Scott Schimmel (00:00)
Well, big, big news of our week, we dropped our son off at college, our firstborn son off at college. And there was this dynamic that happened. They had the parents come and stay for two days, which was way too long. We just like, especially a boy, it took 20 minutes to set up his dorm room. He's like, moved the bed around, put his clothes in a rack, put two surf posters on the wall. And we're like, okay, we're good, right? We're good. So
Anyways, we ended up spending quite a bit of time over the course of two days. There's like these all these parent workshops and stuff like that. What I noticed kind of on the side as my son was meeting people, having conversations, almost all of the conversations I heard about after they would ask, where do you live on campus or where are you from? They would ask, what are you majoring in? And what I was eavesdropping in on was he has decided that he's going to go study accounting, which is very funny if you know my story. But what I heard is
Joe Lara (00:52)
Mm-hmm.
Scott Schimmel (00:53)
three or four conversations where he's talking to other college kids. And I hear one either him or someone else say, you got to do this. And then my son would like sit down after having a chit chat. And then he would say something like, yeah, I think I'm going to do and then he would actually, you would just see he just met a stranger who he doesn't even know and talk about future life plans.
sit down and then actually declare and it wasn't just him. It was also this roommate. Yeah, his roommate was also like, yeah, maybe. Yeah, I think that's right. Maybe I will just do accounting because that I was talking to he's like, was talking to your son's frowning. You know, he's a junior. He said it's like really good. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, dude, but you know, you guys are idiots. But number two, this is actually how life works all the time. And I was in a conversation last week reminding
Joe Lara (01:23)
adopting.
Mm-hmm.
Scott Schimmel (01:46)
remembering that there's this whole concept called mimetic theory. Like, so this dude, Rene Girard, is a Stanford professor came up with this concept called mimetic theory and mimetic think of like mime or mimicry. And it's the concept that the reason we want things as humans is because we think other people want them. So to go back in time, if you're like in middle school, and you and you see a kid wear something
you've never seen before, whether it's high tops, low tops, tall socks, low socks, like baggy gym shorts, small shorts, whatever it is, you see a kid that you, I don't know, you like or look up to or look long for their approval of you. You see them pursuing something. They want something. And all of a sudden you don't even realize it, but you want that too. And we as parents get that. You see our kids making horrible choices about their fashion or their music or whatever.
Joe Lara (02:36)
Mm-hmm.
Scott Schimmel (02:41)
And like, why? And then they will sincerely look at you in the eye and say, because I want that, you know, I, I want that. And I know as a parent, no, you do not want that. You want what other people want. And so it also happens professionally. Like I, and I was watching it happen with a bunch of 18, 19, 20 year olds over a couple of days. So I'm curious your thoughts on that. Do you think that also happens in veteran transition?
Joe Lara (03:08)
I think it does. You reminded me of Mimetic Theory. I might have heard about it in the marketing class back in my master's degree where I think LeBron, Dre Beats, Dre just came up with different headphones and was trying to figure out which ones he was going to use. He called up LeBron and said, LeBron, will you pick one? And LeBron came over and was like, okay, I'll wear this one. goes, okay, wear this when you go to China for the Olympics. And so LeBron wore them.
Scott Schimmel (03:22)
Yeah, yeah.
Joe Lara (03:37)
as he's warming up in front of the largest audience in the world. And guess what happened? Grape eats. Like that, right? It blew up, So yes, people don't know, they don't know where it's coming from. affiliation, all these things, they want to fit in, they want to be accepted. And so they say these things. You're right. With veteran transition, I think there's a lot of that. And the reason being is I used to look at hundreds of applications for folks.
Scott Schimmel (03:45)
blow it.
Here it is.
Joe Lara (04:06)
joining the Honor Foundation. So that's the 10 years of working with veterans. It's how we created Vector Accelerator. It's why we're here today. I looked at hundreds of these things and I can't tell you, one of the questions is, what's your dream job? And most, not most of the time, I shouldn't say that, but a lot of times, and this is 2000, yeah, 20.
Scott Schimmel (04:08)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Joe Lara (04:33)
17, 18, 19 and 20, guess, basically for like four years, I saw a lot of Elon Musk. Like, I want to build rockets, I want to electric vehicles. And it was basically Elon, the creator, the inventor, the billionaire, just doing really cool things. Tony Stark, basically, yeah. And it's just so interesting to see this trend of, know, of...
Scott Schimmel (04:39)
really?
Yeah.
Yeah, Tony Stark. ⁓
Joe Lara (05:01)
what I want to be when I grow up kind of thing. of course it's kind of cool and neat. ⁓ But there's another side of it too that as you were saying, describing this theory of, you know, your son hears something and then maybe wants to do that and says that the other side, almost like a 180 side of that is you don't know what you don't know until you talk to somebody and then a spark is lit. And I think that happened to me a couple of times in conversation where
Scott Schimmel (05:23)
Yeah. Yep. I agree.
Joe Lara (05:30)
was trying to figure out what I want to do in my life and I discovered somebody doing something really neat. And that's not necessarily what I went to go do, but it sparked curiosity, which therefore led me to research further. And in doing that, you have more conversations, more cups of coffee. And it's this relationship piece, which I didn't know I needed as I was transitioning was the relationship piece. yeah, there's a lot happening. I'm kind of all over the place right now, but yeah.
Scott Schimmel (05:49)
⁓ huh.
Yeah. agree. No. Yep. Yeah. It reminds
me I before doing what I'm doing now, I spent maybe six to nine months trying to explore what to do next. I just knew that I was pretty done. I was like, I'm done with this, this role, this organization. I'd been there for a decade and a part of what I enjoyed was doing stuff like training. And I know you like training as well and had that in your career. So I was like, okay, what can I do with training?
And I ended up tracking down people that I knew tangentially. I knew them from neighborhood, family, friends, church, like those kinds of people. like, hey, you, and I would just kind of, you know, spark up a conversation. What, what do you do and how did you get into it? So I, I, it was kind of like centered around HR or human resources. And it was like this, if that's the center, there's like all these spokes. There's people that work inside companies. talked to them. What do you do all day?
And then there were people that were like consultants that came in and worked with them. And then there were specific just trainers. But what I found that was interesting was every conversation I was in, I would hear someone start a phrase, start a sentence with this phrase, like, you know what you want to do is. then fill in the blank. You know what you want to do is, and you would hear, go get your masters. You would hear, um, or I would hear like, you're going to want to go get a cert certification from a major company like a Ken Blanchard or
Joe Lara (07:05)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Scott Schimmel (07:18)
John Maxwell or something like that. You know what you're gonna wanna do is you're wanna start out small as this, know, and what an interesting phrase, what you're gonna wanna do, like, and it comes back to this memetic theory. What do mean what I wanna, and to your point, I didn't know what I wanted. And so I had to do some discovery and then it would try on for size each one of those. And most of the time I would kind of understand it more and it would just be like an intuitive, eh, like, eh, that sounds terrible. That sounds awful.
Joe Lara (07:18)
Mm-hmm.
There's a lot of those. There's a lot of those.
Scott Schimmel (07:47)
But then there were a couple of sparks, like you're saying, of like, ⁓ I didn't know that that could be a thing. I didn't know that I could want that. And eventually ended up kind of creating my own thing, my own curriculum, my own thing that I could train others. And that was like, I didn't know I could want that.
Joe Lara (07:58)
Yeah.
You want to hear something funny. You actually did that for me in a good way. When I was going through the Honor Foundation and I met you and a lot of the questions inside the journaling aspect was causing my brain to just go in all kinds of areas I'd never been before. And then I picked up a book that I had in my shelf at home called Love Does, Bob Goff, because it's a guy that does really cool things. And just like, it's a wild story. It's just really neat things.
He's got a really cool like mindset on things. And I was kind of inspired by it. And I'm like, dude, this book. And I remember distinctly, you're like, check out, check out, ⁓ tattoos of the heart. And, ⁓ and, and there's a really, there's a really cool Jesuit priest in LA doing some cool stuff. And I'm like, okay. And so I went and got that book and father Greg Boyle. my gosh. I was so.
Scott Schimmel (08:47)
Yeah. huh.
Joe Lara (08:56)
⁓ taken over by that these stories and, I don't want to get into like what it did for me because that's not really the point. ⁓ but it did cause me to like physically drive to LA to go meet the people in the book. These are people with tattoos on their face and reformed gang members. There's a whole nother story there, but it, it's sometimes those, those to your point, you kind of do a little bit of exploring and it either
Scott Schimmel (09:08)
Yeah.
Joe Lara (09:23)
sends you in another direction like, okay, that's really not for me. Or, man, this is really neat, I'm gonna dive in. I'm all in, right? It's the all in thing. ⁓ So there's...
Scott Schimmel (09:25)
Yeah. Yep.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the point is
to figure out what it's doing to you when you hear someone share advice. What is it doing to you? Is it like you're just like, I'm to drive up to LA. I'm going to go meet this guy. And I remember you telling me that I'm like, Whoa, seriously? Whenever I recommend books, most of time, no one ever buys the book, not to mention goes to meet the author. Like, that's insane. So that obviously did something to you. And it was a lightning bolt. And then, but I think
I'm going to circle back to those undergrad college students, my son and his friends. There's something that's happening. That's probably just right below the surface where, you know, you don't want to be the odd man out. You don't want to be criticized. You don't know what you don't know yet. So you might as well go with the majority opinion. And so how do you kind of like discern that because what we're offering and inviting you to do in vector accelerator.
Joe Lara (10:14)
you
Scott Schimmel (10:29)
is to have a lot of cups of coffee, to invite a lot of people to give you feedback and advice. And we try to make it so it's really productive. So you're having the right conversations with the right people at right time. But inevitably, you're going to be getting your advice. People are going to say, you know what you want to do is, and so how do you then take that and filter it through this sense of what's important to you? How does that feel to you? What does that do to you? And I think
Joe Lara (10:47)
Mm-hmm.
Scott Schimmel (10:57)
especially if you're young or looking for affirmation to beware of the people whose opinion really matters to you, whose approval you really want to get. Because I've made many mistakes over the years, especially having older mentors, older guys that will say, know what you want to do. And then I will just say, okay, I'm going to, I'm in, I'm all in. I'm going to go do that. And it wasn't necessarily the right choice. I was going after approval. I wasn't going after the right thing.
Joe Lara (11:08)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's, that's really good. think sometimes the advice is very pointed, very direct. And then other times when it sounds direct, if you start having multiple conversations with various people that are doing some kind of the same thing, you'll pick up on the theme and the essence of what they're trying to say. So let's just say, I'm a project management. You should go get your PMP or something like that. And there's a lot of veterans that are getting that assuming that, I'm going to go on a project management. Therefore I need it. When some companies.
Scott Schimmel (11:49)
Yeah, that's right. ⁓
Joe Lara (11:57)
don't recognize it at all. They're like that we don't do that process. have our own process. And I mean, that's okay, but that's not what we do here. And so, ⁓ but, but if you start going to multiple project managers and they're all saying various different types of, of, of frameworks or certifications, and you're like, okay, maybe I do need to further my education. That's the theme. And so it's almost like somebody saying, Hey, I recommend you wear slacks.
Scott Schimmel (12:05)
Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Lara (12:25)
or something like that. I'm like, okay, well, slaps to you and slaps to me. can mean dockers or whatever. I don't know, it can mean different. I need to find what's gonna fit me. And I remember, again, I thought I was done with education. Went through these questions and I realized these questions, cups of coffee, I probably need to continue my degree or learning, I should say, not degree. And so I started looking at degrees and the path for degrees was enormous.
Scott Schimmel (12:25)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Lara (12:52)
So I'm like, okay, well, how do I make it fit me and what I'm about and who I am and what I'm trying to discover of who I want to be? And then I discovered Ken Blanchard's program and, and, I could have, I could have went to other programs, but this was Ken Blanchard, who is a servant leader and speaks the language and is the person I want to become one day. So it's, I think you get a lot of advice and the tendency can be, and I don't know if it's envy. don't know if it's, want what they have.
Scott Schimmel (13:07)
Yes. The man.
Joe Lara (13:22)
I want to be accepted. There's some of that for sure. But it's probably advantageous to have multiple cups of coffee with multiple people before you go all in. think that's kind of what I'm hearing from the conversation is maybe if your son, it'd be interesting if he has more of these conversations at the end of a semester, at the end of a year, more clarity. That's usually what happens with students.
Scott Schimmel (13:32)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and the operating word, most important part is what do you think, not what other people want for you or think you want. And that's ⁓ that I think is why in the process of transition, the way we're defining it with vector, we want we want to ask that question to you. What drives you? What guides you? What kind of life do you want to have? And to be able to actually put pen and paper
Joe Lara (14:03)
you
Scott Schimmel (14:14)
and then go and have conversations so that when someone says, you know what you want to do, you can listen to that and be like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. That's logical. I like, I respect you. But then to look back to the paper and say, but what drives me, what guides me and see if that fits through that filter. And if it does, okay, explore it. If it doesn't, you know, be polite and say, thank you. That's, cause I don't think anybody actually is going to get their feelings hurt if you don't take their advice.
Joe Lara (14:30)
Yeah.
Scott Schimmel (14:43)
If they do, that's very controlling and weird. Instead, I think people want to feel valuable and heard, and you can do that respectfully and say, hey, I hear what you're saying. think for me though, what drives me is this alternative path.
Joe Lara (14:57)
I like the order that you said, like have conversations and then go through it and think about it, inspect it and match it against who you are. So that tells me that who you are homework has to be done first or should be at least attempted, maybe not completed because we're never completed. do some inventory, get a good catalog of your strengths and your talents and your values, what matters to you. Have conversations with people that love you, that know you.
Scott Schimmel (15:11)
Yeah. Yeah, right. First draft.
Right.
Joe Lara (15:25)
And then if you start integrating these cups of coffee, then you can bounce that off of the lens of who you are. But if you haven't done that work, everything sounds amazing, right?
Scott Schimmel (15:33)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's a,
it must be like a matrix. Like if you only listen to other people, you're going to go down some weird paths. If you only listen to yourself, it's probably not going to take you very far. And so what's the, what's the both ends? Yeah. The combination of both. Uh, we should put that down, write that down somewhere, use that in the next workshop. Oh, dang it. We should anyways, yo, it's, Friday. Let's wrap this up. Thanks for being on another episode of the vector.
Joe Lara (15:45)
Combination. Yeah. Yeah.
I know, right? If only we were recording this or just like, I don't know. Dang it.
for show.
