KIM FIRST PODCAST

Rich Hegberg discusses his decision to move to Whidbey Island and the creative projects he engages in there. He talks about the importance of meditation and spending time in nature for inspiration. He also mentions his work as a psychologist and his current project on startup founders. 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 Hegberg. 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. Two 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 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 that's the island that you take the public ferry to, right? This is a 51 mile long island. OK. 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 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'm you know, I've I've created a place that. I love to be in it. And even when Covid was going on, I was here because it was a great place to isolate. Right now, I'm actually writing a book on. On startup founders. And I'm a psychologist by training. So. I I have I combined my intuition with a fact base. And I have data on around 2000 executives where I have personality data and 360 data on from their management and leadership skill assessments. And I have one hundred and twenty two 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'm 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, there's my asking that is because, well, I'm a data person, but I 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 love levitated because I did a lot of different type 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 I kind of gravitated to the 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 V in the dirt. Like and that's what I meant by creative. We have we have 17 acres of forest. And and so we put in trails all around crisscrossing it. My wife's name is Tori and we call those Tori trails. And 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 that's a source of ideas for me. And it gets me out of sitting here at my desk and 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 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, OK. If I would have done it without walking, I would have been pushing me, pushing that stuff. But when I walked, I actually got inspired and got this really cool idea. Oh, I'm going to go on the beach because I'm in Gulf Shores during the winter months as a snowbird. And I guess 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 all that extra stuff you don't count in money and data. Right. The whole, you know, the differences, you know, this, the difference with 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 fifteen thousand dollars. Fifteen thousand dollars 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. People 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 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. For me, the routine is pretty consistent, more than pretty consistent. So I get up at five a.m. by about five thirty. 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 come. It will like a lava lamp that will 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 one hundred and twenty two 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 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.