MI Bruce Poon Tip
Jaime: Thanks so much for being here at Millionaire Insiders. I’m so excited to have Bruce Poon Tip
back on the show. I know the first time we talked there was a ton of information, especially about
finding your purpose. He’s the author of a book called “Looptail” and also the owner of a company
called G Adventures, which is a kickass travel company. What I wanted to get into today, though, is
really about finding your purpose – because he really talked about how important it is and I know a
lot of you are sitting there going ‘Great… I don’t know how to do that!’ So, Bruce, thanks so much for
being here right now.
Bruce: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jaime: Some people are in corporate jobs, some people are in a business right now, but a lot of
people listening right now can’t pinpoint their purpose. If you ask them, usually people blather, like
‘Maybe it’s this…’ How did you get so clear on what your purpose is?
Bruce: You have to spend time on it. I think that we get so busy and people get scared because it
goes into that self-help realm and it’s not suitable. As entrepreneurs, we like to think that we’re
aggressive in business and all of that, but business is about self-evaluation, about getting better and
stronger and getting faster as a business. In order to do that, you have to be able to self-evaluate to
make sure that you cover your weaknesses. Find where your weaknesses are and make sure you
make them strengths. In order to find your purpose, I don’t think it’s really that hard, but you do
have to consciously change the way you think because you have to spend time on it. You have to just
look and see. I think it’s complicated for people because people think of it in a grand sense, as
opposed to narrowing it down to their lives, narrowing it down to the small parts of their lives.
Because yo have different purposes between what your purpose is for your family, and you can even
narrow it down there because it’s a different relationship with your parents and your siblings and
your kids and your husband, but understand whether all of those relationships that are part of your
life add pressure to your life and when you start the business or the job that you want to, every
decision you make reflects on everything else. Because if you’re unhappy in your job you have to
spend all of this time separating your work and your life because your job is so horrible. That energy
is wasted and it filters right down to all of the other parts and relationships in your business. So you
have to find passion in what you do and in order to do that you have to know what your passion is
about. You have to spend some time thinking about it.
Jaime: So what does that time look like? I know a lot of the time we’ll be like ‘Okay, great…’ but
what do we do? Just sit there and think? Do we meditate on it? What do we do to spend that time to
really go into it?
Bruce: I think everybody’s different. Meditation is great. I’m a big yoga practitioner. I’m not pitching
yoga here. Lots of people like lists – I know lots of people who like to sit down and write lists. People
just love to write lists. Maybe that’s for different people. In whatever way, you need to gather your
thoughts. You have to start with a circle with yourself in the middle and then you put in all the
different relationships you have in the world, that are in your little world. You create your own little
circle around you, because your world circles around you. Your happiness is at the core of you,
everything else around you has to be able to reflect on that. So, as I said, in that little circle you
might have your friends, and maybe you might even want to get more personal, with your old school
friends, some people might include people that they’ve known since kindergarten even though they
have nothing in common any more, some people have more recent friends, people have kids, their
siblings, brother and sisters, their parents, their husbands or wives, and then there’s your employer,
maybe your immediate manager, all of those people who have direct access to you, that somehow
impact your life. You have to create a purpose in that relationship and once you’ve got it
documented on a piece of paper and know who all of those people are, you then start working on
what the purpose of each of those individual relationships is. Like if your purpose with your boss is
to make him look good and to perform at a certain level, achieve results, make sure you hit your
deadlines, that’s your purpose. Then, once you know that, maybe you can work on creating a better
relationship with your boss, on a more intimate level where you can get to know a little bit about
where they come from, what their motivations are, know their triggers and create a bit more of a
relationship that goes beyond just work. It’s not necessary, but in order for you to achieve happiness
you have to have that connectiveness with people. You can’t just work for someone you have no
connection to. I don’t believe you can do that anymore – you can do a good job but you can’t be
happy doing it. That’s where you get into the situation, or I think it’s more of a disease, where
people have to separate their work and their personal life, because work/life balance means work is
here, then I cut it off at 5 o’clock and then I go home and this is my personal life. If you don’t have
the integrity, and integrity is short for integration, integrating all parts of your brain so that
everything flows. That’s how some people can work for a tobacco company or work for a mining
company and they go home and recycle and teach their kids how to recycle and do things like that,
because you have to separate these things in your brain and that lacks integrity because you don’t
have the integration and that takes a lot of energy, it’s a very difficult and horrible way to live. I think
that when you are able to integrate those two things together in your life and are able to truly love
what you do, no matter what it is you do, you have to have that connectiveness of the people, you
have to find a purpose in all of those relationships that exist in work and they have to blend
together. You can’t have integrity with this boss and have a completely different relationship with
how you connect with your brothers and sisters. I mean the connection with your brothers and
sisters is obviously way deeper, way more personal, but there should be a framework of core values
in which you operate and that’s your grid. That’s your grid of how you run your life; that’s your
moral fiber, that’s your existence and that’s what creates your grid – because everyone thinks
differently. Some people are very aspirational, they’re very aspiration-based, they want to achieve
and money really drives them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but just make sure where it fits in
and how it affects every aspect of your little circle, your little world, and make sure there’s integrity
between all of them, that they all work together. There’s nothing wrong with achieving your dreams,
being aggressive and going after whatever it is you want, that you value as successful, but make sure
you understand it. Some people value helping others and doing charity work, working for non-profits
their whole life, and some people work for banks or Wall Street and money means a lot to them. I’m
not saying that either of those is right or wrong but just make sure that it reflects your grid, it
reflects around your purpose, with everyone and everything that’s around you, so you don’t create
those separations, that lack of integrity in your life, like ‘Okay, I’m going to deal with my parents this
way, my job this way and I’m going to draw a line between work and home life because this is my
personal life, this is my work life.’ Many people say that work/life balance is about cutting off work
or not working long hours. I’m not big on working long hours but you should love what you do and if
at times you have to work long hours you should be willing to do it because that’s what makes
people successful. If you have to cut off at 5 o’clock, and you shut off your phone and you’re like
‘Now I’m going into my personal life,’ that’s a very weird way to live, I find.
Jaime: Listening to what you’re saying, I want to get your definition of purpose. Because a lot of
times people will go ‘Okay. This sentence right here, that’s my life’s purpose,’ and they distill it
down, but it sounds as though you’re saying we have a whole bunch of different things and we want
to make sure they’re in alignment.
Bruce: It boils down to core values; your purpose comes out of your core values. What’s important
to your values? As a company, we have five distinct core values about changing people’s lives, doing
the right thing, creating happiness – all of these things are important about how we drive our
relationships as a company. When you put those down, there’s no specific number, but it should be
very evident, once you start mapping out all the different people and all the different relationships,
what’s important. There’s no reason why you should be ‘Okay, my relationship with my brother and
my mom or dad is this. When I’m at work, it’s that.’ There shouldn’t be a line, it should all work
together, and that’s how you start narrowing down your purpose.
Jaime: How do you find those core values? Your company has those – how did you find them?
Bruce: How did I find them for the company?
Jaime: And for you. You have them too.
Bruce: There were three groups of 17 people randomly selected from around the world – Africa,
India, Asia – people came from all over the world, I flew them to Vegas, if you can believe it, and we
sat in a room and I said ‘What’s important to you in this company?’ Because I didn’t know. I asked
everyone ‘What is your purpose? What is important to you? How do you see our customers? What’s
important to them?’ and we distilled it down to five. They’re not even sentences because they were
people from all different cultures with different languages. I met the CEO of Netflix and their core
values is 14 pages long – 14 pages, single spaced, huge. I said ‘If you were a cook on a trek for us in
Africa, you would not be able to understand 14 pages of corporate.’ We had to distill it into very
simple, basic things that drive what we believe as a company. But the process shouldn’t be any
different in your lives. When you say ‘What’s important to relationships with people? Or your life or
what you want to achieve?’ you put all of those things together. People are just all very different. To
some people, integrity, honesty, loyalty are things that are the foundations of their existence and
the foundation of anyone they associate with, but for some people, it’s not that they don’t need
those things, it’s just not as important. Some people want to achieve big things – they want to be
aggressive, they want to go after success, their success is about aspirations and getting promotions.
There’s nothing wrong with that, just as long as it’s all in line with your spirit, it’s understood, and all
of that is integrated into your purpose. Does that make sense?
Jaime: It does make sense. Especially having core values. Do you have separate core values for your
business and your personal life or do you not have core values for your personal life or are they one
and the same?
Bruce: For me they are the same. I have different things to my kids – I have kids and they’re at that
age now where they’re in a completely dimension, but my core values aren’t any different to how I
deal with my kids, really, but my kids certainly add a different dimension to my existence and my
leadership and everything that I do, but how I manage my life and my core values with the company
isn’t very different to how I deal with my children and my family.
Jaime: So let’s say we have those core values and really start feeling what that is, how do we
embody them? Do you have them up on the wall? How do you remind yourself? Sometimes people
will go through exercises, like ‘This person told me to do this as an exercise,’ and we do it and it
sticks on our computer, never to be seen again. So how do we implement and really embody it?
Bruce: First of all, I would say keep it very simple. Our core values aren’t even sentences, there are
very words. For some of them we’ll just have words, like five words that mean everything to them,
and when you make any decision in life you go through those words. If you’re buying a house, you
say ‘Okay, does this represent everything that’s relevant for me in my life at my stage right now?’
The other thing is, it’s a live document – once it’s written, it doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. Our
lives are moving goalposts, they change every day, depending on different things, so don’t think
‘This is it today,’ – it’s a live document. You can remember it any way that will enable you to
remember it. The best thing to do is to make it simple and keep it to the core that’s important to
you. If someone comes to you with an idea or a new job and you put it through your grid of what’s
really core important to you, it might be ‘Oh, it lacks a bit of this,’ and you have to be strong to say
‘That doesn’t fit within my goals. It does not fit within my purpose,’ because you’ll get yourself into
situations, and I see this over and over again, when people chase money and it’s not necessarily the
best decision for their moral compass or their purpose compass. That lack of authenticity will catch
up with you. It always does, and I rest comfortably knowing that when people decide that they want
to go down a path that isn’t necessarily within their authenticity, it’ll catch up on them. It will catch
up on them eventually.
Jaime: So they’re guides, they help you make decisions, they help you move forward. They probably
make things a lot easier, because once you know that these are important to you, once you start
following that path, good things usually come.
Bruce: It’s about creating a better version of yourself. These things keep you focused. People are so
fear-based because they’re scared, because it’s so overwhelming, but if you have all of those things
that are just so important and you distill it down to the few core things that mean some to you,
you’ll lose a lot of that fear and you’ll lose a lot of that ability for you to create fear, because fear
doesn’t really exist, we all manufacture it. But if we know that this is a right fit, this works within my
values, this works within my system, I can be good at this, I can do this, it eliminates all of that fear.
You can compromise to a certain extent, but if you compromise too much and you’re not
comfortable, that’s where fear comes in – or you’re scared because you don’t know what your
limitations are, people don’t do that homework at the beginning. What’s important to you? What do
you want to achieve? What is your purpose? I want to take care of my family, I want to take care of
my kids, I want to make a certain amount of money or I want to spend more time with my kids.
Some people have those things that are important. Some people are motivated by free time, some
people are motivated by giving more to their families or their kids, some people want to support
their family, some people want more money to buy a sports car. Whatever it is – just be clear. There
are no right or wrong answers. Then you can develop the values that actually drive that success and
then you create your limits in what you’re willing to do, because sometimes in business you have to
make decisions that are very aggressive, very tough and stone cold. They lack emotion sometimes,
like when you have to fire people or you have to restructure or you have to make really difficult
decisions. You have to do it within your grid and do it the way that you feel comfortable, otherwise it
builds up all of that fear and you’ll be crippled by it.
Jaime: I love this. Thank you so much Bruce, I really, really appreciate it. We’re going to create an
action guide, step-by-step on going through and figuring out that connectiveness, what those
purposes are, and figuring our your core values, so that way people can actually take something
away from this. So I really, really appreciate you being here. Where can we find out more about you,
in general?
Bruce: You can go to our website for trips at gadventures.com. My book, “Looptail”, has a website at
looptail.com and it’s also available in any book store or any online retailer. It was a New York Times
bestseller and the forward is written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It’s been very successful and a
very fun project to write.
Jaime: So impressive and everyone should pick that up today. Thanks so much for coming on today,
Bruce, I really appreciate it.
Bruce: Thank you. Thanks for having me.