Focus on your usefulness. If you can figure out how you can be useful, helpful of service, how you can move the dial, right? In Emerson's terms, to do something to kind of tweak it just for one person for one moment to make that difference, then your usefulness can become your passion. On confidence, I say confidence comes last. If you think that you're just waiting to feel more confident before you take this step, before you look for another job, before you embark on this new phase of your life, you're gonna be waiting forever. All right, so John Tionoff, you're in for a surprise today. How do you get confidence? Or is confidence a thing you actually even need? If you're waiting for the confidence to happen, you'll be waiting forever, just do it. Feel the fear and do it anyway. The true goal in life and career starts on the inside. How does your usefulness become your passion rather than the other way around is John Tionoff. All right, so John, how would you define success? I like to, well, first of all, Brad, thanks for having me on. It's great to see you and talk to your listeners. I hope I can be helpful here. You know, success for me always goes back to the great Emerson quote, right? I'm sure people talk about this on your podcast a lot, but I kind of printed it out for today because I really want to kind of set the bar on this because we are so often focused on the external aspects of success and the material aspects of success, particularly today, I think this is an important topic. So I'm just gonna read this for us all to remind us of the wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson. What is success? To laugh often and much? To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate the beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded. You know, it's interesting because when you go back to that, you think he must have put a lot of thought into it, but I guess, you know, when you started in your entertainment career, it wasn't about that. What do you think it was as a young man? Like what was success definition as a young man? Great question. So for me, it was always about curiosity. I was just kind of taken by the complexity of how things worked. And I was a kind of creative kid. I was a camera kid. I was always interested in tinkering with stuff. And I kind of got into it just by a fascination with the process. How does an image go from being out there to being on a picture, right? What is the process of that? And then expanding that out into moving pictures, how does that process happen? And this illusion that we've created through the technology to tell stories. So this complexity really drove me to find out what it was all about. Yeah, the intrigue, the curiosity is found in so many successful people. How did your intrigue with that turn into your current intrigue? Like take me on that journey of John moving from intrigue with that entertainment industry and now really more an in a game guy than the out of game. It really interesting because you would think from looking on the outside that what is being a film producer and a studio executive have to do with career coaching. And what I realized along the way was that where I started was this curiosity about, well, how does one script get made and another script not get made? What goes into that particular project? Is it the combination of a good writer? Is it the director? Is it the actor? The combination of all of these factors? What's the secret sauce? What are the criteria that you use? And everyone's got a different formula which makes it very frustrating because at the end of the day, as the famous screenwriter William Goldman says at the beginning of his book, which I would advise for anyone who's interested in how this business runs, called Adventures in the Screen Trade, first thing he says is nobody knows anything. And that goes, I think, to the heart of it. You have to have a certain humility about this process. If you think you know how it works, you'll never figure it out. So the interesting thing for me was in my process, I went from this curiosity and fascination about how do I conquer this process? How do I figure out the formula? In the process of doing that, I was working with all these talented people. And I began to understand and kind of get interested in what was their process? How were they attacking these issues? Why was this writer more successful, this director? What was the vision there? Was it timing? Was it talent? Was it discipline? Was it that Woody Allen idea of success is just showing up? It's like 95% showing up? So over time, what I realized is that this fascination with the people began to become more important for me than my fascination with the projects or the content. And this came particularly true for me in my last big gig in the industry, which is that DreamWorks animation. And I was there in the 2000s. That was and is a company that totally is dependent upon the talent of those individual artists and technologists to create those images, those stories. And my role there was a talent management role, really. And how does one person go from being a graduate out of art school to being an art director or a director of an animated movie? What is the arc, the evolution of their talent, of their awareness, of their ability to collaborate, to self-evaluate the discipline? All of those questions came into sharp focus as I was managing these teams. And when I left DreamWorks to go off and consult, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to consult. And I just knew that I was done being an executive and I wanted to do something on my own. I had had a startup in the 90s, so I knew what the entrepreneurial life was. I wasn't necessarily sure that I wanted to do a startup again, but I wanted to do something independent. And I wound up falling in so that career coaching practice because people were coming to me. And I was talking about these questions, and look, the last 15 years has been just so changeable in the career space. So many things happening, so many different approaches, so many conventional wisdoms dashed to the ground in this new environment. Here we are. Yeah, and I want to go back to it because, you know, one of the things that I find more interesting in your perspectives is you hear a lot of people say, you know, focus on your passion, focus on your passion. You're like, no, focus on what you're good at, or focus on your usefulness, I think, is your word. Tell me more about that philosophy. This is an idea, this is not my idea. I stole this idea from a venture capitalist named Ben Horowitz who delivered this great commencement address at Columbia University. And the point is, if you subscribe to the Joseph Campbell notion of follow your bliss and the money will follow, Ben Horowitz's idea is, look, if you subscribe to that, that means that every contestant on American Isles is going to be a zillionaire, right? Because that's all they've got is their passion. Maybe they've got talent, but the passion alone is not going to carry you. And his prescription is focus on your usefulness. If you can figure out how you can be useful, helpful of service, how you can move the dial, right? In Emerson's terms, to do something to kind of tweak it just for one person for one moment to make that difference, then your usefulness can become your passion. It makes it simple, doesn't it? I mean, it's a really interesting one that I think a lot of young people in particular get pushed down that road. And a lot of people going into their own business, and as you said, starting your consultancy, starting that thing, it's like, what do I enjoy? Well, it's more, what am I useful? Where can I add the most value? Because if you're adding the most value, you're making the most for other people and therefore yourself. So that brings me then to the thought of, how do we, whether it's getting a job or whether it's as a consultant getting hired by a client, how do we attract rather than go off to chase, hunt down, et cetera? Chasing after a job, a client is a fool's errand because you're not starting from an inner place of foundation. And in everything that I do, I subscribe to this notion of inner to outer. This idea that your outer experience, whether that is success, whether that is traction in your business, your ability to sell, to land a deal, that outer experience is always a reflection of your inner reality. How do you feel about yourself? How aligned are you with the values that you hold? All these kinds of considerations. Self-knowledge, what are you good at? What are you not good at? All of these emotional intelligence questions. That's where you have to start. So if I start there, what are some of the most important questions I should be asking myself in order to start attracting that to me rather than chasing after as we term it? I think there are two aspects to this. The fundamental aspect is to have an attitude of service. You always wanna go in and how can I serve this person? Whatever that conversation might be, it could be a friend, it could be a new contact, a client, it could be a boss, whomever that is, how can I serve this person in this situation? How can I help them be successful? And then the pathway to do that is to listen. We are really bad at listening. And we are very bad with silences, right? Very often, the magic in a conversation happens when you've had your say, the other person has had their say, and you wanna give it a moment to settle and allow the process to take care of itself so that the next thought, the next idea emerges from this relationship that you're building. Got it, got it. So if I'm sitting there thinking, and I'm really intrigued, John, because I look back at the business you're in and the movie business, I know my wife was in the modeling business, and selecting actors, selecting talent, it's like so 100% on, we need this exact look and this exact frame and this height and this thing here, to now you're on the opposite side of that, and it's so much more about the human aspect behind everything in there. Do you think it's just you that shifted or do you think the world shifted with you in that frame? I really don't know. I think, certainly for me, it's been a maturation process, right? I mean, I think that for all of us, we get older, we start to put some things together. So you're talking about the casting process. Look, the secret is everything is about casting, right? When you're in any kind of a situation, we look at casting in media, actors, all that, as kind of this kind of hallmark process, but it's true in every situation. If you're building a team, it's all about casting, right? This is why someone may have a perfect resume that maps to the job description, but they're not the right fit for the role, because you don't wanna have a team where everyone is identical, because you're gonna miss all of the other things that you don't know, those known unknowns or unknown knowns, whatever that kind of famous start of the process is. You wanna have a diversity of backgrounds, abilities, attitudes, perspectives. You wanna have a healthy interchange. You don't want everyone to be agreeing all the time. You want civility, you want people to have their say, but you want a difference of opinion, right? You want the person who doesn't talk a lot, but who in the meeting, you ask them for their position and they go, well, have you thought about this? And you go, oh my God, why didn't we think of that, right? You want that person, right? So that's about casting, right? That's about understanding that people who agree with you are your weak spot. They're not your strong spot. So, I think that this has changed to your question. This has changed to a certain extent because the world has become so much more complex and has changed so fast, is continuing to change. I mean, AI is the word of the year, right? It's gonna completely upend our lives for the rest of humanity, perhaps. What are we doing to address that complexity? Yeah, yeah, I think it's interesting though that you're trying in a world with such, you know, how it looks and how the resume looks, what you're trying to get us to remind ourselves of is, is there a culture fit? Is there an inner fit? Is there a, do these people get a long type thing? How do you convince people of, you know, making the inner choice first rather than the outer choice? Like when someone's going for a job, they're looking for the highest pay. When someone's going to get themselves a contracting gig, they're looking at, well, you know, this was gonna pay me this much. It's hard to say no sometimes on that to go back to your inness. How do you get someone to focus on that? Look, I think this comes from experience and I think that there are, I'm working with a guy right now who's in his 30s who comes out of investment banking, was in it for 10, 15 years, realized that he was fighting his way upstream every single day because he was not aligned with the values of the people on his team. He wanted to admire the people that he was working with. Instead, he found it distasteful. So this is a kind of a classic situation between people who are very material driven, externally driven and people who recognize that the true gold in life and career starts on the inside. If you don't know yourself and balance that self-knowledge, the values that you have with your external connections and process, you know, you're not going to be successful. You may wind up at the end of your career with a lot of money, a lot of houses, but at the end of the day, when you get to your deathbed, it's the old cliche, you know, no one says, oh, you know, I regret the fact that I didn't make a lot of money. People say, no, I regret the fact that I didn't have connections with my kids, right? That I didn't really work hard on my passion to live life, to travel, to breathe, clean air, whatever that might be. Those are the regrets that people have. So knowing that, you can either look at that and go, oh, well, you know, that's not really me, I don't care, I really want the money and I want it now and I want to retire early and all that. Okay, I have to say, I don't really spend too much time worrying about those people. I worry about the people who are going, I see that all this is going on, but I know there's got to be something more. How do I get to that something more? Yeah, yeah, and I think that whether you own your own business, and it's probably harder, I guess, John, for those of us that own our own business, because we've signed on the dotted line to go down a certain road and until we sell it, I guess, is the thing. It's hard, it's hard. I mean, I had a startup in the bubble in the 90s when it was very go-go and we kind of rose up with the NASDAQ and then the NASDAQ tanked in April of 2001 and everything fell out. All the investors went away. It was tough and my partner and I were kind of looking at each other, we had built out this company over the last five years and we had 50 people working for us at the peak and at the end of the day, within the space of about a year, it was down to just the two of us again. We started in this little studio apartment in Venice, California and built it up from there and then at the end of the day, we were back to that apartment. So, you know, and if you're going to look at that and say, well, I failed, that doesn't serve you, right? You know, you have a question about the failure to success quotient and I would say, first of all, that there is no failure. Failure is a judgment, it is subjective. You know, one person's failure can be another man's success. You really want to look at your life as a set of experiences and you want to be able to learn from the feedback that you're getting from those life experiences. You know, what does this teach me? In that instance, when my startup blew up, I thought, I'm not going back to those movie business jobs that I had, I want to do something different. I don't know what it is. So, I decided to go back to school and I earned my psychology degree because I wanted to know more about me, about people and change up my pitch, my pattern, you know? And that worked. See, to me, John, that story of changing your life mid-life, changing your entire thing, that to me is a big part of success. I think a lot of people, they get stuck on the train tracks and they miss their success because they don't shift, they don't jump off that train. Now, I could say luckily or unluckily, but luckily, John, you were forced off that train. It's like, you know, NASDAQ crash, tech bubble boom, done. You were forced to actually rethink. Do you think, actually, this is a tough question for you, do you think if it hadn't, you would have just kept running? Maybe, maybe, but I think, look, I have the good fortune or the bad fortune to have been buffeted about in my career. And I'm not sure what that's about, whether this is me just taking that curiosity beyond where it was safe. I think some of it has to do, maybe in retrospect, of being a little bit ADHD and not wanting to get bored. And when I got bored, my performance went down and I couldn't hide it, right? So I got fired a lot, either because I got bored and I found something else to do, or because I got bored and they didn't want me around anymore. So I'm not sure what the story is, but I think that the process of change and of changing yourself out, evolving, challenging yourself to get to the next level is really important today. And I would say that there used to be an industrial-era model of career, and that had three phases. You get a good education, that entitles you to work for 40 years, and then you get to retire. That's gone, right? That doesn't exist anymore. We're working longer. Wall Street Journal is talking about this idea of a 60-year career, but it's not a 60-year industrial-era where you get to work in this one field and you work for 40 years or 60 years in the same company or the same industry, and then you're done, right? That is a factory model of a career. In the new model of the career, the first stage is not education, because education is lifelong. You're always gonna be in school, basically. Self-knowledge, we talked about this before. Know who you are, know what you do well, know what you wanna do, right? And then the second phase is generativity, constantly changing up this idea. How can I be useful today? It's gonna change tomorrow. How can I be useful tomorrow? Where are things going? Where do I fit into this? Where do I keep delivering on a higher level? And then the third stage is not retirement because who wants to stop, right? There's too much going on, too much interesting stuff to do. You wanna give back. That's the third stage. That's where the service really kicks in. So those are the new three stages. And in that generativity phase, that generativity phase of your career is about portfolio. It's about working here, learning something else, taking a break, taking a sabbatical, raising kids, changing things up with your partner, maybe going back to school, maybe trying something new, prototyping different ways, having multiple streams of income. It's a different world. And we have to take advantage of that. Well, hey there and thanks for listening. I've noticed that 78% of you are brand new, which means you haven't hit the subscribe button yet. By subscribing, you help us bring on even better guests, better quality content, and serve you better with even more podcast. So please hit that subscribe button. It only takes a second. It makes a huge difference. If you support us, we're gonna support your success and help you achieve big success together. I love that summary. Love it. So to change careers and stuff brings up the subject of confidence. You've got to, I don't know, your perception on this or your take on this is different to most people. Help me understand how you arrived at it, or maybe give me the concept and then tell me the story of how you arrived at it. So, I'm a bit of a contrarian about a bunch of things. On confidence, I say confidence comes last. Right? If you think that you're just waiting to feel more confident before you take this step, before you look for another job, before you embark on this new phase of your life, you're gonna be waiting forever. Right? Confidence, and I think if you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, they will not characterize themselves as confident. They seem confident on the outside, but I would say for most of them, there is this real, not a fear inside them. But they are driven by their vision to move forward. And you'll ask them, how did you overcome this? You could have just stood by and let this wash over you or let the failure wash you out. And they'll say it was never a choice. I had to do this. It doesn't feel like it was courageous or confident. I just had to do it. And that I think is an important lesson for all of us that if you're waiting for the confidence to happen, you'll be waiting forever. Just do it, right? Feel the fear and do it anyway. It's an old line. Susan Jeffers wrote a great book, didn't she? You mentioned the word courageous in there. I've heard courage defined as, you know, you can't have courage unless you do have fear, unless you do have doubt sort of thing. When you're confronted with someone that is in that phase, John, how do you help them get through that phase? Or is there no helping them? Is it just the mother bird kicks you out of the nest sort of thing and you gotta fly? What's the strategy there? I think it's an interesting question. Cause, and I love the word courage cause it comes from the French word, coil, which is heart, right? So if you're dealing with courage, you're dealing with your heart, you know, with the love that you have inside yourself. And I think that love for self, not self love in the sense of vanity or conceit, but a real sense of appreciation for the fact that you are a worthy person by definition and that you deserve to have what you want. You deserve to live a life where you feel in balance, in sync, where you're able to, you know, to move forward and try to do the things that you wanna do. Starting from that place is what builds the courage, right? The courage comes out of a self-nurturing process. Where you believe that you're worthy and that self-worth carries you forward to the point where you wake up in the morning and go, you know, I'm gonna do this today. I'm gonna follow through on my plan today because that courage is something that you express every day in small ways. Got it, got it. So final question then that I ask everyone on this podcast is what was the best advice you ever got or even the best quote you ever read on success? So you're giving us the best quote. So what's the best advice you ever got on success? The quote that comes up, this is from an old teacher friend of mine who said, God fires you from jobs you're too dumb to quit. Ha ha ha ha ha. Why is that your favorite? Why is that one it for you? Cause obviously you've been fired that many damn times, John. Because it is about, it takes the stigma away from it and it turns it into a bit of a joke. And the idea that, you know, whether it's God or the universe or whatever the forces are, what's going on in the world is much bigger than we are, right? We strive for so much control. And really how much control do we really have over what's going on on the outside? So this idea that God fires you from jobs you're too dumb to quit. Let's get to the too dumb to quit part, right? Why do we stay stuck in a situation which we know is not right? So that is a reminder to me that I need to kind of question my situation every day. Am I doing what I love to do, what I want to do, what's being useful to other people? Am I being of service? Am I following my values every day? If I'm not, I need to address it, right? Because if I don't, it's gonna, the piano's gonna get dropped on my head. Absolutely. Hey, you're on the Big Success podcast. I'm Brad Sugars. Hit the show notes, John Tarno, follow, like, share, study, do all the things and we'll be back next week with more of your success. You've been listening to the Big Success podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradshuggars.com.
