--:-- Ryan Hanley: Welcome back to the show. Today we have a conversation with Cyrus Jaffrey. Cyrus is an entrepreneur. He's a speaker, a podcaster. He's a family man. He's a board member. And all of these things were born out of this tremendous story. His home was literally bombed in Afghanistan. He was forced to move to Pakistan, in which he lived in a one-room apartment with six brothers and sisters and his mom. Somehow found his way to the United States and has now become a multi-time entrepreneur, founding multiple brands in the insurance industry and the technology industry. Has more than 160 people working for him across all his brands. This story is amazing. It shows you that with determination, with the right mindset, with the right focus, with the right belief structure, we can make anything we want out of our lives. This is what Peak Performance is all about. It is what this podcast is all about. And I love bringing stories like Cyrus's to you. So with that introduction and no other avail, let's get on to Cyrus Jaffrey.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm good, man. I'm excited to have you on the show. I'm excited to talk about your journey. I really want to focus on the entrepreneurial parts of it. I think that's really where I'd like to talk about it. Obviously, we can talk a little bit about the insurance stuff, but I really want to know, dude, you have such an interesting story, being on your show and getting to know you just a little bit and then just digging in afterwards and learning more about what you're doing. I think it's incredible. And I guess I'd love for people who don't know your story and maybe aren't familiar with you. You kind of gave me some of your background before we went live on your show. But I'd love for you to maybe just kick it off here. Start us off by telling us a little bit about where you came from, how you got into being an entrepreneur and business and all that kind of stuff. Just give us a little bit of the backstory.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Yeah, man. I'm originally from Afghanistan, man. So I think that kind of throws off people when you're like, okay, so I'm two years old. The back of the story is actually right here. So my book just came out. Literally, it's the first copy I just got.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Awesome. Awesome. Triumph After Trauma.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: And my whole life story is basically just dealing with adversity, is just basically having a winning attitude. So two years old now, I was in Afghanistan. Mom and dad are born there. So we're basically hanging out. That's the early 90s when the Taliban came and invaded Afghanistan. And they bombed our house. My mom and dad are in there. My dad comes into the house and says to my mom, "Hey, our neighbor's house got hit and there's a lot of dead bodies. I gotta go help." My mom is fighting him because my mom's pregnant. I'm with my younger brother who is a year old, or no, my older brother who was four years old, and it's me, I'm two years old. And they're fighting because my mom was like, "Dude, you gotta get your kids out of here. You can't be worried about other bodies because we will be next." And as soon as she says that, dude, our house gets hit with a bomb. Debris everywhere, man. I go under a table. My mom's sides open. I've got on the back of my head actually scars from it, that's in the book, because I was bleeding from my head. And somehow, man, we all got out of that house. Somehow, man, it was not my time at the time to be the end of it for me. We go to a hospital for a week.
--:-- And then, so the Taliban, when they invaded Afghanistan, they wanted to control everything. So they shut the whole country down. You couldn't go from roads to get away to go to other countries because they wanted to keep everybody internal. So you couldn't go through the main roads to escape. So we had to—my mom, my dad had to pay like $50,000 a person to go to a remote place, get in a helicopter. And from there, they'll take us to Pakistan, which is the neighboring country, to be safe. And my older brother and older sister were already there because there was some war. My dad worked for the US military, so he heard something. So they got the two of them out to go to school there six months before. But he didn't know that things were going to turn really bad that quickly. So it did happen. And we got stuck there.
--:-- So my mom walked for two weeks. She's pregnant. And then my older brother, she would walk during the night. And then during the day, she would just hide because she didn't want to be seen. Because if they see you, they don't care, man. The Taliban at the time didn't care. And so she did that. We got to this remote place. This is a crazy story because we get to this remote place. There's six helicopters, me and my mom. And we get into one helicopter. My mom is just freaking out. And she's praying really, really hard. And the helicopter, the pilot is like, "Dude, lady, stop freaking out. Get in this. Let's relax." So we get up in the air. Dude, we're up in the air. There's six helicopters. Kabul River is underneath. That's the largest river in Afghanistan one or two times. And then he just kept going, man. It just grazed the bottom of the helicopter. The other five fall in the Kabul River. I'm 100% positive everybody is dead except for our helicopter somehow.
--:-- So my story starts with the first two years of my life. We pretty much—like I should have been dead two times easily. But God had a different plan for me. And so we got to Pakistan. We're 12 years old, lived in refugee camps for a year, and then found an apartment. And we stayed there for 12 years. My dad's side, their whole family is in Omaha, Nebraska at this point, because my oldest, my dad's oldest sister's husband worked for the University of Kabul. They had a relationship with a university here in Nebraska. He came as a professor and then brought all his brothers and sisters as refugees to the U.S. My dad was the only one out of 12 that said, "I don't want to go. I love what I do." He was an entrepreneur himself. He owned restaurants and gas stations in Afghanistan back in the 70s. He was like, "I don't want to do that." He was a little bit older at the time. And so that's why we stayed and we never came here. And then we had to deal with this.
--:-- We stayed in Pakistan for 12 years, one bedroom, man. Six of us kids in one room sleeping on the floor. Going and fetching water to give a bath. There's no bath showers. You had to go grab water. There's not running water at the time. You had to go grab water a mile away, bring the water, and then use the same water with six of us once a week to shower before you go to school on Monday. But you didn't know any better, man. It was me and my brothers. I have two or three of my brothers that are within two years apart. Everybody else was living the same way. So you have no idea. We played cricket. We played outside all the time. So we didn't know what life was like other than the life that we were living. So we thought we were hitting the lottery because we escaped Afghanistan.
--:-- Anyways, tried 10 times to become a refugee, hit the lottery. I believe it was May of 2002, six months before or seven months after 9/11. We get approved to come to the U.S. We come here. I'm a freshman in high school. I don't speak English. My brother doesn't speak English. 9/11 just happened. We don't look the same. We look like we're from those countries that pretty much got them. We brought 9/11 to them. So it was a tough upbringing. But yeah, man, so that's kind of like my backstory of how we go from Afghanistan to Pakistan to come to the U.S.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So when you get to Afghanistan, is your dad reengaging his kind of entrepreneurial spirit? Did he find a job? Is he trying to start businesses? Obviously, we're going to get into more of what you're currently doing as we go, but I'm really interested in how you have had this entrepreneurial nature embedded into you. Obviously, you saw it, but you were two years old, right? I mean, you were two years old when you first left Afghanistan for Pakistan. Sorry. And now you're in Pakistan. And is he continuing to push that? Is he teaching you? Is he talking to you? How is your dad or any family members influencing you at this time as you're continuing to grow? I mean, you were there for what you said. You were a freshman in high school. That's what, 13, 14. That's 12 years that you were living there. What was that like? And do you think that played a role in who you are today in terms of the entrepreneurial side? Obviously, it impacted you immensely as a person.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Honestly, man, not really. My dad would come to Pakistan for six months, and then he'll leave for six months. He'll come in for three months, and then he'll leave for six months. And we had a terrible relationship, to be honest with you. We still do. Because my dad was old school. We got beatings all the time. But that's how his parents were. By no means—he was just like, "Hey, I'm trying to enforce rules." So one thing I learned about my dad, man, is the discipline of doing things right. You got to be on time. We would get beat if—back home, there was no cell phones or watches, so you don't know the time. You go play in this playground which is about a mile away. Over there, there's prayers, so big noises come out. It's time to pray. Everybody prays in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they're Muslim countries. So you see these loud noises. When those loud noises come and my dad is in town, that means I'm late.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, you got to be home. That's like you're just booking it as fast as you can, that fast mile to get home. And that bell rings for like two or three minutes to get home. And then when you come home, my dad's praying and you're kind of slowly going behind and trying to sneak into the house saying you're not late. So my dad didn't teach me a lot about the entrepreneur side of things. My dad didn't teach me a lot about how to become a dad, how to be a good dad, any of that stuff. What he did teach me was the discipline of how do you treat people? How do you, in his capacity, how do you raise kids? And how to truly be just disciplined and all the other stuff and how to treat other people with respect. Those are the things that I took from my dad, not his entrepreneurship.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You know, I didn't have the best role models from a male perspective as well, growing up in terms of my dad and my stepdad. What I took a lot from them at that time in their lives—they both have since come around and are really good grandfathers to my children. But when they were, you know, my stepdad and my dad, I basically lived from the standpoint of, I want to do everything the opposite of what these guys are doing. So it was like seeing—sometimes if you can have the right perspective, even if that person is not a role model in so much as "I want to be who this person is, I want to model myself after them," they can almost be the negative. They can be the opposite and say, "Okay, I'm going to take how they did things, the way they treated me or the way they treated my mother." And it almost provides an even stronger framework—at least that's what I've found—as to what I don't want to be. I don't want to be this person. I don't want to be an addict. I don't want to fly off the hinge or not be trustworthy in my emotional state or how I'm going to speak to you or the physical violence piece. So I do think that you've been able to put in perspective and not perpetuate that. And in doing so, you probably use your dad almost as a "here's what not to do" in some cases. And that can be just as strong, I think, for us. I don't know, particularly for guys, I think that you oftentimes can look at that male role model and say, "They're basically giving me a case study on who I don't necessarily want to be."
--:-- So tell me, you said you hit the lottery. Tell me what it was like. Obviously, I'm a white kid from the country in upstate New York, so I have no idea what it's like to be a refugee in Pakistan and to get a letter, a call, a message that says, "Hey, you have the opportunity to go to the United States." What's that moment like for you guys? What's the conversation? How much time do you have? Just talk me through that process a little bit because it's such a foreign experience to me and probably most of the people listening. I'd love to just know a little bit about what that was like and what you were thinking in your head.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Yeah. So remember, we did like nine interviews. And after that final interview, they tell you, "Okay, you guys are going to the US or no, you're not." But by the ninth one, I was like, "Hey, we're just going to go do this again. And then it's just not going to work. So, dad, I got to go play because I really enjoy being outside and playing sports." So for me, when we did get the news, it was one of those things where like, "Oh, okay. This is going to be different." Dude, I had my life there, man. I had friends there. I had my life. I had everything that I had going on for me. I thought I was living the dream. I was doing certain things. I thought I was going to go up there and do certain things. And I didn't know anything about the US. So it didn't really—I didn't really have any expectations. It was almost like my mom was taking me from somewhere where I was having a good time and being a party pooper and taking me somewhere else and kind of disrupting my life.
--:-- But one thing I would tell you about my mom is she's a go-getter, man. She has her mind on something. How she escaped and walked for two weeks to get us to the helicopter, to getting us to Pakistan as a single mom and raising six kids, the way she's raised those six kids, and then leaving her husband back home. Her husband didn't come. My dad did come here and say, "Hey, I'm going to do what's best for my kids and raise these guys into certain individuals." So I take a lot from my mom, more so than my dad, of course. But the moment was like, "Man, no." Because we've been going and going and going. This was another time of like, "Okay, now we got to go somewhere else." It was like, "Damn, mom, I don't want to do that." So I cried for the first 30 days. I promise you, man, I came here. Because I was like, "I don't want to be here. It's different. It's not the same. I don't speak the language. It's not the same people. They don't like me. They treat me as an outsider," especially at that time. So that first part was pretty tough. And that moment when they told me, man, I had some bad feelings at the time about leaving.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Was it fairly easy for you to integrate into Pakistan relatively?
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Yeah, I mean, I was two, so it was one of those things where my mom was just like, "All right." So I kind of know Pakistan. I don't know Afghanistan. So it's one of those times where I don't really remember Afghanistan much. Writing the book and going through the past and then interviewing my dad and my uncles and my aunts back home brought back some memories, but I was still pretty young. And when you deal with some trauma, a lot of times, man—I'm seeing a therapist and looking through a lot of things that I've dealt with in life. When you deal with some of those things, you kind of almost block a part of your life that was very challenging and you don't want to talk about it. You don't want to hear about it. You almost act like that never happened. But it shapes you who you are and you need to talk about it. Honestly, if you don't talk about it, you're going to keep it inside of you for a long time and it's just not going to be well for you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think I actually said this on your podcast when we were talking that the best advice I ever got was back in—geez, I'm going to forget it—2017, 2018. A mentor of mine said, "Go find a counselor or someone you can talk to. It's got to be someone outside your family, someone you pay, and go see them every other week for the rest of your life and consider it just a life expense." And I've done that for the most part. And I'm with you, man. You start talking about things. And it's funny how—I read a ton. I consume a ton. I think about a lot of topics. I write a lot about a lot of topics. But when you actually sit down with someone and you hear the words come out of your mouth as they're asking you questions and you're explaining—and I love your feedback on this since you have this trauma and you have all these experiences and now you're recreating them in your mind through your book—I found that I would say something and I would stop myself and be like, "Is that really the way I feel about that? Or did it really happen that way?" And then as I talked about it more, I started to go, "Wow, I've pretended like I felt this way about this. Or I boxed this up. Or I never really dealt with this issue. Or I've literally never told another human about this situation or how I felt about this or what happened in this moment." And then you can start to deal with it. But man, it is wild when you are explaining something to a counselor or a therapist and you hear certain words come out of your mouth and you're like, "I don't know," your internal monologue would have never said that. But when you verbalize it and you hear it, it really starts to set it in your head. One, is that a shared experience? Is that something that you found? And two, how has that been going through the process of writing a book and recreating these past experiences? How has that impacted you?
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Man, I would say going to him for the last 6 to 12 months or whatever that I've been going has made me a better husband. I'm a better communicator. I open up a lot more. I share a lot more. There's one thing in my life that I never shared with anybody, and it almost like—I knew it happened, and it was embarrassing a lot of times. And then talking to a counselor or therapist, things just come out of your mouth. It's almost like, "Wow, I can't believe I've never even told my wife this. I've never told the person I care about the most," because whether it was embarrassing or—anyways, I was really young when this thing happened, so it's not my fault that somebody took advantage and all that stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You just dropped on me. That's okay. Hey, let's restart at where you said you started to hear things come out of your mouth and you became a better communicator with your wife, better communicator with your family, that kind of stuff. Right around there is where it started to get a little choppy. I just sent a message to the team, so I think we're going to be just fine moving forward. I apologize for that.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: No, good. Oh, good, man. You were talking about how when you started meeting, things started coming out of your mouth that you hadn't said before, some stories you hadn't even shared with your wife, and that has made you a better communicator.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Yeah, so it has, man. It has made me a better communicator. The biggest reason being is because when you can tell your dark, deep secrets to somebody that you just met six months ago, it feels a lot better to say that to somebody because that person is not going to judge you. Your significant other is not going to judge you. Your brother and sister are not going to judge you. But you almost feel embarrassed to tell them because what are they going to think of you? Because they're important to you. Your wife and your brother and sister are important to you, and you don't want them to think any different of you because certain things happen to you. So I would say, man, I wish everybody in the world would have a therapist, would have a counselor that they can just go and talk to about life. Obviously, with mental health and a lot of things happening, especially some of that stuff happens in the winter around this time when it's a little bit colder here. Or any time, really, in general. I feel like when people talk about it, get that stuff out, you're just a better human being. I'm a better father. I'm a better husband. I'm a better leader at the office because I feel free and I don't have things inside of me that I'm just not sharing with somebody. And it's not embarrassing. It really is not, man. It's not you. It's things that happen to you in your life. And honestly, sometimes if it is embarrassing things that you did, sharing those things—it's funny because there are so many people that are dealing with the same exact thing. But nobody wants to talk about it because social media and other places are all about, "Let's talk about the good stuff." But man, there's some bad stuff too. And I think we need to talk about it because that's the only way to become better and move forward. Especially with me and you, people that are high achievers, they want to do certain things and go and go and go and do this or that. I feel like those are the people that are hiding a lot of things sometimes because you're getting yourself caught up in all these businesses and stuff. So you're busier than you truly should be.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's a couple of things in there. I think, one, the more open that I've been with my life, the more I've found that most people's stuff is even crazier than mine. You think your stuff is the craziest stuff. You think, "Oh, no one's going to understand about this or no one's going to understand that." You know, every male role model in my life was an addict. For a large portion of my life, my father was in jail. And then you tell people and they're like, "Oh, here's what I had to deal with." And you're like, "Oh, wait, your stuff is just as crazy as my stuff." We're all messed up, broken people trying to do our best.
--:-- And I think this is the thing I may be the most interested in about you. So you got a wild story. And I am positive that there are dozens, hundreds of moments that you could have just become a victim. You could have just said, "My home got blown up in Afghanistan. God hates me. I lived in one room with six on the floor and my mom and my dad wasn't around. God hates me. And then I got forced to go to this country where I don't speak the language. And I'm dealing with all this nonsense because this thing just happened." You could have been a victim so many times. Yet you're not. You've pushed forward. You're a family guy. You're a business guy. People respect you. You help people. Your family's part of your business. How did you not become a victim? What is it about you, your story, the people you surround yourself with? You could be a victim and no one would blame you. No one would say to you, "Hey man, we get it. You had all this messed up stuff. It's okay to not achieve. It's okay to sit on a couch and eat Doritos and take money from the government." You didn't do that. You chose a different path. And I'm so interested in why you, how you didn't go down that path. You chose to push and to become this thing that you are. I just think it's such a great example of what's possible. And I'm just really interested in how you got there.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think a lot of it, to be honest with you, is because of other people. First and foremost, when I came here at 14, 15, I really caught up on soccer. My dad played soccer and we played. I was a good athlete. So I really got caught up into soccer right away when I got here at 14, 15 years old. And I was really good at it, man. I was like the best player on our JV team right away as a freshman and played varsity for my sophomore, junior, and senior year. What soccer did to me at the time was it turned something negative that was basically happening to me into something positive. Because as I started having success on the soccer field as a freshman, you could see all these people that weren't talking to me, that were making fun of me, that were being racist to me—all of them kind of turned into, "Wow, Cyrus, you're really good man. Hey, do you want to hang out?" I was like, "What? You guys were just doing this like two months ago. And now that I'm on the soccer team, I'm one of the best players, I have all these friends." And I've never had that in the past. So then I was like, "Man, I'm gonna be really, really, really good because I want a lot of friends and I want a lot of people to like me." It was almost like a drive to make it so people could like you. And then it basically turned into, "Okay, how can you do better? How can you be an All-American? Can you go to college? Pay for college?" and all these things.
--:-- So at the time, it was—here's what happens. God puts you in different situations and puts different things in your life for certain reasons. If my house didn't get bombed, if I didn't get hit in a helicopter, if I didn't go to Pakistan, if I didn't go through all the stuff I had to deal with my freshman year in high school, I wouldn't be the person I am today, man. Maybe I am that couch potato that's sitting there and saying, "Man, I had it really good. So I'm sitting here and I'm doing my thing." So I almost see it as the more adversity in life that you deal with, it's almost building calluses in your mind to tell you that, "Hey, man, this is just another day in Cyrus Jaffrey's life. It's just another thing I got to deal with." I don't know where that comes from, to be honest with you. Maybe it's from being born and just being put into adversity after adversity after adversity, making it every day. It's like, "Where are we going to eat today? How are we going to eat today? Do we have enough for everybody to get fed today?" So it's almost one of the survival mode.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: If you're not really thinking about anything else other than making it through the day to be able to have food on the table, if that makes sense. So that kind of survival. And even to today, I'm still in the same mindset. I'm just like, man, I just got to make it throughout the day because now that I have people that honestly—I got with my wife at 23, 24 years old. And I was like, oh, this person relies on me. I have to support this person at the time. And then when I became a father is when I truly changed. I became a completely different person because when you have too much success, when a lot of friends—as you might know, when I was 17, 16 years old, man, I had a lot of friends. I was on the varsity. I was like a cool kid for once. I did some stuff that I'm not proud of, man. And I wasn't the person I am today for sure. From like 17 to 22, man, I just went into like a hole almost. And everybody in life, you're going to go into a certain kind of hole, but you got to know how to get out of that hole because a hole is always going to be there. You're going to go in a hole and you got to be able to find a way to get out of it. And that's where I'm looking at. Like God puts different people and different things in your life saying, hey, soccer is going to get you out of that hole. And then it's Michelle, which is like my wife now, she got me out of that hole because I'm like, man, this person relies on me. I got to do really good on my job to pay the rent for our place that we had. And then when you have a kid, you're like, man, now like Sophia, my first—I had her at like 27, 26 years old. I was like, man, I can't fail because now it's not just me failing. I'm failing many other people. And then you have employees, right? And then you're like, man, I can't fail in the business because I'm going to fail like 10 other people. So I feel like it was survival mode for a long time. And then God puts all these people into your life. And you got to take those as fuel. So now I've got our organization, 130 people. I've got three kids, my wife, my mom, my older brother who got in a car accident who was disabled. I feel like all that weight of all those people are on my shoulders. And I'm just going at it. And I can't even sit down one minute and think, oh, because I don't have time for that because I got to just go, go, go. And that's not good. So that's why a therapist is really nice because you can sit with them in that hour and just absorb everything and be like, man, not every one of those people have to be on your shoulders. Who is carrying you? And that's a question that's hard for me that I'm still searching today because it could get lonely at the top once in a while.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I think it certainly does. In my career in my life, I feel like I've been on the top of the mountain and been knocked all the way down to the bottom quite a few times. I've had to start from zero quite a few times. And everything that you talked about, going down past becoming a person that you don't necessarily like or even recognize in the mirror at different times and having to pull yourself back out of that—I think people excuse it when we're young, but we don't like to talk about it when it happens when we're older, right? There's like a certain age, and I don't know what that age is. Maybe it's late 20s, early 30s, where all of a sudden, when you find yourself in a hole, it goes from like, oh, you're just a kid finding yourself to, you know, what's wrong with that guy? What's wrong with her? Why—I can't tell anybody about this. I don't want anyone to know that I got fired. I don't want anyone to know that I'm depressed, even though I got all these people and I'm making all this money. And, you know, what's he got to be depressed about or why is he stressed or anxious? You hear this stuff. And I think that these are the struggles. It doesn't literally matter. Sometimes I hear people who are super successful will give advice and I'm like, yeah, I think it's very trite. It's like, yeah, you can say that now, but let's talk about what it was like when you were getting to where you are. Right. And it feels like to me, how do you plow through that for the person who's looking at what you built? I want to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But when they hear about what you built, if they don't already know and they're hearing 130 employees and you've gone through all this—how do you deal with the day-to-day? How do you make sure that you have these people who are relying on you? This is the last thing I'll say and I'll let you talk. I will say something to myself when I know I'm not in a good mental place, and I don't know if it's the right thing to say or whatever. But there are days when you just feel like the weight of the world. And maybe it's even not, but it feels like it. And you have to be aware of that data point, right? Even if logically, you know, that's not true. Some days you feel like it. And I will literally look in the mirror and I'll say to myself, your only goal for today is don't fall apart. Don't fall apart. I'll literally look at myself in the mirror and I'll be like, Ryan, just don't fall apart today, right? And you don't be reactive to someone. Don't have drinks when you get home. Don't death scroll on Twitter or Instagram or something. Don't—just don't fall apart. You don't have to kill it. Just don't fall apart. And I found that just giving myself that grace of like, you can have a C-plus day today and it's okay, right? Gets you through to get to more A days where you have a day where you blow everything up, right? You just decide to go to the bar or whatever your vice is, whatever your thing is. Those days knock you back so far versus just having a kind of crappy, okay day, getting to do and getting the next one. So that has worked really well for me. A psychologist may have different thoughts on saying that, but how do you do that? You had 130 people that look at you. How do you get through each day and make sure that you don't fall apart?
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Yeah, I think, well, I would tell you, you're going to fall apart, right? And if you don't fall apart, you're lying to yourself that you're not falling apart. It's okay. It's okay to fall apart. But one thing I know is I know when I'm falling apart. I think a lot of people—for me, when you know you have a problem or some things are not going well in your life, that's when you pretty much excel at this thing called life because you're falling apart because that's the only way to fix it. If you know there's a problem, right, you just keep bullshitting yourself that, oh, I'm not falling apart. I'm the best and I'm doing this and this. That's just not right for you. So for me, it's pretty simple, man. I know when things are not going well and I put triggers in my life to be able to know when those things are not going right. For example, there's four things in my life, man, and I look at this in the mirror at night every day, every day, because I know these four things are right, man. Everything else is going to fall in line. And if I have a C-plus day, I know that tomorrow is a new day, but I need to know that I've had a C-plus day. The people that are going to have four C-plus days in a row are the people that are going to have a very hard time having a lot of A days. But the people that go from C-plus to an A the next day, man, just don't fail twice. If you guys do that one thing, just don't do it twice in a row. Things are going to be just fine. So for me, it's the relationship with God and what he has created for me and my wife. So I know at the end of the night, one thing we do, me and my wife, is a kiss at night. So we don't just kiss at night just to go to bed. It's one of those things where if my wife is this way, she won't give me a kiss if something's wrong. And we need to talk about that. Then I know it's my trigger. Hey, babe, I'm going to bed tonight. And I know something's right. Let's talk about it. What happened? Because a lot of times people go to bed not talking about it. Then they're gone. Tomorrow night, you will go to bed not talking about it. The next time you'll go to bed not talking about it. You're not on the same page. So for us, it was pretty clear right away that because I know that if that relationship is right, man, everything else is going to fall into place because I'm not in the correct mind when I come to work and I'm fighting with her or something. I'm just not in the right place. I'm going to have a C-plus day. So that's number one important thing. Can that communication up there be correct? Because from then it goes my second one on my mirror. I cross out a day. So right now it's 4,231 days. That's how many days I've left with my daughter when she leaves for college. So I know how important it is for me every day to cross that out and go one more day. I'm like, man, did I spend quality time with her and with my son and the other son? Because that's extremely important as well. Because every day you're crossing it down. You're like, man, I didn't do a good job today. But you know the next day you will have a good day because you'll remember that. And then third is health, man. Because if you're not taking care of your health, you're eating bad, you're not doing certain things, you're just going to go in a funk, man, when you're not eating right, when you're not exercising. For me, it's 5:30 in the morning. Every morning I go outside and I work out. That kind of puts me in the right stage. And it's my meditation. A lot of people, it's meditation. For me, it's early morning and I go work out. And then fourth is I pick one employee every week, man, that's on my list that I have to just touch base with, whether it's a quick call or email or just keep an eye on them because a lot of times when you have a larger organization—we have like 29 to 30 employees and another 100 contractors and it's all over the country, 30 some states—so I can't talk to everybody. But I know that strategically I can pick one person a week and then I can just go down the line so at least they know I'm just touching base with them, seeing how your son is doing, your daughter, whatever that you need to ask. So for me, if I can be disciplined on those four things, I know everything else is going to fall into place. But if one of those things is off, I know I'm having a C-plus day. But having it visually every night when I'm brushing my teeth, it's very hard for me to be off two days in a row.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. No, I love that. I love the "don't fail twice." This is actually something that at Rogue Risk and in every team that I've managed, I used to say all the time, I was like, guys, we're going to make every mistake that exists, every mistake. And I think as humans, as people, we're going to make every mistake. And I'm with you, like God tests us. I'm a firm believer and I have a strong faith and I believe that God purposely tests us. And I think the test is okay, here's the miss. You went—you didn't even talk to your daughter tonight, didn't even talk to her, didn't see her, you were doing this crisscross, she's got this thing, bam bam, you didn't even talk to her. And you go in and that's the miss. And you're standing there in front of the mirror and you're brushing your teeth and you're like, man, you just get mad at yourself for a sec. But here's the test. Don't let it happen the next day, right? And this goes for everything. You missed your workout. Don't miss your workout the next day. You had a bad moment. Your willpower was low, and you grabbed a bag of potato chips instead of a handful of grapes for a snack, and you mowed those potato chips because potato chips are delicious. Okay, right? Potato chips are the best. But don't do it the next day. Next day go to yourself, hey, I had my chips yesterday, I'm gonna have grapes today. And now the chips mean nothing. And these little trivial things, the loss is when it becomes a habit, when the failures become a habit. And again, dude, this is a big reason why I changed the name of this podcast from The Ryan Hanley Show to Finding Peak. To me, these are the conversations that we need to have as entrepreneurs, as leaders, as mothers, fathers, partners. I think in life, I've never heard—I'll put it this way, and I think you would agree, but obviously give me your feedback—I've never talked to a successful person who ever blamed tactics for something not going right. I've never had someone blame tactics, right? Ever. Ever in history of all the conversations I've had with all the successful people either on this podcast or in business, I have never had someone blame tactics for the reason that something happened in their life or their business that they were unhappy with. It was always their mindset and the way that they operated their life. Right. I wasn't disciplined for this period of time. I let my relationship with my spouse go. I neglected to have a tough conversation with this employee. I was too egotistical. I didn't have courage. Whatever the thing is, it's always the stuff that's going on between our heads that causes the real problems. It's never like, well, if only I knew how to optimize my Facebook campaigns, then my business would have been a success. That's never ever been the case. And I just love that to death. So I do have one follow-up question on this. Someone's listening and they love this, right? I am going to get just a little nerdy on this because I think it's just interesting. When you say it's on your mirror, like a piece of paper, did you write it? How did you visually present this to yourself so that it was a reminder every day?
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: It was just a marker, just a marker, a black marker on the mirror. I just wrote it down. And then I had a marker right next to my toothbrush every night. I crossed out 5,220 days. No, 5,219 days, right? Wow. They wrote it down. It just keeps me on track, man. Because here's the thing, Ryan, money and fame and all the other stuff, man, none of that stuff truly matters. What truly matters is in that order, man: your relationship with your faith, your significant other, your kids, and then your health. Last in the bottom of it all is my work. Work stuff doesn't—at the end of the day, man, that stuff really doesn't matter to me if the first three are not done correctly. But if the first three are at a nine out of 10, at a 10 out of 10, work is going to be well because you're going to be in the right mindset. And for work, you need to be in the right mindset. Nobody ever comes to work fought with their significant other or their kids are fighting with them and they're going to come to work and give it 100%. They're just not because you're just thinking about those things.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Dude, I absolutely love it. So I want to—we haven't even talked about the entrepreneur side and I want to be cognizant of your time and of the audience's time. And I think we got to have another episode here and I want to even learn more about the book. There's like a whole bunch of stuff. So I definitely think we're going to do a part two of this. If you're up for it, if you agree, we'll have a couple of weeks. Have you come back? I want to do a part two because I want to get into the book and I want to get into your entrepreneur journey. So let's stay—understanding that we'll do that. And I got your commitment and I'm excited for that. Let's stay, just the last few minutes we have together, on mindset. So as you've talked about how you've started to go to therapy, and I know you're a big—I know you have your own podcast. You talk to a lot of successful people there. I know you're a big thinker about stuff. I know you spend time on these thoughts. So you have three kids. You were tasked with—God comes down and says, Cyrus, you can give your kids one idea, one concept to help them become the best versions of themselves. You get one concept, right? You can give to them. What would that concept be? What would be the message that you would give them to help them—you're there, you're pushing all three of them off into their life journey at the same time, and you can give them one message, one idea as you push them off into that journey. What would that be?
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Fail and keep trying. Fail and keep trying because man, if you don't fail, you will not learn. And I use that to heart, man. I have made some decisions on the business side. We've lost a lot. We have failed big time, but I learned so much from it. And the other part of it is I don't want to set 10 years from now and be like, man, I wish I would have spent 10K and did that venture because look where that person has gone who tried it. I never want to be that guy that sits back and says, man, I wish I would have done that. I want to be like, man, I lost 10K. It is what it is. Not everybody can afford to lose. I understand that part of it. But relative to them, it could be a thousand bucks, not only a hundred bucks, relative to them. A hundred percent. So try, dude. Try everything. And I tell people all the time, in your 20s, man, try everything. And that's what I would tell my kid. Try everything. If you don't wake up in the morning and you're excited about putting your pants on to go to work, no. Go find something that you truly enjoy. Try a bunch of different things in your 20s. Figure out exactly what you really want to do. Fail and all because failing is truly what's going to tell you what you really like. The things that you fail in, you're probably not very good at. You're going to learn some stuff from it, and then the next time you're going to do it, you're going to do it correctly. So for me, for my kids, that's going to be the thing. Hey, it's okay to fail. Get back up and do the things that you're supposed to do because adversity is going to hit you. You're going to go in a hole. You're going to run into stuff. But how do you get away from it and then take risks? I'm a risk taker, man. I think a lot of people that are entrepreneurs are risk takers, of course, because 97% of businesses don't make it after five years. So if you're not taking those risks, man, you're not going to be in situations that you truly want to be. So you got to be able to take risks. I'm not calculating their risks for some people, of course, right? You got to really—what I'm going to tell my kids—I don't—they want to be in insurance, right? One of my biggest jobs in this world is to make sure those kids are good human beings. If they can be that, the rest of this stuff, I don't care what they do, whatever, none of my business. If they can be good human beings, but one thing they can learn from that is to truly just do what you love, right? And if it's insurance or banking or tech or whatever that is when you grow up, do what you love. But then the other part of it is fail as much as you can because that's going to take you a lot of things in. And I'm hoping those lessons go to them. But as you know, kids, man, they do whatever they want to do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's what I know about that. My dad said a bunch of things to me in all the craziness of my childhood. And many of those things when I was a kid, I probably couldn't have recreated. However, there were some concepts that he said to me over and over and over again that as an adult now and as a father myself, have now become part of my core value structures. And one of them is exactly what you just said. If you were to ever meet my dad, who's an amazing grandfather and our relationship is wonderful now, but he said to me one time, Rye, he said, you're going to realize this when you become a dad. I was asking him about something. He said, you're going to realize this when you become a dad. When you become a dad, and this goes for moms too, when you become a parent, your only job from that moment on is to make your kids better than you. And that does not mean financially better. It means a better human. Your job is to help fill in the gaps where your places are so that they can be better versions of you. And to your point, I think if you do that and you make that your focus, the derivative of everything else in your life—your work, your relationships, your friendships, your hobbies, all these other things—they just become better because you can't put that kind of positivity into these humans that are connected to you and not have good things come out the back end. I think it's wonderful, my man. Dude, so the book, Triumph After Trauma. Where can people get it? How do we get them connected to the book? There'll be links in the show notes for anybody, whether you're on Amazon or on Spotify or Apple or wherever you're listening or watching on YouTube. I'll have links to the book. So where can people go if they just want to go directly?
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Yeah, it's just my story, man, about my life and how I've come from where I came from and detailed notes on things that I used to basically use as leverage to be where I am today. It's on Amazon. It's on cyrusjaffrey.com where you can go in and grab a book. We would love for you guys to try it out, man. And I hope it—the book was honestly pretty simple. It's a legacy thing. One thing that sticks around for a very long time, as you know, is books. And it's something that I'm hoping that it maybe changes one person's mindset about what they're dealing with, that, hey, a lot of other people have dealt with this as well. Wake up and do big things in life.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, my man, after people hearing your story and hearing the type of guy you are, I think they'd be crazy not to pick up the book. And I know that more than one person will learn something and grow from it. It's been a huge pleasure. And we're definitely going to do this again in a couple weeks because I want to get into the business side of stuff, which we didn't even. But I appreciate the hell out of you. And thanks for coming on the show.
--:-- Cyrus Jaffrey: Man, this means a lot to have me, man. It's an honor. So appreciate you. Thank you.
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