The man in the Walmart parking lot

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #33

This spring I walked out of the Walmart in Salem, Indiana, and spotted a man sitting in a pickup truck with his son.

I knew his face.

Last winter I'd watched him spend eighty-three days by himself above the Arctic Circle on a History Channel show called Alone.

If you haven't seen it, the idea is simple and brutal: they drop contestants into the wilderness miles apart, each one alone, with a few tools and a camera. Whoever lasts longest takes home five hundred thousand dollars.

His name is Timber Cleghorn. He grew up off-grid in the woods outside my hometown, and when he isn't surviving the Arctic or on a big game hunt, he brings comfort and aid into some of the poorest and most dangerous corners of the world. That's his full-time occupation.

Yep, you read that right. It's not an occasional mission trip he takes. It's what he does for a living.

So I stopped, and we had a good talk right there in the parking lot. We agreed to get together in late August, and I'm looking forward to it.

I've been working through the whole Alone series ever since, season one forward, and one thing about it is teaching me a ton. It has almost nothing to do with special bushcraft skills or laughing at the cold.

Here's what this issue has for you:
• Why the most credentialed people on that show are usually out first
• What actually makes a person quit out there (hint: it isn't hunger)
• What Timber did on day eighty-three that stunned me and my family

But let me start with your Tuesday.

Last Tuesday, somewhere in your week, something good happened. A real conversation with a real prospect. A client win. Maybe just a moment where the thing you're building made sense again. And when you shut the laptop, there was nobody to share it with who really gets your business. Your wife asked how the day went and you said "good," because the honest answer needs forty minutes and a white board.

You've got a business that's finally moving and nobody sharing it with you. That's the part of this trade that can wear you down... that nobody warned you about.

The money isn't the thing you're short on somebody for. There's never been a shortage of people willing to share money. What you're short on is somebody to share the experience with... the build itself, while it's still happening. The fresh catch. The rough weeks. The feelings that ebb and flow between them.

The show proves it season after season. People walk in with bravado, pounding their chests and talking smack. And yes, I'll admit, it seems to be exclusively a man thing. Military training, bushcraft credentials, some special history they're proud of. The wilderness serves them humble pie inside two weeks, and the credentials are useless. What lasts out there isn't the fittest or most credentialed. It's the most resourceful and mentally tough.

But here's what I saw right away. It's a game of controlled starvation, and hunger can cause people to do things they never imagined. Yet most of them don't tap out because the body quit. They starve emotionally long before they starve physically. Someone lands a beautiful fish after days of empty hooks, holds it up grinning... and there's no one to hold it up to. You can watch the excitement of the win fade pretty quickly.

You know that ride. It's the Emotional Whirlwind I've written about in recent issues, and out there you can watch a person drift down it one emotion at a time with nobody to catch them. Excitement to loneliness, loneliness to doubt, doubt to hopelessness and the phrase every tap-out starts with: "I proved what I came to prove."

Sharing with other humans is how you slow that drift. And out there, they can't. The show puts them in solitary confinement.

But not you. There's a phone in your pocket and somebody in the next room.

I've had one small taste of it myself. But hardly anything compared to what the contestants on Alone go through.

In 2007 I spent a week tent camping in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, on the border with Canada, eight hours by canoe from where we parked the truck. We had plenty of food for three or four days. Then we didn't. The last few days we ate what we caught or we didn't eat, and I'll tell you, I came to Jesus pretty quickly out there.

I mean that a bit cheeky and I mean it dead serious, too. Things get very real when you get hungry. Just two or three days is all you need. I'll never forget that week.

But here's the difference...

I wasn't alone in that canoe. We all experienced the hunger together. I fished the lakes in a canoe with a school teacher named Russ, who I'd never met. And we shared every fish we pulled out of that lake with our group of six. Hard as it got, that week is one of the best memories I have... because there was somebody in the boat.

Think about it this way. Same hunger, opposite outcome. Shared, it turned into a story we've told for decades. Alone, it turns into a tap-out.

So what does this look like for you Monday morning?

One. Bank calories in the fat season. When the work is good and the clients are plenty, that's exactly when you keep prospecting. It's also when you build the machine that finds the next ones... your positioning, your messaging, the whole system that brings clients to you instead of you chasing them.

A consultant told a member of my team just last week that he had to hold off on building his, because a windfall of new clients landed and he's too busy fulfilling for them. I understand it. I've done it. And it's the trap exactly.

Things are good right now, so the system can wait. The lean season is coming, and you already know it. The ones who last on that show fill the cache while the fish are running.

Two. Share it with somebody, and the bar is lower than you think. They don't have to understand your work. They don't have to feel your hunger. A spouse, an old friend, one fellow builder who gets it.

The experience gets shared the moment you let somebody into it. Forty minutes and a whiteboard is worth more than you think, in both directions. And if you can find somebody who's made this trip before... more than once, all the way through the lean seasons and out the other side... that's a different kind of sharing altogether.

Now you're not just lighter. You're learning. There's an old saying that you'll never live long enough to make all the mistakes yourself. The contestants who go the distance on that show studied the ones who went before them. You can too.

Three. Decide what you came for while you're still full. Hunger is a terrible negotiator. If you don't decide what enough looks like, the lean season will decide for you. And here's something I've noticed watching contestants go home, winners and not: I've yet to hear one of them say their highest priority out there was something money can buy.

The money matters. It's just never been the answer to the real question, which is how you want to live.

Now comes the part that shocked me and my wife.

Day eighty-three. Timber has more than a month of fish and moose meat stockpiled. He isn't starving, and he isn't hurt. He's one of two men left, and he may be the better-supplied of the pair. And he taps out. He walked away from a half-million-dollar contest he was still fully in, on purpose. My wife and I just sat there looking at each other. The other man was declared the winner the next day.

The way Timber explained it afterward: "Had I won, I was afraid that people would only see me as the guy with a half a million dollars, not as just plain old Timber." And his wife and his boys were waiting at home, with a baby on the way.

He chose the people he'd spent eighty-three days unable to share it with over the prize.

I've been writing a version of that sentence at the bottom of this newsletter since January.

P.S. I'm reaching out to Timber this week to set up that late-August visit. I've got one question saved up for him that I won't spoil here... if the answer's any good, you'll read about it in a future issue. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and watch Season 11 of Alone. It was on Netflix when I found it last winter. You'll never look at a packed pantry, or a packed calendar, the same way again.

"Two are better than one... For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up."
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

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