7 things MrBeast, Bezos & Thiel do that you don’t

if this was a v tape it it'd be labeled sean our gore part two people would not be getting what they thought they were getting you're an union indian guy is just screaming about management hacks ceo i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on on a goal travel never what i wanna talk about is basically if you're a ceo of a company if you're running a company right now which i think a lot of people listening this are there's a good chance you're not being hardcore enough and what i wanna talk about is like six or seven real anecdotes stories of what ceos do moves that ceos do that sound wrong sound almost illegal but they actually work the idea being when you're a ceo there's no ceo school there's no ceo training there's no nobody there to manage you you're the one managing everybody else and most people don't even give you like real feedback because you're kind of their boss you're in charge is this like famous examples or your friends i have a mix of examples you'll know examples i think you won't know but they're of famous companies and then one or two for my friends k so i have i have one two three four i have like seven and whenever you come up with ideas like this which you do all the time they interest me but what also interests me is why you care what do you hear right now well two things one is in general like i wanna be better at what i do and so if i ever hear of somebody else doing something that i think could be either i haven't tried or i think like wow that sounds kinda crazy but i guess i see how that might work it's like i kinda found a new move in a video game and i like to know that but the other is we talk a lot about almost to the point of it being obnoxious this phrase frame breaking which is you see the world a certain way and it seems like there's a there's a border everything about the world fits inside that frame and then you'll hear this story that will just be outside of the frame but it breaks the frame the frame has to expand now incorporate this new information and i don't know why i love it i love it like dudes love pokemon cards i just wanna collect as many of those frame breaking ideas of stories and the reason why is if you've ever heard that story of like the elephant who has a young age like the t to the stake in the ground and then he grows and now he's so powerful he could easily rip out the stake but he doesn't there there's many examples in my life where it feels like there's the illusion of control that like i'm limited by something that in in actuality i'm not limited by at all the stories i'm gonna tell you are sort elephant the state things were like oh i i couldn't possibly do that why not why can't you do that before i go into like kind of the famous stories of people you know doing this i'll tell you the guy who i was having breakfast with that told me a story like this they got me thinking got me paying attention to these so i was getting breakfast recently with this guy martin who come on the podcast martin be siri now martin was he was like the one that got away from me the very first angel investment i ever wanted to do it ten plus years ago i started making like a little bit of money i think i was making like i don't know a hundred and sixty grand a year not even that much money not enough money to be i would say an angel investor but i wanted to i a sitting in san francisco i thought that would be the thing to do i should start angel investing and i had this kid who was like this thirteen year old kid who was using one of our products and he he always used to hang out in the tech rooms and hang out with contact tech things he emailed me and he said hey i'll be your scout so here i was this guy who had never made it an angel investment and now i got a scout said i'm gonna send you three companies a week and you know you don't have to invest in any of them but it'll just be great practice for me you just give me feedback on those i'd love to learn what age are you at this time i'm probably twenty four twenty five okay yeah alright he sends me this email with the first first company and he goes this guy martin was here he's in canada where i live and already i'm like i'm not trying to invest in a canadian company i wanna invest in silicon valley companies he's like what he's doing is really cool he's got this company called a p board and what a applied board was doing is very simple they were letting international students who you know if you've ever lived internationally the dream of most international students is to come to school in the united states yeah to go to university here but imagine just being like a kid in malaysia with malaysian parents and it's like great why don't you apply to whatever uc davis and they're like what what is uc dave where is that school how do i apply how do i fill out this form like is it very like there's a huge gap between where you are and where you're trying to go and you need a bridge and applied became that bridge they basically made it very easy for foreign students to apply to us universities and what they did they realized it was very smart was that us universities absolutely rip off foreign international students there's a reason they love international students is because they charged them three times the price to go to school and this to the same school get the same education so if you're us state school you obviously charge less for state tuition out of state tuition and then there's a third tier called international tuition that's crazy three times higher and so he went to the schools and he got the schools to say yeah i'll pay five grand or ten grand per student that we admit like as a as an affiliate fee as a bounty yeah so this is it's like incredible but and the international is dying to go there so it's not the hardest sell in the world they just needed a bridge so i hear this i'm like to this thirteen year old might have actually sent me a good company and i'm like think i was thirteen the scout was thirteen why okay and so he i'm like dude i i'm gonna do this deal and so he he comes out of i meet him in san francisco and i agree on the spot i'm gonna invest twenty five grand to this company and i said it very confidential true which is a huge amount of money by the way was like your annual savings it's san francisco on a hundred and seventy thousand dollars one twenty thousand dollars yeah exactly i was basically putting all of my like post tax disposable get into this one random canadian startup well guess what it's a day later your boys got cold feet i'm like man that was a lot i should've have said that i felt stupid coming down i was like do i go back to him and say five grand ten grand that fell stupid and you know what did i didn't back out but i just didn't say anything and like i didn't follow up and he didn't really follow up and some time went by and then i got unavailable and then anyways i missed out on the deal apply board today i think it does over like a billion dollars here in revenue or something crazy it's like a multi billion dollar company it's since it's insane i don't know the exact numbers but i know it's a multi billion dollar company so huge miss for me on that that's for the very first possible angel investment what was his valuation back then oh dude it must have been like i don't know ten million dollars or something yeah five six i would have been the first investor in it is those was like deal yeah first valley investor in it yeah there there was it would've have been amazing so last week i'm having breakfast with him and i've now invested in his new company pass which is doing some amazing things but i'm saying like dude how's was i was like how is it like how do you operate i was like tell me like we're having breakfast right now you're gonna go to the office what do you doing and he's he was like i worked pretty hard and he's like i was like okay what does that mean and so he's telling me his work schedule the guy basically like i drop off my kids you know eight am i'm in the office at eight thirty and i'm there from eight thirty to you know midnight every night and i'm like midnight jesus christ i was like are you the only one there he goes i used to be but not anymore i was was like well what what do you what do you mean i had you get people to start staying so late to work like extra like that like what'd you do to inspire them motivate them he goes option drop so what and and he's like option drop i said what's an option drop he goes at any time in my company if anybody does something awesome i just say option drop fifty thousand options just give them share options of the company on the spot like if somebody has a great idea they go above and beyond for a customer they solve a problem in the meeting right there option drop like dana white giving out a bonus what i'll you say it's a bonus but stock in the company on the fly and he goes and and then at night he goes if i'm there at ten pm and if there's like let's say twelve people there i'll just say everybody here option drop twenty thousand options all of you he's like i don't do it every night but i'll do it once every you know fifty days and guess what it got people to start doing the things that i cared about they know if i solve a big problem if i unlock some new growth if i solve the customer's problem if i'm working really hard that's how i get more options option drop and i was and if so i'm sitting there and i'm like laughing so i'm laughing at him first because i'm like that's just a little hilarious just a phrase and the way he said it i just was cracking me up and i was like well of course of course that would work of course that would reinforce behaviors rather than saying well i put our company values on the wall once six years ago i sure hope they're doing it you know what i mean like obviously a in the moment incentive positive reinforcement for a behavior the more specific the more concrete and the more immediate reward the more more of that behavior you're gonna get that's kinda of basic behavioral science i was like okay i guess that does i was that legal can you do i like i don't know i just can't feel like you can't just throw around options like like why not yeah you could i was like i just sent a message to my assistant option drop these people this out and then it gets paper that's it well and and it's an option meaning they still have to buy it right so it's not like it's free money yeah i'd like this has a strike price yeah so you can you you can exercise the option if you if you so choose but there's that exercise window you don't have to buy it right away you can you know you can wait if you want so okay option drop is the first one of i was like oh obviously a way to incentivize the types of behaviors that you want right there on the spot using your company's share options can i give you the next one keep going this is exciting any any really wanna rate these maybe give me you know give me a e of a very simple gl gladiator thumbs down luke lukewarm thumbs up or double thumbs up that's your options not a double thumbs up so just one one thumb up okay yeah that's that's very effective good not that like extreme do you do it i don't do options but because yeah like i just give money okay i do do that on the spot no okay but i'm also not the ceo and i'm also not extreme like you know what to be like i'm about playing that game what the game of trying to win what do you mean of course you are not not at the price of being there at midnight no i'm more of a like it doesn't have to be admit like that that's one or you just decide of the things i care about do i on the fly reward the behaviors i want we do it via having a gong in the office and when someone does something awesome we smack a gong so honest well well it's just like because everyone stares at and you're like we're gonna like celebrate what is happening right now and but no i don't give up money okay here's the next one hey everyone really quick if you're enjoying this episode on ceo stuff so del heavy hard conversations with your team hiring then i've got something for you so the team at hubspot they actually went and put together a bunch of best practices that sean and i use in our own companies and they put it together and something that's really easy to read and understand and so if you wanna just save yourself ten years of headache and heartache then you should check it out i wish we had this long time ago would help me a lock but there should be a qr code on your screen that you can scan or a link in the description so check it out it's totally free and totally awesome open ai to makers of chat gp they are trying to fight friction so in every company there's just a whole bunch of bullshit and especially as you grow and when you're like them you grow very fast there's always just things that are just dragged in bureaucratic drag in the company policies procedures you know potholes things that just start to trip you up as you're working in the company just try to do good work so they created what they call the friction removal service and sort of like a adobe idea inside the company but it's actually very simple which is there's an email inbox called friction at open dot com and you could just email friction with anything that's causing that's causing you to not get your job done so like is there something slowing you down is there something that's missing is there something that's a problem so anything that's there and there's a person assigned to the company whose job is to triage everything that comes in there and if there's something that seems like oh that's actually a pretty like legitimate source of friction we should we still eliminate that that's gonna help our people move faster and then they go and they move they they remove that friction and it creates a culture of saying like look we are going to actively fight the b that comes in companies that grow really big and grow really fast by having a jan crew for a bureaucracy i was oh i kinda love that idea so for job that's brilliant give me a score two just two am i allowed to do too yeah yeah double thumbs up like what a caesar would never do that but that's okay yeah that it's sort of it's sort of giving like chuck your cheese trying black no too because that is like less heroic and more systematic yeah yeah i'm on to them more with that alright next one is one bit communication so do you remember this app y from back of the day yeah hilarious all the rage when you and i were twenty six years old people you don't you you'll only know if you know which is back of the day in san francisco this app became the rage for like i wanna say thirty days yeah if there was like a one hit wonder like song for silicon valley that would be chu w i get knocked down by chu w and then y brother describe what y did i think it was just an app where your friends downloaded and you clicked one button and it said y to the other person i think that's it and then if they click the button it would say y yeah we're right back all you could say is y to each other and so it seemed like the stupidest thing in the world people was going viral for being almost so silly and then andrew h wrote a big check into them and we're were like what this you know one of the smartest investors invested in y are you kidding me it was like straight out of the tv shows to silicon valley in fact i think they they mocked this by with the bro app in the in the show whereas as you said bro to each other but i was like why and mark wrote this blog post called one bit communication straight and he talked about how like there are many forms of communication right you can write letters you can write text messages which have a hundred whatever forty or a hundred sixty character limit be had beep back in the day and a beep was just a way to get your attention and you kinda had to know if i'm beeping you with this code that what that code means and he goes the smallest form of communication would be a one bit communication just a single bit back and forth y but y can mean a lot he wrote this like very like this like thesis on y and i just remember reading it and being like honestly kinda have convinced about this you know like mark i could really sell you anything and he did he's told do that well i've learned that there's a couple ceos who used one bit communication so here's the first one siemens the siemens ceo came out and he said yeah i have a very specific management system my management system is this you email me anything you wanna talk to me about and i will respond with okay or no that's it i'm just gonna say okay or no to your email and if it requires more than that then you're gonna come talk to me and when do you come talk to we don't have weekly recurring like calendar meetings we don't have like scheduling if you need me you'd come talk to me right now and that's it that's how i unblock everybody in the company and i will not be the bottleneck simply gonna give you permission rejection or if there needs to be more detail you'll find out that you need to come talk me right now and we'll we'll discuss more and then you'll get the okay or know after more details been revealed yeah this guy's is having like a moment right now i think i saw a few articles about them what happened with them well he's he's like a theoretical physics background ceo like but he's a ceo and so they always kind of if you come from a a traditional background where being cool and he goes i love this quote he goes they so you don't have any recurring meetings with your direct report like it to sit and just catch up and discuss and he goes i don't entertain people and they don't need to entertain me which is if you think about like if you ever been in the company a lot of like the meetings you have are really theater it's right it's it's progress theater like i would like to put on a little play for you but how good i'm doing and then you you sit in the back and you you give me a little you know theater clap back to me and i feel good and then i go on my way and we've both just kinda wasted an hour of each other's time it's not the work isn't getting done there that's just basically like you don't trust me enough to just do the thing and i don't trust you enough to know that i can just show you the work and that said that's enough for you to understand my my value there so we'll we'll we'll tap dance for each other is he german see great it's a very german behavior yeah he's german i had to look them up because i i think siemens is a german company this guy is great is this gonna be like the new snowflake ceo maybe maybe early signs my scouts are we my scouts are paying attention to this we have to get on this train early too alright related the jeff b escalation so this is bezos so bezos famously would read any customer email if you know his his email was out there so customers could email him and he would just be like a router he would route the email to the team if there was a problem and it would only have one bit in it one bit communication just a question mark which has gotta be like the most annoying thing that any ceo could do but he trained the team that the question mark has a very specific meeting and the if you send you the question mark means is this true why is this happening and what are we gonna do about it all encoded and do a one question mark thing allowing him to actually like triage email way faster than having to like take each thing find a good time to bring it up when can i bring this up with you you know then i delay and then i bring it up and then we're gonna have to have those long conversation just one question mark and that's what he would do and his take was this he would say at the beginning a lot of the teams would say no no that's just you know that's just one loud angry customer or something like that look the data shows that we're ninety eight percent you know success rate and his take was look we're a very data driven company but these customer anecdotes matter and they matter a lot and i want you to investigate these because i'm not saying when i send you this customer email i'm not saying drop what you're doing and go satisfy joanne and wichita this prime customer you know you don't need to solve her problem what i'm saying is amazon is a machine the machine might be broken and this anecdote is a little bit of a signal as a squeak in the machine that i'd like you to investigate get to see why this would happen because that's not how the machine is designed to work yeah i tend to think those stories are more important than than traditional data and what he said was he goes look you're not wrong that maybe ninety eight percent is happening the way you want what i'm telling you is that the anecdotes typically show you that your metric is incomplete that it's not capturing some part of the customer's experience that actually matters and both the metric is right and the customer's right the metric is just incomplete because it is not capturing this part of the customer's experience i was oh i kinda like that that's a very that would have been a very satisfying explanation for what would have otherwise been an absolutely infuriating thing of just getting this one question mark from your ceo forwarding a random customer complaint to you as the head of whatever some part of the business and i think a question mark from you or i would come off incredibly douche she there's something about jeff that seems a little bit more polite and respectful and so i don't take it as a douche thing originally what i heard question mark i was like that's that's pretty disrespectful but i don't view him as a disrespectful guy when i if you seen me send a question mark assume it's disrespect it is disrespect yeah it's because they don't have a backhand slap emoji yeah yeah i can't punch you through his screen hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data someone so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses alright what's the excellent one alright next one comes for peter till okay so peter t famously at when he was the ceo of paypal he had this thing that i really loved but he goes we are gonna be a single tasking company you are not gonna be a multitask which is great because paypal was full of some of the biggest brains in the world right max love chan elon musk reid hoffman the creators of youtube the creators of yelp the create obviously like a bunch of big brains in that room you would think if anybody could multitask could be those people well no peter's take was this everybody has one big problem that you're trying to solve at any given time like you might be fighting fraud from the ukraine right now and you might be trying to optimize viral reality of the paypal button on ebay and this other guy might be trying to you know lower our you know processing fees with the banks right so everybody's assigned one problem and his thing was this think go well you know how do you get people to actually do that right because sounds good in theory right focus is always a word everybody nods and agrees on but we're all pretty bad at focused so how did you get your teams to actually do it and peter till answer was oh if if they tried to talk to me about anything besides their problem i would just simply walk out of the room and the nonverbal communication was pretty clear how i felt and and be like did he really do that and keith you know keith boys was like yeah he would literally do that he would if you tried to bring up anything else besides your problem he would just turn around and he would just walk away and then you got signal of how important that was and if you wanted to be valued by the ceo you would stay on task of your problem you would just do like the autistic k just you your feet just cl away the door did you think he's wearing shoes no chance that he was wearing shoes that office this so slow dude he's a low for guy you because he's the type of guy where you just hear a clump around i can tell he said that's ridiculous focus is convex unfortunately i'm too student to know that means exactly what that means but it sounds very provocative and i've used it three times since the good news is nobody else i work with knows what it means either i don't know what this has to do with focus that's what looks like he where's the one bit he he goes if you are eighty percent focused on a task that will only be half as good as if you are ninety percent meaning the jump from eighty percent focused to ninety percent focus will double your impact and so you really want this the last mile of focus the last level of ruthless about your focus will we'll double you know you'll get one or two more doubles in the output which kinda makes sense like if you look at any field right if you're the eighty percentile swim nobody knows your name and you work at a tire company if you're the nineties percent swim you know people in your county might know your name but you still you manage the tire company if you're the ninety ninth percentile swim you might you know be able to swim fresh but if you're the ninety nine point nine nine nine right like the final is that last leg you're michael phelps and you know you get all the gold medals and the millions of dollars and so on and it's basically like your use of focus that the last mile of it the last level of obsession is what gets you like a disproportionate amount of the rewards so what's point number three or are we on four on sean's hardcore if this was a v dhs tape it would be labeled sean or galore part two people would not be getting what they thought they were getting you're an union indian guy is just screaming about management hacks ceo but the o ceo alright it was where we got what's left i got i did one two three four five i got five i got three left alright i jack welch ceo of of ge when he rent when you run a big company it's very easy for you know all your children are us sort of not equal they're not loved equally all the different business divisions ge was in very a bunch of different business divisions and he had two simple rules when you was running ge one was every division you need to be number one or number two in your market otherwise you have one year to fix it sell it or close it that's it we will trim the business divisions unless you can be number one or number two which is an incredible forcing function because it's sort of darwin pressure to survive and the other darwin pressure he applied was every year jack welch would fire the bottom ten percent performers in the company every year and so a con a continuous calling of the herd which sounds i mean i'm sure people interpret that different way some people think he's an asshole for that when i first heard it i like that's that doesn't sound that hardcore but then you go try to do it don't try to do that every year it is incredibly difficult or go look at your own track record how much low performance have you tolerated because you don't fire people until push really comes to shove i think jack welch is i think he's controversial we actually should do a deep dive one day on them because people say that he was a horrible ceo because if you look at like ge it was kinda became this like ama modulation of like a bunch of like nonsense and it like owned a bunch of stuff that ended up not working out but i don't know enough about jack walsh should know if that was his doing or what happened but but i know that he was well loved as a leader but at the same time i hear smart people say the exact opposite about firing like jensen from nvidia he was like he's like i'm gonna sm you in greatness i'm not gonna fire you like it's so funny how great people assuming they both are great have different opinions on firing as i mean as well as everything else like it like total opposite right yeah and you you will find that true for every single one of these you'll find people who are very successful doing the polar opposite which is not meant to say that this is the way to be great it's just meant to say damn i thought these stories were pretty hardcore cor that's really kind of all all we're saying and that there are it kinda pushes the boundaries of your thinking of what is acceptable tolerable and potentially effective you know i think firing your low performers is a pretty i would say logical thing to do meaning yeah i could see why that works i could definitely see why that works and i'm i'm in support of that one but yeah i think others you know like like i think jen said when he made that point he was like i don't fire but i turn up the intensity so much that you either become great or quit right which is more of a sync swim version of like yeah they quit instead of getting fired but either way you weed out the low performers one way or another so last two alright i let's give this last one twelve i'll tell you i don't even really like it the ford ceo sky comes in sky allen becomes a ford ceo they had just lost seventeen billion last year and he came in and they did like the business review where they go through all the different business like projects and how they're on track are off track and it was like color coded that green is on track yellow is at risk and red is off track and everything was green and he's like guys we lost seventeen billion in last year how's everything green and he realized they had like a culture of where you know people were sort of afraid to admit failure and so he's like heavy be afraid you know you have to be honest and so the next week they're all green again except for one was red and he stood up and started clapping and changed the the culture around failure and i was like sounds a little bit like a disney movie to me yeah that was that's sort of cool running shit yeah it's a so i think we're gonna think we're gonna thumbs down allen to together here nice try alan i'm consider me uni base podcast is brought to you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody to who disagree disagrees with me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services provided through choice financial group and call him an a members fdic alright the last one comes from jimmy a aka mister beast which was i think you were there when he described his cl strategy which we were like so dude how do you train your employees they're all really young seems like they're all new you're growing so fast like do you have like curious like you don't you know you never went to this college or business school or anything like that like what what do you do for your like kind of management and he's like oh i just do cl and we're like that sounds illegal what does that mean and he's like well if i hire are you in one of like kind of the key roles you just follow me everywhere like you literally shadow me every single place i go and i think the guy who initially was doing it was like sleeping at the same house that he was in like it was like that that hardcore like from morning tonight like the i remember one guy he hired he he was also jimmy alarm clock like he would go wake him up and from the mom jimmy woke up they were together till the mama jimmy signed off to go to sleep and he would do that for six months and he's like by the end in six months you know exactly how i think because you've been with me everywhere you know you saw every decision i made so essentially you're like a proxy me like i can now be in two places at once because you know exactly what would jimmy do in this situation and yeah cl works great and remember there was like a room full of ceos like multi billion dollar ceos as he was telling us this who were like i think that's awesome and illegal alright like what i'm what because these people don't like get weekends he's like nah you come here to you come here to win i don't know if he still does it but in the early days of his thing i thought that was pretty pretty awesome how is that going like it's it's interesting to hear about extreme people and how it ends up like if they if they soften it when they have kids and up it appears as though elon is not a guy who has softened at all as the company has gotten bigger and has he has more had more kids i wonder if that's happened with jimmy and what's it called beast enterprise or i don't know what it's going these these industries yeah i think both right i think he matured right i when we met him he's probably only like twenty five or twenty four years old or something like that right so like again matured like thirty usually from year over year yeah you're gonna mature and his rate of learning like he's you know pretty obsessive about learning from smart people and so he his the slope of his line is pretty crazy right so i'm sure a lot has changed at the same time if something's working and that's your edge you gotta be pretty careful you don't just dole out all your edges and so yeah he does have a ceo now beast industries i'm sure they have more people and they're less like kind of business malpractice you know you're do in the early days when you're kind of rough and tumble figure things out but yeah dude i think they still go pretty hard and try to win and i think that you know i think a lot of the fundamentals are probably still there of the stuff that works right like like anything the stuff that's working tends to survive and the stuff that's ineffective tends to get prune out over time i am not compared to these guys i've we're not even in the same ballpark in terms of being like hardcore i don't know where you are but i know that when i hear this i'm like it sounds like a lot of work i'm not into that i don't i don't want the same outcomes and i had a story for you today that is the exact opposite of hardcore i didn't mean for this story to be a matter of hardcore or not more so a matter of there's money everywhere can i give you an there that like supports what you're saying about the the other side of the the coin here david per friend of the pod had kevin kelly on the podcast and kevin kelly's is the guy who i really like and admire he had a really ec career he like started wired magazine and he wrote a thousand true fans which really shaped kind of my thinking is he like a was he i know he's like a thinker in a writer but was he a successful business person too yeah i think he's done well like he's i he's done done very well compared to normal standards but like you know not not like some crazy whatever billionaire type but i don't think that was ever his goal but he's just done a bunch of really interesting projects and his projects were successful he asked him a great question about this he he asked him something like like what's been the cost of being kevin kelly like what have you given up to be kevin kelly the way you the way you have and kevin's like you know that's a great question to have this life i have i had to give up on greatness and he goes what do you mean and he goes well i think the cost of greatness is some level of being extreme i just never wanted to be extreme i didn't want the cost of extreme and so he's like i surrendered to the path of i'm not going to be as great as i possibly could be had i been obsessively focused on one thing had i been more and stream had i given up certain parts of my personal life and he goes i i'll give i'll give you a very specific definition of greatness and he goes let's just for lack of better word because so i say greatness and it means two different things in our heads he goes let's say greatness is being remembered by people other than your family more than one generation from now and he goes i don't think i will be remembered for anything more than one or two generations from now from anyone outside of my own family and he goes to be to be able to he goes like a ga fly where i just kinda float from thing to thing and i i get to dabble and explore and like kinda see different projects and bring them to life in little ways but i don't own any of them not any of them became the biggest thing in the world to be the ga fly i just surrender and and give up on the path of greatness and i'm i'm perfectly happy with that and i thought it was just a very i never really heard anyone say it that way like i kinda respected his thinking on two levels one i don't think people ever define the words what they mean i like that he started by being like i can't give you this answer if i don't define what this word means to be was it grandchildren or great grandchildren so let's just say grandchildren yeah okay that's actually interesting i've always i've had a similar definition of greatness but it's always been way longer where it's been like a hundred and twenty or a hundred and fifty years which i guess would be of a couple more add a few more generations to that but that's actually an interesting way to find it yeah i like you could i mean i don't know who you would consider to be great but like whether it's you know steve jobs on the business side right like you could go into like you know gandhi and nelson mandela like people who did great in terms of their civic actions or people like houdini people who are great artists great creators that way right like there's all these kind of people who are great if you look at them very few of them live very chill balanced like lifestyles right like there ain't normal people on the top of mount everest like you're not to find well balanced people i actually think about that all the time because i love history and i'll see street names and it's clearly named after someone and i'll go and research who that person is like for example fort greene is named med in nathaniel green fort greene a neighborhood in brooklyn it's of it's a park and it's named after nathaniel green who was a general in the american revolution and he's he was a big shot in american revolution one of the key generals and it's like just remembered mean his name is named after a park in which no one even knows that fort greene was nathaniel greene and i'm like this guy was one of the key top twenty people in the american revolution which is one of the most consequential consequential revolutions of all time and i don't even know him and and when you think about it over the last five hundred to a thousand years there of the billions of billions of billions of people who have ever existed the ones who do who we remember more often than not it has nothing to do with money for example if you and i do the best that we will ever do when it comes to business the likelihood that we will be with it like maybe there's a world where we'll crack the top five thousand or top ten thousand living americans in terms of wealth maybe that would be obviously point zero zero zero zero zero one percent of like the that right and yet even matt is not gonna get you remembered for five hundred years you can't name who the ad richest person was in the nineteen thirties fifty years yeah yeah you can't so that's like correct so therefore oops who's today you don't know now yeah you don't know and so and then you're like okay so i won't know that okay so money can't really be it and then it's like okay what about business it's like well there's that some companies that have i've lasted that long but like it's basically when you really think about it it's like humanitarian a handful of amazing like leaders or politicians which would also include like the mother traces of the world like someone who did something really special and then it's like inventors like it it's like occasionally never invented something yeah or an artist a occasionally like at occasionally artist and i'm like so when i think about i'm like well the odds if i define greatness as me being remembered like let's say a hundred and fifty two years i'm like hey i'm doing it wrong and b the i's are so low and then i was like therefore maybe i just shouldn't care right i like i felt like years working through this can i tell you where i landed with that same idea being remembered legacy types i've never really appealed i think i was pretty quick to shed that one in fact there's a great h one sense there i really loved he was like you know the queen died six months ago and guess what choose was the queen i bet you haven't thought about her since she died i was like god so true that's the queen you know was a queen of england after a hundred years you know dying and so i never really cared about the legacy stuff so much but i wanted to achieve greatness and when i thought achieving greatness it was some version of success or you know building something that mattered in the world or you know like the the number one of something being the number one of something and what i've realized is that achieving greatness was sort of like not not for me would be a fool errand for me it's not what i'm wired to do it's not what i would enjoy to do it's it comes at a cost that i would not be willing to pay once i knew the cost but there's a big difference achieving something great and being great i know a lot of people who are great our buddy ramon is great he's a great friend he's a great dad he's a great guy and he's a great hang and he's a lot i mean he he is good at being great you you'd mentioned ben wilson ben wilson right now is being great in handling such a difficult circumstance with absolute you know class and courage and there's just being great at my trainer he's a guy he's just great he's he's a great guy he's a great uncle to my kids he's a great you know great trainer he cares about people you know he's so fun to be around he's he's always in a great mood he's that's called being great and so i realized i'm being great the active tents the day to day thing that's the thing to chase because you could do it right now and in the moment how you're showing up you could be great right now and if you could also fall out of being great if you lose track of that and you should get right back on the horse try to be great again and i think that was the where i landed i like okay i think i that resonates for me i feel i feel comfortable with that and it's a it's a far more holistic sense it's you could be great when you're exercising and you're in the last three reps at the set and you have to decide if you're gonna put the reps if you put the weight down or if you're gonna push yourself and try to really like see what you're made of that's a moment of being great mean you know you could just be courteous and kind to somebody that's a moment of being great you know like sometimes i'm with i'm at the park and there's other kids and they're kind of like you know talking to me and i'm kinda like i don't know why this four year old is talking to me and sometimes i brush them off and i just wanna be on my phone i really wanna talk to the stranger kid about like you know this caterpillar pillar that he found and sometimes i indulge them and i'm like no i i you know i'll say something in that's plays back into them because that's how i would want someone to treat my think it's a moment where i get to choose if i'm gonna be great or if i'm not gonna be great and i'm not always and not always the best of that but increasing that hit rate is the goal and that's one i can kinda get behind what's the phrase again say it's again i think this is good instead of building something great be great yeah don't try to achieve great i like just be great right now like just being great did you see the guy who go went viral this week on twitter where he was like saying like someone was talking about like hard work and he was like i think you should work hard but but there's a there's this a age between like three years old and thirteen year old where your kids don't dislike you yet and they're willing to spend time with you you know past thirteen that doesn't happen and they're out of diapers so they're a little bit easier and they start having opinions in that they can think and for a lot of men who are ambitious people what they notice is that their ambition goes away or dials down during this period because they love being around their kids and it doesn't happen to everyone but a lot of do and what i've noticed is that the people who are fearful of this i just wanna let you know that it tends to come back ambition does come back and the reason why this went viral is because i'm experiencing this and i think maybe you are in a lot of our our folks listening are but like there is this moment where you start like experiencing these things with your kids when they start having opinions and they still like hanging out with you and you're like i don't know if i care about the same things like ambition or these other things where i dedicate my life to them i guess i'm not willing to pay that price and frankly i find it to be kind of a pain in the ass because you're like life was so much simpler just climb the ladder make money you know it's like f checks to get money like like it's so much simpler that way and then you have kids that you're like shit everything i thought to be true it's not true right now and the the poster was like but it cup becomes true again later on like you it does come back but i remember reading that last weekend and it really hits hit hit with me because when you're talking about these like guys who are hardcore i'm like i don't i'm not staying till midnight right now yeah no my chair has lumbar support you i i'm gonna be here till midnight that that ain't happening no option drops for us yeah yeah do i gave him a great idea at the breakfast and he option dropped me i was a guess immediately like hook lion in sink i was like how do i get that again that was a really weird i like that reward i was gonna bring up another story but i'm not going to anymore i think that was perfect yeah that'd be a little too hardcore for us too it's fifty five minutes and not go to the sixteenth no i think this has a good bow tie tied to it or bow tie a good you know whatever that phrase is about it's going to again presents rapid shit it's all done i don't know alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that's is part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric sue and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who were actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast