185. The AI Acceleration Decade Is Coming for Everyone. Are You Ready?

I use it. I love it, I hate it. I see the posts about how you’re going to be nothing if you don’t start identifying every single piece of your tech stack. Right.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
The pressure and the noise is already there.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Totally.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Like, it’s scary. How do we think about the things that become really important that we’re not thinking about to ensure that we can sustain the next 10 years?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. He had the corner office, the fund, the watch, the house in Vancouver and he was having panic attacks. Scott Barker spent a decade building one of the most respected Go to market careers in tech. He was the youngest director at Outreach in their history, helped scale the company from $20 million to $250 million ARR. And then raised $100 million for his own venture fund. Then he sold everything he owned, put what was left in a backpack and spent four months in ashrams in India. His article about what he found there stopped a lot of people in this industry cold. Today he’s on the show to talk about what it means to slow down.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Not as self care, but as strategy in the middle of the fastest technological acceleration any of us have ever lived through.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Josh.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’m Josh Schachter. This is Unchurned. Subscribe to our substack@ Unchurned.Gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode. Like how one post sales team at cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com hey everybody. Welcome to this week’s episode of Unchurned. I’m Josh Schachter, senior vice president of strategy and go to market development at Gainsight. I am joined with my special co host for this episode, Jenny Calvert.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Jenny is many things, many things. My right hand at Gainsay and at my startup. My last startup update AI and keeps me grounded. And with that in mind, speaking of keeping grounded, we have on the show today Scott Barker. Scott is former Go to market guy, worked at companies like Outreach and he was one of the founding members of the Go to Market fund, a very successful VC within the space. Then he quit it all and he went and Started visiting ashrams and writing articles about how to really kind of wake up your spirit and your soul. Scott, I don’t know exactly how to introduce you, but what I do know is that you wrote an article about a month or so ago. Jenny shared it with me.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
This is going to be the most cliche, platitude, AI generated line, but it’s the truth. It stopped me in my tracks and it really did. Well, I didn’t have tracks, fine, whatever. But it stopped me. I forwarded it on to. We have a cxo group on WhatsApp at gainsight of some of the executive leaders and stuff. I forwarded it to all of them in the industry. I forwarded it on Slack internally in my own WhatsApp friends and family channels.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It had such a profound impact at that point. I don’t know if it had gone viral or not at that point. Right. Like I was probably just in that moment. So it wasn’t because. But. But clearly it resonated with many other people as well. So tell us here a little bit about who you are, what you’re up to and this article on your blog, which is one of many that stopped people in their tracks.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, well, thank you for saying that, man. And thank you both for supporting that article. That article is about, you know, 15 years in the making probably. You know, that’s, it’s funny. Everyone’s like, how, how do I go viral? Like, how did you do this? Like, it comes from pretty deep, you know, lived experience and making a lot of the wrong decisions for, for a long time. The, the wrong way to approach life, at least for me. Um, and yeah quickly for, for the listeners. So I built my whole career on Go to Market.

Scott Barker:
I built a venture fund called Go to Market Fund, GTM Fund. And, and you know, I’ve been in, in sales in one form or another since I was like 18, you know. And then I found my way into Tech about 11 years ago and I started as a BDR, the entry level into. Into tech. And I worked my fucking ass off for 11 years. You know, just over a decade to just keep getting promoted as quick as quickly as I could. You know, team lead to manager to director, you know, ended up being, being the youngest director in company history at Outreach and helped him go from 20mil ARR to about 250mil ARR while I was there, which was just a crazy supersonic run. I did that for 10 years and there was a lot of fun I had.

Scott Barker:
I learned a tremendous amount. But I call it, my own acceleration decade. So I was moving real fast, you know, to keep growing as quickly as I wanted to grow and you know, my benchmarks for living a good life, you know, if I’m honest, were money and status. And that framework started falling apart actually the more I, I grew. And the fund, over the first four and a half years of, of starting it, it went really well. You know, we raised 23 million and then we raised 50 million and we have 100 million under management. It’s like the dream and it’s everything I thought I ever wanted. I had the corner office in a beautiful building in Vancouver where I’m from.

Scott Barker:
And I’m, I’m living. I, I buy the house, I got the car, I got the watch, fancy vacations, all of that stuff. And my framework, I, I was not happy at all, you know, and so I, I hit a, a breaking point, you know, and then, you know, that leads to some unhealthy habits as many, you know, high performers do to cope. Long story short, I hit sort of a breaking a point. Panic attacks, crazy anxiety, not sleeping. I decided the best move for me was to walk away from the fund and try and find a better way to live my life. Because the last decade of moving a million miles a minute was not making me happy, was not making me fulfilled. So, yeah, I stepped down from the fund.

Scott Barker:
That then led me a few weeks later to look around at my life and be like, I don’t know if I need this house and, hmm, I don’t know if I need all this stuff in this house and I don’t know if I need this watch. And I basically sold, not basically, I sold everything that I own and put what I had left in a backpack and I went to go look for a better way to live life. And it took me quite literally all over the world. Bali, Vietnam, Nepal. Climbed up to Everest base camp. Then I spent the last four months in India, largely in ashrams, at meditation retreats, many times meditating for up to 10 hours a day. And one of the things, and it was all about just like going inward and understanding myself better. But one of the things I sort of stumbled upon which we can get into is the world started accelerating around me and that is brought on by technology, particularly AI.

Scott Barker:
And I noticed that, oh no, like, it looks like the entire world is about to enter a decade that looks very similar to the one I just had. And not by choice, I chose my acceleration decade. You know, it was a self imposed acceleration decade. But now because of how Quickly, AI is moving. We’re all gonna be forced into having our own acceleration decades.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
What I’m hearing you say now that we’re entering a decade, maybe more, we don’t know where that’s. It’s external pressure that’s forcing us to, to not really have choice and agency, if you will. It’s a, it’s a forcing pressure function that. Add that to some of the things you’ve experienced and I’ve experienced as well. Like, it’s scary. And that’s, I think, the point of your article and what stopped me when I read it and immediately was like, Josh, you have to read this, like today. What I find most interesting is your call to how do we ensure that we’re building solid foundations so we as people don’t crumble as this happens? Because it’s happening. Right.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
I play on, you know, AI all the time. I use it. I love it. I hate it. You know, I see the post about how you’re going to be nothing if you don’t start identifying every single piece of your tech stack. Right. Like the pressure and the noise is already there.

Scott Barker:
Totally.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
So what a critical moment for you to write. How do we think about the things that become really important that we’re not thinking about to ensure that we can sustain the next 10 years? That’s what I took away from your piece.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, thanks, Jenny. And good call out. It’s kind of. It was clear the foundation people are working from is already really rocky because the last 10 years, it was still crazy. You’re in startup land, tech land. Like, it’s, it’s demanding, it’s intense. If you have a rocky foundation, the next 10 years are going to be really hard. So my call to action in the article and, and the ways that I believe people need to prepare is actually going inward like we are.

Scott Barker:
The outer world is accelerating at an incredible rate. We have no control over that. Do you have to play the game? To a certain extent, of course. But a lot of these pressures we feel, a lot of these stories we tell ourselves are not necessarily true. Um, if you really start going inward, this is not an article about like just like mental wellness, you know, like, it’s not just about, like, how do you de. Stress your life? I’m really trying to put forward the idea that that stillness, solitude, contemplation, these things are uniquely human. Pulling on your own direct, true experience, these are uniquely human. That will actually give you an advantage in the future.

Scott Barker:
You know, this is not woo woo, kumbaya. I’m gonna Feel a little bit better. Cause Scott told me to sit on a cushion for, you know, an hour a day. It’s. If you want to win in the future, I think slowing down as a strategy can really, really help you.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
The moment that caught me and the whole thing captured my attention fully, but the particular moment that stopped me in my tracks was when you talked about the acceleration of time. Time is perception. Perception is reality. And it. And it’s just. There’s something about this technological boom right now that is just feeling like time is at warp speed. And as much as the LLMs and all these tools are saving us time, it’s going somewhere, right? And it doesn’t feel that way. Let’s actually talk a little bit about some of the solutioning, because you did, you did propose, you know, a resolution potentially, for people that are also struggling with this fatigue and anxiety around this AI era, which you call, by the way, you know, the title of the blog, the Wake Up Call is your blog, your substack, the Wake Up Call.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And the article is how to Prepare for the Next Decade. And then your subtitle is a guide to Preparing for the Most details Destabilizing Chapter in Human history. Which I don’t think you’re making hyperbole in your own mind. Many would agree with you. But yeah, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about the upswing to that. Like, what. What can we do then?

Scott Barker:
Yeah, yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll break it down and I want to make sure we’re talking about some, like, negative things. I think I started my journey as a cynic and I’m leaving an optimist, so that’s good. You know, there’s a lot of beautiful things that can happen, but we do need to make some changes. And I’m of the belief that the changes happen on an individual level first. You know, if you can take care of your own mind, body, nervous system, that’s going to cascade into your family, that’s going to cascade into your community, that’s going to cascade into, you know, your city, your nation, so on, so forth. I really do believe that’s how big change happens. So the first one, the first bullet, was slowing down as a strategy, so not thinking about slowing down as something to de stress. This is a strategic thing that will help you write an article like this, that will help you figure out that blocking thing that’s stopping you from doing your job.

Scott Barker:
What I propose in this is this kind of sounds crazy for people who haven’t Done it. But it’s very doable. Is pick an afternoon. One afternoon. Tell your family, your colleagues, whoever it can be on the weekend or weekday and block out six hours. This doesn’t mean you have to take work off. You can still, you know, I. I think it’s a highly productive time.

Scott Barker:
I would actually build teams again. This is. I would. I would implement this. But you’re going to go into silence. Silence means you’re not speaking to anyone. No one’s speaking to you. You’re not reading, you’re not writing.

Scott Barker:
You’re cutting out any new input.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Watch tv.

Scott Barker:
No.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
No network.

Scott Barker:
You just find in the. Finding the loopholes. Okay, so I’ll be on the iPad.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
You’re not consuming, right?

Scott Barker:
It’s like no new.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Yeah.

Scott Barker:
You’re not even supposed to have eye contact in like traditional vipassa in some of these places because that’s an imprint. You know, you all of a sudden think of like, oh, that was a strange look that person gave me. I wonder what they’re thinking. And it’s just a fascinating exercise to notice how much we’re influenced by our environment and the things that we take in and how that affects our brain and our thoughts. Like, we don’t really understand where thoughts come from. Right. And so if we’re having a constant influx of new inputs, we don’t know if those are our thoughts or those thoughts are being hijacked and it’s not even ours. And you’ll find what I found is my brain without inputs given time.

Scott Barker:
This is new. It’s gonna feel weird. Is so much more productive. It’s happier, healthier mind, that makes more creative, productive connections. So that, that’s one that I would.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Scott. What about the people who are like, what if they’re doing that but they’re using like AI as a thought partner? Like you hear a lot. A lot of people. Right. It’s like I’m. I’m using it to like, you know, so that would. That would count on the. Don’t do that on this list.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Right. Like, don’t play with AI and bounce ideas back and forth, even if the origination of thought is yours.

Scott Barker:
Yeah. Don’t. Don’t do it.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Okay.

Scott Barker:
Don’t do it. And you. There’s a time and a place, but like when you are trying to foster the idea of slowing down as a strategy. No. There should be no thought partner getting to the core of Claudia. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I just want to make sure I’m getting this straight. So. So you’re saying in the Next month, find a six hour block of time or just you just basically you’re just sitting, doing nothing or.

Scott Barker:
Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right.

Scott Barker:
Walking. You can walk.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You can walk.

Scott Barker:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Can you eat?

Scott Barker:
Yeah, you can eat. Yeah, you can eat. For sure. Yeah, you can eat.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Question.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, you can eat.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re not like, you’re not actually don’t

Scott Barker:
spend the whole time eating.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You know, you’re distracting yourself, but you’re alone.

Scott Barker:
Right.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
So Josh is with his wife. Like. No, no. Hanging out with Jess. Josh.

Scott Barker:
Right, right. And, and Jess could be home. You’re just not, you’re not. You, you tell her. And they’re not interacting.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, my wife, like, they’re like, hey hon, why aren’t you talking to me for six hours? No, I don’t think so.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, and you’ll, you’ll find you’ll, you’ll absolutely hate it for your, the first, you know, three hours maybe your first whole six hour session. And again, don’t make it like a thinking session either. You know, this is not like, hey, I’m gonna like sit here and like figure out all my problems. You’re trying to just flush out any inputs and any thoughts. You will have thoughts that arise that are, it’s okay to acknowledge them, maybe go down that thread a little while, but you’re, you’re trying to sort of clear the, the vessel out and if you look up a lot of. I’m not obviously the first person to do this. This was like Buddha’s teaching 2600 years ago. This Prapassana technique and some very high profile people.

Scott Barker:
You know, Yuval Noah Harari spends three months in silence every month to write the books Sapiens Homo Dias, which is some pretty high order thinking that’s going on there. Um, I think, yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Dude, I don’t even know if I would be able to do this. I live in Manhattan. Honestly, I don’t think I could. I couldn’t even walk around without hearing the, the cars honking and, and some kind of stimulus. I’d have to, I would literally have to just put myself in my room. Let’s move on. Jenny, you’re going to help me be. We’re going to figure this out.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
We’re gonna, you’re, we’re gonna be accountability partners for ourselves on this one.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
I haven’t done six hours. I do walking meditation where there’s no sounds and people or anything like that. And it’s amazing. It’s 45 minutes. So new challenge to, to accept from Scott here.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Scott, build depth, not root, not route skills.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, so this like skills are becoming a commodity. Right. I think we can all, all say that. And, and what does that mean when everything that we hung our hat on. I’m a good writer, I’m a good designer, I’m a good. Things like that’s gone. That’s terrifying because a lot of us derived meaning from our skills, our job. And with that going away, I, I would encourage people.

Scott Barker:
I think depth will be very valuable. I don’t find my interactions with AI all that deep at this current period of time. And I try and go there. There’s just some link sort of missing. I think it’s because even what it regurgitates, I know that it’s not lived experience. It’s something that it. So it’s not as it’s not making the same connection. Humans can do that right now how you build depth.

Scott Barker:
And again that’s. I think a lot of people have talked about that. But what does that actually mean? Well, that’s. Pick a question. What does success mean to me? What does living a fulfilling life mean in general? What is power? What is success? What is status? These are bigger questions and actually spend time on your downtime. This should be somewhat interesting to you, but pick a question you’re interested in and for two weeks explore that question with no outcome in mind. No, I’m going to share this great blog at the end and look at it from a philosophical standpoint, from a scientific standpoint, from a historical standpoint, like ancient religions, like just try and dive into it. And you now have all these tools.

Scott Barker:
I actually encourage you to use AI as part of this. Don’t make that your only thing. You know, read books, do all the things. But we have all of this access to go quite, quite deep and layer our understanding. And yeah, I think again it goes in line with that like quick answer thing. We get the answer, we move on. But really go deep and you’ll see that that way of approaching problems, questions will start bleeding into like your personal or, sorry, your professional life in I think a really helpful way because there is a time where things are going to shrink. You’re going to have to work cross functionally a lot more.

Scott Barker:
You’re going to need to make connections and I think that’s helpful to do do that as an exercise.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
I will say that I. Both of the first two things you mentioned were instrumental when I also somewhat blew up my career and made massive changes. And so what I find really encouraging and I hope the listeners hear is like, you don’t have to Blow up your life and quit your job to implement these foundational strategies. They’re things that I wish, and maybe you do as well, that like I had discovered earlier on, so that maybe I wouldn’t have made some of the same decisions and chased the same things. Cause I would have been asking the deeper questions. I love the topic of defining success. I encourage everyone to do that. I think that’s one question you can dwell on for a really, really long time and just keep going deeper and deeper.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
And why and where does that come from? And where did that information. And was that something I learned, or did I actually, like, come up with that on my own? That’s what I’m hearing in this one, is to really like. It’s. It’s deeply personal. The depth. Right. It’s really starting to dispel those stories you mentioned that there’s these tokens of truth that we’ve just accepted and never questioned again. So a lot of that is really just getting back to the foundational root of what is truly true for us.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
And is that an original idea or thought? Is it something that we inherently just learned and never questioned?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Join me at Pulse this May in Las Vegas. I’d love to meet our listeners. Come say hi. And your daiquiri in that tall fluorescent cup is on me. Seriously. Use code unchurned for a special rate@gainsightpulse.com Scott, what’s something that you did you have gone deep on? I’m sure there’s been several. But what’s something that’s really stood out to you that you’ve. That you’ve researched?

Scott Barker:
All I’ve been doing is going deep, man. I have too much fucking time on my head. I mean, a big one is. And it’s probably something I’ll write about, but is money as we know it the currency of the future? You know, which opens a whole lot of interesting thoughts. Like you. You could make a pretty strong argument right now that attention is already more valuable than money. You know, because if you have attention, you can continue to make more and more money, but money’s still kind of what you’re after. So there’s an interesting interplay there.

Scott Barker:
So attention is one. And then, you know what? Scarcity creates value, right? So what are the things that are going to be really scarce in the future? What can AI not do? And for me, the only thing I can see right now that artificial intelligence cannot do is find meaning in someone’s life. So does that make meaning become incredibly, incredibly valuable in the future? And. And One of the ways that, and I know that’s abstract, but meaning already has like a lot of value in society. If you look at like kind of this starving artist archetype or something, or like a great poet, for example, they don’t need to have any money or status to be viewed really like high in society. And that’s because we see them living a meaningful life. They’re expressing truth, they’re having an impact, they’re getting it out there. And so I think that could grow in the future.

Scott Barker:
But yeah, I think money will lose footing as maybe the only currency we’ll have. The rise of maybe some secondary or third order, so sort of currencies that people are after.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
That’s deep.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Lead us into the next one.

Scott Barker:
Uh, yeah, so this one I think is if you take anything away from this one, just do this, please. It’s very helpful. It’s, it’s changed, you know, my life. Um, and the, the third one is you have to train your nervous system. So imagine there is a bit of a, a war going on. You know, that war is for your attention. Um, and there are some big players out there that are trying to get your, your attention and billions and billions of dollars. And so you have to pay yourself first.

Scott Barker:
So every day you wake up, be like, okay, I’m gonna have to spend a lot of my attention today. Let’s make sure I pay myself, you know, first and give some savings in my attention bank account. So build a non negotiable daily one hour practice can be however you want to do it. My suggestion would to have movement in there can be five minutes of movement, I don’t care. Movement, stillness, breath and solitude. So if you have those four things in your one hour daily practice and you guard that time like your life depends on it, which I do think it does in a way. If you want to live consciously and not be unconsciously guided by all the forces outside, then that’s going to be incredibly, incredibly important. So, yeah, simple.

Scott Barker:
But I think that used to be like, seen as a nice to have. I do think it’s a need to have now.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I hear you on that one. So Jenny, you know this. You know, one of my best friends passed away a year ago last week.

Scott Barker:
Sorry, man.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Thank you. And, and before she passed, you know, in the months, years leading up to it, she did, she made sure that time was not going to, you know, speed by. So she was very intentional, very present. I mean it was incredible to see the transformation. And so she would go to, in Miami this Cold plunge, like ice bath club. And before they would do their plunging, they would do the Wim Hof method of breathwork. And I went once with her when I was visiting about a year and a half ago, and it was really cool. And of course, I came out of it like, oh, I’m going to do ice bathing three times a week and breath work three times a week.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And you know, then two weeks later. Right. But in honor of her last week, you know, on the anniversary of her death, all her friends and family, I was on Zoom. Others were there in person, Miami. And we started the morning with an hour of breath work. I held my breath for close to four minutes. Didn’t even flinch. It wasn’t even a struggle, you know, by the end of it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And it was such a nice way to start that day, of course, in ceremony and remembrance of her, but just in general, just. It was such a nice way to give myself a beat before loading up, you know, the agents, the GPTs. So, yeah, I don’t know. I’d love. I. I need to start to do this more often myself. Of course. Jenny, what do you’ve got some practices for these things, right?

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
I. I medicate and do breath work. My meditation is always, as I mentioned, it’s always movement. I am not good at sitting still. Hence why I want to go to India and force myself to sit still in silence. Cause I think that’d be cool. Um, but, yeah, and. And I wouldn’t say I’m perfect in the practice.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
So I’m. I’m curious, Scott, if you have, like, recommendations on how both individuals can reinforce practice, but also, like, how do leaders create space for it? Right? Like not starting the slack threads in the morning that we’re addicted to opening up and reading because we can’t handle not, you know, doing that or how

Josh Schachter [Host]:
many of us phone our apps while we’re in bed within the first six,

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
first thing in the morning. And these habits, you know, creating the awareness but then reinforcing it through this kind of. How do you. How do you do a great job at making sure that you reinforce and protect those boundaries? That’s hard this day and age when we’re constantly flooded with what we’ve been talking about. Noise notifications, Slack, email, you know, I mean, TikTok, I don’t have it, but, you know, how do we. How do we do that?

Scott Barker:
Yeah, it’s a, It’s a great question. And I, you know, this would be a good. I’m very aware that I was just experiencing almost not normal Life for a year. I was, you know, I had, I was removed from the chaos of modern life for a year and now I’m kind of reemerging and building this, you know, media company. I’m involved in this wellness retreat now and my like life is getting busier and I can already see, you know, what you talk about if I, you know, the creep. The creep, yeah. What I, what I would suggest is like do what works for you. You know, I’m all about, I’m, I’m just trying to, trying to inspire people to experiment with these things and, and find what works for you.

Scott Barker:
So for me, just recently, so when I was in India, getting up in the morning and, and, and having my beautiful routine worked really well. Now that I’m back, I actually don’t enjoy it because I have all this head trash that’s like, oh, you should check this email. You should do this. So I actually can’t get a good meditation in. So like, okay, well if that’s true, let’s just get out of bed. Rock and roll. I, I have a lot of like kind of energy naturally in the morning when it’s just cortisol spiking or whatever. I’m going to, you know, quickly see the, the emails.

Scott Barker:
Maybe I’ll do some writing, get some ideas out of my head, text the people that I have to get back to and then, you know, at, you know, 10:00am I’m going to block my calendar and do my practice instead. So just like eliminate whatever friction is. If you’re sitting there in bed and you’re like, hey, my alarm went off at 5:30. I don’t want to go meditate. This is pointless. Like whatever the friction is, just remove it and know that like yeah, you’re on your own, own team. I kind of always have this like, okay, there’s a higher self that makes the plan and that higher self, if wants to set up my lower self and I’m not feeling like doing stuff for success, well, they’re going to make it as easy as possible for them to follow. So just like give yourself some grace and simple, simple is good and adjusted accordingly.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
I’m laughing over here because it’s like the permission that it doesn’t have to be when you wake up in the morning, right? Like you just gave the permission to like, hey, if you wake up and want to get some of that clutter out of the way before you do your practice, like, cool.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
I don’t know why that just like hit me to be like, oh yeah, I don’t have to do it right. When I wake up. I don’t have to be mad at myself that I open my phone. Right. That’s only probably adding to everything you’re talking about. Right. This like says who. Figure out what works for you, remove the friction and find something that’s sustainable.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
I love that.

Scott Barker:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Jenny, were you. Were you with us at Update AI when we actually were running community breathwork sessions for customer success?

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
No, but that sounds awesome.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Did you know we did that? Yeah, no, we had. Yeah. Yeah. We stopped doing after like a few months. It was the same people. You know, as the founder, business owner. I was hoping also it would scale a little bit. Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It was. Ended up being like the same four or five, but it was great. It was a forcing function for me to do this because now in my mind, everything as the founder needed to be through a business lens, but now it could be right. It was giving me permission to take the time to do that because it was also for building my community. But yeah, we had our former designer similar situation to you guys. She decided that her functional role in the world wasn’t the right thing for her, so she wanted to be a yogi and do these other types of practices. And I said, great, stay with us as this contractor to run breathwork sessions for the community. It was super cool.

Scott Barker:
Super cool.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And I kind of want to bring it back to Gainsight. We’ll talk off. I’m thinking it could be kind of a cool thing for maybe not for the. Internally.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Very cool.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. To offer that up. Right.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Well, I think we’d be practicing all of the things that we’re learning from Scott’s piece. Right. Is like, how do we help set up our people.

Scott Barker:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
For success is. We’re also demanding more from all of them. Yes, we are.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
To be honest.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Totally. Totally. Scott, I’m a little cognizant of time here. I want to. I want to allow people to read the full article which. Which is much more glorious than even this conversation because you really have such depth to it about the problem statements and things that resonated. And people should also read the comments because people left a lot of good community feedback too. And they.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
They really kind of echoed and it snowballs from there with their own insights. And then of course, that you have these 10 recipes for. For potential resolutions. Leave us with. With one that we haven’t gone through yet that you think people should really hear about.

Scott Barker:
Yeah, we. We touched on it briefly, but this was really important in my journey and Jenny almost goes back to what you’re saying of like, just whoa, like I just needed permission to like be nicer to myself in the morning. And we have so. And that was the same with me. I was like so, so hardline that this has to get done in the morning because like it’s going to affect my whole day. And like, turns out it doesn’t. I just do it at 10 and it’s great. But we are riddled with old programming, old stories we told ourselves.

Scott Barker:
And most of us got into the workforce at 18, 20 or whenever. And that’s usually when we make our definition of success and we actually don’t change it that much. If we change it, we just add another zero or it gets bigger. But the fundamentals of what it is is very similar to when we were 18, 20 years old. And would you trust them with any other decision? Like, I certainly wouldn’t. You know, 18, 20 year old Scott was an idiot and that idiot wrote a lot of the programming that I still use. And you know, part of this year was getting rid of all of that, that programming or examining it and saying, okay, is this still what I want? Why do I want it? Who told me I wanted that? Was that even original idea or was that just borrowed from society? Borrowed from my parents. And so, you know, again, it sounds kind of like corny or cliche, but it’s a beautiful exercise if you take it serious, is be honest with yourself and write down what your definition of success is and what you’re paying the most attention to because that will make you be maybe a little more honest with yourself.

Scott Barker:
Because if you spend 10 out of your 14 waking hours trying to impress your boss or trying to make money, it’s kind of what you worship more than anything, right? So that kind of is your definition of success and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not here to judge anyone’s definition of success, but a lot of us, it’s an old definition. So try and understand what your definition is now and see if you want to make any adjustments to that definition with what you know now at whatever age you’re at.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Jenny, any final thoughts?

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
I’m going to echo that one for sure. Just challenging, challenging stories is really kind of the through line here. Right. And again, getting to the root foundation at the individual level. And I think, you know, my experience, having reentered, taking time off completely and going back to this kind of hybrid world, it one allows me to have firmer boundaries. Josh gets to experience those all the time. Like hey. Nope, you booked me.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
And I have yoga, right? There’s my hour. Friday morning practice. I don’t miss it unless it’s super, super important. But there’s all these old programming stories. Mine was that I thrived in chaos, right? I loved startups because they were chaotic and messy and like, I didn’t. Like I was. I didn’t love chaos, man. Like, nobody does.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
And so what is the new story? What is the new definition of success? And that really can ground towards really beautiful things. Right now, my definition of success at Gainsight is to make myself not needed. So if I can automate away my job, if I can create, you know, workflows and efficiencies that make me not needed here, that’s success. And guess what? I’m still here. So it’s not like I don’t have a job or a purpose. It just continues to evolve. And that’s really fun because I get to be creative. And so I think, Scott, I’m hearing a couple of different things, but, like, challenge the fear that if you go after something, it’ll make you obsolete.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
It won’t. You’ll continue to learn and grow in the process, and that’s the fun part of it. And be mindful of those expectations. So I’m going to double down on everything in your piece. I’m so grateful that you wrote it. I’m pumped that it’s gone as viral as it has, because I truly believe it’s the most critical thing for individuals, for leaders, and I think organizations that are figuring out how to best support their people as we move forward. It’s going to become really important stuff.

Scott Barker:
Thanks, Jenny.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And I just want to end with something that, just as you were saying that Jenny, came up in my mind is I think it’s good for people. You know, in recent years, just very recently, I’ve kind of learned about myself where my sources of true authentic energy are. I always thought, or I kind of really tried to push them into, because I was a product manager and I went to engineering school, so. Oh, I’m a builder. I need to be technical. I need to have like the best acceptance criteria on my JIRA tickets because. Because that’s how I’m going to grow in my career and become this.

Scott Barker:
That.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Don’t get me wrong, Jenna, you know, all these. Still, a lot of these things still exist within me. But what I have learned is that my energy actually comes from a different aspect of my. Of my professional and personal world. Like speaking professionally though, right? Like, it actually is a More creative outlet. It’s the. It’s the. It’s the divergent thinking.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s this podcast. And that to me was a big kind of unlock. Very recently it was giving myself permission to use your terms to. To have that growth mindset, to use more platitudes to. To be. To like, to look at like, what’s, like what’s really driving you so that you’re not just kind of in the. The rat race for some artificial reasons. Scott, great conversation, great article, great blog, great podcast.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
We appreciate. We appreciate it all. I would actually love to hear back from our listeners on this episode. You can, you know, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn or something, because I would really. Actually, I’ve never asked that before, but I’d love to understand how this episode landed with folks. The reason that such important episode for me to do with you, Scott, and to have Jenny here is we. I mean, in some sense I’m also part of the problem here. Or not in some sense I am part of the problem here with like the substack articles that I’m creating of, you know, how I built 150 agents yesterday and how we did this.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And it’s creating more of that acceleration hype and. But at the same time. And I’m excited about that stuff, but at the same time truly matters. And so I wanted to make sure that it was a balanced reflection on my values. But also, yeah, I mean, where I think people should be, what people should be thinking about and doing for their own wellbeing. So. So there was really no intention behind this episode besides. And I know for you too, Scott, there was really no intention behind, besides evangelism, of what we think, you know, can be really helpful to a community right now that is, you know, uncertain and anxious and all the things.

Scott Barker:
Totally. I think that’s a great way of putting it. And like the idea is balance. Right. And. And what. Why things feel weird right now is it’s really unbalanced. Like, I have nothing wrong with the articles on using 200 agents.

Scott Barker:
Like, do that. That’s so cool. It’s going to unlock so much. But as the acceleration goes up, we need the integration to go up as well. And that. That’s been missing. And acceleration is going faster. So these practices we talked about today are just integration practices because that’s the best way.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I love that. I love that. Let you know the acceleration is going to go up. You know, feed it, do all those things. Continue to hone your skills with your Claude skills. Literally. Right. But make sure the integration skill, the two can coexist.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And they should. Scott Barker, Jenny Calver, thank you so much for joining us on this episode.

Scott Barker:
Thank you, Scott.

Jenny Calvert [Co-host]:
Thanks, Josh.