We were lucky to catch up with Greg Weiss recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Greg, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
I believe for any person running a business to be successful you need a compelling mission. There are so many things a person can do in this world to make money. Will your mission carry you through the hard times? (Is it your mission or just a business mission?) If it’s your mission, and you can hold on to it throughout the times that make others lose faith, you’ll be sucessful.
“Lost Creek Adventures are designed to instruct and inspire through experiences with the natural world.”
The idea is that hands-on experience with our world is important, whether it be through adventure, traditional skills, or taking a nature hike. We’re not meant to be “Leave No Trace” We’re meant to have an impact. Will it be positive or negative?
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I”m 52. I started on this path as a kid who loved the woods and didn’t like people all that much. The realization came at some point that I was a person too, and so educating others, rather than relegating others, became the challenge of my life. Hindsight is 20/20. (Well maybe if we’re honest with ourselves) It’s fun to look back at my career and see where a skill learned became a skill used, which led to future skills to learn, and then seeing my niche build. Looking back I can see that my teens were about building my ideals, my 20’s was getting the experience, my 30’s was applying that experience to working with others while learning a bunch of ways to do that, and my 40’s was applying that experience to building my own business. My 50’s are still building a business, with the challenge of staying relevant and keeping hold of my ideals, tempered by reality and desires to learn new stuff, (Like getting a pilots licence!)
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I may as well comment on my mission and how that has changed.
In my teens and 20’s I had my ideals that drove me. That is incredible energy, and I wouldn’t change that time for anything. Not knowing what I didn’t know allowed barriers to be broken that I didn’t see were even there. Taking risks was huge.
What I had to unlearn, and am for sure still working on, is that ideals are just that. They are based off of what you want, not what will really happen.
For example, getting into education was a great leap of faith for me and didn’t come naturally from being a shy teenager. Believing that I could change the world just through teaching however… Things are still bad, and often still getting worse. Our planet is overpopulated and no one is talking about it. We can educate all we want and not change reality. BUT we can change the life of a few people for the better. I think older people realize this one-on-smaller scale approach is a more realistic way to stay relevant and do good, without becoming too bitter at the big picture.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Tony Robbins is a more recent person. I have attended a couple of his seminars. He’s a realist when it comes to the psychology of people. He’s also a master at scaling his business. At around 70 years old he doesn’t seem to be slowing, and is as relevant as ever.
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