Tell me about your vision.
Man, so my vision, I have several different versions
of my vision.
One is for my business and one is for my life.
And what I do is combine both of these
in a way that is synergistic so that they're compatible
and they complement each other versus being, you know,
at ends with each other and that compete with each other.
And I think that's where most people get it wrong
is they have incompatible visions
and that's why they struggle in life and or business.
So for me, even the way I struggle with setting
up a business has to do with making sure
that life comes first.
And so for instance, every decision that I make
in my business has my personal vision
at the forefront of that, which allows me to really make sure
that my business is tailored to my life.
So for me, that's, for me, well, I have two,
I have two brand new daughters.
I have three total, but one's three and one's five.
Congratulations.
And so thanks, man.
And so I wanna spend a lot of time with them.
So my vision is really for me, mostly about family.
It's about health.
It's about making contributions.
It's about kind of empowering others
with living what they want to live instead
of just following a, you know,
a made for you version of their vision.
That's something I'm really passionate
about helping people discover for themselves.
And so I'll tell you, it's, and that's evolved over time
because, you know, if you look back before I had my girls,
I'd be on the road for, you know, months of the year.
And so now, as an example, my vision has shifted.
Like I don't wanna be on the road more than 30 days a year
total for everything related to work.
And so the core of the vision has stayed the same.
The way it's been executed has shifted
and some of those, you know, the particulars have changed.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're paying attention to what matters most.
Yeah, absolutely, man.
Each child can create that.
So, you know, it reminds me a little bit
of the idea behind the one minute,
not the one minute manager.
That's also a good book though.
The four hour work week by Tim Harris
and how he defines the new rich.
Now life and air, that's the same with the company, correct?
It is, it is.
Yeah, and I can see that.
So it's, there's very few entrepreneurs out there
who have built their business model
with their lifestyle in mind.
And it's also super common to find entrepreneurs
who have lost sight of what's most important in life.
So it's pretty neat that yours are tied hand in hand
together, it kind of keeps you honest at your mission.
Right, yeah.
Otherwise it'd be a hypocrite, right?
I'd be on the road and sacrificing my life
and be way out of shape.
And yet I'm telling people to do this
and that would not work.
So where did your vision come from?
Did it come from the four hour work week
or did it come before that, after that,
or, you know, is there some influence there?
I'm just curious.
Man, so my first version of my vision started around 2007,
2008, when I, and actually what I'd say started
my pursuit of a vision was not having a vision.
And I found myself in a job that while I was qualified
for skill wise was not aligned with my passions.
And I very quickly discovered like, and literally, listen,
my journey, I went to school for literally 15 years
with the belief that having a great job would end up
in having a great life.
That's what I was taught.
And I got that first job and I realized
there's something that did not feel right to me.
Like someone else controlling that much of my life
and what I made and what I worked on
and all this other stuff.
And so I realized that I hadn't had a vision.
I had just gone, I'd pursued the world's plan, right?
Like of what is expected of you.
And so that was the first part that really pushed me
in the direction of creating my own vision.
It was actually Steve Cook,
who is a founder of Life and Air that started asking me,
he was like, well, what do you want?
And I'm like, what do you mean?
Like, I mean, it doesn't everybody just do this?
Like, he's like, and he was like, no, he's like,
what would you define success as?
Like, what do you really find most important?
Similar to like what you had mentioned a second ago,
like what's most important to you?
And how do you define success based around that?
So I had been associating success and vision with,
hey, I'm gonna make a ton of money and have the nice house
and the cars and that's great for some people,
but that wasn't gonna fulfill me.
And so that was Steve's prompting
that really made me start to think about
whether or not I was pursuing like my path
or the world's path.
And like, that's really where I really even realized
this thing called a vision existed, frankly.
I love that.
And I think all of us come from backgrounds
of having different types of relationships with goals
and ambitions.
We fail at a goal, we might fear goals for a little while.
We succeeded a goal, we might set an easy goal.
We might start setting easy goals for ourselves.
We're on this process of figuring out
how we're gonna maximize our life,
what we wanna get out of it.
I remember telling my mom in middle school,
I think I was in high school.
I said, mom, I was reading,
we're learning about indentured slavery.
And I was like, isn't that kind of the definition of a job?
She's pissed.
I came from a blue collar family.
And she's like, she didn't hit me, you know?
But she's like, that's right.
Some people have jobs like that, you know?
And I was like, whoa, I hit a chord here.
But I was like, yeah, totally what an indentured slave is.
Well, listen, to that point though,
like the people in our lives,
even the ones that care about us a ton,
they love us to death and they wanna see us succeed.
They kinda even have an influence on what they want us to do
and what they think is best for us.
Till I was 41, almost every single time I spoke with my mom
on the phone, she'd be like, Jason, you have a PhD.
Why aren't you running a lab?
Why aren't you a professor?
Why aren't you a biotech?
And listen, like again, she loves me,
but this is another example of others
kind of influencing our path
versus us taking the time to figure out our own vision.
Yeah, I love it.
Absolutely, and that's, I could go back and forth
through there for a while.
There's a lot of things I wanna go off on,
like why aren't you a stunt double for Mark Wahlberg?
So a lot of fun things we can pull out of this conversation,
but yeah, having power moms who want us to be our best,
right?
Sometimes one of the greatest refiner fires.
We can have that.
That's good.
All right, so well, good.
Just to get a little bit of background on me
and that concept a little bit further too,
I did come up with the idea at that time
to write a book called Dead and Broken.
Jobs are dead and universities are broken.
And how a guide to freelancing
and what we're gonna do the freelance world
and how that's a return to what existed
before the corporate America fad from 150 years ago.
The apprenticeship, that was entrepreneurship.
That's what you had.
You're either an entrepreneur,
you're an indentured slave or worse, or your royalty.
You know, that thing too.
But nonetheless, coming away from all of that,
I love what you do.
I'm a big believer in it as well.
My programs are very much aligned with the same realities.
I was very fortunate to not dive too deep
off of the corporate ship.
I know I'm like realizing, man,
I get too buried into that.
What you described, same feelings that I had,
like, this just doesn't feel right.
Even if the other path is harder,
or even if the other path is less conventional.
No, man, I got a program called Balance Entrepreneurship.
The acronym for that, it's B.
To be, right, it's I am.
B, yeah.
It's all in that I am concept of becoming.
And I didn't realize that for a while.
And I was like, cool, that bra,
I really learned what it meant to become.
I realized that.
Then two, I got a program called Passion Pro.
Passion Pro is designed to help people find their passions.
Very easy assessment.
And I use it with all my team members.
I want, and all my clients, prospects,
I wanna know what their passions are.
It's hard to build something well,
if you're not aligned, it's hard to build something great
if you're not aligned with that.
And then Vision Pros is the latest rendition
and piece of the puzzle to help us
because at first class business,
I don't build second class results.
And I can't build first class results
with a visionary who doesn't have a clear vision.
That's where it all starts.
They gotta have a clear vision of what they wanna build,
the culture they want, the leadership,
then gravitates towards them.
Nobody cares about the product or the service.
That comes later.
We wanna belong with people who have really cool concepts.
So you have a really cool concept.
It's really easy to see.
And Life and Air, now you mentioned,
you said Steve Cook was the founder.
Is he the founder or are you the founder?
No, man, I'm a partner.
So we partner, but I actually started with that program
under Steve as my mentor in 2009.
Started teaching for Life and Air as a coach
three or four years later.
Then I started speaking and being lead trainer.
And then in late 2016,
he asked me to come and partner with him.
So we've been running the company together.
I run the company and Steve does the coaching
within the company and he contributes a lot
in terms of the vision of the company
and some of the ideas of how to expand and grow.
And I'm the integrator combined
with the lead trainer kind of person.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.