Transcript of Too Broke for Bankruptcy: How Michael Hyatt Rebuilt Success Without Sacrificing His Life

Winning at work and succeeding at life is a possibility.

Michael Hyatt, from the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publisher. Now he's the founder of Full Focus, author of several best selling books. You're a podcaster, you're a speaker, and you're all about showing leaders that they can win at work and succeed in life.

If you're less stressed, if you're more healthy, you make better decisions. I do private coaching, too, and a lot of my clients, I'll say, What are your hobbies? And the most common answer I get is, Well, my work's my hobby. Sorry, that doesn't count. In July of 2000, my boss quit, and the CEO came to me and asked me if I would be the new publisher for that division. It took us about 18 months, but we went from number 14 in revenue growth to number one. All this came at some expense to me because I was working nights and weekends. My wife said, You're never home. I feel like a single mom. That was like a gut kick.

How do you recover from that and how do you find balance?

First of all, Michael Hyatt, from the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publisher, all the way to the acquisition of Harper Collins, which I think we all heard of.

Now he's the founder of Full Focus, author of several New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, best selling books. I don't know how you do it all. You're a podcaster, you're a speaker. Michael, it's incredible. You're all about showing leaders that they can win at work and succeed in life. First of all, it's so great to have you on the show with us, Michael.

Thank you so much for having me, Elana. It's a privilege.

I think you studied philosophy, religion. Take us back in time. How did that shape your career path?

Well, it's funny because I was in music I didn't major initially, but it didn't take me long to figure out that I probably wasn't going to make a living at that because the competition was fierce. I thought I was good until I got to college, and then I was around people that were brilliant. I thought, plus I need something practical, so I decided to major in philosophy, which, of course, isn't practical at all. But I think the great thing that I got from that was that it taught me how to think and got me really acquainted with the Western canon of literature and It was really helpful and has really served me well in my career.

You came from a pretty religious household, or is that something that came later?

That actually occurred when I was 18. I didn't grow up in a particularly faith-based home, but I was drawn to it when I was about 18 and right before I went into college. I took a couple of theology courses, and I said, I really think that what I need to understand is first principles and worldviews and delve into philosophy philosophy. So that's what I did. And I contemplated going to seminary after that. I thought about going to law school after that, but I got really intrigued by business, and I love entrepreneurialism and business. That's what I did. Even in college, I was doing entrepreneurial things, and I still, to this day, love business.

And I love that because the truth is, Michael, you started at word publishing, but very quickly, you got to entrepreneurship Honestly, before the word even existed, right, Michael? I don't think that word existed. You co-founded your own publishing company. Talk to me a little bit about that route from Baylor and how that formed into your own company.

Well, it's funny. My boss at Word Publishing in Waco, Texas, took a job at Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville, where I live to this day. He invited me to come on as the vice president of marketing. Now, I'd gone back and forth in the early part of my career between marketing and editorial. I was really good at marketing, but I really loved editorial because I loved shaping ideas and interacting with authors on their ideas. I, by that point, considered myself to be a bit of a literary midwife. I just love the idea of helping people give birth to their best ideas. But it was a hard time at Thomas Nelson Publishers. After about two years, we were fed up. This was my boss and myself. We decided, and by the way, we were in our early 30s, and we were full of ourselves. We'd seen some early success, and we thought, shoot, we could do this better than our boss, so let's just start our own company. We left, we started a company, and it took off like a rocket ship. We had few New York Times bestsellers, and the company grew. Then after about five years, it crashed and burned.

It crashed and burned because we grew faster than our cash flowed in. It's possible to be very successful and still be cash poor. We just got to the place where we had so much money tied up in inventory and accounts receivable and author advances that we couldn't keep the lights on. All of our assets were pledged. We didn't even have enough money or enough assets to go bankrupt. We just basically folded up the tent and we were done. It was an incredibly devastating experience. I had people from my church bringing in us food. We were in dire straits. But my business partner and I, which, by the way, is still one of my best friends to this day, we decided that we would divide up everything, and he would stay in the old business so that when vendors called, he could talk to him. We just didn't want to disappear. Our reputation was important, and we felt like we had a responsibility to tell them what happened. I, on the other hand, launched a literary agency with many of the authors that we had been the publishers for, and that began to take off. Once the old business was wound down, then he joined me, and we stayed in that literary agency for about six years.

I really felt like I wanted a team to play on, so I went back to Thomas Nelson.

Wow. Oh, my God. First of all, I want to take you there, and I appreciate the real truth here because I think there's some myth about, and we see it in our business, right? I mean, we're on one hand, one of the fastest-growing companies in America. On the other hand, you're a little duck trying to stay above water. People are like, Yeah, but you guys make multimillion dollars. Yeah, that doesn't quite get to the bank. So walk us through a little bit just before we move on, what made you continue, Michael? Because that can get really hard and scary. What kept you going in those really hard moments?

Well, first of all, I think it's pretty normal for businesses to fail. I hate to I don't say that, but according to the Small Business Association, 80% of all new businesses fail in the first five years, and of the 20% that survive, 80% of those will fail in the next five years. If you do the math on that, you've only got a 4% chance of existing 10 years from now if you start a business. I think the key is resilience. Resilience for me was not a choice, it was a necessity because I had to feed my family. I have now five grown daughters, but at the time, I don't remember how many times I'd have to do the math on this. I think we had all five of them when the business went under. Oh, my God. I just had to scramble. I was scared. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I knew that I had to do something to put meals on the table and a roof over our head. That really drove it. But yeah, that was where we were back in the early '90s.

Wow. I mean, theoretically, your wife can cut the cord and say, You're done, Michael, with your games. You go back to whatever it is that you do, find a job, stop entrepreneurship altogether. Even though you did have some very specific roles, we'll talk about it. But in general, you are an entrepreneur in the making, right? You're either at the top somewhere or you're an entrepreneur. What made you decide, yes, I am going to be resilient. I am going to continue doing this despite the fear, despite the risk?

It's a good question. Thankfully, my wife, Gail, we've been married for 46 years now. I think she knew what she was signing up for. She is like the most positive, optimistic person you'll ever meet. She's told me on more than one occasion, because there's been a lot of setbacks and challenges. She said, Look, make the decision you need to make, and if we end up living in a refrigerator box under an overpass, I'm with you 100%. That's given me a lot confidence to try new things and to feel like failure is not final, it's only feedback. I took that as feedback, and believe me, there's nobody I blame for that business failure except myself. I wish I had known then what I know now, but I didn't. I just made some not-so-great decisions. But who trains you for that? Where do you get the help for that? We were just making it up as we go and trying to make the best decisions we can at the time. But it turns out all those decisions weren't great. But yeah, I think resilience is the key to success. The people that are the most successful are literally the people that are the most resilient.

When you see and you understand their story and all the things that they have to go through to be successful, I think the main superpower is you don't have to be the smartest person, you don't have to be the most hardworking person, but you've got to be resilient. When you fall off the horse, you've got to get back in the saddle. I learned that as a boy because my dad bought me a pony, and we went out into a softly plowed field, and I was about five years old. Within 30 seconds, I was on my butt in the field. I was crying, and my dad, basically, I grew up in Western Nebraska, and the general wisdom, the common sense was, Look, just rub some dirt in it and get back on the horse. That's what I did. That lesson served me well my entire life. I didn't really know any better, and it's always been a necessity. So failure to me is not an option. It's a choice, and I choose not to stay down.

Incredible. What do you think, if you need to summarize that specific failure, what did you take later to be the CEO that you were, to start full focus? What do you think are some of the biggest lessons?

I think one of the biggest ones was that we didn't have a clearly articulated vision for where were you going. As a result, we didn't have a filter to be able to discern between what what was a opportunity and what was a distraction. This is really hard for people as they become successful, because the more successful you are, you start to draw opportunities to yourself. A lot of those are actually distractions masquerading as opportunities, but without a vision as a filter, then you just end up saying yes to everything, and we got spread too thin. We thought, Okay, we're great at adult trade books. Those have been successful. So let's publish kids' books, and let's publish gift books. We got into all these genres, fiction, that we had no expertise in, and that just not being able to focus was huge. But it starts with a vision.

Wow, this is powerful. Okay, and that actually feeds so well into how you grew from there. Take us there then in time. I mean, you somehow shake yourself from that moment. Take us there to your path all the way to the CEO.

Working as a literary agent was a lot of fun. I love that because I still considered myself, even at that point, as a literary midwife. Now I got to work even more directly with authors as their agent. But at some point, it was mostly just my partner, one other agent, and a couple of executive assistants. I said, Man, I thrive on working in a company, in a culture, and with leadership and a team. And so I decided, I went to my business partner one day, this was in 1998, and I said, Look, I would love to entertain the possibility of selling my half of the business to you, and I promise I'll be reasonable, but it's just a matter of this is not the best use of me. He was super agreeable. We were dear friends, and so we emmatically parted ways. And I went back to Thomas Nelson as the best way to describe it for somebody that's not in the publishing business was I was like the assistant general manager of one of Thomas Nelson's 14 publishing divisions. Initially, the second time around, I came in and most of my responsibility was editorial.

I was working with authors again. So not very different from being a literary agent, but I was working with some amazing authors at that time. People like Dave Ramsey and John Maxwell. We even published a book by Trump, if you can believe it, back in the day, so I got to meet him. But at any rate, it was a great experience. But in July of 2000, my boss quit, and the CEO came to me and asked me if I would be the new publisher for that division. What I didn't understand, because I wasn't privy to all the financial detail, was that division was in the worst shape of any of the 14. We had the lowest revenue growth. In fact, we were shrinking. We had the worst profitability. We had lost money in the previous year, and the Well, in that division was terrible because people just don't like losing. People were blaming everybody else, pointing fingers, all that stuff. I got really clear on the vision. I did a private retreat, and I came up with 10 things that I wanted to be true in three years. The CEO had asked me how long it was going to take me to turn that division around.

Of course, I didn't have a clue. But I just pulled a number out of the air and I said about three years, and he said, Well, that's what I was thinking, so you got my full support. I came back and I painted that picture of a bigger, better future to team, they got energized, and they rolled their sleeves, and we worked hard. It took us about 18 months, but we went from number 14 in revenue growth to number one, from number 14 in profitability to number one, Of course, the morale was off the charts because people like winning. Well, all this came at some expense to me because I was working nights and weekends. So was my team. I wasn't spending hardly any time at home, and my family was really suffering. But I wasn't aware of it, or I was pushing it out of my awareness. But I finally, at the end of that 18-month period, I got this ginormous bonus check. It was more than my annual salary. I was gitty. I rushed home. I couldn't wait to share it with Gail, my wife, just knowing, A, that it was going to validate all my hard work, and that she was going to be excited about it.

But not so much. She looked at the check, and she began to get a little tearful, and she said, I think we need to talk. So We went and sat down in the den, and I could tell this was going to be a very consequential conversation. She teared up and she said, First of all, I want you to know how deeply I appreciate how hard you work, all that you've accomplished. I want to acknowledge that But I got to be honest. She said, You're never home. Your five daughters need you now more than ever. She said, If I'm honest, I feel like a single mom. Man, that was like a gut kick. I was very confused because I felt like I was faced with this impossible choice. Either I could win at work and just kiss my family goodbye, basically, hope they survive, or I could throttle back my ambition professionally and go all in on the family. And either one of those just didn't seem right. I thought, there's got to be a third alternative. And that basically sent me on a journey to see if I couldn't figure out a way to win at work and succeed at life.

And that's since become my life mission to figure that out.

Oh, my God. How do you recover from that? And how do you find balance? Is balance a myth or is it real?

It's really popular today to bash balance. For people to say, Oh, I don't believe in life balance. I believe in life integration and all that. It's partly because they have a misapprehension about what it is. Balance does not mean that you're applying equal time energy, capital focus to every area of your life. You're not. There's a dynamic tension. It's much like if you were a gymnast on a tight rope and you're just trying to balance yourself. There's always this tension. You're always shifting your weight to try to accommodate. And I think life is like that, too. It is dynamic in that way, in that it constantly requires us to reposition ourselves, to reassess, to allocate our resources, and all the rest. But I think it's actually possible. It's not only possible, it's essential. In my worldview, I think life is made up of multiple domains. There's body, mind, and spirit. There's family, there's friendships, There's friendships. There's finance. There's our hobbies, there's our health. All those things are interrelated. If something goes south, if you have a health crisis, it's going to bleed into or cascade into all those other place of life. If you have a health crisis, it's going to impact your marriage, it's going to impact your work.

If you have marital problems, it's going to impact your work. If you've got stress at work, you're going to bring it home. All these things are interrelated. If they're not considered carefully and if they're not pursued intentionally, then you're basically going to drift through life and end up in a crisis. And so I make a real big distinction between designing your life and drifting through life. Those are two different things But the default mode is to drift. I would say that that's where most people, that's their approach to life.

First of all, I absolutely agree. I think we shared the same language, which I love. I think there's a lot of similar stories in the sense of getting to massive burnout. For me, I needed to have losing almost everything in order to start realizing that I need to get a lot more intentional about every step I make. But take us there on the journey. The year of the big talk, Michael, when is it, roughly?

2002.

2002, you realized that I need to change. But if I'm not mistaken, you actually become a CEO and you turn around the company and all of the good stuff after. You need to put this all together for me and for the listeners. How did that path come?

When I turned that division around, the CEO said, Congratulations, we're going to give you more responsibility. Now you're going to become a divisional manager over several publishing units. Then ultimately, I became the COO and then the CEO. At the time, Thomas Nelson was a publicly traded company in the New York Stock Exchange. So all that goes with running and operating within a public company. But that year in 2002, I thought, I'm out of tricks. I turned this division around, but I'm scared because I don't know what I can do to continue to grow that division, plus the new ones I was leading. I actually went to John Maxwell and I said, I think I need a coach, but I don't know any coaches. John said to me, I've got the perfect coach for you. He introduced me to Daniel Harkovi, who runs a company called Building Champions in Portland. Daniel and I began a coaching relationship, and he and I are really good buddies to this day. We've written a book together, and we go fishing in the fall together, fly fishing. That was a good relationship. Relationship. But one of the first things Daniel said to me as he listened to my story and was doing that intake in our first coaching session, he said, If I can be frank, it seems to me like you don't have any boundaries around work.

Well, that was a brand new concept to me. I'm like, What are you talking about? Boundaries? He said, Tell me if I'm wrong, but my guess is that you get to the office early, you work all day, and you finally get out of there at about 6: 00, you go home, you have a quick dinner with the family, and then you're right back on your laptop. I said, Man, guilty as charged. That's exactly what my day looks like. They said, My guess is you probably work a fair amount on the weekends, too. I said, Yeah, because I learned that early in my career. All the executives at Word Publishing where I was at initially, their cars were always there on Saturday morning and oftentimes on Sunday afternoon and evening. I just thought that was the table stakes.

That normal thing.

Yeah. Yeah. What you have to do to play at that level. I said, He asked and he said, My guess is that on your vacations, you get up early, you crank through a lot of email, but you're late to the party and the family goes to the beach or they do whatever they're going to do, and you join them later. I said, Man, it's like you're reading my mind. That's exactly what it looks like. He said, Would you be willing, and he said, It's going to be counterintuitive, but would you be willing to put hard boundaries around your work day, around your weekends, and around your time off? I said, What does that mean? He said, It means you're not going to do any work. It means you're not going to think about work, you're not going to think about work. You're not going to read about work, you're not going to talk about work. You're going to be all in on the other elements of life. I'm literally secretly thinking to myself, There are other elements of life? I knew there was my family, but there's stuff beyond that. That's how deprived I was.

I was so just focused on work. It was crazy. I said, Yes, I'm willing to do that because I knew something had to change. He said, Well, first of all, you're going to become more productive and more focused. Because instead of goofing off in the afternoon and getting distracted, you You realize you have a hard stop at 6: 00, and that's it till the next morning. It was like that day before you go on a vacation where you're uber productive. Yeah, exactly. I just was a machine. But I said, Yeah, I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to observe those hard boundaries. I swallowed hard and tried to count the cost. He said, Well, then I'm sure you won't mind if periodically I check in with Gail to see how you're doing. He called her several times. That's scary. I wasn't part of those conversations. But that created the accountability that forced the change. Everything began to turn around. Now, I'd be lying to you if I told you that that was the last time it was a one and done thing and it got fixed. I'm just like anybody else. I deceived myself into thinking that whatever big project I'm in is temporary.

I tell myself, Well, just as soon as I get this product launch or as soon as we get this company launched or whatever. But unfortunately, those temporary periods can become a season, which can become a way of life if you're not careful. You've got to really look in the mirror and be honest with yourself. That was the beginning of sobriety for me.

Hey, I'm pausing here for a second. I hope you're enjoying this amazing conversation. Don't forget to like this video, subscribe to our channel. Now, if you're looking, you're yourself to catapult your own career, figure out what's next for you, get that clarity, fast track your own growth, check out our free 30-minute training at sleepacademy. Com/training. That's leepacademy. Com/training. Now, let's get back to the show. How scary is it to lose relevance or to not be able to succeed in your career now? This is what will hold you back from the promotions that you want to get. Obviously, it didn't. So walk me through this a little bit.

It's weird and it's counterintuitive, but as it turns out, if you're less stressed, if you're more healthy, you make better decisions. A lot of times people think that they just got to grind and grind and grind. There's been a lot of research around I write a lot about this in my book, Free to Focus. But there's been a lot of study about working beyond 55 hours and how the productivity goes south fast once you get past about 55 hours. And yet people always think they're the exception. They think, Well, I could work for 100 hours. I could work for 120 hours a week. The truth is, you can for a short amount of time. But what the research shows is you start really losing momentum and your health begins to deteriorate and your relationships deteriorate. Those people don't perform well at work. Now, I didn't put all that together initially. I just knew that I was making better decisions. I was less stressed, I was calmer, I led better. You know how it is when you're tired and everybody becomes more stupid?

You can read the same thing again and again and again. I'm like, It's not coming in. Then tomorrow morning, you read it and I'm like, Oh, that was so easy. That's what it was.

So, yeah, Rest is a huge thing. Getting adequate rest and play- It's everything. Is everything.

Well, there's a beautiful saying, and I know I'm going to butcher the quote, and I don't know who said it, but it's something along the lines of you can have a thousand problems Well, once you have a health issue, you have only one problem.

That's right.

It's such a wake-up call because you're right. That's the first thing that we always neglect as high achievers, workaholic. The truth is, you bring such a great point because I used to have a boss, way back in Intel, that literally awarded people if they stayed until 4: 00 in the morning, 5: 00 in the morning. That was an award. I was always embarrassed that around 2: 00 AM, I got so freaking tired that I had to duck so that nobody will see that I need to drive home. I remember that embarrassment of what a wuss. How am I at 2: 00 AM going home? It's like, Dude, that's freaking 2: 00 AM. Why am I embarrassed about it? But I think there was this notion of you will not be able to be successful if you don't grind. And I think a big thing of what you're doing, and I love that, is you're showing us that it's possible, and we'll talk about full focus in a second, but you're showing us that it's possible, not only that it's possible. In fact, you will actually do better. You will be more intentional. You will be more successful if you take some time to yourself and you put the boundaries and you do this right way.

It's about working smart, not just hard.

One book I read back in those days, early on in the early 2000s, was a book called The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loar. He was a sports performance coach, and he took those lessons and applied them to the corporate world. Basically, the metaphor was you're a corporate athlete. What do athletes know about high performance? Well, they know that rest is the foundation. The world's greatest players in any sport rest like nine hours a night because they realize how important that is for performance. They have a pregame ritual that sets them up for success. You always think of athletes, they're parting on game night. No, not the good ones. The good ones are to bed early. They're taking care of the nutrition. They're taking care of their stress levels through meditation or whatever. But they take care of the instrument of their self so that they can perform at the highest levels. For whatever reason, we don't understand this in the corporate world. We grind people. Dr. Stephen Covey talked about the need to sharpen the saw. We just had people out there who continue to change the metaphor a little bit to an ax that are basically trying to cut wood with a dull ax.

Everything takes longer, everything is rougher, everything's a mess. A well-rested person can accomplish in half the time what an exhausted person can I love that.

Oh, my God. I think the listeners need to hear this because you put these boundaries. You had a coach, you put the boundaries. We'll talk about how exactly this all happened. But then you become a CEO at what? 2005?

That's right.

What do you think are some of these pivotal decisions that you made that made this and brought you to be a CEO? Then I do want to take a little bit about what it actually takes to be a CEO.

Yeah, and being a CEO is really challenging, as you know, particularly when I was running the company in 2005, became a CEO. We were still publicly held. We took the company private two years later. That was its own education. But I'm trying to do all of this like a baby CEO, just learning the ropes, and I've got all these challenges. A few years later, we would face the Great Recession, and we were fighting for our lives and all of that, and trying to keep my boundaries in place and all of One of the most helpful pieces of advice that I got, though, is on the day I became the CEO of the company, I got a call from John Maxwell. I mentioned him before. He's a good friend. He said, Look, first of all, congratulations. But he said, You've heard that it's lonely at the top? I said, Yep. I just figured that goes with the territory. He said, I want you to understand something. He said, I want you to listen to me. He's very direct that way. He said, That's the choice. Well, that rocked my world because basically, he was saying that I didn't have to be lonely at the top.

In the next couple of weeks, I reached out to two other public company CEOs in Nashville and wanted tractor supply and the other one at a parking company that was also public. We started to get it together once a quarter. The whole premise of it is we had lunch and then we spent the afternoon together. We had a different topic every time. It was a place where we could be ourselves ourselves and really share vulnerably the challenges we were facing that we couldn't share with the board and we couldn't share with our team. That was my first experience. I didn't have the language for this at that time, but that was my first experience of a mastermind. I think that part of success has to be a team sport. Get a coach if you want to perform at the highest level. Join a mastermind. You need the accountability. You need a safe space where you can just let it all out. And I think that was critical for me.

That's such a beautiful sentence. That's a choice. I met John Maxwell recently in some crews we were on, and he's an incredible person. Listeners, if you haven't checked him out, great author and great speaker, too. But one of the things, and we do have a President's Club in Leep Academy as well for people who are like C-suite, and they create a mastermind. Like you said, I can't reveal it anywhere, but I can reveal it with my little safe space. But you somehow, let's talk for a second, 2008 is an incredible hard time to navigate, especially as a CEO. The buck stops here. You need to somehow go through all the decisions. How do you sleep at night? What do you do? What were some of the challenges?

I can remember I was in New York City. We were in the office of Wells Fargo because they were an investor in the private equity company that had acquired us. We were meeting with them, but all the meetings were canceled that day. Everybody knew, like this is a big storm. I was sitting there in the basement of Wells Fargo. All my meetings had been canceled. I was looking at this painting they had on a wall that was the trip that was going through this incredible storm. I thought, wow, this, I think, is prophetic for what we're about to go through. Of course, none of us had any idea. We're sitting there not knowing what we're about to enter. At first, it's like, is it us or is it the environment? I can remember the chairman of my board was very upset at one point because our sales were slipping. In fact, they fell 20% in one year that first year, which is catastrophic for a company of that size. We had to make some cuts, had to lay off a lot of people, all that stuff, which was very painful. But we had no idea what was coming.

The The chairman of my board was of the mindset initially that it was us. We'd had this seven-year run prior to them acquiring us where it was just up and to the right. Shareholder value was growing, everything was increasing, revenues, profit. I remember telling him one time, I said, Look, the same idiots that are trying to run the company now were the same idiots that for seven years had this crazy run. I think it's something other than us. Certainly, we're making mistakes, and there's things we could do better, but something's happening systemically in the environment. That didn't leave us an excuse. I'll tell you a story in a minute, if you want, about my coach talking about leadership and ownership and how it's always about your leadership.

Right. I love that. I want to hear more because I think at the end of the day, it's that level of self-ownership that differentiates the great leaders because they will always look at what they can control.

Well, I'll tell you the story. This was, I I think in the summer of 2009, so we were beginning to get on the other side of the recession, but there were still a lot of problems. My executive coach came in. She would work with me for a full day every month. She came in, and this was in August of 2009. She said, Well, how was July? I said, We missed our budget, top line and bottom line. How much? I said, Well, about 20%. She said, You're kidding me. She said, You were so confident when I was here before that you were going to make the budget. I said, I I know, I know. But I said, Look, foot traffic is down, and retail still. The economy is a mess. Consumer confidence is still low. All of our competitors are flailing away in the marketplace, and we're really struggling. It was always about this out there. She said to me, Okay, I hear you. It's a tough market. By the way, she said to me later, she said, It's always a tough market. There's always factors that are against you. She said, But I want to ask you a hard I said, Okay, shoot.

She said, What was it about your leadership that led to this result last month? That tick me off. I said to her, I said, Look, I just told you this has nothing to do with my leadership. It has everything What does it do with the environment. She said, Okay. She said, But what was it about your leadership that created this result? I said, I just told you. And it's getting a little heated. She said, Well, let me ask the question another way. If you could go back 30 days and lead differently, what would you have done differently? I said, Well, that's easy. I said, I would have met with the sales staff for a daily stand-up meeting just to get a sense of what was happening in the marketplace. She said, What else? I said, Well, I would have gone on that sales call to Walmart last month because I'm convinced that if I had, my presence could have made a difference. They would have bought more stuff. What else? I listed off three or four things. She smiling and she said, So what you're telling me is that it was about your leadership. She said, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is it's your fault. Now, you don't have to beat yourself up about it. I'm not telling you to blame you, but it was your fault. But the good news is this is now in your control. As long as it's out there, it's not under your control. You can't fix it. You can't fix the economy. You can't suddenly flip a switch and change consumer confidence, but you can change the things you have control over, and those will be enough. That was the best leadership lesson I ever got.

Wow. I think it's beautiful. The more we can get used to looking at ourselves and what we can control versus all the rest of the things, because there's always excuses. If you want a pile excuses of why it's not going to work, there's always excuses. If you're a very persuasive person, you can go on with excuses. But at the end of the day, it's like, what can I do right now? And what would I've done different? I love that. I wrote that down. So you're taking all this incredible insights and the things that let you lead at this level and decide to start full focus. First of all, what made you decide to leave the publishing industry altogether, I think? Well, you're an author, so you're not really believing, but you're doing it in another way, I guess. But then to start full focus. Talk to me a little bit about that time of decision, if you will.

The inciting event was that in 2011, we sold the company to Harper Collins. And by that time, I'd already picked my successor, and I had moved from being the CEO to now as the chairman of the board. And I stayed on for a year after that. But I thought, this is my opportunity. Rupert Murdoch wasn't going anywhere, so they didn't need a chairman. So I was basically on my way out. That was good. I was ready for a change. But it all started really back in 2004 when I started blogging. I did start blogging, and I started writing just for myself. In fact, I usually don't know what I think about something till I've written. It's all a jumble in my head, and I'm confused and not clear. But then I start writing, and somebody once told me that thoughts disentangle themselves, passing over the lips and through pencil tips. That's really true. If I can talk it out or write it out, I get clarity. I was just basically sharing at that time productivity hacks, things I was learning about leadership. Again, just writing for myself. A lot of people signed up for the newsletter.

By the time I left, Thomas Nielson had a little over 100,000 subscribers to my newsletter. By the way, I should say, my board was not a big fan of me blogging, and I was very active in social media. I was an early adopter on Twitter, now X, on Facebook, those two platforms A couple of the board members met with me in the middle of the Great Recession, and they said to me, We would like you to stop blogging because we think it's a distraction.

Wow.

I said, Okay, where do you think the future of publishing is going. I said, I think digital is a huge part of where it's going. In fact, if I wasn't blogging and involved in social media, and I was sitting in your shoes, I'd insist that the CEO get active in this. Because my number one job as a CEO is to find the future. I learned so much about social media marketing, learned so much about digital content and all that. I was able to lead the company into that. But I told I said, Here's the deal. I'm not going to stop. I said, You can fire me if you want, and if I have to make a choice, I'll leave. But I said, I think this is not just critical because I'm trying to be stubborn, but I really think this is the way that it's all going to go. If we don't figure this out, we're going to be behind. Right now, because of my involvement, we're ahead of our competitors. I never heard about it again. That was the end of it. But I built up this audience. When I left Thomas Nelson, I thought, Okay, I'm going to do this full-time.

Out of that, I wrote my book, Platform, which became a New York Times best seller. I was trying to share with people basically how to do what I did because it wasn't that extraordinary. You just create content that solves people's problems and the rest happens. It was the early days, to be honest.

I think that's interesting because you've seen personal brand before we talked about personal brand, before I personally understood personal brand. I was the person that will put my head down and just work my ass off, and this is all I could think of. You somehow saw it. You saw that this is where you want to go and what you want to do. Talk to me a little bit about that, too.

It was the weirdest thing because I fell into it. It was mostly just experience an observation. I noticed, for example, my Twitter account, I had about 200,000 followers, and the Thomas Nelson account had about 30,000. I said, People don't want to follow institutions. In fact, people are generally wary of institutions. They connect with people personally. I had thousands of people tell me, You put a face on Thomas Nelson. You gave us a personal contact. I would get customer service things. I remember somebody reached out to me on Twitter at one point and they said, Hey, we just got one of your... We were the largest Bible publisher in the world. We just got one of your Bibles. I think it was in South Africa. They said, The thing came totally beat up. In fact, I've written a blog post that I want you to read about how bad your customer service is. The truth is, it wasn't our fault. It was the carrier's fault, right? Because I understood social media, I called my head a customer service up and I said, I want you to overnight a package to this bookstore owner who's complaining about this.

The truth was, they were embarrassed with their customer. I said, overnight the Bible, reverse the charge on the one they bought, and don't charge them for this one. They said, Do you know how much that's going to cost? I said, No, tell me. They said, That's going to be like over $100 a postage. I said, No problem. Do it. They got that. They were floored. They took the post down. They completely wrote a new one about our extraordinary customer service. But that's just the world of social media that we lived in. I had the same thing happen just two weeks ago with a customer that somehow got my phone number and texted me. It's just amazing. You can talk directly to customers, and that's the world we live in today.

Walk us there. You have all these followers. You understand personal brands, so you already have a personal brand, which makes it a lot easier. I think for our audience, a lot of times, and our listeners, one of the things that I want you to get a lot out of this conversation is that being really intentional strategic was where you want to go and start building that brand for yourself, because otherwise, if you do, you always fall forward. You can always do the next things. If you don't have anything, you literally start from scratch. It's so hard. But walk me through, Michael, you decide to not go rest and sit on the beach for some ungodly reason, but you decide to start another company with full focus. Walk me through why the passion and where does that come from?

I think, Alana, that a lot of that is just having a sense of purpose and the feeling that if I'm still alive, I haven't completed my purpose. I've always been against retirement. If you look at the statistics, I think I'm right on this. Somebody could fact check me on this, but most people die within five years of retiring. They don't run out of life, they run out of purpose. Even if you are retired in the traditional sense, you better have a purpose, something that gets you up in the morning, something that gives you a sense of responsibility for this one life that you've been given and to invest it in other people. I just felt like I wasn't done yet. I was 56 years old when we started the company. I'm I'm almost 70 now. I'll be 70 this summer. I feel like I'm 35. I'm probably self-deceived, but I feel like I'm 35. I'm super excited. This last year, I spent a year doing a deep dive on AI, and I am all in on that. I'm totally geeking out on that. But I think if you're curious and always willing to learn, there's always going to be a future.

But to come back to the personal brand thing, I think everybody has to realize that they have a brand, whether they know it or not, and it's simply your reputation. Inside your company, if you're an individual contributor, you have a brand. People know you for certain things. Those may be good things or bad things. You may have a good brand image or a bad brand image. The good news is you can change that. One of the best ways you can do that is keep your word, fulfill your promise, give people what you commit to do, whether that's your boss, whether it's your customers, whatever. If you attend When you get into that, it creates trust. When people are faithful to keep their word, and that's what I regard as integrity, making your actions line up with your words. That's my definition of integrity. If you do that, then it creates trust. Trust is the foundation of every business, and it's so easy to lose. If you decide you want to build your brand, I would say, don't build it because you want to become famous. That's a really bad reason to do it. But because you want to be a good steward of who you are and what you've been given and your calling.

To be honest, building a personal brand is a double-edged sword. Because if you're going to start a new company, the best way to do it is with a personal brand because people will connect with you more than they'll connect with an idea or a concept. The bad news is it doesn't scale as well because you only have 24 hours a day, and some of those got to be given to sleep. Plus, what do you do about succession? When you pass away and the whole thing is built on your brand, and I've seen this happen over and over again, then it collapses unless you're intentional about it.

Powerful. The way I like to say it, and I think that is so beautiful is you all have a brand, and the brand is what people think about you when you're not in the room. I don't know who I stole it from. I know I stole it from someone, but I can't just write. I think the other thing that you talked about, legacy, We had an episode with Howard Behar, the ex-president of Starbucks. And one of the beautiful sentences that he had that he said is, there's no amount of success that you can live on forever. And one of the hardest moments in his life was when he retired. So it's exactly what you're saying. He needed to find a purpose again. So it's beautiful to see where he is now. But I think you're spot on just in terms of finding that purpose For those, by the way, not on YouTube, take a look at him. He is looking 50s. But then you also have the time to build a business, author many books. How do you fit it all in?

It can be challenging at times, but it's self-imposed. I just have so many things I want to do. To be honest, it's a challenge to turn it off. I do private coaching, too, and a lot of my clients, I'll say, What are your hobbies? The most common answer I get is, Well, my work's my hobby. I love my work. Sorry, that doesn't count. I have to remind myself of that, that I've got to have hobbies outside of work. Otherwise, I'm just going to burn out. But I think learning things is really important. Having that strong sense of purpose. It was funny. I went to a longevity conference recently, and I was sitting in a session where there were these four doctors, and they were They're worried about the usual things: sleep, nutrition, exercise, all those as being the foundation of longevity. Somebody asked a question from the floor right at the end, and they said, So of all those things you've talked about, what's the single most important thing? The doctor that had the microphone said without blinking, he said, Oh, that's easy. A strong sense of purpose. And all the other doctors concurred. They said, That trumps everything.

Actually, two things: strong sense of purpose and deep social connections. They said, You can have all those other things in place, but if you don't have a sense of purpose, and if you don't have deep social connections, you're not going to live long. It's one of the components of longevity. I think that's something to be considered. I've got this thirst, but I also don't want to burn out. I have to realize that sometimes I can get addicted to work, and I think it's a legitimate addiction. Sometimes it just has to be dialed back for the sake of the rest of your life so that you can go the distance and live not just a meaningful life, but a full and meaningful life.

Wow. I wonder what it is for you. I personally need to go on walks. I might run or whatever, but I have to hike many times a week, and that's where all my ideas come from. This is where my sanity comes from. This is where suddenly I don't see the noise of the constant emails, but I can actually think about the big picture and scaling the business and big ideas. All my best ideas came from these walks. What is it for you, Michael?

I'm a serial hobbyist, which means I go all in on something for a while, and then I go to another hobby. I got this from my dad, who, by the way, is 91, still living, still a hobbyist. But I still, to this day, play a lot of golf. I love fishing and playing the guitar. Those three things are the things I keep coming back to over and over again. I love them. That's where I find myself and life has its meaning. Crazily, I get great business ideas sometimes in the middle of those things because my mind's relaxed. That's a prerequisite for creativity, is a relaxed mind.

Talk to me just for a second about your why, What is the legacy that you hope to leave behind for future leaders, for entrepreneurs?

My why is that I want people to get this concept that the double win, winning at work and succeeding at life, is a possibility. The thing that I love more than anything is to see other people flourish in every area of life. Particularly when you talk about AI and how that's going to help us or hurt us going forward, I just think there's always going to be a place for the human dimension. I think AI, I'm very optimistic about it. Obviously, it could go wrong. We've all seen the Terminator, right? But I think that it could go wrong, but I think there's more ways that it could go right. I think it can enable us, and this is what I've been playing with this last year, to get that double win and to see the realization of human flourishing, not only in our lives, but in the lives of our customers and clients. I had a friend tell me at one point, this was probably four years ago, he said, At this season in your life, your job is to grow fruit on other people's trees. That's what I think a true legacy is, because the truth is, unless you're some international pop star or somebody Everybody who does something enormously heroic, all of us are going to be forgotten within a generation.

I can't even tell you my great-grandparents' names without really thinking about it. They're just forgotten in my own lineage. The idea that you're going to be remembered for time and eternity is mostly vanity. But that doesn't mean your life doesn't matter, because what you do in this life, I believe, will ripple through in the lives of other people and into eternity. That's what I'm committed to doing, is being a good steward of this one life I've been given. First of all, having an impact on my children, having an impact on my grandchildren. I've got 11 of those now.

You have 11, exactly. Wow. Yeah.

If I can just do my part there, really be intent about the few and building quality family relationships and they do the same thing, then you start seeing the exponential growth and the exponential change. It won't be credited back to me, and that's well and good because I stand on the shoulders of other people and people stand on my shoulders. But we can make a meaningful difference in the world, for sure.

Do you think there's something that you went through in life beyond the stories that you shared that built you to who you are today, Michael?

No doubt. I grew up in a family where my father was an alcoholic. He started drinking at probably the worst possible time for me as a kid when I was in middle school, and he just wasn't there. He was pretty much checked out. He wasn't a violent drunk. But I would frequently come home from school in the afternoon, and my dad would be passed out with six crumpled up beer cans on the floor. I can remember one time in high school coming home with my sister, late at night, some friends dropped us off, and there was my dad, to our great embarrassment, passed out on the sidewalk. We had to pick him up as our friends laughed at us and haul him into the house. I remember standing in a corner. My sister ran into a room crying. She's two years younger than I. I remember looking at him with such disgust and really fury. I said, I will never be like that. Well, so what happened was then I became driven to a fault. I over-corrected, and I became a workaholic. It took me years of therapy and just trying to work this out to get some sense of balance.

I came to the conclusion a few years ago that I didn't get the father I wanted, but in retrospect, I got the father I needed. Because it's It's like the the adage that you learn more from a bad boss than a good boss. My father, in fairness, he did a lot of things remarkably well. He's still living. He lives not very far from us, so I see him every week. He's really changed a lot. But that was traumatic in those days. I think for a lot of people, their trauma is something they resent. There have been many people who've gone through far, far worse than I have. I'm not trying to glorify my experience. But I do think sometimes it's in our wounds that we're able to heal and to be really helpful to other people. I think that built some character qualities in me that I couldn't have gotten any other way.

Thank you for sharing. That explains that massive drive that I see. That's incredible. What would you advise your younger self based on everything that you've seen and the things that you overcame? I I'm sure your balance is part of it, but how would you talk to younger Michael?

That's a great question. I think I would have gotten therapy earlier. Therapy is a really, really helpful thing. I can tell you, up until probably six years ago, I didn't think I had any anxiety. I think this is a very common characteristic of leaders and of entrepreneurs. I had a diagnosis about two years ago from a doctor that said I needed a stent based on a test that he had given me in my annual physical. He said, You need to stop exercise. Don't lift anything over 10 pounds. He said, You need to get a stent. I'm sending you this cardiologist as a referral. I went to the cardiologist. And of course, it takes you weeks to get in. And of course, my stress is through the roof. But now I'm starting to get language around it. I realized that something was different. And so if I got in to the cardiologist, the cardiologist said, well, he misinterpreted He did the test. He should have never given you that test to begin with. He said he misinterpreted the results and, No, you do not need a stent. I was like, Hallelujah. I went back to the original doctor.

I said, Look, I met with the cardiologist that you referred me out to, and he said, I don't need a stent. I thought, that's the end of the story. He says to me, he was wrong. He said, You need to go back to him and beg him to give you a stent. He said, I've been in this business a long time. I have a sixth sense. You need a stent. Now I'm right back. This is like this roller coaster ride. I go back to that same cardiologist and I said, Dr. Houston told me to beg you for a stent that you're wrong. He just laughed and he said, I can't put on your insurance papers that this other doctor has an intuition We try to be science-based here, and there's no science to support that you need a stent. I said, What would you do if you were me? Because I'm in the horns of a dilemma here. He said, I'd get another opinion. I said, Great. I got not one, but three. I went to three different cardiologists. They all said exactly the same thing. I went back to the original physician and I said, I have three doctors now, three cardiologists that have said, I don't need a stent.

He wrote me back a one-word email. He said, Noted. That's when I fired him. But I suffered like crazy from anxiety. I got back into therapy. I even got a medication. But out of that, this beautiful thing has happened where I've been talking openly about anxiety. Everybody thinks, every leader, every entrepreneur thinks it's just them. I would just say to the listeners here, if you have racing thoughts at night, if you struggle with sleep, if you feel a sense of impending doom, but you can't really put your finger on it why it's happening, you've probably got some anxiety. The good thing is there are so many wonderful tools now. I got real help that changed everything, but it was a process. But it wasn't just from that diagnosis. That surfaced it. But I think I've really struggled with this my entire life.

Wow. First of all, I think every time you ask the question, I was like, Yeah, check. Not sleeping at night, check. I'm like, Darn it, Michael.

What really helped me was, I'm always not recommending this, but it's worth exploring if you have any of those symptoms, is I went to a somatic therapist. Somatic just comes from the Greek word for body, and it's embodied therapy. It's a lot of things like EMDR therapy or tapping, a lot of those kinds of things, and they work remarkably well, and they work, at least for me, pretty quickly. When I went in, I took a self-assessment on my anxiety level, and I think the test was... It goes up to 21, and I was at 19.

Wow.

So really high. But 12 weeks later, I was at a three because of some of these somatic therapies. To be honest, some medication, that helped, too.

Wow, this is amazing. But you're also open to listening to hearing new things, to trying new things. I think that's actually really interesting. I want to talk just for a second about that because I think sometimes we come with a lot of ego of, I know it's not going to work. I don't need this. I think there's some ego that comes with leadership sometimes or maybe with success. I think sometimes it's just really hard to listen. I wish I was more receptive, more coachable a decade or so in my career, because again, at that point, I'm like, VP, I ticked a lot of boxes. I don't need this thing. I don't need help. I don't need coaching. How do you get that receptive? How do you listen? I know about tapping, but I'm like, Oh, I don't need this. How do you become more open to ideas?

Well, I do think it takes some humility, and humility usually comes with failure. I've experienced enough of it in my life that I'm open to new ideas. I figured somebody somewhere has solved this problem. If I just begin to search, I can find the answers to this. I also, and I try to do this with my private coaching clients, is try to normalize things for them. Because when you think you're the exception, then it makes you not want to get help. I think to normalize it, and one of the things I say to my clients when they share with me about their anxiety, and I usually go first, I'll share about mine, they're like, Oh, my God, I'm going through that same thing. I try to normalize it and say, Well, you're not alone. This is very, very common. Then I try to normalize therapy because I had a therapist tell me one time, and I've been in and out of therapy, really, for the last 20 years. It's been enormously helpful, but I'll go back for different kinds of things. I had a therapist tell me, It's the healthy people that come for therapy.

It's the people that are obstinate that don't think they need help to stay away from it, and they don't get the help they need. Why go through life struggling with something that somebody has already figured out the solution to. I really believe in coaching. So anytime I do anything, I hire a coach. To this day, I rarely go fishing without a guide. Why? I could do all the things myself. I know how to do it. I've had some of the best guides in the world that have teach me, but I'm not on the water every day. I don't know all the conditions. I don't know all the fish are eating. And so a guide, a coach, accelerates progress. So does a therapist. I don't want to be in the misery any longer than I have to be. I want to get the help I need to accelerate my progress. That's really what a coach does. It's a catalytic accelerator. Same thing for a therapist that helps you move faster. If you got problems in your marriage, get a therapist. You deserve a great marriage, and you can build one. None of us got training on that stuff.

Same thing with your health. Hire a trainer. I got a trainer that comes to my house three days a week, and it's really hard to tell him to go away when he shows up on my doorstep. I work out and do serious strength training three days a week, my wife and I both do. But don't be afraid to ask for help. You can't know everything. You don't need to know everything.

I love this. I wish I knew this earlier in my career. If I need to tap into my younger self, it's definitely get coaching faster. I probably have six coaches for different things right now. Again, you're always going to go faster and higher. We see it in LEAP Academy because you have big data. I can tell you, based on thousands of people a year, who's going to get a job, what title, what the compensation, versus if you're trying to do this alone. Michael, this is so, so, so valuable Thank you for coming on the show. This is incredible.

Thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun talking about this.

Oh, my God. Well, not everybody is as open, as incredible with so much achievements and just so humble and awesome. Thank you.

You've been a delight to talk to.

Wow, what an incredible conversation. I am so inspired. I hope you are, too. If you enjoyed it as much as I did, please share it with friends. It really, really helps us bring more amazing guests. If you, at some point, want to take yourself and your career to the next level, watch our free training com/training. It's leepacademy. Com/training. I will see you in the next show of Leep Academy with Elana Golan.