The Worst Advice a Founder Can Receive with Jeremy Swift

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, Co- founder and CEO of Bolster. And I'm here today with my friend Jeremy Swift. Jeremy is the Founder and CEO of Cordial, which is a cross channel marketing platform. And Jeremy is someone that I have been friends with for many years as fellow CEOs in the digital marketing arena before I started bolster and since. Jeremy, welcome to the Daily Bolster.

Jeremy Swift: Great to be here with you, Matt.

Matt Blumberg: I have been looking forward to our conversations today. We're going to record a couple of episodes. And this first one, I love the topic you suggested, which I will just lay out and let you go, which is, why fake it till you make it was the worst advice you ever received. And this is such an interesting one because people get that advice all the time. In particular, first time founders get that advice, right? First time CEOs get that advice. So why was that a bad piece of advice? And first of all, did I give it to you or did you get it from someone else?

Jeremy Swift: No, thankfully it wasn't you. It couldn't have come from you. Come on. You never would've said something like that to me.

Matt Blumberg: I don't know, I might've. But maybe not after I hear your answer.

Jeremy Swift: I love it. It's funny, it's probably good to hear that other founders are getting this advice, but I would love to hopefully be one voice that maybe might help dispel some of that a little bit as well. The very brief backstory on that for myself was, I was a very young kid, I was a junior in college when we were starting our first software company out of our dorm rooms. And a pseudo mentor of mine, inaudible, I mean, I was dear in headlights, didn't know what I was doing in terms of what we were trying to build. And he said, " Don't worry about it, Jeremy. Just fake it till you make it, all the way through." And I remember as a 21- year- old kid, I thought, that is some dang good advice right there. I'm going to run with that one. And little did I know that became an earworm inside of me, and I started repeating that to other people, other talent that we would hire into the organization. I took that for years into my professional career. And it was some of the most harmful advice. And I didn't actually realize that or even get to a point of understanding or acknowledging that until, gosh, probably a year or two into starting Cordial. So you think 2000 is when I got that, 2014, 2015 is when I had this kind of aha moment about that. And I think the three areas that, as I've examined that and really inspected that in my own life... Because I guess as a preamble of that too, I think about this in terms of any words, phrases, experiences that we have or actions we take regularly on repeat, those create pathways in our brains. So they create these almost tunnels that our brain almost neurologically knows to just go to over and over. And I created a lot bad pathways with this particular piece of advice. Because again, these can be good or bad pathways we're creating. But I think the three areas for myself as I've examined that are, it really stunted my ability to learn, to mature, to gain wisdom from the people around me.

Matt Blumberg: Oh, it's so interesting. So it made you fake it as a strategy as opposed to a tactic, basically.

Jeremy Swift: Totally.

Matt Blumberg: So interesting.

Jeremy Swift: And somewhat unknowingly kept me from really having a growth mindset within that too. I mean, I'd like to think of myself as a pretty positive and optimistic person, but that's different than having a growth mindset. And so I think those two were really at odds. The second area is, I think it really eliminated vulnerability from almost my mental lexicon as well. To be really candid, I felt the need to pretend that I knew it all, that I had the answers to things, even when I didn't. And there's a longer story, but getting to a breaking point of that, almost like an emotional breaking poin, that really led me to a place of therapy, which is something that I'm a big champion and an advocate of. But that lack of vulnerability for so long really did reach that breaking point and kind of drove me into that type of a place. And then I think the third piece is almost like the connection between vulnerability and empathy as I think about that as well. And I really think those two are really intertwined with one another and this fake it till you make it mentality, candidly it slowed the growth or maybe maturation of my marriage. It slowed the kind of maturation or empathy that I had as a father to my four kids. And ultimately those things all come back to me as a person and as a leader, and that translates to negative impact or maybe slowness of how I could have been executing on building Cordial in the early years of this business. Yeah, it's been an interesting process, for sure, to analyze that one.

Matt Blumberg: I need to process the third one a little bit. The first two are very clear, the way you laid them out. And I will think twice before I give that advice again. There are times where I might still give that advice, but I feel like I need to give it now with like, " But here are the perils if you take it too far or if you make it the centerpiece of you as opposed to a tactic." And I got to process the empathy one a little bit more. Super interesting. Jeremy Swift, one of the most thoughtful CEOs I know with a very thought- provoking topic today about the perils and risks of faking it till you make it. Thank you for being here.

Jeremy Swift: Great to be here, Matt. Thanks so much for the time.