Michael Hyatt
speaker
169 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Feb 2025
Michael Hyatt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's a good question. Thankfully, my wife, Gail, we've been married for 46 years now. I think she knew what she was signing up for. And she is like the most positive, optimistic person you'll ever meet. And she's told me on more than one occasion, because there's been a lot of setbacks and challenges. She said, look, make the decision you need to make.
And if we end up living in a refrigerator box under an overpass, I'm with you 100%. That's given me a lot of confidence to try new things and to feel like failure is not final. It's only feedback. And so I took that as feedback. And there were, believe me, there's nobody I blame for that business failure except myself. And I wished I'd known then what I know now, but I didn't.
And I just made some not so great decisions. But who trains you for that? I mean, where do you get the help for that? We were just making it up as we go, trying to make the best decisions we can at the time. But it turns out all those decisions weren't great. But yeah, I think resilience is the key to success.
You know, the people that are the most successful are literally the people that are the most resilient. When you see and you understand their story and all the things that they have to go through to be successful, I think the main superpower is you don't have to be the smartest person You don't have to be the most hardworking person, but you've got to be resilient.
When you fall off the horse, you've got to get back in the saddle. And I learned that as a boy because my dad bought me a pony and we went out into a softly plowed field. And I was about five years old. And within 30 seconds, I was on my butt in the field. And my dad, you know, I was crying. And my dad, basically, I grew up in western Nebraska. And the general...
Wisdom, the common sense was, look, just rub some dirt in it and get back on the horse. So that's what I did. And that lesson served me well my entire life. I didn't really know any better. And it's always been a necessity. So failure to me is not an option. It's a choice. And I choose not to stay down.
I think one of the biggest ones was that we didn't have a clearly articulated vision for where we were going. And as a result, we didn't have a filter. to be able to discern between what was a opportunity and what was a distraction. And this is really hard for people as they become successful, because the more successful you are, you start to draw opportunities to yourself.
And a lot of those are actually distractions masquerading as opportunities, but without a vision as a filter, then you just end up saying yes to everything, and we got spread too thin. So we thought, okay, we're great at adult trade books. Those have been successful. So let's publish kids' books and let's publish gift books. And we got into all these genres, fiction, that we had no expertise in.
And that just not being able to focus was huge, but it starts with a vision.
Working as a literary agent was a lot of fun. And I love that because I still considered myself even at that point as a literary midwife. And so now I got to work even more directly with authors as their agent. But at some point, it was mostly just my partner, one other agent, and a couple of executive assistants.
And I said, man, I thrive on working in a company, in a culture, and with leadership and a team. And so I decided, I went to my business partner one day, this was in 1998, and I said, look, I would love to entertain the possibility of selling my half of the business to you. And I promise I'll be reasonable, but it's just a matter of, this is not the best use of me. And he was super agreeable.
We were dear friends. And so we amicably parted ways. And I went back to Thomas Nelson as the best way to describe it for somebody that's not in the publishing business was I was like the assistant general manager of one of Thomas Nelson's 14 publishing divisions. So initially, the second time around, I came in and most of my responsibility was editorial. So I was working with authors again.
So not very different from being a literary agent, but I was working with some amazing authors at that time. People like Dave Ramsey and John Maxwell. And we even published a book by Trump, if you can believe it, back in the day. So I got to meet him. But at any rate,
It was great experience, but in July of 2000, my boss quit and the CEO came to me and asked me if I would be the new publisher for that division. What I didn't understand, because I wasn't privy to all the financial detail, was that division was in the worst shape of any of the 14. We had the lowest revenue growth. In fact, we were shrinking. We had the worst profitability.
We had lost money in the previous year. And the morale in that division was terrible because people just don't like losing. You know, people were blaming everybody else, pointing fingers, all that stuff. So I got really clear on the vision. I did a private retreat and I came up with 10 things that I wanted to be true in three years.
And the CEO had asked me how long it was going to take me to turn that division around. Of course, I didn't have a clue, but I just pulled a number out of the air and I said about three years. And he said, well, that's kind of what I was thinking. So you got my full support. So I came back and I painted that picture of a bigger, better future to the team.
They got energized and they rolled up their sleeves and we worked hard. It took us about 18 months, but we went from number 14 in revenue growth to number one from number 14 in profitability to number one. And of course, the morale was off the charts because people like winning. Well, all of this came at some expense to me because I was working nights and weekends, so was my team.
I wasn't spending hardly any time at home and my family was really suffering. But I wasn't aware of it or I was sort of pushing it out of my awareness But I finally, at the end of that 18-month period, I got this ginormous bonus check. It was more than my annual salary. I was giddy. And so I rushed home.
I couldn't wait to share it with Gail, my wife, just knowing, A, that it was gonna validate all my hard work and that she was gonna be excited about it. But not so much. She looked at the check. And she began to get a little tearful. And she said, I think we need to talk. And so we went and sat down in the den and I could tell this was gonna be a very consequential conversation.
She teared up and she said, first of all, I want you to know how deeply I appreciate how hard you work, all that you've accomplished. I wanna acknowledge that, but I gotta be honest. She said, you're never home. Your five daughters need you now more than ever. And she said, if I'm honest, I feel like a single mom. And man, that was like a gut kick.
Showing 21–40 of 169 · page 2 of 9
← Previous
Next →