August 20, 2025 • 65 mins
Townsend Wardlaw shares his story of rising to entrepreneurial success, facing personal crisis, and then losing everything. His net worth. His marriage. His health.
This episode is about the interplay between creation and destruction that shows up in high performers. The way early programming shapes beliefs, behaviours, and the silent rules we live by. The invisible operating systems that run in the background, built in childhood, optimized for survival.
We talk about the rise, the breakdown, and the aftermath. The hard truth that success doesn’t always mean safety. And the deep, sometimes painful process of excavating some of these personal rules or beliefs to create a more flexible and fulfilling life.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
In the following conversation, Isit down with Townsend Wardlaw.
Townsend shares his story of rising to entrepreneurial
success, facing personal crisis,and then losing everything his
net worth, his marriage, and hishealth.
We discuss this interplay between creation and destruction
that is often prevalent in high performers and the impact of
(00:24):
early programming on beliefs andbehaviors.
Sort of the common operating systems that successful people
operate under in their day-to-day and the process of
excavating some of these personal rules or beliefs to
create a more flexible and fulfilling life before we get
there. This episode is brought to you
by Dream Fuel. Dream Fuel is a mental
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wake up call listeners. Now on to my episode with
Townsend. Welcome back to Wake Up.
(02:15):
Call everybody excited to be here.
I'm coming to you live from Lombok, Indonesia.
It's a beautiful day where I'm at and I am joined by my friend
Townsend. Townsend Welcome to the show,
man. Thanks brother, thanks for
having me. Excited to have you.
(02:35):
I'm excited for this conversation.
It's funny, I as it been going on this little journey of mine
and, and sharing bits and pieceswhen I feel called to on, on
LinkedIn, How we actually got connected was honestly, I think
it was about 5 or 6 people that I know, trust and respect
(02:59):
greatly kept tagging you and a bunch of like posts and, and
things that I, I was writing about.
And I think it was #4 I think itwas Rory Blanton.
Shout out. Rory, Rory.
Such a good. Good human being.
I was finally like, I got to shoot this guy a message.
Who is this guy? I got to know his story.
(03:21):
Took it 4. It's slow on the uptake.
Right, a little bit slow, but I,I was moving intentionally
slower at, at that point and that at that stage.
But then we jumped on a phone call and you have just such an
incredible story. And I think it's, it's perfect
for kind of what I'm hoping to, to achieve with with these
(03:45):
conversations I'm having. And maybe a good place to start
is just the big one, man. Like what is your, your story?
How did you you get here today? Divine grace, I think is the
answer. But it's funny, I, I'm, I'm
(04:05):
working on a, on a book right now.
And actually it's at the editorsand it's, it's a book on being.
It's called the how of being andit is a, a manual, a user guide
for how one can begin to access,see experience and work at the
(04:28):
level of their being, which I also sometimes use
interchangeably with the word consciousness.
It's not a book about reaching enlightenment.
It's not, you know, that's not my game, but it is a it is a, it
is a book about learning to create, not from the doing, but
from what produces our thinking,our our being or our
(04:49):
consciousness. And I've got, I don't know, 10s
of thousands of words. I think it's, it's an 80,000
word manuscript will trim it down.
So I've got this, this comprehensive work on being and,
and, and the, the book alchemistthat I work with made it very
clear about a year ago. She goes, yeah, that that's a
wonderful book. And, and nobody's going to care
(05:12):
because being in as a, as an abstraction is not interesting.
It's not useful, but it will be useful for some.
And, and those will be those whosee themselves in you and your
story. So you got to, you got to get
that out there. You got to do some excavating
and, and I really hate that part.
I hate thinking about my story. I hate telling my story.
(05:34):
It's like I'm just here who cares?
But turns out it's, it's ultimately relevant because
anybody can produce information,right?
And, and, and certainly with ChatGPT, you can have access to
all the world's information. What people are hungry for is
transformation, right? And that is, in my mind, the,
(05:55):
the, the, the consumption of information, but really the the
adoption and taking action on information in the face of
something that's really, well, in most cases, fucking scary,
terrifying, counterintuitive. And and the only way you're
going to do that is, is if that,which is conveying the
(06:18):
information, the thing sitting across from you goes, yeah, I
know it's scary. Let let me tell you what it
looked like for me, right? That, that, that empathic layer,
that, that it's not theoretical.So I've spent a lot of time,
this is a long, long ramp of a long, long time thinking about
(06:38):
what is my story? How did I get here?
And I can answer that from a lotof perspectives.
I'll give sort of the, the, the just the facts version because
that'll be interesting. And then we can go play some
other layers because there's, there's the, what happened in
the timeline, in the chronology.And then what was the fuel for
the journey? And, and, and where did that
(06:59):
fuel stop working the way it used to?
And, and, and how did I find a new source of fuels when I think
about it? So grew up in the East Coast,
single mom. I have one younger sister.
And we'll Fast forward all the way to I was living in Boulder,
(07:21):
Co and I was 27 years old. I, I, I went to college but
decided I really didn't want to go and run off with all, all my
college mates to Boston, NY and work in investment banking or
finance or accounting. I'm like, I'm not going to do
it. So I went and had a bunch of
fun. I wanted to be a professional
bike racer. I traveled the world.
I would work in bike shops, rolling burritos, make some
(07:42):
money and then take off for three or four months.
And it's incredible life and literally never had the thought
of this is going to be a problem.
I'm like, it'll be fine. I, I, you know, I don't need a
career. And then one day I was 27, I
woke up and I thought, yeah, I probably should do something.
Like there was one day the next.And it wasn't like I'm behind.
It was just let me get a job andlike, you know, do something and
(08:04):
make money and procreate or I don't know what I'm supposed to
do. But there was like, it was time
And I, I got a, a sales job. My first job was selling long
distance for a reseller in, in Minnesota.
I was in Denver, this was quite a few years back.
And just like the idea that thatlong distance phone calls cost
(08:25):
money, you know, dates me prettywell.
So my first sales job was selling for businesses the
ability to call people on the phone or receive phone calls and
that costs money. Not anymore.
And I had an incredibly meteoricrise in the in the corporate
world. I went from this long distance
reseller in the span of about six years, found myself as a, as
(08:47):
a vice president of a Fortune 500 company, leading a sales
team, making incredible money. I had the house, I had the least
cars that were new, the two or three or four vacations a year,
2 little kids. And, and you know, I was, I was
living the dream and, and I, I despised it.
I despised waking up on Sunday thinking about going in to do
(09:09):
this job that other people coveted.
And my solution was I'm going toquit and start my own company.
So this was somewhere around 2002 start my own company didn't
even know what I was doing. I was going to do some sales
consulting or training or something. wellthe.com bubble
had just burst. I quit my job.
All these clients lined up and every one of the clients said,
(09:31):
hey, sorry, our budgets are cut,we can't work with you.
And I had a choice go back to the corporate world or figure it
out. And I wasn't going back to the
corporate world. So I, I figured it out and over
this next seven years, I pivotedand invented and, and, and ended
up kind of pioneering an industry when you know about
sales organizations and softwareorganizations, there's this
whole world of SDRS and BDRS andsegmented sales process.
(09:54):
Well, back in 2003, I had the idea to do outsource sales and
actually we, we started one of the first organizations doing
outbound cold calling to set appointments.
Now what we call SDRS, BDRS is really common.
From 2002 to 2009, I built that company up, moved the company to
(10:14):
Denver, had 80 people working for me, was getting close to 3
million in revenue. And as we approach the end of
2008, I, I remember the day thatI was driving from Boulder to
Denver to go to the office and, and saw that this company wasn't
going to make it. I've been flapping my arms.
(10:35):
I've been doing everything. I've been generating all the
revenue, like everything we were, we were getting low on
home equity because we didn't change our lifestyle when we
when, when, when I went independent, we're running
through all the four O 1K and, and, and that kind of stuff.
And, and more importantly, my health was just completely shot
(10:57):
degraded in probably December of2009.
I remember being in a hospital gown with my ass hanging out
drinking some barium nitrate fora fluoroscopy so they could see
what was going on because I was certain I must be having, you
know, heart problems or, or, or cancer.
It's with the pain was so bad. And I remember when I went to
the doctor for the, the results,he said, yeah, you're fine.
(11:20):
It's just stress. And I remember saying I'm not
stressed. He said, your body, your body
disagrees with you. And I, I, I saw the end of the
company coming. I was able to bring that company
to a well, relatively soft landing got people jobs,
transitioned our clients and there I was in early 2009 with,
(11:45):
I don't know, couple couple $1,000,000 in personal
guarantees health that was shot a marriage that was a shell and
you know every other bit of the life just just like what the
hell is this right? One, one day you're playing a
dream of I'm going to get boughtand exit and, you know, options.
(12:06):
And the next day it's like literally everything is just on
fire or burning or already burnt.
And over the next few months, bankruptcy got started.
That process was initiated personal bankruptcy.
Everything you know, I had was gone.
The marriage went away and and that wasn't pretty.
(12:27):
And I started to try to figure out like what the hell even
happened. And apparently I wasn't done yet
because there was still another couple years after that.
I've just still railing against the world, fighting light and
shit on fire so I could get a hose and put it out, going to
(12:50):
court with my ex, custody battle, you name it.
Not to mention, let's just say more than my fair share of
entertainment, substances, beverages, clubs, right?
The whole deal. Like I like, I'm going to, I'm
going to numb the shit out of all of this and maybe that'll be
it. And I would say things didn't
(13:14):
start to even really change until probably 2012 or 13.
So it was just a couple years ofhell, but it didn't feel like
hell, right? My life is in shambles.
And I was still going. Yeah, no, it's fine.
I got this. No problem.
And you know, hey, let's go party.
And all I can say is that, you know, beginning around 2013,
(13:38):
fourteen, 1213, the universe putsome people in my path.
I met my my first coach, a gentleman by the name of Mike
Valentine through an extraordinary set of
circumstances like when I go back in the number of
coincidences and the things thathad to happen in exactly the
order that happened. So that I was having coffee with
(14:00):
them in November of 2013, a coffee.
I was going to thinking I was going to help him like work on
his business or do some better market.
I don't know anyone. I was thinking, but I wasn't
there for a coach. And I remember sitting down with
him and he was speaking and, andliterally 15 minutes of the
conversation, I said, I want youto coach me.
(14:20):
Now. I, I didn't know what a coach
was. I'd never had a coach, but
literally I want you to coach me.
And that was really the beginning of just incredible
journey and, and, and I don't want to say clawing my way back,
but sometimes it felt like that.And since then it, it, it truly
has been a miracle after miracleafter miracle of what the
(14:43):
universe has put in front of me,the guides, the teachers, the
information, the knowledge, whathave you building, building my
business as a consultant backup in 2018, deciding that and I had
a very successful solo consulting business helping
founders grow and exit and basically get through the the
death zone that killed me. And then in 2018, I had the idea
(15:10):
because I, I'd, I'd started working with the gentleman by
the name of Rich Litvin, who is a very well known and, and, and
very high end coach. I call my first big boy coach,
first person I wrote $120,000 check to, to work with.
And he asked me a question on our first session.
And I, I, I believe to this day that that question was worth
(15:30):
like, if I'd, if I'd stopped coaching with him after that
question, it would have been worth 120,000.
And the question was, which of your clients inspire you?
And it was a question about my clients, but it was really a
metaphor for my life. Like, what about life inspires
you? Is what I heard.
And I said nothing. I inspire them like I'm doing
all the inspiring. My life is about inspiring.
(15:53):
And he paused for a bit and he said in his really little cheeky
English accent, he said, isn't that a shame?
And I was like, this lightning bolt hit me and I'm like, shit,
even this, this business that I've built where I'm making lots
of money serving people and helping them get what they want,
even that is kind of a racket. I'm running right where I'm like
(16:13):
always the most important guy inthe room, the smartest guy in
the room, right? The coolest guy in the room.
And, and, and in that moment I said, I'm, I'm done with this
consulting shit. I want to coach, I want to, I
want to do this shit with people.
And I can, I can go into all sorts of amazing stuff that's
happened since then, but that's been an incredible ride.
I'll pause there. Well, First off, thank you for
(16:37):
for sharing that story, man. And resonate unfortunately too
deeply with, with various parts of your, your journey as as many
listening might. But you know what a what a
journey you've been on. And you know, the thing that
really stuck home for me and like just hit me to the core was
(17:01):
you said it so well when you're in this kind of, you called it
the death zone and you said I was lighting shit on fire so
that I could get a hose and put it out.
That one hits, hits too, too close for for liking.
(17:23):
And I see that as a really, it'sreally common.
This, this, Yeah. And I would love to talk about
it a little bit because it's something I have certainly
wrestled with, probably still wrestle with.
Is this like creative and creation force that a lot of
entrepreneurs have like the ability to make something out of
(17:47):
nothing, you know, and that's a a foreign concept to a lot of
people. But there's there's some people
that are are have the audacity and the maybe stupidity to just
be like, I'm just going to go and create this thing and you
don't always know what you're doing.
And it's so incredibly powerful.But what I've learned is that
(18:08):
like on the other side of that creation, there's like an
equally and just as powerful force of destruction.
And I'll just speak through my own story.
Like there were there was times when something incredible would
happen in my life, some like bigmilestone, you know, we hit a
(18:31):
fundraise target, we close an incredible deal, like whatever
it was. And that elation on the other
side of that would be I would want to like kind of destroy
something like just as big, you know, and whether that was
substance abuse or gambling or like whatever it was.
(18:52):
And I'm really curious about your thoughts on sort of the
interplay between those two things.
Yeah, Well, we play. Humans play for results.
Universally, everybody's playingfor results.
People say, oh, it's not the destination of the journey.
Yeah. And we care about results, the
(19:14):
money, the wife, the car, the travel, whatever.
And some people's results are modest and some are grand.
That's not the point. The point is, the human
experience is about getting someplace, doing something,
achieving something. Fine, universally results are
produced from action, right? Sometimes we'll be Socratic
about this with folks say what produces results and the same
(19:36):
motivation. I'll say, listen, I know people
with a lot of money, they don't have motivation and they're
stupid. So don't tell me it's smarts.
Action produces results, like just functionally.
So once we get clear on that, I say, well, well, what produces
an action? And sometimes it takes a little,
little bit, but ultimately what people realize is there's no
action I've ever taken or not taken without a thought.
(19:59):
I speak a word. I had the thought, say that
word, punch a guy in the face. I have the thought, punch him in
the face, right? I say something nice instead of
something mean. I had the thought, don't say
this. Say that thoughts produce
action. Well, I take a certain amount of
actions during the day. This thing produces way more
thoughts than I take action. And in fact, I have thoughts
(20:22):
about my thoughts. Sometimes I have a thought and I
have a lot of thoughts about I shouldn't even have that
thought. And then I try to make it a
better thought or good thought of the right thought of the
pause. I do all this thinking and I
take some actions, but simply the ratio of actions I take the
thoughts, the the research says there's between 30,000 and
50,000 discrete thoughts that wehave in a day.
(20:42):
I don't take 30,000 to 50,000 actions.
So lots of thoughts, some actions.
So there's the processing between my thinking and my
doing. And that's interesting.
And that's that's the realm of what we call mindset work.
So when people talk about mindset work, to me it's the
working with your thinking, qualitative nature of it and the
degree to which you act on some thoughts, don't etcetera,
(21:03):
etcetera. The question people don't ask
enough is why do I think the thoughts that I think, right?
You and I could walk into a situation of circumstance and
environment. We will have the exact same
objective reality that we are infront of.
We will produce different thinking about it.
(21:23):
Now I call and refer to what produces our thinking, our
being. Alternately, I'll say that's our
consciousness, right? Our access to consciousness.
Another way I think about it is simply our operating system
layer, right? It is that which determines how
the apps even going to run. I cannot think a thought that is
(21:48):
not in alignment with my operating system or my being or
my consciousness. And every human on the planet
has a different footprint or fingerprint, if you will, of, of
this being or this operating system.
Now, we'll keep it really simple.
And to me, this isn't woo woo. This is, we can get woo woo with
it, but but it's also really practical.
(22:10):
My operating system is how the world occurs for me.
I think about operating system in a phone.
It's it's power management, it'sfunctional, it's really basic
stuff. Well, we have an operating
system that is installed very early on by our teachers, our
preachers, our mothers, our fathers who teach us how the
(22:30):
world is, teach us how things are right.
They teach us this is right, this is wrong, this is good,
this is bad. Well, they start by teaching us
even who we are. They teach us you're Scott
right? Even your name is programmed
into you, right? Try changing your name or not
(22:51):
answering to your name for a week.
It's difficult because it it, it's so ingrained there.
It's like I can't just undo that.
Well, starts with your name and then and then we get you're a
good girl, you're a bad boy, you're a smart boy, you're fast,
you're cool, you're you're destined for greatness.
You're going to have to work harder than we get very early
(23:13):
on, programmed from an opinion, not the result of our efforts,
but that which ultimately produces our efforts, right?
So the source code, the parents,the preachers, the teachers
(23:33):
install this code that literallyas if it's your name, creates
for you how you are, how the world is, and how you will
relate to it. And sometimes they do it
overtly, sometimes they do it covertly, innocently, right?
Sometimes it's awful, sometimes it's not.
Now, I'll give you a very personal story that I think
illustrate this. When I was 8 years old, give or
(23:56):
take, my mother had what I referred to as a nervous
breakdown. Now, I was 8, not a doctor.
I don't know what 1 is. I call it that.
But all I remember is, you know,life was tough.
It was always stressful in our house.
Money was scary, right? Even that money is scary.
That's a operating system, little belief for people.
(24:17):
My mom was in the kitchen, you know, in the corner, sobbing,
freaking out. I don't know what was going on.
Bills weren't paid or my sister was, you know, causing trouble.
I, I don't know, it was a very chaotic time And, and usually
when my mom was upset, I would comfort her.
I'd bring her, her, her cigarettes and her gin and that
usually would do the trick. But today that didn't do it
(24:39):
right. She didn't want it, you know,
she didn't want to live whatevershe was saying.
OK, cool. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm going to
grab that phone over there with a 30 foot extension, you know,
handset cord. I'm going to call the neighbor's
mom. And she begged me not to call
the neighbors. She begged me not to call them.
She said you can't call them, They'll take me away.
Now I'm 8 years old. I don't want to take me away.
(25:00):
I don't know who they are. Doesn't sound good.
So we put the phone back and we,you know, we sorted out.
And at some point, mom gets off the floor.
I don't remember when or how long.
It doesn't matter. And life goes back to normal.
So that was that, right? No big deal.
Well, little Townsend learned something that day, not just
(25:20):
like a little lesson, but like it was programmed into them.
And that was nobody's coming. It's up to you, right?
Like, it's up to me. There's no phone.
No, it's up to me. What I learned was like, not
here, but like, it's up to me now.
Maybe that's scary. It's also powerful, right?
(25:41):
Like, wow, I, I did this right again, I'm 8.
So this is all really deep subconscious stuff.
I'm not, I'm not thinking about this at a time.
Now, some people go, well, that's childhood trauma.
I say, yeah, check out what I did with that.
My entire life, right? Middle school, high school,
(26:01):
there was never a situation or acircumstance where I was like,
hmm, I wonder if I can do that or I wonder if I'll be able to
get over there, if I should, youknow, take a trip cross country.
There was never the thought after high school.
I'm going to college away from home.
Why? Well, that's what I want to do.
Aren't you nervous? No.
Why not? Well, it's up to me.
(26:22):
I know that. I don't even have the thought.
It's just it's it's a knowing. It's a way of being.
It's in the code. That won't be a problem because
it's all on me anyway. Nobody's coming after college,
driving across country, going togo race bikes in California.
Aren't you scared? No.
No hesitation. I got this right.
My whole life I've been infused with this outsized
(26:45):
self-confidence, knowing it's going to work out.
There's never been a moment in my life and I'm like, I don't
know if I have what it takes now.
People like, I wish I had that. Well, let's be careful because
there's a flip side. I have the thought I'm too much
all the time. We'll talk about that later.
But fundamentally, if you look at my life and you kind of track
the story arc, I can, I can tellyou moment after moment after
(27:09):
moment where the operating system, it's up to me, nobody's
coming. You got this.
Produce the thinking about the circumstance, produce the action
and worked. What kind of person goes from
selling long distance to a Fortune 500 VP in six years and
(27:30):
doesn't give a shit about, you know, job hopping, what anybody
thinks? It's up to me, I'll figure this
out. What kind of person quits a
quarter $1,000,000 your job witha house payment, cars and a fan?
I got this right. Every step of the way was this.
And every time it worked, it reinforced itself.
It was more and more true. It was more and more, yes, this
(27:53):
is right. So company grows, I build it.
It's up to me, it's up to me, it's up to me.
At some point, I got 80 people working for me.
I have a leadership team of seven and I still walk in any
every day with the idea, the knowing the code.
It's up to me. So you know what?
(28:15):
Nobody was any good. Nobody could be trusted.
Nobody knew what the hell they were doing.
They're all fucking incompetent.Why am I paying these people
right? Fact I wouldn't go so far to say
is it's up to me. Probably hired incompetent
people just to prove itself right.
And the more you stack on right,the more of that toxic
(28:37):
byproduct, right? Because everything I create from
it's up to me produces, but it also takes it takes energy.
It, it, it, it, it hollows you out.
Oh, let's not forget it's up to me.
Came home to his wife and littlechildren.
And whenever something was out of sorts, well, I'll take care
of that. I'll do that.
Yep, you can't get along. I'll do that.
Right? It's all on me.
(28:57):
Which, hmm, wonder if that's going to create some stress,
frustration, resentment, right. I was married for 11 years.
The woman I married was beautiful and powerful and
brilliant and I wanted to have children with her.
And I did. 12 years later, who is this awful human who I
deserve better? She can't like what I had
(29:19):
created from the from the bitterness and the resentment
which was created only from my constantly doing.
It's up to me. It's up to me.
Nobody was there, but the poor woman had to be married to that.
So at some point in time, it allfalls down, it all comes
crashing down. You cannot sustain.
And and what I found is that every, you know, I work with
(29:41):
these people now I work with these founders and high power
people who who have created everything in the life from some
fuel that creates powerfully. But the more they create takes
more and more away from them such that either it simply
becomes a game of how much more pain can I endure to get what I
want right? And by the way, it's a trap
because I can't say, well, let me slow down because no, then
(30:04):
I'll fall, I'll fall backwards. It'll all get come crashing
down. Or I get to a plateau and I go,
I don't want to go any higher because that'll just hurt too
much. And then I'm feeling like,
what's the point of the rest of my life?
It's why, it's why guys end up doing something terrible to
themself all the time that you wonder why somebody who's got
everything that everybody else dreams about says goodbye to the
(30:28):
life. Well, I know why.
I know why. Yeah, again, that is a quality
that we we share and this what Ifound too.
And you can tell me if this is true for you as well as like
when you live in that, it's up to me.
(30:51):
It's not just like the outer world that you're taking on too.
When you like have that framework is for me, like I
wouldn't let anyone in on like the pain I I was having because
again, it's no, it's on me. No one's gonna understand.
Only I yeah, you know, it's likebig ego, I guess that like only
(31:15):
I can solve my problems. And you, you stunt a lot of
relationships in in your life that way.
Oh, you, you, you have awful relationships because you never
let anybody in. And and in fact, when, when,
when you are, you're just pretending to let them in.
It's not even real. All right, Because we're all
smart enough to go, OK, well, I should, you know, share and do
(31:36):
that. But that's just a game too.
Because then today, you know, and again, this, this all
happens at such a deep level, right?
I wasn't aware to this. I didn't know what I was doing.
What I was aware to was they're no good.
They're wasting my time. They let me down.
I can do better, right? Because that being it's up to me
(31:57):
produces evidence in the form ofour thinking of how it is.
And that evidence is real, right?
I, I had metaphorically binders full of evidence about how, why,
when and where my ex was awful, right?
There's no shortage evidence. Of course, it was all produced
(32:18):
from here. And if I was looking from
another place, it would have looked totally different.
But that's, that's the power of the mind.
It's the same power that creates.
I want to build a company like this and then does things to
build it. Well, we start with the end in
mind and at the end of mind it, it's up to me.
Guess where you're going to end up?
You're going to end up sitting on a pile of money all alone,
wishing, wishing you were dead. Yeah, talk me through like I
(32:43):
know in this chapter of your life, you work with so many
incredible founders, incredible just leaders that are are going
through big transformation. And I think you've put words to
to common, call it subconscious beliefs or, or operating systems
(33:03):
that a lot of quote UN quote successful people have.
You have this, you know, self-destructive tendency, which
we talked a little bit about andthen this idea that, you know,
it's all on me. So those are kind of 22
operating systems. What are some other kind of
really common ones that you see over and over again?
(33:26):
Not enough behind needing to prove or show them right?
I need to prove myself. I need to work hard to get what
I want. I mean, you, you literally can
think about them as a line of codes that produce the thoughts,
right? You can say I have the thought I
need to work hard to get what I want.
(33:46):
But then there's the code that says I need to work hard to do
what I want. I was working with the founder a
couple years ago and we were going out to, to do the a raise
and as we're getting ready to, you know, put out the package,
do all the stuff. What I heard him talking about
was in his language sort of girding himself and preparing
for all the work and blah, blah,blah.
And, and I said time out. The way you're talking about
(34:09):
this, what I see is you're creating this is hard.
Like it's not hard, but from where you're looking, it is
hard. Well, where would you be looking
if you see hard? Well, it needs to be hard,
right? It needs to be hard to get what
I want. I have to work hard to get what
I want. I have to work hard to feel like
(34:31):
I earned it. Those aren't post thought
reality, you know, stuff out here in the world.
They're where we start, right? So if I look at a situation from
I need to work hard to get what I want, guess what I'm going to
see about the situation. Guess what I'm going to identify
(34:51):
as possibilities for my strategies.
And then all the things that will be hard.
There's a giant easy button there, but I literally can't see
it because my movie projector isnot projecting onto that screen.
It doesn't acknowledge it. And I could say, hey, there's an
easy button and and all you willdo is produce evidence of no,
(35:12):
that's that will never work. So you can think about it needs
to be hard. I have to work hard, not as a
conclusion, but as the introduction is the start.
It's the position, it's the stand, it's the being that I
begin with and then look at the world and, and have ideas about
it. We start with being, being
(35:33):
producers are thinking and, and there are, I don't know.
I've, I've got a list of 40 or 50, you know, the most common
ones that I've seen. But I think it can almost be
boiled down to something really simple or a couple of simple
possibilities. And and and they're both, you
(35:55):
know, two sides of the same coin.
The idea that I am not enough onsome level produces powerfully
right. The amount of stories you talk
to founders. There's there's always the story
of some time in their life wherethey were not enough behind bet
(36:17):
against the underdog. And then something happened and
they popped out right. And and that moment taught him
something. Oh, I can get what I want if I
work hard, right? I don't, I don't get to enjoy
myself if I get what I want, right.
(36:37):
There was some pivotal moment, usually early, and it kept
reinforcing itself And and it often, you know, follows some
patterns from parents. I think about it.
Nope, No parent says, hey, don'tworry about everything to be OK.
Life is great, right? What our parents teach us is no,
you have to work hard to get what you want.
Nothing comes for free Monday night.
We're taught all these things and they're all scarcity based.
(36:59):
They're all fear based. Now, our parents aren't being
abusive. They want us to have a good
life. So when they see us struggling,
not getting something, well, thefirst thing is they, they judge
themselves as not enough of a parent like so then they go,
wait, I got to teach them this. And what we teach them is you're
not just going to get what you want, loving your way through
(37:21):
life. And they're not wrong, right?
It it works. The opposite works too, right?
I am enough works, right? Most of my life I've created
from some variation of I need todo more, right?
I can, I can go back to moments of my childhood where like there
was this, this, this programmingof when you're tired, you do
(37:43):
more right? If if you're sick, you go do
some work and that fixes the sick.
Like everything in my life was about moving into action.
That was my mom's ethos. That's how she got where she
got, she passed a couple years ago and, and, and literally the
last week of her life, she's in a hospital bed at home, hopped
up on morphine. When her eyes would open, her
(38:06):
hands would reach for the bars. Be like up, right?
Like, like she was. I need to be in motion.
I need to get going, right? That's what that's who raised
me. So when everybody else was
taking a break, I'm like, time to go and guess what?
It worked as I like to say, get you paid to get you laid.
So it reinforces that's just nota strategy or a tactic.
(38:27):
No, that's how it is. If we want what we want, that's
how we'll do it. So the idea of these ways of
being, they're not problems inherently.
They're not destructive inherently.
What what causes the problem is in the absolute nature of them,
right? I need to work hard to get what
I want. It's not wrong, it's not evil,
(38:49):
it's not universally true. I can get what I want slacking
off in the right conditions, andsometimes I have to work hard.
But another way to talk about these ways of being, and I I
call them our rules. If my rule is I have to work
hard to get what I want, well, Idon't get to change the rule.
I got to do it everywhere. If my rule is it's up to me,
(39:10):
it's not my choice. I don't have freedom.
I find ways to make it up to me.So not only does this become
this enviable strategy for life that we have to apply everywhere
and we can't break, thus we haveno freedom.
And that's what causes this pain, but it also puts us in
opposition to other people who don't have that rule, right.
(39:34):
So if, if if you think about thecosts of this, and again, it's
not, it's not there's nothing. This is how we work.
My mission, this lifetime is notundoing how we work.
It's simply helping people have an awareness of how we work.
So we have a choice. If you know how the thing works,
you can do something with it. If you think that's just how
life is, you've got no options. So when I see somebody else who
(39:59):
has a different rule, like I cantake my time or I can get what I
want, just, you know, having fun, well, we judge them.
They're not just doing somethingdifferent because they were
raised with a different rule. They're a bad person.
They're the enemy. They're wrong, right?
It's up to me. You know what I thought about
(40:20):
people who lacked independence? Losers like awful, like who are
these like disgust, like somebody who couldn't just go
and do it. They were, they were beneath me,
but only because my rule was I'mon my own.
I got to do it myself. So they were offensive to me.
(40:43):
They were unacceptable to me, tome because I could not accept
that that was possible. I would whatever.
We don't allow for ourselves, we, we, we judge others and
don't allow it in them. So it creates all this chaos and
just crap. How do you suggest?
And this is a big question. People start to excavate these
(41:09):
rules that they have because it's it's.
Painfully. It's painfully simple, right?
One of the analogies I use is that of a movie theater.
We're sitting in a movie theater.
I'm looking at the screen. Well, got a news flash for you.
There's no movie on that screen that's light.
The movie is in the booth and I see something on the screen,
(41:33):
right? So my relationship is with the
screen, but nothing I do with the screen is going to change
what's on the screen. It's just going to get me tired.
I can yell at the movie or throwshit at it.
If I want something on the screen to change, I got to work
with the projector. The good news is, if I'm paying
attention to what's on the screen, I'll get a really good
idea what's up in the projector,right?
(41:55):
It's the upside down inverse image.
Like I can tell you exactly what's up there once you get
that idea, and you can apply themetaphor of my thoughts are the
particles of light flying through the theater.
What I see on the screen, the movie is what I perceive as
reality. I'm projecting onto not
perceiving, but what I call reality, how things are, how
(42:17):
people are. Well, that's on the screen.
That all comes from the projector.
So as soon as I see something onthe projector, my instinct is to
yell at the projector, throw shit at the projector, scream at
the projector, argue with the projector.
Nothing's going to happen. When I see something in reality,
or what I think is reality, my first instinct is always to
(42:39):
interact with it. Like it, love it, fire it, fuck
it, kill it, yell at it, whatever.
And we wonder why things don't change.
What's a more interesting line of inquiry is to start to slow
things down and moving from the metaphor, notice the specific
(43:01):
thought. I'll give you a very, very
simple example. A few months back I was making
dinner for my beautiful wife, Louisa.
I was making some some carne asada tacos, You know, cooked
them up delicious. You know, fresh tortillas
grilled, made in homemade slaw and sweet potato waffle fries.
(43:22):
Love me some sweet potato wafflefries in the air fryer.
So I'm making dinner and I'm plating it up.
She's sitting down and I'm bringing it over and I say, hey,
honey, the fries are a little overcooked.
Now what's funny is the fries weren't overcooked.
They were burnt to shit. So right then and there, there's
(43:43):
something right? I, I, I, I took them out of the
air fryer, burned, put them on the plate.
So there's something going on with that.
And then I say, you know, hey, there's something wrong with
them. You know, they're OK, They would
be fine. They're just a little, little
overcooked. We sat down, my wife's looking
at the fries and she goes, how did that happen?
Now? She said literally how did that
(44:05):
happen? My response was excessive heat
and time, I imagine, which was snarky, but it was the nicest
thing that I could think of saying because what I wanted to
say was, are you fucking kiddingme?
I make dinner and you don't Like, I had this whole like, I
was immediately activated. Right now, these are waffle
fries. This is my wife.
(44:25):
Like you. You pan back, you go.
What the hell just happened? We ain't talking about the
waffle fries, kids, Right? See, her words to me weren't.
How did that happen? Her words were an accusation.
Her words were condemnation. Her words were judgement.
Her words were scorn. It's not what they were.
In fact, my beautiful wife asks how questions all the time.
(44:50):
She's always asking how did thathappen?
Like I never asked how. I don't care.
It just either is or isn't. But she loves how.
So she just doing what she always does.
But I turned it into my projector, turned it into this
entire story of judgement and scorn and blame and
dissatisfaction and then have reacted appropriately.
(45:12):
Now I do this work a lot. I'm good at slowing down.
And so I'm noticing. Wow, those are some really
narrowly thoughts in my head. Wonder why I'm thinking those
thoughts. Why?
Why are those thoughts there? What do I think I see right
(45:33):
Well, what I think is she's attacking me.
What I think is she's judging me, right.
Well, what is she judging me for?
Well, she's judging me for making a mistake.
I didn't make a mistake. Well wait a minute, slow down.
The waffle fries aren't good. Like you have to slow it down
and look at the thinking. Why would I have the thought?
(45:55):
It's not OK for her to point outa mistake, right?
Because all she was doing was pointing out this is not how
waffle fries was to be cooked. She could have literally said,
honey, you've made a mistake with the waffle fries.
That would be accurate. That statement was offensive to
me such that I was energized, agitated, and wanted to attack.
So you get curious, what's offensive to me about being told
(46:17):
I'm making mistake? What is my relationship?
What is my being? What is my operating system say?
What is my rule about making mistakes?
And as soon as I ask that question, what I saw was I'm not
allowed to make mistakes. That's a rule, right?
Growing up, you don't make mistakes.
Measure twice, cut once, or measure 3 times, cut once,
(46:37):
right? We don't make mistakes.
Now what is somebody whose rule I don't make mistakes is do?
Well, they don't make many of them.
They triple check, quadruple check.
They cover all the bases. They always make sure.
You know what else they do when they make a mistake?
They don't admit it. Cognitive dissonance kicks in.
I put the freaking fries in the plate.
I couldn't even call it a mistake because mistakes are
(46:59):
offensive to me. What is offensive out there is a
projection of what is offensive in here.
What is unacceptable You can't call me out of IS merely a
projection of what is unacceptable to me.
I am not in acceptance of I makemistakes.
My rule is I'm not allowed to make mistakes.
Oh, I found the rule all right. And this was a violation of the
(47:20):
rule. I'm not allowed to make mistakes
and I'm making a mistake. I'm not allowed to make
mistakes. And she's telling me I made a
mistake. No bueno.
So once I see the rule, well, I don't have to do too much except
go, oh, yeah, that that rule created that thought.
Hey, here's the deal. That's not my rule and I've got
other practices and ways of doing it.
(47:40):
But but the but the simple way is, yeah, that that rule doesn't
need to apply here with my wife,right?
And, and mind you, in that moment, I'm adrenalized, right?
My lizard brain is kicking in. The prefrontal cortex is all
fuzzy. So you got to, you got to, you
got to practice this stuff because it happened so fast.
The truth for me is I'm pretty fucking amazing.
I'm almost flawless and I'm alsohuman.
(48:02):
So I created, I shifted my being, I changed the code in
real time. And in that moment, I literally
felt all the energy drained out,all the like the, the thoughts
starting to start and, and, and I came back to a place of
loving. I apologize to my wife.
I said, I want to apologize for my reaction right there.
That's not how I want to be. And I love you and I'd love to
(48:22):
have dinner. Can I make something else right?
So as soon as my being shift, assoon as the operating code
shifts, the thinking changes immediately.
All that's left is to clean up if you made a mess, right, which
I had done. I don't mean with the fries, but
I mean with my wife and to cleanthat up.
And we're back to, you know, Harmony.
(48:43):
Now you, you learn that you practice it, you learn to see
it. The, the quicker you catch the
thinking and the projection and it takes time, but that's the
process. And then over time what you do
is you're reprogramming your recoding the operating system,
the being the rules that got youhere.
And the idea is to program them with more flexibility ideally,
right? It doesn't have to be like I
(49:03):
make mistakes. It's not the opposite.
It's I'm allowed to make mistakes.
So simply creating an exception to the rule rules are really
useful. But if you are not allowed to
bend to break the rules, they become a prison.
So none of my rules are a problem.
None of the rules that built thecompany, the marriage, etcetera
are a problem. The degree to which those rules
are operating without my awareness, right.
They're running Townsend, not Townsend choosing, and there's
(49:27):
no flexibility. That's what causes the pain.
That's what causes all the the mischief.
Yeah. So bringing the subconscious to
the conscious mind, I imagine like taking the effort to not
only identify, but like write these down, really get to know
(49:49):
these rules that you have and then write new rules for
yourself that they can lean intothe superpower that comes with
that rule. But maybe gives a little bit of.
Flexibility when and you said something really key you said
some really key, right, It's notabout making the old rules wrong
(50:09):
and bad and killing them right, because I believe that puts us
in opposition to the self that got us here It's about saying
that's not the only way to do it.
I have options, right? It's about having access to
other rules. And there are times when I am, I
don't make mistakes. There are times when I am
(50:30):
superior. I am.
It's all on me. There's that that's not
unuseful. There are situations where I
want that producing my thinking in the actions because it's
going to create a lot of thrust.I don't want my whole life to be
about that though. And this gets to, I think really
the heart of the issue and why it, it, it can be really
challenging for founders and frankly really successful people
(50:52):
to step into this work is there's the idea that they're
going to have to tear all this down and destroy their ego and,
and, and give it all up, you know, and, and that's why for so
many, the solution is, well, I'm, I'm not going to build.
I'll go live in a yurt and smokesomething and burn incense and
wear a, a robe. It's like, OK, but it's not what
we're made for. We're made to build shit.
(51:14):
And that's fun. You know, I get founders all the
time saying, yeah, I, I, I, I I think I need a walk away from my
company. I'm like, yeah, you don't.
We can get some different fuel running in the car.
This will actually be fun. And we'll grow it, you know, for
three more zeros, Wouldn't that be fun?
But not, not because we're not enough or needed or we got to,
but just for the joy of it, justfor the love.
(51:36):
Like that's fun man. It is my question, and this is
kind of the meta question behindthis whole podcast in this
journey. I'm I'm going on that I honestly
don't know if it's true yet. Do you think so the idea behind
this is is, you know, helping people wake up before their wake
(51:56):
up call. Do you think that you can
actually switch your fuel so that the fuel at which you're
creating from what you're building from without a wake up
call? Or is that part of the deal,
like humans are just really bad at learning shit without like,
(52:17):
some pain? And I'm, you know, I think about
it all the time. If if yeah, if humans are
capable of doing that. Yeah, well, I, I can say a
couple of things. One, I can, I can, I can assure
you it's possible. And, and I've, I've been party
to that. I've experienced that wasn't the
case for me. I had to, you know, grind
(52:38):
everything down to a nub. I can also share that that is
what I'm committed to, right? And what, and one of the, the
unique abilities or perspectivesand, and, and I think one of one
of the ways of understanding I have about this is how to speak
about it, engage with people in a way that allows their
(52:58):
identity, their ego to go, OK, we could try that, right?
Because this is to powerful, successful people, the idea of
letting that fuel go is, is terrifying.
So somebody come along saying this is the right way to do it,
but it ain't going to work, right?
It's not going to work. So there, there almost always
(53:20):
needs to be some catalytic events, right?
There got to be a glimpse, right?
If you're just grinding out and creating and and racking and
stacking, what's the problem? You have to have some awareness
to this might not go the way I think there has to be.
And what I found is almost everybody has that.
(53:42):
So if you can work in that layer, then then then great.
And I'm committed to that. I'm, it says literally my
LinkedIn profile, My, my first company cost me my, my marriage,
my money, my health, my sanity, everything.
And I'm here so people can skip that step.
And I, I hold great reverence for that's part of the journey
(54:04):
for some, right? That's not bad.
And there have been lots of people that I've initiated
conversations, started working with some even beginning to
coach. And I said, Hey, I think you
need another, you know, 5 or 6 years and then I'll be back.
Like literally, I can just, I can, I can, I can calibrate
pretty well if there's receptivity.
(54:24):
And, and, and I don't say that out of like you should be doing.
No, man, I get it. I think often if somebody had
come along, 2008 said, oh, Townsend, you know, you can
create with love, I would have thrown him out of a 27th floor
window, you know, and and laughed watching him fall down.
I get this guy out of my like, that's where I was at.
(54:47):
And that was, that was part of my experience and not
ironically, that's how I get to do the work I do.
I couldn't do the work I do if Ihadn't gone to the depths of
hell. I, I, I couldn't.
So I'm uniquely qualified on my rap sheet, you know, oh, you
(55:07):
want the infidelity, you want the drug.
Like, yeah, I got all those merit badges.
I'm uniquely qualified to serve somebody on the other side of
that, I'm, I'm also uniquely qualified to say, hey, we could
avoid that. I'm also uniquely qualified to
say, yeah, by the way, it wasn'tall bad.
There was a lot of fun I had. So have at it, man.
I'll be there, You know, when you scrape the bottom.
So I, I, I'm a stand for the possibility that we can avoid
(55:30):
that. And, you know, there's plenty of
motivation. And then ultimately it's up to,
well, I just say it's above my pay grade.
People are ready when they're ready.
Yeah, the timing thing is so interesting and, and it's I'm
with you. There's certainly periods of my
life that I think some of the things I'm learning now and
(55:54):
maybe slowly trying to pass on to some others.
I, I would not have been receptive to.
You know, when I was grinding, there was only a goal post.
That's the only thing that mattered.
We were going to, you know, score the goal.
The thing was going to happen. And it's, it's funny, I don't
know if you find this with clients or even yourself, but a
(56:16):
lot of the things I'm like learning or, or writing about or
thinking about, they, they feel like these almost trite, like
Disney movie fucking things thatwe've been told 10,000 times in
10,000 different ways. But you can't receive the
(56:37):
message without, you know, it's just information.
I think you said it, you know, there's information, but people
want transformation and you're not able to actually absorb the
transformational part of the information until you hit this
certain, certain point. I I find it interesting.
I well, you said it well, yeah, I've seen that on 100 T-shirts.
(57:00):
And then one day it meant something, right.
Here's something I want to say, right.
We asked the question, is the fall avoidable?
Yes. No.
Maybe so. I don't know.
What's really important to me isthat we don't think about even
that as something that shouldn'thave happened.
(57:23):
Right? Like, the idea of can you avoid
it presupposes it should have been avoided, right?
And we had this idea that life should be a compilation of all
the things we love and are proudof.
It's like, well, last time I checked, it's a spectrum, man.
This is the human experience. We are spiritual beings having a
(57:44):
human experience. I think about that literally,
right? I am energy.
I am light. I am the universe.
I bought a ticket to the amusement park called Planet
Earth. And when I was planning my trip,
you know, I was picking out the rides and my rides were, you
know, founder and growth and drug use and divorce.
Like, you know, that's why we'rehere.
(58:07):
We're not here to sit on a Lotuspedal and chant.
And right. I mean, maybe some people are,
but the human experience is, is the full spectrum.
So the idea that we should or could opt out of things that
they somehow shouldn't have happened, I don't buy it.
Like I celebrate everything thatoccurred and there were times
(58:30):
when it was incredibly painful to me.
But that that love and acceptance of what occurred as
regardless have I felt about it exactly what was supposed to be
happening. That was my journey.
I didn't take a wrong turn. I didn't get off the path that
was my path. So even that infusing our life
(58:53):
with that idea, right? I'll say this to people all the
time, you've never made a mistake, you've never screwed it
up, you've never got it wrong. I know you think you did.
And to me, there's a great deal of peace in that because if I
look at my life as a series of mistakes or narrow escapes or,
you know, close calls right out the rearview mirror, the car
(59:16):
well out the front, I got to worry.
I got to stay alert and, you know, navigate.
But if I say, yeah, no, literally everything that
happened, that happened the way it was supposed to happen, it
was never going to happen another way.
And it was perfect. Regardless of how I felt about
it, regardless of how much of a mess.
I mean, well, not only does thatcreate a lot of peace in the
(59:36):
present, it says, well, everything's going to be OK in
the future. So what I have is, is a great
deal of peace that everything's OK, Everything's OK Now.
That doesn't mean I'll feel OK or I'll like it.
I'll be happy, but I'm here for the I'm here for the full band
man, the full spectrum, the whole experience.
Totally. Yeah, I often have this thought
(59:59):
experiment when I'm thinking of,you know, doing some deeper
reflection, thinking about deathand, you know, aging and all
this, all this stuff. And I've kind of come to think
that when you're truly like on your, your deathbed and you're
kind of going through the. The movie of your life, like
you're not just going to miss oror want to have just one more
(01:00:25):
experience of like all the good shit you're going to think about
all the most human shit you wentthrough.
Like, you're going to want to feel that like crazy, messy
heartbreak you had 'cause that was like, so human.
And when you're about to lose the human experience, you're
gonna crave, like, just break myheart one more time, you know,
like, throw me in the deep end one more time and make me feel
(01:00:47):
alive. So it's.
It's interesting, Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, I was watching the other night, the movie Click
with Adam Sandler, where he's got the magic remote.
It's a it's such a great movie. It's a perfect metaphor for
this. Like if we think life's about
skipping all the crappy stuff, maybe why, what, what if we love
(01:01:10):
that too? I, I, I, I have a simple
declaration, and that is each moment teaches me to joyfully
transform judgement into love orfear into love.
And I mean that literally. Each moment is an opportunity to
transform a judgement I have or a fear about the present, past
(01:01:30):
or future into love. So I have a thought of, oh man,
that was a lot of money to spendon that divorce.
I'm going to love that. That's that's an opportunity.
That's a little, you know, nugget of gold the universe just
gave me as an opportunity to turn a judgement of something
into love. Like I'm always looking through
(01:01:51):
the past not to find fault or blame, but but am I am I loving
it enough? Have I come to resolution with I
love that too. Like, what if we just live life
that way? That'd be pretty damn cool.
Yeah, you get to be like a a time traveller that's just
transmuting all the tougher things from the the past into
(01:02:13):
into a better future. Man, I like that.
I have one final question as we we sort of wrap this up and
thank you again for the time. I really, really enjoyed this
conversation. Yeah, man.
So if I could fly you back to yourself at at 2008, things are
(01:02:34):
things are pretty wonky, you know, staring down the barrel
of, you know, bankruptcy, the divorce is going.
You're just you're in it, man. You're really in it.
And you could, you know, say a couple of sentences to to that
version, who's who's going through this huge kind of wake
up call that what would you say?Like there's literally, you
(01:03:04):
know, all these different thoughts coming through, but I
would just tell him I love him, you know, and I wouldn't even be
doing it for him, right? I'm not trying to change him.
I'm not trying to fix him. I'm not trying to get him on the
(01:03:26):
none of that. Like, it's funny, the question
gets me emotional. I would, I would say thank you.
That's that's the truth. I would say thank you.
Right. Like from your thank you for
all. Thank you for going through all
this shit, man. It works out great.
And we wouldn't, we wouldn't be doing this without this.
(01:03:48):
So, dude, respect. Thank you.
Yeah. Well, I love that answer.
Yeah, I love that answer. Yeah, without, without him going
through that pain. You're not here living this
beautiful. I'm not me, I'm not serving.
I'm, I'm worthless, right? I'm, I'm not useful to anybody,
(01:04:12):
right? I mean no offense, but like, who
wants to sit across from somebody who's had a perfect
life and what the fuck? You got to learn from him and,
and maybe that's fine. I'm not, I'm not disparaging
that. I'm just saying I'm, I'm here to
serve others and I can't serve others with a, you know, with a
clean, clean slate and, and no black marks on my record.
(01:04:34):
You know, my pain, my pain. This is not my expression.
My pain is my purpose. My pain is my purpose.
And it's, it's turning that paininto pure love and joy and just
sharing the possibility of that.Yeah, yeah.
He he, he took the licks. Yeah, Yeah, he took the beat and
(01:04:55):
then. Probably.
He had hit some destructive fun along the way.
It was. It was great fun.
I got great stories. Some of them are even true.
Yeah, I love it. Well, man, thanks for sitting
down with me today. That was that was super fun and
appreciate you being just honest, transparent with with
(01:05:17):
your story. I know a lot of people are going
to resonate and I'm excited to check out your book.
I feel like I I mastered the howof doing and it's time to get a
new new fucking book. The how of being is is very much
said. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Awesome brother. Thanks for having me.
(01:05:38):
Appreciate you. And to all our listeners, see
you all next week.
In the following conversation, Isit down with Townsend Wardlaw.
Townsend shares his story of rising to entrepreneurial
success, facing personal crisis,and then losing everything his
net worth, his marriage, and hishealth.
We discuss this interplay between creation and destruction
that is often prevalent in high performers and the impact of
(00:24):
early programming on beliefs andbehaviors.
Sort of the common operating systems that successful people
operate under in their day-to-day and the process of
excavating some of these personal rules or beliefs to
create a more flexible and fulfilling life before we get
there. This episode is brought to you
by Dream Fuel. Dream Fuel is a mental
(00:46):
performance coaching platform, both for leaders and teams.
And I've already told you how big of a fan of theirs I am.
But I'm not the only one. They recently coached the team
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(01:09):
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The coaching strategies and skills we gained were absolutely
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quarter. You can check them out in the
show notes below and mention wake up Call.
(01:32):
And of course, you can't forget about our partners at Optimizing
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(01:54):
tech I've seen in a long time. And for a limited time, they are
offering two months of optimizing dot AI for free to
wake up call listeners. Now on to my episode with
Townsend. Welcome back to Wake Up.
(02:15):
Call everybody excited to be here.
I'm coming to you live from Lombok, Indonesia.
It's a beautiful day where I'm at and I am joined by my friend
Townsend. Townsend Welcome to the show,
man. Thanks brother, thanks for
having me. Excited to have you.
(02:35):
I'm excited for this conversation.
It's funny, I as it been going on this little journey of mine
and, and sharing bits and pieceswhen I feel called to on, on
LinkedIn, How we actually got connected was honestly, I think
it was about 5 or 6 people that I know, trust and respect
(02:59):
greatly kept tagging you and a bunch of like posts and, and
things that I, I was writing about.
And I think it was #4 I think itwas Rory Blanton.
Shout out. Rory, Rory.
Such a good. Good human being.
I was finally like, I got to shoot this guy a message.
Who is this guy? I got to know his story.
(03:21):
Took it 4. It's slow on the uptake.
Right, a little bit slow, but I,I was moving intentionally
slower at, at that point and that at that stage.
But then we jumped on a phone call and you have just such an
incredible story. And I think it's, it's perfect
for kind of what I'm hoping to, to achieve with with these
(03:45):
conversations I'm having. And maybe a good place to start
is just the big one, man. Like what is your, your story?
How did you you get here today? Divine grace, I think is the
answer. But it's funny, I, I'm, I'm
(04:05):
working on a, on a book right now.
And actually it's at the editorsand it's, it's a book on being.
It's called the how of being andit is a, a manual, a user guide
for how one can begin to access,see experience and work at the
(04:28):
level of their being, which I also sometimes use
interchangeably with the word consciousness.
It's not a book about reaching enlightenment.
It's not, you know, that's not my game, but it is a it is a, it
is a book about learning to create, not from the doing, but
from what produces our thinking,our our being or our
(04:49):
consciousness. And I've got, I don't know, 10s
of thousands of words. I think it's, it's an 80,000
word manuscript will trim it down.
So I've got this, this comprehensive work on being and,
and, and the, the book alchemistthat I work with made it very
clear about a year ago. She goes, yeah, that that's a
wonderful book. And, and nobody's going to care
(05:12):
because being in as a, as an abstraction is not interesting.
It's not useful, but it will be useful for some.
And, and those will be those whosee themselves in you and your
story. So you got to, you got to get
that out there. You got to do some excavating
and, and I really hate that part.
I hate thinking about my story. I hate telling my story.
(05:34):
It's like I'm just here who cares?
But turns out it's, it's ultimately relevant because
anybody can produce information,right?
And, and, and certainly with ChatGPT, you can have access to
all the world's information. What people are hungry for is
transformation, right? And that is, in my mind, the,
(05:55):
the, the, the consumption of information, but really the the
adoption and taking action on information in the face of
something that's really, well, in most cases, fucking scary,
terrifying, counterintuitive. And and the only way you're
going to do that is, is if that,which is conveying the
(06:18):
information, the thing sitting across from you goes, yeah, I
know it's scary. Let let me tell you what it
looked like for me, right? That, that, that empathic layer,
that, that it's not theoretical.So I've spent a lot of time,
this is a long, long ramp of a long, long time thinking about
(06:38):
what is my story? How did I get here?
And I can answer that from a lotof perspectives.
I'll give sort of the, the, the just the facts version because
that'll be interesting. And then we can go play some
other layers because there's, there's the, what happened in
the timeline, in the chronology.And then what was the fuel for
the journey? And, and, and where did that
(06:59):
fuel stop working the way it used to?
And, and, and how did I find a new source of fuels when I think
about it? So grew up in the East Coast,
single mom. I have one younger sister.
And we'll Fast forward all the way to I was living in Boulder,
(07:21):
Co and I was 27 years old. I, I, I went to college but
decided I really didn't want to go and run off with all, all my
college mates to Boston, NY and work in investment banking or
finance or accounting. I'm like, I'm not going to do
it. So I went and had a bunch of
fun. I wanted to be a professional
bike racer. I traveled the world.
I would work in bike shops, rolling burritos, make some
(07:42):
money and then take off for three or four months.
And it's incredible life and literally never had the thought
of this is going to be a problem.
I'm like, it'll be fine. I, I, you know, I don't need a
career. And then one day I was 27, I
woke up and I thought, yeah, I probably should do something.
Like there was one day the next.And it wasn't like I'm behind.
It was just let me get a job andlike, you know, do something and
(08:04):
make money and procreate or I don't know what I'm supposed to
do. But there was like, it was time
And I, I got a, a sales job. My first job was selling long
distance for a reseller in, in Minnesota.
I was in Denver, this was quite a few years back.
And just like the idea that thatlong distance phone calls cost
(08:25):
money, you know, dates me prettywell.
So my first sales job was selling for businesses the
ability to call people on the phone or receive phone calls and
that costs money. Not anymore.
And I had an incredibly meteoricrise in the in the corporate
world. I went from this long distance
reseller in the span of about six years, found myself as a, as
(08:47):
a vice president of a Fortune 500 company, leading a sales
team, making incredible money. I had the house, I had the least
cars that were new, the two or three or four vacations a year,
2 little kids. And, and you know, I was, I was
living the dream and, and I, I despised it.
I despised waking up on Sunday thinking about going in to do
(09:09):
this job that other people coveted.
And my solution was I'm going toquit and start my own company.
So this was somewhere around 2002 start my own company didn't
even know what I was doing. I was going to do some sales
consulting or training or something. wellthe.com bubble
had just burst. I quit my job.
All these clients lined up and every one of the clients said,
(09:31):
hey, sorry, our budgets are cut,we can't work with you.
And I had a choice go back to the corporate world or figure it
out. And I wasn't going back to the
corporate world. So I, I figured it out and over
this next seven years, I pivotedand invented and, and, and ended
up kind of pioneering an industry when you know about
sales organizations and softwareorganizations, there's this
whole world of SDRS and BDRS andsegmented sales process.
(09:54):
Well, back in 2003, I had the idea to do outsource sales and
actually we, we started one of the first organizations doing
outbound cold calling to set appointments.
Now what we call SDRS, BDRS is really common.
From 2002 to 2009, I built that company up, moved the company to
(10:14):
Denver, had 80 people working for me, was getting close to 3
million in revenue. And as we approach the end of
2008, I, I remember the day thatI was driving from Boulder to
Denver to go to the office and, and saw that this company wasn't
going to make it. I've been flapping my arms.
(10:35):
I've been doing everything. I've been generating all the
revenue, like everything we were, we were getting low on
home equity because we didn't change our lifestyle when we
when, when, when I went independent, we're running
through all the four O 1K and, and, and that kind of stuff.
And, and more importantly, my health was just completely shot
(10:57):
degraded in probably December of2009.
I remember being in a hospital gown with my ass hanging out
drinking some barium nitrate fora fluoroscopy so they could see
what was going on because I was certain I must be having, you
know, heart problems or, or, or cancer.
It's with the pain was so bad. And I remember when I went to
the doctor for the, the results,he said, yeah, you're fine.
(11:20):
It's just stress. And I remember saying I'm not
stressed. He said, your body, your body
disagrees with you. And I, I, I saw the end of the
company coming. I was able to bring that company
to a well, relatively soft landing got people jobs,
transitioned our clients and there I was in early 2009 with,
(11:45):
I don't know, couple couple $1,000,000 in personal
guarantees health that was shot a marriage that was a shell and
you know every other bit of the life just just like what the
hell is this right? One, one day you're playing a
dream of I'm going to get boughtand exit and, you know, options.
(12:06):
And the next day it's like literally everything is just on
fire or burning or already burnt.
And over the next few months, bankruptcy got started.
That process was initiated personal bankruptcy.
Everything you know, I had was gone.
The marriage went away and and that wasn't pretty.
(12:27):
And I started to try to figure out like what the hell even
happened. And apparently I wasn't done yet
because there was still another couple years after that.
I've just still railing against the world, fighting light and
shit on fire so I could get a hose and put it out, going to
(12:50):
court with my ex, custody battle, you name it.
Not to mention, let's just say more than my fair share of
entertainment, substances, beverages, clubs, right?
The whole deal. Like I like, I'm going to, I'm
going to numb the shit out of all of this and maybe that'll be
it. And I would say things didn't
(13:14):
start to even really change until probably 2012 or 13.
So it was just a couple years ofhell, but it didn't feel like
hell, right? My life is in shambles.
And I was still going. Yeah, no, it's fine.
I got this. No problem.
And you know, hey, let's go party.
And all I can say is that, you know, beginning around 2013,
(13:38):
fourteen, 1213, the universe putsome people in my path.
I met my my first coach, a gentleman by the name of Mike
Valentine through an extraordinary set of
circumstances like when I go back in the number of
coincidences and the things thathad to happen in exactly the
order that happened. So that I was having coffee with
(14:00):
them in November of 2013, a coffee.
I was going to thinking I was going to help him like work on
his business or do some better market.
I don't know anyone. I was thinking, but I wasn't
there for a coach. And I remember sitting down with
him and he was speaking and, andliterally 15 minutes of the
conversation, I said, I want youto coach me.
(14:20):
Now. I, I didn't know what a coach
was. I'd never had a coach, but
literally I want you to coach me.
And that was really the beginning of just incredible
journey and, and, and I don't want to say clawing my way back,
but sometimes it felt like that.And since then it, it, it truly
has been a miracle after miracleafter miracle of what the
(14:43):
universe has put in front of me,the guides, the teachers, the
information, the knowledge, whathave you building, building my
business as a consultant backup in 2018, deciding that and I had
a very successful solo consulting business helping
founders grow and exit and basically get through the the
death zone that killed me. And then in 2018, I had the idea
(15:10):
because I, I'd, I'd started working with the gentleman by
the name of Rich Litvin, who is a very well known and, and, and
very high end coach. I call my first big boy coach,
first person I wrote $120,000 check to, to work with.
And he asked me a question on our first session.
And I, I, I believe to this day that that question was worth
(15:30):
like, if I'd, if I'd stopped coaching with him after that
question, it would have been worth 120,000.
And the question was, which of your clients inspire you?
And it was a question about my clients, but it was really a
metaphor for my life. Like, what about life inspires
you? Is what I heard.
And I said nothing. I inspire them like I'm doing
all the inspiring. My life is about inspiring.
(15:53):
And he paused for a bit and he said in his really little cheeky
English accent, he said, isn't that a shame?
And I was like, this lightning bolt hit me and I'm like, shit,
even this, this business that I've built where I'm making lots
of money serving people and helping them get what they want,
even that is kind of a racket. I'm running right where I'm like
(16:13):
always the most important guy inthe room, the smartest guy in
the room, right? The coolest guy in the room.
And, and, and in that moment I said, I'm, I'm done with this
consulting shit. I want to coach, I want to, I
want to do this shit with people.
And I can, I can go into all sorts of amazing stuff that's
happened since then, but that's been an incredible ride.
I'll pause there. Well, First off, thank you for
(16:37):
for sharing that story, man. And resonate unfortunately too
deeply with, with various parts of your, your journey as as many
listening might. But you know what a what a
journey you've been on. And you know, the thing that
really stuck home for me and like just hit me to the core was
(17:01):
you said it so well when you're in this kind of, you called it
the death zone and you said I was lighting shit on fire so
that I could get a hose and put it out.
That one hits, hits too, too close for for liking.
(17:23):
And I see that as a really, it'sreally common.
This, this, Yeah. And I would love to talk about
it a little bit because it's something I have certainly
wrestled with, probably still wrestle with.
Is this like creative and creation force that a lot of
entrepreneurs have like the ability to make something out of
(17:47):
nothing, you know, and that's a a foreign concept to a lot of
people. But there's there's some people
that are are have the audacity and the maybe stupidity to just
be like, I'm just going to go and create this thing and you
don't always know what you're doing.
And it's so incredibly powerful.But what I've learned is that
(18:08):
like on the other side of that creation, there's like an
equally and just as powerful force of destruction.
And I'll just speak through my own story.
Like there were there was times when something incredible would
happen in my life, some like bigmilestone, you know, we hit a
(18:31):
fundraise target, we close an incredible deal, like whatever
it was. And that elation on the other
side of that would be I would want to like kind of destroy
something like just as big, you know, and whether that was
substance abuse or gambling or like whatever it was.
(18:52):
And I'm really curious about your thoughts on sort of the
interplay between those two things.
Yeah, Well, we play. Humans play for results.
Universally, everybody's playingfor results.
People say, oh, it's not the destination of the journey.
Yeah. And we care about results, the
(19:14):
money, the wife, the car, the travel, whatever.
And some people's results are modest and some are grand.
That's not the point. The point is, the human
experience is about getting someplace, doing something,
achieving something. Fine, universally results are
produced from action, right? Sometimes we'll be Socratic
about this with folks say what produces results and the same
(19:36):
motivation. I'll say, listen, I know people
with a lot of money, they don't have motivation and they're
stupid. So don't tell me it's smarts.
Action produces results, like just functionally.
So once we get clear on that, I say, well, well, what produces
an action? And sometimes it takes a little,
little bit, but ultimately what people realize is there's no
action I've ever taken or not taken without a thought.
(19:59):
I speak a word. I had the thought, say that
word, punch a guy in the face. I have the thought, punch him in
the face, right? I say something nice instead of
something mean. I had the thought, don't say
this. Say that thoughts produce
action. Well, I take a certain amount of
actions during the day. This thing produces way more
thoughts than I take action. And in fact, I have thoughts
(20:22):
about my thoughts. Sometimes I have a thought and I
have a lot of thoughts about I shouldn't even have that
thought. And then I try to make it a
better thought or good thought of the right thought of the
pause. I do all this thinking and I
take some actions, but simply the ratio of actions I take the
thoughts, the the research says there's between 30,000 and
50,000 discrete thoughts that wehave in a day.
(20:42):
I don't take 30,000 to 50,000 actions.
So lots of thoughts, some actions.
So there's the processing between my thinking and my
doing. And that's interesting.
And that's that's the realm of what we call mindset work.
So when people talk about mindset work, to me it's the
working with your thinking, qualitative nature of it and the
degree to which you act on some thoughts, don't etcetera,
(21:03):
etcetera. The question people don't ask
enough is why do I think the thoughts that I think, right?
You and I could walk into a situation of circumstance and
environment. We will have the exact same
objective reality that we are infront of.
We will produce different thinking about it.
(21:23):
Now I call and refer to what produces our thinking, our
being. Alternately, I'll say that's our
consciousness, right? Our access to consciousness.
Another way I think about it is simply our operating system
layer, right? It is that which determines how
the apps even going to run. I cannot think a thought that is
(21:48):
not in alignment with my operating system or my being or
my consciousness. And every human on the planet
has a different footprint or fingerprint, if you will, of, of
this being or this operating system.
Now, we'll keep it really simple.
And to me, this isn't woo woo. This is, we can get woo woo with
it, but but it's also really practical.
(22:10):
My operating system is how the world occurs for me.
I think about operating system in a phone.
It's it's power management, it'sfunctional, it's really basic
stuff. Well, we have an operating
system that is installed very early on by our teachers, our
preachers, our mothers, our fathers who teach us how the
(22:30):
world is, teach us how things are right.
They teach us this is right, this is wrong, this is good,
this is bad. Well, they start by teaching us
even who we are. They teach us you're Scott
right? Even your name is programmed
into you, right? Try changing your name or not
(22:51):
answering to your name for a week.
It's difficult because it it, it's so ingrained there.
It's like I can't just undo that.
Well, starts with your name and then and then we get you're a
good girl, you're a bad boy, you're a smart boy, you're fast,
you're cool, you're you're destined for greatness.
You're going to have to work harder than we get very early
(23:13):
on, programmed from an opinion, not the result of our efforts,
but that which ultimately produces our efforts, right?
So the source code, the parents,the preachers, the teachers
(23:33):
install this code that literallyas if it's your name, creates
for you how you are, how the world is, and how you will
relate to it. And sometimes they do it
overtly, sometimes they do it covertly, innocently, right?
Sometimes it's awful, sometimes it's not.
Now, I'll give you a very personal story that I think
illustrate this. When I was 8 years old, give or
(23:56):
take, my mother had what I referred to as a nervous
breakdown. Now, I was 8, not a doctor.
I don't know what 1 is. I call it that.
But all I remember is, you know,life was tough.
It was always stressful in our house.
Money was scary, right? Even that money is scary.
That's a operating system, little belief for people.
(24:17):
My mom was in the kitchen, you know, in the corner, sobbing,
freaking out. I don't know what was going on.
Bills weren't paid or my sister was, you know, causing trouble.
I, I don't know, it was a very chaotic time And, and usually
when my mom was upset, I would comfort her.
I'd bring her, her, her cigarettes and her gin and that
usually would do the trick. But today that didn't do it
(24:39):
right. She didn't want it, you know,
she didn't want to live whatevershe was saying.
OK, cool. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm going to
grab that phone over there with a 30 foot extension, you know,
handset cord. I'm going to call the neighbor's
mom. And she begged me not to call
the neighbors. She begged me not to call them.
She said you can't call them, They'll take me away.
Now I'm 8 years old. I don't want to take me away.
(25:00):
I don't know who they are. Doesn't sound good.
So we put the phone back and we,you know, we sorted out.
And at some point, mom gets off the floor.
I don't remember when or how long.
It doesn't matter. And life goes back to normal.
So that was that, right? No big deal.
Well, little Townsend learned something that day, not just
(25:20):
like a little lesson, but like it was programmed into them.
And that was nobody's coming. It's up to you, right?
Like, it's up to me. There's no phone.
No, it's up to me. What I learned was like, not
here, but like, it's up to me now.
Maybe that's scary. It's also powerful, right?
(25:41):
Like, wow, I, I did this right again, I'm 8.
So this is all really deep subconscious stuff.
I'm not, I'm not thinking about this at a time.
Now, some people go, well, that's childhood trauma.
I say, yeah, check out what I did with that.
My entire life, right? Middle school, high school,
(26:01):
there was never a situation or acircumstance where I was like,
hmm, I wonder if I can do that or I wonder if I'll be able to
get over there, if I should, youknow, take a trip cross country.
There was never the thought after high school.
I'm going to college away from home.
Why? Well, that's what I want to do.
Aren't you nervous? No.
Why not? Well, it's up to me.
(26:22):
I know that. I don't even have the thought.
It's just it's it's a knowing. It's a way of being.
It's in the code. That won't be a problem because
it's all on me anyway. Nobody's coming after college,
driving across country, going togo race bikes in California.
Aren't you scared? No.
No hesitation. I got this right.
My whole life I've been infused with this outsized
(26:45):
self-confidence, knowing it's going to work out.
There's never been a moment in my life and I'm like, I don't
know if I have what it takes now.
People like, I wish I had that. Well, let's be careful because
there's a flip side. I have the thought I'm too much
all the time. We'll talk about that later.
But fundamentally, if you look at my life and you kind of track
the story arc, I can, I can tellyou moment after moment after
(27:09):
moment where the operating system, it's up to me, nobody's
coming. You got this.
Produce the thinking about the circumstance, produce the action
and worked. What kind of person goes from
selling long distance to a Fortune 500 VP in six years and
(27:30):
doesn't give a shit about, you know, job hopping, what anybody
thinks? It's up to me, I'll figure this
out. What kind of person quits a
quarter $1,000,000 your job witha house payment, cars and a fan?
I got this right. Every step of the way was this.
And every time it worked, it reinforced itself.
It was more and more true. It was more and more, yes, this
(27:53):
is right. So company grows, I build it.
It's up to me, it's up to me, it's up to me.
At some point, I got 80 people working for me.
I have a leadership team of seven and I still walk in any
every day with the idea, the knowing the code.
It's up to me. So you know what?
(28:15):
Nobody was any good. Nobody could be trusted.
Nobody knew what the hell they were doing.
They're all fucking incompetent.Why am I paying these people
right? Fact I wouldn't go so far to say
is it's up to me. Probably hired incompetent
people just to prove itself right.
And the more you stack on right,the more of that toxic
(28:37):
byproduct, right? Because everything I create from
it's up to me produces, but it also takes it takes energy.
It, it, it, it, it hollows you out.
Oh, let's not forget it's up to me.
Came home to his wife and littlechildren.
And whenever something was out of sorts, well, I'll take care
of that. I'll do that.
Yep, you can't get along. I'll do that.
Right? It's all on me.
(28:57):
Which, hmm, wonder if that's going to create some stress,
frustration, resentment, right. I was married for 11 years.
The woman I married was beautiful and powerful and
brilliant and I wanted to have children with her.
And I did. 12 years later, who is this awful human who I
deserve better? She can't like what I had
(29:19):
created from the from the bitterness and the resentment
which was created only from my constantly doing.
It's up to me. It's up to me.
Nobody was there, but the poor woman had to be married to that.
So at some point in time, it allfalls down, it all comes
crashing down. You cannot sustain.
And and what I found is that every, you know, I work with
(29:41):
these people now I work with these founders and high power
people who who have created everything in the life from some
fuel that creates powerfully. But the more they create takes
more and more away from them such that either it simply
becomes a game of how much more pain can I endure to get what I
want right? And by the way, it's a trap
because I can't say, well, let me slow down because no, then
(30:04):
I'll fall, I'll fall backwards. It'll all get come crashing
down. Or I get to a plateau and I go,
I don't want to go any higher because that'll just hurt too
much. And then I'm feeling like,
what's the point of the rest of my life?
It's why, it's why guys end up doing something terrible to
themself all the time that you wonder why somebody who's got
everything that everybody else dreams about says goodbye to the
(30:28):
life. Well, I know why.
I know why. Yeah, again, that is a quality
that we we share and this what Ifound too.
And you can tell me if this is true for you as well as like
when you live in that, it's up to me.
(30:51):
It's not just like the outer world that you're taking on too.
When you like have that framework is for me, like I
wouldn't let anyone in on like the pain I I was having because
again, it's no, it's on me. No one's gonna understand.
Only I yeah, you know, it's likebig ego, I guess that like only
(31:15):
I can solve my problems. And you, you stunt a lot of
relationships in in your life that way.
Oh, you, you, you have awful relationships because you never
let anybody in. And and in fact, when, when,
when you are, you're just pretending to let them in.
It's not even real. All right, Because we're all
smart enough to go, OK, well, I should, you know, share and do
(31:36):
that. But that's just a game too.
Because then today, you know, and again, this, this all
happens at such a deep level, right?
I wasn't aware to this. I didn't know what I was doing.
What I was aware to was they're no good.
They're wasting my time. They let me down.
I can do better, right? Because that being it's up to me
(31:57):
produces evidence in the form ofour thinking of how it is.
And that evidence is real, right?
I, I had metaphorically binders full of evidence about how, why,
when and where my ex was awful, right?
There's no shortage evidence. Of course, it was all produced
(32:18):
from here. And if I was looking from
another place, it would have looked totally different.
But that's, that's the power of the mind.
It's the same power that creates.
I want to build a company like this and then does things to
build it. Well, we start with the end in
mind and at the end of mind it, it's up to me.
Guess where you're going to end up?
You're going to end up sitting on a pile of money all alone,
wishing, wishing you were dead. Yeah, talk me through like I
(32:43):
know in this chapter of your life, you work with so many
incredible founders, incredible just leaders that are are going
through big transformation. And I think you've put words to
to common, call it subconscious beliefs or, or operating systems
(33:03):
that a lot of quote UN quote successful people have.
You have this, you know, self-destructive tendency, which
we talked a little bit about andthen this idea that, you know,
it's all on me. So those are kind of 22
operating systems. What are some other kind of
really common ones that you see over and over again?
(33:26):
Not enough behind needing to prove or show them right?
I need to prove myself. I need to work hard to get what
I want. I mean, you, you literally can
think about them as a line of codes that produce the thoughts,
right? You can say I have the thought I
need to work hard to get what I want.
(33:46):
But then there's the code that says I need to work hard to do
what I want. I was working with the founder a
couple years ago and we were going out to, to do the a raise
and as we're getting ready to, you know, put out the package,
do all the stuff. What I heard him talking about
was in his language sort of girding himself and preparing
for all the work and blah, blah,blah.
And, and I said time out. The way you're talking about
(34:09):
this, what I see is you're creating this is hard.
Like it's not hard, but from where you're looking, it is
hard. Well, where would you be looking
if you see hard? Well, it needs to be hard,
right? It needs to be hard to get what
I want. I have to work hard to get what
I want. I have to work hard to feel like
(34:31):
I earned it. Those aren't post thought
reality, you know, stuff out here in the world.
They're where we start, right? So if I look at a situation from
I need to work hard to get what I want, guess what I'm going to
see about the situation. Guess what I'm going to identify
(34:51):
as possibilities for my strategies.
And then all the things that will be hard.
There's a giant easy button there, but I literally can't see
it because my movie projector isnot projecting onto that screen.
It doesn't acknowledge it. And I could say, hey, there's an
easy button and and all you willdo is produce evidence of no,
(35:12):
that's that will never work. So you can think about it needs
to be hard. I have to work hard, not as a
conclusion, but as the introduction is the start.
It's the position, it's the stand, it's the being that I
begin with and then look at the world and, and have ideas about
it. We start with being, being
(35:33):
producers are thinking and, and there are, I don't know.
I've, I've got a list of 40 or 50, you know, the most common
ones that I've seen. But I think it can almost be
boiled down to something really simple or a couple of simple
possibilities. And and and they're both, you
(35:55):
know, two sides of the same coin.
The idea that I am not enough onsome level produces powerfully
right. The amount of stories you talk
to founders. There's there's always the story
of some time in their life wherethey were not enough behind bet
(36:17):
against the underdog. And then something happened and
they popped out right. And and that moment taught him
something. Oh, I can get what I want if I
work hard, right? I don't, I don't get to enjoy
myself if I get what I want, right.
(36:37):
There was some pivotal moment, usually early, and it kept
reinforcing itself And and it often, you know, follows some
patterns from parents. I think about it.
Nope, No parent says, hey, don'tworry about everything to be OK.
Life is great, right? What our parents teach us is no,
you have to work hard to get what you want.
Nothing comes for free Monday night.
We're taught all these things and they're all scarcity based.
(36:59):
They're all fear based. Now, our parents aren't being
abusive. They want us to have a good
life. So when they see us struggling,
not getting something, well, thefirst thing is they, they judge
themselves as not enough of a parent like so then they go,
wait, I got to teach them this. And what we teach them is you're
not just going to get what you want, loving your way through
(37:21):
life. And they're not wrong, right?
It it works. The opposite works too, right?
I am enough works, right? Most of my life I've created
from some variation of I need todo more, right?
I can, I can go back to moments of my childhood where like there
was this, this, this programmingof when you're tired, you do
(37:43):
more right? If if you're sick, you go do
some work and that fixes the sick.
Like everything in my life was about moving into action.
That was my mom's ethos. That's how she got where she
got, she passed a couple years ago and, and, and literally the
last week of her life, she's in a hospital bed at home, hopped
up on morphine. When her eyes would open, her
(38:06):
hands would reach for the bars. Be like up, right?
Like, like she was. I need to be in motion.
I need to get going, right? That's what that's who raised
me. So when everybody else was
taking a break, I'm like, time to go and guess what?
It worked as I like to say, get you paid to get you laid.
So it reinforces that's just nota strategy or a tactic.
(38:27):
No, that's how it is. If we want what we want, that's
how we'll do it. So the idea of these ways of
being, they're not problems inherently.
They're not destructive inherently.
What what causes the problem is in the absolute nature of them,
right? I need to work hard to get what
I want. It's not wrong, it's not evil,
(38:49):
it's not universally true. I can get what I want slacking
off in the right conditions, andsometimes I have to work hard.
But another way to talk about these ways of being, and I I
call them our rules. If my rule is I have to work
hard to get what I want, well, Idon't get to change the rule.
I got to do it everywhere. If my rule is it's up to me,
(39:10):
it's not my choice. I don't have freedom.
I find ways to make it up to me.So not only does this become
this enviable strategy for life that we have to apply everywhere
and we can't break, thus we haveno freedom.
And that's what causes this pain, but it also puts us in
opposition to other people who don't have that rule, right.
(39:34):
So if, if if you think about thecosts of this, and again, it's
not, it's not there's nothing. This is how we work.
My mission, this lifetime is notundoing how we work.
It's simply helping people have an awareness of how we work.
So we have a choice. If you know how the thing works,
you can do something with it. If you think that's just how
life is, you've got no options. So when I see somebody else who
(39:59):
has a different rule, like I cantake my time or I can get what I
want, just, you know, having fun, well, we judge them.
They're not just doing somethingdifferent because they were
raised with a different rule. They're a bad person.
They're the enemy. They're wrong, right?
It's up to me. You know what I thought about
(40:20):
people who lacked independence? Losers like awful, like who are
these like disgust, like somebody who couldn't just go
and do it. They were, they were beneath me,
but only because my rule was I'mon my own.
I got to do it myself. So they were offensive to me.
(40:43):
They were unacceptable to me, tome because I could not accept
that that was possible. I would whatever.
We don't allow for ourselves, we, we, we judge others and
don't allow it in them. So it creates all this chaos and
just crap. How do you suggest?
And this is a big question. People start to excavate these
(41:09):
rules that they have because it's it's.
Painfully. It's painfully simple, right?
One of the analogies I use is that of a movie theater.
We're sitting in a movie theater.
I'm looking at the screen. Well, got a news flash for you.
There's no movie on that screen that's light.
The movie is in the booth and I see something on the screen,
(41:33):
right? So my relationship is with the
screen, but nothing I do with the screen is going to change
what's on the screen. It's just going to get me tired.
I can yell at the movie or throwshit at it.
If I want something on the screen to change, I got to work
with the projector. The good news is, if I'm paying
attention to what's on the screen, I'll get a really good
idea what's up in the projector,right?
(41:55):
It's the upside down inverse image.
Like I can tell you exactly what's up there once you get
that idea, and you can apply themetaphor of my thoughts are the
particles of light flying through the theater.
What I see on the screen, the movie is what I perceive as
reality. I'm projecting onto not
perceiving, but what I call reality, how things are, how
(42:17):
people are. Well, that's on the screen.
That all comes from the projector.
So as soon as I see something onthe projector, my instinct is to
yell at the projector, throw shit at the projector, scream at
the projector, argue with the projector.
Nothing's going to happen. When I see something in reality,
or what I think is reality, my first instinct is always to
(42:39):
interact with it. Like it, love it, fire it, fuck
it, kill it, yell at it, whatever.
And we wonder why things don't change.
What's a more interesting line of inquiry is to start to slow
things down and moving from the metaphor, notice the specific
(43:01):
thought. I'll give you a very, very
simple example. A few months back I was making
dinner for my beautiful wife, Louisa.
I was making some some carne asada tacos, You know, cooked
them up delicious. You know, fresh tortillas
grilled, made in homemade slaw and sweet potato waffle fries.
(43:22):
Love me some sweet potato wafflefries in the air fryer.
So I'm making dinner and I'm plating it up.
She's sitting down and I'm bringing it over and I say, hey,
honey, the fries are a little overcooked.
Now what's funny is the fries weren't overcooked.
They were burnt to shit. So right then and there, there's
(43:43):
something right? I, I, I, I took them out of the
air fryer, burned, put them on the plate.
So there's something going on with that.
And then I say, you know, hey, there's something wrong with
them. You know, they're OK, They would
be fine. They're just a little, little
overcooked. We sat down, my wife's looking
at the fries and she goes, how did that happen?
Now? She said literally how did that
(44:05):
happen? My response was excessive heat
and time, I imagine, which was snarky, but it was the nicest
thing that I could think of saying because what I wanted to
say was, are you fucking kiddingme?
I make dinner and you don't Like, I had this whole like, I
was immediately activated. Right now, these are waffle
fries. This is my wife.
(44:25):
Like you. You pan back, you go.
What the hell just happened? We ain't talking about the
waffle fries, kids, Right? See, her words to me weren't.
How did that happen? Her words were an accusation.
Her words were condemnation. Her words were judgement.
Her words were scorn. It's not what they were.
In fact, my beautiful wife asks how questions all the time.
(44:50):
She's always asking how did thathappen?
Like I never asked how. I don't care.
It just either is or isn't. But she loves how.
So she just doing what she always does.
But I turned it into my projector, turned it into this
entire story of judgement and scorn and blame and
dissatisfaction and then have reacted appropriately.
(45:12):
Now I do this work a lot. I'm good at slowing down.
And so I'm noticing. Wow, those are some really
narrowly thoughts in my head. Wonder why I'm thinking those
thoughts. Why?
Why are those thoughts there? What do I think I see right
(45:33):
Well, what I think is she's attacking me.
What I think is she's judging me, right.
Well, what is she judging me for?
Well, she's judging me for making a mistake.
I didn't make a mistake. Well wait a minute, slow down.
The waffle fries aren't good. Like you have to slow it down
and look at the thinking. Why would I have the thought?
(45:55):
It's not OK for her to point outa mistake, right?
Because all she was doing was pointing out this is not how
waffle fries was to be cooked. She could have literally said,
honey, you've made a mistake with the waffle fries.
That would be accurate. That statement was offensive to
me such that I was energized, agitated, and wanted to attack.
So you get curious, what's offensive to me about being told
(46:17):
I'm making mistake? What is my relationship?
What is my being? What is my operating system say?
What is my rule about making mistakes?
And as soon as I ask that question, what I saw was I'm not
allowed to make mistakes. That's a rule, right?
Growing up, you don't make mistakes.
Measure twice, cut once, or measure 3 times, cut once,
(46:37):
right? We don't make mistakes.
Now what is somebody whose rule I don't make mistakes is do?
Well, they don't make many of them.
They triple check, quadruple check.
They cover all the bases. They always make sure.
You know what else they do when they make a mistake?
They don't admit it. Cognitive dissonance kicks in.
I put the freaking fries in the plate.
I couldn't even call it a mistake because mistakes are
(46:59):
offensive to me. What is offensive out there is a
projection of what is offensive in here.
What is unacceptable You can't call me out of IS merely a
projection of what is unacceptable to me.
I am not in acceptance of I makemistakes.
My rule is I'm not allowed to make mistakes.
Oh, I found the rule all right. And this was a violation of the
(47:20):
rule. I'm not allowed to make mistakes
and I'm making a mistake. I'm not allowed to make
mistakes. And she's telling me I made a
mistake. No bueno.
So once I see the rule, well, I don't have to do too much except
go, oh, yeah, that that rule created that thought.
Hey, here's the deal. That's not my rule and I've got
other practices and ways of doing it.
(47:40):
But but the but the simple way is, yeah, that that rule doesn't
need to apply here with my wife,right?
And, and mind you, in that moment, I'm adrenalized, right?
My lizard brain is kicking in. The prefrontal cortex is all
fuzzy. So you got to, you got to, you
got to practice this stuff because it happened so fast.
The truth for me is I'm pretty fucking amazing.
I'm almost flawless and I'm alsohuman.
(48:02):
So I created, I shifted my being, I changed the code in
real time. And in that moment, I literally
felt all the energy drained out,all the like the, the thoughts
starting to start and, and, and I came back to a place of
loving. I apologize to my wife.
I said, I want to apologize for my reaction right there.
That's not how I want to be. And I love you and I'd love to
(48:22):
have dinner. Can I make something else right?
So as soon as my being shift, assoon as the operating code
shifts, the thinking changes immediately.
All that's left is to clean up if you made a mess, right, which
I had done. I don't mean with the fries, but
I mean with my wife and to cleanthat up.
And we're back to, you know, Harmony.
(48:43):
Now you, you learn that you practice it, you learn to see
it. The, the quicker you catch the
thinking and the projection and it takes time, but that's the
process. And then over time what you do
is you're reprogramming your recoding the operating system,
the being the rules that got youhere.
And the idea is to program them with more flexibility ideally,
right? It doesn't have to be like I
(49:03):
make mistakes. It's not the opposite.
It's I'm allowed to make mistakes.
So simply creating an exception to the rule rules are really
useful. But if you are not allowed to
bend to break the rules, they become a prison.
So none of my rules are a problem.
None of the rules that built thecompany, the marriage, etcetera
are a problem. The degree to which those rules
are operating without my awareness, right.
They're running Townsend, not Townsend choosing, and there's
(49:27):
no flexibility. That's what causes the pain.
That's what causes all the the mischief.
Yeah. So bringing the subconscious to
the conscious mind, I imagine like taking the effort to not
only identify, but like write these down, really get to know
(49:49):
these rules that you have and then write new rules for
yourself that they can lean intothe superpower that comes with
that rule. But maybe gives a little bit of.
Flexibility when and you said something really key you said
some really key, right, It's notabout making the old rules wrong
(50:09):
and bad and killing them right, because I believe that puts us
in opposition to the self that got us here It's about saying
that's not the only way to do it.
I have options, right? It's about having access to
other rules. And there are times when I am, I
don't make mistakes. There are times when I am
(50:30):
superior. I am.
It's all on me. There's that that's not
unuseful. There are situations where I
want that producing my thinking in the actions because it's
going to create a lot of thrust.I don't want my whole life to be
about that though. And this gets to, I think really
the heart of the issue and why it, it, it can be really
challenging for founders and frankly really successful people
(50:52):
to step into this work is there's the idea that they're
going to have to tear all this down and destroy their ego and,
and, and give it all up, you know, and, and that's why for so
many, the solution is, well, I'm, I'm not going to build.
I'll go live in a yurt and smokesomething and burn incense and
wear a, a robe. It's like, OK, but it's not what
we're made for. We're made to build shit.
(51:14):
And that's fun. You know, I get founders all the
time saying, yeah, I, I, I, I I think I need a walk away from my
company. I'm like, yeah, you don't.
We can get some different fuel running in the car.
This will actually be fun. And we'll grow it, you know, for
three more zeros, Wouldn't that be fun?
But not, not because we're not enough or needed or we got to,
but just for the joy of it, justfor the love.
(51:36):
Like that's fun man. It is my question, and this is
kind of the meta question behindthis whole podcast in this
journey. I'm I'm going on that I honestly
don't know if it's true yet. Do you think so the idea behind
this is is, you know, helping people wake up before their wake
(51:56):
up call. Do you think that you can
actually switch your fuel so that the fuel at which you're
creating from what you're building from without a wake up
call? Or is that part of the deal,
like humans are just really bad at learning shit without like,
(52:17):
some pain? And I'm, you know, I think about
it all the time. If if yeah, if humans are
capable of doing that. Yeah, well, I, I can say a
couple of things. One, I can, I can, I can assure
you it's possible. And, and I've, I've been party
to that. I've experienced that wasn't the
case for me. I had to, you know, grind
(52:38):
everything down to a nub. I can also share that that is
what I'm committed to, right? And what, and one of the, the
unique abilities or perspectivesand, and, and I think one of one
of the ways of understanding I have about this is how to speak
about it, engage with people in a way that allows their
(52:58):
identity, their ego to go, OK, we could try that, right?
Because this is to powerful, successful people, the idea of
letting that fuel go is, is terrifying.
So somebody come along saying this is the right way to do it,
but it ain't going to work, right?
It's not going to work. So there, there almost always
(53:20):
needs to be some catalytic events, right?
There got to be a glimpse, right?
If you're just grinding out and creating and and racking and
stacking, what's the problem? You have to have some awareness
to this might not go the way I think there has to be.
And what I found is almost everybody has that.
(53:42):
So if you can work in that layer, then then then great.
And I'm committed to that. I'm, it says literally my
LinkedIn profile, My, my first company cost me my, my marriage,
my money, my health, my sanity, everything.
And I'm here so people can skip that step.
And I, I hold great reverence for that's part of the journey
(54:04):
for some, right? That's not bad.
And there have been lots of people that I've initiated
conversations, started working with some even beginning to
coach. And I said, Hey, I think you
need another, you know, 5 or 6 years and then I'll be back.
Like literally, I can just, I can, I can, I can calibrate
pretty well if there's receptivity.
(54:24):
And, and, and I don't say that out of like you should be doing.
No, man, I get it. I think often if somebody had
come along, 2008 said, oh, Townsend, you know, you can
create with love, I would have thrown him out of a 27th floor
window, you know, and and laughed watching him fall down.
I get this guy out of my like, that's where I was at.
(54:47):
And that was, that was part of my experience and not
ironically, that's how I get to do the work I do.
I couldn't do the work I do if Ihadn't gone to the depths of
hell. I, I, I couldn't.
So I'm uniquely qualified on my rap sheet, you know, oh, you
(55:07):
want the infidelity, you want the drug.
Like, yeah, I got all those merit badges.
I'm uniquely qualified to serve somebody on the other side of
that, I'm, I'm also uniquely qualified to say, hey, we could
avoid that. I'm also uniquely qualified to
say, yeah, by the way, it wasn'tall bad.
There was a lot of fun I had. So have at it, man.
I'll be there, You know, when you scrape the bottom.
So I, I, I'm a stand for the possibility that we can avoid
(55:30):
that. And, you know, there's plenty of
motivation. And then ultimately it's up to,
well, I just say it's above my pay grade.
People are ready when they're ready.
Yeah, the timing thing is so interesting and, and it's I'm
with you. There's certainly periods of my
life that I think some of the things I'm learning now and
(55:54):
maybe slowly trying to pass on to some others.
I, I would not have been receptive to.
You know, when I was grinding, there was only a goal post.
That's the only thing that mattered.
We were going to, you know, score the goal.
The thing was going to happen. And it's, it's funny, I don't
know if you find this with clients or even yourself, but a
(56:16):
lot of the things I'm like learning or, or writing about or
thinking about, they, they feel like these almost trite, like
Disney movie fucking things thatwe've been told 10,000 times in
10,000 different ways. But you can't receive the
(56:37):
message without, you know, it's just information.
I think you said it, you know, there's information, but people
want transformation and you're not able to actually absorb the
transformational part of the information until you hit this
certain, certain point. I I find it interesting.
I well, you said it well, yeah, I've seen that on 100 T-shirts.
(57:00):
And then one day it meant something, right.
Here's something I want to say, right.
We asked the question, is the fall avoidable?
Yes. No.
Maybe so. I don't know.
What's really important to me isthat we don't think about even
that as something that shouldn'thave happened.
(57:23):
Right? Like, the idea of can you avoid
it presupposes it should have been avoided, right?
And we had this idea that life should be a compilation of all
the things we love and are proudof.
It's like, well, last time I checked, it's a spectrum, man.
This is the human experience. We are spiritual beings having a
(57:44):
human experience. I think about that literally,
right? I am energy.
I am light. I am the universe.
I bought a ticket to the amusement park called Planet
Earth. And when I was planning my trip,
you know, I was picking out the rides and my rides were, you
know, founder and growth and drug use and divorce.
Like, you know, that's why we'rehere.
(58:07):
We're not here to sit on a Lotuspedal and chant.
And right. I mean, maybe some people are,
but the human experience is, is the full spectrum.
So the idea that we should or could opt out of things that
they somehow shouldn't have happened, I don't buy it.
Like I celebrate everything thatoccurred and there were times
(58:30):
when it was incredibly painful to me.
But that that love and acceptance of what occurred as
regardless have I felt about it exactly what was supposed to be
happening. That was my journey.
I didn't take a wrong turn. I didn't get off the path that
was my path. So even that infusing our life
(58:53):
with that idea, right? I'll say this to people all the
time, you've never made a mistake, you've never screwed it
up, you've never got it wrong. I know you think you did.
And to me, there's a great deal of peace in that because if I
look at my life as a series of mistakes or narrow escapes or,
you know, close calls right out the rearview mirror, the car
(59:16):
well out the front, I got to worry.
I got to stay alert and, you know, navigate.
But if I say, yeah, no, literally everything that
happened, that happened the way it was supposed to happen, it
was never going to happen another way.
And it was perfect. Regardless of how I felt about
it, regardless of how much of a mess.
I mean, well, not only does thatcreate a lot of peace in the
(59:36):
present, it says, well, everything's going to be OK in
the future. So what I have is, is a great
deal of peace that everything's OK, Everything's OK Now.
That doesn't mean I'll feel OK or I'll like it.
I'll be happy, but I'm here for the I'm here for the full band
man, the full spectrum, the whole experience.
Totally. Yeah, I often have this thought
(59:59):
experiment when I'm thinking of,you know, doing some deeper
reflection, thinking about deathand, you know, aging and all
this, all this stuff. And I've kind of come to think
that when you're truly like on your, your deathbed and you're
kind of going through the. The movie of your life, like
you're not just going to miss oror want to have just one more
(01:00:25):
experience of like all the good shit you're going to think about
all the most human shit you wentthrough.
Like, you're going to want to feel that like crazy, messy
heartbreak you had 'cause that was like, so human.
And when you're about to lose the human experience, you're
gonna crave, like, just break myheart one more time, you know,
like, throw me in the deep end one more time and make me feel
(01:00:47):
alive. So it's.
It's interesting, Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, I was watching the other night, the movie Click
with Adam Sandler, where he's got the magic remote.
It's a it's such a great movie. It's a perfect metaphor for
this. Like if we think life's about
skipping all the crappy stuff, maybe why, what, what if we love
(01:01:10):
that too? I, I, I, I have a simple
declaration, and that is each moment teaches me to joyfully
transform judgement into love orfear into love.
And I mean that literally. Each moment is an opportunity to
transform a judgement I have or a fear about the present, past
(01:01:30):
or future into love. So I have a thought of, oh man,
that was a lot of money to spendon that divorce.
I'm going to love that. That's that's an opportunity.
That's a little, you know, nugget of gold the universe just
gave me as an opportunity to turn a judgement of something
into love. Like I'm always looking through
(01:01:51):
the past not to find fault or blame, but but am I am I loving
it enough? Have I come to resolution with I
love that too. Like, what if we just live life
that way? That'd be pretty damn cool.
Yeah, you get to be like a a time traveller that's just
transmuting all the tougher things from the the past into
(01:02:13):
into a better future. Man, I like that.
I have one final question as we we sort of wrap this up and
thank you again for the time. I really, really enjoyed this
conversation. Yeah, man.
So if I could fly you back to yourself at at 2008, things are
(01:02:34):
things are pretty wonky, you know, staring down the barrel
of, you know, bankruptcy, the divorce is going.
You're just you're in it, man. You're really in it.
And you could, you know, say a couple of sentences to to that
version, who's who's going through this huge kind of wake
up call that what would you say?Like there's literally, you
(01:03:04):
know, all these different thoughts coming through, but I
would just tell him I love him, you know, and I wouldn't even be
doing it for him, right? I'm not trying to change him.
I'm not trying to fix him. I'm not trying to get him on the
(01:03:26):
none of that. Like, it's funny, the question
gets me emotional. I would, I would say thank you.
That's that's the truth. I would say thank you.
Right. Like from your thank you for
all. Thank you for going through all
this shit, man. It works out great.
And we wouldn't, we wouldn't be doing this without this.
(01:03:48):
So, dude, respect. Thank you.
Yeah. Well, I love that answer.
Yeah, I love that answer. Yeah, without, without him going
through that pain. You're not here living this
beautiful. I'm not me, I'm not serving.
I'm, I'm worthless, right? I'm, I'm not useful to anybody,
(01:04:12):
right? I mean no offense, but like, who
wants to sit across from somebody who's had a perfect
life and what the fuck? You got to learn from him and,
and maybe that's fine. I'm not, I'm not disparaging
that. I'm just saying I'm, I'm here to
serve others and I can't serve others with a, you know, with a
clean, clean slate and, and no black marks on my record.
(01:04:34):
You know, my pain, my pain. This is not my expression.
My pain is my purpose. My pain is my purpose.
And it's, it's turning that paininto pure love and joy and just
sharing the possibility of that.Yeah, yeah.
He he, he took the licks. Yeah, Yeah, he took the beat and
(01:04:55):
then. Probably.
He had hit some destructive fun along the way.
It was. It was great fun.
I got great stories. Some of them are even true.
Yeah, I love it. Well, man, thanks for sitting
down with me today. That was that was super fun and
appreciate you being just honest, transparent with with
(01:05:17):
your story. I know a lot of people are going
to resonate and I'm excited to check out your book.
I feel like I I mastered the howof doing and it's time to get a
new new fucking book. The how of being is is very much
said. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Awesome brother. Thanks for having me.
(01:05:38):
Appreciate you. And to all our listeners, see
you all next week.
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