Geoff Arias: How Tough Times Can Refine You or Define You

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 528, featuring Geoff Arias...

Geoff Arias first met Tom Rowland as a teenager on a Make-A-Wish fishing trip after being diagnosed with leukemia in high school. Years later he returned to the podcast as a grown man, a father of three, and the host of his own show, Business Unusual, to talk about how the toughest stretch of his life ended up shaping who he became. This is their conversation about risk, upbringing, fear, and the difference between times that refine you and times that define you.

Reconnecting After Fifteen Years

Geoff Arias: This is Geoff Arias, and you're listening to the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Geoff. How are you, man?

Geoff Arias: Good, man. Been a long time since we've seen each other. It's been, I think, probably... we did that trip, let's see, it would have been like 2009, I think. I think we saw each other shortly after that — I happened to be in the Keys fishing, you happened to be down there doing some filming. But yeah, it's been some time. Maybe a boat show here and there.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Well, you look like you're doing awesome, man. What, tell me, fill me in.

Geoff Arias: Man. So, to fill you in — since we did our trip and filmed our show, I got married, got three kids, nine, seven, and five, I hope I got that right. Yeah, just staying busy, you know how that can be. Working here downtown Fort Lauderdale, where you happen to be in town this week, and focusing on commercial construction. So life's busy.

The Make-A-Wish Trip That Started It All

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. So not to gloss over it, but I think it's super important, as far as your story goes — how we got together and how we spent a week fishing in the Keys in 2009. So, to bring everybody up to speed, tell them a little bit about your story. How did that happen?

Geoff Arias: So, my senior year of high school I was diagnosed with ALL leukemia, which is a form of blood cancer. I had a relatively smooth process addressing it with great doctors, went through that whole course, went to college, and didn't delay anything in terms of keeping moving forward in life. I'm a big proponent of just putting your head down — no excuses, find solutions. That's just how I approach life. Through that experience, I qualified — because I happened to be a few months under the eighteen-year-old mark — for a Make-A-Wish.

And, as you know, I spent forever debating back and forth on what it should be. It needed to be something money can't buy, was my big thing. I can make all the money in the world if I want at some point, but what can money not buy? Money can't buy experiences. So we tossed around a few ideas — trips to Costa Rica, whatever — but for whatever reason the logistics just didn't work out, and I got to the age where they basically said it's time, or you're too old. So I sat there and said, give me a week. I was watching your show one weekend and said, you know what, what about these guys? Let's go fish with them. I threw the idea out, and Make-A-Wish, as they do, just ran with it and made it happen. It ended up being, I think, August.

Tom Rowland: I remember it was a good time of year to fish, because I was just thinking about your trip. We went to the Marquesas one day, and I remember there were a ton of big tarpon around. What do you remember about that trip?

Mechanical Trouble and a Magical Day in the Marquesas

Geoff Arias: What I remember about that trip was, well, first of all, our mechanical difficulties.

Tom Rowland: We had mechanical difficulties? I remember we took Sam and David McCleaf with us — I figured they'd want some pictures, this was going to be a big trip, so let's get some pictures. Those guys were fishing with me a lot back then, so I brought them. But I don't remember the mechanical difficulties. What was it, the trailer?

Geoff Arias: I don't think you had planned on fishing the Marquesas — I think what we ended up discussing one time is you kind of thought it was going to be the typical Make-A-Wish trip. A kid with some interest in fishing, come to find out I fish, fish — like, I'm out in the bay after school three or four times a week. But that had been a recent thing for me. Anyways, you said, let's go down to the Marquesas, that's my favorite place, this is that time of year. You gave me the whole sales pitch, and I said I'm on board, you tell me where and when.

Through that, I think we ended up needing to borrow a car or something, and the Yellowfin was just too much boat for that truck. We ended up overheating the transmission or something, but anyways, we made it there. We fished. And what I will remember always about that trip is you're running down south, running the channel, and then just in the middle of nowhere — nothing I could discern other than maybe a channel marker — you pull back on the throttles and go, we're just gonna sit here and watch, it's that time of year. And then they just start rolling, and I go, you gotta be kidding me. Just like that. And I think we hooked up into a tarpon right there off that channel. Nice battle — we got that one boat-side and kept heading south, and then just had a great day. Permit, bonefish, big snapper, grouper. The Marquesas are truly a magical place.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, you slammed them, I remember that. That was super awesome. And I do remember that morning — it was slick calm, and that place can hold a lot of fish. It was at the time I was discovering the magic of the jerk bait and braid combination, because before that I would almost entirely fly fish for those laid-up fish, since with the old tackle — thick mono, big reels — you weren't going to cast that rod very effectively. So when you came up on a bunch of laid-up fish, the most effective way was fly fishing, because you could land the fly softly and cast farther than you could with heavy mono. So these fish just weren't getting much pressure at all, other than from the few guys who could really throw a fly.

Then the rods got better, the reels got better drag systems, and braid came out — twenty-pound braid that was the diameter of eight-pound mono. Then I could sling a jerk bait three or four times as far as a fly. It was a melee.

Geoff Arias: So that's the technology I walked into in my fishing journey. I hate mono — tying knots with it, everything about it stinks to me. I'm fully indoctrinated in the braid thing, so I completely get that, it's a game changer. It's cool to hear how much it changed the approach for guys like you, because I didn't experience that transition — I started fishing later in life.

How Geoff Fell in Love with Fishing

I always had an interest in fishing. I grew up camping with my family, and I'd tell my dad we had to take a boat somewhere, so we'd get these inflatable boats, and I'd spend all day out on the lake and catch one stinking fish — didn't matter to me. It's funny how I see, looking back, this redneck-engineering approach, not knowing what I didn't know but still using the same methods I use today. Drifting too fast in the inflatable with no motor, I'd tie Publix bags together with rope and toss it out the back to make a drift sock. I just knew, physics — I needed to slow my drift down.

Then I ended up buying a John boat. I was raised to work — had a lawn business as a middle schooler, worked for my money. A John boat came up for sale down the road, and I convinced my dad to let me buy it, and that's really when my fishing started. I started talking to a buddy at school who took fishing trips with his dad, and he started inviting me along. By the time we got to about sixteen, he got his driver's license, and that became a whole level of freedom — now we could tow the boat wherever we wanted. We fished Chokoloskee a lot, did a camping trip out there every end of the school year. He was really the guy who walked me through how to approach fishing.

Through college I ended up buying a flats boat and fished North Bay, South Bay, Biscayne Bay, all over the area. I went to school in Miami, so there were days I dragged the boat to class, parked it in the lot, and went straight to the ramp after. I just grew up totally addicted. For me it was an outlet, because going through what I went through at that time — I was still going through treatment in college — there are times you can't really go out into crowds, your immune system's low and compromised. There's nothing out on the water to catch, other than a fish or two, when you're fishing. So I just fell in love with it. I always had the passion, but being kind of forced out of athletics after everything I went through and the side effects — I could no longer really participate in athletics the way I wanted to — fishing gave me that competitive edge, that drive, that laser focus of how do I get better at this, how do I catch that fish I know lives there. It kept me engaged with something at a critical point in my life.

The Florida Sportsman Forum Era

Tom Rowland: So how did you do that? When you discovered a certain type of fish, what was your process for getting better, for making sure you accomplished that goal?

Geoff Arias: I have the benefit of being a dot-com baby. I remember the first dial tone in my parents' living room — that was the internet for me. The Florida Sportsman Forum — several of the people I've had on my own podcast I've met through that forum. It was an unbelievable time, ahead of its time, essentially what social media is today. It was such a close community in South Florida — local meetups, local tournaments, guys knew each other at the ramp — and it was all driven through that online forum. To this day I'll stand by it: sportsmen did not know what they had there, because eventually they shut it down.

It was unbelievably tight-knit — a lot of BS'ing, a lot of razzing, a lot of photoshopping, but an unbelievable community. Even to this day you go on Facebook and see how many people on your friends list are from that forum, and it's astounding. It was an unbelievable resource that led to even more knowledge — guys would take me fishing in Flamingo and I'd learn something, then I'd go to Chokoloskee with another guy and learn something from him. It was a combination of self-education and learning from everyone who'd been there, done that.

Tom Rowland: I also had a forum on my website — looking back, it's hard to understand what we had there, this community of people coming to the site every single day and talking. Mine shut down because it got infested with porn spam, and I'm sure that's what happened to the Florida Sportsman forum too, because that's where those kinds of people saw, oh look, there's this online community, all we gotta do is post here and everybody's gonna see it. And they saw it, but it also led to the demise of those forums. There was another forum I used to go to, an exercise forum run by a guy named Ross Enamait — beautiful community — and the same thing happened, he ended up shutting it down and turning it into a public Facebook page, which just doesn't have the same magic.

Chat Rooms, AIM, and Booking the First Trip on the Internet

Tom Rowland: And even before that, do you remember the AOL chat rooms?

Geoff Arias: Wasn't a huge chat room guy. I did have AIM — Instant Messenger — but I used it more socially with people I already knew, and never really explored the chat room side.

Tom Rowland: The chatroom came before the message board, and it was way ahead of its time — an online live community, these little pieces of data small enough to transmit immediately with the internet the way it was back then. You and I could be in a chat room together, we can't see one another, but you're typing, and it's instantaneous — almost like a group text, which is what it is today. There was this one dude who ran a room called FBN, the Fishing Broadcast Network. I don't even know how I found it — I tried a chat room, there was fly fishing, saltwater fishing, and then this general room, and you'd type, hey, what's going on, and it would be instantaneous.

And that's where the first blog, basically, came from. This guy, FBN Pesky, ended up coming down to fish with me, and he said, I'm gonna come down, take some pictures, and write an article. I said, where's it gonna be, and he said, on AOL. I said, okay, I guess — who's gonna see it? But it turned out a lot of people saw it. Those chat rooms were this exchange of information that eventually turned into message boards, which eventually got damaged by spam and turned into social media. But it was so far ahead of its time that I booked the first trip on the internet, ever, through that chat room.

I'm still in touch with this guy today, Kyle Quillen — hey, Kyle. He and I got on that chat room and went back and forth, and the FBN Pesky guy would ask me, hey, when you come home from fishing, how about coming on so people can ask you questions about fishing in the Keys. I'd sit on there for an hour, and I remember my roommate saying, what are you doing? I said, I'm talking to these people online. He said, on the internet? When are you gonna be finished — I gotta use the phone. We used to have to unplug the phone to plug it into the computer, and then nobody could use the phone for an hour.

So Kyle said, well, I wanna book a trip with you, and this was the first time I ever did anything online without seeing someone first. There was this urban myth back then that people will stalk you online and kill you — all these weird stories about bad things happening from something online. But I'd been talking to this guy for months, and I thought it's gonna be okay. I had to really come to terms with booking a trip with somebody I'd never seen or talked to on the phone — and you never put your phone number out there, so I said, meet me at Garrison Bight at seven on this day. I told my wife — well, girlfriend at the time — I have no idea what's gonna happen here, I hope I see you this afternoon. And I decided the best place to fish that day was the Marquesas, so I picked him up and we went out there.

We had a great trip. He caught a permit — or maybe he didn't catch anything, I don't fully remember, but I remember it being a great day. He ended up fishing with me a whole bunch of times after that, and we became friends. He eventually opened a fly shop up in Boca Raton called the Old Florida Fly Shop, and got way into it — I went up and did some fly casting instruction there. We've stayed in touch to this day, and I see him all over my social media. Eventually I asked him, was that as weird for you as it was for me? And he said, are you kidding — we had never talked to each other, and then I get in the boat with you and you run me out to the Marquesas. I'm like, I'm definitely gonna die today.

Would You Let Your Own Kids Do That?

Geoff Arias: I look back at that time in my life, and with today's perspective — being a dad changes everything — I was crazy doing what I was doing. I can't believe my parents let me. I'd just meet these guys online and say, Friday morning, four a.m., I'll be at your house, drive down to Flamingo. I can't believe they didn't have a tracker on me, that they let me just disappear for a day and come back and say, yeah, I just met a stranger. But it was crazy, and I met a lot of good people that way who are still friends to this day. It was the early era of the internet.

Tom Rowland: Would you, as a parent now, let your kids do that?

Geoff Arias: I've had this debate in my mind, and my wife and I always talk about it, because it's funny how you parent a certain way and then go, well, gee, I used to do that. It's always case by case. Probably not the way my parents did it, which is basically they never touched the forum, had no presence, knew nothing about it — probably zero chance of being that unattached in today's world. And the way people use those tools has changed, unfortunately, for the negative in a lot of ways. But yeah, probably zero chance I'd let my son, at fourteen, meet up with some forty-year-old guy online.

Tom Rowland: It's such a weird thing, because that's how helicopter parenting starts — things have changed, but have they, really? Maybe we're in the safest time we've ever been, we're just more exposed to more information.

Geoff Arias: That's how I view it. I kind of always have to tell myself, those people were still there back then too. It's just now it's all about clickbait, and say whatever you want about today's media, but we're more exposed to it in a different way than we were twenty years ago. So I tell myself, people don't change, bad has always been in the world. At some point you've gotta do a risk analysis. That's the main thing I'd say — I raise my kids to understand risk, be okay with risk, but weigh your risks. I think that's important to learn in life, how to analyze that.

Tom Rowland: But then there's also the question — what did I gain as a young person having those experiences, and would I really want my son not to have those? That adventure — when you talk about it your eyes light up, you were in Chokoloskee, out of an aluminum John boat, going offshore, catching mahi. That's adventure. And that shaped who you are. That's where my wife and I are always walking this line — when do you let them go do the things you know are dangerous, but that you did?

I remember running out of gas in a John boat with a pull-start motor with the flywheel exposed on top like a spinning circular saw, right by your hand — and my parents just let me go out there with it. I ran out of gas on the other side of the lake and had to swim the boat back. I remember looking up at the dock, thinking I saw my dad there, just sitting, watching me swim all the way back. When I made it, he said, that was a long swim, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a long swim. He said, maybe next time you check your gas.

Geoff Arias: Right — learn a lesson while he's watching. We did a trip to Chokoloskee every year in an old seventeen-foot Mako with an unreliable two-stroke, no problem, until one trip — a two night, three day camping trip — the second day out, the engine won't start. We're away from camp, fishing, and we have a trolling motor, so we say, alright, it's two o'clock, let's start pushing. We get out of the boat and push across the flat — I guess this is the bigger picture, it teaches your kids how to solve problems and fend for themselves. We had to cross a channel, so we couldn't use the trolling motor there since we needed it for the deep water — we said, we'll push the boat as far as we can, and if we can't make it we'll push it up on the beach and sleep in the boat. We didn't have much choice. We made our way, got a ride back with a guide, and showed up at my buddy's house without him — his mom freaked out. He was still back at camp with all the supplies and the boat, and there were other guys camping on the island with him, plenty of food. But yeah, it's a story we look back at and reminisce about, even as parents going, man, that's crazy that I did that.

Tom Rowland: Today there'd be a search party and a helicopter going after that kid, even though you could probably talk to him on the phone and he'd say, I'm fine.

Geoff Arias: We were down at Lostmans, no cell reception, twenty miles from the nearest ramp. But it's a story that bonds us for life.

Tom Rowland: That's a real delicate line to follow when you're raising kids in this world of helicopter parenting — that was the real trick to good parenting for me, knowing when you can see the mistakes about to happen and allowing your kids to make them in a safe spot, and fail. That's really changed with parenting now — a lot of parents don't want anything to happen to their kid, don't want any failure, and I don't think that's good at all.

Geoff Arias: I love that saying — I think I heard it on Rogan's podcast recently — tough times make good men, good times make soft men, and it's this circular perpetuating motion which, if you look through history, is true. We have times of great success, everyone's having a great time, and then the next generation is kind of compromised, and they've gotta learn, and I think we're going through that as a nation.

Risk, Danger, and the Appeal of the Outdoors

My wife and I have different fences as to what's dangerous — my son will be playing with a hook, and I'll let him touch it once so he knows it's sharp. That's ask me how I know. You learn to be careful — it's part of the territory, and you've gotta tell yourself that to some extent with hunting, fishing, and the outdoors. I think that's part of the appeal for a lot of us who love it — there are no rules, it's a little bit figure-it-out-yourself, but it's also that level of danger and risk, whether it's taking a boat to the Marquesas with no reception and no support, hoping you make it back, or stalking prey on a multi-day hunt and hoping you brought enough water and food. I think that's somewhat ingrained in our DNA as humans, to push the boundary — pretty Neanderthal, honestly, but we do it today with technology and different things. We're willing to take a level of risk for the upside, and that's just part of our DNA as people.

An Immigrant Upbringing and No Excuses

Tom Rowland: You've got a really interesting perspective, a good work ethic, a good attitude about so many things. Where does that come from — your upbringing, your parents?

Geoff Arias: I think a lot of it's influenced by what I saw growing up. My dad is an immigrant from Cuba, and early in my life we lived behind my grandparents, who were highly involved in my early years. I was always very proud that I came from a family that came from nothing, really — my dad came here with basically the clothes on his back and made a way for himself. My grandfather worked three or four jobs at times to make it happen. I was raised to really not bring the excuse to the table — it's fine if that's your reason for not doing something, but that's not what you tell others. I think that was ingrained in my dad through that immigrant mentality, that put-your-head-down-and-work mentality.

I was also raised to project an air of confidence, and to know where you want to go — it doesn't mean that's where you end up, but you've gotta have a goal, something you're working toward. Little things — I was always told, if someone asks what you want to study in college, you don't say, I don't know. You just don't. Pick something, it doesn't matter, just pick something, because if you don't know, what are you doing, working with no objective and no goal? I think that mentality shaped a lot of how I approach things, including my experience with cancer — it was just, alright, what's next? There's no time to wallow, no self-pity, the only way to get out of this is to move forward, so how do we move forward, because anything else is just wasting time.

It's a lot of my upbringing — things like, at seven years old I couldn't even pull-start the lawnmower, it was that small, but my dad would pull-start it for me and say, don't let go of the handle, you're gonna mow the lawn. Then I got to the point where I could pull-start it myself — another level of independence, hey, I can go mow lawns on my own now, from this block to this block, that's your territory, go get those lawns, go make that money. So a lot of that drive was self-driven, but a lot of it was enabled by the way I was brought up, which was, yeah, you could go do that.

Diagnosis

Tom Rowland: How did your mindset and the way you were brought up play into the cancer? When you were first diagnosed, did your family come together and say, okay, this is what we're presented with?

Geoff Arias: My dad handles things differently — he gets a little more stressed out about that stuff. For me, I never felt a sense of self-pity, really. Something unique about my story — I had a physical in August and was in tip-top shape, running track, cross country, playing basketball hours upon hours. Come November I started feeling a little down, but I thought it was seasonal flu, allergies, whatever, and got through the holidays. Then sometime in January we had a game, I went up for a rebound, took an elbow to the nose, and the bleeding just wouldn't stop.

We went to see an ENT, who patched things up, but the bleeding came back, and he said he thought there was something bigger going on — go see your primary. My primary couldn't believe the test results, said there must be some error, run it again, wash the machine. My hemoglobin had always historically been high, like sixteen, on the highest end of the spectrum. I showed up that day telling her I'd just come from basketball practice, and my hemoglobin was in the twos. She said, how are you standing up? I said, I can't stand up too quickly, I black out. She said, you just came from basketball practice? So again, I think it's just my mentality — so driven to put your head down and get through it — that I never felt that self-pity. I showed up to the ER, they told me what it was, said we'll take care of you, and I said, alright, you're the doc, tell me what to do. I just saw solutions.

I probably had a positive diagnosis early on — we caught it early enough, and I responded well to treatment, but it didn't come without challenges. One of the side effects from one of the medicines blew out my shoulders and hips — I've had double hip replacement surgery. But again, it was, let's find the solution, let's get on with it, and I came to a point where I said, I can't let this hold me back anymore, I've got a life to live. I know they say the hips only last so many years, but I'm not gonna get those thirty years back if I don't do it. I've always had the ability to spin everything into, what's the positive here, what's the upside. That's how I got through it — next step, next step, when's the next appointment, onto the next thing. It was just a meeting on my calendar, nothing else attached to it.

Can This Mindset Be Taught?

Tom Rowland: Do you think that can be taught to people — how to go through that process?

Geoff Arias: Yes and no. A lot of it can be a programming of the mind, in terms of what you focus on. A lot of people focus negative energy on excuses or reasons why something hasn't happened, when a lot of times it's right there for the taking — they want to come up with every reason for why it hasn't happened for them, when nothing ever happens overnight for those who are successful. A lot of it is a programming of the mind, understanding this isn't a microwave solution — you're not gonna put it in for thirty seconds and have it pop out done. It's something you're gonna have to invest in. My dad really drilled into my mind that everything you do, do it to the best of your ability, and how do you use that to do the next thing.

That's kind of how I approached that whole time in my life — how do we get through this as fast as possible, what do I need to do to make it a smooth road, but also, what can I do in the meantime to take my mind off of it? Because I think the negative creeps in when you spend too much time thinking on it — if you sit there and think about the situation all day, every day, you're gonna find the negative and start focusing on it. So it's about teaching your mind how to focus on certain things and not focus too much on others.

Tom Rowland: It's really interesting, because you could have been talking about your experience with cancer or your experience starting a business and having pitfalls and challenges, and the same explanation could apply to both.

Geoff Arias: Absolutely. Through my early professional life, that was the frustration I had with a lot of the roles I ended up in — not happy with the inability to focus on what I wanted, being told how to do the job, and if I have the solution, great, but that's not our solution. That frustration isn't for everyone, but that's kind of what I preach — define success the way you define success, not how the world defines success. If your definition of success is going to college and becoming a doctor, great. But if it's being a carpenter and making amazing furniture, go do that — you don't need to go to college because a guidance counselor told you to.

Redefining Success

There's success all around us, and that's what I love about South Florida particularly — it's such a thriving hub of business, this immigrant story down here. You've got guys who came from nothing and are now unbelievably successful, running nonprofits, running businesses, whatever that might be — they've found their avenue. And it doesn't have to be about the dollar. My definition of success could be having a healthy family and owning my own house, working for a corporation and being happy there. I think that gets lost in today's society, where there's too much outward definition of success and not enough inward. That mentality has gotten me to where I am now — doing what I want to do, operating the way I want, with the level of freedom to keep learning along the way. That's the beauty of life, never stop learning — if you see everything as a learning opportunity, there's always a positive, because you're learning something, whether it's a negative or positive experience.

Tom Rowland: And then you can apply that somewhere else in your life and turn it into a positive. That's like the line attributed to Conor McGregor — there is no failure, you either win or you learn.

Fear of Failure Versus Fear of Success

Tom Rowland: There are a couple of fears people have. There's the fear of failure, which affects a lot of people — you won't try something because you're afraid you might fail. But then there's the fear of success. I never had the fear of failure, because I failed all the time — I was in the bottom third of my class, small, failing constantly, so failure didn't matter to me. I failed three or four times before I succeeded, and there's a lot of success in there too, but tons of failure involved. Other people who are more athletically talented or smarter have a huge fear of failure, because they've been set up as the best, the natural, the smartest one in the class, and they don't want to be exposed as anything less. So they're afraid to really put it out there. But then there's the fear of success — if I do what I'm talking about doing, how will my friends react, will I still have friends, can I maintain it, would I have to move away, take a different job? That fear of success is sabotaging for a ton of people, me included. I battled the fear of success more than the fear of failure, honestly — I don't know which is harder to get around.

It's funny, you talk about your Cuban heritage and the immigrant mentality, because some of the hardest-working people I know — Cuban immigrants — you look at them and think, you stayed up all night for three nights to edit this, and now you're doing something else. Do you think that's a Cuban thing, an immigrant thing, or just a situation where a person has no other option but to put their head down and work?

Geoff Arias: I think you see it in all immigrants — you see it with the Italians in other parts of the country, with the Irish elsewhere. What's unique to South Florida is how quickly it happened here, probably due to the era it happened in versus the Italian or Irish immigration, which was much longer ago — how quickly that community established itself and started making an impact. Guys who came here at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, like my dad, and by the age of forty are VPs of huge banks. How did that happen — a guy who came here not speaking English is now running an operation a lot of people can't fathom? The guys at the boat manufacturer here are a perfect example — Cuban immigrants who bought the company out of bankruptcy and now it's a monster operation employing hundreds of people, just moving into a brand new factory. Those stories are not rare down here. I think it is a uniquely immigrant thing, not a uniquely ethnic thing.

I think what's unique about that generation of immigrants is their parents came here with the mentality of spend as little money as possible, save up everything to give your kids a better life. Then those kids grow up and think, I don't wanna just save all my money and get by, I want more to life than that — and if I'm gonna make my father's sacrifices worth anything, I've gotta make my kids' life better. So by nature there's this mentality of one-upping what you experienced growing up, which is what you see a lot of down here — if this is where the bar is set, how do I raise it?

An Ownership Mentality

Tom Rowland: So where does that sit with your life now and the goals you have for yourself?

Geoff Arias: It's more of a mentality, work-wise — I attack everything with an ownership mentality, which I think is unique to the relationship I have with my employer. Every decision I make isn't what's easiest for me, it's what decision would I make if this was my company. I think that brings a level of value that isn't typical, and it's an intangible that's hard to find, but it also enables a different level of success, because people see that trust and think, if I can trust him to make those decisions, how much value is that to my company? I'm not hiring an employee, I'm hiring someone to run this division, run the shop.

That's part of the purpose behind my own podcast — I was frustrated with how I saw education approached, still very much a you've-gotta-go-to-school mentality, which again is very much the immigrant upbringing, because you came here and part of what America offers is you're gonna participate in it. But I think in today's world, with how many resources we have via the internet, college is a dying institution, personally. That's shaped by my own experience — I studied accounting, didn't really love it, but it was the safe decision, the one I ended up with after changing my mind a few times, knowing I could make good money if I put my mind to it. Didn't love it through my early professional career, started realizing I like to tell people I'm an operator — just give me what needs to get done and I'll figure it out, I don't care what industry, I don't care what the task is, I just see how to take that elephant down one bite at a time.

I don't think those skill sets are taught enough in today's world — too much of it is memorize this, pass this test, become this person, and that has its place if you want to work for the big companies or become a doctor or lawyer, you've gotta play that game. But we should also be teaching kids how to maximize everything they do — if you wanna start a business, we can teach that too. We see it on Shark Tank, entrepreneurship has become a little overly sexy, in the sense that people think it's easy, and it's not.

Staring Into the Abyss

Tom Rowland: Did you ever hear the Elon Musk quote about being an entrepreneur? Somebody asked him what he tells people who ask what it's like, and he said, well, no one really asks me that, but if they did, I'd say being an entrepreneur is like staring into the black abyss of death while chewing on glass. And then you get going, and you're doing it — I'm paraphrasing, I might be messing it up — and some days it's like staring into the abyss of death while chewing on glass, and some days it's just chewing on glass. That's the rest of the days. It's like the whole thing of an overnight success twenty years in the making. That's why a lot of people look at the sharks on Shark Tank and think, wouldn't that be awesome — but every one of those people has a story of horrible failure and staring into that abyss, and somehow pulling themselves out of it, and here they are today.

Geoff Arias: And it looks like success is just failing enough times.

Tom Rowland: That's a really good way to put it. And that's what we were talking about earlier with kids — if that's the definition of success, what are we doing with our kids right now? There are so many people who won't let their kids fail the smallest thing, won't let them get cut from the football team in third grade. It's like the old story about Michael Jordan getting cut from his basketball team — if that hadn't happened, he might not be Michael Jordan, he might be the guy who works at the car dealership instead of the guy who owns all of them.

Geoff Arias: Or Michael Jordan, the guy who was a high recruit but didn't make it in college. It's like, successful people continue.

Tom Rowland: Right — that failure is sometimes the hard lesson it takes to develop the fire inside that can't be taught. You have to have that fire to be Elon Musk, to be Michael Jordan, to be Conor McGregor. But where does that fire come from? It doesn't come from easy success — it comes from really soul-scarring, disappointing failures.

Geoff Arias: And you tell yourself, that will never happen again. I think even worse is what happens when kids and people are taught to blame others for the failure — oh, you didn't make the team because the coach is bad, or he's running the wrong offense, whatever the excuse is. That, to me, is the worst thing you can do — instead of motivating the kid, you're telling him it's that guy's fault, and it's all backwards.

Tom Rowland: I used to see that all the time — a kid comes off the field and says, the ref did it, and the parents pile on, yeah, that ref's terrible. When my kids would come off saying the ref made bad calls, I was so careful to say, well, sometimes you've gotta beat the other team and the ref. You have to be good enough that there can be a dozen bad calls and you still win — you have to figure out how to overcome all of that and expect the ref is gonna make a bad call, he's a human being, and he might even be a human being doing some home cooking. You have to know that, because when you get into the real world, there's a system that rewards friends of people, and if you're an outsider coming in, that's the ref making a bad call. Are you gonna make excuses, or realize sometimes you have to beat that system too?

Geoff Arias: The world, the system, the job, the career, the sport — whatever it is — isn't catered to your success. It's not the assumption that you're gonna win, just that it's not made for you to be successful, you've gotta get around the system. Another big thing in these failures and learning opportunities is the ability to be retrospective. Everything you go through shapes the way you frame a situation. As you look back on failures — or just experiences, not all of them are failures — the way you view something at thirty might be different from the way you view it at forty, and different again at fifty. It's important to sit back and spend that time in retrospect.

Weakness as Strength

Geoff Arias: If I hadn't been that trout fisherman in Wyoming, do I win the tournament in the Keys, which puts a unique spin on my whole career and makes me more marketable, more approachable, so now I have opportunities that may not exist otherwise? You don't get that framing until you win and experience that success — but then that time frame in your life, which may have sucked, may have been hard, where you thought about quitting, all of a sudden becomes, that's why that happened.

Tom Rowland: That's what we were talking about on your podcast right before this — the concept of weaknesses as strength. That somewhere along the line, what you thought was your biggest weakness will, if you work hard enough on it, turn out to be your greatest strength. And your experience with cancer — that was a weakness in your life, you're like, oh man, this is it. But now, looking back in retrospect, did that turn into a strength you couldn't have bought, couldn't have gone to school for? This is an experiential thing you had, and you overcame it with the help of your family, your doctors, everybody else. But still, at the time, it's your greatest weakness. What do you think about it now?

Geoff Arias: Looking back, there's a couple takeaways. One, I think it kept me somewhat grounded. I wasn't a bad kid, but I was very open to everyone and anything — always willing to explore — and I think there was always the opportunity to fall in with the wrong crowd. I don't think I would have, but who knows, in some alternate universe — what happens if I go away to college, do I stay with my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife? There are little things I look back on in life and think, maybe this is why that happened, which shows me the importance of retrospective thinking.

It also gave me the ability to compartmentalize my life. When I was dealing with doctors and treatments, we were gonna focus on that, get through it, head down, grind it out. But then when I went out into the world and to college, I wasn't a cancer patient — it frustrated me when people would ask how I was feeling, how I was doing, and I know it came from a good place, but for me it was, I'm just a normal person, don't treat me special. We're gonna pretend this doesn't exist, because I'm not gonna let it hinder me — which I think, to this day, benefits me in the roles I'm in, in terms of being able to focus in on whatever I'm doing. If I'm with my wife, I'm with my wife. If I'm with the kids, I'm with the kids. If I'm at work, I'm at work. It enables me to juggle a lot of things while still driving levels of excellence in all those areas, because I'm able to compartmentalize my energy into those areas.

What Geoff Is Most Grateful For

Tom Rowland: What are one or two things you're most grateful for in your life?

Geoff Arias: I'm grateful for the unique upbringing I had, being brought up in a pretty conservative household, because I think that's hard to find today, and it lent me a perspective and exposure I probably wouldn't have had otherwise. You can always go get the liberal agenda or the worldly view on things easily, but to get the yin to that yang is harder to find, and I'm grateful I was brought up with that different upbringing.

The other thing I'm grateful for is that I was born with a thirst for knowledge, this inquisitive mindset — I call it my blessing and my curse, but it's hard for me to walk into places and not see how something could be done better, more efficiently, differently. I think that's gotten me to where I am in my career, that ability to always question everything. And lastly, I'm thankful I had that experience with cancer to get me to where I am today. When I look back at that time, and think about those alternate universes, I somewhat fear if it hadn't happened — which is a different way of putting it, because I don't think a lot of people would ever say, I'm afraid if I didn't have cancer I wouldn't be where I'm at today. People usually don't view it like that — they say, that was terrible, the drugs did this, I had to have hip replacements. I don't ever view it like that. I always view it as, gosh, if that didn't happen, how could this have all gone the way it did? Take those experiences and learn.

Respecting the Journey

Tom Rowland: I like thinking that you have to respect the journey. That's kind of what I tell my kids and my wife — when you have these disappointments, these failures, there's going to be something you learn, something you experience, something you decide will never happen again, something you will never tolerate again, and that guides the future of your life, changes its trajectory. And you have to respect that journey. That's coming from somebody who's fifty-three thinking about myself at twenty — when you're twenty and going through these things, you look back at fifty-three and go, that was a real learning experience, and I'm glad it happened. But when you're twenty, you're like, the world is ending, this sucks, I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel, this is a terrible thing. Then you look back and think, no, that really wasn't a terrible thing — not getting that job, having that girl turn me down in a way that was damaging and embarrassing, was actually a really great thing. But you have to have that retrospect, that time to contemplate where you've been, what it means, how it applies to where you're going, and then apply those lessons to whatever you're doing now.

Business Unusual

Tom Rowland: So tell me about your podcast, because I know we're getting close to time. You started this podcast — you didn't need to. You're a professional, a dad, a husband, you've got plenty of things to do. Why did you start it?

Geoff Arias: It goes back to that second point I touched on, this thirst for learning, for exploring stories and histories. It's funny — podcasts and I have this long history, because I remember when they first came out, my cousin would download them onto her iPod, and we carpooled together in college, and she was always doing that. I thought, man, that seems like a pain, connecting my iPod, waiting for it to download, iTunes always needing an update. I knew what podcasts were, I loved the idea, I just hated the method — again, part of my curse, this can be done better.

Fast forward, I didn't do too much podcast listening, but I always loved the spoken word method of delivery — I was a big sports radio guy, influenced by my dad, who was a big sports radio guy. Trips to Home Depot on the weekend meant sports radio in the car — I didn't grow up listening to music, my dad listened to talk shows, political or sports. That's part of why I have an appreciation for the spoken word and this interview style of podcasting.

In college I met a guy I'd consider a mentor and influence, a buddy named Eamon, who was on another level — running websites and blogs, and he took the playbook for his flag football team in college and made it an ebook and threw it on Amazon. To this day he still gets a twelve dollar auto-deposit from Amazon randomly. He was always a true entrepreneur, also from an immigrant family, I believe. He went to FIU, a good school but not an Ivy League school, and studied accounting with us, and then interviewed with Microsoft for an analyst position. He told me the story — he's in this waiting room with thirty other people in suits, all from Harvard, Duke, Yale, Penn State, Indiana, these blue-chip business schools, and he's thinking, I'm from FIU, not exactly anything to brag about in that room. And he got the job. I followed his career after that, and he ended up at a startup — I've always believed in the saying that you're the average of the five people closest to you, and I carry that throughout life, very aware of the influences shaping who I am. Watching his career was motivating, because excellence strives excellence, and I truly believe that.

So, circling back — fast forward, I became a big fan of, probably the biggest push to do the podcast, Joe Rogan. I loved, and I tell people this all the time, you can hate him, love him, agree with him, disagree with him — if you're listening for those reasons you're listening for the wrong reason, just listen with an open mind, because the vast array of people he has on is mind-boggling. He can hold a conversation with a stand-up comedian for three hours, then interview Elon Musk for two and a half hours, then Robert Downey Jr., then a biologist from Harvard — nothing's off limits, and I love that. A buddy first told me about Rogan back in the early days, when it was just him on the couch with a webcam, like 2009. I started listening in college, fell away from it, came back to it as he moved to YouTube, and really got into it the last couple years, appreciating the amount of information and perspective you can gain. I thought, how can I apply this to my life?

I started brainstorming what that would look like — did I want to get into this, what's the time commitment — and what I struggled with was having the podcast be specific enough but broad enough, because I knew it needed a purpose, you can't just throw a podcast out there and say it's whatever I want to do, that's a hard sales pitch. So I came up with the name Business Unusual, built around the idea that success is a journey, and how do you define success — let's dive into that. Every time I meet someone doing something, running an operation, I sit there and think, how did they get there? Like my client who runs a coffee shop — have you always been running a coffee shop, how did you get into it, there's Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, did you think you were gonna compete, why? All these questions start going through my mind, shaped by the idea that I studied accounting and I'm not doing accounting — what is school really, and how do we learn?

I felt, let's start exploring locally, especially in South Florida, these journeys people have taken to get where they are today, because all too often people think success is this overnight thing, and it's not — it's a journey shaped by little experiences that hopefully, retrospectively, you learn from to get to whatever you define as success. And success doesn't have to be a CEO making two million dollars — it could be a guy who just wants to fish every day and is happy making sixty or eighty thousand a year, living on the water, running his boat every day, that's what he wants to do. It doesn't have to be a monetary tie or a title — it could be a stay-at-home mom who launched a little side business. How do you balance all that out, how do you take care of three kids and run the side hustle — like the story of my friend who launched a coconut butter business at the peak of the CrossFit paleo diet craze, got it into Wegmans and a couple regional stores, and then made an exit, because she wanted to focus on her family. She sold the company, made some money, and I love exploring how that shaped how she raises her kids, why that happened at that stage in her life, why she started a business she then felt she needed to get out of to take the next step.

A lot of people would see that as, oh man, where could that have gone, maybe she could have been a billionaire — she doesn't view it like that. It was great, she learned what she needed to, made some money, made a lot of mistakes, but now it's enabling what she's really passionate about, which is stay-at-home moms working — she started a virtual assistant training program, helping moms learn what a virtual assistant is and how to sell themselves as one. I love stories like that, because would she be doing that if she hadn't done what she did early on? Probably not. Would I have been where I am today if I hadn't gone through cancer? There's a high probability it would look different.

Tom Rowland: It's definitely gonna look different, and you can't second-guess all of it. Some people, when I've been on other podcasts, ask, what do you regret? There's plenty of things that weren't the best decisions, but I don't know that I regret any of them, because they all led me here, and I'm exactly where I want to be, really happy and fulfilled in my life. And I know a lot of that comes from the mistakes I've made, from the places I've been that I shouldn't have been. It's one thing to say, I wish that had never happened — but if it had never happened, you might not be here. And if you're really super happy, then you have to respect the journey.

Geoff Arias: If I want people to take one thing away from my podcast, it would be that — to start viewing everything they go through as a learning opportunity, and as the frame their life is going to fit into. There's a reason this is happening, it's gonna change your perspective on something. Success is a grind, success can be a difficult journey, success is not linear — it's peaks and valleys, ups and downs. I just want to speak to anyone who has that story, because I love it.

Tom Rowland: Where do people find it?

Geoff Arias: It's on Spotify and iTunes, called Business Unusual. I debated a name change, because apparently Barbara from Shark Tank has a similar name for her podcast — I said, if it's an issue that I'm competing with Barbara, I'll address it. On Instagram it's biz.unusual, and on Facebook the page is Business Unusual. Subscribe on Spotify or iTunes.

Tom Rowland: Alright, well, you're obviously great at it. This has been one of the better podcasts we've ever done, and you're great at it.

Geoff Arias: Thank you, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Tom Rowland: Absolutely. It's great to see you. Congratulations on all your success, and certainly on your mindset — it's a winning mindset, and that's super important. Alright, that's Geoff Arias, find him on Business Unusual, and we'll be back next week.