20 years to the day, 20 years earlier, to the day that my son was born, on August the
17th, 1960, the Beatles arrived at Hamburg, Germany.
They had just hired Pete Best to be their drummer.
They hired him for this gig, they hired him to go to Germany.
They would remain in Hamburg through December, 1962.
So they were there about two and a half years and during that two and a half year period
by all accounts, they honed their skills because they played seven days a week.
They would often play hours and hours on end.
In fact, Paul McCartney in interviews has said that they would play songs for 20 minutes
or more.
Songs would be just full of riffing, a lot of improvisation, solos as they were honing
their craft.
In fact, in various accounts through the years, they have said that as long as the German
audiences liked what they were playing and they did, and they did according to Lenin
and McCartney, as long as it was loud, the Germans liked it.
All of that playing, all of that time, it made them better.
They initially hit stage and they would just stand and play and they learned to move around
on stage while in Hamburg.
Their reputation grew while they were there, their first record deal was obtained because
they had gone to Hamburg.
Brian Epstein, the famous manager of the Beatles, they caught his attention while they were
there.
That photographer, that German photographer, she was there credited with the famous Beatle
haircut.
I think in various accounts she denies that.
She claims she knew there were a lot of guys that cut their hair that way.
It just began to be ascribed as that Beatles haircut.
From August 17th, 1960 through the end of December, 1962, it was home to the Beatles.
It could be successfully argued, I think, I would argue it, that had they not gone to
Hamburg, had they not gone through the pain and the suffering, I mean, the interviews
that you see and that you read about the living conditions when they first got there and that
they persisted in for some period of time until they got to a level of some success,
pretty deplorable.
Lots of prostitution, drug addicts, not the best accommodations for the rock stars that
would become the Beatles.
But they weren't the rock stars.
Not then.
Oh, well, maybe on a local level, but they weren't the rock stars that they became.
Same guys.
Well, okay, Ringo joined.
Hamburg, Germany, two and a half years, two and a half year process.
In which time they became better and better and better and that becoming better necessarily
made their influence reach further and further and started to get some attention and isn't
getting attention.
What it's all about really.
The point of this is many of us, myself included, many of us, we are in our Hamburg, Germany
phase, we are in this phase where we're honing, we're getting better, hopefully we're figuring
things out.
And nearly every success story that I have ever read about or studied, there is some,
there's some Hamburg, Germany in every story.
We see these young men get off of this airplane in New York City and we see hordes of girls
screaming and going crazy.
We have recollection because we've seen the video of them on the Ed Sullivan show.
That's the Beatles.
But now we didn't see them in Hamburg, Germany, most of us.
We didn't see them when they started out.
We didn't see these Liverpool school boys as they were learning to play.
We didn't know them then.
So all of that process, all of that mountain climbing that they had to go through, we weren't
there to see that.
They were.
And there are some people who were, but the masses of us, we didn't see any of that.
We just see them get on the mountain top and we see them get the big, that big proverbial
flag and we see them just stab it right into the mountain top and Eureka.
They have arrived.
We want that feeling.
We want that feeling.
We just don't want to have to climb the mountain to get it.
Can't helicopter.
Just can't you just fly me up there and let me climb down and no.
No, you got to go, you got to go through Hamburg, Germany.
Now make metaphorically, you got to go through Hamburg.
It's the only way that you're going to get to the mountain top.
Well, I've been traversing this mountain and I'm, I'm not saying I mean, we're close to
emerging from Hamburg, but I am hoping to move out of the area where there are all the
drug addicts and the prostitutes and the bad area of Hamburg.
I'm hoping, I'm hoping that I'm, I'm getting close to migrating and moving out of that
neighborhood to a slightly better neighborhood.
I'm still in Hamburg.
There's no question.
And maybe you are too.
Maybe you haven't left Liverpool yet.
That's a big step now.
It's a big step to leave Liverpool and go to Hamburg when Liverpool's home.
Well, I left Liverpool.
I'm pretty confident.
I've left Liverpool.
I'm pretty confident I'm in Hamburg and I'm, I'm equally confident.
I'm still in Hamburg, but I'm also equally confident that this is all a process.
This is all a necessary process.
So what does all this mean?
Well, I've been asked the question because I have been, I, I wouldn't say agonizing.
It may have started out that way, but it certainly hasn't ended up that way recently, but I began
to do some heavy lifting.
And so is not to make this video too terribly long.
I began to make this heavy lifting because a friend of mine who has a business coach,
she began to recount to me how this, how this works, how this business coach work.
And let me back up and tell you that this friend of mine, if you were to meet this friend,
you would not at all describe this friend of mine as being, how shall I say it, um,
insecure, lacking confidence, lacking ability.
You would not at all describe this person as, Oh, they need a coach.
They need a business coach in the worst way.
No, you would probably look at this friend and determine they don't need a coach.
What do they need a coach for?
Now this friend of mine does coaching in a particular genre, a particular niche, does
a lot of writing, produces a lot of good stuff, serves this, this industry, this little niche,
which isn't so little, but you would not describe this person.
If you knew this person, you would not describe this person as weak, ineffective, unskilled,
desperately needing coaching.
Like I said, you wouldn't describe this person as needing coaching at all.
Well we were having this conversation and the conversation included our, both of us
acknowledging how we can help somebody else.
We can recognize very quickly because we are both strategic thinkers.
We can recognize in someone's life quite quickly the opportunity, the challenges, the problems,
the constraints.
We can identify those things and we can help map out some suggested and that's all they
are suggested courses of action because these are not people, they're not living our lives
nor are we trying to live their lives.
We're simply trying to, as the British say, we are in the helping business and I like
that.
We are in the helping business so we are trying to help them push through.
We're trying to help them climb the mountains so they can stake their own flag at the top.
However, in helping other people, it's ridiculously hard to sometimes do for your life what you
do for others.
I have some theories as to why that's true.
The biggest theory I have is we have all this emotional baggage in our life.
You do, I do.
My friend does.
We all do.
So as I look at my life and I try to apply strategic thinking to my own life, the difficulty
that I have is I have this big backpack on and it is packed.
It's heavy.
In each arm, I have got a suitcase.
They're packed.
They're heavy.
There aren't rollers on them either, by the way.
I have one foot, I have the toe of one foot wrapped around the handle of yet another bag
that I'm dragging on the floor.
It's cumbersome.
It's really cumbersome.
This baggage is made up of a variety of things, my past, childhood, adulthood, all of the
people, all the circumstances, all the things that have happened in life.
They're in these bags.
I have them in these bags.
It's not all bad.
Do you want to make a trip with no bags?
Leave the house right now.
Go to the airport with all, simply what you have on and go make a trip.
In fact, take a long trip.
Well, no, right, I don't know who wants to do that.
There are things I need to take with me.
I need to prepare the things I've got to take with me.
If I'm going to have a successful trip.
If I'm going to have a fun trip, exactly, you need some bags.
Well, you're going on an overnight stay.
Do you need three suitcases?
Do we really need to load the trunk down so low that the headlights shine up into the
into the trees at night?
No, no, we need to pack appropriately.
So not all baggage is bad, but it certainly isn't all good either.
So we have these bags and we are not able necessarily to easily discern our problems,
our challenges and our constraints, even though we can quite quickly, those of us that are
in this helping business, those of us that prize ourselves of being pretty good at it,
we can more quickly determine for others what we sometimes can't even remotely come close
to, to finding out for ourselves.
So we need some help and enter business coach and not really a business coach, but a coach,
coach that came out of the healthcare business kind of morphed into a little bit of business
coaching and out of that, my friend began to have over the course of the last couple
years meeting two or three times a year marathon sessions, discussing the past, discussing goals
and objectives, the ones that were met, the ones that weren't a lot of heavy lifting,
a lot of emotional heavy lifting.
If you've never done any of that, I urge you to.
I'm not going to point you in any direction, but any kind of exercise, any kind of process
that forces you to really think about things that you may have never thought about before.
Things that force you in this art of self-examination, pursue those.
They're worthwhile.
Now, I will give you a word of advice and a word of warning.
They can make you sick physically.
Yep, they can.
Because the stress of the heavy lifting of looking at yourself in some of the toughest
ways possible to come to grips with why can't I push through in this area or that area?
Or what is it?
What are my hangups?
What's my problem here?
And we've all got those now and we all sense that we all know it.
We may not know what they are, but I don't care who the rock star is.
There's issues there.
You are going to probably find yourself in bed after such a session.
It seems to be a common place where we go.
I've been there, have you?
I'm trying to think of anybody I know who has gone through some process and many of
these are what I would call a marathon kind of a process.
This isn't some little ditty thing where you sit down for 30 minutes and you write out
the answers to some questions.
This is where you really reflect.
This is where you really think.
This is where somebody is really probing.
This is where somebody is really asking some pointed questions and making you answer them.
I have long maintained asking the questions.
That's easy.
And take the time and the effort and the energy to answer them.
Oh, that's tough.
And when you go through the process, the reality of your situation, and it's not that it's
a bad situation, just the reality of and the exhaustion that sets in knowing that you've
done this, knowing that you've looked at things in ways that you've never considered before.
And yes, as my tagline has said in sometimes past Twitter and various other places, just
a man in search of an epiphany, you will have an epiphany.
Hopefully you'll have more than one epiphany.
There will be some things that just dawn on you.
You've never had that feeling.
It just dawns on me.
Yeah.
And when you have those feelings, when it's over, you're going to be spent.
I'm just telling you, you're going to be spent.
So my friend has a recent one, gets done, goes home, goes to bed.
This is a strong person.
This is a confident person.
This is an assertive, if not aggressive in a good way person.
So the friend begins to share with me some of the questions and these are questions that
my friend developed.
These weren't questions that were given by this coach, but they were, they were ones
that my friend developed in light of what the coach was teaching and showing.
And my friend shared these with me, shared not only the questions, but shared the answers.
My friend's answers, not mine.
I didn't spend so much time looking at my friend's answers, but I did spend time with
these questions.
And what I did is I took those questions and I plastered them into a Word document and
I thought, I'm, I'm going to do this on my own.
And those are profitable, by the way.
When people tell you, oh, you got, you need to hire somebody.
You may need to, but you may not need to, if you can do something on your own, do something
on your own.
And doing something with somebody else makes it faster, quicker, more efficient, more productive
than do that.
So I've got all the questions in the Word document and I begin to type.
I begin to write.
This happened a little over two weeks ago.
I began to write the answers to the questions.
Now there were many questions that I hadn't considered quite a few, in fact, and quite
a few didn't seem to have much to do with business or career, but I answered anyway.
And so I write out all my answers and I would dig this document out and I would look at
this document pretty much every day for a few days and every time I dug it out, I edited.
I would go back.
I didn't necessarily delete, in fact, I didn't, I didn't delete anything.
I would go back and the edit would be an addition.
Some other thought would cross my mind.
Something else.
Okay.
I left.
I'm thinking now about something else that I wasn't thinking about when I answered
it the first time.
This went on and this went on, this went on.
I didn't decide I'd fire up the webcam and I would, I would record a video, not for you,
not for anybody else, just for me.
And so I did that.
And what I did is I used the questions and my typed answers as kind of a template and
I would read the question and I would record my answer on video that I had written.
But a lot of other thoughts would come into play and I would just, I'd speak those into
the camera.
I would come back to the document then after I did that, I'd come back to the document
and I kept noodling with it, noodling with it, noodling with it.
And this is just a little bit of time here, a little bit of time there.
I then set aside another day, this was last week, and thought I'm going to go back through
the document from A to Z.
And I added answers.
I purposefully didn't touch anything I had done.
In fact, I selected another color font on my computer and I added page after page after
page.
I recorded another video now with this more refined thing and the video was an hour and
eight minutes.
No, this video is not going to be an hour eight.
I promise you.
And I had already been wrestling with, with, with some thoughts and the thought was mainly
this and I believe it to be true.
See if you don't agree sometimes, sometimes our success can be more determined by what
we quit than by what we persist in chasing.
I have long believed because I've long, long ago I proved it to be true in my own life.
Sometimes we are most benefited by the things we say no to as opposed to those things we
say yes to.
So let's put these two things together.
So on one hand I'm working through these questions and I'm working through a lot of just self
realization kind of stuff.
The heavy lifting of self examination, it always is if you're going to do it right.
And I don't much like to do things wrong.
Couple that with quitting are the things that I'm pursuing that I really, I really probably
should quit for a variety of reasons.
It could be any number of reasons that you quit something.
You could quit something because well, it doesn't work.
It's not working.
Well, what, what does that mean?
Well, it means I'm not getting the results that I want.
I'm not getting enough of the results I want.
I'm not getting any results that I want.
It could be that it could be, well, this isn't working in that I'm getting results, but I
hate it.
I don't really want to do it.
And we wrestle with, I hate it, I don't love it, but I can't afford to not do it.
And then we wrestle with this whole sell out thing, this whole, okay, I'm doing it, but
I'm only doing it for the money.
By the way, I'm not, has Rush Limbaugh says, I'm not throwing big heap do do on that.
If that, sometimes you got to do that, right?
Been there done that.
I may even have the t-shirt.
So I'm wrestling with all this and I'm thinking as I have long thought, I mean, the Humbert
Germany thing is, I've thought about that for decades.
And so I'm thinking about these three things now, I'm thinking about the Beatles and Humbert
Germany and I'm thinking about, we all go through that.
We have to go through that because I had caught myself telling somebody, you know what?
I'm producing, I'm producing podcasts.
I'm writing some blog post.
I'm now throwing up YouTube videos that is really a recent kind of a thing.
And I'm not stupid.
I'm not stupid.
I realize that not everything that I produce is great.
You know what?
I don't care.
I don't care because I'm in Humbert Germany.
I'm honing my craft.
I'm figuring stuff out.
Yeah.
I'm doing it live before people recorded before people.
So did the Beatles.
No, I'm not comparing myself to the Beatles.
Well, I don't know.
I might get off of a plane someday in New York City.
I won't have the haircut.
I'm pretty sure that ship sailed.
You know what I'm saying.
I'm in Humbert Germany.
You're in Humbert Germany.
Maybe, maybe you're past.
Maybe you're, maybe you're leaving home or you're packing your bags to get out of Humbert
because you've already figured it out.
Well, I'm here to confess to you, I haven't.
I'm not in Liverpool, but I'm still in Humbert.
And I know that there are things that I've got to quit because here's what it's like.
And you've all, you've all heard this story.
Some foreign country where they've got monkeys.
I don't know.
Pick a place, India, Africa, I don't know where.
Okay.
Where are the monkeys?
They need to trap these monkeys.
Okay.
So they've got a jar bottle of some sort and it's tethered.
It's tied down.
They stick a peanut in there and the monkey comes along.
The monkey's hand fits perfectly through the opening of the jar.
But the minute the monkey grabs hold of the peanut, now with a fist, well, fist doesn't
fit through the jar.
Monkey can't get his hand out of the jar.
What does the monkey do?
Just pulls and fights and isn't going to let go of the peanut for all the tea in China.
Not happening.
Okay.
They trap the monkey, kill the monkey, eat the monkey, whatever.
If the monkey just had the brains to know to let go, quit, give up on that peanut, save
your life.
Sometimes we're no smarter than that monkey.
We don't know what to let go of.
We don't know what to quit.
And so we continue to pursue something down a path that will only lead to failure, disappointment,
maybe worse.
So let's put a bow on this, shall we?
I got all this going through my head and I'm thinking about all this and I'm thinking,
okay, dude, there's some things you need to quit.
Now I'm going to throw one more little piece of whatever information in here.
Have you ever heard the notion that if somebody does the same thing for 20 years, that's prime
candidacy for burnout?
I don't know if it's true or not.
I don't know if there's anything magical about 20 years.
I mean, there's some things that I have felt burned out of, you know, after a year, but
people that stay in a career, let's say, people that do something year after year after year
after year after year after year after year after year, after 20 years, burnout factor.
I've been fascinated with people who quit, not quitters, but people who had the gumption
to quit something so they could pursue something else, big, big difference.
Not talking about people who quit so they could do nothing.
I know we live in the four hour work week world and I know everybody in their dog wants
passive income.
I know everybody in their dog wants to be able to sit on their couch, do nothing and
be paid wild money for it.
Well, good luck with all that.
Good luck with all that.
The fact is the real accomplishment driven high achievers in our world, in our society,
quit one thing in order to pursue something that they deem more valuable, more important
to them, maybe to others too.
They don't quit to do nothing.
So it's in that light that I begin to think of the things in my life that I might not
enjoy, that I might not like so much, that I might want to quit to pursue something else.
Barry Sanders, record setting running back in the NFL for the Detroit Lions prior to
that, a college stud at Oklahoma State University sets all records, would have set more, but
Emmett Smith continued to play and Barry Sanders in the prime of his career.
He walked away from the game and NFL fans were like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute.
You're just getting going.
You kidding me?
You can't quit now.
Oh yeah.
And he did.
And then we were stunned when we found out later in interviews that he would absolutely
go on record, unashamed to say, I never much like football.
You're kidding.
You've got world class skills.
You're better than anybody who's played the position ever.
Many people thought and many people still think didn't want to do it anymore, but millions
of dollars didn't matter.
Didn't want to do it anymore.
Did he want to just sit back and do nothing?
No, he just didn't want to do that.
I began to think about all of that stuff now by really complicated things for you.
I began to think about all of that stuff and I began to think about, you know what?
If you're really going to pursue something, you're going to have to quit some things.
You just going to have to quit some things.
Let me leave you with some questions.
Are there things in your life that you really haven't dealt with?
Are there, is it possible?
Is it just possible that there are questions that you've never asked yourself?
Is it even more possible?
Maybe there are questions that you've asked, but you really haven't taken the time to answer
them that you really haven't spent enough time with yourself because sometimes here's
what I've discovered.
Sometimes we need quiet time alone with our thoughts, with our life because we have to
quiet down the room here in the yellow studio.
It's a pretty quiet room.
It helps when you're doing this because when I'm not talking, you hear silence.
These recordings would be impossible to listen to.
They would annoy you to no end.
If I turned on the television and had the sound going, I've got a radio over here.
I plopped a CDN and I had that going and you suddenly you had me trying to speak and you
had all this noise, all this racket.
You'd end up saying what we all say.
I can't even hear myself think.
I can't even hear myself think.
Don't keep living your life unable to hear yourself think.
Don't live your life unable to examine yourself.
Don't live your life in Liverpool.
Don't stay in Hamburg, Germany either.
But you need to get to Hamburg.
If you're not there yet, get to Hamburg and when you're in Hamburg, work your tail off.
Work, work, keep working, keep improving and figure out the things that you need to quit
so that you can pursue what you really want.
Chase whatever it is you want to chase, get up the mountain, make progress, hold on for
dear life and keep climbing and keep climbing and keep climbing.
And until next time, I'm Randy Kentrell.
See ya.
