KIM FIRST PODCAST

Rich Hagberg, a psychologist and former consultant, discusses his move to Whidbey Island and his love for creativity and nature. He combines intuition and data to make sense of information and generate insights. He emphasizes the importance of routine, meditation, and outdoor activities for inspiration and clarity. Welcome to Soundbits, a podcast, an exploration of what's not said, or clearing up what's misunderstood. Hi, it's Kim. Let's get started. Hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome Rich Hagberg. He is a colleague of mine of many years, and hasn't been in the industry for a long time. And I'm so honored to have you on the show today. Thank you. I'm on Whidbey Island in Washington State, in the middle of the forest. How did you end up there? Well, I had a consulting firm in the Bay Area for 22 years that did leadership development, coaching, that sort of thing. And we built up, we started as a consulting firm, but we ended up building a lot of assets, tools. And Accenture came after us and bought us. And I felt like if I were going to not be proactive before the deal closed, I was going to end up on airplanes every week. And they were going to be sending me off on a Monday, and I come back on a Thursday or Friday. And I didn't want to live that life. And so I sold my house in the Bay Area, and I moved to Whidbey Island 18 years ago. And that was one of the best things I've ever done. So that's the island that you take the public ferry to, right? This is a 51 mile long island. Okay. What do I do for fun? Two things. First of all, I meditate regularly, and I meditate a lot, get myself more grounded. And then we have 17 acres of forest and meadow. And so one of the things I love doing is we landscape this whole place, and it's an outlet for creativity that is endless. And that's been a driver for me. Creativity has essentially been the driver and a differentiator for my whole life. But this sort of happened gradually. And so I've created a place that I love to be in. And even when COVID was going on, I was here because it was a great place to isolate. So I'm a psychologist. And right now I'm actually writing a book on startup founders. And I'm a psychologist by training. So I combined my intuition with a fact base. And I have 122 founders who we have actually got financial data on. So it's a real good example of where the kind of creating I like to do. I mean, I look at what the data are telling me. And then I use that as a basis for trying to make sense out of it, and then come up with some insights that other people may not have had. I look for what's counterintuitive. Well, the reason I'm asking that is because, well, I'm a data person, but I also am an artist. I have art on people's walls all over the United States. I have actually a painting on the library, local library wall. It's like six foot by seven foot or something. And I also have, I mean, I'm a computer scientist, as you know, but I levitated because I did a lot of different types of computer stuff. It wasn't, you know, back in the day, as you know, we could do whatever we wanted to do. And I kind of gravitated to the data side. You know, I did MS SQL and, you know, learned how to do SPSS and SAS and, you know, everything data. I mean, Realtor.com, I was behind all of that. Like I had a whole team that set that up back in 2000. And, you know, back in the day in the 90s, I set up education dynamic websites before they were anything big. Now everyone has them, right? I was riding the wave on myself. But I was curious, because my husband likes to be out. You know, we've got acreage as well. And COVID didn't affect us either, because he loved, he personally loved to be outside and, you know, get his, be in the dirt. Like, and that's what I meant by creative. We have 17 acres of forests. And so we put in trails all around crisscrossing it. My wife's name is Tori, and we call those Tori trails. And so I spend a lot of time walking. Already, I've walked for about an hour this morning out on the trails, even though it's raining. Frequently is here. And that's a source of ideas for me. And it gets me out of sitting here at my desk and exercising my intellect and, you know, my analytical side. Yeah, it's really funny. You know, like, the last, about the last week, I've been adding new things to my routine. And I am an athlete, I like to go swimming and do yoga a few times a week. I wish I could do it more. But you know, and it's so easy to get into the routine. Oh, my goodness, I have to do a lot. So I'm on the computer a lot. And I decided to add a walk in the morning. So when I wake up in the morning, instead of laying in bed, and I end up doing something, right, I decide to now, for the last, it's been about a week, seven days, I get up, and I get my shoes on, I put my watch on, and my, because it's really dark out. It's like usually five o'clock in the morning, because that's when I wake up. It's just a natural alarm clock. I'm an early bird. Some people are like birds, right? And I've been getting up and I agree that it's like, all of a sudden, like, if I have to create a video or something, it's like, okay, if I would have done it without walking, I would have been pushing. I mean, pushing that stuff. But when I walked, I actually got inspired and got this really cool idea. Oh, I'm gonna go on the beach because I'm in Gulf Shores during the winter months as a snowbird. And I got the story of what I'm going to talk about. It was like value. What is my value? Right? And it's like, oh, my goodness, that's like, someone had I taught someone how to create an event. You know, I did a, I was a guest on a show, right? And I talked about it. And then I taught someone who never did it before. And then I asked her, how many hours did it take you to do that? And she added it up. And she said it was about, about 50 hours. And then obviously more value in, you know, your blood, sweat and tears, like, you know, all that extra stuff you don't count in money and data, right? The whole, you know, the differences, you know, this, the difference, but the audience, the difference between, you know, the, the real data, and then the subjective data, right? And it turned out that she spent over $15,000, $15,000 to create an event. And it was really very good to talk about, because I think people, there's all this stuff out there and people are, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they are misunderstanding a person's value. Like, you know, like, I have these, I host these events. And I'm not saying anything about the guests or anything. But many times, speakers apply to be a speaker on an event and they say, they say, well, I'm going to speak on the event. And then they don't even consider or aren't even very kind to the host who's spending a lot of hours putting that together. So that's kind of that whole, I can relate to that, you know, the creativity that kind of popped up. Yeah, I, for me, the routine is pretty consistent, more than pretty consistent. So I get up at 5am. By about 5.30, I'm doing a combination of yoga asanas and stretching and weights and things. I then meditate for an hour. And even though the best meditations are when thought drops off, and you're just aware of awareness, often, when I'm working on something like this book, all of a sudden, an insight will just it will, like a lava lamp, it'll come up out of the sand at the bottom. And that same thing has been true for renovation projects around here, you know, we built a guest house, and then we turned a chicken coop into first a gym and then an office and etc. So a lot of those ideas come from that sort of silent place where creative bubbles will emerge from the sand. The other thing is that I think what the meditation does is it gives me a level of insight and clarity into whatever it is I'm looking at. I mean, I may be looking at a data set, like I was this morning on comparing our data on best leaders to our data on 122 founders. And I've been working on this in some form for a long, long time, many years. But I had some insights this morning that were significant. And I wasn't looking for them, I was just playing around. And out of that came some ahas. Yeah, I love it. Well, thank you so much, Rich, for your time. Thank you, too. Bye bye. And there you have it, sound bits, little bits of information. What's said may shift your perspective. Until next time.