Leadership isn't an easy thing. Author and leadership expert Mark Miller and I discuss how to be a smart and effective leader! We go over Mark's own stories, his books, and all the ways he knows and implements into his own life on how to be a better leader! This is not a podcast you want to miss if you want to learn how to become a better leader!
Mark Miller started his career at Chick Fil-A where he was the 16th corporate employee and has worked for them ever since now serving as the Vice President of High Performance Leadership. Along the way, he has been fortunate to author (and co-author) a few books – nine and counting. Today, more than a million books are in print in 25+ languages. His approach to writing has always been to find what is true in principle and figure out how to make it applicable to the real world. He look forwards to your journey together unlocking your full potential as a High Performance Leader.
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MARK'S SOCIALS
https://www.instagram.com/markmillerleadership/
AND
https://www.facebook.com/MarkMillerLeadership
AND
https://www.linkedin.com/in/highperformanceleaders/
MARK'S WEBSITE
https://www.markmillerleadership.com
SMART LEADERSHIP WEBSITE
https://www.markmillerleadership.com/feature/smart-leadership
MARK'S BOOKS
https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Miller/e/B0057LJOYA?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_3&qid=1642612840&sr=8-3
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Many entrepreneurs want to start their own business to gain freedom. Yet most business owners complain that they don't have enough time or money, and therefore, they have no freedom. Here, we want to introduce you to Brett Snodgrass's journey to freedom. And hopefully, you'll be able to find help from our channel, of how to become a truly successful entrepreneur. Our desire is to help you entrepreneurs who are passionate risk-takers to Live Your Purpose.
Brett is an Indiana Real Estate broker who has owned and run one of the Midwest's most successful real-estate businesses for over 16 years. He specializes in wholesaling, wholetailing, creative financing, and scaling a business from an individual to a full team doing hundreds of deals a year. Brett works with investors all over the country who want to invest in one of the top rated cash-flowing markets in the nation, Indianapolis, Indiana. If you are interested in connecting with Brett's Real Estate business, you can check out the Simple Wholesaling website.
SIMPLE WHOLESALING: https://simplewholesaling.com/
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Brett is part of the real-estate mastermind group The Collective Genius (CG).
COLLECTIVE GENIUS: http://www.TheCollectiveGenius.com
CG BRETT'S BUSINESS STATS: https://youtu.be/YwdlztgJb0Q
HOW CG HAS HELPED BRETT'S BUSINESS: https://youtu.be/31A2wZi2rjY
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Brett has been a speaker for this high-volume real-estate investment group on multiple occasions. Brett has also recently helped lead their go-giving arm called "Generous Genius" that supports several charities. Brett helped Generous Genius raise $265,000 for 7 charities in 2020. He introduced them to supporting a new charity in 2020 that he has personally been involved with called "Transforming futures."
TRANSFORMING FUTURES: https://transformingfutures.org/
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Brett is also a part of the mastermind group Multipliers.
MULTIPLIERS: https://multipliersbrotherhood.com/
Brett has been featured on several podcast interviews and is a premier guest on two BiggerPockets podcasts including Biggerpockets podcast episode 231: A Simple Strategy of doing 25 Deals per Month & the Best Deal Ever Show Episode 10: Substitute Teacher Makes 80K on First Land Deal. He has also been a guest on dozens of other podcasts including Wholesaling Inc. and FlipNerd.
BIGGER POCKETS PODCAST 231: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/bi...
BIGGER POCKETS BEST DEAL EVER SHOW 10: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/de...
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Brett has written for publications like Think Reality - A Real Estate of Mind.
THINK REALITY: https://thinkrealty.com/find-your-mat...
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NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP:
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this is the brett snodgrass podcast thank you
guys so much for joining me today i have a an amazing guest for you guys so so smart mr mark
miller uh he has worked with the chick-fil-a i believe he said he was the 16th corporate member
or employee of chick-fil-a he's been working with chick-fil-a for over 40 years he has written his
10th book this is called smart leadership uh four simple choices to scale your impact you guys
are definitely going to read read this book it is filled with so m
uch content so much meat that
if you are a leader and you want to figure out how to make better decisions grow more capacity have
more margin get real with yourself as a leader and to grow as a person and to grow your organization
this is a book for you but right now go over to the brett snodgrass channel on youtube and also
subscribe leave a comment in the comment section and i'll reply to that as soon as i can but now
i want to introduce you to the one and only mark miller what's going on
mark and excited to be with
you today i'm super excited for this number one i love chick-fil-a we probably go there at least
twice a week and you've been with the company for uh many years now i'm not going to say how
many you can say that if you want about 100 years but my family loves chick-fil-a i got
four kids so we're all about chick-fil-a and and i love authors i love interviewing authors
and you have this new book called smart leadership four simple choices to scale your impact
and
i love that word impact that's what right we get to this certain point where it
is really all about people and impact and you really had done that with this book i went
through this book uh this week it is jam-packed i'm gonna have to go through it again uh smart
leadership guys so we're gonna talk about that a lot on this show but before we get into that mark
i want to ask you this question who is mark miller mark miller is a chicken salesman from atlanta
as you mentioned i've been on the
corporate staff here over 40 years i was a 16th corporate
employee i'm a husband a father a grandfather a guy who's trying to add value and serve leaders
around the world man i love that and you're doing such a great job i mean smart leadership isn't
your first rodeo with books i think you've had what maybe this is your 10th it's my 10th 10th
book so so this is different but it's different a quick word to any of your listeners who've
read my previous books i want to prepare them uh all of
the others were business fables the
creative non-fiction and my publisher and family and friends told me it was time to write a
real book which i tried not to take offense to that i worked really hard on all those other
books but this is a traditional leadership book a traditional business book and i'm excited about
it even though i approached it like an experiment there's one fundamental reason i'm so excited
and you already referenced it is with all of the fables the publishers wouldn't l
et me put a lot
of tactics in the book they said you'll destroy a fable with tactics i mean i wrote one manuscript
several years ago they made me take 75 percent of the content out wow and they said look you're
not writing a field guide and so by the way that's when we started writing field guides to support
all of the fables the fundamental problem 95 of the people in the world who read the book never
saw the field guy right so when they said you can do a traditional leadership book i said
does
that mean i can include tactics yeah and they said absolutely because the question i get over and
over and over from leaders all over the world is yes but how and so in smart leadership we
devoted eight full chapters to tactics and others sprinkled throughout the remaining chapters so
that's when you reference the fact it's chock full of ideas uh that's one of the things that excites
me about this book yeah that's interesting i got a personal question for you by the way and before we
really dive into the book because i have so many questions about that but so author fable versus
versus kind of this non-fi they're both kind of non-fiction i don't know what you maybe call a
fable because it's real but it's kind of you know an allegory sort of thing but what's your mindset
going into this writing a fable versus this particular book well i saw it as an opportunity
to stretch and to learn and to grow i mean i've read a lot of leadership books in in my career
but i'd actuall
y never thought about how you would write one and i've never fancied myself as a
writer again i'm a chicken salesman the accidental author that's another story for another day but
i've always fancied myself more as a storyteller and and so with all the previous books there was a
tremendous amount of rigor several of the previous books we spent millions of dollars researching
one of them particularly we spent four years doing research we spent millions of dollars and
then i go write a story
about it which is great i mean so there's it's not an absence of rigor but
that's what my publisher was fearful of he said for many reasons people generally don't assume
there's rigor behind a fable they assume it's just something you dreamed up you know one
night and thought about hey why don't we do this uh and they said this will give you a chance to
to showcase some of the the rigor and diligence behind the books so i went into it thinking
it was an experiment what i didn't realize is h
ow difficult it would be for me now i know
for other writers maybe this is not a very steep hill to climb but for me writing a fable if i
want to make a point i have a character say it yeah and if i don't have a character to say it i
make up a character to say it right and now i need an example from industry an example from the
nonprofit world i need statistics to support it i need to uh include this in the endnotes
and the bibliography and so the amount of time the research was comparable
we spent a couple
million bucks doing research for this book and spent a couple years had a research
team of six eight ten people working on it but the actual writing took 50 times longer
wow at least than writing a parable so that was a bit uh of an awakening uh for
me like okay this is gonna be different it definitely sounds like it that was just
something because i'm i'm interested in writing a book and i'm kind of like in that zone of
which direction to go but i really want to dive int
o smart leadership and uh so you start
off the book with a quote by peter uh drucker and he talked about effectiveness can be learned
effectiveness must be learned and this really kind of stopped you in your tracks and kind of take
us into that why was that so impactful for you well i think one of my mentors told me a long time
ago that two things determine the value of a book the content and the context that you might read
a book today that doesn't meet you where you are it doesn't strike
a chord emotionally uh it
it doesn't meet a felt need well when i first read that statement from peter drucker it was
40 years ago and i was a young leader who was struggling with how do i add more value how do i
increase my contribution i didn't even have the words to to articulate it and then i came across
the effective executive and i said yeah what i'm looking for is how to be more effective so it it
was drucker's great content which i do recommend even in the introduction to my book i
tell people
if you've not read the effective executive you should put down smart leadership and go get the
effective executive now some people go well that's crazy that book was written 60 years ago yeah
it's the source of the nile all of the leadership books in the world emanate from drucker's book the
effective executive and so it's great content and it spoke to me in that season of my life and it
launched for me a more focused career-long search for how to be more effective so when we sa
t down
for the very first meeting with the research team for smart leadership i made them all go read
the effective executive i said we're going to write the modern equivalent of that i mean i'm
certainly not peter drucker don't pretend to be but i want to look for the things that will
help today's leaders be more effective just like he did 50 60 years ago and so that's that's
why that spoke to me as we launched this project oh interesting interesting i have not read the
effective executiv
es i'm gonna have to go get that right now so you should thank you for that uh
so then you go into a chapter called swimming in quicksand and you kind of talk about that most
leaders and i mostly have business leaders on this show entrepreneurs and our personality is at
some point in some season of our life we end up in this sort of quicksand we didn't mean
to get there but we wake up one day and we just feel stuck and we're sinking and we're
exhausted and stressed and anxiety and all that
stuff so yeah you focus this chapter on swimming
and quickstand i want to get your your verbiage on what is that all right what are you saying
with that so let me give you the quick backstory when we start a project we like to start
with a hypothesis now i try not to to to reach conclusions early because i don't
want to do research to validate my bias but but when asked why are you doing this
book it was it was born from the observation that we i and others on my team said we
think we see
more and more leaders struggling that was just this is pretty covet we think
there seemed to be a greater number of leaders struggling and so we said why is that and we
began to talk to leaders about their struggles some of the very very early preliminary
work and they talked about busyness and they talked about uh complexity and they talked
about distractions and we said okay okay how do we get our head around all of this
stuff and we said it's sort of like quicksand and so we began the wo
rk honestly
thinking the problem is the quicksand and what we determined is but early we said
well whoa whoa there are leaders who aren't in the quicksand or if they're in it they got
out true and we said ah okay the villain is not the quicksand the quicksand is the quicksand
yeah we're the villain because our choices have um have kept us a prisoner of the quicksand
or our choices have allowed us to escape because you mentioned it earlier we're all
in there from time to time we don't go th
ere on purpose i've never met a leader that said i
think i'm going to get up today and go find some quicksand and jump in right it doesn't happen like
that but when you're in it you only have three options and you went through it really quick but i
want to be clear the first option is just to sink just to quit to give up to die now you may not die
but your influence and your hopes and your dreams and your aspirations can be extinguished well no
but we don't want any leader to do that what m
ost leaders do is they learn to swim in it well that's
not sustainable it's exhausting but see we're leaders and so we just keep swimming like when the
going gets tough the tough get going you just have to keep doing this for carter yeah yeah and and
i've heard a lot i've heard a lot of leaders say and this is uh the verbs they use is i don't know
how long i can keep this up exactly yeah yeah i mean you're reading stuff about the great
resignation and certainly that's not confined to the le
adership ranks but i think that's part
of what you're seeing is leaders are just saying this is just too hard in part because covet has
made all of this harder i don't think covet is the problem but it has magnified the problem
it has intensified the problem and and so some leaders are giving up some leaders are swimming
but then the third group or those men and women that we ended up focusing on they're the ones
that have escaped and we said let's figure out how you can get out and stay ou
t of the quicksand
no i love that and you mentioned just choices obviously your book is really focused on choices
and you go about saying we make choices all the time but we really really think about the choices
that we're making and you kind of rank them some choices rank higher they really affect your life
and some are just routine types of choices and uh so i want to ask the question why why do
we not really think much about our choices well the the the brain uh is a self-optimizing
mem
ory system so it it is the way we're hardwired is we don't have to think about a lot of
our choices so it's it's kind of in the in the software if you will or maybe even in the
hardware is a lot of our choices are response type choices many of our choices are unconscious
choices but virtually all of our choices are affected by our biases and we have many some we
know about and some we don't so what we found is knowing that there is a lot of subconscious
activity around choices smart leaders
really do focus on those conscious choices i mean that's
that's actually all we have control over right we by definition a subconscious choice is something
we are not consciously deciding or choosing so the best leaders work on
those things that will give them disproportionate return i often describe
it like a set of dominoes that are set up is the smart choices are the first right
they create a chain reaction they create a ripple effect think of them like keystone
choices that generate o
ther positive outcomes so we decided that would be the focus of our
work because the men and women the smart leaders do make smart choices but they already know how
to lead this is not a book to tell anybody how to lead this is for a pitcher that's having trouble
hitting the strike zone if you're not a pitcher there are other books to teach you to pitch
if you're not a leader i've written other books to tell you how to lead this is a book
four leaders men and women who are leaders but they
they've lost their mojo right
they they can't hit the strike zone they're they're encumbered by this quicksand and
one more quick asterisk i mentioned complexity and busyness and all the coveted stuff there are
other types of quicksand success fear fatigue i got a text this morning from a leader and he said
aimlessness is my quick sense so we've decided to label that entire toxic mix anything that impedes
your effectiveness and reduces your impact because we've all got our own personal blen
d the answer is
still the smart choices no i love that and we're going to dive into smart choices so you talk
about smart choices and there's four different categories when looking at uh making smart choices
the first one is confronting reality so uh this is kind of like you know it's a very simple term it's
like okay confront reality and really to think about your choices and think about your life think
about yourself just being self-aware right so talk to us about uh confronting reality a
nd why is this
so hard too well yeah um i've asked leaders and this is a fun little conversation over a cup of
coffee and i usually don't ask a later point blank i wouldn't ask you because that's getting way too
personal but i would say do you know other leaders that appears are unwilling to confront reality and
you're going to say sure and then i'm going to say why do you think that is the case and because i've
done this with scores of leaders i've asked them to think about other leaders a
nd you can make a
long long list fear insecurity i mean there any number of reasons that people people who are more
concerned with with with posture over performance with appearances uh i mean there's just so many
reasons but it's never good it's never good only when you choose to confront reality can
you can you lead from a position of strength and so the best leaders are willing
to do that in all areas of their life you know they start with themselves that's
what we always recommend star
t with yourself start with your leadership then
confront reality about your team how good is your team because those closest to
you are going to determine your level of success don't stop there confront reality about your
health about your family about your relationships about your finances if you're grounded in
truth you can lead from a position of strength so these four choices they're not intended
to be uh sequential because they're all uh forever and ongoing they do create what i believ
e
is a virtuous cycle but this is first among equals if you can't confront reality you're never
going to scale your impact and again that is that is the objective the objective is not to
make the choices for the sake of the choices you make the choices so you can have more impact
in the world you got to start with confronting reality i love that and sometimes we just don't
want to hear the answer so we just ignore it i love that so you speak on this confronting reality
so kind of being awa
re of your reality and then you talk about pursuing relationships bringing
other people around you to help you confront your reality maybe someone else that can speak
truth into you so how important is that like maybe with your own personal life surrounding yourself
with people that can say mark this is what i see sure how important well yeah i'll hit this quick
because this is a big idea um it's impossible for any of us to be totally self-aware i think
there's a lifelong journey for leader
s smart leaders to reduce their blind spots well
my favorite strategy is to look for fresh eyes people who will bring perspective they'll
bring challenge they'll bring questions they'll tell you the truth about various facets
of your life there are a lot of ways to do this a personal board of directors coaches mentors
consultants uh peer groups i i'm part of a group we've been meeting i think this is our
23rd year wow we started studying leadership we meet twice a month 23 years ago and the
y
helped me they provide fresh eyes they helped me confront reality about my life and about
my leadership and so any number of strategies i i don't know that the strategy matters
as much as the fact that you find help so that you can more honestly and more completely
confront reality it's it's just critical yeah definitely no i love that i'm a big uh person
i love coaches consultants peer groups and uh just having people because it's so hard to just
think about yourself because you have al
l like you said you have all these biased opinions right
you have your own desires what you want to do and i don't know so it's just it's just really
complicated really really messy um let's go in to so you talk about team right you got this team
around you especially in your business and as a leader visionary you got this team around you
and i was talking to someone the other day and i was i'm getting into this new kind of project
and i said what's your advice someone knew getting into thi
s this industry this area and he said
number one take it slow and number two team is everything and so what's your take on that about
the team and um on unscaling and growing your impact yeah so that's a big question so again i
i want to be careful that your audience doesn't um assume that the brevity of my response is
any reflection on the magnitude of your question i'd love to talk about that yeah i started
studying teams over 25 years ago specifically consciously purposefully i've writte
n a book on
that i'm a huge team guy we could talk for three days about teams here's here's i think that if i
could if i could boil it down yeah teams well-led outperform individuals and it happens about 96 of
the time based on the data that i've been able to discover now the four percent you could argue is
when they're not led well because we're smarter together no matter how if your iq is 180 you put
six people around the table with you and you still get smarter right they bring diverse e
xperience
and perspective and skills and passions and gifts you just get smarter and so there are very few
endeavors in the world where i think an individual will outperform a team even in the world of
sports it's again another topic for another day the individuals who excel are supported by a team
exactly they don't do it by themselves they've got psychologists and trainers the nutritionist and
on and on and on and on and on so that they can perform well in the spotlight but it's it's ther
e
are very few individual sports uh any anymore in the world so huge team guy and so that's a big
blind spot for a lot of leaders it's an area where they're not willing for whatever reason to
confront reality if your team's not strong you are you are limiting your impact remember that's
the the choices aren't the goal impact is the goal yeah and so to confront reality about the men and
women around your table it's just essential that's that's amazing number two growing capacity
so you talk
about growing capacity another probably the biggest complaint that i have from
business owners business leaders is that i don't have any time i don't have any margin in my life
i'm again i'm tired i can't i'm balancing so much i was talking a guy yesterday he said i
definitely do not need another thing to do so growing capacity right so talk to us
about this well this is the one that i think particularly in today's world probably drives
leaders crazy when i start talking about it uh and i
hope your listeners won't shut this
off because that's what we're talking about uh smart leaders make the choice to grow capacity
you can but it's crazy it's like you that is the fundamental problem right are you working on
the fundamental problem now there are a lot of things you can do again we devoted three four five
chapters in the book to this so let me just give you a couple i want to be mindful of our time here
let's start with your calendar we we we began this interview talking abou
t drucker 50 60 years ago
drucker said he'd never met a knowledge worker that's me and you it's interesting if you want
to explore his definition of a knowledge worker but we work on complex uh problems and issues
we have discretion some discretion over how we use our time so forth and still we're knowledge
workers 50 years ago he said he'd never met a knowledge worker that couldn't eliminate 25 of the
items on their calendar and no one would notice i don't know what that number
is today b
ut you got to start fundamentally you need to clean up your calendar
you need to clean up your calendar i've got some specific tactics in the book we won't get into
that you've also got to manage your personal energy in your setup you said some of these
leaders are tired i understand that what are you doing to manage and steward your energy sleep diet
exercise nutrition water relationships it's like we have some say so over our energy but not
if we neglect it not if we don't focus on it and
here's the last and crazy thing i'll mention
is the best leaders build margin into their lives now again i know people think that is absurd
but here's the story you go this was one of the bigger findings from our research you go
back through history great leaders have always done this at least going back a couple thousand
years you say i just don't have time it's like in fact let me say it like this
i had a leader just last week say you've lost your mind he said i don't have
time for a va
cation i said i'm not talking about a vacation you may need a vacation i
said i'm talking about margin as a leadership discipline so let me tell you what i'm what i'm
talking about when i say margin dedicated time to do some critical activities reflect assess
think create and plan like when do you do that well i do that in the shower or i do that in the
car what how deep is your level of thinking if you're doing it in the shower and in the car the
best leaders always find time they make tim
e to reflect to assess to think to create and to
plan there's a 12-year study that just came out from harvard been looking at ceos and how
they used their time for 12 years they spend 28 of their time alone now i don't know that there's
a magic number that's an average i don't know your situation or your circumstances but i would
say you add the most value when you're alone why because that's when you're reflecting
assessing thinking creating and planning i love that so just with that do yo
u have uh like a
perfect scenario is that once a week you think uh is it once a month or is it different for
everybody else but oh here's here's the deal i would say the bigger your dreams the bigger
your goals the bigger your challenges the bigger your responsibilities the more time you need to
do these critical activities i know a guy who became the president of a multi-billion dollar
company and he said he immediately doubled his alone time it's like but you just became the
president of
a multi-billion dollar company yeah that's why i had to double the amount of
time that i spend reflecting assessing thinking creating and planning wow so i don't know what
the magic number is for you but i would say this it's a challenge to your to your audience
for those that have never experimented with with margin block two hours next week two hours
put it on your calendar and when somebody calls and they want that time you look at your calendar
and you say no i'm sorry i have an appoin
tment and you protect that time well
what it what do i do in that time well you reflect you assess you think you create
and you plan pick a topic pick an issue maybe it's how are you going to get out of the quicksand
yeah it'd be a great thing to think about yeah i love that uh so number three fueling curiosity
and this is something just kind of interesting so uh i bought so just quick story i bought a guitar
uh a few weeks ago and uh people asked me like what are you doing i'm 40 you know
i just turned
42 yesterday and like what are you doing i don't know how to play the guitar i have no idea
but i'm just curious i've always i'm curious i've always thought wondered if i could do it and
it's not just an example but but leaders sometimes they forget to be curious like so take yourself
back to the kids so this is number three fueling curiosity and so talk to us about
this and why do people stop being curious well first let me say it it's a choice that it is
the third choice th
at you and i get to decide now we didn't get to decide when we were little
because we were all curious that's how we learned to walk that's how we learned to speak that's how
we learned everything right we had an insatiable level of curiosity and the world kind of beat it
out of us is is how we lost it but that is not the case with the best leaders i have been asked
on and off throughout my career various forms of the question is there a leadership fountain of
youth and i used to say i hope
so i'm looking for it i feel like possibly on right i want to i
want to add value as a leader until my last breath but i really didn't know how to how to make that
a reality this is the fountain of youth curiosity is how you maintain relevance and vitality in a
changing world and if we make this choice we can continue to add value so here's the way i would
summarize it your capacity to grow determines your capacity to lead your capacity to grow determines
your capacity to lead and so smart
leaders choose to fuel curiosity no i love that and with
that chapter you uh kept talking about asking just a lot of questions maybe asking questions even
strangers do you talk about fresh eyes getting a fresh perspective and just continuously asking
questions and that's something i've been doing like i said i'm getting in this new thing and i
just talked to some of the experts i just want to sit at your feet and ask you questions you
know and right anyway so talk to us about that how impo
rtant is it start asking questions
yeah real real quick on that um one of the strategies we devoted an entire chapter to this
it's called ask don't tell now for leaders i would say whenever possible there are times we're going
to tell and so yes yeah take that off the table what what i what i find to be true is the best
leaders ask more questions it's true in my life the more questions i ask the better i lead and
so we talk in that chapter about cultivating the skill set of asking great que
stions i've even
encouraged people to think of it like a game like like a kid you're going to start collecting
questions you're going to put them in a bag and you don't know when you're going to need them
but you've got them if you need them yeah i have a granddaughter that loves to collect shells on the
beach and you know invariably we're going to end up counting them well collect your questions count
them see how many you can get and then look for opportunities to use them and i think you
'll take
your leadership to the next level yeah i love that last one create change so this is your
uh last uh ask you know your choices creating change when you're making choices so
talk to us about this creating change well um confronting reality is the first among equals
but this is where the rubber hits the road if you don't do this one then the other choices
are actually irrelevant i know leaders you probably know leaders who know what to do but
they're unwilling to pull the trigger ye
ah you actually have to create change some leaders
look at change as a an inconvenience or a burden like change is your job change is our
job as leaders right we're supposed to take people from here to there we're
supposed to create a preferred future leadership it's not about control it is about
change it's about releasing human potential it's about movement for it so so many leaders
miss this they just they just don't create change now i'm not saying it's easy i'm not saying
you're gonna
bat a thousand on everything you try to change in fact our team has started a
research project for a 2024 book on change there are a lot of leaders who need help with change
i'm not disputing it's hard i'm not disputing that you and i both need to learn best practices we're
out there searching the globe for those right now but you have to choose to create change
yeah it's good it's going to be challenging um i i don't i don't have a lot to add in the
moment but you don't have you really do
n't have a choice if you're going to be a leader yeah
exactly exactly well guys this is an amazing book uh mark miller has written and again i'm going
to really dig in there's so much in there that there's just so much meat it's like you could
spend hours just on one chapter of this so smart leadership uh mark where's the best place for
them to get uh get this book i think the best place is on amazon the book has by the time
you see this will have just recently launched and we're trying to
serve leaders around the world
so check it out there if you want more information there is smart leadership book.com the only reason
i mention that if you wanted to buy it it's going to send you to amazon but i mentioned that site
specifically because there's some free downloads in the book their chapters where i
really just couldn't write anymore so i created some additional free content you
can access that even if you don't buy the book you can get it at smartleadershipbook.com awesome
t
hank you for that guys we're going to put that in our show notes too on the youtube channel
so check that out mark i always like to end every show with a little fire round so i
have a couple of questions for you here and these are just kind of fun so name the
first thing that comes to your mind i was reading your bio it sounds like you like
adventure i think you've climbed mount kilimanjaro got to the base camp of everest jungles of rwanda
what's been like your favorite memorable adventure
you know it might be kilimanjaro there have
been a lot of great exciting adventures uh kilimanjaro i did with my oldest
son for his high school graduation uh gift and it was our first real
adventure now he and i've done quite a few since then but that was that
was a real highlight to do that with him made it made it really special oh that's so
good i love that all right number two what's been a big personal challenge for you as a leader
what's been one thing that's really challenged you qu
icksand i think quicksand is is every leader's
challenge um i've been i've been trying to get out of it and stay at it my whole life and i think
i'll continue but i'm going to use these choices just this week i was having a conversation with my
assistant about some quicksand that we could see like uh-oh here we can see it are we are we going
to step in it and we actually use the choices to go around it and so i feel like i wrote this
book for myself if it helps others great but it's already
helping me that's good when when you're
an author and you create you have a problem and you go to your own book love that all right last
one what would you tell business owners out there that have a desire to to be an author to be more
of the knowledge type of leader like yourself you need to get a first draft uh i have been talk
i've been writing for about 20 years now uh i'm the accidental author i didn't i didn't seek it
out it kind of jumped in my lap but for the last 20 years every ti
me i meet an author i ask for
their counsel wisdom advice and best practices because i still someday maybe i'll become an
author um and the consistent overwhelming advice that i have gotten that i've applied and that
i pass on is you have to get a first draft you don't have a book until you have
a first draft and it will be awful prepare yourself for that but but you can't
make it better until you have something right go back 20 years it's been 20 years my first
book i got what today i wou
ld call draft zero i gave it to my wife she read it and said it's
not half as bad as i thought it would be because i said i'll take that and she said don't you
think you should have used some punctuation and i said that will be the second
draft and i handed her a red marker that's that's your job i don't even put don't get
caught up in is it good is this right is this the best way to say it no it's not good no that's not
the best way to say it and you don't care how to punk you know put the
punctuation in on that first
draft the advice to people is get a first draft and then you can turn it into a book yeah that's
awesome that just reminds me so two days ago i met with a writing coach and i met with her and i said
i have no idea how to write a book i'm a probably c-minus english student and i've never done this
before and she was just like those are the best people i love to work with so i'm like okay we'll
give it a shot anyways thank you mark for being on the best congress
podcast awesome guys go check
out smart leadership on amazon make sure you guys get that and mark it's been a pleasure man
it's been a blast thank you so much been great take care thank you so much for checking out the
brett snodgrass channel if you like this video please slam on that like button and if you
really like it then subscribe to our channel here and remember to leave us a comment below
and i'm going to try my hardest to reply to all the comments thank you guys so much this is
wh
y i do what i do every single week i come out with content that focuses on success freedom and
living out your purpose thank you guys so much
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