The SECRET to Kicking Ass and Achieving Your Full Potential | Sarah Robb O'Hagan on Impact Theory

i hope you guys enjoyed the episode brought to you by our sponsor blinkist go to blinkist.com impact theory to get 25 off a blinkist premium membership and a 7-day free trial all right enjoy the episode hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory on today's episode we are joined by arguably the most interesting woman in the world entrepreneur activist and endurance athlete sarah rob o'hagan sarah spent the majority of her twenties with the constant fear of being fired and relentlessly fighting to find her own lane after a string of crushing failures she went on to become the global president of a 5 billion company where she led its successful reinvention get ready to have your mind blown by one of forbes most powerful women in sports sarah rob o'hagan [Music] [Applause] how are you very good thank you wow absolutely overwhelming it's awesome to be here man doing this research was really interesting seeing how much fun you have yeah it's really surprising because you think like as people become more and more aware of what women especially have to do to really climb the ladder you think of them as really taking on sort of aggressive traditional male tactics yeah but you're also fun and funny and laugh till you snort which is one of you it may happen today yeah i'm very open to that so that's that's pretty incredible now i wore this shirt in your honor which toughen the [ __ ] up buttercup yes let's go yeah i was really i love that i do that i love how you answered every question about what people have to do to succeed with basically you've gotta shine you've gotta outwork people you've gotta bust ass and is it true that in um new zealand that like one of the biggest insults you can say is you're half-assing it oh for sure like that means you're a [ __ ] like not bringing it right and that means like you're not even like contributing to the team let alone doing the best that you can do so for sure that's not cool i love that and you said something in the book it was like you have to like have an honest assessment of like your assness level [Laughter] all right i actually you mentioned adam grant adam partnered with me and we created a quiz that is now on my website which measures your assness level are you kicking ass are you half ass or you like totally not asking at all and it's awesome like we've gotten it down to psychological rigor what are some of the questions it's really interesting like i um having wrote my blog as you know um where i basically studied some of the world's most successful people through a very broad range of um walks of life and career so you know i'm talking body miller who's a downhill skier mr cartoon the tattoo artist condoleezza rice kind of successful right and i interviewed these people and then said how do i figure out the common threads of what made them essentially achieve their potential which i know what you believe in and adam grant was really helpful in guiding me to the psychological underpinnings of what they were doing and really it came down to some pretty like systematic behaviors that they all had which is what we tried to capture in this quiz so that it were things like um openness to new experience you know people who are too scared to try something out of their comfort zone generally don't get to the next level of their own potential humility was a huge one you know like the willingness to say i don't know the answers i'm gonna ask for help um personal drive you know like just being willing to push yourself so you know there was there was definitely some just obvious behaviors that they all had and that's how we figured it out like what is the definition of kicking ass it's basically putting all these behaviors together that's interesting humility was one of the things that comes up in your talks and in the book that i thought was really really interesting and you talked about how so going through the uh career um canyon of despair i love that or the canyon of career despair i thought wow that's and as you were going through that that you got your ass handed to you so roughly that you were like i'm now going into the nike job with with real humility totally but you said then looking back on that that may have been part of the reason why you succeeded so why is that how did that play out yeah so i don't know if it's just a standard part of growing up right but i certainly in my 20s you know i had a few experiences where i broke through and had some early successes right so one being you know i'm 26 years old i'm partying at the khan film festival with richard branson i mean like that's kind of amazing for someone who came from a country of 50 million sheep let's just start there right and so i'm thinking i got this i'm like the [ __ ] like i can't do any wrong and then i turn up to a new job at virgin mega stores which i don't know if any of the audience knows that we used to buy music on things that went round around you know in a retailer as well and i show up at the time actually that napster had just come along so the whole industry is being disrupted but i just thought i could do no wrong because i had had done so well at virgin atlantic the airline and there was just a cockiness and an arrogance that just got ahead of me right and so that was one of the reasons i ultimately ended up getting fired and to your point it wasn't until i'd had my ass handed to me a couple of times that i realized this is not working and then it's almost like you just get such a dose of like when i started at nike i was like i just don't want to get fired so i will do anything to help and support and listen and learn and truly like that is what i think made me successful there because i was a sponge like taking it all in and recognizing that there was a hell of a lot more that i needed to learn to be good you've got such a cool perspective because you're actively uh running businesses and have been for a very long time so as you're writing this stuff it's i'm thinking okay well how how do you teach that to your culture what do you what have you learned to look for like in in interviewing what do you train your hr team to look for and do you have like qualifications like we look for these things yeah what does that process look like for you now it's a great question and it's something i mean in my current job i'm ceo of flywheel which is an indoor boutique cycling company and you know so we're a relatively small company and we're a young company which i love young company in terms of seven years old but young in terms of our employee base and so we're at right now at that point of how do we start to get more systematic because we i think in the early days because our culture was built on one of just performance in general because our proposition is an athletic performance fitness experience we attracted people who were attracted to that so we just kind of did it naturally once you start to scale up you actually have to do what you just said which is how do we more systematically make sure we're looking for these right behaviors and i'm just such a big believer i could give a [ __ ] about educational qualifications if you don't have the right set of behaviors and sort of humility and team work capability to to play well on a team you know how do you so just having gone through this so at quest we ended up scaling up to we had 1400 employees by the time that i left and it was absolute madness and when i was hiring one-on-one i thought i got it right because you can look in their eye you can spend time with them you can ask them crazy questions most importantly you can follow them down a path they say something you see a micro expression you can chase it down i was good at that once it was now my hr team has to go and try to do that same thing then it was like i realized i'm only as good as what i write down yeah because now it's trainable it's teachable it's pass on the goal yep what are the things that you write down or if you haven't already what what do you think are some of the core things you're going to need to instill in the hr team to make sure that they hire right actually this goes back to how you opened this entire discussion it was funny i'd never thought about the point you said of like you know the further up your career you probably become a little stiffer a bit more uh what's the word i'm looking for like held back whereas i seem to have gone completely the other way around because i think i've learned along the way that when you are trying to be something you're not that's when you lose your confidence and so i've almost gone this completely other way to here it is f-bombs and all and if i [ __ ] up like come on team let's be honest about it tell me you know and so i think as part of that and i think as a leader particularly in the world we live in today it's it's up to you to consistently express what matters to you in terms of your value so you know i'm making a lot of effort with my blog posts and whatever to really point the whole time to the examples of those values that matter to me that also matter to our leadership team and you know they are a lot to do with sort of commitment to the team resilience you know willingness to take risks but push through to the other side when things are not going well and i have to write about them but i also have to demonstrate them i think that's the other big thing on a daily basis like i'm very conscious in meetings of when i've walked out the door did i leave the impression that it's okay to make mistakes and if i didn't i better circle back around and make sure i articulated that yeah i uh i love that and that opportunity that you have as a leader to really live it and let people see it like that was so important to me so at quest i had created the 25 bullet points that it was a belief system right so and i remember it came out if we were trying to create a like a traditional value system um and you know most companies have them and it's like a sentence or two of what we stand for and i just couldn't do it it all felt so trite like i was really trying but then i was like this isn't gonna help somebody like reading it you sort of get a pr message of what we're about so i sat down and literally like in one pass just wrote what were the 25 things i had to do to my mind to go from feeling like a trapped employee who was trying to keep his head down do as little work as possible and avoid punishment at all costs to like really like you discovered being myself bringing something unique to the table that i can actually trust my instincts and so once i wrote those 25 i thought whoa like this is really it if people took this and did it we'd be golden yeah but my fear was that they'd memorize it and not do it yes and so what you're talking about so fascinating to me of how do you show grit yeah how do you show that it's okay to make a mistake and to that end what happened when you met angela duckworth the queen of grete it's a great question i love her obviously um and it's speaking of grit when i was writing my book i did become a stalker of the people that i knew needed to be in my book and lily duckworth and i was like i'm just gonna keep going and i'm not gonna take no for an answer um but it was what i loved about angela was you know she'd written a book on you know passion and perseverance and what grit is but i wanted to speak to her specifically okay tell me about you the leader and how does this come to life in your own day-to-day life and she dropped pearls like you can't believe but the one that really stuck with me was she said when i think about my employees there's not one of them that would come to work and say i turned in a piece of work and it was good enough for angela like she's like there's without a doubt i am pushing i want more i want more she said and there's not one of them that wouldn't know that 24 hours a day i've got their back and i was like i had chills just hearing that i was like that's it like as leaders it's our job to to push and to to make sure we're saying just when you think your limit is here we can push you a little bit further but you have to know we're in it with you you know because i think it's the two sides that go well together that's what i learned from angela anyway and how do you how do you find people that you can push that hard or what qualities do those people have to have to be pushed that hard yeah it's a good question i mean i do think resilience like grit is the biggest one and that's what i that is one of the behaviors actually that i um studied when i was writing the book because it's really interesting to me the difference between people who come up against an obstacle and just get stopped by it and those who just go well it there's no reason why i can't get through it and so to me like that's one of the things i really push when i'm interviewing you know new employees i bet you went through this too where this day and age like kids coming out of college have been so scripted as to what they're going to say in an interview here's my perfectly packaged failure here's my perfect you know what i mean and so i always go okay get through it okay now tell me the next one okay and now the next one and now the most epic fail in your life like and then they're just like but that's where you get down to the levels of where was the real resilience like is this a marketing story of what you did or what did you learn in adversity and what did you dive deep and find inside yourself and how did you push through it i love that because anybody that's read your book knows that you have your own tale of that where you got fired tried to make it everybody else's fault you finally realized that's not right totally right i have to own it and so then you started going to interviews and saying i'm just gonna tell you why i got fired so that you know i've learned yes right yes walk us through that like yes what gave you the courage to do that and what was the result so it's funny i obviously publicly go everywhere and talking about the sarah gets fired stories because i don't think leaders of my level do this enough and all of us have had embarrassing screw-ups along the way right and it is amazing to me how every time i give a talk there'll be the line of three people at the end who come up and say i just got fired i've lost myself i don't know what to do i'm terrified like it is a really really tough experience and i always use that story of like the obvious question they all say is what the hell do i say in my next interview and i learned it the hard way from sitting in these interviews trying to dodge the question and trying to go oh well it was a company downsizing you know and it's not until you know because you realize when you're doing that the person looking at you is just like they don't believe you and so you're like okay that's because i don't believe me and and as soon as you just say hey this is embarrassing i don't know how to say any other way but here's what happened your vulnerability in that moment just makes that other person suddenly want to to almost help and care for you i think and which leads to a much more open conversation and it's it's very hard to do particularly when you've just been through it because you're at that weakest point where you feel like god am i ever going to get a job again but it it's i always tell people just try it even in the most tiny way take a step forward to acknowledging what you did and what when what happened because the minute you acknowledge what you did you have control over changing that it's really interesting so one of the most powerful there's a few movements in your book that i think really add up to something strong and one of them is to have that vulnerability to really own it but then the other one is that as you begin that process the danger of okay i just had a fail the danger is that you're gonna now try to fit into the box the next time but that you actually put yourself into a weaker and weaker position yeah um you touched on it a minute ago but take us a little bit deeper into what you mean by stepping out of line yeah um and how how do people balance like the the two moments that you've had where you were winning but you became arrogant and then later you realized i can be me and humble at the same time how do they cultivate that yeah it's a great question i mean so going back to stepping out of line like where that whole idea came from is is i do think culturally you know a lot has been written about the millennials and the entitlement whatever and i kind of call [ __ ] on that and i more say this is a generation that was raised with a very different parenting style to probably what you and i were like where i grew up certainly it was you know finn for you so i was the youngest of four and i was like i don't think my parents ever came and watched me play sport let alone acknowledge a participation trophy um yet we then had this next generation where there was psychological belief that you would build self-esteem by really protecting people from the things that could go wrong and i think the output of that was people didn't step out of line because it's kind of like i have to follow the perfect path and everything is going to be fine and so i really wanted to delve into this and going back to adam grant he helped me with some of the research around there's there's moments in your career that are those clutch moments where there's an opportunity in front of you that no one else is stepping up and taking that you can step up take advantage of an opportunity that no no one else is seeing because you have a certain set of experiences and skills now it's the people that try and clutch at something that aren't experienced enough yet that get and the whole team gets annoyed with them because it's kind of like whatever you're just trying to take the credit which is very different to you can bring a value to the team because of what you already know and you can move the ball forward and it's funny because i often hear from people they'll say to me that you know take today's college graduate if i've heard it once i've heard 500 times this is the hardest environment to get jobs it's so competitive and i'm like talk to your grandparents who graduate in the recession of like 1930. you know this is not hard compared to other eras it's just that no one's given you the skill sets to recognize how to make it happen for yourself to to overcome that hurdle so you go to a job interview and you get told your resume's not good enough okay how are you going to go back in there with a reason why how are you going to take some value to them and say here's what i can do for you you know it's like reframe it what i love is these are not empty words for you so you had a story where um oh this was back at uh new zealand yes right where you weren't selected yes and you were like whoa whoa i don't think you guys understand yes no it's funny i looking back i didn't realize what a pivotal story it was in my life when it happened but this is i graduated college and i came out when it was you know a very tough time in the economy and you know there was way too many graduates coming out for the number of jobs available and so we would all um apply for the big companies and they would make you take these tests you know like intelligence tests or whatever and i remember taking the test and i did the same set of tests for mobile oil company and air new zealand so mobile i crushed it and they offered me a job can you imagine me working in the oil business like can we just go there uh in new zealand i take the same set of tests i just had a bad day and i [ __ ] them up like completely and i knew i had and i get home that night i was like [ __ ] i really wanted to work there not just a little bit like my whole dream was like i come from this tiny country i need to work for the airline it will fly me somewhere that was my whole life and i was like i can't let this opportunity go and so i get the letter saying we used to when we were kids we used to call them pfo letters when you got to reject please [ __ ] off letters it was very well known amongst the college crowd and i was like i can't accept this i've but if you just go back and sort of whine and complain to the you were unfair on me that's going to get you nowhere so instead i went back to this the woman who was the hiring manager and i actually created a whole set of thoughts and ideas that i would like to bring to the airline so i'm bringing value as opposed to going in and saying this isn't fair and i think you know i was a stalker a little bit too let's be honest but she ended up saying okay i'm going to give you a half hour with the actual line manager it's your type if you can prove to him you know where you go long story short the guy hires me this they were meant to have six graduate trainees he creates an extra job for me which in any corporate america that never happens i mean how do you get to do that and what that ended up doing is the whole sort of storyline of me stepping out of line him taking a bet on me caused me to work 500 times harder than anyone else because i needed to prove that my seat was worthy you know and that in itself i think is a good motivator for success i love that and there's another and i re everybody lean in right now because this you want to pay attention to because this is actually how you get ahead you it's okay because you've done it um you do this again where you go you show up at virgin you think you have a job the guy that hired you now isn't there anymore doesn't say a word by the way you've been planning for months you move you show up and walk so i moved to new york put all my credit cards fully maxed out the little kiwi i don't know anyone in new york and i move into a non-air conditioned apartment which was very bad because it was cheap and it was like august i'm like oh my god i'm like sweating my ass off i turn up to the office at virgin on the first day i walk in and say to the front desk and i ask for the name of the person who'd hired me and the lady behind the dish says she doesn't work here anymore i'm like wait what [Laughter] literally she goes i don't know who you are but yeah she doesn't work and i walked into the bathroom and just bawled i was like oh my god i've like put all my life on hold for this job and and then i come back out and i go back up to the desk and i said well she may not work here but i have a piece of paper that says i have a job and so find me someone in hr so eventually the hr person like puts me in a little cube in the corner and the whole the person who'd hired me actually had been let go from the company which is even worse even better and so i was like oh god like if anyone's about to get fired it's going to be the person she hired so i sit in the corner and at first i was like this is really bad they're going to get rid of me and that was when i was like i have no choice but i've got to move quickly to prove that i have value i can add here and long story short i spent a weekend with no sleep writing a marketing plan for the airline an organizational structure and i put it in an envelope and slipped it under the president's door i still can't believe i did that when i think about it and i was like he's either going to think i'm a cocky you know don't deserve any opportunity or he's going to see that i have value to add and i'll do anything to you know to hold on and be here and of course the latter happened i ended up not only getting to do all the work but i actually got a promotion out of it which is incredible and it's just a good story of don't ever worry that like someone didn't ask you to do something just get on and do it it's like when people say to me you know i want to get a promotion well go bring more business into your company then because guess what you'll get rewarded pretty quickly yeah one thing that i i love about that and you've talked about a lot in your book is don't try to please me as a ceo right like yes please don't try to please me because what i actually want is for you to help the business yes yes so one what do you mean by that exactly and then two for anybody watching now that really wants to supercharge their career how do they put that into action this is a great one and because i actually think this applies a little bit more to people mid-career and particularly because when you get to mid-career maybe your late 30s 40s you got more on the line you might have you know kids you've got a lot that that is resting on you and i think that's when people get more fearful and um i certainly observe when i was working at gatorade and it was a massive turnaround and it was you know in the recession and like it was a very stressful time that initially we would go to meetings and people would keep saying to me well you need to present it this way because that's what indra the ceo of the company is looking for but that would have required presenting information that wasn't going to successfully turn the business around because it was what they'd done before and it suddenly occurred to me like why are we trying to please the boss she wants us to succeed she doesn't give a [ __ ] we do it the way she expects us to i really believe when i say don't come and please me i say to employees all the time i believe when they have their own kind of ideas of how to solve a problem they will fight so much harder for those ideas than if i try and say i think you should do it that way yeah that's critical and that ties into your notion of the mountain's got to be yours yeah what do you mean by that what is sir edmund who's a fascinating character by the way for sure i got very into my mountain metaphors in the book so edmund hillary is a kiwi and he is was the first man in the world to summit mount everest and i use his quote at the beginning of the book it's not the summit we conquer but ourselves and it's beautiful the children i read in the book the mountain being yours in the book you're referencing like to have that drive to really do what you have to do so you have to like i want people to feel this in in the context that you wrote it which is man you've got to grind like if you want to win you've got to show up to play you call it swinging hard right the kiwis know how to swing hard and if you really want to make something come true in your life you've gotta you gotta really really go for it and thusly the mountain has to be yours yeah because i think what happens particularly with younger people is whether it's your parents your professor your boss like everyone else has got an opinion on what you should do but if it's not your dream you're not going to fight nearly as hard for it and i think that's where i feel so blessed that i had parents who gave me the tools to you know education like a great childhood to succeed but then it's like you go figure out what you want to do i never felt any pressure to be anything do anything it was like you go figure out where is your mountain to climb and i found with all of the people i interviewed for the book that is what stood them apart like in every instance they had a dream that significant influential people in their life said it won't work you shouldn't it's too risky but that it's what they cared about no one else knows what's going on inside you except you and i think once you know that something you really want just clear out the obstacles and go everyone there's no way to build an empowering mindset or get ahead in business without constantly learning and accessing new information and today i want to share with you guys my secret weapon in the battle to learn new things and get ahead blinkist blinkist is for anyone who cares about learning but doesn't have a lot of time blinkist takes the key ideas and insights from over 4 000 non-fiction bestsellers in more than 27 categories and gathers them together in 15-minute text and audio explainers that help you understand more about the core ideas use the blinks to get into a topic quickly find new topics to grow from or figure out which books you want to spend more time reading and listening to more deeply also they've teamed up with popular podcast creators to blink those for you too so you can get to the heart of a podcast episode fast you can use blinkist's shortcast to quickly catch up on podcast episodes you've missed with high quality audio you can jump right in on the go during your commute at the gym around the house or even download to listen offline 15 million people are already using blinkist to broaden their knowledge in 27 non-fiction categories including self-improvement personal growth management leadership and mindfulness and happiness two books from their library that i've listened to and highly recommend are start with why by simon sinek and the power of habit by charles duhigg right now blinkist has a special offer just for our audience go to blinkist.com slash impact theory to start your free 7-day trial and get 25 off a blinkist premium membership that's spelled b-l-i-n-k-i-s-t blinkist.com impact theory to get 25 off a blinkist premium membership and a seven day free trial all right guys take care and be legendary what are you going to teach your kids like what do you want them to take away is are you more lazy fair like let them find their way are you going to make sure they've got grit and tenacity like what does that look like that's a great question i mean certainly they all have to hand back participation trophies do you really make like give them back yeah that is amazing where's that anything after three at all period no trophy what if they win the gym if they wouldn't that's they want it for sure yeah no but if it was just for showing up no and they they always like oh yeah that's my mom the one that makes us um there was one once or twice where early on where they kept the trophy and i allowed them to if we repurposed it for an achievement they were trying to do themselves i i really really believe that it's about getting them to understand that you will be happy and fulfilled if you do whatever you do in your life off your own steam you know i think that's for me the the single biggest learning is like don't look for shortcuts don't look for people to give you handouts like go figure it out for yourself because that is what will make you the most satisfied happy person that you can be and what do you think is has been the secret to your success and one thing i'd love you to touch on is you've said i never saw myself as a a great female executive i was just the best executive yeah so one why how did you not fall into that and then two like what makes a great executive i come from new zealand and we many people may not know we're the first country in the world to give women the vote really 30 years before the united states wow that's amazing and i have wondered is that why as a woman i grew up with a set of different cultural guardrails because i remember coming to america and discovering what title nine was and i was like why would you need something like that like it just never occurred to me growing up that as a female i couldn't do anything that i wanted to do and and it's it's funny i think now for women i i give sheryl sandberg clearly so much credit and love for what she's done to start this conversation on you know what we need to do to get more women into leadership roles and i feel like sometimes we can get all of the data in our way and use that almost as a reason to not take the step because like there's so much incredibly real data that says that you you know are not going to get funded in the same way as a guy will you you won't you know so you've just got to almost say those are today's circumstances but they're not a reason not to change and move it forward and you know i think for me i just have worked in predominantly male industries the whole way through and it just i've never even really noticed that i was the only woman at the table very often i just was like well [ __ ] i'm here and so i'm gonna do the best i can and and it's up to me to outperform my peer group whoever they are do you have strategies for self-improvement like are there things that you do yeah i mean i i think i'm more purposeful about them having written the book and studied other people the way i just have and i'm now very very focused on getting out of my comfort zone like pushing myself to do things that i haven't typically done um give an example yeah i mean even like in the job i'm in today right now it's like every day you know we have a as i mentioned we're launching a big startup a tech startup on the side of our business which for me is a whole set of experiences i've never had i mean if i was looking back to last year and some of the job opportunities that came my way there was a lot that i could have easily done and made a [ __ ] ton of money that were just kind of keeping me in the same set of skills whereas to take on a smaller you know company that needs to be scaled up with whole like that was really quite a big challenge for me is that an important thing for you to reinvent yourself to get a new skill set push yourself out yes talk to me about that because that's how most people get stuck there yes because i think that maybe it's because i um i get very restless if i don't feel like i'm growing and i think that is something that i saw was a common thread of all these people i interviewed too is that when you get to mastery that feeling of um just comfort that kind of after a while like okay this is good but what more can i be doing i think up until now my career was about the what's like you know the what did i do at gatorade we turned the business around what did we do at equinox et cetera now i'm focused so much more on the how how do i achieve the save results and frankly have a more positive impact while doing it which is kind of pushing me out of my comfort zone in a bigger way let's dive into like the book book for a second so what does it mean to be extremely you so first of all the title um everyone goes well to be extreme you does that mean that you have to be loudmouth you have to be extroverted you know and the answer is absolutely not to be extreme you is to be the extreme of your personal set of passions skills idiosyncrasies behaviors right so i always tell people it starts with what blows your hair back when you get up in the morning like what makes you go i [ __ ] gotta do this like what really excites you combine that with what are your natural skill sets style etc like as you can tell i'm very extroverted i love people like i wouldn't do well if i was in a job or a role that you know was in a box without people that i could interact with what are those things that you know about yourself and then the extreme part is once you've sort of understood that is the kind of lifelong commitment to keep pushing your boat out a little bit further like every time you get to the top of your game push it a little bit further what's the next challenge you can take on and how do you pick the people that you yeah for the book are so diverse i know like how did you come up did you come up with a list and go these are the ones i'm going to go after did you have a much bigger list those are the ones you could make contact with like what i really wanted to do i put a lot of thought into it being there's 25 people in the book the most diverse cast of characters when i say diverse i mean styles um country of origin career they ended up like i just wanted it to be something that anyone out there could find a story that related to them and and i also found what was so fascinating about doing it that way was that you know i would have these moments of just like jumping up and down after i'd done an interview and i'm like how is it possible that body miller and a chef are using the exact same language and how they do what they do you know it was cool tell people who bode miller are because it once you know like if you don't know what he does yeah so bodhi is um the most decorated american downhill skier of all time and he i have a whole chapter that he helped inform about pushing through failure and what i call making failure your fuel and his basically strategy as a skier was to just crash more all the other guys and because it made him more battle tested and it made him push harder on race day um and then the i talked to sam cass who's the former white house chef you know i was always like you know chef i'm sure he would have come up through a more sort of artistic creative side he was a former like he wanted to be a professional baseball player who failed and used a bunch of skills there to move into the world of um being a professional [ __ ] like it was amazing to me that these kind of completely disparate experiences led to behaviors that were clearly uniformly driving these people's success and what were some of those behaviors so definitely like resilience as we mentioned before definitely um uh a willingness to just go for it in the face of people saying here's all the reasons why not so i'll give you an example will dean who's the founder of tough mudder who you must have on this um show sometime he's fantastic but he gives a story i don't know if you know if your viewers know what tough mudder is but it's the obstacle mud run where you get electrocuted and you jump into dumpsters of ice cubes and sure enough like he's now what something like two million people have done these things worldwide it's crazy and it's an extraordinary movement but he had so many influential people in his life tell him you are crazy what are you doing and he just you know had that just clarity of vision and that this is what i'm here to do so you said to him makes me why did you start a movement why so you got the book why actually like you actually have a movement you have a website the whole shebang yes why wasn't the book enough i think because today um especially the way you know younger people are wired they want to take action they want to participate not to just be passively um reading and i felt like yeah i felt i knew that the act of all of the research around the book would lead to this great piece that that people could read but they'd want to apply it to themselves like i felt so strongly i didn't just want to write a book that was a great beach read and like a bit of inspiration i wanted to have really practical tools that i can go home and apply to me myself now and help make myself be better at what i'm trying to trying to do yeah i love that you said something really really interesting in the book let me see if i can get really close um if you just failed and you've lost your confidence good it means you're actually processing through it and if you're going to fail you better be better on the other side and to do that you have to process it yes how how do people learn to process through that how do they not just get stuck i have found when i go speak particularly to college kids but for actually people of any age like the failure thing is a really big scary topic for people it's bizarre to me maybe because i've been through so much of it that now i'm like whatever but it is like it absolutely paralyzes people and i can't tell you the number of times i i almost see the the eyes of a college student it's like i want to take a course in college that's the failure course and i've checked the box and i'm always like i don't know how to explain to you that until you've been to the depths of the canyon of despair like that's where the learning and the growth comes from and you come back so much stronger on the other side and if you haven't done that then you haven't failed then there was no point and it kind of i suppose it's easy for me to say because i've had so many massive [ __ ] ups that you know i'm still standing but i do feel like you get to a point later in your career for anyone particularly if you you know want to be in leadership the stakes get higher it gets tougher and if you haven't been through some really shitty times and endured you will not have the intestinal fortitude to handle it and like i think about the gatorade turnaround like for me i realized nine months into that when i had wall street analysts the media everyone basically writing articles on how badly i was [ __ ] up gatorade and i realized like i remember saying to my boss it was like here's the deal we've either got to go for it and go this way or you should fire me now now i wouldn't have had the courage to even do that had i not been through those earlier experiences yeah it makes sense i am deeply horrified that we're running out of time so but where can these guys find you online yeah so definitely go to extremeu.com um and i'm at extreme sro on twitter at extreme sarah on facebook and so yeah come join the conversation for sure awesome and i have one last question yes what is the impact that you want to have on the world yeah so i started touching on a little bit in terms of i really really want to help the high potential young people in this country and in the world who because they were not born in the right places with the right connections to go to the right colleges to open the right doors don't get the same opportunities and if there's one thing i know about my own story it's like i don't have an mba i didn't go to an ivy league college but somehow i had the right mentors and parenting to give me the grit to get around the system and so if i can help other people see that find that in themselves then to me that would be amazing that would be amazing sarah thank you so much guys i could only ever hope to give you the very tip of a massive iceberg on this i really encourage you guys to read the book watch her talk see the interviews that she's doing take it all in as a gestalt and you will really understand why it has been said about her that she doesn't just sit at the table she stands on it you're gonna see the enthusiasm the passion for results and that's the part that i want you guys to take home i hope you've heard what she's been saying about grit and resilience and how you have to push through and how so much of this came from her time at the bottom of the canyon of despair and that truly and here's the bad news the canyon of despair it eats the souls of many of the weak who enter it but the people who are brave enough to climb back up the other side to rebuild their confidence to actually process it as she says those are the ones that go on to rule the world i just gave myself chills thinking about what you've been saying guys this is the truth and you know that is my standard when i can say that somebody's advice will make your life better because it's real and it is true it is the highest compliment that i could pay them and sarah i pay you that compliment in spades so guys be sure go out there engage with her and her movement and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care if you adopt the belief that everything is figureoutable and you take that on for yourself you don't need to go hunting down all your limiting beliefs because that one thing is like the master key that handles everything below it it's almost like flipping a switch in your consciousness where then everything else becomes possible