#34 - Purpose w/ Nick Bradley (Business Growth & Scale-Up Specialist)

Nick Bradley joins us to chat about a lot of important things, including knowing your purpose, the importance of process, using fear as a positive, and the how running allows helps you overcome roadblocks in life. 

Nick is a renown business growth and scale-up specialist with a track record of facilitating massive mergers and acquisitions. He co-founded the Fielding Group, a growth accelerator that helps companies improve business performance, which in turn helps business leaders unlock their full potential. 

Transcript

Description

Nick Bradley joins us to chat about a lot of important things, including knowing your purpose, the importance of process, using fear as a positive, and the how running allows helps you overcome roadblocks in life. 

Nick is a business growth and scale-up specialist with a track record of facilitating mergers and acquisitions. He co-founded the Fielding Group, which is a growth accelerator that helps companies improve business performance, which in turn helps business leaders unlock their full potential. 

Transcript

Erol Senel:

Hello everyone and welcome to Success Shorts, I'm Erol Senel. Today, we're joined by Nick Bradley, who is a world-renowned business growth and scale-up specialist. Nick co-founded the Fielding Group, which is a growth accelerator that helps companies improve business performance, which in turn helps business leaders unlock their full potential. Additionally, he has a tremendous track record of facilitating massive mergers and acquisitions, which we definitely hit on throughout the episode.

Erol Senel:

Now, as you'll come to find out, Nick is a really engaging guy and we chat about a lot of important things, including knowing your purpose, the importance of process, using fear as a positive, and the benefits of running. In fact, Nick may have inspired me to train for my first ultra marathon. That said, I really enjoyed this chat with Nick and I got a ton out of it, so I hope you do too. Let's go.

Erol Senel:

Nick. It's an absolute pleasure to have you.

Nick Bradley:

Hey, Erol, fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

Erol Senel:

Definitely. You're joining us from the UK today. I'm curious, whereabouts are you?

Nick Bradley:

I live about two hours north of London in a tiny little village called Wansford. It's massively small. It's got like a few houses in a pub, and that's about it. But I live in a country house out here, and I've got a couple of young daughters and they enjoy the countryside. And I do a lot of running, marathon running, trail running, all that stuff, so I'm in a perfect part of the UK to do all of that.

Erol Senel:

It sounds wonderful. I'm also a marathoner, so I could definitely just kind of imagine what that's like. And a few houses in a pub, what else do you need?

Nick Bradley:

You don't need anything. You don't. I used to live in the big city. I grew up in Australia and I lived in Sydney for about seven or eight years. I was in London for a while and then I was in New York for a while. And so when I got married and had my daughters, we thought, you know what, we just don't need any of that chaos. We just need somewhere which is a bit more of a retreat that we can kind of just enjoy the countryside and enjoy the open spaces.

Erol Senel:

I mean, you bring a unique perspective. You're actually the first guest that I'm speaking to that resides outside of the US.

Nick Bradley:

Cool.

Erol Senel:

I am kind of curious as to what's going on in your world and in the world you operate in, in London. What has your experience been with COVID on a local level, and then I'm curious what you've actually learned about yourself during this really unique time?

Nick Bradley:

Yeah. I mean, it's a great question because there's so many different ways of answering it. You know what I mean? Because it's not really like COVID's this thing that just lasted three weeks. It's been pretty much most of 2020, and it looks like it's going to be a fair bit of our future. It doesn't look like it's going away anywhere soon.

Nick Bradley:

In the UK, without getting political about it because I'm not really that political anyway in terms of my thinking, we were quite slow to lock things down. We had a pretty full-on wave that hit sort of early on around that sort of April/May time. And we have got a secondary wave that's coming in pretty strong right now where there's a three-tier system in the UK, where depending on where your based... And the UK's not big. Remember, it has a land mass. It's a pretty small sort of islands, so to speak. There's different tiers, literally, within miles away from where I'm living and various parts. And what that basically means is if you're in a Tier 3 lockdown, you can't really go out anywhere. All the pubs and restaurants are closed. Tier 1, you can still do certain things, but the geographic land mass around that is quite small.

Nick Bradley:

It's been interesting. Put it this way, I work, as I said with, with lots of different business owners of different sizes, and I've seen two different things happen. I've seen some people go into massive fear mindset, "Absolutely, this is the end of everything." And a lot of them hibernated at the very beginning, literally had to lock themselves away to kind of deal with what was going on. They couldn't understand how much of a paradigm shift this was going to be.

Nick Bradley:

And then I've had others who have done the opposite, the sort of fight or flight. They've definitely fought. And they've doubled down on marketing, doubled down on their businesses, and some of them have done really well and have grown. I mean, one client of mine has tripled his revenue in the last four or five months.

Nick Bradley:

And me, personally, I spent a lot of time on my own personal development. I have routines and habits and things in my life, which helped me manage times when things can feel uncertain. I've found this amusing in terms of how I've managed it personally. I've seen my family go through some challenges, particularly with things like homeschooling with the kids. My businesses have grown through the last few months, all of them.

Nick Bradley:

The thing that I've found the hardest, I think, has been, I love to travel, I love to have experiences and I love the concept of freedom, and the fact that I have felt constrained, that's been a bit more challenging than perhaps I anticipated. It hasn't sort of made us suddenly go, "Oh my God, what's going on," but it does make you appreciate and have gratitude for some of those freedoms that we did have before COVID hit.

Erol Senel:

Yeah. That last part, I think, is something that we probably took for granted our whole lives prior to this is just how good in many parts of the world, especially here in the US the amount of freedom that we have to just hop in a car and go wherever we want. I live in Southern New Hampshire and just to our south is Massachusetts, and they're having a far different experience with COVID where their rates are a lot higher and there's a different structure in place from how they're running their state versus how we're running our state.

Erol Senel:

Even going into Massachusetts is a little bit of like, "Oh, do I really want to do that because what does that entail?" Or if we want to go down to New York, do we have to quarantine when we come back? It's really weird to have to think that way after living a whole life of being able to pretty much do what you want.

Nick Bradley:

Yeah. And the one thing that I think with this is, I often say to myself, "What is the good in this," right? It's a question that I've asked myself around many challenges. But in this situation, and I don't mean to say this in a way that... Obviously, lots of people lost their lives, people who have had some absolute catastrophes through what's happened the last few months, but I've also seen different connections forming. I've seen people appreciate things maybe more than they did beforehand. And there is some good in that, regardless of it's surrounded by obviously lots of things that could be quite challenging.

Erol Senel:

A lot of people are starting to look for opportunities at this point now that initial shock of having to be somewhat sequestered and not being able to do everything. It's freed up energy to look at different ways to grow. As you said, you were focusing on personal growth, and I think a lot of people have started to do so because there's not a lot of options to do with other things. It's opened up horizons for that.

Erol Senel:

I appreciate you sharing all this, but I'd really like to get into a couple of topics with you because, I mean, you are an absolute force when it comes to a lot of fairly unique spaces, especially when it comes to business of scaling up and mergers and acquisitions. And these are worlds that I don't think everyone, unless you're in the investment world or in the high level business world that you really get to see all that often. I'm curious, besides our grandeur visions of what we see when we watch Succession or Billions on TV, what does this world look like for you? Because I have a very romanticized version of it, but I know that's not reality. What's this look like for you?

Nick Bradley:

Well, you know what, it's so funny you say that. I mean, Billions is probably my favorite TV show of all time and I like Succession too, so there you go. It's not that far removed. It's changing, but just to kind of draw on potentially the image that people may have of this world. I've done this for a decade or more, worked in private equity firms. I've gone and bought businesses, sold businesses, created a lot of value for shareholders, for myself, through that journey, and I transitioned out of it to do something slightly different now.

Nick Bradley:

I still apply in the same space, but I needed to get away from sort of the stereotype of what it is, because it's not that far removed from reality. It can be quite a toxic environment. Because when you're focused so much on money, I focused so much on creating value, sometimes the decisions that you make become clouded. And therefore, instead of trying to do things that can have a greater impact, and that means not just wealth but making a bigger difference in society or whatever that is, the world's in high level investment and hedge funds and all that sort of stuff, you can become almost intoxicated really in the fact that you can make a lot of cash. That's one of the things that's quite challenging about it.

Nick Bradley:

What's happening now is that people are kind of waking up to the fact that that's just not realistic, and you're starting to see these kind of Uber businesses be formed, like the classics of the Amazons of this world, the Apples. And you've got mega... I don't even know what the term is, when someone like Jeff Bezos is worth a couple of hundred billion, there's more power in these individuals and these large empires of businesses than potentially governments to make change. What you're starting to see now is you're starting to see a bit more... It's called things like conscious capitalism and the idea that companies can't just be there for profit, they've also got to be there for purpose. And I quite like that dynamic.

Nick Bradley:

The world that I now operate in is a mix between those things. Don't get me wrong, it's still ferocious in terms of value creation and making money. But to say that's all you do and that's accepted, that's not really where the game is being played. And I think back as we draw into COVID, if anything, what's happening right now is maybe shining a light on that even more so than what it has over the last few years, and so businesses have more of a responsibility to be thinking more holistically about the impact that they're making.

Erol Senel:

I know in that venture capital world, there is a real focus on efficiencies because you're going in, there's typically a shorter time horizon that you're with a company, and there's an exit strategy typically in that, if I'm correct. It that accurate?

Nick Bradley:

That's right.

Erol Senel:

Within that, there's for the past, probably two decades, just this overall theme of efficiency and lean and all of these other concepts that really try to drive down to really gain the most amount of productivity translating into each dollar that's spent, I think, has been something that's been hyper-focused on and we've lost something. And now you're starting to see a lot of conversations kind of take a step back. And I know that there's been a couple books out, actually slipping my mind right now as far as the title, but they focus on too much efficiency and where we lose our connection with the employees, with the community, with being a better global citizen and some of that.

Erol Senel:

To hear you say that, and redirecting the shift towards conscious capitalism or however you want to label that, I think that is something that's becoming more and more prevalent in the thought process, and that probably has to do with COVID. I think it probably has to do with a lot of the social change that's happening, probably because a lot of the people who work, worked out of things, might've been part of the dynamics that are feeling like they're underrepresented.

Nick Bradley:

Yeah. Exactly. And that side of things is also another importance challenge but complexity that's come in to the world of late. And I live on the side of the planet where we've just had Brexit, so that's caused a certain layer of disruption. And I think both of our countries have had sort of political instability, but there's a funny thing, right? If you simplify it all, and to kind of come back to your question about what is scaling and what does that mean in the world that I play in, and I can simplify like this is that the thing that really matters, right, is growth and there's different dimensions of growth.

Nick Bradley:

When I say that people will think of just a growing company. But you can have a company that's stalling and it might've grown. It might've been a startup that was doing really well, and all of a sudden it stopped and that happens, and sometimes that stopping isn't like a gradual thing. It kind of just happens, like hitting a wall. And then the other end of the paradigm, you've got businesses that are growing too quickly. A lot of the tech businesses.

Nick Bradley:

And so when I come in, and I've got different companies now, there are seven separate businesses, but when I come in and I work with founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors, I'm looking at it through the lens of growth and I'm looking at the various dynamics that underpin that growth. And there's two big things. One is the ability to generate revenue, which then obviously contributes to profit, which is the definition of value anyway. And it's the ability to have an intentional culture that drives that performance and drives that growth.

Nick Bradley:

And so if I use the example of a company that's in fast growth, and we saw this recently with what happened with Uber. They were growing too quickly, they got ahead of themselves. You could argue the leadership became really arrogant and the culture died, and then the business started to go backwards and and the share price drops. When you think about these dynamics, the simple thing is you've got to manage growth the positive and the negative connotations of that.

Erol Senel:

It's not even just on the business level, it's on the cultural level. Because I think all those things, like you were saying, they kind of merge together to create sustainability.

Nick Bradley:

Yeah. And sustainability [crosstalk 00:12:48] is a key part, you're right, 100% right. After 10 years of private equity, I created a methodology, which is nothing rocket science or anything like that. I call it the Six Peaks of Value Creation, and the six characteristics of all the companies that I worked in... The last company that I was personally involved in that sold back about three or four years ago, it's a Blackstone private equity group. We sold it for $2.3 billion. And a lot of what I learned from that journey, and previous ones, was that there are six characteristics and they are:

Nick Bradley:

Every company needs to have a strong purpose, a why behind what it does. It has to have a really good focus, or I call it a relentless focus on profitability. Even if it's not profitable now, it needs to understand the pathway towards it. It needs to have a really strong value proposition, and that's not just a product or service. It's also the experience that it provides for its ideal customers. It needs to have predictability of revenue, so that means an ideal flow of the right customers coming in driving recurring revenue. It's got to be underpinned by really strong processes, systems and automation. And it's got to have, at its heart, really high caliber, engaged people, which back to what we were saying beforehand, fires the culture which then drives the whole growth.

Nick Bradley:

And those six principles, characteristics, whatever you want to call them, when they're all focused on, there's a piece where they all fit together, think of it like a well-run machine, a real sort of well-oiled machine, that's when you start to get a business that is both valuable and sustainable.

Erol Senel:

One of the things I was curious about is, so you have these Six Peaks of Value Creation that you just laid out, as you were going through them, I mean, it makes complete sense from a business perspective. However, is there a way to kind of translate those six and apply them to each of us as individuals? How could we potentially look to do that so that we can be running our own machine a little bit better?

Nick Bradley:

Well, the one that really jumps out, and this is why I start with it, is purpose. This is probably the thing that isn't said. A lot of people will engage me to come into their businesses, and I suppose the area that I focus on mainly is helping an entrepreneur or a founder build their business and scale their business to the extent that they can sell it for eight to nine figures, so tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars within a three-year horizon. That's what I do, right?

Nick Bradley:

And when I come into a business that has that ambition, of course, people think that I'm going to start mucking around with the marketing and the sales and whatever else, the operations, but do you know what the answer is? I actually work on the person. I work on the person first who's running it, the leader, and then effectively that moves into the leadership team, the C-suite as it's sometimes called, and then it starts to move into the organization.

Nick Bradley:

And the reason is, and this is why I want to ask you a question this way, is that more often than not, if a person who's running an organization doesn't have a clear purpose, sometimes called a why, the reason why they are doing what they're doing, if they don't have a clear vision or direction, they don't have an end game. Whatever that is, even if that end game is selling the business for eight and nine figures, if they haven't got that clear and then if they haven't got a plan that brings those two elements together, the direction and the why, then all the rest of the stuff I talked about in the other peaks doesn't make a difference.

Erol Senel:

That makes complete sense.

Nick Bradley:

Yeah, and that's really back to the person. Often, I work with a leader so that they can step into the identity they need to create that outcome that they desperately want.

Erol Senel:

Then the other peaks just are basically conduits to bring that vision or that purpose to life.

Nick Bradley:

Absolutely. Because the strategy, the thing that comes out of that first conversation around purpose and around vision is a strategy. It's okay, let's say you want to sell your business for 100 million dollars in three years time and the gap at the moment to get there is substantial, but that's the ambition, that's what you want to do. Then we can go into, "Okay, well, what market are you operating in? How well are you currently, or can you solve a problem for your ideal customer that you've decided that you want to help? How precise is your sales and marketing plan?" But it all starts with understanding where you're going, because you can build back from there.

Erol Senel:

Where do you think people or businesses go wrong when it comes to having this stuff in place? Because I work in an environment where this isn't necessarily something new, but I feel like there's a lot of businesses that are either starting out or maybe they are mature and they've never drilled down to this. Where do you think businesses go wrong?

Nick Bradley:

The thing that I've found with private equity, and I'll sort of frame it from that experience, is sometimes people forget that businesses are organic, emotional beasts, as much as they are strategic and financial. And the reason for that, and this is kind of where people ask me all the time, "Nick, what's your definition of scale-up?" Because I own the scale-up space. That's where I play, right? That's not startup. That's not corporate.

Nick Bradley:

And the difference is this, is that from going from startup to scale-up, you have to have two really strong qualities. You need to be able to build teams, bring people into your organization who share the vision and can enable what you're trying to achieve. And that doesn't mean employees all the time. That could mean investors, it can mean suppliers, it can mean all sorts of things. And you have to be able to move from chaos, right, to something which is much more structured and complex. So often businesses that are really good at startup, they come with from a really creative underpinning, they struggle when they go into scale up because they can't cope with the fact that there's more complexity and they need to be able to simplify that complexity's restructure.

Nick Bradley:

To answer your question, a lot of businesses are looked at I think probably in a too shallow way. In my private equity days, we would just look at numbers. And a lot of the MBAs that came in and worked on the various boards that I run, they were all fixated by cashflow modeling and net present value calculations and all these things. And those things are important, right, but they're only half the story. And so what I find is that operating tempo, that ability to go in there and feel the company, to actually understand it, being a bit more intuitive, being able to get a pulse on the culture, being able to work out if the CEO really does have the mettle to take the business to where it needs to get to. Those are things that you can't really do on a spreadsheet. The difference is businesses that kind of get to the really extra ordinary levels of growth and value are the ones that can balance, dare I say it, the art and the science of business growth.

Erol Senel:

No, it makes sense. I'm going to change directions just a little bit here and I'm going to put this on you as a person, what's your purpose?

Nick Bradley:

I'll give you a little background. My purpose, my whole kind of reason for doing what I'm doing is I have a relentless desire to be the best version of myself, and that comes from some pretty harsh things that happened in my life. Nothing that anyone else hasn't gone through by the way, but various lessons that happened at various ages. And I've always had a really high level of expectation of what I can be. And to some extent, what I need to be to feel fulfilled.

Nick Bradley:

Then I had a separate gift, and that was from an early age I was always helping people achieve the same for themselves. I started a business at 18. I was a personal trainer. We're talking back in the 80s, right, in South Australia, where personal training these days, everyone's either had a personal trainer or ones. To start a personal training business when everyone would think it was crazy that you would yell at someone on a treadmill was... I'm deadly serious. But the funny thing about it was I had this kind of sense I had to help people step into their identity, step into themselves. And I was a quite high level basketball coach. And again, I was always helping people.

Nick Bradley:

My purpose in life is to become the best version of myself, so therefore that's almost like a never-ending purpose because I'm always growing and I'm relentless around that. And it's helping other people realize that same desire for themselves, whatever that level is. I choose to do that through business, through scale-up and a few other things I'm involved in, but that's what I'm constantly moving towards.

Erol Senel:

There was no hesitation to that so I have a feeling you were asked that before.

Nick Bradley:

It's not that I haven't been asked it by someone like yourself, it's also, I've asked that of myself. I have a saying that I say every day, it's like an affirmation. It's basically, "Be grateful, be brave, have faith and show up." It's almost like four pillars of my life, right. Be grateful for everything you have right now because you can't have fear when you have gratitude, right? Be brave. You've got to make decisions. Sometimes you've got to step off that cliff, right? It's never going to feel comfortable. Anyone who says they've conquered fear is lying. You've just got to manage the emotion.

Nick Bradley:

Have faith is about trust in yourself. Sometimes faith can come from religion. I don't see it for me personally like that. It's having faith that actually I'm good enough to achieve what I want to achieve in my life. And showing up every single day doing what it takes to get the results. No excuses, no procrastination. If you want to do it enough, you have the means to do it. You've just got to basically not make excuses around that.

Erol Senel:

There's a lot of self-belief in what you just said and also how do you manage fear. I think that's one that, as you're trying to do something new, as you're trying to take that step towards being your better self or however you want to put that, that initial fear could be the thing that derails you really quick. And it just reminds me, I just want to tell a quick story because it's one of my favorite ones. Have you heard of Felix Baumgartner?

Nick Bradley:

I have. Yeah, remind me again. Tell me story.

Erol Senel:

Yeah, so he's the psycho who jumped from the stratosphere. He was the fastest descent back to earth. It was just an absolutely insane thing. And he did this really wonderful interview that I listened to, and I refer to it a lot as I would speak to other people and help them try to engage in what they were doing a little bit more, because fear is a great inhibitor. When you think about like your six peaks, fear could be the thing that doesn't even allow you to kind of even start with that that.

Erol Senel:

What his message really was, is the way he looks at fear, it was very healthy. He looks at fear and he knows he's going to be scared, because I mean, for God's sake, he's jumping from the stratosphere. But what it would allow him to do is every time he would be going through this progression of eventually working up to the point where he would step out and begin his descent from ungodly levels is he would let fear be that indicator, is something in the preparation going wrong? Does something need to be adjusted? Am I pursuing this the right way? He would use it as this internal barometer as opposed to an internal inhibitor, and I thought that that was just such a healthy way to look at fear. Okay, it's looking at, I'm feeling something, why am I feeling it? As opposed to I'm feeling something, I shouldn't be doing this.

Nick Bradley:

Yeah, and most people will have the latter, I suppose, expression of fear. They see fear as an unhealthy emotion because it's uncomfortable. But it's funny, like someone said to me years and years ago, actually it was back when I had my personal training business. It was a guy, he was a very, very successful, wealthy client I had. He was one of my first clients, and he said to me, he said, "You know what the opposite of fear is, Nick?

Nick Bradley:

And I said, "No, what is it?"

Nick Bradley:

And he said, "Boredom." And he said, "Would you prefer to feel fear now and then, or would you prefer to be bored?"

Nick Bradley:

And I thought it was really interesting. I've never forgotten that, because he's right. Fear is uncomfortable. But the more you face fear or you jump into it, the better you get at it. It's definitely manageable is my opinion on it. But actually, you feel the most alive when you're in those points. As much as it may feel uncomfortable, you're very present and it can feel quite exciting as long as you can understand exactly what you're feeling. But being bored and feeling stuck, I personally think that's the worst place to be.

Erol Senel:

It's boring.

Nick Bradley:

It's boring, exactly.

Erol Senel:

I appreciate you taking so much time. I'd like to just kind of bring things to a head. A lot of people who are listening, they may not ever be a business owner. They may not ever work in the exciting world of mergers and acquisitions or anything like that. However, I think a lot of what you shared with us is very applicable to anyone. I'm curious, what advice would you have for those listening around intelligent ways to approach this really dynamic life that we live and try to really pursue and embrace the competitiveness required to be successful in it?

Nick Bradley:

Yeah. I'll try and keep this short because I could talk about this for ages. Again, it's a very insightful question. There's two things that I've learned as part of my journey which have been very helpful. And I don't think it's, as you said, it's got nothing to do with M&A or investing billions in companies and things.

Nick Bradley:

The first thing is that you may not know what your path is. You may not know exactly what that vision that you need to have or that purpose, as you asked me, but you get a sense of kind of what that direction is, you'll feel it. And for many years before I started doing what I'm doing now, I was in the corporate world for a while and I knew that I wasn't really living to my purpose. I was living someone else's life, the expectations maybe of my family and what I was told programming growing up.

Nick Bradley:

My first bit of advice is, if you have a passion, if you have something that you desperately want to do but it's fear that's holding you back, it'll catch up to you at some point in terms of you have a degree of resentment if you don't follow that sort of purpose or that pathway. My advice to people is, always, if there's a scratch to be itched, you need to find a way to scratch it before it's too late. That's the first piece really.

Nick Bradley:

And the second piece, we talked a little bit. We both like running. I've run something like 67 marathons and 25 or so now ultra marathons, and I don't say that to impress anybody. I say that because actually what I was doing was really molding my mind, my grit, my fortitude, my resilience, to be able to be tough enough for some of the things that I've wanted to achieve in my life. And I always encourage people to do the things, do the habits that are going to give them the greatest chance to be successful, to achieve more, to be more fulfilled.

Nick Bradley:

Because like anything in life, it's just as easy to do the things as it isn't to do the things. But if you do the things that may feel a bit challenging and tough and take a bit of discipline, the rewards from those efforts are so big and so compounding that I think you can be able to make that decision. And if you can do that and if can understand that, particularly depending on what stage of life you're at, then it can be a really important lesson to learn and something that's certainly served me throughout my career and my life.

Erol Senel:

I think that last part that you shared is really important to embrace. I think as we get older, a lot of people who used to be athletes kind of give up some of those pursuits because other things enter the fray or other things are less demanding of them. And one of the things that I love about marathoning is the fact that I should not be a marathoner.

Nick Bradley:

[crosstalk 00:27:12] probably.

Erol Senel:

I'm a stocky 200 pounds. And for a while, I had a goal of qualifying for Boston. Was it a realistic goal? I don't know. However, it still pushed me and allowed me to challenge, and it allowed me to get to a point with marathoning that I never thought I would be with. I mean, I was a collegiate football player and a soccer player my whole life, and that's all short sprinting. I had no business in that world. But once I knew that I could push through 26 miles when my body didn't want to do it, when my body was telling my mind it didn't want to do it, yet I was still able to do it, it allows you to push through other things in life and allows you to deal with discomfort a little bit differently.

Erol Senel:

And I think that you just probably inspired me to do my first ultra so I got to figure out what I'm going to be doing in that space soon. I need something, I need a goal, and I like those opportunities to make myself uncomfortable, because there is a lot of growth that comes with that, even in the process of it. Because I don't know about you, but I think about all the other aspects of my life as I'm running and pushing through the discomfort and I think it gives you a little bit more courage to attack some of those things differently.

Nick Bradley:

It does. You're working... [Inaudible 00:28:22], we could talk for ages. I know we're going to run out of time, but certainly my favorite book over the last couple of years is Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins. And he says in that book, "Most humans are only reaching 40% of their potential." And if you expect that all of a sudden everything's just going to click into gear without working for it, then you're crudely mistaken.

Nick Bradley:

And everything you just said there is right. The reason that I did all that, and I still do a lot of athletics and sports and whatever else, and certainly running, is I was crafting my mindset to be able to step up and stand out and to achieve more because I knew it wasn't just going to happen. No one's going to turn up and just make you a millionaire if that's what you want or make your relationships better or make you super fit with a six pack. It's just not going to happen.

Erol Senel:

Dammit.

Nick Bradley:

You got to do it. You got to do it.

Erol Senel:

Yeah, so I probably shouldn't have gotten Chinese last night.

Nick Bradley:

I still do that. I still do that.

Erol Senel:

Oh, it was so good.

Nick Bradley:

You've got to have balance. I think, at the end of the day, yeah, there is time for a beer and a steak and a Chinese and all that stuff.

Erol Senel:

Well, Nick, this has been so much fun. Man, I really appreciate this. Thank you so much.

Nick Bradley:

Hey, it's been great. Thank you for having me on the show. And again, thanks for so many insightful questions. I've very much enjoyed it.

Erol Senel:

Thank you. And that's all we have for this episode of Success Shorts. Hopefully you found today's topic useful. And remember, have fun, stay curious and keep it short.