Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts

How to Lead Like Your Life Depends on It

Michael Brody-Waite

• Publisher: Forefront Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781948677325
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

What if you learned that to lead well, you'd need to livelike a drug addict? During treatment for drug addiction, Michael Brody-Waite learned three principles that became the difference between life and death:

• Practice rigorous authenticity
• Surrender the outcome
• Do uncomfortable work

Leaving rehab, Michael entered the workplace where he was shocked to see most business leaders doing what he had been taught would kill him. He began to see striking similarities between drug addiction and what he calls "mask addiction." Leaders everywhere were hiding their authentic selves in order to get what they wanted. They were doing things like:

• Saying yes when they could say no
• Hiding their weaknesses
• Avoiding difficult conversations
• Holding back their unique perspectives

Instead of chasing drugs, leaders were chasing professional, financial, and social success from behind a mask—to the detriment of themselves and the people around them. Thanks to his recovery, Michael's three principles gave him an unlikely competitive advantage throughout his career, resulting in a level of success unexpected for a "drug addict." In Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts, Michael explains what drug addicts do to recover and provides a step-by-step program you can use to break free from your mask addiction to thrive in both work and life. He equips you with the tools you need to live and lead mask-free—tools to enable you to stop following others, lead yourself, and become one of the dynamic, growing, authentic leaders this world desperately needs.

CHAPTER 1 I’M MIKE. I’M A DRUG ADDICT.

I’M SURE YOU REMEMBER YOUR first “real” job. The nervousness. The commitment. The determination to do everything just right to make the most of the opportunity you’d been given. I started that first job back in college. I spent so much time perfecting my role that my grades suffered, and I was eventually kicked out of school for it. I bet all the money I had on this job, which led to me going broke and getting kicked out of my apartment. I poured everything I had into this job with laser focus twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with no breaks. Despite all the success I’ve had in the years since then, I still identify myself by the first real job I ever had. To this day, whenever I’m around a new group of people, I still introduce myself by that very first job title:

Hi. I’m Mike. I’m a drug addict.

Let me give you a picture of my normal “day at the office” back then. I was at Venice Beach at 2:00 in the morning sitting with a homeless guy on one side and a prostitute on the other. It was a weird triangle of lies and manipulation. I wanted the homeless man’s blunt (a hollowed-out cigar filled with weed). He wanted the prostitute. The prostitute wanted me to be her last customer of the night. But none of us was honest about what we wanted or what we had to offer. I pretended I had money. I didn’t. He pretended he had more weed. He didn’t. And she pretended her flirting wasn’t an attempted business transaction. It was. All three of us were working overtime pretending to be someone else. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned as an addict: how to be whoever I needed to be in order to get what I wanted.

This is a behavior I lived and breathed during my years as an active drug addict. It’s also a behavior I’ve seen nearly every day since—but I’m not talking about something that’s only hiding in back-alley drug deals or condemned crack houses. No, this is something I’ve seen most often out in the “civilized” world of business. We live in a world where most leaders hide behind masks to get what they want. As a result, the rest of us learn to do the same. Then, before we know it, nearly everyone is a “mask addict,” hiding who we truly are time and time again.

I realize it may feel like a stretch to compare drug addiction to mask addiction, to make the claim that practically everyone is addicted to some sort of mask. Well, we know that most addicts remain addicts when they live in denial and refuse to see their problem. So in order to determine if you are a mask addict, I am going to start by showing you what addiction looks like through my own story. Then I will show you what it looks like to be a mask addict and why knowing that can give you a significant advantage. Ultimately, you will see how the world of drug addiction and the world of leadership have some stark similarities that most of us would rather ignore. I can’t ignore them anymore and by the time you finish reading this book, neither will you.

We’re off to a great start, huh? You’ve probably never picked up a leadership book that used the terms drug addict, prostitute, blunt, and crack house and then had the gall to suggest you are an addict too—all in the first few pages. If that didn’t tip you off, let me clear it up for you right off the bat: this is not your standard, boring, vanilla, paint-by-numbers leadership book. We’re going to deal with some real-life stuff, some things that will probably make you uncomfortable. You’re going to read about some really stupid things I’ve done, but you’ll also hear about the process I used to turn things around. Throughout this book, I’m going to walk you through the program I’ve developed over the years that turned a broke, homeless drug addict into an award-winning CEO and entrepreneur.¹

This has been an unbelievable turnaround for me. As you’ll see, I was not someone who could have been (or should have been) trusted. I was the guy who would steal your money and then help you try to find it. But today, I’m a guy people trust with their careers and livelihood. Businesses trust me to help them get their startups off the ground. Employees trust me enough to uproot their families and move across the country to work with me. That’s nuts—but that’s the power of the Mask-Free Program I am going to teach you in this book. It’s a program anyone can use to turn around how they live and lead. To understand it, though, you first have to understand my story. So, allow me to introduce you to Michael Brody-Waite, circa 2001.

MY DAILY WAKE AND BAKE

Alcohol. Weed. Food. More alcohol. More weed.

If I had created a budget in my early twenties, that would have been it. From the moment I woke up in the morning until whenever I passed out at night, my mission was to get and use as much alcohol and drugs as I could. Some people call this the wake and bake. As soon as I woke up (usually around 11:00 a.m.), I hit the weed pipe. The goal was to get high again as quickly as possible before the hangover from the previous night kicked in. All I wanted to do was get high and stay high. I was a liar and a thief. I stole from my friends and family. I told so many lies that I couldn’t remember the truth. Thanks to my addiction, I was kicked out of school, forced out of my house, and fired from my job—several jobs, actually. I had no money and what I assume was a single-digit credit score. The only thing keeping me off the streets was a friend’s couch. That was convenient, because the only money I had was what I stole from him during the day while he was at work. I had one pair of pants that didn’t fit, and I didn’t have a belt to hold them up. So, you’d find me stumbling down the streets of Los Angeles with baggy clown pants cinched up with a piece of rope. Classy, right?

At least I had my health—except for the giant beer gut. And the blood I had recently thrown up. And the fact that my lungs were so scarred from smoking that I felt like I was drowning every time I took a breath. Oh, and my liver. My doctor once told me that the only thing higher than I was were my liver enzymes. I’m no expert, but that didn’t sound good. It didn’t matter, though; I was pretty sure I’d be dead by thirty, anyway. And I was fine with that.

Killing Myself Slowly

I got into drugs and alcohol in college, and I fell hard into that lifestyle. I quickly became addicted, and I poured poison into my system nonstop. Not surprisingly, my grades took a nosedive—along with my attitude and behavior—and I was ultimately asked to leave school. They really weren’t asking so much as they were kicking me out. And where do you go when school doesn’t want you and you’re basically unemployable? That’s right: you go to work for your parents. I somehow conned my folks into “hiring” me to digitize a lot of old papers and newsletters they’d been wanting to throw out. Here’s what that “job” looked like: I got to their house late in the morning and sat down at the computer with some of the newsletters nearby. I then spent the next eight hours surfing the internet and pirating thousands of songs online. Throw in some meals from Mom and Dad’s kitchen and some afternoon television, and that shaped up to a full day at the office. Because my parents weren’t computer literate, it was easy to excuse the slow progress. “Digitizing all this stuff is technically challenging,” I said. “It’s a lot of work, but we’ll get there… eventually.”

Apparently, my skills as a paperwork digitizer earned me another key position with my folks: professional house sitter. My parents decided to take a long vacation and asked me to live in their house for the month. I had three responsibilities while they were gone:

1. Take care of my childhood cat.
2. Clean out the birdcages every day.
3. Shred a stack of old documents they wanted to recycle.

“No problem,” I said. “I think I can manage all that.” Needless to say, I didn’t manage any of that. I spent the entire month drunk and high. Every day was pretty much the same: wake, bake, watch TV, have some food delivered, drink, eat, bake, drink, watch TV, bake, drink, eat, pass out. I don’t remember many details about that month. Occasionally, I’d realize someone was mad at me or I’d lost my keys or phone, and the only way to trigger the memories about what had happened was to track my trails of vomit. After getting an angry text from a buddy one morning, for example, I found a pile of puke near the front door and remembered, Oh yeah. He’s mad at me because I kicked him out of the house for beating me at a video game last night. You know you have a problem when you depend on day-old vomit trails for a daily journal.

The day before my parents got home from their trip, I realized I hadn’t done anything they asked me to do. The birdcages had not been changed in thirty days. I hadn’t touched the stack of recycling (and had no plans of doing so). I had only scooped the cat litter twice in a month. The filth from my complete lack of home hygiene (not to mention a month’s worth of bird and cat poop) caused a massive gnat infestation throughout the house. I still laugh remembering myself running around the house holding a vacuum cleaner in the air trying to suck up all the gnats flying around. Newsflash: that doesn’t work. The only thing of any value I’d done the entire month was keep my cat alive. There was no way I was going to let anything happen to him. The truth is, I loved that cat more than I loved myself.

During this time, I had pretty much given up on life. I endlessly watched—maybe even worshipped—movies like Leaving Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I tried to overdose. I made… poor… relationship decisions. I drove drunk all the time. One day, I was driving down Sunset Boulevard completely wasted. A police car pulled up beside me, and my first thought was, Good. Finally. I guess this is going to be it. It wasn’t. The cop just told me to slow down and drove off. An hour later, I took a hard turn at ninety miles per hour and almost flipped my SUV. It would have killed me for sure, but my overriding thought was, Whatever. I honestly didn’t care if I lived or died. I basically had three options staring me in the face: die quickly in an overdose or accident, die slowly as the drugs destroyed my body, or get help. Of those three options—the first two of which involved me dying—it was the third that scared me most. I would rather have died than have to deal with the mess my life had become at that point.

Addiction Is Hard Work

Movies, especially comedies, often glorify the drug and alcohol lifestyle. They make it look so fun and carefree, with the wasted goofball being the life of the party. I totally get how addiction can look to the outside world, but that’s not how it is at all, at least for me. Being an active drug addict was hard work. Doing the drugs was the easy part; what was hard was having to manage every little piece of my life around my all-consuming need to get high and stay high. Addicts spend entire days doing whatever it takes to fund our habit, including stealing from our friends and family. Anything that didn’t lead to a buzz was a buzzkill. Anything that didn’t feed my addiction was the enemy. I had to figure out how to turn every interaction and opportunity into a chance to get what I wanted. And, along the way, I had to lie every minute of every day to the people around me about what I was doing and who I’d become.

For example, I could never let anyone know that I had a problem. Whenever my family or friends started poking around the edges of that conversation, I immediately shifted into one of three defensive reactions: I laughed it off, got mad, or went into avoidance mode. As much as possible, I avoided any discussion with any person that might lead to a surprise intervention. I didn’t see my parents very often because I knew they’d see straight through my bloodshot eyes. As things got really bad, even my drinking buddies got worried about me—so I stopped drinking with them. I didn’t want to hear their concerns. Whenever avoidance failed and someone did get through my defenses and try to confront me, I relied on humor and anger to keep me “safe.” They were the twin shields I used to hide how weak and broken I really was.

My only offensive weapon was lying—and I lied a lot. I lied about having a problem. I lied about stealing from my friends. I lied about having my drug use under control. I lied about my grades, my work, my relationships, and anything else that could have given me away. All my energy was focused on trying to look put together on the outside while I was falling apart on the inside.

I also ignored my problem by saying yes to things I had no business saying yes to—even something as stupid as a Big Mac. I’d be drunk and high at home alone, see a McDonald’s commercial on TV, and think, Man, a burger sounds really good. Then, I’d hop in my car and make a burger run, risking my life and the lives of everyone else on the road in the process. Or, if I was completely wasted and barely conscious but someone offered me a drug I’d never tried before, I said yes. After all, it would have been rude to turn down such a generous offer. So, I just kept saying yes, even when it put myself or others in danger.

One of the hardest parts of the whole addiction lifestyle for me was the need to act like a completely different person to fit in with whomever I was with. I’ve always been a pretty sensitive guy with big emotions, but that seemed like the very definition of weakness for a man, at least when I was growing up. When I was a kid, the other guys at school made fun of me relentlessly for being so soft-hearted. The girls seemed to like it, but only up to a point. I was always the safe, reliable, trustworthy friend. Translation: I was the guy the girls complained to about the moronic jerks they were dating. The girls—most of whom I had crushes on—came to visit me in my little lovesick prison, safely tucked away in the friend zone, to get my advice on their love lives. My advice? Date me! Of course, I could never say that. It’s not what I thought these girlfriends (emphasis on friends) wanted me to be. So, I held back what I was really thinking and fed them what I thought they wanted to hear.

After barely getting through the emotional minefield that was high school, I knew “Sensitive Michael” would get eaten alive at college… so I reinvented myself. I became the cool, distant guy who didn’t seem to give a crap about anything. Getting high and drunk allowed me to cover up my emotional “weaknesses” and pretend I was strong, pretend that I was a real man. That seems so weird to me today, because I honestly think my emotional intelligence is one of the most valuable things about me. It’s what ultimately helped me build a business and a platform to help people. In a way, it’s why you’re reading this book. Throughout my entire life, I had something uniquely valuable to offer the world, and I held it back out of fear. I wasted so much time and energy trying to hold back what made me me, and it was exhausting.

My drug addiction didn’t just make me a drug addict; it also made me a fraud. It impacted every part of my life and changed every one of my behaviors. It aligned every thought, desire, and action around a single goal: to get high and stay high. As hard as it was to get clean,² my life before recovery was ten times harder. My worst day clean was better than my best day using. It was an endless loop of lying and hiding, never giving me a chance to be real, to be me. Getting free of that, I’ve discovered, is one of the greatest gifts of recovery—but it’s one most people have never really thought about.

It’s time to think about it.

LIFE IN RECOVERY

Before I get into the specifics of the program I’m going to unpack for you in this book, I need to show you how this material transformed my own life and leadership. You’ve already gotten a glimpse of me at my worst; now, let’s look at what my life is like in recovery.

My first job out of rehab was a retail position at a local Sam Goody music store. I wasn’t changing the world, but I could at least save a few people from wasting their money on Phish albums. After a while, I was ready to step up and took a sales position at a huge Fortune 50 company. I was pretty good at it, and I discovered a passion for business and leadership. I broke a few company sales records and got my leaders’ attention. They made me a sales manager, and the team I led consistently outsold the other teams. It was weird looking back on the time just a couple of years earlier when I felt worthless and wanted to die. The drunk, depressed, semi-suicidal guy was gone, replaced by a bright-eyed, optimistic, award-winning professional.

By 2010, the nation was wading through a serious recession, but I was riding high on a wave of success and enthusiasm. Jobs were scarce back then, and I was blessed to have a solid position at a relatively secure company. There was only one problem: I was ready to leave. I loved my job, but I had a burning passion to do more. I wanted to build something, to create something new and powerful that would change the world. It was my life’s dream to become a successful entrepreneur. I’d lost that dream to my addiction, but they taught me in recovery that my lost dreams could be reawakened.

I’d spent the last several years consuming business and leadership books with the same appetite I used to have for drugs a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Author Note
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: I’m Mike. I’m a Drug Addict.
• Chapter 2: You’re ___. You’re a Mask Addict.
• Chapter 3: The Addict’s Advantage
• Chapter 4: The Mask-Free System
• Chapter 5: The Mask-Free Sponsor
• Chapter 6: The Mask-Free Society
• Chapter 7: It Only Works If You Work It
• Chapter 8: A Tale of Two Divorces
• Photographs
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Meet Michael Brody-Waite
• Your Mask-Free Living Offer
• Copyright