Out of Office, Into Alignment

to business and let's talk about business and vacation. This is the very first trip I have taken in the last six years, where I set an out of office and my out of office said this. Bonjour! I'm currently out of the office and we'll be back online next Wednesday. This week is a special one. I'm checking off a longtime personal, professional, and financial goal of heading to Formula One in Monaco while I'm away. If something is urgent, feel free to text me. To request a meeting. Please

reach out to tailor insert my assistant's email. And finally, and most importantly, I won't be sorting through a backlog of emails when I return. My inbox was at zero before I left and will be cleared while I'm out. If there's something I need to see, please resend it on Wednesday when I return so it doesn't get missed. Thanks so much and have a ten day. The reason I set this out of office is I am going to change my environment, and being in Monaco solidified this

change that I'm about to go through. Because in order to get to where I want to go, I can't keep spending my time the way that I'm spending my time. I've had different transitions through running Cardoen ventures, where I reshape meetings, I reshape emails, I reshape my communication to my team and my role with my team. And that's had to happen in order to go from where we were six years ago to having hundreds of team members today with portfolio companies and partners and different demands on

my time. But being in Monaco just cemented for me that I have to take full ownership of my environment and how I set other people up for success in my environment and it's really cool. Right now, I updated my screensaver because my screensaver for me is always like the theme of the current time that I'm in. And my screensaver is this picture of this glass building on a street of brownstones, and this glass building has bright pink smoke in it. So it's like electrifying. And it

it's different. It stands out from everything else that's beside it. And this is my visual on building my own dream house and my environment is what my dream house is. And when you really own how you do business, how you want your life structured, how you want people to communicate with you, who you want to show up as. It's okay that the way you do things might look entirely different than everybody else, because it is your freaking dream house. It is your environment that you get to create,

that you get to craft. And I just had this realization right before I went out of the country that I am no longer going to pretend like I'm every other brownstone on the block. Like, oh, come in, and we're just slightly better. No. Like the way I do things and the way that I want to run. My life is different. The way that I view the people who I will allow in my environment is different. My expectations, they are different. And so pretending. And this is a

trap that I sometimes find myself in. Pretending like it's the same and then surprising people doesn't get a great result. But being so clear on who you are, what you expect, what you want your environment to look like, and being really willing to confront areas that don't fit. Is this next area of evolution. And so as something as simple as emails, I mean, every vacation I've taken for six years has been me still answering emails and waking up early in order to to clear out my inbox and

to make sure I'm there for my team. And what if something happens? No, I'm now in a phase where that doesn't work. That's not going to get me where I want to go, where I want to go, and what's required to get there is actually me doing a crap ton of research and talking to other people and networking and learning. That's the only thing that's going to get me from where I'm at to where I want to go. It's not more one on ones, it's not more structure. It's learning new skills to catapult into this

next level, into this next arena. And my I'm going to be sending an email out later to my team saying, this is what you can expect from me when it comes to emails moving forward, because I'm not doing emails for more than 30 minutes a day. I have other things that I have to learn and I have to contribute to and be involved with that. I currently am not able to do because so much of my time is spent approving people's projects and reviewing metrics and going

through and operating. But now I have the operations skill. I don't I don't need to flex that muscle any longer. I know that I can operate, I know that I have the skill set. Therefore, what do I need to do in order to manage a portfolio of $100 million going to $1 billion going to $10 billion. It's a different skill set. It's an elevated skill set. And the fastest way to get there is learning and immersing myself in that arena. Not the same arena that I'm already in.

And so this trip has been eye opening and spectacular, and being around people who make hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars and watching how they think, watching how they operate, watching how they make decisions just through the periphery over the last week was inspiring and gave me more excitement and zest than I've had in recent months to really become the next version of myself and

to put myself in uncomfortable positions yet again. The fun part of evolving and changing in order to get to where I'm trying to go. So if you haven't gone to Formula One, or if you're somebody who hates on wealth or thinks that you know money is gross, and if people make more money, they should just give all of it away because there's people who need it more. You know, you probably still aren't listening to this podcast.

To be honest, I'm not that type of person that if you if you thought that that was the message for today, that is not the message. In fact, I just posted a Instagram reel where I'm explaining how I ended up with the Rolls-Royce that I drive and it's, you know, as 2 million plus views. It's gone pretty viral. And there are people who are just so not my people in the comments. They're just not my freaking people. I take zero offense to it. I could care less.

I'm honestly completely unbothered by it, but it's just a reminder that I'm creating my own environment, as should you. Your environment matters and only you can decide what you're willing to tolerate, what you want, what you are going to communicate to the world about who you are, what you believe, and the level of conviction that you have for your environment is a reflection of the vision that you have for your life and for the goals that you have. And so if you're very low, confront in

your environment. You don't tell people when they make you uncomfortable. You don't call people out for making a mess of something that matters to you. It might be that you're not that committed to your dream, and if that's the case, then go get around your dream. Be closer to your dream. One of my dreams one day is to have a yacht. I want a yacht. I haven't decided if I want to own one or just rent one for a month

out of the year. But like, there is no question in this lifetime I'm going to freely have access to a yacht and it's going to be a big one, and it's going to be a beautiful one. I don't have that yet. I haven't created the wealth yet. I haven't created the skill set that would create the wealth yet.

But getting in proximity to it made me feel even more excited about what the prospect is, and made me honestly more willing to confront the parts of my life that I've allowed to depart from where I want to go.

And so, guys, I'm back in action. This is like the first hour that I've been back in my office, but I really want to share this podcast because this trip was so pivotal for me, and I'm so glad that I wrote this goal down eight years ago to go to Grand Prix in Monaco, and to be around the type of people that I've just spent the last seven days around, because those types of bucket list items, if you choose to allow them to be meaningful to you,

really can transform your life and transform how you view things. And sometimes it's just about getting in that proximity to what you want in order to actually get to where you want to go.

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