The Plus One Theory
The Plus One Theory Podcast explores how small, intentional actions can create big, lasting impacts in our personal and professional lives. Each episode features inspiring guests sharing their experiences with kindness, resilience, and the transformative power of doing just one more, The Plus One Theory in action.
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The Plus One Theory
Episode 38: The Art of Making Meaningful Choices
What if everything you've been taught about making life choices is fundamentally flawed? Hussein Halek, founder and CEO of Next Decentrum, believes we're approaching life all wrong – and he has a refreshing perspective on how to fix it.
"We never get trained on our choices," Hussein explains, highlighting how our education system prepares us for careers but fails to teach us the most crucial skill of all: how to make meaningful decisions. From childhood through early adulthood, we're given few opportunities to practice choice-making, then suddenly thrust into a world that demands constant decisions. No wonder we feel overwhelmed and uncertain.
Hussein's philosophy, detailed in his new book "The Dark Art of Life Mastery," offers a powerful alternative. He suggests we operate on three levels – personal, community, and systemic – with our greatest power lying in our personal choices. Yet modern life has disrupted this natural balance, leaving us with little time for meaningful connection or reflection. "We barely make one or two choices a day," he observes, despite choice-making being our "biggest power."
This conversation goes far beyond self-help platitudes. Hussein challenges conventional wisdom about business, arguing that companies weren't created primarily to make money but to serve customers through principles like honesty and integrity. He explores how storytelling shapes our perception of reality and how innovation isn't just about technology but about creating meaningful value.
What makes this episode truly special is Hussein's ability to blend philosophical depth with practical wisdom. Whether discussing his work making art accessible through Momentable or explaining how to develop "shorthand" decision-making processes, he offers concrete strategies for living with greater purpose and intention.
Ready to transform how you approach life's choices? Listen now and discover why Hussein believes that despite life's unpredictability, we can master it through conscious choice-making and meaningful contribution.
Hussein’s new book, The Dark Art of Life Mastery, is out now and available!
The full episode drops Sunday, August 31st, and you don’t want to miss it!
Connect with Hussein:
Website: husseinhallak.com
Substack: husseinhallak.substack.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/husseinhallak
BlueSky: darkal777.bsky.social
Instagram: instagram.com/hhdarkal
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Today I'm honored to welcome Hussein Halek, founder and CEO of Next Decentrum, global entrepreneur and author of the new book the Dark Art of Life. Mastery Hussein has spent his career using technology and storytelling to create meaningful change across Vancouver, new York, Cairo and Dubai. I always take time to research my guests before we sit down and I have to confess, going through your work, hussein, left me completely blown away. The way you continue to influence people is extraordinary, and what struck me most is how clearly your philosophy on life comes through in everything you do. Clearly, your philosophy on life comes through in everything you do. Your mission is clear to help people live with purpose and intention in a world that's constantly changing. Hussein, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me. I'm so glad to be here.
Speaker 1:I am very happy you're here too. Okay, you've lived and built across very different parts of the world.
Speaker 2:I mean you've been everywhere. Canada.
Speaker 1:Almost everywhere. I mean what I've, and there's probably more than what I was able to find on you, but Canada, the United States, egypt, dubai and yet there's this common thread of resilience and leadership in your story. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and what resilience has meant in your life?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for the question and so glad to be here. I ended up pursuing a lot of the things that was available to me rather than, let's say, the stuff that I really wanted. I wanted to be a doctor, and thankfully I am not. I would have probably not enjoyed it as much, but that's one of the things that I wanted. I pursued engineering and loved computers. I ended up working in such a way, but I ended up being a designer first, and then a marketer, someone who works in branding, and then, funny enough, the thing that I loved the most throughout my life, which is writing, and I've been writing since I was 16, I ended up being a writer and everything that I kind of ended up living was not something that I thought myself I would do. So along the way, I guess what I was doing is discovering what can my life be, and I was lucky to be able to live the life that I've lived so far, and I think I'm lucky that I'm excited about life as much as I was 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 20 years ago. What is that old saying If I only knew then what I know now, it would be a great success.
Speaker 2:I think I would be calmer if I knew then what I know now and I would well. If I take, let's say, how things unfolded, I would be much calmer and I would kind of take it easy. But I'm not sure that would be helpful for me because I may not be here and if I knew how, let's say, geopolitically things will change, or that we would have climate change, for example, I would be very depressed like that.
Speaker 1:I know You're right there's a lot of things that's best we don't know. I know You're right there's a lot of things that's best we don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, going in, so going in blind can be better. Yeah, it's like knowing the end of a movie. You know, like sometimes you, and it's not like that very good movie, so you kind of like, at least I don't know, at least there is some surprise there. But if you knew you would like, you would not probably waste your time watching it.
Speaker 1:Well, what I've learned even if you knew, you would not probably waste your time watching it. Well, what I've learned even if you knew, you would still do it again. You know, I mean, we are guilty of patterns.
Speaker 2:Oh for sure, the human race.
Speaker 1:We repeat over and over all our mistakes.
Speaker 2:I think what we do is we remember things and we relate things. I would argue that, yeah, we say, for example, history repeats itself, but what we are is, I think, we are governed by the same desires and the same needs, so we react in similar ways to similar situations because we're driven by those needs, because we are human beings at the end of the day. So we can't expect ourselves to be a totally different species because 200 years have passed. Species usually evolve over millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years. I don't think we can expect I think we expect too much of ourselves from that perspective that 20 years have passed, or you know, this was the 50s and this is, let's say, 20, 2025. We should have known better.
Speaker 2:Well, we didn't evolve as species. We are the same species. Yes, we we know more uh, but are because we're driven by those. I think that wants and desires that are embedded with uh, not with our way of thinking and our knowledge. It's more embedded with our feelings and who we are as uh, or what we are as a species. I think we're driven by those and that's why we repeat ourselves, not necessarily their mental, but they're more like embedded behaviors and tendencies nature yeah, tendencies yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we, oh those are. I battle those every day because we are just human, you know. But let's talk a little bit about what you're. When people hear the word innovation, they immediately think technology, and I did notice you know a lot. I've looked at a lot of your work this past week and, man, you've done a lot of things through technology, but innovation is much bigger than that, and I've heard you say that over and over. So what does innovation really mean to you and how can leaders apply it in their own lives?
Speaker 2:or a new version of something that adds new level of value. So that is innovative. So let's say, this mic now is connected. So a wireless mic, for example, will be an innovation because it allows me to move more. So the value that I'm getting from the Now, this may not be an innovation for somebody sitting or in a studio why would I want that? Or somebody else who would use it, let's say for movement, that's considered an innovation. For somebody sitting or in a studio. Why would I want that? For somebody else who would use it, let's say for movement, that's considered an innovation for them. So that is what an innovation is.
Speaker 2:To be innovative is to continuously think of new applications for something or where you can take it further. And that's why we say, let's say about Apple that, let's say, the last few versions of the iPhone was not innovative because it didn't add much value. It's the same thing, kind of new shape, so the value is not deep, whereas if we think from the iPhone, let's say the first iPhone to, let's say, the third iPhone, there's a level of innovation because the camera was so much better. Maybe there is Siri was introduced I don't know if it's the third version or the fourth version. So innovation needs to be a step up in the amount of value that we get and the impact on our lives, and I think why it's important?
Speaker 2:Because it allows leaders always are looking to serve. What leadership means for me is that, as a leader, you're looking for new ways or ways to serve the people that you lead. Service leadership is very important to make their life better, to make their well-being towards, basically move them together towards well-being. So how do you bring them together? How do you create something new, or something what we call innovative, where it provides more value to the community, like, for example, allowing them to do their tasks faster, for example, or creating a new form of protection? So these are the kind of things that we call innovations, and that's why it's important, because if you're stagnant and there's nothing new, as human beings we get bored really fast, especially right now that we are used to this constant stream of entertainment.
Speaker 2:So, I think there is more demand for innovation and meaningful innovation there is more demand for innovation and meaningful innovation.
Speaker 1:Well, and I love that. And the reason I asked about innovation is because it plays such a close part to my message of the plus one theory. You know, the plus one theory is all about doing your best, plus one more right. No mediocrity, so, but finding the desire to apply yourself like that can sometimes be challenging in the society that we have today, you know, because people are really turned into themselves, I mean. And really who's saying people, I think, love to hate these days. It makes me sad to see that. So I like to talk about kindness, and how can we be innovative with kindness? You know, not just you know the technology of the world, but, like you said, with human beings and with with mindset. I mean, I was having a conversation.
Speaker 2:Sorry, did you want to continue?
Speaker 1:No, no, please, I'm. I'm welcoming anything you have to say.
Speaker 2:I was having a conversation around this and it was an interesting one which is I have a different perspective on that and I'm writing and I'm still in discovery. I have a perspective. That doesn't mean it is true, but it's a perspective. I think what we tend to assign for people is way more than how it works. So I think of how we operate on three levels the personal level, the community level and the systemic level. On the personal level, you're responsible for your choices. We never get trained on our choices. In fact, we put so much into our choices. To make a choice usually takes time, for example, to choose who to be around, to choose what job you want to do, and all of those things. These are usually things that we put so much on it that we don't become good with our choices, and I'll come back to that in a second. The second level is community, where we work with others and where our actions and our words have meaning. Without community, our actions, our words really have not that much value. Of course, you can go around the house and rearrange cook for yourself around the house and you know, rearrange cook for yourself but really actions and words have more meaning and more impact when there's a community, people around you, where you know your words kind of have an impact or change people's minds or impact them or inspire them, or your action serves or helps people, contributes to people, and the systemic level is where communities come together to form a country or society and they collaborate and they trade and so on and so forth. That's where systemic forces, kind of are in control.
Speaker 2:So what we do is, if we look at today's world, we look at, let's say, school School you don't. What do you learn? You learn math. You's say school School you don't. What do you learn? You learn math. You learn some social science. You right now they're kind of history, whoever's ruling, they change the history. So you learn some of these things. But what you don't learn is you don't learn how to choose every day, because all you're doing is you're you, study, study. You don't choose what you study very rarely. You don't choose is you're you study, study. You don't choose what you study very rarely. You don't choose when to get an exam, you don't choose. You know, and and you're told that you have to win and you have to get marks, because other than that you don't enter into university and throughout your life until you get into university. You don't know what university even means to you. So all of that gearing up, and then you go to university and you're working hard to get higher marks because you need to get a better career, but you still don't know what that means and what that means to be an adult and to have responsibilities. So the solution for that is to get you to work at a at a coffee shop, maybe, or a restaurant earlier. That is the solution to get you to learn what work means later.
Speaker 2:All of those things are not things that are natural for us. It's things that we made up so that, in service of the systemic forces, society needs us to work in a certain way, especially capitalist society. You need to go to the job, you need to be productive. The more productive you are, the more those companies make money, government functions, et cetera, et cetera. That's fine, but that doesn't mean it has to be your life. What we've done is in service of that.
Speaker 2:We broke up the communities. We don't have time enough to spend time with our community, to be in service of our community members, to speak with our neighbors, because we have to go to work and we have to come back. We barely have enough time with our family and the time when we have with our family and then we barely have time for ourselves to think our choices or work with our choices, we have to browse a few social media and post a few posts and whatever. So we never have time to spend with ourselves to enact our choices and to choose and to and to run through our choices. We barely make one or two choices a day, probably what we want to eat and what to drink, and that's it. And even that. If you ask someone, what do you want to eat I don't know pizza, you know. Even that choice becomes so hard when we should be making.
Speaker 2:We're a choice machine. It's our biggest power, and we're wondering right now how to make choices. Then our communities are broken apart because we never have the time to spend that and all we are is in service of systemic forces. That doesn't even help us, because at the end of the day, and after working for hours upon hours, upon hours every day of the week, we can barely make ends meet. Most people are. So all of that. You cannot hold responsibility for it as a person, so you need to know where you have the biggest power. You have power over your personal choices yes, and you have less power in a community.
Speaker 2:In a community, it's all your actions and your words and you have even less power and systemic forces. So what you do is you have to come together with community in order to change how things are. And you have to do that, and that usually takes a generation. Changing the community takes sometimes months and years. Changing yourself is a split second. So where is your biggest power? It's in your choices, and we spend the least time making as many choices. What do you want to drink? I'll drink tea. If you don't like it, you can change it. But we say I don't know, should I drink tea or coffee? Just pick. We spend.
Speaker 2:I hear I see I'm going to go off on a rant right now. I hear I see I'm going to go off on a rant right now. Please feel free to stop me. I see those kids who are just. You know I have to. You know I don't know what my passion is. I don't know what my purpose in life is.
Speaker 2:Pick something. It should be as easy as playing a game, and I'm not being hard on them. The reason why they can't is because we're not used to that. We think of life as if these choices. You know our life depends on it. It doesn't. It's just like a game. You pick a game and if you don't like it, you pick another game. And if you don't like it, you pick another game. And the faster you do that, what ends up happening is you end up trying so different things in life.
Speaker 2:In fact, right now, research studies are showing that some of the best ways to choose a career is to actually spend a few months testing a few career options until you know how it feels, so that you can make that decision. You cannot make it with no data, but what we're doing is like we're front-loading things like listen, let's teach you for everything, let's fill your brain with information for everything and let's destroy any creative talents. How much we spend on music? How much we spend on writing? And who are the people who are leading the world right now? Who make the most money? Who did we celebrate her engagement? Taylor Swift, and what's his name? The other guy who plays football and she's a singer. You know, they're not the scientists, they're not the math geeks, but what does school teach what? How much time do we spend on art, culture, music?
Speaker 2:Nothing, so we front, load it with so much information, zero information on what career choice. You look at the media and you see people that don't look like you, that don't spend, and we wonder why do we have these gaps between our thinking and reality? Well, because we are making up those gaps from the way we're thinking and the way we're following. So what we need to do is we need to stop and breathe and start learning, understand that school and society didn't prepare us for life. Let's just agree on that. It's the way it is. You can change it, but crying over it is not going to help Changing it. You have to change it and you have to act. But just understand that working to change it will probably benefit the next generation, not just your generation, and you should do it for sure.
Speaker 1:And it makes so much sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, understand that. That's your reality. And now that you're anchored in reality, now you make choices based on your reality. You haven't been trained for life, so what does that mean? You need to practice. It's like somebody throwing you into a game of basketball when all you've studied you studied math all your life and now they're throwing you in a game of basketball. And you? It's okay for them to. Now they throw you here, but it's on you that you expect yourself. Well, now I'm playing basketball. I should play basketball, like you know, michael Jordan. Why are you putting that on yourself? It's like we expect that we should go through life knowing how to make choices very well.
Speaker 2:We punish ourselves for making bad choices when we haven't been making any choices throughout the last 20 years of our lives. You didn't choose your parents, you didn't choose your school, you didn't choose, you didn't have any information to choose the career. And now you're looking back and say why am I bad at making choices? You haven't made any choices, you're just starting your life. Usually, in old tribes, what they do is you.
Speaker 2:When you grow out, when you grow up and you're an adult, you have a mentor, you have you have someone to learn from. You have your adults and what do you call them? Elders that you learn, and you around and you see how they make choices? No, at 18, we're thrown into life and not only that, we're expected to live outside of our parents'. Help Now, you're on your own. Right now, you have to provide for yourself. You know, make right choices and deal with life when you had zero experience in life and nothing spared you. So now, and we're wondering why we're making bad choices? Because you're supposed to make bad choices, because that's how you learn. You're just starting to freaking learn right now.
Speaker 1:I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, all the people that I help now with the tools that I offer are people that have no clue who they are. They have no sense of identity at all, and it's okay that they're like is this it? What's this all about? I have no clue. You know, it's the journey right and it's the mistakes. It's everything that teaches us who we really are. I agree with you. I love what. I'm going to play it back over and over and over. Oh my gosh, you're saying. I mean, it's quite simple, really, you know if you think about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We have the freedom to make choices.
Speaker 2:Simple but not easy.
Speaker 1:But it's not easy because we're brainwashed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll explain what that means. Like we say, simple but not easy, climbing up Mount Everest is simple but not easy. What does it mean? Simple Simple means there are certain routes, you take certain gear with you, you have to go through a certain with a group of people. Everybody has a role, you have a Sherpa, the guide that takes you. So everybody knows how to climb Mount Everest.
Speaker 2:Everything is known about Mount Everest, but it's not easy because when you're there once, first of all, once you get to base camp, which is the first camp before coming to Mount Everest, you have to stay there for a certain amount of time and you have to acclimate to the, to the height and how it is. And because we're different people, we react differently. There are certain people that just won't work for them, and it has nothing to do with how well prepared you are. So you can be physically fit, but you can't handle the height. It's as simple as that. It's like another example of it. There are certain people who can't handle the height. Uh, you know, if you, if you look from you know, second floor, third floor, 10th floor it's like they just can't help how they feel, they get vertigo or something you know that's not that has.
Speaker 2:You can't overpower, you can't brute force through that and but but everything in life teaches us that it's brute force. You know like you do something. You do something. You study through it.
Speaker 2:You power through it, you want to become stronger, just practice. But we're different. We're not machines. We treat ourselves like machines and we build systems and programs and we teach like we're machines. Even school is like everyone's the same. We're different. So basically, we are put into this machine to come out grounded and we look the same. When we are completely different, it's like what's the name? Pink Floyd, you know yeah, don't need no education. The song and how these kids are falling into these meat grinder yes, came out the same, because that's what it is. It's supposed to make us the same. Whereas if you look at music, when people pursue their own dream and their own style, there are some similarities but everybody goes after the same. But when you put it into industry, what ends up happening? Regurgitating the whole thing once you.
Speaker 2:Once you put productivity into the world not that I'm saying productivity is bad for producing food, but once you're like you take human potential and you want to package it to get a certain thing, you have to make it similar because that's the only way you can scale Right. If I ask you to write 20 articles in a week, it's different than if you had the chance to write one or three. I mean, you might run three. Somebody like Noam Chomsky or Stephen King might write like 30 and be okay because we're different. But if everyone has to produce 20, what ends up happening? The person who can produce 30, you know like oh, I have to produce 20 that are a certain size. So you kill their creativity, the person who has to take their time, and you kill their creativity as well because you're putting them in that meat grinder. It's like okay, you have to be the same Quality is out the window.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the only way I can scale, because you're now in service of a different goal than the goal of creativity. And not that it's bad. It works in certain areas and for some people it works. For some people, school is the best thing that happened. For others, they need a different kind, but we cannot do that on a scale of society. So all we need to do right now is, instead of being angry at system, we need to be angry and we need to change it. We need to evolve it. What we need to do right now is to understand that this is the product of the system. Now that we have that understanding and that awareness, well, what do we choose to do Exactly?
Speaker 1:I mean, I love this so much because you can see in everything that you're doing that you're trying your best to expose people to different types of create, like art, your love for art. I love what you have done with that. You want others to learn about art because it is a lost. A lost art, it's lost.
Speaker 2:I wanted to be an artist but I couldn't. It's lost. I wanted to be an artist but I couldn't. I draw and, like I have some artistic talent, but I didn't reach the level that I wanted. So my next best thing and I didn't mean like that's a bad thing it's like I pursued art. It's like, you know, let's come back to the game Like I want to be the person who's shooting the hoops, for example, but I may end up, you know, not being that capable of doing that. So that's what a lead, being leader, is. Instead of grabbing on and say, no, I'm going to become an artist, I'm going to brute force, it's like. No, I like art. Is there something else where I can even have more? I can add more value and I can even express myself more?
Speaker 2:Because when you're entering into a field, you may think that you want something like. I played the guitar and I love the guitar and I wish I could be the like great at playing guitar. Yeah, I am good, don't get me wrong. I played and I trained and I became good. But you know what I discovered after entering into music? I am far better at performance and singing, and when I was in a band I wanted to be. I loved if you see all of my music, all my libraries. I adore guitar players and actually a lot of the things I've listened to are just instrumental guitars. But the thing I excelled at was being headliner of a band, and I loved it as well. I didn't know when I wanted so you might enter into something. That's why you choose differently. I chose to become a guitarist, but then, once I played guitar, I chose again to become a headliner of the band and to sing.
Speaker 1:It's self-discovery right, but you won't know that unless you make an effort to learn. I mean, I noticed in. Let's talk about your new book. You just released the Dark Art of Life, mastery man. That artwork in there is incredible. I feel all kinds of emotions when I just look at one image or one piece of art. Did you do that? Did you do the artwork?
Speaker 2:For the book. Yes, no, it's actually Antonio Piedade, who's a Portuguese artist. I wrote the book and I loved his art. This is his art as well on the T-shirt. So I love his art and I think for people as well, if they want to see like that's. That's the cover is um it's incredible.
Speaker 2:I just I stare at the cover forever and he, he created actually colorful or like the. We have the colored versions which we will uh will release soon, hopefully. So I wrote, I wrote the book and I loved his art and I said I wanted people to stop between one chapter and the next because I wanted them to think, I wanted them to contemplate, I wanted them to sit with what they read and everyone takes differently. But it's a good separator because it's a visual separator. It tackles a different sense rather than, let's say, hearing yourself talking. So it gives you kind of maybe a reflection, maybe you see something different.
Speaker 2:And I gave it to him and he and I told him it would be great if you can draw, work the art, but I'm not going to give you a direction, just read it. He read it, he loved it and yeah, and he started making sketches and I never interfered with any of the pieces. It's complete freedom. So that's for me the act of co-creation. I wrote the uh, I wrote the words, he created the art and together this is kind of our co-work.
Speaker 1:I mean it's mastery. I mean that's in the title, but I mean it is mastery and it isn't about perfection. Actually, if you study that cover design, it's about embracing the messiness of life which you talk a lot about you know, and I love it so much. You say that you can't stop life and you can't slow it down and you can't hold on to it, but you can master it.
Speaker 2:Can you just unpack that a little more for us in your own words, the moment that we started this podcast is gone right now and I can maybe. Let's say we started the podcast and I said something. Let's say I started, maybe I called you the wrong name. Let's say, you know, like, let's say you were, your name was Pamela and I said Pam, and maybe you don't, you hate that, okay, and I chose, and I chose that. Now you might say please don't call me that, I prefer Pamela. Let's say you did that. That moment is gone.
Speaker 2:What I can do is like oh my God, I messed up. Oh my God, what could I have done? I should have not done that. I should have done, I should have asked. And I can go all in my head, while you're asking me a question and I'm not present to the moment at all, I'm reliving or I'm thinking of a moment that passed, yes, and I can't change anything in it. What I can do, I can make a choice in the moment that I can say Pamela if your name was Pamela. And I say, and I'm sorry if I did that, but I can say, hey, I just want to say something. I want to say that I'm really sorry. I'm not saying that you have to apologize, but let's say I in my mind, I am saying to myself I should have apologized. I can make a choice in that moment. Right now, I just want to say I apologize, I should have taken care and, if it's okay with you, I would like, if you want to say anything to me so that we can both say it, so I can be completely present with you. Let's say I do that Suddenly, whatever is in my head is gone. I acted on it and I made a choice in the moment. Or I can choose to say listen, I made a mistake, that's it, sit with it, be here. So that's a choice as well. Or whatever choice. Or I say I choose to continue to think about it until the end of it, and that's how I'm going to do that.
Speaker 2:What I should not do ever is to consider it's gone, I can't do anything about it. And now I'm held hostage to something, to not being able to choose to move forward, whether to apologize or to ignore, or to continue to relive or think about the moment. All of these choices are choices that I'm postponing and basically I'm refusing to make a choice. So I'm held hostage for me, not able to make a choice. Life doesn't care. You're continuing to ask questions. Life is happening and I'm choosing to pretend that I'm holding it. I'm going to make that choice a little bit later. Choices happen in the moment and when that moment is gone, you can't do anything. You can take a shot. Right now, the game is going to be over. Life continues to happen and you can only make those choices.
Speaker 2:And if you live in the moment and make choices in the moment, and the more choices you make, the more skilled you are at it.
Speaker 2:Yes, I, I can tell you, the last two weeks I've had like for every people think, oh, you've done 22 businesses and they think it's a lot if I, I can tell you how many businesses. Not only I had ideas for ideas, I have like thousands, but I would say businesses that I started to write even what the profile would be, choose the name, even book the domain. I think I had like hundreds of domains. So it's a business that I decided the idea and I thought about it and I spent time, wrote the let's say even the plan, for the 22 are like the ones that I managed to execute on, similar to when you shoot hoops at a basketball you have to take hundreds of shots to get a few in, and that is how life works.
Speaker 2:So, in order for you to make good choices, you have to make a ton of bad choices. In order for you to live some great moments in life, you have to live through a ton of really bad, good, horrible moments and making mistakes. That is the only way Life continues to offer you these opportunities, live them, experience them. Life continues to offer you these opportunities. Live them, experience them, try, test and learn along the way. What you don't want to do is just stick with one and keep trying to go back to it to fix it when it's gone.
Speaker 1:Don't let fear dictate what you do right. Don't let fear. Over here in my family we say it is what it is. Some people like that and some people hate that. Some people don't like it, but it is what it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is what it is. It's talking about what's happening outside, which is mostly about the systemic level, which is it is what it is and you can't change it Right what it does and in one way and I use that all the time and I don't mean, but if you don't mind, I'll jump on it, please do, because it is what it is. It talks about the outside circumstances. It is raining. It is what it is and what that does the unsaid, which is what are you going to do about it? What's your choice? So it is raining, it is what it is. Do you choose to go out or stay in? If you choose to go out, you're probably going to get wet, it's going to be not a very nice ride, but you can drive or walk, but you can choose to do it. And if you choose to go in or to stay in, you didn't get the fresh air, you didn't walk, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Every choice there is no perfect choice. There is no good and bad choice. Every choice has the choice and the consequences. There is the choices you make and the choices you don't. These are the only two kinds of choices, the only thing that makes a choice, good or bad, except if you're harming people, which is we're outsiding that. I'm talking about choice, about personal Talking about right here, and usually those are actions and words. These are not choices. Right, you can choose. Many times, you know, somebody angered me. I used to have anger issues, like I want to choose to harm them, but I don't do it and I don't say the words. Sometimes I used to say the words which there are consequences for it. Right, but that's words and actions. But choices live within you and then you act on them. So there is either a choice you make or a choice you don't.
Speaker 1:Exactly, I agree wholeheartedly, man. This is some good stuff here, hussein, it really is. And you also talk about building with purpose, and so, whether it's communities or companies or personal growth, which we've talked a lot about, in your experience, what happens when leaders prioritize vision and values first? What?
Speaker 2:happens. I think so leadership happens at the personal level, when you choose to act on your choices. That's personal leadership to make a choice and to continue to make a choice and to lead your life. But I think we're talking about leaders on the community level, and on the community level, even a company is a community level because it's a group of people coming together for a shared purpose. So I would say, as a leader, you're responsible for the well-being of those people. We kind of right now we'd say in business no, it's a business relationship, so you come, you sign an agreement, you do what you do. No, that's not true.
Speaker 2:All great companies happened, aside from the scale side where they went beyond, let's say, the ability to have that connection it's because of a group of founders, leaders convinced another group of people to come together and to build something great or to create value for people. Nobody came, not one company that you would consider a great company today. On their inception, two people came around or a group of people was like let's do this. And when somebody asked why? Because we can make a ton of money. In fact, most of them didn't know if they're going to make money at all, but most of them started because it's cool or because they wanted to serve people or because they saw a vision and they saw a problem they wanted to solve. They believed in something.
Speaker 2:And most companies I mean today you come up with an idea, you raise funding and maybe you get a lot of that, but these are like the rare companies. Most companies spend one to three years, you know, probably having to max out their credit cards to try to do that. So you have to believe in something and you have to believe in each other and you have to believe in something and you have to believe in each other and you have to be in service of something bigger than yourself. So that is the community level. That's what requires and as a leader, you need to be in that. You have to showcase that. But somehow along the way it became about and it's important in business numbers and profit and money and we forget the origins. So when we say how important vision and you know, purpose values values are stories that are made up.
Speaker 2:I would say principles. Okay, you know the principles of being business. I'll tell you. For example, like you know, we value our customers. What does that really mean? It doesn't mean anything. But if you follow the principles of honesty and integrity, you're always going to deliver, regardless of your customer, regardless of you value them or not. I don't want to wait for your personal values to judge how you do business with me. Your business should be based on principles that if I took this and you said it works, it works. That's integrity. So, if you notice, apple doesn't publish values, but Apple operates based on principles.
Speaker 1:Very true.
Speaker 2:So these are the things that work. There's a principle If you get an electronic device, I don't care how much you value the customer. If your electronic device doesn't work, I'm returning it, value me or not, I don't care if you value me or not, I want it to work. That's the integrity which means it operates as it should operate. The device has integrity. We say that in engineering. It has integrity. The device has integrity. We say that in engineering it has integrity. A bridge has integrity. I don't care if the engineer values me or not. He needs to build a bridge that works. You know the car should work.
Speaker 2:So these things about values, for me it's BS, it's marketing. What needs to happen is a business has a shared, service-based purpose. It needs to serve a community of customers, it needs to deliver value, it needs to follow certain principles honesty, integrity and it needs to continue to do so. And it needs to continue to do so. Where we would go off rails is when we start saying well, the founder has vision. Tell me, what was the vision of Steve Jobs? Nobody knows what their vision is. Apple never published a vision, right? So Steve Jobs dreamt of something and maybe we can call it a vision. He's a visionary leader. He's a product driven person. And when did we do? We live by the customers, because once the customers don't believe, it doesn't matter how much vision you have, it doesn't matter how much money you have. Look at Apple right now. It stopped innovating and it's going down. Yes, it's a collaborative thing that we come together, but along the way it became about how much money we can make and how much of our competition we can acquire to reduce competition so that we can make even more money.
Speaker 2:Businesses weren't created for making money. They have to make money as part of their function. It's part of their function. Just like a clinic is not supposed to be driven by making money, it's supposed to be driven by healing people, a business is not different. A business that makes cars, it needs to make the best cars possible for a certain group of people. If it's a truck, it's a truck. If it's a car, if it's a trailer, it needs to be a trailer and it does its best job and it's focused and it's niche. But somehow, along the way we let I mean in Apple it happened the same way. There was a documentary that talks about the difference between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, for example, and how their leadership style differs. And Tim Cook started meeting with investors. Steve Jobs didn't care about investors at all, so didn't meet with investors. He went to the product every day of the week. He would meet with the product team, tim Cook, probably once every two weeks.
Speaker 2:And he met with investors and that's why the most innovation that Apple has done in the past few years is financial innovation where to go with their money and what to acquire. They didn't do any innovation on the product side, whereas Apple its success and the success that it achieved is because of the products. It changed seven industries it's unheard of it invented seven or eight industries Every industry that it went through. I mean, one of the things I would recommend for the listeners is to go search for, I think, the first kind of earbud, not the wireless one, the wired one, and there's an ad where how many ears they tested to create an earbud that fits smoothly into most ears.
Speaker 1:And how much attention.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the ad itself is such genius. In fact, apple used to make ads about the making of the devices, not the features they made, because the making was inspired by the needs of people and the problems that need to solve, not because apple was great or big or it has money. Of course it has money and it can do these kinds of things, but the principles and what drives them are these things. And once they lost right now the biggest product, johnny Ive is out of Apple they lost, of course, steve Jobs and all of that, and Apple became great at making money but lousy at making great products. So it's what you incentivize and businesses made for making products and being productive to produce. That's what businesses are.
Speaker 1:Right. Businesses are like people to me they have to have a purpose. If you don't have a purpose, you know you don't feel any of the other words that we use vision, value, whatever those things are, you have to have the purpose first, and the purpose needs to be serving people, serving yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes, in a certain way, like you, know someone who like a server in a, in a in a restaurant somebody serves coffee, the other serves, let's say, the plates. In a restaurant, somebody serves coffee, the other serves.
Speaker 2:Let's say the plates, somebody serves the menu. You're in service of people. Everybody does a job and together you can actually run a restaurant very efficiently. That's service. And every business is the same. You have to serve your customers and serve them in a certain way and serve them very well. Your plumber comes and be of service. He serves you by fixing your plumbing. You cannot ask your plumber to do your electric or, you know, to cook your food, so that's his purpose. That's the purpose of the plumber, and the same thing with businesses. They need to have a purpose and their purpose needs to be to serve their customers in that particular area.
Speaker 1:Man, I love all this. This is like you're the most amazing storyteller and I know you have mentioned that storytelling is so powerful.
Speaker 2:You're making me blush.
Speaker 1:Huh, you're making me blush. Well, I mean, I know the more. I looked at all of your work, the more I was like this guy's unreal. He's so amazing. I've learned so much just in the week I've researched you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. You're so welcome.
Speaker 1:You're so welcome. I've learned a lot already, but the storytelling that is my. I tell everyone that they have a story in them and if everyone would just share their stories, I think that all of us would be a lot better off. Would just share their stories, I think that all of us would be a lot better off. So you think that it shapes how people in organizations grow? And yeah, oh yeah, I believe so too, because when you tell a story, it's either about it's either about a mistake or something that has happened. You know that you learn from, and basically that's what we need to do as people and organizations we need to, like you said, make choices and keep learning, keep educating ourselves. So the world's changing really fast and too fast, I think and, like we've talked about uncertainties, overwhelming. What advice would you give to someone trying to find clarity and direction? I guess maybe you would talk to them about making a choice, making choices.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think one of, let's say, you're living in the moment, whether you're, let's say, going into adulthood or you are my age, you know midway through your life and you're kind of making choices. I think you need to be aware of your environment and the story you tell yourself, like I can tell myself, that I can tell myself many stories. At 51 right now, I can say you know what I lived all this life and I still don't have, you know, 100 million dollars in the bank, which is, I think, 300 million. That was, that was, that was my, that was my vision board thing.
Speaker 1:Your personal goal.
Speaker 2:I had 300 million. For some reason I love the number three. So like, why, why get 100 million if I, if I had three, three, so I also. One of the stories is I will climb mount everest is the peak of, uh, of physical accomplishment or human accomplishment, and I have to climb it and I would have to have, um, the mercedes sls red car that would be, that would be the. These were, that was the story I was telling myself. I would.
Speaker 2:I could look back and say, well, I haven't achieved those. So it means this. So I tell myself the story and that story will color and will impact how I look at life. Because if I look at life and say I haven't achieved what I meant and maybe it's true, I mean it's true that I haven't achieved those things but I'm not telling myself or I'm not talking to myself about the most important thing, which is what did I really want? And, along the way, if I, one of the things that we don't, we don't spend a lot of time contemplating is what do we want? We know what we don't want. If you ask anybody, they know immediately what they don't want. But what do?
Speaker 1:you want? Oh, you're talking to a web designer. That's what people they tell me, what they don't want. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm a designer as well. That's one of the reasons I left. Design is because I would show someone. I was like, well, I don't like green. I was like, who cares what's like?
Speaker 2:We spend a lot of time. We don't spend enough time considering what we want and why we want it, and what does it mean to us and why it matters. And when we do that, what ends up happening is we become more intimately aware of who we are and what matters to us, and we also discover that that changes across time. You know, if you think of something simple like the food you eat, very rarely would you like the same food at 40 as when you're 30 or 30, as you're 20, and definitely when 20 is, let's say, 15 or 10. So you change as a person. So you find out that you grow and you change as a person. So you find out that you grow and you change as a person. You find out that your wants and likes some of them matter to you, some of them don't and then you can make better choices because your choice is now in service. So if I give you uh, I we did this, uh, I would say forum called the Forum, which is highly recommended. I would recommend for others and they would ask you this question chocolate, vanilla, choose.
Speaker 2:And if I haven't spent enough time, you know chocolate and vanilla, you know like going to an ice cream and you don't know these options and you don't know what you'd like, you'll stand there like a deer in the headlight. You do the same in Starbucks, especially when they introduce something new. I mean, when they introduce three things that are new. It's like, oh my God, as if I need more choices. Can you just introduce one thing new so I can make the choice? And in fact this is actually proven by science, they say in the. That's why if you look, let's say, in anything Costco or Walmart, you see those people who go around to give you options.
Speaker 2:There's a book called the Paradox of Choice. You shouldn't give someone more than six choices, because more than six choices now they're hindered by the choice, even though it's more choices. That's why you go to Ben and Jerry's like I don't know what I want to choose, even though you know what you like like. You know you like, you always like chocolate. And maybe every time you choose chocolate, but every time you see it, the overwhelm. Because we were not. We used to spend. We used to go for hours to find one thing to eat when we were, you know, 100,000 years ago, yes. But now we're like we have a ton of choices, so we're crippled by the number of choices.
Speaker 2:Our brain is not used to that kind of thing so overwhelming, yeah, so we need to spend time knowing what we want and my recommendation is to choose or to create, I would say to create a big short or a shorthand to making certain choices, because it becomes easier. For example, I do a lot of partnerships with people, so every time I need to consider a partnership, I need because I need a ton of people. I mean, like I know, thousands and thousands of people. Uh, I mean my, what is it? My, I think, my, my phone book itself is around like 3,000, 4,000 people Almost. So I remember I had to change from a Samsung to an iPhone because the Samsung phone started when I went to dial someone, it would hang up because I had so many people on my phone.
Speaker 1:It couldn't handle the load.
Speaker 2:Couldn't handle that. So how do I make decision onto? Who do I spend time with, who do I partner? Because when you're a certain, let's say, level, you're working on something and something that it's fine. A lot of people want to work with you. So I developed a short hand for that and I say I have to work with people that I like. So that's the first thing, and it's easy to, and they have to be like snap judgments, you know like they have to. I know who I like. It's very, it's very visceral. You know who you like, you know who you don't like.
Speaker 2:The second thing is our visions have to align. So I asked them the first thing I said I'm like what kind of world, what are you working towards? Where are you heading with your life? And if they have a vision that I align with, that's the second thing. And the third thing we have to leave the world better than we found it. Oh, yes, so if they're working on something that, because I've done, you know I've done so many work, so I'm not interested in something that gives me something that is like some work that gives me something that I don't want.
Speaker 2:Like somebody said, let's work on an e-book that you know I don't know, help people know what to feed their cats. Now, if I work, I can work, I can do the work, but do I want like, is that what I want to leave? No, I want to write, you know, about mastery and life mastery. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Some people who love cats like I have two cats, I love cats, but not that much you know like. But for others, for somebody else working on life mastery, whatever they don't, and they and they care about cats, they become vets. So everybody has a different thing they want to leave their life with or they want to. So these became my shorthand for making quick decisions in regards to partnerships. Shorthand for making quick decisions in regards to partnerships.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the perfect example of your shorthand is Momentable, because I was looking at that. I even loaded it on my phone just to try it out, and I'm really not that into art, but now I feel very well versed. I mean that's I think you said, and at one point there's over 120,000 works from artists, galleries and stuff. But not only do you expose people that probably have never been exposed to art, you're also helping like storefronts and museums. I mean you're accomplishing a lot of different things with one effort.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm hoping, I'm hoping to the art. The art thing is, I would say, something that I've always had since 1992. Because I always I was born before the internet didn't have access and I remember begging. So I can borrow one art book from the father of a friend of mine, because the art book in America is $100, $200, let's say, I remember Picasso's art book and Dali, two of my favorites, but for me in Syria $100 is the salary of an engineer for a month. It's like if I told you right now, you know, and not any engineer electronic engineer. So I's like if I told you right now, you know to, and not any engineer electronic engineer. So I would say, if I told you right now, here's a book, all you have to do to buy it is six to $8,000 a month, you know. Like to buy one book a month. You wouldn't buy, like if somebody would have given you to say, here, do you want to see this book? You would want to borrow it because it's very valuable. So that's how valuable those things were for me.
Speaker 2:So I've always felt that there was so much more and I loved art and there was very little space to experience art. We didn't have a national gallery. We didn't have, like a lot of you know, these big museums. We had two museums, one war museum and one national museum, which is more focused on artifacts rather than art, and we had some galleries. There is there are a lot of artists and I've hear about the artists but I'm yet to see their work, so I always had that.
Speaker 2:So when the internet came around, I was like I can see, you know, I can. I'm finding so many things, why don't I? I put you know artists online. So that's kind of my driver. And right now, because I love museums so much and I love art, it's very hard to travel to see many museums. So, and I'm finding it hard and I'm blessed and I'm lucky to have the life that I have, what about all the people that are me right now that can't see the art of museums, can't visit museums? Can I help the museums create a digital presence? That is true as much as possible, true to the art and the experience of art.
Speaker 2:So it's not like a metaverse, it's more like you know, you experience the art in its purest form and gives the museums the ability to reach far more than the people who have the money to travel to the museum itself.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's the epitome of the plus one, because I mean it does everything that you just said, but also it introduces the art world to people that may not know what artwork they like yet. But it's AI-driven correct, so I mean, like, depending on what art that I'm choosing to look at, I mean it can decide for me. Oh, she likes this type of art, so let's show her these artists, let's show her these, let's show her these. I mean, it's educating me and I probably wouldn't have even known it if I hadn't looked that up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we, we are. I mean we we held back a little bit on the AI until the AI models are developed a little bit more. It does give you now some randomness. It's like how you discover music right now. Music streaming might be not that great for artists, unfortunately, musicians but it's great for discovering new music and lowering the barriers for people to discover new music and listen to new music, and I think that's important. That art and culture used to be something that we shared. We've always spent time attending plays, sharing it with each other. It creates shared language. It builds bridges, breaks down barriers, and I think it's important that we come back to that or else we're going to continue to see ourselves adrift from each other.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes. And back in my youth ministry days, when I was a youth minister, you know I had sixth graders through 12th graders their whole time, and you know teaching them about faith and the importance of it. However, I would also have classes on just the basic skills of life, you know. Show them what art's like and why it's important. Show them how to change a flat tire, for Pete's sake, or how to balance their checkbook All the things that would prepare them to go out, since, like you said, we're just shoving them out there at 18 years old. You know they're not prepared to live life and I think that if a lot of leaders would take that approach, I think that you know we'd have a lot of uh. It would make a big difference out there.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 2:If you could leave listeners with one principle from the dark art of life mastery that you hope they apply starting today. What would it be? I would say the biggest thing is remember that that life is finite. Um, we don't like to think about that, but I think it's important to remind ourselves that we don't know how long we live, and so the moment that you're living right now is the moment that you have. It's not to make life more precious or less precious than it is, but that that's what you have right now.
Speaker 2:So, in this moment, live to the max and let that be an act of service and an act of contribution, because that will build you up, that will give you so much more value than you can ever think. And we think of contribution as kind of giving, but it's sometimes just loving someone, saying a nice word, smiling at someone. Contribution can come in all shapes and sizes, so I think. But when you put yourself into it, you find your purpose, you'll find out more about yourself and what works for you, and you'll end up building community and you'll end up changing the world with small acts of kindness and contribution.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness, just kindness heals my friend, I know that for sure. So before we wrap up, hussein, where is the best place for listeners to find you, follow your work or get a copy of your new book?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you very much. Go to husseinhalakcom, so that is H-U-S-S-E-I-N-H-A-L-A-Kcom, and you will find everything about me that you want to know, or maybe you don't want to know.
Speaker 1:And I will make sure and note this in the show notes, everybody, so that you can just click on a link. Hussein, thank you so much for this conversation. Your journey reminds us that innovation, leadership and purpose aren't abstract ideas. They're choices we make every day. For those listening, I encourage you to connect with Hussein through his website I'm going to repeat it for you Hussein HusseinHalikcom and it's H-U-S-S-E-I-N-H-A-L-L-A-K, and follow him on LinkedIn, instagram and Substack. I'll include all those links in the show notes and, of course, be sure to grab a copy of his new book, the Dark Art of Life Mastery. And, as always, thank you for tuning in to the Plus One Theory Podcast. Remember your past doesn't define you, it prepares you and you can always finish stronger than you started. See you next week.