Andrew Gottlieb On Appreciating A No Typical Moment Life

 

Everything happens for a reason, even the most challenging and complicated ones. Rodney Flowers sits down with Andrew Gottlieb to discuss how to appreciate and make the most out of a no typical moment life. As the Founder of the company No Typical Moments, Andrew explains the necessity of hardships in life and why you must go on even if you fail in chasing your goals. He shares his difficulties as the CEO of his own company, how he motivates himself, and how his experience as an extra in the movie The Dark Knight Rises made him realize the importance of putting all of your efforts into something you love.

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Andrew Gottlieb On Appreciating A No Typical Moment Life

I am excited about this show. I have a special gentleman with me. I have Andrew Gottlieb with me. He is the CEO and Founder of No Typical Moments. We’re going to get into what that particularly means. Founded in 2013, No Typical Moments has supported authors and thought leaders for the last several years and selling their educational products through the digital market. The business’s core competency is Facebook advertising with an emphasis on helping their clients lower their cost to acquire leads and sales. No Typical Moments has worked with brands such as Eckhart Tolle, Lisa Nichols, Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts and Ken Blanchard. Help me welcome, Mr. Andrew Gottlieb to the show. Welcome to the show.

It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me on.

I’m happy that you’re here. I’m happy that you decided to hang out with me for a little while and talk about No Typical Moments, how we can be game-changers with your brand and what it is that you do and the work that you do in the world. As we get into this, I want to talk about No Typical Moments. What caused you to create this business and why the name No Typical Moments?

I may look young. I know I’m growing out my facial hair with the COVID going on. In the spring of 2011 in my senior year of college is when I had the first idea of building a company. The name started about six months before that. What was going on during my senior year of college and even going beyond before that is, I was intent on working on Wall Street, making a ton of money with my career. As I entered that summer after my sophomore year of college, the only objective of my career was to have something prestigious and to make a lot of money.

I went to New York City in the summer of 2009 and I realized how much I didn’t like finance. I got all of Wall Street out of my system within ten weeks, which I’m extremely grateful for. I learned in college that internships are more about figuring out what you don’t want to do and necessarily always figuring out what you want to do. The next summer, I held my grounds. I didn’t find another job on Wall Street. I didn’t go back to New York City. I took a step in a direction that I felt was the best next step for me.

I went to Washington DC to intern at a political consulting firm. It was a step in the right direction. I enjoyed politics. I enjoyed more of the consulting angle of their business. I could see how many different clients and challenges they are faced with on a day-to-day basis. As I came back to school, my senior year of 2010, that fall, it still didn’t feel like the direction I was going to take with my student and feel like something I could wake up inspired to build on a Monday morning.

At the same time, while this was all going on, I was partying hard in college. I went up to school early in my senior year and drank nonstop for about two weeks straight. At the tail end of that, I woke up one morning and I looked in the mirror and I had a terrible acne breakout on my face. I had acne throughout all of high school, all throughout college, but this was by far the worst acne breakout I ever had. I was told by the doctor that I should go on a medicine called Accutane, which is an intense medicine and it impacts your liver.

 

Drinking alcohol, it’s impacted your liver with Accutane. It doesn’t add up. I had a choice. There are two directions I could go down. I could continue living my best life, as they say in 2020, as a senior in college, owning a home, being legally allowed to drink. On the other hand, I felt like I was given this opportunity to figure out what do I want to do with my life and clear my head after the four years of the nonsense of college. I decided to go on the Accutane medicine. During this process, I read a book called Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. There’s a moment in the book which stood out for me. The mentor tells his mentee to go sit in a car. He tells him to not come back until he can come and tell him what the meaning of license is. He says all these cliche things. Eventually, he comes up with the phrase, “Life has no ordinary moments.” I was reading that book. It was a profound experience for me of having this awareness of how all my happiness was geared towards the nights and weekends. There can be so much joy, happiness on a Tuesday afternoon.

I was impacted by that saying of life has no ordinary moments, I decided to shift it. I went into Google and I shifted what ordinary could turn into. I wasn’t directly plagiarizing and I found typical. I came up with the phrase, “No typical moments.” Way back when in the fall of 2010, I knew that I was going to one day build a company called No Typical Moments. There wasn’t a business plan. I had no idea what it was going to be, but I always had this aspiration of running my own company. I knew something was going to be called No Typical Moments. Gradually over time, I started to put the pieces together of what it would merge into now. That’s almost a decade later since that whole experience happened in roughly September of 2010 for me.

Here we are several years later and I’m sure you’ve experienced a lot of not so typical moments in your life since then. Are you willing to talk about those and how those have shaped you, your company and landed you where you are now? Is there a particular one? You’re living no typical moments, it’s not a branch, it’s a business. It’s something that you are experienced. Maybe you have experienced a deeper meaning about no typical moments in life that you could share with the audience. Maybe someone needs to know that profile message from you.

I’m thinking of two moments that were make or break for the company. I’ll share something that happened several months or so ago. I was almost outside of the CEO of my own organization. I realized that this is a common thing that happens. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ryan Dyson, Digital Marketer. They haven’t fully built it out yet, but it’s this new thing called Scalable. It’s the same idea of Digital Marketer, but it’s more focused on training for CEOs to scale companies. Not necessarily honed in on like Facebook ad campaigns, it’s like about leadership, systems and operating procedures, all of that stuff.

I was listening to a great video module and that company’s going an S curve. A lot of times organizations, once you identify what your product-market fit is, you’ll start to grow rapidly. At a certain point in time, you’re going to flatten out as a business. This happens to every organization especially as you’re going through different phases of growth. What can happen a lot of times is the CEO and founder get burnt out when the organization flatlines like that. In a lot of ways, it’s because what made the company special as it was getting going becomes a liability to the company as it starts to grow and mature.

For instance, for me, I built the company with a lot of spontaneity and pure willpower. As a result, we didn’t have great systems and we didn’t have great accountability to hold people to results. With this, a lot of times what can happen in the CEO, founder burnout is that he might get voted off by the board of directors. He or she could be bought out by a partner. Whatever the situation is and this is what happened to me. While this was going on, I had entered a leadership training program about four months before that, which was funny because in my mind I was saying to myself, “I’m tired of being a leader in a CEO,” but for some reason I enrolled in a leadership training program.

While this was going on, in a way it was a rebirth of me wanting to be a CEO, a leader and run this business because I was so burnt out and maxed out. It would have been years of this idea. It worked for someone for eight months out of college. There hasn’t been much for me since I graduated from college. No Typical Moments has been an idea I played around with for a decade coming up in September of 2010. I was put into a situation with a negotiation in which we ended up not needing to give into some of the requests that were made. It was a make-or-break moment for me where I knew I can either eat doggy dodo for the next six months or I’m going to lose my company, maybe go into bankruptcy, and I have no idea what’s going to come next.

To get the juice out of life, you have to experience the squeeze. Click To Tweet

I needed to look within myself and my soul, get so recommitted to my why and have the attitude of you are going to have to kill me to take this company away from me. If I didn’t dive that deep into my soul and my why and my desire that this is my company, I’m here to save it, 100% I would have lost it several months or so ago. It gave me the opportunity to rebuild the company in a way I saw fit and have a reset button. The true direction and the true reason that I had sacrificed so much since 2010 to birth this idea that I lost control of.

Let’s park here for a second. We’re dealing with a crisis. There are a lot of people that have lost jobs, lost their families because they lost their job. It’s been a spiral effect for a lot of people and you know what that’s like. You’ve been at that place where it seems your breaking point, but you were able to pull yourself through, charge forward and experienced success as a result of that. If there were 1 or 2 things that you can name that caused you to rebound and pivot the way you did because that’s a breaking point. A lot of people can’t make that turn. You say burnt out or they feel like it’s too massive of recovery to mask. They don’t do it. How were you able to make that turn?

I’m pausing as I’m reflecting and putting myself back in that mindset. I would say the first one was my community of friends and support system. When I was in that leadership training program, I was on the phone for three hours at night with all of my coaches talking this out, them listening to me and hearing me, them calling me out on my stuff when I was afraid and holding me to what I wanted and not allowing me to create a backup plan. I had an amazing support system from a business mastermind I’m involved with in town in a more strategic business sense. That was healing in a way to hear from the leader of him being like, “This happened to me too.”

I view him in such high regard of, “This happened to him and he was telling me numerous times that a similar situation happened to him throughout his career and what he did.” I would say my parents were huge support systems for me to lean into. I also had a great team who we all hunkered down together and made the vow of, “This is potentially going to have negative ramifications for all of us. We’re in this together and there’s no other option.” There’s no backup plan here. We either save the company or we’re all going to be out of work and income right now.

The second thing is I would say where I’m able to access that type of drive and motivation is because of being a competitive athlete and playing college soccer. There’s a depth of your soul when you’re in the 85th minute of a game and you have nothing left in the tank, your calves are cramping out and it’s tied 0-0. They’re a part of your psyche that I believe athletes are able to tap into. It’s easy for me to go back to that place of like, it’s the 85th minute of a game. It’s tied 0-0. This is on the line to make the playoffs advanced to the next rounds. It’s like muscle memory of like, “Maybe not in an intellectual capacity, but I’ve been here before. I know what this is like to come out the other side.”

In my life, I’ve put myself in those kinds of stressful situations. That’s another thing. I showed up to run a half marathon one day. I ran at 826-mile. I didn’t do any training. That is such a mental battle. At the 12th mile, your legs are dead. You can barely walk and you have to find it within yourself to cross that finish line. Putting yourself in these types of stressful situations time and time again, when there’s not something on the line. If I didn’t complete the half marathon, no one would have known. I wouldn’t have been able to post a cool Facebook photo about it. There’s not anything online. It prepares you though for the instances when there’s stuff to lose.

I relate to that on many levels because I love stress. Stress is a necessary part of life. I was talking to someone about in order to get the juice out of life, you have to experience the squeeze. People don’t want to experience the squeeze. I get it. The squeeze isn’t comfortable. It hurts. If I was orange and you try to squeeze me, I can imagine what that feels like. It’s painful and uncomfortable, but yet it’s necessary if you want to get the juice out of life.

 

I believe that nature, the universe, God, whatever you want to call it understands that. The way life is set up for that to happen because no one goes through life unscathed. No one goes through life without experiencing some level of stress, even trauma, challenges, obstacles. These things that are seemingly devastating to us, painful to us, uncomfortable to us are a part of life as taking a shower. It’s normal hygiene for you to take a shower every day. It’s a normal development for you to experience a lot of stress every day.

The key is learning how to manage it, learning how to manage the obstacles, learning how to manage the challenges and manage them in a way that you pull the most that you can get out of it. If you squeeze the orange in a certain way, you may lose the juice. You got to be careful. You got to be strategic about it so that you can capture the juice from the orange such as life when they show up. It all depends on how strategic you are in managing the stress, the challenge that dictates the juice that you get, the results that you get out of life.

Another thing that I love that you said is putting yourself in a pressure situation. For me, I play football and fourth and one. In the fourth quarter, it’s all in or you’re down on the one-yard line. You got one play or the time is going to run off the clock. If you don’t score, you lose. It’s all or nothing. At that point, it doesn’t matter if you’re hurting. It doesn’t matter if you’re cramping, nothing matters other than look what you’re going to do at this moment. When you get to that space, you have to pull yourself through. It’s like a life-or-death situation, you win or lose. You’re going to muster up everything in your willpower to win.

I feel that too is necessary for life. Sometimes that the challenge or the pressure causes you to get to that place where it’s that last little bit of juice. When you squeeze, there’s easy juice. It’s a little squeeze and then you get that. That last drop, that extra, you got to manipulate the orange in a certain way. You might have to put your elbow on it. You may have to put it in a certain position with a jar or something heavy and squeeze it. That’s when you dig deep. For some reason that’s not common amongst society. I don’t know why. You and I get it, but imagine if that was common. If everyone understood that sometimes you got to take it to the third degree.

I believe that life sometimes requires a little bit of aggression. I still have a little bit of aggression and that has served me well. It has made some people uncomfortable, unfortunately. It’s understanding when and when not to turn that on. For me, there have been many times battling paralysis that I’ve had to turn that on in order to take the next step. Those types of things, I call them game-changing moments. They’re not your typical moments for many people. What has been one of your biggest challenges as a CEO?

I would say people pleasing and wanting to be liked. In my opinion, you don’t get into leadership to be liked. I’ve shifted my desire to be liked, to be respected. When my desire to be liked takes over, I become a people pleaser. It can show up maybe I’m negotiating a new deal, but I want this person to like me. I take a 25% dip in or service fee, or someone needs to have a direct conversation about their under-performance, but I’m afraid of hurting their feelings. I don’t have that conversation.

If I’m able to shift that to a place of what I’m wanting is for them to respect me, I can deliver those direct conversations in a way that leaves a person better than we started. I can have those conversations and negotiations about what our rates are without them feeling like I’m ripping them off whatever it is. Letting that go is extremely beneficial for you. People want to work at my company, not to be friends with me. They want this to be a source of upliftment for their career. I hope they make friends along the way. If they want to be my friends, let’s go get coffee and chill. When you’re in a position of leadership, there’s a lot of feathers that you can rattle with your decisions. It’s impossible to have everyone like every single decision you’re going to deploy at your organization. They respect you so much that they’re okay with it even if it doesn’t please them.

Always stand for what you believe in and what you value when it comes to your dreams. Click To Tweet

How has that served you, that mentality of being a people pleaser or wanting respect, not wanting respect?

It’s owning my power and worth. I’ll give you an example of what happened, we spoke about how it played out. We had a new client. We did a great job in his advertising campaign. I gave him a huge discount. I cut our rates significantly. In my mind, I was thinking, “We’ll do a great job on this. I can renegotiate in the future.” I sent an email to him, telling him what our rates are going to be. I left it open-ended of like, “If this doesn’t work for you and your budget, I wish you the best of luck on your marketing campaign.” It was almost like a sense I felt from him of like, “Come back.” What’s happened is the amount of new work that he signed up for at our regular rates is already triple what he paid us. I stood my ground with them and he loves to barter and negotiate. I was on the phone for 45 minutes with him. He’s bartering back and forth. For him, it’s like if I don’t do that back and forth with him, he won’t respect me because he’s expecting me to push back. When I don’t, it creates maybe subconsciously, maybe consciously like, “I can push him around for the rates I want.”

It was a feeling I had within myself of, I know how good of a job we did, and I know what we’re worth to be paid and holding true to that. There’s another client I’m thinking of and it’s like with this one client. I know I give a little bit and then we get taken advantage of. Every single time I step in powerfully to renegotiate what works for us. If I don’t, it’s a slippery slope. It happened once and I learned my lesson. Say yes for one thing, the next thing I know, I’m seven more things down that I’ve slipped into. Now, I cut it off at the first one. She respects me a lot more in my opinion because I don’t let her push me around.

It goes back to understanding the value in yourself and being able to stand before that, which is game-changing all in of itself too. Sometimes we don’t understand the value and we want to get the deal done. We act out of desperation to get things done. Sometimes we sacrifice our value and even our identity sometimes. These are great lessons, great traits to build up, cultivate and then stand for. I’m with you. There have been many negotiations that I’ve been. I was inexperienced, I wanted to get the deal done. When I look back on it, I was like, “I got the deal done. I gained a painful experience because I didn’t stand the ground.”

It’s a life lesson. There’s a lesson in that. I realized that’s not the way to do things. That’s not the way to conduct business. In your life, you want to stand for what you believe in and what you value when it comes to your dreams, goals, business, your family, decisions, all of those things and not be afraid of that. It’s not about someone liking you. They like you or not. It matters, but then again, it doesn’t. You don’t want to piss people off and not be a likable person, but to what extent, expense are you going to be light? I love the idea of respect. It carries a lot more weight than like. You were an extra in the movie, Batman. I was reading about you and it came across. I chuckled. How did you become an extra in a movie, Batman? How did that happen for you?

The third Batman with Bain was shot in my hometown of Pittsburgh. This was the fall after I graduated from college, that would have been the fall of 2011. My buddy sent me a text a couple of days before telling me, “If we get to Heinz Field at 4:00 in the morning, we’re able to be an extra in Batman. They’re only going to let the first 1,000 people in. We got to get there super early, see that we get a spot.” You got to dress in winter clothing because the game was in winter and the scene in Batman. It was the middle of August in Pittsburgh. The weather in August is 90 degrees. The entire stadium is people in winter clothing. I was wearing all black on top of that. Even Batman’s colors, the home team was black. We’re the third row back.

We’re too close to the field that my friend yelled to Bain to flex for him. He turned around and showed us muscles. They tell you scenes where you’re supposed to scream and whatnot. We walked away thinking that was the coolest thing in our life. Batman came out and my friend texted me saying that we got in. We’re in there for a split second. You have to have a DVR and go 0.01 second by 0.01. You see us for a split-second. That was an awesome surprise when the actual movie came out to see that. None of my friends knew. It wasn’t like I was in there long enough for my friends that text me and go, “Were you in Batman? Am I going crazy?” I had to put on Facebook for people to see it.

What was that experience like? Were there any takeaways from going through that entire experience that was a game-changer for you?

The movie-making process for that 30 seconds took twelve hours to film and how much detail. Everything goes into that one-minute shot in a film. It made me appreciate how extensive of a process movie-making is. We sit down and eat our popcorn and watch a sweet two-hour movie and the hours and months, and maybe even years that it takes to create that is powerful.

Listening to you say that takes me back to life. It takes me back to where this conversation started about no typical moments, the challenges and the obstacles that we may face in life, even accomplishing a goal. You’re several years into No Typical Moments. There’s a lot of activity, small steps, pivots, learning, falls, failures, successes, a life that goes into purpose. If we go back, we were talking about how the challenge and stress are necessary. If you don’t have those twelve hours to produce a two-hour movie, then you don’t have the two hours. When we look at life, we look at the things we want to accomplish in life. One of the biggest problems we face as a human race is a need for instant gratification.

When we’re willing to put in our 10,000 hours and we’re willing to suffer a little bit, that’s a harsh thing to say, I get it. I know you guys don’t want to hear that. I’m not saying that everyone should suffer and we should be okay with suffering. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that there’s an element of effort that’s required to accomplish anything. That effort isn’t always comfortable. I want to help people understand that to get anywhere in life, for example, if I get in my car and I want to drive home, that’s a five-hour drive. I’m going to be in the car sitting. I got to cover every piece of ground from here to North Carolina, no questions.

I can make it more comfortable by getting in a plane and flying, but yet I still got to pack bags. I still got to drive to the airport. I got to go through security. I got to get on the plane. I got to go through all the processes and procedures to get on a plane, get off the plane and then get to where I’m going. You can’t get around the process. You only can go through the process to get to where you want to go. If it’s trauma, that’s the process. If it’s divorce, it’s a process. If it’s stress, it’s a process. If it’s a job loss, it’s a process. It’s all a process. Life is a great big process. How you go through that process dictates your outcome. Making a movie is a process. You had to put on all black winter clothes in the middle of summer for not even a full second shot, but it was totally worth it. Hearing that, the lesson for me is sometimes you have to do things that are uncomfortable, difficult, unorthodox or against the grain in order to have your moment of fame.

That’s a good reflection point for people who are thinking about entering entrepreneurship. I know it’s been glorified of this Instagram model lifestyle where you’re working from the beach, sipping your $10 latte from Starbucks all day. That’s a delusional perspective as to what it takes to build a business. It’s an extremely uncomfortable day in and day out for days, months and years ahead. It’s a constant battle of embracing that. You’re not at a big company where you have a strict to-do list of what your job role is. Your job role as an entrepreneur and founder especially at the beginning, it’s everything. If you don’t do it, there’s no one else like, look behind you and be like, “Jeff is taking care of that.” You’re Jeff.

You’re Susan. You’re Joe. You’re Bob. You’re Tom. You’re Harry. You’re all of that, but it’s totally doable.

Life is a great big process. How you go through that process dictates your outcome. Click To Tweet

I liked it personally.

The effort part, I don’t think that ever stops. There’s always the effort. That becomes habitual, but you have your moments of rest, recovery and restoration. You have to take that. That’s what I love about recreation because it gives you that opportunity to recharge. It’s like a season. If you look at nature, there are not many things that grow in the wintertime because that’s the time for it to go dormant at rest, but then it stretches out in the summer. It’s all in 120, full-on, stretch out, grow as fast and as far as I can, and then rests in the winter.

That’s the S-curve of business. You need that flat line to even out your systems. You can’t always be on this upward hockey stick trajectory of growth.

I believe that sometimes things happen like with COVID to open our eyes to new pathways, different vehicles, ways or systems and even ideas. I know we’re the most intelligent species on the planet, but we have our limitations. We are very habitual beings. If something works, we’ll keep doing it. We won’t even think to like, “Let’s think about another way of doing this.” If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. We keep going. When something changes that challenges the status quo, we get upset because it’s been working. This has been working, we don’t want to change. Yet COVID, in my opinion, as bad as it is, has identified new ways of doing business, new collaborations have been created. It’s changing the telework environment, the office environment.

There are many businesses that are not going to go back to the way it used to be. They’re going to be even more productive. There are going to be cost savings. There’s going to be growth as a result of this. A lot of the things that are happening that we’re calling successes as a result of COVID could have happened without COVID. We didn’t need COVID for it to happen. We could have opened up our minds and been proactive and identified a lot of the savings and ways of doing business before COVID, but COVID was necessary. If it wouldn’t have happened, we would still be doing it the old way.

We’ve cut about $6,500 a month in expenses that we weren’t forced to look at our books that intensely before COVID and then COVID hits. You’re like, “I didn’t want it.” There’s some easy cost to cut. Once you start to do it, you’re like, “I’m spending so much unnecessary money on a monthly basis of like, ‘I haven’t been forced to be this honest with myself and my business as to where are we spending stuff that we don’t need to?’”

My message is it doesn’t have to come to that. It does, but it doesn’t. It does because we don’t put that level of pressure on ourselves. Why would we? We don’t want to feel that pain. We don’t want to feel that discomfort. It goes back to what I said in the beginning, stress is necessary in order to get the juice. If you’re not consistently challenging yourself at that level, nature’s going to do it for you. Don’t worry. Life is going to do it for you. However, you have to be ready to go through that process. You have to have the right attitude and the right mindset, which I believe is looking for the opportunity. That’s what people are doing with COVID, taking advantage of the opportunity. They’re pivoting.

 

They’re looking at new ways to do business, having an open mind, having the right perception and perspective about the ordeal and about the challenges that realizing that it’s the same as you taking a shower. It’s the ebbs and flows of life. You’re going to have seasons without challenge and then you’re going to have seasons of extreme, excruciating challenge. Who are you going to be in those times? That’s the question. Andrew, if people wanted to learn more about you, perhaps work with you and your company to increase their digital marketing, how can they connect with you? How can they find you?

Our website is NoTypicalMoments.com. My email address, if you want to reach out, it’s Andrew@NoTypicalMoments.co.

One of the things that you believe is the standard is the standard. I want to talk a little bit about that. What do you mean by that?

It’s a quote by my favorite football coach of all time, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers. You said you played football. I don’t know if you’re still a football fan.

I like Mike Tomlin.

Do you like him or love him?

I love him. He’s an underrated coach. He doesn’t get the recognition that he deserves.

If you don't have seasons without challenge, you're going to have seasons of extreme, excruciating challenge. Click To Tweet

Don’t even get me started about comparing him to Belichick in the history of the NFL. I’m going on a total ramp, but I agree with him. It’s like comparing someone to Michael Jordan. It’s like Belichick up here and then Tomlin, but you can’t compare that without going down that rabbit hole. Tomlin has all of these, what I call Tomlin-isms. To such an extent, my mom for my birthday gift in 2020 created a Tomlin-ism mural of his sayings over the years, with the one front and center right here is the standard is a standard. What Tomlin means by that is in the NFL, everyone is prone to injury.

Look at the Steelers in 2019 with Ben Roethlisberger going down the second game of the season. We have Devin Hodges starting for most of 2020, our fourth-string quarterback, and his mentality of that is it doesn’t matter who’s in, who’s out. Our standard as a Pittsburgh Steelers is that we’re contending for the Super Bowl. This is our standard of excellence and it doesn’t waver. It didn’t matter that Devlin Hodges was our quarterback for most of the season. It didn’t matter that Mason Rudolph got his head decapitated by the Ravens. This is our standard as an organization. What excellence looks like to us, and we’re not wavering from this, no matter who’s on the field.

I try to bring that to my own life of this is a standard of excellence I hold myself to, and it doesn’t waiver because of circumstances. It doesn’t matter that COVID hit. This is our standard of excellence of what we deliver to our clients, the way we run business. We’re not going to make excuses of, “I totally get it, COVID is going on.” I’m not denying there’s a pandemic, but we’re not going to use that as an excuse to lower what we believe we’re capable of.

I was talking to someone. She was talking about COVID and how it has prevented her from doing things that she would normally do with her life. That’s not me. I’m not doing that. I believe now is not a time to slow down. Now it’s time to pick up the pace. Anytime there’s an opportunity, you go after with everything that you have. When that stress is here, it’s because there’s an opportunity for growth. In the case that you described for Hodges, it’s an opportunity. The team needs to rally around him to make this opportunity happen for him and the team.

Yes, he’s the fourth screen, but we’re going to show you that all of our players are there. It doesn’t matter if he’s on the fourth screen, he’s the fourth-best, but he’s still one of the best. We’re going to go and we’re going to pick up the pace because we know where we are and we know what opportunity this is. You don’t slow down because of, “It’s the fourth screen so we can pull back.” “No, you have to go faster.” Because it’s COVID, you have to go faster. You have to go harder. You have to be stronger.

Be greedy when others are fearful.

Always go in the opposite direction of the masses. Look at the direction that they’re going. Look at the pace that they’re going. If they’re going fast, you probably should be slow down. If they’re going slow, you probably should speed it up a little bit. Always in the opposite direction. That’s my model. The standard is the standard. No excuses, all in, 100. Let’s go get it, game-changer mentality. Andrew, I appreciate you coming on the show. I’ve enjoyed this conversation with you. I love the idea of No Typical Moments. I don’t think you want to live your life with typical moments because that sounds boring to me. If everything is typical, that’s boring. I know what to expect every day, all day, boring. I’m not growing. There’s nothing exciting about that.

 

It’s a good reflection of COVID of not falling into a boring routine. Even though I’m working out of my bedroom for eight hours a day. I went up to the mountains to go on a 10-mile hike. The last thing I’ll leave with everyone is we are in COVID, there’s a pandemic going on. For me, I refuse to believe my life is over. I believe that we have a choice like in Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I started to read that at the beginning of this because that’s a great example of a human being in the most horrendous conditions you could ever be in. His thing about you always has a choice of how to respond. No matter what continues to go worse, hopefully, a little bit better with COVID, we all have a choice of how we’re going to respond to it. The government, big business, Walmart, Amazon, Facebook can’t take away that choice from us. We always have that power.

It’s like an opponent. It’s opposition. It’s a defense and it’s doing its job. It’s trying to prevent me from scoring. Scoring is whatever I want to experience in my life. It may take my job away. It may take my business. It may take things and it may stop this and that. At the end of the day, I have the responsibility to score. I’m going to figure out how to get all that back because I got to score because that’s what my job is. That’s what my purpose is in life. The fact that I wake up every day, means that I still have that responsibility and the opportunity to navigate this opposition. It’s no different than anything else. In my opinion, it is a player on the field trying to stop me from scoring. I have to be strategic. I have to be in shape. I have to be aware. I have to be focused and I have to be in the game in order to navigate this opposition.

If we can get in our minds, the horn hasn’t sounded. The game isn’t over. We’re still playing. We got hit hard, but we’re still on the field. The field is still there. The opposition is still there. We have the opportunity to navigate. If you feel like life is over, you’re not even thinking about how to navigate because once you learn how to navigate the opposition, you can score on it all day. That’s what a good life is. Now it’s almost like the opposition doesn’t exist because you know how to score. You know how to get around the opposition. You know where its strong points are, its weak points are and how to maneuver through all of that.

It’s because we haven’t figured out how to maneuver it. We haven’t figured out how to navigate it. That’s why we feel the way we feel. It’s like you played sports, the defense is kicking your behind and you’re walking up the field with your head down. Everything you try is like, “They have our number.” The coach doesn’t look too optimistic. You’re trying to figure it out. Once you go back to the locker room, you go back to the drawing board and you figure it out, you go back on the field and you score. All we need is a little bit of momentum. Once we get a little bit of momentum and we can shift the momentum back in our favor, but now it feels like we are defeated. We got to get on the field.

We got to try different stuff. You got to try different plays. You got to try different maneuvers. We’ve got to do things we haven’t done before. We’ve got to come up with stuff on the fly. We got to pull out the best of ourselves in order to overcome this. That’s and that’s what we do in a game. It’s no different than playing a game. You don’t give up. If you wake up, that means you still in this thing. It’s not over. I want to give some people hope. We’re bigger than this. We have to know that. As big as it is, we’re still here. That’s the only way you lose in this is you die. As long as you have life, you can fight. As long as you’re fighting, there’s an opportunity to win. That’s where I’m at. Andrew, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me on.

Important Links:

• No Typical Moments
• Way of the Peaceful Warrior
• Andrew@NoTypicalMoments.co
• Man’s Search for Meaning
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/get-up-book/
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• https://Rodneyflowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734

About Andrew Gottlieb

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