The Story of Your Life with Rand Selig

george grombacher 0:02
Ryan, say, like is an accomplished entrepreneur. He is a coach, a conservationist, he is a board member and investor, and he is the author of thriving, how to create a healthier, happier and more prosperous life. Welcome to the show, Rand,

Rand Selig 0:16
George, it’s great to be here with you today,

george grombacher 0:18
and I’m excited to have you on tell us live about your personal lives, more about your work and what motivated you to put pen to paper to write the book.

Rand Selig 0:27
Well, I have a story I like to tell because I believe I am the author of my own story, and I’ve designed my own life. So along the way, I’ve made a lot of decisions, a lot of really great decisions, including marrying my wife 40, almost 44 years ago, moving to the great town of Mill Valley in Northern California, where we’ve lived for a very long time, raised our kids here, and then starting my own investment banking firm After working for a dozen years with the large firms, I realized I was an entrepreneur, and I wanted to have my own firm. I didn’t like meetings,

and I wanted to pick and choose my clients and do the work I wanted to do. So it’s those are the top three. Although writing the book, I think George has to be number four. Now. It’s been an amazing adventure. I’ve read 1000s of books in my life, but to pull back the screen and find out what it takes to write a book, to edit it, to publish it, and then market it. Now, this is this is an adventure galore.

george grombacher 1:37
It’s a brave new world, for sure. So you authored your own life story, and it’s been a good one thus far. Congratulations on that. Certainly congratulations on 44 years of marriage and and all the other things you’ve accomplished was it just time. Was this, was this book inside of you struggling to get out or, Why? Why? Why? Why put pen to paper.

Rand Selig 2:00
Well, I’m a very organized person, and starting in high school, I started taking notes about books I read. I would collect quotes. My book is full of quotes which my readers tell me they love where I’ve located them because they amplify a point I’m making. So So I had a big a four foot high stack of papers with all these goodies in it, and I kept on looking at this stack. It was in my office, and I kept saying, there’s several books in that stack, and there’s several books inside of me. And so four years ago, I said, it’s time. And I originally had the idea that I would write the book as kind of a legacy project, give it to family and special friends. And I wisely went to three friends who knew me quite well, several had written books. And I said, here’s the manuscript. Please tell me what’s missing, what you like, what needs to be changed. And they all came back and said no. And I said, Oh, no, this is like a throw away, this project. And they said, No, you cannot make this a small project. This is so important. This is so valuable. You have to publish it. You have to get it out there. You have to have, you know, get in front of as many people as you can. And so that’s, that’s what I’ve done. And it’s, it’s been joyful. A lot of unintended, really positive connections are being made. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with 11,000 teachers talking about financial literacy. There’s an organization in the United States trying to get all 50 states to have as a high school graduation requirement a seminar or semester long, sorry, semester long course in personal finance. And I was delighted to speak with them. I really think we need to have that everywhere.

george grombacher 4:05
Amen on that certainly so when you talk about writing your own story, big part of that is knowing yourself, the things that you want was that always obvious to you, that you had that ability to carve your own path or figure out what you wanted and to make it

Rand Selig 4:26
happen, I think so I’m very self conscious, and somewhere along the same time, I started collecting all these files and papers, I began taking a lot of notes about who I was and what I was doing. I, even in high school, had a statement of purpose. It’s been revised a number of times since then, but it’s been a very powerful guiding force for me. I journal whenever, especially whenever I’m confused how I’m feeling about things, because often it’s not. One simple emotion that’s going on. It’s an interweave of things, and I need to take the time to break it down, figure out what’s going on. Only after I figured out what’s going on can then I come up with the solutions and what I need to do next. So yeah, I’m very happy with that approach to life. I really recommend other people take it too. But you’re right, George, it’s a deep dive, and it’s not a one and done. You know, there’s Thomas Twain who says, or Mark Twain says, the two most important days of your life is day you’re born and the day you figure out why. And I love that idea. I think he actually needs to revise it to say, and I’m going to revise it for him right now, as a published author, I can do that is it’s not just one day when you figure out why it’s multiple days, because you can revise it over time and have new focuses, no new purpose for getting on with things.

george grombacher 6:03
You had a statement of purpose when you were in high school. That seems crazy to me.

Rand Selig 6:08
Well, I’ll tell you, it was pretty it was pretty wide open. It was to reach my potential, okay, and but it gave me, it gave me a lot of energy. It, got me on the road to being a lifelong learner. I like to say I picked my parents well, my mother is a scientist. She’s she’s still with us. She’s turning 99 next month, and she, she, she loved to read. I began reading very early on. And this whole idea of having, you know, being curious about things, I think I got in spades from her. And this is, I mean, we all change. We all change. Yeah, if you look at yourself, three years ago, five years ago, whatever it is, you’re not quite the same person, and it’s certainly the world is different. So navigating through the changes that are going on, being a lifelong learning being curious is very valuable, and it has a super duper bonus, that it helps with conflict resolution. You know situation might be where you’re you have a friend that you’re talking to about something, and a topic comes up where you where he starts talking about he or she starts talking about something, you go that’s gobbledygook. That is the stupidest thing I ever heard. And if you can get into some some problems if you pursue it that way, but if instead you say, Hey, I’m curious, tell me more about that, and sort of kind of detach yourself a little bit, be the sort of fly on the wall, ask some really great questions. Keep pursuing it until you really understand. Doesn’t mean you have to change your view of the world or that topic, but it means you’re understanding them better, and that’s a way of avoiding a lot of messy problems. It’s all being curious.

george grombacher 8:08
I think that that’s extremely valuable advice, and certainly extremely practical advice right there. So thank you for that. I’ve I’ve come to to realize that my ultimate driving purpose force, what the thing that animates me is realizing my potential as well. It took me, probably until I was 45 years old to figure that out. So you got me beat by a couple of years. Is that still yours?

Rand Selig 8:35
No, I didn’t think it was clear enough for me, and it didn’t have enough legs, so I revised it in the in the direction of becoming the best person that I can be, and to navigate through life being kind and being generous, Being a good listener, doing acts of loving kindness, being being a good person for the planet. That’s why I do the conservation work I do, sharing what I know and trying to help help this marvelous planet that we’re living on. So it you know, I’ve said a bunch of things there, but I broke them into very specific things. My kids are grown up. They’re doing fantastically well. So the role that I played and had a purpose for decades had to do with raising them that that set, I mean, they still listen to me, they still They still ask me questions and ask for advice. But I know, I know my voice and my wife’s voice is in their heads and and that’s good, so now I can go back out into the world with purpose.

george grombacher 9:49
Appreciate that. So you talk about the importance of humility and courage to be able to take different risks, and it’s pretty clear to me that you. You, you’ve already expressed humility throughout the course of the short amount of time that we’ve been visiting. And I would consider you to be a self assured, self understanding person, and talking about being kind and loving acts of kindness and just being a good steward of all of these things. Tell me a little bit more about courage to to take risks.

Rand Selig 10:28
Um, you know, life, life is full of endings and beginnings, and in the in between the two are transitions. And when you leave one thing, maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s some responsibilities. You had a job, you had, maybe you’re moving to a new place. What you’re leaving behind you’re leaving, maybe because you should leave, maybe because you you choose to leave. But what you’re going towards next may not be so abundantly clear. You may not really know all that you would be would like to know to be comfortable with it, and so that you know, injects the notion of risk added. And what’s required then is, along with this, being a lifelong learner and being curious, is the willing to say I’m coming to this with some strengths, and I’m not, I’m not bulletproof. I’m not, you know, Superman, or, you know, pick your superhero, but I’m, I’m acquainted with what I need to do to get on with this job. And I’m willing to ask for help, I’m willing to ask for support, either in the responsibilities of taking out or amongst the people, friends and family, and seek it out so I can move forward. Well, that that that takes courage. You know, I woke up about 15 years ago, George and I said, Wow, I’m having a great life. Things are going really well for me. What could make it even better? And I immediately said, deeper, more enduring friendships. I’ve always had a lot of friends, male and female. And I said, Ah, you know, what I need to do is go to I’m going to pick six, six friends. They happen to all be males, although I have many female friends, and I’m going to be vulnerable with them, and I’m going to tell them stuff and ask them for their input about stuff that they’ve never heard from me before, because they always see me as being a strong, self assured guy, running my own company and having a good family and all these things. And I said, you know, have to be aware that the needle may not move for all six of them. I don’t think anybody’s going to vote me off the island, but there’s, you know, there’s a little bit of risk about all this. And I’m very delighted to say five out of six immediately respond with some really good suggestions. So they knew me, and they also began opening up about issues that they were facing. It just deepened our friendship and our relationship, and the one that didn’t move the needle, it didn’t everything stayed really good. So just, he just wasn’t really ready for a more open thing. I think that’s all about him. That’s fine. I still think he’s a great guy, and we still connect from time to time. So this is, this is the great life that we can have for ourselves on this path to thriving. It’s about making choices. It’s about choosing how we spend our time and who we spend our time with, and what our habits are, and even our feelings and being positive is so enormously important,

george grombacher 13:52
so much important stuff, so many things. I want to ask you I agree with with all of it, and I think it’s, I think it’s cool that 15 years ago, you looked around said, you know, this is going awesome, but What? What? What can make it even better? And to go through that process and to ask those questions and to get the feedback and then implement it does that time is it was it recognized? Because you also talk about enoughness, so I guess that’s what I wanted to sort of segue into. Is it realizing like, wow, okay, I have enough. But just, I guess, just tell me more about that.

Rand Selig 14:30
Well, I talk about enough just when I’m talking about defining success our society has throws at us countless messages about success is financial and it’s and it’s easy to kind of do do that because the yardsticks are relatively clear. Income, you know, your investments, if you have some and those kinds of things, how much do. That you have and whatnot. But I think we all know, without having to think about it very hard, that success is much more than that. You know, in my in my career as an investment banker, I’ve met a lot of very wealthy people, and a lot of them, I’m sad to have to report, are not, in my view successful because they are surrounded by failed relationships, either with in the business space or in their personal lives. And that, to me, is an essential. It’s not the only one. There are many, many ingredients. And I just invite people to say, take, take some time. Think about what does success look like for you, don’t pay any attention to social media. Don’t try to stop listening to all these messages you’ve heard for a very long time, and maybe they came from mom and dad or teachers. Just put all that aside and say, Who am I, and what does success look like? And once, once you have that definition, for me, it’s a robust definition, includes spirituality, includes physical and emotional health, so, so, and, of course, financial things, and, and, you know, relationships of quality. But at a certain point you can say, enough? Do I have enough? And enough? I usually think about that in again, the financial term. But enough could be friends, just like we were talking about a minute ago. It could be enough time. This is one of the great freedoms, if we’re running our lives. Well, there is time to with priorities, you know, take care of ourselves physically, to try to get to bed and sleep well, and get help if you’re not sleeping well. So enoughness, to me, has to be an again, an internal focus. If you’re looking outside and you see a co worker, you see a neighbor, you hear some friend talking about some fancy trip they took that was really expensive. You could say, oh, you’ll never have enough. You’ll never have enough. But on the other hand, if you look inside, say, you know, I’m very happy with this seven year old car and the house I live in, or the apartment I live in, totally fine, very adequate for my needs. And a trip, I just didn’t go on a driving trip. I want to go see George down there in Arizona. You know, I don’t have to, you know, spend a bucket load of money to get someplace that’s enough. That’s enough. Very powerful.

george grombacher 17:36
There’s no doubt about that. And certainly something that I grapple with and try to figure out, as are all of these questions. It’s I just it’s not none of it is obvious to me, and maybe it’s just because I’m moving too fast or trying to move too fast, but I am trying to get to the bottom of the answers to these questions, and I want to be fulfilled. I want to to be striving, but not because it’s a desire for more. It’s just because that’s in my DNA to continue to improve. What do you think about all that?

Rand Selig 18:17
Well, I want to acknowledge you, first of all, George for for being on a path that says you want, you’re looking for fulfillment, and you and you are striving. You know you’re you’re vital Aging. Aging everybody ages, but not everybody ages well. So aging well is about vitality. It’s not about longevity. And so asking the question, so you’re asking that, having the conversation that we’re having, I think, is a big shout out to you and and that’s great. That’s fantastic. And there’s no right answer. There are multiple possibilities. Life is an experiment, a series of experiments, and we all know whether you did well in the high school or college science courses, some experiments work out just fine the first time around. Some have to be tweaked, and some don’t work at all. So that’s just that’s the way nature life, life comes at us, and so fulfillment is something that is within our, our, our possibilities. I have to sort of put aside some things that are in the way. You have to identify what they are. You have to sort of say, Where am I shooting myself in the foot? Am I self sabotaging? Boy, there’s a lot of that going on. Do I need to get a little more emotionally healthy by forgiving. I’m carrying heavy stones in my backpack, and you know this, it’s a steep climb already, but the stones make it much harder. You know, do I need to Who do I need to forgive and why? And even if they’re not around, maybe you write a letter to them. You. And say, Hey, this is what happened. This is how I felt about it. I think you owed me apology. You never gave it to me, but I’m going to forgive you, and then you move on, you can just drop that stone right out of the backpack. And same for yourself, forgive yourself. I mean, I’ve yet to meet somebody who says I have never made a mistake. I have nothing, nothing to forgive myself for that doesn’t happen. So you have to say, well, you know, where was I not? You know, morally right, or when was I not a good person? And you know, to have to forgive yourself and and again, move on. Very, very, very helpful.

george grombacher 20:42
Totally agree, and when you say it, it seems so obvious. And just thinking about myself, I think I’m probably more wired to trying to make myself stronger, to go faster, whereas I can get faster by doing the work that you just described, by getting rid of some of those stones that I’m carrying around with me.

Rand Selig 21:02
Oh, so true. I read a book recently that 10x is easier than 2x and it’s it’s along this line that sometimes we get stuck, and we’re pushing so hard on the day to dayness that, you know, we’ve kind of lost the vision of who we are, what’s important to us. You know, there’s a distinction. I have a chapter in my book leadership and management, and a lot of people use those terms interchangeably, but they’re very different concepts. You know, there’s a great quote by Stephen Covey, and he said something along this line, I’m going to paraphrase, that management is operational efficiency and climbing climbing a ladder to success, but leadership is Making sure the ladder is on the right wall. So it’s all about you doing the kinds of things that are that are important, that are have value, that are having impact, and in some cases, about having your focus be on somebody else and something else. You know, when I I am happiest, I’m invisible. It’s not about me. It’s about doing this work, of helping somebody else, or helping our local Marsh where, you know, we, we’re, you know, the environmental stewards. And my wife says, Get over yourself. We’re weed pickers. We take out non native, invasive plants. Okay, fair enough, that’s what we do. But it’s it’s so satisfying, and the time goes by very quickly. And that’s a sign, a signal, big signal to me, that I’m in that zone, that I’m not looking at my watch every 10 minutes. I’m, I’m, I’m, I look at my watch a few hours later, I can’t believe that this amount of time has gone by. Marvelous. That’s

george grombacher 23:01
absolutely marvelous. How did you did you think about that while you were running your company, while you were doing billions of dollars in deals and transactions, was, was this was still a part of your life, or was that compartmentalized?

Rand Selig 23:21
Well, I had some really great learning experience the first dozen years of my career. After getting my MBA from Stanford, I went to what I call the caverns of Wall Street. I worked with big firms, and I worked with some incredibly talented, very smart people, and I realized these are kind of most of them are not my kind of people. They’re doing deals because they were going to make money. They weren’t asking any questions about whether this was a good deal to do, whether it’s going to have a good impact for consumers or or the planet. And I said, No, no, when I finally set up my own company. Took three years asking a lot of questions, what was my talent? Was I ready? My wife and I went off for a couple of coffees and pieces of pie, no fancy dinner. We said, this is maybe the world we’re going to be walking into, or are we going to be okay with that? And so I set up my company based on some very specific principles, and one was that I wanted to have clients that I respected and that respected me, and that we could have a great communication because it’s really important for me to understand what’s the good stuff as well as the not so good stuff about my client, as well as their company, and if they can’t communicate that to me, that’s that’s a real issue, and I can detect this very quickly. I think a lot of us can, whether somebody being open, whether somebody has integrity. And so one of the one of the things I also set up as a principal was I want to be a. To live and work in the same town. I didn’t want to have the big commute and I wanted to be able to have the time have my hand ons on the the gear shift to decide whether I could say no to a client. You know, okay, instead of doing five, have five clients all at the same time. You know, four is just plenty, because I’m a little league coach, and I need to carve out the extra time to do that. I want to carve out the time to be the scout master that I was for, you know, quite a number of years. And so this was a choice I was making. And could I have made more money? Well, yeah, of course I could have, but would I have been a richer person? Not the least, not in the least. So, you know, we can again, measure things. It’s, it’s, it’s not kind of how much money you have. Sometimes it’s, you know, how how much wealth have you include being accumulated inside. Are you smiling? You know, can you put your head on the pill at the end of the night and say it was a good day. I did good I did a good job. I

george grombacher 26:15
think that’s beautiful. So I wanted to ask you about prioritization, but I feel like you already answered it. Going into your opening your own company, with eyes wide open, and making those decisions, you set it up in a way that I imagine, that the smaller decisions were probably not obvious, but a lot easier. It’s

Rand Selig 26:36
really true. It’s really true. George, it’s a subtle point, but it’s really important. In a part of this difference between leadership and management, you can, you can get really consumed with the day to day management of things, but if you don’t have any real vision, no real mission, then you can’t pull away from the minutia to say, Hey, this is not important. This is not a priority. And let me focus on the priority. If I, if I get to those smaller things later, great if I can’t. Obviously they, they didn’t. They weren’t. They didn’t rise to the level of importance that demanded my time and attention. I think it’s important too. I just want to come back to this question of speed. It’s important to slow things down, and I do that in various ways. One, I consider myself to be a very spiritual person, and by that I mean that I am humble and I’m in awe, and the way I get to that place, more often than not, is by taking a walk, usually by myself, out in nature, and I look around, and I just stop and I look at something, I go, wow, this is amazing. And I’m a nobody. I’m this little, tiny thing. I’m gonna be gone in how many, ever years, and in 100 years, or whatever, notwithstanding my book or other things I’ve done, I’m not going to be remembered. And that’s, that’s, that’s fine, but just get real about the humility and at the same time they are the world I’m living in that just causes my I can feel my heart rate slowing down, you know, turn the phone off completely off. I’m not I’m not tethered to it when I’m there doing that. And so slowing things down is a gift we can give ourselves. I just encourage people to embrace that gift.

george grombacher 28:39
Agreed, well ran, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? Where can they get their copy of thriving, how to create a healthier, happier and more prosperous life? Well,

Rand Selig 28:53
yeah, thank you. George. My book is available at Amazon, of course, but also at independent bookstores, you can go to my book website, www, ran, say, leg.com, R, E, N, D, S, E, L, I, g.com, and there’s live information about me, some Amazing testimonials in from a number of great people, including the head of Kaiser Permanente, Dr Ansari, and their quotes, you can get the 40 quotes that I think are some of the best quotes by chapter in my book. You can contact me, you know, connect with brand. And if somebody have a question, or you want to invite me to do something that’s that’s a great way to do it. You can obviously order the book. So, and there are a list of other podcasts, George, you know, I’ve done quite a number of podcasts in the last seven, eight months. You. And this is really my purpose, is to engage people around the possibilities of thriving.

george grombacher 30:06
I love it. Well, if you enjoyed this much as I did, show Rand your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Pick up your copy of thriving, how to create a healthier, happier and more prosperous life on Amazon or wherever you enjoy buying your books, go to RAND say, leg, R, A, N, D, S, E, L, I, g.com, and check out all things beyond our scope of our conversation today. Check out the other podcast Rand has been on, and reach out and get in touch, see if there’s an opportunity to work together. Thanks again, Rand.

Rand Selig 30:38
George,

george grombacher 30:39
my pleasure until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best. You.

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.