I wanted to make an episode in this book that Michael Jordan published when he was about
halfway through his career.
And so I spent the week reading that book and I also read this long form piece about Jordan
when he was 50.
And when I was done with all that and I was just reviewing it, all my notes and highlights,
I didn't think I had, I just wasn't as excited about it.
I didn't think I had enough good information to actually make an episode.
And so since that wasn't good enough, what I'm going to do instead is I'm republishing
this episode that I made about Michael Jordan that I do love.
And it's based on a book that I absolutely love and highly recommend you buy.
It's called Driven From Within.
And so even if you listened to this episode when it first came out three years ago, I would
listen to it again.
And if you haven't heard it before, then you're in for a treat.
This is one of history's greatest competitors in his own words.
And I just want to tell you about two quick things before we get into it.
I'm hosting two more conferences this year.
The first one is July 29th through the 31st in Scotts Valley, California.
The venue is absolutely gorgeous.
It is surrounded by beautiful California redwoods.
The second one is in September 27th through the 29th in Austin, Texas directly on the Colorado
River River in a secluded spot 15 minutes from downtown Austin.
These events exist.
I do this for one reason to help you build relationships with other founders, investors
in high value people.
The last event the Vena did in March sold out and was a massive success.
People traveled all over the world to be there.
And they left with new friendships, new business partners, new advisors, new customers,
new investors and new energy and inspiration.
It is so important to invest time, energy and resources into building these relationships.
The best way I've ever heard this put was someone that designed in person relationship
for family offices.
He said, relationships between two people like this, these investor founder types, they
produce nonlinear returns.
Here are a few details that you need to know before you attend number one.
I ran out every single event I do.
I ran out the entire venue.
That means every single person you see there is there for the same reason and has the same
interest as you.
Number two, they are all inclusive locations.
I mean, you get yourself there and I take care of the rest.
You're lodging your food, access to all the events.
It's all taken care of.
Number three and four are related.
Number three, these are events for already successful people that have already progressed
in the career that are already built a successful career.
The price should not be as stretched to you.
And if you were just starting out in your career, the podcast is free.
It's a world class education on demand for free.
Listen to it.
Use those ideas to build your work and then come to another event in the future.
So number four, these are smaller events.
This is intentional.
The one in beautiful Scotts Valley, California among in the redwoods is going to be around
120 to 130 people.
The one in Austin is going to be around 150 people.
I will of course be there the entire time.
The one change I'm making for the second and third event that is different from the first
event way less stage time for me and way more small group conversations.
If you want to attend Do Not Daily Dally, I'm doing both of these events in partnerships.
These events are being advertised not only on this podcast, but on business breakdowns.
I'm and invest like the best.
I'm doing that in partnership with them for the Austin Texas event and then the art of
investing podcasts as well for the Scotts Valley, California event.
So you are welcome to attend both events.
If you like, some people have already bought tickets to both events.
You can see more details and apply to the event by going to founders podcast.com for
such events.
The second thing and I'll make this really fast.
Yergebati in the episode that you're about to hear Michael Jordan talks a lot about how
his career was made better as a result of the setting that he did of the great people
that came before him.
I have made myself a tool and now it's available to you.
So I've made you and me a tool that allows you to do the exact same thing.
It is called founders notes to develop founders notes.com founders with an S just like the
podcast.
And it allows you to get access to every single one of my highlights notes and transcripts
for every single book.
An episode I've ever done.
It's in one giant database that you can search.
So you can search by keyword, you can have sage, which is the assistant search and synthesize
the data for you.
Or you can read highlights by book and existing founder notes subscriber.
Send me this message this week.
He says founder notes is literally a compounding tactical advantage over my competition.
So at the end of this episode, which you're going to hear me, you're going to hear me
use founders notes to answer the question, how did history's greatest founders think
about hiring?
What you hear was not committed to memory.
This is the most important part.
It came from me doing a keyword search on hiring in founders notes.
This becomes a superpower for you are a compounding tactical advantage as the one subscriber said
because it gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest
founders on demand.
So make sure you stick around to the end to hear that.
I think the last 20, 30 minutes is remarkable.
And of course, don't forget to subscribe at founders notes.com that is founders notes.com.
Now I hope you enjoy this episode of Michael Jordan and his own words.
His relentless determination produced six MBA championships and some of the most spectacular
performances in sports history while his enduring grace and unique sense of style made him
equally famous in the world's fashion, business, and marketing.
In driven from within, Michael makes it clear that the basis for his phenomenal success
came from the inside out.
Thanks in part to those who guided him along the way.
His skill, work ethic, philosophy, personal style, competitiveness, and presence have
flowed from the basketball court and into every facet of his life.
Nearly three years removed from his last turn as an athlete, Michael's 20th air Jordan
shoe has helped push Nike's brand Jordan division to nearly $500 million in sales.
This is a book about the power of collaboration and teamwork.
The awe-inspiring energy generated when people combine their creativity and passion and
have fearless desire to lead.
Whether it's waking up at 6 a.m. to work on fundamentals as a high school junior or
spending hours with legendary designer Tinker Hatfield on the intricacies of state-of-the-art
shoe design, Michael Jordan has never wavered in his desire to be the best.
Everyone knows the results.
In driven from within, Michael Jordan and those in his inner circle revealed a philosophy
that made it all happen.
So that is from the inside cover of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today,
which is driven from within and is written by Michael Jordan and Mark Vancell.
So I was not expecting to do this book right now.
It was actually 200 pages into another book that hopefully will come in the next few days.
But ever since I read almost 700 page biography of Michael Jordan, I couldn't stop thinking
about it.
The ability to look into Michael Jordan's mindset and operating system really motivated
me and really fired me up actually.
And so I had read briefly the introduction to this book.
And I was like, you know what?
I need to do this right now.
I feel compelled to.
I can't put this book down.
So in the last few days, not only did I finish reading, I read this entire book, but
also would go on YouTube and every free moment where I'm washing the dishes.
I'm in the car.
I'm going for a walk, whatever I've been doing.
I've been looking up videos and listening to Michael Jordan speak.
Not videos about Michael Jordan, but literally downloading into my mind as much as I could
just him talking.
And that is what also this book, because most of it, there's a couple like little, he calls
him vignette, little stories from people like his mom, some of his oldest friends, the
shoe designer, Tinker Hatfield that he's worked with for 20 years on the Jordan shoe and
you know, his main business.
But the vast majority of what I'm going to share with you today is just straight from
the words of Michael Jordan.
And then you and I will have the ability to download his mindset straight from him.
And there's some ideas that I've learned from both these books that I don't think I'm
going to forget.
And I'll make sure I'll point them out to you as we run over them today.
So this is a Michael talking like, why does this book exist and what it's about?
And when I'm about to meet you, remember he's talking, he's not talking about his playing
career.
He's talking about his business.
And what's fascinating, so this book is almost what 20 years old, something like that.
And I think it's a great illustration of what a lot of these other great minds that
you and I have been studying, they always tell us to never interrupt the compounding that
it's hard for our minds to grasp that all the profits are far into the future.
So 20 years ago, it's already a Jordan brand, which he refers to as brand.
So in the book, he'll call it brand Jordan.
In modern day, he says it's Jordan brand.
So I don't want you to get confused about that, but I'm going to read it as it's a
Pearson book, which is brand Jordan.
But the Jordan brand, you know, over 20 years ago was doing $500 million to sales, fantastic
business, right?
You fast forward 20 years in the future.
He did not interrupt that compounding.
And now they're doing seven times that amount, 3.6 billion a year.
So let's go to this.
He says, no one, and remember, he's talking about the business.
No one could have predicted the outcome because I was never following someone's lead or operating
off an existing model.
There were no models for what happened at Nike.
As you remember, if you listened to the podcast, I just the previous podcast, when he signs
at Nike, they're doing $25 million a year in revenue and a large endorsement contract
for an athlete at the time would be like $100,000.
So he says there was no models for what happened at Nike and certainly nothing close to what
we have created with brand Jordan looking back.
So again, this is why the book exists and what it's about.
Looking back isn't about celebrating the results as much as it is about understanding
the process that produced those results.
It's been about leading and staying true, authentic to those fundamental values that flow downstream
from my parents and later Coach Dean Smith.
That's his college coach at UNC.
Moving through the business world full time, I recognize that the structure of success
is no different there than it was on the basketball court.
Great companies have a lot in common with great teams.
Players who practice hard when no one is paying attention will play well when everyone
is watching.
So right there, what really surprised me is his complete dedication to practice.
How much he talks about it over and over again.
And that is one of the main ideas I learned from Jordan that I don't think I'll ever forget.
It was so surprising to me.
And it's something he's going to repeat over and over again.
You know what?
It just struck me while I was reading the inside cover to you a few minutes ago.
And I didn't make the connection until, whatever reason, it just popped into my mind there.
But if you go back, you'll see, I've done an extensive amount of reading and studying
of people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett or the three that popped in my mind
over decades of their career.
And what's fascinating to me is how much they have a handful of ideas that they repeat
over decades.
Jordan shares that trade with them.
There's a lot of things that he's saying when he's 35, when he's 40, that he's still
repeating when he's almost six years old today.
So let's go back to this.
There's no shortcuts.
I've always believed in leading with action, not words.
And I learned very early to follow my instincts.
This is again, these ideas he's going to repeat over and over again.
My standards have always been mine alone.
I've never tried to live up to the expectations of others.
And everybody knows the results.
This book is about the process.
The values that form the foundation of my playing career are the same values that define
brand Jordan.
I truly believe those values never go out of style.
So then he sets a very beginning of the book saying, with asking a question, will there
be another Michael Jordan?
Sure.
There is no doubt a player will come along who will be able to build on what I've accomplished
just as I built on the example of great players before me.
And then he talks a little bit about like the growth of the NBA in the game since he's
retired.
And that there's obviously it's way more successful as a business in general, a lot more fans.
And so the rewards the players are not only larger but they come quicker and he's not
sure that's actually beneficial.
So he's saying there was an online corporation looking to invest in young NBA players in
1984.
It's often the other way around today, meaning that you could have he had to prove that he
had the ability to play and then he got their rewards.
He's saying that there being a player today are being rewarded on future potential.
And this is his opinion on why that could be potentially detrimental.
It's often the other way around today which makes it a lot harder for young NBA players
to realize the depth of their potential.
It's hard to spend all summer working on one aspect of your game when you've already
received the payoff.
I never had that problem.
And so now he's going to go into like what motivated him.
I wanted to prove what I could do.
This is something he repeats over and over again too.
When my place start when my place started providing me with the rewards, then I wanted
to prove I deserve them.
I never felt the desire to rest on what I had accomplished.
I never felt like I deserved to drive a Bentley when I got my first contract or live in
a mansion.
There's actually a story I'm going to share with you later in the book which talks about
his really surprised me how financially conservative it was.
I was not expecting that from him.
And it's actually kind of funny what motivates him to be so conservative too because he was
terrified at the idea of ever having to get an actual job.
Those things might be symbols of success to some people but there are a lot of people
who confuse symbols with actual success.
What's left after you got all the money and buy the best car?
There's no way to go from there.
There's nowhere to go from there.
And so his point is like I just focused on achievement and I knew the financial rewards
would come from that achievement.
When we won one championship, I wanted to win two in a row.
When we won two, I wanted to win three in a row because Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had
never won three straight.
Everything of value comes without being earned.
So I guess there's a shop on here.
Everything I'm reading to you right now is coming right after one right after another.
There's not really a narrative to the book.
What I really feel is like so it goes in order of like the design of the shoes, goes through
all like the thought process, the growth of the business as a result of all this.
But really a way to think about this book is just Jordan just speaking freely like off
the cuff like if you're having a conversation with a friend just downloading into your brain.
And he learned from his not only his play his playing career, but building the brand and
giving you his mindset and operating system himself.
So he's saying nothing of value comes without being earned.
We're going to get into his motto, which he which he got from his high school coach, which
I think is fantastic.
But he he talks a lot about the you know, the fact that he looked at himself as a leader.
He says that's why great leaders are those who lead by example first.
You can't demand respect because of a title or position and then expect people to follow
you.
He's not for a little while, but in the long run, people respond to what they see.
I practiced hard every day because I wanted every one of my teammates to know what I
expected out of myself.
If I took a day off, then I know they would too.
Just like my high school coach used to say, it's hard, but it's fair.
I live by those words.
And then a few pages later, he just got this great sentence, which really is just an echo
of this idea that you and I have talked about over and over again that the score takes
care of itself.
Another rather surprising thing I learned about Jordan, he just focused on being as good
as great as his craft as possible.
And he knew if he did that, then he'd get the rewards he deserved.
I figured if I was good as I could be at playing sports, eventually it would pay dividends.
I didn't know how, but my main focus or to me, my focus was to be the best player in
whatever sport I played.
That's all I ever thought about.
So at this point in the book, he's still reflecting on his early life.
This is about what his dad, like we talked in the last podcast, that the fact that his
dad told him you're not good at anything, go in the house with the women, get out of here,
like really burned like a extreme sense of like motivation in him.
And so there's two main ideas.
He's going to start this page on him talking about his father's opinion of him when he
was a kid.
But really the thing about Jordan, I think, is he's got two really good ideas on this
page that he shares with other people.
I'm going to, the shorthand on the note of myself was have one speed go.
That is something I learned from Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese.
He was a mentor of Steve Jobs, hired a 19 year old Steve Jobs.
And he said, he's like, when I gave Steve Jobs a job at Atari, like he did, there was
no, he had one speed.
He was all out all the time.
And then this really, the second idea really surprised me not because of the idea behind
it, because he was, he said it explicitly.
And this is an idea you and I have talked about over and over again, that if you want
to be truly great at something, fine work that feels like play.
So this is Jordan and his dad.
He didn't think I'd amount to anything because I had no hand skills, no mechanical skills.
The way my father looked at it, there was no guarantee I'd be able to make a living.
Remember, they're just like a normal, you know, maybe lower middle class family, country
family and willing to North Carolina.
So his idea is dad's idea is like you have to be able to be, if you're a mechanic, you
can always, you know, fix things for other people.
Then you at least you're guaranteed some kind of way to, to make a living and to support
yourself and your family, right?
So he's like, that's, that's what I did.
That's what you should do.
Because I had no hand skills, no mechanical skills.
That's where my father looked at it.
There was no guarantee I'd be able to make a living.
So if you, if you didn't have those skills, there would be no guarantee I'd be able to
make a living.
But I never thought about that.
All my energy was focused on getting where I had to go.
And Jordan talks about one of the motivations of that.
I wanted the freedom to do what I wanted to do.
And I wanted to do it my way to this day that, and this is shocking because Jordan is,
is widely known for one of the greatest work ethics of any sports, any player in sports
and any sport ever, right?
And somebody saying to this day, I don't enjoy working.
I enjoy playing and figuring out how to connect playing with business.
To me, that's my niche.
People talk about where work ethics is a player, but they don't understand.
Would appear to be hard work to others was simply playing for me.
We were playing a game.
Why not play as hard as you can?
And so it's on this page.
His mom is talking about stories from his childhood that this sentence might be surprising,
right?
Michael wouldn't have done anything if we didn't remind him not when he came to sports,
but just doing chores, going to a good job.
He would have laid around and looked at the TV all day.
And so I think a lot of people have that problem like, oh, I don't feel motivated.
You're probably a driven individual in general.
You just pick the wrong profession.
If there's somebody out there that has to, you know, they're dragging themselves out
of the bed like, oh crap, I don't want to go do what I'm about to do, they'd find something
else to do.
If you told Jordan, hey, I got to go work as a mechanic, I got to go sit in an office
from 9 to 5 and answer emails.
These are examples he's actually used in conversations.
And I think they're also appearing this book.
You know, he's like, to me, that's torture.
I'd have to force myself to do those things.
I wouldn't work very hard at them, but you say, hey, I have an opportunity to make, to
be a pro athlete.
And I will work from the time my eyes opened in the morning till I go to bed at night.
And no one will have to push me from behind.
But what's interesting is it wasn't always this way.
So that leads me into the next section where this is about his first mentor and a constant
desire to improve his skills.
And this is his, this is his, excuse me, his high school coach.
So there's a guy named Coach Herring.
Coach Herring is the guy that gave him that life motto.
It's hard, but it's fair.
Coach Herring was the first one to see in me what I saw in myself.
He picked me up every morning my junior year, took me to the gym before school and worked
me out.
He was my pusher.
He was one of the coaches who would just talk to you.
You have to stay focused, MJ.
You can't do this, MJ.
Get your grades up, man, get your grades up.
Most days I enjoyed it.
Some days I didn't feel like going.
Remember this whole idea about I didn't feel like doing it because he explicitly talks
about your feelings don't matter.
Business is about service to others.
When he is playing, he feels it's his obligation.
Somebody paid their heart.
They worked all week.
They paid their hard earned money to buy a ticket to watch me and to play to entertain
them.
And to that degree, I think it's smart to have a motivation that's bigger than yourself,
right?
But his point is it doesn't matter if my knee hurts, my ankle hurts.
I don't feel good.
I have an obligation because I'm serving other people to go out and give my best
effort.
So most days I enjoyed it.
Some days I didn't feel like going.
But those were the days the coach airing would push me.
Eventually, Michael was able to play that role for himself, right?
He made this big old poster with all the drills listed and we went through them every single
day.
That's how it got started.
I wasn't a great athlete at the time, but I wanted to be.
I wanted to be admired.
I wanted to be respected.
I wanted the girls to respect me too.
All of that drove me a lot more than most people think.
I didn't have any status at the time.
If that's what you saw, meaning you know, I wasn't the best player, I wasn't excelling,
I was going to prove you wrong.
Just watch me.
That was my mentality.
And then he has an idea that I think is very, again, surprising that he starts with low
expectations and then he'll tell you over and over again, you should be concentrating
on the fundamentals.
But what I found interesting is like he started low expectations.
And once he reached that low expectation, he didn't rest on his laurels, right?
He picks on the next target, but as he's moving up that progression, he's building confidence.
So let's go into this.
You'll see what I mean.
My expectations are very low.
I wanted to be the best player at the park in Wilmington.
Then I wanted to be better than my brothers or the guys in my neighborhood.
These were my expectations.
Then he started with the progression.
With the varsity team in high school, impress the coach, get a four year scholarship to
a major college with each and then he ends that sentence there.
But if you think about it, he's like, go to college, win a championship in college.
Try again to win a championship, get go to the NBA, spend seven years trying to win one.
Then I'll win two, then I'll win three.
And I was watching this other interview with him.
And it was like real quick with a reporter, but they're like, hey, you've just won three.
Isn't that enough?
He's like enough for who?
It might be enough for you.
No, there's always something else, something that's coming next.
So it says with each progression, I gain confidence.
Then he talks about what he learned from his college coach.
Coach James Dean Smith system wasn't about excelling at one phase of the game.
He was about excellence in every phase of the game, scoring, rebounding, passing, playing
defense.
And so part of the progression that had to occur to get him to the next level is the
fact that his coach lies, his high school coach lies to get him into a five star basketball
camp.
And before Jordan is just isolated in North Carolina, he doesn't know how good he is, but his
coach sees other people playing.
He's like, you can play with these guys.
So he wants to blind, gets him into the into the basketball camp.
I'm not going to repeat stuff I already covered in the in the last podcast, but this was
new information was the fact that the guy running the coach or running the camp was so
impressed that originally Michael was only supposed to stay for one week.
So the guy running the camp, his name is Mr. Garfinkle, calls his parents and I don't
pick up Michael.
And so this is his mom, Michael's mom, we're laying the memory.
Each week we would sit there talking about, you know, they're finances were tight.
They had to stick to a budget, stick to figure out which bills we can pay this week, which
one should we can.
And this guy calling saying, hey, you know, come, Michael needs to stay for a second week.
We don't have the money for it.
And this blew my mind.
Each week we would sit down and figure out what bills we were going to pay.
We had paid for one week of basketball camp when Mr. Garfinkle called.
We told him we only had one week, one called to say, hey, Michael needs to stay for another
week.
This guy's like, you don't understand your, your son's going crazy.
So it says he called, we told him we only had money in the budget for that one week.
Mr. Garfinkle just let us have it.
He told us we didn't know the skills of our son.
I said, sir, that's okay.
We paid for one week and we're coming to get him.
He said, I'll give him the money.
And then Michael jumps in and talks about what this camp gave to his confidence and his
ability.
Hey, I can play with the best, the best people around.
I'm as good as they can.
All right.
I'm as good as they are.
I was full of energy after that second week.
I thought I must be doing something right.
All I wanted to do was to improve to keep getting better.
I became a sponge.
I got a glimpse of what success looked like.
So I'm going to fast forward in the book.
He's in Chicago, rookie year right away.
He's like, okay, this guy's not playing.
And so there's going to be some stories from friends.
Two different stories from two different people in here.
Let me give you the first one.
You couldn't help but notice this guy was different from all of us who were already
with there with the bulls.
His practice habits were unmatched.
And so that's an easy, you know, that's the idea that he repeats over and over and
it's an easy idea for you and I to use.
And whatever field that we're in, we're just making the commitment.
No one is going to prepare more than me.
No one is going to practice more than me.
His level of effort, his level of competing stood out.
He always wanted to take it to the next level.
If the other guys didn't take their effort, their effort up, then Michael had no problem
embarrassing them.
And so then we have another story on the same page from a different person.
Really, the note of that for himself on this page is practice, combine practice effort
and education.
You ever see Star Wars?
You always this little ugly thing.
But he's the Jedi master.
He's the guy who taught everybody.
Everybody went to Yoda for knowledge.
When you sit around talking to any older person who has lived their life to the fullest,
they have great stories to tell because they've had great experiences.
Michael is Yoda.
He's always been an old soul.
That's probably attributable to the education that he got from his parents, the education
he got from Dean Smith in college, and then the education that he got in the Olympics
with Bobby Knight.
He was more mature than the average 21-year-old kid coming into the NBA.
And you see that maturity too if you watched the last dance because his rookie season,
think about it.
You're a kid from a small town.
Now you're dropped into Chicago.
You have a nice contract, not nearly comparable to what athletes today make, but you're making
a lot more money.
You've ever made your life.
You have more freedom.
You have people even though at the time I think they were like, they didn't even sell
half the arena in Chicago.
But you know, you have, you probably feel good about yourself.
He goes looking for his teammates one day, knocks on the hotel room, goes in, and he sees
most of the bulls.
Remember, the bulls is a crappy team.
A bunch of, you know, average players, not really serious about their craft, goes in there.
There's a bunch of girls.
There's a bunch of alcohols.
A bunch of people doing cocaine.
And he just turns around and he's like, all right, well, I'm leaving.
I'm out.
And so the maturity for a 20-year-old person to not give into the temptations because
those temptations would get in the way of what his goal in life was.
That is very rare.
So this next section is called uncompromised.
And I want to pull, before I read this to you, I want to pull out, I have a bunch of notes
from these talks that I were listening to the last few days.
One of them comes, there's like this long, it's like an hour long talk that's on YouTube
where Michael's just sitting down and being interviewed by the magazine cigar, cigar,
aficionado.
And they're talking about, this is like two years before the last dance is released.
And they hear the rumor and they're like, well, it's not out yet, but he says, Michael
said something that was very interesting.
I think ties into the section of the book.
Where he's like, listen, if you're going to watch the last dance, it's going to show
my unwavering dedication to the game.
And really think that I think unwavering and uncompromised are similar ideas, what he's
talking about here.
Some players look at me for all the wrong reasons.
Marketing, admiration, money made off the court.
They don't understand the foundation I had to create to support everything that came
afterward.
They don't know about lifting weights at 7 a.m.
Practicing hard every day, finding ways to motivate myself for every game, sitting
up half the night with an ankle in a bucket of ice or hooked up to an electronic stimulation
machine.
They don't know about any of those things.
In a sense, my experience created a vision that obscured the hard work and commitment.
With all the attention on the surface, it's easy to become confused about the source
of the money and glamour.
And the great maxim that I think would condense are to still what he's telling a series
to fact that the public praises people for what they practice in private.
The public praises people for what they practice in private.
They're seeing the money, they're seeing the private jet.
They're seeing the commercials, they're seeing the championships.
They don't see the hours of practice.
The fact that I'm getting my knee drained, my ankles messed up.
I woke up at 7 a.m. this morning.
I lifted weights before practice.
I worked on jurals after practice.
And so he gets to his punchline here.
You have to be uncompromised in your level of commitment to whatever you are doing or
it can disappear as fast as it appeared.
And so he continues to steam.
Don't pay attention to the wrong things.
Pay attention to the way I play the game.
Pay attention to my passion.
Pay attention to the idea of focusing on improvement every day.
Pay attention to my commitment.
Commitment cannot be compromised by rewards.
Excellence isn't a one week or one year ideal.
It's a constant.
There will be days when you don't feel on top of your game.
But your commitment remains constant.
No compromises.
Look around and just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has the same
focus.
The morning after Tiger Woods rallied to beat Phil Millicolson at the Ford Championship
in 2005, he was in the gym by 630 to work out.
No lights, no cameras, no glitz or glamour.
Uncompromised.
So something I learned that was surprising in this book is the fact that Jordan almost left
Nike to set up another company.
And this is just a few years into his career.
So this is Jordan talking about it.
Then I want to talk about then we have his agent David Falk talking about this time.
And I love comparing the same diehard competitive spirit that Michael Jordan applied to his game
Phil Knight had that same competitive spirit in building Nike.
And so it says so when my contract was coming up, he came to us and said so he's talking
about there's two executives in Nike, Peter and Rob, that were really like Jordan's
liaison, liaison's to Nike.
And so they went up dipping out and saying, hey, why don't we start our own company, your
own equity that you can build the business.
And so Jordan is talking about this.
And my contract was coming up, they came to us and said, let's go out on the edge, let's
do something different, let's start our own shoe company.
Peter was our lead designer and I had worked very closely with them and Rob was a very
good close good friend of the family.
And so Jordan's really about loyalty and personal relationships.
So he was contemplating this.
And so this is his agent talking about that.
But Michael was at Nike and he was becoming the most successful endorsement in the history
of professional sports to say that I was in shock would be an understatement of the
century.
First, I thought Rob was a really close friend.
And to think that he would have done all this behind my back amazed me.
Second, starting your own company seems at this point seems the kind of thing or it is
the kind of thing that seems really sexy rather and exciting to a client because they're
not seeing the downside.
I had a meeting with Michael's parents who were very, very competitive and I said, you
don't understand.
This is going to be like World War III for Phil Knight and Phil is a very competitive guy.
This is his number one talent leaving and he's not going to say no problem.
You have my blessing.
Take my number one endorser.
Good luck.
Phil is a competitive guy.
Nike wanted to take over the world.
Michael wanted to take over the world of basketball so that drive was mirrored from one
another.
They are parallel stories.
And I love that that stated explicitly because if you read, I've read, I've done, I've
read reread Phil Knight's book.
I don't know, like probably like 30 podcasts back or something like that.
I did another episode on Shudog.
Now I've read two books on Michael.
I've spent a long time studying him.
I do believe that that is my understanding as well.
And I'm glad it stated explicit here.
They are parallel stories.
It's the same idea manifested in two different personalities and two different industries.
So what they wind up doing here that's smart is they're using the other offer as a leverage.
So David and his parents talk Jordan out of doing this but then they use that offer as
a way to get equity and to actually get brand Jordan.
Nike put a big deal on the table that expanded our line, gave me more creative control.
This is Jordan's being here.
Gave me more creative control and approval rates.
Within Nike, it appeared we were expanding line.
When in essence, we were starting another company beneath the Nike umbrella.
Rob and Peter understood my feeling.
They told us to use what they were trying to do and to get what we wanted from Nike.
And that's what we did.
So then there's this great story about when Michael Jordan gets to meet Warren Buffett
and gets to hang out with him spend some time with him.
And they really realize like this is a different animal, same beast.
And it has to do with how they come about making their decisions.
I've always wanted to know what successful people used when they were evaluated and deal
or making a decision.
I was with Coca-Cola earlier in my career and they would put me on a dog and pony show
all over the country to meet bottlers.
It would take almost eight days, I'd go into supermarkets everywhere shaking hands.
On one of those trips I was in Omaha, Nebraska and I had an opportunity to meet Warren Buffett.
He invited me out on his boat.
First of all, I don't like boats.
Now this is the richest guy in the world of time and he's the largest shareholder of coke.
I said Mr. Buffett, I don't mean to offend you but I'm afraid of boats.
He said don't worry, we have life jackets.
I told him you're going to have to give me two to give me on that boat.
And so then they have this decision.
Or excuse me, this discussion.
I asked him about his decision making process.
What do you think about when you're making your decisions?
What is your thought process?
And he says, whatever my gut tells me, that's what I do.
And so Michael's like, oh, I'm the same way.
I thought that was pretty wild.
Because up until that point, I was just, when he's talking about making decisions, I was
just asking myself, what do you feel?
Once I made a decision, I didn't think about it again.
It was strictly off gut.
That's how I made a decision to go with David Falk.
That's how I evaluated deals before I signed my contracts.
I don't think about it again from that point forward.
It's still amazing to me that given the decision's warm buffet makes and the money that transfers
with those decisions, that he still goes with his gut, it just felt good hearing that
from a guy like him.
Or excuse me, I just felt good hearing that from a guy like him.
And so now we got to the part where I mentioned earlier how it's kind of surprising how
financially conservative he was.
And so Tinker Hatfield, main designer, like he calls him, is right hand man in the Jordan
brand for the design of the shoes, goes to visit Michael.
He's a few years into his career.
And he goes to his house.
And he says his first house after he got married was a normal place.
It wasn't anything special whatsoever.
And he was a major superstar by then.
That was an interesting aspect to Michael.
That reminded me because there's this great story Bill Gates to go to visit Steve Jobs.
And they're working on a deal.
And he goes to his house and Bill goes, he sees his house, he sees his family.
And Bill at the time had been living in, I think it's called Xanadu or whatever his,
he's got like a 60,000 square foot house on the lake in Washington, right?
That got a lot of attention because there's like leading technology of its day and all
the other stuff that he built into it.
But he asked Steve Jobs, he goes, he goes, do all of you live here?
He couldn't believe he's like how mod, it relatively modest for the amount of wealth
that Steve Jobs had.
He didn't need to feel to do the same, you know what Bill was doing.
So this is Michael talking about that.
It's always been very conservative financially.
That came from my advisors.
And I listened to them because I was scared.
You don't want to be like some of the guys at the end of their career with nothing to
show looking for work.
That was scary to me.
The idea that at some point in time, it had to go get a job.
I've seen a lot of people who had opportunities to be successful and wealthy, but they made
critical mistakes.
I pay attention to those things.
He never drove me.
Sure, I wanted to be successful.
I wanted the nicer things that success brings.
But my passion was pure.
The way I played and the way I go about things has never had anything to do with money.
And part of this, the motive it was the fact that even when he was in his early days of
his career, his mom would repeat the story of Joe Lewis.
I didn't know that.
I heard the name Joe Lewis.
I didn't know what she's about to tell us.
I often told him about Joe Lewis, the boxer.
He died homeless.
He didn't even have money to bury himself.
He had no discipline and no direction.
And then just a quick paragraph, two ideas that he repeats that I think are worth reiterating.
One, blinders on focus.
They're just like when the horses, they put the horses on the blind, the blinders on the
horses so they don't look left and right.
They just look forward to whatever their goal is.
I think a lot of successful people in life have that mentality.
And then the Steve Jobs quote that I repeat over and over again, that remind me of, reminds
me of, there's a lot of parallels between Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan.
So you'd be a yardstick for quality.
People are not used to environment excellence is demanded.
So he's saying, I'm very secure in my ability to focus on what I want.
If I have a goal, no one is going to deter me from what I want to do.
I'm going to get up and work out in the morning and do all the necessary things I have
to.
I am not going to be talked into looking the other way.
When I got to the point where I was a senior partner on the Bulls, the guys, the guy who
had been, the guy who had been their longest, I started to exert, exert my leadership
vocally.
I guess you could say I became a tyrant or at least that's how some people chose to
interpret those actions.
That's not how I viewed it.
I knew what it took to come from where we were in 1984.
I had put it on the line and I had earned the right to let my teammates know what I expected
of them.
And it was no more than I expected of myself.
I played in front of 8,000 people in the beginning that never determined how hard I played.
It's easy when 18,000 people show up to watch you play and every game is sold out.
It's not hard to find your motivation in that environment.
I was playing when Chicago Stadium was half empty and my effort was exactly the same.
And a lot of what Jordan has to say, he says this in interviews too, I need to start reading
some of my notes to you because I'm going to get to the like, towards the end of the book
and not include the notes which I think are very valuable in just hearing them talk as
well.
But it's about managing your mind and this mindset.
So in addition to practice and just saying, hey, no one is going to out prepare me.
No one's going to practice more than I do in my craft, right?
That's another idea that I'm going to take from Jordan.
The other idea is another main idea that I think I at least I definitely struggle with
is like, I'm constantly worried about what's going to happen in the future.
Like, hey, I'll be happy or I'll be satisfied when I get to X.
And then you get to X and you play that game with you.
One thing I learned about Jordan that is just shocking to me is he just lives and thinks
about this moment.
He did it when he was playing in the bowls, he did it when he became an NBA owner.
He talks about it when he's building brand Jordan.
He talks about it now is almost a six year old person.
And actually, let me just read this to you now because this is when he's 58 and he says,
I want to go through, I want to go through a day or a week, not worrying about what I have
to do on Wednesday or Thursday because I won't then enjoy Monday.
It's just this more living in the moment.
He has different ways to say that same idea.
All is now, all you can focus on is this moment.
And the example I used in the last podcast was the fact that he just won a six championship,
he's playing the piano, throwing champagne everywhere, he's smoking cigars.
And the guy's like, hey, you got another one in you.
He's like, it's the moment, man, live in the moment.
We're enjoying this now.
We're worried about that in October.
That discipline it takes.
And I think it'll be a lot happier.
I think that's also why if you have little kids, like you know, they're just usually happy
and even if they're upset, they get over it really fast.
Because it's all for, you know, 18 months old, like my son is now, it's like everything
is just whatever's happening at that moment.
And I think everybody, like every human struggles with that, but it's especially driven,
motivated people struggle more.
And I think we have to learn to live in the moment because if not, you're compromising
the present.
Like you just said, if I'm worried about what's happening on Wednesday or Thursday,
it means I can't enjoy Monday.
And I have limited Mondays left.
He talks about, you know, I'm, I mean, he might be 54.
I said 58.
Now coming to mind, I think he said I'm 54 at this point in the interview.
He's like, I'm 54 years old.
You know, I have a limited time left.
Whatever is 54, 58 same, same difference, you know, but his point is like I have limited
Mondays left.
I'm not going to ruin them by worrying about something.
I'll worry about Wednesday when I get to Wednesday.
I'll worry about Thursday when I get to Thursday.
Sorry, anyways, let's go into this page.
This is know what you want and don't rely.
Oh, don't really pay attention to other people's expectations of you.
Another thing I learned from Kobe Bryant too, because he was given this interview with
a mod Rashad and you talk about, you know, when you go through struggles, like, what about
the fans expectations of you is the question a mod Rashad is asking Kobe and I love it,
because Kobe has like the stanky face.
I think it's like, oh, like if you're, you tasted, you smell something really gross.
You can just hit him with the stanky face.
And he's like, and he shook his head immediately.
He's like, the expectations will never be higher than my own.
And I think that the idea there is like you really messed up if you're, if people that
have, they're able, they're capable of putting external expectations on you that are higher
than your own, back to this note, focus on the present moment.
And then it's all you can control, focus on the present moment.
It's all you can control.
And then why not me?
So let's see what, what Jordan's saying here.
All I knew was that I never wanted to be average.
I just wanted to follow what I felt.
My father put a challenge in for me, in front of me.
I knew what he expected.
So back to, you know, be a mechanic, be whatever.
The expectations I had for myself were beyond my father's expectations.
My thoughts were way beyond the idea of preparing myself for jobs so I could be like the guy
down the street.
I had dreams.
They were my dreams and I had no fear of them.
And this is an important sentence.
I knew going against a grain was part of the process.
I wasn't limited by someone else's view of how my dreams should look or whether they
were reasonable or not.
So they talked about like what do you do after you identify the goal, put all the work
in and then let the future emerge.
That is a lot different than forcing the issue because you're worried about an outcome
that hasn't been determined yet.
Anything can happen if you're willing to put in the work and remain open to possibilities.
Dreams are realized by effort, determination, passion and staying connected to that sense
of who you are.
Why me?
Why not me?
And he's not saying, oh, don't worry about the future, whatever we're having or what
will happen.
He's saying the point is like if you did everything possible, if you know you put all the work
in possible, then let the results land where they are.
That's not the same thing as just being, oh, whatever maybe will be.
No, it's like I'm going to do my level best and then if I know I do that, I will be
okay with whatever happens.
And so let me give you a call from another interview.
I never feared about my skills because I put in the work.
If you put forth the work, then what are you afraid of?
And then this is a line from his Hall of Fame speech.
Limits like fears are often just an illusion.
So then another idea that's going to pop up in this book over and over again, it's really
an introduction and why he's worthy of study is his extreme mindset.
This is the extreme mindset of Michael Jordan.
So he says, if you want to win, you have to pay the price.
It's not complicated.
If somebody didn't want to hear that from me, fine, go play somewhere else.
Come on, man, you might be sick, but you can still play.
I remember when we were playing Detroit and one of our guys was bent over after getting
hit.
I said, don't let them see you in pain.
You know why?
Because they're going to do it again and that's going to take your mind off what you need
to be doing.
Show that you can stand up to whatever they have to give.
Let them know it's not affecting you and they won't do it again.
But every time you winp out, you bitch about it, you cry to the ref, all that all I'm going
to say is shut up and play.
You know what they're trying to do.
Don't let it happen.
Play right on through that stuff.
And so that is one of his main criticisms about the players that came after him, the fact
that they don't look at it.
They look at like, it's almost like there's an echo to what we learned from the great
advertisers of the past.
The fact that a lot of people are saying, hey, I made some tires by my tires.
It's like, no, you think the best ads is service first.
It's like, what can I offer you?
What Jordan's point was like, they paid money for you to play.
You should show up and play, right?
And what he's saying right here about it, you got to learn how to play through the pain,
don't let people see a struggle or whatever the case is.
For some reason, when I got to this section and made me think of a paragraph that takes
place in Henry Ford's autobiography, My Life and Work, because Henry Ford had the same
mentality about service first.
You're serving your customer first and your feelings and desires come second.
So he's writing these words almost a hundred years ago, but it echoes exactly what Jordan's
mentality was when he was playing basketball.
I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have an atmosphere of
good feeling around him before he can do his work.
There are such men and in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness
to lift them out of their software lines on feeling, they are failures.
Not only are they business failures, they are character failures also.
It is as if their bones never attained a sufficient degree of hardness to enable them
to stand on their own feet.
There is altogether too much reliance on good feeling in our business organizations.
And Michael is not just preaching this, like he actually lived this.
So that's what gives his words, I feel more weight.
This is the continuation of this extreme mindset of Michael Jordan.
A leader has to be willing to sacrifice to help everyone else get to where they need
to go, where the team needs to go by there.
Someone could take days off of the bulls because I never took a day off.
Horace Grant and I had a falling out because he wanted a day off here and there and I would
chastise him for it.
That's what leaders do.
They set a standard and everyone has to live up to that standard.
It is the same in every great organization.
You have to rise to our level.
We are not going to drop down to yours.
I apply that standard to whatever I do.
And this is his mom on the same page reflecting on this.
Michael earned every bit of this.
I tell people, do you know how many ice packs?
Do you know about the ice packs on his knees?
How he hobbled out of Chicago Stadium Sunnites, barely able to make it home.
I remember that day in Utah, they called the flu game, which we learned as the food poisoning
game.
I'll never forget that day.
I told him, don't play tonight.
You were too sick.
And what did he do?
The best came out because you find that little bit of strength when you keep going, when
you keep going.
That's determination and focus.
The idea that he wasn't going to give up until he had given his last, that is life.
Give it your best and all other good things will come to you.
Then a few pages later, there's just two sentences, two ideas that are conveyed in two sentences
that I want to bring to your attention.
And this is Tinker Hatfield describing what it's like to work with Jordan.
He's just deadly, cool, efficient.
And then Jordan talking about how he approaches everything which I love.
I focus on the little things.
Little things add up to big things.
And for some reason, when I was reading this page in the book, it made me think of, I
did this two part.
It's like one of the longest episodes of founders.
It's the Peter Teele episode.
I think it's back in the 30s, something like that.
I read Ryan Holiday's book Conspiracy, which I thought the storytelling of that book was
fantastic.
And then Peter's book, Zero to One.
And there's something I heard Ryan on a podcast one time.
He was doing like the book tour, doing these interviews to publicize that release of that
book.
I think that's probably how I found the book.
Anyways, he said something about Peter Teele's approach to the conspiracy, to get revenge
for, again, somebody that he felt wrong to him.
And he's describing the whole arc of that book and all the different decisions that had
to go into from Peter's perspective, the successful outcome.
And the sentence was, it was ruthless efficiency and hyper competence.
That's the same description of Michael Jordan as well.
Now remember, the point of studying Michael Jordan and people like him is because it's
not like the person walking around the average person has anywhere close to this extreme
mindset that that Jordan does.
This is an example of that.
This guy telling a story has been Michael's friend for 25 years.
And this is Michael Jordan's You Can't Ride the Fence story.
This is crazy.
I was really close to Ralph Samson.
Ralph had a big Puma contract.
When I would go to Boston with Ralph, we'd go to the Puma warehouse.
I would do the same thing when I'd go out to Nike with Michael.
They'd say whatever you want, pick it out and we'll ship it to you.
I had my closet separated out, half Puma, half Nike.
Michael comes to my apartment.
We're getting ready to go out and he says, man, it's kind of cold.
Can I borrow one of your jackets?
I said sure, go on the closet.
He went in there and saw everything separated out.
He's in there a little longer than necessary and he comes out of my room.
He has taken all of my Puma stuff out, brought it to the living room and laid it on the floor.
He goes into the kitchen, gets a butcher knife and literally cuts up everything.
This was like his second or third year in the league.
He literally took a butcher knife to it all.
When he's done, he picks up every little scrap and walks it down to the dumpster.
He then says, hey dude, call Howard tomorrow and tell him to replace all of this.
But don't ever let me see you in anything other than Nike.
You can't ride the fence.
Let's tell Michael thinks.
Now we're going to fast forward in the timeline.
This is Jordan talking about his time on the dream team.
And so one of the sentences that stuck out from last week's book or the last book rather
was that Jordan had been surprised to learn how lazy many of his Olympic teammates were
about practice.
And then he says something or says something that just gives me goose bumps, gives me chills.
They were deceiving themselves about what the game required.
Think about the extreme mindset of Michael Jordan.
This is not only like you have multiple levels.
It's extremely hard.
What 400 players, something like that.
400 people for that exact number can get to the NBA.
Then even smaller number gets to be an all-star.
An even smaller number gets to be chosen for the Olympic team.
This is who Jordan is talking about.
And then he's saying even when you got to that level, they didn't understand the importance
of practice.
They were deceiving themselves about what the game required.
But they already got to the Olympics.
What are you talking about?
And I was thinking about that.
I was like, well, how many of those players?
Yeah, they got to the Olympics.
They had individual accolades.
They got deep in the playoffs.
A lot of them won six championships on that team.
And a lot of them never won a single championship.
So I think that really ties into this extreme outlier mindset that Jordan possesses.
So I'm just going to read nearly this whole section to you because I thought it was very
interesting.
He says in 1992, Barcelona Olympics was one of the best times in my life.
We're talking about the greatest players in the world, guys who had every story written
about how great they were, all the things they could do and had done on the basketball
court.
All I thought about was, I want to see this for myself.
I want to see what those these guys are all about.
That was my motivation going to the Olympic Games in 1992.
We were coming off back to back titles.
I was exhausted.
But I had to see these guys for myself.
I had played against them, but I wanted to see how they practiced.
The best part of the whole thing turned out to be the practices.
All we did was line up and play.
Chuck daily, the coach of the Olympics, he'd just say, come on guys, let's go hard for
an hour or two.
Let's get loose.
That's all he did.
He didn't coach.
He didn't call fouls.
He just threw the ball out there.
The games were competitive as hell.
It was up and down the court.
We had 12 players, but John Stockton had broken his leg and Christian Laker, Latener was
on the team, but he was still in college and no one would let him in the games.
We played five on five.
If magic got off to a good start or anyone else, the talking would start.
These were the teams.
Me and Scotty, Chris Molin, Larry Bird and Patrick Ewing.
That was our five.
They had magic, Drexler, Malone, Charles Barkley and Robinson.
Think about this.
He beat magic in the finals, beat Drexler in the finals, beat Malone in the finals, and
beat Charles Barkley in the finals.
That is crazy.
I didn't realize I'd tie red the sentence.
We whipped their ass every day.
In Monte Carlo, we got into the most heated match of all time.
Patrick was telling us how great the Lakers were and how Showtime was the best basketball.
Me and Pippin are listening to this on the way to practice and we say, okay, we're going
to show you what the new kids are all about.
Me and Magic talked trash back and forth all day.
I was guarding him and I'm saying, you don't have Kareem now.
You got to do it all yourself.
At the other end, he was guarding me and I blew right by him.
I'd be trash talking.
This is a new year old team.
We beat them so bad that when the game was over, magic said, we ain't leaving.
We got to keep playing.
It's God and I looked at Bird and we said, we're ready to go.
Magic said, why are you ready to go?
And we said, because there isn't any competition here.
Magic didn't speak to us for two days.
So another thing that Jordan says in this book, I've also heard them in interviews multiple
times as a important, like if you were being authentic to yourself, if you're making
decisions from your instinct, that's the only way you're going to have long-term success.
Because you can't, if you're just following Fads, you're trying to fake something, like
you can only do that for a short amount of time. And then he combines this with the idea
as like, skip the shortcut.
Like it's supposed to be hard.
It's hard, but it's fair.
Remember his motto.
This is going to remind me of, there's a quote in that book, The Hour of Feet.
I forgot which founders episode it is, but you'll see it in the archive if you're interested
because it's about the partnership, like the, I guess the feud and then the unlikely partnership
between Theodore Roosevelt and Chepi Morgan.
But Theodore Roosevelt, somebody I'm going to read multiple books on the future, I've
already done, I think, what, two or three podcasts on him at least.
Because he's just a very fascinating individual.
And he lived, I feel multiple lifetimes.
Because he dies, you know, about six, the river of doubt is a great book about like towards
the end of his life and just the crazy things that he would do.
That's also in the archive.
But in The Hour of Feet, it said Roosevelt was forever at it.
He was a curiosity, always pushing and straining and amodishing friends around him to do the
same.
Theodore loved to row in the hottest sun over the roughest water in the smallest boat.
He is not one for shortcuts to ordinate either.
So he says, we have become a shortcut culture.
To a certain degree, we define success on the basis of fictional attributes.
If a guy has commercials, a lot of money, the girls, the car, then he's considered successful.
Whether his performance matches all those things or not.
Success to me has nothing to do with how much money you have or what kind of car you drive.
I always wanted to know where I fit in with the best.
Authenticity is about being true to who you are, even when everyone else wants you to be
someone else.
It is a lot harder to become the best you can be when you're focused on trying to be the
best version of someone else.
There's nothing authentic in that.
And if it's not authentic, then it's not going to last.
And so that reminds me of something he said in this interview, this is your car, cigar,
a fishing auto interview.
Because it's like, you know, your own NBA team, you got businesses going everywhere,
what is most important to you?
And so Duren says, have all the things I'm involved with?
My strongest passion is the Jordan brand, because I can impact that in a much greater sense
than owning an NBA team.
To be able to continue to continually talk to that consumer, to interact with that consumer,
it's not dependent on how the season ends.
This is the most important part.
If I had to pick, if I had to pick of all the things I'm involved in, the most important
is the Jordan brand, because it's my DNA.
It's in my DNA.
It is who I am.
This is a story coming from the preparation and his work ethic that he was previously
applying to basketball, now he's applying it when he's in the minor leagues trying to
be a baseball player.
And really, this is the Jordan doesn't have an off-button story.
When Michael did to get himself ready to play baseball, he was grueling.
He would get up every morning and go to the complex, or before way ahead of the other
players.
He'd get into the bat and cage, swing the bat, and knock around the ball.
He would do this for an hour to 90 minutes.
Then the team would show up, and Michael would go through the regular practice, which ran
about three hours.
Then he would go back out for another hour.
His hands were so raw that the calluses would rip open every day.
The trainers would wrap his hands and gauze and tape.
He looked like a prize fighter.
The next morning, Michael was back in the cage, swinging a baseball bat for hours.
He never missed a day.
Not only did he not miss a day, he never said a word about his hands.
That's how you get ready.
Once the on-button is pushed, there isn't an off-button.
So another idea I love the fact that Michael was always talking about something he learned
from his parents, something he'd play for the rest of his life, is that you got to take
negatives and turn them into positives.
He's got this really famous commercial, Nike commercial.
It's the Nike commercial about failure.
I'm just going to read you real quick, because I've pulled it to the transcript.
I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.
I've lost almost 300 games.
26 times.
I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.
I've failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.
So he's asked, I'm going to combine this with it, something else I heard him talk in
this interview.
He's like, what's your biggest regret?
I don't have regrets.
To win you have to lose.
To be successful, you have to have something that wasn't successful.
To be happy, you have to have disappointment.
And to me, that's the idea he's expressing.
I just have one sentence for you here.
He's talking about the commercial that I just read to you.
The idea of not being afraid to make mistakes are using negative outcomes to create positive
ones was great.
And so let's go back to this mindset.
The reason I'm talking about, hey, you get close to Jordan, you hear his words, you read
books about him, you watch his interviews, you're really downloading his operating system
and the mindset that he approached his craft and he talks about the mind over and over again.
And he says, the mind will play tricks on you.
The mind was telling you that you couldn't go any further.
The mind was telling you how much it hurt.
The mind was telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal.
How weird and twisted and crazy this is.
You have a goal, your own mind is trying to play tricks so you don't accomplish that goal.
The mind was telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal.
But you have to see past that.
Turn it all off if you're going to get where you want to be.
I'm going to read this again.
The mind will play tricks on you.
The mind was telling you that you couldn't go any further.
The mind was telling you how much it hurt.
This is Michael Jordan.
This is not a soft, weak person.
And he's telling you the mind played, my mind tried to do the same thing to me, right?
This is extremely important.
The mind was telling you how much it hurt.
The mind was telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal.
But you have to see past that.
Turn it all off if you're going to get where you want to be.
So there's a couple quotes I'm going to, before I go to the next page from my notes on
these talks I've been watching.
So one of this I think that will help.
And Michael says, work ethic eliminates fear.
And actually, you know what?
Before I go back to my notes, what he's talking about the mind playing tricks on you that
you're going to be here for work ethic eliminates that Jeff Bezos in the next page.
Jeff Bezos, what Michael's about to tell us from reminding me of what Jeff Bezos said.
He says, Jeff says, stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that
you can have some control over.
So Michael is saying, I was as prepared as I could possibly have been for that moment.
I couldn't go back and practice a little harder.
I knew I had done the right things to prepare myself for that situation.
One way or another, I knew I was prepared to be successful.
Now if you know you haven't prepared correctly, which is what Jeff is just saying, where
is the root cause of stress, are you haven't worked that and that you haven't worked hard
enough, that's when other thoughts and emotions creep into your mind.
That is stress.
That is fear.
Pause here.
That's work ethic eliminates fear, right?
Back to Jordan's paragraph.
It is the same process for doing anything anywhere in life, no matter how big or small, whether
it's running a corporation, taking a test in the second grade, or taking a shot to win
the game.
At that moment, and I double underline the sentence, this is fantastic.
At that moment, you were the sum total of all the work you have put in.
Nothing more and nothing less.
If you are confident that you have done everything possible to prepare yourself, then there is
nothing to fear.
Back to my notes on the talks.
I have total confidence in my skill, so I am not afraid.
It's the same idea.
He's expressing, I think, like, 15-year gap between those two ideas, so it's obviously
very fundamental if he's still talking about it.
More notes.
I know I can play this game, and I know I can play it at the highest level.
You've got a lot of guys with the ability, but they don't have control of their mind.
I'm not making this up.
How many times is Jordan saying the same idea over and over again?
The importance of having control over your mind.
A lot of people can run and jump and shoot, but they don't have the killer instinct and
the confidence in themselves to perform those skills.
Let's go back to this Zen.
He's having an influence by what he learned from Phil Jackson, from the psychologist and
meditation that living in the moment, like the Zen Buddhism idea.
I want to allow whatever is going to happen to happen at its own rhythm.
There's a single quote on an entire page.
I want to allow whatever is going to happen to happen at its own rhythm.
Something he told Oprah that's kind of similar to that thought.
If you chase something, you might not get it.
If you put forth the work, the next thing you know, it's bestowed upon you.
Okay, so now he's got a bunch of ideas on this page.
So my note is, my driving force was to show people what I could do.
Wake up and go on the attack.
We are on the offense all the time.
So you can find these principles of Nike in the early days.
I think they're first marketing managers when I wrote it out, but they said that we're
on the offense all the time.
Jordan was the same thing and then find ways to trick yourself.
Let's see what this is about.
My driving force, my passion was to impress people with what I could do.
It was the idea somebody might be sitting in the stands who had never seen Michael Jordan
play before.
I thought about that person who had never experienced the excitement or the entertainment
I could provide.
I would wake up in the morning thinking, how am I going to attack today?
And then the idea of, you know, how do you have that motivation every day?
Even after you, now he's got the accolades.
He's all-star, gold medals, MVP, each championships.
You've got to trick your mind.
You've got to play games with yourself.
I never knew what my motivation would be until something during that day.
It wasn't easy as I went along because I had accomplished so much.
I had to trick myself.
I had to find a test within the test.
I look at these kids today and they don't know how to trick themselves.
They don't even understand the need to find a way to get yourself ready to play at that
high level every night.
And now we're going to see that again.
He's holding everybody else to a high standard, but not a higher standard than he held himself.
And so this section reminded me of that quote I say to you all the time because I think
it's extremely important to know.
It comes from founder for seasons, Izzy Sharp, excellence is the capacity to take pains.
Before I read this section to you, let me read some more quotes.
From these interviews that I think are echoing what I'm about to read to you.
Remember earlier, he's saying, I'm not going to fall down to your level, right?
My competitive drive is far greater than anyone else I've ever met.
We have a goal of vision to obtain.
Sometimes you have to do it when you're tired.
It's a test of your will to succeed.
So how does this relate to what's happening?
You're talking about when he's playing on the wizards, it goes from being GM to going down,
trying to get the players.
Now Washington, Kwame Brown said I was hard on him and I was, because I never believed
he had ever tried to push himself.
He had developed bad habits and I don't believe in bad habits.
Tomorrow's kids are going to have to see someone playing hurt, see someone practicing
the day after winning a championship.
We have to provide examples so they can relate to that ideal.
Otherwise we'll lose the gap that it starts to fade away and 20 years from now you'll
never see someone play sick or get out on the floor with a sore ankle.
So on the same section we have a friend of his, like, add to what Michael's saying here.
I saw a guy sitting on the training table for two weeks with a sprain ankle.
Michael had a back spasm one day and we literally had to carry him off the floor and drive
him home, drive him home in a bed of a truck because he couldn't move.
They gave him treatments and they gave him heat treatments and cold treatments all night
long and he played the next night.
He had fluid drained off his knee.
I don't know how many times.
One night he had 22 C.C.s of fluid drain.
Do you know how much that is?
And that was before the game.
So again, I think Michael's words resonate because they're not just words.
He's not telling you, hey, you know, Sky, do you have a migraine getting here?
Hey, your back is hurting, you know, because in the last dance Michael, in-cursion
play, he's like, just go out there and be a decore.
That wouldn't work if he didn't do it himself.
And so what did he say?
You have a goal, don't you?
You have a vision to obtain.
Well, sometimes you're going to have to do it when you're tired and sometimes you're
not going to feel well.
You have to do it anyways.
It's a test of your will to succeed.
Let me go back to my notes.
There's another thing he says in this other interview.
If you love something and your goal is to be successful, there's a certain price you
have to pay.
There's a certain accountability you have to hold.
Later in the same interview, he says, everything comes with a price.
And I'm going to read the last note I have on this and then I'll just finish it with
a book.
Because really, this is something you said about his dad.
He's saying it 25 years after his dad was murdered, right?
And part of the reasons founders exist is, of course, we want to learn how they thought
about work, the ideas they had.
They spent 40, 50 years over their career.
They've obviously picked up useful information that is useful for future generations.
But work is just a smaller part of life.
It's really like how to learn how you have a great life.
And so outside of the work relationships, I think about the personal relationships to
a lot because these are life stories.
They're not just work stories, right?
And really, something that has, I feel like I've benefited greatly from reading these
books is understanding the profound impact that the relationships, how your relationships
with other people affect their journey in life.
It could be your close friends.
Obviously, your kids, your life partner, your spouses, whatever it is.
But there's two, he's just as a few cents that says, there's just two ideas that jumped
out on me.
It's the fact that, you know, he's having this discussion 25 years after his dad died.
So the impact that you're going to have, if you have kids now or maybe you have kids
in the future, like how important that relationship is to your kid and know that it's going to affect
what you do with them.
Your actions are going to affect their lives long after you don't exist anymore.
And then Jordan's ability to process and to get control of his mind and to take one of
the most negative things that could ever happen to a person and say, hey, I'm going to,
I'm, I didn't have control over.
I didn't want it to happen.
But moving forward, it's going to have a positive impact on my life.
He says, so this is when he's asked about his father 20 or 40 years after his dad, after
he died, I had him for 32 years.
I never look at it from a negative sense.
So he's talking about it.
Yes, I wish he was still here, but I had him for 32 years, right?
Obviously, he was murdered.
I think about him practically every day.
So those two ideas, like, yes, I didn't want to happen, but I had him for 32 years.
I got a relish in the fact that I did have him for that long for that, that period of
time.
I wanted more, but I didn't, I don't get control of that.
I had him for 32 years and even almost three decades after he's no longer with me.
I'm still thinking about him every day.
So let's go back to the book.
I almost ended on this because I thought it was so such a great thought.
Like it doesn't have to be someone else.
It could be you.
And so he says for the 20th anniversary shoe, we asked, who's going to be next?
Who's going to come along and take Michael Jordan's spot?
In one way or another, just about everyone is going to go through that kind of search.
The idea that it could be you is something all of us can relate to when we think about
our goals.
It doesn't have to be someone else getting all the accolades.
It could be you.
And then we have Michael explicitly talking about the fact that building a team on a business
is extremely similar to building a team in a sport.
Difference is one is negative sum and one is positive sum.
It's only one NBA champion that could be many, many successful businesses.
And really he's going to touch on one of his another main idea.
The guy that ones at least I'm going to take away his idea.
Okay, practice right?
The importance of practice.
Believe in practice is the way I would distill that idea down to its essence.
Believe in practice.
Live in the moment and then the importance that listening is a superpower.
How shocked were you when you if you listen to the podcast, the fact that everybody around
and talked about Michael is one of the greatest listeners.
That is not from the outside.
It does not look that way, right?
So let's go to what he says here.
We bring our personalities, our visions and our creativity to discussion.
He's talking about the team at Jordan Brand.
And we don't give a damn about getting credit.
We are there to create something beautiful, something representative of what the brand is
all about.
What I think they like about me is I can admit when I'm wrong and I can accept criticism
and I can accept creative insight coming from someone other than myself.
There are a lot of people who can't do that or won't allow this person to do that.
They all feel like it's an attack on their intelligence or a negative comment on their
ideas.
They want so much credit that they can't share the credit.
But that dynamic is just a destructive inside of creative team or a corporate setting as it
is on the basketball court.
In its highest form, business is a team game.
The team can accept that philosophy.
The teams that can accept that philosophy are the teams that get the best chance long term
to be successful.
Team sports are no different.
Give me five guys who want to work hard and play together and I'll take those guys every
time over more talented players who can't come together for the good of the group.
For years people viewed me as an individual and not a team player because I scored so much.
But I was a team player.
I was just filling my role on it at that time.
Brand Jordan is no different.
Even though my name is on the product, it's a collaborative effort.
I have the same kind of commitment to the brand that I had to basketball.
I have an intense focus and desire to make the brand successful.
But I'm not so dominant that I can't listen to the creative ideas coming.
Remember, listen, he said that word.
But I'm not so dominant that I can't listen to creative ideas coming from other people.
Successful people listen.
Those who don't listen don't survive.
And then Jordan closes for just a reminder that you just have to focus on the moment.
All is now.
In all honesty, I don't know what's ahead.
If you ask me what I'm going to do in five years, I can't tell you.
This moment, now that's a different story.
I know what I'm doing moment to moment.
But I have no idea what's ahead.
I'm so connected to this moment that I don't make assumptions about what might come next
because I don't want to lose touch with the present.
Once you make assumptions about something that might happen or might not happen, then
you open up the possibility of making mistakes.
You start limiting the potential outcomes.
I don't make assumptions.
I know what I know and I deal with my life based on what's happening right now.
And that is where I'll leave it to get the full story by the book.
If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting pockets
at the same time.
That is 213 books down 1,000 a go and I'll talk to you again soon.
Okay, so what you're about to hear is this question I was asked a few months ago.
I actually recorded this a few months ago.
They asked how did history's greatest entrepreneurs think about hiring?
All the answers, people think I have a better memory than I then actually do.
You know, if people say, oh, David, you have a great memory.
My wife would laugh at that.
I forget things all the time.
It's not to have a good memory.
It's I reread things over and over and over again.
Every single answer, every single reference you're about to hear in this 20 minute, many
episode came from me searching all of my notes and highlights.
That option is now available to you.
If you like what you hear, if you think it's valuable, if you're already running its
successful company and you want an easy way to reference the ideas of history's greatest
entrepreneurs in a searchable database that you can go through at your convenience anytime
you want, then you go to founders notes.com and sign up.
I want to start out first with why this is so important.
There's actually this book that came out in like 1997.
It's called In The Company Giants.
I think it's episode 208 of Founders.
It's two Stanford MBA students, if I remember correctly, and they're interviewing a bunch
of technology company founders.
In their Steve Jobs is one of them.
This is right, I think even before he came back to Apple.
They were talking about, well, yeah, we know it's important to hire, but in a typical startup,
a manager or a founder may not always have time to spend recruiting other people.
I first read this, Steve's answer to this, I don't know, two years ago and I never forgot
it.
I think it's excellent.
Why this question is so important and you should really be spending, especially in the early
days, basically all your time doing this.
In a typical startup manager, may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people
than Steve Jobs in.
I disagree totally.
I think it's the most important job.
Assume you're by yourself in a startup and you want a partner.
You take a lot of time finding a partner, right?
He would be half of your company.
I'm going to pause there.
This idea of looking at each new hire as a percentage of the company is genius.
Why should you take any less time finding a third or a fourth of your company or a fifth
of your company?
When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds
or not.
Each is 10% of the company.
So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all a players?
If three, three of the 10, we're not so great.
Why would you start a company where 30% of your people are not so great?
A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does.
Okay.
To answer this question, the advantage that I have making founders and that you have as a
bi-active listing to founders is not only that I've read 300-something biographies of
entrepreneurs now, but I have all of my notes and highlights stored in my Readwise app.
That means I can search for any topic I can look at the past highlights of books or I
can search for keywords.
What I did is, first of all, what I've started to do with these AMA questions is I read them,
decide which ones I'm going to do next and then think about it for a few days.
I don't put any, I just literally, I know that's the next question, just let my brain work
on it in the background for a few days.
Then I'll go through and start searching all my notes.
That's what I did here.
There's a bunch of, I might have 10 or 15 different founders talking about hiring.
The first idea is the most obvious, but I think probably works best when you're already
established.
Steve Jobs is talking about, hey, great way to hire is just find great work and find the
people that did that and then try to hire them.
When you're Steve Jobs, that's a lot easier.
If you're just somebody that doesn't have a reputation, maybe you don't have resources,
maybe your company's rather new or not as well known, David Ogovie, I just did Confessions
of an Avertising Man, a couple episodes ago, like 306 or something like that, 307.
He did the same thing, but he's David Ogovie at that point.
He would find, he'd go through magazines, find great advertising, great copywriting, and
he'd write the personal letter and then set up a phone call.
He says he was so well known and he's one of the best in his field that he wouldn't even
have to offer a job.
Just the conversation, then the person would, he would want to hire the person, never mention
it, and the person would apply to him.
So again, I think if you can do that, then of course, it's straightforward.
Find somebody who does great work.
Usually you can do this.
I actually have a friend that I can't say who it is.
He's doing this right now, actually.
I have a friend that's really good at doing this.
He's finding people that do great stuff on the internet and then just cold DMing them
and then getting convince them to work on things.
That usually works, especially with younger people early on their career.
There's a bunch of different ways to think about this and a bunch of different ways to
prioritize.
So the first thing that came to mind, but I found surprising, is you read any biography
on Rockefeller and he had a couple ideas where he felt the optimization, you know, table
stakes that you're intelligent and you're driven and you're hardworking, right?
We don't even have, like if you're listening to this, you already know that.
But he prioritized hiring people with social skills.
And so this is what he said, the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity
as sugar or coffee.
And I pay for, I pay more for that ability than any other under the sun.
There's the two, the second part to this though.
And this also works well if you have access to more resources.
He Rockefeller would hire people as he found, as he found talented people, not as he needed
them.
It's not like, okay, Standard Oil has six open spots.
Let's go find six candidates, right?
He'd come across what he considered a talented person.
He didn't even matter if he didn't know what they were going to do.
He's like, I'm just going to stack his team.
And if you really think about the, his partners are Standard Oil, he essentially built a company,
an executive team of founders of cause because he was buying up all their companies.
So it's very rare.
But there's a line from Titan I want to read to you, taking for granted the growth of his
empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed.
And then I found another idea in the hiring, like the actual interview process.
So there's this guy named Vanny Verbush.
I did two episodes on him.
I think it's 270 and 271.
He is the most important American ever in history in terms of connecting the scientific
field, private enterprise and the government.
The most important person to keep alive for the American War effort was FDR.
The second one was Vanny Verbush.
Vanny Verbush is like the force gump of this historical period.
He is involved in everything.
The Manhattan Project to discovering like a young Claude Shannon to building a mechanical
computer.
Like this guy literally has done, he just, he pops up in these books over and over again.
If you are reading about American business history during World War II and post World
War II, you are going to come across the name Vanny Verbush over and over again.
I read his fantastic autobiography called Pieces of the Action and I came across this
weird highlight.
And so this is his brilliant and unusual job interview process.
And so he's talking about his organization, he's running called Amrad.
At Amrad, I hired a young physicist from Texas named CG Smith.
The way I hired him is interesting.
An interview of that sort is always likely to be on an artificial basis in somewhat embarrassing.
So I discussed with him a technical point on which I was then genuinely puzzled.
The next day he came in with a neat solution and I hired him at once.
Here's another idea.
This is from Nolan Bushnell, Nolan Bushnell's the founder of Atari, founder of Chuck
H.E.S. and Steve Jobs mentor.
He hired Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs was like 19 at Atari.
He would ask people their reading habits in interviews.
This is why.
One of the best ways his whole thing was he wanted to build all of his companies laid on a foundation
of creative people.
So that's what he's looking for.
He's like, I need creative people.
One of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question.
What books do you like?
I've never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm to a question
about reading habits.
The way books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read it all.
I've known many talented engineers who hated science fiction but loved say books on bird
watching.
A blatant but often accurate generalization.
People who are curious and passionate read.
People who are apathetic and indifferent don't.
I remember that that's such a great line and I obviously agree with it.
I remember one, I'm going to read it again, a blatant but often accurate generalization.
People who are curious and passionate read.
People who are apathetic and indifferent don't.
I remember one particular woman who during an interview told me that she had read every
book that I had read.
Sorry, I started mentioning books.
I hadn't read and she had read those two.
I didn't know how someone in her late 20s found that this much time to read so much.
But I was impressed.
I was so impressed that I hired her right there and assigned her to international marketing
which was having problems.
This is why I'm reading this whole section to you.
A job with a lot of moving parts benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving parts.
It wouldn't be possible to have read that many books without such a brain.
So you see what I mean?
We start with Steve Jobs saying this is the most important thing that your role is the
leader of the company and the founder to do.
It's so important to study and this is why I'm glad this question exists and why I'm glad
that I took the time and I had the foresight to it.
I should really organize my thoughts and notes because there's no way I would have remembered
all this without being able to search my read wise.
You have Rockefeller saying this is what's important to me.
You have Bush saying this is how I hire.
Now you have Nolan Bushnell saying well, here's another weird thing that I learned.
Let me go through what Warren Buffett says about this.
So this is about the quality.
One thing that is consistent with his jobs, Buffett, Bezos, Peter Teal, this just pops
up over and over again.
They talk about the importance of trying to find people that are better than you.
The hiring bar constantly has to increase.
Now obviously the larger the company gets, that's impossible.
Steve Jobs says this is a great quote where he's like, you know, Pixar was the first time
I see I saw an entire team, a tire company of A players, but they had 400 players.
They had 400 team members.
He's like at the time, Apple 3000.
It's like it's impossible to have 3000 A players.
So there is some number that your company may grow to where it's just, you're just not.
You're not going to have thousands of A players.
In my argument, I don't even know if you get a 400, I guess you, I mean, I'll take Steve's
word for it.
I think Pixar definitely produced great products, but it's probably a lot lower than that as
well.
So Warren Buffett would tell you to use David Ogovie's hiring philosophy.
And so Warren said, Charlie and I know that the right players will make almost any team
manager look good.
Again, that is why it's the most important function of the founder, maybe directly next
to the product right above the product actually because those are people building your product.
We subscribe to the philosophy of Ogovie and others founding genius David Ogovie.
This is what Ogovie said.
Each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we should become a company of
dwarfs.
But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we should become a company of
giants.
David or Jeff Bezos rather used a variation of Ogovie's idea to Jeff used to say in Amazon
every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire so that the
overall talent pool is always improving.
They talk about this idea in Amazon where the future hires that we do should be so good
that if you had applied for the job you already have an Amazon, you wouldn't get in.
That's a very interesting idea.
Take your time with recruiting.
Take your time with hiring.
This is a great book on the history of PayPal.
It's written back.
Actually, I recently become friends with the authors named Jimmy Sony.
And this is in his book.
The most fascinating thing that I found was that PayPal prioritized speed.
So from the time they found it, to the time they sell to eBay, it's like four years.
He spent more time researching the book than he spent six years researching the book.
I was teasing him because you took a long run of book than they took to start and sell
their company.
It just speaks to the quality he's trying to do.
But as a byproduct of that, obviously they move fast, but they prioritize speed over
everything else except in one area, recruiting.
Max Lebchon kept the bar for talent exceedingly high even if that came at the expense of speedy
staffing.
Max kept repeating A's higher A's, B's higher C's.
So the first B you hire takes the whole company down.
Let's read that again.
A players hire A players, B players hire C players.
So the first B player you hire takes the whole company down.
Additionally, the team, the company leaders mandated that all prospects, here's another
idea for you.
All prospects must meet every single member of the team.
Now the next one is the most bizarre.
It makes sense.
If you study, I did this three part on Larry Ellison, three part series on Larry Ellison.
I should read those books again.
Because the podcast is like 50 times bigger than when I publish this episode.
And he's just crazy.
So he would hire based on the confidence, the self confidence level of the candidate.
Listen to this.
I have tears of my eyes.
I don't know why I'm laughing.
Okay.
It's just okay.
Because you read about Larry Ellison and he's one of these people it's like really easy
to interface with.
Because he just, you just know exactly who he is and what's important to him.
That's why I think it's so funny.
Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest new college graduates.
When they were recruiting from universities, they'd ask people, are you the smartest person
you know?
And if they said yes, they would hire them.
If they said no, they would say who is and they would go hire that guy and said, I don't
know if you got the smartest people that way, but you definitely got the most arrogant.
Ellison's and this is what?
The personality of the founder is largely the culture of the company.
Apple is Steve Jobs.
Apple is just Steve Jobs in 10,000 lives.
Right?
I was just texting a founder friend of mine.
He was assisted by podcasts.
I actually met him through the podcast and he's going through this like process of self-discovery.
Like he's already started a bunch of companies are really successful, but he's like, I think
I'm more of this type of founder than the other type of founder.
And that's good that he's doing that because he's, he's hopefully his next mission is
like his life's mission, you know?
And you can't get your life's mission unless you figure out who you are.
Ellison knew who he was.
Ellison swaggering combative style became a part of the company's identity.
This arrogant culture had a lot to do with Oracle's success.
Here's another odd idea for you.
Izzy Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons, actually could figure it out that in his business,
which was hotels, right?
That hiring could, hiring the right person could actually be a form of distribution for
his hotel.
He gave me the idea because of what?
What do we know?
What do you and I know in our bones?
That history's greatest founders all read biographies.
They all read biographies of people that came before them and took ideas from them.
Izzy Sharp is trying to build four seasons.
What do you think he did?
He picked up a biography of Cesar Ritz, the guy that, Ritz Carlton's named after, the
great, arguably the greatest hotel of all time.
And when he realized, oh, shit, Ritz, he says, remembering that Cesar Ritz made his hotels
world famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs, we decided to do something similar.
So what is he talking about?
Cesar Ritz went out and partnered with August Escaffe.
What Cesar Ritz was to hotel, to building hotels, August Escaffe was to French cooking.
And so what happened is you partnered with world famous chefs.
People come into your restaurant that's in the hotel because of the world famous chef.
And now they know about your hotel that leads to more, that leads to more activity in your
restaurant that you own, but also leads to more brand recognition of your hotel.
And then by as a biopartic, that more people staying at the hotel.
So hiring as a form of distribution, this is fascinating, as a fascinating idea.
Okay, here's a problem.
You can identify great people, right?
Maybe they even want to come work.
Like if you've identified them, you've sold them, hey, this is what, this is our mission,
this is what we're doing.
And yet, humans have complicated lives.
They have spouses, they have kids, they have a reason maybe they can't move across the
country to work for you, even though they want to.
So there's a problem solving element that you see in these books on, you have to solve,
like you've already identified the person, you've recruited them, they can't go for some
other reason.
Okay, well, the great founders are not going to take no for an answer.
I read in this book called Lift Off, which is about the first six years of SpaceX, this
is what Elon musted.
They had anticipated his friend's issue.
Having convinced Musk they needed to bring this brilliant young engineer from Turkey on board,
it became a matter of solving the problem.
Because wife had a job in San Francisco, she would need one in Los Angeles, right?
Because that's where SpaceX is at the time.
These were solvable problems and Elon's better at solving problems than almost anyone
else.
Musk therefore came into his job interview, prepared about halfway through Musk told the
guy that he wants to hire.
So I heard you don't want to move to LA and one of the reasons is that your wife works
for Google.
Well, I just talked to Larry and they're going to transfer your wife down to LA.
So what are you going to do now to solve this problem?
This could call his friend Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, the engineer sat and stunned
silence for a moment.
But then he replied, given all that, he would come to work at SpaceX.
That's really smart.
There is another idea when you're promoting.
Are you going to promote one within or from without?
That's dependent on you, depending on what's going on.
I do think this is interesting though.
This is a guy named Les Schwab who built this really valuable chain of like tire companies
in the Pacific Northwest.
I actually found out about him because Charlie Munger is like, hey, you should read the
biography.
He said it in, he didn't say it to me personally.
He said it to, in like one of the Berkshire meetings, that to study, Les Schwab had one
of the most, one of the smartest financial incentive structures or any company that Charlie
Munger had come across.
So this is what Les Schwab did.
He did not want to hire from, he didn't want to hire other people from other companies
because they might come with bad habits.
He liked to train his own executives.
And so he says in our 34 years of business, we have never hired a manager from the outside.
Every single one of our more than 250 managers and assistant managers started at the bottom
changing tires.
They have all earned their management job by working up.
And then another thing, if you're going to hire the best of the best in a players,
a players don't like to be my crewmanage.
And so this came in Larry Miller's autobiography called Driven.
He owns like, he owned like 93 companies all throughout Utah, card dealerships, movie theaters,
all kinds of crazy stuff.
He owned the NBA team Utah Jazz.
And what was fascinating is he's trying to recruit Jerry Sloan as the coach at the point.
And Jerry Sloan would only take the job on one condition and I really like it.
I really like this idea.
If you hire me, let me run the team in business.
That's what you're hiring me for.
One of the best things we had ever done was hire Jerry Sloan as coach.
At the time, he said, I'm only going to ask you for one thing.
If I get fired, let me get fired for my own decisions.
If you hire me, let me run the team slash business.
Here's another idea from Thomas Edison that I think is fascinating.
Really the way I think about a founder is like you're developing skills that you can't
hire for.
You're going to hire for everything else, but you shouldn't be hireable.
And Edison wasn't.
Edison expressing his views on the preeminent role of applied scientists, which that's
what he considered himself, coined the expression, I can hire mathematicians, but they can't
hire me.
And so when I read that paragraph for the first time, the note I left myself was develop
skills that you can't hire for.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable.
Estee Lauder would give you advice that you need to hire people aligned with your thinking
and values.
Hire the best people.
This is vital.
Hire people who think as you do and treat them well in our business, they are top priority.
So this idea is like, that seems kind of weird.
Like hire people who think like you, there's obviously not one right way to build a business.
I think that your business should be an expression of your personality and who are as a person
at the core.
And so I think there is an art to the building of your business.
And the reason I use the word art, I don't mean in like a hoidi toy, you know, pretentious
manner.
That's not me at all.
I don't even care about it.
I don't art at all.
Really?
I mean that you're making decisions not just based on economics.
Like there are non economic important decisions based on how you're building your business.
Like you could probably make more money doing a decision A, but decision A goes against
who you are as a person or you just don't like it or it's just not as elegant or beautiful.
And so therefore you don't do it.
So that's what I mean about you know, hire people who think as you do and what for whatever
reason when I read essay law or say that, I was like, okay, there's like this art to
what she's doing.
One thing that's going to be helpful in recruiting, this comes from Peter Teal.
I think this is the book zero to one.
Understand that most companies don't even differentiate their pitches to potential recruits
into hiring.
So therefore like they're just going to buy as a byproduct of that.
They're going to wind up with a lower overall talent base.
And so he says, what's wrong with valuable stock smart people are pressing problems.
Nothing.
But every company makes this these claims.
So they won't hope you stand out general and undifferentiated pitches to join your company.
Don't see anything about why a recruits should join your company instead of money, instead
of many others.
So that idea of like your pitch, your actual, he would tell you you're you shouldn't
be building a undifferentiated commodity business.
But even above and beyond that, like you're the mission that you're trying to engage everybody
to join you in that pitch, that sale, sale you're trying to make to potential recruit should
be differentiated should not.
If that person's applying to five other jobs, there should not be like, it's like they may
not like your mission.
They may not like your pitch, but they shouldn't be able to compare anything else.
Another quote from Nolan Bushnell.
Higher for passion and intensity.
That's what he would do.
All right.
That's what he did when he found Steve Jobs.
If there was a single characteristic to separate Steve Jobs from the massive employees, it was
his passionate enthusiasm.
Steve had one full, but one speed full blast.
This was the primary reason we hired him.
And one thing all these founders have in common is that he know how important hiring is.
And when something is important, you do it yourself.
This is again Elon Musk on hiring.
He interviewed the first 3000 employees at SpaceX.
That's how important it was.
One of Musk's most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would
fit his mold.
Because people had to be brilliant.
They had to be hardworking and there could be no nonsense.
There are a ton of phonies out there and not many who are the real deal must said of his
approach to interviewing engineers.
I can usually tell within 15 minutes and I can sure I can for sure tell within a few days
of working with them Musk made hiring a priority.
He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first 3000 employees.
It required late nights and weekends, but he felt it was important to get the right people
for his company.
And then the close on this we started with Steve Jobs telling us why it was so important
and why should be a large part of how you spend your time.
And now we'll close with what you do after.
What do you do after you hire the person?
This is what he says.
It's not just recruiting.
After recruiting it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded
by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are.
The feeling that their work will have a tremendous influence and it's part of a strong, clear,
vision.
So that is the end to that 20 minute mini episode.
I just relic into the whole thing.
And it really does I think it's a perfect explanation and illustration of why I think
founders notes are so valuable because some of those books I haven't read in five,
six years and just the ability to have a searchable database of all these ideas, like this collected
knowledge of some of the history's greatest entrepreneurs to reference and then contextually
apply to our own businesses.
It's nothing short of like it's magic.
That's the really the way I think about it.
I think it's a massive superpower.
It gives me a massive superpower.
I couldn't make the podcast without it.
I also think if you have access to it or make your business better.
And so if you're already running a successful business, I highly recommend that you invest
in the description and you can do that by going to founders notes dot com.
