Ep 218: The Mindset Shifts That Took Alan Lazaros from Burnout to Business Growth

Have you ever faced a moment in life that completely changed your trajectory? For Alan Lazaros, that moment came in the form of a near-fatal car accident. Once a corporate high-flyer with a successful career in engineering and business, Alan found himself questioning everything he thought he knew about success, fulfillment, and purpose. That moment of reckoning led him to embrace podcasting as a vehicle for growth, connection, and impact.

Fast forward to today, and Alan is the co-host of the Next Level University podcast, boasting nearly 2,000 episodes and a global reach. His journey is one of grit, reflection, and resilience, proving that real transformation happens when we align our work with our values and commit to daily self-improvement. If you’re navigating the challenges of building a business or searching for a deeper sense of purpose, Alan’s insights will inspire and motivate you to take action.

We Also Talked About:

• The pivotal moment that made Alan re-evaluate his life and career
• Why he chose podcasting over other business models
• The journey from two guys having deep conversations to running a daily global podcast
• How core values shape business success and partnerships
• The key mindset shifts needed to sustain a long-term business
• The role of humility and work ethic in building a strong team
• Navigating conflict in a business partnership and why it’s essential for growth
• The difference between external success and internal fulfillment—and why both matter
• Why hiring from within your community can lead to a stronger, more aligned team

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Podcast: https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/next-level-university-podcast/ 
• Alan’s Book Club:  https://www.nextleveluniverse.com/next-level-book-club/ 
• Alan’s Website:  https://www.nextleveluniverse.com 
• The Conscious Couples Podcast:
  • Spotify
  • Apple
• Books by Russell Brunson on entrepreneurship and sales funnel:
  • Traffic Secrets
  • Expert Secrets

Want regular access to tips, techniques, and advice from experts about growing your business? Sign up here.

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 218: The Mindset Shifts That Took Alan Lazaros from Burnout to Business Growth

Trudy Rankin: [00:00:00] Alan Lazaros had plenty of dreams, from succeeding as a fitness model, to competing as an athlete. But when his coach asked him to choose just one so he could focus, he had to decide, which was really tough. But eventually he said, honestly, it’s the podcast. He wanted to work on his podcast. And what happened next set him on a journey from corporate high flyer, to passionate self improvement advocate.

Have you ever thought about how personal setbacks might lead to a complete change in how you see success and fulfillment? Alan Lazaros’s story might just make you rethink your goals and what really drives you.

In today’s episode, we take a good look into Alan’s inspiring transformation from overcoming early losses and a near fatal car accident to embracing podcasting as a vehicle for growth, connection, and impact. Alan shares his unique take on the realities of building a successful business, why core values matter more than ever, and how [00:01:00] he and his business partner have scaled from two guys talking to a daily podcast with a global reach. And Alan’s journey is one of grit, reflection, and resilience, lots of reflection.

And as someone who’s built a thriving business around authentic self improvement, I think his perspective is a breath of fresh air. If you’re navigating the challenges of building a business or even exploring your own path to fulfillment, Alan’s insights are right on point. 

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast.

I’m Trudy Rankin, and I bring you stories, tips, and advice from online entrepreneurs who have overcome problems and challenges to get to success. Because if they’ve done it, so can you. My mission is simple. I want to help you solve the challenges you face as an online business owner so you can have more time and money for yourself and your family and more choices in how you live your life.  [00:02:00] 

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast.

I’m your host, Trudy Rankin, and today I’ve got Alan Lazaros with me, and we’re going to be covering a range of topics, but we’re going to be talking a little bit about Alan’s story and where he is today, how he got to where he is today and what drove him there. So welcome to the podcast. 

Alan Lazaros: Trudy, thank you so much for having me.

I always want to start and end what I do with gratitude. And I started listening to podcasts nine years ago. I got in a tough car accident, changed my trajectory and they really, podcasts helped me reorchestrate my life in a much more positive direction. And now that’s what I do for a living.

So I’m very grateful. This is very much a dream come true to be able to speak into the lives of other people about self improvement and business and podcasting and that kind of stuff. So thank you for having me. 

Trudy Rankin: It’s going to be an interesting conversation. So I want to move back to the beginning.

You’ve given us a quick potted thumbnail sketch of, of your, [00:03:00] of, who you are and what you’ve done or what you’re doing. But can you go back to a little bit closer to the start of why did you get into podcasting? What made you even decide to get into business, online business in the first place?

Go back, just share your story with us, who you are, where you’re from, and how you got to where you are now. 

Alan Lazaros: Okay, so I’ll give you the very 10, 000 foot version, and the key here is to realize that I didn’t necessarily understand all this at the time, it’s only in hindsight re watching the movie of my own life where I get it.

When I was very young, my father passed away in a car accident, I was 2 years old, he was 28. And when I was 26, so I had a stepfather from age three to 14, stepfather left at 14, and I bootstrapped my way, because he took most of the income with him, into my dream college. It’s WPI, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

I was a computer engineer. So I got my bachelor’s in 2011. I got my master’s in business in 2012, and I was this computer engineer, MBA combo, [00:04:00] came from after stepdad left, early 2000s to bootstrapping my way, a broke high school and college student to all of a sudden very sought after.

So I rose in corporate very quickly, many different tech companies. And then I’m 26 and I get in my own car accident and physically I’m okay, fortunately. And that’s a whole story in and of itself. However, it was my sort of quarter life existential crisis of this, the second chance my dad never got. And really in hindsight, this is very clear to me now.

I used to be very achievement oriented. Improvement oriented and professionally developed, but I wasn’t self improvement oriented. I wasn’t personally developed and I didn’t have a therapist or anything like that. And I started doing therapy in my thirties and I started to really understand not only the external world and how to achieve engineering, that kind of thing, but.

and business and I call it science, technology, engineering, mathematics, business, and finance. Those are my natural go tos. The parts I didn’t understand were me and courage, [00:05:00] humility, empathy, vulnerability, all these kinds of things. Now I’m, I flipped the script after that car accident and that’s when I started getting into the podcast space.

So I started a little podcast called Conversations Change Lives. And the idea was I want to interview people and Have the listener be a fly on the wall because I looked at my past and I looked at where I started versus where I ended up and a lot of my friends didn’t fare so well in their careers and I thought the difference, I now know this isn’t necessarily true, but I thought the difference was my mentors and coaches.

I had a lot of decent mentors. I don’t know if I’d call them great anymore, but because as you get older, you realize, Ooh, Okay, so maybe some of those role models weren’t quite as well good as I thought But anyways, so I thought that made the difference So I wanted to interview people and I wanted to interview an engineer and say okay listen I made a decision to be an engineer when I was too very young.

What is engineering actually like? What is it like behind the scenes? I wanted to pull back the curtain so that these kids can make a [00:06:00] decision about their future based on the reality Not the perception because when I went into engineering, I had this perception of it, and then when I got designing circuits, I realized for an entire summer, ooh, this might have been a mistake, so then I went into business.

But anyways Conversations Change Lives podcast my first guest was a man named Kevin Palmieri, who is now my business partner. He grew up in Massachusetts with me, same town actually, and he had a podcast called the Hyper Conscious Podcast. And it was change the way you think, change the way you act, change the way you live.

Because he felt like he lived most of his life on autopilot, and so he wanted to be more intentional. And so I was his first guest, he was my first guest, and then we eventually teamed up and we just started having weekly conversations, deep conversations about fitness and health and wealth and love and relationships and all that stuff.

And we had the worst named podcast of all time, it was the Hyperconscious Podcast Meets Conversations Change Lives podcast, which was terrible. And so eventually we went all in on the Hyperconscious Podcast. [00:07:00] And then we did two, one a week, then two a week, then three a week, guests all over the world, traveled a bunch, and then eventually it was, we got all the way up to seven a week, and then around episode I think 700 or so, we rebranded to what’s now known as Next Level University.

And now we are approaching 2, 000 episodes. We are about to cross the 1, 900 mark, and we do one every day, and it’s basically every day. In hindsight, this is very clear at the time we figured this out as we went, but we started that back in early 2017. So we’ve been doing this for seven, coming up on eight years now.

And. Ultimately, the point of the show is now 1 percent improvement. We’re the male role models that we never really had because he grew up without his dad. I, my father passed away, stepfather left. So we now realize we are the male role models that we never had. And ironically, paradoxically, most of our listeners are actually women.

I think women tend to be much more humble, but ultimately the point is that [00:08:00] Self improvement in your pocket from anywhere on the planet, completely free. And we had to build a business underneath that sort of brand. And now we have an 18 person team and I have 26 coaching clients. I’m a business coach.

He’s a podcast coach. Some podcasters need a business. Some business owners need a podcast. And that’s the shortest possible version I could give.

Trudy Rankin: There’s a lot packed into that and we could go any number of different ways. I want to ask a question which you touched on, but I’d like to go just a little bit deeper and that is, why did you choose the podcast model for starting to, have those conversations? Why podcasts?

Why not radio? Why not, all the different ways that you could do it. 

Alan Lazaros: So way back when I had a coach, his name was Alex, and he said, what are your dreams? And I wrote them all down and there was a lot of them. And I now realize that I was extremely optimistic and I was, I had a lot of self belief and I’ve actually achieved [00:09:00] Many of my dreams.

Some of them I decided not to do. Some of them I achieved and then some of them I’m still working on, but I had a ton, I wanted to be a fitness model, fitness competitor, fitness coach. I did all of those, all this different stuff. And this is back then he said, Whoa, awesome. Great. You have big dreams.

We get it. Cool. If you could only choose one, what would it be? And I was very triggered. What do you mean? I’m not choosing one, I’m going to do them all. I’ve been told my whole life what I can’t do. And don’t tell me what I can’t do, because it’s just going to drive me harder. But anyway he said no hypothetically, if you had to choose one, what would it be?

And at the time, I said, honestly, it’s the podcast. Because I get to, I don’t have to go get a speech in order to practice my craft. Because I wanted to become a more effective communicator. I’m an engineer. I always say that as a disclaimer for everyone out there. I’m an engineer. And the reason I say that is there’s four modalities of thinking and the least common statistically is math, formulas, and numbers, and statistics.

And that’s how I think. So I’m this [00:10:00] weirdo. Everyone knows Who’s listening to this, that I’m extremely analytical. And a lot of people consider engineers cold and calculating. And a lot of engineers have high self belief and low self worth because they struggle to talk to humans. I wanted to be a speaker and I wanted to bring accurate thinking into the world.

And I wanted to bring self improvement to the world. And the way in which I was trying to do that, I used to have a company called Alan Lazaros LLC, what you’ll never learn in school, but desperately need to know, and desperately was in all caps, and I was trying to get Speeches in high schools and colleges.

I wanted to bring personal development to high schools and to middle schools and all that kind of stuff. And I now realize how naive that was. But at the time I thought maybe that could work and So eventually he said here’s the irony. If you were to go all in on that one, believe it or not You can have all the others.

And he was absolutely right. Some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten. And now I coach people. He was a business coach. Now I’m a business coach all these years later. This was like seven or eight years ago. And I tell my [00:11:00] clients that too is what is the main thing? The main thing is to keep the main thing.

What is the main thing? So Next Level University is the brand and the credibility that allows me to go and do these other things. I still do fitness. I still do business coaching. I still do these trainings. I still do speeches. I still have, we do events. We still have all, I’m a, I have a book club, but the podcast allows all those other things to flourish because not only is it lead gen, but it’s also credibility and global branding and the opportunity to build relationships.

Every listen is an opportunity to build a relationship with someone globally. And there’s 5. 45 billion people on the internet right now. And that’s increasing. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, it’s interesting. I always find it interesting looking at podcasting as a way of reaching people. And it is just a huge growth area still.

It’s just it’s not gonna, it’s not going to go away. And I’m curious because you’ve used podcasting as a way to find your own place to stand. [00:12:00] I’ll phrase it that way, and you’ve met somebody else who’s doing the same thing, done the same thing, and you’ve both of you started working together, and I’m referring to your business partner.

I’m interested to dig a little bit more into the journey along the way where you went from being two guys who are talking together with common interests and things, To the point where you decided to actually work together and, we all know that even in business, especially in business is that it’s like a longterm relationship.

You have to be able to learn how to fight respectfully in order for the relationship to last. Can you just talk a little bit about the process, the journey, the mindset shifts you had to go through in order to establish a solid working business partnership? 

Alan Lazaros: Yeah, that’s the question right there I mean I could do a hour and a half on just that because a lot of people early on said don’t get a business Partner and we disagreed intuitively and so some [00:13:00] of this was just intuitive and the other piece of this too And we didn’t realize this at the time, but in hindsight, it’s very clear So in hindsight, there’s a couple things that were really in our favor one.

We both grew up without fathers We both in hindsight had pretty low self worth which actually made us work really well, because someone with inflated self worth is very entitled. And if you have one person who’s willing, who’s not entitled and wants to work for everything and earn everything, and one person who’s entitled, usually that creates a very negative.

I know a lot of people out there listening are probably like, yeah, been there. And if you’re on the other end of it, you don’t like me. But anyways, so we both had a lot of grit. We both had a lot of work ethic. We both came from extremely humble beginnings and that’s a polite way to put it. And we had a common core wound and we had a common core aspiration.

So the common core wound was low self worth and really not having a male role model growing up. The common core aspiration was self improvement. In this case, hyper [00:14:00] consciousness for him, self improvement for me, really was the, Solution to becoming fulfilled, not just successful, but fulfilled. And so there’s three stages of relationships.

If you, according to the research, quote unquote, the first stage is the honeymoon stage, and this happens in business partnerships as well as intimate relationships. My girlfriend and I, we’ve been coaching couples now for four years. We have a podcast called the conscious couples podcast, and it’s how to flourish in your relationships.

And so this has been very obvious to me now at this stage, but the first stage is the honeymoon. Stage and we had that, and then there’s the power struggle stage. And that’s when you talked about being able to handle conflict respectfully. And that was definitely a thing with Kevin and I. We would do this every now and then, but we always handled it well through vulnerability.

One of us would eventually go vulnerable and one of us would end up crying and most men don’t cry or whatever. And we don’t, we didn’t have that ’cause we grew up, he was raised by his mom and his grandmother. I was raised by my mom [00:15:00] and my older sister. And so for us, emotions were a good thing. And in hindsight we realized.

That’s probably why most of our listeners are women. And we also realized we’re also low self worth and cowardly and all that is changing in our thirties, by the way. But we’re not those guys who like pretend they’re awesome and, real men don’t have feelings. And yeah, I have these awards in the background and it looks pretentious, but it’s really just about credibility.

And anyone who really gets to know me knows that I’m not like that. So all of that kind of worked. The core aspiration we had in common Self improvement and helping people with self improvement, deep conversations. And the truth of the matter is, and I’ve realized this, I told you that I have an 18 person team, but it’s been nothing short of atrocious.

I’m being playful, but leadership’s the hardest thing in the entire world. And anyone who says otherwise is full of it because it’s so challenging to be a strong leader, to be a good leader. Not only do you have to lead by example, but you have to build a team. You have to understand all the different types of [00:16:00] people.

I’m an engineer. So my modality of thinking is so different than most people. You have to know your strengths and your weaknesses. You have to know their strengths and weaknesses. You have to rallying people for a common cause underneath a common flag, for lack of better phrasing, like brand is extremely difficult.

And why I mentioned that is the core value piece. So we have very common core values, very common core aspirations, and very common core beliefs, but we didn’t know that you, we intuitively knew it. And only in hindsight, looking back, Oh, okay. So the metaphor that I always use with business partnerships and intimate partnerships is this.

When I was in my early twenties, I drove from Boston to LA and there’s a Northern route, there’s a middle route, and then there’s a Southern route. If let’s say metaphorically, Kevin and I are going to drive from Boston to LA. Let’s say I love, we both agree that we want to go the Northern route. That’s a common core belief.

The Northern route’s the best. And then we both want to go to LA. That’s a common core aspiration. That [00:17:00] same goal. But what if he loves screamo music and I love country? Now we’re going to have to take separate cars or we’re going to fight the whole time. That’s a core value in conflict. And then you can do this the other ways too, where, okay, maybe we both listen to country.

We both love country, but he wants to take the Southern route. I want to take the Northern route and see the Rockies. Now we have to take a separate car. And then the last one is the goal in conflict, which is, I want to go to Vegas. He wants to go to LA. Now we have to leave. We can maybe go in the same car until Vegas, then we have to get out.

And so most people in relationships, particularly in business, what they don’t realize is that there’s this constant conflict because where you’re headed is different or the way in which you’re headed there is different. And that’s core aspirations and core values. And usually that’s built on core beliefs that just are not similar.

And I told Kevin this last piece, we were cleaning out the studio. We used to have an in person studio one time and. I said, Kev, this never would have worked if you didn’t have ridiculously high humility and really like a lot of grit. Because I’ve come to [00:18:00] understand that anyone out there who is entitled, who has low work ethic, low grit, and who wants big rewards for minimal effort, they’re just going to hate me.

And it’s taken me 35 years to figure out how much that’s true, almost no matter what I do. And if you have humility and work ethic and grit, and you want to earn your way to success and fulfillment, you’re going to love us. You’re going to love me. You’re going to love Kev. And we just realized, okay. We’re never going to be able to convince those other people to work on themselves when they, they just don’t want to work.

And that’s okay. 

Trudy Rankin: I’m interested in something that’s come up a couple of times and I’d love it if you would expand on your, on this as a theme and give us your thoughts here, because you’ve mentioned success and fulfillment in the same breath several times. And I’d like you just to pull that apart a little bit.

Are they the same thing? Are they different? If they’re different, how different are they? What are they to you? 

Alan Lazaros: [00:19:00] Yeah, I appreciate the to you part because ultimately it all depends on what we define. Pre car accident, I was externally successful, very lots of wealth, beautiful girlfriend, tons of high school friends and college friends and corporate friends.

So I was externally quote unquote successful, but I was internally very unfulfilled. Drinking too much often, not reaching my potential, not in alignment with my calling. And so I think the place we all want to get to, it took me till my 30s to get to, because pre car accident, I was unsuccessful. No, I was externally successful and internally unfulfilled.

Then I flipped the script. I liquidated all my assets. I had 150, 000 in a Vanguard account with all tech companies. I liquidated all of it, started my own company, went broke. And I was fitness model, fitness competitor, fitness athlete, fitness coach. I loved my life and I loved myself, not in an ego way, but in a self improvement way.

And I was super fulfilled, meaningful work, happy, healthy, productive. But I [00:20:00] went broke and so I couldn’t sustain it. And so then I had to figure out how to make money and podcasts and coaching and all that stuff. But ultimately I went from externally successful and internally unfulfilled to internally fulfilled and externally unsuccessful.

So I couldn’t sustain it. And then eventually it’s called the two, two, seven rule. It takes two years. When you start a business, it takes two years to go into debt, two years to climb out, seven years to be successful. And again, that’s a metaphorical mountain that gets higher as you climb it. You’re never actually successful.

It’s always. Growing or dying, but I remember when I first heard that rule, I was like, not us, is exactly what happened. So anyways now I’m very grateful to be able to look in the mirror and say, okay, I want my future to be an amplified version of what it already is. Therefore, I know that I’m both externally successful and internally fulfilled.

The extent of that is what is hopefully growing and it’s a trend line that’s up and down and up and down and we have big months and we have [00:21:00] skimpier months like everybody, but the trend line is definitely up. And so external achievement, I think is what most people think of when they think of success.

That’s certainly the way I think of it. Internal fulfillment is what we’re all really after. And unfortunately meaningful work in the world is usually not what the economy pays the most for. Sometimes it is. But very rarely, and it’s super hard to turn your passion into purpose, into profit. It’s super hard despite what the four Hour Work Week might tell you.

Trudy Rankin: It, and it is, and it’s one of those things where people hear about that as a concept with the fulfillment as the basis of it, and they yearn for it. But getting to that point is what is hard and tricky. And I’m just thinking, I’m coming back to something else that you said and I guess responding to it just a little bit later.

And that is, is that you talk about the whole, you talk about the whole side of things where you’re [00:22:00] not the sort of person where you’re out there being like what I call a bro marketer, that just said, look at me, look at how successful I am. Look at me. And it’s just yeah, I’m looking at you. You’ve got your foot on a rented car and how happy are you inside? And I think that for a lot of people listening, it’s the same. They don’t really resonate with what I call the bro marketing aspect. It’s about, most people don’t really care about that sort of stuff, but for some people it’s important, but most people don’t.

And so as you started to learn these life lessons and you did, you do that model where, oops, yes, it does take that long to actually get to, to, to the level of success that’s sustainable. And when I say success, I’m going to say monetary success. That’s sustainable. It doesn’t, and that differs for everybody.

Some people can live off, a very small amount of money a year and other people need more. It just depends on your context and just where you are in your life. But I wanna talk a little bit about something that [00:23:00] probably most people. thought when you said how many podcast episodes you have, and that is, is like, Oh my goodness, there’s no way in the world, if this is listeners thinking to themselves, there’s no other world I could do that all by myself.

And you’ve already mentioned that you have a team. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like for you when you hired and when did you hire your first team member? 

Alan Lazaros: Our first team member. So there’s actually a, Really cool origin story for lack of a better phrasing about that because every entrepreneur And by the way, if you are an entrepreneur, that’s awesome.

I Playfully joke about this. So I’m gonna say this tongue in cheek But if you don’t have to be an entrepreneur meaning you really don’t mind working for someone else Seriously, don’t it’s atrocious And I’m not, it’s also awesome, right? There’s two sides to [00:24:00] every coin. There’s a lot of awesome. And that’s what everyone’s showing.

I coach 27 business owners. It’s, behind the scenes is never the same as the front of the scenes and especially with the bro marketers. So if you can, If you are certainty driven, and you really do want nice quality of life, and you want to wake up when you want and you want to go on trips and enjoy yourself just don’t start a company thinking you’re going to save time.

If you start a company to try to like, have more free time you’re going to die, in business, metaphorically. Because it’s just, for the first decade, it’s just not true. Now that said, Going back to what you had originally asked. The origin story of that was Time Audit. Kevin and I, we were in the studio back when we had an in person studio.

This is back, I want to say 2021 2022. Maybe 2020 2021 2022. I think it [00:25:00] was 2020. We got a studio actually after COVID. In person. I remember doing the virtual the real estate agent. His name was he was actually a client for a minute. What was his name? Oh my goodness. This is going way back, but anyways, we did a virtual tour.

We got the studio, it was in person. And I want to say this is probably five years ago and we had this huge whiteboard. It’s actually in my basement now. We had this huge whiteboard in the studio and we eventually said, dude, we’re going to burn to the ground if we don’t figure this out. And we did a time audit and we wrote out and I’m, I probably still have a picture of this in my iPhone, my iCloud.

We wrote out the entire whiteboard is full of everything we do, everything. Audio editing, video editing, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, blah, blah, blah. We put sleep on there, we put working out, we put everything on there. The whole whiteboard was completely taken up, and we put the number of hours per week on average.

We added it all up, [00:26:00] and we figured out that there was only 12 hours missing per week, out of the 168 hours per week, 24 times 7. And that’s when we realized we are going to die, metaphorically. If we do not hire a team and every entrepreneur waits too long to hire a team. Usually humans don’t do things they don’t want to do and they’re scared to do until they’re more scared of not doing it.

So putting yourself up against the wall is very important in business. And that’s not talked about nearly enough, by the way, but we ended up getting a team member on Fiverr or something. And she’s actually a director of next level podcast solutions now. So we work directly and indirectly with 61 podcasters.

And we produce over 40 shows. We coach 22 podcasters directly. And then most of those shows too. And then three of my own, Kevin has two, but at the beginning, it was him doing all the audio and video editing. And so our first team member, her name is Ron. [00:27:00] We started working with her and it worked really well.

And then we brought her on and then it just got bigger and bigger. And then we built a whole team. Now we have an 18 person and half of that team is a production team that does podcasting. So that’s how it started. And then this is the cool part about podcasting. When you build a brand and a business, you can start getting really good at when you start getting really clear on your core values.

So NOU has three core values as a company. The first one is growth mindset. The second one is impact driven. You have to be service oriented. If you don’t want to serve, we’re not for you. And then the third one is humility. And that one’s by far the most important. And most people think I’m arrogant. So I had to really figure out humility.

They think I’m arrogant because if you have level 10 self belief and mathematical certainty as an engineer, you sound very arrogant. What if I only have level eight humility, I’m going to appear level two arrogant. So I finally realized why that is. Because my whole life everyone’s you’re so arrogant, you’re so arrogant, you’re so pretentious, you’re so arrogant.

And I remember thinking like, I read books every day, I’m taking courses, like I work, [00:28:00] you’re arrogant, I work hard every day, you like say these goals and then go to the beach. It turns out I’m humble in action, but in words people think I’m very arrogant, except for people who believe in themselves.

But anyways, so what’s my point of all that? When you do eventually figure out your core values, now you can hire based on that. And I know that sounds cookie cutter, but I’m not kidding. If someone doesn’t have humility, I run in the other direction. I actually have a filter called on MedsEye.

Unstable, naive, manipulative, entitled, delusional, significance driven, arrogant, or immature. If I see any signs of those, I won’t go anywhere near you. And I won’t work with you. I won’t coach you, all this stuff. Now, in the beginning, I only learned that filter through massive pain and failure, by the way.

But now if you’re humble, have work ethic and grit, and you want to achieve your way to success and fulfillment, and you want to earn it through your own effort, you’re going to, I’m going to hire you. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be wonderful. If you are entitled and ungrateful and lack humility, and you’re [00:29:00] arrogant, I’m, we’re not going to work together whatsoever.

You’re never going to hear from me. It is what it is. But for a long time, I used to try to save those people and not even know. And that’s from childhood stuff and all that. But here’s my point. If you’re going to build a team, this is the cool thing. If you do have a podcast, anyone out there listening, you can hire from within the community.

Our best team members came from listeners. They were list, they were already aligned with our core values because they were getting to know us. So you can hire from within your own community. And that’s a really freaking cool thing because our COO, for example, her name’s Christina. She started out as a listener.

Then she coached with Kevin for a bit. Then she coached with me for a bit. And we were like, Hey. You want to start working together? And she said, yeah, we’ll start small and build. Now she’s the chief chief operations officer of the company. Now she’s the backbone of everything we do. I reached out to her earlier cause I’m having, I had an issue with the mailing list and she, no, I tell the whole team, go to Christina.

She knows everything. She’s been with us for five years. And that’s a really [00:30:00] cool thing about when you are building an online community of real people in the real world, not fake fluffy bro, what you said. You can start hiring people that are naturally aligned with your mission, your purpose, your core values.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. I think that’s incredibly important. I don’t know if you’ve come across the Gina Wickman sort of entrepreneurial operating system and it, at the end of that, that right person, right seat concept where you’ve got the willingness, the aptitude and yeah, all the bits that go with it.

Finding those people is, it can be really difficult. So I’m, Curious whether or not you’ve ever had any hires that just didn’t go the way that you thought they would. Have you? 

Alan Lazaros: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the worst part of the journey. Growth journey, we’re all on one for me. Metrics and systems and products and services and innovation and consistency and discipline and grid and work ethic and tracking metrics, all that feels good.[00:31:00] 

Oh my goodness, do I suck at relationships. Now, for an engineer, I think I’m pretty good at relationships. But I didn’t understand what made me different. And I had I made so many poor choices. Now, that filter, was actually created through the pain that would come from being what I would call hoodwinked and Every business owner knows what it’s like to be hoodwinked.

Everyone interviews well, and oh, it’s really it’s People say well words lie actions don’t no Actions lie to who they are when they’re around you is not who they really are. All of us have been hoodwinked. Entitled, arrogant people are really good at pretending to be humble. You gotta be careful.

I look arrogant! I’m, I appear super arrogant from the outside in, from the inside out. I promise you that’s not the case. Other people are the opposite [00:32:00] and you’ve got to be really careful. So I had to learn the hard way and I’m grateful I learned because I’m still a young leader. I’m only 30, going to be 36 this month.

So I’m grateful that I took all that pain and suffering and failure and turned it into a filter of someone I’ll never talk to again. Not just her, but just in general. And yes, I definitely have learned my lesson. At the end of the day, not everybody really wants to work hard. Some people are actually really lazy, and I don’t want to come off as a mean human being, but if you want massive rewards for minimal effort, you can take a hike, because we are never going to fit in here.

And by the way, you’re screwed with that mentality anyway. That’s not going to work long term. You can only hoodwink yourself to such a certain level, and even then you’re not going to be fulfilled. Yeah, you got to find your people, you got to learn how to intuitively sniff out. By the way, if your intuition says This is the wrong person, and there’s something off.

It’s never not been right. So just trust it. I know it seems weird. I’m the engineer who needs to have a reason before he [00:33:00] does anything. Now, I don’t. When it comes to people, I don’t need a reason anymore. It’s okay. Yeah, that’s over and take care. Good luck. And I wish you all the best and keep that person as far away from you as humanly possible.

Trudy Rankin: It’s one of those things. It’s interesting. Cause that whole, the whole promise of minimal work for maximal award sort of thing is it often underlies a lot of the enticements or the allure of working for yourself. And, we’ve, we already spoken a little bit about this and it’s just not true.

You do have to work so hard. When you’re working for yourself as an entrepreneur, you have to work so so much harder than if you were just an employee, when I say just an employee. When you’re an employee as part of a bigger, wider organization where you’ve got support from so many different ways other people can do stuff you can’t and all that.

So if anybody’s thinking, listening to this podcast and thinking, Oh, I’ve been thinking about getting into running my own business because I’m sick of being an employee and being told what to do. And I just want to [00:34:00] Do my own thing. Even as a, as your own boss, you can’t just do your own thing. You have to do a lot of things that you don’t like.

And I know that you know that this is the case. So it’s interesting to hear you talk about that as a I guess as a theme I’m. I’ve got one more quick question before we need to wrap up, because we’re both keeping a bit of an eye on the time, because the time just goes by so quick.

Right back at the very beginning, you mentioned that you have a book club. Now, I know a few other people in this space who, When I say the space, running your own business and having an online business that, that run book clubs and they find that they can, that they’re often one of the more successful parts of their business.

Can you just talk a little bit about your book club and why you’ve kept at it with, in terms of having it as part of your business? 

Alan Lazaros: The first thing, and yeah, absolutely. So thank you for asking the first thing, it has to be something that you’re already passionate about because you’re never going to sustain something because at the end of the day, to your point.[00:35:00] 

Starting your own business is it yeah over here. It’s meaningful and it’s Rewarding and it’s gonna help you grow and contribute and that’s all great and over here on the other side of that coin It’s nothing short of absolutely atrocious and you just have to understand you can’t have one without the other if you don’t understand that you are Going to not make it And that’s statistically true.

Most businesses do not make it. I just can’t with the people who want to pretend otherwise. However, and so I’m grateful you’re being honest. I think more people being candid with the truth. I often think of most of the reason people say the truth will set you free. I say accurate thinking will set you free.

I have a self driving car, and it’s supervisor mode, but if it thinks there’s a road to the right and it’s really a cliff, it’s going to keep driving off a cliff and then blaming the world, and I feel like that’s what a lot of people do. A lot of people don’t think accurately, and when you don’t think accurately, you make poor decisions.

You can’t make good decisions based on bad data. And most of us have horrible data based on our [00:36:00] conditioning and what people lying to us and people perception versus reality and hoodwinkery and manipulation and all this stuff. We want to, we inflate, we deflate, and we omit. We lie to ourselves and we lie to each other.

So you have to be very objective. And if you don’t have a mathematics background, it’s very hard to be objective. Because everything’s subjective everything’s art and it takes science to win in business You need art too, and you got to be creative, but it takes it’s a science especially in 21st century So anyways the book club we first and foremost it started with a passion I already read self improvement books for my own personal development for my own Fulfillment.

I don’t know if I’d say for my own enjoyment, I’d say for my own fulfillment because those are two different things. So that start. So I started at 3. 7 years ago and I have it all tracked. I’ve been tracking metrics ever since. And my average attendance is only 12 people. So it’s not this huge, crazy book club.

And a lot [00:37:00] of them are clients. Now, is that because my clients come to book club? Yes. Or is it because book club members end up coming to book club? becoming clients. Also, yes. And so I’ve had some that were 30 people. I’ve had some that were five people, but I do it every Saturday, 1230 PM, Eastern Standard Time.

Anyone can register. And then when you come it’s next level books with next level people is the branding and the tagline. But really what it is it’s people who are humble enough to work on themselves, who love self improvement books. And that’s really what NLU is. It’s next level you, pun intended.

I’m going to be Alan 3. 6 November 17th, and Alan 3. 6 is going to be smarter and stronger and more capable and make better decisions and a better leader than Alan 3. 5 was. And I always use the metaphor of the iPhone. This is the iPhone 14. I think the 16 just came out, but in 2007, when I was a senior in high school, Steve Jobs and Apple came out with the very first iPhone.

It was a revolutionary breakthrough compared to this phone in front of me. It would be nothing but hot garbage. It would be not even close. [00:38:00] And so I feel the same way. Alan 1. 6 was very unintelligent compared to Alan 3. 6. And. To me, that’s what Book Club is about, is everyone comes there to read these books, to discuss them, to be honest and vulnerable.

It’s private, it’s not recorded and to talk about the challenges. And then what’s really cool about it is we have a WhatsApp group, private WhatsApp group, and we all set intentions. And all I say at the end of every meeting is, Okay, we just spent this hour together. We’re doing this book, one chapter per week.

We’ve done 18 books now, and right now we’re reading Identity Shift by Anthony Trucks, a friend of mine, and it’s all about your identity, inner work, what motivates you, all that stuff. Okay, so the question I ask at the end is, let’s set intentions for the week. I don’t want to just read books. I don’t want to just talk to talk.

I want us to improve. What are we going to change? So what’s your intention for the week? And so everyone writes their intention in the chat and then the director of book club, Brandon on my team, he takes all those tags everybody in WhatsApp and then puts it in WhatsApp so they have [00:39:00] accountability.

And so it’s a public accountability, private WhatsApp group with a private, non recorded weekly book club session, where we all get to talk about real stuff. Because ultimately when you’re, Thanksgiving’s coming up and the holidays for me, I enjoy quality time with the people I love. However, you just can’t talk deep.

It’s so brutal. Like you’re, imagine just saying, imagine being at Thanksgiving dinner and saying, Hey what are your goals and dreams? People look at you weird. It’s what do you want to do with your life? What do you, what is the, what’s the next couple decades going to look like for you?

People would be like, what? Why can’t we talk about the, our hair, and the Thanksgiving parade and politics, or, to me, the taboo topics that you’re not allowed to talk about? That’s why we suck at them because no one talks about it, right? You don’t talk about your relationship and what goes on in it.

You don’t talk about your intimacy. You don’t talk about money. You don’t talk about [00:40:00] business. You don’t talk about your net revenue versus your gross revenue. You don’t talk. And then we wonder why we’re not mastering these things because we’re not allowed to talk about them. And that’s why I’m so grateful to be here to talk about things that are real because that’s what we need.

That’s what people need more than anything. It’s just to, to make progress. You’re going to have to face these hard realities that most people really just don’t want to talk about. 

Trudy Rankin: And I have to, I’m sitting here nodding in agreement because I think what you’re saying is really true. It’s just spot on.

And it is one of the hardest things is to In terms of getting to your fulfillment, your success is actually breaking through your own way of thinking and how you are in the world and how you show up in the world. Alan, it’s been really great having you on the podcast and listening to your story and listening to the wisdom that you have to share.

If people were interested in reaching out to you or maybe even looking a little bit closer at what you have to offer, where would they go? Where’s the [00:41:00] best place for them to go? 

Alan Lazaros: The best place is probably the website. It’s nextleveluniverse. com, spelt just like it sounds. We have a podcast, as I’ve mentioned, called Next Level University.

It’s a place where you learn to reach your potential. Next level version of you, next level you, pun intended. You can reach out on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Anyone who Googles my name, those will come up. And I’m on Instagram threads now too, I’m experimenting with that a little bit. But you can DM me.

I really appreciate it. If you do, please just provide context to this episode because obviously I get a lot of spam. We all do. And yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate it. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Thank you. It’s been fantastic.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Alan Lazaros. He really brings to life the process of going all in on self improvement and staying true to your vision even when it gets tough.

So if Alan’s story resonated with you, remember to check out his podcast,

Next Level [00:42:00] University, for more on personal growth and achieving your potential. If you’re loving these insights, please make sure to subscribe and leave a review. Your feedback helps others find the show and lets me know that I’m bringing you the kind of value you want to hear.

Thanks for listening, and until next time, keep working towards your dreams.