Picture a high school track meet: a sixteen-pound shot put thrown the wrong direction, a burst spleen, three weeks in a hospital bed. That's how my guest this week learned, at sixteen or seventeen, that avoiding failure is exactly what guarantees it. Mark DeCarlo woke up after three days unconscious to a doctor telling him ten more minutes and he'd have been dead, and he's spent every day since orienting his choices around one question: will this make me more happy or less happy?
Mark is an Emmy award-winning comedian, bestselling author, and in-demand corporate speaker and leadership trainer (also, if you had a kid in the 2000s, the voice of Hugh Neutron). We get into why he believes fear is always and only self-destructive, never useful once you're past outrunning actual predators, and why failing on purpose, over and over, is the only way to find out what you actually like. Mark also walks through the "ten times" exercise for identifying your own happiness, and calls out the biggest myth keeping high performers stuck: that you have to suffer now to be happy later.
If you're one of my high performers white-knuckling through burnout because you think the money has to come first, this one's for you. Mark's simple two-bucket framework for burnout, and his blunt reminder that no one's getting out of this alive, might be exactly the permission slip you need to stop postponing your own happiness.
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tc9hy5ItJ4
Mark DeCarlo is an Emmy award-winning comedian, bestselling author, and in-demand corporate speaker and leadership trainer. He's also the voice of Hugh Neutron on Nickelodeon's Jimmy Neutron and a former travel show host. After a near-death accident in high school, he built his career and his life around a single question: does this choice make me more happy or less happy?
Learn more at Mark's website, or follow him on Instagram.
"Fear is only and always self-destructive." —Mark DeCarlo
"And if you don't fail, you're not pushing hard enough." —Mark DeCarlo
"No one's getting out of this alive." —Mark DeCarlo
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