The Power of Perspective and Prioritizing Family & Friends

What's up everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I'm talking about the power of perspective. Let's hop into it. This episode is a followup to the last episode of Founder's Journal on perfectionism and being a striver and some of the baggage that comes along with that. We've also purposely published this episode ahead of the 20th anniversary of September 11th.

20 years ago, terrorists coordinated four separate attacks on US soil leading to not only the collapse of the twin towers and damage to the Pentagon, but also the death of almost 3000 innocent people. This event is forever etched into all of our brains, and honestly it'd feel wrong to talk about pure business and career stuff on a day that reminds us that honestly, things like business really don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Without perspective, you can get lost in the day-to-day grind without a reminder of what it is you're actually grinding for.

I already mentioned it, but I have found that one of the best ways to be able to strive to reach for perfection, but also strive healthily, strive with balance, Is through experiences that create perspective. Experiences that force you to sit and reflect on some of the biggest, most uncomfortable questions that the business of life often enables us to avoid. This perspective can be shaped either through lived experiences, but even better is through understanding other people's experiences. Fortunately, or unfortunately I've experienced this in both ways.

First I've, I've experienced it with the death of my dad. When I was a junior in college at the University of Michigan, this was 2013, a week before going back to Michigan, going back to campus for school, my dad passed away suddenly from a stroke. He was in perfect health, literally same build as me, same health as me, ate healthily, worked out five days a week. And unfortunately for, for him, for my whole family, just shitty luck and losing the genetic lottery.

My, my dad had a stroke. We thought he was going to be okay and he didn't end up making it. And what I'll say is that losing your best friend, ‘cause my dad was my best friend, it forces perspective and changes the lens through which you look at everything in life. And it sounds cliche, right? Like you, you know, you hear people say they experience loss and it changed everything. You look at things differently, but unfortunately, I can say that it did exactly that for me. So I want to talk about some of the perspective that the loss of my dad gave me and how it leads me to guiding my life differently. And then I want to talk about actually how I've learned from someone else's experience recently as well. 

How My Perspective Changed: Being Less Reactive

First off, losing my dad has just overall made me less reactive in life. If I want to connect it back to career and business, it's made me so much less reactive in building Morning Brew. When Russian hackers decided to crash Morning Brew's website with a DDoS attack, basically sending too much traffic to our website and our website was down for over a day. When an employee decided to quit and we had no idea what we were going to do because we were already packed to the brim with work. When we launched a new newsletter product about politics, it didn't work out as planned and we had to shut it down. When we weren't hitting our growth goals for Morning Brew and the cost of acquiring customers through Facebook and Instagram was increasing rapidly. Don't get me wrong. I was annoyed, frustrated, anxious about all of these challenges that happened in Morning Brew and will inevitably continue to happen in business and life.

But I had this perspective to place them in a larger context of experiences and appreciate in the grand scheme of things, how insignificant these things truly were. I mean, at the end of the day, I would always get back to the same thought, which is nothing can be worse than losing your best friend. Nothing can be worse than losing your dad. All of this is small shit compared to the stuff that really matters. 

​​How My Perspective Changed: Building Beyond Yourself 

The second change in perspective this has created for me is the idea of doing things for other people, the idea of building beyond yourself. I would say growing up, going to college, all the achievements that I tried to attain were for the purpose of my own gratification, my own achievement, my own status or recognition, but when my dad passed away, it reaffirmed what was truly most important to me. Not work, not career, not Morning Brew as much as many of you probably think Morning Brew is my baby, it is, but it wasn't most important. My family was most important. And right before my dad passed, I, you know, I will never forget this experience as long as I live. My dad was in the hospital. He basically was on life support. We knew he was going to pass and I stood by his bed and I promised him that I would take care of my family from that point on. I told him that basically the responsibility was no longer on him. I had assumed and owned the responsibility and I just had this vision in my head from that point on that one day, I would hand seven figure checks to every member of my family to make sure that they never had to worry about a dollar or about money again.

And so no longer was Morning Brew just this opportunity for a striver like myself to find success. It was my chance to create an outcome for my family that made me feel settled, that I had kept my word to the most important promise of life. Because from the day my dad passed away, moving forward, all I could visualize was the Lieberman household was now all cash out and no cash in. My mom had retired and my dad was the breadwinner of the family and no income was coming in and so I own that responsibility from that minute moving forward. And so just overall this perspective created by my dad's loss made me realize that fulfillment, purpose and achievement for me, went beyond just feeling good for myself and attaining success for myself.

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How My Perspective Changed: Glass Half Full

So as I just shared, my dad's death made me less reactive to the bumps of life, the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship. And it also made me feel this sense of, I don't want to say obligation, but the sense of responsibility to achieve for people other than just me. The third thing that it did was honestly made me operate in a glass half full manner always. That was my default setting moving forward. In everything, I was finding opportunity and optimism. And I've found that so many of our experiences in our careers and our lives are prompted by the stories that we tell ourselves versus the actual facts of what happens. Let's just use an example. Let's say you've been busting your ass for months to hire someone in your company, you've finally gotten to a candidate you love and they reject your job offer. By the way, this has happened many times to me with the Morning Brew. 

There are two ways things can go down after the person rejects your job offer. First, you can decide to feel disenfranchised and ashamed that a candidate decided to not pick your company. You feel embarrassed, you feel rejected. And because of that, you emotionally feel rushed to just get someone in the door to prove that you can get someone to work for your company. And you finally have an extra set of hands to help out. You end up only running a recruiting process for another two weeks. You end up hiring the first good candidate that comes through the door. And two months later you realize you hastily made the hire and you end up having to let go of this new person you hired because they weren't the right person for the role. So much of this happened, not because of the fact of the first person deciding not to join your company, but because you created a negative story around a set of events.

The other way, I would say the more productive way, that this can go down is by focusing on the opportunity created by the obstacle. Yes, factually a candidate decided not to take a job offer, but that doesn't mean you've been rejected as a person or that you did something wrong as a leader or founder. Any number of reasons can explain why they decided to go elsewhere. Maybe it was the pay or the location or the benefits or the requirements of the job. The fact is that someone decided not to join you. And the fact is that you still want to hire a best in class employee to push your company forward. The story you can choose to tell yourself is that you have an opportunity to patiently and correctly hire someone that is just as impressive as the person you had initially given a job offer to. Perspective allows you to see opportunity where others see obstacles. 

How My Perspective Changed: Everyone Has Challenges

And finally, the loss of my dad, the experience made me appreciate that everyone has challenges and there's no better or worse challenge. There's just different. This is an experience that I hope no one else has to go through, but it did create incredible perspective that I believe will serve me well for the rest of my life. So the question is, how can you learn from these perspective-shaping experiences without experiencing them yourself? Well, unfortunately I'm not the only one that has experienced loss or trauma.

Form Perspective Without Pain

And in the age of the internet, so much of this, so many of these people's experiences have been well-documented. While I would never wish my pain or suffering or loss upon others, this is a reality of life for many. And by studying their experiences in the way you're studying mine right now, you can have the unique opportunity to form perspective without pain. And so I want to share one recent example of this. I recently read the book when breath becomes air. And this book did exactly that for me, the book is about Paul Kalanithi, who was a chief neurosurgery resident, and he passed away after his battle with stage four metastatic lung cancer.

The book is a memoir about Paul's life before and during his battle and his reflections on life, happiness, and hope in the face of a truly life-changing experience. And everything about Paul's experience was such an important reminder for me, even as someone who has experienced trauma myself, I need these reminders. I need reminders of how lucky I am to have my health, how lucky I am to have great friends, how lucky I am to have a loving family, to be in a happy relationship, to have had the opportunity to build a business, to have the luxury of writing and recording this podcast right now.

I find that going back to the idea of being a striver and a perfectionist, you can easily get caught up in the day-to-day grind and never think about these things that truly matter. Being a striver forces us to focus and work with little break and without time for reflection, if we're not careful about it. But a book like this changes all of that. Because in Paul, I saw myself. A striver, someone who spent many years working hard to find success. Paul literally talked about how we worked for decades, studying science, then getting into neuroscience, then going to medical school, then getting into his neurosurgery residency.

And that's why I think this book hit me so hard and has hit so many others so hard. Because this guy who, so many of us can resonate with, did absolutely nothing to deserve the hand he was dealt. Like my dad, he was just someone who was on the losing side of the genetic lottery. One day, he was thinking about his life as a neurosurgeon and starting a family with his wife. The next day he was contemplating what he'll spend his remaining days doing. And if he should even have a child, since he'll likely be gone when they're born and he didn't want to leave his wife with the burden of being a single parent. I highly encourage you all to read this book.

Not because it's a fun book, not because it's going to teach you about entrepreneurship or building a business, but because it's a necessary book to realize how much building a business actually matters in the context of life. To live your life with perspective of what truly matters. And I'd feel remiss not to talk about this on the podcast, because while most of my content focuses on how to build businesses or accelerate your career at the end of the day, there's so much more to actually give a shit about. And if we can learn from Paul's story to have a new found appreciation for the fragility of life or from the story of my dad, the things that truly matter, I think we can continue to be strivers without losing sight of why it is that we actually choose to strive.

I Want to Hear From You 

With that, I would love to hear from you, whether it's about this episode and things you've done to great perspective for yourself, or if you're just a new listener and you were want to write in, whether it's to show your appreciation or to share a little bit about yourself or let me know a topic you want me to cover on Founder's Journal. I'd love for you to write in, and I'd love to chat. Send me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista with any thoughts or questions about this episode or the show in general. And finally, if you enjoyed the episode, please share with a friend that you think would love to use Founder's Journal as a tool for thinking better in order to build better. Our show is produced an engineered by Dan Bouza.

Credits

Our associate producer is Bella Hutchins. Brian Henry is our executive producer. Alan Haburchak is Morning Brew's director of audio. And I'm your host, Alex Lieberman. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.