Tenacious: How Scott Scovill Beat His Fear of Failure and Built a Life Worth Writing About

I made myself a promise that I was going to start trying and never stop trying until this dream life that I had just discovered was mine. And in that moment, tenacity was born. If that moment didn't happen for me, I don't know where I would be, but I wouldn't be where I am today. That's the big message in the book is that just by being willing to try, while the concept's incredibly simple, will change your life. Execution's really hard. And that's what the book gets into. How do you actually flip the switch and start being tenacious, being willing to fail?

You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Hello and welcome to Write About Now. We're always talking about how you can get right. And that might be in your business, it might be in work, it might be in life. I saw the title of this book, it got my attention, which is always a winning combination for a book. And if you're watching, which you should be on YouTube, you'll see the name of it very before I can even give it away. But it's an underutilized word, but one that I think we all need to embrace. And I'm really pumped to have Scott on the show.

You've found some things you love. Maybe this show is one of them. I would certainly hope so. And I bet you've relentlessly pursued gathering your audience. Obviously, podcasting can take a lot of form. It's a content medium. It's the new world talk show or interview machine. And for me, for eight years of doing this show, twice a week, no breaks, it's definitely been a passion and love. It's conversations like these and meeting guys like you that have done... a lot of different things. I have always loved the statistic that so many years, every cell in our body has been replaced, and we really are a different person than we used to be. There's the lifetimes, but there's the lifetimes within. I think back to myself as a kid, who is that guy?

If you go see any one of about 30 other acts, it's my equipment and people putting all the video gear up, the screens so that people in cheap seats can see, but the scenic elements, and that's what we do. I got into that when the industry was brand new. So I grew up with all the hurdles of trying to overcome fitting technology from other things into an industry that doesn't exist. It was a pretty wild ride. Trailblazing is what that's called, Scott. In a lot of ways, right? Yeah, wouldn't want it any other way. It was hard, but it was exciting.

While flunking out of college, my family scraped together some money and put me in to see a therapist. And he diagnosed me with fear of failure. The diagnosis hit hard. He said, Scott, it would be easier for you to grab a hot stove and hang on than actually try. There's some reasons for that that I don't go into in the book. But there was some tough stuff early in my life. I was so afraid that if I tried... I might prove that I was as dumb as I was told I was at times that Manifested in this really confusing way and thank goodness for the therapist who showed me that that was what was going on So about that same time a girl i'm seeing is killed in a car accident Like i'm a wreck that I am failing because i'm too afraid of failing It's all coming to a head and a bus pulls into a restaurant.

I worked at I was working at a howard johnson's on the side of the road And I had a space shuttle on the side of it. I'm like, oh, this is exciting Maybe these guys work for NASA, right? Huge space nut. So I'm like, I want them in my section. The hostess says, okay. They get off the bus and I'm watching them get off the bus and they're wearing all black and they've got long hair. Great. They don't look like they work for NASA. They sit down and I take their drink orders and I go, so what's up with the bus? And in the thickest of Irish accents, one of them goes, we work for the band, you too. And I was like, what? What?

I walk back to the kitchen. My mind is racing. How could you do this for a living? What do you mean you work for you too for a living? So I come back out and mind you, I've been really depressed for like three months, but I'm interested. I say, so what do you mean you work for you too? I would have thought you had to be Bono's cousin or something. Please explain how that works. And the guy laughs. There's seven, eight people at the table. And he says, Scott, we put on the show. We're great at doing the lights and the sound. We're maybe the best in the world at what we do. And then he puts his arm around the guy next to him and says, and this is AJ.

He's Bono's cousin. So everyone laughs at AJ. And AJ and I are friends to this day, by the way. Great dude. And that breaks the ice. And I got interested. And apparently I was amusing because they asked me to do a show. I went to the show. Couldn't stop asking them questions. Then they said, do you want to come back tomorrow? I went to that second show. The lights went out and the crowd went insane. 15,000 people screaming in the dark. This is right when Joshua Tree came out. Like it was nuts. And standing there in the dark, I went, oh my God, this is what you're going to do with your life. You love music. You love travel. You love technology. Bono's trying to make the world a better place.

This is amazing. A moment later, I realized I was going to have to try. That hit pretty hard. But I thought about it for a moment. And before the band even started playing, I sat there and I made myself a promise that I was going to start trying. and never stop trying until this dream life that I had just discovered was mine. In that moment, tenacity was born. If that moment didn't happen for me, I don't know where I would be, but I wouldn't be where I am today. That's the big message in the book is that just by being willing to try, while the concept is incredibly simple, will change your life. Execution is really hard, and that's what the book gets into. How do you actually flip the switch and start being tenacious, being willing to fail?

Because this was the thing in my life, I believe, that has led me from that kid who was broken and feeling like he was going to be something less, was working in a restaurant, a Howard Johnson's. Now I have several companies, a few hundred great employees. I have my own tour bus now. My life is something I'm proud of because I was tenacious. That was the inspiration. If this is so powerful for me, I want to share it with anyone who will listen, really, all my friends and anyone who will listen. I hear all the time fear of failure, but you said I feared making them right. And that triggered something for me in how I know that it's not necessarily the fear of failing.

And I was afraid of proving that was right. There's definitely truth to that for a lot of people, but damn, that tour bus needs to remind you every day that that ain't true. Yeah, I mean, I still have the fear, right? We never stop being ourselves. But I stopped letting the fear win. Releasing this book was terrifying. And I'm 35 years into being tenacious, right? Yeah. Releasing this book is terrifying because I'm afraid people will see it and they'll see me and they won't like me. We all have those feelings. The book helps you resolve how to get over them and do it anyway if it's something you really love and care about. I want to get into some meat of that. I'm going to say something that a friend of mine or a good acquaintance that says, Rand Cardone, he says, just show up, show up, do it.

He does a little bit, but he writes about fighting brain cancer three times. So much. of what held him back was just the thought that he was left or he couldn't. Hopefully what the book tells you is that you are what you think you are and you can decide whether or not it makes sense for you to try. You know, you don't want to be stupid. Like I'm not going to run for president of the United States because I wouldn't get elected. But I did decide to write a book, which is a hard thing. and I managed to write a book. I've done some crazy things. I was told as a kid I couldn't sing. And in the book, I carry you through the journey of finding out I could sing in my 40s.

The next thing you know, I'm singing in a band in Norway. Then we start getting more popular. We end up being on the big stage at a festival. Then they named the headliner as Brad Paisley. I have told no one in Nashville that I'm singing, which is where I live. Brad is one of my best friends, and he doesn't know. Suddenly, I'm his opening act. By the end of that chapter, he's decided to make me his opening act. Two tours later, 2024, I traveled around Europe as Brad Paisley's opening act. I stopped thinking to myself that I can't. I learned through overcoming my first thing, my fear of failure, that I could do more. And hopefully the book just teaches us that we can do more, that it's probably going to hurt a lot less than we think it's going to.

That's another concept in the book. You know, you think that it's just gonna be horrible, and when you get in there and do it and fail, it's actually not the end of the world. The fear of failure is worse than the failure in so many instances in the book. I hope that makes sense, and forgive me if I don't sound like an expert. I don't like books that beat you over the head with something and say, you need to be doing this. You should do this. Do it now. Why aren't you doing it yet? Do it, do it, do it. My book is more the way I like to learn. Tell me a story, let me listen to what happened to you, then I'll decide what parts of that were good enough to embrace.

And more importantly, what dumb stuff Scott did that I am definitely not going to make that same mistake. That's the way I like to learn. I do constantly nudge the reader along to ask themselves questions, but I'm proud of the fact that I've written a self-help book. Simon and Schuster and Forefront Books seem to be all in. They're like, yeah, that never tells you what to do. Really. It barely tells you what to do. It just gives you an example of what you just might do if you wanted to. You know why this book's a hit, Scott, and why it will be a hit, an even bigger hit? It's because it is an embodiment of you. You've done some of the most incredible things. You've told three stories already on this show that very few people could hold a candle to.

That's early on in the book. It's like you gotta find something you love. This is not a book to help you trudge through that shit you hate. This is a book where you think of something unlikely and you make it happen. You think of something that would make your life more interesting. One of my favorite phrases, and I got this off of Tim Ferriss. He and I hung out a few years at a conference. He and I are not great friends. I don't have a cell phone number. I just admire the man. And we spent some time at a conference. I asked him if he did everything he said he did in the four-hour work week. And he said, he got real quiet. And I thought, oh, crap.

I shouldn't have asked him. And then he smiled finally and said, yeah. He said, but the first part was my life falling off the rails. That was all true. Then when I came back to my company and saw that it ran better while I was working, over in Europe exploding and just falling apart. It ran better when I got out of the way. That's when I decided to run an experiment. So I knew I was writing a book and running an experiment. And that's why I did all those things. So I did them all, but I will tell you, I knew I was writing a book when I did them. And I was like, That's a great answer. The next morning, I sat straight up in bed as I woke up and went, holy cats, my friend Tim had a life worth writing about, not because he had a life worth writing about, but because he started writing a book.

So the truth is, Tim Ferriss' life is really interesting. And even before he started writing that book, it was worth writing about. But it got extra interesting when he decided he was writing a book. And I made myself a promise that morning that I was going to start living my life like I was writing a book and constantly ask myself, would this crazy idea make the next chapter more interesting? Tim blew his life up doing some crazy things. I wasn't willing to do that. I didn't really think I was writing a book. I didn't want to let down my employees or go nuts. But I did a lot of crazy things because it kind of made sense. It sounded fun and it wouldn't blow my life up, but it would.

definitely make the next chapter more interesting. I've tried to live my life like I was writing a book. Magically, now I've written a book, which was not what I anticipated. I was more thinking metaphorically of the book that I will thumb through when maybe I'm too old, do some of the things I've done, go to Antarctica, do astronaut training. When you're sitting on the front porch in your rocking chair, you want to thumb through the metaphorical book of your life, and you want it to be as interesting as possible. And so I credit Tim with inspiring me to do just that. I've made a lot of crazy decisions because of that. That comes through in the book, too, that you got one life. Make it interesting.

The way to do that is to do things that make you uncomfortable. You're going to have to try. If it's a really lofty goal, you're going to have to be tenacious. For sure. Talking with Scott Scovel, he is the author of Tenacious, The Art of Relentlessly Pursuing Your Wildest Dreams. This is why I love the name of the book. I don't know why. I'm terrible at a lot of things. I am the world's worst at about 100 different things. But damn, I will start shit. I will just go. I'll write it down. And it's not like it's half vague. Like you said, like knowing you're writing the book, how audacious that might seem. But it creates patterns and beliefs of things that like, okay, I need to do this.

One of the fun things about the book is I knew it to be true, but I really discovered it when I started interviewing my friends. I have, there's 17 people who are like hall of fame level people in this book. Amazing stories. They all had these incredible talents. They might have an eidetic memory. They might have pitch perfect hearing. They might have incredible natural athletic ability. They're physically beautiful, all of these things. But when you sit down and talk to them, They'll all tell you that somebody was better than them, but you've never heard of this person. They've fallen to anonymity because they gave up. Like Peter Frampton, he had the biggest selling album of the year, Frampton Comes Alive. He had this incredible journey, but then he had like 13, 14 years where he couldn't get arrested.

The wheels just fell off of everything. And where Peter pulled it out of the ashes, he gave a great interview. Just an awesome guy. First album I ever owned, so that's why I wanted him in the book. He did not disappoint. I've been just an incredible human. I've loved working with him. But not giving up is a big part of tenaciousness. How do people avoid giving up when they're stacking these tasks and the evidence of success isn't 100% clear? You go with what you know. For me, I got desperate enough. And you can get there by hitting rock bottom or by finding a dream. I found both. You get desperate enough to try even though you think you might not. make it. But when you take each step and the world doesn't blow up and you might fail, but it doesn't kill you, you learn from that.

And you're like, okay, well, that didn't kill me. I guess I should take another step because I still really want this. I want my life with this, not without it. You just learn one step at a time that it'll be okay if you keep moving. That's the way it was for me. That's the way it was for a lot of my guests.

I got two astronauts in the book, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Dierks Bentley, Chris Young, Kate Snow, NBC anchor, a couple of hockey stars, Scott Hamilton, head of SEAL Team Six, like some crazy, really interesting people. And they'll all tell you that it's about not giving up. I don't speak as the underlying character in the book. I don't speak as the expert on tenacity. I speak as the expert on my tenacity. I present myself not as the most tenacious person ever. I really am not. But I maybe am the most improved. And that's what the book will hopefully get the reader to be. the most improved. And what does improvement look like? Well, for me, it took me from this place in my life where I was ashamed of myself to a life that I'm really proud of, really proud of and happy with.

He goes, because I think it's the most important quality any of us can have. So in his case, it was really instilled in him. And that's what I hope this book will help do. We're all glad that Cam's father instilled in him that you just don't give up. Keep going. There's other people like, I've mentioned Scott Hamilton a few times. He's chapter one, so he keeps coming to mind. But he had piles of crap on him through his whole young life. And that's what grew his tenacity. And so there's so many different ways to come about being tenacious. The book shows you, you don't have to fit the mold. You're certainly not to be me. I wouldn't recommend that. It's worked for me, but it might not work for anybody else.

But all of my guests have found tenacity in their own way, chased their dreams in their own way. But some of the core ingredients are all the same. I think you mentioned showing up earlier when we were talking just before we got on air. Yeah, just taking the first step. Show up and try. Just take one first step. Keep going. Find a dream. Don't be too stubborn to smash your head against the window and just keep trying to get outside by hitting the window harder and harder. You're going to end up dead on the windowsill. Figure out a way to go around. There's a lot in the book about the specifics of the journeys, and I've tried to curate and drop guests in where they fit in those spots.

The worst things that have happened in my life, I'm grateful for all of them because they're just part of the recipe that got me here. And while if you presented me, they were all going to start again tomorrow, I might try and avoid them. But I would never try and avoid my past because the past got me here and it taught me so much. I talk a lot about giving back. And then the next chapter after that, it's called A Look in the Mirror, and it talks about the most important part of your tenacity is you. How do you become the best version of yourself? And it talks about all the work that I did towards self-discovery. At the end of the day, if I can become the best version of me, I make the world a better place not just for me but for everyone.

I actually encourage the reader that I don't suggest that I'm making the world a better place for everyone. I hope I am. And the result of that, of all the therapy and interesting things I did, I did some quite interesting therapies and some interesting things in chapter 10. The result of all that was I figured out my why. So many people ask why. Why am I here? I believe I'm here. It's so simple. And yet it's a great reason. I'm here to have the most interesting life I can have. I didn't say best. I said most interesting life. I want to experience everything this life has to offer, the good, the bad, because you need the bad. The mind's a comparative instrument to appreciate the good.

I want to have the most interesting life I can have, number one. And then number two is I want to share that with as many people as I can to help them along the way. That's my why. This book scratches the hell out of both of those itches, right? It's great. Scott, I think my brain brings complex parts and things like this is what I did strategy and marketing into like one thing. It's like when I think about how this summarizes down is the moment you start focusing inward and stop worrying about outward, you get real fucking dangerous.

for living a great life. That's interesting. Can you tell me a little more about that? Let me interview you for a second. First off, Ryan, you're an interesting dude. Thanks for having me on. So tell me a little more about that, please. You got out of the mindset of thinking about, oh, they think I'm gonna fail and I'm gonna fail, like things outside of you. Then those are excuses. They disguise themselves in different ways. And I hear everything you've talked about. And at least for me, you decided to focus inward, repair, and you've dealt with what I can tell is some shit. That is easy to manifest itself outwardly. Blame and disappointment, probably justifiably on some levels for people and yourself. But that is not going to allow you to live the life of your wildest dreams.