Transcript

Joe Mills: What shared experiences motivate today’s business leaders to keep growing and how have their unique stories impacted the way they enable others to do the same? I’m Joe Mills,

Reid Morris: and I’m Reid Morris,

Joe Mills: and we’re investigating what and who it takes to build companies that foster growth in people and business.

Reid Morris: Then we’re sharing those stories with you.

Joe Mills: This is 1,000 Stories, an original show from Element Three.

What do we wanna get out of John?

Reid Morris: You know, I think we’ve uncovered kind of an interesting narrative over these last two conversations. And I think we had a little bit of a moment of clarity the last time we chatted.

Around this idea, it’s almost a nature versus nurture thing, but not necessarily. Like the different environments that these people grew up in and the different experiences they had over the last, however many years of their career and personal. With Darren and his competitive background and his family life, and Tiffany and her whole storyline of before E3 and her time here, but just the different environments that these people have been in that they all ended up having this shared mindset from these different reasons.

And ended up in the same place and sort of diving deeper into that.

Joe Mills: Yeah. It’s interesting. Cause I feel like Darren and Tiffany are in really different camps on that. Darren, like doesn’t seeks out what group of people will pull me and force me to g better, like almost ignite my competitive edge in a way that requires me to then like advance myself.

And then Tiffany comes at it from this more intrinsic. I think natural, just like to myself, I’m only happiest, most peaceful, at my best when I’m finding a new frontier for myself to go find like away from other people. It’s really interesting. I think those are two different camps and I’ll be interested if John is, is he in the same boat as one of them or is he something completely different?

I don’t know, like what gets him motivated? How does he chase growth himself?

Reid Morris: I mean, before we were actually recording this, we’ve chatted a bit about how there’s a military background there to dive into. And just the fact that he’s this individual that uprooted his family and moved to the Midwest for this company that in theory doesn’t have a lot of awareness out there in Arizona, right? Is like the place to be? Yeah. So essentially why?

Joe Mills: It’s also really interesting. Like to us, we, we keep saying like you uprooted, your family made this big move. It might be really normal to John because John lived in Italy.

John lived in the United States. His dad traveled around with the military. So his family moved. Like, he might just be like, Is that weird? His reaction is like, is that different? That’s my life like his whole life so back to your point about nurture versus nature, it could just be really natural for him to be like this isn’t really that big of a deal.

I can live anywhere. I’ve lived everywhere. 

Reid Morris: And I think as much as there’s that whole background of why he came to do what he did, but there’s this other layer of, you can very clearly see from the outside he just chooses to take. A lot of difficult things. I mean, six kids is no small task on its own.

There’s a lot. So there’s the family side of things, but also coming in and having to rebuild a team within Element Three. There’s just so much going on there and yet he’s somebody who has this, like even keeled, unbreakable…

Joe Mills: John always is the same. Like you get the same, John, regardless of the scenario, which is always people like that are, there’s a lot to learn from.

Especially somebody who’s like, I try to be very even and show up the same way all the time. And typically I try to show up in like a very happy go lucky, lots of energy, sort of Energizer bunny sense, but I do not have the mastery of that experience. That John is like the same guy when he walks into every room.

It’s the same, same over and over. 

Reid Morris: I aspire to that same thing, but I give myself a C minus.

Joe Mills: Well you’re ahead of me.

Reid Morris: Okay. I’ll take it. I don’t believe you, but I’ll take it.

Joe Mills: You’re ahead of me. So yeah, I think that’s great. I think learning from John, like, does he see that as growth or not? 

Reid Morris: And this is somebody who led an entire organization the past. So I feel like those are a couple sort of avenues that we can go down in this conversation is, you went from owning your own and how has that played into his overarching storyline of where he is today? Yeah, his family life is big for him and that has to be available in the overall equation as well.

And then yeah, that like military background moving around, there’s so many different things that you can already sort of see the beginning of what that might be. But I feel like those are sort of the strings we need to pull on that conversation. 

Joe Mills: Yeah. Good point. I even think about that. Those are good strings to pull on.

Awesome.

John, welcome to the show

John Gough: Thanks Joe. It’s great to be here.

Joe Mills: I’m very excited for this conversation. We’ll probably touch some professional. We’ll touch some personal, but I wanna start with this one. Right now as you look out, it doesn’t have to be professionally, personally, whatever, just the first thing that comes to your mind when I ask you, where are you trying to grow right now?

John Gough: In the same areas of my life I think that I’m probably always trying to grow in. I don’t know if there’s a right now distinction that I’m making there. My most important role that I have as a father. I’ve got six kids. And my oldest is 12. My youngest is gonna turn two in September.

And so I have a lot of kids that are in a really formative moment. So being there for them in the right way is critically important to me all the time. There’s a couple of preteens who are learning some preteen things about decision making and about who they want to be and the way that they’re gonna make decisions and think about things.

And that’s really interesting and hard. And then there’s a five year old and the seven year old who just wanna play games all the time. And then there’s a baby who just loves attention and loves time. And so growing as a father to them is important. My relationship with my wife is really important to me.

We’ve been married for 15 years this year and so continuing to develop that ability to be the person that she needs me to be, and that to communicate well and to grow as a husband is important. As a business leader, that’s a really fun and hard challenge at the moment. As you know, I helped start a business more than 10 years ago and grew that, and was really proud of the success that we had.

And then when I left that business and came to Element Three, starting within an organization and learning the culture and growing into a place of leadership here at Element Three has been a whole set of new things to learn where I brought in things that I knew and cared about, and now have to find my way to add to them and add to the strategic capabilities of the organization as I help build the team and help steer where we’re going next. 

Joe Mills: I’m gonna take a curve ball on you then if you thought I was gonna go business, I’m actually much more interested in the comment that you made have around, I have two kids who are in the preteen and starting to learn preteen things. And that’s hard.

You don’t have to give specifics, but can you just unpack the ‘that’s hard’ part of it?

John Gough:  Yeah. It’s been a different amount of time for you and me since we were preteens, that was longer ago for me than it was for you. But recall your mind to the time where you thought that you, and I think this was in the past, I don’t know this for sure.

Joe Mills: Uh, oh, this could be a current situation for me. 

John Gough: Yeah. Where you thought that you had it all figured out and you could not understand why your parents kept trying to get you to do things or to try to explain things to you that were so obvious that were so clear that you were just gonna do ’em the way you were gonna do ’em because you were smart enough and you were capable enough.

And why would they condescend to talk to you the way that they’re talking to you? and to my boys’ credit, they get over that pretty quickly. But I laugh with my wife all the time and we remind each other that like preteen boys, their brains are not fully developed and they don’t work all the way. And so sometimes we joke that they need a frontal lobe slap when they’re just doing stuff that makes absolutely no human sense.

And it’s because they’re not thinking and they think they’re thinking, but they’re not. 

Joe Mills: Have you always been that good at keeping perspective?

John Gough:  No. Okay. No.

Joe Mills: Where’d it come from?

John Gough: I think that people would probably say that I’m an old soul, which is like a nice way to say that I’m kind of a killjoy. It has been true that I have always felt like I knew those things that other people wanted me to have perspective about.

So like what I mean is when you are around a person who, like an empty nester and they say, you really need to really cherish this time with your young children, because they’re not always gonna be there that has always been present to me for some reason. It’s very infrequent that I lose sight of the fact that my kids are going to leave, even my two year old.

I know that 18 years from now, I’m gonna be an empty nester too. And it’s very clear to me that I’m gonna miss my kids. They have been a huge part of my life and having them move out is gonna be like a hard thing for me and for my wife and that is ever present for me. And I think it informs why I center my time with them and their experience.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I do a lot of that wrong. I screw that up. I’m sure constantly. And I probably work more than I should. I make all of those mistakes, but I’m also just keenly aware of the importance of those things. And I try to center that as I can. 

Joe Mills: Your kids are obviously a huge part of your life. It’s the first place you went when I asked you what you’re growing into. Did you always know, like I’m definitely going to be a dad?

John Gough:  Yeah. I had no idea that I would have this many kids, I’d be a dad this many times this many times. No, I thought I wanted three kids and my wife was sure that she wanted more than that.

It sort of evolved naturally. And we had several kids and we didn’t feel like our family was complete. It’s a weird thing to try and explain other than to say it didn’t feel done. And then we had our last son in September of 2020, and then it did, and it was sort of like a light switch. No, that’s it. That’s the whole crew.

Joe Mills: Can you unpack that at all? I’m gonna push on one particular point. One thing somebody said to me, and this is somebody who has no kids. So I’m very curious about your perspective on this, cause you’ve been a parent now for 12 years. One of the things I’ve always heard is, Hey, don’t have kids expecting them to fulfill you.

And you said it just didn’t feel like we were done yet. And then it did. What happened?

John Gough: Well, I guess I would probably explain it with a counter example. Like there are people who know that they never want to have kids, and I accept that completely without question. They just know that they don’t want kids.

That’s not how they’re gonna live their life. And I think that’s more than valid. Like even to say it’s valid seems silly because there’s no question that it’s completely acceptable. And I think my experience is maybe the counterpoint that proves the rule is like, it just felt like the right size family.

It felt like the right amount of people. And it felt like the right group of people. And I’m not sure that I can explain that feeling without sort of getting into my faith and the way that I feel like the world is understood about how people are together. I will say that as I had more kids with my wife, it became clearer and clearer that every one of them was different from the moment they were born, that people who have a kid, they think they know a lot more about raising kids than people with two kids, because it becomes immediately apparent that whatever you thought you knew about kids, that you sort of generalized into the world because you have one, is immediately like undercut by the fact that now this new person has entered the world and upended all of your expectations.

And so having more kids is like history at times, but it doesn’t exactly repeat itself. 

Joe Mills: Can you touch on the faith part of that? You said, I can’t explain this without going into my faith a little bit.

Can you touch on it? 

John Gough: Part of my faith is a belief that the way that God directs the world is through feelings and impressions that people get. And so understanding that the things that you are inclined to do or that you’re impressed to do is a way that, that higher power speaks to you. and that if you listen carefully, if you pay attention to those promptings, that you develop a sensitivity to it, and that when those inclinations are good, when you are inclined to do good things, that you do them immediately, that you try hard to follow those impressions, then you are acting in accordance with the will of God.

There’s a lot of nuance to that, but I think that you could have probably fairly say that leaning into your inclination to do good will always lead to good. 

Joe Mills: There’s an incredible amount of self-awareness that you seem to have, even in saying this, feeling, this intuition, a lot of people question their gut implicitly.

Maybe, because they don’t really know what it’s saying. Things sort of talk themselves into thinking either side of, well, is this my gut feeling or is that my gut feeling or is this my intuition? You talked about the awareness around, we just didn’t feel like our family was complete yet and I always knew I wanted to have kids, which was really a feeling.

And then you talked about, this is a being in touch with the direction that you’re being pushed in and allowing it to be the thing that comes out of you. Where do you think this self-awareness came from? I would say most people lack it in the degree that you have. 

John Gough: Thank you for the compliment. I think that it’s cultivated.

I think most people have a sensitivity to it, and I think that most people are afraid of it in the way that you describe I am. I’ll certainly question it regularly, constantly. Am I doing the right thing? Did I say the right thing? Am I in the right spot? Am I making the right decision? Am I living the way that I should?

Is this the best of all possible worlds that could exist for me and for my family and for the people that I’m trying to work hard for? And there’s no guarantee about any of. And I think for me, it’s been a slow learning and opportunity to become comfortable with the fact that I don’t believe that there is a perfect version of any of this.

I don’t think that there is one right answer. I don’t think that we can confidently say that we did the hundred percent right thing. I think the opportunity to choose right is so broad. Right? And I think that there’s so many good right answers to all of the things that we could be doing. I know that this is an area where I have experienced a lot of weakness in the past, and it’s forced me to kind of step into some uncomfortable choices and decisions to say that there is really not a right answer.

And I spent a lot of time previously and probably still do, worrying about what is exactly the right next thing that I should do. What is the right answer? And so coming to believe that it’s really probably a set of right answers always. And the best one, I mean, I would hesitate to even say that there is often one best one.

There’s just so many right ways to proceed in most situations that you’re in. That it really comes down to, are you going to choose to act or are you going to choose to not act more often than not? You can act poorly, right? Like there are certainly ways that you can screw things up. But my experience has been that acting with good intent is more often preferable to doing nothing.

Joe Mills: You talked about good intent and you’ve mentioned leaning into the good option and making the right choice, which typically means there’s a filter system that you’re making decisions through. And I imagine it develops over time and maybe even evolves over time, but like what’s yours? How do you start to narrow that down to direct, yeah, I know I have a lot of good options, but let’s define good for a second. What’s your filter for what’s good? And what’s not defining good is?

John Gough: I mean, I think that that is a really important part of this that people often overlook and we talk about it in a business context a lot, right?

And so part of my work is helping organizations to find success. Right? And so like when people come in and they want to do marketing with us, one of the things that we wanna be really explicit about is like, what does success look like? What does victory look like? How do you win? And how will you know that you won and failing to really carefully examine that and define that upfront often leads to real disappointment.

And misalignment in work. And I would say the same thing is true in life. And it’s way harder to do it in your life to define what good looks like. I would say that the two things that have guided me on this have been one that I think actually business provides a really useful framework for which is values.

So when you talk about like company values, if you have any, that mean anything to the organization and many organizations do and most organizations don’t, but if you are able to articulate the three to five things that really matter to you over time, that’s extremely clarifying in terms of what good looks like.

Are you living your values? Remember, probably about eight years ago, I made a new year’s resolution to myself, which was this year I’m going to live my values really explicitly. And when I told people about that, they said, well, that’s weird, cause it feels like you’re a good person. You live your values.

And it was really hard for me to articulate

no, what I really mean is that I’m going to be really disciplined about making choices in my life that align with what I say I care about. That’s a pillar for me is, are you living your values? And then the second one is one that’s actually pretty well backed up by psychology and it says that the greatest way to live a happy life is to work to minimize regret.

Which feels like maybe a little bit counterintuitive at first, but that idea of making decisions that over the course of time will cause the least amount of regret in your life is actually a pretty predictable way to live a happy life over time. And so if you are doing those two things, living your values and you’re working to minimize regret, you’re making decisions with those two paradigms in mind.

That seems to, I mean, I’m not done yet, but at the moment I will say so far that seems to be working out pretty well. 

Joe Mills: You have a lot of frameworks. I know this from working with you, but also even today, as you talk about, Hey, this is a pillar, this is a pillar. Defining what victory looks like. And I know some of your background in terms of your dad was in the military.

Can you just touch on that for a little bit? Where do you think this framework thinking came from? I think you’ve mentioned to me before that you and your dad would spend time talking about this and this terminology came from the military. Just what was growing up like for you? With a dad who probably was really structured and, but you guys moved and like, I just love to hear about where did it come from?

John Gough: Yeah, my dad, he was a civilian that worked for the military. So he wasn’t enlisted, never an officer or anything like that. But the answer to your question is it definitely came from him and observing my dad as a very careful thinker, all of his life. And I think that that’s one of the qualities that is probably defining in him is his careful, thoughtful approach to everything that he did.

So what was growing up? Like we joked that there was a lot of long answers to short questions. My dad is one of my very best friends. I love him with all my heart and it was hard when you’re 12 and like my 12 year old knows a lot more than his dad. And so it was hard when I was 12 and I knew a lot more than my dad and he would try and explain things to me.

I was probably 18, 20 years old by the time I figured out that, oh, this actually is probably the smartest man that I’ve ever met and maybe you will ever meet. And so paying close attention to the weight that he thought about things and his careful methodical approach. And he was always reading. He was always looking for inputs.

After his last job, he went and he took a certificate program at Oxford and he has been taking graduate level courses in history and he will never stop learning.  It’s how he experiences the world is through learning and observing. And that was formative for me. 

Joe Mills: Where were you when you were 12? Like what part of the world were you in?

John Gough: When I was 12, we had just moved back from Italy, where we had lived for two years and we were living in Seattle.

Joe Mills: Was Italy the biggest move?

John Gough: Yeah, Italy was, yeah, the biggest move. So we lived there from when I was nine to when I was 11 and then he spent a couple years in DC when I was in high school. And then after that, we all moved to Hawaii for a year for another assignment of his.

Joe Mills: You were like all over the place.

John Gough: Yeah. Not, not as much as some military kids, but I certainly got to, I got to see some wonderful things. Yeah. 

Joe Mills: How much do you think being in Italy, seeing how they approach life during like a formative portion of your life versus traveling when you’re 25 or 35 or 45, and then Hawaii different style of life to continental United States, Seattle versus DC, especially Seattle before it was like Amazon Seattle.

Did you observe or notice different ways that people approached the world in general?

John Gough: I don’t know if I would’ve framed it that way, but it had a huge impact on me seeing a fully different culture and living largely in that culture. So I went to a department of defense school while I was there. So I was an American school with American teachers.

But we didn’t live on base. So we had Italian landlords and we would shop at the market and my parents were great about taking us to museums and we would go regularly out into the country and travel around Europe. But I was really keenly aware of the fact that there were a lot of people who lived in the world that were not Americans.

When I turned 19, I spent a couple years in Georgia working with Spanish speaking, Latino people and living with them kind of every day and talking to them. And that experience a lot of those people who I love deeply, good friends of mine, were illegal immigrants. And so they had come over at great personal risk and they were working in the United States, but having a much, much different experience and their kids were growing up in a much different way than I had grown up.

And so that was really impactful to me too, to see that there’s a lot of lived experience, even right here that’s way different than mine. 

Joe Mills: It’s interesting. I am a classic type, A individual. I’m sure you can feel this from me.

John Gough: I wouldn’t have guessed that. 

Joe Mills: And I think I have a lot. I think I have a lot of answers to things and I mean, I remember even in my microcosm, this is the most classic privileged American statement ‘during my study abroad’. I remember showing up to Spain, I studied abroad and Barcelona, and I remember showing up for Spain, probably peak cockiness level of my life.

You know, just like, yeah. I figured this out. Coming outta school. Got this fancy job. I’m gonna sell wine. Uh, whatever I’m showing up here to finish my degree.

John Gough:How old were you? 20?

Joe Mills: I just turned 22.

John Gough: Isn’t it amazing how 22 year white men just know everything? Oh my gosh. I mean, like we, we just, we just had it figured out back then.

Joe Mills:I have this feeling you weren’t quite like that.

John Gough: I knew a lot. I knew a lot when I was 22, I’ve learned, I’ve learned that I knew way less than I thought I did.

Joe Mills: I have a hard time imagining you acting the way that I acted as a 22 year old, but I mean, even inside of that 75 period day, you know, just short enough, so you don’t need a visa to travel.

You know, like the most classic of study abroad experiences, even inside of that, I remember coming back to the states and it was like, oh, there’s another way to do this that I had not thought about before. It really shifted what I wanted to do. Like an incredible amount. And so I imagine you with all of these different experiences, having a, from like an early age perspective, like almost like a, it didn’t need to dawn on you, that there was a different way to do things because you saw a different way to do things all the time.

John Gough: I think that was sort of the gift that my parents were trying to give me. My dad tells me now that what his measurement for success on that trip, you know, when he was basically my age now, so almost 40 when he decided to take his family to Europe, to live for several years. And he said, by the time that my kids are out of high school, if they’ve forgiven me for what I’ve done to them, then I’ll have felt like it was okay.

I’ll know that was okay. And it didn’t take that long. It certainly didn’t take that long. I will say, honestly, that we weren’t that excited when we left. We had no idea what we were getting into, but I think that was one of the things that he wanted us to understand really early on. 

Joe Mills: Did that have anything to do with you deciding to move from, because most of your life is west coast. You and your immediate family were in Phoenix before you came to Element Three, correct?

John Gough: Yeah. So I married my wife and she was born and raised in Phoenix and we lived there for probably another gosh, 11 years after that. And then we moved to Utah for about eight months and then we came to Element Three.

Joe Mills: So, yeah and your family’s still out west, correct?

John Gough:  Her family’s out west and my family’s in Mississippi.

Joe Mills: Oh, you’re not in Mississippi. Okay. So why Indianapolis? I mean, why the Midwest in general, but then why Indianapolis? 

John Gough: We had a couple criteria when we moved my wife and I talked about it for a long time.

And we had agreed that when it was time to leave Phoenix, we knew it was time to go. It was another one of those moments of inspiration, frankly, is she and I were sitting at church and we were listening to the speaker. We have no idea what they were talking about or why. And we both got this really strong impression that it was time to.

It was just time to go. We walked home from church that day and we said to each other, that the weirdest thing happened to me today. And I don’t know why, but like, it’s time for us to go, to both of us. 

Joe Mills: And then did you, had you been planning, like we’re gonna move at some point?

John Gough: We had talked about it. We had known that we weren’t gonna be there forever.

Why is that? She was born and raised there. And she knew that she wanted to have other experiences to see other parts of the world and live in other places and figure out what that was like. And we were busy raising our kids in Phoenix and we had great friends, people who we really loved, obviously her family still there.

And so we knew that leaving there was gonna be hard, but also that it was just an important thing for us to be able to experience together. And it didn’t happen like a light switch after that sort of moment of clarity for us. It honestly, it was like two years later when we finally left, because we had things that we had to wind down and to become clear about together and where we wanted to go.

It’s one of the big ones. And so, yeah.

Joe Mills: What was the criteria?

John Gough: Yeah, so we knew we wanted seasons. Uh, Phoenix has two. Very hot and slightly less, very hot. So seasons were really important. Good schools for the kids. We knew that obviously that’s a huge criteria for families and then work.

That felt important to me, but she’s staying at home currently. She’s a physical therapist, but she’s not working at the moment with them. A lot of kids at home, she’s working really hard. She’s working harder than I do. And I tell her. 

Joe Mills:  So you’ve made the decision. We’re gonna leave Phoenix.

I want seasons. I want good schools, but you found Element Three on like reached out to us on LinkedIn. And you said it was important that I had work. That felt important to me. Look, you and I have joked about how hard it is to differentiate marketing firms from one another. Yeah. Where did the reach out come from?

John Gough: Yeah. So when I left my previous agency, I really explicitly left because actually I wanted to work in academia. That was always a goal of mine and sort of still is in some ways to be involved in that. But we left at the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020. And there were about three months of 2020 that going and doing that seemed like a perfectly fine idea.

And then there were a lot of months of 2020 that it was really unclear what they were going to do exactly. And marketing for universities seemed particularly hard.

Joe Mills: Here come to school, it’s all online, but pay us the same amount of money. 

John Gough: Yeah, exactly. It’s a hard sell. It’s a hard sell. And there’s also some demographic changes that are happening right now that make university enrollment really, really hard.

There are just fewer people who are going to enroll in undergrad in the next three to five years, three to 10 years. And so there are a lot of small schools that are gonna have a really hard time and a lot of them that are frankly just gonna shut down. And so we were evaluating that landscape and thinking about what to do next.

And I was really clear that if I was gonna go back into a marketing agency environment, that I needed to really have a lot of confidence in the leadership. And I needed to be in a place where the culture really mattered. That sort of feels like sometimes that’s kind of trite to say it’s like, yeah, culture matters in an organization.

And for me, my experience was having built a company and seeing the difference between when we were really explicit about our values and our purpose, and very aligned around that in contrast to when we were just sort of figuring that out and then sort of like growing it organically, when you had that clarity, everything else was so much easier.

Clarity is a multiplier. And so when I was evaluating where I was gonna go work, that was one of my big criteria. And one of the things that really stood out immediately to me about Element Three, they talk about the way they work and the way they live in a way that resonates with me, that I recognize, I see where these people are coming from.

I know the framework that they’re working from, I want to talk to them and see if they actually walk the walk and not just talk to talk. 

Joe Mills: There’s a sort of inverse relationship between like, we really care about our people and the amount that they actually care about other people. So as you go into that interview, are you like I’m gonna sniff this out?

John Gough: I would say that there’s sort like a Goldilock situation, right? There’s like the companies that explicitly don’t care about it and say nothing about it. Like, you don’t need to really figure that out. They’ve done the work for you. And then the people who talk too much about it and those are also ones that you need to be a little bit wary of.

And so it’s like finding the porridge just right sort of question. I think all of my conversations felt. We could have talked for another 30 minutes with all those people that I mentioned. And I think that was probably one of the green lights to me that, yeah, these people really are the real deal. Like it’s a good sign when you run out of time to have an enjoyable conversation with somebody. 

Joe Mills: You strike me as someone who has earned a lot of freedom in your life. And when I say earned, I don’t mean like I’ve accomplished all this stuff so I’m free. I mean, like you’ve given yourself the permission to move in a direction and recognize that it, number one is not forever.

And two, there’s many good directions. So why would I worry about getting the perfect one?

John Gough: Yeah, I think that’s interesting that you’ve characterized that way cause I think that there are probably many people who would look at my life and say that guy’s pretty much strapped down.

Joe Mills: That would be me. I would look at your life and be like that guy’s from the outside, like man, six kids. I can’t imagine something more strapping down than six kids.

John Gough: Well, it’s hard. And in terms of like ability to pick up and go do literally anything on a whim, like if that’s how you’re gonna define freedom, then no, I have very little of that. But if you define freedom, as in, are you doing the thing that aligns with your values?

Are you doing the thing that you said you care about? and you’re doing it intentionally, then, yeah, I feel like I’ve designed the life that I said I wanted.

Joe Mills: I could talk to John for hours. We actually went a little bit over on this one and I could talk to John for a very long time. He’s just interesting.

Reid Morris: Yeah. He’s a person who, when you talk to him, when you are around him, like we are for work, that you can just sort of feel his outlook on life. And the sort of like, I don’t wanna say refined, but he just has this understanding of what is important to him, how he needs to show up all of these things that he just kind of has figured out.

And it’s really interesting to be exposed to.

Joe Mills: There’s an enviable amount of I’m gonna say self-confidence, but oftentimes when somebody says that phrase, I feel like we take it in an almost like a negative light where it becomes like I’m the best. And I know I’m the best. It’s not what I mean. John’s just secure in who he is and in how he approaches his life.

And it’s awesome. It’s just like emanates from him. It’s like very refreshing. 

Reid Morris: We talked about it a little bit before we were on around how we would talk about business, or you would start to go down this business avenue when we’re talking about his motivations, because he is this successful person in the business space that he brings it back to family and those motivations.

And he’s somebody who just has that figured out of like, this is the motivator behind what I do and a lot of people don’t have that clarity in their drivers. I mean, I know I’m still figuring those things out.

Joe Mills: Yeah. well, that’s what really interesting about his, I said this to him on air as well, is just to contrast his perspective on growth Tiffany’s perspective on growth Darren’s perspective on growth and we’re seeing a lot of differences there, but I think they all come back to this very similar sense of, I’ve made a choice in my life to move in this direction and like this falls into that point of my life. I don’t know that I know the commonality across them yet.

Reid Morris: One thing that is just sort of hitting me in this moment.

There’s this level of introspection this sitting with yourself and figuring out what’s important to you that even though they have different motivators, I feel like the three people that we’ve talked to so far in Tiffany and Darren and John are people that you can see that they’ve spent the time thinking about what’s important to them and what drives them?

And there is that thing of like, you can go through life and just like shotgun blast of putting your energy into a bunch of things and take on challenges and say yes to everything, but this stepping back and taking the time to be like, what out of these things is fulfilling me?

What out of my experiences are my drivers? Like, I feel like they’ve all done some intentional work there. And I think that might be something that was sort of a piece of, you know, as we’re talking to different people over the course of the season, looking out for these people’s expressions and stories around how they’ve spent dedicated time thinking about what’s important to them versus just doing.

Joe Mills: Yeah. John was the one who I felt like has the most intentional intuition and grooming that. When I went through dream fuel’s mindset course, that’s the company Kevin Bailey owns, there actually is a whole section on intuition and how to develop it. So it might be interesting to have him on, to talk about that at some point, because John is like intentionally in touch with, what am I being told to do?

He actually talked about, this is how you connect with a greater being, whether they call it  God, whatever you subscribe to from that nature, you feel it, it’s not a, and then the cloud’s part and somebody just says a word, you need to go move to Indianapolis. It’s like, we feel like, oh yeah, we need to move, it’s time to move. But yeah, I really like your parallel there between like, they all do the inter work so that they can know how to act out in the world.

Reid Morris: Yeah. I think Kevin’s conversation will be interesting if we ended up talking to him later on, because he’s essentially taken a mindset and productized it.

Joe Mills: That’s a really interesting conversation.