Welcome to Career Cratchers, where we tell the stories of those who are not content to weigh around following rules and hoping for good things to happen. Great careers aren't found, they're forged. Time to crash the party. All right, today on Career Cratchers, I'm really excited to have Jeff Sandefur with me.
And Jeff, I was actually just thinking back, when I first launched Craxis in like 2013, I don't even know how we got connected, but somehow we had a phone call, and I still remember to this day, it was a really interesting phone call, really valuable to me as I was getting that started, and you had already started acting MBA. But just by way of introduction to the listeners, Jeff is a very successful entrepreneur who kind of, I don't know if this is how I would frame it, maybe you can correct me, kind of the first half of his life, he's building incredibly successful business endeavors, and then decided to turn his attention to helping more people become entrepreneurs, more or less, and think like entrepreneurs, and find their kind of entrepreneurial journey by forming acting MBA, which is a very, very well-regarded kind of alternative to a traditional business school. And then from there, has founded Acton Academy, which are all across the country, and these are K-12 schools that are a wonderful alternative to that approach. I'm actually on the board of the Acton Academy in Washington, D.C.
that a friend of mine started. No, that's great. That's wonderful. Yeah, absolutely.
So that's who Jeff is. And Jeff, I want to let you kind of just freestyle. I only really have two high-level questions, and I'm sure I'll stop you with a few small ones here in there, but question one is just, what is your own career journey? And question two is, at Acton MBA and Acton Academy, how do you, why do you think it's so important for people to find, I've heard you use this phrase, their hero's journey, and how do you, how have you helped people to do that?
So you can start with whichever one you want to start with. Sure. Well, the story about me is not that interesting. I'll start there, but we'll keep that one.
Oh, come on. It has to be interesting. No, I mean, it's truly not very interesting to me. I'll say that.
Okay. So I was born and raised in West Texas in a small town called Adelaide. My father was in the oil business, and he was kind of a guy like you'd see on Doubts or on The Giant, if you favor old movies. So he was a wildcat.
He was rich one year, broke the next, but our family always lived as if we had money, because he wasn't, he once told me when I came back from business school, and I said, it was 1986, and I said, Dad, you're broke, and you're going to have to sell your airplane. And he said, son, I'll tell you one thing. I may be going to the poor house, but they better have a runway, because I'll be damned if I'm going to drive there. So he was a gambler, you know, fun guy.
My grandfather was a depression baby. So I had every penny, you know, he ever made, never spent any money, drove an old car. And I tell you that story, I was like my grandfather. So, you know, some of us are hoarders, and some of us are spenders.
My sin is the sin of hoarding. So I'm an asset fox. I'm a hoarder. You know, I'm a kid that might have had a limited stand, but I did better trading baseball cards.
You know, I was better as a trader. So I did that. My seminal, entrepreneurial moment, actually, I owe to a man named Armando. And my father had me working in oil fields, and I was this skinny white kid, you know, working among older men who were primarily Hispanic.
And a lot of men were getting minimum wage and had drug problems. But it was a rough crowd, right? So I'm working with him, and it's hot in the West Texas sun. You get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, you're in the field.
You work until you can't see anymore, which is probably 9 o'clock at night, and it's hot all day long. So all of the summer, I wanted it to rain. I just wanted one day. And one day, it finally rained, and we went back into the shack.
I knew we were going to have to go out in the field. I was going to get a day off and work in the hot sun. And Armando called me over. And while all the other men played cards and had a beer, he said, Junior.
He always called me Junior. And he didn't like me very much, by the way. And he said, Junior, you see that big pile of rocks over there? And I said, yes, sir.
And he said, I want you to move the pile of rocks from that corner over to this corner, like across the yard, like 100 yards. So I carried these great big rocks all morning. And I finally got all those rocks to the other side of the yard. And it was raining kind of lightly, and I was moving them.
And I went in thinking, gosh, it's lunchtime. I can have lunch. And I finally get to spend the rest of the day inside. And Armando said, oh, Junior, I have made a terrible mistake.
I like the rocks back where they were at first. So I spent the rest of the day moving the rocks back over. And that was actually, I don't think Armando was necessarily trying to give me a gift. But the gift was, I said then and there, I will never again work for someone else if I don't choose to.
So everybody has a boss. You have investors. You have the bank. You have your wife.
Everybody's got a boss. But I was determined from then on out I was going to choose my boss. And that was actually a great gift that Armando gave me. I wasn't ever going to carry somebody else's rocks.
That's incredible. That's like a fable or a parable. Someday your kids, your grandkids probably won't think that's true. They'll think you're making it.
I can hear Armando's words. I can hear Junior right now. Among other words, you're just going to talk to me. I've heard a handful of people I know have a career story that basically begins with a bad boss or with a bad work experience.
And sometimes just having something be so bad that suffering through something that is making you come alive is not even an option can be a gift in a way. Well, one of the things we see at the Academy of the A, which has been renamed, but we'll come to that in a minute. Oh, okay. But at the Academy of the A for years, we always teach this life and meaning course.
And you see people come in with one of three drives. And this is almost always true. Either they have kind of a father issue. They want to overcome a parent.
And it's very often a male with a father. It can be a female with a father. It can often be a tough mother. It's usually a father.
And so they want to kind of overcome. And if they do really well at about age 40, they'll probably do a lot of therapy. But at least it's a driving force to go forward. And that group tends to do pretty well, at least financially and business.
You've got a second group. These are the Navy SEALs, the Olympic athletes, and people that have had a terrible tragedy. You know, worse than anything I just described. They came out of poverty.
I mean, like real poverty. You know, they were beaten as a child. And that group has seen the worst of life. And actually, every day is a good day.
Like every day, they're not worried about risk. They're not, whatever comes, they can take it. And they tend to be actually more fun than the first group, which I fall into. They're more fun to be around.
But they're also very honest, they'll just try anything. The third group is the most interesting to me. And it makes up about 25% to the third of the group we attract. It's a group that was captain of the tennis team, you know, valedictorian, went to a prestigious college, and has never failed.
And far too often, you know, the group is living for an image or resume, because they're too scared to make a mistake. They've got too much invested in an image. And, you know, over time, we've windowed that down. We don't have many people like that in an MBA program now.
But those are the ones that worry me. Because I don't know how people can break through that image problem, investing too much in prestige. Man, that's such a powerful insight. And I don't know where, I don't know when it's too late.
Maybe it's never too late. But there is some point where just, you know, like you said, the investment in prestige, I know through running the practice program in the past, there were so many times with young people, but especially with their parents, where you would talk to a parent, and they would know. They would know their kid had the entrepreneurial spark. They're already out there running businesses, doing stuff, crushing it.
They're happy. But they were so invested, they had decided that success meant going to a certain college. And they wanted their kid to go there, even if they were depressed and miserable. And they had separated their kid's happiness from the thing that they thought represented their kid's happiness.
And, you know, it's like the status. They thought it was one and the same, but it wasn't. And they just couldn't let it go. And that's a really hard thing to do.
Well, no, in fact, it's where we see the most damage at acting academy on the K-12 side is there are parents that I'm sure mean well, but, you know, they're more worried about being successful parents than loving their kids no matter what. And so, you know, if I send Isaac to Harvard and he screws up after that, I mean, I'm sure I've made more mistakes than any dad in the world. It's like, you're going to be in therapy for something. You might as well blame me for it and get over it.
You know, you're going to have hang-ups. You're going to have a shadow. You're going to have, you know, we all these humans have it. And I'm going to love you no matter what.
You know, even if you screw up, I got your back. I mean, that's, you know, that doesn't mean you're not going to suffer consequences. I'm going to let the consequences happen to you. And that's an important thing, even for ourselves, to say, you know, whatever status I do or don't achieve, I have to still live with myself.
I have to still be happy with who I am. So you had this experience where you realized you wanted to choose your boss. How did you kind of go about from a young man, you know, getting yourself in a position where you could do that? Well, I mean, one of the things I did directly after that, which had a big impact, is I didn't want to work in an oil field anymore.
I was 13 or 14. And so the next summer, I hired all the high school football coaches and their players. And we went out and competed against these oil field roustic outgroups. So mainly painted tanks did kind of dirty work.
But instead of charging by the hour, which meant your employees just hung around all the time, we charged by the job and we changed the incentives we paid by the job. We could paint nine tanks. It took the group that I worked for with Armando three days to paint a tank. We could paint three tanks a day.
So we were nine times more productive. So we could charge two-thirds of the cost of anyone else and still have 80% profit margins. And these coaches worked, you know, they took their own trucks out there, so they didn't have very many costs. And that summer, and this was in the 1970s, but that summer we cleared $100,000 in the summer.
Wow. Which was a lot of money back then. It was still a lot of money, but it was a lot more back then. I tell that story because the thing I learned from that is that incentives matter.
Incentives matter a lot. And people don't do things just for money, but if you set the incentives opposite to what you're trying to do, like paying by the hour, you know, you attract people not interested in getting the job done and you have to manage them a lot more. So that was a big lesson. I went on to get an engineering degree at the University of Texas.
I worked for a large company for a year. Then went back to Harvard Business School. And, you know, there I learned, I thought I was pretty smart. I mean, I graduated high in my high school class.
I could outwork with people I couldn't outsmart, and I could outsmart most of the people I couldn't outwork. I got to Harvard, and it was a whole different planet. I mean, you know, there were people at HDS that worked 23 hours a day, and there were people that on my best day I couldn't keep up with intellectually. And so the lesson I learned from that was pick your competition right.
I'm going to go compete in the energy business. I'm not going to go compete, you know, against the best of the best at Harvard. I'm going to go pick a place where there are plenty of smart people, but where I can focus, have expertise, develop, you know, the knowledge of an industry and a skill. And so the lesson I learned there was, you know, pick your spot.
I love that entrepreneurial story. I mean, it's great for a lot of reasons, but that, you know, entrepreneurship, sometimes people feel like you have to have either a big technological breakthrough, like you invent some new software that nobody else has invented, or, you know, some big innovation in the way that business is done or you create a brand new category of product. But often it's really an insight. I mean, your innovation was just realizing that the incentives were not very good in the way that things were currently being done.
And that's true. Like all the time, you can look everywhere. I mean, you know, there's a lot of a whole sort of revolution in the way that training is being funded now. And it's got pros and cons, but the idea of like income share agreements or whatever, because somebody looked and said, it's not that these bootcamps are teaching coding in a way that's never been done before.
It's that they looked and said the incentive structure of you pay us tuition and then we're not accountable for what happens to you after that is not a good incentive structure. That's a big innovation. Well, and attracting the right people to the job, you know, attracting the people who are gifted in coding. Our daughter went to Galvanize.
She was a straight A student all the way to college, hard worker, great kid. But with a straight A student in the University of Texas, you know, economics and math, she had no chance to get a job. She was smart enough to know that. So she went to Galvanize and now she's an AI person, you know, that turns away work every day.
But to your point, she told me, why didn't I go to practice? Or, you know, why didn't I go to crash? Or why didn't I go to Galvanize? She said, you know, at age 15, I could have done it at 15.
I wasted six years of my life in an expensive prep school and at college and learned nothing. Yeah, yeah. So you came out of business school and you realized, I want to go into the energy business. What did you, did you kind of take over from your dad or did you start something fresh?
No, I started something fresh and I'll skip through this part but we basically drilled oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico. And at this time period, the major oil companies had spent a lot of money offshore and they were stuck with a lot of leases that weren't worth what they paid for them. The price of oil had crashed and they were going to expire. And so like any good asset trader or asset fox, you know, I saw an opportunity.
There weren't many competitors out there. No one had any money. I'd been at business school, so I hadn't been caught up in the boom. I'd escape that.
And so what I did is I went around to each of the major oil companies and hired one of their employees who knew where all the best leases were. It wasn't a conflict of interest because the companies were going to get rid of them anyway. They didn't want them. I managed to raise money when no one else could.
And, you know, it's getting back to incentives. And back to incentives and kind of recognizing an opportunity. And, you know, we turned a million dollar investment in four years into $500 million of profits. And it was just, you know, picking up things no one wanted, turning them around and holding an option on lots of extra acreage that later on could be worth something.
So we got very lucky. And in fact, I think, you know, I think if you work extremely hard, and I've heard this from lots of people, whether you're flipping houses or you're running a junk dealership, I mean, we're running a real business, right? And you're working really hard. You're going to make, it's not easy, but over a lifetime, you'll make several million dollars, maybe $10 million.
You know, you stick with it, like you said, there's no magic, but you just kind of keep that and go to the reputation. You got to get really lucky to make $100 million. I mean, something's got to happen right for you. And in our case, you know, we bought low, prices went up, we got lucky in some of the things we found and we sold well.
And with a lot of leverage. And when that all happens, you know, you can really multiply. But we turned that million dollars into $500 million of profits. And I was 28 years old.
And I don't spend any money, so I had far more money. And by the way, I didn't get all the 500 that went to investors and other people, but I got some of it. I got more than I needed. I was pretty much done money-wise and never much motivated by money, so I had to find something else to do.
And that's when I started teaching, leading Socratic Discussions, taking all the things I learned from Harvard at the University of Texas. And I was going to do it for one year just to find myself. I wasn't doing it to kind of save the world. I was doing it to, and you know, 34 years later, I'm still doing it.
That's incredible. So I want to ask you about that moment when you became very wealthy from this business success. I think a lot of times when people are in the grind or they're looking to the future of what they're trying to achieve, they kind of imagine this moment where they make a bunch of money and then they just like chill on a beach or something. And I think that's almost never what actually happens.
And I guess, I think there are reasons for that, that I'm guessing are reasons for that, that people need challenges and adventures to be fulfilled. But I'm curious from your personal experience, after that happened, what was your mindset? Was it like, okay, I don't need to strive for money anymore. What do I do?
Do I just enjoy myself? What led you to kind of go and take on a whole new challenge which we'll get into next with an accident? Well, yeah, and again, everything you're going to hear from this point on, probably every story until here, it's all a matter of kind of accidents. You know, fortunate accidents, my father was just what I wanted to do.
And I loved it. And somewhere deep inside. So that was kind of over. You know, it was over and I didn't have that battle anymore.
And so I had to sit and spend a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do. Because that had defined you in a way, that challenge of trying to overcome your father. It didn't mean in ways I didn't think about in ways I knew about it. But, you know, that was over.
I mean, it was over and it was over times 10. So that was no longer the driving mechanism. And I had to think a lot about what mattered to me. And I care a lot about freedom and free markets and lots of, you know, but I had to stop and think what really matters.
And I've been, you know, helped a lot by Howard Stevenson, my Harvard professor who talked a lot about the life of meaning. And I just thought about it. I mean, I basically thought about it and for a year I kicked around to try to decide what to do next. I will say, you know, I love Howard Stevenson always said, you know, look, let's get this clear.
It's better to be rich than be poor. So this idea that not having money is good. You know, people that don't have money do it right. And I admired it.
But it's not fun to be really poor. I mean, I wouldn't wish that on anybody. But once you have more money than you need, it's very uninteresting. And it doesn't bring you much power.
The toys you can buy aren't very interesting. I mean, it's just so, you know, people that want to make a lot of money, once you have more than you need, whatever you need, it just turns out to not be very interesting. It won't do much for you. So I came to that conclusion pretty quickly that, look, it's great to have it because it gives you your freedom for your time.
Your time belongs to you. That's the value. And also that's the responsibility. Now what are you going to do with it?
So that's the way I thought about it. I had more than I needed. It wasn't very interesting. I need to think about what to do next.
So you started teaching at University of Texas. At what point, you know, I know there's, I'm sure a whole lot of things have happened between there. We won't get into everything. But at what point did the idea for acting MBA, and you can tell us what it's been, what it's called now?
Yeah, it was pretty simple. It happened today. We either all, we had eight entrepreneurs at UT. We built one of the top entrepreneurship programs in the country.
We were all teaching part-time. In fact, eight of us part-time were teaching 25% of all the elective hours in the school. That is a school with 140 faculty. So eight of us part-time.
So if you did the math, 17 people teaching full-time could teach the entire program. And I was just always confused. Why do they have 140 people? So we asked some questions about that.
And then one day, depending on which side of the story you want to listen to, we were all fired and we all quit. And there's some truth on both sides of that. And we stuck around. We realized half the students had come for our program, but we just left.
So we felt really badly. These first-year students hadn't gotten to take an entrepreneurship course. We said, look, we'll teach one course off campus. And it's $25 for the materials.
We'll give you the money back, but it's 40 hours a week. It's going to be really hard. And we thought, nobody will show up. We will have kind of discharged our responsibility.
And we'll go over and do something else. 140 people showed up. Wow. Students and faculty drove from Rice, from U of H, from Baylor, from A&M.
We had this following we didn't know we had. And so that by accident kind of led to the acting NBA. You know, we always say the first year of an NBA is worthless. Why don't we just teach one?
No, we didn't know what that meant, right? And we just kind of made it up. First year of Princeton Review named our students the number one of the most competitive NBAs in the United States. Just a fluke.
And we were off to the races. And that was 2002, 2003. So that's been now a 17-year run. Wow.
So what in that program, because I know you're really motivated how do you, for people who go through your program and even to a degree through acting academy in the K-12, what have you found to be the most effective techniques for helping people discover a life of meaning, an adventure, you know, a journey that's worth traveling? Yeah, that's, boy, that's a long story. I mean, I was trying to think of all the things you need, but I'll tell you, I think the three things you need to find it and we can back into how you find those. And this will lead in the story of we actually gave away, we gave back the NBA credential last year.
We abandoned, and no one I think anybody's ever done it before. We literally were in great standing. Princeton Review just rated us top in the country again. And we went to the accreditors and said, here's your NBA, we don't want it anymore.
Tell me why you did that. We did that because the constraints on doing what we wanted to do next, we had been bound by the constraints for too long and be able to deliver better, faster, cheaper. I mean, much of the kinds of things you're trying to do with Crash and done with Praxis. The lessons we learned from 10 years at acting academy, we wanted to bring into serving kind of high school age enough.
So same kinds of things you're doing. And we now are the acting NGA, which stands for Next Great Adventure. And it's all about helping people figure out what they're going to do next. Again, a lot of what you're doing.
And I think the three things you have to figure out to do that and we want to help people do. And this starts at age six, by the way. I mean, it's six to 36. But you have to figure out what's your superpower.
There's something you're naturally good at. And I believe you have to put in the discipline and the deliberate practice to become so good at it that people will pay you a lot of money per hour for doing it. And that's not to get the money, by the way. That's because it attracts better opportunities.
But you've got to really work at that. It's like karate or it's like jitsu. It's an art form you have to invest in. So superpower, what I'm going to be great at is probably something I think is easy because I've already got a gift in it.
The second thing is, I need to master an industry or a domain. So I want to understand the players in this world, who they are, how the competitive economics work, the supply chain. I just want to understand the battlefield. That's another way to think about it.
And that's going to take some time. I can accelerate it, but there's a lot of pattern recognition. I need to read the history books about the industry. I need to understand the economics, all the players.
But I want to master that domain. I've got a superpower. And then I want to figure out where do I want to be? And that's probably a city and a culture.
Am I more of a Google guy or more of a Microsoft person? Am I more? But you tend to see in these companies that they take on the founder's DNA. And they don't necessarily work because of that.
They work, I think, because the founders DNA, a lot of hard work and opportunity all show up at the same time. But there's a certain flavor. Some people run a pirate ship. Other people talk about this as a family.
You know, other people, other people like engineers think of like a machine. You've got companies that are more like machines. And I think, you know, all of us, each of us has a special culture. You've got to think about do I want to work in a machine?
Am I a pirate? Do I want to be in a family atmosphere? And so the third thing you need is this sense of place that also probably involves city too. And frankly, I think you can pick any one of those three and find the other two later.
But you've got to choose. That's really interesting. So I want to talk specifically about number two because I found with young people in particular, people who are kind of looking for their first career opportunity, they often know kind of that they would understand they wouldn't see it as a superpower. They kind of know what they're good at and they kind of have a skill area loosely identified.
And they often at least think they have a sense of place. And I experience a lot of times their idea of a sense of place, especially when it comes to city, is very limited because they're not exposed to a lot. So a lot of kids, for example, are afraid to move away from their hometown and they tell themselves because they want to stay there, but they just don't know how much more opportunities out there. But the area where there's the most question is that number two, industry or domain.
So many people, you know, with Crash, for example, we're trying to give job seekers the tools to run an effective job hunt and to pitch themselves to companies instead of just clicking apply. And we often say like the best opportunities to pitch yourself to are often startups and often relatively small startups that don't have big HR departments that are full of bureaucracy. And there's just really cool early career opportunities. And so many job seekers are like, well, where do I find good startups to work for?
How do I like learn about the startup environment? What is that domain? And it's a very hard question to answer because I didn't know anything about startups when I started Praxis. But over time, it's like, well, I've just followed a lot of people on Twitter and listened to a lot of podcasts and like little by little.
Now I'm like very immersed in the startup ecosystem, but I can't tell you like where to start. That just sort of happened over time. So how do you address that number two? People who have no, you know, and young people, especially they always want to pick like a sexy sounding industry.
I want to work in travel or something like that. It's just because they don't know anything else. But how do you help people explore industry or domain? Well, there are a couple of ways.
You know, at the Academy, one of the things we do that I just love is starting at age 10, everyone has an apprenticeship and they're not working in the real world. So we have a whole process that they would go through. And my guess is it's similar to Crash. It's similar to what color is your parachute.
We all know that I'm going to think about my guests. I'm going to pick 10 places. I'm going to narrow the list. But they do that at age 10.
And I also learned how to write an email. People can't say no to, to get a phone call where you can explain what you're doing, to get that in-person meeting where you can say, will you give me a chance one day? Let me prove myself. And so at age 10 or 11, they're picking up.
Well, I was at a law firm last year. I worked construction this year. And I think of it as like trying on different kinds of sport coats or jackets. You know, do I like this color?
Does this fit work well? So the more people are out working, doing something. I mean, gosh, how much you could learn at a Chick-fil-A, right? I mean, Chick-fil-A is so well run.
Or a Starbucks. And so I think the best way to do it is to start early. We had this funny time talking about my daughter who went to Galvanize. And our 10-year-old son was riding in the car one day and she called from Denver and she said, Dad, I'm at college.
I've got to get an internship. And I Googled internship in Austin and I can't find anything. And so I talked her off the ledge and worked with her and I hung up the phone and my son had been listening and said, you know, doesn't she know you just write an email people who can't say no to and get the phone call, ask if you can have a chance, narrow down your opportunities, make a pick. He went through this whole list.
He's like, how stupid can she be? And I said, Sam, she's never heard any of that. And so my point being, start early with the process, get lots of examples. If you don't do that because you went to college, you didn't work during college, it's okay.
But you've got to start doing real work somewhere and I just think you have to choose. I mean, in fact, we run a series where the acting NGA students, the older students actually make a pitch and they tell their hero's journey story and where they're going. But towards the end of the program, if they can't choose, they have to throw a dart at a dartboard and they have to choose where the dart lands and then they have to explain to the group why they couldn't make a choice. And we have to use that much pressure.
I mean, our program's 100 hours a week. So these are Navy SEALs, Olympic athletes, these are workers. And yet we have to put them under enormous pressure to get them to make a choice. That's such an interesting, just get out and try things.
I think there's like a preparation mindset that people can get stuck in, which is I don't want to try anything a way that I found in my own life to de-stress that is instead of trying to pick the perfect thing, just eliminate anything that I know I hate. And then everything else is basically fair game and I won't know what's going to be good until I try it. And so just getting out there and I tell job seekers often too, like if you're not sure of an industry or an area to start, you don't even have to go get a full-time job. Start doing projects.
If you think you're curious about design, try designing some websites, try learning some stuff, try going out there and offering some services. Find somebody you can job shadow. For God's sake, before you pay for law school, go shadow a lawyer and see what the day-to-day is like. One of the things we do at the Launchpad or high school level at the Academy is you have a choice kind of starting your first year.
You can either get a job, an apprenticeship that pays $25 an hour minimum or a minimum wage job. What is it? But the point is, if you really want to be good at something, people will pay you $25 an hour. It's not crazy at all.
But nobody will pay me that. Well, not if you're not good at something. So go find some freelance clients for design if you're good at the design, but you've got to focus on it and be good and deliver for customers. So I love the way you're doing it because if you narrow the reins and go do something, then you find out pretty quickly.
But people don't want to make that choice. And I think it's ego, it's fear. They also expect the world to come to them. I'm so smart.
I'm so good. I shouldn't have to go out and call the world. It's like, sorry, we all sell. Everybody's got to go out there and sell.
And so this ego keeps them from being, because they're going to say no and reject me. It's like, of course they are. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's funny, especially with Crash, which is very laser focused on sort of the job hunt phase.
Everyone's frustrated by the job hunt, but I've seen a lot of people who, when they get an actual offer, for a company that there's nothing about it that they dislike, it's right up their alley. They kind of have a freak out moment if it's their first job where they don't want to take it. They're looking for excuses not to take it. And I think what happens is, as long as you haven't made a choice, you exist as an infinite possibility set.
And like a concrete opportunity is not, because that has an opportunity cost. It means you're doing that one thing, you can't do anything else. All of those options. Well, I have options.
Well, I'm still exploring and becoming something. And that's kind of the process of growing up, like becoming a concrete thing instead of a cloud of possibilities. That's a scary first step. And the pressure, like it has to be right.
It doesn't. Like there's no major cost. And, you know, my first job was like at a grocery store and delivering papers. And then I've worked in politics, which I now would never do again.
I want nothing to do with politics, but that didn't cost me. That was beneficial to me. I learned from that. So just that idea that like, I'm going to be screwed if I pick the wrong thing, or if I become something concrete, then I can't be this cloud of possibilities.
Well, cloud of possibilities is nothing. That's just, those are all theoretical, you know? Well, and also if you're working hard, even if you're at IHS, even if you go there and it's not your thing, if you learn how to write well, you know, that's a foundational skill. It may not be a superpower in mind, but it's certainly one of those skills you have to be able to write and think.
And so there's no wrong answer. I think this is why a hero's journey is so important because, and by the way, it's a big part of the whole NGA story. It's not even a job pitch the way we do it. It's okay, here's what I come from.
You know, here's what, and I remember we had one Navy SEAL that started and he said, single mom, a brother, 11 cities in 14 years, often sleeping on a park bench. 9-11, joined the SEALs. And then he went on with the story. At the end of the story, he comes back to what he wants to do and he wants to develop residential real estate to help people with homes.
And he goes, you know, understood there was something deep inside him that place mattered and something about having a home and he had these skills and software and he learned it. So it's the hero's journey. You hear a call, you cross the threshold to do something and then you expect to meet monsters. And you know what?
Heroes don't always win. They get knocked down, they get bladed. And you think if you get up enough times, the hero always wins. It's not true, but the hero does always get back up.
And so you know what? You thought that I'm going to get knocked down, I'm going to get my nose bladed and I'm going to get back up. That's the point, not winning. I think, you know, going out to raise venture capital, which I've done a couple of times now, it was such a phenomenal experience for me for self-knowledge.
Not so much that I want to talk to 50 investors on the phone. There's a whole lot of it that just sucks, right? But there's something so cool about having to make a pitch deck and boil down a pitch that has a narrative arc to it. And there's a way in which it forces me to look back on my own past and to say, oh, the reason I'm here today, it's all connected.
Like, it's like, of course I'm here. Of course this is the next step in my journey. And to be able to see that and to like retell the sort of biographical facts of my life in a way that has a narrative arc to it is such a powerful skill that like helps me just feel motivated and more connected to what I'm doing. And it's so much more compelling instead of like, hey, here's our product.
Here's our market. Here's our credentials. Give us money. It's like, no, I want you to feel like I was born to do this because that's how I feel.
And learning to do that, put some narrative structure around your life is very powerful. I think it's incredibly powerful. And so I think that's why the hero's journey is this idea of failing. If your narrative arc in your story is, you know, that you expect to fail and it's going to be hard, then you cross the threshold and you go do it.
It's not a failure. And by the way, this whole thing about failure is good. Failure is nonsense. Failure is horrible, right?
No, it's like, oh, failure is good. And we say, you know, you want to fail early, cheaply, and often, but that doesn't mean failure is terrible. If it doesn't hurt, it's not failure. It's just necessary.
And so you don't get into this thing like, oh, it doesn't matter. I'll just go fail. It's like, no, no, that's not the point. The point is it's necessary and it hurts and you get back up and that's courage.
And one of the things we do at the beginning of the NGA program is you have to sell door to door and you've got quota. And if you don't make quota, you're out of the program. Wow. You're done.
You know, your check's cashed, you're done. And you'd be amazed how many doors you lock on. And the point isn't to teach people to sell. It's to do what you did when you were pitching.
You know, it doesn't work. You go pitch one more time and you pitch until it works and you eventually get pretty good at it. But the point is 99 doors, people say no, you knock on one more door. Whatever it takes.
I love that. I love that. Just getting the understanding that at the foundational level, like just persistence is one of the first building blocks you need to get. It doesn't matter if you learn that selling vacuum cleaners or working at a gas station or...
some prestigious job you've just got to get that trait somehow uh that's that's really cool i found it giving people a challenge uh when they say i want to level up in my career whatever i will often say publish a blog post every day for 30 days because there's no barrier to entry you can do it from anywhere you know and like that's i've never had someone who actually did it 30 days straight they came back and said yeah that wasn't really worth it everyone's like wow okay i feel like i leveled up very few people can actually do it it's not about writing per se it's not like you said door to doors it's not about actual selling it's about showing up every day and doing something and turning turning that into a discipline rather than like well when the wind's low the right way i feel inspired and then i do something you know so well you ask how do you get people to do this of course you're a master at it and i think the book atomic habits is so good about forming habits but at the academy when we can experiment so much you know the academy is not like a school it's like a big game it's like a series of games um we've at this particular act and at our campus where i am now we have 100 young people and only two adults so young people run everything but you get into this kind of argument or discussion with adults and say you know is extrinsic matter more or intrinsic or it's like it all matters group squad individual tribe every trick matters of what you can get to get people to stay on that path to write 30 block posts and so we're going to say we're going to use everything we can to get you in that habit of looking not at your own navel gazing at your navel worrying about yourself to thinking one day ahead and a week ahead then a session ahead and a year ahead and worrying not just about you but the people around you while you worry about you i mean you still care about what you want but then you kind of get so managing that tribe and using all the different levers you can use to get people on that journey people on the journey and then having them learn those levers um you know we had something interesting happened at the launchpad at the high school this year our sons one son just graduated one son's still there and they developed this elaborate culture i mean really healthy like i'm like google it's really incredible culture but it got pretty complicated so on their own they decided to wipe out all the three rules in the studio and the new rule was before you add back another constraint and a consequence you must ask yourself is this for more than half the people in the studio because it's for only one or two people we're going to ask them why they don't want to be here anymore we're not going to design a cage to hold a snake we're going to hold it because there's something we love the people here but if they're violating things out of their own spirit there's something wrong with the way they're thinking about well we're going to reach out to them and now instead of having a couple hundred rules i think even after a year they're back to like seven rules but one of the things is if somebody's not in the spirit we're not going to kick them out we're going to have a conversation with them about what are the consequences they don't want to be here but what's wrong um so just that is the kind of cultural knowledge that those different experiments at young age build you want to manage your own world i love it jeff we're gonna we're gonna link to uh acting nga um all of your stuff in the show notes and i absolutely encourage people to check it out because this is jeff's been in this game speaking this language i think longer than anyone that i know like you know i and a lot of people in my sort of milieu we're latecomers by comparison um and so he's got a lot of wisdom his programs are phenomenal i want to leave you jeff with a final you know this this show is primarily listened to by people who are early in their career journey and they kind of they kind of know there's a big step that they want to take they don't quite know what it is necessarily and they're kind of thinking about how do i how do i make that next big leap in my in my career in my life any final thoughts you have for our listeners yeah this just came to me um you know i think often when people are in that position when i was in that position you key on the word passion you say i want to find something i'm passionate about you know you made a comment about well if i don't if i don't if i don't go down one path then i can't i can't give it all the other paths so i can't face reality but what's fascinating me is if you look at the root of the word passion it means to suffer for so passion isn't every day is sunshine and wonderful and i never have a hard time passion is picking the thing that you care enough about solving and i mean really solving not talking about on twitter or not i mean really getting in the trenches and working hard and so i think if you flip that word and you really go back to the root of it is what would i really invest and suffer for knock on the doors make the pitches um do the hard work uh that's what that leads you to down the right path and it's not suffering it's fun it's a lot of fun to work hard but you've got to start with the idea it's gonna be hard i love that it's it's not so much that you'll be suffering all the time but you have to be willing to suffer for it uh that's a great test hey jeff thank you so much this has been a blast and keep up the good work thank you great to be with you like to hear go to crash.co and join the career revolution you want to share your own career crash story send it directly to me at isaac at crash.co