Title: Kevin Schmidt – Finding Contentment In Work And Beyond
Guest: Kevin Schmidt
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. My guest today is Kevin Schmidt.
Kevin is a, I kind of consider him to be a renaissance man. I’ve known Kevin for well over twenty years. We used to work together at a little company called DealerNet. I’ve been seeing Kevin on Instagram lately and decided to reach out to him through Instagram and invited him to be on the podcast to talk about contentment. Kevin, you wanna say hi?
Kevin: Hey. How’s it going?
Peter: So Kevin is, he’s a island dweller. He’s over in Bainbridge Island, which is, along the Puget Sound. Today, we’re gonna talk about contentment and, what it means. The reason I’ve been thinking about it in general is, you know, it’s Thanksgiving week, and it’s 2020. We got a hell of a lot to be discontent about.
So I’ve been thinking about, wow, maybe think about a different way. You know, what are those things that we can be content with and about? So I just wanna start off by asking you like, what does contentment mean to you?
Kevin: It’s a really good question. Contentment to me, in a nutshell, is the ability to fall asleep easily at night because your head isn’t filled with all the discontent of the ongoing struggles around you, sort of thing.
Peter: Yeah.
Kevin: Yep. And then they wake up in the morning and just realize that your your to do list is up to you and not up to somebody else.
Peter: Bravo. Now, one of the things I I mentioned, you live in Bainbridge and I Mhmm. Follow you on Instagram. Kind of stalked you for quite a while. Even though we haven’t really spoken to each other for many years.
I appreciate that. This is our first conversation. One of the things I noticed is that your location is, is it Goldfinch Meadows?
Kevin: Is that Yes. Yeah. That’s the just the name I gave to the little, acre and a quarter that we have. Yeah.
Peter: Okay. And I noticed that you have a lot of, nature in your, neck of the woods there, so to speak, that you Yeah,
Kevin: we do. It’s a nice situation. Like I say, I’ve got an acre and a quarter, but just the way things work out, right, in a part of the island that’s one of the oldest parts of the island, so all the homes around us are as old as ours. Our house was built in 1904. The house next to us was built in, I don’t know, eighteen eighty something.
Mean, yeah, yeah.
Peter: They built houses back then?
Kevin: Yeah, even older than ours. So yeah, it’s a nice area, but more to the point, our acre and a quarter is surrounded by people that have two and a half acres on one side and five acres on the other. And then the people beyond the people with two and a half acres have another two and a half acres. So it’s in 25 acres of land, there’s four houses. And even though I’ve got a small house, from every window in this house, I see nothing but green, except if I look out this one window right here, I can see, barely see the corner of one of my neighbor’s houses.
And so every other window I’m looking at trees and lawns and it’s just a, situation it’s just real given how little property I actually do have. I’ve got quite the territorial aspect.
Peter: How long have you lived there?
Kevin: Also a good question. We actually moved in to this house, which we laughingly referred to then as our starter house. Thanksgiving weekend of ‘ninety three, getting close to thirty years.
Peter: And when you say we, you’re-
Kevin: Yeah, my wife Janine. We’ve been together since a blind date in 1988. Wow. So that’s also some longevity. Yeah, she’s a leadership coach, has been doing that for quite some time.
Does a lot of work with the Henley leadership group, Dee Dee Henley and company. And, you know, she’s got some fabulous clients now that, well, with everything that’s going on, she’s transitioned nearly everything to virtual. Lots of Zoom meetings these days.
Peter: Right.
Kevin: Tiny, tiny bits of in person stuff in the past couple of months. But thankfully her business is doing really well.
Peter: That’s good to hear. So you’re living here at Goldfinch Meadows and you’re just surrounded by nature. That’s one of the things that really impressed me is just the amount of nature that you show on your Instagram. What role does that play? What role does nature play in your personal contentment?
Kevin: Well, first of all, think one of the most obvious things to me is the way that just being in nature has a calming influence, on me at least. It brings me to ground. It centers me. I think that just walking out the door sometimes is enough to just bring everything back to ground, back to center. So, for me, just any nature at all is wonderful that way.
The other great thing about the nature around me here is that even though it is only an acre and a quarter, I’ve got a nice big lawn, then behind that, back where my studio is and where, Janine is currently using it as her office, I’ve got just enough land. When the pandemic hit and the first time I went to the grocery store and saw empty shelves to the left of me and empty shelves to the right of me, I thought, you know, I’m not going to give over control of my life to someone I can no longer trust with that. So yeah, I immediately bought lots of starts. And thankfully for all the online businesses that had seeds to offer, I bought a bunch of seeds, expanded the little area I had back there to begin with quite a lot. Planted corn, planted broccoli, planted onions, planted cucumbers, planted tomatoes, the list was very long of things that knew it would probably work back there and had a couple of peach trees back there for a number of years.
And yes, on Bainbridge Island, I’ve been I’ve been actually getting ripe peaches every year. So it it can it can be done. It’s hard to believe, but it can be done.
Peter: In the Banana Belt.
Kevin: Yeah, and so I thought that if I can grow peaches back there, I can certainly grow some tomatoes. So that’s one of the great gifts of having a little bit of dirt around it is being able to utilize it when you feel like you need to utilize it. That’s been a great gift to me.
Peter: Have you ever grown fava beans?
Kevin: No, I’ve actually grown bush beans and some climbing string beans, but no fava beans.
Peter: Don’t waste your time. Yeah. There’s not much there. You have to mix them with all kinds of other stuff.
Kevin: Well, that’s the other thing that you learn too. You plant a lot of stuff and some of it works really well and some of it just doesn’t work at all. And you figure out that, yeah, so next year my list of seeds is quite truncated. I’m gonna do it again, but my list of seeds is quite truncated. I will plant more of some things and not repeat planting some other things.
Peter: So let’s talk about your sort of journey of contentment. When I knew you back in ninety seven ish, June, I think, and around that time, you, you always struck me as being a man of, contentment, and, you you always seem to be at peace. And, I I maybe I don’t know if that was true or not, but that was, you know, the way that I felt that you, carried yourself at the time. And so, what I’d like to know is what is your secret? Where are you really as at peace as I thought you were way back when?
Kevin: I think it’s true, and I’m gratified that you noticed that. I’ve been meditating for quite some time, Probably had just begun doing that when we first met, probably mid-90s was when I started doing that.
Peter: Was there something that prompted that? I mean, could you, was there a point in your life where you were really discontent and you said, I’ve gotta do something to find myself?
Kevin: Yeah, I think that probably it wasn’t so much that I was discontent is that I just saw what I thought to be people around me that were content. And I wondered how they got there. And that seemed to be a common thread is that meditation was a common thread that you got there through self effort. And that was the more basic tool and toolbox was meditation.
Peter: I don’t recall that meditation was really that popular, I guess is the right word. Back then, I mean, now it seems like mindfulness is sort of Oh,
Kevin: there’s an app for that.
Peter: There’s a magazine, there’s Yeah, several apps for
Kevin: Exactly. Yeah. It’s definitely it’s definitely blown up.
Peter: There’s Calm. Mhmm. There’s several, yeah, sort of apps Yeah. For that. What was if I could ask, what was the, was there any particular inspiration or was there a certain book you read or some person that you follow that
Kevin: Yeah, has some another sort great question. I the first influence, if you will, was Doctor. Wayne Dyer. Loved his work, followed him quite a lot, read him, and also actually at one point in time met him. He produced a meditative CD of the Tao Te Ching and just an 80 verse, just sutras for each of the verses of the Tao.
And that was one of the first sort of methods I used to get into a meditative state, listening to that CD repeatedly. Used to do that early on, used to do that daily. And then shortly after meeting Doctor. Dyer, I also ran into a fellow named Eckhart Tolle. Read his books, and I think the thing that made the biggest difference in my forward progress along this sort of path, if you will, was while I did other things, I remember mowing the lawn while listening to Eckhart Tolle read his book, A New Earth.
And so I ended up listening to that book multiple times all the way through, got to the point where I’d almost had it memorized actually. But that specific book made a real big dent for me.
Peter: What is that book about?
Kevin: Well, I think one of my favorite little sort of stories from the book, we’ll say as much as I need to say about it. Is Eckhart is meeting with a person who is completely unhappy with herself, with life. And he gets to the point in the conversation where he asks her, how would it be for you if you weren’t so unhappy about being unhappy. And boy, I’ll tell you that just, that landed for me like nothing else has ever landed. Out of that entire book, it’s the thing that I remember most of all, actually.
That idea that it is one thing to experience something, it is another thing to amplify the experience in a negative way by how you think about it, how you react to it.
Peter: That’s
Kevin: powerful. Now, Rose Kennedy said this a long time ago. Someone asked her, you know, how did she, while she was still alive, someone asked Rose Kennedy, you know, how have you survived, right? After losing of her sons, two of her sons to assassination for crying out loud, and other things too as well. But they asked her how she got through it.
And she said, it’s not what happens. It’s how you deal with it.
Peter: Yep.
Kevin: You know? And I think that’s the gist of what I got from Akrotoli too, that it’s our mind that’s weak part there. And it’s getting in the way just as much as it’s helping. It helps to keep it in check.
Peter: Bravo, well said. Good. So I think before we met, you were in the radio world, right?
Kevin: Yeah. Sort of a It was a back and forth thing for me. When I first graduated from college, my degree was in Mass Communication. Actually, I got a double major in Mass Communication and English. English, the language, not literature so much, but the language.
So anyway, my first gig right out of college was at a tiny radio station in Oakhurst, California, K A A T, the mountain cat. And I was the midday personality from ten in the morning to two in the afternoon. Boy, had probably a good, solid, I’ll say ten years of radio between that job and working for a couple of radio stations down in Fresno, California. Had a good solid first iteration of a career in radio broadcasting. Parlayed that into a job with a record company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of all places.
So moved from Fresno, California to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for this gig with a record company, which turned out to be quite a good one. I was there for five years, ended up getting a gold record with my name on it for the work that I did for one of the artists on the label, and we were very successful. I was director of national radio promotion, using my knowledge of radio to be the guy who’s calling the radio stations about this music at the time that was referred to as new age and getting like pop stations to play it. It worked. Oh.
It worked. And then when I decided I was gonna stop doing that before I took another job with a record company, which led me back up to Seattle, which actually led me to Seattle, not back to Seattle. I grew up in Northern California, but I ended up in Seattle for another record company job. But in between then, for a little while, I worked for AMFM combination radio station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, called WMILWOKY, Milwaukee. And that was a lot of fun.
That was short lived, but again, radio became my fallback position at that point in time. So then I moved to Seattle, took the job with Miramar, which was a record and video company at the time, and did that for a number of years. When that came to an end, I also went back into radio. And yeah, I worked at Young Country in Seattle.
Peter: And then you’ve since moved on, you were our spider guru at Dealarnet, our SEO, king of SEO.
Kevin: Yep.
Peter: Way ahead of your time.
Kevin: Well, you love that I own my own URL. You also maybe remember that my vanity plate for the longest time was web surfer. Was I’m fine with that go.
Peter: Mine was the net. I’ll never forget the phone that you had from the guys at Hotmail that were trying to sell us advertising. Yep. And they were, this was literally the guy who started Hotmail. Yep.
And they were talking selling advertising on Hotmail. And then, they were talking about, f the VCs.
Kevin: Yep.
Peter: Yep. This was a web company that we worked together in. And then and then, turn around, and I know that was probably a year later, they got sold to Microsoft for $400,000,000. Yeah. And I think at one point, we had an opportunity to invest too, didn’t we?
Or they were offering shares or something?
Kevin: Yep. Yep. I think that’s true. I think I remember that.
Peter: Dude, we missed out.
Kevin: I know. Right?
Peter: Okay. Let me just okay. We’ll forget about that. And then since then, you’re we kind of folded up shop. And so you’ve obviously been doing all kinds of other things.
Where where where have you been spending your time since then?
Kevin: Yeah. Also a good question. I think the thing that happened that sort of sent me off into other areas was that after I left Rentals and Rentals, right?
Peter: Yep.
Kevin: After I left there, I opened my own, put up a shingle, just started doing SEO work for other people. Including actually, including you for a while, think, as I remember, right? I took it out, took in house, took it home. And so I was doing that for a while, you’ll probably get this. I know this has happened for a lot of people now with pandemic happening and everyone working from home, like working from home has become the thing.
But boy, I was working from home then and I really got to the point where I just couldn’t stand it. I was just like, God, just, I gotta be around people. I just, I have to be around people. I just, I hate this, right? I hate being in the office by myself.
Peter: Yes.
Kevin: And I love doing the work. I really love doing the work, but yeah, I just
Peter: It’s lonely.
Kevin: Yeah, I had to get out the house. And so the first thing I did was I was an REI member, loved shopping at REI. Had been an REI member since, I mean, I’ve got a mid three hundred’s co op number. I was just really getting tired of working by myself at home. And so I thought I would continue doing the work, but I wanted to add something to it.
And so I, like I say, chopping at REI. They made great stuff and really respected the business model and the business itself. Yeah. The co op in its essence. And so I saw just happenstance that they were offering a job fair.
And in the new Seattle, the brand new at that point in time, the brand new
Peter: Seattle Flagship.
Kevin: Flagship store, right? Yeah. Right there on Yale. And so I went and they hired me on the spot. I must have impressed them somehow or another because I’d never worked in retail before in my entire life.
They hired You’ve me the
Peter: the REI look.
Kevin: Well, they hired me on the spot and I worked there for a number of years actually. I really enjoyed working there. I really did and just was successful with it. They, at one point in time, wanted to make me a supervisor and I was gonna go for that. And then they were gonna open a store in Bend, Oregon, And I applied for that.
Then they said, Well, where are we gonna hire Oregon people for the Bend store? So we’ll maybe send you to Pennsylvania. And I said, Yeah, no, you’re not. I said, Yeah, thanks, but no, thanks. I’m going to move on.
So at that point in time, I also was kind of getting tired of the commute, I have to say. I’ve developed, as I’ve gone along, my fuse has gotten shorter and shorter. So that fuse got pretty short and realized that the commuting was also bothering me. So I was ready to leave REI. So I walked into a store here on Bainbridge Island called Bay Hay and Feed.
And Howard is the owner and walked in and asked to talk to Howard. And Howard and I talked for about ten minutes and he hired me on the spot. So I was just basically gonna do the same thing at Howard’s store that I did at REI, clothing. They started curing clothing and footwear and that’s my bailiwick. So I was able to just make that transition very easily.
Started working at Bay Hay and Feed and was working there for a couple of years. Nice. Really enjoyed that. And then I started, this would have been when made my first foray into working professionally in the wine business. A winery here on the island called Eleven Winery was just opening their first tasting room on Winslow Way.
And I just happened to be a member of his wine club. I joined some years before. So I was drinking the wine and getting to know about the winery and the wine the winemaker. And so I was coming home late from Seattle one night and I was driving down Winslow Way and I saw Matt, who’s the winemaker, he’s like inside the space on Winslow Way with all the Klieg lights on, painting it. I’m going, Oh dude, first of all, you shouldn’t be doing this, is what I was thinking in my This is not something you should be doing.
And so I reached out to him immediately. I said, Dude, you need some help? And I thought I was gonna help him just finish painting the space, right? What I thought I was gonna be talking to him about. So he said, Yeah, come talk to me tomorrow.
So I stopped by the space the next day and talked to him for about ten minutes. And he hired me to open the tasting room and manage it for him some. Was
Peter: You thought you were gonna paint.
Kevin: Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. So basically every job I’ve ever had has been really easy to get.
Peter: Ten minute conversation.
Kevin: Yeah, ten minute conversation.
Peter: Think of those jobs that you didn’t apply for that, you know, a ten minute conversation could have been, you know, I mean, not that there’s any out there that you would want, but I mean, you know, just some dream.
Kevin: Yep. Senator.
Peter: Okay. No. Thanks. I don’t
Kevin: but I don’t think you can I don’t think you can higher job? Conversation. With a ten minute conversation for that job. Right? That’s not a job you can get with a ten minute conversation.
Peter: No, no, these days it’s getting harder. Harder and harder.
Kevin: Well, yeah, so anyway, yeah, I worked at eleven Winery for a number of years, was the first and only employee there for a long time before we actually hired help. And then shortly after we hired our first employee, I quit and went elsewhere.
Peter: Okay, okay.
Kevin: I think Talina never forgave me for that over time. I think she finally did, but it took her a long time to forgive me for that. I am
Peter: Is that that fuse, that shorter fuse, is that the thing?
Kevin: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I had the opportunity to take a job at the Freestone Inn up in Mazama, and I did that in ’20 This would have been in 2013.
Peter: Don’t they run the heli skiing out of there?
Kevin: Yep, yep.
Peter: Because I’ve actually done that.
Kevin: Yeah, heli skiing lands right there in the meadow, right up from the swim pool. Yeah, North Cascades, skiing, yeah, yeah. They’re still doing that.
Peter: So you were there?
Kevin: So yeah, so I moved up to Mazama for, ended up just being a full year. That one, again, was really easy to get the job, but boy, the guy I was working for was a piece of work. I’ll just say that about that. And again, back to the ever shortening fuse conversation, they do a temporary closure in October just because it’s the rainy season, so it So hasn’t started they just do a temporary closure in October and then everyone comes back just in time for Thanksgiving sort of thing. But we all went away in October and I just didn’t come back.
Because again, the guy was just, yeah, impossible to work for. I have no patience for people that are hard to work for.
Peter: Agreed.
Kevin: Another job that went back into the wine industry, actually worked for Delisle for a while up in Woodinville, which very enjoyable. But again, that commute was And the only reason that worked was for a while, my wife was living part time in a condo in Seattle to make her commute easier when she was doing a lot of in person stuff in Seattle at the time and a lot of actually stuff on the East Side too. And we just getting to be too much of a schlep to get from Bainbridge to the East Side. So she got this really lovely condo in Downtown Seattle for a while. And so I was only commuting from there, but still it was just all the way to Woodinville.
Again, D’Lil, fabulous company, fabulous wine, wonderful people, but yeah, just couldn’t keep that going. Just couldn’t keep that going. Yeah. That’s played into a few of my shorter term things is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Peter: Well, it’s nice that you’ve had the flexibility to pursue that passion too.
Kevin: Well, absolutely, yeah. I’m really grateful that Janine’s career has blossomed so profusely here, and that I was able to make enough money in fits and starts to fund other fits and starts. So yeah, it’s been interesting for sure. If you look at my resume, I don’t really produce one much anymore because it doesn’t really help to put out a piece of paper, my resume has got a lot of experience on it.
Peter: Well, and I would say it’s got a lot of passions too. Mean, you seem like a very sort of a passion driven, feel like you’re a Renaissance man, you know?
Kevin: Well, I appreciate that. I think I do have a passion for wine for sure. I have a passion for being outdoors. That certainly played into the REI and the Bay Hay thing that I really loved helping other people get out there, getting the right footwear on. One of my best stories from REI actually was back in the day with leather boots, you could actually modify them.
You could actually put them on an anvil and you could actually rework the leather to fit around someone’s, for example, a bunion or an arthritic joint or something. And I remember after custom fitting some boots to a woman some years ago, probably a year later, she comes back into the department and runs up and hugs me. And basically was telling the story that she had been able to take the longest backpacking trip of her entire life because of the boots that I had fit to her. So yeah, that’s part of it for me is that not only do I have a passion about it, but I love to share that passion with others and allow them to experience it themselves. So that’s been part of the wine thing.
Certainly it’s been part of the outdoor thing. Comes down to this, posting poems on Instagram for crying out loud. I’m also posting them on LinkedIn and Twitter and YouTube and, you know, trying to get it out there. But poetry is definitely a passion.
Peter: Let’s talk love to share
Kevin: it love to have other people hear it.
Peter: You are, I noticed on Instagram, you’re starting to post a lot of poems. So let’s talk about So is a daily? It looked like it was a challenge of something or is it a personal challenge?
Kevin: Yeah. Was, it’s interesting. Again, part of this, part of the being at home with the pandemic, I was again working for the winery, believe it or not, early this year, had been working there for about a year again when the pandemic hit. And I was one of the people that, tens of millions nationwide have gotten rug pulled out from underneath them, I was furloughed. And so I was home.
That’s why I was able to do all the expansion of the vegetable garden, for example, because I had really nothing better to do. But the timing of the transition that I wanted to make couldn’t have been better. In other words, I had to stop doing what I was doing. I was forced to stop doing what I was doing. And my wife brought up the idea of, if you could get yourself out there more than you’re getting yourself out there, you could probably generate even more work for yourself in the voice acting realm of things.
And she’s the one that laid down the gauntlet. She’s one that laid down the challenge, the everyday challenge. And I think she probably thought I was only gonna maybe do it for a month. But I’ve been joking, this is now season one of the Everyday Challenge, and I’m just gonna keep doing it. I’m just gonna keep doing it.
Peter: So posting a poem
Kevin: Usually, yeah.
Peter: Yeah. Everyday. Yeah. And what is the topic or are Is there a theme or are
Kevin: There’s you planning not theme. The one thing I did, for example, last week I started Last week was the first sort of themed week in net. Last week was David White week. So every poem last week was David White. This week is Mary Oliver week.
So this week, every poem will be my Mary Oliver poem. I don’t know if I’m gonna continue doing that, but I think I’ve gotten a little bit more interest from people who were David White fans last week and from Mary Oliver fans this week who’ll continue to follow for the next couple of days at least. So there seems to be an advantage to doing it that way. But yeah, it’s just a way to get my voice out there. I think that it would be a little bit of a reach to start like reading a book, like a page at a time or something.
I poems lend themselves to being short little vignettes that I can get away with posting daily. So it’s how poetry sort of became the thing, the vehicle that I chose.
Peter: Bravo. So if we’re going to if somebody is listening and they wanna find you, of course, we’ll have links, but what is the best way to find Kevin Schmidt on Instagram and some of your other Hangouts?
Kevin: Well, Instagram, kevin at kevinyschmidt, e is the middle initial, kevinyschmidt, k e v I n E S C H M I D T. On Facebook, you can go to facebook.com/certifiedhappinessengineer. Nice. That’s me, that’s me. I got that Nom de Plume working for the winery for the first time around.
Peter: Oh, got it, okay.
Kevin: So yeah, I became a certified happiness engineer.
Peter: So that was after you got Web Surfer as the license Yeah,
Kevin: And go ahead, anyone that wants to can zing me an email, kevinkevanschmidt dot com.
Peter: It’d be great if you could take us out with a poem.
Kevin: This week is Mary Oliver week for me, from my little posts on Instagram and other platforms, And one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems is Swan. Did you too see it drifting all night on the Black River? Did you see it in the morning rising into the silvery air, an armful of white blossoms? A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned into the bondage of its wings. A snowbank, a bank of lilies biting the air with its black beak.
Do you hear it fluting and whistling? A shrill dark music like the rain pelting the trees, like a waterfall knifing down the black ledges? And do you see it finally just under the clouds, a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river? And did you feel it in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
Peter: Thank you. Wow.
Kevin: Thanks for having me, Peter. I really enjoyed 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.
