Keep the Kid Inside Alive

Hey, it's Scott Smith. If you are a professional and you own a business right now and you are beating your head against the wall feeling like, man, I have locked myself in a cage and I built the cage myself.

I want to talk to you because the fact is you will not move forward until you fix it. And if you don't fix it, you might as well get a job again. And I know you don't want to do that.

So I can help give you the key. How? One short conversation. That's all it takes to kind of unlock the path forward. I'm looking for a couple of coaching clients right now.

You may be a good fit. Send an email to coaching and motivation to move.com. Tell me a little bit about yourself and we'll figure it out. Coaching at motivation to move.com.

This is the daily boost podcast with Scott Smith. Yes, it is. How are you? Happy, happy, happy Monday. Come on in here, man. It is almost back to school across the fruited plain of America.

Parents everywhere right now going, yay! It's school's almost back. Summer's almost over. The kids are out of my hair. And the kids are saying, no! It kind of sounds the same, completely different meaning, but it happens every year.

So whichever side you're on, it'll be okay. Good to have you. My name is Scott Smith. Thank you for stopping by today. I'm going to tell you a story today.

It started in the sauna. Usually I have a Monday morning mastermind in the sauna. That happens often. The goal now is how long can we stay in the sauna?

That's kind of the limit of our mastermind. How long can we survive it? Right now it's currently 48 minutes. But on Friday, sometimes it happens too, but I had a story I was telling this morning because of something happened last night and it's very motivational and it's kind of cool because it kind of fits into my wheelhouse.

Uh, I, I'm, I'm a really nice guy by every standard. I buy most of the rules. I bend them occasionally. And if I do break them, you won't know I did it.

I'm also a pretty nice guy, right? But also, uh, you can tell a little bit, uh, impact oriented, a little bit, uh, if I'm smiling, I'm probably up to trouble, things like that little mischievous kind of thing. I just like to shake things up. I like to make my life what it is.

And that's just me. I've always been that way. It's not a bad thing. I'm just one of those people, but I love one of those people. I love those kinds of people.

And the story today is one of those guys. His name is Croy Sather. I've talked about Croy before. Croy is running across Death Valley. And if you want more information on Croy, just go to deathvalleyrun.com.

It starts in 12 days, 4 hours, 43 minutes, and 10 seconds from this point in time. Let me tell you a story about Croy and some things along the way that involved me along the way. And the reason I'm telling you this is because Croy is really one of the nicest renegades I've ever met.

Smiles all the time, happy-go-lucky, just doesn't really care. Although I know him well. I talk to him four days a week, five days sometimes, six days sometimes. And he's carrying a ton of stress.

He's trying to break a record, right? And yet you wouldn't know it. I know it because I talked to him, but nobody else would know it. And yet he's doing something pretty amazing that five people have even overdone in their lifetime.

Only five people ever completed this. Nobody his age. So let me tell you how this happened and how I was involved and how I think this really applies to you because I think you're a nice renegade too.

I think you are. I think a lot of people go through their lives and they do everything they're supposed to do, but inside of them lives something like Croy. A little renegade lives inside of them. You don't want to be bad.

You don't want to break the rules. You just kind of want to do stuff, right? So about last November, in my inner circle, Croy's a member of my inner circle. I talked to him in there and privately.

And Croy said, I know what I'm going to do. He'd been very frustrated for a couple of years. This is the man that ran across America. You look it up on the internet.

He set a crazy record, had TED Talks and everything. And he said, he's been lost. He said, I'm going back to my roots. I'm going back to who I was as a kid, just going doing stuff like this.

I'm going to run across Death Valley again. And we're like, what? But he was so excited we didn't hold him back. We're like, yeah, we take your word. Let's go.

So we began to support him on that training and everything else. He's living in Bogota, running every day at almost 10,000 feet above sea level. And he stayed there for seven months just to train. And in the meantime, he's having trouble even getting ready for this.

And he's having trouble paying for it. See, the problem is when you try to achieve what you want to achieve in life, you need something called slack in business, not slack the software, but slack, meaning you have a little wiggle room, right? You got enough money to kind of wiggle around. You got enough time to wiggle around.

You can make some mistakes until you figure out what you're doing. Typically, when I'm working with somebody in a coaching environment, that's probably the most important thing that we have to have, a little bit of slack in order to get done what we want to get done. We have to make the slack first, by the way. Make the space first before we can actually do what we want to do.

Remember that. That's a good tip for you, okay? So Croy's going through this issue. So we're working with him every single week. And finally we said, man, you got to get this paid for.

And he's kind of thinking small. He's thinking, well, I'll sell some t-shirts. I'll get some Patreon sponsors. I said, now let's go for, get a title sponsor.

Find a big company out there that wants to get behind you, that wants the press, that wants to kind of come along with a ride and we'll give you money.

And it took a while. Eventually he found one, turned out to be an old friend who had heard what he was doing and came to the table with a really nice offer to support this.

Then it was contract time and Croy almost walked away. I called him one day and he had had the contract. I said, well, you sent it back. Have they gotten back to you yet?

He says, no. And our whole group got on him. He said, we'll call him. Something might've happened. See what's going on. We pushed him for two months to get this contract done.

Big corporate thing back and forth. We helped him negotiate the whole thing. Got it done. Got the check. Boom. He gets to do his dream. Had to fight through it, though.

You see, when you step off to do something, it's something nobody else has done. It's going to be a fight. It's not going to be easy. It's going to be stressful.

But it doesn't matter because your vision is there. You've decided what you're going for. Croy told me this many times. He said, it's going to happen no matter what.

I'm doing it. I'm thinking, how the hell are you going to do that, man? You have no time. You have no money. How are you going to make it happen? But he just believed in it.

So we all worked together. We got him the money. And there he is. Now, right now, today, he's in Las Vegas. He's acclimating to the heat, take about 14 days to acclimate to running in 117 degrees.

So he's out there running every single day. And about two weeks ago, I'd mentioned that I was going to go out. I'd offered to produce this documentary for him. I have done that before in a past life.

I've done lots of doc productions, producing and directing. And I said, let me produce this for you. And he said, yes, it was exciting. And about a week later, I made one of those phone calls nobody ever wants to make after you offer something.

I declined my offer. He said, I could tell you you were going to say something based on how your voice sounded. I felt bad about it. I really did. I said, I thought about what was going on here.

And while I would love to do it, and to me, it's a big, like a bucket list thing for me even to do things like this. I love this kind of thing. But I'm not the right fit.

What you're going to need is not what I can do. I can't do the run and gun photography. I'm older than a cameraman should be. I've done a lot of that stuff.

It's not my thing. I can produce it for you. But there's a lot of reasons. I just felt like this wasn't the best move. And so I pulled out. I said, you'll find some, I'm still going to support you in every way I possibly can.

Well, about four days later, he's meeting with a sponsor. The sponsor happens to have a film production team that does a lot of work with their corporation. The guys happen to be adventure junkies. And I look at their stuff and they've done Netflix and Nat Geo and all kinds of crazy things.

And they're mountain climbing. This crazy guys, right? I got to tell you, when you're shooting in Death Valley at 250 feet below sea level and you're out there in the sun in the middle of August, in the middle of the day, and you end your run in an alpine environment at 14,500 feet above sea level on Mount Whitney, you can't just hire any person to do it, which is one of the reasons I backed out. I wasn't ready for that.

So he found the perfect crew. And he sent me a note. He said, what should I do? I said, hire him now. I looked at their work. I looked at their track record.

I said, hire him now. And he did. And they worked within his budget. They were so excited to be part of this adventure. They bought into it. And that's what you want.

So now they're struggling trying to get it all together and the pieces together. And I'm watching this come together and try to, Croy's not a producer and they're not producers. They're great cinematographers, but they're not producers.

And so I'm just kind of advising from the background. And last night I'm on a call. And I said the day before, I said, Croy, get your team together. Let's get on a call.

And let me serve as the translator. Let me sit between you and the crew and do what I do. Excuse me. Do what I do. Let me do that. And I can move you forward a little bit.

I can just accelerate this thing. I could see it was slipping. So I jumped on the call. And about 45 minutes into the call, have you ever hit this moment?

I bet you probably have. About 45 minutes in, everything is good. And I'm hitting some brick walls. And so are they. And now, if you know me, as a guy who coaches a lot of people, my job is to get you beyond that brick wall.

And I'm sitting here thinking, man, there is only one freaking option. There's only one place we can go here. And I said, I'm going to regret what I'm saying right now.

Hey, it's Scott Smith. If you are a professional and you own a business right now and you are beating your head against the wall, feeling like, man, I have locked myself in a cage and I built the cage myself.

I want to talk to you because the fact is you will not move forward until you fix it. And if you don't fix it, you might as well get a job again. And I know you don't want to do that.

So I can help give you the key. How? One short conversation. That's all it takes to kind of unlock the path forward. I'm looking for a couple of coaching clients right now.

You may be a good fit. Send an email to coaching and motivation to move.com. Tell me a little bit about yourself and we'll figure it out. Coaching at motivation to move.com.

I think I should go produce this thing for you and serve as a true producer and work with your crew. And we have our sponsor who will serve as a logistics man on the top of this thing. We give you a real team. You got a nice budget.

You got the people to get the job done. I can do what I can serve at my absolute best. Really good at doing. Don't need to be running in the heat. And you can do what you do because the reality is it's a solo crossing.

He can't talk to anyone. He can talk, but he can't do anything. Once he starts running, he's completely 100% unassisted. So imagine you're trying to do something on your own, just like that.

You tend to think, the thing that gets you to do things like that, to run across Death Valley, it's like, I can do it on my own. And truthfully, you're the only one that can do that.

Your heart and soul will get you through it and you'll get the record, right? And yet to get there, there's a bunch of people around you that are going to have to support you to get there.

Yet you are so focused on what you want to get. You don't even see that. And so it's the nicest renegade in him. I saw that right away. I saw that in me.

I said, well, wait a second. He is so focused on what he's doing. He's just going to do it. You can't stop this kid. And so I'm just, all right, let me jump in and help them do it.

I did promise producer credit. I said, you got to give me producer credit on this. If we get to Netflix or Nat Geo, you got to give me producer credit. He said, you got that.

And it took a minute for the crew to accept it. And then after about 10 minutes of talking about how my vision of how this thing should actually go, again, I've done this a long time and they didn't know that. They don't know my history. But I popped a vision out and suddenly they bought in.

They leaned in. And before you know it, we're high five and on Zoom high fives and happy. And it's a team. So on August 4th, I am flying out to Las Vegas and we will jump in an RV and we will head out to the desert.

We've got RVs and we've got cars and we've got all kinds of equipment and we've got all kinds of things to make this thing happen. And then we're going to tempt.

We're going to attempt a 48-hour crossing. Almost impossible if you do the math on that. If you guys want to sit down on ChatGPT or Claude someday and say, I'm crossing from Badwater to Mount Whitney. It's the ultra crossing, the solo crossing.

I want to do it in 48 hours. Just watch what it tells you about that. It'll scare the heck out of you. Almost said it, didn't I? So we're going to shoot for a sub-57.

Sub-70 would be fine, but it's in. So the reason I share this story with you is because notice what happened. It kind of puts you in a bucket called nicest renegade.

That feeling that, hey, I'm smart. I'm nice. I go along. I don't break the rules, but I got things I want to do. And I'm going to do it no matter what anybody says.

And if I'm convicted enough, if I'm so into it enough that other people will get in behind you. And this is exactly what happened. Completely, total 100% conviction he was going to do this. Not sure he's going to break the record.

He did tell me last night. I said to my wife, I said, I see about a 60% chance right now. I'm based on knowing him and his conditioning. About a 60% chance he's going to make it.

Last night he said he sees himself at 70%. He was talking to me in Las Vegas at 3 in the afternoon while he was running the strip conditioning in the afternoon sun.

I raised it. I said, this is 70 plus now. Here's the moral. You get it already. He had a dream. He loves a saying. He says, don't let your dreams die.

He's not letting them die. No matter who didn't believe in him, no matter how hard it was, he didn't let it die. And now he's got a whole team behind him and he's financed and he's going to end up a world-class video.

These guys are great. All because Grogius would not say no. Anyway, I hope you get something from it. I just want to share that with you. So yeah, I'll be there.

So that week, I don't think I'll share it live with you. I don't think I can do that. I will be in Death Valley trying to survive. But we will catch up.

We'll talk to him maybe before we get there as well. If you want to check, let me give you the site again. Just go to deathvalleyrun.com. There's information on Croy there.

You can see what's happening. There'll be a little bit of streaming. He's on Facebook too. You can follow him there and Instagram as well. And I think he's going to stream a couple of times and post some pictures if you want to follow along.

But if anything, just to inspire you to go after your dream. Inspire you. Not a crazy go for your dream kind of thing. No, don't do that. It's just because it lives inside of you.

Like I said, he's the kid that nobody can say no to. And he's 55 years old. That's why I work with those kind of people. That's why I do the work I do.

I can take a doctor. I can take a lawyer. I can take a corporate executive. And that kid still lives inside. And if I can just pop the lid on that and open you guys up, man, magic happens.

Makes me happy to think about that. All right. Make a good week. Get out of here. I will see you tomorrow.