Changing your perspective changes everything. Author Charlie Harary reveals the number one ingredient that will make us achieve greater happiness and success.
Often, we don’t realize that we are our greatest weapon for positive change and that changing our lives is all about perspective.
Charlie Harary is a business executive, author, and prolific speaker known internationally for his charismatic, passionate, and sophisticated lectures, seminars, and keynote addresses. In this fascinating interview, he speaks about the mental obstacles that hold us back from achieving the joy, fulfillment, and success that we all crave, and how by rewiring our minds, we’re able to see the path that will lead us to the life we truly desire. He offers practical ways that business leaders can reframe our perspectives to achieve success, how to avoid the dangers of measuring ourselves against others, and the key to developing a company that is not just a service or a product, but a people-first business. Please listen and enjoy!
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Changing Your Perspective Changes Everything with Charlie Harary [Transcript]
Our guest is Charlie Harary. He is a business executive, author and public speaker known internationally for his charismatic, passionate and sophisticated lectures, seminars and keynote addresses. For the Let’s Talk Business community, Charlie Harary is not a new name. We have him speak at our events because he inspires and he delivers a very important message. In his book, Unlocking Greatness, he taps into what stops a person from achieving success, so I figured he’d be a great candidate to be on the show. Pay attention to how Charlie shares the importance of unlocking the greatness inside every leader and why that’s the first step to achieving success. We also spoke about the importance of happiness and living the moment, the number one ingredient that will help you achieve greater happiness, and the danger of measuring ourselves against outside metrics. Finally, we discussed the importance of building company culture—building a company that’s not only a service or a product, but rather a people-first business. Without further ado, here’s the episode!
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Charlie Harary, thank you so much. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. It’s great to be on.
You and I have known each other for a very long time. You spoke at our events. We probably collaborated a dozen different projects. What I’ve always come to appreciate is not only your knowledge but the way you’re delivering your message. My question to you, and I think this is going to be a starting point for our audience, how do you package not only having the knowledge but ultimately being able to deliver that message? The reason I’m asking you this question is that speaking to leaders, sometimes those leaders are very smart people and they have the knowledge and all they need is a way of communicating that to their people.
The true secret of that is God, and whatever he puts in is whatever comes out. From a practical perspective, I think it comes down to two things. First and foremost, whenever one speaks, a great trap is that people think that when you speak, you share what’s in your head. Many times, people like things or are familiar with material, or have the knowledge that their audience doesn’t have. They take for granted that their audience doesn’t know what they are saying. They may not be as passionate about the subject or may not know the words that they are using. The first thing always is to remember, speak for your audience. Don’t speak for yourself. Where are they coming from? What do they understand? What do they know? What do they care about?
The more you put your audience’s perspective in yours, the more you’ll be more impactful in what you say and what you don’t say and how you say. The second thing is you have to always get to a place of enthusiasm. Some materials are easier than others but no one is listening to somebody else speak about anything and pay attention if that person isn’t enthusiastic. If you’re talking about the tax code, you better be enthusiastic about it or they’re not paying attention. Whatever it takes to get into the material, to understand the value of what you are saying so that it comes across in an enthusiastic way, that will signal to the brain of the listener that whatever is coming out of your mouth is important because you are enthusiastic about it. If you put yourself in someone else’s mind and you speak enthusiastically and passionately, you’ll be able to get a lot more across than you would think.
That’s valuable because a lot of times, leaders have that passion but they’re stuck on how to deliver that passion. What you’re saying is that understand that may be a person on your team doesn’t have the same level of passion. When you’re overexcited or under-excited, you’re not doing it justice. If you try to bring it out in a way where this is how the other person should feel about it, ultimately it connects more. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, and a lot of it comes down to the way you’re naturally into the passion. When you’re excited about something, it comes across. For some people, they’ll speak loudly. For some people, they’ll use their hands or some people they won’t. It’s okay, but they’ll sense it and it’s real and you’re passionate about it. Whenever you’re talking about things in the business world, you have to dig into that same level of passion. You have to go there. You have to allow yourself to get to a place where what you’re saying is exciting for you. If you allow yourself to go there and you allow your authentic passion to come out, it will be felt across the room.
For example, I’m in a corporate boardroom and talking about hiring processes or culture or people. That’s not as exciting to me as other things that I’m doing, but I’m still passionate about these topics. If I’m talking about real estate or investments, I try to get myself to a place where I am passionate about that in which I’m talking about and let it come out naturally. If I’m not excited about what I’m talking about, why would I expect the person across the table to listen to me? Wherever you are in your business or your life and you’re speaking to other people, you have to get to a place, even if we’re talking about accounting rules. If it matters, it doesn’t mean the answer is on the table, but you’re authentically enthusiastic about that and what you’re discussing. Because if you’re not, then the listener intuitively knows that this is not important and they’re not listening to what you’re saying.
We should back up a little bit about yourself. A lot of people know you, but you are a successful businessman, a lawyer and you’ve been in real estate and public training and so on. Most people know you in the outside world through your videos and you’re speaking all over the country. The inspiration you give, the ability to inspire people to unlock their potential. I was wondering let’s be open. Let’s be humble and speak about it. How did it come to be and how does this overlap with the business side of your life? How are those two things known to be the person that inspires a crowd, get people to the actionable steps and unlock their potential? With your other side, how do those two things overlap?
To me, it’s all the same. The ability to become more and to become greater than we think we are, that’s the core. Every one of us has an incredible amount of potential that may most likely go untapped throughout life. The excitement that I have in my personal life is to try to get somebody else and myself to be more than they thought possible. That’s the underlying connector and what does that apply to see one’s own religion, spirituality, marriage, parenting. Those are all examples or manifestations of the core work that each one should do, which is unlocking the talents and the potential that’s inside them. In my business life, I built a business around that. A lot of what I do is management consulting. It’s corporate advisory.
It’s helping companies figure out how to unlock the potential in their employees and themselves. It all fits. Whether I’m talking about it in a boardroom, the subject matters are different and they mean different things to me. As much as I love business, it’s not as important to me as religion. They have different values to me. If you get underneath it, people think that inspiration is like, “Rah, rah, rah,” and there are lots of people like that. You get up there and they’re like, “Hip hip hooray.” I try not to do that. I try to understand what’s holding us back psychologically and try to speak about the things that if somebody can hear it, could help them gain some bit of insight that can help them in their lives. That applies across the board in my business life and my other life.
[bctt tweet=”Once we realize that the circumstances in front of us aren’t driving our emotions but rather our perspective drives our circumstances, then we learn to stop trying to control the world and start trying to control our minds.” username=””]
Let start talking about this topic in greater detail and it’s all in your book, Unlocking Greatness, which we had the privilege of having one of the book-signing events in one of our Let’s Talk Business events when it came out. You spoke on these topics, so I heard it and read it in great detail. For our audience, the message and what I understood from the book is changing our thoughts and we could change our brains and unlock the greatness within us. Understanding that it all starts with how you think and how your brain is wired so to speak. Tell me a little bit about the journey that led to it. You were a speaker on different topics and you saw corporate culture in different ways. You saw companies, you have been involved in different larger companies in corporate America. Tell me what was the journey that led you to write this book and why is this topic such an important topic that you feel that you need to make waves with?
For many years, I was involved in speaking about these topics. Thank God, through a whole series of events, how I got here mostly started by volunteering for smaller organizations that wanted me to speak to high school kids, college kids that were more interested in getting more inspired about life. That transitioned to speaking for companies and coming into organizations and speaking to employees. That’s transitioned to other things as well. What I realized what was happening was I was trying to figure out why people weren’t growing. What was the block? How come they would hear a lecture and they wouldn’t implement it and why they weren’t changing. When I would go speak somewhere, people would look, they would call and say, “Can we talk to you about this issue or that issue.” whether it’s personal, whether it’s corporate.
They were having the problem translating what they heard into action. As they were talking, I started to research more. What is the block? How do you change? It’s nice to hear it and everybody wants to hear some story about some person that overcame a challenge and he speaks, “Hip hip, hooray.” The whole crowd goes, “Hip hip, hooray.” They walk out and go, “I’m going to change the world.” The next day comes and they’re still reaching for the donuts. What happened along the way? I started to research it. I started to understand or learn about the brain and how it works. How the mind works and how our thoughts change the actual physical structure of our brain. And how habits work and how rituals work, which opened up a whole new world of understanding as to why in religion we do what we do.
It allowed me to understand how people work differently. When they started calling, I started giving them this information. What I found was I kept on repeating myself a million times. I get three or four calls a day and start from the beginning. Here’s how it works and I will do it again and again. So I went to a college in the area that has a business school. I said, “I’m doing this and I want to teach you.” I went through whatever process and they said okay. I took this information and I’d put it in front of a college course because I figured if it has to be a college course, I would have to step it up. I would make sure all the research is right. I would make sure that it’s long enough so it wouldn’t be a one-hour conversation. It’s a full college semester and I went to this school, I taught in the business school for five semesters. Every semester, I kept on researching more and honing the material until finally I put a proposal together and I sent it out to the Random House in Rodale and they accepted the proposal, thank God.
So I was able to write the book. The goal of the book was that when someone says, “How do I do this?” It’s not a whole conversation. I can hand them something that’s like a tool and say, “Read it. You’ll understand how your brain works. You’ll understand how it’s part of your soul. You’ll understand how your habits work.” With exercises and all that stuff, and my hope is that this tool could help bridge the gap of the life you have versus the life you want. It evolved over time with me trying to help people, and after a while, realizing that the best thing you could do is give somebody something they can put in the pockets that can give them information that they need. Because once they have that information, they’ll do it on their own.
Let’s speak to that business owner leader in a company or even an entrepreneur. They read the book, give me some practical examples once they understand how unlocking the greatness works, how it’s going to change the actual day-to-day in their life.
The book is split up three ways. You’ve got the first chapter, which is understanding your mind. It’s one of the great challenges that people have. They don’t understand how their mind works. You can look at your body and if you go to the gym and you work out, you know how your muscles work because it’s in front of you. Your mind is not in front of you, it’s within you. You don’t know how it works. If you don’t know how your mind works, you won’t be able to craft any real solutions for how to make any changes. The first section of the book gives you an overview generally. It’s a topic that requires thousands of hours of research, but I’m talking about generally how your mind works. There’s something called neuroplasticity. The thought creates these connections and these connections change your mind. It gives the reader some basics so when we talk about strategies, they know what the strategies mean and why they’re important.
We go into the world of spirituality. Speak about what you want because if you know how your mind works, but you’re just chasing things and you can’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. The worst thing that can happen is that you can’t reach your goals. It happened to people all the time. They think that once I make enough money, then I’ll be happy. They go out there and they make enough money and they’re not. They’re like, “It’s the next thing.” They chase their whole lives and ruin everything along the way. Because no one ever taught them how to think about their lives in a way that tries to gear them towards what is it that you’re after, which is much deeper pursuits, significance, connection.
Once you have certain general myths of what you’re looking for and how to get there and we have tools in the book. We have these exercises called the eulogy exercises, where you literally have to write the bullet points of your eulogy, which is intense. We have books on the vision. We have all these different tools to try to elicit out of you what you’re going for. The last section is how you get it. Visualization and how that works. Habits, rituals, failure and all of the practical steps for growth. If you follow the book, you open with your brain, so now you know how your most powerful tool works. You go into your souls that you know exactly what you’re after and then you end with practical strategies that you learn and get it.
I met somebody in the business world and he reached a certain level of unhappiness and I said, “Let’s dissect it a little bit.” I went into his personal life and his family and his business and all the different pieces of the person’s life. I said, “I want to tell you something. The happy moment that you were looking forward to, it’s exactly now.” He paused and said, “You’re right. I might want to have goals to achieve larger successes, but I’ve already achieved success.” People are sometimes lost in that moment and always looking for the next big thing to happen to them, holding them to achieve happiness. You have to achieve happiness in the stages where you are.
[bctt tweet=”We have to stop looking at the world and going, “When I… then I….” username=””]
The truth is a person should be able to feel happy and fulfilled every step of the way. It’s only this world that we live in that teaches us and it’s a material world. It’s not spiritual.
Let me deviate a little bit of the conversation. You speak a lot about spirituality and also the inspirational part of life. Let’s take this example I shared with you. It was a lengthier conversation and this person said, “Why should I be so happy? Just because somebody else doesn’t have a nice family and a healthy family or doesn’t have a job that gives him this type of comfort that I have? Should I be happy because this is what I wanted?” It’s a very interesting angle where he went with a conversation but I would love to know your take on it. Let’s dissect a little bit. What is happiness from a spiritual perspective and a practical perspective? What is happiness versus positivity? Is happiness a mechanism of positivity? Give me some clarity on that.
The closest word we have that explains happiness is empowerment. Happiness, at least from a spiritual perspective, is not like dancing in the streets. There’s a concept of being emotionally positive, but you don’t have to get to a level where you are singing and dancing to achieve happiness. In fact, the saddest month of the Jewish year is Av, the month that we remember the destruction. In that month, we’re taught and told to decrease your happiness, not to get rid of your happiness. How could you be sitting around and be happy if you’re thinking of destruction? The answer is that happiness, you don’t have to be whistling in the wind. You could be, but you don’t have to be.
Happiness at the core is empowerment. When you feel empowered, you feel you can get bigger and stronger. When you feel a certain level of hopefulness that you can make the best it can be. How does one get empowered? One would think that empowerment comes from the circumstance. If someone pats me on the back or if I make enough money, then I’m going to feel empowered. That’s not the truth. Circumstances don’t lead to empowerment. The truth is that empowerment is a perspective. You could be in any situation and look at the situation in a way if you know how to use perspective to empower yourself at every moment. You could be sitting in the funeral and being empowered to be a better person and be empowered to see your life differently.
You can also be sitting at a wedding and being totally depressed. It’s perspective. There are people that I know, they’re sitting in luxury vacation. They’re fetching over the stupidest things because they don’t have perspective. They’re literally sitting at a Passover program and there are 17,000 choices. One choice this two people online and they’re like going through a bit of loneliness, like blown out. It’s because their perspective is off. Once somebody realizes that the circumstances that’s in front of me isn’t driving my emotion, but my perspective of those circumstances, then they have learned that I have to stop trying to control the world and I have to start learning how to control my mind. Once you get that, you’re halfway there. Once you get that the problem is in your brain or your perspective and not in the world. Some circumstances are easier.
If you have a mediocre perspective and you’re on vacation, you’ll feel happy. That’s because some circumstances are easier. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s about your perspective. If you’ve got a great perspective, you can be anywhere and you’re still feeling totally empowered. First and foremost is the recognition of that. We have to stop looking at the world and going, “When I, then I.” We’re doing it our whole lives, “When I got to school, when I get to this, when I get married, when I get my first kid, when my kids get bigger or when I get my job.” We’re always playing this treadmill of, “When I, then I will feel empowered.” The minute a person says, “I’m done with that. Nothing’s going to make me feel empowered because it’s my perspective.” That’s the first step to change in the world of happiness.
I want our audience to take a deep breath and reread this episode. I’ve heard you so many times speaking and it’s such a valuable lesson being able to identify that happiness is a perspective. It’s the way you look at things, not so much about an external type of approach to a situation. Giving the example of you could be in the most exciting places and still be depressed and vice versa. Being in the saddest place and still feel that entitlement and happiness. I think for our audience and leaders in general, when they look of what they have accomplished and even they have still a way to go. If they look at the perspective of what they have achieved in that short period of time, I think that level of happiness should always overtake the potential that they still have. They definitely need to have goals and have ambitions to continue growing and achieving more success, but it doesn’t take away the happiness of living the moment.
Let me continue the point, which is your question. What do you tell a person who goes, “I’ve got to be happy because of someone else’s worst life?” The answer is the way you build this muscle of happiness and perspective is through gratitude. Gratitude is the most important muscle that we have. It is the core of who we are. If you are not grateful as a person, you’re broken in your perspective. You can test us. You can put a thermometer in your mouth and test your perspective and you test it with gratitude. When a person is grateful for everything, it is almost impossible to have a bad perspective. You’re so overwhelmed with all the things that you have and recognize, which is why gratitude is important. Gratitude is the recognition of which I have, I don’t deserve.
I don’t expect it. That’s what you’re grateful. Someone gives you $1 for doing something. If somebody gives you $1 million, you’re grateful because you didn’t expect the $1 million. The more you can limit the thing that you expect in your life, the more grateful you’ll be for the things that you have. When you hear stories of someone else that doesn’t have as much as you, it’s not meant to say because of that. It’s meant to enable you to start to get a grateful approach to things that you took for granted. Not everyone’s married. Not everyone has children. Not everyone has a business. Not everyone has food. Not everyone has health. I have a friend of mine who is going through cancer and he told me that when this doctor came into the office and said, “You don’t have to be here for him.” He and his wife were crying tears of joy. He’s telling this to me.
They felt they were overwhelmed with happiness because he still has cancer, but he’s able to go home. How many people go home and closed the door and are blown away by the gratefulness that they get to live in a place where they get to feel safe and secure and stand around the table? Who does that? The people that are going to become grateful, “I can breathe, I can walk, I can talk.” People think that if I become grateful, then I’m not going to be hungry. I have to not to appreciate things. This way I can fight for more stuff. Because if you’re happy, you’re grateful, you don’t want to reach an X million, that’s not true. You become a good person along the way. The more you’re able to lower the things that you expect in this world, the more you have gratitude for the things that you have, the more you are building a rock-solid perspective. When you get things in life, whether it’s walking down the street with your two legs or eating food or closing a big deal of your life, whatever that is, you’re so focused on that positive that it’s almost impossible not to be able to have some level of empowerment. That’s the goal. That’s what the person could get and they can train themselves.
[bctt tweet=”You never reach your goals. You become your goals.” username=””]
I learned so much because you’re putting it in perspective for me, which is the gratefulness is the ingredient to build that positive outlook. The positive outlook will give you that empowerment, which automatically will make you a happy person. Let’s dive back into the book, which is probably you’re going to say that it’s very related to what you finished stating about happiness. In the book is something very dear to my heart especially with the age of social media. People could see eight see this in the wrong way, which is looking at success. Society measured success in a certain way. The business specifically has measures of success. Ultimately, if you look at social media, you’ll see all kinds of success stories of people. What it does is that average person that’s building a small business, this leader that three years in struggling and building piece by piece for their business or employee or person, father or spouse. Whoever that person is and they look at success and they measure their success against the success out there in the universe. I know you speak about this and I think it’s such a dear subject to myself and to every person out there to know what you teach as far as how to look at success.
Using outside metrics to look at your own success is a recipe for disappointment. It comes from somewhere. One of the things in the book we speak about is the power of exposure. The more you see something, the more that thing feels normal. When you grow up in a world where you have grades and you take tests, you’re being compared to everyone in your class. You start to think that that’s how you feel success. The kid who gets an A and the teacher calls up the parent and go, “Your kid’s doing great.” The kid gets more points than everybody else in the class. That’s not how life works. The more a person thinks that their success is comparative, the more they’re going to live a very disappointing life and here’s why.
As you achieve success in your life, you get put into the next category of people. Let’s say, you have a certain amount of financial ability and you’re trying to pay your mortgage. Even in the community, you seem to be around people that are having very similar financial situations. As a person grows financially, many times they get to be around people that have similar financial situations. As a result, they have a different category. People do it. There’s always someone that has more. There’s always someone that has a seemingly better life. The way one is supposed to measure success is entirely based on one metric and that is themselves. Where are they are and where are they need to go in every single day. You can have a long-term vision, but that’s not where the fight. The battle takes place on a daily basis. The battle takes place against yourself.
Your greatest partner and your greatest opponent is yourself. We have what to do every day. For somebody, they ease into the things that we work hard on. For others, we do things easily and they may have a hard time doing it. You can’t compare it because no one has the same exact life scenario. If you’re able to compare yourself against yourself and where do you need to go against where you were whether that’s in business or that life or spirituality, it doesn’t matter. That’s your only metric. When you live this way, life becomes so much more enjoyable because you’re not waiting for the world to tell you how great you’re doing. You stopped caring what they think because you realize that they don’t know. You don’t need an award or the size of a house or an honor or at dinner to be the proof to your success. Your success is something that you’re going to feel constantly. When you feel that constantly, that progress is inspiring. It only gets you excited to get up and try harder the next day. You wake up one morning and you’re a different person and you don’t even know how you got there. It’s because you focused on the stuff that matters and not the step that doesn’t.
Speaking about good habits, which is so important for business owners in general. Because as you’re building a company, the more habits you have and the more good habits you have, the more things you could put into place on a regular basis versus constantly juggling between going back and forth. I know you did a lot of research for the book. What is the science behind creating good habits?
Your brain is what they call neuroplastic, which means that every time you have thought neurons fire in your brain and create connections. If you can almost envision it as a kid growing up, my mother held a cup in front of me and said, “Charlie cup.” In my little brain neurons fired and basically connected a made-up word cup with a cylinder that I look like a cup. That’s what I got. I lived in America my whole life, so that word kept on coming into my brain. Every time it came to my brain, that connection got stronger. All of a sudden, thousands of times I heard it. If you can almost picture it, two neurons and every time you think of it, it creates a connection. When you hear the word cup a billion times before your ten in your brain, there’s a connection between that word and the object. Now, it’s a part of who you are.
If you open my brain, it would be a connection to cup. If you look in the middle of the night and go, “What’s this thing? I’m not going to have to Google it.” I know it’s a cup. When things are clear and repeated, they form connections in your brain and then becomes a piece of you. That applies to knowledge and information, which is why when you learn things for the first time, you don’t know it and then you do it every single time and you know by heart. It also applies to habits. That’s why some people bite their nails because they did it when they were younger. In their brain, there was a connection between stress and the pain of whatever the cuticle is. Some people run to the cabinet and eat everything in sight because their brain made a connection between a circumstance and behavior and it got reinforced.
As soon as you get to a place of stress, some people immediately reach for a cabinet or reach for a cigarette or reach for their nails, whatever the thing is that they’ve always done. Behaviors are conditioned as well through repetition. What rituals and habits allow you to grow in a way that sticks? Let’s take it dieting. The reason why people don’t eat well is because in their heads, they don’t value food for its nutritional value, they value it for its taste. A person says, “I need to lose weight,” or whatever the circumstance is. I’ll use it as an example. The last thing you should do is go” I’m going to lose ten pounds,” and in one day, you go to the gym and run and eat healthily. That doesn’t work. What they should do is realize, “I have to start to learn how to link behaviors. Let me identify something that I can do every day at the same time that’s very small and repeat it every single day so that my brain starts to connect and create new neuro-connections about food.”
Let’s say every morning I’m going to eat this one thing for breakfast, not the whole day. Your brain gets used to you go downstairs and now that thing is in your life. When you do that one thing again and again, the repetition starts to change your brain literally. The best thing you can do if you want to accomplish a goal is to take the goal to pick one habit that’s going to help you get to that goal. Hopefully, under five minutes and pick a time that you want to do that habit and do it every single day at the same time, the same habits. Don’t worry about trying to get to the goal too quickly because as you repeat the behavior, the behavior becomes neurologically embedded into your brain. Once you have it, it becomes easier to do it.
All that discipline that you have, you don’t have to do it anymore for that behavior because that behavior is a part of you. It feels like it’s normal and natural and then you move onto the next behavior. If you consistently use this model, you’re able to create habits every few weeks or whatever or month, depending on the habit. Over the course of a year, you’re a different human being. You’re not excited or inspired and you do something then you lose inspiration you go back to where you were. You’re not making the same goals every year for twenty years. You are literally changing your brain to get you closer to where you are. That is going at it every day, that’s the core of real greatness. If you look at great people who have accomplished big things in lives and you get into their lives, they’re structured. They do things every single day. They keep at it until the things that they want to become becomes a piece of them.
This is a very important point for leaders in general when you have so much on your plate and sometimes you say you’re not making enough progress. The famous Michael Hyatt, which teaches a lot about greatness and achieving success and productivity hacks, speaks the same concept obviously you mentioned on habits, which is rituals, which means that certain things as a leader almost becomes so natural that you don’t even realize you’re doing it. I don’t want to use this example because it’s a negative example, but the way that you refresh your phone for new messages or email. You’re not realizing you’re doing it or you’re reaching your phone, it’s a negative example. When you put in great habits or great rituals in that sense, those things become so ingrained and ultimately you see the progress out of it.
[bctt tweet=”The problem is in your brain, not in the world.” username=””]
This is an important lesson to remember. You never reach your goals, you become your goals. It’s very different. Goals are like directions. Goals are like north, west, east, south. You never get there. They’re just ways to go. What you’re doing is using a goal to move you in a direction, but then you want to become the goal. You want them body the goal. You never wake up one morning and have the discipline to choose good and health. You become that person where you see food differently. You see your body differently. You don’t become the dad because you get inspired. You created habits about being a father that makes it natural for you to do the right thing. You become the goal. That’s the difference. People that are trying to reach goals, they live in a world of like, “I’m inspired. I’m not inspired.” Their life is a seesaw. People that are trying to use habits, they walk a lot slower but they go into a direction and over time they get there.
I do want to put in a couple of questions and speak about what you’re doing in the corporate workplace culture. Obviously, you do a lot of work with companies to help them achieve great HR processes and ultimately build a more successful culture. My question to you speaking to business owners, what are the trends you’re seeing happening in the workplace that changed? What leaders need to be aware of more like instructive to our audience to say these things that are happening. This is what a workplace needs to be in order to attract good talent and maintain good talent and so on and so forth. What would be one or two pieces of advice you would leave us with?
What we do for a living is to help companies grow. We want the company to become the biggest as it can be. They don’t always have the knowledge to do that and that’s where we come in for. The reason why I spend most of my time in people is because that’s where it is. What’s been going on for the past fifteen years is you see a trend in what companies need to be successful. There was a time where the best factory produced the best goods and that got you the best price. That’s what is changing. When technology came in, now it’s not just a manufacturing facility, it’s technology. Three guys sitting in a Starbucks could have disrupted an entire industry.
Technology became in vogue. What’s happening is there’s a return to the human. You see this at every level. That’s why movements start left and right. That’s where the whole world is going crazy. Where we are is in the world of the human. People live in a place where the center is not a piece of tech, it’s not a factory, it’s the human being. This is all coming from the Millennial generation. When I grew up, I was saying, if I came home and I was in trouble, my parents would say, “What’d you do wrong to your teacher?” Parents are saying to their teachers, “What is wrong with my kids?” The world is changing. People can reach anything at any point. The idea of respecting authority has changed. There’s a whole movement, but it’s all changed around the human.
That means that your business is going to make it or be broken by the power of your people. If you’re not hiring right, if you’re not hiring with any level of insight. If you’re not growing your people right, if you don’t have them in the right places. If you’re not motivating them consistently, you’re not thinking of your company as a people organization that does whatever service or product that you do, you’re putting yourself behind the people. People live in what’s called “the freelance economy.” They could be working for you but in their hearts, they’re freelancers. They’ll go to someplace else whenever they want. That idea if I worked for a company for 40 years is gone. You’ve got a whole bunch of freelancers that are very talented and the companies that have the best are the ones that understand that they’re a people company. They’re not a service or product company. Herb Kelleher who’s the founder of Southwest says, “If you focus on your people, they’ll create the best service and then the profits will come on their own.” That’s why he built one of the most profitable airlines of all time and he’s a billionaire. That’s where we are. That’s the trend. The more you’re able to do that, the more you put yourself in a position of success, no matter what the market throws you.
My version of that quote is, “Happy team makes happy clients, which makes happy shareholders.”
Happy equals empowered team. That’s how I would add to that, but I agree completely. The more empowered your team is, the happier your clients are and then the happier your shareholders are.
On the other side of the empowerment is if you give proper empowerment for the proper people, it frees up the leader to work on the business versus in the business. Now, you have great people that you could trust doing the basic work, the daily tasks or the daily projects in order to be able to free you up.
One of the things that I see a lot with companies is their leaders are not able to do the job that they’re supposed to do because they haven’t been building their people along the way. As they get older and they get more experience, they realize that to grow the company, I’ve got to be working on the business or spending time outside the business trying to drove up a business or bridge strategic alliances. They can’t because they spent so much of their lives focusing on their service that there’s no one around them who can pick up the ball. It’s sad, but that’s what people are going through, but you’re exactly right. The more you work on your people, the more you end up working on your business not in your business as you get older.
This is a great closing statement. We covered so much ground. I’m going to close with the four rapid-fire questions. Share with us a book that changed your life.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
A piece of advice you got that you’ll never forget?
Never be pareve. Take a stand. Don’t be pareve on anything.
For our audience, that means that you have to be very clear in where you stand on situations. Anything you wish you could go back and do differently?
However much I learned Torah, I would triple it. When I was younger, I was too wild. I was as crazy as a kid. If I can go back and just sit for another decade and just plow, I would do that.
The last final question, what’s still on your bucket list to achieve?
My number one is to see the day that I get to see God’s presence in the world. I think that would be my best bucket list.
Thank you so much, Charlie. This was a pleasure and an honor. I know our audience will take a note of all these golden nuggets and practical no-nonsense of device. How would they become happy on the present moment, unlocking their own greatness and ultimately understanding how they could take those things to be a better leader and ultimately share it with their team in order to make a bigger and successful prosperous company.
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you for all the wonderful work that you do for so many people. It’s an honor to be here.
It’s my pleasure.
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About Charlie Harary
Mr. Charlie Harary, Esq. Mr. Charlie Harary, Esq. is a business executive, author and prolific speaker, known internationally for his charismatic, passionate and sophisticated lectures, seminars and keynote addresses.
Currently, Mr. Harary is the CEO of Ayven Point Group, an investment and advisory company based in New York. Mr. Harary is the author of the best-selling book, “Unlocking Greatness,” published last year by Random House. His podcasts, videos, and radio show have reached hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, providing messages regarding business, personal growth and spirituality.
Mr. Harary was also an executive at RXR Realty, a multi-billion-dollar real estate company. Prior to RXR, Mr. Harary was an associate in Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Davis Polk & Wardwell. He received his J.D. from Columbia Law School where he was awarded the James Kent Scholar and the Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. For more on Charlie, visit http://charlieharary.com/unlockinggreatness/
