Making It – Episode 157
Chasing Fulfillment, Not Success (Peter Sage)
Peter Sage: I’m Peter Sage and you’re listening to Making It. And I run a company based around international education around mindset and we help people that are struggling or stressed with being able to find more joy and freedom in life.
It really started when my mum and dad who were working class, they worked hard. We had a low-cost government housing rental, two-bedroom place but their dream was to send their only child, myself, to private school to try to get a better start, a better education, common with some parents. But they worked their ass off so that I could go to a private school.
So all the friends I lived on the street with were going to the local state school with virtually zero guarantee of a university education whereas I was going to a private school where you have a very high probability of university education. And at ten years old, I’ve been in private school for six years. They put the fees up to a point where my mum and dad really couldn’t afford it so they had the conversation with me at ten years old saying listen, we can continue to keep you in this school but mum will have an extra job at night and you won’t be able to see her.
So I’m like hey, no worries, I’ll go to the state school. That was the other option. And what happened for my parents at that point is they lost their certainty in their child’s future education. Now it was down to me. And so leaving for the summer recess, during that summer holiday my mum would reiterate drill into me, if you don’t work hard now, you’ll end up emptying the dustbins of the kids you were just at school within their big mansions. If you don’t really push yourself, you’re going to end up living on a park bench for the rest of your life was kind of the message I got and it scared the crap out of me into becoming an instant overachiever.
And I can trace everything back to that part of my life where everything following that I was number one. I was the award winner in everything, ironically, other than academia. I was never a smart kid at school. I worked hard to get into the top set of math because I thought if I didn’t, I’d be a dunce and that would be it. I’d be working in a factory for the rest of my life, sweeping floors.
But I became an overachiever in that moment. It made me a millionaire in my early twenties. I dropped out of school at 16 but I went and I worked my ass off, gave me a good work ethic but it was always because I needed to achieve because I needed to prove, because I needed to avoid the life disaster that I would become if I didn’t. And that gave me lots of toys, buying Ferraris and flying Concorde while my friends were still working in college.
But it was so unfulfilling, so draining. And I nearly killed myself driving home at 02:00 in the morning, leaving the office and hit an intersection of 60 miles an hour because I’d worked 133 hours that week, consistently for week after week. And that’s when it really woke me up. And as an event in childhood that shaped me, you don’t know at the time, you only joined the dots looking back.
But when I saw that, I’m like, whoa, if I hadn’t have swapped schools, if my mom hadn’t have, through love of her child, not drilled into me relentlessly at ten years old, that if I didn’t work hard and achieve, my life was over. And when I saw this experience for what it was, it was earth shattering for me because I saw the power of patterns in childhood.
I started my first business at 17. I had quite a few jobs between the age of 16 and 17. I don’t really get on that well with external authority, so they weren’t long lasting jobs. I actually ended up working for my dad for a short while. He owned a scrap yard, a junkyard and two employees. I was the tea boy, but I didn’t want to work for my dad. Parents never pay you enough. I got out and set up my first business with my last week’s wages, which was $40 a week from my dad, and went and bought some toys and sold them on a flea market and kind of built up.
And Pete’s toys was my first business. I remember making my first thousand pounds and I was amazed because I’d made it, not earned it. And there was a difference there. I’m like, no one can take away my toolbox. So I got into business. But the key for me was I also got into personal growth. I discovered that at 17, and that was an incredible moment because I’m like, whoa, you mean there’s an industry that teaches success? Holy cow, that’s what I wanted to learn at school, not algebra.
So I threw myself into personal growth from the achiever driven insecurities of avoiding failure. I was focused on goal setting, goal achieving, making money, being better, faster, stronger, easier sleep, hacking, all of that stuff. Hence the burnout at an early age, 24 years old. And for me, personal growth was the catalyst for being able to combine what I was learning and wrapping it up through the vehicle of business. It gave me the certainty that I could handle the uncertainty. It gave me the goal direction. It taught me time management and all this kind of stuff.
So, yeah, that, unbeknownst to me at the time, was setting up 35 years now as a personal growth junkie, but also teacher. But at the time, it was really just giving me the tools to go achieve because that’s what I thought I needed. There’s been many people that have helped me along the way to making it, and I’m very blessed that live in a time in human history where we have so much more access to other people’s wisdom, other people’s experience, other people’s advice that have walked the paths that we wish to walk and we’re able to learn from.
And I’d be remiss without mentioning a few people. Number one mentor I have is a gentleman called George Zalucki, and he was teaching mastery of emotional response. You mean that I can choose whether I get upset or not? I thought personal development was teaching me how to avoid being upset and know how to deal with it when it happens. And that opened my eyes to a whole different world, which translated into what I’m probably best known for right now, which is in personal growth, understanding human behavior.
Because we experience life, we don’t do life, we experience life. We experience predominantly through our emotions. We have amassed at how to work with, relate to, utilize on our side, rather than having to utilize us our emotions. I can predict the quality of life and how much stress you’ve got or how much stress you’ve got trying to avoid stress. So, yeah, George Zalucki, he was a huge mentor and learning point in my life.
Tony Robbins is another influence. I had the privilege of working as an experienced trainer for Tony for over a decade. So that gave me a lot of insight and understanding and working with people. The best piece of advice I got from Tony Robbins was actually an offhanded comment at a leadership meeting that I was in, where we’re having a small training from Tony, and he threw this one line out that just hit me. It may have sailed over the head of a lot of other people, and I’m sure everyone has their own things that impact them, but for me, this hit me square in the eyes.
He said, if you want to get good working with people, get good at spotting patterns, because there’s only so many of them. And that turned me into a pattern recognition machine. I didn’t care about the story, and that was a big one. As coaches, we know this, we get sucked into stories, and people suck themselves into stories, and really what they’re looking at is patterns. My pattern of overachieving was hidden by my story of wanting to be the best. I didn’t realize until later on that it was all about that interaction in that summer recess when I was ten years old, plain as day. What is it set up? It sets up a pattern. Why? Because our thinking is habitual.
I think the term made it, rather than making it has a finality about it that doesn’t align with the human experience. I’ve been to the gym now. Oh, have I made it? Am I healthy? No, it’s a lifestyle. How often do I need to focus on health? Till my last breath. Making it under that definition as a continuous process. And it’s continually aligning with who I am right now and what that means, which was different 20 years ago, which will be different 20 years from now, I’m sure.
I used the whole aspect of success or making it as a way to prove to the world that I was good enough because I dropped out of school. Making it meant having enough money that I didn’t need a job, that I could do it on my own. I didn’t need the piece of paper to walk into an office to sit down for an interview to someone, say, okay, I’ll pay you some money every week. So, for me, making it was, can I be independent? Not wealthy, not rich. I mean, that would be nice.
But making it was just, can I survive without walking back with my tail between my legs saying, it didn’t work, I need a job? That was back then. And it had an upside. As I said, the upside was it made me financially successful. At a young age, I was running multiple companies, buying supercars and blah, blah, blah in my early twenties. I was very successful. I’d made it and was massively unfulfilled. And that was the point where I started to have the switch as to what making it really meant.
As I teach a lot of my students now, there is a huge difference between a life chasing what you think is success and a life chasing fulfillment. Trying to prove to the world you’re good enough to get over insecurities as a young man dissipates when you shine the light of truth on it, that nobody gives a crap, nobody cares about my story, nobody’s judging my story. If they do it for a microsecond to try to deflect the fact, they think you’re judging theirs. For me, making it was about being good enough until I realized that, wow, I nearly killed myself.
Thankfully, no one else was in the car. By trying to make it, what the hell am I making? I thought I was chasing freedom, and I’m basically putting myself in a prison. I’m building a monster that’s trapping me. Well, that’s not what I thought the freedom on my own business would be. How did I get here? Well, I got Higgs, I built a business, and I’m still unfulfilled, always, because I haven’t got two businesses, right? So I got two businesses. I’m still not quite fulfilled. I need three, four, five. Then I’ll finally make it. When I catch the next rabbit, I’ll finally have made it.
And of course, you can’t catch the rabbit of fulfillment by running on the track of achievement. The two aren’t correlated, not because I’m not good enough at achieving stuff. We can all set and achieve goals. I was a master at that. I just fell completely on understanding why I was achieving them. Making it now is very different. Making it now is understanding that fulfillment comes from a change in priority of the needs. Instead of being driven by the need for significance, aligning with growth and contribution. I was trying to be the best version of myself, but there was no contribution.
It was trying to be a better version of me, to prove to everyone I was a better version of me. They say your mission in life is to discover your gift. Your purpose in life is to give it away. I was like, oh, no, I just want to take every gift I can get to show everybody I’ve got a lot of gifts, and universe doesn’t support that. So now, being more in line with making a difference, making an impact, being able to put a smile on somebody else’s face, going to sleep at night regardless of the financial position.
I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life. I’ve been unemployable for 33 years. I’m not fussed about making money, losing money, that’s a roller coaster I enjoy riding. I can live on dog food for six months if I need to. But the making a difference, the turning over at night, knowing that I’ve helped somebody, that’s making it, that’s where I’m at.
One of the biggest mistakes people make on the road to making it is they have a fixed goal in mind that in order for me to feel successful, this has to happen, or I need to have achieved x. They then get focused on not feeling great until that happens. They play the game of I’ll feel great when I’ve made it. And for some people that could be when I found my dream partner, when I get my dream body, when I’ve made my first million. They lose the joy in the journey because my rule for happiness says I’ll be happy when I’ll be fulfilled, when I’ll be content when I make it.
And I know what making it looks like. I’ve written down my goals on my vision board. There’s a criteria set up and you miss out on all of life between now and then. If there was a mistake, I would encourage people to avoid in the pursuit of making it, it would be by all means set goals. By all means have aspirations. You should set your targets high. But play the game of feel great now, not feel great when. I feel great now because I’m on track. I feel great now because I just learned a painful lesson in business. I feel great now because I know at some point this situation that I’m resisting will serve me. It’s an amazing level of training to give yourself to play feel great now rather than feel great when.
I think the rarest question, I don’t know if I’ve ever been asked this or not, but certainly the rarest subject matter is around what does it mean after you’re gone? Everybody’s too busy trying to make it now. But if we use movie metaphor and I’m starring in the movie of my life, if you go to the Fast and the Furious, then Dwayne Johnson doesn’t get to keep the cars at the end of the movie. They’re props. So everything in our movie, our life that we are trying to make happen or accumulate or milestones we reached, we don’t get to take that with us.
So why are you making it as a great line of inquiry in terms of what does it mean after you’re gone? And this is where for me personally, the answer to that would be back to the movie example, we don’t get to take with us what we achieved in the storyline. We don’t get to keep the props that were built for that particular movie. But we do get to take only one thing into our next movie. Now we don’t even remember the script of the previous movie because that would confuse us in the next one.
But what do we get to take with us? We get to take our accumulated acting experience. So who do we become is where I focus on making it, not what do I get, what can I achieve, what can I hoard, what can I put on the wall. From that perspective, what is it about making it and how does it relate to after we’re gone, your legacy becomes who did you become? Not what did you achieve.
I’m Peter Sage, and you’ve been listening to Making It, and you can find more about me at petersage.com. That’s P-E-T-E-R-S-A-G-E dot com. You’ll also find the link in the show notes. And if you’d like to know more about me, you can follow me on social my hashtag is @therealpetersage.
Melinda Cohan: Making It is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as To Lead Is Human and Neuroscience of Coaching. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making It, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It is the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you, and we’ll see you next time.