Adam Johnston has extensive experience leading and developing diverse teams and functions in mid-size and Fortune 500 companies. Operating under the belief that continuous curiosity, hunger to improve, and thoughtful prioritization are key elements of sustainable and beneficial growth, Mr. Johnston has utilized diverse professional and personal experiences to build an agile career. From his start as a U.S. Marine, to real estate appraisal, police officer, process improvement, project management, and many roles in mortgage lending, Mr. Johnston is authentic and open in sharing insights into his many failures, improvement opportunities, successes, and principals that function as his true north.
In this episode, Steve and Adam discuss:
- Cultivating perpetual curiosity
- Treating others with humanity
- Applying your learnings with humility
- The real adventure
Key Takeaways:
- Be perpetually curious. You have to have a desire and the will to execute it and be willing to endure and improve.
- Power is neither good or bad, it’s how you use it and how you treat people when you’re in a position of power that makes it good or bad. Just like you and me, other people want to be respected. You’ll see people open up more easily if you give them respect and dignity.
- Understanding a concept is only half the battle, being able to apply your learning is what really makes a difference. Applying your learning and being able to evaluate yourself honestly will take humility.
- The real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes. It’s not about the place that you’ve arrived at, it’s about who you’ve become along the way. That’s the real adventure.
“Being perpetually curious is an important true north and a desire and will to continuously improve.”
- Adam Johnston
Connect with Steve and Jason:
- Website: Rewire, Inc.: Transformed Thinking
- Email: grow@rewireinc.com
Listen to the podcast here:
Adam Johnston- Perpetually Curious as True North
Welcome, everybody to the Insight Interviews. This is your host today, Steve Scanlon, and I am really excited for today because I get to bring in a guest that, I guess all our guests are like this, but today's guest is a gentleman by the name of Adam Johnston. Adam, say hello to the Insight Interview world.
Hello, Insight Interview world.
There you go. Adam, we're really excited to hear about your story. You know, I don't know that I've ever said this on our actual show, but we have a pretty cool little vetting process for people that we bring onto the show, and part of that is I get to introduce myself to some of these people, some of them I know already, and I get to have some conversations with people. And usually after those conversations, if you're hearing Adam on the show, either Adam or I got pretty excited about this thing, so I'm excited to at least have our listeners get to hear your story, Adam, and you have a really unique take on the world. I think your background, which I'm going to let you talk about is really, really cool. And so, I'm just excited to get it out there. So, you ready for it?
I'm ready.
Okay. Well, I guess the first question I have, today when you woke up and you were walking around the planet, I know you're on the East Coast over there, but what jumps to the front of your mind when I ask you this question: what are you grateful for?
I am super grateful to be breathing, so that’s important. It allows me to enjoy the rest of my day. I am immensely grateful for my family, my incredible wife, and I'm grateful for my faith in the Lord.-1.png?width=340&height=260&name=Untitled%20design%20(15)-1.png)
Those are great, great gratitude’s. Awesome. I'm just kind of curious, how often do you remind yourself of your own gratitude’s?
Regularly, on a daily basis. I pray every day and part of that I offer gratefulness to start out, you know, recognizing that even when things have been pretty bad in my life at times, there was always things to be grateful for. I think that'll weave into the theme of other things I look at. That's the humbleness, right? Being grateful is a is an attribute of humbleness.
Well, I That's fantastic. I'd love to dive in. By way of introduction, again, I can certainly read people your bio and your CV, but again, as I mentioned upfront, you've had some really cool experiences. You know, without taking too long, because I want to ask you questions about the experiences, but I think it's just fair if the listeners get to know a little bit about you, so to the best of your ability, how would you synthesize who you are, where you've come from, and maybe, you know, obviously vocationally, what do you do there? And if you wouldn't mind, giving us that background and having you share your story, that'd be great.
I don't know where to start. There's a lot in that question.
All right. Tell us about you in five minutes or less.
Well, I guess I'll start out and just describe maybe how I think about life around me, and that'll frame up how my career, you'll see why I have such a, what seems like a very random career path. But, you know, I am a person that is entirely unafraid to be open about my many failures, and I've got a whole stream of failures, but I'm okay with that. I’m also open about my improvement opportunities and successes. And I think from a principles standpoint, you know, my true north, if you will, you know, my faith in the Lord and then thoughtful prioritization and planning, and you'll see that in my career. That means I am unapologetically devoted to my family, and I jealously guard my time with them. And generosity and kindness, you know, being a critical part, I think of my true north perpetual curiosity. I'll touch on that, you know, in some of the questions of why my career has gone the way it has. But I think being perpetually curious is an important True North and a desire and will to continuously improve. And those two go hand in hand, you can have a desire. I read on LinkedIn all the time; people have great desires. And of course, I see people say somewhat outlandish things, like you can be whatever you want. Well, I beg to differ, like, a few things, and I'm just physically incapable of doing so, but at the end of the day, you must have a desire, and then you have to have the will. I mean, you got to execute. You got to be willing to endure to improve. And then my last one, probably is that there's just some hills that aren't worth dying for.
See, see, this is why I don't, I think I told you, when we first talked, like I bring a bunch of questions to the table, I never get to any, because just that right there. I love being perpetually curious as a true north. Like, I just want to stop and go, okay, I got so many questions about that. A desire, a willingness, and the fact that some hills are not worth dying for. Okay, I didn't mean to cut you off. I just, I only have about 200 questions based on those things, but that's cool. Tell us a little bit about this crazy career path that you've been on with that as a backdrop.
So, I guess to be brief with it, I watched a lot of war movies in went and decided to go in the Marine Corps out of high school. I was a relatively poor high school student, because I have, you know, other things that interest me, and so I ended up going to the Marine Corps. I did get a choice of job field, in that, and I chose infantry, and unfortunately, you know, I became a machine gunner, which isn’t unfortunate. I had fun doing that, but there is no civilian application for that skill set. So, I found myself having spent some time learning to do things that nobody really cared about when I got out of the Marine Corps, which led me to get out of the Marine Corps. I was married at the time, and we had a child on the way and so I needed to make money. The long and the short of it is I tried college, and much like my career in high school, I found that I was disinterested in learning some of the things that were being taught. That sounds antithetical to perpetual curiosity, but I'm curious, and if I find I'm not interested anymore, I move on, and that that kind of happened with some of the classes; classes like English that I loved, but I dropped out, and ultimately got into real estate appraisal. I had a father who ran a company, and I asked him if he would train me. And so, he made me do some things to prove that I was worthy of being trained, and I did them, and he trained me, and that just opened up a whole career, you know. I did tax assessment for a while as a bank fee appraiser, until they laid me off and ran my own company for a while and ultimately started a huge opportunity for me at the time to start up a national appraisal management company, the national division, and that was a tremendous learning experience. But the one in a company where there was no direction, it was kind of like, go do it, and if you fail, goodbye, and so that is where curiosity really started. And then I moved into mortgage insurance for 12 years, worked as an AMC for 11 years, I moved into mortgage insurance for 12, and currently, I'm with a mortgage lending firm in their enterprise risk, which is just fantastic. During that time of appraisal, I decided that I wanted a backup career, because getting laid off from the bank was just very impactful to me. It threw me for a loop. I am a person who values loyalty and I felt cast away, and so I said, I gotta get a plan B, so I started going to police academy at night and eventually became a police officer. I did that full time for a while and part time for a while, and that was another great experience, a good people experience, and that framed a lot of how I process what I see in the world. But throughout this, you know, the perpetual curiosity, I got exposed to Jack Welch and Six Sigma and eventually you know, got my Six Sigma Black Belt, which caused me to overcome my fear of math, design for six sigma you know, lean process engineering and all that stuff and then eventually decided project management was a skill that would really benefit me as a leader. And so I developed that and got a PMP and Scrum Master and Scrum Product Owner, all that good stuff, and that those things have helped open up just tremendous doors for me to lead other units to develop things within fortune 500 companies. Just because you know, the curiosity, and yeah, so I think it was great.
Okay. So, you know I have to pause for a second. And again, I'm going back to my original notes of, okay, hang on, desire, willingness, your true north and the curious thing keeps repeating itself, but if I can get this straight for a second, you were a machine gunner. And by the way, thank you for your service. You were a machine gunner. I guess I'm kind of grateful that doesn't have a civilian applicant
Maybe in some cities it does.
Exactly. Ah, that's terrible. You needed to make money, so you got into appraisal, tax assessment, you had your own appraisal management company, you kind of mentioned it didn't have a lot of direction, then you're going into mortgage insurance. Eventually mortgage lending where you're doing enterprise risk, but even before that, you were a police officer. And even after that, Six Sigma, Black Belt process engineering scrum master- that is a lot, and they seem disparate in some ways. But I'm sort of curious if I was the listener of this, I got questions about each of these, but what did you learn by being a police officer? What was the people, you said, you made a quick passing comment there, maybe other people are interested in the six sigma, we can maybe get to all of them. What did you learn about people being a police officer?
Well, I learned something about the use of power, and you know, a badge imparts a particular kind of authority and power. I've worked with police officers that I would characterize as some of them as being very unpleasant, and they would wield that power in a very destructive way, and then I worked with officers who could just interface with anyone. Didn't matter what the socio-economic background was, they could connect with people at a very deep level, because of the badge. The badge overcomes, in many cases, people's natural resistance to outsiders, there was something about the badge, and it could be good or bad, and how you wielded it was so important. So, I learned I could go into affordable housing areas, and I could get out of the car, and I could walk right up to a group of kids and begin dialogue. You just couldn't do that if you didn't have that badge on it, so it just opened a lot of doors, but I learned that, you know, I mean, people, first of all, people want to be respected, and if you can learn to treat humans as humans and respect them, most of us have very similar wants, needs and desires. Very basic wants, needs and desires. And if you can appeal to those, you can open up doors and have conversations with people that you otherwise never would have been able to interact with, and that was huge for me. But you see people at their best and their worst. You see people in tragedy, victims of crime, you see people committing crime, but you can still be relatable. And one last thing that I mentioned on that is I spent a number of years as a part time officer. I was doing this, but I was doing warrant service, and that involves going and finding people that we had warrants on and it needed to arrest them, and bring them to jail to appear before the court. And so that was a responsibility of the department. And so, I would do that and unfortunate because of staffing, I had to do that alone. And it's one of the more dangerous things that a police officer does. You show up at a felon’s house, someone who knows what they're wanted, and you show up there and tell them that you're gonna go put them in jail. It’s just not a great introduction. So, but I learned to be successful with that, in part by treating people with dignity and respect. An example would be not arresting them, not cuffing them in front of their family. I found that was a big way to keep people from fighting with you..png?width=340&height=260&name=Untitled%20design%20(14).png)
Wow, wow. Again, I on the Insight Interviews, I do sometimes wonder, Adam, if these things are just for me. I know we have a lot of listeners, but I just, you made me think about this idea of the badge. Maybe in some ways we all wear a badge. I know it's not like a police badge, and I get that that's what you were talking about, but we all wear some sort of badge and I asked myself well, am I going to wear it? And with whatever badge I have and whatever power that carries, will I use that power for good or well I use it for bad?
Yeah, yeah.
And then the dignity of people seems pretty basic. I mean, maybe some people listening. That's humanity 101. I don't know, dude, like when you look around our world, not to be overly cynical, but don't you think that there's improvements that we can make in our world with regard to how you view other people, treating people with dignity?
"Oh, for sure. You know, I think people can intellectually understand a concept and oftentimes have a very difficult time putting it into practice, and we see executives do this with some degree of disturbing regularity. And that's become so obtuse to people in their organization, that they can go through all this high-level executive training, and still not be able to treat people with humanity, and still not be able to defer to others, and empower others. I mean, it can be, it's astounding."
Well, I have a philosophical question about that. Maybe you didn't expect these in this call, but I don't disagree with you that I think what you're defining, and again, I can say it back to you and make sure that I heard you right, We can learn about it, you can go to classes, you can take classes on leadership and servant leadership, and obviously you can learn the stuff and still not practice it, you know, with all that you've done with regard to people in the military and police and in your own business, in the multiple businesses that you've been involved with understanding Six Sigma, how do you how do you make sense of that? When you think about the discrepancy between our unbelievable capacity to learn, and our unwillingness to act on the learning, I'm curious, how do you make sense of that? What do you say ?How do you describe that? How do you explain that.
Maybe I'll just route it in one word, and that's humbleness. What I think sometimes happens with people that reach levels of high power, like, you know, an executive, for example, the humbleness can often disappear, and when you lose the humbleness, you stop seeing yourself with honest self-evaluation, and you have a hard time listening to others, and you have a hard time acting in a way that doesn't in some way promote yourself. And I mean, I know I’m being a little bit harsh, but I think it starts with being humble, and if you can see your failures, I mentioned that earlier, I don't consider failures to be, you know, that's just part of life, but recognizing them and saying, man, what could I have, if I could do that over again, what would I do differently to have a better outcome? And that includes how you treat people. So, like leadership, and they go get all this training, and they go to an Ivy League school and executive companies pour all this money into trying to teach leaders to be emotionally intelligent, and they get all this training, but they aren't teaching humbleness. And so, they come out with the intellectual understanding the academic understanding of what a good leader looks like, and they can get a good pen, but they have a hard time when they're sitting in a meeting. They have a hard time acting out that humbleness.
Okay, so, I told you when we first talked, it's not my job to put you on the spot and the question that was in my head kind of put you on the spot a little bit.
Yeah, I don't know how-
You might say that. Depends, right? If you are going to, to a sense, that's such a crucial component, humbleness, humility, as a leader, and yet you're saying like, people lack that. And so, I think what you said is one of the ways that you describe the gap, the delta, between action and understanding is in someone's humility and their humbleness, right?
Yeah.
How do you teach it, Adam? If you are going to teach a course, on this, how do you teach someone that? Do you just hope they get it? Is it a quality that you just hope they have? Or can it actually be developed? And if you are going to help someone develop it, how would you do it?
That's a really good question. I'm probably not bright enough to answer it correctly. I think experiencing things is a good way for people to learn, and we oftentimes learn well by doing, so if I was thinking about a classroom setting where, you know, that was my only opportunity for someone to learn, and let me put myself in here too, because when I look at all my failures in my in my leadership failures, I have probably blown it a whole number of times, pivotal times in my career looked back, like oh my gosh, I'm such an idiot. And so, I've learned from that, but I would probably take people in a classroom and I would bring up scenarios and I would have it acted out what we normally see in an executive meeting, right? Versus what's an example of how a leader could have handled this in a way. I know that stuff is done today, so maybe I’ll just shut up.
No, I know actually, it isn't. I think you bring up a really good point. I don't know that people go out of their way to say, hey, let's bring live scenarios in and actually touch it and feel it. Maybe part of what you're saying is, unfortunately, some of this stuff does get stuck in the realm of academia in a textbook. I mean, I think humility and humbleness is, I don't know, I got to imagine that's taught in leadership classes in the book.
Yeah.
And the other thing that I'm hearing you say, and again, I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to give this back to you, so that you can say, yeah, that is what I'm saying. You have said it several times now, this willingness to see mistakes, and so I wonder if humbleness doesn't stem from the willingness to admit it, see, it, and then even make sense of it and let mistakes be your teacher. Again, you didn't say quite like that, but I think that's kind of what you're saying. I mean, how do we do that better?
Yeah, that I don't know. I have no insight. So, you know, character traits of humbleness.
"I don't know how you make someone humble. Sometimes life is the teacher. It's being broken, and then some honest people around you are pointing out that no, this wasn't everyone else's fault. You've got to own your portion and pointing it out. You know, I've had a few people in my professional career that have been honest evaluators, and I would listen to them even if it hurt my feelings, but I wasn't afraid after meetings, because I would often be in meetings with them to go after them and say, what could I have done better?"
And they would say, boy Adam, you did not read the room very well, you should have shut up 20 minutes earlier than when you did, and you know, you were just not reading the crowd. And you know, you don't want to hear that, but if you if you're willing to listen and go, alright, I get it. So, what would I do differently?
But that's learning from it. You know, when I asked you how would you do this, and you thought, and you said, I don't know, I think that's frickin' brilliant. Because isn't that part of the problem? Like, and my question to you, how would you teach a class on humbleness? Like if someone asked me that now that I'm thinking about it and go I, I wouldn't. I don't know. Maybe it's not a very humble thing to do, and yet it's such a powerful trait. Wow. When you said you had no insights, that's crazy, because I have some as a result of just this whole dialogue, and I want to thank you for it. Talk to me about curiosity. That also came up and you had some energy around that and being perpetually curious, and I wanted to give you a space, like, what's the story behind that? And tell us a little bit about how you foster curiosity?
Well, going back to probably, you know, an embarrassing admission, and it's been my Achilles heel, and I hate even saying it in public, because I always live with a bit of a shame, I never graduated from college. I've gone back a couple times, and, you know, instead I went back and just would pivot and focus on professional development, but that lack of that degree just closes doors for me all over. Like I could have 30 years of expertise and leading a nonprofit entities and work in Fortune 500 companies and having all kinds of P&L responsibility and HR responsibility and yet, I can't get an interview, right? I wouldn't qualify because I lacked that, and that has always been deep in the back of my mind, and it informs how I try to operate and its influence. We talked about the curiosity. This is how it ties in. I am constantly living with this Achilles heel and so I'm constantly looking for new ways to make myself marketable. Not because I'm a job hopper, because I'm not. My last two jobs have spanned 24 years. So, you know, but at the end of the day, I am constantly looking for how do I how do I improve? How do I develop, learn, learn, learn? And so, I am constantly learning both professionally and personally and that's very satisfying to me, and whether I was broke, or whether I was doing very well, I would get a great deal of satisfaction out of developing, even though I carried this Achilles heel that kind of interrupts my ability to have doors opened. And it's embarrassing to admit that. But look, you know, it is what it is.
Well, I'm grateful. I love the transparency. And I'm grateful that you did and it sounds like, you know, that's pretty trite to say, that's making lemons. I mean, it's also helped you spawn all the curiosity that you have. So, well, I hope you never get a degree. It sounds like you're going to serve the world better with your curiosity than you might by getting a degree.
Well, yeah, I think so too. But, you know, we had an earlier conversation and I had mentioned Marcel Proust, the French philosopher, that just my favorite quote is that the real voyage of discovery consists in seeking and not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes, or in other words, the real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes. And so, you know, I keep the curiosity. It’s simply saying, hey, you know, people have the human capacity to learn, to grow, to adapt to, to go from being arrogant to being humble, to go from being tough and brutish to being empathetic and caring. People have the capacity to do that, but it starts with humbleness. Honest self-evaluation begins that process, and, you know, you can see yourself in a new set of eyes. I don't see myself through the lens of some college degree or profession, I don't see myself as well, I’m a real estate appraiser, therefore, that is what I am. No. I'm a human, and I have the capacity to learn to grow to take different routes. I don't have to discover new lands; I can do all kinds of things in place. I don't have to get a new job to learn new skills. So, if you're in a job, continually be curious about how to develop new skill sets within the job. I gained, for example, the Six Sigma, not as a career, not coming out of college with math degrees and taking them into business learn, I developed that because I saw how valuable that could be at correcting defects, that helping to identify correct incorrect defects, organization and lean to take waste out, because I saw where it was valued, and I went to look for the tools. How do you do this effectively? And that opened the door. So, you go learn, go get certifications and then go to the business and say I want to contribute in a new way to this business. I think I can bring value to my employer by bringing the skill set.
Adam, it's just absolutely excellent. Believe it or not, we're getting close to our time. What is something in this particular season of life that has your curiosity piqued?
Are you talking about like the development that I was just referring to?
Sure. Or really anything. Like, where are you seeing with new eyes? What's hitting you or what are you super curious about?
I'll be very basic with it. I desperately want to grow in information technology. Not because I want to do that as a career path, but, you know, I think everybody would identify with this. Everything goes through it.
These days, for sure. Yeah.
We use computers for our most basic functions. Entirely complex organizations still all intersect in IT, and I think understanding more about architecture, you know, systems architecture and how programs interface, all of those things help you speak the language of business. I did the scrum master and the Scrum Product Owner, not because I wanted to be a scrum master, but because we were doing projects that were Agile projects that were using the scrum system, and it would make it much easier for me to have a conversation with the Scrum Masters, and those involved in the process, if I could speak the language and if I could have at least a functional understanding of what was going on. And so, I went and, you know, got that training and got those certifications, just because I wanted to know. So the same thing with developing a better understanding of how these tables go together.
That's awesome.
That’s my long-winded answer to your question.
No, that's great. It's absolutely great. I think it must be good because you got me thinking why I should be studying that stuff like our lives so depend upon it. But like, I'm the kind of guy like, I don't even know how can-openers work, much less like any of this, you know? That's why I'm always calling people out on LinkedIn or, I don’t know, you know, whatever. So, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that you have that curiosity, learn, and then continue to educate the rest of us. So, hey, look, thank you. Thank you for your time, thank you for this. I have so many questions certainly with regard to these other aspects of your vocation, where you are right now as an enterprise risk, what did you learn in the mortgage, and there's so much that I could ask you, so I'd love to have you back on the show. But again, we have the show Adam, because we try to draw your insights, but as our guests are articulating themselves, the idea is, what insights are we having? So, I can tell you that I've had some amazing insights as you're talking so I trust that other people will too. And for that, I am grateful for you, so thanks for being on the show.
Thank you, Steve.
I hope everybody got some insights there and we will see you next time on the Insight Interviews.
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