John: Who’s ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here with an audio master class on how to ignore everybody, carve your own path, and live your best life.

And I am bringing LGO on the mic to speak about this, because Laura speaks with change agents, entrepreneurs, investors, leaders, and donors to get them past the doubt and indecision that consign their great ideas to limbo.

In Fire Nation, we’ll be going deep on where does happiness come from. Why is purpose and meaning in work such a hot topic, and we’ll be talking about that and so much more on Fire Nation when we get back from thanking our sponsor.

So, LGO, Laura Gassner Otting, say ‘what’s up’ to Fire Nation, and share something interesting about yourself that most people don’t know.

Laura: Hey, Fire Nation. What is up? One thing that most people don’t know and are often shocked to find out is that I went to computer sleep away camp when I was 13 years old and learned how to program Basic and COBOL and a little bit of FORTRAN on Atari computers.

John: I didn’t understand any of those words. I wish I had done that, because those are really valuable skills to have as you get older and actually start to live in this computer world that we live in now, but Fire Nation, I am excited, because LGO is in the house, and as I mentioned in the intro, we’re going to be talking about how to ignore everybody, carve your own path, and live your best life.

And we have so many great things to talk about within that. So, I want to just dive right in, because LGO, a lot of people think that happiness comes from success, but where does happiness come from if it’s actually not coming from success?

Laura: So, one of the things that we get wrong so often is that we think if I just check all the boxes along the path then I’ll be successful and I’ll be happy. I’ll be happy when. And in 20 years of interviewing people in my career and executive search, I was struck by the dichotomy that success did not always equal happiness, and it was only the people who were successful in a way that was continent to them, that aligned with who they are, that flowed with who they are, where all their energy was focused on the thing they actually cared about who are happy.

You know, we hear all these things all the time about like just hostile harder and just work harder and you’ll be successful and you’ll be happy. And the truth is, a lot of times you’re just checking all the boxes along someone else’s path to someone else’s success, and then you turn around one day and you go well, the boxes are full, so why do I still feel empty.

John: So powerful. And Fire Nation, this is something that we need to be doing on a day-to-day basis, keeping your finger on the pulse of yourself. That’s why I’m so big about meditation, about journaling, about being part of a peer-led mastermind so that you’re taking your self time. You’re taking friends’ time to really talk about what you’re doing and are you happy, and are you driven, and are you going on the path you want to go, because a lot of times, we just have our heads down, and we’re not even looking up. Then we look up years later, and we’re like how did I even get to this place.

So, what do you want to share with Fire Nation, Laura? What can we do to fix this potential issue?

Laura: I think the first thing we have to do is we have to start ignoring everyone else in our life who’s defining success as the right car, the right house, the right spouse, the right after-school program for our kids, the right you know whatever the thing is that we’re doing and say well, what do I really care about.

So, you know, it starts with figuring out what you’re calling is. What is that thing that you care about more than anything else on earth? And I think part of the reason we get it wrong is we think calling has to be purpose. It has to be saving the world. It has to be this big lofty, higher purpose.

And in fact, calling is really just this gravitational pull toward something that’s larger than yourself, and maybe something that comes to you when you’re meditating or when you’re journaling, and when you finally say, you know, I actually just really want to build that business, or I want to work for this leader who inspires me, or I want to start my own thing, or maybe I want to cure cancer and save the whales, or maybe I want to buy a Maserati and a beach house.

And that’s all totally cool. You’re purpose doesn’t have to be a higher purpose. I actually looked up purpose in the dictionary, and it turns out that there is no definition of purpose other than the reason for which something is done. And there’s nothing under the definition of calling. There’s no picture of Mother Teresa saving – feeding the lepers in India, but what it is is it’s your purpose. It’s what matters to you.

So, is the cause that you wish to serve, and if you’re an entrepreneur, you can be your own cause. You can be on calling, but it’s starting by saying I don’t care about the Joneses, and I don’t care about what everybody else thinks is the thing that will make me happy on social media. I care about what I care about. And if that is like you did, moving to Puerto Rico, it’s creating a life that you want to create, then you’re able to have this. You’re able to build an entire life around something that actually matters to you.

John: Fire Nation, when’s the last time you felt those butterflies in your stomach where you’re like oh my goodness, I am so excited about this right now? And something, LGO, that you shared in the pre-interview chat that we had that I wouldn’t mind breaking out right now is you said hey listen.

I was on The Today Show recently, but I was actually a little more nervous, I had a little more butterflies before this interview started. So, kind of talk about you finding your purpose, having those butterflies before doing stuff like being on TV, speaking in front of a big audience about topics that you love, or were you just pulling my leg there?

Laura: No. You know, people keep asking me as I'm doing podcasts, and The Today Show, and other media about why I wrote this book and how this book, Limitless, came about. And the truth is that it really came about because I couldn’t not write it.

So, people always ask what’s your super power and what do you do better than anybody else, and what I do is I'm able to look at people and I'm able to see their greatness sometimes in a way that they haven’t necessarily seen it before or have been able to believe it.

And as I was doing this 20 years of interviews of people who had massive moments of career shift, always at the highest level, C suite individuals, I could see in them the thing, the thing that they cared about.

I was the CEO of my company. So, by the time people got to me, frankly they were qualified for the job for which I was interviewing. It wasn’t a matter of whether they had the book smarts are the subject-matter expertise. I wanted to know what they were made of. And I looked for five things.

I looked for hunger, weight, tenacity, speed, and grit. And I’ll say that again. Hunger, weight, tenacity, speed, and grit. And if I could see that in them, I knew that not only could they do the job at 10:00 on a Tuesday, but they could do it at 2:00 a.m. on a Thursday when all hell broke loose.

But it was because there was this thing inside of them that they had to do. It was their why. It was the thing that gave them continence. And I do firmly believe that if you don’t have goals that give you butterflies that excite you that just scare the living daylights out of you, you’re not setting your goals high enough.

And so, the idea behind Limitless is that if we are constrained by somebody else’s definition of success, then we’re never going to be insatiably hungry or deeply inspired. You cannot be insatiably hungry for someone else’s goals no matter how hard you try.

And so for me, I have butterflies about this, because I know that this framework works, because I have now talked to every single type of person from every different type of walk of life and they are like yes, I get this. This makes sense for me both professionally and personally.

And so for me, the stakes are high. I get butterflies about being on the show and talking to Fire Nation, because I know the people who are listening are people who take action when they’re inspired and the hear something that might work for them.

And so for me, it’s not a question of beyond the show, tell people about the book, it’s a question of am I going to move people today to make a change in their life and to do more and to be better and to be greater and to be that leader that they know deep down inside that they can be.

John: Oh Fire Nation takes action. Now, I want to dial in on one word you said. Weight. What did you mean by weight?

Laura: So, weight is when you – if you take a look at somebody and you say are they a serious player? Are they somebody who I know that I can put in front of my toughest client, my hardest employee, my highest stakes deal, and they’re going to be the person who’s going to represent me well?

They’re going to know the right language to use, they are going to understand the right cadence and tenor and tone, and they’re going to carry my ethos and my culture to this client and make the sale in a way that I know that it would be as if I were there. They are weighty.

John: Now, as Paris Hilton would say, purpose and meaning is so hot right now. Now, why is purpose and meaning such a hot topic in the world we live in today?

Laura: By 2025, millennials are going to make up 75 percent of the US workforce, which is a huge number. And I was actually talking to a woman from Accenture just two days ago, and she was 75 percent by 2025? They already make up 75 percent of Accenture right now.

So, even though we blame millennials for everything going wrong in the workplace, and I love millennials, but they are – if you read any newspaper article anywhere, millennials are apparently the devil incarnate.

So, even though we blame them for these things, they’re actually forcing a conversation that has never been had before in the workplace, because millennials care deeply about purpose and connection and meaning and matter. But it’s not just them. As more and more baby boomers are nearing retirement and starting in 2011, 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every single day.

John: That’s mind blowing.

Laura: It’s mind blowing, right? So, they’re going back to their roots and 1960 social justice. These are the children of RFK and JFK and MLK, and they’re searching for encore careers, one last big thing that really matters. And in fact, a recent study by Stanford University in Encore.org, said that a third of Americans over the age of 50, and that’s 34 million people, are looking for more meaning in their last career.

And then if you add on to that, you have Gen Xers of which I'm a member, we’re not to be left behind. I know we’re forgotten all the time, but we’re not to be left behind.

So, we’re caught between raising children and aging parents, and we want to do something that contributes to managing these demands rather than working against them. So, when we’re at work, it has to actually mean something.

And then, one last thing I’ll tell you is that there’ve recently been studies that have shown that the very best entrepreneurs are actually not sitting in their dorm room creating Facebook at Harvard, they’re actually people that are in their mid-career.

And the reason why is partly because they can self finance a little bit in the beginning, but also because they know themselves. They know what matters to them. They know what brings them purpose. They know when they are their very best fundamental leader so that they can actually do what they do best.

So, right now, we’re having this conversation about purpose, because everyone at every generation is waking up and going huh. Is this all there is? There’s got to be more, right? There’s got to be more. And so, we’re now having this conversation both for people who are in the traditional employment world, or as our mutual friend, Scott Stratton, likes to say, they are entrepreneurs, which is Latin for bad employee.

John: Now, I’m a Gen Xer as well. So, I'm going to help you, LGO, carry that torch for our Gen Xers for sure, but a quick question before we move on. What are some people saying about millennials, in kind of a derogatory way, that you’re observing?

Laura: Well, I see a lot of people saying oh millennials don’t really care. They’re all about themselves. They mail it in. They’re narcissistic. They’re more interested in social media. And the truth is – and this is what the research has shown, that millennials are the ones who are driving the conversation about purpose.

And so, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have millennials driving companies to think more about purpose and also say that millennials are narcissistic. It just doesn’t add up. And some of this can be traced back to the presidential election in 2016, and no I'm not going to get into politics on your show, but after 2016, there was a conversation that happened in our country where people started to say well, what do we stand for and who are we?

And if you watch the 2018 Super Bowl, you saw every single commercial had something – some company was saying something about what they stood for. They talked about women and education and LGBTQ and access and the environment.

And so, even companies know that people are spending their dollars – the consumers are spending their dollars with companies that they care about that they think are moving in a direction in the world they like, and millennials are obviously the largest generation right now. And so, you can’t have it both ways and say they are both narcissistic and they care about the world.

And so, I am of the belief that you always bet on youth. So, I’m all about the millennials, and I think they’re the future. So, I love that they’re forcing this conversation.

John: When it really comes down to the wick of things, people love repeating what they hear. They’ll see one article or they’ll hear one pundit on TV say one thing, and then they just go around repeating that like to see absolute truth when in reality, it’s just one person’s opinion and typically it’s a pretty lackluster opinion at that for the most part.

Laura: Yeah.

John: So, Fire Nation, unless you’re repeating JLD or LGO, make sure you’re getting the facts, because just reporting stuff doesn’t make it real. It just makes more mess in the world.

Laura: Right. I mean they’re lazy, right? Lazy people are talking about millennials being lazy.

John: Oh. It is. It’s mind numbing sometimes.

Laura: That doesn’t make any sense.

John: Come on now. So, let’s talk about the opposites of being lazy and that’s leaning and more and hustling harder. Will this bring us happiness?

Laura: Yeah. So, I leaned in. I leaned in like the best of them. I read that book and I thought oh this makes sense. I'm going to lean in to my family and to my community and to my business. I started my last business when I had a six-week old baby in my arms. I mean that’s – and my first child. That’s insanity.

John: That’s leaning in.

Laura: It’s leaning in. I mean I was leaning in every which direction. And here’s the thing. It worked. That business was super successful. We grew 100 percent every year for 10 years until I finally turned my business partner and said I'm done. I want to sell. And we had a five-year plan for me to exit.

But that book, which gives us one particular path, which is claw your way to the spotlight, wrangle the fast track, demand the big shot, it champions the path of assertiveness and boldness and driving to the top of the organizational chart with as much speed and determination as we can muster, and yet even though we’re smack dab in the middle of the deal flow, it turns out five years on, even Sheryl Sandberg’s own research says that leaning in didn’t really work and there aren’t that many more women in the C suite.

And I believe that this myopic view limits both women and men, because we have this idea that our progress is only measured by how fast and how high we climb, and this unflinching definition tells us that we have to do what other people think is the way to do it, and we are only limited by their definitions of success and their opinions about who we are or where we belong.

And I think that even if you do get to that point – I mean I got to that point. I was the CEO of my company, I was phenomenally successful, and I was still unhappy. And what I realized was that it wasn’t – my problem wasn’t how I achieved success, my problem was how I do find success.

And so, I changed my definition of success to allow myself to use my career to build a life that I actually wanted, right?

So, you could be sitting anywhere on the world that you want to sit and you could be phenomenally successful, but you made a very specific decision to move and to move to a place that you wanted to be in, and that changed the way that your career contributed to the life that you wanted to have.

And so, I think that leaning in, well at work for her and it worked for me, it might not work for everybody. And what I want to encourage people to do is figure out what they actually want and how they define success and to lean the hell into that instead.

John: “My problem was how I do find success.” Fire Nation, that’s an LGO original. It’s a great quote, and I want you to make sure that you absorb that and make it your own. That’s huge.

Now, we have a lot of value bombs coming up after the break. We’re going to take a quick minute first and thank our sponsor.

So, LGO, we’re back, and you said the word limitless multiple times today. Will be coming limitless bring us the work/life balance that we want?

Laura: Work/life balance is one of those insidious crimes against humanity where we believe that some flaxen haired girl in a flower crown staring off into the distance telling us to follow our passion is also going to tell us about work/life balance. And the truth is that work/life balance is – it doesn’t exist.

And even if you find it for this one fleeting moment, it disappears. It’s ephemeral. But it’s set on this idea that work and life a) are separate, and b) have to be completely and equally in balance all the time.

Now, I posit that if we spend our lives with work and life pitting against each other and always trying to balance them, then we are code switching in between the two, and we’re never going to get there.

And what I would rather see people do is to create work/life alignment. So, the idea behind being incontinent is that there is a calling, something that you care about more than anything else on earth and that’s the first piece.

The second piece is connection. Does the work I’m doing every single day, why do I, in this box, in this organizational chart, as an entrepreneur, sitting in my basement, wherever I am, is the work mattering, and is it going to serving that calling.

The third part is contribution. If connection is all about the work, contribution is about you. So, is this work contributing to the lifestyle that I want to have, the life that I want to live, the career I want to build? Is it allowing me to manifest my values into the world in the way that is important to me?

And then lastly, control. And this is where Fire Nation is going to love this, because we’re all entrepreneurs. Does the work I’m doing allow me to have specific control over the amount of connection and contribution I have towards that calling.

So, am I able to choose who I work with, what I charge, how much I work, where I work, am I able to control my destiny? And so, rather than having balance where you say I’m a one person at work, I’m one person at home, and those people need to be completely in balance, I’d rather, Fire Nation, be the same person everywhere so that the what they do matches the who they are.

John: So, there was a lot right there, Fire Nation. I just want you to know that I looked up the word insidious, and it means proceeding in a gradual, subtle way but with harmful effects.

So, basically, stop stressing over work/life balance, Fire Nation. Stop stressing over that. Instead, focus on some of these things that LGO is breaking down right now.

But we might have some people listening right now, Laura, and they’re saying listen. I’m just not ready to make this step yet. I’m just not prepared or able to make this change right now. What would you say to them?

Laura: So, I would say two things. The first thing I would say is I would say go to LimitlessAssessment.com/FireNation and take a quiz. It’ll take 10 to 15 minutes, there’re about 60 questions, and it’ll walk you through each of the four Cs of calling, connection, contribution, and control, and will tell you exactly how much of each of these four you have in your life currently and how much of each of the four you would like to have in your life, and then give you some tips on how to maybe go about adding some of these things in.

So, LimitlessAssessment.com/FireNation is where that assessment is.

So, now, if you don’t have the privilege or the luxury or the audacity to start making all of those moods right now, you can do some of them. And this is what my 16-year-old son likes to call the side quest.

So, I don’t know if you’re a gamer at all, but I’m sure some of the members of Fire Nation are. So, this is how he explained it to me on a day where I was really unhappy. I woke up one day. I'd had gotten a terrible night of sleep. I knew I had to write a big hunk of a big chapter, and it was the meaty thing that I’d been procrastinating and putting off, and I was just sitting there in the morning having one of those woe-is-me moments like agh, I'm not going to be able to get this done, and this is, you know, stinks, you know, and this really – and I was just grousing.

And he looked at me and he goes well, why don’t you just go on a side quest.

John: Ooh.

Laura: And I was like well, son, what’s a side quest? And he said well, you know, it’s like sometimes I get finished doing the dishes after dinner early and I want to go upstairs and log on to a game with my friends, but they’re still stuck in family dinner.

So, I don’t really know what to do, because I really want to go slay the dragon and save the princess at the castle, but I can’t go until my friend finishes dinner with his parents, and I know his mom’s asking him a million questions, so it’s going to be a while. So, I go on a side quest.

What that means is if you’re going to go to the castle and you’re going to slay the dragon and save the princess, you’re going to need a horse and you’re going to need a sword. Now, in order to get the horse and the sword, you’re going to have to have some wheat to take to the market, because if you have the wheat to take to the market, you can sell it and get the money to buy the sword and the horse to slay the dragon and save the princess.

So, if you’re not ready, Fire Nation, to go slay the dragon and save the princess, tend your crops. There are plenty of things that you can do right now, which you can get started on. So, maybe you can’t go get a graduate degree or maybe you can’t leave your full-time employment and start something new or maybe you can’t expand your business to seven different locations, but you can start creating relationships with people that might.

You might be able to take a class here or there. You may be able to get some skills. Maybe you attend a conference. There are all sorts of things that you could be doing right now. Listening – you know, you could download all of the back catalog of Entrepreneurs on Fire, right? There’re all kinds of things that you can do right now to tend your crops so that when the moment comes and your friend finally finishes, you know, all the 80 questions from his mom, you can then go and jump on the horse, and take your sword, and slay the dragon, and save the princess.

John: Okay. That side quest thing was really impressive how you did that. I mean it makes me think that your son may have wheeled you into a couple games there, because you knew lots about what was going on as far as the order of operations and all that stuff.

So, love that, LGO, and let’s be honest. You know, Fire Nation, we are entrepreneurs. We’re small business owners. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what we want as human beings in general. So, what’s a process that we can follow to become limitless?

Laura: Most entrepreneurs have control. Right? They have a lot more control than other people, because they have made very specific decisions in their life to be in more control, but we all fall prey to this idea of comparison.

I think the Buddhists say that comparison is the root of all unhappiness. So, as entrepreneurs, we have to start saying well, why did I start this, and why did I do this? I got into a position when I was running my company where I realized that as the CEO of my company, it was my job to be 18 to 24 months ahead of the market. I had to be making decisions and creating solutions to problems that the market didn’t even realize they had yet.

Now, my staff, and I had 25 staff doing the delivery of services, their job, if they were doing exceptionally well, they were focused on today, delivering this product to this client, this week. Maybe they were looking at the month, if I were really lucky, they were looking at the quarter, but honestly, they were really mostly looking at today.

And so, the better they got at their job and the better I got at my job, the further divorced we were. And what I realized was that I actually didn’t love the work that we were doing anymore. I sort of outgrew it. I hadn’t learned anything new in a while, and what I realized was that the piece that mattered to me about my continence was calling. I wanted to save the world, but I wasn’t that connected to the work anymore. I didn’t really care that much about it, but I wanted a huge amount of contribution. I wanted to be learning new things every single day. And I was getting kind of exhausted of carrying the entire firm up over the next mountain of innovation.

And so, as an entrepreneur, I thought I cared deeply about connection and doing the work, and then I realized what I really liked was being an entrepreneur. I actually like to be in a CEO. I never wanted it to be a CEO. I was sort of an accidental CEO, and then I realized not only did I like it, but I was pretty good at it, and I wanted to get better at it.

And then, when I got to a point where I realized that the business that I had built was constraining me, was limiting me from being able to have that piece of contribution in my life. That’s when I realized maybe it was because the company I was building had outgrown the kind of leadership that I brought and needed a different kind of leadership.

I was the growing, building, driving leader, and they needed sort of a steady-state conductor of the orchestra leader. And so, as entrepreneurs, I think it’s important to say just because I started this business at one point in my career, at one age, and at one life stage, doesn’t mean that this is who I am forever.

When I turned to my team and I told them that it was time for me to go, I remember a couple of my senior people looked at me and said you can’t leave. I was going to leave one day, but this is your business. You can’t leave. And they were so shocked at the idea that this business was not my identity forever and ever, amen.

So, I think as entrepreneurs, it’s easier to become limitless, because you already have that mindset that you have agency, that you have control, that your destiny is your own, and you’re not as afraid to take risks, but I think we also as entrepreneurs get stuck in this oh my god, I have a lot of mouths to feed and I have a lot of expectations and I have a lot of people who need me to be here. And the truth is they don’t. You could do something else. And they’ll find another job.

So, I think you have an easier time becoming limitless, but I think then we do get trapped. And again, it’s insidious. We don’t even realize it’s happening, and then we turn around one day and this thing that was the factor that made us limitless is now limiting us.

So, it’s recognizing, going back and continuing to say is this still my calling? Do I have the amount of connection that I want? Is it contributing to the life that I want to have, and do I still retain the kind of control that I wanted when I first got into this?

John: “The thing that was making me limitless is now limiting me.” I mean, Fire Nation, that’s a huge realization that you want to make sooner than later. That’s why you keep that finger on the pulse. That’s why you do the things that we talked about with the meditation, the journaling, and the self-care, and really just making sure that you are turning into who you are and what you’re doing.

And of course, you want to head over to that direct call to action, LimitlessAssessment.com/FireNation. Those 60 questions are going to help you get to that point where you need to be so you can recognize okay; this is where I need to go next.

So, LGO, you’ve been dropping value bombs in this entire interview. Take it home for us. What is the one thing you want to really make sure our audience gets from our chat today. Then of course, give us a strong call to action. Where can we find out more about you, and then will say goodbye.

Laura: The thing that I want people to do more than anything else is to say to themselves, am I happy, and what is making me happy. Is it because I’m successful? Is it because I am doing the thing that I want to do? Is it because I’m doing the thing that other people are telling me is what I’m supposed to do?

I would love Fire Nation to say am I running faster on the treadmill because I actually like running or am I running faster on the treadmill because the treadmill keeps getting faster beneath me.

John: Ooh.

Laura: So, what is the goal that we have? What would make success meaningful? What would make our work matter, and then to go after that.

John: And where can we find out more about you?

Laura: So, you can find me online on all the socials, and my website is HeyLGO.com. That’s H-E-Y-L-G-O dot com, and on all the socials the same.

Your audience can go to LauraGassnerOtting.com/FireNation, which will have the link to the assessment and all of that, but LimitlessAssessment.com/FireNation is probably the best place to start.

John: Fire Nation, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you've been hanging out with LGO and JLD today, so keep up the heat, and head over to EOFire.com. If you type Laura in the search bar, her show notes page will pop up with everything that we’ve been talking about today.

These are the best show notes in the biz. Timestamps, links to everything we’ve mentioned, but of course, check out LimitlessAssessment.com/FireNation and HeyLGO.com will get you to some great content as well.

So, LGO, Laura, thank you for sharing your truth with Fire Nation today, for dropping those value bombs. For that, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

Laura: Thank you. Let’s go slay some dragons.