Lessons from Tim S. Grover and Andy Frisella
Ideas, Thoughts and Quotes pulled from…
Insanity, Intensity, and Becoming a Peak Performer ft. Tim S. Grover, with Andy Frisella – MFCEO199
The True Meaning of Being a Good Leader
Friendship destroys leadership and respect. When you’re leading people and let them cut corners, things slip, because you think you’re friends with them. That’s being an a**hole. People mistake that being a leader has nothing to do with being a friend. It has to do with holding accountable and setting an example. That’s it. When you’re leading someone and (business), become friends, and the person you look after starts cutting corner, doing things wrong. They feel you’re friends and they will loose respect for you as an authority figure. You’re not friend with the people you manage. The way you’re their best friend, is by holding them accountable to their best self. That’s the biggest challenge I have with other leaders.
Andy Frisella [00:17:05]
Routines
The best athletes [, performers] have routines that prepare them, get them ready for the game [-as sort of a checklist.]. If you don’t have a routine, it’s very hard to pinpoint where things can [or did] go wrong; which variable, what changed. Excellence doesn’t happen by accident.
Tim S. Grover [00:46:34]
If you want to be able to actually identify which factor was critical for the the changed outcome, try to keep the number of variables changed as low as possible; stay as close to AB-testing as possible. Changed variables can also interact with other, already tried and tested variables, be a confounding factor, amplifying, attenuating or even reversing their initial effect, when combined; but maybe only then, and not when changed independently.
Making Decisions in Life
If it’s your idea, follow through with it. See, where it can take you. At some point in your life, you got to stop making suggestions and go to start making decisions.
Tim S. Grover [00:50:55]
The Value of Making Mistakes
Start with actions. Looking from a leadership standpoint, I much rather hire someone who is aggressively making mistakes. I can deal with that. Not making anything happen, you’re of no value.
Tyler Haegele [00:51:03]
A work environment with a no-blame culture is certainly facilitating such a behavior that helps to uncover potholes, ways how not to do something in the future, which is eventually just unused improvement potential.
Also, under HR considerations, bear in mind Tyler’s following statement…
I can train that guy, point him in the right direction.
Tyler Haegele [00:51:24]
I never fired someone for making mistakes with good intentions. Maybe I got mad. Money is lost only in the short-term. See it as education.
Andy Frisella [00:51:30]
Even though learning from winning, or other’s failures is cheaper, making failures your own and learning from them (!) does not mean money is lost for nothing.
When you don’t do anything, the people above you, who put you in the position of leadership, now they’re saying you’re lazy – not that you’re afraid or scared of doing failures.
Andy Frisella [00:51:52]
After Winning
[On Coolers, Closers, Cleaners, from his book Relentless:] Coolers don’t really learn at all; they come in and do their job. Closers learn from failures; you teach them, they learn that. Cleaners learn from losing and winning, that’s a huge difference. They have the ability to learn when they win. There’s so much to learn that way, to learn of how, of what you did to get there, what’s the next step.
Tim S. Grover [00:52:13]
Extending even more on Ray Dalio’s Principle, to not only learn from your own mistakes but from those of others’ as well.
What could you’ve done [and could do], to win by more?
Tim S. Grover [00:52:37]
There is always room for improvement! And to tie in with Bill Gates’ saying “Don’t make the same decision twice.”: things going according to plan is the first indicator for you to change, since change in the outside environment is inevitably coming. Prepare early.
The Power of your Dark Side
All this stuff can be taught. It’s not in you. You got to trade one addiction for another. But when you do, make sure it’s a beneficial one. Because it’s a constant cycle. That way, you’re either evolving to get better, or to get worse. And if you’re staying in the same place, guess what, you’re getting worse.
Tim S. Grover [01:01:30]
Nonetheless, bear in mind Ray Dalio saying: “I don’t know that being obsessed and striving to achieve at the highest level is actually better than wanting a relaxed chilled live. I just know that given my disposition, it was my only option.” – taken from Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu: After Impact: Brendon Burchard [00:17:00].
To which Tom himself, staying with the addiction analogy, adds: “Being obsessed is my narcotic of choice. It is so invigorating, it allows me to dominate a room, to learn faster, get people to pay attention to me, paint a vision that people want to live inside of it.” [00:18:09].
Channeling your Dark Side
However, it has nothing to do with being a jerk. If people say telling the truth and working hard means being a jerk, then that’s it. If sacrificing, not hanging out with your boys on Friday, because you got something else more important to do, for example work, personal development, family, if that is called being a jerk, then become a jerk. […]
Tim S. Grover [01:02:25]
Even though balance in your physical, spiritual, mental and social/ emotional life is important, “too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life.” – Stephen R. Covey, p. 115
When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, “licking the earth.”
From “A Twentieth-Century Testimony”, by Malcolm Muggeridge
[…] The dark side is what’s special to you, what lights your own fire. It can be about drug, sex and alcohol for some. But also hardship in earlier days, being raised by a single parent, and using that as your personal fuel, to make a better life for yourself and those individuals around you. Things that make you high, feel good, those are earned. In moments of uncertainty and emptiness, loss of direction, control, that’s when your dark side takes control of you.
Tim S. Grover [01:02:22]
A just and peaceful rest, enjoying the finer things in life, comes after harnessing the power of your dark side, after flipping the switch of some otherwise self-destructive and anti-social, non-fulfilling behavior back to social.
Anger and Negativity as Underrated Motivators
It’s control. If you can’t perform when you’re calm, you not gonna perform when you’re mad. You got to be able to control it. It’s controlled anger, rage. Channel that rage into something productive, use it to make a point, to get what you want, to help the business, your family.
Tim S. Grover [01:10:25]
A person that immediately comes to my mind, embodying those values and character traits – calm and focused from the outside, but able to channel his deep inner dark side to achieve greatness and produce calmness of the mind – is Kai Greene:
“There’s something else that has to be motivating me. [I have to] be able to call on that when I need to, and that’s what makes me proficient at my job…” – Kai Greene
If you don’t control it, it controls you.
Tim S. Grover [01:10:25]
Or, as one of Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People reveals to us: Act or be acted upon!
Great performers don’t think about the ones that they won, they think about the one that got away.
Tim S. Grover [01:15:07]
Even if the frail physical human embodiment of our-Self could not withstand in our pursuit of greatness and it would entail its demise – “I endured an 11 hour major back surgery last Tuesday. Do I have any regrets? […] when I squatted that 800lbs I would do 4 reps instead of 2, that is my only regret in my career. Those 2 reps I did still haunts me today because I know I had 4 in me but the coward in me only did 2.” – Ronnie Coleman
Process over Wins
Wins, accomplishments, you enjoy it, but you don’t celebrate.
Tim S. Grover [01:16:21]
If “success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal” (Earl Nightingale, Lead the Field), isn’t then the win, the accomplishment in and of itself celebration enough? Don’t get distracted by the small stuff; which undoubtedly is necessary for the big wins to occur, and are a stepping stone for you and your confidence to build on and feed of, to keep the momentum of success going.
…because if you do, your competition is coming up on you.
Tyler Haegele [01:16:23]
Always think Continuous Improvement, so that the ever changing outside environment – time, circumstances and your competition – has no time to catch up on you, realizing your goals, of which full accomplishment is not possible, but also was never intended to in the first place.
Examples
“… as great as today feels, as great as this day is, in all honesty, we’re five weeks behind the 2017 season to the most teams in the league.” – Bill Belichick, New England Patriots, morning following their win of the 2016 Super Bowl (YT; Twitter)
Tim S. Grover [01:16:40]
“That damn game cost me a week of recruiting [time]” – Nick Saban, head football coach at the University of Alabama since 2007, about being in the national championship (News article;Twitter)
Vaughn Kohler [01:17:05]
Definitely leaders who are truly in love with the process and making progress, not the outcome itself or some arbitrarily decided on snapshots, measures and validations of the current status in comparison to others. Winning for them means daily progression.
You get what you deserve
Before you get a paycheck, you need to get a reality check first.
Tim S. Grover [01:21:25]
