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From Curiosity to Calling: My Voice of Growth
12 Plays2 months ago
In this personal episode of The Voice of Growth, host Manny Teran steps away from interviews to share his own origin story—and the philosophy that now drives everything he builds.
Through three distinct phases of life—Foundations of Character, Ambition and Exposure, and Integration and Purpose—Manny reflects on how early loss, relentless curiosity, leadership, and lived experience forged a worldview centered on responsibility, freedom, and service.Grounded in Stoic principles like Amor Fati—the practice of loving one’s fate—this episode explores how adversity becomes fuel, how identity shapes trajectory, and why true success isn’t measured by accumulation, but by the ability to handle success without losing oneself.This is the why behind Profectory, Infrared Laboratories, and the Voice of Growth Podcast—and an invitation to listeners to reflect on their own arc, their values, and the future they still have the power to shape.
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Transcript
Introduction to Voice of Growth Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
The Voice of Growth, Mastering the Mind and Market. Welcome to the Voice of Growth podcast, Mastering the Mind and Market. My name is Manny Turan, and I'm your host.
00:00:16
Speaker
As we kick off this new year of 2026, wanted to tell you my story.
Human Story Arc and Personal Growth
00:00:23
Speaker
and reminds you that every person on this earth has their own story.
00:00:28
Speaker
There's an arc there of where they came from, where they currently are, and of course, where they're going. The hindsight is 20-20, right? In the back, we can see where we came from.
00:00:42
Speaker
We can clearly see where we are by our own senses, our own so sense of being. And the future, our ambition, our direction is, although we do have momentum behind it, it can still be altered and changed.
00:00:57
Speaker
That's the beauty of it. So every life is shaped by experiences and mine was shaped less by discomfort or comfort and more by curiosity, by loss and by discipline.
00:01:14
Speaker
And I'll get to this in a minute.
Early Influences and Shaping Character
00:01:16
Speaker
What drives me is really the integration of mind, market and meaning. And certainly we this is all tied to identity, which I talk about a lot.
00:01:29
Speaker
That identity is core to establishing the trajectory of our life and of course can change and adjust as we not only face new things in our life, but decide that we want to go in a different direction.
00:01:47
Speaker
A lot easier said than done, of course. So to start off with, I'm going to break this down into three phases, each about 18 years.
00:01:58
Speaker
And that will give you an idea of why I do what I do. And we'll show you the direction of where I want to take the balance of my life. Now, this is tied to the amor fati, the idea of that we should love our fate.
00:02:16
Speaker
Whatever hand we are dealt, love it. It's oftentimes hard to do when we're faced with lots of issues, when we've got madness, when we've got things in our life that are challenging.
00:02:29
Speaker
It's hard to love our fate. If we look backwards, it's sometimes a reminder that, hey, we're still here. We're still alive. We're still cranking through this.
00:02:40
Speaker
And so let that be a reminder to you that this too shall pass, and there's exciting times in front of us. Love thy fate. So foundation, ah phase one is foundations of character.
00:02:53
Speaker
This is where I came from. you know My father passed when I was very young, a little over a year old. My mother moved us back down to her hometown.
00:03:04
Speaker
And that loss, the lack of not having a father really defined me for the rest of my life. I was raised by my mother, my grandmothers, a lot of ah women in my life.
00:03:16
Speaker
And what that gave me, it gave me a very unique perspective, an acumen to understand people in a very empathic way that many men in particular struggle to find.
00:03:29
Speaker
Now, I'm not saying that I'm in full command of this. I'm saying only that I've come from this. And in sales, in negotiation, and in interpersonal relationships, in being vulnerable, man, that has been a game changer for me.
00:03:44
Speaker
And this really added on to my curiosity that came from an early age. I was always interested how things worked.
00:03:55
Speaker
I dismantled the clock radio to see how it worked. And I was always chasing after a deeper understanding of the foundational pieces life.
00:04:07
Speaker
engineering and science and although I wasn't super deep into any one of them, I did establish a high level understanding of how things worked. i I was also very creative and I had an artistic slant as well from doing small art projects to even being in a band.
Family, Work Ethic, and Leadership
00:04:26
Speaker
And I kind of gained a love for music in my 15, 16 timeframe. And I expressed it by playing guitar. I was in band in marching band in high school and and in junior high. And also i use nature as a classroom.
00:04:43
Speaker
I was in Boy Scouts, I was an Eagle Scout, and to me, nature brought me closer to God. You can name it God, you can call it the universe, you can call it whatever you want. That's the beauty of it.
00:04:54
Speaker
For me, it was God. For me, it was a um a path, a connection to a greater sense of purpose. And at the same time, a complete revelation that we're so insignificant, it doesn't matter.
00:05:10
Speaker
So as you can tell, those are very early early Stoic seeds that I was able to garner from being in touch with nature so much. I was also exposed very early on to an interesting kind of inequality.
00:05:26
Speaker
This too has guided my entire life. My mother being a single mother, working her butt off, working two jobs to the fact where i was a latchkey kid, I'd come home with my key, open the door and my mom would have dinner on the stove ready and she wouldn't be there and she wouldn't get home until nine or 10.
00:05:45
Speaker
And so she worked so hard to provide for our family And at the same time, she had cousins that were able-bodied, but were able to game the system to get government assistance, disability, whatever.
00:06:01
Speaker
And I'm not necessarily naysaying that that's a bad thing, but I am saying that many folks take advantage of it. And to me, that really guided me deeply in life and created a sense of individualism that is true for me today.
00:06:20
Speaker
And although it was very conservative rooted in when I was a yeah younger guy, younger kid, it's now morphed into more a libertarian mindset. which has really defined everything about who I am.
College Years and Pursuit of Success
00:06:33
Speaker
So from this young stage being in Scouts, I also developed a love of leadership. Leadership as a practice, leadership as a study, leadership as a way of life.
00:06:45
Speaker
And that to me as well has been a defining thread through and through my day-to-day existence even today.
00:06:56
Speaker
I was also exposed to a very strong work ethic by my family. Everybody in my family was very, very hardworking. My mother, my stepfather, my grandmothers, my grandfathers, everybody really leaned into it.
00:07:12
Speaker
on and this might've been to some detriment as well, because I oftentimes have a hard time letting go. have a hard time, quote unquote, relaxing and just sitting there.
00:07:22
Speaker
If I watch a movie, I have a, I just have a little bit of guilt and I can only really watch one movie and i watch maybe one movie every couple of weeks. It isn't like I watch things all the time.
00:07:34
Speaker
And I feel this guilt and I don't know where it comes from. it must come from that. But either way, it has been a game changer and giving me that voracious appetite for growth, personal success and so forth.
00:07:47
Speaker
Now we'll go into the next level, which is phase two, ambition and exposure. This is from 19, ages 19 to 36. The previous one, of course, was from zero to 18.
00:08:01
Speaker
In this timeframe, I was a college student and the world opened up for me massively. I saw different cultures, I saw different ideas, ah the systems and the opportunities all presented themselves during this college land landscape. I was no longer at home, so I had lots of autonomy, lots of freedom, lots of ability to explore.
00:08:24
Speaker
And in this way, I also expanded my leadership
Wealth, Mentorship, and Self-Guided Learning
00:08:28
Speaker
abilities. I became president of my university fraternity and as such was able to really put into practice a lot of what I had developed in my earlier phase one world, but also bring in these other culture, these other things that helped to elevate my game.
00:08:48
Speaker
Through this process, I pursued the quote unquote traditional success, the white picket fence, the find a girl, marry, have kids, have have a wedding and all that, which I kind of thought that's what life was all about.
00:09:04
Speaker
I didn't really have much of ah guidance in this domain. I didn't have people that would sort of walk me through the process or give me some deep guidance. I was just kind of figuring it out.
00:09:15
Speaker
And with that corporate success, There was no fulfillment. I always felt challenged by kind of doing the thing and not seeing that it was part of my giving to the world.
00:09:28
Speaker
It was part of somebody else's giving to the world. So that little piece stayed with me throughout time as well. And even today rings through that for me, corporate is a means to an end.
00:09:41
Speaker
And although i am CEO of a corporate company today, To me, it is really about the people. The corporate structure as it lays is is is fine, nothing wrong with it.
00:09:55
Speaker
But to me, the people that make up that corporation is what really makes me happy, fulfilled, and makes me get up in the morning excited every single day. I was also during this phase exposed to very powerful and very wealthy people.
00:10:13
Speaker
That exposure gave me a foundation of what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Now, of course, wealth is sometimes defined by how much you accumulate, how much you have of this money, of this stuff.
00:10:29
Speaker
And although that's important to some degree, what I began to learn is that there's a huge wealth and richness in freedom and in choice.
00:10:41
Speaker
I also traveled during this timeframe and i remember going to Italy to the Amalfi Coast and and all this travel we did in this timeframe, early timeframe.
00:10:52
Speaker
where I'd see these people, these jet setters that were walk into executive first level class, or even as we'd pull into the the airport, they were going to the private jets. And so it gave me the sense of, wow, they have a certain level of choice and freedom that many folks out there, including myself at the time, did not.
Marriage and Personal Transformation
00:11:15
Speaker
I also looked for mentorship. Mentorship back in this timeframe was hard to find. Sure, there was people that I could talk to about certain ah very very specific questions that I might've had, but I didn't really have a mentor, somebody that that took me under their wing. Not having a father, not having somebody close to my family that did that for me,
00:11:38
Speaker
created kind of ah an itch for me that to me now is part of why I'm providing this service, this amount of mentorship. But that was early on in my career, and I had a piece together elements of mentorship.
00:11:55
Speaker
The social media ah machine didn't exist back in the day. There was no gurus per se, in the same way there is today, to divvy out mentorship or or concepts or ideas, it was different. So I picked up books.
00:12:11
Speaker
I was able to sort of piece together mentorship through that. And that really today even gives me a sense of what I want to give back to the world.
00:12:23
Speaker
This phase was was about accumulation, not of wealth, but of clarity and of experiences. In this timeframe, I was also introduced to my i wife, actually, who is not my wife anymore, my former wife. And I began that whole white picket fence landscape, which yeah as you'll learn in a second, changed drastically.
Entrepreneurial Journey and Mindset Shift
00:12:50
Speaker
All right, the next phase, phase three is about integration and purpose. This is from age 37 to now, not quite 18 years, but close enough.
00:13:01
Speaker
So in this timeframe, I founded a company called Aztera. Aztera was a company that brought together the electrical software and mechanical engineering to create products and services for other organizations.
00:13:17
Speaker
It was an amazing time in my life. There was so much dynamicism. There was so much motion. There was so much growth. It was an exciting time. I grew this. I started the the process just myself, and I brought in people that helped to elevate it to higher and higher levels. My leadership abilities,
00:13:37
Speaker
went from a linear growth path to an exponential and maybe even a hyperbolic growth rate. I was doing so much. I got my PhD, if you will, in business during this timeframe. And that business acumen really was paired with some personal loss at the time.
00:13:55
Speaker
So during this process, I experienced a divorce, which was a very, very difficult time in my life, especially having young children.
00:14:07
Speaker
And I didn't know how to deal with it. And this was a bit of an identity reset from having the white picket fence when having the the marriage and the perfect wife and the kids and the house and all the stuff to having basically it all scratched away from life.
00:14:26
Speaker
my roster, I was like, what the hell's happening? And it was during that timeframe that I began to learn about stoicism, learn about what really matters in life. I learned about very early on about mindfulness.
00:14:39
Speaker
And that to me, was what bridged the gap between Stoicism as a theory to Stoicism as a practice. I remember during the early days of, we were still married, but we were going through the separation process.
00:14:56
Speaker
I just couldn't grasp what was happening. We had just had a ah conversation prior saying that, you know, we were so lucky to still be together while others in our same friend group were divorcing and all this.
00:15:07
Speaker
And I couldn't sleep. I was sleeping an hour or two a night. I was walking my dog in the morning. It was just a very tumultuous time. But now looking back, That heartache is what shaped me and gave me the perfect opportunity to grasp and to so to really suck in that stoic mindset that would define me to who I am today.
00:15:33
Speaker
All that we endure in life builds us up to who we are today with the caveat that that we need to self-reflect and think about how that will go forward in our life.
00:15:47
Speaker
I would give a lot of people
Stoicism and Emotional Control
00:15:49
Speaker
power over my personality, my actions, my behaviors. I'd give too many people power. What I mean to say is that people would make me angry You hear that word? Make me angry. Nobody can really make you angry except for yourself.
00:16:07
Speaker
So at the time, i would always blame other people for my anger, for my happiness, for my whatever. Now I totally understand it's all up to me.
00:16:19
Speaker
It's all up to how I frame it. It's all up to how I respond to it. The whole essence of stoicism, right? How we respond to these things. I also experienced during this time, a lot of introspection, growth, happiness by finding another love in my life.
00:16:38
Speaker
And through that process integrated, um families. I mean, my two kids, her two kids, we brought them together. And that was a bit of an enlightenment for me. It was a renaissance. It brought me to a deeper understanding of mindfulness, a deeper understanding of my own limitations.
00:16:54
Speaker
And just like any good partner does, they show a mirror to your face. And that mirror still had a lot of unresolved issues. That mirror had a lot of things that were still dark and ugly for me.
00:17:10
Speaker
And I didn't understand how to work through that. I had a lot of challenges in my own self. And although that relationship ah came to an end, we never actually got married. It did give me so much introspection and it gave me back my power
Gratitude and Perspective on Challenges
00:17:29
Speaker
so that I was no longer giving power away to people.
00:17:32
Speaker
i the I didn't react the same way I used to. And it was a tragic loss because she was somebody in my life that was so, life-changing that i I hope that she understands what she's done for me um because she provided that that training ground. And I hope that in her life, she has recognized what part I played in helping her in her personal growth.
00:17:58
Speaker
This is what life is all about. I've said this many times before. Life is a full contact sport. We're gonna get hurt. We're gonna have issues come up. And that's part of the beauty of it.
00:18:09
Speaker
We get to be involved in this life. I saw lessons played a few days ago that said, we get the number two. We get to.
00:18:20
Speaker
We get to be in this situation. If I feel sad, if I feel down, if I feel cheated, if I feel frustrated, if I feel entitled, whatever feelings I might have, I bring that phrase to mind.
00:18:38
Speaker
I get to So that company I told you that I started as Terra in this phase three came to a crashing end. It was not a ah glide path.
00:18:51
Speaker
It was slamming into the mountain. And that to me was foundational in who I am today as well, because that gave me the impetus to then create this podcast and now be the CEO of IR Labs and so forth and so on.
00:19:07
Speaker
But let me come back to why I mentioned that. I sit here and i and I drive past the building that i once owned, this beautiful multimillion dollar building, 35,000 square feet. It was just, I loved it there.
00:19:20
Speaker
And I think to myself rather than, oh crap, I lost that. And what was me and looking, you know, I'm going to cry in my in my spilled milk and this and that. No.
00:19:31
Speaker
I flip it on the side. I say, i get I got to
Sharing Wisdom and Future Plans
00:19:35
Speaker
do that. I got to be at the helm of this dynamic growing company that provided an economic impact into the region. I changed lives by by having that that idea and working hard and bringing on the right people. And they added to my vision and it grew and it grew and grew and then it didn't. And then it ceased to to be what it is.
00:19:58
Speaker
But the tendrils, the foundation, the calories that that fueled that company remain in the muscle of today in employees that used to be mine that I talked to all the time, or even customers or clients. It's all part of that continuum, that fabric.
00:20:14
Speaker
And I got to do that. And every day, even now as I'm running IR Labs and I'm doing this podcast and so forth, I get to do these. I get to have these conversations. So if you're feeling down, spend some time with gratitude. Because that I get to phrase is a mirror of gratitude.
00:20:35
Speaker
it's an it's It's like the the gratitude is um is the the root system and the I get to are the sprouts that pop up.
00:20:46
Speaker
The experiences that are our losses are equally as important as the ones that are are major wins. And so what drives me now? Now that we've gone through the three phases of my life, I feel a duty to share my lived wisdom um not as a platform for my expertise per se, although I do offer that to a handful of clients. It's more of a platform for exposing my shared wisdom so that others might see that and might alter their future trajectory.
00:21:21
Speaker
Tying back to that arc I mentioned earlier, the previous arc of our ah past is already set. Where we are today is where we are today. We can experience this by looking around, by being part of the the moment, right? Mindfulness.
00:21:37
Speaker
But the future, although we do have the momentum of the past, and the and a bit of the guidance of the present, we can still alter the future.
00:21:48
Speaker
We can still make adjustments, remembering that people don't change very much, including yourself. And change, especially in the personal development or career domain, is extremely difficult.
Intentional Growth and Vision for 2026
00:22:00
Speaker
but it can be done. I've said a couple of ah ah podcasts about this. There's many other things you can do. There's um the atomic habit stuff, there's identity change, but fundamentally we have this amazing opportunity to change the the trajectory of where we're going.
00:22:17
Speaker
So I want to curate and translate these insights from myself and from other business leaders. When I have somebody on my show that has seen so many things.
00:22:30
Speaker
And it's unfortunate that we only have one hour or less to talk about it because some of these folks have decades and decades of experiences to share.
00:22:41
Speaker
And part of my goal for 2026 is to continue the process and bring people that will enlighten us in different ways. I'm going to bring people from all levels, people at the corporate level. We are talking to the former CEO of a very massive department store who's going to be on our podcast in February. I'm talking with a bunch of of people that are in the social media domain, which is important because it's a new domain, it's a new kind of business, and there's lots of activity in that business, but I really wanna bring it back down to the business side and the growth. How do they get there? That's really important.
00:23:21
Speaker
And you know I wanna help people avoid the the decades of unnecessary friction that can hold you back from massive growth. Friction is important. Friction needs to be there.
00:23:33
Speaker
But if it's overwhelmingly strong and if it prevents you from actually getting off the ground, then it's a problem. So growth must be intentional, must be resilient,
00:23:47
Speaker
And really needs to be value anchored. Who are you fundamentally? Who are you in that phase one part of your life where you were exposed to early values? And then the phase two is when they sort of set like a hook and in a fish. And then phase three in life is when you can really start to create massive momentum driven by that value system.
00:24:08
Speaker
Now, that value system is very personal. It is ah put out there in the world in very um specific ways, very tactical ways. But if you take a few layers back and you wait enough time, your values will be exposed.
00:24:25
Speaker
There's a few things that I'm still dealing with today from my As Tero days is that I wish I could talk more about, but it really shows that I'm committed to honor my value system, even if it takes me a decade to do so.
00:24:37
Speaker
And one of these days i'll I'll talk more about what that means. um And you know true success is tied to the ability to handle success, which is tied to a a change in people's lives. I equate success by how much personal freedom can I Create for myself and for my family.
00:25:04
Speaker
Personal freedom, of course, is tied to financial freedom. And also, how many lives can I touch? How many lives can I bless with the same blessings? I'm telling you what, when when you are able to give somebody a ah new skill or ah a lot of money or a renewed sense of self and it changes their life, man, that is extremely humbling and should be respected.
00:25:32
Speaker
And that's something that I don't take for granted. I really make sure, and even call people that I used to, they used to work for me, I used to work with, because it means, they still mean a lot to me.
00:25:42
Speaker
Every employee out there that I had in many years ago that helped me to become the person I am today, positive or negative, right? These are all, these are all just experiences.
00:25:54
Speaker
um I'm very thankful for. So if you've worked with me, for me, alongside me, or were my boss, I thank you so much.
00:26:06
Speaker
I thank you so much for the experiences that you gave me that led to me being here today with this pulpit, with this ability to to share my story.
00:26:18
Speaker
And I'm looking forward to so many other things. that being the CEO of Infrared Labs is extremely fulfilling. Lots of interesting things happening there in the future. And I'll bring you up to date on some more things as they unfold. Being the founder of Perfectory and the handful of of clients I have now now, and I'm able to service and give my experience to, fantastic. As being the host of the Voice of Growth podcast, very humbling, very proud of that.
00:26:47
Speaker
And my singular focus among those things in the business domain, I'm not talking about my my family, my personal growth, which is a different aspect.
00:26:57
Speaker
But from the business side, those three elements is really helping leaders master their mind so they can master their market. Leaders that are leading infrared labs, so people that work in the business today, people that are part of my clientele in Prefectory, and people that I'm reaching via this podcast, via social media, those are all servant leaders. Those are all leaders that by having a better grasp of their mind,
00:27:30
Speaker
they can master their market and create that massive change, that massive momentum, that looking forward in life, you can look back and have that sense of accomplishment, of growth, and of giving the gift and the blessing of changing people's lives.
00:27:55
Speaker
so massive, and I'm so proud to be doing what I'm doing. 2026 is going to rock. Thank you for your time. Cheers.