Keep Up Or Get Left Behind
Host: Isaac Mashman · August 30, 2021 · Episode 76 · 16 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited for names and terms. 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 and 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 and 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 Kenny Herzog of Entrepreneur Media, 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.
And what I need to do every single Monday is have monologues, because I don't want you guys to know me for my interviews and for my guests, right?
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 monologue. And 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, right? 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. And I was in Boy Scouts between the ages of 11 and 17. I was in Cub Scouts prior as a wee below. And then I crossed over into the Boy Scouts of America. Now there are tons of negative allegations and things about different scout masters and boy scouts of America. And from my experience, it was nothing short of excellence and it shaped me into the man I am today and many different facets, many different ways. And 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, right? 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.
And that is, you know, the case with the media in general. So going into my early years in Boy Scouts, right, you go over at the age of 11, you're getting into middle school, right, you're a sixth grader, you just moved on from elementary school, you're going in and you're like, man, oh my God, I have all of these different hormones. I have all of these different chemicals. And 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, right? showing up to meetings, your learning life skills, your 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 commands.
And 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, it was practice for a fundraiser.
It was practice for a charity event called the MS-150 that always took place in Daytona Beach. And the premise of the event, it was 150 mile bike rides split up into two days. And it was, I believe, 70 to 75 to 80 miles one day. And 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 and 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 you know once every couple of weeks to you know train and prepare for the event.
What we 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, right? Depending on the weather, depending on how we all felt. And I remember going in the first couple of miles always went well, right? 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, right?
For some reason, when I first got physical education PE in the ninth grade and the weightlifting in the 12th, I'm like, man, I got to go ahead and work for this grade, so I'm getting to better shape.
So that's an aspect of gamifying your success. And that's something that I'm going to do an episode on in the future. And 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. And I oftentimes was one of the last kids. I wasn't in the front, I was in the back. And how the structure would be is we'd have the Scoutmaster in the very front of the line right directing, paying attention to traffic saying, hey, car left, car right, turn right, turn left, because we needed to stay safe, right? We had to make sure that we were doing what we had to do so everybody knew where we were going, right?
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 and 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 light and so we always had at least two scout masters. of 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 it 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 to 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. And 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. And it sucked, but the thing is, in order to get caught up, they weren't stopping, they weren't changing their speed.
They had a set speed to maintain momentum. Just like if you're running right, you run at a set pace in order to meet your mile and stay on track and stay in breath.
And I had to hustle to get to the front. And I don't talk hustle anymore. And 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. And when there was a hill, man, it didn't matter. I was cruising through. and 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 gonna 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 couple weeks ago and it's stuck, you know, 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 online and into par with the people around us who are not of equal energy means that we're lowering our vibration. And this is spiritual. This is talking about emotions. This is talking about the law of attraction, but by lowering your pace, lowering your energy and 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, you're going to be being pulled down by them without them even intentionally doing it.
And it's not to 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, right? Having this hero save your complex and that is a form of codependency. And 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 and 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, and then from there it got into the younger kids, right 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 person and 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. And from there, there 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, you know, front right. There's a walker front left. And then that would develop and create the awareness to everybody else. Your job is to be the Scoutmaster in front directing the pack. You determine where you go and you determine who and where the people who follow you go.
It is up to them to be on board with you. It is up to them and the other person to listen to you or to not listen to you.
And you can't say that 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, I mean, like 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. If you're stopped at the Rose pedal 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. And 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 for 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 sometime if somebody is just not doing what they need to be doing out of sheer laziness and procrastination. And 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 scout, Master Man. Man, I love the guy. Love the guy. And 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, right?
He was in his late 60s when I was practicing when I was still younger. And by the time I left the troop, he was in his early mid-70s, he was better than me. He was more in shape than me. And I regretfully say that, but he's like, Isaac, come on, hurry up, push yourself, push yourself. And this is somebody who went to Vietnam. He was a veteran, right? He was a military veteran. He's like, Isaac, hurry up. Like, come on, you can do better than this. He was holding me accountable. And over the following weeks, when I went to the trainings, I wasn't falling behind.
I might, I might have to slip up every now and again, But I knew that if I was to continue going and not maintaining my own pace, it would be three, four and five times more difficult to try to catch up with everybody else. So I 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 rights. Look within, 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, you maintain your pace and 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. into conversations online about drinking, right? Everybody thinks that it's okay to have a beer with your buddies. Is it dope? 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.