DREAM THINK DO | Motivation, Encouragement & Strategy

Permission to Dream BIG with Mitch Matthews Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Dream Job Redefined BIG Dream Gathering BIG Dream Gathering Facebook Page INTERVIEW: I'm going to share some stories I've never shared before. How about that? I'll be sharing some stories connected with The BIG Dream Gathering, an event that you may have attended, maybe not. If you haven't, I'm going to get you information so that you can attend one in the future. We're doing them all across the country this fall and would love to see you at an event. But I want to share with you three stories that I've not shared before. Each one is going to have something that I've realized has been so important to me over the last few years. These stories will help you go after your dreams, get more clear on your dreams, stay with it on your dreams. Maybe just as importantly, they'll help you to help someone else do that. Because if you're a DREAM THINK DO-er, you're all about dreaming bigger, thinking better, and doing more of the stuff you were put on the planet to do. By the way, I'll just put it out there, one of the stories is kind of embarrassing for me to tell you. That's why I've not shared it before. It's something my wife knows about. It's a business story, you can probably put it in the "embarrassing disasters" category, but I learned something that's guided me now and helped me grow my own business. But more importantly, what I learned from it, I've taught others. I'm excited about sharing these stories for a couple of reasons. Recently I've been doing a bunch of podcast interviews. Not for DREAM THINK DO, but on other podcasts around the world. People have found out about Dream Job Redefined my newest book. If you haven't gotten it, go grab it. It's available on Amazon. Because of that, I've been doing a bunch of interviews with some great podcasts; I love it. But in that book, Dream Job Redefined, I share about The BIG Dream Gathering. The event that we do around the country. The event that got started in my living room as a happy accident. I didn't mean for it to happen, but I'm very glad it did, and that's turned into something much bigger than I could've imagined. In doing these interviews for the book, I talk a good bit about The BIG Dream Gathering. I realized, as I was thinking back, here at DREAM THINK DO we're on our 187th episode, and I know I've mentioned The BIG Dream Gathering in passing sometimes. But I don't know that I've ever actually told the origin story of how it got started. I don't spend a lot of time talking about it on the podcast. So with this episode, I want to tell a little of the origin story of The BIG Dream Gathering. What it is, how it got started, all of that, but also three stories, again, that I haven't shared before. Some of the kind of timeless truth that I needed to learn, or at least be reminded of, as a part of those experiences. I want to share those with you now. Because I want to inspire you. I want to encourage you to get clear on your dreams and start to go after those at new levels. I think we all need encouragement to take a second and to permit ourselves to dream, and that's what The BIG Dream Gathering is all about. That's what this podcast is all about. You may be familiar with The BIG Dream Gathering. If you are, fantastic, I hope you've attended an event. If not, here's what it's about: The BIG Dream Gathering is an event that we do all across the country, it kicks off with a little keynote from me. I'm a storyteller, so I tell some stories on the front-end to get people thinking and get them a little encouraged. All of those things. Then we cut them loose to think about some of their dreams, write them down on sheets of paper; we call those dream sheets. Then we put them up on the walls, and go around and look at each other's dreams. We write on each other's dream sheets - words of encouragement, ideas, suggestions,

My guest today is Greg Layton. Greg is the founder of Chief Maker. For over a decade, Greg has been a trusted advisor to CEOs and executive teams of multi-billion-dollar companies around the globe. He's the author of a the bestselling book, Chief Maker: How to Rise Above the Pack and Get a Seat on the Executive Team. He's also the host of a popular podcast called "The Inner Chief." In addition, Greg has spent 15 years traveling the world to learn and master the world's foremost performance techniques. From living with Shaolin monks in China, all the way to racing in desert ultra-marathons, Greg has spent a lifetime studying the limits of personal endurance, as well as finding the best paths to mental strength and peak performance. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Chief Maker Book: http://bit.ly/2uusEOW Website: chiefmaker.com.au Save an Hour Video Series: chiefmaker.com.au/saveanhour INTERVIEW: Let's get to it, Greg. Welcome to DREAM THINK DO, buddy Mitch, thanks, mate. Great to be here. I love it, man. All right, so I want to talk about your book. I want to talk about the power of routine, all the stuff you do for managers and leaders. But it's my show, so I get to go wherever I want. And I want to go to the Shaolin monks you hung out within China. How the heck did that happen and what was that like? Well, it started out as a bit of a journey. One question I've had since the early days is, "Who out there is an outlier in performance?" I've seen the Shaolin guys on the telly and even at a circus kind of show once. I always thought they were out of this world. They were sticking swords in their bellies and all sorts of stuff, but it wasn't hurting them. So, who are these guys and how the hell do they do that? About six months later, I started doing Kung fu feverishly where I was living at the time. Six months after that, I found myself up to my knees in snow in the mountains in a remote part of China at a very small Shaolin Monastery and academy. I was welcomed into this little Shaolin school, and I can tell you now, it was like going back in time, it really was. The training was 1000 years old, and just nothing seemed to have changed. We trained 12 hours a day, every single day, dawn till dusk. We didn't just do Kung fu, which I found very interesting. They started off the day with Tai Chi and meditation. Even though Tai Chi is actually a form of martial art, the training is that it was a calming process and balancing the body and the mind and the spirit to begin the day. Throughout the day, we did everything from Qigong to power stretching and conditioning to Sanda, which is China's kickboxing, and also Kung fu. It was dedication to your art form all day, every day. You were there for three months? Three months. Yeah, three months. Interesting - I was never injured, and we did some crazy stuff. An example of one of the things I do is we did this thing called power stretching. I love to tell this story. Instead of a brief, gentle stretch, you get nice and limber and warmed up. And then you'd get into a splits position, with your feet out wide. You might. I don't. Yeah. I truly do. My first day there, I couldn't do splits. I don't know. I was reasonably flexible, but no, I couldn't do the splits. So, I'm in this vulnerable position with my feet out wide, and my hands on the ground. So, my back is parallel to the ground. And a guy comes in, and he starts sitting on my back because he thinks I'm not deep enough into this stretch. And then another guy, because now I'm finding that like a really difficult stretch, he starts kicking my feet up. Wow. It gets to be such a brutal stretch that I can't breathe. I'm in that much pain with the level of stretch; I can't breathe at all. I'm gasping. And then you actually at a certain point, you stop breathing. And then my shifu, my master who they've got a few key things there. One,

My guest is Calina Mishay Johnson. Calina, or Cal, has been doing some amazing work as an artist in Texas. She's been painting since she was a child, growing up in a small town in West Texas, with a population of 600. That's right, 600 people. After years of life-dealt hardships, Calina Mishay Johnson artistic style started to blossom as she gave herself permission to paint with reckless abandon. Her professional art career began back in 2012, as she started to focus on one-of-a-kind commissions. Then a few years ago, Cal expanded her work and started tackling urban street art, making these huge, amazing, freakishly cool murals all throughout Texas. She's also infusing new life into these small towns where she's doing these murals. Heck, her next big dream, which I can totally get on board with is to complete murals on walls all around the world. So, maybe we DREAM THINK DO-ers can help her out with that. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Website: streetartbycal.wixsite.com/artist Instagram: instagram.com/Cal_calinamishayart INTERVIEW: Cal, welcome! Hi Mitch, how are you? That was an amazing intro – thank you. Let's talk about how this mural thing got started. Let's go back, and let's talk about when the art started. Were you an artistic kid? I was a weird kid. I loved nature; I loved being outside. Like you mentioned, I grew up in a small town. So, we had a lot of freedom. It's like being the last of the Mohican's before anyone had to worry about their kids playing. We were all over town. We built tree houses; I had animals growing up. It wasn't so much that I knew I was super creative, it was just that I would get sticks and make potions in my room. I was always building something. My dad says, "We'd wake up and then we wouldn't see you until it was time to go to bed." My grandmother saved a painting that I did, like an abstract painting when I was probably four. She had it professionally framed; she still has it professionally framed over her bed, until this day. She had that insight to see that I had that creative mind, it's pretty overwhelming. I love featuring weird people. I love that you said that. I'm so with you. There are so many people that I've talked with that whether it was a grandparent, or a parent, that saw something. And it probably didn't dawn on you fully back then, but to think about the seed that got planted when someone would take something that you did and put a frame on it, to honor that. How cool to think about that seed that got planted right there, and look at where it's gone now, is really cool. Calina Mishay Johnson was the first to say, "Hey, this was worth investing money into." It could have been a $10 frame from Hobby Lobby, I don't know, but at the time, now looking back on it, I think, "Wow! That's really special." That's cool. I also liked to doodle, and I liked to draw, and I liked to make things, but it wasn't my everything. It wasn't like I was fully immersed. I went to a small school – no art department. It wasn't until a bunch of drama in my later years of high school when I dove into that gift more and more. http://instagram.com/Cal_calinamishayart That's amazing. I'd love to talk about that a little bit too. I saw a little bit of your story. I know that you tried to take some art in college, and you'd been experimenting with all kinds of stuff, your grandma had framed something, but you go to take a class in college and it didn't go so well. Tell us a little bit about that. Oh, man. Okay, first off, I was the first to go to college in my family. So, I went off by myself, I have an older sister, who has a gene disorder, so, used to run and play when we were younger, and then it slowly gets worse, and worse, and worse. Now she's in a wheel chair. Then my family situation fell apart a little bit. I left at a very volatile time to go to college, and I was doing it on my own.

This week, we have a returning friend, Howard Berger. You may remember Howard from episode 74 of DREAM THINK DO. He's an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning special effects artist. He and his KNB EFX Group have been involved with over 800 feature films and television shows… including the Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, the Orville, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (which he won an Oscar), Hitchcock, and every Quentin Tarantino movie… just to name a few. The first film that he worked on was Aliens, and he did that the day after he graduated from high school. If you go to his IMDb page, you'll realize that he's touched just about every horror movie that's scared the stuffing out of you the last 20+ years! I can't wait to talk again, so let's get to this! Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: IMBD Page: https://imdb.to/2z3qVpt INTERVIEW: Howard, welcome back to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you so much. That was a good intro. It was definitely shorter than the last one. I think so. The last time, I think I went about 10 minutes because the list is so long! I knew I needed to keep this one under five minutes. I put it out to the DREAM THINK DO community that you were coming back. I said, "Alright, what would you ask Howard this time?" And we got flooded with some great questions, so I can't wait to pepper those in as we go. But what have you been up to lately? I've been busy with KNB, which this is its 30th year in existence. Greg Nicotero and I own it and run it for the last 30 years. I was talking with someone the other day about how we used to do all movie work, rarely TV. Now it's tons of television, be it Netflix, or AMC, or whatever it is. TV has become more of a creative venue for us than feature films to some degree. We love working on movies; it's a whole different animal too. But, it's been great. I started working on Seth McFarland's Sci-Fi drama comedy hit, the Orville. Then I got approached for a TV show called Legion. This was for season two. I signed on to that, then Orville went over. I had planned for two weeks off. I had three days. I had Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and I was on set Monday for Legion for the next several months, and then I went onto a film with Mark Wahlberg, a film called Mile 22 that's coming out August third. My wife Miriam and I just got back from Atlanta, where we shot Mile 22. I had four days off, and then started another movie with Mark. Kind of a family comedy called Instant Family that'll be out next year, I think Valentine's Day. We just finished, and I just got home, and I'm just getting acclimated to my house, my bed, my things that I haven't seen in seven months. Well, you know you've been away for a long time when you get to your own bed and go, "This is the best hotel I've been in for a long time." Yeah, you feel like you're on location in LA. That's amazing. It leads into one of my first questions. So, you love what you're doing, but that's a tough schedule for anybody, whether you love what you're doing or not. How do you stay fresh when you're running a marathon like that? What are some of the things you do for Howard to cultivate creativity, to stay fresh as you're doing this? Well, I'm not getting any younger. I find that what keeps me going is I love everything I do. So, I'm always enthusiastic about the people I work with, and the projects I work on. I always try to have as much fun on everything as I can. But, on my days off, I like to not think about it, and I just need to decompress. I love spending time with my wife. We are big foodies. When we were in Atlanta, I literally would plan Friday, Saturday, Sunday because there are so many great restaurants in Atlanta. Oh, it's amazing, yeah. So, we had seven months of amazing restaurants. I think we ate at one restaurant three times. That was the most. I like just chilling and taking long walks,

Well, hello there, and welcome to episode 183 of DREAM THINK DO. It's a deep dive, and that means it's just you and me diving in deep on a subject that seems to be growing in importance. We're going to talk about focusing on Beating The comparison Trap with Mitch Matthews. That's right. Breaking free from comparison. It's that thing that can hit us. It's been around since the dawn of time, but it's really amped up in this day and age of social media, where it's so easy to compare ourselves to others. And I asked for your help on this. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: The How of Happiness book: https://amzn.to/2yxUBuv 7 Habits of Highly Effective People book: https://amzn.to/2K0UTzC EPISODE: So we're going to be sprinkling in wisdom from DREAM THINK DO-ers from around the world. You guys sent in some great insights and I appreciate it. So I'm going to be giving you a shout out as we go. Plus, we're going to dive into the science of comparison, a little bit of the brain science, but we're also going to talk through a three-step process for beating back comparison with a big old stick. I think we can all relate to having that negative feeling at some point. So we're going to be diving deep on the science and the solutions to beating the comparison trap. So let's put the hurt on comparison. I want to help you to break free, especially if you've ever felt the pain of comparison. Sound good? This is a tough subject. It's a big subject. I found it fascinating the more and more I dove into it, and I can tell you I'm at the front of the line here as well. It's something I've dealt with myself, and so it was a passion project for me to go after this. You guys submitted some great information, so stay tuned for that. But comparison has been around since the dawn of humanity. I mean poetry, philosophy, scripture, dating back thousands and thousands of years talk about the temptations and perils of comparison. It's not necessarily new, but a lot of research coming out to address how we compare ourselves and how we are getting hammered by comparison at new levels because of, and not limited to, social media. For example, a new study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that comparing our lives to others, especially when we do it and see it on social media, it's playing a big part in the rise of depressive symptoms and depression. Researchers specifically said it wasn't necessarily the website platform or just the social media necessarily itself that was causing the negative emotions, but more so where the comparison took us in our heads as the result of the content that we're bombarded with. Another group of researchers from Humboldt University in Berlin looked at Facebook use. They found that the more time people spend browsing Facebook, the more envious people got. They were able to isolate that emotion and link it specifically to Facebook use. And it is not just limited to Facebook. I'm guessing this doesn't surprise you. You've probably heard about a lot of this research. More importantly, you may have experienced it yourself. You've felt that comparison creep in and nail you, zap your joy, make you feel discontent, make you feel less than. And that's why I want to go after it. And some of what we talk about may surprise you because we're going to dig into the science of comparison and realize as we do that, that some comparison between yourself and others is good. That's right. It's actually good for you. So we're going to talk about where comparison is good and where the lines are and where it goes bad. More importantly, I'll give you some specific strategies so you can overcome bad comparison and live in freedom. You want to break free of this so you can live your best life. And so we're going to give you the ABC's, literally a three-step process for breaking free of comparison. How does that sound? I hope you're excited. I know that I am.

My guest is Travis Ensley. Travis is one of my best friends on the planet. This guy, over the past 20 years has been a successful leader within the tech industry. He's worked with startups all the way to fortune 500 companies. I can say that he's successful because the companies he's helped have been wildly successful. But I can also say that because I've gotten to know many of the people that he has led. And they love working for and with him. Here's the thing, as you'll see, Travis has this kind of no-nonsense Ron Swanson quality to him, so I'm guessing that he's already bristling at my accolades, but I'm going to go further. He's been successful in business, but I can also tell you he's successful in life, too. He's an awesome husband and dad, and I'm also grateful to say that he is an "bonus uncle" to my boys, and that means the world to me. We talk about a lot of subjects, but today we're going to dive into the subject and focus on one area of expertise that Travis is just incredible at, and that is establishing systems to manage your time, your tasks, and your priorities. He is a black belt level genius at this. And I benefit from his wisdom on this front weekly, so I wanted to get him on DREAM THINK DO, so you can benefit from it, too. Listen To The Podcast: INTERVIEW: So pour yourself a cup of coffee and let's get to this. Travis. Welcome to DREAM THINK DO, buddy. I'm honored to be here. Thank you. Absolutely. So, we're going to talk about systems and strategies. I mean, you use technology, but your brain works in this way. There's been a couple of questions I've been dying to ask you as a long-time friend. I assume I know the answers to this, but before we dive into the specifics, I want to start a little bit more in your brain. How about that for being scary? So, I wanted to ask you. You're one of the most organized systems oriented people that I know. But have you always been that way? Like, were you that way in junior high and high school? There's very little chance my mom will listen to this. So I will say yes. I've got your mom on speed dial. I'll check right now. I was one of those kids who would open the bag of Skittles and organize them by color because it made sense for me to do it that way because I wanted to know exactly what I was doing. I'll tell you that my room was not very clean when I was young, but after high school, I went into the Navy, into service, and they beat that out of me. And so, coupled with that, I like to say that I'm just this side of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The healthy side of it, right? The healthy side. Yes, the healthy side of it. With my experience in the service, the very regimented leadership they gave solidified the kind of lifestyle that I choose to lead that way. Absolutely. I wondered if that experience just kind of ground that into you for the first time, or whether that was bringing out natural tendencies. But I assumed it was bringing out those natural tendencies. It allowed me to understand why I thought that way. I think it encouraged that behavior. It showed me a lot of interesting ways to do it, too. But it's also interesting to think about how the world of technology that can support systems for helping navigate our time and our task has evolved so much. I've seen you experiment with different things, try different things, so that was something that I was looking forward to diving into with you. I think sometimes technology can be a benefit, but I think sometimes technology, with all of the options, can also start to bungle that up a little bit. I think in a lot of cases it comes down to discipline. I think technology, in general, can be a huge distraction. It's designed to be that way. Hey, it's a cool thing, or this is the next widget or the next flashy thing that's going to come up, and so everybody has great ideas. In this day and age, it's very easy to take those ideas and translate that ...

My guest today is Light Watkins. Light is a former GAP fashion model. He started attending yoga classes and meditation circles back when he was doing casting calls in New York City. Since 1998, Light has been active in the wellness space, first, as a practitioner and then he's gone on quite a journey with meditation. This journey led to a trip to Northern India, to a little hamlet nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas to become a master in meditation. After about three months there and over thousands of hours of meditation, he completed his training. He now travels the world giving talks on happiness, mindfulness, inspiration, and meditation. He teaches meditation to A-list actors, big name entrepreneurs and a whole lot of regular people because he does it in a unique way. He just got a real practical approach. He introduces all of that in his most recent book called "Bliss More: How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying" which was released earlier this year. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Bliss More Book: https://amzn.to/2kNy6bc INTERVIEW: Light, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thanks, man. I'm so excited to be here. Our mutual friend, Antonio Neves introduced us. Antonio started talking about your book Bliss More as you were launching it. I started to dig into it a little bit, and I was like, "Gosh, meditation can be such a heady thing." I loved how you were very transparent in your story. You didn't try to set yourself up as some mountain top guru; you're a regular guy who's had mountain top experiences through meditation, so I love that. It's a real practical approach. It wasn't that you sat down and immediately had just these incredible experiences. Tell us a little bit about how your journey with meditation got started. Yes, sure. I got introduced to meditation through taking yoga classes. Everybody always talked about meditation. I was reading a bunch of the new age spiritual books that everyone's familiar with, the Eckhart Tolle book, Power of Now, The Seat of the Soul, The Celestine Prophecy, Conversations with God. There were always mentions of meditation or meditative states, and you figure, if something is hanging around for thousands of years, there's got to be something to it. Yeah, right. If it's been hanging out this long, then maybe, maybe I should dig into it just a little bit. My curiosity got the best of me, and I started going to these French meditation circles in New York City. This is back in the '90s, so I didn't know anyone else who was interested in this which kind of made it more interesting to me. You always want to feel like you're in on something that no one else has heard about yet so then you can then introduce everyone else to it. In those early days, it always frustrated me and fascinated me at the same time that I didn't feel like I was having the experience, the advertised experience. I wasn't going to nirvana. I wasn't having the bliss experience. You don't know what you don't know, so I didn't know that there were different approaches to meditation. I didn't know that there were monastic techniques and there were householder approaches. I was mainly doing monastic approaches, and that's one of the reasons why I was having such difficult experiences. After three years of knocking my head against the wall, I stumbled upon a teacher who showed me some of the householder, meaning regular people, approaches to meditation where you sit on a couch, or you sit in a comfortable chair, and you meditate there. That's where I finally found the bliss that had been eluding me for a very long time. Then everything made sense. It started to click. Well, I love that. A lot of people think of meditation, and they think of the discipline, the monk who deprives themselves of all things to have this experience in meditation. How would you say the householder approach is different?

My guest today is Karen Brown. Karen is a recognized thought leader in the fields of leadership and professional performance, specifically in the areas of the unconscious mind and optimizing your thinking for elevated levels of endurance and success. She is an ultra-endurance athlete who competes around the world. In fact, one of her biggest recent accomplishments was qualifying for and finishing the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii! Along with being an expert in neuro-linguistic programming and mental and emotional release, she's also an executive coach, sought-after speaker, and best-selling author. Karen's most recent book, called Unlimiting Your Beliefs: Seven Keys to Great Success in Your Personal and Professional Life, has been winning awards and accolades. It has also inspired me to invite Karen on DREAM THINK DO to talk about breaking through those limiting beliefs that creep in and start to shut us down. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Free Micro Solution Video Series: velocityleadershipconsulting.com/dtd Karen's Book: Unlimiting Your Beliefs book INTERVIEW: Let's get to it. Karen, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you, Mitch. I'm so thrilled to be here. Okay. I do want to dive into your concepts on limited beliefs and breaking through those things, but I've always wanted to ask someone who completed an Ironman World Championship, what was it like to round the corner and see the finish line? Ok, let me set the scene a little bit. I am an amateur athlete, nowhere near pro level, and that is to say that I'm a bit slower than the pros. My time at Ironman World Championships was 15 hours, 45 minutes. When I was rounding the corner, as you said, it was nighttime. It was about 10:30 at night, 10:45 at night. There was total blackness, a sky full of brilliant stars, and two miles away from the finish line, you can hear the roar of the crowd. Oh wow. Even at night? Yes. Hey, and by the way Karen, just so you know, for me to just do the swim, I still wouldn't have been done with just the swim part by 10 o'clock at night. So it's still very impressive. So you're two miles out, and you start hearing the crowd. Yes, you start hearing the crowd, and then you can just faintly make out Mike Riley's voice, who has been the voice of Ironman for 30 some odd years now. He's the one that says the iconic, indelibly memorable, "Karen Brown, you are now an Ironman," when you cross the finish line. It was the most magnificent day, Mitch. Now I'll say the journey to get there was very, very difficult, and there were plenty of times when I wanted to quit and worried that I would quit. We can go into that later. But that specific day, there was never one moment when I wanted to quit. It was joy and bliss and wonderful, and I say this knowing that it was a billion degrees, it was like the surface of the sun hot. It was humid; asphalt was melting, we had torrential rains at the turnaround point in the bike, we had big waves for the swim, incredible crosswinds on the Queen K for the biking portion. So this was no cakewalk. This was very challenging. The part that I tapped into was my journey to get there. This was a lifelong dream. This was something that I wanted for 28 years. The day that I was there, and I was racing alongside all of my heroes, all of the icons that I had seen over the years on the coverage, specifically the icon that touched off this entire lifelong dream of mine, Julie Moss. It had been 30 years to the day since she had competed originally in the second Ironman World Championships that ever televised, and she came back that year and raced one more time. Oh my gosh. She wanted that to be her swan song, and I got to race alongside her. Wow! Did you know that going into it, or was that something you found out along the way? It was something I found out two days before the race...

My guest today is Ryan Carson. Ryan is a longtime entrepreneur who has built four startups, two that got acquired, one that went down in flames, but provided a lot of learning, and a fourth one called "Treehouse," which is currently doing about $15 million in revenue annually. Treehouse is an online tech school with about 80,000 enrolled students. Their goal is to take people from zero to job-ready and to teach them how to code, amongst other things. He was voted EY's Entrepreneur of the Year, and he's been a guest on some of the top podcasts, shows like Entrepreneur on Fire, Mixergy, This Week in Startups, and Bloomberg's Game Plan. Listen To The Podcast: He's doing some awesome stuff, but Ryan popped onto my radar because he's a longtime DREAM THINK DO-er. Like many of you, he reached out a number of times to offer some encouragement and some feedback. After Episode 171, specifically, he sent an email about the five-minute moment concept. We started going back and forth on that, how it was working for him, and that opened up a whole new subject on the power of "why," and how being clear on your "why" makes all the difference. Welcome to the show, Ryan! Thank you so much. This is fun. It's weirdly like a family reunion, but this is the first time where we're actually talking, so I love it. I want to talk about the power of "why," because I know it's something that's really helped you to get on track with life and career. But I want to go back a little bit and talk a little heart and head stuff first. We have a lot of entrepreneurs on DREAM THINK DO. We're all about helping people get clear on their dreams and goals - so one of the things I wondered, did you always want to be an entrepreneur? Was that your dream as a kid, or was that something that that hit you later? No. It's kind of strange. I hear these stories from other entrepreneurs about selling lemonade to their friends in fourth grade and buying bubblegum in bulk so they could then make a profit on it by selling it to their friends, and I didn't do any of that. This is why I'm excited to talk about my "why," because the truth is, I'm not really an entrepreneur. I'm someone who is motivated to get a specific thing done in the world, and I've realized that building a business to accomplish that is the best way I can do it. I'm not one of those guys that stares at spreadsheets and obsesses about growth. Right, so for you the entrepreneurial journey is more of a means to an end as opposed to an end itself. Absolutely. That's a great insight. I'm extremely mission-driven, so I can't wait to kind of dive into that more. Great. Now, this is somewhat of a loaded question, but I have to ask it. You've got three startups that anyone would define as successful. I mean two got acquired. One is rocking, right? And one went down in flames. Yes. I don't know of an entrepreneur that doesn't have one of those stories, but what would you say? Which of those experiences helped you the most in getting clear on why you were put on the planet? I think the failure was the most transformative. I was born and raised in Colorado and actually started off in a very religious home. I'm not particularly religious now. My parents did a really good job of driving into me that people are the most important thing in the world, and serving people and making their lives better is the highest possible calling. I continue to believe that. People are people and stuff is stuff, and I try to keep that really clear. I have some nice stuff now, but it has nothing to do with what's good, or what's right, or what makes me happy. So I had this upbringing, and I actually thought I was going to be a pastor for a long time. Interesting. I thought, "I love people, I love helping people. Gosh, if I can serve people like that, that sounds really rewarding," so I was going down that path. I ended up studying computer science in college,

My guest today is Chelsea Moore. At age 22, Chelsea co-founded a company called BOXFOX with two of her friends. BOXFOX is a cool, personalized gifting service they launched with the mission of connecting people and creating stronger relationships through giving. It's a unique service that allows you to put together a perfect gift, for any occasion. Each BOXFOX box is then hand packed and sealed with a written note before it's shipped. She and her friends started this company when they saw a gap in the lifestyle and services space. They wanted to be able to deliver a higher quality gift and make it easy for people too. Listen To The Podcast: To date the company has delivered over 45,000 boxes to over 20 different countries around the world! I do want to talk about the company, but the big reason I wanted to have Chelsea on was to talk about the idea of pursuing a dream with your friends, because that sounds awesome. And sometimes it's the absolute right thing to do. But going after dreams with your friends is not always easy. So I want to talk to her about how they've done it and what tips she has for clarifying the dream together. Deciding on how to go after it together and then just as importantly, maybe even more importantly, how do you stay the course. Especially with the wild twists and turns that can come with any dream journey. So I'm excited to have this conversation, let's get to it. Chelsea, welcome to Dream Think Do. Thank you so much. Absolutely. So how do you describe BOXFOX? We are a gifting company that specializes in bringing personalized and custom gift boxes to people everywhere. And our claim to fame is our Build a BOXFOX platform that enables you to build your own custom gift and care packages that are specifically created from all the best brands. It's all in one place, brought together for the specific recipient and the specific occasion. Anything from new moms to birthdays, to sympathy to get well, to just because, to congrats on your new job. The reasons are truly endless. We have taken that authenticity to scale with the corporate concierge B2B side of our business as well. We take the same care and detail oriented attention to detail for our corporate clients as well. That's cool. I have to say one of the great things about having a growing podcast is you get pitched by lots of different people. But we went and checked out your website and everybody was really impressed. You have a lot of different offerings but it just feels nice. It feels real like you said, it's a very personalized experience where you really can deliver something nicer than hey, sent you something through Amazon Prime. I love Amazon Prime but this is a different type of experience than that. How did it get started? What was the catalyst for the idea for you guys? I was about six months out of college in 2013 and a good friend of ours had been hospitalized. I was working crazy hours. I couldn't leave to go to five different of my favorite stores and the post office. I to put together something really thoughtful. I had the intention and the want and the need, but not the time. And so it sparked this idea – what do you do on those occasions when flowers don't cut it? Amazon Prime doesn't cut it. How do I put together a meaningful gift box or care package with the next level essentials that somebody actually would need in a specific situation? How do you physically be there for people when you can't actually go to them and be there? That's what sparked the idea of Build a BOXFOX. Being able to use our platform to create these custom perfect, well presented gifts in high quality, nude or black gift boxes, topped with your note handwritten by our fulfillment team. Personal, as if you had done it yourself. We make it easier, streamlined with all the best brands available to you. We launched with prepacked offerings because some people do like to shop that way and just tru...