Episode Transcript
Gary (00:00): Hi there, my name is Gary LeBlanc, CEO of ZeroDB and life engineer. I love today's episode. I think if we're lucky, we all have to deal with today's topic. You know, I call it the Second Mountain, and it's about navigating life's challenges and finding meaning in our lives. Now, I say I call it the Second Mountain, but David Brooks wrote a wonderful book called "The Second Mountain." He also wrote "The Road to Character," which had a big impact on my life.
But the second mountain is specifically about us navigating pretty much those two phases we all have in life. And, you know, for me, it was that very insecure phase. I've talked about this a few times. A lot of people know this about me. I stuttered profusely when I was a kid, like really bad. You know, it's funny, I can't really remember stuttering per se, but I know I did it all the time. I remember this; it's almost like a memory that you know you have, but it probably happens so often that I can't think of one instance. And it was always reading in class when I was in grade two, really grade two, because it was before I moved to Edmonton where I remember. And, you know, it's one of these things that you carry for so long. You know, I also had big ears that were pinned back when I was a kid. And these two things shaped who I was. I talked about it in another episode. It creates this ego. And that ego typically selects for behaviors that aren't necessarily serving us. It's a bit of a scarcity mentality. It's all about me.
Again, a little bit of a digression. I always rail on the fact that people say Maslow's peak was self-actualization, whereas it was actually transcendence. And it's funny, we get into this self-actualization as a way to absolve ourselves of not being generous, of having a scarcity mindset, seeing life through the lens of a zero-sum game.
And we take it as that's the pinnacle, self-actualization, but it really isn't all about us. But that first phase in our life, it kind of is all about us because it's being fueled by insecurity and ego. And that's why 'it's all about us' can't be the answer because it's fueled by fear. It's fueled by where we got hurt. And if we look at what we've created in that first phase of our life, excuse me, the first mountain, well, it's those materialistic things. And this is fairly obvious. Everybody knows this. You know, it's about being revered, maybe getting to a position where people look up to you, maybe it's about amassing a lot of money. Whatever it is, it's typically these egoic pursuits, these ephemeral experiences, you know, the partying, the drugs, a lot of traveling, but not traveling because you're getting intrinsic value from it, but just traveling to have a good time. It's this hedonic pursuit.
And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but it's not necessarily fulfilling. That story's been told many times. So that would be considered the first mountain. And then oftentimes you have that dip and you get in the valley, right? And you start to shift and you start to realize that those things weren't necessarily fulfilling and you start to pay more attention to what gives you purpose, what you're jazzed about, and eventually what gives you meaning. In our platform, Andrew and I, we have the meaning matrix and it's these eight pillars of meaning. And I find in the first phase of our life, we really don't focus on any of them for their value, one being family, one being health. You might be healthy in your first phase, in that first mountain.
But it's not fueled by the right things. In the second mountain, you start to look at life more holistically and what really serves you in a good way, serves you in the sense that it nourishes you, nourishes you is probably a better way to put it. So those are the two mountains, right?
We get to the second mountain, unfortunately, after a fairly big dip, right? For myself, you know, everything's degrees, right? So the first part of my career was relatively successful. I had a lot of different jobs, got promoted a lot in my field. I was in engineering. I ended up managing a fairly important operation. And you could see that from the outside, it seemed successful. I wouldn't necessarily say I was successful from a character perspective, but I was successful on the outside. And it kind of all came to a crashing halt, and it was really weird how it happened. You know, there's the telltale, you know, call it depression, not necessarily depression, just kind of a dis-ease. Things just seemed not to be changing, and I was still having those same, I don't know, that same narrative in my mind that I had my whole life. It didn't change. You know, it's like in the movie "Soul," you know, the guy, it's a Pixar movie, it's a beautiful movie, but the jazz singer finally has his big gig and he gets out and there's this moment and it's so captivating because you can feel it. And he says, you know, "I thought this would feel different." And it is such a...
The way it's said, it's so true. We always think it's gonna feel different, but it never does. And that was building up over time. And then a dear friend of mine, Brad, got sick. And he had a serious, serious battle with cancer, which shifted my mindset, obviously. I was disillusioned with my old job. I had kind of had enough. And you create the circumstances to just kind of hit rock bottom in the way that your old life is no longer. And trust me, it is a very uncomfortable feeling when everything you knew is not there anymore, regardless of whether it was serving you or not. That delta is very, very visceral. So that valley, you know, you need to unlearn a lot of what you learned. You need to be humbled because the first phase is typically steeped in a lot of ego.
So there's a lot of humility, a lot of humbling that happens in that valley. And, you know, for me, it's funny, maybe I'm still in the valley, who knows? The second mountain has been a journey that, I wish the slope was a bit steeper, let's put it that way. I'm not in the valley, but it is a new life that the further you were from it, the harder it is. And you kind of have that slope on how you're going to climb that mountain. And it's funny if you just really ride that metaphor out, you know, you could climb a steep mountain, you know, it's harder, bigger sacrifices, you might get to where you need to get to quicker.
Or you could be very progressive, you know, you could still approach things with a little more risk aversion, you know, and there's nothing wrong with that. Everybody has their own slope, right? It's either the quick climb or the slow steady climb, but the quick climb is a bit more, you know, a bit more dangerous. You need to be really sure of your footing. And I love that metaphor because for me, when you look at the second mountain and you look at why you're doing it and the meaning behind it.
For me, a lot of those things that were deeply rooted, like I mentioned before with the stuttering, a lot of those things that were deeply rooted take a long time to rewire, and that's obvious, right? And I would say it shaped my character pretty forcefully. So, you know, I had a deeply entrenched sense of fear that was impacting a lot of my characteristics, a lot of those pillars of character.
And for me, the biggest challenge of the whole thing was really being honest with myself and being aware, you know, starting to become aware of those parts of yourself that you're not really proud of, well, not really proud of, you're not proud of, and you delude yourself into thinking you're not that way. And it's a really weird conversation because part of you wants to be the other way so bad.
But your behavior tells a different story. And I can't think of anything really acute, but I think there was always a dis-ease and an uncertainty, especially because we were so focused on character. My second mountain is literally, is literally to build a platform describing these eight pillars of character and eight pillars of meaning. Like that's literally, and then we have our fear cards and concept cards, and it's literally, my second mountain is this. So it's kind of a weird, it's like those Ukrainian dolls, I forget what they're called, the ones that kind of go inside each other. It's kind of like what I'm doing is the challenge, but I'm writing about doing it, which is the challenge. I'm confusing myself.
Gary (10:11): All right, so when we look at the next step, right, approaching that second mountain, so we're in the valley, we're deeply motivated, obviously, right, we've kind of realized the first mountain didn't really shape up the way we thought it would. We hit that crash, and for everybody, that crash could be, you know, it could be a divorce, it could be leaving a job, it could be a lot of things, but it's a complete flipping of the script.
And it's not going to be easy. There's going to be a lot of incongruity to what you want in life and what reality is. It's going to be a lot of humility. And it's going to be something that's going to be incredibly uncomfortable. And that is the storming we need before that second mountain. But that second mountain is incredibly compelling and it's incredibly compelling because of that awareness that we've garnered in the first part of our life, in that first phase, in that first mountain.
So now we have all this awareness. So that's a lot of inertia driving us to change. But it's still gonna be incredibly, incredibly uncomfortable. And for us starting out, we really gotta condition our mind. We gotta have the intention that we're gonna be naive with our expectations. We have to have almost an unbridled optimism that things are gonna work out. Being realistic, but again, an unbridled optimism in terms of, you know, everything will happen exactly as it should. You know, I have that tattoo, character's fate. I truly believe that if I act in the best way I can in terms of character, that everything's gonna turn out exactly as it should. So this gives me a belief that everything's gonna turn out. And this is the belief you need when you start to climb that second mountain. You know, it is definitely, definitely something that you're going to have to believe in.
Because there's going to be very few cues early on that this was a good decision. Again, we can write things out on paper, but when things are executed, it is very, very different. So you're going to need to believe that this is the right way forward. And again, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I use the metaphor of you eat an elephant one bite at a time. It really is about that. It's about those nudges.
You know, you're going to have to make potentially big changes in your life, but you can nudge yourself in a lot of ways to get to that life you want to get to. The most important thing is your intention. Your intention is fulfillment. Your intention is meaning. Your intention is better relationships with yourself and with others. And this is really the point. It is this intention, this awareness that's going to drive because you really do need drive. You need the willpower. You need the resolve. You need the discipline.
To stick with it because again, this is gonna be a belief thing. This isn't gonna be a tangible thing that we'll be able to fuel, to feed off of. It's not gonna fuel us. So we really need to, again, try to make things as tactical as possible. So we're gonna break this down into nudges. We're gonna make these changes. We're gonna have realistic goals about this second mountain. We're not going to create lists of 60 things to change. We're gonna create a North Star.
And we're going to break that North Star down into manageable chunks, which means maybe one or two big goals per quarter where we break that into a lot of tasks, a lot of tactics. And if we don't achieve what we want to achieve, quote unquote, then there's no judgment. It's a calibration. We're constantly calibrated because that North Star isn't going to change. That North Star doesn't change. That is your, that's your
That's your anchor. You know, that's literally what the North Star is. It is the only thing that should be unwavering. And again, that North Star might evolve in certain ways. You know, it might become more defined, but really it's about the intention to live a more meaningful life. It couldn't be more broad than that. So you're gonna have that, you're gonna break these things down into manageable chunks.
And really what you want to get down to is you want to get to a place again, where you have that belief, but you want to create as many opportunities to reinforce that this is the right path. You want to have as many of those as you can because it will come in helpful for myself. Look, I've been in this for 11 years, which is, I'll tell you the first thing I think of, it's almost humiliating for me.
Like it's humiliating for me to say it's been 11 years. It feels humiliating. Nothing was ever that slow in my past as far as what I would consider evolution. But again, I'm still tethered to that old metric for success. I'm still tethered to the materialistic aspect of it. But from an evolutionary perspective, call it spiritually, call it connectedness, call it relationships, I'd like to believe that things have changed immeasurably in my life.
So, you know, all that to say, the first thing I think about reaction-wise is it's a bit humiliating. So we're gonna have to realize that that's something that's gonna always be there. It's gonna be this constant judgment and really relinquishing that judgment and looking at things with a more compassionate perspective is gonna be, well, for me, it was super hard. You know, when I got into this,
I had all of these expectations that were still expectations born of the old Gary. And I've been slowly trying to unwind those and to really understand what those look like in a more, a more healthy perspective. You know, I'm really doing what I love right now. Every aspect of my life is what I want to be focused on. Let's say I'm living my purpose right now, but things also have to be in balance.
And it's that constant calibration, it's that constant balance you do need. Because again, we can be tipped a little bit, you know? We can take a hit and we can be set off course, but we need to get back on course, right? So we can sway, it doesn't always have to be a straight line. But we really need to get to a place, and especially for me, it was just super, super hard,
to get my head wrapped around where I was. So I know exactly how it feels. I know exactly what the challenges are, but each person has to approach this tactically in what works for themselves. But everything that is holding you back, again, we have to remind ourselves of this, everything that's holding us back is old programming.
And it's this old programming that we have to be aware of, we have to be mindful of, and we have to hopefully put things in place to start to rewire. And usually that starts with behavior, right? If you look at it like a flywheel, with character being that wheel, being the weight of the wheel, right? And behaviors are kind of like you trying to turn that wheel. So each time you give it a little bit of force, you try to turn that wheel, right?
Starts to gather momentum, but it's slow, right? And you know, those behaviors create certain values, right? And now you start to really turn that wheel and then those values start to translate into a different character, right? Start to shift your personality, that expressed part of your character. So, you know, it's a constant reminder that that's what's happening. It's a long process. You know, climbing that second mountain is really the only thing that we need to be focused on from an evolution perspective.
And I'm telling you, if you can maintain that resolve, lean on the process, not judge yourself too much, you're gonna get to a beautiful place where you're gonna start to realize that there've been massive changes. It's like the frog in the boiling water, which is not an accurate metaphor, but you're gonna, at some point, notice how much things have changed from a meaning perspective, from a true fulfillment perspective, and it's going to be like the sun just came up. So with that said, I'd love to hear from you guys, people who've started their second mountain, people who are in the valley. Again, it's the perspective that helps us understand as a community how we can flex different ways to help quiet the noise in your life. So until next time, be safe.
