Ep550: John Spence – Don’t Let Material Things Define You

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk but to win big, you got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives to reduce risk in your life, go to my worst investment ever.com today and take the risk reduction assessment I created from the lessons I've learned from more than 500 guests. Fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guest, John Spence, John, are you ready to join our mission?

John Spence 00:44
I'm on the team, my friend, I'm on the team.

Andrew Stotz 00:47
I'm excited to have you. Well, let me introduce you to the audience. John Spence is an author, International Executive Coach, professional development educator, virtual trainer, strategic planning facilitator, keynote speaker and developer of online learning programs. John is recognized as one of the top business thought leaders and leadership development experts in the world, and was named by the American Management Association is one of America's top 50 leaders to watch along with Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google And Jeff Bezos of Amazon's of Amazon. As a consultant and coach to organizations worldwide, from startups to Fortune 10 companies, John is dedicated to helping people and businesses be more successful by this is interesting ladies and gentleman making the very complex awesomely simple. John, take a minute, and tell us about the value that you bring to this beautiful world.

John Spence 01:43
Well, you just did a little bit, I have a, I guess I was teaching this the other day to a class about look for your zone of genius. Minus and finding patterns. I've worked with companies all over the world, I read about 100 to 120 business books a year, and I have every year for almost 30 years. And my value is I'm able to take lots and lots and lots of information and experience and boil it down to understandable ideas that people can take action on.

Andrew Stotz 02:13
And you know, that's fascinating, because you'd think people should be good at that. But in fact, what you find is that it's just the opposite. People are good at complexity. So can you just explain a little bit about your observations, from your years of experience? You know, why are people constantly moving towards complexity? Why is simplicity hard? And if people aren't doing simplicity, they're doing complexity? Why is complexity wrong?

John Spence 02:47
Well, first of all, complexity, infers intelligence. If I can talk about things that are very complex way, and it's, it's hard for you understand that, obviously, I must be smarter than you are, because I understand these complex things. And I'm making a little bit of fun of it there. But complexity is easy, because you don't have to think about it, which sounds counterintuitive. But simplicity is taking away everything that isn't relevant. Being able to wade through the complexity, and figure out only the most essential ideas, it actually takes a tremendous amount more effort and work to be able to peel away the layers and find the essence of something as I as I like to say the pattern, or the thread that runs through everything, and be able to identify that and explain that rather than being caught in a giant, you know, ball, the mess of complex that looks intelligent.

Andrew Stotz 03:41
So if you talk about complexity, you just mentioned something I wrote down a word bluffing. You know, there's plenty of people that are out there kind of bluffing. And they're talking about complex things and making it difficult because they don't really understand it. But of course, that's not everyone. Some people kind of hide behind that. But there's other people that are operating in complexity. for other reasons. Such as, you know, if I look at, if I look at my own business, let's just say in a factory that I've got here in Bangkok, with my friend coffee factory, we've had it for 28 years. It's just layer upon layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of ideas that have been implemented, without ideas being extinguished, you know, clearly extinguished. And so you just build this layer upon layer of complexity. And I'm just curious, like, how is it? I mean, we know this complexity exists in most businesses. How is it that big businesses survive with all this complexity?

John Spence 04:44
I don't know if I can speak to big businesses. I've worked in companies all the way up to the fortune 10. They are sort in my opinion, sort of successful in spite of the complexity. there that may be at the heart of it is there are some people that and see through and see the pattern. But for the most part I this is my opinion on very large companies is they have enough money that they can throw problems at complex ideas, if they spend a couple of million or a couple of 100 million chasing something, and realize that wasn't the direction they needed to go, it's not going to completely wipe them out, where smaller organizations don't have the luxury of throwing money at problems like that. And you know, edge really the key of it here is having the discipline to say no, when things start to layer, and layer and layer and get more and more complex, someone has to have the courage to walk in and say, we're not doing that anymore, we're not investing in that this isn't a good time of our good use of our limited resources of time, money and people, we have to be able to walk away from it. And I see a lot of organizations, especially larger organizations, that have legacy things that run on for years and years and years. And because of the sunk costs, they don't want to walk away from it. So it just keeps adding layer and layer of complexity.

Andrew Stotz 05:58
And one of the things I've always said to people is that a small business should not fear a large business. Because if you can keep focused in one area, and keep it simple in that area, you can easily be a big company in that area, they have the advantage of the brand or the money, yes. But you have the advantage of keeping it simple and serving a specific need. And so maybe you could just give us some ideas, from your own experience over the years, like what are some tips? Or what are some thoughts that you could share with us, you know about what you've learned?

John Spence 06:33
Well, it's interesting, you've hit on a point here, a little bit of a TED talk I did on the future of leadership. And I talked about the three quotients, if you will, that it's going to be necessary to be successful as a leader in the future. IQ, EQ and IQ. Your IQ is not the number it's not being Einstein, it's your competence level. Are you good at what you do. EQ is obviously your emotional quotient. Do you get along well with other people, if you're brilliant, and you can't, can't get along? Well, with other people, you aren't a leader, and you probably don't run a business very long unless it's sitting in a basement. coding things that you never have to deal with the last one, the AQ is the one we've touched on right now, which is your adaptability question. My wife is actually the one that introduced this to me, she heard it on a Wharton Business Channel, podcast. And it's about adaptability and agility. And when we look at the things we're talking about, right now, there's a couple elements to that. And two of the most interesting to me are one is an insatiable curiosity, constantly wanting to Li learn, read, study, find out more and more and more. But also, you'll love this one is the ability to unlearn things quickly, to figure out what isn't working anymore, what doesn't add value, what the customer doesn't want. And from a small business standpoint, typically you're much much much closer to the customer. And you have the ability to be more apt, adaptable and agile at a much faster pace.

Andrew Stotz 08:01
And I guess you don't even have the resources to do complex things or try to hit on many points with a particular product or service. One of the questions I have you know, I tell you a story about my father went to Cornell to study chemistry . He had a professor there that you know, that he talked about that later went to cow Caltech, and that was a guy named Richard Fineman. And Richard Fineman was a you know, amazing. So my dad introduced me to Richard Fineman, my dad's passed away, but he introduced me then. So I have books by Richard Fineman, I've watched a lot of his videos. And he's a remarkable man, because he would start teaching by telling an example of something quite simple that we saw in everyday life, and then building on that example, into a very complex theory. And, you know, I've learned a lot in my teaching. And I think that's what I've tried to do is take complex financial matters, and figure out how to build them up block by block. And I'm just wondering, you know, he, I would say that Fineman is a, someone to look to, as an example of simplicity. I mean, if he can make things simple, you know, we have no excuse. And I'm just wondering, besides Fineman, and you know, he's already an amazing example, who are some other either people or companies that we should look to, or that could inspire us to build more simplicity into our businesses and into our lives.

John Spence 09:40
So actually, Richard Fineman is a hero of mine. If you were to look this is one of my libraries like my shoulder, seven easy pieces and all of his all of his books are up there. I know little to nothing about quantum physics, but I've enjoyed reading Fineman because he does make an incredibly complex top Make more approachable, not I won't say easy. Quantum physics never really easy. But it he does make it more approachable. I think the absolutely the best example I could use and it's one that's probably a little overused is apple. You know John IV that design these things, I'll give you an example. It's my favorite one is Apple's come with no instructions. I can buy a, you know, a $5,000 laptop, which is I don't know, I'm on my wife's laptop, right now, it's a super high end Mac. There's not a page of instructions. I just got a brand new iPhone, you open it up, and she's like, figure it out it because they made it so simple and so intuitive. And if you ask John Ivey, who's the designer of Apple, who's obviously, their products are beautiful and sleek, and incredibly approachable, all those things, you said, you just keep taking away everything, until you get to only the things that are important. The fact that you can open up an exceedingly complicated, very sophisticated piece of technology, more technology that have existed on the face of the earth, in the year I was born, 1964, you can hang on, you can hold it in your hand, and it doesn't need an instruction manual. That is, to me one of the most profound examples of simplicity.

Andrew Stotz 11:23
That's a great way to think about it. You know, for everybody out there. How do we come up with products and services that are so clear and so simple that they don't need instruction manuals, that's a great way to think about it. Well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment, thinking it will be. Tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to and then tell us your story.

John Spence 11:48
So interesting story, I became the CEO of one of the Rockefeller Foundation's when I was 26 years old. I had offices and projects running in 20 countries around the world. At that age, I didn't understand what I didn't understand. And I still don't understand what I don't understand, but I knew even less than, and a little bit, not even a little bit of a fair amount of hubris led me to investing in houses, houses and boats and property, and artwork and wine collections and things that were the trappings of being the CEO of a multinational company. At a young age, I thought that those were the things that would impress other people that I had a beautiful house on the beach in Miami and I had nice boat and you know, a house and the keys with my family and all these things are the Florida Keys. And that turned out after the story I will tell you to change in my mind pretty dramatically. So in August of 1989. A long time ago, I was traveling out of the country, and Hurricane Andrew started heading towards Miami, Florida. And I made it back just in time to grab a cooler of food. And one of those big bought water cooler bottles of water from my office. This is back in the old days I had all the hard drives and all the disks in a backpack from the company and a little bit of food and I jumped in my truck I had a SUV truck and evacuated about 14 miles inland. At three o'clock in the morning the house that I evacuated to with my friends. The roof came off of there was 11 of us jammed in the bathroom. And I'll never forget looking at the lock in the bathroom with water shooting through it straight through it like a squirt gun and water sloshing out of the toilets against the walls of the room. Which is when I realized the entire house was getting ready to get sucked off the foundation and be gone. Woke up the next morning obviously we survived it it looked like someone had taken machine guns to the to everything in sight drove back to try to find my house. My house was basically gone it took us seven hours with a chainsaw to try to cut our way back to where my front door used to be. I ended up having to live in my truck for two and a half months and then I lived in an abandoned apartment with a huge hole in the top with fiberglass and cockroaches and you know taking cold showers and living on a little mattress and with a light and eating out of that trying to take care of the people that work for me because that was the most important thing to me is make sure all the folks that I have are well taken care of. And it was an interesting thing that I invested so much time energy effort ego personal in I'm trying to personal ego I guess would be the right way to say it investing in all that stuff. And all of that stuff was taken away from me in one one day. Everything I collected all my pictures, artwork, wine, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla boat, house, everything disappeared. And luckily, I had lots of insurance, which is great. But it was an incredible lesson for me to learn that it was just stuff that my family was healthy, my wife was okay. None of my friends got hurt or killed. It was incredibly, and it also taught me another lesson is you can put your head down and get through stuff, you can suffer a pretty significant loss. But if you just stay focused on your values, and understanding that there's other people that have been through things as bad or worse, and for me, at least in the hurricane, everybody was going through what I went through, and I was lucky that I had insurance and, and money in the bank. But today, fast forward, I have a nice home and a nice office and a beautiful yard and all that. But if my wife called me tomorrow and said the house burned down to the ground, as long as my two dogs and my wife were fine, it literally would have zero impact on me whatsoever. I'm just like, hey, we'll go to a hotel room, it'll be fine. We'll rebuild everything. So I guess it was the investment of ego in stuff. That was my worst investment ever. And it was an incredibly brutal, if you will, lesson of when all that stuff was taken away that just now made me understand that those things are wonderful. And I like them. I mean, I love the nice stuff I have, but it doesn't define me. And it doesn't define my life. And it's nice, but it's not really that important. And life will go on if you are focused, and you have people on your team to help you. And you have good people around you. And if you have clear values about what's most important to you.

Andrew Stotz 16:49
Wow. I think you have discussed, you know what you've learned, but let's just recap it. If you were to summarize what you learned, what would you say is less than 123?

John Spence 17:02
Lesson One is, it's just stuff. Yeah. Lesson Two is you're much stronger than you think you are. And Lesson three is Be grateful for everything you have now. Thank you for asking that question. No one's ever asked that. I don't tell their story very often. This is not something I talk about. Not that I'm embarrassed, but it's just not a topic that comes up often. And the question you just asked me was very insightful for me as well.

Andrew Stotz 17:29
Yeah, it's, it's great to recap and think about it. Maybe I'll share a few things that I I've been, you know, writing down some stuff here, as I've been listening and talk. I think the big takeaway from this for the listeners and for myself is it's just stuff. And that's great. And in fact, that could be the title of this episode. But what I also wrote down was, when you lose your stuff, you don't cover your values. And you re you know, you said, Okay, these are my values, but sometimes when we have when, when we're when we're covered up in stuff, we detach or lose contact with our values. So sometimes losing stuff forces you to re refocus on your values. The third thing I wrote down as zero impacted by lost everything. And, okay, that's freedom. That's ultimate freedom. And I always say that, you know, there's the ultimate freedom is the freedom of your mind, the freedom to think, the freedom to detach. And maybe I'll just share a story of my own situation, I was in somewhat of a similar situation, but I arrived there with no stuff. I didn't accumulate stuff, and then a lot lose it. I just arrived at a point with no stuff. Basically, I was 16 and going into serious trouble with alcohol and drugs in high school. And so you were born in 64. I was born in 65. And I went into really, really difficult time in high school and tried to kill myself. I was dealing drugs, I was getting in serious trouble my parents, they ended up putting me into three different rehabs and eventually the third one took and it worked. And it was a seven month rehab where I was forced to reboot myself basically, I didn't have anything to worry about, except how do I changed the way I think, feel react and all that. And it was a 12 step program. And you know, since that time, now, as of in September of this year, it will be 40 years that I haven't taken an alcohol or taking any drugs. So thank you, it worked. But what I recall is graduating from that rehab, and then going out on my own I was 17 just about turned 18 My parents had asked me to go out and you know, make your own way. don't want to go through, you know, your struggles again. And so I went out on my own and I had no money, I had a little moped that I rode. And I wrote it to a factory about an hour away. And I worked on a factory production line and make it three to $3.35 an hour. And you know, riding that bike that moped back home. And, and, but what I had was I had the friendships I had made from the rehab, plus the friends that I had that were getting clean and sober at the time, which was some of my best friends, we were all kind of doing the same time, we went to 12 step meetings and things like that, and after meetings, went out for dinner and talked, and what I can remember, and even I remember going to the church to occasionally get bags of like canned foods. I even had food stamps for a period of time, it was just I had nothing. I lived in a room inside a boarding house at Kent State outside of Kent State in the City of Canton, Ohio. And I had nothing. But you know, I was happy. Every day I was happy, I was just having a good time at work, I made friends at night, I look forward to being with my friends, I was clean and sober. It had been lifted from me, the obsession that I had, and I was just very happy. And so as I've gone through life, I've had accumulations of wealth, and I've had destructions of wealth and accumulations of wealth and destructions of wealth. And what I can say after being through those cycles is that I can always look back at that time and say, I had nothing. And I was still happy. Therefore, the accumulation of things is I would just say uncorrelated to happiness, you know, it's, it's neutral. And so you know, you got there by accumulating and then losing and then building that awareness. I got there just by, you know, never really accumulating but it prepared me for future losses. When I saw that we were going to potentially lose our coffee business, I'd lost my job, the Asian crisis in 97. Everything was collapsing. But what I knew in my course, I'm going to make it through this. And that is my you know, takeaway you bring me back to that. And I think it's a such an important lesson for the listeners out there is that it's just stuff. Anything you'd add to that?

John Spence 22:22
Yeah, there's three things. First of all, you and I've had a discussion about issues we've been through one of the things I've learned through that everybody's been through some sort of health, pain loss. And that doesn't stop us we move forward, we've all had challenges, but we still have the ability to be very, very successful. Key here by whatever dish definition of success you choose. Again, I like stuff a lot, and I have some, but my definition is not around stuff. It's around, do I live my values every day, and am I living a life that's close to the life I've dreamed of. So that's one thing is that we all have baggage. And I as now I'm 58 just turned 50. And I've really learned that at a deep level. Number two is when I was at the foundation, I had four billionaires on my board, and everyone else was worth more than $100 million, most of them close to half a billion. And the wealthiest director I work for made roughly my CFO, CFO and I sat down and said for the time, he's actually sitting at his desk, in his office doing stuff not on one of his jets, or boats or houses or whatever. What is his hourly wage. And this is back remember, 1989, maybe 9090 It was about $800,000 an hour, which I don't know in modern time, that's probably 7 million, several million dollars an hour. And he was one of the most unsuccessful unhappy people I've ever met. He had more problems than anyone I knew. We just say he arrived at them in style in a Learjet or a limousine or something like that. Now the other side of the coin I make this clear is I had some exceedingly wealthy board members who are happiest could be Greek family relationships, owned jets and houses and everything. The correlation was not the amount of wealth the correlation was the values. And then which takes me to the third thing I did a TED talk on this too, which is the most important thing I've ever learned in my life. And this will go back to your youth and the 12 step program and everything. And what I just spoke about is you become what you focus on, unlike the people you spend time with. If you're focused on negative things, that things that are bad for and you spend time around people that are doing the same things, you get the outcome that you got, and I've had, I haven't been through the same thing but you get a negative outcome. However, if you surround yourself with bright, sharp, smart, talented people with high values and integrity that tell the truth and you focus on living a life of values. Understanding your relationship with wealth, there's nothing wrong with wealth. Money is really good. A allows you to take care of Have your family, your cell phone beating allows you to help other people. One of the things I think about accumulating wealth is that it gives you the opportunity to give away wealth, and to help people and support people that support your values. So the as I take away all this, I look back then I look back now, which is surround yourself with great people and focus on the right things. And even if you lose all your stuff, or you make a whole bunch of stuff, it all seems to go on the right path.

Andrew Stotz 25:27
Yeah, I would add one last thing is that I live in an apartment. And I'm 50, almost 57, I live in a basically a three bedroom apartment. And one of them is my office. One of them is my mom's room. And one of them is my room here in Bangkok. And it's a simple life. And I kind of made a point of not moving into a bigger place, or a big house or something. Because every year at New Year's time, I hire some people to help me. And we just go through everything in the house. And I think I gotta reduce by, you know, 20 3040 50% what's here, as a way of just keeping myself from getting attached to stuff. And that just makes me free, ultimately. So now, let me ask you based upon what you learned from this experience, and what you continue to learn what what action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

John Spence 26:21
Wow, that's a great question is to, to look at the things that are truly important and valuable in your life. You know, I'll actually I'll give you a great example, do what's called the eulogy exercise. And this is a really, really tough exercise, or workshop, I teach it in some of the classes I teach, is sit down and take about, it's going to take up several hours in a couple of boxes of tissue. But sit down and say, I want to look at three people at my own funeral. If there were three people giving me eulogy, What would someone from my family say about me? What would from someone from my business? My business community say about me? And what would someone from my regular community or my faith community say about me? And if you sit down and you truly take this seriously, and you write down the actual words, that you want your family, your friends, your business associates in your community to say about you, guess what is not in there? how big your house was? How many boats you owned, if you had a plane, how many pairs of shoes you had, those things are all great, and they're fun, and I'm I'm all for him, but no one's gonna remember that in your life. They could remember, are you a person of honesty, integrity? How much did you love other people? How much did they love you? How much did you give back to the world from love and kindness and caring. And as soon as you look at that, you know what you realize I can do that today? I don't need more money or more stuff. It's again, it's fine. I, you know, you're, we're many of your listeners are here because they want to build wealth. But at the end of the day, it's about relationships, and love and integrity.

Andrew Stotz 28:01
Beautiful. So what's a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners?

John Spence 28:06
I will recommend a good friend of mine, Tom Morse has written several books on this. And I'll say this. Interestingly, as I read one of his books, when I was younger, just in college, I failed out of college on the first try my family, who was very, very wealthy disowned me. And I had to turn things around. And one of the and I ended up graduating number three in the United States on the second try, so I was able to turn it round. But there's a book from Tom Morris called true success that I read, that had a profound impact on me. And he's written many other books since then, if I were to point you towards a resource, it would be the books from Tom Morse, especially true success and the seven A's of achievement. Those were life changing books for me.

Andrew Stotz 28:51
Fantastic. And I'll put links to that in the show notes. Well, last question. What is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

John Spence 28:59
Learn more, read more, learn more. I was thinking in my birthday again at 58 was just a few weeks ago. And here's what I realized. I know almost nothing about almost everything. And a little bit about almost nothing.

Andrew Stotz 29:18
That times,

John Spence 29:19
I know well, I early in my career, I thought I was really pretty sharp. And I would challenge people, even CEOs of huge companies to prove that I was right. One day I woke up realized I'm not right. I have an opinion. It's fairly thoughtful and well researched and well read and I've got a lot of experience during the day. I'm just, I'm just kind of making stuff up as I go along. And now at my age, I'm learning the most I ever have. Every day is new and exciting. Every book I read leaves me to three more every person I meet creates larger people my network, so I'm the most excited I've ever been about learning and growing and expanding and meeting new people. goal. So my goal is, learn more meet more people.

Andrew Stotz 30:04
Beautiful. I was just thinking that, going back to what you said earlier about simplicity. Life doesn't come with an instruction manual. No, it doesn't keep life simple. You know, keep life simple. I always say to people, when it gets complicated, go back to simplicity and learn more, you know, meet more people try to, you know, expand yourself, there's a challenge for all of us. Well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't yet, taken the risk reduction assessment, I challenge you to go to my worst investment ever.com Right now, and start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. As we conclude, John, I want to thank you again for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

John Spence 31:00
Just live by your values. Treat other people with love and have fun? We'll just leave it at that

Andrew Stotz 31:09
eautiful and that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Thank you for joining our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.