Mike Brcic, is an entrepreneur, adventurer, and community-builder. He is the founder of Wayfinders, an organization that helps high-performing entrepreneurs and leaders find greater meaning, connection, and happiness through curated adventures and experiences. Mike previously founded Sacred Rides, which he built into the “#1 Mountain Bike Tour Company on Earth” according to National Geographic Adventure. His personal journey through entrepreneurial success, depression, and the search for deeper fulfillment informs his current mission: helping people find their own path to joy and purpose.
Mike Brcic joined Host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to discuss finding meaning beyond success, his personal journey through entrepreneurial success, depression, and the search for deeper fulfillment informs his current mission: helping people find their own path to joy and purpose.
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Mike Brcic On Finding Meaning Beyond Success
Our quote for is from Joseph Campbell, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Our guest is Mike Brcic. He’s an entrepreneur, adventurer, and community builder. He’s the Founder of Wayfinders, an organization that helps high-performing entrepreneurs and leaders find greater meaning, connection, and happiness through curated adventures and experiences.
Mike previously founded Sacred Rides, which he built into the number one mountain bike tour company on Earth, according to National Geographic Adventure. His personal journey through entrepreneurial success, depression, and the search for deeper fulfillment informs his current mission, helping people find their own path to joy and purpose. Mike, welcome to the show.
I’m thrilled to be here.
Mike’s Deep Love For The Outdoors And Adventure
I always find it interesting to start at the beginning or earlier. I know you’ve described your upbringing as one filled with a love for outdoors and adventure. I find people are always running against or running towards something. Can you share how those early experiences shaped your worldview and eventually your entrepreneurial path?
Maybe I’ll share a toward and an against.
It’s always a combo. As adults, we’re all just running towards and against things. If everyone realized that, it would be a lot easier.
It’s a great question to ask yourself like, “Why am I motivated by this thing?” If you look far back enough, you probably see you’re rebelling against your parents or echoing your parents in some way or your caregivers. My upbringing in the toward part is I spent a lot of time growing up with my dad just exploring the wilderness. I grew up in Toronto, Canada.
It’s this amazing provincial park, it’s like the equivalent of a State Park in the US. It’s about four hours North of Toronto called Killarney Provincial Park. It’s gorgeous. It’ the most beautiful place in Ontario. We used to go up for a couple of weeks at a time, typically in the summer. Sometimes it was just the two of us. Sometimes my mom would come along. Sometimes friends but it was always just the two of us.
The campground is on this lake, the George Lake. There was this spot that we would go to most days. It’s about a fifteen-minute paddle from the campground along this lake. It’s this granite outcropping in the lake. We would sit there whiling away the day. There’s this beautiful view of the mountains and cliffs you can jump off.
It was this amazing experience of just sitting, doing nothing, and basking in each other’s presence and the wilderness. That was formative. Those experiences of crystallizing my love for the outdoors. That continues to this day. There’s just something about wild natural places that speak to my soul and my heart.
The against, it was also a lonely childhood. I was an only child. I was the son of immigrant parents at a time where Toronto was not the immigrant haven that it is. It’s still very waspy. I felt like an outsider through a lot of childhood. Never felt like I found places where I belonged. The arc of my life, if I were to trace it, is moving against that sense of alienation, lack of belonging, loneliness, or whatever.
I’ve been intentional at this point in my life about living a life that’s rich with connection, the type of people I want to spend time with. I still struggle with it. There are many days where I feel the echoes of that childhood, even though the evidence would show I have some wonderful friendships, partnerships, and all that kind of stuff.
You literally combine the two things. You’re like a case study in this of like, “How do I take my love of nature and travel but bring human connection into it?” You don’t like solitude retreats, I’m guessing, in the woods.
What’s funny is I do like my solitude and draw a distinction between solitude and loneliness, where solitude is intentional. It’s a different internal experience of being alone. On my adventures, we often have dedicated solo time. It started with my trip to the Amazon. We took people into the jungle and just left them on their own for 2 or 3 hours or something like that.
That’s doable. It’s the seven-day stuff that I get a panic attack thinking about.
We’ve done up to 24 hours. In Ecuador, we took people out in the wilderness and just left them with a tent and some water for 24 hours. It’s amazing how fiercely people rebel against the idea of sitting on their own with no technology.
People often rebel against the idea of sitting on their own with no technology.
Their thoughts.
When we wrap up these execs, almost everybody are like, “I wish I could have stayed a little bit longer.”
Creating A T-Shirt Empire And Building Sacred Rides
That’s fascinating. We talked earlier about your first entrepreneurial venture. Scarcity tends to drive entrepreneurialism. Tell me a little bit about how you got into your T-shirt empire. This was after school.
The T-shirt empire was between first and second year of university. I took a year off and went to Southeast Asia, Nepal, and India for six months with my girlfriend and my good friend. There we were in Kathmandu. We had about a week and a half to go until we were due to be in Delhi and then fly to Amsterdam for our final month. We were down to our last C$500. We were making every dollar go super far in Southeast Asia. You can get a place to stay for $2 a night back then. This was in 1992. I knew $500 wouldn’t last us a month in Amsterdam. We couldn’t go to our parents for money. It was getting a little bit desperate.
There was no internet, Western Union, PayPal, or any of these things. You’re truly on your own.
We’re walking around Kathmandu. Kathmandu had all these T-shirt vendors there. They’re selling these beautiful embroidered T-shirts like these mandala patterns and whatnot. I’m looking at these T-shirts. They’re selling for about $2 a piece. I’m looking at them and I’m like, “Surely somebody in Amsterdam would pay more than $2 for one of these T-shirts.” We’re at the Hail Mary stage. It took about a day to convince my girlfriend to spend $300 of our last $500 on these shirts on inventory.
What did you do? Did you get extra bags to check them on the plane? How did you take them?
We got a couple duffel bags. Duffel bags were only $4 or something in the shop there.
This was before all the excess baggage charges. I’m thinking in current terms, that’d be $300 in baggage fees. This is when they gave you a bag.
Exactly. Basically, we agreed that we would spend $300 and no more. We still needed a couple hundred dollars just in case. Not that would have done anything. There were tons of these. I went around from shop to shop. I said, “How many T-shirts can you give me for $300?” I negotiated hard. Finally, I got to a shop and said, “We’ll give you 300 T-shirts for $300.” I’m like, “Perfect.” I know for sure somebody will give us more than a dollar. They got to work. I can’t remember how many days, but they had all the shirts done.
They were making them and we filled up two duffel bags with the shirt. My girlfriend was freaking out. She was like, “It was already dire enough. Now, we’re down to $200.” We’ve got two duffel bags of T-shirts to lug around Amsterdam. We get to Amsterdam and we get there on a Friday night. We checked into Bob’s Youth Hostel, which was a popular hostel back then. The next morning, I talked to the guy at the counter, I said, “We’ve got all these T-shirts. Do you know where we can go to sell these things?”
He said, “You’re in luck. On Sundays, you can go to Vondel Park. It turns into a big yard sale there. You can sell whatever you want, including drugs.” We go there on Sunday and at this point, we’re down to our last $50. We spread our T-shirts out on the lawn. It’s a beautiful sunny day. By the end of the day, we had made about a thousand guilders. We were charging $10 or $15. I think guilder was about $0.75 or something like that.
Ninety for a 5% margin shirts.
We were off to the races. That was enough to keep us going for the next week. The following Sunday, we double that. We knew where to go and all the little tricks of the trade. The next day, we went to a rental agency, rented an apartment for the month, and lived high on the hog for the rest of our time in Amsterdam.
You didn’t go back to get more inventory?
That would have been fun. You keep doing that over and over.
You call that your first business?
Yes, I had a paper route. That was about it. I wouldn’t say that was very entrepreneurial, but that was my first foray into making money that involved real risk. It was significant. We could have been homeless.
Presumably, you went back to school, finished and then what did you do next?
The day after my last exam, I graduated with a degree in History and Economics. I scratched my head wondering, “What the hell am I going to do? I don’t want to be an economist. I don’t want to work.”
Not a lot of jobs for history other than teaching.
I don’t want to work on Bay Street, which is Toronto’s equivalent of Wall Street. I don’t want to be in a suit. I just decided I was going to pack up my Volvo station wagon, drive out to the mountains, and do the, “Go West, young man. Be a ski bum for a year, and figure it out from there.” Over the span of the next four months, I promptly got fired from my first four jobs in this little ski town in the Rockies.
What were you so bad at?
I was just bad at working for others.
It didn’t matter what the discipline was.
I had this rebellious streak in me. I didn’t like being told what to do and inherently, a job is being told what to do. I had this real rebellious streak and I had to push the envelope. I’m not going to get into the details of why I got fired from each of these. I was a lifty at the ski resort. I was a dayshift bartender at this rough neck bar in town where all the miners hung out and I was a dishwasher. It takes a lot of work.
Real Renaissance man to do all three of those things.
Lots of skills there. That bar was like a Bukowski novel like the characters that would walk in every day. I’d be going there at 10:30 to open up the bar at 11:00. These guys are just waiting outside for me to open the bar and sitting there all day. It gave me a glimpse of the future that I didn’t want for myself. Anyways, after getting fired for my third job, this is a town of 6,000 mind you. I’m thinking, “I clearly don’t like working for others. I don’t think I can work for anybody in this town because my reputation’s terrible.”
I was walking along this trail along the river. The town’s Fernie, British Columbia. I’m with my friend and being a bit despondent. He said, “You love mountain biking and there’s all these amazing trails here. More and more tourists come in. Why don’t you just see if somebody will pay you to guide them around the trails here?” I let that sit with me for a day or two and then thought, “That’s a good idea. Getting paid to ride my mountain bike would be amazing.”
I managed to convince another friend to join me. We got a $10,000 loan from the Community Futures Development Corporation. We bought a fleet of mountain bikes, bought a sign, hung it up on the highway, and convinced a local bike shop to let us piggyback off of them. You can call our first summer an unmitigated disaster.
I thought you were going to say a runaway success, like the T-shirts, but no.
I wish. That’s not a very interesting story, is it? We had exactly one customer. We started in early June. We would sit outside the shop every day with our bikes and our sign. It was August by the time we got our first customer. We drew straws or whatever on who would take them out. I took them out and he paid us $80. He was good.
I just had the biggest sheet-eating grin all day. I couldn’t believe somebody was paying me to go mountain biking in the Canadian Rockies surrounded by beautiful scenery. That was all the motivation I needed. We decided to rent out our fleet because the guiding customers weren’t coming. We made enough money off of that barely so we could afford some craft dinner and then decided to keep at it. There was enough motivation. The second summer wasn’t much better. The third summer is when we started offering week-long overnight trips. We got a big article in Outside Magazine. That’s when things took off.
This became Sacred Rides or was Sacred Rides?
Yes.
How big did that business get?
By the time I sold it in 2019, we were operating in 45 different countries around the world. We were both outside. National Geographic Adventure had rated us the number one mountain bike tour operator on Earth. We certainly had a pretty good claim at the top of the industry. It’s still not a huge industry. You’ve talked about some of the road trips you’ve done. There’s a lot of people who will pay for road trips through France, or Croatia or Italy.
The mountain biking world tends to be a little bit more independent. What was interesting was we chugged along for about ten years. Growing steadily, but by no means on easy street. It was about year eleven or year twelve, we were operating in this very crowded marketplace with a lot of operators doing the same thing.
Was there content involved in these or was it just about the biking?
It was just about the biking. The content was the travel experience. For the first ten years, we just ran trips through Southern British Columbia. My partner had exited many years prior to become a chiropractor, so it was just me. Year ten is when I started expanding internationally. I went to Peru, Guatemala, Slovenia, and Croatia and started developing trips internationally. I saw this market for combining a mountain bike trip with a unique travel experience.
What made it unique was that when you’re on a mountain bike in a place like Peru, you can get out to these places that are hard to get to by foot. You can’t get to by van. You can get to these places that are untouched by tourism. It was this meaningful travel experience paired with a kick-ass mountain bike trip. That was the content. It’s these eye-opening travel experiences. A few years after that, the industry as a whole was growing at that time. We had a lot of competition and it was very hard.
You just knew COVID was coming. You sold it just at the right time.
I did.
Proves why timing is so critical in the success of that.
I was watching what was happening in Wuhan at the time. What was interesting was we were operating in this very crowded marketplace where everybody was doing the same thing. It was roughly $250 to $400 a day where everybody was landing. If you do like a week-long trip, expect to pay about $2,000 to $3,000, which is kind of mid-range.
Yet I’m looking at the companies like Backroads and Butterfield and Robinson. They’re charging a thousand and up a day for some of their trips and clearly crushing it. Around the same time, there’s a club called Durham Mountain Bike Club, North of Toronto. It’s Canada’s biggest mountain bike club. They have like 800 or 900 members. I went to one of their Wednesday night rides. I get to the parking lot and there’s a Lexus pulling in. There’s a Mercedes pulling in. There’s a Land Rover.
All these guys pulling in with these expensive cars and pulling their $10,000 mountain bike. There had been this conception about the mountain bike industry that it’s just a bunch of dirt bags. Back in the ‘80s when mountain bikes launched, it was a lot of young kids just cobbling together, crappy mountain bikes, but it had matured.
I’ve been to a mountain bike store. These bikes are like $20,000. It’s no joke.
I realized the industry or the sport had matured. A lot of these guys who got into it when they were 18 or 19 are now in their 40s or 50s, in their prime earning years. That’s when we did a big shift and started going after the high-end of the market. Over the next three years, we raised our prices on average about 25% each time. We’re slowly climbing up to the top of the market, and developing more higher end trips, which nobody else was doing. We had this blue ocean to ourselves. That helped differentiate us from the market.
You’ve been open though. While the company was doing well, you were struggling with some depression during that period. Maybe this led you to your second incarnation, but entrepreneurship is lonely even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s why these groups like EO and stuff exist. People feel like they’re on their own. I’m sure it’s not unrelated that when you had your second incarnation with Wayfinders, you were going after that crowd a little bit.
You hit the nail on the head. It is a lonely journey. We don’t have colleagues we can talk to. Although, I do espouse vulnerability in the workplace. As an owner and CEO, there’s a limit to that.
Your problems don’t seem relevant to other people even though they’re real. Most people don’t see the cost, the health cost, relationship cost, and all this stuff that a lot of entrepreneurs go through. I would say, it looks sexy in the rearview mirror. I had a friend who you would know. I always tell this story. We were meeting as part of one of our forum retreats.
He and his wife were coming from selling their business. It was awesome because we’re all going to get together. We did one retreat with our partners a year. His wife came in. Everyone’s like, “How do you feel? This has been twenty years.” First thing his wife said was like, “I remember being in that lawyer’s office years ago when we were pretty much going bankrupt and trying to figure out.”
There was even trauma. People see the end and they see it’s great. I don’t think that people see the cost. As you said, it’s hard to talk about these things with other people. It seems like a first world problem but it’s real. The burden of owning and running a business, until you have done it, you don’t understand the psychological impact. Everyone else gets to go home and not worry about that at the end of the day.
One of the best definitions I heard of entrepreneur is someone who’ll work 80 hours a week so they can avoid working 40 hours a week.
An entrepreneur is someone who works 80 hours a week just to avoid working 40 hours a week.
For maybe more money in some cases.
It’s a tough journey. It has made all the more tough because we often isolate ourselves. We feel there’s nobody to talk to. If you’ve got staff, you don’t feel like you can open up to them about your struggles. You certainly don’t want to share cash flow struggles or whatever with your team. If you’ve got investors, you’re certainly not going to open up to them. Maybe you’ve got one or two confidants. We met at a conference at MMT that brings together entrepreneurs. There’s so much value in being around people who understand and share your struggle. They get you. You feel like you can open yourself up to them because they understand you.
The Origin Story Of Wayfinders
You sold this business with your impeccable timing and then you decided to found Wayfinders. Walk us through the moment when you realized what was missing the first time around and what you wanted to bring in Wayfinders that wasn’t in Sacred Rides.
There’s a two-year overlap. Two years before I sold the company in 2019. In September of 2017, I did my first event. It was called Mastermind Adventures back then. I rebranded a few years later. At that point, I was almost twenty years in with Sacred Rides. It’s pretty hard to sustain your passion for something.
You needed something a little new.
Even something as cool as mountain biking around the world. I’d brought on investors a few times. I’d taken on a bunch of debt and grown the team. We’re expanding like crazy. I was spending more time looking at spreadsheets, writing shareholder reports, managing my team, and putting out fires than I was. Back in the early days, I was on my mountain bike 100 days a year when I was guiding and driving. I got to this point where I was like, “This is not what I set out to create. I’m not enjoying this anymore.”
At the same time, as I was growing and encountering more and more problems that I didn’t feel qualified to be able to address with my own knowledge. That’s when I joined EO. I started going to these entrepreneur conferences, trying to surround myself with people who had been there and done that. What I noticed was that so many of these events were based on the exchange of knowledge. A speaker at the front of the room and then you go into a breakout session or a workshop. It was always like somebody talking at the front of the room which is great. I got a lot of useful knowledge.
It was in a room. I’m guessing that was also a big factor.
I don’t like being in rooms for very long. The biggest value I got from these things was the connections that I made. I had to work at them. This networking break in the hallway or over a meal or whatever. I knew based on my experiences with guiding, that when you take people outdoors and you’re doing fun, challenging things together, people tend to bond. The greater the challenge, the greater the bond.
They become more vulnerable.
They become more vulnerable because you’re dealing with this adversity together. An extreme example of that is going off to war. We’ve all heard stories about the deep bonds soldiers have created during those times. Mountain biking is not akin to war, but it’s on the spectrum towards it.
On your ability level, I don’t know. If you follow Matt and Brad down a couple of trails, it feels like war.
Exactly. I thought, “There’s a different way to do this.” My first few events were a mix of adventure and conference. We’d go mountain biking and then in the afternoon or the evening, we’d have some workshops and stuff like that and peer sharing of knowledge, which was fantastic. People loved it and asked me to do more.
After a few events, I was jazzed by this. I was providing a lot of value for people. I wasn’t jazzed by the other company. I’d offloaded everything. I said, “I’m burnt out. You guys run the ship.” They did a pretty good job of that. After a year and a half, two years, I was like, “I’m just completely done here.” That’s when I sold the company so I could go all in on Wayfinders. Over time, it’s become less conference and more of a personal development and personal leadership journey.
The first year and a half of COVID, everything went on pause. I had this wonderful opportunity. A lot of my customers were friends at this point. They weren’t asking for refunds. I was doing fine cash wise. I was not in a panic. I took a lot of that time to just up-level my skills as a facilitator and a leader. When we relaunched again, I leaned in this new direction. I want to create a meaningful, personal, soulful journey for people if I’m going to take them halfway around the world.
I don’t want to talk about Facebook ads and how to hire. I want to talk about the real deal that we never talk about when we get together. I leaned into that. On the surface, it looks like a travel or an adventure. The way I describe it to people is that’s the delivery mechanism for the transformation and the experience of community that comes from it.
I had all of my best ideas, including a breakthrough idea for a business in an Uber in Chicago. There’s just something about getting out of your environment. You can have brainstorming and stuff, but getting off the autopilot, there’s something that travel does. It’s getting you out of your current environment and seeing how things are done differently.
It gets your little Medici effect in your brain going, “I’ve gone and met with people around US tipping culture. It’s got to be this way.” I’m like, “I travel around the world. It’s not this way. People work. It functions. That is a cultural thing that we have developed that doesn’t exist in this form anywhere else in the world.” This is why it’s super helpful to get out of your four walls.
In terms of idea generation, there aren’t that many original ideas in the world.
It’s combinations.
Humans haven’t been around for so long. The things that we might label as original ideas are just a mashup of two things that weren’t mashed up before. When you go travel, you get out of your home environment. You’re exposed to all new things. In your brain, those get mashed up against the things that you know. Some interesting things occur.
You get exposed to different ideas when you go out of your home. In your brain, they get mashed up and interesting things occur.
For me, travel particularly, as you know, I take people to very unconventional places, deep into Western Mongolia or in the Amazon. I took a group to a remote part of Papua New Guinea. You’re exposed to these radically different cultures and radically different ways of being. It takes you out of this dominant narrative that we’re a part of what it means to be human, how we live a life, what it means to live a meaningful life. We’re exposed to very different interpretations.
To give you an example, when we went to Bhutan, we spent three days living with a group of monks in a remote monastery at 10,000 feet elevation. These are monks who dedicate themselves to stillness and to contemplation. The extreme example is some of these monks will go into isolation for anywhere from 3 to 9 years. They’ll be in isolation in a cave or a hut or whatever just meditating and praying for the wellness of all sentient beings.
People bring them food but they don’t have any interaction with them. You meet some of these monks. They’re some of the calmest and most joyous people I’ve ever met. It’s like, “Maybe there isn’t a direct line or direct equation between achievement, constant goal chasing, internal peace, and happiness. Maybe there’s a different approach to that.” I didn’t come away from that experience wanting to become a monk.
I did come away from that experience with an appreciation for the value of stillness and contemplation. Before we did this interview, I went for a one hour walk around my neighborhood with no objective other than to just walk around and be. It brings me great peace and satisfaction to be able to do that. It used to be a struggle. What am I doing? Why am I not spending this time crossing off my list and achieving and setting new goals? Now I’m like, “Goals are fun but so is inner calm.”
Going Out Of Your Realm Of Control
Do you get pushback on these trips from people who are used to being in control like, “We’re going to this remote place. What’s the emergency?” I assume there’s some angst amongst the types of people who would. This feels very out of their normal realm of control.
Thank you for asking that question. One thing about my adventures is, I’m very opaque about the itinerary. You know you’re going to Papua New Guinea, but you have no idea what you’re going to be doing.
That’s smart. That’s much better.
I’m going to give you a packing list. I want you to be prepared. Every night, we’ll tell people, “Tomorrow wear this and pack this in your bag.” They have no idea if they’re going scuba diving, if they’re going for a seven-hour trek through the jungle, or where they’re going to sleep that night. I do that for two reasons. One is that surprises are fun. If I tell people we’re going for a trek through the jungle, we’re going to this remote village, and we’re going to stay with the village.
You’re going to have more than just a hundred questions.
They’re going to maybe rebel against that because they have an idea of what it’s going to be or they’re going to have a picture of it in their mind. Even if the experience is amazing, if it doesn’t quite match the picture in their mind, there’s going to be a dissonance. Two, it’s to not mess with people’s sense of control.
Most entrepreneurs have developed a pretty good belief that they can control the world, or they can control their world at least. We’re used to setting goals and achieving them. Ultimately, we have very little control. The universe, the world, God, whatever you want to say, will mess with our sense of control all the time. Yet we remain anchored in this idea that I can control everything.
To me, there’s real value in just surrendering. Not surrendering in the sense of, I give up but surrendering and not being so attached to outcomes having to be exactly the way I imagined them to be. I tell people “Show up. I’ll take it from there and don’t ask any questions.” Some people lose their mind after that. Almost everybody by day three relaxes and they start to enjoy it. It’s like, “I have no idea what’s going to happen.”
There are a few outcomes that we can control, but many outcomes are outside of our control.
We’re so focused on the future. I tell a story that some people from our company planned a London to Paris bike ride. It was biking down the middle of the night, taking a barge over, and then biking in the morning. It was for charity. I was like, “Awesome. Sign me up. Let’s do it.” The week before, as I’m getting ready to pack and reading the list, I’m like, “Holy crap. What the heck am I doing?”
I’m looking through the time of the night. We’re going to sleep for two hours and it’s 180 miles. If I had read all of these things in advance, I would have found 100 reasons not to do it. I figured it out and we got through it. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. When we’re given the stuff, we tend to let our minds go. I get it.
In September of 2021, I ran an event in Greenland. It was day three. This guy came up to me and he’s like, “This crap has to stop. I need to know what’s going on. You need to tell me. This is crazy. This is unsafe. I need to be able to prepare all these things.” I said, “Take a breather. It’s going to be okay. If you have to know, I will tell you what’s happening today and tomorrow. I want you to ask yourself, what part of you needs to know?”
“Why is it important for you to know? I invite you to just take fifteen minutes to reflect on this journal about it if you have to.” He came back to me fifteen minutes later and said, “I’m still pretty uncomfortable with this but I’m just going to trust you.” Two days later, he came to me and said, “I want to thank you. I’ve had a big personal breakthrough. I’ve realized just how wound up I am all the time.”
I was just going to say. If you went to look at this guy’s life at home, I’m sure you would find anxiety, stressed out, and controlling. All of these things.
He had this moment of realization of how much of his life was out of a sense of fear or anxiety, needing to control outcomes. There are a few outcomes that we can control but so many outcomes in our lives are outside of our control. If we maintain the illusion that we can control them, we’re set up for just stress and anxiety. If we accept that things sometimes are out of our control and we can let go and accept what comes, it’s ultimately a more peaceful internal experience.
One of the values you emphasize is joy. A lot of leaders are chasing metrics and milestones. Frankly, they’ve probably subjugated their joy thinking that joy will just pop up when they hit the top of the mountain. As you and I have seen, all high achievers, when they get to a goal, they don’t even look back down to enjoy the view for five minutes. They just start climbing. There’s very little joy at the summit because it’s like, “What’s the next summit?” If you’re not enjoying the process, you’re very unlikely to enjoy the destination.
That’s the hedonic treadmill we’ve thought. You achieve this thing. You’re temporarily happy, then it’s like, “Got to set the next goal.” I’ll tell you a story about that. In 2016, I sat down with my team. I set this infamous Big, Hairy Audacious Goal that I wanted. I wanted us to operate in 150 countries by 2021. That’s a big goal. There’s only about 190 countries in the world. We’re probably not going to be running trips in Sierra Leone for instance. In hindsight, it was a ridiculous goal to start with.
It became a process of deconstructing that, “How are we going to do that? We can’t do it with our existing business models.” We launched this whole Airbnb kind of model for mountain bike guides around the world and that rapidly expanded. One day, there’s two things that happened. One, I read Ryan Holiday’s Ego is the Enemy. Do you know the book?
It’s great.
As are so many of his books. I saw myself in those pages. The other was our mutual friend, Philip McKernan, around that same time in MMT Carmel, who ran a clarity session. One of the questions they asked is, “Where are you seeking validation?” I realized that so much of what I was doing and chasing was in this quest for validation that I probably never got from my parents. I needed to prove myself to the world. I’d set these twin goals of being in 150 countries. I wanted to be on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine.
One’s an ego goal and one’s a big goal. It’s a growth goal for growth’s sake.
Both of them were goals if I’m being honest. They were part of me that didn’t feel validated by whomever or the world. They just desperately wanted validation. I woke up and I could clearly see in my mind’s eye. I could see it. We were on a track to hit 150. It wasn’t an easy track, but we were expanding rapidly all over the world. I could see us achieving that. I could see myself popping a bottle of champagne with my team, toasting ourselves a job well done, and then boom. Done. Now what?
I felt so empty and miserable. The same thing with the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine. That’s a tough goal to hit. Only twelve people a year do it. I could see myself framing that on the wall. All of a sudden, it seems like such an arrogant thing to chase. What does that mean for the value I’ve created in the world or how I’ve touched others? Think about some of the people that have been on the cover like Elizabeth Holmes.
They have a bad track record. I’ve seen some of these images.
It’s a curse being on that cover. I still chase achievements and I still have goals. I try to front load the process of asking myself why I want these things and making sure they’re deeply aligned with my essence, what I want in this world, and who I want to be in this world. I love Dan Martell’s frame on this. When he’s goal-setting, he’s chasing goals that are going to stretch him to become the type of person he wants to become along the way, whether he achieves it or not. That’s a useful frame for me. At the end of the day, it’s like how I want to be in the world, how I want to impact people around me, how I want to be seen, how I want to be remembered rather than the actual thing that I’m chasing.
There’s a famous story I heard on this with Ryan Holiday and the New York Times Bestseller List. Ryan had a bunch of books. The one you mentioned, was it before Obstacle is the Way? I can’t remember. He had some big book launches, but he had not made the New York Times Bestseller List. That was one of his goals.
His agent called him while he was mowing his lawn and told him, “You made the New York Times Bestseller List.” It went right through him and he went back to mowing his lawn. That was his revelation that these things aren’t going to move the needle. You romanticize them and sometimes they’re helpful. They push you forward and stuff.
Sometimes it’s weird. It’s what it’s like committing to in a physical event. It’s not what happens at or during. It’s that it got you disciplined beforehand. I just remember his demarcation on that. I was surprised how quickly he was like, “That’s when I realized these things were never going to make me happy.” It was interesting.
Maybe you were at his talk.
Yes, at MMT. He was great.
At Palmetto Bluff. What I took away from that is he is devoted to the craft of writing to becoming the best possible writer he can. That’s such a beautiful, worthy goal. That’s a lifelong pursuit because you’ll never get there. You’ll always feel that you can improve as a writer. You can take great pride in your writing and still want to keep improving. For him, the result of that is that he’s become a very popular author. He hits the New York Times Bestseller List often. My sense is that he’s not chasing that anymore. What he’s chasing is the craft and the pursuit of excellence. It’s such a beautiful frame on what we pursue in our lives.
How High Performers Can Deal With Isolation And Disconnect
I know we touched on this. A lot of our audience are high performers who sometimes feel isolated or disconnected. What advice would you give someone who has all of the demonstrative trophies or entrepreneur covers of success on the outside, but feeling unfulfilled on the inside? It sounds like you were there at one point. Other than, come on one of my trips, which is an obvious answer.
I don’t need to convince you of this because you’ve attended a lot of MMT events. You’ve gone to other events a little bit. There’s such value in attending experiences that other people have put together. They’ve done the heavy lifting of choosing the people who are in the room creating a context for a connection.
I’ve attended so many different events and been part of so many different communities. The value to me is 10X. Sometimes it’s direct 10X financially, but it’s 10X in terms of how it up-levels my life. That’s the low hanging fruit. You just pick at a level that you can afford. If you can only afford a thousand dollars to attend an event, then go find an event locally in your community.
If it’s only a few hundred dollars, find events where people like the type of people that you want to hang out with and that you aspire to be are hanging out. Go to those places. If you have the means, up-level from there. You and I are both used to spending tens of thousands of dollars to surround ourselves with the right people.
Not only did these people help me up-level, but many of them became friends. They helped lessen my sense of loneliness around this journey. That’s, to me, the best bang for your buck. The other thing for me is just being intentional. It’s funny that you take any study of longevity or mental wellbeing, they always point to relationships.
That famous Harvard study.
It’s always number one and number two on the list. We know that having fulfilling relationships is the biggest contributor to our wellbeing. Yet I rarely ever see people being very intentional about this in the same way. Think about the gym. People are fanatically intentional. They hire trainers, have apps, and track everything. I don’t see people bringing that same intention to their relationship life.
For me, I’m extremely intentional. I have a database of people that I want to stay in touch with. I have people who are close friends, people who are more acquaintances. The commonalities, these are people I genuinely want to stay in touch with. I have a time blocked in my calendar. I have two hours every Monday set aside. That’s my time to look at this list of people of who I want to connect with.
Sometimes, it’s just sending them a text message and say, “I’m thinking about you. Hope you’re doing well. How are things?” Sometimes, it’s like, “Let’s grab a coffee.” Sometimes, I put together a dinner and bring together ten of my favorite people. I’m intentional about it. I set aside time for it. The last thing I’ll say is that almost everybody is starving for real genuine connection.
Sometimes, it’s easier like, “I’m going to join a community or I’m going to attend an event.” If you want something meaningful, you need to do the heavy lifting and create exactly what it is you want to see in the world. For me, I want to connect with other midlife entrepreneurs. I’m in my 50s. I want to connect with people who are in this stage of life. They’re battling these same questions about, “What does the latter half of my life look like?” There isn’t anything out there that I see that’s that specific and targeted. I want to create some dinners or some experiences where I can bring these people. We can have these rich dialogues around it. Sometimes, you just got to do the work yourself.
The Real Value Of Taking Risks
Well said. Mike, last question. This is the multi-variant one that I ask everyone. It could be singular, repeated, personal or professional. What’s a mistake that you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from?
I would say for me, one of my core values is risk-taking. At one point in my life, in my twenties, it was just like, “Take whatever risk. Darn the consequences.” It resulted in a lot of broken bones and broken relationships. I’ve become just broken. A lot of positive things as well. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tempered that and I try to take smart risks. I still believe in the value of taking risks.
The mistake I’ve made is when I played safe and I pulled back from taking risks. I’ve done this with some of my events where I play safe, a little bit safer than I want to, and the result isn’t the same. It falls a little bit flatter. I know that when I take risks. I’m always taking physical risks with people. Nobody’s ever gotten seriously hurt at my events, but I like to push the envelope. It’s more about the emotional risk.
I call it uncomfortable plus safe. That’s the good quadrant.
Whether it’s an event I’m running or my own life, when I play it too safe, the results are kind of flat or maybe stagnant. Coming back to you and your excellent book that’s coming out that I read, was a great reminder to me of being clear on my core values. Living life according to them and being unflinchingly honest when I’m falling short. Your book was a great reminder that risk is a core value of mine, that I want to be risky and that I want to surround myself with people who like taking risks with me. To answer your question, maybe in a broader sense, it’s just forgetting my core values is a mistake.
Get In Touch With Mike
Good sponsored answer. You get bonus points for that. Mike, where can people learn more about you and Wayfinders and the work you’re doing?
The website is Way-Finders.com. I just announced my 2026 adventures. Most of my alumni grabbed most of the spots but there’s still a few spots left.
When you play things too safe, you will get flat or stagnant results.
It’s always a good sign. Mike, thanks for sharing your incredible journey with us. I appreciate your openness and commitment to helping others find the meaning and connection that they’re missing in their lives.
Thank you. I appreciate you.
To our audience, thanks for reading on the show. We’ll include links to Mike’s work and Wayfinders on the detailed episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you enjoyed today’s show or the show in general, I hope you’ll sign up for Friday Forward, which is my weekly newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers. Friday Forward is free, but there’s also a premium version that includes a second newsletter called the Leadership Minute, which provides some best practices to meet your potential as a leader.
Premium membership also includes access to recorded webinars I’ve done with guests like Philip McKernan, Liz Wiseman, and Joey Coleman. You can join at RobertGlazer.com under the Friday Forward tab, or just go to Substack and look for Friday Forward. Thanks again for your support. Until next time. Keep elevating.
Important Links
- Mike Brcic
- Mike Brcic on LinkedIn
- Wayfinders
- Sacred Rides
- Adventure | National Geographic
- Backroads
- Butterfield & Robinson
- Durham Mountain Bike Association
- MMT Community
- Ego is the Enemy
- Philip McKernan
- The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph
- Friday Forward on Substack
