SEASON 2 EPISODE 05: REDEFINING SUCCESS

DRINK INFORMATION

Every episode we drink a different libation – so what are we drinking this episode?

Tom’s Drink – Balvenie Triple Cask 25 year

– This is a top-shelf, very expensive bottle of Scotch that is well worth the expense.

Ian’s Drink – Kombucha

– Ian is just drinking it to feel healthy or something…

*Visit our “Tasting Room“

TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Hey, Tom, I would consider season two so far a success, wouldn’t you?

Tom Kubiak
Oh, that’s a really lame lead-in, Ian.

Ian Robertson
Was it lame or was it successful? I mean..

Tom Kubiak
I think it was lame.

Ian Robertson
All right. Well, either way, we’re going to talk about basically defining and redefining success and what that means, because there’s a lot of stuff going on with social media and all over, everybody’s going crazy about being successful in life. And..

Tom Kubiak
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
You know, the American dream and all that craziness.

Tom Kubiak
And self-help books on how to be successful, you know, the recipe for success and the vanity of that.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, well, I think it’s more about influencers now. The best way to success is to write a self-help book about success.

Tom Kubiak
How I Manage, by Michael Scott.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. If I had an autobiography, I’d call it, I Tried.

Tom Kubiak
I like that.

Ian Robertson
I did the best I could, yeah, what are you drinking tonight, Tom?

Tom Kubiak
In honor of our episode about success, I figured I’d, I’d pull from top shelf. And so my brother very kindly gave me a Balvenie Triple Cask 25 year. This is a highly, a highly valued bottle, very difficult to get, not something that everybody has, and so I’m not drinking much of it. I’m having a very small taste. But if it just sits on the shelf and never gets drunk, that’s not a good thing either. So I’m enjoying it, yeah, and it’s so smooth and good. I think I did a MacAllan 18 a couple years, a couple weeks ago, and I really enjoyed that.

Ian Robertson
Tell us how it tastes.

Tom Kubiak
Oh man. It’s so, oh man, it’s so good. It’s like the pinnacle of of warm and comforting and and Scotch is not normally sweet. Scotches are more savory. But this is, it is sweet. It has like a sugary texture to it, brown sugar and molasses. And it’s so, it’s like syrupy in its consistency. Just a beautiful, beautiful scotch. Boy, I need to drink this more often.

Ian Robertson
Hey, life is uncertain. Drink your double cask Balvenie 25 year, first.

Tom Kubiak
I need to. That’s really good.

Ian Robertson
So that’s definitely a buy. I mean, if..

Tom Kubiak
Oh man, yeah, yeah, it’s definitely.

Ian Robertson
That’s not something you’re getting off the shelf. Yeah.

Tom Kubiak
What are you drinking?

Ian Robertson
in honor of our last episode last week about alcohol being bad for you. I actually said, you know what, I’m gonna drink some kombucha on the show.

Tom Kubiak
Did you make it yourself?

Ian Robertson
Yup. Oh yeah, yeah.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, awesome. I love it.

Ian Robertson
So kombucha, for those that don’t know, is basically fermented tea. Now there is some alcohol in it, but is usually under a half a percent. Okay, so most commercial kombucha, they can sell to children because it’s under half a percent of alcohol. But Kombucha is fermented tea using what’s called a SCOBY, S-C-O-B-Y, which stands for symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. Okay, so it it looks like, imagine if you blew your nose and it solidified, grew legs, and then climbed into a jar and then grew uncontrollably. That’s what it looks it.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, love it. My taste buds are watering as we speak.

Ian Robertson
Most people are like, I hate kombucha because it sounds gross, but it’s usually like, why people hate homemade wine. Because the person who made it just did a crappy job. Yeah, good kombucha is good. Like my kombucha, I hate to brag, but it’s good.

Tom Kubiak
It’s good.

Ian Robertson
I do know somebody that makes kombucha that blows mine out of the water.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, actually we were at your pig roast. We talked about with a with a mutual friend of ours that makes kombucha, and he, he does a really good job with it, yeah, but I didn’t even know you were making it.

Ian Robertson
Well, yeah, I do it for myself. I have a big gallon or two gallon thing on my counter, and I just keep refilling it. So at various stages.

Tom Kubiak
How is it?

Ian Robertson
Yeah, it’s good. This is the stage where it has still have a little bit of sweetness to it. It hasn’t gone completely vinegar. And it’s not that in between stage, because I just refilled it. It’s good. It’s a prebiotic. I use tazo passion fruit tea, and I ferment that. So mine is actually kind of like jun, J-U-N, it’s not kombucha, and it’s not jun, because kombucha is made with black tea and jun is made with herbal tea and honey, mine is made with honey, honey and herbal tea. Jun is green tea. Anyways, it’s just kind of a weird combination of what I make, but I like it. They say it has all sorts of health benefits. I don’t know if it does.

Tom Kubiak
I’ve heard it’s very good for your health, but I personally, I cannot drink it. As soon as I put it in my mouth, it’s like, it’s spoiled.

Ian Robertson
No. So I’ll have to bring you some of mine, because mine is very good. Everybody who says they don’t like kombucha tries mine, and they go, that’s not kombucha. I’m like, no, that’s good kombucha.

Tom Kubiak
Okay. I’m always willing to try it. I love IPAs, and everybody now is drinking these sours, and I cannot drink them soon. As I put it in my mouth. I can’t, I can barely swallow it, so, but I’m always willing to try it.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I’ll bring you some.

Tom Kubiak
Okay.

Ian Robertson
They say it’s good for you. I don’t really notice any good or bad health effects from it, but it’s supposed to help your digestion and give you all sorts of prebiotics and gut health and gut biome and all that stuff. But, you know, it’s it’s fun, nobody would drink it if they saw the thing floating in it.

Tom Kubiak
Well, the podcast that I listened to, The Stuff You Should Know, they did an episode on on kombucha a couple of months ago, and it was interesting learning the process and what happens. Yeah, I’ve never made it and never drank it, so don’t like it.

Ian Robertson
It’s not, it’s not that hard. People make it complicated. You throw this big, snotty looking thing in some liquid with some sugar in it, and it starts the process of turning it into vinegar. You want to drink it before it turns all the way to vinegar. But if you want to make vinegar, we’ve actually made some very delightful vinegars with this, red wine and white wine, and just about anything that you want to turn into vinegar, apple cider. Throw, cut a chunk off. Throw that snotty thing in there. Give it a few weeks, and you have vinegar.

Tom Kubiak
Ah. So would you say you’re successful at making kombucha?

Ian Robertson
I am super successful. You say kombucha, weird too.

Tom Kubiak
I do.

Ian Robertson
Kombucha.

Tom Kubiak
I say kombucha. You say “kam-bucha”.

Ian Robertson
Kombucha. You sound like..

Tom Kubiak
Everybody makes fun of me of how I say alcohol, because I say alcohol instead of alcohol or something like that.

Ian Robertson
Where are you from?

Tom Kubiak
Upstate New York, the best place in the world.

Ian Robertson
So we were talking about this subject of success. Actually, it came from a rant that I sent you earlier today, and it turned into a discussion of the book Outliers, which I admittedly never read. I don’t read, I like to read information to learn. I don’t read for enjoyment. So I actually read a lot of the cliff notes, and a lot the anecdotes he uses in there, and a lot of the application and stuff like that, but I’ve never read the book cover to cover, because it’s just not what I do. But my rant started out as basically complaining because, from certain perspectives, I own a couple of companies that are considered successful in my field.

Tom Kubiak
Very.

Ian Robertson
And people will complain. They’ll be like, what’s the secret? Tell me what to do, and my answer is always the same thing. There is no secret. I worked like an animal, to get this done, and I’m like, here’s everything that I do. And I learned a long time ago, I could list out everything that I do in a day, and that same person will come back month after month, year after year, and say, what’s your secret?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
Because they just won’t do those things, and it’s funny what people consider successful in general. So it kind of just turned into a whole discussion of what people consider success in life, why a lot of people don’t reach what they consider success, and how we can redefine it and actually reach some of our goals. So we’ll get into that.

Tom Kubiak
Interestingly, the Malcolm Gladwell book of Outliers is, is a very interesting read, and I recommend it as a, as an informational read. He, he’s an awesome reviewer of situational personalities, basically, and what, what leads to a person acting the way they do. Has several other good books too, which I’ve read, multiple books that he’s written. But Outliers is the one that probably drew a lot of attention recently, because in the book he discusses, and many people might recognize this, the 10,000 hour standard, where, if you are willing to put in 10,000 hours in practice towards something you will become a master at it. And he discusses a couple of different categories of experience, like or categories of, I can’t think of the word, but he talks about chess and how, if you’re, if you are willing to put in 10,000 hours of practice, you can possibly reach the Grand Master stage. He also talks about music and how people who are willing to put in 10,000 hours of practice could could become a professional with a particular instrument. And there’s an obvious truth to that, the more time you spend practicing in something, the better you become. And so eventually you become an expert in a, in a particular field. But interestingly, he links success to basically only that hard work, and there is obvious benefit that comes from hard work, and like you’re discussing, if you are willing to put hard work into a business, you can, you can pull it up and cause it to be successful. But from my perspective, and the point that I disagree with him on is, that’s not the only piece of success or piece of becoming an expert.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. And there is a lot of factors that go into what people consider success, so we’ll put off to the side on a shelf right at the moment, what people consider success, because there’s a skewed reality out there as to what success actually is.

Tom Kubiak
We should come back to it. But yeah, I agree with you.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. But let’s say our ideology is of success, is to have an amazing tech company. And in Outliers, he actually used the example of Bill Gates. So Bill Gates, is he a super smart guy? Yes, he’s a genius. But interestingly, there are a lot of people that were a lot that are and were a lot smarter than him, but a lot of it came down to circumstance. So for instance, he was born at a time when computers weren’t big yet. And then he became of age when they started to, just before they boomed.

Tom Kubiak
Right.

Ian Robertson
And then he just happened to have an upper middle class family that could afford a computer that would back his, back his work, pay for his college, and all this stuff. Everything was set up so that he could do that. If even one of those circumstances were removed, he might not have been Bill Gates, and there might not be Microsoft.

Tom Kubiak
Right.

Ian Robertson
You could say that about a lot of people, Elon Musk, smart guy, right? But if there was no .com boom, so I still remember Elon from the .com boom, yeah, if there was no .com boom, he would just be some dude, right? Yeah, Now, granted, he’d still be Elon, and he would still do really successful in life as most people consider it, but he wouldn’t be, I think right now, he’s one of, if not the richest man in the world that they know of.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah. I think it goes back and forth. And hey, had he not bought Twitter, I think he would have been the richest man. But I think Twitter..

Ian Robertson
Twitter ruined him.

Tom Kubiak
It wasn’t the best decision.

Ian Robertson
He does it for fun. They actually say Putin may actually be the richest man in the world.

Tom Kubiak
I wouldn’t doubt that.

Ian Robertson
Or the Cargills, because they’re privately owned, and there’s a lot of different people, but those are the ones that are publicly known.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
But there is a lot of circumstance that goes into it. But then there’s also a measure of hard work, and then you sprinkle on some natural talent, because, listen, yeah, you think about the physical and the mental, there’s going to be genetics in both of those things. I don’t care if I grew up on the 50 yard line of the Green Bay Packers field. I’m not, I’m not going to be a quarterback. That’s not going to happen.

Tom Kubiak
That’s the argument that I have that I think is the piece that’s missing in Outliers is that genetics plays a part in success to a certain extent. So for example, like we were talking about the Olympics, you take Simone Biles. She’s unbelievable what she can do on an Olympic or on a gymnastic mat, but the reality is some of that comes from her body makeup. Now, granted, has she worked really hard to get where she has? Undisputed, she definitely has. Has she put 1000s of hours into practice? Undisputed. She definitively has. But I don’t care if I put all of that time, if I did the exact same thing she did, I’m still not going to be able to reach her standard, because my body is different than hers. Like she has a body that is made for gymnastics, and as a result of that, she can, with that hard work, she becomes exceptional. Michael Phelps is another example.

Tom Kubiak
He’s like, his body is made for swimming, so his genetics put him in a spot that if him and I spend exactly the same amount of time practicing, he’s gonna be better than I am in every, in every event, just because of his genetics. And I think that’s the piece of success that Gladwell is missing.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I was thinking of him.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and even our minds, how our mind works, let alone our level of intelligence, because there’s different types of intelligence, it’s not a linear model of it, but even how our mind works and how intelligent we are can come down to a lot of genetics, too. Look at Albert Einstein.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
That dude figured out one of the most complex things that people have been trying to figure out for hundreds of years before him, since Newtonian times, they’re trying to figure that out. And he’s sitting in some chair in Germany, and he goes, oh, okay, energy equals matter times, okay, cool. So he figured, like he didn’t have any really great circumstances that put him in there. There’s no, from the book Outliers, there’s nothing that really said that he should have been there, except for, you know, what? Dude’s smart. He figured it out.

Tom Kubiak
An even better example of that is Stephen Hawking. So this is a man who, as far as conceptual physics, is undisputed as being one of the great geniuses in history, not just in modern history, in history. Another example is Leonardo da Vinci who not only had the ability to be able to conceptualize engineering feats, he also used the side of his brain that dealt with art. These people are amazing geniuses. That is not only related to the work that they put in. There’s a genetic piece to that, as far as I’m concerned, cannot be disputed.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, you just meet some people and you’re like, man, you just naturally got it upstairs. Something’s, something’s clicking that’s not, not clicking on the same level as the rest of us. But I guess, I guess too, we have to come down to when we talk about redesigning success. You said something before the show about how most people see success like they do on TikTok, yeah, like this dude is jacked and he’s rich, and look at that car, and they go to fancy restaurants, and everybody, all sorts of accolades for them and stuff like that. And people are like, I’m not really thinking that, but come on. Subconsciously, as we’re scrolling through we are being programmed at..Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, said, we’re being programmed at a level, basically, that we don’t, that we don’t even understand, we’re being programmed to think that way. We are the, we are the product. Because if we are discontent with ourselves looking for new success, then we’re going to be a better purchaser of things and buy more things. And, you know, sign up for programs that we don’t need or want. But there’s an unrealistic view of success and also the way that we get there.

Tom Kubiak
They’re very true. Yeah, very true. And I know you find this to be the case. You even mentioned it a little bit in our lead into the episode that oftentimes people will say, oh, I wish I had a business that was as successful as yours. And granted, both of us have successful businesses that you know, we’ve worked very hard in order to be able to support and to get to the point where they are, but many times, people are not. They don’t see that piece of it. They don’t see the piece that the running a business or bringing it to that level requires an enormous amount of time and effort, and a business owner who is is generally running that type of business. They don’t, they don’t work an eight hour day, like, when was the last time you worked eight hours? To me, eight hours is a day off.

Ian Robertson
Yeah.

Tom Kubiak
You know. And the reality is, many people who want success, are not willing to put the work into it, and that ties in exactly with what Gladwell says is that the success oftentimes is related to the amount of hard work that a person is willing to do and a person who’s not willing to do hard work, they’re not going to reach that automatically. So I do agree with him in that point, and I sympathize with people who are really struggling to make their business work. And in many cases, even a ton of hard work doesn’t bring it to that level. Lots of things have to come together in order to make success happen.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and I guess when we say hard work, I see a lot of different aspects to that. We all like to step into something and say, I want to do this, so I want to be successful, like this person or that person, I’m willing to put in the work. We all like to say, I’m willing to put in the work. But here’s a couple of aspects that we may not consider. We’re willing to put in the work, but we’re not willing to put in the discipline. So we’re willing to put in 16 hour days, but we’re not willing to give up our fancy lifestyle. We have a standard of living that we go for, and now we’re living paycheck to paycheck and working like an animal so we can’t get ahead. Or we are working like an animal in something that nobody wants. Yeah. So I see that a lot. I have clients that are like, Ian, I am working like crazy, and I can’t, I can’t get anybody to buy, buy what I’m selling, basically. And I’m like, then stop trying to sell that. But they’re like, but I love it. I’m like, okay, you’re not working then, you’re doing what you love. Those are two different things.

Tom Kubiak
Right. That’s, yep.

Ian Robertson
If you, if you’re doing what you love it’s successful, cool you’re one of the rare 0.01% of the people. Doesn’t happen all the time. But now you’re just, now, you’re just taking your hobby and doing it. And I’m like, well, why don’t you add on this service, or add on this or add on that? They’re like, I don’t like any of those things, I’m like, okay, you’re not working. You’re having fun. There’s a difference between those two things. I’ll do what needs to get done, even if I don’t like it. That’s that’s part of life, or the other thing, some people don’t want to put in a mental effort. So I’m relating this all to building a business, because, to be frank, that’s actually the second most trending thing. When I asked ChatGPT on TikTok right now, is business success.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, interesting.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. So that’s, that’s what everybody wants, but the mental effort is a whole different level. Like, oh yeah, I’ll work like crazy. It’s like, okay. But have you thought about what you’re going to do with this product or that product, or how are you going to advance this? They’re like, I’ll get, I’ll think about it when I get there. It’s like, listen, you just want a job. There’s a difference between running a business and having a job. So running a business takes a lot of forethought, emotional and mental effortm that 90% of people are not willing to put in. When you are working hard and not putting in those other three things, discipline, mental and emotional effort, and whatever the second thing is that I said because now I can’t remember, because I just started talking, it’s like splashing in the pool and saying that you’re swimming.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
Just because you’re splashing in there doesn’t mean you’re going anywhere.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, very true. Yeah, very true. And those, those are harder things for people to recognize. Another thing is the definition of what success is. So many people just boil success down to the the number in their bank account. Or some people view success related to the number of likes that they get on a stupid Instagram post. And the challenge is, and that’s a sorry definition of what success is, because it’s very tied to a physical thing. Rather, success should be fulfillment, and doing what you enjoy doing, and a family that you enjoy, those things are, are way more meaningful when it comes to success.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, the problem is it’s hard to help people to understand that. Usually we end up finding that out too late in life.

Tom Kubiak
That’s accurate.

Ian Robertson
There’s a work acquaintance of mine, great guy, super generous, but he spent his whole life building a mass fortune. Dude’s got cash coming out his ears. The last I heard, he was worth somewhere around a little north of $300 million just in assets that he knew about. He’s like Ron Swanson. He’s buried gold literally, and just doesn’t know where it is. And he’s in his 60s. He’s, he actually has three little kids now, a newborn baby. Oh, wow. And people go to him for coaching, you know, people come to me for coaching and business, and they’ll go to him. He’s way better, obviously, but, um, he’s keep saying, telling him the same thing lately. He goes, stop working for money, he goes, I wished I had learned that. And I think he regrets some some things earlier in his life, and I’m not going to spill it all here, but there’s a cost when we have just monetary..

Tom Kubiak
Definitely.

Ian Robertson
Things as our goal, and we almost never admit it. We always like to paint our monetary goals as, oh, I’m building a life for my family, but you’re not spending as much time with them as you should, or I’m building a business for the future. Or, I love helping people in XYZ thing that I do, or I’m giving back to the community. Okay, those are great ways to paint us saying, dude, I want to make some cash, because that’s what society has told me is real success.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah. And I love that, that final phrase about what success, what society has told me is success, that’s empty. Society’s definition of success is not a good definition of success. And the problem is, is that many people just cave and take that definition of success. Rather, it would be better to say what really is meaningful to me, what brings me happiness and and pleasure, and I can guarantee you the money in your bank account, while it does, I think there’s a, there’s a ancient proverb that says money is for a protection the same as wisdom, but wisdom is what preserves alive its owners. And the reality is, that’s very true. So there are benefits that come from having a large bank account, but honestly, what has the biggest payback is experience in life, and as a result of that, if, if you fill your bank account with money, but then you end up not being able to spend it, and you just have wasted your life on trying to accumulate it. What good is that? Yeah, it doesn’t accomplish anything.

Ian Robertson
So the best years of our life are usually when we spend working too much, and ruining our health, ruining relationships, all this other stuff. So I do, I do business coaching for my industry, and it’s, it’s funny, because a lot of guys will come to me and the first thing they say is, how do I get to where you went? We’re at at this point or that point and whatever. And I’m like, no, no, no. Hang on. Stop. Where do you want to be? And they’re like, oh, and they start talking about a house and a car or, you know, want to make sure my kids colleges are paid for. I’m like, all right, hang on. I’m like, listen, I was a high school dropout, and, you know, I didn’t go to college. So listen, this is not, those aren’t requirements for your kids. Anyways, that’s a whole different podcast, yeah. But I’m like, what if you could make X amount of dollars four days a week? And they just look at me. I’m like, you know what you would do? You’d make X amount of dollars four days a week, and then you go and work another two and a half days that week anyways.

Tom Kubiak
Right.

Ian Robertson
I’m like, that is a course for sadness.

Tom Kubiak
Bad decision.

Ian Robertson
Bad decisions and a ruined family. And nobody ever likes to hear that, but they always come back. I’ve never had anybody come and tell me, oh, you were totally wrong. I’ve had people come back, even sometimes years later, and they say, okay, I’m ready to listen. I get it now, because they’re, they’re two or three years into a career. They’ve done everything right business wise, and their wife has left them there. They see their kids on the weekends. Or, you know, my favorite is, you know, I just need a day off. I can’t, I can’t sleep. Doctor says I need to lose weight. And my heart. I’m like, yeah, but you’re making a ton of money, you know, because I’m sarcastic, they’re like yeah, I get it. I get it. I’m like, okay, business success is letting your business support your life. Can you do without a little bit of money and be able to wake up in the morning and have a cup of coffee for 20 minutes and just sit for a moment, you know?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, it’s funny you say that because I talk to clients all the time in my practice, and they’re often talking about retiring. And do I have enough money to retire? And, you know, what should I spend my money on? And oftentimes my suggestion is, listen, you don’t have a crystal ball. You don’t know what’s going to happen five years from now, but I can guarantee you one thing. If five years from now, your life situation has changed, you’re going to kick yourself that you didn’t spend time doing the things that you want to do. So the reality is, in the life of a typical human, there’s a relatively small period of time when you have both the time and the energy to do things that you want to do. And most people blow through that time working, like they don’t slow down and say, now’s the time I want to experience some things. Now, now’s the time I want to do some things. And start crossing things off on a list of of bucket items. The problem is the reality is, most people, when they get to the point where they say, I gotta start doing some of those things, they can’t do them. Their health has left them, or they’re challenged by mobility, or whatever it is, and they don’t have the ability to do the things they want to do, and as a result of that, they wasted the best years of their life. And what good at that point does a million dollars in the bank do?

Ian Robertson
Yeah, so we’re talking, we’re talking about two ends of the spectrum. We’re talking about the people that, you know, they’re like, oh, I want to work towards a goal, but they don’t actually work towards it. They put forth an arbitrary outward effort, like, you know, they walk to 5k who cares? You know, unless you have a disability. I’m not saying if you walk to 5k. But it’s like, if you’re a perfectly healthy person, like, why didn’t I finish first? Okay, stop walking the 5k if you want to finish first. Then the other end of the spectrum are people that are running that 5k three times and burning themselves out and then ending up in the hospital. You know, they’re just going too hard. There’s a, there’s a happy middle ground. Listen, if we’re gonna, if we’re gonna run a business, if that’s where we view success as, I’ve always said, most amount of money in the least amount of time. Because if I’m gonna run a business, running a business stinks for a lot of reasons. It’s awesome for a lot of reasons, but it stinks for a lot of reasons. I want to make the most amount of money in the least amount of time so that I can have a life while I’m young enough to enjoy it like you said. If we have a job and we’re like, well, I want a career or job. Listen, I know a lot of people that have reached a high level in the corporate world, who have these amazing careers. It’s funny, I’m wearing a flannel shirt, and, you know, I wear my pocket knife on the outside of my pants, and I’m gonna go split wood later. And this is my life. I’m doing deals with these people that have gone to Ivy League schools. We just had a meeting with some guys from an Ivy League school talking about a deal, and there was like, oh, where’s your sweater vest, bro? And I’m like, they didn’t actually say that, but that’s how I felt Tom, and they’re just, they’re just worried about the next leg up. They’re working insane hours. They respond all hours of the day and the night they’re expected of all these things from their bosses. Are they making a lot of money relative to the average person? Yeah, but they have literally sold their life to a company. There’s very few companies out there that don’t demand your entire life for making these killer amounts of money.

Tom Kubiak
Right. Yeah, and so we’re talking about success. Is that the definition of success that you want, like when you think about what, when you look back on your life, do you? Is that going to be valuable to you? And that’s the, I think that’s the question that we need to ask ourselves, is, is what is going to end up being the most valuable to us when we look at the replay of our life, I can pretty much guarantee the job is not going to matter. I’ve heard many people say, I never met a dying person that said, I wish I spent more time at the office. That’s not something that you say. What they will say is, I wish I did more of the things that I wanted to do. I wish I spent more time with my family. I wish I visited more places in the world. I wish I crossed more things off my bucket list. Those are the things that you’re going to want to do. So isn’t it more realistic to say, let’s, let’s live my life so that I can do those things. So when I get to the point where I’m looking at the replay of my life, I’m happy that I did those things, so that, you know, that’s, that’s probably a better definition of success. And I think, interestingly, I think the pandemic caused some people to maybe take a step back and say, I’m more interested in experiences in life than I am in padding a bank account. And as a result of that, I think we’ve, we’ve seen kind of a twist the other way to where, especially younger people are living a life that includes experience, traveling and going to places. I’m not talking about Instagram, you know, influencers. I’m talking about people who are starting to do things that the normal young couple wouldn’t do because they’re saving for a house or something like that.

Ian Robertson
You know, it’s funny, too, when we talk about experiences, one of the types of experiences that we want to experience is giving to others. So they actually did a study recently where they found that older people had higher levels of measurable, there’s several different measurements of happiness. There’s dopamine, serotonin, and what’s that third one? I can’t remember it off the top of my head, but some of them are short term..

Tom Kubiak
Scotch.

Ian Robertson
Exactly. Some of them are long term chemicals, and some of them are short term so they actually started to measure in all age ranges how much of the happiness chemicals were present in the bodies of these people. And they found that younger people were way less, and older people were more. And then they started narrowing it down. And they’re they, they’re like, why is this one group of older people so incredibly happy? So they actually found out that older people in retirement had more time on their hands, so they would do more volunteer work, and where they were getting the higher reading of happiness were actually physically from people. And this was actually mentioned on another, I read this somewhere, and it was mentioned on another podcast that I listened to, and they found that these people that were sending out these high readings were actually doing volunteer work, so they were helping people. So Jesus said there’s more happiness in giving than in receiving, right?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, that’s right.

Ian Robertson
There’s actually a chemical reaction that happens that causes us to be happier, whether, yeah, whatever we want to think, that’s what the study showed. But experiences aren’t all about what do we want to do. What do we want to experience? And that’s why these influencers, a lot of time, are very unhappy people. When you..

Tom Kubiak
Oh yeah.

Ian Robertson
When they’ve done interviews with them, they’re like, oh, I struggle with depression. I just struggle with anxiety. I hate myself, all this other stuff. And it’s like, well, it’s all focused on “us”.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, and it’s, it’s basically just a display of showiness in their life, like those Instagram photos of walking through the high end hotels and these fabulous meals, that’s just ridiculous. Don’t, don’t focus your life around trying to get likes on an Instagram post. Focus your life on enjoying an experience and being able to share with others. And personally, to me, that is a really beautiful definition of success. So can you get to the point in your life where you can, you can do things to help other people, and if you can make other people happy by what you do, that’s success, and it can range from even just simple things like remembering somebody’s special event, or something like that, and letting somebody know that they’re valuable to you, to something that’s more complicated, like spending time in having someone over for dinner, or doing something socially with somebody, those are things that definitively create well-being in the minds of other people, and it’s easy to identify that as being successful.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, listen, go volunteer in a nursing home. Help some old lady carry in her groceries. Bring, bring a family member, or, heck, your neighbor that you don’t know, bring them to the doctors when they need to go once in a while. These things will do more for us than it will for them, and you should never do it with a selfish motive. But you know what I’m talking about. So success is measured, in my opinion, by happiness. I know a lot of people that have ridiculous amounts of money but aren’t happy. I forget this is, this anecdote, but I remember this one guy, big company owner, there’s an older guy walking by a younger guy, and they said, oh, man, wouldn’t you like to be him, to the younger guy? And the younger guy’s, no, I have something that he would trade everything he has for. And they go, what? And he goes, youth, because that guy spent his whole life building up a fortune. Now he’s old. What? What’s he gonna do? He has all these health problems. I’m not saying that you don’t enjoy life at that point, but I’m just saying, enjoy it while it’s available, because it’s not here long. You can’t bring it with you.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, exactly. And be mindful of how you use it. So don’t just waste your life, make decisions that lead to happiness, and that is something that I think a lot of people don’t do. They tend to ride the wave as it happens and react to what life throws at them, but they’re less likely to say, I’m gonna consciously make a decision that’s gonna lead my life to a better place. And as a result of that, they end up with situations that are not enviable. But if you say, hey, I’m going to think through decisions before I make them. I’m going to consider the end result of an action before I do it. I think that has the potential to be able to make your life really successful, even if you don’t have a lot of money in the bank. And that’s, that’s a powerful thing.

Ian Robertson
So this was an interesting discussion. We kind of covered the whole gambit here. But, you know, it’s important to talk about these things. We’re not talking about hard science or anything like that. It’s a good subject matter. But do you have a joke to bring us out with, Tom?

Tom Kubiak
I always have a joke. So in harmony with our or in agreement with our current subject, did you hear about the scarecrow that won the Lifetime Achievement Award?

Ian Robertson
No.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, he was outstanding in his field.

Ian Robertson
You know, I should have known that one was coming. I’m gonna have to eat crow.

Tom Kubiak
My jokes make me laugh every day.

Ian Robertson
You didn’t get that one, didid you?

Tom Kubiak
No, I got that one.

Ian Robertson
Oh, Tom. Well, thank you very much for ending your show on a low note.

Tom Kubiak
Great to talk to you, Ian.

Ian Robertson
Thanks a lot.

Tom Kubiak
Have a good night.

Ian Robertson
You too. Bye.

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