Marshall: I’ve written or edited 46 books. I have six bestsellers, three New York Times bestsellers including one big bestseller, but CB, on the other hand, the six, they sold three million copies—that’s good!

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Marshall: I always come up with ideas I don’t know where they come from.

CB: Well this is true because those of us that have worked with Marshall know the secret is to hold on tight because you’re in for a ride. You never know which way he’s going to turn or when. But we do know that whichever way he goes we’ll follow because it’s going to be fun and it’s going to be a great learning experience.

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09:30 Marshall: My book “Triggers” is really about the environment and how oftentimes without knowing it our behavior is a function of things around us. Sometimes we are aware of these things and sometimes we are not aware of them. As we journey through life we need to become aware of why we’re doing what we’re doing. Then we need to be able to look forward and try to adjust or to avoid things or to plan for things so that we won’t be controlled by the outside world.

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11:30 I was always confused why brilliant people do irrational things. There are a lot of brilliant people who do crazy things and then I finally realized that there’s only a small correlation between intelligence and rationality. Many brilliant people do completely wacky things. Most of our decisions are not based on logic—they’re based on emotion, and we use logic and rationality to defend them.

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12:54 As we journey through life, we’re being manipulated by the world around us and most of the time it’s outside of our consciousness.

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Marshall: Talk about the theory “it’s your parent’s fault” … to me that’s very impressive until you’re about 15 years old.

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CB: Marshall, you know one of the things about you is you’re a no-bullshit kind of coach. Were you always this way? I mean did you always just say it like it is?

Marshall: I’ve had a complete lack of tact for years.

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21:52 Marshall: Nobody knows if I’m a good coach. Why? I’ve got great clients and any idiot could look like a good coach if you had my clients.

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25:48 Marshall: … another thing I learned was a great saying, “if I’m not the expert on this topic then why am I speaking? I will probably do more harm than good.”

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Marshall: I said to JP Garnier, CEO of Glaxo, what did you learn about leadership as the CEO? He said I learned a hard lesson, I learned that my suggestions become orders. Now, before I speak, I breathe and ask myself is it worth it?

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28:55 Marshall: The essence of Buddhism is every time I take a deep breath it is a new me.

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Marshall: The essence of the book “The Earned Life” is we are constantly reinventing ourselves in life, and the focus of the book is not to focus on results but to focus on the day-to-day process of life and how we’re constantly reinventing ourselves and constantly re-earning our life

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30:51 Marshall: I talk about three things in the book: aspiration, ambition, and action

Aspiration: our aspiration is the higher mission: why am I here? And aspiration doesn’t have a target or a finish line.

Ambition: our ambition is the achievement of goals. Ambition has a distinct target and a finish line.

Action: our action is the day-to-day activity.

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Marshall: The problem with setting goals is we think the next one has to be bigger.

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32:46 Marshall: Then what happens is “Hedonic Adaptation”* which means once you achieve something you think it’s going to make you happy. Maybe it does for a little bit but after that no not much. We get fixated on the achievement of goals and when we do we can sacrifice either the higher purpose of what am I here for or the day-to-day joy of life.

Curtis Martin** is a great example. He was an incredible football player, number five rusher in the history of the national football league. Yet he never had his identity tied up in being a football player. His broader goal—his aspiration—was to help people

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Marshall: When you focus just on achievement, you’re headed for typically lots of problems. Let me give you one example, there is a great research study called the Marshmallow Study…

“Sometimes you need to eat the damn marshmallow***”

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Marshall: Jack Welch**** almost died he when had a triple bypass. He was asked, What did you learn about life when he almost died? Jack said, “Why am I drinking the damn cheap wine every night?”

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58:48 CB: What do you do when you screw up, Marshall?

Marshall: Forgive yourself start over. It is another time, another day, so let it go. Old people say, “We don’t regret the risk we took and failed, we regret the risk we failed to take.”

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Footnotes

* Hedonic adaptation refers to the notion that after positive (or negative) events (i.e., something good or bad happening to someone), and a subsequent increase in positive (or negative) feelings, people return to a relatively stable, baseline level of effect (Diener, Lucas, & Scollon, 2006).

** Curtis James Martin Jr. is a former American football running back who played the National Football League for 12 seasons, primarily with the New York Jets. He played his first three seasons with the New England Patriots, who selected him in the third round of the 1995 NFL Draft.

*** The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1972 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University.

****John Francis Welch Jr. was an American business executive, chemical engineer, and writer. He was Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001. When Welch retired from GE, he received a severance payment of $417 million, the largest such payment in business history up to that point.

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Summary:
Dr. Goldsmith has been a guru to thousands of leaders, managers, coaches, and business leaders. He continues to display the courage it takes to give true feedback and direction to stimulate change for ongoing success. He proclaims that it is easy to be an incredible coach with incredible clients but I challenge that it takes courage to speak up and stand out; to guide leaders to ongoing success; to challenge the norms that society puts before us.

In this episode CB and Marshall discuss:

👉🏼 Triggers

👉🏼 The Earned Life

👉🏼 Aspiration

👉🏼 Ambition

👉🏼 ActionAbout Dr. Marshall Goldsmith:

Marshall Goldsmith is the only two-time winner of the Thinkers 50 Award for #1 Leadership Thinker in the World. He has been ranked as the #1 Executive Coach in the World and a Top Ten Business Thinker for the past eight years. Dr. Goldsmith is the author or editor of 36 books, including three New York Times bestsellers, that have sold over 2.5 million copies and been listed as bestsellers in 12 countries. His books, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” and “Triggers” have been recognized by Amazon.com as two of the Top 100 leadership & success books ever written.