Making It – Episode 166
The Myth of Making It (Dr. John Austin)
Dr. John Austin: I’m Dr. John Austin, and you’re listening to Making It. I run a company called Reaching Results, and we help leaders create more effective and safer work environments all around the world to improve their safety and operations through behavioral leadership.
I’m the only person in my family to go to college. I grew up around people who were laborers. They worked for a living in real jobs, hard jobs in many cases. I was surrounded by people who loved me and loved their families. And I saw them working in jobs that were difficult and sometimes unsafe, both physically and psychologically unsafe. So like for abusive bosses and kind of jerks in many cases and also places that put them in unsafe conditions. So I saw people working hard to put food on the table for their families, earning hourly wages that weren’t usually enough, and feeling like they didn’t have a choice in what they did. So they felt forced to work in this kind of crappy environment.
It was always from day one that my mom said, you are going to college if it kills me. And if you don’t, I’m going to kill you. It’s funny because she’s 4 foot 10 and 80 pounds, and yet she’s a force. And so it was known at a very early age. Like in my world, it was like, there’s no other option. You will go to college for something, it doesn’t matter what, but you’re going to do that. I had so little exposure to what that even meant, that when people asked me what I wanted to do, I didn’t know for the longest time. And then in high school, I encountered my homeroom teacher was an accounting teacher. And I didn’t know anything about accounting. I didn’t even take his class.
But then I realized maybe I want to be an accountant because they work in an office. And that was my level of understanding of professional life. Like, if I’m not outside digging, then I’m a success. So I went to college and then to grad school. Because I learned that in college with a psychology degree, I didn’t have many career options in psychology. And I learned that people get paid sometimes to go to grad school if you get in the right place. They don’t pay you much, but they’d be paying me to learn and get a PhD. So that’s what I did.
And when I graduated with my PhD, I became a professor. That was really what I wanted to do. Teach. I was a professor for 15 years, teaching and research. I did a lot of research and published a lot of papers, was constantly writing. And my my grad students were too. And along the way, I realized that what I really wanted to do was to teach people who would use what I was teaching right away to make the world a better place. A lot of times the students I was teaching, while I loved it, their top questions would be like, you know, is this going to be on the test? Or how do I get an A in this class? Rather than how do I use this? How do we tweak these concepts and techniques around behavior and behavior change to make the world a better place?
I started my business because I felt like at the university I wasn’t getting to that point. And I wanted to work with leaders who could immediately apply the concepts and techniques. And starting a business allowed me to do that. I didn’t know if I could succeed doing it. It required a lot of learning and behavior change on my part. And I thought that was exciting. I mean, it wasn’t just overnight that I started my business. I started doing consulting work when I started being a professor, almost in the first couple of years to supplement my income. A lot of people think that professors make a ton of money, but they really don’t.
And so the first thing that I tried was in a local manufacturer who, who needed help. They reached out to the psychology department and someone put them in touch with me. They had more injuries than they wanted. I had done some projects like that for research, but this was one of my first consulting projects. So I went and charged them almost nothing. Cause I really didn’t know what I was doing. And it was a learning experience. It was a small manufacturer, like a paper company, and I helped them reduce their injuries. Their site leader really liked what we did.
And so at one of their annual meetings with all the other companies involved, he told the whole group what they were doing. And then I started to get calls. And so in the next five years, I’d say I did probably 60 implementations of behavior based safety and helping people succeed. Every time they succeeded, they told other people about it who also wanted to get in on it.
There was a time in my life when I went from project to project or goal to goal and thinking that as soon as I get my master’s thesis, life will be better, everything will be better. And then it was like, as soon as I get my PhD and I finish this darn dissertation, life will be better and I’ll have a good life and I’ll have made it. And then getting a professorship, you know, that was like, oh, I made it. And I realized that each of those wasn’t really what I thought it was, it wasn’t the pinnacle of success or everything’s going to be better when you reach that goal. I think most of us discover that over time. Like, you have these repeated opportunities to earn something and then you earn it. It’s like, oh, okay, I have all the stressors and anxiety that I had before and everything’s not fully better.
So I’ve gotten to the point now where making it with my business and personal life is to have a work life that challenges me, where I continue to learn and have the opportunity to learn and work with really interesting people. I make enough money to live in a place that I want to live and have a safe place that is comfortable. Also, I have enough time to spend with my family and do cool things and be there for my son growing up and take him places and do interesting things with him. Those are the elements. And I guess along with time with my family, it’s time for friends too, which I haven’t always worked out. That’s kind of a work in progress, you know. So I don’t know if I feel like I’ve made it per se.
I mean, I feel super grateful for what I have, and I work on practicing that gratitude. I’m kind of a scientist at heart and a teacher I like to experiment with. Like, what if I changed my schedule in this way? Would I feel more comfortable? Would I get a better output? Would I learn more? What if I took this project on? Would I learn something important from that? And so maybe making it is about continually challenging myself without overstressing the system and making myself super anxious. So you need pressure. Somebody once told me, you need pressure to make diamonds. But too much pressure, not so good.
Every challenge makes it feel like once you’ve achieved that challenge, you will have made it or your life will be good and all that sort of thing. And I think that’s just a myth. Achieving things is not what makes your life good, in my opinion. So that’s one big lesson. But one of the biggest things that I learned in running my business was that I don’t need to grow it, hire a bunch of people and take over the world in order to be happy doing it. In fact, that makes me less happy, that kind of striving. And I discovered that the hard way, where my first contracts were more than I could do. So I hired people and I hired one, and then I hired another, and then another. And pretty quickly, like within the first year, I was doing all kinds of things that I really didn’t want to be doing it.
And I kind of powered through it for a few years, but I realized I was traveling 50 weeks a year, and that’s not what I set out to do in the first place at all. But I felt like I had to in order to succeed. At that point, succeed was paying the bills for all these wonderful people I had hired who were great at what they do, but it was putting me into difficulty and misery. And so I realized that instead of growing my company, it’s an equally valid way, is to work with the clients who I want to work with directly. I didn’t sign up to manage people, to do the work that I love to do. I wanted to do that work. And then I realized, oh, I’m the one who’s in control of this. Like, I’ve done this to myself. So I think that was a big lesson, was like listening to what my gut tells me and what my own wants and desires are and what my own life dictates. Let that dictate what I want to pursue in business.
From an early age, no matter what I wanted to do, my mom would tell me, you can do it if you work for it. And I would brush her off and say, well, yeah, but I couldn’t do that. And she’s like, yes, you could if you practice. That’s all it is. It’s putting in the hours and the time. And so I think that’s the advice that I’ve tried to follow. And I think the best advice I have ever had and the advice that I give my son right now, we have those same conversations. I still have to remind myself that when there’s something that I really want to do, absolutely, I can do it a hundred percent. I just have to say and do the right things. And for that to happen, I need to put in the time and give it some thought. Maybe a lot of trials, but you can get there if you want to. If you want it bad enough, you can do it.
My entire journey after leaving the university, I have had a coach. There’s never been a time when I haven’t. And the reason is to help me uncover those things that are inadvertently causing me harm or my business harm. But I think I classify them into time wasters. Sometimes in business, we want to do things because they’re new and interesting and like, oh, look at this AI app. And I want to do that. And, like, it’ll help me write my blogs. And so you go down this rabbit hole of time that is unrelated to the real thing that you’re trying to do. It’s fun and it’s interesting and it’s a huge time commitment and yet it does not really get you more clients and it doesn’t really pay off in the end.
And so I think the business world is littered with these things. Not all the ideas are worth doing. The key is creating the right environment for you, the right social environment to succeed is really important and I think you should consider it as a cost of doing business. It should be part of your budgeting process. It’s going to cost you money no matter what, whether you pay to be a member of a group or travel somewhere. There’s no fee, but it costs just as much. So I guess it’s worth thinking about like where do you want to be from now? What do you need to get better at? And then how will you challenge yourself to do that? How will you create some consequences or put consequences in the way of your behavior so that you rise to the challenge? Because if you sit in your office all day typing away, you’re never going to get better.
I got lots of feedback early on that I didn’t manage my time well. I often couldn’t estimate very well how long something was going to take and I over over committed and stuff like that, so I couldn’t deliver on time a lot of the times. I took that feedback and I worked with some of my colleagues. One of the guys developed an Excel pivot table. We all started to measure every week what we committed to and estimate how long it would take and then track how long it actually took. It would give us a score and we would share our scores every week with each other and debrief and try to get better. Someone gave me feedback that I needed to smile more. So I started tracking the number of times I smiled and reflecting on it changes your behavior.
I needed to get better at selling and so I became a student of marketing. I just find ways to make it reinforcing to do the things I know I need to do. The more you practice them and get feedback, you see yourself getting better and if you can measure it, even more powerful. That’s the way I try to live. And I feel like I do a pretty good job of identifying stuff and getting better through using that behavioral process of observation, data collection, reflection, making it reinforcing.
I really didn’t know what I wanted entirely. I knew I wanted to have a successful business, but I didn’t have that well defined. I thought that meant growing a business and making a bunch of money and stuff like that. And I discovered over time and reflection that it wasn’t what I thought it was, that there were other things that were really important to me, and I was a little embarrassed at the outset to admit that these were the things that were important to me because they weren’t what everybody else was saying. So, like, be yourself and discover what that is and what you really want and go after it. But don’t listen to everybody else and don’t be somebody who you’re not.
I’m Dr. John Austin and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find me at reachingresults.com and you can download a free copy of my new book Results on that website.
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