Podcast Ep 146 | Why the Greatest Leaders Obsess Over Their Goals

Are you look­ing to become a more effec­tive leader?

In this episode of the ​“Growth Whis­per­ers” pod­cast, we explore the impor­tance of goal obses­sion in suc­cess­ful lead­er­ship. Dis­cov­er why the great­est lead­ers are dri­ven by a deep sense of pur­pose and relent­less deter­mi­na­tion to achieve their goals, no mat­ter the chal­lenges that come their way.

Learn how to set and achieve ambi­tious goals that will set you apart and allow you to make a last­ing impact. 

It’s not enough to have big goals. Great lead­ers obsess over them. They nev­er let them out of their mind — OR their team’s mind. 

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:12

Wel­come to the growth whis­pers pod­cast with Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence. In this pod­cast, we talk about every­thing that relates to build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, not just your typ­i­cal build and flip, but ones that endure for decades, gen­er­a­tions, because we get a kick out of that. We’ll be dig­ging into some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions today around obses­sion, which we’ll get to in a minute. But before Brad, how are things in your world? And what is your word or phrase of the day?

Brad Giles 00:43

Things are extra­or­di­nary in my world? And my word of the day? Imma­ture? Isn’t that what you thought I was gonna say? Mature? Imma­ture, imma­ture? That’s yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 00:56

Is that the Aus­tralian ver­sion of immature?

Brad Giles 01:00

Yeah, you know, there’s anoth­er ver­sion, that’s Aus­tralian, which tells you which Creek you can go and jump in, but I won’t go there. So imma­ture is my word of the day, thank you, and what time think­ing in par­tic­u­lar, so this kind of the­sis, when we deal with peo­ple in a lead­er­ship set­ting, as we do, lead­er­ship, team mem­bers, etc. They got prob­lems they got, you know, every­one’s got their own stuff going on. And all of the per­son­al­i­ties, that the per­son­al­i­ty traits that we observe that are neg­a­tive, they all kind of dis­till up to be one sin­gle thing, which is they’re act­ing imma­ture, and so soon, and so, yeah, you got some­one who’s nar­cis­sis­tic, or you got some­one who’s not got a high enough EQ, per­haps to be able to inter­act in a respect­ful man­ner, or they’re bit­ing in or what­ev­er it is, or they’re pick­ing on peo­ple’s accents. So I don’t know, what­ev­er it might be.

Kevin Lawrence 02:02

Nice. I slid that in there. That was I

Brad Giles 02:04

don’t under­stand. But the point that I’m mak­ing is just think­ing about the peo­ple. And it’s like, we can just call it imma­tu­ri­ty. That’s my word.

Kevin Lawrence 02:14

Inter­est­ing. Inter­est­ing. Well, my word is mas­tery. You know, last night, we had din­ner with some friends. And the one one of the cou­ple made din­ner, like mind blow­ing, like this. This this, he could be a mas­ter chef, he could I would put the din­ner up against almost any din­ner I have prob­a­bly ever had. Wow, in terms of Yeah, it was it was unf­reak­ing. believ­able. Like, and, and but he’s the Ben­net­t’s mas­ter, he’s obvi­ous­ly put a lot of time into it. And, you know, and a lot of ener­gy into it, and a lot of care into it. But it was like, it was mas­ter­ful din­ner was just shock­ing­ly, like just unbe­liev­ably good, which I did­n’t know he was that great of a cook. Or almost like a chef. It was just it was beau­ti­ful. And but that’s its mas­tery and focus­ing on doing some­thing. And the care and the inten­tion to do it. And it was just, you know, when you see one of your friends do some­thing like that. And we see it at work, and we see mas­tery every­where, but just as fresh in my mind. And my taste­buds from that din­ner last night just you know, absolute mas­tery. So mas­tery and matu­ri­ty are kind of the two themes here today. And yeah, awe­some. Well, let’s this let’s dig in to anoth­er term of obses­sion, which, you know, I would sug­gest that my friend was prob­a­bly very obsessed with mak­ing a spec­tac­u­lar din­ner. It was like, a obses­sion. And I would sug­gest that, you know, obses­sion would prob­a­bly lead to mas­tery in a lot of cas­es. So

Brad Giles 03:59

what was the din­ner? Like? You can’t just leave it hang­ing like that. What? What was for dinner?

Kevin Lawrence 04:04

Like, I could say that we had chick­en and sal­ad. Cool. It was it was like, but it was a sal­ad with this dress­ing. That was mind blow­ing ly good. That’s good. But there was this. This past it. It was it was a spe­cial pas­ta noo­dle. I’ve nev­er had like a hol­low spaghet­ti that was cooked absolute­ly per­fect­ly all Dante with this grilled roast­ed chick­en on it. That I don’t know why it was so good. And then this love sauce over top that he had sim­mered for hours. So it was like it was chick­en and pas­ta. And it was like Miche­lin restau­rant qual­i­ty. It was just unbe­liev­able. Yeah,

Brad Giles 04:55

let’s talk about a session.

Kevin Lawrence 04:56

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay, okay. Well, yeah, I’m almost obsessed with that din­ner. was so good. Yeah, it was just, you know, I wish I’d love Mas­ter I love see­ing some­one do beau­ti­ful work and being a part of it. So today the theme is obses­sion and how obses­sion is real­ly pow­er­ful, if direct­ed to the right things, and obses­sion, and you know, in our last episode, we talked about Stephen Cov­ey’s time man­age­ment matrix. And, you know, if obses­sion is put on unim­por­tant things, it obvi­ous­ly is not a healthy thing. But if it’s put on real­ly impor­tant, mean­ing­ful things to you, it is an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful force. And real­ly, we looked up the def­i­n­i­tion of obses­sion, it’s an idea, or a thought that con­tin­u­al­ly occu­pies or intrudes on a per­son­’s mind. So there’s a lot of neg­a­tive obses­sions peo­ple can have, we’re talk­ing obses­sion about some­thing pos­i­tive, and in par­tic­u­lar, your goals. And it could be your pur­pose, or your behav­ior or some­thing you want to do with your fam­i­ly or your friends or your health or who knows what, but it’s chan­nel­ing your cre­ative mind and your ener­gies towards some­thing that’s very, very, very mean­ing­ful to you. And, you know, it just relight relates on you just work­ing hard at it and con­tin­u­ing to try things. And, you know, we were talk­ing before the show, but when we look at peo­ple who achieve great things, there’s usu­al­ly a great deal of obsession.

Brad Giles 06:30

And what’s inter­est­ing, as you’re say­ing that is think­ing about the inverse, what’s the oppo­site? Yeah. Okay. So if you don’t have an obses­sion about big goals, well, there’s a very good chance that your team think that you just don’t care. And if the team think, right, you just don’t care, then there’s a very good chance that will lead them to not care. And then this is this kind of down­ward spi­ral loop of, well, I don’t care why should I care?

Kevin Lawrence 06:57

Right? It’s like, if if those big goals are some­thing over there on a wall, but you don’t ever talk about it, or you don’t con­stant­ly talk about it, or bring it up? Yeah, you’re right. They’re gonna say, Well, you got there inter­est­ing, but there’s no ener­gy there. So I’m not going to put any ener­gy there. That’s a very, very good point. And I think that’s what it is, is that if we con­nect a lot of ener­gy to it, it’s con­ta­gious to oth­er peo­ple around. It’s also dan­ger­ous. If you’re obsess­ing about the wrong things, like if you’re obsess­ing about, you know, pol­i­tics, and pol­i­tics aren’t real­ly that rel­e­vant in your busi­ness. That’s a dis­trac­tion, as I talked about on the show last week, you know, if you’re obsess­ing about stuff on social media, and you know, and learn­ing about things that real­ly don’t mat­ter to you, that can be a waste of time. And some­times it can be bad for your brain to be obsessed about things that aren’t impor­tant or just pure­ly distraction.

Brad Giles 07:54

There’s a there’s an entre­pre­neur here in Aus­tralia, friend of mine, named Nao­mi Simp­son, she’s got a com­pa­ny called red bal­loon. And they pro­vid­ed she real­ly changed the mar­ket a bit mov­ing from giv­ing gifts, which were things or prod­ucts into giv­ing gifts were, which were expe­ri­ences. And she aggre­gat­ed expe­ri­ences from across Aus­tralia, you know, Hal­loween bal­loon­ing, or raft­ing or what­ev­er it might be all mas­sages. And so she turned them into gifts that you could give. And so she obsessed over this goal of giv­ing 2 mil­lion expe­ri­ences. And in when you walk into their office, when you used to walk into their office, they had this this mas­sive counter, which said, how many expe­ri­ences have we pro­vid­ed? And so every­one knew that she cared about that. Yes. Every­one knew it was hard not.

Kevin Lawrence 08:46

It’s a great exam­ple. So not only was it a big goal, but there was active ener­gy and obses­sion going towards it, which helps it to come true. Yeah, it’s it’s fas­ci­nat­ing, I think about the we looked up the data before on the sto­ry of Thomas Edi­son and invent­ing the light bulb. And we’ve heard the sto­ry that, you know, he tried 10,000 times, or failed 10,000 times try­ing to cre­ate it. And it was a quote from him, is that, you know, I did­n’t fail 10,000 times, I just fig­ured out 9999 things that did­n’t work. Yeah. And there’s lots of truth. But you think about the amount of obses­sion, some­one would have to con­tin­ue to push to find ways to make that hap­pen, when it seems all but impos­si­ble. And it’s inter­est­ing, and we looked up the data from one of the uni­ver­si­ty site that seemed quite cred­i­ble, it said in a peri­od of 1878 to 18 ad, Edi­son and his asso­ciates, worked on at least 3000 dif­fer­ent the­o­ries to devel­op an effi­cient incan­des­cent light bulb. And I’ve heard oth­er sto­ries about spe­cif­ic exper­i­ments. So there’s prob­a­bly many expe­ri­ences or many exper­i­ments with­in those 3000 the­o­ries. And, you know, that’s I’m sure Prob­a­bly that 10,000 num­ber could be true. But the idea of it is, is it’s it’s unre­lent­ing focus, and test­ing and try­ing to make that goal hap­pen. And it works. And it’s ener­giz­ing to be around too, espe­cial­ly when they’re obsessed about pos­i­tive things. Yeah,

Brad Giles 10:16

yeah. Because peo­ple respect what you inspect. Like I say, if, as a leader, you spend your time on one par­tic­u­lar thing more than over more than oth­ers. While peo­ple think to them­selves, well, they care, it must be impor­tant. So if it’s the big goals, there is great cause great rea­son to focus on those big goals and not the hun­dreds that you know, the few over the meanie that real­ly mat­ter. This is what real­ly mat­ters, send­ing that mes­sage gets peo­ple aligned behind where you want to go.

Kevin Lawrence 10:50

Yeah, and it explains why some peo­ple, you know, might have the same ideas, but one comes out and achieves it and oth­ers don’t. It’s just time thanks. So, in my place in Van­cou­ver, I have a cof­fee table that is born from this con­cept of obses­sion. And it’s a sto­ry about Hen­ry Ford. And I think it was in the 30s. Back when Ford was when VAT engines were com­ing to be and Viet engines had been invent­ed. But they were mul­ti­ple chunks of steel that had to be bolt­ed togeth­er as in mod­ern lan­guage, there was the block, and then the heads had to be bolt­ed on with all these mov­ing parts. And it was hard and expen­sive to make. And Hen­ry Ford was obsessed him­self with you know, eco­nom­i­cal trans­porta­tion for the mass­es. Right part of his vision was that you know, every man and and we had the words of women because it was men that were dri­ving in those days, but should be able to have access to God’s great pas­tures and explore the world through his trans­porta­tion. So when he decid­ed that the V eight engine was going to be very impor­tant to Ford and a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, and but he in his mind believed it need­ed to be made it a one cast block, because it was cheap and fast to make. So very effi­cient, Dr. Acos­ta, and his engi­neers could­n’t do it. And final­ly, he had a bit of a tem­per tantrum and a rant. And as the sto­ry goes, he said he bangs a table, I will have one, I must have one. And if you aren’t the peo­ple to devel­op it, some oth­er men well. So I don’t want to see you again. And don’t come back until you have made my V eight engine out of one chunk of steel. And you know, you can imag­ine in the days and it might have been a lit­tle bit rough. But 18 mates months lat­er, they came up with a final work­ing ver­sion of what’s called the Ford flat­head V eight. It’s a leg­endary motor. And I have one of these motors in my place where it’s bro­ken down and made to look nice, but it’s the full work­ing motor with a glass top on it. And I just, you know when I when I heard that sto­ry, and I’m a car nut by nature, but it remind­ed me of like, at that point in time, it was­n’t pos­si­ble. But he took a stand that it will hap­pen. And he was obsessed because he need­ed it for his capac­i­ty to give Ford a notable com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. But the main thing is because of the way it’s built, it’s super cheap and easy to make at scale. Any­way, just a great sto­ry about how that obses­sive obses­sion pays off, when some­one is will­ing to com­mit to it and get oth­er peo­ple lined up to get it done.

Brad Giles 13:39

Yeah. Switch­ing gears a lit­tle bit. There’s a there’s a sport in Aus­tralia most pop­u­lar sport called Aus­tralian rules foot­ball. It’s not rug­by, but it does­n’t mat­ter. It’s play­ing with a ball on a pitch. And there’s a foot­ball club called Rich­mond. It’s a Mel­bourne sub­urb. And in in 2009, the main guy there Bren­dan Gale said a big hairy auda­cious goal that with­in 10 years, they would win three pre­mier­ships, they would have $20 mil­lion in cash, because at that time, they were $25 mil­lion in debt or some­thing. And they would have 100,000 mem­bers. And I think at that point, they had like 60 or 70,000 mem­bers, and it was leaked to the press. And with­in days he was on the foot­ball shows hav­ing to defend his b hag because it was so auda­cious and so crazy. Because to give you an idea of win­ning three pre­mier­ships, it had­n’t real­ly been done since the 1960s. And so it was very auda­cious on mul­ti­ple fronts any­way, so he focused on it, and focused and focused and focused and focused and did it and so, a cou­ple of years ago, they got that they got they won their three pre­mier­ships, which was sim­ply unheard of in The mod­ern era, I think they had like 25 or $24 mil­lion pos­i­tive cash going from, you know, minus 25. And they had like 108,000 mem­bers. And that was because he focused on it. And he just kept focus­ing on it. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 15:15

shock­ing, like many of the great things that have been invent­ed in this world, like many of the great accom­plish­ments that have hap­pened, peo­ple are just com­mit­ted, and they push through the resis­tance, and per­sis­tent per­son first they believe, and then they per­sist and per­sist, and bring all their cre­ativ­i­ty to find­ing a way. Yeah, anoth­er real sim­ple ver­sion is one of the com­pa­nies that I work with. Very suc­cess­ful com­pa­ny. I’ve worked with them for more than a decade. When I first start­ed, I think they were a cou­ple, you know, like, maybe 30 mil­lion in rev­enue some­where in that range. And, you know, the CEO has a vision of hit­ting dif­fer­ent lev­els of achieve­ment. And then there’s foot­ball fans, Amer­i­can foot­ball fans. In Amer­i­ca, they have this thing called Super Bowls, right? The big foot­ball com­pe­ti­tion, kind of like the foot­ball ver­sion of the World Cup for what is also called foot­ball, but in Amer­i­ca, they call soc­cer. Yeah. And same in Cana­da. We call it soc­cer. But so what we have, and I don’t have it with me, right, I could show you but basi­cal­ly, that we were going to call our Super Bowls, hit­ting 100 mil­lion in rev­enue to 5500 and a bil­lion. And so I have my 100 mil­lion ring, which is like a Super Bowl, Super Bowl style ring. And I got my 250 mil­lion ring. And, you know, we had a meet­ing recent­ly, and we’re all ral­lied around those bought mile­stones that we will hit. And we had a meet­ing recent­ly. And, you know, they hit I think it was for some­thing U S, when you con­vert it to Cana­di­an dol­lars, it’s over 500. So I’m say­ing Hey, Joe, hey, well, we got the Cana­di­an, you know, 500 Super Bowl ring. Yeah. What’s your foot­ball com­pe­ti­tion call? Well, well, we got ours is called the Grey Cup. It was Yeah, well, we so we did­n’t get a Super Bowl, but we got our Grey Cup, because it’s, you know, the Cana­di­an ver­sion of foot­ball. And, and, you know, they would have hit 500. But the point of it is, all of us are like, and the ring is a token cel­e­bra­tion. But it’s we’re obsessed with get­ting to the 500. And then the bil­lion, because like why not? And it’s a pur­pose led com­pa­ny, they give a deep crap about their team and every­thing else. But we’ve got these lit­tle anchors to help us stay focused on our way to the to the B hag, and it’s fun. And it’s engag­ing, and we talk about it a lot.

Brad Giles 17:43

Yeah, yeah, this com­pa­ny that I work with, that comes to mind when you say that the leader was absolute­ly focused on hav­ing mul­ti­ple ser­vices with­out going into who it is. So you, some peo­ple focus on the nich­es or niche. And oth­ers focus on try­ing to go wide. Well, he was focused on try­ing to go wide. And the prob­lem was, the prob­lem was that that meant that they weren’t real­ly awe­some at any­thing, there was one thing they were pret­ty good at. And that and that’s a trap for many, many peo­ple. But yes, but to his cred­it, a focused on say­ing we want to get to this point, which is a cer­tain amount of total rev­enue. That meant that we can over­come the width. And through the, I guess, five years ago, through the there was some pret­ty tough times around here. You know, we were los­ing mil­lions of dol­lars a year in that busi­ness. And he kept on focus­ing and kept on focus­ing and adapt­ed and adapt­ed, came out of it. And did it and has now kind of come through and is just get­ting stel­lar results. So it does­n’t mean that you should not focus on the knee. That’s not what I’m say­ing. It was about his relent­less, relent­less, relent­less focus on build­ing this kind of mul­ti­fac­eted business.

Kevin Lawrence 19:12

Right? And the learn­ing and the test­ing and all that that comes as a result when you do that, ver­sus just let­ting go because in many ways, you’re hav­ing to defy gravity.

Brad Giles 19:24

Defy­ing sickness,

Kevin Lawrence 19:25

the I’m defy­ing, I’m defin­ing exact­ly. So the ques­tion I’m will­ing to, for us to think about is, you know, are you obsess­ing enough about your most impor­tant goals? That’s real­ly what it is, are you putting ener­gy time towards your most impor­tant things? Num­ber one, and then num­ber two, you know, are you poten­tial­ly obsess­ing about things that aren’t most impor­tant? Right? Are you think­ing too much about some things that maybe don’t mat­ter? Most and real­ly You know, obvi­ous­ly we know there’s a real dan­ger in focus­ing on neg­a­tive obsess­ing about neg­a­tive things. Because we get caught up in it. There’s also an ener­gy to focus­ing too much on neg­a­tive things. So yeah, are you

Brad Giles 20:09

real­ly put anoth­er way? Are you not pay­ing enough atten­tion? Are you ignor­ing the big goals?

Kevin Lawrence 20:15

Yes, you’re ignor­ing, or you’re pay­ing atten­tion to? Are you ful­ly giv­ing the right amount of obses­sion that is need­ed to make them hap­pen? And you know, and that’s whether its goals are at work or in life, you know, or you’re focused on, you know, obsessed with find­ing ways to have the best rela­tion­ship can with your part­ner, or your chil­dren or your par­ents, if your par­ents are still around, you know, are you are you real­ly spend­ing the time think­ing about and then act­ing upon thoughts to dri­ve towards the things that mat­ter most which goes back to, you know, even we talked about last Episode a bit, is real­ly hav­ing clear goals, so you know, what mat­ters most and then chan­nel­ing enough time and ener­gy and thought and activ­i­ty to those things.

Brad Giles 20:59

So why the great­est lead­ers obsess over their goals. That’s kind of the pod­cast episode. It’s because if they don’t, peo­ple think that you just don’t care if they don’t. And this could be be hags, big, hairy, auda­cious goals. This could be any of the big things that you’re try­ing to big goals that you’re try­ing to achieve. If you don’t obsess over them. The peo­ple think that you just don’t care. And then they just kind of drift into the gray­ness of life. Good check, Kev. Well said, well said, good chat. All right. So hope­ful­ly, we’ve either answered that ques­tion or stim­u­lat­ed you to obsess over the big goals that you’ve already set, and to go back and obsess and obsess and to reit­er­ate that with your team. So this has been the growth whis­pers pod­cast. My name is Brad Giles. The oth­er chap with a cough that you’ve been hear­ing is Kevin Lawrence in Kelow­na BC. I do believe it is in Cana­da. And you can find Kevin at the web­site, Lawrence​and​co​.com You can find me at evo​lu​tion​part​ners​.com​.au. We’ve both got newslet­ters and inter­est­ing stuff that we’re always talk­ing about. Also, you can find us on YouTube. Don’t for­get to like us there and to rate the pod­cast. We would cer­tain­ly appre­ci­ate that. But we’ve enjoyed the show. Do have your­self a great week.