Do Less, Achieve More with Chris Do | Ep 14

Chris: 00:00:00

Do less but better. I think everybody's trying to do more, but doing more means you're not doing as good of a job.

So if you could just do less but better, I think everything works out.

Arjun: 00:00:17

All right. Chris. I appreciate you, brother, taking some time to be on the show.

I've been a huge admirer, and the more I've gotten to spend time with you, I just really respect who you are as an entrepreneur and thought leader, but also a human being.

Chris: 00:00:29

Thank you so much.

Arjun: 00:00:29

Thank you, brother. I feel that you and I have maybe a lot more in common than people might think if they looked at the two of us in that.

If I talk about the concept of potential and expectations, there's potential in all of us, right? And there's also potential in a brand, in a person to perform whatever it might be.

We also have expectations, or I should say, what we believe our potential is internally. But then on the external, there's these other expectations of us about what they feel and what they think we should become or what we should do.

And if I'm not wrong, you being the children of immigrants and me being a child of immigrants, there's a certain expectation that we turn out a certain way. And when we kind of buck that trend, maybe there's some adversity and a lot of friction that comes with that. Sure, I experienced that.

Did you experience that as where you've ended up now? But this maybe wasn't necessarily what your parents or other people close to you were kind of expecting of you or thinking about turning out?

Chris: 00:01:30

Yeah, absolutely. I'm a first generation immigrant, so I wasn't born here. I don't know about you. And so I'm still figuring out my way, my own identity.

And when you flee a country due to war, civil war, and communism, and you start over, I think there are certain traumas that are just inherited in the body that I don't learn about until much later after talking to a therapist. That my parents feel for sure.

I can't imagine what it's like to now drop everything, your identity, your language, your culture, and start over somewhere else where everything is stacked against you. And so that's held into, like, their bodies as my parents, but they shielded us from it.

But there are little behaviors that once you look back on in your life, you see happen all the time. And the stereotype of, like, tiger mom, high expectations of asian children to do well in school, it's like a given. The.

If you get an a that's called average. You need to get, like, an a. Plus, those things you feel.

And the way I can explain it is I remember very clearly the fear of God was put in me while going to school, that if you don't get an a, you're not doing well. If you get a b, it's acceptable. But if you get a c, don't even bother coming home, right?

And I remember, like, talking to my friends who are Caucasians who grew up here, multi generational, they're like, I got to see you. I'm getting a new bmx bike. I'm like. And in that kind of mindset, I was like, life is so unfair. Here I am getting a's, a minuses, and it's not.

Not something that's. You get praise thrown upon you. There's no reward. It's just lack of punishment is all that is.

So definitely, I think there's a lot that we probably share, and I know. I know that this goes across like any type of asian, right? We. We definitely feel this.

Arjun: 00:03:14

Yeah, definitely. I mean, you're still evolving, right? As a human being. I know that's big for you. It's constant growth and evolvement, much like brands, right?

They never stay the same. They continue to evolve. But in where you're at here in life and in looking back, and obviously, there's so much there in your story, right?

And the country you fled and how you came here and then reframing this identity of yourself, there's a lot of lessons or strategies or internal protocols that you probably developed along the way.

And reflecting on that as to how you battle through adversity, how you bounce back, because you've been through very unusual hardship and turmoil that most children maybe have never encountered or could even begin to fathom?

Do you find that in your everyday life, Chris, in struggles or when you feel like maybe things are difficult or very challenging that you recall on those moments, or is it just something inherent now that just happens? Like, in terms of a strategy for a way out.

Chris: 00:04:08

Now, I really like that question. We were just talking to Irwin McManus earlier, and he was. He's asked this question.

I just want to reflect and share on that, which is the question he's asked is, are we capable of change? Are all of us capable? He says, all of us are capable of change when it's. When it's. Our survival is dependent on it.

And so when you grow up with war or as a refugee and all the hardships that you have in the moment, it doesn't feel like it's a gift, but it actually is a gift, because you learn to adapt, to survive out of necessity. And so those skills, those gifts that was given as a child, carry into adulthood.

Because if you're living in a place that's very challenging mentally, physically, or economically, you learn to adapt and you learn to make do so that it becomes, that's the normal, that's the baseline. So as you progress in life, it seems like nothing is ever as bad as it used to be. So I don't have that mindset anymore.

Problems come to us, and I think it's one of these things that I think is a buddhist idea where we should not try to escape or run away from pain or challenge, because living the existence is painful. And once we embrace that and not try to avoid our problems, I think we'll become much more happy and at peace with ourselves.

And so I just accept everything, good or bad. It's really hot outside, but that's just the way it is.

And it's our thinking of it, the story that we tell ourselves, that we frame it as good or bad. And so, luckily, I think once I'm in my early to mid twenties, I've developed a different mindset around this.

I'm in control of my destiny, my fate, how hard I work, where I want to go to school. I'm good with all the challenges at this point. It's just, it's work. It's not a horrible work. It's joy. It's not like exuberant, euphoric joy.

It's just there. I try and rein in the motions to try to be as stoic as possible.

Arjun: 00:05:55

Beautiful. That's LFG energy right there, man.

Chris: 00:05:58

Is it?

Arjun: 00:05:58

Yeah, it is. So if brands, humans, we all evolve, right?

You coming from the marketing world and where you spend so much time and energy and guiding people and understanding that there needs to be an absence of rigidity. Like, things continually evolve, like it's a fluid space.

Even as human beings do, you feel that with entrepreneurs or humans that you interact with, this is perhaps the one thing that maybe holds them back or holds back a brand or holds back a business or a company from continuing to forge forward, which is being stuck and rigid as opposed to remaining fluid. Right. Being like water, as Bruce Lee would say. Right, right.

Chris: 00:06:37

Yes.

Arjun: 00:06:38

Yeah.

Chris: 00:06:39

I think what makes this stuck is attachment. Like, we don't like problems, but we. We are more afraid of change and unknown than we are with our problems.

So when there's a better solution because it's unknown, it's unpredictable, there's no guarantees.

It's going to work out, we'll stick with the devil that we know, and we become really attached to these things that I think define us and this identity, and we carry it with us, like, and it's a very heavy burden to continue to carry it.

So, for example, if you grew up and you were, you've looked and sounded a certain way, somebody might be picking on you, and then you just have that thing, even though it didn't serve you, it protected you for a little bit, but you still carry that.

I'm going to be picked on for the rest of my life, and you can be a captain of industry, you could be city council person, or chairman, or chairperson of the board, and you still like, oh, is that, are you sliding me right now? It's like nobody's picking a fight with you anymore. That was in the past.

Something I learned from my business mentor was that oftentimes we are responding to things that are not here right now.

So if your wife, your husband, your children say something to you, you're recalling a memory from the past and it's like not even serving you anymore. But you hold onto it so tightly. And I see this in entrepreneurs and creative people all the time.

And until we let go of that, can we take something else? And if you think about it, it's like your body and your mind, your spirit and your soul can only hold so much.

And in order for you to be able to receive new things, new gifts for you, you have to be able to, like, unburden yourself, unencumber yourself and get rid of the weight so that you can actually have the strength to carry something else.

Arjun: 00:08:11

Very deep, man.

The one thing I want to ask too, which generally ask more towards the end, but I would just want to ask is given what I had shared with you earlier about the essence of LFG and like, what I have in this community, what does LFG energy mean to you? There's no right or wrong answer. But you as an entrepreneur and as a thought leader and someone who's very resilient, you embody this so many ways.

What does LFG energy mean to you? If you had to define it or say anything of it?

Chris: 00:08:36

Yeah, I think it just means that anything's possible.

Arjun: 00:08:39

Yes.

Chris: 00:08:39

And you can achieve anything. And only person you have to blame for the things that you don't have or the things that you have is yourself. Blame goes both ways.

When you achieve something, it's like, it's my credit and I should receive accolades. But when things don't go your way, it's always somebody else's fault.

And somebody didn't open the door for you, then the man is trying to hold you down. It's like it's all you. You can achieve as much as you want in your life. You just have to be willing to see it and then to work towards it.

Those two process, like, you have to see the goal clearly, and once you have clarity and the vision, then you can actually take steps towards it. I think it's been a theme that we heard all morning from Neil and other speakers like Rory.

It's like we got to just, like, focus in on the thing that we want, because if we broaden our focus, there's too many things that are coming at us and we don't know what to do. So we try to do all of them, but not very well. There's a phrase, I forget who.

I should be able to cite this quote, but maybe it will come to me later. It's like, do less but better. I think everybody's trying to do more, but doing more means you're not doing as good of a job.

So if you could just do less better, I think everything works out beautiful.

Arjun: 00:09:56

There's a Bruce Lee quote that I always come back to as a martial artist. Right? And he's the. He's the icon.

Chris: 00:10:03

Yeah.

Arjun: 00:10:04

A guru, I should say.

Where in that human beings are all merely works of progress who mistakenly think from time to time that they are done right and the work is never done. So a lot of what you said there in involvement and growth ties back to that and made me think, think of it. But I know you embody this.

And the businesses that you help, the brands that you help, the people that you associate with, they have to embody this also, because otherwise they'll be stuck and they'll remain rigid. Another thing you touched on in that last. And that last answer in terms of blame, right.

Is there's an association with, like, victim mentality, which is really big, sadly, in society. It's prevalent, I should say. It's not big in a good way. It's just prevalent. But it also. It holds people back as individuals.

Do you also see that with businesses, brands, campaigns, that rather than choosing to make the shift, that there's a lot of people that choose to actually blame the external, blame the market, blame the response, as opposed to fine tuning this message, is that the easier way? I think so, yeah.

Chris: 00:11:09

Because to accept that the world could be different if you chose different paths would mean that now I'm responsible for the things I don't have or that the relationships or whatever it is that you want to achieve in your life. And I think it's the reason why sometimes our content, I think, is relatively innocent. Not all of it.

Some of it is out there, and I accept those parts. But then people have such strong negative reactions, like, I could not in a million years see why this would be negative.

And then they're finding this one thing later on. I think I've come to theorize that the reason why they respond so negatively towards it is because it's calling them out.

I don't live in that space, in that world, in that mindset. I don't frame things that way. So I could never see, like, why won't everybody want this?

And then there's some people who are, like, very easy for you to say because you have x, y, and z, and then they're like, you're not considering neurodivergent or my own personal story or whatever. It's like, look, let's just put it out there. No one lives a perfect life. Even perfect people don't live perfect lives.

And they make do with what they have. And your ability to respond to challenges, to the things that scare you determine what kind of life you're going to have.

Arjun: 00:12:16

So an amazing trait that people may or may not know about you, but I do, is that you're an Emmy award winner, and that doesn't happen by accident.

And I know this as an athlete that competed and won two world championships, you having received an Emmy, this takes a lot of discipline and structure and real commitment to get there.

But then getting there is one thing, and it's not nothing to dismiss or diminish, but staying there at that level, maybe if you don't necessarily win the Emmy year in and year out, or if I wasn't winning a world championship year in and year out. But a certain standard is a really, really challenging thing to maintain. How do you do it? How do you stay on top?

How do you not let yourself get either lazy or lethargic in certain ways or complacent?

Chris: 00:13:04

You know, I think, and your story may be a little bit different, but there's this idea that really I gravitate towards, which is the people who love the process of the journey more than the destination wind up going farther, further, and outperforming the people who are in it for the destination. So I imagine in the world of martial arts, you're doing it for lots of different reasons.

The martial arts part, the philosophical part, the mind body connection, and the winning the championship is just a marker of your commitment to it, not because you pursued it, because the only reason why you want to do that is the world to win world championship. And if you don't, then. Then your whole self is destroyed.

So for me, my goal is to do work that inspires me and my team and I, that challenges what we think can be done, given the budgets that we have and to delight and surprise our clients. And every once in a while, you receive some accolade for that. So the winning of the war was not the intention of the work.

We just did the work because we love the work and we love the clients who trust us with their brands, their properties, and for us to do the right thing. And then your team says, maybe we should submit it for something.

So it is, in a weird way for us, kind of happenstance, like, I wasn't pursuing awards, especially towards the latter part of my career. It didn't matter to me. Maybe when I was younger, I was thinking, I wonder if we can win that award as a game.

We play that and then we win one and a different one. And so we've won a lot of awards, probably over three dozen awards for different things.

Arjun: 00:14:28

Amazing.

Chris: 00:14:28

And we're just moving around. So it's like. And, you know, the thing that I realized after winning it, it means more to other people than it does to me. It really does. Yeah.

It's kind of wild, right?

Arjun: 00:14:39

So people.

Chris: 00:14:40

People need a shorthand to sum you up. And we live in a day and age now where your social proof, your social clout, is more important than what the traditional models were like.

For example, what family did you grow up in? Or what school did you graduate from? What degrees do you hold and where have you worked before? Those are the traditional measures of one's worth.

But now, I don't know. And we talk about it, and maybe it's kind of like. Kind of like myopic or self centered.

But these days, it's like when you look at somebody, you're like, how big is their following? What's engagement like? Who are they attracting? What kind of energy are they putting out there?

No one even cares if you went to whatever at school, right? Then even check. And because we know, it's very hard to verify that unless you're the school itself.

And the case in point here is that I met people, I looked them up on LinkedIn. They're like, oh, Stanford. And then later on I talked to them.

It's like, you dropped out after one semester, yet you put that out there because you know what it's doing. So that part can be faked. It can be manipulated.

Arjun: 00:15:43

Right.

Chris: 00:15:43

But. And social following can be as well. But it's a little bit harder. We can tell usually.

Arjun: 00:15:47

Right, right.

Chris: 00:15:48

You have a million followers, but four people liked your post, so that's like 966 bot accounts, I think. 966,000.

Arjun: 00:15:54

Right.

Chris: 00:15:55

So it's that kind of stuff.

Arjun: 00:15:56

It is, yeah.

And I think also, to your point, like, the people being shorthanded with this or zero sum, whether you either won or lost, you went to this school or you didn't go to this school, and everything in the middle, which we, as the people were in the trenches, really value in that process and that commitment to struggling. Right. Like Muhammad Ali said, if you suffer as you train, you'll celebrate the rest of your life as a champion.

Like he said, training was, like, insufferable. It was terrible. Absolutely terrible. But I think people just don't necessarily understand all that work that goes into the middle.

Like, I would hate it. And I don't know if this speaks to you. Not hate. It's a strong word, but it's kind.

Chris: 00:16:34

Of like it would.

Arjun: 00:16:35

It would irk me a bit when someone say, you're so talented, you seem so gifted. And I'm saying, I appreciate where that might be coming from. And I could say, that's you, Chris, as an artist, as a creative, you're so gifted.

You might say back to me, look, I'm not. It's not that I'm talented or gifted.

To say that would diminish all the work that I've put into this craft to get up to this point, my continual evolvement. You're seeing this, but you've missed all of this, which is what I celebrate and where I choose to stay. Right. So you identify with that 100%. Okay.

Chris: 00:17:05

I mean, like, we could be brothers on this one, right? Because people will say something like, oh, that's easy for you. Cause you have all that talent. No.

You are kind of dismissing everything that I did to get here, right? Like, I've come from a place where I felt like an outsider.

I'm an introverted, and I've gotten into fights with people I don't even know because for whatever reason, I didn't fit their image of what was acceptable. And so they try to bully me. They try to do all kinds of things, and I had to go through that adversity.

And so now when I have the privilege to be on stage and speak and share my truth and not be afraid that some bigger kid is going to punch me from behind my head. Then I go, it's so easy for you. Like, no, there was a lot of inner work that you and I are doing.

How we show up when no one's watching the invisible work, as people often refer to it, is. And now you can quickly summarize it like that.

And the reason why you hate potentially or why it aggravates me is you say that not because you're complimenting me. It sounds like you're complimenting. You say that because you give yourself an out.

Like, oh, you must come from a certain kind of family that supported you or you come from money or you do that. They just say all kinds of weird things because it gets them off the hook. It relieves their accountability.

that's okay when you're like: 1417

Arjun: 00:18:30

Yeah, of course.

Chris: 00:18:31

So he's a powerful, amazing actor. Yeah, just amazing. And everything he touches.

And he was sharing something with Terry Gross and he says, you know, the late, great Brian Dennehy, the actor who passed recently in the storyline, he says, you know what?

You can blame everybody, but at some point in your life as an adult, you have to say, okay, I've done, I'm done blaming everybody and I could just own my own s, I just got to own it. And now it's on me.

And I'm not saying that there is a chronological timeline when you have to say you have to own it, but when you have agency and you can do your own things and you have ability to make money to live on your own, at some point into that, you kind of have to own it. I think.

Arjun: 00:19:07

Yeah, we touched on struggle, you know, as a youth and during those formative years.

Chris: 00:19:13

Yeah.

Arjun: 00:19:14

Is there anything in recent months, weeks or just recent years where you've really battled through some adversity, either professionally, personally, that you feel you were able to draw on those past experiences and that's what actually got you through. You didn't feel alone in that moment.

Chris: 00:19:31

I'll share two things with you I'm not through. So this is, it's still very fresh. Okay. So we'll see how this works out professionally. I believe the education space is changing quite rapidly.

I think it's due to a number of different things. Number one, everybody is an expert at everything. Everybody is a life coach, 14 year old life coaches. Okay.

And so the market is flooded with people who know how to excel at the marketing game, the squeeze funnel and the pushing all your levers, the psychological manipulation that get people to buy. And so the market's exhausted, they're burnt out and they've become very jaded as to everything sucks. This is all a scam, which I get, unfortunately.

And what they do really well is they promise you quick results, no work, pay now, and it's just all done for you. And we know that it's a lie. Nothing worth having is easy. If it's easy, everybody have it, therefore it's not worth it.

And so there's a flood in the marketplace and then there is the commodification of information. Its information is cheap and it's accelerated by the advent of AI.

Gary was asking this question on stage about how many of you using AI to search versus Google. And a lot of people stood up. I couldn't tell how many percentage, but it was a lot more than I thought.

And so if AI, for like $10 a month, can answer most of your questions, to give you a tailored answer, why would somebody buy a $200 program, a $500 program or a $5,000 program? So we're seeing potentially the beginning of the end for information products.

So people are going to want something different, maybe in person, one to one, accountability, peer group mentorship, those kinds of things. I can see that still working. So we're an education company and this is like hitting us sideways. Like I'm driving the bus and I didn't know.

And usually I'm pretty good at spotting these things pretty quick. Boom, we're t boned AI and the race to the bottom for information. So this is what we're trying to work out of.

I mentioned before, like, we're down a million dollars in revenue from the previous year, and it's something that we have to sort out or otherwise we're not the same company we are today, which I'm okay with adapting, but I'm trying to sort out this problem. I don't have an answer yet.

We're trying lots of things, and I hope by the next time we have this conversation I can tell you we successfully navigated, we've pivoted, as we have done so many times before, because I'm not in love with the anything, the way we do things, how we help people. So I'm willing to try. I know for my team that kind of instability feels like chaos. It feels very uneasy, and there's lots of fear.

And I try to quell people's fears like you know what? Do the best you can every single day.

Arjun: 00:22:02

Yeah.

Chris: 00:22:02

And we're going to get through this. Right? We're going to get through this. The second part is a personal thing. This is something I struggle with.

So I'm hardwired to work to continually to work on myself and to work on business. So my therapist told me many, many years ago I'm a constant improver. It's just part of my DNA. So it's not saying that everything's wrong.

It's just like everything could be better. And so I'm trying to do that all the time. That means that, like you said, works in progress, works in progress are never finished.

It's just I'm tired today. So today's finished, but tomorrow's another day to start again. Right.

And we know this, and that's, that's fine if you're by yourself, but it does take a toll on everybody who's around me for a number of different reasons.

The one that's indirect and might be surprising to people is, and I understand this, I feel this, that when you're around somebody who's moving so fast, if you don't move fast, it makes you feel slow, lazy, lethargic and not worthy. And that's the unintentional consequence.

Like, I believe in this and there's many people have said it different ways, but I believe that our highest purpose is to pursue our passion to do that and to do that with that expectation or attachment of outcome. And that's what we should do, and I'm doing that. But unfortunately, sometimes when you do that, it has impacts.

Like I have two boys, they're 20 and 18, and my wife, they kind of have to carry the burden with me and they didn't sign up for this. So I kind of have to figure that out.

So it's creating definitely a strain on our relationships and how we have to navigate this moving forward, to which, I don't know. I'm going to do this because I love unconditionally. I hope that I'm loved unconditionally back. But sometimes there are conditions.

Of course, we're trying to figure that out.

Arjun: 00:23:41

I think everyone who knows you does love you, and I know this about you and what you embody, which is an indomitable spirit.

So I have no doubt that the professional and the personal challenges or adversity that you're enduring right now, that when we do sit down and have this conversation again in the future, yeah. It will be about the triumph for the next chapter or how it finished in a beautiful way. All positive. Nothing but good stuff. And I have no doubt.

So I appreciate you very much, Chris. Thank you so much for spending the time with me, man. I wish you all the best and mad respect for you, man.

Chris: 00:24:17

Thank you, Lfc.

Arjun: 00:24:18

That's it.

Chris: 00:24:20

Thanks, brother.