How To Be More Happy With Seth Buechley

CEO of Cathedral Consulting and author of Ambition: Leading with Gratitude – Seth Buechley

Here’s what you’ll learn from Seth about How To Be More Happy:

– How to allow people around you help you become more centered.
– The surprising reason why you feel let down even when you achieve your goals.
– Why most highly driven people tend to self-destruct. (And how to prevent this happening to you.)
– What is hedonic adaptation and why it’s making you miserable even when you’re winning.
– The quickest way to a fulfilled life is ____________.

Tune in and listen: How To Be More Happy With Seth Buechley

Seth’s Websites:

SethBuechley.com
CathedralConsulting.com

Transcript: Download

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services.

Jaime Masters:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Masters and today on the show we have Seth Buechley. Now, he runs and CEO of Cathedral Consulting. He's author of Ambition: Leading with Gratitude. 

I'm really excited to have you come on the show today. Thanks so much!

Seth Buechley:	It's my pleasure to be here with you, Jaime.

Jaime Masters:	You're a serial entrepreneur. It's always hard to introduce serial entrepreneurs because you have so many things in your background. But can you give us the gamut, so that way we understand what you've done?

Seth Buechley:	Sure. Yeah, a serial entrepreneur by DNA. I had a dad that was an intentional mentor and entrepreneur, so was a catalyst in that regard. Joined the first business with him, built it, sold it to a public company. We were in the business of building cell towers, back in the late '90s; sold that business. Then fancied myself an investor. Did a whole lot of other things after that, some with success, most with lessons. Most recently was involved in growing a national company that made smartphones work inside stadiums and airports and skyscrapers and whatnot. 

Jaime Masters:	So, tech geek also. We were just going over some Skype issues beforehand. My gosh!

Seth Buechley:	Not as much as people would think. I tend to have a personality that is - somebody once affectionately described George W. Bush as being an inch deep and a mile wide. I tend to have a personality that's very interested in a lot of different things, but I only wanna go far enough to get by. Then I tend to be interested in other things except for leadership, which I tend to really wanna go deep in.

Jaime Masters:	We'll go deep in that in a second but I really appreciate you saying that. A lot of entrepreneurs are very similar. We like 'pooh, shiny objects. Sometimes, especially when you haven't had success to begin with, that's not a good thing. And sometimes it's an amazing, wonderful thing, like what you've been doing. So, where's the distinction between that? The not going deep on something versus the changing directions.

Seth Buechley:	I think we have to distinguish between preference and priority or necessity, meaning - I think one of these good examples might be if we're married, to put ourselves in our spouse issues. In my case, it's my wife. 'Hey, I'd like a paycheck. I'd like a nest. I'd like these basic things covered. I appreciate that you have this never ending quest for adventure and progress and all the things that define an entrepreneur,' but there's also a certain sense of what entrepreneurs often need and we hate it, but we need it, is constraint. 

Jaime Masters:	Tell me more about this because I agree with you. Especially because I work with a lot of people and I'm a female. I'm generalizing, for sure, but females and safety are a fun, wonderful thing. We just wanna know that everything's coming through okay. Right' So, how do we mitigate what that is with what we can't stand to not do because we're also stubborn and kinda crazy sometimes versus the constraint side of things?

Seth Buechley:	I think structure and constraint, like I said, we tend to resist them but we need them because our personalities - we can get diffused really easily because we take on so many projects and we're touching everything. So, I think the shortest answer to that is to have constraints that are built in. When you start to have employees, for instance, now you have to start to trade your desire for freedom and latitude for a sense of obligation and commitment to those people that you're going to do whatever it is your job requires. If you're stepping up and saying, 'Boy, I sure like to be the leader and I like to be the CEO,' then you also gonna have to own the fact that that means you're gonna have to have meetings; you're gonna have to commit to participating and getting your hands dirty and doing stuff that seems menial.

	I think it's balancing the sense of am I doing my work as a sense of personal fulfillment' The answer is yes. But also I have obligations and commitment to others which frame that constraint.

	And then giving people permission to tell you when you're getting out of balance. I find, for me I drift. Naturally I go into these places as an entrepreneur and I drift. So, I need things (skills, techniques, people) that will pull me back to what I would consider to being centered and focused in the right way.

Jaime Masters:	Tell me way more about that. What are the things that you're actually doing? Who are the people? What do they say without insulting you? How does that work?

Seth Buechley:	I'll start with being clear as a person what motivates you; finding mentors who also understand that about you. One of my rules - and I'm working on - this is probably going to become a book. I'll just say it. When you're trying to establish what my potential is and where I should go you need people that you can trust. We often struggle with this question of where's my mentor at. One of the ways that I have started to think about people that I allow to speak into my life and influence me is first they have to have some level of expertise or they don't even get in the door. They have to have context otherwise I wouldn't be seeking them out.

	The second is do they know me, really know me? They know what makes me tick. They know my strengths and my weaknesses, maybe even my background. Do they love me? The things they're sharing, are they sharing them exclusively for my benefit or is there some ax to grind? Are they giving me candid feedback just because they want what's best for me?

	And the last one is do they share my values? These are big decisions about business types, directions, sacrifice, commitment, and you want somebody who shares your values weighing in on those kind of decisions if you're giving them permission to influence you.

	We gotta be very careful who we listen to because these are - I won't call them life and death - but they're right up there with life and death decisions on how we're gonna start which business. Is this the right time to start the business? Poking holes in our grandiose visions and expectations. 

One of the things that I talk and write about is as driven entrepreneurs we get clocked by the same things over and over. One is if we get what we want we find that we're often disillusioned when we get there and the emotional reward we were expecting isn't there. We have this sense of letdown because we got what we wanted and we didn't get the emotional feedback we expected. 

	The second is we don't get what we wanted and we're suffering this profound disappointment. Either way, as a driven entrepreneur, I find we struggle. We get what we want, we struggle; we don't get what we want, we struggle. Learning how to process that is challenging.

Jaime Masters:	I wanna go down that path, too, but before we go down that path when you are at that decision-making point do you bring it to your mentor specifically? Or will they notice because you're in each other's lives and they'll call you out when you need it
, also?

Seth Buechley:	I think to start with, when you're at that very front end, bouncing our dreams and schemes off of somebody who knows us is profoundly important. There are a couple reasons for that. Number one is the feedback they give us. Number 2 is I think it's important to us later on, when it gets really difficult, we'll question what we were thinking when we made the decision. 

It's important for us to know that as a matter of responsibility we checked the boxes. If you're a person of faith did you pray? If you're married did you talk to your spouse? If you have a mentor did you talk to your mentor? If you have a CEO forum or a small group did you share it with them? And if the answer to all those things is yes and the people who know you, love you, share your values gave you good input, you can then have the sense of confidence that I actually did the work on the front end and so I don't have to second guess myself. This is just being difficult because it's always difficult in the middle. Right?

Jaime Masters:	Yes.

Seth Buechley:	That's part of what people don't often talk about, how difficult it is in the middle, but it's always difficult in the middle.

Jaime Masters:	I wanna couple - especially what you said on the letdown. Even when we achieve our goals we're kind of letdown, and when we don't we're disappointed. I feel that's the ebb and flow of in the middle. I work with a lot of six-figure entrepreneurs and they're like 'I thought I was supposed to have made it. We're making lots of money. It looks good. And I still go like this often.' Tell me a little more about that.

Seth Buechley:	I think that's normal. Part of that is we set a goal out ahead of ourselves. I write about this in the book about we set this goal on the horizon and we can barely see it. But as we approach it, now the earth is kinda curved beneath us. Now, not only do we see the original goal that we set but now we see a new goal. All of our emotional energy moves from that original goal that maybe we're getting close to or even achieved it, and then we're off chasing that next goal. Many times we don't even celebrate that we got the first goal because for driven entrepreneurs the celebration feels selfish and it feels like we're whatever. We like the chase more than we like the celebration, frankly. We're uncomfortable celebrating the wins. We like progress and we like the challenge. We like winning, of course, but we don't really need to talk about it a bunch.

	What I've learned to do is celebrate the wins. I heard one time - I think it was John Maxwell - said, 'Give yourself 24 hours to really celebrate those victories. Then when you screw up, give yourself 24 hours to revel in defeat or whatever you're gonna do, grovel. Then you move on.' But I do find that those goals are always blowing by us because we're chasing. How to mitigate that is a challenge.

Jaime Masters:	I'm a coach and sometimes I have to go, 'Do you not realize how far you've come? Do you remember this stage a little while ago and you were frustrated about this "We are blowing by it like crazy." Noticing that gap of how far they've come - even though we love progress, we love progress but we don't look back and go, "Wow! I've made a ton of progress."

	When you talk about 24 hours of celebration what do you do? Yoou're right. Most pat themselves on the back. They'll go to dinner, maybe. They'll buy themselves something-ish but that's about it. What do you do?

Seth Buechley:	For me, it's actually just verbalizing it; verbalizing it, high-fiving in my office. I have an office in a co-working space with a bunch of entrepreneurs. We have a bell. You're supposed to ring the bell and tell people about it. They're like "If you ring the bell and there's nothing that really happened you owe everybody a dollar." You ring the bell when something big happens, like you launch a product or you hire a person or you open an office. Just little, simple things like that that kinda make it fun and maybe a little dorky, but it's okay to do that.
	Back to the other thing you were mentioning, Jaime. What I find is that many driven personality types, people who have to say "I'm a solopreneur; I'm an entrepreneur," we struggle to find the sense of satisfaction and contentment. You hinted at it. Part of it is we are so forward-focused on that next challenge and that next opportunity that we don't actually stop and do self-reflection; to say "How far have I come?" And then number two, what are the gifts and the good things that I have that I've already achieved? 

	Here's the challenge. If we don't ever stop to value those things that we already have then we don't actually protect them. What happens in my view is that a lot of driven people self-destruct because they don't protect the things that they've already been given. Even though they've had all this success they just don't value it like, frankly, we should.

Jaime Masters:	How do you do that, though? You're right. Progress was my mantra when I was little. It was all about that.

Seth Buechley:	I saw that.

Jaime Masters:	"Go, go, go! This is what we do!" So, contentment has been an issue that I am learning and learning and relearning. I love that because that's, I think, part of the game. Right? That's why I love your book being about gratitude. How do we actually do that? Once we've gotten the Tesla in the garage we do devalue it after a while. You either want another car or you don't. How do we do that?

Seth Buechley:	I'll give you a little bit of a long answer and then I'll give you a short answer. 

	The reason that the Tesla doesn't mean much to us after we have it is something called hedonic adaptation. That's what this ' for some of the listeners that don't know this is this idea that when something bad happens to somebody you notice that they get over it after a certain amount of time. Not completely, but from the surface view, it appears that they've learned to cope with it. The same thing happens when something great or even amazing happens in our lives. Pretty quickly that emotional buzz does wear off. If we're trying to find our happiness and our satisfaction in our stuff - and by stuff it's anything materialistic. It could be social status, beauty, money, power whatever - it dissipates pretty quickly.

	What I discovered and what gave me the impetus for writing the book, what I needed personally was a relationship with gratitude. I had perceived gratitude as this fluffy, rainbow, unicorn kind of thing. Gratitude actually became a really, really powerful thing in my life when I would start to recognize that my natural bias was to be very anxious, very driven, very frustrated because I had all these things that I really, really wanted to do. Even though I had accumulated these things and had a beautiful family and all these things, I didn't value that stuff like I should have and I wasn't operating from this place of being fulfilled and wasn't recognizing what I had.

	What gratitude helped me do is balance out those emotions and then shift from being driven around what I could do and what I could acquire or get done to say "No, I'm actually motivated as a response to what I already have.' Now, I see "Ah. I have a platform. I have gifts. I have opportunities. I'm gonna do my work out of this place of being grateful in response to what I have, not out of this need for what's next or this need for progress, even." It's more about moving from a place of gratitude in response to what I'm grateful for.

Jaime Masters:	Let's talk about the distinction between that, too. I tell my clients this all the time, too. I believe that anything we do is for the feeling that we're gonna have, what we're gonna get after. Like what you said, as far as emotions go, we get the thing; it's gone. But that's the way life is.

	Then I've seen a lot of people go "We do gratitude journals." So, I write my gratitudes every day. But it also seems like a quick hit of "Okay. Great. I am grateful." What you're talking about sounds a lot more intuitive or within you; not just writing your gratitude journal in the morning kind of thing. How do you actually embody that? How can we look at opportunities, instead of "I'm missing out" to "Oh my gosh, I'm so grateful that I've got them."

Seth Buechley:	I have a framework that I use called leading with gratitude framework. I've just codified this. It's interesting how writing a book forces you to think, and then after the book I came up with this framework. I won't tell the story too long, but at some point, probably 15 years ago, I had this thought. I was getting ready to do a speaking engagement. I thought, "What do I want on my tombstone?" I got an answer. It was "He reached for his potential. He impacted his world. He left a legacy." I thought about that so much that I'm like "I actually really believe that." After that I developed a relationship with gratitude. 

The power comes in merging those two things. Now that I understand that I don't have to strive, that there's this abundance of things coming my way, how am I going to take all this energy and this ambition I have and harness it in ways that are good and healthy? The framework I use is I invested in reaching for my potential, which means I'm always committed to learning and growing and stretching and getting people around me who can help me with that. It's really this investment in me. 

Then the next area is impacting my world. This is the part that I spend more time living, which is to take an assessment and say, "Alright. Where are the opportunities that I've been given to serve? My clients, my family, my high school sweetheart who's now my wife of 27 years; in my community as a speaker, as an author." I view the interactions with those people - I remind myself that all of this impact and reaching - instead of trying to reach those people, which a lot of people especially with social media, we can get ourselves into this world that we're reaching these people that we don't even actually know who they are, all at the same time we're actually stepping over the people that we're in contact with every day.

For me, I like to draw this distinction between serving these people right here rather than trying to reach those people that are out there; these versus those. 

Then the last one is, and part of this framework is alright, I do wanna leave a legacy. We all do. What does that look like? For me, it's about a legacy of values. How am I really codifying what I believe? How am I recording it and exchanging it in a tangible way? This podcast, for me, one of the ways I would say it is why are you doing a podcast? Well, so people can get to know about my book and my company, yes; but also because I wanna leave a legacy of values. This gives me an opportunity to articulate the things that I've learned because it will help others. I may never know them but I can still feel some satisfaction that I've made effort in an area that I think is important to me.

Back to your issue of progress, I did some studying on what makes us happy. There's a great book called The Happiness Pie, about what comprises - the influences that make us happy. It turned out about 40 percent of what makes us happy is intentional activity. 

Jaime Masters:	I like that!

Seth Buechley:	For me, it's making progress in areas that we think are important. A quick highlight: 50 percent of what influences our happiness was our DNA, according to the research. 10 percent was our circumstances. And a full 40 percent was this intentional activity in areas we think is important.

Jaime Masters:	That's a big chunk that we can swing one way or the other quite easily.

Seth Buechley:	We can't change our DNA. Changing our circumstances is a small percentage and that's difficult sometimes. Sometimes we're just in a period where we're stuck.

Jaime Masters:	Think of this as only 10 percent, also. 

Seth Buechley:	Because that's not original research I'll share it. The lady's name is Sonja Lyubomirsky and I think the book is called The Happiness Pie. The research is in there. She's got her undergrad from Harvard, Ph.D. from Stamford, so she's a pretty sharp woman.

Jaime Masters:	That's amazing. How do we do that, as far as being more intentional with what we're trying to do? Are you saying an intention focus could be this is my goal and I'm going after it and I feel good that I'm achieving it, though, too? I feel like that is also an intentional activity that we're moving forward on, also. Right?

Seth Buechley:	Yeah. Having a framework to say what are the basic areas that I wanna be spending energy in and does it fit. Looking at our activity and saying if it doesn't fit what I truly think is important and I'm noticing that it's emotionally draining and all that, cut it out. Then as we take on new things ask ourselves does this fit with what I say is important to me? Does it line up with my values? 

Jaime Masters:	I was just gonna ask you about values. How do you determine your values, specifically?

Seth Buechley:	My values - I'm a person of faith. So, I believe that the Bible is inspired truth. What I look for is synergy between all that I love about personal development and all that I love about business, and I frame that in this thing that all truth is God's truth. So, there should be synergy with biblical truth and business for me. In fact I bought Cathedral Consulting this year because the founder had died in a plane crash. He was a very intentional mentor to me, as well. But he had this framework which was in God's world business done right is a blessing.

	For me, there's three parts to that. First is in God's world, which implies that he's over all of things including business. Business done right speaks to the excellence of the science of business; that there are real sciences and technical details around business which can be understood and applied. And then the last part is that business should be a blessing. So, there's a difference between hard business and good business. Business can be a blessing. There are gonna be hard seasons, but even in the hard seasons you realize it's okay, it's normal. Like you said earlier it's part of life. 
And that ultimately as we create value and we become eventual millionaires, it's like now what? That can't be the end. That's actually probably just the beginning and, frankly, it is because as you get some wealth and you learn to see that wealth is not No. 1, is not going to satisfy the emotional things or needs that we have in itself. It certainly gives you freedom. But freedom isn't always a great thing for some people.

I found when I was young and late 20s and I had multiple millions, frankly, it wasn't a very good thing for my character at that point. I had to learn those lessons.

Jaime Masters:	Do you have your values written - as a human and you're evolving in general, especially as a business owner because personally I think business owners are, out of everybody, pushed to personal growth because you are faced with all of these issues that we have to get through. As you evolve anyway, the values start to come out. But do you have them written down somewhere? Besides company values but your own personal values; is it a thing that you just know and abide by? Or is it just within you?

Seth Buechley:	A little of both. I wouldn't say it's as formalized as it could be. The first is, like I say, I do view scripture as truth. Truth is what God says. I always hold that as if I'm feeling one way that's great but let's get back to truth and I use that to center. The other is I do use the framework of reach for my potential, impact my world, leave a legacy. Those are ' but that's kinda telling me which direction to go. If somebody were to say, "Give me a couple words that you really value," the words that would come to mind: progress is also one that I share with you. Authenticity is another one that I feel strongly about. 

As I get to share my story and I see the people that are having the most impact - in fact I just came from a meeting with a great mentor here in the Pacific Northwest, and he talked about sharing his uglies. He talked about being in a small group and you gotta share your uglies. I've never heard this phrase before. He was basically sharing all these stories about things that he had done wrong in a small group setting that really disarmed people and helped them see that this is just part of the human experience. It's not me above you or me below you, it's us together. That's the authenticity part.

Then the last one is escaping my brain? Oh. Recently I've said, "This is the year of courage." Which is to have the courage to have those tough conversations, to push myself beyond where I may be comfortable, just to have courage. That is currently one that - I had to pick a word for the year and I picked courage. I'd better add it to?

Jaime Masters:	Yeah, exactly. Add it to the list. Tell me more about that. One of the reasons why I did this show is because most people put people that are amazing in business on a pedestal. Either they came from money or blahblah. They have all the excuses in the world as to why them and not me. Right? What's interesting, sharing the uglies, and thankfully we live in a world now where online you can hear the crazy stories of both up and down/crash and burn authentically, which helps all of us understand that we are all humans and we all make mistakes. 

	But what I love, specifically, is that your word this year is courage. And usually, everybody listening to this would assume that you are a courageous person. You are a serial entrepreneur that has all of these success and wins and you're striving and making progress. Why courage? And what does that look like in the end for you?

Seth Buechley:	I'll ask this as a question for the audience. Once somebody's had a win or two why would they risk their reputation? Why would they risk failure? Why not just go out, sink that three-pointer with the time running out on the clock and go back ? why would you risk it? 

	Part of it is there's a tendency to play it safe. But more specifically, I would say that those of us that are forward-focused, we have this grand vision and we've got this road in front of us. Say this is the road of potential. On this great road of potential there's a ditch on either side of the road. On the right side there's a ditch and on the left side there's a ditch. 

The ditch on the right is the ditch of ego and pride. I think we're all tuned, especially if we're married or have kids that point out our bald spot, in my case - you have people that will let you know when you're becoming an arrogant jerk. We're aware of people that we consider to be an arrogant jerk and we're like "I don't wanna be that guy." We do a fairly decent job of paying attention to the ditch on the right side of the road.

	But there's a ditch on the left side of the road, too, which also holds us back equally well. That is, in my view, the ditch of fear and insecurity and thinking too little of ourselves. If the ditch on the right is thinking too highly of ourselves and becoming arrogant, the ditch on the left is thinking too little of ourselves because we don't have the courage to say, "Listen. I am gifted in this area and I actually have a responsibility and an opportunity to impact people because I've been given a gift. If I just lay up because I'm afraid of failing or I lay up because I don't wanna do the hard work of building a business then I'm really just lacking courage." That's where, for me, the practical application is pushing through that stuff.

Jaime Masters:	I love that! I love that you shared that. That is the piece, right? Once you've had even success over your peers, whatever that means -

Seth Buechley:	It's always changing.

Jaime Masters:	Exactly! That's the thing that's tough, too. You're like, "Oh, and then I'm here. Oh. Then why push? Oh, wait. There's always another level." There's always another goal over the horizon like you were saying before.

Seth Buechley:	Which is why I think it's so important for us, and I talk about this in the book, for entrepreneurs in particular, I say "Listen. If we fall into this myth that satisfaction is found through achievement we're toast. Satis -

Jaime Masters:	I know. Yes. I have worked on that for many years now. Continue, please.

Seth Buechley:	Satisfaction is found on the other side of gratitude. What happens is we start to ratchet up our expectations and we hang around with people that are successful, and there's all sorts of levels. Millionaires hang out with ten millionaires. Ten millionaires hang out with hundreds. Hundreds hang out with billionaires and talk about professional sports teams and islands and jets. I'm not kidding. That's literally what happens. So, there's always something on the horizon that's out there beyond where we're at, and if we let that consume us then we're living for these external things. I think this internal work - Maxwell, again, says you gotta be bigger on the inside than you are on the outside. It's the inside work that we need to do that actually helps us be happy millionaires, effective, you know.

Jaime Masters:	Yes! And when I work with clients it's so funny because I'm like "Okay, now we're going down the intangible road which will affect everything that is tangible, and yet because we don't have checklists and charts and ' you know what I mean - different things to see or in physical life, a Tesla or whatever it is, we don't know what's changing on the inside either." I love the distinction that you made because I was one of those overachievers that was like as long as I can keep overachieving I will feel satisfied in life. That doesn't work as we all have found out which is painful, but being grateful and having that satisfaction deep within you either way? Mind-blowingly awesome.

	But the difference in the trajectory of trying to see where you're at - like I said, there's no chart, there's no whatever. How do we know when we're getting better at this? Or do we? And how do we know and what do we do to keep pushing that forward? Does that make sense?-

Seth Buechley:	It does. The indicators are kind of emotional, emotional health and just the thoughts that we're having. I think we do get a feeling of satisfaction that comes when we're in our zone and we're doing the things that are important to us. It's prioritization. 

	What I find, frankly, is we drift, flat out. I read the book that I wrote not long ago and I'm like, "This is good stuff.' Not because of how brilliant it was but because I need it. What I realize is even though I know these things to be true, I'm pulling myself back to what is true because I don't feel it every day. If I go three, four, five days without thinking about what I'm grateful for and processing and really stopping and being a little bit reflective, I can drift pretty quickly. So, we need things that anchor us back to what is real. And I find that gratitude, particularly, creates a lens through which we see everything else. 

	You can't be, for instance, hateful and grateful at the same time. When we look at some of these tragic things that happen in our country, one of the things that's in common is these people are carrying these grievances with them. They've collected these grievances for decades and now they're so' they're so poisoned by these grievances that they've carried that now anything they do is justified because they have so much "pain.' This happens to all of us. We gotta have this process of letting go of those grievances, being grateful for what we have, approaching it from a place of abundance, not this scarcity. 

It is the work. I really do think it is the work of an entrepreneur is balancing out all the gifts and all the desire to go out and push and create and take these risks with how do I do that without letting it consume me, burn me up. I like to say the entrepreneurs that make the biggest difference in the world are those that aren't burnt up by their own ambition. 

Jaime Masters:	Yes! Okay. I love this because it's so important for entrepreneurs to hear. And it's also not talked about very much because we want tactics and this. It's like "Oh, great. Now you hit your million because you did all the tactics and strategy?" Some of the people call it the millionaire myth. And then we crash and burn because it didn't give us what we wanted anyway, and we just worked our butts off for an emotional dip that just hit us.

Seth Buechley:	I remember the first time I heard a phrase, sudden wealth syndrome. 

Jaime Masters:	I haven't heard that.

Seth Buechley:	It was in a paper about a tech executive who'd struck it rich. At that point, I was living through this because I had just made a ton of money and had not come from "money.' I wasn't really prepared. I was too young to be prepared. Didn't even know how to listen. If somebody gave me good advice, I didn't know how to take it. Somebody's "Oh, you needed good advice." No, I actually needed to listen to good advice.

	The point of it is we're like that proverbial dog chasing the car. We have no idea what would actually happen if we grab ahold of the tire. That's what happens to people who actually do make it over that hump. And it's actually not something that people can detect from the outside. There's the process - and somebody wrote an article or a book on the sudden wealth syndrome that talks about it's really around your identity. When you actually break through and you have the wealth, and that's what you've been chasing all this time, you're not sure what to do next because your muscles and your time and your whole philosophy of life is all oriented around chasing, and now the pressure's off and you don't have to chase. 

	It's a lot like a divorce or a death and people don't realize it. They're like "How can?" Here's the practical example. Look at lottery winners. We all know the stories of what happens to lottery winners. What happens is sudden wealth syndrome happens. It's actually the same thing to that young or whenever executive who sells their business and ends up with their first couple million dollars. It's actually a major change in their life that they have to be ready for or it can be very harmful.

Jaime Masters:	What I love is that even if the people listening don't have that crazy, nutso wealth you can still work on this stuff now so when you do make your first million it isn't downhill after that. This is the stuff that when you go through failures, these are the turnarounds. This is all practice. This is the work. This is exactly what you said. We sometimes discount that.

	I loved how you said you have lessons, lots of lessons learned. We've heard that a thousand times. "There's not any failures; there's only learning." It's become a bit of a shtick nowadays but it's the work, so we can't be bad about the downsides because you're learning so much and pushing through anyway. There's always ups and downs and if we can get past that in our own mind, no matter now intangible it is, the work that we're working on, that makes our entire life better which makes our children better, also. You know what I mean? That stuff, to me, is what leaves the legacy. Besides the money that you leave your kids or whatever, but the who-they-are and the fact that they can go be grateful is hugely important. The work you are doing is so important. That's all I have to say.

	I know we have to start wrapping up soon. So, I'm gonna ask you the final question. But I really appreciate this and the intangibility that everybody needs to hear. So, I'm switching it around to being what's the action? But still? What's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Seth Buechley:	Take an assessment of what they truly think their gifts are. By gifts it's something that you are significantly better at than most people around you. Ask themselves the question of are they reaching for their potential? Are they growing in those areas?

Jaime Masters:	I love that.

Seth Buechley:	It's a gift assessment, first; then it's am I growing.

Jaime Masters:	And if you don't know, ask your friends because everybody else can see it probably easier than you can, too. 

Seth Buechley:	Plus we like talking about ourselves, so why not get them to talk about us? "We're gonna have a meeting. We're gonna talk about me."

Jaime Masters:	"I love words of affirmation. Tell me how good I am, please, please. That'll be great." 

	Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Seth. Where can we find your book? Where can we find out more about you and definitely get more words of wisdom?

Seth Buechley:	My book is at readambition.com and everything to connect with me on social is there. The work that I do for small businesses and medium-size businesses is through Cathedral Consulting. It's at cathedralconsulting.com. We have offices in the thriving metropolis of Roseburg, Oregon, and one in the thriving metropolis of Manhattan, one in New Jersey, and we're starting some things here in the Pacific Northwest, as well. We get to serve a lot of companies around the country there. It's our privilege to serve small businesses, in particular, as they make their mark in the world. We also serve non-profits for the same reason. We're grateful for the opportunity to do that work.

Jaime Masters:	I know you have a Facebook page and videos and all that fun stuff, so everybody check you out online.

	Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Seth. I really appreciate it.

Seth Buechley:	It's been my privilege. I enjoyed the conversation a lot. Thank you.

Tags: Business Owner, entrepreneur podcast, eventual millionaire, hedonic adaptation, hedonic adaptation example, how to ba happy alone, how to be happy, how to be happy everyday, how to be happy with your life, how to be happy with yourself, jaime masters, millionaire entrepreneurs, podcast, Seth Buechley, start-ups / startups, startup entrepreneur, top entrepreneurs

Categories: All, Featured Millionaire Interview, Millionaire Interviews, Personal Development

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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