Living intentionally is not just about setting goals, it’s about aligning every aspect of your life with purpose. In this episode, Tommy Thompson reconnects with Shawn Boyer, the visionary entrepreneur behind Snagajob and goHappy, to dive deeper into the journey that took Shawn from bootstrapping a startup to redefining his life’s mission. After the emotional challenge of leaving Snagajob, Shawn spent years reflecting on what truly matters, ultimately leading him to found goHappy—a tool designed to help people nurture their most important relationships. Listen in as they explore the intersections of personal and professional growth, the power of mentorship, and how applying business principles to life can create a more balanced, intentional way of living. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or simply looking to live more purposefully, this episode offers invaluable insights into how to thrive in both work and life.
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Building A Life Of Purpose: From Startup To Intentional Living With Shawn Boyer
I don’t very often in this podcast, if you’ve been reading this for a while, have repeat guests along but sometimes certain people have been connected to over years that they have much to offer. That just telling their story isn’t doing justice. I’ve just had such respect for our guest, Shawn Boyer over the years of how he lives his life and we’ll get a lot more into this. I’m excited to have a conversation that doesn’t necessarily cover much just who you are and where you’ve been, what you’ve done, but what’s underneath that.
Shawn and I did an episode together. It was a multiple episode back in May of 2021. If you’re interested in reading more of his story, which is a phenomenal, powerful life story, go back to those episodes. I am not sure what the numbers of them are, but from May of 2021, I think you’ll hear a lot more of that. We’re just going to get a brief update on what’s going on professionally in your life.
Then we’re just going to share some of what I consider the life lessons that you’ve experienced and me too, that cross these lines between what we’ve done professionally, who we are on the inside, and what we do outside of our professional life. Shawn, I’m excited to have you back. It’s been great to catch up with you and now we’ve stayed in touch over these years, not as much as we would like but I’m just really excited to have you back.
I’m super excited to be back and thanks a ton for having me. The repeated nature of it may be because I’m long-winded and I need to be more concise taking out a single episode but I’m super excited to be back.
This is great. It’s going to be much fun to catch up on a lot of things. Every time we’ve had breakfast or lunch together, it’s just a rich conversation that I feel is just this sharing of my learning much from the different ways that you’re living your life out. Not just professionally, but personally and with your family.
Right back at you. I learned a lot more than you do.
We’re going to get into a lot of this stuff. This is I think going to be a rich and useful conversation for anyone who’s reading with a lot of unplanned ideas about what you could perhaps put into practice in your life and all of your efforts to just live a better life. I’m going to use this word and we’ll probably use it a lot, to live more intentionally, instead of what is prevalent these days is to just live in reaction to everything happening.
We can’t help that. There is so much of that’s going on but the more we can live intentionally, I just think there’s much value in that. Before we dive into a lot of that, I’d love to catch up with those who are listening to what you’re doing. Maybe you can just go back and give the real Cliff Notes version of what you’ve done over your career, from the professional angle and maybe a touch of family, real briefly, but there’s a lot of stuff going on.
Shawn’s Career Journey
Try to make it as concise as possible. Yes, on the work front, I had started a company back in 2000 that was in the frontline hourly worker space. It was a two-sided marketplace where frontline hourly workers could find work. On the other side, these employers could find these types of workers. Bootstrapped it initially with friends and family. Over time, ended up raising around the VC funding. We created a whole suite of software over time. Ultimately, we dug into this more later, it ended up becoming interesting, left there in 2013, and then we ended up selling to a private equity syndicate in 2016.
That company was Snagajob.
Yes, it was Snagajob. It’s based here in Richmond, Virginia.
A lot of people who are reading this are from Richmond, and you’re probably familiar with the name Snagajob. It was quite a force that having worked in Richmond all through those years, it felt like it just sprung up out of nowhere and a real force to be reckoned with. You founded that and built it then.
Yes, and then after that, again, left there in terms of the operating capacity, stayed on the board in 2013, stayed on as the board chair for another couple of years, and ended up selling the majority interest in that to this other group. I would say too, maybe we can come back to this later, but that was an emotionally hard time to be parting ways with something that I had cared much for, and still cared much for all the people who were there.
It still had many additional opportunities and different directions in which we could have run. Ultimately, that wasn’t God’s plan at that time. I then spent a couple of years just thinking about what I wanted to do next. I was young and did not want to be done in terms of working. Wrestled with what that was. I ultimately decided that I wanted to do something again from an entrepreneurial perspective.
I was, as you mentioned the word intentionality at Snagajob, our mission, vision, and values were incredibly important to us there. If I rewound the clock to 2004, the first four years basically of Snagajob, all I did was just work. I wasn’t married, I ignored friends and everything. I just felt that I got to pour myself into work.
I got to the point where I can’t work any harder than that. We were still burning cash and weren’t sure how we were going to make payroll type of a thing. Is this going to work? Is it not going to work? We have to make it work, because Uncle Bobby and Aunt Linda are invested, and all of these different people, my mom and dad.
Reading back to these episodes, you stuck your neck out big time with Snagajob.
When you or I look back on it now, when I left to start Snagajob, I had been an attorney for a few years and wasn’t married or anything. I didn’t have that type of responsibility but I did take out what 401k money I had. I had to defer all my law school loans. I took out every credit card that I could with the law firm because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get a credit card once I started my own thing.
I kept in a Manila folder these yellow legal sheets of paper where it tracked which credit cards I was transferring which money to back during those first several years because you get those promotions in the mail that you know, you would probably throw away. Back then, I didn’t throw them away. I thought, “I can transfer this balance. This credit card gets free entry for six months, and I’ll find another one to transfer it over to.” That was just, it was a very stressful period.
It worked for you, but it’s not the recommended way.
I don’t think I would recommend that to anybody.
Did you read that? We’re not recommending it.
Yes, sorry. I probably shouldn’t say that out loud, but that was just the nature of what was happening then. Ultimately, I just got to this point where I don’t know what else to do. I said, “I’ll just give it to you.” That was an impossible thing for me to say. I feel like six or three months before that, for whatever reason, I just got to that point where I said, “I’ll give it to you and whatever you want to do with it.”
I just felt that I’ve got to have more balance in my life. I wasn’t going to church at the time, and didn’t have a church. I started searching for a church. I ignored all my friends to the point where I found out later that one of my best friends from college got married. I said, “I didn’t even know you got married.” He said, “Dude, you never returned any of my phone calls.” That’s why. True.
Even during those first four years of Snagajob, we were intentional about our mission statement and our vision, values, and whatever reason. I said, “Do you what? I’m maniacal about us having this at work. Why do I not have a mission, vision, and values in my own life?” I then took time to craft a mission statement for my own life and then, the same thing with the vision and the values.
Similarly, we were maniacal about setting goals at Snagger Job, but yet I didn’t have any goals in my own life. I said, “I’ll employ the same philosophy in my own life that I have in my work life. Then, I went through this process of, “It’s not my work life and then my personal life.” There are these different buckets of my life that I care about and just one of them happens to be the professional side.
There is my health, the spiritual, the trips, and the adventure side. I just started to think about these different buckets and then setting goals in each of those and then, again, I may be getting out of line with where you want to go at this point. The other thing was at least it worked. It was like, if you have goals, they don’t become tangible until you put them on your calendar and you’re going to put time to go do these things.
If you have goals, they really don’t become tangible until you put them on your calendar.
I’ve got my relationship bucket of goals. What do I want to do there? As unemotional as it sounds, I guess, it was okay. I said to my buddy, “Matt, let’s go spend time together.” Why don’t we get to go spend time together and block the time on my calendar to go have a recurring lunch with Matt every two months, wherever that rhythm looks like? Trying to take those same types of principles that we operated with at work and employ them. These other buckets of my life.
It was a very write-out of my three-year objectives and then my one year, then cashing that down to the month and so forth. My wife jokes to me all the time that we do these now as a family and I want to plot out our goals with her, mainly me, and she obliges me with sitting down and going through them with me. I have on there, the ages of what our kids will be and stuff at the end of each year.
She jokes that before our third son was born she was due in a couple of months and I came running into her office and said, “Dude, we were six months ahead of schedule on our third year.” According to what we said, we wanted to hit timeline-wise with the kids. Anyway, when I left Snagajob I was in this period of a couple of years trying to figure out what I was going to do next.
I said, “Do you know what? I wish there was something more interactive that would help people me plan their goals all cascaded from what their mission, vision, and values were or task you that down into some interactive tool that helps them set goals, share them with the appropriate people, get them on people’s calendars.”
“Have a doodle-like functionality to find the time to go do these things together rather than the more privately sharing of the photos of the cool things that we did together to have it that motivates you to go do those things again.” That’s what is now named goHappy. That’s what that started as and that initially started as a company named Die Happy. It was all about living a life intentionally so that when you do get to that ultimate time that we all will come to of dying, I can look back on my life and feel I lived a rich intentional life.
I never knew that it started with that. That gives some real color to it. I wanted to get him more goHappy. I’m going to start calling it Die Happy. I want to just piggyback on what you said about this path because it was very similar to mine and I think that’s one of these places that we connected in that through myself, into this entrepreneurial life that I was living by running companies.
At my particular stage, it was probably running multiple smaller companies, you were running the big Snagajob during that time and there was this a-ha moment in a sense of saying these things that I clearly know are adding value to the company. That is, we should understand what our mission is, we should understand what our values are, and we should have a vision, we should set goals. I can see how this is a good way to run a company.
Why wouldn’t I live my own life that way? I had that same a-ha moment that this is a good way of running a company. It’s not as simple as that, but it’s still very powerful. I need to have that in my own life. This translation began with what I saw working at work that I then applied to my personal life. Then you begin to make these other translations, saying, “If it works for me personally, could this work for my family?”
“If I’m going to do it there, what about my health?” You begin to think this way and it creates, in a sense, this snowball effect of this trajectory that happens. At least for me, I don’t know if it was the case for you, I began to look at these various areas and think, “Are they all keeping up?” “Am I overweighting business to my family?” “Am I doing something now in my personal life that I ought to consider applying to my business life?” It began to create all of these parallels, which is what I hear going on with you.
goHappy
It was very cool. I would not have seen that outside of that entrepreneurial journey that was demanding and stressful. Almost out of desperation, we’ve got to do these things. That’s great. I love that. To me, if those who are reading just picked up that one thing of saying that this idea of these things that we know are good in business, mission, value, vision, and goals.
We just said, “Why not try our own life?” We could cut off the show here, but let’s go a little bit more. You had this initial vision with Go Happy. How has it been? How many years?
Since the initial Die Happy days, it’s been seven years and 6 months. The logo of Die Happy, if you’re a Nirvana fan, you probably remember that t-shirt, the X is for the eyes and then the smiley face. That was our logo. What we fairly quickly found doing discovery with your target audience was trying to help people be intentional about all of the different areas of their lives in an app.
If somebody’s downloading this app, how do you get them to be more intentional about all these different areas? It was hard. We started to pair it down and what we ultimately paired it down to that we were going to try to focus on was helping people be more intentional about their most important relationships in life.
That got into like a CRM tool for your most important relationship. When is Tommy’s birthday? When is Tommy and Masey’s anniversary? Making sure that I’m getting notified plenty of time in advance that I can buy Tommy a gift in advance of his birthday or, buy you and Masey a card or whatever it might be. The Mother’s Day reminders and being able to collect the things that I know Tommy is interested in and put those against Tommy’s profile.
Also, there was a doodle polling type of functionality where you’re busy and I’m busy, especially if there are more than two of us trying to find time to get together, it’s couples friends, or whatever. That’s a pain in the rear to find a time. Having this polling functionality to find time to get together. The messaging back and forth between these different groups of people, like a group chat, SMS context, but more interactive with the sharing of photos and all that, more private than what you would do through a social media platform like a Facebook group.
That’s where we ended up focusing. The monetization plan was to ultimately go back to our Snagajob roots, we felt we cracked the code on that, like this more healthy social media. We can help you to be more intentional about these important relationships. We can then take that to the, let’s call it Chipotle’s and say that your employees are already using this tool in their personal lives.
We think this can be an effective tool to help you communicate from the corporate office to all of your Chipotle employees, also be a tool that your GMs at the local level can use to communicate to your employees and a way for your employees to communicate with one another. What we wanted to do though, is to first crack that code on what I call a B2C side.
Just the consumer side or just the attentionally around the relationships and helping people share stuff before we then took it to the corporations. By 2019, I was going through this accelerator at the time called Praxis, a basic accelerator, which was an amazing experience for me. It was life-changing. I remember sitting with a mentor and I was describing to her what it was that we were starting to do.
Just step back for a second, what’s an accelerator?
An accelerator is, at least in this case, they are there to help you identify more specifically the pain point that you’re trying to solve. The target audience for which you’re trying to solve it, your whole go-to-market strategy, or the funding of it. The whole thing is there to help entrepreneurs build their businesses.
An accelerator is there to help you identify the pain point that you’re trying to solve. It’s there to help entrepreneurs build their businesses.
Is it a business coach or consultant?
Yes, it is. In their case, you’re not giving away any equity to them to help you do that. They’re about building redemptive entrepreneurial businesses. That’s what they’re there for. They wrap this whole ecosystem around you. Help people who are trying to build what they refer to as redemptive businesses and just help them do that better.
The people in their ecosystem, they’ve been there, done that before entrepreneurs. Which is what my mentor who I was going to tell you about. They bring in people who are funders or investors who may invest in these businesses. They bring in speakers and so forth. They bring in programs. In their case with Praxis, it’s amazing.
It sounds incredible, part of my vision for this episode is thinking about these crossover points and I think about an episode just a couple of months ago about talking about key relationships, advisors in our life, and mentors. That’s another place where if that works on the personal level, why not? Why wouldn’t we do that on the corporate level or vice versa? If it works on the corporate level or if we think we need wiser people to help guide us and give us perspective on things in the business world, why wouldn’t we also want to do that on our own? It’s this crossover that I believe could be of value to anybody that we could all use personal accelerators.
Yes, indeed. Interestingly, I view you as a mentor, I view Fritz Kling as a mentor. Fritz is the one who introduced me to Praxis. I would have never met the Praxis folks without Fritz saying, “Shawn, I think this would be a value to you.”
We need mentors, we need people who see things that we don’t see, who have context and experiences in their lives that are beyond, and sometimes it’s not such a clear line as mentor-mentee. It’s good friends who can offer new wisdom to one another but whether again, in our personal life, in our business life, or with our families, the wisdom that’s behind bringing counselors, advisors, coaches, or whatever word you want to use to it. You chose at a critical point in goHappy, I’d say that we need to get some fresh wisdom.
Difference Maker
Yes, it was the difference-maker. Sitting down with this woman and describing to her this current path that we’re on. The ultimate path that we want to be on is that we can monetize because if you’re just sharing photos with friends and planning to do things with them and it’s a CRM tool, you don’t generate revenue because we didn’t want to be an ad-based platform.
Again, I feel that incense behavior is not helpful to the person, that’s why Instagram, Facebook, and everybody are under such fire because this is an ad-based platform. When I showed her this, she got out literally a napkin and drew this B2C thing over here and then she drew the B2B thing over here and said, “Shawn, look, you’re describing to it, then you’re sayingfull potential of if you’re successful on the B2C side, then you’ll hop over here to the B side.”
“If then you’ve got to pick one of these two and you need to pick one now, which one would you pick?” Immediately, I said that I would pick the B2B side. I’ve lived in this B2C world long enough now to know it’s hard. We’d gotten some traction but we were in the hundred and some thousand number of people who were using it.
100,000.
Yes, but, again, you’re generating revenue from it and you look at Instagram or Facebook or whatever with hundreds of millions. I would go the B2B route and I don’t know why it took somebody else to say it that way for it to just become clear to me, but it did. The next day, I was meeting with more mentors, and I was describing it to them. They resonated with what she had said. Within 24 hours, it had shifted my thinking from being this one place to this other place. I came back from that.
They called it the summon. I came back but we only had two other people in the goHappy team at that point because we were struggling. We had built the team to six, but we had to part ways with three of those folks just because we were trying to find our way. All three were good friends who I had worked with at that Snagajob. That was tough.
I came back to the other two people on the team and said, “Here’s what happened there. Here’s what I think we should do. I think we should focus on the B2B side.” This is November 2019 at this point. COVID had not yet hit. They make sense to us. Hard to leave what we’ve been working on, but we’ll let it sit over here. We won’t sunset that.
Major shift.
Yes, we’ll focus on the B2B side. We did and then we’re getting ready to launch our B2B app in the app store and COVID hit. We had a pilot lined up, a pilot type of agreement with Aspen Ski Resort. It’s going to be a big deal for us to have a paying client. That was March 2020 and three days later, COVID hit. The guy from Aspen called back and said, “We just had to shut the mountain down. We let go of all our people temporarily. We don’t know what’s happening. We got to call this off.”
I thought, “What’s this going to do?” We were hanging on a bit of a shoestring in terms of funding. It ended up acting as a tailwind. We were in Colorado at the time skiing for spring break. I remember my wife was working with a different company at the time. She was talking to this company, Metro Diner, which is a restaurant chain.
She was selling online learning products at the time. The person was telling her that what they struggled with was getting online learning down to the frontline hourly people. My wife, Tennille said, “You need to talk to my husband’s company because that’s what they do. They help get communication out to the frontline hourly employees.”
I ended up having a call with this guy at Metro Diner. He says, “I love what you’re doing.” “I love the app-based approach, but can we just text our people? With COVID just hitting, we’re trying to communicate with all these people, including our furloughed people. I don’t want to have to make them download an app and learn some new behavior. Can we just text them?” I said, “I can’t right now.” “Give me a couple of minutes. Let me call our CTO and see if he can.”
I called my buddy Dan, our CTO. I said, “Dan, can we just text?” They allow people to text him within 30 minutes. He had made it so that they could send texts. Ultimately, they didn’t end up signing with us. They were too far down the path with somebody else but that was another pivot for us where we’re helping companies deliver messages to people, or communicate with people out in the field via SMS instead of any of that-based solution.
Anyway, that’s somewhat of a long story, but we went from three people. We’re now, again, we’re not big. We’re 24 people. We work with about 320 different companies now, but we work with all the cracker barrels around the country. It has 75,000 employees. We work with all of the Outback and Carrabba’s and First Watch, PFGE. Anyway, it’s been a ton of fun.
A ton of fun with a lot of hard work and a lot of stress associated with it.
Yes, and there’s a lot more of that stress buried in there.
Personal Mission Statement
Yes, I’m sure. I think one of the things that I’m hearing in this is when I talk to people about the value of having a personal mission statement, having guiding principles for your life, and having a vision. I call it, Dreaming 360. Some of what I sense push back sometimes is that it just sounds rigid. It sounds like you’re just trying to plan and control everything in your life.
What I hear in your story is that more of these things are frameworks that in some senses give you the freedom to pivot because we constantly have to pivot. We have these a-ha moments and we have to say, “I need to do something different.” The presence of these good foundations of how we operate and what we do week to week allows for some of that to happen. Your conviction of the value of having mentors put you in the place that Fritz, a good friend, suggested Praxis, and it creates this ripple effect by doing these things. Yes?
Yes, absolutely. I think my life mission statement is to joyfully love people for exactly who they are and enthusiastically encourage them to reach the full potential of who God has uniquely made them.
Can you say that again slowly?
Yes. To joyfully love people for exactly who they are and enthusiastically encourage them to reach the full potential of who God has uniquely made them.
How did you get to that statement?
That was, I would say, iterated upon over time. Just going through several different frameworks over time with people. I went through something called Life 360 that helped me focus out of 360 degrees. What’s that one degree where God has uniquely gifted you and given you these passions where you can make the most impact?
For me, one of the things that I just love to do is the visioning piece. I love learning and I love to encourage. That’s how ultimately I ended up coming up with that piece. I would say and maybe we can come back to this later, I can tend to err on the side of envisioning what something could be of someone they could be and maybe pushing a little too hard on that side and not focusing as much on the first part of that of joyfully loving people for exactly who they are right now.
I bring that up because, at Snagajob, our mission statement was to help put people in the right fit position so that they could maximize their potential and live more fulfilling lives. There’s that element of maximizing potential and living more fulfilling lives. At GoHappy, what we’ve iterated over time in terms of what we’re doing now is to help all frontline workers feel more valued and connected so they can reach their full potential and live more fulfilling lives.
The first part is to help them feel more valued and connected by their organizations. We do that through several different things in terms of people communicating, giving shoutouts, and that type of thing. We also do it by allowing employees to give feedback to their employer on things that they wish they were doing differently, they could do better, or whatever it might be.
It starts first with how I help you feel valued and connected. Basically, how do we help you feel loved for exactly who you are right now? How do we help encourage those people to maybe see something about themselves that otherwise they didn’t see? How do we put career pathing opportunities in front of them? How do we help give them feedback? “Man, you’re gifted at this. If you took this path over here, you could be a GM at some point, whatever it might be.
Back to your point, there’s this intentionality piece of, “What am I passionate about?” At the same time, knowing that I and our team had specific goals around what was Die Happy, and what that could be over time, this was much more valuable, safer, and richer social media in a sense. That wasn’t God’s plan ultimately for us. Holding that loosely, but still saying that what we’re ultimately passionate about is helping people feel connected and how do we help them make sure of their full potential?
What’s thought-provoking with all of this is it’s really clear that you’ve taken this idea of the value that comes with having a mission statement and you’ve done this very clearly to the degree that you just know it right off the top of your head for these companies and yourself in such a way. These things leverage one another. I also see the connection between who you are at the core with the way you form these companies.
The mission of the company connects pretty closely to what your personal mission is. The other thing that stands out to me is that your mission statement is something that’s an expression of what you’re passionate about uniquely and what you feel personally very passionate about. It also has this great aspirational element to it and it takes something that you’ll say, “This joyful piece of it does not come naturally to me.”
This is the person I want to grow into, this is who I am, and it’s also where I want to grow. These are just all great ideas for people who are trying to figure out who they are and who they want to become and how a process like you’ve gone through, which again, you took that step to say, I’m going to bring other people into this walk with me to help me with it. I’m not going to just Lone Ranger it. These are the ideas that I think all of us could just benefit from so much say this intentionality gets to steer me and yet still live this life that I know I’ve got to pivot all the time.
Yes, I’d love the quote by PJ Marshall, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” I know that a lot of people will say that it seems structured to structure your personal life, these buckets, and have these plans and all that. I just want to be more freeform, spontaneous, and that type of thing. As you were saying earlier, you can plan time to be spontaneous, even having that is one of the things. We’re going to plan a couple of vacations but we want a couple of things just to be spontaneous this year.
I found that if I don’t take the time to step back and think about what we’re doing and who is most important to me, I’m in reactive mode. This is the same way in a business, a CEO would be fired in a heartbeat if they went to their board at the beginning of the year and said, “We’re going to be more spontaneous based on what the market is saying this year or so. I don’t have a plan for this year.” Many of us will do that in our personal lives.
The result unfortunately and unintentionally is that we missed a good friend’s wedding. That is the type of thing. There are lots of ways that we could have a lot into it. I am thinking particularly of vacation above the reason for planning and thinking of the fun of having a broad structure that leaves a lot of it unplanned. The plan is to be unplanned. That’s okay too.
That’s free. We don’t have a plan, we intentionally don’t have a plan. You’re not stressed about not having a plan.
From Professional To Personal
We could go much into this but I’d love to also hear just a few of your ideas of how you’ve taken some of this mission, vision, values, and goals. For instance, apply it in some other areas of your life. Particularly, I think that a lot of people struggle with how to put that into practice with their families. A few ways or things that have happened with your family that probably outside of this wouldn’t have happened?
Yes, absolutely. Similarly, we have our mission, vision, and values as a family and we have one of our gold buckets as trips and adventures. We sit down at the beginning of the year and we’ll plan that year, the different things that we want to go do and we’ll plan it even into the next year sometimes. For example, one of my goals, ultimately, I mean, a family goal was to take an out west trip for a whole summer in an RV.
We did that several years back. In one way, it was a terrible time to go to it given the age that the kids were, just given work and everything but it was probably one of the best, if not the best vacation we’ve ever taken. There were many amazing memories. We still talk about the trip all the time and from the work perspective, you figure it out.
Get up earlier than the rest of the family and I can get stuff done, I could block certain times of the day or certain days of the week. We were able to get work done but I’m thankful that we did that. I think it’s all about prioritizing. Where it’s, “Yes, my work is incredibly important to me, and the work that we’re doing, I feel is meaningful and I don’t want to shirk any responsibilities there while at the same time, my family is important to me.”
If I had to stack the two against each other, I would say that my family is more important to me than the work bucket of my life. Going and making memories, doing these trips, and creating this adventure for a family is an important piece to me. It may not be for some people but it is for me. Prioritize that more heavily than being out of the office and trying to coordinate wonky schedules to make it happen.
I remember when you told me about that summer and it’s an incredibly bold move and it’s one that certainly I would have looked at a decade or two ago and said, “It’s a great idea, but I could never do it.” I was an entrepreneur like you. You took that fearless thing that I think that you do well and it might not be easy, it may not be the most convenient time but we could do it. let’s just do it.
You found a way of making it work. I think that was an encouragement to me to say how often I’ll have an idea that would be good and then I quickly figure out all the reasons that it won’t work, that I can’t do it, and then quickly discard what could be a good idea. I think you have a bias which I appreciate by saying, “Let me take it a little further down the road because I know what is my higher priority.” I’m just not going to let go of it that easily.
That’s also just something that it’s good for me to learn. Some things are maybe some of the most valuable life-changing experiences that come from that decision to do what seems you can’t do. For me, this show, to think of, let’s say roughly 60, learning a completely new skill and doing all of this and standing behind microphones and doing that when I didn’t need to do it or have to do it.
I think of just how rewarding and powerful it is. What I’ve learned from doing these podcasts over now, is almost five years or five years plus. Then I think of this experience and you could have just worked through another summer. That summer you would probably not be able to remember back a single thing that had happened at work.
Yet, you have a whole summer of memories. Your kids and your wife have a whole summer of memories that will probably go the rest of your life. Let me provide an example that I think of. At least for me it was edging. We decided to do trips with our kids wherever they wanted to go for their 16th birthday. I realized people can’t do it.
It’s such a blessing that we were able to financially do it even though it was a stretch. For me, this trip that I had with my son Alex to California for us to play golf which we both love together at Pebble Beach. One of the great bucket list places to play and I think now of that trip which was many years ago. I remember it in vivid color, every piece of it.
I could have just easily said, “It’s just not practical.” “It’s not reasonable.” “It’s going to be hard.” “I don’t know whether the timing’s right.” Many things were not right about the timing and yet we chose to do it and we have the memory of a lifetime as a result. I guess that’s maybe another kind of big encouragement to people that when you think about what matters and you have some of these goals, if we want to call them goals, whatever, there’s just much of life to experience by taking these risks together. Anyway, thank you for sharing. Three months, that’s powerful.
One of the things that it showed us is, we can do this. Since then, we venture things each summer because I just feel like our oldest will be off to college in another two years. I don’t know how many more summers we’ll have them trapped to go do stuff with this. It was, “Do you know what? We made it work. Let’s do it again.”
Yes, it’s a whole different perspective on life because we’re just prone to think that we can’t, I can’t, our company can’t, and we as a family can’t. When you start, which you did by taking a risk, when you start to create that mentality, we cannot do it. We may not choose to, but it’s not because we can’t. That’s a whole different mindset. Big encouragement to people.
We’ve thrown out a lot of ideas for people. I hope those who are reading this will go back and read your story because I think there’s this pattern of intentionality and fearlessness that I think we can all learn from. There are these practices of being and employing other people’s wisdom of setting goals across all of these different buckets that I think are very valuable.
The whole thought of me on this particular episode is there are lessons that we learn in certain silos of our life, whether it’s business, families, our spiritual lives, or our health that can easily translate and create this powerful mechanism in other areas of our life. I hope people will begin to just rustle their minds and say, “This is an area that’s working for me.”
“What am I doing here?” “How might that work if I applied it over here?” I think we’re uniquely pushed to do that as entrepreneurs where we have to make things work. Anyway, thank you for sharing many of these specific lessons. I love your intentionality and fearlessness. I’m encouraged by that. Hopefully, everybody who is reading this is encouraged by that.
Share this episode, share these thoughts and these challenges with those around you. I just want to encourage people to have a more intentional and bold life. There’s much to be experienced. There’s much life to be lived. When we choose to just step outside of what may seem possible in a moment. Your life is a testament to that. I appreciate you sharing all these.
Thank you. I love being with you as always.
Thanks, everybody, for reading. Share this broadly, and thanks for joining us on this episode of Space for Life.
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