Three Mantras From Joel Peterson’s Entrepreneurial Leadership

I met former JetBlue Chairman and Stanford Business School professor Joel Peterson in interesting fashion. A few years ago, I decided to upgrade myself on a JetBlue Mint flight from Boston to Los Angeles. I had been an early employee at a startup called Next Caller, and after 7.5 years, I had just helped the company reach an acquisition by Pindrop Security. I decided to move on at that point and I took a month off to reset mentally before taking on my next challenge. This involved a trip to LA to see some friends, and I decided to splurge on the upgrade.

The Mint experience was particularly good, in large part due to the attention to detail by the flight attendants. I posted about the experience on LinkedIn, not really expecting much. Of all the LinkedIn posts I have ever created, this one happened to go the most viral. I am not sure why. It was a pretty innocuous post about a good customer experience, but it had tens of thousands of impressions, and hundreds of likes and comments. This got it onto the radar of Joel, who reached out to me about a book project he was working on at the time.

I’ve learned a lot since then by interviewing some of his colleagues – other business leaders who have entered his orbit and led big companies to great success. I’ve also learned a lot by following his journey online and by reading some of his books. He also recommended some books to me which have really sparked my curiosity and even led me to participate in political campaigns to some degree.

Recently, I was turned on to the Entrepreneurial Leadership online course, and as I was initiating this journey, I was turned on to three mantras that are preached early on. These mantras are as follows:

• The mission is greater than me
• I am not my emotions
• I have what I need

These three mantras mean a lot to me personally as well, and resonated with me quite clearly. I want to share a bit about each one and how I have tried to incorporate them into my life.

1. The mission is greater than me.

This one may seem quite obvious on the surface, but I think it is actually quite complex.

We all know what this means – we put the team above ourselves. But I think it is actually a little more nuanced than that. In a way, the team does not really mean much unless you believe in the mission. Certainly if you were on a team doing something that you were not really passionate about or that you did not  believe in, you would not necessarily feel compelled to make sacrifices simply for the sake of helping others. I do not intend to sound selfish, but I think it is just a reality of our human nature that we are driven by shared values and internal motivations that we have.

By default, you need to sign up for a mission that you truly believe in. In order to do that, you need to understand your “why.” Your “why” is what you truly want for yourself in life. To that end, “making a lot of money” is not really a “why.” It is more a means to an end. Some people are financially motivated, but they are financially motivated because they want to do something specific with their financial independence. That might be as simple as providing for their family. It could also be that they want to travel the world. Whatever it is that you want for yourself, you need to understand it quite clearly, and you need to find missions that can help you achieve it.

If you are truly locked in on your “why” and sign yourself up for a mission that you believe is your strongest chance of achieving it, then you should naturally feel compelled to make whatever sacrifices are necessary. It may seem unselfish, but ultimately it is selfish: you’ve already determined that the successful missions helps you get what you want.

Before COVID started, I decided I want to give back somehow. I was given a lot of opportunity growing up, and there was a phrase we learned in high school “From those to whom much has been given, much will be expected.” Thus it became my mission that I would start fulfilling my end of the bargain. I signed up for the Big Brother Big Sister program and started a mentoring relationship with a teenager in Brooklyn.

Six months or so later, COVID hit and I left New York City for good. At this point, I had a decision to make: would I give up this relationship in light of the circumstances, or would I continue it? Despite the fact it was a six hour drive, I made the commitment to see my little brother once a month or so throughout the pandemic. While this came at some inconvenience to me and lots of time in the car (and expense), my mind was already made up. The mission was greater than me. And there would be nothing worse for the other individual in this relationship if I had entered and then quickly disappeared from his life. 

I try to apply this lesson to my work. Sometimes I slip up, but I always ground myself in why I signed up in the first place. Sometimes we do not get our way professionally. We need to make a decision in those situations: can we put our ego aside for the greater good?

2. I am not my emotions

This one is the toughest for me. My greatest asset is also my greatest weakness, which is that I am a passionate, loyal, and emotional person who wears my heart on my sleeve. 

It is important to distance yourself from your emotions because your emotions come without the benefit of all of the information required to act and they often betray your ability to be calm or rational. I used to work with a leadership coach who taught me “People do not try to suck on purpose.” While it may seem trite, it is a good piece of advice. 

Very rarely are other people actively trying to be evil, nor are they trying to ruin your day. There have been many times in my life where I regret being angry or frustrated with someone when I later found out additional information that would have changed my original judgment. And there is nothing more embarrassing than irrationally losing your cool in such a situation. 

In the world of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – otherwise known as CBT – you are often forced to reconcile with alternative possibilities than the conclusion you have already drawn in your mind. Maybe a coworker seems like they are being rude to you and you draw the conclusion that they do not like you or they are disrespectful to you. In the absence of CBT, you might react poorly to this and tell them off. But what else is possible? Perhaps they are having a bad day or a bad week. Or, what if they are being a bit rude…but they are rude to everyone? Is it possible that they just lack situational awareness or that they are socially awkward? Even in that alternative scenario, their intention is not to be rude, and intentions certainly matter here.

The important lesson here is that you will always have emotional reactions to things – sometimes positive or joyous ones! – but you still need to distance yourself from your feelings in order to be rational and to make the best and most informed decisions. 

I’ll tell an embarrassing story about this. At the beginning of my sales career, I had a prospect who kept no-showing for meetings and re-scheduling with me. I felt it was unprofessional. Eventually I said something to him about it. He told me that he had been in and out of the hospital, and he made me feel badly about it. I felt guilty for my reaction, even though it had felt justified in the moment. I have no way of knowing if he was being honest but I assume so because that would be an awful thing to lie about. From that point forward, I learned it was best not to make assumptions about why others might be frustrating me, and that it was certainly best to keep whatever feelings I had to myself.

3. I have what I need

There is a chapter in my book Authentic Selling: How to Use the Principles of Sales in Everyday Life all about the theme of accountability. Suffice it to say, I am a big fan of this last mantra.

Look, at the end of the day, blaming others for your own failures is never a winning strategy. The reality is, it is always in your locus of control to fix your situation. And if you lose sight of the little things you can be doing that are within your locus of control, all you are doing is wasting time in seeking a good solution for yourself.

Sometimes at work, you can feel like you are being pulled in a lot of different directions. I know I often feel this way because I have spent most of my career in early stage startups where you are forced to wear a lot of different hats. In this scenario, one of two things can be true. You might just not be prioritizing adequately, or you just might not be advocating for yourself properly. In either scenario, it is still your fault. Even if the reality is that you are being asked to do too much in order to succeed at any one thing, that simply means you are doing a poor job of advocating for yourself and building the case for what your role needs to be and why.

I have found that people really grow to respect others when they are accountable to their own failures. There is nothing worse than hanging out with a failure who simply blames others for their failure. We have a word for those people: “losers.”

What people do respect is seeing others own up to their mistakes. Simply put, it makes those people seem human. We relate to people who are flawed because we are flawed. But when we meet people who can never be wrong about anything, we find them unrelatable, stubborn, and annoying. I know people like this, and I have made a conscious decision to stop proactively engaging with them, because I already know that they are incapable of having a nuanced conversation wherein they might be imperfect somehow.

There have been times in my life where I made the mistake of burning bridges with people when I shouldn’t have. This goes back to the second mantra about not being your emotions. When I reached out to these people to apologize and to tell them how I came to the realization I was wrong, I think they ended up respecting me a lot more by the end of those conversations than previously before we had any turmoil to begin with. I think this is why most politicians seem insufferable to us – even when they are very obviously being intellectually dishonest (and this goes for both sides), you will never see a single one of them apologize for literally anything. Seriously, think about it. When is the last time you can remember a politician saying “I was wrong”?

When you believe you have what you need, you stop making excuses for yourself. And when you stop making excuses for yourself, you win. Plain and simple.