About this week’s episode: Someone who embodies the hustle doesn’t shy away from the opportunity to make a career pivot point – they embrace it. Brian Ferguson shares his story of how he’s tackled three completely different, but equally fulfilling careers and what he’s learned along his journey of hustle.
About our guest: Brian Ferguson has spent the past 15 years working in high-performance organizations, learning from leaders and decision-makers in national security, the military, and technology. He has used those experiences to build Arena Labs, a company focused on optimizing performance “in the arena”. Arena Labs works with a wide range of businesses and institutions to understand how to balance modern technology and the age-old “first principles of high performance” to construct adaptive, flexible organizations. The company focuses heavily in High Performance Medicine, crafting technology solutions to train surgical teams and medical staff in areas such as fear & anxiety management, decision-making under pressure, and pattern recognition.
Before founding Arena Labs, Brian served in the US Navy. Aside from his duties at the tactical level, he worked with senior leaders to understand the impact of accelerating technology on the modern battlefield. He built and directed the first innovation cell in undersea special operations, focused on human performance and emerging technology.
Prior to serving in the US Navy, he was a Presidential Appointee in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, focusing on US national security & defense policy-making. Early in his career, Brian worked in the White House, as a Federal Liaison to the Governor of Ohio, and founded The Global Trends Group, a political and economic risk analysis firm.
He is currently on faculty at Singularity University in Silicon Valley .He received an MSc from The London School of Economics and is a graduate of the Santa Fe Institute on Complexity. Brian is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Pacific Council on International Policy. He and his wife Lindsay are both proud Midwesterners who now live in San Clemente, California.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Farnam Street Blog https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/
- Ryan Holiday Reading List https://ryanholiday.net/reading-list/
- How I Built This Podcast http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this
- Finding Mastery Podcast https://findingmastery.net/
- Santa Fe Institute https://www.santafe.edu/
Listen to Brian’s episode here or on your favorite podcast app.
Hustle Over Entitlement is a podcast telling the stories of trailblazers and risk takers, hosted by Camille Stewart & Gabriella Ziccarelli.
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