Taking Control: Escaping the Autopilot Lifestyle Trap | The Growth Booth #99

Aidan 

Welcome to episode number 99 of The Growth Booth. This is episode number 99, and I'm joined today by Steve Clayton, longtime business partner in Cartzy, SendPad, Float Hosting, Blueprint Academy, and other bits and pieces as well. If you've been following the episodes of The Growth Booth for some time now, then you may have seen a few that I've done with Steve in the past, episodes number 12 and 13 about lifestyle design, and really a framework for happiness. We'll probably touch on a few ideas from that here today. And perhaps the most popular episode I think that we've had on The Growth Booth today is episode number 50, in which Steve was telling us all about how you can get paid for owning a Ferrari, owning super yachts, planes and all these things without being like a professional racing car driver or anything like that. If you haven't checked out episode number 50, make sure you check that out at some stage as well. You can find it over at thegrowthbooth.com. You can find it on YouTube by searching for The Growth Booth or wherever you like to listen to the show.

So, Steve, thanks for taking the time out to be here today.

Steve 

Yeah, thrilled to do it. Thrilled to do it. Just sorry I missed 100. Would've been good to be on 100.

Aidan 

Yeah, well, there's still a chance. Put on a good performance today and you might get a call up. You never know.

So we're talking today about autopilot. Probably not what a lot of people think when they think in terms of autopilot. We often talk about what other income streams and things like that, but with autopilot today, we're talking about how being in autopilot mode in your life can mean you're potentially leaving a lot of good things on the table. 

What do you mean, Steve, when you say autopilot in the context that we're talking about today?

Steve 

I see a lot of people fall into this autopilot trap. I think there's a lot of reasons for it, but it starts really young at age, when people are in their childhood, and depending on their upbringing. It doesn't matter what your upbringing is, each upbringing sort of brings with it a certain level of expectations. So let's say you've got two parents who are white collar executives for some corporation, or middle managers or something, or college professors, or they're electricians, or plumbers, or whatever it is, doesn't matter. There is a certain expectation that is not even consciously applied to you, I don't think, but I think it's just your environment does it. And so as you're growing up and you're going through primary school, and then maybe into high school, you're sort of thinking and looking ahead at your life, and many, many people fall into this autopilot trap, which is to say that they get on this path and they don't even realize that they're on it. They're on it because of their environments, either their parents are like pressuring them, "Hey, Dad has a plumbing business, so we certainly want you to grow up to be a plumber," or maybe they're not pressuring you, but just by their example, "Hey, mom and dad both went to college, university, and they are management in a corporation," so that becomes sort of what's expected of you, whether it's set out loud or not.

And so you set down on this path out of the gate, and there's these expectations in front of you that you haven't even picked for yourself. You haven't even sat down and said, "Hey, I don't really want to do this," or "I do want to do this" or anything like that. You find yourself on this path and sometimes you're on the path for 20 years. You can start to see why this might be not so beneficial for you if that's not necessarily the path that would make you the happiest.

Aidan 

I think a lot of societies around the world almost like a factory for autopilot. Really, I mean, the old thing of you go through school so you can get a good job and then you stay in that job and it's a short bet to winning the game of life. But in my case, I think I was very much on that autopilot machine until some big events happened in my life, which really forced me to think a little bit differently. What was it like for you Steve?

Steve 

Yeah, same. Keep in mind now, it has changed over the years and I do want to touch on that, I think COVID has given a big shock to a lot of people's autopilot. However, I'm a bit older, right. I was born in the mid to late '60s, let's say, which just sounds horrible, saying it out loud. But anyway…

Aidan 

It's not like you were born in the Great Depression or anything.

Steve 

No, but it feels like that. But my parents were. So back then, everybody had different upbringing and environment. The big middle class, right back then in the mid '60s, parents were perhaps the first generation to go to college. It was a huge expectation that if you were middle class, and there was a huge chunk of middle class in the mid '60s, if you were middle class, you were going to college, you were going to get a college degree, and you're going to work for a company for 30 years, and you're going to retire with a pension.

My parents, they didn't really pressure me or anything, but it was just expected. There were no other options on the table that were ever discussed. So I was on this autopilot from high school all the way until I was in my late 30s really, until the something really big happened to me, which was I kind of climbed the corporate ladder. I became a chief information officer for a public company, I was a vice president for a Fortune 500 company, and then we got bought out and then I was under contract for five years. And then I was just out of a job. I had sort of done it. I kind of won the game. I was like, "Well, the hell do I do now?" I ran that autopilot.

I do want to make one thing clear. There's nothing wrong with that path. There's nothing wrong with the path of if your dad's a plumber, be a plumber, or if your dad's electrician, zero wrong with any path. The thing that's wrong is you being on that path without even realizing you're on the path and without even asking yourself, "Hey, is this the right path for me?” The other thing that also is included in autopilot isn't just education and career, it's also "Hey, you're going to graduate college, then you're going to find a nice gal, and you're going to get married, and you're going to have a couple of kids and a white picket fence in the suburbs, and a minivan and a dog," and all of this is autopilot.

Aidan 

I think in my case, I almost stumbled upon being able to break out of autopilot mode. For some of our listeners that know my story, I came to Buenos Aires in 2005. I met my wife in Lake Tahoe, California on a ski season in 2003, and when I came to Buenos Aires in 2005, I had just graduated as an industrial engineer, and I was going down that path. But when I got to Buenos Aires, I couldn’t speak Spanish. I was on a tourist visa, so I can't stay here very long, not legally anyway. It forced me to think outside the square a little bit and think, how else could I do? And that's how I started getting into online business and why I started looking at online business. But if I hadn't been in that situation where I was thrown out of my world, which was growing up in New Zealand, going to school in New Zealand, getting a good job in New Zealand, then I don't know if I would have broken out of autopilot. The positive for me was that I realized that I could design a lot more of my life to be the way that I wanted it to be because all of a sudden I was consciously thinking about it. So I guess when you're on autopilot, one of the dangers is you're not consciously thinking about how your life could look different. Would you agree with that?

Steve 

Yeah, no, totally. I mean, the way to get off of autopilot, the biggest way to get off of it is to first realize that you're on it. Once you sort of see it for what it is, that you know that you're on this path, you haven't necessarily chosen this path, and who the heck knows if it's the right path for you? Once you come to that realization, then it really empowers you to sort of say, "Okay, well, what am I going to do about it?" And usually, if you can recognize that you're on autopilot, you can figure out the ways to get off of it.

Aidan 

But what are the symptoms? How do you recognize if you're on autopilot?

Steve 

I think that if you have a general lack of, or a feeling of lack of control, I think a lot of people suffer from that. It's sort of a generalized anxiety and lack of control feeling that they have. It's probably why a lot of people are on antidepressants and other kinds of drugs, because there's so many people that are on autopilot. And so I think that's a big one. That's not the only reason you might feel that way, and admittedly, it's not an absolute test with great sensitivity, but that's certainly a big one. General unhappiness, again, can be caused by many, many things, of course, but autopilot is one of them.

Aidan 

I was going to ask you about that feeling of fulfillment, because I know one moment you were in corporate, achieving amazing things in corporate, but always reporting to a boss, working for the man, following the rules, and then the next moment you are building your own online business. There must have been a significant change there potentially, in the fulfillment.

Steve 

Oh, it's huge. I mean, night and day, but you didn't even know any better. You're in there with these blinders on autopilot. You don't even realize that. I mean, I remember one time I was talking to my dad after I had left corporate and couple years into the building an online business. He said to me, he goes, "Man, I can't even think that I would have thought that was an option." That's probably the single biggest thing that got me started thinking about autopilot, and this sort of mindset thing has become kind of a passion for me in talking with people. 

There was a lot of things that my dad has said over the years that have kind of triggered something that snaps within me, and that was clearly one of them. That's probably when I really started thinking about this autopilot thing. I was like, "Man, my dad was on autopilot." And he did, I mean, my dad, to the point where he commuted, and I'm not exaggerating, he commuted. It took him almost four hours a day on a bus because he wanted to. He was expected to have the kids live in the suburbs, and he worked in Manhattan, and it just took that long, both ways, more than an hour and a half each way. He did that for decades. Yeah.

Aidan 

It's incredible. It's amazing. The incredible thing is there are hundreds of millions of people out there who have done the exact same thing. And again, not to say that there's anything wrong with it or they're not happy doing that. A lot of people probably feel fulfilled doing that. But it is interesting to think about and to know that there's a different way. What we've done with our businesses, we've been fortunate to be exposed to thousands and thousands of people who have taken this path of entrepreneurship, and specifically online entrepreneurship, and making deliberate decisions to go down a path which would allow them to live a lifestyle that they want to live. For me, when I started out, it was being geographically free and having that ability to be a digital nomad, but there's so much more to it than that.

How do you think COVID played into all of this? What did that do to the autopilot conveyor belt?

Steve 

Well, I think it's been autopilot problems have been getting better and better I think over the last 50 years or so. The further you get away from my parents' generation, the further you get away from my generation, I think that people are less and less on autopilot, but there’s still tons of people on autopilot. Then COVID really threw a bomb into everything, because all of a sudden, people's whole lives changed overnight in so many different ways. They lost a job, they got a different job, they worked from home, they didn't go into an office there, they started to realize, let's take my dad, like if my dad was working during COVID and all of a sudden, he didn't have to commute four hours a day and he was working from home. I mean, imagine what his life would have changed. He would have started to realize, "Oh, God, why am I doing this? I'm missing out on so much. I'm missing out on 20 hours a week of stuff I could be doing with my kids and my family or leisure time," whatever it is, right? Multiplied by decades. I asked him, probably even just like 10 years ago, I said, "Why did you do that? I don't understand, why did you do that?" and he didn't really have a great answer. He's just like, "Well, that was what you do." That’s autopilot.

Aidan 

The technology, I think, has become a paradigm shifter in that regard as well, because when your dad was doing all that commute, don't think they were using much of the internet. You wouldn't be running a business on your mobile phone thing, you certainly weren't surfing the web at 30,000 feet above the ground, like we do on international flights and so forth today. So I mean, the technology, I think, has been an enabler over the last 20 years, for sure, and it's gone a lot better with COVID in fact, because people were forced to find new ways of hiring people or doing different things that they've always done in person.

For example, one of the big shifts I've seen has been in the ability to be able to get documents notarized, like an important legal document, if I need to get it notarized, I can do that virtually on a Zoom call. I've done some for the United States and have to go into the United States Embassy in Argentina and make the line and waste half a day. But now it's just, I jumped online with someone, show a couple of IDs to verify myself, and I can do the same thing in five minutes that used to take five hours. So I think the technology has been a huge paradigm shift and a door opener, especially in this world of online business.

Steve 

Oh, yeah. No doubt. But COVID really just threw this bomb and everything. I think what it's done is it's knocked a bunch of people off autopilot, and now they're spinning. They're just like, "I don't know what to do now. My whole identity has been all about this autopilot that I didn't even realize I was on, and here all of a sudden, COVID flipped this switch, autopilot is off. What do I do?"

Aidan 

The other thing is, it's been probably an eye opener for a lot of people I've spoken to. It was the first time they ever worked from home, and they were like, "I kinda like this," and now you've got these big corporations all over the world saying, "Look, you've got to get back into the office, otherwise, there's going to be hell to pay." You might not have a have a job to come back to kind of a thing. And a lot of these people are like, "Well, that's okay, I'm going to try my hand at something else."

Steve 

Which they wouldn't have done pre-COVID because they were on this path. They're on autopilot and they just wouldn't have done it. They wouldn't have risked it, they just wouldn't have felt like they were able to. They wouldn't have felt like there were other options out there.

Aidan 

So for people that are listening, that sounds all good and well. What are the kinds of things perhaps that they could do to sort of unshackle themselves to this autopilot or maybe rethink what they're currently doing to see if there's another way that they could do the same thing? Any ideas around that?

Steve 

Yeah, I mean, goes back to what I was saying before. I think the biggest thing is to know that you're on autopilot. I think we don't do a very good job generally of being sort of introspective. Most people don't anyway, and so you've got to set aside some time to have some open and honest conversations with yourself. Think about the path you've been on and the path that you're on, and ask really honestly, why are you on this path? Is it something that you chose? Or is it something that just sort of happened to you without you making a conscious decision?

I think the other thing is to focus on, and this is hard for a lot of people, what does make you happy. If you've got a certain amount of time, which we all do, you talk about this all the time, we have X amount of time in the bank, and we're going to have to spend it on some stuff that we don't like doing. There's no way of getting around that, but we sure should figure out a way to make that the smallest withdrawals from our time bank that we possibly can and make sure that we're spending the biggest withdrawals on the things that give us joy, or our passion or you know, whatever. So, having an open and honest conversation about what path am I on, why am I on this path, and then also, kind of in parallel with that, looking at your time bank and looking at your withdrawals and seeing how much of it is going towards doing the stuff I don't want to do, like, four hours of commuting a day versus the stuff that I'm passionate about, the stuff that makes me happy, that gives me peace, that gets me content.

The other thing is maybe there are situations where you have sort of a cash flow problem with your time withdrawals. You don't even see that there's enough to withdraw, to do some of the things that you want to do. It's not even that you're not spending enough time on them, you're not even set up to even spend any time on doing those things. I think those are the things that people need to be doing.

Aidan 

A lot of the ideas that you're sharing here, by the way, tie in really nicely with what we covered in the last episode, which was about personal effectiveness, not to be confused with efficiency. We spoke about ways that you could identify what makes you really happy and what you want to do and to design a life around that. 

Just to recap a few of the ideas to sort of start wrapping up here, start by knowing that you're on autopilot, set some time aside to be introspective about that. I think when you set time aside to be introspective about that and also to deliberately think about what you might want your life to look like, you can try to think a little bit bigger, try to think outside the box, because I think all of us are constrained somewhat by our imagination, by examples that we've seen in our lives. Hopefully, if you've been tuning into The Growth Booth for some time now, you’ll already be aware of the different types, or a number of different types of online businesses that you could potentially grow to give you an almost potentially limitless income stream and more money than you know what to do with, geographic freedom, time freedom, and everything else.

Getting back to some of the summary points, what's the path you're on? Is it the right path? And what would something else look like to you? Is there something else that would really make you tick? In episodes 12 and 13 with Steve, we spoke about lifestyle design and the framework for happiness. That'd be great ones to go back to and listen again, because everything we discussed in those couple of years ago hasn't changed. One thought about time and everything you're spending your time on is coming out of your time bank. One thing that you can do, and it's an interesting way to think about it, is you can actually buy time, and you buy time by hiring people to pick up the slack. Doesn't mean you've got more than 24 hours in a day, but it does mean that you no longer have to do a bunch of things. So there is a way to buy time, and in wrapping up there, to spend time on the things that give you the most joy and passion. So this has been great, Steve. Any last comments there to wrap up?

Steve 

Yeah, just real quickly. The one pushback I get from people who I talked to about this are like, "Oh, well that's all fine and dandy if you've got a lot of money," and it's not about money. I always use the my favorite example of we looked at what makes us happy. My wife and I were like, "Yeah, we want to move to Key West and have our boat there." I was a pilot at the time and have an airplane because flying is passion, boating is a passion. Moving down to Key West for a couple of years, see what that's like. “That's all fine and good if you can afford all these things,” but you can do it. 

I use this example. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and you have a car, let's say, just drive down to Key West, right? When you're there, sell the car, because you don't need the car anymore when you live in Old Town, Key West. Go to Craigslist and find an apartment, get a job on with charter yachts or fishing charters, so you're out in the boats. Get a job helping park airplanes. You don't need any special training for that. They'll teach you how to do it. Use that for flight training, use that money for flight training lessons, and live the life. I used to say, there still are clearly things that are impossible. I used to use the example, like I'm not going to be an astronaut. Guess what? Now I probably could be. But yeah, so there are clearly things that are impossible, but most things are not. You can achieve some reasonable facsimile of kind of what your ideal world is if you can get the hell off of autopilot and start thinking about things that, like my dad said, I never even thought that was an option. Guess what? Everything's an option. So that's my pushback.

Aidan 

Yeah, and I think that's a great example of if someone were to sit down, if they were to start off by imagining what they wanted their life to look like, almost going through a vision exercise, if you like, and then they would sit down and think what are the different ways that we could achieve this, the example you gave with Key West, I mean, you could apply that to living in a ski town and the French Alps. You wouldn't need much money at all. There's all kinds of different things that you could do to make enough money to get by and have an absolute blast. So I think, where there's a will, there's a way, and it starts with just consciously thinking about what you want to be doing and then starting to think about how you can make that a reality.

So look, Steve, this has been fantastic. Thanks for joining me here again today. This is episode number 99 of The Growth Booth, make sure you tune in to episode number 100, which is happening one week from now. And for this episode, as always, you can see show notes, links to different bits and pieces that we've mentioned by heading over to thegrowthbooth.com, navigating to episode number 99, or you'll find the same information over at YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all the other places that you can stream and listen to audio and video content online. So that's a wrap for this one. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth. Thanks very much, Steve.