2409 - Finding Opportunity Through Fear as an Entrepreneur and Paraglider with Patrick Sweeney

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0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Patrick Sweeney. Patrick, you are a five-time founder. You're the author of some best-selling books, including your brand new book, The Founder's Creed. Congratulations on the launch of that. Your last book did pretty good. It was a Wall Street Journal best-selling book. In fact, I think hit what, number five? Number five, yeah. Number five, yeah, but this new one's going to hit number one, Josh. All right, good, good, good. Well, I'm going to do everything I can on this podcast to help make that reality.

1:27But Patrick, it's fantastic to have you. Thank you so much for joining us. Josh, thanks for having me, and thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Yes. So before we start talking about your work, and I'm excited to talk about the new book, but I always love finding out what high-level leaders do for fun when they're not at work. And I understand that you have something that is quite in alignment with your last book. It is. I'm addicted to paragliding. So where I live most of the time in the Alps is just absolutely perfect for hiking up a big mountain, opening up your chute and jumping off. And that's something that gives me a tremendous pleasure and something I couldn't have even imagined 20 years ago.

2:18Well, Patrick, I dare say you're not someone, you know, you're not 21. You know, sometimes I think, you know, as we, if you don't mind, let's just kind of go from there. I want to talk about paragliding, but I think this is going to go right into your topic here. You know, I think a lot of times, you know, I probably like I've done, you know, tandem, you know, jumping out of an airplane, you know, parachute, you know, that sort of thing. I've done some crazy stuff and, you know, run marathons. And for some reasons, I think that there's practical reasons why I'm probably not going to do those things again.

2:56But but, you know, paragliding is not on my bucket list, to be honest with you. You know, and, you know, just kind of cresting in my into my young 50s here. And sometimes I think it's a matter of practicality. Other times I think it's a matter of capacity. capacity should I be doing things and sometimes I think my wisdom you know talks to my younger version of myself it says you know what are you doing that for like what are you trying to get out of it I'm sure this is something that you've thought greatly about especially in light of your last book well in in in so many aspects we change our life and we can we have the capacity this is you know what I hope a lot of your listeners take away we have the capacity to completely rewire our brain and we can rewire it for adventure and being able to deal equally well with uncertain moments and certain moments.

3:52So dealing with the uncertainty is really one of the keys to successful entrepreneurship. And for me, I'm always looking for challenges that scare me. So I really believe and I've got a history and this is why I wrote Fear is Fuel, my last book. I really believe all our dreams are on the other side of fear. And when you address that fear and you face it full on, you get a tremendous payoff because we only make decisions one of two ways. We either make decisions out of opportunity or out of fear. If you make a decision out of fear, it almost always leads to regret. You make a decision out of opportunity, it just opens so many more doors and creates such an expansive lifestyle and success and encouragement of what you're doing.

4:41And I think for me, paragliding was something that would have terrified me 20 years ago when I was really afraid of flying. So every time I do it, I get this little dopamine hit, especially when you launch, because that's the scariest part. And then when you're in the air and you're soaring around and maybe, you know, there's an eagle next to you or a vulture or something and you're, it's just the most peaceful, relaxing, amazing thing, you know, that you can do. And so for me, it's one of those things where, you know, I get the adrenaline rush briefly and then I'm just in this complete flow state, this very calm flow state.

5:20And ideas come to me and, you know, thoughts come to me and it's really beautiful. Yeah, it is. It's always the anticipation that, you know, it's always the worst part or, you know, the very beginning of it. And then once we're in it and, you know, there's countless examples of this in business, which I'd love to talk to talk about, you know, you know, a very silly example. I have a two story home and early last year we have a radiant heating up on our roof and it heats up the pool and it had sprung a big leak up there. And so now I thought, well, I'm not going to go up on a two-story roof. That's insane.

5:59That's scary. That's dangerous. I'm not going to do it. So I had someone else go up there. It comes down. Yeah, it's going to be$7 ,000. Just go and bill your insurance company. Insurance company denied it last year, really wasn't able to use the pool a whole lot. And so I was persona non grata in the family because I didn't want to spend the money. And I thought, well, I need to get up there. And I just kind of had to overcome my fear. So anyway, we set up a two-ladder system. Anyway, I was able to get up on the roof, scared at first. And then the crazy thing is, you know, after a few minutes of being up there, now, again, I'm going to stress to other people, you know, roof falling accidents are, you know, the number one reason people die from accidents.

6:43So you have to take all of the precautions you have. And I'm sure, again, there's business, you know, kind of parallels to what I'm talking about here. But again, you know, within a few months, a few minutes, it just wasn't scary. And then I was like, you know, kind of trudging around. I'm like, oh, what was I so worried about? You know, again, as long as I'm careful, you know, it's going to be all right. What was going on in my head? So what was happening in your head, Josh, is your brain is a prediction engine. So every moment of every day, we're trying to predict the future. And when that prediction creates an error, prediction error, then we release free energy, as one of my favorite neuroscientists from University College London, Carl Friston, refers to it.

7:32And the free energy principle is the fact that when we can't predict the next moment, we basically dive into that uncertainty. And if we're not practiced, and this is key for entrepreneurs, if we're not practiced in dealing with that uncertainty, then we feel all this fear. And our amygdala, which is a little gland at the base of our brain that handles the fight, flight or freeze response, it's our lizard brain, right? It's running a 2 million-year-old piece of software that is just trying to procreate our genes onto the next generation. That's the only thing it cares about. It doesn't care about making your kids and your family happy so they can use the pool.

8:12It doesn't care about your career or anything like that. It just says survive. And we're going to fight, flight, or freeze when we get in a situation where we might be threatened for survival. So that 2 million-year-old piece of software is what's trying to predict the outcome of everything. And it does it in a couple ways. It does it top-down. So all the things that we see, we smell, we feel, and it does it bottoms up by our respiratory rate, our heart rate, our digestion, where our blood's flowing to. And so you can control that amygdala. And this is really key for leaders. When you feel that amygdala hijacking, you start to feel butterflies in your stomach or tension in your jaw.

8:49You can shut that off and start to use that fear as fuel because now you're primed to fight or flee. right in your your blood's going into your your brain with more oxygen your pupils dilate your hearing gets better all these things make you stronger and a better person so if you can give it some bottoms up information you can shut off that amygdala and then use that that fear as a fuel use it as a superpower and the easiest way to do that is just with breathing exercises yeah which if we had more time i would love for you to talk about our breathing exercise if you can give us maybe something to search or, you know, again, if you've got content on your website or your YouTube or just something that we can send people to, make sure to give that to me so we can link that up in the show notes as well.

9:37Because if we had more time, I'd love to talk about breathing exercises. We must talk about the Founders Creed. And I'm sure a lot of what you're talking about is a part of this. The Founders Creed is new. Forge unshakable belief and dominate your market. So please do tell us what the Founders Creed is, Patrick, if you would. Well, Josh, my goal is to help create a thousand unicorns. So create a thousand companies that have a valuation of more than a billion dollars. And I'm well on my way working with a bunch of companies, mostly in the technology and sports space. But really, the Founders Creed is all about something called the Buddha Doctrine.

10:20And Buddha is not the little pudgy guy who's going to give you a spirituality. It's an acronym for believe, observe, orient, decide and act. And that's a decision-making loop and a decision-making framework that has been adopted by military doctrine called the OODA loop. But there's a big difference between the OODA loop that's used in air-to-air combat and maneuver warfare for the Marines and the Bouda loop, which is critical for entrepreneurs. And the big difference is the OODA loop was designed by the best fighter pilot instructor in the world, John Boyd, in the 1970s. 70s and it's observe orient decide and act and the person who does that the fastest the combatant who does that the fastest wins in the air-to-air combat what happens with um with the the if you're at top gun you know you have the best plane in the world you know you have the most uh hours under uh you know logged as a fighter pilot you know you have the best technology so they have an inherent belief that they're the best.

11:27When you're doing a startup, you're the only person with that belief. So you have to create that belief among followers, both internally and externally. You've got to recruit employees. You've got to recruit investors. So if you have this vision, and most entrepreneurs do, your founders have this vision of what the world can be like three years from now, five years from now, the rest of the world says, no, it's over here. This is what the world's like. So there's this belief gap. And if you look at Elon Musk 15 years ago, he said, I can make a car that's as fast as a Porsche that goes 250 miles an hour on one charge.

12:03And that is$35 ,000 or less. And everyone else over here is saying there's no way Toyota can't even make a good hybrid. There's, you know, batteries don't work, blah, blah, blah. So he had this belief gap that he had to cross. And he did it first by recruiting really good employees and internal believers. And then he did it by asking people for a thousand dollar deposit for when the car was starting to be produced. And so he had external believers and he crossed that belief gap and changed the world. And all your founders can do the same thing using that Buddha doctrine. So your book is The Founder's Creed.

12:42It's available everywhere, Patrick. Aside from being an author today, obviously you've been involved in investing in over 75 companies. You've had multiple successes yourself. What do you, aside from paragliding, do you also consult? Do you coach? Do you provide other resources that our friend who's listening here may be interested or may know somebody that should connect with you? It looks as though you do some great speaking. Well, I do a lot of public speaking. I've done probably 300 speeches since Fearless Fuel came out. a lot for YPO, Young Presidents Organization. I do probably 30 or 40 events for them a year, but I also do the Buddha workshop.

13:28So I'll bring the Buddha doctrine into companies. And usually they're companies that are rated at scale up or pre-scale up level. So they're companies that have gotten some product market traction, and I'll come in and do a two-day workshop incorporating the Buddha doctrine. And the real key is, as you know yourself, Josh, that when there's fires to put out, everyone, it's all hands on deck. People are working hard. Things are going fast. And amidst that chaos, there's real speed and there's real effort being done. What most businesses are challenged with is when there isn't a fire to put out, how do they keep that cadence, that same speed.

14:09So the Buddha doctrine replaces that chaos with cadence. And that's really a key to building an amazing company. So if you look at, you know, some of the unicorns that I've been affiliated with, my friend Sami started two of them. One was called Trulia, which was bought by Zillow for 3.5 billion. And now his latest one, where I'm an angel investor, called Virta Health, and they're eliminating type 2 diabetes. And they've already had a$2.2 billion valuation as well. So it's replacing that chaos with cadence and then really being able to observe what's going on, get data back, and go through those loops again.

14:51Patrick J. Sweeney II, it's been a great pleasure, sir, having you on. Your book is The Founder's Creed. It is now available everywhere. You can get to it by going to thefounderscreed.com, or you can go to your website, Patrick, and that is pjsweeney.com, where you have access to your speaking, corporate training, and other great resources, including information about your Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Fear is Fuel. Patrick, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Josh, I really appreciate it. And go up on that roof at least once a summer to scare yourself and get used to that fear.

15:35Love it. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much.

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