Toms Shoes

Now, where does real self-worth come from? This is so interesting.

Um, One of the things, I did a podcast with Blake Mykowski who created the Tom's Shoes empire and then sold the business for lots and lots of money.

And even after this massive success that he had, he felt like he was not enough.

And he went into a deep trough of depression that lasted, I think, seven years.

That was early on the one for one.

Was that before around the same time as Tom's Shoes?

Right after.

So he had actually...

So the Paradox Project came out of a 10 year team building exercise that we did at Fusion.

And in short, it's a give back program similar to like Tom's Shoes.

I think Bombas Socks is another one that does that basically like a buy one, give one type of program.

It's not revolutionary by any means, but we applied it to the marketing industry specifically like services.

Our keynote, excuse me, our podcast guest next week is Blake Mycoskie.

Blake was founder of Tom's Shoes and went into it madly, focused on the passion and the purpose, and kind of came out of it where he... you know, he sells the company money.

Isn't going to be an issue, but he feels like his soul is sort of needs repair.

He told me that he, he ended up, um, not posting anything on social media for three years after the sale, like he had so lost himself.

True story.

We worked at Tom's Shoes together.

...

Keith and I.

... your mom and my work.

And now you guys are in college or out of the house, you know, I'm now re- getting close to retirement and, uh, I love your mom, but I can't spend every moment with her, and so I don't really have anyone to hang out with and I'm lonely." And he said, "So don't make that mistake." And so I w- that time I was 30 years old, I had just started TOMS Shoes, we were like two years old, and I w- wrote an email to my seven best friends, couple of them from like college, some were from newer friends in LA, and I said, I told them the story and I said, "We can't have this happen to us.

Let's do an annual trip every year." And so we started our first trip in, uh, 19 years ago, and we're gonna have our 20th anniversary.

Where'd you go? What was the first trip?

So usually those are in developing countries.

For example, Tom's Shoes, right, giving shoes to poor communities in developing countries.

That tends to actually squash a lot of the local entrepreneurship, right? So if I'm a shoe producer in that economy and someone just flew in a lot of free shoes, then I might have to fire some employees or I might not be able to feed my family because I'm not making those sales.

So

And so what I've told my kids is like, listen, there's no limits.

You know, my daughter right now is just taking on being ambassador for Tom's Shoes and their You Are Enough campaign.

And, you know, I mean, that's literally like we they heard her speak.

I mean, she's one person away from, you know, Blake, the guy who just sold Tom's shoes for five hundred million dollars.

And she's probably going to get to do a lot of stuff with them.

And it was like, you know, everyone's like, how did she get this? I'm like, because she just had no limits.

Yeah.

All right, Blake founded Tom's Shoes.

Every year, it just grew.

Well, maybe this is your story, but like...