Making a life plan

Welcome back to You're On with Maureen Umeh. We've all heard the saying that success comes with sacrifice, but what about when you reach your pinnacle of success and yet somehow it feels empty? You feel like you really have not arrived. It seems like a really sort of imbalanced conundrum here, but it is happening. More and more entrepreneurs, more and more business leaders, they're reaching their pinnacle of success and yet feeling that something is missing. So joining me right now is business consultant and author Jonathan Slane to talk more about this phenomenon. And Jonathan, thanks for being with us today. Good morning, Maureen. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So you've worked with a lot of very successful business leaders. Are you really seeing people who've reached, again, the heights of success get everything they wanted and they're still not happy? If so, what is this all about? Well, the idea here is that, and I have a question to open up for you, Maureen. I guess it's for the whole audience. And really, it's do you have a life plan? Do you have, like, not just a plan for the next quarter, a plan for your next vacation, but what is the plan for your life so that you know that when you make it, it will be enough? Like, what does that look like? What does that really mean to you? So here's the thing. When I hear that, do you have a life plan, it seems daunting. I'm looking at my entire life and I'm supposed to have a plan. You know, life does things. It doesn't zig when you zag. So how do you have a life plan? Well, there's some easy entry points. For me, one of the first things that I did was actually to work on my bucket list. I found that exercise to be fun. And the way that we did it was I found a list online of, like, 2,000 bucket list ideas so that I didn't have to start with a blank sheet of paper. And then I was able to go through that list with my wife, with my two daughters, and pick off the ones that we wanted to do and also check off the ones that we'd already done. So I think that's a less daunting entry point. So making that bucket list. I agree, so make that bucket list and check it off one at a time. All right, so you've done that, and you have some modicum of joy here. How do you now move it to where I have a little bit more and I'm on this life plan that I should be on? Well, I don't have an easy answer for you, Maureen. I think that this is where, after you do the bucket list piece, now you have to invest some real time and energy. And for me, it was about eight years ago, I met one of my mentors, Paul Belair. He was actually a co-author of a book with me. And Paul and I talked about how we need to spend 16 hours doing life planning. So invest 16 hours, and really you can do it in four four-hour chunks. You can do eight two-hour chunks, however you want to do it. But it's really thinking about, where do you want your life to go? What are your goals? What do you want to be able to say that you've done with your life? So give me an example. What does that look like? Like for you, how did that look? Well, for me, it's evolved over the past seven years. And now what it looks like is 20 PowerPoint slides. And I know, I know, it's just how I happen to think is in PowerPoint slides. But really, we have goals for our family for the next year. And I think that's a great place to start. So for me, I've got a goal for my fitness, what I want to accomplish. I've got a goal for my finance, what do I want to accomplish this year? Fun, what do I want to do that's fun this year? And so again, looking at the Fs in our lives, your friends, your family, the fun, the fitness, your finance, what is it that you want to accomplish in each of those domains? And just setting a simple fun goal for each of them. Okay, and so as you just said, some of it changes. So it is okay for it to change. It doesn't have to be static. And once you do it, that's it for the rest of your life. Well, it's your life, Maureen. So I think you mentioned that at the start, like, you know, all lives, they change. I'm not saying that your life plan has to be rigid. I know some people out in the audience right now, they may have already tuned out because they don't want their life to be so driven by a plan. That's cool. I'm just saying that it's better to have a plan to start from so that each year, each week, each day, you can come back to whatever that plan is, and that plan can help you decide what you want to do with your life, what success looks like to you, and so that you have more control. I'm trying to give agency back to everyone so that instead of just spending time on our vacations and what we want to do with those, we can really think about where do we want to go with our career and are we on the right path? Jonathan, you have a book called Rock Your Business. It's your new book. Tell us about that. Yeah, so thanks for asking. We published a book seven years ago called Rock the Recession. We just recently, last month, published Rock Your Business, and it's meant to help people figure out how do you grow your business, and really we're looking at larger businesses, so businesses that are more like $50 million and they want to go to $100 million and beyond. So what does that look like? And a lot of it, the reason we're talking about Lifeline, Maureen, is because a lot of what we've learned about how to rock your business is to start with rocking your life. That really is what we've seen over and over. Wow, so I mean, I guess for someone listening, they're thinking, well, I don't have a $50 million business, you know, but I still would like to know what it is I need to do to get on the right path. A lot of what you're saying makes perfect sense, but why do you think it is that people have such a hard time wrapping their heads around simple, you know, simple tricks that can get them over that hurdle? For all of us, me included, there's a lot of friction to getting started. So I loved your opening question, like, what's one easy thing that I can do that the audience can do to get started? And that's where this idea of, like, if it's daunting, if you're like, oh, forget it, I'm not doing a 20-slide PowerPoint, start with the bucket list idea, or just start with the rest of this year. What is it that you want to have happen in your life for the rest of the year? And also, I didn't mean to be daunting with, you have to have a $50 million business for this to apply. That just happens to be the types of companies that Audubon works with. This same advice, this same advice applies to anyone starting a business. I had a chance to watch your last interview, and it's like anyone who's starting a business, who's being entrepreneurial, I just want them to have a plan for where they want to go. That's what we're really talking about. So, Jonathan, I wonder, what was it that made you sort of get on this thinking wavelength? Was there a pivotal moment for you? Have you always been this sort of driven and focused? So, yeah, I think if you asked my daughters, they're 15 and 13 years old, Caroline and Anne Penny, if you asked them, I think they would tell you that I've always been this driven. I think for me, though, I know it's hard to tell from this angle, Maureen, I used to own gyms, fitness centers, so in Cleveland-owned fitness centers, and discovered after a decade that what I really love doing, what I really love doing is growing businesses, and it wasn't helping people to get in shape. While I think that's a beautiful goal, it just wasn't what got me out of bed in the morning. And so I met a mentor, who I mentioned earlier, and he had me work on my first life plan. And as I said, spending 16 hours, and for me, I did it in four four-hour chunks. I would go to Starbucks on the weekends, and I would set up my laptop, I was that guy, and would just think about, what do I want my life to look like, and where do I want it to go? And I'm hearing from you, if you're into fitness, there's a level of dedication that everybody takes, so your mind was probably already tuned into figuring things out, and being dedicated in a certain way. For those who, okay, I've reached this milestone, are there mistakes you find that people make once they do reach a milestone that maybe derails them, or once you get on this track, is it easy to stay on? Well, I think that, I want to talk about hustle culture for a minute. Right now, I think is a moment in our history where working all the time is highly lauded by society. Everybody strives to look busy, wants to post on Instagram all of their busiest peak moments, and then the rest of us are just living our regular daily life, but we're watching on social media as everybody talks about their peak moments, how busy they are. And for entrepreneurs, it's not a four-hour work week. That was a famous book, the four-hour work week. It's really, we're all doing a 400-hour work week. The problem is that there aren't 400 hours in a week. And so, again, pivoting back to my thesis, I want people to just have a life plan so that if they are going to work all of the time, they understand what it's for, or they're doing it according to their plan. And I think that's beautiful, that's fine. If what you love doing is what you're currently doing and you're passionate about, keep doing it. No, no, please go ahead, finish the thought. I was just going to say that if it's not, then sometimes we get a sunk cost bias. So you've invested so much time and energy in something, you've dug yourself in so deep that it's really hard to get out of it. And so that's something that we all have to fight and overcome. I was going to ask you about balancing without guilt. How do you do that? Oh, no, I don't have the answer for you on that, Maureen. There is no work-life balance. If you ask me, I think we have to think about it differently. I hate that term. I think we should replace it with something more like a work-life integration. Like for entrepreneurs, for my audience, for business leaders that are at 50 million, or if they're at 5,000 or 50,000, it doesn't matter. Our work is in large part intertwined with our lives. And so I've been a lot more comfortable and recommend to the business leaders we work with, just accept that. Figure out how to make that work for you instead of trying to turn it off at the end of the day. In our last minute here, I want to have you leave our audience with a parting thought, if you will, when it comes to, excuse me, I'm choked up about it. Look how impactful you've been. When it comes to just making a life plan, leave our audience with one last thought that you want them to know. The key is to just break the seal and get started. And so for me, I sat down at Starbucks on the weekend morning, and I just committed to spending four hours there with a legal pad. It wasn't digital. I brought my laptop for reference in case I wanted to look something up. But just sit down with a legal pad and a pen and just think about where you want your life to go, what you want that to be, and then work backwards. And you could really just think about where you want it to be by the end of this year, but there's something beautiful, there's something powerful about committing in writing to doing something, and then taking action from there so that you can live a life that you've designed as opposed to just a life of surprise and circumstance. Jonathan, is there a place you could send people to find you, get more information? Yeah, so autobahnconsultants.com is our official website, and then if you're interested in this idea of life planning, rockyourlifeplan.com is also a website where we've got very specific information. You can check out a copy of our life plan, and you can see, if you think in PowerPoint slides like we do, just how to get started. Jonathan Slane, he is a business consultant and author. Thank you so much for being on the show today. We appreciate it. Thanks, Maureen. All right, and this has been another edition of Be Wrong with Maureen Umeh. We're coming back with more Weekend Live right after this short break.