Welcome to the Struggle Bubble. I'm Chad Kutting. I'm Craig Surgey, excited about today's episode. Craig, we have our first live guest. Robert Hatta is going to join us later on in the episode, and today we're going to focus a bit about burnout. We've talked about the struggle, the guilt, the feelings that are associated with us working so hard. We only have one speed. We're going to go as fast as we can. But before I go any further, craig and if you aren't watching the video, please, you know, find it on youtube. Craig is wearing bright pink headphones. Does scarlet know that you took her headphones?

no Scarlett

, so mine keep it real I think you need, like princess, glitter, sparkle stickers all over it. Is there any glitter that comes with those headphones?

I don't know what's the side. Look like Pretty legit.

Pretty legit. It goes great with your Santa Cruz boards back there.

Yeah, we should do that. Yeah, dude, keeping it real we California, we Calias.

Well, shout out to everybody that's liked and subscribed. We're getting some great commentary on our Instagram as well as through our podcast platforms, Interesting Craig of the viewership numbers, as we reviewed this past week and where we're getting our viewers from. It's global. Did you see the international exposure we have?

Singapore sling. We got somebody in Singapore. So whoever that is, leave a little comment on Instagram or wherever, because I was kind of blown away that we've got Europe, asia, us. Obviously I think we need what.

Australia. We need somebody. Oh, I didn't know, it's gonna be a geography lesson, let's. Let's have you think this through. So you went to two continents and then one country. So you're doing great so far.

Australia is a continent, but that's okay. Well, the United.

States is not a continent.

Well, we need? What do we need? What do we need? We need Africa, yeah, south American Africa, and if there's anybody, in Antarctica on an expedition. That's where I was going. I was going North and South Pole.

next, Santa Claus if you are listening, please drop us a note, a like and a follow Share on Instagram. It's great seeing all the exposure. So we have it locally. We have Los Gatos, san Francisco. I've got my hometown. We had in Lorain, ohio, and Akron, ohio, a few Ohio's lighting up.

Chad, try and pronounce my word. Yeah, there you go, there you go. That's why we're on the same wavelength.

All right, so Loughborough, loughborough, loughborough, like 99 Luft Balloons

. Yeah, it's an.

F.

It's a G-H, it's an F. How do you say H, H?

H, H Like O-H-I-O. Like herb. There's a H in front of the E on herb.

You've got Loughborough, okay. Then you've got Leicester, leicester, damn it, yeah.

Okay, then you've got leicester. No leicester, damn it, yeah you pronounce it l-e-s-t-e-r.

Like uh, like uncle fester, like leicester square, where phil's coffee is okay, uh, there was another one in there that I could not pronounce to save my life. But uh, leicester sheer. No, there's leicester sheer. There's another one in there with an s there's a lot of shit places in england.

Um, no, it's pretty, pretty impressive though. So appreciate everybody that's subscribed and uh starting to follow us. We're starting to get a bit more traction on the uh old uh social media and insta spam, which is great. We're going to start dropping these into linkedin as well, especially with today's guest. Um, pretty impressive, uh background. I mean ohio to miller silicon valley, and you know he's very humble, but to get the right gpas and be an athlete, to go to stanford is no easy path. For sure, that's a pretty. There's a lot of people globally trying to get to these schools, and from a sports side and the academic side. So, yeah, robert did a solid job.

He's a great job and just the power of connection, of community. I reached out to him in 2018 when I was going through a little bit of the burnout that we're about to talk to, because I saw a VentureBeat article where he was talking about what they're building in the Midwest and what Drive Capital and the partners that came from Sequoia are building out there, because there are talented individuals, there's great colleges, there's a huge ecosystem that can be built, and he brought attention to it. And meanwhile I was going in the reverse and going from Ohio and didn't feel like there were enough opportunities for me to pursue and I wrote an article in college of are we forced to leave? There's not enough opportunities. We're talking about making interesting investments in the state at the time and a bunch of folks leaving.

After college, I went out to California, same as Robert, and it was great to hear his story of how we got back to the Midwest and really made it work after he had the drive to move out, to learn to make connections and really start building that company and building a life back in the Midwest. So let's go into that a little bit. Right now we're talking about burnout. You and I have left, I think, a combined 12 jobs in the past 15 years, maybe more.

Yeah.

Yeah, and each one of those comes with different calculus. We talk in the interview with Robert a little later about what motivates you coming out of college or even getting into college. You and I, I think, had the same experience where we go back and say, well, I went to college because my mom made it very clear, you're going to college. That was a conversation I remember, one of the earliest things of you don't have a choice, you're going, you're going to go, so you have all the opportunities ahead of you. The problem for me is when I went into college, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Ask an 18-year-old what do you want to do for the rest of your life?

I don't know, I just want to hang out with friends. I want to live my life. I don't want to need to specialize and personally I struggled to find a major that really resonated with me. I went from economics, I tried to get into computer science and maybe some of the worst advice that I ever got in 2002 was from my college football coach that said don't do computer science. Well, let me pause you there.

Let me pause you there. You asked the football coach if you should do computer science.

I didn't ask the football coach. No, let's be very clear.

You probably started in the wrong direction.

When you go in you don't declare right away, but you talk about what you're interested, the class load that you're going to take as a freshman, so that they know what they're dealing with with football practices.

And I said let me pause you again. Let me pause you again.

Sorry, you went to play football yes, and not soccer football, actual american football. Got it got, it got it and baseball craig, if you want to get into.

Uh, you know no, no, I understand the baseball at five foot seven. I don't understand the football at five foot seven.

That's where I was going well, you haven't given an s-bomb yet today. So I want, I'm keeping track, but you have insulted me. So if this is payback for the damn pink headphones, I get it. But yes, I'm very proud of at five, seven, and barely five, seven at that. I played four years of college football, four years of college baseball. I'm not a pro soccer player like you were, for you know how many months that you were able to do that.

Yeah, no, no, no. My my going back to my yeah, I'm school of life, right. I to your point about the jobs and et cetera, it was always. Well, obviously, the transition to California right, it was the big one there, but it's that you don't know. And my thing was 18, 19, whatever the age. It's a lot for.

And we're going through this now with the kids. We see it right as being parents. Now, we've got seven years left until our eldest start making those. Well, less than that. Five to six years. They start making some kind of decision and, depending on their skill sets right, be that education, be that athletic of where they may look to go.

And you know, I think Robert hits it on the heads if people listen to the interview of college isn't right for everyone, and I think it's more abundant now of you don't need to go and get a degree in something random, to go and get a career in something you want to do, right, if you're going to be a doctor, you're going to be a lawyer. There's obviously certain paths like that. But if you know, for example, take my kids right, maybe they want to become choreographers. I have no idea if there's something in universities or colleges that relates around dance and choreography, or is it better for them to go down to hollywood and try and get on something that who knows right? But the point being is there's multiple ways now to skin that cat, to get to the goals that you want at 18.

Right, and those and I think ro Robert hits it on the head in the interview as well that what we were all aspiring to from 18 to 30 is then different from 30 to 40, etc. As your life change. You potentially get married, have kids, family, whatever. Um, he hits it really on the head and there's one section in there that we didn't dive deep into but, um, the one year that took out of traveling. That will add the link to his medium um blog posts about taking that hard stop one year out kids out of school. We're traveling around the world, we're going to experience all these different things and you know, I'd love to interview robert again in a few years time and see what effect that had on his kids as they transition into those college years of taking that year out and getting that experience.

That's the biggest part of what we've been talking about over the past couple of months here on the podcast is what motivates us. We want to maximize life. You're trying to be the best employee or business person. You're trying to be the best husband. You're trying to be the best father. You're trying to be the best coach. It comes down to being that, having that flexible and openness, but understanding what you want. And I think, looking backwards in time, you know we want to be able to provide our kids that flexibility. You mentioned it with the girls dancing. If they have the flexibility, they're not going to get trapped in a job, they're going to know what's important to them and they're going to move forward with that as the foundation and know that you and their family are there to support them every step of the way. And we have that level of support. But I think the driving factors in our minds were I need to get a job, because that shows success. I need to keep up with the Joneses to show that I can get a job too. I can have the highest paying job. I the Joneses, to show that I can get a job too. I can have the highest paying job. I'm going to be the best and that's where you were.

As a human, your value is directly correlated with the job that you had, how much money you were making, the car that you're driving, and I think, coming out of the 80s and the 90s, you have the Gordon Gekko-esque greed is good, and you see all of these boiler room know, boiler room type movies that you all everyone wanted to be a salesman. You go in, you make that high commission, you make that high dollar, and what we talk about with Robert and you and I have talked about in the past couple episodes is your perception changes as you reach each tier plateau and I think for us, the first couple job moves were about access and forward movement, climbing the ladder. I left jobs in sports because they weren't paying enough. I wanted the next big thing and I go into technology and into Facebook where you're making a great salary. You're on a rocket ship.

And then the next path is well, let's leave this job because I'm not getting management opportunities. I want to be able to manage people, because that's what I think progression looks like, and then it starts to flip a little bit of like all right, I got the manager role, I'm making really good money, but I'm having trouble waking up in the morning and getting motivated to get out of bed. I'm not able to go to a Little league game practice a recital because I, I need to. I feel like I need to build these decks or do this homework, do this prep, and it just starts to change their perspective.

It's all the bullshit, dude, it's all the bullshit people are doing 16, 18 hour days. You're falling asleep in bed with your laptop on your knees and it's that ladder system to your point. You try to get mid-management. Well, that means I get more stock, that means I can retire earlier. All that bullshit you get absorbed into honestly is, um, it's hard, it's really really hard and it's hard to extract yourself.

It's hard to take a pause, it's hard to and you know robert talks about it is the prioritization of life, right sitting down with you, significant or his, his style will sit down, prioritize, literally whiteboard it. If it's not written down, it's not real and then start working out where the lines either get blurry or you need to fix things. And in his story it was okay, I'm done with job, I'm done with all of this. And again we're taking that one year out and again it'd be great to speak to him in a few years. And what that did for his kids, because that's his priorities it shifted.

So it's a really good interview. Puts a lot of perspective. I think one thing I took out of it as well is you can do anything from anywhere. We all had the drive to come over to California, to Silicon Valley, to the hub spot of what is known on the planet right as Sand Hill Road, and he proved it out that you can be in the middle of Ohio and do the same job. And I think COVID has something to do with that the people's ease of closing a deal on Zoom, rather than flying in and shaking a hand to close the deal, those kind of things switched and I think he's a proven point of yeah, you can do this in the middle of of ohio, no problem yeah, I think there's two pieces of anything as possible there is.

You can do that from anywhere, that's not a problem. You can also do it with the right attitude and perspective. We talked on earlier episodes of the struggle to get coaches or volunteers or people out onto the fields. You know, I don't have the time, I don't have the expertise. There's a lot of excuses built up. If you change that perspective to say yes, I can, let me figure out a way.

And some of the best advice I got in the early days of Facebook. Jeremy Lewis was, you know, one of the direct sales guys looked up to him and everything that he was doing and he had a kid that was in little league in Los Gatos and ended up playing high school ball at Los Gatos. He made it a point to get to absolutely every game and for somebody coming up early in the career saying, oh, he's prioritizing the family, he's able to leave work and he gets caught up, he does a great job but he's able to prioritize that and he set the foundation and the entire outlook for his life centered around being there for his kids. And I've been fortunate to be at companies that helped prioritize Cheryl, what she's done at Facebook, to really prioritize being there for your families. The companies provide that outlet, but it's kind of like unlimited vacation as well. It's great that you have the perk, but until you do something about it it's meaningless.

And that comes down to us, our own personal drive to prioritize and take action on what those priorities are. And that could mean leaving a job, like for me. I came, I was driving two hours a day into San Francisco. It was. It was a drag on me, it was a drag on the family. I came home and instead of wanting to be, you know, around everybody, it was like oh, let me have a minute, I just need to decompress. So I prioritized a job, jump, you know, into San Jose, which is a little bit closer to home, which really helped. But it still wasn't prioritizing the right things until later on in life, later on in the career well I think we talked about this prior as well of um our generation, I think.

If we're not the hardest workers in the room, we're not working hard right? So our mentality was you needed to be in the office, you need to do 12 hours a day. All this, all this bullshit.

But let me tell you just for a second. It wasn't about the actual drive. I think we have the drive. It's the perception of the drive.

Yes, I'm going to show up earlier than everybody else.

I'm going to turn the lights on and turn the lights off in the office yeah, I'm burning the candle at both. It's like all of that was the, the perception, yeah, being a great worker. Now, it didn't matter if I could do that job in two hours. I'm still going to draw it out so that I have the perception, yeah, which is that's the, the bullshit I think you're hitting on yeah, and that was the management perception as well, that if you weren't in the office you weren't working, which is complete bullshit.

Right it's. There's so many ways again of skinning the cat that as long as the job's getting done and I think that's one thing that shifted in sales as well was nobody cared where the top reps were, because they were the ones bringing in the pos, so it didn't really matter and nobody nobody blinked an eyelid. Um, and it had to shift food covered for the engineers and the other team members because you couldn't be in the office. So then you really saw where people's skill sets were when there wasn't somebody on their shoulder watching them. So I think you're totally right, dude.

It's hard to juggle, it's a struggle, as we keep saying, and I think Robert really caps it well in this interview of a 10 year journey and how he's now treating his life a different way, but still having the enjoyment, as he says in it. He's still doing the same things. It's just in a different process now and the prioritization side of it has shifted a little. And again, not that he was bad at any of these things, just his what he wants. It wasn't at the top of the priority and that's when he made that shift. So it's a good interview. I think people, um, everybody that we know that has gone through the sugar bubble of why we start this podcast. This is an ideal of somebody we don't know um that's in another state, that's made this, made this work, but went through the same pressure and stress. That, you know, is what we're seeing from our friends on the daily and that's the takeaway.

Everybody's experiencing their own struggle bubble. We talk a lot about sports, of bucket filling, making sure that the kids bucket is filled with whatever motivates them. The same thing happens with us. The problem is we have many buckets that we want to keep filled, some at the expense of others. Robert does a great job of walking us through how to keep each one of those buckets filled and refocus that priority. But it comes with experience. So if you're listening to this on the early part of your career or the tail end of your career, I'm sure your experience is a little bit different, but the same root causes of that little bit of discomfort here and there comes down to that focus on priorities. So with that, please stay tuned.

Coming up next, our interview with Robert Hadda. We're excited to welcome our first guest on Struggle Bubble, robert Hadda. Currently the founder of 10xTalent, he's got a wealth of experience working with startups and tech CEOs, helping them grow and scale their companies, turn into exceptional leaders that their companies are really looking for. And Robert reached out to us a little bit ago with his personal experience and what resonated with the struggle bubble. Welcome, robert Hata.

Thank you, craig and Chad, for having me. I didn't know I would be the first guest, but as I was listening to your early episodes, I was like these guys are speaking a language that's really familiar to me, and that's why I reached out to not only get caught up on what you're doing, which I think is amazing, but also to share a little bit about my journey in a lot of similar, which resonates in a lot of similar ways to what you guys have shared on this podcast, which I think. Again, I applaud you for giving it a name, both literally but also figuratively, saying hey, this is a thing that we are experiencing and that we think a lot of other folks like us are experiencing, and maybe we'd benefit from talking it out, even if it's just amongst ourselves. So, thank, you.

We appreciate you reaching out and I mean you and I connected what. I just looked back on the initial correspondence I think it's been about six years now I saw an article that you were featured in in VentureBeat talking about the Midwest being overlooked as far as VC and tech and everything that you were doing with Drive. At the time it resonated with me because, growing up in rural Ohio, northeast Ohio went to Oberlin, where you're from. It is flyover country in some people's minds but there is a ton of talent and great people there that can build companies. Walk us through a little bit about your journey from Northeastern Ohio and get us caught up to you today.

Well, like you mentioned, I grew up in a small town just west of Cleveland and, as far back as I can remember, my sole intent was to grow up and get as far away as possible, as soon as possible, and California always represented probably similar to both of you this sort of promised land of opportunity. This sort of promised land of opportunity. And when I was looking at colleges to attend, I was fortunate enough to be a good enough athlete and a good enough student to get recruited to Stanford, and this is in the early to mid 90s. So it brought me to California, brought me to the Bay Area, specifically at a time when so many amazing things were happening in tech.

Silicon Valley had gone from sort of the early stages of the semiconductor and chip industry to what was, at that time, the internet, and it offered so many cool ways for a young and pretty clueless person to jump in, learn really fast, get way more responsibility around a product or even a company than they deserved or earned, and I got hooked. I got hooked bad. I loved working at the pace of my work very quickly, and I loved the other types of people that it attracted to it. You know, fast moving, entrepreneurial, creative folks that seem to be everywhere and it was really intoxicating.

So I spent after Stanford, the first decade of my career, split between Bay Area and later in Europe where I was working for tech companies Bay Area-based tech companies across the full spectrum, startups of a dozen or fewer folks to Apple and Netflix and some pretty well-known tech brands and some pretty well-known tech brands and that journey was again exciting and fun and really exposed me to the internal workings of how these companies grow and change through scales. But ultimately, as I entered my I guess my early to mid-30s, it's funny that all the reasons I was trying to get away from Ohio were the ones that called me back being close to family, just the value system of the Midwest, and wanting to build and grow my own family around that. So my wife and I moved back in 2007, 2008. And it's been the last 15 years or so here but, very fortunately for me, still very much involved in the tech industry, both working closely with startup founders and CEOs, but from the standpoint of a talent partner inside of the venture capital fund.

And when you look at what makes the Midwest tick and California tick, being able to see both sides and as you're building companies, what are some of those characteristics that you see, that translate on both sides, that you've seen come out in the tech scene in Silicon Valley but also rise through the Midwest?

Yeah Well, when I first went to Silicon Valley in the mid to late 90s, you had to go to the Bay Area to build. If you wanted to build a large scale technology company. The infrastructure, the trade, craft, the talent, the research, the capital were all based in Silicon Valley, literally on Sand Hill Road, the like one square mile of real estate, and if you were far away from that epicenter, it was harder and harder for you to envision building a big company. Today, though, that's totally different. The infrastructure you used to have to build and own, you rent with a credit card. The engineers who build and scale and protect and secure that infrastructure, you rent with a credit card. A lot of cases, the software, you rent with a credit card.

So there's a lot of tools and platforms that Silicon Valley built that have enabled the creation of large-scale technology businesses anywhere, and that really starts to shift toward the top layer of an offering or of a product. How well do you understand your market, your customer and your domain? Many of which are not in Silicon Valley, many of which surround us here in the Midwest healthcare, insurance, financial services, banking, retail, supply chain, logistics, agriculture. These are vast industries that consume or are being disrupted by technology. Those enabling technologies have allowed entrepreneurs here to tackle those problems, to disrupt those industries, and I was fortunate to join Drive Capital at its beginnings a little over 10 years ago as it started to put real capital toward the building of those companies and into those businesses.

And as you're building that business up with Drive, talk to us a little bit and we're going to get to the struggle. Bubble a bit of the motivating factors for you when you just moved back. You're close to hometown, you have the family structure there, but you're trying to build a business. What was the motivating factor in those mid-20s to mid-30s, as you're trying to grow this business?

mid twenties to mid thirties as you're trying to grow this business. Yeah, I mean my. I wish I could say I had a planned career path.

I think a lot of people wish they could say that, but there's so many bright and shiny objects in Silicon Valley and so many cool ideas and it was it was easy and fortunate to sort of follow the momentum.

You know, look at the interesting startups, the technology trends and pick a company or follow a friend or former colleague places, not with a ton of direction or intention. When I got home to Ohio and graduated out of that opportunistic follow the momentum of your career 20s and 30s to really invest in not only that stage of life family, being a father, a young father, young father but also to really pick where I wanted to invest the next decade or so of my career, I started to put a little bit more thought into that and luckily, like I said, the opportunity set was actually quite strong in tech, returning to Ohio and the Midwest, and that's what led me to shift into what I've been doing now for the last 15 years, which is helping these founders build their teams, strategize the talent side, the people side of their business and then put in place those best practices, those systems, that infrastructure that helps them actually become a growing company, not just grow.

That's a lot about the work life and the transition from West Coast back to, as I call it, the East Coast, which will get critiqued by everyone from Ohio, but you mentioned it a couple of times now that there was a real fundamental thought process around hey, young family, maybe we don't want to be in the middle of silicon valley, maybe we want to go back to. You know ohio and you know, fortunately you've got a skill set and, as you said earlier, you know it's gone from. You need brick and mortar and develop your own software and your own code and all that too. I'm just going to swipe a credit card. We work. We'll just get an office. We'll get Adobe on a credit card. We'll use Git, whatever Open source comes wild.

You've made that transition, which is amazing that you can take that skill set now into the middle of the country. But the family part of it, right, you're now in your early to mid thirties. You've realized consciously that I really want to spend more time as a father and doing more things with their kids and raising them in a different way that's maybe different to the middle of silicon valley. Just kind of walk us through that. So, um, you're basically your decision to to leave drive capital. Um, and then I know there's a big, there's a big year there that we can dig into that you guys took out to travel. So yeah, just kind of walk us through that if you can.

When we landed back in Ohio and this is in the Cleveland area originally it was very much a conscious decision, in total alignment with my wife. My wife we're going back to raise our family near our four living and mostly healthy parents so that they can know and love our grandchildren and vice versa or sorry, our children, their grandchildren and vice versa. And that was the sort of last. It would be another decade before I made that conscious and that aligned life decision with my wife. We came home with total alignment and intention and sort of put the steps in place. We finally got married, we had kids, we bought the home, we started thinking about our community. I was doing interesting work things, but they were not consuming or putting any of those other priorities at risk.

When I got the opportunity to join Drive Capital and we moved a couple hours south to Columbus, a lot of that changed, and not in ways that I was actually giving enough attention at the time. We pulled our kids, not to the other side of the world by any means, but a few hours away from their grandparents. We changed our lives for the first time purely in pursuit of a career opportunity that I was grateful to have, opportunity that I was grateful to have, and especially with the group of folks that were involved. This is a fund founded by two former Sequoia Capital investors in the state where I live, two hours away, that are about to launch the largest venture capital fund to ever exist between the coasts. Yeah, that was really exciting to me and a really great opportunity, and I don't regret that.

But it was the first time where I made a decision for me and my career that wasn't in alignment both with what was best at the time for my wife and her career which she had to pause when we moved and all of the other reasons.

We had moved back to the Cleveland area to be near our parents. So it sort of set in motion a shift away from what, up to that point, had been very clearly articulated priorities shared by the two of us and a life that that aligned with it. Here it was a deviation. It felt to me like, oh, a temporary one, or I can still be a, you know, a great father, great husband, present in all the ways that matter. But that first move and that decision led to what was a near decade of pure focus on the job, and the job ended up being pretty demanding, both in time and travel and urgency, that over the years, again, as we moved back to have a life close to parents, close to family, close to each other, it's what we all want. I took almost 10 years I wouldn't say deviation, but enough off the track and in pursuit of my own ambition that over the years sort of drifted further and further away from the things that were important to me and the things that I cared about.

Yeah, and I presume that makes the pause right. That gives you the pause of okay, and just as you're talking, it relates to myself and Chad as well. I'm sure that we've come from somewhere, we've transitioned to somewhere else with the goal of I don't want to say climbing the ladder, but we've got these sets of goals we want to achieve and then, 10 years in or so, we hit this very hard pause of like OK, now I actually want to go back to where I started, because that makes way more sense to me than keep trying to jump this ladder system me then keep trying to jump this ladder system. This and you've been here so you know people that haven't affects a lot of people's health, a lot of people's mental health. A lot of people's families get disjointed and there's multiple, multiple things that can go wrong by trying to chase that ladder system.

Um, and sometimes it works out great, don't get me wrong. But and again, it's the drive for me, it's a drive to silicon valley. It was the um. You can do anything and that's still true, by the way like don't take that away. Like you literally can walk into a starbucks with, pitch an idea to somebody that you made the next billion dollar company. It's just the way it is here, um. But it's really interesting that you consciously or maybe subconsciously, had that pause moment after that decade and realize, oh shit.

A pause moment after 10 years is not. You know, I was consumed and enjoying myself and seeing the positive outputs of that effort, for sure, yeah, and it wasn't like I was a deadbeat father or husband. Yeah. But if you asked me before, you know what are my priorities. It would be relationships, my wife, my kids, my family, my friends, my health, and then my career. And if you asked me today, you'd get the same answer. But in the middle, during those 10 years, how I spent my time was flip-flops. It was career taking to lion's share and being an okay dad, an okay husband, an okay friend and definitely not being okay at health. You know the schedule did not allow for a lot of exercise over that decade, which and all the things that you know that long-term matter for a lot of reasons, but especially as you start to get into your 40s, that was way down the priority list, way on the life spending time on it list.

It's a cultural thing a little bit too. The Valley definitely, but I think in the United States in general that grind culture, the glorifying, that grind, and if you're not suffering, you're not succeeding.

That's what we grew up with that grind and if you're not suffering, you're not succeeding. That's what we grew up with, and ambition is very narrowly defined toward career, toward income, toward wealth, where there's a lot. I've since learned there's a lot of ways to approach and be ambitious about things that matter to you. Ambitious about being a great dad. Ambitious about being a great coach, things that matter to you. Ambitious about being a great dad. Ambitious about being a great coach if you're involved in youth sports or sports. Ambitious about being a present partner for your spouse.

Those are ambitions that often get devalued in American culture, and especially if you grew up in, you know, not so economically strong circumstances like I did, where you feel like it's not just about you know, work hard, keep your head down, make sacrifices, have ambition, career ambition, make money and then get to do the things you want to do in life. You have that added fear of if I'm not moving relentlessly toward those things, I'm actually sinking and falling backward, and can fall all the way backward, as we see all the time. You see in the Bay Area certainly on the streets of San Francisco, but also just growing up in a rural area of Ohio you see a lot of folks that are on that line and then they slip and they keep falling down and that is an added motivator, not always the healthy ways of that drive.

The anxiety that comes around that as well is unbelievable.

It's not healthy. Was there a? And we mentioned that it was a 10 year bubble for you as you go through and you get in that flow, focus of what's important to you. You you're waking up.

You're grinding, you're, you're feeling that is who you are, so you continue to do that and then you as you mentioned, the tethers to the other things that you you did want to be great at at the beginning become harder to do. There's only so many hours in the day and if you're going to grind throughout it's tough to prioritize, as you mentioned, your health. Exercising literally games for some people. You know. Going to dance recitals, right, it's just hey of, I can't. I need to get this deck built, I need to go to Vancouver on this work trip, I need to go down, I need to go to Europe to close these deals, and then the years start to slip away. I'm curious as you go over that 10 year span, are there little nuggets in time or advice or feedback that you were getting that started to then build up to lead you to the decisions that you made over the past couple of years?

Yeah, the first signs of the wake up started in COVID. Like so many other people, covid changed the way I think about a lot of things, but here I was no less consumed or focused on the job. But all of a sudden I'm home all the time on Zoom calls with the noise canceling headphones, knowing that in the same house, not more than a few feet away from me, the family and the struggle with the schoolwork and the online stuff and just all of that's going on. And I'm here and I'm in the house, but I'm not here and I'm not accessible. And from whatever it was 8 o'clock to 6 o'clock, I'm in the guest room on the computer and the guest room has its own bathroom, so I'm not even leaving that little space, its own bathroom. So I'm not even leaving that little space.

And just knowing how much was going on under the same roof at the same time not all of it great, and I'm useless and I'm there but not at all present. That was kind of the wake up, and it was made worse by the fact that I took on another project that had me on Zoom calls from like eight o'clock to 11 o'clock, so I'd pop down and have dinner and then back up in the room and that was the way it was for like nine, 10 months, so that I think it was. That was like Whoa, I'm, I'm, this is um, where, where I thought I was being ambitious and focused and prioritizing career but not quite sucking at the other things, where I was like no, you do suck at those things because they're right here happening and you're not able to help at all.

If you're listening to this and not watching the video, we're all nodding and resonating the story. We try to ignore those years, those three years of being locked inside. But similar situation. We had a guest room that was converted into an office so that I could be present in those meetings, and our twins are going through Zoom, kindergarten, and Lauren, my wife, is struggling to just get them to stay seated because it's a foreign thing for them to do it's. I mean, it feels traumatizing to think back on it, but I could feel that guilt. But also didn't know, didn't feel like I had the tools to say anything at work, because that would be perceived as me not giving 110 percent and oh, you're not being a team player. Everybody's doing this, go in there. At the same time.

I've got, I mean, I think, resentment. I think Lauren would say that building up from a spouse and even from the kids. You know our youngest would come in and use that bathroom that's off the guest room, because that was the chance he got to see me and we had some great videos of him doing pull-ups in the background and I didn't even know it, while I'm presenting to 300 people. But that's what started to chip away for me is that I just couldn't deal with that guilt every single day of I'm in the house, dad, I can see you, why aren't you here with me? And it starts to just build up more and more, and that was for me that putting the perspectives in line. It just build up more and more and that was for me that putting the perspectives in line. It sounds like similar for you of hey, a realization that I could do better.

And, as it's happening, you don't really necessarily have a name for it Um, you know, you just feel uneasy, you feel, um, out of alignment, you feel like something's, something's not right and then I'm anxious, um and anxious, and that's sort of how it manifested with me. It was just feeling anxious, feeling out of sorts, as we started to move back into the office and back into the schools and back into the world throughout 2021, I think that's when, you know, as that year progressed, I got back into contact with a coach. I started working with a coach Again. I've worked with coaches on and off over the span of my career, but with this time was like an intended. It wasn't just, hey, I want to get better at career, I want to get better at public speaking. This was one of those where I went back and I'm like something doesn't feel right in me and and I want to work with, like re-engage, the coach that I've worked with in the past, who's, you know, a friend, a mentor and a really sharp person at pulling out what's going on with the right kind of questions.

And it was through that effort over sort of the middle of 2021 and going into the late, late, late that year where I started to crack open. You know, it wasn't just this uneasy feeling. I could. I could start to identify and understand just why I was feeling out of sorts and what was how I got here, um to the point where I started like this last, call it nine years, um, I've been completely misallocating my energy and time relative to the things I cared about most, and that's of. It's not like career, ambition or drive are bad things. They're great and for a lot of people, like, there are periods of time where that's the number one thing and you should allocate your time and your energy toward it. But for me it was a misallocation vis-a-vis the priorities that I still held and cared about. And when you have what you're spending your time on versus what you care about coming out of alignment, your body, your mind, starts to tell you if not your spouse or your kids or the other extrinsic voices.

So we go through there, the bubble pops a bit and you want to take action. What do you start to do?

Yeah, and when I say it cracked open for me it cracked open it was like, ah, like you know, I've been working with the coach and then I facilitated an offsite for the CEOs in our portfolio that had Jerry Colonna and a bunch of the reboot coaches there and Jerry Colonna does what Jerry Colonna does, which is ask the kind of questions meant to crack you open, call out where you are, cut through the bullshit How'd you get here and where do you really want to be? And it was through that experience over a couple of days, on top of the foundation, I was already starting to reestablish with my coach that said, I'm out of sorts, it feels like I'm in control of nothing, which means it feels like I suck at everything. And the first thing I could think of to sort of get back to and start working on investing and fixing was my marriage, and it wasn't in crisis by any means, but it was absolutely not given the priority over those prior years that it deserved and that aligns with what I care about. So the first thing I did, as I realized, you know, shit, I'm, I'm. I'm not where I want to be, I'm not spending the time where I want to spend it. Um, it's out of alignment with my priorities. Let's pick out one of those things and and and get it to where it needs to be.

And, um, and thankfully that was my partnership with my wife. She was ready, she was there, we had drifted and sort of like you do in so many ways at this stage of our lives, you kind of figure your lanes. You know she's going to do the transportation and the bill paying I'm going to do. You know meal prep and you know and coach the kids, or work, you know you kind of settle into these roles and we had done that. Or work, you know you kind of settle into these roles and we had done that. They hadn't completely drifted to sort of opposing sides but we weren't right next to each other in the way we needed to be. So this return to invest in our partnership getting marriage counseling, getting back right with her unpacking all of the stuff, that kind of gotten us to where we were in this sort of separate but parallel life saved everything for me and really righted me so that the other things were sort of fairly easy to tackle and figure out.

Yeah, I kind of talk about that as kind of like a flow state. You don't realize you need to take a pause and get back into that flow. But when you do it then you start finding that other things fall into the flow as well. You didn't know you were missing certain things. But the minute you fix that first one, it's like running the marathon right. You take the first step, then the second step, then the third, and that flow state generally kicks back in. And it's amazing what the brain and the body would will trigger when you get back into those states. When you've been out of them. It's pretty impressive how small the body and the brain yeah, it's.

It's really an elimination of, of noise and chaos and really fixing on a signal. For me that was my wife, our marriage, our partnership, our friendship, and once that, once that was identified, that's the, that's's the stable ground and I planted my feet on that foundation. Sort of the chaos, the anxiety of all these other things sort of come into clearer focus and it's like that's no big deal. Wipe it off the board. That's important. Why don't I spend some more time on that, this thing we've been thinking about and talking about for a while but ignoring let's put that into the, into the focus area, so that and that ultimately led to the decision to leave my job and then pursue this this round the world trip slash, homeschooling experience for for our family that we had been talking about and sort of shelved for years, that grounding, realignment with my wife opened the door to something we'd sort of forgotten and put back in its place.

Yeah, well, you've got the whole Medium series. You did a really great job of blogging from start to finish, so we'll add that link into um, the podcast etc. So people can go in and take a look and a read.

And if people are, you know, I'd love to do it get me out for a year, but, uh, um, yeah, I think it's really interesting, really captivating way of doing things with your kids and your family and something they're going to live by for the rest of their life. Right, it's something they're going to take all the way and so kind of transitioning a little bit. What's the future hold? What does that look like today for Robert?

Yeah, I mean we take it one chapter at a time. Yeah, I mean we take it one chapter at a time. And for us, the next chapter is the limited number of years we have while our kids are at home. Our daughter's a sophomore in high school, our son's everything else sort of is shaped in the wake of that priority. So we moved back to Columbus after our year abroad. It's a community our kids love. It's a community we love.

The economic opportunities for me are still abundant, as they were before, so there was no major change there. But for me the bigger changes were I love what I do. I love what I've been doing. I'm good at it. There's still a need for it out there, but I want to do it on terms that I can control. Who do I work with? What feedback findings advice can I give them? What feedback findings advice can I give them?

All of which, through various stages of my career, have required or involved filters that I no longer need or want, and independence gives me that freedom. But also I don't have to travel a ton. We can work and I can support clients all over the country, as I do through Zoom and through virtual engagement. So being home, being around, having a flexible schedule, working with who I want the way I want. These are the kind of things that are different for this next stage and after that, who knows? Once the kids are up and doing what they're doing out in the world, hopefully you know, my wife and I'll take a look at where we want to go and what we want to do at that point.

Yeah, I love how you take the stance of prioritization and then re-looking at that prioritization of depending on the time and the kids, the family, etc. Etc. But just keeping that as a moving model. Right, priority right now is this and then we'll see where it takes us in the next year, two, whatever if those. If they flip, they flip, that's okay. But and I think the communication, by the sounds of it, that you now have um is, you know, completely open like, okay, the career is in there, but where does it sit right and give me your opinion.

Yeah and it's intent. You know it's intentional. You got to write it down. If you don't write it down, it isn't real. And um, I went through an exercise, um, with my coaches. Basically, here are the things I care about. This is, this is me, these are my values, this is, these are my priorities as as defined and supported over the years by the choices I've made. And what are the actions and decisions and choices that support that model of who I am? Then the next stage is all right. How does a life, a decision match up and align with that model? So this isn't by default or by accident. It's very intentional, whereas before I probably would have written out the same model of who I am, what I cared about. But then, if you looked at the life I was leading, the decisions I was making, it didn't match up. And in this stage it does. And it doesn't mean I don't care about being excellent in my career, I don't care about money, I don't care about ambition, but the ambition is being distributed across other priorities as well.

So I'm going to bring us home with one more question or theme. Robert, as you've gone through your personal journey, You're back in the Midwest, you're raising your kids in the Midwest. You have kids high school age, junior high age. What advice are you giving them as they start thinking about next chapters in their life, as they look at colleges? Based on your experiences, you know it's funny look at colleges based on your experiences.

Yeah, it's funny the only college conversations we have with our kids are intentionally around college as an option, or if you are going to go to college, it needn't be right at the year you graduate. I want our kids to understand themselves, understand the world, understand themselves in the world and start to make conscious decisions around where they want to take that. And some of that might lead to college, it might lead to international travel, it might lead to trades, it might lead to culinary arts, who knows. But we are really intentional about saying like figure out what you want. And figuring out what you want takes time.

It's longer for some than for others and I think again, our struggle bubble at this stage of life is really just another chapter of a struggle bubble that started when you were a teenager, where the world expects you to do this go to college, what are you going to study? I don't know. What kind of job are you going to get? I guess the jobs these guys are getting, because that's what everybody's doing, all the sort of momentum and inertial driven, seriously important life decisions made out of reaction or extrinsic influence, without any real choice. I don't want that for our kids. I want them to take lessons and sort of figure things out and make mistakes, and college is just one of several applications of that self-exploration, I guess.

Yeah, that's really good advice. I think we talk about that a lot and you hit on every single subject that we chat about that we were going through the schooling system. There was expectations, there were certain things you had to tick the box and if you didn't, you didn't move forward. There was certain things you had to tick the box and if you didn't, you didn't move forward. And I think now those things our generation and our kids are not going to experience the same way that we did, because not every uh, you can't put a, you know, round hole, square peg scenario.

Yeah, and you know, and to acknowledge I mean, they're lucky like they will have these choices, and that can't be said for a lot of folks in our country and around the world. So I definitely remind them of that. I want you to take your time, I want you to understand yourself, I want you to make intentional choices, but also understand the world you were born into allows you that privilege and be grateful for that. And part of the travel experience for us was to see other parts of the world where that is not the case and to appreciate the world they were born into.

Yeah, Robert, this has been a fantastic conversation. I appreciate you reaching out to us in the first place and walking us through your journey from Ohio to the West Coast and back again. A lot of head nodding from all of us and I'm sure our listeners are going to love the commentary that you've had. With that, we're going to close out this seventh episode of the Struggle Bubble. As always, please follow us on Instagram, the Struggle Bubble Pod. Any questions or commentary, get in there, craig, and I answer. Robert, I'm sure will join in if you have any questions and like and subscribe everywhere that you're listening. We're on YouTube, apple Music and Spotify right now. With that, until next week, thanks everybody. Thanks Phil, thanks Phil, thanks guys.