Did You Live the Life You Truly Wanted? Interview with Writer, Entrepreneur, and Pilot, Chris Laney
This week’s interview is with Chris Laney, a published author, writing coach, pilot, and CEO of Zenergy Technologies, an IT services company that helps clients develop software leveraging services such as agile coaching, dev ops strategy, and test automation.
As you can tell from his description, Chris has embraced a life that is wonderfully multi-faceted. But it wasn’t always easy to be this way. Over the course of his career, he’s learned to embrace both his creativity and his business acumen, while cultivating a passion for imparting the lessons he’s learned via his writing and teaching. Upon meeting Chris, I could instantly tell he was the kind of person that has infectious energy, a positive attitude, and lives his life with a strong sense of intentionality. A sentiment that was embodied by the message he shared at the end of the interview, “I want to live a life where I can say, ‘This is what I wanted.’”
Over the course of the interview we spoke about:
The impact of a major mindset shift (hint: business doesn’t have to be boring)
How being open to pivots has contributed to the longevity of his business
Learning to chew on advice rather than blindly following it
Reframing failure as valuable experience
The liberation of removing unnecessary deadlines
The desire for freedom that’s guided his life
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. While every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of the conversation, please be aware that the quotes may not be verbatim but reflect the essence of the dialogue.
How would you describe your occupation?
I primarily see myself as a creative type, whether that's tapping into creativity to start, grow, and run a business, or writing books, magazine articles, or internet content. About 16 years ago, I felt like I had to keep my business world separate from my creative world. I felt like I was living a double life. One day I was talking to a pilot friend of mine, whose dad was the CEO of this very large company when he was growing up, and he told me a story about asking his dad what he did for work. His dad said, “Son, I'm a storyteller. I go out, and I share our story to get people excited to buy from the company and work for it.” My company, Zenergy, started not too long after that. That story helped me unite those two worlds and gave me permission to bring my full creativity to the business world.
Can you describe the internal shift you made? What really made you feel comfortable identifying as a creative and as a business person?
One of the biggest mindset shifts I made was realizing that business didn’t have to be boring, which is what it felt like to me when I was suppressing my creative side. Business felt like a chore then. Once I brought what was fun creatively to the business, like my writing skills, I felt unleashed. Those writing skills were instrumental in starting Zenergy and writing lots of content for the new website. We started to communicate much better with prospective clients. That mindset shift then extended beyond what was fun creatively to what was fun in general.
I co-founded Zenergy with two former coworkers who had become good friends. I worked with one of them for 29 years and the other for 27 years now. The strengths we bring to Zenergy have to do with what is fun for each of us. One of them is highly technical. He loves solving clients issues, doing process improvement, and analyzing finances so he spearheads all of that for Zenergy. Nitty, gritty financial details are not fun for me. In fact, looking at a complex spreadsheet makes my head spin. But it's fun to work with my business partner on financial decisions because he takes care of all the detailed analysis and then communicates it in a way that makes it easy for me to understand the big picture. Then we can both make the best decisions based on that.
About 2 years ago, I gathered all our core core staff members. I told them I wanted to get back to what was fun for me in helping Zenergy grow, but I didn't want to assume what was fun for them. I wanted everybody to go around the room and answer, “What is fun for you in general? What parts of your job do you love to do and consider fun? What part of that job do you not like so much?” I didn’t say we could necessarily change their entire job, but we could work better with an understanding of what each person liked and didn’t like. It was a really interesting exercise. One of the things I walked away with was a better understanding of how to work with my business partner. My business partner that does the financials and helps with operations is always super busy. There would be times when I was trying to solve an issue, and I’d try to fix it myself instead of pulling him in because I wanted to be respectful of his time. Well, one of the things he said was fun for him is to help other people solve problems. He said, “Bring me your big, gnarly problem, especially if it has to do with finances!” I realized I wasn't intruding on him, and it was actually fun for him to help solve those things.
As you were talking, I was running through my own professional life. There have been many points where people have asked me what I'm good at, or what my strengths are, but I don't know if anyone ever asked me what was fun for me at work.
Sometimes those things align. However, some of us have strengths in certain areas that we may not necessarily like to use a lot. We just happen to have strengths. I think if you find the things that are fun, you will inevitably find strengths there. If you go that route, it just fuels you and makes business or whatever you are doing more enjoyable.
I’m sure fun is part of the answer. You and your business partners have been in business for 15 years. What mindsets or philosophies do you think have contributed to that kind of longevity in business?
Fun is definitely an aspect of it. I've worked with one business partner for 29 years and the other for 27 years. I've worked with other people in the company, who were at my previous company, for over 20 years. It’s like a big family. There's a lot of joking around and enjoying ourselves, but we always say that we take what we do very seriously, but we do not take ourselves seriously. I think that's one element that's allowed us to thrive.
Early on, I realized that I had to stop thinking, “How am I gonna get everything done?” or “How am I gonna do all these things?” and start thinking, “Who can I get to help me?” If you're starting a business, you may not be able to hire employees right away. A lot of times it might be turning to friends and saying, “Hey, I'm dealing with this issue. I know you have a lot of experience in this area. Can you help me figure this out?” I'm a big believer in making good friends in all aspects and all walks of life. Those relationships help in the journey along the way.
One other thing that has helped us a lot is being ready to pivot when needed. When we started the company 15 years ago, it was focused in one area of expertise and that was quality assurance and test automation. Over time, we realized that some aspects of that were becoming commoditized and that if we didn't add more services, we might be at risk. It took a while but we added additional expertise, and now we have this whole array of services that covers many aspects of the software development lifecycle. I know firsthand of several companies that started in the same vein as we did, who never branched out, and those companies are no longer around now. I'm very thankful we did that.
When you run a business, there is no shortage of opinions, advice, articles, books, and podcasts on how you should be running things. Where have you learned to buck conventional wisdom and do things in a way that works for you?
I'm not a fan of conventional wisdom. I wrote a novel, Flying Colors, and one of the themes is don't do what someone tells you to do because they're telling you what worked for their life, and what worked for their life and their business, may not work for you and your business. I’m not saying don't listen to it. Chew on it, think about it, and try it on to see if it works, but don’t just run with what somebody else told you to do. I am a big proponent of experimenting and figuring out what works for you in the quickest, least risky manner possible.
I enjoyed your blog post about having to overcome the fear of being bad at something in order to avoid procrastinating. I often work with people who are struggling with being “too old” to do something, think “it’s too late,” or are generally afraid to be a beginner again. What advice do you have for them?
The book I wrote is a fictional account of a lot of my life philosophies and what I've used to create the world I've wanted for myself. There’s a line in the book where a mysterious stranger tells the main character, “It's never too late to become the person you're meant to be.” I believe that. That's not to say you don't have choices in life in who you are meant to be. I believe that if you make most or all of your choices from an authentic place, I believe you will become the person you're meant to be.
When I talk to people about this subject, I tell them to become more comfortable with failure. One way to get more comfortable with failure is to reframe it as valuable experience, as long as you keep moving and going forward. I have never, ever read a thorough success story about someone who hit it big in their industry that didn't highlight multiple failures and how they learned from them. Overnight success stories are extremely rare. 99.9% of the time there were years of trial and error before that huge success. There are, of course, certain things you don't want to fail at. You don't want to die failing at something. But there are all these things that we can do, these quick experiments, that allow us to fail and learn.
You wrote another blog post called, “Why You Must Believe in Yourself”, where you write, “Dreams are great. Dreams are necessary. But they don’t happen if they’re not powered by action. But, we stall. We procrastinate. Mostly because we fear we won’t succeed. We worry the first landscape painting we create will be mistaken for an abstract, that the majestic sculpture we attempt will look more confused chipmunk than a gallant steed. We cringe knowing the first draft of our perfectly envisioned manuscript will never, ever live up to our fool’s gold expectations.” What has helped you overcome the fear that you won’t succeed?
The only way to guarantee not succeeding is to give up. Never give up on what you truly want in the grand scheme of life. To be clear, I'm not advocating that you keep going on some idea you’ve realized wasn't as good as you once believed. I'm just saying, never give up on creating the life you want for yourself, even if it manifests itself in an unexpected way. I think when you let go of a particular way to get what you want, all of a sudden you find there are multiple paths to get there and some of those paths are more fun than others. Don’t be too rigid.
There’s another post I wrote called “The Downside of Deadlines.” People put deadlines on themselves all the time which create a lot of unnecessary pressure. Timelines like, “I’m going to be the CEO of a million dollar company by the time I'm 35.” And then 35 rolls around and you're not there yet. If it takes you until you’re 40 and you hit that million dollar number and you own a business, are you going to be upset because it took you until 40? No, you're going to be thrilled that it happened at all!
You’ve mentioned your book, and I definitely want to talk about your career as a writer. You teach a writing class called “The Write Motivation.” What have you found helps people stay motivated with writing or any creative endeavor?
The first thing that comes to mind is “micro-movements.” People often have an all or nothing mentality. They think that to get in shape or to improve your fitness you can’t just take the stairs instead of the elevator. They think that the only way is to go hardcore in the gym. The reality is that you can just do basic stretches throughout the day to activate your muscles. Those micro movements can also help you rehab injuries and ease pain. Micro movements can also apply to work - any small task that you can do in 5 or 10 minutes that moves you toward your goal. I tell my writing students to never underestimate the power of micro movements over time. They compound over weeks, months, and years. James Clear popularized that idea in Atomic Habits. He's basically saying that small increases or percentage increases in performance or improvement add up over time. I love that book, but I've been saying this for years. One example of the compounding effect is a person wanting to write a novel for years but never actually sitting down and getting started. It's hard to sit down and write because the prospect of writing a 400 to 500 page novel is daunting. It's overwhelming. Micro-movements are a way to get through that overwhelm. Take 5 minutes to write one paragraph. Here’s the key - it doesn't have to be a good one. When I coach students and clients to bring a paragraph from a novel they haven't started writing, I immediately see tension all over their face. Then I tell them that my only request is to make it really bad, and they usually laugh. My goal is for them to take the assignment and themselves less seriously. The exercise almost always gets a decent paragraph out of the person, but it’s really about getting them to remove the self-imposed pressure.
You have great energy and seem like an incredibly positive person. When you do have days where you feel like you’re in a funk or feel like everything is in crisis, what helps you make a mental shift?
The first thing is - tomorrow’s another day. A lot of times when you’re trying to navigate some issue or crisis, something can look bleak or almost unsolvable one day, and then the next day you find the answer. You have to persevere and keep going into those next days.
Another thing is about stepping away. Our subconscious is constantly problem solving, especially during downtime and sleep. Don’t give up until you find a solution but give yourself breaks from directly thinking about the issue. There's a reason why good ideas come in the shower or driving.
A final thing I’ll add has to do with your clients. When you’re in business, your clients expect you to be open and transparent, not perfect. It took me a while to learn this early in my career. I was a perfectionist, and I worried that if we made a mistake or there was an issue beyond our control, it would make us look imperfect to the client, which would be the worst thing. So when an issue happened, I'd work super hard behind the scenes for days trying to fix it and not communicate until it was fixed, which sometimes took a while. Being silent during that time usually made things worse. I finally realized that there is no such thing as a perfect vendor. All vendors and companies make mistakes because they're run by humans who make mistakes. When AI takes a big foothold, it will make mistakes sometimes too, right? It dawned on me that a great way to separate myself and our business from other vendors was to be open and transparent with the client as soon as possible. If something goes wrong, whether it's our fault or not, we pull everybody together quickly and decide on the best course of action. Before we act on that solution, we go right to the client, point out the issue, and tell them what we plan to do about it. We’ll say, “If you have other ideas or know a better way, please tell us.” I'm actually surprised how often a client goes, “You know what? That's not a big deal. We actually changed course over here, and we didn't really need that.” Often we find out something that makes the issue a moot point. But the way we approached the issue built serious trust.
Many people I interview for the No Directions blog have created lives that are uniquely theirs in terms of how they live, work, and build their lives. What does the life that is uniquely yours look like today?
There’s no such thing as total freedom, but it’s always been about having as much freedom as possible. At the end of the day, I want to live a life where I can say, “This is what I wanted.” I'm still working toward it but that is the goal. I’ve met too many people who woke up one day and found themselves living a life that they settled for. Sometimes the issue is not necessarily knowing what you want out of life. I encourage everyone to figure that out, because once you do, you know what the life you want looks like, and you have a better chance of making it happen.