Settling for a career that doesn’t spark joy is a choice you don’t have to make. In this inspiring conversation, George Appling entrepreneur, author, and self-described “passionpreneur” shares how to avoid settling and instead pick your path with intention. Drawing from his eclectic journey from global consulting to leading in the cell phone industry and now building passion-driven ventures like a Medieval theme park, George unpacks the framework behind his book Don’t Settle: A Pick-Your-Path Guide to Intentional Work.

He outlines five unique paths to align passion and career, the power of role models, mentors, and accountability partners, and why persistence, ownership, and clarity are essential for meaningful success.

Check out the full series of Career Sessions, Career Lessons podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/george-appling/.

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How To Avoid Settling And Pick Your Path With Intention, With George Appling

Passionpreneur And Owner Of A Medieval Theme Park And Much More

Journey Of A Passionpreneur: George Appling’s Unique Career Story

My guest is George Appling, who describes himself as a Passionpreneur. He creates and builds businesses that he truly loves, and he wants to help others do the same. His leading business is a medieval theme park just outside of Austin, Texas. In our discussion, we’re going to be talking about George’s new career guidance book, Don’t Settle: A Pick Your Path Guide to Intentional Work, and we’ll also cover George’s unique career journey. Let’s get going. George, welcome and thanks for doing the show with me.

I’m happy to be here.

It’s good to have you, and I’m looking forward to diving into your background and your book. Before we get to your book, why don’t you give us a quick overview of your background?

My career has had three phases. Phase one was strategy consulting where I worked at McKinsey & Co., and Booz & Company, just helping solve problems for usually Fortune 500-ish enterprises. Phase two with cell phones. I worked at Siemens making cell phones. I was the COO of Brightstar, the world’s largest cell phone distribution company.

The big job, I was the chairman and CEO of a US-based cell fund distribution company with about $1 billion in revenue. Phase three, which is the fun part, is I call Passionpreneur. I’ve got eight companies that I’m completely in love with. I spend my time running businesses where I have a genuine, deep affection for them. The core being a medieval theme park, what most Americans call a Renaissance festival outside of Austin, Texas.

I definitely want to come back to that, but I do have one question before we dive into talking about your book Don’t Settle, which is how big are the turkeys that produce Renaissance fair turkey legs?

Huge. There’s always this rumor that they’re not real turkey legs. People are always saying they’re emu or something, but I have inspected the box from the Sysco, the food distribution people, and it says turkey legs. I think they’re legitimate turkey legs, but they are huge.

Yeah, they really are huge at the amusement parks too. Every time you see somebody walking by with them, I’ve always been left to wonder is there some prehistoric species of turkeys that’s still out there.

If I’m not mistaken, turkeys are a Western hemisphere creature. This idea that they belong at a 16th century, or in my case, 12th century English village, is completely anachronistic. Somehow, turkey legs are the iconic food of the Renaissance festival.

You have sacrificed accuracy for the sake of crowd pleasing.

We have. It’s over 1,000 calories. You eat one of those, you’re good for a while.

“Don’t Settle”: The Genesis Of A Career Guidance Revolution

We’ll come back to the Renaissance fair and your particular version of it. Let’s talk about your book Don’t Settle. What inspired you to write it?

I had been thinking about this book for fifteen years or something like that, and constantly taking notes. I wasn’t taking notes about this book. I was taking notes about a book that might be useful to people. At some point, it congealed and then I was like, “I’ve got the framework, I’ve got the outline. I understand what it is I’m trying to say,” and then brought it to life.

Fundamentally, the book is a framework through which the reader can choose 1 of 5 paths, a path being a definition of the relationship between their passion and their work. Half the successful people will say, “You have to follow your passion,” and half the successful people will say, “That’s a really dumb idea.” I think that’s too simplistic. I’ve created five different ways your work and your passion can relate to each other, and then developed a framework that you can choose the one that’s right for you.

Your book suggests an active choice. Why do you think most people settle or feel like they’re settling in their work lives?

I spend a lot of time reading psychology, and what I understand is that the number one problem with humans when they go for counseling is a belief that they have agency, a belief that they can make decisions that will make their lives better. There’s just a very large percentage of people who don’t believe that. They don’t believe that they can make choices that will make their lives better.

Hurdle number one for mental health practitioners is yes, you can. In fact, if you did 1 pushup yesterday, you can do 2 tomorrow, and that will be better. Your life will be better if you do 2 tomorrow, and it’ll be even better if you do 3 the next day. I think there’s this belief that, “I can’t make a decision. I can’t make a choice that’s going to make my life better, because there it things are too hard or too hopeless.” Once you get over that, then my core premises, if you make the decision intentionally on how you’re passion and your work are going to relate to each other, then you will be happier, more productive and more fulfilled.

You like to ask people the question, “What does your ideal life look like?”

Yeah. I love that question.

Why is it so powerful in your view?

People don’t think about that enough. What does your ideal life look like? Most of the time, I ask people that question, and their eyes get big, and they slump their shoulders a little bit and go, “I haven’t thought about that.” They try to get out of it, and I say, “No, go ahead. Think about it now,” and they do. Invariably, they’re glad that they did because it’s a very helpful question to paint a picture of where you want to be. Of course, I back into, “Let’s talk about a next step. Let’s take one step toward that vision of the future. “if we talk again, let’s say as a coaching client, for example, we’ll say, “We took that step. What’s the next one?”

Yeah, it’s a great question. I thought about it for myself when I read it, and it does prompt you to go deeper than you might otherwise go and to blend the professional and the personal, which I think sometimes people deliberately keep separate. It’s like I’m going to enjoy my personal life, but I’m going to tolerate my professional life. It comes back a little bit to your point on agency from a minute ago.

If you can think about it, and you’ve obviously done this in spades with the way that you’re approaching your professional life right now, you can make it work holistically, but it takes being deliberate about it. You used the word intention, and I know that intention is a key word for you. I wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit about why that word matters so much and how it ripples through the book.

The Power Of Intentionality: Purpose As An Antidote To Hopelessness

I think the intentionality is what gives you a sense of purpose. If I step back as to really why did I put the book in the world, it’s targeted for young people. I think everybody who’s reading the book tells me they’re getting something out of it. For the most part, it’s targeted at people say 17 to 21 years old. What’s happening in that cohort is in 2023, the CDC, Center for Disease Control in the US, did a survey and 43% of young people in America said they experienced persistent feelings of hopelessness.

Of course, we all read how the incidence rate of anxiety and depression has more than doubled in young people. We know that anxiety and depression has doubled amongst young people. We know that 43% say they experience persistent feelings of hopelessness. We know that purpose is an antidote to hopelessness. My belief is the intentionality of the choice of how is my work and how will my passion and my work relate to each other, and then there’s a work plan with that choice from the book. That intentionality will give you a sense of purpose, which then is one of the best antidotes we can find to hopelessness.

How do you push past that fear? If fear is keeping you from pursuing an intentional professional path, how do you push past that?

I really tried to make the book a workbook. There are even these blank spaces in the book where you can write things down with a pencil.

I love those pages. It gave me a sense of progress that I was reading faster.

I get a bunch of people who say they got halfway through the book and realize, “He was right. I should have been filling in these blanks.” They’ll go back and fill in the blanks. I have these five paths, and each path has a chapter on its own, and the chapter’s laying out a work plan. Here’s the five next things you got to do, and let’s create that plan and put a timeline on it.

The action steps aren’t scary. I lay out these action steps that are not scary and coach the reader to put them on a timeline. It’s also like fear of moving forward. The key in my experience is step one, and once you take one step, then you have a good chance of snowballing, which is why I really aim at here’s the next step. It’s not scary, and that’s easy, and it’s only going to take you ten minutes to do it. Let’s take that step.

It’s a little bit of nudge theory, and I think you had this right at the end of the book, 1.0 to 365 is 1.0, 1.01 to 365 is 37.

I’ve run around giving a talk about my book to university classes, and I always end with that like, “1.01 raised to the 365 is 37, so just take one step, get 1% better every day or take 1% step every day, and it add up to 37. It’s huge.”

Let’s talk about the five paths. We’ll come back to some of the earlier content of the book, but let’s just dive into the five paths. Why don’t you walk us through what the five are?

Beyond “Follow Your Passion”: Navigating The Five Paths To Fulfillment

Sure. The first one is the passion path. That is, of course, aligning your work and your passion now. I sometimes call it the passion now path. That tends to work for people who know what their passion is, and they know that they can make enough money from it to achieve their financial goals, which tends to mean their financial goals are very limited. It’s rare to have significant economic success following a passion at twenty years old. You don’t want to choose that path unless your financial expectations are low. That’s one way your passion work can relate, is the passion now path.

George Appling: It’s rare to have significant economic success following a passion at 20. Don’t choose that path unless financial expectations are low.

The second is independent, meaning your passion and your work don’t have anything to do with each other. For example, I say this only half joking when I talk to classes. I say, “If your only passions are smoking pot and playing video games, you’re probably not going to make a living at that.” I’ve got this professor at A&M who’s a good friend, and he is like, “You could probably make a living at that.”

Maybe the video game part.

I didn’t realize this, but the global video game industry is several times bigger than the global movie industry. It’s like $400 billion a year in revenue or something. Video games are massive. Anyway, if you can’t monetize a passion, then the independent path is you’re doing a career that funds your passions on the side. It’s very much a default. People fall into that. The world does that to you. My belief is that if you consciously choose that path, you’re going to be happier with it. If you say, “I’m choosing this path because it makes sense for me, it’s the right answer for me,” I think you’re going to be happier and more productive as opposed to the economy doing that to you, or life defaulting that to you.

The third is an experiment. That tends to be for people who don’t know what their passion is. Experiment, meaning go try a bunch of things, expose yourself to a bunch of things. In the book, there’s a bunch of guidelines because you don’t want to change organizations every year or 2 for 10 years, because then people are going to think you don’t have the loyalty gene.

You can try different roles inside of an existing organization. You can try different geographies inside of an existing organization. You can change organizations every 3 years say, or even every 2 years. Just do that a couple of times. It’s bounce around a little bit and expose yourself to a lot of stuff, intentionally looking for a spark, a spark of something that excites you and energizes you and then dig into that to see if you can cultivate that into a passion. Passions are often cultivated. Sometimes, it takes work to generate a true passion for a topic.

The fourth is the money path. Those were all of our friends from Harvard Business School who went to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. They just had to be rich and they couldn’t have any peace unless they were wealthy. There’s a certain section of the framework where if your need for financial security is really high, you might want to do the money path.

Finally, the path that I did is the balance path. The balance path is you do want to align your passion and your work, but not yet. What you want to do is you want to maximize the probability of that success by working a more traditional career to build capabilities, capital, brand, network, whatever it is you need to build to increase the probability of success, of monetizing a passion later on.

Of course, the main guidance there is when you’re in that “regular career,” be intentional about what you’re learning. Learn the things that are going to help you succeed when you switch over to monetizing a passion later, be that digital marketing or procurement or whatever it is you need to know, to succeed monetizing passion later in life.

George Appling: When you’re in that ‘regular career,’ be intentional about what you’re learning. Learn the things that will help you succeed when you switch to monetizing your passion later.

Those are the five paths. The cool thing I think about it is that, ultimately, I think everybody can end up on the passion path. It’s really just a question of when. The passion path is now the independent path. A lot of people, I find they do the independent path, they retire, and in their retirement years, they end up doing something they’re passionate about, which is cool. The experiment path is, hopefully, once you find that spark, you cultivate that passion, then you can figure out, “All right, what’s next? Do I want to do the passion now path after experiment, or do I want to do the balance path and then hop to passion later?”

The money path, I put some effort in the book saying, check yourself after you’ve got a bunch of money in the bank and see is that really what you want to continue doing or can you switch over? For example, I think Scott Galloway, he’s my exemplar of the money path. He tells all these stories about why he was driven to be on the money path, or what I call the money path. In his mid-50s, he switched. I think he’s following his passion now. Of course, balanced path, the aim is to build those capabilities or wealth or brand or network to be able to follow the passion path later. Everybody can end up there. It’s just a question of when and how.

How did you come to realize that the balanced path was the one that you wanted to pursue?

I was driven to have financial security, and I was driven to build capabilities. All the while doing that, I had in mind, I don’t know if people still think this way, but when we were young, there was this idea of the number. How much money do you need to have in a bank to be free and then go do what you want to do? Very popular concept when I was younger.

I had in mind the number. I’m going to save that much, and then I’m going to be financially secure, and while I’m getting there, I’m going to build a broad set of capabilities so that when I am free and I have hit the number, I can do whatever it is I want to do. That was my animated idea in my 20s, and it turned out, then 20 years later, I decided to call that the balanced path.

Cultivating Your Career Crew: Role Models, Mentors, And Accountability

You talk earlier in the book about having a support crew. You particularly talk about the importance of three different types of people, role models, mentors, and accountability partners. Talk about why having each of those makes a difference.

I think role models are inspirational. There’s a great value to seeing someone that has done or is doing what you want to do and think, “This is possible. I can do that.” I think the primary purpose of the role model is to inspire you. You can learn how did they get to where they are, and what can I take away from that?

In my journey, I think mentors are truly invaluable. I think the young people in the world are underinvesting in mentors. It’s partly fear. I always say this when I talk to university classes. If you go ask 10 very successful middle-aged people for lunch, it might surprise you how many of them say yes. It might be 6, it might be 8, and it may be sometimes it takes 3 months to book.

I think you might be underestimating how many successful middle-aged people will say, “Sure, I’ll have lunch with you,” and then you can pick their brain, but that’s different. A real mentor is someone who is coaching you along the path. I think that’s how you find a mentor. If you’re twenty years old, you’ve got to go ask someone to be your mentor. I think that young people need to do that.

It’s hard to overestimate the value of having someone who’s been there, done that on your side. There’s a great peace and comfort with having a mentor that doesn’t want anything from you. They just want you to succeed. There’s a whole bunch of psychological evidence that people with role models and mentors are more likely to achieve what they want than people without. It’s statistically true.

Of course, accountability partners, if you’re going through my book, for example, I suggest having an accountability partner when you’re going through the book. The idea there is that you’re more likely to do it. You’re more likely to do the work if you are doing it with someone else. It’s like going to the gym. You’re more likely to do it if you have an appointment with a friend to meet there. You’re far more likely to go. Accountability partners are about maximizing the probability that you do the work.

I think people underestimate the importance of having people around them in whatever form, role model or mentor or an accountability partner. They feel like they should go it alone. They feel like people aren’t going to be willing to invest in helping them. I do think people underestimate the extent to which, as you said a second ago, middle-aged successful people will actually spend a few minutes of time with you.

I know when I was doing a job search, this probably goes back twenty years when I was leaving McKinsey, actually. I talked to so many people who I didn’t know before that, and they were willing to take fifteen minutes and help me understand what connections they could help with. They would make introductions, and I lived off of those informational interviews or whatever you want to call them for months, doing hundreds of those calls with people.

I think a lot of people are afraid to just ask because they feel like this person will never give me the time. A lot of people won’t. You can’t be dissuaded by that. I think you make the point in the book. It’s like, if you can’t give up after trying three people and trying to generalize that to say, “The whole world won’t help me because these three people wouldn’t,” you’ll definitely find people eventually.

You will. If you ask 10 people to talk to you, and you only get 2 yeses, those 2 yeses could change your life. Your life will be better because of those two yeses. Completely ignore the 8 noes and dive into those 2 yeses and learn from them what you can learn from them.

I describe job searches, and I think some of this more generally as I use a baseball analogy, it’s a little bit like the game of baseball, except you want to get as many at-bats as you can, but you only need one hit. You don’t have to be a 300 hitter, you just need 1 hit. If you’re not going to get that one hit, if you don’t step up to the plate enough times.

I didn’t want to miss something you mentioned a minute ago about people going it alone and underinvesting in the handful of people around them. I’d be remiss to not point out there’s this Harvard study that’s been going on for like 85 years. They followed a group of people, several hundred, like 700 or something people for that entire period, and a few of them are still alive, and they collected data on them for 85 years and correlated that with everything they could think of.

The number one insight from that analysis was that human happiness is more correlated with quality of relationships than anything else, be it money or health or all these important things. Having a few people that you are deeply close to, genuinely close to, that’s the highest variable correlating with human happiness. I’m always suggesting to people that you have to cultivate that. You have to make that happen. Don’t let the depth of your friendships be default. Be intentional about going deep with three people because that’s what’s going to drive a happiness in human being.

George Appling: Don’t let the depth of your friendships be the default. Be intentional about going deep with three people, because that’s what drives happiness.

That study is like the mother of all longitudinal studies. It’s amazing how long that they’ve carried it on, but it has provided just an incredible amount of interesting information based on a lifetime worth of study of that population. It’s pretty amazing.

It’s got to be one of the most cited studies. It’s hard to read about anything about life, the universe and everything without reading about that 80-year Harvard study.

The EPO Framework: Expectations, Persistence, And Ownership In Your Career

Apart from having these support people, you also talk about the importance. You have an acronym you coined for this, EPO, Expectation, Persistence, Ownership to help bring that into the conversation.

Expectations are so important. There’s a one of my favorite thinkers in the world is a guy named Arthur C. Brooks. He’s at Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Community School writes a column for the Atlantic. He likes to talk about happiness as an equation where relative to expectations, it’s how you’re feeling and what you have and what you’re doing, but it’s all relative to what you expected.

He doesn’t use these words, but I say happiness equals reality minus expectations. It’s the same idea. You can manage both sides of that equation. People forget that. I think being clear about what is it you really need versus what is it you really want, what’s important, what’s not so important, I think, means a lot in the happiness equation.

Persistence is probably the most important human attribute there is. There’s a great book from the last few years named Grit by Angela Duckworth. Grit is persistence. She created this index to score a person’s grittiness and then correlated that with all the things. Of course, not surprisingly, grittiness or persistence is correlated with all the good things. I think that’s hard to cultivate, but she lays out various pieces of guidance on how to cultivate that.

I think cultivating your persistence is extremely important. I think trying to inculcate persistence in your kids, which is hard, but I think it’s really important. That’s something that I’ve been trying to do. Ownership just gets back to this agency idea that we talked about earlier. It’s don’t let life do life to you. It’s your life. Own it. You decide on the steps. You have agency to take actions to make your life better. You may not believe that, but everybody can make decisions that’ll make their life better. That’s this idea of ownership.

I think it’s important. You bring in the book Duckworth, you bring in Carol Dweck and growth mindset. You bring in Shirzad Chamin’s positive intelligence and his concept of mental saboteurs, which we all have that get in the way. At one point, I think you talk about both the mental saboteurs and what you call cognitive distortions. All of these things get in the way. They get in the way of the reality, expectations, our persistence and our ownership.

We think we aren’t ever going to get better. We don’t deserve to get better. There are all these forces working against us. It’s hard sometimes to get past that. Back to your ultimate point, which is about agency. If you don’t believe you’ve got agency in this world, then you’re just going to get pulled through by whatever forces are acting around you.

I’m a huge fan of Shirzad Chamine’s positive intelligence movement, which is fundamentally what he is doing is he’s got these ten universal mental saboteurs. I won’t go through all ten. I couldn’t even remember all ten, but you can rank them for you for free on his website, PositiveIntelligence.com. The big one that he says everybody has is the judge. The judge is the voice in your head that says what’s wrong with you and what’s wrong with everyone else.

What’s wrong with the world in this situation is everybody has the judge. There are all these other ones, like the victim and the overachiever and the stickler, which is a perfectionist, all these things. What he’s doing is if you rank your mental saboteurs and you just pick the top two and learn to recognize them and learn that voice in your head, go, “That’s my victim talking.”

He can take you through these exercises that gets your mental saboteur to step aside. You get back to what he calls the sage mind, which is the awareness that you do have mental saboteurs, and that one was talking to you, but it needs to go be quiet now and get back to your stable sage mind. I absolutely love that stuff.

You’re also a big fan of Ikigai, which I think you devote for four chapters to in the book.

I blow it up.

For those who aren’t familiar, walk us through Ikigai and your views on it.

Ikigai is a Japanese concept, and it’s a framework of four circles that are overlapping. I had a printout of Ikigai on the back of my desk for twenty years or more. Ikigai is Japanese concept meaning reason for being, and your reason for being lies at the intersection of these four circles. What you’re good at, what you can get paid for, what you love and what the world needs.

The idea is, if you are spending your time in the middle of those 4 things, meaning all 4 are satisfied, you’re good at it, you can get paid for it, the world needs it and you love it. If you can spend your time there, that’s your reason for being, that’s your Ikigai. I’ve just loved that forever. That became the inspiration for the book because I found the framework to not be tactical.

You can write down 10 things you’re good at and 10 things you can get paid for, and 10 things the world needs, and 10 things you love and not have anything in the middle. I thought that the framework isn’t quite actionable enough. That’s when I synthesize the 4 circles into 1 question, which is, can I monetize the passion? The passion captures the love part, but can I monetize? It captures the world needs it. You can get paid for and you’re good at it because I think those three concepts are highly overlapping.

If you can get paid for it, the world probably needs it and you’re probably good at it. They’re not perfectly overlapping, but they’re very overlapping. I took those 4 circles of the Ikigai and made them 1 question, can I monetize a passion? I then laid out against the other axis, which is need for financial security. That ends up being the core of my framework in the book.

In the scheme of things, go back to what you said earlier, half the world believes follow your passion, half the world says it’s a load of baloney. I guess the positive Ikigai as a framework is that it pushes you to think more deeply than just about your passion. It asks you to think about what you are good at? Focus on your strengths, which I think is one of its positives. Also, what are people actually willing to pay you for?

You can have things that you’re really good at, that you’re really passionate about that you might not be able to get paid for. To me, that’s how it all comes together. I appreciate that none of these frameworks are perfect, but that one has always held at least some weight with me because of the fact that it just gets you to think a little bit more comprehensively about the problem than just the three-word nonsense of follow your passion.

Follow your passion is terrible advice. That’s one thing to do. You might end up there, but you’ve got to think much more deeply about how to get there.

It’s like the ultimate of not useful graduation speech talk, though.

Scott Galloway always says that the people who tell you to follow your passion now made their millions in iron ore melting, which they were not passionate about. They were good at it, and the world needed it, and they could get paid for it. That’s what they did.

Unlocking Your Path: Interactive Self-Assessment Tools And Resources

You have a bunch of exercises in the book. It, you obviously wanted to make it interactive. You’ve got your own survey. You talked about Shirza Chamine. Tell us about some of the interactive exercises that you’ve got in the book and how people can access this poll, this survey to find their path among those five that we talked about earlier in the conversation.

I’m glad you asked about that. On my website, GeorgeAppling.com, I have a self-assessment tool. It takes about five minutes, it’s free, and it walks you through questions that answer the framework or that walks you through the framework. You choose one of the five paths and the tool will say, “This is the path for you,” or it will say, “You should choose this path,” or that it might give you a choice of two, and you pick one.

When you pick one, then it gives you, “Here are the five next steps on that path.” It’s a five-minute, quick and dirty synopsis of the book or synopsis of the outcome of the book. I don’t think it replaces actually reading the book, but people are telling me it’s very helpful like, “It looks like that’s my path.” These five next steps make a lot of sense. I encourage people to go to GeorgeAppling.com and do that thing.

I’ve got several thousand data points now. What I feel very good about is that each of the paths has its audience. I’ve got five paths and if the population were divided equally, there’d be 20% per path. The way the dataset lands, it’s like the most popular path is at 26%, and the least popular path is at 13%. The other 3 are in between those 2. I feel really good that each of the five paths has a significant audience. If one of the paths had 60% and another had 3%, then my definitions are not good. They range from, I think, 13% to 26%. Each path has its audience.

Obviously, that matters. Giving people just an opportunity to think through, the process of doing these things, even if they’re not research-backed in the formal science technical way, doing things like your survey gives people a chance to think about the topic more deeply and reflect on whether whatever of the five paths really feels right to them and why. I think being able to do those kinds of things, ocean, MBTI, whatever, at least forces you to do a bit of self-reflection. I think that in and of itself can be helpful, even if you aren’t quite sure how to then take it into your real life.

There’s a ton of resources on the internet that are free that can help you think about the relationship between your passion and your work, or what career makes sense for you. Truity.com, they’ve got Myers-Briggs, they’ve got the ocean model that psychologists use, and then they even roll that in. You do the test, it’s free, and then there’s a section that says, “Here are careers that are suitable for your personality type. That stuff is really helpful.

The other one I liked was CareerFinder.com, and I think that one costs like $10 or something, but I’ve sat with a bunch of people doing it, and it’s very good. I remember sitting with a friend of mine. She’s a writer and she’s a brilliant writer, and she goes through CareerFinder.com and it pays the $10 and it says, “Here are ten careers that are suitable to you.” Being a writer was number three. She felt good about that, but number one was university professor. She goes, “Yeah, I should have done that.” There’s a ton of great, and either free or super cheap resources out there to help you think through these things.

Let’s talk a little bit more about your background. You’ve got this path that you’re on now, but you started in a pretty traditional career path. You had your heart set on consulting pretty early.

I went into strategy consulting right out of undergraduate. McKinsey has this program called Business Analyst. You work there for 2 or 3 years and then they will support you financially through business school. That’s what I did. I wanted that for three reasons. One, I was told the learning curve was steeper than anything else in the McKinsey Business Language program. That sounded good from a capability point of view.

Two, the idea of someone else paying for graduate school sounded pretty good to me. Three, and this is where I got to be brutally honest with myself, I think when I was in my early twenties, I was a status seeker. I wanted to be the guy who got the one job they offered. McKinsey hired one person out of Texas A&M per year for all the years that I was there. I wanted to be that one. That was an ego thing. That was status seeking. I was very focused on getting that job.

When you got there, how did it feel to work there? You have obviously gone and off and are currently doing some really different things for management consulting. Did it feel like it fit you or did it feel like it wasn’t really a home for you? You were there a decently long time.

I did 3 years before graduate school, and then they paid for graduate school, and then 4 years after. The first year was terrifying and awful because I had no idea what I was doing. I think undergraduate business school back then in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s prepared students for the marketplace in a much less effective way than they do now. Even undergraduate business schools have gotten a ton better at preparing people for the workplace.

I felt unprepared. I felt overwhelmed. I was terrified. My face broke out in acne. It was awful. I found a mentor, he was my engagement manager, he was my boss, but he just decided to take the time to coach me through how to do this job. There was a moment where it clicked and it was like, “That’s it. I got it. I know how to do this job.” The rest of it was awesome, so much so that my third year, I was in the Moscow office, and this is before graduate school.

I was 25 years old, and the engagement manager had to leave because I think his mother was ill. The partner said, “George, you can run this job, can you?” I was like, “Yes, I can.” I did and it’s because that mentor took the time to say, “Let me walk you through how this is working and what makes sense and how it all fits together.”

I know you went to Booz and then you went to Siemens. You had some corporate jobs that you mentioned. How did you find the shift from consulting into the corporate world?

I didn’t find that too terribly difficult. I went from McKinsey to Siemens, which is a gigantic 100 billion Euro German conglomerate. Siemens had been my client. I was serving Siemens, trying to help them improve their mobile phone business when the chairman of that division said, “Why don’t you come work here and drive improvements in the mobile phone business from the inside?”

I was hopping over to an organization in a business that I had been studying deeply. I knew the people, I knew the business, so it was a pretty comfortable transition. That was in Munich, Germany, which was really exciting. I did that for three years and then felt like I wanted to go home. I found a bunch of former McKinsey partners who were building a new consulting firm. I knew all the guys. It was like people that I had worked with. When I decided to come home from Munich to Texas, I called those guys and said, “Can I come join you?” They’re like, “Yeah, sure.” I went back into consulting, and then I went back into the real world, and then I went back into consulting. All the twists and turns and I was basically following opportunities.

Did you, in your own career, have a feeling that you were settling and was there some spark that made you realize that you wanted something really different, more intentional than what you were doing then?

No, I was really happy with my career. I really wanted the McKinsey job. I loved it there, and I only left because the offer to go to Siemens was irresistible. I went to my partners and said, “Guys, I have to do this, don’t I?” They said, “Yeah, you have to do that.” I didn’t feel like I was settling. The only thing where I was unsettled was the Siemens job. I failed at it.

I tried to build a new brand, a sub-brand, and I tried to make cell phones that were fashion accessories, and we put some into the market and it flopped. When I went home and went back into consulting, when I’d said to those guys, the former McKinsey guy, “I’m not going to stick around because I’ve had one operating role and I failed.”

I’m not going to end my career as a consultant with that one thing. I’ve got to succeed in an operating role. I knew these guys. They’re like, “Cool, we’ll take you as long as we can have you, and we understand.” I was happy that I got to be transparent with those guys about that. I did that for a while and then went to work for Brightstar, a cell phone distribution company in the world. That was a big success.

From Corporate Success To Medieval Theme Park Mogul: A Diverse Portfolio

I feel like I’ve waited too long to get to this point, but tell us about the very eclectic and interesting mix of things that you are doing now.

Now I spend my time on things that I love. I own and operate a Renaissance festival. That’s the industry term. I call it a medieval theme park. We are a theme park. It’s a permanent facility. I’m here now, and we are open weekends in March and April. We entertain 177,000 people in 17 operating days. We average 10,000 people a day. What that really is, if it’s raining, it’s 5,000. If it’s not, if the sun is shining and it’s 70 degrees, it might be 15,000.

People come and they watch jousting and falconry and comedy and juggling, and they eat their giant 1,000-calorie turkey legs and drink mead, which is fermented honey, and they just have a brilliant day of fun. That’s my core business. I built this show because the Renaissance festival is the only thing I’ve loved my entire life, other than my mother. The thing that I was in love with since I was twelve was the Renaissance festival.

Things expanded from there. I’m a part of the mead business, which is now, I think where the number one mead business in Texas. I have a Robin Hood summer camp. We’ll have 500 kids across 4 weeks, something like 120 a week for 4 weeks. They live here for a week, and they take classes and blacksmithing and leather working and painting, glass and throwing pottery, sword fighting, archery, horse riding, all these things, and without any electronics. There’s a show every night. We have a summer camp, then I have a music festival. We’ve got a historical weapons and armor business, and so that I’m not drunk all the time, I do executive coaching.

I’m involved with Vistage, which is the largest small and medium business CEO coaching organization in the world. It’s been around 67 years. I’ve got my dozen Austin-area CEOs that I work with. I co-founded an audio software company that has, at present, 171 patents. That also keeps me in the real world. That’s what I do. I absolutely deeply love all of these things. I pointed out to a friend that I get to spend my time on things that I love, which is awesome. I think I love too many things because I’m really busy. This is supposed to be my calm week. Camp ended and vacation starts next week. I’m just fully booked, but I’m fully booked on cool stuff, so, okay.

There are worse problems to have, but sometimes, it does pile up too much. You say yes to too many things, or too many things hit at once, and all of a sudden, you’re like, “This is exactly what I didn’t want. I wanted a little bit of flexibility and freedom of my life.”

That happens once in a while.

Now you have this passion for the medieval, but you take a very modern world approach to managing your business. I know you’re very much into the numbers. Do you want to just describe that briefly?

Sure. The primary value proposition of a Renaissance festival to patrons or customers is escape. The whole idea is you come here for a day and you are escaping from the real world. You may dress up like somebody else. You may pretend to be somebody else. You may get a buzz off me but you are not thinking about work when you’re watching jousting or falconry or juggling. You are escaping.

We put a lot of energy into creating the conditions under which our customers feel like they’re escaping. Behind the scenes, it’s really about how fast you can get people parked. How long are the toilet lines? How long are the beer lines? There’s me sitting there with a stopwatch making sure the beer lines are five minutes or less, and sometimes they’re not.

There’s just a lot of math going on to create a beautiful experience. Of course, at the end of it, we’ve got to decide how to invest. We might rebuild a stage or build a new front gate or build a new jousting arena, or build a new wedding chapel or build a new bar. There’s just a lot of actual real business work going into this.

Of course, there are the people. I’ve got eight directors. I call them team one. I’ve got to make sure that they have the support that they need and that they are on a career path that they find value in, and they want to keep doing this, and they’re really happy. I put a lot of energy into making these eight people joyful in their work, which is real business. That’s what general managers do.

You’re a living example of somebody who found a way to take something that they were passionate about and make a viable business out of it, and build other businesses. You’ve got the armor business, the mead business, you run both your camp and your renaissance fair, your medieval theme park out at the facility that you’re at now. It all blends together and you’ve found a way to do that. For people who say like, “It’s not possible,” you’re obviously in evidence to the contrary.

It is possible. More people than you know have figured this out. This idea of your work and your passion being the same thing, I think everybody can get there. For some people, you may need to get there twenty years from now. For other people, you can do it immediately. That’s where my framework comes in. Even my little five-minute thing on GeorgeAppling.com can coach you through which is true for you.

The Unsung Hero Of Success: Prioritizing Physical Health For A Fulfilling Life

Last question. Looking back, what advice would you give your 25-year-old self? What advice we haven’t covered? Maybe you give all these college kids that you talk to and high school kids.

I’m glad you asked that because I always end my talk to university students with this curve ball. The curveball is physical health. There’s a very specific definition here where your maximum heart rate is 220 minus your age. If you’re 20 years old, your maximum heart rate is 200 and you want to get your heart rate to at least 60% of that, so 120, at least 30 minutes a day, at least 5 days a week. That’s this definition of rigorous physical activity.

If you do that, the following correlations are true. Doing rigorous physical activity is negatively correlated with the risk of dying from heart disease, which is the number one killer in America. The risk of dying of cancer, which is the number two killer, the risk of anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts. It’s negatively correlated with all the bad things.

It is positively correlated with longevity, brain health, happiness, sex appeal and the ability to do things with your body. That last one I just made up, because I wanted five on the other side. That definition of rigorous physical activity is negatively correlated with the worst of the bad things. It’s positively correlated with the best of the best things, longevity, happiness, and even IQ. There’s really not a better case for anything in a human being’s life than that case. That is the best case there is for anything that you should be doing something. You should be doing rigorous physical activity.

What I implore them to do is find that thing, that exercise that can get their heart rate to at least 60% of maximum, at least 30 minutes a day, at least 5 days a week. Find that thing that you can stick with because it be anything right? At my age, a brisk walk will do. It might be weightlifting, it might be tennis, whatever. That’s the challenge. Just go find that thing because there’s no habit ever that is going to be a better habit than taking care of your body. We didn’t talk about that at all.

It’s really true. The longer you have your health. It sounds for a twenty-year-old, you’re like, “Yeah.” When you get up into the later years of your life and you see people have died, people are sick, people can’t do things that they used to be able to do, it shrinks your world when that happens. The longer that you can sustain that ability to live an active life, like you say, it’s positively correlated with all those things, that’s important. All the things that matter a lot to you when you’re young will probably not matter as much as things that will matter later in life and having your health definitely is one of them.

Even if you’re twenty, you’re going to create certain habits, and if you can make rigorous physical activity a habit in your twenties and stick with it, all of these good things happen and all these bad things don’t happen. It’s the best decision you can make.

I’ve got my Peloton right here, so that’s one of my ways of staying fit.

My home gym in the castle is there, and I actually live near Austin and I’ve got a home gym there too.

I think torture devices would be more appropriate than a home gym, but I’ll give you this one

I should probably do that. I’ll get some torture devices. I want the rack where you just stretch, you pull your arms and legs in opposite directions. That sounds good. That sounds helpful.

To a degree, that sounds great, but then it gets taken a little bit too far. All right, George, thanks for doing this.

Thank you so much, JR. This was awesome.

All right, take care.

Thanks to George for joining me to discuss his book Don’t Settle, and his own very unique career journey, which has a lot of non-traditional elements of particularly right now. As a reminder, this episode was brought to you by PathWise.io. If you are ready to take control of your career, you can join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the newsletter, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

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About George Appling

George Appling describes himself as a Passionpreneur. He creates and builds businesses that he truly loves, and he wants to help others do the same.

George has been a partner at McKinsey and at Booz. He’s also been president of a business unit at Siemens, COO of Brightstar, and chairman and CEO at Personal Communication Devices. He also co-founded a software platform called BoomCloud 360.

Beginning in 2009, George dedicated his professional life to building businesses that he is passionate about: the Sherwood Forest Faire (Austin’s Renaissance festival), the Sherwood Forest Summer Camp, Thorin’s Viking Mead, Eternal Arms (historical armor shop) and Castle Rentals LLC. Instead of sitting in the boardroom, he now brings a day of joy to over 150,000 people. Even though he is often found swinging swords with friends in a 12th century English village he keeps one foot in the present-day real world and is a by-the-book numbers guy. He builds businesses based on facts and logic.

George is also a Vistage Chair, helping CEOs and business owners experience the joy of doing what they love and succeeding at it.