Episode 143: No Limits: Uncover That "Thing" You Do That Is SUPER Extraordinary! With Jeff Gibbard
What does it take to live a life with no limits? The answer is lies in tuning in to the thing that makes you unique, your potential greatest contribution to the world – your superpower. In this episode, we interview Jeff Gibbard, the Author of The Lovable Leader, a professional speaker, and the founder of several companies including Super Productive, and The Superhero Institute. We discuss how his upbringing with his father being a funeral director and a mother that was tech savvy influenced his own journey as a creative entrepreneur and strategist. Jeff also talks about the vision behind his brand and why he calls himself a Superhero. Tune in and find out!
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No Limits: Uncover That "Thing" You Do That Is SUPER Extraordinary! With Jeff Gibbard
Welcome to this episode where I interviewed Jeff Gibbard. He is formerly known as the world's most handsome social media and content marketing strategist. However, he is also the author of The Lovable Leader, a professional speaker and the Founder of several companies, including Super Productive and The Superhero Institute, a certification program for coaches who want to help their clients grow revenue and unlock their potential to make a positive impact on the world. Jeff is also the host of his own popular podcast called Shareable. In this interview, we discuss his upbringing and how his father, being a funeral director and his mother, being tech savvy, influenced his own journey as a creative entrepreneur and strategist.
It means so much that you support this show each time that we launch an episode and have these guests on who tell their stories. We hope that you will share, subscribe, and leave a comment on how this episode was helpful to you and how it not only impacted you but maybe changed a little bit, something in the way that you think about things or you interact or created a different type of energy with the people around you.
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I'm so excited to be with Jeff Gibbard. Jeff, did you want to start off and give the audience a little background on yourself and who you are?
Sure. I'm a speaker, a strategist and a coach. Most commonly, I go by Superhero as my title. What I do is I own a company called Super Impactful and all of the work that I do is geared towards helping people make a more meaningful impact in the ways that are important to them. I help people escape their jobs if they want to, so they can start their own thing or I work with people who want to stay and help them make good trouble so they can do some meaningful disruption in their companies. I wrote a book called The Lovable Leader. I'm a podcaster. I'm a blogger. I have ADHD. I'm autistic. I do a lot of different stuff. I'm all over the place. It's always difficult to give a concise answer but I'm a man of many interests and many passions and I try to help other people do the same.
I think it's the speaker way of life of doing a bunch of different things. That's what makes it fun.
Yeah, exactly. Never boring.
Thank you so much for being here and I love to start not with what you do now but where you came from. If you want to give us a little background. Where'd you grow up? What did your parents do for a living? What was fun for you when you were little?
I think this is such a good way to start off because it does contextualize each of your guests. I’ve read a bunch of your episodes and it's always interesting when you look at the title and then you read someone's backstory. I grew up in Long Island, New York. I was an only child and my dad was a funeral director and my mom did a lot of different stuff. She was an OG computer user, very early, a lot of Microsoft DOS and all that stuff. We grew up in a very techie household in the early days. My dad was a funeral director and I wanted to be a professional basketball player for my early life.
When that didn't work out, I tried to be a world-famous movie director. I wanted to be like Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino or whatever. When that didn't work out, one thing led to another. I tried this, I tried that. I wound up going back to school and got my graduate degree. I started my own business in 2011 after realizing I could not hold down a job. That is not who I am. I wasn't built for it. I wasn't designed for it.
Let's get back to your dad because that's hugely fascinating. It brought me back to a memory. In my first job, I was an auditor, so I'm a CPA by trade. One of my first audits was a funeral home company. How they would name things was always interesting on the financial statement reports, like pre-need or at need, to not say that someone was before death or dead. I was getting used to the whole thing and understanding what they did without it being so emotional. Growing up with that in your background, I'd love to understand how your dad got into it and what was your perception of that?
This is probably in my backstory, the most meaningful detail, honestly. There are a couple of pieces of it. One, my dad grew up in upstate Albany. He was adopted. His father passed away young. His mother ran away. He and his brother were adopted by their aunt and uncle. He grew up in a time where the standard advice was you grow up, you go to school, maybe you go to college, but more likely you go to some trade. You get a good union job, you get married, you have kids, you retire, you pass away, pay your taxes. That was very much the path.
He grew up basically because he wasn't going to college. When Vietnam broke out, he basically knew like, “My number's going to get called because I fit the demographic of people who are going to get drafted.” He chose instead to enlist so that he could choose what he did. What he chose to do was body retrieval. He basically was the guy who showed up after all of the fighting. He wanted to stay out of harm's way. If you think about it, it was a pretty good survival skill.
He did that. Naturally then, coming out of Vietnam, when he got back, he naturally decided, “I already have the skillset.” He went to embalming school. He did all the things they did. He went into funeral directing. At some point along the way, he met my mom. At some point, they had me. I look back at my dad and I remember him waking up early or coming home late and all of his working overtime.
He did all of that so that he could provide. Also, he did things in such a way that he could structure his time so he could be home when I got home from school so we could play cats so we could hang out. That impacted me that he made these decisions to be around for me. He was always around. I had such a tight relationship with him. Also, I saw that he did this thing that he didn't love. He wasn't passionate about funeral directing. That wasn't his thing. I think it was Confucius who originally said this but he always said to me, “Find something you love to do and you'll never work a day in your life.” He said that to me very, very early in life.
It stuck in my head. I couldn't ever let go of it because I saw him doing what he did without passion, purpose or excitement. He wanted me to have a different life than that. I always felt it was a bit of an obligation, a bit of a duty to him, that he went through all that he went through so that I could have the opportunity to choose what I wanted to do and do something that makes me happy.
I’ve consistently done that. Come hell or high water and whether or not it worked out or not, I kept going that path and I finally arrived at a place where I could. That's a lot because of him. I would say the other part of that, real quick, is that being around someone who's always around death, you're very keenly aware of the fragility of life. Our own mortality. You don't have much time here. You never know when your number's getting called and because of that, I found myself very much in the I'm going to do what I can with the time that I have here to make sure it's impactful.
I'm also wondering when you think about that job of being a funeral director, there is a lot of purpose in the healing that you're giving to those families. Did you ever see him interacting as the funeral director. What were your observations of the people around him?
I’ll tell you, if you ever want to laugh your butt off, hang out with a funeral director. They're the most twisted, hilarious people. All of the people he worked with, absolutely hilarious. You have to have a dark sense of humor. It was a thing. I went to work with him a lot. I have far more clear memories of going to work with him than I did of going to work with my mom. It was because she bounced around a lot. He had the same job his entire career, basically.
I saw him interact with people and he took his job very seriously. I saw how he presented. I'm sure of the impact he made on people. I know that when he had family or friends that passed away, he would basically give away his commission to hook up the people that were coming to him because it wasn't about the money. It was about trying to do right by the people in his circle. He was very insular. He didn't have a big network of friends but if you were on his inside, you were his people and he would do whatever for you.
On the one hand, I know that he took it seriously and I know that he worked hard and I know all of that. I also know the backside of it, where we would chat over dinner. We would talk about life and I know how he felt about the job. He was like, “This is my lot in life. This is what I'm doing but I do it because I want to be able to provide for family. I want to be able to do all those things.” I did see him provide comfort and I know that he had that skill and he could turn it on. He was a very compassionate and empathetic person to begin with. The bigger lesson was life's short. Do something that makes you happy and, if you can from the very start, try and go find something that doesn't feel like work.
No Limits: Life is short. Do something that makes you happy. And if you can, from the very start, find something that doesn't feel like work.
Finding Purpose
A lot of times, when I'm working with people or leaders, trying to figure out what their purpose is and what they do because, just like your dad, so many people choose what they do based on what they know or what they're good at. So he was already good at that skill. He went into that as a career. I do think we overlook because you're that purpose of maybe I don't love what I do every day, that this is what I'm good at but my purpose is it provides me the flexibility to be with my son every day. It provides me with the type of life that I can give my family. Sometimes, we lose sight of that important piece of it. We get so stuck in the drudgery of maybe not loving every minute of our day but not necessarily looking at the purpose behind everything else it gave us. It sounds huge.
There's a post that floats around the internet that falsely attributes this philosophy to Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, Charlie Brown and everything, that talks about this idea of like, you probably can't name the last Nobel Prize winners. You probably can't name the last Oscar winners but you can probably name a teacher that made an impact on you. You probably can think about a family friend or something. This idea of little moments, day-to-day interactions that are big impact. I think when we talk about purpose, there are a lot of ways to look at it. I'm trying to help people to think about purpose on a grand scale. A lot of the purpose could be those grand scales on your day-to-day life.
How can you impact your child's life in this remarkably profound way by how you show up as a role model for them, how you spend time with them, how you're present with them, and how you structure your career so that you have that time to be present with them? That is one side of it. The other side of it is the bigger, broader purpose. This idea of you only have this much time here, what are you going to do with that time? It's everybody's choice how they're going to answer that.
For me, I know that looking back on my story, there's the fact that my dad was a funeral director and that very much put in my mind this idea of purpose in this longer timeline. This idea of you have this window here, but time will exist after you and there was time before you. I always tried to think about like, “What could I do that would make the biggest possible impact on the life that I have, something I could feel proud of about my contribution to this world?” That was reinforced actually by another incident that happened in my life, which is that on my last day of high school, my mother got into a catastrophic car accident with it's a company called GOD, Guaranteed Overnight Deliverers tractor trailer. She got hit by GOD.
It’s ridiculous. It rips off the side of her Jeep. She has this traumatic brain injury. She manages to live through nine hours in the operating room. It was my last day of high school. I took the car that morning, she came and picked it up during lunch and we met for pizza. I gave her the car. She was going to get stuff for my graduation party and then that happened. It makes you think seconds is all it took for it to be her and not somebody else or for it not to have happened at all. It is always never lost on me that we don't know when our moment is. For me, that inspires me to try and think about how I can make the biggest impact for the most number of people.
I'm not saying that everybody has to do that. That’s not the thing when I'm in the conversation around purpose, but I do think everyone would do well to think about and take time to think about what is their purpose? What's the thing that drives them, that makes them excited? It could be spending that time with somebody. It could be finding something they enjoy. It could be that they don't have to like what they do for work because that's not important to them. It matters how they spend their time outside of work. Everybody's got to figure that out if they want to have the best possible life. At least that's my philosophy on it.
No Limits: Everyone would do well to think about and take time to think about what is their purpose? What's the thing that drives them, that makes them excited?
Everybody makes small impacts or large impacts. There's no comparing. Your dad might've thought it was a small impact and look at how that carried forward all the things you're doing to help impact other people because of the examples of your parents as well. You said your mom was into computers. What did she do as far as that?
She worked for Grant Thornton. She worked for Olympus for a little bit and a couple of different companies. I don't even know, honestly, what she was doing because I know it had a lot to do with DOS, early Windows, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. That's what she was doing. She did that for a little while, worked in the city and came home late. She was always miserable and always burnt out. She always went from thing to thing to thing, got laid off a bunch of times. Here he was, working this union job and did it for his whole life. She went from job to job and got laid off. She decided to start her own thing. She was an electrologist, zapping hair, eyebrows, mustaches, any of those things. She did that at home for a little bit.
After my parents split and she got remarried, that was a thing that she did. She did a bunch of different stuff. I think that impressed upon me that job security is an illusion. If somebody else gets to decide whether you have a job or not, it's not job security. I’ve always felt I have the best job security in the world because all I have to do is keep being me, being honest, being authentic, being good at what I do and finding people who need that. I have tons of clients always at my disposal because I have solutions to people's problems. None of them gets to be the sole reason why I'm employed or not.
I think that whole entrepreneurial thing, I feel like it's something in your soul. You're either like that or not like that. You can be taught entrepreneurial skills but be willing to take those risks. Also, even in your hardest times, your mom, losing your jobs or whatever, having faith that you can support yourself, you can get back on your feet. That's such an important thing that you don't realize your children are watching or and so forth.
I'm not sure if I think that entrepreneurialism is baked into it. I do think there are certain factors that some people have that make it easier for them. If you're risk averse, entrepreneurialism is a little more tough. If you are singularly focused on one thing, it becomes a little tougher because you need to master a lot of different skills. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
You said you were a basketball player.
I wanted to be a professional basketball player, but I played a lot in high school. I'm going to tell you the very quick version of this story, but because this the first time I’ve ever told this story anywhere. When I tried out in freshman year, I got put on the junior varsity team. Sophomore year. I got cut in junior year, I went in. I was ready. I had hustled and played all off-season. I came in ready to play. As I remembered it, I went in and I crushed it in tryouts. I went in and I crushed every tryout, but I didn't get put on the team.
It broke my heart. It was at that point that I gave up on the dream of basketball. For years, my entire adult life, I carried with me this like, “Maybe you can't do everything you set your mind to. Maybe I wasn't as good as I thought. Maybe I had an inflated self.” I woke up one morning to a random Facebook message. The random Facebook message was from a kid who was a senior at the same time that I was a junior.
Long story short, in a beautiful long Facebook message, he basically was like, “My daughter was trying out for this team and I wanted to give her a lesson. I essentially told the story about how you came in and you dragged our asses up and down the court and you were the best player on the court. For some reason, the coach didn't put you on. You can't control everything, whether the coach puts you on or not, but you can control your effort. Put the effort in like Jeff did.”
I was like, “What? That's how you remember it?” He was like, “No. We all talked about it. All the seniors talked about it. The coach came and was like, ‘Go lock up Jeff Gibbard. Show us if that kid actually did improve.’” he was like, “You gassed me. You dragged me up and down the court.” I cannot believe that that's actually what happened and it wasn't a figment of my imagination but it was so validating. It was a movie moment. Nobody gets this. If you read the message, it’s like it's from a script. It's beautiful.
He might've assumed that you already knew that.
It's funny. I started crying after I got it because it was heavy. I was like, “I need a minute to respond to it.” He was actually like, “I'm so sorry. I should have thought that might have been a different memory for you. I remembered it. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to be a thing.” I was like, “No, this is great. This is the best thing you could have done for me. Please don't apologize. I just need a minute with it.”
Goals, Goals, Goals
Isn't that amazing how you carry those things with you for so long? I played the violin growing up and there was this orchestra I wanted to get into and the conductor hated me. I don't know why. I play and he get this look on his face. Everywhere else, I get this positive reaction. I don't know how much you know about classical music, but it was my freshman year of high school and I still didn't get into this orchestra and I wanted to get in the next year. I'm working my butt off. I was at the symphony one night and my mom said, “What about viola?” I'm like, “Viola?” It never gets any attention. As a violinist, I'm like, “What do you mean?” I sat there quietly and I was like, “Interesting.” By the end of the symphony I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to pick up viola.” Next year, I got in. She stood up and said, “That's your instrument,” which actually hurt my feelings.
You're like, “I want it to be that.”
Sometimes your route isn't where you think. You've got to find another way to accomplish your goal. I think what's cool is just like your dad, when something you do actually got used as an example for another generation. That's even more validating than the whole experience.
As a 15-year-old, 16-year-old, like, I wasn't thinking like, “One day, one of these kids is going to tell their 10-year-old daughter about how I worked in the off season.” That wasn't a thought. It's wild. It got me thinking. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate this into one of the talks that I do. How essentially, you can only control the effort you put into it but you never know the impact you're going to have on people. I have this idea called those little moments, big impact for a talk that I'm going to be working on. I might fit that in there.
I had a podcast with a good friend of mine, James Lee. What he does is he is a coach's coach. He trains coaches to understand their impact on their players and so forth. He has a story where he went out for the volleyball team and he was actually not good but he kept going out there. He was for sure he wasn't going to get on the team. He ended up getting on and he talked to the coach, like, “How did I make it?” The coach was the opposite of that coach for whatever reason why your coach didn't want to put you on the team but his coach basically said, “The fact that you keep getting up and motivated and having that attitude affects the whole entire team. I want you on here.”
Same thing about the trajectory of my life had that been the coach I had.
That is so important, the impact people have on your life. We have to be so careful with whatever biases we're holding because who knows what that coach's issue was with you. He had all that power in his hand.
It's brutal to think about.
When that didn't work out for you, where did you pivot?
Do you mean the basketball thing?
Yeah.
After that, I was like, “We'll pick the next passion. I like movies. Maybe I want to make movies.” To start with, the basketball thing, I wanted to be the starting point guard for the Knicks and break the assist record. It wasn't like, “It would be cool.” I always thought I was the next big thing. When I thought about making movies, I thought, “I want to win Oscars for best director.” I thought I wanted to make culturally iconic movies that withstand the test of time and shape how people see the world.
That was how I saw movies at the time. I went to Temple in Philadelphia. That’s how I wound up in Philly. I wound up doing that. At the time I went, it was the bridge between analog film to digital video and from analog photography to digital photography. I wound up actually shifting away from film because it was difficult to make any films at that stage. As the transition was happening, all the computers were slow. It took three hours to basically render a three-minute clip. How far the technology has come is mind-blowing to me now.
I did that and I decided to actually start doing photography because I took a photography class and I was like, “This is amazing. I could tell a story in a single frame.” From there, I decided that I wanted to travel the world and take pictures. I wanted to be a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model photographer because I was a twenty-something-year-old dude. That was obviously the best job in the world to me.
I love how clearly defined you are in your goal.
Every part of it was very clear. After that, in keeping with the theme, I decided, “I love cooking and I know how to cook well. I'm actually going to start an in-home fine dining, personal private chef service that's going to revolutionize in-home fine dining, starting in Philadelphia and then spreading across the country.” Think small all times. I had the whole idea very clearly planned out. I knew where I wanted to have my open kitchen that would basically supply all the cooks that would drive around. This was pre-iPhone. Mind you, this is pre-Blackberry. This is flipphone and MySpace era, if even that. I was way ahead of the curve for what DoorDash and Grubhub and all that has become, although that's more coming delivery food anyway.
That was what I tried to do. When that failed, I was a bartender and a waiter for 5, 6, 7 years trying to figure out who I wanted to be, feeling like, “Maybe everything's horrible. Maybe I’ll never get what I want.” I went back, got my MBA and that got me out of the rut and back into doing stuff. I came at around the same time that social media was taking shape. I started a social media agency that I ran from 2011 through 2017. That got acquired. I was at that company for about a year and a half. I left to start doing superhero stuff. The period in between my MBA and starting my agency, I held down two jobs.
I had one at a consulting firm for two years-ish. I was miserable after about six months, but I somehow managed to stick it out for another year and a half. I went to a PR firm to be the director of social media. That was my big break. I sat in a cubicle and everything was horrible and I hated it. I had a client. They laid me off and I brought one of my clients with me because he insisted. I was like, “Cool. I have a client. I’ll start my business.”
I start a business. My very first day working for myself, I immediately felt different. I could feel every cell in my body vibrating at a different frequency. I felt alive, I felt excited, I felt motivated, I felt creative. I felt free. Everything felt good. Even when I’ve struggled in my own business, it has felt a million times better than the best I’ve ever felt at any company where I had a job or a boss, God forbid.
I’m curious because your dad was so stable in a job, has that ever bothered you at all? I know he told you to do what you love.
Not once did it ever bother me that I couldn't hold down a job because I didn't like it. I was like, “Who are you to tell me what to do? I'm smart and creative. I don't need your permission to do something smart and creative.” Apparently, you do need their permission to do something creative. In my own business, I don't need anybody's permission. I do stuff and it either works or it doesn't. I get to live and die with that. I appreciate the accountability that comes with making my own decisions and living with the results of it, as opposed to being confined to the imagination of the people who employ me.
As someone whose brain is going at all times with ideas and with things that I want to work on and creative projects, what people pay me for is this brain, the brain that is able to see patterns in what people are talking about. To see the things that people aren't saying, to ask the questions that pull out valuable information. I have never had the opportunity to do that at a company. Even if I did, even if I could find a company that would allow me all of those things, they would be reaping the primary benefits of all of that talent, of all that effort.
They would want me to do all these other things that I'm not good at. For instance, before I even came on this show, I made a point that I wanted to say this to you. Your profession, the profession that you hang out in and that you do accountants, that world, you are my singular example of do what you do well and bring in people who do the things you don't do. I could never, ever be an accountant. I'm good at creating a single spreadsheet and a budget. If it's mine and it's the way I want it, I could do it but I could never, ever do it consistently because consistency isn't baked into this brain. I appreciate that you do what you do and that folks like you do what you do. My accountant is one of the most important people in my life.
I think that's important for anybody, whether you're an accountant that needs someone like you. You're willing to invest in wherever you have gaps because you can't be hard on yourself. All brains are not equal and they shouldn't be or else this world wouldn't operate the way that it does. It's important to know what you're good at and know where to invest so that you can keep being good at what you're good at.
I’ll tell you the model that I use to think about it, this might be helpful pe for people reading. When I think about whether or not to hire someone, I think, “What would it take for me to learn how to do this? How much time would it take for me to do this, do this while I do this consistently?” I try to quantify that versus what I could sell my time for otherwise. If I could do a coaching engagement for $250, $500, $750, $1,000 for that hour, if I were to take that hour and do my accounting, do my taxes, would it be worth it? Probably not.
If the money that I pay to my accountant to get all of those things done in both the time, the money, the opportunity cost that I would be wasting and the money that I could make with that time instead but also all of the frustration of learning the skill that I'm not particularly excited about, it makes perfect sense. I’ll gladly write that check. I'm like, “There you go.”
A lot of people who would hire someone me often will talk to someone me and think I should be able to do the thing that he does. It's like, “No, but you can't. My brain is designed for this and yours is not. If you want to learn everything I know about brand or leadership, culture or marketing or sales, I’ll give you the reading list, but I’ll talk to you in ten years. It's going to take you a while. You might as well hire me and we'll get it done.”
We All Have A Superpower
As far as your movie making abilities and what you learned, how have you used that in the work that you do?
It's so funny the way that our job history, our career history and our interests come back. Yes. I'm going to give you one example before that, which is that I worked at Banana Republic and Express in my late teens. I was in retail. I can tell you my closet is immaculate. Everything is folded perfectly. I know the difference between a flat front fold and a jeans fold. I know what I'm doing there. That has come back. The movie making, it's funny because when I was in film school, I was like, “This will never be useful. This is the dumbest degree I could have gotten. Film and media arts? Give me a break.”
It turns out media literacy is incredibly important right now. Being able to understand how the media can shape our opinions by the use of their words, their framings, what they choose to show, what they choose not to show is incredibly vital. The fact that at some point in my life, social media became a thing and video started taking off. You have TikTok, you have Reels, you have Facebook, you have YouTube. What's a valuable skill now? Understanding lighting, sound, how to frame a shot, editing in its basic form, and transitions.
These are all things that I use in creating video content. I also use it when I'm on stage and I'm doing speeches. When I put up together a keynote, I'm thinking theatrically about how can I craft this experience. When I do virtual, thanks to COVID, now there are so many virtual presentations, I now have to think about what was a stage presentation and how do I fit it into this little box. How do I make it to this experience?
I think about that experience. How can I make that theatrical or engaging relative to the format and how people tend to think when they're looking at screens? All of these skills came together and actually wound up being very useful. When I do speeches, I have to think about the flow of the story. That's storytelling. I actually went to school to do screenwriting. That was my primary thing. I wrote a lot of plays and movies when I was coming out of high school. Telling stories and putting together what's happening in that story, speaking and writing visually. That's a thing that I use all the time now. I'm a podcaster. I do that. It's all come back to be useful.
Isn't it Interesting? It's your viola. It's your other path of using the same thing.
All of it's come together. I use a lot of movie references and things.
Where did the superheroes come from?
The superheroes have been a lifetime theme. When I was a kid, I always had a red towel tied around my neck and a Superman shirt on. I was obsessed with Superman. I was into superheroes my whole life as a kid. The whole Superman thing. I remember when I was a real little kid, my parents put a TV in my room because I always stayed up late and I didn't to go to sleep. They put a TV in there and they're like, “We need to sleep. Watch the TV.” I remember watching an old Superman TV show and Krypton exploding. I was like, “All those people died. Is the Earth going to explode?” I had this whole epiphany.
There are so many points throughout my life that were studded by moments of superhero media. When the first Spider-Man movie came out, at that point, I had this very weird arachnophobia thing going on where I didn't spiders. They freaked me out. I saw Spider-Man, I was like, “Spiders are cool.” Now I have this complex relationship where I still think they're creepy, but now I think they're cool because Spider-Man's the coolest superhero in the entire world. That was an example of me turning a fear into strength.
Which Is your favorite Spider-Man?
Of the movies? I would have to say that Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man is my favorite of both being Spider-Man and Peter Parker. I think he does the best job relative to the comic runs that I have tended to read. I love Tom Holland. Don't get me wrong. Homeboy is amazing. Toby is my original. I love all of them but if I had to pick one, I would like to see him come back and continue. I wouldn't have a problem with it. Tom Holland should be the guy now because he's the guy but Andrew Garfield would've been very much someone I would've liked to have seen continue.
How do you use that in the work that you're doing since it's a big part of your brand?
The whole superhero theme is present in everything I do. Every company I have, everything that I do begins with super. Super Impactful is my parent company. I have a company called Super Productive, which is we set up Asana Monday Notion, different productivity workspaces. We do it in a neuro-inclusive way. I have projects that are on deck that I'm going to be building. There's The Superhero Institute and Super Creative Studio. I have an online resource store called The SUPER Market. My blog is called Becoming Superhuman. Literally, everything is superhero-related.
The idea behind that is I think every one of us has something that is unique and extraordinary about us. We all have a superpower. It could be something as simple as like we know how to be there for someone when they need us. In a situation where they're not feeling right, we have the ability to be empathetic and listen to them. That's a superpower. Maybe you're good at sales or maybe you're good with numbers, maybe you're athletic.
No Limits: Every one of us has something that is unique and extraordinary about us. We all have a superpower.
We all have these unique abilities and we have the ability to then learn the path of learning more abilities. We can grow and we can become better at all sorts of things in whatever ways we're interested in that we have the capacity to do. It's when we take our abilities and we put them towards making the world a kinder, safer, more equitable place when we apply those abilities towards heroism, towards making the world better. We do it in the community. Rather than like, “I'm going to save everyone,” we do it together to try and make a better world. That's superheroism.
Ultimately, what I want to see in the world, is more of us doing things that make life not so tough for people, especially people that don't have the same advantages. We should be trying to create a world where there's no losing, there can be winning but there shouldn't be any losing. The superheroism, where that comes in in business and in the work that I do is it's a lot around encouraging people to create spaces that are more inclusive and more equitable. It's about giving people the freedom to be creative, do work that's joyful and generally not being miserable. Those are a lot of the things where it comes in.
This has been fascinating. I’ve loved your story. I'd like to end each episode where you pick a category. Family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
Family and friends.
Things are actions I don't have that I want to have with my family and friends.
I would say greater presence, not so much like phone in hand. Part of it is just when I'm tired, it's a lot easier to zonk out a bit than to be present. One thing that I would want more of, I'm not present but I wish I was more present. I have two children. There are times when it's they want to play and I'm like, “I’ve been working all day. I'm exhausted.” A lot of times, I try to get down on the ground and play ice cream with them or whatever, but there are times when it's like, “Daddy needs a nap for a second.”
I know. It's so hard. Those ages are fun and hard.
It's a good time, though. I like it.
Things or actions I do have that I want to keep with my family and friends.
Words of affirmation. I am joyful of the fact that we are a family and friends and that we tell each other how we feel. I have a number of guy friends that when we sign off talking to one another. We’re like, “I love you, man.” It's very openly like, “I love you, man. I hope you're doing well.” It's very appreciative of one another.
I try to let all of my friends know how important they are to me. Sometimes, it's tough with ADHD because of object permanence. I forget anything exists if it's not right in front of me. Every day that I see my kids, every day that I see my wife, I tell my wife that she's beautiful every day at least three times. I tell my kids that I love them with the force of 1,000 exploding suns at least once every other day. I think that's something I'm glad to continue and I hope that I never stop doing that, even if it annoys them.
Things are actions I don't have that I don't want.
I don't know the right phrase for it, but I don't want to lose everything. I'd like to keep being mildly responsible with our funds and with our lifestyles. I don't have intense struggles right now. I'm very fortunate for a variety of different reasons that things are pretty good. I would not want that to change. I don't want to have intense struggles. There are struggles, but we're good with the level we have. We're alright, we'll maintain here.
Don't bother us. We're good. The last one, things or actions that I do have that I don't want, so I want to get rid of.
I would love a cheaper mortgage on that side of things. That's a tough one because I honestly feel very fortunate. I have a lot of what I want and I don't have too many things that I don't want. We've had a lot of loss. I'm good not having any more of that. I can't think of anything, honestly because everything that I do have, I think I want.
Clutter. There we go. I'm a minimalist by design. Clutter makes me very anxious because of my brain. There's a lot of clutter in the house. We do have that and I do not want it. I would love for everything and every part of the house to be neat and organized and in order and all of the forks that are in the fork drawer are the same fork and all of the clothes. That is what I do have and I don't want.
With kids, you have to prepare for a while.
It's not going to happen. They don't care. They don't even put the caps on their markers. It makes me so sad.
Is there anything that we didn't cover or any message that you want to make sure we end with in this conversation?
You have no idea what you're capable of. Whoever you are that's reading, you have no idea what you're capable of. I don't mean that you're ignorant of it. You are capable of so much more than you probably give yourself credit for. That's all of us because the things that we do that are extraordinary, we think are easy or common. It's not until somebody else looks at you and says, “That thing that you do is extraordinary,” that we start to recognize that we have the capacity to do more than we think we can. I want people to try on the idea that they're capable of so much more than they currently think.
Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your story. There are so many things that I think people will take away from this conversation.
It was good. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
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Now my mindful moments with this interview with Jeff, who was hugely fascinating. I love this conversation we had about his father and his father's background of how that impacted him with him being having his own father die when he was young and being adopted by his uncle and aunt. Also, the impact that that made on his life and the foresight he had with the draft for Vietnam. He actually signed up first so that he could make a better decision on where he was going to go.
I think a lot of times, people react the opposite, that they actually react with, “Hopefully they don't draft me or hopefully they don't call my number and my name,” and we avoid versus how can we take control of our outcome? I think that is an important lesson because so many times when I am coaching people or working with leaders, we sometimes feel that we don't have control of our circumstances.
Often, we talk about is what it is that I can control. Where are the things that I can make sure that I make some decisions that will give me the freedom or the empowerment to feel I am owning my life or owning my decisions? I think this was a great example in a little way of being able to take control of your own circumstances and not focus on what you can’t control but what you can control.
The other thing that was interesting is based on that experience, and I think this is so important because all the things that we do in our life, even if they're not something we enjoy or not something we would have chosen, we can always look backwards and say we understand why we had that experience because it actually led into the other. That was his journey to being a funeral director.
The things that he learned from it were being around death so much and being around in a role that he felt that he was not stuck to say, but this is where his experience was and he dedicated his life to that career, that you start understanding that you don't know when your time is up and life is short. It is important that we do something that makes us happy.
We talked about this in essence with the job that we do or the work that we do. It doesn't always have to be the work that you do or the job that you do. It can be the things that you enjoy outside of your work that your job actually gives you the flexibility and the type of life that allows you to be able to have the hobbies that you want or spend time with your family or have the flexibility that you need in your life.
When we can actually shift our focus into what makes us happy and we are able to find that happiness in our daily life, I think that it's important to look for those little things that make us happy. It’s what we can control versus what we can't. In Jeff's father's case, the fact that he had a job that did give him the flexibility to be able to be home with Jeff, to be able to have the flexibility to be the father that he wanted to be, that can be what makes you happy in life. We don't always have to make it these huge things. It can be the simple things in life that are important to us and why we do what we do.
The other big lesson that I think was in this was about his basketball career. I think this was an important thing about how hard he worked to be able to make his high school basketball team. Every year, he didn't make it, which actually changed his trajectory of where his goals were in life. This is important that sometimes, again, we cannot control our circumstances and those circumstances do shift our life, maybe add a fork in the road that we didn't expect.
Who knows why that fork in the road happened for Jeff? He was not going to go down this path that he had hoped to go down as a younger person to be able to be a professional basketball player but there's a reason. If you can look back at your life, there were lessons that he has learned over time and experiences that he has had that he would've never had had he made that basketball team.
This comes up a lot every once in a while. Not everybody has seen this movie, but there's a movie called Sliding Doors and it's an older movie. It's an important movie. Gwyneth Paltrow is in the movie and if she missed the subway or got on the subway, how different her life was going to be. They play out both parts. It would be interesting to me if this is a Sliding Doors moment of whether he got on that basketball team or he didn't get on the basketball team, where would that path have been and where would that have led him in his life?
To me, it taught him so many things about hard work, something he carried with him. That message that he got from another player on that team that had noticed what had happened and no one spoke up, no one said anything. He had been carrying this for so long. I think this is important, too, that we think about those moments that we didn't speak up and how we can reach out to someone to let them know that you noticed or even that there's an apology for not speaking up for whatever your circumstances are.
You can forgive yourself for whatever the circumstances are. All those players knew he was getting wrong but there was nothing they could do. Supporting him, letting him know how well he played and also that they thought he should have made it could have given him some justification at the time that he couldn't make sense of in his head. All of that is so interesting how these paths happen in our life but we also learn our work ethic. From doing what he did, he's learned his work ethic over and over again of shooting high, of taking big risks and having the confidence in himself that he can do that.
It led to the title of this. Knowing that you don't have limits. I talk about it in the opening of this episode. We are never too old. There's never a time that we have to give up on our dreams or give up on the things that we want and say, “That time has passed.” It might be something different now, but that time has never passed. We always have the opportunity to find out what is that thing that makes us extraordinary, how do we uncover that and what does that mean now? How can we utilize that now in our life to find that joy in our life because life is short and we have no idea what we're capable of, like Jeff said. How do we make sure to emphasize the things that make us unique, that make us, us no matter how small or large those things are?
I want to thank you again for reading this and supporting us. It means so much for those of you who leave us comments, subscribe, and follow the show because the more that happens, the more it gets out to people everywhere. We are over 140 episodes at this point and I appreciate all that support over time. That gives me the momentum to keep going. Thank you for that. I hope to have you back for our next guest that will be coming soon. Thank you very much.
Important Links
Jeff Gibbard – LinkedIn
About Jeff Gibbard
Formerly known as "The World's Most Handsome Social Media & Content Marketing Strategist" our guest today now goes by another title: Superhero.
Jeff Gibbard (”Gih-Bird”) is the Author of The Lovable Leader, a professional speaker, and the founder of several companies including Super Productive, and The Superhero Institute, a certification program for coaches that want to help their clients grow revenues and unlock their potential to make a positive impact on the world. Jeff is also the host of his own popular podcast called Shareable.