Living Life On Your Own Terms: How Rick Seymour Found And Maintained His Passion For 47 Years

It is often challenging to maintain interest, let alone a passion, for what we are doing for nearly half a century. Yet, that is exactly what Rick Seymour has done. He has been helping people improve their health through individualized nutrition plans for 47 years and reports feeling even more passionate about his business than he did when he started! It was not an easy journey though. Finding the right fit involved exploring many different options and transitioning out of corporate America took years of hard work and sacrifice. Learn more about Rick’s inspiring journey as he bares it all in this conversation with Stephen Jaye. --- Listen to the podcast here Living Life On Your Own Terms: How Rick Seymour Found And Maintained His Passion For 47 Years One thing I talk about quite a bit is this idea of living by the script. By the script, what I'm talking about is the standard expectations that we have almost unwritten in our culture now. Every culture has them. In this culture, this manifest says something along the lines of go to school, get good grades, get a good job, gradually move up the ladder, have 2.3 kids. I'm not here to throw shade on anyone that is living according to the script. If you're happy with it, I'm happy for you. One of my goals is to open people up to other possibilities. I want to introduce my guest, Rick Seymour, who began living in a semi-retired state at the age of 38. Rick, welcome to the show. Thanks, Stephen. I’m delighted to be with you. Thank you so much. Your journey is going from something that was way more by the script in the sense that you were working a standard corporate job to what you're doing now, which is a state of semi-retirement or working at your own discretion. Describe the overall process. "If somebody is forward thinking enough that they have a growth mindset, they realize that by working on themselves they can accomplish things they weren't able to do in the past. All of a sudden things change dramatically." When I went to school at CU, I had a Major in Applied Mathematics and Physics because it was easy for me. When I got out of school, it's like, “What do you do with that if you want to stay in Colorado?” In those days, there are only two significant corporations to work for that could utilize that talent. That was Martin Marietta, which is now Lockheed Martin, and Ball Brothers. Martin Marietta was very involved in the space program. I came into it early. I'm literally a recovering rocket scientist. I started right at the end of the last Apollo mission and worked on our first space station, which was Skylab. Several years ago, we put a lander on Mars for the first time with less technology than you have in your cell phone. I worked on the early shuttle programs. As interesting and exciting as the work was, the bureaucracy, office politics, all of it made me a little crazy. Maintain A Passion: Until you're able to have that perspective about what it is you're doing and how you put yourself out there, it doesn't matter how good you are at what you do, you're not going to be very successful at it. Being a contractor to NASA, with another layer of politics and bureaucracy on top of us, it was a stifling atmosphere to work in. I got to the place where I didn't want to have to put up with all of that. You have to get a little beat up in the corporate world before being an entrepreneur and being on your own makes sense. I got to the point where I was tired of working for people I wouldn't hire. When you add to that, all of the stuff that goes with large corporations, I wanted out. I wouldn't even eat lunch in the company cafeteria because I was afraid somebody would talk to me. You'd know what to do with that. I couldn't figure a way out but knew that I wanted out and kept striving to make that happen. I knew I wanted the freedom of being in my own business. I wanted the flexibility with a good enough income to enjoy the time freedom. In the early days of being an engineer, it was a mystery to me. To make sure our audiences are oriented, that would be in the 1970s. Yes. I know there's a lot of new stuff going on with the space program over the last years with Elon Musk and SpaceX. This is the tail end of the first set of space exploration that culminated with the 1969 moment of landing on the moon. There was a whole bunch of other missions. Most people don't have the self-discipline to do what needs to be done in an entrepreneurial environment. At that point, everything we're doing was being done for the first time. Everything I worked on, with the exception of the Viking Lander, was manned spaceflight. When you're talking about people's lives at stake, the hoops you had to jump through, the thousand different iterations and meetings you had to go through before anybody would ever make a decision about anything drove me nuts. I wanted to be able to do my work, make a decision and get on with it. You had to have approval from 74 people before anything was ever allowed to happen or make a decision about. One of the things I wonder is, do you believe it's any different now? Do you think that since there's still a lot of bureaucratical government involvement, we'd still have that same frustration if you were to be doing that now? When you look at the fact that private corporations are part of the space program without all of the government oversight that we've had historically, there's probably less of that now. When they're talking about taking passengers into space in the next few years, you're going to have to pay attention to how well you're doing your job and jump through as many hoops knowing that people's lives are in danger. Look at what's happened to the airlines over the last several years and even in experiences that people have seen on the news. The reality is you got to be good at what you do and you can't cut corners. It doesn't matter whether it's NASA driving the program or a private corporation driving the program. You're saying that by the very nature of the work, it requires strong attention to detail and significant layers of quality control. One of the things that will be interesting for a lot of people to think about is we often have ideas of what we want to do but don't necessarily see the entire picture. People think of space. They think of going out into outer space, building rocket ships. All the glory is part of it. Any career path, anyone who pursues this is going to have something of a non-glorious component to it. It's a matter of thinking that through as well. Maintain A Passion: Network marketing is a business model where you can leverage yourself by engaging other people in the same endeavor that you're in. There's that, but there's another piece that becomes obvious to people that find themselves in their own business however they got there. It's always about the other guy. It's about your customer. Until you're able to have that perspective about what it is you're doing and how you put yourself out there, it doesn't matter how good you are at what you do, you're not going to be very successful at it. Would you say that an important component of maturity, even as a broader concept, is recognizing when things are not about yourself? Yes. When I was looking to get out of Corporate America and get into my own business, it was all about me, my goals, dream, and vision. I knew what I wanted my life to look like. Once I made that transition, there were several things that became apparent fast. Number one, most people don't have the self-discipline to do what needs to be done in an entrepreneurial environment. Nobody's looking over your shoulder. There's not a clock to punch. Nobody's telling you what to do. Nobody sets your goals for you. It's entirely up to you. All of a sudden, they have that freedom, most people. I did it too. Most people go on vacation. You left that 40, 50 hour a week job. You think you have all this time in the world to be successful. The reality is you can fritter away that time in a heartbeat and not even know you're doing it. One of the most frustrating experiences I ever had in the corporate world was with a system known as SMART goals, which is an acronym that became a buzzword for a while. It's fallen out of favor over the last several years. In the mid-2010s, it was everywhere, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. The overall point was that it wasn't my decision of what my goal is going to be or my assessment. It's more important to say my assessment because it seems like as an entrepreneur, you need to be self-motivated. You also need to look around. It's not all about, "This is what I want." You're responding to market forces and to your customer base and then figuring out, "What do I need to be accountable for? What needs to happen between now and next year for this business to progress the way it needs to?” Even what happens now. You have to ultimately boil down to what are the daily activities you're going to have to do in order to make that progression toward the goals that you set. A lot of people are good at the big picture, putting it out there, "This is where I want to be in five years," but they never boil it down to, "What do I have to do now to make that happen?” Personal development is paramount for anybody who wants to succeed at anything. That's interesting because in a lot of job descriptions, a lot of people will describe themselves as big picture people and detail-oriented. One thing I've wondered is, is that a false dichotomy? Are the real successful people, people who are able to perform the details but understand how these details fit into a big picture? It's exactly both of those. They have to dovetail together. If you don't have the big goal, you're not going to have the motivation to do those day-to-day tasks you know have to be done....