Key Quote
• “Doing the right thing is always the right thing. Doing it when it’s hard is even more important.” – Kyle Golding
Episode Summary
• Kyle Golding was faced with an ethical dilemma when his boss asked him to produce an advertising campaign promoting a calcium supplement as a potential cancer cure, despite evidence having been debunked of this in 1935.
• Facing no support from the marketing director, head of legal, or CEO, he chose to leave the company and found a new job with a much better boss who taught him about business ethics.
• This experience taught Kyle to prioritize ethical decisions over taking shortcuts for quick financial gain when doing business and building relationships.
• He believes that society needs to focus on building relationships and creating value instead of chasing quick fame or money, which will ultimately benefit everyone in the long run.
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Wesley Jackson: Can you relate to this? Picture yourself in charge of an advertising campaign for a nutritional supplement. The industry for this particular supplement has been around for quite a while, so when you see the copy that’s to be used in the ads, you can’t help but notice that it’s been full of outrageously untrue claims in order to spice things up.
“This can’t be right.” you think to yourself. Yet, when you present this problem to your CEO, that’s when things get weird. But how do you know if this is truly a case of unethical advertising at all? Hell, seemingly everyone else is making basically bogus claims about their own products too. So what’s the harm in doing it, right? But this just doesn’t sit right with you.
So, what will you do now?
You’ll find this out today through a story from Kyle Golding, CEO and Chief Strategic Idealist for The Golding Group, an award-winning think tank of strategy, business process management, and marketing integration experts.
In today’s self-help podcast episode, you’ll learn about unethical advertising, how it relates to habits, and how these two powerful forces influence our lives.
Welcome to Surviving Humanity: A Self-Help Podcast, where we shift your perspectives to help you overcome the obstacles in your life. We are Wesley Jackson and Andrew Gilley, and we hope to foster a sense of connection and community over our common struggles while providing you with the tools to overcome them.
As always, our Facebook, Subreddit, and Twitter are the best places to go for community, connection, and support.
Links to these are in the show notes.
Let’s get started.
Kyle, do you have any stories that you’d like to share that are related to unethical advertising?
[00:01:34] Kyle Golding: This was around 2005. I was doing graphic design and marketing freelancing in between corporate jobs, and I was working for a client that made nutritional supplements.
They were not a drug manufacturer, they don’t make medicine. And when you market and advertise supplements versus medicine or things of that nature, you have to be very specific in the language you use. Because if you use certain language, it comes under the FDA, and there’s all kinds of regulations and all kinds of standards they hold you to.
But if it’s a supplement, they can use looser language, but there’s certain things they can and cannot say about what the product can do for you. So they can tell you that it helps with good health, but they can’t tell you it’ll cure something, cure a headache, or cure a pain in your body. Some specific things like that.
This particular client I was working freelance for them, but I was going in the office, their office several days a week, because their CEO was only in the office certain days of the week. And he was very micromanaging. He wanted his hands on everything, which was fine.
Their typical process was the director of marketing would give me kind of the gist of what they were working on, whatever products that they were gonna be promoting.
We wrote some copy. We ended up scheduling photo shoots, just things of this nature, putting together ad campaigns was the regular workflow. As soon as we wrote copy, we would take it to their legal department. They would make sure you’re not crossing any lines when it comes into what they could legally and ethically say and not get them in trouble with the FDA or any other regulatory bodies.
We had a good formula of what we could do and could not do. So, in this particular case, the CEO, he was an eccentric millionaire type guy, a Richard Branson type guy who never wore suits and did his best work like at his beach house.
So, he was all excited about new idea. We had a product, an existing product, but he was gonna change the marketing in this new campaign and this was gonna be the thrust of the business and we were gonna make so much money off of this. So, I come in the office expecting to get the details on this and start working on this campaign.
I’m all excited about it. And there’s a sheet of paper and there’s a headline at the top. And the headline said, we cure cancer. “Wait a minute. The headline is, we cure can-” that’s a no starter, right?
I start reading the copy and essentially it says, if you take this product, which was a calcium supplement, that you wouldn’t get cancer. I also found to be an amazing claim because at this point now, 18 years later, we have not cured cancer.
We have not found ways to prevent you from getting cancer, and it definitely doesn’t come from a calcium supplement.
So, I immediately went to the person I worked for, the director of marketing and said, “This is insane. This is such a bad idea and I don’t know anything about medical, but I know the public is going to say this is an outright lie.”
And the marketing director, she was a big believer in the C E O. She had drank the Kool-Aid. If he says it’s true, I’m going with the guy. Very frustrating.
I’m like, “Do you not understand that a headline like ‘We cure cancer’ or ‘We prevent cancer’ is going to really get people’s attention, but in a bad way because there’s no way to prove this with a calcium supplement.
Now, her response was “We have a award-winning report that says this, actually, it’s a Nobel Peace Prize award-winning report that says you can avoid getting cancer. It had to do with oxygen in your bloodstream.
Okay. I’ve never heard of this either, I’m almost gonna need to see this report or see this data if you want me to write copy and create an ad campaign around curing or avoiding cancer in your life.
So, she brings up this Nobel Prize winning report and the Nobel Prize was awarded to it in 1934.
In 1934, this physician had proffered this theory that cancer shows up in people when there’s an event or conditions that they’re withheld oxygen.
What she didn’t tell me, what I found out much later in this whole process, was in 1935, the Nobel Prize for that same category was a study that debunked this study completely , but essentially they cherry picked the idea that in 1934, someone said that more oxygenation of your blood, which is what a calcium supplement is supposed to do, would prevent you from getting cancer.
So, the marketing director did not tell me, “Yes, we’re not gonna do that”. She said, yeah, if the CEO says so, we’re going to do it. So I knew what to do. I went straight to the legal department, because, of course the legal department doesn’t want us in hot water. Legally and ethically, they don’t want the FDA involved, et cetera.
Went into them. I said, “Have you seen this?” And the lawyer was like yeah, I know what you’re talking about. He was being elusive. And I said here’s the headline: “We cure cancer.”
He goes “We can’t say that. It’s the word cure that we have to take out.”
I’m still thinking, “No, we can’t talk about cancer because we have no reports or data or research from this year or last year.”
We have this thing from 1934, and this still is going to raise such ethical eyebrows, no matter how much fluff or marketing spin or anything else I put on the headline, the copy, this ad campaign is a terrible idea. It’s going to be mocked, it’s going to cause trouble. You’re gonna get this company sued.
And the attorney went through the “Well if you say this and not this, if we substitute these terms, we could still do this.” My ethical dilemma was we were gonna try to convince people to buy a calcium supplement with the idea that they were going to not get cancer in their life.
And I knew, again, I’m not a doctor, but you weren’t going to avoid cancer forever in your life by taking a calcium supplement. And convincing people to buy this, whether it was a dollar or a hundred dollars, it didn’t matter to me. It was super unethical, and I just, I didn’t want to do this.
Everything in my gut said, “This is a bad idea. Do not be associated with this. These people are going to get sued. These people are gonna be ridiculed, there are gonna be articles written about how bad of an ad campaign this is, because it’s so outrageous.”
Now the marketing director and the head of legal say, “If you don’t like it, you can take it up with the boss.”
Go to the CEO, why not? So, I went right in, made the same case. I’m like, look, this is outrageous. This is insane. This is a bad idea. He said, “No, it’s a great idea. I believed in it. I believe in this product.” Although he could not offer me any proof outside of this study from 1934.
And I just told him, “I’m not doing this. You could, you can hire someone else to do it.”
And he told me, “If you’re not doing this, you’re not doing anything for us.”
And again, in the back of my head, I’m like, “Ah, this is income I’m losing. This is an opportunity I’m losing.”
But my gut told me, ” You have to get away not only from this campaign, but if these three people who were the decision makers in this company were so set on doing something that I found to be this unethical, I absolutely did not wanna work for them, and didn’t want to be associated with them at all.
So, he told me, “Go back to your desk and get to work on this or pack your stuff up and go.”
I packed my stuff up and I left.
The irony is, as soon as I left, I went home and was reminded that I had a lunch scheduled that day with one of the guys who I used for their printing services. He was a salesman of a printing company that I used for all types of brochures and flyers and things that we printed for all my clients.
He called me up, said, “Hey, we’re going to lunch today.”
I said, “Yeah, I’ve got a crazy story to tell you.”
So, I immediately go to lunch with this person. Telling the story, we have a good laugh over it over lunch, because he found it to be as crazy as I thought it was.
He said, “You did the right thing.”
Later on that afternoon, he called me back and said, “I went back to the office. I told my boss this crazy story. I told him that you quit on the spot and refused to do this and you kept your ethics about you, and my boss was so impressed with that and some other work we had been doing together, that he wants you to come work for us.”
I said “You guys do printing and you’re a salesperson. I don’t do sales. I’m a graphic designer. I’m an art director.”
He said, “Yeah, we’re actually considering creating a position for you, we’ve been thinking about it previously, but your dedication to ethics and doing the right thing and holding yourself to a standard really impressed everyone in the organization and we think now’s the time to do it, and we think you’re the person.”
So, within less than 24 hours of losing that gig, I had a full-time job with a company that I really liked and ended up working for one of my best bosses ever.
We learn a lot from good bosses and we learn a lot from bad bosses. I have a ton of great stories of lessons I learned from bad bosses. Only two bosses that I really hold at a high level, and the person who hired me for this next job, 24 hours later, is one of those good bosses who always taught me the right way to do business and instilled a ton of great business ethics in me.
So, I went in a 24-hour period from working for possibly the worst boss I ever had, to the best boss I ever had because I wasn’t willing to do something that was ultimately unethical.
[00:10:04] Wesley Jackson: Wow, good for you. It’s really messed up. It sounds like they’re preying on the hope that everyone has and even if they were trying to get into the nitty-gritty and the details and trying to be like, “oh, we just don’t have to say the word cure and everything’s gonna be A-OK.”, I could see why that didn’t sit well with you. But props to you for actually having the gumption to quit.
Because, all too often in this industry, we see the opposite of that. Especially these days.
So I’m curious, let’s get a little bit more personal here. What were you seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking when you were going through this process where you were going to the marketing director, you were going to the legal team, and then you went all the way up to the CEO and you just kept getting pushback.
What was that like?
[00:10:50] Kyle Golding: First, I was shocked. I was really like, “This can’t be right.”
And I thought, “This will be an easy fix. I’ll have a conversation with these professionals and collectively we’ll be like, you’re right.”
And in my mind, like when advertising a product, you gotta begin by what else is happening out in the market, right? What are your competition doing? How are they marketing theirs? How are they positioning what they do? And trying to find a differentiation and a different position for you.
I thought, throw this piece of paper away and let’s go look at our competition, let’s go find a position and let’s find a way to smartly market this calcium supplement in a good way and cohesive along the brand too, because they had a lot of other supplements, I felt like it needed to fit in there as well.
So, first I was a little confused by it, but I thought “I can solve this.”
The marketing director not being helpful in that kind of raised my ire a little bit, agitated me a little bit, and when I went to legal , I really felt like I was, I don’t wanna say – I wasn’t necessarily telling on her, but, I really thought she needed to be scolded and put in her place professionally for not stopping this process.
And I thought the legal department would do that. Essentially, the whole role of a legal department is to keep you outta trouble in these things.
When the legal team started finessing as opposed to throwing the idea out, I knew there was a problem. They’d all been working together on this, and I also knew they were not gonna take “no” for an answer.
And at that point, because I still considered it so highly unethical, I actually got very angry at them at that point because they were trying to do something I found to be unethical. And they were trying to coerce me, bully me, force me to do it as well. They were gonna take me down with their ship, and that made me very angry.
I thought they were trying to take advantage of me. I even thought at one point, “Maybe if things go south, they would blame me.”
Like “Oh, we hired this marketing company and THEY did that.” If the public really got outrageously mad about it. So, I was thinking about how to protect my brand as well, and when I finally left legal, went into the CEO’s office, I was full on irate.
I went in there to pick a fight, essentially because I knew he had already made his mind up. And I also knew he was the type of guy who would never, ever admit he was wrong in my dealings with him in the past, and so I went in there essentially to get fired. Went in there to put a stamp on the whole thing and leave.
I knew at that point I wasn’t going to leave because I knew he wasn’t going to backtrack on it either. So, it definitely started with a little bit of confusion and concern and elevated right up to, I was thinking in my head like, “This guy’s a real jerk and I need to get so far away from him right now.”
When you’re angry like that, when you get that adrenaline pumping, I was really going. It was collecting my stuff and taking the elevator ride down where that started to wear off and I started thinking about, “I’ve gotta replace this income.”
And typically in my line of business, my next client comes from a referral from my current client.
Typically, people say, “We like working with him so much, you should hire him too.”
I’d been doing work for them for maybe six or eight months, and so that was a whole period of time I couldn’t use as a reference and I couldn’t list them as a client.
And I wasn’t sad or scared, but I was disappointed that I couldn’t use any of this professionally to move myself forward. By the time I got to telling my friend about it, it became comical. I was laughing the whole time I told him, mostly because I was free from it now I wasn’t going to be sucked up in it and there was nothing I could do about it.
He reassured me I had done the right thing and then obviously his boss reassured me as well. From there I felt a great sense of pride that I had stuck to my guns, that I had done the right thing.
I took the risk of losing that income and losing that opportunity, but it paid off for me in the long run. And so ultimately now, looking back at it, that was the right thing to do. But, in the moment it was scary. But, I was super happy that it worked out the way it did.
[00:14:34] Wesley Jackson: It sounds like you found a way through this by just sticking to your guns, AKA your values in this case, and then using humor to just laugh it off. That elevator ride that you described, it’s very vivid in my head. I could see when you talked about the transition from anger to kind of relief, right?
So, how would you say this whole experience back then changed your perspective in general?
[00:14:56] Kyle Golding: That was maybe 18 less than 20 years ago, but it was a long time ago, and I’ve had good and bad bosses since then, I’ve had good and bad clients. My firm now, The Golding Group, been together 11 now, almost 12 years.
And so we’ve had ups and downs, we’ve had great relationships with clients, we’ve had relationships go bad. We just let a client go in January over an ethical issue. Now, it’s very easy for me to see something coming, those grey areas, and say, “Don’t even go there, because we’re not going there with you.”
It’s much easier now with that experience, because it worked out in a great way, because I did the right thing, if you will. Now, the decision to do the right thing is very easy to do. The first one’s the hardest one. The first time you say no to something because of an ethical dilemma, the first time you say no to a client because it’s not the right fit.
The first time you do it, it’s the hardest one. It’s the scariest one. It gets your nerves going, because it’s opportunity and it’s income and you’re supposed to keep clients, you’re not supposed to lose clients.
But every time I’ve done it, I’ve come out on the other side in a better position. Whether it’s being free from a client that was, sucking up that bandwidth, avoiding a client that was going to go downhill eventually.
Other clients I’ve had in the past where we said, “Ethically, we’re in two different places, we’re not gonna work with you.” They’ve gone on to do very poorly, because those things catch up to them and we avoided it catching up to us.
So I’ve had the luxury, if you will, of being very firm and making ethical decisions and making decisions that are better in the long-term, even though in the short-term it’s scary and it’s frustrating and it’s apprehension about how you’re gonna replace that income and opportunity.
I think it’s important for people to hear stories like this and understand that, that first time you say no in this situation, it’s super hard. It’s scary. It’ll make you almost want to throw up, but it does work out the way it’s supposed to, and it gets easier to do. And I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 35 years now, it’s very easy for me to say no to things that don’t look right.
[00:16:47] Wesley Jackson: I’m sure if you were doing this all the way back in 2005, you’ve got a lot of experience with saying no now and standing up for your ethics. It also sounds like you’ve got a lot of foresight and that’s continued to this day.
Let’s switch gears here a little bit and blow this topic up a bit. How would you say unethical advertising is related to habits?
[00:17:06] Kyle Golding: There are plenty of people in the world who go straight for, “Let’s screw everybody over.” But that’s one or 2% of the people out there. That’s evil approach, if you will.
I think most ethical dilemmas and gaps in ethics come from, you described it as habit, but I kind of look at it as shortcuts. As someone who is focused in the wrong place, if you’re solely focused on making money, making fast, quick, easy money, you’re always gonna go down the wrong path.
Whether it’s ethical or execution or the depth of the relationship you’re supposed to be creating, you might sell something one time. You won’t repeat that business if you take that shortest, easiest path, that only benefits you, financially in the very, very short term.
But I think a lot of people who just don’t have enough experience or understanding about how business works, sometimes that’s the default for them. That’s their habit.
Those individuals are not gonna find success very often. It catches up to you very quickly, no matter where you are in the world. When you learn your lesson of don’t go for the short, quick, easy thing, but build your relationships and provide value for you and them, a 50-50, a win-win.
Those situations, not only do you get paid today, but you get paid next week and next month and six months and a year from now because you get to repeat that business or you can build off of it to attract your next client, your next opportunity, et cetera.
So, I think the habit is looking at the shortest path to success and thinking that’s the right path. Then you can do the opposite. If you take the longest path, if you wait for perfect, you end up, missing opportunities as well. The habit of going right for that quick money, the easy money, and forgetting to build your relationships and build deeper business opportunities is a bad habit.
But never launching, never committing, never putting any parameters on anything and waiting for perfect is also a really bad habit as well that will ultimately kill any business.
So, create your economic flow and develop your relationships, build on repeatable business, sustainable business, creating your brand as opposed to just a product that you sell one time today. Those are the habits that you need to create in order to avoid those bad habits.
[00:19:12] Wesley Jackson: I love it. Yeah. It seems like the habits here in this case is habitual thinking, always looking for that shortcut, like you said.
Let’s broaden this topic even more now. How do you think this story of yours is related to larger problems throughout society, and why is this important?
[00:19:27] Kyle Golding: If your sole motivation for anything is making money, you’re already on the wrong path.
In this case, the CEO thought, people will buy the cure for cancer like crazy, we’ll sell so much of this. It was actually a relatively cheap product to make, so they were gonna make a huge margin, et cetera. So, he was only focused on making money and that was his first mistake.
It may seem counterintuitive; people are like, “Well, you’re in business to make money.”
Yes, but you’re in business, like I said earlier, to create value for the people that you do business with, for you and for them. If your focus is creating value and creating good systems and creating relationships and repeatable business, the economics will come, they will happen.
So, I think when we talk about society, what’s the bigger picture here? Instant gratification. People wanting to become famous overnight. Overnight sensations, making a lot of money or being famous or having a ton of success with doing very little work.
Going back to the idea of taking those shortcuts. That’s the bigger problem. You need to work for your success because you need to understand how you built it, so that you can then sustain it. And fast, easy, overnight success, flash in the pan, going viral, it’s like winning the lottery.
How many people win the lottery, and a year later they’re completely broke? Why? Because the money was too easy. They had a ton of money, but it was so easy for them, they don’t think about, “How can I keep making money with this money?” And a lot of people do that in business.
A lot of people are trying to use social media and digital channels and all kinds of ways that we connect and communicate with each other now, to make something happen very fast and very easy. And if they do make it happen, it’s not sustainable, they don’t know how to manage it, and ultimately whatever money or fame or success that you draw to it, it goes as easy as it came in.
So I think overall, when we talk about society, everyone needs to slow down a little bit. Be more focused on creating value, creating relationships, as opposed to going out and doing something crazy that becomes a viral video.
You could be on this Earth one year or a hundred years, and if you think you’re only gonna be here for a year, you’re probably gonna take those shortcuts. But, you could slow down, you could take your time, and try to do things that are more of a win-win, more equitable for the people around you so that you can continue to do that as opposed to go viral, make a buck, and then other people end up making more money than you do and you’re ending up left as that person who did that one thing, that one time.
Trending on Twitter today doesn’t mean anything because tomorrow a hundred other things are trending, and having a single viral video, or having one Instagram post that gets a thousand likes on it, it’s fine, but if you can’t follow that up, if you can’t marshal it, if you can’t use it to continue to be successful, then there’s really no value there.
[00:22:04] Wesley Jackson: Wow. Yeah. We’re so addicted to the drama and the money making here, aren’t we? The CEO effect, as it’s called, where all the spotlights are on that one person. Just like you said, as fast as it comes in, it can go out just as fast.
[00:22:17] Kyle Golding: Easy come easy go for sure.
[00:22:18] Wesley Jackson: For sure. Other than the topic of being too obsessed with making money, what would you say is the moral of this story and what can we all do that are listening today to become better humans in response to all of this?
[00:22:32] Kyle Golding: The simple answer is doing the right thing is always the right thing.
It’s too easy to give yourself an excuse of, “I was just doing my job, or my boss told me to, or, maybe these people are smarter than me.”
But, these are excuses. It could be really scary to tell your boss no, or to avoid an opportunity because it’s because maybe the ethics are wrong or it’s just not right for you, but doing the right thing is always the right thing.
Every time that I’ve said no to something I felt was wrong, something better came along almost immediately. Not necessarily that the universe owes you something or gives you something for doing the right thing, but you put yourself in the right mindset and the right position to have future success when you do the right thing today, in the moment.
And I think the second half of that is your gut is almost always right. If you look back at every major decision you’ve made in your personal life, in your business life, if you thought, this is a person I want to know and get to know better, or this is a person, maybe I want to avoid, you can look back a week, a month, two years, 18 years later and say, yeah, “My gut was right.”
I find most times that little voice in the back of your head, your gut, your intuition, whatever you wanna call it, that first reaction is typically right. Then you gotta find the reasons to follow it and then have the COURAGE to follow it when the situation is a little scary or unknown.
But if you go back to the idea of doing the right thing, if you put yourself in other people’s shoes, walk a mile in their shoes, et cetera. If you can think things like this, if you can be empathetic like that, if you can understand the big picture and not get focused on “Yeah, I won’t get a paycheck tomorrow if I quit today, but I understand if I don’t quit today, I’m gonna be stuck in this job with a horrible boss, or my reputation’s gonna be tarnished along with it.”
I think if you can focus in those ways and remember that people will appreciate, people will reward, people will congratulate, people will want to know and associate with you if you do the right thing, especially when it’s hard.
Doing the right thing when it’s hard is even more important. It’s easy to talk about it, it’s hard to actually do it. So, if that voice in the back of your head says, “this isn’t right, we gotta get outta here, we need to not do this, we need to say no”, you should probably listen to it.
[00:24:35] Wesley Jackson: I love what you said there, the right thing is not always the easiest thing, but when it’s hard is when it matters even more. So true. Wow. Okay, so before we go, Kyle, if you had to choose what is your one tip for surviving humanity?
[00:24:50] Kyle Golding: The more you work and collaborate and cooperate with other people, the more success and the more positivity and the more good comes from it.
When I was young in my career, I was really like cutthroat. Go out there and win and, and step over who you need to step over. And I, I gotta get mine. And I had some success, but again, it wasn’t sustainable.
I made a buck, but the next day I didn’t know what to do. The second half of my career later in life and much more as an adult and much more understanding how the real world works, the more that I was a part of something, a part of a team, a part of a collaboration; owning 10% of something that’s awesome is much more beneficial than owning a hundred percent of something that sucks.
So, the more we can work together, the more we can collaborate with each other, the more that you can learn from each other, the more that you can find commonality, common ground. In any situation, if you put ten humans in a room together, or five humans or two humans, we have so much more in common than we do different.
So, if we focus on that commonality, if we focus on what we can do together, if we focus on win-win and how we can benefit each other, if I can have 50% of a great thing and you have 50%, that’s so much better than me having a hundred percent of nothing.
These are ways that you extend yourself out in the world. You create relationships, maybe those people come back with other opportunities. Maybe those other people tell other people about you, and they create opportunities for you. There’s this kind of synergy that comes from being giving and open to other people.
In my line of business, I do a lot of essentially just strict consulting with businesses. We work one-on-one with them on what their problems are and how to solve them. But I also come on podcasts like yours, and I have my podcast, the Strategic Growth podcast. I have my personal podcast, the Saturday Morning Hustle, and I give those same tips and I tell people the same information I’m telling CEOs of businesses behind closed doors, because the more we share that information, the more problems I could solve for someone else, that’s just gonna move them to the next thing that they need help with.
They may think, “Hey, that guy that helped me on a podcast or gave me free advice online, maybe I’ll call them up and maybe we can do some business together.”
Because he wasn’t holding the information back, he was giving it, and that’s happened before. I’ve had plenty of people that I work with because I’m not afraid to give advice, give information to help other people without focusing first on how much money I make.
If you do those things, if you’re collaborative and open-minded and you work with people and you’re open to experiences, the profit comes later. Whether it’s economics, whether it’s opportunity, whether it’s just meeting great people and being invited into great situations and having great relationships, all of the good is the side effect of you creating and sharing value with other people.
So, don’t focus on you. If you focus on how you can be a part of big things, great things with other people, the benefit to you will come to you.
It takes a little bit of patience, but it always comes and it’s continually creating success for itself as opposed to you having to continually grind out that thing for you. Working with other people, being collaborative, being open-minded. Understanding you might be an expert in something, but there’s still something you can learn.
All that enlarges your brain. It enlarges your possibilities and if you get out of, “I need to do it my way” in this set narrow path, and you get into that big wide path of “here are the possibilities”, so much can come from that.
[00:27:57] Wesley Jackson: There’s more than enough to go around, just like you said.
[00:28:00] Kyle Golding: Success it is not a zero sum game. There is not a limited amount of success or happiness or positivity in the world. So, if you are successful and I’m successful and we’re working with 10 people that are successful, 10,000 other people can also have success at the same time where none of us are, getting the success meter down to zero.
There’s continual positivity for everyone. So, share with other people and help other people along, because they’re not taking from you, they’re adding to your success.
[00:28:28] Wesley Jackson: Thank you to our guest, Kyle Golding.
Kyle is the CEO and Chief Strategic Idealist for The Golding Group, an award-winning think tank of strategy, business, process management, and marketing integration experts with offices in Oklahoma City and Philadelphia. They focus on creating systems within your own business that can be measured, adjusted, then repeated by incorporating data analysis, market trends, and audience feedback.
You can find their latest work at thegoldinggroup.com. I personally found Kyle and The Golding Group’s list of awards that they have received to be really impressive. I mean, it is LONG. We highly encourage you to also check out their Strategic Growth podcast if you’re interested in learning more about how to navigate specific problems in your own business, straight from the mouths of business thought leaders and experts.
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Links to our Patreon and the challenge can be found in the show notes.