For Episode 166 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast, Rennie is joined by Howard Brown. Howard is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, best-selling author of Shining Brightly, award-winning international speaker, inspirational podcaster, survivorship coach, health technology consultant and two-time stage IV cancer patient, and survivor, 30 years apart. Howard shares the keys to leading a resilient life with hope that drives successful community leaders, business innovators and healthcare advocates. Be prepared to be inspired!
For Episode 166 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast, Rennie is joined by Howard Brown. Howard is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, best-selling author of Shining Brightly, award-winning international speaker, inspirational podcaster, survivorship coach, health technology consultant and two-time stage IV cancer patient, and survivor, 30 years apart.
Howard shares the keys to leading a resilient life with hope that drives successful community leaders, business innovators and healthcare advocates. Be prepared to be inspired!
Are you ready to shine brightly and live a resilient & well-balanced life?
In this episode, Rennie and Howard cover:
02:09 Howard shares his life journey to where he is today and why he does it.
5:50 Having lived through cancer twice Howard shares his favorite charity Colontown at Colontown.org and how they support him in his journey with cancer.
7:54 Howard shares a plea to the listeners to be screened regularly.
9:58 What Howard considers his biggest failure as a young man – driving himself too hard.
11:48 The insight he got from that experience that stopped him in his tracks due to his cancer at age 23 & 50.
13:06 Where you can go to learn more about everything Howard has to offer – his podcast, speaking, and other resources - visit shiningbrightly.com.
14:17 Find out if Howard believes in miracles.
“Along the way, I've also accomplished a lot of great things. I am so much more in balance now because I have a purpose. I wake up each day and I am very blessed, lucky and grateful because I want to help others. And I want to do that. And I do that via teaching how to live a resilient and well-balanced life with hope and still be able to make a living and still be able to do the things that I like to do. And so becoming an author, a podcaster and a speaker allows me that financial freedom to be able to do what I want to do and which is help others and inspire others.” – Howard Brown
To learn more about Howard and get access to his podcast and resources visit https://shiningbrightly.com
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Episode 166: Living a Resilient and Well-Balanced Life with Howard Brown
[Rennie Gabriel]
Hi folks, welcome to episode 166 of the Wealth On Any Income podcast. This is where we talk about money, tips, techniques, attitudes, information, and provide inspiration around your business and your money. I'm your host, Rennie Gabriel. In past episodes, we spoke about how to understand the numbers from your business, how to measure the level of pleasure based on where you spend your money, how to track your money in five to 10 seconds, what determines how close you are to complete financial choice, and how to run your business without being in your business. And last time, we had Ali Taylor, who's the founder of Wisdom and Wayfinder Consulting. And today we have as our guest, Howard Brown.
Howard is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, best-selling author of Shining Brightly, award-winning international speaker, inspirational podcaster, survivorship coach, health technology consultant, and two-time stage four cancer patient and survivor, 30 years apart. He shares the keys to a resilient life with hope that drives successful community leaders, business innovators, and healthcare advocates. Be prepared to be inspired.
And it was great for me to be on Howard's podcast the other day and see how much we had in common. Howard, now I welcome you to the Wealth On Any Income podcast.
[Howard Brown]
Rennie, thank you for allowing me to be here as your guest. I'm honored, and it's so glad that Mr. Shining Brightly is in the house. We're here for you. Thank you.
[Rennie Gabriel]
You're welcome. So let's get right to it with some questions. So tell me more about the work you do.
And I have a good idea why, but tell me anyway.
[Howard Brown]
So I am, by training, a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur. I went to the most amazing undergraduate college called Babson College. It's number one for entrepreneurial studies in the world.
Say that name again. Babson, B-A-B-S-O-N dot E-D-U. Babson.
And it's a little small school outside of Boston. They basically, entrepreneurship changes economies and makes the world go round. They really teach you to think outside the box, and entrepreneurship affects everything.
You need to know when you're an entrepreneur, you need to know a little bit about accounting, a lot about marketing and sales and profits and losses, and putting teams together and chemistry and understanding total available markets and supply and demand. So the whole economics of business make up an entrepreneur. And you can own a gas station and be an entrepreneur, and you can work at a Fortune 500 and be an entrepreneur just the same.
And so great training ground for me as I went to work for a very big computer company coming out of school in 1988. So you can already tell you how old I am. But I love that.
And I was actually just so enamored by technology and how technology could help help others. And so from processing bank accounts to transmitting audio and video, I got to do some really cool stuff in technology and really do it first. And so we put digital television on air in 1994.
That was done by videotape at the time. And when we did it off of a hard drive in 1994, it was very early on. And that's how it's done, right now today.
And so I've got to do some great things, and I've enjoyed the technology part of things. I built an online community to serve the largest social networks in the world, faith and religion. No one had ever built an online community calendar before, and I did it in 2000.
And Google didn't do it until 2006. So they make a lot more money than I do. But it was fascinating to bring people together using online calendaring at the time and going away from paper calendaring.
And remember, your Palm Pilot and your BlackBerry didn't have a calendar. It wasn't there at the time. Didn't come along until afterwards in the iPhone days, right, that an integrated calendar was part of that.
And a web calendar was new too. So anyways, lots of fun doing that. So technology's always been part of my life.
And unfortunately, I've been struck down and my life stopped by two stage four cancer diagnoses. Once in 1989, I had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a blood cancer of my lymphatic system. And thank God for a twin sister that saved my life through a bone marrow transplant.
And then unfortunately, what we didn't know then is young onset cancer can bring on another cancer later in life. And I was diagnosed at age 50, colonoscopy was stage three, and a year later, metastatic stage four colon cancer. And I am here on your show to say that I'm alive, I'm thriving, and I basically am so glad to be here and to be able to teach people not about just about being good in business, but about being good in life.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Thank you, Howard. And yes, I know that you are not an artificial intelligence avatar, but a real human. Yes, I am.
[Howard Brown]
You can poke me, you can poke me, I'm real.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Yeah, well, okay. Now you know that I donate 100% of the profits from the work I do to various animal and veteran charities. Tell me about the charity that's near and dear to you.
[Howard Brown]
So when you go through cancer twice, okay, once in the analog times and once in the digital times, it's really a holy moly moment, right? You have cancer, what do you do next, right? And there's lots of digital resources out there, but the advocacy to be able to walk and inform you along the way is very important.
And you don't want to isolate when you get the bad news. And we want to surround you with resources and information to be able to make really good decisions after you get that yucky news for you and for your caregiver and for your families. I was very fortunate in my colon cancer diagnosis to find colintown, colintown.org.
It's a peer-to-peer online community that has neighborhoods. And these neighborhoods are all custom to different stages and ages and also geographies. And if you have an ostomy bag or you don't have an ostomy bag, if you're a single mom, and it's just a custom community to help walk alongside with you and inform you.
And so I was a patient there, my wife was a caregiver, and we felt really supported. And when you're talking to others that were five steps ahead of you, they become your cancer whisperers or mentors, and they are watching out for you. And I so appreciated that because when you're talking from a cancer patient to another cancer patient, there's no rules to it, but basically you have an understanding.
You're coming from a place of understanding that you've been and walked in those steps before the other, and you can share that lived experience with someone. And so colintown did that for both of us. And so I joined their board of directors to volunteer, and I wanted to give back to an organization that really helped save my life.
And colintown did that, and I became and really learned how to use my patient voice and my patient expertise to advocate for screening. Don't get this disease. Go get screened for colorectal cancer.
Go get screened for your mammography if you're a woman, or your prostate if you're a man, or go to the dentist. Go keep up with your tests. And so if you get screened, you might not have this disease.
But once you do get it, as a patient, treatment is very difficult. Radiations and clinical trials and chemotherapies are not fun. It's not a fun existence.
But we can help guide you through that. And then, unfortunately, there are many folks that their cancer burden is too great, and we need to memorialize them because colorectal cancer is the number one leading cause of cancer for men under 50 and number two for women. 153,000 people will get the disease this year in the United States.
53,000 will die. That means over 100,000 will be in treatment, and they need support. And so colintown.org is that place for you. It's just an amazing support infrastructure and system for people. And I'm grateful for it, and I give back to it. And since I joined the board of directors I've been on since 2018, eventually, you're on long enough, I became the chairman of the board of directors.
And so that is my philanthropy of choice right now is to support this growing nonprofit for a, unfortunately, a disease that is affecting younger and younger people.
[Rennie Gabriel]
And the advantage to this, even though we're talking about this as a business podcast, a financial podcast, I guarantee that there are many listeners who, if they don't have or haven't dealt with cancer, have a family member who has or a friend that they know who has. And so this is a fabulous resource. Thank you for that, Howard.
And now to the next question. And it's a two-part question. The first is, what would you say would be your biggest failure or challenge, whether you're talking about business or personal?
And the second part is, what would you say your insight is from that experience?
[Howard Brown]
So I want to tell you, although we're talking a little bit about soft skills, right, of cancer, okay, it affects you emotionally, it affects you physically, it affects you financially, and it affects you in relationships. So that financial people, many people diagnosed with cancer have to stop work, take off time for work for treatment, and it can affect their incomes. Many go on social security disability, and it can affect you financially and affect your business and affect you to either work or not work, or then be able to...
The hardest thing for a lot of people is to get a job after you've had to take off time for this as well. So failure. So I failed more than a few times, but I will tell you that one of the biggest things is that as a young person, I was such a go-getter and chasing the dream of success and accomplishment is that you get out of balance.
And I will tell you that I more than once have been on the workaholics anonymous plan, that you understand that work and driving your team and taking companies to public offering and IPO and exit isn't actually what the game is all about. But as a young person, it becomes all-consuming and you stop going to the gym, you stop eating healthily, you stop paying attention to the people that matter most, your friends, family, or spouses. And that's happened to me a few times in my life where I've gotten out of balance.
And that is what I consider a failure, because that is not what it's all about. It is not about making work and driving success, the only thing that matters.
[Rennie Gabriel]
I don't even have to ask you what would be the insight from that, because it's obvious that it's to get a life in balance.
[Howard Brown]
It is. And so I've learned that lesson the hard way, right? Because I've been stopped in my tracks at age 23 and a half and at age 50.
But along the way, I've also accomplished a lot of great things. I am so much more in balance now, because I have a purpose. I wake up each day and I am very blessed, lucky and grateful, because I want to help others.
And I want to do that. And I do that via teaching how to live a resilient and well-balanced life with hope, and still be able to make a living and still be able to do the things that I like to do. And so becoming an author, a podcaster and a speaker allows me that financial freedom to be able to do what I want to do, and which is help others and inspire others.
And it took me into my 50s to learn that, just like you, Renny. That's why we're so aligned. It took us a little while to get there, but we got there.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Oh, yeah, exactly. And people, when they find out I had to start all over at 50, think, oh, well, I guess there's a chance for me. Life has not yet passed me by.
There's still hope. So thank you for that, Howard. And now let me ask this.
If people want to know more about the work that you do, Shining Brightly, booking you as a speaker, inspirational, whatever, what's the best way to get ahold of you? Or is there a free resource that you have for people?
[Howard Brown]
And I really appreciate you asking that. So ShiningBrightly.com is a great place to go because you can learn about the book. You can learn about how to book me as a speaker and how to make your event shine on all sorts of different topics, from survivorship, mentorship as a lost art of leadership, knowing the other interfaith relations, and finding your happy place.
This is the spoiler element. I am a basketball junkie. Also, my podcast is on there as well, Inspirational Podcast, which your episode will be coming out in a few weeks.
I want to actually motivate, educate, and inspire there. But the most important part of knowing me and at Shining Brightly is my advocacy work. It's my work in the cancer world.
It's my work helping young, budding entrepreneurs learn the life balance and get to the next level, and my interfaith work in knowing other people and their customs and foods and the cultures to broaden your life. So there's three free resource guides on there that you can find. And you click, and you put in your email address, and we send you the PDFs.
And you can come talk to me about them, and you can share them with others.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Thank you. And my last question, do you believe in miracles?
[Howard Brown]
You're looking at a miracle and listening to a miracle two times over right now. So although I am Humpty Dumpty version 3.0, I am a miracle. And I believe that I've learned that it's not what you get in this lifetime.
It's what you give. Basically, now I care about people more than myself sometimes that help me survive and thrive and stay alive. But medical technology and my twin sister, miracle number one, bone marrow transplant, 1990.
Medical technology and in vitro fertilization gave me a daughter after 11 years of frozen sperm. And medical technology of heated chemo and a massive surgery in 2018 saved my life from colorectal cancer. So do I believe in miracles?
Hell yes, I do.
[Rennie Gabriel]
And I can see how miracles show up in your life. Howard, thank you for being on the Wealth on Any Income show. My pleasure.
Great to be here. And to those who are listening, if you'd like to know how books, movies, and society programs you to be poor and what the cure is, then log on to wealthonanyincome.com forward slash TEDx. You'll hear my TEDx talk and can request a free nine-step roadmap to complete financial choice and philanthropy and receive an occasional email with tips, techniques, or inspiration around your business or your money.
And if you'd like to see how you can increase your wealth and donate to the causes that touch your heart, please check out our affordable program, Wealth with Purpose. To my listeners, thank you for tuning in. You can listen to the Wealth on Any Income podcast on your favorite platform and please rate, review, and subscribe.
Until next time, be prosperous. Bye-bye for now.