Failing For You
Failing For You
Developing Emotional Intelligence & Adaptability
Robert Derringer, Manager for Distribution Strategy at Crouzet, shares his unusual career path and the lessons he learned along the way. He reflects on his early years as an aggressive and self-confident individual, driven by insecurity and a desire to prove himself. Through introspection and exposure to different philosophies and religions, Robert began to question his behavior and strive for personal growth. He emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence, adaptability, and critical thinking in today's rapidly changing world. Robert encourages early career professionals to be open to failure, self-reflection, and diverse perspectives.
Takeaways
- Embrace self-reflection and be willing to question your beliefs and behaviors.
- Develop emotional intelligence and adaptability to succeed in today's world.
- Don't be afraid to fail and learn from your mistakes.
- Share your knowledge and empower others to make decisions.
- Step outside your comfort zone and seek diverse perspectives.
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Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Failing for you. It is me, your host, jordan Yates, back with another guest who you may remember from season one. It is Robert Derringer and he is the manager for distribution strategy at Krusei and although he has a super cool job now, robert has had a very unusual path to his career and has taken a lot of windy roads and has learned quite a bit. And now that he is super duper old like like, oh my gosh, he's lived 150, no, I'm just kidding. He has gotten to a point in his life where he realizes, you know, when I was younger, I acted in some ways that probably weren't in my best interest. I've learned a lot, I've gotten a lot of perspective and Robert's a cool guy just to talk to. So I'm excited to introduce him to you all again. If you're a new listener or you're back because you love Robert so much the first time, robert, say hello to everybody.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody. Thanks for having me on Jordan. I look forward to it.
Speaker 1:But real quick. Before we get started, let's hear a quick message from our sponsors.
Speaker 3:Hi there, I'm David Turner from Process and Automation Specialists. In our world, process improvement isn't just a phrase. It's the key to unlocking efficiency in your operations. With over 20 years of hands-on experience in the heart of manufacturing plants, I've walked in your shoes, worked alongside teams like yours, and understand the ins and outs of your daily challenges. My journey from the plant floor to leading process solutions means I know exactly what it takes to elevate your operations. Interested in transforming your process efficiency? With a partner who's been there, let's connect on LinkedIn. Don't wait for the future of automation, let's create it. Process and Automation Specialists engineering efficiency together.
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Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it'll be good. Robert and I were just talking about what we were going to discuss beforehand and I wish I was pressing record, because even when he's just discussing what he's going to discuss, I'm just like got to write that down. That sounds real good. So, robert, you were the one who were like you know, I had this interesting career path. Can you kind of start us off from the beginning, like we don't need to go too far into like your origin story, but sort of where you got going and why it was unusual?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, I am as old as the Hills. I'm 62 now for those that are counting. My wife says let's stop saying we're 62 years old. I'm level 62.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, I love that.
Speaker 2:It sounds a lot better. So I wanted to be in electronics. Probably around 1974. And I shared this on your last podcast that you were, that you were kind enough to host me on I wanted to be in electronics. I didn't know exactly what that meant, but I just sensed that this electronics industry that was developing with handheld and pocket calculators and digital watches was exploding. So I went to a technical school, votech, a vocational school alongside college. I studied the college prep courses, but I also studied electronics and I decided at age 17 to jump right into full-time work and by the end of that year so I graduated in June. By the end of the year I was actually an assistant design engineer designing transformers while I was 17 years old it's my birthday is late in the year, so I was still just about 18. And I was an assistant design engineer.
Speaker 2:I would later get married, not much later. I just turned 19, bought a home when I was 18, and decided to run for public office the town council in the town I lived when I was 20. It was after my divorce and I was around 25, that I realized that I wasn't going to make it in the business without an engineering degree and I needed to start getting my finances together and get an engineering degree. But while doing that, and there's a thing you might not know of these things, jordan, but they're called the one ads. I don't know if you ever heard of them. They come from this printed thing, black and white thing, newspapers. I'm just teasing it.
Speaker 1:Listen, robert. I have parents. They live during that.
Speaker 2:So I literally was looking at the one ads just killing time at the laundromat and I saw a regional sales position for an electronics connector company and by chance I was hired and I've been in this business now for 26 years.
Speaker 2:So my my path has been characterized a lot by being super independent, super self confident, but at the same time it would take me years to realize this driven by an underlying sense of insecurity, almost an imposter, imposter syndrome.
Speaker 2:I think part of it as I look back and I think I knew this early. I was now at 26, a regional manager working with design engineers, people with the engineering degree that I didn't have MBAs, people with advanced degrees, and yet I'm sitting here trying to hold my own against them and I would work harder, smarter, faster, longer hours. When I say smarter, maybe more efficiently, I would always try to find the quickest way to get something done and I didn't care how many dead bodies I climbed over to get up that corporate ladder and I was obnoxious, not self aware at all, really dug in into my own personal beliefs. It characterized a lot of me and I think it was tolerated much more in the 1980s when I started as a regional late 80s and 90s, then it would be today. I probably would have been fired early in my career for some of the stuff that I did, some of the things.
Speaker 2:I said yeah, some of the ways I treated people, so that that's a long story about kind of the genesis of it all and why I thought your audience given that this is failing for you might want to hear more about this story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think he'll be good and I don't remember if I said this last time. I have a tendency to hear something and think the same thing. I'm very consistent with that. But the way that you described that really reminds me a lot of my dad and the things that he said, because I think I told you maybe on the last episode, like my dad didn't finish high school, he just kind of got straight to work around like 16, 17.
Speaker 1:And then he got into the car industry and he was a car salesman and as he got older and like would get promotions to like manager and things like that, he'd say it's so weird because I'm managing these people who have like business degrees and finance degrees and he's like I just I feel like I need to be working so much harder than to prove that like I'm worth being there. But the ironic thing is sometimes with industry experience it's almost I'm not going to say one's better than the other, but if you have been in the industry five years and somebody just got five years out of college, the industry person at the time is going to probably know more. And that's what I always tell them once I got through college. I'm like man, dad, like you really you don't learn that much in college Like you're good, like don't worry about it that you didn't go, so it's.
Speaker 1:It's funny though, like when you don't do it, it's it. I could see having the chip on your shoulder. So I'm interested to get more into that story. So let's bring it back to you and off my tangent, robert. I guess around that time, like, what would you say was your, your personality was like, and do you feel like it was rewarded the way that you were? Did you keep seeing success from being so abrasive?
Speaker 2:I saw success because I really battled for my customers.
Speaker 2:I would go through any wall. I pretty much didn't pick a fight. I fought every fight that was presented to me. I would do anything to get the customers what they wanted. So in my early career small company, everybody sat under one roof production facility and you know the accountants and HR, everybody sat there. I could. I could literally enter an order, get a manufacturing order created myself, get it onto the shop floor, sweet, talk somebody on the shop floor to build it and by the afternoon get it shipped. Put it in a box myself and put it in the shipping room and have it shipped, and I would just get things done. And that's how I saw my job.
Speaker 2:People would say why do you do this? You know my colleagues would say why do you do this? Well, I am going to really wow my customers. So I guess I was driven by a really high sense of service. So I was rewarded because I got things done. But the owner of the company once pulled me aside and said there's only one A-hole in this company and that's me. And I said well, you set a bad example. He said I don't care, I'm the owner, you can't pave the way you do. But he tolerated me. A lot of people tolerated me and you know I made a lot of bad jokes. I would imitate and mock people, especially, you know, turn them into a caricature. If somebody had a tick or something, I would exaggerate it and get people to laugh and a lot of that really Jordan unfortunately was driven by my own insecurities.
Speaker 2:You know I wanted to be large in and charge and in control of everything because that kind of allowed me to not deal with some of those things some of those insecurities that I really didn't understand very well until later in life and really one of the epiphany moments and I probably have quite a few epiphany moments in my life, but really one of the biggest early ones. I was 31, 32, I left that job to go to another job and make more money I have a family now and I had to do better by them financially. And there was a woman that really wanted the job. I was national sales manager and ran a small manufacturing operation and she had been there since the beginning. It was a German-based company.
Speaker 2:I won't say her name or the company, but she was universally despised in this company. And one day I pulled her aside in the warehouse and I said to her again I'm not going to say her name. I said but it's like every time there's a storm here, you're the center of it. I mean, I know you want to get things done, I know you care about the company, but every time there's a storm, whatever it is, you are the epicenter. And I said, oh my God, this is my boss at the past job talking to me.
Speaker 2:I literally had that moment and I said, oh my God, people must see me like they see her. That's disgusting. I mean, she was really, really a tiger by the tail. She was obnoxious and I said, oh my God, that's me. And funny thing is, halloween being one of my favorite, probably my favorite holiday, I went back to the company where I had worked. I had been gone for about two years. I went back there and showed up, parked away from the place, walked in in costume and no one could figure out who I was.
Speaker 2:I ended up sitting down with the owner and shared that story with him, and then he would end up offering me a chance to come back not a chance, but an opportunity to come back which made sense for me for multiple reasons and I would slowly start to turn around. But still it took me a long time until I started to change and really could say I have changed. And that would be arrogant to say I have changed and I'm done because you're growing every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess I want to take it back to when you were 25 or 26 at the other job, when you were the tornado yourself. You said that was around the time you'd gotten divorced, correct, right? Do you feel like a lot of your lack of self-awareness and sort of the chaos that you were may have been creeping in from what was going on in your home life and maybe it was like a way of feeling like you had control somewhere? Is that something that you'd ever thought about? The correlation there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm super introspective. Always was as a kid, partly because I was a mouthy little bugger and my mom would put me in my room and I would want to make sure she couldn't break me, so I would just stay in there until she kind of begged me to come out.
Speaker 2:So, very introspective. So I was a lab technician at a relatively large company owned by Thomas and Betts, and we all had levels. We were punched the clock, hourly workers I'm not working an extra minute if you don't pay me overtime type of job and I realized that after divorce I was a level 10 lab technician I think it was and this fellow named George was a level 10 lab technician as well and I considered him dumb as a piece of wood, as arrogant as that might sound. That's the way I looked at it. And I said to myself if I'm going to go to a bar, meet a woman, george and I can both say we're level 10 lab technicians and I'm so much smarter than that I'm really wasting myself here and that's that was.
Speaker 2:Again. There's a hubris and arrogance to that statement, but I would you know I joined Mensa because I thought joining Mensa and putting that out there would get me a fantastic job. Not going to college, mensa would offset that. You know, that's that high IQ society, yeah. So, as I said earlier, I didn't really have much of a plan. I just thought people would recognize this amazing talent, this luminous talent, in front of them and say, wow, you need to run my company.
Speaker 4:But by 26,.
Speaker 2:That didn't happen. So for sure there was a lot of stress in the divorce, but really it caused me a failing. Since this is failing for you, that that at that time was like that's my biggest failure. I got married in divorce. That's a huge failure. And marry the same woman and get divorced a second time, that's even a bigger failure.
Speaker 1:You did that, Robert.
Speaker 2:I did that, yes.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, my dad did that too. You guys should pay out.
Speaker 2:I gotta get down there to Texas, I guess.
Speaker 1:You two would have a lot to talk about. Man, my dad's gonna get on me and say stop talking about my business on your podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know, failing for you, that was a huge failure for me, although again I look at things and say failing is kind of relative, because I wouldn't be where I am today. You like to tour the hard way. I've been married to my wife for 10 years and wouldn't have adopted the two kids I did, and I wouldn't have found my way to California from Pennsylvania, new Jersey, illinois, connecticut. So I think a big part of it was me just saying look, you're pissed off all the time that she's divorced you. There's truth to that. But it was also that my marriage really defined me. My marriage, my home, the things I had built we're all getting shredded because I had to get divorced and sell the home that we had built together and move into a shabby apartment. And those were my badges of honor.
Speaker 2:I didn't go to college but look what I've got college colleagues. Look, I've got all this stuff and you don't have this stuff. So I was kind of hung up on material things and all that just kind of fell down around me and what I had was my job. That was my identity now and it's like you can do better than this. You just don't have a degree. So go get a degree and then when I took a seat when I've got the opportunity, it was a fantastic opportunity to be a regional salesperson. I did pursue some night classes but never went very far with that just because of travel schedule and so forth. But hopefully that answers what you were asking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, absolutely. So I'm going to just make sure my timeline correct. So you're on 26,. You get the regional sales job. That's the one where you're the eye of the storm. There you go off to a different company. A couple of years later you get the perspective because you meet the other Craig Craig lady who's struggling to notice her storm that she causes. You go back to your other company. How old are you when you come back? And you're like, hey, like I've learned all this. How old were you there?
Speaker 2:I guess I would have been around 34. Okay, so I had two, or my son would have been about three. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you go back and you tell him this and your boss is kind of like or ex boss, current boss. At the time he's like okay, yeah, like I. You know people love that when someone takes time, they get their perspective, they learn, they come back. At this time, do you feel like this was a turning point or do you feel like you had a small epiphany but you still continue to kind of stumble down that self-absorbed, like chaotic route, like, or do you feel like this was a turning point? Where were you then?
Speaker 2:For sure it was a turning point. But I like to say, if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space. Edgy characterizes me being edgy, maybe not living on the edge, but being edgy. One of the stories I remember and I wanted to recount for your audience here was we hired a gal named Heather who was right out of high school, 18, working the front desk receptionist, opening the mail and doing bingo leads.
Speaker 2:Back in the day there were people in magazines would get a little bingo card and circle what products they were interested in and we get leads from those. She did this kind of work and then moved into the customer service operation and I traveled and I would call in every morning, every night and Heather would read the faxes and I tell her what to do and she would dutifully take care of whatever it was. So I remember once saying, when you're traveling, maybe you didn't get a chance to call in, the pay phone was taken. You didn't get a chance for that reason. Maybe you were out too late and drank too much and didn't get up on time.
Speaker 2:But I wasn't serving my customers well by having all the information filtered through me. So I started to say let me share with you how I came to that decision. Now, heather was extremely uncomfortable with it. It was just like just tell me what to do, I won't get in trouble. So you're not gonna get in trouble. But the more you understand of how I'm thinking and why we can approve, let's say, this sample request for two pieces, but not that one, you'll eventually be able to make 80% of the decisions if you have the same base level of knowledge as me. And it took time. But I mentored her on that strategy and after I would leave that company she would eventually become customer service manager of, I think, a 20 person pharmaceutical operation in New Jersey.
Speaker 2:Wow, go Heather this was a very unconfident person.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it was definitely a change for me and a turning point, because I started to say, if I stop hoarding all my knowledge, which was driven by the insecurity that if I don't, if I give up that knowledge and I'm not gonna be needed, Mm-hmm that I could actually force, multiply my efforts by having a strong team that could make better decisions and quicker decisions, and I would learn how to stand behind them and say, okay, I might not have made that decision, but let me tell you why.
Speaker 2:Because that's information I hadn't shared with you before.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's still people who can't deal with that. They just want to be told what to do. But anybody who wants to be mentored wants to learn. I will go into the greatest detail to try to share what I have gained over 35 years of doing this with them, so they can make a similar decision.
Speaker 1:That's really cool, the way that you actually describe this.
Speaker 1:It's kind of eerily lining up with Jackie Fisher's book. She was on episode two of this season and she wrote the growth paradox, and the funny thing is is she literally described the manager who has the style who's like they want to do everything themselves. Basically what you described that you were when you were like 25 of like you'd go to customer service, you'd go this, that every which way you were doing it, she literally calls it in the diagram the asshole. So it's like then you called yourself in a hole and I'm like, oh my God, wait what. And then how she describes that a good manager works is that they empower their employees by creating a process, explaining to them each step of the process like you did for Heather and then empowering her to believe that she can do it, and then assigning her a task to where it's hers and she's responsible for it. And it's actually kind of crazy that, like, in a way, you described exactly what she wrote in the book. So it's cool that you learn that through experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I remember. I'm pretty sure it's the same episode. That was maybe two weeks ago, Mm-hmm. Yeah, I remember that was a good episode. So many corollaries there, I remember.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny what people having comment after they've like managed people throughout their career. But okay, so now you worked with Heather. Where are we at next in your train of learning? What did you move on to from there?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, financially I was doing well enough but wanted to get to a point where my now ex-wife could retire not retire, I shouldn't say that, but that's how it sort of ended up. Yeah, she could go to a reduced schedule so she could be available for the kids. I traveled a lot, felt a super, super high sense of guilt for being away from the family so much and thought it was better for them to have mom get them on the bus and be there when they got off the bus. So I was looking to make more money and still the material things allowed me to have a boastful pride, you know, fed my ego. So we had a nice home and you know Volvo SUV or a Mercedes sedan and you know that needed money to support that.
Speaker 2:Sure did so I would jump and move jobs based on financial reasons, but also to gain more experience. So along with this, independence was also a high level of curiosity and I always wanted to add to what I was doing. So I wasn't just a sales person, I managed customer service. I was brought back to that company that I returned the second time to actually implement an ERP system because I knew the entire ERP. I joined Amphenol because I wanted to have distribution focused experience.
Speaker 2:I joined Dialite because in 2002, 2003 is when I joined, I believe but in that time period everything seemed to be moving to China and I wanted to have a more global view. So I made a lot of calculated decisions, some based strictly on finance and then later more on gaining skill sets and teaching myself things and learning them throughout business. I worked for a German company throughout that where I didn't last long. That's certainly another failing in some respect, but I actually was responsible for building, for being the lead person in the Americas and the only one for building an 18,000 square foot ISO 14,001 factory.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So I oversaw all the contractors, all the legal negotiations. I hired people, I did all the accounting, I did all the freight and logistics. I did it all there and I was still pretty aggressive and still somebody who cracked way too many jokes and was an empathetic at all, kind of like it doesn't bother me, so why should it bother? You Just deal with it or grow a thicker skin and I would realize later in life that it's not what you intended. It's how it's perceived. So I've learned to tone down a lot of that, not again because I'm trying to be some sort of PC person or woke, but I really think it's just a proper way to be to people and to get the best out of people is to put aside those jokes and those things that are just calling out characteristics or accents or maybe a different sounding first name.
Speaker 4:It's not funny To me it's not funny.
Speaker 1:At what point? I guess because you've like you said, it's kind of personality trait for a while. Maybe it was a coping mechanism or a defense mechanism, whatever you want to classify it as, Since I've known you in the last year, so I would say you're definitely a very introspective, aware person. But at what point in your life do you feel like you really started thinking about these things and taking a look back and thinking, oh gosh, I don't love how I handle that. Like, when did you hit that stride in your life?
Speaker 2:That would certainly be in my mid 40s, maybe to the later 40s, and it has to do with a slow and steady kind of curiosity about philosophy and religion. Raised Lutheran Christian, moved away from it pretty quickly after I was of voting age, confirmed in the church, moved away pretty quickly, but always felt like I owed it to my kids to expose them to some things and I wanted to learn some things about other religions. So I would travel a lot to Europe, not to Europe. I did travel to Europe, but I would travel a lot to Asia after I'd started with dialect and I was very intrigued by Eastern philosophies and Eastern religions and I would eventually gravitate toward kind of the principles of Buddhism.
Speaker 2:I don't necessarily believe in every single thing about it, but it's a very introspective way of thinking. And I had a woman in Singapore that was with the distributor that we used to manage that market and she was going through some training and would drop CDs and books into my lap and I would take them and read them and listen to them on the plane, for instance. So I started to do that and it was about the same time that my ex-wife wanted to divorce a second time and I realized, jordan, that all this energy that was somewhat anger rage almost would potentially be really debilitating.
Speaker 2:I mean, I could hate women for life. I mean, this second divorce was even more financially ruinous to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 2:So we had accumulated a lot of debt and it was stupid. But we did because I wanted to make her happy and I also liked having stuff because that made me feel like I made it. So I really started to question what drives me to do things, and so much of it was ego, so much of it was the insecurity of not going to college and I don't know how many MBAs I've trained to do a pivot table, or some of them to spell POS, because I didn't know what it was.
Speaker 3:Why do?
Speaker 2:we have stock rotations. Why do we do this? Oh God, you're all book smart, but I would have to train them because they would come in at senior roles above me and I would never still get looked at because I don't have an degree. I was really driven by a lot of that stuff and it was then my late 40s and actually got a tattoo. That's the Tibetan home. I never wanted to lose it. I wanted to commit to it, never wanted to lose it. I don't do a lot of meditation, I'm not practicing, I don't get into a whole bunch of the reincarnation thoughts. It's really just about why did that hit me a certain way?
Speaker 2:and what's driving my anger, my frustration, my sharp tongue, and I work on just trying to be incrementally better, one day at a time, one thought at a time, one action at a time.
Speaker 1:And now that it's been a while since you've been kind of practicing that lifestyle, would you say, is there times where you feel like you default to how you used to be, or do you feel like you've been so practiced in your new ways that like that's more of your default now?
Speaker 2:I'd say it's more of my default. But around I think they say familiarity breeds comfort, right? So I can be certainly quick quick to hear, perceive something my wife says and quick to react in a similar way. We both have that same problem. We both will perceive a certain tone and both react in kind and wasn't necessarily intended. So that's still a default mode and I have to work on it. But I don't brood on it.
Speaker 2:What I used to do in the past was I brooded over that stuff and then I used to try to. Then I go tell five people why that person made me angry, why it was their fault that they made me angry. They made me angry and really it's never that. It's always how you, how you handle the situation that you presented. And my default is it's right there under the surface. I mean it's right there under my under the surface. My daughter she used to be really good at pressing all the buttons and I would put as much duct tape over them as I could, but she daughter's are good at that ripped them off and press that button or find a new button.
Speaker 2:I didn't know I had, but I would learn over time ways to deal with it. Even if it's a 10 second meditation, just the deep breathing is really valuable for me and and yeah, I wish I could say that I am, you know, this Zen relaxed person all the time. But if you know, the more you know me, the more you'll see kind of the old style, but it's, it's. Certainly I don't work hard to watch what I say, you know. I'm just aware that what I say lands differently than what I might have said in the past. I wouldn't care how it landed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I mean just being aware is a totally different skill set that sometimes some people never develop, where it takes a while. But as we're getting towards kind of the end here, I always like to have sort of like a takeaway for the listeners of in your case, you know, it took you a lot of years, a lot of trial and error kind of, to gain this perspective, even though along the way it sounds like you had some aha moment. If somebody is kind of earlier in their career and they're noticing like they're kind of dealing with a lot of the same issues and they struggle to with the imposter syndrome and maybe it's it's that, maybe it's just like the quick tongue as well, what advice would you give them?
Speaker 2:Well, for sure I can direct this more towards men, I think. But I think women, face in business, face sometimes the challenge to behave and operate as they perceive a man would in the same role. Yeah, so if that's, if you're a man or somebody that's kind of presenting in that way, trying to hold your own in a male dominated market, which higher industries male dominated, I would say, be very introspective. Don't don't hang on to old all your old beliefs as if they were etched in stone on some mountain. They, they are changeable. It's not. It's not a weakness of character to question yourself. You're firmly held beliefs. Be willing to fail. I just saw an Adam Grant thing on meme or not a meme, a short, I guess it would be on Instagram where he said he plans to fail at least 10% Per year, or something like that, because if you're not failing 100% of the time, then you're not taking enough risk.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, don't be afraid to fail and don't be afraid to admit. Admit you're wrong and really hoarding, you know, hoarding all your knowledge that you've gained and worked hard to gain. Be proud of that, but share it because the people around you will lift you up. The old rising tide lifts all boats right and I think for men it's a little more. A little more impactful because we're socialized to think that we're large and in charge and in control and we don't like to give that up. And if you can get to where I am in your late 20s or early 30s, that's going to be much more rewarding for your career.
Speaker 2:Because every study I've seen, Jordan, everything I'm seeing these days is your IQ, which I've hung my hat on for so long. That's great and cool, and everything. And in your MBAs and all of that, that's great and cool. But your emotional intelligence and your adaptability quotient you have high scores in being emotionally intelligent and being adaptable. You're going to succeed and that's what the younger generation, Gen Zs and the younger millennials, are looking for. They're looking for managers that can really relate to them, not have to relate to them, but really can attempt to understand and empathize.
Speaker 1:Robert, can I tell you something embarrassing?
Speaker 2:Go ahead.
Speaker 1:I have never done an IQ test because I've always been afraid it's going to be low.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:And so I don't want to put a number on it. So I mean, I'm sure I've done one, like in school and like they have my data, but I've literally always been so afraid and I guess most people regard me as being decently smart, I might be an engineer or whatever, but like I refuse to take one because I don't want to know, I took.
Speaker 2:I think that's afraid. You know, I've taken a couple because I thought that had to have been a fluke. So I've taken, I think, three, and they all were within points of each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, but yet teach me a foreign language. You would think I'm one of the dumbest dumbest people in the room, because it's not logical. I speak two languages English and Excel but but that's a logic. You know, that's a logical way of thinking, and I am on a 240 or so day streak on Duolingo for French. I work for a French company.
Speaker 1:Wow, I spoke.
Speaker 2:French. I spoke French. No, I don't speak much. I can at least read some words now and recognize them. But the pronunciation and the exceptions, it's just illogical to me because I'm always trying to take the American word and fit it in a box and reconstruct it the same way and it doesn't work. It's communication. It's not same words just in a different language, but it's. It's a big challenge for me to learn a language. So I think intelligence is great, but being emotionally intelligent and adaptable, I mean, look, we've got artificial intelligence. You know, you got to be able to sift through the BS. Right, there's so much that's being put out there by AI these days that you have to have critical thinking skills.
Speaker 2:You can take everything at face value and, as much as it can be painful and I don't do a great job of this keep yourself out of echo chambers Not only people who will tell you you're right, make sure people around you will tell you you're wrong and feel comfortable and safe doing that, but also whenever it comes to any of your philosophical, other firmly held beliefs, Try to get outside your comfort zone.
Speaker 2:That's always a big message from me. Jordan and I related to exercise. You gain muscle, you gain speed, you gain strength through working out harder, running faster, doing another hill, lifting a heavier weight, and the same thing applies to your mind and your your spiritual.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well, Robert. I feel zen right now, so also a little bit motivated. It's a little conflicting. I want to go do something and I feel really calm about it.
Speaker 2:I'm going to go to the gym soon, actually.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm jealous. I got another podcast today and then I will be right behind you. But, robert, thank you so much for coming on today. Guys, thank you so much for listening to another episode. Robert, I will put your LinkedIn in the description.
Speaker 4:Are you?
Speaker 1:cool with people reaching out to you if you want to chat. Okay, awesome. Well, guys, I will put it down there. Connect with Robert If you want to talk through some of the stuff that he mentioned today and you want some of his deeper perspectives that he's learned throughout the years. But you know, as always in the meantime I'm your host and I'll be failing for you. Also, I'm Jordan, and I said that backwards, but that's on brand for me. So bye guys.
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