You're Best Days Are Ahead if you choose to believe it. Paul Goldsmith shares his perspective on when you're feeling down to stay hungry and humble. If you are feeling like has gotten off course, it may be time to update your life plan. What do you truly want to do? Get started ... don't let anyone else judge you or hold you back. Take it one next simple step at a time.
Next Simple Step
Your Best Days Are Ahead ... Stay Hungry & Humble
today didn't go as planned. Okay, if I'm being honest, this whole week not even close to what I had intended. Have you ever felt that? Maybe your entire year or even longer is way off track. Full stop. I want to help you pause today and get some perspective and start to believe that your future can be greater than your past. But that'll require some intentionality, maybe humility and some drive. So let's get started. This is the next simple step. I'm Paul Goldsmith. Everyone's got a life plan until they get punched in the face. Whether it's debt, divorce, a diagnosis, whatever your particular punch in the face, maybe it's multiple punches one after another. It was definitely not part of the plan when you were a kid. But I've discovered that any good plan requires flexibility, adjustment as you go. And when you create a plan, you're working from a certain set of circumstances and assumptions, information that you have at the time. But if you don't update your plan when you receive new information, well, that's kind of the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again, inspecting different results, you need new plans as you get feedback and new information because the old information is no longer accurate and is not going to help you get to where you want to go. You remember before we all had smartphones, there were these things called GPS devices and I had the TomTom Go and it got me where I needed to go most of the time. But sometimes it required a software update with the latest map so that I could get there more directly because if you didn't get the update, you could end up lost or worse in a ditch. The best maps or plans require continual updates as you go. So for your own life plan, have you updated it in a while or are you just coasting? Just trying to survive. You haven't had time to stop and think about where you're headed, where you're going, how you're going to get there. It's hard to update your life when you're going 100 miles an hour and it feels like if you slow down now, you'll be lost or you'll crash and then what? Best not find out, just keep trucking, just keep going. Maybe in your case, things are going really well and when they're going well, you definitely don't want to slow down or do you because no season lasts forever. The good times will come to an end. But so will the bad times you have to keep moving forward and adjusting your plans as you go. I have a perfect illustration of this. When you're riding high, it's hard to slow down and take perspective. Remember Peloton? Maybe you had one, maybe you still do and it's holding some laundry? Well, that company was riding high. They kept creating more bikes to meet demand during the pandemic. Gems were closed and people bought them by the millions. Peloton stock reached 69 billion dollars. But then, of course, the gems reopened and all of a sudden, people started reselling their pelotons and the demand not only slowed, but it rescinded. Today, the company is worth only 3% of the value it once had and its founder and CEO, John Foley, got pushed out of his own company and he gave an interview recently to the New York Post. I think we can glean some wisdom from his misfortune and his perspective on what happened. We were so essential to people's lives during COVID and in our effort to really get as many bikes and treads to people. We overinvested in capacity and then coming out of COVID, that overinvestment became a liability. So that was kind of the story. It cost me my job. It was pretty brutal in the public markets. I've had to sell almost everything in my life. I built a fancy house and I had to sell it. So I'm hungry and humble and I was able to raise some money for this new company that we're super excited about. And I also think potentially the best days of John Foley are ahead of me. So I love a good underdog story. I love that guy's attitude. Did you hear that? He lost his fancy house, his fortune, and he's building back with a new company, selling rugs, by the way. He still believes the best days are ahead. And I believe that for you and me as well. Because what's the alternative? Do you believe that it's all doom and gloom from here? That's not a life you can make a better future. You just have to create a plan to achieve it and adjust the plan as you go. And I believe we all are born with this innate ability to dream and be creative. But that kind of gets cultured out of us as we're conditioned to behave, to fit in, to go to school and pursue a worthy career that somebody else designed for us and do what the boss says. Earn a living and have a mortgage and we get caught up in all these things that we forgot to go back to what makes us come alive. We are memetic creatures and so we have a tendency to mimic the behavior and ideas of other people, whether we like that idea or not. Have you stopped to think about it? At some point, you wake up and realize that maybe you're doing stuff that you don't really want to do any longer. And it's time to dream again and stop following somebody else's model of what it looks like to live and thrive and follow your own. Of course, when you do that, when you try being creative and make something new, you're going to not be very good at it first, just like anything. And then there's a danger that you give up because that's what most people do when you try something and you're not good at it and it's not very comfortable. But if you can push past the fear, the discomfort, you might begin to dream again to not settle for the little easy pleasures and wins, but pursue the big ones that are just for you. So if you have gotten off track, I think there's wisdom in John Foley's words where he said he got hungry and humble. And that's what led him to believe that he can build another great company, learn the lessons from his past. And so you can either learn from his painful lessons or make them yourself. I'm choosing to learn from others the best I can. And there's a whole book on this that has the concept of doing great work. It's called The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lynchione. And what makes an ideal team player, he says they're hungry, humble, and smart. And by smart, he means emotionally intelligent. And I think that really is the secret to finding work that moves you and achieving new heights is when you're hungry and you show up wanting to learn more and you're humble. So you don't know it all. And you learn from the mistakes and you're emotionally intelligent. So you're not offended when other people judge you or misunderstand you, but you just stay curious. And that's what I've been thinking a lot about recently as I've pursued some new business opportunities and it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows. It's hard. The new business that we have with the restaurant. It's been bumpy. There have been huge learning curves, but we're staying hungry. We're staying humble and trying to be smart at the same time. And I hope that that encourages you, inspires you today. If you'd like to reach out, please do. I'm Paul J. Goldsmith on Instagram and X, where you can find me at nextsimplestep.com. And I'll talk to you next time on the next Simple Step Podcast. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]