Churchill lost something in 1915 that he never regained.
At 40 years old, youth begins to slip away from most people.
But what Winston lost was not merely a matter of looks or energy.
It was a spirit that had once seemed so vital and inexhaustible, a lively spark that had served him well from crisis to crisis.
But it flickered and went out in 1915, and Churchill was never the same.
He persevered in politics until his moment in the sun came 25 years later in 1940.
But by that time, he was a harder, much less exuberant character.
He had learned the tough lessons of a long life, lived at a high level that even the best plans go awry, that even the best friends prove unreliable and that even the best intentions may be misunderstood.
It was better for the world that he had known failure and suffered moments of self-doubt.
What took the place of this glamorous charm was the cumulative force of a character that had been tested and strengthened over time.
These experiences had taught young Churchill invaluable lessons.
Often, a politician who fights on equal terms with other giants is already in his prime and will be too old to apply the lessons of his experience in a second career like that which Churchill enjoyed as prime minister in 1940.
He brought to that position of leadership a level of skill and understanding that few politicians could rival.
For 25 years.
After the end of his first rise to power, Churchill was frustrated to sit and watch as others reached the top, while he seemed to languish in lesser positions.
He was forced to learn patience and to ponder the meaning of his early experiences.
Most importantly, he refused to accept that the promise of his early career was dead and gone.
He continued to guard that legacy, even when few believed it was worth guarding.
His old enemy, Edward Carson, seemed to understand that there was something in Churchill's character that simply wouldn't allow him to give up.
At a dinner not long after Winston was dismissed as the first Lord of the Admiralty, a journalist asked Carson, what is the trouble with Churchill?
Carson thought for a second and shot back a perceptive reply that would have made Winston smile.
Winston is a dangerous optimist.
That is an excerpt from the very end of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Young Titan, the Making of Winston Churchill, and it was written by Michael Sheldon.
So I stumbled into a rather lucky set of circumstances.
Last week.
If you listened to last week's episode covers the first 26 years of Winston Churchill's life.
I had bought the book that I'm holding in my hand months before I bought the other book.
I didn't even know.
This book picks up exactly where last week's book ended.
So this book is focused.
This is a very unique biography of Winston Churchill.
There's over 1,100 biographies in print in the English language on Winston Churchill, by the way.
But this book picks up.
It covers only the year 26.
He's 26 to 40 years old when this book ends.
So you don't have to listen to last week's episode before you listen to this one.
But I think listening to them both will give you a better understanding, because what we're trying to figure out is like okay, everybody knows the Winston Churchill, you know who's in his 60s, the one that's fighting Hitler, the one that inspires his entire country to fight, the one that refuses to give up.
What this book is about is the personality and the force of will upon which his future success that's going to come 25 years after the book ends rests upon.
So let's jump right into what this book is about.
History Likes Winners.
And the image of the older, Victorious Churchill has long overshadowed the story of the eager young man who soared to prominence only to find that he had overreached and who left office with his reputation in tatters.
So book starts, he's 26 years old.
It's going to end when he's 40 and fired.
And wait till we get there, because even his choice of what to do after he was fired and left in disgrace and rather in shock and depressed, but really his choice of what to do next is one of the most admirable things about Winston and Something I talked about last week is everything he did in his life.
He did not have to do.
He sought out difficulty.
He sought out greatness.
He really thought from the very early age.
I think I said last week he's maybe the most confident young man I've ever covered on the podcast.
He believed from a very young age that he had a role to play in history.
Back to the book.
So he leaves the office, repetition and tatters.
Yet in many ways, this is really the crux of the entire book.
Yet in many ways, this early period is the most colorful of his career and is a key to his character.
Churchill thought his chance for greatness on a grand scale would come early in life.
And for such a restless, ambitious man, the long wait was difficult to bear.
By the time he became prime minister at 65, he was more than ready for the job now.
What's amazing, there's examples in this book.
There's even examples in the book last week.
He was expected by himself and the people around him to be prime minister 20, 25 years before he actually reached that goal.
And yet the entire point is that he would not have been ready to take that position if he had gotten it when he wanted, if he had gotten it earlier in life.
There's a lot of parallels.
I think I have a lot of notes.
Steve Jobs is on my mind.
The wilderness period, you know, when Steve was fired from Apple.
And then when he comes back and sets the greatest record in my argument, greatest record in entrepreneurship history.
And Steve would tell you this himself without that 13 years of struggle, he wouldn't have nearly been the leader and the entrepreneur that he was later in his career.
Same exact case here for Churchill, which we'll talk to a lot about today.
He had spent a lifetime preparing for his part.
This sentence is one of the most important in the book and an important understanding of Churchill.
The adventures and ordeals of those early years were essential to the making of the man who triumphed in the Second World War.
Young Winston's career began with dreams of success that fueled a spectacular political rise, but which ended in dramatic failures, just like Jobs, creating an equally spectacular fall.
Just like Jobs.
At 40.
He was largely written off as a man whose best days were behind him, just like Jobs, except Jobs.
That happened to Jobs when he was 30.
As Churchill confessed in old age, he had felt so misunderstood in those younger days that he thought that he had become, in the eyes of many quote a freak always that, but much hated and ruled out.
Redeeming this is his next mission.
If you think about how incredible from 40 to 65, this guy persevered through this redeeming.
The promise of his youth became the great challenge of his later life.
One thing that you get out of reading a bunch of biographies is you realize that people don't stumble into greatness, and it was the case for winston churchill as well.
In a conscious and methodical way, he set out as a young man to become the hero of.
If you go back and listen to last week's podcast, The Reason, you can read that book.
The book is excellent.
But the reading of the book is going to be very different from the podcast that you hear me, that you heard that I made.
I wanted to focus and I did this intentionally on the fact of this relentless self-belief.
And this is why I think we're going to come to this a lot today as well.
This idea at my career is a grand experiment.
I feel I have a role to play.
I can contribute.
I can change the world.
You have to persevere.
In his case, he did it for decades.
In the face of other people telling him, stop believing you're special, Winston.
Why are you talking about yourself like this?
Why do you think you're destined to do great things?
Why do you have all this self-confidence?
Fuck these people.
In this book and last book there's a bunch of other people around Winston telling him to not be who he was.
In the last book, and in this book too, there's a bunch of examples of people constantly trying to get Winston to not believe in himself.
And every time you have Winston refusing to cooperate, refusing to be, in their eyes, reasonable.
Why does that matter?
Because it is highly likely that if he gave in to the opinions of other people about himself, Britain would be speaking German today.
The choices we make and the actions we pursue make a difference.
They matter and they can change the course of history.
And this idea that Winston is constantly surrounded by people that don't share his high opinion of him.
It's an important thing to point out and to repeat.
No one knows you as well as you know you.
Therefore, your opinion about yourself is greater than all the other opinions of everybody else around you.
Winston Churchill's life is, a decade after decade after decade, example of that extremely important point.
Many of his contemporaries accepted that history is quote the biography of great men.
But whether Churchill belonged among the great was always subject to hot debate.
It is no longer a debate.
This is my favorite part of reading books about Winston Churchill and why I highly recommend you do as well.
He had few doubts about his destiny, however.
At the heart of this story is an irrepressible spirit.
I believe in personality.
He declared endorsing the notion that the heroics of great leaders, not vast movements or impersonal systems, shape history.
We live in an age of great events and little men, he said.
And if we are not to become the slaves of our own system, it will only be by the bold efforts of originality, by repeated experiment and by the dispassionate consideration of the results of sustained and unflinching thought.
Little men let events take their course.
I like things to happen, and if they don't happen, I like to make them happen.
Churchill's words will fire you up.
This guy was gifted at his mastery of the English language.
You see it in his speeches.
You see it in his writings.
Another thing I pointed out last week I want to repeat today.
People around him, they realized that there's this great line about him.
They said that his ear was sensitively attuned to the bugle note of history.
And the fact that he had a legendary ancestor, which I talked about last week, which is John Churchill.
John Churchill, they said, you know, was one of the greatest generals up there with Napoleon.
Churchill writes a biography.
Winston writes a biography about John Churchill.
Says he never fought a battle that he did not win, nor besieged a fortress that he did not take.
And if you really sit here and think, I'm only on page six.
But already you're sitting here and you're completely enveloped in Churchill's perspective, his personality, his worldview.
And what I feel like he's speaking to the reader, he's like, in every age, right?
He's using the example, you know, he knew a ton of history.
We're going to talk about Napoleon.
You know, I should buy the Kindle version of this book.
I bet you if you buy the Kindle version, you search Napoleon.
It's in there a dozen times, maybe 10 times over and over again.
But the fact that he was he was, since his ear was sensitively attuned to the bugle note of history.
He greatly admired people that achieved great things in the past.
And really what the message that he's saying to you and I is in every age, there are great men.
Why not us and why not now?
And so as he's reading about these great people, he realizes, oh, they're like me too.
I always talk about this example.
I wasn't expecting to say this, but it's one of my favorite things I've ever heard.
And it's the fact that Kobe Bryant obviously idolized Michael Jordan growing up patterned a lot of his game after him.
We'd watch videotapes of him.
I remember this was hilarious.
I read this like 600 page biography of Kobe Bryant and his high school girlfriend was like being interviewed.
Like, what's it like dating Kobe Bryant?
Like well.
Our dates consist of me going over to his house and us watching videos of Michael Jordan.
And so early in his career, I think, maybe the first time he ever played against Michael Jordan, his teammate.
Says, hey, I got some advice.
Whatever you do, don't look at Michael Jordan in the eye.
And Kobe's like, what?
Why wouldn't I do that?
And what Kobe had realized, he's like, oh, my teammate didn't realize is I'm that too.
And so there's all these examples of Churchill being inspired by these great people of the past, but not in like a set.
Put him up on a pedestal, not an idolization kind of way.
It's like, oh, I'm that too.
And so one of these people is Lord Byron.
And so it says that Churchill found encouragement for his passionate nature in the writings of the romantic poet.
So that's Lord Byron.
From early youth he was drawn to Byron as a stirring example of the man of action who was also a man of ideas.
Both men, so now he's starting to compare himself to Byron, right?
Both men were dazzled by the story of Napoleon's rise and fall, and both kept cherished busts of the great French leader on their desks.
Churchill was fascinated by Byron's poetic meditation on Napoleon's unbounded ambition.
And so what I love is these people that mastered the English language or any language for that fact, And they're able to convey a deep insight or idea in just a handful of words.
And so Byron's version of describing Napoleon's ambition only took five words.
He just he called it a fever at the core.
More similarities between Byron and Churchill.
Like Byron, Churchill was a chronicler of his own history.
In a series of books written at a rapid pace in his early 20s, he created vivid descriptions of his early adventures as a soldier and war correspondent.
When I was 25 years old.
Churchill said in old age I had written as many books as Moses, something I discovered.
I think I discovered it this week when I was reading this book.
Churchill had written 43 books.
Did you know that?
That was very surprising to me.
And in these books it says he lived the adventure of a storybook character fighting on the Indian frontier, scouting for rebels in Cuba, traveling along the Nile and, most dramatic of all, surviving capture by the Boers in South Africa.
And just like he predicted early in life, his goal, I'm going to get glory at war.
I'm going to use that war to get famous.
I'm going to use that famous to get elected to political office.
That is exactly what happens when he has that daring escape after being in the prisoner camp in South Africa.
And then the news of his escape spreads all over the world.
He becomes world famous and he gets swept into office.
So that is the starting point of this book.
Also going to talk about what happens to him over the next 14 years.
This is a journey that will take him from the beginning of his 26th year to the end of his 40th year.
The failure part being very important.
What he learned from failure was crucial to his later success, but it was a devastating setback whose sting he would feel for years.
That's the first time, or maybe the second time wrote the word steve jobs, because there's so many times that winston's story parallels steve between his rise and fall.
He built a modern navy, experimented with radical social reforms, survived various threats on his life, made powerful enemies and a few good friends, fell in love several times, became a husband and a father.
Annoyed and delighted, two british monarchs took the measure of the german military machine, risked his life in the air as a pilot in training, authorized executions of notorious murders and faced deadly artillery barrages on the Western Front in World War I.
By the end of his first 40 years he had a good understanding of how far his talents could take him and how far he could fall.
What remained constant was his obedience to that bold, early declaration, I believe in personality.
Exploring the heart of that personality is the aim of this biography.
So, in addition to spending the last few weeks reading two books about Churchill, I also rewatched this movie called In the Darkest Hour.
And there's a scene in the movie that I want to tell you about that comes at the very, very end.
The movie is just about him becoming elected to prime minister when he's 65 years old.
And what I found most interesting about the movie is all the pressure for the people around him in the government.
You know we need to sue for peace for Hitler.
We need to sue for peace.
We need to like, let's give up.
We can't fight this war.
We're not going to win.
Let's, you know, try to bring him to the bargaining table.
And the movie ends with this speech.
That happened in real life, where you know half the people are trying to convince him to give up.
The other half are with him saying we should fight.
He gives he's just a masterful orator and very persuasive speaker.
And so what happens is by the end of the speech, everybody's on his side.
And there's one guy that did not want this to happen.
He's sitting in the audience with another guy and one guy turns to the other guy and goes what the hell just happened?
And his response is perfect.
Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
Steve Jobs said the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world.
The most important point here is not that Churchill was born with this gift.
He developed it through practice.
She could not tell if he was speaking or reading aloud.
Even when he was speaking extemporaneously, the sentence would come out fully formed, almost as if they were written.
And so that's going to be a present fact in any book that you pick up on Churchill.
He spent the days leading up to his speech, polishing his remarks and committing them to memory.
He stood before a mirror, pretending he was addressing the house.
This became a common method for preparation for him to the annoyance of others nearby.
All day recalled a friend.
He might be heard booming away in his bedroom rehearsing his facts and flourishes, and the resounding knocks on the furniture.
So hitting his hand to emphasize the point on the wooden furniture.
He would write out a short list of his major points and keep them handy while he spoke.
His greatest speeches would use common words in pleasing rhythms to cast complex ideas in memorable images.
From early adulthood to old age, Churchill's eye and ear were attuned to the discovery of arresting analogies.
Something else that Churchill has in common, read everything.
He read everything.
This is just like an early you can go to Thomas Edison, when he's like a 12-year-old boy working on the rail line.
He would stop over, I think, in Detroit.
He'd read every single book in the Detroit library.
I always tell this story because it's one of my favorite things ever.
Edwin Land gets to Harvard, right?
Where he goes to the Harvard library, reads every single book on light.
Once he finished that, he's like, oh, there's nothing else I can learn here.
He drops out of Harvard, goes to New York City, then goes to New York City Public Library, reads every single book on light, then goes back to Harvard.
Does it again.
Jeff Bezos' grandfather would talk about this.
When Jeff Bezos was a kid, he'd spend his summers on his grandfather's ranch in Texas.
They'd bring him to the local library, let him sit on the floor and he would just read every single science fiction book in the library.
You don't read one book, you don't read two, you read them all and you see this over and over again.
While other politicians were content to get their information from a scattering of newspapers, Churchill devoured whole shelves.
Whole shelves of books.
Churchill began living with books and sleeping with encyclopedias.
Even from an early age, his work ethic surprised everyone around him.
His power of work is prodigious.
It's almost commencement with his passion for it.
The great thing about Churchill's life is so much of it's documented in writing and in speeches.
Even when he was young, he'd go around.
So he's in the House of Commons and he doesn't feel like he has a peer group that is looking at life the same way in which he looks at life.
And I think understanding his view of life, knowing why he believed what he believed, is key to understanding his actions.
And so what he's noticing is like, well, my peers don't think the way I do.
His peers weren't looking to cultivate a sense of destiny.
They did not share his particular passion for great men and great monuments.
Churchill had a romantic view of life as a heroic endeavor full of grand sentiments.
Remember, he grew up in a physical environment that celebrated greatness.
Winston was in no danger of remaining quiet about his own achievements.
The house could still speak volumes on his behalf as a testament to the fighting spirit and boundless ambition of his breed.
Talking about John Churchill again.
Winston Churchill wanted to be the dominant political figure of the time.
So we're going to talk more about his relationship with his father.
Remember, his father dies.
I think Churchill's about maybe 20 years old when his father dies.
His father dies relatively young.
And so you'll see in the way that a young person churchill acts like he treats older more powerful figures as really as father figures if you've ever read robert carl's books on lbj there's this thing that uh lyndon johnson they lyndon did this the same thing like he it's not like he didn't particularly admire his father or look up to him and yet he would early in his political career he'd meet all these really successful usually you know speakers the house whatever the case is and i think they even use the designation in the book they call him lbj's they called him a professional son and in many ways churchill's behavior reminded me of this The first example of this is this guy named Joseph Chamberlain.
Joseph Chamberlain is going to be this very powerful like self-made entrepreneur and then a very powerful political figure in Britain and Neville Chamberlain and a twist of fate.
This is Neville Chamberlain's father.
Neville Chamberlain is obviously the prime minister that was basically kicked out during World War II, and Churchill takes his place.
Friendship with Joseph Chamberlain, they wind up becoming kind of enemies.
Joseph Chamberlain is older.
I want to give you a little background on who he's seeking out, who he's trying to be influenced by.
Joseph Chamberlain was a self-made man.
He made his own fortune as an industrialist by mass producing screws so cheaply that he dominated the market.
He became one of Birmingham's largest employers and then moved into politics and transformed the city.
It was definitely a world builder kind of personality.
In his city.
He decides to clear out the slums, he fixes the water supply and then he starts erecting all these civic buildings, literally changing the physical environment in which he inhabited.
He gives Churchill a tour, turns to Churchill and says the first time I came here I came here to sell them screws.
And so Churchill seeks him out, says Churchill was very friendly towards him in the same way He would treat him like a father figure and engage him in late night talks.
Often that would last until two in the morning.
I had a great many more real talks with him than I ever had with my own father, Churchill said.
And so in turn, Joseph treats him almost like one of his own sons, because at the time his two other sons They said they didn't seem headed for distinction.
And even at this young age, Churchill only had one goal.
This is going to vary similar to Lyndon Johnson again.
The goal is the very top.
I may start out as a congressman, right, in LBG's case.
I'll go to Congress, then I'll be a senator.
But his goal from day one is like, I'm going to be the president.
Churchill's goal from day one is I'm going to be the prime minister.
For Churchill, there was only one goal in politics, the top.
And everything else, no matter how pleasant, was just a stepping stone.
And one thing that was particularly fascinating to me in this book is they talk about like now, you know, he's kind of a Joe, is kind of like a distinguished gentleman or trying to play like the role of aristocrat.
But there's a line that jumps out at me and it says on occasion Churchill caught a glimpse in him of the old cutthroat.
That word is literally in the book, right?
On occasion, Churchill caught a glimpse in him of the old cutthroat king of the screw trade.
That's what people would call him.
They reference him as king of the screw trade.
And doing business against him was difficult because he was a cutthroat.
Why is that important?
I've talked in the past about my obsession with Game of Thrones, watching the series multiple times.
I just went through it I don't know a year ago, six months ago, something like that and took notes on literally any line.
I have an Apple note of Game of Thrones lines I want to remember because I think they're like maxims and instructive for life.
A couple of days ago, I was just interviewed on Invest Like the Best.
It's episode 343 in case you want to Listen to it.
But Patrick.
At the very end of that conversation he asked me like what is your favorite Game of Thrones line.
And I realized after the fact that my favorite Game of Thrones line is those on the margin often come to control the center.
But my answer on the interview was actually my favorite Game of Thrones story.
Quick little story in like three or four sentences.
And so it comes from this character named Bronn.
Bronn came from absolutely nothing, born in unbelievable poverty.
But he's one of these cutthroats and he's trying to negotiate a way to get the most valuable land or the most valuable castle in this actual like in this world that they're operating in.
And when he states his goal hey, I want Highgarden.
And he states it to the sons of this illustrious family called the Lannisters.
One of them says, Highgarden will never belong to a cutthroat.
That is the word that they use.
Highgarden will never belong to a cutthroat.
And Braun's response is excellent and it's a summary of what I've learned by reading hundreds of these biographies.
And he says, no?
Who were your ancestors?
The one who made your family rich?
Fancy lads in silk?
They were fucking cutthroats.
That's how all the great houses started, isn't it?
By a hard bastard.
And the way to think about this is Joe Chamberlain was the cutthroat.
He was the hard bastard.
He's the one that built the family fortune.
And with age and time, that aggressiveness may diminish, but it never disappears.
And we're seeing that even when he's a much older man in his interactions with Churchill.
And she says, on occasion, Churchill caught a glimpse in him of the old cutthroat.
And other people saw this too.
There is a woman who compares.
She meets both Joe Chamberlain and Church when she compares both of them on separate pages.
This is excellent.
Let me go to what she said about Joe Chamberlain first.
She had looked closely into his personality and didn't like what she found.
By temperament, she concluded, he is an enthusiast and a despot.
Running alongside this genuine enthusiasm is a passionate desire to crush opposition to his will, a longing to feel his foot on the neck of others.
Then she has dinner with Churchill.
First impression she wrote of him in her diary restless, almost intolerably so, without capacity for sustained and unexcited labor egotistical, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism.
He had what the kids call Riz, what you and I would call charisma, superhuman levels of charisma, but with a certain personal magnetism that's the word she's using great pluck and some originality, not of intellect but of character.
He talked exclusively about himself.
He has no notion of scientific research, but his pluck courage, resourcefulness and great tradition may carry him far.
So I want to go back to this idea that other people constantly get you try to limit your ambition, try to dim your light for their sake.
And I want to compare and contrast it to the advice that he actually gets from Joseph Chamberlain.
So this guy says when he was told one day that Winston was caught up in reading yet another book on Napoleon, he shook his head in disappointment and said that Winston would do better to study the drab heroes of life.
Framing oneself upon Napoleon has proved a danger to many a man before him.
That's just another way of saying Napoleon was special.
You're not special.
You're not Napoleon.
What are you doing?
You're wasting your time.
That's not advice that other cutthroats or other people that have achieved great things or have the desire to achieve great things would give you.
So this is Joseph Chamberlain.
Somebody achieved great things.
Counseling a younger Winston Churchill.
He says, if a man is sure of himself, it only sharpens him and makes him more effective.
Remember Winston said he had more conversations with Joseph Chamberlain and he had with his own father.
That leads me into his relationship with his father and the fact that he's going to write a thousand page biography on his father.
A main influence in Winston Churchill's life, just like a lot of people that you and I study, is the fact that you can always understand the son by the story of his father, that the story of the father is embedded in the son.
So before we get into this, I need to put down this book and pick up Hero of the Empire from last week.
There is a photo insert and, more importantly, a caption in the photo insert of that book that describes gives you an overview of the complicated father-son relationship.
Born into the highest ranks of British aristocracy, Churchill had an air of haughty self-confidence even at the tender age of seven.
What he longed for most however, was the love and attention of his father, his father's Lord Randolph Churchill.
Lord Randolph had little time for his oldest son.
One of the greatest regrets of Churchill's life was that Randolph died an early and tragic death, depriving Winston of the chance to know his father.
And so now we have Churchill in his late 20s, maybe early 30s I'm pretty sure it's late 20s writing this gigantic biography on his father.
The biography was meant to honor Randolph's memory, but writing it was also a way for Winston to understand his own life.
He had never established a close connection with Randolph, though he had yearned for one.
His father was a tragic figure.
An ambitious and outspoken politician sounds familiar, but a failure as a statesman.
At 40.
People would argue that winston was just like randolph a failure as a statesman.
Randolph was a restless man, always searching for attention but never getting enough to please him.
Sounds just like his son, the proud son of a great family, but a difficult husband and father living in randolph's shadow was far for much of his life.
Winston couldn't help wondering if his father's legacy was a blessing or a curse.
And so the fascinating part is, in this biography he's not just trying to tell the story of his father.
He's trying to tell the story of himself.
The Randolph who emerges from Winston's book is a misunderstood hero who tries to inspire his party and his country to achieve great things, but who is defeated by the forces of reaction and selfish interests.
Too soon, his wings are clipped and he slowly falls to earth.
At the time that Churchill is writing this.
He has no idea that he's going to find a similar fate for himself about 10 years from now.
He lives large and dies young.
A thousand pages long.
The biography is a towering, gleaming monument the son gathering up the disordered pieces of his father's life to construct a romantic vision that might guide his own career.
What is also fascinating about this book is the fact that because his dad I think his dad dies when he's like 46, something like that.
There's a lot of people that were friends with his dad, that worked with his dad, that were colleagues of his dad, that are still alive as Winston matures and becomes older.
Winston becomes to know some of them, and they usually hold an opinion like this.
Winston is astonishingly like his father in manners and ways and the whole attitude of his mind.
But Mr. Churchill is superior to his father.
He adds a knowledge and industry that his father did not possess.
Everywhere you go, when people meet Winston Churchill, they're shocked at his energy, his intensity and his work ethic.
What is happening there?
Did Churchill know his father didn't possess these talents?
Is that part of what drove him to outdo his father?
You see a lot of lines like this.
It was this deep well of strength that often left his contemporaries in wonder and that sent him apart from so many other sons of the aristocracy who thought it vulgar to appear too energetic.
It also distinguished him from his father.
Why would he want to be distinguished from his father?
What killed his father?
Randolph suffered for years from the debilitating effects of the syphilis that killed him.
The whole experience, as Winston says in the biography, was an embarrassment.
It was also heart-rending to a son who wanted to idolize his father.
He never forgot the mourning that Lord Randolph died more than a half a century later.
I'm going to interrupt this sentence.
If you have kids, do not underestimate the impact.
Long after you're dead, your impact on your children lives on.
Listen to this.
More than a half a century later, when he was prime minister for the second time, he surprised his doctor by suddenly remarking My poor, poor papa died on January 24th 1895.
It was a long time ago.
The date was seared into his memory.
Strangely, listen to this.
Strangely, his own death would fall on the same day.
Churchill took his last breath, at the age of 90, on the morning of January 24th 1965, the 70th anniversary of his father's death.
Churchill was special and was obvious to a lot of people around him.
There's this quote that has been on my mind a lot since I read it for the first time.
It's actually in the other book too, and it's in this book.
And the more I think about this description, the more I like it.
So, He has this lifelong friendship with actually a woman that he wanted to marry.
And she turned him down.
Her name is Pamela.
And so they wound up becoming friends for 60 years.
But she gave one of the best descriptions of Churchill.
And the more I think about it, it's one of the highest compliments that you can actually give a person.
If you sit here and think about what she's saying.
The first time you meet Winston, you see all of his faults.
And the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.
There's two successful attributes that Churchill has that I think we should try to emulate.
One is it says they always talk about his energy levels.
They say that he never seemed to run out of energy.
I'm just going to leave a link down below.
There's this excellent video.
I think it's 11 minutes long.
It's about this guy who sold his company to Steve Jobs a few years before Steve Jobs died.
And even when he was sick, knew he had cancer, knew he was dying.
And even though Steve was older than him.
This is the guy that wound up selling his company to Steve and then going to work at Apple, even though Steve was older than him and sick.
He said that Steve was way higher energy than he was.
And so I'll leave that link down below in the show notes.
I highly recommend it.
I've watched the video, I don't know, probably five, maybe 10 times.
The story is fascinating.
And so the second trait is the fact that Churchill, throughout his life, sees things earlier than other people.
What I'm about to describe to you.
This is eight years before World War I.
He's observing the German military.
He knows that they're a threat.
He tries to tell people around them.
People don't believe him.
They don't agree.
There's another great, I covered this book on Churchill.
I think it was the first book I ever read on Churchill.
It's called The Splendid and the Vile.
And it's all about his time as prime minister.
And there's a great line in the book that goes something like you may not like Churchill, but he was right on Hitler.
He saw Hitler for who he was way before most of the people around him.
This idea that he just sees things earlier than other people.
It happens over and over and over again.
Remember, this is eight years before World War I Churchill spent a week observing maneuvers of the German army.
It was a chance to take a close look at the military machine that posed the biggest threat to peace in Europe.
Though Kaiser Wilhelm insisted that's the leader of Germany at the time insisted he didn't want a war with anyone.
Yeah, okay, well, what's coming out of your mouth and what are your actions?
Always go with people's actions.
The Kaiser himself issued the official invitation asking Winston to be his personal guest for the week.
Oh, okay, what are you going to do?
Churchill followed a mock battle of 50,000 men in the German infantry, artillery, and cavalry.
The regiment was a proud one and took itself seriously. seriously as a fighting force.
This is Churchill's observation.
The Kaiser gave him a special pass to inspect the latest German artillery weapons and invited him to a field conference with his generals.
Well, for a guy that says he doesn't want war, he's certainly practicing a lot for it.
Kaiser Wilhelm began showing off his knowledge of all the great battles fought over time.
His history lesson had a serious point.
He was clearly suggesting that blood would be spilled again if any army was unwise enough to attack the Germans.
His words reinforce the message.
Germany was ready and willing to make war if pushed.
So Churchill goes back and he says he gave the Germans credit for superiority in numbers quality, discipline and organization.
This is Churchill's writing, right?
They have superiority in numbers, quality, discipline, and organization.
These alone, he emphasized, were four good roads to victory.
You should pay attention to what they're doing.
We should prepare now, eight years before war breaks out.
Third trait is Churchill's force of personality.
And it's really interesting because this is described by one of his lovers.
It's remarkably consistent.
This is Churchill as a young man.
It's going to sound a lot like the Churchill, the one that the world came to know and love.
Winston discoursed on the brevity of human life and his determination to accomplish great things in the short time available.
He told her, we are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glowworm.
More important, she perfectly understood the nature of his talk, that it was essentially Winston thinking aloud.
He was highly opinionated strong-willed idealistic romantic intense, overwhelming and demanding.
He possessed a boundless, boundless drive.
Churchill had big ideas, and he wanted to act on them without delay.
He says stuff like this to everyone all the time.
Sometimes I feel as if I could lift the whole world on my shoulders.
And the reason this is important to repeat is because his internal world right, his internal monologue, is telling him I'm special, I'm special, I'm special.
And then the external world starts to agree with his internal world, telling him that you are special.
And you see that, at his rapid rise, at 33 years old, he was finally taking his place in cabinet and was the youngest to do so in almost half a century.
This is so important to understand because then you realize the shock.
Imagine if you had this relentless self-belief since the time you were seven, they said.
From the time you were seven then everything around you.
You rise faster and at a younger age than anybody else.
You get to 40, you're saying, okay, this is the next stop is prime minister.
And then the exact opposite happens.
You get kicked out of government and you think your entire life is over.
We're going to get there in a minute. more personality traits that he shares with Steve Jobs.
He generated his own light.
It was intense, direct, and concentrated as a beam.
Another trait that Churchill shares with Steve Jobs is the fact that he raises the bar and pushes the pace for everyone around him.
This is going to be Churchill's frenemy, I guess is the way you would describe it.
They're serving together.
Their fellow politicians and even his own biographer notices a distinct difference between Lloyd George's life before Churchill and after Churchill.
This is what an ambitious somebody that's raising the bar for you, that's pushing the pace, what that looks like, the effect they have in your own life.
The answer was that his greatest cabinet colleague and rival, Winston Churchill, came afterwards stirring Lloyd George to do more than simply sound radical.
Once Churchill joined the cabinet, everything changed.
As a pair of powerful personalities with high ambitions, Winston and Lloyd George came to dominate the liberal government.
Winston was the spark that ignited the change.
Winston made it clear that he was not there to do business as usual.
I intend to make myself damn disagreeable, he said.
This phenomenon was noticed by Paul Graham when he was building Y Combinator.
He talks about in his essays why ambitious people need.
They must be around other ambitious people.
Let me read you an excerpt from one of Paul Graham's essays.
Ambitious people are rare.
So if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers.
When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants, given water.
Probably the most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement that they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.
And so Churchill's doing this not only for the people around him, but he's actually trying to change the institution in which he's operating.
He tries to do it for the government.
And really you could think about this as not as what he's doing as a politician, but this is his blueprint for life.
In effect, Churchill was proposing to do for the nation what he had been doing for himself to achieve quick success by thinking big, taking risks and making the most of opportunities.
Why they lasted.
And then just a few observations that I enjoyed from the human aspect of his life, not just his career.
And it's the fact that he did want a family.
He wanted love.
You see him in this book struggle, try to find the right woman.
He attempts this many times, finally gets it right, gets married, lucks out, finds a supportive lifelong spouse and then becomes a father for the very first time at age 34, and he's writing.
There's a bunch of letters that he writes to his wife that are fascinating, but i love this, like he's happy that he's not single anymore.
Being a father and having a family was very important to him.
Bachelor life had been lonelier than winston had wanted to admit, and now he finally had a companion with whom he could share everything.
And so he writes to his wife.
And so Churchill's aggressive nature obviously is going to be loved by some people and hated by others.
He winds up doing a good job of offending Two kings.
One king that he was able to offend is Edward VII.
And if you really think about the description of Edward VII and how he chose to live his life, Churchill was really offended by the behavior.
It's just the worst kind of monarch that you could ever imagine.
And I don't know much about what he did to the country as a whole.
I'm talking about how he lived his life.
Churchill just viewed him as just this fat, lazy king.
And you'll see why with this description.
Edward VII would indulge his gargantuan appetite with gusto.
It was the good life that had ruined his health, adding so much bulk to his modest frame that he could barely move at the end.
He was so stout that he completely loses his breath when he has to climb upstairs.
Life had become one long feast.
Much of it served to him by a parade of society beauties who added their fond caresses whoever knows what that means who added their fond caresses to his many other comforts.
So he just sought comfort, sought a life of idleness, sought a life of the easiest path through life that you could possibly imagine leads to an early death.
This is the exact opposite.
Again, I know I'm repeating myself.
But Churchill, like Teddy Roosevelt before him and a bunch of other people.
I just like people that do things when they don't.
They're taking the harder path when they don't need to.
And you see this later on in his life in that book, The Splendid and the Vile, I mentioned earlier.
There's notes that Churchill sends to his son where he hates idleness.
He hates laziness.
He hates it in other people and he hates it within his family members.
And so he writes this to his young adult son at the time.
And he says, your idle and lazy life is very offensive to me.
You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence.
And so if his son and the king were searching for the easiest path possible, Churchill did the opposite.
And we see this with a letter that his wife writes to him.
Dearest, you work so hard, she wrote him, and have so little fun in your life.
She was only partly right.
Hard work in exciting times was Winston's idea of fun.
And the constant desire to push the pace, the constant intensity that he conducted all of his fairs with it, could be exhausting to people around him.
He was demanding in all things that mattered to him, which was often exhausting for others who lacked his intensity.
And even the way he plays, this is the surprising thing that he liked best.
I don't remember reading this before, but it comes up a bunch of the times in the book.
So I have to imagine that the other it was in the other biographies I read.
But it says one of Winston's favorite ways to relax was to dig in the sand.
So he'd go down to these beaches and sometimes he'd get caught doing this.
And this is what he's doing on the beaches.
He would create battle defenses and pretend campaigns as a way to indulge his ever active imagination.
Idle onlookers were not welcome.
This was serious work in its own way, giving the builder a refreshing chance to create worlds of his own without having to ask anyone else's opinion or permission.
It was one of the things that he liked best in the world.
And out of everything else that you and I are talking about, right?
If we're really like okay, let me.
What we're trying to do here is like trying to figure out what was a young Winston like.
What was he doing that is going to prepare him for his greatest moment that he could not have possibly predicted was going to come?
And this idea is like, what was he doing when he was playing?
Going down to the beach and actually engaging in these campaigns, almost preparing himself for real life events that are going to happen 25, 30 years into the future.
And this kind of intensity and practice and dedication leads to again another sign from the external world that he is as special as he thinks he is.
At 37 years old, he becomes the civilian head of the strongest naval force in the world.
He becomes the first lord of the Admiralty.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
And as soon as he takes over the organization, we see his personality imbibed in the organization.
He said that the only results that really mattered was the fleet, so his ship's ability to confront an enemy with a few minutes of shattering blasting, overpowering force.
The only punch worth throwing was a knockout punch.
This is Churchill personified, said Churchill.
The best way to make war impossible is to make victory certain.
He did nothing by halves, and so he immediately goes and tries to fix all the problems that he sees with Britain's navy.
The first thing is the fact that hey, our ships have to be fast.
And ships go faster, if you, if they burn oil instead of coal.
At the time, all of his ships burn coal, so he's like okay, let's burn oil, but they're like Winston, here's the problem Britain doesn't have a reliable supply of oil.
Now, this is crazy.
This blew my mind.
You know British Petroleum, BP.
Winston played a role in creating it.
So he solves the problem.
The fact hey, I can't, I want to burn oil.
My shift to burn oil, not coal.
Winston, we don't have any oil.
Okay, so let's go buy a majority interest in an oil company.
So he says he would solve that problem by taking Britain into the petroleum business, arranging for the government to acquire a majority interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which is now British Petroleum or, as we know it, BP.
That is insane.
That blew my mind.
Second problem the most advanced gun of the day is these 135-inch guns that are on these like the naval destroyers right.
He's like, that's not big enough.
I want a 15-inch gun.
And everybody tells him, like, well, here's the problem.
No one knew if the 15-inch gun would work because, as Churchill put it, no such thing as a modern 15-inch gun existed.
None had ever been made.
But that did not deter him.
So I get to this part, right?
He's essentially saying, hey, team, I want you to build something that we don't know, like, one...
No one else has.
And the reason no one else has is because no one knows if it can be done.
But if we can figure out how to do it, then that means we'll be the only ones with it.
A long time ago, like two or three years ago, probably three years ago I read this biography of Larry Ellison's.
That's insane.
I should actually reread it.
It's called The Billionaire and the Mechanic.
It is about I think the subtitle is How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the America's Cup Twice.
And so I'm reading this section of this Churchill book and it made me think because...
Larry was, you know, he's an extreme winner.
I think I said in that book that if Michael Jordan sold enterprise software, he'd be Larry Ellison.
Like they have the same kind of competitive, like psychopathic competitive drive.
And so Larry pushes his team.
They're losing at the race.
He's like, Hey, we're going to build the largest hard wing.
It's like thing that goes on top of the sailboat and everybody's around him is like you can't do that.
No one's ever done it.
And Larry's way he thinks about it is actually kind of genius.
He goes, this is what Larry said.
I know that most people think that trying to build a hard wing of this size is crazy, but that's the beauty of the idea.
The other side isn't trying to build one.
So we'll have a wing and they won't.
And what he's really saying is like if we can do something really hard, we won't have any competition.
It's exactly what Winston is saying here.
Winston was willing to make plans on a grand scale and to be imaginative and daring when others were content to think small and go slow.
I think, the fact that Churchill was a relentless student of history.
I think he stumbled upon and discovered something that I think you and I also know.
If you read a lot of biographies, if you're studying and you're learning from history, this stretches your own story.
It makes you reach farther.
It makes you believe that you're capable of more than maybe you're doing right now.
And we see this as a lifelong student of the country's history.
Churchill was allowed to play a role in the epic story of the British naval power.
He was following in the steps of giants who had defeated the Spanish Armada in the 16th century and Napoleon's Navy in the 19th.
He did not want to be the man who let the Royal Navy be overwhelmed by the Germans.
And so, as I mentioned earlier, Churchill has this talent to be able to see things usually years in advance of other people.
He wants to prepare the Navy, wants to be the world's best Navy, wants more ships.
And the cabinet keeps telling him, no, you don't need four battleships.
What's wrong with you?
You only need two.
Be reasonable.
I hate that word.
The worst advice I've ever heard is like, be realistic.
That's terrible advice.
So it says, you know, you don't need four more battleships.
You know, I think two is going to be enough.
Two, you know, we feel in the cabinet that is more reasonable.
And I love this few sentences.
That word reasonable was the key.
Winston's opponents never tired of saying that he was unreasonable.
He wouldn't listen to reason, they said.
He wouldn't compromise, they said.
And part of the reason they thought he was so unreasonable is because they didn't believe war was actually going to happen.
There's a lot of statements in the book.
They're like.
It's impossible for two civilized European countries such as Germany and England to actually engage in warfare together, or against each other, rather.
And yet just a year or two later, in August 1914, the war with Germany actually began.
Still only 39.
This is just great, great writing.
Still only 39, Winston was now at the center of a world war.
It had taken him only 13 years to rise from a parliamentary backbencher to one of the top posts in an empire at war.
He now had the chance to change the course of world history and to prove the worth of his heroic view of life.
Winston enjoyed an enormous advantage, for this was his hour, the arrival of the war that he had seen coming and had prepared himself to fight, whether by land, sea or air.
And what is shocking is how everybody around him does not have this same approach.
They weren't taking it seriously.
There's a bunch of people in high positions in the government.
It says for the British, what would help to turn the war into such a long and bitter slog was the half-hearted way in which their leaders threw the nation into the fight and then failed so long to pursue it vigorously.
Churchill's rival.
Churchill talks well he says but he's never done anything big.
He continued in this vein for some time, completely blind to the irony that he was golfing while Churchill was hard at work.
Churchill gave a forthright explanation of his position.
If we have to fight, we must fight with single-hearted conviction.
And so I just have three notes on this page.
Number one, pursue your goal vigorously.
Number two non-self-aware idiots surround you, like the guy saying Churchill's not doing anything while this guy is golfing.
Churchill literally puts himself in harm's way repeatedly.
He risks his physical safety which he does not need to do, which is also what he did earlier in life, as we talked about last week over and over again, while this guy's on a fucking golf course.
Non-self-aware idiots surround you.
That is number two.
Number three, fight with single-hearted conviction.
And so we see the fact that Churchill was willing to put skin in the game.
He shocked the military and most of the nation when he abruptly decided to throw himself into combat as a field commander in all but name.
As First Lord, Lord of the Admiralty, he wasn't supposed to be on the bridge of a battleship under fire, much less commanding troops on the front lines.
But on October 3rd, when he went to the Belgian port of Antwerp to observe the fierce fighting there, he ended up staying three days and leading the beleaguered forces, as if he had suddenly been transformed into a general.
This is leadership.
He was under continuous and heavy fire, and the sheer violence of it, as well as the drama of the last stand against an overwhelming German force, awakened every fighting instinct in his body.
And even with that, the shocking thing is how fast his fall comes.
Remember, he gets the job at 39.
At 40, he is disgraced.
And it comes down to the Gallipoli campaign.
He definitely played a role in formulating this idea for this campaign.
I've heard it's always his blame.
That's that's what I understand.
This book makes the case that, you know, definitely he was definitely to blame.
But, you know, he took the lion's share of the blame and there's a lot of people to blame.
But it says he was wrong.
It was a disaster from start to finish.
As the situation went from bad to worse in the next few months, mistakes after mistakes was made by both the Navy and especially the army, which tried to clear Gallipoli of Turkish troops who proved to be far more disciplined and determined than the British had been willing to believe.
Talked about that last week.
There is this tendency for large powerful countries, just like large powerful companies, they get fat and lazy and arrogant because they've just had success after success, after success.
This inevitably leads them to underestimate their opponent.
That is never smart to underestimate anybody.
It is all downside, no upside.
They did this in the Boer War.
We can't lose a bunch of these farmers, right?
They do this two decades later in Singapore, like I talked about on the Alistair earthquake.
I think it's episode 318, a few episodes back.
Same exact thing here.
They're like, these Turkish troops, we're going to smoke them.
And the result was something around 20,000 to 40,000 dead British soldiers.
Tens of thousands died as the fighting dragged through the rest of the year.
It was one long misadventure that did nothing to change the course of the war.
The blame for this tragic campaign was put at the feet of churchill, who was made to pay the price for the failure.
This setback was so big that a suitably big scapegoat was needed, and winston was it.
With astounding suddenness, his meteoric rise flamed out.
He's going to keep get kicked out of government.
The people he thought were his friends did not see any reason to help him.
Supposed friends and allies say stuff like churchill will have to go.
He will be a rumined manned.
He is kicked out.
He is no longer allowed to be the first Lord of the Admiralty.
He says, I am finished, he lamented.
I'm finished in all that I care for.
This is what he cares about, the waging of war and the defeat of the Germans.
The reversal of fortunes could not have been more shocking.
And because he was so self-confident and so boastful.
This is obviously going to be predictable as well.
Winston's enemies were jubilant.
They were finally having their revenge for all his moments of defiance and imprudence.
For a long time, Winston was in a state of shock.
It really was describing what happens when you lose a sense of purpose.
For a long time, Winston was in a state of shock.
He wandered around like a man half alive.
He looked years older, his face pale.
He was very depressed.
It was not simply his misfortune that weighed on him.
It was the abrupt loss of purpose.
He spent five months idle, waiting for opportunities that never came.
He made up his mind to start his career all over at the age of 40.
He was suddenly confronted with the possibility that he had reached the last chapter and now he must fight or die.
Remember, the war is not over.
He couldn't take any comfort from the story of his father's life, for Lord Randolph had never managed to revive his own career after falling from power in his late 30s.
Just like he is right.
Winston must have been haunted by that fact and have wondered whether he was simply repeating a family tragedy.
His father lingered too long and suffered a slow death.
Winston would take his chances in the trenches.
His star had grown so dim that he didn't think his reputation could suffer much more.
From this point it seemed that he could only rise if he survived ever.
The gambler he was willing to throw the dice once more and risk everything for another chance to restore his fortunes.
He arranged for a letter to be given to clemmy, his wife, in the event of my death.
He is going off into the trenches of world war one.
Death is a very real possibility.
This letter was supposed to be the voice of a ghost speaking to clemmy in case his story had reached its end without the chance to add one more chapter.
He wrote, Do not grieve for me too much.
I am a spirit confident of my rights.
Death is only an incident and not the most important which happens to us in this state of being.
On the whole, especially since I met you, my darling one, I have been happy and you have taught me how noble a woman's heart can be.
If there's anywhere else, meaning an afterlife.
If there's anywhere else, I shall be on the lookout for you there.
Meanwhile, look forward, feel free, rejoice in life, cherish the children, guard my memory.
God bless you.
Goodbye, Winston.
And that is where I'll leave it for the full story.
I highly recommend reading this book.
And I would also read Hero of the Empire.
I think they're both fantastic.
If you find yourself wanting to learn more on Churchill, I made two other podcasts about him.
It's episode 196 and episode 225.
If you buy this book or any of the books using the link below, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
That is 320 books down, 1,000 to go.
And I'll talk to you again soon.
