I Was the Guy Taking Meetings From the Car
I Was the Guy Taking Meetings From the Car
Jana opened today’s Living Lucky® Podcast episode by saying she can tell within fifteen seconds of a first call whether somebody is going to hit their goal.
She was hot when she said it. Her boundaries had been run over a few times that week and she said so on the recording, more than once, and apologized for the heat while she was still in it.
I'm leaving it in anyway.
Nobody is going to say this to your face. Not the mentor who gets on a call with you. Not the prospective partner. Not your boss, who will simply decide what level of person you are and quietly keep you there until they're done with you. You will never get that feedback for free. You'll get it from someone who's being paid to tell you, or you'll never get it at all.
So here it is for free, which is the only reason to publish a bad mood.
What fifteen seconds actually shows
You get on a Zoom. You're driving. The audio is choppy because you're cycling between cell towers. There's road noise. You're nine minutes late because the errand ran long.
Nothing has been said yet, and the meeting is already over.
Not because driving is a moral failing. Because of what had to happen for you to end up there. You looked at the hour, decided it could share space with something else, and the something else won.
The way you play anything is the way you play everything. That's the whole claim.
And I was the guy
I used to do this constantly.
Sales territory out in the middle of nowhere, meetings with my boss on the calendar, and I would take them from the road. Every time. Headset on, highway noise, pulling into a parking lot halfway through.
It wasn't logistics. I could have left earlier. The territory was far but it wasn't unpredictable.
I took those meetings from the car because I wanted my boss to hear that I was in the car. I wanted the road noise. It was evidence. Look how much ground I'm covering for you. Look how busy I am.
I thought I was broadcasting commitment. What I was actually broadcasting was that I'd rather be seen working than be useful for an hour.
So when I say I recognize it in fifteen seconds, that's not intuition. That's recognition. I ran that play for years and I know exactly what it feels like from the inside, which is why it's a pet peeve now instead of a curiosity.
The car isn't the problem
Sometimes the car is the only quiet room a person has. Kids in the house, roommates, a shift that ends twenty minutes before the call, no office and no door. That's real and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
The failure isn't the car. The failure is the silence around it.
If you message me and say I'm in my truck because it's the only place nobody's talking, the audio may be rough, I'd rather do that than move it. That's not a low standard. That's a stated expectation, and it tells me more good things about you than a tidy background ever would.
What costs you the meeting is arriving in the car as though it's nothing. No heads-up, no acknowledgment, no indication that you noticed. That's the signal. Not the location.
The thing we never said out loud
We got something wrong on our end too.
Most disappointment lives in unexpressed expectations.
Jana was frustrated that week because people kept showing up in ways that didn't work. And we had never once told anybody what worked. There was no sentence anywhere that said: solid Wi-Fi, a quiet place, on time, present. We had a standard. We'd just never issued it.
That's on us, not on them. You cannot be let down by a rule nobody was given.
So there are requirements now, and we say them before the call instead of resenting them after. Good signal. Quiet room. Be on time. Be here.
Expectations that get expressed turn into agreements. Expectations that stay in your head turn into resentment, and resentment is a terrible way to run a business or a marriage.
Grace is not the same as effort
Everybody gets up and does the best they can with what they have. Their capacity, their understanding, their resources, whatever they believe is available to them that day. I believe that completely and I've said it on this show.
And there is enough grace handed to me on an average day that I have plenty left to pour out on other people.
Grace is not the same as effort, time, or money.
I can believe you're doing your best and still decline to spend my Tuesday on it. Those two things sit together without any trouble at all. Grace costs me nothing and I'll give it away all day. My calendar is finite and when it's gone it's gone.
Anybody who tells you unlimited compassion requires unlimited access to them is going to burn out, and the people they're serving will be the ones who pay for it.
The ten thousand dollar football game
Watch two people watch the same game.
One of them has a dollar on it. The other one has ten thousand dollars on it, and it's the last ten thousand they've got.
Same game. Same couch. Totally different human being.
Neither of them has any control over what happens on the field. That's the interesting part, because most of the time we don't feel like we have much control over our lives either. But the one with real money on the line is locked in. No small talk. Not getting up during the drive. Arguing with people who talk down his team.
That's what putting money on something does. It isn't magic and it isn't mystical. Money is stored value, and when you move some of it onto a thing, your attention follows it there.
The number that scared us
Our first five-figure mentor was Kane Minkus, for business, and that was the one that moved the needle.
We'd invested before. Five thousand here, seven thousand there, enough to feel like we were doing something. Twenty-five thousand dollars was a different category. That was a freak-out number. We could not comfortably afford it and we wrote the check anyway, and I remember exactly how it felt, which was terrible.
Everything downstream of our business changed from there.
Not because the information was twenty-five thousand dollars better than the free version. A lot of it we'd heard before. What changed is that we could not afford to waste it. We showed up early. We did the homework. We executed the same week instead of adding it to a someday list.
The number bought the discomfort. The discomfort did the work.
We've kept going. Thirty-five thousand after that for real estate and multifamily, and we now average somewhere around twenty-five thousand dollars a year on mentorship in whatever area we're trying to grow in, and that's separate from our coaches. It stopped being a milestone and became a line item.
The number is relative
Twenty-five thousand dollars was not a universal threshold. It was my freak-out number, in the year I wrote that check.
For somebody else it's five hundred. For somebody else it's fifty. The dollar figure isn't the mechanism.
The mechanism is nausea.
What you're looking for is the number that makes you slightly sick. The one you can't file under rounding error. The one that would embarrass you to waste. That number is different for every person, and it moves for the same person over a decade. Mine moved. Yours will.
If you can lose it without noticing, it will not change your behavior, and no amount of sincerity substitutes. If losing it would actually hurt, it changes your behavior whether you like it or not.
That's the entire test, and it has nothing to do with how much money you have.
Why we stopped coaching people for free
We used to do it all the time. Somebody would tell us money was tight, that they'd do whatever it took, that they just needed a shot. We'd see the whole path for them. We're built to live into possibility and we could see exactly how it could go.
So we'd say don't worry about it, we believe in you, let's just work.
It failed nearly every time.
Late, or cancelled, or something came up. Homework undone. Same rut six months later.
It's the dinner thing. You have a great night with friends and everybody says let's do this again next Friday, and Friday comes and something comes up. Now put ten thousand dollars on that dinner and watch how nobody cancels.
We thought free was generous. Free was a disservice. We were removing the exact pressure that would have made the work work, and then feeling hurt when it didn't.
Your calendar and your credit card already know
People tell Jana all the time that they don't know what their values are.
She'll tell you she can walk into your house, look at your credit card statement, and have your values in about five minutes.
Money on your kids: family. Money on your house and what's in it: environment. She can see whether you value your health, how you present yourself, what you wear, how you move through the world. It's all right there and none of it requires an assessment.
Do it to yourself. Last ninety days of statements, last four weeks of calendar. Not to feel bad. To compare the list against the one you'd have given out loud.
Wherever the two lists disagree, the statement is right and the speech is wrong. Your money and your hours are the only honest witnesses you've got.
Living Lucky® Practice
The Values Audit
Two columns. One is what you'd say. The other is what you funded and scheduled. Where they disagree, the second column is correct.
No dollar amounts needed. Categories only. This isn't a budget.
01 My five values, out loud.
Write these first, before you look at anything. What would you tell someone matters most to you?
02 Ninety days of spending. Top five categories.
Skip rent, utilities and groceries. Those are survival, not signal. Look at what's left.
03 Four weeks of calendar. Where did the hours go?
Outside of work you're obligated to. Include the hours that aren't on the calendar but happened anyway.
04 Where boxes two and three disagree with box one.
Name the gaps plainly. This isn't a verdict on your character. It's a reading of the instrument.
05 The expectation I've never said out loud.
Someone in your life is falling short of a rule you never gave them. Write the rule, and who needs to hear it.
06 One hour I'm protecting this week.
Name the hour, and name what you're moving to clear each side of it.
What this looks like when we do it
We work nine months a year.
November through January we're gone. We travel, we deliver wheelchairs, we serve somewhere. The business doesn't run those months. If somebody wants to work with us during that window it's a special case at special pricing, because the alternative is pretending the boundary isn't real.
That costs us money every single year and we do it anyway.
Three months off the calendar, on purpose, every year, says something about what matters to us that no amount of saying so could produce.
That's the test. Not what you'd say your priorities are. What your December looks like.
Where this lands in the formula
The first question we run is what do I want to experience? Everything in this episode is downstream of that one, because wanting an experience and protecting the hour it requires are the same act.
How do I want to grow? Growth has a price and it's usually not money. Sometimes it's an hour you have to stop multitasking through.
How do I want to contribute? You can't contribute from the driver's seat of a car you're using to avoid deciding what matters.
How lucky am I? That I get asked. That people bring me their dreams. That's worth protecting the hour for, and the honest answer to that question is what makes the boundary feel like care instead of punishment.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: Pull ninety days of card statements and four weeks of calendar. Write down the top five categories in each. Compare that to the five values you'd say out loud.
Reflection question: What did I schedule this week as though it were optional, that isn't?
Journal prompt: Where have I been quietly disappointed in someone who was never told what I expected?
Action: Pick the single most important meeting on your calendar in the next two weeks. Protect the hour around it on both sides. Nothing before, nothing after.
Frequently asked questions
Can you really tell in fifteen seconds whether someone will succeed?
You can read their relationship with their own time, which is a reasonable proxy. Someone who arrives on time, prepared, in a place where they can think, is someone who treated the hour as real. Someone who squeezed it between errands has already ranked it, whether or not they meant to.
Is taking a meeting from your car always a mistake?
No. Sometimes the car is the only private space available. The mistake is arriving that way without saying anything. A short message beforehand turns it from a signal of low priority into an expressed expectation, and that's a different thing entirely.
Why does paying for coaching produce better results than free coaching?
Money creates stakes, and stakes change behavior. People who pay show up, prepare, and execute at rates free participants rarely match. Free removes the very pressure that was going to make the work effective.
What is a values audit?
Reviewing your actual spending and your actual calendar to see what you fund and schedule, rather than what you say you care about. Where the two disagree, the spending and the calendar are telling the truth.
How do you set boundaries without being harsh?
Say the expectation before the event instead of resenting its absence afterward. Most people are not disrespecting a rule, they're unaware of one. An expectation you express becomes an agreement. One you keep to yourself becomes resentment.
Do I have to spend a lot of money to grow?
No. What matters is whether the amount is meaningful to you, not whether it's large. A number that makes you slightly sick does the same work at five hundred dollars as it does at twenty-five thousand. If you can lose it without noticing, it will not change your behavior.
Invest change to create change. That's the shortest version of all of this, and it isn't only about money. It's about whether you've put something at risk that you'd rather not lose.
Right now, somewhere on your calendar, there's an hour you've been treating like it's negotiable, and it's the one your whole next year depends on.
Go protect it.
We Create Our Luck®.
Hear the full conversation on the Living Lucky® Podcast with Jason and Jana Shelfer, Season 11, Episode 44: "The 15-Second Reality Check: Why Comfort Kills Your Success." Listen to the audio, watch the video broadcast, and tell us what standard you're raising this week.
