Michelle MacDonald (00:54):

In the first episode with Joshua Medcalf, we talked about chop wood carry water and the importance of embracing the process and staying committed to the basics. In this episode, we're going to dive into his other book, pound the Stone. We're going to really focus on why you need to be relentless with consistency, something that a lot of people overlook, really focusing on the things that you can control and the role of true mental toughness in achieving long-term success. Aren't we all after that the first conversation laid out the groundwork for the one in this episode? Understanding how living intentionally and embracing the mundane can lead to extraordinary outcomes? Enjoy.

(01:46):

And you told me when I first reached out to you, you said, oh, well, I'm not so excited you didn't quite say this, but you really downplayed chop wood, carry water. And you said, like this book though, this book I'm really excited about, and that's pound the stone. So I'd love to dive into that one and pick your brains about what that means to you and why it's an important read. Why did you want me to read that one? Well, I run a few things, but one of the things that's very important to me because I too let you, is I'm very pushed by feeling a need that I didn't have when I was younger. And I'm fulfilling part of that need because one part of course is to create something meaningful and digestible for young girls that I didn't feel I had. But what I'm doing now with women with the transformation programs is helping to facilitate real live role models for the young girl that I was didn't have.

(02:49):

So I often say, God, I'm 53 right now, but when I was nine, when I was 10, I didn't have a role model for what aging would be like as a girl. And so thank God I grew up in the era I did because I was very much a tomboy and I didn't identify, I didn't want to be a girl. I thought I had got the short end of the stick. And when I saw women that were even 30, which seems very old when you're eight, right? Of course when we look at eight now we're like, oh my God, a baby, a baby. There just wasn't that. Those role models of power and strength and independence and women going out there and doing things, and I'm sure there were, but they're not in the public eye to the degree that a young gal's view would be saturated, right? Really deeply influenced. In fact, women are inculcated into this belief that there's something wrong with her bodies and that we lack independence and all those things that I know you are aware of to have written the book he wrote on the letter to Future Mrs. President. So let's dive into Pound the stone. What the heck does pound the stone mean for people that haven't heard that before? What does it mean? What's that metaphor about?

Joshua Medcalf (04:07):

So there's a poem by Jacob Reese that says something along the lines of, I'll paraphrase it, but when you think that your work isn't working, he goes and he looks at a stone cutter hammering away, hammering away, and it isn't. Then he sees it's the hundredth blow and all of a sudden at the hundredth blow, the stone cracks in two. But he knows that it wasn't the hundredth blow, it was the 99 that came before that actually made that happen. And I think it's just such a beautiful metaphor because sometimes I hear people say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again. And it's like, yeah. And I do think that there's validity to that at some level. I like to ask people, how's your strategy working out for you? I try and not tell people what their priorities should be.

(05:03):

I sometimes don't even tell them whether they shouldn't be doing a certain strategy. I ask them, how's that working out for you? And if you are frustrated and you don't think it's working out, then maybe we should try and change some stuff and work on our process and maybe refine it and get it a little bit better. But oftentimes we've all seen probably the means of the cartoon of the ice pick, trying to get there and get there. And then he's so close to getting to the diamonds when he quits. And so I think that pound the stone, I wrote somewhat as a follow up to chop wood carry water because like I said, it is very level one. It didn't deal with things like suicide that that's one of the dirty little secrets in sports. It's one of the dirty little secrets in Western culture of how many people are on antidepressants, how many people are taking their own life, how many people are disillusioned at, even Michael Phelps has talked about that he was kind of suicidal after winning all of his gold medals and retiring. We saw that happen with Rhonda Rousey. Tom Brady said, is this it?

(06:25):

There's this belief that if I climb the ladder, if I climb the mountain, that once I get to this certain level, then I will finally feel what I think I've been missing. But if we don't deal with things at a heart level, and this is again, it goes back to why it's so important that the two things that I think matter at the end of the day are the impacts we have on other people and our relationships and who we become in the process because it's not about the winning and the losing. So it just went so much deeper. It's another fable, but it's dealing with heart posture, it's dealing with all this stuff that's just so much deeper than just chop wood, carry water alludes to identity. And you shouldn't have your identity wrapped up in what you do, but it doesn't really go deep with that and pound the stone.

(07:27):

We really went deep. Even there's a scene at the end where the character has a big shot at the end of the book. We don't say what happened. We don't tell the audience whether he made it or he missed it. And I get emails every day, did he make the shot? And it's like, look, I'm hammering this point home that you have to surrender the outcome and it is not the outcome that matters. And that's very frustrating to people in western culture that like bows on things and they like things to be neat and they don't like it to be messy, but it's like life is messy. And so it follows this young boy's journey who starts off at 14 and follows him through high school. Rory Vaden was the one whose personal story inspired it. He sold books door to door. There's a door to door book selling program that he was a part of, and I was having dinner with him one night long time ago.

(08:26):

And he told me that he would rather hire somebody that had been through that door to door sales program than a Harvard graduate. And that really stuck home with me. And I was like, wow, that makes a lot of sense though, that if you're willing to go and knock on doors for four years, especially as an 18 to 22-year-old, the character, the skill that you're going to develop, the perseverance that you're going to develop from doing that is going to serve you for the rest of your life in ways that are almost hard to describe. And so that's what he does. He gets in trouble, and the way he can get back on the team is by doing this door to door sales program throughout the summer. And then it just follows his journey. And it really helps people understand, well, what does real leadership look like and how do we change the echoes inside of our programs?

(09:27):

And so for me, to me, it's the best book that I have written out of the 10 that I've published. And I don't even know exactly why, but I just think that I always say if people are only going to read one book that I've written, that's the one I would want them to read because I just think that it deals with real life in a way that none of the other ones do. They're all important. I think that they all will meet people where they're at, but pound the stone really just my brother drowned whenever I was nine and I was two and a half and I was the one that pulled him out of the pool. I lost two coaches to prison, one when I was 14 and one whenever I was 16. Then my father passed away whenever I was 22, he'd gone from living in a trailer park to becoming a very successful eye surgeon, diagnosed with terminal cancer at 49, gone at 50 51.

(10:29):

And so that book, I've dealt with suicidal ideation most of my life. I tell people that the most suicidal ideation I dealt with was after Chop Wood went viral. And after I knew that I'd probably never needed to work another day, my life. And so it was really a book that's very meaningful to me. And I get people all the time that say, oh, pound of stone is so much better than Chop wood. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't get to make that decision in the marketplace. So it's not like there's something that I'm doing that's saying, oh, chop wood. Is it? Like you said, when people come to me, I always try and say, Hey, yes, you should start with Chop Wood. It's a great starting point, but please don't stop there because it is just a starting point. It's not the finish line.

(11:25):

And then even with Finish Empty being the sequel, that one I deal with it head on where Akira confronts a lot of the ways that Chop Wood has been used in misused inside of popular culture in America where transactional leaders have taken that book and they beat it over the head of those that they lead. And it's like that's not the heart posture at all. That's not what this was designed for. It was not designed to be bumper sticker material. It wasn't designed to be bulletin board material. It's designed to be a transformational tool for someone personally. And then hopefully when people see you living differently, then when they come to you, you say, oh yeah, you should read this. I think it would be helpful. It's supposed to be an inspirational book to start people on a journey. It's not supposed to be a one size fits all. Start here, finish here. And so I was really grateful that in Finnish empty, we were able to kind of bring that full circle and have Akira unpack some of those things in that story for his frustrations for how some of the ideas and principles in that book in general has been used in this abused and misused in popular culture in America especially.

Michelle MacDonald(12:53):

What would be the key takeaway that you would want people to have for pound the stone?

Joshua Medcalf (12:59):

It's a great question and it's a hard one. So on the tagline, we put seven lessons to developing grit on the path to mastery. But then I don't know what the seven lessons are. I've never really tried to focus on that. Part of when I write a book is me surrendering the outcome of, I don't know what's going to be most important for somebody. I try and create a product, I try and put as much wisdom and palatable, understandable, practical wisdom tools that they can take away, but then I don't know what it's going to be. So one of my favorite things to do is to ask what was most meaningful to you? What hit home the most for you? What lessons? So when people would say, well, what were the seven lessons? I say, what were the seven lessons to you? Because that's what matters.

(13:53):

It doesn't really matter what I think I even write very differently than the way they tell you to write. So they always say, you should have an avatar. You should have a specific audience in mind that you're writing to and a specific person, an age, demographic, sex, gender, et cetera. And I don't believe that I try and write in a way that I just share wisdom. I share it in a story format, and then I let the results be what they are. And so I never know what's going to hit home for people, and that's not really my job or responsibility. I believe that my job is to be in the arena. My job is to do the work. My job is to hit publish and put stuff out there sometimes even before it's ready, which bothers some people that are perfectionists in Type A and they say, well, this has typos in it.

(14:55):

And I say, yeah, I actually like that. A lot of my books, especially the first or second edition, have typos because one of the things I love is whenever people pick up one of my pieces of art is what I call them, and they don't go, oh man, I could never do that. It inspires them to go, oh, I could do this. Now, it's easier said than done, but I like when people go, well, if he can do this, I can do this. And so even one of the coolest things for me with you is the impact you've had with your mom in her seventies and seeing what she's done. That's so special because when you see somebody in their seventies doing what your mom has done,

Michelle MacDonald (15:41):

She loves your book, by the way.

Joshua Medcalf (15:42):

So that means so much to me to hear that because she's such an inspiration. And it shows people, so what's your excuse? What's your excuse? We all have legitimate excuses, but when somebody that is 70 is doing this, when somebody makes it to the NFL, that's deaf. When somebody is playing division one basketball and they have one arm, what's your excuse? What is it? And so it removes so much of that because you and I both have the privilege of working with people that we know they would be really successful and have amazing results with or without us. They're just built differently. They're top zero 1%. They have different skill sets. One of the things that was really cool for me is I've done a lot in golf. I was the director of mental training for Oregon Women's Golf for a year. I keyed the Women's College golf conference back 10, 11 years ago, had a big influence in golf.

(16:52):

And I was always afraid of writing a golf specific book because yes, I have this transformational experience in soccer, but golf always felt like it's just one of those games that maybe you don't want to get too technical with because it's such a beast. It's so hard, it's so mental, it's non reactionary sports. And I always kind of wondered in the back of my mind, maybe I was just kind of special. Maybe what happened at Duke isn't possible for everyone. And then in my first ever golf tournament, I went out and I won my club championship, and then I went to the National Championship of Club Champions in Kiawah on the Ocean course, one of the hardest courses in America. I shot two over with two soft bogies on the last two holes. And I finished seventh and I went, yeah, I need to a golf book.

(17:50):

And so I wrote from Hack to Scratch, and that showed me, again, there's just no excuses. Everybody has more inside of them. If they are willing to do the work, everybody could get stronger just like your mom. Now we don't know what our ceilings are. That's the thing. We don't know what our potential is. And I do think that there's a limit to everybody's potential, but the only way we're going to find that out is from being in the arena, doing the work, making the sacrifices and exhausting ourself to find out what those limits actually are. But we know from research, we know from science, we know from just observational anecdotal stories that we have no idea what human potential actually is and what our potential is as a human being until we actually get in the arena, make the sacrifices, have the people around us and really exhaust ourself.

Michelle Macdonald (19:01):

So I love the direction that we're going here. So I'm working with this. I'll just say this one client, I'm not going to name any names here. So the listeners are going to be, I wonder if that's me. I wonder if that's me. And it could be, I see this story coming up quite often. So here we are, this idea of you don't know when you're pounding the stone. You don't know when that 100th or when that magical strike happens, when it's going to happen, and you're going to have that outcome. Not that we want to be outcome focused, but that outcome that we're looking for, that pot of goal. However, as a coach, and there's two questions that I have coming to mind here that I'm going to ask you to answer if you can, Joshua, but I see two things happening with people that don't quite make it.

(19:50):

One of them is that they get to a place where things get hard, and it's not always because the thing itself is hard, but they start to negotiate with themselves. They go into their old habits, they get in their way, and they start getting sidetracked. So I see that happening. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And then the other thing is, as a coach, I'm get involved in leading them towards their stated goal, and there's some guidance involved in unpacking what that goal is. But we get to the sort of existential crisis where again, things are getting hard and challenging, and we have to go back to what your why is like, well, why did you want to choose this goal? Sometimes we actually get to a moment where we realize we put a ladder up on the wrong building, as he said, and we don't want to do that.

(20:43):

We don't want to be climbing the ladder to success, but it's the wrong building. We've got the ladder prepped up to, and I get that right, and I'm there to work with my clients through that. Well, maybe that's not really the goal. If you really want to be healthy and we're doing this thing and it's actually leading us now to an unhealthy place, maybe that wasn't the real goal. What's your real goal? But maybe it's negotiating, and how do you ever know this piece, Josh? What Maybe you're negotiating with yourself because it's getting hard, and now you don't want the goal anymore. So there's two whammo questions for you tied up in a pound of stone. Sure. This is something that you see yourself. So what about this idea of you're chasing something, it's getting hard, and you start negotiating with yourself around the things that you need to do.

Joshua Medcalf (21:29):

So I think there's a few different things that I could unpack. So one is that we do talk about in chop wood care, water, listening to yourself versus talking to yourself. So I think that based off of, again, a lot of the fuel that we put in our heart, this one's a big circle thing, because the people that are around us and different demographics, I'm sure that some of the specific demographics that I'm referring to, they like to tell their friends what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. But you're doing, but you've been, oh, well, you work so hard. It's okay. You can have achieved that. Oh, you can. And so then that kind of becomes a part of our self-talk, and that becomes a part of the story that we tell ourselves.

(22:27):

And then oftentimes, our self-talk comes from what our parents said to us when we were young. So there's times I'll be out on the golf course and somebody will make a mistake and they'll start yelling at themselves and berating themselves. And I'll say, whose voice is that? And they're like, what? And I'm like, well, I don't think you just were born speaking to yourself that way. Somebody taught you to talk to yourself that way. And that's probably how they talk to you. And more often than not, it's either a mother or a father, that mother or father's voice that becomes your own self-talk tape that runs over in your head. Maybe it's you're not good enough. Maybe it's you fat blank. Maybe it's you're soft. Maybe it's you're never going to amount anything. Maybe it's that that's not for you, that's just for those talented people, whatever those things are.

(23:27):

But it's really important to catch ourselves when we're just listening to those thoughts that run through our brain versus being intentional and talking to ourselves and creating new, beneficial, constructive self-talk statements, tracks that help us in those. Then some of it comes down to the beliefs that we hold. And I think that there's a lot of work that can be done, but until we change the beliefs of our heart, we're constantly creating, attracting and repelling the world. We experience based off the deepest beliefs of our heart. So if I believe that I'm an asshole, I am going to do stuff that creates that scenario. If I believe that I'm hard to deal with, if I believe that I'm the most unlucky person in the world, if I believe that I can't lose weight, if I believe that I am, whatever it is, I am going to subconsciously or consciously do things that create that experience in the world.

(24:35):

And so it's a little bit like with the elephants, and we talk about this in common. Stone of the father and son go into an animal park in India, and father freaks out because the elephants are being held by nothing but a little rope and a small guy. And he's like, these animals could kill somebody. And the guy's like, sir, sir, calm down. What you don't understand is that we've had these elephants since they were babies, and when they're babies, we tie their leg to a rope to a strong tree, and they pull and they pull and they pull and they pull and they pull. And eventually they're not able to break free. And so what breaks is their will, and they start to believe that anytime that rope is tied to their leg, that they're stuck. And so a lot of what life is about is identifying what these beliefs are and the ropes that we need to cut in our own life so we can start sowing new beneficial and constructive beliefs and stories into our heart that don't trip us up along the way, because our brains are processing around 11 million bits of information per second, but we're only conscious of about 40 of those bits.

(25:52):

And so 99.999% of what we're actually seeing in the world around us, we can't even process. So what determines that tiny little bit is what we believe. That's what determines the 0.0, 0 0 6 4, whatever that decimal comes out to, that tiny little percent that we see. So with my client yesterday, he had said something kind of funny to me a couple of weeks ago, about half the time when I'm talking to you, I just think that you're a hack. And then sure enough, by the end, you'll have unpack something and I'll understand something, and I'll realize that you're a genius and it's really annoying. And so now I give him a hard time, and I always say, yeah, I'm not bad for a hack. And he was like, you know that I was just kidding. And I said, what's funny is I said, if I believe different things about myself, I would've probably focused on the hack part.

(26:57):

But I said to me, I thought it was the greatest compliment that I ever could receive, and I focused on that aspect of it. But that has to do with my belief about myself. And I wasn't born with that. I was born with something radically different than that. But if I am insecure, if I have these beliefs that say I'm not good enough, that I am a hack, that I'm a fake, that I'm a phony, that everybody's going to find out that I'm not good enough. I don't have a sports psychology degree who authorized me to do this, who do I think I am? Well, then a comment like that could be really disruptive for me in my life. And so we need to figure out what those beliefs are, oftentimes, subconsciously, that we're carrying around with us and we need to cut the ones that are no longer serving us.

(27:50):

And so I think that that impacts so much. I remember a person telling me one time, oh, I'm not a first class person, meaning of how they fly. And I thought, wow, that's such an interesting thing to believe about yourself. And look, I fly first class, sometimes I fly coach other times, occasionally when I'm with some of my friends, I fly private, but I would never say that about myself. I would never want to speak that into my life because we never know what the future holds. So I want to sow beliefs into my heart. I want to sow stories into my heart that are beneficial, constructive, and then really what it comes down to and what I learned at Duke is that I was my own worst enemy. Anytime I would make a mistake, I would say awful things to myself. So when I hear people say those things now, I say, don't talk to my friend like that.

(28:54):

And they're like, what? I'm like, yeah, don't talk to my friend like that. They're like, I was talking to myself. Yeah, don't talk to my friend that way. That's destructive. Don't do it. And what I learned is that I needed to become my own best friend and my own best coach. It's so easy to look around and say, man, I wish my coach talked to me this way. Why did they talk to me this way? My boss doesn't talk to me the right way. My wife doesn't talk to me the right way. My husband doesn't talk to me the right way. My friends don't speak to me the way I want, but we don't control that. The one thing we have control over is how we coach ourself, how we talk to ourselves. And so rather than focusing on all those external people, why don't we just worry about becoming our own best friend, our own best coach?

(29:45):

We would never talk to our best friends the way we talk to ourselves. We would never coach people the way we coach ourselves. We know that it's not the most beneficial and constructive way of talking to ourselves of coaching ourselves. And that's something that we have 100% control over. It's a little bit similar. I have a client that I'm working with right now done amazing things in his life. If you were to look at on paper, some of the things that he's done, but I knew that some of 'em were kind of fake, and they were sort of fake measures of success that society kind of says are cool and important, and he liked telling people about them. But I said, dude, you don't take yourself seriously until you take yourself seriously. Nobody else is going to take you seriously. You think that these little things that you did really matter, and they don't. And I learned it the hard way. When I moved to California, I literally had people tell me, that is Vanderbilt to high school.

(30:50):

And it's like, no, Vanderbilt is the 17th best school in the country. And I got to, they did not care because in Los Angeles, nobody cares about a degree that you have. Nobody cares about those things. They want to know, what have you created? What have you done? How do you treat me? Are you transactional like the rest of these people? What value can you add to my life? They don't care about degrees, they don't care about anything like that. And I told them, I said, as soon as you start to take yourself seriously, the rest of the world will follow suit. And I know this because I got so frustrated. I felt like nobody took me seriously. But the truth was I didn't take myself seriously. And as soon as I changed what I did with my time, as soon as I cut certain things out of my life, as soon as I started to believe and act like I was a person of high value, a person that had a lot to bring to the table, a person that really could change the world, the world fell in line.

(31:50):

But I had to change what I believed about myself first. And then it became very clear to me when I was in an elevator with S Endurance. And we get out of the elevator and I say, who works with your girls on sports psychology? And he says, I do. I can read and write. And I was like, Touche. We'd won 20 national championships out of 35 at that point. But I'd been studying in training like I was in medical school. Nobody was telling me what to study and train. Nobody was telling me what to do with my time. I had just started to take myself very seriously for the last year and a half, two years. And so a real life mentor, Russ Pillar, that was loosely based off of Russ and Palm of Stone, he had said to me a quote about, Joshua, will you prepare for appointments that you've not yet made?

(32:41):

I didn't know I was going to run into the endurance. I didn't know how it would go, but I did. And I had prepared for that moment long before, as if those types of opportunities were going to present themselves. There's a big painting on my wall that my girlfriend is a really cool artist and she makes stuff for me. And it says, how would you use your 86,400 seconds today if you knew that in six months to two years, you would get the opportunity of your dreams? And so all of a sudden, Anson is here. He's basically saying, shoe fly, get away from me. And I said, well, do you know who Barbara f Fredrickson is? And he said, no, why should I said, well, our research on positivity shows that if your positivity ratio is around one to one, that forecast clinical depression, if it gets above two to one, that forecast languishing.

(33:33):

If it gets above three to one, that forecast flourishing no matter if it's individually or collectively for teens. And she teaches at this little school, what's it called? Oh yeah, it was yours. She teaches at the University of North Carolina, and he stops dead in his tracks, and he says, can you write that down for me? You might've just made my trip worthwhile. And then six months later, he invites me out to be the second outsider to ever work with the greatest dynasty in college sports on mental training. It was me. I didn't take myself seriously. As soon as Rusted asked me, what do you do with all your time? I justified it. I said, well, I started a nonprofit where I do all this stuff in Los Angeles and I do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's easy to justify. But when I actually started taking myself seriously, the world lined up.

(34:27):

But it starts with me. It starts with me taking myself seriously. So that client that I'm talking about over the last three months, he's like, dude, I don't know what you did to me. People just walk up to me now and ask how they can get involved. They ask to be, he's like, I don't understand what's happening. And I go, oh, well, you just take yourself seriously. And people can feel it. They know it. It's different. You're no longer acting like a little boy. You're acting like a man. And if you knew his background, he didn't look like a little boy. He is done some of the hardest training in the world, yet from a emotional, psychological perspective, from a groundedness and a security perspective, he was still acting immature and not taking himself seriously. And once he started taking himself seriously, boom, all this stuff has just started to flow. And it's like, but it starts with you and it starts with your heart.

Michelle MacDonald (35:26):

It starts with your identity, really. And that's core belief. Yes. And thanks for answering that question. I love that. So it sounds like you yourself were pounding the stone not knowing what the outcome was going to be, but just getting up trusting in this core belief and then doing the worst. Oh, yeah.

Joshua Medcalf (35:47):

I had no clue what was coming. All my friends thought I was crazy. I told you Brent, Brent Richard was on New York Stock Exchange today ringing the bell. One of my friends is the biggest IP person and runs University of Kentucky's ip. One of my friends is the best justice lawyer in California. One of my friends is the biggest developer in West Palm Beach. And these are just kids that I went to school with. One of my friends owns 700 franchises. I'm probably missing some people that do other incredible stuff that are just in my circle from Vanderbilt. And what do you think they thought when they saw that I was living in a homeless shelter, then living in the closet of a gym, then living with my mom for a period of seven years. They thought I was crazy. They thought that I'd lost it. They did not understand at all what I was doing. And then at 32, I was like, yeah, I think I'm going to retire. And they're like, what?

(36:51):

But I had no blueprint in front of me other than, well, what have all these people that you respect and admire in terms of the Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela and all the autobiographies and things that I would come through, what have they done? And then even a big one was Eric Thomas. I watched the et the Hip Hop preacher. I watched him when he sold, I think it was 7,000 copies of his book. I was like, well, I can do that. When I saw him create the motivational mixtapes, I was like, well, I can do that. And I just saw some people and it was like, maybe this works, maybe it doesn't. But I had seen when I shared my story about what had happened to Duke and the tools that I learned there, and then some of the stuff that I had been studying, I saw what it was doing in people's lives, and I was just like, I got to go all in on this, and I'm willing to live with the results, but this is too powerful to not try and share this stuff with the world.

(38:11):

I really, optimistically delusively believed that I could get it out to the masses. And I didn't know if you would've told me that it would be through a book. I would've thought, no way. I thought it was more, many people have told me that I should be the next Tony Robbins. And I made a decision seven years ago that with what happened with my little brother, with what happened with my dad, I didn't want to just keep climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing that I wanted to really step back and I wanted to focus on building local community. I wanted to focus on finding somebody that I could potentially build a family with. I wanted to do some different things with my life. And so I said, I'm going to step back, because I'd always ask myself the question, if I got diagnosed with terminal cancer, what would it change?

(39:05):

And when my dad had that happen at 21, I really made a commitment that I wouldn't wait until I got diagnosed with terminal cancer to change the way that I lived. But when I was 32, I remember distinctly, I was out on the road speaking in Missouri. I think I had spoke like seven times in three days. And when I asked myself that question, if I had six months to live, it was no longer can you let me get back to doing what I'm doing. It was, I don't think I would be speaking anymore. And so I once again made another radical shift. And for five years solid did virtually no work other than mentoring my protege at the time, who was running the brand. And I am so thankful that I did, because today I'm in such a better place personally. And I had watched as a lot of people that do similar things to what I do.

(40:03):

I watched as a lot of their personal lives kind of imploded at different points. And it's a little bit of that. Put your oxygen mask on first before you help the person sitting next to you. And going back to those litmus test questions for me. And I hit, at that point, I knew Chop Wood was going to sell a hundred copies a day like clockwork. And so I knew that the impact I wanted to have was going to continue, even if I said, I'm going to step aside because I'd created so much intellectual property and so many tools and so many mixed tapes and MP threes and keynotes that were on YouTube. And at that point, I think there were six books that were out. And so the tools were there. So when people said, well, I want your help, I was like, no, you don't want my help.

(40:57):

You want my time. And time is the most valuable thing in the world. And so if you want my help, well, here's six books. Here's all these MP threes. Here's all these tools for you. But personally, I'm going to take a step back and I'm not going to be as involved in the day-to-Day. And then about two years, I Protege decided he wanted to go and have a local partner and do things on his own. And I said, you know what? Maybe I'm going to start getting back. And so I did one virtual keynote. I did one live keynote. I put out Finish Empty. I wrote from Hack to Scratch, I wrote, dear Futur, Mrs. President. And so I've kind of tiptoed back in and I've found a little bit of a balance and even better word that I like harmony for my life that allows me to work 10, 15 hours a week maybe, but that it's in a much better harmony for my overall mental health wellbeing and things of that nature.

Michelle MacDonald (42:00):

Joshua emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, active listening, the need to focus on strengths while navigating challenges. And he also says, we need to choose joy and maintain resilience in the face of adversity. We're going to go deeper in our next episode with Joshua. He's going to share the power of self-awareness. And this is something that's so important, especially in that season of life, when you really can reflect on so many lessons that you've encountered, how to cultivate resilience, the importance of choosing joy even during life's toughest moment. Thanks for listening. And please don't forget, guys, leave a rating and a review. Share this episode with your friends.