689: Eric Ries - The Costco Hot Dog, Why Good Companies Go Bad, Financial Gravity, Building Incorruptible Organizations, and The Lean Startup's Unfinished Business
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Read my NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, one of the most influential business books of the past 25 years, and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the first new U.S. exchange to both list and trade multiple stocks since NASDAQ launched 50 years ago. His new book is Incorruptible. Key Learnings The more successful a company becomes, the more valuable it is as a target. Companies are worth stealing and taking over. Most founders are naive about this and don't understand what's coming for them. They've been following the so-called best practices about how companies should be built, structured, and governed. Most of those best practices are value-destroying. Sol Price was a lawyer before he became an entrepreneur. He believed a lawyer had a fiduciary duty to put the client's interests before his own. So when he became a retailer, he asked: "Who's my client?" The customer. He treated the customer as the person he would rather die than betray. When competitors sold a product for less, he'd put up signs in his own store: "Don't buy this from me. You can get it cheaper somewhere else." He capped his margins at 14 percent. He paid above-market wages. It is so much easier to destroy than to create. One day, Sol came into work and couldn't get into his office because the locks had been changed. Investors had pushed him out and forced Fedmart to practice retail best practices. Within seven years, they bankrupted the company. We've built an economy that rewards people for cost-cutting without holding them accountable for the consequences to trustworthiness, brand, or culture. The origin story of Costco: Sol took two weeks off, then leased the office upstairs from Fedmart and started Price Club. One of the young guys who left with him, Jim Sinegal, had worked his way up from stock boy. Jim eventually started his own company using the Sol ethos. A few years later, their companies merged to form what we now call Costco. Wall Street routinely calls Costco the exception to every rule. Wall Street analysts say things like: "At Costco, they take money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invest it in the customer experience." As if that's a criticism. Costco endures because it's protected by a governance fortress. A series of worst practices that resist outside pressure structurally. The $1.50 hot dog has been the same price since 1986. A McDonald's Big Mac was $1.60 in 1986. Today that same Big Mac in California is over $7. Costco sells more hot dogs than every Major League Baseball stadium in America combined. If they raised the combo to $7, it would be a billion dollars of extra net income. They could do it. They choose not to. "If you raise the price of the effing hot dog, I will kill you. So figure it out." Jim Sinegal said it to his COO in 2008 when costs were rising. Figure it out. Costco vertically integrated the hot dog supply chain. They own hot dog production plants in multiple cities. They worked deals with soda vendors. They did all that extra work for the privilege of not making more money on the hot dog. Harder is easier. "When you take the hard road, when you make a principled commitment, you get these almost unbelievable values. Because you're generating the most underrated and most valuable asset in all of business: trustworthiness." "Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life." Jerzy Gregorek, Olympic weightlifter. "Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder. Nobody wanna lift these heavy ass weights." Ronnie Coleman, eight-time Mr. Olympia. Everyone wants the outcome. Nobody wants to do the actual thing. Culture and mission can be cultivated, not commanded. Most leaders get this wrong. They say "I'm in charge of my team." But can you command your team to have integrity? Can you command it to have a particular culture? You have to make consistent, responsible choices, just like cultivating health in your body. Get reps. Eric gave practice talks at a Hobee's restaurant at 7 AM to six people just to get the reps. Caring and trying to do a good job is so unbelievably rare. That alone is a competitive advantage. Feedback tells you something about the person giving it, not about yourself. If someone reads Eric's manuscript and says, "This book sucks," he hasn't learned anything about the book. He's learned this person doesn't like this kind of book. When he stopped arguing with negative customer reviews and started studying who they came from, he noticed patterns. People 16 and younger loved the product. People 16 and older hated it. He learned who his product was for. Separate qualitative from quantitative feedback. Qualitative is for hypothesis generation. Quantitative is for hypothesis validation. When test readers told him a chapter wasn't working, that was qualitative. When the platform data showed nobody was getting past that chapter, that was quantitative. You need both to know what to fix. It is always too early until it's too late. Eric tells the story of a multibillion-dollar founder he warned before his IPO. The founder talked to his bankers, lawyers, and CFO. They told him Eric was a downer. The founder went public anyway with conventional governance. Five months later, his stock dropped 90 percent, and he was ousted. The best time to plant a tree is 40 years ago. The second-best time is today. Eric's checklist for building an incorruptible company: Encode your mission into the corporate charter. Most founders have never read their charter. If your mission statement says one thing but your legal charter says another, you're lying. The easiest fix: file a public benefit corp filing (PBC). Two pages. 44 states. Your lawyer can do it tomorrow. Identify your fiduciary commitments. Who would you rather die than betray? Is it your customers? Your employees? Product quality? You decide. If your answer is nobody, you're a sociopath. The whole book is for the people who actually want to accomplish something. Align your employees to that mission. Make sure everybody on the team is committed to the same fiduciary priority. Create a director's oath. Like the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, but for your board. They must pledge to commit to the company's mission. Board betrayal and investor pressure are leading causes of death of companies in the modern world. Make the directors accountable to somebody. Power without accountability is corrosive to the human spirit. Novo Nordisk is governed by a nonprofit foundation. Patagonia is governed by a perpetual purpose trust. John Lewis Partnership in the UK is governed by an employee ownership trust. IKEA, Vanguard, and REI all have these structures. The data shows these companies are dramatically more stable and higher performing than conventional structures. You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. People love to blame the system. But you're not just a passenger. You're part of what creates the system. Where you work. What you buy. What you give your attention to. Every one of those choices is fueling somebody's company, somebody's algorithm, somebody's bonus. The richest people in the world spend billions on PR because they know your individual choices matter. Use that power. Eric's champagne moment a year from now: a grassroots movement around Incorruptible. This book won't get wall-to-wall media coverage. It's antagonistic to people in power. So Eric hopes readers will hand it to their founders, their bosses, their friends. If consumers and employees start demanding, "I want to work in an incorruptible company," that's the toast. Reflection Questions What is your equivalent of Costco's hot dog? The one commitment you'd defend even when it's financially painful, even when the easy move would be to abandon it? Have you ever read your corporate charter, or the foundational document of your team or department? Does what's actually written match what you say you stand for? Where in your work or life would the harder short-term path build something more durable in the long run? Are you willing to lift the heavy weights? More Learning #258: Jesse Itzler: Creating Your Life Resume & Living Outside the Box #529: James Clear: Setting Up Your Future Self & Becoming an Optimist #565: Noah Kahan: The Art of Asking For What You Want Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now! 01:03 Meet Eric Ries 02:55 Is It Possible to Build an Incorruptible Company? 04:04 Why Culture Alone Won't Save You 05:13 Sol Price, Fedmart, and the Locks That Got Changed 07:56 Why Wall Street Calls Costco the Exception 09:11 The $1.50 Hot Dog Story 13:59 Harder Is Easier: The Principle Behind It All 16:48 Why Governance Is Just Soul Craft 19:50 Building the First New Stock Exchange Since Nasdaq 22:33 Eric's Communication Style: Reps, Not Talent 30:52 The Opportunity Hiding in Broken Markets 31:59 How to Know Which Feedback to Listen To 35:39 Qualitative vs. Quantitative: Why You Need Both 37:23 The Whole Foods Cautionary Tale 40:25 The Founder's Checklist for Building Something Durable 43:44 Encode Your Mission Into the Corporate Charter 47:35 You Are Not Stuck in Traffic. You Are the Traffic. 52:37 The Champagne Question: A Grassroots Movement 55:27 James Clear, Author's Equity, and the Future of Publishing 56:43 EOPC
688: Dr. Henry Cloud - The Difference Between a Dream & a Vision, Why Revenue Is Not a Goal, the 5-Step Model for Achieving Any Goal, and Why the Highest Performers Seek the Most Coaching
Go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming for my new book, The Price of Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. His titles include Boundaries, Integrity, Necessary Endings, and Trust. For three decades, he has worked with leaders, helping them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. His newest book is Your Desired Future: The Five Essential Steps That Take You Where You Want to Go. Key Learnings Henry's five-step model for getting from here to there: Vision (clear and compelling) Talent (engaging the right people around you) Strategy and plan (how you'll win) Measurement and accountability (how you'll know) Fix and adapt (course-correcting in real time) At the age of 16, Henry's daughter asked, "Dad, how do people become singer-songwriters?" Henry went out to the garage and brought in his whiteboard. Lucy rolled her eyes. He gave her the five-step model. A couple years later, she published a song called "Crash and Learn" that got bought by CBS, the CW Network, and featured on Spotify and Apple Music. We tend to create departments and businesses in our own image. Of the five components, we're going to be good at two, maybe three. But the others still have to happen. That's where most leaders fail. Only humans can picture a desired future state. Finley is Henry's Doberman. When the FedEx guy comes to the door, she runs to it, and barks every time. Henry has never seen her stop and ask herself: "I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on Thursday." Most leaders are operating like Finley. Working hard. Doing what they've always done. Never stopping to ask if any of it is getting them where they want to be. You need an observing ego. The worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going. Tony Blair, while Prime Minister, spent half a day a week sitting by himself next to a pond in reflection. Warren Buffett spends an hour and a half a day at his desk staring out the window. A revenue number is not a vision. The single worst vision statement Henry ever heard: "We want to be a $50 million company." It provides no clarity of what the company is going to do. A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it's a metric, not a vision. Will Guidara created a "dream maker" role at Eleven Madison Park. Their job: listen for clues from guests, then create a personalized, unexpected, memorable experience the guest will never forget and tell everyone about. Trust Fuels Investment. People invest in leaders who feel like they understand them. You're taking your team into a war. They've got to have deep trust with you. The first thing a leader has to do is develop deep, deep trust and let their team know that they understand the pressure they're under. "A vision can die without a plan or without people." Alan Mulally's weekly 7:00 AM Thursday meeting at Ford. Every VP had to give every project a red, yellow, or green status. When Mulally first arrived, the company was hemorrhaging money. Everyone was holding up green. He said: "How can you be holding up green when here's the reality over here? I need some reality in here." When one VP finally held up red, Mulally moved him to sit next to him. The wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. The right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination. You get what you create or what you allow. Henry was working with a global CEO whose team had cultural problems. Henry kept asking, "Why is that?" After a few rounds, the CEO finally said, "I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I?" If you are the one actually in charge, you are ridiculously in charge. Either you're creating it, or you're allowing it. Accountability answers two questions: Did we do what we said we were going to do? If not, why not? Don't just tell people to "do better." Run a root cause analysis. Maybe they don't have the tools. Maybe you gave them competing goals. Maybe it's a leadership problem. If we executed perfectly, did we get the result we expected? If yes, pour on the gas. If no, go back up the model and adjust your strategy. Most leaders measure goals, not activities. Goals are lagging indicators. You can measure them after it's over. It's too late. Measure activities. Did we do this week what we said we were going to do? Micro drivers matter. Henry worked with a CEO who built multi-billions in valuation from a one-office company who was excellent with micro drivers. It's an atomic compression of the 80/20 rule. He knew the specific activities at each level of the business that actually moved the needle, and he made those objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, and deliberate practice. Peter Drucker said, "Nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things." The number one thing the greatest leaders share: character. Not moral or ethical character. Your makeup as a person. How you're glued together. Integrity comes from the word that means wholeness. The great performers are drivers of tasks and relationships. The highest performers utilize coaching the most. Henry expected the disastrous leaders to be the ones calling. It was the exact opposite. The ones crushing it are the ones who reach out. The struggling ones rarely do. The greatest leaders reverse the law of entropy: things get worse over time. But entropy only applies to a closed system. Open the system to a new energy source from the outside plus intelligence to organize it, and you can reverse it. That's what coaches, mentors, and advisors do. A leader is a closed system when the only voices they're ever listening to are the ones in their head. The greatest leaders embrace negative realities. They move toward problems. Not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better. Reflection Questions In how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door, working hard at activities without ever stopping to ask if any of it is getting you where you want to go? Is your current vision a metric, or a compelling picture of a future state that would make people want to sacrifice for it? Where in your life are you a closed system? Whose voices outside your head could open you up to new energy and intelligence? More Learning #229 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You #050 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Integrity is the Wake You Leave Behind #682 - Will Guidara: Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming – Pre-Order Now! 01:13 Meet Dr. Henry Cloud 02:40 The Leadership GPS: Where Are You Going? 04:54 Step 2: Building the Right Team Around You 06:09 Steps 3-5: Strategy, Measurement, and Adapt 10:45 Why the Best Leaders Carve Out Time to Think 15:50 Why a Revenue Number Is Not a Vision 18:20 Crafting a Vision People Will Sacrifice For 23:12 The HVAC Story, Joe Girard, and the Dream Maker 27:38 Trust: The First Thing Every Leader Must Build 30:04 Alan Mulally's Red-Yellow-Green Meeting at Ford 32:38 How to Run Status Reviews That Actually Work 34:26 Accountability Should Be an Immune System, Not Autoimmune 38:18 Measure Activities, Not Goals 43:10 Micro Drivers: The Atomic 80/20 Rule 45:14 The Voices Outside Your Head: Peers and Accountability 47:47 The #1 Trait of Sustained Excellence: Character 50:39 The Greatest Leaders Reverse Entropy 56:17 EOPC
687: Jim Collins - What To Make of a Life, The 3 Types of Luck, Inflection Points, Cliffs, Encodings, Navigating the Fog, the Art of Getting People To Want To Do What Must Be Done, and Reconnecting with an Old Friend
NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming Buy it -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Jim Collins is the author of some of the most influential business books ever written — Good to Great, Built to Last, and Great by Choice. His concepts have become part of the leadership vocabulary. Level 5 Leadership. The Flywheel. First Who, Then What. The Hedgehog Concept. He spent more than a decade at Stanford as a professor and has advised CEOs, four-star generals, and heads of state. His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. It is the product of ten years of research and is the most personal thing he has ever written. We flew to Boulder, Colorado, to record this one in person with Jim. Key Learnings Jim's grandfather wrote his own death story. Jimmy Collins was a test pilot in the 1930s. He told Jim's grandmother, Dolores, that if he died, she should pull the last chapter from his desk and publish it. He died in a test crash. After the service, she pulled out the chapter. The title was "I'm Dead." The last chapter, written in first person, described the plane coming out of the sky, the screaming wings, the crash. The final words, by his own pen: "I am dead now." For seven decades, his grandmother never cried. When Jim asked her in her nineties to tell the story of his grandfather, she cried and said, "Thank you for that. I've never cried before." She'd been a single mom in the middle of the Depression. Of all the things Jim feels good about in his life, asking her to tell that story before she died at almost 100 years old is one he's most proud of. A cliff is an event that alters the trajectory of your life and forces you to reconstruct everything that comes after. Jim's first big cliff: he lost his father while his father was still alive. Jim's father took the family to San Francisco in the 1960s. They lived a few houses down from Haight Street. When a man was shot dead on their doorstep, Jim's mom moved them to Boulder. They lived in a cold basement with cots and a hot plate. They couldn't afford a Christmas tree, so Jim and his brother rolled a boulder into the basement and called it their Christmas rock. The Greyhound bus moment. In high school, Jim took a Thanksgiving turkey on a Greyhound bus down to New Mexico, where his father was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor. He had this romantic vision: they'd cook the turkey, share Thanksgiving, bond as father and son. The whole weekend, his father had no interest in him. He spent it trying to convince Jim to convince his grandmother to give him money. On the bus ride home, looking out the window into the fog, Jim realized: there will never, ever be a father there. No male role models. No frameworks. No guidance. "I've got this one life. What do I do with it?" The inflection point in Jim's life is Joanne. They got engaged four days after their first date. He'd admired her from afar for years but never had the courage to ask her out. Once they were together, Jim began a conscious process: I need to become a person worthy of being married to her. He didn't know exactly what that meant or how to get there. But he knew that was the work. Forty-six years later, it's still a never-ending journey. What Joanne does brilliantly: she sees what needs attention. Jim is encoded to hear it. Someone once asked Joanne what she thought Jim's greatest strength was. She said: "Jim takes critical feedback better than any person I've ever met." Joanne sees what needs attention. Jim hears it. Then they adapt and adjust. That's the inner flywheel of their marriage. Circle the wagons together. Guns pointing out, never at each other. When life gets really difficult, whether it's disease or other cliffs. You are always together. Always on the inside of the wagons. Never aimed at each other. Joanne won the 1985 Hawaii Ironman by 92 seconds. With a hamstring injury that limited her running training to 16 miles a week, she came off the bike with a 10-minute lead. Then mile by mile, the lead shrank. Nine minutes. Eight. Seven. With a few miles left, she stopped in the middle of the lava field, massaging her legs, almost pleading with them to run. She looked up at the sky. Then her gaze fixed somewhere down the road. She started to run. You're racing for self-respect. Joanne told Jim afterward: in the end, you're racing to know that you couldn't have run a step faster. Only you'll know. If you know you couldn't have run a step faster, that's actually winning. When Jim writes, he's on the lava fields. When he finishes a book, he wants to know he couldn't have written one sentence better. When you're on the lava fields, this is the moment you want to quit. Don't. Writing is thinking. When the writing isn't working, the thinking isn't clear. Go back to the data. Find the through-line. There are three types of luck: What luck. A cancer diagnosis. A guitar left in an empty house. An event that breaks your way. Who luck. The people who walk into your life. Joanne. Morten Hansen. Jerry Porras. Bill Lazier. Zeit luck. When what you're doing intersects with the surrounding zeitgeist. Jimmy Page was in Surrey when the British rock explosion happened. Luck is an event you didn't cause, with significant consequences, and an element of surprise. The big winners weren't luckier. They had a higher return on luck. What you do with luck events matters more than the luck itself. Bill Lazier: the closest thing to a father Jim ever had. Jim ended up in Bill's class at Stanford because the class he was trying to take was full. The random course-sorting mechanism threw him into the first class Bill ever taught. Pure WHO luck. Jim did not cause that. Discover your encodings. An encoding is a durable capacity of your intrinsic construction that resides within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. Jim has done over 300 online courses on every imaginable subject. Constitutional law. Napoleon. World War I. The history of China. He started them to learn how to teach. Then his curiosity took over. That's what an encoding looks like in the wild. You have a constellation of encodings. Like stars. When your life captures a bright set of those encodings, you're in frame. When it doesn't, you're out of frame. The same person can look amazing in frame and not very amazing out of frame. The most important finding from this book: don't follow anyone else's advice. Their advice is well-meaning. It may have worked beautifully for them. But it worked for them because it flowed from their encodings. And their encodings are not your encodings. Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper. Two women who won the Nobel Prize and shaped computer science. McClintock was encoded for solitary work. She didn't even have a phone. She heard about her Nobel Prize on the radio. Hopper was encoded to work through people. She kept a pirate flag in her office and once stole furniture for her team in the middle of the night. Two completely different encodings. What they shared: their lives were in alignment with their encodings. Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. It's not a trait. It's a choice. Anyone in any organization can lead, depending on their desire to make a difference. Nobody needs to wait for a title. Ryan's encoding is "the relentless persistence of invitation." Jim observed that Ryan has incredible encodings for what he'd describe as attractive persistence. Not pushy. Not aggressive. But persistent and welcoming. The invitation never goes away. The way you lead should be different from everyone else. Because you are encoded differently. Trust your encodings, not their playbook. Roger Sherman saved the U.S. Constitution. Twice. He created the bicameral legislature compromise. He insisted the Bill of Rights be amendments, not rewrites. Yet most people don't know his name. He almost never spoke. He listened in committees and waited for the precise moment to introduce just the right point to turn American history. Quiet. Behind the scenes. Uncharismatic. Unglamorous. Enormously effective. That was his encoding. You should largely ignore what other successful leaders did. It's marvelous to listen to. It might give you ideas. But everything that worked for them reflected their encodings, not yours. The work isn't to copy their playbook. The work is to discover your encodings and trust them. The color of Jim's fire changed. When he was younger, his fuel was rage, fury, and a sense of terror with no safety net. He used to worry that if he ever lost it, he'd lose his drive. What replaced it was a different kind of fire: the joy of curiosity, of being lost in giant projects, of marvelous conversations, of sharing what he's learned. His drive is higher than ever. It just feels a lot better now. The 3x3 reflective practice. After almost any conversation, teaching moment, or significant interaction, Jim writes down three things that went well and three things he could have done better. He's done it for years. He's now systematizing it. He doesn't pause to celebrate. He pauses to learn quickly and move on. At the top of Jim's notes for this conversation: "The biggest reminder for today, reconnecting with an old friend." That's the celebration. What could be a better celebration than reconnecting with somebody you've had marvelous conversations with? Reflection Questions What is your most significant cliff? What did you reconstruct on the other side, and what are you still rebuilding? What are your encodings? Not what you've been told you should be, but what genuinely flows from your intrinsic construction. When have you felt most in frame? Like Jim with Joanne, is there a person or purpose you are actively trying to become worthy of? What would that work look like this week? More Learning #397: Jim Collins - Creating Your Generosity Flywheel, Make the Trust Wager (Part 1)#398: Jim Collins - Creating Your Generosity Flywheel, Make the Trust Wager (Part 2) #216: Jim Collins - How to Go From Good to Great
686: Dr. Nicole LePera (The Holistic Psychologist) - The Hidden Cost of Being Good at Everything, Self-Medicating at 13, Why Awareness Isn't Enough, Healing the Body Not Just the Mind, What a Real Boundary Actually Is, and How Vulnerability Makes Love Rea
Pre-Order new book, The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver My Guest: Dr. Nicole LePera is the creator of The Holistic Psychologist, a platform with over 12 million followers, and the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including her newest, Reparenting the Inner Child. Key Learnings: Nicole was good at everything, so struggling meant failure. Her family's message was clear: success in life meant financial security through academics or athletics. The implicit message: you're worthy when you're bringing home A's, when you're winning the softball game. She quickly learned to identify things she wasn't immediately good at and just not pursue them. She filtered life, staying on the path of comfort. Your childhood adaptations don't leave. Nicole calls it the inner child. It doesn't matter how old you are or how far beyond your childhood you think you've gotten. It impacts you in reactions, in identities, in your way of being. What was once your best attempt at safety, security, or connection still drives behavior today. Not all adaptations are problems. Many continue to benefit us. The question isn't whether the adaptation is good or bad. The question is: are you choosing it, or is it choosing you? Nicole's drive for achievement created opportunities. It led to massive impact. But she still has the overachiever who wants to blow past her limits and say yes when she's exhausted but means no. The Holistic Psychologist started in 2018, and Nicole had no idea it would explode. She was living in Philadelphia, operating within a private practice model. Within the first year, people from around the world were resonating, joining, and interested in working with her in this new way. But at the beginning, even learning how to speak on camera was such a big challenge. Her partner would say, "Say what you said to me earlier," and Nicole's mind would go blank. Just putting a camera in front of her was near debilitating. Boundaries are about knowing who and when to take feedback from. Sometimes the feedback from a loved one, while uncomfortable, is helpful to hear. Other times, it's a helpful boundary where you're not opening yourself up to the opinion of someone who has a different vantage point or is speaking from their own projection. That's allowed Nicole to create safety in herself, confidence in herself, which translates to flow. Several years in, Nicole's dad sat front row at her book event, crying with pride. In the beginning, her dad and mom would ask, "Why do you have to use us as the example? Why do you have to share about our family?" Nicole would explain: " This is the only experience I can speak from, and our family's experience is so common. To see her dad, who came from a family largely shut down emotionally, crying in understanding and pride, was overwhelming and validating for why she does this work. At 13, Nicole was getting straight A's but unraveling on the inside. She was socially shy, struggled to order food at restaurants, and had very few friends. Then she discovered alcohol and pot made her feel comfortable. That anxiety she lived with suddenly felt freer. She would stumble through the living room at night, her parents already in bed, then wake up at 6:00 AM the next day, pitch a softball tournament, win it, and seemingly be fine. Her parents had no idea. She was very good at suppressing her emotions and coping. By contrast, on the surface, it seemed like she was doing well. They were a family who didn't really talk about emotions, so they had no indication. The drive itself isn't the problem. It's the energy that inspires action. Nicole's dad worked into the night to support the family. Her mom would say, "why not 100?" when Nicole brought home a 96. That translated into drive and ambition. That's not a problem. For a lot of us, it's the energy that inspires action and translates into impact. It can become a problem when we have no limits to our working, where we exhaust ourselves and burn out, where we don't feel worthy in moments of inaction or rest. The marker of a healthy relationship with drive is flexibility. When you're forced to stop because you're sick, exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, or someone else needs you, can you be flexible enough to do that without feeling terrible about yourself? The ability to choose to say, "Okay, contextually speaking, I need to pause," and still feel okay about yourself, that's the marker. Hold space for both: acknowledging harm and taking agency. Other people have contributed to our discomfort. Maybe parents didn't meet our needs. If we don't acknowledge that, we suppress. But we also can't stay stuck in anger and resentment. A true boundary isn't demanding that someone else be different. That's still giving away your agency. A true boundary is saying: you've hurt me, and I'm gonna take responsibility that I'm allowing it. I'm gonna show up differently now to limit the impact of what you're doing. Talking about trauma can keep it alive in your body. Trauma doesn't live in logic and understanding. It lives in your body. It lives in habits and reactions. Your mind is so powerful that you can think something and feel as if you're living it in that moment. If you're going week after week talking about all the things that are hurting you, you're continuing to keep that alive in your body. Holistic psychology bridges the gap between mind and body. Traditional psychology focused solely on the mind. The CBT model says if we think differently, we produce different feelings, then different actions. But Nicole was missing the body. Our nervous system, our earliest environments, neurobiologically created patterns wired into us. Science now shows we maintain the ability to change throughout our lives. Drop into your body. Where is your attention right now? Are you feeling your muscles, your heels impacting the earth, where you're sitting? Or are you so lost in thought you're disconnected? Jaw clenched? Fists clenched? Shoulders up to your ears? Holding your breath? Breathing short and quick from your chest? These are markers that your body is under stress right now. Once you have that information, make small shifts. Slow and deepen your breath. Elongate your exhale just a little longer than your inhale. If your movements are quick, slow them down. If you're holding tension, release it. Now you're regulating your body so you can show up differently. Meditation is just awareness. It's not sitting cross-legged trying to make your mind quiet. Life can be a meditative experience. Thoughts are helpful. They're where we create things, have insights. The goal isn't a blank, quiet mind. The goal is awareness. Nicole calls it her spaceship. Her protective habit for so long has been to dissociate, to disconnect. She pursued clinical psychology where she can live in her mind. When what she's feeling in her body is too uncomfortable, the quickest path out is to distract herself with someone else, with the next achievement. This work has made Nicole's relationships more real. More authentic. More grounded in vulnerability, messiness, emotion as opposed to curated versions of who she thinks she needs to be. What she's most familiar with is dealing with all her feelings alone. The Harvard study found one thing leads to a happy life: love. Ryan referenced the longitudinal Harvard study that has gone on for 90 years studying what leads to a happy life. At the end of the day, it's love. The ones who live the happiest, longest, most fruitful lives are surrounded by people they love and who love them. What a gift it is to be loved for all of yourself, not just the perfect parts. When you can show someone all of yourself, your messiness, the things you hid and kept secret, and still be loved. The overachiever gets to show more parts of herself, and people don't abandon her. They stay. That's the love most of us are striving for. We are all a bunch of messy humans trying to figure it out as we go. Nicole's champagne moment a year from now: presence and beingness. Whatever is happening or not happening in her life, she's celebrating the celebration of that moment. Being alive. Feeling the gratitude, the joy. Not focusing on what was produced to give her the opportunity to celebrate, but being present to the life around her. The taste of the champagne, the humans surrounding her in that moment. Reflection Questions Which childhood adaptations are still driving your behavior today? Are you choosing them, or are they choosing you? When was the last time you actually dropped into your body and checked: am I tense? Am I holding my breath? Am I stressed? Who in your life sees all of you, not just the polished version, and loves you anyway? More Learning #547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What People Think of You #140: Dr. Carol Dweck - The Power of a Growth Mindset #229: Dr. Henry Cloud - Be So Good They Can't Ignore You Podcast Chapters 00:00 Book Announcement 01:08 Show Intro and Guest Setup 02:36 Good at Everything: The Hidden Cost 06:47 When Therapy Stopped Working 09:32 How The Holistic Psychologist Started on Instagram 11:20 Purpose, Fame, and Setting Boundaries 15:06 How Her Family Reacted to the Spotlight 19:21 At 13: Straight A's and Self-Medicating 22:12 What Her Parents Missed 23:48 Drive vs. Worthiness: Where It Becomes a Problem 29:20 Why Flexibility Beats Rigidity 31:03 Agency vs. Blame in Therapy 31:57 When Therapy Becomes an Excuse 33:47 What a Real Boundary Actually Is 35:44 The "Bad Therapy" Debate 38:50 What Holistic Psychology Actually Means 41:35 Daily Body Practices, Not Retreats 44:06 How to Drop Into Your Body 46:38 Meditation Is Just Awareness 49:36 Why Vulnerability Makes Relationships Real 52:07 The Harvard Study: Love Is Everything 55:36 The Champagne Question: Being Present 57:33 EOPC
685: David Epstein - The Freedom Trap, Narrative Values, General Magic, The Nobel Prize Winner Who Simplified Everything, Wearing the Same Thing Everyday, and Why Constraints Are the Secret to Your Best Work
Read my new book, The Price of Becoming. www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: David Epstein is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene. A former investigative reporter at ProPublica and senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His new book is called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Notes Be part of "Mindful Monday" -- Text Hawk to 66866 Key Learnings The easier move is to let it go. David found a factual error in Ryan's new/my new book. David was supposed to read it and write a blurb on it - but went further and challenged a factual error. The kind move, what great leaders actually do, is being willing to point things out, even if it could cause a little friction. There is such a thing as too much autonomy. After Range became mega viral, David optimized for autonomy. He individualized his whole life. He no longer was writing about what others assigned him. A year later, he realized there is a thing as too much autonomy. He missed the structure of a work day, the deadlines, the annoyances of working with other people's schedules. This total freedom ended up feeling terrible. "The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living." This quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi hit David when he was on a dating app for book topics, just swiping and swiping. That day he said, "I'm really interested in constraints. I need some myself. I'm writing a book proposal on this." Two weeks later he was 10 times more interested because he decided to dive into it. Cal Newport says "system shutting down" at the end of his workday. It seems silly, but when you have all that freedom, you need something to close the workday so you can recover and be ready for the next day. Your brain is made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says thinking is energetically costly. So when your calendar is too open, all you'll do is what's convenient. Your brain will be lazy. The path of least resistance. The mere urgency effect: when schedule and structure is too open, people do things that seem urgent even if they're unimportant. When you're too unstructured, you end up doing huge volumes of low value stuff just to have checked off doing something. What David's workday looks like now: Batching work: people at work check their email on average 77 times a day. The way people are usually doing that is they're toggling all the time between email and something else. When you do that, it lowers your productivity and massively increases your stress. David doesn't start his day with his inbox. He'll check it at the end of the workday because emails can take him away from the most important work at the beginning of the day. Stress + Rest = Growth. The workday ends when David's son gets home. When writing, you have to program in rest, just like you would if you were an athlete in training. Daniel Kahneman said writing "Thinking Fast and Slow" was the worst few years of his life. David had lunch with Kahneman and praised the book. Kahneman said, "Never again." He said it was so isolating. He was used to working with a partner or multiple partners and colleagues. He felt so isolated that he said he'd never write a book again, or if he did, he would write it with somebody else. And that's what he did. And David could empathize with that. David made a one-page architectural outline for how "Inside the Box" would look. If it's not on that page, it is not in the book. He wrote as small as possible to try to defeat his own system. The book's 20% shorter than his other two. He thinks it's much tighter writing. He was so much more efficient that he doesn't feel nearly as burned out. After a mega hit book, two things matter: (1) A lot is out of your control, and (2) Identify as a craftsman. David's colleague at Sports Illustrated told him, "If a book about genetics and vampires comes out the same day, you're screwed, and there's nothing you can do about it." He was right. But David very strongly identifies as a writer now, as a craftsman. He's taken fiction writing courses just to learn about craft. With Inside the Box, he did a structural experiment that he found so engaging because he was focused on the craft itself, not just the commercial outcome. "Docendo discimus" - by teaching, we learn. This is a quote from Seneca. If people think they're going to have to teach certain material, they organize it more coherently in their own mind. They start pulling out main ideas and attaching different ideas together. Teaching it is even better, but just making someone think they're going to have to teach it makes them learn in a much more coherent way. Narrative values: the recurring themes that give coherence to a life. David went back and looked at his life and identified: curiosity, open-mindedness, diligence, and resilience. Now that he's started telling his story in that way, it shows up everywhere. But going forward, he also wanted some things in his story that he didn't have. So he identified forgiveness in particular because that has not been a strong suit for him. Ben Helfgott: the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp. Almost everybody in his family was killed in the Holocaust. He just preached forgiveness all the time. When David saw what Ben did, these petty grudges he's holding are nothing. You're just poisoning yourself when you hold these grudges. So David decided he wanted forgiveness to become one of his narrative values. Herbert Simon won the highest award in computer science, psychology, and the Nobel Prize in economics. His quote serves as the epigraph of the book: "It is a myth, widely believed but not less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they're most free." Simon coined the term "satisficing." It's a combination of satisfy and suffice. It means having good enough decision rules. He contrasted that with maximizing. From a mountain of psychological research, it is almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret. There's not much evidence they actually make better decisions most of the time. Simon was a proactive satisficer. He said you need three sets of clothing: one on your back, one in the wash, and the next one ready to wear. He simplified all the decisions in his life so he could save cognitive bandwidth for the really important ones. He famously said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Choose when to choose. Choose when to save and when to use your cognitive bandwidth. Good enough doesn't mean you have low standards. It means you're saving your bandwidth for the most important things. "How you do anything is how you do everything" is completely wrong. This is one of David's least favorite quotes. It's wrong. Herbert Simon did the same mundane thing, the same breakfast every day, the same socks, so he could crush it in his work. He wasn't doing everything the way he was doing his work. The Fredkins Paradox: We spend the most energy on the least important decisions because we agonize when the options are really similar. General Magic: They invented the smartphone in 1990. The iPhone would not exist without them. They had infinite degrees of freedom. They could do anything. When the device came out, it didn't solve a clear customer problem. It had a 200-page manual. They sold 3,000 units in the first six months. Meanwhile, people inside General Magic who bit off much smaller chunks had success. One low-level engineer started Auction Web. His bosses said no, too small. He left and changed the name to eBay. Another created Graffiti. He said "I'm going to solve a clear customer problem. Busy professionals want contacts and calendars on the go." He did just a calendar, contacts, and a memo pad. That was the Palm Pilot. By doing way less. By doing something, not everything. Tony Fadell (the "podfather"): "If you don't have constraints, make up constraints." Bill Gurley said, "We have a saying in venture: more startups die of indigestion than starvation." When Tony co-founded Nest, he made his team work inside a literal box. He made them prototype the box before they had the product. If it didn't fit in that box, it was not a priority. Reflection Questions What area of your life has too much freedom right now? Where could you add a constraint (a deadline, a ritual, a boundary) that would actually make you more productive or creative? If you had to pick three narrative values that run through your life story, what would they be? Are they the ones you want, or do you need to add an aspirational value like David did with forgiveness? What's one decision you're maximizing (trying to find the perfect choice) when you should be satisficing (good enough and move on)? How much time and energy would you free up if you applied Herbert Simon's approach? More Learning #310 - David Epstein: Why Generalists Will Rule the World #582 - Cal Newport: Obsess Over Quality #660 - James Clear: The 4 Laws to Behavioral Change Podcast Chapters00:00 The Price of Becoming - Ryan's New Book 01:15 Meet David Epstein 02:39 The Fact Checker: What Great Leaders Do 04:27 Dedication Easter Eggs 05:50 The Problem With Too Much Autonomy 10:47 Why You Actually Need Constraints 12:29 Batching Work: The 77 Email Checks Problem 17:20 Lunch with Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow Was Miserable 22:18 What To Do After A Viral Book 27:07 Docendo Discimus: By Teaching, We Learn 29:13 Why Leaders Should Regularly Teach 31:09 Desirable Difficulties 31:56 Narrative Values: The Themes That Define Your Life 34:31 Adding Forgiveness As an Aspirational Value 36:13 Chips on Shoulders vs. Proving People Right 39:10 Herbert Simon: The Man Who Won Everything 40:20 Satisficing Over Maximizing 42:40 Choosing When To Choose 44:29 Good Enough Doesn't Mean Low Standards 46:13 Why "How You Do Anything" is Completely Wrong 47:25 General Magic: Do Something, Not Everything 52:49 One Year From Now: What Are You Celebrating? 54:54 EOPC
684: Marcus Buckingham - Design Love In, The 5 Feelings Leaders Must Create, The ABCs of Authentic Leadership, and How to Unleash The Most Powerful Force in Business
Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment. He is a New York Times bestselling author of influential books, including First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Currently, he leads the People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute. Key Learnings When you start a business, it's all about love. Seven out of 10 businesses fail, so when you start a business as an entrepreneur, you love what you do, you love your clients, and you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important and it's gonna work. Marcus sold his company in 2017 and calls it the biggest mistake of his career. His company was broken down into silos, and the conversation became about maximization, compliance, and efficiency. "Love is born savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting." (Pablo Neruda) When you stop talking about love, you destroy it. Before you sell or scale, ask: Will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company and more employees saying they love working there? If the answer isn't obvious yes, then don't do it. Great companies protect the founder's flame. Walt Disney, Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Apple's passion for design, Southwest Airlines, and Herb Kelleher. When companies lose their connection to the founding passion, they become the machine. The machine doesn't have a soul, and people can all feel it. Love is the most powerful force in business. If you want to drive productive human behavior, repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, the precursor to that is love. But we don't say the word. Marcus was with 30 C-suite executives, and they spent two hours talking about data. They couldn't even say the word, love. They came to say it about customers, but never about their own employees. The job of a leader is to change human behavior. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. You've got two choices: directive (which works temporarily) or designing experiences. If you want sustainable behavior change, experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes. The best leaders are skilled experience makers. That email you just sent? It's an experience. That meeting? It's an experience. Onboarding? It's an experience. Every touchpoint is picking up what you're putting down. Culture is just a series of experiences. Either you are getting people to say "I love that," or you've failed to change their behavior. "If you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it, and I don't want to follow it." Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs, and they better be coherent with who you authentically are. Your customs are the living manifestation. The things you customarily do have got to flow from your authenticity and your beliefs. The best leaders have their ABCs line up beautifully - they are authentically who they are, you know exactly what they believe, and their customs bring those authentic beliefs to life. The biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader, not the culture of the company. The culture is like the river, but there's a lot of different eddies. You join a company, but the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. The most important decision you make is who you make the leader of that team. A, B, C: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection; we want authenticity because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you. I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable. The definition of love to Marcus: Love is an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time. Which is flourishing. Most of us go through life balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armor plating. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside and express it. Love is a forward-facing emotion. We're anticipating goodness, and we have to take the armor off one plate at a time. A question for all leaders: What are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team? The five sequential feelings of love: Control: "What's this world you've invited me into, and how does it work? " Harmony: "You have to tell people that you know what they're feeling." Significance: "Do you know my story?" Warmth of Others: "Who's with me? How can they help?" Growth: "How will this experience make me more capable?" If a leader understands the five feelings, they have a blueprint to get your team where you want them to go. Marcus's Audi story: he loved his Audi, then at the end of the lease, he got a robocall. "You are at the end of your lease. You have not turned in the car. You have one week remaining, or you will be charged $500." He wasn't planning to turn it in. He was planning to get another one. Next week, same robocall. He leaned out. It was jarring because he was excited, and Audi was pissed off. They lost him for five years. Audi didn't take harmony seriously. They don't design for experiences; they design for processes. The person at the dealership is in a different silo than the person writing the script for the robocall. No one creates a holistic experience map. We don't design for experiences; we design for processes. Go to a hospital. It's one handoff after another. The person who's supposed to hold the narrative together is you, the patient. The whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience. Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes. Disney builds a berm around the whole park so you can't see out. You can't see the Red Roof Inn next door. Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why? Because Disney is trying to create a holistic experience. These companies think holistically about a human having an experience. The best leaders, when you ask "How do you motivate people?" always say "It depends." It depends on the person. At some point, the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. Start with control, then harmony, then significance. Tell them you understand their story and what will change because of that story. The hospitalist movement in hospitals produced the best patient outcomes. They give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process. Their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. As a result, you feel held. If you love anyone, you don't imagine they're ever finished. Love is a forward-facing emotion. Growth is the fifth feeling, not the first. We get this wrong when we think about designing love. We build it backwards. We start with growth and warmth. No. What's happening is feeling by feeling, we're taking off one plate of armor. If you haven't taken off the first four, you can't hit them with growth. The simplest thing leaders could do: check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one, every week. Ask them: How'd you feel about last week? What are you working on this week? How can I help? Do that 52 times a year with each person individually, and you'll hit control, harmony, and over time significance. Marcus is creating an app with an AI design partner. He doesn't want his kids to grow into a world accepting loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. The app will have a slider: loving/unloving. Let's call it what it is. It's love or not love. It's not okay to live in a loveless world, and we should call out unloving when we see it. Reflection Questions What would happen if you asked yourself before every major decision: "How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more?" Are you designing experiences or just optimizing processes? What's one touchpoint in your customer or employee journey that feels mechanical and could be redesigned to feel more human? Which of the five feelings (control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth) are you strongest at creating for your team? Which one are you weakest at, and what's one thing you could do this week to improve it? Time stamps 00:00 Marcus Buckingham Intro 02:21 The Biggest Mistake: Selling My Company 05:55 Can You Scale Without Losing Love? 07:59 Protecting the Founder's Flame 12:03 Why CEOs Can't Say the Word "Love" 15:42 Your Job: Change Human Behavior 17:55 Experiences Drive Behaviors Drive Outcomes 21:42 Love Is Five Sequential Feelings 25:40 Jesse Cole and Josh D'Amaro: Real Love in Action 29:50 How Do You Prove ROI? 31:32 The Local Leader Drives Everything 32:09 The Scatterplot: Same Company, Different Experiences 33:43 ABCs: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs 35:41 What Love Actually Means: Flourishing 38:28 The Five Feelings Blueprint 39:00 Feeling #1: Control (What World Am I In?) 40:28 Feeling #2: Harmony (Do You Know What I'm Feeling?) 43:43 We Design for Processes, Not Experiences 47:34 Feelings #3, #4, #5: Significance, Warmth, Growth 53:04 The Simplest Practice for All Leaders: Weekly 15-Minute Check-Ins 57:37 EOPCMore Learning #467: Marcus Buckingham - How Love and Work Must Be Forever Linked #305: Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall - A Leader's Guide to the Real World #676: Jesse Cole - Built for the Fans (Obsession & Excellence)
683: Nir Eyal - How to Break Limiting Beliefs, Create Your Own Luck, Transform Your Relationships, and Start Seeing Opportunities Everyone Else Is Missing
Order my new book, The Price of Becoming... www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Nir Eyal is a Stanford lecturer, behavioral designer, and bestselling author who has spent his career at the intersection of psychology, technology, and human behavior. He's one of the most rigorous thinkers alive on why people do what they do, and what it actually takes to change. Notes Julie introduced Nir to the Turnaround technique. Nir and Julie met the first week of college in 1997 and have been married since 2001. A big part of the genesis of Beyond Belief came from Julie introducing Nir to this technique called The Turnaround, which comes out of the work from Byron Katie, that she used with her mother to repair the relationship she had with her mom. A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation and increases suffering. It does that by creating short-term relief from discomfort. "I hate public speaking, I'm no good at public speaking, so I'm going to avoid public speaking." You reduce your motivation to go on stage, providing yourself temporary relief, but long-term suffering. The Turnaround helps you collect a portfolio of perspectives. The problem is that our minds hate changing beliefs. We use these beliefs to justify passivity. A turnaround helps you identify many different kinds of beliefs, and then you can choose the ones that serve you versus the ones that hurt you. Your conscious mind can only process 50 bits of information per second. Your brain is processing 11 million bits of information (the sound of a voice, light hitting your retinas, the ambient temperature of the room). Your conscious mind is not aware of all this. Your brain has to filter out and leaves you with 0.00045% of the information that's coming in. The brain sees reality through a tiny pinhole of attention. It's the difference between reading a simple sentence or War and Peace twice every second. In order to make sense of all this data coming in, the brain has to see reality through a tiny pinhole of attention, just a tiny fraction of reality you're actually consciously aware of. The brain makes predictions based on our beliefs. How does the brain make sense of all this information? It has to make predictions, and those predictions are based on our beliefs. We call this predictive processing. Everything you experience, everything you see, everything you feel, and everything you're inspired to do is determined by the three powers of belief. The three powers of belief: The power of attention changes what you see The power of anticipation changes how you feel The power of agency changes what you do Limiting beliefs hide themselves. A limiting belief, by definition, is hidden because we think that what we see is accurate. We all think that what we experience is a fact. "I saw it for myself. I'm stating my truth. This is the way things are." But that's not true at all. The way the brain processes information is woefully inadequate to put that burden of truth on it. The Turnaround uses four questions to challenge limiting beliefs. Is it true? Is it 100% absolutely true? Who am I when I hold onto this belief? Who would I be without this belief? Nir's story: "My mother is too judgmental and hard to please." Nir sent his mom flowers for her 74th birthday. She said, "Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead. Don't order from that florist again." Nir instantly became his 13-year-old self and blurted out, "Well, that's the last time I order you flowers again." Venting is terrible. It does nothing but reinforce your beliefs about people because not only do we not see reality clearly, we certainly don't see other people clearly. We see our beliefs about people. We don't see reality as it is. We see reality as we are. The Turnaround opened up new possibilities for Nir. In 30 seconds, he determined: (1) that belief may not be true, (2) it doesn't really serve him, and (3) there might be a better way to be. He could actually be happier without that belief. The brain hates changing its mind. The turnaround asks you to look at the diametric opposite of your belief. We have a psychological immune system. Just like if you get a splinter in your finger, your body will mount an immune defense. The same happens in our minds. The more you feel "that's crazy, I don't wanna think that way, that can't be true," the more you need to explore it. Nir found four beliefs instead of one: My mother is too judgmental and hard to please My mother is NOT too judgmental and hard to please (maybe she was just conveying information) I am too judgmental and hard to please (I had rehearsed a script of effusive praise I wanted) I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself (I felt incompetent that the flowers didn't work out) "Beliefs are tools, not truths." This is the most important thing Nir can convey. Which one of those four beliefs is true? All of them. None of them. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. Facts, faith, and beliefs are three different things. A fact is an objective truth about reality. It is so whether you believe it or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. That is an objective fact. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. Most problems come from thinking faith is a fact. Too many people think that their faith is a fact, and the things they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs, which are changeable. That's where most of our problems come from: interpersonal problems, personal problems, geopolitical problems. The original belief left Nir powerless. "My mom is too judgmental and hard to please" only has one way out: she has to change so I could be happy. Good luck. The other three beliefs, Nir could do something about. They were in his control. That enabled him. It freed him. It was liberating. Misattribution of emotion: hurt people hurt people. When we feel bad inside, if you've ever been bullied or been a bully yourself, this is always what happens. When you feel crappy on the inside, the first person you can find, you're going to punch him in the face, either physically or verbally, because you feel crappy. That's what Nir did to his mom because he felt bad. So now she should feel bad. How to handle narcissists: acknowledge they're operating with the best tools they have. That person is a narcissist? Awesome, because you don't have to be around them. But narcissists are operating from the best tools they have. It doesn't mean you have to include them in your life, but how do you stop suffering because of them? Acknowledge they are, and reduce your suffering around them. Nir called his mom and apologized. He said, "I'm so sorry for my behavior. I realize that you were trying to help me. You were conveying information about the flowers, so I wouldn't order from that florist. Thank you for that." That call completely changed their relationship. We expect people to change, but we can't even change ourselves. We can't do the simplest habits like eating better, exercising more, and managing our time. Why are we expecting other people to change? "Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt." When Nir's daughter was born, and he held her for the first time, he felt overwhelming adoration. Five minutes ago, she didn't exist, and now he loved her more than anything. He gave her complete, total benefit of the doubt. Why? She didn't do anything. She never sent him flowers. Babies poop, they need food all the time, they cry. But he never said, "she's crying to annoy me." We give babies the ultimate benefit of the doubt. Why don't we give adults the benefit of the doubt? When those babies grow up and become adults, we don't give them the benefit of the doubt. The narcissist in your life, the person who offends you, the person that hurts you, those are the best tools they have. It doesn't mean you have to be with them or include them in your life. The requirement is: how do you figure out how to stop suffering, to be at peace? We're constantly judging everything. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. Jerk. There's a line at the burrito place. The business thing didn't work out. The stock market goes down. Judging, judging, judging all day long. Good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Expecting things to be different than they are. These are all limiting beliefs, and all they do is make us suffer. "We don't have relationship problems. We have belief problems." The problem is your belief that something should be different from what it is. It's like asking Nir's daughter to speak Russian. She can't speak Russian. What am I expecting? She doesn't have that ability. Why should I have expectations that people should meet my expectations? Nir and Julie now collaborate instead of argue. Since they started using the Turnaround technique, they used to have disagreements. Now they collaborate. If there's a very smart person, much smarter than Nir, who has an opinion, who he respects deeply and loves and admires, why would he fight with that person? He would collaborate with that person. Different perspectives are an asset to collect. If Nir sees things one way and Julie sees them differently, that's amazing. A new perspective. It's like collecting Pokémon cards. You've gotta get 'em all. Now with more perspectives, he can pick the best one. Writing sessions with Tim Urban, Shane Snow, and Mark Manson. Nir would work on his own and get distracted. But when he had other authors around him, they would sit down, write for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break, write for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break. They'd do that for three hours every morning. Not only is it inspiring, it keeps you on track. Find a focus friend. Somebody you can go to a coffee shop with and say, "I really need to focus. Let's keep each other accountable. Let's just work next to each other." Just like working side by side and seeing that other person also working on the stuff they should be working on keeps you accountable. Comparison is the thief of joy. Sometimes it can be tricky to be in a room with people who are super successful. Nir was the least successful author there at the time. You have to put it in perspective and know it's not about the outcome, it's about the journey. The best thing you can do is do the work. Time boxing is better than to-do lists. To-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for personal productivity because there's no constraint. You can always add more things to a to-do list. You come home from work every day and say, "I still have all these things I haven't done on my to-do list." A time box calendar is the most well-researched time management technique. What's much more effective than a to-do list is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. This is called an implementation intention. The goal now becomes not to finish anything. The goal is to work on that task for as long as you said you would without distraction. Make time to do the work, to turn your values into time. That's the secret to avoiding comparison. You put in the time to do the work. When you have it on your calendar, the goal is doing the work, not finishing the work. Lucky people literally see reality differently. They did a study where they asked people who were self-described lucky or unlucky to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. The unlucky people took on average two and a half minutes. The lucky people took 11 seconds. Why? On page two, one of the images said in big, bold text, "There are 43 images in this paper. Collect your prize." The unlucky people never saw it. Their brains took in the information, but it never became part of their conscious awareness. Entrepreneurs see $100 bills on the ground when everybody's walking over them. That is driven by beliefs. You believe you can will things to change. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, talked about his reality distortion field. That's exactly what this is. Entrepreneurs tend to be way more optimistic. They believe that lucky things happen to them, and so they see opportunities. "With our luck, it's going to be a bright, beautiful, sunny day." So many people say "with my luck" and follow it with something bad or negative. This belief and mindset of saying "with our luck" followed by something extremely positive is contagious and enjoyable. "Everything good happens to us." Nir's family says this whenever something good happens. There's no line at the TSA. "Everything good happens to us." The food was good. "Everything good happens to us." Little things, big things. Do more good things happen to them than bad things? Maybe, maybe not. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. When you believe those things, you notice them more. Your life actually does seem magical, blessed, like you're always lucky. 60% of opportunities are provoked luck. They studied super successful entrepreneurs and VCs and found that 60% of their opportunities provoked luck. They provoked the lucky thing that happened. How? Something as simple as sending a note of gratitude. Never hold back on a compliment. They're free. You get so much back from them. Thank you notes create provoked luck. Tina Seelig writes thank you notes compulsively. She wrote a thank you note to somebody. The thank-you note landed on someone's desk. You're sitting at your desk with things to do, and here's a thank you note, and to the right is your laptop with an email about a new opportunity. Who is going to get the call about that opportunity? You're top of mind. "Ryan's such a nice guy. He sent me that note. I'm going to call Ryan about that opportunity." Changing Nir's relationship with his mom changed his relationship with his daughter. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. When Nir started giving his daughter the benefit of the doubt, it pushed him to figure it out with his mom because he needed to give her the benefit of the doubt as he would want his daughter to give him the same. He's doing his best. He's not perfect. He makes mistakes. Those are the tools he's got. You go from loving your kid to liking them. Nir and his daughter went skiing together for his birthday. The entire three hour car ride up, the entire three-hour car ride back, they were chatting. They wrote an article together in the car. You always love your kid. As soon as your kid's born, you love them. But if you do your job right and things fall into place and you're very lucky, you like them. And that's a game changer. Reflection Questions What limiting belief are you holding onto where someone else has to change? What are three other ways to look at that same situation that would put the control back in your hands? Are you treating your beliefs like facts or like tools? Which beliefs are you holding because they're true, and which ones are you holding because they serve you? Who in your life are you not giving the benefit of the doubt? What would change if you gave them some grace? More Learning: #554 - Tim Urban: Become a High Rung Thinker #342 - Shane Snow: The #1 Leadership Skill is Intellectual Humility #596 - Arthur Brooks: The Art & Science of Happiness Podcast Chapters 02:19 Julie Introduced Nir to The Turnaround 04:28 Limiting Beliefs: How They Sap Motivation 07:51 Your Brain Filters 99.99% of Reality 10:17 The Flower Story: When Nir Became His 13-Year-Old Self 12:41 The Four Questions That Change Everything 15:25 Finding Four Beliefs Instead of One 19:08 Beliefs Are Tools, Not Truths 22:52 Narcissists Are Using Their Best Tools 27:53 Focus Friends: Writing with Tim Urban, Shane Snow, and Mark Manson 31:09 Comparison Is the Thief of Joy 32:04 Time Boxing Beats To-Do Lists 35:04 We Don't Have Relationship Problems, We Have Belief Problems 35:59 Why Nir and Julie Don't Fight Anymore 38:25 Explaining Worlds vs Changing People 42:03 You Can't Write Clearly If You Can't Think Clearly 43:23 Lucky People See $100 Bills on the Ground 46:29 "With Our Luck, It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Day" 49:38 Thank You Notes Create Provoked Luck 52:42 From Loving Your Kid to Liking Them 56:16 EOPC
682: Will Guidara - Obsession, Adversity, Learning From Danny Meyer, and The Only Competitive Advantage That Lasts... Unreasonable Hospitality
My new book is The Price of Becoming. To order, go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Will Guidara is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant he took from a struggling two-star establishment to become the number one restaurant in the world. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, the host of the Welcome Conference, and a co-producer on the Emmy award-winning series The Bear. Notes: Key Learnings "Obsession is a beautiful thing when you can grab it by the tail." This quote is from chef Sean Brock when he opened his pizza place in Nashville. For Will, obsession is when you care so much about something that you give all of yourself to bring its most fully realized version to life. What obsession means to Will: "Loving with every ounce of my being the pursuit of something." He can't imagine a life where he doesn't have something to be obsessed about. When you lose yourself in the pursuit of something, that's when it gets ugly. Obsession is a beautiful thing if you can grab it by the tail. For those that can't, it becomes ugly. You need to hold onto yourself while obsessively pursuing whatever it is. Find a hobby to be obsessed with before you retire. Will is 46 and has seen people he's long looked up to finally retire in their late seventies without a hobby they're obsessed with. They're feeling listless and without purpose. He's thinking about this now for his future: start to become obsessed with a hobby so that when you do one day retire, there's something else to fall into. "Adversity is a terrible thing to waste." You cannot always control what life throws at you, but you can always control how you react to those things, what you choose to learn from them, how you allow them to fuel your competitive spirit, the perspective you glean from those moments. Allow yourself and your team to feel the weight of the disappointment. When there's a moment of adversity, leaders hear "adversity is a terrible thing to waste" and immediately shift into cheerleader mode. That is not the right thing to do. You need to allow yourself to be as human as humanly possible, and give your team the grace to fully feel the weight of that disappointment. Sometimes adversity sucks, and you just need to be able to say, "This sucks. I don't feel good. I feel bad. Let's feel bad for a moment." Suffer together. When your team is going through adversity, you want to know that your leader thinks it sucks, too. It's good to feel bad alongside a community, but then after a measure of time, that's when you say, okay, now how do we grow from this? How do we use this to compel us forward? Be thankful for the tough moments. Will can look back at every tough moment with gratitude. The girl who broke his heart two years before he met his now wife, he's so grateful that she did. Breaking up with his business partner and selling his restaurant company felt like the worst thing ever, but he wouldn't have written Unreasonable Hospitality had that not happened. "Who is a restaurateur without restaurants?" COVID forced Will to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next. When he sold the company, two days later, he had a full-blown identity crisis. COVID gave him the gift of forcing him to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next, as opposed to running back to do the thing he'd always done. Team first. "The best way to make sure that you are taking care of your customers is to start by taking care of your team." This is what Will learned from Danny Meyer. The power of language to define a culture. How beautiful and impactful it is when you take the time to clearly and succinctly articulate your values through language. Danny spoke in "isms." Every time he gave them an ism, it was clear that thing mattered to him, so it needed to matter to the team as well. Cult is short for culture. Will's friends from college joked that he worked for a cult, but cult is short for culture. The funny thing is, they worked for companies that lacked a culture. Every great team feels a little cultish, and that's because of the leader. Hospitality is the advantage. The only competitive advantage that exists over the long term comes through hospitality. Every company is trying to identify its competitive advantage: what is the thing about the business that will prevent someone else from coming in and taking away its customers? Those conversations almost always center around the quality of the product or the strength of the brand. Here's the thing: it does not just matter how good the product is, and it does not just matter how strong the brand is, because eventually someone's going to come around and build a better product or create a stronger brand. Relationships matter. Hospitality comes through consistently, generously, and creatively investing in relationships. Those take a long time to build, and if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you will earn takes a very long time to erode. McDonald's vs. Chick-fil-A. The hospitality difference. McDonald's does some of the coolest marketing things in the world. Their product is consistent, and there was probably a season for a very long time where they were the best burger chain out there. Compare that to Chick-fil-A: if you ask 10 people who makes a better chicken sandwich, a lot of people would say other people make better chicken sandwiches than Chick-fil-A. But people are still loyal to Chick-fil-A, not because of the brand, not because of the product, but because of the way that they make people feel. Little gestures go a long way. Chick-fil-A does things like "my pleasure" and refilling your drinks in the dining room. These little gestures go a long way because we are much less likely to leave one company and go to another, even if the other company is better priced and the product is a little bit better. Food is just a conduit through which to express hospitality. As many stories as you hear about Chick-fil-A doing little and big things to make people feel seen, you don't hear those stories about McDonald's. And that's not an accident. One company has chosen to invest all of itself in pursuit of that. The other one has not. If you're in the business of serving other people, these opportunities exist for you in an endless way. Find the smallest touchpoints. Every experience you're serving is filled with lots of big and little touchpoints. The problem is so many companies focus on only the most obvious touchpoints without realizing that there is impact to be made with each one of them. Hospitality is a craft, a muscle that you can strengthen. Will created the Welcome Conference because he wanted someone who was a server at a restaurant who had dreams to own their own restaurant to have a place where they could learn about the craft of hospitality. What you can't afford to do with money, you can afford to do with time. Will can't afford the kind of speaking fees that people who inspire others on stage at his conference deserve, so he came up with a more creative way to show appreciation: a dinner the night before. It's about community, because the people who take that stage have the responsibility to create the conditions through which attendees can come together and form community. And it's impossible to form a community for others until you first feel a sense of community amongst yourselves. There needs to be a good reason for the event to exist. Will created the Welcome Conference years ago because there were chef conferences all over the world, and he was always the only dining room person speaking at them. He wanted a place for the dining room people to have community. Gift bags are a terrible idea. People think the more they put in the bag, the more hospitable they are. It's usually junk. "I look at something, design the version of that I wish existed, work obsessively to bring that vision to life, and then welcome others into my imagination." What makes a great conference is meeting the people at those events. The best events are about the people in between the meetings. That time matters. Energy in a room is so important. Will is one of the most extroverted people in the world, but if he walks into a cocktail party and he doesn't know anyone, he seizes up. He doesn't like it. He likes to be around people he knows. Be a connector. A month before Will's event, he realized many people were coming alone, which he wasn't expecting. They sent an email to all of them and said, "We saw that you're coming alone. We have an idea. If you'd like to meet some people, let us know." They set up dinner reservations at Will's favorite restaurants in Nashville and did some matchmaking. Those 40 people ended up coming into the beginning of the conference the next day already like this one big, awesome community. Make the "yes" as easy as possible. Will gets Emmy screeners, and some people send DVDs (which he doesn't have a player for), while others send QR codes, which make it very easy to watch. The lesson: make it easy for people to say yes to what you're offering. Shop your own business. Stay in your own hotel. Until you've actually been on the receiving end of whatever you're serving, you have an inability to see all the things you're doing wrong or the opportunities you have to do more things right. "Never let a gracious impulse pass." There's the devil and angel on your shoulder. The devil will tell you how hard it will be. Don't listen to that. If you are going to shop your own business, when an idea pops up, do something about it. Get out of the sea of mediocrity. The Unreasonable Hospitality Guide is the "how." There are exercises on how to build a team, how to build a culture of hospitality, how to work with your team to create magic, daily huddles to move the needle, the dreamweaver concept, etc. "I've never once regretted caring more. I have regretted not caring enough." People can't always notice things, but they can feel it. Reflection Questions What are you obsessed with? If you had to retire tomorrow, what hobby would you fall into? If you don't have one, what can you start becoming obsessed with now? What adversity are you currently facing? Have you allowed yourself and your team to fully feel the weight of that disappointment before shifting into problem-solving mode? Map out every single touchpoint in your customer experience. Which ones is nobody else thinking about? How can you make those more awesome? More Learning #545 - Will Guidara: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect #372 - Will Guidara: The Nobility of Service Podcast Chapters 01:00 The Price of Becoming 02:16 The Correlation of Obsession and Excellence 08:06 Adversity Is Fuel 11:38 COVID Identity Reset 15:19 Lessons From Danny Meyer 20:36 The Hospitality Advantage 26:01 Touchpoint Experience Audit 28:55 Welcome Conference Preview 30:44 Creating Community Over Dinner 32:02 Creating A Magical Event 33:35 Why Events Must Exist 35:30 Designing Hospitable Touchpoints 40:42 Make It Easy To Say Yes 45:58 Never Let a Gracious Impulse Pass 47:29 Unreasonable Hospitality Field Guide: The How To 51:20 Obsession, Care, And Excellence 55:53 EOPC
680: Scott Galloway: Action Absorbs Anxiety, Handling the Haters, Becoming an Excellent Storyteller, Reverse Engineering Your Success, The Importance of Novelty, and Why Praise Is the Most Underrated Leadership Tool
Go to Go to https://www.learningleader.com/becoming to see the pre-order bonuses for The Price of Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Scott Galloway is the New York Times bestselling author of books including The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, Adrift, and The Algebra of Wealth. Notes: Key Learnings Routine speeds up time, novelty slows it down. If you want life to go fast, just spend it alone and have a routine and never bust out of that routine. What makes life interesting is diversity in people, because people are complicated, and relationships are complicated. Lean into your emotions to slow time down. If you see something that moves you, stop, think about it, ask yourself why it moves you, and try to cement that moment in your brain. Otherwise, you're not sleepwalking through life; you're sleep sprinting. "The greatest wasted resource in history is good intentions that don't get articulated." No matter how famous someone is, they love affirmation as much as anybody else. Good thoughts that don't get articulated are wasted. Absorb when you're upset and lean into emotions, good and bad. This sort of marks the day and slows things down. Otherwise, if you get up every morning, do the same thing, eat the same thing, have the same relationship, the week's just gonna go really fast. Reverse engineer your success to things that aren't your fault. What are the things that played a role in your success that you had no control over? Your luck, your good fortune. For Scott: big government, assisted lunch, Pell Grants, University of California, technology financed by middle-class taxpayers, DARPA, the internet, deep pools of capital, and acceptance of failure. His mom told him he had value every day. Scott's mom, every day, implicitly and explicitly, told him and communicated to him that he had value. That builds a basic confidence that manifests in different ways: the confidence to fail, approach strangers, believe you're worthy of love, that you'll add value to a company, and that you can ask for tens of millions of dollars from someone. When good things happened, he used to call his mom. Whether it was getting a bonus at Morgan Stanley or striking up a conversation with a woman at Starbucks and getting her number, Scott used to call his mom. Your parents can bask in your victory, and you can brag to your parents, and it's okay. If there's no one there with you, it's like it didn't happen. Scott travels for business and stays at really nice hotels, and inevitably gets upgraded to the penthouse or the George V in Paris when he's alone. But if there's no one there with you, it's like it didn't happen. Celebrate victories, tell people how much they mean to you. You have to call your friends, celebrate their victories, celebrate your own, and tell people how much they mean to you. Every day, no matter what, tell your kids you're proud of them and love them. No matter how much Scott's kids piss him off, at some point, he finds a way to say, "I'm proud of you, and I love you immensely. You know that, right?" He hopes they have that same kind of base or pillar of confidence he had his whole life. Having someone tell you they believe in you every day works. You don't have to be a baller or successful. Just having someone in your life and every day telling them they mean a lot to you, they can't help but not believe you after a while. Being a leader isn't about being the smartest person in the room. Scott used to think being a leader was being the smartest person in the room, and he had trouble, especially with other men, thinking if he acknowledged someone else was doing a good job, somehow that made him less impressive. You have so much currency as a founder or manager. If you're in a management or leadership role, much less a founder, you have so much currency to pull someone into a conference room and say, "You were outstanding in that meeting" or "I just read this, and I love this paragraph. God, where did you come up with this idea?" You literally see these people just light up. "If you're thinking it, say it." The instant you're thinking something positive about somebody, just tell them, text them, call them. Don't wait. We have a tendency to think other people are telepathic, that they must sense we think they're wonderful. No, they don't sense it. Articulate it. When you're on your deathbed, you're not gonna think "I gave too much praise at work and told too many people how much they meant to me." Young people need watering. If you don't give young people feedback and praise when they deserve it, it's like having a ton of capital and not spending it. Especially with young people, they need watering. Feedback is incredible compensation. Whenever someone does something good, Scott tries to remind himself via email. Then, when he does their review at the end of the year, it's like, " Wow, this dude is paying attention. That is a form of compensation. Give thoughtful reviews that show you understand them. Tell them what they need to develop to get to the next level. Pay for the courses they need. They're a single mom who needs flexibility and wants to make more money. That's compensation. "Become a clip machine." Certain people are clip machines: James Clear, Morgan Housel, Kat Cole, Scott Galloway. These are people who communicate ideas in ways that are instantly shareable and memorable. For leaders, becoming an effective communicator isn't optional anymore. You need to be able to inspire and move people. The ability to write well is the stem of storytelling. It forces you to manage your thoughts and think things through. It's difficult to be a great storyteller if you can't write at a competent level. Rank yourself across every medium and go deep on one. Look at every medium (texting, LinkedIn, short form video, TikTok, long form writing, speaking), rank yourself, listen to yourself, decide what your specialty is, and then go very deep into one. Figure out your medium and commit to being in the top 1%. Challenge yourself to be in the top 10% within a year, the top 1% within three years. Identify which medium you have skills in, then challenge yourself. If you're in the top 6,000 podcasts out of 600,000 that put out content every week, you're in the top 1%. "Social media may make you want to shower after you use it, but it's frightening how powerful it is." In terms of economic power and influence, it's frightening how powerful social media is right now. If you're a young person and you want to be influential or economically secure, you need to master it. Storytelling is the enduring skill to give your kids. Scott's core competence is storytelling. His superpower is attracting and retaining people who help leverage his skills. The most radical act in a capitalist society is not participation. Scott started Resist and Unsubscribe because action absorbs anxiety. He was sick of being virtuous and courageous on a keyboard or a mic and wanted to do something. "Ready, fire, fucking aim on this thing called life." Scott wants to dance like no one is watching. He's gonna be dead soon, and it's all going really fast. He doesn't want to look back and think about losing sponsors or what people thought was stupid. He wants to think, "Right on, I tried to do something." He wants to be that guy who was unafraid, who showed up with a carpool to try and make a difference. Your spending or lack thereof is a weapon hiding in plain sight. The government most quickly responded six years ago during COVID, not because tens of thousands of people were dying, but because the GDP crashed 31%. The president backs away from plans when the bond market or stock market goes down. Even a gnat on an elephant matters. Even if it's just a gnat on an elephant, enough gnats will take down an elephant. If you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, you have an obligation to speak out. Sam Harris has this great saying: if you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, then you have an obligation to speak out and speak your mind, because most people don't have that luxury. Do what makes you feel good about yourself. It's not easy being mediocre-looking; it takes real effort. Scott grew up very skinny with bad acne and thinks maybe he's a little too focused or self-conscious about his looks. America is ageist, and looks matter. New York is the ultimate tip of the spear for a capitalist society, and it's optimized for two people: hot women and rich guys. For everyone else, it's a soul-crushing experience. We can talk about the way the world should be and the way the world is. That's the way the world is. Start working out. Scott coaches young men: start working out. It's good for your head. It shows women and employers you're in shape, not just because it looks good (which it does), but because it reflects how you show up, that you have discipline, that you can commit to something. The rule of threes puts you in the top 5% of attractiveness. If you work out three times a week or more, if you spend at least 30 hours a week working outside of the house, and put yourself in the company of strangers (church group, nonprofits, sports league), just by doing those three things, you put yourself in the top 5% of attractiveness of young males. Anyone who's had great yeses has had a shit ton of no's. If you can be in the top 5% and learn how to mourn and move on from rejection, at some point, you'll be voluntarily celibate, which is awesome. There were hundreds of no's for you to get to a top podcast. You get used to no. No one has the right to a living or to reproduce. If you want to score above your class economically or romantically, get out a big spoon and get ready to eat shit. It's what everyone of us has done. "I'm constantly worried about my boys now." Scott didn't worry about his kids when they were little unless they were sick - they were safe and home. Now he's worried about them all the time: are they doing okay at school? Is the quiet one okay? His champagne toast moment would be celebrating his son's first year of college going well - having fun, a good friend group, a couple of dates, football games, and gearing up for sophomore year. Reflection Questions What things played a role in your success that you had no control over? Your luck, your good fortune. How does reverse engineering to those things change your perspective? Who in your life needs to hear that you're proud of them and that they mean a lot to you? When's the last time you actually said it? Rank yourself across every medium you participate in (texting, LinkedIn, video, writing, speaking). What's your specialty? Are you willing to commit to being in the top 1% of that medium within three years? More Learning #578: Scott Galloway - The Algebra of Wealth #492: Scott Galloway - Finding What You're Good At #396: Scott Galloway - Turning Crisis Into Opportunity Podcast Chapters 00:00 Preorder my new book! 02:45 Meet Scott Galloway 04:13 Resilience To Criticism 05:43 Slowing Time With Novelty 08:43 Scott's Mom Building Confidence 14:52 Use Praise As a Leadership Currency 24:27 Becoming A Great Storyteller 31:06 Resist And Unsubscribe Origins 35:35 What Comes Next 37:13 Facing Both Backlash and Support 39:45 Living Unafraid 41:23 Why Sell Prof G? 42:37 Building Enterprise Value 46:46 The Openness of Cosmetic Surgery 48:47 The World's View on the Physical 50:42 Rule of Threes for Men 53:11 Scott's Champagne Toast 56:52 The Belief of Reasonable Politics 58:10 Where to Find Scott Online 01:02:14 EOPC
679: Kat Cole - From Hooters Waitress to $500M CEO, You're Interviewing for Your Next Job Every Day, Learning vs. Ego, The Four Key Mindsets for Senior Leaders, and The Journey of Who You Become
Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Kat Cole is the CEO of AG1 (formerly Athletic Greens) and a renowned business leader known for a meteoric rise from Hooters waitress to Fortune 40 Under 40 executive. As former President/COO of Focus Brands (Cinnabon), she specializes in scaling global brands. Her career is defined by driving billions in sales, strategic innovation, and a strong, people-first leadership style. Key Learnings You can't market your way out of a bad product. AG1 has 3x'd the business in four years while being in only one channel (direct to consumer) for 15 years. 80% of retail is in brick and mortar, so they were doing that volume in less than 20% of where transactions happen. That only works when customers love the product, keep buying it for years, and tell their friends. Scale comes from trusted recommendations, not marketing spend. Real volume comes from people telling their friends, recommending it to their teams and companies. That's where real scale and sustainable growth comes from. Two questions guide every career decision. Is my work done here? Can someone else do what the company needs better than I can? If the answer to either is yes, that guides you toward pushing for change in your role, the way you show up, or finding the next opportunity. Sometimes the best move is the lesser-known role. Kat could have stayed running big franchise brands everyone knew (Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's), but becoming COO of the parent company, Focus Brands, was a bigger, more complex role. Lesser known, smaller team, bigger stretch, more learning. That bridged her into consumer packaged goods and got her ready for AG1. Consider financial needs, learning, and ego separately. Between financial needs, your ability to learn or contribute, and your ego or optics, there are questions you can ask yourself about a particular moment or opportunity that will help you be sharper in what you actually want versus what just looks like what's best next on the surface. The founder heard her on podcasts and asked for an introduction. AG1's founder heard Kat on a couple of podcasts, knew Sahil Bloom, and asked Sahil to make the intro. She just happened to be taking time off and had been a customer for two years. "You're interviewing for your next job every day." Whatever you do now, that choice of time, that tone of voice, that decision, how you show up or don't, creates an impact that leads to an experience and people's actions and then results. Eventually, it leads to the next thing. Showing kindness in the airport matters. A caring note to someone struggling, a teacher or stranger saying, "I see something in you," a compliment when someone's in a dark place. It helps people out of darkness. Or opportunistically, being the one who sent the email or made the ask means you're the one who got the opportunity. Don't burn bridges even when you feel wronged. When Kat was an executive at Hooters at 26, peers in their 50s and 60s would say things in meetings that weren't kind or appropriate. She would write letters expressing how it made her feel, but never sent them. She processed, reflected, and showed up professionally. Years later, those same people became advocates, partners, and references. Four key mindsets for senior leaders. Humility, curiosity, courage, and confidence. By the time candidates get to Kat, they've been vetted on technical capability. She spends time validating those four characteristics because leadership and style trickle far into the organization. Ask "if not for" questions to reveal humility. When someone tells you how they stood tall in tough moments, ask what enabled them to do those great things. They'll say, "I had access to this data, this team, this technical leader." Then ask: "If those people did not exist, if that resource did not exist, how would you have navigated that?" You peel back layers and see if they have the humility to acknowledge their success was due to critical factors. The best candidates do the job in the interview. When someone says, "If we're doing this, we'll absolutely need this person in this specific role," or they have people in mind they're bringing with them, that's a good sign. Hiring leaders who have people who are loyal to them shows something real. In reference checks, ask, "What does this person need to be successful?" It's a positive framing to get at what someone might lack or require around them to be effective. Help people answer "how should I think about this?" In a fully remote company, you have less context and fewer vibes. When you send a note about ending a product line or launching something you said you'd never launch, people's subconscious internal war is "how should I think about this?" Leaders should start communications with "here's how I think about this" or "here's how we should think about this." Sometimes the answer is to shut up and speak last. As teams get stronger, there's more weight on the few things the CEO says. Leave space for other leaders to lead. Kat removed herself from some meetings entirely because she has such great leaders and a strong culture. Pay attention to themes in criticism, not individual attacks. When competitors attack you, ask: Are there patterns? Is there something reflective of industry questions? Sometimes criticisms point to things you already do well but aren't communicating well enough. Comparison ads work short-term but don't build credibility long-term. Challenger brands use the playbook of "we're like the leader, but better/cheaper." Consumers see through it. People tell AG1, "I saw an ad comparing their product to yours, and they're clearly saying you're the leader." The rage bait is brief; the truth is long. Algorithms reward dopamine hits and rage bait. Something untrue or negatively spun can quickly become widely seen because the critique is brief and witty, but the explanation and truth are long. AG1 has more human trials on a single SKU than any other multi-ingredient product ever in the space, but that's harder to say in a sound bite. Don't criticize a car for not taking you to the moon. Someone criticized one of AG1's products for not doing something the product isn't supposed to do. When addressing criticism, clarify what the product is actually designed to do. Her husband will be the fourth person ever to row across three oceans. He's already rowed the Atlantic (set the US record as a pair) and the Caribbean. Now he's training for the Pacific. If he completes it, he'll be only the fourth person to have ever done it in the world. It's about who you become while striving for the big thing. After her husband got rescued in the Caribbean, he questioned why he was doing this with two kids. But this pursuit is who he is, what drives him, it's inspiring for the kids, and it makes him a better person when he's home. It's about the journey and who you do it with. More Learning 476: Kat Cole - Raise Your Hand, Raise Your Voice 078: Kat Cole - Courage, Confidence, Curiosity, and Humility Reflection Questions Is your work done where you are? Can someone else do what the company needs better than you can? When interviewing someone, ask what enabled them to succeed in a tough moment. Then ask: if that team or resource didn't exist, how would you have done it differently? What communication this week needs context? Start with: here's what this means, what it's not about, and how we should think about it. Audio Timestamps 00:18 Meet Kat Cole 02:42 AG1's Growth Story: $160M to $500M+ 03:28 Product-Led Growth Wins 05:57 Kat on Writing and Reflection 07:39 Two Questions for Every Career Move 12:25 How Kat Joined AG1 16:09 You're Always Interviewing 18:47 Neutralizing Opposition at Hooters 24:19 Hiring Great Leaders 27:43 Inside Executive Interviews 31:56 Reference Checks That Reveal Truth 32:52 CEO as the Storyteller 34:16 "How Should I Think About This?" 35:46 Speak Last, Empower Leaders 37:41 Handling Public Criticism 39:59 Separating Signal from Noise 44:49 Staying Focused Through Criticism 48:00 Champagne Question: Family First 48:45 Rowing Three Oceans 51:37 Who You Become on the Journey 56:14 EOPC
678: Jamie Siminoff (Ring Doorbell Inventor) - Shark Tank Rejection, Selling to Amazon for $1 Billion, Surviving $3M to $480M Hypergrowth, Hiring Passionate People Over Experts, and Jeff Bezos's Leadership Lessons
www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Jamie Siminoff is the founder of Ring, which he sold to Amazon for over a billion dollars. He's an inventor and builder who couldn't hear his doorbell while working in his garage, so he built a video doorbell. When his wife said it made her feel safer, he realized technology had changed, and home security needed a complete reinvention. Ring became the world's largest home security company with a mission to make neighborhoods safer. Key Learnings Jeff Bezos reads and writes his own stuff. When Jamie asked Jeff to write something for the book's back cover, Jeff actually read it and wanted his own curated quote that was from him. Jeff loves entrepreneurs, so they kept him out of negotiations. After the Whole Foods deal, Amazon learned to keep Jeff out of negotiations because he finds it tough to negotiate hard with someone he respects. Hardware companies can die while growing fast. Ring grew from $3M to $30M to $174M to $480M, which sounds amazing. But to go from $170M to $480M, you're buying hundreds of millions of dollars of product when you're selling less than that. If sales growth slows, you're basically going out of business. Going from $480M to over a billion in revenue was like being on a motorcycle at 200 miles an hour. If a leaf falls down and hits you, you're dead. At Amazon, when Ring said, "We need another billion dollars to order stuff for next year," Amazon said, "Okay, what else do you want?" There are different types of entrepreneurs. Jamie is an inventor/entrepreneur. There are business entrepreneurs who are maniacal business people we've never heard of that have just crushed it. Jamie is maniacal on product and brings invention into how they run the company. Hire marathon runners. Marathons are the dumbest thing any human could ever do. Even if you win, no one cares. Jamie finished the Boston Marathon in 22,000th place and he's so proud of himself. You want people that don't care about external validation; they just care about getting the mission done. AI has democratized all information. With AI making it so you don't even need to know C++ programming anymore, fill your business with passionate people who care about the mission and they'll crush anything. When building your team, start with the mission. Jamie tells people, "Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. Do you want to work on making neighborhoods safer? Because if you don't, you're going to be miserable here. You're going to hear it every day, and you're going to roll your eyes." Referrals work because people don't want to let you down. The best hires are when someone's referred by someone (uncle, friend, whatever) because they feel guilty. They don't want to let the person who referred them down. Find an infinite truth to work on. Amazon's core principles are infinite: Will customers always want lower price, more selection, and faster delivery? Yes. If you deliver in 30 minutes, they'll want it in 10 minutes. Making neighborhoods safer is an infinite thing to work on. Your wife saying one thing can change everything. Jamie built a video doorbell so he could hear the door from his garage. His wife said, "It makes me feel safer at home." That's when he realized technology had changed and home security needed a whole new approach. The hard part is bringing the infinite down to the tactical. When you have an infinite mission, you can get overwhelmed trying to solve it all at once. You have to figure out what to do every single day to work toward that infinite goal. Shark Tank was a disaster that turned into everything. Jamie went on Shark Tank desperately needing money. He got zero offers and cried in his car after. But when it aired, the boost in sales gave them cash to hire people and build Ring, which started the clock on their success. Sometimes you can't stop because you're in too deep. After Shark Tank bombed, Jamie couldn't back out. He'd already ordered too many products and owed too much money. He'd be personally bankrupt if he stopped. People think he's tough for keeping going, but he didn't have a choice. Being naive is a superpower. Great inventions are things people say can't happen because if they could happen, they'd already be out there. You have to be naive enough to say "I think I can do this" or "I don't even know that I can't." People said you couldn't build a battery-operated camera on WiFi. Jamie had never built anything before, so what did he know? They just went out and tried to put some parts together that seemed like they would work. Knowing too much gets in the way of doing the work. If you're thinking and analyzing the whole world, that's time you're not inventing, building, making calls. When are you actually doing the work? The Ring.com domain negotiation was survival. The owner originally wanted $750K for the domain. Jamie had $178K in the bank on the day he was supposed to pay. He called and said "My board said I can't do the deal, but they approved $175K today and $1M total over two years." The guy hung up, called back, and said fine. There was no board, it was just Jamie. The stress internalized and destroyed him. Jamie wasn't sleeping and was super stressed. There are different types of entrepreneurs: some can handle that stress and sleep like a baby. Jamie internalized it, and it affected him terribly. Be transparent at home. Jamie's son was six years old and knew where the business was. His kindergarten teacher would say, "I hear the business isn't going well." They just had open, adult conversations about everything. Work-life integration, not balance. Jamie integrated work, life, and family together. His son came with him to pick up the first DoorBot in China. Oliver has been to 40 countries and almost every state because he traveled to every meeting. Bring your kid to the meeting. People asked, "How do you bring your kid to a meeting?" Jamie said, "Who do you think they're gonna remember more?" We're always scared to be different. Follow your passion, but make money when you need to. It's hard to see anyone who's achieved greatness who didn't do what they loved. But there are times you have to work your ass off to make money (Jamie was a bellhop and valet parking cars). When you set out to do something, do something you care about. If you fail trying to make money, that really sucks. If you fail trying to do something you love, at least you tried to do something you love. If Ring fails, they try to make neighborhoods safer. That's noble. You can tell who's successful by how fast they respond. It's a weird flip-flop of what it should be. You'd think a successful person should respond in a month, but the people running at the highest levels are actually very efficient. There's something about it. First principles thinking eliminates recurring meetings. There's no way every single Monday at 9 AM you have something important to talk about. The world can't exist like that. Meet when you need to do something, not on some cadence. Hire the best and let them work. Get the best quarterback, best kicker, best coach. Let them work together, let them practice, have the plays. You don't need to get together every day to talk about how you're feeling. No standing meetings, zero recurring one-on-ones. Jamie doesn't have a standing meeting with his team in any cadence. He talks to people all day long, all night long, Sundays, but it's event-based. "We have to get sales up on this, where are the issues?" If you're not doing your job, we'll fire you. Service to others is the best thing you can do. A year from now, Jamie would be celebrating something on the charitable side. Probably something with their work in South Central LA with LAPD, or at their 75-acre farm in Missouri helping the town that's been impacted by opioids and industrial farming. More Learning #191: Robert Herjavec: (Shark Tank Investor) - You Don't Have to Be a Shark to Be Effective #626: Rob Kimbel - The Power of Grit and Generosity #632: Nick Huber - The Sweaty Start Up Reflection Questions What's a problem you could pursue for decades without exhausting its potential? What mission has no endpoint, only continuous improvement? Work-life integration. What are you keeping separate that might be better together? Where could you stop trying to "balance" and instead integrate? Audio Timestamps 02:19 Bezos' Endorsement for Jamie 03:30 Selling Ring to Amazon 05:04 Hypergrowth Cash Crunch 07:54 Inventor vs Business Operator 09:34 Hiring Marathoners 11:20 Interviewing and Firing Fast 13:25 Mission Origin and Big Vision 15:40 Infinite Truth and Focus 17:06 Getting on Shark Tank 19:32 Live Demo and Rejection 23:13 The Aftermath and Momentum from Shark Tank 24:57 Naivete as Superpower 27:00 Doers Beat Planners 27:33 Winning Ring.com Deal 30:17 Stress and Family Support 31:33 Work-Life Integration 33:26 Passion Versus Practicality 36:08 Scaling Authentic Culture 37:26 Frontline Leadership Style 42:15 Team DNA & No Standing Meetings 45:19 Service and Jamie's Farm Mission 47:39 EOPC
677: Erin McGoff - How to Communicate at Work, Negotiate Your Salary, Write Cold Emails, Overcome Rejection, Run Better Meetings, and Build a Career That Matters
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader The Learning Leader Show Key Learnings Go out and dent the universe. Erin's parents didn't put pressure on her to get perfect grades or go to Harvard; they wanted her to use her privilege and beautiful upbringing to make the world a better place. Youngest child syndrome makes you quick. Being the youngest of six, Erin learned to speak very quickly to get her thoughts in at the dinner table, and she was given unsolicited advice her whole childhood (which is why she loves giving advice now). Your siblings' sole job is to keep you grounded. Erin's parents are proud and supportive, but her siblings roast her and beat her down (all in good fun) to keep her as humble as possible. Success is attributed to a sense of humor. Erin gave career advice that was funny, and nobody had ever really seen that before. You don't get that unless you're the slightly bullied youngest of six kids your entire life. Rejection rage is a choice. At a Women in Film networking event, the head of the organization paused Erin's documentary trailer 30 seconds in and said, "You need to be more realistic." Erin went on to get a Pulitzer fellowship and premiered a feature documentary at 23 with international distribution. When you get a rejection, you can either let it beat you down or say, "I'm going to show them." "Tell me about yourself" is the world's worst interview question. It's lazy, not specific, and hard for the interviewee to truncate their entire life into 90 seconds. Use the past-present-future template: 1-2 sentences about your past, 1-2 about your present role, then future (where the interviewer's ears perk up), connecting to why you're applying for this specific role. Specificity is the magic word. When sending cold emails, the chances of getting a good response dramatically increase if you're specific: specific praise, specific question. Instead of "Can I pick your brain over coffee?" say, "I watched your video about X, and when you said Y, it piqued my curiosity." Higher quality questions get higher quality answers. This isn't just for podcasts or job interviews; it's a life skill. Good professional communication is like chess, not checkers. Most people just play checkers (you said this to me, I'm going to say this to you), but chess is thinking 10 steps ahead about what your end goal is and how this person falls along the path to that goal. Don't ask for a raise; ask for an adjustment to your compensation. Your job is transactional (you do work, they pay you). When you accepted your salary, you were doing X, Y, Z. Now you're doing X, Y, Z plus A, B, C. It's no longer an equal partnership, so you need an adjustment. It's not personal, it's just professional. Know your audience and your leverage. Emotional regulation is powerful communication. If we just act impulsively and say what's on our mind all the time, it doesn't actually get you where you want to go. Always keep your desired outcome in mind. It's about checkmate. Don't just react, think about what the end goal is and how this conversation gets you there. Humanize people, don't make them wrong. That egotistical senior VP is probably actually really insecure about where they are in their career and wakes up every morning not knowing what they're doing. Put your ego to the side. Being a great communicator requires taking a break from thinking about yourself and thinking about what the other person's life is like and what their goals are. Align your goals with their goals. Think about how you can create that authentic relationship by figuring out how your goals align with what they're trying to accomplish. Shut up and listen. We do a little bit too much talking when we're trying to negotiate or strategize. It can be very beneficial to embrace the silence and practice active listening. Curiosity is an amazing way to show love. Being genuinely curious about a person makes them like you, and it becomes more natural the more you do it. Compliments have to be genuine and specific. People are way better at sniffing out fake compliments than you realize. If you can't find one thing you truly admire about someone, don't say anything. Don't make it transactional. When people ask, "How do I not make it feel like I'm using them?" Erin says, "Well, don't use them. Just be genuine." The most loving thing you can do is respect people's time. Meeting bloat has gotten really bad since the pandemic, and a lot of time is disrespected in meetings across the world. Maybe don't have the meeting. A lot of meetings are completely unnecessary, or at least the way they're set up, the people invited, or the way they're run are really inefficient. Only invite crucial people. Make sure that only the people who absolutely need to be there are invited to the meeting. Always have an agenda. At the beginning of every meeting, say "Here are the three things we're going to cover today, and here's the goal of this meeting." Put it in the calendar link with bullet points. Don't have brainstorming meetings. Have meetings with very tangible goals at the end, state them up front, and make sure that goal has been achieved by the end. Email subject lines are underutilized. Erin's dad's company would put tags like "request," "informational," or "command" on subject lines so you knew exactly what type of email it was and what was expected. The exercise of making a five-year plan changes your brain. Erin doesn't believe in sticking to a five-year plan, but the exercise of thinking about the future creates new neural pathways that change the way you think about yourself and your life. A happy life is an intentional life. The vast majority of people float through life and act very reactionary. Sitting down and thinking about what you actually want in five years is powerful self-care. Sit down with your partner and do this together. Before you get married, make five-year plans together. They might look really different (which is revealing) or really similar which doubles down on alignment. Create multiple five-year plans if you're young. If you don't know which path you're going to take, create five different scenarios for yourself and see which one energizes you most. Financial freedom is a goal worth stating. Erin wants to be financially free in the next five years, which allows her to pursue mission-driven work on her own terms. You're just another human trying to figure it out. Even though Erin wrote the book on workplace communication, she's still winging it every day just like everybody else. Combat the knowledge curse by staying connected to real people. When you're an expert in something, it's hard to imagine not being an expert. Erin moved back to Maryland suburbs to experience people working normal corporate jobs, DMs with people daily about their experiences, and gets on free calls just to listen. The data in newsletters tells a different story than people's actual experiences, so she stays grounded by hearing real anecdotes from IT workers in North Carolina or nurses in Kentucky. Set goals really high. Erin wants her startup to help 500,000 job seekers in a year, which is ambitious, but she doesn't care if she fails as long as she tries to reach it. More Learning #507 - Jesse Cole: How to Build Your Idea Muscle #344 - Jesse Cole: How to Create "You Wouldn't Believe" Moments #365 - James Altucher: How to Become An Idea Machine Reflection Questions Good communication is chess, not checkers. Think about a difficult conversation you need to have this week. Instead of just reacting to what they say, what's your desired outcome? What would "checkmate" look like, and how can you think 10 steps ahead to get there? Who in your life keeps you humble If no one does, how might you be losing perspective on yourself? What would it look like to invite that kind of honest feedback into your life? Erin recommends making a five-year plan, not to stick to it, but because the exercise creates new neural pathways. When's the last time you sat down and intentionally thought about what you want your life to look like in five years? What's stopping you from doing that this week?
676: Jesse Cole (Owner, Savannah Bananas) - The Beauty of Obsession, Building a Fans First World, Walt Disney, Mr. Beast, Radical Transparency (Opening the Books), Do the Opposite of Normal, Turning a $6M Mistake Into a Moment, and Creating Banana World
Go to www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My Guest: Jesse Cole is the owner of the Savannah Bananas. He went $1.8 million in debt, slept on an air mattress, and built a business that is now valued at over a billion dollars. I spent half a day with Jesse in Savannah watching practice, and Jesse gave me a personal tour of their entire operation. It was incredible. Notes: Fans First - The sign is on every locker. And leading out to the field, "Tonight is someone's first time seeing our show." Obsessed/Focused - Banana Ball/Serving people is his life. We didn't talk about hobbies, TV shows, or anything other than what they're doing now and in the future. He's obsessed with what he does and super focused. Transparent - Jesse just released their full P&L as a private company: revenue, expenses, player salaries, everything. Most businesses guard this religiously. He's completely transparent. I asked why, and he said, "Fans first. They deserve to know everything." Reps - We went to the field to watch practice. It looked just like a game. Players were dancing all the time. And every single rep they practiced as a trick play (behind the back, through the legs, etc.). They never play normal baseball. You wonder how they are so good on gameday at doing a backflip while catching a fly ball. Because they practice it thousands of times without fans so that when they're there, they put on a great show. Hiring – "Love your people more than you love your customer." 12,000 people on the waitlist to work for the Bananas. When you hire, have them do a "fans first" essay. Then they write a future essay. Always Be Caring, Different, Enthusiastic, Fun, Growing, & Hungry Fans First: The Counter-Intuitive Decision - Jesse sacrificed $6 million in ticket revenue after a system messed things up for fans. Merch – 787,000 fans purchased merchandise in 2025, totaling 1.96 million total items. That means the average person is purchasing ~2.5 items at checkout, with 80% of total sales taking place in person. 621,000 at live shows versus 166,000 online. It's a $50m business! TV: The Distribution Strategy - Giving Away Value - Jesse insisted on free YouTube streaming even when ESPN wanted exclusivity. Jesse is building a zero-profit secondary ticket market. He's literally giving away things other sports properties would monetize. So, even with all of the team's games still airing for free on YouTube, the Bananas averaged 500,000 viewers on ESPN, The CW, and Roku. The team's most-watched broadcast was a July 4th game at Fenway Park, which averaged 837,000 viewers on ESPN, making it the holiday weekend's most-watched primetime sports broadcast. TV networks want exclusivity, but you demand that the games still be broadcast for free on YouTube (in addition to whatever channel they are on) Social Media - The Bananas added 12.7 million new social media followers in 2025 alone. That pushes their total social media following across all channels north of 35 million... Roughly 2x more followers than MLB's most popular team, the Yankees, at 18 million. You have to believe something before you achieve something. Six years ago, Jesse said, "We're gonna sell out Fenway Park," and his team looked at him like he was crazy (they were a college summer baseball team, not even doing tours yet). You have to get through the messy to get to the great. Their first world tour was brutal: the sound was terrible, the show wasn't great, the game finished in the seventh inning because they didn't have a rule to make it go nine innings. See what's best for the guest, not what's best for the business. Walt Disney was the first to go into full-length animation, color, sound, and with Disneyland, he focused on one entrance to control the experience, custom rides, and invested in a castle and landscaping, which made no money. Go where others won't go. Sam Walton went to small towns, and no one paid attention to him for the first five to ten years. It's somebody's first time every night. Fans wait three years on a waitlist to come to a game, so Jesse doesn't care if you're having a bad day. That's their first time. Control the entire experience. Walt learned he couldn't control the experience when people watched his movies at a theater (it could be dirty, and people might not be nice), so he built Disneyland. Who do we work for? Fans. Jesse opened the books completely (numbers, player salary, merch sales, everything) because they have a responsibility and accountability to their fans. We have to feel our mistakes. When they sent a wrong email to 44,000 fans instead of 4,000, it cost them $6 million to take care of those fans with tickets (more than the company brought in their first five years). We need to have bigger failures. If we're not trying things big enough, we won't have bigger failures and mistakes that cost us a lot more in the future. Turn mistakes into moments. After the $6 million email mistake, Jesse set up a Zoom call with all 44,000 people, had everyone turn their cameras on, and apologized while looking at every single person. Build something you wish existed for yourself. Jesse played baseball until he couldn't anymore. He put so much pressure on himself that it wasn't fun anymore, and he was told he wasn't good enough. Design every second of the first-day experience. When players showed up, they went to a parking lot with a DJ at 8:30 AM. Three buses arrived with balloons, hundreds of people lined the streets cheering, Man-nanas served munchkins on silver platters, a custom hype video played, the host introduced from the roof, and fireworks went off. Every player has been told they're not good enough. All Bananas players have been drafted or been top college players, and at some point, they've all been rejected, cut, told to hang it up. Obsession is awesome. If you can find something you're obsessed with, so few people in the world get to have that. Watch the best of the best obsess over details. Derek Hough (one of the greatest dancers) wasn't just focusing on the dance; he was producing while dancing, telling the camera crew exactly where to come, when to hit him, and where he would wink. No one goes home excited about normal. No one says, "That restaurant was really normal, the waiter served it the same way, the food was pretty normal, the parking lot was normal." Whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. Normal gets normal results. There's a lot of normal in the world, but not a lot of extraordinary. Put yourself in the customer's shoes and eliminate friction. Where's the game tonight? On Amazon, Peacock, CBS, NBC? Jesse threw away millions to keep all games free on YouTube because that's a friction point. Your fans will reward you. The Bananas sold over 1.9 million merch items last year because they built something people are proud of and want to wear. If people don't want to wear your merch, you haven't made them feel something yet. One fan gets a new Bananas tattoo every year (he's got six logos on his leg now). Invest everything in the experience, spend zero on traditional marketing. Make the experience so good that fans will share with everyone that this is something they haven't experienced before. Social media growth came from trying and stumbling into learning. In 2016, an intern said he could create videos; they did a lip sync to "Can't Stop the Feeling" by Justin Timberlake. It wasn't even well-produced, but they tried. Give energy back because of how good it feels. A woman came up to Jesse on a cruise and said she was there because he gave her a hug at a Sacramento game the day after her sister died. She came on the cruise to give him a hug back. Do what gives you energy. Jesse's entire day is filled with things that give him energy: being with people, rehearsing shows, banana ball youth meetings, broadcast team, and talented writers. Have people who love to execute. You do what gives you energy and have them execute at a high level. Be very involved at the beginning (get the idea and vision right) and at the end (make adjustments).
675: Tom Hardin (Tipper X) - The Largest Insider Trading Case, How Ambiguous Leadership Destroys Culture, Resume vs. Eulogy Virtues, Bad Decisions vs. Mistakes, and Building Psychological Safety
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Tom Hardin was known as "Tipper X" during Operation Perfect Hedge, the largest insider trading investigation in history. After making four illegal trades based on inside information, the FBI approached him on a Manhattan street corner and convinced him to wear a wire over 40 times, helping build 20 of the 81 cases. Key Learnings Ambiguity is where ethical lines blur. Tom's boss said, "Do whatever it takes," after the hedge fund lost money, and as a junior employee, Tom didn't ask clarifying questions. The undiscussable becomes undiscussable. Leaders give ambiguous messages, then pretend they weren't ambiguous, employees get confused and don't question the boss, and you end up with a culture of silence. Making decisions in isolation is dangerous. The information came to Tom and he didn't talk to his boss or his wife (who probably would've slapped him around for crossing ethical lines). Psychological safety requires muscle memory. You have to practice saying "I'm just going to ask some clarifying questions here" when your boss gives ambiguous orders. Bad decisions aren't mistakes. Mistakes are made without intent, but bad decisions are made with intent. Tom told himself for years he made "mistakes," but on a drive home from speaking at a keynote, he realized: "There's no way I made mistakes. I made bad decisions." Never say never. Tom argues you're more susceptible to falling down your own slippery slope when you think "that would never be me." 80% of employees can be swayed either way. 10% are morally incorruptible, 10% are a compliance nightmare, and 80% can be influenced by the culture around them. Tone at the top means nothing. Company culture isn't the tone at the top or glossy shareholder letters; it's the behaviors employees believe will be rewarded or put them ahead. Reward character, not just results. You can't just focus on short-term performance and dollar goals without understanding how the business was made and what was behind the performance. The question isn't "what?" but "how?" If you're just focused on the numbers and not on how you got there, you have the opportunity to end up in a slippery slope situation. Celebrate people who live your values. Companies that spend millions on trips for people who live out shared values (not financial performance) are putting their money where their mouth is. Leaders must share their own ethical dilemmas. We've all been in situations where we could go left or right, and sharing how you worked through those moments makes you more endearing and a better leader. Keep a rationalization journal. When Tom and his wife have big decisions (or even little things), he writes them down in a rationalization journal and reflects on them once a month. He's still susceptible to going down another slippery slope, so checking himself on those passing thoughts improves his character over time. It's not what you say, it's what you do. Just like kids see what parents do (not what they say), employees see what behaviors leaders actually reward. $46,000 cost him $23 million. A business school professor calculated Tom would've made $23 million if he'd stayed on the hedge fund path, but he made $46,000 on the four illegal trades before getting caught. His wife was his rock. 85% of marriages end when something like this happens, and she had every right to leave. They just got married, no kids yet. But she stayed. When Tom interviewed her for the book 20 years later, she said, "All I remember is you accepted responsibility immediately. You didn't make up excuses." Running pulled him out of a shame spiral. Tom got obese as a stay-at-home dad. His wife signed him up for a 5K race (and beat him while pushing a jogging stroller). Just crossing that finish line lit a fire. He ended up running a 100-mile race. Doing hard things teaches you that you can do hard things. When Tom had to start a speaking business because they were running out of money, he said, "I can do this" because he'd already put his body through ultramarathons. No challenge is insurmountable. He ended up with something better. It's not about status or money anymore; it's about who he is with his family and his relationships now. Windshield mentality, not rearview mirror. Tom can't change the past, but he can look forward instead of backward. A lot of people in their twenties do stupid stuff (maybe not to this degree), but now, in his forties, he can learn from it. Why not embrace it rather than try to scrub it off the internet? Eulogy virtues versus resume virtues. In his twenties, Tom only thought about resume virtues (how much money, the next job, the next stepping stone) and never about eulogy virtues (what people will say about his character when it's all over). What will people say at your eulogy? Will they still be talking about those four trades, or will they talk about who you became after? More Learning #226 - Steve Wojciechowski: How to Win Every Day #281 - George Raveling: Wisdom from MLK Jr to Michael Jordan #637 - Tom Ryan: Chosen Suffering: Become Elite in Life & Leadership Reflection Questions Tom's boss gave him an ambiguous message ("do whatever it takes"), and as a junior employee, he didn't ask clarifying questions. Think about the last ambiguous instruction you received from leadership. Did you ask clarifying questions, or did you fill in the blanks yourself? What's stopping you from creating psychological safety to ask next time? Tom argues that 80% of employees can be swayed either way by culture. Look at your organization right now. What behaviors are actually being rewarded? If someone asked your team "what gets you ahead here?" what would they honestly say? Tom asks: "Will people be talking about the resume virtues (money, titles, achievements) or the eulogy virtues (character, relationships, who you were) when you're gone?" What's one eulogy virtue you need to start prioritizing today, even if it means slowing down on resume building?
674: PJ Fleck - Building Elite Culture, Nekton Mindset, Selecting >Recruiting, Intrinsic Motivation, Row The Boat, and Transformational Coaching
Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: PJ Fleck is the head football coach at the University of Minnesota. Before that, he transformed Western Michigan from one win to 13 wins and a Cotton Bowl appearance. Before his coaching days, PJ was a stud receiver at Northern Illinois and was a guy I played against in college. Coach Fleck has built one of college football's most distinctive culture-driven programs. You'll hear why he maintains an 80-20 split favoring high school recruiting over the transfer portal, how he runs practice with a 32-second clock to make it harder than games, and why he sees himself as a cultural driver rather than a motivational coach. This is a conversation recorded with all of our coaches inside "The Arena." That is our mastermind group for coaches in all sports. And it did not disappoint. Notes: Stop recruiting, start selecting. PJ doesn't chase the highest-rated players... He looks for fit and alignment with his values. Ask yourself: Are you trying to convince people to join your team, or are you selecting people who already want what you're building? Efficiency beats duration. PJ runs 95-minute practices with a 32-second play clock, always moving, always intense. The principle: Make practice harder than the game. Where in your work are you confusing time spent with intensity and focus? Internal drive trumps external motivation. PJ calls his ideal players "Nektons," always attacking, never satisfied. He's looking for people who prove their worth to themselves, not to others. If you need constant external motivation, you're not ready for elite teams. A leader must teach and demand. A team member must prepare and perform. These aren't opposing forces—they're two sides of the same commitment to excellence. My junior year at Ohio University. I was the quarterback of the Ohio football team. We lost to No. 17 Northern Illinois 30-23 in overtime on a Saturday night. P.J. Fleck caught the game-tying 15-yard touchdown pass late in the fourth quarter. PJ finished with 14 catches for 235 yards and a touchdown. (I threw a 30-yard TD pass to Anthony Hackett to put us up a TD right before halftime). Let your team see you played. They do"Guess that Gopher" before team meetings, where players guess which coach's highlights they're watching. Give them a peek behind the curtain. It builds credibility and connection. PJ honors his mentor, Jim Tressel, by wearing a tie while coaching. Who are you honoring through your daily practices? Keep your door open. PJ has no secretary. Players can walk into his office at any moment. Create fluidity between you and your team. Transparency after tragedy is a choice. When PJ's son died from a heart condition, he had two options: never talk about it again, or let it shape him. He chose radical transparency, knowing it would get scrutinized. That's where "Row the Boat" comes from. A losing season reveals what you actually need. After going 1-11 at Western Michigan while also getting divorced, PJ says every coach should experience a losing season. It forces you to identify what you actually need versus what you don't need. Choose what scares you. When deciding on Minnesota, Heather asked him, "Does this scare you?" He said, "Hell yeah, it scares me." His response: "Well then, that's where we're going." Life versus living. Living is the salary and contract. Life is about moments and memory. If you can't stay in the moment and reflect on great moments or hard moments, life will be like mashed potatoes to you. Your expectations should match your resources. The gap between expectations and resources is called frustration. The bigger the gap, the more frustration from everyone around you. Maintain an 80/20 model if you can. 80% high school players, 20% transfer portal. PJ has one of the highest retention rates in the country because of selection and fit, not recruiting. "It's not about the money until it's about the money." The kids' PJ gets value for other things before the money talk. They enjoy the experience of being a college athlete. PJ leads with "I'm really difficult to play for." PJ's opening line to recruits. He asks for a lot. This makes people who are lazy, complacent, or fraudulent run like hell. "This is going to expose me." Start with good people, not good players. Out of 500 kids, who are the best 25 young men? PJ doesn't get five stars. He gets two and three stars who believe they can be five stars. A chip versus a crack on your shoulder. Once you do something the media says you couldn't do, they'll set a new bar. All PJ wants is kids who want to prove to themselves that they can do what people say they couldn't. You don't need PJ's personality. You need the internal drive to be the best version of yourself. That's what he's selecting for. "I'm not a motivational coach. I'm a cultural driver." PJ picks their "how." He picks their journey. If someone needs constant motivation, they're not ready. Peel back the Instagram filter. Everything you see on social media is filtered. You have to dig deeper with this generation to find out who they really are. Hire former players back. PJ's staff has more former players who played for him than ever before. They cut their teeth in the building. In this transactional era, former players help you stay transformational. The HYPRR System. This is PJ's hyperculture framework he created after going 1-11: H (How): The people. Nektons who always attack. How you do one thing is how you do everything. Consistency matters. Y (Yours): Your vision. It's YOUR life, not anyone else's vision. Players are the builders. Don't tell me you want an extravagant home and then hire bad builders. P (Process): The work. The who, what, when, where, and why. Anyone should be able to ask those questions at any point. R (Result): Focus on the HYP. It's not the officials' fault. It's not the other team's fault. R (Response): How will you respond to the result? Don't believe the hype. Everything about hype is before the result happens. Focus on How, Yours, and Process instead. Someone will take what you were taught was horrible and create a business model. PJ uses Uber and Airbnb as examples. We were taught "stranger danger" as kids. Now we get in cars with strangers while drunk and sleep in their homes. The right people plugged into crazy visions can change everything. Define success as peace of mind. That's how PJ's program defines success. Not wins and losses. Train body language. "Big chest" means standing up straight. Players are not allowed to put their hands on their knees or their heads. If you can't hold yourself up, trainers need to check on you. Teach response, not reaction. You can have emotions, but train to not be emotional. The real world wants to see you react. Train to respond properly in every situation. Your words have power. PJ's players know the definitions of 150 words that will help them for the rest of their lives. Give substance to the filters. That's your job as an educator. Cut all the fat off practice. PJ was from the era of 3.5-hour practices. He has ADD and needs to move. He got bored as a player, so he vowed to run practice differently. Run a 32-second play clock constantly. Every 32 seconds, you run a play. You are always under the two-minute warning in practice. This trains your team to operate under pressure. Never practice longer than 95 minutes. It's one thing to watch as a recruit. It's another to experience it as a player. Kids puke during dynamic warmup in the first week because it's that intense. Make practice harder than the game. The game will eventually slow down for your players if practice is legitimately harder. Nektons flow through water currents without being affected. Don't let circumstances dictate behavior. Train this mindset daily. The biggest jump in sports is from high school to college. 17-year-olds playing against 24-year-olds. It's not just talent. It's experience, development, strength, and confidence all at once. Never let any environment be too big for your coaches. Train your staff to be comfortable in all situations, not just your players. Always be learning outside your field. PJ attends leadership seminars with SEALs and Green Berets. At one dinner, a retired military officer who looked like Sean Connery scanned the room quietly, then said: "I'm taking in all the good in the room. I'm also coming up with a plan to kill every one of you, in case I need to." He never came back to the table because he got called to active duty and left for Afghanistan. Always be ready. That's what makes you special. Watch to learn. PJ watched "Landman" and took notes on how to run the next team meeting. His wife hates that he can never relax. Find teaching and education in everything you do. When you stop, you stop growing. Get better at celebrating. PJ has a great bourbon and champagne collection. He celebrates more than he ever has. Balance the intensity with moments of joy. Make transformational programs real. Gopher for Life program. Monthly educational courses. Monthly date nights where players bring their dates and learn dinner etiquette. Monthly racial education class. Weekly coach development on Thursdays, where coaches speak on any topic to advance their careers. Don't let important things stop when the news cycle moves on. COVID and racism got put in the same bracket. When COVID stopped, racism education stopped everywhere. Not at Minnesota. Keep going. Bring back the fun. After wins, players can't wait to pick the design for the next team shirt. PJ gives them five options, and they get into it. People are losing the fun connection that made elementary school great. A coach's job is to teach and demand. A player's job is to prepare and perform. If you're a coach, you better be teaching things: life, sport, relationships. Elite teams are led by players. Your job is to get as many elite people to the front of the bus as possible. More Learning #226 - Steve Wojciechowski: How to Win Every Day #281 - George Raveling: Wisdom from MLK Jr to Michael Jordan #637 - Tom Ryan: Chosen Suffering: Become Elite in Life & Leadership
673: Daniel Coyle - Opening Yellow Doors, Mastering Your Craft, World-Class Storytelling Techniques, Great Questions to Ask, Building Your Community, The Power of Curiosity, and How to Flourish in Life
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Dan Coyle is a New York Times bestselling author who's spent the last two decades studying what makes great teams great. He wrote The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and now Flourish—books that have shaped how millions of people think about skill development, team culture, and meaningful connection. He works with the Cleveland Guardians as a special advisor on culture and performance. We recorded this one together in Cleveland. Notes: Find your yellow doors. Most of us go through life looking for green doors (clearly open paths) and red doors (obviously closed paths). But yellow doors are different. They're out of the corner of your eye, things that make you uncomfortable or feel brand new. That's where life actually happens. We think life is a straight line from A to B to C, but it's not. Life isn't a game... It's complex, living, shifting. Yellow doors are opportunities to create meaningful connections and explore new paths. "Life deepens when we become aware of the yellow doors, the ones we glimpse out of the corner of our eye." The craft journey always involves getting simpler. Simple is not easy. The great ones have their craft to where there's a simplicity to it. In this world of clutter and noise, it's easy to want to compete with energy and speed, but the stuff that really resonates is quieter and simpler. Be a beginner again in something. With climbing, Dan's at the very bottom of the craft mountain. With writing, he's somewhere in the middle. It's fun to have a couple of zones in your life where you're a beginner. It's liberating, but it also develops empathy. Some stuff looks very simple, but isn't. Every good story has three elements. There's some desire (I want to get somewhere), there's some obstacle (this thing standing in my way), and there's some transformation on that journey. Teaching teaches you. Coaching Zoe's writing team helped Dan, and then Zoe ended up coaching Dan. It was never "let me transmit all my wisdom to my daughter." It was a rich two-way dialogue that helped both of them. Suffering together is powerful. Doing hard things together with other people, untangling things together (literally and figuratively), and being vulnerable together. That's culture code stuff. Whether it's skiing with your kids, seeing them fall and get back up, or being trapped underground like the Chilean miners. Behind every individual success is a community. Dan dedicates all his books to his wife, Jenny (except one). Growing up, he had this idea of individual success, individual greatness. But when you scratch one of those individual stories, what's revealed is a community of people. Jenny is the ecosystem that lets Dan do what he does. Going from writing project to writing project, hoping stuff works out, exploring... it's not efficient. It's not getting on the train to work and coming home at five o'clock. It's "I think I need to go to Russia" or "I need to dig into this." She's been more than a partner, an incredible teammate. Great organizations aren't machines; they're rivers. The old model of leadership is the pilot of the boat, the person flipping levers who has all the answers. That's how most of us grew up thinking about leaders. But Indiana football, the SEALs, Pixar... when you get close to these organizations, they're not functioning like machines. Machines are controlled from the outside and produce predictable results. These organizations are more like energy channels that are exploring. They're like rivers. How do you make a river flow? Give it a horizon to flow toward (where are we going?), set up river banks (where we're not gonna go), but inside that space create energy and agency. Questions do that. Leaders who are good at lobbing questions in and then closing their mouth... that's the most powerful skill. Great teams have peer leaders who sacrifice. Since Indiana football's fresh in our minds... Peer leaders who sacrifice for the team are really big. Fernando Mendoza got smoked, battered, hammered, and he kept going without complaint. In his interview afterward, he talks about his teammates. That's the DNA of great teams. Adversity reveals everything. The litmus test: in moments of terrible adversity, what's the instinct? Are we turning toward each other or away from each other? You could see it in that game. The contrast between the two teams. When things went bad, they responded very differently. The coach isn't as important as you think. Coaches can create the conditions for the team to emerge, but great teams sometimes pit themselves against the coach. The US Olympic hockey team of 1980 would be an example. They came together against Herb Brooks. So coaching sets the tone, but it's not as big a part of DNA as people think. Curiosity keeps great teams from drinking their own Kool-Aid. The teams that consistently succeed don't get gassed up on their own stuff. They don't believe in their success. They're not buying into "now I'm at the top of the mountain, everything's fine." They get curious about that next mountain, curious about each other, curious about the situation. They're willing to let go of stuff that didn't work. Honor the departed. When someone gets traded in pro sports, it's like death. Their locker's empty like a gravestone. What the coach at OKC does: on the day after somebody gets traded, he spends a minute of practice expressing his appreciation for that person who's gone. How simple and human is that? How powerful? What makes people flourish is community. It's not a bunch of individuals that are individually together. Can they connect? Can they love their neighbor and support their neighbor? That's magical when it happens. The Chilean miners created civilization through rituals. 33 men, 2,000 feet underground, trapped for 69 days. The first couple hours went as bad as it could. People eating all the food, scrambling, yelling. Then they circled up and paused. The boss took off his helmet and said, "There are no bosses and no employees. We're all one here." Their attention shifted from terror and survival to the larger connection they had with each other. They self-organized. Built sleeping areas, rationed food, created games with limited light. Each meal they'd share a flake of tuna at the same time. When they got contact with the surface, they sang the Chilean national anthem together. They created a little model civilization that functioned incredibly well. Stopping and looking creates community. What let the miners flourish wasn't information or analysis. It was letting go. Having this moment of meaning, creating presence. All the groups Dan visited had this ability in all the busyness to stop and ask: What are we really about? What matters here? What is our community? Why are we here? What is bigger than us that we're connected to? They grounded themselves in those moments over and over. Getting smart only gets you so far. There's a myth in our culture that individuals can flourish. You see someone successful and think "that individual's flourishing." But underneath them, invisibly, they're part of a larger community. We only become our best through other people. We have a pronoun problem: I, me, when actually it's we and us. Self-improvement isn't as powerful as shared improvement. Ask energizing questions. "What's energizing you right now?" is a great question. "What do you want more of?" "What do you want to do differently?" (not "what are you doing poorly"). "Paint a picture five years from now, things go great, give me an average Tuesday." What you're trying to do is get people out of their narrow boredom, let go a little, surrender a little, open up and point out things in the corner of their eye. When things go rough, go help somebody. Craig Counsell on how to bounce back when you're having a bad day: "I try to go help somebody." That's it. Create presence conditions. The ski trips, the long drives, the shared meals, no phones. Schedule them. This is how connection happens, whether it's with your family or your people at work. Leaders who sustain excellence are intensely curious. Dan walked into the Guardians office expecting to pepper them with questions. The opposite happened. Jay, Chris, and Josh kept asking him question after question, wanting to learn. Leaders who sustain excellence have this desire to learn, improve, get better. Ask better questions. Actually listen. Ask follow-up questions. Curiosity is also the ultimate way to show love. Reflection Questions Dan says yellow doors are "out of the corner of your eye, things that make you uncomfortable or feel brand new." What's one yellow door you've been walking past lately? What's stopping you from opening it this week?The Chilean miners' boss took off his white helmet and said, "There are no bosses and no employees." Think about a moment of adversity your team is facing right now. Are you turning toward each other or away? What's one specific action you could take this week to help your team turn toward each other? Dan emphasizes we have a "pronoun problem" (I, me vs. we, us) and that "self-improvement isn't as powerful as shared improvement." Who are the 2-3 people you could invite into your growth journey right now? What would it look like to pursue excellence together instead of alone?
672: Brad Stulberg - The Neuroscience of Curiosity, Process vs. Outcome Goals, The Power of Consistency, Playing Like The Beatles, Focusing on Your WHO, and The Way of Excellence
Go to www.LearningLeader.com to learn more This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Brad Stulberg is a bestselling author and leading expert on sustainable performance and well-being. He's written for The New York Times, Outside Magazine, and The Atlantic, and his previous books include Peak Performance and The Practice of Groundedness. His latest book, The Way of Excellence, is great. Brad's writing combines cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, and stories from world-class performers to help people do their best work without losing themselves in the process. Notes: Never pre-judge a performance. When you're feeling tired, uninspired, or off your game, show up anyway. Remember the Beatles scene—they looked bored and exhausted, but Paul still wrote "Get Back" that day. You don't know what's possible until you get going. Discipline means doing what needs to be done regardless of how you feel. As powerlifter Layne Norton says, we don't need to feel good to get going... We need to get going to give ourselves a chance to feel good. Stop waiting for motivation. Start moving and let the feeling follow. Audit who you're surrounding yourself with. The Air Force study is striking: the least fit person in your squadron determines everyone else's fitness level. If you sit within 25 feet of a high performer at work, your performance improves 15%. Within 25 feet of a low performer? It declines 30%. Your environment isn't neutral... Choose wisely. Treat curiosity like a muscle. It's a reward-based behavior that gets stronger with use. When Kobe said he played "to figure things out," he was tapping into the neural circuitry that makes learning feel good and builds upon itself. Ask more questions. Stay curious about your craft. Excellence isn't about perfection or optimization... It's about mastery and mattering. It's about showing up consistently, surrounding yourself wisely, and staying curious along the way. To the late Robert Pirsig - one of the greatest blessings and joys and sources of satisfaction in my life is to be in conversation with your work. He's the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance— "gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going." Arrogant people are loud. Confident people are quiet. Confidence requires evidence. The neural circuitry associated with curiosity is like a muscle: it gets stronger with use. Curiosity is what neuroscientists call a reward-based behavior. It feels good, motivates us to keep going, and builds upon itself. Kobe didn't play to win. He played to learn and grow. Kobe Bryant said he didn't play not to lose, and he didn't even play to win. He played to learn and to grow. He said the reason he did that is because it's so much more freeing. If you're really trying not to lose, you're going to be tight. If you're really trying to win, you're going to be tight. But if you're just out there to grow, you're going to be in the moment. When you're in the moment, you give yourself the best chance of having the performance you want. The word compete comes from the Latin root word com, which means together, and petere, which means to seek, rise up, or strive. In its most genuine form, competition is about rising together (Caitlin Clark's story against LSU). Love: The Detroit Lions had just won their first playoff game in 32 years. Following the game was a scene of pure jubilation. During a short break from the celebrating, the head coach, GM, and quarterback all gave brief speeches. Which collectively lasted about 2 minutes. During those 2 minutes, the word LOVE was repeated 7 times. Homeostatic regulation -- Sense it in the greatness of others and when you're at your best. What Brad calls "excellence." Surround yourself with people who have high standards. When things don't go your way, when you're inevitably heartbroken or frustrated, it's the people around you, the books you read, the art around you, the music you listen to, that's the stuff that speaks to you and keeps you going. It keeps you on the path even amidst the heartbreak. Process goals work better than outcome goals for most people. If you're an amateur, you should be process-focused. When I train for powerlifting, I don't think about the meet that I'm training for. I think about showing up for the session today. If I think about the meeting, I get anxious, and my performance goes down. But if you're Steph Curry and you've been doing your thing for 20 years, you can think about winning the gold medal because your process is so automatic. For 99% of people, focus on the process. "Brave New World" turns fear into curiosity. When you walk up to a bar loaded with more weight than you've ever touched, there can be fear about what it's going to feel like. If you go up to the bar with fear, you're going to miss the lift. If you're convinced you're going to make it, you'll make it, but your nervous system knows when you're lying to yourself. The middle ground is curiosity. Instead of saying "that's heavy, it's scary," I say "Brave New World. I've never touched this weight before. I have no idea what's going to happen, but let's find out." It splits the difference. I'm hyped, I'm giving myself a chance, I'm not lying to myself, but I'm also not scared. Curiosity and fear cannot exist at the same time in the brain. There are seven pathways in the brain defined by affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp. Two of those pathways are the rage/fear pathway and the seeking/curiosity pathway. These pathways cannot be turned on at the same time. They compete for resources. It's a zero sum game. You cannot simultaneously be raging and curious. You cannot be terrified and curious at the same time. If you get into a mindset of curiosity, it's extremely hard to be angry or terrified. By being curious, we turn off the fear deep in our brains and give ourselves a chance to perform our best. Practice curiosity in lower-consequence situations first. Curiosity is like a muscle. If you're about to do something absolutely terrifying and you're really scared and you say, "I'm just going to be curious," you know you're lying to yourself. You have to practice in lower-consequence situations first. When you, as a paren,t get really upset with your kid, try to be curious about their experience. Watch your anger calm down. When you as a leader, have a board presentation where you're feeling anxious, try to have that mindset of "Brave New World." When you're an athlete going into a big game obsessing about what could go wrong, try to be really curious instead. The best competitors have emotional flexibility. As a competitor, you would know that in the confines of the game, you're not singing Kumbaya, you are trying to kill them. Then you have the emotional flexibility the minute that game ends to respect them as a person. That is the best way to compete. That's when our best performances happen. It's not either/or, it's both/and. It's playing really hard, giving everything you can for the win, seizing on your opponent's vulnerability, at the same time as having deep respect for them. You don't have to be miserable to be excellent. There are people like David Goggins or Michael Jordan who seem motivated by anger and a chip on their shoulder. But Jordan would put his tongue out like this primal expression of joy when he was about to dunk. And Jordan won all his championships while being coached by Phil Jackson, the Zen master of compassion. There are the Steph Currys of the world, or Courtney Dauwalter (best ultra marathoner to ever exist), or Albert Einstein (total mystic who had so much fun in his work). There are two ways to the top of the mountain. For 99.999% of people, you end up performing better with fun and joy, and you have so much more satisfaction, which contributes to longevity. The best leaders take work seriously but laugh at themselves. The best leaders I know in the corporate world, they take the work so seriously. They are so intense. But my God, do they laugh at themselves and their colleagues and have fun. Reflection Questions Brad says, "The things that break your heart are the things that fill your life with meaning." What are you currently holding back from caring deeply about because you're afraid of getting hurt? What would it look like to step fully into that arena despite the risk of heartbreak? The Air Force study showed that sitting within 25 feet of a low performer decreases your performance by 30%. Honestly assess who you're spending the most time with right now. Are they raising your standards or lowering them? What specific change could you make this month to shift your environment? Brad uses "Brave New World" to turn fear into curiosity before big challenges. Think of something coming up that makes you anxious. Instead of trying to convince yourself you'll succeed or dwelling on the fear, what does it feel like to approach it with pure curiosity: "I've never done this before. Let's find out what happens."
671: Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia) - To Get Trust Give Trust, Why Nupedia Failed, Assuming Good Faith, Walking the Walk, Transparency vs. Sharing Everything, Curiosity as the Ultimate Love Language, and Attracting Trustworthy People
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for more This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. After his daughter Kira's birth faced medical challenges and he couldn't find reliable information online, Jimmy launched Wikipedia in January 2001. In this conversation, Jimmy shares why extending trust before it's earned creates better outcomes, how to deal with bad actors, and the seven rules for building things that last. Notes: Key Learnings (in Jimmy's words) Wikipedia launched 20 days after my daughter was born. When Kira was born, I realized that when you go on the internet, and you've got a question like, "what is this condition my daughter has?" It just wasn't there. There were either random blogs or academic journal articles that were way above my head. Kira was born on December 26th, and I opened Wikipedia on January 15th. Nupedia failed because of the seven-stage review process. Before Wikipedia, we worked on Nupedia. We recruited academics to write articles. You had to send in your CV showing you were qualified before you could write anything. We had very slow progress. I was on the verge of giving up. This top-down approach with a seven-stage review process before you publish anything that's no fun, and nobody's doing it. We let anyone edit and figured we'd add structure later. We thought we'd have to figure out who the editor-in-chief of the chemistry section is. You're gonna have to have some kind of authority and hierarchy. But I thought, let's just not have too much structure for as long as possible. "It's fun. You could be the first person to create a page." There was a point in time when you could write, "Paris is the capital of France". That's amazing. It's not much of an encyclopedia article, but it was fun. It's like, oh, we can just start documenting whatever we know. People started just doing all kinds of stuff. The magic is when you come back and see others improving your work. You could just write a few facts down and hit save, and it's not very good yet. But you'd go back a few days later and see somebody dug in, and they added more information. That element has always been really important. Is it fun? Do you enjoy the activity? Do you meet interesting people? You spend one afternoon, you add a few facts, and then you think, you know what? The world's just ever so slightly better. Trust is conditional, not naive. Out of every thousand people, probably a small handful are gonna be really annoying. But it's really rare to have somebody who's actually malicious. The idea of assuming good faith, as we call it in Wikipedia, is extending trust first before it's been earned. It's conditional. You extend that friendly hand of trust. And if the person proves themselves to be super problematic, then you have to deal with it. To get trust, give trust. Most people are decent. It also creates an environment where trustworthy behavior is rewarded. As a boss, wouldn't it be fantastic if you said, I'm going to go off and do this other thing, but I just trust my people are so good, they're gonna crack on with the work? Sometimes they'll make a call I would've made differently. That's okay. They're smart. Sometimes they're going to get it better than I did. "You haven't earned my trust." When somebody looks you dead in the eye and says, "You haven't earned my trust," that's destruction. It's the opposite of building a culture where people can thrive. Extending trust works in parenting, too. When teenagers say, "Well, it doesn't matter what I do, they're going to think the worst anyway, so I might as well do the bad thing." That's really unfortunate. As opposed to saying to your teenager, "Yeah, you want to go out and stay a little later than before. I want you to do that. I trust you, but you gotta do it the right way." You give that trust and believe me, they come home right on time because this is my chance to actually nail this. Give your children an opportunity to live up to building trust. When trust is broken, you can rebuild it faster than you think. Frances Fry is a Harvard professor who had a huge job at Uber when they had an enormous crisis of trust. People say once you've broken trust, that's it, you can never get it back. But is it really true? No, it's actually not true. She thinks companies can rebuild trust faster than you think. A teenager who's broken a rule can rebuild trust pretty quickly. And our job is to let them rebuild that trust. The eighth rule is walk the walk. The rules of trust aren't just a lot of good words. You actually have to walk the walk. If you say "I screwed up" and you own that, but then you go back to being the same as you were before, you're not going to rebuild trust. But if you walk the walk, people will see that. Airbnb rebuilt trust by walking the walk. Really early in Airbnb's history, someone rented out their apartment and came home and it was absolutely trashed. Airbnb handled it very badly. They were stonewalling. In this era, that's often the wrong advice. Not saying anything just means it goes viral. So they ripped off the band-aid. They said, Look, we screwed this up. They started requiring ID's for people renting apartments out, ID's from customers, and substantial insurance for owners. They walked the walk. Transparency doesn't mean sharing everything; it means sharing the process. If people can see your workings, they can see what you're doing and how it works, it gives them assurance in the process. It's about judgment calls. What would be helpful for us to share so people can trust the whole process? If you think people are fundamentally rotten, you can't work with them. It's very easy when we look at the state of the world to be downtrodden, cynical, and don't trust anybody. If you think people on the other side of you politically or people at your workplace are fundamentally just rotten people, then you're going to have a hard time listening to them. You're going to have a hard time understanding where they're coming from. You're not going to do the right things that make sense to people. Which hurts all of society. When you've been beaten up by life, change the channel. If you work somewhere where your boss doesn't trust you and your coworkers are all backstabbing freaks, it's time to change the channel. Every night, you should be trying to find a better position. Your number one criteria in looking for that next position is finding somebody who you think is a proper person to be your manager. Think of it as you're interviewing the company just as much as they're interviewing you. When you give trust, you attract trustworthy people. When you become known as a person who gives trust before it's earned, you magically attract trustworthy people. It's kind of cool how it works. Will you get burned every once in a while? Maybe. But you attract the type of people that you wanna be around. Curiosity is the ultimate love language. Get out there in the world and be curious. Asking people questions and being genuinely curious about their stories and learning about them and asking follow-up questions is a great way to show love and to connect with people. When you find yourself in a curiosity conversation where everyone's asking and learning, and they're head nodding and into it, there's nothing better. That's human nature connecting. We are born to connect and collaborate with others. It's quite easy and natural for people to fit into whatever culture is around them. We naturally like to work together to build something good. We're social, and we like to be social. We collaborate to build experiences together. A party with only yourself is not a party. Do what you love, even if it takes time to get there. One of the things that I think is really important is do what you love, do something that you really care about. Oftentimes for young people, there's this struggle between here's the thing that I really want to be doing, and here's the thing that's going to make me some money. Work really hard to find a way to put those together. Reflection Questions Jimmy says extending trust before it's earned creates better outcomes, but it requires not being naive when someone proves untrustworthy. Think of a situation where you're withholding trust. Is it because of actual evidence that this person is untrustworthy, or are you bringing baggage from past experiences with different people? What would it look like to extend conditional trust in this situation? If you're in a leadership position, honestly assess: are there team members who feel you don't trust? What specific actions could you take this week to demonstrate trust before they've "earned" it in the traditional sense? More Learning #605 - Seth Godin: The Power of Remarkable Ideas #598 - Sam Parr: Bold, Fast, Fun (Founder of The Hustle) #645 - Ryan Petersen: Take Action - From Crisis to Solution Audio Pod Timestamps 02:07 Jimmy Wales' Early Fascination with Encyclopedias 04:28 The Birth of Wikipedia 07:35 The Trust Factor in Wikipedia 12:04 Managing Bad Actors on Wikipedia 15:28 Personal Reflections on Trust 27:05 Setting Reasonable Boundaries for Teens 28:18 Rebuilding Trust After It's Broken 32:37 The Importance of Transparency in Leadership 36:50 The Power of Positive Purpose 39:06 Practical Advice for the Trust-Broken 43:01 Connecting and Collaborating with Others 45:17 Career Advice for Young Professionals 49:41 EOPC
669: Oz Pearlman (Oz The Mentalist) - Overcoming Rejection, Getting the Reps, Always Following Up, Living with Gratitude, America's Got Talent, The Curiosity of Steven Spielberg, and Making Others Feel Seen
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for world-class notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Oz Pearlman is the greatest mentalist in the world. After leaving Wall Street to pursue his craft full-time, he's performed for Steven Spielberg's family, for Nobel laureates, and Fortune 500 CEOs. He ran a 2:23 marathon and holds the record for most laps around Central Park in a single day. With five kids and 250+ performances a year, Oz has mastered the art of reading people and understanding what separates good from world-class. Key Learnings (In Oz's words) Doug Anderson is the magician who got me into magic. When I was 13 years old, I went on a cruise with my parents. I got pulled up on stage and took part in a magic trick. (The sponge balls) After the trick, my dad and I started creating theories on how the trick worked. The people in every industry who make it to the top are the ones who are kind and respectful to others. As soon as you stop thinking that you can learn from others, you start dying. What is the recipe for success? It's getting through the tough times. When I walked up to someone at a restaurant, and I'm 14, and I have a very fragile ego, after three tables in a row at differing levels of rudeness go by, "Dude, get outta here, man. Like, I don't wanna see this," it hurts. That's a painful thing to experience. I had to learn a defense mechanism very quickly because carrying that pain, pain turns into anger. When I get to the next table, I'm angry at the next group, even though they haven't done anything wrong to me. I realized to get my goal, I needed tougher, thicker skin. Deflect the rejection onto someone else. Create separation between you and rejection. I created what I would call an agent in my own mind. When you're in showbiz, the conversations you don't wanna have, your agent has for you. I'm a 14-year-old doing restaurants. I don't have an agent, so here's what I decided. When they don't like me, they don't know me. They don't know Oz Pearlman. They know this guy Oz the magician, who walked up to them. Maybe my tricks aren't good enough. Maybe my approach wasn't good enough. Maybe they had a bad day at work or their kid's sick. I made it less about me, and I was able to deflect all of that pain and hurt to this other person. The fear of rejection is worse than the rejection itself. Once you experience rejection a few times, it's not that bad. It's like dating. It's a numbers game. You'll probably not meet your spouse on the first try. You gotta meet a whole lot of other people to realize what you like best in the person that hopefully ends up spending your life with. "Never let someone else be in charge of your destiny." When I do a gig, I don't wait for someone to go, "Oh man, that'd be great. Let me get your business card." I go, "Amazing. Let me get your number and your info. I'll have someone from my team call you." My team is you, me, myself, and I. There's no team. But it sounds fancier. Fake it till you make it. Branding is so important. When I went on America's Got Talent, I made a conscious decision to separate myself from the guy from the year before. (Matt Franco) He won. I thought we were too similar. I had to do something unique or do something better than anyone else. That's when I branded myself as a mentalist and not a magician. Mentalism is much harder than magic to practice. Magic can be practiced in front of a mirror until you get almost perfect at a trick. Mentalism is near impossible to practice at home without an audience. It's like comedy. You can't tell jokes to a mirror and find out if they're funny. You need the audience to do it. Charm takes the sting out of so many things in life. It allows you to win people over quickly. What is charm? Just the ability to smile, to make someone laugh, to be vulnerable in a certain moment. That's a skill that's developed, and if you study it well, you can develop it quicker because everyone thinks it's natural. What I've learned from comedians: It's the purest form of entertainment that exists. You, the audience, and a microphone. I think you start to get a feel for timing. Where to pause, what's funny, how to get people on your side. With a heckler, there's a very fine line between punching down and offending your audience versus having them on your side and laughing with you at someone as opposed to laughing at someone. I'm a slightly more exaggerated version of myself when performing. The volume is turned up a little. The charisma is turned up a little, the ability to joke around, but it's me. I think that resonates. Walking into a room smiling, having no hesitation, connecting with somebody, remembering their name, giving them a compliment. Such easy, low-hanging fruit, separates you from 90% of other people if you can do them consistently and effectively and genuinely. "That's why he's Steven Spielberg." The Steven Spielberg lesson changed how I see success. I did Spielberg's dad's 99th birthday. At the end of it, Steven beelines to me and I'm ready. I thought I'd get 30 seconds. He talked to me for upwards of 20 minutes. He just asked question after question after question. When I left it was like a blur. I didn't ask Steven Spielberg a single question about Jaws, Close Encounters. I had all these things I wanted to ask him. I'm like, man, I totally screwed that up. But over time, the lesson got through to me. It wasn't about me. It wasn't what I was gonna ask him. It was about him. It was learning what makes him tick. No matter who you become, if you can make the other person feel like they're a star when they meet you, they will always remember that memory. Try to deflect. If people ask you questions, answer, but ask them something about themselves back that no one's asked them. Make them feel seen and heard. Make them feel like they are the star of your movie as well. Little things add up to big things over time. If you were to ask my kids what do I ingrain in them all the time? Gratitude and being polite. One of my secrets to success has always been being very polite. "Please, thank you. Always." Write a thank-you note. When I was doing bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, I realized early on, when people are throwing a party, it's very stressful. The person hosting doesn't always have the greatest time. They're so worried about everyone else. Create memorable moments. I would take a selfie with the bar mitzvah kid. I found this online service where I could instantly upload the photo. I would always give a compliment that was specific. I'd send these cards to them on Monday. The parties are usually on Saturdays. It would get there Tuesday or Wednesday. To this day, 15 to 20 years later, I'll get emails when I'm on TV from people being like, "I just dug up this card from 17 years ago. You were at Benjamin's Bar Mitzvah, and now he's 30 and has a kid of his own." Takes notes | Write everything down. In today's day and age, there's a power in the human touch that still exists. Take notes, write stuff down. I'll leave a gig, I'll write some stuff down, I'll remember it. If I run into that person again in a month, in a year, in five years, I can literally look at my phone. It's literally like a mentalism trick to reveal that information to people even though they gave it to you already, because it shows you took the time. Some of the biggest things I've ever landed backtrack to small moments. ESPN, the thing that brought us together can backtrack to a Bar Mitzvah 18 years ago where I first met Adam Schefter. The first seed was planted, and I had to keep watering it, watering it, watering it. Small plant, small plant, until it grew into this thing. Now look at all the things that came from all the things I've done with ESPN, where Adam Schefter originated them. You are interviewing for your next job every single day. You have no idea who might be in the audience. You have no idea, but you give it your all every single time. One time, Adam Schefter was in the audience. Intelligent people are often the easiest to fool. When intelligent people watch what I do, they're confident in their ability to figure it out. They think they're smarter than the average person, so they start looking for solutions. But that overconfidence creates blind spots. They're so focused on being right about how they think it's done that they miss what's actually happening. The more you think you know, the more vulnerable you become to being fooled because you're operating from assumptions rather than staying open to all possibilities. Reflection Questions Oz created an "agent in his mind" to deflect rejection away from his core self, making it about "Oz the magician" rather than Oz the person. What mental separation could you create to handle rejection or criticism more effectively in your professional life? Oz emphasizes that intelligent people are often the easiest to fool because they're confident in their ability to figure things out. In what areas of your life or work might overconfidence be blinding you to what's actually happening? Oz sends handwritten notes with specific compliments and a selfie to everyone he performs for. What's one relationship in your network right now that could be strengthened with this level of intentional follow-up, and what specific compliment could you give that person? More Learning #525 - Frank Slootman: Hypergrowth Leadership #540 - Alex Hormozi: Let Go of the Need of Approval #510 - Ramit Sethi: Live Your Rich Life Audio Timestamps 02:43 Oz's Career 04:48 The Art of Mentalism and Magic 08:22 Early Career and Overcoming Rejection 17:45 Branding and Success Strategies 22:59 Authenticity and Charm 27:25 Building Trust Through Honesty 27:53 Developing Genuine Confidence 28:36 The Power of Preparation 29:22 Learning from Failure 31:24 Connecting with Influential People 34:27 The Importance of Politeness and Gratitude 37:05 The Art of Follow-Up 42:27 Handling Nerves and Anxiety 43:23 The Magic of Mentalism on Ryan 51:55 EOPC
668: Brian Kelly (The Points Guy) - Building a Media Empire, Crafting a Big Vision, Relentless Leaders, Hiring Well, Scaling Up, & How To Win at Travel
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Brian Kelly is the founder of The Points Guy, which he built from a side hustle blog into a travel media empire that he sold for $28 million. At 42, he's now an angel investor in 15+ companies, including Bilt (valued at $11 billion). In this conversation, he shares lessons on manifestation, selling too early, building yourself into the brand, and why vulnerability beats wins in interviews. Key Learnings (in Brian's words) In 1995, I was 12 years old, and I was great with computers, so I started booking all of my dad's travel for work. He'd pay me $10 per booking. Then it turned into points, when my dad showed me all the American and US Air miles he had. "If you can figure out how to use all of them, we can go on a family trip." And the rest is history. That was my first real, oh wait, this points thing is amazing. Points were a way for us to live a fabulous lifestyle. I grew up thinking we were poor, but I really wanted to live a fabulous life. My parents were very humble and did not spend money lavishly. For me I always wanted to travel. When I was a kid, I would spin the globe and be like, This is where I'm going. I would actually research Oman. Somehow genetically, I got this gene of I need to be rich and travel the world. I used to call Mercedes, get all of their glossy pamphlets for all their new cars, and I would cut them out and stick them on my wall. Manifesting alone won't make you wealthy, but visioning helps. I do believe being able to visualize what it looks like and taste it and get close to it helps you take the smaller steps to actually achieve it. When I think of my investments, I actually envision what they're gonna be. I envision that they're multi-billion-dollar companies. I believe it unlocks a level of pushing you to reach these mini steps that you can't see throughout the process. I started The Points Guy in 2010, but there were already Titan bloggers. I for sure felt imposter syndrome, but I saw that what they lacked was creativity. Points and miles are very clinical. Very few people were translating that for an audience. I knew I had an opportunity. I'm in my twenties, living in New York City. I'm gonna explain what everyday people need to know. Building a media brand became my moat. No one else in the points world was doing media. Doing media's frightening. While it was scary going on TV the first couple times (I almost fainted), I knew that each time I did it, I got better. That was the moat I would build. I would build The Points Guy into a brand more so than any of the others who had come before me. I saw from the beginning to double and triple down on that strategy of building something that's more than just a blog, but a lifestyle that people want to achieve. "I made a million bucks in my first six months of just blogging, but using affiliate links." In 2011, within six months of learning about affiliate marketing, I made six figures a month using the credit card links in my blog. I was still working at Morgan Stanley. My mom was like, this sounds too good to be true. You can't leave Morgan Stanley. I was making like $300,000 a month in affiliate. Meanwhile, at Morgan Stanley, my salary is $70,000 a year. But it didn't pay right away. My parents actually lent me $10,000 just to pay my rent. I remember where I was in Madrid when that first Chase deposit of $490,000 hit from months of back pay on the blog. I sold for $28 million because I thought the industry would collapse. When Bankrate offered me $28 million in May 2012, I kind of had this negative mindset over where the industry was going. About a hundred blogs started when people knew they could make money on affiliates. Most bloggers have zero business sense. They were writing stuff like, "Cancel your Amex, cancel your Chase, cancel, cancel. Then get new cards." I saw this really bad business sense, very shortsighted greediness. I'm watching this thinking they're gonna pull the rug. Do I regret selling? Yes, the company is way more than what I sold it for. But at the time, you always have to remember what the landscape was. We're coming out of the recession. There were still a lot of weak indicators. Building myself into the brand gave me leverage. I had a three and a half year earnout. Over that time, the business really started to grow, but then I realized, well, I am also the business. So, the more press I did, when I negotiated with that parent company to stay on, they paid me a lot of money and still a cut of the business to grow it as CEO. It's kind of crazy to think 13 years after selling, I'm still here. But because I built myself as a core part of the business as The Points Guy, I've been able to stay on with less risk, getting paid well to do what I love. I'm more of the brand visionary, the consumer person. I'm very much an ideas person. When we're speaking with our longtime clients or pitching new ones, that's really where my special sauce is used and not in the day-to-day. People are not mind readers. In 2020, I had this breakdown where I thought I would actually leave. I went to the owners, and I was like, I just can't do it anymore. They said, "Brian, we've been waiting for you to say that. You don't need to be CEO. We have plenty of smart people." It was this aha moment. I think in life we often think polar, black or white. That's advice I give to people. Whether it's your parent company, your boss, your mentor, people are not mind readers. While there is risk to leveling with someone and saying, "Hey, this role is just killing me," more often than not in my career, the more vulnerable I was, the more it turned out to be such a blessing. Check Your Spam Email Frequently: In 2011, I was featured in the New York Times, but the email came to my spam email. At that time, the narrative that points were dead, blackout dates, etc. I was the only blogger putting a positive spin on points. And I tried to do it in an informative and fun way. I'm 6'7", so putting my personal angle on my travel reviews had a huge impact on being the face of this industry. As a founder, I was a tough boss because it was so personal. If I look back at my time as CEO, I still took it very personally. I do take the integrity of this site. As we expand, we can't forego quality. In hindsight, I didn't highlight enough of the wins. I would focus too much on mistakes. That's advice I would give if I could do it all back over again, to just be much more positive reinforcement over negative. Founders need someone who can check them. You need to have someone around you, a leadership team, someone that can check you. I didn't have that for a very long time, and that's my fault. Making sure you have good people on your team that can be honest with you, and you create an environment of inviting that feedback and not freaking out when they give it to you, is important. I know I would be a much different CEO today if I did it again. Stop BSing in the interview process. Too many people take jobs not knowing what is going on whatsoever at the company. Far too many senior executives walk into positions and they're like, oh wait a minute. I like to be brutally honest in the interview process. Truth-telling is the beginning of having a great relationship because I want you to understand exactly what's in front of you. If you don't want to take it, that's so much better than hiring a senior exec and six months later, you just lost a year. Stop telling me the wins. In the interview process, stop telling me the wins because anyone can make their job look successful. "Oh, 200% ROI, this, that the other." In an interview, you're not gonna be able to fact-check any of this. We all know people can cherry-pick the data. It's really just diving deep into vulnerable moments about their leadership, the challenges as leaders they had with their teams. I'll tell them my challenges when I was CEO. I want people to be real and allow me to understand how they think, the type of leader they are. Charismatic people can trick you. The problem is that very charismatic people can trick you easily. I've been blinded by a great interview, especially when you're exhausted as a CEO and then someone's bantering with you. You're like, oh, that was fun. But I've hired plenty of people who are all talk. I don't want personality hires. I'm the personality. My engineering team, I really need people to ship updates. I still wake up in the middle of the night asking if my bills are paid. I still have imposter syndrome about "is this crazy what I've built?" It's for sure not about the car, but I will say investing in a home that's beautiful and makes you feel really good is important. For a long time, I was traveling a lot. I never put roots down, and I always felt like I was in transit. Now I have this beautiful farm with animals and horses in New Hope, Pennsylvania. It takes my blood pressure down immediately. Angel investing has basically become an addiction. In 2020, I opened up a space where I decided I wanted to have kids even though I was single, and also started investing and advising in relevant companies. The first one was Encore Jane, who was building Built, a credit card loyalty platform for renters. I'd always thought, how cool would it be to earn points on rent? I said, You're crazy, but if it does work, it'll be massive. Built is now at $11 billion valuation. I'll make more money now, probably on Built than I will at The Points Guy, which is wild to me. I have probably about 15 other companies I put my personal money in. I love it because I can help advise founders on everything I've done, and help open doors. Using that to build wealth has become an addiction. Relentlessness is what I see in leaders who sustain excellence. I am amazed at Encore's ability to push. If he's got 10 major things impacting his business, most CEOs will start with one or two, put the others on the back burner. He will relentlessly push for excellence. I don't wanna work for Encore, but to be in the room and strategize, every time I leave a meeting with him it keeps me fresh and active. Find mentors, not just companies. For recent college grads, find people, even at a company where you might not see your future. Find someone at that company that you connect with. If you're looking for a job, interview until you find that hiring manager that you feel is on an upward rise and that you can learn from. We often focus too much on the line of work or the company. Stop focusing on that and look at that manager or the CMO whose organization you would join. If they've done amazing things, get in right away and start networking. Put time on the CMO or CEO's calendar. Be bold. Every senior executive loves to see people come in with eagerness to learn. Show up and do extracurriculars at work. Go to the lunch and learn with the senior executive and actually get face time with them. Make sure they know your name. Those are the things that matter because when it comes time for compensation and reviews, the senior person may not work with you day-to-day, but they're like, oh yeah, that's the person I really like. They are a future leader. That's how you get ahead. Even if that boss leaves to another company, they might take you. Reflection Questions Brian says manifesting alone won't make you wealthy, but visioning what it looks like helps you take the smaller steps to achieve it. What specific vision do you have for your future that you could make more tangible (like his Mercedes pictures on the bedroom wall)? How might making it more concrete change your daily actions? He emphasizes that in interviews, he wants people to stop telling him the wins and instead dive deep into vulnerable moments about their leadership and challenges with their teams. If you were in an interview tomorrow, what's one vulnerable leadership moment you could share that would demonstrate how you think rather than just what you've accomplished? Brian realized he needed to tell his parent company, "I just can't do it anymore" as CEO, and they responded with relief, offering him a better role. What conversation are you avoiding right now because you assume the answer will be no, when the other person might actually be waiting for you to speak up? More Learning #525 - Frank Slootman: Hypergrowth Leadership #540 - Alex Hormozi: Let Go of the Need of Approval #510 - Ramit Sethi: Live Your Rich Life
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