In this episode, I unpack my three biggest takeaways from the GoBundance Winter Adventure and Mastermind in Stowe, Vermont.
Are you a lawyer interested in learning more about the GLM Tribe? Click here to book a discovery call.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
In this episode, I unpack my three biggest takeaways from the GoBundance Winter Adventure and Mastermind in Stowe, Vermont.
Are you a lawyer interested in learning more about the GLM Tribe? Click here to book a discovery call.
____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
What's up everybody, welcome back into another Friday's solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I'm your host, brian Glass, and I could not be any happier that January is over. As a guy who says things like build a kind of law firm where you can go on vacation without having to answer client emails and you can have dinner with your family without having to check your phone, you would think that a month where I was out of the office probably 75% of the time, either traveling or at mastermind meetings or at annual retreats for the law firm and for great legal marketing, would be like my ideal month, and of all the things that I did, I 100% would have selected individually to do every single one of them Collectively. However, it is really hard to run two businesses, get home and show up for your family, produce a podcast and do any client work, all while you're traveling and being out of the office for 75% of the month. So I am happy to be in February and to not have any travel on my calendar until the end of March. What I want to tell you about today is the last bit of travel that was on my calendar in January and that was the abundance winter adventure and mastermind up in Stowe, vermont, which is a four day event filled with skiing, masterminding, hanging out with the guys and generally getting inspired.
Speaker 0:This is my third year in Gobundas. This is my third major event, and by this time I generally know what to expect, which is there's going to be some business teaching. You are going to walk away with far more personal and relationship advice and tactical things to do than you do business stuff, and also that you're going to have to suffer through I'm going to have to suffer through a whole lot of talk about real estate, which is not my industry, because most of these guys are based somewhere in real estate. And so let me tell you this isn't one of my top three takeaways, but it is just an interesting takeaway. Almost everybody who I talk to who is pivoting into a new asset class is pivoting into either mobile home parks or self storage, which I think is a bad sign for the economy. If my friends are right about the fact that people are going to have to downgrade from apartments to mobile homes and move all of their stuff into self storage, that is probably not a good thing for the economy. So just be aware and when you go to these events, you do have to.
Speaker 0:As a real estate outsider, which I still consider myself you have to suffer through a lot of conversations about cap rate and interest rates and occupancy rates and a lot of people who can do way more math in their heads than I can do, and I love it. I love hanging out with guys and learning new things. I definitely feel like the dumbest guy in the room when they start talking about real estate, though, and so my intention when I go up there is almost never to come away with something tactical into business. It's almost never to learn how to do a new thing. There's plenty of conferences to go to for that. There are plenty of 101, 201 style real estate conferences. That's not why I show up. I show up to get inspired by these guys because they're all badasses, and to connect with them and to try to form some long term relationships.
Speaker 0:I'm going to get to the inspiration here in a minute, but I talk about going to these masterminds a lot and my preparation for showing up, which is I like to look at the list if I can get a handle. I like to look at the list if I can get a hold of the list and figure out who's going to be there and make a plan for who I want to connect with. I didn't do a great job of that this time because I didn't realize that everybody's name was posted in the app until I was already there, but I do have a great list of things that I'm going to do after the conference in terms of connecting with people. I've got about 10 names on my list. Five of them are just thank yous guys that I connected with either in a small group who gave me some advice, or guys that I heard something from a stage, wrote it down and I'm going to act on it. I'm going to definitely send notes back to those guys, because the thing that lights me up the most when I'm on the other end of that is when I get a thank you from somebody who says I heard something on your podcast or on somebody else's podcast or from the stage and it changed my life. That's why I produced this stuff for free for you guys, and so I want to pay that back 100% to anybody who's provided that to me.
Speaker 0:The next three on my list are guys who I might do deals with. At this point in my investing career, I don't really have the bandwidth to learn how to do any of this stuff or manage any real estate on my own, but I do investing as a limited partner in somebody else's deal and finding smart operators, and I think I've found three of them who I'm ready to deploy some money to. We obviously need to do a little bit more due diligence and find out more about their deal and get the details, but at least I found three deals that are interesting to me during my time up there, and then the last two are newer guys to the organization. I think it's really important, as we're building communities of people, that the people who've been around for a couple of years reach out and reach down to the new guys to make them feel welcome, because I think we forget what it is like to be the new guy.
Speaker 0:And this event was awesome for me because I've been there where you don't know anybody and you don't, as an introvert Like I, don't really go up and introduce myself to people. But I've been around now at three major events. I've been on the Spartan Raise team. I probably knew a third of the guys at the event. This is awesome. This is my sweet spot of I can say hi to people I feel like I belong and I want to make sure that we're providing that opportunity to new guys along the way. So those I got about 10 guys on my list to reach out to by phone or by text or by email over the course of the next week. Okay, so you clicked on this episode for which is my three major takeaways from this event.
Speaker 0:So here's takeaway number one, and this comes from Colin O'Brady, who's a world explorer and adventurer and all around badass. Colin was the keynote speaker on the win on Wednesday night closing the event. You can find a TED talk on YouTube. If you don't know who Colin O'Brady is, he'll give you his full story, but it's awesome. O'brady, who, in Thailand, when he was 21, 22, was jumping over a fire rope something only 21 and 22 year olds would do caught both of his legs on fire. He was totally would never walk again, made a goal to run triathlons. He ended up winning triathlon, chicago triathlon, almost making it onto the US triathlon Olympic team. When that chapter of his life closed, he went to go find other hard stuff to do. He went to boat across the Drake Passage, which is the wildest patch of the ocean, and then was the first guy to ever walk unsupported, carrying all of his own food and tent and calories across the Antarctic continent, which is crazy.
Speaker 0:Colin's advice was this embrace the lows. And I've gone through this patch where I've just had a bunch of lows and I haven't felt like I've had a high in a while. And what Colin said is we live our lives in these one to 10 scales and most people Play safe and most people, because they play safe, live in this mediocre middle of four to six, four to seven On the one to ten scale because they've hedged and taken the ones in the twos off the table. Trying For the tens and failing is how you end up in the ones in the twos, and if you take the ones in the twos off the table, you will never hit a ten, and so that's resonating with me in terms of like, how am I taking ones and twos and then the Opportunity to fail off the table and is that why I'm not having this big swing back in the pendulum?
Speaker 0:A similar conversation that I had About Lowe's was a conversation I was having. I had a couple of good chairlift conversations with people and I was talking to this guy, snowboarder, who worked on the mountain. He worked in one of the restaurants at the resort and we started talking about golf because he was explaining all the other things that they had on the resort and I said I don't really play golf, but it I can understand the appeal because every once in a while, like you pipe one and it goes Straight and it goes for a long way, and so I could see how that can be addicting. They said, yeah, that's like life, we have highs and we have lows. And we started talking about Top ten and the bottom ten percent, and something that I'd heard recently is that you're gonna have those bottom ten percent days. That's just how a bell curve works and the thing is that on during the course of a year, your bottom ten percent makes up 36 days, which is three days a month. Like three days a month are gonna be your bottom ten percent days For your year. And when you put it into that perspective and you go, I feel like I'm having all these bad days. Yeah, you have to expect them, because the bottom ten percent is gonna happen once every other week or so, and so when that happens, we've just got to embrace it, we've just got to understand that's part of the process and that having the bad days is the thing that shows us that we're working and it's a necessary requirement to have the good days on the opposite end of the spectrum. So I just thought that was interesting perspective. Take away number one embrace your lows. Take away.
Speaker 0:Number two comes from Nick Staggaberg. Nick is a go-bro. He runs a company called black swan real estate which owns 300 million dollars in In real estate and single family multifamily real estate. Nick also has built three other hundred million dollar Startups, owns a real estate sales team and a construction company, and he married with four kids and lives an all-around awesome life, sounds like. And what Nick said is every organization is a direct reflection on the leader, and that was gonna punch some people in the gut, because there's some law firm leaders out there that goes my team sucks, I hate my firm. Here's the thing is that everything that you dislike about your firm, you either Created or recruited or you allowed it to exist, and some of us just need to look in the mirror and Recognize where the problem actually lies and where the problem actually begins, because everything that's going on in your organization is a direct reflection on you.
Speaker 0:And so we did this exercise where we drew out our organizational chart Flowing down from us as far as you want to flow it down. If you have a hundred forty person organization, probably doesn't make sense to do this. But if you're running a law firm that's got ten to twenty people in it, it's pretty easy to sketch out your whole organizational chart and then rank everybody in the organization, including yourself, on a scale from six to nine, because you don't have anybody in your organization or you shouldn't have anybody in your organization. Who's a one to a five. If you have a one to a five, really we can't help. And here's how these rankings break down Six, six is sixty percent, six is fire. Seven is somebody who's okay and Serviceable, a nine is a rock star and eight is somebody with a little bit of coaching who may become a nine and may become a rock star.
Speaker 0:And the thing is we aren't doing the six is any favors by keeping them in our Organization and what we do is we go. They're nice, or I haven't given them enough opportunity or I don't want to hurt their feelings. And the thing is that when we keep people who are operating at a 60% Rate in our organization. We prevent them from being a nine somewhere else, because everybody is a nine somewhere else. We prevent them from learning the thing that they are bad at so that they can change and be a nine somewhere else. But we do what we think is the kind thing and we keep those people on board and we allow them to flounder and we allow them to not be very good at their job, and they know it, they have to know it and we know it, and it's no good for anybody.
Speaker 0:And so as you draw your organizational chart and you identify these sixes, you've got to start having hard conversations with them and making hard decisions. And then you want to look at the sevens and the eights and the nines, and what you want to make sure of here is you don't have a seven who's in a managerial role, who's managing a nine. And if you do, we gotta figure out how to change them. Either it's elevate the nine or fire the seven and bring in a nine or an eight to manage them, because nobody likes being managed by somebody who's a lower skill level or a lower competency level than they are. And that's how we lose elite people out of our organization. And I personally have this theory that too many entrepreneurs and too many law firm owners want to build up and coach our people to be just like us. We want to have entrepreneurial people in the organization, and it's a mistake, because not everybody is an entrepreneur and not everybody needs to be a nine. But what you can't have is a nine who's managed by a seven or, heaven forbid, a nine who's managed by a six. So if you have that going on, that's an immediate thing that you have to solve for in your organization. And what we did at the conference was we drew out our organizational chart, assigned numbers to everybody and then went around in a circle and had to explain to the people at our table what we were gonna do with the sixes who were still in the organizations and the sevens that were managing nines. And I promise you, if you do that exercise, it will open your eyes to deficits that you have in your law firm or in whatever business it is that you're running. And if you can find people that will hold you accountable to making changes in those sixes and sevens, your business will take off.
Speaker 0:Takeaway number three inspiration. And this is why I show up to these events, and these little synchronicities show me that I'm in the right place at the right time. Matt King, who's the CEO of Go Abundance, opens the event by saying this there's two things that you can do with your life. You can make sugar water and I don't really know what that means, but you use that phrase over and over. You can make sugar water, or you can change the world, and I wanna change the world. And some people might say isn't that a little bold? Who are you to change the world? Yes, of course it's bold, but why would you wanna live your life any other way? And that little story or parable, or I don't really even know what to call that, but it hit me right between the eyes and it told me this is the room. God, I'm just so thankful to be in that room, because there are so many places in our lives where people tell us to chill or to be less intense or not try so hard. And if you're a lawyer or a law student, you know this and you've been through this because you've been in a room where somebody's like oh, that person's a gunner or that person's a tryhard or whatever, and I've been the one in the back of the room saying that about the people in the front. It's not me anymore, but I 100%. I used to do that.
Speaker 0:And the thing is that as a society, we have these little slights and we have these offhanded comments about successful people and we just denigrate success. So we had a claim an insurance claim for a pipe burst at our beach house, and I remember vividly. I'm on the phone with the insurance adjuster and I'm explaining the problem to her and she's like, oh, it's a vacation home, oh, that must be nice. I'm like, yeah, it is nice, I worked really hard to get it and your company ensures it, so take care of my problem. But we have these oh, it must be nice. Or you, oh it must be nice to be a mogul, or who does he think he is? He's Donald Trump buying investment properties.
Speaker 0:I've heard that one, too, from a neighbor. I hang out with that neighbor anymore and it's just what happens. I describe it as crabs in a bucket. Like you put one crab in the bucket and he can get out, he can crawl his way up, but you put 10 crabs in a bucket, ain't nobody getting out, because they're all pulling the one down as he's just about to exit the bucket, and it's just so amazing to be in a room and to hang out with people where the opposite is normal, where somebody is successful and you don't go down. You must be lucky or you must have started with a lot. You go how did you do that?
Speaker 0:And they tell you it's not normal in society, and so I'm just so thankful to be able to hang out in rooms like that and to be able to come back and share a little bit of that with you and with the team in both of my businesses, because there's this Mary Ann Williamson quote that I love from the return to love, which says there's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people don't feel insecure around you, and so my hope for you is this my hope for you is that you find a community that does this for you.
Speaker 0:If you're a lawyer, I wanna invite you to check out the GLM tribe, because I think that we are doing this for the legal community, and so I'm gonna drop a link for a discovery call. If you're not a member of the GLM tribe and you wanna get on and find out what it's more about, I'm gonna drop a Calendly link for a discovery call for that in the show description here. My hope for you is that you find this inspiration in your life somewhere Doesn't have to be with us, but somewhere where you have people that celebrate wins, because most of society does not. And you will go through your life in the mediocre middle If you are never allowed to try hard without feeling bad about it and fail hard and if you are never allowed to let your light shine. So, with that, have a great weekend.