No! Don't go in there! Daddy's working.
Jonathan: Yes, yes, y'all, it is another edition of the Daddy's Working podcast. If you were listening last week, then you heard Part 1 of the interview and I left you hanging. But we're here and we're ready to rock and roll, so let's dive back into Part 2 of the interview.
…
So, let's talk a little bit about being selfish. Some people might think that getting up early and doing your personal development, and working on yourself, some people think that's selfish. We should be giving all our time to our family. What's your take on that?
Nick: Yeah, it is a balance. It is a balance. I tend to do a lot of the stuff before my family wakes up. I'm not naturally a person who likes to wake up early, but I also realize that those couple of hours, those two hours before sort of 7:00 AM give me a lot of time to do these things, which I now know are really important. [01:15.8]
So, it's funny, when I used to do my running, when I used to go and do training, I used to do a marathon every Sunday as a training run.
Jonathan: Wow.
Nick: And my wife used to always say to me, You've got to go out there really early and be back by at least 10:00 AM, so that you don't interrupt family time on the weekends. And I took that same approach into my personal development, the same thinking, so I'm very conscious that it can't impact on them.
The other thing that’s interesting is my wife, now that I've been sort of on this path for some time, she has seen such a huge difference in me that when I go away, every quarter I go away and do something. I go to an event or I change the room that I'm in to sort of be in a room that's a bit more scary with different people, and she lets me do that. She knows that every quarter I need to go and do something like that and I just come back so energized, and that keeps the momentum up. [02:04.5]
Jonathan: Let's unpack that a little bit. What do you mean when you say you go to a room that's a bit more scary?
Nick: One of the things I started to do early on is I realized that I was surrounding myself in a peer group of people who are either the same as me or maybe a little bit behind, and I didn't realize it was probably a deliberate thing. And someone said to me if you're the most important person in the room, you're in the wrong room, and it's the same as the concept of you're the sum average of the five people you spend the most time with. That's a thing that is said.
And it really hit me, particularly the first comment around, okay, that's interesting. So, what would happen if I went to a different room? What happened if I put myself into a different environment where perhaps I'm going to be a little bit intimidated because it's full of people who are ahead of where I am for the first time? They are a few years ahead of me on the journey of this stuff that I'm trying to achieve. And I kind of learned that a little bit from the Tony Robbins event because that was a bit weird, right? I’m in a room with all these people who actually look really happy or certainly are trying to improve themselves. I haven’t been in that environment before. [03:06.8]
So, I started to kind of do more mastermind events that were focused on both professional and personal development. When I was learning to buy businesses for no money down, just broadly what I do now, I needed to learn that, so I put myself into a room with some really high-net-worth people who had built their wealth by doing these sort of things. And at that point in time, I had some money, but nothing like these guys. So, I'm in there as the poorest guy in the room and that was a bit intimidating, but I never would've done that sort of stuff beforehand had I not thought about the power of changing that environment.
Jonathan: Okay, I want to take a step back for a second because I think this is where most people are going to get hung up, and then I want to continue exploring this scary room idea.
Nick: Sure.
Jonathan: But I believe that was a Jim Rohn quote, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And so, you have people in your life that obviously are not lifting you up. I have this analogy where you have anchors and sails, and sails would be the room with the people that are blowing you away to a whole new destination and anchors would be the people holding you back to where you were. [04:11.7]
Nick: Yeah, I love that.
Jonathan: Tastefully, how do you do it in a good way? How do you start dumping these people?
Nick: Of course, you don't want that to be your family. Sometimes it is.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Nick: I’ll kind of gently sort of share a couple of perspectives on this. So, my wife, she's not as focused, if you like, into the personal development side. She's a very kindhearted person who feels very comfortable where she is. That being said, she totally gets why I'm doing what I am. We're just programmed differently. We have a different psychology in these things. So, she has come with me on the journey to the extent that she needs to, but I think that had I had to change everything and there was a lot of resistance there, a lot of friction, that wouldn't have been good longer term for myself, my family and for her. But she has seen such a change in me, she is all over this now. [05:04.3]
It's so funny, she'll joke when I make some quotes, like a Jim Rohn quote or something like that, and then she'll say, Oh, stop telling me this kind of stuff. Then we'll have a dinner party and then she'll talk proudly about it to everybody.
Jonathan: Nice.
Nick: To answer your question, there were a few relationships there where you kind of just work on it and those are really important relationships, and there's obviously a point where it could be that it's such a divide that you have to make a decision, but, great, thankfully, my family, my immediate family, that's all good. If I go out a bit, go out the sphere to my friends, I still had the same friendships. There's only a couple who I don't really see at all anymore, but the conversations are very, very different. So, when I launched the podcast, for example, everyone just thought that was mental. People just couldn’t understand. What are you doing this thing for?
And so, if I still catch up for lunch with them now, it's a very different conversation than what it is. They treat me differently and perhaps I treat them differently. Perhaps that's the same as well. But there are a few who just don't get that I've burnt the bridges of my past life to go and create something new, and those ones have dropped off. Yeah? [06:11.5]
Jonathan: Yeah.
Nick: What's interesting is the question from that might be, Do I feel sad about that? I do to some extent, but I also don't believe in looking back too far because I think you meet people in your life and they give you so much and they also take stuff away at certain points. And I've met a whole heap of new people since, and I kind of think on my journey perhaps that's the time that there's a transition. So, I don't feel like I've missed anything out. It's just that I've changed and things have changed.
And the last one I suppose is where you have to make a conscious decision, as you call it, the anchors, and there's been a couple of times where I just can't be in the same room with someone who has a very negative mindset for too long, someone who's a victim who blames everything that's going on in the world on the challenges they have. It's just so far away from where I've gone to now. But I know that because I feel so much better about myself now that that's the right decision. [07:03.5]
Jonathan: Man, you don't even know. You just nailed me in the heart because I'm struggling with that right now and it's not with the company I keep. It's the company I own. I'm thinking about that with my rentals and we're raising rents that we had people on the same rent five, six, seven years. Why are you doing this to me? What's going on? Just the other day, I'm like, I … I … I don't know if I'm cut out for this anymore. That whole negative thinking and what about the five years that you got the same rent where everybody else is paying so much more? I'm starting to think I either need to sell this business or I need to put somebody else in place because I'm on another plane, and this might sound nasty maybe, but I don't have the empathy for that. I'm like, I don't care. This is what it is.
Nick: Yeah, I don't think it's nasty at all, particularly because you're aware of it, and if you weren't aware of it, that's a different point. But, in those situations, it doesn't help anybody. It doesn't help. I persisted for the wall in some relationships and then I just felt drained, and what happened after that was I just got so busy with other things and not seeing the people that I wanted to spend time with enough that there was a bit of a natural transition. But I did make some decisions, which were tough decisions, but I haven't looked back on them. [08:17.1]
Jonathan: Yeah, I'm in one of those spots right now. In order to fly, forget the anchor and the sail. I need a jet engine, baby.
Nick: Yeah. I mean, you know your business stuff. A lot of the stuff, when I buy businesses, I often put general managers in to deal with exactly the situation you're talking about and you become owner-investor, not owner-operator, less operation. That allows you to still have the benefit of what you want in those businesses without having to deal with the stuff that's going to potentially just derail some of the stuff you're working towards.
Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow. Didn't expect to go there. But as we were talking, one of them was -
Nick: There you go.
Jonathan: - knocking on my door that was pissed at me.
Nick: There you go. That was a sign, you see. This is how these things are.
Jonathan: Yeah. So, let's talk about those scary rooms again. Talk to me about some of the scary rooms you’ve put yourself into and what you've gotten out of them. [09:06.7]
Nick: Yeah, it's funny because one of the things I said when I was creating this sort of blueprint for what I do now was about having greater influence, and that was driven … I don't like the term influencer. I wasn't trying to become some famous dude. It was really to balance contribution, to help people, because I thought, Do you know what? If I can help people, and I've always helped people in different ways, but I've never really thought about doing it at scale.
So, when I started doing the podcast, it grew really quickly. It grew really quickly for a few reasons, but what it did do is it started to open up all these other really interesting conversations with people that I wouldn't have dreamed of beforehand. And so, I thought, Hold on. Now I need to start to think about, Where's this going to take me and who do I need to become? What's my identity going to be in the next few years to be able to really enjoy this? I wasn't expecting it.
And so, I thought, Okay, I've got to become a better speaker. And if you go back to school, I was the kid in school who just wouldn't. I'd be shaking if I had to go and do any type of speech. So, one of the rooms I went into was to go and learn how to become a speaker, and that was challenging in its own right, but it’s effectively … I've certainly broken the back on that now. I feel really comfortable with it. But that was practice and repetition. But it was, again, scary because I was around people who've been doing it for longer. [10:18.2]
I mentioned the investment around seriously high-net-worth people, net worth over a hundred million to be in the room. No, I'm not there, just to be clear to everyone on the podcast. However, I was learning from some people like that and the conversations you have with people who have that capacity, it's not just about wealth. It's about the ability to sign the check. Do you see the difference? And when you're around those people, they talk differently and they were definitely talking differently to how I spoke. So, I did that.
And then, I've been involved in a number of kind of masterminds which extend themselves from some of the Tony stuff. So, I'm involved in one called M1by a guy called Rock Thomas, who used to work with Tony quite directly and exchange a story or to share it around I believe in serendipity. [11:04.0]
I was that a Tony Robbins event and I met this guy, who had a very similar background to me. He lives in the U.S., sales guy. Had a breakdown and realized he needed to change everything. We just got on really well at this event, just again talking. I talked about the podcast because I just launched it and he said, “You've got to have Rock Thomas on this podcast because Rock's had, like, 90 million views on Goalcast and he’s a pretty prolific guy in this space.”
Anyway, I'll shorten the story for everybody. But I was supposed to have a call with him on a Friday afternoon and he lives in Canada and I live in the UK, but on this particular Friday I was traveling in Amsterdam with the family and so we were going to have to call the day before whatever else. And I find out from his PA that he's flying into Amsterdam that morning. Weird, right, out of all the cities in the world, he happened to be there in the space of a 12-hour period. So, we ended up going out to dinner, getting on famously. He then comes on the podcast, and after that I'm speaking at his event in Mexico in a couple of weeks’ time. [12:01.0]
Jonathan: Wow.
Nick: And so, I think about these things. I would never have even had that conversation, which opened up this pathway, which I'm doing stuff in that different world now. Had I’ve not put myself into a different room to start with.
Jonathan: Yeah, that's amazing. I like a sentence you said and it's something that we like to explore on this show, and I'm asking myself this all the time. You said, “Who do I need to become?” How often are you thinking that and what kind of actions are you taking around that?
Nick: I'm asking myself that all the time. So, identity and the perception you have of yourself to me is everything really in terms of the journey I've been on. If you asked me to summarize the journey, it's the change in my identity, the change in my, the way I think about myself that has allowed me to do some of the things I've done since. Because before that I had an image of myself that was created by others, as I said, from the outset, from other programming, what I could be good at, what I should do. [13:04.8]
And going forward, I knew that if I lived in that world, if I lived in that identity, it wasn't going to get to where my goals are. So, when I set a vision, I set a vision 20 years out. I said, okay, for me to be the person and to do the things that person can do 20 years out—the reason I do it 20 years out is it's so far in advance that it feels almost a little bit ethereal. You can set a goal for 12 months, just put a vision out there of what you want life to be like in 20 years, that's a lot for most people to take in.
And one of the things I sort of said is, and this was just a bit of a stupid thing, but I quite like it because I'm massively into my basketball and a little bit probably inspired by the Garry Vs of this world, I said I wanted to buy the Boston Celtics. Right?
Jonathan: All right.
Nick: And I wrote that down. Now, here's the funny thing. I get asked about this a lot because I've shared it on my podcast, Oh, you wanted to buy that? You know what? It hasn't really got anything to do with buying the Boston Celtics. It's got the ability to know what it likes to be able to.
What sort of person, what sort of difference can that person make in the world? Yeah? How much can I help other people get to where they want to be in their entrepreneurial journey? Which is one of my big things. It's not really about having the wealth and the cars and all that sort of stuff, because I know that that's not going to make me happy, but it's the ability to influence them, having that type of capacity just as a symbol for myself. It’s about that. [14:20.6]
So, for me, again, someone said to me, a goal is not something that you work to work towards. It's something you come from.
Jonathan: Wow.
Nick: And, again, it just hit me in the eyes, because most people would have a goal, and they set it and they move towards it. But what happens if you're there and you're moving, and you're coming back from it? And that's all about identity.
Jonathan: That's deep.
Nick: There you go. Told you [crosstalk].
Jonathan: I'm sitting here processing that. I have never heard that before. That's awesome. So, let's switch gears a little bit. What are you excited about, man? What's got you going right now?
Nick: Yeah, so I've got heaps of stuff. We plan our years out in the very beginning. We plan all that travel. And one of my big goals this year was doing so much more, having different experiences with my family, my girls. My girls are eight and five, and my wife is a travel blogger. So, we have got literally a whole year of just cool stuff planned. We're actually coming back your way soon. We're coming back to Orlando in October. [15:17.1]
Jonathan: Hit me up.
Nick: Yeah. It’s funny. We went and did the whole Disney thing last year, but we just like being in the environment there and stuff like that. We like the beaches around there, so we've got that. We’ve got lots of mini-breaks and things like that, so I'm really excited about that.
I'm excited about some of the business investments that I'm making. So, we've got some really … as I said, I invest in buying businesses. I try and do that using other people's capital, and I scale them up and I sell them, and I do that for wealth creation as well as interest. And I've got a whole heap of different businesses lined up, so I'm hopeful to try and acquire five businesses this year. Similar to buying houses, but just a different dynamic obviously. So, I'm really excited about that.
And I'm excited about, I suppose, the journey that I'm going. I've got a few sort of personal development goals this year myself, which more speaking, I've got a book that I'm writing. It's going to be coming out later in the year. The podcast is going from strength to strength, so I'm starting to get some really amazing guests on that and just having some great conversations. [16:10.6]
So, this feels to me like a real consolidation year of what's been a good sort of two to three years of building the machine.
Jonathan: How exciting. How exciting. I want you guys out there listening to know that it's Nick Bradley, the Scale Up Your Business Podcast. Scale Up Your Business Podcast. That's right, isn't it? I hope I’m not butchering it.
Nick: Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, it’s how it sounds. It does what it says on the tin.
Jonathan: Perfect. So, Nick, is there anything that you wanted to talk about that maybe we didn't hit or anything you want to go deeper on, as we're coming up on the tail end of this?
Nick: There's a couple of bits we touched on which I think would be useful, hopefully to help people who listen. I think you talk about faith and fitness. Faith is a funny one because it's probably the one I struggle with the most. I didn't come from a kind of religious upbringing, so faith for me is more about … I suppose the way I think about that is you can say it’s Buddhist, but it's more just doing things the right way by people. [17:08.0]
So, one of my big beliefs, if you like, is to help people without expectation, and I believe that and it's changed. I didn't used to believe that, but I've come to understand it really helps that if I help people without expectation, I'll get the things that I need. I think it was a Zig Ziglar quote, but it's such a powerful one. So, when I think about things like faith, I think about it more as beliefs and usually it's about just trying to do the right thing, knowing in your heart that you've got to do things in an honorable way.
Jonathan: Yeah. And, actually, I was with you there for a long time. I'm a Catholic and I look at it as they're just delivering a moral code to us, whether we choose to believe the stories and all that. And I'm with you that the faith is in what we do in doing the right thing and making the impact, and taking care of those people close to us. So, I'm with you there. [18:00.4]
What about fitness, bro? You look like you're in great shape. What do you do around fitness?
Nick: Yeah, it's one of my things. Back to identity. I had a background in fitness, so I used to be a personal trainer back in my sort of early twenties and I sold that business and I started my first corporate job that was in media actually. It was with Men's Health magazine and I was the fitness writer in Australia.
So, I've always had sort of fitness and the reason for that was because I was massively overweight as a kid and huge. In fact, I weighed something like—in kilos, which I know most listening wonder what the hell that is.
Jonathan: Just 22 pounds.
Nick: I think 165 pounds is what I weigh now, but I used to be, God, 210 or something like that.
Jonathan: Oh wow.
Nick: Yeah, when I was a kid. Yeah. I mean, I was massive. I know, that's a whole nother podcast, isn't it?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Nick: But, yeah, I had to lose that weight and I did that. Partly, I think it was just going through puberty, but it was also, I got really … I just did rowing and basketball and running and all sports, and I just lost all the weight. And because I had that image of being bullied as a young kid, as the fat kid at school, I never let that happen again. [19:04.5]
So, every single day, I do something. Sometimes it's just walking the dog, but often it’s … I literally just jumped off my Peloton bike before jumping on this call, so 30 minutes at least a day. Gym, two to three times a week. I don't do ultra-running anymore, but I still run probably once or twice a week, play basketball twice a week. So, I'm doing one or two forms of exercise usually daily.
And as I get older now because I'm 45, I do more yoga and stuff like that, which I find more challenging than going for a run, just because it's a slower pace.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Nick: But my goal around this is around energy. It's about, again, the ability to, as I said, to do more, to be more. And I find that all of those things, the more I sort of work on my physicality and my health, the more energy I have to be able to do some of these things I've described on the podcast today.
Jonathan: Yeah. I've always found it's a weird thing that the better I take care of my body, the better everything else seems to work around me. It’s what I'm noticing. I don't know. I don't know how it all works, but that's why I tell people to be a little selfish. Take care of yourself. [20:08.2]
Nick: I think, honestly, health and fitness is right up there. It's probably my number one pillar, and my wife knows me so well now that if I haven't exercised for, say, a couple of days or whatever or if I start getting like, yeah, literally climbing on the ceiling, she's like, Get it out. Go on your bike. Go for a run because you are not … this is not what you are.
Jonathan: Nice. She needs to walk you.
Nick: Yeah, a bit like that. But, yeah, I suppose, to finish the conversation off really in terms of stuff we've covered, I think just to talk about my girls and we touched a little bit on this, I think most dads would say that their children, their family are their why, their drive. And when I was doing that first Tony Robbins event and I was doing that intervention I mentioned, a lot of it was about how I show up for them, being both the role model for them, being brave, having faith for them, so that they can learn from me, because I had different experiences growing up. [21:05.6]
And that's not to say that they're going to do everything, model themselves just on what I do. But me being the stressed out corporate guy who's not around much, and when he's around he's drinking too much and he's not really there, wasn't the thing that I wanted to show to them.
So, a lot of how I wanted to change, and I mentioned the word “standards” before, I needed to change my standards for my life, so that I could give them a different perspective as they grow up and they can see what is possible by being someone who is happy, who is intentional, who is following their own life and not being driven by having to do what other people say they should be doing.
Jonathan: Dude, and it goes so much deeper than that and I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it's especially for you, it's not just about showing them. You have a little girls. You're being a role model, but showing them what a man is supposed to be, so that when they're selecting a man in their life, they have a good barometer of what they should be looking for. [22:01.3]
Nick: Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. Even when I finish this with you today, I'm taking them out, a bit of a daddy date, so to speak, because I've been away, as I said, traveling for a week. And this weekend coming up, it will be exactly the same. So, it's not that I wasn't doing this stuff before. I was doing it, but I do it at a different level now.
And it's funny. Beforehand, they were growing up really quickly. They're still growing up really quickly, but I'm much more aware of it, whereas beforehand I was in this different cloud. So, I think that's the thing, just to say to everyone listening, if you're in that place, it is possible to change it. It's not easy necessarily because you've got to face a few fears, but it is possible to do it.
Jonathan: Yeah, we could go on forever. It's NickcBradley.com. You can find everything on NickcBradley.com. The podcast, go wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen to the show where he interviewed me, obviously, the best one, and then all the other ones, the Scale Up Your Business Podcast. Anything you want to say as we're closing out today, Nick? This has been awesome. [23:03.1]
Nick: No, just that I've enjoyed it. I enjoyed the conversation when you came on my podcast. We went into some weird places. It was awesome. And I've equally enjoyed having the conversation with you again today, so thank you very much.
Jonathan: Brother, thank you for being here. It's been a blast.
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