There is something about having a potentially life threatening crisis like this that brings you face to face with your own mortality and that’s a gift.

It was a Wednesday morning in September, and that’s when we got the worst possible news. Michael Hyatt, our founder at Full Focus while out on a walk, experienced the heart attack.

A subsequent angiogram revealed some significant blockage caused by a genetically high calcium score. He went into bypass surgery just two days later and has been on the Mend ever since. Now are you ready for the good news? The good news is the Mend was actually faster than anticipated, and Michael’s actually back. He’s not only back, he’s back today.

Hi, I’m Joel Miller. I’m the Chief Product Officer here at Full Focus, and we’ve got a really special show for you today because we’re welcoming Michael back to the show. He’s here today to talk with Megan Hyatt Miller, our CEO, and maybe more importantly, Michael’s daughter, about his heart surgery and five truths that he learned through the process of his recovery.

Well, dad, welcome back. I’m so glad to have my partner in crime back on the podcast.

Thanks me Megan. It’s good to be back. It’s actually good to be alive.

Yeah, and that’s not an exaggeration. It really is good. It’s always good to be alive, but especially when you had a scare you’ve had. So tell us what happened.

Okay, so I have to go back a little bit and do the setup. So years ago, probably eight or nine years ago, as a part of a routine annual physical, I got a calcium scan and it was really high and so it scared me to death. And so I immediately started working with a cardiologist and with another doctor. They were going to help me try to stabilize the calcium growth and try to level it out because that’s a precursor to having a heart attack or certainly plaque buildup. And by the way, for those of you listening, the best way to avoid something like I went through is to get to it early, is to make sure that you identify it early and that means that you’ve got to be proactive with your health. I was very proactive. So I started working, started searching first of all, for a doctor that could help me stabilize that calcium score or to lower it.

Every place I looked, everybody said, well, there’s no way you can lower it mean once you have the calcium, you have the calcium and have the plaque and whatever. Long story short, I got networked to somebody, Dr. Mark Houston here in Nashville, who’s an extraordinary doctor. He’s an internist, but he’s board certified in four different things, including internal medicine. So he is board certified in longevity, nutrition, and cardiology. So he practices something called precision medicine where he basically tries to target, and this is a whole new field of medicine, but they basically try to target the genes that lead to this so they can turn them off. So I had 13 markers for cardiology problems and so they began to target those. Long story short, in less than two years, we reduced the calcium score by 32%. So I was feeling great about that.

Even to this day when I tell other doctors what I did, they were like, their eyes bug out. They go like, “What?” Yeah and this is Dr. Houston’s practice. So I was working on it, taking lots of supplements, exercising, nutrition. I’ve had a nutrition person I’ve worked with for several years, a trainer that I’ve worked with for several years, all that. But fast forward, my score kept going up until Dr. Houston. I met him a couple of years ago, and then it started going in reverse, but it still continued to go up prior to that. So I end up in Peru with a couple of my daughters, with my wife, Gail, and we’re hiking at 7, 8, 9, even 10,000 feet. We’re hiking in the Andes, which is two hours by plane to Lima, which is the capital in the biggest city of Peru, where I’m sure they have amazing hospitals.

But if something had happened to me in Peru, I probably would’ve been dead before I reached the hospital but I was out of breath. I started experiencing shortness of breath, which I attributed to high altitude, even though I knew that was a symptom of a heart attack. So I got back home, and by the way, promptly caught COVID for the second time. So fortunately was mild was not really a big deal. It was about three days, felt like a cold and then I was over it, and Gail got it too. And then I seemed fine. We went, Megan, as you know, on owner’s retreat to North Carolina. And I was feeling winded again as we were hiking some of those hills. I thought, “Okay, so now we’re at a lower altitude.” At one point I had to bail and I just said to my wife, I said, “I got to go back. I don’t think I can keep going.” So at that point I began to worry a little bit, but I kept on.

It’s easy to think too that that was just the lingering effects of COVID because that’s sort of a known-

Exactly.

… long COVID symptom, right?

Well, that’s exactly right. I thought this must still be COVID still wrestling with that. So got home in one morning, in late September, I was out for my usual two-mile morning walk, and about a quarter of a mile from the house, I began to feel nauseous and I felt short of breath and I threw up.

Not normal.

Not normal. So I called Gail and I said, “I don’t think I can make it home.” And this is my first thought of, “Okay, I don’t have any chest pain. I don’t have any pain in my left arm, all the other symptoms, but maybe this is a heart attack.” So that began the conversation with myself. So Gail picked me up, took me back to the house, and I thought, “Well, maybe if I lay down and rest, I’ll be okay.” I threw up again. So then I said, “I don’t know if you should drive me to the hospital, to the ER, or we should call an ambulance.” Because I don’t want to make a fuss.

I’ve never ridden an ambulance before and that just kind of seems extreme. I picture myself image is of a healthy person, right? So I’m thinking, “This can’t be a heart attack.” So I finally said to Gail, “Why don’t you call Nathan.” One of my son-in-laws. The words I heard that got out of her mouth and Nathan said, “Absolutely, call an ambulance. What are you thinking? Get an ambulance over there now because they can get him hooked up and begin to treat him so there’s no or so they can limit the damage before he gets to the hospital.” So Gail promptly called 911, and amazingly the ambulance was one block from my house when they got the phone call.

Wow.

They were at the door knocking about the same time Gail hung up. They came in, they got me all hooked up, and they said, “Yeah, your EKG is showing something abnormal. We think you’re having some kind of cardiac event. You definitely need to go to the hospital.”

Wow.

So they put me in the ambulance. Again, my first time to ever ride in an ambulance. I felt this extraordinary peace come over me and I thought, “I may die, but I’m okay.” I’d rather live… If I have a preference, if I get a vote, I’d rather live, but I may die. But I’m okay either way, which I really can’t explain that except that I was just flooded with peace. I had no anxiety. I just felt like this is going to be okay no matter how it turns out. So I assumed that we were going to my local county hospital, but the ambulance attendant that was working with me, the paramedics said, “Which hospital would you like to go to?” And I said, “Oh, I have a choice.”

He said, “Absolutely.” And I said, “Well, I want to go to St. Thomas in Nashville because that’s where my cardiologist is. That’s where Dr. Houston is, and I would feel better being there.” So then he says to me, “Well, I can’t tell you where to go.” But he said, “If I could tell you, and if I were choosing for myself, that’s one of the best hospitals in the country for cardiology. In fact rated probably fifth in the entire country.” So I got there, and by the way, 67% of all men who have a first time heart attack are asymptomatic. They have no symptoms leading up to it.

Really?

67%.

Wow.

This is why it’s imperative that you be proactive and why if you’ve got a problem, you need to start working on it now, because again, the longer you wait, the problem generally doesn’t go away.

It just narrows your options and makes it more likely that if you have a problem, you’re going to have even fewer options. So I got to the hospital, they checked me out, and those enzymes that indicate you’ve had a heart or a cardiac event as they like to call it, don’t show up for several hours. So they said, You look great. I mean, you look amazingly healthy.” And they were just wondering if it was anomaly. Well, then the enzyme showed up and they said, “Yeah, you’ve had a heart attack. It’s been mild. We’re not detecting any heart damage, but we’ll know better once we give you an echocardiogram.” Another thing, so they did the echocardiogram. They said, “We see an issue.” They scheduled me the next day for an angiogram, which is when they send the monitor up through your artery to actually see the blockage and that’s a fullblown procedure. They knock you out completely.

When I got into the operating room for that, the doctor and the nurses said, “You look so healthy. This is probably nothing or if it is something, we can probably fix it with a stint and we can do that while we have you under best prac but it can’t be anything worse than that because you’re not overweight, you don’t smoke, you don’t have any of the symptoms.” I said, “Well, I do have a high calcium score.” And they said, “Yeah, but still.”

So I woke up, I don’t know, maybe an hour later, still thinking by the way, that I hadn’t even been put under. I said, “Well, when are you guys going to put me under?” They said, “Oh, you’ve been under, we’re done.”

That’s such a strange feeling isn’t it?

It is a weird feeling. And so the doctor said to me, he just put his hand in my arm and he said, “You have some major blockages. We can’t address it with stents. These are going to have to be handled with bypass surgery, and you’ll have a bypass consultation with a cardiologist, one of our cardiologists a little bit later today.” So that was shocking. In fact, he said, “The artery commonly called the widow maker is 90% blocked.-

Gosh.

And you have two other arteries that are 70% blocked.” So he said, “You’re not going to leave the hospital until you have surgery.” And I said, “Okay.” So when I saw the cardiologist, he says to me, “You definitely have to have bypass surgery. There’s no other alternative. Fortunately, you’re healthy otherwise, and you’ll do great with this surgery. We do 1700 of these bypass surgeries per year at this hospital.”

Wow.

So he said, “It’s very routine. The risk is very low, and it’ll be life changing for you, but you’ve got to have it.” So I said, “Great. When can we do it? I’m ready then.” He says, “Well, here’s the problem. We’re completely booked up till…” And this was on a Thursday, “We’re completely booked up till next Tuesday.” But he said, “We rarely have cancellations, but if we do, we’ll let you know otherwise we want you to stay in the hospital so we can monitor you.” I thought, “Okay, I’m going to have a quiet weekend at the hospital.” Well, they come in on Friday and they said, “We just had a cancellation, and so you’re going in now.” I said, “Like now?” They said, “Yeah, well 30 minutes. We have some procedures you have to get showered and cleaned up and all that stuff. But yeah, 30 minutes.”

It was basically a six-hour procedure. So I went in and they ended up doing not three bypasses, but four bypasses. I came out of it and I thought that was a lot, but I have two guys in my cardiac rehab group that had five bypasses each.

Wow.

So then I came out of the surgery. I was in ICU for a few days, and in fact I was in ICU more days than I should have been, only because they didn’t have beds in the hospital because the beds were all… The hospital was full. So I had to stay in ICU but honestly, I mean you saw me Megan. I felt pretty good. I wasn’t in much pain. I was pretty talkative, mostly lucid. Then they transferred me to the general hospital where I stayed a few more days. And then I got out and every time the cardiologist or whatever would come by, he’d say, “Man, you’re looking great. You’re responding great. This all looks good. You’re good to go.”

So they sent me home and they told me that typically this takes three months to recover from, possibly six till you’re feeling a hundred percent normal. But they have a very strict protocol for what you can do and what you can’t do. So immediately, Jim Kelly, my assistant in consultation with you, Megan, decided just to clear my calendar for the rest of the fall. So the surgery was on September the 23rd, and we cleared my calendar completely. And as we’re recording this, it’s early December. And I would say, I tell people I’m basically a hundred percent back in the morning.

Yeah.

And in the afternoon, I’m more like 85% because I tire easily. I am doing physical exercise now, part of a cardiac rehab group. But here’s a cool thing. It’s given me a ton of time to reflect and to think and to consider this season of my life. Most of us don’t get the luxury of doing that. So I see that as a gift, an opportunity to really read, reflect, and come to some conclusions that have been enormously helpful to me.

Yeah. It’s so surreal to kind of hear that timeline of all the events obviously, and the rest of our family and team lived it in real time when it was happening. But it’s wild to think back on it and what a miracle it was honestly, that it didn’t happen while you were in Peru, that you were so healthy prior to these things happening that you’ve recovered so well. I think I can remember seeing you that first night you were still intubated, you were still under anesthesia. So when we saw you, I was with mom and Mindy, one of my other sisters.

It was pretty startling to see you in that state and then to see you the next day, you were doing amazingly well. You were sitting up in a chair, you were talking. I think we all thought, “Gosh, this recovery is just going to be terrible.” Certainly getting your strength back is a long process when you’ve had your chest cracked open, that’s a major, major surgery. But the pain part was far less than you thought. Anyway, I just feel like there have been so many gifts in it that as a family, we feel so deeply grateful for.

Well, one of the things I’d like to say to people listening to this right now is if you have heart attack symptoms, you don’t have a time to mess around. Once you start experiencing those symptoms, it’s a race against the clock. Don’t be embarrassed to call an ambulance. That’s what they’re there for. It’s really much easier than you think. Not a big deal. And here’s the cool thing, if I would’ve gone to ER on my own, maybe not for this, but typically when you go to ER, you have to wait in the waiting room to be called. Sometimes it could take hours but when you come in as a heart patient who may be having a heart attack, you bypass all that. Speaking of bypass, you bypass all of that and go straight into care and again, time matters.

It really does.

Because when I got there, they immediately gave me four baby aspirin. Actually, they did that in the ambulance, got me hooked up to IVs and all that kind of stuff. So again, they’re racing the clock, trying to minimize the damage. One of the things that came back from the angiogram is that I had zero heart damage, which was great. I think that was a function of acting quickly to deal with it.

Totally. If you’ve been a relatively long time listener of this podcast you know that I also had a heart attack in 2021, May of 2021. While we certainly do have a strong family genetic predisposition toward heart disease, in my case, it was a totally different type of heart attack, had no genetic component, no risk factors that would be similar blockages, things like that but it is an unusual coincidence. So here we are dad, two heart attack survivors who mercifully came out on the other side. We’re very grateful.

I would say that you don’t have to do everything I’ve done, but in this case, you preceded me and kind of showed me how to deal with it.

Joel here again, sorry for the interruption, but we’ve got to go to a break. We’ll be back with more for Michael and Megan in just a minute.

Well, I know that people are excited to hear from you again. They’re excited that you’re back and are probably really curious when you’ve gone through something as significant as this, and this is very significant. What are the lessons that you’ve learned? I think that’s part of the reason people love to listen to this show and follow you and the work that we do at Full Focus, because we do try to be very intentional about learning the lessons that life gives us and trying to glean things from those that we can share with you guys. So tell us what you’ve learned.

Well, this actually precedes all that because I want to share kind of five truths that I came to over the course of the last nine weeks. But let me just say that one of the things is that it just the consideration of going public with this was not easy for this angiogram three.

Right.

Because part of what angiogram three do is we’re trying to manage the brand image and always put the best face on and make things look like they were easy and I’d been, as Megan, I’ve worked on my health, I’ve worked on being fit. And so I like projecting that image. So to go public with this, which I did in a social media post right after I got back from the hospital with your encouragement, I think being as transparent as we can about the problems we experience are also helpful to people.

That’s really true.

So once I reframed it and said, “Well, maybe this could help people.” Interestingly, that social media post, which I did on Facebook, which there was just a picture of me holding my cardiology, heart shaped pillow, which they give you, and then just talking about what happened to me. I had so many people write to me that were so thankful that I’d shared those symptoms, including one lady who said, “Because you shared your symptoms and your willingness to go to the hospital, you saved my husband’s life because he read these symptoms, he read your post, and a few days later he started to have those exact same symptoms and he is the kind of person that would’ve blown it off but because it happened to you, he said, ‘We need to go to the hospital.'”

Wow. That’s amazing.

It save his life.

You just never know.

You never know.

Just never know how God might use your experience to help somebody else so.

Okay. The first truth, and maybe I’m a slow learner, but is that I’m mortal.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

I think that that wars against everything our culture subliminally tries to communicate to us because we have a culture here in the United States of America where we’re very youth focused and we’re very health conscious, even though we don’t always practice the things that lead to health. But in general, mortality is one of those things we don’t consider. When people are sick, we get them in a special institution so we don’t have to deal with it. So death is one of those things too that we do our best to sanitize and don’t have to confront but probably about six years ago, I read with my wife Gail a book called Being Mortal by Atul Gawandi. Megan I know you’ve read it.

Yeah. It’s such a great book. It’s a really important book.

Really important book and that’s the first time that I came face to face with my own mortality. Even though, gosh, I’ve written about in the Life Plan, pre-writing your obituary and thinking about what it’s going to be like after you’ve died and what your family’s going to be talking about, your friends will be talking about but it was kind of all theoretical. But I would say the difference is this time I realized I’m mortal at an emotional level.

Yeah.

Where I said, “You know what? I’m going to die.” There is something about having a potentially life threatening crisis like this that brings you face to face with your own mortality and that’s a gift. It really is because I think when we realize that we’re not going to live forever, we can make every day, every moment count.

Right.

It’s hard to explain unless you’ve gone through this, but it’s made me appreciate every moment that I’m alive, every person in my life, my family, my friends, my colleagues, all of that. I appreciate it a deeper, deeper level. So I would just say that for all of us, the sooner we can embrace that, and I would start by reading that book, but the sooner we embrace the fact that we’re going to die is the moment we begin to live in a new way.

I think that’s really true. I mean, it reminds me of Psalm 90, “Teach us to number our days so that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” I think that that’s hopefully what we’re growing in as individuals, as leaders, as business owners, as spouses, parents, grandparents, whatever, that we’re becoming wiser as time goes on. I think the scarcity of time has a way of bringing things into clarity in a different way than… It’s not theoretical. All of a sudden it serves as a compass that really helps you make decisions that align with what matters the most.

Okay. Truth number two, I’m not in control of everything. And both of these things, the first one, and the second one should have been obvious.

Right.

But again, I like to indulge myself in the fantasy that I’m in control of everything. I’m very proactive. I take a lot of initiative. If there’s a problem, I go after it. But you can’t control everything. You’re not God. I think a lot of us labor under the illusion, and frankly, I’ve been judgemental of other people in the past or I’ve said, “Oh, well, if they’d just taken a little better care of themselves. They wouldn’t have ended up in this mess.” But that’s not necessarily true. I mean, certainly there are things that we can do that can sabotage our own health or relationships or our business endeavors but even if you were to do everything perfect, there’s still the X factor. The things that you can’t control. Could I have eaten better as a young adult? Absolutely. Could I have exercised more as a young adult? Yes, I could have. Would that have been enough to overcome the genetic hand I was dealt? I don’t know. But you control what you can control, but you can’t control everything.

It’s so interesting that you bring this up because this is something that I’ve really struggled with after my heart attack. Maybe somewhat similar to you, maybe even more so I can really go to a shame place. So it wasn’t so much the arrogance if I’m in control of everything, although that was probably there under the surface as well. But it was like I failed if I would have just done something. I don’t know what, in my case and in your case. It was just a freak thing that there’s nothing I could have done about. There’s no known, in my case, no known risk factors other than age and being active, which not much you can do about that. But I had that feeling of like, “Oh, I failed. There’s something I did wrong.”

I think getting to the place of letting that go and just saying, “Yeah, there are just going to be things.” I mean, I think this gets to this central existential question of life. What are we going to do? And how are we going to explain suffering? Is it always somebody’s fault? Or are there things that are just outside of our control that we to have to contend with? It’s just kind of a mystery. So I really relate to this because it was definitely part of my recovery, my emotional recovery from my own heart attack, just realizing I’m not in control of everything.

Well, this is a place where I think we’re at odds with the general culture because I think the general culture says, “If you work hard enough, if you make the effort, you can control everything and you could eliminate suffering from your life and you could eliminate suffering from your kid’s life. And if you’re experiencing suffering somewhere, somehow you chose that.” That’s just a lie.

Yep.

It’s not truth. Now, having said that, a lot of it’s we bring on ourselves. We make a stupid decision, or we procrastinate and don’t deal with something and then it becomes a real problem. So I’m not talking about that, but I’m just saying, once you’ve done everything you know how to do, there’s still that X factor that’s outside your control.

So that leads me to the third truth and the third truth, based on what we’ve just been talking about. You might be tempted to say, “Oh, the third truth is obviously then why try.” Just throw up your hands and say, “If you can’t control everything, then why control anything?” Because at the end of the day, we live in a capricious universe where things just happen and you could just lose your life or lose your health or lose anything else because you just can’t control anything, right?

You kind of become fatalistic.

That’s right. Well, I wanted to say just the opposite. The third truth is I can control what I can control, and I need to take the initiative to control that because it does make a difference. When I met with Dr. Houston and I was telling him the whole story. He said, “Well, first of all, I’m just so surprised based on the work we’ve been doing.” But he said, “Honestly, it’s a miracle you didn’t die in Peru. If we knew then what we know now, I would’ve said, number one, do not leave the country. Number two, don’t hike. Number three, whatever you do, don’t hike at altitude.” Well, I did all those things, right? But he said, “The reason you survived, and the reason there was no damage is because you did take control of what you could control and even though there was this part of it that you couldn’t control, that you did, enabled you to survive.” And of course he was telling me this now weeks and weeks ago.

He said, “It’s going to make your recovery so much better, so much easier.” So I don’t care if it’s in your business, if it’s in an important significant relationship or if it’s with your health, you may not be able to control everything, but that doesn’t remove the responsibility of trying to control what you can control so you can get a better outcome. To me, fundamentally, Megan, this is an issue of something you and I have talked about a gazillion times, which is stewardship.

Right.

I am not responsible for the results, which sounds weird. I’m responsible for being faithful to do what I know I need to do. In my perspective, from my faith perspective, I leave the results with God. Now I can think about raising children. I raised five daughters. There were times when some of you were coming off the rails. I thought to myself, I mean, I felt all those things like I’m responsible, but at the end of the day, I can only do what I can do as a parent and I’m going to leave the results to God and thankfully in that particular case, everything’s turned out okay. So far so good.

I think this is a really important lesson as business owners, because I know what I feel within myself. What I hear, kind of reading between the lines sometimes with our clients and just kind of talking with people in our audience, is that we tend toward either abdication. I just throw up my hands, there’s nothing I can do. And maybe we talk about the economy is against us in this situation, or you have a new competitor, or the cost of goods has gone up, or whatever the obstacle the moment is that you’re particularly aware of, or you trick yourself into thinking that you have absolute control and you take total responsibility in a way that is really total and that is an equal lie. It’s really damaging. Both of those can be so damaging.

One, because in the abdication side of things, you’re going to undermine all the good things that you’ve been trying to do in your business, and it’s probably going to fall apart from there. But the other, I mean, you’re just setting yourself up for a big crash because you’re going to have a collision with reality at some point that will be very painfully humbling. So I think that whole idea of stewardship is the right one. We want to be moving toward wisdom. We want to be moving toward maturity. I think being mature means that you can hold things that are seemingly paradoxical intention. You don’t have to resolve them. You can say, “I have responsibility and I don’t have total responsibility.” I think that’s as important when you’re thinking about your health as it is when you’re thinking about your business.

Well, that leads us to the fourth truth which is this, “I need to embrace my season of life.” So again, I want to make a book recommendation. Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. So I’m 67 years old, and I’m not in my thirties, I’m not in my forties. I’m in a unique stage of my life. I hope I live to be a hundred or 120. But I think statistically that’s not what the numbers say. But regardless, I mean, I certainly don’t have a death wish. I don’t want to go any earlier than I have to, but I need to embrace the season of life I’m in and not kid myself.

One of the things that Arthur Brooks talks about in this book, and I would say the book is a little bit sciencey, but not too heavy handed, but he draws from a lot of studies and so forth. But one of the things that he talks about is that in the early parts of our career, up until we’re in our thirties, early forties or so, we are at our peak cognitively. And he calls this fluid intelligence.

We have the ability to think laterally. We have the ability to innovate. We have the ability to charge on with stamina, work, long hours and all that kind of stuff. But then he says, as he was studying the data, he realized that cognitive decline, energy decline, all of that happens earlier than any of us would like to admit. And so that he goes to a variety of fields, physics, all the different sciences, music, all this stuff. And he talks about the decline that happens again in your late thirties, early forties. For some people they may be able to push it out into the fifties, but then it takes more and more energy to maintain that level of cognitive functioning, that level of stamina and all the rest. He talked about Albert Einstein, and he said after the theory of relativity which he wrote, I think in his late twenties. He never had another important discovery because he didn’t and this is really true in the area of physics.

Those breakthroughs tend to happen early and then people don’t have that kind of breakthrough later. But he talks about every field’s, music, all of that. But he says what a lot of people miss, a lot of people tried to continue in that state of fluid intelligence and just run faster on the hamster wheel, just put more effort and all of that. And it becomes increasingly frustrating because you’re putting more and more effort in to accomplish the same thing. He said there’s another kind of intelligence called crystallized intelligence. So as the fluid intelligence is declining, the crystallized intelligence, which we might commonly call wisdom, is now becoming increasingly a part of our personality and our makeup and what we have to contribute. So we ought to be moving as we move into our forties and fifties and sixties and seventies and on more into mentoring, teaching, coaching, things where we can help other people.

Fortunately, that’s essentially our business. But instead of trying to fight the season of life, and I’m trying to build a six pack in my late sixties, I might be better off continue to exercise for sure, by the way. But some of those things are only possible when you’re younger. I know we can point to pictures we’ve all seen on Facebook where some 70 year old has a six pack, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. So I don’t want to resent the season of life I’m in. I don’t want to be embarrassed by it, embarrassed to say my age. I want to embrace that because this is a very special, very important season.

So how has that caused you to reevaluate things? Obviously we’ve been through our own succession plan. We’ve been moving for many years, really toward your role shifting and your contribution shifting within the company, but how does that change things or does it?

Well, I think it does. I think it’s in this way. I’m already mentoring, coaching, teaching, which is great. But here’s what I said to you today when we had lunch before we jumped on to record this is I said in my next version, Michael Hyatt 3.0, which we’re going to begin this next year. I really want more white space, more margin in my life because if I’m going to be a successful coach, mentor, and teacher, I need more input, more time to reflect. And that’s what I’ve absolutely loved about the last nine weeks. All I’ve done is read, reflect, journal, think, and that’s a luxury that most of us don’t have.

So we’re going to be meeting a week from today, Megan, with you and your assistant and my assistant. We’re going to talk about what could be stripped out of my schedule so that I have more time to do those kinds of things, which I think are equally, if not more important than what I’ve been doing for the last year.

Yeah, I have so many thoughts all at the same time. One being that I think the other thing that you really enjoyed about this season is just the space because you’re only working a couple hours a day at this point. Maybe a little more than that now but as of a couple weeks ago, that was true. You have time to, when the grandkids come over in the middle of the day, one of my sisters, Madeline, has a six-month-old baby and when she brings Nico over, you can stop and play with them and read them a story or whatever because you don’t have back to back meetings or those kinds of things. I think that’s really a game that is more qualitative than quantitative, but not to be dismissed, especially at your season of life, because it’s just a precious time with grandkids and other people. Your parents have really needed a lot of hands on help and you’ve been able to be with them some as well and just to have the freedom to do that is a gift and I think something you want more of in your life.

Absolutely. Okay, so that leads us into our fifth and final point. And that is the final truth is I need to build my business to go on without me. Okay. So I’m bringing this back home to the Business Accelerator podcast audience, which I know most of you are business owners or business leaders or CEOs. And it’s critically important that you build a business that can continue without you. Now, I’ve had people say to be business owners say to me, “Well, I don’t ever intend to sell, so why would I need to do that?” Because you are not fully in control. I’ve talked about in this podcast about a friend of mine who lost his business because he got COVID and he was in the hospital for six months or something and was in a coma for a good percentage of that time, a medically induced coma.

He lost his business because his business was too dependent upon him. Well, the luxury I’ve had is because we’ve been focused Megan for the last five years on this succession and building a sustainable business that the business has gone right on without me. In fact, I’m embarrassed to say it’s actually done better without me being involved day to day. I think we proved something to ourselves, and that is you can take me completely out of the business and sales continue to go up. We continue to make money and Megan, thank you for continuing to send the checks.

You’re welcome. We should say before we start any rumors, your intention is not to be completely out of the business. I mean actually-

That’s right.

… the changes that you’re contemplating are really more kind of on the backside. It won’t really be as noticeable on the front end. You’ll continue to do the podcast and the coaching work that you’re doing and those kinds of things so no real changes there. But I think what’s so instructive about what you’re sharing here is how willing you have been over the last five years, I mean really without a crisis until very recently to really ask hard questions about the future and ask yourself, what is the highest and best contribution I can make now? I would even say, if we were to add the spiritual dimension to it, what does stewardship look like now? What does faithfulness look like now?

How do those things all overlap? And that’s not like a one and done thing, that’s not just like you figure it out and now you’ve gotten the answer like it’s on your tablet down from the mountain etched in stone, and you’re going to go for the rest of your life. This is kind of an evolutionary process of things change and unexpected events happen, or things go better than you thought, or things go worse than you thought. Whatever. All those inputs affect the answer to that question. I think this is something we coach our clients on a lot and something that we love to talk about is this idea of constantly coming back to the question of, “What is my highest and best contribution?”

Because if somehow you find yourself not making your highest and best contribution for an extended period of time, or you’re making what was your highest and best contribution five years ago. You’re going to be holding your business back, your team back, your potential for impact in the world, and ultimately it’s not good stewardship. So I think you’ve done a really good job of that. I think we can learn from your example and just your willingness to, again, just ask those questions and be willing to hear the answer and adjust accordingly.

Well, just to summarize, five truths about life for my recent heart surgery, I hope they’re applicable to you, but number one, I’m mortal. Truth number two, I’m not in control of everything. Third truth, I need to control what I can control. Fourth truth, I need to embrace my season of life and the fifth truth, I need to build my business to go on without me. And in that process, I want to just exhort business owners listening to this. You need to begin that now because again, you don’t know what the future holds and you want to be in the best situation you can be in to survive and thrive in whatever happens to come your way.

Well, dad, I’m so happy to have you back. I love the guests that we’ve had. We’ve had some awesome episodes while you’ve been out, but you’re my favorite, so I’m thrilled that you’re back. And honestly, thank you for giving us a window into your experience and the lessons you’re learning because I know speaking for myself, I’ve learned a lot. I know our listeners have learned a lot and we’re all going to be better for it.

Well, Megan, I just want to thank you because you had to kind of assume all my duties in the interim here, taking speaking engagements and webinars and things that were previously scheduled for me. And you already had a very busy life and a very busy career but thank you so much. You’ve done an extraordinary job.

Thank you.

I’m so glad today we were able to hear from Michael about these five truths that he had to share. This is one of the first public appearances Michael has made since the heart surgery. However, in Business Accelerator, he’s actually been doing our monthly morning coaching calls for the last couple of weeks. And beyond that, he’s actually teaching Business Accelerator this week. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb too far and saying that Michael would love for you to join him in Business Accelerator. If you’re a business owner and you’d be interested in learning more about our Business Accelerator Coaching program, go to businessaccelerator.com. We help successful but overwhelmed small business owners just like you. Scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win. And if you’d like to experience that for yourself, go to businessaccelerator.com.

That’s it. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with more conversations to help accelerate your business.