The Secret Society of Success

When your first employee helps you grow your business from $250,000 to $16.5 million, you would think he would want to stay in what appeared to be a dream job and ride the wave of success.

Tim Schurrer had a different dream and another path he wants to follow.

Tim was the COO at StoryBrand where he worked alongside Donald Miller, and in a previous role, worked alongside one of my heroes, Steve Jobs. Tim just released his new book, “The Secret Society of Success: Stop Chasing the Spotlight and Learn to Enjoy Your Work (and Life) Again.”

Brian: Take us back to the beginning. You're living your book before you wrote it. Tell us a story about how you got from where you were to now?

Tim: I am so grateful for that time working under Steve Jobs and spending almost a decade with Don, two visionary leaders.

And I do pinch myself that I had the opportunity to do that.

We all know the story of Apollo Eleven, right? You have Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

What's interesting to me is a lot of people don't know there was a third astronaut on that mission, and his name was Michael Collins.

Here you have Michael Collins. The guy, Ubers Neil, and Buzz to the Moon and drops them off so those guys can do various paths on the Moon's surface while he in the command module, orbits the Moon something like 26 times until the guys are ready to be picked up and brought back to Earth.

This would make this a pretty miserable story because when Mike Collins gets back to Earth, he sits down with the press and says, "It sure would have been nice to walk on the moon;" if he acted like a victim.

It would have been such a human response. I feel like we all would have empathized with him at that moment and likely shared the same thoughts if we had we had been in his shoes.

What's beautiful to me and why I love the story so much is how he responded. How he responded was to talk about how content he was to have had one of those three seats.

He was happy to be part of the team. What I think is so interesting is we live in this world, in this environment that says to be successful, we must step into the spotlight or climb the ladder.

There are many of us who think, "To be happy, do we have to walk on the moon?"

Now I feel like I am operating out of my sweet spot and have had some amazing experiences.

I've learned that success for me is no longer this idea of fame, money, power, or stepping into the spotlight, and I am defining success more in line with other people who have shown me a new way to live.

People like Michael Collins would say, "Hey, I'm part of the team doing our job with excellence. That is what success can look like."

I wrote this book because of this narrative that I feel like we're all up against in this discussion, this conversation that I want to start for people, which is, "If we're hearing all this, how do we go about living any differently? What is Another way to define success?"

There's a big conversation happening, but I don't feel like there are many people giving answers.

Brian: You're right. I think people are too focused on significant outcomes. Think about the growth that StoryBrand experienced, from $250,000 in the first year to $16.5 million in revenue. That's a dream that many business owners have.

At the same time, that comes along with a lot of challenges and a lot of headaches, and a lot of obstacles— not only just running the business — but also the fact that other people have this expectation of living up to their definition of success.

Tim: Yeah, that's it. What we're up against is this idea of the spotlight mindset.

I define the spotlight mindset as this unhealthy desire for attention and recognition. It's the thing that's tripping us up.

There are many ways that the spotlight mindset can disrupt our lives and a handful of what I call symptoms of a spotlight mindset.

• Comparison. There's always the next level. When you achieve a certain peak, there's always another to chase after. There's this idea of comparison. Are we constantly measuring ourselves against someone else to define our success or contentment? Comparison is one of the symptoms of the spotlight mindset.
• Striving.Do you struggle to find contentment in your life? Does striving leave you on a restless pursuit for more?
• Damaged relationships. Does money, fame, or status trump other things in your life? Are your relationship suffering because of it?

It's just interesting that often when we achieve these metrics of business success, revenue growth at the top of the charts, that other parts of our lives are suffering.

What is success?

If I were to ask you, "What is success?" I think it's important for each of us to have an answer.

If we're unaware of our motivations, the spotlight mindset takes over. This unhealthy desire for attention and recognition can lead us on a destructive path if we're not careful.

Do you believe you need a bigger stage to have a life of significance?

Tim: I used to believe that to be successful, you need to be standing on stage in front of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people.

But what I'm learning today is that you don't need a stage to make an impact.

I've learned that if we focus on the work itself, fall in love with the craft, and be so concerned about helping someone else win — and not as concerned about what we will get in response — we can create some beautiful things.

We don't need a stage to make an impact. What if one life at a time was enough? Creating impact in one life can be the starting point for all of us.

There's so much more to this conversation with Tim Schurrer in this episode of Everybody Brands. Listen in your favorite podcast channel or in the player above.

If you want to know how to live a life of significance and success and join the Secret Society of Success, go to Secretsocietybook.com, which has everything you need to buy the book and connect with Tim.

You can connect with Tim on Linkedin and his website.