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298 Is Sam Bankman-Fried the Crypto Madoff? with “Madoff Talks” Bestselling Author Jim Campbell

FYD - Episode 298 Jim Campbell on Sam Bankman-Fried

Given recent events in the world of Cryptocurrency, almost everyone in business is currently pondering the following question: Is Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, the Bernie Madoff of Crypto? Or is he merely an entrepreneur who made some horrible errors? Today at Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we are joined by the legendary Jim Campbell to examine this question.

Jim Campbell is the author of the bestselling definitive book on Bernie Madoff called Madoff Talks. We did a deep dive with him on the book and on the topic of Madoff himself. Check it out if you’re interested in how Madoff manipulated everything before it all fell apart (FYD 217).

On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we go deep with Jim Campbell on the similarities and the differences on old school scammers like Bernie Madoff and the disaster that is Sam Bankman-Fried and the fate of FTX.

Jim Campbell on Sam Bankman-Fried: Madoff 2.0 or not?

The dialogue starts off direct to the point: is Sam Bankman-Fried Madoff 2.0?

Jim responds that there are similarities but also differences between the two. The biggest similarities is that both Madoff and Bankman-Fried comingled their firm and customer assets to boost the value of its company, with Bankman going so far as to use said money to create more connections in the tech, business, and even so far as government and politics.

Both were also involved in something like a Ponzi scheme, though FTX allegedly took it a step further by using its own FTX tokens as collateral to further increase its own valuation, which is a form of market manipulation.

The baffling behavior of Sam Bankman-Fried

When you are accused of a crime as big as the one Sam Bankman-Fried is currently facing, it’s normal to avoid the public eye for a while, and make no statements unless in the presence of their lawyer, lest they say something incriminating.

Which is why Sam Bankman-Fried’s behavior baffles everyone, as he goes so far as guest for certain podcasts and interviews. Yet he still had the arrogance and audacity to say that he didn’t know what he has done would result in a loss of $32 billion dollars for their investors and consumers.

Jim Campbell on doing your due diligence

The thing is, there were a lot of questionable aspects to FTX, once you dug into their model. Unfortunately, doing the due diligence seems to be a rare thing nowadays, due to the fear of missing out. With the boom of crypto in the latter half of the 2010s and even more so during the pandemic, investors wanted to hop it to latest coin or token, should it increase in value exponentially like what happened to Bitcoin.

Some tech companies and businesses are also guilty in this regard. Take for example on what happened to Theranos. Businesses were so eager to jump in even with just a concept, because they think it’ll be more expensive to establish connections and partnerships later on. Some were dazzled by the names attached to the concept, others by the “projected” earnings should it be developed. In the end, they all lost their investments because they couldn’t be bothered to do their due diligence beforehand.

To hear more from Jim Campbell, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Jim Campbell is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show Business Talk with Jim Campbell. He is known for his hard-hitting interviews of leading figures from the worlds of business, politics, and sports.

Known for “firsts,” Campbell snagged the first extensive interview with former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer after his resignation, the first interview with former Tyco CEO Denis Kozlowski after his release from prison, and the first broadcast interview with former stock analyst Roomy Kahn, a government informant in one of the biggest insider trading busts in American history.

Campbell’s extensive corporate, consulting, and entrepreneurial business background includes roles at KPMG Consulting, Dean Witter Financial Services (now Morgan Stanley), and IBM. He is founder and president of JC Ventures, Inc., a management consulting business.

Links

LinkedIn: in/JimCampbell

Book: Madoff Talks: Uncovering the Untold Story Behind the Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme in History

More about Bernie Madoff and Madoff Talks:

Wall Street Journal: Bernie Madoff Dead at 82

CNBC: Bernie Madoff dies, Mastermind of the Nation’s Biggest Investment Fraud

More about Sam Bankman-Fried:

Exclusive: SBF secretly funded crypto news site

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on FacebookTwitterInstagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

297 GrubHub: Bedroom Start Up To Billion Dollar Category King with Mike Evans, Grubhub Founder & Author of Hangry

FYD - Episode 297 Mike Evans

Plato once said that Necessity is the mother of Invention. This could not be anymore true with Category Design, and for our guest today, Mike Evans.

Mike Evans is the founder of Grubhub, a category in food delivery service that was born from the necessity of having a multitude of options in one app, rather than having to look for it in different websites or printed pamphlets. From a budding delivery guide, Mike grew his company into a premier delivery ordering platform, and became Category King in this regard.

On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we go through Mike Evans’ journey, from the spark of the idea to managing a successful startup and beyond.

Mike Evans on the inception of Grubhub

The conversation starts off with Mike sharing how their love for great food made them a big fan of ordering.

“I live in a household with a woman who loves to cook. Because we like to eat, sometimes we don’t feel like cooking. And when I say we, I mean her – I helped mildly. And maybe it’s because we’re getting a little older or whatever, sometimes you just don’t feel like the rigmarole of going out to a restaurant and sitting down and that. And there’s this magical ability to press a button on your Star Trek communicator and have a very nice person show up at your house with some very warm food from one of your favorite local restaurants. It’s a fucking miracle.”

– Mike Evans

Grubhub came at a time that the home internet is still finding its foothold in everyone’s household, and is one of the first few apps you’ll find in the App Store.

Necessity brings Innovation

But as the idea might seem like a simple one nowadays, it’s surprising that we haven’t thought of it sooner, even as a simple website or catalog.

Of course, there was the yellow pages, but it’s not like there’s a dedicated section there for restaurants, and the numbers aren’t always updated. And you still have to resort to pamphlets to find out what’s on the menu, so can be quite redundant.

“I just wanted to find who delivered to me, and the Yellow Pages was a terrible, a terrible way to organize that information. It was just alphabetical sorted for the whole city and Chicago is 25 miles tall and 3 miles wide. And so the restaurants that deliver to the White Sox area, don’t deliver to the cubby area. Not useful to see it in a in a big Yellow Pages book. And so that was the original idea.”

– Mike Evans

While there were some restaurants that were doing online ordering at the time, it wasn’t what Mike has originally had in mind. He just wanted to have the location and contact details of a restaurant, as well as and updated menu of what they offer. Eventually they would expand Grubhub to be an ordering platform as well, but that’s a few years down the road.

Mike Evans: Content comes first

Now that he has the idea for it, the next step was creating the business and driving traffic into it. Mike Evans explains that the common trap among starting business that bridge two markets together is that they often cater to just one end or the other.

According to Mike, before you even get to any side of the market, you first need to create great content for your business. In his case, he built out the online menu guide first for high-traffic restaurants before marketing it to potential users and showing restaurant owners that it is a viable product.

He basically found a way to get value on his business that doesn’t depend on either side of the network to start.

Mike also commented that there’s a common misconception that you have to be the first in order to corner a big chunk of the market. For him, being the First Best is important, as you will be used and remember much better this way by users, rather just having a clunky business model that happened to come out first.

To hear more from Mike Evans and his startup journey, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Mike Evans founded GrubHub in his spare bedroom and grew it into the multi-billion-dollar online food delivery colossus that is a household name.

In Hangry, his insightful and hilarious memoir, he reveals the inside story of how a pizza craving turned into a hobby, and then became a business, and then ultimately grew into a multi-billion-dollar behemoth that changed the way we eat.

Shocking everyone, at the pinnacle of startup success, Mike leaves it all behind, quitting the company he started to bike across the United States.

Links

Connect with Mike Evans!

Mike’s Website | Linkedin | Twitter | Instagram | Hangry on Amazon Books

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on FacebookTwitterInstagram and subscribe on iTunes!

165 16 Learnings From Marketing Legend George Lois

LOM_Episodes-165 George Lois

The Wall Street Journal says, “George Lois is the one the only prodigy or fathead, founder of agencies, creator of Legends, George Lewis is a genuine advertising superhero”. George Lois is well known if not famous for designing culture, changing cover images for Esquire magazine, and his “call your cable company and tell them I want my MTV”. That campaign made the music video category and made MTV the Category King. In his life and career, he broke every rule, created legendary categories and brands, and he did it in a brash, bold, exciting way.

Sadly, we recently lost this legend at 91 years old. George Lois died just three months after his beloved wife, Rosemary died. And he is one of my heroes, a man that so many of us in marketing owe so much. And yet, most young people in entrepreneurship, marketing and creative endeavors and design. Don’t really know of him. But if you’ve ever done anything in entrepreneurship in category design or marketing, that breaks boundaries, you’re following in George’s footsteps, and you might not even know it.

Today, let’s dig into some of George’s life’s teachings. Because if you want to become legendary, you have to study the legends.

Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind.

George Lois and a Damn Good Advice

George Lewis was born in June 1931, and he passed in November 2022. And it is said that in the end, we are all remembered for two dates, and a dash. And I’m here to tell you that George made some legendary shit out of his dash.

I want to focus on a book of his called Damn Good Advice for People with Talent, How to unleash your creative potential by America’s master communicator, George Lois. If you have not read this book yet, I would suggest you do so.

What I want to share with you are some of the learnings from this book – not all of them, but some of them that really have spoken to me over the years and made a big difference for me that I think might make a big difference for you.

Force a Choice

Idea number one is to Force a Choice. At the very beginning of damn good advice, George says this:

“There are only four types of person you can be: one, very bright, industrious, [your perfect]. Two, very bright lazy [a damn shame]. Three, stupid lazy, you’ll sit on your ass, so you’re a wash. And four, stupid industrious [uh oh, you’re dangerous]. If you’re a number one or a number two, you’ll get a lot out of this book, if you’re number three, or number four, why you reading this book?” – George Lois

So right off the top and this landmark piece of work by George, he’s doing what legendary brands do, which is they attract who they are for, and they repel who they are against. Legendary brands force a choice, not a comparison. And best I can tell, that’s how George lived his life.

You are who you are

Big Idea number two: Around here, we would express it as Follow Your Different. In George words, he writes:

“Whether you’re male, female, black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, ethnic, or gay, and wherever you work, you are who you are. And that’s what you are, and be damn proud of it. Don’t change your name. Don’t change your accent, don’t change your heritage, don’t denigrate a humble upbringing. Be true to yourself, and you’ll ring true to the world.” – George Lois

To learn more about the different teachings of George Lois, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

George Lois

Links

Learn more about George Lois

Website | Wiki | Books

More about George Lois:

NYTimes

The Atlantic

Washington Post

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on FacebookTwitterInstagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

296 Our Worst Episode with Neil Pearlberg, Santa Cruz Surf & Skateboard Podcast Legend from Off The Lip Radio

296 FYD - Neil Pearlberg

On almost every episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we strive to provide radically valuable, radically different real dialogues that hopefully make a big difference. Today, we aspire to do none of that. Because what you’re about to hear is a fun funny ADHD conversation with our guest, my buddy and Santa Cruz icon, Neil Pearlberg.

So sit back and listen to two buddies have a conversation while the cocktail flows and the better judgment goes out of the window.

Neil Pearlberg On podcast high jinks and Cameo

The conversation begins with some light-hearted ribbing about podcasting, and how they don’t get together often anymore unless there’s a podcast. There’s also a couple of stories about their previous attempts and always having an issue every time they do so.

Afterwards, Christopher brings up the idea of Cameo, and maybe hiring someone to do audiobook readings of their Category Pirates mini books. They muse if UFC fighters could be good audio books readers, and also wonder how much they would charge if they set up their own Cameo.

Neil Pearlberg on high-profile guests to the podcast

The conversation then shifts to the past guests they’ve had on their respective podcasts, particularly the higher-profiled ones.

Neil recalls the time when he had Jimmy Panetta on as his guest, back when he was still a District Attorney and was running for Congress. He remembered how nervous he was and how he wanted to ask great questions rather than the usual ones they dish out at interviews.

So as Neil’s interview winds down and he is down, to his last question, he decides to take a chance.

“So at the end of my 10 questions. I’m like, fuck it, I’m just gonna ask the guy. Because I know he’s gonna say No, and I’m not afraid of the word No.

So I said, “Mr. Panetta, What could you tell me? What it was like to be in the situation room with you and Obama went off to bin Laden? Can you describe to me that process?” I’m thinking, “Fuck no. Hey, that’s top secret”, you know?

He answers, “Do you have half an hour?” Yes, sir. I do. And he told that story about the whole thing with the three helicopters and that black ops and Navy Seals and the whole thing was badass. was pretty cool.”

– Neil Pearlberg

Getting Banned on Twitter

Christopher then talks about Twitter, and given its recent trends, how he got suspended for the most ridiculous reasons.

One of his suspensions was from an offensive Covid tweet, where he sarcastically replies that Bill Gates has a farm that puts Covid on 5G towers (a weird conspiracy hoax perpetuated at the time). Unfortunately, Twitter customer service bots can’t detect sarcasm, and he was suspended the next day, although he got immediately reinstated once he deleted the tweet.

Though given the current trend, getting banned or suspended on Twitter is almost a badge of honor for some, especially if their ban came from the most ridiculous or offhand reason. Which is sad, because despite its flaws, Twitter remains one of the few places were people could have an open discourse, provided it is executed properly.

To hear more from Christopher Lochhead and Neil Pearlberg, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Since September 2009, Neil Pearlberg has written over 200 articles covering the sport of surfing, as well as skateboarding, and soccer, for the Bay Area News Group, & Santa Cruz Waves.

He is also the host of the “Off the Lip Radio Show”, & Hour Local Radio Show aired on Santa Cruz Radio Show KSCO AM 1080, FM 104.1, ksco.com and streamed on Santa Cruz Waves Facebook Page.

Neil has also published articles in Adventure Sports Journal, National Geographic, Stand Up Paddle Board Magazine.

Links

Connect with Neil Pearlberg!

Off the Lip Radio | Instagram | Twitter | Linkedin

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on FacebookTwitterInstagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

164 How to be a Legendary Creator/Writer: Sachit Gupta & Christopher Lochhead Unpack #1 Bestseller Snow Leopard

LOM_Episodes-164 - Sachit Gupta & Christopher Lochhead

Recently, I was a guest with the legendary Sachit Gupta on his fantastic podcast called Conscious Creators, which I highly recommend. During our conversation on his podcast, we unpack Category Pirates’ most recent book Snow Leopard. Our producer Jason DeFilippo heard this podcast and thought it’d be a great idea to drop it here for you.

What you’re about to hear is me and Satya go deep on what it takes to be a successful native digital creator slash writer.

Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind.

The Reason for Podcasting

The conversation starts off with a discussion of how the two first met, and it was through the legendary podcaster Jordan Harbinger. Christopher was looking into getting sponsors and thinking about was to monetize his podcast, and was recommended to Sachit Gupta this way.

While he did get ideas on different styles of monetization, the biggest thing that Christopher got out of the conversation was the realization that monetization was not his primary focus on doing podcasts.

“I sort of had this aha that said, “Hey, wait a minute, dude, this was actually never about money”. And if I want to make money, I know how to go do that. So you sort of set my head straight, and that the emphasis was on the wrong syllable that if I wanted to make money, I knew how to go make money in a way that was much more exponential than being essentially an ad salesperson.

The real gift you gave me around podcasting, was that I’m not doing this to monetize.”

– Christopher Lochhead

Sachit Gupta on Monetizing Directly vs Indirectly

One of the things that Sachit wanted to share was that one doesn’t have to monetize directly. Focus on making good content first and foremost, so that you can reach out and cultivate an audience naturally, rather than going for cookie-cutter approaches for a short-term viral status.

“Here’s what I see happening in this greater world right now: there’s a stat that I think like 75% of youngsters want to be YouTubers, and the path most of them see in front of them is go on YouTube or something else and create content that’s for the extremes, because that’s what spreads. And then once you chase views and get to a certain level of audience, you can monetize in some way, right. And if you don’t become big, you can’t monetize. In your book, you call like the obvious content, which is not really the stuff that’s useful.”

– Sachit Gupta

While there is merit to uploading consistent content, you don’t have to flood your audience with bit-sized content that is just a big nothing burger. Creating meaningful content, let’s say once every week or two is way better than just dropping portion-sized content that just adds to the collective brain-rot of society.

The Content Pyramid

The topic then shifts to the concept of the content pyramid, and what types of people thrive in each level.

Consumers, for example, are at base of the pyramid and consists of the largest section of it. In internet culture, there is something known as the 1% rule, which states that on social media platforms, 1% create while 99% consume.

Most people spend their entire lives being content consumers—not content creators. And that’s totally fine, so long as you understand you’re not “playing the game.” You’re sitting on the sidelines watching the game.

In order to “get in the game,” you must move out of consumption and up The Content Pyramid.

To hear more of the conversation between Sachit Gupta and Christopher Lochhead, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Sachit Gupta

Connect with Sachit Gupta!

Website | Conscious Creators Show | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on FacebookTwitterInstagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

295 How To Have A Legendary Career In Tech, Designing The A.I. Category, & IPOing with Bruce Cleveland, Bestselling Author of Traversing the Traction Gap

FYD - Episode 295 Bruce Cleveland

On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we go deep with one of my favorite people in Silicon Valley, Bruce Cleveland.

Bruce Cleveland has had a career in Silicon Valley for over 40 years. And he’s pretty much done it with building companies, technologies, categories, and brands, as well as working on and with some of Silicon Valley’s best executive teams and entrepreneurs. He’s been a successful investor.

He’s also a bestselling author. In fact, one of my favorite books is Traversing the Traction Gap, which he wrote. And I recommend it to all entrepreneurs.

By the end of this dialogue, we hope you’ll have gained radical new insights into how you can do legendary things in your life and career.

Traversing the Traction Gap

The conversation begins with a discussion of Bruce Cleveland’s book, Traversing the Traction Gap. His best-selling book was praised by Silicon Valley insiders and many entrepreneurs for the information and insights it provided.

Bruce shares that his reason for writing the books stems from people trying to make VC seem like a mystical thing, rather than explaining things in a clear way.

“The reason I wrote it was because I began to grow pretty weary of really, really smart people not making it. Their companies not surviving for a variety of reasons. And they all tended to be pattern-matched against those reasons. I was also not happy with the venture community in its entirety, because I don’t think it was honest with a lot of these entrepreneurs as to why they weren’t getting investments, etc. And I kind of wanted to demystify those issues.”

– Bruce Cleveland

Bruce Cleveland on helping out entrepreneurs

Another reason Bruce gives for writing out the book is that he wanted to help out fellow entrepreneurs who may be feeling lost, or guide those who are doing well into things that could make their ventures better.

“The purpose and objective of this book was to share with entrepreneurs that, “hey, here’s some things you could possibly do to significantly enhance the probability of success.”

You know, we only get one shot at this life, I felt like I owed it back to the entrepreneurs of the world who take all the risk as to what I saw, from my vantage point, both as an operating exec and as an investor, to why I thought things weren’t working for the vast majority of startups.”

– Bruce Cleveland

C3.ai and Enterprise AI

The conversation then goes to Bruce’s latest ventures into category creation. Together with Tom Siebel, they founded C3.ai, which delves into enterprise AI.

Bruce then talks about how it came to be, and how working on C3.ai has been so far.

“I think this is one of the benefits of having a CEO who understands and believes in category creation, is that it as your job as CMO becomes much easier to do.”

– Bruce Cleveland

When they started conceptualizing and creating the category of enterprise AI, the term wasn’t even on the radar. While there were companies who were doing something similar to a lesser degree, it wasn’t clearly defined, and no one was pursuing rapid advancement on it.

Now, it’s something that a lot of companies are looking at, and C3.ai is at the forefront of it.

To hear more from Bruce Cleveland and how to have a legendary career in VC and tech, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Bruce Cleveland’s career in Tech spans more than 40 years as a venture investor and operating executive.

He was a first investor and a board member of Marketo, which held an IPO in 2013 and was acquired in 2018 by Adobe for $4.75B.

He was an early-stage investor in other notable companies such as C3.ai, Doximity, Vlocity, and Workday. Bruce also held senior executive roles in engineering, product management and product marketing at Apple, AT&T, C3.ai, Oracle and Siebel Systems.

His book, Traversing the Traction Gap, is a prescriptive guide for startups and new product initiatives within larger companies helping teams to use ‘market engineering’ techniques to successfully transition from Ideation to Scale.

He attended the US Military Academy, West Point, New York, and received a BS in business administration from CSU, Sacramento. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Connect with Bruce Cleveland!

LinkedIn | Twitter | Website

Check out his book here: Traversing the Traction Gap

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on FacebookTwitterInstagram and subscribe on iTunes!

Pause for Democracy

FYD-Pause for Democracy - Midterm Elections

In observance of the Midterm Elections in the United States, we will not be dropping full normal episodes of Follow Your Different this week. And if you are American, I do hope you get out and vote. It is, in my opinion, one of the most patriotic things you can do.

I also just wanted to read you a little something that I wrote recently on LinkedIn that I think is germane. Because whatever happens in the American midterms, roughly 50% of the country is going to be elated, and 50% of the country is going to be pissed. So let me do a little reading for you here.

“Today, more Americans hate more Americans than ever. And yet, we all know hating someone because they disagree with you might be the biggest stupid of them all. So how did this happen in the oldest surviving democracy in human history?

It’s because politicians, media, and social media, on both sides, create hate. Politicians, media, and social media, on both sides. monetize hate. We took the bait and internalize the hate, but it’s not too late.

We can start really thinking. We can start really dialoguing. We can start really making a difference. American on American hate stops with us. This is something every American can be a leader on, and frankly, everybody in the world can be a leader on. American on American hate stops with us. God bless America and God bless the world.”

Pause for Democracy

LOM-Pause for Democracy - Midterm Elections

In observance of the Midterm Elections in the United States, we will not be dropping full normal episodes of Lochhead on Marketing this week. And if you are American, I do hope you get out and vote. It is, in my opinion, one of the most patriotic things you can do.

I also just wanted to read you a little something that I wrote recently on LinkedIn that I think is germane. Because whatever happens in the American midterms, roughly 50% of the country is going to be elated, and 50% of the country is going to be pissed. So let me do a little reading for you here.

“Today, more Americans hate more Americans than ever. And yet, we all know hating someone because they disagree with you might be the biggest stupid of them all. So how did this happen in the oldest surviving democracy in human history?

It’s because politicians, media, and social media, on both sides, create hate. Politicians, media, and social media, on both sides. monetize hate. We took the bait and internalize the hate, but it’s not too late.

We can start really thinking. We can start really dialoguing. We can start really making a difference. American on American hate stops with us. This is something every American can be a leader on, and frankly, everybody in the world can be a leader on. American on American hate stops with us. God bless America and God bless the world.”

294 Quit A Job You Hate For The Work You Love with Pat Hiban, Bestselling Author of The Quitter’s Manifesto

FYD - Episode 294 Pat Hiban The Quitters Manifesto

On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow your Different, we discuss the idea of keeping a successful career that you have stopped liking a long time ago versus quitting it to find one that you find more fulfilling. And who better to have this conversation than with our guest, Pat Hiban.

Pat Hiban is the bestselling author of the book, The Quitter’s Manifesto. He is an investor, author, podcaster, and a guy having a very good time living an epic life.

By the end of this dialog, you will gain radical new insights to build your muscles for designing the life of your choosing, and not just do something because of a current trend.

Pat Hiban on The Quitter’s Manifesto

The conversation starts with Pat Hiban’s book, The Quitter’s Manifesto, particularly on the topic of why he wrote it, and his inspiration while doing so.

Pat shares that during the past year or so that we were all locked up, people had time to think a lot about their work conditions, and what they want to do in life.

“It was during COVID. I just heard of a lot of people making decisions to change jobs and the change the location of where they were working from. Also, we had this great resignation going on.

I saw it, and I called Tim and I was like, “Tim, the one thing that I learned from you, you are my mentor in quitting, and I said, we should write a book on quitting.”” – Pat Hiban

So Pat and Tim Road pooled their thoughts together and The Quitter’s Manifesto was born.

Quitting is Scary

Pat’s idea for the book was that it should be a tactical, step-by-step book. So first things first, they have to acknowledge the reality of things: that quitting a stable career is scary.

“The first chapter in the book is called, Acknowledging the Truth. And the truth is, quitting is very, very scary. It’s like going to a cliff and jumping off.” – Pat Hiban

For entrepreneurs, taking the jump is just Tuesday to them. This is because before they jump, they already have a parachute or glider ready even before they take the leap. Normal people do not always have those prepared beforehand, and jump blindly to their doom.

So the aim of The Quitter’s Manifesto is to create rope swings that they can hang on each chapter, and at the end of it all, a net of safety when you finally decide to take the plunge.

The Company Healthcare Trap

The conversation then shifts to the topic of job fluidity being hampered by healthcare being tied to their employment. There are a lot of people who stick it out with big corporations for less pay, because of the healthcare benefits that they could have. So a lot of people end up being stuck or always teetering at the edge of quitting, until they find something with enough income that it overshadows the healthcare benefits they get.

The weird thing about this is that they may already be earning a lot more monthly than that potential “healthcare benefit” might provide, but they still hedge because they don’t want to let go of that supposed “security blanket”.

“I talked to a guy yesterday that had a family health care plan, it was worth $2,000 a month. And he wouldn’t quit his work because of it, even though he was flipping real estate on the side, making 400 grand a year. He wouldn’t go to flipping real estate full time, just because he wanted that healthcare. And then he finally did quit, and he realized how minuscule that the healthcare actually was, it didn’t matter.” – Pat Hiban

To hear more from Pat Hiban and The Quitter’s Manifesto, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Pat Hiban

As a young child, Pat Hiban was labeled “learning disabled with speech deficiencies” and put into special classes.

Through his teenage years, Pat fell forward through life and tried everything he could to find his purpose, including 2 years as a 4th string player (benchwarmer) on the lacrosse team.

He graduated from college with a degree in sociology and a 2.6 GPA. After being turned down for several corporate sales positions out of college, Pat jumped into real estate and sold 10 homes his first year (6 condos, 1 house, and 3 mobile homes); he earned a total of $13,200.

Through the consistent application of 6 steps, Pat grew his real estate business each and every year.

In 2004, he became the #1 RE/MAX agent in the world.

In 2006, he was honored with the same recognition by Keller Williams Realty. Now, having sold over 4,000 homes and over one-billion dollars in volume, Pat is one of only a handful of residential real estate agents internationally to hold the title of Billion Dollar Agent. Pat is also an avid real estate investor, a venture capitalist, and the founder of Rebus University: an online training platform for real estate agents who want the secrets that most successful agents try to keep to themselves.

On average, Pat takes 153 days off each year to spend with his wife of 18 years and his two daughters.

In his book, he outlines the exact process he follows to earn more working less so you can too. He lives in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland.

Pat’s book is titled “6 steps to 7 figures” and includes a glowing introduction by Gary Keller, co-founder of Keller Williams Realty and three-time bestselling author.

Connect with Pat Hiban!

Gobundance.com | HibanDigital.com | LinkedIn | Real Estate Rockstars podcast

Check out Pat Hiban’s works here: Amazon Books

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