Grand Slam Journey
This podcast discusses various topics around - sports, business, technology, mindset, health, fitness, and tips for growth. Topics range from what sports have taught us and how we transitioned from a singular focus and pursuit of our athletic goals and dreams to the decision to end our sports careers and move into the next phase of our lives. My guests share how they found their passion and purpose, tips for maximizing potential - holistically - physically and mentally, how they transitioned from one chapter of their lives to the next, and how to drive success in sport, business, technology, and personal life.
Grand Slam Journey
65. Andrew McConnell: Get Out My Head - Mindset for Personal and Professional Mastery
When Andrew McConnell steps up to the mic, you know you're in for a tour de force of entrepreneurial wisdom woven with personal anecdotes that hit close to the bone. A former competitive long-distance swimmer turned lawyer, consultant, and business creator, Andrew lays bare the transformative journey from defining oneself by titles to embracing a life led by true passion. The birth of his daughter and growing love for writing emerge as turning points, alongside his embrace of stoicism and a compelling argument for prioritizing effort over talent. As we unpack these layers, the conversation becomes a masterclass on the alchemy of turning one's multifaceted identity into a fulcrum of success.
Andrew's reflections on growing up in a melting pot of cultures and the rigors of swimming shape the narrative, shedding light on the intersection of self-care and ambition. The essence of self-care is often misunderstood as selfishness, but through my lens, it's the cornerstone of thriving in one's personal and professional spheres. Andrew and I share stories that reveal how mental fortitude and strategic time management, honed in the crucible of athletic training, are indispensable in the marathon of life and business. It's a dialogue that challenges you to audit and budget your 24-hour daily allowance, encouraging a reckoning with how we allot each priceless moment.
We round off our exchange with a look into Andrew's foray into the vacation rental industry and how the parallels between sports discipline and entrepreneurial drive are compellingly similar. From identifying niche markets to crafting innovative solutions that resonate on a global scale, there's inspiration at every turn. As Andrew gears up to launch hight next venture in holistic Health, we delve into the importance of a well-rounded approach to well-being, where fitness, nutrition, and stress management are as integral as social connections. His insights shed light on the power of a sound mindset and unrelenting effort as the linchpins of success—a testament to the fact that mastery, in any field, is not just a gift but a reward for perseverance.
Find Andrew:
đź“š Get the book: GET OUT OF MY HEAD Creating Modern Clarity With Stoic Wisdom
https://www.mandrewmcconnell.com/
https://www.instagram.com/mandrewmcconnell/
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you have the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. I also had a daughter born during that time. So I got married. So I'm a husband, I'm a father and you have these different pieces of identities. And I had this question to myself of if I'm not a entrepreneur, if I'm not a CEO, like what happens if all this goes. Am I gonna have this identity crisis or can I see myself as more than a labor?
Andrew:And by doing that, it kind of gave me the freedom to start writing, because I wanted to write. But I would always tell myself, oh, that's next phase. Right, you need to do this, you need to exit the company, you need to do all these different things. That's later. And then, by giving myself the freedom to just be me and not a label, I can do a bunch of things. Oh wait, I can be a father, I can be an athlete, I can be someone who starts companies, I can be someone who writes.
Andrew:It gave me permission to go back and say, if I wanted to craft my life today to be the life that I wanted, as opposed to waiting for some future, indeterminate day to be what I think I want, which I may be wrong about and won't find out for 30 or 40 years. What would it look like if I started crafting my life today you know I'm not perfect at that by any means, as my wife would like to remind me, but I've gotten better at it and going back and saying, okay, well, if today was to look like what I would want it to be versus what's gotten filled up from other people, what would that look like? And what are the pieces? How much am I learning? How much am I sharing? How much am I creating? What are those pieces that come together?
Klara:Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Grand Slam Journey Podcast, where we discuss various topics related to finding our passion and purpose, maximizing our potential, sports, life after sports, and transitioning from one chapter of our lives to the next, growing our skills and leadership in whatever we decide to put our minds into. My conversation today is with Andrew McConnell, who has an impressive trajectory of excellence in almost anything he decides to put his mind into. Andrew is a former competitive long-distance swimmer who was a member of the USA Open Water Swimming National Team. He became a lawyer, worked at McKinsey and then decided to start his own companies. He's currently on his fourth startup, if I'm counting correctly.
Klara:Andrew was born in Birmingham, alabama. He was raised in a neighborhood built on a former tobacco field population of about 50,000. Through had stoicism and sudden grit, he managed to graduate Harvard College, harvard Law School and University of Cambridge with honors, all while becoming a member of the USA Open Water Swimming National Team and earning an international bronze medal in the process. Entering the work world, andrew took a while to find his footing, bouncing from banker in Mary Lynch to attorney to consultant at McKinsey Company, before finally striking out on his own. By developing the ancient philosophy of stoicism, andrew eventually took the company he founded from less than 200,000 in revenue to nearly 10 million in under three years. Rented is now a two-time Inc 500 winner. Andrew is also a board member of Sheltering Arms, georgia's oldest non-profit early childhood education program, as was a founding board member of Atlanta Technology Leaders and a Techstars mentor of social impact startups. Andrew's drive to share encouragement, resources, understanding and techniques have led to a creation of his book. You can check out the link to the book and Andrew's website in the episode notes. The book is called Get Out of my Head creating modern clarity with stoic wisdom.
Klara:We cover so much during this episode. Andrew being a competitive long-distance swimmer, there are certainly many skills that his swimming journey has taught him and that mindset helped carry him through establishing success in his studies and the next chapter of his life consulting at McKinsey, becoming entrepreneur. We talk about all of that, including facing an overcoming identity crisis. Can we see ourselves more than a label and deciding to choose our own freedom to be who we allow ourselves to be? Get Out of your Own Head. Back to the title of the book and the theme of this podcast.
Klara:I find this message very accurate. I believe our own minds can be our best friends and also our worst enemies, whether it's tennis, swimming, any other sport or entrepreneurship. I believe one of the skills that is important to learn is to discern what thoughts are productive and what thoughts need to be discarded and eliminated, and learning how to control your own mind is a skill that is transferable in anything and everything you do. During this conversation, we also highlight the insignificance of our existence. I think Andrew brings a unique perspective. Swimming in the big blue ocean that reminds you how tiny and powerless you might be. He highlights the importance of being curious, putting in the work and effort. Andrew's perspective is that talent may help you get some edge at the beginning, but being great always requires discipline and putting in a ton of hours and work perfecting your skills and craft. In fact, he believes this is mostly what his swimming journey had taught him the power of agency, being confident, being curious and being able to putting the work and create things.
Klara:This episode may be one that I may need to re-listen to again and again. I hope you enjoyed the lesson as much as I enjoyed creating it. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone you believe may enjoy it as well. Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast and Spotify, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. This is your host, clara Gossova. Thank you for tuning in, and now I bring you Andrew McConnell. Andrew, thank you for accepting my invitation to Grand Slam Journey Podcast. It's great to have you. Happy Friday.
Andrew:Happy Friday. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Klara:Yes, I'm very excited. I've been diving into your past and present and things you're creating, including your book Get Out of my Head, which is really interesting. We have so many topics. That actually makes you a perfect guest for my podcast, through your endeavors of sports, then conversions of business, technology and entrepreneurship. I'm sure there's lots, and just those few, of finding your journey to being the founder and CEO of Rentecom, even what led you to writing the book Get Out of my Head. I have a number of questions, but before we get to all of this fan conversation, I want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to the listeners.
Andrew:Yes, so, like you said, andrew McConnell, kind of varied background. I was a swimmer growing up when I was young, did all sports, right, so you play soccer, you play basketball, you do all that kind of stuff. But then when I was kind of 13 or 14, got much more serious in swimming, ended up getting recruited to go swimming college and so I swam when I was in college, made Division, I All-American, made the US national team, so that was nice. And then got injured and wasn't competing at the same level and so I had this kind of identity crisis oh dear, who am I? What am I? And the nice thing for me was I was in school at the time and so my identity could be oh, I'm a student, right, instead of the swimmer, the elite swimmer. Now I'm a student. I stayed on the team. I just wasn't competing at the same level and got very serious on my studies and so ended up getting into law school and doing law school in the US and the UK. Funnily, when I went to the UK they didn't have the eligibility rules, so I was able to swim again. So I was two years out and I could start swimming. It was much lower bar. Uk University swimming is not the same as US University swimming.
Andrew:I got to meet my wife because she was the captain of the university team and so it was very fortunate, got to do some swimming and go to law school and then school was ending so I said what's my identity? And I tried being a lawyer and said, oh, I don't like this. So then went into consulting McKinsey, recruited on campus and went into management consulting and it just sounded amazing. You travel around the world, you work with the best companies in the world, you work with these really smart people, and it was pretty incredible, right, my first month because I didn't come from business school they take all the people around the world who come in without business degrees and they put you in a resort and bring the best business school professors from Harvard, from NCAD, from GSB and Stanford there to teach you about business. So for a month we lived in a resort in Kitspuel that they own in Austria. It was just absolutely absurd, and so that was amazing and that was my identity. Right, I became I wear the blue shirts, I wear the dark slacks, I carry my to me bag, I fly out on Monday, I fly back on Thursday. Right, there was this whole package of this is my identity, but I really didn't like it. They got to a point of I was really really unhappy, which was yet another identity crisis. Wait, this is who I am, but I really don't like who I am. What does all this mean? And ended up navigating, went to an earlier stage company, said, wow, this early stage thing's really fun. Maybe I should go start my own thing. So, back in 2012, started my first company, vacation Futures, and kind of got the blog. So Certification Futures and Rented Capital, rentedcom which I sold just over a year ago, back in November of 22.
Andrew:And kind of as I was doing that journey, you have the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and what's going to happen. And I also had a daughter born during that time. So I got married, so I'm a husband, I'm a father, and you have these different pieces of identities. And I had this question to myself of if I'm not a entrepreneur, if I'm not a CEO, like what happens if all this goes. Am I going to have this identity crisis or can I see myself as more than a label? And by doing that, it kind of gave me the freedom to start writing Because I wanted to write, but I would always tell myself, oh, that's next phase, right, you need to do this, you need to exit the company, you need to do all these different things.
Andrew:That's later.
Andrew:And then, by giving myself the freedom to just be me and not a label, I can do a bunch of things.
Andrew:Oh wait, I can be a father, I can be an athlete, I can be someone who starts companies, I can be someone who writes. It gave me permission to go back and say, if I wanted to craft my life today to be the life that I wanted, as opposed to waiting for some future in determinate day to be what I think I want which I may be wrong about and won't find out for 30 or 40 years what would it look like if I started crafting that today so you know, I'm not perfected that by any means, as my wife would like to remind me, but I've gotten better at it and going back and say, okay, well, if today was to look like what I would want it to be versus what's gotten filled up from other people, what would that look like? And what are the pieces? How much am I learning? How much am I sharing? How much am I creating? You know, what are those pieces that come together? That may be a long-winded and pretty abstract way to describe me, but that's who I am.
Klara:Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much and I have so many questions and want to dive in deeper into many different aspects of your journey because I can imagine there's been probably Some pain associated with kind of the growing pain and finding the next stages as you went through what you beautifully described, the different identities we associate ourselves with. I'm guilty of that myself to you. Obviously every athlete is because that sport defines you. But then even after that sport, I think it's just a human condition To put labels on ourselves and even the society.
Klara:So I've struggled even myself of kind of defining who am I as a business leader or a person in a large corporate organization. And Actually I love what you mentioned about the book and resonate a lot because my podcast literally has been at one way of Me allowing myself to be more than just my corporate self, even though it's my sad passion and hobby and I dedicate a lot of my nights and weekends to it. But just for the sake of differentiating my identity, I actually enjoy it. So there's a lot of selfishness, I guess, in that that allows me to be something else than I am in my professional life. So thank you for mentioning that and your writing seems to work in many ways similarly.
Andrew:You described it as selfish, but I think We've kind of been brought up to think about caring for ourselves is selfish, but if we don't, who is gonna care for us? And how can we care for anything else if we're not caring for ourselves? So I think there are things that are selfish, but doing things that fulfill us, I don't see that being selfish. If it was all just seeking pure Hymnistic pleasure, yet Maybe that's selfish, right, that's not serving any purpose. But if it's something that's truly fulfilling, that just seems a necessary investment in the self versus selfish.
Klara:I agree, I think the selfish can have a negative connotation, and Even from being an athlete, I think it's so important as I grow older, to understanding the importance of Putting yourself first sometimes, and if you do that, everything else will follow.
Klara:And there's other Operanese that open up, including I'm just so much nicer to other people and obviously podcasts and meet amazing people, even such as yourself, that I learn and grow from so literally my podcast has become but my primary ways of learning, because it also requires to me me doing quite a bit of research and just other things into topics. I'm curious, then and just sit in and so it again self-serving learning, and hopefully it, you know, serves others as well, whoever decides to tune in. But I want to go back to your childhood and upbringing, grown up in Birmingham, alabama. I have a lot of guests that are from the US, but also international, and I'm always curious how the upbringing shapes us into who we are and even specifically how it allowed you to find your passion in swimming so I was born in Birmingham and Actually moved around a lot.
Andrew:So I was born when my parents were in med school and Then, when they did their residency, we went to Cincinnati for a couple years and then back to Birmingham till I was 10 and then they wanted to raise this in a Smaller town so they moved to Greenville, north Carolina, which is this? Basically a bunch of tobacco fields. At that point, less than 50,000 people with a big university and the entire city population would swing wildly based on is school in session or not, because the university made up so much of the population. And and then my junior year of high school, my swim coach left and that's really when you start getting recruited and so trying to figure out what do I do. And I ended up going to a boarding school for the last year and a half of high school. That was in Jacksonville, florida, and it's a subserv place. My graduating class small, 170 people, but in the 96 Olympics we had 19 Swimming Olympians. Wow, just in swimming. You know, at times there were ranked number one in the country in football and they would win all these state sports even though it was this tiny school and they had a deal with the International Olympic Committee. So they had my friends, the people that I lived with, boarding. Most of people did not board, they were day students but the borders were from all over the world. So my friends were from Brazil and Suriname and Malaysia and Zambia and Indonesia. They came from all over. Those were the people that I was living with. So it gave me this totally different perspective Of Birmingham and Greenville to all of a sudden this global World. It was really really interesting and I think helped open my eyes to the bigger world. That ended up being out there and so swimming. Certainly being on the national team, being able to travel and compete Internationally, helped to open that more. And then when I went to law school and be able to study abroad, when I worked in McKinsey, spent a year living and working in Copenhagen, london. Another year that I was working back and forth in Afghanistan Right, just taking that bigger global perspective. And now I live in Bermuda.
Andrew:I don't live in the US anymore, but just made me see that I can love where I am and Also recognize how the world's really big. Maybe there are a lot of places I could love being, because there's so many different things it can offer and going into situations when I could be the minority or a hate. Look, I don't speak the language. I have to overcome some things instead of everything being built around me. Right, this is the interest being outside the US. When you talk about being selfish, there's a long time that we had this very selfish existence.
Andrew:Right, like I only listen to music I want to listen to. I don't have to wait for the radio. I have open music and I'm like. I have my playlist. I list exactly to what I want to listen to. Right when I, when the temperature is not exactly what I want, have my nest thermostat and that gets the temperature exactly how I want it. And if I want something, I click a button and Amazon gets it there in 10 minutes. If I want to ride somewhere, I click a button and Uber's there in five minutes. Right, like everything is built around me Was moving now to an island when I didn't have a car for the first year and you're riding public transportation and they're striking 20% of the time and you never know if they're going to show up. It makes it much more humor, like wow yeah or swimming in the ocean.
Andrew:Right, I swim in the ocean every day. Man, I am insignificant, I am nothing compared to this ocean. I can disappear and the ocean would not care, it could take me down at any given second. And so that perspective taking it's humbling and that continuing humbling of me, I think is a very healthy Outlook. Right to go from this small town and maybe you're very good in the school or you're very good in that small world and then you're competing in different levels, like, oh wait, no, there's this whole world other than this little thing that I've been living in and that's been really helpful for me, I think, in Making me less selfish, like, if we go back to that kind of side Of, there's a good selfish and then there's a unproductive or maybe harmful selfish, and I think there have been times, certainly, that I've allowed myself to slip into the more harmful selfish, that putting myself in more uncomfortable, more foreign situations Help me with.
Klara:If that makes yeah, I love it and I wanted to. Specifically, I wanted to get into swimming Because I actually don't know that many swimmers. But I have very different admiration for swimmers than maybe other sport or perhaps it's kind of my understanding of what swimming entails. But for me, typically swimmers, it's the type of sport where you jump into cold water at 5, 30 or 6 am and you just got a rock up mild and keep swimming like that. What is? The door. Your emo just keep swimming, like to me.
Klara:What do we do with swim, swim, dorino, singing. Being a great swimmer, that's what it means to probably just put in a lot of Miles in the water and perfecting how you move. I feel like swimmers must have a little bit different mindset To do this. So I'm curious what really attracted you to swimming and the sport, and even more so the open water swimming? I'm really curious. I don't actually know any open water swimmers and so you deal with so many more different challenges, as you mentioned, like the ocean. If you swim an ocean or even a lake, there are so many more things to consider Just the coldness of the water or currents, wind, etc. So I'm curious, just tell me more about it.
Andrew:Like I said, you know, growing up, did soccer, did basketball, did different sports and then got more serious in the swimming, I think, because I had a friend who's very, very good swimmer I also on the national team who said there are kind of two kinds of swimmers those with talent and distant swimmers. And when I first went into year-round swimming I was 13 years old and I was put in the group with a seven year olds. Right, I was not at the level of anybody else, but it was a sport to your point of, if you're willing to put in the work, you could just grind it out. So what I found was the longer distance I swam, the fewer people were willing to put in that level of work. So if I was competing as a sprinter, it'd be bottom half, and then you kind of keep stepping up the distance and whoa, okay, wait, I can be this level and I can be this level, and so ultimately got to 25 kilometers, and it's very few people back then were swimming 25 kilometers. So I could go to nationals in metal and I can go to international meets and metal like, okay, well, that that's what I'll do, because I'm just willing to put in the hours you say, jump in at 530 and swim for a few hours, then go do weights, then come back at 530 at night and do a few hours more and do that seven days a week and just grind and grind. Probably no surprise that I ended up getting hurt right and not competing at some level, because not getting the rest of recovery you need. Yeah, I think that was a point in time in how training worked. I think we're getting smarter on what it actually entails.
Andrew:Back then it was all fitness, all fitness, all fitness. And I remember my my roommate in law school was also a very good swimmer in college and we talked years later and said if we knew then what we know now about nutrition, right just is a second pillar Wow, like probably wouldn't have gone after practice and said I'm on a cheeseburger, I want a chicken sandwich and I want a hot dog and that's just my appetizer before I go eat all this other junk. Or if we knew about nutrition, how could we have competed differently Then? Rest and recovery right did. Should I've been doing seven days a week? What days should I have been sleeping in what? What did I need to recharge my body to truly compete at my best when I competed at my best, I had this Mindset tape.
Andrew:It was this Australian sports psychologist. My dad got through some spam email but the the mindset part wow, we didn't do any of that with my team. I just locked in to having this tape and I would listen to that and I do the visualizations, all that. Wow, okay, so these four pills, you start bringing them together and then, fortunately, nobody was thinking about and no one's still thinking about it.
Andrew:But it is at least as important as everything else is the purpose in the social connection, and the beauty of doing a sport Is you're getting that social connection because you're out there doing it. So even if you're doing a long swim, you're by yourself. When you're at practice, you're talking to other people in between sets. When you live together as a team, we ate together as a team. So I was fortunately getting that. But basically I had social connection and purpose and I had the fitness and the other three pillars of health and performance no one talked about, no one thought about and say huh, I wonder what that could have looked like if we really Thought about all of what health and performance look like together and made sure that we're investing in all of it instead of just as one fitness pillar and locking into the purpose and social connection.
Klara:I love that one. I would love a link to the mindset tape if you still have it. I'm just curious. I would love to rewatch it or if you know where to find it.
Andrew:I don't know how I'd find it, because you know, I don't even have that email account anymore.
Andrew:It was a full cassette tape that I had a friend convert then to a cd At one point and it was this Australian, the sports psychologist, and that friend who converted it at the end did this whole Steve Irwin impersonation. They kind of ruined it, like you're going through this whole visualization, and then he added this at the end and blew all of it up. So it wasn't that useful but it was fantastic. Basically, I didn't know until, you want to say, three or four years ago, I went to a conference and someone was talking about hypnosis and going through that was like whoa, that's a hundred percent what this was. It was, it was your picturing on the screen and the numbers counting up and down and it was a hundred percent hypnosis. They got you in to this visualization of you competing 10x better than you ever thought you could. And just the year of doing that I went to this entirely different level of performance and the training wasn't different, but the mindset was so different when I jumped in the water it was crazy.
Klara:Yeah, this is one thing that I really like about sports and I think any sports you got it from swimming, I got from tennis and any sport because it's so measurable, right, I feel life in general is just where more messy and chaotic.
Klara:So, really measuring the impact of your mindset, you can sort of measure it maybe on like how a specific meeting went well, but in long scheme of things it's really hard to measure how that mindset really contributes to the progress. But I think in sports because it's so in many ways black and white you kind of swim a race, you have a specific time and you kind of measure yourself against, you can really see the difference Of performance. That actually one of the things I have really taken away from tennis. Like I know, no matter how many times I can hit an ace or a specific serve, if I'm standing on a baseline and I have a thought, oh, just don't double fault, I'm gonna double fold 99.9 of the time. So it's so crazy how that mind-body connection works and I think really this awareness that sport allowed us to test on ourselves that's like almost Running your own lab trial, right, but living through it how much has that helped you later on in life, and you even, maybe, for writing this book. Get out of my head.
Andrew:Yeah, I mean Tremendously the discipline that you have to have for sports, right with the get up and train. So even when you're not feeling great, you're getting up, you're going to train. So, oh, I don't quite feel like right now you're getting up and you're gonna go right, right, you, just you do the thing, there's not a question. And not everybody was like that, but I remember there was me and one of my roommates that someone said you guys don't miss practice. Like if you miss a practice it's because someone snuck into your room and broke your alarm clock. It doesn't matter what's going on. Now. I ended up in the hospital at times because of it, because I'd go with 104 fever and I had the flu. And I'm still at practice and like maybe that wasn't the right answer. But that discipline there was just never a question on. Are you going to do the thing? You've committed to do, the thing You're going to do it? So that's one. And then the structure of I had to be so structured with the time when you have two practices a day Plus your classes, you have to be really specific when am I going to get this work done? When am I going to get that work done and I think that carried over how I balance my life on. On what time am I going to allocate to what piece?
Andrew:Because Truth is, we all get 24 hours.
Andrew:Bezos gets the same 24 hours all of us get, and so we have that same gift. If we give it away to other people, if we give it away to Zuckerberg and like, hey, you know Instagram, you're gonna get two and a half hours of my day, and Reed Hastings you're gonna get another two and a half hours, because I'm gonna, instead of watching one show, I'm gonna sit there and slip into autoplay next for five shows. Then what is left for us? Are we stealing from the sleep and recovery we need? Are we stealing from the social connection? Because social media is like a fruit rollup right, social is in the word, just like fruit is in fruit rollup, but we're getting none of the nutrients from what actual fruit or what actual socializing have. And so I think it helped carry over to me being much more protective and proactive of my time and not just giving it away, cause there's just not that much time to give away. None of us have. We all only have the 24 hours. We don't have time to just give away to people 100%.
Klara:I resonate with that a lot because tennis requires a lot of hours, mainly because there are so many different skills, so literally could just split your day and practice different components of what tennis game needs, and so growing up in that really structured environment, I think, propelled me to naturally wanting to have structure in my work. Life is actually more of the lack of structure that makes me nervous and I'm trying to find new balance in that. Then the structured self and kind of routine. So I'm definitely prone to routine. Because of that it seems like you are as well.
Andrew:Yeah, reviewing the routine, so it's like routine and say, okay, here's how much of my time each week I want to allocate to fitness, here's how much time I want to allocate to sleep, here's how much time I want to allocate to learning versus creating, versus helping these broad buckets, and then kind of audit my week and those seasons can change. So, with building the business, there can be a time that, hey, I need less time with my team, I need more time with investors. Or, okay, we're not dealing with that. I need more time with clients, less time with team. Or more time with team, less time with each.
Andrew:And so auditing that and rebuilding what that budget should look like I'm thinking of my time as a budget on a quarterly or monthly basis, of saying, okay, what is the right allocation for this time and am I sticking to it? Let me look at next week. Am I sticking to this? If I'm not, why was I wrong on the budget? Have I been lazy or sloppy in how I've been giving away my time and kind of repurposing, reallocating around that?
Klara:And you have some good examples in the book, including worksheets for people to download, and they can sort of do their own budgeting of what they believe is their own priority, which I really appreciate, and it's a lot of how I do things. I actually just have everything on my calendar, including my free time. I just plan it and so I can see over a period of week or month of how I'm spending my time and also see energy level, and based on that I can look back. Am I being exhausted? Is there something that is draining my energy too much and I need to add maybe more free time or eliminate a toxic person or a project from my calendar? So I feel like that's a similar way of how you do things.
Andrew:Yeah, how long have you been doing that? Cause I actually just started that practice I wanna say a year and a half ago, or maybe almost two years now of looking back at the year prior. So the new year instead of new year's resolutions. Here are the things I'm gonna do, doing the audit and say what gave me the most energy and what took most energy and how can I proactively.
Andrew:This year I'm like, oh man, you know, what I really loved was unstructured time at the coffee shop. So I'm gonna make sure at least once a week, or once every two weeks I'm getting just 90 minutes that nothing else has happened. I'm gonna show up to the coffee shop and work on what I want. I'm gonna be offline, whatever it is. Or when I talk to my teammates from college, I'm so happy for days afterwards, instead of just waiting and say, hey, we really shouldn't let this slip so much. I'm gonna remind myself every two weeks reach out to somebody, schedule the time, be the person that pulls people in to do it, and those are some learnings. But how long have you been doing that? Because I found that that's amazing practice.
Klara:Yeah, I started doing it. Funny enough, you talk in your book also about the crisis and the hardest time that helps you become better. It was right before the pandemic started and I had a very chaotic manager that couldn't get his job done and I ended up doing much of his job and he never knew what's gonna happen, and so he would come up every day with one or two fire drills and so my schedule ended up being so over the place that I couldn't get my own work done. So it really forced me to learn how to say no and be more structured and actually stepping up and say sorry, I don't have time right now. Like I have this thing if you want me to do this, like I have to negotiate with him what I can get done. Otherwise I could work 24-hour days, and so that constrained in, I think, being in just exhausted mindset and having so much that I could say yes to and as somebody you are reporting to, I feel like there was a little bit of that authority.
Klara:I think we're more prone of saying yes, sometimes too much. So at the beginning, taking the courage and standing up and saying no it was terrifying, but it really kind of helped me refine of how I schedule my calendar so I've been doing it for quite a while. Also what I realized, what it really works for planning, let's say, some of the things that require a long time, even projects. So I kind of budget everything in and so I've gotten so much more accurate over the period of, you know, two and a half years or how long I've been doing it, assuming how much something will take, what is the time and effort they will take to get it done. So I've gotten much more accurate of forecasting my time and the level of effort. I think at the beginning I had only about like 50% accuracy and that was part of the problem. Right, I was overestimating on a highly positive side of what something would take to get things done and saying too many yeses.
Andrew:Yeah, I mean that's where the optimists can get really punished, right Cause you think best case here's how long it's gonna take, and then you sign up for twice as much stuff. And I think you said something really important there that I hope people listening will take to heart and not lose, which is we have this tendency to just add, but having the conversation with your manager, anytime something's added, okay, well, what needs to come off? Because presumably it's not like I'm at 30% capacity right now, right, unless that is, and that's been the conversation but presumably I'm working a full-time job and you've just added this thing, so should we go back? And so here's all the things I'm doing. If this is gonna come in, what needs to come off? Are there things that actually we did and it made sense a while ago, but it doesn't make sense for the business anymore and so let's just stop it? Are there things that maybe I'm no longer the right person to do this and there are other people that can do it? Are there things that should just be automated? Actually, there's a software that can do this and it can do it for all these people, and let's stop having people do that thing. But being proactive in having that conversation. It's a thing I've always coached my team on and my direct reports. It can seem like micromanaging but it's incredibly powerful tool of if a direct report starts feeling really, really overwhelmed, I say it's been two weeks and track every 10 minutes in your day. Here's a spreadsheet just put every 10 minutes what you're doing for two weeks and then let's go sit down together and let's go through what are the stuff just needs to stop.
Andrew:A lot of times, like 40% of the things they're doing say no one should be doing this, just stop doing it and see if it matters, see if it impacts the business in any way. This report has anyone read it? If we stop sending it, would anyone complain? Multiple times you read it like stuff just stops. This stuff yeah, I guess that made sense that you did it before, but now shouldn't this other person or should we get an EA like all short, to go do this thing and just working through?
Andrew:And then all of a sudden you think, wow, I can be so much more effective on this 20% of stuff that only I can do and that 20% grow into 80% of the time. But they're not four times more productive. Maybe they're 10 times more productive, because that's the stuff that really requires them. And so, having that courage to have that conversation with your manager, say, okay, if this is coming in, let's look at what needs to come off, because otherwise what you're gonna do is either overstretch yourself and or everything's worse. Look, I'm just giving mediocre effort on all these things because I'm doing too many things versus excellent execution on the stuff that only I can do and I'm needed for.
Klara:Yeah, definitely, and I encourage people to do their own audits. Maybe this is good time, january, so everyone can start thinking about and reflect if they haven't during the holiday what has last year looked like for them and what they want to say yes and what they want to say no to and be picky about. On that note, and going back still a little bit deeper into swimming, because I'm really curious about this what does it take to become a great swimmer and do Because you mentioned you weren't the most talented at the beginning You've achieved the bronze international medal, qualified for the US Open Water National Swimming Team, which I'm sure has big competition. I think US overall is a great country with a lot of swimming talent.
Klara:Reflecting back on your time and the again time and effort you had to put into that sport to achieve that level, what did it look like? And I'm curious if you can even walk us through maybe a competition day again in the open water. There's many different conditions, so how do you navigate that race and even train for something like 25 kilometers that you can imagine swimming that distance? Many people can't. People typically suffer with that triathlon, right? Ironman? That has just a few miles. That is a tough enough challenge, but here it's a completely different distance that you're swimming.
Andrew:There are a bunch of questions embedded in that. So I think there was one piece of. I was fortunate when I went in in some ways in that open water was not an Olympic event until 2008. So I was doing early 2000s, late 90s and it was just less competitive because it was an Olympic event. We had world champs. We did that, but because it was an Olympic event some of the best swimmers weren't really focused on it.
Andrew:So the bar for making the national team, the bar for winning medals internationally, it's different than it is now. I mean, the competition is higher level and I think that's true across the board. If you look at the times to put it in perspective, for the Olympics there are A cuts, which a country can send two athletes for, or B cuts that smaller country, like you, can slip somebody in. The B cut. For a smaller country to get somebody to the Olympics is a sub-15, 1500, long course Before 2000, the year 2000, there was never an American in history who had ever gone under 15 minutes. Now, just to get the B cut, much less to get the A cut and compete and make the like the level of competition and speed. I have this conversation with a bunch of friends that have been on the national team back. They're like I don't know how they keep getting this fast. I don't know what's going in, and maybe it is because they're getting smart. It's not just about the fitness, but they're getting smart on sleep and recovery and nutrition and the sports psychology and all these pieces are bringing it together. That probably helps a lot, because we've seen, when you start stacking these things and think about it holistically, the impact is bigger. So I think that was a big help for me in getting in and getting where it was On a competition day just trying to think of what are the things you can control versus not.
Andrew:And so I remember going to the nationals for the first time for the 25K and they were in Hawaii. So I say, okay, currents come into play, because we're out in the ocean off of Hawaii like figuring out what's going on. So let me go talk to lifeguards to understand what the currents are and where good lines to take would be. And so go to the lifeguard and say, okay, we're coming out of here, we're going around Diamondhead, we do this loop. And I said no, you're not. So yeah, he said no, you're absolutely not. And I said, well, here's the map, here's the course. They said that's a breeding ground for hammerheads. There's no way they're putting you through that. And sure enough, people saw it 14 foot hammerheads while they're swimming. And some people got out of their ways. So when they ended up having world ships there a year later, needless to say, the course changed.
Andrew:We did not go around the hammerhead breeding ground, but the people designing the course hadn't talked to anybody, but just trying to do the research ahead of time. And then there's different psychology, like with the US, we were behind Italy and the metal cow and so, even though I was there to some of the 25K, something like two days before, they said everybody has to do the 10K because we need more metals. I'm like, okay, 10k, it's way less than a 25K. I'm gonna revolutionize the sport. I'm gonna turn the 10K into a sprint event. So two and a half K into the 10K race, I'm four and a half minutes ahead of everybody. We're just like I'm changing the sport. This is amazing.
Andrew:I ended up getting faulted to 13th and I've never heard more in my life. My parents are both physicians. They said when you got out, I thought we were gonna have to take you straight to the hospital Like you had zero blood flow to your skin. They said did you see a bunch of stuff while you're swimming? I said I saw a bunch of stuff. I just don't know if any of it was real because I was hallucinating Like it was a bad reason. So the 25K was much more paced. Okay, let me figure out my position.
Andrew:And the difference with a 25K is you get your own boat. It's long and they're the ones feeding you. It's like throwing drinks down and so you can do stuff. So you're just grinding, grinding, grinding and at some point you don't really know where you are, because it's like two marathons back to back. The equivalent would be running two marathons. And so you're in your three hours and four hours in and the national team coach held up because I'll have whiteboards and said look, you got a medal, let's just see which one you can get now, cause I, where I'd been, oh okay, well, all of a sudden I feel much better than I did five minutes ago. I thought I'm dying. Now I'm like whoa, got a medal, let's go. So it's in a race that long.
Andrew:If you're doing a 50 meter race and it's 20 seconds, the number of emotions are very, very different. Yes, doing a four or five hour race, like you're playing five set mat or whatever it is, it's a whole roller coaster. You're going through all sorts of things throughout the whole process, and so it's just a different mindset. So now I live on the ocean, swim in the ocean every day, and each year we do a 10K race. And was it last year, not the most recent one, but the year before.
Andrew:I found myself jumping ahead of, like oh, I just can't wait for this race to be over, like it'll be done and stop hurting, and all this. And then I remember this Japanese concept of Ichigo ETA, which is once in a lifetime, which is every single moment. This is the only one of these moments in your entire life that you're going to get. Okay, actually, I'm swimming next to a friend. They're literally stingrays swimming under me. It's glass on the water. It's a beautiful day. Why don't I just see if I can just enjoy this and not think about the end, but just think about now and enjoy it? And that year was way better. This year I told myself that was the last year I was going to do a. Did again this year, but it made it so much more enjoyable. I wasn't just like, hey, I'm just getting through this to get to the end, but let me just enjoy the process that this is. And one of the things in the book and I constantly have to remind myself of make the process the result you're seeking.
Andrew:And you talk about tennis a lot. I've not heard or seen a better example of this than Joke of Edge with Wimbledon. I didn't even watch the match, my wife was watching, but I went and at the very end saw his speech. Right, he's teary-eyed and he's looking at his son. And they asked him about how he feels. And, disappointed, he said look, there were certain years that Roger should have won. Maybe he should have won, but I won. Those were my years, and this year it was Carlos's right, like it wasn't mine.
Andrew:And he didn't get hung up on the result as the signal Cause when you were talking about sports, like, figure out the metrics and we measure those. But he understood that wasn't the important metric. The important metric for him was his process. What is he doing on his training? What is he doing on his training? What is he doing each day to be a better Joke of Edge than he was a day before. And so he didn't take the wrong lesson when he beat Roger. He didn't take the wrong lesson when he lost to Carlos. And then he goes back to the US Open wins. It becomes the most grand slimes of anybody, and I go back to that example all the time. That guy understands and there's a reason he's the best tennis player that's ever played, because he gets it. It's the process, and his process is so consistent and it must be exhausting. It must be so hard and because it's so hard, very few people are willing to do it, which is what allows him to be the best.
Klara:I agree. I think that's a beautiful example and Novak is just a different breed. Just to achieve what he achieved so far already and he has potentially long ways to go. He seems healthy and still at his age. I'm actually impressed how he can still, at his age, outrun in the finals of the young kids, which decade makes a lot of difference. When it comes to regeneration as an athlete, we feel it perhaps more than the average person. I'm sure you feel it on your body now. Swimming Like fling tennis in my late 30s and getting an injury is very different than you know how I recovered when I was 18 versus even 22. There's a big difference in the recovery that my body is not able to just recover through intense workouts as it has been in the past.
Andrew:And what they're willing to invest in it. Right, if you think about what Novak invests in recovery or LeBron, right? Lebron, this is my asset and the amount of time in training versus recovery. That changes with seasons based on what your body is you may need. Hey, there's twice as much investment now on the recovery side. I've got the muscle memory, like I know the technique and skill. What is needed now is that I am fully there each time. I'm not having to learn the same skill. So you adjust your allocation across those different pieces 100%.
Klara:I have been very slow learning that process Since that. You struggle with it even in college because at some point I think even in their Early 20s, I have to say I guess the bad luck for women we start aging a little bit sooner Then you guys men, and so just fine tuning. How much volume I should have put in. Even in my college tennis years I should have been more careful of not over training and adding more Rehabilitation and just self-care earlier on to prevent injury systems Like that's what ultimately Triggered your injury as well. Where you had to step, is it over training, andrew, or it's a good question.
Andrew:I mean, you know, I'm now 20 something years removed from it and I don't know, right like there's a part of me that says, hey, was it Very psychological because I go swim now, I swim 10k like I never had an operation, but I don't have that pain. Or was it? Hey, it was just really really bad tendonitis. It took me a decade of not swimming at that level to actually work itself out and do these other things. So I I don't know what it was, I don't know what fixed it.
Klara:And I want to go to one more point you mentioned in this swimming that I see actually different in tennis. Because the benefit of tennis Is there's always an action and reaction in that instant moment and point and you actually measure which can be good and bad. But you know you're standing at all the time during the match. So the benefit is sometimes actually Distancing yourself from what the score is. But I wonder how it is in the long Distance swim you kind of mentioned. You have the boat guiding you but when you're in that race and you have so much space in the ocean, you recognize how insignificant you are. Is it the benefit to just tune to yourself and just still focusing yourself and swim your best, or how much are you judging the strategy and awareness of where others are versus your pace? What is the strategy for that?
Andrew:That's where I think a little bit like pool swimming. It's one of the reasons I like swimming or running versus maybe something like water polo.
Andrew:Where it's objective. There is a number on the clock and you see who moved through this distance faster than the other person and because of that you don't necessarily have to get hung up on when you're racing because maybe you're racing back. I certainly always got faster and trained better when I train with people who were faster than me, because I would just race every single one and so they wouldn't be faster than me that much longer because I was just trained with them. And if you say, wait, what are your times? How are you up here with me? I don't know, because I'm going to race you. I guess, to take that to the open water, it's just doing the best I can In that situation.
Andrew:So, example the 10k this year got to the end, I finished and the guy comes behind and and we're talking and I just asked to say, hey, who won?
Andrew:Oh, you did buy a lot. I'm like, oh, I had no idea really, like I didn't know who won, but I was just Swimming my race and no really where I was positioned in the thing, because it's a long, it takes a couple hours and you don't see everybody. So yeah, for me it's, it's much more. The competition is with me versus someone else, and I think that's probably different when you're really competitive, like as a teenager, early 20.
Andrew:If you're In college, you need to get the points for your team, you need to go in and the competition is with someone else. But because of training and everything being around a clock, the real competition is the clock and and because of that I think it carried a little more over to even I was from now or in open water of yeah, you need to be conscious of where people are and see if you can push yourself. But if you're doing the best you possibly can, regardless of who's around, then it doesn't really matter, as long you did the best and maybe you won by five minutes or maybe you got tenth, but that was the best because you did the best, if that makes sense.
Klara:I love it. So it's still very much seems like focusing really inward, being aware, but swimming your race, what your body allows you to do, and try to follow your pace and I guess still, if you can just Outpace the clock, to swim your race. It seems like that's the key to the Victory there and success. Is that correct?
Andrew:It's so hard because you don't know, is it go out fast and see how long you can hold on? Is it pace yourself and then really push it at the end? And then you say, well, how much more could I have pushed it? How? How much earlier could I have started pushing? And so that I don't think there's anyone who knows exactly the perfect strategy.
Andrew:I remember having a conversation with a guy Olympian from Suriname in high school and people would always say, oh yeah, if I just push this a little more, and he's like that's total BS. Like any race you're doing, you gave it on, there's no extra at the end. You gave it and maybe it wasn't the best way of giving it and the, the sequencing, you gave everything Right. I think if you're in the race, there was an extra, because everybody here competing at this level, we're not laying off like you're putting all on the line while you're doing it, and so it's just maybe playing with different strategies to see, hey, what gets me to that better time. And Because it's different. It's different in a offense defense game like tennis or b-side ball, that you're having to play someone else and you have to adapt each thing. Oh, they're hitting this way or they're hitting that, so it's just getting through the water fastest and so it's a little more straightforward, I think. Less game theory, more just go yeah.
Klara:But then there's, you still have the currents and kind of now, as you were describing what came to mind what you were saying, the nutrition and the preparation, because you wake up and every day you may feel a little bit different. So how do you structure your long swim and do start slow, pace yourself? Will you run into a different current, like how much those conditions will impact you, like that's so much variability, probably, and kind of the food. Can you touch on the food, like how do you Actually nourish yourself before a race like that, or do you actually get any food? I don't know if that's possible. You're probably loose time like doing that swim itself. I actually I like to train every now and then under the worst possible conditions right.
Andrew:So I typically like I just did a really really difficult pool workout today and didn't eat at all before and a lot of times. So whatever I work out, I'll go do it fasted and on, say that race day, maybe two hours before, I'll do a protein shake, and all this so I have more nourishment than on what I'm used to doing when I was able to. And then normal days I'll go out against the current so they coming back easier. But then every now and then you do the other way because you can't guarantee what the current's gonna be on the day. Hey, a hurricane may have come in.
Andrew:The current's going this way versus that, and so putting myself in position when I say, hey, I know, in the tougher times, like this year in the race, I got stung by jelly, people got stung by jellyfish, which I'm used to. Again the current. It was way choppier than the year before. People were doing C-sick and like this is not anywhere close to the worst day I've stolen, like I saw in days way, way worse than this. And so Back to the. You know the line. You don't want to Rise up to the competition of the day but fall back to your level of training and so what I always loved In doing the open water swimming when I go to a pool race Is anytime I stood on the block and say there isn't any single person in this race who's put in more work than I had.
Andrew:I know that going 100 confidence. There's not someone here who's put in more work, and that gets back to that mindset part. So there there was the fitness. Maybe that wasn't the best strategy, because maybe I should have more recovery and everything in there, but the mindset certainly helped. Love I know I can read these people Love it. I think we can talk about swimming and I have many questions forever.
Klara:But I want to diverge a little bit more to your next curve, diverge a little bit more to your next career. So it seems like you mentioned you really enjoyed swimming, got injured. That got you interested into law and eventually became a lawyer for a while, until you Realize it's not for you and you joined McKinsey consulting. But how was even that transition? You mentioned the identity crisis that every athlete goes through. How do you reflect on that time?
Andrew:I got actually depressed and I think realizing that identity, that identity, is a death. It's the time we have to deal with our own mortality and I'm like, oh no, that version of me is dead. And if you don't process that right and go through the morning and think about, hey, wait, this is also an opportunity for rebirth, what that looks like. And so you know, as a 19 year old kid I did not have the maturity to figure all this kind of stuff. I was just really sad and I get drunk and I'd start crying, like get really upset. It was just, it was really rough.
Andrew:But I was a part of a team that we lived together. I slept in a room that we had three beds. I ate every meal with 30 other guys, every single meal, right. I was with these people every waking hour of my day. We have similar glasses, right. And Without that group, I have no idea how long it would have taken me to get the other side. What I would have looked like if I didn't have that group, that We'd give me a kick in the butt when I needed, or a hand around the shoulder when I needed. That were there for me, and so that helped me navigate it to say, okay, that was the death of that.
Andrew:You know what? Could this rebirth mean? What is the opportunity here for rebirth that led to being a student and getting really passionate about civil rights, human rights, going to law school to do that, getting exactly the job I wanted, like everything that I possibly wanted. I got and I was doing it and I hated it because I was passionate about the issues. But the day-to-day work it's just so mind-numbing and Solitary. It was so used to spending so much time with people and the energy and everything and I lost all that and lawn that. That was one of the things that excited me with mckinsey was You're in a room with your team and you're constantly going back and forth and ideas and I remember a year in I went to a training and this French guy said hey, do you see yourself being here for a long time? I said I don't know like probably go do something else. He's like that never really surprised me. I thought you'd be here forever. So why is that? He said when you hear the word problem, your Face lights up. You grab the marker, you're pulling everybody in the room like you just get so excited With the word problem, because it's that collaboration of working on something that matters with other people that are super smart. It was just so much fun, and so that was fun for me until it wasn't right you're traveling all the time.
Andrew:I got married but I was never seeing my wife, and the variability was really fun initially, but then it became exhausting because I would constantly switch industries and so I'd have to go learn all about shipping, all about reach out, whatever it is To show up in these kinds of paying absurd amounts of money why are they hiring me? And I'd have to get really smart, really fast or be able to fake it, and that it got really, really tiring. And so then a person I had worked with on some of the afghanistan work had gone to that.
Andrew:What was this early-stage company? There's a new concept law firm and they said, look, we're going into these big banks and energy companies and we need somebody who knows law but does consulting with these kinds of companies. And that's kind of you Like, that is me, okay. So did that and grew that from 4 million to 22 million in the first year and like, wow, that's really good. Like I can go build stuff, let me go do that. And then then led to just starting my own companies, and that's been the journey. I spent, I guess, 11 years in the the vacation rental, short term rental industry With various companies and your rentedcom that you started.
Klara:I'm curious even how that idea came about. I've listened to some of your podcasts but the listeners didn't perhaps don't know the story, so you can highlight a little bit of that and what made you decide to do that, actually as your first big founder and CEO startup?
Andrew:Well, rentedcom was actually my third. It was this kind of ongoing journey. I was at the new concept law firm startup and I was on a family vacation in january of 2012 and two family friends started talking about the rbo and I never heard of it, didn't know anything about airbnb, vrbo. So I started asking questions and Then eventually say, wait, that sounds like you're having to do a lot of work doing all this yourself. Why don't you work with professionals? I said, well, they charge too much, they have no skin in the game because they just take percent of the commission, yeah, but they don't have a job without homes from the homeowners. I don't understand why homeowners wouldn't just force the managers to bid against each other To tell you exactly what they'll give you for the year. And they looked at me and said, wait, if there was a way to do that, everybody would be doing that Everybody. How big is this market? So we were in Turks and Caicos and I didn't go back to the beach. I was in the hotel room researching this industry, emailed who the guy who ended up becoming my co-founder on the company and we went and launched that business and that business grew that one Quickly right, like it was doubling revenue every month. It was making a bunch of money. We were all over the globe, grew revenue 51 times in three years, from x to 51 x, and so that was really good. But then it plateaued. Why is this not growing anymore? And what we found was 90 percent owners, you say none of the work doing it, guaranteed income and market clearing price because they're bidding against each other. It's simul, please.
Andrew:But the companies that were managing were these really small companies in very isolated locations? Say, they were in Hilton head, they were in destined Florida, and if A hurricane hit and messed up 4th of July weekend and they had all these guarantees, their whole business would go under. They couldn't do guarantees across a whole bunch of contracts. They didn't have the financial means. So one of my employees said look, we know the owners want this and we know the managers can't really do it because they don't have the money. What if we could finance to bridge the gap? I don't know. Let's go see that was.
Andrew:The second company was Rindy Kappa. We raised this big fund, nine figures. I ended up placing properties all over the world. I had thousands of properties in India, in Australia, like all over the world, and then we started getting this big portfolio. It was amazing.
Andrew:Then again, one of my employees said you know, we have all these properties, but these small managers, they're not very good at pricing. They're really good at guest communications, they're really good at the relationship with the owner and cleaning the homes, but they don't have data scientists, they don't have data analysts. What if we could price these things like airlines do, like hotels do, where it's fluctuating, is very sophisticated? And I said I don't know, let's go hire and like, build this out and see what it looks like, and within 30 days, we're making the same properties 30 to 100% more money on the exact same property, same manager. Oh well, maybe that's its own business. So that's what led us to starting Rindycom. That became the pricing engine for vacation rentals and Airbnb's and so launched that and then sold that at the end of 2022. Well.
Andrew:Yeah, so I guess every idea just came from conversations, listening to people, kind of other people's ideas. You're like oh maybe there's a business there.
Klara:But what I'm kind of sensing is your drive towards what you identified and even your colleagues at McKinsey seem like identify as this problem solving scale. And I'm actually almost gonna tie it back to the swimming, because in the water you're probably always solving how are you gonna swim that race, since conditions are always changing and it's a lot of uncertainty, especially in the long swim. I always, I guess, wonder how much the sport made us at a core of who we are or where we born that way and kind of, as you go through that journey and the process and experiences, how it further kind of shapes and refines your strength and kind of that curiosity into that problem solving scale. And it seems like you have beautiful combination of that and the curiosity of being open and looking around for opportunities and exploring and experimenting what hypothesis you can test to solve it.
Andrew:I would put it very much on the curiosity side. When I'm at my best, it's when I'm asking questions and I'm seeking to learn as opposed to giving other people information. That's when I'm at that. That's when I learn the most. That's oftentimes when they learn the most, because I'm not the expert on all this stuff and that's where the new ideas come from. Then I would tie it back to the swimming side in a slightly different way of learning that putting the work in can make measurable difference. Right, it's this idea of agency. If you haven't put that in and seen what you're capable of when you put the work in and push yourself, maybe you don't have the confidence to say, yeah, maybe that's a good idea. I don't know. I don't know if I could go do it. But if you have the curiosity, you're so excited about it and you say you know what? I could go put all this work in, I could go try to do this. That opens up a whole new world.
Andrew:How many people said oh, I had the idea for Airbnb. Oh, I had the idea for great Like are you a billionaire? Did you start Airbnb? No, no, because all these other reasons. Well, those were excuses. These guys wouldn't started it, and here's what they did, and it needs both right. You need the curiosity to uncover the stuff and get excited about it and you need to have the self-confidence and the discipline to then go do something about it. I think it's probably that combination to where the swimming part probably helped much more on the ladder. The curiosity, I think, is just trying to observe myself, and when I'm doing too much talking and stuff, I'm like man, that guy is boring. I really do not like listening to that guy. Versus, when I'm in a conversation, I'm asking all these questions. Wow, that was so interesting. I learned so much about this new person that I just met and everything that they've done.
Klara:So I'm on the opposite side. Thank you for allowing me to ask all the questions, andrew, and learn from you. I love that and I 100% agree because even at work and some of my friends that are the smartest friends they always come up with these ideas. But I feel there are so many smart people who have great ideas, but until you actually do something about it and try to get your hands dirty, rub your sleeves and actually execute on them, they'll just stay ideas. So I think that execution and willingness to try and build something and maybe fail because most entrepreneurs in startup actually fails if we look at the statistics.
Andrew:I would challenge that. I would personally challenge that, because fail is a label that we give something, just like success is a label. So the company may be closed, the company may have done X. You get to decide is that a failure or not? And you say, whoa, no, I wouldn't have met these people had I not done this, I would not have learned these things had I not done this. And you get to decide what labels you choose or choose not to put onto something. And if you can go into it saying the success is in the doing and the trying, then by doing and trying, that was successful. That was a success. You're not going to become multi-millionaire working with somebody else anyway. So why would you say, because I didn't with this company, that was a failure? Like, maybe it wasn't all the experience.
Andrew:I remember when I was hiring my first CTO, I was trying to get him to think about compensation across a few different buckets, say, ok, look, you have your base salary, but then you have any bonus potential and then you have the equity in the company and how I could grow.
Andrew:And he said, look, there's actually something that's probably more important to me than those three and that is the experience of being a CTO and building a technology organization. I haven't done that before and that opportunity to be able to do that is actually incredibly valuable to me. It made me realize so much of what we track. We do because it's easy to measure. It's like the drunk under the light saying oh, you're looking for your keys, is that where you dropped them? No, but this is where the light is, and so we measure all these things that are easy to measure. But are they the things that matter? And so, getting back to what is it that actually matters? What is it that we value? And for him, I was pitching the wrong things. What he valued was this totally other thing, and if I had been my better self asking questions and listening versus pitching and speaking, I could have gotten that faster.
Klara:That's a great example, and I think, of us, including myself. I'm really often guilty of that when we get this tunnel vision instead of asking questions and approaching things from curiosity. So, going back to your rentedcom, you had built an amazing company, had sold it in 2022. What is now next for you? You enjoy writing, so maybe there's another book, but I'm sure, with all your energy and passion for curiosity and problem solving, there's more things coming ahead. I'm curious what you're looking into as your next thing.
Andrew:My personal mission statement is to continually learn and grow and then to use that in service of helping other people. And what I found is the thing that has been of most interest to me for the past several years is health, and that health is. In much of the Western world, we define health as an absence of sickness, and that's not what health is. Health is vitality, Health is thriving, and to do it it requires all five of those pillars. It's not enough to just do fitness. It's not enough to just do fitness and nutrition. Fitness nutrition, sleep and recovery. You need the stress management mindset, and that was hey, here's why let me do the book and speaking and build some tech around that. And you need the social connection.
Andrew:And if we look at the crisis in people feeling alone in the US, it goes back to 2017. It's pre-COVID. It's gotten much worse, but people are spending $600 billion less a year on social activities going to the movies, going to restaurants, doing these things with other people and displacing that spending and just buying stuff at home, which we know does not bring happiness. But we know, when you don't have social connection, your cardiovascular events go up, your cortisol levels go up your blood pressure goes up all these bad signals.
Andrew:So to be healthy, to truly be healthy and thrive and have that vitality, you need to work across all five. But almost no one knows that. Very few people see across that. And as much money as we spend on fitness trackers or supplements, it's all these individual subcategories of each of these pillars. And so me and my co-founder are building is a marketplace aggregating across all five pillars, saying hey, to be healthy, to thrive, you need to work across all five. And so first it's just bringing it all together so you're not having to deal with the noise of everything that's going on, because there's new companies, products popping up every day and then also creating that visibility.
Andrew:So personalized dashboards where you can see what am I doing on this and my balance. I need to allocate more of my time or resources to these other pieces and really try to follow the path of a Netflix or an Amazon, where you go from aggregation to then seeing, hey, what has the impact? Hey, you did AMB. We see people who added C. Here's what it did for them. Would you be interested in now adding C and then identifying gaps in the market and say, hey, we think this could be really impactful. Let's go develop a product or service that fills this gap that nobody else is going after right now. And so it really is. If you're familiar with the concept of health span right, life span saying hey, I want to extend the number of years I'm living. Health span is I want to extend the number of healthy years that I'm thriving in life. That is the next company that's in mission is to become the first name, the first place in health span to help more people thrive through their full life.
Klara:I love that. You have my full curiosity and you're initially. Are you willing or able to go anyhow deeper? Because I'm trying to imagine what does marketplace will look like and how well people access it. Is it an app or a website? What do I need as an input to measure, and how do you even suggest the activity? Sorry, a lot of thoughts, as you can imagine.
Andrew:Yeah so initially launching web first, just because otherwise you have to get people to find the app, download the app, do all this, Whereas on the web it's much easier to do so web first and ideally we're starting with bundling, so making it easier. Say, okay, here's what a bundle could look like. So you may have come in and say I really want all in one nutrition drink. Say, okay, well, why do you want that? You're like, well, I hear it's really good on the nutrition side, It'll help my fitness performance and I'll be on recovery. Like, okay, well, you actually care about these things. Let's think about what a package for you could look like. So we're building kind of a AI guide to help take you through that, so you can have this customization on what your package could look like. And then working with some partnerships with people to create custom packages as well.
Klara:Wow interesting, and when is the launching? I'm just curious. I would love to try it myself. Do you have a date or a tentative date?
Andrew:You do not have a date yet. Yeah, yeah, we're still in stealth. I've probably shared way too much already. We're launching in 2024.
Klara:Excellent. Well, if you need any test person, I volunteer myself. I always like to try things and I've done biohacking on myself too. I always like to test an experiment of what works, and that's one of the biggest questions that you sort of answer some personalization, because different things may resonate with different people. So how do you measure what's actually driving the benefits towards what they define as success and growth, as health, because that can a little bit vary from a person to person.
Andrew:Yeah, instead of pushing out, say what is it this person cares about and how do we help him or her navigate to that? And if you really are open to it, then I would love to flip the table and be the one asking the questions and really learn, because we're very much in that customer discovery phase of what are the things that you really like today, what are the things missing and gaps that maybe we could fill to unlock new value for people like you.
Klara:Yeah, 100%, I'm ready for it. I'm realizing we're kind of right on time. Do you have a little bit more time, andrew, to stay on? I have a few more questions about your book that I wanted to cover. Excellent, so talking about Get Out of my Head book Creating Modern Clarity with Stoic Wisdom.
Klara:Being completely candid, I read the title even when we talked our introductory call. I was like duh, doesn't everybody know this? Like it just makes sense, and I'm sure it makes it for Andrew. After you know, looking at everything you have done in your life, including swimming and sort of that act of, I'm sure in swimming you have to get a lot of out of your own head, and trying to just suffer through the hard conditions, you know it makes me ponder doesn't everybody in the world already know it, and do we need a book about it? But I was intrigued and so I listened to your audio book. Actually, I have to say it's a really beautifully narrated. So I even have questions about you. Know how you achieve that, because I'm sure there is a lot of effort that goes into it. So Curious, share a little bit more of what do you want people to know about it and what made you write. It was kind of that instinct or the invitation. You felt like I need to write this book.
Andrew:You're saying, doesn't everybody know it? I think actually less than 5% of people know it Is. The fun is you'll talk to people and some people say, wow, a lot of the stuff in here. This is how I think and live my life. I didn't know anything about stoicism, I didn't know anything about Taoism, like these other philosophies you bring in, but I've kind of come to it in my own way because I found that this works for me. But 95% of people, it isn't immediately obvious to them. But even for those 5% myself included of like you kind of navigate to it the reason.
Andrew:I wrote the book is knowledge is not power. The power comes from the application of knowledge, and so we can intellectually know these things to be true. But what my investigation that ended up leading to writing the book was why would Sam Altman, the guy who created ChatGPT and OpenAI, why would he tweet back in 2019, don't let jerks live in your head Like he's around the smartest people in the world doing the most amazing things, but he's seeing something that people are allowing this to happen. Why would Taylor Swift, the most successful, maybe human being in the world, why would she sing about free rent living in my mind? Why would she sing about didn't notice you walking all over my peace of mind in the shoes I gave you as a present? Why would she deal with this? And so I went on this investigation. She was like oh, it's our biology, like evolutionary. Here's what our brains do by default. It doesn't matter how successful we are, it doesn't matter how much money we make or what we do. Our biology works against us.
Andrew:So knowing something is different than applying, and we know with fitness. We don't go train for a week and say I'm good to compete for the next two years, I've done my week of training. We don't eat healthy for a year and say cheeseburgers for the rest of my life. It's ongoing work. We don't sleep one night and say I don't need that anymore. It's every day. It's everyday work, because that's our biology. We know what it takes and for some reason we think, oh, I go hear a talk, I go do a workshop, I listen to a podcast or I read a book and magically everything's different tomorrow. And for some reason, we go to bed and we wake up and tomorrow looks just like yesterday, did nothing actually changed, because it requires work, and that was what led me to read the book of hey.
Andrew:For the people who don't know it, let me put a bunch of illustrations on hey. Here's the bio. Here's why this stuff's going on. Here's how myself and other people Navy SEALs, olympians, social activists, entrepreneurs have put these things into practice and what that's looked like. But then here's very tactical tools that you can use day to day, and so I actually I built an AI to do that too. So a personalized guide. So you have the workbook, you can do the PDF or, if you want a chatbot, go back and forth to guide you through it. I built that as well.
Klara:Oh, that's awesome. I haven't seen the chatbot. Where do I access it?
Andrew:I've been launching it Okay.
Klara:Yeah, curious. So I love this and what it actually reminds me, even joining it again to my experience. Also, the act of writing the book is solidifying all of those thoughts and kind of your experience and journey that you have gone through. Right, because that's a little bit why I started podcasting and even my own brief articles. Usually, again, I go to the word of selfish, not an in a negative connotation. But why sometimes write things out? Cause I think when I write them, even in a short article or I talk about things on podcasts, I just feel like there's something about getting it on a piece of paper or out to the world in words. That seems like it connects to my deeper self and I identified with it so much more so it becomes a much more easier or second nature. Does it work that way for you too, andrew? I wonder if, even writing this book out, I'm sure it's a journey you've gone through yourself. How much has that sense of kind of all of these learnings really settled more deeper into you after you wrote the book?
Andrew:If you go back 10 years and I'm maybe 20% good at this stuff and then with work I was getting to 40%, maybe writing the book took me to 60% and the ongoing practice is like I keep going. I have an article coming out later this year on false impressions, Cause my wife gets frustrated all the time. She's like it is such BS that you're out there talking about this stuff Like you were not perfect, I know. If I was perfect I couldn't write about this stuff cause it would be so obvious that I wouldn't know how difficult, I wouldn't know the exercise you need to do to overcome. And so the whole point on false impression like I just want to put it out there and be very clear.
Andrew:I am not great at any of these things. These are just when I'm at my best. These are the things that I know and I do, and I'm not always at my best. Let me raise my hand and not make sure there's no disabusing of any false impression that I am Buddha, Like I am not. I am someone who is struggling through all these things and so yet it's helped me. I don't think it's gotten even to 80% right, but it's definitely helped me as I go.
Klara:Yeah, I love it and thank you for sharing that and I share the same. I feel like if anybody says they're perfect, 100%, if something, they're probably even I'm going to say plain full of shit or they're just like nurses they don't know much about themselves and can measure.
Klara:So I think we all are work in progress and I think that progress and that what you mentioned, jerny, described earlier or even in the book, is actually how do you make it enjoyable, and that's really kind of what the name Grand Slam Journey is from too. It's the process that makes us learn and gutter skills, and we can go back a little bit to what you share kind of the failure categorization. I've always looked at tennis as my biggest personal failure in my life, and it's true in that sense that I've never achieved the goals that I had set for myself, but it's also been the biggest teacher I've ever had. So we decide the labels of what do we put on ourselves, and you can either live as you know, looking at yourself as a failure, or you can redefine that label and try to think about it as a teacher, or it can actually be both.
Andrew:That mindset is huge, that label of failure, and if you put it. There's a friend of mine, five Time Olympian, former world champion, world record holder, who his swimming career ended. He said the gift weren't the medals. The medals of ribbons, those are trinkets. The gift was the mindset. That was the gift. I have that for the rest of my life and we can all take that. The gift is what we learn along the way that makes tomorrow better than yesterday. We all have the ability to tell that story and I don't know why we'd want to tell a different.
Klara:I agree, it's beautiful. Andrea, I could talk to you probably for hours, but I have maybe three more questions just to be also mindful of your time. One I have to ask how you got endorsement of Adam Grant, because I was listening to one of his podcasts and he shares openly how difficult it is for him to write an endorsement for a book, that he doesn't do it because he receives thousands of these every day maybe, and so he says no way more often than he says yes. So I'm curious what that story is.
Andrew:I immediately wrote him after listening to that podcast and said thank you even more. I just listened to the same podcast and I reached out to him immediately as a result. Yeah, so, adam, I had a slightly unfair advantage. Adam and I have known each other since we were 18. He was on the swimming and diving team together, so he was a diver, I was a swimmer oh, that's right, I've heard that story too, then Very cool.
Andrew:Yeah, so we've stayed in touch. So when he wrote his first book Give and Take, and he's doing the speaking event in Atlanta, like me and my wife went there and go meet up with him and just constantly stayed in touch over the years. So as I was thinking of writing, like he's just always been super helpful at each stage on meeting agents and doing different things and so fortunately it was willing to give me the endorsement once he saw the book.
Klara:That's great and I recommend the book and two thirds through again, I'm listening to the audio. It was just great. You really did a great job with the recording and narrating Any lessons you want to share on that? I'm sure that's a whole process, separate process outside of writing.
Andrew:It is. It's totally different, but it's knowing. I was going into it. I have a daughter and I read to her every night, and so I was just like, ok, let me treat this like it's training for going and narrating the book, and I think I became a better reader for my daughter as a result and I think it made that whole process better and easier to do. This is the thing, you know. They're somers with natural abilities and then distant somers, and so I don't know if there's anything that comes naturally, like maybe for other people there are. I do think.
Andrew:Natural you can start off better than other people, but in terms of the highest level you're competing at. The natural thing is mediocrity. Excellence requires work and whether it's getting up speaking. Adam just did a podcast with Andrew Huberman where he talks about this and people think, oh, because he's doing all these TED Talks, like he's a speaker, and people, because I do TED Talks, I go, oh, he's a natural speaker.
Andrew:Adam said something that I tell people all the time. It's like when I was in school, my heart would race and I would start sweating before I'd raise my hand. Adam had the same thing. Like none of this is natural. It is. We've committed to say, hey, this is the thing we're going to do. We're going to go do the work to get good at it. And so it's the same like, oh, we listen to the book. Yeah, I'm not a natural IQ. Like, how is it natural? I spent every night practicing, reading this to my daughter on how would this flow, how would this work, what would this look like? And we can use it.
Andrew:This idea that it's natural for other people is an excuse for us not putting in the work. Oh, I could never do that, because they're just natural. Well, we know, for example, the chess masters, on average, have higher IQs than the average population, but the best chess masters, the top 5%, have lower IQs than the average and bottom 5% of chess masters Because it was harder for them, they learned that they had to work harder and that process of continuing to work made them that much better. And so you think about going back to Djokovic, like when he was coming through, and it's Federer and it's Nadal, like he had to learn.
Andrew:He thought about nutrition probably differently than any of them did when he cut out gluten and he did all this stuff. He had to work harder and no one works like him. No one does all the stuff he does and that's how he competes, and so don't use oh, that's natural for that person is an excuse. I can promise you the top levels none of it was natural for any of them. They put in work. Because they put in so much work, it looks natural and it looks easy, but it's not. None of it's easy.
Klara:Yeah, 100% agree. Even from my observations of sports and other athletes and speaking to other podcast guests that I've had on, I see sometimes things that do not come natural to us but that we preserve here and put in the effort. Actually, mark Cuban has the saying follow the effort, not your passion. But you can argue one or the other, they don't need to be the same. But if you actually follow the thing that you're willing and able to put in all the effort, that's where you become great at it and that's actually, I think, what makes you realize all the things, what it takes to be excellent and then shared with the world Because we often debate, or with some of the guests we've debated, because we were so bad at some things, you can actually now explain them better to others. Then, in things that we are natural at, it becomes much harder explanation. Do you resonate with that, andrew?
Andrew:That's the book. That's why I try to explain it my way. If it was easy and natural, I wouldn't have written the book because I wouldn't understand the process and the work. And this follow the effort, I think is a huge point, especially as a parent with a child going into sports. Of. There were so many kids way better than me growing up. They were pushed into it by their parents and they never had the personal effort to go, and so they were great until their parents weren't there forcing that effort on. And then they're out. They never finished something in college Versus following your own.
Andrew:And so, in debate with my wife, I say oh, you know, our seven year old, she needs to be doing two day practices, the. Suddenly I'm like she doesn't know what sport she wants to do. She absolutely does not need to be doing today Practicing. She needs to go taste and follow the effort. Follow what am I excited? Like? Messi isn't so amazing because somebody was forcing him to go practice. He never wanted to be away from a football because he was obsessed. Same with Beckham. You watch that video. He was upset. Like, yeah, his dad was also pretty intense, andrea, I guess your stuffy graph I don't know if you've read open like this I've loved that book.
Klara:It's so accurate. I find it so accurate.
Andrew:Yeah, there's so much push, but a certain level it has to be intrinsically driven. Yes. And the war that it's forced extrinsically, the less likely that intrinsic motivation is going to come. So that followed that for a huge point.
Klara:I agree, and your comment also made me think about back to Adam Grand, because I think he has a new book coming out. Oh, it actually writes about his diving and swimming experience and how bad he was at it and how much he enjoyed it and how it actually made him a better person because of that effort that he had put in and how much he had to work for it. So I wonder if he got maybe inspiration from you, andrew, and your book too, and reading it. So last couple of questions We've talked about so many amazing things. People think about 2024, what they want to create. What would you want to inspire them to be doing more of or less of?
Andrew:On motivation and inspiration. It is a sugar high and it disappears, and so the inspiration has to come internally. I think for me, the word of the moment and the concept of the moment is agency, and realizing how much agency you actually have. Oh, I can't do this because of this, because of this, and it's all these. I am a victim, or I am in a situation where I don't control these things. And if you can just reframe it to say I'm choosing because it's a choice, hey, I can't quit my job to go to this other thing because I have to pay for my mortgage or car payment or whatever, ok, that's actually a choice, because you could choose to have your home foreclose on, to have your car repossessed. You're choosing to prioritize that over that and any situation. Don't think it's happening to you, but try to replay the story, as I'm choosing this versus what the alternative is, because there are some times you say, yeah, I would still choose this. And there are other times you can say, wait, that's what I'm choosing over this. No, I don't want to choose that, let me go choose the other thing.
Andrew:But back to the excuses. So often we think, oh, I can't do anything about it by doing nothing about it. We've chosen a path. You could choose different paths and map that out. See what that looks like. That would be the biggest thing I would encourage, as we're looking in 2024 of. Don't just let 2024 be what 2023 is. We say, hey, that's what it was, that's what I'm stuck in. But look at it and say, ok, what am I choosing? What am I choosing to do? What am I choosing not to do? What trade-offs am I making by not making them and defaulting, or that I'm proactively making?
Klara:Yeah, I love that, and it seems like the book is actually an interesting guide for that, and they can get some great tips, including setting goals or base budgeting that you described and really figuring out how are you spending the time, and that spending of the time then will drive the progress and the results which I agree with as an athlete to and resonate. Thank you so much, andrew. Anyone who wants to get in touch with you, I'll add your website and your LinkedIn profile, if you OK with it, to the episode notes, but any other means or ways to connect with you regarding your book, this conversation or your new health projects that you're working on.
Andrew:Those are the two best for Instagram. Instagram is the same at M Andrew Volkanl, so those three are probably the best Website LinkedIn, Instagram.
Klara:Fantastic. Thank you so much again for your time. I could probably talk to you for hours If you enjoyed this episode. I want to ask you to please do two things that would help me greatly. One, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, spotify or any other podcasting platform that you used to listen to this episode. Two, please share this podcast with a friend who you believe might enjoy it as well. It is a great way to remind someone you care about them by sharing a conversation they might be interested in. Thank you for listening.