Thriving in a World of Constant Change with Fred Marshall

Introduction and guest background

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More.

00:36Bill Gallagher: Easily three-quarters of us, the vast majority of us, are anxious about the future of our work and the future of the world. Things are changing. It feels like faster than ever, and that's uncomfortable. It's unsettling in so many ways. And we wonder, is this time any different than any other? Years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, and it seems now more appropriate than ever. What if there's a different approach to all that? That's our conversation today. How do we lean into it? How do we deal with it? How do we handle the pace of change and the anxiety that we're grappling with?

01:16Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of this super groovy Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with an author, a speaker, a topic, a story, something to do with growing, scaling your company and surviving, maybe even enjoying the whole process. You'll find more than 650 episodes and more at scalingcoach.com or wherever you're getting this right now—YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, X, all those places, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, etcetera.

01:54Bill Gallagher: Alright. My guest, Fred Marshall. He started as a biochemist, molecular biologist, lab science. And he applied that kind of research methodology to business leadership and management. And he's CEO and founder of a company called Quantum Learning whose clients include people like Apple, Pfizer, Genentech. Those are organizations, right? Very large organizations. Many others. He's trained over 130,000 people across many countries and helped launch lots of brands in the biopharma world, generating billions. He's got a new book coming out, Thrive: The Antidote to Future Shock. And I think this topic of anxiety and future changes and all that is so near and dear to all of us. He's also an obsessive-compulsive gardener, at least according to his bio. True.

02:53Bill Gallagher: Welcome to the show.

02:56Fred Marshall: Thank you. So glad to be here.

What gardening teaches about patience and long-term thinking

03:01Bill Gallagher: Your website says CEO, investor, author. What does gardening teach you that you can't learn anywhere else? Tell us about your gardening.

03:08Fred Marshall: Oh, that's a great question. The thing about gardening is it's an exercise in love and patience. Gardens take a long time to build and become really great, and I've been working on my garden for almost thirty years now. And it's pretty great, I have to say. But storms happen, trees fall down. Recently, we had a tree just cut right through the middle of this Italian garden. It's like, oh, man. Huge, massive tree. It's dynamic. It's interesting. It's beautiful. It has seasons. And you have to have this kind of combination of strategic thinking. You have to know where you're going ultimately with this thing. But at the same time, you have to live in the moment and, literally, smell the roses.

03:55Bill Gallagher: What do you garden? What do you grow?

04:02Fred Marshall: I have an Italian-style garden, which means boxwood and fountains and statues, and I have arborvitae instead of cypress trees. But the goal is to imitate someplace around Siena, Florence, Italy, and pretend I'm there even though I'm in wintry cold Pennsylvania right now.

04:19Bill Gallagher: Yeah. It's funny. It's actually been really sunny here in Northern California where I am. But as we talked, the weather just turned, and suddenly, it's like, cold. I walked around. I'm like, what am I doing? It's gotten cold and cloudy again. I don't know. You can kind of see at the window there. But yeah, it's changed rapidly on me.

04:41Fred Marshall: Well, you know what they say. They say it's always sunny in Philadelphia, and that tends to be true. It's sunny a lot here, and I love it. But last couple of days, it was like five degrees. Sunny, dry. You touch your car, you get an electric shock because it's so dry outside. But we love it anyway. It's four seasons of magic.

05:04Bill Gallagher: Well, responding to nature, allowing, being patient, letting things grow and develop. For me, when I think about future shock, when I think about change and that kind of thing, one of the things that's given me a great deal of perspective, balance, and patience against all that, is the garden. I look out the front of my house. It's set back quite a bit, and I have trees. And then I live in a very tree-filled neighborhood, and looking out into the trees and walking around the trees is just enormously helpful when there's a major terrorist attack or a market freefall or some other kind of shocking, unsettling event. I look out and I'm like, yeah, the sun came up again today or the clouds came out or, like, this thing that feels enormous—like, life still is happening. Like, the world is still… it feels like things aren't working anymore, but in fact, maybe a lot is still working.

06:08Fred Marshall: You know, nature is the best medicine by far, right? Going out and—I'm a little bit jealous because you can grow pretty much anything in Oakland where you are. You've got the mist from the bay, but you've got a lot of sunshine, and it's the perfect combination for thriving.

Why we are all feeling overwhelmed

06:24Bill Gallagher: It's pretty good. So, thriving. Maybe tease a little bit about the book, and then let's talk about how you arrived at the book.

06:32Fred Marshall: Okay. Well, the big challenge that I faced and I think everybody faces is we're all kind of on the edge of overwhelm all the time these days. There's so much streaming in. We have more information flowing into our lives through our phones, through text messages, and everything else, and it's created this kind of dynamic where there's just too much to process emotionally, mentally, even physically. We've just got too much data streaming in. The average millennial picks up their phone a hundred times a day. That's once every nine minutes. It's hard to build a breathtaking future in nine-minute chunks. And so one of the big challenges is, how do you get unaddicted to the dopamine hits and the outrage algorithms that are designed to monetize your attention and hang ads in front of you? How do you escape that and live a meaningful, beautiful life? I know a lot of people who struggle with that. I know I've struggled with that. And I wrote the book to give people a roadmap to simplify it, to kind of get rid of the clutter. There's sort of mental, emotional noise clutter that we need to kind of get rid of, and that's all part of the journey to going from wherever you are to this state where you can truly thrive—run with your strengths, and make your weaknesses not a big deal.

08:03Bill Gallagher: I mean, it seems like the why is obvious, right? That kind of thinking and stuff is obvious in the world. The need for this. But why you? Why did you say, I'm gonna write this? What's your…

08:21Fred Marshall: What prompted me to do that and why should anybody bother to listen to me? I get that. Well, one fast way to say it is, all my dreams have come true, and that's really true. I was cleaning up my closet and I found this journal that had all the goals that I'd set when I was 22 years old. And I looked down the list and it's like, every single one of them happened. But they all took at least a decade longer than I thought they were gonna take. Yeah. And so I'm like, oh, okay. That's interesting. I have done a lot and I'm a big investor in AI startups. I've got a pretty big portfolio.

09:04Fred Marshall: I can see what's coming. I have privileged access to things that I'm not allowed to talk about because I'm under non-disclosure. But I can tell you that it's going to get intense and it's going to be fantastic at the same time. And I wrote this book to give people access to ways of thinking that are completely new and different. You could label it exponential thinking if you wanted to. I'm not a big fan of those kinds of labels. But it's really the kind of thinking that's needed in an exponential world because we're out of the linear environment and we're into exponential change. And you can see that every day with a new version of an AI, agentic AI, climate, all kinds of things have shifted from linear to exponential. Hard to predict what's going to happen. So we need new tools, and I've built what I think are simple tools that anybody can use to do that.

10:00Bill Gallagher: It's interesting, the shift. Right? And I definitely am older, so I remember sending and receiving postcards when we would travel places. And then having to dig through news and mostly the news that was available, unless you had some kind of access to foreign papers or things like that. Like, you didn't have very immediate news about too much of the world when I was young. And then along came a thing like CNN.

10:29Fred Marshall: And then came 24-hour news was a breakthrough.

10:33Bill Gallagher: And things like, then early more broader access was like Dow Jones News Retrieval, and you could access dynamically, not just wait to see what AP stories got fed to you in The New York Times or whatever your paper was. But the amount and volume was far more limited to get and maybe you listen like, I always had a shortwave radio as a kid. Right? And I would fiddle around.

11:05Fred Marshall: My brother did, so I know it well. And what's interesting though, Bill, is the difference. Like, what you just described is so perfect because you were initiating. You were reaching out to find the news that you thought was relevant to you. I think one of the things that's different today is we're getting news whether we want it or not. Your phone is beeping at you whether you want it to or not, and that's new. That's a completely different thing. Just nonstop.

11:28Bill Gallagher: Oh, I didn't know about that. Oh, I didn't know about that. And of course, algorithms and things try to figure out what you're interested and susceptible and will feed you things not, as well. As along with ads and things like that. Yeah. I find that I'm personally tuning out and being much more selective with the social media in, say, the last year that something started to shift not long ago where it's just like, oh, it's just too much, and there's too much crap in there. So my time, I'm, I will go and look at things for a variety of reasons, both amusing, personal, as well as business. But then I'm like, yeah. This is, like, this is crap in here.

12:11Fred Marshall: I know what you mean. Right? It's just nonsense.

12:15Bill Gallagher: It's noise. It's all noise. AI starts to add in to me, and I'll be flicking through news. And I'm like, this story is terribly written. I don't actually know what's going on. And then I'm like, so instead of looking for 10 more stories anymore, I immediately go to Claude or chat, and I'll say, what really happened over there? Do we have anything else going on? And then it'll say or I'll go back and I'll say, they've been saying for a week now that an entire Armada is in the, but are they really in the Persian Gulf? What the hell does it mean? How far away, like, is that carrier? Like, what's really happening there? And, like, I can ask and I can get analysis and deeper dives and things like that. So I have some tool and some agency. It's to make sense for me of the onslaught of stuff that I maybe or maybe didn't, depending on the subject, wanted to know or not want to know about.

13:09Fred Marshall: Well, this is the incredible power that's been given to us. You just have to prompt chat or Gemini or whatever, and you can get unbelievably sophisticated answers. You can have it do things for you. Agentic AI is happening right now. It's not an idea anymore. It's a real thing. And I've set up all kinds of little agentic AIs to do stuff like track all the things that are affecting the stock price of Nvidia, supply and demand chains, black swan events that might happen in the Taiwan Straits. You can get very sophisticated now just through prompting, and then you can have fun too. Like, we're going out this weekend. We want to go to a cool place. What do you recommend in Manhattan? We're going to be in the, near this area. What's cool and hot in the city? Because we want to party tonight.

13:58Bill Gallagher: I don't look like a party guy, but you never know. Right. You yeah. I'm sure you have your festival wear and you put on.

14:07Fred Marshall: I do. I do. Yeah. Sparkly jumpsuit and a crazy hat, and you're on the way. Oh, that's a vision. Yeah. My kids are alarmed now.

14:17Bill Gallagher: Yeah. How many kids do you have?

14:20Fred Marshall: Three kids. Three grandchildren. They are 40, 38, and 35.5, 36 almost.

14:29Bill Gallagher: So they're fully adults at this point. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

14:34Fred Marshall: And their friends actually were part of the reason why I got stimulated to write this book because I see what's going on in their lives and their worlds and how much they have to handle, the kids with the flu, got to do daycare, the commute into the city, one's working from home, who's going to pick up this? It's too much. It's too much. We need ways to cut through the clutter and really, lead good lives, not just get by.

15:03Bill Gallagher: Well, I know I have a family member. Well, actually, more than one now who sends me news items and reels and things like that on the regular that they're just freaking out about. Right? Like, oh my god. This political leader is doing this. This change is going to happen, and this group is doing that. And I'm like, settle down. I'm like, you're, you're just, they're playing you nonstop. Just breathe. Take a walk. And if you're really serious, before you send this to me or get yourself worked up, ask AI to fact check it. Like, is it really true? Does it matter? Like, you know?

15:41Fred Marshall: And even if it is true, I think one of the most important things that we have to manage is our attention. You have so much attention in the day, and where are you going to spend it? Are you going to spend it on your kids? Are you going to spend it on building this new thing for your business? Are you going to spend it on news feeds and all the drama that may be fake or it may be real? How much of your emotional attention and your mental bandwidth do you want to dedicate to that? And I think the answer is probably less than we're doing now so we could put it into more satisfying and meaningful places. And we can do that.

When change outpaces our ability to adapt

16:19Bill Gallagher: What's all in future shock? When you say future shock, what falls in that category for you? What is shocking?

16:28Fred Marshall: Well, so, if you read Alvin Toffler's book from 1970, which is where the theme came from, he says it's the acceleration of change. Too much information, too much change, and our inability to adapt as fast as it's changing. So it's like you're running up an escalator that's going down, and it's going faster than you can run up. That's kind of the feeling.

16:56Bill Gallagher: So I think about, so there's news and events, there's technology, there's arts and entertainment. Like, all of it feels like it's changing. But sometimes I think, well, that's just because I'm 60.

17:14Fred Marshall: Yeah. I wish that were true. Right. We're getting slower. It's getting faster. I think, you know, 61 is when you get older, have a little bit more perspective. You know what to get upset about. You know what to ignore. It's like babies crying. You know that that's a, I'm not getting what I want cry, not I've just cut my finger cry or I need to go to the emergency department cry. We learn to distinguish those things. I think for young people it's harder. But there's something else too because for them, these changes that Alvin Toffler suggested were coming are showing up in really unusual and interesting ways. Like, something as simple as the American dream. Right? What was that? That was I get a good education, I'm gonna get a good job, I meet somebody, fall in love, buy a house, live a good life. That was the model. And now, it's kind of turned on its head. You get a good education, maybe. You get a lot of debt. You're paying off the debt instead of building equity and a home. Everything gets pushed to the future. You thought you were going to have a house by this age, but it's a decade, you know, behind that because you're spending money someplace else. And that's a structural thing and we need better ways to manage that because, you know, saying, oh, grind harder, try harder, that's not gonna cut it in a world where even if you did that, it wouldn't matter. And human beings are finite. We have only so much emotional and mental bandwidth in a day. If you're tapped out at the end of every single day, that's a problem, and it needs to be solved at a structural level, but it also needs to be solved in the way we manage our time and energy.

18:59Bill Gallagher: What so when I think about the young family and friends, younger family adults, but younger adults, I hear a few things. One of them is most of them, with a couple of exceptions, I'm never gonna be able to buy a house. Right? Feeling. Yeah. And they've kinda given up. And then a couple who are able to buy a house are like, I wouldn't wanna buy a house. It's too constraining. I can do as well or better just straight investing in the market. And if I don't buy, I have flexibility in where and how I live.

19:36Fred Marshall: Yeah. That's a good I think that's a pretty good argument, actually. I have an investment mindset. Maybe, you know, invest the difference. I haven't run the numbers and that kinda thing.

19:48Bill Gallagher: I mean, historically, we're like, okay. Well, that rent is an investment with tax advantages if you're buying. Right? So I don't know what the equation looks like. But yeah. And then the other one is, like, complete distrust of institutions. Like, all these companies are trying to fuck us, and the government can't be trusted. And you might like this party or that party, but maybe they're all bunk. And maybe everybody is in the Epstein files and just, like, profound distrust. And the media is all running an angle on us and, like, I when I think about future shock from a particular young person standpoint, I think about that. And then when I think about getting a little bit older, I think about there is no safety net, the concerns of people. There's no safety net. My job's gonna be cut out by AI. Right or wrong soon. You know? And I don't know what to do with it anyway, and this is all happening too fast for me. Right? That's kind of the feeling.

20:58Fred Marshall: I think so. Yeah. It's not good. It's not good. And but, you know on both political sides. Right? So, like yeah. It's politically neutral for sure. We're both afraid

Take back control through weekly action

21:08Bill Gallagher: of every of the other everything and everyone else's motive. Right? There's a clinging or a hope that my tribe will take care of me. Right? Yeah.

21:19Fred Marshall: My clients are all over, but I and so I kinda hear all sides of them. That's good. Yeah. It's good to have all views. I'm a big fan of that. You know, we need to get back to something that's really important and fundable, that is agency. And taking responsibility for what you can control, not sweating what you can't control, and making sure that every day or every week you're putting some of your energy. And I think the week is kind of a magic unit of action. I might not be able to get something done today, but I could probably get it done this week. Every week have a cadence of action that's building the future you want. And then you don't you just called government institutions or whatever. Just call that noise. Don't worry about that. Just focus on the things that you can control. And I think if you do that well, everything works out. And then leverage the incredible tools that are here. AI being, you know, the elephant in the room. But there are other tools that are available to us to do extraordinary things. You know, your whole thing is how do you scale a business? The tools to scale businesses today are like never before in human history.

22:34Bill Gallagher: Exactly. You have everything.

22:37Fred Marshall: Also has everything. Right? So yeah. But you have everything as well. They probably use it less than you might think because they're caught up in the day to day. I mean, one of the things I think is fascinating is how much of your attention is spent by the drama and, you know, pressures of today versus how much of your attention you're investing in the future. It could be your granddaughter, you know, which I try to invest time in my granddaughter every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a little bit as much as I can, because I know it will compound. And then you've got exponential growth happening for the things you care about. And I think that little shift in mindset, it's not rocket science, can make a big difference because over time, consistent weekly investments in relationships, in systems, in yourself, your own skills, your own development, and then the forest bathing, which you referred to earlier, can all really add up over time. You know, it's like working out. I started working out when I was 60, so I'm 70 now. And I thought, okay, now or never. I started doing workouts twice a week. And suddenly, I'm like really strong. It's like, when did that happen? I don't know when it happened. But every week, you know, I get over the corner here. Yeah. I do a little 60 minutes twice a week and then another 60 of aerobics. It adds up.

24:04Bill Gallagher: So I hear a couple of things in what you're saying so far. The first one is, like, the serenity prayer. Right? Like, being able to accept things and focus on what you can actually change and where you can, and then a little bit of weekly action against something that you want, and then intentionality and design around the areas of your life that need attention.

24:31Fred Marshall: Yeah. And I think it's good to divide it into two chunks. You've got the stuff that needs attention now, and then the stuff that's gonna take a while to build, and that's why gardening is such a powerful metaphor. It'll take you a decade to build an amazing relationship with your children so they'll want to come back from college and hang out with you. Right? That's not going to happen in a weekend, and one bad event isn't going to change that. It's a long term investment. And if you can divide your attention into those two buckets,

Shift from consumption to creation

25:02Fred Marshall: Make sure the present's working pretty well, deal with the problems that come up, which they do, and then consistently invest in the main building blocks of life. And we know what they are. Right? It's your mind, it's your body, it's your systems, it's your relationships. It's a little wonder and joy. I think that we're grinding so much, we don't make room for wonder. We don't make room for joy, those little magic moments that are happening all the time. And then maybe contribution too, because I think for those people who are ambitious, ambition is a great thing when it's tempered with contribution. If you can contribute at a high level, if you're ambitious, karma comes back around. The more you create, the more you get. And shift from a consumption mindset to a creation mindset. That may be one of the most important mental shifts that people need to make. Stop consuming stuff on Instagram and TikTok. It's okay. A little bit's fine. But think about what can you create? How can you help others? What value could you imagine and then use these incredible tools today to build it? That's how you get real traction and real meaning, which I think is another thing that people are really hungry for.

26:20Bill Gallagher: Well, I regularly with our clients, we're having conversation about, okay, we're doing these things to grow the company. And then there's just the day to day, like a customer problem, a system, a thing, paying bills like that. So your bandwidth to do new and growth-oriented things is fairly limited. Right? So then we're wondering, like, so, like, how much can we move it? And I generally say from personal and client experience, if you spend a half an hour or an hour a week doing a little something new, like getting in that workout around the growth of the business, and you did that, like, you'd get, you know, you'd get forty-eight weeks of productive lift, accounting for some vacation time and bad weeks. Right? You'd get forty-eight weeks of stuff in there where you nudge things forward. And if you're a leader working with other people, then there's some amplification between your own team and vendors and partners and things like that. And we can actually move a lot with that.

27:29Fred Marshall: Well, that's the compounding effect. And I love the way you articulated it too because it's not just compounding your own time, but it's also compounding the time of your network, the people who are working with you, the supplier, the supply chain, even customers. Customers like to innovate too. And I've always found my customers were happy to partner. They're kind of excited to partner. Oh, we're doing something cool with Quantum, leading edge stuff. Yeah. Count me in. People like that. And you can enroll them, and they want to contribute. They want to try to do something new. It looks good on their resume, and it helps them internally with our customers.

28:04Bill Gallagher: So moving things forward a little bit every week, the compounding effect of that, remembering to go back and put a little attention. And then you talked about respecting and understanding your wholeness. Right? Your psychology and your physicality and your sleep and your rest and your fun and your, like, all of that kind of thing, like, having a balance to that. I'll find that I'll be out doing something, like, really fun. And then that is the moment where my brain has enough bandwidth for some other things that I was too busy to think about before, where they would finally click and crystallize into something and be like, oh, that's what I need to do with that client or that situation, that family member. But it'll be because I was surfing. Right? Like, it'll come to me when I'm out there.

28:58Fred Marshall: Isn't it? It's like that's when it pops up, when your mind is relaxed and in neutral. And then, yeah, those magic moments when everything gels.

29:16Bill Gallagher: I've had a few days of skiing the last couple weeks. Next week, I'll get some board and wing surfing time working in Hawaii. So, yeah, that's pretty good.

29:28Bill Gallagher: But I think that, like, well, I also did a hundred and fifty days away from home last year.

29:36Fred Marshall: I know that game.

29:39Fred Marshall: How did you train a hundred and thirty thousand people, Fred? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of air road.

29:47Bill Gallagher: Yeah. That's where you get Global Services or 1K Flyer. For sure. You get upgrades, but it doesn't replace the fact that you're, like, going, going, going, going. And I, but I think against that, like, at this point and with the amount of agency that I have, I also got nearly sixty days of surfing last year of one kind or another. Right? So, and I had thirty of my hundred and fifty days was on the beach in Mexico where I spent time writing a book. Right? So that.

Slowing down to hear the quiet signal inside

30:21Fred Marshall: That's how it's done. That's what we're talking about. You are living the model. You are thriving, my friend.

30:34Bill Gallagher: And I don't know that everyone does that at a younger age. You know? I wish we did more, and I did do some myself younger.

30:40Fred Marshall: It's an interesting paradox. There's this investment phase that you go through when you're younger where you're building, you're building your systems, you're building your infrastructure. And then once that's in place, that frees you up to do the things that you and I are just talking about. But, yeah, it's fascinating. I don't know how to do it when the kids are little and both parents are working. And that's something I think about a lot is how do you set up the infrastructure and the systems in your own life at the household level and at the career level or business level so that you do have not just the time, but the bandwidth. And maybe the emotional bandwidth is the real rate limiting one. Because when you're fried and overwhelmed, you know, you're not going to get much done.

31:30Bill Gallagher: Well, I feel like our kids are programmed today to be too busy. They're filled with practices, soccer game, etcetera, etcetera, like, on and on and on. They're a lot and then homework for endless hours, and there's not just like, hey, go chill out. Go play with friends. Like, and certainly nobody can just run outside and run down the street in most places anymore. We're all too, like, worried for that kind of thing to happen. And I feel like there's a massive amount that gets missed out on, like, that we've gotten too protective of time and filled everything with stuff.

32:05Fred Marshall: Yeah. We let our anxiety about what might happen cause us to just be smothering our kids rather than letting them, you know, you know this probably, but when I was a kid, my parents never knew where we were or what we were doing. We'd sort of show up at the end of the day. It was pretty wild, the wild, wild west.

32:31Bill Gallagher: My location services were always off.

32:36Fred Marshall: Mine too. But, you know, you can do it. You just have to do it in a different way. And I think maybe if we had to pick one culprit, this phone is maybe the enemy. And that is when I feel like I need a little time to chill, people are looking at their phone instead of doing something else. And I think that, you know, my son and daughter both will brick their phone. I'm sure you've heard about this, where you basically stick it in this brick and it's sort of locked and all you can do is check the essential things and almost all the apps are locked out.

33:15Fred Marshall: They love it. Brick your phone. It's a good thing.

33:22Bill Gallagher: For me, it does help to put it down and to take a walk or to meditate or to take a hot tub or do certain things that you could do. Like, I can't look at the phone if I'm surfing. I can't look at the phone while I'm skiing. So some of those things are so all-involving. You know, go take a run, dance, do things like that. You could listen to a podcast while you do some of those things, or you could listen to music, or you could just listen to the wind.

33:54Fred Marshall: What we're brushing around is the idea of slowing down. It's a very fast world right now. We're going from thing to thing to thing to thing. Slowing down is a powerful thing. You kind of reset your nervous system. You prioritize what's important. You can ignore the stuff that doesn't matter. You regain perspective. It can be powerful, and I'm a big fan of slowing down. And then, you know, your child will suddenly show up or your grandchild's like, they want to play. They want attention.

34:27Bill Gallagher: Between my last client call and this recording, I had, I don't know, ten, fifteen minutes. And there's a family member who I have been so anxious to—I haven't been able to talk to for a couple days, and there's some things going on. And I've been so anxious, and I came in, and I just—I'm like, hey, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I implored them out. And I think maybe they didn't need to hear any of it. But they looked at me, and they're like, yeah, just you're not listening to me. Chill out. Like, and in my mind, those three things have been spinning around my head and I'm like, they've got to know that. They've got to. And do they really? I don't—I think that they didn't think they needed to hear any of that. And probably what they would have needed is just me to look at them for a minute and go, how are you doing? You know?

35:22Fred Marshall: Yeah. A real connection. It gets back to slowing down. Slow your mind down enough and not be so focused on what you're worried about or what you need to get done and just really be with them. I think that's one of the hardest things to do. I'm not particularly great at it myself, but I try my best at least when I know it's happening. You had the presence of mind to know that it was unfolding the way it shouldn't have been. You were able to adapt.

35:51Bill Gallagher: I just had this fear. Like, okay, I only have like ten minutes here. I've got to come up and do this thing. We're scheduled. And then, but what if I don't know what their schedule is? What if they're just gone? And by the time you and I get done, and then I don't have a chance to do this, and I'm worried that like I didn't share something with them that would have made the thing, that made the difference in a critical moment in their life, like, and that I might have missed that. Right? I was terrified that I like, this has been spinning in my mind for like three days now. And but that anxiety, right, about not having time for a family member, right, like, has been running me. And and so I like see that, but the cost of it was I wasn't really there in the moment.

36:42Fred Marshall: Yeah. It's such a great irony because all of your heart—your heart and your intention was right in the right place. Right? I suspect some of that might have come through somehow or another, maybe not. I don't know. Live and learn. We'll find out. You'll find out. But you know, this moment that we're having right now, isn't this what we're talking about? Taking time for this? Right? This is it, to have this little connection that we just had. That's kind of rare. I think it's—I'm certainly affected by it and it's meaningful to me. Yeah. This is—I think this is—this is available to us. It's available to us if we just kind of slow down and open ourselves to it. It's there.

37:42Bill Gallagher: Well, I think so. First of all, there's a self-awareness that there's a future that is shocking. There's a self-awareness that we've got some anxiety going on. We may notice it in our thinking. We may feel it in our body if we're tuned in and listen to our gut. Like, literally, your stomach sometimes is one of the key places I notice it. I might also notice the back of my neck.

38:05Fred Marshall: Our gut has so much wisdom. Yeah. Yeah.

38:08Bill Gallagher: Is your gut sense? Right? You feel sick to your stomach over something. Maybe you should take a pause for a moment on that.

38:16Fred Marshall: You know, one of the things I've thought about a lot is how do you, in a distracted world, how do you listen to that quiet signal inside? Because there's the hot emotion that can be distracting. I'm upset. I'm angry. I'm frustrated, whatever it is. And then there's the quiet signal that kind of knows what's important, knows what to do. And sometimes I think we need to push all the noise to the side so we can hear that deep signal that's there and it's powerful and it knows what's up. And for me personally, I found that all the problems I've had in life are when I don't listen to that signal. Or I either don't hear it or I hear it go, yeah, yeah, whatever. Then I get into trouble.

39:00Bill Gallagher: You rush through it. So, what haven't I asked you about the book and the model and the work? What haven't we talked about? What is the antidote that we need so badly?

How intentional scheduling creates liberation

39:12Fred Marshall: I think to trust that the future can be breathtaking, that it can be incredible if you want it to be, and I think almost everybody does want it to be. That tools like AI, they can be scary, they can be intimidating, they can feel overwhelming. They're superpowers, unbelievable superpowers that are right there. And it doesn't take long to figure them out, and that's where that consistent weekly investment, you know, pays off big time. But I think the other part of it that to me is so important is the meaning that we get in our lives comes from this combination of slowing down and being open to things, and at the same time, managing where we put our attention and kind of being a little systematic about it. It's kind of like be organized and systematic and then just let it go. That's a sweet combo pack that I think is where great things happen.

40:21Bill Gallagher: You know, it's funny. For me, so scheduling has been liberating. My schedule is liberating for me. And yet when I show it to most people, it's not very liberating. Right? Most people's looking at my schedule, and it feels constraining. It feels overwhelming. You look at all the stuff swimming around there, and the first reaction to it is overwhelming. But the reason that it lives for me as liberating is because, like, I don't have to worry about a preparation for a client workday or some other kind of thing like that because I know that it lives in there in the appropriate time frame. Like, I have a deliverable for some curriculum that I work on every quarter. And I don't actually know or remember when it's due, but I know that the time to work on it is already in my calendar.

41:21Bill Gallagher: And so let it go. I just can relax about it. I know that when that time comes up, I'll either do the work then or I'll have to find another time for it. I may move something around. It may not occur the way that it is, but I don't have to think about it right now because I know that it's programmed in there. So the only thing that I'm anxious about is something I haven't calendared yet.

41:43Fred Marshall: Yeah, go ahead.

41:46Bill Gallagher: I also reserve time for the unstructured things. So I don't have this anymore, but I used to put in for Sunday, I used to have like four hours or so, four to six hours. I forget exactly now, but it was "surprised and delighted at what the world threw my way." And that was my Sunday morning appointment for spontaneity and for presence and for disconnecting.

42:16Fred Marshall: That's your wild card. So whatever's going to show up is going to show up.

42:21Bill Gallagher: I have time for lunch and dinner. I have getting up in the morning time. So basic kinds of things like that live in there so that when I go to throw in an appointment or a call or something like that, then I have to move around the other thing so I don't end up shortchanging it. It might mean that I get up early one day or something like that, or I move or skip a workout. But because some basic things are in there, then I am always grappling with the wholeness of my humanity in life. I'm always having to think about that. So then I'm left with some free time and some playtime and some time to take a walk or that kind of thing, get out there and surf for sure.

43:06Fred Marshall: One of the big moments that I had, maybe seven or eight years ago now, is the role that open loops play in my quality of sleep. If there's something that needs to get done that isn't done yet, it'll just spin around up there and I'll be up till two in the morning, or I'll fall asleep and wake up two in the morning and it's still spinning. And finding a way to manage those open loops and stick them in the calendar. Sometimes I'll literally just open my phone in the middle of the night and just go, 10:00 tomorrow, do this, solve this thing. And getting it out of my head. David Allen used to talk about that, remember that, in Getting Things Done? And it's such a simple idea, but it's so powerful.

43:51Bill Gallagher: I'd rather put time for something than add it to a list because the list makes me anxious. The calendaring of it lets me relax because that isn't now. The list is like forever, always there. But if I put it in tomorrow or next week or whatever, and then even if I don't do it, as I look at it and I manage the calendar, I'm like, oh, that didn't get done. Let's roll that forward or find a new home. Or maybe it's past time to deal with it, and I just need to let you know, "Hey, Fred, I didn't get that done, and I don't know what it's going to mean for our work, but that didn't happen." Like, I can grapple with the breakdown. But I don't have to deal with it necessarily right now.

44:34Fred Marshall: Which is important because if you have too many things in your head, you're just not effective. We know that people can't multitask. There's so many studies now that have firmly established that performance just nosedives if you have more than two things going on in your brain, unless it's doing dishes and listening to a podcast or driving your car. So some automated behavior, yeah, no problem.

44:57Bill Gallagher: And even that, like, if you're too much into whatever your podcast, you're not going to drive that well. And if you're too much into the driving, you're not going to podcast that well.

45:06Fred Marshall: Yeah. You'll have that fantastic experience where you get somewhere and you don't know how you got there.

45:14Bill Gallagher: So I remember I used to handle some phone calls. In particular, I would talk to my mom on a long run or a long bike when I wanted to bring the tempo down. Now I couldn't do it when I was really working hard, like climbing or something. I would be like, okay, now I'm on kind of a long flat stretch. I can recover. This is a good time to call Mom. And then I'd call and I'd talk to her for 30 minutes or whatever, and then I'd pick the tempo back up again or something like that.

45:43Fred Marshall: Figuring out when elegant multitasking works, because you don't have to think when you're riding your bike. It's just autopilot. And that's the beauty of it.

45:54Bill Gallagher: Yeah. I mean, you have to watch, a little awareness of the traffic.

45:57Fred Marshall: Cars are important. Certainly don't want to be looking at your phone while you're riding your bike. That's for sure.

46:06Bill Gallagher: Well, there's a lot of good stuff to chew on here. Future shock, your anxiety around what's going on in the world and where we're headed. Thrive, the book. Thrive, Antidote to Future Shock. Thrive Future You is there. Fred Marshall, thank you so much for joining us, for talking about it all today. If you want to know, go to his website, get the book. You'll probably get it wherever you get it now, but your registration information, all that kind of stuff will be at the website, thrivefutureyou.com. Thank you. Fred, thanks for being on the show. Thanks to everyone for watching, for listening. Hope it was helpful for you. Pass it along. Share it with somebody else. Take a chill out. Do what you can do. Manage yourself. Thrive in the face of all of that anxiety. That's our lesson for today. Keep scaling. 650 plus episodes. You'll find all our programs, workshops, that kind of stuff at scalingcoach.com. Not crap. Good stuff. And thanks to Wanda and to Anna for getting our show produced and out the door every week, and to my friend and mentor Verne Harnish who created the whole Scaling Up framework. That's the heart of our work. Thanks again, everyone, for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.

47:28Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.