Monte Wood
speaker
192 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Monte Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So the answer is yes. But I have to be careful, right? Over-optimistic. will turn people off. So if I am appropriately optimistic with the person that I'm talking with, if I'm understanding their energy, their way, how they communicate, the tone of their voice, their comfort with eye contact, if I'm aware of those things, then the optimism I give them in a way that they can absorb it is a gift.
I go through life thinking the optimism I share with people is a gift. It's a gift that maybe they walk away from me and are more hateful and more positive in the next engagement that they have in life. And it turns out amazing for them.
Yeah, in order not to be a hypocrite, I'm going to give an example because I think that I have to practice what I preach. I keep a journal. And in that journal, I document some form of generosity and some form of appreciation every single day. And I haven't always done this, but I think I'm very close to 600 days now.
of doing this and our recommendation in the book is just to do it for 30 days to document to actually be generous every day for 30 days so i set out to do that and i liked it so much that i'm now on day 672 or whatever it's just like anything else in life If you practice it, you will get better at it. You'll find a thousand ways that you can be generous. It may be sharing optimism.
It may be sharing a smile. It may be just really intently listening to somebody. It may be calling, using somebody's name and remembering their name and making them feel special. There's so many ways to be generous. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes and the more you realize all the different ways. And of course, we list all of those ways in the book. And in the book, there's 12.
I talk about famous leaders that I've worked with and so forth. In the book, there are 12 incredibly successful people that we interviewed and asked them how generosity has played into their success and how they've been generous in their lives. It's great to not only practice it yourself, but to understand how other people have done it.
Yeah, I do both. Sometimes when I'm traveling, it's easier to do on the phone. But the hardest thing in life is doing anything consistently. So I have done it consistently for 600 days every day. And there are a few other things that I do consistently every single day, but I'm not going to go into those now. Because I also, I think you need to be generous with yourself.
So there are some things I do exercise-wise every single day for the last 600 days. And that's my way of being generous with myself. documenting your generosity and what you appreciate in life. When you appreciate more, when you understand, when you become good at appreciation, you become much better at being generous.
I think Maybe I've created an evangelist of generosity over there.
It's been a pleasure chatting with you. I think you have a generous spirit, and I appreciate that. If there's anything I can do to help or anything you want to do in the future, you just let me know.
In my very early days, probably at the age of 16, I had a young mentor. And that mentor actually gave me a formula. about being successful. And part of it was just believing that I could be successful. And then part of it was living a good life, being a generous person. And I believed him. So at a very early age, I had very high aspirations.
I grew up in a small town called Milton-Freewater in Oregon. Only about 3,500 people in the town. And yet I believed at that point I would someday run a company that was over $100 million in revenue with hundreds of employees. And I believed it right from the very beginning. To augment that, interestingly enough, my mom... is one of the most generous people that you will ever meet.
The combination of my kinkle, my mentor, and my mom as my mentor in generosity led me to this simple formula that I would become successful by making other people successful. It's pretty simple, but I will tell you is magic and it worked. I had tremendous success and my goal is really to pass it on and help others do the same because not only was it very good formula, it was a lot of fun.
It's a great question because there is a lot of exchange, as Adam Grant talks about in leadership, where I do something for you and I expect you to do something for me. But great leaders, great servant leaders, care about the person, not just the work being done. They care about the person's family. They care about the person's life. They help them grow, in many cases, themselves.
I helped employees grow out of our company because the best path for them was to go do something else. They outgrew the jobs they were in and the potential they had within the company. And I took great pride when they left and did something else. I'll give you a simple example. I have a very good friend who owns many franchise stores, Taco Bell franchise stores. He cares about his employees.
He actually hired somebody to come in and train his employees how to change their tires, how to balance their checkbooks. It has nothing to do with how to make a taco or how to service their customer. It's about caring for the person. And when you care for somebody, you create a connection. And that connection is really important in everyday life, but even more so in business.
I'll give you a much grander example. Mark Benioff of Salesforce, the founder, CEO of Salesforce, started the company with the idea of giving a certain percentage of profit to charities. He supported many different organizations. But I will tell you. The most generous thing I ever saw was he could walk through a crowd of his employees and he always remembered their names. He showed them respect.
He let them know that he cared for them as people. We would have an event with 2,000 people and I swear somehow he knew all of their names. I'm sure he studied before he ever got there. But he truly cared about the individual, not just the job they did. And because of that, they worked very hard for him. They created tremendous success. Andy Grove at Intel is another individual that I worked with.
I loved this man was so humble. You've heard stories probably of the great leadership and he literally reinvented the semiconductor industry and rejuvenated Intel, but he worked out of a cubicle. He drove an old Toyota truck and he didn't consider himself any better than anybody else in the company. And he treated everybody as important as
as the next person, whether they were a vice president or whether they were somebody in the fab making chips. And that is, that's not just doing generous acts. That's being a generous person. And I think they're two different things.
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