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Episode Summary
You spent a decade climbing a mountain you never really chose, and the higher you got, the less you remembered why you started. I sat down with Stever Robbins, host of one of the top business podcasts on iTunes and a longtime executive coach, to get into why so many owner-operators arrive at the peak and feel nothing. Stever has been in the rooms where the Fortune 500 CEO retires to the tropical island and admits he didn’t like the industry, the people, or the job. He has coached the founder whose net worth crossed $100M and felt about the same as it did at $99M. We got into the four myths that quietly drive every long career (hard work, planning, goals, deferred gratification), why each one is a strategy that works on the small scale and breaks at the life scale, and what Stever did instead: a three-year experiment where he set the journey first and let the goals follow. Concrete questions for the owner who’s halfway up and starting to wonder if it’s the right mountain.
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## Top 10 Takeaways- Most owners climb a mountain they never chose, then arrive at the top and feel nothing.
- Hard work as a life strategy means doing what you hate, badly, for longer. That’s not a path to anything good.
- Money past your real number stops adding security and starts costing you the years it took to earn.
- You can’t plan at 25 for the person you’ll be at 65. Your needs and wants don’t project that far.
- Don’t pick a goal and reverse-engineer the path. Pick the journey, then choose any goal that forces you onto it.
- The peak of Everest takes three seconds. Climbers talk about the journey, never the summit.
- Your identity is the highest control on what you’ll let yourself do. Change “I am” and the options change.
- Who you talk to and what you talk about determines your life more than almost any other variable.
- Fund your real number, then stop pretending the next dollar is mandatory. Most of it is optional.
- If you didn’t already have this job, would you get up and go in tomorrow? Your answer is the answer.
Sound Bites
“In a world where today almost every job consists of sitting catatonic in front of a screen twitching our fingers on top of a keyboard, what the heck does hard work even mean?” (@TBD) — Stever Robbins
“When we say to a young person, work hard and we’ll get ahead, what we’re saying is find something you’re not good at that you hate doing and work really long hours and that’s the path to success. I just reject that, frankly.” (@TBD) — Stever Robbins
“He didn’t like the industry. He didn’t like the people in the industry. He didn’t like the things he had to do to become CEO and he didn’t like being CEO.” (@TBD) — Stever Robbins
“Why not decide the journey you want to take and then choose any goal that will force you to take that journey? It doesn’t matter what the goal is because the goal is not the point.” (@TBD) — Stever Robbins
“The only difference between me and Ted Turner is who we talked to and what we talked about.” (@TBD) — Stever Robbins
About This Episode
Stever Robbins is a serial entrepreneur, executive coach, and host of Get It Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More, one of the top-downloaded business podcasts on iTunes. He’s a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School, was part of the founding team at FTP Software, and has been on the initial team of eleven different startups. He’s the author of It Takes a Lot More Than Attitude to Lead a Stellar Organization and Get-It-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More, and co-wrote a musical about personal productivity. This conversation lives in the early Life After Business arc on what owners actually do once they’ve built the thing.
Resources Mentioned
- Get It Done Guy podcast — Stever’s productivity podcast. — getitdoneguy.com
- Stever Robbins’ personal site — Several hundred articles on business and life design. — steverrobbins.com
- Living an Extraordinary Life talk — Stever’s talk on the four myths and the three-year experiment. — steverrobbins.com/LEL
- Work Less and Do More — Five-minute preview of the musical Stever co-wrote. — worklessanddomore.com
- Halftime Institute — Referenced for the “smoldering discontent” concept Ryan brings up.
Connections
Phase + Module:
- Module 1 — Ownership Goals — Why you’re doing this and what life on the other side actually looks like
Milestones:
- Milestone 1 — Time & Role Goals — How the owner spends the 168 hours and which seat they actually want
Concepts referenced:
- 168-hour constraint — The fixed budget everyone has and almost no owner allocates on purpose