Elevate Yourself & Reach Your Potential | Robert Glazer | Modern Wisdom Podcast 236

You and I get into a car accident, you know, this morning. You are enlightened, and so you're like, "Oh, I've got insurance. That could have been worse." You walk away. You go, you go do three podcast interviews, you have a great day, you meet a bunch of friends, all that stuff. You know, I'm, like, swearing, "Ah, damn freaking Chris, and one more thing in the world, and what could go wrong this year?" And I, I get into a fight with my brother. I don't do the goal thing that I said I wanted to. Like, we both experienced the same thing, right? How we chose to respond and react to that, we tell ourselves different truth. We tell ourself the truth that my day got ruined by a car accident. Well, that's not, that's not really the whole truth. The truth is, you had a car accident and that wasn't your fault, but you control what comes after that. (wind blowing)

What does the word elevate mean to you?

Yeah, I mean, I, to me, elevate just means taking it to another level, and I think the important part of that an- and- and the way I look at it differently than, than maybe some others, I think when you talk about success versus achievement, but to me it's, like, really, like, w- to your potential, not other people's definition, not what other people think you should be doing, but how, how do you, within you, you know, raise your game to another level from, from the potential that lies within?

And you've looked at a framework to go around that. Obviously, you're a business owner-

Yeah.

... multi, multinational, international business for multiple years now, into the, uh, into the twilight of running a business, I think as, as many people would-

Yeah.

... was, would have said by this time. Not many people have survived as long as you.

Or at least, or at least the teenage/adolescent years. Um, so...

(laughs) Yeah.

Yeah, I, I, I sort of fell into this framework, um, by accident. So, uh, I had actually started a note to my team about five years ago, every Friday. It came out of, actually, a personal leadership, uh, event that I went to for a week that was hugely impactful, very focused on improving your morning, uh, things you can do in the morning, kind of think, reflect, read something positive, write. The reading positive stuff that I wrote was just way too rainbow and unicorny for me. Like, it didn't, it didn't do it for me, like... So, I, I had some stories and some quotes and some stuff that I saved, and I just started writing this note to my team every Friday at 4:00 PM. And it wa- it was something about, we were rem- all remote, and it was about getting better or improvement, and it sort of fell into a formula. And I wasn't sure if people were reading it, but I liked writing it. It was a good habit. And eventually, I heard from back, back from people that they were, they were reading it. They were sharing it inside the company. I told some other people around it. Eventually, I opened it up so people outside the company could join it, and there were a couple hundred thousand people within a few years signed up for it. So, what, what happened was, I, when I went to write a book, uh, our company had really grown. We had sort of tripled during that time period. Um, I was meeting a lot of interesting high achievers from all around the world, and I just d- this pattern analysis sort of came up, which was... I, I tried to write a compilation book called Friday Forward, ironically, which is the book I had just released, but no one would buy it. They wa- they said, "Look, you're not... No one knows you, and you can't write a compilation, and these stories are online." But the agent challenged me to, like, "What's the story behind the story?" And so, so when I actually started looking at how had I fundamentally changed my life in the last three years, what, how, what, how had we grown as a company? We always said we invested in people holistically. Why were these little notes having an impact on strangers I had never met? And what was common about all these high achievers that I would run into? Like, these four things, just... I mean, I had lists and cr- and then just, you know, g- you know, Punnett squares, and it just always came back to these four principles of, of... and this notion of they, people build capacity faster than others, and it was spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional. I just saw that pattern. And actually, from our company's standpoint, that's h- how, how we had been training our employees. Not, not... I mean, yes, there's direct training to what they're related to, but we had tried t- we were training them to become better overall, and we were getting the business benefit of that, and they were getting the benefit outside of work.