The Dailey Edge Podcast
Join hosts Trent, TJ, and Todd Dailey as they explore the intersections of technology, culture, fitness, and personal growth. Through engaging discussions and personal anecdotes, the trio dives into topics ranging from childhood gaming nostalgia and cutting-edge fitness tech to the pursuit of happiness and lifestyle choices. Whether reminiscing about epic gaming marathons, sharing tips for staying on the forefront of fitness trends, or unraveling the complexities of modern life, The Dailey Edge delivers thoughtful insights, lively debates, and relatable stories for listeners of all walks of life.
The Dailey Edge Podcast
🎙️Episode 14: When Doubt Creeps In: Sustaining Vision Despite Uncertainty 🎙️
Grit is defined as passion and perseverance over a long period of time, and this quality is essential for entrepreneurial success despite being increasingly rare in today's instant-gratification society.
• Todd shares his seven-year journey developing Eternize, a haptic cross designed to provide spiritual reminders throughout the day
• The importance of community support when pursuing long-term business goals
• How fear of failure can be overcome by falling in love with the problem-solving process
• Why nobody cares about your solution - they only care about the problem you're solving
• Realistic timelines for business success: potentially 10 years for a side business, 3-5 years for a full-time venture
• Strategies for balancing multiple businesses, family responsibilities, and day jobs
• Methods for instilling grit in children through manageable challenges and celebrating progress
• The potential societal implications of declining grit in younger generations
• Secondary benefits of developing grit, including increased risk tolerance and adaptability
For more insights on building businesses with staying power, follow us on social media and subscribe to The Daily Edge podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the Daily Edge where we bring you the latest insights, opinions and thought-provoking conversations to give you that competitive edge in life, business and beyond. Let's go Welcome to episode 14 of the Daily Edge here with my brothers, tj Daly and Todd Daly, excited to be here this morning. And we're going to start off with grit. You know like what is grit? It's passion and perseverance over a long period of time. Everyone talks about grit, how necessary it is, trying to lock into something for not only a week, a month, a year, but maybe a decade. And throughout our journeys we've had a lot of failures, but there's been several instances of where we've each adapted to or we've each had to get in a situation where we've had to had grit over a long period of time. And so I want to kick this off. We've launched different companies. I so I want to kick this off. We've launched different companies. I want to go to Eternize and I remember running with Todd and he's like I got this idea. And you know, with us like that, we're never short of saying we've got an idea right. It's like everyone's got a million ideas, but the ones that actually you put action behind them are few and far between. And he's like no one has patented a haptic cross. He's like I'm so tired of being distracted, I want something to bring me back. And so he had this vision and this was about seven years ago of what it would look like to bring something to the market that would help him personally with his faith, his spirituality and making it present in his every day. But throughout the last seven years, I mean we're really not even to the finish line right now. Right Like we're I'm sorry, we're really not even to the starting line, right. So like you've had seven years of just staying faithful. You've been to China twice, you've got people in India doing development, like there's a lot going on here and there's been a lot of failures along the way. So I would say that the journey of Eternize seven years, a lot of money and a lot of time, is a great example of grit. I'm sure you've learned a lot along the way, but kind of tell us where you're at with that, what are some of the lessons you've learned a lot along the way? But kind of tell us where you're at with that, what are some of the lessons you've learned, and kind of take us through that journey.
Speaker 1:I was telling someone the other day that if I had realized how much work it was going to take and what it was going to be, I'm not sure I ever would have started. So there's, honestly, there's a little bit of ignorance that played in my favor of what it was going to take and how long it was going to take. I would say what I think has probably, at a high level, kept me in this game is that I've been chasing something I'm very passionate about and I think you hear the cliche comment of do what you love. You know you'll never work another day in your life. And I feel like in a couple of different instances I've unpacked, I think, some of those cliche phrases. There is some sort of a foundational truth to those and I would say for me, eternize chasing that. It's been something that I've passionate about and something that's benefited me and that's why, honestly, I've stuck with it. If I was doing it for the money or if I was doing it for the recognition or notoriety, I would have stopped several years ago. So I would say, for me that is huge. And another way I would kind of characterize that is starting with why. Another shout out to Simon Sinek, great book. Starting With why and I've tried to stay really, really close to that over the years is why am I doing this? And it's certainly been for the eventual impact that I think could come from it. So I would say for me those have probably been the pillars of why I'm continuing to do that. But just to talk a little bit to the story, it was seven years ago.
Speaker 1:I shared it with a buddy of mine, I shared it with you guys, and one thing I want to highlight about this is that I also don't think it's all been me. Now this taps in a little bit to my spiritual disposition, but I feel like God's put so many people in the way of this project and maybe part of that is just me being open-minded to that and seeing that and being open to it. But I think he has put a ton of people in my way that have encouraged me and that I've been able to take energy from to continue on this journey. Because, even though I know it was passionate for me and I was interested in it, given the time and energy and resources that I've invested into it, if I had run into people that were like, yeah, this really, you know, I'm not really interested in this.
Speaker 1:I mean, you guys both the two of you especially have shown incredible amount of support on this, both verbally and just in wearing the cross, the prototypes that we've had, I mean that is absolutely critical for someone like me, I will say, to continue to be on, waking up at 6.15, 6.30 in the morning, getting on calls with the team in India at 2.30 or 3 o'clock and working through tactical screen issues of how the screens are laying out or how people are navigating through those to late nights on calls with the team in China they're 12 hours and working through production issues and challenges. That energy that I got I can't take full credit for. That comes from a lot of people who had so much excitement, anticipation, you know, people who invested, even financially, early on. It's just. I feel really grateful to have had an incredible support community. Well, there you go. It comes back to community again, right, surrounding yourself with a community that can support you on some of these difficult things. So let me pause there.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I think that, yeah, I think it'd be good to expound on what the value is in terms of you know that authentic because I think authentic is a big word there the authentic community that was around you, because I think you know early on to just dive in a little bit more to the product itself, it's a vibrating cross and when you hear that it's like we've had vibrating devices for dozens and dozens of years, I mean you can go back to wind up alarm clocks right, like they've been around.
Speaker 2:And so, that said, you've had people around you that not only supported your vision because it was you, but I think there was this authenticity about them, willing to have conversations on how it could be implemented, and then that helped broaden your vision and give you more resolve to drive forward. So maybe it would be interesting to hear how you talk to obviously touched at it on a higher level but hearing maybe a couple of specific examples of the types of people that you've looked for, the types of people that you've sought out based on, maybe, their personality, or based on their, their personality, or based on their professional success, or based on their, their involvement with other projects and what those people have done, cause, you know, maybe our listeners have a friend who's you know taking a journey or or pursuing an endeavor, and they want to support them in the best way possible. So what are some of those ways? In a little bit more specific detail, they could do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the thing that I had to get over was the fear of rejection.
Speaker 1:Sharing that idea with somebody and them saying, yeah, that's not a great idea, or oh, that's cool, but just kind of placating me. And I think that's the a great idea, or oh, that's cool, but just kind of placating me. And I think that's the first step. I don't think you ever know exactly who is going to be the most passionate and going to be your champion at the end of the day, and so I think that's step one is being willing to share it and almost experiment with reactions, and I think that's how part of how I found certainly you're going to look for, that's how I found, I think, the right people to support me in this. I think certainly there's an element of you're looking for people that have, maybe characteristics and dispositions who might find it valuable. I mean, for me. This was the reason I did this and, as you mentioned, trent, maybe at the start I just felt like I was getting pulled back into this societal vortex. I want to be a great dad, I want to stay in good shape, I want to professionally perform at a high level, I want to volunteer on these nonprofit boards, all of the things. You want to be a good husband and you're trying to juggle all these things, and so I just found I kept getting wrapped up in so many things to do and so much going on. I was on autopilot and it was, and so finding others that had those similar characteristics was certainly a part of it, but I think I would say the biggest part is just being willing to share it and put it out in the universe. To steal a line from Cameron Balzer Put things out in the universe and see what the reaction is. And things have evolved. I would say when I first introduced this and I think, the more that you can collaborate in community, not only do you get the support, but you get good ideas to kind of evolve where things are going.
Speaker 1:So when I first did this, this was all just about having something that you could program either on random or at specific times to hit you during those stressful moments or those moments where you found yourself throughout the day or the weekend really being vulnerable to being excessively frustrated or having challenged to keep your head in a spiritual place. One of the early guys that I had engaged really leaned into the community aspect of it. He said and TJ, I think you were very early on, you may have even had this idea initially. We had a few conversations of like what if you could send a prayer to someone else or send a vibration to someone else's cross? And it's like that opened up a whole new world and we went down that path.
Speaker 1:And so those are also energizing moments, because a lot of this is about we talk about grit. It's maintaining that energy, maintaining that level, sustaining that motivation, maintaining that energy, maintaining that level, sustaining that motivation. And it's come in the most unusual ways and some of the most surprising people and I have, I will say, I've run into a lot of people that I've shared this idea with and they've been like, eh, that's kind of cool, but I would never wear a necklace, or I don't wear necklaces, and some of that, again, is is part of the evolution, of finding the community. I will also say some of those people now have tried the cross and they feel very differently about it, which has been been fun to see as well. I okay, yeah, I'd like to ask you both a question, because I really don't have a lot of experience in starting a business. I would say I come in and probably later in the stage and I'm more of a scaler.
Speaker 1:But one of the biggest things and you touched on this is, like you have to be the visionary but you're also the energy hype guy, right To believe in yourself and to believe in the product. And there is a lot of time where I think you have doubt right. Like you've started the track club, you've started TPD Productions, you've started Eternize, you've started Premium Logic. But I know from going through that, even with the businesses that I own, is that there are times when you're like everything's going great or you've got. It seems like you need momentum, you want people around you, you want to share.
Speaker 1:For people out there that are starting a new business and I think this ties into grit, but it's more so like you start a new business, you have this idea and you're on fire about this idea, but at some point in time those emotions of doubt creep in, like is it really a good idea? Is it like? And you start to get like oh, do I, should I really do this? How do? How did you persevere through those emotions of like? I'm not really sure, and maybe it was community and other people, but I would be really curious of what got you guys on the other side of that, because I believe that that doubt is something that really holds a lot of people back.
Speaker 2:For me, I think you hit on a big one there with fear and it's getting over the fear and then really becomes getting over the fear and falling, falling in love with the process. So if you remember, back to the early days of nightlife production, there was this idea. So the way this came about was Trent was I think we've touched in other podcasts. Trent was the social one of the three of us. He moves out to Seattle. I'm essentially a 23-year-old living in what you would call mom's basement, even though it was an apartment in Kirkland Washington, but I didn't do anything socially. I'd been social at different times in my life, but it just wasn't. Then Trent introduces me to nightlife and a buddy of ours is a very successful DJ.
Speaker 2:At a night that was driven by when I say night, it was a Monday night and the crowd attending this event was driven by the drink specials that were offered. There was no other reason and we misinterpret. So we see this thing and again back to one of my driving passions making people happy. It's like, oh, we can do this. Everybody's coming here and we think that they're coming here to see this guy DJ and we can create all these other really cool events and provide this value and make people happy.
Speaker 2:And at that time, when you're partnered with somebody who's serving 700 people a night, you feel really confident. You don't have a lot of doubts, you're like we can just do this. And so we're like we're going to make flyers and we're going to put them on people's cars and they're going to come to these other events. And so you know, based on the success of that particular event, we got somebody else to allow us to do New Year's Eve by the Space Needle and again, we put flyers on cars and people showed up. Well, of course they did, because it's New Year's Eve and it's right next to one of the biggest landmarks in the entire city and they're just going to walk by and walk in. So we're like, oh, my goodness, we made $3,000 or whatever it was, and we thought, and then we got smacked in the face the shark club, the shark club, on Sundays and three of us there for
Speaker 2:years Korean Olympic restaurant. Right, we had gotten referrals from other promoters who'd attended that Monday and they'd told other club owners that we were the East side Kings and it was a total farce. And so that's right, you're right. When the doubt started to creep in, and then that's where I say you fall in love with the process. You're like, okay, putting flyers on cars isn't working. What do we do? How do we solve this problem?
Speaker 2:I still have this like inner drive to create something to make people happy, and there's part of the passion. Then part of it is the fear of failure. I don't want to be a failure. I got mom to give me $1,500 to print this first round of flyers. I don't want to be a failure here either. So I've got to remove we'll just use traditional business jargon KPIs from myself. Let's not worry about hitting these numbers that we've seen in the past. Let's realize that this is hard. If it was easy, everybody would do it. And let's look at okay, where can we leverage our skillset to be successful? So one of those things was we were working at Microsoft and we had IT background and we had technical skill sets and we could code a little bit. So well, let's put up a website.
Speaker 2:I don't see a lot of people doing that and then you think about it and you have more conversations and you're like you know we probably need to become more ingratiated with that community. So let's start going to a lot of events and just talking to people and getting to know them and buying them drinks and building that community. And then you start to have these revelations where you know what. I've noticed that when someone's looking at a yearbook or someone's looking at some type of photo gallery that they're always looking for themselves. It's like they have this. We should take pictures of people and put them on the website. Let's do that. And you know, we've started going to these clubs more often and I see that getting people's email addresses is a big deal and I see that what people are doing is when somebody goes to check their coat at a coat check, they're writing their email down on a piece of paper and then they're putting that in and they're sending them emails about events. Well, what if we took the pictures that we know people want to see and we password protected them so they had to give us their email and then we could validate the email and it wouldn't be written down by somebody who's half-trunk in a club. And then all of a sudden we have the biggest email list in the Northwest and it was just by following, and then we implement text messaging and all. But it was OK.
Speaker 2:I'm passionate about having a good time with people. I've got to get over this fear, like you said, of being a failure or of not hitting the numbers that I think I should hit, and then falling in love with the process of solving the problem. What are these little things we can do? Let's pay attention to our surroundings and maybe we don't have a direct mentor at times. That's great, but let's look and pay attention to those. Let's let our ego let's let our ego aside and be humble and realize that this isn't easy and that this isn't something that just happens overnight. And that was, you know, for me, a big. I guess that's kind of the amalgamation of different things that helped initially with those other businesses and the track club is the same thing Helped get them to where they got.
Speaker 1:But it took years, like you just extrapolated, like eight years of that process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, tpd started in 03. And really that wasn't profitable. I mean, we started going out in 02, probably right, so it wasn't really profitable for four or five years after that, for sure. And MTC was even less so right, we started that in 16. And this is really the first year, nine years later, where we're even at a breakeven point. But it's grown. We've sold out our races and it's continuing to grow because we really care about the experiences that people have. And again, that's back to that underlying driving passion.
Speaker 1:Todd, I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that. If not, I got another question for you. Go ahead, I'll ask that.
Speaker 2:Well.
Speaker 1:I remember with you and a couple of businesses one in particular there's an urgency, right, it's like we got to do something. We got to do it now. If this doesn't take off, things are moving too quick. In every example that I've heard from TJ and you, it's an incredible amount of patience. There is a process I've never seen anything take off in just a couple years. Right, it seems like the first five years are just like letting people know you exist. Talk me through what you've learned in that process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say I love what TJ said about falling in love with the process and being purpose-driven. I would say I love what TJ said about falling in love with the process and and being purpose driven. I think my sense of urgency at times it's this balance of sense of urgency and underlying long-term patients that I love to not I love to continue to keep the ball moving to the best of my ability and if things are moving forward as fast as you know I, I can reasonably do that and, and the others who are contributing, that actually gives me a little bit of energy that we're putting our best foot forward, and so I think some of that feeds the long-term patients just being more impact and purpose driven is hey, I want to be doing my best at whatever I do. That's just a standard of excellence, um, that I kind of carry forward. That motivates me. Uh, it does take an incredible amount of patience and I have learned a ton on that front from a long-term perspective, especially, as I mentioned earlier. This was the case for Eternize, as well as Premium Logic, which is a data analytics business. If I had known how long it was going to take and where we would be. I mean, neither of these businesses are profitable. I mean they're still continuing to consume significant amounts of time and money and energy and right now they're not generating any money. I mean, I'm squarely in that this isn't looking back and like, oh, I'm squarely in the part where I am struggling to prioritize and having to ask myself some tough questions what am I doing? But I am trusting the process and I have fallen in love with the process and found different ways to keep going.
Speaker 1:I will say the one thing that's helped me with Eternize especially and I learned this a little bit with Premium Logic is having appropriate expectations, knowing that it is going to take a lot of time. So I would say two things that have really, from an expectation perspective, been huge for me. It takes longer than you think. It's going to be more complex than you think. It's going to take more time, money, energy. You're going to have more time, money, energy. You're going to have more roadblocks. There's going to be more oh crap moments than you think. I mean psychologically, physically, emotionally. It is going to be harder than you think.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I think counters that is, especially when you're looking for community and you're looking for support and energy, it is harder than you can imagine for people to actually get your idea and understand it and be as excited about it as you are. No one will ever be as excited about your idea as you are, no matter how much you try I've tried to do this on both of my companies to just and I feel like it should just happen If I explain it to them like hey, here's what we're doing, that everyone should have that same amount of excitement. And the reality is it's really hard for people to get it the way you get it, because you've been living, dreaming, you've internalized this like you can see it, you can feel it, and when you try to convey that to somebody. It just doesn't happen. You can't transfer that like you would think, and so for me, I've learned that over time and it's really helped me not to be discouraged by people's lukewarm reactions, because it just is really hard for people to get it to that level until they get engaged and they're thinking about it to the extent that you are on an everyday basis. So just my expectations and knowing that going in it's helpful.
Speaker 1:When you say that to someone, when you share the idea with someone and they just kind of give you that lukewarm response, if you know that's coming, it's easy to kind of let that roll off your back. If you go into that conversation looking for the energy and the excitement and you're expecting that and you just can't wait to see the reaction because you're going to share this great idea with them and they're going to be so pumped up, it can be a huge letdown and can let a lot of air out of the balloon. So I think understanding those two things and keeping them in your mind as you move forward is critical. What would you guys? I think that's really, really good. A lot of people I know want to start their own business, right? Young entrepreneur got an idea. Want to start a business. The easiest thing to do is go on and register your LLC.
Speaker 1:Get your thing. You post it online. I got my LLC. What would you say to those new entrepreneurs that got an idea? They go register the idea. They're at square one. What advice would you give them?
Speaker 1:Nobody cares about your solution. They care about the problem that you're going to solve for them. I've got that advice and that's been really hard for me. Having data analytics business, having this cross business, I'm just like, oh, we've got these cool dashboards and these cool analytics and oh, check out this cross and it does this, and it does that and it does this. Nobody cares. I would say nobody gives. I'm going to pardon my French, but nobody gives a shit, frankly. So if you are coming up with a business, it better be solving a problem for a large group of people and it better be a problem that is annoying enough that someone's willing to invest some of their resources into you to help them solve that. And so anytime that you're thinking about starting a business, you need to be thinking and falling in love with the problem and not falling in love with any sort of solution you have. That's been the toughest thing for me to learn.
Speaker 2:I think you also too. To add onto that, you have to be realistic about where you are in your life and how you can accommodate the growth of your business. So I'll give an example. I think there's a couple of different instances. You know, uh, premium logic got on its feet faster than it turned ice. For sure. A lot of that was because of the proximity that it lived to your day job. So there was a little bit more focus and there was more benefit to IMG and things like that in the early development and you guys were kind of working together on some things like that.
Speaker 2:You know, I think what's been interesting for me is, you know, in the first couple of years of TPD 02, 03, 04, it was very especially 03, 04, it was secondary I was working at Microsoft, I was working at Disney. We're doing as much as we could, but really spending that time understanding the lay of the land. I mean, again, I've mentioned in prior podcasts I didn't have my first drink till I was 23 and I'd never been to a nightclub in my life. I've been to some house parties, but that was really about it. So I was really learning the lay of the land and learning the environment. Tpd from 05 to 06 grew exponentially. Why? Because I lost my job and I didn't have a family and I was 20 some years old and I was rooming with five people. So it was like that was the time of life that we talked about in prior episodes, where I was kind of living in my car for a while, I'd had a couple thousand dollars left over from my last paycheck at my job, and that was when I met Eric, who was my business partner in that back that time and that first night we worked together. I made 500 bucks, but I was at a point in my life where I could dump 17 hours a day into this it was, you know, going to so was able to make this exponential leap.
Speaker 2:So is it possible to do that? Sure, but you, I think a lot of times people downplay those years spent learning the landscape. Right, you may have. You were in insurance and you were over at Liberty Mutual for a decade learning the landscape and then it seemed like, oh, premium logic was on its feet in 18 months. Well, you had a thorough understanding of the problem, similar to what we did.
Speaker 2:But you can take it from there to there if you've got that thorough understanding if you've got the time and effort to dedicate to that. But then what you find is, if you have an entrepreneur who's maybe a little older, has a family, you know you can't put 35 hours a week into a side hustle with a job like that, so it's going to take longer and I think you have to be honest with yourself as it relates to those expectations. We're growing each and every night right now and I'm constantly trying to find little places where we can work on some of the things that we have in front of us. And Todd's very understanding because he deals with the same struggles, I think, where, okay, I put 10 hours into it this week. So I think, being honest with yourself in terms of the time and effort you can put into it and understanding, like you said, the problem at a very thorough and deep level, this is a really good point.
Speaker 1:So, grit, basically you got to be able to put in the work right over a long period of time. So here we are several businesses, several focuses right, and there's probably people out there that have a business or they have a full-time job and they want to start a new business. Would you recommend someone start a new business when they already have a job? Or how are you guys managing the difficulty of because you know, when a business starts, it's an infant, it's like taking care of a baby. You got to feed the baby, you got to change the baby, you got to. How do you go about that? And what advice would you give to young entrepreneurs that are trying to do more than one thing?
Speaker 1:I think what TJ said is key and TJ's had, I think, better said is key and TJ's had, I think, better patience than I. First of all, it's extremely difficult and, whatever you do, do not try and start multiple businesses while you're working a full time job with three kids. It's a horrible idea. And what TJ uncovered and when he was talking about the intricacies of him, pouring in and they started to get and spend time with people and that's where they uncovered some of these keys to unlock the pictures they wanted to see themselves. That's where you have those ideas and those moments that can be transformational. It can accelerate progress and when you're trying to juggle five and six things, it's extremely, extremely difficult to get down to that level of granularity where you really find the gems and the diamonds that can transform the business. So I would say, whatever you do, do not. And so, yeah, do not try and juggle more than what can be reasonably expected.
Speaker 2:I mean, to me that's I think we talked about this maybe a couple episodes ago. You also have to kind of shift expectations of yourself. That's really hard because, as competitive people, as driven people, we want to do that tactical work because it makes you feel important and you're like I have to do all. This is my idea. I have to do every little thing to make this successful. I don't trust anybody else to do it. You know I have to drive this to the end.
Speaker 2:And if you're 25 and you have no family and you're working a job that, let's say, is very fixed in terms of you know, say you work in the service industry five nights a week and you work six hours and you make your base plus tips, and you have all of this extra time to focus on your thing and you can do more of the tactical stuff, Great. But if you're in a situation like Todd is or like I am, you know my primary commitment is to the company who compensates me, which is my professional career day to day. I can't. And so for me, with like MTC, I have to trust the team. I have to trust Christie doing social media and driving that, and trust Corey with the logistics sides of things, and that's not always easy to do. You you know, so you have to.
Speaker 2:I think that's one of the toughest things is like look, be comfortable and take some pride in connecting the dots and take some pride in again your experience in whatever endeavor and whatever environment that you're operating in, and the value of that experience and how that helps you build the right community to drive your vision forward. That's tough and that's a big thing. That if you're going to start two businesses or a business with multiple kids and you're going to jump, you better be willing to trust other people or there's going to be some massive issues with inside of whether that's your day job or your family.
Speaker 1:And I want to add to that and one of the things I wanted to I think you've done really well at is manage your own expectations about how fast it's going to go, Because you have been great about MTC. You knew that was going to go at a snail's pace based on the time and energy you have and invest in that, and you were okay with that. That's something that I have struggled with and learned is stepping back and thinking, okay, what pace? You know it's okay for this to move at a slower pace. And knowing that and sitting in that and being comfortable with that Because, as I mentioned earlier, naturally I'm wired to like respond and keep this going and keep it going as fast as I can. And okay, the dev team has a question. I need to get back to them within 24 hours and I think setting those expectations with yourself will relieve a lot of pressure about how fast it actually truly needs to go.
Speaker 1:Is it the end of the world if this gets to market in 2025 versus 2026, or 26 versus 27, or whatever that case is? I think you can do yourself a lot of favors by resetting at a high level. This is fascinating because I believe from the entrepreneurs that I talk to. They want to start their own business because they want freedom of their time and they want financial freedom. So my assumption is, as most people will probably resonate with this, it's like I'm going to start my own business because I want free time, I want to make my own schedule and I want to make lots of money. Realistically, and your guys is expected I mean, how long does that take for that to even happen? Like, when do you cause? I know there's different stages of this, but you guys have both been in several businesses. Talk to me about those expectations.
Speaker 2:It might never happen. I mean, you may get to a point where it's a large part of your lifestyle, but maybe you have to supplement it a little bit. I think the important thing is it really does back to your cliche statement. It really does back to your cliche statement early. It really does have to be something you love and like. One of the reasons I've been able to maintain my patience is it's like focus on don't measure yourself against every other business out there. And it's so hard because you have people that we're.
Speaker 2:We're in this time, um, especially about a decade ago, maybe six or seven years, where Amazon reselling became huge and people still do it. But, like people figured out, I can go to Alibaba or whatever site in China and I can buy these things at a reasonable price. I'll create a fake brand and I'll relist it on Amazon. And there are always those first adopters, like the people that bought Bitcoin 15 years ago. Right, they get in at that, and. But the problem with today is they're sharing those journeys on social media or on YouTube and you're like, oh, this guy, we've all seen it right. The, the, the, the finance bros. Oh yeah, dude, got to make 20,000 this week. You know, all I got to do is you got to do these five things. It's going to take you 20 minutes a day and you're going to make your 500 grand a year. Take my course. We've got to stop comparing ourselves with those types of people out there and just let the driver not be. I'm going to have all of this money and all this free time, but I'm going to solve this problem for these people. You know, with the FOMO, that's the best example I have.
Speaker 2:I was so nervous about it. It was like the first time I ever threw an event in Seattle. It was like, man, I'm going to throw this event and it's going to be terrible. Nobody's going to be there. These people are going to have paid for a race. They're going to show up and they're going to feel like they got their money and they're going to feel like they got their money. They were taken advantage of and yada, yada, yada, yada. On the flip side to, nobody gives a shit about your idea. No one is going to see your shortcomings like you see them, and that's a again, I've used this word in private. That's a superpower, right? Nobody cares as much about the aid station experience as I do so. Look, I'm starting this first event. 25 people showed up, all right Again, best experience we can deliver for those 25 people. That's $2,500 in revenue of a race that year cost probably six or $7,000 to have.
Speaker 1:But you had your expectations set.
Speaker 2:Expect yeah.
Speaker 1:You knew that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, and that was huge but that takes some real self-searching and real effort to remain humble. Like, hey, the monumental marathon, you know, or the mini, the mini, the indie mini, happens in may, a month before us, and they have have 20,000 people and I have 20. I can't measure myself against those guys, but guess what? Here we are, five years in, and we're within 20% of being the largest 50K in the United States. And the only reason is because I'm obsessed with making sure that everybody has the best experience possible, that this race is accessible to everybody and that this helps people achieve things they didn't think they could achieve. Had I started, I think personally, measuring against some of those larger races, I would have shut it down after the first year because I'd have been so embarrassed I might not have even I might have shut it down before the race started. 25 people, it's a joke, but now it's one of the strongest communities in the country.
Speaker 1:I want to add to that. And then, trent, I want to ask you a question. So if you were trying to start a business while you're doing a full-time job, I would say 10 years. I would say it's probably going to take you a decade for it to start to actually yield meaningful resources. And I would say, if you're going to do it on your own and you're going to go out and you're going to drop your full-time job, to make it happen, it could be three to five years before you really turn a corner and it starts to produce the resources that you're expecting.
Speaker 1:The reason you should start a business is probably not so much for financial freedom, in my opinion, in my experience, not for financial freedom or freedom of time. It's to be able to do something you're passionate about and to feel a lot less like work right. So quality of life is how you feel. It's not necessarily what you have. And so if you are spending 40 hours a week doing something that you are enjoying versus not enjoying, that changes your quality of life drastically. The stuff that I do on Eternize and Premium Logic does not really feel like work. It can feel painful because of all the things I'm trying to juggle, but it's not something I've got to I dread doing. That would be the reason to start your own business if you can't find another one Now. There have been many examples, um that of people creating financial freedom and freedom of time by starting their own business, but there are also plenty of examples of athletes making it to the NBA. Right. There are 1% of businesses get to a million dollars in revenue and you know we're not talking about a million dollars in profit, we're talking a million dollars of revenue, which maybe is a hundred thousand or 150,000 in profit. So really, the American dream is a cool thing and a cool opportunity, but know what you're getting into.
Speaker 1:But I wanted to come back to this idea of fear of failure, because we've talked a lot about startups. You've purchased companies that are already off the ground. You've purchased companies that are already off the ground, and I think that fear of failure very much applies at all stages of businesses. You've had several businesses where you've been at these inflection points where you have had to make some very scary investments that jeopardize the long-term success of the business. You've had to been willing to to let the business fail almost in order to try and transform to the next stage. I mean talk about some of that failure and some of those journeys or that fear of failure. You start asking the question.
Speaker 1:I started to like get sick to my stomach of all those nights that I just didn't sleep. I think when I hit some of my inflection points. One of the things that did bring me comfort was to find other people to join me in the journey. One of the questions I asked earlier that when you came in and you were an owner and you had skin in the game and you ran at the same level and intensity as I did and you believed in it, the more people that I could get that believe in the company that were bought into it, the less I would have anxiousness or anxiety about it. So all of my companies I have partners in I don't own any of well, almost all of them, and part of that for me is I love bringing people together along the way and trying to create this unified approach.
Speaker 1:But there are several times where I just I didn't sleep. For weeks I was really nervous highly leveraged buyouts. I worried about accounts, I worried about things falling apart and I think faith was a big component for me. I turned to prayer and I turned to again trying to find the right people that could close some of the gaps. But it probably started when I realized I couldn't do it all Back in. I bought IMG in 2015. And I soon thereafter I had one of the largest books of business I was.
Speaker 1:So I was in sales, I was trying to run operations, I was trying to run the sales team, I was trying to be involved in finance and I I realized and it took several Tony Robbins events of like, and I say one of the things about Tony Robbins is he really helps you gain self-awareness and kind of get through your thoughts of like, what your shortcomings are, but also give you motivation and inspiration to believe in yourself. Right, because I think that's one of the things as an entrepreneur is. You're like, you have to believe in yourself, and you have to believe in yourself when you have those doubts and we all have those doubts of like is this going to work? I don't believe too many people have absolute certainty about what they're doing and you have to come across with absolute certainty. People want to feel absolute certainty to get behind you. So how do we create absolute certainty within our chassis? Well, you have to. You either are strong in your faith, you're, you know you're doing something in your life that makes you believe what you're doing is going to make a difference in people's lives.
Speaker 1:So for me, you know, a lot of those failures were trying things, learning things, realizing I can't do it all, bringing in the right people, being open to ideas, being realizing. I think one of the biggest things that I finally realized is that I didn't have to do everything. I'm the entrepreneur. I got to be the guy. I got to know everything. I got to do it all and then I realized like I'm only good at a couple things, that's it. And once I realized that and I didn't try to compare myself to you in ops or like James in sales or I didn't have to be everything to everyone and my ego, I didn't have to. I wasn't trying to live into a persona that I thought people wanted me to be. I got to be this guy. I got to have the answers.
Speaker 1:Like there was so much freedom when I realized like, look, I'm playing a role and this is the role I play and it's not any more important than the role you play, than James plays, than our account managers plays, like every role in the company, I believe is vastly important, and we all have different skill sets to fulfill those roles. So when I started to get freedom and started to get from what I'm going to call a business operator to a business owner, because I think we all dream about being the business owner, which is where you do start to see some of that financial freedom and the freedom of time it came from, just a humbling experience is that there are people out there that are better than me and a lot of different things willingness to spend the money to bring them in and the willingness to trust them and I think, when we can and really that's how you formulate teams and what happens is is your team starts to grow and they start to gain confidence and you're providing an opportunity for them to level up, which I think is a game changer. Now, with that, you lose some of your identity in the business. But I can't think of any other specific stories, but there's a lot of emotion there. I think what you hit was critical around recognizing what you are good at and spending time there, because I mean, every minute we spend doing something is creating some sort of value. The more time you can spend doing the things that you are really good at, the more return you're going to get on that investment of time, and so finding opportunities that allow you to spend more time doing the things you are really good at, naturally, I think, is going to pay off in the long run.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the things I wanted to ask you guys about because I think this is, you know, just this is something that a lot of people struggle with. Whether you're starting your own business or not, a lot of people are passionate about their profession and they spend a ton of time. Maybe it's not 17 hours a day, but maybe it's well more than the seven and a half and eight hours a day. One of the things that I've struggled with that I'd love your insight in and this is anyone who's just professionally minded and passionate about that and trying to achieve a standard of excellence is juggling that with parenting in particular and other responsibilities. I found myself and sometimes it's making excuses like, hey, it's okay that I'm doing this stuff over here because I'm accomplishing this thing for a broader group of people and I'm here for my kids. I'm doing enough here. It's really.
Speaker 1:I found it's really hard to find and feel like you're doing enough in these places when you're trying to do this and professionally, how have you guys sorted through that or reasoned through that feeling fulfilled in both aspects and not feeling like you're robbing Peter to pay Paul? I think you have to set boundaries. I always. I think it's a healthy tension. I think you're always going to have the tension right, like if you care passionately about both things. There's always a wrestle, there's always a tension of well, am I doing enough here? Am I doing enough here? So I try to set boundaries of, I try not to be on the phone when I get home and I try to set time.
Speaker 1:The bigger problem for me is sometimes it's easier to be at work Not that I love my kids any less than my work or my spouse, but like sometimes it's like being at work is the easier play and it's more fun sometimes, and so sometimes those because it is like more enjoyable at times, you find yourself wanting to do that versus some of the guilt that I have is I want to want to be there with the kids more Right. And so when you're you're running a successful business and you're growing and it's exciting, there's a lot of momentum and you're winning and like parenting doesn't have a ton of those moments where you're like I'm winning, right, it's always like gosh, am I ever going to figure this out? So you're getting better. I think you get feedback quicker and you get more satisfaction when you are successful in your profession and I think that drives you to want to do it more.
Speaker 2:I, for me, I just trust my standard of excellence. I guess kind of where that watermark lies. So not only am I getting done what I need to get done, but am I helping drive the business forward in a meaningful way. You know for me that that is different and there are different things that I do throughout the day to make myself feel more at peace with particular decisions. One of the things that I do, you know I know a lot of people set hard boundaries, like you do, like, hey, I don't want to be on the phone after five. I don't necessarily, you know, do that per se, because we're headquartered on the West Coast. I make myself available most days, you know, until eight or nine o'clock at night. Of course, if there's things going on during that time and I need to call somebody back, that's fine. But, um, you know, I kind of look at it. I also look at the day more broadly. So I look at the day from 7am until 9pm and I carve that up versus like, okay, the, you know. And that's different for people that are in an office environment from nine to five or eight to four or whatever that are fixated, but for a lot of the people that are working remote. Now it's like, okay, two hours here, and then it's kind of like block scheduling for school or whatever else. I'm doing two hours here, then an hour here with the kids, and two hours here, then an hour or whatever, however that looks for you.
Speaker 2:But I think it's being comfortable setting a standard of excellence based on your past accomplishments and past achievements.
Speaker 2:So if you've been involved with companies and you've risen the ranks and you've done that through a particular method, then continuing to apply that as your life changes and again understanding that as you grow professionally, it is more important to leverage your experience to recognize who the people are that are better than you and how best to help them integrate with the other people in your organization and how to best benefit your organization.
Speaker 2:Like you have to be able to be. Like I can't oh, I didn't code the website, so you know I'm worthless. No, I found the best person here to do that and this best person to write copy and this best person to develop, um, you know, marketing campaigns and this. You get where I'm going with it, so those. That, for me, is how I'm able to um juggle things. And then I also realized, too, that you raise kids once and that's the most impactful thing, in my opinion, that you do while you're on earth. Period. I love my job, but and and you know any CEO or president that has kids I think you know those that don't yet Any.
Speaker 1:CEO or president that has kids. I think those that don't yet may not understand that, but they don't ever play second fiddle. Let me ask you guys this, just to bring this back to grit, which is in kind of sustaining things long term. Is that eroding as a society? We've talked in different episodes about the dopamine chasing and what was the movie that you referenced with the people and going around in their-.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, WALL-E, WALL-E, yes.
Speaker 1:I think delayed gratification is becoming more and more a lost art, because you talk about this Some of the stuff at work. The reason it's fun is we get hit with dopamines as we're solving problems and accomplishing things right. As a society is grit becoming more and more a thing of the past.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean yeah, and I say that fairly definitively. How can it not? You know, I think that's a benefit of growing up when we grew up is that we didn't have as many distractions. I think, you know, and as you age you realize more that you can't rush the process, and so grit kind of naturally becomes part of your being. But, man, you know, I look at our children collectively and kids in that age range, and, granted, most people don't have grit at that age, but I, I see a lot less of it, um, even even the beginnings of it, you know, at that age, because there's so many shortcuts to satisfaction satisfaction and then, like you said, the delayed gratification.
Speaker 2:That's hard man, that's, that's something that really takes time to master and I think, even as parents, we have trouble enforcing delayed gratification you know, it's oh, I'm gonna make you wait two days instead of you know two minutes, or I mean everything in life, man, from product shipping to the availability of food, to the availability of content, to oh, it's unbelievable. So I'm not saying we're better, I'm saying I don't know how anybody maintains it with what's available today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think society has set a new norm of more of an instant gratification. I don't know how you teach. I think, when you ask that question, what I think of is how do you instill grit? What were the things that we did growing up that were just natural, that built more grit into us to do things long-term Cause?
Speaker 1:I, I would agree with you that I don't believe grit is common, and you do see the social media and the different places saying hey, you know, sign up for this course. Like, become a coach. Like you know, everyone's trying to find the easy button into a job, a role, to to get here, from here to here as quick as humanly possible, which we've all talked about, isn't very realistic, at least in our experience. It's not something that happens overnight and it takes years upon years, upon years. And I'm not saying you can't, one of those couldn't work for someone, and they're one of the first ones. And they figure something out or they go viral and boom, it takes off, but 99% of the time it probably isn't. So I, I, I would be interested to understand what things in our upbringing or what things that we could do for the next generation to help build kids um with grit.
Speaker 2:I mean, I could talk a little bit about some of the stuff that we've done with Kay, because she has that in her.
Speaker 2:I don't know how much of that's intrinsic, but it's really recognizing what is priority at that age, which is play and fun and exploration. How do you weave that in in a a meaningful way? We her and I actually talked about this yesterday. We went on a five mile run and I was talking to her about just running in general and you know how she's able, or how she's been able to to kind of progress like she has and I think it's. You know, we started with something easy. We started with, um, something digestible, that like running the mile a day. Because for her, you know, I asked her yesterday, um, sorry for digressing there a little bit, as we were running I'm, you know she was fixated on four miles and she didn't want to run four and a quarter. It was like the end of the world.
Speaker 2:And I said I just asked her. I said, well, what is the like we're talking about three minutes, you know like in a day. You know I can't as an adult understand that. And she's like well, dad, I don't want to feel like I'm missing out and because it's not top priority for them. So she's like, well, that three minutes they could be jumping on the trampoline and I'm missing out, or they could be at the pool and I'm missing out. And so it's like, at that age, helping them either integrating those things that they feel like they're missing out on to integrating friends and community, into whatever consistent endeavor you want them to pursue, chunking up those things in smaller bites. So, as they're younger, you know, they get used to the mile a day thing.
Speaker 2:Right, she gets used to 10 minutes a day when she's eight, um, or eight minutes a day. It doesn't have to be running, it could be anything, but doing it consistently. Let's go shoot for 10 minutes a day and then that builds. And then, you know, so it's an art, right, and it's spending a lot of time thinking about it. You know, I know Noah has some of the same proclivities.
Speaker 2:So, with with Kay, that's how we've done it and we're we're continuing to listen to her and and then to help her and the kids recognize the fruits of their labor, right, you know, look at your progression throughout time and understand that is the result of your hard work. And oh, by the way, there are going to be failures. She's going to come into track season here and she's not going to be as fast as she thinks she is. I know that because I can see her confidence and that's going to be a little bit of a setback, but then she's going to be able to look back and assess the situation. Bake you know what? I took some shortcuts here. Maybe it means enough. Maybe success means enough to me to fix that going forward. And then that's when you grow that capacity to be more gritty and to be um more successful long-term.
Speaker 1:So it takes time, I would say. First, it takes time for kids and anyone to learn that, and I would say for me, the best way for kids to learn grit and delayed gratification is for them to experience it, and I think that's what TJ just talked through and I think, as we've just been talking, there's no shortcuts. There's no shortcuts to that either. You have to hold their hand through that process and you have to provide all the tools you can for them to experience enough motivation until they get to that point where they can experience that delayed gratification. So Noah is an example where I have had to spend a lot of time crafting like different fun programs for him that give him something to shoot for and something to be excited about until the progress and he can actually feel and see that. So I remember last year he would not go out and practice golf on his own, which is probably reasonable. He's 10 years old who wants to go out and just grind and chipping and putting, and so we had happened to be listening to this book by Tim Grover, who is Michael Jordan's. Noah loves Michael Jordan, so I was tapping into some of his interests there. He was his trainer and he has these different types of people that he talked about, of closers and cleaners. And there was one other category that I yeah great book, one other category that I'm spacing. But I created this program for Noah. He could go out and do a closer session or a cleaner session and there were short game and long game and you know, hit 10 out of 15, you know, out of 15 shots, you need to hit 10 within. You know three feet if you're chipping or go out. And so created this program which, again, I was initially frustrated, like why is he not going out and practicing Like he's got? We've been working on golf for so long, he's got so much potential. And like it was, it was I. My frustration was directed at him and it should have been directed at myself. It's like I need to be better to step up and help him through this. So I finally went through that whole cycle of emotion and realized it was me and so I give him this program that allows him to go out and really grow his golf game. And then, when it came fall, so that was like early summer when he finally started to get out there. And then it came fall when he performed in his U S kids tournaments way better than he did in the spring. You know he was finishing top five. He probably got four or five medals in the fall, when I think maybe he got one in the spring. And so then he's experiencing that gratification, but it took a lot of handholding and took a lot of time and energy and effort, self-reflection, vulnerability, to get him to experience that. And now that starts to build right.
Speaker 1:And the same thing in basketball. He does a lot of training and a lot of things and I again, we had to find some ways to keep him excited and engaged about it. He last year in the spring he played on primetime's gray team, which was their fourth team, actually played on their white team, which was their fourth team, actually played on their white team, which was their third, and then he dropped to the gray team, to the fourth team, and so here we are, and and, but he stuck with it. We've, we found creative ways to keep them engaged and then he just made the silver team, which is the second team. So he jumped two teams and that's that. He experienced that. Wow, I worked this hard. Here's the progress, here's the delay gratification, and I think when you can get them to experience that. Then it just starts to compound.
Speaker 2:You know. I think that brings up a point to me that I'd like to talk to you guys about, which is the secondary benefits of of of grit, right? So you talked a lot about and you've talked a lot about this in a lot of certain scenarios, about dealing with risk and and and sleepless nights. But and maybe you can expound on this, that would lead me to you're also you've also become very, very risk tolerant, right? So you can take risks now because you've probably been through some things and I think that's a secondary benefit of grit. So maybe expound on that a little bit and like what some of the side benefits have been from going through some of those long-term struggles.
Speaker 1:I think we've talked about it Like the body and the mind are both incredible from a standpoint of I think you adapt to things that you put yourself in right, like whether it's heat acclimation when you're running or you know. So for me, I think I guess in any area of my life where I've forced myself out there and that's that initial push that the next time I do it it gets easier. The next time I do it it gets easier. There's a few fundamental things when I'm looking at risk that I kind of have a chart of how I approach it. There's certain things I won't do and there's certain things I will do and there's little things that say this is a 50-50, but if it has these three things in it, then it checks the boxes. So I've done it enough now when I've bought enough businesses or done enough things to where I do have somewhat of a formula. But my ability to handle hard situations and to take risk is directly correlated with just having experience doing it right, because when you risk is like you don't, it's the unknown right. There's a fear of the unknown of what if. Well, if you take risk all the time and you start to realize like well, I've painted this really bad picture of this is how, like, if this doesn't work out, this is the worst case scenario. I don't think I've knock on wood. I've never seen the worst case scenario and so sometimes it's not as bad as you think it actually was. So I've learned to navigate that as I've grown and I've had more and more experience of what the actual risk is. And then the more I do it, the easier it gets. I think that's the biggest secondary benefit, right, there is certainly the primary benefit of grit is you get to achieve these things that you're striving to do over long periods of time. I think the biggest secondary benefit is that grit gets easier. The more you grind, the easier the grind gets in any areas of life, because you are training and adapting your brain to that.
Speaker 1:I want to ask a follow-up question of you both. I'm just interested as we pontificate about this, because you have a lot of generations that think, oh my gosh, we were like this, we walked uphill to school both ways and we did this, and they kind of chastise the next generation for not having that quality or characteristic. But in a lot of reasons or in a lot of situations, it's not that big a deal, right? The society's adapting, generation's adapting. So I would ask you guys, as we look about grit we talk about grit eroding as a society and it being very difficult to instill in kids what are the potential implications like societally?
Speaker 1:Is there a real impact there? How do we see, from a macro perspective, that changing dynamics within families or within societies, or just overall progress? How do we see if there's anything that you guys can think of, how that will, and if it's as big of a deal as we're we're making it out to be like we used to talk about we'd go, we'd all, we were outside, we would play all the time outside and this and everyone's just playing screens. Now, we did play our fair share of screens in the basement, right, but there's those are the types of things that I talk about, that we kind of reminisce about having this sorts of, or its characteristics. Is the fact that people may not have as much grit in 10, 20, 30 years going to be that big of a deal? And, if so, where do we see that manifesting?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to take this one off the rails, sorry, because I've been thinking about this a lot. What is this is kind of rhetorical. We've done a lot of hard things, a lot physically, business-wise. There's one thing that we're experiencing now that is by far and away the hardest thing you'll ever do in life, and that's raising your kids. Like from a grit perspective, it's just constant. Everybody's kids are different, everybody's situations are different, and that is and I wonder now, granted you know we're, you guys are very early millennial. I'm kind of on that Gen X border there, as technology has advanced, which I think a lot of people categorize as the catalyst to this lack of grit. If you will right this instant gratification to this lack of grit, if you will right this instant gratification, is that why we're seeing and from what I understand from the content I've digested a pretty significant decrease in the decision to have kids.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is where I'm very curious from a societal impact, and we may have to cut this out of the podcast entirely, I don't know. So you have a lot of people that maybe see their friends and the struggles. They're at a party with a friend who's got an infant, who can't participate at all because they're at that infant's beck and call or they invite friends to do things and the friends can't do things for weeks and weeks in advance because they have to plan it around their kids' sports and they're like I don't want any part of that because it sounds hard and I have to do it for at least 18 years, right, or 17, or 16 or 25. And I wonder if that's why this is again kind of out there. We're seeing what seems to be an extreme focus on the well-being of people that aren't related to us. So what I mean by that is maybe we're wired from an evolutionary standpoint to be parents.
Speaker 2:There are things that there's this inner drive to exert our will on something, to bring it up the right way, and we have all these people that are not doing that because they're afraid of this long-term challenge. And that's why we see a lot of very overzealous concern about marginalized communities out there. Because we're taking that inner desire to be parents. It doesn't get, you know, driven out through the traditional channels of something that's very difficult and instead it's manifesting itself in again this extreme concern. And so when you say, when that question is posed, how do you see this potentially affecting it. I see that as a major factor. So I mean that's kind of out there. But I'd be interested in your guys' takes.
Speaker 1:I mean that's really interesting. So you're saying kids choosing and people choosing to have fewer kids, if kids at all, is a potential implication, and I would stretch to say some of what you said. Maybe even the quality of the parenting potentially could be impacted. I mean we've seen that generational trend now for several I mean our parents and parents' parents it was 12, 10, 8, 7, 6 kids. Now you see that in Catholic communities, but that's really one of the few pockets where you see, because that seems just unbelievably, I mean it seems so overwhelming. Now, in generations where 80% of the US were farmers and you were working 12, 12 hour days, the idea of 12 kids probably didn't seem all that intimidating, or 10 or eight, but now you know, more than two seems like what am I doing to myself? So it's just a really interesting observation that potentially that has been that trend.
Speaker 1:But, trent, well, I think about what you just said is people used to have kids and a lot of kids because they helped. The more kids they had, the more they helped in whatever it is, and now it has shifted to I got more things to take care of. Right, like it's more of a I have to do this for all these kids and take them all these places and do all these things, versus the kids were helping the parents and they were helping add to the value of the family. I think it's a fascinating question Is the lack of grit going to change and see a decline in population over a long period of time? Because people are more focused on themselves and they don't have that innate desire and kids have become more of a burden than a help, which I think that's a fundamental shift? Yeah, and I think what's interesting I'll just share from our time in the Dominican, a lot of third world countries are still having high numbers of kids, partially because of the lifestyles they live.
Speaker 1:Now I say that kind of out of two sides of my mouth because I know that is some of the problem with generational poverty. When you have five, six, seven kids by the time you're in your mid-20s, it's very hard to get out of that. So I don't want to say that's necessarily a bad or a good thing, but it just. There's an interesting element. It does kind of support the trend that, relative to the difficulty of the life that they're living on a daily basis, there may be a correlation and again, we're not experts or scientists or whatever. We've not done the studies, but it would be interesting to look further into a potential correlation between quality of life and kind of population growth.
Speaker 2:There's obviously a ton of variables there, but oh, it's just, it's such a fascinating thing to explore. I mean, it's such a I don't know it's such a unique situation to explore. I mean it's such a I don't know, it's such a unique situation, like I was saying, I think about it a lot.
Speaker 1:What about the quality of parenting? So we talked about maybe maybe there are still people, if they're having fewer kids, they're still having kids, or maybe some some aren't. But for those that are like, do we feel like as parents and I mean I'm not, I'm not excusing ourselves from this I mean I think we probably are more challenged to as we've just talked about today to really engage and do some of those more difficult parenting things. I mean you just said that's the most difficult thing we do today. I would guess two or three generations ago parenting wasn't the most difficult, or several generations ago wasn't the most difficult aspect of life. But now that it is like, how do you see equality of parenting? And again, in what ways does that manifest and how do we, how do we dodge that bullet?
Speaker 2:I remember a quote from years ago that somebody put on Facebook and this has been at least a decade, and I probably mentioned this quote to you guys before, but I think it's relevant here and it was somebody at the time that was in their teens, comparing their experience with today's societal struggles, with being on the front lines in World War II, and it seems so absurd to me. I'm like what are you talking about? What do you mean? You have it tough with your iPad and your whatever, whatever, and these people were dying, you know to, for the freedom. But then I mentioned to Tara and she's like well, think about it a little bit. Um, you know, it may not be as as this. The space may not be as cavernous as you think it is, you know, with the permanency of your life being captured online and the potential ridicule to follow if you do something.
Speaker 2:I mean, we see it today a lot. But I think back to the. I do not, and we're in it, I guess right, but I don't envy the parents that are coming after us and I don't envy the parents coming before us, because I think we're finally in the generation that's seeing the recoil of what happened when we didn't understand the impact of technology. We didn't understand when I mean fighting the urge like not knowing the benefits or not having done the cost benefit analysis or the benefit weighing the risks and benefits to an iPad and, as a parent 10 years ago, just throwing it to your kid.
Speaker 2:I mean you dealt with it with Roman. Probably you didn't know, nobody knew back then, like it was just man, this is a lot of work. Here's an easy solution and oh, by the way, there's educational stuff on here and it's going to help with hand-eye coordination and yada, yada, yada, like that was a big thing. We're finally in the generation where we're at now starting to see a little bit of a recoil and okay, the time limits and screen time pass all these things. And then you know the generation after us is going to face. You know even more challenges that relate as it relates to, you know, delayed gratification, and I mean man is there any way to use technology to offset this Right?
Speaker 1:So, like one of my things with, eternize is okay, technology is causing all these distractions. We're pulled into this societal vortex. We're running around like chickens with our head cuts off, trying to do everything. And then here's a technology we can deploy that vibrates at some point during the day and just allows you to recenter, to reset, to reground yourself spiritually or however you want to do that. That was an attempt by me We'll see how much that plays out into reality to take technology and use it as a catalyst to kind of restore some of those, um, some of that mindfulness, I guess. Is there a way to use tech? You think there's a way to use technology or for parents, ourselves or in future generations, to use ai or other technologies to offset, to maybe make it easier to be a great parent? I I don't know um the answer to that, um to go back to your original question, I wonder if our parents cared about. They probably cared, cared about.
Speaker 1:I feel like people are obsessed with the outcome of their children because of social media, it's like this, this huge comparison thing, and they got to we talked about in one of the episodes. Take. They want all their kids to take the four lane highway to, you know, doing good in school, doing good in college, making good money, starting a family. I feel like that is something that our generation focuses on, a ton which I think drives some of this craziness.
Speaker 1:I wonder if our parents, or their parents, man, they were like Grandpa Jim was. You know, he worked, he had seven or eight kids and he worked three jobs and all he was focused on was just making sure there was food on the table. I wonder how much grandpa Jim thought about. I wonder if my son, jeff or Tim or Pete or Fred were, are going to make it like versus like. Right now, I feel like there's so much focus on the outcome of our kids and there's so much of our identity tied to the outcome of our kids. Um, I think there's got to be something there. I'm not sure what it is I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think the next 20 years, from a purpose exploration standpoint, are going to be critical because we're going to have to find, as I think, as humans, there will be people, certain people that have to find different purposes and passion around different purposes. You know, what are things that humans can do that you know computers can't replicate, and that's going to be. I don't know if, if you know, we can leverage technology to help us find those things, or if it's going to kind of come out in the wash as we see how these different technologies evolve and we see where their shortcomings are and then we can. I mean, physical fitness is always going to be right, like I think there's something one thing you've seen over the years is that there is an inherent disinterest in, um, robotic, uh fitness endeavors, like that basketball machine from Honda or somebody that can hit shots, like you see, but nobody cares. Like if that machine hits 100 threes in a row, nobody really cares. Like everybody looks past that kind of in a similar way that people have kind of you can instantly recognize AI art. You know you're seeing where some of these shortcomings are and you're seeing where humans just don't necessarily. You know, oculus, right. Or Google Glass there's something about. Or Apple Vision Pro there's something about, things that people wear on their face. They just don't, it just doesn't quite resonate.
Speaker 2:So I think, over time technology, we may leverage it in a way that we're using it as this kind of roadmap for where we can find more passion and purpose and then, once that's achieved, then we can, like you, leveraging some of the things you and I talked about earlier with our kids.
Speaker 2:Then we can help nudge them down those paths, knowing that eventually they're going to find comfort and solace in the fact that they are seeing progression down paths that have meaning, as opposed to paths that don't. Because I wonder, with school now you know, I mean, I get it why I have chat, gpt or Grok or Gemini or whatever, at my fingertips. That is going to answer all of the questions I need answered for the most part as it relates to what would traditionally be offered from a testing perspective in school. What am I doing? You know, and I don't think we quite know yet where we're going to need to go, and but once we do that, I think you know so. So that's maybe how I see using technologies. It's kind of more of a, a roadmap and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Speaker 1:There's a ton to think about man. That may be a good place to uh, yeah, I think we put a wrap on it, wow. So thank you guys. I think for me, grit, passion, perseverance over a long period of time we've all experienced that in some ways. It isn't easy and, as we've talked about, I'm not sure we're doing a great job of instilling that even in the next generation, not sure we're doing a great job of instilling that even in the next generation. But it does play a part in all of our journeys and trying to have the patience to kind of grind through that to get that long-term fulfillment, I think it's even more meaningful when it takes a long period of time. So thanks for tuning in today. That's a wrap on episode 14.