TVC082 Life After Awesome With Chris Lochhead
What To Do Next When You’ve ‘Made It’
This weeks show is with special guest and entrepreneurial guru, Chris Lochhead, co-author of Play Bigger and also the master behind the Legends and Losers podcast
Chris calls himself a small E-entrepreneur – with the reality of his experience being quite the opposite as true influencer. 
Staring his first company at 18, after getting thrown out of school – Chris ultimately became the head of marketing for three publicly traded technology companies in Silicon Valley. Born and raised  in Canada he moved to Silicon Valley about 21 years ago.
The last company Chris was with as head of marketing, was a company called Mercury Interactive and they sold the company for about 5 billion dollars to Hewlett Packard. After that, Chris retired for the first real time, and then ended doing coaching and consulting for start ups and venture capital firms – which lead him to started a business with two friends, called Play Bigger.
Between the independent advising and the work we did at Play Bigger, the three of us and another genius named Kevin Maney, wrote this book called Play Bigger. We broke down this discipline called category design in the book, which came out in June of 2016, and then I retired – officially.  
With all that behind him, and no stranger to being the top of the corporate and innovation food chain – Chris made a conscious decision on what was next. Spending a lot of time with my family in beautiful Santa Cruz, California.  Now, Chris is “mostly retired” and his passion in life is his show the Legends and Losers podcast. Well worth having on your Must Listen To list.
 
…so when there’s waves I surf. I surfed this morning. I still do a little bit of speaking and I still do a very little bit of work with a few companies.  Mostly, I’m just trying to be half the man my mother thinks I am, or mother thinks I should be. Something like that.
 
What does life after awesome look like?
How does someone who has made their career happen, invested time and IP into companies, being part of many mergers and acquisitions – move on to What’s Next?
By the way, before we go into this it’s very important to realise that many times what is defined as AWESOME is usually just what we feel we need, should and must be doing based on our own expectations or what is ingrained in us as we grow up. This expectation builds up.
Many of us chase titles and a place in society connected to getting a role, working through the ranks and having your businesses define who you are – without even realising it. A kind of success conditioning. Along the way there is often collateral damage as personal and commercial life became out of balance. 
So the big issue question is what happens to those high achievers once they have ticked all those boxes how do you  stay relevant and decide what to do next.
Chris: It’s such a powerful question. You never see anything or hear anything, really, in the world about what happens after you win. Right? It’s all about winning. It’s all about getting to whatever this place is and then if you get to whatever your definition of that place is, then what the F?
We don’t talk about that. Here’s the thing, in a lot of ways life as you know, is about how we identify with ourselves and who we are for us.