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Oil! by Upton Sinclair
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Exploring the first 100 pages of Oil! by Upton Sinclair, Jesan Sorrells and Tom Libby dive into the gritty realities of entrepreneurship, the evolving concept of work-life balance, and how leadership demands both killer instinct and humility. They draw parallels between entrepreneurship and film direction, critique society’s shifting attitudes toward work and success, and dissect how true leaders mentor others amidst competitive challenges. Hear lively debates on generational expectations, lessons from pop culture, and the importance of intent and teachability on the entrepreneurial journey.
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Exploring the first 100 pages of Oil! by Upton Sinclair, Jesan Sorrells and Tom Libby dive into the gritty realities of entrepreneurship, the evolving concept of work-life balance, and how leadership demands both killer instinct and humility. They draw parallels between entrepreneurship and film direction, critique society’s shifting attitudes toward work and success, and dissect how true leaders mentor others amidst competitive challenges. Hear lively debates on generational expectations, lessons from pop culture, and the importance of intent and teachability on the entrepreneurial journey.
- Book: Oil!
- Author: Upton Sinclair
- Guests: Jesan Sorrells (host), Tom Libby (co-host)
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Time Stamped Overview
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Time Stamped Overview
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00:00 Welcome and Introduction - Oil! by Upton Sinclair.
10:21 "There Will Be Blood Overview."
13:12 "Upton Sinclair's Influence on There Will Be Blood."
20:17 Startup Founder as Visionary Director.
24:26 "Track Record Drives Investment."
30:28 Rethinking Work-Life Balance.
33:28 Work-Life Balance and Societal Evolution.
38:57 "Rethinking Work and Its Role."
44:48 Defining Human Nature and Oil Exploration.
53:36 "Success Requires Sustained Effort."
58:04 "Confronting Uncertainty with Resilience."
01:03:00 "Embracing Uncertainty Through Learning."
01:09:11 Entrepreneurship: Ten Years to be an 'Overnight' Success.
01:12:26 "Defining Legacy: Provider or Visionary?"
01:19:04 "Evolution of NBA Eras."
01:26:18 "Art School: Talent, Drive, and Killer Instinct."
01:31:09 "Fostering Competitive Spirit in Youth."
01:33:54 The Role of Social Media in Opportunity.
01:43:04 Humbling Arrogance Through Jiu-Jitsu.
01:48:11 "Elevating Others Through Leadership."
01:53:12 Staying on the Leadership Path with Oil! by Upton Sinclair.
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Opening theme composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.
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Creators and Guests
What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?
Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.
Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and
this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books
podcast, episode number 182.
Reading directly from our book today,
ladies and gentlemen, I have traveled over just a about half
our stake to get here this evening. I couldn't get away sooner because my
new well was coming in at Lobos River and I had to see about it.
That well is now flowing 4,000 barrels and paying
me an income of $5,000 a day. I've got 2 others
drilling and I've got 16 producing at Antelope. So ladies and
gentlemen, if I say I'm an oil man, I'm
an oil man. You've got a great
chance here, ladies and gentlemen, but bear in mind you can lose it all. If
you ain't careful. Out of all the fellers that beg you for a chance
to drill your land, maybe 1 in 20 will be oilmen. The rest will be
speculators, fellers trying to get in between you and the oil.
Oilmen to get some of that money that ought by rights come to you.
Even if you find one that has money and means to drill, he'll maybe know
nothing about drilling and have to hire out the job on contract. And then
you're depending on a contractor that's trying to rush the job through so as to
get another contract just as quick as he can.
But ladies and gentlemen, I do my own drilling, and the fellers that work for
me are fellers I know. I make it my business to be there and to
see their work. I don't lose my tools in the hole and spend months
efficient. I don't botch the cementing off and let water into the hole and
ruin the whole lease. And let me tell you, I'm fixed right now like no
other man or company in this field, because my Lobos River well has
just come in. I got a string of tools all ready to put to work.
I can load a rig onto trucks and have them here in a week. I've
got business connections so I can get the lumber for the derrick. Such things go
by friendship in a rush like this. That's why
I can guarantee to start drilling and put up the cash to back my word.
I assure you, whatever the others promise to do, when it comes to the showdown,
they won't be there. Ladies and gentlemen, it's not
up to me to say how you're going to divide up the royalty, but let
me say this. Whatever you give up so as to get together, it'll
be small compared to what you may lose by delay and by falling into the
hands of gamblers and crooks. Ladies and gentlemen, take it from me as an oil
man, there ain't gonna be many gushers here at Prospect Hill. The
pressure under the ground will soon let up and it'll be them that get their
wells down first that'll get the oil. A field plays out very
quick. In 2 or 3 years, you'll see all these here wells on
the pump. Yes, even this discovery well that's got you all crazy.
So take my word for it and don't break up this lease. Take a
smaller share of the royalty if you must, and I'll see that it's a
small share of a big royalty so you won't lose in real money.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I have to say.
No one likes to talk about work,
at least not in real terms, right?
When we talk about work, of course, we tend to glamorize
work. We tend to talk about the grind or the hustle, which of
course you can find all about by looking it up
on Instagram or TikTok, you know. Next to
videos of Kobe Bryant talking about how much work he put in as an
athlete, or, well, some other football
star, hockey star, sports star of your choice.
But the real work, the work of showing up every day,
the work of grinding
every day on things that you may not like— work
is a part of growth that we don't talk about because it isn't
glamorous. And if you fail at work, your status
declines in other people's eyes. I think of many people in
my own life who have worked very, very hard and earned
absolutely— well, maybe not absolutely— almost
nothing. But then I think of the people
on the flip side, or on the other side of the continuum, who seemed to
have done almost no work at all and fell
inevitably ass backwards into success.
What warms my heart at the end of the day is
that no growth comes without friction,
and friction comes from work. And putting in the work without
applause or recognition or even acknowledgement, that is
what creates quality.
Quality in writing, quality in acting,
quality in athletics, and even quality in the topic that
we are going to talk about today— quality
in entrepreneurship. We
don't talk too much about entrepreneurship on this show, and it's kind of weird. We've
done 400 and some odd episodes, and we'll talk here and there about
it when it pops up, but directly talking about the entrepreneur, directly
talking about the work that the entrepreneur puts in, we We haven't really
focused on that, but today on the show we're going
to do that. We're going to drill our way deep down
through the exegesis of entrepreneurship and what
that actually means in putting in the work so that other
people can come along and work with you.
We're going to do that today by
framing the work in terms of The first
100 or so pages of our book today,
Oil by Upton Sinclair,
the basis of the 2007 motion picture with
that monster actor Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be
Blood. Leaders,
the work of leadership we should be doing in public and everyone
should see us doing it. With all of its potential for
failure, heartache, grief, and even recrimination.
We could either do it gladly or we could do it sadly, but
we have to do it publicly.
And back to Discuss Insights on Entrepreneurship, even though
I did not give him notes for today, so he's going to do this
by the seat of his pants. Is my old friend
off the cuff
and very hush-hush. Now he's going to do it out loud
as usual. Is my good friend Tom Living. How are you doing
today, Tom? I am living my best life, my friend. I am
loving it. Every time. Every time he's living his best life. Every time.
Well, because I can't live anybody else's. Well, exactly. Yeah, they won't let you.
They won't let you live that way. Although I recently watched
a movie. It went slightly under the radar. Keanu
Reeves just came out with a movie with Seth Rogen and Aziz
Ansari called Good Fortune. Okay. It's basically
about a rich guy, poor guy swapping, you know, Freaky Friday thing,
like Trading Places, Trading Places.
Really low key, kind of good. I like— I like that. It was actually a
decent movie because to your point, like, you can't live anybody else's. Well,
these guys switched places and they were living
it. And the whole point was to show the other person, like, okay, so
take the poor guy, put him in the rich guy's shoes, and then basically tell
the poor guy that, that he's missing out by not being the poor guy anymore.
And Aziz Asari went, go fuck yourself, I'm
staying right where I am. I love this now. I love this life. It was
really funny anyway, but I'm not changing places.
It was low-key pretty good. Good deal. I'm glad to hear that, like, Keanu
Reeves is actually like, you know, doing work outside of, you know, John Wick,
you know, 12 or whatever the hell. Back to his roots too, right? Like, like,
if you think about where he came from, he didn't— he wasn't an action star
first. He was Bill and Ted. It was like, come
on, everybody forgets about Bill and Ted. Everybody does.
Everybody forgets about Bill and Ted. Um, this was closer to his roots,
closer to the beginning of his career than, than— good, good.
The Matrix and John Wick thing, that was great. And don't get me wrong, Keanu
Reeves is Keanu Reeves, he's awesome. But the beginning stuff, him
being funny, in my opinion, is when he's at his best. He's at his best
when he's being funny. Well, speaking of actors who are at their best,
Daniel Day-Lewis. I opened up with that entire
speech there, which is the opening of There Will Be
Blood from 2007, directed by one of
my favorite modern directors, Paul Thomas
Anderson. I put him up there with
Christopher Nolan, who we talked about on the show. He's coming out with The
Odyssey this year. And the last movie, of course, that I saw with him
was Oppenheimer. But I always
watch whatever it is that Paul Thomas Anderson does ever since he did
that great ensemble
piece in the 1990s, Magnolia. That's
when I sort of stumbled onto him. I know he'd done Boogie Nights
beforehand. I watched Boogie Nights years afterward, but Boogie Nights,
Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, these are—
he seems to have this ability to take on landmark films
and to pull something out of actors. And Daniel Day-Lewis
always brings it. He never mails it
in. He's never sort of just hanging around. I mean, we were
talking about before we were recording, uh, Gangs of New York, which you did
not necessarily particularly care for, um, but, um, but
you did like Daniel Day-Lewis's, uh, acting in that character. In that,
I thought he was fantastic. He was the best part of the movie, in my
opinion. He was absolutely— he was— he— him on screen was the—
was worth watching. I thought the rest of the movie kind of fell apart without
him. Well, and the thing that— wow.
I agree. There's all kinds of third act problems in Gangs of New
York that we don't need to get into right now because that's not the focus
of the show. But There Will Be Blood,
I know it's been a while since you've seen it, so you may not necessarily
remember all the specifics of it, but it is about the oil man J. Arnold
Ross and about his
entrepreneurial journey. All the way from being
a guy who starts out— and
There Will Be Blood opens not with that speech, but it opens
with the music opens and it goes—
it's not even music, it's a sound effect—
and then you're in like the Nevada desert and Daniel Day-Lewis
is in a hole using a pickaxe to
pull silver out of the ground to
establish, um, a silver mine. And
there's no dialogue, there's no music,
it's just the sound of the pickaxe and, and him
pulling dirt out of the hole. And the opening goes on
for 5 minutes, 7 minutes. He's digging, he's pulling, he's digging,
he's pulling, and he thinks he's got it. He finds a piece of silver,
right? And I can't remember all the specific details 'cause it's been a little bit
of a minute, but his, his tools fall down the hole. And so of course
he goes down into the hole to pull out his tools. He slips,
falls back into the hole, breaks his leg.
Again, no sound. Drags himself out of the
hole, drags his silver find back to
town, and the next scene that you see
is them staking his claim and basically saying, yeah, you can
pull silver out of here. And that's the first introduction we get
to J. Arnold Ross. Every
time I watch this movie, and it's been a little bit, I should have
refreshed and watched it beforehand, and it's a good use of your time if you
haven't watched it. Um, and I'll talk about Upton Sinclair
in a minute, and I'll talk about oil. Every time I watch this movie
I think finally a director has actually captured
exactly what entrepreneurship is like and put it on screen. I was gonna say
that one scene is basically it. That's the whole thing. Just that
one scene. Never mind the rest. Never mind the rest of the two. I think
the movie had, uh, 2 hours and 40 minutes or something like that. Oh, it's,
it's a monster. Yeah. It's a long movie. But so take the rest of the
2 and a half hours out of it. That 10 minutes is entrepreneurship all
by itself. Work your ass off, fall
down, break a leg, drag yourself up.
That's entrepreneurship in a nutshell right there.
Um, and it gets to this idea because Paul Thomas Anderson as a director
and as a writer, right, because I think he, he wrote and directed the,
the film, or co-wrote and directed the film if I remember correctly,
um, he He's part of a line that
goes back to Upton Sinclair himself, right? And there's a lot
of things going on in the book Oil. Um, but Sinclair was—
I'll just read directly from his, his Wikipedia page for those of you who
maybe haven't listened to the Shorts episode that precedes this, where we talk a little
bit about Sinclair and his writing. Um, he was born September
20th, 1878, and he died November 25th, 1968.
Um, He was an American author, a muckraker journalist, and a
political activist. And interestingly enough, he was the 1934
Democratic Party nominee for governor of California. He,
um, he wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres.
Sinclair's work was known, well known and popular in the first half of the 20th
century, and he won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for
fiction. His first book was The Jungle, which talked about the
U.S. meatpacking industry, um, in Chicago. And when
he, um, when he published that book
in, in 1906, it caused a public uproar that
contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the
1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking
exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of journalistic
malpractice in the United States. 4 years after the publication of
The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.
Time magazine called him, quote, a man with every gift except
humor and silence, based on his wife Mary Frank Sinclair's
book Southern Belle: A Personal Story of a Crusader's Wife.
He also is well remembered for the quote— I love this one—
quote, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
upon his not understanding.
He was a deeply socialist progressive during a
time in America. Tom and I were just talking about this as
well. During a time in America where socialism
wasn't a boogeyman, because in
the West we did not know— we are— not only
did we not know, we did not have accurate reporting on exactly what
was going on inside of Stalin's Russia.
We also had the Great Depression on during the time
of much of Sinclair's writing. And World War II.
Now, what is modern progressivism back in the day would
have just been called social reform. They didn't use the term social
justice, they used the term social reform. And Sinclair
was a social reformer, and he used his
talents, he used his ability to write and turn a phrase,
um, to critique and reform the society around him. He, he had
a vision for a better world, and he used his talents to, to
try to bring that world into into
reality. He wanted to convert his
readers and his fans from a constrained
vision of tragic trade-offs
in a world that just was. If you just worked at a meatpacking plant, well,
it just is. Or if you're a journalist, it just is. Or
in the case of oil, if you're an oil man or a landman,
you're part of a system that just is. You just operate in the system and
there's no way for you to reform it. Sinclair didn't
believe that, and he didn't write from that position.
Um, he, he believed in an unconstrained vision and
utilizing— well, you creating entertainment out of the
paradoxes of human nature. So one of the things you see in Oil
is that J. Arnold Ross, well, he is an
oil man and a land man, and he is, for lack of a better term,
portrayed as being greedy and venal. His son
is portrayed as being a social reformer, basically rejecting all of
that venality and greed and being able
to see through his father's hypocrisy, such as it
were, in order to create a new
world. Now, those things are very interesting about St. Clair, and that
frames sort of the book.
I opened up with differing perspective because unlike Paul
Thomas Anderson, well, no, let me frame it this. Let me use
a different framing. I think that being a movie director
inside of the Hollywood system is about as close as you can come to being
an entrepreneur inside of a system in any
modern system that we have. Because think about what a director has to do, right?
They've got to obviously arrange for things to be on set.
They have to make sure the writing is clear. They have to make sure the
storyboards are correct. They have to make sure the actors hit their lines.
They have to have good relationships with the actors, all of the
members of the crew, everyone from the grip to the caterers. They
also have to have good relationships with the financiers and the money men who
will come by and have an opinion because they're giving money. Case in
point, a meeting that we had this morning, Tom and I, on another project that
we're involved in, right? Money men are going to have an opinion. And
the director sits even more so than the cinematographer who just points
the camera— well, not just, but points the camera and makes sure the shot is
good. Or the writer who writes the words that the actors say.
Heck, even more so than the actors themselves, who quite frankly are puppets on a
string if we're really going to be direct about this. Um, some puppets are
just better than others. Um, the director is the
guy who has to have the vision and keep all of those people on the
straight line towards the vision. And if he deviates
even just a little bit, if he's allowed to be distracted by the money men
or by the actors, or by, um, the
situations that will surround him on the set. If
he deviates even just a little bit from that, you don't
get a masterpiece, you don't get quality, you don't get excellence.
Um, heck, you don't even get a mediocre product. I think of the
movie that came out this week, Maggie— Maggie Gyllenhaal directed Bride,
and it was a $100 million movie And I think it
grossed $9 million.
Brutal. It didn't look exciting to me either. I, I, I, you
know, we talk about— we're both pretty good movie— we're movie people,
and I, I watched the trailer and I went, what are we doing?
Like, I'm sorry, I just didn't get it. And now, by the way,
by the way, the original Bride of Frankenstein, great movie. That was a
great movie, by the way. It's not, you know, it was
just this ver— I didn't, I didn't get it.
But back to your analogy here though. So, and, and pulling— yes, back to the
analogy, pulling this back to entrepreneur, uh, entrepreneurship.
If you think of that, so the director in your analogy is the startup
founder, and keeping that North Star to their
mission and what their plan is and what they're trying to build can get very
easily get distracted by the developers
that are producing the software. Let's just say on the left-hand side, you've got
a whole slew of operational things, whether they're developers, your first
hire, hiring the right team, etc., etc.
On the right-hand side, you got all the money people, right? So, the VCs and
the angels that once they give you their money, they want to have an
opinion. So, to your analogy there,
it's interesting to me that you chose the movies and the director
is basically the startup founder. The director is that person that's supposed to have the
North Star, that's supposed to have the steering compass
to steer the startup in the
movies that is the director. So that, like, to your point, it's the closest to
entrepreneurship in the movie industry is that director. I agree with that.
I didn't really put those two and two together, but it's a good analogy.
So I look at directors like, you know, we're not going to talk all about
directors this episode, but we're going to talk more about entrepreneurs. We're going to sort
of lean into that. And I want to talk about the work too. I want
to tie it into what I said there in the opening because I think there's
something something valuable. Not something— there is something valuable there, 100%.
Um, but I think of directors like, um, directors I, I
particularly care for, and directors who are— who have been
acknowledged as creatives who produce something of quality, right?
They all had the ability— and I'm going to name 5 of
them, right? Actually, I'm going to name 3 more because I already named Paul
Thomas Anderson. And I named, uh, Christopher Nolan. I'm going to name
3 other ones, okay? All 5 of these
men, quite frankly— oh no, I'll throw a woman in there actually,
um, had strength of vision, to your point, and they had strength of singular
vision. So
the man at the top of that mountain was Orson Welles.
I mean, he created Citizen Kane at what, like the age of like
26? Yeah, that's nuts.
By the way, Michelangelo also created the David at like, you know, 20-some-odd
years old. So like, you know, genius in youth is
not just limited to like— you're telling me that Mark
Zuckerberg wasn't the first, wasn't the first child genius?
It's been done before, Mark. And
by individuals who— anyway, doesn't matter. I won't go down that road. Don't you
tempt me. So you got Orson Welles, Um,
then you have, of course, the great British master. I have two
Britishers on this list. Alfred Hitchcock. Oh yeah, I mean,
please. From the silent films, um, that
he directed, um, in the, um, in the '20s and '30s—
or not, sorry, not '20s and '30s, in the '40s and '50s. Um, and then
the remakes that he did, um, in the, uh, in the '60s and later
on into the '70s. The man was just— the man was just ridiculous. So you've
got Orson Welles, You've got Alfred Hitchcock. And I said
I was gonna throw a woman on there because, you know, I'm not gender-specific here.
Kathryn Bigelow, you know, The Hurt Locker, Point
Break. I mean, those are singularly visionary,
visionary films. And then of course, Christopher Nolan, like I said, Paul
Thomas Anderson. Those are 5 directors I can name just off the top of my
brain. And I know that our listeners can name more where they had that
vision. And they drove the vision. Sometimes I think of
Stanley Kubrick, actually, a man, by the way, whose vision I could not understand
on most of his movies. I just could not.
Um, but I cannot deny that he had a vision. He
absolutely did. It's just one I didn't understand. You know, the interesting thing too here
is, if again, pulling it, pulling it back to entrepreneurship,
film— the film directors and entrepreneurs are very similar in this respect as
well. If you've done it once and you've made a lot of money at
it, you are less likely to get those
left-right side influences trying to change your vision if you've
already been there, done that. So, yes. So, second, you know, second-time
entrepreneurs, third-time entrepreneurs, when you hear people talk about having 2
or 3 successful exits and they want to start another company, I mean,
funders will just throw money at them because they think that if they've been successful
3 times already, it's like The same thing with the film,
right? Like, so Christopher Nolan— now don't get me wrong, I
wouldn't say I'm in love with every movie he's ever done, but the fact
of the matter is most of them produce a lot of money. Like, let's just
be realistic, with his name on it alone, even the
bad movies that he has made have made a lot of money because his name's
on it. So it's like that. But the
entrepreneurship journey is very similar in that respect as well.
Like, a first, a first-time founder is very hard to get money. I
hate to tell you guys this, but it is what, statistically speaking,
it is now in the current landscape, less than 1% of,
of companies that start actually get significant funding. I'm not
talking about your uncle or your grandparents that give you a couple hundred thousand
dollars. I'm talking about significant influen— influential
money, uh, anything over 7 figures. It's
less than 1%. But if you've kind of, if you've done this
and you've exited once or twice, let's say
twice, now you're starting a new company when you got this new idea,
you are not 1% chance of getting
money. That
exponentially grows. Like, you're talking probably a 50-50
shot on whether you get money. Which is unheard of
in the startup world. But those producers, those filmmakers are the same
way. My, my only part to this tangent
is— No, you're right. Yeah, this jog we're doing around the block. Yeah,
there's a direct correlation, I guess, is my— There is. There is. Well, and
it's not just on, on the money and on the exits, which is a good
point. It's also on the work. Yeah. So I had
a meeting today with somebody where I said to them, and this
person probably in their late 20s, and after I
said it, he was like, I've never actually heard that before. I said
to him, advice is easy. Getting money, or no,
getting money is easy. Getting good advice and acting on it is hard.
And he didn't understand that. He's like, that's, oh, okay, that's an interesting position.
I think there are a lot of people who would disagree with you on that.
And I said, that's fine. They could disagree with me on it, but it's true.
Getting money is easy.
Getting good advice, notice I said good, not bad, good
advice and acting on it is hard.
And the reason why it's hard is because
we forget about the part that unites the advice to
the money. And that's the work. Yeah.
Work is hard. And so I already sort of went
on my tangent about that. What is the important part of work? This is
my question in red, which you would have seen it if I sent you the
notes today. What is the important part of work
in getting an idea from napkin to reality that we don't talk about as
leaders?
Good Lord, there's probably 100 different, like, cliché comments
that people make here, right? That are— I know all of them are true. And
at the same time, like, we don't understand how to put them into practice, right?
Like, for example, and we— the one of the conversations
that we, um, that we had, uh, this
morning, we— you and I had a brief conversation. I won't bring up the— but
it was a brief conversation about it. But so about this particular comment,
which is you know, don't let perfection get in the way of
good enough, right? Like, right. So, like, but, but what, like, so you can
say that to a startup founder and that's good advice, by the
way, but acting on that good advice is not
that easy because it's, it still leaves too much up to the
interpretation, right? Like, so what, what is good enough to
you and good enough to me may be very different. So it goes back
to your point about the the whole, the founder's vision
and reaching for that vision.
It's like, well, it's very
difficult. So again, my kind of like, there's a lot of cliché things in here.
What I will say is this, the biggest problem in
my opinion about people starting businesses today
is this, and I'm going to use the word ridiculous people and
I'll explain in a minute what I mean by this. The ridiculous
notion of work-life balance.
You will never start your own company to work less.
That just doesn't happen. And if you think you're going to, then you're
insane to start with, right? Like, so when you're talking about
like what is the work that needs to be done, the idea—
listen, I know you've started companies in the past, Hazar.
I've started companies in the past. I remember the very first company I ever started.
I, I didn't take a solid day off. Not
a solid day, meaning, meaning I didn't look at an email, I didn't
look at social media, I didn't look to— I didn't look at anything. I didn't
think about the company. I didn't think about it for a whole day. One
day. Not once in the first probably 2
years of the company. Now, did that mean that I worked 24/7?
No. What it meant— what it means is on a Saturday when I was supposed
to be with my family an email would come in and I would tell
them, I'm really sorry, but I have to address this. Give me 5 minutes.
So maybe it was only 5 minutes of work on that day. But I'm telling
you, every single day for 2 years, there wasn't a single day
that I took off to get that company off the ground.
Now, I successfully exited that company about 5 or 6,
6 years ago now and started another company.
Started from square one, just started doing it all over again. But, uh, but the
point, the point I think that, I, I think that people
misunderstand, I think that that statement of work-life balance, I
want to find work-life balance, I, I want work-life balance, I think
people misunderstand what that term means. Or let me
rephrase, my definition of that is very different
than most people's, I'll put it that way. To me, work-life
balance is not a 50/50 amount of day and
time that you work versus not work, or— no, to
me, work-life balance just means one of two things
that you accomplish. Sometimes it's both, but one of two things:
what you do for work aligns with the person that
you are so well that they just kind of blend in, and
you're not worried about how many hours of the day you're working. It's just
kind of like, it is what it is, right? Like, Like I just said, like,
and even now at this point, if I have to
interrupt my wife's— I'm at a christening with my
wife. If I tell her I have to excuse myself, she knows it's really
important. That's balance. If it's a run-of-the-mill email,
I don't care. But if it's something that really, like, is unbelievable, earth-shattering,
like emergency, I will still take the time out of my day to answer
it on a Saturday or a Sunday or in the evening or whatever. It doesn't
matter. Because to me, that balance is
if I lose that client, then my work sucks. Like,
and I'm not willing to lose that balance of work.
So, it's that allowing that
what you do to marry and match who you are
as a person, that's balance.
Or the other side of it is that when you are
at work, you are focused on work and your personal life does not
interrupt you as much as when you are in your
personal life, you don't allow your work to interrupt you.
That's balance. Now, whether you work 8 hours a day or 12 hours a day
is irrelevant. That, that is not— that's not what I'm talking about. I'm
talking about being in the moment and working through whatever's in front of you
and not allowing interruptions so that you can actually focus on it.
That's balance. And when you allow that balance— when what, what creates
the balance is when you allow it to happen on both sides of the coin.
So again, that scenario, like when you are with your family, you are with your
family. You do not allow your work to interrupt that. When you're at work, you're
at work. Now again, in both cases, emergencies are
emergencies. You can't— there's nothing you could do about that. There are going to be
times where you interrupt one of those things because it's just absolute
necessity. That does not mean you don't have balance.
That just means that you have an order of importance in your life.. And I
think from an entrepreneur standpoint, that's where I think they start
to fail in today's world. That order of importance
and misunderstanding what work-life balance is, is the surefire
way to failure, in my opinion. So
I also think, so I think two things. One, the
idea of work-life balance is the way you're talking about it, the way
it's conceptualized, not what you have defined. The way the
popular culture conceptualizes work-life balance, is a
direct outgrowth of the work of Upton Sinclair and the other social reformers of the
'20s and '30s who looked
at work through the lens of a society that
was transitioning from being primarily farming to
being primarily manufacturing, where the
manufacturing conditions and the industry conditions
were demonstrably worse than what would have been
on the farm. And
then the social reformers
failed. The progressive social reformers failed
to update their software when the transition was
made post-World War II from a
manufacturing society to a mostly white-collar working
society. Where work shifts from being a
physical thing to being a mental and emotional
thing. And the only update the social reformers
had was the popular conception of work-life
balance, because work looks different
when it is emotional or
intellectual versus when it is physical.
That's right. So, um,
case in point, right? The Jungle. The Jungle was written about meatpacking
plants. Um, I lived in Chicago for about 5 seconds when I was in
my early teenage years, long enough to remember it and long enough
to talk about it and long enough to forget it, except when it comes up
in examples like this. And when you would drive
through, uh, and they still had slaughterhouses in Chicago back in the early '90s, like
that, that whole culture hadn't yet sort of all completely
transitioned over. And you could, if you were stuck in traffic on certain
parts of the expressway, whichever one it was, I can't
remember, you would smell
the slaughterhouses and the meatpacking plants. You could smell them driving by
the highway. When I went to high school in
northern Louisiana, at that time in northern Louisiana, there were paper
mills all over the place and you could smell paper mills. Oh God,
it's horrible. I'd rather drive through
a— I'd rather drive through a fertilizer, like cow manure,
than a paper mill. Closing the loop on a previous conversation that we've had. Okay,
now we're talking about manure again. This is
great. But these are the kinds of jobs, whether it's a
fertilizer plant, a papermaking
mill, or a meatpacking plant,
where The, the work that is being done is physical and
messy and smelly and, and for many people,
disgusting. They associate that with work. No
one, no one associates, for
black, for good or ill, no one until recently, and by recently I mean
within the last 30 years in our culture, associates the
white-collar effort of
Being mentally and emotionally focused on making a decision, either
in a startup environment or a white-collar corporate environment or a white-collar medium-sized
business environment. Nobody associates that with
work. Most people throughout the history of the 20th century associated that
with ease because that was the bourgeois class. That was
the capitalist class. Those were the folks that Sinclair was writing against. Those
were the owners. They were And that's— and this is how he frames
J. Arnold Ross. He frames him as an owner, but he frames him
as an owner who is willing to get down in the
dirt, but he's working really hard to make sure his
son doesn't have to get down in the dirt. And
Sinclair critiques this in Oil, using the
son to critique the assumptions of the
father and to call out the father and say, to your point about
work, How dare you not have work-life balance? How dare you not this? And
how dare you not that? Which is, of course, is the lament of every child
whose father works 24/7,
365, and doesn't see them. I was talking with my wife,
totally different context, but it applies here. I was talking with my wife about liquor
stores the other day. You would think that owning a liquor store would be
an easy kind of retail. Thing
to do. Uh-huh. I would— I'm going to go on
record right now. I would never— and never is a long
time— never want to own a liquor store. I don't want to be a part
of a liquor store. Don't come to me with any ideas about liquor stores.
No. Distilleries, distribution, that's a different thing. But the
actual retail store
itself— the reason liquor store— owning a liquor store is hard is because
everyone's trying to rip you off. From the people who are, from
the people who are doing the customer service to
your customers, to your distributors, to the
landlord. You have to be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to
make sure no permit, the government. Oh, and I haven't even talked about the government
and taxes yet. I haven't gotten into that yet. Right. Um, just
the people on the ground trying to rip you off. Forget the other people, like
3 levels up trying to rip you off. And guess what? If you— oh, and
by the way, the government, if you do anything wrong with like the stamps on
the liquor, oh, forget it, your life is over,
right? And you know how I know this? Because Gary
Vaynerchuk, who is the son of, I believe, a
Russian Jewish immigrant, talked about how when his parents came
over, he never saw his father until he was in
his 20s. Because his father owned a liquor
store and coming over from what was terrible conditions
in Eastern Europe or in Russia, wherever the Vaynerchuk came out
of, coming here, work in a liquor
store looked like paradise in
comparison to what they came from and emigrated
from. Work. This is the thing. We have to change
our conceptions around work. So I'm supporting your point around
work-life balance, but I also think we have— and not but—
and I think we have to take into consideration that we have to
reconceptualize what work actually is, which is part of our struggle that we're having right
now. No, and I agree. And we both have children in
their 20s, and that's another fight. Oh, yeah. I
mean, the whole idea—
so without giving away too much and without talking too deeply about whatever,
so We have a very large house, right? And so my house
is about 5,000 square feet. This
disillusion— they're delusional in thinking— my
kids, I'm not saying everybody's kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My kids
are delusional in thinking that they should be
afforded the ability to go work 40 hours a week and
live the way they want to live or the way that they were accustomed to
living living in my house. So, you know, 3
acres of land, 5,000 square feet, 2, you know, 3,
4 cars in the driveway. They, you know, when they turn 16, they could just
take the car whenever they want, like, whatever, right? They want to work 40 hours
a week and live the way they want to live. And I keep trying to
explain to them, you can't start like that. Like,
you want to run like Usain
Bolt when you're— you haven't even learned how to crawl yet.
Like, when I, when I came into the workforce, I had to work two jobs.
And they always have this, like, they always get this— they always try to get
very analytical on me and talk about how inflation is,
like, isn't there— their salaries are not keeping up with inflation, etc., etc.,
right? Whatever. And that might be true. I don't really care, to be honest with
you. I don't, I don't care because I,
I don't care that my first apartment that I ever rented was
only $450 a month. I
made $3.25 an
hour. And I understand that, you know, that,
that, that math may not math for, for my kids,
but I remember when I lived on my own, very first time I lived on
my own, I, I had to work 2 jobs.
So you're right, the idea of work-life balance to me at that
time was just simply I didn't have to live at my parents' house anymore. I
was happy. The balance to me was living on my own,
working 75 hours a week. Didn't matter. I lived on my own. Didn't matter.
That's the balance was there was always like a give and take, right? Balance is
about give and take. They don't understand
that today. So, when I tell my kids like, well, if you want to earn
more money, just go get a second job. I shouldn't have to do that. I
should be allowed to work. Well, why? Because I can work 40 hours a week
and afford my— well, I've got 30 years of experience behind me. I've
done the— I've scrubbed the toilets. I, I've wiped the
floors and picked up kids' puke off the bathroom floor.
Like, what are you talking about? Like, you— to your point about the whole difference
between white collar and like— so let me get this straight. You want to walk
in the door at— you have a psychology degree. You want to walk in the
door as the director of HR with never having HR experience? Yes,
yes, that's exactly that. Yes, that's exactly— that's exactly it. Yes. And make
$150,000 $140,000, $150,000 a year. No, it doesn't work that way. You have
to earn that. You have to go work your ass off to
earn that. You have to go
scrub toilets, if that— whatever, whatever the equivalent. And I
apologize for HR professionals here, that's not my— my intent is not to crap on
HR. It was just the one that popped into my head because of the psychology
degree that she has. Anyway, but like, whatever the equivalent to that is, you
have to take that $50,000, $60,000 a year job, maybe
it's $40,000, I don't know. You need experience before you can
demand those salaries. But because we put so much emphasis on higher
education and the fact that when we were coming out of higher
education, the jobs were better for people who had that
degree, no doubt, no doubt. When I graduated high
school, at the time I graduated high school, the workforce
was probably closer to
70-30 of college degrees, like about 30%. And it
was going up. It was definitely on the upward swing. By the time I was
about in my early 30s, it was probably closer to about 40-45%
of jobs that were— that required degrees. Now it's much higher than
that. So guess what happens to you, the value of your college degree, now
that 90% of the jobs out there require college degrees? The value
of that college degree goes down, not up, right? Which
means that now they can offer that $40,000 a year job to
the college graduate instead of the person who never went to college.
Well, and this is— and this is— they don't get that. They don't get that.
They want $100,000 out the gate. Well, because we just told them that
a $200,000 education is going to be worth it for them. Well,
and this— and, and the thing— well, the thing we also don't consider
is, um, human nature in this, right? So one of the things that, that Sinclair
does really, really well in his book, right, um, is
he describes and defines human nature,
right? So whether it's Bunny's nature, um, whether it's
the nature, which is the son, um, if it's the nature
of, um, the, um, the, the dad, right, J. Arnold Ross, or
if it's the nature of— and I'm going to talk a little bit about this
because this gets directly to what you're talking about here— the
society, right, that
is consumed with this new product, right? This new thing called
oil, which we
forget— in the early 20th century, oil drilling in and
of itself was
as dangerous— and no, more dangerous
and harder than mining, because people have been mining
for millennia, thousands of years by, by that, by the point the 20th century
showed up. By that point. But oil, oil was a
totally new thing. Totally new product, pulling it up out of the
ground, refining it, which no one ever talks about refining. You know, we have
this, we talked about the show Landman. We have this idea that
it's just, oh, you go, you, you find a spot in the ground,
you drill it, boom, like there's oil that pops up.
Now, that's no longer the case. We now have fracking and a whole bunch of
other processes that exist. And by the way, the reason I know about all this,
ladies and gentlemen, is because I live in Texas. And I'm going to talk
about my dealings with landmen in a minute. I've dealt with
landmen. I've dealt with guys like J. Arnold Ross. I've dealt with these
guys. And so we forget that in the early 20th
century, wildcatting, you know, making
bets on wells, making bets on this new
commodity, all of the speculation, all of that that existed that
Sinclair critiques All of that existed
because there were people who were, to your point about
education, who were what we would consider to
be poorly educated people who were looking
for, um, a way to get rich. How?
Not slow, but get rich
quick. And they wanted their kids, to Tom's point about his
children, They wanted their kids to get rich quick so their kids could be in
a better spot. No, I want them to work their ass off. Right, exactly.
I want— 100 years later, we're like, no, you got to go to work. You
got to go get a job. Well, so like with my
children, um, I will say this. My children
have been raised with the principle of work, right?
So small case of this. My wife and I have gone off and on
on like allowances, right, with kids, right?
And when we're off, we're really off. And when we're on, it's in a spurt,
kind of like an oil well, and then we're back off again because we
can't. And it's not that we disagree on it, it's just that our minds shift
and change based on whatever happens to be going on.
And so we were having a conversation, gosh, probably about a month ago about this
with our youngest kid, and he's
9, and he's gotten to the point where you can start
doing work, right? And I don't mean work
like chores. So for us in our family, chores are— particularly for
younger children, I always used to tell my kids, chores are preparation for
you going out working in the real world. Yeah. Your
pay is that you get to live here. That's the pay.
Your, your, your compensation is
that, um, you get to feel good about having a clean room
or clean kitchen or clean whatever, right? A clean
bowl and plate. That's your compensation, right? And let me tell
you, when I was a kid, it was framed in a lot harder terms
for me. My father was old school
blue collar, so it wasn't, you know, do
this and I'll pay you, or do this chore and you can complain. It was,
no, shut up and wash the dishes. Or, you know, are you going
to get something and you're not going to like it? Oh, you're right, sir. Yes,
sir. All right. May I go over there and dry that dish? Yes. Thank you.
And my mother was the same way. So let's not be— let's be clear. It
wasn't just my father. Okay. And so
the principle of
work, but not tied to compensation, right? Not tied
to material compensation is something that I've tried to pass on to my children. Because
at the end of the day, our children are going to— like your
20-year-old daughter. I've got a 20-year-old daughter. You know, I've
got, I got another daughter who's in her— she's getting ready to be 16 here
in about a spit of a minute. And my 9-year-old boy, and then
my oldest, my oldest son is, he's in his late 20s.
He's already in the work world, thank God, and doing the
work. My 20-year-old is transitioning into the work world and is putting in the effort
of doing the work. Because what I think the next thing is, particularly with
our LLMs and all of that, is that
the ways to get money have become so easy
that people think the work should be easy
too. And I take the position that Dana White takes of the UFC. He's been
quoted, I see this quote all over Instagram and he's right. Somebody talked to him
in an interview and he said, he tells his kids kind of the same way
I tell my kids, all you have to do is just be a little bit
better than the next person because everybody's just so, he uses the term weak. I
don't use that term. Everybody's so flat. They want everything so
easy. All you have to do is just work a little bit harder, just a
little bit, and you will just be a monster.
So I'm raising monsters. I'm raising them not to be a little bit
harder, but to work a lot harder because the
compensation level between the people who have chosen to not do the work or who
just want it handed to them, the gap between them and the people who
are just willing to put in this massive amount of work. That compensation gap is
going to be huge. It's just going to be huge. Yeah, I
agree. And it's just going to get bigger and bigger as our digital
tools continue to delude us into this idea that work is something
that just doesn't matter. Well, they're— the
digital tools are commoditizing it. Right.
Yeah. Essentially, we're commoditizing entry-level work. Right.
That's what we're doing. So to your point, So, the work harder,
et cetera. But it's not just about, to your point a few
minutes ago, it's not just about the physical work harder. You have to mentally
work harder. You just have to
be— when you tell your kids you have to be better than everybody
else, you're not talking about— I used Usain Bolt a few minutes ago as
the reference. So, again, you're not telling them that you have to go beat Usain
Bolt in a race. No, but, you know, my kid
being the wise guy that he is, he'll be like, I'll beat Usain Bolt in
a race any day and twice on Sunday. He can run all he wants. I'm
getting in my car. You know what I'm saying? Like, so to
your point, it doesn't always have to be the physicality of it. You just have
to be better. You have to be better than the next guy or girl. Yeah.
Whichever. Yeah. And, and, and that, and that's where
I find, that's where I think The creativity of being better is
going to really accelerate people because, again, to your
point, can it be physically better? Absolutely. Of course, you can be physically
better. I spent the first 10 years of my career in a restaurant and my
knife skills were better than most people's. I could fly
by people with knife skills. Not today, by the way, just so you know, not
today, but I haven't done it in a long time.
But it's so there are physical skills like that,
sure.. But if there are also mental skills,
there are not just mental, but there's, there's
creative skills. There's like the
ability to problem solve, problem solving skills. If you are better at
any one of those than the next person, you'll
accelerate. You'll accelerate your, your— and by the way, getting back to
the entrepreneurial conversation, that's half of entrepreneurship right there is
figuring out the better mousetrap or the new mousetrap or
the faster mousetrap, whatever, bigger, better, faster, stronger, smarter, whatever
that is. That's the entrepreneurial journey. You just have to decide whether
you're doing it for someone else or for yourself. So let me ask you
this question. What is the scariest thing about entrepreneurship that very few people
consider before they
jump in? I think I— to me, I think this is
going to sound counterintuitive here. I think everybody thinks the
fear of failure is the biggest problem,
and I don't agree with that. I think the fear of failure is actually a
halfway decent motivator. I think
people underestimate— to your point, if you— throughout this whole conversation so far, I
think people underestimate the sheer volume and level
of work they're going to have to do when
successful, not if, because all the work you do to get
to do, if you're trying to be successful, if you're not quite there
yet, is expected. You're expected to continue pounding your head against
the wall. You're expected to continue running uphill. You're expected—
no, you're— that's— that work is expected of you. When you hit
the pinnacle, when you hit the top and you say, now my
startup is successful, I think people underestimate
how much work there is from that
point forward. There's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done after
that fact. And I think that, I think the fear
of success is actually very real. People,
once people can start seeing the skyline and they go,
oh crap, if I get to this point that's in front of
me, oh boy. Maybe I'm not sure I want that. And that's
what— maybe they exit out their company before they hit it, which is fine too,
by the way. So maybe you don't exit at $200 million or $300 million.
Maybe you exit at $2 million and you're perfectly fine with
that because you don't want to do the work.
Like, that's just to let you know, people, $2 million, if you're in your 20s,
is not going to last you the rest of your life. It's not going to
last you the rest of your life. It'll barely
last you. Well, it won't even last you through retirement these
days. So that— I, I think there's a big piece of that that people don't
think about. I remember when I first made my
first $100,000, um, and that was a big milestone for
me. Sure. Um, and I
remember watching the invoice come in where it clicked over right
in my, um, in my bank account, and I sat there and looked at it
for about I don't know, maybe a minute. And
I thought, hmm, that's interesting. And then I went right back.
I went right back to doing the things that I needed to
do in order to make the next $100,000 and the
next $100,000 and the next
$100,000. And I'm a weird entrepreneur because I'm
not driven by, or my entrepreneurial mindset is
not driven by, um,
the normal benchmarks of success,
uh, or failure, quite frankly, you
know. So I've had the nights where like I've laid awake and like it's
Wednesday and I've got to make payroll on Friday and I have no idea how
I'm going to cover. I've had that happen, right, more times than I
can count. I have
had the creditors chasing me around the block and
I'm pushing invoices and moving things around.
Rob and Peter to pay Paul. Rob and Peter to pay Paul. You know, yeah.
I've had the— Tom's previous point, I've
had to prioritize what are the things that I'm going to
do this week or today. And trying to figure
out without knowing what the answer is, what are the things that are going to
produce the most money, or they're going to— that are going to knock down
the most dominoes. So by the end of the week, the thing that has to
be knocked down gets knocked down. I've done all that. I've done all
of that. None of
those things, um, none of those things scared me, but all of
those things drive me. Weirdly enough,
I found— not weirdly enough, interestingly enough— talking to entrepreneurs, talking to people
who are entrepreneurial adjacent, those are the things that
scare people. Those are the things that I remember talking to an employee years
and years and years ago, and I was telling
him, listen, I haven't taken a check from this company to feed my family in
like 3 months. And he was stunned. He's like,
I'm getting a check every week. Like, yeah, I know. Because it's important that you
get a check every week so you can show up and do
the thing. Now you may ask, well, how are you feeding your family? We don't
need to get into all that. I figured out ways to do that. My
point is that thing that I had
committed to, that thing— and not Peter Thiel,
another entrepreneur has said it this way, I can't remember who, but I was able
to stare that thing in the face and not
flinch. And I think that's the scariest thing for people. To
your point, it's not even success, I wouldn't even say, or failure. It's
can you stare into the
abyss of uncertainty day in,
day out for multiple weeks and then months and
then sometimes years? Can you stare into the abyss of
uncertainty and never lose your optimism? And by the way, optimism doesn't
mean like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, everything's going to be
sunshiny tomorrow. Optimism just means— I used
to think this, actually, I still think this, not as sharply as I
used to because things have changed, but I still get up every morning and I
think, okay, nobody alive has
lived today. Nobody. Like the next minute
that I'm going to be talking, no one's lived in that next minute
yet. So there's still all kinds of things that can open up, just like
we're recording this in, in, in
early March, uh, 2026, right? No
one's lived in April of 2026 yet. Not any human being,
you know, not one. And actually I got that idea from a
boss of mine who I absolutely despised and had a
problem with. But that was one good lesson that he taught me.
And when he said it and then he walked it out, I
thought, huh, I do not respect any other thing about you,
but that is correct. You are correct
on that. And so as an entrepreneur, I've been
able to channel that into getting up
every day and staring into the abyss of uncertainty. Company and doing it
for years and being okay. I think somebody with a mindset
who is more, shall we say, socially, social, more of a
social reformer or more of an employee, which I think, not I think, the
statistics are 99% of people will never start a business. They just never will. They'll
never start because they can't. They had that expression on
their face. I'll never forget it from that employee. Like he looked
like he would, he couldn't, It was like I was talking to him
in a foreign language. I was like, I was talking to him in Chinese at
that moment. Like somehow we'd switched from English to Chinese in the conversation. He didn't
understand what I was saying. And I think the people who have a mindset of
I have to get paid because my bills have to get paid. If my bills
don't get paid, then somehow the
world collapses into this ignominy of like lack of status and
I'll be homeless and I
don't know, searching for gum underneath, like, you know, benches on the
side of the street, like, whatever. Like, whatever the thing is that people think is
a horrible thing, they go right to that. And then they— the fear of
going right to that is what drives them to, to working for people
like me, because the fear of being kicked to the
curb and, like, living in a cardboard box doesn't— I mean,
that's not optimal. I wouldn't want that. But it's not scary.
That's not the scariest outcome. There's other scary outcomes
that are scarier to me
than that. And I don't think— I think that's just the distinction with the difference
between an entrepreneur mindset and an employee
mindset. Yeah, no, that's true. Like, and I don't disagree with any of
that because I also
think like if you If you take Stephen
Covey's theory of beginning with the end in mind, right? Like, if you
look at Stephen Covey's 7 Habits book and you think of like
at the end of your life and you're all— everyone's standing around and
talking about your eulogy. What do you want them to
say? Do you want them to say like he was a good provider for his
family? Right. If that's your end goal, then you're
right. Stay an employee, get a decent job, and just keep providing for
your family. At whatever that level is that you feel. Now, at what
level do you provide for them? Sure. That, you know, like we talked about a
few minutes ago, you know, you started the bar, by the time you retire,
you're making six-figure, whatever. That's fine again. And if that's
your goal. But if you're at the end of the eulogy, you want people to
be saying things like, my God, he was such a risk-taker. He
always did like he threw caution to the wind. He wanted like, you're
probably going to be an entrepreneur. Like, you're going to probably you're going to
be. But to your point, and that's why I
did— that's why I don't equate the uncertainty thing. I don't think I view
it that same way because
to me, the uncertainty doesn't make or break me, right?
Like, like whatever is uncertain, to your point, I'll just go figure
it out. Like, I'm— I've never worried
about— and by the way, the same— to me, the same rule applies about just
about anything in my life. Anything. So my daughter made an
observation of me when she was about 16 or 17
years old. She had asked me a question about a particular sport we
were watching, and I was showing her. I was like, no, but if you do
this and you look at the way they're doing that, and she goes, oh, have
you played this sport before? I went, no. She's like, how do you— how the
hell do you know, like, about— and I go, well, because if I don't know,
I go learn it. Like, I Education to me does
not happen in four walls in some high
school or college, university. No, education happens when you
seek out knowledge. Seeking out that knowledge is the
most important thing. So, to me, I've never viewed uncertainty
as a problem or a fear because if I don't
know it, I'll go figure it out. I'll go find out. I'll go learn it,
right? So, there's not a lot of problems you can throw at me that will
scare me. What I think, like I said, in my little
spiel on this topic,
I would be more fearful of how I would react—
one of the projects that you and I are involved in, if somebody
came to us tomorrow and said, I'll give you guys $500 million
for that right now,
that would scare me more than uncertainty. So I
would laugh. No, no, no, I know. No, no, I would, I would, I would
lie, I would laugh. It wouldn't be— I would laugh and then I'd be like,
uh, where's the other shoe?
All right, again, again, I know that. But yes, I know you're— I know your
point. Yeah, I know that project is not worth that right now. I just thought
a very large number to just— no, no, just to throw it out. Yeah,
but my, my thing would be, okay, so does that
mean that we're out? Like, we're bought? We're selling it to them? Are, are
we staying in? Like The fear of that success,
that successful conversation, that has more to do
with my hesitation than anything else. Because I wouldn't— interesting—
I would not— I'd be nervous to what the rest of the
people involved in that, in that project with us. Yeah, I'd be more
concerned about what they would do. Well, because,
because I can't dictate what they do. No, you can't. There's no— I have
no control over That's— so your uncertainty,
mine is the lack of control. It's control. Once you
get to the success point where you no longer control
the outcomes, that's a problem for me. And I'm not a control freak either, by
the way. I'm not one of those people that have to control every little detail
and every little aspect of every little thing in life. I'm not a
control freak. I'm just saying that that's what would— Well, and I
would be like, So
first, after I got past the whole, like, is this like, am I on
Candid Camera? Like, is there a camera around somewhere? Like, do I need to be—
I need to worry about Green. Is Draymond Green to pop
out? Sorry, if he is, I got, I got some words for you
too. But, um, after I got past that, my initial
thought would be I
don't care about the money. Now, I'm not— this
is not from a moral high horse perspective. I want to be very clear, this
is not from a moral high horse perspective. If somehow I
were able to, to, to, to make off of this,
this thing that we're involved in, if somehow I were able to make, I don't
know, $50 to $75 million after taxes,
that's for someone like myself in my position, in my life, what I've
got going on, that would indeed be at the stage of
life I'm at life-changing money for at least a couple
of generations. Nothing to sneeze at. I got to be very honest about that. So
it's not from a, I'm on a moral high horse perspective,
right? That's not what I'm talking about at
all. The reason I would go to, I don't care about the money is
because what's way more interesting to me in thinking about the people that are
on this project, what's way more interesting to me is the shenanigans that
are going to jump off because of
that offer. And so
for me, the curiosity on that is, wait a minute, wait
a minute. So we're not being candid camera'd. Draymond Green isn't going to show
up. Okay, that's cool. That's fine. Drew Carey's not going
to somehow run around screaming Cleveland rocks or something. Okay. All right. So this is
legitimate. Okay. We vetted it. It's a legitimate deal. Now let
me watch everybody's around the table, like in those old Westerns where like, it's all
like, as my wife would say, it's all just eyes and looking. Everybody's just looking.
All of a sudden I start looking around and everybody's seeing who's going to do
what, who's going to jump on what. Because for me as an entrepreneur, I go,
well, yeah, that's life-changing money. And even if it's not $50 to $75, let's
say it's $25 to $30 million. That's still a pretty good chunk of
change. I could think of things to do with that that will last me
my entire life. Because I have very small appetites. I live
very conservatively. Same. My point
is the ways in which people react for me are
that abyss. That's what's in the abyss of uncertainty. You
know, my master's degree is in conflict resolution and
reconciliation and negotiation and all that kind of stuff. And what drew me to all
of that was I am
a control freak. I do like to be
in charge, particularly when it's stressful. I get more of that, like more
of that pops out. And so I've had to
really, and I'm not a master of it, ask my wife and kids, but I've
had to teach myself to let go of
control and be okay with uncertainty
in that abyss. And an offer
like that creates massive uncertainty. It just does.
It creates massive uncertainty. And so the easiest thing is to just, for me anyway,
the easiest thing is because to your point about, well, we haven't really talked about
money here, but to your point about entrepreneurs, people associate entrepreneurs with a
lot of money because of these big exits and things like that. And the reality
is most entrepreneurs wind up broke. They
don't wind up with a huge amount of life-changing money. That is the
reason you read about those things in Fortune magazine or you see them on LinkedIn
or you see them on posts on Facebook or on Instagram or wherever it is
you go and look at, um, is because they are
rare. Most entrepreneurs wind up either broke
or they, or they barely break even for what they put in on
a 10-year project. And by the way, kids, all
of you listening, it is 10 years. It
is 10 years before you see a dime in profit as
an entrepreneur. 10 years to be an overnight success. Yeah, I was just gonna say,
and every time you hear the term overnight success, it's It's a bunch— it's crap.
There's no such thing. No such— every, every single,
every single time you see the words overnight
success, it's— yeah, it's because you didn't know their name yesterday, you
now know it today, so that's overnight. I get that. So overnight
success to you, but that doesn't negate the 5, 8, 10
years that they've just put into their blood, sweat, and tears to build to the
point where yesterday happened. Like, right, well, and
that's— and that's part of what Sinclair sort skips over because
the social reformer doesn't put any value on that. Like
the first part of Oil, if you read the first
few chapters, one of the points that he definitely is trying to build as
he's building this
character of J. Arnold Ross, he's
building him into a character where
he invites corruption. He's looking
for a shortcut. He's resentful that the government is taking
his money and not spending it correctly on the roads. He wants to drive
as fast as he could possibly drive, and he wants to run over everybody to
get to where he's going. He understands the value to
us, to our point earlier about education. He understands the value of education because he
wants his son to be educated, but he himself does not need to be educated
because he knows everything he needs to know about pulling oil up out of
the ground. He is framed as a person who will bribe
an official, a local official— not framed. He is a person who will bribe a
local official to get a shortcut to make
things move. And the local official is the one that is the victim of this
bribery, not Mr. Ross, of the system that has
been created around him that encourages the need for bribery. And
so Sinclair definitely takes a position that is in opposition
to the entrepreneur. And by the way, I think this is what attracted Paul Thomas
Anderson initially to There Will Be Blood, because we've always had a problem in
this country with people who build things and
have that ruthless vision. We've always had a problem
with that. Um, and I think the reason why is it genuinely
scares people who, quite frankly, to my point earlier, have
to get up and go to work for
somebody else. It's, it's to your point about your
point early that you made about You know, who do you want at your eulogizing
you when you're dead, right? He was a great provider. I think most people are
fine with that. I think 99% of the 99% of people who have employee
mindset are absolutely fine with the great provider at the end
of their lives sort of eulogy. I think the people
with that mindset are
absolutely stone scared of the
person who was ruthlessly focused like this
General Ross
character, or, um, I'm gonna say a few names, or, uh, the
Mark Zuckerberg type, or the Elon Musk type,
or the, um, the Henry Ford
type, right? Um, or any of the folks who did build the big
oil businesses, the Andrew Carnegie types. I think those
people Like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, these guys started working when they were 8, 9,
10 years old. They didn't care about school. They
were ruthlessly focused on business and
making money. And they did not lose
the North Star of that because they didn't care about the provider
thing at the end of their lives. They cared about— and there's another great scene
in There Will Be Blood. I'm going back to the movie here for
just a second. There's a great scene where Daniel Day-Lewis is sitting with a man
who claims to be his brother. And he's actually a grifter trying to
hustle him. But before he finds out that he's a grifter, they're
sitting by a fire outside on an oil field.
You know, he's pulling oil out of the ground or something like that. Or maybe
it was a home. I can't remember the specifics of the
scene. But Daniel Day-Lewis has this line and it is the line
of the entrepreneur. He says, actually, I should look
it up. I should look it up because I don't want to miss it. It's
actually a really good line. And it defines what entrepreneurship
is for the entrepreneur, but it defines it in such a way
that it, it, it sets it up as being
scary and horrific to someone of an employee mindset,
right? He says, yep, there it is. There Will Be
Blood. Yes. Beautiful. Just typed it in. It came right up. Look at
you, IMDb. Goose credits,
storyline, taglines, quotes. Here we go. And I'm not getting into, by
the way, the religious elements of the book. I'm not getting into the
parts about higher education. Those are some of those are explored in the movie as
well. I'm just focusing on
the entrepreneurship. This is the variation of it. But it's at the end
of his speech, he says basically, There
are times when I see people and I see nothing worth liking. I
want to earn enough money where I can get away from everyone. I
have this thing inside of me that doesn't want other people, and
now I'm paraphrasing, but doesn't want other people, doesn't want other men to
succeed. Daniel Day-Lewis says this, and I think that that's the
way the employee, a person with an employee mindset, looks at a person with
an entrepreneurship mindset. What they fail to understand
is that, and this is the Hollywoodization a little bit of this idea, what they
fail to understand is that many
entrepreneurs, yes, don't want other folks to succeed, but just as
many do want others to succeed, and that's why they're leaders. They want
to bring people along.
And the challenge they have is
other people I'm going to paraphrase from Michael Jordan in The Last Dance. Other people
don't want to be led. Michael Jordan said most infamously in The Last
Dance, he said, was I a horrible— the interviewer
asked him, people call you a tyrant, right?
And Michael Jordan goes, maybe I was a tyrant.
Maybe I was. Maybe I led people where they didn't want to go.
Maybe I did get up into them, right? Maybe I did force them to do
things that they didn't want to do. But you know what? That's the way I
played the game. You don't want to play the game that way? Fine. Don't play
it that way. But like, you're just saying these things because you've never
won anything. And to Michael
Jordan's point, we are a results-oriented society. I've been saying
this since college. We can talk all we want about process, and we love to
talk about process. The result is what we actually like. This is
why Tom Brady— no one's ever going to step over Tom Brady.
No one's ever— God bless you, LeBron. No one's ever going to step over
Michael Jordan. It's not going to happen. It's just not. Not in my
lifetime anyway. Because the result is the thing that
we value. Good, bad, ugly, or indifferent. We'll talk a lot all day about
process, but the result is the thing that we value, and it's the thing we
put money on. And entrepreneurs produce results. But along
the way, They want to hire A-players to help produce those results. And when all
they see are players from their perspective that
aren't A-players, they really do struggle with how do I raise these people up?
That's what Steve Jobs struggled with. How do I raise these people up? That's what
Michael Jordan struggled with. How do I raise these other players
up? Right? So there's a number of different threads that come together here. But at
the end of it, I think there is a horror that a person has who
comes from that employee mindset. When they look at that entrepreneurship mindset, when it's
actually laid bare for them. Yeah, there's also—
I think there's, there's, there's, there— I think there's a lot more.
I think there's a lot to it as well from a different vantage point. Like,
I also think that there's, like, there's this
weird, like, misnomer that comes with entrepreneurship.
Like, people think, oh, you own your own company, you must be wealthy. Like,
they, like, they immediately think that you're in a
different financial status just because you own your own company or you
have a— And I'm like,
listen, people, to your point a little while ago, it's not the case.
Like a very good majority of these people are never going to make it. They're
not wealthy to begin with and they're not going to be wealthy afterwards. It's not
about wealth. It's about building something that
you can be proud of. But to your point
about entrepreneurs, not hoping for success for other entrepreneurs. I
think you're— I think in today's landscape, that's actually more
likely than not. I think entrepreneurs want to see other
entrepreneurs win. I think that's a very thing. Now, but, but I think there's a
caveat to it. I think they want them to be in different industries than
they're in. Okay. So what you're talking about is, is the I call
it the— it's the thing that happened in the
NBA post-Kobe. So there's the Michael Jordan era, there's the Kobe era, and now we
live in the LeBron era. And in the
LeBron era, everybody's friends, everybody sub-tweets each other,
everybody's friends on Instagram, nobody's trying to dunk on
each other. We're all going to be collaborative together. We're all going to high-five and
jump, and maybe I might beat you by 1 point or whatever.
The thing that, and tell me if
I'm wrong, I think it's also happening in entrepreneurship and I think it's because of
the internet and social media has allowed for globalization of
this. But when you are a person who has that Jordan
or Kobe level in entrepreneurship or
the J. Arnold Ross level, Daniel
Plainview level of killer instinct. I don't think there's a place
for you anymore. I think you get run out of town. I
think you get called all kinds of names. I think people accuse
you of, to Upton Sinclair's point, bribery, grifting, manipulating
the system, whatever. Like, I think, so Mark Zuckerberg's a good example.
I look at him and yeah, he's a weaselly guy for sure. And yes,
he's a, he's a whatever in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It's fine. I'm a thing in
Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Mark can come find me anytime. We can work it out on the
mats. Tell Mark where I live. It's fine. Actually, he could find it out anyway.
I got a Facebook account. He can find me. I'm not worried
about it because here's the thing. I think Mark has that thing inside of
him that Daniel Plainview has. I don't think he likes other people.
I don't think he wants to roll and subtweet like LeBron wants to roll and
subtweet with everybody and maybe kind of make a $100 million business on the side
and maybe be a celebrity too. And he wants to do all these other things
and be— No. Killer instinct. He doesn't
have it, and I know he doesn't have it, and he knows he doesn't
have it. Jordan had the killer instinct. Jordan would roll around
with John Starks in the offseason, and that was fine. They would
go gamble in Vegas or whatever, but when it got on
the court, he was going to touch his kid. He was going to cut your
heart out, and then he was going to go to work
on you. And that's what I see happening in entrepreneurship. Or maybe I'm
wrong. No, no, I think you're— like I said, I think you're right to a
degree. But again, I think it's like— and we've seen it, right? Like, so
you and I have been judges on pitch competitions and stuff like that,
right? So, and you're right. It's almost like this,
like they're in the room together and they're like, oh my God, you did so
well. It's good for you. And I'm like, I remember, I'm telling you
my first company, I didn't give a rat's,
you know what, about any other— like, no, I wanted to
go and succeed and I didn't care if I stepped over
somebody. Right. So, to your point, I do think it takes a certain type
of person to be that person for sure. Like,
but I also think that you're right with the whole globalization of things because the
Olympics was a good example of this. Too. Think about this for
a second. The US hockey team just won gold. US men's hockey team hasn't won
gold since 1980. 46 years, they finally won gold again.
They come back to the US, now they're back in the NHL. The
first time around, players on opposite
benches were pulling each other onto the ice to wave to the crowd. Now
it's a week later and they're basically checking each other through
the boards, right? Like, it's like they don't care that they were on the same
team a week 2 weeks ago. That's all done. Like, that's all
done. We high-fived each other, we hugged it out, we're good. Now guess what? You
have a different color jersey on than I do. I'm gonna knock your teeth out
because that's how, that's how hockey is. That's just— but, but,
and I think entrepreneurs— I, but again, I think to your point,
like, that, that is a good representation of what you're talking about in
the entrepreneur landscape right now, where if there's, if there's 5 people in
a pitch comp— oh, better yet, And I'm not gonna
single out the— I can't even say that word because you'll know exactly who
I'm talking about. We recently watched
a group of entrepreneurs pitch to us
that are very kumbaya. Oh yeah. Okay,
they're very kumbaya. And I know for damn
certain that there's one or two of those people that should be killers. And
if they were killers, they would be successful the day they stepped out
of college. Yep. Like, or the day they stepped out of the environment
that they were in or whatever, wherever they are right
this minute, they're going to be successful. They've got to stop
the kumbaya BS because if they turn on
that killer instinct, there's at least 2 of them that I think
would be wildly successful right out the gate. But they have
got to stop looking at their peers
as peers and start looking at them as people they can step over
to get where they want to go. So I will tell you that
the level of smothering that occurs
of that instinct from other people
is a dynamic that I've experienced myself. So
I'll tell a small story here. 20-some-odd years ago, I was in
art school. I was not a great artist. It doesn't matter. I went to art
school because I loved art. I'd done a few art projects, blah, blah, blah. It's
something I've been doing ever since I was like 10, 11, 12 years old. Decided
I was going to go to college for it. By the way, I paid for
my own school out of my own pocket. Didn't take on
any loans, whatever. Okay.
In art school, I got into so much trouble when I would say
to people, and I was a little bit older than all these folks, who were
like 18, 19 years old, but I would say to them,
we're in competition against each other. We're
in competition for an A.
We're in competition for the professor's attention and
good critique. We're in competition for who can put
up the best, the best
display of our art. And quite frankly, in some cases, we're in competition for
who can sell the most art. And do you know what the
feedback was that I would get from people? They would say, oh, hey, son, you
don't understand. We're just all here hanging out. I remember one— We're building a community.
We're building a community. We're not in competition with each other. We're not in competition
with each other. We can't be in competition with each other. I remember one person
who I considered a very dear friend at the time, he said, we can't be
in competition, man. We're like, we're like just— And he was sort
of like a little bit like the dude in The Big
Lebowski. He was a little bit like that guy. He was like, dude, we're
just, Like hanging out, man, just vibing,
man. And I learned from that interaction
that the people around you smother
the instinct. And so you could hold it, hold it
like a— I learned for me, I have to hold it like a, like
a weapon, right? And I have to figure out where
I can deploy it. Either to cut
those people off, right, or to,
in some cases, like in art school, try to ruthlessly
crush them, or to combine it with a talent
and skill that they may not possess because
they're all kumbaya over here, but I'm going by a
different metric. And the close of that story is, when I was in art school,
I put on my Bachelor of Fine
Arts printmaking show. I sold almost every single one of my prints that was in
that show. Almost every single one of the other folks who
was in a, in that printmaking program struggled to sell a print.
And these are all people that said it wasn't a competition and they were just
hanging out. And I went, I understand business and you don't, but
you just told me it wasn't a competition. You have a good day.
I win and I clear the deck. Right? And
that's where— and like, I've never lost that thing, but I learned, and
even through entrepreneurship, I learned
like, okay, this is where I have to navigate it because the smothering from
others, once you reveal that, is so
intense sometimes that it can almost smother the fire out. It can almost smother the
killer instinct out if you don't have it well developed enough. Well, or,
or you redirect it into— so there's something to be said on the flip side
of this that you go from,
from competing to mentoring, right? Like, that's a, that's
a good use of that creative energy. So you get to a certain point
where you're successful enough that you don't need to compete with anybody anymore, but
now you're gonna redirect your— that same competitiveness
goes into your mentorship. Which, by the way, so in one
of those conversations with that group of people that we were— that I was just
talking to, first thing I said to this
gentleman was, I'm not your parent. I'm not, I'm not your— I'm not your
uncle, your brother, your mother. I'm not your family member. I'm not a
college professor. My job is not here to go rah-rah, you're the
best. I'm gonna tell you like it is. I'm going to tell you what's wrong
with your stuff, and if you don't like it, you
don't like I would have appreciated that when I was his age.
He did too, by the way, at that point. I think at that point
I saw something change in his eye. I saw
him go— and I asked him, I said, "So what do you do next?
What you do next is the most important decision you're ever going to
make. If you decide that what you're building right now is
never going to be a company, then what are you
doing? Then this conversation is irrelevant unless you really want to
make this into something. So you have to decide,
is this real or is it not? Are you playing around with this or are
you not? And if you're going to make it real, then you're going to listen
to some good advice and you're going to start treating this
like it's real. Do we have
to start So I do believe that that instinct, and then we'll move on, we'll
sort of close here. I do believe that that instinct exists inside
of leaders, inside of entrepreneurs. I almost repeat
myself there, athletes, but I also believe it exists
inside of creatives,
journalists, almost every sort
of area of life, modern life even, or postmodern
life. Where anyone can either make a buck
or gain status or increase their class, there's going
to be competition. Now, I think
that instinct comes out in a few different places. I think
the social smothering is huge, but I think it comes out in different places in
different ways because that's the human spirit that you can't
snuff out. How do we— this is a core question, and this is why I'm
a big fan of entrepreneurship in schools, entrepreneurship programs in
schools, because I don't— we got rid
of gym. Ambassador schools don't have
gym anymore. It's, it's nuts.
Sports is a whole other kind of thing. I mean, the NFL even is
leaning into flag football. I mean, come on, people.
Right? Sports is a whole other kind of thing. I mean, I coach
my, my, my kids' soccer team, right? Oh, assistant coach my
kids' soccer team right now. And one of the principles
of the organization that the team is under is that everybody
plays and everybody has a good time, but we don't keep score. And I literally
told the director of the program a couple of weeks ago, not literally, I told
the director of the program a couple of weeks ago, the kids all keep score.
They all know. Who
are we fooling? Yeah. You're not
fooling me. I'm keeping score. You're not fooling them. They're
keeping score. Okay, anyway, we, we have
a globalized society that flattens,
uh, the competitive spirit a little bit into like
this weird democratic globalized
mash of meaninglessness, right? Where the nail
that sticks up Sometimes by the algorithm gets
pounded down, but then weirdly enough, all the nails are trying to stick up and
try to be noticed because, you know, everybody wants to be
noticed, right? Um, and then of course we have the, the, the
areas where competition has always existed, which
is in, uh, reproduction, sexual competition, um, competition
between women over men, between men over women that has not gone away. And then
that will never go away in our lifetimes. So my question
here is, how do we, other than entrepreneurship
programs in schools, huh, or bringing back shop
and gym, how do we provide opportunities
for people at a younger and younger age to access that
killer instinct and really, for lack of a better idea,
start to separate themselves from other folks? Because right now athletics
is really the only place where that can actually occur. And athletics
is even gradually being winnowed down and
flattened out. I don't know. I think, I think there's something to be said
about like, like even like, so if you think about like, if you think of
the, or the stories of like Mark Cuban and guys like that
who like, listen, I was an entrepreneur at 12 years or 10 years old.
Like I went out and got a paper route and when I figured out I
could get like deliver more papers by talking my buddy
into doing one street for me and I'll give him back, you know what I
mean? Like, so like, but to your point, there's
no way to encourage that, right? Like there's no way, like,
and I, by the way, I still firmly, firmly, firmly believe
in a very old
statement that necessity is the mother of invention, right? Like,
so if you find, Again,
I think to your point about the globalization and the
socializing, we socialize our problems now too, right? So
poor people are universally poor. So
we're now like we're— and by
the way, I know this from experience because I grew up very poor.
So like, but like, but when I was a kid, nobody paid attention to
the poor neighborhoods. Nobody. Except
the police departments for all the wrong reasons, but that's— we won't get into that.
But like, but nobody, nobody cared. Like nobody, nobody took, nobody
took interest in ideas coming from those poor neighborhoods or
any. But now even the poor neighborhoods have social
media, so you could turn yourself into an influencer in your, in your
bedroom of a studio apartment that you're, that you're, you know, 6 people
are living in. Like, you know what I mean? Like
So, we're globalizing and socializing even that part of
our lives. So, it's very— I think it's very difficult to
find those needles in the haystack because to your point about not every entrepreneur is
going to be successful, not every idea is going to be
the next Facebook, not every— like you
have to nurture those types of ideas. So,
do we start looking at them through different lenses like meaning
like So, we're not going to look at that kid in school that just had
a science fair project that could actually be a product on the market if somebody
actually paid attention to it. No, we're going to wait until he becomes an
influencer and then see him creating some garbage online
that we go, oh, wait a minute, that kid's got a nice— like, I don't—
yeah, I agree with you that some of this is broken. I certainly don't know
the answer to it because if I did, I'd be the
next Facebook. I would have already turned on the spigot. Like, I would have already
turned on the spigot if I knew how to answer that question. But I do
agree with
you that there are some new— there's new
ways that we're trying to globalize this that
makes it very tough for people to get that competitiveness. And to
your point about— I
tried really hard with my kids to get that competitiveness because Just so
you know, I was not that guy. Like, I was not that dad to
like, okay, shoot the basketball, honey. Oh my God, look at— oh, you
won. No, no, no. If you're going to beat me, you're going to beat me
and it's going to be legit. Which is why, by the way, so when I
taught my daughter how to play chess, like, she— out of all I have, out
of my 5 kids, my daughter was the only one that enjoyed
playing chess. She has a competitiveness to her. That is— and
I hate this, I know that you and I are both competitive. I'm telling you,
you would take both of our competitiveness and just crush them. She would
crush them. She's way more competitive than any human being I've ever seen in my
entire life. She would sit and play hours, chess game
after chess game after chess game, because I would beat her and I wouldn't, I
wouldn't let her win ever. Yeah, I would beat her every time because I felt
like it was going to improve her chess game. So
she So the handful of times that she
beats me, it's like the world is like opening up
her— it's like the world is her oyster and she can— it's
like she accelerates that
joy. Not accelerates, sorry, exacerbates that joy.
Like it's like she just hit the lottery.
But I can't do that with a kid down the street that I don't know
that, like, that you're trying to encourage entrepreneurship to. Yeah, like, you
just can't do that, right? Like, you— now, I will say though, I remember when
I was a kid, strangers weren't dangerous. I could walk— if there
was a guy— and by the way, the way I learned how to play chess,
being in the neighborhood that I was in, being a very poor neighborhood, we used
to go down the street into a little bit wealthier neighborhood, and there
was always a guy there. They had these— they had these like park,
uh, park benches, park like tables, like that
had chessboards on them already. They were built in to the— oh, that's awesome. Yeah.
And this guy would sit there and play chess with anybody who wanted to play
chess with. So I would go and I would tell him I don't know how
to play chess, and he would— he taught— he taught me how to play chess.
Now, by the way, same thing, his rule— he was a— I found
out much later in life that guy was like a grandmaster, like
chess, like he won chess competitions around the world. Like, this guy
was really He could beat somebody in chess with
5 moves. 5. No doubt. Like, he would sit
there and he'd go, he'd ask, are you a chess
player novelty, or do you like, do you know? And if you said, no, no,
I'm a chess player, I enter chess competitions, he'd
go, okay, on. He would beat that person in 5
to 6, like, no doubt. I was like, I would watch this and go, what
just happened? What just happened? Like, so anyway, but if
you sat down with him and said, listen, I'm a beginner, I don't know chess
very well, different story. His competitive— like I talked about a few
minutes ago, his competitiveness went away because
his mentor, his mentor side came out. Came out. Yeah, he wanted to be
a mentor. Now, he again would not just quote unquote let
you win, but he would play as if he was
a novice so that you could play on equal playing ground so that you could
learn. He would ratchet it down. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
And I think, I think that that's part of the key to all of this.
Right? So if you're a leader and you have that competitiveness and you've built
this business and you, you started from nothing. And, and by
the way, to Tom's point earlier, most entrepreneurs start
from nothing. It is the very rare entrepreneur that gets gifted you
know, $100 million by their daddy. That is not a normal
story. Most people start from, like I did, $500
and I'm into my last $500 and I guess I got to do something. So
like, let's go. You know, most people start like that
and then build something over the course of time. But
I think if you're a leader, it's— you
have to, you have to understand innately how to ratchet that down
and how to ratchet that up. You know, and I think that's, I think that's
at the core of what you're saying. I also think that, um, I
mean, the closest analogy I can have is to a martial arts
master, right? Like a person who's, and I'm not going to use
the term black belt, a person who is an advanced practitioner in any kind of
martial art, whether it's boxing all the way to
jiu-jitsu, uh, karate, all the way to tai chi. I don't care what
they're doing, right? A person comes in who's
a beginner, they're not going to— if they know
anything about how to handle their killer instinct, they're not going to manhandle
that person. They're just not. Can I, can I tell you a very, very quick
story about that? Yeah, go ahead. So I, I— one of my favorite things,
I— so I, I don't know, I would not consider
myself an expert because of my definition of expert, but I
I can, I can spin chucks really, really well. Okay. And
the first— yourself in the face. First time somebody ever came to me and
was like, oh, I could do that. I was like, here you
go. And then just watched them beat the ever-loving crap out
of themselves. And I said nothing. Nothing. And I was like, that is not a
very
good mentor. Or is it? Like, you know, to your point, like because there are,
there are some lessons that I feel like you need to learn on your own.
And one of the lessons you need to learn on your own is that just
because you— to your point— just because you see somebody swing those things and do
it really, really well— so I think watching it and doing it
are two different things. And so I have to start at step one. You can't
just swing them. You have to learn how to, like, how they move, what they
do, how they— you have to learn how they hurt before you can learn how
to— well, really well. Okay, so this goes back to what you were saying earlier
in our conversation as we wrap up here about your kids, right? They want to
start with the master's degree and go directly to the $100,000 job. They don't want
to do the things like with the nunchucks. They don't want to get hit in
the face because getting hit in the face sucks, you know,
right? Except getting hit in the face, you know, maybe not physically. As the
comedian Marc Maron would say, it's all going to be thinky pain now. It's not
going to be pain in your body, right? Like you're— or pain in your mind.
Like you're done with the physical pain part. Now you're going to go into thinky
pain. Psychological pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain. Nobody wants to go
through that, right? They'd rather skip all the pain parts. And what a
good mentor does is— a good leader who's a
good mentor, they give good analysis at the beginning and
they see the difference between someone who can, who maybe
can come in and experience that thinky pain and maybe in
some cases physical pain, like the nunchucks. They see the difference
between that person who's willing to go on that path and the
person who, to your point, is just arrogantly coming in thinking they
can do something. Like, we've seen this with entrepreneurship. We've seen this with businesses.
You wanna know a really good experiment to figure this out? Take one
of the most complicated subject matters you can think of,
theoretical physics, space travel. I don't care. Whatever you think is difficult
to understand, put it in ChatGPT and then prompt it
to say, tell me this like I'm a 5-year-old, and
watch what ChatGPT spits back to you. Because to your point,
that's where you're starting, people. If you're
trying, if you're trying to be a mentor to somebody, you have to assume
they know nothing. They— you just, you have to give them the basics
and the foundation before you can start, you
know, throwing master classes at them. Well, and you also have to sort of, you
have to sort of Sometimes you have to, and I will
go specifically into jiu-jitsu, sometimes you have to humble the
arrogant. Of course, yes. Sometimes you do. We have people, it
happens in our tiny little school in my tiny little town that I live in,
in Texas, right? We will have people who walk into that school and
they'll go, they will say sometimes with their mouths, but most often with
their body language, oh, well, that crap doesn't work
on me. Or I love this one, I'll just see red, bro, and go in
a fight. And I'm thinking of a few months ago, someone came in for
a trial class. And I've been
doing this for a minute. And my instructor was like,
you go ahead, you go with the new, the new guy,
right? And I always ask new people, like, what's your background? Like, do you have
any experience doing this before I get into anything with them?
Right? Just to test and see, to your point about the nunchucks, who am I
dealing with? Am I dealing with someone who wants to just hit themselves in the
face all the time? Because I'll accommodate you. That's fine. Or
am I dealing with somebody who genuinely wants to learn? And
this person was not genuinely interested
in learning. And so when it came time to— so we did our drills
of our moves or whatever, it was fine. Move of
the night, and then we were going to actually put
it into practice. We're going to roll, we're going to wrestle, right?
"Poleada," which is Portuguese for fighting with
intent, right? So, fighting with intent is different than fighting without intent, right?
Fighting without intent is what you see on 99% of the videos that you see
on Twitter of people
getting jacked or getting surprised or getting ambushed. It's what
Tom has experienced in his life, I've experienced in my life when you get into
a brawl, It's all of that, right? That's without intent. The people with the haymakers
flying and all that kind of good stuff, right? When you
roll with intent though, none of that factors
in, right? Now, if you don't have intent but I do
have intent, um, I'm going to beat you every single time. This is not pride
or arrogance. You have no intent. You're just out there
doing stuff. I know enough and I'm not, I'm not even close
to mastery. Not even close. I'm on a 10, talk about 10 years of being
an overnight success. It takes 10 years to get a jiu-jitsu black belt
at minimum. Most of the time in America, it takes people between 12 and 15
years at my age. Gonna be going a long time. I'm
all the way at the beginning of the journey. This is not a pride thing.
This is just a fact. If you are engaging with
me without intent, I'm going to
maul you. I'm just going to maul you and I'm not even going to really
sweat that hard. And so like the person came in and
he does, he starts, I was like, okay, I put a bully grip on him.
Like, like when you were a kid and they were like, give me my money.
Like they grabbed your collar or whatever. And I put a bully grip on him
and I watched his eyes shift and I went, oh, okay. He
has no intent now because he's panicking. And he did. He started
like lashing out and going around and I just moved around him and moved around
him and moved around him and did my thing. And all I was doing was
playing defense. And I looked over at my instructor and he was laughing.
Sit with me a while, um, or be with him a while. And
he started laughing and I was like, can I just go? And I did. I
looked at him, can I just go? I raised my eyebrow, can I just go?
And he goes, yeah, go ahead. And so like, I just, I wrapped him
up, wrapped the guy up. Guy's flailing around. I wrapped him up. I didn't even
submit him. I didn't even put like a choke on him. I didn't knock him
out or anything. I just put him on the ground. I was like, you gotta
calm down. Like you're flapping all over the place. You have to stop.
You have to stop. That's with intent. And by the way, this is not
a small dude either. This can
be applied to leadership. Are you leading with intent?
Are you doing it in an intentional kind of way? Are you doing your entrepreneurship
with intent? And when we talk about getting that killer instinct, are you using that
killer instinct with intent? Or is it just like a weapon you're just waving around
like your nunchucks? You got to get hit yourself Hit yourself in the face and
then a bunch of people are going to laugh
at you. It's been a good conversation. I didn't know what we were going to
pull out of Sinclair. I will say
to everybody who's listening, this is
a 575-page book. I have covered maybe the first 100, 120
pages of it. So we will be back with Sinclair. I will have a follow-up
to this episode. We'll talk a little bit more about it after I do a
little bit more of a deep dive into it. Go watch the movie There Will
Be Blood. It's a great example of entrepreneurship from the beginning to the end. By
the way, it's based on probably about the first 100 pages too,
right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very small chunk of it because there's so
many other dynamics. A very small chunk of the book that is a 2.5-hour movie.
It's a 2.5-hour movie. That should tell you something about Sinclair's
writing. Again, a guy who was also playing for keeps, by the way, on
the work. Tom, final thoughts. How can we integrate all
these lessons together for leaders? What's our final thoughts
here? Well, I think you pretty much summed
it up just a couple of seconds ago.
I think the difference between a leader, a
true leader, and somebody who just wants to, as you put it in
your jiu-jitsu example, of just going, a true leader wants to bring
people with them, right? A true, a true leader wants to
elevate everybody else around them. And the only way you do
that is, is to meet them where they are and help them get
better, not push them down and just suppress them. The
killer instinct is different in those cases, right? So you need the killer instinct
to get yourself there. But once you're there, you need to kind of suppress it
a little bit. And use the killer instinct to elevate everybody else
around you. Instill that killer instinct around the people that
you're around, in the people that are around you. So I think that's the other—
there's a phrase in the medical field, and I'm not in the medical field,
so I'm not going to get it 100% right, but I know it's something to
the effect of like, you
know, learn about it, watch it,
do it, teach it, right? Like, so you, you— what— taking
what you're learning in a book, seeing it
in practice, and then trying it in practice, and then teaching it
in practice— that's how you, that's how you elevate everybody around you.
And being humble enough to start at the beginning
multiple times, I think that's also important, because nobody knows everything, right?
Nobody knows it all. So again, so you and I have talked about
martial arts a lot in our in our friendship. I didn't take
Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I was a Jeet Kune Do guy. If I walked
onto a Brazilian jiu-jitsu mat right now, regardless of how much I
knew about Jeet Kune Do, I would feel humbled by the
art form. I would want to be
taught. So, even knowing what I know with Jeet Kune Do, I would not be
that guy that you experienced on the mat. Right. There's no way I
would be. My intent would be to learn. I'm new here. I'm the new guy.
I don't give a shit what I came to the— I don't care what I
come to the mat with. I don't know your art
form. I'm gonna— I want to learn it from a
perspective of teaching me, not what that guy experienced,
which was basically humility. Like, you had to teach him
humility. That you're, you're not going to teach me humility. I think that's the
difference between somebody who is I'll put it this
way. I feel like, I feel like if I wanted, if
I chose to go learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu right now, I would eventually be
a leader in that dojo. Yeah, because
I would— I know, I know myself. I know I would start at the bottom.
I know I would want to learn from the best. I know that, and I
know I would elevate myself eventually to being good at what that, what that
art form was. But ultimately My goal would be
to then teach people how to be that good
and to exactly what you would have did with that guy, teach them
the humility of it because I hate to say it, but no
matter how good the Western world and Western
philosophies are, well, I guess Brazilian jiu-jitsu is kind of
Western, but the martial arts art forms come from the East. All of
them, the foundations are all in the East. It doesn't matter
which one you're in. And you're practicing
right now. But they— it's, it's all, it's
all foundational, right? And it's no matter how many times you go back, you start
at the bottom and you work your way up. Like, and I, I think people
lose that. Like, I think
people— like, I, I can't even count how many times in my career somebody has
said to me— and by the way, I've been sales manager, I've been
a VP of sales, etc., etc., right? So I
was a sales manager at the time, and I went to interview for another sales
manager job, and they basically said to me, you don't know this industry well enough
to be a sales manager. We're going to start you back as a sales rep,
and then if you work out, then we'll put you as a sales manager. I
did that like 3 times until finally I was like, I'm not
doing that anymore. Like, I'm going to go do
my own thing because I'm not going to start at the bottom and work my
way up. In the same, the examples are different.
The martial arts example is exactly, that's a perfect example
of it's completely different, right? The art forms are completely different. To
me, sales is sales. Sales is sales. Yeah. Yeah. I'm selling,
I'm selling a phone or I'm selling this mouse, like my computer mouse or my
phone to be, it doesn't, I don't care what this
product is. Sales are sales and people are people. So I was, I was done
doing that. But But what I did learn throughout that process is exactly what
I'm talking about, taking that step back and then taking
that role. I learned that the people I wanted working
for me had to be people that were willing to learn. They had to be
people willing. I would hire guys that have been in sales, like not
management, but I've been a sales rep for 20 years. I just want to be
a sales rep. I never want to be anything more than a sales rep, but
I'm going to go from product to product to to better myself in finances
or whatever, right? And I would interview a guy that's been in sales for
20 years, and the only thing I cared about was, was
he teachable? Was he stuck in his own ways or her own ways? Were
they stuck? Were they stuck in a philosophy of sales that I
couldn't break? And if the answer was yes, I didn't hire them. I don't care
if you've been in sales for 5 years or 50 years. It didn't matter. What
mattered to me was are you open-minded enough to
listen and learn and be— and then, by the way,
if you do and I put a new sales rep with you, can you teach
them? Like, can I pair a new sales rep with you so you can teach
them? Those are the two things I cared about. Can you learn and can
you teach? That's it. And I think
that's a good— I think that's a good overall
kind of turn to what we're talking about. Today, even from entrepreneurs. You
have to have the killer instinct, yes, but you have to be willing to be
taught and you have to be willing to teach. If you're not willing to be
taught and willing to teach, then you're probably not going to be successful
at it. That's a good spot to stop. So I'd like to thank Tom Levy
for coming on the show today once again in
our Wild West ranging conversation
around Oil by Upton Sinclair. Go ahead and pick up that book. And with
that, well, We're out.