It is often challenging to maintain interest, let alone a passion, for what we are doing for nearly half a century. Yet, that is exactly what Rick Seymour has done. He has been helping people improve their health through individualized nutrition plans for 47 years and reports feeling even more passionate about his business than he did when he started! It was not an easy journey though. Finding the right fit involved exploring many different options and transitioning out of corporate America took years of hard work and sacrifice. Learn more about Rick’s inspiring journey as he bares it all in this conversation with Stephen Jaye.
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Living Life On Your Own Terms: How Rick Seymour Found And Maintained His Passion For 47 Years
One thing I talk about quite a bit is this idea of living by the script. By the script, what I’m talking about is the standard expectations that we have almost unwritten in our culture now. Every culture has them. In this culture, this manifest says something along the lines of go to school, get good grades, get a good job, gradually move up the ladder, have 2.3 kids. I’m not here to throw shade on anyone that is living according to the script. If you’re happy with it, I’m happy for you. One of my goals is to open people up to other possibilities. I want to introduce my guest, Rick Seymour, who began living in a semi-retired state at the age of 38. Rick, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Stephen. I’m delighted to be with you.
Thank you so much. Your journey is going from something that was way more by the script in the sense that you were working a standard corporate job to what you’re doing now, which is a state of semi-retirement or working at your own discretion. Describe the overall process.
“If somebody is forward thinking enough that they have a growth mindset, they realize that by working on themselves they can accomplish things they weren’t able to do in the past. All of a sudden things change dramatically.”
When I went to school at CU, I had a Major in Applied Mathematics and Physics because it was easy for me. When I got out of school, it’s like, “What do you do with that if you want to stay in Colorado?” In those days, there are only two significant corporations to work for that could utilize that talent. That was Martin Marietta, which is now Lockheed Martin, and Ball Brothers. Martin Marietta was very involved in the space program. I came into it early. I’m literally a recovering rocket scientist. I started right at the end of the last Apollo mission and worked on our first space station, which was Skylab. Several years ago, we put a lander on Mars for the first time with less technology than you have in your cell phone. I worked on the early shuttle programs. As interesting and exciting as the work was, the bureaucracy, office politics, all of it made me a little crazy.
Being a contractor to NASA, with another layer of politics and bureaucracy on top of us, it was a stifling atmosphere to work in. I got to the place where I didn’t want to have to put up with all of that. You have to get a little beat up in the corporate world before being an entrepreneur and being on your own makes sense. I got to the point where I was tired of working for people I wouldn’t hire. When you add to that, all of the stuff that goes with large corporations, I wanted out. I wouldn’t even eat lunch in the company cafeteria because I was afraid somebody would talk to me. You’d know what to do with that. I couldn’t figure a way out but knew that I wanted out and kept striving to make that happen. I knew I wanted the freedom of being in my own business. I wanted the flexibility with a good enough income to enjoy the time freedom. In the early days of being an engineer, it was a mystery to me.
To make sure our audiences are oriented, that would be in the 1970s.
Yes.
I know there’s a lot of new stuff going on with the space program over the last years with Elon Musk and SpaceX. This is the tail end of the first set of space exploration that culminated with the 1969 moment of landing on the moon. There was a whole bunch of other missions.
Most people don’t have the self-discipline to do what needs to be done in an entrepreneurial environment.
At that point, everything we’re doing was being done for the first time. Everything I worked on, with the exception of the Viking Lander, was manned spaceflight. When you’re talking about people’s lives at stake, the hoops you had to jump through, the thousand different iterations and meetings you had to go through before anybody would ever make a decision about anything drove me nuts. I wanted to be able to do my work, make a decision and get on with it. You had to have approval from 74 people before anything was ever allowed to happen or make a decision about.
One of the things I wonder is, do you believe it’s any different now? Do you think that since there’s still a lot of bureaucratical government involvement, we’d still have that same frustration if you were to be doing that now?
When you look at the fact that private corporations are part of the space program without all of the government oversight that we’ve had historically, there’s probably less of that now. When they’re talking about taking passengers into space in the next few years, you’re going to have to pay attention to how well you’re doing your job and jump through as many hoops knowing that people’s lives are in danger. Look at what’s happened to the airlines over the last several years and even in experiences that people have seen on the news. The reality is you got to be good at what you do and you can’t cut corners. It doesn’t matter whether it’s NASA driving the program or a private corporation driving the program.
You’re saying that by the very nature of the work, it requires strong attention to detail and significant layers of quality control. One of the things that will be interesting for a lot of people to think about is we often have ideas of what we want to do but don’t necessarily see the entire picture. People think of space. They think of going out into outer space, building rocket ships. All the glory is part of it. Any career path, anyone who pursues this is going to have something of a non-glorious component to it. It’s a matter of thinking that through as well.
There’s that, but there’s another piece that becomes obvious to people that find themselves in their own business however they got there. It’s always about the other guy. It’s about your customer. Until you’re able to have that perspective about what it is you’re doing and how you put yourself out there, it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do, you’re not going to be very successful at it.
Would you say that an important component of maturity, even as a broader concept, is recognizing when things are not about yourself?
Yes. When I was looking to get out of Corporate America and get into my own business, it was all about me, my goals, dream, and vision. I knew what I wanted my life to look like. Once I made that transition, there were several things that became apparent fast. Number one, most people don’t have the self-discipline to do what needs to be done in an entrepreneurial environment. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder. There’s not a clock to punch. Nobody’s telling you what to do. Nobody sets your goals for you. It’s entirely up to you. All of a sudden, they have that freedom, most people. I did it too. Most people go on vacation. You left that 40, 50 hour a week job. You think you have all this time in the world to be successful. The reality is you can fritter away that time in a heartbeat and not even know you’re doing it.
One of the most frustrating experiences I ever had in the corporate world was with a system known as SMART goals, which is an acronym that became a buzzword for a while. It’s fallen out of favor over the last several years. In the mid-2010s, it was everywhere, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. The overall point was that it wasn’t my decision of what my goal is going to be or my assessment. It’s more important to say my assessment because it seems like as an entrepreneur, you need to be self-motivated. You also need to look around. It’s not all about, “This is what I want.” You’re responding to market forces and to your customer base and then figuring out, “What do I need to be accountable for? What needs to happen between now and next year for this business to progress the way it needs to?”
Even what happens now. You have to ultimately boil down to what are the daily activities you’re going to have to do in order to make that progression toward the goals that you set. A lot of people are good at the big picture, putting it out there, “This is where I want to be in five years,” but they never boil it down to, “What do I have to do now to make that happen?”
Personal development is paramount for anybody who wants to succeed at anything.
That’s interesting because in a lot of job descriptions, a lot of people will describe themselves as big picture people and detail-oriented. One thing I’ve wondered is, is that a false dichotomy? Are the real successful people, people who are able to perform the details but understand how these details fit into a big picture?
It’s exactly both of those. They have to dovetail together. If you don’t have the big goal, you’re not going to have the motivation to do those day-to-day tasks you know have to be done. If you don’t know what the day-to-day tasks are, the odds that you ever get another goal are slim. All these pieces have to play together.
Would you say that if someone’s naturally detail-oriented they should have a detail-oriented job within a larger organization? Likewise, if someone’s only thinking about the big picture, their goal should be to become a C-level executive where you’re thinking on the big picture and then delegating all the details to the people below you on the org chart?
I don’t think I would generalize that way, Stephen. I look at our own business. In our organization, we have every spectrum of person you can think of, people that have big dreams, big goals without a lot of effectiveness when it comes to the details and vice versa, but they all figure out a way to succeed. I don’t think I would want to limit anybody’s thinking that if I’m a detail-oriented person, I can’t be an entrepreneur or I’m just a dreamer, I can’t be an entrepreneur. It boils down to this. Personal development is paramount for anybody who wants to succeed at anything. I think about myself who couldn’t carry on a conversation in the company cafeteria. It scared me silly.
All of a sudden, I find myself in a business. It’s a people business. I come to the realization that if I don’t learn how to come out of my shell, if I don’t work on me, if I don’t learn the communication skills, how to interact with people, how to discover their needs, wants, and desires are to find out if I can meet those needs, then nothing would ever have happened in this business. We’re going to have to work on ourselves. One of my mentors told me years ago, he said, “Rick, if you work as hard on yourself as you do your business, you’ll have a great business.” I have never forgotten that because I’ve been a personal development junkie for years. I went from somebody that couldn’t carry on a conversation to having a great time speaking at a conference in China for 14,000 people. You don’t get from where I was to where I am now if you’re not constantly working on yourself.
The takeaway here is that people should be spending less time thinking about, “What I am and what I’m not,” and more time thinking, “How can I develop the skills I need to get to where I want to go?”
One of the things that I’ve seen over the years is when I share the opportunity that we have for people, I’ll get a response more than occasionally where somebody says, “I’m not that kind of person.” The minute somebody says, “I’m not that kind of person,” to me, what it says is, “I’m not willing to change. I’m not willing to grow.” If somebody is forward-thinking enough that they have a growth mindset, they realize that by working on themselves, they can accomplish things that they weren’t able to do in the past, all of a sudden, things change dramatically. It has as much to do with attitude as it does anything else.
Let’s go back to the initial corporate part of your story. Where were you working? How long did you work there?
I was at Martin Marietta. I interned there when I was still in college for two summers. I ended up, because of the internship to slid into Martin company with a full-time job after graduation because I had already proven myself there. I ended up spending eighteen years there. I was in my late 20s when I had made an active decision that, “I have got to get out of here.” I didn’t know how that was going to happen. I started looking for opportunities.
That’s about six years in, I would assume, after college.
The reality that I knew I couldn’t spend my life in Corporate America, it was 5- or 6-years in. Most people have to get beat up a little bit in Corporate America before the idea of taking the risk to be on your own would even be a temptation for a lot of people. People think, “I have security because the paycheck says the same thing every two weeks,” but the reality is somebody can take that paycheck away from you anytime they want.
That’s one reality I point out to people quite a bit, is that the security behind that paycheck is often overestimated. People think, “I’m going to keep getting that same paycheck every two weeks.” A lot of people, even more commonly nowadays, experience, “That every two-week paycheck is not quite as secure as what I had believed in my own head about it.” After six years, you start feeling you got beat up by Corporate America a little bit, getting a little bit sick of the bureaucracy, what goes through your head and what actions do you start taking at that point in time?
Like most people, I thought the brick-and-mortar thing was the way out. Own your own business. What I thought business, it usually looked like a store. We lived in South Turkey Creek Canyon, Southwest to Denver, across the road from a tiny town. It’s not a coffee shop. In those days, it was called a little log store, gas pumps out front. It went on the market. I thought, “We’ll buy that. We’ll be independent. It’s five minutes from the house. I don’t have to commute. I don’t have a boss. It’ll be awesome.” A couple of weeks before we were getting serious about signing the papers, I was pumping gas on our way to work. I was adding up the number of hours, their doors were open. They were open 96 hours a week. It registered on me, “45, 50 hours a week at Martin company isn’t so bad.” I was going to stick my wife and me in there. It’s been 96 hours a week with no life.
You’re that close to being behind a register for 96 hours a week.
A couple of years after that, I had been an avid cyclist my whole life. I thought of owning a bike shop. That’d be wonderful. I love bikes. I love people who are cyclists. I had the good fortune of having a friend buy a bike shop before I did. I watched him work 80 to 90 hours a week and never had time to get on a bike. All of a sudden, it registered on me. Maybe the whole brick-and-mortar thing isn’t the way to go, but I still hadn’t found an alternative at that point.
You’re still doing the Martin Marietta thing. It was a close call with that gas station. You had some time and you were doing some exploration about different ideas.
It was only through a fluke conversation that we were introduced to the company. It was my first introduction to network marketing.
Can you describe what network marketing means for anyone that might not know or be familiar with that term?
It’s a business model where you can leverage yourself by engaging other people in the same endeavor that you’re in. I pulled a couple of quotes down that I thought was fascinating. Here’s Tony Robbins says, “What’s beautiful about network marketing is that you got all the benefits of being an owner, but you don’t have to worry about the supply chain and accounting, especially in the world we’re in now. There are some great companies out there.” Bill Gates said, “If I would be given a chance to start all over again, I would choose network marketing.” Robert Kiyosaki said, “Network marketing gives people the opportunity with low risk and low financial commitment to build their own income-generating asset and acquire great wealth.” We were exposed to network marketing through a fluke conversation about biodegradable cleaners. This was several years ago.
Several years ago, you’re having a discussion about biodegradable chemicals?
Cleaners for the households. I got my wife out here from Chicago. She was disappointed that there is pollution in the creek. We’re at this luncheon and one of the guys there asked her how she liked Colorado. Coming from Chicago, most people like me love Colorado who thinks, “How could you compare the two?” She looked at him and said, “I was disappointed.” He was in shock. He said, “What do you mean?” She said, “There’s pollution in the creek across the road.” He looked at her and he said, “What are you doing about it?” We were both rather taken aback. That was our introduction to biodegradable cleaners. Now it’s 90%, but those days, 60% of water pollution came from household cleaning products. Corporations have since cleaned up their act, but now we’re still flushing the same toxic chemicals down our drain every day. Walking down the cleaning aisle, most people get knocked over by the odor of it.
We were intrigued. I was an environmentalist. I helped put the first Earth Day together in Denver several years ago. I didn’t know there was such a thing as biodegradable cleaners. They came out and told us about cleaners then they started talking about nutrition. I didn’t know anything about nutrition. I didn’t care about nutrition. I didn’t believe most of what they said. They drew out the business model. It was my first exposure to network marketing. I’m a rocket scientist, I understood the mathematics of it. I understood geometric progressions, how things could grow. It captured my imagination. I decided right there that was going to be my ticket out of Corporate America. In fact, it was.
At that point in time, you decided that network marketing was your ticket out not necessarily, or did you decide that biodegradable house products were?
It was both. If the company didn’t have credible products, it’d be pointless to think about creating a business. It doesn’t matter how good the business model was, they went hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. I’m fascinated by something that I was already passionate about, which is the environment, wellness, and being an exercise junkie for most of my life. I had a resting heart rate of 42 in those days from being so fit. That’s better than most Olympic athletes. When they started talking about health, wellness and green cleaners, green in those days was just a color. Here’s a business model that makes sense to me. I can see how I could leverage my time, help other people achieve their goals at the same time. You put that whole package together. I got excited. All of a sudden, I had a vision for how to get out of Corporate America.
You can’t have one foot in one boat and one foot in the other. The will always come a day when you have to decide.
There’s a couple of things I want to point out about this story. First of all, a lot of people end up in the mindset where you have to pursue one thing and only one thing and spend almost your entire waking life, except for when you go to the gym and workout or unload your dishwasher, focused on one thing. One of the ways that you discover what you wanted to do was cultivating multiple interests. Even the ones that didn’t work out. You had your interest in your cycling, originally your first job. You’re interested in physics and space.
The other thing I want to point out is that it seems I’ve heard a lot of people describe the idea of some people gets lucky. It’s not so much that people get lucky. The people that seem lucky are the ones that try more things and that put themselves out there more. I’ll often use the analogy of rolling dice because I like to go to the casino and play the game craps. Sometimes what I say about life is that life is like rolling the dice and trying to get box cars or a pair of sixes. That’s a 1 in 36 chance. The key to eventually getting your pair of sixes in life is to roll the dice enough times to get that pair of sixes. If you keep going out there, you keep rolling the dice, keep pursuing different interests in different places, eventually, something’s going to click.
I might not describe too that I got very close to doing but I was looking at all kinds of stuff. In those days, we didn’t have the internet to explore. It was more about reading current business magazines, talking to people, finding out what other people are doing. I’m sure everybody reading this has heard that if you love what you’re doing, you’re never going to work a day in your life. For me, it was about the environment, wellness, and the idea that I could take something that I was interested and passionate about and create a business around that. That was exciting to me. We were originally introduced to it by Shaklee Corporation. We’ve been with Shaklee Corporation for several years. I am more passionate about what I do now than I was when we started several years ago.
If you wait around for everything in your life to line up so can feel good and be positive, you got a long wait.
That’s amazing to be able to maintain that passion for that long because a lot of people do burn out. One thing I wonder is, as you were pursuing some of these other ideas, the gas station, the bike shop, or the ones you didn’t mention, did you ever start to run out of patience? Did you ever start to feel like, “This is never going to happen? I’m going to be stuck in the corporate world forever.” How did you respond to that?
Stephen, there were times where I was almost desperate. I dreaded Monday morning so much. There were times where I knew I was going to be doing that for the rest of my life. I couldn’t figure it out. “Is there any way ever to get out of this thing?” I never quit looking. There were times where I felt like I had explored all the options. I’d looked at everything. Had I not been in that mindset, when we had that first conversation about biodegradable cleaners, it would have been, “That’s nice. We probably should use green cleaners in our house. I’ll go on being an aerospace engineer.” My mindset was not in Corporate America. I was already seeing myself out there in the world, creating something much bigger than myself that would solve a problem for other people but also help my wife and I get to where we want it to go.
At the moment you determine that was your path forward, how long did it take you to realize that path?
I realized the path the day I decided. That’s the thing most people have to understand, is that there comes a day where you have to decide. You can’t have one foot in one boat and one foot in the other, mentally is what I’m talking about. In reality, we built this in our spare time. We’re both working full-time jobs. I remember something Stephen Covey said years ago where he said, “From 8:00 to 5:00 you pay the bills. It’s what you do after 5:00 that creates your future.” We saw that. We understood that. Evenings and weekends are when we worked on our future. I was maybe more security-oriented than I needed to be. It took us eight years before I left the corporation from the time we started. We were making 2.5 times in our spare time with Shaklee Corporation than what I made as a full-time Aerospace Engineer after eighteen years with the same company. Unless people don’t think that it was a big day in my life, it was 2:42 PM, August 2, 1984. I drove through the front gate for the last time, looked at my watch and never looked back.
You don’t have to be a high-risk person to make something like this happen. You could even be a little bit risk-averse as long as you put in the hard work. There is a certain amount of sacrifice for eight years working still 40 to 50 hours a week at a regular job, keeping the lights on, as well as putting together your business in your spare time. Those of us trying to do that nowadays are lucky that we do have some options such as freelance work and Uber, although none of that would pay nearly as much as a full-time job as an aerospace engineer.
With the present technology, it’s like what we’re doing right now. If we had this technology, if we had Zoom, if we had all access to all the information and the ways that we can interact and communicate with people now that we didn’t have when we started this business, it would have gotten a whole lot faster. The average person who is coachable could accomplish what it took us eight years to accomplish in half the time or less because there are so many more resources now that we didn’t have when we started.
It is amazing to hear about people taking advantage of these opportunities that we have now, because of all the technological advancements. A lot of doors are being opened. What would you say is the key tenet of the idea of network marketing?
The reality is that if you can offer other people a product or a service that they benefit from, that enhances their life somehow, you will also find some people who are looking for a side gig, a plan B, or a way to create another stream of income that they can go out and share that same thing. All of a sudden, it’s not just you that’s creating that market. It’s other people doing it. You’re literally multiplying yourself by helping other people achieve their goals. That’s the beauty of it. It’s a win-win thing.
Our attitude is a choice we make and our feelings follow it.
In Corporate America, your worth is based on the box you own on the organization chart. It’s based on your position. In network marketing, your worth is based on your performance. There are people who can come into this business and make dramatically more money than the person who introduced them to it. Everybody wins. In the corporation, the odds of some guy going from the mailroom to the CEO are probably zero. Anybody can succeed in this business. Is it for everybody? Not. It’s hard like everything’s hard. The concept is simplistic but the work is still got to be there. You’ve got to put yourself out there. You got to hear a lot of people say no. If you come at it with a big goal that you’re passionate about and you believe in what you’re sharing and you share that with enthusiasm, things change big time.
One of the most important lessons I ever learned, I learned very early on because once I decided that this was what I wanted to do to move ahead, my wife was a huge part of supporting me in that. It was clear that I had no people skills and I needed to fix that. I went down to Arapahoe Community College and I signed up for a course in sales. We were living on the edge even though I had a good aerospace income and my wife was working. Like so many people, we had a lot of stuff that happened in the past. We’re living paycheck to paycheck, so to spend the money on the course was a big deal for the family.
It was a twelve-week course. It was two hours, once a week for twelve weeks, the most boring course I ever took. A total waste of money. The guy who taught it never been outside of academia, never sold anything to anybody. He was teaching a course on sales, but on the wall was a poster. I was there for two hours, looking at this poster. For the first 3 or 4 weeks, I looked at the poster and said, “That’s not true.” Halfway through the course, I started to decide, “Maybe there’s something to it.” By the time I left the course, I decided, “That is true.” All this poster said was to be enthusiastic. You must act enthusiastic.
I came to the realization that our attitude is a choice we make and our feelings follow it. In other words, you decide every day of your life what your attitude is going to be and how you’re going to project yourself to other people. The feelings will come along. The reality is, if you wait around for everything in your life to line up so you can feel good and be positive, you got a long wait. It’s like we wait for the light to turn green before you leave the house. Our attitude, how we project other people, how we come across and attract other people, that’s a choice we make every single morning. It has nothing to do with the circumstances and how we feel. It has everything to do about what we want our future to look like.
That 100% perfect situation is something that’s never going to present itself. The battle is, are you trying something or are you finding reasons not to act? It’s important also to invest money in ourselves, whether it be a course on how to learn about people skills or health or nutrition or fitness. Tell me a little bit about those services that you provide now with regards to personal health, nutrition and fitness. That’s something that universally is important to everyone, regardless of what your pursuits are.
Especially with this pandemic, people have finally figured out that they’ve got to take some responsibility for their own health. One of the things we figured out several years ago when we were introduced to this is if you prevent it you don’t have to cure it. It’s simple. Rather than being in the mode like most people where they don’t give serious consideration to their health until they don’t have it, that’s when they walk into the doctor’s office and say, “Doc, I’d like to buy my health back.” I would much rather be on the prevention side.
Shaklee Corporation is the largest natural wellness company in the country. We’ve always been about prevention. We’ve always taught people how to make better diet choices, lifestyle choices, how to supplement their diet intelligently knowing that our food is changed dramatically in the last generation, that lifestyles have changed to the point where none of us eat what could be called a balanced, consistent diet. If you learn how to supplement intelligently, you can maintain your health. UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Tufts University tracked the health status of Americans who take vitamins, people who don’t, people who take just a multivitamin. Our owner went to them and said, “Would you track a bunch of people who have taken up Shaklee supplements for twenty years or more and compare them?”
It was one of those bet on the company kind of things because they were going to publish the results. If it showed that it didn’t make any difference, it’s over. It turns out that people who take nothing or just a multi have three times as many serious health issues as they age than the Shaklee population. People who take lots of vitamins but other brands besides Shaklee have twice as many health issues. The difference is in the quality of the vitamin, science, and research behind it. All that stuff. My passion has been, for a long time, is to show people how to make smarter choices. The reality is you don’t catch a heart attack, cancer, and type two diabetes. You decide every day of your life what you want to die from by what you put in your mouth.
Those are some amazing results there. If someone wants to get ahold of you or wants to learn more about Shaklee, how would they go about finding you?
My email is easy enough. It’s Rick@RickAndAldona.com. The website is PWS.Shaklee.com/Aldona. Easy enough to find. The fun part is we have an assessment wherein 4 or 5 minutes. People can go through and define what their diet is, their exercise, what drugs they’re taken, what their family health history is and get a very personalized output of what supplements and vitamins are crucial for you to maintain your health based on all of that. There’s nothing else like it in the market right now. Whether you ever use a Shaklee supplement or not, you’ll at least know what you ought to be looking at to maintain your health.
That’s very important because it is different for every single individual.
I have somebody asked me, “Is it individualized considering there are 110 million different possible outcomes?” It’s personalized.
I love the story of finding a way out, finding a way to do something that you’re passionate about, and being so passionate about something that several years into it, you’re even more passionate about it than you were before because health is not going away. It’s always going to be a universal human concern that people need to take care of their health. Rick, I would like to thank you so much for joining us on the show. A lot of great insights as to how to keep putting yourself out there and focus on improving yourself as opposed to what you can’t do. Stay tuned for more stories about amazing individuals that find a way to live life according to their own truth and pursue something that they feel passionate about.
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About Rick Seymour
Rick is a self-described “recovering rocket scientist” who realized that the standard corporate lifestyle was not a good fit for him. It took him many years and the exploration of many different possibilities to land on his eventual career path promoting personalized nutrition plans. He’s been able to live his life on his own terms since the age of 38 and is just as passionate about his business today as he was when he first started.