Chris Do:

This is now round four. Round four.

Mo:

Okay. You once told me that if the plan isn't working, change the plan, not the goal. And I think this is matching round one and round two. How does one stay in the pocket? And what I mean by staying in the pocket is, stay in pursuit of that goal not pivot to the next shiny thing, whenever the results aren't presenting themselves. I don't know if we already touched this when we kind of dipped into round one and round two but, how does one stay in the pocket?

Chris Do:

One could say the fighter in the red corner's on wobbly feet and is having double vision.

Mo:

Chill out.

Chris Do:

Because we don't know. No, I'm fine. Look, here's the idea you want to be resolute in your goal and almost uncompromising your goal, but be completely flexible in the means on how you achieve that goal. Why is this important? Is because when it gets tough, when you get challenged and you have setbacks and you are facing all kinds of challenges in terms of your staff, your team, your clients getting fired, losing money, you're going to want to quit. And when I say you're going to quit, I mean, you're going to quit the entire thing. You're going to give up on the goal.
If you wanted to become a children's fiction writer and you're having all kinds of setbacks, publishers, the first book is a bomb and nothing is working. Rejection after rejection. So you're like, I'm going to give up on my goal of becoming a children's fiction writer. So you're done, that's the quit I'm talking about. You want to avoid that. What you want to say is, okay, so that first book didn't work. What did I learn from that? What can I apply to the second book? And can it be self-published? Do I need a publisher to help me? Do I need a PR agent to help me? Can I build a fan following based on dropping micro stories, little chapters along the way and building of a fan base so that when I'm actually done it could be kick-started, it could be self-funded. And they're going to be fans who then help me to leverage a better publishing deal so that I don't have to give it all the way.
So I'm going to change the strategy, of maybe this wasn't meant to be read as words on a page. Maybe it was meant to be spoken, to be listened to on an audible format or a podcast. Maybe it was meant to be acted out in an acting troupe. I don't know. That's what I mean. It's like your story can be told, be flexible with the delivery and the tactics, but inflexible with where you want to go with your goal.

Mo:

I got nothing after that or else we're just going to take a point to the grave on that.

Chris Do:

Okay. You're going to take a ten count.

Mo:

[inaudible 00:03:14]
Let me take a breath. I don't know where the ref is.

Chris Do:

Yeah he's on the ropes right now. Ladies and gentlemen, we're round four here. I'll give you a moment.

Mo:

I do have a follow-up to this. I have the privilege of being in the pro group and hearing you say a lot of one-on-one advice. And right now I'm hearing you say things that are so easy to comprehend logically, I should do this instead of this. What do you think as somebody on the coaches side, why is taking action on this advice so damn difficult?

Chris Do:

I think it has a lot to do with your internal wiring, your operating system, your culture, the examples that you have to model after, your resistance to pain, your avoidance of suffering, and the other kinds of attachments that you have around who you see yourself as, and potentially that it may not work out. All those things are barriers in your way. And if you can navigate that, you're going to have a lot more success in your life.
The people that I've seen, who have been impacted by the content and the advice that we've given positively, they just say, "You know what? I don't know. I'm just going to try this thing. I'm going to go for it." Because in their hearts and in their mind, they understand that if it doesn't work out, then they're no worse off than where they are today, but at least they can find out one way that doesn't work sooner than later, this is really important. And so the narrative, the self or internal dialogue that you tell yourself really matters. So when I make bad decisions or I suffer the consequences of actions of others, and I dwell on that and I blame people. I'm not really getting much out of that. If I turn that negative energy into spite, it's only going to consume me. There's a quote, I think it is from Gandhi, it's like, "Holding hate in your heart for other people is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."

Mo:

Cool.

Chris Do:

Right.

Mo:

Gandhi with the mic drop.

Chris Do:

Right. So the way I look at it is this Mo, it's if something bad happens in my life, I want to quickly move it from this happened to me versus this was an opportunity for me to learn.

Greg Gunn:

Time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Welcome back to our conversation.

Chris Do:

In life, you win or you learn. So I'm going to move into the learn category. I can say to myself, when that one sales rep it's essentially extorted me to buy them out of their contract, that did not feel good in my heart. This is tens of thousands of dollars. I think it ended up being about 30k and that's a significant amount of money that I had to pay out to make this issue go away. And I could hold spite in my heart. I could sit there and blame my team for not being thorough, but ultimately I walked away and saying, never agree to a contract with these kinds of terms, because you will wind up here again.
So I'll look at it as that was a $30,000 lesson, it was painful. And I want to remember that pain so that I don't put myself in that same position, again. An expensive lesson. Then I look forward. The way I look forward is to say, I'm glad I made the $30,000 mistake because when I become more successful, the $30,000 mistake will be 300,000. So I probably have saved myself 270 grand.

Mo:

Dang.

Chris Do:

I got to remember that lesson.

Mo:

Dang it. I need to ask different questions. Cause you're just dropping them. You're just like taking them out. I don't even know if I can debate right now. I just want to listen to you answer the question.

Chris Do:

That's fine.

Mo:

Okay. Here's the thing. You are somebody that every time something happens, cause you share stories a lot with us. Every time something happens, you're able to do this thing where you just freaking flip it. Right now, an average Joe or Jane would have been like, $30,000? My businesses is under, I'm done. I'm a horrible CEO. Is there a technique? I mean, I've watched you talk about your son having that game, but what's going on in the domain where you can be like, "Nope, 30,000 is going to be 300,000 in the future of gain, not loss." How do you do that flip?

Chris Do:

It's easy. I've come to the realization Mo, that there is actually little objective truth that most of it is subjective interpretation. But we walk around our lives, looking at things like that's objectively true. That's objectively true. And we're just lying to ourselves. So if I know that in a given situation, there's a thousand ways of looking at it. Why would I, to my own detriment, tell myself a story that hurts me. Objectively you could say $30,000 was transferred out of one account from one person to another. Everything else that you look at that is subjective. They wronged me and they're looking at it like, "Well, you tried to cheat me." There's a thousand ways of looking at this. So I'm going to construct the narrative that is most advantageous to my own personal growth.

Mo:

Wait a minute. The church said, "Amen." I'm going to need you to repeat that one. Construct the narrative that what?

Chris Do:

That is most advantageous to my own personal growth.

Mo:

Okay.

Chris Do:

Okay?

Mo:

Yep.

Chris Do:

You can get into a car accident. Somebody that you love and care about can become sick. You can then go into many ways of interpreting this and we could see this happen all the time. You can blame society. You can blame God. You can sit there and say they deserve this. They were an evil person. And there was a lot of ways to interpret this. This is our subjective interpretation. Do any of those things help you live a healthier and more balanced life that help your condition on this planet to improve? If they don't, tell yourself a different story. Change the narrative it's in your power to do so because the person who authored the first narrative is also the same person who could rewrite it and that person is you.

Mo:

Bet.

Chris Do:

Done.

Greg Gunn:

Thanks for joining us this time. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get a new insightful episode from us every week. The Futur podcast is hosted by Chris Do and produced by me, Greg Gunn. Thank you to Anthony Barro for editing and mixing this episode and thank you to Adam Sanborne for our intro music.

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If you enjoyed this episode then do us a favor by rating and reviewing our show on Apple Podcasts, it'll help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. Have a question for Chris or me, head over to the thefutur.com/heychris and ask away. We read every submission and we just might answer yours in a later episode. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefutur.com. You'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and creative business. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.

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