If I'd Had Posters on My Wall, They Would Have Been CEOs
Dr. John Dentico marked the hundredth episode of the Throttle Up Leadership Podcast by going back through three years of conversations and pulling out the theme he found running underneath all of them: hire for values, hire for heart.
He included a segment from my episode, alongside seven other guests. Being picked for a retrospective like that is a particular kind of compliment — not that the conversation was interesting on the day, but that something in it stayed useful three years later.
He asked me what got me through, and I gave him two answers.
My mother
She did some things that weren't optimal. I say that plainly because the sanitised version helps nobody.
What she did extraordinarily well was build my self-confidence, and teach me one specific idea that has done more work in my life than almost anything else: working harder than everyone else is entirely within your control.
Not talent. Not circumstances. Not who you know or where you started. Effort is the one input nobody can ration for you.
And she demonstrated it rather than describing it. She worked two full-time jobs, regularly, so that we could live a middle-class life. She's a force, and she's no-nonsense, and both of those transferred.
When people ask where resilience comes from, they're usually hoping for a technique. Mine came from watching someone do something difficult, repeatedly, without complaint, for years, in order to give me options she didn't have.
Posters of CEOs
The second answer is about contrast.
I could see, quite clearly, the people around me who weren't achieving. And I could see, at the same time, the business leaders I'd started paying attention to — the maverick CEOs of the nineties and early two-thousands. They became my north star.
Most kids I knew wanted to be basketball players or rock stars. If I'd had posters on my wall, they would have been CEOs.
I understood at an unusually young age that this was the thing I wanted. And once that was fixed, the rest followed more easily than people assume. Adversity wasn't hard to push through, because whatever got placed in front of me was smaller than the reason I was moving.
That's the whole mechanism, and it's why I keep coming back to it. A why that's big enough makes obstacles feel like logistics. A why that's too small makes every obstacle feel like a verdict.
The thing John said that I keep thinking about
In his framing of my segment, John made an observation I hadn't articulated myself: the more pain you've endured, the more bandwidth you develop for handling disappointment.
That's a better description than the one I usually give. Enduring something difficult doesn't just make you tougher in some vague way. It expands your capacity to keep functioning while things are going badly — which is most of what building a business actually consists of.
That capacity becomes resilience. Over enough time, resilience becomes the thing people mistake for luck.
Listen to the full episode
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Episode 100: Celebrating 100 Episodes, Hire For Values, Hire For Heart. Throttle Up Leadership with Dr. John Dentico, May 2025. A retrospective featuring eight guests — my segment is one of them, and the others are worth your time.
Congratulations to John on a hundred. Three years of consistent, thoughtful conversations is its own argument for everything he teaches.
Turning effort into something that compounds rather than something you repeat forever is what Ignite Funnels is built for.
