How to Fix Modern Leadership: David Castro on Power, Integrity & Influence Without Force

[0:00]  Great leaders build a culture where people are not afraid to say that they don't know and where people are not afraid to tell the truth and where they're not afraid to admit weaknesses you know that is that is how you get a stronger organization you know and and by admitting the places like you said the places where we're uncertain that's there's power in that the concept that winning is more important than doing the right thing and that is that is another terrible idea you know, um when you focus only on winning, what you're focusing on is is on gaining power advantages over people. And um and I believe that, you know, that's immoral.

[0:43]  That's not the right way to behave. Um, when we're in a strong organization with a strong leader, what we're doing is we're both valuing each other's welfare and we're we can be cooperating to try to help one another, but again, based on reality, based on facts, and based on mutual accountability. All right, everybody. Welcome back to a brand new episode of the of the Heart and Hustle podcast. Now, today is going to be amazing conversation because I have another amazing leader across the table from me, an individual who founded a company back in 1995 around the

[1:32]  premise of leadership. Today, I've got David Castro with me here today who is the founder of Ilead. David, welcome to the show, man. Thank you so much. It's great to be with you today, Kenan. Great, man. This is going to be a lot of fun. My first question for you is is what's wrong with leadership today from your perspective, David? Well, I think there's so there's so many things wrong.

[1:51]  Um I think one of the big problems we have is we have terrible role models out there. I mean, you know, uh when people start thinking about leadership, they look around in the world to see people who are in leadership positions and generally those people have no training. Um and they may have gotten to where they are uh through some process that was not a very good process. And then they're giving a lot of bad lessons about how the best way to do it, you know, and um and so then people take the wrong um ideas about what what is good.

[2:21]  And you know, I believe leadership is is a moral philosophy. It's it's something um that where you it's filled with values and you got to talk about those values. You got to talk about what is good leadership, you know, and and and good leadership, I think, is something that um helps people to get where they want to go, you know, and to and to build the kind of organizations and communities where everyone prospers. And you can't leave those values out of the equation when you're talking about leadership. But uh you know um the thing that I've learned a lot also studying leadership over the years is that we have very unrealist unrealistic expectations of how we're going to build leaders. Uh leadership takes a lot of learning. It takes a lot of practice you know and we tend to think people are

[3:08]  just going to get it by osmosis and that that is uh usually not the case. In fact uh the opposite is true. Well, I mean, we've heard the phrase, right, that leaders are born, not made, or there's the argument over that. Why do you think we're getting that wrong? That leaders aren't exactly I think it's completely wrong. Um, and I guess we have to also, you know, define terms like what do we mean by leadership? I'm going to draw a sharp distinction between leadership and organizational power. You know, there's a lot of people that have organizational power who have no leadership ability at all. Um, you know, and organizational power can come from politics. It can come from money. Uh it can come from economic wherewithal, you know, and um but to me, leadership is the ability of someone to move people without access to power. It's the ability to leverage

[3:57]  somebody's freedom to get somebody to come along because they believe it's the right thing to do, you know, and and so I tend to think of leadership in a in a I it may not be a traditional view of leadership, but I think if you think hard about what leadership is, you'll see that when you know leadership is operating, it's when you're using people's voluntary ability, when you're using their free will, when you're engaging people to work collaboratively because they want to, you know, and that's a powerful force. in the in the world. By the way, I mean, enormous enormously consequential things happen in the world because of that force in the world, you know, and I would argue the best things that happen in the world happen because of that kind of energy.

[4:39]  Yeah. And I think we've seen um a yearning for that as well, right? Everybody's had a boss that calls themsself a leader that forces you to do things via brute force, intimidation, and tactics that get you to do the task, but they don't feel good when you're doing it. But yet you see organizational structure and great leaders who get people behind a mission and a vision and use their own motivation to execute on that vision as well, which is a stark difference. That's exactly right. A leader, a true leader is able to move things when they don't have access to power. Like great examples of this like imagine like Nelson Mandela is somebody I think about a lot. Nelson Mandela leading a whole nation of people from inside a prison cell, right? you know, I mean, imagine the kind of uh skills that you have to have to do that, you know,

[5:29]  um people like obviously like Martin Luther King, you know, you know, you're dealing with a leader when you ask the question, would people still follow this person if they didn't have money, if they didn't have power, if they didn't have a threat, you know, and and and that's what tells you if you have leadership operating. I mean, so what do you think about the current landscape of leadership with people who are able to amass huge followings, right, on the world of social media, who do not demonstrate those good characteristics, if you will, that are tied to leadership, influence, and the ability to get people behind a vision, but maybe they've acquired it through, you know, bad means of intimidation or pranks or just being a bad version of themselves, which a lot of people are kind of like drawn to. Well, I want to add something else in here and I never I never thought

[6:16]  I would live to see this day, but I think we see this in our world today where um there is a a new form of violence that we are dealing with in our communities. And that is um that is the violence that comes from telling lies, you know, and we have a whole generation of people who who are out there in in leadership roles who think that it's okay to lie. It's okay to exaggerate the truth. It's okay to twist and bend it.

[6:44]  It's okay to to uh not share information that somebody would need to know. uh when you deprive somebody of the truth, you know, that is a form of taking extreme advantage of them, you know, and that so we need to reestablish that as a baseline in our culture that we're going to tell the truth to one another and then we're going to try to seek the truth together, you know, and it's such a world of difference to be in a community where people are trying honestly and sincerely trying to seek the truth. Compare that to a to an organization in which people are conspiring as to how they're going to mislead people. You know, that is wrong.

[7:23]  That is morally wrong. And it is a cancer, you know, in our culture today. And it is destroying a lot of things. It is destroying. It is doing great harm. And um so I think that you know this is something that I never thought I would live to see but I think it's one of the most important issues facing us today to think about uh what does our morality tell us about how we need to deal with each other in terms of truthtelling and truth seeking by the way truth seeeking I think it is equally terrible for someone to make statements that they don't have a that don't necessarily have a foundation in truth we see a lot of people who just say whatever they think whatever they want to be the truth without any bother to check, any bother to verify. That has enormously terrible consequences.

[8:09]  I mean, I think this is kind of be summed up by a simple phrase which became very popular, right, over the last years, and I'm sure it was around more so, but it was fake it until you make it. Yeah. Yeah. Unbelievable. I mean, that's not cool. And, you know, I I do think, you know, I want to say that there's a nuance here because a great leader will talk about a vision. you know, something that they want to create in the future.

[8:34]  And a vision is always a departure from what what we have now. You know, if I'm telling you what I want to build in the future, if we're having a conversation about what we should be trying to make together, we know that it's not here yet. We know that that's a dream that we're pursuing. You know, again, one of the most famous leadership speeches in in in history, the I have a dream speech, talking about a compelling moral vision. That's okay because a a a moral leader admits that we're not there yet, that we're talking about something in the future. But when you start to talk about that as if it existed, if you try to pretend that parts of it exist, now you are lying to people. And that is a completely different kind of an undertaking. And then there is of course just misrepresenting the facts andor making statements about reality that

[9:22]  have no basis in fact where you're just speculating and not admitting that you're speculating that you don't know. I mean a lot of leaders when they're asked a question should have the courage to say I don't know. I don't know. You know can you say that again David for the recording just so everybody can hear that super loud. What did you just say?

[9:39]  Yeah. I said a lot of leaders should have the courage when they're asked a question to say I don't know. you know, instead of making something up that sounds good or that will advance their cause. When you make statements that have no basis that you don't have a have necessarily have a basis in reality, that's just as good as lying to me. Hey, real quick. Have you enjoying the podcast? We first want to say thank you.

[10:03]  And we also just want to give you a little insight of what we're up to at Francis. Some don't even realize that we're working with organizations to help them use AI to create that real human communication experiences. where that's actually supporting your your families, those patients or the entire community. We're actually creating tech that connects. Check it out.

[10:25]  Francis.ai. I uh I was having a conversation and why I wanted you to repeat that is I was having a personal conversation with my girlfriend. Uh she's a physician's assistant, right? And she just started a new job where she's interacting with patients and she said, "You know, one of the things that I've become very comfortable with when I'm in the patient environment is deferring to somebody else when I don't know the answer." And I said, ' Do you know how powerful that is to just the relationship and the trust that you have between somebody who you're looked at as that secret relationship between your provider and your patient? When you say, "I don't know, but let me go consult with somebody else so I can bring you back the best answer." Naturally, that is a move of being humble. It's not acting like you know everything. And it also shows that you're willing to put yourself in a position where you can learn. And I feel like that in itself is a true form of leadership, but also how we build trust in relationships as well.

[11:12]  Absolutely. Absolutely. And you see great leaders build a culture where people are not afraid to say that they don't know and where people are not afraid to tell the truth and where they're not afraid to admit weaknesses you know that is that is how you get a stronger organization you know and and by admitting the places like you said the places where we're uncertain that's there's power in that you know I think when you're when you're talking here I can't help but ask the question like where did the accountability go right.

[11:43]  But more importantly, where did the accountability go for the accountability for ourselves? You know, first in order to lead others, we must first be able to lead ourselves. And it seems like so many people can't lead themselves or they don't have the ability to do so. And so that's where the fake it where until you make it kind of mentality comes out of that. Yeah. And the and the concept that winning is more important than doing the right thing. And that is that is another terrible idea, you know.

[12:11]  um when you focus only on winning, what you're focusing on is is on gaining power advantages over people. And um and I believe that, you know, that's immoral. That's not the right way to behave. Um, when we're in a strong organization with a strong leader, what we're doing is we're both valuing each other's welfare and we're we can be cooperating to try to help one another.

[12:38]  But again, based on reality, based on facts, and based on mutual accountability, like you said, this is another thing, another aspect of leadership is keeping your promises. You know, integrity. Integrity is one of the most critical values in public leadership that it's awful to say but we have we are in the process of losing it as a culture and it is one of the things that keeps me up at night you know worrying about that. What do you think the the root cause of that is? Right. So somebody can't be accountable. They don't have to do what they say and say what they do. Right. So where how do how do we lose weight in this kind of process? Yeah. I think I think there are a couple of things that lead to this one is again a focus on um on performance rather than process. So the idea that

[13:29]  well if I win if I got what I wanted then what I did must have been right you know and and um that is a very slippery slope that leads you to a terrible place because as soon as you start breaching integrity and breaching um you know honesty and engaging in manipulative behaviors using power to force people to get what you want um you're degrading the whole culture of collaboration you know and then where where it leads I, you know, it leads to violence and warfare. At the end of that road is physical conflict, you know, because when you, you know, there it's a lot of this stuff is ancient wisdom, you know, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Eventually, it catches up with you. Eventually, it turns very bad. and

[14:17]  you might be able to get along for a while, but it you're sewing the seeds of your own destruction when you engage in that behavior or you're passing it down to a future generation. And it's it's it it is something that um you know, in in our statements of values. We we we were talking about this when we were getting ready to to do the interview. You know, I believe that leadership is a way of talking in a multicultural, multiffaith context about the values that we share that cut across all religious traditions. Mainly about caring honestly, sincerely caring about one another more than we care about getting what we selfishly want. And then being faithful to our core values like integrity, like we said, honesty, following through on our commitments, um

[15:05]  you know, treating people with respect. I mean, all of these things. If we lose that, we we we can lose everything. And it's so interesting to me that these are just like natural human characteristics that are baked into who we are as people, right? And it's like if you truly listen to that little voice in the back of your head, you understand what the right thing is to do. I shouldn't have to convince you of this. You know what I'm saying? I believe that. I believe that. I think that I think that um to me one of the proofs uh I think one of the great proofs that there is a divine force operating in the world is that we do know we do know in our individual conscience the difference between right and wrong if we give ourselves like you're saying the space to listen to that still small voice. But David, we don't even have the space

[15:52]  today. You know, I think about because I'm in I'm in the space of, you know, developing technology and things like that for my business and I think about just how quickly technology's been thrust into our into our world. Like all of our generations today in this pocket of time are dealing with distraction more so ever than before. And if you think about being able to pay attention and remember what a leader or a prominent figure says and then holding them accountable to them following up, it's very difficult because it's always seeming like we're twisting our head looking at the newest shiny object in society, in our personal lives, in our professional lives. And maybe that's why it's so easy to get that drift away from what we know true or what we know is truly right. Well, and I I believe that you're pointing to something really important about our relationship with our leaders, you know, which is that in

[16:40]  in and this is something I've spent a lot of time working on, and that we tend to have a really dysfunctional view of leadership, I believe, in our organizations today, which is that we're looking for people to take responsibility and we're looking for people to blame when things go wrong. and and um so you know it's who's going to make me the biggest promise and who can I hate when it all blows up like that's the question that we want to ask and that is really a dysfunctional way to think about leadership I think that leadership is a force in when it's operating healthy it's in a healthy way it's a an energy that that resides and is transferred around in organizations that everybody gets a turn you know to exercise leadership I don't believe that

[17:28]  leadership really goes with positional power. I believe that the leader in a situation is the person who can help the group to take responsibility and engage everyone's energy in in um in making a difference, you know, and usually when that person is operating in a way that's exemplary, they're very humble. They're not power seeking. they are trying to help the group be as good as it can be you know and so that really reframes the question which is what am I going to do how am I going to take responsibility how am I going to make the world better today and not get like focused on this question of like well who am I who's going to who's going to take uh the burden of all this away from me and then how am I going to punish them if they don't do what I if they don't if they

[18:15]  don't you know follow through on the crazy promises that they told me because That's what I wanted to hear, you know. Yeah. I mean, I think that this is an important lesson. You know, one of the analogies that I liked when I heard when I was in like middle school is be careful when you point a finger because there are three that are pointed right back at you, you know. And it's like we do have to take more personal responsibility to control what we can control and to let go of the things that we cannot. but also looking through, like you said, the lens of how can I be responsible and accountable to what the outcome is going to be in my personal, my professional life or whatever it looks like, rather than looking to cast away all of our power and give it to somebody else and kind of use them as a scapegoat, which is a huge common thread that a lot of people do today.

[18:55]  Absolutely. So, here's a here's a question for you. Yeah. When you were young, who was still are a young man, by the way, David? Yeah. when you were who was the first leader who you remember that made a real impact on you? Do you have a a coach, a teacher, a mentor, somebody in your personal life? What was that like? Yeah, I mean I think it was probably some teachers I I I will speak highly about um the person who I'm still very close to actually the chair of my board um Lynn Abraham. So Lynn Lynn um was a controversial figure in her day. She was the district attorney of Philadelphia and um and I I believe, you know, um was very tough tough prosecutor on crime, but um and not everybody agreed with all

[19:43]  of her policies. But what I will say about Lynn was what struck me immediately about Lynn was her um just unwavering dedication to honesty and integrity. That was one of the first things that I saw. You know, she was a person who How did you recognize that, David? I I saw it immediately in her in her um raising enormously high standards for everyone around her. You know, she was a person that wouldn't tolerate any kind of misbehavior, any kind of um of a lack of ethics. Um just holding just really high standards for personal integrity. And then I also saw a person who had dedicated her life to public service. I mean, she was a person who really could have been a super multi-millionaire lawyer, but she gave

[20:31]  her life to serving the people of Philadelphia and and um and literally it was it was, you know, 16 hours a day. She'd be at the office at 9:00 in the morning and she'd still be doing community meetings at 10:00 at night. She spent tons of time interacting with every people at all different levels. Um, she was a person who who treated the poorest person that you could have met on the street with the same level of dignity as somebody who was a very powerful public official or a very wealthy business person, treated them the same, you know, with the same level of respect and and and care, you know, and she was a person that really stood out to me. Um, but I would say that there there were um, you know, any

[21:19]  number of teachers that I've had also that I felt were were um, and I'm I I shared with you, you know, I'm a Quaker and there's a lot of Quakers that I know um, from from Quaker life who I admire enormously. Quakers Quakers are show a lot of personal integrity. You could see personal integrity is something that matters to me enormously. And and um, not to say that any of us are perfect.

[21:42]  We all have our our mistakes and and challenges. Um I don't ever want to put anybody on a p pedestal and say that they're perfect because we're all human beings. But um to me it's about the sincerity of the effort that you make. Yeah. I mean just I love I love the the the frame of personal integrity. You know one of my personal values and something I've implemented into our business is called ultimate accountability. Now ultimate accountability starts with ourselves first because when we are accountable to ourselves then we are accountable to everybody else around us meaning we can be accountable to our customers as well but it all starts here right you have to focus here which is so important completely so so here's a here's a question for you when you were starting this organization in 1995 what were some of the macro trends that you kind of saw

[22:30]  out in the marketplace that said hey I need to create an organization that's going to talk about leadership that's going to implement these values and these custodial elements into kind of how we approach this subject. Yeah, it's a great question and and I'll tell you it's a really simple it's a really simple answer. Um, so I was at this point I was a young prosecutor and I was working with community leaders all over Philadelphia and uh I had had a chance to be in the Kellogg National Leadership Program, Kellogg National Fellowship Program, which was a really intensive leadership development experience with some of the best people like doing leadership development work. um people like Stephven CVY and uh Don Clifton from the Gallup organization and uh people from the from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Sloan School of Management. I mean, I really got like an incredible

[23:19]  uh lesson in from so many great people thinking about, you know, leadership and I was able to see that um what really made a difference in communities was people, you know, and people with leadership skills and I could see like for example, I would be going through I worked in Philadelphia and you could go like to one neighborhood where everything was really solid, beautiful homes with gardens. um safe safety, public safety, people really super engaged. And then you could go literally not even a quarter of a mile away and see a neighborhood that was in utter chaos with you know taken over by drug gangs experiencing terrific problems with violence and and and and um you know an assault to public quality of

[24:06]  life. And what was the difference between these communities? And often it wasn't an economic difference. it was more about the caliber of the leadership that was active in those neighborhoods. And and I began to see like a ter a terrific need to try to increase neighborhood leadership capacity that wasn't being addressed. And I what I thought to myself was what if all what if I could bring the training that I had received to to people who didn't have access to it and what would that look like and how could that make a difference? And that that was the animating thought behind our whole organization was that process. I mean just think about getting back to the roots of having leadership right in our personal lives and how that impacts everything else that we do in our life you know. So what were some of the common things that we saw like when you say lack of leadership in the community?

[24:54]  Was it public figures? Was it leadership in the home? What are we talking about? So I would say one of the key things was um vision. You know get getting right down to that. So you know a lot of times in a strong community there are a bunch of people who are keeping the vision for the community. They are you know one of the ways it would manifest I'll just give you just a really easy to understand example. So you imagine you live on a block and one day some kid shows up or young man shows up with a gun and a bag full of drugs and starts selling it on the corner of the block where you live. Now, for some people, that was an affront to the vision that they had for their community. And they

[25:42]  immediately went to work with their neighbors and with the authorities to try to say, "Hey, we're not going to let that happen on this community." And and I knew people that went would go out and then even begin to talk to the drug dealers. I mean, they would go out and they would say, this is in this is in the late 80s where and you still see this, by the way. You still see tremendous gangland violence around the drug trade. I mean, it is happen. It still happens today. If you if you hear about a driveby shooting or something like that, you pretty much know it's a drugrelated um incident of violence. It's still happening unfortunately. But they would even go out sometimes and go talk directly to the gang leaders and say, "Please, I live here. My children live here. Don't do this on my block." You know, so people holding the vision of what they

[26:30]  wanted to see happen in their community. whereas in another community there wouldn't be that person and that was the end because the chaos just spread you know from there you know so um that's to me a very tangible example but I think you could see that in many many different contexts that that there's somebody holding a vision for what they want for themselves for their family for their neighbors um for their community and they are going to take a stand and like you say be accountable and they're not going to try to blame blame the problem on somebody else. They're going to do what they need to do to make a difference locally. It starts with them.

[27:08]  It starts with that that primary personal responsibility. I mean, we're talking about leadership, right, from a personal perspective, but in our communities and I know that, you know, a lot of your work is also in organizational leadership and you're the author of a couple books. So, why don't you share the books that you've written and I want to talk about the inward sun a little bit as well. Sure. Yeah. So I wrote I've written two books on this and I've done a lot of teaching in my life.

[27:31]  But um the two books I wrote I wrote a book called Jennership which is really to me about it's about collaborative leadership about leadership that really focuses on creativity and engaging people in a creative process as opposed to the kind of power dynamics that we've been talking about. And that's a very it's a philosophical book. It really is um thinking deeply about what's the difference between leadership and these other forms and then what does it take to be a creative leader that is able to do this kind of work and um and uh so it's a long book you know and and then uh many years later I said I really want to write a different kind of book that is just way more um practical in terms of giving people a pathway to get there without having to go through all this

[28:20]  you know background ground thinking. One of the things I learned after writing the book, you know, was that um in the early in my life, maybe you'll appreciate this early in I think a lot of people suffer from this. They're like, if only people understood the truth, they would be better at doing, you know, what they need to do. And it turns out that unfortunately, you can understand things really well and still not be able to put them into practice.

[28:42]  So, I tried to write a book that was about how do you put this into practice? Like, what do you need to do to really practice this stuff? And the second book is much shorter, but I would argue it's still just as hard because it's throwing you into a bunch of practices, you know, asking you to do things which then lead to the kind of transformation that we're talking about. And that book is called The Inward Sun. Yeah. So, you know, one of my favorite phrases is like you cannot read about doing push-ups. And this is where I feel like a lot of people get lost in the sauce is we can read about leadership all day. You can read blog posts, you can read books, you can listen to audio books, you can do whatever, but unless you start implementing these tactics, right, and the tactics that actually lead to outcomes and you're incredibly intentional about how you're doing that, you're never going to get the results, right? So, why don't we kind of talk

[29:30]  about like some of the tactical elements that you kind of cover in the book that can help people really kind of get a better understanding of how to change the way in which they lead. Yeah. So, I'm going to I'm going to call out two or three things uh you know, just to get the conversation going and uh but um so a a simple one and and you you've heard people say this before, I'm sure, but the practice of meditation and deep listening is essential um to any kind of a growth process. Um a lot of leaders are terrible listeners. You know, they they are just always full of their own message and never able to process anything of what's happening around them. to be I learned early on um in almost every leadership course I did about the importance of learning how to shut up and listen to people. Um and I believe meditation is a practice of

[30:20]  being quiet. It's a it's a practice of learning even to listen to your own mind and to the practice of silence. The practice of being still and silent and observing, taking it in is such a powerful uh change agent in your life, you know. Um and um so meditation and some of the related practices around meditation are a really foundational piece of of leadership development. That's I mean, what's the phrase, David? It's like you have two ears and one mouth. use them accordingly, right? We should listen twice as much as we talk. But unfortunately, we feel like we have to often fill that blank space with sound and with action, but often our greatest leaders are willing to take a step back.

[31:07]  They're willing to listen and they're willing to sit in the moment to create a good outcome. Right? Mistakes love a rush decision. And I feel like in the world of hustle and bustle, especially in leadership today, we feel like we have to accomplish all these things to make progress. But that often couldn't be less true. That's so true. And and one of the things that I've learned is it takes a lot of strength. People think it takes strength to talk. It takes a lot more strength to be quiet. So I like to try to flip that around when we're working with people to say, "Do you have the strength to be quiet?" You know, that's that's a something that a lot of people don't have and they need to practice it to get it. Yeah. I use the word pretty much. Um I used the word intentional intentionally a little earlier because if you fail to plan you plan to fail, right? And so why is

[31:54]  intentionality something that you emphasize in your book? Yeah. So so this raises another uh practice which I think is equally difficult and um but and requires practice which is the practice of visioning you know and and I think powerful visioning can take place when you're able to be quiet. And the way I would describe visioning is it relates deeply to intentionality because it's asking you to really imagine what you want for yourself, for the people you care about, for your community, for your organization. And you know, you could extrapolate it up to the society as a whole. And I and I like to work with people to try to nest those visions like you know because when when when you do that well, you're aligned, you know, you you're building alignment. So the kind of person that you want to be with your

[32:43]  family and your friends also uh is aligned with what you want to be in your organization and in your community and in the world as a whole. And what we see a lot of times is people may not have their visions aligned. So they want to be a certain kind of person at work and then they want to be a completely different kind of person in their personal life. That's never going to work. That you're going to be torn into two different people. No one can no one can really do that with integrity you know wholeness. So um but it comes uh that process of visioning is very demanding because um and this is again a really powerful lesson about leadership.

[33:21]  Leaders are not reactive you know so they're not bouncing off of what's there. They are not overly sensitive to what is happening right at this moment. They are as you said very intentional and that intentionality comes out of deep reflection and mindfulness about what they're trying to build what they're trying to make and again nesting that and I believe deeply that there's a spiritual component to this which is why starting with meditation you when you're practicing leadership you're asking yourself the really tough questions which is what do I want for my life you know what is going to give me a sense of satisfaction and wholeness and meaning you know as I take this rare and precious thing I have which is the time that I have and how am I going to invest it you know we don't give each other we

[34:09]  don't give each other enough space to think about that and dialogue with with the people that we care about to to examine that you know and oftenimes it's filled unfortunately with some of the things that you were talking about earlier with social media visions of things that are crazy that don't make sense you know we want what somebody else has because we think it looks cool or because we think that there's something attractive to it. And the truth of the matter is to really sit with yourself can be very liberating because you might decide and learn that you don't want any of those things. You know that the things that you really want are really quite different and that can be extremely liberating.

[34:47]  I want to talk a little bit about fulfillment. I'm currently reading a book um called the dopamine detox and it talks about a really interesting paradox which is we've confused at some point in time in modern society that fulfillment comes with excitement right we're we're exchanging the two excitement equals fulfillment but we're in your book you talk about the importance of like goal setting and how that leads to fulfillment as well so why don't you talk a little bit about what fulfillment really means and how we can use goal setting to accomplish that sense of fulfillment yeah so so I've done a lot of work with people on on creativity and I think creat this is the question the way I interpret your question it relates a lot to creativity because when you really um develop a strong personal vision um and a vision for your life and your organization you're involved in a

[35:36]  creative process because what you're going to do you're going to articulate some things that are not what you have you know they're not where you are so there's a lot of metaphors you can use I mean sometimes people use the journey metaphor I like to use you know mountain climbing metaphor course because people can relate to that. But we have a summit. We have a hill we're climbing.

[35:54]  You know, a lot of us want to go somewhere, get to somewhere and and um and you see that you're not where you want to be and then you have to you have to grapple with well, what is it going to take? How am I going to get there? You know, that process of closing the gap, you know, we the we can call this creative tension. You know, the gap between where I am and where I want to be. um great leaders and I be believe great creators are able to hold a lot of creative tension without getting depressed without um experiencing massive fear without you know freaking out basically like I'm never going to get there if you're able to hold that creative tension now you can move forward in your life and it's there's there's some psychological dynamics going on behind the scenes when you

[36:42]  accomplish your goals you feel a sense of satisfaction you feel you get the dopamine rush you know, from achieving something that you put your mind to. But, um, I think the really interesting thing that we've learned about great creators is that some of the greatest creators that we have in our society are never satisfied. I mean, they always wherever you think, however great it is that you think that they think they are, they are not satisfied. They want to go somewhere else, you know. Um, and so what it tells you is that they have tremendous strength to hold big goals, you know, and and this this ties back to religious themes, you know. I I often think about Martin Luther King, one of his famous, you know, um, famous speeches. He said, it's right the night before he was killed. He said, "I've

[37:30]  been to the mountaintop. I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you." You know, so he has the strength to see something that he's reaching for that he's never going to achieve in his own life, but it gives him a sense of meaning, you know, to reach for that. And that that's I think his ability to communicate that to others also gives them a sense of meaning of where we're all going as well. Yes. Exactly.

[37:56]  Exactly. Yeah, man. So, we know I want to kind of ask you um about the process of becoming a better leader, right? So, one of the things that I recognize, and I see this often, I have the blessing now of being 34 where I can see kind of the patterns of my life, right? I'm conscious enough now to recognize that I've been through ups and downs. Sure.

[38:16]  When I set out to be a a better leader, right, naturally, I'm going to go through the process of saying I'm in the form of uninformed optimism. If I become a better leader, my business is going to explode. I'm a better relationship in my life. And then I go through a downturn of informed pessimism where I'm like, "Oh gosh, this is going to be a lot tougher than what I need to." And then I go through a form of informed optimism of like, okay, well, I've actually experienced this and I can accomplish this again. How do you survive the ups and the downs of the kind of I would say regression of the mean, if that makes sense, to become the better leader who you are? Yeah. Yeah. So, so there's so some of this is about um you know, two other things that I talk a lot about in my book, The Inward Son. One is willpower. Um and there's a lot of great work that's been done on building

[39:02]  willpower. you know, how do we do it? I will tell you that vision is a huge part of willpower. I mean, vision is what gets people back up off the mat when they have been knocked down. You know, vision is what does it their commitment to this dream that they have, that's part of, you know, what does it uh but I think there's some also really uh counter unintuitive or counterintuitive things. One of the things that I learned studying willpower and resilience because this is the other thing is that you're saying like how do we respond to failure? You know, that's the question you're asking and and um and there's some deep lessons around that too. like how do we learn from failure instead of getting discouraged and giving up you know and one of the things that I

[39:50]  learned that shocked me it didn't it shouldn't have shocked me but it did when I finally brought it into focus was the power of our loving relationships you know and this is something that that that leaders I think often overlook you know which is they are so committed to what they're building that they're not building those powerful support networks and and relationships built on love. You know, when you are down and out, when you are on the canvas, part of what's going to bring you back is the person who cares about you and who you care about. You know, when we're building things because they not only matter to us, but they matter to the people we love. Now we have tremendously more powerful resources to get back up, you

[40:38]  know, and that's what you're going to see when you look at great leaders. You're going to see that they were able to build that support system, you know, and that that's tough because anybody that's built a support system like that, you know that it's not all about you. It has to be about the other people, too. You have to be a giving person. You have to be there for the people who are there for you, you know, and so, but at the end of that process, you're happier.

[41:03]  you're more you're stronger. Um it gives you um a great word if you ever want this is a great book even if you're familiar with Na Nessim Taylor but he wrote a book called anti-fragility anti-fragility. So anti-fragility is about the superpower of getting stronger under stress you know when you so that what happens is when you get knocked down you're better after you got knocked down. You know what I mean? So that's that's what we're all going for. We want to be that that that the hurdles that we face make us stronger, you know. So, and I will say that I learned that loving the loving relationships that you have around you, that's part of anti-fragility. That's part of what makes you stronger, you know, under stress. Don't we natively kind of

[41:52]  intuitively understand that, though? I mean, if you've ever gone to the gym, right, you only get stronger under stress, underweight, under the ability to think, I'm not going to get out of here and pushing yourself further. But it seems like we approach like our life journey differently, like it should be frictionless, and we should become the version of ourselves without having to go up the hills and down the hills. It seems a little bit like interesting that we kind of perceive it that way. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think and I think there's there's a tendency because, you know, when we're really in love with our vision and we're really focused on our success, it can make us naval gazers. That's a that's a risk factor you know where you become like well this is the most important thing is is is being successful you know and that's where again the the real fundamental work um I think in in in in

[42:42]  meditation and visioning is to see the other people in your life and have visions that are shared with them you know so that's also about building a great team you know where the team is committed to the vision you know and you know you're making progress in your organization when everybody cares about the vision maybe as much as you do, you know, that makes you stronger, you know, it gives you the room you need to take care of yourself as well as other people, you know, and it's so I think I think there's a lot of really really great ideas in that space about you know um being a whole person too and being happy you know because at the end of the day what does it matter you know in the Bible it says you know what does it matter to gain the whole world and lose

[43:29]  your soul. You know, that's that's what a lot of people do. They gain the whole world, but then they lose the things that really at if they thought about it meant the most to them. You don't want none of us want to be that person. Yeah. Here, uh, one thing that I've recognized is that some of the leaders who I look up to share a common trait in being extreme optimists, right? And I've tried to in I would say reflect that in my personal life, but honestly, David, I've gotten a lot of scrutiny for it. I mean, I've been called toxically positive, right, for for looking at situations and always looking for the bright side. And so, I had to kind of reframe my toxic positivity into um into practical optimism, right? In a situation, I have the practical ability to choose how I want to look at the situation. I'm still going to choose to

[44:16]  go to the optimistic side of things. What do you think about practical optimism? And how important is optimism for leadership? Yeah. So I think you know what's interesting in so there's from from the study of creativity there's a really interesting um I think viewpoint on this. So I think the trap that we get into with uh optimism is only focusing on our vision, you know.

[44:40]  So it's like we're like, well, we're going to get there or it's going to be great and we're we're painting the picture of where we're going to go, you know. And one of again, one of the things that I've learned studying creators is that um creators are really in touch with reality. So they're able to keep that um really incisive and truthful uh awareness of where they are and they don't sugarcoat it. So they're able to say, you know, you're running the race, whatever. You're able to say, "Well, I really wanted to run this race at 8 minutes a mile and I didn't do it.

[45:15]  I was at, you know, 12 minutes a mile." and they they tell the truth. And and so it's that integrity to tell the truth while you're holding the vision, you know, and and what makes a creator great is the ability to to to feel both of those things, you know, to feel the sense of of power and and energy that comes from clinging to the vision, but also the integrity and the truthfulness, you know, that comes from really being clear and honest about where things stand and and whether you did it or not, you know, and goes back to that word you were talking about in the beginning, accountability. You know, holding yourself accountable like no, I didn't do it. I said I I I know what I wanted to do and I you and you can hold both things. It's holding the contradiction,

[46:04]  having the courage and the integrity to hold the contradiction, to hold the tension, you know, that's what makes people great. And there's just lots of examples of that um in life. I I'll tell you one story which I think you'll like. You may have heard um one of the greatest composers in history, you know, Lo Lwick Beethoven. Okay, so Beethoven, this is after he's written the fifth symphony, which is again one of the greatest symphonies and he writes this letter to a friend. Actually, he doesn't it's not even Yeah, he writes a letter to a friend basically saying, "I'm the worst composer. I'm terrible.

[46:40]  Like my life is meaningless. I'm I essentially saying I suck as a as an artist, you know, you can feel his sense of incredible depression about his abilities as a creator, you know, and yet, you know, this thing confesses being near suicide. That's how bad he felt about himself at this moment. Wow. And he walks out of that and writes the seventh, eighth, and ninth symphony, you know. So, it's like the ability again.

[47:11]  What do you see the ability to hold these this tension, you know, tension? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Man, you know, I I think about this something I discovered maybe in 2020 during the pandemic. It was 2019 was the work of uh Dr. Carol Dwek at Stanford. She came up with the growth mindset. She published a book called the growth mindset. And when she frames, you know, a growth mindset represents the only objective, right, is not to master but to continue to learn. I thought that that was so powerful and it kind of summed up like my personal journey in business and in life in general. I've always when I was younger thought that for very transparently for everybody who's listening, I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I was a terrible student, David. I got D's and C's my entire academic career. The one time I made it to the honor role was the

[47:57]  last semester of my senior year in high school. And I told my mom, I told you I was going to do it, right? But by then it didn't really matter. And one of the things that I was really grounded in as I was coming up was recognizing that there had to be something on the other side right of the educational process.

[48:12]  And when I became an entrepreneur in 2014, I started falling in love with learning again because I knew that there were skills that I could continue to develop and learn that were going to help me be better on my journey. And then I recognized the fallacy of when I was younger, I thought I knew everything, but when I actually knew a lot more, I realized how much I didn't know. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you kind of think about the growth mindset as it pertains to leadership and how we can continuously evolve and continue to you know grow as that person? Yeah. I I I completely uh believe in her in in uh her work and um you know to me when I first encountered growth mindset it really again I I I perceived it through the lens of create creativity and the work that I had done with creativity because um a person that has growth mindset to my mind has a vision like

[49:00]  they that's what it is it's a vision of what they think they can accomplish and they don't think they're stuck with this reality you know they think that that that this reality is malleable it can change. I can change, the organization can change, things can change, and we're going to go to work on it. And we're not going to be stuck with what we have. You know, we're not going to have a limit that that we feel we're imprisoned by, you know, and I think that is the that's an essential factor of of leadership.

[49:26]  That's different. No leader walks into an organization and says, "It's great, everything's great the way it is." You know, that's that's just that's just not not true in the DNA, right? A leader has expectations on reality, on himself, on the organization or herself, you know, and is is a leader is introducing tension into the situation, creative tension, and that's that's growth, you know, it's it's where we want to go, what we want to build. And um I often have a dialogue with people. I because I'm a Quaker, I I I also have a lot of friends who are Buddhists and we have we have a a deep conversation about the Buddhist thing of letting go, you know, letting go and uh because a lot of um Buddhists practice non-attachment, you

[50:15]  know, and and I have to say like I come down in the place where I don't think that non-attachment is consistent with leadership. I I just don't think it is. I think that leaders are attached. They're attached to building things, growing things, making things better. But my my push back to my Buddhist friends is to say, here's the problem with non-attachment. You have to recognize that you want to be in a state of non-attachment, but you're not.

[50:41]  Exactly right. There's that healthy friction once again, you know. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, man. Well, David, we have a tradition here on the podcast where our previous guest wants to ask you a blind question. I'm going to change this up because I want to get your your true honest opinion on this. So, our previous guest wants to ask you, imagine a situation happens. The TV starts blaring. It's World War, right? There's a zombie apocalypse that's having on or coming on. The phone rings and somebody says, "David, there's a bunker three doors down from you. Here's the secret code on how to get in. You can take three leaders from any point in history with you into the bunker. You guys will be safe and come out the other side."

[51:20]  What leaders are you taking into that bunker with you? Any point in history? any point in history. Yeah, we also have a little time machine or a little teleporter, right? Okay. One of them is gonna be Jesus. Um, probably I will say Socrates. And let's see who would be my third. I'm going to take Martin Luther King with me.

[51:48]  That's a that's an amazing reservation for four there, David. Man, I appreciate the time today. Honestly, so cool to see, you know, why you're on the podcast. Definition of heart and hustle, brother. Seriously, I can't thank you enough. Thank you so much. I've so enjoyed this conversation. It's been wonderful. Well, there you go, guys. There's the pod. Catch you in the next one.