this was a moment where I’m the leader of this group of 150 people and the exact thing I told them to do was the thing that resulted in this moment of [Music] failure hey Will welcome to the Craig Rell leadership podcast thank you so much man I’m I’m really excited to be here with you appreciate initation I am I am more excited I um I came I’m going to hold up your book for those that are watching I came across your book unreasonable Hospitality I had three people recommend it to me in one week and so that that hits the threshold of I
better read it and I I read it quickly and immediately I um I became every year I try to recommend three books last year I only had two that I recommended and this was one of the two books that I recommend to anyone everyone had our our whole team read it and so I want to ask you a lot about the concept of unreasonable Hospitality but before we do that um in case we have some in our community that don’t know you yet I generally ask our guests um this question I’ll start here will when in your life did you first see that you
might have leadership gifts H oh that’s a great first question you know I grew up in an interesting household my dad is my gosh my hero my mentor my my best friend and he was all of those things because of the situation with my mom my mom and I was young when I was four years old was diagnosed with brain cancer and the tumor was removed but the radiation treatment she received it rendered her into becoming a quadriplegic by the time I was like eight or nine and my dad from whom I’ve learned more than I’ve learned from
anyone else in my life was concerned about my confidence growing up he didn’t want me to be overly reliant on others and so he moved us to a house really close to my high school such that our house could be the convening place since I no longer had a mom to drive me around to other places and I think it was actually in that season that I recognized not only the extent to which I loved entertaining people which is a fundamental part of kind of what made me successful in my career but also that I was a good leader
because I think there is a correlation between being a good host and being a good leader um I think what a good host does is well they’re the ones that show up and and give people something to look forward to and a place to coexist they create the conditions for connection which is not dissimilar to setting the rules within which people convene um and then from there I went into student politics I became the president of my high school and kind of things went went on accordingly but yeah I really do believe it was in those early
years where my house became where people gathered that I recognized I had a a knack for being able to show up for people in a way that was well received and was that something that you learned did your dad model that I know your mom was had compromised Health but you still learned a ton from her was that something you saw them model or was something that you kind of were the first generation um who would kind of excel in Hospitality I mean my dad my dad was in the restaurant business he was a successful restaurant
tour um he never got to start his own company because of the situation with my mom we couldn’t afford to not be on his company’s health insurance plan but my gosh we talk about leadership my dad is one of the great leaders um he showed me the power of of Integrity always asking yourself what right looks like at every single turn and whatever the answer is just doing that he showed me how to navigate through moments of adversity one of my favorites of his quotes is adversity is a terrible thing to waste that’s
