Kevin Miller is a former pro athlete, lifetime entrepreneur, father of 9, and podcast host. He hosts the top-ranked “What Drives You with Kevin Miller” podcast, a professional and personal development podcast that has been ranked #3 in the “All-Time Careers” category on iTunes and downloaded more than 70 million times. Kevin has conducted an in-depth interview series with more than 200 thought leaders in the professional and personal development sphere, including Susan Cain, Michael Hyatt, Rich Roll, and Simon Sinek.
Kevin joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about his career, finding purpose in life, and much more.
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Listen to the podcast here
Kevin Miller On Purpose And What Drives You
Welcome to the Elevate Podcast. Our quote is from Dwayne Johnson, “With drive and a bit of talent, you can move mountains.” My guest, Kevin Miller, is a former pro athlete, lifetime entrepreneur, father of nine, and podcast host. He hosts the top-ranked What Drives You With Kevin Miller podcast, a professional and personal development podcast that’s been ranked in the top three all-time careers category on iTunes and downloaded more than 70 million times. Kevin’s conducted in-depth interview series with more than 200 thought leaders in the professional and development sphere, including Susan Cain, Michael Hyatt, Rich Roll, and Simon Sinek. Kevin, welcome to the Elevate Podcast.
Thanks for having me. I like that quote, drive and talent. I’ve got drive, talent, that’s subjective.
I try to match them up.
Thanks, I like it.
What’s the quote I really like? I’m going to butcher it now, but it’s, “Working hard beats talent, especially when talent doesn’t work hard,” or something like that. It’s a good quote.
Agree. I think some of the best talent we’ll never see because they can’t quite bring it to market. Those of us who can, maybe not as much talent, but at least we got it here.
The Impact Of Entrepreneurial Upbringing
You’ve described yourself as growing up in an entrepreneurial household. I’m always curious about entrepreneurial households because I think they tend to have particular impacts on kids. Can you talk about what you learned in that environment and how it shaped you?
I didn’t know anything different, for one. I never knew a dad who worked for someone, always did his own thing. To that degree, I didn’t know much.
When he was complaining about the boss, it was weird?
Yeah, which he did sometimes. “Boss is a pain in the ass, won’t give me a day off.” To me, it was a gift, honestly. Even my mom, we went through some hard times when he had businesses go upside down. My mom said, “I think if he had had a consistent job, he wouldn’t have been the guy he was.” I always saw him interested in what he was doing. I never knew anything different. That was probably the greatest gift. That, and then just flexibility. The work was wrapped around family for the most part. He worked plenty, but we might be there working with him, and I learned to work with him.
Was there a main business or a bunch of different businesses?
A couple of main ones. He was really into cars. His parents were Amish. He went the other way and loved cars. I was well-versed in cars and European sports cars. He had this business of aftermarket accessories. He’d go into car lots and put in radios, pinstripes, sunroofs, and whatnot. I’m a kid, I can’t even drive, and I’m on top of a new Mustang drilling a hole and then taking a jigsaw and cutting the ceiling out to put a sunroof in. It was really pretty great. I can’t say that I loved it all then, but what I learned, the values and the work ethic, I continually grow to be grateful for.
It’s funny. A friend of mine, Christie and Cam Harold, I don’t know if you know Cam, she told me this story. I did this with my son the other night because we went out to dinner. Every restaurant they went to, they did a case study on, what do we think the revenue per evening is? What are the variables you have to do? They would ask the host or the owner, and they wouldn’t tell them half the time, and they got really good at it. I just think it feels like those are the things that go on in entrepreneurial households.
Totally. We would go out, and he’d critique them and just say, “Imagine if that employee, who may not have been doing a good job, owned the business. What would they act like?” That was his thing. It wasn’t that you had to be an entrepreneur, but act like how you would if you owned the business. Do your job that way. That stuck with me. Even my kids are like that. They can’t believe that people just do a job and do the bare minimums. I love the perspective.
Mail it in. I think you started your first business at fifteen, which was mostly to fund your burgeoning professional biking career. What was that business?
It was in the car industry. It was back when tinting windows got popular. We lived in Kentucky. I went down to Atlanta and took a two-day course on tinting windows. I was 14 or 15 at the time, learned how to tint windows, and came back.
Is it just a film?
Yeah, it’s just a film, but you learn to put it on right and the different shades and whatnot and the little tools to make it easier. I learned how to do it, and we put an ad in the local paper for window tinting. I got a business phone line.
How much did you charge?
The roll of tint, window tint, big roll, was $100 back then. I could get about five cars out of it that I’d charge about $100 a pop for.
There’s a good margin.
It was great. In my head, I used to think, “I’m making like $50 an hour.” My buddies back then, minimum wage was like $3.75. I felt like a legend at the time.
How Kevin Miller Got Into Biking
How’d you get into biking?
Back then, bike riding in the neighborhood, you do that with the guys. Then somebody built a BMX track in our town, and we wanted to do that. My buddies and I wanted to do that. Me, I didn’t just buy, I worked, got a BMX bike, started racing, and just did well. Rode, riding bikes is what we did all the time, started racing and did that from when I was 10 until 16. I quit and had bought a ten-speed at the time and thought maybe that’d be fun. I got invited to the college group. There was a college in town, Bowling Green, Kentucky. A college group went out for like a 15-mile ride, almost died, about killed me, that just the endurance of it, but I dug it and so just started racing.
Was it still like the two levers on the tube?
Yeah. It was old school and literally a ten-speed. I don’t even know if it was twelve-speed. Maybe it was back then.
I remember at the time that the levers were in front of you on the tube.
I remember a race I did years later, and it was an uphill time trial where they’d stack you next to another guy. I was next to a pro. I wasn’t pro at the time, but I was a high enough amateur to be with a pro. We took off, and I was neck and neck with him until you had to shift going up this hill as it got steep. I had to sit down, put my hand down, and hit the little lever. He had just got the new brake lever shifters. He just shifts without and took off. I think that was about the time I got some new shifters.
I remember years ago I bought a carbon bike. I like biking. I bought my first one, and I biked with this guy who’s ten years older than me, a ridiculous biker. I think he had one of those tube shifters, and he kicked my ass. That was when I realized the equipment only matters when you’re in the, like, top 95th percentile, and then you’re good enough where it makes a difference. How long were you in the professional cycling world?
I think I turned pro at 20 or 21. The pros in America, the pros and the elite amateurs, raced together. Some years I’d have a pro license, and they’d change the rulings, and it’d be a top amateur license, but I raced with the pros until I was 31. I did it a long time, but I got into the business of it. We hosted events, and I had my own team and sponsorship. I was still racing until I was 31. It was a long run.
Let me ask you, because I’ve watched the Lance Armstrong series, the one on ESPN or whatever. There’s a culture of a lot of cheating in professional cycling. You’ve got all this crazy e-doping now and people stuffing batteries in their bikes and stuff. As somebody who looks at the culture, how did that start? Do you think it was like people realized other people were doing it and they couldn’t keep up? I was surprised how it seems to have just kept evolving in different ways.
To some degree, yeah. If everybody’s doing it, it’s hard to not. You don’t justify cheating, you justify trying to keep up with it. Somebody was talking to me this year when the Tour de France was happening. It’s also a stupid setup. Imagine marathoners, we watch marathons, you do the New York Marathon. Imagine having a marathon every day for 21 days. They wouldn’t do it. They do that with cycling. It’s that you can’t recover that fast. I think if they want to stop the drug stuff, don’t make them do ridiculous stuff. Have a 100-mile race one day, and then let them rest for two days and recover.
If everybody is doing it, then it is hard to not do the same. You do not justify cheating. You justify trying to keep up with it.
It’s an interesting viewpoint. You’re basically pushing the human body so far.
It’s too much. Without the drugs, I say this, and this sounds judgmental and I don’t know, but I’m tempted to say without the drugs, on the last day of the Tour de France, the guys wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.
It’s like the Mcgwire-Sosa year. That was the most popular year in baseball. Watching saved baseball, watching them knock all those things out of the park. The fans enjoyed it.
They should have clean cycling and then have the ones where everybody just lets them go nuts and race for 100 days, 200 miles a day, and knock themselves out.
Balancing Entrepreneurship, Racing, And Family Life
You continued down this dual path, entrepreneurialism and racing, into adulthood. How did you balance those two demanding things while also starting a family, and a very large one at that?
There’s pros and cons and goods and bads. People used to ask, “How do you do it?” I said, “I don’t know that I do. I guess if you don’t die the next day, you get credit.” But it was a lot. It was too much to some degree, but my business and my interest, I usually was marrying them. There’s always so much overlap. It didn’t separate.
It sounded like you did it. Was the events part of cycling?
Yeah. In 2002, we hosted the United States Cycling Federation National Championships in Nashville, Tennessee. We’re hosting an event, and a lot of times we’re hosting an event, and I’m racing in it as well. We’ve got sponsorships that are sponsoring the team and the event. It was all in one thing, but I also, Bob, in that I learned the power of having a platform. That’s when I really started being able to influence people with messages that I cared about. That’s been going on ever since then.
No matter what business I’m in up until today, it’s being involved in, I call it human potential, but personal development, whatnot. I got to do it back then. Now I look at it and go, it was a vehicle for that. I realized the power of influence ultimately. Whatever you’re doing, whatever I was doing, I was able to do that within. Even as I went to different various businesses, that was always the undergirding factor.
How Meeting Zig Ziglar Became A Turning Point In Kevin’s Journey
I know a real inflection point was meeting Zig Ziegler. How did you come into contact with him? What was the first connection?
It was abuse. It was absolute psychological abuse. I’m this little kid, like 6, 7, 8, 9 years old, and I’d get out of line, and my parents would give me an attitude adjustment, which meant I had to listen to these Zig Ziegler tapes.
Your parents? These are the cassettes, right?
Yeah. You’d think that I would have hated the thought of Zig Ziegler, but I literally went with my dad. Again, he was born in an Amish culture, and he came out of that pursuing psychology and so personal development and motivation.
He grew up in an Amish culture, and he came out doing psychology and auto.
Going the other way and digging cars.
People always say everyone doubles down or goes the opposite.
He went the opposite. I grew up going to these seminars where he’s opening in his mind and learning new things. I’m a kid going to Zig Ziegler seminars back when there were 50,000 people, and it was Oliver North and all these big names. It stuck. I got the power of that. Later in life, as I started building a platform of entrepreneurship, I got to meet Tom Ziegler, probably through my dad, Tom Ziegler, Zig’s son and CEO. I got to speak for them, speak for Ziegler at a couple of events, and got to be friends with Tom.
He came out here to my Colorado home and stayed with us in our guest room. When Zig died, we were auditing the business. Where’s it going to go without the icon? I saw that in iTunes at that point. I saw there’s still a lot of downloads of these Ziegler clips that they had put online. Not a real podcast, but Ziegler clips.
He wasn’t doing interviews or new recordings or anything.
Might’ve been a couple right at the end, but not really. I said, let’s bring the message to this culture and play some of the stuff, and then talk about it, and then bring some of the influential people that were really impacted by Zig. The first people I had on the show were like Dave Ramsey and Seth Godin and Brian Tracy and some of these guys. It was a gift. It was a gift to be involved, be a part of the Ziegler message, and to keep that going. It was a great entry to what I care about and having a voice in this arena. It was a gift.
It was a lot of pressure carrying someone else’s legacy in that brand. How did you put your own spin on it?
Good question. At first, it wasn’t, because I did it as a labor of love. I wasn’t trying to make a buck or do anything. It was just something I felt honored to do.
It became a big show though, right?
It did. It was at the right time, and it did. As time went on though, there was a little bit of friction. It was a Ziegler show, and I was trying to uphold that. Yet podcasting is very host-centric. The podcast reviews would be about me and about my message. It took a while, and ultimately, I did brand my own show, but even today it says presented by Ziegler. I’m still part of that, and we promote them.
Is it all the same show, or did it split off, or did it just rename?
That’s a sordid question. I had three podcasts at one point. I had the Ziegler show, I had my own show, and then I had a health and wellness show. That became ridiculous. I did that for 2 or 3 years and then came back and then just combined them all into one show. That’s what I got today.
Podcast Success Secrets: Building A Top-Ranked Show
Your show has 70 million downloads. That’s, for people who don’t know the scale, that’s top one-tenth of 1% globally on podcasts. We both probably talked to a lot of people who want to start a podcast or now. I say it’s interesting, I think three years ago when I had a book release, or maybe it was four years ago, and I went on a bunch of friends’ shows. Some well-known people that started shows, and they had big businesses.
I had another book come out about eighteen months later. I went back around all of them to see if they wanted to have me on. Half of them weren’t doing their show anymore. I have some thoughts as to why that is, but what are your thoughts on getting into that position, being differentiated in something that’s become crowded? Why do you think that it’s been successful?
I had the benefit of getting in a long time ago.
Early, so it was like Buffett, the return to get in early and compounding interest.
To some degree, and then so a lot of credibility. People would almost always say yes to coming on the show and whatnot. If I was coming in today, I don’t know. The landscape is difficult. I want to say there’s a lot of opportunity. I think there is, like demand, just like for weight loss, there’s never-ending demand, but to get in there, to be a top performer, and I’m saying like to perform. I don’t look at myself as an entertainer or a performer. I really care about messages that matter these days. If you’re not a performer, I think it’s harder. I’m not as gung-ho to tell people, “Go start a podcast,” and go, “What’s the niche? What is it really about? What makes it different than what’s out there?”
Why do you want to do it? My thesis on why a lot of the folks stopped is because I think they probably did it for the wrong reason, in the same way how people have, maybe you’ve heard the story, or my wife read some book where you had a kid because they needed the organ for another kid or something. There are a lot of people who have a business, and they think, “I’ll start the podcast, and then I’ll generate work for my business,” which is the wrong motivation. I’m not sure that’ll get you up every day when nothing happens.
When we talk about James Clear and his writing, and he talked about, “I wrote this stuff for seven years, five times a week, and no one read it, and then I just hit the hockey stick.” I’m not sure a lot of people have set up the right motivational mechanism to want to keep doing it and doing it without seeing any results. They don’t have an intrinsic motivation to do it.
I agree. If they don’t have an insatiable appetite for an area of content, for one, and then two, questioning, is podcasting the place to be? Does your voice resonate well on here? Are you a good conversationalist? Do you do good talking with others, or do you do well doing a monologue? Is it really fit? Kind of like saying, “Everybody’s dancing. I should go dance.” I can’t dance. I don’t want to dance.
This is the old, “Do you have a face for radio?” quote.
In me, I don’t really pursue being on literal stages. I saw you had a TED talk. I don’t have a TED talk. I’ll do it sometimes, but I really like this. I like having a conversation with a person. If I’m on stage, my favorite thing is panels with questions, live questions. I’ll do that sometimes. I like conversations. That’s a good fit. That’s good for podcasting, but I’m not doing other things that I’m not so great at. Does it fit you? I think there’s a lot of questions to ask. I agree.
Someone had asked me once, and I said, I became clear that it’s nice to get the expensive to run a podcast. It’s nice to get the advertising and offset that, but unless maybe you’re Tim Ferriss, you’re not going to get rich off of it. I was like, I look at it as, these are a bunch of people that I’m probably going to have one-hour meaningful conversations with in my life. I’m super interested to have that conversation. That’s the reason. I’m not looking for it to do other stuff. If it does other stuff, great. I think if you’re hoping for one thing to do a different thing, you’re setting yourself up for potential failure because it’s hard to get yourself motivated to do a good job when it’s serving a different purpose. I think a lot of people tried to start a podcast to help their business and then realized there was a lot of work.
It’s funny you said what you said a second ago. Sometimes I feel selfish with it, that I feel like I can get free counsel.
No one’s listening.
A lot of times, I’ll literally say that on the shows. A lot of time, as somebody’s, I’m interviewing Arthur Brooks and literally asking questions that I care about. He responds to me personally about something that I’m dealing with. Send me an invoice. I can’t believe I get paid for this. I should be flying across the country and paying you. I love that about it. That feels second to none as far as a vocation, and I get paid to learn, to get paid to improve my own life. I’m grateful that some people like to listen as well.
What Drives You: Understanding Motivation And Purpose
You wrote a book called What Drives You: How to Discover Your Unique Motivators and Accelerate Growth in Work and Life, focused on motivation and purpose. Two very loaded words with different meanings to different people. How would you define them? What are some of the common myths about purpose that you talk about in the book?
I originally wrote the book because I wanted my kids just to know, what do they want? What do they value? At the end of the day, it’s a hidden agenda.
Those are two different questions. We should talk about both of those.
That’s fair because at first, it was just, what do they want? As I looked at that, I thought, to know what you really want, authentically, what you want.
You got to know what you want.
Get to your values. That’s where it came about, but then the aspect of drive, your values, I thought that is what drives you. It was my own values that had driven me, one. What I found out later, being unclear on some values drove me to some places that I later found out I didn’t want to go. Again, it was getting clarity on those values, and that’s what drives you. The other part that was really important to me, Bob, is looking at drive. You said the myth was the myth of some people thinking that so-and-so got gifted with drive, like just genetically. I didn’t. I got gifted with being a couch potato. That’s my genetics. I thought, it’s so false because we all know it’s either happened to us, or we’ve seen somebody, and they went from couch potato, zero to hero overnight because something happened.
There was some event in their life, and they didn’t have to then go, now I’ve got a reason to do something. I’m going to have to spend the next ten years listening to self-help podcasts to be driven. No, they were driven the next day. They went and kicked ass because they had a reason to. It’s in us. The drive is in us, but we’re not clear on our values. We don’t have something that’s triggering us and fueling our drive, but it’s there. That became really important to me and still is today. It’s almost like not a passion. It’s like a burden that people think that they don’t have drive and so-and-so does. The other part was thinking that drive is the Holy Grail. You can drive yourself to hell really fast. It’s not just drive, it’s, again, back to values.
The drive is in us, but we are not clearing our values. We do not have something triggering and fueling our drive, but it is there.
The Drive Switch: Trigger Points For Finding Purpose
Everything there resonates with my story and history, from underachievement to then overdoing. I think a lot of people who are late to hit that tipping point, then just redline it for far too long and cause a whole other set. I can share mine. What are you seeing as common trigger points or tipping points to turn that on? Are they life stages? Are they formidable moments? What causes the switch to go off for people?
No, it’s a great question. That’s another thing that bothers me for myself and for other people, that usually the tipping point to trigger is pain. Something’s gone wrong, and then you’re trying to address it from that place of pain. How much better if we would address it from a place of wisdom and auditing what we care about and going after it proactively with some space instead of waiting for pain. That was, again, part of my story.
When was your switch, and what precipitated it?
I’ve had so many.
What was the first one?
Don’t embarrass me on your show. What was the first one? My cycling. It was 2002, and we hosted a huge event. It was like a $170,000 budget for the event. I had a team that was racing in it. I was still racing, and it looked like everything was going on, but I had no business plan. I was just driving as fast as I could and going upside down financially until the day came. We had three kids, and my wife said, “Kevin, I got this great vision for my life, and you’re in it, but this isn’t it.” I was so upside down financially and, again, just driving with my hair on fire and didn’t know where I was going. That was a wake-up call.
We literally, Bob, in a matter of months, we were in Tennessee at the time, sold everything. I was already on the bill to do the national championships for the next event. I canceled it. I canceled the team. We sold about half of what we did and moved to California at the Silicon Valley area. I took an independent contracting gig with a big bike manufacturer, totally flip-flopped our lives. I stopped racing, stopped everything. That was the first big shift of realizing, I’m driving fast, but I don’t know where I’m going. I was unclear on some of my values and letting some hidden motives, some hidden drives, really fuel me.
The analogy that I always like is none of us have more time in the day or hours, or some people have more resources. That could be an illusion, but if you think about, like light or energy, if you take energy and you put it through tons of different lenses, you get a pretty prism. There’s light everywhere in colors. If you focus it, you get a laser that cuts glass. I think that if you’ve ever been part of something where someone did a calendar audit or worked with a leadership coach or mentor, it’s pretty telling.
We tell ourselves a lot of lies about how we’re spending our time. I don’t have time, and I’m always like, I don’t have time. I want to write a book. You’re looking at fifteen minutes a day, looking at what people eat for lunch on Facebook. If we added that up over 90 days and you wrote a couple hundred words that day, do you not have the time to write the book, or is your energy all over the place? That seems to be, for me, a lot of people, when they put some horse blinders on and they focus that energy, they’re surprised at how much progress they can make.
I love the analogy, Bob. Literally the laser. I had that analogy in my book. I was really excited about it. At some point, we edited it out, and it didn’t make it in there, but I love the concept of it. You’re totally right. I have been guilty of that, just disseminating my light everywhere, not focusing at one. You said something a minute ago, I think you even used the term redlining. That was another big point of, I’m driving fast, but I’m stuck in first gear and I’m redlined. I want to go fast, but man, if you’ve got a nice car, you can be going really fast in sixth or eighth or twelfth, whatever gear, and your RPMs are low. I love that analogy as well. I wish that was in the book. That really came to light to me. I wish we could revise them every year.
Maintaining Drive: Enjoying The Journey To Success
Next edition. You’ve talked to and interviewed a lot of successful people. I think one of the common problems is that I think people think that, in Arthur’s books, probably, I think he covered this best, I got the most probably out of his book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, that they believe that getting to this top of this mountain will make them happy. They get up there, and they look around for about ten seconds, and then they’re looking on the next peak. What’s the key to maintain the drive without making it so goal-oriented that you lose sight of making the journey enjoyable?
You just said it. You nailed it. Arthur helped me with that. Literally having him, when he came on the show, when was his book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, whenever it came out.
I don’t know if it’s blown up since then.
A couple of years. I was sitting on the couch behind me. This is my home studio. When you’re on my show, I’ll be in my other studio. This is my home. That’s where I sit in the mornings. I’m reading his book, prepping for the interview, and it depressed me at first because it just nailed me. It showed me how I was redlining, and it was talking with him and with Robert Waldinger.
He did the study, right?
Yeah. The Grant Study, the happiness study. It was Robert Waldinger who said, I asked him about achievements. He said, “I still am motivated by achievements, but I just want to enjoy the path that I’m on.” It was along that that I realized really just what you said a second ago, and I’m driven, and we’re great to have the goals, the destinations in essence, to give us a direction to go and to inspire us and whatnot, but we’re going to get there. What happens the next day? We’ll go somewhere else. It’s not an arrival. I started thinking, I’m not driving to some destination. I’m driving, and there’s a scenic outlook.
A great top-down.
Here’s a research. Here’s a pit stop for resources. You got a raise, or you did a business, and you made a million bucks. Great. The next day, where am I going? That key to drive is I want to enjoy the drive. If I don’t enjoy the drive, it’s only the destination. I do not see it paying off.
It’s like a double entendre on drive.
Totally. I love it. Regardless of the destination, I just want to enjoy driving. It’s just like Song of Solomon in the Bible, the best thing is for a man to work and enjoy it, and eat and drink and enjoy, not just party all day, but enjoy the day. If I’m not enjoying, it feels arrogant to think that the goal that I’m going towards is going to make everything okay.
If you are not enjoying today, it is arrogant to think that the goal you are working towards will make everything okay.
How does someone know if they’ve found their drive?
To me, it’s literally waking up in the morning with interest and curiosity and drive. Again, enjoying the drive. I enjoy waking up in the morning. I enjoy looking forward to the evening. I enjoy that. I haven’t always, and I’m saying that, and I have driven myself into so many ditches. If we went along, like my bio, he started nineteen businesses. How many of those are still going? How many of those ended up upside down? How many of them succeeded? I walked away from them. It’s a sordid story there of really not focusing on the drive through the day.
It was your ultimate test of a business. Once you figured this out, whether keep going with it as long as you enjoyed it. Was that where you ended up?
To a degree, yeah. Is it enjoyable in and of itself as opposed to, it’s just a means to an end? I looked at so many things. I looked at myself. You see on my show these days, half of my folks are therapists, and I looked at myself as I was a tool to get things done, and so was everybody else. That did not end well. It did, it ended is what the thing, it ended relationships. It ended my own self into bitterness and burnout, and holy smokes. It’s a lot of hard lessons.
Brooks had a concept in his book that really resonated with me. I don’t know if you talked to him about it, but this notion of that self-objectification and the objectification that we do to ourselves is worse than anyone else could label us in terms of tying us to our accomplishments and otherwise. I remember reading that twice and being like, that’s pretty dead on.
It’s great that you’re talking about it. It’s one of those things that people ask, why, like they do to you. Out of all the people we’ve had on the show, who did you enjoy the best, or what book, or whatever? I just come up with the messages that impacted me. His book, literally, reading it the first couple of days, I thought, I’m just depressed. I’m just going to end it here. He gets to the good part, to the redemption aspect of it, but he nailed so many things in my own. But that’s probably my greatest focus, Bob, identity, self-identity.
How many businesses do you have?
It’s primarily wrapped up in this, the podcasting and the book.
You’ve narrowed it down a lot.
I always have other things going on, but these days I either try to house them under the same umbrella or have them overlap. I’ve got one now that is a different corporation because I’m partnered with somebody, but it’s really in the same. It’s in all the stuff that we’re talking about, identity, and it’s more therapeutic. I’ve really gone that route more, into more of a psychology and therapeutic.
It’s interesting. I run a professional services business for twenty years or been part of it. At that point, it overlaps with therapy. It’s just all people stuff. Everything is people. I haven’t had a lot of deep conversations with people and understanding them and their backgrounds and where they come from. At the same time, one of the most impactful books I’ve read is a book called Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up that Abigail Shrier just wrote. I think that in five years it’ll be like The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure was five years ago.
You’d be like, she was early on this. It talks about just how we put therapization in schools and kids and that side of it. To me, it’s not about like, what are all my problems and all of this stuff. It’s about understanding the experiences that I have and how they impact and how I show up. Knowing a lot of these people deep, I can see how these things just show up and how they live and how they work. They don’t actually have to change it. They just have to be aware of it.
I like your term. It’s all people stuff. At my studio, my main studio is a medical practice that I helped. I co-founded, it’s a functional medicine practice, but again, it all overlaps. I think that’s it. I saw somebody, maybe you did, who’s really dissing the multiple streams of income concept and saying most people made their money on one specific thing. I appreciate that if I have multiple streams, though, I do want it under one umbrella. I appreciate that.
I’ve just seen things like someone is being crazy about a budget and that the company’s spending too much. You know that they grew up with not enough on there. They just come from a place of scarcity. Overspending, to them, is just not comfortable. You don’t just walk away from something like that. It shows up in your personal life and your professional life and a lot of things.
You’re at the heart of what drives you. The things that I was aware of, the values that I was aware of, I drove well towards those things. The areas I wasn’t, I had bad values driving me, just like you’re saying. I’m fighting for X. I don’t even know why. It’s not healthy. Everybody probably saw it except for me. Awareness. I don’t know what else there is.
Raising Driven Kids: An Entrepreneur’s Approach To Parenting
I’m interested. I’m doing a bunch of research for my next book in the Elevate series that is going to look at comparing leadership and parenting, because I think parenting has gone off the rails these days. In terms of, if you showed up in your company and parented the way a lot of parents are doing it, you’d be fired or in a performance review in five minutes being labeled the worst micromanager ever. You were an entrepreneur, you grew up an entrepreneur. You have nine kids. I’m sure you’re very focused on. What are their age ranges?
Twelve.
We’ll give you a margin of error here.
12 to 29.
You’re in the thick of it. 12 to 29. This is right in the heart of it. What has your approach been with your kids in terms of thinking about their drive and what they’re good at and what they should do and not do, and that they’re all different? I’m curious, how many entrepreneurs came out of that lot too?
That’s interesting, Bob. I was on somebody else’s show yesterday, and we talked about this, and it dawned on me a few years ago. That’s probably been longer than that. Anything I think is however long, it’s twice that long.
I said that someone in there, I said, I’ve been saying three years about this thing for at least five years.
A decade ago, whatever. You may have known this story. It was some chess grand champion, and he had two daughters, and he brought them up playing chess, and they became grand champions. I’m thinking, what’s the chance that both of those girls were really geared to do that, even though they succeeded, that they geared it? Because I haven’t found that in my kids. Does it say more about me that I could say, I got nine kids, Bob, every one of them is a star athlete going to the Olympics. Every one of them is an entrepreneur, and they got the yada, yada, or to say, every one of them is doing something different? Let’s see out of it. I got one out of the kids around the house.
The different is the more, like, I would say is the better parenting because you nurtured whatever. You see this with the chess stuff. I see this with sports and all the private sports and everything. The only way you can be really great at something is if you love it eventually. I understand being pushed to get past the beginner level at something, like I was talking to my son. He said, does that person like skiing? I think he was talking about a niece and nephew. I’m like, they’ve only been a couple of times. You have to get decent at it to know if you like it, but then someone else, you got to want it for yourself. Someone else can’t want it for you.
Agreed. I grew to be proud of that because, at first, I thought everyone’s supposed to be an entrepreneur, and they’re supposed to be an athlete. I’m like, no, the kids are going in all different directions and are clearer all the time as they go through life on their values and expect to work at things that they care about. Not that that makes it easy. They’re on their own journeys. We were very intentional parents, and we saw a lot of things work. Not everything did, but that shapes everything, and to watch the fruition of that, even as I’ve got older kids and say, we’ve screwed that one up, we can fix that with the younger kids, has been a gift.
To the flip side, you said something earlier I was going to comment on. I think the last ten years of the Zerp, or the zero-interest rate growth, has really distorted entrepreneurship in terms of the success-failure ratio because a lot of people did dumb things. In the internet, they got out of it. It just seemed like there was all upside with no risk. If you knew people that were in businesses or entrepreneurial, maybe now the last three years, or maybe the nineties, there were a lot of people that lost everything, went bankrupt.
I know some people, it’s interesting, that grew up in entrepreneurial households that were like this. Where they had success, they had failure, they embarrassed someone around trainers. Someone went and found, like, partner track, like the steadiest job you could find, which you can understand. They just grew up and they’re like, God, I want something that is consistent, and I don’t want this up and down. There’s no right or wrong. Kids are just impacted in different ways from things.
Everybody’s got their thing. Mine, I really just pushed my book. It was a big thing for it, towards my kids, to figure out what it is that they value. What do they care about, and do that? I’ve got one that’s art. She loves art. Another, it’s psychology. I got a kid who works at the most steady job ever, at a hospital, and he apologized one time to me for not being an entrepreneur. It broke my heart that I had held it up like this Holy Grail. I got another kid now, he says, “Dad, I’ve seen all the stuff you’re doing. It’s cool, but I just want to make bank.” Brother, go at it.
The implication is that you’re not.
There’s a caveat there. He says, you might’ve made some money, but you got too many kids. It’s a lot of expense. He says, I’m not going to have that many kids.
Our kids will go in their different directions and will figure things out as they go through life based on their values. Not everything may work out as planned, but that shapes everything.
He feels the competition with nine, and one kid loves that and wants to have a big family. One kid wants to have one kid because they see that. People are impacted in very different ways from different things. You combine that with your values, and then you decide that you want it.
They see your values. Mine came out, and I had a friend one time, and I was just, again, going with my hair on fire. He said, “Is that what you want to model to your kids, that being an entrepreneur is just living with your hair on fire?” No, that’s terrible. That’s not the model I want to be. Yet that’s what I was doing. It’s like having a mirror up. You get to see yourself.
Do you? The mirror can be painful sometimes. When I always say when someone tells me that their kid says something inappropriate, I was like, it’s either you or your wife saying that. Where else do you think they got it from?
Totally. Again, it’s daunting. I’ve got kids old enough now to see the fruit of what I’ve done, good and bad.
Do you have a list of family’s values?
We’ve gone through times of doing that. The things evolve, and the circumstances change, but at the end of the day, for me, respect was always really big. You guys don’t have to agree. You can even have some conflict, but you’re not going to be disrespectful.
At the end of the day, respect is always big. You do not have to agree with someone. You can have some conflict, but you do not have to be disrespectful.
Family Values: Guiding Principles For Life
That was one of our family values. I feel you on that.
I’ll tell you, somehow it worked. How many kids do I have out of the house? I have six kids. Let’s see. I got to do the math. I have six kids out of the house. One of them is in Florida with other extended family. All the rest of them are about an hour and a half from here because they wanted to be together. I got one kid who’s the brainiac academic and got offers to bigger schools, but he went to the school where one of his siblings was, and they want to be together. My couple at home, they just can’t wait to graduate and go be with the siblings. I think back to the respect aspect, though, it was a double-edged sword. You guys got to respect each other, but I can’t really enforce that well unless they respect me.
I’ll share the story. I may get in trouble for sharing this, but it happened a few weeks ago. Respect is one of my personal values. It’s part of this value of respectful authenticity. It’s also one of our family values, and it’s one of the things that I just can’t stand, particularly among kids or other people’s kids. It’s just disrespect.
My kids play sports, and I am not a crazy sports parent. I am the lowest key. Again, if you want to do it, my son had his last soccer game of the season, and they were losing in the game. It wasn’t a particularly contentious game. This other kid on the team just kept chirping. When they kicked the ball out of bounds, he’d be like, nice kick. Twelve. He was just being an a-hole to everyone. It was almost to me, this is like when your values are crossed, it’s like a kryptonite thing.
It’s like any in something. It was the end of the game, and someone was going over, hit a ball. It wasn’t even my son. He just said something, and I was near the sideline, and I was like, “Why do you have to be such an a-hole?” The other parents looked at me. Three people said, thank you for saying something. Again, I didn’t even mean to say it. It just was so bothering me because it was like, you’re just being a jerk for no reason at all. He heard me, and the others heard me, and I had a little bit of regret for a while, but it stopped. He stopped doing it.
That’s such a big conversation, Bob. We got a culture right now that we go into the headlines or social media, not a lot of respect happening. It’s that age-old cliché of it. It starts in our house. That’s where they learn it.
Again, my kids have played sports, and the only times I’ve ever got mad, there was another thing. My son was playing tennis, and this kid said something unbelievably offensive, and my son heard it. The other people didn’t hear it. You either have coaches who let this go, or they don’t, because it’s not the first time he probably did something like that. If that kid was on my team and I had heard what he said, I would have thrown him off permanently. It’s sad. That’s just not something that happens in a lot of places.
I’m with you. My kids would say I was a pretty chill dad. I was fairly lenient.
Until your values are crossed.
Disrespect and dishonesty. I would consciously overreact, and apparently, it worked pretty well.
It helps them know where the red lines are. It’s better than a lot of rules to say, these are the red lines. This is what I care about. I would say if you yell at your kids about everything, they won’t know what’s important to you. I think it’s really important to overreact to the really important things, and you need to be able to differentiate between, that was Dad’s red line or Mom’s red line.
I just did a show. I just did one of my short shows and referenced my mom. I grew up with a mom who said, major on the majors, not on the minors but the majors, they’re major, so make them major and then let the others slide. I saw good fruit from it.
Learning From Mistakes: A Key To Personal Growth
Last question for you. What’s a personal or professional mistake that you learned the most from?
That would be unawareness of myself and a lack of boundaries. Bob, I thought I was so valiant in being, again, it goes back to pro cycling, limitless, no excuses. That is great in sports and on the battlefield. I took that into life, and it was, no limits, no excuses, no complaints, no whatever. I was just silent with no boundaries. When people would do things and I’m feeling a disconnect or friction, I didn’t say anything, whether that’s in business, in marriage, in all the relationships. I hurt myself in relationships so much. There’s why I’ve had people, how many times have I had Nedra Glover-Twab on the show on boundaries and Terri Cole on Boundary Boss, and trying to learn how to do that in love for myself.
It’d be like one of those questions. If you go back 30 years and talk to your younger self, or 40 years, what would you say? It would be that being limitless and no excuses. I’d say that it’s great on the sports field or battlefield. Otherwise, though, if it’s rubbing you wrong, you got to deal with it.
Kevin, where can people find more about you and your work in the podcast?
Everything’s at KevinMiller.co, the website, social media, everywhere, but I do five shows a week at What Drives You, having people like you on the show, which you’ll be on before long, and you’ll be on a Monday. I’ll talk about points that you made the next three days in little ten-minute shows. Usually, on Fridays, we’ll do just a classic from the archive show, but I live and breathe on the microphone right here.
You know where to find Kevin. You can learn more about Kevin and his work on the episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you enjoyed this episode of the Elevate podcast in general, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave us a rating or review, as it helps new users discover the show and it only takes a minute. Thanks again for your support, and until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Kevin Miller on LinkedIn
- Robert Glazer on LinkedIn
- Kevin Miller
- Robert Glazer
- What Drives You: How to Discover Your Unique Motivators and Accelerate Growth in Work and Life
- From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
- Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
- The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
