Optimism | Choosing to See the Kernels of Corn in the Vomit of Life All Around You

Audio Transcription

You have questions. America’s number one business coach has answers. It’s your brought up from Minnesota. Here’s another edition of ask clay. Anything on the thrive time business coach radio show.

Okay. Yes, yes, yes and yes. Z. We have a thriver out there who asks the question? How do you foresee, oh, you mean how do you stay optimistic on a daily basis?

Well, I’d just take a few letters and rearrange them in optometrist and I figured out that, you know, hey, I’m uh, I’m uh, I’m optimistic. Let me rephrase the question. Sorry. Let me rephrase the question. Sorry.

How do you choose to find and to see the kernels of corn in the vomit of life all around you?

You just pick out the yellow ones. They’re yellow. See either yellow. Here’s what you do. It is a choice. It’s a choice baby. The world, the globe as we know it. Wherever you’re listening to, this is a choice. When you stop waiting for something to make you happy and just real yourself into joy, will yourself into happiness. I promise you this. Somebody got it worse. Somebody who’s got it better, but you’ve got it the way you’ve got it. Find joy in your life and therefore you will become a light on the hill. You’ll become someone that people are drawn to. And that drawing to will help expand your, and I think that that right there is where, uh, Joel Olsteen leaves off and I’m going to now get into the dark side of op. Oh, because this is where you read us that dark ism, no, Joel Osteen Tivoli gets up there and says, all right, everybody like to start off every Sunday with a joke. And uh, so the three, there’s a pope and a pirate and Jack, they all walk into a bar and the cat says, oh yeah, you know, that’s what he does that, but Jill Austin kind of keeps it light, but your O’Steen doesn’t get into the Darth Vader aspects of business. So we have Jonathan Kelly on the shelf who manages a lot of people and we have Andrew, who is what we call the coacher. He does some coding, does some business coaching. Andrew, um, since you been in you, you worked with epic photography for me about what, three years ago.

So you started, yeah. Around there. Yeah. Do you remember the first time that you saw or really horrible, terrible, crazy thing where you thought to yourself, truly a photographer working for me is not doing that. True. I mean, surely he’s not actually putting the wedding ring in a precarious situation where it can be lost. Surely this is not happening. Do you remember that moment? I remember a few of those moments. Give us a few. It, give us a few examples because you were a photographer, you’re very positive guy. Yup. You never cause any drama during the office, but just give us some examples during your photography career where you thought, I cannot believe this is actually happening. So multiple times people would be late. That’s one for someone’s wedding. Yeah. For someone’s wedding. They would just show up, you know, after they’ve gotten ready as the Brian visible as an example, or a photography company.

When I used to own it, you know, we would tell people if you’re late, you get a late fee light finding, get paid less. We warn people, we tell them, you have to beat to the wedding. At least, you know what, two hours in advance that goes two hours in advance, someone’s still would show up late. Right. Did it just rock your soul that someone would be like, I can’t understand it at all. It doesn’t even make sense. What other abominations did you say? Oh Man, I’m the one that you mentioned. Tell us, tell us the stories. He has not heard this story. Come on now. All right, so we were at a certain chapel in Tulsa and um, it was, it was a church and there’s a stairway that goes over a, um, almost like a moat. There was a cliff, not almost quite menu is this.

Um, it was the whole, it was the holy family and downtown holy family downtown. There’s a big stairway, big stairway and off the edge of the stairway there is a tree. But if you look down a lot of full, there is a lot of water, a lot of water. Lot of water. Water, like a pond or a moment or a, it was more like a moat. A moat is Modi. Yeah. So the photographer decided that, um, he was looking for a good place to take photos of my photographs. One of your photographers got it decided, uh, well he was looking for a spot to take photos of the rings and he wanted a spot. Had good natural light. Yeah. So he took it outside as the Lord of the rings. He took the ring outside? Yes. The bride’s ring or the grim. Both of them.

Okay. I’ll be engaged. What’s it? The one ring to control them all is precious. It was the three rings, my precious. And so he took them outside. He looked around and he’s like, watch this. That’s what we went over to the tree and leaned out over the trees, put all three rings on a branch and began taking macro photos. Really upclose leaning over the edge, taking photos of the rings that were huge rings. It was a, you know, a big wedding if we can, until it was my first wedding and went till two and the rings fell off at all. Any type of wind, weather. Yeah. The rings, probably 10, $20,000 to have never been found again. Yup. Okay. So you, you saw that kind of stuff at Hyde. Yup. What was the biggest crime against humanity that you saw while working for me in the wedding photography business?

Oh Man. The biggest one. And would you thought, whoa. Ah, one of the biggest ones was when there was a photographer who said he knew how to take photos that did obviously did not know how to take photos, gone to school for this, showed us a resume, college degree and Cetera continuing. And so, um, he was like, I’m going to use my own camera. So he incentive using the epic cameras, he decided to bring his own camera. So going from a can and probably an icon because the Sony, yeah. Sony. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, he decided he was going take his own photos instead of using the company cameras. And uh, he took them. And uh, at the time he was the lead I believe. And I’m so he took them all of the big shots, the kiss, the rings, the, you know, everything that cutting of the cake, everything that is important.

And wedding photography he took with his own camera. And then when the editing team got a hold of them, they realize that absolutely none of these photos we can give to them. So the entire wedding was just, there was no photos, they were all blurry and they were all out of focus, irritate you at all as bus ride if you paid for wedding. So again, the ideal Z as we have a checklist, we have a system, we tell people follow the system, follow the checklist. We’re going to Ah, have you shout out, we train, we spend hours training and then somebody puts the wedding, the wedding rings at risk, puts all the wedding photos at risk, uh, just jack ass or he runs a muck. Were you there? The, the, the, the, the, the a day the guy decided to edit wedding photos while watching Lord of the rings.

I was not there, but it was not lord of the rings. See what your favorite show game of Thrones, game of Thrones right now. So I season’s coming this, uh, this year he’s watching game of Thrones while editing. Oh yeah. Were you there then? I was not there, but I’ve heard of this. So that’s the ideal is over here. And then the reality is over here. Yeah. How do you emotionally recover when you’re teaching people specifically what to do and then they know what to do but they choose not to do it. Cause a lot of these leadership books would tell you that great leaders would know how to inspire everyone. Z. A lot of these networking events would teach you that if you’re people choose not to do what you tell them, dude, cause you’re a bad leader, you’re a bad leader. How do you, how, how do you emotionally overcome those situations while staying optimistic? What would you, what would you do see in those situations? Well, you got to understand that it’s not you, it’s them number one. And people change. One of my core beliefs, seldom this, Justin, this just in. And so a lot of times people ask me, how long have you put up a jackass? It and I go, as long as you want to. Cause it ain’t going to change and ain’t gonna change anytime soon. Shunda come on, come on. Hello. Can I get an amen? You can’t get an amen

for now. That’s what you can do. This is your shit. You can get whatever you want. You say people are out. There are people, people have all the reasons why they are who they are. They are who they are and you can’t. You know what you might think you could change him. Okay, you may say this, give him 30 days is me. I’m, they’ll be a changed person. I’ll have him read all the books to manage of books, leadership, books off on how much each person, if don’t read them, if they read him, come on now. But the reality is the reality is a tiger has it strike strike whole life. He has a tiger I laika has maybe sort of stripes because it’s a combination to the tiger and the lion. That is a true statement that I cannot bear upon

and a lot it doesn’t happen is tribes because he’s a liar. He’s a mediator to whoa takes up, tried to get him on a Vegan Diet. See how that works out? What were we talking about? I don’t know. I kind of went off. I kind of went off the rails a little bit,

but the point is, is that when you, when you find someone who’s in a worker is a good person, got a good heart, they’re going to have that their whole life. And when you find someone that for whatever reason, they weren’t take shortcuts. You don’t want a dog. They want to do their thing above what they know they should be doing. Right. That’s just a core. That’s a core thing in them. You didn’t put it in there, you didn’t create it, you didn’t make it. They may have story to you in the interview.

A shocking, I know. Talking to somebody who would make up a narrative that you want to hear during the job interview. Shocking. And then when you actually hire them, chuck con,

did she stay there? When you hire them, you find out, wait a second, this isn’t what was advertised. In fact, I found out they put some false certifications on their resume. They said some things to me that weren’t,

you’re saying it but falsification on the documents that could lead to their ultimate compensation. Correct. Okay. What, what did they say? What is 75% people by 1%? Gosh, lie on there is lie on resumes. Crazy. [inaudible] 75% of employees steal. Now Jonathan Kelly, um, you started off doing a search engine optimization. How many years ago? Finally? I think we’re going on six. So now before you joined the search engine optimization team, you worked in a pharmacy. My correct. True. What kind of jackass did you discover on a daily basis in the pharmacy where you thought, I cannot believe this is happening? Well, uh, we would have insurance fraud all the time. Um, people would come in and fill their narcotics or try to fill their narcotics, uh, twice in the same day and say, oh, I dropped them in the toilet. And there are certain people that would just let it happen.

Right. Are Certain, there are certain people that worked at the pharmacy, whatever, whatever the name of the company was, who would just let it happen. Yeah. I mean, if the insurance will pay for it, they don’t care, you know? Uh, we also had meth heads come in and try to get pseudoephedrine products all the time. No, if somebody is a method, well, the lack of teeth, the scratching of the neck, I had an inch, hey, listen, I had to, I had a hockey accident and it was always, it’s always your grandma. My grandma’s says that I need to get this one very specific type of pseudoephedrine and you’re like, your grandma said, okay, well this, I think we’re going to do this backyard every day. Daily, daily, hourly, hourly. What? At one they’re kind of jackass you see at the pharmacy. Um, those are really the two big ones is the pseudoephedrine the uh, trying to beat the system with their insurance, trying to get there more pills so they could, so you saw from the consumer side, what did you see from the employee side where you thought, I cannot believe this is happening.

Um, they wouldn’t win. This is going to terrify a lot of people. But uh, they wouldn’t actually check the prescriptions before they went out. They would just kind of mail it in and go, I think this is 30 pills and they would put the in the bottle and send it off. Right. Oh Wow. You could make up your own prices if you don’t want to deal with the insurance and there’s low, oh no, seriously. I, I, these are, these are real, these are real situations. And you worked in the pharmacy, so this was a real, real, this is a real situation for you. I, and uh, you saw the consumer side and the employee side. Now you, you manage a team of people. We do search engine optimization, we do sales calls, we do graphic design, print pieces. We have a very, very good team.

Yes. But, uh, when I asked you to take over the day to day operations of, of make your life epic and managing that on a daily basis, what kind of crimes against humanity would you see on a daily basis before you were able to get in there and clean house? Well, we had the coder that couldn’t code. Okay. We had the, we’ve had a couple of hairstylists that actually couldn’t cut hair. We had the guy that would say he set the same appointment every week and he would just change the date on the appointment that he said it. So let’s talk about first off the hair, the hairstylist who can’t cut hair. Yes. What does that look like and how is that even, uh, for somebody out there who’s curious, they’re going, how is it possible for someone to have a job cutting heroin that they can’t actually cut hair?

Well, the, uh, there’s one person that graduated from hair school and, uh, uh, top of their class time and a, I was like, yeah, I could definitely do this. I’m awesome at it. Yeah. We’re like, okay, cool. Graduate top of your class in hair in here school. Great question. Uh, we also wanted to know this and so I guess it comes out where if you’re emotional or if you suffer from anxiety, anxiety, you don’t actually have to cut hair. I can verify the situation. What w what w w from hair school. Rewind what? There was a person who has a certificate of completion. I called said hair school to verify this person has graduated and they’re like, I graduated top of my class. I would just want to be here. I’ve heard elephant in the room was the top the best. So we interviewed, we go through the shadow process.

I said, well, tomorrow or whatever day it was, and you’re gonna need to go ahead and go out there and cut that hair. Yup. Chopped that mob to a demo. Cut Z, which means a customer comes in, we’d say to the customer, Hey z, uh, we appreciate you coming in as a customer. If you’d like to get your hair cut for free today, we have a new person on the team who would like to cut your hair for free much. She pay you $38 to get your hair cut today or would you like to one not get your hair cut for free or half his pay you $30 yeah, so, okay, that’s nice. I’ll pay a 38 bucks, but the part of this took confusing is is this person? Yes. Didn’t cut hair, right? All, hey, hey, you guys don’t get it. They suffered from anxiety and every day just kind of anxiety.

Just multiple days though. It’s like day one the person’s like, here’s the deal. I’ll do it tomorrow. I just, I’m a little stressed out. I’ve just forgotten tomorrow. Can I get away, get away in the phones or maybe we do more management work or this went on for what, two days? What’s interesting is anytime anybody actually won’t do their core job, they always need one more thing. One more. That was the same thing with the coder. That was the same thing with the hairstylist is, hey, I need this one thing. There’s the same thing with the podcast. Or Hey, this computer is a festive, oh, I need a better mic. It’s always one more thing in the morning. I didn’t or not get the job. So you think about this is we’re saying here, the ideal would be when someone graduates top of their class that can actually cut hair.

The ideal is when a coder has graduates top of his class from a top university, they can actually code. But the reality is that a lot of times the top coder can’t coat the top hair stylist can’t cut hair. So how do you stay optimistic, Jonathan Kelly? What do you do? What’s your process? How do you stay optimistic when you know that 81% of employees are lying on their resumes? Well, you have to realize who’s coachable and who’s not, who wants to get better and who’s not. Um, and so I think when you’re in a leadership position or a manager, uh, or the, you know, the president of a company or CEO of a company, you, you feel this need to mentor everybody in your life at first and you can’t do that because you can’t waste time on the people that don’t want to get better.

You can only help impart into people that are, are willing to receive your mentorship. Z, what would be your advice for somebody out there who says, you know what, Gosh, I started off as a super positive entrepreneur like you know, five years ago and now I become like the Darth Vader. I have so much skepticism and pessimism and I just don’t believe anybody ever come to one of our in person business conferences. You know, there you can get your batteries recharged. You can be around other positive entrepreneurs. You could spend a couple of days just in like entrepreneur heaven in fact, the music prize, every cute up my music kid, I’ll do it. It’s like wait, maybe once in a while. What kind of music are you looking for? [inaudible] the monks chant or something. Oh the, Oh, let me check here. Andrew. Are we are we see z tried to get her real quick. This might be an omission.

It’s to be an iteration. It’s a me issue. Andrew had it set up there. For those of you wary of heart for the downtrodden and entrepreneurship, for those of you who think there’s no, there’s nobody that can you on an island of just you. Does she come to one of our in person business conferences? We will meet other great entrepreneurs just like you that believe who inspire you. You learn our 13 basic steps in how to start and grow a business. You’d be encouraged and edified and lift it up. Yes. Oh. When you leave here, your heart will be swollen with joy. Your mind will be full of knowledge and you will step out into the daylight of the world and said yourself, I can do this. Yes, I want to do it and I’m going to do it.

People are going to lie. I think it can. I think it can can feel a little bit rough. They can. When you go out there and you start a business and you, you know, you’re a team up with your sister or your brother or your friend to start the company, you’re going to hire your friends and your buddies. Uh, because,

but isn’t that here and here? Here’s the, here’s the reason why clay and I’m just going to shoot straight to the heart. This is going to be some tough talk. So you may need to pull over. You’re driving and listening to this. You may want to pull over into a truck stop or something. Beans. While I was driving, you might want to pull over a little bit, but I wanted to tell you this, and this is something that is some of you out there listening. If you’re wanting to start a business, you want, you started one, you want to grow your business. You don’t have a lot of fans. Your competition doesn’t want you to succeed. True. And I know that sounds crazy. When you meet them at the coffee shop, they’ll shake your hands, smile, fake, smile at you and wish you the best to ask if there’s anything to help you out. But in the back of their mind, they’re going, I’m going to crush this kid. Crushes number two, the team that you think would have your back the most, your friends and family, sometimes you’re a little jealous that you’re stepping out and trying something on

sometimes. Can I say every time? Every time for with the exception.

Yep. There you go. That’s your being. You know what, you’re probably would be more agile.

I mean seriously. It’s like every single time you have success, everyone in your family is mad about it is, except for exceptions except for very rare, almost exactly. It’s up. You’re wealthy. Uncle was like, go, I told you because everyone hates him was he’s are inclusive,

crazy toward the club. Join the hate club. So what I’m telling you is that, hey, hey, hey, hey, you are a tad bit on an island. And that’s why really I was, I was kind of teasing him but, but I’m being accurate about coming to these conferences, these business conferences that we do, you can find other people from around the world that are doing the same thing you’re doing that are going to the same issues and same problems you’re going through. It’s another one of the breakout sessions are kind of fun or just hanging out in the breaks and talking to people and learning people, you know, network in that regard. But it’s also the coaches that are here and the speakers that are here. We’ve had some great speakers, international speakers that have come into our conferences. They’re not, it’s not a good here and try to get a lot of money out of you. It’s a good here. They’re very affordable. We even have you know, scholarships for them. But the thing about it is is that there are avenues, there are resources for you to get the right help you need need.

And that is why we could not be more excited about our next upcoming thrive time show in person two day interactive business conference. If you’ve yet to attend, buy your tickets today at thrive time, show.com and we’d like to end each and every show with the boom and so that he further ado three, two, one. Boom. You may not feel like you’re living to your highest potential because you’re stuck in a Rut with your head down just trying to survive when people are trying to get out of a Rut. The first impulse is to often dream of a new destination, a new job, a new location, and maybe even a new career. Most people think unlocking ones highest potential requires a vision or a new destination and many books actually encourage that type of thinking. However, Carly Fiorina believes that this is where most of us get off track.

It’s not a destination. It’s a path and being the type of person who will take that path. You may know Carly Fiorina as the first female CEO of a fortune 50 company, but you may not know that she started out as a secretary and rose to success one step at a time by solving the problems in front of her and empowering those around her per new book. Find your way will help you choose your own path to unleashed your highest potential. Start Your journey today. Please visit. Find your way. Thrive time.com it’s find your way, thrive time show.com or purchase a copy of. Find your way wherever books are sold.