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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, with our season five co-host, dave Nurchi, and this podcast is all about inspirations that we get from good books. This season's book is the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. What we do is we take a whole bunch of takeaways from the book and then talk about how we actually use those in our day lives, in our day lives. Dave is the chief operating officer for Sea Planning Group. I'm the chief executive officer. We do this all day. This is our focus, this is our passion, this is our love. We're trying to share with people. Maybe it helps you, motivates you on implementing some of these ideas into your business. Or maybe you're just working at a company and you're trying to figure out why your boss is crazy. Maybe this will help you understand a little bit more. And, as always, do us a favor If you are listening, like or subscribe to this. Wherever you're listening or watching, or and do both, you can definitely do both Share it with a friend so that other people get to hear us and get to get some of this inspiration. And so, dave, our takeaway today that we're going to cover is don't cripple the army by giving it a task that it cannot possibly complete. The army by giving it a task that it cannot possibly complete. So this is a. We're taking a left turn, you know from what we've been talking about. We're completely get you know, going in a different direction. So that's kind of fun.
Speaker 1:
And you picked this one. So I'm interested to hear, kind of where you want to go with this. And before we do, though, we got to bring our sponsor into it, and I think that we are up to Cutthroat College Planning Podcast. Put the whole name in there that time, normally about the planning part. Boom, cutthroat College Planning Podcast, helping people avoid going broke because of the cost of college. So learn what you can do to prepare for college, prepare your kids for college, save a boatload on tuition. Make sure that you don't spend 60 grand and have them drop out after a year. Check it out on nqrmediacom or just go wherever you can find podcasts. You'll find them. And so, dave, back to us we are trying to talk about don't cripple the army by giving it a task that it cannot possibly complete, all right, so where do you want to start with this one?
Speaker 2:
the vision first. So I'll start with you know, a task you can't possibly complete. You could have a, a vision or something that right, a great idea, something big, and it's like this is where we want to be. Whatever it is right, it could be like a multi-year type of thing or just a really big picture of where you want to go. And and if you can't articulate that to your, to your warriors, right, well, and your, your people, you just say, hey, go do it, right.
Speaker 1:
Like make it happen.
Speaker 2:
That could cripple them because they they might react to well, yeah, I love that, it's great, but what the heck do I do? Where do I start? And so that kind of takes me to the articulate and the breaking it down. We talk about project management on some of the episodes. So the task and the picture that could be big. That's great, that's going to motivate people. But you've got to be able to break it down into the smaller pieces so the Army can move forward and have a game plan here to attack and make progress and move the ball forward and get some of the small wins along the way as they continue in battle type of thing.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think about this, we, we, uh. Well, I got all kinds of ideas with this. One's not the big, the big flashing word that came to my mind where you were going. It's like milestones. Right, I'm going to, I'm going to throw out a project or a mission or vision, and you're somehow supposed to figure out how to get there, and it's overwhelming in the first place. So it's, I got to give you something that you can actually achieve. Right, we talk about the just cause and the just cause being this thing bigger than ourselves. That's going to outlive us and we're going after it because we're trying to change the world and everything, and it's galvanizing and motivating and it brings people in. But at the same time, I can't just like be focused on that. I have to say, okay, but what are the things that I need to do so that I can actually pursue that, so that I can try to go after it? What are you know, what are the milestones of the projects and things like that that I'm going to be working on? I have to break it down into bite-sized pieces, and we've had conversations with project management all the time, where we send a project to somebody and it's so complicated that the project itself has, let's say, 50 sub-project components of it, and each sub-project component probably needs its own space. And so it's like how are you setting people up?
Speaker 1:
I was thinking about Kirsten, who runs our Sweet K business, which is our 401k business where she came from a couple of jobs ago. She fondly tells the story about how their goal was to get to $2 billion in assets in their retirement plans. There was no how, there was no why and there was no. What do we do when we get there and what's it mean to us? It was just I want two billion dollars, because my ego says that's from the leader, that's bullshit, you know. And her thing was you should drive me nuts because it doesn't mean anything. Yeah, you know, I mean. So yeah, we're gonna chase this dream for somebody else, but we don't know how to do it. Like how do you actually get that many assets? We don't know why we're doing it. So how do we stay motivated when things get tough? And we don't know what happens when we do it. So who cares if we actually get there, Right?
Speaker 2:
And that's how you get crippled, right, yeah, you're not going to move forward. There's no action plan. I think, like what I think of with that, with milestones and moving forward on something. It's the action plan, like what is my, my takeaway, um, and and where am I going from there? Right, like what, what? What is the, what are the next steps?
Speaker 2:
If you can't get that point across, you're not going to get something started, cause everyone's going to, they can, everyone can sit in a meeting and say, yeah, like this is great, let's, let's move forward. I love this idea. Everybody walks out of the meeting, nobody's going to work on anything until the next meeting, and then you're going to show up and say, where are we on this? And nothing moves forward. So that's that whole point of, like you said, milestones, action plan. Where are we going with this let's? Let's have a way to move forward, a way to move the ball forward and not just have this kind of goal out there with no purpose. And then you might get there and it's like well, what did that mean? Where do we go now?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, funny story. When I was a kid we had some work done around the foundation of our house and they had to report like the concrete and stuff and fix the foundation because of water and everything. So when they did that they destroyed the entire yard. So when they fixed the yard there were rocks everywhere. And so my dad says to me and my siblings well, really to me, because I was old enough at the time to actually get my siblings to help he goes listen, I'm going to give you a penny a rock for every rock that you pick in the yard. I said, well, that's a pretty good deal.
Speaker 1:
So we went out there and there's gazillions of rocks. So you can either be like this is so overwhelming, look at all these rocks. Or what I did is I'm like let's make piles of 10 rocks and then let's take 10 piles of 10 and make piles of a hundred, and then let's make 10 piles of of 10 and make piles of 100. And then let's make 10 piles of 100 and make piles of 1,000. And so I get my siblings, you know, who were much younger at the time, like you know, in the single digits and I'm like, look, just make piles of 10 rocks. And so we went out there and we made a game out of it and made all these piles of 10 rocks and I'm putting together in a bucket, you, you know, until we had 100 in each bucket and, you know, just dumped the bucket in piles until I think we, we picked up 20 000 rocks in about three days.
Speaker 1:
And so my dad comes home I don't even know it's three days, it might have been one day we, we, we picked out 20 000 rocks, so and we stopped there because basically there was no gravel left in the yard, right, like it was like like every anything that that was big enough to see we picked. And he comes home. I'm like, yeah, we picked the rocks. He's like, okay, how much? Oh, yeah, we picked 20 000 rocks and he just, he just stared at us. He goes, no, you didn't. I said, yeah, we did, and he gave us 10 bucks. So so he, he really wasn't. You know one of my first experiences in business sign a contract, right, but uh, there's no litigating that, he's in charge. It's like, yeah, right, whatever, here you go. But um, but the point was is, is we did something that to most people would be completely? I mean we're talking, the yard itself was over an acre big. You know. I mean, yeah, probably two acres worth of yard. That we did and, um, we did it and we were happy about it and we did it fast and and easy. And he was shocked at what we did and it was just like you break it down into little pieces.
Speaker 1:
It's not hard to fill a bucket up with with little rocks, if you're. You know, hey, you get 10, I get 10, you get 10. Bring them over to the the bucket, throw them in the bucket. Okay, let's do it again. You know it's, it becomes easy and it almost becomes a game, and that's that's the point. You know, if you give something to your army of warriors that is not properly digestible and they don't have the creativity to digest that, you know what I mean. All you've done sorry about that All you've done is, uh, give them a whole pile of frustration. You know you're back to that $2 billion, just to be $2 billion. It's like look, you know, I'm going to give you a penny, a rock. When you're all done, we're going to have this beautiful lawn, and I'm not going to tell you how to do it. In our case, we figured out how to do it. Fill up, you know, one pile at a time until we get there. You've got to be able to break it down into pieces.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, because it takes out that, like the thought of this can't be completed, right, if you just looked at it and you said, geez, we can't do this, or the whole lawn is full of the rocks, it's not even worth it because you had a. You got the team together to do it Right and you say, hey, if we all just do this, it is doable, and I like that point too, because the first point I made was more like an exciting thing too.
Speaker 2:
Right, but not every project or, you know, task you give is going to be exciting. So this is also a way to hey, sometimes you just got to do the hard work, that's not so fun. And being able to break it down and have a plan, for that is also a great way to keep people motivated to say, hey, let's just break this down and hammer this out and then we're done, we can move on to something. Maybe that's more exciting.
