In this episode, Joe shares his views on how venture capital can create a positive impact on society across a range of different communities. He also unveils the most important traits that all great leaders possess, and the strategies that everyone can use to find self-realization and fulfillment in their career.
This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Joe Musselman, Founder and Managing Partner of Broom Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies with exceptional teams, leadership, and culture.
Joe is a board member and advisor to national non-profits, endowment funds, and technology companies ranging from seed stage to multi-billion dollar market cap companies across several industries.
In this episode, Joe shares his views on how venture capital can create a positive impact on society across a range of different communities. He also unveils the most important traits that all great leaders possess, and the strategies that everyone can use to find self-realization and fulfillment in their career. To learn more about Joe’s work, visit broom.ventures, and to learn more about our work at Thruline Networks, visit thrulinenetworks.com
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Guest Quote
“Ask yourself this question: what is the vision I hold for the world, the ideal vision? What is my mission statement? Meaning my worthy cause and what are the values that I hold closest to me? Values are how we think, act, feel, and communicate into the world. They're indicative of behaviors. Take a moment. Define those things however you choose to define them. You don't have to use my definition, create your own. Now, once you get clear on that, you'll start to generate a lens into certain types of teams, you'll be attracted to certain types of leaders, and you'll start to recognize cultures that believe what you believe. Then you'll start to have clarity around the question, what’s next?” -Joe Musselman
(00:29) Introduction
(04:49) Starting Broom Ventures
(09:56) Defining impact through venture
(13:22) Commonalities between startups
(17:26) Mission-driven companies
(21:23) Figuring out what’s next in life
(24:31) Quick hits and tips
(27:50) Final thoughts
Phil Dillard: Hello, and welcome to Thruline to the fourth sector where we're exploring fourth sector capitalism and impact investing as an invitation to innovation that builds the future economy that works for everyone. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, founder of Thruline networks. This episode features a conversation with Joe Musselman founder and managing partner of broom ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in early stage technology companies with exceptional teams, leadership and culture.
Joe is a board member and advisor to national nonprofits, endowment funds and technology companies ranging from seed stage to multi-billion dollar market cap companies across several in. Previously, he founded honor.org, a career transition Institute for us Navy seals and the special operations community.
He then scaled it into a multi-million dollar business with a network of over 7,000 supporters. In this episode, Joe shares his views on how venture capital can create a positive impact on society across a range of different communities. He also unveils the most important traits that all great leaders possess and the strategies that everyone can use to find self realization and fulfillment in their career.
To learn more about Joe's work, visit broom.ventures. That's broom.ventures. And to learn more about our work at thruline networks, visit thruline networks.com. Now sit back and enjoy the convers. With Joe Musselman founder and managing partner of broom ventures.
Hello everybody. And welcome to another episode of through line to the fourth sector. I'm your host, Phil Dillard here today with the amazing Joe Musman of broom ventures. How you doing today, Joe?
Joe Musselman: I'm doing very well, Phil, thank you very much for hosting me today. I appreciate
Phil Dillard: you. Thank you for, for coming and I, I really appreciate you making the time and I look for the opportunity to actually have other folks here, get to know you as well as we do and appreciate who you are and what you do in the world.
So I'll actually start out with the first segment. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who are you, what do you care about and why do you care? To start off
Joe Musselman: with, I have a very crystal clear vision of the world. I certainly hope to bring about, I imagine a world where people feel safe doing work they know, and love.
And work to me has been a big part of my professional and personal life for all types of reasons. My, it, it's a very unusual kind of journey to understand this vision of the world. And it started in the United States. I was training to be a Navy seal years into training. I sustained a pretty wicked injury and I was out.
Now you burn the boats. When you go to seal training, there's no kind of want to maybe become a seal. You're all in and I was certainly all in. But when you have that taken away from you, you ask yourself a, a very universal question and it's only two words, and we've all asked ourselves this question, what's next, right?
It's a serious question. And it usually happens at an, in between moment of our lives. I preach this over and over again, because so many people, all of your listeners who are hearing this have asked yourself that question in both your personal and professional. And you don't know what the next step is.
Otherwise you'd be asking you would be asking the. So in every point in people's lives, they get hit. With those two words. I have seen Navy seals freeze in their life, going from fearless to fear-filled in a matter of seconds, once they realize they don't know what's next in their own transition, professional athletes have this, the hell CEOs.
Who have been CEOs their entire life. They have this, the single mother who's working three jobs. They ask that question. So the, this question is very universal. And when I was faced with that question, I went into panic mode and I tried to find a need. And I wanted to still prove that I could provide value to a community that I love, which was the seal community.
And so I ended. You know, listening for several years and I did find the need and the need was around transition and helping members of the military find that that what's next. So when you ask me what I believe you ask me, what I care about. I care deeply about people knowing, or feeling confident in themselves to answer that question when it comes into their life.
Flash forward throughout the fun startup journeys of creating a foundation. And now moving into a fund, it's still based on the same principle, which is in creating the foundation. And filling that need, I experienced levels of joy in my professional life, doing something that I truly loved. And Phil, you know, this, you've spoken to hundreds of people, if not thousands at this point who hate what they do, they just hate it.
They don't like it. They don't like going to work. Imagine a world. Where people felt safe doing work, they know and love. It would change everything I wanted to share with the seal community. Then the entire special operations community sharing with Congress to push on to the rest of the general force and the military.
I wanted to share that joy with people who have served us first because that joy should be shared. And if they love what they do next in life, if they love what their next great adventure is. They'll go off and continue to do extraordinary things in the world. So when you ask me what I care about, that was the first thought that came to mind is I care very much that people find the next step.
Cuz what do you do for people who have already had their dream job? What do you do for those folks? They've already had their dream job, whether it's being a professional athlete, whether it's being a teacher like my mother for 41 years, what does she do next? That's what I care about. That's
Phil Dillard: amazing. You know, it's funny.
I'm sure. Some people think, well, those people have a dream job. That's awesome. But if you hit that pinnacle at a certain period in your life, and you're like, that's everything I've trained for and whether you got it or whether you didn't or whether it was, you had a hall of fame career, or it was taken away by injury before it really got started, you have to set a new pinnacle.
and if you're actually trying to develop yourself constantly as a human being, you never stop growing. You never stop seeking for new pinnacles. You're always finding this what next? So your work starts at a place, but can be a little more endearing. And it's interesting that you talk about the first time, the road diverged for you and what you saw that kind of couldn't change you.
Can you talk about the second divergence as in, you know, you left the Navy. You created the foundation, but then there was time to leave the foundation. It was time to do something different. How does broom ventures answer your what's next after everything you learned at the found.
Joe Musselman: I get this question off.
And how did you go from a nonprofit creating a nonprofit business, which by the way, is the same thing as a business? The only thing that's different is a tax code. That's it? I had marketing, I had advertising, I had sales. I had donors who were the investors in the mission. And it's twice as hard. If not three times as hard to raise money for a non.
It is to race for a venture fund. I'll say that to everyone listening. Here's why you have to filter differently. You have to find someone and say, Hey, give me, you know, a million dollars Mrs. Or Mr. Donor. And I will show you how many lives this impacts. Give me a million dollars Mr. Mrs. Investor. And I'll show you how I can give you four in seven to 10.
Those are two very different pitches, right? So it takes a different filter, but how did I come across that transition was very simple. It was, I should say it was simple. When I, when I opened up my eyes and my ears and listened to what actually brought me joy. Working with a very high performing community who took a tremendous amount of responsibility for themselves, for what they wanted to do with their lives, for the impact they hoped to create.
And I created a very simple list of all the things that I loved about this job, because everyone who's listening. Remember we just went through this phase where people like to nickname it, the great resignation. I am starting to see more and more data that would imply that it's more like the great regret because the grass is not always greener.
On the other side, the grass is greener where you water it. And when I think about my transition, I sat there with myself and did a very serious deep dive into what truly brought me joy at the. And it was my choice to leave the foundation. It wasn't like, you know, it was this hostile board takeover or, you know, I was doing poorly at the job.
We grew to a national foundation within five years, raised tens of millions of dollars partnered with all the major special operations communities and had a volunteer force of 7,000 within five years. It was a wild success, but I am a zero to one person. So for those listening, when you understand the type of work you like to do, when it got to the kind of copy paste, repeat, expand part of the business that doesn't excite me.
When I started feeling that I was having the same conversations every day, that doesn't excite me. I need things that are new novel, and extremely challenging and complex and solving a real need. And I love seeing the look on people's faces when they find what's next for them. So I needed to feel that and experience that for.
So when it was time for me to transition, I did a very serious deep dive into myself. I categorically created buckets of things that brought me joy for my previous job. And then it hit. What is the other community in the world that is filled with high achievers and trying to solve big problems in the world, seals and members of the special operations community, metaphorically, Phil, you signed on the same dotted line.
I signed on the same dotted line to give yourself, to give your life to something that's much bigger than you. In our case, it was the country that takes a certain person to do that. Where is another C? That is metaphorically signed on a similar dotted line. And for me, that is a founder, a founder signs on a metaphorical dotted line to give up friends, family, personal life, to dedicate themselves to something that's much bigger than themselves.
Their accountability levels, responsibility levels are through the roof, very similar to a community coming out of the special operations. So when I made that link, I knew that that was a community. They wanna be a.
Phil Dillard: That's great. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I've seen all that in a number of ways. I've seen a number of folks who've actually successfully made that transition to, you know, there are a couple things you said there, I thought were really interesting.
You talked about buckets of joy. You talking about places filled with high. High achievers, complex challenges and solving a real need. And there are two things that came to mind for me that I think are really important. When we talk about fourth sector. When we talk about mission driven companies, we were talking about organizations that exist to make a profit, but with a purpose, I thought two things.
First founders can often be misunderstood. Military folks can be misunderstood, right? I mean, I went into the Navy to make an impact and left because I. I felt that I needed to do it differently. And it took me a long time to figure it out. But I realized that it was the impact through entrepreneurship and mission driven entrepreneurship to the economics of the planet.
That was my, my means for making that change. So I'm curious if you think about different folks and you say, how are they misunderstood? How does it lead to the ability for you to add value or, or to create community or create great teams, that sort of thing. And how do you think about defining impact with the folks you work with and the fund and the communities that you choose to serve?
Joe Musselman: Everyone is walking around right now with a golden thread in their going throughout their life, it's woven throughout their life. And what I mean by that is from when you were a child, you were driven to do certain things, be interested in certain things, be interested in certain people. Like I have a two and a half year old son.
And if I were to sit down right now and write a one page bio on this young. Here's what I would say. Strong willed, determined, willing to not listen and break rules, high energy. These are all things I could say about him right now. None of that's going to change when he's my age. None of that will change.
It's all true. Even our genome can't even change more than six to 8%. There's all this stuff about us that is embedded inside of us from the moment we're brought into this world, the sooner we start to listen. For that, and look for that golden threat throughout our lives. The things that have brought us joy, the moments where we would do something for free, the moments that we find ourselves losing track of time, all of these things are categorically within the same kind of tunnel.
And so to answer your question, when I was going through the foundation, I didn't know it, but I was attracted to the seal community because I wanted to be part of a great. The greatest team. I wanted to follow great leadership and learn from great leadership. And I wanted to be part of a culture that's rich in history and, and also much bigger than myself when I left Naval, uh, special warfare and started to go on a listening tour to then build the foundation.
When I interviewed hundreds of special operators, guess what they told. When I interviewed folks that were looking for their next job, they said, Joe, I just wanna be part of a great team. I wanna follow a great leader. And I wanna be part of a great culture. Then when I interviewed 151 fortune 500 CEOs, they said about their successes to date.
Oh, it's because of our teams. We've got great leaders here and our culture is strong. Okay. When I interviewed 50 founders to figure out venture. Tell me about your successes in failures. We have great teams. We have great leaders. We have great culture. And then for the failures, they would say the same thing.
We had bad teams. We had bad leadership in our culture turned toxic, right? Ask VCs. What are you invested at the earliest stage? I'm a seed investor, preceded seed, a round investor. That's very early for the folks listening to this. This is like Facebook. When mark Zuckerberg was in a room with like three people and nobody was getting paid.
That's when I would like to enter the. right. You're only investing in a team, their propensity for leadership and their worldview around culture. So TLC has become team's leadership and culture has become a theme. My golden thread that I've been attracted to my entire life. That's how I came to know you, Phil.
I was attracted to a great team, a bunch of leaders trying to pull this conference together. I love the culture that you were trying to. And then look at where you are now. Ian runs Caspian you're here on his podcast through his studios. I'm here because I know Ian, and he knows you that we see this, that like attracts like, and that people who believe very similar philosophies in life, end up being attracted to each other.
Everyone has this. It's a matter of you listening throughout your life, closely enough to put it down on paper and then begin to attract it.
Phil Dillard: That's a great answer and a great description. Great insight for somebody who's thinking about how to look at preceded companies. If you think about the things that these companies that you're looking at want to do, are there any common threads?
Are there any common ways that they're looking at the world and desiring to make it
Joe Musselman: impact the vision of our fund at. Is crystal clear from the day that I met my partners and kind of onboarded them into the idea of TLC. We all believe the same thing. We, they just hadn't been calling it that, but they had been living it throughout their lives.
And when I talked them through the idea, it was like an aha moment. Like, oh, this is, oh, I've been living my life. The vision of our fund is we imagine a world where empathetic mission oriented founders. Empathy continues to be one of the top leadership traits across the greatest leaders. The world has ever known empathy, the willingness and know how to jump into someone else's skin and understand how they feel.
And so when I think about some of the earliest leaders that I worked with worked alongside and, you know, came to know in an intimate way, there's one team that comes to mind. Brian, Nate, and Joe at Airbnb, what Brian, Nate and Joe were saying in 2008 and 2009 about that company. They were saying, as they were ringing the bell, when they went public, they believe the same thing, the vision mission value set of the company, the principles they hold around design, it's never changed.
It's never changed. So if there's a second trait that I look for in leaders, it's consistency, the best leaders are consistent with what they believe with what they say with how they act. And there is no difference on who they are behind the scenes. On stage or whatever it might be. I would say that that's probably the most important thing that I notice and recognize about founders.
They have a belief system, they can talk about it. They can link it to stories that matter to them that were emotionally changing for them in life. And no one ever starts a company on a whim. Doesn't happen that way. Whenever people say like, oh, it was a coincidence. No, it wasn't. Oh, it came out of nowhere.
The idea. No, it didn't right. There's a thread throughout your life. That led you to be exactly where you are. So a mentor of mine said something a couple days ago that has just stuck to me like glue. He said everyone is self made, but we only hear the successful people say it. That got me thinking for days.
It's like, that's very true. Of course, he, he, he meant a lesson in self accountability and responsibility and, you know, people could argue whichever way they'd like, but at the same time we have created the self that we see right now, whether we like the self we see or not. And there's a thread that got us here, there's a decision tree that got us here.
And all I'm telling people that if you are unhappy with what you are seeing in life or work or in your business, if you revisit the roots of where you come. And why you are doing what you're doing. And if it's misaligned in any way, you'll find why you are unhappy. We are unhappy when we are MIS.
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And now back to the interview. There's a whole lot to that, right? I mean, there's the alignment with your core. You need to know your core to be aligned with it. You need to figure out if there are repeating challenges or disappointments, where they come from and, and why and what you're listening to and what you're, what you're not listening to.
And you have to find a way, especially at those who choose to serve, choose to sacrifice all the things you talked about earlier to persist through. The challenges cuz you don't get to those great successes that you talked about without a lot of challenges, you have to know that you're being drawn somewhere and then understand yourself well enough to know why you're being drawn somewhere and then seed the patterns or habits that you're making that you could fix so that you can get yourself to where it is you need to go.
And then the game starts to change, right? And to me, this is the solution versus doing nothing. When the game starts to change. Because you see things differently or because you've figured out who you are and where you're going and how you fit those sort of things happen. Can you talk a little bit personally about how we've seen the game change when people go from what's next to knowing what is next and then actually executing on it, what's changed.
What's different. What becomes easy? That was
Joe Musselman: hard. Well, I think a lot of folks struggle with first getting. I can offer a very simple equation. This is something that I talk about often. What I noticed about TLC is at first, I thought, well, as teams, times leadership behaviors equal the culture. Right. And that kind of makes sense.
And when you think about it, a company has teams. The company has certain leadership behaviors and leadership trickles down. So it's kind of this circle. So if you were to think about team's leadership equals your culture and culture being over on the other side of the equal side, we talk about culture often, but it's actually an end result of something.
I don't think anyone would deny this culture is the end result of something. So then what are the prescriptive behaviors? Most importantly, what are the prescriptive words and ideas that can morph into a. Because that's exactly what happens with the culture. Your words become your actions, your actions become what the world and what people around you see, and that becomes your culture.
So when you say what becomes E what has become easy? That was once harder. I immediately go to, well, how clear are you? On what you believe it becomes initially it's hard if you don't know once, you know, and you're clear, it becomes easy because it becomes a filter this equation that I've kind of worked out.
I call it the TLC equation. If you can't sit here right now for everyone, who's listening to this and you say, well, I don't know how clear am I like, what's the test. What's the rubric. Can you clearly define the vision of the world you hope to see and imagine to create alongside others? What's your. When I say mission, I mean, what would you be so excited to put your feet on the ground and do every day?
What's your worthy cause? Right. When it comes to values, do you know what they are? You probably talk about them like, oh, one of my values is you probably say I value this. Can you say that you have eight core values? And my number one core value me, Joe Musman is love hard. That's different than tough love.
That's certainly different than hardly love. That's how I was raised. My whole family loved hard, right? With responsibility, accountability. It was not tough love because I always felt so loved. So there's something different there for me. And this is just speaking for me, but I can tell you what my vision, vision values are.
Right now I can have a whole conversation and link my vision to stories throughout my life. I can link my mission to stories throughout my life. I can link every value to an emotionally shaping story that happened to me in my life, which led me to build leadership principles for me, which led me to an ethos that I believe about me.
That's my filter on how I attract great teams, leadership, and a culture into my. So, if we were to think about this horizontally, get clear on your vision, get clear on your mission, get clear on your values. Write out your principles, write out your ethos or you're about us. How many times Phil, have you gone to a website?
Go to the about us page and left knowing nothing about them all the time. That's what I would say is get clear and then becomes very
Phil Dillard: easy and people need to do the work. Obviously, given what you share shared, you've done the work, right? I've done a lot, a lot of that work. So I understand the depths of what you say in the way you say it and the clarity with which it, it comes out.
Right. Love hard being a top. Right. I could see it. I could smell it. I could feel it. In you, right. And I understand organizations need to develop those values and teams need to develop those values and then they need to figure out how to live them. Right. It is a challenge to get people to come together on those things.
But if you're together on it tightly, that's what makes a great team. And you could tell the difference if it comes early, because you're very highly aligned or not, you know, but you can work your way to it as.
Joe Musselman: That's right. So you talk about mission driven companies. This is a challenge for everyone who's listening to this podcast.
Let's say you are trying to figure out what's next for you. First. You ask yourself the next question and you say, I don't know, you know, I don't know. And you think to yourself, well, it's not necessarily, what's next. It's people say like, what do I want do next in life, wrong question. You have to say who's doing something that inspires you.
A, who is traceable, a who is trackable. They come with a track record and a background. And when you ask these people, you'll be surprised that the ones that are doing things most likely that inspire you. They too will have a very clear vision, mission and value set, but be able to talk about it. When you sit down in interviews, by the way, the biggest joy I have is helping people get to where they belong in life sooner.
The world would change if that were the case, but ask people when you talk to them, what's the. At this company, what's the mission of this company. What are the values? And if they can't answer those questions run because those things trickle down from leadership. And if they don't know, that means the leadership doesn't know.
And that means the company does not know what they believe. So that's, to me, the challenge is you want to get clear. Yes, you have to do the work, but companies. Not companies. They're a group of people accomplishing something on behalf of a product place or thing. Like it's still people that are inside of a company.
And if you wanna align with their TLC, their team's leadership and culture, you have to ask them about vision, mission values.
Phil Dillard: Absolutely. Cuz there are so many companies that don't know it. So it seems to me, probably on your core value list is not leaving something on the table. You don't wanna see someone's potential go unrealized.
That would be the tragedy for you. Right? And for me
Joe Musselman: that the value that translated from what you said is the value I hold is practice artistry, which is on a sliding scale there's days where Phil Dillard is a. And he's at a two, right. You're not motivated that day. Fine. Right. But the next day, you're at a 9.9.
The next day, you're at an eight. The next day. You're at a nine the next day. You're an eight. The next day. You're at nine. The point is we're all trying to up our average of when we are practicing artistry in our lives, because it's, it's okay to have a bad day. It's okay to be a. Piece of at times,
Phil Dillard: but you have to recover from it.
You have to learn from it. You say, why was it yesterday bad and what can I have done better or differently? What did I learn from that? Am I being hard on myself or trying to be perfect. So just accept that, you know, I just described that as life's a S wave it's ups and downs, right. That the entropy is constant.
So I could choose to be positive about downs. Cause I know there's gonna be ups. And I know if I'm disciplined through a tough day, I'm gonna be proud of myself when I wake. The next day, after a really tough day, right. I go back to Admiral McCraven speech about how he got through buds thinking about, well, first I made my bed right.
Cause I knew I could tackle that. And when I hear about people. Who talk about breaking difficult things out. When I would do triathlons, it was, I'm just gonna run to that next marker, or I'm gonna swing to that next buoy. And I'm gonna attack one after I get to that next thing, because now I can put it behind me.
So it actually gets me into the last section, a real quick thing about. Quick hits tips, suggestions. As we were talking, I thought there were of three things that you said that would probably be really helpful first to find the core value of yourself, second of how to get started. And the third is like how to engage with the people you seek to.
Once you found that group, do you have any tips on those three areas,
Joe Musselman: a quick self test? Here's what I would. Ask yourself, this question, what is the vision I hold for the world? The ideal vision? What is my mission statement? Meaning my worthy cause and what are the values that I hold closest to me, values are how we think I feel and communicate into the world.
They're indicative of behaviors. Take a moment, define those things. However you choose to define them. You don't have to use my definition, create your own. Now, once you get clear on that, you'll start to generate a lens into certain types of teams. You'll be attracted to certain types of leaders and you'll start to recognize cultures that believe what you believe.
Then you'll start to have clarity around the question. What's next.
Phil Dillard: Yeah, that's beautiful. Extremely, extremely well said. You know, as you were saying that I was like, my vision is clear. Ours is shared, right. Uh, economy that works for everyone where everyone can find joy in their work and deliver impact.
And, and we can all share in that abundance. That's my vision, abundant world of 10 billion people. The mission is, is actually. Helping build and grow entrepreneurs who are delivering these mission driven companies, a hundred impact unicorns in the next decade. Right? That's my mission. And the values are pretty, pretty clear and, and also shared, right.
Equity, fairness, creativity creation, some of my values, right. And the more I got clear about which ones matter. The more, you know, what was easy for me was to say no, cause it was hard for me to say no, cause all sorts of things sound great until you narrow things down like that. Doesn't, that's great. And it's great for someone, but it's not great for me.
I will introduce you to someone, my obligation. I'll introduce you to someone who does that. Who's fully passionate about that. And the more people I know who are great at other things, the more I can give them great people and great things to deal with. And I could focus on the thing that I do best. And then I just started attracting more and more.
To me who are aligned with the things that we really, really wanted to do. So I just applied your self test and I'm like, I love, love hard, and I will borrow TLC and credit it back to you. When I share it with other people, I can speak personally and professionally about the importance of being able to do that self test and that you know what to tell people it is.
It's not easy to do this. I've worked on this for a long, long time. I've worked on this for a decade, at least specifically, to get very, very clear about this. And it's an iterative process. So I say to people, my riff with you is tell me if you like this. If it feels hard and UN daunting, it is take 30 minutes, set a timer for 30 minutes, do your best in 30 minutes and let that be okay for a day or.
Until you can try and do it again because you're trying to eat an elephant. You're trying to do a, a marathon and you've gotta do it by the little steps along the way. Would you agree? Challenge add to that?
Joe Musselman: I would. So this is me loving hard, sharing this with your audience. This is a good example of what a love hard looks.
I've learned one thing with working with the top performers on the planet. I cannot convince anyone to do anything ever, ever. I don't care what it is. I cannot convince anyone to do anything ever, but I will share this, that if you're sitting there and you're like, oh, this is all very high and mighty or soft.
This is a bunch of soft skills. I need like hard tactics. I need strategies. I need this, that and the other. You're missing the point. If you are in pain, because you feel like you are not doing what you love. If you are sad, because you feel like you are not living out your life's fullest purpose, this is actually not high and mighty and soft things.
We know this in work and life, the soft skills are the hard skills period. People don't leave. Companies, people don't leave leaders. They leave cultures where they don't feel heard, loved, or respect. They don't leave a technical founder because he or she doesn't have the technical skills to run the business.
It's cuz they don't feel love, heard, respected or valued. That's why people leave companies. So right now, if you were listening to this and you don't feel loved, heard, valued or respected in your current work, here's the love heart things in your life will change when the pain of staying exactly the.
Outweighs the pain of change. And when you dissect that and actually listen to the words that I just said, you will begin to realize that, oh, well maybe my pain threshold is higher than I thought it was. And then you'll keep enduring pain for a while. But one day you will say to yourself, I cannot handle this anymore.
And only you can convince you that it's time. Cuz I can't convince anyone
Phil Dillard: of anything. Sure words have never been spoken. We're gonna highlight that and hopefully put that as a teaser to your, uh, podcast so that more people will hear it, even if they don't listen to it, because I think it's a really important one.
Pain is a message. Right? Pain is always a message, right? Sitting, sitting in a too long, running, too running, too hard, lifting too much. Put your hand in the fire. Pain's a message. Emotional and mental pain, cognitive dissonance, dissonance, all a message. And we've gotta decipher the message for ourselves and then sometimes work harder or smarter than we think we ever could.
To kind of make that transition, right. If you've ever done it or if you've had to done it, do it more than once knowing that going through the transition is better than the fear or, and the pain of sitting there. One place. Thanks so much for, for sharing that. Well, I know, uh, we could do this forever. um, but we are out of time.
I wanna be respectful of you being graceful with your time with us. I wanna thank you for coming on the podcast. I'm curious if you have any last parting shots or share any information for people who might want to get in touch with you to understand how you're contributing to the economy of the future.
How should they reach you? Very
Joe Musselman: simple. I'm very respons. On email and I have a team managing LinkedIn inbound from entrepreneurs to other folks. So I would say that's the best way to get in touch with me is to follow me on LinkedIn or send me a note or email at Joe B ventures. And you will get a response back within 24 hours.
And also, I want to tell everyone too, you know, pay attention to what Phil is putting out into the. I've watched him grow and evolve and build for many years and he's come across amazing people and life lessons and philosophies that I wish more leaders would share. So pay attention to what he puts out and the people that he surrounds himself with.
I, I think he's onto something special. Thanks
Phil Dillard: so much, Joe. I really appreciate that. And I can't wait to see what happens from broom ventures and look forward to collaborating in building this future. And thank everybody else. Who's come. Uh, we hope to see you next time. On the next episode of through line to the fourth sector, talk to you all soon.
Thank you for listening to this episode of throughline to the fourth sector. I'm your host, Phil Dillard. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a rating and tell a friend to learn more about the fourth sector economy. Visit throughline networks.com that's T H R U L I N E networks.com. Thanks again, and we hope to have you with us in the next episode.
Hey everyone. Thanks for being part of the movement of human evolution that we call fourth sector capitalism. The fourth sector is a space where companies operate at the intersection of purpose and profit, where companies are intentionally built to deliver both impact and financial. As a compliment to this podcast, we'll be out speaking, both in live and virtual conferences and events around the world.
Upcoming plans. Speaking events include world rainforest day global summit on June 22nd. That's virtual New York climate week in September. That's live nexus global conference and cop 27, both in October, you could find more information in the show notes and on our website and LinkedIn pages. We hope to see you there.