Adam is an author, sales leader, and entrepreneur. In addition to leading Enterprise Sales for Automattic (one of the largest remote workforces in the world), Adam writes about how to create the best version of ourselves. His work has been featured on Men’s Journal, INC.com, The Huffington Post, Men’s Fitness, Lifehack, and Entrepreneur On Fire. He is the founder of The Vitruvian Project, Better Than Yesterday Publishing and former founder of Bodeefit, a fitness community of over 500,000 people worldwide. 

Topics:

• How to create your best self? 
• Challenges with building and scaling a global sales team
• Skills and strengths of best sales professionals
• Leveraging the power of content marketing and partnerships to build a startup
• Why is the act of writing a vulnerable act?
• Most important leadership traits
• Biggest lessons from failures

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Adam Griffin: [00:00:00] Almost without fail, the highest performers I've ever been around are always seeking out coaching. They want the hard feedback. They don't want to be patted on the back. They don't want to be told you did X, Y, and Z great. I mean, our egos loved that, but they want to also get beyond that and think, okay, but where are the holes? Where am I missing? Where can I get better?

[00:00:39] Cesar Romero: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Ivy Podcast. If you are someone that is looking to be a better leader, then this episode is for you. My guest today is Adam Griffin. He's an author, sales leader and entrepreneur, and he is currently leading the enterprise sales for Automaticc, which has one of the largest remote workforces in the world.
Additionally, he's also the former founder of BodyFit, which is a fitness community of over 500,000 people worldwide. And if that wasn't enough, he's also the founder of the Vitruvian Project and Better than Yesterday publishing, where he writes about becoming the best version of ourselves. Adam, I'm so excited for today's episode, and thank you so much for being on the show.

[00:01:39] Adam Griffin: Yeah, super excited to be here. Thank you, Cesar. It's going to be fun to chat, looking forward to it.

[00:01:44] Cesar Romero: [00:01:44] Absolutely. So before we dive a little bit deeper into your background, let's start with what does becoming the best version of yourself mean to you in your own words?

[00:02:01] [00:02:00] Adam Griffin: [00:02:01] That's a good question, and that's an answer that I think has changed quite a bit over time, because I have really used that idea of better than yesterday or kind of creating the best version of yourself for a long time, probably over a decade, just personally, as a kind of guiding light. But I think what I mean by that has changed a lot over the years. Even though I've held on to that as a true North, I think if I went back to my mid-twenties, let's say, I think that probably equated a lot more to ambition, dreaming big, you know, setting high bars, high goals, working towards those reverse engineering, your goals. It's just something I talked about in one of my books, and I think if you, if I look at my life the past few years, I think that definition has evolved quite a bit too much, much less about doing and much more about removing, meaning removing, cloudiness of judgment, trying to make sure ego's not making decisions and trying to operate more from just kind of a really authentic place. That's like something more central to you. So I think today, my definition around creating the best version of yourself being better than yesterday is much more about like the inner work, looking at yourself internally, doing a really good accounting of where you are at personally, where your head's at, what is holding you up? What is keeping you from being that better version of yourself? I think that the easiest way to think of it, as we all know when we're our best version of ourselves, like we feel it, our energy is high.
We're attracting things and people in our life because our energy is at a good level. things are easy. You're probably in flow state much more often. So we all recognize these moments in our life when we are at like, operating at a different level. So I think it's much more about paying attention to that and trying to dissect, like what, why is it that causes this?
What is the difference in that day that I wake up on top of the world on fire, ready to go. And what is that day that I wake up like, I can't, I don't want to do this again. Like there's distinct differences. And I think taking the time to investigate that question is so critical. And I think that's the path, at least currently to creating the best version of myself personally.

[00:04:53] Cesar Romero: Yeah, no, I love that, Adam, and a couple of things I want to echo here is that the answers are within ourselves, right? Like no one can give you these answers of what is the best version of yourself, right. Cause, it's an inner work as what you mentioned. Right. And definitely through practice, through trial and error, I have become better.
At identifying when I'm in the flow or when something is just not resonating with me, and it's something that we're, no, my parents didn't teach me that, school didn't teach me that, it's something that I have to come to learn. Like, what is this that I'm feeling inside, right. What is this? I guess, intuition or whatever you want to call it, but yeah, I think it's so important to listen to that, right. Because emotions are there to guide us, you know, in some weird way, right? Like if you're feeling something's not resonating, and it's worth looking into that, so how do you bring this into your work at Automaticc?
And maybe before we jump into that, for those that are not familiar with Automaticc, just give us a brief background on what is the problem that Automaticc is solving and, you know, what do they do about it?

[00:06:29] Adam Griffin: [00:06:29] Sure. So Automaticc was founded by the, Co-founder of the open source WordPress project.
So if you go back 16 years or so, Matt Mullenweg founded the open source WordPress project, and it's still the lead developer on the project today. And he founded Automaticc about a year after to basically build products and services known into this open source community. And so WordPress as a software, and an Automaticc as a company, like the mission is really to democratize publishing and has been from the beginning. Meaning we have this thing called you know, the worldwide web, the open web, and this is a place where people can have a voice and publish content, and you know, what started out as primarily a blogging platform. If you go back all those years it has really evolved into a platform that powers Fortune 500 businesses, online presence, it powers e-commerce stores, all sorts of stuff. So that's what Automaticc does that we're in the web content space, and I particularly focus on the enterprise space, so large companies utilizing WordPress.

[00:07:53] Cesar Romero: Yeah, no, I mean, if you're around our age, right, you definitely use work risk at some point in your life.

[00:08:01] Adam Griffin: For sure. We just hit the 40% mark, 40% of sites on the web are powered by WordPress.

[00:08:07] Cesar Romero: The first blog was on, on WordPress, right. As I was getting into the internets and putting my thoughts into that what, why, where.

[00:08:19] Adam Griffin: When I was in my early twenties, my wife and I, and our buddy, we owned an online greeting card company and we built our company blog on WordPress.
It's life should be simple that wordpress.com, but it's so fun. It's like going back in time, going in the way back machine looking at sites from the early web is pretty fun to do.

[00:08:50] Cesar Romero: Yeah, no, absolutely. So there's two things I want to dive into. Work at Automaticc, one is your role that you have right now, as enterprise sales leader and the other one as, as a team builder, right. As someone that recruits and hires and trains. So let's start with your role specifically, what are some of the biggest challenges that you are tackling?

[00:09:20] Adam Griffin: Yeah. So we're in pretty heavy scale mode right now, which is a bit unique for a company that's been around for 16, 15 years, but I think content is even more critical and present today and more relevant today than any point in history. And we'll only continue to be so, so Automaticc continues to grow.
Alongside the web, alongside the growth and the importance of content. So challenges right now, a lot of them come down to scaling. Scaling companies is hard, not just the revenue side of things, but organizationally, how do you scale in a meaningful way that is not like everyone is constantly working, that is not everyone being, you know, pushed to their red line every day.
That retains culture, retains happiness. Like how do you build a team that still, you know, loves their work while also changing all the time, cause scale has changed. Ultimately it's intentional change that sets you up for the future iteration of your organization. And so how do you keep culture and just kind of the joy of work, high amidst, all of that change? So that's probably the biggest challenge and there's a lot of things nested within that, but that's my current state.

[00:11:04] Cesar Romero: So, how do you tackle those challenges? Like how do you make sure that you keep the culture and that you keep things aligned right, especially when you hire people, right?

[00:11:19] Adam Griffin: Sure. So we have a saying at Automaticc, which is pretty central to the way we work, which is communication is oxygen. And I would start there, like If you're not communicating well, it's very difficult to do much of anything, much less scale, a large business. So we are hyper communicative and we're also hyper or try to build a culture of hyper honesty in our work. So we want hard conversations. We want continual feedback. We want people to feel empowered, to have an opinion about something. And so it's very much a culture of transparency of communication.
[00:12:00] And so that honestly doesn't solve the problems of scale, but it makes it digestible. And then the other thing is like making sure you're seeking a diversity of opinions, and that has implications in hiring, that has implications in decision-making, that has implications in culture itself.
And so making sure we're not kind of existing in a silo, we're getting opinions. We're, seeking out intentionally a diversity of opinions and, you know, ultimately leadership's job is to listen well and make a decision on how to move forward based on observing, listening and also intuition and past experience and making a column moving forward from there.

[00:12:58] Cesar Romero: I'm really glad that you mentioned communication because, you know, it's one of the first things that suffers when a company grows and scales. So if you don't have the right systems and processes and the right leadership in place, that can become toxic for the company. So now Automaticc is one of those companies that attracts a lot of people, right? Because it has a reputation and also the culture, right. Everybody wants to work at Automaticc. How do you weed out those candidates that are enough because of the perks, I guess, and those candidates that are in it, because, hey, these are my people and I truly see myself, you know, in this company.

[00:13:49] Adam Griffin: Yeah. That's a great question. And it's very, very on the nose. You know, we do there, we call them fanboys and fangirls, like there's a lot of Automaticc families. They're fanboys. I think honestly, they weed themselves out. Because if you think about it, if you put yourselves in the shoes of someone building a team, someone hiring like the least possible interesting thing you could say is. The thing that everyone else says, like, I want to work for Automaticc because, you know, I love the culture. I love the reputation it's like yeah. You and everyone else. So yeah. It's they weed themselves out in the sense that you're saying the things that you think are compelling about you, but you're actually just saying the same things that everyone else is saying.
[00:14:42] And so it's like, the last way you want to stand out is by saying the same, the thing that everyone already knows. Yes, it is a great culture. It is as good as advertised. It is a wonderful company and we have to get beyond that. What I love, I will say that that idea doesn't extend to the WordPress software itself though.
And what I mean by that is a lot of people genuinely love WordPress because it is the thing that grew up alongside the Internet. It is the thing that gave so many people on the web a voice. It really like pioneered blogging and the idea of the open web and open source technology. It was very core to a lot of the early movers in open source.
And so people that come here because they genuinely love the software and what it does for the world. That's a different story, yeah. But so the short answer is they oftentimes weed themselves out and then we can start looking at what are the other compelling reasons they want to be here and start from that place.
And also not everyone has to want to be here deeply. Like even though Automaticc is one of those companies that attracts a lot of people that just want to work for the company. And there's also people that have never heard of Automaticc and then don't have deep WordPress stores. And I love those people too, because then you get to sell them on why it is such a good place.
[00:16:18] And so that is equally as fun, I think, people that aren't familiar with the impact that the software and the company has had on the world, and getting them bought into what we're doing.

[00:16:32] Cesar Romero: Yeah. I mean, I'm one of those people I didn't know about Automaticc until recently, you know, I always associated Matt with WordPress but not Automaticc. Sure. So, if you have an interview with Adam, do not tell him how much you ended up with the culture, because he's gonna be like, okay,

[00:16:57] Adam Griffin: We don't make it past the resume screening stage if it answers like that. But I don't want to bash on people. I know I certainly have probably done very similar things in my career, so yeah.

[00:17:12] Cesar Romero: No, we all do. Right. But, I get your point though, right? Like don't tell me how much you love the culture of the product. I mean it's great, but show me what you can do, right? Show me how you would fit into what we're building. Right. I think that that might have a better impact

[00:17:29] Adam Griffin: For sure. Yeah. You gotta find your people. The thing is so much more important than finding a company. You gotta find people and values that you align with, and sometimes that's a start-up you've never heard of, sometimes it's a big corporation that, you know, maybe we think is boring from the outside, but that actually is specifically where you'll thrive? So yeah, I think company is generally a poor indicator of whether or not you'll thrive at a place.

[00:18:01] Cesar Romero: Speaking of finding your people like for you, as a hiring manager right in a sales role, what are some of the things that you'd look for in your people that are going to be a part of your team?

[00:18:16] Adam Griffin: Yeah. One thing that is incredibly central to hiring both for me personally and Automaticc broadly, and that kind of ties back earlier to like diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences, diversity of backgrounds, diversity of individuals generally. I think we unintentionally build ourselves blind spots.
If we're not operating from a place of diversity, equity, that could be an inclusion. So, and then, from a skill standpoint, I look for a few things above all others. I look for curiosity, which is, I think, people that are genuinely curious, make incredible salespeople because they ask questions. They follow, you know, little carrots to learn more. They want to understand someone's business, so curiosity is big. If you're not curious, I think it severely limits your ability to do a sale effectively. Really good listeners, really good salespeople are really good listeners. They pay deep attention and they shepherd a conversation based around what they're hearing. So it's active listening. It's absorbing and also extending the conversation in particular directions because of what they're hearing, and then the third thing is coachability. We are pretty intentional about building a culture of feedback.
[00:20:00] We even build coaching into the hiring process and, that comes from a place of like, if you're not coachable, then no one can help you. No one can help you see your blind spots. No one can help you get better, and what's ironic about it is almost without fail, the highest performers I've ever been around are always seeking out coaching.
They want the hard feedback. They don't want to be patted on the back. They don't want to be told you did X, Y, and Z great. I mean, our egos love that, but they want to also get beyond that and think, okay, but where are the holes? Where am I missing? Where can I get better? And so starting with that mindset is I think critical in success in any field, but it's something in particular that we look for in the hiring process quite a bit.

[00:21:02] Cesar Romero: I'm curious about that because that's something that, you know, if you don't have, the red process in place, it's hard to measure if someone is coachable or if someone is a good listener through the interview process. So how do you make sure that a candidate successfully meets these requirements?

[00:21:27] Adam Griffin: That's a fair question. I think the particulars take different shapes and it's changed over time. I used to have an actual coaching call as part of the interview process. I would have someone deliver me or have a mock like sales conversation with me, and the intent was not how well they did in the sales call. The intent was after the call, I would coach them on what I thought went well and what didn't. And then we get to the whole underlying reason of why we're doing this.
And I'm just paying attention to how they are responding to that feed? Do they go blank? Do they perk up, do they pay attention? Do they listen? Well, and then we actually would jump into a second, we would redo this mock sales call and I want to see, did they actually listen to, did they incorporate the feedback into the conversation moving forward? So that's one way I've done it. Now it's a bit more subtle. We will still have a mark-like sales call, but we'll do it with a group of people on the team. And immediately after we stop the mock sales call, we go around the horn and the team gives feedback directly to the person, both good and constructive feedback.
And so what they did well and then also areas to improve. And it's a similar methodology where I'm just observing, I'm seeing how they're responding, what are like the nonverbal cues they're giving. And that can tell you quite a bit about, you know, the way someone is, at least in their current state is wired for coaching and coachability, by the way is not some hardwired trait. It's something anyone can make a decision to be coachable. Today, it's the decision to remove emotion from feedback and to take it as what it is, which is constructive. And you remove the emotion from the feedback and the ego from the feedback. And that's a decision thing. So you can do that in the next five minutes, if you want to.

[00:23:40] Cesar Romero: Yeah. I agree with that. It's a decision that you can make right now. And I'm a big fan of the four agreements. One of the agreements is to not take things personally. And I think it's important, right. Because we have to be humble. Right. We have to be open to how others perceive our actions, you know, feedback. It's such an important trait to have.

[00:24:11] Adam Griffin: Sure. It's interesting how tied together the different aspects of work are. Cause like, you know, we were talking about culture a little bit ago and this is one of those things that might seem separate from culture, but it's deeply entwined because if you have a highly coachable group of people, your communication can be more open and honest. People aren't afraid to give their opinions, people have a respect for giving and receiving feedback. And so it's like, you know, culture gets the spotlight, but culture is this aggregation of so many moving parts. This being one of them, like if you can't start with coachable people, it's very difficult to build a culture that is not centered around the egos of the individuals within it.

[00:25:06] Cesar Romero: Yeah. No, a hundred percent coat being coachable. I feel it's such an underrated skillset. But it can have so much return of investment right in the culture and on you as a professional. Great. So I want to shift gears here a little bit and transition from Automaticc to your time with Bodyfit.
You and I met when you were still running by the feds, and I was actually a user of of Bodyfit because I love the idea of someone or this app, just giving me my water for the day and just doing those workouts, by the way, what else? By the way, and I'm curious about your journey with Bodyfit, like why did you decide to leverage content marketing and partnerships as a strategy, to grow the community to over 500,000 people?

[00:26:08] Adam Griffin: Yeah. The decision is probably not that fun of an answer, but it is the truth. So I started Bodyfit as a side project. I'll give a quick backstory and then I'll answer your question a bit more directly, but yeah, I was working for a technology startup at the time, and was pretty heavily involved in CrossFit. Back then I was coaching CrossFit just for fun, was very deep in my local CrossFit community, and I saw firsthand the positive impact CrossFit had on the community broadly. Me personally. Yes. But more so than that, because I had always been into fitness and I would have been into fitness regardless of CrossFit, but what I love was watching what it did for people . That wasn't their story. That fitness was new to them or it helped them overcome various things in their life. Like I loved seeing those stories and what the whole intent between starting or behind starting it as a side project was like, CrossFit was unapproachable for a lot of people. It was then, it is now some people are just too intimidated. I'm like, how do I make a community like this more accessible to more people like that? Stay at home parents don't get out of the house. They don't know how to start. They don't know where to start. Like how do I reach that person or the person that like, just, they have self-confidence issues?
[00:27:49] They're not going to carry themselves into a gym. They're not going to take themselves to CrossFit and rip that bandaid off. Like how do I reach that person? So that was the underlying intent behind starting it as a side project. It grew really quickly out of the gate. Like I think it touched on a nerve, and it seems silly. Now, if you go back to the time when I started it, the idea of daily workouts and workout apps, it wasn't much of a thing. Like there was CrossFit, they had their workout of the day, but that was pretty much from that perspective, and so it was a bit novel at the time.
[00:28:28] It grew really quick, I think because of that novelty and it struck the right chord with people. And so I decided to leave that startup and run it full time. And the decision to grow through content marketing was purely one of like, I didn't have the intent or the desire to build some like a big fitness tech company.
[00:28:51] I didn't want to go raise capital. I had worked for venture funded startups and there's trade-offs that come with venture capital. And so that just wasn't a path that was interesting to me. And so I had to just be creative about, “Okay, well, how do I grow? How do I grow this thing in a manner that doesn't require a bunch of capital and something that I can drive myself?”
And so content became that thing, because I had been writing, I loved writing. I knew a bit about the online content world. And so I just started literally writing down like the publications that I wanted to be in, you know, setting that kind of big, hairy, audacious goal, and I just started working towards it.
So I think when I left the startup, the first thing I did was I set a goal of being in these five publications. By the end of the year, it was January. So I had a year to do it, and I accomplished it within the first like two months, which means I probably did not set an ambitious goal, but that's when I knew like, okay, there's a path here.
[00:30:10] Like this is repeatable, this is sustainable. This is a great way to grow. and it just works for me. It worked for my skill set. It works for my personality and it allowed me to grow and, you know, a way that didn't depend on money.

[00:30:25] Cesar Romero: Yeah, no, I love the app. Especially at the time I was traveling a lot. Right. Running trips with Matt, from one day experiences in, I love the app because it was quick. I could get the workout done. It was something that I had not seen before. I remember that and I know you mentioned writing and we'll get into that, but I'm curious to know you’ve always been someone that is willing to serve.
Right. I see you as a servant leader, and I'm curious to know, like, where does that come from? Did those have to do with your upbringing or maybe something that happened throughout your career? I've always been curious about that. I always wanted to ask you that.

[00:31:21] Adam Griffin: I appreciate you saying that. I hope it's as accurate as advertised. I think this isn't a question I've thought about deeply, but it's a great question. I think it stems from a place of my own personal values. Like I value autonomy very highly. Like I think we as humans, as these animals that we call humans, like we at our core need some level of autonomy and ownership over our life. Like I think when the autonomy is removed and we feel like we're just part of something else that we have no control over, I think it's difficult to set goals. It's difficult to dream big. It's difficult to envision a better future if you don't start from a place of being an autonomous, independent human that can go create in the world. Yeah. So that's a very fundamental underlying value for myself. And when I think of. Leadership, I just think like, things like power are so antithetical to this idea of having autonomy over our lives, and so it's not to say, I like to go against power structures, I just approach power or leadership. And those are two different things. But I approached them both from the perspective of like, we're both humans. We need to be on a level playing field. This is not a me versus you thing. This is not I'm up here or you're down here or you're up here and I'm down here.
[00:33:10] We can't start from that place. We have to start from a place of like, we're on the same level. Let's talk as human beings, human to human, to solve, whatever it is we're trying to solve to create whatever it is we're trying to create. And so, getting to that place of just level setting with individuals, no matter what their position or stances in life, if I have to start from that place or else, it rubs up against my values. And if you're rubbing up against your values, I think it's a hard place to operate from.

[00:33:43] Cesar Romero: Yeah, no, I agree with that, you know, two things here. This is why I love sports because in a sports arena, right? Let's say soccer or football, you start SQLs, right? Like each team, you know, the score is even, and the team that makes a better play wins. Right. And I think, leadership and being a servant leader, it's a very similar right to that because you see the other team or the other person as an equal, right, not of, you know, have below you, and there was something else I wanted to mention that I'm totally blanking out.

[00:34:25] Adam Griffin: I like the analogy though. It's an apt analogy for sure. Yeah.

[00:34:31] Cesar Romero: Just on, on the values, so you can't see it, but here on my wall, I have my values and psychology so far seven, but there were some I haven't because I can see it every day. And remind me, is this decision or is this action that I'm about to take, does this align with my values or is it not right?
It's a very yes or no answer and every time that it's a no, it's like, okay, then this is not worth it. Right. But it took me a while to do that because at first I was like, oh, you know, values, goals, mission. Yeah. It sounds very woo. But whatever. But one day I decided, you know what, I'm going to write them down and just put them in here and look at them every day. And yeah. Strange, strangely enough, it's made a difference. Sure.

[00:35:24] Adam Griffin: Guess I'm looking at it.

[00:35:28] Cesar Romero: That's not going to make me happy. So I'm not gonna answer that.

[00:35:31] Adam Griffin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kind of goes full circle to the beginning of the conversation in that like I just think it's difficult to create that best version of yourself.
If you're not doing the work to understand what your values are and aligning the way you show up in the world to those values. I think when we're younger, like, you know, again, how that definition has evolved, like early twenties, mid twenties, there's energy, there's ambition. But it's generally, unless you're an old soul or you were raised by very wise parents, you know, you haven't done the deep work to understand internal values, to understand what's intrinsic to you to understand how you're wired and that's okay.
I don't think that's a problem, but at some point we start to evolve a bit and we start to understand how core operating from this internal space is to our own happiness. and to our own contentment in life. So yeah.

[00:36:52] Cesar Romero: Yeah, no. I want it to shift to writing because I know writing is a big part of your life and yeah, I know that you have mentioned in the past that writing is a vulnerable act. Describe what do you mean by that? You know, what do you consider writing a vulnerable act?

[00:37:11] Adam Griffin: Yeah. So I'll speak to a particular kind of writing, which is the type I do, like non-fiction personal development, because I think your fiction, your novelist might have a different take on this. That's totally fair. What's funny about personal development is writing, is that as the reader, you think you're reading from an expert, someone that has solved all of these things they're writing about. Yes. But how this writing actually comes about, and this is not a me thing.
I think this is how almost every personal development writer they're solving their own problems. Like there. Because that's the stuff you have to write about like writers or processors they write because it helps them understand the world around them. It's a vehicle for understanding the world around them.
[00:38:11] So when you're reading that book, you're reading what the author themselves has struggled with and the approaches they took. And you're not reading from a person that has perfected something. You're not reading from a person that is so far ahead of you in these particular areas. You're reading from someone who has struggled with them, just as much as you have and is likely, still struggling with them.
[00:38:37] Otherwise they would not be writing about them. So that's why it's a vulnerable act is because. Even if it's unbeknownst to the reader, you are pouring out your own issues onto the page and you're working through them on the page. And so, that's what I love about writing. That's the thing, that's one of the biggest misunderstandings about writing.
And that's what makes such a vulnerable act is once you understand that, that truth about what writing is you realize quickly, it's like, oh, that person struggles deeply with this same thing that I struggle with. And the information becomes helpful in a new way. Not because they've given you some secret formula, but because one, you have a shared experience with someone.
[00:39:29] And two, you get to see how they think about it and maybe it's useful. Maybe it's not, maybe parts of it are useful parts of it or not, but you're doing the work to look at the problem itself.

[00:39:40] Cesar Romero: Yeah, no, I definitely had this misconception of, you know, authors and writers that. I put them on a pedestal because you know, this person that wrote this book is a published author and I'm not, and I'm reading through the book and I'm finding all these nuggets of wisdom and knowledge.
But over the years, I've realized that these are just people like you. When I write like normal people that are sharing their journey, that the hero's journey, right, of their struggles, challenges, and overcoming those challenges, and I really liked that you mentioned how writing is a tool to help you understand the world around you and I'm becoming more comfortable with that and being very vulnerable here, I've struggled with the writing habits, cause some days let's be honest, I don't want to do it. You know, I don't show up, but every time I write down my feelings about something, whether it's at work or life, I feel much better. Right. What do you think that is?

[00:40:57] Adam Griffin: I think it's therapy because it's holding a mirror up to ourselves, and I don't think it's dissimilar from therapy itself. Like when you go to a therapist, you are or should be, addressing something head on you're looking at, in the face that is what allows you to process it. Like you can't see what's in the dark, unless you shine a light on it. And that's effectively what therapy is. And I think that's effectively what writing is, it forces you to look at something that you might not shine a light on otherwise, but what it also does is like, our brains, our thinking brains are not good processors.
It's very difficult to think your way through something. And writing forces you to have like conciseness of that, it forces you to make sense of things. It forces you to distill problems down a bit simpler. Like, you know, thinking is you can think a million miles a minute and that doesn't mean you're doing yourself any good, but writing forces you to slow that thinking down, it forces you to distill that thinking into something actionable or discernible, and so to me it's just the most beautiful way to approach problems, and there's no better way from my perspective to think through something to think through that thing that you struggle with, which allows you to create that next best version of yourself.
[00:42:46] I'm probably the opposite of most writers. Like you mentioned writing habit, I don't have a writing habit. I have gone through phases where I have writing habits, but I've really detached from that idea that writers have to be these, like people that treat it like a job, they show up at your table every day for however long that works for so many people and some of my favorite authors, they swear by that. For me, I don't think about it like that, because again, I see writing as a tool. I see writing as a way for me to see the world a bit more clearly and the problems that I'm dealing with. So when I have something I want to process, I'm going to write about it, whether that's for other people's eyes or not. Writing will help me think through it.
[00:43:36] But there's times in my life where I don't need more writing. I need more experiences. I need more energy. I need more time to just not think about being a writer, like time to just not wear the identity of being a writer and have to like, feel like I have to live up to this thing of being a writer, and that's okay too. And so if people build a writing habit, fantastic. If people want to build a writing habit. Fantastic. But I don't think it's required to be a writer or to be someone who writes.

[00:44:11] Cesar Romero: I definitely resonate with that. Especially with all this advice you see on social media that you need to have riding habits, you need to do this. Yeah. I think what you said, it's so true, right? Right for yourself. When you lead, when you feel like you need it, and then when you don't feel like you don't need it, then go out and experience it. Right. I think that's awesome.

[00:44:33] Adam Griffin: That's one thing I picked up on later in my writing career, that wasn't as obvious to me or earlier in my writing career, is that there is no writing without experiences. And so too, to tap into that creative energy, that creative energy is stirred by novel things. It's stirred by new experiences.
And those new experiences give you a different way of looking at something. And then you, it starts with like a seedling of an idea, and then it grows into a bigger idea, or it takes a different path, but none of that can happen without having a life of experiences. And I don't mean like traveling the world.
I mean, like leaning into life, engaging in life, the normal throes of life, and paying close attention to those. And so sometimes I step away from writing completely and I just focus on things like, I need more inspiration. I need more experiences in my life. Cause they'll trigger different thoughts.
They'll trigger new ways of seeing things, you know, it's very similar to reading to me, like I don't need to read any more books. I have read enough about every topic. That's been interesting to me for far too long. So I don't read to gather new information. I read to gather more dots. So if you think about knowledge, think about knowledge as a bunch of different dots.
[00:46:16] Imagine a poster board in front of you. I've got millions of millions of dots, and this is like the aggregation of your knowledge or things you've read or learned about the world. Reading is not because you need it. Like more information, it's because the more dots you have, the more information you have, the more connections you can start making on that board.
That's where novelty comes from. That's where creativity comes from. That's where inspiration comes from, not gathering some piece of new information. It's being able to see the world differently because you've connected dots that you have not been able to cope with. Connect historically. I think that's where the magic of writing is. Like Mark Manson is brilliant at this, he's written several good books. What I love about them is that nothing they say is new. These are not novel ideas, but he has a completely different lens on them because he's connected dots that people haven't connected before. And that's why it resonates so much. Not because it's some novel idea, but because the way he's viewing the information is novel.

[00:47:22] Cesar Romero: Yeah, I'm a big fan of Mark Manson as well. I think human James clear is one of the top people out there, writing about real personal development, you know, habits, items, we could spend hours talking about, personal development, writing, leadership and. One last question for you since we're talking about reading, what is one thing that you're reading now? It could be a book or a course or anything that you're trying to connect to that.

[00:47:59] Adam Griffin: Yeah, so I am about to finish a book called A Course In Miracles, Made Easy. Hmm, cheesy title. Of course miracles were not something I was familiar with until recently. I heard about it on a podcast.
They asked someone, you know, what's the one book that's had an outsized impact on your life. And they mentioned A Course In Miracles. I was like, oh, that's surprising. I've never heard of this thing. So we do some research and it turns out, It's a book written in the 1970s, I believe by a psychologist. My elevator pitch for it, we'll not do it justice, but of course in Miracles is this, I haven't read the actual text clear. It's a super dense text from everything I've read about the reviews. And this psychologist basically looks at the Bible. And effectively says, like, I think we've been misinterpreting this thing wrong quite a bit.
[00:49:10] And she applies like a psychological slant to the truth that she pulls out of the Bible and regardless of religion, because the idea is it has been equally useful from everything I've read too. People that don't believe anything to people that have a wide range of beliefs. And so don't think of it from a religious context, because it's much more about psychology and personal development than that.
[00:49:39] But man, it has been a really good read. I actually just bought a copy of it yesterday. I think it's fascinating for the same reasons that ironically, that we were just talking about, like, it is introducing information in a new and novel way where you're like, wow, I have never thought about that.
[00:50:01] Those are the best, the best books. So anyways, the book I said is A Course Of Miracles Made Easy, which is this guy basically took this super dense text and made it a lot more accessible. So he brings down the core themes, and the core takeaways, and it's been a fun one.

[00:50:22] Cesar Romero: Awesome. I'm going to have to go check it out.

[00:50:26] Adam Griffin: I would be remiss to not also talk about the War of Art, which is the book I recommend and give probably more than any other.

[00:50:33] Cesar Romero: Yes, I have that book, and funny enough, the irony is that I have resistance to reading the ultimate irony.

[00:50:44] Adam Griffin: If you give it, the beauty of Steven Pressfield's writing is that some of the chapters are, you know, order of a page or half a page. If you can commit to a minute of reading, you might. Yeah.

[00:50:58] Cesar Romero: Yeah. I need to put it on my night table, so Adam, what would be a one take away in terms of leadership that you will want to close, and want the audience to take from this episode, what would be your one advice around leadership?

[00:51:20] Adam Griffin: I think the best leaders or human leaders, like, you know what you're getting with them, you're not getting a facade, you're getting the human. And I think that single attribute unlocks so many other things within leadership, trust and confidence, energy to achieve difficult things. Like I think it is best unlocked by starting from a very human place.
And so I'm not a perfect leader by any stretch, but I try to be the most human leader. I can, I try to connect with people. Where they're at, I try to get to know them beyond the quota, beyond the task at hand, and start from that place. And I think, you know, we spend so much of our life working and if it becomes this thing that we have to like isolate from the rest of our life that becomes this like other versions of ourselves, and then we've got our non-work-life person.
I think that's maybe the saddest way we can pass a life. Because we worked for most of it. And if we're passing that time, being someone that is not core to who we are, it's just a wasted opportunity.

[00:52:38] Cesar Romero: Adam, thank you so much for being on the show and I'm really looking forward to getting you on another episode and diving deeper into some of these topics, but for now, thank you so much. Awesome

[00:52:50] Adam Griffin: Cesar. So good to see you. Thank you so much. I appreciated the conversation and am looking forward to next round.

[00:53:00] Cesar Romero: We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the podcast. Please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe on your preferred podcast listening platform. And we really appreciate that effort until next time.

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