Living Forward With a Life Plan, with Michael Hyatt – Episode 138 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Bestselling author and CEO Michael Hyatt explains the basics of creating a life plan and the 3 questions to ask when making one, shares some prophetic wisdom from Steve Jobs, and talks about engineering your legacy, and why putting yourself first isn’t always selfish; it’s of-service.

About Michael:

Michael Hyatt is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

While serving as CEO of a $250 million publishing company, Michael Hyatt grew tired of the endless hustle. The toll on his relationships, health, and overall quality of life wasn’t sustainable. So, Michael developed a plan that would enable him to succeed at work without sacrificing his personal priorities.

After making changes to his productivity, goal-setting, and leadership, he was able to lead the company through an economic recession and deliver winning results, all while making it home in time for dinner each night.

Once he realized the impact his system could make on others, Michael left his role and launched Full Focus.

In 2014, the American Management Association named him as one of “The Top 30 Leaders in Business”, and his leadership development firm, Michael Hyatt & Company, has made the Inc. 5000, a list of America’s fastest growing, privately-held companies.

Michael started his career in the world of traditional media. In fact, he spent most of it in the book publishing industry, most recently as the Chairman & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, until it was acquired by HarperCollins in 2011. At that time, it was the seventh largest book publishing company in the U.S.

Michael was an early adopter of social media. His blog, MichaelHyatt.com, is one of the most popular in the world, with almost a million page views a month. His podcast, Lead to Win, ranked as an iTunes top 50 in Business. He’s the creator of several popular online courses, including 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever, Free to Focus, and Platform University.

His work has been featured in publications like Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Forbes and many more.

To learn more about Michael, visit MichaelHyatt.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Michael Hyatt is the guest on today’s show. And He is the former CEO of Thomas Nelson publishing. So Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Hyatt
Hey, thanks. Great to be on with you.

Host
So tell me like, what exactly is this concept of life plan?

Michael Hyatt
Yeah. So a life plan is basically a brief written document, you know, not one of those big documents that some of us prepare to the corporate world, that, you know, we took three days or four days in an off site retreat, to create and then we put it on the shelf and never looked at it again, you know, this is a very brief document, eight to 15 pages. It covers every aspect of your life. And we talk about where you want to be in all the major areas of your life. And it’s a document that you’ll tweak and adjust as you go through the seasons of your life. But the basic design is to get the 30,000 foot view of your life, so that you don’t end up at a destination you didn’t choose. And people do that all the time. You know, they end up getting through their midlife and they find that their health is not what they wanted, or their marriage isn’t what they had signed up for, or their career is just stalled out. But the way to avoid that is to be intentional. And I don’t know of a better way to be intentional than to create a life plan. It’s like anything else. You got to plan for it if you’re gonna get a different result.

Host
Yeah. And you, you you use this phrase, you call it the drift.

Michael Hyatt
Yeah, I love this concept. And it really came from an experience that my wife Gail and I had when we’ve been married 10 years, we decided to go on a vacation to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. Only problem was we didn’t have that much money. But we took all of our airline miles and we went to Hawaii. When we got there. We ended up money for the hotel and a rental car, but not a lot of money for entertainment. But we found out that the hotel was offering free snorkeling lessons. And they were going to teach us in the swimming pool and they were going to take us out onto the reef. So we did that. And when we got out into the reef, I mean, our heads exploded. We could not believe how amazing that was. So we discovered that we could rent snorkeling gear for $10 for the entire week, we thought oh my gosh, this is unbelievable. So the next morning after those snorkeling lessons, we went to the lagoon that was adjacent to the hotel, okay, and we paddled out into the water. And it was like swimming in an aquarium. All these multicolored fish and the seaweed was swaying and reflecting the sunlight. And we were totally captivated, totally distracted. 45 minutes later, we look up into our horror, we’d been caught in a riptide and we were way out to see the hotel look like a toy in the distance. And so Gale pulled her it up. And she screamed, fortunately, we were still together, we had a boogie board, which was also a blessing. She said, What are we going to do? And I said, we’re going to swim like crazy for the shore. And so it took us like an hour to get back, we collapsed. But that became for us a central metaphor for how most people live. They just drift through life, they don’t wake up in the morning and say, You know what, I think sometime in my middle life, I want to have a heart attack, you know, I’m gonna gradually get overweight, until I just have a health breakdown and a health crisis. Or they don’t start out after they leave their wedding and say, you know, I want to grow gradually apart. Until we end up in separation or divorce. Or in my career, I think I’ll just hop out and get stuck, you know, in about five years and never progress any further. People drift to those destinations. It’s what happens when we get distracted. It’s what happens when we don’t have a plan. And we’re just drifting through life. And here’s the thing, no one ever drifted to a destination, they would have chosen.

Host
Have you always had a life plan?

Michael Hyatt
No, so here’s what happened. Um, like a lot of people, I had a plan for my work. But the truth is, life is a lot more than work. And I want to win at work, but I want to succeed at life. But initially, I was highly driven in my work, and I was very successful in my work. But in about the year 2000, I had taken over one of the divisions at Thomas Nelson Publishers, we had 14 divisions at the time, the Division I became the general manager of was dead last in every single metric. So yeah, sales growth, return on investment, return on assets, all those things were just upside down. So the CEO said to me, he said, Okay, how long is it going to take you to turn this division around? profitable? I just picked the number out of the air. I didn’t know I’d said three years. He said, Okay, you got it. So I went back to my team I shared with him what I thought we needed to do. Everybody started, you know, working together, but we were on the road constantly. We went from number 14 to number one in 18 months. That’s why I ended up as the CEO. But here’s the problem. It came at a cost. Because I was on the road all the time, I wasn’t paying attention to what I was eating, I wasn’t working out like I should. I felt like I was drifting apart from Gail and my relationship with her. Other members of my team, were doing it. And I finally went to John Maxwell, who was one of my authors that I was publishing at Thomas Nelson, and he’d become a good friend, and a mentor. And I said, John, I don’t think this story is going to end well. If I continue drifting, like I’m drifting. I’ve gotta have something, I gotta I gotta figure this out, because it’s not sustainable. And he said to me, I want to introduce you to Daniel Harkavy, who’s the CEO of building champions, which is a coaching company. And he said, I think you should talk to him. So I hired Dale as my executive coach. First thing that Daniel did with me is he said, buddy, let’s create a life plan, because I get that you have a plan for your career, but it’s not working so well with the rest of your life. And we need to plan for those other domains of your life. And so we did that. And we took, I took an entire day. And that’s what we asked for in the book as people give us a day. And we created this life plan, I created this life plan, ran it by Daniel, and I’ve had one ever since. And it’s been major, probably the most major thing in my life, to help me not only win at work, but to succeed at life.

Host
So did you and Gail, like, do this together?

Michael Hyatt
Gail and I have been married for 30, almost 38 years. And we have five daughters are all grown now all of them are very successful in their own right. But yeah, it was really when they were in their teenage years that I finally decided that I needed to get this life plan together. But it made all the difference. I know till and where I would have ended up in my personal life. If I had not gotten the life plan and gotten the vision for what was possible in my marriage. And in my parenting in my health and every other domain.

Host
You know, some people still kind of think about their lives in like the second segmented compartments, do you think that they are really segmented? Or are? Are they all connected? And it really is this holistic view? or kind of like, What’s your thought on that?

Michael Hyatt
It’s holistic. I mean, we for the sake of abstraction, for the sake of focusing on him, we divide them up. But the truth is, all these things are interrelated. So for example, I worked for guy one time, who was going through a divorce. And it was brutal. It was very contested, it was very, a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of resentment, the guy was totally unavailable at work, this was my boss, he would come in at about 10. In the morning, he was completely sidetracked by what was going on with his divorce, his head was not in the game, he was not engaged. And that went on for about a year. So these different areas affect everything else, if you have a health crisis, you know, you have a heart attack, it’s going to have an impact on your family, it’s going to have an impact on your work, it’s going to have an impact on your friendships. So you can you can separate them for the purpose of planning. But they show up together as a seamless whole part of my life plan is to make sure that I get enough sleep. Why? Because sleep is directly related to your ability to focus. But that’s why you know, sometimes you get up and you’re tired, and you’re trying to read something in the morning, and you have to read the same page three or four times, because you’re tired. You know, you didn’t get enough sleep out. On the other hand, you know, I think sometimes when I get to the end of the day, and I’m trying to do a complex project, and Gale will say to me, You know what, why don’t you just go to bed? Because you’re like, 10 times better in the morning. Why? Because I’m rested.

Host
So how do you create a life plan? So tell us about how.

Michael Hyatt
It’s pretty simple, but the life plan is basically the answer to three incredibly important, powerful questions. Okay. Okay. So I’m gonna give these to you. Yeah. Okay. So the first question is, how do you want to be remembered? Now, kind of the myth of our society, is that you’re going to live forever, you know, we conveniently put six sick people out of our line of vision, people that are dying, you know, we put those out of our field of vision, you know, because we act like we’re gonna live forever. But the truth is, we’re all gonna die. And Steve Jobs said that this was faster. He said this two years before he died, almost prophetically. He said that facing death was the single most important tool he had for making life’s most important decisions. And that was at a commencement address at Stanford University. And it’s true. So one of the things that we do in this section of the book and answer to this question is we have you imagine that you’re a guest at your own funeral. So just imagine on the front row, there’s your family, all the people that are living now imagine if you were to die an untimely death today. And on the front row are all the people that you love the most. Directly behind them are the people that you work with and your friends and your neighbors and the people you go to church with? What would they be saying about you? If they were asked to give a eulogy we hear and we have you write that out? Write your eulogy. And for most people, there’s going to be a gap. They’re gonna go, Ah, I need more time. You know, because what my kids are probably going to say is I work too much, or what um, They’re having dinner with them. I’m on my cell phone, and I’m entering email, and I’m not paying attention to them, or I need more time to get in shape or whatever it is. But here’s the good news. You’re not dead yet. Right? So there’s still time. So then we have you create a series of legacy statements. And this is, this is one of my favorite things to do. So you’re not dead yet. And we have you and we give you a little formula. So you know, for example, I say, I want Gail to remember. And then, you know, it’s things like that I take long walks with her in the evening, that we sit and watch the sunset, that I’m her best friend. So we create these legacy statements. Because here’s the reality, all of us are going to leave a legacy. Sometimes we think that’s, you know, Margaret Thatcher will have a legacy or Winston Churchill had a legacy. Or Theodore Roosevelt had a legacy. But all of us will leave a legacy. The only question is, is it going to be good? Or is it going to be bad? And you and I can engineer those memories that the things that people talk about when we ultimately pass? We can engineer those conversations beginning today? And that’s, that’s the first question, how do you want to be remembered. So this is my one for Gail. I said, I want Gail to remember how I loved her, understood her, pursued her and helped her accomplish her dreams. I want her to remember specific times that we shared together times, we laughed, times, we cried, times, we spent discussing things that were important to both of us, the times, we just held one another and watch the sunset, or here’s one for how I want my colleagues, the people that work with me, my company, I say are one of my colleagues to remember my servant leadership, my integrity, my humility, and my commitment to having fun, I want them to remember how much they learned and grew as a result of knowing me. Most of all, I want them to remember how I stood for the greatness in them, and empower them to accomplish more than they ever thought possible. So I do one of those for each major category of my life. And the second question is, what is important to you? Now you probably know what’s important to your spouse, you know, what’s important to your boss, you know, what’s important to your customers? You know, we all know what’s important to other people, but this is a question about you what’s important to you. Because if we don’t know what our own priorities are, that it’s gonna be very difficult to order our life in a way that gets us what we want to get. So we have you identified the major categories of your life, and it’s going to be different depending on the season of life you’re in, like, once you guys have kids, that’s gonna be a completely different game than the one you’re playing now. And your priorities will shift, you know, your your priorities can shift if you’ve got a new business, you know, all of us that have been through that certainly understand that. But you know, for me, for example, you know, and by the way, once we identify the different categories, and we asked you to rank them, so for me, you know, it’s God first, it’s me next. And you know why? It’s like, when the flight attendant comes out, does the little thing before you take off, they say, put the face mask, you know, the oxygen mask on yourself first, before you attempt to help somebody else. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re not going to be of much use to anybody else. So the purpose is not being selfish, the purpose is to be of service. So I got to take care of me to be of service to somebody else. So to get that, that list down, and I tell you another quick story. During the recession, when I was the CEO of Thomas Nelson, I took a much needed vacation after you know, months of hand to hand combat slugging it out, the recession Board gave me the approval guild I took off for Denver on a Friday afternoon, we changed planes in Dallas, I made the mistake of checking my email, there was a message for the Chairman of my board said, Hey, change your plans. We need to come in and talk about an issue on Monday. And I need you to come back. And I said, I showed it to Gail, her heart sank, my heart sank we’d had all this plan. So I made a really hard decision. And it was scary. But my priorities gave me the courage to make the right decision in the face of that. I wrote him back and I said, I’m sorry, I won’t be there. My staff will be queued up to help you. But I’m going on this vacation, because I need it for the rest. And I need it for my relationship with Gail. And those two priorities. And I didn’t say this part, those two priorities come ahead of you. And, and then I turned off my email. Now, here’s the funny thing. I got back to the office. I asked my CFO, I said, What was that meeting about? He said, Look at totally could have been handled by email. It was a non event. And I almost scuttled my vacation for what was going to be a non event, but because I had a list of priorities, and I knew what came first, second, third and fourth, and I knew for me at that time work was about number five on my list. It it became a clear decision for me. It gave me clarity, and courage.

Host
I love that and that is unique. So well. You’re not going to get the third answer here. So what is next for Michael Hyatt?

Michael Hyatt
I always want to make and I got this idea from Dan Sullivan. But I always want to make my future bigger than my past. So I have a 25 year plan, because I think it’s important to constantly be creating value constant It’ll be stretching and growing. To me happiness comes not in attaining anything. It comes in the pursuit of the stuff that’s important to me and the stuff I feel called to pursue. So it’s, it’s feeling like I’m growing, feel like I’m progressing. And for me, it’s really right now at this period of my life, it’s about building my team and pouring into their lives. So I’ve got a small team of about 15 people, and they’re my top priority. I just want to build into their lives and make them great.

Host
Michael, I just want to say thank you for who you are and what you do and just for the countless number of people that you inspire every day.

Michael Hyatt
Thanks, great to be with you.