This Is Stopping You From Achieving Your Goals | Ep 194
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What's up, guys? Welcome back to Build. And today I want to talk about something that absolutely affects your business and your career growth and has nothing to do with it.

So today what I want to talk about is something that's really top of mind for me because I have a lot of people on my team and within my portfolio companies that have big lofty goals. You know, they really want to succeed and they're very clear about what they want for themselves. And so a lot of the times what happens when you have a really big lofty goals is the first thing you look at is what are the skills that I need to acquire that goal? Or what are the skills that I need to accomplish that goal? A lot of the times we look for those skills within like a set of job skills we need.

the set of professional skills we need. What I have just found over and over again is a lot of the times what stops people from achieving those lofty goals is actually not their job skills. It's actually not their professional skills. It's actually everything else outside of it. The number one thing that I have noticed is that what holds people back is not what they do inside of work, but it's what they do outside of work. And more specifically, it's who supports them outside of work.

Now, this can be whether you are an entrepreneur and you have your own business, or it can be whether you are a leader or even an individual contributor in a business and you have big lofty goals for yourself. And I'll tell you, this is top of mind for me because over the last couple of months, I have noticed a super strong correlation between support at home and work performance. And almost so much to the degree that I am pretty convinced as of this point in my life that there is a one-for-one correlation.

I'll kind of give you the buckets that I see existing. I think that what you have is dynamics that work well for people, right? And this doesn't matter your gender, but like just in terms of picking somebody that's your significant other, which is, I would say, your number one supporter. You either have somebody who's a cheerleader or you have somebody who's a quarterback.

Okay, I think that those two things work the best. A cheerleader is somebody who, they're not in the game with you, but they're on the sidelines and they're constantly cheering you on. They are your number one freaking fan. They come to every game. They wear your jersey. They paint on their chest, right? And they're just constantly encouraging you. And so they give you this energy that you can absolutely

excess when you're not at your best. And when you're not at your best, they don't say, hey, you should get off the field. They say, you fucking got this. You can do this. Remember who you are. Remember your goals, right? And so they're a constant source of encouragement. On the other hand, we have a quarterback. And a quarterback is somebody who is on the field with you. I would say that the quote that comes to mind for me is it's actually the only biblical verse about having a spouse, which is like you want somebody who you would go to war with. You look for a comrade in arms.

And so this person is your partner. They're your ride or die, and they are in it with you. When you are weak, they are strong. When they are strong, you are weak. You're constantly picking the other person up and reminding them of how great they are,

and even shouldering some of the work when they're maybe not at their best. And so you create this really healthy relationship because a lot of relationships, what happens is one person doesn't feel great and the other person goes and meets them down there, right? They get pulled down by that person. Whereas I think in a quarterback dynamic, when one person doesn't feel great, the other person uses their strength to pull that person back up. The people that I know that are able to accomplish their goals either have one of three things. They

They have a cheerleader, they have a quarterback, or they have themselves. And they don't have anybody interfering with their goals. And so the reason I like to bring this up is because I think it's the last place people look and listen, I am not here to be a relationship coach or preach to people about their relationships, but fuck.

there is no stronger correlation. If you really just think about it, I want to kind of break down the ways in which this affects your ability to achieve your goals. And this is not just me pulling this out of thin air. There was a Harvard study. It was David McCleland, I think is his name. And he found that 99% of your success depends on this one thing, which is your reference group.

Right? And your reference group is the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And now the reason I bring this up is because your spouse, your significant other, the person that you choose to have a romantic relationship with, takes a big disproportionate amount of that time that you spend with those five people. So it's like you've got five people, that person probably takes up 80%. And then the other four take up that 20%.

A lot of times people are like, yes, I understand. People I hang out with have a large influence over me. However, what they don't look at is the person that's closest to them. And they don't want to look at it because it's a very hard thing to see. And once you see it, really hard to unsee it. People look at their friends. They look at networking groups. They look at their boss. They look at their co-workers. They look at mentors. But they miss one thing. They miss their significant other, right? They miss that one person they spend the most time with.

And if you change your reference group and you change the people you spend the most time with, you will change your life. And these people have more influence over you achieving your goals than your skills. Yeah, I said it. The person that you marry or the person you spend the most time with, right, whatever it might be, has more influence over you achieving your goals than your skills themselves. And the brutal truth is that that starts with the person that you spend the most time with, right? Which is usually your spouse or your significant other.

And so I really want to break down the three things that I've seen in terms of how this affects somebody in the workplace and how it translates into achieving or not achieving your goals. The first one is that if your work punishes your partner, they are more likely to try and get you to do it less. Your work absolutely punishes or rewards your partners. Let's think about it like this, right?

If you are gone a lot for work and your partner doesn't like being alone, they're going to try and get you to work less because if you work less, they're alone less. Point one. Second one. If when you work, you come home and complain about work and are less fun to be around, they will want you to work less to eliminate how much time they spend with you when you're in a bad mood.

Point three, if you really like your work and because of that, you spend a lot of time doing it and not a lot of time with them and they don't have something to spend time on aside from you, they will try to get you to work less because they have nothing to do. Your work punishes your partner by proxy of the fact that it removes a positive from their life. If your work in any way removes you from their life and they don't have something else to fill it with,

the likelihood that they try to get you to work less is fucking high. There's a quote that I heard, and I really didn't understand this to the last like two years of my life. The goal is to make it home to the dinner table. And when he said that, what he meant was the goal is for the whole family to be bought in on the job, not just one person. And it's funny because

I didn't really understand this. I didn't really know how much it would affect people until I looked at reasons that people in my company and in my portfolio companies have succeeded or not succeeded in the last 12 months. And guys, I literally stayed up last night thinking about this. Really, my mind could not stop thinking about this because I literally wrote down the people who had left the company or the people who didn't work out and why. And I could correlate it back to one thing.

All of them had an unsupportive spouse. And in some way, and for most part, within my company, for example, it's because they love work so much that they spend less time with their spouse. And then eventually their spouse convinces them that work is bad, and then they take them back.

That makes me very sad because it's not about the work. It's about their personal goals. And work is a way in which they accomplish those things. You essentially have somebody who is closest to you sabotaging your success. And I think a lot of people think that self-sabotage or when somebody sabotages you, it's like they're evil and out to get you. No, that's not how it works. Sabotage is that they have different incentives than you and push their incentives on you. And they push their agenda on you and it conflicts with your own.

And if you are a person who is, likes to please people, is easily influenced by emotions, feels like you're in charge of their wellbeing, then you are likely going to be manipulated by it. And I feel like very passionate about this because I am watching actively young professionals who have lofty goals and very impressive skillsets and the will to do great things in this world be brought down by people who have no goals, no will to do great things and only negativity to bring.

I just want to put this out there because I want you to ask yourself, is that me? Or is that somebody that I work with? Or is that happening to people on my team? Or is it happening and I don't even know it's happening?

Now, I would say in terms of how you mitigate this, something I always try to do with people that work on my team is I want to get to know their family. I want to get to know who's at home. Who is their support system? A question I always ask people is like, how supportive is your spouse? How supportive is your family? How supportive is the environment that you have at home to help you? Because if you're joining my company, one of our core tents is competitive greatness. And I know this can be tough. Like, is that person going to be there when things get rough? Or are they going to be the person that's like,

When is it going to end? You know, you've always said it's going to end. You know, you always say, oh, I'm going to stop working so much when I'm always going to stop doing this much when I'm not going to be so stressed when. Right. It's like if you have somebody that's just constantly reminding you of those things, is that person really trying to help you achieve your goals? Tough.

I mean, the second thing to think about to this, guys, and by the way, I say this as somebody who literally had to break up with every person before the person I married because they deterred me from my goals. Do you want to be like your spouse? Do you want to be like your significant other? Really think about that. Are they someone that inspires you? Are they someone that you admire? If they're giving you advice about how to live your life, are you envious of theirs? Do you want their life? Do you want their work life? Do you want their goals?

Because whether you want it or not, you're going to get it if you spend this much time with them. Which brings me to the second point. The second way in which this affects people is that if you and your partner have different goals and those goals don't benefit each other by achieving, you create a system where you sabotage each other. If

Your goal is to build this big, amazing company and you're joining a different company because one day you want to be able to create that and you want to go all in on your career and you want to create something that changes the world. You're like, I want to help create sustainable energy. I want to help fight global warming, like whatever it might be, right? You've got this huge goal. And then you have a spouse whose goal is to create an amazing family and to spend all of their time creating a family that is unlike any other. And they want to have eight or 10 kids

And you say, you know what? I love that for you, but I actually don't want to do that, right? I have this other goal. And so you have two people that have conflicting goals because what happens is that their goal conflicts with yours. Your goal to have this big company conflicts with their goal. And therefore, they don't have an incentive to help you achieve yours.

Now, I will say this. I think that in general, people do a bad job supporting people. They don't know how to support and they don't know how to create systems in which you can do win-wins. But I will say that it's very difficult to create a win-win when two things abruptly conflict with each other.

And I will say it also depends on the level of emotional skills that each person in the relationship have. But all in all, what I've seen is that if two partners have completely different goals and those goals don't benefit each other in any way, and if anything, by having your goal, you make it harder for them to achieve theirs. You just create resentment. I actually was in a relationship when I was younger and I always had big goals and I always knew I wanted to get into business and I wanted to do great things. And I actually was in a relationship with somebody who had...

had been that way. And then over time, kind of changed his mind. You know, he was very ambitious when we met. And I would say over the span of the five years we were together, it dissipated more and more. And one day I kind of looked up and I was like, what am I doing? And the reason I felt that way was because I noticed more and more how these little, little, little passive comments spoke doubt into me. He'd say stuff like, why are you working so hard? We should just have a family and have kids and like, we'll be so much happier that way.

Why do you need to like get a job that makes so much money? Like it's going to take time away from us hanging out and doing stuff. And then he ended up quitting on his dreams. You know, he had dreams. I don't want to speak to this because I don't want to out this person, but like very lofty goals on which that they were going to achieve from a professional standpoint. He just gave up on them. I realized that.

When we got to the point where he said he actually wanted to get married and I said, I would like to achieve these things before I get married. And I think getting married and trying to have family right now would really distract me. And these things are very important to me that I couldn't be in that relationship. I loved the person. He was genuinely like a good person, had good intentions, but we had completely different goals. We had a different mission in life.

And they conflicted with each other to the degree that I said, any amount of compromise right now, it's not working, right? Like I'm compromising by just spending time with you when you speak doubt into my dreams. That's compromise enough for me. And for me, it's like I had to make that really hard decision, which was like, I really love this person. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with them. They're not the person that I thought they were. And you know what? I'm not the person I was when I got into this relationship. I want different things for myself now.

And I have these really big goals. And I just want somebody who doesn't think they're silly, doesn't think it's stupid, and doesn't think it's bad that I spend less time with them because I'm trying to achieve them. And so what I recognized in going into my next season of life when I said I want a partner, the reason I said I want a partner and not just a boyfriend or a husband is because I wanted somebody who had similar goals to mine so that we could set each other up for success, not just ourselves, but each other.

And that's really what I have now with my husband, Alex. You know, we are business partners. We are also life partners. I will absolutely put myself in short-term discomfort to help him achieve his goals.

I will make decisions that make me uncomfortable to help him achieve his goals, even if sometimes they don't help me achieve mine. Because there are times when he does that for me. And it's just a matter of balancing it in the long term rather than the short term. I'm sorry, it's a matter of balancing it in the short term and over a long enough time horizon, you see that you both support each other to that degree. And it's been so much easier because I also know that by helping him achieve his goals, he helps me achieve my goals. It's a reciprocal relationship where if he

gets closer to achieving his goals, I also, by consequence, get closer to achieving mine, right? And the reason is because we have this thing where if he gets better at his craft, I benefit from it because we share a business. This is the same reason that people that have kids together are more likely to stay together, just like people who have a business together are more likely to stay together. You have a shared goal or shared mission that you're working on. You know, for example, if you have kids, it's like if you become a great parent, they benefit from it. If you have a business, if they become a great business person, you benefit from it.

setting up a situation where you have a win-win becomes really important, especially when you have really big goals. Guys, when I talk about big goals, it could be a big goal in business. It could be a big goal in life. It could be a big goal with your family. Like, it doesn't matter what it is. The point is, I don't give a fuck what your goals are. I give so many fucks, though, if you stay with somebody who makes it harder to achieve them. And I say this because it's like, this is the root of so much discontent with people.

is they have so much conflict because what they don't recognize is that the one person who has the most influence over them doesn't want for them what they want for themselves. And I say this because like you don't fucking deserve that. Nobody deserves that. Nobody deserves for the person that's closest to them to be actively fucking sabotaging them. I wanted to make this podcast. I just want you to wake up. Wake up. Nothing is worth this. Nothing is worth degrading yourself. Nothing is worth giving up your dreams. Nothing is worth becoming less of who you want to become. No person is worth that.

Guys, I say this because it's just like I spent so much of my life trying to fit in a box that somebody else wanted me to fit in because my goals...

conflicted with theirs. And I think that a lot of people deal with this. I don't think it's just because I am a woman who likes business and I'm ambitious. I think that men deal with this all the time. I think that other women deal with this all the time. I think people deal with it within different contexts of family, career, kids. There's so many different goals you could have. But like, fuck, when are you going to wake up and say, I come first. My goals come first. Because my goals are my autonomy. They are my identity.

They are the only thing that nobody and nothing can take away from me. And I just really want people to think about that more seriously. Because a lot of people just end up with whoever they started with, who is the most convenient selection of a mate or a significant other or a spouse. And they don't think about, is this person making my life better? Is this person making it easier to achieve my goals? Or are they actually making it harder? Because they constantly speak little words of doubt

It's never big. It's never obvious. If it was obvious, he would call them an enemy. But it's not obvious. And that brings me to the last point, which is if achieving success makes your partner insecure, anxious, stressed, they will speak doubt into your dreams.

I had a friend who was making a big life transition. She decided that she wanted to essentially sell her business and start a completely different one. And she was wildly successful. I thought it was great. You know, I'm like, you've done great things here. And the new business is obviously, it was beyond her skill set. But she was like, I'm committed to learning. It's going to take two or three years. But like, here's where I'm going. And I was like, fucking get it. Like, I love that. Like, go do your thing. Do big shit.

you know, she brought up and she didn't even realize, I think when she brought this up, like how poisonous this was. She brought up, she's like, oh, well, you know, I'll just call him Harry. Harry, you know, he's just so nervous. And Harry keeps saying like, are you sure you want to do this? And like, do you really think that like this is possible? And like, do you really think that like maybe you shouldn't sell the business and maybe instead you should just like

get a CEO in place, then we can like travel the world and do all this stuff. Like we haven't spent that much time together and like this and that. And it's like, oh, great. Let me ask you a question. She was like, what? Has Harry said anything that has been encouraging? I just flat out said it. I'm like, there's no bullshit over here. And she was like, honestly, not really. And that made me so sad.

Because what you see is somebody who is so afraid of their partner blooming and blossoming and growing that they actively speak down because they don't want them to achieve their dreams because it makes them insecure about the fact that they're not achieving theirs or it conflicts directly with them. I say all this because, again, I think that this is one of the obvious things that

It so very clearly affects your success. It very clearly affects how well you're going to do in business, how well you're going to do in your career. It affects your daily mental well-being. I mean, that's something people don't talk about. Like the amount of stress that you can endure directly correlated with the type of support you have.

The people in my company who can endure very stressful periods of time have very robust support systems. And I will tell you, the more lofty the goals that you have, the more supportive of a spouse, of friends, of family are you going to need. Because at some point when you are really like you're constantly reaching for those goals,

Even the slightest distraction can throw you off your game. I care about you guys. And I just care about people taking care of their fucking selves. And sometimes the best way to take care of yourself is to take a really, really hard look around the people around you and say, are they making my life better or worse? I will just end with this. I don't think that anybody is inherently toxic. I don't think anybody's inherently bad. I only think that people conflict with each other.

And so somebody who is quote bad to you and achieving your goals is quote good to somebody else and their goals they wish to achieve. And oftentimes the real issue is that you just picked wrong.