Notes for An Awesome Life with John Spence

Failure: Your Worst Mistake Can Be Your Best Teacher

• Notes for An Awesome Life with John Spence • Episode 10

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Failure sits at the center of every meaningful life change, yet most of us meet it with fear, shame, and avoidance. In this conversation with John Spence, we explore how to turn losses into leverage by focusing on what we can control and what we can learn.

 John grounds the talk in his own rock‑bottom college experience and the arc that followed: disciplined learning, better habits, and a deliberate mindset that trades rumination for reflection. The result is a practical framework for handling setbacks while gaining ground.

  • 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 foremost business thought leaders in the world, a global top 100 business thinker and advisor to companies from startups to the Fortune 10. But it didn't start that way. In college, John hit rock bottom, kicked out of one university and rejected by another. That's when he made a decision to change his attitude and take a systematic approach to building the life he wanted. Through hard work and relentless learning, he went on to create a life full of meaning, joy, and connection. I'm Josh Wilson, and this is Notes for an Awesome Life with John Spence. We invite you to join us in conversation as John shares with us the lessons, habits, and tools that he used and that you can use to build an awesome life. And I'm John Spence. John, how have you been doing this week? Awesome.

SPEAKER_00:

Pretty much every week's awesome. I finished my last uh major business project for the year. I've still got executive coaching and things to do, but I did a big strategy retreat and had to turn in a and you know, I was gonna say, what would have taken me in the past six or seven days of really hard work with AI took two days and it was dramatically better than anything I've produced before. So uh excited about that. My client saw the report and went, This is, and I've been doing strategy for him for 10 years. He's like, this is the best ever. And I'm thinking, welcome to the world of AI, which just doesn't replace you, it augments you, it doesn't think for you, it thinks with you.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's so interesting to me, and this is a live podcast, it's not a business podcast, but I do want to wander around on on this playground for just a little bit. I think that anyone who uses AI a bunch is aware that there's there are hallucinations, there's just plain made-up shit that that AI spits out. So, how do you deal with that? You know, because you have to be right in everything you present.

SPEAKER_00:

This is a really easy answer because I studied this carefully and I teach it from the stage. There are three things that AI does really well, and one thing it can't do. So, and it's in stages. The first stage is AI is good at just collecting information or data, just data. One zeros, boom, blah, boom. It has no meaning, it's just brought in, raw data. Stage two, level two, is when it turns it into information. And information is when it starts to organize it, put it in spreadsheets, or you know, starts looking for patterns and organizing the data. Level three is knowledge, and this is where the AI is starting to actually give you recommendations, give you advice, create reports, being your thought partner. And it a lot depends on how you program, the prompting you use. Uh, but at this point it becomes, and I use mine as thought partners. Critical, they ask questions, it challenges me, creates report, does analysis. Uh, you know, now it's pretty, but there's the last step, and you just nailed it, is the wisdom stage. And it's the the difference between knowledge work and wisdom work is where humans come in, is like I'll use the example, the strategy work I did, it can it can generate amazing data, information, and knowledge. But if someone else looked at the report, they'd have no idea how to apply it to my client. And if you hadn't done 30 years of doing strategy work, the data wouldn't make sense, then information wouldn't make sense. So I'll give you the quick other side of that is I did get hired by a client to give a major speech in front of about 3,000 people. It was from a unique industry that I knew nothing about. And they asked me to highly, highly customize my presentation. Uh so I did a massive amount of research. I created an executive overview, I sent it to my client, and she said, Where did you get this research? Where'd you get these numbers? I've been doing this 20 years. I've never seen these numbers before.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Go verify the numbers. And I went and I couldn't. Everything was a hallucination. Problem is because I didn't understand the industry, I didn't know it was wrong. That's that idea about you've got to have the wisdom level. And that works in all things. I mean, in my personal life, I I have a health GPT where I track my weight, my blood pressure, my A1C, and everything else like that. It recommends diets for me, you know, what vitamins to take, supplements, but I damn sure don't trust it over my doctor. Oh, of course.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

I bring all the data that it generates to my doctor and say, Am I on the right path here? And I I also tell him I'm I don't think I don't go to the medical GPT to tell me what to do. You do. I just want to make sure I'm not doing anything wrong.

SPEAKER_01:

I've definitely encountered the idea of data, entire data sets, famous quotes from people, and and it only had to get me once um in generating like a fake quote from Abraham Lincoln. I'm like, well, okay, so I'm not doing this anymore.

SPEAKER_00:

Abraham Lincoln said you can't trust everything you see on the internet. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Very good. But that's an interesting segue into what I want to talk about uh this week. And what I want to talk about this week is uh inspired by a question someone asked me. And I'm gonna make it into a dear John here because it applies. Dear John, let's start with the big one. How do you deal with failure and particularly the emotional part of failing? Now, this podcast is framed and built on the fact that you had a huge failure going into your college career, and you did deal with that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, um, very good question. Thank you uh for the person that asked it. Uh, a couple of things, and I we might have discussed this earlier, but your explanatory style.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, we have, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. It's it's how you explain to yourself why things are happening to you or what's happening. So it's uh permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization. I go into a lot more detail, but how I handle it is I back up and say, how bad is this really? Um, how much of my life is this truly gonna affect negatively? Uh, and how much of this is in my control. And, you know, and most failures I look at and go, uh, in the scheme of things, this isn't that bad. You know, and if it's bad, I go, this is bad. And then I try to say, okay, is this gonna last a day, a week, a year, many years? And then as soon as I do that, I say, all right, uh, what can I control about this? And I try to let go of all of that. Um, I think that unless, you know, and I've spent a long time, I've failed a bunch. Uh, all of us have. I've spent a long time working on turning my perception of failure into actually learning opportunities. Sure. Uh, you know, every now and then there's a failure that's emotionally painful. But as quickly as I can turn it into what can I take away from this? What does this mean to me? What can I do with this? What can I learn from it? All of a sudden it it changes the way I look at it too. This is a learning opportunity, not something to be uh, you know, and again, I'm trying to think of the word here, constantly focusing on it, you know, and thinking about I should have done this differently, I could have done that, and this, this wasn't fair, or blah, blah, blah. None of that helps.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Ruminating or perseverating. Uh there you go, ruminating.

SPEAKER_00:

Good words.

SPEAKER_01:

Mr. Uh Thesaurus here is saying that. Well, as I was looking at different resources in preparing for this, I was looking at some research on what's called effective forecasting. And that's the idea is that we always overestimate how bad we're going to feel after a failure. And if we are were able to remember that, that our recovery time is going to be a lot quicker and easier than we thought it would be, it would save us a lot of anxiety, pain, and suffering on this end of it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

That's what we referred to last week as this, you know, avoiding the second error or a couple weeks ago, I don't remember. Um, you know, not causing yourself undue anxiety because you are creating scenarios in your head that that aren't based in reality.

SPEAKER_00:

I don't again, I don't know who the quote was from. Some motivational speaker said, you know, 99% of the stuff you worry about never happens.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I see a lot of people create pain because we'll use your word, they ruminate, they worry, they get anxious, they get excited. Um I went to the doctor this week for my checkup, and my PSA levels, which I guess is something around prostate levels, are elevated. And I thought to myself, well, if he comes and tells me I have cancer, the first thing I'm gonna say, are great, what do we do? All right, there's nothing I can do to change it. It's here. Uh, and you know, I'm going to get testing. I'm sure I'll be no, I'm not sure I'll be fine. But if I do find out, I'll be fine. I'll just say, okay, this is where we are. I can't go back and change something I did years ago that might have caused it, or I had no cause in it. Uh, but what I do have is the ability to choose my response and decide the most optimistic and powerful way to go forward.

SPEAKER_01:

I just heard from a friend who has is going through some uh tough times now. And you know, basically I told him that same thing. It's easier for me to say than it is for him to receive.

SPEAKER_00:

But I've been through some pretty serious health scares in my life, and each one of them uh I just looked back and said, All right, what's the way forward? What's the best thing I could do? How can we make this better? I do think it freaks out, you know, the one time it happened was pretty serious. I think it freaked out my doctor where he came to tell me there was a problem, and I'm like, okay. He's like, You're not upset? And go, would it help? What do we do? You know, what what's the best course of action? And I'll take that.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's funny that we started this whole thing talking about the emotional part of failure, and having control or mastery over your emotional reactions is a huge part of all this. And we talked about that before.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I was reading about um Thomas Edison and how he failed a lot before he succeeded. And again, this is more in the venue of he failed in a scientific endeavor rather than a personal failure. But in any case, I wanted to ask you about how he responded to it because he, I think, tried over 3,000 theories of what to use for the filament in the incandescent light before he settled on one that would actually work. At some point, his workshop or his lab or his factory, whatever it was, burned down, taking with it what in today's dollars would be millions of dollars worth of experiments and materials. And his reaction to it was to call his family out and say, Come look at this fire, you'll never see one like it again.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And then saying saying something to the effect of, well, I'm glad that all of that rubbish is gone. We can start over fresh. It was pointed out that that was a great example of stoicism. You've mentioned Stoicism before. I don't know much about it at all, except for the connotation for stoic is is unemotional and closed off. And I would assume that's not true. Tell me about stoicism.

SPEAKER_00:

A lot of things people think that stoicism is um trying to think sleeping outside, you know, in the, you know, having as little possessions and living a um austere life, right? Never having emotion. That is not true at all. It's having the ability to control negative emotions.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh and there were some very wealthy, well-to-do, you know, high-level people that were stoics. And really, stoicism, again, we've talked about it, it comes down to two general ideas. It's not what happens to you in your life, it's how you decide to respond to it and understand what you can control and can't control. It's not about uh giving up all your worldly goods or being very not non-emotional.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

It's just trying to keep an even keel and focus all of your energy on what can go right, what you can handle, what you can do moving forward, and let go of the things in the past. And I think it gets a rap about that because are of you know, no emotion because they don't stoicism is pursuing a lack of negative emotion.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

There's no reason to get upset about this, there's no reason to worry about that, there's no reason to get angry about this. It isn't going to help the situation. So let's not play in that field. Let's not entertain those thoughts.

SPEAKER_01:

But does that temper also your ability to have joy?

SPEAKER_00:

No, not at all. No, you can be very, very joyful if you choose the response. I mean, you can be mad or sad or anxious, but just realize that you're the one deciding to give yourself that pain. You should be mad or sad or angry from time to time. You know, if someone close to you dies, I'm not saying that you just go, well, that's good. When are we doing the funeral?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

I hope we have nice cookies at the funeral. But lamenting on it forever and you know, carrying that pain with you, you can do it if you want to. That's just a choice. You know, that's someone else's values. That's important to them, then that's great. If that's what they want to do.

SPEAKER_01:

As you have developed through your your life, how has your relationship with failure changed? And even like recently, I mean, I can't assume that you all of a sudden you had your failure in college, you fixed it, you sorted it, and then your development uh with dealing with failure stopped frozen in that whatever state it was just then.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, um, no, it didn't. But what I've become good at, and you know, I we're just talking about my own personal experience. There's a lot of people do this way better than me. Sure. Yeah, I'm just some schlepp that's here. No, I'm not.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, but you're you're just you're the guy in front of me right now.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Uh yeah, thank you. And I you notice I just did, I stopped myself from calling myself a schlepp. I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm kind of, but um I I always looked at impact and like permanence and pervasiveness. Right. This is bad. How bad is it really? And how much of my life is this really gonna affect negatively? And I was able to, and I still am to look at failure and go, for the most part, eh, not a big deal. Nobody's gonna die, not gonna, you know, run run me out of business or anything. It's not gonna impact my family life too negatively. Um, what can I learn from this? How can I move forward? Uh, and every, you know, and I also am try to be prudent uh in what risks I do take and what exposure I give myself to failure. I am not totally risk averse, but I, you know, I try not to do that thing, and I see it on the memes, like where I I give someone like, here, hold my beer, and I run off. I try to avoid the here, hold my beer situations fairly often.

SPEAKER_01:

You would not be where you are, both personally and business-wide, if you didn't take risks.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And what I know about you is you're extremely um research-driven, data-driven. So there's probably a very technical answer to this, but even in your personal life, like how do you draw that line between, oh, this is right up to the line of here, hold my beer. But you know, I want to I still want to take risks because that's the joy of life as well.

SPEAKER_00:

It's the same thing I use in business, probability and impact. What is the probability that something could go wrong here? And what is the impact if it did? If it's low probability, low impact, just go do it here, hold my beer, bam. You know, it's it's probably not gonna happen if it does, not a big deal. Uh, if it's high probability but low impact, you're probably gonna fail, but it really won't impact things definitely. Learning experience, yeah. You'll give it a shot, you know. Um, like me, painting. There's a high probability I'm gonna not be good at it, but I can just paint over the canvas and start again. And we've talked about that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

When it's high probability but low impact, there's a really good chance it's gonna happen. Uh but it wouldn't be catastrophic. Uh then no, no, let me go. Low probability but high impact probably won't happen. But if it did, it would be serious. That's where I'm gonna slow down and go, all right, let me think this through. You know, let me take my time and think about my options. Because if I pick the wrong option here, it could be bad. Uh so that's when slow down, get advice, ask for input, be thoughtful, write some notes, be reflective, and try to figure out what your best option is. And then if it's high probability, high impact, it will probably be fail and it will be bad. Try not to do those things. You know, let's try to avoid those. And then I use I use examples, you know, one of them for high probability, high impact from a business standpoint. I say yes, if you own a company on the coast of Florida, you will get hit by a hurricane eventually. Sure. Gonna happen. Yes, sure. So pretending it won't is setting you up for a severe failure. You know, it will be, and I keep using the word, catastrophic. It's gonna just mess everything up. So that's the kind of stuff you need to say. I can't take a risk there. I can't afford to fail there. Um, whereas something else might be, eh, you know, if we plant some palm trees in front of the building and they die, uh, I could put new ones in later. It's not the end of the world. Did that work? Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

It did, but I would love for you to see if you can put some flesh on that with an example, uh like a personal example.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, I I don't know if this is going to be a great example, but you know, one of the things we've talked about is time is the most precious resource you have. And I'm very careful in protecting my time. And I but I do get asked often to send on the board of directors of a of a nonprofit or a charity or a company. Uh, and I have to look at it and say, is this going to be fun? Good, or is this gonna turn out to be really a pain in the butt and not valuable to me? So there's a risk that that could fail. Sure. Um so I'm very thoughtful about that. And I have made the mistake of getting in there, and as we've all done, they found out that it's not quite what they promised. It's a bad waste of my time. I didn't think it through, and now I'm not trapped, but now I'm in there and people are depending on me. And I don't want to disappoint them and fail in their eyes, but I'm failing in my own eyes because I'm wasting very, very precious time. Uh, so that's one of those ones where I have to I have to look at it and go, I took a risk, it didn't turn out right, it's painful, but I can fix this and move forward. Uh, and I'm gonna be able to get out of this without too much pain.

SPEAKER_01:

You have an advantage over a lot of people, though, because you teach this stuff. You know, you teach your classes, and then you were telling us this stuff through the podcast. And I was reading um where there's a theory, and maybe you've heard of this, that the impact of giving advice about helping people deal with failure sometimes is more effective for the person giving the advice than receiving the advice or actually going through the failure.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I I agree with that, and I'm reluctant to give advice too much. I I like to tell stories and say, How might this match with your experience? And then I'm a big fan of something I learned from my father years ago, which is who does a person believe above anyone else in the world? And the answer is themselves. Sure. So, like when I teach uh or when I give quote unquote advice, I want The person to tell me what I wanted them to hear. And you do that through being curious and asking questions. And this is not manipulative because you don't know what the answers will be. You know, if the answer is something right out there, you got to ask a different question, a different question. But if I could tell someone that they ought to do X, Y, or Z, partially have to look myself in the mirror and say, Am I doing that? Do I have the right? Like, you know, I'm not, you and I are not doing hair growth commercials.

SPEAKER_01:

No, no. Well, let's be clear. Not head hair growth.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, well, thank you. That was a little bit too personal.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh, but talking about facial hair, friend, but I don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00:

I learn as much by asking questions and being curious about what they should might want to do and what how I might be able to improve rather than just saying you do this. When I have it doesn't work very well. People rarely just do what they're told to do. Um, they'd rather decide on their own that it's a good thing to do.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, I mean, that that is a strategy I have with my kids, is convincing them that they came up with the idea. So I'm right uh with you there. I think that the emphasis of what I was reading, or the thing that it triggered in me is this idea of when you're learning how to process things, take advantage of all the different ways you have to process. And I talked about this before, where I could be talking to someone about my problems, and all of a sudden I realize I didn't know that I thought that. Oh, wow. And I I will say something and and realize that as I'm talking to them, I'm not simply just explaining to them what's going on or the nature of my failure. I'm processing it myself. And I will often come come up with breakthroughs that I will say that me and the person listening get at the very same time. That's that's really what I'm emphasizing, too, is to just take advantage of the different ways to process uh any part of your life or any aspect of your life, including failure.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, as you say that I'm thinking about situations like that for me, and the thing that's triggered for me for mostly is when some someone says, What why do you think that way? Why why do you feel that way? What do you mean by that? And when you have to explain an obscure idea and actually put it and verbalize it just like you, I didn't understand what I thought until I had to say it. And then when I hear myself say it, I'm like, oh, I didn't realize I was actually thinking that way.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. And then you make the assessment of, oh, well, that's good that I thought that, or oh, maybe I need to get rid of that line of thought there. Is there a quote, a phrase, or a piece of advice about failure that you had to let go of?

SPEAKER_00:

A piece of advice about failure that you should be embarrassed, that it shows that you personally are a failure. Being embarrassed, being ashamed, um, feeling uh like you're not good enough when you fail is easy to do. Um my number one fear is embarrassment. Uh I've learned that all which is crazy because I stand up and talk in front of people and there's a high level of opportunity for me to embarrass myself. But I hate to be embarrassed, and I used to put failure together with embarrassment. If I made a mistake, looked stupid, said something stupid, that scared me. Like I didn't want to be in it. And then finally one day I realized uh none of us have this figured out. This isn't gonna kill me. And if I make a mistake, big deal, and I can laugh it off. And if I don't, then big deal. It happened and I'll went forward. Uh but yeah, I was very fearful in the past to take risks because I didn't want to look stupid or be embarrassed for doing something stupid. And you can hear in my own voice that it's that is a trigger for me that I've had to learn to get over. I can't even watch TV shows or movies where there's a really embarrassing situation for the uh character on the show without going, oh, that's gotta hurt.

SPEAKER_01:

You empathize just a little bit too much with that idea. That's exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm like, oh, I'd hate that to hate for that to happen to me.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, as I was reading about this, I saw something that drew a distinction between two of the possible reactions to failure, and that's guilt and shame. And I really appreciated the framing there. The guilt, when you feel guilt, you're having a reaction to the idea of I did something wrong or I did something bad or I failed, right? Shame is I am bad, I am wrong, I am a failure. That's pretty staggering to me just to see that written because of my childhood. There's a lot of I'm I'm not a good person or I'm not worthy that I've carried into my adulthood. And that doesn't work very well when you're trying to deal with a failure.

SPEAKER_00:

You you saw me uh stop myself earlier, the self-joke, like I'm a schlepp, and I went, no, I'm not. Yeah, I mean I immediately stop myself, and I've learned to do that. But it's fascinating to me to listen to other people talk sometimes and hear those sentences about, you know, I don't deserve this, I'm not smart, I can't do this, I am, I am. And I can listen to that. And A, it makes me check myself. I think this is one of the most important things we can share with people on this is this is still a work in progress.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, I slip on these things constantly, but I think my ability to check myself quickly or jump back quickly uh is what helps me. And I this is a big thing too, is I will see someone else do something like this. Say I'm a bad person, and I I don't have to I don't say anything, I just back and say, are you doing that yourself, John? Listen to your own self-talk. Are you acting or behaving this way? What can you learn from this that will help you be more aligned with your values and the kind of person that you want to be? So there's a lesson, and when I hear people do this, I don't feel sorry for them or anything. I just say they've got a habit that might not be serving them very well.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, John. It is homework time. You have some homework for us?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I would I would go back and do the same thing I sort of did is try to identify some of the worst failures in your life. Uh and then ask yourself, did that actually turn out to be something that was helpful? Did I learn something? Did it make me grow? At the time it was, you know, we've used my college experience, but I have other ones. If at the time it really seemed bad, like I have messed up severely here. I look back now and go, no, actually it was very good. If I had to mess it up, I wouldn't be where I am. I think a lot of people have those if they'll just look back and then I I say think about a couple of those. And then the way I visually do is put it in your pocket as a touchstone. So when you feel like you failed at something, you can pull that back out and look at it and go, you know, in a year from now, or three or four years from now, I might look back and say, this is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I didn't fail. This was awesome. I'd learned a ton, and I was able to bounce back from this and be a better person, even though right now it doesn't feel that great.

SPEAKER_01:

And so interesting. I'm looking at all of these stories of failure as I'm getting ready for this. And Edison was just one of them, a famous example. Another famous example is Abraham Lincoln and how many times he ran for office and failed, how many businesses failed under him, and then he went and he was elected uh president. And people will always say, Well, yeah, but that's Abraham Lincoln. And my answer to that to myself is, yeah, but he didn't do that when he was Abraham Lincoln. He did that when he was Josh Wilson.

SPEAKER_00:

You know what I'm saying? Uh well, another one is Michael Jordan, who used to talk all the time about how many shots he missed, how many games he lost for his team. Uh there was a lot of times he says, when, you know, they trusted me at the buzzer to make that three-pointer to win the game, and I missed it. But on the other side, he's one of the best to ever, ever, ever play the game because he realized that it, you know, we lost a game, but there's other games to play. We will win other games.

SPEAKER_01:

And interestingly, Michael Jordan has his own John Spence story where he was cut from his high school basketball team. So, you know, there's that thing early in life where you say, Well, never again. And he did that. He did that. But um, as we say all the time, it's never too late to go down this road. Wouldn't you agree?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I didn't know that was a that was a pause that I was supposed to jump in and say something profound. I mean, you usually do, so I'm I'm just I was mesmerized by your brilliance.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, God. Oh, it's getting deep in here, boy. This is not notes for an awesome life with Josh Wilson. Let's just remember that. All right, John. Um, that'll do us for this week. I just want to again thank all of the thank you, of course, and thank the the people on your team um who are have been really great. Thank my wife, Amanda, and of course, the family that keeps me going every day. Who do you want to thank?

SPEAKER_00:

I want to thank uh some of the CEOs I look up to, Carl Rapp, Bill Deleker, and a few others for being a living example of something for me to to really. And by the way, it has nothing to do with running their business well. It has to do with people of extreme integrity that care about their people, that are kind and generous with their time and their intelligence and their knowledge. Uh, every day when I think about the kind of person I want to be, there's a handful of people I think about. And uh Bill Deleker this week was very, very helpful to me. And uh I appreciate him being my friend and helping me so much in my life.

SPEAKER_01:

All right. Well, I thank you too, Bill, because you've helped form this guy uh right here. And I love that. And hopefully you send this episode to him um so that John understands that I also thank him. Okay, you got it. If you folks out there want to find out more about John Spence, go to johnspence.com. It is a a cavalcade of resources for folks in business, and you get to see more of this guy's accumulated wisdom. If you want to find out more about doing podcasts, go to familiarwilsonsmedia.com and and give me a shout and we'll see if we can work together. John, I want you to join me in wishing these people a week full of a successful, awesome life. Will you do that? I wish all of you every possible happiness, good health, and success. All right, and if you want to let us know what's going on, awesome life notes at gmail.com. Drop us a line. All right, folks, thanks so much for listening.