007: John Hughes – Author of “Unselling” and Founder of Gnu Talent

Title: John Hughes – Author of “Unselling” and founder of GNU Talent

Guest: John Hughes

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. Today, my guest is John Hughes.

He is an author and the owner of New Talent. John, welcome to the podcast.

John: Thank you, Peter. Appreciate that. Looking forward to the discussion.

Peter: Just to get started, why don’t you just tell us a little about you?

John: So the whirlwind life tour, see if we can do this in thirty seconds. I was born in Aspen, Colorado, early 60s, but grew up in Ohio from about age five on. Went to school in Ohio. Most of my career was in Columbus, Ohio. Grew up in Western Ohio.

Moved to Seattle area in 2005, I’m sorry, 2003. And my career has been in information technology, software developer early on, just worked my way up to the executive level, so CIO for a company in the Seattle area, and launched my own independent consulting business in 2005, and we can probably unpack that in a little bit as well.

Peter: Sure. You grew up in Ohio, you said around Columbus?

John: I grew up in Western Ohio near Dayton. Oh. But my career, my business career was in Columbus, Ohio.

Peter: Okay. Did I tell you I used to work for Reynolds and Reynolds?

John: In Dayton. In Dayton? Didn’t know that. Okay. Yeah.

Peter: Yeah. So Dayton, Ohio. Go Reynolds. Yeah. That was, we had a startup in 2000 or sorry, ’94, sold it to Reynolds and Reynolds in ’95, then I worked for them for about nine years.

John: Okay. Yeah. Neat. Okay. Yeah.

We’re a well known company in Dayton. Yeah.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. A It’s neat part of the country as well. So what took you out to Seattle?

John: I was working for a company at the time called Sendent, and Sendent is one of those companies that no one, very few people have ever heard of, but at the time, they’ve since split up into three different businesses. At the time, we owned about 20 brands across The US and more around the world. I think it reached about a $20,000,000,000 annual revenue at one point, But we owned Avis and Budget Rent A Car and some hotel brands.

Peter: Oh, yes. I I remember Sendin. Yes. Yes.

John: And cheap tickets. Yep. We own, Trend West Resorts Okay. Locally and and, like I said, about 20 other Got it. 20 other brands.

Peter: Yeah, do remember Sendent. So what were you doing with Sendent?

John: So with Sendent, I joined a, I even forget the name of the company now, that was in Connecticut As a director of business intelligence, which is on the IT side and analytics and reporting. And that was in June 2000. I got my 20,000 shares of, you know, company stock. Yeah. You know, the.com.

Yeah. The exciting stuff. Yep. And literally within two months, it was worth nothing and everything fell apart. And we’re all looking around at each other, wondering if we’ll have a job.

Peter: Yeah.

John: And what they did though, is they took our IT group in, information technology group in Columbus, Ohio. We were actually in Dublin, Ohio. And made us part of corporate IT. So I had the most fun I’ve ever had working for a company, which was I got to fly around working with some of our different brands, Avis Rent A Car, doing project assessments, we were turning around failed information technology projects. Did some due diligence when we were looking at acquiring companies.

So when we bought Budget Rent A Car, I led the software assessment on that, the due diligence on that. So I literally was flying around New York, New Jersey. I was just all over the place, having the time of my life. My family wasn’t too thrilled, yeah, having the time of my life from

Peter: a career perspective. Interesting, interesting. And then you said you launched your firm in when did you launch your firm again?

John: At the beginning of two thousand and five.

Peter: Okay. Why did you do that?

John: Always wanted to, and the name of that firm, if you will, it was really just it was just me, independent consultant. I’d been wanting to do that for about five years. And I bought url.com, growthwave.com in 2000.

Peter: Okay.

John: Laid out a business model. I’d never been a CIO. But the model for Growthway was I would do interim CIO work, go company to company, and do information technology turnarounds. And that was my vision in the year 2000.

Peter: Wow.

John: About the URL, and it’s just like, it’s interesting that when you put, literally when you put that out there, and I bought the URL. I didn’t do anything with the website though at the time. Yeah. But bought the URL, laid out the business model, and just kind of like, okay, there it is. Then I became an interim CIO within one of the brands at Sendit, and I became their CIO.

Peter: Okay.

John: And that’s what brought my family out here.

Peter: I got it, okay.

John: But I knew at the time that CIO job would go to Orlando, Florida, because we were merging Oh, two sister right, yep. And there is no way I’m leaving the Pacific Northwest for the, yeah, as warm and nice as Florida, Orlando, Florida is, I stayed, and I’m like, I’m gonna go do this. I have an opportunity to, you know, polish off that business model that I put together and then just go out on my own and see if I can do this thing.

Peter: What was that like starting your own firm?

John: It’s, know, day one is exciting. It’s like, Hey, I have my own thing. I have my own business. This is gonna be exciting. Day two is like, Oh my goodness, I have to create income.

Yeah. Right? And I’m not getting that check anymore from the company. No one’s, you know, within a company, especially when you’re in the information technology group, someone else is doing sales and service delivery. You know, we’re just making sure the software and, you know, internet access is there and the network’s running and word and all that is working.

Everything, when you’re a business owner, everything falls on you. And you don’t really have that reality until you cut your paycheck off and you step out on your own. I will say I got lucky my first year. Got an interim CIO opportunity for a well known retail company in Seattle and across The US, And I thought, Man, this is gonna be easy. It’s just people are just gonna start calling.

Year one was actually really good. Year two, literally nothing. I mean, almost made no money my second year. And that’s when, you hit the wall and you say, What am I gonna do? And the thing, though, is I didn’t want a job.

Was done working for companies. And so you’re faced with this thing, What do you want and how bad do you want it? And that’s when I had to figure out, I do want this bad, but I still, I have to figure out how introverted, shy John is going to, quote unquote, sell. How am I gonna create income and develop a business, especially in a town where I’ve only been here a couple years. And I’d worked for one company, I didn’t have much of a network.

Right. And so I was starting from ground zero, basically. How did you

Peter: figure it out? What was your secret?

John: The first thing to figure out is, I mean, literally is acknowledging that, well, first of all, acknowledging that I really do want this. I want to be out of my own. I want to have my own business, and I want to be my own boss, and create my own destiny, if you will. But the next step was, okay, how do I get there? And that was the struggle.

I thought the phone would just ring once I told a couple people, right, and that just doesn’t happen. In fact, the phone really has never rung. Business just doesn’t work that way.

Peter: Right, right.

John: That way anymore. Yeah. I did get introduced to a business coach at the time, and she hit me upside the head with some reality. Okay. Because I wanted to write, and as I say in this book, you know, I told her I wanna write, and I’m gonna write a book, and then I’m gonna use that to market my business.

And she literally said, No, you’re not. And I was mad at her. I’m like, I wanna write, so I’m gonna write this book. She was, No, that’s not how you develop business. You’ve got to network.

You’ve got to meet people face to face. You’ve got to, and so that’s what it was. Said, I’ve gotta trust this person. She knows what she’s talking about. And so that’s what I did.

Just, I went on a kind of a networking frenzy, if you will, trying different networking groups and meeting people face to face. Yeah. And then, I mean, it’s still not that easy, right? Because you have to be able to to somebody what it is that you do. Sure.

Right? And how, in terms of the types of opportunities that you want, they have to be able to recognize them for you.

Peter: Yeah.

John: And so I had to, I mean, it’s just a whole new world. It was a black box before. It is a whole new world to figure out how you create, how you build basically a business that’s in a sense self sustaining. You’ve got to figure that out and do it yourself, and no one’s going do it for

Peter: you.

John: When you’re doing this on your own, there isn’t a single soul that cares about it as much as you do. Right. They might care, but you know what, they got their own stuff that they’re

Peter: Exactly. Dealing you’re an author. How many books have you written?

John: So this is my second, just published the second one.

Peter: Okay, give us the title and the subtitle

John: Sure, all so this is my second book that I just wrote and self published three or four weeks ago called Unselling. Okay. And there’s, there’s a concept behind unselling, so the subtitle to Unselling is The Independent Consultant’s Guide to Trusting God for More Business, Faith, and Life. Right. When I first started scratching out this book, I wanted to call it Begging for More.

Okay. Because it fits. Begging for more business. Yeah. Begging for more faith and begging Sure.

For more But a couple people that I trusted, I used the word unselling in the manuscript of the book, and these two people do not know each other, and they both said that’s the name of the book. Got it. I trusted them on that, although I still love begging for more. Right. And I and other business owners that have started their own thing, yeah, I mean, we cringe just, we’re having that stomach pain Yeah, right

Peter: so this was just published

John: October 1. It hit, I got it out on amazon.com. Okay. And so there’s the Kindle version of it. There’s the paperback version and lucked into an opportunity to have it in audiobook.

So it’s gonna be, it’s supposed to be, audiobook is supposed to be available on December 25, so Christmas Day. It’d be a nice Christmas Awesome. It’s also on barnesandnoble.com, so it’s available those outlets.

Peter: Great. We’ll have links for the book, both books, in the show notes as well, so folks can find that. How long did it take you to actually write this book?

John: Oh, let me count the years. And it’s interesting that when people look at a book, it’s like, oh, that must not have taken very long. Or you know, if I were to sit down and just like work full time, it probably took three or four months to write the book. It took about five years to write the book.

Peter: Right, yeah. Right.

John: Okay. And you’ve got life and you’ve got business and everything, everything else that’s kind of that’s going on as well. And the first book was the same, so that one, I drafted it three times. I shouldn’t say drafted it, sorry, outlined it three times, and I get it started because I was trying to write a normal textbook type business book, really boring and dry. The first book was written in story format, or fable format, if you will.

And once I realized I could write dialogue, book literally wrote itself. Oh. And so that one I wrote start to finish in about nine months, and it takes a few months to publish. This one, start to finish, literally took about four or five years, it really did. Yeah.

Because I just struggled with it. I struggled, I had, as I told, I used a writing coach, I told the writing coach, I’ve got 30,000 words, but it’s just in a pile on the table, and I do not know how to tease this out and make

Peter: something, you

John: know, make this into something.

Peter: So why did you write this book?

John: I didn’t wanna write it, but I’d meet, I’d network all the time with tons of people, and I’d been out of my own ten or eleven years at this, probably more like nine or ten years at that point in time, and I was getting the question all the time, how do you develop business? And I always think people look at me like, here’s this kind of somewhat shy, introverted guy, but he’s been interim CIO at some decent sized companies, and he always seemed to be busy. And literally it was three people on the same day, same Starbucks, Downtown Seattle, because that’s easy for me, right? I get to sit in one Starbucks, I had a client nearby.

Peter: And

John: all three of them wanted to go out on their own as independent consultants, and they asked me how I developed business. And after the third one, you end up with this thing on the inside that says you have to write the book. So that’s why I wrote it is self responsibility that said, Okay, John, you have to write this book. And what’s interesting, though, is it’s not a book about how an introvert develops business, right? It became so much more than that because it’s kind of a hard book to describe, but there are definitely strategies around developing business as an independent consultant.

But at the same time, that period that I’d been out of my own since 2005 was as much a faith journey as anything else. And I ended up with this, as I had all these 30,000 words, I was at this crossroads of, is this just going to be a business book where I share my strategies and my thoughts and perspectives on sales and marketing and networking and all those other concepts. Kind of

Peter: an advice book for these people that came to you.

John: Is it just an advice book? As I thought about that, I never would have survived that if it wasn’t for God and my faith. I truly would not have. And it felt like it would have been a betrayal if I didn’t. The acknowledgment God and his son, and the book is infused with faith as well.

So this kind of commingling of a little bit of my journey, lessons learned, failures that I experienced, but the successes as well, and then some of the strategies that I look back and allowed me to develop business as, as I say, this shy, introverted individual trying to survive on his own.

Peter: So you mentioned successes and failures. Is there one story in the book that just really kind of encapsulates or illustrates, you know, is there one that was just a little more meaningful?

John: Yeah, are really two stories, I’ll share one if we get in You’re a welcome to share two. Okay. As you asked that question, yeah, there are other stories, but the one was with my business coach back, and I used her for a few months back in probably February. I was in my business two years, and I tell her still today, because we’re good friends today, if I had used her my first year, I would have saved a lot of time and money and aggravation. Yeah.

But I was two years in and wasted a lot of money on, basically a lot of it went into building a website. Yeah. That just wasn’t effective for the type of business But that I in the book, it’s about a page, maybe a little over a page of that first dialogue Lenora and I had. And it literally was, she said, So tell me how you develop business. And I said, Well, that’s why I’m here.

One thing I wanna do is write a book. And that’s when she literally said, No, you’re not. And so we had this, I was angry, right? Because I really wanted to write a book, but it was more about, I’m more of a mental person. I’m not this outgoing person.

Sure. I’m not a networker. And I wanted to sit behind my desk and write and write processes and write articles and think I can create all of this paper and marketing things as an independent consultant and put them out into the world, and people would just follow with themselves calling me or emailing and it doesn’t happen. And she knew that. That story is so meaningful to me because she’s the one that really got through to me that said, You know what, John?

If this is what you really want, you’ve got to meet people face to face. You’ve got to get to know people. You’ve got to contribute to this network of independent consultants and service delivery, and you’ve got to be out there, and you’ve gotta get out from behind your desk. So that’s, of all the stories, that’s probably the most meaningful. Yeah.

She’s the one that was able to get through to me, and I really try to come out strong in the book as well in telling that story.

Peter: That’s great advice. And the other story?

John: So the other story, gentleman that lives here in Edmonds. Okay. His name’s Ron. And I’ve known Ron for a good ten years or so. And Ron, anybody that knows Ron, he’s one of the most generous people you’d ever want to know.

And started a few years into my consulting business, I started a, I love leadership development. Okay. So I wanted to start a leadership development group for up and coming information technology leaders. Yeah. But I was having trouble marketing it.

I’d created it, you know, sit behind my desk, and I can write all types paperwork they’d go through. I had all of the back office type things all set. Was set to go, but nobody was knocking on my door. And I got introduced to Ron, I said, Hey, he asked me how he could help me, and I said, Well, I’m starting this networking or this leadership development group for IT leaders. And I said, I’m struggling a bit, trying to get the word out.

He literally picked up his phone started calling people right then and there. And he was calling HR leaders because he knew that they connected, they would know if anybody in their group. I’m sitting across from him at a Starbucks in, I think, Madison Park, and he’s calling people right in front of me. And I don’t know this gentleman. I’d never met him before.

And he goes, he says, I’m sitting across from my good friend, John, you know, talking to this HR person, and he’s starting this type of group and just wondering if you have anybody in your IT group that would be interested Oh, in being a part of really? Well, I’ll connect you and John. He did that three times while I’m sitting there. I was, you know, you really understand the concept of humility in a good way, right? Was so humbled, but I was honored at the same time that this person would, in a sense, really go to bat for me with people in his network.

And you could see that all three of them responded yes. You could see the trust that they had in him, that he’d be willing to introduce me, right? You just saw all this stuff kind of come together. And so I tell that story in there, and I label that one as the way it’s supposed to be done, right? This giving of trust and giving of ourselves.

There was nothing in it at all for Ron Right. Except helping John and maybe helping some people at his at his clients.

Peter: Right. Wow. That’s a great story. You’re you’re now kind of in a different place in your career, right? Or what you’re doing.

John: Oh yeah. So why

Peter: don’t you talk about kind of how you ended up where you’re at now and what you’re doing now? Yeah, it’s, I mean,

John: you just, know, fourteen, fifteen years later, I guess it’s fourteen years later, you just don’t know what right you’re going to go through and what you’re gonna learn from it and where you’ll be at a certain point in time. Fourteen years ago, now I have, I do executive technology search. Companies hire us to help them hire CIOs and CTOs and other IT leaders. In my wildest dreams would have thought I’d be doing, I’d have an executive search firm. It’s just not who I was.

The journey itself, though, was, first of all, you think you go into, one, just, like, we wanna own our own business, right? That’s what I And you kinda think it’s about making money, right? It’s about this, you know, being an independent, and it’s my own thing, and I own this and there’s some, you know, maybe some ego status that goes with that.

Peter: Definitely.

John: But it becomes an extremely humiliating process. And you learn more about yourself, I think, than you ever would inside of a company. Because again, it literally is all on you. It’s a make or break. You’ve got, you know, kids in school, kids that want to go to college.

You’re looking at yourself and your income plummets, you know, from an executive salary to something, I’ll just say something less than executive salary. But yet on the inside, it’s like, really continued to feel like I was supposed to be doing this, that there was something I’m supposed to be learning out of this. So you stick with it, right? So every I mean, I would wake up, it was probably three or four years that this went on, I’d wake up at three about 03:30 in the morning ready to quit, right? And I just wanted to quit.

Just didn’t I did not want to go through this anymore. It just seemed easier to go get a job and just suck it up and do the, you know, to do the forty to fifty hours a week and just kind of ride life outside.

Peter: Sell your soul.

John: I mean, that’s exactly what it felt like.

Peter: Yeah.

John: But I first step out of bed in the morning, it’s like, You know what? I’ll give it another day. And every day you just keep doing that. Like I said, it’s hard to see when you’re going down a path or you’re about to head into a journey, what it’s gonna be like in the middle of it and what it’s gonna be like on the other side of it. I guess I would say I love that part of it, right?

A lot of times working in corporate America, which I did for twenty some years, a lot of times it’s pretty predictable, right? You know what it’s gonna look like, and you kind of know where it’s headed, you know what the end of the story looks like. Doing something on your own, I mean, you don’t know where you’re going to end up. You don’t know who you’re going to meet. You don’t know the impact you’re going to have.

It’s way more open than it is working inside a corporation. And I love that. I’m a learner. So one of my strengths finders, one of my strengths finders is I’m an extreme learner, so I don’t mind taking risks. So I’m a risk taker, and I’m a learner.

Yeah, I love that aspect of what that journey was like.

Peter: What does business done well mean to you?

John: The first word that comes to my mind is authenticity, and that’s what I care more about than anything else is, and I touch on it in Unselling. It’s, you know, when I talk about in unselling and the strategies I say work for me, they work for me because they’re an extension of who I am. I develop business John’s way, because I’m comfortable with it. Can sleep at night. I feel comfortable with it.

I give of myself because I’m passionate about helping other people and lifting other people up. Business done well for me is all about authenticity and are we being who we truly are in the way that we handle ourselves in business on a daily basis, whether we’re working directly with a client or maybe working on some back office functions. It’s just not about the money. Never, and I needed to create income, right? I’ve got bills to pay and mortgage and all but it was never about that.

And I knew the moment I made it about that, I’d be perpendicular to who I was, who I was created to and my core values.

Peter: And

John: on the one hand, it’s kinda like, I mean, this is where trust and our faith really comes into play, which is I’m not gonna worry about the income side, right? Because we have a provider. Sure. And it’s hard, right? It’s hard to say, We’ve got a provider, and I trust in that provider, and he will provide for us, right?

Can be hard to rely on that. And that’s one of the things I learned over the last, these fourteen years of being in, having my own independent consulting business. And that is the first three or four years, it was John. John’s going to do this. John’s going to do it this way.

Yeah. And it just, it wasn’t working. It was just really slow. And kind of mentally and emotionally quit three times.

Peter: Okay.

John: And started even talking to people about, Hey, who do you hear is hiring? Literally all three times. The same person, he had his own consulting business, called me with an opportunity to work as a consultant through his consulting business.

Peter: Okay.

John: And the first time I’m like, Great, thanks, cash Second time I’m like, Great, thanks, cash flow, appreciate that. The third time, same person called with an opportunity. I’m like, Okay, God, I get You want me here. I absolutely believe it, and I’m gonna trust it. And I’m not gonna worry another day about when the next opportunity is coming, and I didn’t.

Mean, literally, it was just like I got to flip that switch, and I just absolutely trusted. And yeah, I guess when we’re, I just believe when we’re faithful. Yeah. He’s always faithful, but we need to be faithful too. And I talk a lot about promises in unselling.

I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’ve heard at least several 100 promises in the Bible. And I’m a fan of pick one. Yeah. Pick one that’s speaking to you and hold Right. Onto And there are some verses that I have just held onto.

And promises, and it’s not like I say, Okay, prove it, God. That’s not the dialogue. Dialogue, maybe it used to be, but the dialogue anymore is, Okay, you know, it’s going to happen. I’m just gonna hold onto this. And you’ll make it happen when you’re ready.

Peter: Yeah. Any verses in particular that you wanna share with us?

John: Jeremiah 2nine 11 is one of the big ones that stuck with me. At the front of chapter one is Jeremiah 2nine 11, For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. And I just, that is literally the one, one of the primary ones that I held onto. And then throughout, not just the beginning, but throughout the chapters, I’ll bring in a verse that is germane to the topic at hand.

You know how we read the Bible, we read it often, we’ll even see the same verse dozens, if not hundreds of times, right? And say, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever. Galatians five:one, one day I woke up, and I don’t know when it was that I read it, and I think I read it for what it was for the first time, and I was blown away. So Galatians five:one, It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

And then there’s another verse in John talking about abundant life. He wants this for us. Yeah. I mean, wants us to understand what freedom truly is and what to be, know, what it means to have an abundant life from his perspective. So unselling is a lot about that.

Was, at the beginning of it, I talk about the difference between believing in God and believing God, and for me, there’s a huge difference. I definitely believe in God. I gave my life to Christ in 1981, and my faith has always gotten stronger, but it was just believing and a lot of going through the motions. But I’m gonna say it was believing in, right? He exists and he’s there, versus believing, which is grasping one of his promises and saying, Yeah, I believe you.

I’m gonna trust in you. I’m not gonna lean on my own understanding anymore. It’s not, I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s very difficult to do, but when, and this is what I went through the last fourteen years, when you’re, when you wanna be out doing, creating your own thing, and it’s not going well your way, and yet you wanna be there, and you have this faith in God, at some point you go, You know what? It’s not working with me, so I’m completely yield and listen to you, and I’m gonna be faithful and trust.

Peter: If I give you a reset button, and you could take the last fourteen years of what you’ve been doing, is there anything else you would do differently?

John: When I first started out in 2005 with Growth Wave, I really wanted it to be a boutique consulting firm. I wanted a handful of, because I don’t want anything big, right? I would never want to build a national consulting firm. That’s never, it’s not who I am, it’s not what I would want. But I did want this small firm of, you know, three or four interim CIOs and some project managers and some business analysts, because I know we could do awesome things.

Yeah. The problem was everybody always wanted to hire me, right? Versus I didn’t have that ability to talk about the firm or Growth Wave. I only ever talked in terms of what I could do. And so I limited my, you know, the size of my firm, Sure, yeah.

Just by doing it to one. And when I finally realized that I was doing that, just surrendered it and said, Yeah, I’m okay with this. But that’s one thing, knowing what I know now, and maybe having the experience and maybe abilities to do that now, I might, if I got to start over, do a reset, I might take a run at creating that small boutique consulting firm versus just John.

Peter: What do you do outside of the business side of things?

John: It’s hard to separate my business. So a lot of what I do is business. It doesn’t mean I’m working, I’m not a workaholic, I don’t work all the time, but it’s such a piece of who I am, especially when writing books. So I get requests to talk often and meet, and people want to just ask me questions about my experience. So I do a lot of networking around the book and how I built my business.

So business and then writing, I’ve done my two business books, and I’m deep. Hopefully I’ll have my first novel, which is a Western published next spring.

Peter: Oh, wow.

John: And I call it a, it’s an emotional drama set in the Old West, slight historical fiction, slight mystery. So there’s a lot, a lot going on there. Cool. So yeah, it’s been so fun to be able to just write pure fiction. But yeah, I’m four drafts into it, so this is hopefully next spring.

I’ve got, you know, I remarried recently, and so love my wife, Jill. She’s from Vancouver. Okay. So she grew up in Vancouver. And so that’s where we are.

I’m now in Vancouver, actually in And we bought a

Peter: That’s Vancouver, USA.

John: Yes, thank you. Is there another Vancouver? I didn’t think there was, right? We should just all assume Vancouver, Washington.

Peter: Yeah, well I love the big sign when you drive into Vancouver, it’s Vancouver, USA.

John: Vancouver, USA.

Peter: Yeah, I grew up there by the way, so.

John: So we bought, a year ago, bought a small farm, really small, two and a half acres. Previously was a cattle farm, and was downsized, and the barn was changed a bit. It’s now to be a horse farm. And we did that because Jill’s daughter, she’s 19 now, has a horse and she’s starting to board horses as well. So we have our second horse on the property.

And just I love space. I did a 3,000 square foot garden this year. Just broke new ground. Nice. Just planted everything you could think of under the sun, and we got a ton of everything and wasted way too much.

So I do love being outside and gardening, gardening from a vegetable perspective. I’m not a flower guy. So yeah, the business, the writing, doing things with family. Have three grown kids in their 20s. They’re all in.

They live in Portland, so somewhat nearby. Jill has three kids as well, so we’re pretty active with all of that. I had some other interesting experiences. So there’s this, I don’t know if you’ve heard of HSP, or Highly Sensitive Person. No.

So Doctor. Elaine Aaron developed this concept out of Jungian theory that there’s this trait around high sensitivity, and I never would have put myself there, but one of the young gentlemen that worked for me, you know, fifteen, sixteen years ago gave me her book and literally said, Here, this is you. Wow. And I was kind of a bit taken aback. Yeah.

But I read it and I understood it. Are, deep thinkers, high empathy, so these aspects of the HSP that are just very real and kind of stand out. And so I followed Doctor. Aaron on her newsletter for a while. Then three years ago or so, three or four years ago, put out this newsletter that said they’re gonna do a film, like a documentary of And I’ve always wanted to do a film.

And so I immediately responded and say, Hey, I can carry water, I’ll do anything. And she’s in San Francisco area.

Peter: Okay.

John: And so are the producer, the filmmaker there too, and volunteered myself. Next thing I know, I’m wrangled into being in it. There is a, I still think it’s hard for me to watch, but as I say, I did it for science, right? And it’s actually a very well done documentary, and they’re actually doing more aspects of HSP. That was just hitting all the highlights.

Peter: What’s the documentary called?

John: So the documentary is called The Untold Story. And I believe it’s, I don’t know if it’s on Amazon, Netflix, I’m not sure where it is. I’ve seen the DVD, It was fun to be a part of. It was an interesting process. I got to know Doctor.

Aaron, the filmmaker, and the other producers. They filmed me, we went around all around Seattle one day filming me on the tram and walking down the street, and I think it’s Highland Park where we have just a beautiful view of the Space Needle, and that’s where they did that filming.

Peter: Okay.

John: And my so in this film, what they do is it’s, again, at a really high level, kind of describing high sensitivity. And they hit all the different aspects of it from relationships and children. And then they hit, my part was actually on business and leadership.

Peter: And

John: they went, they interviewed people throughout the world, both doctors and individuals. So it’s a very well done film. Just one of those things that’s interesting to be a part of. And today I still get emails, LinkedIn messages from people literally from around the world thanking me for being a part of that film because they identified with usually men, but a lot of times, you know, it’s women as well. Identifying with high sensitivity and what I talked about, because I did talk about I crafted my own life because my high sensitivity, a lot of us are creative, and we have a hard time in the confines of a company, and so we need to be out on our own.

A lot of people, though, struggle to find their way in

Peter: the world to

John: be able to create an income. What I talked about was, you know, creating my own business in my way and, you know, being successful, writing the book and then being successful with it. It’s just one of those aspects of myself that very few people know about.

Peter: Yeah, I had no idea.

John: I’ve spoken on it. Occasionally get asked to speak on it, but it’s fun to get messages from people throughout the world. Yeah. And I’ve done little Skype calls with people, and we just sit and chat, which the people that know me know this about me. They can call me anytime, have a phone call, meet for a coffee, and I’m a coach at heart, which is why I write these books, wrote, you know, my first book, Haunting the CEO and then Unselling.

It’s my way of sharing and teaching and giving. And I do that whether it’s with business or with these books or with you know, high sensitivity. I just open myself up and, you know, all the good, the bad, the ugly, the indifferent. That’s

Peter: pretty gutsy.

John: It’s, yeah. I don’t think I would do that.

Peter: I don’t think I’ve got the guts to go there, but I’m glad that you’re here to There do

John: are those of us out there just willing to kind of display our internal organs and lives.

Peter: In the name of science.

John: In the name of science and in, yeah. It’s really in the name of, so when, it’s like people identify with it, it’s like, Oh my gosh, that’s me. I get it. Yeah. And there are people literally that think, you know, this HSP, that there’s something wrong with them.

I did a talk to a small group a few weeks ago in Seattle, and when I made the comment like, You’re not broken, there was a lady there that was just like, Really? And she talked about, I think it was afterwards that he and I chatted. Yeah. And it was her, know, some of the relationships she had, they pointed at her and said, You know, there’s something wrong with you. Yeah.

No, there’s not. This isn’t an innate trait. And there’s something very special about you. It’s just hard for us to find our way in the world. And so if I can embarrass myself in a film, but yet give a name and help people understand more about themselves and help them find their way in the world better.

I don’t mind embarrassing myself to go down that path.

Peter: What was the title of the first book, and what was that about?

John: Sure, Hunting the CEO. Okay. And it sounds like a ghost story, but it’s not. There’s a story behind Hunting the CEO, and that is written in story format. Okay.

So it’s the story of a CIO, a chief information officer, who’s struggling, and he’s been fired a couple times, and he feels he’s about to get fired again. The company brings in a new CEO, and he’s cleaning house.

Peter: Yeah.

John: But instead, the CEO sees some hope for this character, this CIO, and he introduces him to a mentor. Oh, And the mentor helps him understand what it means to be a true leader. And so Brian is the CIO character. So he goes from this mental transformation of failing as an executive or a CIO to understanding what it means to be a true leader.

Peter: So

John: even though it’s written, it’s not a technology book, but it’s written, the main character’s a CIO, but at its core, it’s a leadership book. A lot of my leadership principles, and I kind of, if you will, bring them to life in story format.

Peter: Yeah. Cool. Great. We’ll have links to that as well. So we’ve talked about books.

What books inspire you? Obviously, we’ve talked about the Bible, but what other books inspire you?

John: Other books inspire me. So at the back of Unselling, I list a couple pages of further reading.

Peter: Yeah.

John: And I need to scan it. I So have my business books that have been really important to me, and I’m gonna guess you know these books. Go ahead. The E Myth?

Peter: Yes, that’s the second time somebody’s mentioned the E Myth on our podcast.

John: Okay. Yeah. It’s, yeah, it’s just, you know, when I first read it, it’s probably been twenty years, I don’t know, close to it. It’s just an interesting, powerful book. Really simple, but yet really powerful.

So that’s the E Myth, The five Dysfunctions of a Team, the Lencioni book, Good to Great is actually, we’re almost at the top, which is a phenomenal book on leadership and getting into the somewhat science of leadership.

Peter: So Patrick Lencioni, five Dysfunctions of a Team, he also did, what, The Ultimate Team Player?

John: That one I don’t know.

Peter: Okay, okay.

John: Yeah, he did Getting Naked. He’s got, and he writes a lot of his books in fable format or story format as

Peter: well. Yeah.

John: And then one that not many people have heard of, unless you’re in manufacturing, is the goal. Okay. And so I actually patterned my book Haunting the CEO after the

Peter: goal. Okay.

John: So the goal is probably 30 plus years old, and it’s written in story format. But the core of the goal is about continuous improvement. What’s the biggest blocking factor you have in your business? Address that. Now what’s the next one, and what’s the next one?

And what I like about that is it’s not just a business concept, right? It could be personal business or whatever. The concept of, he calls it theory of constraints. But it’s about business improvement. I’ll

Peter: have to check that out.

John: Yeah, I’m skipping through, so from a writing perspective, again, I love writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, for those writers who are out there.

Peter: Yeah.

John: And On Writing by Stephen King, which I’m reading through again or skimming through it anyway. I’m not a fan of Stephen King’s writing by any stretch of the imagination. Right. It’s just not my thing. But his book, On Writing, is just really, really good for those that enjoy writing, his perspective.

He does a really good job of kinda coaching the individual through writing. The one that really impacted me personally, probably mostly over the last ten years or so, is The Journey of Desire by John Eldridge,

Peter: who

John: wrote Wild at Heart. Never read Wild at Heart,

Peter: but

John: Journey of Desires, there’s some oddities to it, but there’s some absolutely powerful concepts that just hit me hard and spoke to me, especially when he talked about striving and striving and striving. But anyways, yeah, so The Journey of Desire I’ll by John

Peter: have check that out. I’ve read his, the first book you mentioned, but not that one.

John: And then the only other one I do wanna mention, but more the author than a particular book.

Peter: Yeah.

John: The author is Brene Brown.

Peter: She’s the best.

John: She’s, I mean, just don’t know how, you know, she’s just phenomenal what she does, and not just what she does, it’s all research based. Yeah. And her humility and the way she handles herself is just, I think she’s just a really authentic person. Yeah. And I’ve seen tons of her Google, I’m sorry,

Peter: Instagram posts.

John: YouTube videos of her. The book I read, even though after I bought it, I realized it was written for women. But it doesn’t matter. Mean, she does have a chapter, I think, the end that really kind of speaks directly toward men, but it doesn’t matter. She talks deeply about shame and vulnerability, which I think is, we just need more and more of that.

So by the way, that book is called I Thought It Was Just Me, but it Isn’t. That’s the title of the book, and I read it cover to cover. Wife Jill looks at it, and I’ve got the thin little stickies. Must be like 200 of them She’s like, Why don’t you just highlight the whole book?

Peter: Braving the Wilderness is the most recent book that I read of hers, and she just has a new book out called, is it Dare to Lead or Yeah. Something along the So I think it was released, like, last week. That would be a good one to, pick up. Yep. Yeah.

That’s that’s some good that’s some really good You’ve got a great lineup there. So what about your, like, personal productivity habits? Do you have any particular sort of personal productivity habits, morning routines, or just things that you do that are, you feel are really helpful?

John: This may surprise you, I’m not a very disciplined person. Okay. So I’m not, like writing, so Stephen King will say writing is a job. You get up in the morning. If you want to write 2,000 words a day, you get up, it’s a job.

You close the door, you work the job. Just as if you’re hammering nails constructing a house, it’s a I can’t view it that way. I’ve got to feel right.

Peter: Yeah, so you got to get inspired.

John: Gotta get a little bit inspired. Yeah, have to kind of get in the groove. And I tend to have slower mornings. I make coffee for my wife and I do other things because she does the eight to five thing. Yeah.

Yeah, you can tell I’m struggling with routines. So my routine, it’s not even routine, it’s what I care about is what’s the most important thing I need to be doing today? What’s, and I focus on the big things, and

Peter: That’s what most productivity coaches

John: I wouldn’t look

Peter: at that. Days if you talk to Michael Hyatt or, you know, of course, you know, Steven Covey.

John: Mhmm.

Peter: You know, put the first things first. Yeah. You know, the big rocks. Yeah. And that that is something that, you know, just making sure that you understand what that one thing is is huge.

John: Yeah, yeah. It used to be, you know, all the little, if you’re getting a lot of little rocks done, you can really, it feels productive. It feels like- Check, check, check, check. Yeah, and I like, I do little check boxes on my to do list, right, and I love checking boxes a lot, but at the end of the day, if you never really understood, so one thing I will say in terms of that productivity, mine is the night before, even if it’s in my head, tomorrow, this is what I wanna get done tomorrow. This is my priority.

And so that when I wake up, I know what my priorities are, right? Even if it’s just one thing, I’ve gotta get this thing done today, and nothing else is gonna matter until I get this one thing done. But I’m a plan the night before, so there’s no doubt about it.

Peter: So you have the ability to focus, though.

John: So when I’m, yeah, that’s my thing, is when I’m going, I am absolutely focused, and it’s hard to get me off of that focus. So big thing, focus, and after that.

Peter: So those are two superpowers right there.

John: I yeah. I guess I don’t think of them. I just picture myself as not quite that disciplined because I don’t do the same thing the same way every day or in the same, I don’t write first thing in the morning. Sometimes I might start at ten, sometimes I might start at four There’s just nothing, There’s nothing rhythmic about it at

Peter: all. Yeah. Yeah. What else do you want to tell us? Is there anything you want to share with us that we haven’t really touched on or something you just want to leave us with?

John: I think you did a great job covering everything. The one thing that’s come up now yesterday, and it’s come up again today in different conversations, that is that concept of what do you want and how bad do you want it? Yeah, And as I have that conversation with people, not everybody knows what that is, and I think it’s important that we, I’m a huge believer that God put something in each of us, right? And I mean, I remember from the ’80s when I was in college that it felt like God said, you know, one of your things is going to be leadership. Didn’t know what I didn’t even know really what leadership was at

Peter: the time. You know,

John: it’s this kind of highfalutin’ word. But I ended up writing a book on leadership and spoken on it, and I’ve done leadership development. I didn’t plan that. It just kind of happened. Yeah.

And I think we all have that about us. So I’ll say it another way. I was, you know, I had just met with a friend of mine. We’ve known each other probably just about as long as you and I have, about a year and he’s doing his own independent consulting thing. And we’re talking, talking, talking, and I asked him that question.

So what do you want to do, and how bad do you want it? And he goes, Well, I was afraid, literally after an hour conversation, he goes, I was afraid to tell you this, but, you know, and he’s like a technology consultant like I am. I said, I’m doing this stuff with boats, right? Yeah. And I’m making canvas seats and all that because they’re hard to find and they’re expensive to make.

He goes, I’m loving it. But you can see it click in him, though, I don’t which know how to make money at that though. And I said, But what do you want? What about the quality of life and fulfillment and all these other things? So this is just really important to me, is helping people understand what it is that they want, because I want people to be happy and full of joy and fulfilled and know that what they were created to be and to do on this earth, that they get to experience that.

And I do think, I hint at it in this book, in Unselling, and that is, I think, and I’m not an expert at this by any stretch of the imagination, this is just John’s philosophy, that there’s a lot of illness because people don’t want to acknowledge, right, that they have this thing that they want to go do. And so we kind of settle. And I don’t like settling. It’s just never been a part of me. I’ve taken a lot of risks.

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t mind embarrassing myself. Right. I just love it when people know what it is that’s inside them that’s never come out, whether it’s writing or starting a business or I don’t care what it is. Because I think people come to life and we truly become what God has enabled us to be here on this earth.

Peter: Yeah. That’s great. Thank you. Thank you for joining me today, and, we will have links to, you know, the firm and the books and, contact details as well. So if anybody wants to track down John, links will be there.

Thanks again.

John: Thank you, Peter. Enjoy the conversation.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.