What happens when you achieve success, do everything you thought you were supposed to do, and still feel exhausted or empty?

On this episode of the Mile High Success Podcast, Nick Elder sits down with Dr. Laura Schwindt, a former practicing dentist and practice owner who experienced severe burnout after years of growth, responsibility, and constantly doing more.

Laura shares how burnout changed the direction of her life and helped her discover that sustainable performance is about more than having the right strategies and systems. It also requires learning how to manage your energy, reconnect with what matters, and build the capacity to handle the demands of leadership.

Laura spent more than 20 years practicing dentistry and built her own dental practice from the ground up. As the practice grew, she hired more people, expanded, invested in equipment, and continued learning. But doing more eventually left her spread too thin.

A conversation with one of her favorite patients helped Laura recognize that something needed to change. She began working with a life coach, an experience she describes as transformative. That journey eventually led Laura to become an embodied leadership and heroic performance coach herself.

Today, Laura helps dentists, organizations, and other high-capacity leaders move away from cognitive overdrive and toward more grounded and sustainable performance.

Nick and Laura discuss why successful people can reach their goals and still feel like something is missing. Laura explains the importance of reconnecting with your personal “North Star” instead of measuring your life only by outside definitions of success.

They also explore how small daily choices compound over time. Laura encourages leaders to think about three areas: energy, work, and love or connection. Instead of always asking what else needs to be added, she suggests asking what can be removed.

Sometimes the most powerful step forward is doing less.

Laura also shares the value of conducting an “energy audit” by asking what gave you energy today, what drained it, and what you can change tomorrow.

The conversation is a reminder that success does not have to come at the cost of your energy, relationships, or ability to enjoy the life you are building.

What happens when you spend seven years building a business without making money—and almost everyone around you thinks it may be time to quit?

On this episode of the Mile High Success Podcast, Nick Elder sits down with entrepreneur Zach Garfias to talk about the long and difficult road behind building and eventually selling his real estate software company.

Zach’s path was anything but simple. He started in real estate at a young age, moved into distressed property investing, built a demolition company, and eventually decided to take on the real estate software industry.

What followed was seven years of persistence, uncertainty, financial pressure, and sacrifice.

Zach shares what it was like to keep believing in his idea when even the people closest to him were worried. He opens up about risking his mother’s home equity to keep the company alive, living out of his car, and reaching a point where he finally walked away from the business—only to realize he wasn’t finished.

That decision changed his life.

Zach eventually sold the company and went from worrying about basic expenses to facing an entirely different challenge: figuring out what to do with money after a major financial change.

Nick and Zach also discuss why entrepreneurs need smart people around them, the value of getting advice from several trusted experts instead of just one, and why happiness should come before money.

Zach also shares what he is building next with VNTR, a new consumer packaged goods company designed around his love of adventure and the life he wants to live.

At its heart, this conversation is about much more than business. It is about persistence, belief, guilt, gratitude, money, happiness, and having the courage to keep going when the outcome is far from certain.

What does success look like after more than 50 years of writing software? For Jim McMaster, it comes down to staying curious, solving problems, and never stopping the learning process.

In this episode of the Mile High Success Podcast, Nick Elder sits down with Jim McMaster, a veteran software engineer whose career spans an incredible period of change in technology. Jim shares stories from the early days of programming, his transition from IBM 370 assembler to Java, and his experience as the fourth person on the team that eventually produced Google Drive.

Jim also gives listeners a fascinating look behind the scenes at the early thinking that helped shape Google Drive. He explains why he pushed for a familiar files-and-folders structure and how the team thought about making file sharing simple for users.

The conversation then turns to artificial intelligence and the major changes AI is bringing to software development. Jim explains that AI can write code and research solutions much faster than he can on his own. But speed comes with a tradeoff. Instead of personally solving every programming puzzle, his role is increasingly about directing AI, reviewing its work, spotting problems, and making sure the final code is right.

Jim and Nick also explore one of the biggest themes of Jim's career: continual learning. Jim talks about studying at MIT, changing direction from chemistry to computer science, building knowledge beyond his main field, and continuing to learn even after decades of experience.

For anyone building a career in technology—or simply trying to stay relevant in a changing world—Jim offers a simple lesson: read other people's work, ask for feedback, keep practicing, and never assume you are finished learning.