Podcast

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

#486: Dr. Marshall Goldsmith: How to Live the Earned Life

When the time is right to do something, you just know it, don’t you?

My dad, Keith, grew up in North Dakota during the Depression.

One Christmas when he was a boy he got just one present: a pair of mittens knitted by his aunt Dora.

He said it was the best present he had ever received given that there was ice on the inside of the windows in his home.

Following WWII, Keith became a successful civil engineer and president of Constructors PAMCO in Seattle.

Long after he comfortably retired, a new, expensive restaurant called The Barking Frog opened near my mom and dad’s home.

Dad told me it was something like $250 for a seven-course meal. He was curious about it.

But he had never splurged on anything that expensive until one day he did.

We were talking on the phone when he mentioned that he’d taken Mom to the Barking Frog for dinner.

Surprised, I asked him why he suddenly decided to indulge themselves.

He said, “I woke up that morning, looked in the mirror, and decided to stop saving money for old age.”

He’d earned a seven-course email.

He was living his earned life.

But today’s guest thinks we should all be living our earned life much earlier.

That’s why Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, considered by many the #1 executive coach in the world, wrote The Earned Life: Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment.

A New York Times #1 bestselling author, his 55 books have sold over 3 million copies and been translated into 35 languages.

In 2023, both Chief Executive magazine and Thinkers 50, listed What Got You Here Won’t Get You There as one of Best Business Books ever written.

Marshall’s acknowledgements are many. BusinessWeek tabbed him among the 50 great leaders in America.

The Institute for Management Studies honored Marshall with its Lifetime Award for Teaching.

Harvard Business Review named him the World’s #1 Leadership Thinker. The accolades go on and on.

But what I liked most about talking with Marshall was his down-home, level-headed insights on leadership and personal development.

Dr. Goldsmith served as a Professor of Management Practice at the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business.

He has a Ph.D. from the UCLA Anderson School of Management – where he was the Distinguished Alumnus of the Year, an MBA is from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business – where he was the Distinguished Entrepreneur of the Year and a BS from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology – where he received an honorary Ph.D. in Engineering (in 2023).

Kind of a curve breaker.

Marshall has over 1.5 million followers on LinkedIn and 4 million views on YouTube. Hundreds of his articles, interviews, columns, and videos are online (at no charge). His resources have been viewed, read, listened to, downloaded, or shared over 100 million times.