This week I am talking to Zachary Green, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former Firefighter, author of ‘Warrior Entrepreneur’ book who has had an interesting career and some major events and adversity that he has had to overcome. Imagine being told by a lot of people including teachers that you would not amount to anything. Zachary refused to accept this notion and took this as a challenge rather than a description of who he was.
We talk about the value that crisis in your life bring to your resilience and how early childhood experiences may not be good enough to prepare all of us for the adversity we fave in our lives. As Zachary puts it, it is our crucible
“And the crucible is that crisis in your life or everything you’ve done up to that point in time is not enough to get you to that next level. At the bottom of the crucible is the Abyss where death, darkness and failure lies and through the top of the crucible, when you prevail through that is you have to transform”
Once he left the Marine Corps he joined the fire fighting service and identified a big problem for these emergency responders navigating dark poorly lit environments and from these created a brand new company out of the back of his car to create glow in the dark solutions to help – something that became a large successful company.
We find common ground in his assertion that entrepreneur of startup companies do not always make good leaders of those organizations and he has an interesting perspective of looking at new companies much like parents of children that ultimately need to survive without their parents and another critical juncture when his company despite success was failing.
One Year Death Anniversary
Perhaps in part thanks to his experiences and training he was able to face a near death experience when he came down with COVID19 bringing him and his breathing to his knees and as he put it the abyss and a near death experience. As you will hear he recalls with a visceral reality his being unable to breathe.
Listen in to hear his insights on coping with Mental Health and you may be surprised to hear that the stress on Entrepreneurs is so high that their rate of mental health problems exceeds that in veterans who are well recognized as having significant mental health challenges especially post PTSD. He suggest some incremental steps to resilience that include
- Regular Exercise
- Regular mindfulness or (transcendental) meditation
- Helping Others
And if you are looking for more suggestions you can buy his book here (and he offers a 50% discount with the coupon “PODCAST2021″)
Things that are bad are actually makes you better and stronger
Listen live at 4:00 AM, 12:00 Noon or 8:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday for the next week at HealthcareNOW Radio. After that, you can listen on demand (See podcast information below.) Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheIncrementalist.
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Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden
Today I’m delighted to be joined by Zachary green. He is a US Marine Corps veteran, a former firefighter, and author of the warrior entrepreneur, Zachary, thanks for joining me today.
Zachary Green
It’s a real honor to be here and having this conversation.
Nick van Terheyden
So you have a pretty interesting background, some unique experiences that have contributed to a lot of the things that you have done. Tell the listeners a little bit about that history and your journey to where you are now.
Zachary Green
Certainly, you know, growing up, I had a lot of challenges. As a child, I had very severe ADHD went to about five or six different schools growing up, I was told by a lot of teachers and other people, I was never going to mount to anything. And, you know, that helped both motivate me, but also helped shape the character that I think I have today. Now, it’s funny, because when you’re younger, they called ADHD. But when you get older, and you get out of school, it’s called multitasking. And then it’s this great thing that everyone says, Oh, he’s a great multitasking entrepreneur, you can do all this stuff. I always had a deep love for our country and the Marine Corps especially. And I joined the Marine Corps when I turned 18 While I was still going to college, and that’s where I really started to see this, this this arch of the what the Warriors way is, I guess I would call that and that is resistance and challenge helps prepare you for your crucible. Now each of us can have different crucibles in our life, it could be a death, that could be a divorce, it could be a toxic relationship at work, it could be a whole bunch of things. For me, my crucible was, I got to Parris Island, in the Marines very difficult. And I realized I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. And a lot of the other kids down there, even though he didn’t have all the benefits that I had growing up with my family and where I lived, you know, some of these kids are coming from the coal mines of West Virginia and the projects of New Orleans and they were out there just thriving. And what I realize is that that resistance that they had growing up, better prepared them for the crucible of Parris Island. And the crucible is that crisis in your life or everything you’ve done up to that point in time is not enough to get you to that next level. At the bottom of the crucible is the Abyss where death, darkness and failure lies and through the top of the crucible, when you prevail through that is you have to transform and in the Marine Corps is very regimented. They want you to transform from a civilian into a Marine Corps warrior. After I got out of the Marine Corps in 1999, I kind of missed the brother and camaraderie and then September 11 happened and I felt really guilty. So I joined our local volunteer fire department. And in as a firefighter at my full time job was at Eli Lilly, I was in brand development and marketing. I got lost in the fire. It was a really horrifying situation. And I wanted to try to find a way to solve the problem that firefighters accounts are being disoriented in the dark and not seen around. And I invented this glow in the dark material that we could put on helmets and tools, started selling it out of the trunk of my car and over about a 10 year period grew into about a $30 million company. So the book warrior entrepreneur is the journey that I took from a high school kid that had a lot of problems to transform through my crucible and Parris Island. And then my second crucible was when I got a call about three years ago for my CFO telling me that we were going out of business, we didn’t have enough money to make payroll, we had a bunch of vendors that weren’t paying us on time, I had what I thought was a heart attack, it actually turned out to be a panic attack. But that was my wake up call. And my transformation that I made during my second crucible was I stepped down as CEO of the company that I started, I actually brought in somebody else, I shook up the management team a little bit. And that’s when we really were able to transform and I transformed from an entrepreneur to a CEO back to saying, You know what, a lot of entrepreneurs don’t make great CEOs were visionaries, we’re multitaskers we do a lot of stuff. The CEO needs to be someone that’s really got their nose to the grindstone, and that focus and that attention to detail. And I moved into more of a visionary role in the company, and my new CEO took care of more of the day to day operations. So that’s a quick five or 10 minute overview on the last 40 days, you know,
Nick van Terheyden
the there is so much to unpack there. Not least of all, you know that so many sort of inflection points in your life. I just want to start out by saying you know, who ran my dad was a Marine you know, part of World War Two And, you know, Dutch Marines, he came and trained in Camp Pendleton, when he finally escaped. So, I’m a little bit of a fan, let’s say, so delighted to be joined by somebody that, you know, has been part of that group. So thank you, for your service and to everybody that serves the country and our freedom when you talk about some of these and
Zachary Green
that I was gonna say Semper Fi to your dad, and we are connected as brothers even though he never met each other. So love to hear more about him some other time.
Nick van Terheyden
I appreciate that. So you talk about some of the the crucibles which I think is a sort of central tenant within your concepts. And I want to dive into one because you shared in some of our previous discussions, that you have this virtual abyss, but you had a real abyss, and it was pretty recent as well. Tell us a little bit about your COVID experience.
Zachary Green
Yes, I’m coming up on my one year death anniversary. I, you know, got COVID Back in early December. It started with kind of just a little nausea. And by the second day, I was absolutely over the top Sekhmet nothing like anything I’ve ever encountered in my life. I’m a relatively healthy guy. Other than being overweight. I have really great cholesterol, blood pressure, everything else. I’m not on any medications. And for two weeks, I could not get out of bed and I couldn’t eat. I mean, I completely stopped eating. I even stopped drinking liquids. And the nausea was so ungodly, intense. I was taking every type of anti nausea medicine, nothing happened. And then right about December 20 Or so I got a little tickle on my chest. And within a couple of hours that tickle turned to a cough. We called my doctor and he’s like, yeah, it’s time to go to the hospital. By the time I was getting ready to go and my wife is gonna drive me I’m like, Honey, we got to call 911. This is I don’t think I’m gonna make it and I collapsed at that point in time. did finally get loaded in the back of the ambulance. My pulse ox was probably about in the low 90s High 80s. I was on about four liters of oxygen. When I got to the hospital. It was so packed from the other COVID patients. They were lining us up in the lobby and down the hallways, they couldn’t even get rooms for all of us. Thank God through being a fellow firefighter. Some of the other firefighters were moonlighting there and they got me attention because at this point, my pulse ox had dropped down to the 60s, they had maxed me out on six liters of oxygen was immediately transferred to the ICU or they put me on a external ventilator of 60 liters of forced air. And I just couldn’t breathe. And later that night, my mask had kind of fallen off my face. And it was the most horrifying I’ve I’ve been around death a lot in the Marines and firefighting but there’s nothing more visceral and intimate the experience I had over the next couple of hours, my breathing basically stopped, my heart rate started to drop down. The Crash Team came into the room and I had a real visceral experience of the Abyss, I started falling down this black tunnel, I literally felt myself outside of my body sitting over on the side of the room, I could see everybody I could see myself and at the bar as I was reaching for that a bit. I wanted to quit and give up. I didn’t want to die. But what I wanted to do was to stop breathing because I knew that then they could put intubate me, and then I wouldn’t have to work so hard to breathe because just the mere act of breathing was so difficult. As that was happening, I started to think about it and again I was kind of in and out of consciousness I was it was really surreal. You know, that’s not what Marines do. We don’t give up. And that was my literal abyss, not not not metaphoric, it was literal. And I got close to the abyss, I didn’t go into it. And I ended up battling back and obviously made it out and I’m healthy and safe now. But for me, you know, there’s a quote by the great philosopher Nietzsche, who says when you stare long enough into the abyss the eventually the Abyss will stare back. And what I think he believes by nurses by that is, if you stay in that toxic relationship, if you stay in that bad environment, if you’ve got those bad health benefit issues that you’re dealing with, if you stay so close to the abyss, eventually it’s gonna consume you, you’re not gonna be able to get out of it. And so for me, I touched it, I didn’t touch it, it came close to it. You have to honor the Abyss you have to recognize it’s there just like when you’re walking along a a wall, you know that if you go to the left or the right, you’re gonna fall and die, but you don’t want to think about that. You just know that it’s there and you keep walking that straight line. And for me, it really helped bring this whole concept together of my book, which is resistance challenge prepares you for your battle. You have the crucible in the crucible lies the Abyss well transformation. And then once you transform, you’re stronger, but you do have to change something in your life, you can’t get through your crucible unless you make a change. Otherwise, you’re gonna get right back there, my change in my business life was stepping down to CEO. And that was, you know, a big change and stop me from going into the crucible again. And as a result, the company really flourished.
Nick van Terheyden
So I interesting and, you know, I’m glad that you managed to recover from that I can only imagine the extraordinarily challenging experience of difficulty and breathing, you know, all of those, you know, and also that the, the sensory perception of all of that that’s a, it’s a dreadful feeling, having seen it in patients, and you know, I’m glad you’ve recovered, you obviously learned something from that, that I think is important. And it’s the fact that you can’t just ignore things. I that’s what I hear as part of this, and you’re sort of the touching of the abyss. Tell us a little bit about how you go about that process. You’ve obviously learned through multiple instances, to have these experiences, but to not allow them to overwhelm you. What’s your process? How do you go about that?
Zachary Green
So I think what’s interesting is, courage is not the absence of fear, courage is having fear, and then progressing through that fear. And as a firefighter, every time I go into a burning building, people say, Aren’t you scared, I’m like, Absolutely. The day you stop being scared going into a burning building, you need to stop being a firefighter. So but you still you go through there, and the same thing that happened, you know, going through COVID, going through all these issues in my life, is that you recognize where failure is you get outside of that comfort zone. But that’s where that warrior spirit comes in, is you honor failure, you honor the abyss, you honor that fear, for the mere fact that it’s there, and it’s not good. And you respect the fact that it’s not good, just like you respect a car that’s barreling down the street at 90 miles per hour, but you don’t go in front of the car, you just know it’s there, and you stay off to the side. And as an entrepreneur, you’re faced with so many difficult decisions, so many challenging problems. And if you don’t have that courage, and you don’t respect what that other side is, it can get really dangerous.
Nick van Terheyden
I think great insights, and, you know, important sort of approaches. For those of you just joining, I’m Dr. Nick the incrementalist today, I’m joined by Zachary green, he’s a US Marine Corps veteran and former firefighter and author of warrior entrepreneur, we were just talking about the abyss and the whole process of how you don’t allow it to overwhelm you, you accept it. But then sort of move past that. I think very much, you know, these small steps that you found a sort of incremental approach to recovery. And, you know, you launched a business, you launched it from your, the back of your car, successfully, clearly. But you made an interesting comment that I want to go back to, and that was entrepreneurs, don’t make good CEOs. And something I learned almost at the very beginning of my career, was the first thing you do with a newly launched company is fired the entrepreneurs. And I always felt that was very mean. But ultimately, I think that’s what you’re getting out, they have a place that they need to sort of step aside, maybe that’s not true across all the board. But tell us a little bit about your thoughts, because that clearly helped in terms of both you and also the company, I think
Zachary Green
I’m a big fan of analogies. I think one of the great analogies that that helped me get through that point was when you have a child, an entrepreneur gives birth to a business. Now early on, you have to do everything for the kid, you have to clean them, you have to obey them, you have to feed them, but eventually, if you carry them everywhere, they’ll never get a chance to walk. And we want them to be able to walk so we got to let them fall down. We gotta let him scrape their knees. And that’s what that resistance comes in. However, at a certain point in time, if we keep them and coddle them until they’re 20 or 30 years old, never let them leave the house. We’re not doing a good job as a leader as a parent. That’s the same thing as an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur starts off with a company where you literally have to do everything. I was waiting in line at the post office, I’m filling out QuickBooks, I’m doing the sales or I’m working 100 hours a week like you wouldn’t believe. Then I started to let the company take off and the challenge was early on. I didn’t have a lot of great employees because I couldn’t afford them at a people with a lot of heart but not a lot of talent. So I had kept having to over look over there. Shoulder, I knew I was doing good when I went into a business meeting once in my office and I realized I’m the dumbest person in the room, I’m like, damn it, I did good. Because, you know, it’s the regression to the mean, if you’re around a bunch of people that are less than you, you’re gonna get dropped down. If you’re on a bunch of people that are better than you, they’re gonna rise you up. And so to your point is a, a entrepreneur is a visionary. A visionary is somebody that again, multitasker, ADHD, however you want to call it, they’ve got lots of ideas, they’re very creative, but they’re usually not detailed people, they’re usually not people that will follow up, they’re usually not people that can really just sit down and work a p&l statement like somebody should. And so when you get to that point, I realized that caused me to get to that crucible, which is running out of money was because I wouldn’t let anybody do anything because I’m still looking over their shoulders, I wasn’t being a good leader, a good leader hires good people and gets the hell out of their way. I wasn’t doing that I was staying on top of them. And so I had to separate I had to let my kid get out of the house, make some of those failures and challenges and get out there. Now, I will tell you this, nobody will love your company as much as the founder. It’s just not possible. Nobody will love your baby as much as you do. It’s not possible, nobody will be as good as you are. And but if you can get someone that’s 60%, as good as you, and you hire two of them, or three of them, guess what they’re doing more because of the capacity, option. And eventually, capacity will make up for that difference in talent or emotion and passion. And there’s a great book by a gentleman named Gino Wickman, the founder of Eos, it’s called rocket fuel. And it talks about the concept between a visionary and integrator, the visionaries, the founder, the integrators, the CEO, or the CEO. And just like rocket fuel, you have kerosene, you have liquid oxygen on their own, they’re not that different, not much to them. When you mix the two of those together, you can get to the moon. And that’s the concept he uses around having a good visionary and a good integrator in a company.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, I like the family analogy. I’m a big fan of that kind of approach as well. And, you know, interestingly, I always find that children and family and in fact, pets, as well, have taught me a tremendous amount about life in general, and how to sort of approach it. And I think, again, the way to sort of approach some of these problems in small steps is to bring in other experiences where, you know, perhaps it’s more natural, we, hopefully we let our family fly, you know, fly little bird fly little birds. So as part of that, I think very clearly one of the things that both you as a veteran, but also as an entrepreneur, and I thought this was really interesting in you know, some of the thoughts and ideas that you have in your book is that the whole mental health challenges are, you know, relatable there, there. There are huge challenges for entrepreneurs who sit in this sort of very lonely, in many instances, experiences challenged with mental health. And you’ve sort of thought about this and how you approach it and how we address some of that. But tell us a little bit about that.
Zachary Green
Yes, I think there’s, it’s a very important thing to address. And the reason why is as they say, it’s lonely at the top as an entrepreneur, you can’t get there and be raw and share with your employees because they may lose confidence in you. They may not like that. I’ve been around a lot of really crazy stuff between my time in the Marine Corps as the fire service, I’ve seen things that most people would would haunt them forever. I will tell you nothing was as difficult as it’s been being an entrepreneur mentally, emotionally, spiritually, it literally rocked me to my core on multiple times. So what do you do about that? Well, the first thing you do is you recognize that that it’s difficult. The number one trait an entrepreneur needs is grit, just to get out there and keep getting punched in the face over and over again, and eventually just kind of working your way through. So that that’s number one. The number two thing is is address the the issue here. In the military. There was a study done that showed that 17% of people serving an active duty in the military suffer from PTSD. I think that number is really low and not accurate, because a lot of people in the military don’t want to admit that because they could lose their security clearance. That could be a sign of weakness, whatever. But let’s just say it’s 20 or 30%. Let’s say it’s double what that number is. They did the same study with entrepreneurs and found it was over 70% of entrepreneurs suffer from depression and PTSD and mental illness. So that that is one thing we need to recognize. This is the level of suicide and entrepreneurship is off the charts. People don’t realize that. So what do we do about it? The mind In body are connected exercise, just simply getting out there and moving, I can tell a complete difference when I exercise in the morning, versus when I just sleep in late number to be mindful, I started to take up Transcendental Meditation, it absolutely rocked my world, I could not get over how 15 minutes of just closing my eyes and repeating a mantra release tension that I got to the point when I was meditating, I would get in such a deep state of relaxation, I would forget to breathe. And I’d find myself coughing sometimes when I meditated, which was good, that meant I was really in the zone, and just 15 minutes, that’s all you need a day. The other thing is, you know, helping others in that journey to and having mentors but also being mentors. So in my book, I talk a lot about the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, I talk a lot about cortisol and adrenaline, how those come into play, when you’re faced with emergencies, you know, you’re not pulling up to a burning building like I did in the fire, but you get that phone call from your CFO See, or run out of money, or you get ready to go into that big meeting in the thumb drive you left in your car, you go through that same fight or flight feeling, and your body will release certain chemicals that make your breathing, increase, new, pupils dilate, and things happen. But the opposite also happens, which is then it has to deprogram that. And that’s why a lot of times when people have a real emergency situation, they they tend to cry and let go, because that’s your body’s rebalancing that out. So understanding that working through that training and experiencing that those are all the things I think that can really help you mentally prepare you for the battle that that lies and entrepreneurship.
Nick van Terheyden
I couldn’t agree more. You know, I think exercise for me, and you know, I know it varies by individual, not everybody gets the same benefit, but I find it completely decompressing, especially if it’s competitive, you know, maybe that’s a guy thing. But I like competition as part of it, maybe I can compete against myself, I’m not as good at that, because that just never feels as good and I to you know, mindfulness is an integral part of my day. And the only regret I have is, I didn’t discover it when I was a kid, you know, that it could have been, I love that helping I think the contribution and the ability to bring others in and do something good. Pay It Forward is my sort of shortcut to describe that. But you know, very much, you feel so much better giving than you do receiving, at least, you know, that’s been my experience. So I think great sort of advice, any closing thoughts you have, in terms of ways to approach the world, you know, we all face adversity is just a reality. And it sounds like you found a system and a process, eye closing tools,
Zachary Green
get my book, it’s all in the pages there. So the website is www dot warrior entrepreneur, book.com. As a special gift to your listeners, I’m going to offer 50% off for anybody that wants to download the version or get the hard copy or paperback version that the the code is podcast, 2021 podcast 2021. And in the book, it’s three sections there. One, it’s talking about the science of adversity. Number two, it talks about examples of other people from the military, from history, entrepreneurs, you know, I think the greatest warrior is that mom that’s working two jobs to try to just help her kid get out to school, the resistance, that crucible she has to go through is much more difficult than a marine that’s got his gear and his weapons and everything else on them. And then the third part of the book is my story that I weave in and out through the book. So it’s not a big focus. But I weave that in there. And I think what you’ll find is a tools to help you get through your crucible tools to help you prepare for your crucible. But I think the biggest thing is know that a lot of people feel bad about the bad things that happened to them. I hope this book inspires you to know that those are things that help you train and get better. So rather than thinking those as bad things, and oh, woe is me, let’s look at them as a way that hey, we survived because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And I think that book is that’s the main theme through that.
Nick van Terheyden
Fantastic. Um, I think, you know, rousing words and appropriate sort of message, especially in this time of COVID that I think people are even more challenged than ordinarily I think it’s sort of exposed many things in our system in our world. I think you know, great positive thoughts will link to the book in the blog post. Appreciate you joining me, Zachary. Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure.
Zachary Green
It’s been a real honor. Take care
