Welcome to It's a Good Life Podcast where it's all about helping entrepreneurs think, feel, and do better. Here's your host, Brian Bafini.

Well, the top of the morning to you and welcome to today's program. Today's title is called Ownership is Everything.

Now, there was a big negotiation amongst me and the team on what we should call this episode.

My title was What's Your Excuses. And the reason being is today we're going to talk about excuses.

However, my very sensitive staff said that sounded too harsh, Brian. So we needed to come up with something that's better.

And it's actually a little more outcome based. So I capitulated and I agreed. Ownership is everything. And where I first came up with that idea was when I interviewed Jocco Wilnik.

And if you remember, Jocco is the Navy SEAL officer who was actually season one episode 166. If you haven't heard of fascinating guy with some great insights.

He's written some great books and one of his books, in fact, his biggest best selling book is called Extreme Ownership.

His dynamic is, you know, all school people used to say, you know, take responsibility, take responsibility for your life and so on and so forth.

But I think the more modern approach is to take ownership of things. Now, Jocco is also communicates from that Navy SEAL perspective.

It's kind of high and inside as a baseball would say it's kind of hard core stuff. And in that interview, he said that excuses are the lies we tell ourselves.

And it's true. It's just that's a tough way to hear it. And it's also when you're dealing with things or struggling with things and things are hard.

It's very easy to check out all together. The phrase I like to use is the stories we tell ourselves.

And the better a story teller we are, the more we believe our own BS. And I know a lot about that. In fact, I'm going to, at the end of this broadcast, bring you back in time to a live event where I told a story about golf with Lou Holts at the Masters with my dad and my brother,

and I said, hey, brother, don't worry about it. It's basically how I got my own excuses exposed. We had had a fire, I hadn't played golf in a long time.

And we get invited to the Masters. I go to a Gustav with my dad and my brother and Lou Holts, the chance of a lifetime. And rather than focus on the experience and be present and enjoy and optimize the opportunity.

And I'm going to be bringing it on to some excuses to try to protect myself. And so when we finish up here today, it'll be good because I believe leaders go first.

And so I'm going first. I'm going to expose myself to all of you with a funny story about my own excuses, how I told my own excuses, turn them into stories.

And at the end of the day, it turns out they were lies because with a bit of coaching and a bit of help, the story got exposed. And the performance changed.

And today I'm going to talk about excuses because we live in a world where accountability is optional, where anything that's difficult can ultimately be rationalized and packaged.

And so I'm going to talk about the types of excuses that there are. I'm going to talk about how excuses have purpose. And there's a reason for them.

And then we'll finish up on the how to side of things, which is, you know, we want you to think, feel and do better on this program. So we're going to talk about the thinking part and that's the types of excuses that the purpose is really the feeling part.

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