Transcript of 682: Will Guidara - Obsession, Adversity, Learning From Danny Meyer, and The Only Competitive Advantage That Lasts... Unreasonable Hospitality

Quickly, before we get to tonight's episode, I just want to say thank you so much for your support for the announcement of launching my new book, The Price of Becoming. It comes out in July, but we're doing a lot of work to help spread the good word prior to launch. I'd love you to be part of my book launch team. There's a lot of pre-order bonuses as well as additional things that you can get if you're a part of my book launch team. You can learn more about this at learningleader.com. We've moved everything to the homepage, learningleader.com, to preorder The Price of Becoming, as well as take the extra step to be part of my book launch team. Thank you so much for the support. Preorder The Price of Becoming, be a part of my book launch team. Go to learningleader.com to learn more. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now on to tonight's featured leader. One of my favorites, Will Guidara, is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant his team took from a struggling 2-star establishment to become the number 1 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. During our conversation, we discussed why Will believes obsession is one of the most beautiful traits a high performer can have and what it actually means to be truly in pursuit of something. Then the lessons he took from legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer, including the one idea that became the foundation of everything he's built. And then why the only real competitive advantage that exists over the long term has nothing to do with your product or your brand. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Will Godera. I've been studying recently obsession, and I feel like you're a good guy to talk to about that.

Maybe this is still part of your life, or maybe it was a past part of your life. I rewatched 7 Days Out. I feel like you have lived a life of being obsessed at times.

Can you tell me more about that?

What do you think about overall obsession in people who sustain excellence and how a lot of them do have an element of being obsessed about what they do?

There's a chef named Sean Brock who lives here in Nashville, a good friend of mine, has for years been one of the great chefs in America. And about 4 months ago, he opened a new pizza place in Nashville. This is not someone who came up making pizza, but at some point he became obsessed with pizza. And like any obsessive person, as a hobby for a while, over and over and over again made more and more pizzas to try to really perfect the art of pizza making. And when the pizza place finally opened, on Instagram, when he posted the announcement that it was open, the caption was, obsession is a beautiful thing when you can grab it by the tail. Listen, I, I feel for obvious reasons that word brings with it for many a negative connotation, and I think like anything, it can be both good and bad, but I don't think it's implicitly a bad thing. For me, obsession is just when you care so much about something that you give all of yourself to bring its most fully realized version to life. I am an obsessive person. When I get excited about something, it consumes me.

And thankfully, now I'm excited about enough things that no single one overly consumes me to the point where it becomes a bad thing.

Do you think it's necessary to become the number one restaurateur in the world or to become the guy who sells— between you and James Clear, as I told you before, you're the guys hanging out at the top of the bestseller list for years. Is obsession necessary in order to do that?

That's a good question and almost hard for me to answer because it feels so binary. I don't know if it's necessary, but gosh, it sure helps. Yeah.

Isn't it fun though?

Isn't it fun to be obsessed about some stuff?

Like, I'm obsessed about what we're doing right now, about thinking about, preparing for, and then having conversations with brilliant people. I think about it 24/7. I have for 11 years. It's the coolest thing in the world to get to do. I love being obsessed doing this thing, learning from bright, thoughtful, curious, good people. Like you. So I view it maybe slanted all the way in the other direction of it's beautiful. Being obsessed about something is such a fun way to live.

I want to say this the right way.

Okay.

I would be really depressed if I had nothing to be obsessed with.

Same.

I'm obsessed with my children. I'm obsessed with my work. I'm obsessed with my friends. And, like, I've not used the word obsessed this many times in, in my life. It's like anything, you know, when you use the word so many times, it starts to lose its meaning, which makes me almost want to look it up and to figure out what the dictionary definition of it is. But what it means to me is loving with every ounce of my being the pursuit of something. I'm not obsessed with a thing because I can't pursue a thing. I'm obsessed with ideas that I can pursue every single day over and over and over again. And I can't imagine a life where I don't have something to be obsessed about. One thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently— I'm 46, and I've seen over the past few years some people who I've long looked up to finally retire. In their late 70s, and these people are incredible, great family people with unbelievable careers, and they retired without a hobby that they're obsessed with. And one thing that I'm thinking a lot about now is slowing everything down just enough where I can start to become obsessed with a hobby so that when I do one day retire, there's something else for me to fall into.

Because I, I see them feeling listless and without purpose. It doesn't matter what the hobby is. You could be golf or woodworking or whatever the heck. But I definitely want that in my future, and the fact that I know I will want and need it later in life shows me what a powerful part of my life it is now. Now, I brought up the Sean Brock Instagram caption because I do think it's important. It's a beautiful thing if you can grab it by the tail. For those that can't, it becomes ugly. It's not dissimilar to anything. I love cheeseburgers, but gosh, if I only ate cheeseburgers, it would not be good for me, right? Like, I think when you lose yourself in the pursuit of something, that's when it gets ugly. You need to hold on to yourself while obsessively pursuing whatever it is.

It's beautifully put. I could talk all day about this. There's so much though I want to get into. We've talked about adversity before. You've had adversity in your life growing up. Your dad's had adversity. And one of his sayings that I love, that I want you to riff on a little bit more, that I think could be helpful for a lot of us is, adversity is a terrible thing to waste. What does that saying mean to you?

I mean, it means that you cannot always control what life throws at you. No matter how prepared, no matter how hard you worked, no matter all of the things, you can't 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. Now, a caveat there, because as I've talked about this more and more since the book came out, I've realized there's a thing that people don't often fully grasp. Some moments when a leader is leading a team and there's a moment of adversity, they hear adversity is a terrible thing to waste, and they immediately shift into cheerleader mode, like, hey guys, let's use this to our advantage. And That is also not the right thing to do. To be a great leader, you need to allow yourself to be as human as humanly possible. And that means that in those moments, you need to allow yourself, and along with that, 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. And the reason it's important for a leader to do that is because, gosh, you want to know that your leader is being honest with you. And when something sucks, you want to know that they think it sucks too. It's good to feel 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? And I can without exception, look back at every moment with hindsight that at a certain point felt like the end of the world with gratitude. The girl that broke my heart 2 years before I met my now wife. I am so grateful that she did. Breaking up with my business partner, and which led to the selling of my restaurant company. I felt like the worst thing ever. But I wouldn't have written Unreasonable Hospitality had that not happened. Adversity is a terrible thing to waste. When it happens to you, feel bad for as long as you feel you need to feel bad, and then don't waste it.

How did you respond in that moment? I don't think we've talked about this yet. When you and your business partner, you're both these famous guys, you have the number one restaurant in the world, which is insanely hard to do, obviously. And you break up. I don't know the details of the breakup, but it happened.

Are you able to say in that moment, okay, my dad told me adversity is a terrible thing to waste?

No, that's what I said. You feel bad for yourself for a while.

Can you take me to that moment, though? What did you do? How did you get to the point to where you were able to say, okay, I'm going to make the best of this situation? And then you write one of the bestselling books of the last however many years.

I think COVID gave everyone a gift in spite of all the damage it caused, lives lost, everything. And most people I know can point to like a thing that COVID gave them as a gift. The gift it gave me was this: when that happened, I woke up— I mean, invariably I sold the company, so it was hard but good— and about 2 days later had a full-blown identity crisis. Like, who is a restaurateur without restaurants? Like, who am I in the world, right? The same demons that I think many of us share. Here. And aggressively, in hindsight perhaps even frantically, started raising money, putting together a team. When COVID hit, I was one week away from signing 3 restaurant leases in New York City. So we moved up to our place in the country for what we thought was going to be a few weeks. A few weeks turned into a few months. I kept all those deals warm for a little bit before one day I was on a walk through the woods and I was like, hold on, what am I doing? The gift that COVID gave me was forcing me to find the space to decide what I wanted to do next, as opposed to running back to do the thing I'd always done.

And I wrote the book as a part of that process, figuring that if I just pressed stop, sat down, and started writing, not only could— one of the other things my dad always says is the best way to learn is to teach. And so if you can articulate your own ideas, ideals, core values, non-negotiables, the lessons you've learned, you're better equipped to embody them going forward. But also that in rewalking the road I'd just been down, I'd be better equipped to decide what road I wanted to walk down next. It just so turned out that the book became that road. But again, COVID was terrible. I mean, globally and personally, like, there's a lot of stuff that COVID messed up in some of my finances and all that. But that was a terrible thing to waste. Had it not been for COVID, I wouldn't have had the space to figure out— I think, like, it's, it's pretty persistent. Yeah. And it's definitively not easy to see at first. I mean, I've been hearing that line, adversity is a terrible thing to waste, since I was a kid when my mom was a quadriplegic. It's been drilled into my brain.

I have been reminded of its validity over and over and over again. And I guarantee you, the next time something really bad happens, which I guarantee you that will happen, I will not be able to see it as an opportunity the moment it happens. That is just a part of how we are wired. Yeah, but I'm getting better at seeing it more quickly.

Okay. Because I was going to say, and I think getting this message out, what can be helpful is we probably all have those experiences that we are now grateful for, but at the time we were not. We were upset. And what this message, I think, hopefully can help people do is have a little bit of perspective when the adversity strikes, because we know it's coming. We don't know what it is, but it's one of the few certainties of the world is that something's coming and it's on us then how we choose to respond. And to be able to draw from some of those things in the past can be a way to get us to maybe respond a little bit better or quicker the next time it happens.

But that's what I want to be clear in saying is there are some, I'm sure, who are better than I am that see it right away.

Yeah.

That should not be the expectation. The goal should be to get to the point where you see it as quickly as possible.

Yeah.

Love it.

Talked about one of your mentors, your dad. I want to talk about another one of your mentors because mentors have played such a huge role in my life and I love learning about the people that you've learned from. Danny Meyer, you said Danny Meyer gave me the foundation upon which I've built everything. What are some of the most useful things, or maybe just one, that you've learned from Danny Meyer?

The two, and the first honestly feels pretty obvious, not just to me, but I think to many at this point, but it was definitively not obvious not that long ago, which is The best way to make sure that you are taking care of your customers is to start by taking care of your team. Feels almost trite at this point, and yet so profoundly true. And he's the one that really opened not only my eyes, but I think the eyes of many to that idea.

What are some of the things that Danny did? Because he's ahead of his time. Setting the Table, another great book. It's funny now that you've kind of written the next one that's probably in the line of Setting the Table. What did he do to take care of his people? What are one or two or a few of the things he did that was ahead of his time to take care of his people?

I mean, the, the little things that are easy to articulate honestly feel insignificant in the grand scheme. At the time, restaurants didn't pay for health insurance, and it's like Danny was the first person to do that, or one of the first. Little things like whatever, barbecues or holiday parties, all that stuff, like compensation-related things that weren't simply about just paying people more but treating people with more dignity and treating them like professionals as opposed to hired guns, that, that sort of thing. But I think it was just more of a philosophical thing. I mean, the culture of the company was rooted in the idea of enlightened hospitality. We take care of each other first. And then we take care of the guest in that order. And that one central operating system influenced the approach to everything else, which is a good segue to the second thing I learned from him. And by the way, I could— there's a much longer list than two, but I'm going to focus on these two. And the second thing was the power of language, the power of language to define a culture, and how beautiful and impactful it is when you take the time to clearly and succinctly articulate your core values, developing almost these isms, right?

Danny was a master of isms. He didn't call them isms, I— that's how I reference them. These short, succinct articulations of the things that mattered most to him. Charitable assumption, was one of Danny's things, which is effectively give people the benefit of the doubt. "The swan" was a reference to how you move through a room kicking like crazy under the surface of the water while gliding over the top. "Enlightened hospitality." We take care of each other first and then the guests, right? All these things, because every time he articulated an ism, which, I mean, I was 21 when I worked for him, some of them felt cheesy to me. "The swan," you know, you just graduated college, you're like, "What are we doing here?" And yet, every time he identified one of these things, it was a medicine. To every one of us on the team that that thing mattered to him and it needed to matter to us as well. I remember after I graduated from Cornell, a lot of the kids I graduated with went to work for either big hotel companies or consulting groups. And I write this in Unreasonable Hospitality, they all kind of jabbed at me saying I worked for a cult because of our shared internal language, like most cults, right?

But I've come to realize that, listen, a cult is short for the word culture. The people saying that I worked for a cult almost entirely worked for companies that lacked a culture. And so it felt weird to see one that was so focused on its own.

It is funny when I think about the best teams, companies, whether I've worked there or worked with or been on, they've all felt a little cultish. Yeah, all of them. Like every one of them. And from an outsider's perspective, maybe it feels that way. The language, the way you move, the way you practiced, the way you met, the way you talk to each other, even like great friend groups. I was with one last night at a dinner with the boss who hired me for my first ever job and some of my other coworkers, because we still want to take care of this guy. His name is Rex Caswell. We love Rex. And 5 of us just took him out because we're all grateful. He gave us our first jobs in sales, telephonic, just craziness, right? But it was cultish in there. That's because of him, the leader, the way we talked, the things we did in the best possible way. And that's why we meet up 20 years later when we've all moved on to completely different things. And yet it felt like we were there, we were at work, the things we said, the people we talked about, the laughs.

I mean, all of it, man. It was like, yeah, we're kind of in a cult and it's awesome.

Yeah. I mean, Caveat PSA, cults as we normally know them are bad. I just want to be on record saying those things are bad.

David Koresh, whatever. Yes.

Not good.

Not good. So one of the things too, your book has spread well beyond restaurants and all that. It's into everything. When I think of a business leader, we're all— every company's in search of its competitive advantage. And you've said the only real competitive advantage that exists over the long-term comes through hospitality. And I want to make a compare and contrast, even though I'm cool with both of these companies, and I believe you are too, but I think it can help bring this point home. That's McDonald's and Chick-fil-A. You've done this before a few times, but can you talk to me about the difference between McDonald's and Chick-fil-A?

Um, I want to be careful in doing this one too many times because I actually, like, I grew up with McDonald's, right? McDonald's has like an unbelievable nostalgia to me, and even my kids somehow have discovered it. They Old McDonald's, which— Daddy, can we go to Old McDonald's? This is my, my belief, not about the two companies, just generally, and then I'll get into that. Every company I've spent time with 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? And yet those conversations almost always center around the quality of the product or the strength of the brand. But 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, and this is not my opinion, it's a fact, time has proven it to be true, someone's going to come around and build a better product. They're going to create a stronger brand. They may be better capitalized. They may be just newer and shinier. They may be younger and more innovative. They may just be better at the thing than you are.

The only competitive advantage that exists over the long term comes through hospitality, through consistently, generously, and creatively investing in relationships, because 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. If you have like any marketing spin to your algorithm, you'll see McDonald's does some of the coolest marketing things in the world. They really do build a great brand. I mean, those arches, everything, some of the stuff they do in Europe, even the way their social media team responded to the whole ridiculous CEO taking a little bite out of the Archburger— that was brilliant. Their product is consistent. And there was probably a season for a very, very, very long time where they were the best burger chain, full stop, out there. No one could ever threaten their position at the top of the pyramid. And then Five Guys and Shake Shack and In-N-Out Burger, and they'll serve better product. Now you compare that to Chick-fil-A. If you ask 10 people who makes a better chicken sandwich, Chick-fil-A or whatever, Popeyes— there's a bunch of people that jumped into the fried chicken sandwich wars— a lot of people would say other people.

People in many cases like other people's chicken sandwiches more than they like 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. I've heard stories from so many people about the hospitality of Chick-fil-A. I heard a story more recently from a woman who had just had her second kid and was going through postpartum depression and walked into a Chick-fil-A to get lunch for her and the older child and realized she lost her wallet and was just really struggling. And the person behind the counter, just an hourly employee, was like, hey, you're having a hard day, I'm so sorry, this one's on us. She will never forget that. The things they do with my pleasure, with refilling your drinks in the dining room, all that stuff— 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 that the product is a little bit better, if we feel a genuine sense of loyalty to the first one. And everyone can think about their own experience as a customer, and I'm sure find an example of when that has been true for you.

So yeah, that's how I compare the two. I, I know a lot of people who feel an incredible nostalgia for McDonald's, people talking negatively about their food. I know a lot of people who love their food, and I will go tit for tat with anyone around the idea that McDonald's has some of the best french fries on the planet. I believe that. Yeah. But as many stories as I hear about Chick-fil-A doing little and big things to make people feel seen, I don't hear those stories about McDonald's. Yep. And that's not on accident. One company has chosen to invest all of itself in pursuit of that. The other one has not.

How would this apply outside of the restaurant business? As I said, unreasonable hospitality has exploded to every industry. Now, as you know more than anybody. They want you to come speak and help them out, whatever. So let's go outside of restaurants and say, we want to make the Chick-fil-A of fill in the blank. I want my company to be the my pleasure company. I want my company to be the one that makes people feel a certain way. How does that work? How does that work outside of the world of where you're actually serving people food?

And has always been for me just a conduit through which I've been able to express hospitality. If you are in the business of serving other people, these opportunities exist for you in, I'd argue, an endless way. One of the things I'm always encouraging people to do— listen, the things that Chick-fil-A does that have garnered the most attention are, I think they call it second-mile service, right? It's not just my pleasure, although that's a significant one, It's also when they go in and they refill your drinks while you're in the dining room, something that would never happen in another fast food restaurant, or at least when they started, it would never have happened in another fast food restaurant. Effectively, what they've done is they've gone through the experience they serve, they've identified as many of the little touch points that exist in that experience, and they've tried to figure out how to make as many of them just a little bit more awesome as possible. Every one that serves other human beings. The experience they're serving is filled with lots of big and little touchpoints, big and little moments of interaction. 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.

What happens if you have an office building and people visit you When they get into the elevator to go to your office, that is a touchpoint. When they're greeted by the person at the front desk, that is a touchpoint. When they park the car, that is a touchpoint. When they get back in the car, that is a touchpoint. When they receive a bill, touchpoint. Like, I, I could just keep going on and on and on and on and on and on and on. No matter what you do, detail every little part of the experience. Then once you have, it's like a big long timeline. Just look at each touchpoint. In that map and say, how can we make these more awesome? And it is wild, the impact you can have when you focus on parts of the experience that no one else has even paused for long enough to consider. You can blow people's minds. And by the way, it's just fun to do. It makes the work more fun, more creative, more fulfilling.

Well, every company right now, every leader of a company right now could take a second and say, Let's think about every tiny little touchpoint, one for our employees and us, right? Because you got to take care of your employees, your teammates, and then every single tiny little touchpoint for our customers. You could do that audit and say, what do we do? I mean, Jesse Cole, who I just recorded with the Savannah Bananas, right? That's what he does. And like, their invoicing completely changed now. And the way that the language of the invoices, the way it's the whole music when you call them and how they really optimize for the whole music to be exciting and entertaining and not boring like everybody else is like, this could happen and everything. One of the ways I've read, you tell me if this is true, I'm sure it is, that you do this because I want to hear more about how you put this into play is, so you host a couple events and I want to get into hosting events even more in a second, but let's go to one particular part of this. There are speakers at your events.

I've read that the night before the conference, you host all the speakers at your house. Is this right? You serve them Chinese food and then you gather everyone in the living room and give them specific gifts. Is this accurate? Can you walk me through this process?

Hey, where did you read this?

I'm not sure, dude. I just, I'm just, you know how I just go as I try to find everything.

I love your approach to research. I, okay. I want to be able to talk about this without ruining it.

I know. I don't want to mess with the surprise, but yeah.

Yeah. This is the Welcome Conference you're talking about right now, which is the first one I ever started. It's a one-day symposium about hospitality in New York City that is now held at Lincoln Center. It's become a very big thing, but it was started for restaurant people. I 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 and I'm using those words with intention because I do believe hospitality is a craft. It's a muscle that you can strengthen. And so for those reasons, some of these conferences you go to, it's like $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a ticket. The Welcome Conference costs like $250 a ticket. It's generally effectively a break-even proposal for me, but I want to keep the tickets inexpensive because now there's plenty of people that go that could afford a much more expensive ticket, but I want to make sure others can always afford to be there. For that reason, we cannot afford the kind of speaking fees that people who inspire others on that stage deserve. So I had to come up with a more creative way to show appreciation, and that's what that dinner is.

And yes, it's about Chinese food because, listen, I don't think— I live in Nashville now, but I'm a New Yorker my whole life, and there are a few things that feel like home and friendship and community, like delivery Chinese food in New York. It's about community, because the people that take that stage, their responsibility is to inspire the people in the room, but also to create the conditions through which those attendees can come together and form community. And it's impossible to form community for others until you first feel a sense of community yourselves. And then for me to show genuine appreciation and what I can't necessarily afford to do with money, I can afford to do with time, to give them the gift of feeling seen. And that's where I'm going to leave it for right now.

Okay. I've read a little bit more, but I love it. Just about the amount of effort and work that you and your team put in to make sure they feel seen.

Yeah. This is like something we spend months and months and months.

You're not just getting like an expensive bottle of wine, let's just say, to give to them. No, no, no, no, no. You're doing something much more personalized to make them feel seen. It's probably the best way.

Yeah. One of the things I love about magic, I love magic. I love creating magic through hospitality, but I also just love seeing great magicians and I love it because there's still surprise. And in this day and age where there's so few things that can surprise us, there's like a, a youth-filled joy and not understanding something or being prepared for something. Yeah. So I don't know if someone else talked about the welcome thing or if someone else tricked me into talking about it, but that's why I choose not to go into too much depth.

I got you. It's all good. I want to get further actually into live events because you do one in New York, which you just talked about, and you also do one in Nashville. Because I think live events are everything right now. I host one a year, right? The one I was trying to get you to come to, you're going to be out of town in Nashville, is that I think from my experience of hosting them myself, everybody just like, they crave that feeling of connection and community and being and literally touching shoulders with people. They want to be together in person. So I'd love just to hear you riff more about hosting events. Everyone probably has crazy high expectations because you're the guy who wrote Unreasonable Hospitality. So they're expecting the craziest of crazy things. And so you probably feel, I'm guessing, some pressure to deliver on that. So I feel like I have a lot to learn from you on how you approach events and how you make people feel special or feel some of that magic when they come to your event in Nashville or New York or other places where I've read that you're going to have them.

Yeah. So the first thing I'd say is there needs to be a good reason for the event to exist. And I think people skip that step a little bit too quickly sometimes, doing an event just for the sake of having an event. I created the Welcome Conference years ago because there were chef conferences all over the world, and I was always the only dining room person speaking at them, and I wanted a place for dining room people to have community. And then it evolved over the years and became not just dining room, but dining room and chefs, and then The book came out and exploded into much more than that. Had you asked me 5 years ago whether I'd ever do another event, I would have said no. That's the event. I did it. I had a reason for doing this one. I don't have a reason for doing another one. But Welcome, I'm just the host. I curate the speakers, but it's not about my book. It's not about my ideas. It's about me creating a stage through which other people can present their ideas. And I remember after the book really gained traction, the Welcome conference that followed was the first we'd ever gotten complaints about because people went expecting to learn more about the book and from me.

And so then it was time to create another event because I wasn't going to change Welcome. I never wanted Welcome to be all about me, but clearly we were letting some people down, which meant we needed to step it up and create something for them. And so that's when we created the Summit. Welcome is a couple thousand people, Summit is just a few hundred, and it's It's over a 2-day period, and it's a training workshop slash conference slash party, effectively, where people who see the world through the same lens as I do can come together and find other people who feel the same way. And it's also where we guide people, truly train them on the unreasonable hospitality framework and how to bring it to life. Now, how do you make an event more hospitable? Well, using the exact same process I just talked about before. Again, if food was the conduit through which I served unreasonable hospitality, now ideas are the conduit through which I serve it. And that's just looking at every moment and figuring out how to make it a little bit more hospitable. And by the way, that does not always mean more.

As a rule, I hate gift bags at events. I think they're airport garbage cans just filled with terrible swag that's been given out at events because people feel like the more stuff they put in the gift bag, the more generous they will come across as having been. I give less because I've been on the receiving end of that, and for me it doesn't work. There are some crazy over-the-top gestures of hospitality for individuals, but For the most part, I have always liked to create things in the following way: I look at something, design the version of it that I wish existed, work obsessively to bring that vision to life, and then one day I get to welcome people into my imagination. I think we can only serve the thing that we want to receive and then just hope that other people want to receive that thing too. When we try too hard to create what we think other people want, it's never going ring true.

Thinking about all of those little touch points again, that would be another great exercise to do with your team or a group of creative people, as well as thinking about the highlights or the best moments of past events you went to and then try to optimize for that. I know from some of the best events I've went to where I met amazing people in between meetings.

Okay.

Let's think about that. Let's optimize a little bit for the time in between meetings, whereas most people think, let's cram as much stuff as possible. That, in my experience, is not what makes a great meeting. What makes a great meeting or makes a great conference or a great gathering is usually the people who are in the room and creating an opportunity or the container or the space for those people to meet and potentially have life-changing relationships. That's just one example. There's so much there on conferences and meetings, but the—

I'll give you, I'll give you an example from our summit last year, which we're doing in this year. Last year was the first time we did it. And in my mind, I expected that it would be filled with groups of 2 or 4 or 6 people, right? You and a colleague are coming from your company and you're going to attend it together. It's going to be half team building, half education, whatever. And then like a month before the event, one person on my team was walking me through the entire guest list because I wanted to start getting like really savy on the industries that were going to be represented. And a lot of people were coming alone. I was like, whoa, I did not see that coming. This is not exactly adversity is a terrible thing to waste because it's not adversity, but it was certainly something I wasn't expecting. And sometimes when we encounter things that we weren't expecting, we can let them throw us off our game, or you can embrace them and try to figure out how to make that into something amazing. So what we did was— and this is the reason why I wasn't excited about so many people coming alone.

I think energy in a room is so important, and like when you do these activities, you want everyone leaning in. But I am one of the most extroverted people in the world still. If I walk into a cocktail party and I don't know anyone, I seize up. I'm not good at it. I don't like it. I never picked up a girl at a bar. That's just not my thing. Like, I like to be around people I know. And I was worried that the energy of the entire room would be thrown off by that many people attending alone. I was also just worried that they'd be lonely the night they got to Nashville. So we sent an email to all of them and we said, hey, we saw that you're coming alone. No judgment. We're actually really honored that you are coming here by yourself to do this, but we have an idea if you're so inclined. Now, maybe you have friends down here, or you just want a night alone watching TV because you're leaving a family behind and you just need some some, some you time, or maybe you'd like to meet some people.

If you're the latter, let us know. And we set up dinner reservations at some of my favorite restaurants in Nashville, and we did some matchmaking, and we ended up having like 40 people dining together at restaurants all over Nashville. They ended up then coming into the, the beginning of the conference the next day already like this one big awesome community. That's not doing some crazy dreamweaver gesture for each of the individuals. It's simply based on saying, gosh, what would I feel like if I were coming alone? And what would I hope that someone would do for me? Let's do that.

Just the extra step of preparation, looking at the list of people, where do they come from? Wait a second, this is not what I expected. What can we do? What can we do that's unreasonable? What can we do that will show that extra hospitality that's outside of the actual event. Again, I think we all could be better at that. Okay. One of the things that I just got from your email yesterday is we all should do a better job. I know I need to do a better job of this, of making it easy for someone to say yes. You wrote about the fact that people send you screeners and sometimes they'll send you like DVDs, which is surprising because I don't have a DVD player. And then other times they'll send you QR codes, would make it very easy to watch whatever the movie or the show is.

Is.

Can you maybe riff on that example and then just the overall mentality and this idea of making it easier for others to say yes?

Well, yeah, I mean, this is, it's a good segue from the last conversation because they're part and parcel. For people who did not read the newsletter, and I'll seize on this as a shameless plug for the newsletter, I write a newsletter. It's called Premial. It comes out every 2 weeks. It's one of my favorite things to do.

It's really good.

Chiefly because I developed a practice of writing when I wrote the book, and I think it's irresponsible once you've built a practice to let it die.

Well, it also, as your dad and you have already said, is writing is a form of teaching, and so writing creates clarity of thought. So from a leadership perspective, I will stand on this mountain forever that all leaders, whether they choose to publish or not, is on them. But all leaders should have some sort of a writing practice in order to get more clear on what they believe, what they think. And if you're not doing that, I think it's an injustice to the people that you're leading. Yeah, because it's such a powerful tool. It's hard, right? But in your case, you're publishing and it's also changing lives.

In addition, it's hard in the beginning, but like any— it's like if you start going to the gym, it's hard. Over time it gets much easier.

Yep. Anyway, go ahead.

Yeah, anyway, that email or the pre-mail newsletter, unreasonablehospitality.com, to set it up. Shameless plug complete.

Great.

The one I wrote about yesterday was— so I'm a producer for The Bear, and this just started happening 7 months ago or 6 months ago, and I had no idea it was going to start happening, but I started getting the 4 for your consideration packages for Emmy voting. And by the way, it wasn't some people send DVDs, it was all people send DVDs for Emmys and Oscars. It's all I got were DVDs after DVDs after DVDs. And every time I had this little pile, because the first time it happened I was like, oh, this is cool, I'm getting the for your consideration things, I never thought that would happen in my life. And I'd show my wife and we'd joke about how we didn't have a DVD player. And then the second time we'd joke about it again. The third time I was like, well, this is This is ridiculous. Who's running this? I was like, maybe people in Hollywood all still have DVD players, but well, I guess technically I'm in Hollywood now if I'm receiving these. And, and then eventually Amazon Prime arrived, and it wasn't a DVD. In fact, it was this beautiful printed, almost like a pop-up book with the QR code on the front, and it's the only one we were able to watch.

The lesson for me is this: A, just shop your own business. Go to your own hotel. I say this all the time, like the metaphor I use is stay in your own hotel. That 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. The example I use about staying in your hotel is the number of hotels where I go to get in the shower and I'm soaking wet and I reach for the shampoo and realize that it's set up on the sink, not in the shower itself. And every single time I see that, I'm like, if the GM of this hotel ever stayed at this hotel, that would change tomorrow. Or all the hotels where I go there and I go to turn the lights off and it's like the Da Vinci Code to figure out how to turn off every light in a hotel room. Like if the GM of that hotel ever stayed in that hotel, it would not be that hard.

Yeah.

It's the same thing with this. People are sending things to people, and in this case it's an ask and making it so unbelievably hard for the person to answer that ask in the way they hope. It's not about doing more. What Amazon did was actually less. They removed one thing from the package. They just structured it in a way that actually was more hospitable.

Yeah. Think about whatever the thing you provide, you sell, you do is from the other person's perspective. It sounds like the most obvious thing ever, and yet it's obviously not happening.

It's unbelievable to me. Like, If you run a business and you have not engaged in your own business in every way that one of your customers engages with your business, you are being reckless. You are leaving money on the table. You are not doing your job. If you run an e-commerce business and you haven't bought something yourself, if you have not tried to return something yourself, if you've not filed a complaint yourself, if you've not tried to get someone from customer service on the phone yourself, You talk about Jesse Cole and hold music. I mean, clearly no one's doing that based on the fact that most hold music is 30 seconds of music repeated for an hour on end, which by the way is not just unpleasurable, it will actually drive you insane. That's just someone that's never called their own customer service line, otherwise that would be changed. Because these changes can be made so quickly if someone actually cared enough to make them. I was in a meet and greet after I talked the other day, and someone came up and they said something that stopped me in my tracks to the point where I had to press pause on the conversation and write it down.

He said, I love everything you just talked about. It reminds me of something we say all the time, which is never let a gracious impulse pass. Which, by the way, this applies to your event too. When you're thinking about your event planning and you come up with a really cool idea, there's always going to be like the devil and the angel on your shoulder, and the devil's gonna be like, that's too hard, it's gonna take too much time, forget it. Don't listen to that. Just go over to the angel and be like, hey, how do we make this happen? Like, don't let the good ideas go away. The difference between the good and the great are not the number of good ideas they have, but the amount of time they're going to invest in bringing those good ideas to life. But the second is like, if you are going to shop your own hotel, if you are going to be a customer of your own business, you're going to experience things When you have the idea, actually do something about it. Don't allow your business to hover in a sea of mediocrity because you were too busy to fix a problem that you are very aware exists.

Love it. I told Will before we started that I get the BookScan bestseller list sent to me every week by book publishers, and there are two names that are permanently stuck at the top regardless of who else is writing books. It's James Clear and Will Goedert. That's it. Every single week. It's crazy. It's awesome.

Right?

And now it feels like we have an extension of this. So Unreasonable Hospitality: The Field Guide. Tell me more. What is this? What's it about? How could it be helpful for all business leaders?

I mean, I'm so excited about it. Like most things, we can circle back to the beginning of the conversation, obsession. I made this much harder on myself than it probably needed to be. I started working on this because of the question you asked about 15% of the way through the conversation. How do other people bring this to life?

Yeah.

And it's one of the questions that I've heard with a ton of consistency every time I go around and speak. And when I speak, I really work hard to make it equal doses of inspiring and actionable. I don't like hearing someone deliver an inspiring speech where at the end of it I don't know what to do with the information. So I work really hard to give people tools. And yet over and over and over again, I get questions like, okay, but how exactly do we bring it to life? And so if Unreasonable Hospitality is the why, the field guide is the how. This is structured as a series of building blocks, and it's a workbook. Like, you get a pen, we co-author it together. By the end, you're going through exercises, answering questions, I'm asking you to map your customer journey. I'm asking you to do a bunch of stuff like that, but it's how to build a team, how to create a culture of hospitality through focusing on excellence, collaboration, communication, feedback, and repair. And then once you've done those first two things, once you've built that foundation, how to work with your team to create magic.

And it goes through how I, I talk all, all the time about pre-meal. It's a literal step-by-step how to deliver a daily huddle that will move the needle. I've seen so many people across pretty much every industry build their own Dreamweaver programs based on my Dreamweaver concept in the book, and it's made me realize that I never actually made super clear how that program is meant to be built. And so I see people doing it still to good effect, but incorrectly in a, in a bunch of different ways. So It's a how-to on building a Dreamweaver program. It's really just me walking alongside you as you make the choice to create this kind of culture. And what I'm particularly excited about it for is this: there's been a lot of companies that have done Unreasonable Hospitality book clubs where their, their team gets together and reads it. I think this will be such an impactful way to do a book club. For the entire team to work through the material together. It's half education, half team building, and I can't wait to see what comes out of it. But we made it harder for ourselves because one of the best compliments I got about the first book was that it was an awesome beach read, which meant a lot to me because I wanted a business book about hospitality to itself be hospitable, to be fun to read.

And I wanted a workbook about hospitality to be hospitable, to not feel like work. And so we brought in a designer named Don Clark, who's done work for Lego and Pixar and NASA, to do the illustrations. And it's just stunning what he's done. It's something like 200 pieces of original art throughout the entire thing.

And wow.

And I'm really happy with how it turned out. He really kind of breathed life into the ideas such that they jump off the pages.

It seems like you also have a deep care for beauty. Looking at that, the little details, getting the best illustrator in the world, or one of them, so that the product itself is like a piece of art, a work of art, that there's a beauty in it in addition to being practical and useful. And you could implement this into your life, but it also is beautiful.

I think it's the obsessiveness. Yeah, I mean, even in the first, the first cover I remember we probably went through like 150 iterations of the COVID design.

Who was that designer and how did they respond to you being obsessed?

Well, I ended up switching designers from the publisher's designer to my own in-house designer that I'd worked with at the Museum of Modern Art because all the original cover designs, it was like a plate with a linen napkin and And I was like, no, guys, you're missing the mark. Like, A, this is not just for restaurants. And B, I don't want to lean into the stuffiness of restaurants. I want to lean into the brightness of hospitality. And now maybe not everyone likes it, but the point is that I don't think you can choose what to care about. You care about everything.

Well, so it's been 11 years of this. When I think about one of the commonalities. Obsession is one of them, but what's like right alongside that is exactly what you just said. I was going to say the word care again. That sounds obvious, but it's not. If you go through life, you'll see people are living in zombie land. They're just existing with whatever it is. And one of the biggest differences is this deep care for whatever it is that you're choosing to do. It's I have kids going off to college and I'm like, I find myself writing them these little notes. And one of them is, I don't care what you're going to do when you go to college, but do it with excellence. If you're going to go work at Wendy's or whatever, the bookstore, be like the most excellent version of you possible while you're sorting the books at the bookstore or you're putting the shirts of your college back on the rack, whatever, or you're helping a customer.

It doesn't matter.

Be excellent at it.

Like, care, right?

Care about being excellent at the thing. It's not, well, I just have this job because I need to make a little money and I'm tired and I'm hungover. No, that's fine. You're going to do those things. I get it. But be excellent at whatever the thing is.

And you got to care.

And that's what I feel so much from you, is just this deep care for whatever it is you choose to do.

Thank you, man. And by the way, I feel it in return. Even looking at your screen, between the lighting and the backdrop. And I know you have the bookcases blurred a little bit, but I'm sure you've already obsessed over every single book that's on there in the order that it's in, even though I can't even tell what books they are. I think like obsession manifests itself in really beautiful ways when you focus a lot of energy on things that not everyone will even fully notice, but people can feel it.

Yeah.

And Honestly, a lot of the stuff that I pour myself into is just for me because I just like things being a certain way, and I like to be proud of the hallway that leads to the room that I'm sitting in and talking to you from. And I—

what's the hallway like?

It's just got a bunch of art actually from the Field Guide. We spent a bunch of money to really put out a bunch of these things because I love that. I like to be reminded of the things I believe in. As I continue to perpetuate the ideas out in the world, I've never once regretted caring more. There's been plenty of times where I've regretted caring less.

I love it, man. I could talk to you forever. Next time we'll be in Nashville. Unreasonable Hospitality: The Field Guide. I'm pumped for this to get out into the world, man, and impact people. It's definitely going to impact me. It's something I'm going to go through with my team. I was already thinking about questions while we talk through of how we can be more hospitable, how can we, we can be more unreasonable, how we can be more like the way that you guys treat your guest speakers. All the things like doing the audit of every single touchpoint makes so much sense that we're missing things. We all are. Like we're missing things that could be better. And this is just an amazing reminder. So thank you, man. I really appreciate you and all that you've put out in the world and how you've been so gracious with me as well, both both when we record and in between times too. Uh, just your communication, always fast, always useful, always kind and curious, which is really cool, man. So I'm super appreciative of you. Thank you so much.

Hey brother, I appreciate you too. Thanks for having me on.

We'll continue this dialog as we both progress, man. Gonna be a lot of fun.

Awesome, dude.

It is the end of End of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, ryan@learningleader.com.

Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Will Gadara.

A few takeaways from my notes: map every touchpoint, list every single interaction a customer has with your business, from the first email to the hold music to how you invoice, and ask yourself one question about each one. How can I make this awesome? The magic is in the details that most people ignore.

Jesse Cole is another great episode to listen to if you want to talk about mapping every touchpoint. Jesse and Will are perfect at this.

And then never let a gracious impulse pass. The next time you think of doing something kind or generous for a customer, a colleague, a teammate, a friend, do it, do it right now. That impulse is the thing that builds loyalty that nobody can take from you. And then stay in your own hotel. Now, this is a metaphor, but what Will's talking about is whatever you're selling or you're offering, experience it as your customer does. Book the reservation yourself, call your own customer service line, read the email you send. You can't fix what you can't see. It's all about putting yourself in the shoes that from the perspective of the people who are experiencing it from you, stay in your own hotel. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Will Godera. I think it'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, you subscribe to the show, you rate it, hopefully 5 stars, and you write a thoughtful review.

By doing all of that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I'm obsessed about, and for that, I will forever be grateful.

Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.