Redefining Success and Navigating Regret with Keynote Speaker Mark Sanborn

0:00Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. Cutting-edge conversations on business and personal success, as well as how to level up. Here's your host, number one business coach in the world, Brad Shoghers.

0:17Mark Sanborn, as he says to his audiences, nobody can prevent you from choosing to be as extraordinary in whatever you do. The guy is all about being extraordinary, and today he delivers in spades. His philosophy on success, though, is a little different. His philosophy on goal setting is really unique, and I think you might relate to it really well. Hall of Fame keynote speaker, won all of the speaking awards, including the Cavett Award, which is the highest NSA National Speakers Association award, because he's taught in more than 90 countries. He's taught everybody about this. His book, The Fred Factor, is coming up with its 20th anniversary of its release, which is phenomenal.

0:57More than a couple of million copies worldwide have sold. But today, he's going to take you on a journey around being extraordinary and being successful. I think you'll really enjoy. Take a lot of notes, though. Mark teaches a whole bunch. So, Mark, I have to ask, what is your definition of success? I find it interesting that everyone is so interested in being successful that very few people have ever taken time to define what it means. Probably 50 years ago, I heard a definition that was kind of the de facto standard for years. It's the progressive realization of predetermined worthwhile goals.

1:34And that's fine. Although I'm one of the people that think goals really aren't nearly as motivational as other things are. But for me, I can define success in one word. And I discovered this early in life. And that is freedom. Success is the freedom to pursue the things that make you happiest, that give you the greatest joy and make the biggest difference. And as long as they're legal or ethical, there's no reason why you shouldn't have that freedom. The problem, of course, is I think today, Brad, a lot of younger employees, younger people forget that it's not an overnight freedom. You know, we kind of start with a no freedom, right?

2:12We're in a crib and we're dependent on two people to feed us and love us and purpose and care for us. And then the older we get, the problem is a lot of people never leave the crib. You know, they never pursue the autonomy. And so I've always wanted to make a lot of money, but not because of the lot of money, but because a lot of money gives me the freedom to do what I want to do. Yeah. So how did that evolve for you over time? Like when you were a young man, did you see it that way or did it evolve? How did that progress? I guess part of it was, you know, lucky birthing. You know, I had parents that were very much into the idea of freedom and liberty.

2:52And so I kind of grew up in that environment. And they seemed to do what they did professionally and enjoy doing it. I never saw parents come home at the end of the day demoralized or burn out because of this oppressive job. And now they had three hours to drink beer and watch TV before they passed out. But I think the other part of it was I was lucky because of my involvement in different youth organizations. I started hearing motivational speakers when I was in my early teens. And ideas are powerful. You know, your career, my career, they've been driven by ideas. I find ideas invigorating. And whenever I ran across a good idea, I tried to remember it.

3:31I tried to take note of it. And then I tried to use it. And so from an early age, we had kind of a drip or a trickle system of success going into my metaphorical veins. I want to touch back on something you mentioned there, which was, you know, not as big a believer in goals being such a motivator, because I think it's an interesting concept to explore. Tell me more about that. I think goals are terrific because they allow us to track progress or regress. They're a measurement, if you will. But it's the reason behind the goal that motivates you. You know, I've shared with audiences that if I said to someone in the audience, your goal is to make a million dollars in the next 12 months, they'd say, well, good luck with that.

4:14But if they had a son or daughter who needed a special operation that wasn't covered by insurance and cost a million dollars, I'm guessing if they didn't make it, they'd raise it. And the reason is because it's a really compelling reason. So I think too often we tell people to set goals only to find out the goals weren't that important to them. To me, the power is in purpose. You know, the motivation comes from mission. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very powerful. So when in your life do you think you chose success? Was it as a young man? Was it as a boy? Was it later? Where did success become your choice?

4:50Well, I can answer that on two levels. First, I was an overweight kid with no athletic ability who got beat up a lot on the school bus. So I'm just being honest. I'm not bitter about it. It was what it was. And so I learned that my way out of that kind of oppressive situation was to excel at things. For me, it wasn't sports, but it was academics and related subjects. But I started speaking in a contest at the age of 10 where I was abysmally bad. I didn't think it would be that hard. It was really hard. And so it was that failure that drove me to finally crystallize, not just wanting to be successful, but more importantly, successful at what?

5:32Learning to speak. then later and it's funny because I just was going through my library I pulled this book out and uh December 25th 1978 I gave my parents a copy of Zig Ziglar's book Confessions of a Happy Christian and I don't even remember doing it but in the front I wrote that I knew they'd enjoy the book I just heard Zig Ziglar speak and I decided that someday I wanted to be a professional speaker So even though obviously the idea had occurred to me before then, it's fun to see a precise moment in the history where I actually told someone, you know, sometimes we have these aspirations. We don't tell anybody because we're afraid later they'll go, hey, whatever happened to that dream?

6:14But for me, at the age of 20, I said, wow, you can make a living at professional speaking. Now, of course, the challenge of 20 is I didn't have a whole lot of life experience or success. I'm a good believer that you need to do something before you tell others how to do it. So I got busy in sales and marketing and some other areas. So what is the Mark Sanborn formula for success? How do you see that success happens for someone? There's a classic Hemingway line from the book The Sun Also Rises where one of the characters says to the other, how did you go broke? And the response is gradually and then suddenly.

6:58And everybody reads that line with a certain amount of trepidation because it's it's about going broke. It's also about becoming successful. The idea of an overnight success, it does happen, but it's rare. My friend Michael once told me that the good news is, is the bad news is it'll take me 15 years to become a success. But that's how long that it takes to be an overnight success. We just don't see the 14 years ahead of it. Right. So when my boys were younger and Darla and I have two sons, one's a Marine and one's a realtor. We had a real easy prescription. Try a lot of stuff. Do things. Don't just take the idea that I could tell you, you need to be this or someone with your guidance counselor would say you need to be that.

7:46Try things. If you like them, keep doing them. If you don't like them, move on. And I think over time we start to find out what we, A, enjoy doing. But B, and this is key, what we enjoy doing that we're willing to work to become good at doing. Both my boys are really smart and I'm not bragging. I probably get it from their mother's side. But I said to them, I don't believe any grade that you get in school as long as you couldn't have gotten a higher grade. Because I was afraid that, you know, if life comes easy academically, you can do nada and skate by with C's. On the other hand, if you're a B student or an A student and you're skating by with C's, then dad's got a problem.

8:31So I think it's the idea of really applying ourselves. And, you know, I subscribe. Arnold Schwarzenegger's new book is out. And I subscribe to his daily email, which is really quite good. And he said something the other day that rang so true. He said, you know, the biggest problem in our culture is an unwillingness to endure discomfort. And success comes from hard work, always. Now, the hard work can be enjoyable, but it's still hard work and it doesn't happen overnight. Let's let's dive into that just for a little bit. So success and failure, what's your perception on the relationship between the two?

9:12We enjoy success, but we learn more from failure. You know, I know people, you can learn from success. I don't want to suggest that there's no lessons in being successful. But the problem is for most people, when you're successful, you don't look for the lessons. When you fail, it has an emotional impact that causes you to want to figure out how not to feel that way. In financial services, we know that the fear of loss is higher than the hope of gain. People are always tend towards, in general, the pain minimization. And so I think when we have a, you know, I remember clearly, I was 10, so my first speaking contest was 55 years ago.

9:57I remember vividly the room and the table and the lectern and the audience when I sucked so bad at my first speech. I don't remember the age of 10. I mean, I remember vaguely. But why is that? Because failure has such an emotional impact. The problem is most people, when they fail, they got a decision tree. And what, Brad, people say so much is that didn't really matter. No big deal. And of course, I found maybe you've observed whenever somebody says that, that's usually not true. It mattered a lot, but they didn't want to feel the pain. But the other decision tree is where you say that really mattered.

10:35I don't ever want to do that again. I don't want to fail. I don't want to feel that way. And that's why I think people who are successful, while they enjoy success, they learn a lot more from failure. how did you and and maybe because this is something i know you've spoken on how do you get someone to realize that you don't need to carry all of your mistakes on your shoulders type thing you can put them on the ground and use them as stepping stones type thing how do you teach people to get through that or change from that thinking to using the failures or using the mistakes? I've come to believe that one of the most powerful tools you have as a leader or as a parent or as a colleague is awareness.

11:19When I was in college, my roommate as a junior was memorizing all the muscles of the cat. He had a course and he, of course, was pre-med. And I said, by the way, what made you decide to be a doctor? And this was a big epiphany for me, Brad, because I was an ag econ major having grown up on a farm. And he said, well, you know, my grandfather is a doctor. My dad is a doctor. What else would I be? And I was like, really? My grandfather is a farmer. My dad is a farmer. And I'm majoring in ag business. And it dawned on me that it was not anything more than a lack of awareness, right? I mean, I just assumed, right?

12:00You grow up on a farm, you become a farmer. You have a doc as a dad, you become a doc. And that was so profound. You know, we can't be everything we want to be, but we can be anything we want to be. And so few of us, myself included, realize that until it's too late. So, you know, the whole idea of somebody changing and using failure as a lesson is making them aware of how they frame it. They probably never thought about it. You know, they probably just didn't grow up in an environment. You know, we kind of are parents of our parents for many years. and if your parents basically suppress the fact that they were unhappy and failed, that's what you do too instead of looking at the lesson.

12:44Got it. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We're with Mark Sanborn. We're going to be back in a moment. We're going to dive into things like passion, how to be extraordinary. This is the Big Success Podcast. Stay with us. In 30 minutes a day for 30 days, 30X Business will take you through the exact hard-won business principles that Brad Sugars has personally developed over the past 30 years as an entrepreneur, investor, and business advisor. Join Brad and his team and 100 other entrepreneurs who want to start building a successful business today. And you're back, Big Success Podcast, Mark Sanborn, up, down, sideways.

13:18Mark, I want to start with the idea of passion. How does someone either find their passion, live their passion? What's your theory around that? Because some of the things you've taught me over the years on that are really powerful. first you know i go back to what i said earlier how do you know what you're passionate about you try a lot of things and by the way even if you don't know what your singular or primary passion is you can still bring passion to your work that's energy that's uh commitment and you know we have mutual friends and scott mccain and larry wingett and joe calloway and the four of us we talk about that a lot passion is actually very overrated for this simple reason passion isn't the starting point it's the add-on process without passion is sleepwalking it's sterile it's exciting but passion without process is nothing more than undirected emotion so you know i wrote a book that talked about the encore effect that says you need both process and passion to me passion is the fuel uh you know there's different kinds of fuel you put bad fuel in an engine, it will run well.

14:30You put good fuel in, it'll run better. And that's to me what passion is. But the question becomes, how do I create value in my passion? I mean, there's a lot of things I'm passionate about. I'm never going to make a nickel from it. My son and I love F1 racing. I am never going to profit from it. If anything, I'm going to make the people who own F1 richer by paying for merchandise and tickets and things. So that's a passion, but it's not what I would call a sustainable career passion. The real goal in life, and I learned this a long time ago, is to find the intersection in your life between money and meaning.

15:08Finding a way to make money doing what is meaningful. When I was young, I did a lot of crap that wasn't that meaningful, but I knew over time that would give me the freedom to reach a point where I could do what was meaningful and still profit from it, even though others were profiting from the value I great. Love it. So something you touched on, I've seen it many years and I'd like your perspective on it. This thought that you have to find your one thing. And I think it came from that crazy cowboy movie where Curly said, there's just one thing. Where do you think that came from and what's your perspective on it?

15:49You know, we all gravitate towards easy solutions and simple answers and sometimes easy solutions and simple answers work. But the thing about Curly in that movie, of course, is he never tells you what the one thing is. You know, it was almost, it was a Zen cone, right? The one thing. Don't know what it is, but it's one thing. I think that there are a lot of things that make our lives purposeful. You're a person of faith. It's a little easier because you have a higher standard, a God or someone that you worship. But at a practical level, I think saying that you've got one thing is a disservice.

16:27A friend of mine called me years ago and he's, you know, he's our age, right? So even years ago, he wasn't a young guy. And he said, I can't find my mission. I can't find my purpose. And I said, well, I can't help you there, but I'll tell you this. Until you find your purpose, do whatever you're doing purposefully. Because I'm a big believer that purpose resides in everything we do, whether it's interacting with a neighbor over the back fence, whether it's how you drive in traffic, if you hold yourself to a higher purpose, and that is being kind, being of service, being a peacemaker, not a divider, then you don't have to necessarily say, you know, I was put on this earth to make sure that everybody's puppy got vaccinated.

17:16I'm obviously in the physician. And that's great, by the way. If you find that out, God bless you, most of us, we try to do things purposely. Somebody, I locked up my dogs and my wife's keeping them quiet. So somebody's knocking on my door, even though we're in a no solicit neighborhood. Maybe it's somebody searching for the purpose. I'll get with you later. Go away. You know, someone said to me, a friend of mine actually, whose son was born with autism, severe autism. He said, you know what, Brad, sometimes you find your calling in life and sometimes you're given your calling. And I think that relates to a lot of whatever you're given as your calling or whatever you find or decide as your calling.

18:05Because I think finding it and deciding it are two different things as well. I want to touch on, though, my favorite chapter, which is just more my personality, I guess, in here, was where you talk about the scorekeeper system. Change the score, change the way you think. Can you explain that to everyone? Because, again, my personality is drawn to that nature of learning. Well, first, you know, the old adage is how you keep score determines how you play the game. And that's true. The problem is most people have never examined their scorekeeping system. It's been inherited or perhaps it was something they decided on.

18:44And in the book, I state that this is a generalization. You know, it's a short book. I didn't have time to do a deep dive. But I found that, you know, there's basically four ways you can keep score. You know, and the first is results. And we all know people. They're all about the results. They're hard workers. By the way, they may or may not be highly successful monetarily, but they do create results. and then you've got the people who are into uh you know the the riches right they make money only to make more of it and in my life i'm neither condoning nor condemning it's just we know i know people that you know when you say how much is enough their answer more then then the third is recreation right and the recreation part is uh the guy with the boat and the jet ski and the atv and the Jeep and skis and all the rest.

19:37And everything they do during the week is a means to the end of recreation. But the fourth one is relationships. Now, typically we say, you know, people are, you know, some people are relational, some aren't, you know, everything in life is ultimately a choice. You might be born an introvert, but you can still learn to be an extrovert. I'm actually a borderline introvert extrovert, which most people don't believe, but it's true. So here's what I found. If you're only about results, at the end of the day, life suddenly goes on dim. And if you're only about riches, you've got no one to share those riches with.

20:15And if you're into recreation, but you haven't focused on relationships, you're on your boat by yourself, which makes water skiing very hard. but what I found is that the people that focus on relationships tend to have all four. If you have good relationships at work, you're able to get results. If you have good relationships with your business partners, your customers, your vendors, it tends to be profitable. If you have good relationships, you don't have to buy a boat because three of your friends have a boat and they invite you to go with them on the weekend. Now, again, a very big oversimplification, But in it, there is this idea that where you focus is where you're going to be most successful.

21:00Just the warning is don't wake up later and say, I picked the wrong R. Yeah, I the reason I love that chapter mostly was that I'm like, I think I'm all for it. It was like, maybe I'm all for I don't know if I can be all for it. It's kind of like that disc profile, like maybe I'm all for sort of thing. I want to switch tangents. Extraordinary. The word extraordinary is something that you are synonymous with. Tell me more about this whole how to be extraordinary. You know, after spending 30 years talking about it, because my book that really kind of framed up extraordinary came out in 2004, The Fred Factor, How Passioning Your Work and Life Can Turn Ordinary into Extraordinary.

21:4820th anniversary is coming out next year because the book continues to have legs and people like the message. I do worry, however, that people look at extraordinary as only big and not sometimes small. It sounds like, wow, that was an extraordinary YouTube concert at the Sphere. Well, it was. But you know what? A lot of little things went into making for an extraordinary conference. The idea of the sphere and the pixelization, however many years ago. So I always like to say extraordinary literally means a little extra from ordinary. It doesn't say how much. It doesn't say mega extraordinary. You know, Brad, we talk about, you hear speakers say this all the time.

22:31You've got to make a quantum leap in your life. In physics, they rarely, by the way, use quantum. They use quantum jumps. quantum jump or quantum leap is the smallest distance an atom can travel from one orbit to another it's the smallest distance an atom can travel but what makes it powerful is the occurrence so if you make enough little moves funny thing happens over time cumulatively you experience the big leap if you can if you can solve cancer and world hunger god bless you go for it but more often than not, it's those little leaps that create extraordinary. In the book, The Fed Factor, I call it the ABCD principle, above and beyond the call of duty.

23:18Just a little bit more. Somebody says, how do I get to the HR office? You walk them. You don't tell them. It takes you 15 more seconds. Your day's not shot. And when you go through life looking for ways, little things that can make a big difference, it's pretty easy to be extraordinary. Yeah. So when we think about that, if you just tie that into the word consistency, tell me more about how that's a big part of it. Here's a funny thing. There are some hotel chains that when I stay there, I know it's going to be great because they're consistent. There are other hotel chains when I've stayed there, sometimes they're amazing and sometimes they're terrible.

24:03And from that, I formulated the idea that it is better to be consistently good than occasionally great. Because consistency is your outward facing brand. It's what you're known for over time, not a flash in the pan. You know, we all know one hit record, you know, one hit wonders, right? We know that. But here's the funny thing. We know the song. We rarely know the artist. And so you have to find a level where you can deliver consistently so that people will be able to think of you as, you know, distinctive in your category, consistently good, consistently great, consistently bad, but cheap, which is, by the way, typically how the hospitality industry shakes out.

24:44You know, you stay at a cheap hotel, you know, you stay at a Ritz and, you know, they don't deliver your room service on time. You're angry. You stay at a cheap hotel. if you don't get murdered that night, you're happy. And the reality, it's about this consistency in the brand. So yeah, consistency is important. And by the way, the more you are good, the easier it is to be consistently good. The more you are great, the easier it is to be consistently great. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We're going to be back with Mark Sanborn in just a moment. And we're going to look at that whole thing of doing that scaling up, going from good to great and get into more depth on it.

25:22Mark Sanborn is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker and bestselling author of eight books, including the New York Times and international bestseller, The Fred Factor, How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary, which has sold over 2 million copies worldwide. To learn more about Mark Sanborn, please visit marksanborn.com. Mark, how is there a difference between someone who goes for good and someone who goes for great. What do you notice is the difference in those two groups? Oddly, it's not always ability. I know some people with limited skills that have gone for great and got it.

25:59I know people who are extraordinarily well, are extraordinarily good at what they do, who never get above good. And my theory on this is simple. And that is that aiming low is a regret minimalization process. Hang on, hang on, say that, say that, hang on, say that again. Aving low is? A regret minimalization process. It's a way we manage disappointment. I think, I really believe that really successful people are more often disappointed than unsuccessful people. Unsuccessful people expect to be unsuccessful. Successful people are always trying new things and occasionally fail, maybe fail a lot until they get the big hit.

26:42so if you you know if your self-esteem says you know i just want to make sure i feel good about myself don't try much and you won't be too disappointed if on the other hand you want to be great start trying great things i was asked recently by a client you know what's your biggest regret or variation what would you tell your younger self and you know i would tell myself 20 40 50 years ago to aim higher i think i wasn't afraid of failure but i think i underestimated what it took to be great or what it took to be really successful. You know, Nito Cabane at High Point University says, you know, most people are hunting rabbits when they could be hunting elephants.

27:23Now, by the way, if you're a member of PETA, we're not talking about literally shooting rabbits and elephants. We're just saying most people are pursuing small game when the reality is it's the same process to pursue big game. So in a lot of your coaching and teaching, you've worked with people and groups that are shooting for that massive level and they're achieving that massive level. What is the strategic difference that you see? Like, what are they doing that the others aren't doing? If we say, okay, we've gone for the massive goal, those that are getting there, what's the difference? I think there's two primary differences.