Deciding What You Want to Accomplish with Jeremy Bloom

Intro: 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 Jeremy Bloom. Jeremy is the founder and CEO of Integrate. He is a former Olympic athlete. He is a former NFL player. He is the author of a new book called Recalibration. Is that right? Recalibrate or Recalibration?

Jeremy Bloom: Recalibrate, yep.

Matt Blumberg: Recalibrate. Jeremy, welcome to the Daily Bolster.

Jeremy Bloom: It's great to be here. Always a pleasure to chat with you, Matt.

Matt Blumberg: So here's my question for you. You have accomplished a lot in at least 10 years less than me, maybe 15 years less than me. And not only have you accomplished a lot, you've accomplished a lot in a lot of different arenas, which is I've always thought one of the most impressive things about you. And so my question is particularly as the CEO of a technology company, but even just in life, how do you set goals? What's your framework for figuring out what you want to accomplish?

Jeremy Bloom: I think it's a great question and an area of passion for me that I've thought about most of my life. And the question is how can you create the best mental framework for accomplishing whatever goal is in front of you? And could that framework be universally true, whether it be your personal life, your relationships and your professional life, your colleagues, and your startups? And taking a step back, I think first we have to always understand that no matter who you are, you're going to have moments in your life where you need to recalibrate the compass towards success. I mean, just look at some of the most successful people in the world. Michael Jordan was cut twice in high school while. Walt Disney fired for a lack of imagination before starting Disney. Steve Jobs fired from Apple. So really doesn't matter who you are, you have to learn how to recalibrate and recalibrate quickly. I think the biggest mistake that we all make in those inevitable times of transition is we over personalize the experience. And instead of saying, hey, I tried it this way. It didn't work. Let me change my formula. We look at it as we're not good enough. I'm not good enough. I'll never be good enough. And that thought pattern kills a lot of dreams, kills a lot of goals. And so I've taken a framework from a lot of people that I've met. I've been very lucky to be around some of the world's best athletes, both at the Olympic level and at the football level. Really great coaches, really great entrepreneurs. Being part of Foundry, guys like you have taught me a ton. Seth Levine, who was our board member at Foundry, and I met Sergey Brin really early on in my career in tech, and he's just been a great friend and mentor. So I think that the first thing that I think about in times of transition that helps me, I think about those old school kind of GPS navigation devices that we used to plug into our cigarette lighters in the car if you recall before GPS was on cell phones, those things were magic. And I was at the age where I just started traveling around the world on the US ski team, 15, 16, 17 years of age. And they were like, you'd land in Switzerland, they'd tell you how to get to wherever you needed to go. It was unbelievable. But the concept that I really liked that they do is if you make a wrong turn, they would just say, recalibrating. And they put you right on the right path.

Matt Blumberg: They're not critical. They don't say like, oh, you screwed up. Go back.

Jeremy Bloom: Yeah, exactly. They're not like, Hey, you don't know how to drive, pull over and stop driving a car. It's like recalibrating, boom, right back on another path. You didn't think you were going to be on that road when you were looking at the navigational path before you took off, but now you're on a different road, and you're kind of figuring out how to get to your ultimate destination. And so I really think about it that way. I don't personalize it too much, and I really try to think about what are the inputs I've learned in that experience in that moment? And I want to recalibrate my compass towards where I want to go really, really quickly. And there's just been a number of times in my life where I've needed to be able to do that. And it's a skill that I feel like I've gotten better with over time.

Matt Blumberg: It's a critical skill. And I think it's a critical skill for founders and entrepreneurs and the mentality of fail fast and learn and apply and retrospectives. How does that influence the way you set goals in the first place before you make the wrong turn and someone tells you to recalibrate?

Jeremy Bloom: Yeah. It's funny you ask because just thinking about it in real time, it allows me to set really big and audacious goals because your fear of failure goes way down if you have a framework and a methodology of how you want to handle these transitional periods in your life. So yeah, it has allowed me to say, you know what? I want to go climb Everest. Why climb a smaller mountain? And ultimately if I don't get there, I'm going to learn a lot along the way. And the journey is going to be more important than the end result anyway, or the" destination." Because once you get to the top of Everest, there's plenty of other mountains to climb, and that's typically never good enough. We always have this concept of treadmill goal setting where it's like, well, as soon as I do X, fill in the blank, my life's going to be complete or I'll be happy or whatever.

Matt Blumberg: I'll be happy.

Jeremy Bloom: It is like running on a treadmill. You're not going anywhere. And ultimately, life is not about that end result or that destination. It is really more about appreciating and enjoying the journey along the way.

Matt Blumberg: That is just such a healthy philosophy. Jeremy Bloom, CEO of Integrate, thank you so much for being here.

Jeremy Bloom: My pleasure.