TT129 Mastering Growth and Boundaries: Insights from Parker Harris

Have you ever wondered what it takes to redefine your life after hitting rock bottom?

Parker Harris, the dynamic leader of Punto Global, tells us how he did just that.

After surviving a near-fatal car accident, Parker found a newfound perspective on life, relationships, and success. He discussed his journey, from starting his first company at 17 to his transformative mastermind group, Junto, that fosters entrepreneurial growth.

As you listen, you'll learn about the power of personal growth, setting boundaries, and the pivotal role of relationships. Parker shares how choosing the right people to surround ourselves with can lead to profound personal and professional development.

We also dive into the art of asking the right questions and the impact it can have on our lives. The conversation takes a fascinating turn when we tackle the paradoxes in entrepreneurship and the role of gut instinct in decision making.

Before we wrap up, we delve into some of the unique challenges and failures we face as entrepreneurs. Through our shared experiences, we attest to the role of failure as a stepping-stone towards success.

Tune in for an enlightening conversation that is as inspiring as it is informative.

Enjoy!

Head to https://junto.global/

The link exposes you to a mastermind of curated entrepreneurs who challenge and support each others personal and professional success.

Credits
Tailoring Talk Intro and Outro Music by Wataboy on Pixabay
Edited & Produced by Roberto Revilla
Connect with Roberto, head to https://allmylinks.com/robertorevilla
Email the show at tailoringtalkpodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I guess my joke with you around like masterminds and being busy, have you? Have you ever heard that like that, saying that you should master, you should meditate for 10 minutes every day, unless you're too busy for that, and then you should meditate for 20? Yeah, you know, and we can, we can get to this, but I just, I just wanted to just rift with you, is I? I almost feel like that's the the benefit of a mastermind. It's like you know, like you said, curating people that you want to be around, and it's like setting up a coffee, like with that person you know every week or every month or something, and usually that will end up burning out or you know, and then trying to do that with eight people is like almost impossible. Instead, just bringing all of those people that you'd want to have coffee with every week together for a conversation, it ends up creating a lot of value and like for everybody involved, like the individual and and you know, these, these relationships form that end up becoming a great gift in life.

Speaker 2: 1:14

Welcome to the Taylor Talk Show with your host, roberto Rivilla. I'm a bespoke Taylor menswear designer and owner of Roberto Rivilla London custom clothing and footwear. I activate your superpowers through the clothing I create and the conversations on this podcast. We'll meet self starters and creators to learn about their journeys, while they share valuable lessons to help you be the very best you can be. Please support the show by subscribing, and it helps so much if you take a few seconds to leave a rating and review.

Speaker 2: 1:45

Today's guest started his first company at the age of 17 and was recruited by the president of the USA to speak at leadership conferences across the country. Three years later, having almost died in a car accident, he decided to create the people in his life and start fresh, eventually landing his dream job at a Fortune 100 tech company. Today he leads Punto Global, which has served thousands of entrepreneurs to connect with like-minded peers and build the relationships, health and business they deeply desire here, to show us what successful entrepreneurs do differently and the importance of walking people out of your life. Taylor Talkers, please welcome Parker Harris to the show. Parker, how are you? I'm excellent. Thank you, roberto. You're still here after our weird 15 minute pre-talk.

Speaker 2: 2:37

I thought I'd scared you off, so thank you for sticking around and being so brave, but I wouldn't expect anything less from someone who has I don't know if achieved is the right word, but certainly packed a lot in in your early years. Now, the audience might be thinking that you are still 20 years old at this stage, or 23 years old from that intrigue, if they've been adding everything up, because that's how my brain would go. But you're a little bit further on from that, aren't you? You're what like 27, 28. Now I'm 37. Whatever, you're going to age well.

Speaker 1: 3:13

It's funny. I got my wife a facial like from an esthetician last week and I ended up going in too because she loved the experience so much and the person gave me the ultimate compliment from an esthetician. It was that she thought I had gotten Botox.

Speaker 2: 3:30

So I'm feeling pretty good about myself this week. Awesome, I do facials. I go every five or six weeks and it's partly to try and preserve my youth. But also, I mean my mum. She was an. I don't know if you had Avon in the States, yeah yeah, my mum was an Avon lady.

Speaker 2: 3:53

Yeah, my mum was an Avon lady, so she used to kind of get all the free samples and stuff and then she would just try them out on me and then she put me into a skin care routine from like the age of six or seven years old or something. So I'm eternally grateful, because I was at an event recently and somebody said that they thought I was 33 years old, which is really far from the truth.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Well, Bobby, you do have great skin.

Speaker 2: 4:18

Thank you, at 88 years old, I'm really really grateful to my beautician, amy. No, I'm not 88. I'm half that. But yeah, thank you. So, parker, originally from San Diego, currently traveling Europe, and you're calling in from somewhere around the Black Sea, so thank you so much for interrupting your trip for me.

Speaker 1: 4:43

It's an honor and I love Europe.

Speaker 2: 4:47

Yeah, so do we in Britain, despite what, politically, people might think. But we won't go there. I'm really angry about my exit. So where are we? What are we doing today? Okay, so, parker, life changing event Actually. Just bring the audience up to date actually and give us a bit of context. So, early years what was the first company that you actually started as a teenager?

Speaker 1: 5:23

Yeah, so I was one of those weird kids that didn't like watching cartoons or comedies or even the Simpsons, which I get in trouble for sometimes but and I got really interested in economics and business and politics at a young age, so I'm happy to talk Brexit with you.

Speaker 1: 5:43

But I also got really interested in health back to skin right, our largest organ and I started a company called your Health Store, which was like a vitamin and nutrition company that sold at different events, online and through a catalog.

Speaker 1: 6:02

When I was 17, with my best friend who was a little older than I was, and we started to grow, it started to get some sales in kind of learned to put myself out there, and we're about to open up a storefront in San Diego, and we had a family friend who was a corporate attorney putting the paperwork together for us and he asked me he's like hey, what do you, what do you want to do with this? And I'm like well, I want to build a company that has a big impact on the world. And he's like well, it looks to me like you're creating a job for yourself. So if you really want to do that, you should go learn business, which he just you know he described as like the language of business, which was finance, and then go work for a big company. So, whether that was the right decision or not, it's the path that I chose. And and then I went to work for a large company and kind of learned what the inner workings of that would look like.

Speaker 2: 6:57

Wow, so where did the? So who was the president at that time? Was it Obama?

Speaker 1: 7:03

Wait, it was a little earlier than that.

Speaker 2: 7:05

Yeah, so it was George Bush Jr.

Speaker 1: 7:12

George Bush Jr. Okay, and he started an organization called freedoms answer, which was the goal was to get younger people involved in civics and like engage politically, and you know, I think we were successful in that. The largest turnout for like 18 to 21 year olds was 2008.

Speaker 2: 7:32

Yeah, wow, I mean, how awesome to have been able to put yourself up there and get to that sort of platform at such a tender age. You know, because most of us, you know entrepreneurs let's call us that Don't actually get that to a lot later in life. If you think about it. The majority of entrepreneurs they basically, you know, go to college or you know what we call college over here. You still call high school, I think, because you call university college and then we might go to university.

Speaker 2: 8:09

I went to university, kind of dropped out pretty quick because I just thought what am I doing here when I could actually just be earning money? So I quit and went to do something else. Then we get into a job and we largely hate that job for a very long time, although we might actually love what we do. It's kind of that we have that kind of gene in us where we don't actually like working for other people and then eventually we kind of get brave or decide that we'll go and do it for ourselves and we think that we're creating a company, but we actually are just creating, as you described earlier, a job for ourselves, and then some of us will fall along the wayside and some of us will prevail and we will start to educate ourselves and then we will actually start to kind of grow a business or turn our jobs into some sort of business. You packed all of that in to such a short space of time quite early on, which is pretty awesome.

Speaker 2: 9:15

But then you have a big life changer, this car crash and I don't necessarily want you to go into the gory details of that. You know I've been through similar. I had a plant truck run over me when I was on my scooter about six years ago and that changed a hell of a lot. You know, my headspace. It was all spun around. My view of life was different. I think a certain amount of rewiring has gone on in my brain as well. There are certain things that I just, you know, I can't cope with. That I could before. There are other things that I couldn't cope with before that I can cope with now. There are things that I used to get emotional about that I'm just dead to now because of what's happened there. Kind of take us back to that time and again. But you know, I was nearly 40 years old when that happened to me. So I kind of lived a bit of life. You know you're 20. You've only been here for like less than two decades.

Speaker 1: 10:19

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2: 10:20

Yeah, what was that like for you and how did you get through it out the other end?

Speaker 1: 10:30

So to get, let me get, let me get there. You might have to ask this question again, but I I realized at a pretty young age that nothing was going to be given to me and that the path that, like I was on wasn't going to take me to where I wanted to go, and so I started working a lot and just finding ways to add value to other people, and I think that that's something like, basically, what entrepreneurship is is adding value to other people, and for me, I really learned how to enjoy doing that, which I think gave me, gave me an advantage. And then the political side, like getting involved in this nonprofit whose mission was to teach democracy to the next generation, helped me find my voice, but it also gave me exposure to like I thought I wanted to become a congressman or a senator or something like that. I just saw so many broken promises and strategies and tactics that really turned me off, and I saw business as a place where your word was, your bond, right, and people chose to do business or not, based on you doing what you said you were going to do or me doing what I said I was going to do, and that really turned me on and that was something that, like, I was excited about, and so that's kind of where why I focused on it, but it was also a very lonely journey and a lot of this was like pre-social media with the opportunity to, like you know, I was able to travel to these conferences, but I wasn't able to stay connected to these people in a way that maybe I would have been today, and so I would kind of go back to my school and it was. It was a less nurturing environment that I hoped to provide for my children, and so I ended up selling out, like, in terms of, like, my own goals, my own dreams.

Speaker 1: 12:22

I went from like an all-boy Catholic high school to a really large university that was one of the biggest party schools in the United States, and I lost myself for a while and I ended up surrounding myself with people that didn't really care about me or probably taking advantage of me, and I was just not making good decisions, and it led me to a bunch of places where, looking back, I, you know, I learned a lot from, but maybe I could have had a better use of my time and energy, and I was leaving a party and I was not in a position to drive and I ran through a barrier, like in the middle of the road, and the car flipped multiple times and went over a guardrail and dropped you know 30 or 40 feet and landed on all four tires. Like I'm so grateful, like one of my biggest gratitudes from that is that I didn't hit anybody Like no one else was involved in that accident and no one else was in the car with me and I didn't. I wasn't like dismembered or like injured in a way where I lost use of any parts of my body. But I remember waking up in the hospital with hand like handcuffs on my wrist, like chained to the bed and not like not feeling, like I could call anybody, you know, and I just had to kind of like sit with that and deal with myself. And I ended up, you know, I told my parents the next day and I just took a good hard look at my life and realized that I had to make some different decisions. And I looked at everyone that was in my life and I was like this is, you know, I'm going to start another chapter and I don't think any of these people are going to go with me and, rather than just escaping.

Speaker 1: 14:18

I had some of those difficult conversations with those people and the visual I had in my head, or the language that I had in my head, was walking these people out of my life.

Speaker 1: 14:31

And so, you know, I told them like usually one at a time, not like sitting them all down and you know it didn't come from a place of judgment, it was just like what, what served me and who I wanted to become.

Speaker 1: 14:45

And you know, for some of those conversations I cried, some of them I didn't, and and then I spent the next, you know, 12 to 18 months really recommitting myself to excellence, committing myself back to school, actually reading and studying and being very alone and like walking, you know, walking to school and seeing people in houses, like laughing and having a good time and seeing the value of that in a really visceral way, but also not wanting to like rush or like get that in a place that I had gotten it previously. So, up into that point or after that point, I was very careful on who I let into my inner circle and who I surrounded myself with, and that actually became the foundation for him. So, or like this group was, was that those people? So I'll stop there, I think. I think there's a little bit more to say on it, but I'm feeling some of that energy right now.

Speaker 2: 15:42

Yeah, no, and I can. I'm feeling everything that you were going through, as you were sharing that as well. A part of me is really sorry. I asked you the question and made you relive some of it as well, and the interesting thing that comes out of that for me is well, there's so many interesting things that come out of that for me, but one of them is that when we talk about and if we've talked about it on this show with various guests previously about curating the people you know that you have in your life, it's the first time I've heard the phrase walking people out of your life. They're walking with them out of your life, because most of the time when we talk about curating people, it's like OK is the word that she's most often is cutting cutting people out of your life Because they're like a cancer, something bad that you need to take a scalpel to and you need to just get it out of there. And I'm that, that's how I've described it.

Speaker 2: 16:48

You know, the last few years and I will very much, I would say actually 100 percent of the time I have done exactly that. I've probably not given any explanation whatsoever. I've just been like I can't deal with that energy in my life anymore and I'm not going to and I just drop it. And for some people I feel like they wouldn't care anyway, even if I did try to sit down with them and have a conversation with them about where I was going and why. You know, unfortunately our journey together was going to be no more. And but then there are other people where, now I think about it, I was probably quite harsh, which is kind of a weird one, because as a person I'm I don't think I'm naturally like that. But then I guess, where I don't know, going through this period of change, that this that I've been on the last five or six years, in our pre talk I said to you it was, it was chaos, but it was good. Chaos because it was stretching and breaking and growth and all of those wonderful things.

Speaker 2: 18:06

But still, you know, even now I realize that there's some people that I could have handled things a little bit better with and I probably would have rather have walked them out rather than just kind of cut them off, because also, life is, is funny, you know, you think you're leaving one chapter behind, never to be seen again, but then that story can pick up years or decades later, without you knowing it, without you engineering it, without you consciously doing anything to kind of you know, make that story kind of thread its way back into your life. But then all of a sudden you don't know that person. That situation can come back, you know for different reasons, maybe you know they weren't someone that you could have, that that could help you along the way or be part of the journey you're on, or the person that you were becoming at that point in time. But maybe 20, 30 years down the line they come back into your life and actually they you need them at that time or they need you.

Speaker 1: 19:15

It's interesting. I think what we're talking about here is almost leadership. It relates to leadership in a way. When I made that choice to move forward, I was leading myself at that time, having that conversation. I've heard it said and I love this quote it's you can judge the amount of success that someone's going to have in their life by the amount of uncomfortable conversations they're able to have. It's definitely an uncomfortable conversation. I'm not saying that we need to do it with everyone.

Speaker 1: 19:54

If someone is lying, cheating, stealing or harming me or us or you, I think sometimes a clean break is fine. Some of these people were people I've loved, or friends or people brothers, sisters in my wording of them I'm an only child. It was interesting that over three years, five years, 10 years, some of those people came back in my life and I'm like Parker I'm so glad you did that. It made me question the path I was on. Sometimes. I think leadership can be a very lonely journey. When we make that impact on other people, it can be some of the most rewarding things that maybe at the end of our life we look back on and it's like that was the real reward versus the money or whatever.

Speaker 2: 20:56

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, man, I've been such a dick. I will try to be better. You know, I'm actually getting better at walking clients out of my life, so I will actually sit down with those people rather than just dropping them and kind of explain why I don't want to work with them anymore. That's courageous.

Speaker 1: 21:22

I'll just say, Bobby, I don't think you need to judge yourself unless it serves you to judge yourself that way. I think a lot of this stuff. Like you said, there's not really a clean break in life, as much as we want that to happen. If there's anyone that pops in your head that you're like wow, I wish I would have handled this differently or this relationship mattered, I still maybe made the right decision, but how I did it could have been different. I think that conversation is still possible and maybe would serve that person and you.

Speaker 2: 21:57

Yeah, the one thing that I have definitely got better at, because it's like exercise, right, you have to work at it until it becomes muscle memory, and then you just do it without thinking. Now it's like, so I still do stupid stuff or handle things really badly in the moment, but then I immediately now my muscle memory kicks in because I've been working so hard at it I ask myself the question did you really handle that in the best way that you could have, and what could you have done differently given the opportunity? Again, I say to myself well, quite honestly, I was a bit of a dick. I could have done it this way. Then what I do if I still have the opportunity, I pick up the phone and I get that person on the other end of the line.

Speaker 2: 22:46

It's so scary to do it because you really feel like so many thoughts go through your head. You're like they're not going to want to talk to me. I've been an asshole. I say, hey, listen, I was just thinking about what happened when we were together yesterday or whatever it was that happened. I really felt like I could have done better. I firstly wanted to apologize. Once I get those words out of my mouth, the rest of the conversation is really, really easy. At the moment, I'm in this space of dropping people off a cliff but reaching down and pulling them back. What I now need to get to, which I guess is the next stage of growth, is not dropping them off the cliff in the first place, but maybe just sitting on the edge of it with them side by side, as two people that have a relationship of some sort, and just working through it. Thank you for impacting my thinking in that regard. I hope that people are listening Again. I'm really sorry this has got so deep.

Speaker 1: 23:56

That's only conversations I like to have.

Speaker 2: 23:59

Yeah, I know I imagine you and I just getting together for dinner and that's it. We'd be going into the small hours of the morning. I'd like that.

Speaker 1: 24:09

May I share something?

Speaker 2: 24:11

Absolutely Go for it.

Speaker 1: 24:16

One of the ideas that's been coming up in different masterminds that I'm a part of is this idea of creating boundaries. I think it's something that doesn't get talked a lot about in school or really even in personal development, I think, whether it's with our friends, our coworkers, our team, the PR, our families for me, my clients, even our significant other it's been.

Speaker 1: 24:49

I've grown a lot over the last six to 12 months around not taking on my wife's energy, like if she's like if something's really bothering her, that doesn't mean I need to be really bothered and I used to think that's what love meant. Right, it was like your storm clouds are my storm clouds and I'm going to experience that, but I've learned that that doesn't best serve anybody. And you said like, oh, I've been a dick and I think, whether it's a psychopath or a dick or an asshole, those people don't think that they're doing anything wrong. Like a real dick or asshole, like wouldn't have any regret around it.

Speaker 2: 25:38

Yeah, they wouldn't have any remorse whatsoever. They wouldn't be feeling guilty about it afterwards and wanting to try and make things right, to whatever level that means potentially situation.

Speaker 1: 25:49

I think so. I think so, and I think part of being confrontational and disagreeable can serve leaders and entrepreneurs at a different point I've heard some really interesting talks on that from you know, sociologists and psychologists and even earning potential being tied to disagreeableness and the ability to like stand up for ourselves and like be confrontational that there's some value created from that. But I think that there's a different journey happening here and it's it's like the four stages of learning. Are you like? I'm sure you're familiar with this, but it's essentially like unconscious incompetence and then conscious incompetence, and then conscious competence and then unconscious competence.

Speaker 1: 26:41

And I think this idea of walking people out of our life or creating boundaries and you know, essentially what I'm hearing from you is that you were, you know, unconsciously incompetent around it, but you know potentially, and now you're becoming consciously incompetent, and then the next step is just consciously competent, and it's just that that learning journey shows up in so many areas of life and I think, unfortunately, most people are just not even willing to go through that journey.

Speaker 1: 27:06

There's like a lack of awareness and most even myself, like, looking back, I thought I was a master in all these things when I wasn't even unconsciously or like I wasn't even consciously incompetent at those things. I was just like totally unconsciously incompetent and happy in that bliss of it. So, yeah, I don't. I don't think, you know, sometimes that judgment creates this like identity like around, like, oh, I am just this right. It's like label this judgment and then a story gets created from that that sometimes doesn't serve a person. You know, it hasn't served me. And I think learning to like, write that story based on the identity that we want to have, and essentially process triggers that come up, like these things that happen, that we don't want to happen, like Mike Tyson said, like the punches in the face that life gives us, you know, if we, if we learn how to process those triggers, to create a story that serves us versus a story that doesn't serve us, I think that's the difference between success and failure.

Speaker 2: 28:16

Wow you know, part of that growth also comes from the people that you hang around with, you know. So, as much as we're talking about we have talked about walking people out of our lives it's also about the people that you bring in and you choose to kind of hang around with. A couple years ago, just as we came out of the pandemic I previously had not yet I know you lot listening at home. You've heard this before, but Parker and I have only just met. Okay, he hasn't heard it. So just get forward if you need to. But the long story short is that I made a decision. I didn't do networking stuff. I didn't go to events and things because you know, I don't like sort of jumping into a room and having to talk to people. I'm fine if they initiate conversation. If it's the other way around, like, forget it. And I just made a decision that from the beginning of 2022, I would just say yes to everything. You know that Jim Carrey Sovietationale movie yes, man, that's. I would just do that. And it has started to change my life. It has changed my life actually for the better, and definitely the people that it's brought in to my life that are a big part of that yet anyone from Founders Club that's listening shout out to all of you wonderful people. At the same time it has also brought people in that potentially, you know, could be toxic or dangerous. But then I'm able to sort of recognize that and sort of learn how I'm going to sort of navigate around and make sure that they kind of stay at the door, as it were.

Speaker 2: 30:08

Junto is something that you started and is now a thriving place for entrepreneurs to go. It's I guess you describe it as a mastermind for entrepreneurs. What's your definition of a mastermind? First of all, because it, you know. For some people it's, you know you pay a lot of money to jump on a Zoom call on a certain date in a certain location and there's a whole bunch of other people on it and you. It's almost like a big networking thing. For others, it's a place where people can come to regularly to kind of share things that you wouldn't necessarily get the answers to from the normal places. Like for most of us, if we've got a question to ask in any area of life, we just Google it. What's your definition of a mastermind, or what is Junto to the concept of a mastermind?

Speaker 1: 31:12

So the definition of a mastermind that most resonates with me is two or more minds coming together in the spirit of harmony to accomplish a common goal.

Speaker 2: 31:30

There's so much more I want to say.

Speaker 1: 31:33

That's the definition.

Speaker 2: 31:35

Do you know what show you're on? This is? You know like my questions are super long and your answers can be a million times longer, so you carry on. You've got something you want to say? Continue, please.

Speaker 1: 31:49

I think the value like for me. I invested a lot in building a network, a professional network, when I was in college and or university and and then post university as well. I was attending a lot of events and I noticed this, like this thing you know, most of the time what would happen is someone be like so what do you do? Right, the first question, like what do you do? And I would answer, and if they couldn't sell me something or benefit from me, like they would make that assessment in 15 seconds, they would start just kind of like looking over, you know, over me, at like who else is here, who else can I talk to?

Speaker 2: 32:33

You know, and it was the whole kind of, at some point in the course, like, oh, I've just seen someone over there, I need to say hi to you, and then they just kind of drop here. Because I've heard that in a few of the kind of groups that I've got involved with, where I actually, when I hear other people talking about me, I hear good things, like he's someone who makes you feel comfortable, is really interested in you, no matter what you do. Even if you're someone that would never use his services, he still wants to find out about you and to see if there's a way that he can help you. And that's exactly. You know what my intention is.

Speaker 2: 33:12

You know I don't care if I meet you and you never want to buy tailored clothing, it's you know. Okay, fine, whatever. But you know, if I can find out about you and connect with you on a certain level and as if there's some resource or if there's something I have, or if I'm connected to somebody in my network that through finding out about you I can find a way to help you and not hold on to that power, then I will try and do that. And then, similarly, I've heard you know, okay, well, that's Bobby, unlike so and so person who you know when you meet them because you're not someone that they can make money out of they'll be polite for about five seconds and then they'll drop you and move on to someone else. You know, that's not what it's about for me.

Speaker 1: 34:03

It's the difference between being transactional and being relational. Yeah Right, and everything becomes. I think everything becomes possible when there's that desire to add value to other people you know and have, having a certain level of abundance around energy and connections and resources, versus again being transactional and saying, well, can I get out of this? And for me, a mastermind space is when we have each other's best interests at heart. There's not like this hidden agenda that we're really there for. We're really transparent about what we're there for and I heard this from someone else but a mastermind is relevant when your problems are no longer Googleable. Right, you said like most people can just like Google their way there, and I think that's important because if we can't help ourselves, then what business do we have? Help, you know asking for help, but there's a certain point in the journey when we can't Google it anymore. At least that's been my experience. Even using chat GBT recently I've had a few things come up where I'm just like very unsatisfied with the answers and being around other people that have that are going through it or have gone through it or have learned how to think critically, which I think is one of the kind of the rarest traits now in the world is that that ability to think critically.

Speaker 1: 35:39

Often what happens in a mastermind environment is not someone telling you what you should do. It's not like a place to get advice. It's a place to get the question right. Sometimes it's like what we think the problem isn't actually the problem and it's like a little bit deeper and we need to get to a root cause around it. And then, once we get the right question and it's like the quality of our life determines the quality of our questions. Excuse me, the quality of our questions determines the quality of our life then we get to hear the truth within ourselves that we already know, but we didn't have the question.

Speaker 1: 36:17

And one of the questions we ask someone when we're onboarding them into our community is what's a question that you would invest $100,000 to be able to answer? And some people have that question but most people don't. And the thing about it is, if we don't have that question, then we'll never be able to get it answered, even if it doesn't cost $100,000, you know what I mean. So there's some interesting ways, but often we don't. I think sometimes we're always fascinated by the 50 steps ahead.

Speaker 1: 36:50

What did Elon Musk do right or what did, and it's like, hey, you're right here, we need to get you right here. What's holding you back right now? What's that bottleneck? And most people think it's like, oh, I need more customers. You know, like it's some sort of like marketing thing or sales thing, and usually we see it something way deeper, whether it's again back to that identity layer, whether it's a limiting belief, whether it's like a lack of alignment between vision and habits. You know there's just a lot of layers deep that people get to go and often you know we don't know what's holding us back.

Speaker 2: 37:37

Yeah, often we don't know what's holding us back until we put ourselves out there to a group of people with that kind of growth mindset growth and service mindset, service of others mindset Because they're outside of our perceived problem and I guess can turn the Rubik's cube from a different perspective. And certainly I've been finding a lot of the problems that I've been having in the bottlenecks that I've been having as I've opened myself up to other people who have that shared mindset has helped not necessarily to solve all of them, but certainly to start unlocking some of the numbers in the combination lock to start kind of getting some of the way there. Am I using too many metaphors or analogies or whatever?

Speaker 1: 38:35

I love these words. I'm not sure about for other people, but I can see what you're saying and yeah and I think what's what's interesting about that?

Speaker 1: 38:45

like I want to hold, I'm like trying to hold on to a few different ideas that are coming up at once, but you know when. I'll just share an example for me is I came to a mastermind meeting once and I was like you know, this is where my business is at, and like we're just having a hard time with this and I really want to get like here and like nothing that I'm trying is working. And one of the other members is like you know, parker, I don't think this is like a customer acquisition issue or like a sales issue. Like it seems to me that you have like a victim mindset around like this and and I was like kind of angry about it when that person said it and I was like what are you talking about? I've been doing personal development for 10 years. I don't have a victim mindset and and I sat with it for like three or four days and I eventually realized that he was. He was right and it unlocked a whole like the next level of growth for me.

Speaker 1: 39:45

And I didn't know it was on that mindset level, like that victim versus hero mindset, and I think that's one of the things about entrepreneurship that that most people don't like, that someone that's not an entrepreneur doesn't get. They think it's like it's just so great, right, this freedom and money and just all these like things. But it's actually the most humbling experience in my. In my opinion, like entrepreneurship is like very humbling, because there's this realization that I had as an entrepreneur and I've heard other entrepreneurs have it they realize that it's on them and that no one else is coming to save them and that no one really cares about them. They care about themselves and the value that the entrepreneur can provide to them and so there's no favors being done, right. Like this is a game of like adding value to other people and being rewarded for that, and I think that's a great gift of life.

Speaker 1: 40:43

Is like that realization that it's not about me, right, it's like it's not, it's about it's about the other person. And when I think, when that reframe is possible, everything becomes possible. And you know, I think a lot of people and I'm thinking about some people in my family and in my life and probably you know the larger world when I see what's what's happening in the in the world and when I, every once in a while, when I, when I put my head up, is that there's a strong desire to be the victim and to have it be about me versus being. You know being around everyone else and you know entrepreneurs you know, for better or worse, realize that it's not about them, it's about the other people, and there's a certain level of humility and, I think, accurate thinking that comes along with that.

Speaker 2: 41:37

Yeah, and it's this you know, because for anyone who's listening, who's who's thinking hey, you said at the start you're going to tell us what successful entrepreneurs do differently to people who aren't as successful. Well, we're talking about it right now. Successful entrepreneurs come from a place of giving and a certain level of selflessness, because certainly I can think back to times. I mean, I've been doing what I do for 21 years, 12 of it under my own brand as a fully-fledged entrepreneur, and the other 20, sorry, 10 years before that or whatever it is as an employee, but an employee with an entrepreneur, business owner mentality and mindset. I'd like to think why that's why I've been or I've had a certain level of success in whatever I've done because of the mindset I've had. I think the biggest problem, the biggest regret that I have over that time, is that I did it largely on my own and I didn't seek help when I needed it and I didn't open up myself to help when it was offered to me.

Speaker 1: 43:04

You know, bobby, I think that's one side of the paradox. I was on the other side of that paradox where I was asking for help. I was looking for advisors and mentors and people that had the answer and I relied on their answer to be my answer, versus learning to hear the truth for myself. I've had the fortune of being able to meet with several billionaires and just really successful entrepreneurs, and at a certain point in the conversation I'll ask them how do you make decisions? 98% of the time the answer is my gut, and I'm like what does that mean? And I was so interested in finding the answer outside of me and through that network that I had carefully cultivated and worked hard to create versus I think one of the big gifts of life is being able to hear my own gut, and so I think there's a balance. There's like a not a balance, a paradox that maybe we're hitting on here that you know.

Speaker 1: 44:16

I'm interested in writing a book called Standing in Paradox, because I think that's what leaders have to do. It's like somehow there's two truths that contradict each other and rather than judging one of those one side of that truth and being like this one's right, right, like we should always find the answer. We need to develop advisors and mentors. And asking for help versus like. Your approach was like doing it myself and like. I think that those are two contradictory truths that are somehow both true, and we need to stand in that paradox and understand both of those sides and how they can both work, and how they can both work for the individual versus like oh, there's only one right way to do something.

Speaker 2: 45:04

Yeah, I think one of the biggest lessons I learned, because people ask me all the time how do you make decisions? We had a big decision to make recently that a lot of my clients and some of some of my friends cannot get their heads around how it. So I've been going on for a long time. So we have our workroom in London where you know, we make a lot of our clothes and we also see clients there and I visit clients too, although I've been kind of trimming that side of the service down as I get older, because you know I've got to have an eye on when I'm a lot older and I'm maybe less physically able.

Speaker 2: 45:42

I don't want to be running around like I was when I was 25 years old because physically you just can't do it right. So you have to adapt and all the rest of it and start thinking about the future. But you know clients come into the workroom and it's not the best experience. The end result we give is amazing. The journey to get there isn't. It doesn't marry up. You know what I mean, because the workroom is a bit rough and ready. It's not, like you know, super luxurious and all the rest of it. But then you contrast that with the complete opposite to what a lot of my peers do is that they have fancy places, whiskey and Chesterfields and all of that nonsense, and then the end result is not what the experience led the customer to expect they were going to get. So we need to.

Speaker 2: 46:31

So you were talking about paradoxes. We need to kind of find a happy balance between the two. So the big goal that I've had and I always share a lot of my goals with other people and I have had advice from past guests, even on this podcast, who've said never share your goals because people will find ways to tell you that you can't achieve them and so on. You know, I kind of see that point of view, but for me it's like if I've got a big goal and I share it, I'm trying, I'm willing it into existence and I'm what's the word? I can't think of the right word for it but I'm going to attract huh Manifesting.

Speaker 2: 47:11

Yeah, manifesting exactly. So the things that I need, the energy I need, the resources that I need to make that goal become real, will suddenly start appearing in my life, and so looking for a studio space has been the big thing that I'm talking about with everybody, and we found it, it manifested. But then, 48 hours before we were due to take the keys to the place, I had to back out, because there were things in the contracts that we had been asking for for weeks and weeks and weeks. When it finally came through, there were clauses that just didn't sit right with me and that weren't going to work, unfortunately, and so I had to write to the person who had given us this opportunity.

Speaker 2: 48:01

And this is where I'm really proud of my growth, because, rather than just walking away and saying I'm not doing this, I walked away and said I can't do this, but I gave an explanation and I said thank you for the opportunity that you presented to us. I am really, really upset that this isn't going to work out, but I am also very, very grateful to you because, although we can't work together, you've now set me on the path to taking this huge step for my business, and we parted as friends. So that's my maturity story, but anyway, bobby, I have a question for you.

Speaker 1: 48:42

Yeah, sure, you said that you have friends that have the space, the whiskey and the chastor field.

Speaker 2: 48:50

I wouldn't tell them my friends are like competitors, but anyway, carry on.

Speaker 1: 48:54

Well, collaborators, right. I'm wondering if there's an opportunity there and maybe we go offline with this but is there an opportunity to I'm using the word partner very loosely here but form a mutually beneficial relationship with potentially multiple people that have those spaces? And I would have some conversations like exploratory conversations, where it's like, hey, how can we add value to each other here? Because I can help you on the back end, creating that like that wow moment for your people with the work that we do, and maybe I give it to them at a preferred rate so that they're able to actually make more money from it and create happier customers and more lifetime. You're then getting more business without even having to sell because they're selling, and then you also potentially get access to those spaces to use for your fittings and you're doing the work and then maybe they get something for that, like a small percentage.

Speaker 1: 50:10

We would have to spend some time to get the questions out and then to have some of these conversations, because essentially what we're doing is like customer discovery here, even though they're not actually. But I would say like you probably dodged a bullet by not increasing your monthly expenditures by getting that space, and I think the leaner you can keep it and it's like if you can deliver the product, that's great. It seems like there's probably a lot of these different spaces and then they have their own problem that you can solve and maybe there's like a bigger opportunity for you to 5, 10x this business over an 18 month period by forming some of these relationships with competitors that are no longer competitors. These people are part of your. In Japan they would call it a Koretsu, which is essentially like an alliance a business alliance, yeah.

Speaker 1: 51:00

That's interesting.

Speaker 2: 51:01

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I had this knee-jerk reaction when you started talking and then, as you progressed, actually it's different. Now I see how this mastermind thing works. That's so cool. That's definitely worth. Yeah, you've impacted, you've interrupted my thinking, which is always a good thing, actually. No, thank you. So what were we talking about? Oh, we were talking about decision making. So, yeah, so people were saying to me you were so close, how did you? I don't understand how you made the decision to back out when you were that close. Why don't you just go with it? And I say to them, because just going with it was the easy thing to do.

Speaker 2: 51:47

I've been taught. I was taught by an ex-boss of mine, chairman of a big company that I worked at, and I remember I used to always like to get these quiet moments with people in the leadership teams or the businesses I worked in, because obviously they were older and wiser than me and they'd live more life and so on. So I'd learn as much as I could from them. And I remember he said to me he said when you're faced, generally speaking, in life when you are faced with a decision, you will have two choices to make, and almost always the more difficult of the two choices is the right one. And in the moment it was easier for me to say sign the damn thing, get on with it, pay the money, let's do the move, because everything was all set up ready to go. The harder decision because I had to take a breath and think about it. I was like, if I back out of this, this is going to be really difficult. I'm going to have to call the removals company and have to cancel that. I'm going to have to say no to this person Running the space to us was actually a client of mine who I'm in the same cycle club as, so I see him like every week. You know, all of that was just really really difficult stuff. And that's how I knew it was the right choice to make. And it still doesn't feel like it. People listening is still doesn't necessarily feel like it at the moment.

Speaker 2: 53:25

You then cross the line and you make that decision, but in the days that come afterwards, once the dust settles down, you realize that it was actually the right decision, which is a place that I'm in right now, like a week later or whatever. So that's my thing on decision making. I think you know I get the gut argument but people say you know, it's like, how do you make a decision? It's like I rely on my gut. Well, what the hell does that mean? I've personally just my personal opinion and my experience. I've come to learn that gut instinct is different things to different people and for me personally, gut instinct, parker, is something happens. You have to make a choice. You've got one or two things that you can do. Which one is the more gut wrenching? Which one's the harder one? Which one's the one that you're resisting against more? That's usually the right one.

Speaker 1: 54:24

But if you, if you start like abstracting this out to all areas of life, right, it's like I think most people you know go with the easy decision, whether it's the you know a relationship that they're in, whether it's the thing that they're consuming in their body, whether it's the you know, there's just, I think this, this, this can be applied in so many different ways and it's really it really like makes all the difference.

Speaker 1: 54:49

You know, and I think the reason why gut, the gut piece of it, is so hard to communicate to someone else is because it's, in my opinion, it's honed from experience of not listening to it or listening to it Right and like, essentially the experience of failing. And I love this idea that you know failure is the highway to success. And I think, unfortunately, you know, college and university and just the school system, really promotes this idea of like getting 100%. You know where entrepreneurship is, more like you know being willing to be wrong every day and maybe being wrong more than we're right, but continuing on that path and then someday I think that those hard decisions may end up becoming easy because we've just grooved it like we have, we've calloused it over, we have those grooves. So it sounds. You know it sounds sexy or easy, but I think, going through it, it goes back to like who we become and it's like someone that we can trust ourselves and that's just a huge gift.

Speaker 2: 56:06

Yeah, wow, I feel like we've inadvertently been on a two-person mastermind the last.

Speaker 1: 56:15

However long it's been 45 minutes now, I don't even know, probably two or more months, coming together in the spirit of harmony to accomplish a common goal, which was add value to your people. So I think that's exactly what happened.

Speaker 2: 56:26

Exactly, my head is swimming in a good way right now, so, no, thank you so much. Anyone who's listening that wants to connect with you. Where can they find you?

Speaker 1: 56:39

I am active on LinkedIn, instagram, facebook and my handle or name is Zachary Parker Harris.

Speaker 2: 56:48

Awesome. I'll make sure I put those links in the show notes and also the link to juntoglobal, which is where people can go online to find out more about your mastermind community. Thank you so so much. Where's Next for you and your other half on your travels around?

Speaker 1: 57:08

Europe. We are on our way to Montenegro next week.

Speaker 2: 57:11

Oh wow, You'll have to tell me what it's like.

Speaker 1: 57:15

I'm excited. It'll be my first time there, but I've heard great things about it.

Speaker 2: 57:18

Yeah, I think Montenegro was the location for some of Casino Royale.

Speaker 1: 57:24

Is it? I've been thinking that that it was like Casino Montenegro or Hotel Montenegro or something, so I'm not sure it's supposed to be beautiful. It's right on the Bay of Couture, which it sounds like is a very old place, and, you know, I never really thought I would fall in love with the Balkans, but it's very much grown on me and I'm loving it.

Speaker 2: 57:49

Yeah, it's become a very popular vacation destination for a lot of people. You hear so much nowadays or it's like, oh, we went away over the summer. It's like, oh, where did you go, Mediterranean? And it's like, no, I went to Montenegro or Croatia or something like that. I'm just, I've got my. I can't even hold it up because it's so damn heavy.

Speaker 1: 58:11

James Bond.

Speaker 2: 58:12

Archive Book. So I was going to see if I could really really quickly just double check. I tell you what I'll look it up and then I'll let you know. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 58:23

I'd love to have another conversation too, around like your business, like where, like this kind of decision that you have to make, and if I could support you with some questions. That to me this is where I think I think you probably have an opportunity here. That's pretty exciting.

Speaker 2: 58:40

Yeah, no, thank you, and you lot listening. Definitely do check out Hoontoglobal. So that will take you to the Hoonto Mastermind thing. How do you describe it?

Speaker 1: 59:00

I mean, I describe it as a mastermind for entrepreneurs, but yeah yeah, I think it's a place for like to.

Speaker 1: 59:08

You know, at a certain point in an entrepreneur's journey, you know a mentor or like a coach maybe doesn't have all the answers for them, and so connecting with peers like other entrepreneurs, getting to root cause and breaking through bottlenecks, like it's this thing that creates such a return on investment and like a lot of leverage that you know, for most entrepreneurs CEOs, executives it's something that you know they'll participate in it, they'll get involved in a certain point of their career and then they'll participate in it the rest of their life, because there's just so much value that's created, and part of that is business. But I think a lot of it comes down to relationships and learning about ourselves and, almost, you know, growing as a leader, growing as a human being and, you know, I think it's the future of education.

Speaker 2: 1:00:10

Yeah, personally, the only thing is I'm asking you to define a mastermind. Describe it to me. A lot of the people that listen to my podcast. They know exactly what a mastermind is. They are probably part of various groups like this and they're probably screaming at their iPhones or whatever. They're listening to this podcast on saying Bobby, you stupid idiot. And next time I see them I'm going to get about 500 different lessons on masterminds and all the rest of it. So sorry to put you through that. No, no, I think it's a great question.

Speaker 1: 1:00:46

I'm excited to be able to explain it to someone in one or two sentences. I've worked with some mentors who owned and operated some of the biggest mastermind organizations in the world and they tell me they were never able to get it down to an elevator pitch either, because I think, at the end of the day, it's something that people have to experience to understand. It's not something that we can tell. This is going to be a really weird analogy, but it's kind of like sex right, you can't really explain that to somebody, but then, once you experience it, it's visceral, and I think that there's probably different things in life that are like that, where it's like we want to explain it to someone.

Speaker 1: 1:01:32

But it's just like words will never do it justice, even a picture or a video. People have to experience it for themselves to really understand it.

Speaker 2: 1:01:41

Yeah, totally yeah, that was the wrong analogy to use with me.

Speaker 1: 1:01:47

I don't know what you're talking about now.

Speaker 2: 1:01:49

I'm kidding.

Speaker 1: 1:01:50

I've never used that one before. I like it.

Speaker 2: 1:01:54

I'm really glad I brought that out of you. Tarko, have you had fun?

Speaker 1: 1:01:59

Yeah, I had a great time. Bobby, next time I'm in England I'm going to reach out to you Really make sure you do it for sure, parker.

Speaker 2: 1:02:11

Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. You've been so giving today. I'm on Kuntoglobal, so I'm going to definitely be checking it out and I suggest everybody does the same. Thank you all so much for joining Parker and I on this episode. Don't forget Terry and Torquys on Instagram and you know I love feedback, so email me at the usual address. Remember to subscribe, rate and review, and you can also very important click the share button in your player to send this episode on to someone you know who might get some help or be inspired by what Parker shared today. And if you're enjoying Taterine Talk and want to support the show, you can do so with the doobies in the show notes. Have a great week. I'll see you on the next one.