CEO of KOTA Longboards Mike Maloney Talks about his Decision Hour

In this episode of The Decision Hour, Host Adam Bird talks with U.S. Navy Veteran and the founder of KOTA Longboards Mr. Michael Maloney.  Mike shares his stay as a Navy F-14 Tomcat Pilot and graduate of the Navy’s TOP GUN school to his time spent for a few companies in change of several projects to where he is now and how he started KOTA Longboards.

Here is a snippet of Mike offering up some advice for this going through their Decision Hour.

Show host – Mike, we’re coming up on the end here.  I got one more question for you.  For our listeners, for those people out there that are in a time in their life where that hour is upon them where they need to make a decision in their lives, their decision hour is upon them, what advice do you have to give them? 

Guest – Well, I’m going to try and be very succinct and very quick.  Look, it all comes down to are you going to wallow in risk aversion, or are you going to go out there and be bold?  A risk aversion is the cancer on our free market economy, and we have been in a risk-averse environment since September 11^th.  Naturally, because of the psychology of having a disaster like, you know, a big blow to our confidence like September 11^th, and then an economic collapse and stagnation and all that.  Are you going to wallow in that, or are you going to go out there and say, you know what?  I don’t care what everybody else is doing.  I’m going to do something extraordinary. 

Well, you know what?  You can wait until tomorrow to do something extraordinary, or you can decide to do it right now.  And that’s really, I mean, circumstance forced me into that.  I had nowhere else to go, but it was more than that.  That faith, hand of God, I don’t know what it was.  Call it whatever you want, but that moment was thrust upon me, and I said, look, it’s just not in my nature to sit here and feel sorry for myself, so stop doing that.  I don’t know where this is going to take me, but all I can tell you is that if I do nothing I will be sitting here a year from now in the same exact place wondering what am I going to do?  

You can’t wait for some catalyst to come along and make your life better.  You can’t wait for some catalyst to come along or some event to occur that will all of a sudden make everything right in your life.  There’s only one way to do that, and it that is to go out and put something in motion.  It may not be the thing that you wind up being successful with, but put something in motion.

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