Mads Friis: How Simple Gratitude Supports a Successful Business

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Playing sports at a high level today’s guest studied personal growth and performance. They found that many resources focused 80% on the problems and only 20% on the solutions. Now he’s on a mission to flip this statistic around, to help more people on his own podcast about performance and human wellbeing.

His guests have included Sean Percival, former CMO of MySpace and Dan Brulay breathing, master and Tony Robbins breathing coach. Here today to help you have a health positive impact on your business ventures, please welcome Mads Friis. You ready to grow your business? And I love helping entrepreneurs find success.

So let’s do this. I’m Damon Burton Forbes contributor, author of the search engine optimization book, outrank and president of SEO National. I’ve been featured on Forbes, entrepreneur and hundreds of websites and podcasts for helping big businesses grow bigger and make more money by showing up higher on search engines, including shark tank, featured businesses, NBA teams, and Inc 5,000 companies.

I’m bringing my successful network to you here@learningfromothers.com. Whether success to you means financial freedom, freedom of time or freedom of the soul. We’re in this together. Welcome to the learning from others.

Ready to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize, but without paying for ads, download your free copy of my SEO book outrank. If you visit www.freeseobook.com today, mass phrase, Hey, thanks for jumping on learning from others. Thanks, David. I’m doing really well. Yeah. I appreciate the, the little chat we had before.

And, uh, we don’t really use the video here. And so for our listeners, Mads says just as huge ginormous smile and I like it. Are you always this happy? Um, most of the time, actually, as far as the things often get comments about, are you always so heavy and people that are around me after it’s often, like, they’re so happy.

Well, that that probably ties into, you know, what you do as a profession. Um, so, so let’s start there, you know, mass, tell us, give us the abbreviated explanation of what you do or what are we going to hear from you about today? Yeah, so the short version, I help people live happy, healthy. I do that both through building companies from the health and wellbeing.

So starting up new ideas, testing them out. And then the other part of it is more relevant for what we do here is I do workshops on habits and Nordic biohacking. So how do you live your best life? How do you actually build those habits that makes it easy to do. Happy and get the results that you actually want.

I know that with coaching and I’m about to write a book now as well. Mm. All right. Okay. I’m making notes. I’m gonna ask you about your buck here in a minute. All right. Before we get into the details about those items, you just mentioned, my audience knows that I like to ask a second question, which is, what do you suck at?

Yes. That ties into one of the things I’m doing right now. I’ve always been really better, right? So, uh, so I thought, okay, I had this, uh, belief that I wasn’t going to writing because I have a hard time spelling, or at least when I was a kid, I had to take extra classes to get better at writing because I was simply so bad at writing in Danish.

I actually find it easier to spell in English. The Denny’s language is not the easiest. And so I decided that, uh, I wanted to get better. Um, and get some help with that. So that’s one of the things I’m working very hard on right now of taking a workshop and then getting some writing classes and so on.

But it’s, it takes, it takes a lot of energy from me, but I love to get better at things that are. Good. So, so, uh, for our listeners. So it was Danish as your, your primary first language then when you were a kid. Yes. Okay. So is that, well, it’s the way we spell things doesn’t make sense. Like, no Witchen is a closed language to Davis and it’s easier to spell.

So when I was a young kid, I actually learned to read no written before, learn to retain this because I was a football fan. I got magazines and Norwegian. And so you’d read through the magazines and learn that way. That’s funny. So is, is that the main reason that you’re writing the book is, is, well, not the main reason, but is that it sounds like that’s a big part of it is for your own self goals, but then what is the book going to do for once it’s published?

What’s who’s the ideal audience and what, what’s it gonna. Yeah. So the main purpose is actually because I’ve been running these workshops so many times and watched the way of really scaling something. We can impact more people. Well, books are just an easy way where there’s an audio book. I listen to a ton of audio book books, ours, a normal book.

And the thing about books that I should like is. When you have a podcast and so on, it’s more free flow, which is one really nice format to follow along. When you have a book, someone has spent hours and hours and optimizing every single word to make sure it give the biggest impact. Yeah. So that’s one of the reasons to actually test that out as well.

Now that I had all this knowledge and the primary audience of Omar’s intrepreneurs, it’s a consultants. I used to be a management consultant myself as well, and also started different companies. And then people in the biohacking space, uh, the main. Uh, far into it. So I published a book last year, and so I can relate to the writing process.

How far into the writing process are you? I have the script done and now I’m waiting for an editor to send it back. So that’s going to be a, that’s going to be fun to see what I get back. How many corrections and zone. Yeah, but once I get it back, then I’m going to send it out to around 20, 30 people that are going to review it.

Give me feedback so I can optimize it. Then one more time of optimizing instance, didn’t get out to 20 people again and then it should be, it should be done. Yeah. I think that was the most interesting part that I learned when writing a book is, is when you’re done. Now you have a whole. Book that you have to read to make sure it flows correctly.

And then, and then you get the feedback and the revisions, and then you, you, you might move chapters around and then, and then you realize you just moved entire chapter. So now you have to read the whole book again, and then, and then you go smaller and smaller. So you move chapters. Pages and then even paragraphs, then you move sentences, then you move words.

It’s it’s an interesting process. All right. So let’s talk about, um, biohacking, biohacking. And so how did w why don’t we start with kind of a two part question one, can you kind of define it for our listeners and then two, how did you get into it? Sure. So, um, I’m how much story about Nordic biohacking that we define as the art and science of optimizing your health, your performance and wellbeing through nature.

And technology so is very important for us, especially in the Northern region that we talk about nature as well. The gentleman thing is to, we want to optimize ourselves and feel. Um, that’s the videos like short, some of it, we look at a double blind studies, so we love science. Like, can we actually test something we’re studies, but we also appreciate ancestral wisdom.

So like, what does that mean? Apart from a fancy word? Right. So ancestral wisdom is that we appreciate that. There’s a lot of things that we still don’t know and that we haven’t done all the studies on, but they might still work. So, what are you actually testing first, which is one of the other main components of biohacking is that you chest off, we talk about N equals one, meaning the sample size is one.

When you look at a study, you’ll see that it works for my George of people, but there are also these outliers. So you might be an outlier. So you want to make sure that it actually works in you as well. And that goes back to like the ancestral wisdom, because, um, back in the days we used to think that the brain couldn’t change after we became adults, there was a scientific fact that the brain was.

Today, we know that’s bullshit. The brain can actually change after you become adult. We know that this meditation, that used to be these crazy Eastern people that would meditate and didn’t make any sense. We know that actually physically changes their brain. We know that fasting is extremely healthy today.

There’s so many things are these ancestral wisdom that has been done for hundreds of years, that we haven’t proven yet with science or at least with studies, Western science. However that still works. So that’s why we look at both the studies, but we also look into the system wisdom and then we tested out on ourself and see, does it work for me?

Because that’s actually the most important thing. Does it work for you? It’s much more important than a double blind study with 10,000 people showed that it worked for 95% of P rye, because if you’re the last five. Yeah. Yeah, I got it. You know, our listeners are familiar that I got an auto-immune condition a couple of years ago.

And, uh, as I go through how life has changed since then, a lot of things do and don’t work for me that do, and don’t work for other people with similar conditions. So, um, it’s, uh, it’s interesting to see how. Everybody’s body is different. I mean, a little example is, is just how my body metabolizes, caffeine and coffee, you know, my wife and my mother-in-law, they can, they can drink coffee all the way up to the moment they go to bed.

And if I don’t stop, I’m the total opposite. If I don’t stop at 10:00 AM, then I can physically feel that coffee and the caffeine as I lay down and interrupts my sleep. So yeah, it’s something that’s super interesting that I think people know, but, but they don’t actually appreciate it until. Factored in, into their own situations.

Unfortunately often, um, people either get sick or hit some kind of block. And then they started realizing and feeling more into how they’re feeling or start tracking a bit more. Right. Um, or they hit that roadblock where they don’t get the next results that they actually want to get in the business and so on.

And then they start actually tracking off the stuff to help them figure out, like, what is it that actually makes them. Yeah, let’s talk about the business side a little bit. Um, I want to know, I got, I got a question here in your bio where, so it says you had a couple of ventures. You built three startups with kring or K R I N G.

Can you help me understand what that is? Yeah. So Kenyon’s a venture builder where I’m a partner. So super simple. We raised money from some investors. So we have our own fund. We have our own internal team to be come up with different ideas. We then take those ideas and test. Some of them were closed down.

So we tested a lot more than three companies or ideas, so to say, and had revenue and more companies as well. And then once we get to a certain states where we can see like, okay, this idea is going to work, or it’s very likely it’s going to work. Then we find entrepreneurs to become co-founders and then we put further money into it.

So we basically only build very scalable companies, something that has to become a potential unicorn. Um, they can get VC. Venture funding. Um, it’s super fun because you get to work with amazing new ideas. I have always been an idea guy. So some of, all of my crazy ideas, I see some that. That’s cool. How what’s um, so it sounds like there there’s very specific processes in place for how you test and scale these companies.

What’s the, is, is the, is the goal to, um, test build fund, and then exit or some of these more longterm place that you want to keep. Um, so we will be exiting all of them and we have a timeline of around seven to nine. Yeah, with our fund before we need to exit our companies. So there’s something very beautiful.

Also, like I know many of your listeners are like people that built solid businesses, right. That you can hold onto for many years. And I have high respect for that. Um, and it’s fantastic. And many of the best companies in Denmark are built on that. And that’s how we have our welfare system. Um, this is just in the other category where it’s something that you scale up, you sell your ownership in, and then you can build new.

Yeah, well, either way, I think it’s where your passion falls, because there’s some people that have a passion behind building and keeping something and then other people have a passion in starting something. And so if we got to start the next thing, then you have to get out of the previous thing. Yes. And then there’s also, some businesses are better suited to taking them into capital.

So for example, one of the things that we built is a chatbot based app and mental health assistant. So, um, There’s so many passwords about AI and so on, but this is something where it’s going to have to go from a power point of being AI to real AI. Right. So right now it’s, it is fairly smart. But, uh, to get to the stage that we want to, where we are tracking more biomarkers right now, we are implementing a voice and not only texts.

It’s just going to, it’s going to cost a lot of money and for that, you won’t be generating enough cars at the right time to, to fund it. So you need to raise external money. Yeah. So what’s your background before this though? Because it seems like you’d have to have some business experience to then go into doing other businesses.

So what was your background before that? So I studied business administration and. And psychology. So basically having the understanding of both the numbers and then people, then I did the classical management consultant in. So I had the chance of running around in the faintest suit, uh, advising on PowerPoint slides and Excel, which is always much easier than actually running a of business.

Anyone that’s been running a business operating one knows that, but it was an amazing learning opportunity to actually see, like, what are some of the best practices and how can we test that actually dollar in many different companies and at the same time work with really skilled people. So that was one part.

Another part was that I built my own company. Uh, scale-up or start-up that I had users in 30 countries and people working on different continents and so on. And then I’ve been advising startups around the world. I would tap to buy Bergen Berlin, uh, Dominican Republic and so on. Um, so that knowledge as well, Eh, it’s kind of what went into that.

I could be compiled of, uh, of this venture builder. Yeah. What’s, what’s been one of the more, what’s been one of the projects that you’ve had some of the most, uh, personal attachment or found the most enjoyable or interesting that you’ve worked in. So I would say Nuna that I mentioned before this chatbot based app, and that’s simply because I’ve been very close to many people that had a really hard time mentally.

They’re just not getting enough help. Um, and I think it’s so tough to see that we’re objective and in better than Kings and Queens back in the days, but people are so sad and not feeling well. So it’s kind of been a session to be like, how can we help more people feel better? And what are some of the tools?

And Nuna is not the solution for everything, but. Can be part of the solution. And so we had a psychologist hired, who’s sitting in building all of this stuff and I was reading the manuals from how do you deal with depression? How do you dealing with anxiety? And so on there’s like protocols in Denmark, official protocols is also in different countries of how do you treat that with something called conscious behavioral therapy, which is very protocol-based.

So. And coming up with the idea of Nuna, which was my kind of child you would say in the company as well, and then actually getting it out, seeing real users using it, the feedback that these chats and these tools that we’re giving them, like breathing meditation, um, different kind of ways of looking at your thought, that actually makes a difference that has been extremely emotionally, uh, to see that.

Yeah, it’s, it’s an interesting topic. And I talk about this informally with other people and family and friends, the, your comment about we live better than Kings and Queens of, of past days. And it’s totally true. And it’s, it’s interesting when you realize that your troubles are relative, your problems are relative.

And I think that’s so hard for people to realize, because I don’t know if you know, you may have some further comments on this, but it’s, it seems like it’s human nature for. For our brain to, to always be in protective mode and to be in protective mode, it has to say, what are our problems? And so it’s always saying, what are the dangers?

What are the problems? And so, because of that, theoretically, we could have no problems compared to the Kings and Queens of however many years ago. But because it’s in our, or we’re wired to, to always say, how do I protect ourselves? That means we’re always trying to create problems in our own mind, even if we don’t have them.

Yeah. So high extent, I think it’s spot on like our perception is everything. Um, there’s the famous book, a man’s search for meaning Viktor Franklin, the survivor from the Holocaust. And so on that basically like if we can provide a good enough meaning to something, we can survive anything. And we’re definitely seeing that the way that we compare ourselves to others and making us feel really bad.

Um, and as you’re saying, our brains are not wired for that. That’s like we’re wired to survive. So that means we’re always looking for things that are wrong and things that could be dangerous. That’s why we, but that’s what I find so empowering. We can do stuff about it. So one of the things that I do is I write down a gratitude journal and I’ve been doing that since 2013.

So super simple. We know from, from different research that just writing down three things, you’re grateful for that actually rewire your brains to be more positive. And usually. So I love how there’s so many things that we can actually do actively, but if you don’t do something actively, it’s probably more normal that you’re not feeling that good.

Especially these days with the media where you see so many negative information, eh, you go to social media, you see everyone is doing much better than yourself. They’re looking much better because they have all the filters and so on. So like if we don’t do something actively, we will move towards a negative outlook.

Yeah. How have you noticed that? Did, I don’t know how long you’ve been working on, are you still working on the chat bot? Is it a current. Yeah, it’s still running. Is that something that was, was born before COVID or was expedited because of COVID or did COVID have any impact on, on that coming to market?

So basically we, uh, changed some after we built conversations based on code, because we were about to launch it and then COVID hit. Holy is, uh, now we need to move even faster so we can really help people because so many people are sitting at home, feeling lonely, feeling scared and so on. So we build several protocols or conversations towards how do you deal with COVID and, and is that, is this chat bot.

In certain markets only, or did it launch with multilanguage options? So it’s only in English, but it’s so basically anyone that speaks English can use it. We’re looking at, at some point to translate as well to different languages. The thing is, it’s just not like a normal customer service chatbot, so the language needs to be extremely precise and it’s about stuff like that.

So we’re waiting. Um, but many of the tools as well. So it’s both that you going have this chatbot and the idea is that you should be chatting like hours a day. Right. And the idea is you get a quick check-in and then you learn about different tools and then you use those tools instead on a daily basis, like a breathing exercise and meditation exercise, a good gratitude journal.

So it’s the idea is that it’s kind of like you mentioned. That you go in and once in a while you have conversations and otherwise you go in and learn about tools and then you go into actually use those tools. But, uh, but you definitely need to, uh, be able to understand it. Otherwise it’s not going to be helpful at all.

So let’s, let’s kind of blend the two topics of health and wellness and entrepreneurism. Um, how much of the launch of Nuna. Uh, I’m assuming it was based around general health and wellness, but have you, with your background in entrepreneurism and business ownership, did, did you have an opportunity to put a little extra care into an attention into specific topics that went into the chat bot?

So we focused mostly on. I kind of made the design and everything else to first focus on young women. So between 18 and 35, because we see that the that’s the group that has the most mental health. Hmm. Um, and that are most open to right as well. We saw, however, we also had, when we did interviews with some of the user men that were like late fifties, they were like, I didn’t thought this should be something for me, but now I can finally actually share my feelings that I’ve never been able to share before.

There was some pretty surprising findings to get. I still think the majority of our users are under or around the, up to 35 with a higher screw to watch women for the mines are preneurial coaching and Sopranos can definitely use as well. We have made programs for like, if you’re an entrepreneur and so on, but there’s so many things that I important things you can do as an entrepreneur and mental health.

And I think one of the first thing is definitely getting. At peer network, because you might be thinking that you’re sitting with all these problems just by yourself. And you’re the only one that have these problems. And would you find as an entrepreneur, I want you to start talking to other entrepreneurs are sitting in the same problems and just know that yes, you realize you’re not that unique and it’s perfectly normal things at burning and so on.

Like, that’s one of the super simple things. Just getting the possibility of venting once in a while and getting advice from others. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It just, it’s amazing how powerful, just knowing that you’re not alone can be, even if you don’t find the answer, just knowing that you’re not isolated, I think eases the burden a little bit.

Yeah. I was really surprised when I was working with all psychologist about something as simple as what she calls normalizing or would in psychologist called normalizing, especially just when people have a problem. Um, often we think we’re the only ones in the world. Something is wrong with us. So just normalizing and explain like, Hey, this is actually quite normal.

There’s nothing wrong with you. Like this happens for so many people how that can be so helpful. And then after it’s been like, Hey, so you’re perfectly normal. Um, do you want to work on that as well? So to feel even better, but just, just letting people know that it’s okay to feel like they’re feeling like many people are feeling the same.

That in itself has a very good. Yeah. All right. So I’m going to completely change topics for a minute because I laughed a little bit and I can relate to one of your comments about when you were younger as a kid, you had a lot of Teddy bears and you’d have to sleep on the floor too. So you, if you would have, you would excuse yourself from the bed and allow the stuffed animals take the bed.

The reason I laugh is because my ten-year-old, he. Into Teddy bears and stuffed animals anymore, but he just still has them. And because he still has them, they pick up his whole freaking bed. So

that’s where Ty’s story. Eh, had a, both positive and negative effect on some kits, right. When you kind of feel like these are like, not just did, eh, Did play animals, some of that, but they kind of have their own soul. Right. And then you want to make sure they have enough room in the bed. So then if there isn’t room for them, well, then you got to sleep on the floor.

Right? Luckily my parents got me a bigger bed after a while. So, so, so, so you didn’t less than you didn’t have any less steady buyers. You just had more space.

Uh, okay. And then, and then your other note here is about, about flying. So you’ve always wanted to fly and then you were recently able to, now now, can you define that though? Like just in an airplane at all, or you were at, you actually were able to pilot sort of world? Um, since I was four, I wanted to flower.

So in kindergarten I had noticed that the birds had big wings, so I would take paper and then I would kind of fluff it and I could quickly see, I didn’t get speed, but then I realized. Well, Bert often jumble from high places and fly. Right? So this market, I would call up, eh, to this kind of ship on the roof of it.

Jump out, flipped my hands, slammed thinking. Okay. I got get high up, ended up call up to, uh, to like kind of, I’m not sure what it’s called names, but somethings like two meters, um, where you can like slide down, but that would be the highest part. And I would jump out from there as well. And that didn’t go well either for some reason it didn’t work.

And just Katherine haunting me since I got older, I’ve been trying a bunch of different things. So what happened the 10th of, uh, of June this year was that I was a. And I was really flying there. I wasn’t just like falling, but I learned like how to actually fly. And that was extremely liberating, but all the small experiments I’ve done along the way to try and find a way to fly.

I’m not giving up on the dream, but finding another way to kind of. Live the dream out. Yeah. Have you seen those extreme sports wingsuits where they’ll skydive and then just the, the wind resistance and they can more or less fly. That’s crazy. It’s amazing. I’ve been like, so we, when we go up in the small plane, they will often be some, uh, wingsuits in there.

So a few people jumping out and it’s it’s medical. They are. Yeah, but once you skydive as well by yourself, that’s a maneuver where you can like straighten your legs, take your arms all the way down. And then you’re like flying, like, um, and just like an error with 220 K an hour. It’s just, it’s a magical feeling.

Yeah. Well, good for you. Well, Mads I’ve, I’ve appreciated the conversation. I want to give you the last few moments to tell our listeners how they can find out more about you. Sure. We appreciate as well. So growthisland.com, growthisland.com is basically where I have my website. That’s where I, yeah, it’s easiest to find me.

And then I’m very much on Instagram as well, which is Mads M Friis. So my name and phrase, um, and you can also find me on LinkedIn where I’m active as well. There was a bit, definitely the best place to find me all my podcasts. When I interview people on how to be the best version of yourself, which is everything from doctors to psychologists, scientists, or other experts, and that’s growth island as well.

And it’s on most of the podcast providers also on YouTube. Yeah. You’ve had some cool guests on there. I saw that list. And for the listeners, it’s spelled M A D S F R I I S. Mads. I appreciate the time. Thanks for joining and sharing your stories. My pleasure by Damon Burton here. And thank you so much for listening to the learning from others.

I sincerely hope that today’s guest helped you learn something since 2007, I’ve generated millions of dollars for businesses like yours. Ready to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize, but without paying for ads, download your free copy of my new SEO book outrank. If you visit www.freeseobook.com today.