Interview with Garrison Snell, November 14, 2019

Garrison Snell: Okay, today is November 14, 2019. We're in Nashville, Tennessee. My name's Garrison Snell. I am the CEO and founder of a couple different organizations but, for today's purposes I'll probably talk about Gyrosity Projects, which is a marketing agency and Snell Ventures, which is a small kind of family office fund that invests in different assets between real estate and small businesses.

Chelsea Hallman: Okay so, the first question is what part of your personal biography or background led you to your position currently?

GS: What part of my personal background or biography led to my position currently? How do I answer that? I guess my entire background led me here currently, right? Where do I start with that? So, I mean, I'm going to go all the way back to like childhood stuff. I'll go back to when I was in scouts. There was always kind of this pull toward leadership and pull toward, at that time, it was more about authority, more about power, I guess, authority and respect. I was asked multiple times to lead clubs in high school or lead sections of the boy scout troupe or lead activities in church and always seemed to be able to take the initiative and pull teams together to do those things, but it was more about self-service at that point, it was more about making myself feel good, make myself feel like I was worth something.

CH: Like accomplishing something?

GS: Not just accomplishing. There was the energy and benefit in accomplishment, but it was more about like personal identity, it was more "I am a leader and if I am not a leader, I am nothing." Do you see what I'm saying? It is a very poor way to live. And so naturally I always tried to go to the top and I always tried to jump into positions, specifically paid positions when I got to college, that would allow me to work in a position of authority, which nine times out of ten didn't exist.

CH: So, you made your own positions?

GS: Exactly. The only option was to make your own. The best way to describe it is through a series of dangerous or poor experiences, where people were a lot more graceful with me than they should've been I learned what good leadership is, is really removing yourself out of all of it. The more that you die to self, the less seems to go wrong, weirdly. My job today ends up being putting great people in a place to do work, giving them a mission, giving them a focus, giving them a safe, enjoyable, meaningful place to come to and be, and getting out of their way. So, I grew up with this idea that you had to be the end all be all, that you had to be "the guy," that you had to be the only one from where inspiration could come and that's not true anymore. I look to the team for most of that.

CH: Where do you think your entrepreneurial spirit then came from? If that's where the leadership side came from.

GS: I don't know. I've always have preferred to start things. I've preferred to go out and do it on my own. I'm thinking back to like-- this is kind of a weird story but, when I was younger, my mom, casually, she would enjoy playing chess a lot, kind of nerdy, but it's fun. She taught me how to play it and then I had younger brothers and instead of teaching my brothers the rules and playing fairly, I made my own rules that were tilted toward me being able to win and so I'm not proud of that, but there was the idea that I could create something new that gave me an advantage. It became kind of inherent in how I did things, how I went through school, how I went through college. I always got more out of creating something new that I thought was appropriate and right and benefitted the world and gave me or people around me an advantage as opposed to participating in an existing system. Participating in an existing system has never worked for me and I grow bored of it really quickly. It's bad.

CH: What cultural identities and experiences are most important to you?

GS: That's a weird question. That's a good question. So the culture-- Let me classify myself for everybody out there. I am a 26-year-old 5'11" white male from Arkansas, so how much culture is in that?

CH: There's southern culture.

GS: Yeah, there is. It is not as popular today, as maybe other more exotic cultures would be, but there is a lot of significance, for me. I grew up with this idea that you don't need anybody. It's very much the redneck thing. You listen to Country Boy Can't Survive, Hank Williams Jr., like that was the way we were raised. The fact is you don't have to be that way anymore. It's not real in a lot of ways. But I still identify with the idea to stand on my own, create my own situations, create my own resources, survive on my own. And I know that deep, deep down, if I get into a situation where I have to come up with something, I can do it. And that comes from the way I was raised and a mother who was section eight in food stamps and a night nurse and a dad who was a musician. It comes from a very poor family that needed to find a way to make it happen. I have a lot of people modeling for me pride in being to make something happen yourself. I visited other places where a version of that exists, but I haven't visited anywhere where it's almost as a religion in the south. Surviving on your own being self-reliant, outside of government or dependencies, or anything is a core trait. The funny part is there is often a lot of hypocrisy in it, but definitely informed a lot of my early narratives. Does that answer the question?

CH: I think. What experiences have most shaped you as a leader? We kind of went through that but, if you have anything else to add.

GS: That's a big question. There's a lot. My career is where I've experienced most of my leadership growth. The first was getting myself into a situation where I didn't have the income we needed, and I had quite a bit of debt and no assets. And we were in a situation where we had money coming in, with a significant amount of debt and it was the type of business that didn't have a lot of assets. It had people and a book of clients, but nothing of tangible value. There was no book value. You couldn't sell it. Basically, getting into that situation I learned through a series of personal and external events that the best thing I can do is to stop trying to fix it and to get out of the way and let the team do what they were hired to do. At that point, when we got to our lowest, financially, what ended up happening was, people that I hired, on my team, saying "hey man you need to get out of our way, we can figure this out. We can do this work. You don't have to be looking over our shoulders the whole time." It's hard. It's really hard to do that. It was my first business. I started it when I was 20 sold it when I was twenty-five to a fund up in New York. Getting out of the way and letting the team start to do things was how I have now built Snell ventures, this second business. It's the exact opposite of how I did the first business. It's hilarious. It's working much better. So that's one, financial pressure. If you want a motivator to change, get yourself in six-figures of debt.

CH: You mean, after college?

GS: That's true. It's a really good point, everyone's experiencing that now. What are other good experiences? Here's one. I'm going back to high school. I was elected senior patrol leader of my boy scout troupe when I was seventeen. For all out there, that don't know what that means, it's an important thing if you're in boy scouts. I was about to get my eagle scout. I had twenty-five boys under the age of seventeen looking to me for leadership, which is very hard, especially when two of them are your younger brothers and they have all these friends that want to give you hell. They give you a hard time. I had this massive amount of codependency. I needed everyone in the scout troupe to like me. I needed them to approve of what I was doing. I needed them to sign off on every decision I made because if I made a decision, they didn't like I was getting a lot of hell for it. There was pressure from kids, were all kids. So, what I did was, I put out a survey to these twenty-five boys.

CH: How old were you?

GS: Seventeen, six-teen, something like that. I said 'hey here's everything I'm doing. Tell me what you think of me.' And it was atrocious. It was mean. It was not the encouragement I was hoping for. I learned very quickly you can't live and exist off of other people's approval in leadership. It's a lonely place and its okay. That's kind of your job. Your job is to be removed and to be a shepherd and a steward. Your job is not to make the people around you happy. That is easier said than done, still for me. It's still very difficult. At Belmont, when I was a freshman, I was managing a band and I had started a kind of 'artist management company,' to manage a bunch of students and student musicians. We were in the studio recording and I had so much identity and self-worth in being seen as a good leader, that I made a complete butt out of myself to these kids. We were in the studio and I was cussing them. I was yelling at them. I was shaming them and demeaning them. I was a mean guy and one my buddies that was a senior, he was the audio engineer on the project, he was recording for us. He sat me down and said 'hey man, you're really smart and you're really motivated and you're really good, but people don't like you. You will never be able to do this if you can't get along with people and remove the identity piece of being a leader.' I realized at that point, that I was so concerned about being seen as a good leader and about being successful that I had forgotten people. People didn't matter. All that mattered was that I was accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish. That was really important. No project and no project success is worth the detriment of those who work for the project. We spend a third of our lives at work. If it's not doing something for you, why are you doing it. If it's just paying you, it's not worth it. Those are three of many of the past years.

CH: That made me think, so this is a Global Leadership thing. I know specifically, in a lot of Europe, within their culture they say Americans live to work, whereas they work to live. How do you feel about that with your leadership and indulging yourself in so much work and tasks?

GS: I've gone through the swings of that pretty regularly. When I got to Belmont I was fully and admittedly, living to go to work. I was living to be a success. I existed to be a success. I am now on the exact opposite of that spectrum because I've seen the end of it. There's nothing there. I made a significant amount of money last year selling my business and you wake up on the day after and there's money in your bank account and you don't feel any different. You still feel like it's not enough. It's really important I think for people to remember that work is just part of the journey of life. It's just part of the facilitation of life. It's part of the experience mix of life and its really enjoyable when you get into something not that just you like but that you believe in, that uses your skill set s well, it becomes really enjoyable and so it's another spice of life. It's another flavor of living, but it's ultimately rooted in life and living. Too much of anything is an addiction or is unhealthy and I think the Europeans probably got it right. I saw an article the other day that Microsoft had experimented with a four-day work week and the four-day work week increased productivity by, I think, 60%, it was some astronomical number. I thought about it and if I had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off I would be very excited to go back in on Monday. I don't know why. I really couldn't tell you why, I just would.

CH: And there is kind of that push back where, 'we've only been working for three days, tomorrow is going to be our Friday, we don't have to work, let's get a ton done today.'

GS: Yeah, I agree. If you're plugged into something that uses your skills well, gives you energy, and you believe in it, it gets your heart going, and then you want to do well for it, but you there comes a point where you've worked too much. Regardless of how much you believe in it. It happens in non-profits all the time. My wife experiences that. At that point, anything, regardless of how much you love it, regardless of how much it matters becomes unhealthy. Yeah, that's my thoughts on that.

CH: How would you characterize your leadership style?

GS: Absentee-- For me today, it's really all about the whole person. It's about two things. It's about the whole person. It's about the place in their journey that that person is on. So, an individual comes into my organization and my first interest is what do they do, and what strengths do they have. I usually use gallup strengths to figure that out. It's like what do they do really well. And the cool thing about Gallup strengths is, when you find out those top five, those are the things that are meant to give you energy. If you approach tasks from those perspectives, it gives you energy. So, I know kind of where to put them. I look at where they're at in their lives and where they're at on their journey and then I ask, 'How can I help get them to the next stage while they're with me?' Because no one's going to be there permanently. I am just kind of the steward of their time. Like, think of it this way, if you are running an organization, and you got people sitting in front of you, you literally are a steward of a third of their day, like, you pay them for a third of their day, and it's up to you what you do for them or what you do with that time and to me that's a really scary thing. To me, it's a really important thing, So what I want to do is make sure the business runs well, makes money, is profitable, puts money back out into the community, but that the people that are on that journey with us are getting benefits out of the time they spend with us, well beyond just the income, so I'm interested in, like: Where do you want to volunteer? Where do you want to go in your career next? What can we give you while you're here to help get you there? Personal and professional development. If I had to use a word, I'd say facilitator describes me as a leader. Like, I'm facilitating progress, I'm facilitating people's journeys. I used to not be that way, I used to be a whip cracker. I used to be the kind of guy that, like, you didn't want to tell something went wrong. I'm not that way anymore, thankfully. Yeah, I think I would use the word facilitator, and I believe that is what people mean when they say servant leadership. I think they mean it like, you are helping people along the path as they come in and out of your organization, you're trying to give them more than just the money they make. I think that's how I'd describe it, yeah. Too broad? Too meta?

CH: No, you're good. Did you like seek the leadership that you have now or did you just like came into it?

GS: No, I definitely worked at it. I've only ever wanted this, but I did not have the capacity to appreciate it and to understand why I wanted it and what to do with it once I had it. It's like the dog who chases the car and he finally catches it and now he's like 'what do I do?' The dog grabs hold of the bumper and he's hanging from the bumper now and he's got no control. He finally accomplished his goal and now his life is out of control. You see what I'm saying? So yeah, I absolutely pursued it, caught it, had no idea what to do with it once I did and had to kind of reset and re-center to figure out what do I do with this now that I'm here and where do I go from here? So yeah, there's lots of leadership things, I sit on boards in the community and my job is to facilitate what they want to do, so there's an organization that wants to raise more money. I say, 'okay what do I have over here that can facilitate them doing that?' Or at home, with my family, like, I'm facilitating my wife and the people around me's personal growth. Saying 'what can I do for you?' 'How can I help you?' Yeah, that's really what I see my job as, and I definitely always wanted that, did not know how to get there and I'm happy that I stumbled into it, I guess.

CH: Where are steps in the past that you wish you would've taken?

GS: That's a hard question. There are things that are definitely a regret, but all of the things that I regret caused me enough pain to find a solution or to find an answer. Kind of find help and that led me to where I am today, so it's hard to want to go back and say, 'I don't want to do those things.' Now, I think I would still do them.

CH: Not necessarily regrets though, like other things you wish you would've reached out too earlier maybe or like other opportunities you didn't take.

GS: I mean, I'm an opportunity whore so I take every opportunity. There are things I wish I had said no to. That's really, I think, part of the answer here. There are opportunities that I took simply out of fear of missing out, that I should've said no to because I ended up creating a bad experience for everybody. There was an artist management job that I took for two weeks that was for a famous saxophone player and he was doing a smooth jazz project. His manager needed some help and I worked for him for all of two weeks and was very bad at it. I did not do well. I wish that I had maybe done college a little differently. Let me say, the way I did Belmont, gave me, I believe, what I have today. It fundamentally set the tone for Garrison to be known as the things that I am known for today four years free in the laboratory to establish a reputation. It was great, but I wish that I had maybe, broadened my perspectives a little bit and found more cross disciplinary skills. I wish that I had taken languages. I wish I had taken, and really worked at a couple languages. I wish that I had worked at some sort of art, some sort of other way to express what's going on in my brain. Because it makes me a better human. Being more in touch with myself makes me a better leader and so specifically I wish I had taken Spanish better and I wish I had taken Arabic as well because we work with some Arabic populations now. I had the opportunity to intern at a nonprofit, my freshman year. I was there a semester. I was only there because they had a division that was focused on doing events for entertainers and they were always contacted by popular entertainers. I only wanted to be there to meet the entertainer's teams and network. I could've learned a lot about how to impact the world and the community and people by focusing on learning about that organization and not just using that organization to get to some other ulterior motive that ultimately what was more important there was that I learned about that organization and I would've eventually met the people that I did. It just wasn't all that important and I really botched that opportunity. I just wish I had been more aware. Which is really hard to do at seventeen to twenty. I'm twenty-six. I'm still not all that aware, but I'm more so than I was in my four years at Belmont. Other steps I wish I'd taken-- I don't know man. I've been really happy with the path I've been on. It's been really painful in a lot of ways, but I have so much more actual experience than most people my age. It's hard to want to do anything different.

CH: This kind of goes along with that, but how do you know if an opportunity is something you should follow through with?

GS: That's really hard. At my core, I'm an opportunities guy. If something comes along, it's how can I make it work. What can I do to do this? I'll give you a really good example. For the record and for reference, I've never smoked marijuana in my life. I've never smoked. I'm not a smoker, but Arkansas legalized medical marijuana two years ago. I'm from Arkansas originally and I thought, 'Oh, I'm going to apply for a license. I'm going to spend the money to put together an application and apply for a license to run a pot shop in a medical cannabis clinic in north-west Arkansas.' I had the team together. I hired former head of beverage and alcohol in Arkansas to represent us. I had 2/3 of the application done. I probably put eighty hours of work into the application and my wife looked at me, she was my girlfriend at the time, and said, 'Why are you doing this?' And I'm like, 'Because it's a good opportunity-- It's a good money opportunity. It's going to be really popular. A lot of people are going to talk about it.' She's like, 'Do you care about it?' And I was like, 'not really.' She told me something that has stuck with me a long time. She said, 'Garrison, I've seen you chase a lot of things that your heart's not in and you've never followed through with them. They never make any money. You never stick with them. The only things you stick with are the things your hearts connected to. The things you believe in.' And I've gone on this kind of journey this kind of journey to figure out what it is that I care about at this moment in my life. There's really three things: giving people a place to work, giving people a place to live, and promoting items or products or people that I care about or that I think is important and that I connect with. So, if they fit in one of those three buckets, it's usually a yes. If they don't fit in those buckets, it's usually a no. So, you have to kind of get in touch with-- for me I had to get in touch with what mattered to me, at my deepest level today. That doesn't mean it will always be that way. It will probably change, but I have to constantly kind of check myself and go, 'Is this opportunity something that I care about?' You don't just have to care about missional stuff, like nonprofit stuff or whatever. You care about the fact that you work-- I had a very true heart connection with digital advertising, like I wanted to use digital advertising, and did, to revolutionize and give small businesses and independent artists a competitive edge over folks with higher budgets. We developed a hypothesis there, we crushed it, we sold the business and it was a win. I am grateful. My heart is not there anymore. it's moved on in five years, but I'm really grateful for that season.

CH: What are your valuable skills that you've picked up along the way?

GS: My top five Gallup strengths are: positivity, achiever, input, strategic, and restorative

CH: I'm strategic and achiever too.

GS: Are you? I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised at all. Natalie is an achiever as well. Not surprised at all. So, first, understanding those and how to use them is a big skill. Like, what they are and recognizing, that like when I get into a situation, if I can approach that situation from one of those five things, I usually will get this rush of energy that allow me to do it. That is a skill. One of the biggest skills I've picked up, I have it naturally, but I've developed it a lot is an intuition around people's intentions and an intuition around what to believe and what not to believe. So, if an opportunity comes through the door, I can assess pretty quickly whether something's funky about this or not. Whether it is what it is, or it isn't. And so, the method by which you assess an opportunity for me is like really important. Not just whether you do it or not, but how you determine if you're getting the whole story. A lot of it is a gut check kind of situation that I was learning to listen to and then the questions that come naturally out of that. So we just bought a business two weeks ago and I spent four months going through everything that I thought could possibly be wrong with this opportunity, or that could come out to bite us that I could think of and assess that it was a very good opportunity and it fit in one of my three buckets, so opportunity assessment and people assessment. That's the other things. Being able to look at individuals and pick up on things that they do that allows you to understand how they're going to work in a situation. How or what drives them. And I heard, what was the women's name, Barbra, the shark tank women.

CH: Oh yeah.

GS: You know what I'm talking about? I saw a video of her once that. I heard her best salespeople are the most insecure. So, she finds insecure folks to hire for sales and it's because they're always driven to perform, driven to achieve, driven to prove that they're okay and I get that. I'm the same way. I get that. I'm a good salesman, for many reasons because of that and I took from that video, that if I can recognize characteristics and quality traits of people, they align up for certain specific role types. Being able to recognize those, and body language, and mannerisms, is something that just comes over time. That's a big one for me. It's very like basic skills. Things like professional etiquette, professional etiquette with a dash of self-expression. One really freaking important skill is acquiring publicly available information before other people get it. One little hack I have, I used to have more, but still have certain twitter accounts that are meant to gather information for me and then push them to my phone. So, what happens is they follow certain people, when people tweet they push all that information to my phone and I get a notification. So the idea is that, someone's going to see their tweet later on, but I get it the moment they tweet it and I have maybe a couple hours or a couple days or something to do something with that, you see what I'm saying? Before, maybe, everybody else gets to it and I try to make sure that I'm on the very, very front edge of when information comes out into the public. I'm like one of the first in line.

CH: Yeah, I need that twitter account.

GS: Yeah, it's really important. It's also strategic. A good example, when Robin Hood, you know Robin Hood, as a stock trading app?

CH: No.

GS: Okay, so Robin Hood, is basically an app that allows you to trade stocks as you want. They came out with a cash management system. Basically, you could run your bank account through Robin Hood and they would give you a return on your balance every year and they were, I think the first time they launched it, they were guaranteeing like three percent on your money, which is really good for a checking account. Checking accounts don't have that, they don't do that, so I got that notification and I immediately joined it and I was one of the first couple thousand in line out of hundreds of thousands of people to get into that beta. Being ahead on stuff like that's really important and is also a skill. You have to be willing to put up with inflow of information and sort through it really quickly. There are a lot of little skills that I think are important, but they really come from being able to pick up on patterns. So, for instance, if you're working in a job and you start to notice certain people in email threads are talking certain ways. They're all using similar sentence strength, or sentence structure, or formatting of am email. Being able to pick up on that very quickly and mirror yourself to it is really important because there are people I've employed before that refuse to be aware around them and pick up on like things they might be doing less than good at, you see what I'm saying? Specifically, at daily tasks like how they clean their task management system, how they clean out they're inbox, how they respond to people, how they clean the office. Picking up on things that are important to the culture you're in and doing it very quickly is really important and that to me was something that I had naturally but had to really focus on. I learned a lot of skills just watching other people and learning how to recognize things they did over and over and over, patterns. It's really meta. A lot of them are ways of thinking and what I consider to be skills. They're not like, can't type 60 words a minute or whatever. They're not skill that you can necessarily put on a resume, but they're things that allow you to move quicker than others in most professional settings.

CH: That made me think, like skills you out on a resume should just be your Gallup Strengths.

GS: Yeah, actually I have that at the top of my resume.

CH: Really?

GS: All five at the top, yeah. That was recommended to me by a professor-- Here's something that would go along with that question, let's take Gallup strengths, right?

CH: Yeah.

GS: How do you use them? So, I had a professor that taught me and gave me a piece of paper. I got to find it, but he gave me a piece of paper that I've used regularly that is a lot of questions-- it's a lot of little hacks about an individual that you can ask around their Gallup Strengths to figure out how they're doing that day. What indicates that they're having a bad day or having an off day? What indicates that they're in their flow or in their mode? What indicates where they want to go? Things like that. Basically, this sheet is kind of a format for when you know someone's Gallup Strengths to feed you through how to recognize things that are important to them or manage an individual. That to me, like it was taking a broad concept and brining it down to a tool. That's what I keep trying to do. I keep trying to take concepts that I come up with or concepts that I use and turn them into actionable little tools that I can use over and over, like templates or formats. So I have a unique way of coming up with marketing ideas and spent the time to put it into a process that can be repeated so that I have a six step question process that is how Garrison's brain naturally comes up with marketing ideas that other people can use. Do you see what I'm getting at?

CH: Yeah. Who or what has been your greatest influence?

GS: Greatest? Greatest is so declaratory, like got to put a stamp on the best, permanent stamp. I don't know, I had a lot of influences, but I think my favorite at this point, my most influential to date is one of my old professors, a guy named Dr. Andrew Johnston, who was the former dean of students at Belmont for 20 years. Then, was my honors professor and then was a consultant, leadership consultant, leadership strategist, and then worked for the Giddians for a while. You know the guys who put the bibles in the hotel rooms? He was the development director for the giddiens which is-- what a job, but he's a really good man, started out his career in counselling, and physiatry. I get a lot from him. I have learned so much about how to take leadership concepts and feelings and turn them into practical skills. He's one of my closest authorities on leadership and I just love him.

CH: That's interesting. One of the questions in here is "Leaders help turn ideas into actions and empower others. How do you think you accomplish this?"

GS: That's my whole thesis.

CH: I think that's your leadership style-- in a few words.

GS: Yeah, in a lot less words than I used.

CH: How do you measure success and how do you learn from failure?

GS: How do I measure success? I don't know. I'm trying to think how I would do it today. It's something we do a Gyrosity really well, marketing agency. It's basically we use dashboards and lots of APIs and data to track trends. For me, how I measure success on a project, or a business initiative is, did we come out of this better, more of a team, more understanding of each other and closer to our goal than we did going into it? Did people grow and learn? Did we retain everybody? If we lost people did, we lose them for reasons that further refined the business, further refined the team? To me, that would be very successful. A good example of this with our real estate venture, and under Snell ventures we have a real estate company called Vul Properties that manages a bunch of real estate rental units, long-term rentals in Chattanooga. One of our initiatives there was to get into this program called the PBV Program, project-based voucher program, which is a version of section eight. Basically, with that initiative, we had a team on it that was very capable and successful team in that. We had an ultimate goal, which was fill these units with a certain type of person. For Vul properties, the beginning initiatives were: buy the units, make sure they're well repaired and ready to be lived in, get into the PBV program when those contracts with the Chattanooga housing authority, and then put people that were formerly homeless into these units that the city pays for. Very missional and very good business. It's twenty-year contracts from the housing authority that guarantee your rent for two decades, so it's pretty amazing. We measured success in that at each increment. One, did we achieve buying the units. Yes, we achieved them, and how did we as people come out in that. Well, we got a lot closer to our property manager, we made some really good friends in Chattanooga, and we made some really good friends at our local banks down there to lend for us and there were opportunities in that to love on them and to be good participants in the community with them. So, I would basically go through every phase of that project asking, how did my team come out in this did they come out well, and did we, the business, come out well in this. We just put out first family into one of those units this Monday. And we've come out very well in it, as a team we're doing very well and so success is measured in a lot of different ways but that's how I would keep track of it in my mind. The second part, is it how you recover from failure, or how you learn from failure?

CH: Both.

GS: Well, recovering from failure is hard, especially if you take it personally like I do. But it's really easy to say, "well failure is okay, I'm just going to learn from it." and I agree with that 100%, I agree that that is the way that failure is supposed to go. But I do not think that you seek out failure for learnings purpose. I think it's the if you shoot for the moon, if you miss, you land among the stars kind of thing. So, failure really is only failure if you don't do anything with it. And so, what I choose to do is I go to the postmortems, and I sit down, and I go. What did we do well? What did we not too well? What do I want to take away from this to do well next time? Understanding that the opportunity to learn what to do well next time is a success in and of itself because if I never got that opportunity, how would I ever improve on what I already do well? Like I would never add anything to that list. So, I've had a few of those recently and the postmortems are helpful for me personally. But what's really helpful is making sure I'm balanced, making sure I look at as much as what we did well and what we didn't do well and just write them both out. And then from there basically distill what we did well into actions steps for next time. And not being too hard on my team or myself and realizing that failure is a loaded word. That failure is really the gateway to success and that failure is more interesting than success. Honestly, failure gives you somewhere to go, success is like what do I do now? I don't know that's kind of my opinion.

CH: There are so many questions in here. I'm trying to pick and choose, because I like all of them. What do I want? We have like ten minutes left.

GS: I gave her the long answers too.

CH: Okay, we'll try and get through three. Okay, what are two or three action steps you believe are essential to enable others to be successful?

GS: Say it again.

CH: Two or three action steps that you believe are essential to enable others to be successful.

GS: That I would do to enable someone else?

CH: Yes.

GS: Okay the first one is asking them every day, what do you need from me. That's the first one you should do as a leader, honestly. Two, be willing to do that. And then three, what's the best way to say this. Okay, so if I ask an individual who works for me, what do they need, and they say to me I need you to show up [sic], and I am willing to do that, then what ends up happening is I have this opportunity to kind of interact with someone that is relying on me for something. And that's a really rare opportunity. It's my opinion that if you can show up and be able to accurately do what they need from you and do it without any sort of pretense or judgement, then you end up in a really amazing situation where that person sees you doing it. So, I would say, perform that action in a way that shows them how to do it next time. So one, ask them what do you need? Two, be willing to do it. And Three do it in a way that shows them how to do it next time. Take them along for a ride, if you will. Does that make sense?

CH: Alright, so, what advice do you have for building relationships and trust in an organization?

GS: That's a good question. It's something that I'm working on right now. But you got to be able to have crucial hard conversations with respect and fairness in the conversation. That's on the top of my mind right now. Say, if you've got to have a conversation, doing it without judgement, and respect, and total fairness and honor of the other person. Two, do what you say you're going to do. So, if you say I'm going to respond, respond. If you say I'm going to do a project, doing it. And three, adding more than just what you're required to do. So, if you show up and you punch a list and you crush it and you've got time left, asking the question, what do the other people around me need from me? And then, be willing to do that. That kind of generosity during the time that you're at work is almost unheard of these days. That's really the joy of getting to work with other people. Does that make sense?

CH: Yeah, and how do you trust that whatever you're doing right now is the right way of doing it?

GS: Oh, I don't, I have no idea if it is, but what I believe, and this is new for me. I believe that it is an essential part of the journey. I believe that the way I know to do it today is all I have is my best, right? Like, what I do today is truly my best. The result of that, in my mind, was meant to happen. Because I have nothing else prior to taking the action. Take the action, learn from it and improve upon it later. It's essential to be able to accept that, in my mind. Because there is, I mean, I can't think of a single thing actually. There are right ways to doing a lot of things, but the word right often has a lot of options under it. Do you see what I'm saying? So in my mind, as long as it gets it done, and it doesn't fall apart we're okay. I don't know if this is the right way to build a venture company or notI don't know if God knows if this is the right way to build a venture company or not. But I do know what I know, and I'm willing to step out beyond what I know and see what's there. Do you see what I'm saying?

CH: Yeah. So, last one. What do you want your legacy to be?

GS: Good Lord. What a question. I want people to remember me, if it's one word that I want people to use to describe me, it would be kind. I hope that they remember me as someone who cared about them and didn't care about the results before them. That'd be what I would hope. That people show up to my funeral and they talk about me they go, well he was really smart, and he did a lot of really cool things for the world but let me tell you about this thing he did for me. And that really matters a lot. Because that's what this is all about in my mind. Business and leadership is just an opportunity to help people, as is at the core, if you really trace it down, so is everything. All industry and business is built on solving problems for someone else who is willing to pay for it. The core of economics is solving problems for people, helping people. So, if you can't show up and help the people who are working for you day in and day out, how can you expect to solve world changing problems. So, I would hope they would look at me and say, he was a kind dude who cared about me, and he also had a lot of skills and did some really cool things, but here's what he did for me. Does that make sense?

CH: Yeah.

GS: So, this is what I got on that.