Episode 146 - Al Argo - Leaders on Leadership
As a leader, you have to be equipped with different skills to communicate and deal with things correctly. In addition, you have to be focused on overcoming adversity, making tough decisions, and staying committed to growth. Join your host, Dr. Tracey Jones, as she interviews Al Argo about all of these things and his unique perspective in leadership. Al Argo is a motivational speaker and author. He also speaks on overcoming adversity, gratitude in life and business influence, positive impact leadership, and missions. What price must you pay to be an effective leader? Al provides a deep dive into some of the components you have to deal with as a leader, including loneliness, weariness, and abandonment. How will you overcome these? Tune in!
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Al Argo - Leaders on Leadership
I'm so excited because my guest is the one, the only, the tremendous, Al Argo. Let me tell you a little bit about Al. Al is a skydiving accident survivor, a motivational speaker, an eight-time author and speaks on overcoming adversity, gratitude in life and business, influence, positive impact, leadership and missions, and helping you create ARGO, which stands for A Really Great Organization. Al is an expert in helping professionals achieve more, relate better, grow faster, and overcome obstacles. In addition to all that, he has been a dear friend of many years of my mother and father and myself as well. Al, thank you so much for being on our show.
Thank you, Dr. Tracey. What an honor to be with you and all of our readers.
Tell a little bit about the intersection of you and my father. I like to set the context of how long we've known people. I had a gentleman on who we connected on LinkedIn. Before I even knew about coming back to Tremendous Leadership, you were a part of Tremendous Leadership.
Your dad was always proud of you and his whole family. I first met Charles "Tremendous" Jones back in the early 1990s. I sold books for two summers with a company out of Nashville, Tennessee. That's how he and I connected. We stayed in touch. Toward the late '90s, I ended up transitioning over into Asia, began to work with John Maxwell training leaders overseas, and still work with a nonprofit organization that I've been with ever since then.
Your dad was coming over and visiting us, and then your mom came over and visited us different times, not once, but several times. He and I would speak not only to Christian Ministry groups like Haggai Institute, but we'd also speak for Corporate Asia. I remember doing events with the Napoleon Hill Foundation. He was so proud of you and thankful for all of his readers and listeners, not only in America but in Australia. I still run into fans of Charles from Australia. Several years ago, I did an author publishing masterclass down in Perth and came across fans. Even though he's been in heaven quite some time, his legacy, the influence and impact of Charles "Tremendous" Jones lives on.
He loved Australia, and we still get orders every now and then. They're effervesced and efficacious as he was. He loved them. I interviewed Nikita Koloff. Al was one of the gentlemen in our monthly Godly Guys and Gals group, our little mini-mastermind, where we get together. We're all speakers, authors, and Christians who share with one another because that's what we're meant to do. Al brought me into this a few years ago. I was so honored. I'm like, "Do you want me to be with you guys?" It's been such a tremendous help.
I'm so thankful, not only for you but for Nikita and our whole group. It's a small group but very powerful and influential group. We're like your dad. Until his last breath, he was always learning. I tell people, "My name is Al. It's an acronym for a lot of things, but one of those things is Always Learning." I don't know if it was your dad or someone else, but they taught me always to have a book you're reading and writing. Those two things were huge in books. When I was a young boy, I didn't have a TV. All I had was a library. When I was 14, 15, my dad said, "If you want a TV, you can buy it." I bought and watched it for a little bit, but I never lost my love for books.
He took our TVs out of the house. We were in high school and didn't watch that much. This was in the early '70s. He's like, "You don't need that," and we didn't need it. We wrote book reports. I'm thankful for that. Let's get right into the topic of leadership. My father loved leadership, but he was very pragmatic about it. He did not shy away from the tougher side of it and had a speech called The Price of Leadership where he said that there are four components that if you truly are going to be a leader, there's a price that you're going to have to pay.
It's worth it, but you're going to have to pay for it. The first one he talked about was loneliness. We've all heard that it's lonely at the top. Could you unpack what loneliness means to you as a seasoned leader? Maybe share a time when you were in that season. Maybe a tool for our readers if they are walking in a time of loneliness.
I heard your dad speak to a lot of different audiences from the time I was in college to the time I was in ministry and Corporate Asia. All of us, whether we're brand-new leaders or seasoned leaders, can go through a season of loneliness, whether that's a short or extended period of time. For me, when I was selling books, that was hard because you're out there by yourself. I didn't know how to sell.
I began to learn how to sell when I was 14, 15, and then the company kept doing sales training. Continuous education and ongoing education are important. That's why you and I train in Corporate America, Asia, and different places. Loneliness is different than being alone. Leaders, by nature, oftentimes are alone. It doesn't have to impact us negatively. It's what I'm saying. We've served in Asia for twenty years, the first ten years in Singapore, and the last ten years, we've moved over into the Philippines. We travel a lot. The whole concept of loneliness is about making decisions that are tough and giving up the good for the great.
This goes into these criticisms that are tough. The next thing he talked about was weariness. If it's tough, it wears on you mentally, physically, spiritually, all that good stuff. How do you combat weariness so you can continue to go through those tougher seasons and still stay robust and strong enough to move forward?
Overcoming Adversity: The whole concept of loneliness is really about just making decisions that are tough and giving up the good for the great.
I'm a big believer that you give each day all you've got. I start the morning with journaling. I wish I'd begun to do this when I was in my early 20s or late teens, but I've honestly begun to do it in the last few years. I've not missed a day doing this consistently since I've started. I talked about yesterday and today, but I could talk about 4 or 5 years down the road in my journal. I'm not doing it by hand. I'm doing it right here on my laptop, and that way, I'll always have it with me. It's also searchable.
I write my to-do list in my journal, which is important, but I also write my goals. I even write a small prayer and a gratitude list. These are the things that I'm doing every day. As far as weariness, in particular, I also make sure that I rest well. I've written a book about morning habits called Wake Up and Shine, but I've often thought about writing a book on rest and the importance of sleep. How we combat weariness is we honor the Sabbath. It's okay to be tired, but we don't want to be too tired.
Someone passed away, and he left notes on his desk. This was an older preacher, a gentleman from North Carolina. Found on his desk was, "At the first sign of fatigue, I'm going to rest." I thought that's pretty interesting because I've not followed that. I work hard. I worked through my fatigue oftentimes, but this older preacher in North Carolina had a different view. That's interesting because we work hard, but we also want to rest as well. We honor the Sabbath and rest well at night.
How I've combated weariness is, one of the first things that I do in the morning is I drink lots of water. I've learned that from the Japanese. They drink water. While weariness comes, we don't want it to linger. It is part of the price that we or others have to pay. I've got an acronym toward the end when you asked me as we get through the next one because we've talked about loneliness, weariness and there are two more.
That glass of water thing is huge. When I reclaimed my health, that's the first thing I do in the morning. Go get and drink an eight-ounce glass of water. That's amazing what you do, but I love that you talk about you're being very intentional with writing down in the gratitude. Sometimes weariness comes from a lack of focus. You've pulled so many ways in, and you're tired. You're like, "I didn't get anything done," and then you feel more tired. How can you be tired if you are unproductive?
That lack of focus drains you, and that's getting to our next topic. You need to do a book on rest and the Sabbath because that is critical. We're still flesh and blood and the temple. We need to take care of that. The next thing my dad talked about was abandonment. Abandonment typically has a negative connotation, the fear of abandonment. In his world, abandonment was abandoning what you like and want to think about in favor of what you want and what you need. It was a real focus. I'm like, "How'd you get so successful?" He's like, "I do more in a day to contribute to my failure than I do my success." He would get spun off on other things. How do you abandon stuff and stay truly focused?
When a lot of people think about abandonment, it might have a negative connotation, but it doesn't have to be because it's us abandoning what? It might be good, but it's not God's will. It might be good, but it's not great. TV in and of itself, it might be good, but it's not great. I'm not preaching against TV. Back in the '70s and '80s, a lot of people preach against TV. One of the reasons why we grew up without TV is because someone preached against it, and my dad threw it away. Your dad probably did the same. When we talk about abandonment, it's about us giving up the mediocre for the incredible.
God promised us life and life more abundant. AL is an acronym for a lot of things, but it's also an acronym for Abundant Life. That's God's promise for you and me if we not only know about him but if we know him. God wants us to do four things. He wants us to know him and have freedom in him. Just because you know Him, it doesn't mean you have freedom. He wants us to know Him and have freedom. He wants us also to understand our purpose, whether that's Corporate America, Corporate Asia, or even ministry. Your dad loved the ministry. He often told me, like, "Why couldn't the Lord call me into the ministry?" I don't know if he ever told you that.
He did all the time.
I've been able to walk that fine line of ministry and marketplace. I love it. I'm so thankful for being able to work with the bankers in Nepal, tourism departments in very interesting countries across Asia. I'm very grateful for your dad and other mentors. This whole concept of abandonment is we give up the mediocre for the best for that day. I do write every morning. I don't do one thing every night, but as we're going to talk more, I do this often, is I review the day. I ask myself what went well and what I could've done better. I'm being transparent.
My morning routine is very solid as far as exercising, water, and getting my morning started. Those seven habits are outlined in the book, Wake Up and Shine. We're talking about the price of leadership. We've talked about loneliness, weariness, and abandonment. There's one more, which these three leads to vision, which is very important. Do you have any other comments on weariness?
No, weariness in your abandonment. I love that you are always looking at abandoning every day, and it's a daily thing. We were on point, but it's like your car. You constantly have to be tweaking, preventative maintenance, and rest. It's like you dust your house, and a day later, there's dust. It's a constant tending to getting out the weeds, the non-value-added, and staying on point. You never, ever can sit there, and maybe for ten seconds you can, and then stuff starts happening again. That was beautiful talking about abandonment.
Overcoming Adversity: How we combat weariness is how we honor the Sabbath. So it's okay to be tired. But we really don't want to be too tired.
We're talking about abandonment, and then I circled back to loneliness and weariness. If we rearrange those three things, I like acronyms and alliteration. I do this all the time, even with my last name, when I teach sales. Our sales professionals, if we give a great offer, that's what we want to do. As far as consulting organizations, we want to give ARGO and help build ARGO, which is A Really Great Organization.
If you rearrange those first three things, loneliness, weariness, and abandonment, it's LAW, Loneliness, Abandonment, and Weariness, and that's the law. A lot of our readers love the Lord and have a real relationship with Christ like you and I do. Some may not, and that's okay because we love everybody. We welcome everybody to your leadership broadcast. I love what you're doing, the people that you've interviewed since you've begun this.
I can't wait for the future, but we're not living under the law. We're living under grace. For me, have I dealt with loneliness? Yeah, we've dealt with it. Has it been a big issue? Not so much because I'm never alone. We have to abandon the mediocre to achieve God's best, but that's okay. We give up so we can go up. We grow weary. Sometimes we get tired, but it's not a big issue because we pay the price, but he paid the ultimate price.
I want to bring that out because it's close to Christmas. When he visited us over in Singapore, your dad told me these stories about keeping up the Christmas tree all year long. You can maybe give us more insight because I never got to come up to the house. To this day, I've never been up to where you grew up. Even when your dad passed away, I was overseas. It was very challenging for me to get back. I wanted to. In my spirit, I was there, but he told me these stories about keeping the Christmas tree up all year long.
We're coming into the Christmas season. As I prepared for this interview, I realized Loneliness, Abandonment, and Weariness are an acronym for LAW, but we have a vision. The law leads into vision. God gives vision. We know that verse where there is no vision, the people perish. Vision is also the price that we pay for leadership.
How do you hone your vision? Dad was pragmatic, down-to-earth, not fancy talk at all because he was real. He would say, "Vision is seeing what needs to be done and then doing it." How do you incorporate this into your leadership?
I'm a big believer in goal setting, but I also take action toward those goals. The Bible says, "Faith without works is dead." I shared that verse with a corporate audience in Asia. Some of these young people had never even heard that. We have a lot of faith in different things. I have faith in the chair that I'm sitting in. I have faith in the car that we drove up to speak at an engagement in North Carolina. If I'm flying to Asia, I certainly have faith in that airplane and the pilot.
Even with that pilot in that plane, that plane naturally will tend to get off course, and vision is the act of pulling it back on the course to make sure it gets to the right destination. Even before we were born, God knew all of our days. He understands our purpose and the plan that he has for life. Many people never discover that purpose. No wonder a lot of people aren't happy and don't have real peace.
Whether your purpose is working at the post office or driving a truck, or selling insurance, I met with a guy who's been in the insurance for several years. I told him about your dad. I was like, "You got to read some of these books." Every one of us has a purpose and a vision. If we get it, we'll understand that the desires in our hearts were probably put there by God.
I love that you tied it back to freedom. I heard a quote and tried to find who did it, but they said, "For the center, this world is the closest to heaven they're going to get. For the saint, this world is the closest to how they're ever going to get." Even in our most lonely, tired, messed-up days, we have that freedom. I love that you brought that because that gets the wind back in your sails. We don't just do it on our own.
Those of us that have the faith paradigm know may be alone, but never all alone. When we are weak, he is strong, and abandonment is constantly, as Paul said, "Dying to self," and then we get into another biblical principle of vision where there is no vision that people perish. I thank you for that, Al, and those insights and how you're weaving that into all aspects of your life.
I believe that the best for you and me is yet to come. We have to keep learning and also apply what we're learning.
Overcoming Adversity: We just have to keep learning and also applying while we're learning.
Somebody told me this, "Embrace, but then you have to integrate. Faith without works is dead." We're still learning, but our minds, all the leadership stuff says, cognitively, if you keep your mind active, you can stave off senility, all that stuff. Retirement is not a biblical principle. We're meant to keep going and growing. That's why I love our tremendous fan base because these are seasoned people that already have 1, 2, 3, 4 great successful careers. They're always still like, "There's more." That's what true leaders do, always growing and sowing.
Somebody at lunch asked me where I plan to retire, and I'm like, "Retirement is not even in my mind." I'm barely half a century. I'm so grateful that I've known your dad and family for many years. I declare that for me and my future and the ministry, the marketplace, everything that our hands, the consulting or the books. I love Asia. We've invested two decades. The legacy, the generation that will come as the Lord tarries.
They asked me, "Where do you want to retire?" I'm like, "I want to live forever in Asia." The truth is I go back and forth. I'm at home in America, even though the weather's getting cold. This will be my first Thanksgiving in America since 2015. I'm very thankful to have a Thanksgiving birthday and Christmas in the US in 2021. It's interesting but cold.
Come up to Pennsylvania, where it's even colder, and we'll give you some beautiful winter.
Do you have your Christmas tree up yet?
No, after Thanksgiving. I like to add, "Keep a tree up all year round," because that reminded him every day about the birth of Jesus. When you look at that every day, it helps keep you focused. Every day, there's my reminder that this price was paid for me, and I can live as a free, liberated child and claim my inheritance. I love the tree.
I don't keep a tree up all year round, but maybe we should.
I changed mine out every month. It's a seasonal tree, but it still is the joy of the seasons, the remembrances. It all hearkens back to the birth of Christ. We have Easter for the resurrection, all those data points, and everything in between. We've covered the four points. Share with our readers, too, how you do walk in the ministry and the marketplace? I want you to share a little bit about your ministry and what you're doing with that?
Our purpose in Asia and even in America is to teach. I tell people that it's all about the team. I like acronyms. We're all about Teaching, Equipping, Activating, and Mobilizing. That's an acronym for TEAM. Specifically, we want to help the Asian church move forward and become all that God wants them to be in the ministry. In the marketplace, we want companies to make sure that they hire the right people. I'm teaming with a group of high-level industrial psychologists who've developed software to help HR departments hire the right people. We're not talking about small companies, but these are companies that are 500, 1,000, 1,500, 5,000 employees or more, whether it's Asia or America.
In the ministry, for many years, whether it's a relief in Indonesia after the tsunami, we'd help train a team of locals and were mobilized immediately to go in after the Christmas tsunami back in 2004. It killed 144,000 people in 15 minutes. It's a hard area to get into, but the US government under the USAID got in. We got in as a religious nonprofit. They're still effective ministries in that area there in Indonesia. We work with Bible schools across Southeast Asia. We do relief, whether it's the tsunami. We've done volcano and typhoon reliefs. It's very sad, some of the craziness.
When you talk about loneliness, abandonment, and weariness, when you see some of that without the grace of God, you can tend to go that way. Thank God for vision and provision. The ministry may be a relief, or education, whether that's elementary education or reading programs. One of the reasons why I do the books is to promote literacy and encourage children and parents to read to children. Our readers can find the kids' books on Amazon. We promote literacy, do relief, leadership training for the church and corporate. I get bored easily. Someone told me not long ago, "You might have ADHD." I'm like, "I've never been diagnosed with that." They went on to say, "If you do, you manage it well."
It's like loneliness and weariness. It can be a good thing.
I don't want my hand in too much. Whatever I do to be done with excellence, and I want it to be fruitful. We've talked about vision, but we also need people to pray for us and support us, but we need people you and I can delegate work to. John Maxwell always teaches that you inspect what you expect. That's so important. There are other aspects of leadership, including numbers. I may not be a natural numbers guy, but I understand that numbers tell a story. At the end of the day, if I know the numbers that matter, I can see how my day went. Whether that's a Sunday in church or a Monday through Friday in corporate, the numbers always tell a story.
Overcoming Adversity: We need people not only to pray for us and support us, but we need people to help, that you and I can delegate work to.
Al, what is the best way for people to get in touch with you?
Anyone who might want to donate to the ministry can receive a tax deduction if they're given in America. I have a URL, a short link that would go right to the ministry site. It's www.Bit.do/AsiaMissions. If they want to look at the books, they can search Al Argo on Amazon or Al Argo on Audible. If they want to get in touch with me as far as consulting or some of the HR work we've been doing, or to ask a personal question, they can connect with me on LinkedIn and message me.
There's only one Al Argo on LinkedIn. That's a skydiving accident survivor, author, and consultant. There is a couple more Al Argos out there on LinkedIn, but they don't have any pictures. I'm not sure who they are, or even if it's a fake profile, but my LinkedIn profile has a picture and it is very clear which one it would be.
Touch on some of your children's books because the readers need to know you've got some kids' books, too.
Thank you. When I was down in Australia, my event organizer named Chris, he’s a pastor, a corporate guy, and an all-around good guy. He's my good friend. I've known him for years. We've attended events together in Canada and America. He was coming up to Singapore and the Philippines to see us. He invited me down to do not only speak at a leadership event, but we also did an author training masterclass. On the night before I was leaving Australia, he took us out for ice cream. In that ice cream shop, he got the hiccups. In the Deep South where I'm from, if you get the hiccups, you're going to get scared.
I looked over at him and scared him. He never had that happen. He had a fit. The whole ice cream shop got silent. We all bust out laughing because his hiccups were gone. I made a comment. I said, "Don't worry. I've written the book on hiccups." I was joking, but the next morning at the airport, I wrote this cute, almost like a Dr. Seuss type rhyme. It all rhymes.
At the end of the book, I wrote about 5 to 7 true hiccup facts. This is a book for early readers. It rhymes like Dr. Seuss. All the artworks are hand-drawn. All the parents and the little kids love. That was the first book. I wrote a book about hiccups, and it's based in Australia. A couple of days later, I wrote one about doing number two, which all kids have questions about. I didn't realize a lot of parents would go to that book when their kids had questions about potty training, but that's pretty interesting.
I wrote one about hiccups and then sneezing. Those are the four books in the kid's series called The Adventures of Chris. Chris is a real person. All the books are educational, and our goal is to give away 1 million books in Asia. What we do is whenever someone buys a book on Amazon or they buy a book at one of our events, we immediately donate a book in Asia as well. It's a neat little giving model that we have.
Al, thank you so much for what you meant to my family, the blessing you continue to be to me and for sharing your wisdom with our leaders out there and our Tremendous Tribe.
What a tremendous opportunity to be with you. We have the opportunity to be together every month via our speaker and author mastermind. Thank you for being a part of that. Thank you for being a friend to our family and ministry. We appreciate your prayer and support and friendship. It means a lot to us, and we love you. I love your mom and your dad. They're great people.
You as well, Al. Thank you so much. To our tremendous readers out there, thank you so much for taking the time to read. If you haven't done so yet, please hit the subscribe button so you don't miss another episode. If you do us, the honor of a five-star review, we’d be so thankful. Drop us a note, we'd go ahead, and I forward anything you say to Al, and we answer all of our responses.
Please, make sure you go over to TremendousLeadership.com, sign up for our email letter, where you automatically receive two free weeks of eBooks in addition to making sure you don't miss another episode. To our tremendous leaders out there, you keep on paying the price of leadership. We're right there with you. We're so thankful for you.
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About Al Argo
Al is a Skydiving Accident Survivor, Motivational Speaker, 8x-Author, Speaks on Overcoming Adversity, Gratitude in Life & Business, Influence, Positive Impact Leadership & Missions. Helping you create ARGO (A Really Great Organization!)