Leave Nothing To Chance

 

Destiny doesn’t have to be serendipitous. You can take charge of it and create your own. In fact, this episode’s guest believes that destiny is the function of our character, and he has been helping people develop that. John Solleder welcomes David CM Carter, the Founder of Entelechy Academy. Here, David shares his success story and how Entelechy Academy is helping people realize and optimize their potential through dialing up and developing their character. He takes us deep within their process while tapping into the issues that keep companies from doing that—from the talent crisis to the gap in education. Join David in this conversation as you learn more about Entelechy Academy and his legacy project.

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David CM Carter The Entelechy Academy

It is my great pleasure to bring somebody on the show with a unique set of skills, an amazing career, an amazing human being, and somebody who has helped a lot of people and is going to continue to. You’ll read his message. David CM Carter, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Indeed, John. It’s lovely to be here.

I’m going to share a little bit about you, but I want you to elaborate a little bit because you’ve had such a stellar career in mentoring people. I know your latest project, which is your legacy project. It’s the Entelechy Academy, which is focused on the philosophy of Aristotle and helping people to realize their potential. We’ll start there, but let me give people a little bit of David’s other background. He’s been in the private equity and investment banking world. He owned his own company and started his own company successfully. He mentored many people in the financial world. I was watching a few things about him and realized that I had seen him previously on the BBC and the News Paper Report.

Yes, I did the News Paper Review on BBC world for a few years.

It’s my honor to have you here, David. Anything else you want people to know before we get into some questions?

No, I’m sure a lot of it will come out during our conversation. At the end of the day, you’ve given me a very lovely, warm welcome. I’m just an ordinary guy who puts his trousers on one leg at a time like everybody else.

I appreciate that. I found it interesting. I noticed in your notes, too, that you did not finish college. You’re one of those entrepreneurs that chose the path of figuring it out without the formality of education. Do you want to comment on that a little bit?

That’s quite a good story. When I was eleven years old and went to senior school in the UK, I was besotted with the idea of becoming another James Bond. I was in the school on a county rugby team. I did cross-country and athletics. I was very physically fit. I learned two foreign languages. I worked very hard to get into the army, the Intelligence Corps, which was going to sponsor me through university and then turn me into a spy.

Unfortunately, when I was sixteen, I had to have an artificial hip fitted. That put paid to my rugby career, which was probably my ticket into the Army at the time. I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do instead. I didn’t have a plan B. As John Lennon once said, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. I’m also highly dyslexic, so I struggled at school.

I had to work incredibly hard to get Bs and Cs in my exams, even though I was always annoyed. My teacher said, “Why can’t you write down what you say out loud?” I said, “I did.” They said, “No, you didn’t.” In those days, dyslexia wasn’t a thing. You were just called stupid. After my hip operation and losing my dream, I felt that I was done with school and university.

I wanted to get on, travel the world, get out there, and figure out what I wanted to do next. This would never happen. It wouldn’t happen at all, but I saw an advert in the Financial Times, which said, “Come and join the racy-pacey world of high finance and important deadlines. Become an international officer or a trainee executive with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.”

I thought that sounds very exotic, overseas travel and foreign languages, so I applied. In my interview, the chap figured out I’ve had a very successful rugby career. He asked me why the bank should hire me. I said, “Because I’ll help the bank win the Hong Kong Sevens,” which was very important to the bank. I got in on that interview.

It was only 3 or 4 years later when I left the bank and I was having my exit interview. The same chap invited me in and said to me, “David, we don’t have a copy of your degree certificate.” I said, “There’s a very good reason for that, sir.” He said, “Yes, I knew there would be. Did you lose it?” I said, “No, I didn’t ever go to university.”

I had been in the graduate training program for four years without having gone to university. That was my MBA. That was my most amazing opportunity and experience. I spent ten years in investment banking. I lived in seven countries around the world for more than a year, the Far East, Middle East Europe, and East and West Coast America.

This was many years ago and this was in the days when there wasn’t all of the sophistication that there is nowadays with HR tech, FinTech, series, A, B, C, pre-Seed, etc. There were money, people, and projects. My fascination was, “How come those two companies started in the same town in the same year with access to the same resources? That company, ten years later, was 27 times bigger than the other company. What did they do or have?”

It was their performance leadership X factor. From quite an early age, when we were doing a leveraged buyout of a business, the team sent me in to go and investigate the leadership X factor in the company. That was where my fascination with leadership development and performance enhancement was initiated.

I had ten fantastic years, traveled a lot, did some amazing deals, and had amazing education. I had an amazing boss and mentor. I had several during that ten years, but the last one was probably the one I learned the most from. He called me into his office and said, “Young man, record year, record bonus, record share options, I think it’s time you moved on.”

I burst out laughing. He said, “Why are you laughing?” I said, “I think you are right, but I’m not sure how to go home and tell my wife this.” My bonus probably meant I’d got a couple of years’ worth of after-tax salary in the bank. He said, “Stop financing and consulting entrepreneurs. Go and be one.” That was in June of 1988 when I started my entrepreneurial career.

I’ve been self-employed and a serial entrepreneur ever since. I’ve not only made sure I got paid myself at the end of every month, but I’ve made sure that my teams got paid. For the first ten years, I did two startups in the UK hospitality industry. We owned Golf & Country Clubs. The first one, I built up and sold. The second one, I built up and floated on the Ames stock market.

I had another tectonic plate shift happen in my life, which was the greatest gift I’ve ever been given. I ended up being a single parent of a 7-year-old and a 3-year-old. I had to make a choice between what was more important to me, being a great dad or being a successful entrepreneur. Being a great dad won. I resigned as Chief Executive of the public company.

Whilst I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, because of what I’d spent my time doing in the previous years, people came to me and said, “Can you help me with our strategy, raise some money, look at our top team, hire a chairman, and expand overseas?” For about two years, whilst I was busy thinking about what I wanted to do next, I ended up mentoring CEOs.

I had a very funny conversation with my mother one day. She said, “It’s going so well for you, darling.” I said, “It is going well, but I’ve got no time to think about what I’m going to do next. I’ve got all these blooming clients I’m going to look after.” She said, “I thought this was what you were doing next.” On the drive home that evening, I thought, “I’m enjoying this, and I’m pretty good at it. It pays the bills and makes a difference. Maybe this is what I’m going to do.”

Several years later, I built up what eventually became the world’s leading chief executive mentoring company. We had offices and clients all around the world. It got to a point where I felt I had done my bit. I had taken it as far as I could take it, and I wanted to democratize what we were doing for a small number of expensive fee-paying clients and make it available to anyone anywhere on any device.

I didn’t know how to do that, but I knew I needed some time away from running that big global business to devote myself to it. I was very fortunate enough to be introduced to one of Britain’s leading PR consultants who decided to turn me into a brand, The Mentor. The first thing he got me to do was to write a book which I wrote several years ago.

It ended up being a bestseller. It was how to become the best version of yourself. The book is called Breakthrough. That led me to book tours, speaking tours, the three-year work with BBC Radio, etc. During that period of time, I figured out two things. One was I didn’t like being famous. The second thing was that I figured out how we could democratize what we were doing.

Entelechy Academy is the legacy project I’m going to devote the rest of my life to. Even that’s got a twist in the story. Before Entelechy Academy, over a 2 or 3-year period, I raised a lot of money and put a team of 30 people together. On the 1st of February, 2020, we’re about 10 or 12 weeks away from launch. We had got a commitment from one of our existing investors to put up a lot more money.

He had a business partner who was going to match him. We were all good to go. The completion meeting was on Friday, the 13th of March, 2020. We were sitting in the lawyer’s office waiting to be told the funds had gone through. They called up and said, “This COVID thing turned up. I’m sure it will blow over in a week or so, but maybe we’re going to delay this completion meeting.”

Without going through the whole story, it ended up being the most horrible experience of my life. All of my shareholders and the team lost lots of money. I’ve spent about two months going through and doing as professional a job as I could on the administration. I had an amazing shareholder who took me for a walk around Hyde Park in London with my dog.

He said, “David, none of the shareholders are crossed with you. Everybody’s worried about you and feels sorry for you, but I hope you are not going to be defeated by this. You’re going to pick yourself up, dust yourself down, put the train back on the tracks, and have another go. This is too good an idea, and it deserves to succeed.”

He and eleven of my old shareholders who’d lost all of their money put up a big sum of money for me to get some of the team back together and resurrect a phoenix from the ashes, which is now Entelechy Academy. Although, Entelechy Academy is completely different from the business that went into the tank. It had to change because of COVID, lockdowns, and everything.

I survived a major hip issue that changed my career. I survived a major tectonic play shift in my personal life and rebuilt my life after that. Even in my early 60s, I had another train wreck with the economy in COVID. If my life is described as successful, I laugh because I think I’ve survived. If survival is a success, I guess I’d tick the box.

I’ve had lots of fun and lots of adventures on the way. I learned a lot, made some great friends, and got some great colleagues. In my mentoring company, Merryck & Co, which I had for several years, we used to get all the senior mentors together. These were guys who had been Fortune 100 CEOs, FTSE 100 CEOs, and the top people around the world.

None of them ever used to brag about their success stories of which they had hundreds. They all used to tell each other war stories. “We nearly went under when this happened.” It’s interesting. I learned so much from that. Successful people have always had hiccups and train wrecks, which they’d pick themselves up and dust. No one has a golden escalator that goes all the way up to the top with no squiggles on the journey.

Successful people have always had hiccups and train wrecks, which they pick themselves up and dust. No one has a golden escalator that goes up to the top with no squiggles on the journey. Click To Tweet

There is so much of what you said there. We’ll unpack that for a second. Isn’t it amazing that failure teaches us more than success? That’s what all of those folks were sharing with you.

Here’s one of my favorite sayings, “Failure isn’t falling down. Failure is staying down.” I don’t ever look at any of those train wrecks in my life, which I’ve had 2 or 3, as anything other than an opportunity to grow and learn. If you don’t get back on the horse, you fail. If you get back on the horse, you’ve won and succeeded.

Let me ask you this, David. The very name of the Entelechy Academy comes from Aristotle’s statement about the realization of potential. Why did you pick that? It’s great, but how did you pick it? Were you an Aristotle fan along the way? How did you arrive at the philosophy?

There’s been a red thread throughout my entire life and my career. If you remember earlier on, I said to you, I was intrigued by how that company ended up doing so much better than that company and what the X factor was. In my mentoring career which was many-plus years, it was all about becoming the best version of yourself.

The truth is a few years ago, after the demise of the old company, one of my colleagues and mentors, a lady called Jenny in Australia, who I’ve known for many years, has been a great friend, colleague, and mentor. I said to her, “If I knew there was one word that summed up becoming the best version of yourself and actualizing all of your potentials.”

She said, “I think there is a word. Give me 24 hours.” The next day, she emailed me and said, “Check this one out.” I read all about it. It’s the most beautiful word. People have to ask sometimes how you pronounce it. It’s entelechy. I read a lot about Aristotle, who had done a bit in history, but what a cool guy. Essentially, he talked about how all of our destiny was a function of our character.

We end up in life wherever we end up as a direct function of our character. The entelechy of an acorn is an oak tree. The entelechy of a caterpillar is a butterfly. The entelechy of John is the very best version of John with all of his potential fully actualized. We believe that the way in which everybody optimizes their potential is through dialing up and developing their character.

The way in which everybody optimizes their potential is through dialing up and developing their character. Click To Tweet

What a beautiful, wonderful, and in the times we’re living in especially, necessary philosophy. Here’s another question that comes up. What is the talent and skill crisis that still needs to be solved?

I can answer your question with a lot of numbers, statistics, and data from the UK. I’ve probably got all of that in my head, and I’ve probably got the information from lots of other countries around the world. I know that the ratios and statistics that I’m going to share with you pertain everywhere. In the UK, there are a whole bunch of very interesting tectonic plate shifts going on that have never happened before.

We’ve got a weird situation, and I’ll run you through the data. The good news is we’ve got the lowest number of unemployed people ever, which means that we are paying out less in benefits. We’ve got the highest number of people in employment. We’ve got the highest number of people paying taxes, both great news for the economy.

However, we’ve got the highest number ever of job vacancies. The number of advertised job vacancies is at least a million more than the unemployed number. What that means is that companies can’t find people with the talent and skills that they need. There is a much greater number of job vacancies than there are qualified and suitable candidates to fill those roles.

We’ve got another couple of interesting statistics going on in the UK. During the pandemic, over half a million people over the age of 50 have withdrawn themselves from the labor market. The senior and middle management brain drain on the economy has been huge. That’s because, during the course of the lockdown, a lot of people had an opportunity to do an existential audit of their life.

They decided, “I’m 55, and I made enough money. I can retire now. I don’t need to go back to the office and commute. If we dial down our living a bit, we can make ends meets. I don’t need to work and kill myself in my job anymore.” There are two others I’m going to share with you. The most interesting one for me is that the Office for National Statistics in the UK, ONS, has been tracking this data for about 30 to 40 years.

What percentage of the population is thinking about changing their job in the next twelve months? What percentage of them are proactively doing something about it? The number plus or minus 5% for the last 30 to 40 years has been 45% thinking of changing their jobs, and 30% proactively doing something about it.

That could be polishing up their LinkedIn profile, polishing up their profile on a job board, writing their CVs, sending it to a head hunter, or going off and getting some career advice. However, at the end of the pandemic, those numbers were 90% and 75%. That means for any employer, 75% of their workforce are proactively thinking of changing their jobs.

The pressure on the retention of talent is people don’t have a clue what’s coming down the tracks. I know the same pertains to America. You’ve got a situation now where only 12% of graduates who leave university get a job remotely connected to their degree subject. Some 65% or 70% of them, after accumulating a large student loan end up a year after graduating with a job on minimum wage. They can never repay their student loan. There are more jobs requiring skills than there are people to fill those job vacancies. There are lots of people in employment who are wanting to leave or change their jobs. Employers can’t find the talent and they’re losing the talent that they’ve got.

It seems like some of the current solutions aren’t quite working the way that they should. For example, over here in the states, we’ve got a number of different job boards that are constantly advertising on television, on the internet, etc. We’re seeing the same thing in North America. There are not enough good people for the jobs that are out there that pay well. There’s not enough to fulfill. How do they fix that void? Is there a strategy for fixing that void and getting the right people in the right seats on the bus?

It’s a lot more complicated than that. We’ve had a 2025-year period where universities and colleges have been spewing people out with a degree with all the technical training that they need but don’t have the work-ready skills that employers also want to need. They are highly technically trained, but lacking in work-ready skills.

Universities have said, “You gave them a job, therefore they’re employable.” Employers are saying, “We had to hire them because there was no one else available. They’re not employable. They haven’t got the work-ready skills.” There’s an opportunity for a commercial enterprise to slip itself in between those two stalemate players.

They say, “We can deliver the work-ready skills training to university students, so when they turn up for an interview, they’ve got both their degree certificate and those work-ready skills the employers are looking for. We can also help employers with the work-ready skills that their existing workforce doesn’t have. We can also help employers figure out what work-ready skills they need for each role they’re hiring for.”

They say, “We need these technical skills, but we need these non-technical skills.” Our product enables someone to say, “Here’s my degree, but here’s all those non-technical skills you’re looking for that I’ve got a badge or a digital credential in.” We are helping employers significantly improve their recruitment success, their retention success, and their development success.

It’s a lot less expensive than anything that they currently spend money on. In a recession, which we are all in now, one of the first things to go is training budgets and L&D. It’s a perfect storm, so we can help employers with recruitment, retention, and development. We can also help applicants to develop and showcase the various skills that are in demand by employers that the other competitors for that interview position probably don’t have.

It’s a very interesting thing because everything you talked about there, we’re seeing throughout the economies in the world right now. There are jobs, but there are not enough people to fill the job properly. You’re able to fill it, but you’re not able to fill it properly. It’s such a void, and what you’re doing is going to help that. I’m going to talk a little bit about that a little more. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle stated, “Character determines destiny.” How come most companies and individuals haven’t figured that out yet? How do we figure it out, more importantly?

One of the most interesting things that have come out over the last year is when we show the character qualities model and framework to employers, their number one question is, “Why does no one ever think of this before? It’s so elegant. It’s so simple. It’s so clever. Why don’t schools teach this? Why don’t colleges teach this? Why has no one ever thought of this before?”

I always say to them, “Actually, there was a very clever chap called Aristotle 2,500 years ago who did come up with it. Unfortunately, that’s not how education’s gone in the meantime.” Also, when we show our product to young people, we say to them, “Look at these 54 character qualities. If you developed any of them, what would the benefit to you be?”

They’re like, “I want to develop all of these. They’d all be helpful to me. Why weren’t we taught this at school or college?” Employers have been poor at insisting that education produces the skills and talents that they’re going to need for the future workforce. They’ve only got themselves to blame. They didn’t influence education to deliver that.

 

Education has had a gravy train for the last several years where people from overseas, in America or the UK, are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a place at an Ivy League or Top UK Russell Group University. The universities don’t need to change. They’ve got a very profitable, lucrative model. Some of them are waking up to the fact that to attract students in the future, they’re going to have to deal with this.

I don’t think that’s easy. They’re a train on the tracks, and they’ve delivered their model in a certain way. To add on top of learning all about aeronautical engineering, you’ve got to learn about how to be efficient, organized, disciplined, reliable, accountable, responsible, and all the other character qualities that we help people develop.

Even though it is possible, they’re probably set in their ways and would find it hard. I don’t think education’s going to change quickly. They’ll change at glacial speed. Employers have a responsibility to dial up their insistence on education that they do produce workers who have the work-ready capability, but that’s a long time. In the meantime, we’re going to jump right into that gap and fill both parties.

Let’s talk about this being your legacy project, your life project, the summation of everything you’ve learned in these 45-plus years in the real world of business, the ups, the downs, the successes, the failures, all of the great people that you’ve worked with, all the things you’ve learned from others, and the things you’ve learned from your mentors.

Everything compiled is now the result of what’s being taught through the Entelechy Academy. Talk about that a little bit. Tell people how they can be part of it if they care and what they can learn from it, anything that you want to share. This is your life project, and it’s very important. More than that, it’s important for you, but it’s important for others. If we don’t change some of the things that we’re doing in the world, we’re going in the wrong direction, not only economically, but in so many different directions. What you’re doing is such a wonderful and inspiring thing that people need to know about. Tell us everything that you can.

I don’t think you’ll find many people on the planet who don’t think that the world’s not screwed up. We’ve got wars, climate change, and health scandals going on. We’ve got food price inflation. The world’s in a mess. I believe that the only way that we can solve all of those problems for the world is to raise everybody’s consciousness.

The way we raise everybody’s consciousness to one degree is through the development of character. Whether it’s solving climate change, health challenges, economic challenges, or war challenges, it’s all through raising consciousness. I believe that you do that by developing character. I’m old now, and I left school when I was 18. Back in those days, we had debating societies where you learn critical thinking skills. We had sport, drama, music, all sorts of hands-on cooking, and all sorts of things. Now, all of those subjects have been eviscerated out of this state education system because of cutbacks. All of the emphasis has been on working hard for exams to get into a good college or university.

Part of the problem is that all of the things we learned from being a boy scout or a girl guide have disappeared from the system. It’s not been taught at school, and lots of things in other non-school activities that we could develop, like leadership, team skills, and all sorts of things, have disappeared. I also think that young people spend hours every day on social media or mobile devices.

They’re not collaborating and communicating with other human beings. There are a lot of social skills that have disappeared. The world needs to develop its character to solve all these problems. It’s not like you need to study all 54. You can, over the course of your lifetime. I haven’t met anybody yet, not one person when they see the 54 character qualities.

 

I say, “Choose one that you can think of that you know if you dialed that one up over the next month or so, it would have a pretty dramatic positive impact for you.” One of my colleagues at work joined us months ago. We all do this as a team. We all work on our company character qualities that we want to develop that quarter and our own personal ones.

He said, “I’m going to work on being kind.” Over the course of the month, he kept saying, “My wife’s fallen back in love with me. I’ve done this and that. She can’t believe how kind I’m being. I can’t believe I didn’t do this over the last few years. It’s not that difficult to do, but because I’m conscious about it, I get dramatic results.” One of my other colleagues wanted to dial up being more influential. A month later, she got podcasts and interviews going on left, right, and center. She’s got so much talent and skills that she could share with the world but never developed the confidence that she had something worth saying.

Hopefully, through our efforts, we’ve encouraged her and developed her confidence. She now is out there doing interviews like this and feels fantastic about it. All of that’s happened in a month. You can take one character quality you want to work on and you are conscious about it, “If everything I do today, I want to learn to be more confident, kinder, more disciplined, or more reliable,” and you do that for a week or a fortnight, guess what? You’ve had dramatic results. People go, “This is quite easy. What’s another one I could do?” and then another one. It’s quite good fun getting positive feedback from people, “I noticed the difference.”

Also, if you ask people to give you a 360 and invite them to say, “What do you think I could be better at?” they tell you, and then you say to them, “Thank you very much. I’ve chosen to work on this one and this one.” The other person’s going, “I wanted to tell them that for the last five years I’ve been working with them. Now, they’ve asked me, and I’ve told them. Now, they’re working on it.” I’m going to say, “Well done, John. I’ve noticed this and that. Thanks for doing that.” Everybody benefits from it. It’s not like it’s that difficult or complicated. It’s just about being conscious of, “My life could be better if I dialed this one character quality up.” It isn’t that complicated, and it’s fun.

It makes a lot of sense. Let me ask you one last question here. What’s your advice to young people? They’re inheriting a world that’s coming out of COVID. Some of them are a little bit older than my kids. Maybe they had gotten their education, started their business career, and started their life. Everything was going well. As happened to you happened to me. I launched a book around the same time. That’s why I was laughing. Around the same time, you were going through that. I launched a book called, Moving Up: 2020. When I wrote it in 2019 and released it in 2020, I thought it was going to be an amazing year. It was an amazing year, as everybody knows.

For those young folks, those Gen X-ers, Gen Z-ers, whatever terms that they want to throw at these young folks that they are, what’s your advice going forward? It seems to me like a lot of them have tremendous skill basis with technology. To your point, they’ll sit at a family dinner on their phone, and their brother, sister, mother, father, or whoever’s sitting across from them will be on their phone the whole time. They’re almost anti-social because of the technology.

On one hand, it’s a great tool. On the other hand, it doesn’t give them one of those other skillsets of communication that we grew up with. We talked to people, and that’s what we had to do. We didn’t have these devices in our hands. Let me throw that question at you. How would you coach them? How would you mentor that next generation that’s going to be inheriting the world that we created for better or worse?

I have two children in their 30s. As I said earlier on, I brought them up on my own when they were 7 and 3. Like most parents, I gave it my best shot, but they constantly used to tell me, “Dad, you haven’t got a clue what you’re doing.” It is amusing and ironic now that they’re saying, “Now we realize why you used to want us to do this or make us do that. It didn’t make sense at the time, but now it does.” Twenty years later, I finally get acknowledgment for it. I’m going to answer your question in a slightly different way if that’s okay.

One of the things that I worry a lot about at the moment is the amount of fear that is pushed on everybody, fear of Putin launching a nuclear war, fear of a global economic collapse, the future of the Chinafication of the world, future of another pandemic, and fear of food shortage or scarcity. People who live all day every day in fear don’t function properly. One of the things that I worry about with young people is that their behaviors are driven by fear.

People who live every day in fear don't function properly. Click To Tweet

That fear is FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out. “If I don’t stay on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok all day long, I’m not going to know what everybody else is doing and I’m going to be left out.” It’s that fear of missing out. I remember a few years ago, taking my son and our dog for a walk. We walked all around Hyde Park in London, and he was on his phone the whole time.

When we got home, I said, “Did you see all the ducklings? Did you see the signets? Did you see that funny man feeding the pigeons?” “No, I missed all that.” A week or so later, he came over, and we were going to take the dog for a walk. I said, “Do me a favor, just one time. Leave your phone at home. Let’s talk about the things we see.”

When we got home, he was like, “Dad, that was the best fun. We had a fantastic conversation. We chatted with that nice family. We saw that funny thing.” I’m going to answer your question about what advice I’d give in a slightly roundabout way. I’m often asked by people, “Of the 54 character qualities, David, what are the most important ones? What are the top three to be successful?”

They maybe expect me to say things like being strategic, courageous, confident, or whatever, which are the testosterone alpha qualities that people would perceive most CEOs would have. Actually, if by successful, we mean successful in life, my three favorite character qualities are, 1) Being curious. 2) Being open-minded. 3) Being kind.

If I could get young people to focus on being curious, open-minded, and kind, that would be a good place to start. As they develop competence in those three areas, you can teach them to be lots of other things, too, but I’d start there. If they become curious, open-minded, and kind, they’ll focus less on fear-driven activities and more on collaborating and communicating with other human beings. That’s how we’re going to make the world a better place. It’s by helping people collaborate and communicate.

I love what you said there. To your point of being curious, in my normal profession, I do these podcasts, write for fun, and work with a lot of research scientists. What do they say? The number one thing is always to ask why. Be curious. What does a great scientist ask? Why does this do this or that? Being open-minded, you don’t know what the other person’s gone through. You don’t know what the other situation is. You haven’t walked in their shoes. Being open-minded leads you to accept other people and what they’re going through. Being kind, I’m a big fan of Shark Tank, which I’m sure they show in the UK. It started there. I think Devil’s Lair or something was the original name of it.

You don't know the other person's situation. Being open-minded leads you to accepting others and what they're going through. Click To Tweet

Dragons’ Den.

Canada has called it something. It’s all over the world now, but one of the guys on there now is the founder of the KIND Bar. He told his story one time, which was amazing why he named it the KIND Bar. He’s got a great story to it, but we don’t have time for now. About what you said, it’s being kind to people. It’s amazing when you smile at somebody. What happens? They smile back. It opens up good communication between people. Let me ask you a couple of finishing questions here, David. If people wanted to find out about the academy, what’s their best path to do that?

The best way to explore what we do is to go to our website, which is www.Entelechy.academy. The best way to follow what Entelechy Academy is doing is to go to Entelechy Academy on LinkedIn. Back to your kind introduction, the reason I always insert David CM Carter is because I’m the only David Carter on LinkedIn with David CM Carter, whereas there are hundreds of other David Carters. You’ll go straight to me on LinkedIn.

If anyone wants to reach out to me personally, please do it via LinkedIn. It’s David CM Carter. Entelechy Academy has got a LinkedIn page where you can follow what we’re doing and all the news, updates, and progress. If you want to explore a little bit about more what Entelechy Academy does in our app, then go to the website. The app is also in both app stores as Entelechy Academy. There’s a fourteen-day free trial, so you can knock yourselves out and have a play with it before deciding if you want to buy it.

I know you’ve offered some books as well, have you not?

Only one. It’s called Breakthrough: Learn the Secrets of the World’s Leading Mentor and Become the Best You Can Be.

Where do they get it?

Get it on Amazon.

I have to thank you once again. This has been remarkable. Congratulations, and all the best of success with the academy. You’re blessing and helping so many people with the cumulative experiences of everyone that you’ve gathered and the teaching that’s taking place. I can’t wait to read all 54 of those points. Any one of them could probably be a podcast or a book in itself, needless to say.

They could. Perhaps you’re right. I haven’t got 54 more books in me, though. Thank you very much for having me on the show, John. It’s been a pleasure to chat with you. I’m very optimistic about the future, even though we’re going through a horrible time at the moment. I am excited to bring entelechy back to the world after two and a half thousand years of it being lost from Aristotle.

It’s a beautiful word, and it’s a beautiful concept if we could all remember this little story. One of the questions I was asked all the time was when I was doing my book tour and on television. “David, if you are the world’s leading mentor, are you the best version of yourself?” I said, “Yes, of course, I am.” They said, “Isn’t that a bit arrogant?”

I said, “No, I am the best version of myself because every single day, I accept I can be a better version of myself. I work every day on being a better version of myself. I’m going to keep doing that until the day I die. I am the best version of myself today, but I promise you there’s a better version coming tomorrow and the day after.” If everybody had that mindset of, “I want to be my entelechy. I want to be the best version of me with all of my potential fully actualized,” come and join us at Entelechy Academy because we can help you get there.

Thank you again, David. I appreciate it. Folks, you got a lot of information out of this. Take advantage of it.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Entelechy Academy
• Breakthrough: Learn the Secrets of the World’s Leading Mentor and Become the Best You Can Be
• Moving Up: 2020
• Entelechy Academy – LinkedIn
• Entelechy Academy – Apple App Store