Breaking Work

#469: If you've ever wondered how a teacher stuck in a classroom making $40k per year can transform into a world-roaming remote nomad making over $100k inside 12 months, well you're in the right place. Taylin Simmonds was a music producer and college educator who broke his career and now helps founders and leaders of high-growth companies grow their personal brands.

And he does it while traveling the world. In fact, we recorded this episode while Taylin was in Panama where he has decided to live for a few months. I just love connecting with young folks like Taylin who are thinking hard and deep about their future and taking bold steps to transform their lives to work with purpose.

If you have doubts that you can make a gigantic change to your circumstances in a short amount of time, you need to tune in to this amazing episode with my new friend Taylin Simmonds.

#468: Disruption and change are all around us, and happening faster and faster. I consider the ability to deal well with change to be the single most important skill for young people to learn. To dive into this topic, I'm talking today with MJ Reiners. MJ is an organizational change management consultant. She launched her company Summerland Education in 2011 to enable organizations to leverage internal resources and develop high performing work teams in order to reach their business goals.

She's an expert in change management and has lessons from helping organizations with thousands of employees get buy in for change.

We discuss the skills necessary to get better at change, why we resist change, and what we can do to get better. I hope you enjoy this chat with MJ Reiners.

How we view failure is intricately linked with how we view uncertainty. Our normal view of failure tells us that it is something to avoid. Everybody in that control room should be angry, crying frustrated, mad or whatever, but that wasn't the case, right?

Whatever you think about Elon Musk, in this particular example, is great a lesson in how he relates to failure, and how he's pushed that view into the culture of the company.

#466: What happens when you've reached "the top", but you find it isn't everything you thought it would be? How does being in the C-suite change the way you think about success, achievement, and happiness?

My guest this week is Clint Murphy. Clint rose to the top and became CFO of a large real estate development company based in Vancouver Canada. But I found Clint not in real estate circles or financial accounting circles, but rather, we connected around personal growth, entrepreneurship, and yes, career breaking.

The past few years, he's been building out his future path, which is on its way to transition from a CFO to a full-time creator, coach and consultant and PE | RE investor and owner.

It's about teaching people how to get to the top in one area, to realize what their true passion and path is and how to move from one to the other without burning the boats or taking a ton of risk.

After all, Clint is first and foremost a husband and father to two young boys, now 14 and 11.

What does his Pivot look like? He started taking content creation seriously in August 2020, and now has over 270,000 followers on Twitter and a combined 300,000+ followers across all his social media platforms.

Clint is also the host of The Growth Guide Podcast, which he started as a hobby in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, and will be celebrating his 100th episode in 2023.

Most recently, he started the weekly Growth Guide Newsletter in February 2023, and already has 7,000 avid readers.

Clint is a lifelong learner and growth fanatic with a goal to help 1 billion people be better, achieve more, and become financially free. He does this by sharing lessons from millionaire mentors, expert authors, and his own life.

This episode at a glance:

• The only thing holding us back from having the life we want is the errors in how we view our own reality
• These errors are called Cognitive Distortions in psychology
• Understanding them and mitigating them is key to making better decisions, being happier and having better relationships
• Listen to the end to find a helpful tool I've used to get over my own distortions

#464: For those of us who have zig-zagged our careers, we often feel misplaced, misunderstood, and feel like we come across as scattered. But the truth is there's magic in our intersections, and the key is excavating the unique value that comes from your intersection.

This has worked wonders for me as I now describe my own intersection as a coach who uses principles from human-centered design, investing, and entrepreneurship to help people unlock creative career paths that make them come alive.

My next guest says instead of shunning your disparate interests, embrace them and learn to live a Portfolio Life. HMMM, that portfolio phrase is something I very much ascribe to!

A self-described "human Venn diagram", Christina Wallace has crafted a career at the intersection of business, technology, and the arts. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, where she teaches entrepreneurship and marketing. Her most recent book is The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger Than Your Business Card (Hachette, 2023).

A serial entrepreneur, Christina has built businesses in ecommerce, edtech, and media. She also co-authored New To Big: How Companies Can Create Like Entrepreneurs, Invest Like VCs, and Install a Permanent Operating System for Growth (Penguin Random House, 2019) and was the co-host of The Limit Does Not Exist, an iHeart podcast with millions of downloads over 3 seasons and 125 episodes.

In her free time, she sings with various chamber choirs, embarks on adventure travel, and is a mediocre endurance athlete. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and their two children.

#461: In this episode, we are talking about how each of us is a unique intersection of ideas and experiences. Your ability to see that intersection and provide your POV is a superpower. But, uncovering that intersection is the hard part. Tune in to learn more!

#462: Welcome to the new members of The Break! I'm in Florida this week on Spring Break with my family.

In between chasing kids on the beach, playing catch and having some nice meals, I'm thinking a lot about that feeling.

#461: Last week we talked about how a lot of our excuses are simply lies. That was a big perspective shift for me when I really took it to heart.

That got me thinking about how powerful a perspective shift can be, and how one sentence, one phrase or one book can completely BREAK your path and change your life.

In this episode, I'm detailing the 5 perspective shifts that completely exploded how I viewed my self and the world.

#460: My next guest is Josiah Goff, Vice President of Product at Tune, a technology for partner marketing programs and affiliate networks.

Josiah has been on both sides of the entrepreneurial journey. He believes that only after leaving behind the safety net of corporate life could he truly concentrate on achieving success on his own terms. Additionally, he stresses that personal transformation is crucial to becoming ready to start one's own business.

We get real deep and real on personal transformation leading to career transformation. Josiah shares the two questions that changed his life (#2 is amazing)

You won't want to miss Josiah's journey and how he found his break by leaving entrepreneurship and going back to work for a company - a journey he said he never could have made if he hadn't struck out on his own and learned some valuable lessons working for himself. Keep listening, and if you dig the convo please leave us a 5 star review so others can discover these conversations.

Please enjoy Finding Yourself with Josiah Goff.