Notes for An Awesome Life with John Spence

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• Notes for An Awesome Life with John Spence • Season 1 • Episode 1

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About this episode: John Spence is one of the world’s top thought leaders but he almost wasn’t.

Before the accolades, before lecturing at MIT and Stanford, before helping people and businesses around the world…he failed out of college with a 1.6 GPA, was cut off from his family, and found himself sitting on a Gainesville curb realizing that no one else was coming to save him.

That was the moment he decided to change everything.

He took responsibility, rebuilt from the ground up, and started studying what it really means to have an AWESOME life.

That journey became the foundation of his life’s work: helping businesses succeed. Along the way, he has also been helping people build lives of purpose, gratitude, and joy.

Now, we’re bringing that conversation to you.

"Notes for an Awesome Life with John Spence" is a podcast about living intentionally, facing yourself honestly, and making small, steady choices that lead to a life you love.

Homework (try these this week)

  1. Write two letters: If I don’t change… and If I do the work… Read both every morning.
  2. Start a journal: What did I do today that helped me build an AWESOME life?
  • Email us: awesomelifenotes@gmail.com
  • Learn more about John: JohnSpence.com
  • Familiar Wilsons Media: FamiliarWilsonsMedia.com

About John Spence: John is a globally recognized business thought leader, former owner/CEO of five companies, and advisor/coach to organizations from startups to the Fortune 10. He’s lectured at more than 90 universities and was named by the American Management Association as one of “America’s Top 50 Leaders to Watch.”

About the show: Notes for an Awesome Life with John Spence focuses on personal growth, happiness, clarity, and the everyday habits that compound into an AWESOME life.

Credits: Hosts John Spence and Josh Wilson • Produced by Josh Wilson for Familiar Wilsons Media • Special thanks: Amanda Wilson (writing and production), and Domingo Jimenez (writing and marketing).

SPEAKER_01:

This is a familiar Wilsons media production. John Spence is recognized as one of the top business thought leaders and leadership development experts in the world, and was named by the American Management Association as one of America's top 50 leaders to watch, along with Sergey Brynn and Larry Page of Google and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. He's been a guest lecturer at more than 90 colleges and universities, including MIT, Stanford, Cornell, and the Wharton School of Business. John has also been the owner or CEO of five companies and currently serves as a board member or advisor to several organizations. As a consultant and coach to organizations worldwide, from startups to the Fortune 10, John is dedicated to helping people and businesses be more successful by making the very complex awesomely simple. I'm Josh Wilson and I welcome you to Notes for an Awesome Life with John Spence. This podcast goes beyond the boardroom and invites you into a more personal and reflective space as we consider how to make life more happy, joyful, and successful. In other words, more awesome. Welcome to Notes for an Awesome Life with John Spence. I'm Josh Wilson. And I'm John Spence. And John, I'm really excited for us to start this new podcast endeavor. I think it's going to be great.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm excited as well. It's going to be a lot of fun, my friend.

SPEAKER_01:

And folks listening, I wanted to let you know how it was that John and I decided to do this podcast. I met John because he came and he spoke at my place of work. And I was just really impressed that he talked a lot about love and compassion and empathy. And he did it in his own John Spence type of way. And so, me being the serial podcaster that I am, I said, I got to start a show with this guy.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, uh, my reason was we had talked about this in my on my team and my company about doing a podcast. And it seemed too intimidating and overwhelming. Um and the other reason was because my podcast that we had planned was on business, because that's what I spend my career on is helping businesses. And you said, I want to talk about the information you talked about love and about life success and about overcoming failure. Uh, and that's that's a something I love, love, love to teach and don't get to do it as often as I might want to.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and it's funny because I didn't know that you taught a class on this um at business schools and colleges. So I I just think it's a match made in heaven. Interesting to me that you have taught this to some of the most accomplished business people in the world, and you were telling me that they don't have it all together when it comes to life.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, they've uh and not all, but many that I work with are so busy, so rushed, they they they're looking for the next promotion or then close the next deal that they haven't and they tell me this when I do executive coaching. I go, you need to take some time to reflect. How are things going? How's the company doing? How are you doing? Are you taking care of yourself? You know, are you for your family? I don't have time for that. I go, what? I don't have time for that. And I tell them, you know, if you don't have time for that, you're doing something really wrong.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and my hope is that the folks who have carved out the time to listen to this um podcast, they've also determined that it's really important for them to carve out the time to take the good, honest, hard look at themselves and really assess if they're doing everything that they can to live an awesome life. Because that's what we all want at the end of the day. Now, John, talk a little bit about that time that you had to take a really hard, honest look at yourself because you weren't heading in the direction that you wanted to.

SPEAKER_00:

I was born into a very lot of privilege, very wealthy, very my father was very famous, and I pretty much tried to screw everything up. Uh no drugs, nothing like that, but not paying attention uh once I got to college. And let's just see, I hit a point where I realized that the only one who was going to fix my life was me. So I decided to become a fanatic for understanding how to have, and by a unique definite, whatever your definition is, a highly successful life. And I've spent my whole life since then. I'm 61 and I was 20 something then, uh, trying to find ways, ideas, workshops, things that I could apply to make my life better. And along the way, somehow I started teaching it.

SPEAKER_01:

You decided that you were the only one who'd be able to help you, but I want to hear more about what led up to you having to make that determination, having to make that decision.

SPEAKER_00:

So as I I as I mentioned, I came from a wealthy family. My uh my dad was a malpractice attorney. Uh I went to one of the top prep schools in the country in Miami, Florida, uh, Gulliver Preparatory, did very well in high school, got accepted to a lot of different universities, some very prestigious ones. And I chose the University of Miami in Miami, Florida because it was close to the beach and my girlfriend. Not exactly why you should pick university, uh, which is why I promptly failed out a few semesters in with a 1.6 GPA uh problem. I had a 1.6, my friends had a 1.0, a 0.9, a 1.2. So I was the academic stud of my group at a 1.6. Yeah. And uh the year that I got kicked out, well, let's let's back up slightly. The highest award the University of Miami can give to an alumni is called the Order of the Iron Arrow. Very rarely given out. My father was Order of the Iron Arrow. Uh, the year I got kicked out, he was on the board of directors for the university, and there used to be a wing of the law school named after my dad. So when I got booted out of school, I also got booted out of my family. Uh my father said, You're on your own now. Uh basically said, I don't really want to ever see you again. So I had to restart college uh here in Gainesville, Florida, where I live now. Uh and I went to the University of Florida, and this was the pivot point. And I brought my transcripts from the University of Miami, and I thought, you know, I'm a smart kid, prep school could have been blah, blah, blah. Handed the woman my transcripts behind the uh desk at Tigert Hall. I know exactly where it is, and she literally laughed at me in my face and looked at the transcripts and looked up in me, looked up at me and said, We don't take people like you. And I I was like, But I I I really want to go to school at the University of Florida. Still I remember she said, I don't care what you want, we don't want you, and then said the two words that were the pivot point. Next, please. And I stepped out of line, walked down the stairs, sat down on 13th Street in University, which is uh seven or ten miles from my current house, and I sat there and cried. And I thought, I have just about thrown everything away. Uh I definitely was born not a silver spoon, an entire, you know, place setting. Silver place setting. And I figured at that point the rest of my life was probably gonna be asking people if, you know, would you like fries for that today? And that's then and there, right there, I decided I was the one that was gonna have to fix this. And if I was the one that was gonna have to do it, I was gonna have to study and learn and work and turn things around. So it it really was like a flash of lightning where I said, This is not, I am not going in the direction I want to go in.

SPEAKER_01:

I've heard this story before, but but I never heard the detail about being cut off from your um from your family.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, my father said I was an embarrassment as a son and he wished I'd never been born. Oh. That's a little brutal.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, just a little bit.

SPEAKER_00:

It's not the nicest thing anyone could ever say to you.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it sounds like uh your dad and my dad um had the same speech writers. So you are cut off from your family, you come up here to Gainesville, fresh start and all that. Are you alone or do you have support here?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I had a that's why I came here. I had a real good friend from high school, and uh he was here studying engineering. And to give you an idea of going from living literally at a mansion, I slept under his bed. We put his bed up on cement blocks, and I I would lay down on the ground and roll sideways into the bed. Nice. And then I learned something cool. I could stick my books in the box springs and had a light, and I could study laying upside down and underlying with. So I went from you know having housekeepers to sleeping on a mattress under my friend's bed.

SPEAKER_01:

Mansion to mattress, the John Spence story, now on Netflix. So that's a hard reset. You decide that this is on me, that I gotta do it. What are your first steps in doing this?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, because they wouldn't let me into the University of Florida, this is back uh this is 1984, 85. There's a college here now called Santa Fe College, which is among the top in the country. But way back then it was Santa Fe Community College. And basically, if you had a pulse, they had to let you in. And I got in on probation. Uh and I was talking one day to one of my friends in class saying, I have to get straight A's. I have to figure this out. And one of my professors overheard me and said, I'll teach you how to get straight A's. And that was really the point where from his advice, and it's 35 years later, I think, we still go to lunch about once a month and hang out. So I'm still the impact somebody, a mentor like that can have on your life can last decades and decades. Uh and that's when I said, you know, I'm I had got to go out and get a job, got to get a couple jobs, got to go put myself through school. And I realized that I I had to put my head down and get straight A's. I had no choice. It was non-negotiable.

SPEAKER_01:

And from that, you wrote yourself a manual on how to succeed in life? Like that's how that happened?

SPEAKER_00:

That's what I wrote to myself to help me stay on target. It's strategies for life success. And I had never ever planned to teach it to anybody. It was just for me. And I was walking across campus one day and I carried it with me everywhere I went. And one of my friends said, Hey, you know, hey, what's that, John? I go, Oh, that's my success manual. Gave me an odd look. But then at the time, I was playing rugby, I was a dean's teaching assistant, I was teaching karate, I had opened my own advertising firm, uh, was getting straight A's, and still went out and had a good time. I had a saying back then, beer tastes better when you have a 4.0.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

And my friend said, How do you balance all this and still keep a 4.0? And I said, It's in this workbook. So he asked me to teach it to him, and I did. And then he came back a couple weeks later and said, I have a few friends. And by the end of the semester, we had rented a room at the local holiday in, a little ballroom, and I was teaching it to large groups of students at the University of Florida while I was still there.

SPEAKER_01:

And then now to us, really, because the content in that workbook informs all of the things that we're talking about. I am curious though, John, as you've taught it, what is some of the feedback that you've gotten from folks who've taken this class from you?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, this is one of the hardest things for me, because a lot of people get really uh I get life changing a lot. Life changing. Um, I think I've told you the story once of life saving uh of people that there was one kid, and we'll probably tell the story later, that was contemplating suicide, and after he went through the class, he decided not to. Uh, but it's I I had a friend not too long ago, and I told you and I chat about this a bit. I'm very awkward teaching this information. Um, and it's nothing I wrote, you know. I mean, it's all these are famous things from around the world and and stuff that I but I because it can have a such strong impact on people's lives, and it that's that makes me nervous. I'm like, I I don't want to make someone get a divorce or quit their job or change their life or their values. And a friend of mine who's uh one of the who's really, really good executive coach looked at me and said, That's arrogant, John. That's selfish. Because I I'm disappointed in you. If you can help other people and you don't want to do it because it makes you uncomfortable, that is really disgusting. And it's one of the reasons I agreed to do this podcast with you, is he was right. And uh I I've realized that it's not about me, it's about the information. And it a lot of people say that this is the most reflection they've ever done in their lives, spending a few hours working on being in one of the courses or working on the workbook.

SPEAKER_01:

That really surprises me. And it probably shouldn't, but it does.

SPEAKER_00:

I teach classes at Wharton and Harvard and a few other places. I had, you know, a few other places, and they're all super high-level executive classes. You've got to be a senior executive, a multi, multi-billion dollar company to even get into the conference. Uh, and they asked me to teach a very short 90-minute class there where I only hit like three key things. I've had several of these people who are in their mid-50s, who are, by most people's definition in America, which is, you know, the definition of success is money, fame, and power, uh, they're extremely famous, rich, and powerful. And they say this is the most time I've ever spent in my entire life thinking about my values and reflecting on my life. 90 minutes.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And these are folks who are crafting values for, like you're saying, these multimillion dollar uh companies. And yet when it comes to looking at ourselves, making the assessment, people don't want to look in the mirror.

SPEAKER_00:

I I actually, when I teach it at a high-level place like that or to a large company, I call this strategic planning for your life.

SPEAKER_01:

They seem to like that a little bit better. It's all in the branding. Yes. Regardless, that reinforces the fact that this is for everyone.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I the the workbook I like I I've taught it at about 90 colleges and universities around the world. I've taught it at some high schools, and I've taught it for Fortune 10 companies, and I use the exact same workbook. I don't change anything. These are fundamental key life skills that, as you just said, uh people go, wow, where'd you come up with this? I'm like, well, no, actually, that was Aristotle, you know. You know, it's you know, the it's the same stuff generation, but people don't many people, not people, many people never take the time to sit down and think about it and do a little homework. Not only on learning these skills from amazing people, but the main part is homework on themselves.

SPEAKER_01:

And why don't they?

SPEAKER_00:

Fear.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh fear that when they examine their life, it's not gonna be what they hoped it would be. Or and and again, we're we have lots of episodes ahead of us, uh, fear that when they examine their values and the things that are most important to them, they are not sp focus, not actually focused in that area. So holding up a mirror can be very painful. Sure. Also, I think that people have these expectations of what success is supposed to look like, and using someone else's definition, um, by someone else's definition, oftentimes you fall short. Yeah. Uh and one of the main workshops I have is people defining what succeed success actually means to them. And all of a sudden they realize I'm actually doing a little bit better than I thought. But it's it's all driven from fear. Fear that I'm not I'm not living my life to the fullest.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, sure. Um, self-assessment is hard, but reaching the end of your life and not having asked those questions feels like such a waste.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I I won't say it was a waste of time, but I heard a great thing from Michelle Obama when she was talking to her mother when her mother was getting close to passing. And she looked up at Michelle and said, Wow, that went fast. And I think a lot of people, many people get to the end and realize I I just never took time. I didn't realize it was going to happen this quickly. And I always thought, I'll get to this later. I'll I'll work on myself later. And later, unfortunately, doesn't come. Or, like you said, when it does, it's too late to really do anything about it. Instead, you've just got regret.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Happy Fun Life Podcast, folks.

SPEAKER_00:

Happy and smiling. Well, you know, if we should if we can paint a dark enough picture, someone's listening going, Well, I'm not that bad.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's right. Walk towards the light, people, walk towards the light. And in this case, um, the light is it's never too late. No, never. I work with retirees. That's what I do when in my eight to five, and I've met so many people who have made these massive life changes, um, learning new skills, new avocations, all of these things. And they are happy to have done it, but more often than not, they'll just say, I wish I had started this sooner.

SPEAKER_00:

And it isn't doesn't have to be a major life change. Small steps. There are little things you can do, any stage in your life, that can have a very, very positive impact. I think also when you said why don't people do this, because they think it's going to be, you know, pushing a rock up a hill that keeps running back over you for year after year after year. It's small steps consistently done, day after day, small decisions that eventually add up to a different life.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so let's take all this and let's get intensely practical. We've got these new friends here listening to us on this podcast. Where do we start?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'll tell you how I did. Uh I, you know, besides the reading, studying and learning, I wrote myself, and this is when I was maybe just 20, I wrote myself two letters. I wrote a letter that said, if you don't make changes and you don't get serious about this and you don't examine your life, what will your life look like? And I wrote a wait worst case scenario. Then I wrote another letter that said, if you take the time to do this and you invest in it and you live your values and blah, blah, blah, blah, what will your life look like? And every morning when I got up, I read both of those letters. And I decided I was gonna do the stuff on what would make my life look better. Uh and then I I think the other big commitment, Josh, is time, is saying, I'm gonna, I'm gonna invest some time in this. Might be 30 minutes a week, might be a weekend here and there, but the I'm too busy uh means the I never got around to it sometimes.

SPEAKER_01:

We'll get back to the idea of self-talk later, you know, episodes down the road. But I love the fact that you practiced that and that you decided at some point that you were gonna be your your own best advocate, that you were gonna be your own best friend as you move forward. That's really important. And really, I don't think we can do any of this without that.

SPEAKER_00:

Anthony Robbins, pretty famous motivational speaker. Um I'm not a massive fan, but I read one of his books, Awaken the Giant Within, which is about 500 to something pages, and I took one thing away from it that was life-changing to me. And it was worth reading the 500 pages to get this one thing. The quality of your life will be determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself and others. I was coaching someone today, she's like, Why are my employees so lazy? Why is this organization? Why is this bad? Why does nobody do that? And I was like, Let's change this. What can I do to help my employees get more engaged? So, you know, I think we often talk to ourselves in ways we would never let anyone else talk to us.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I learned early that, and I guess maybe it was would have been considered affirmations. Now it's just a belief system. I I have a saying, everything always works out okay for me. No matter how bad it is, no matter how challenging it is, I will always come out the other side learning something, being okay, but everything always turns out good for me. Well, I aspire to that. So far it has. Now it has. As soon as I convinced myself and started to believe that, it's sort of been that way.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so at the end of every episode, we want to get some homework from John to let us know what we should work on until next week. So, John, what is our homework?

SPEAKER_00:

Ask yourself some important questions and then listen to yourself talk to yourself and say, Am I encouraging myself or defeating myself? And you'll find out, many people find out that they often say things that really are not helpful to themselves.

SPEAKER_01:

All right. So that's our homework, listeners. You and I together. Maybe you can join me. I'm starting a journal as we do these shows and as John gives us things to think about, so that I can really reflect and uh, you know, join you in growing and learning.

SPEAKER_00:

I've been journaling for years and years as well, so I'm a very strong supporter of that.

SPEAKER_01:

Alrighty, John. Great first outing, I would say. Thanks for joining me. Although I suspect that we've lost Tony Robbins as a potential sponsor for our show.

SPEAKER_00:

I had a lot of fun. I think we covered some neat stuff. We spent some time on background, which need which is important to know where we're both coming from. Uh, but I'm glad I think we dropped a few nuggets that might help people start on a path to a more happy, successful, and joyful life.

SPEAKER_01:

And let us know how you're doing on that path. Drop us a line, ask us questions, say whatever you want to say, and send it to awesome life notes at gmail.com. To find out more about John Spence, you can go to johnspence.com. And this has been a Familiar Wilsons Media production with special thanks to Amanda Wilson and Domingo Jimenez. You can find out more about the other podcasts we offer at Familiar WilsonsMedia.com. All right, folks, you've got your homework. Now go out there and live an awesome life.