#27: Love Your Journey with Jason Todd

Guest Introduction (0:00)

Sean Weisbrot:

Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build Podcast. Our guest today is Jason Todd, a self-taught programmer who, before graduating high school, built a computer program for his dad’s trucking business, making it among the industry’s first to distribute rates in an automated way.

By the age of 19, he was fast tracked for management at a multi-million-dollar retailer after proven sales success against larger markets. Since then, he has started numerous multi-million-dollar businesses like Alpine Home Air Products and has coached dozens of entrepreneurs. Jason is currently the founder and Managing Director of Thinker Ventures, which connects aspiring entrepreneurs, small businesses and mid marketing executives with education, opportunity, and implementation services across a variety of disciplines. He is also the host of Coffee with Humans, a social experiment where strangers have a few minutes to say hello before going live and having real, raw and the most random conversations you’ll hear on the internet. This is how I met Jason, and the experience was incredible.

In this very interesting conversation, filled with copious amounts of laughter, we discussed the amazing way his family dealt with internal arguments that set him up for life. And despite this, he still found himself struggling to understand other people. The most important lesson he’s learned in life, how he learned to become a salesman, how did he get the idea to start his for his company, what was the hardest lesson he learned from starting his first company? And much more. I know you’ll love this episode as much as I did, so let’s give Jason a warm welcome.

Welcome to We Live to Build. My name is Sean Weisbrot and I’m an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor based in Asia for over twelve years. Join us every week to fast track your personal growth so you can meet the ever-increasing demands of the company or companies you are passionately building. Time waits for no one. So, let’s get started now.

Getting to know Jason (2:25)

Sean Weisbrot:

Thank you for taking the time to join us today, Jason. So, before we get into anything specific, why don’t you tell everyone who you are, what you do, what you stand for.

Jason Todd:

So, who I am? I’m Jason Todd. I am a father; I am a business owner. I am a social entrepreneur in some ways. I have launched, run, grown and sold multiple companies. I’ve advised hundreds or maybe a thousand entrepreneurs at this point in time. And I am also the host of Coffee with Humans, a global international video cast where I meet a stranger and then an hour later, we are friends. And the whole thing has been live streamed to the internet.

Sean Weisbrot:

And that’s how we met, through a platform. I think it’s called Audry. Was that it? Audry.io?

Jason Todd:

I think it was Audry.

Sean Weisbrot:

So, this platform, Audry, allows hosts to find guests. And I think you messaged me and I was like, “hey, this sounds interesting.” And we went and we did it. And it was the most random thing I think I’ve done in a very long time and yet it was actually quite fun. So, thank you for that experience.

Jason Todd:

Well, good, I was glad to have you on. One of my first guests, she had this background, I thought it was background sitting on what looked to be a boat and I said, “Hey, is that a fake background?” Everybody uses these fake backgrounds on Zoom calls. And I was thinking, how the hell did you figure out how to do that on street yard and no, she lives on a boat. Then all of sudden her husband came on. So now I’ve had a husband and a wife on who both live on a boat in Seattle. Interesting, for sure. Are they the most interesting? No, but from the terms like living on a boat, yeah, that’s pretty darn interesting. So I think everybody is interesting in their own rate.

Sean Weisbrot:

So, what made you want to get into entrepreneurship?

Jason Todd:

I think that it’s always been in my blood. I don’t know that I knew it could be any different. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, let’s say, or an entrepreneur. My dad started a trucking company a long time ago, and, maybe 50 years or something like that. And so, I grew up in a family of people who just did their thing. They launched companies and worked out of them.

So, I’ve always created things. I think that’s the basic of it. I got a computer at a young age as a self-taught programmer and started writing software, I think, out of that idea of, well, if I can create all this stuff, then it’s just a short jump from people wanting to buy it. I never went to school or something like that, where somebody’s like, “Hey, you could be an entrepreneur.” I think they have that right now. You introduce kids to entrepreneurship? Well, I was introduced to it already. I didn’t know I couldn’t.

Sean Weisbrot:

So, did you ever have a role in your father’s business?

Jason Todd:

Yeah, I did at one point in time, and I was always offered, and there’s always a place here for you if you wanted. And I was in customer service at one point in time. Admittedly, I might not be great at customer service. I don’t know. I also worked in retail at one point in time, and I think I was pretty good. And I was on track to be the youngest sales manager in Best Buy’s history, which was cool at the time, until I realized I hated the hours of retail.

But in my dad’s business, I was working customer service, answering the phones, and there’s a particular time that I felt that turned out to be integral to my future. And it was when a gentleman who called up, and apparently, he had been calling up a lot, good customer and stuff, and I said, “Thanks for calling Todd Transit. This is Jason. How may I help you?” And he said, “Pick up,” and I said, “Thanks for calling Todd Transit. This is Jason. How may I help you?” He goes, “Pick up.” And I said, “Thanks for calling Todd Transit. This is Jason. How may I help you?”

Well, the whole time I thought he was saying “speak up,” but he wasn’t. He was saying, “Pick up.” And if you’re in the trucking industry, a pickup is super important because that’s when you pick stuff up. And he just wanted to tell me the details of that. And I was just getting louder and louder in the midst of all of these customer service people who have been there for years, and one lady turns to me is, Jason, you need me to take that? And I was like, I think so. She took it, and she’s like, “Oh, hi, John, how are you doing?” And she knew the guy right out of the gate. And I was like, “Oh, shit, I’m never going to survive over the phone.” So, I quickly got out of that.

But in the meantime, I was writing software for my dad. I wrote one of the industry’s first rating systems where we would send out disks to people and they can load up the rates on their computers. And then, I think I had it so we could download new rates, and then you could click a button that would print out what’s called a Bill of Lading. But that was all when I was in high school. So that was a long time ago.

Sean Weisbrot:

Yeah. When you said disks, it sounds like this was either the very early days of the Internet or maybe right before the Internet started becoming a thing.

Jason Todd:

It was before Internet use became available. It was during the times of BBS’s, maybe shortly after that the Internet was available. People just didn’t know how to use it. People didn’t have email addresses and all sorts of stuff. But yes, I wrote the software because I knew the Internet was coming.

Sean Weisbrot:

So, it’s interesting about your story. When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time around computers in my computer network. We had about, I think, 1,400 computers for 6,500 students. And I spent so much time just fixing problems for the teachers and ghosting and tearing them apart, and fixing the networking issues, all sorts of things that I realized before I went to college that I did not want a career in IT. And even though I loved hardware, it wasn’t a passion.

I ended up working in my dad’s business. He’s a dentist. I worked in the front office. I did a lot of calling patients to confirm their appointments, talking to insurance companies to file claims for patients, and collecting money from people, making them feel better if they were afraid of the X-ray machine or things like that. And I loved it. I just really enjoyed talking to people. Like you were saying, the coworker of yours, she knew his name. I memorized everybody’s first and last names. I could tell you their life stories. It was so easy for me to remember all of these things. So, it’s so interesting how we basically had the opposite kind of experience.

Jason Todd:

I was terrible on the phone. I’m such a visual learner. I don’t think I could tell you at the time that that’s exactly what it was, but I need to see things to be able to make sense of them. I can hear them, but I’ll just catch the gist of it. I won’t catch the details, all the details and things like that. I’ll hold on them for a little while, but my brain will forget them or file them away quickly, because I’m very good in the overall view of what something should look like and how we’re going to get there. But that’s not the detail works.

So, like, when somebody saying on the phone, at least when somebody’s saying, we’re going to do a pick up from here to here with this number and that’s that number, and here’s how many weights and skids and all other stuff, and they’re just kind of rattling it all up. I would probably be a legit, terrible air traffic controller if you ever listen to it. I would crash. “Guys, I’m just coming in to clear the way. I got to go.” That’s my thought. Maybe I could become better at it, but maybe I just never gave customer service on the phone enough time.

Sean Weisbrot:

Well, you know, we all have our own things. I can spend 10 hours a day on calls talking to people, and it doesn’t bother me. I don’t get, like, fatigue, as people would say, zoom fatigue, where some people can handle that. So, you know, we’re all different. That’s why companies are so interesting because if everybody was great at everything, then nobody would be good at anything. So, you need to have your customer service specialist or your sales specialist, or your marketing specialist.

How he started his companies (10:38)

Sean Weisbrot:

So, when did you get the idea to start your first company?

Jason Todd:

I would say that my first company was way back when I was in 6th grade. I created a system to sell fish, an ERP system my friend and I were going to sell. ERP is a little bit loaded, but I created a point-of-sale system at least to sell fish and inventory them from my friend’s pond on an old IBM 286 or 386 or something, maybe even as a 486 time. I was dreaming of business. Then I got to the point where I was selling the ability to write code. My dad paid me to write code for his company before I work technically at the company. And then I was doing IT work. For some reason I got into IT work. I thought I know computers like to fix computers that can help people. And so, I run around and people pay me by the hour to fix their stuff.

So, after dabbling in all of these things, figuring out a lot of what I didn’t care about, I was working at they called themselves a cross media firm. So basically, it was just we do the internet stuff and we do video work and we do graphic design. That’s what it was. We do all the design things, name them, we do them. That company, I was a technical account executive there. So, I would go in with the sales guys or a salesperson who didn’t know anything about the internet and because I could cross both chasms and I was good with people, I would explain to the customer what we are going to be able to do for them and then I would write it back, go back and write a little text back and then send it off to the developers. So, I was kind of a transmission between the techy people and the people-people.

I got tired of selling people on ideas that they didn’t understand and I thought for the amount of effort that I’m putting in here to sell people on stuff that they don’t understand, I could just do this myself. So, I with my business partner started a heating and air conditioning distributorship online. He knew a lot about heating and air conditioning and I knew a lot about everything else. We launched that company October 2002. The beginning of October 2002 we had the idea for what we were going to sell over drinks one night and by the end of October I had written the back-end systems to allow him to input all the products and I wrote the point-of-sale system that took the orders and process the credit cards and sent through notifications to distributor who’s dropshipping for us. We took our first order at the end of October 2002.

Important lessons Jason picked up (13:03)

Sean Weisbrot:

What was the hardest thing you learned from starting this company?

Jason Todd:

Well, in the process of starting a company, the idea of hard work and that kind of stuff, where you’re going to work basically two jobs, programming all night and strategizing on the weekends, and then going back to your day job in the daytime. I did that for about eight months or so before I left the job I was at and gave myself a raise and started working for myself. I tend to think that a lot of people say, “well, I didn’t realize it was going to be quite as much hard work, quite as much pushing.”

But I think for me, the lessons, or one of the great lessons in that was, don’t take things so personally. I think I had a hard time with personalities that I couldn’t understand, couldn’t manage. And so, I think one of the lessons was figure out how to disagree and expect disagreement to come to the best solutions. I think I was unprepared for the amount of disagreement that would arise. When you have a business partner and the idea that you just have to get through it, you have to expect the disagreement, sometimes you have to expect heated disagreements and trust the process that, “hey, if we can bring our best information forward, figure out what we agree to, we can do something great.” Instead of maybe feeling like the point is to figure out how to not disagree or figure out how to not disagree in a heated way or something like that.

There were lessons from other folks too. I’m reading a book. The name escapes me right now, but it’s from early on, google exec talking about some of the heated disagreements that happened behind the scenes at Google. People fiercely fighting for what they believed needed to happen or didn’t need to happen. I’ll speak for myself, but I certainly tried to avoid heated disagreements, and I don’t know if that was beneficial. I was just scared to be in heated disagreements, wasn’t my background, didn’t know how to function in that, so I probably would have done some things differently. If that was a lesson to be learned, I learned that lesson or was learning that lesson. The other lessons were just kind of like, we’ll figure this stuff out.

Sean Weisbrot:

There’s definitely a big difference between figuring out how to not disagree and figuring out how to come together in order to solve issues in order to move forward. I was just interviewing someone recently named Jenny who has a background in psychology like myself, and so we were talking about how we use psychology in everyday life, especially with any stakeholders, and I feel like psychology is something everybody should learn.

Jason Todd:

I spent time on what’s called mock trial way back in high school. So, I would learn how to stand up in front of somebody and put my argument together and be able to present the argument. The thing I was always afraid of was anger. That’s been with me for a long time. Anger and doing something wrong, those two things. And if you put the two together, I’m afraid to do something wrong, and I’m also afraid to have somebody be angry with me about it. My mechanism is to retreat, not to engage in a healthy way or at the time I wasn’t, I’m much different now. It’s been nearly 20 years since they started that company.

I think a lot of that can’t be taught except through experience. You can give people pointers, you can give people documents, and you can give them textbooks, and you can give them tests. But until they get themselves in that situation, there’s no way, there’s absolutely no way to learn the lessons. It’s kind of like when people look at their kids, they finally get fed up enough with their kid’s questions or whatever, and the person says, well, you’ll know, when you’re an adult, as an asinine thing to say to a person, it’s zero help at all, because they can’t know. The answer is they cannot know until they’re an adult, and there’s no amount of telling them that they’ll figure it out when they’re an adult that will speed that up. You must wait until those times and go through those experiences to learn.

I think one of the lessons is, for me at least this is where I’m at right now, is to treat everything as a learning opportunity and just enjoy the journey. Quit trying to settle things all the time. If I’m looking for things to be settled, then I’m likely to try and speed up disagreement. Let’s get this disagreement over. Let’s get us to a point where we’re not angry with each other. Let’s get us to a point where we agree. The whole point it’s, in my case, would get bent around, I think, if I’m digesting my own experiences correctly. But I think I was looking to try and minimize the screen and maximize settling on things instead of looking for best ways to do things. I don’t know if that’s true entirely, but I do know that that is a lesson. It is certainly a lesson. It’s a social lesson that I took from working with people of vastly differing backgrounds.

Sean Weisbrot:

Why do you think your go to reaction was to retreat?

Jason Todd:

That’s what I learned as a kid. That kind of stuff is ingrained in us from a very young age. It’s not something I processed. I really didn’t know it. I didn’t know that that’s what I was doing, not at the time.

Sean Weisbrot:

Do you remember anything specific?

Jason Todd:

Yeah, I know a story that my mom told me that I have no recollection of. My mom told me at one point in time, “Well, Jason, there was a time when you got in trouble for something, something minor.” Didn’t even know. I don’t even know what it was, but it was minor. And mom got upset with me, and she told me so, and maybe hours later, she says it, she’s looking around the house for me, and I’m gone. She has no idea where I’m at, and she’s getting all worried to the point where it’s like, “Where’s Jason?” Nobody knows. Jason took off, and she found me under her bed. Whatever. Jason had retreated under a bed and was hiding under a bed.

So that physically, metaphorically, psychologically, same thing. I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want to have somebody be angry with me, because for whatever reason, I learned the pathway, the pathway of my brain is leave, hide, hide out. And it’s funny, because in my house, which is really interesting, actually, the other pathway I learned is that people disagree. Well, what’s going to happen is that mom and dad are going to sit us down in the family room with me and my brother and sister. We’re going to sit there and talk it out. Nobody’s leaving that family room until we figure this thing out, and then we’re going to pray, and then we’re going to leave.

And so, it’s really interesting that the two pathways exist in my mind, the only way I know how to resolve things is talk them out. But in anger, I didn’t know how to exist in a point of anger when somebody else is angry. My first path was, “Oh, gosh,” first of all, we have to stop being angry, because I feel like I want to retreat. And as an adult, you can’t retreat, certainly not in your own company. You can’t just retreat, not really. You can try, and you’re going to screw things up. So, the answer is you just can’t. You have to stay in it and you have to figure out how to function effectively in high emotional environments. That’s what I’ve learned over time to be able to do function effectively in high emotional environments or highly emotional environments, if you want to say that way.

Sean Weisbrot:

So, who is the one that said, let’s sit down and talk about it? In your family? Was your mom or dad?

Jason Todd:

Mom would lead the charge, but dad was on board for sure.

Sean Weisbrot:

How do you think you learned to retreat then?

Jason Todd:

I don’t know. Probably because I was a third kid. I was the last kid. And I think some of the relationally, a lot of the arguments that we had were not between me and somebody else. It was between my brother and sister who were very close in age. So, the two of them going through high school as teenagers, people just fight. Kids do that. Like, my brother and I would try and beat the shit out of each other, and he would always win because he was six years older than me and he’d locked me. It was all in good fun. I was terrified, but it was all in good fun in retrospect, that he would stick me in the toy box downstairs and sit on the top until I couldn’t handle it anymore. So maybe that’s where I got my claustrophobia from too. I don’t know.

But I think I watched all of these events from the outside. I might be overthinking this, but if I had to hypothesize, I would say, “Well, I’m seeing arguments that happen from the outside between two teenagers and teenagers and parents. I’m not party to this, but I’m in the same space. And I don’t know how to process this, so, Jason, just stay out of the way.” Just get out of the way. Let them do their thing, right? And as a kid, before you even processing, I wasn’t consciously making these decisions, but I’m certain I was just like, “Oh, shit. Get out of there. Your brother and sister going at it.” It wasn’t anything egregious. It’s just kids doing their thing. Yeah. I think that’s probably where it develops.

Sean Weisbrot:

I know my brother and I would get into physical altercations as kids. One time, I think he was nine, and I was, like, six or seven, and he wanted to sit on the couch, and I was in the spot he wanted.

Jason Todd:

Right.

Sean Weisbrot:

I was playing Super Nintendo, and he really wanted to be in that spot, and he wanted to be playing Super Nintendo. The end result was that he elbowed me in the face and one of my teeth came out. It was a baby tooth, so whatever. It didn’t matter.

So of course, I’ve got blood coming down in my mouth, and my mom’s, like, freaking out. Dad is at work, at his office, and she called him up, and she’s like, “What am I supposed to do?” He’s like, “no problem.” So I’m not any stranger to that.

Jason Todd:

If we couple that thought in my life, if we couple this thought that I see arguments, I see disagreements that I’m not necessarily party to, but maybe I am in some tangential way, and I can retreat. I do retreat. And then, I also have this creative energy and this idea that as a six years difference between me and my brother, I’m almost like an oldest child. If I combine that with this idea of, I could just go off and do my own thing, that’s what I do. I go off and do my own thing. Why? Because I don’t have to argue with anybody about it.

The influence of family (23:08)

Sean Weisbrot:

In my family, I’m the youngest, right? But there’s only two of us, I never really witnessed that, kind of like you did, and my parents were always very positive and encouraging, and they both have very high IQs and EQS. So, I was very fortunate because they were always like when they tuck us into bed, you know, take a few minutes, tell me anything that you’re thinking, anything at all. I’m not going to judge you. I’m just here to listen and to love you. And I was extremely fortunate looking back at my childhood, because I grew up thinking that that’s how everybody lived.

And when I became an adult and started interacting with other people from different countries and cultures, especially even people in America, I realized, “Holy crap.” I thought my experience was normal. The reality is, my experience is abnormal. It’s in the minority. And then, I was even more thankful for how amazing my parents were in not physically abusing me or sexually abusing me or psychologically manipulating me in any way. Very, very, very lucky.

And I think that’s also helped me to be a better leader and a better partner for my…

Jason Todd:

Yeah, you don’t have as much baggage. You’re not carrying around a big tote of stuff behind you, and more importantly, you’re not carrying around a bunch of things that you don’t want, that you are afraid to look at and afraid for other people to see.

There’s a book called Don’t Take It to Work. I don’t remember who wrote it, but the book Don’t Take It to Work, and it says, the premise of the book is that the roles that we played in our home are the roles that we will play in our work environments. Why? Because whenever we get people together, there’s always a father figure, like somebody who’s in charge. There’s always somebody who’s the softie. There’s always the somebody who makes the cakes for everybody. There’s always the somebody who does the right. There’s always the Joker, right? There’s these roles that we learn to play in our families that we learn to play in our other environments, and then when we start to play those in those environments, we go to the model that we saw as our family. When you hit real life, and you’re like, “oh, my gosh, no.” There’s actually a person who didn’t live with a father or lived with abusive father.

And so, when I come in as an authoritarian, kind of like, I say, if I’m in charge of an organization, well, who’s the last person I saw in charge of something was dad. And so, if I start acting like my dad, that’s not necessarily a model that somebody else is going to accept or understand, because their dad they hated their dad, or they hated their mom, or they hated the Joker in the corner. There are all sorts of ways that people like you say they grow up. We think that that’s the way the world works, and we hit the real world, we’re like, “Oh, my gosh,” that’s not at all how you view things.

And at that point in time, we have to take a really advised look and say, “Well, do we need to view it that way? Or what’s the end goal here? Do we have to figure out how to get along, or do we have to figure out how to get something done?” And the two don’t necessarily have to be the same. We don’t necessarily have to get along to get something done. You know, I’d rather I’d like everybody to be happy, but in the absence of being happy with. Let’s do great work.

Becoming an advisor (26:23)

Sean Weisbrot:

So, when did you decide to switch from being an operator to being an adviser?

Jason Todd:

Let’s say my first real company was the heating and air conditioning distributorship. I sold that in 2011. Near the end of that, I was thinking, “Okay, well, what could we do as an organization or individuals to do other things to it?” Like, how can we leverage this success into other things? And so, the idea of starting other ventures had been hatched already. I sold that company and started the other organization which was designed to advise and help start other companies.

Sean Weisbrot:

But why did you choose that rather than starting another company for yourself?

Jason Todd:

Because I’m a really good creator, and I didn’t want to operate necessarily the day-to-day of another company. I think it was maybe a little unadvised. I don’t think I would have done it. I certainly wouldn’t do the same thing now. But yeah, I think I wanted to just go off and do a lot of stuff, create new things. I’m a very good creator. I’ve always been creating my entire life and creating stuff.

Sean Weisbrot:

You chose to help other people rather than start another company again because I guess you experienced it and you’re like, “well, did that.”

Jason Todd:

So, I started the company to help other companies. So, we had strategy, technology and communications in one house. And I thought, well, if I could combine those three things, those are the things that small and midsized companies are not necessarily good at. They don’t have teams of people to do these things. So, I thought, well, that’s what I’ll do, strategy, technology and communications. And if we can put these things together in one place, then as the organization grows and it needs these things in different proportions to one another, we could deploy those disciplines into the organizations.

My other thought was, well, we could start other things for ourselves, which was ill advised, I think. Because, and there’s probably a bit of hubris in that because I thought, “Well, I did this once, certainly can do this again. I did one really great, amazing hit in a certain industry, who’s to say you could do that really great, amazing hit in any other industry?” It took a long time to make a lot of mistakes to get to that point. Do you want to do that all again? That’s where it takes me back.

I’m a good creator, kind of like an artist. A great artist probably, going to go off on a limb here, makes art and thinks, “I hope somebody will buy that. Or maybe if they don’t buy it, fuck them because I like my art.” That might be what an artist think. That’s a terrible business model. So as a creator of things, “Hey, I’d like to create that thing. I hope somebody will buy it.” That’s a bad way to look at things. Look at it the other way around, instead. Figure out what the market wants and then go create that.

Learn to enjoy the journey (29:00)

Sean Weisbrot:

What’s Something I haven’t asked you. That you wish I would ask.

Jason Todd:

Nothing. Don’t ask me more questions.

Sean Weisbrot:

All right, I guess we’re done here, then.

Jason Todd:
I’m not as an open book as one might think I am. It’s been a journey, you know. Life is a journey. I’m at a point right now where my phrase for myself is, love your journey. That is a kindness to me. It’s me speaking kindly to Jason. Love your journey. All the things that I’ve done, and I’ve done a lot of things. In fact, somebody looked at my LinkedIn profile and then watched this eight-minute video I had about me, and they say, “Wow, you’ve lived, like, multiple lifetimes, it seems.” It’s like, “Yeah, Kind of have, I’ve done a lot of stuff, and I know a lot of stuff about a lot of things,” it wasn’t so I could be interesting at parties. It is because I just enjoy so much learning and discovering and creating and doing stuff, and I feel like there’s so much out there to do. The challenge that I have been is slowing that down and sticking to something or finding out what I’m really great at, and that’s been a journey. But, hey, I’ve been on it for now 43 years on the planet, so it’s coming together.

Sean Weisbrot:

And hopefully, another, at least another 43.

Jason Todd:

We’ll see, the world is such a big place, and I’d love to see it. Which brings me back to that Coffee with Human’s thing. You mentioned Coffee with Humans, and we talked about Coffee with Humans. Coffee with Humans is all about two strangers. They meet. We meet about eight minutes before we go live and then spend an hour talking, internationally.

And I would love to then take that on the road to go to some place and unpack that for all the other people on the planet who will never go see that place, who will think they can’t physically or they physically can’t. I’d love to be able to explode all that while having those raw, unedited conversations with people, total strangers who can become friends. I think in the creative process, if I keep my eyes on continually opening that door to go meet people and do things I like, that I like, I recharge on that. Just gets me going. I get so excited.

Follow up with Jason (31:01)

Sean Weisbrot:

So, what is something that you feel very passionate about that you want to share with everybody besides the love your journey and the Coffee with Humans and all that?

Jason Todd:
Honestly, I think that’s it. That’s the thing that’s on my mind is passion right now. Be kind to yourself. The world is a difficult place sometimes, and if anybody’s going to be kind to you, stop looking for kindness outside of yourself. Be kind to yourself. Love on yourself for a while. So, here’s a thought. People are attracted to other people who are kind. Why not just be the greatest kindness giver to yourself? Because you’ve got to live with yourself, and it’s really, really hard to be lovable to anybody else unless you love yourself. It’s also really hard to run an organization if you don’t love yourself. If you’re not kind to yourself, it’s really hard to make mistakes and come back from them if you’re not kind to yourself. It’s really hard to stand out in front of people and be willing to give of yourself if you’re not kind yourself. In that whole idea, loving your journey is love yourself in the middle of that. I think that’s a good foundation to work from.

Sean Weisbrot:

Loving myself is something that I place a very high priority on, and I tell a lot of people that I come into contact with as well. Like, you need to love yourself or nobody else is going to love you. And even if you love yourself, a lot of people probably won’t love you, and that’s okay because screw them. As long as you love yourself, that’s all that matters. One of the questions that I ask every single one of the people that I do an interview with when I go to hire them is, do you love yourself?

Because of my background, I’m looking a lot at their body language and not just the words they use, but the whole picture. The most common thing is people laugh as if like, what are you talking about? Of course, I love myself. But just because they say that or do that doesn’t mean they actually believe the words that they’re saying.

Where can people follow up with you?

Jason Todd:

They can find me at therealjtodd.com or coffeewithhumans.com.

Sean Weisbrot:

Great. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. And there’s one thing I say at the end of every episode and that’s entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. So, take care of yourself every day. Thank you.