Keep Up Or Get Left Behind
Host: Isaac Mashman · August 30, 2021 · Episode 76 · 16 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Yo, yo, yo, what is going on, everybody? Isaac Mashman here. You are tuning into another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the show that is all about helping you become a more capable individual through me sharing my experiences and knowledge in business, life, and personal growth. Now, today I got a good episode for you that has to do with a life story. Now, as many of you know, on Fridays I have interviews with awesome guests like Matt Devine of Cameo and Kenny Herzog of Entrepreneur Media, and famous Ashley Grant was my last guest this past Friday, or if you're listening back through, I don't know, two years from now, episode 75 of the show.
What I need to do every single Monday is have monologues, because I don't want you guys to know me [just] for my interviews and for my guests.
Joe Rogan, he doesn't have standalone episodes for the most part. Every single thing that he does, he's got a guest. I don't want to rely just on the guests for you guys to connect with me, which is why every single Monday I'm doing a monologue. Now, I'm doing my best to keep up with every single episode, every single week, every single Monday and every single Friday. But regardless, the value will be there whether it's an interview or a monologue. Today let's go ahead and get into the topic, which is keep up or get left behind. Now, that sounds a little bit, I don't know, I guess you could say aggressive. Keep up or get left behind. Who are you to set the standard of what the pace should be? Well, that's a good question.
Now, to give you a little bit of insight into what inspired this, I've been doing some reflection over my earlier years when I was in Boy Scouts. I was in Boy Scouts between the ages of 11 and 17. I was in Cub Scouts prior, as a [Webelo]. Then I crossed over into the Boy Scouts of America. Now, there are tons of negative allegations and things about different scoutmasters and the Boy Scouts of America. But from my experience, it was nothing short of excellence, and it shaped me into the man I am today in many different facets, many different ways. So as I'm telling you these stories, I'm sharing the things about Boy Scouts that many people don't want to talk about. They're only going to talk about the negative, or you're going to have a couple bad apples ruin the entire bunch of fruit.
That is the case with the media in general. So going into my early years in Boy Scouts, you go over at the age of 11, you're getting into middle school, you're a sixth grader, you just moved on from elementary school, you're going in. You're like, man, oh my God, I have all of these different hormones. I have all of these different chemicals. Now I'm in this entirely different environment that gives me freedom to go in between my classes. And then in Boy Scouts, you have the beginnings of becoming a man. Showing up to meetings, you're learning life skills, you're learning how to tie knots, what goes into starting a fire, leadership especially, you're seeing how an organization runs and flourishes, and the chain of command.
One of the things that I got involved with very early on, it was probably two to three years into my time at Boy Scouts, when I was old enough, was practice for a fundraiser.
It was practice for a charity event called the MS-150 that always took place in Daytona Beach. The premise of the event was a 150-mile bike ride split up into two days. It was, I believe, 70 to 75 to 80 miles one day, then the remainder the second day. Now, I'm from Jacksonville, Florida, and the event would go, if I'm not mistaken, from St. Augustine down to Daytona Beach, which is about 150 miles, or 75 miles one way and then back. I might be getting the exact destinations wrong, because I never participated in the event. I participated in the practice. Now, the event cost money, and I didn't come from money, as many of you know, and I didn't go out of my way to raise money for the charity events.
I'll be honest, I was worried about school, I was worried about other things. I didn't have my, I guess, focus set on raising the money for the charity, but what I was doing is practicing a couple times a week, or once every couple of weeks, to train and prepare for the event.
What we would do is we would get our bikes every single day, and we would meet at the scout hut and go for maybe a 5 to 15 mile bike ride, depending on the weather, depending on how we all felt. I remember going in, the first couple of miles always went well. You're getting into the momentum, and I wasn't one of these super skinny kids. I was a chubby kid. I got made fun of for being a little bit chubby and overweight when I was in elementary school, going into middle school, even into high school, until I really put my fitness as a priority in class.
For some reason, when I first got physical education, PE, in the ninth grade, and weightlifting in the 12th, I'm like, man, I got to go ahead and work for this grade, so I'm getting into better shape.
So that's an aspect of gamifying your success. That's something that I'm going to do an episode on in the future. Back to Boy Scouts, we would go and take these bike rides around town. We started out in an area of Jacksonville on the west side called Lakeshore. We would go around. We had a couple of set routes. I oftentimes was one of the last kids. I wasn't in the front, I was in the back. How the structure would be is we'd have the Scoutmaster in the very front of the line, directing, paying attention to traffic, saying, hey, car left, car right, turn right, turn left, because we needed to stay safe. We had to make sure that we were doing what we had to do, so everybody knew where we were going.
The destination in which we were heading, and making sure that we were safely doing it. Now, I would tend to fall towards the back, and I remember this one time we were biking in Riverside, and from Lakeshore to Riverside, that was a relatively long distance. It wasn't some really short distance that we had going that day, but we were going for a while, and I remember it started pouring down rain, and if my memory serves me right, I fell to the back quick. I went to the very back of the line, and so we always had at least two scoutmasters, one in the front, one in the back, making sure that nobody got left behind, or that they were staying with the person who was left behind, because I would never show up to every single training.
I wasn't in peak performance. I wasn't in peak state, and I was unhealthy. I was unhealthy, and the thing is, this wasn't one of those Boy Scouts where, hey, we're going to sissify everything and make sure that everybody gets a participation trophy. It was, we're going to set the pace, you either keep up or get left behind. That to some could be, oh, that's cruel, but it was a learning lesson for me, because I had this thing in my mind knowing that I was the last scout in this event. I was the last person in this training day. It sucked, but the thing is, they weren't stopping so that I could get caught up.
They weren't changing their speed. They had a set speed to maintain momentum, just like if you're running, you run at a set pace in order to meet your mile and stay on track and stay in breath.
I had to hustle to get to the front. I don't talk hustle anymore, I'm not talking about hustle every single day, but man, my legs were pedaling faster than ever. I was changing into the highest gear, making sure that I was able to go as quickly as possible. When there was a hill, man, it didn't matter. I was cruising through. The rain was pouring down, and I eventually caught up. But the lesson in this story is, as you're building your business, your career, your personal brand, you're going to meet a lot of people along the way, and you should never slow down for the person who has fallen behind. You should be guiding them along and giving them the ability to come and progress with you, but you should never change your pace.
I watched this video on YouTube by Tony Robbins a couple weeks ago. It stuck, it stands out, because he says oftentimes what we do when we're around other people is we lower our energies, because we don't want to be over the top. That is something we have to stop doing. By lowering our energies and getting in line and on par with the people around us who are not of equal energy, we're lowering our vibration. This is spiritual. This is talking about emotions. This is talking about the law of attraction. But by lowering your pace, lowering your energy in life and business, trying to make sure that everybody's coming along, you're going to be so focused on directing energy and pulling other people up that you're going to be pulled down by them without them even intentionally doing it.
It's not their fault. You can't blame them, but you can blame yourself if you become a victim of your own actions, if you become a victim of trying to be the hero, having this hero, savior complex, and that is a form of codependency. I've touched on this in the past, and it can be painful, because you see everybody around you hustling and working and doing their own things. You're like, man, I think everybody's going to the top with me, and you look back and you're wondering where everybody went, because you kept your pace. They did not pick up their pace to match yours. Now, going back to Boy Scouts, we had the Scoutmaster in the front, then we oftentimes had the oldest scout right behind him.
Then from there it got into the younger kids, the middle age kids, the person who was the most out of shape, who was cruising at the back, and then the last Scoutmaster.
The Scoutmaster at the front was directing the overall pack. They're like, we're going to take a ride. We're going to Riverside. We're going to Lakeshore. We're going to this destination. From there, they were also the ones giving orders and giving directions and ensuring everybody's safety. Hey, going back to what I said, there's a car coming up. There's a walker, front right. There's a walker, front left. Then that would develop and create the awareness for everybody else. Your job is to be the Scoutmaster in front directing the pack. You determine where you go, and you determine where the people who follow you go. It is up to them to be on board with you. It is up to them, the other person, to listen to you or to not listen to you.
You can't say, you have to listen to me, because they don't. They do not have to listen to you. But just know that as you progress, and if you continue doing the things that you should be doing, and really, man, going at this with all of your might and all of your effort and all of your energy, you're going to look and turn around, and they didn't increase their speed. They did not increase their speed. When I was left behind, I had to work two and three and four times harder than everybody else, because I was trying to match the speed of the rest of the group.
It's not that they sped up, it's that I fell behind and I was trying to keep up. If you have people who are trying to keep up and you can see their dedicated effort, then you might spend a little bit more time ensuring that they have what they need in order to progress, but you're not going to stop for them.
You're not taking breaks for them. You are intensely focused on where you are going. You are going to get there no matter what, quicker than everybody else, because what is the point of waiting and taking your time and stopping? And it's great to stop and smell the roses, but if you're stopped at the rose petal station for a couple of hours because everybody else is way behind you, then you're going to be missing out on your own opportunities for growth. This also goes back to the conversation of leadership. You have a duty to the people who are following you. Now, I'm not talking about fans and followers on social media.
You're creating content and you're doing things that are pushing them forward, and naturally and subconsciously they're being impacted, but I'm talking about organizations. In this case, you have to progress, and you have to make sure that they have the tools that they need in order to succeed.
Right, that rhymes. But you also have to make the difficult decision sometimes if somebody is just not doing what they need to be doing out of sheer laziness and procrastination. They're not exercising what they should be exercising in order to get results in their own lives. That's when you as a leader have to make the difficult call and hold them accountable. When I fell behind, the other people in my troop held me accountable. They're like, come on, Isaac. My Scoutmaster, man, I love the guy. Love the guy. I'm still friends with him on Facebook, and I'm not going to mention his name, because he is a highly political figure when it comes to Facebook. You know how it is with kind of the older generation. But this dude was in his 70s.
He was in his late 60s when I was practicing, when I was still younger. By the time I left the troop, he was in his early to mid-70s, and he was better than me. He was more in shape than me. I regretfully say that, but he's like, Isaac, come on, hurry up, push yourself. This is somebody who went to Vietnam. He was a veteran. He was a military veteran. He's like, Isaac, hurry up. Come on, you can do better than this. He was holding me accountable. Over the following weeks, when I went to the trainings, I wasn't falling behind. I might have slipped up every now and again.
But I knew that if I was to continue going and not maintain my own pace, it would be three, four, and five times more difficult to try to catch up with everybody else. So I've got to ask, are you setting the pace, or are you the person who's falling behind?
Don't look to your left and don't look to your right. Look within and determine where you should be and where you're at today. Don't look out and look back with regrets, but look forward with optimism and a very high level of self accountability, knowing that the only way that you're going to get there is if you set the pace and you maintain your pace. You go at it with every single ounce that you have to go at it. It requires sacrifice. I made a sacrifice today with something that I really enjoyed, and I'm like, Isaac, there's no reason for me to be doing this right now.
It is a sacrifice. [I've gotten] into conversations online about drinking. Everybody thinks that it's okay to have a beer with your buddies. Is it, though? Is it, though? I'm not going to answer that for you. That's rhetorical. You ask yourself that. The decision is yours, if you want to keep up or if you want to be left behind. Guys, thank you for listening to this episode.
I'd love to get your thoughts and insights, and here's the fee for listening as well. I'm not going to be running advertisements and wasting your time talking your ear off about a product I don't believe in. But I am going to ask that if you got any ounce of value from the things I talked about in this episode, that you share it with a friend. You share it with a business partner. You share it with somebody who you want to make sure is maintaining your pace and is keeping up with you. There's nothing wrong with having an accountability partner, a best friend, or a business partner who is going to tell you and call you out on your BS.
Those are the best people to have around you. Until I see you for an interview on the next episode, much love, and cheers to massive success.