Pepe Marais — Entrepreneur, Author, Creative, Thinker,

And once more, it is What's Involved special guest today. And man, I've been looking forward to speaking to this man because I've spoken to him before and it had such a good response. And I was blown away by having a chat to him. And now the long awaited second book is out. And it's called 20 Habits That Break Bad Habits. Who am I talking about? I am talking about Pepe Maria. Hello, Pepe, how are you doing? - Morning, David. - Very well, thank you very much. - Fantastic. So second book, I am so excited and you know, wow. Well, that's all I can say, but let's take a step back quickly and just give us a bit of a reminder who Pepe is and a bit of your journey and why we got to book number two of Growing Great and it's called 20 Habits That Break Habits. - So I'll try and put it in a nutshell, David. So basically started my entrepreneurial journey at the age of 12, you know, seeking ways to make my own income, started delivering newspapers, progressed, studied art in my early twenties and actually discovered I've got a latent talent for conceptual thinking and art. And because of that, got into advertising and launched my own agency at the age of 29 with my business partner, Gareth Legg.

And I think about 10 years after launch to eight to nine recession, hit the brick wall and faced bankruptcy at the restart from scratch. And at that stage, discovered my own personal life purpose because I was in such as sort of a deep valley and rebuild our business over the past 10, 11 years to being the number one advertising group in our industry. But I think we've got a huge room for growth ahead of us. So hugely passionate about creativity, the business of advertising, but probably even more so the power of purpose for business and for our personal lives. And then I'm also, I am a husband and a father to a 13 year old boy. Yeah, and I'm an active, sports loving individual. - Wonderful stuff. Now, I've just got to say this. So when I last saw you, I was amazed at how good you look. And if anything, you're looking better than you did then. Is this part of your journey?

- Well, firstly, thank you, if you noticed that. But I think it is part of my journey, my journey, my journey, because for me, when I discovered my purpose, my vision for my life changed and I wrote a 25 year plan. I never had a plan for my life. I just lived on my passion from week to week. And I wrote a 25 year plan towards 2032. And I realized if I want to give it my best shot to potentially achieve this vision, I'm going to have to look after my health. So I made radical changes to my lifestyle. And I think it's hugely impacted my health. So I feel a little bit like Benjamin Button at the moment.

- Getting younger and younger, which I think is wonderful because if I recall correctly from when we last had a chat,

you were sort of to a degree living the advertising lifestyle as it were, the late nights, the sort of all the weird foods and stuff and the odd glass of wine too many. And you said that you decided to change on that. And I think that's absolutely fantastic. But growing greatness is something that you are passionate about and we've spoken about that, but why now the second book?

- Look, I suppose the first book was completely based on my purpose. So my purpose being to bring out greatness in other people. And I can only do that if I bring out the best in myself. So the greatness is my one word that I carved my entire life strategy around. But it's not about me being a great person. It's about me doing everything in my power to inspire the best in other people. And hence I need to inspire the best in myself and meet by example, and I still make mistakes every single day. So the first book was written on purpose to give a bit of a sense, well, not to give an in-depth sense of my life journey and business journey in order to inspire other people that come through struggles to put their hand to potentially their own business and in doing so help rock economy. And then that book, it almost surprised me. I didn't write it to make money. I just wanted to touch one person's life. And I literally sold thousands and I got a huge response from it. And then I had this literally an idea in my bed one night about how habits have changed my life and how my habits, and I don't call them good or bad because the habits I used to have like smoking and drinking and all my other habits, I love them and I enjoy them.

So I didn't wanna judge them, but they limited my potential. And hence I've been changing my own limiting habits over the years with liberating habits and it's ongoing process. And I thought, let me put that in a book and address 20 core generic habits that's almost generic to all of us and expose people to how I had the same limiting habits and what I did and which liberating habits I used to make my life, just to make my experience of life greater. - Wonderful stuff. We are chatting to Pepe-Marie. His second book out that we're chatting about now is called "20 Habits That Break Habits." We'll be back in just a bit. And we're back with Pepe-Marie, my guest, talking about "20 Habits That Break Habits," his new book. So Pepe, is it fair because that's the sense I got and I kind of get the sense that you are absolutely creative. You're absolutely passionate about this. But there's also a little bit of the mystic thrown into you. Am I correct in that assumption? - You have to define the assumption of mystic, David, just that I answered correctly. So what do you mean by that? - I think you, and I've been finding this over the last while. It's this concept of finding humanity and becoming more real and developing things like empathy and love.

- Yeah, so I think one of my biggest personal struggles is that I can inspire people, but I can also break them down. It is one of my greatest challenges. And so I think even out of the writing of my second book, one of the key chapters that resonated with me was to replace judgment with love. So I have a high level of intolerance for average, or at least if I sense, and it's just an assumption because I see the world through my eyes and I don't always see the struggles of others. And hence I'm intolerant to when I assume someone's not giving their best and I can get quite cutting. So I am constantly aware that I'm by no means the best version of myself. And I think it's gonna be an ongoing journey until the day I die. But at least I'm conscious of it. I lost myself for the first time in traffic. Someone drove me off the road. I was on my Vespa. And then he hooted at me. And I had a bad morning 'cause I'm in the middle of renovations and it's quite stressful. And I just lost the plot. And I was so embarrassed with myself, but at least I had the consciousness to realize my response was incorrect. And I suppose the mystic side of it is, is this constant strive to be better every day and to be willing to make mistakes and learn from them and then make up for them.

So I think this is my journey. I'm not professing that I'm this amazing leader. - And I think that's part of it is that humbleness that one has. And I was chatting to somebody the other day and they said, if you were forced at gunpoint to say, what is the one thing that you think we as human beings should do, my answer was evolve. And I think that is one of our primary directives is that we need to evolve as human beings. And that evolution, I believe is encompassed in the idea of love and of emotion and empathy. Now, there's a couple of things in the book, a couple of habits that I'd like to touch on. And the one that really had an impact for me was in chapter two where you said, replace your head with your heart and your gut. Let's talk a little bit about that. - Yeah, I'm extremely passionate about that. I see it in the world we live in, in my world of corporate. I see it almost every single day. And I know now for, if you look at all your greatest decisions and George Bezos, founder of one of the greatest companies in the world, if you just have to base it on financial performance, but even on the product delivery Amazon, I mean, he speaks very passionately about the fact that he only follows his gut.

So I don't think this is new thinking, but in my experience, I've experienced the same way. I married my life partner on my gut. I started this business on my gut. I chose my business partner. We chose each other on our gut. There was no head involved in those critical decisions that led to this journey that I'm on. And I find we often override our guts with our head and it's fear-based. The head's conditioned to give us a huge amount of fear. And I think that's why people are stuck in jobs that they hate and they're stuck in relationships that don't serve them the best because we are afraid. And I had to work very hard to get out of that. Although when I started to work hard, that's one thing that I learned very early in my life was just to jump in with both feet. When I have a sort of a sense of my gut that I need to do something, I react to it and I step in. It's got me into trouble now and again, but it's served me better than not serving me.

- Yeah, I think back to the times when I sometimes wonder, should I have gone with my head? Because as you say, your gut can sometimes get you into trouble. Preppy, the book itself and I think as we go through this interview, we're gonna get onto that because I'll tell you right now, I mean, I was so excited after the launch of "Growing Greatness" and I read the book and one of the parts of my journey is I wanted to initially have a big fancy company and have all the big fancy cars and all the bells and whistles that go with it and people that would sit and worship at my feet. And as my journeys progressed, I suddenly realized I don't want that and I've defined riches in a totally different way these days. And it's partly due to the conversation we had and what I decided to do afterwards. One of the things as well and I go back to this book, which is absolutely amazing, I've got to tell you, if you didn't think you could top "Growing Greatness", I think this one does it because of the way you write and the way you put stuff. Like, for example, chapter six, replacing the television with the kitchen table. I first thought you were nuts, talk to me about that. - So, that one came out of that 2008, 2009 recession where we lost everything and I couldn't afford DSTV.

And it was so fascinating 'cause my son was about six months old and I would literally come home at night at seven o'clock and rush, this was before you could sort of record the movies, I think. So, it was, I would rush bathing and spending quality time with my kid in order to go and sit in front of the television and watch a movie and just sort of zone out. And when that, when the recession happened and I've cut the DSTV, I literally stopped, we, my wife and myself stopped watching television. And the only thing we could do to replace it with was to go and have dinner around the table for the first time in our lives because my wife comes from a home where they sat in front of the TV watching, eating in front of the television. I came from a similar home. And now, in our own experience, we just mimic the lives that we grew up within in our own adult lives and never ate around the dinner table. So, in 2008, we started eating every night in the kitchen around the table as a family. And I can say with my hand in my heart, it's something we do 365 days a year. And it's changed our lives because we connect as human beings around that table. And we have proper conversation around the kitchen table.

So, it is a fascinating insight how easily we lose that little discipline, that habit that actually brings us together instead of pulling us further apart.

- Which is absolutely true. I mean, I come from a household very similar to yours. We got all excited back in my day when TV trays came out 'cause that meant that we didn't actually have to go and sit at the table or anything. We could literally sit with our dinner on our laps and eat there. And subsequently with me moving in with my fiance, they've got this massive big kitchen table. And that is where we spend most of our time. That is where all the important discussions happen. That is where friends always end up gravitating to. And I've got to tell you, you're absolutely right. And the thing that struck me when I was reading this is, but it's so simple. It's not a hard thing to do. And yet the benefits of it are mind-blowing. They literally are. I mean, I've had some of my best ideas sitting around that kitchen table. I think if anybody ever wanted to get rid of it, I would be most, most grumpy. - I understand. I'm actually putting a fireplace in our kitchen at the moment for the, you know, 'cause that is becoming more and more, well, it's absolutely the heart of the home. And even our weekend home, we've got the fireplace in the kitchen. So it's almost all I need in our house, is a kitchen, a table and a fireplace.

- Yeah, absolutely. The one thing that I'm gonna need you to dive into and give me a little bit more help with is where you talk about turning swearing into a creative vocabulary. Now I'm gonna give you the age-old excuse. I'm in radio, so when the microphone's not on, I swear like a trooper all the time. I use the F word as a comma, as an exclamation mark, as a verb, you name it. So why, why would I want to change this? And that is one very interesting in the last two, three weeks, I've been swearing more than I probably swear in a whole year. And I think it's linked to renovating our house and living in it. So there's obviously unconscious stress involved there. I'm also extremely busy in studying. So it feels that my own sort of the way I govern my own life is slipping a little bit and I'm so aware of it. Every time I say it, I'm not so aware of it. But I used to, I used to be like a little pirate and it used to be perceived as very creative. And there's two reasons why I changed it. And again, this is just my journey. And I'm very clear in the book to make sure that I'm not preaching to people. We all have our own decisions and what works for us and what doesn't. And maybe one resonates with someone and another doesn't.

There's even veganism in there. And I'm definitely not expecting people to stop eating meat. But for me, there were two things that changed. The little story that I tell with these very beautiful couple of, they sort of the earth people who just don't swear at all. That brought it into my consciousness because the girlfriend of this friend of mine said, yeah, but you know, swearing is not creative. And me being a creative person, I was like taken aback and I was like, ooh. So that was like the first little seed that was planted. And then a second thing that happened was in communication. You know, when I communicate to 10 people and if I swear a lot, five of them are highly likely to think I'm cool and resonate with my way of speaking, but five might be slightly offended. And I lose 50% of my communication ability in speaking like that. So also that was a second building block that took me on this journey of slowly just cleaning my language up and thinking a bit more about how I say things. And then I suppose the third one was from another friend who I met in the Kruger National Park. And he gave me this insight that it's energy. So words have energy. And even if we use them just to punctuate a feeling or an emotion, it's still a negative energy.

And that negative energy half of it goes out into the world and the other half go back into my own system. And because I'm saying to self preservation of my system in order to prolong my journey as long as possible, I just, those three things made me play with it. And then the other thing you said it earlier on David, you said, you know, if you put a gun to my head, it's all for us, it's about evolution evolving as people. And I also found that I'm stuck in a rat. I'm doing the same thing. And when I do new things like new eating habits, new drinking habits, new communication habits, I actually do things in a new way. And inside challenge myself to do things differently and inside grow my experience. So I mean, that's sort of the long and the short of the complexity of starting to play with the habit. 'Cause I also believe in fun. I mean, I'm not gonna have a life that's all like rules and regulations and regulated. Then I don't think life will be fun. So for me, it's more creative experience and playing with new ways of doing old things. - Now, my special guest, Pepe Marais, talking about his book, "20 Habits That Break Habits." We'll be back in just a bit. This is what's involved.

It's so good to have you along with us. And we're back with my guest, Pepe Marais. So Pepe, just in terms of the book and in terms of your journey, how have you found the impact of these to be for yourself? - In terms of creativity, because in a lot of stuff I do, I need to be fairly creative. And sometimes I can sit at my desk and stare at my computer screen and go, there is just, there's nothing. And I mean, I don't know if creativity can be taught or if it can only be experienced, but has this, the writing of the book in your journey, hasn't improved your creativity? - Massively, massively. So, and the interesting thing is the first one was already, I was really frightened writing it, but I was asked to do it and I committed to do it. And I've never written a book. I love, I love copy. It's my second language English, I'm Afrikaans. But because of our industry and the work that I do, and I also used to blog a bit, I love copy. And I also, because I suppose my second language, I use very simplistic and basic language, but I love playing conceptually with words. So I'll string them together in a way that always have a little bit of a fun element to it. But the first book really, that deep reflection of writing my story, I learned so much about myself because it's all stuff that I packed into my unconsciousness that I had to drag out of my past and sort of go through them again and re-experience them.

So the first book was quite cathartic, but the second book was a lot more difficult than the first one. I had the concept in the idea to interview 20 smokers and then time their smoking speed and write the chapters to the length of their reading speed so they can actually read a chapter while smoking a cigarette. That was the concept. So it was almost like a social experiment. I never really expected to get the habits that I've got out of them, which were the generic habits, like not being good enough or not saving. I'm a spender, it was so interesting for me. And once I had all those insights, I realized those were all things we all struggled with, myself included. And then I wrote to that. So the second process was more difficult, but I just followed my heart and I remained on purpose. So whenever I do something to look good, I get a bit, you know, 'cause I used to suffer from social phobia. And I say it's gone down from say 100, I had really severe social phobia for 20 years of my life. And I think it was, it's actually hereditary because I think that's why my father was alcoholic. He drank to sort of self-medicate the social phobia. But when I discovered my purpose and I became more in service of others than in service of my own ego, my social phobia dissipated to, I would say about 5% of what it used to be.

And I think that 5% is there to keep me in check. So I find when I do things to look good. So if I write a book to try and look good, or people say, "Wow, you so great, your book so great." I don't think it will be authentic book. But when I write a book, because I really want one person just to change the habit into a liberating habit and potentially improve their lives, then my job's done. And I know already for a fact, three, four people, one has stopped smoking, one has stopped drinking and two has stopped eating meat. Now that was not my intention to do those particular habits, but those are people that I know of that read the book and actually changed their habits into new habits. So yeah, that's how I operate. I come from a place of service and hence I feel the flow of creativity comes easier to me when I behave like that. - When you talk about this, the part that interests me, and I'm just dipping into the various chapters, and these obviously in my instance, chapters that resonate with me, then you get to the one that says, replace saying yes with saying no. Why on earth do you want to say no? - And beautiful insights by one of my coaches, she's an expert in adult children.

So adults who behave like children are often linked to environments where alcohol abuse was in. So they expected in childhood to take up more responsibility and hence they overtake responsibility as individuals, which often lead them to take on so much that they start becoming victims, myself included, and then start blaming people around me because they're not doing enough and I'm doing everything. So from her, I learned that there's real power

in the art of saying no, that when you say no, you're actually saying a yes to yourself. So it's not in all situations to say no at all, but it is when you feel really you don't feel like doing something, then say no, because that no is a yes to yourself. And I do find we get into the habits of being yes, men and yes, women, to appease the people around us because we want them to like us. Or maybe we want to really serve, but in order to serve others, you first have to serve yourself. That's like rule number one, if you want to serve the world, first serve yourself. Sort yourself out before you help others. Yeah, so I think that was a powerful insight, which I just felt I had to share. It's by a lady called Judy Clippen. She's really worthwhile reading up on. Judy Clippen, we must definitely make a plan, maybe get on the show as well. Because when I saw that, when I saw the title of that chapter, I was like, nah, Pepe, unfortunately this stage mate. And as I read through it and I began to understand, and I thought in my own life, the amount of times I say yes to things that I don't really want to do. Number one, I get resentful. Number two, it doesn't get done to the best of my abilities.

So it's a case of, oh, well, I've said yes, it's really not my thing. So let me do it and get it over with. And I said to myself and I thought, but is that giving the value that you have? Is that giving your true value? Is that serving people? So yeah, once again, one of those chapters that makes huge sense to me personally. So yeah, it's almost like when I was reading through this book, I was wondering if you'd been reading my mail. Now the one thing that I'd noticed, and I'm going to say this right up front, is when we first spoke to each other, you did come across as fairly serious, quietly intent. I didn't pick up a lot of the fun aspect. And I still remember thinking after our interview, I was like, man, he's a creative, but creatives are supposed to be a little bit wacky and crazy and out there and you weren't. As I said to me at that stage, it seemed like you were much more introspective. And now you say, replace fun with fear. And I'm like, okay, now I'm even more confused. - You see, this is the great dilemma 'cause I've lived through it. I used to be the life of every single party. I mean, people absolutely love me. Long hair, bells on my toes, light up the room, close the bar at four in the morning.

And that look of happiness, that big smile was fake because inside myself, I was really anxious and I was being eaten up and I didn't feel worthy and I didn't feel good enough. And I felt like an impostor. So I often see this fake fun that we create. And then I had a few experiences, quite a few in my life. If I really think of the real fun things and I linked them to snow skiing, which is one of my passions and an experience of migrating over the years from the green slope to the blue slope to the red slope. If you're skiing in Europe, America's different, but in Europe and into the black slopes. And I can tell you, it's just such an insight that the more scary the experience, once I get through that experience, the more fulfilled I feel. And that level of joy that I feel at the bottom of a black slope when I didn't die is so incredible in terms of real fun and joy. And I started relating it back to my work life. And I find that it completely related to my social phobia and afraid of being completely not capable to speak in front of people. And when I stepped into that fear, and even while I sweated like bullets and the first time and worked through it and got better at the second time, that immense sense of self-fulfillment and joy to me was real fun.

And I started finding fun on this edge of fear. And hence I started stepping more into things that I naturally push away from 'cause I'm afraid of it. So yes, I am intense, I'm obsessed, I'm mad. I get a lot of these, I mean, a lot of feedback like that. I'm intense individual, but I absolutely subscribe to fun. And if you have to catch me on holiday in my safe space with my family, you'll experience a complete different side to me, albeit still completely on purpose. So yeah, I'm an advocate of fun in my creative department as well, I don't believe in putting pressure on people.

I used to believe that no pressure, no diamond. I didn't find any diamonds that way. So now my mandate to my team is fun. If we're gonna be in business and we're not having fun, then why be in business in the first place? So yeah, I'm intense, but I am a believer in fun. I just package my fun differently to most people. - Wonderful, well put there. I'll never forget one of the things that one of my mentors in radio taught me and to this older Kevin Savage, he says radio is all about fun, but we take having fun very seriously. And I think that can translate as well. - I'm gonna take that, I'm gonna write this with a note. I'm writing that inside down because I so, like it just resonates with me. I make fun very seriously, I love that. - Awesome, when we come back, we're gonna be wrapping up with Pepe Marie and just finding out where the rest of his journey is going to take him. This is what's involved. Great to have you with us. And we're back, we're wrapping it up with Pepe Marie. Author, second book is "Grow and Greatness, "20 Habits That Break Habits." We've been going through some of them and we'll go through a couple more and then I wanna find out from Pepe some advice for life that he would give us and where his next is.

But the one thing that... Well, there's a couple of things, okay? And with me, because I kind of like, I don't know, maybe is it softer stuff? Is it more woo-woo kind of stuff? I don't know, but one of the things, a couple of the things really that resonated with me was replace judgment with love. Also, very easy to write those words down, replace judgment with love. And most people who speak to go, "Well, I'm not judgmental." I also used to think so. I'm incredibly judgmental and replacing it with love is a challenge. Talk to me, how do we go about this? - So this is the chapter that I am working on myself. So this is a new insight to me. And even I, this is funny, actually I'll share with you something. One of my resolutions for the new year was to have 30 days of not making anyone feel crap. And I've gotten to four days. Because I took it too hard, this replace judgment with love, because it's subtle. We don't realize how deep our conditioning and our lenses are. You know, that little story that I share there, which is just judging two guys on their hairstyles and tattoos. And in my mind, judging them as cage fighters from like Oxford, because they were Afrikaans. You know, it was so subtle, but I was complete, or even my first book I wrote of judging two Jim, a guy and his girlfriend, very big.

You can see they go to Jim a lot. Very well developed, big. I judge them as ugly. Because my view of what's beautiful is different to their view. And so we have all these lenses. And it's so complex where these lenses come from. Our religions, our cultures, our races, you know, our belief systems, our friends, our schools. It's so multilayered and they make us judge. I mean, you can just go onto Twitter and watch the level of judgment. And I realized that I participate in that game. So I am daily now working on this. I think it's gonna be a long journey to unravel. But love is after all the uber purpose of the world. You know, the sun is a beautiful metaphor for unconditional love. I mean, no one even notices it's up now. If you didn't come up, we all die. And it's gonna go down to night and no one's gonna say thank you. So that's to me the most beautiful metaphor of unconditional love. So I aspire to be like the sun. But how many years it's gonna take me to get there? I'll let you know. - The reason I was laughing, 'cause as I was going through that chapter, I thought, man, I wonder because in the old days, maybe I would have been judged like that, except now I'm a bit older and a bit rounder.

But I mean, I wear my hair short, almost brush cut military style. I have tattoos. And I thought, I wonder how many people looked at me with my glasses and then saw the tattoos in the short hair and were like, what are you? Which, you know, with my weird sense of humor that did appeal to me, I gotta be honest. But it does, it wakes you up to that. Two more things, and then I'm gonna ask you what your advice is for our listeners. The next thing is, as we get to the end of the book, replace doing with being. And this was a big thing for me because my mentor always used to say to me, "David, you are a human doing, and you need to work on being a human being." And I never got what he said in those days. It's now starting to make a lot more sense to me. - Yeah, fascinating. It's gonna lead into the advice bit perfectly. Because, you know, if I look at double barrel names, very sort of quite big in English, I suppose, if I look at John Pierre, my sister Renee Marie, I'm Andre Peppler. Funny, my nickname, my name Pepe nickname comes out of a Peppler, so it works slightly different. But John Pierre became John, and Renee Marie became Renee. So we shorthand. And we've made the human being human, and we've forgotten the being aspect of the human being.

And, you know, I got two years ago before lockdown, I got given four Bibles in one month by four different individuals who read my books, or who read my first book, and felt I need to read the Bible, which I haven't read for a very long time. I was brought up Christian, but I, so, and I started reading the one Bible. I didn't get past Genesis, but there was a profound insight. So maybe I was just meant to read that one chapter. And there's a double creation. Anyone, if there's any listener, actually do read the Bible, and if you not, just look at it as a book that sold five billion copies. I mean, that must be a pretty good book, 'cause mine only sold 5,000. So, and it's said to be a very good book. So a book that sells five billion must be quite profound. But I read it practically with no religious context, but if you do believe in it, there's a double creation. There's a creation of the human on day number six, and then a chapter later, I mean of the being, in the image of God. And then there's a chapter later is only the creation of Adam. And I've never, I've never, no one's ever told me that. No one's ever pointed that out. I've never seen that or heard of it. But if you go and check, you'll find there's a double creation.

So we are human on the one side, and we get given human names with all our human egotistical behaviors and searches and self-serving, which is good. There's nothing wrong with it. But on the other side, we are beings. We've got a very, very great amount of depth of spirituality within each and every one of us. And that is truly the image of God. And again, not saying this in context of any religion, I find it spiritual. It's higher than any form of religion, it's a higher order. And that beingness is our true power. That is almost the heart versus the gut. I mean, the mind versus the heart, or the head versus the gut. So this beingness is what I discovered in 2007. And I brought this beingness into my life. And then I brought this beingness into our business, and I saw a profound shift in the business. And this is now my obsession. I'm obsessed in getting this knowledge out to people, whether it's through books or talks or engagements like this, is to bring consciousness to people that we're far more than just human. And we're far more than what we do. It's much more about what we be and our greater being and our greater spirituality. So a very exciting subject and a very exciting chapter of my life and that I'm in at the moment.

Very fulfilling, but super exciting for the potential that we each have as human beings. - And listen, as we think and believe, we are limitless and the amount of information to share is almost the same. It's limitless. There's just so much. Maybe before I let you go, for somebody listening now that we've gone through and I've managed to avoid almost an entire conversation without using the COVID word, but we've been through some rough times. What advice would you give anybody that is sitting, listening, whether it be to the radio show or to the podcast? - I'll give two points that I'm following for my own as a strategy to cope in these times, which is extremely tough. The first one is I feel we tend to concern ourselves way too much with things that's out of our control. You know, we can't control government's decisions. We can't control the economy. We can't control COVID and the spread of it, but we can control certain things of our lives. And I find we spend probably, I don't want to put a number to it, but we spend the majority of our time worrying about stuff that we can't affect or change and it just drives our blood pressures up. So my first piece of advice is like focus intensely on what you can control.

You can control your response to a situation. You can control the quality that you bring into your craft, whatever your job is. You know, you can control your behavior and your attitude. You can control your habits. So I'm hugely focusing on what I can control. And if there's anything that starts sort of taking me off course and getting me a blood boiling a bit then I can't, then I go, but you can't control it. What are you doing? And I think that's the way I manage myself through the last 14 months. And then the second input I would give is there honestly is one word that each individual stands for. And those words might be the same words sometimes, but they're different words. They're words like love or care or kindness or greatness or freedom or passion or, you know, all those words of value, integrity. But each human being have a human name

but they also have a being name. We each have this other word that we stand for. And I would say, if you could dig deep to find out what is that one word you stand for in life and you can unpack it and understand its meaning and make that your strategy, you might just surprise yourself in what your life becomes. So those are my two probably best pieces of input I can give in this moment. - Wonderful. And excuse me, but yeah, definitely. Sorry, I get just talking to you now, I'm getting a bit choked up about it. Fantastic piece of advice there, Pepe. Your book, "Growing Greatness, 20 Habits That Break Habits." Is it available, as we like to say, at all good bookstores and online? - It is. I'm not sure exactly how many all good bookstores are definitely available as exclusive books. I know hard copies are struggling at the moment with COVID. I know the sales are down by 40%. It's also available at Amazon as a Kindle edition. Yeah, so everyone's to get it. I hope it offers value to you. - I would highly recommend it if you are listening and I read a lot of books, but this is something special and I've been so looking forward to it. If people'd like to stay in touch with Pepe Maria and find out what you're doing, what you're up to, how do we do that?

- You know, it's so interesting. I used to live on Twitter. My Twitter time was early morning and after work at night for like a quick little zipping. I don't even have time to be on Twitter anymore. It's amazing how busy we've become. But LinkedIn is a good platform for me as well. Search me on LinkedIn, drop me a note. I always, if I resonate with someone, I'll give them my email and then I pick up conversation by email and sometimes even face to face. - Awesome, fantastic stuff. Pepe Maria, I realize you're incredibly busy and I do thank you for taking the time out of your day to have a chat with us in the midst of all of your renovations and everything. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I hope we're going to see more writing in the not too distant future. - Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate your time too. And yes, I am working on my third book. I'll probably give it two years before I bring it out 'cause I'm studying at the moment, but really appreciate your time. - Wonderful stuff, there we go. Wraps it up for this edition of "What's Involved." My special guest, Pepe Maria. Growing greatness, 20 habits that break habits. Go out and get it. As I said, it wraps it up for us.

To each and every one of you, look after yourselves, take care and thank you for listening.