Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 0:00
It’s hard to say no to to higher ups, right? What is advantage mapping? Let’s talk more about that. I really need to have some more detailed discussions with this type of person. Oftentimes it’s fear that’s holding people back from moving forward and taking that next step.

Chris Villanueva 0:14
Welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast.

Chris Villanueva 0:18
And welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast, where our goal is not only to help you land your dream job, but to help you live your best life. Today’s episode is for anyone who’s felt like they’re grinding away in corporate life without a sense of fulfillment, because today is also about overcoming a lack of energy, purpose and direction, and replacing it with a self directed approach that will put you in charge of your career.

Chris Villanueva 0:50
We’re diving deep into the stories and strategies of someone who changed chased success relentlessly, only to find that it wasn’t the key to a balanced, meaningful life. My next guest is Mike garden, founder of rejoin coaching, where he helps achievement oriented professionals break corporate dependence, build self directed lives. Mike is a former trader turned entrepreneur who also holds an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship.

Chris Villanueva 1:18
He has built a career in online media, previously holding [email protected] for views.com and was a managing editor at the simple dollar. Mike is widely quoted in media, including Huffington Post, Forbes Business Insider and Yahoo News right now, Mike resides in the beautiful Midwest with his wife and three young boys and the families building their side hustle, the quote book just as a side note, I got married in early 2023 I own a quote book myself.

Chris Villanueva 1:48
Mike was gracious enough to send it over, and you just write the funniest quotes in your marriage, and it’s just brought me so much joy. So thanks to Mike for that gift. Today, we’re gonna explore the journey of breaking free from the corporate grind and learning how to craft a self directed, holistic approach to work and life. If you’ve ever wondered how to map out your strengths, run life experiments or take control of your career at your own terms, this episode is for you. So without further ado, here is my garden in the career warrior podcast. My mike, it’s awesome to have you back on the show. How are you doing?

Mike Gardon 2:25
I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Chris Villanueva 2:29
Awesome. I’m going to kick into something that I believe is going to prime this episode. I mean, your story, man, is great. Was reviewing your website, you know, thinking about our past conversations, and I think so much of what you’ve done in your own life inspires your clients, the people who you’ve spoken with, even in your own media and episodes and things like that.

Chris Villanueva 2:52
I’m going to read something from your website, because I think it’s it’s going to inspire a good question. You said I chased success and money like a type A madman, until I realized there was no fulfillment there. Work equaled success for me, and I pursued it like a robot. I felt like I had to sacrifice myself in order to get it. Now I know better. Life isn’t one dimensional. It’s a full stack, creative, work, family, relationships, health, spirit.

Chris Villanueva 3:18
Now my goal in life is to be balanced what I call a full stack human to do that in 2018 I decided to break my career, my relationship with work, and build a holistic life where I was balanced, attentive and still achievement focused AF, it’s just what that I wanted my achievement to be mine and not someone else’s. So we designed a way out of corporate work by taking a risk, managed, methodical approach. So tell us more about that story and how you designed your way out of corporate work.

Mike Gardon 3:52
2016 2018 starting a family and I was really raised, you know, as a very hard working person, hard work was a was a big value and I think as all of us start we we develop our model of success based off of, you know, maybe, maybe close people to us, but also just society at large, right?

Mike Gardon 4:17
We get all of these context clues about what we should do, what success is, what it looks like, what you buy, all of that kind of stuff and, yeah, I think when we’re young, that’s the model we take and you know, 2018 ish, I’m starting to have kids, and I’m I’ve been in my career for a while, and I’ve bounced around, and I have tried really hard to go after success, but I just took a look at my life, and I said, Is this what I what I want? Is this actually the model of success that I want? And you know, it wasn’t and it took a lot of sort of introspection, and it took a lot of me being willing to say, this isn’t.

Mike Gardon 4:59
Right for me, yeah, and then giving myself attitude to explore what is right for me. But it was just a critical moment where I looked out and I said, All right, like I’ve got a couple young kids. I got another one on the way. I’ve got maybe 15 to 18 more years left with them, you know, in my home before they go out and I started thinking about what that person would be looking at and feeling and what what I wanted that version of me to be like, and so I just decided to make some changes, and I really didn’t know where to start, but I knew that Success for me was much larger than work.

Mike Gardon 5:36
Whereas work had been the primary focus, it was a way for me to try to prove my worth and to build an identity, and I said, No, actually, that’s not all. You know what all of life is. So what is that? That’s where I started to explore, again, my version of success, which I kind of created, the full stack, Full Stack Life, you know, model, I guess that’s what I use, and I can talk about what that means.

Mike Gardon 6:03
But all right, so if I have a larger view of success, how does work fit into it, and how do I engineer it to give myself what I need internally and what the people around me need from me, which is my best, my best energy, my best guidance, my best presence with them and how do I make an impact, rather than taking orders or building something you know, that is part of someone else’s dream?

Mike Gardon 6:32
How do I take what I have to offer the world, which I wasn’t quite sure of, to be honest with you at this time either, but how do I figure that out and then bring it to the world where I have a real impact. So that’s where that all started.

Chris Villanueva 6:44
I love that story, and I’ve never considered myself to be like the the guy who just focuses only on, like, achievement, success and money, but I have found myself in pockets like that. I remember one time I came home to my wife and she just was like, like, can you talk about anything else besides work right now?

Chris Villanueva 7:03
Like you’re only thinking about work and just like all the things that you have to do? And I realized that my mind, like, the only things that were consuming it at that time were just things that had to do with work and what I had to accomplish next week and KPIs and all those things like that, and I got lost. I was like, it’s it’s so much more about that. It’s about this family you’re building.

Chris Villanueva 7:23
It’s about your relationships with people. It’s about what you do outside of it. Almost every single person probably listening to this episode can probably relate to that, having too much of a focus on that. I mean, this is the career warrior podcast, so in thinking about that full stack human life. How do you help clients define, you know, what a successful career in life looks like, if it’s not just diving into just like the money and the metrics and things like that?

Mike Gardon 7:53
Yeah, I think before I answer that, I mean, money is important, no question about it, and I am not suggesting otherwise, yeah, but money is a tool. It has a place. It has a place in your mind, and it can’t be the central occupier and metric. So whatever you want to define as success, whatever ambitions you have, are totally okay, but you have to put things in context, and you have to realize that money is a, you know, again, a tool that you can use for whatever, whatever it is that you want.

Mike Gardon 8:25
So with success, success is a really difficult one, and it feels, I think, to anybody going through the questioning of their model of success or who they are, it can feel very lonely, because, again, we pick up cues. Just walk out the door, walk into a mall. What turn on social media? Right? Like you just get bombarded with cues of what other people think success is and so one of the ways I teach people to think about this is through a process of inversion.

Mike Gardon 8:53
I mean, think about the problem backwards. So don’t think about working yourself to success. Think about and envision your life as successful at a point in time. So I used, you know, I used when I was an empty nester, basically, that was my thought exercise. When my kids leave the house, what do I want them to feel like? What do I want my life to feel like? It’s a feeling. It isn’t necessarily just a thing and start to put some parameters around that.

Mike Gardon 9:21
Okay, so what does that person not do anymore? What does that person not accept or tolerate in their life? What are they doing? What does that person want now, as a parent of you know, let’s say college age three, college age boys at the time, which was it feel like? What is it? You can start stepping into that vision I call it’s not really a goal.

Mike Gardon 9:44
It’s more of a vision of who you are. And then you can work backwards from that and think about, well, what are the actions that person would take and start to do those today? So that’s kind of how I work backwards, and you can do this from, I do it also from the standpoint. I call it future visioning, but like you, and this is morbid, but like you on your deathbed, what would you be proud of, right? And what would you have regret for? And there’s a lot.

Mike Gardon 10:11
There’s a few great books on this subject, Regrets of the Dying, I think, is the the number one, it kind of outlines five big regrets people have and I just said, like, how do I live regret free? How do I how do I break my attachment to security, to these default programmings, one by one? How do I recognize them? Break that attachment and start to let my life go in a direction that it really wants to go.

Mike Gardon 10:38
I always feel like there’s this battle between your heart and your head, your your heart actually knows where you want to it’s the driver. You got to let that thing point you in a direction and then trick your own mind into allowing you to do that, but then channeling your mind and your brain and all of your acumen to build the plan that actually gets you there. So I love, I love the idea of working backwards and thinking from that future self and trying to work back.

Chris Villanueva 11:05
Exactly, yeah and for those of you who, like, still can’t wrap your head around this, I mean, like, think about what the alternative is to what you just proposed. Mike, I mean, the alternative is seeing all these things on social media and reflecting on what your friends and family have done in their own personal life, what your dad has done and what you haven’t done, and things like that, and you’re comparing yourself like the only other alternative is to compare yourself to other people, and that’s just gonna lead you to sadness and not the right thing.

Chris Villanueva 11:37
So I wholeheartedly vouch for that. I think anyone who does take some time to reflect on what their future self should be, it’s more than work. It really is that holistic approach, like you’ve you’ve detailed. Mike,

Mike Gardon 11:50
Yeah, so I kind of came up with this full stack version. I mean, Success to me is being in a spot where I have creative flow. I am able to express myself and the things that are going on in my head and the concepts and, you know, the all of the stuff that I think about, the problems that I think about the and how I dedicate my time, literally on earth, to solving these ideas of, like, how do we change and how do we become more adaptable and resilient?

Mike Gardon 12:20
So creative flow to me is massive, powerful health in all aspects, like, what does it mean to be healthy at 80 years old, 90 years old, being able to pick up my grandkids and those types of things present relationships. So think about how much work and stress of work being put on us impacts our relationships.

Mike Gardon 12:42
Well, how could I I was thinking about, how could I engineer my situation to not have as much of that? And then unbreakable spirit is just something that I’ve kind of coined. It’s like that spirit of hope and possibility and being infectious with people. I dig that so that when you inevitably encounter setbacks you can, you know, think about them as happening for you, and it’s not the end of the world and then the last one is abundant finances.

Mike Gardon 13:08
Finances matter, like I said, and having enough being secure in what you have or what you are building, it does matter at the end of the day, we I want to go on vacations. I want to be able to give my kids the best life that they can. I want to, you know, I like stuff too. So being able to have those abundant finances and then with that, you know, vision of what success is, yeah, then my next question, you know, in my head was, okay, well, how do I, how do I engineer, what are the, what are the parameters that I need, and what’s the person that I need to step into being in order to get there.

Chris Villanueva 13:46
People I’ve spoken to, a lot of people listening to this podcast, are at a crossroads in their career. I know that back in 2018 there was a lot that you did to figure out your own journey. So I want to talk about this concept of advantage mapping. This is something that you, I think, explained really well to me in our last conversation. But what is advantage mapping? Let’s talk more about that.

Mike Gardon 14:10
Yeah, so I want to set the stage. I mean, 2018 I’m How old was I? 38 something like that. I got three kids. I’ve had a deep career already. I’ve been in finance. I’ve been in some, like, high growth startup situations, and then I’ve been in corporate Amen. I’m like, I gotta do something new.

Mike Gardon 14:31
So I had the feeling right? And I’m looking at what success is, and I kind of define it in this way and then I’m like, I really don’t understand me. I don’t understand me, what I’m uniquely good at, what is the intersection of power and influence and creativity that I have deep in here, like I hadn’t let been able to let it out and because I was in finance, I studied a lot of great investors, and you know, Warren Buffett and Charlie.

Mike Gardon 14:59
Hunger are among the best for just wisdom in general and Warren Buffett has a concept called circle of competence, and basically it’s know what you know, know what you don’t know, and stay around the stuff that you know, and I thought about that, and I’m like, That makes a lot of sense. But competence isn’t the only thing when we’re talking about life, it’s, I thought about it from the angle of, well, how does a trader come up with an edge?

Mike Gardon 15:26
How does a trader come up with a thesis and a advantage where they feel like they have have stacked the odds in their favor of of winning or of making money, or of creating whatever it is that they want to create. You know, no single investment is is guaranteed to work, and so how does this happen? And so I started thinking about, instead of competence, I started thinking about advantage.

Mike Gardon 15:49
How do we take what we’re good at, understand it, and then leverage it on our pathway? And so I looked around a lot for like, programs, or, you know, coaching, and there’s, there’s things like, what’s your zone of genius and your icky guy? And there’s, there’s a lot of different frameworks, but I didn’t, I just felt like they were incomplete, at least from my start.

Mike Gardon 16:08
So I just started mapping this out. I said, All right, well, where, how can you create advantage? And I came up with, basically eight ways, and maybe there’s a lot more, but at the time, and I still haven’t changed it so, but basically eight areas. So in a lot of these, I had neglected So curiosity, just being able to follow your true curiosities gives you an advantage over someone who is just doing something, because it’s the cool thing.

Mike Gardon 16:36
They’re taking the default, right? They’re saying, like, oh, startups are cool. Like, maybe I can make a lot of money there, but if they’re not actually curious and energized by them, you’re gonna have an advantage just right off the bat. Okay, so how else do we stack up? So curiosity was one that I just really had completely neglected. I was going, I was working for startups, just because, right? Because I was, you know, I was enamored by that world.

Chris Villanueva 17:01
Yeah, Curiosity will drive learning too. It’s like, I want to learn more about these things, which will propel your success, too.

Mike Gardon 17:07
Exactly, because you’re not, you just you don’t know everything, so you have to be able to have longevity, you know, along that pathway. So curiosity and energy were huge for me. I always thought about time, managing time, but I never thought about really managing energy, and what are the things that and concepts that energize me? And so I literally would go out and talk to people, you know, friends and work, co workers and stuff.

Mike Gardon 17:28
I’m like, when do I start getting really pumped up and animated? Like, what am I? What are we talking about? What are the concepts? What am I doing? And I got a lot of feedback that way. So, curiosity, energy, expertise, obviously, your skills, what you have acquired over in your career, those like kind of hard skills. and then I broke out aptitudes as a separate one, which is more like things that are just innate.

Mike Gardon 17:51
Like, what are you just innately good at? I mean, you can have expertise in that, but you know, math or talking to people, or having empathy, like some of those things are, are just innate to you your personality.

Mike Gardon 18:02
So how do you just, how are you wired as a set? And I believe you can change personality, but like, how are you wired knowing that and understanding it, and putting yourself in situations and playing games where you are wired to succeed in those places is a complete advantage, isn’t it? And then support, so people, money, assets, all of those different things, right?

Mike Gardon 18:24
How can you use those as tools? Money, especially it’s a tool to to give yourself an advantage, and then how you learn like you’re learning style, understanding that matters greatly in terms of your success on a given given career path, and then how you basically update your thinking and make decisions, and so I think about the first two, curiosity and energy as the what, where should I be pointing my direct where’s my North Star?

Mike Gardon 18:51
What should I be doing? What is the broad area that I should be working in? The next few expertise, app, the two personality support. That’s kind of the how, if I can find an intersection of those for me, I’m going to be unstoppable, and I know I’m going to be able to influence people along that pathway and then the last two learning and decisions are really the when, if I’m not learning at the clip that I need to or updating my thinking and making, you know, very good odds based decisions over the long term.

Mike Gardon 19:26
Then I’m going to start, you know, I’m going to struggle, or I’m going to or I’m going to propel myself forward very fast, and so by looking at those two, you can kind of get a feel for, like, well, I want to make this big transformation, but how? How long might this take? Okay, it’s probably gonna take longer. So what are the interim milestones? Where do I maybe need to get to next on my journey towards this grand vision of what success is? So when I mapped those out and kind of created that stack, I felt like I was much more able to articulate that kind of secret sauce within me.

Mike Gardon 19:59
I Found areas that like speaking, for instance, being on hosting a podcast, like I never would have thought of those things, but for going back and talking to people and them telling me what lights me up and what I’m good at, and understanding my personality like I’m an introvert. I love having one on one conversations, but I don’t do well in groups, and so being on podcasts, it’s like, I’m just shooting here with Chris. It’s just one on one, and we’re gonna broadcast other people. Like, the pressure’s off. I can be myself in that situation. So I’m not putting myself in situations where I’m speaking on big stages and that kind of thing.

Mike Gardon 20:34
I would rather have a much deeper conversation about real problems and real issues and help people that way. So that’s one of the ways I kind of have stepped into using that Advent, what I call that advantage stack. Yeah, along my pathway.

Chris Villanueva 20:48
Most people don’t have that type of self awareness in their lives. I’ve even been confused before too, like there’s so much floating around here, so many different things that I feel like I’m good at, but to really take the time to map out those advantages in those eight different areas, I think that’s just so powerful and so one thing we talked about was this idea of experiments, and maybe this is the bridge that gets you to where you need to go next.

Chris Villanueva 21:14
Because I’m sure some people are thinking, Okay, if I map out all these eight things, how does that lead me to decide what job I’m going to be at next. So how do you kind of connect it to where the job, your future job, and figuring out your advantages?

Mike Gardon 21:30
Yeah, so I think about it like, like Wayfinding. So you have a you have a future vision. You have this grand vision North Star, where you want to get to. But it’s a feeling. It’s a fuzzy thing. It isn’t necessarily, Oh, get this job. And then you have this really solid foundation of who you are, understanding of who you are, and what you’re good at, from advantage mapping. And so how do we connect the two?

Mike Gardon 21:53
Well, if you’re on a journey, if you’re walking through the woods, for instance, you don’t necessarily know the next step, and you have to your mind has to be open to multiple pathways of getting to that final destination, like we often think, we just make decisions one after one, and we should. We’re supposed to know the way. But life doesn’t work like that.

Mike Gardon 22:19
There’s a lot of uncertainty in life and anything in the future. So our brains have to be able to envision multiple pathways. So once you have your kind of direction, of like, the what that you should be going after the direction. So let’s say, say you want to work in real estate, you work in corporate finance and you want to work in real estate, pretty similar, but, like, just as an example, yeah, if you know your why, if you know your why, you want to do that, and you have some parameters, given your view of success, you can start to imagine, let’s say, three different ways that you would get there. One is, you could start a fund.

Mike Gardon 22:56
You could start your own fund, right? And maybe that’d be scary, maybe that you don’t have the connections go back to your advantage map, what? How can you? How could you do that? One might be just getting a job or working networking into a specific company that you want, which requires a different way of thinking. And then there’s another, let’s say, pathway, which may be like you start to offer some particular niche of expertise as a consultant or a coach or something into, you know, into that industry, right? And depending on what you want out of working in real estate, that big sort of undefined thing, it starts to narrow your options.

Mike Gardon 23:34
It starts to define the next step. It’s not going to define the whole, the whole path, but all you need in Wayfinding is to understand and and have high odds that you’re taking the next step. What we do is we take our advantage stack. And I’m actually, I’m teaching this in in college right now. I’m teaching this, this whole system, to college students as a way to think about their careers from an experimental standpoint, which has been fascinating.

Mike Gardon 23:59
It’s my first semester teaching it, but it’s awesome. I teach them. I teach them the same stuff in the that’s in the the online course, deep foundation. Now we’re looking at multiple pathways, which I call creating our options portfolio. So a good money manager has never places one bet, he places a few different bets, because something might go might go wrong. So now you have three, three possible opportunities or options for working in real estate.

Chris Villanueva 24:27
Do you place these at the same time? Or are these kind of like one after the other? How do you how do you map that up?

Mike Gardon 24:34
So we try to get somebody to think about multiple pathways and no more than three at a time. Because some people have the mindset that they need to do one thing at a time. And then some people have the mindset they’re like, Oh, well, I could do a whole bunch of like, I’m, you know, they’re like, me, they’re ADHD, and they’re so wide that they need some filters to narrow things down.

Mike Gardon 24:57
So with those, people will be like, All right. List them all out. Now let’s stack rank the top three, top three, and let’s go after those first and then go to the next one. So this is where experimentation comes in. Let’s say I have three pathways. You can think about running an experiment as just the next piece of information that you need that tells you to continue on that pathway or not.

Mike Gardon 25:24
So that might an experiment. Might be talking to the right person and asking somebody a question. It might be shadowing somebody in a job. It might be understanding how to create an offer if you’re if you if you want to be a consultant or a coach, right? Sometimes people think this is scattered, but the alternative is people pick, often, pick one area, and they think about the 50 steps that they need to do that come in the future, and they get overwhelmed and procrastinate and don’t make any progress, because they’re, they’re sort of future casting what they have to do in in the future.

Mike Gardon 26:08
But ours is, it’s just really simple, what’s the next thing you need to do? And your next move might be a move forward on all three pathways, because your next step might be, Oh, shoot. I really need to have some more detailed discussions with this type of person. And by that’s going to give me information along all three pathways.

Mike Gardon 26:28
So it ends up being one action that is applicable to three pathways, and then you say, Oh, I learned this, and I don’t like that. Okay, boom, we closed that pathway. Now we’re on two. What’s the next piece of information you need in order to know that you’re moving forward. And it’s not reading books, right? It is getting out of the building, talking to people, taking action and making it really low stakes, just making it based on the next piece of information that tells you to continue or to stop.

Mike Gardon 26:59
So this all comes from finance where, like, if you’re a good trader, you’re placing a small bet, and you’re seeing how the market reacts. And as the market goes in your favor, good traders start to double down and triple down and quadruple down on the way up. People always talk about buy low, sell high, but good traders will, like, double and triple in on momentum, and if it goes against them, they cut their losses.

Mike Gardon 27:24
It’s easier to say I was wrong to a small bet, and you’re not as invested in all of the actual, all of the extra work that you did, and that’s how you get outsized gains. That’s how you stack odds in your favor. So that’s, this is what we’re teaching people keep your job, understand your unique advantages, stack them in a way that you feel very confident, and then build that experimental mindset of like you’re not supposed to know everything you change.

Mike Gardon 27:58
Think about who you were at 18, you made a decision to get us to get some job, like, you can’t blame that person. We’re learning and evolving all the time. So we have to take an experimental mindset.

Chris Villanueva 28:09
Exactly. I mean, the experiments thing is such a genius way of phrasing it, because at the end of the day, you don’t know whether you’re going to be, like, 100% successful at something. You don’t know whether you’re going to fall in love with something. It’s like you have to try it out and I think by taking these many bets, I think that’s such a smart way to think about things. I mean, people think that.

Chris Villanueva 28:32
I mean, I know me personally, I feel like I could plan and map out my life 10 to 15 years ahead of me. And it’s good to have that North Star, like you said, but it’s, not realistic to know everything. You have to experiment.

Mike Gardon 28:44
So this is the biggest hopefully listeners will maybe take this and investigate it a little bit more. But there’s this mental model called the map is not the territory, and what it means is that when you have a map, it’s an abstraction of the real thing. So if you go out and your map, your map is going to differ from the actual terrain that you are walking on. And you can’t take the map literally, and you can’t take that take it’s a guide for sure.

Mike Gardon 29:14
You’re going to experience things that are not articulated in the map. And so when we plan super far ahead, and think we have to nail the plan. The plan becomes the ends instead of the means, and so you have to keep that in mind, like we have to have an idea of our destination. We have to have a rough idea of how to get there, or at least how to measure progress along the way. But we can’t take that plan as literal, and so when you start to think that way, you start to think about how futile it is to spend a whole bunch of time right now on paper, mapping something out five years from now, because you’re going to change as a person, and you’re better off spending really.

Mike Gardon 29:59
Real time and energy understanding, you know, at a more at a smaller level, just are you on the right track? Does it still feel good to you? What do you want to change? How do you want to update? I think about it as ane, bumper lanes on a bowling on a bowling alley.