Who is Stever?
Stever Robbins is a strategic advisor dedicated to empowering individuals at pivotal moments in their professional journey. With a focus on reputation building, he guides business leaders and entrepreneurs who aspire to become recognized authorities in their fields. Stever's expertise lies in helping clients establish themselves as the go-to person around their key constituents, whether it's within their industry or among high-value employees. His approach is tailored to those eager to cultivate a magnetic reputation that naturally attracts attention and opportunities, positioning them as influential figures in their respective domains.
Key Takeaways
00:00 Understanding Business Relationships
05:54 "Public Speaking Overcomes Age Bias"
09:41 Networking Maintenance System
14:06 "The Myth of Hard Work"
14:45 Rethinking "Work Hard" Advice
18:16 "Maximizing Productivity and Networking"
22:45 Effectuation in Startup Success
24:28 "Networking: Meeting the Right People"
29:32 Reflecting on AI's Impact
31:12 AI's Impact on Critical Thinking
34:31 Networking for Personal Fulfillment
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Transcript
Note, this was transcribed using transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
executive coaching, personal branding, business networking, building relationships, reputation management, career advancement, professional development, strategic outreach, public speaking, podcasting, productivity tips, maintaining connections, follow-up systems, industry recognition, business leadership, career success myths, high impact coaching, business startups, entrepreneurship, effectuation, business ecosystems, corporate politics, introverts in business, systematic networking, reconnecting contacts, business strategy, work-life balance, leadership skills, personal productivity, AI and productivity
SPEAKERS
Stever Robbins, Stuart Webb
Stuart Webb [00:00:31]:
Hi, and welcome back to It's Not Rocket Science five questions over coffee. I have my coffee here in front of me. I think Steve is ready to go as well. So I have my coffee. Up. We are caffeine up and ready to go. Looks, I'm really, really grateful that Steve has meant, spent some time with us. He's gonna spend a bit of time with us today.
Stuart Webb [00:00:50]:
Steve is well, he's, one of the most interesting and thought provoking and, innovative, speakers I've come across. So, Steba, I'm really grateful you're gonna come here and spend a few minutes talking to us about, well, five ideas we're gonna have over coffee.
Stever Robbins [00:01:08]:
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Stuart Webb [00:01:11]:
So, Steven, let's start with, I know you're you're sort of talking today a little bit about some of the some of the work you've been doing, and we're gonna get into it. So so tell us, who is it you're trying to help? What what what's the what's the the the ideal candidate for the sort of work you're trying to do with them at the moment?
Stever Robbins [00:01:26]:
Sure. I help people who are at an inflection point. People who need to get more widely known and who wanna become the go to person around their key constituents. At some point, I'll probably get a little bit more focused than that. But for example, a business person who wants to get known in their industry, a business person who wants to get known around the, high value employees. So So they wanna have a reputation as a, as a hire as a hire as an employer. Basically, anyone who wants to have a reputation that draws people to them and they want to establish a high profile as go to person.
Stuart Webb [00:02:02]:
And so this isn't just, just business owners. This could be anybody from a business owner to somebody who's already in in an employment and and just wants to get better known around their industry or bet better known around around the company.
Stever Robbins [00:02:15]:
Yeah. What I've discovered is
Stuart Webb [00:02:16]:
that this actually has been one
Stever Robbins [00:02:17]:
of the keys to many of the coaching engagements that I've done. I've I've spent the last twenty years as an executive coach. And I finally realized, wait a minute. Helping this person with their marketing was just like helping this person who, I I work with a lot of high potential leaders, so people who are being groomed for the c suite. And part of being groomed for the c suite is you have to establish connections. You have to be known within the company. You need to be able to to, you know, go to the right places, know the right people, call in the right favors, and get people working together. And I realized this is actually the exact same skill set.
Stever Robbins [00:02:49]:
What it takes to become known in your industry is the same thing that it takes to come to become known within your company, you know, with a few minor tweaks. Instead of speaking at a conference, for example, you might be speaking at a brown bag lunch, but, you know, largely the same
Stuart Webb [00:03:02]:
thing. Absolutely right. A lot of these people will have spent time trying to do this just just by, you know, maybe making making mistakes or maybe sort of trying to sort of get out there and do things, but but I haven't got anyway so far. So what are the what are the frustrations? What are the some of the things you've seen people do? I wouldn't say wrong, but are not necessarily focused in the right way in order to really get that that high impact that you're talking about.
Stever Robbins [00:03:29]:
Sure. Well, you know, one of the big ones is that people treat their business like a business. So if I were to ask people, do you do you know where you make money? Most people would say yes. They might be wrong, but but but at least the point is they have some idea. Like, they're they're paying attention. But when I ask people, do you know do you know who you're connecting with and why you're connecting with them and what their major motivational drivers are and how you can deepen a relationship with them and connect with them, they just kind of look at me and go, well, yeah. I mean, I called someone up to have a lunch date. And I'm like, so you're preparing a proposal and you spend six weeks doing research and write a 25 page proposal.
Stever Robbins [00:04:17]:
But when you're thinking about who do you need to know, who needs to know you, and how are you gonna create that connection, you give that no thought. You just sort of treat it the way that you did back in kindergarten, which by the way, don't knock kindergarten. Really good time, recess, awesome idea. I love the thing where you play with the blocks. But as adults, we get more sophisticated about things. I would say one of the biggest, problems that people have is they're not systematic about it. They don't decide who they're gonna contact. They don't actually have a system for making contact and then a system for maintaining relationships, which, you know, people think, oh my gosh.
Stever Robbins [00:04:59]:
This is gonna take me a hundred hours a day. It is gonna take time. Building and maintaining relationships takes time. However, it doesn't take as much time as one might think if you're systematic about it. And even in the best of worlds, you're only gonna have a small inner circle, and a lot of what you do is gonna be about getting yourself out there more widely.
Stuart Webb [00:05:20]:
Are you suggesting that some people don't think deeply enough about their networking and they just wander into a networking meeting with a bunch of business cards and hope for the best?
Stever Robbins [00:05:28]:
Oh god. Yes. Yes. So okay. I know that it doesn't come across in this in this format. I am a high introvert. You put me in a networking event, and I will find the cheese table, and I will nibble 200 of those little cheese cubes while desperately trying not to make eye contact with anyone. And I realized this about myself.
Stever Robbins [00:05:54]:
And what I found what and and the other thing too is I look, this is actually getting less true. I started getting gray hair, like, all of a sudden last week. I'm like, where did these come from? But prior to getting some gray hairs, I looked much younger than I actually am. And I would go to business networking events, and people would just look right past me. They would just assume, oh, who's this high school kid? He has nothing to offer. And what I discovered was that if I did public speaking and if I was on stage, people would pay attention long enough to me just by virtue of my being on stage that I could say something intelligent. And then they would go, hey, that guy on stage said something intelligent and then they would approach me. So I never had to leave the cheese table.
Stever Robbins [00:06:37]:
I got to be lauded as like, oh, this great public speaker. And of course, for introverts, public speaking is amazing because you have complete control over the room. You don't have to pay attention to anyone you don't want to. They raise their hand to ask a question. You ignore them. Public speaking is a fabulous introvert activity. And and what I found was that was people would start coming to me. So that that was, like, my first big in, you know, in you don't have to network the way that that people say where you go and you show up with business cards.
Stever Robbins [00:07:10]:
You can network by putting yourself on a stage and having people want to come to you. I started a podcast in 02/2007, and, it was called the Get It Done, guys. Quick and dirty tips to work less and do more. It was a personal productivity podcast. It made it to number five on I or number three on iTunes, which I was totally psyched about. Unfortunately, I was never able to monetize it. But one of the interesting things about that is that I started having people come up to me on the street and just saying, you know, hey. You're you're Steve Robins.
Stever Robbins [00:07:42]:
You're that get it done guy person. And I'm like, how do you know what I look like? This podcast is audio only. But, apparently, people found somehow found out what I look like. And, again, that was putting myself out there with my ideas in such a way that I actually built an audience and built people who wanted to, to come speak to me to connect.
Stuart Webb [00:08:04]:
And the problem with all of that, Steven, I think you've just sort of alluded to it, is you've gotta have a system. You've gotta have you've got to have a you've got to have a strategy, you've got to know what it is you're trying to do to connect with them. But but networks can go cold very quickly, can't they? I mean, you just mentioned a podcast in 02/2007 now. In Internet terms, that was that was pre pre dinosaur. You you you can't just assume that the the the people you've connected with three years ago even remembered that your name or whether or not you've got gray hair. You you have to have a system for being available and being with them all of the time.
Stever Robbins [00:08:41]:
You do. And that's one of the wonderful things. So first is so the podcast went through 2020, by the way. So there are some still some people who who remember who I am. But but part of it is in fact being in front of them in some fashion. And you don't have to you don't have to be in front of them all the time. You need to be in front of them enough to reactivate their memory of you. And one of the things that I I mean, one of the wonderful things about the Internet world is you can do that through many different media.
Stever Robbins [00:09:09]:
You can do it through video. You can do it through audio. You can do it through email, newsletters. You can also do it with the telephone if you're keeping in touch. I mean, I I'm if you're doing marketing, you might be trying to keep in touch with hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people. But you might if you're within a company and you're networking within the company, you're not necessarily trying to keep in touch with 10,000 people. You're trying to keep in touch with a hundred people who are your most critical people. Or if you're in a career and entering a new industry, you'd be and and you're and it's not just customers you're going after.
Stever Robbins [00:09:41]:
You may only only wanna be keeping contact with, you know, 20 industry leaders, five or six key suppliers, etcetera. And part of, part of, like, the systems that I have, which I hate, let me be very, very clear, there's nothing pleasant about this, is I have a whole follow-up system. And every it's pleasant to actually connect with people. What's not pleasant is actually sitting down there. And every day, I have a spreadsheet that I can sit down and go through. It'll tell me how long it's it's been since I contacted which people, which ones are currently high priority. And I'll just run through it and drop them all an email. Drop them an email, send them a text, make a phone call, and just do something to remind them that I exist.
Stever Robbins [00:10:23]:
Doesn't have to be a long conversation, but they need to see my name and and remember who I am. And, you know, I'll offer to reconnect at depth. Some people take me up on it. Some people don't. But it's about keeping your name front and center. It's not necessarily about having having tons of in-depth conversation or tons of in-depth content with them at every touch.
Stuart Webb [00:10:45]:
And I remember when I was a very young professional, I I I know, I know I only look back 12, but, but I was I was a a professional at one stage. And I remember one of my mentors saying to me, use the opportunity for the two minutes at the beginning of every meeting to sit next to somebody different. That way you'll find out somebody else who you haven't spoken to yet. So you don't have to you just have to be systematic in the way that you think. You don't have to necessarily sort of think to yourself. I must reach out to them. If you see them, you you you make contact, you make a note, you move on. Yeah.
Stever Robbins [00:11:15]:
I one of the things I was doing recently was cleaning up my address book because I have about 7,000 contacts, and I just decided that, you know, that's a lot of contacts. And many of these people I haven't talked to for quite a while. So I literally had been going through about, you know, 50 to a hundred names a week. It's slow going. And as I've been going through every single one, I'm like, oh, wow. Here's someone I really care about. And for whatever reason, we haven't connected in, you know, ten years. And I've just been dropping people an email or sending them a text and just saying, what are you up to? And it's amazing.
Stever Robbins [00:11:47]:
This is something that a lot of people are afraid to do. They're afraid that if they've lost contact with somebody, oh, it'll be so embarrassing for me to try to reestablish contact because it's been so long. No. Remember, it's been long for them too. They haven't reached out to you. You haven't reached out to them. Without fail, when I reach out to people after ten years, their reaction is primarily, oh my gosh. It's great to hear you, except for the person who says, wait a minute.
Stever Robbins [00:12:13]:
Does the restraining order expire? You know? You know? Like, why? You're the one I was supposed to delete from the
Stuart Webb [00:12:18]:
address book.
Stever Robbins [00:12:20]:
But but generally speaking, I've had a great response. I've reconnected with some people that I I I reconnected with a friend of mine I haven't seen in thirty years. And, you know, we had a great conversation, and it was all because I just picked up the phone. I picked up the phone, and I said, hey. Is this still your phone number? Because if not, I really wanna delete it out of my out of my phone. And she was like, don't delete it. Don't delete it. Call me today.
Stever Robbins [00:12:43]:
We had a great conversation.
Stuart Webb [00:12:44]:
That's brilliant. That's brilliant. Steve, I it it brings me to to what is technically question three, but I think we've sort of veered off track a little bit. And that, I know you've got some really valuable free advice, valuable free offers that you wanna sort of, leave the audience with. Do you wanna just describe those to us and and and tell us about, you know, how you are trying to help people with these, with exactly these problems?
Stever Robbins [00:13:06]:
Sure. Absolutely. So, as I mentioned to you, I don't remember if we were on air when I did. I've recently done a business pivot, and I previously dealt mainly with strategic business issues and am now shifting to this new model, which I call connected and respected, which is helping individuals do this kind of outreach. The the giveaway that I have today is a handout from a presentation that I did called 10 cultural and success lies. And,
Stuart Webb [00:13:36]:
Only 10? Wow.
Stever Robbins [00:13:38]:
Well, the the top 10. Well, let's make it a top 10 list. I gave this first at Harvard Business School, this presentation. I and I ended up being asked and came back and did this several times. The basic idea is as I got older, I looked around at people who were successful. I looked around. I I I did go personally to Harvard Business School, so I know a lot of people who are very successful in material sense. And I started noticing that the way they actually got there was not the way everyone says.
Stever Robbins [00:14:06]:
Right? Success lie I think this is number one. If it isn't, it should be. Is work hard and you'll get ahead. And I'm like, in what universe? I I mean, I know a couple people who are worth who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars when I compare their life to mine. They don't work harder than I do. Meanwhile, my cleaning lady I know how hard she works because I know how messy I am. My cleaning lady works her butt off, and she's never gonna have a hundred million dollars, at least not from not from cleaning. And that was the first cultural career lie that really got me wondering what other things do people say that have become conventional wisdom that if you really stop and think about them.
Stever Robbins [00:14:45]:
You know, we even tell kids to work hard. And I'm like, why would you tell a kid to work hard and they'll get ahead if that's not actually how getting ahead works? I mean, I wanna give my kids or my nieces and nephews because I don't have kids. I wanna give them advice that works. So I will say, work hard under the following circumstances for the following reasons, but don't expect these to be the thing that distinguishes you from other people. This may just be the price of admission or it may actually and this this was the weird thing about having a personal productivity podcast is I took a really hard look at what makes people productive. And one of the interesting things about being productive, if you're an employee, this is not true if you're self employed, but if you're an employee, the more productive you are, the more free time you have. The more free time you have, the less you appear to be working. The less you appear to be working, the more the people around you say that person is lazy.
Stever Robbins [00:15:36]:
And they give you more work to do because they think you have all of this free time, but they don't raise your salary because clearly, you were you didn't have enough to do previously. So when you are employed by someone else, the paradox is the more productive you get, the more work and the more responsibility you get without necessarily getting the rewards. When you're self employed, the more productive you get, you also get the rewards because you get to keep them, to keep the rewards yourself. So hard work, depending on the form, may or may not be having social and reputational consequences and maybe having career consequences that have nothing to do with your output and your productivity, but that have everything to do with the way that the hard work that you're doing is or isn't being perceived by other people. Should I tell you a secret I've never told anyone?
Stuart Webb [00:16:24]:
Please go ahead.
Stever Robbins [00:16:25]:
Okay, everyone. You're hearing this for the first time. I hope my first manager is not listening to this. I figured this out at my very first job out of undergrad. I was a computer programmer, and I Figured it out
Stuart Webb [00:16:39]:
a lot earlier than most of us at Stevie. You know that. Don't you?
Stever Robbins [00:16:42]:
Well, so I was much I was much more productive than any anyone else on the programming team, like, really more productive. And I realized that I wasn't get I wasn't getting paid more for this. In fact, they even told me at my review that I was that productive, and they said, but you're too young to be making any more money than you're making now. So, I had to finish the system that I was working on. I finished the entire system in two days, and I then spent the next six weeks releasing one new module at a time so that it appeared that I was doing six weeks worth of work even though I had only spent two days on it. I spent the rest of the time reading comic books. And what was interesting is because I was so much more productive, the amount of work I was releasing per day was comparable to what everyone else was releasing per day. Whereas if I had released it all in two days, they would have given me six more weeks worth of work to do.
Stever Robbins [00:17:41]:
And, anyway, I've never told anyone that before. If my ex manager is listening, Sheldon, now you know. And the statute of limitations has passed.
Stuart Webb [00:17:53]:
Steve, I hate to I hate to sort of, just summarize that in a in a phrase that that was said to me when I was a much, much younger person. It's not what you know, it's who you know. And so you come back to the fact that you can be brilliant. I mean you can really know some stuff, but if you don't know the right people or you don't know the right person to tell that to, you might as well know nothing.
Stever Robbins [00:18:15]:
And I
Stuart Webb [00:18:16]:
think you're illustrating that brilliantly with the fact that if you are, if you do have that free time, and I do know somebody in one company that I worked with who had a lot of free time because they were very productive. They just spent their time networking. They just spent their time going around making sure the senior managers knew who they were so that when they had an hour free and they had an idea, they knew to go and talk to about it. So they use their productivity extremely well. But, I'm really looking forward now to getting my hands on that and that that freebie that you just mentioned. And what I'm gonna tell people, look, if you go to this this link, I'm gonna put a lot of this stuff from Steve, you know, where you can find him, who you can talk to about him, and and some of his previous talks and things. I mean, we'll even refer to the podcast because I think the the productivity podcast, I do remember listening to it, was a brilliant brilliant insight into productivity. But if you go to systemize.me/free- stuff, we'll have links about Steve, what he does, how he works.
Stuart Webb [00:19:11]:
You can pick up all of that stuff there, and I really do think you should go and find out more about Steve. If you don't know who he is, you really should. So go to systemize.me, free stuff. Steve. I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna potentially take you back a little bit. You you've talked about productivity. You've talked about being a high impact coach. How did you get to be a high impact coach from being somebody who was a programmer? What what path was it were you on? Was there a program, a a course, a book, something that changed how you started to think about yourself? And I I appreciate we could now we could open a Pandora's box, and we could be here for a while.
Stuart Webb [00:19:48]:
So you take your time.
Stever Robbins [00:19:50]:
Sure. Let me let let me let me let me try to summarize as best I can. When I discovered that the hard work I I mean, this is this was my own lived journey. When I discovered that the hard work wasn't getting me the results that I wanted, I was gonna have to wait another ten years for my age to catch up with my work ethic. I started doing things like trying different companies, and I went back to business school, got an MBA, and I was with a series of startups. And after my I think it was my ninth startup, this was over the course of about of about fifteen years. After my ninth startup, I I was seeing patterns. Like, we we we myth mythological, myth logic.
Stever Robbins [00:20:32]:
We turn start ups into myths, at least here in America, and we have kinda corporatized to the whole start up process. So so there's all of this stuff, which just like the career wise, it is just complete b******t that people spew about startups. And part of it is things like how hard you have to work. And after you've been with nine startups, you start to notice the reason people are working hard is they don't know good project management. They don't know project scoping. They don't know how to identify what's important and what isn't. And if you know these things, then you simply, you know, you scope your work so that you can do it and you choose the work that's most important that's gonna get you the next step, etcetera. So I was at a start up.
Stever Robbins [00:21:12]:
It was driving me absolutely nuts to watch a bunch of very earnest, well meaning young people make all of the same mistakes. And I went to my lifelong mentor, and I said, you know, I I'm getting really tired of going through the same learning curve over and over and over and over. And they won't listen to me, of course, because they're young and adventurous and visionaries and all that stuff. And he said, why don't you try helping people from the outside instead of necessarily being part of the company? Because when you're the outside expert, people take you more seriously. And long story short, that's what led me into coaching, and I discovered I loved it. It's,
Stuart Webb [00:21:50]:
I'm gonna have to I I was laughing. I was trying not to laugh too much because this is a very serious subject. But I'm afraid I recognize so much of what you were saying because, you know, I I spent some time myself being a a start up mentor to some start up companies. And then nearly always ask the first question, which is, well, we're we're in the process of developing this or we're doing this. And I'll go, okay. Is that is that how is that gonna help your customer solve their problem? And they nearly always have no answer to that question. I think that's the basic question that you ask of any business. You know? Am I producing a solution to a problem, or am I doing this because it feels like it's the right thing to do? And, you know, I'm a scientist by background.
Stuart Webb [00:22:25]:
So I often use sort of the soul sort of, like, let's run an experiment and find out. And people would look at me as if to say, no. No. That's not how you do it. And I'm thinking, yeah. It is because that is actually the basis upon which most successful businesses have been built. But but it takes time to learn that sort of thing, doesn't it? And I think you've encapsulated that journey brilliantly.
Stever Robbins [00:22:45]:
There there is a there's a set of research in entrepreneurship and business formation that actually supports that. It's, done by a woman named Sarris Sarris Vathid at the Duke Fuqua School of Business, and she has published it under the title under the term effectuation, e f f e c t u a t I o n. It is she somehow has taken an extremely easy set of concepts and made them almost impenetrable using scholarly language. However, at the bottom line or at the at the end of the day, the bottom line is that most successful startups go through a period of extreme experimentation. And the ones that tend to be most successful and have the longest runways in terms of they're able to try the most experiments Mhmm. Are the ones who manage their investment very carefully. They make commitments in a very particular kind of way. And one of the big things that they do is they form alliances.
Stever Robbins [00:23:43]:
They become connected and respected, but they allow their network and their connections to help shape the business. And it becomes an iterative process where the business becomes shaped by the people around the business who put skin in the game. And skin in the game is the big differentiator. Anyone who's only put skin in the game, they get a say. And what happens is you have ecosystems developed, business ecosystems, in which everyone is an interested and committed player because everyone has skin in the game. And it may not look like the ecosystem that any of those players would have imagined in the beginning, but it's successful because everyone involved has had a hand in shaping it so that it meets their needs as well as the needs of anyone else. So it's called effectuation.
Stuart Webb [00:24:28]:
That's a brilliant I've not heard of that book, and I really am grateful for that. You've mentioned it. It's another one to add to my reading pile, which is getting longer, and I need to find some time to do it. But, you know, that is, that once again takes us back to this question about how do you know the right people and how do you keep the right people in your orbit so that they can actually be the partners that help you to form your ideas. I mean, we all have to we all have to have these networks. So it brings us right back to to your basic core tenant of this this discussion, which is you've gotta know the right people, and you don't know them by sitting in the corner with the cheese and waiting for them to come and approach you. You have to have a system for getting out there and finding them out and talking to them about these things.
Stever Robbins [00:25:10]:
Correct. And it it and it's the side of business that pretty much every successful business business owner either has because they work at it or because they have it naturally. Because let's be clear. If I look I was raised in a in a polyam a a traveling new age polyamorous hippie commune. And, you know, driving around in a in a 12 foot trailer with with our little commune members. And I went to Harvard Business School. So I was an extreme outsider to that entire echelon of society and and way of working. And it's been really interesting seeing that from both the inside and the outside because a lot of, you know, a lot of hundred million dollar deals do not get done the way you would imagine with tons and tons of due diligence and whatever.
Stever Robbins [00:25:59]:
It's, you know, my college roommate is running a fund, and he needs to invest in a gas pipeline for a tax deduction this year. Do you know anyone who's selling a gas pipeline? Oh, sure. My friend Bill is. I'll tell you what. I'll introduce you to Bill. You give me a 10% cut. Fine. And I'm sitting here watching these deals get made, and I'm like, really? Really? That that's how this happens? You know? Now there's plenty, I'm sure, that happened with a lot more due diligence and and a lot more care, etcetera.
Stever Robbins [00:26:27]:
But it's astonishing that that at the higher levels of business and presumably of it probably presumably, it's not just business. An awful lot of what goes on ends up being through personal connections, not through formal requests for, you know oh, can I tell you can I tell you something that will blow your mind?
Stuart Webb [00:26:50]:
Please.
Stever Robbins [00:26:51]:
I I realized this a couple weeks ago, and I realized I have never heard anyone else say this. I was thinking about, gee, isn't it a shame that there are no entrance criteria or entrance qualifications to be the leader of a country? And I thought about it. I thought, you know, I I honestly can't think of any country for whom there's their process of selecting a leader includes something like like they have to have passed economics one zero one with at least a passing grade or or a CEO. I've never heard of a CEO being given a balance sheet and saying, can you read this? What does this what does this balance sheet tell you about the business? Our leadership positions, none of them are based on actual competency measurements. They're all based on personal connections, who knows who and who has what reputation. And I would love a counterexample. Please send me counterexamples, but I haven't been able to think of them.
Stuart Webb [00:27:52]:
I hate to, I hate to to support what you've just said. I had a meeting with a CEO of a reasonably sized company, and I sat down with the CEO. And my immediate response was, I'm not sure how this guy got his job, but it wasn't by some sort of competence based interview. And I just asked him a simple question about his finances. Now I'm not an accountant. I'm not a great finance expert, but I knew a couple of questions to ask. And he looked at me and said, well, I don't really understand the numbers. I leave that to my finance guy.
Stuart Webb [00:28:28]:
I said, so how are you driving your strategy? And he said, strategy. What do you mean by strategy? And I said, well, do you know who your main customer is and how you're gonna make them happy? And he went, I'll leave that to my sales and marketing team. And I was wondering how this guy ran his team. And then I realized, he played a lot of golf, and he met a lot of potential customers on the golf course. And he invited those potential customers and potential partners to come back to the golf club and have a drink with him. And that's how he did his deals, and it was nothing more than that because he was playing quite a bit of golf. And and I just thought, hey. I wish I had your life, but on the same token,
Stever Robbins [00:29:06]:
I don't think
Stuart Webb [00:29:07]:
I'd be as successful somehow. And I'm I'm afraid you're absolutely right. We do not have enough people who have been taken through those those lessons unless, of course, they've failed miserably and learned from them. And I think as a species, we're not that good at reflecting and learning upon what we've done in the past and maybe sort of sitting quietly and thinking about it and perhaps correcting it in the future?
Stever Robbins [00:29:32]:
Oh, don't even get me started on humans as a as a species and how we learn. I've been playing a lot with AI recently, which is probably gonna be our next successor species. And and I've been playing with AI, but I've been doing it in a very particular way, which I have been observing my own reactions to the AI. And so I'll solve a problem, and then I will solve a problem with AI. And and what I'm paying attention to, I mean, obviously, is whether the solution is correct, but I'm also paying attention to what is that experience like for me. How is it different for me to use AI as a tool or not? Because I wanna find out. Is this a tool that I wanna use? And what I have found is the piece that you just mentioned, the reflective piece, is virtually a % missing when I use AI. So when I use AI to solve a problem, I'm kind of pounding at the keystrokes and hoping the AI figures it out.
Stever Robbins [00:30:25]:
But when I solve a problem on my own, I kind of stop and think deeply about it. So with AI, it's more like I'm an editor. Oh, okay. Here's the five page essay that chat GPT or Claude just did for me. I'm gonna scan it over to see if there are any obvious errors. But what I'm not doing is really reading it sentence by sentence and going, wait. Do I really believe this sentence? And if I don't, is Claude right or am I right? And if Claude is right, how can I learn this? And how can I incorporate it into my thinking? None of that is happening when I use AI, and it should be because that's how humans learn, and that's how we get better at things. So I am now very afraid of AI.
Stever Robbins [00:31:04]:
I am afraid that it is going to deskill us very, very rapidly. Yeah. And I use it anyway. Go figure it out.
Stuart Webb [00:31:12]:
Articulate you have articulated a number of problems that I think we've got with AI at the moment. And it's nothing to do with the fact that well, it is to do partly with the fact that it's stealing stuff off the Internet and the the business models are highly flawed. But I think it is it's, for me, too often we're lazy and we just use it because it's quick and it's easy and we don't have to do the thinking. And I think sometimes we find thinking to be too much effort and I think that's partly and we go back to how are we teaching children. We're teaching them we're teaching them some of the some of the things which are not necessary to pass exams as opposed to do thinking. It's we're teaching them about we're teaching about the fact that they should know this stuff, but they don't have to think they don't have to learn it by doing any thinking. They learn it because it goes up on the blackboard and they copy it down or they write to a blackboard. Whatever screen they use now in teaching, I'm sure they don't use blackboards anymore, but it goes up and they just copy it down.
Stuart Webb [00:32:03]:
So We could spend many hours on that, but I'm gonna take us away because otherwise, we'll be here for the rest of the afternoon. And I don't wanna keep you that long because I know you've got things to do. Steve, you must be thinking we've had some really interesting questions, but when is he gonna be asking that really key question, the one that really makes me say, well, no. This is the key one that you should have asked. So I'm gonna ask you now to to pose that question and answer it for us.
Stever Robbins [00:32:27]:
I think the question you should have asked me, is why do we bother with any of this? Why why are we striving for, quote, unquote, success or to build our business or to have our hundred million dollar exit? And, you know, there's tons and reams of research that says that on people's death beds, they do not say, oh my god. I wish that I had acquired one more company. Right? It's the relationships that matter. As I as we're sitting here talking, the day care center across the street is taking the little tots out for their walk. There's, like, 20 of them. They're holding this little rope, and they're they're climbing up on the curve, and they're jumping, and they're making these little babbling tock noises. And even though I'm here with you, oh my god, it's coming in the window and I can't can barely stop myself from running over and going, oh gosh, they're so adorable. They're the future.
Stever Robbins [00:33:23]:
So I wanna be really, really clear. Right? All of the success stuff and the business stuff, none of this means anything. The only reason we do it is so that we can have a meaningful, happy life with relationships and people we love. And if that's the whole reason we're engaged in this set of endeavors and pretending that this is important, then why not start with the connection with the connections and the respect and the relationships and and build your business around that. Build your business around who do I wanna hang out with because I do business eight to ten hours a day. I'm gonna hang out with the people I'm doing business with. Instead of choosing the business and then hoping that you can find people to buy, choose the people and then find a business to serve them. And forget the hundred million dollar thing.
Stever Robbins [00:34:16]:
Trust me. You know, a couch made out of platinum thread is not more comfortable than a couch that's you know, that old stuff one that you got in the junkyard. It actually probably is more comfortable. But you you get the basic broad idea.
Stuart Webb [00:34:31]:
I'd love I'd love to have a an old couch, just to sit and talk about this while I've done it. You're absolutely right, Steve. But I I absolutely believe that too many people are spending time in companies and building businesses that make them unhappy. And, you know, you need to you need to know people to reach out to and have a coffee. You need to reach out to and speak to people who can just feed your soul. And I just kind of feel like you've done that for me this afternoon. There there's a big I've got a I've got a large contact list as well. I'm gonna go through that today.
Stuart Webb [00:35:03]:
I'm gonna make a note of some of the people that I have connected with in twenty years. No. I'm not that old. In in five years. And, just, just send them a message and find out. You know, there are people that I was I I spent some very happy years, when I was doing research at universities. I probably haven't spoken to them In a few years, I really should reach out and just say hello to them, and I'll be doing that. And then I'll put a system in place to keep in touch with them because that's the key thing, isn't it?
Stever Robbins [00:35:28]:
That is the key thing. Just remind them you exist, and eventually, you'll both be in the same city. You'll get together for lunch. You know, you'll plan a diamond heist together. You'll succeed. You'll wait long enough for the statute of limitations to wear off, and then you'll write a screenplay about it, and you obviously will be played by George Clooney.
Stuart Webb [00:35:47]:
I I can think of nothing better that I wanna do with my afternoon. Steve, thank you so much for spending some time with me. Listen. I'm I'm gonna say once again, look. Go to systemize.me/free-stuff to find out about Steve. Find out about that valuable, 10, 10, tops tips that he's gonna give me. I was gonna say the 10 tips, but it's not. It's only the top 10.
Stuart Webb [00:36:08]:
It's nothing more than the top 10.
Stever Robbins [00:36:09]:
I need to go put the word top in the title of that really quickly.
Stuart Webb [00:36:14]:
And now I'm just gonna beg you. Look. If you'd like to hear more about some of the people that are coming up, that are as joyful, they're as useful, they're as informative as Steva. Go go join, my my newsletter subscription list. Systemize.me/subscribe. Get on the list. Just get an email. It it doesn't come out very often.
Stuart Webb [00:36:34]:
I do not bombard you with 15 a day. It's I haven't got time for that, but I'll send you an email just letting you know who's coming up on the podcast, who you should join to listen to because some of these are absolutely brilliant. Stevie, you have been one of those people. Thank you so much
Stever Robbins [00:36:48]:
for being
Stuart Webb [00:36:48]:
here today, and thank you for bringing to our attention those tiny tots that are outside right at the moment enjoying themselves. Go join them. Go have fun. Go wherever they're going. I'm sure it's better than wherever you were planning to be some boring meeting that you were gonna go to.
Stever Robbins [00:37:04]:
Quite probably. Thank you very much, Stuart. I've really enjoyed it.
Stuart Webb [00:37:08]:
Thank you, Stever.
