Eric is certified as a Peak Performance Coach and has also completed a coaching certification and apprenticeship with Professor BJ Fogg, who leads Stanford University’s Behavior Design Lab. He continues to research evidence-based studies in psychology, neuroscience, habit change, leadership, and peak performance.
In 2020 Eric released his new book The 3 Alarms: A Simple System to Transform Your Health, wealth, and Relationships Forever.
- CEO Hack: Book- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
- CEO Nugget: Leap and the net will appear
- CEO Defined: Acknowledging that leadership starts at home
Website: https://www.ericpartaker.com/
Peak Performance Insights Blog: https://www.ericpartaker.com/blog
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PPIericpartaker
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericpartaker/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-partaker-5560b92/
Podcast: https://www.ericpartaker.com/podcast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYRealX1sBZmvCw9VXUvWyg
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Transcription
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00:20 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:48 – Gresham Harkless
Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Eric Partaker of ericpartaker.com. Eric, it's great to have you on the show.
00:57 – Eric Partaker
Gresh, awesome to be here. And yeah, An advance thank you to everyone who's listening.
01:03 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. You're doing loads of great things. So it's a great listening. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Eric so you can hear about some of those awesome things. And Eric is a CEO, mentor, author, and peak performance expert. He has been named CEO of the year at the 2019 Business Excellence Awards, 1 of the top 30 entrepreneurs in the UK, 35 and under by Startups Magazine, and among Britain's most disruptive entrepreneurs by the Telegraph. Eric has advised Fortune 50, CEO Wally McKenzie helped build Skype's multi-billion dollar success story, and has founded several businesses.
His work has been featured over on over 7 major TV stations in the Wall Street Journal and The Economist. He also appeared as a guest judge on The Apprentice with Lord Allen Sugar. Eric is certified as a peak performance coach and has completed a coaching certification and apprenticeship with Professor BJ Fogg who leads Stanford University's Behavior Design Lab. He continues to research evidence-based studies in psychology, neuroscience, habit change, leadership, and peak performance.
And in 2020, Eric released his new book, The 3 Alarms, a simple system to help you transform your health, wealth, and relationships forever. Eric, great to hear about all the awesome things you're doing. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
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02:23 – Eric Partaker
I'm ready, let's do it.
02:25 – Gresham Harkless
Let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on your bio a little bit, but I wanted to rewind the clock, and hear a little bit more about how you got started when I called your CEO story.
02:34 – Eric Partaker
Yeah, okay, well, kind of the drive for me started when I was a kid. So I'm half Norwegian, half American. I left Norway when I was 5. I grew up for the most part in Chicago. And I remember my first kind of like entrepreneurial journey, my first movement towards leadership, if you will. So we had this charity drive in Chicago where we would basically sell these chocolate bars. And the more chocolate bars you sold, the more money you raised and the more prizes you got as a kid. And I remember when they pass out these prize books to all the classes with the chocolate bars and I flipped to the back of the book and I saw that, okay, if I sell 20 boxes of chocolate, which is like 600 bars, $900 worth, I'll get a new BMX bicycle.
And I was like, wow, that's cool because I had a bike, but it wasn't cool like a BMX. And you know, my parents didn't have money for something like that. So I was like, this is the only way I'm going to get that. So the problem is, how am I going to sell 600 bars of chocolate at $900? I'm like 10 years old at the time. So I ended up taking my kind of existing bike and I rode to Dominic's grocery store, I remember at the time, and I stood outside the grocery store every single day, 4 hours a day after school, Monday through Friday, and 8 hours a day Saturday and Sunday for a month straight, and all I said was, world's finest chocolate, a buck 50.
And I think after the first week, I think people are like man, this poor kid still here. Because nobody was buying anything. And then by the second week, there were people like, okay, I'll buy some and buy more. And I got to the end of the month, I sold all those boxes, like the second, you know, it was like 20 total boxes. The second school was 5 boxes. I was like, yes, I smashed that. And I got a bicycle. And that yeah, that kind of gave me my first taste of like, if you want something, you just gotta show up, you gotta lead yourself and you gotta figure out a way of getting it.
04:41 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I appreciate you for sharing that. I always remember those kinds of drives that we had in school of like, well, we can sell and do, but I love kind of like, we forget sometimes all of the skills that are still applicable today, like persistence. Like you said, it wasn't like you went out there the first day and sold 600 bars. It took time And you just were consistent. You were persistent and it led you to kind of build, you know, all the foundational, you know, entrepreneurial things you're doing today.
05:09 – Eric Partaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's like those little seeds that we, you know, experience in our youth that often shape us into the people we are today, right?
05:18 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to drill down in here a little bit more on what you're doing, and how you're working with your clients. Could you take us through that and a little bit more into your book as well too?
05:27 – Eric Partaker
Yeah, sure, no problem. So I have a pretty unique background when I'm working with a CEO or an entrepreneur in that when I, you know, I don't coach from like a framework or a set of tools. Everything I coach and mentor on just comes from directly relevant like in the trenches experience. So if I'm working with a CEO or an entrepreneur with regard to strategy, I'm pulling from the the McKinsey and company days. If I'm helping them think through execution, I'm thinking through that rapid blitz scaling environment that we had at Skype before we sold to eBay for a couple of billion. And if I'm thinking through people management, then I'm thinking about the over 2000 people that I hired for the restaurant chain that I built.
So I'm drawing on whatever experience is most relevant for that individual so that he or she can obviously do a better job and scale their company in a better way. So that's kind of like the business scaling part. But the thing is, is that I don't do traditional kind of business coaching and mentoring because I don't believe in it. And what I mean is that the business is the hardware. And if we want the hardware to operate correctly, we need to make sure the software is coded and written correctly. The software is you as a person and your leadership ability. So there are actually 3 pillars that we need to scale in parallel. We can't just scale the company.
We need to scale you as a person, so that you're a peak performer, and we need to scale you as a leader so that you're properly leading, motivating, and inspiring your people as well as scaling the business and the company. So all 3 of those things are in parallel. And the 3 alarms, your last question, the 3 alarms. So that's a book that I wrote this past September. It's already achieved bestseller status on Amazon in 6 categories. And it's basically a book about that first pillar that I was just talking about, about scaling yourself as a person, you know, closing that gap between your current and best self.
And it prompts you to do that multi-dimensionally. It prompts you to think, okay, if I were to become my best, it can't just be on the work front. It also needs to be on the health and on the relationship front. That's the three-legged stool, health, wealth, and relationships. Get those 3 legs in place and you create that strong foundation for growth. So the 3 Alarms, yeah, is a book about personal development really, and helping you turn into a peak performer.
08:11 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. I appreciate you for sharing that. And of course, you know, for doing that as well, because I think, and I say this so often, you know, on the show that we forget about the human aspect of business. We, you know, there's obviously a place for the hardware as we kind of talked about the numbers, understanding all of those different aspects, the analytics, things like that. But I think so often we skip over the software. We skipped over making sure that we're okay and we're stable as we were talking about legs, the 3 rungs of a chair as a person and looking at that holistically, not just saying, okay, well, the business is going well, but my personal relationships are terrible.
So, you know, understanding that each of those are not pillars, but they kind of help us to stay aligned and help us to be full and complete so that we can be better leaders so that we can optimize the hardware that we have in place. But without doing that, then we really don't reach, I guess, the full, I guess, level of what we could potentially be.
09:09 – Eric Partaker
Yeah, totally. And, you know, without our health, we're nothing, right? So it's like, it's game over. But then the other question to think of is like, if you had 5 minutes left, that was it, you were told, hey, you're done, your game over for you in 5 minutes, life is over. What would you use those 5 minutes for? And, you know, if somebody, you know, somebody listening right now, think about that yourself. If you were given your toll clocks up in 5, you got 5 minutes. What do you want to use it for? How many of you would say, Oh my God, 5 minutes, please give me my laptop so I can clear out my inbox. Or, oh shoot, 5 minutes.
You know what, where's my phone? I have to tell them that I'm not showing up for that meeting next week. How would it be happening? If you had 5 minutes left, we all know that it would be more along the lines of, I want to call my wife or my husband or I want to hug them or spend more time with my kids or I want those last 300 seconds with my best friend, or I want to call my mom and my dad. And what does all that mean? That all means that at the root of us, what's most important, no matter who you are, no matter where you are in the world, no matter where you've come from, 1 of the things that unite us all is that our relationships are paramount importance to us.
So kind of the message that I try to deliver in the book, you know, that I wrote in the coach and the mentoring is, you know, pay, pay tribute to that now. Don't wait for there to be only 5 minutes. So if that's the case, and if that would be the most important thing, then what are you doing today to kind of harvest, nurture, you know, and grow those relationships, right, that are important to you?
11:04 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, well, I definitely appreciate you for doing that and sharing that. I was gonna ask you for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for yourself personally or the business or a combination of both, but is it that ability in the way that you approach coaching, do you feel like that's ultimately what sets you apart and makes you unique?
11:22 – Eric Partaker
Oh, definitely. It's the combination of the unique background that I went through, having been in the trenches, taking that three-pillar approach, scaling yourself, your leadership, and your company.
11:37 – Gresham Harkless
So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you about what I call CEO hacking. You might've already touched on this. This could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but something that makes you more effective and efficient.
11:46 – Eric Partaker
Well, I'll tell you 1 of my favorite books that I've read. It's called The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. It talks about how the only way to measure a team's success is to look at the team's ability to create the results that it seeks, right? And that there's no other way to measure a team's success. It's like, is a team achieving the results that it's set out for itself? And then it takes you through this five-step framework of things that you need to tweak or improve upon such that the team is kind of working together cohesively, you know, functionally rather than dysfunctionally so that they're ultimately getting points on the board, you know, scoring touchdowns and winning the games. Yeah, that's been a very powerful book for me and it's still 1 that I recommend to all the CEOs and entrepreneurs that I coach and mentor.
12:43 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business.
12:56 – Eric Partaker
Yeah, so I'll use a quote, 1 of my favorites. So it's from the late American essayist, John Burroughs. And the quote is leap and the net will appear. And there are so many times when, you know, you might feel challenged or frustrated or scared or unsure about doing something that you haven't done before. But the thing is, is that all of our growth lies just outside our comfort zone. You don't go to the gym, for example, and say to a personal trainer, hey, you know, I'd like to grow and get stronger.
And then and then you say, Can you show me the most comfortable weights that you have? It's like, that's not how it works. It's like you need to stress a muscle. That's what causes it to grow. Right. In the same way that you need to stress your leadership ability, you need to stress yourself, step into the discomfort, step into the things that you haven't done before, step outside of your comfort zone, leap, and that net will appear, and that's where your growth and development lies.
13:58 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, Eric, Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Eric, what does being a CEO mean to you?
14:10 – Eric Partaker
Because a lot of the CEOs out there, a lot of them have important relationships in their lives. So if you want to be a great CEO, if you want to be a great leader, acknowledge that actually leadership starts at home. So start by being a great spouse or parent and start there, lead well there. Mean lead well, but directing traffic and telling everyone what to do. That doesn't, you know, being a leader means stepping into your role, whatever it is, and role modeling, behaviorally showing what it means to own your position strongly, confidently, and reliably. And your home is a great place to practice that. And so I think if you can nail that on the home front, it will help you excel on the work front.
14:56 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, Eric, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you wanna let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get ahold of you, get a copy of the book, and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.
15:11 – Eric Partaker
Yeah, well, as a thank you for listening this long, If you head over to my website at eric.com, you'll see on the top-hand navigation, you'll see the name of the book and the 3 alarms. If you just click on that, and you'll be able to on that page, download a free digital copy of the book. Or you can go on Amazon and you can buy it if you want, but there's a free digital copy of the book there. That will also connect us by email if you do that. And that's where the conversation can continue. Or you could just read the book and enjoy that.
15:51 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. Well, Eric, truly appreciate that. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too to make it even easier. But yes, I think it's so important to be able to kind of sharpen the saw, so to speak. So I appreciate you for sharing so much insight and information today in your book and giving us opportunities and ways to connect. So appreciate you again, my friend, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.
16:11 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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