The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
Ryan Hawk
Leaders are learners. The best leaders never stop working to make themselves better. The Learning Leader Show Is series of conversations with the world's most thoughtful leaders. Entrepreneurs, CEO's, World-Class Athletes, Coaches, Best-Selling Authors, and much more.
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20 episodes676: Jesse Cole (Owner, Savannah Bananas) - The Beauty of Obsession, Building a Fans First World, Walt Disney, Mr. Beast, Radical Transparency (Opening the Books), Do the Opposite of Normal, Turning a $6M Mistake Into a Moment, and Creating Banana World
Go to www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My Guest: Jesse Cole is the owner of the Savannah Bananas. He went $1.8 million in debt, slept on an air mattress, and built a business that is now valued at over a billion dollars. I spent half a day with Jesse in Savannah watching practice, and Jesse gave me a personal tour of their entire operation. It was incredible. Notes: Fans First - The sign is on every locker. And leading out to the field, "Tonight is someone's first time seeing our show." Obsessed/Focused - Banana Ball/Serving people is his life. We didn't talk about hobbies, TV shows, or anything other than what they're doing now and in the future. He's obsessed with what he does and super focused. Transparent - Jesse just released their full P&L as a private company: revenue, expenses, player salaries, everything. Most businesses guard this religiously. He's completely transparent. I asked why, and he said, "Fans first. They deserve to know everything." Reps - We went to the field to watch practice. It looked just like a game. Players were dancing all the time. And every single rep they practiced as a trick play (behind the back, through the legs, etc.). They never play normal baseball. You wonder how they are so good on gameday at doing a backflip while catching a fly ball. Because they practice it thousands of times without fans so that when they're there, they put on a great show. Hiring – "Love your people more than you love your customer." 12,000 people on the waitlist to work for the Bananas. When you hire, have them do a "fans first" essay. Then they write a future essay. Always Be Caring, Different, Enthusiastic, Fun, Growing, & Hungry Fans First: The Counter-Intuitive Decision - Jesse sacrificed $6 million in ticket revenue after a system messed things up for fans. Merch – 787,000 fans purchased merchandise in 2025, totaling 1.96 million total items. That means the average person is purchasing ~2.5 items at checkout, with 80% of total sales taking place in person. 621,000 at live shows versus 166,000 online. It's a $50m business! TV: The Distribution Strategy - Giving Away Value - Jesse insisted on free YouTube streaming even when ESPN wanted exclusivity. Jesse is building a zero-profit secondary ticket market. He's literally giving away things other sports properties would monetize. So, even with all of the team's games still airing for free on YouTube, the Bananas averaged 500,000 viewers on ESPN, The CW, and Roku. The team's most-watched broadcast was a July 4th game at Fenway Park, which averaged 837,000 viewers on ESPN, making it the holiday weekend's most-watched primetime sports broadcast. TV networks want exclusivity, but you demand that the games still be broadcast for free on YouTube (in addition to whatever channel they are on) Social Media - The Bananas added 12.7 million new social media followers in 2025 alone. That pushes their total social media following across all channels north of 35 million... Roughly 2x more followers than MLB's most popular team, the Yankees, at 18 million. You have to believe something before you achieve something. Six years ago, Jesse said, "We're gonna sell out Fenway Park," and his team looked at him like he was crazy (they were a college summer baseball team, not even doing tours yet). You have to get through the messy to get to the great. Their first world tour was brutal: the sound was terrible, the show wasn't great, the game finished in the seventh inning because they didn't have a rule to make it go nine innings. See what's best for the guest, not what's best for the business. Walt Disney was the first to go into full-length animation, color, sound, and with Disneyland, he focused on one entrance to control the experience, custom rides, and invested in a castle and landscaping, which made no money. Go where others won't go. Sam Walton went to small towns, and no one paid attention to him for the first five to ten years. It's somebody's first time every night. Fans wait three years on a waitlist to come to a game, so Jesse doesn't care if you're having a bad day. That's their first time. Control the entire experience. Walt learned he couldn't control the experience when people watched his movies at a theater (it could be dirty, and people might not be nice), so he built Disneyland. Who do we work for? Fans. Jesse opened the books completely (numbers, player salary, merch sales, everything) because they have a responsibility and accountability to their fans. We have to feel our mistakes. When they sent a wrong email to 44,000 fans instead of 4,000, it cost them $6 million to take care of those fans with tickets (more than the company b
675: Tom Hardin (Tipper X) - The Largest Insider Trading Case, How Ambiguous Leadership Destroys Culture, Resume vs. Eulogy Virtues, Bad Decisions vs. Mistakes, and Building Psychological Safety
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Tom Hardin was known as "Tipper X" during Operation Perfect Hedge, the largest insider trading investigation in history. After making four illegal trades based on inside information, the FBI approached him on a Manhattan street corner and convinced him to wear a wire over 40 times, helping build 20 of the 81 cases. Key Learnings Ambiguity is where ethical lines blur. Tom's boss said, "Do whatever it takes," after the hedge fund lost money, and as a junior employee, Tom didn't ask clarifying questions. The undiscussable becomes undiscussable. Leaders give ambiguous messages, then pretend they weren't ambiguous, employees get confused and don't question the boss, and you end up with a culture of silence. Making decisions in isolation is dangerous. The information came to Tom and he didn't talk to his boss or his wife (who probably would've slapped him around for crossing ethical lines). Psychological safety requires muscle memory. You have to practice saying "I'm just going to ask some clarifying questions here" when your boss gives ambiguous orders. Bad decisions aren't mistakes. Mistakes are made without intent, but bad decisions are made with intent. Tom told himself for years he made "mistakes," but on a drive home from speaking at a keynote, he realized: "There's no way I made mistakes. I made bad decisions." Never say never. Tom argues you're more susceptible to falling down your own slippery slope when you think "that would never be me." 80% of employees can be swayed either way. 10% are morally incorruptible, 10% are a compliance nightmare, and 80% can be influenced by the culture around them. Tone at the top means nothing. Company culture isn't the tone at the top or glossy shareholder letters; it's the behaviors employees believe will be rewarded or put them ahead. Reward character, not just results. You can't just focus on short-term performance and dollar goals without understanding how the business was made and what was behind the performance. The question isn't "what?" but "how?" If you're just focused on the numbers and not on how you got there, you have the opportunity to end up in a slippery slope situation. Celebrate people who live your values. Companies that spend millions on trips for people who live out shared values (not financial performance) are putting their money where their mouth is. Leaders must share their own ethical dilemmas. We've all been in situations where we could go left or right, and sharing how you worked through those moments makes you more endearing and a better leader. Keep a rationalization journal. When Tom and his wife have big decisions (or even little things), he writes them down in a rationalization journal and reflects on them once a month. He's still susceptible to going down another slippery slope, so checking himself on those passing thoughts improves his character over time. It's not what you say, it's what you do. Just like kids see what parents do (not what they say), employees see what behaviors leaders actually reward. $46,000 cost him $23 million. A business school professor calculated Tom would've made $23 million if he'd stayed on the hedge fund path, but he made $46,000 on the four illegal trades before getting caught. His wife was his rock. 85% of marriages end when something like this happens, and she had every right to leave. They just got married, no kids yet. But she stayed. When Tom interviewed her for the book 20 years later, she said, "All I remember is you accepted responsibility immediately. You didn't make up excuses." Running pulled him out of a shame spiral. Tom got obese as a stay-at-home dad. His wife signed him up for a 5K race (and beat him while pushing a jogging stroller). Just crossing that finish line lit a fire. He ended up running a 100-mile race. Doing hard things teaches you that you can do hard things. When Tom had to start a speaking business because they were running out of money, he said, "I can do this" because he'd already put his body through ultramarathons. No challenge is insurmountable. He ended up with something better. It's not about status or money anymore; it's about who he is with his family and his relationships now. Windshield mentality, not rearview mirror. Tom can't change the past, but he can look forward instead of backward. A lot of people in their twenties do stupid stuff (maybe not to this degree), but now, in his forties, he can learn from it. Why not embrace it rather than try to scrub it off the internet? Eulogy virtues versus resume virtues. In his twenties, Tom only thought about resume virtues (how much money, the next job, the n
674: PJ Fleck - Building Elite Culture, Nekton Mindset, Selecting >Recruiting, Intrinsic Motivation, Row The Boat, and Transformational Coaching
Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: PJ Fleck is the head football coach at the University of Minnesota. Before that, he transformed Western Michigan from one win to 13 wins and a Cotton Bowl appearance. Before his coaching days, PJ was a stud receiver at Northern Illinois and was a guy I played against in college. Coach Fleck has built one of college football's most distinctive culture-driven programs. You'll hear why he maintains an 80-20 split favoring high school recruiting over the transfer portal, how he runs practice with a 32-second clock to make it harder than games, and why he sees himself as a cultural driver rather than a motivational coach. This is a conversation recorded with all of our coaches inside "The Arena." That is our mastermind group for coaches in all sports. And it did not disappoint. Notes: Stop recruiting, start selecting. PJ doesn't chase the highest-rated players... He looks for fit and alignment with his values. Ask yourself: Are you trying to convince people to join your team, or are you selecting people who already want what you're building? Efficiency beats duration. PJ runs 95-minute practices with a 32-second play clock, always moving, always intense. The principle: Make practice harder than the game. Where in your work are you confusing time spent with intensity and focus? Internal drive trumps external motivation. PJ calls his ideal players "Nektons," always attacking, never satisfied. He's looking for people who prove their worth to themselves, not to others. If you need constant external motivation, you're not ready for elite teams. A leader must teach and demand. A team member must prepare and perform. These aren't opposing forces—they're two sides of the same commitment to excellence. My junior year at Ohio University. I was the quarterback of the Ohio football team. We lost to No. 17 Northern Illinois 30-23 in overtime on a Saturday night. P.J. Fleck caught the game-tying 15-yard touchdown pass late in the fourth quarter. PJ finished with 14 catches for 235 yards and a touchdown. (I threw a 30-yard TD pass to Anthony Hackett to put us up a TD right before halftime). Let your team see you played. They do"Guess that Gopher" before team meetings, where players guess which coach's highlights they're watching. Give them a peek behind the curtain. It builds credibility and connection. PJ honors his mentor, Jim Tressel, by wearing a tie while coaching. Who are you honoring through your daily practices? Keep your door open. PJ has no secretary. Players can walk into his office at any moment. Create fluidity between you and your team. Transparency after tragedy is a choice. When PJ's son died from a heart condition, he had two options: never talk about it again, or let it shape him. He chose radical transparency, knowing it would get scrutinized. That's where "Row the Boat" comes from. A losing season reveals what you actually need. After going 1-11 at Western Michigan while also getting divorced, PJ says every coach should experience a losing season. It forces you to identify what you actually need versus what you don't need. Choose what scares you. When deciding on Minnesota, Heather asked him, "Does this scare you?" He said, "Hell yeah, it scares me." His response: "Well then, that's where we're going." Life versus living. Living is the salary and contract. Life is about moments and memory. If you can't stay in the moment and reflect on great moments or hard moments, life will be like mashed potatoes to you. Your expectations should match your resources. The gap between expectations and resources is called frustration. The bigger the gap, the more frustration from everyone around you. Maintain an 80/20 model if you can. 80% high school players, 20% transfer portal. PJ has one of the highest retention rates in the country because of selection and fit, not recruiting. "It's not about the money until it's about the money." The kids' PJ gets value for other things before the money talk. They enjoy the experience of being a college athlete. PJ leads with "I'm really difficult to play for." PJ's opening line to recruits. He asks for a lot. This makes people who are lazy, complacent, or fraudulent run like hell. "This is going to expose me." Start with good people, not good players. Out of 500 kids, who are the best 25 young men? PJ doesn't get five stars. He gets two and three stars who believe they can be five stars. A chip versus a crack on your shoulder. Once you do something the media says you couldn't do, they'll set a new bar. All PJ wants is kids who want to prove to themselves that they can do what people say they couldn't. You don't need PJ's personality. You need the internal driv
673: Daniel Coyle - Opening Yellow Doors, Mastering Your Craft, World-Class Storytelling Techniques, Great Questions to Ask, Building Your Community, The Power of Curiosity, and How to Flourish in Life
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Dan Coyle is a New York Times bestselling author who's spent the last two decades studying what makes great teams great. He wrote The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and now Flourish—books that have shaped how millions of people think about skill development, team culture, and meaningful connection. He works with the Cleveland Guardians as a special advisor on culture and performance. We recorded this one together in Cleveland. Notes: Find your yellow doors. Most of us go through life looking for green doors (clearly open paths) and red doors (obviously closed paths). But yellow doors are different. They're out of the corner of your eye, things that make you uncomfortable or feel brand new. That's where life actually happens. We think life is a straight line from A to B to C, but it's not. Life isn't a game... It's complex, living, shifting. Yellow doors are opportunities to create meaningful connections and explore new paths. "Life deepens when we become aware of the yellow doors, the ones we glimpse out of the corner of our eye." The craft journey always involves getting simpler. Simple is not easy. The great ones have their craft to where there's a simplicity to it. In this world of clutter and noise, it's easy to want to compete with energy and speed, but the stuff that really resonates is quieter and simpler. Be a beginner again in something. With climbing, Dan's at the very bottom of the craft mountain. With writing, he's somewhere in the middle. It's fun to have a couple of zones in your life where you're a beginner. It's liberating, but it also develops empathy. Some stuff looks very simple, but isn't. Every good story has three elements. There's some desire (I want to get somewhere), there's some obstacle (this thing standing in my way), and there's some transformation on that journey. Teaching teaches you. Coaching Zoe's writing team helped Dan, and then Zoe ended up coaching Dan. It was never "let me transmit all my wisdom to my daughter." It was a rich two-way dialogue that helped both of them. Suffering together is powerful. Doing hard things together with other people, untangling things together (literally and figuratively), and being vulnerable together. That's culture code stuff. Whether it's skiing with your kids, seeing them fall and get back up, or being trapped underground like the Chilean miners. Behind every individual success is a community. Dan dedicates all his books to his wife, Jenny (except one). Growing up, he had this idea of individual success, individual greatness. But when you scratch one of those individual stories, what's revealed is a community of people. Jenny is the ecosystem that lets Dan do what he does. Going from writing project to writing project, hoping stuff works out, exploring... it's not efficient. It's not getting on the train to work and coming home at five o'clock. It's "I think I need to go to Russia" or "I need to dig into this." She's been more than a partner, an incredible teammate. Great organizations aren't machines; they're rivers. The old model of leadership is the pilot of the boat, the person flipping levers who has all the answers. That's how most of us grew up thinking about leaders. But Indiana football, the SEALs, Pixar... when you get close to these organizations, they're not functioning like machines. Machines are controlled from the outside and produce predictable results. These organizations are more like energy channels that are exploring. They're like rivers. How do you make a river flow? Give it a horizon to flow toward (where are we going?), set up river banks (where we're not gonna go), but inside that space create energy and agency. Questions do that. Leaders who are good at lobbing questions in and then closing their mouth... that's the most powerful skill. Great teams have peer leaders who sacrifice. Since Indiana football's fresh in our minds... Peer leaders who sacrifice for the team are really big. Fernando Mendoza got smoked, battered, hammered, and he kept going without complaint. In his interview afterward, he talks about his teammates. That's the DNA of great teams. Adversity reveals everything. The litmus test: in moments of terrible adversity, what's the instinct? Are we turning toward each other or away from each other? You could see it in that game. The contrast between the two teams. When things went bad, they responded very differently. The coach isn't as important as you think. Coaches can create the conditions for the team to emerge, but great teams sometimes pit themselves against the coach. The US Olympic hockey team of 1980 would be an example. They came together against Herb Brooks. So coaching sets the to
672: Brad Stulberg - The Neuroscience of Curiosity, Process vs. Outcome Goals, The Power of Consistency, Playing Like The Beatles, Focusing on Your WHO, and The Way of Excellence
Go to www.LearningLeader.com to learn more This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Brad Stulberg is a bestselling author and leading expert on sustainable performance and well-being. He's written for The New York Times, Outside Magazine, and The Atlantic, and his previous books include Peak Performance and The Practice of Groundedness. His latest book, The Way of Excellence, is great. Brad's writing combines cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, and stories from world-class performers to help people do their best work without losing themselves in the process. Notes: Never pre-judge a performance. When you're feeling tired, uninspired, or off your game, show up anyway. Remember the Beatles scene—they looked bored and exhausted, but Paul still wrote "Get Back" that day. You don't know what's possible until you get going. Discipline means doing what needs to be done regardless of how you feel. As powerlifter Layne Norton says, we don't need to feel good to get going... We need to get going to give ourselves a chance to feel good. Stop waiting for motivation. Start moving and let the feeling follow. Audit who you're surrounding yourself with. The Air Force study is striking: the least fit person in your squadron determines everyone else's fitness level. If you sit within 25 feet of a high performer at work, your performance improves 15%. Within 25 feet of a low performer? It declines 30%. Your environment isn't neutral... Choose wisely. Treat curiosity like a muscle. It's a reward-based behavior that gets stronger with use. When Kobe said he played "to figure things out," he was tapping into the neural circuitry that makes learning feel good and builds upon itself. Ask more questions. Stay curious about your craft. Excellence isn't about perfection or optimization... It's about mastery and mattering. It's about showing up consistently, surrounding yourself wisely, and staying curious along the way. To the late Robert Pirsig - one of the greatest blessings and joys and sources of satisfaction in my life is to be in conversation with your work. He's the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance— "gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going." Arrogant people are loud. Confident people are quiet. Confidence requires evidence. The neural circuitry associated with curiosity is like a muscle: it gets stronger with use. Curiosity is what neuroscientists call a reward-based behavior. It feels good, motivates us to keep going, and builds upon itself. Kobe didn't play to win. He played to learn and grow. Kobe Bryant said he didn't play not to lose, and he didn't even play to win. He played to learn and to grow. He said the reason he did that is because it's so much more freeing. If you're really trying not to lose, you're going to be tight. If you're really trying to win, you're going to be tight. But if you're just out there to grow, you're going to be in the moment. When you're in the moment, you give yourself the best chance of having the performance you want. The word compete comes from the Latin root word com, which means together, and petere, which means to seek, rise up, or strive. In its most genuine form, competition is about rising together (Caitlin Clark's story against LSU). Love: The Detroit Lions had just won their first playoff game in 32 years. Following the game was a scene of pure jubilation. During a short break from the celebrating, the head coach, GM, and quarterback all gave brief speeches. Which collectively lasted about 2 minutes. During those 2 minutes, the word LOVE was repeated 7 times. Homeostatic regulation -- Sense it in the greatness of others and when you're at your best. What Brad calls "excellence." Surround yourself with people who have high standards. When things don't go your way, when you're inevitably heartbroken or frustrated, it's the people around you, the books you read, the art around you, the music you listen to, that's the stuff that speaks to you and keeps you going. It keeps you on the path even amidst the heartbreak. Process goals work better than outcome goals for most people. If you're an amateur, you should be process-focused. When I train for powerlifting, I don't think about the meet that I'm training for. I think about showing up for the session today. If I think about the meeting, I get anxious, and my performance goes down. But if you're Steph Curry and you've been doing your thing for 20 years, you can think about winning the gold medal because your process is so automatic. For 99% of people, focus on the process. "Brave New World" turns fear into curiosity. When you walk up to a bar loaded with more weight than you've ever touched, there can be fear about what it's going to fe
671: Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia) - To Get Trust Give Trust, Why Nupedia Failed, Assuming Good Faith, Walking the Walk, Transparency vs. Sharing Everything, Curiosity as the Ultimate Love Language, and Attracting Trustworthy People
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for more This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. After his daughter Kira's birth faced medical challenges and he couldn't find reliable information online, Jimmy launched Wikipedia in January 2001. In this conversation, Jimmy shares why extending trust before it's earned creates better outcomes, how to deal with bad actors, and the seven rules for building things that last. Notes: Key Learnings (in Jimmy's words) Wikipedia launched 20 days after my daughter was born. When Kira was born, I realized that when you go on the internet, and you've got a question like, "what is this condition my daughter has?" It just wasn't there. There were either random blogs or academic journal articles that were way above my head. Kira was born on December 26th, and I opened Wikipedia on January 15th. Nupedia failed because of the seven-stage review process. Before Wikipedia, we worked on Nupedia. We recruited academics to write articles. You had to send in your CV showing you were qualified before you could write anything. We had very slow progress. I was on the verge of giving up. This top-down approach with a seven-stage review process before you publish anything that's no fun, and nobody's doing it. We let anyone edit and figured we'd add structure later. We thought we'd have to figure out who the editor-in-chief of the chemistry section is. You're gonna have to have some kind of authority and hierarchy. But I thought, let's just not have too much structure for as long as possible. "It's fun. You could be the first person to create a page." There was a point in time when you could write, "Paris is the capital of France". That's amazing. It's not much of an encyclopedia article, but it was fun. It's like, oh, we can just start documenting whatever we know. People started just doing all kinds of stuff. The magic is when you come back and see others improving your work. You could just write a few facts down and hit save, and it's not very good yet. But you'd go back a few days later and see somebody dug in, and they added more information. That element has always been really important. Is it fun? Do you enjoy the activity? Do you meet interesting people? You spend one afternoon, you add a few facts, and then you think, you know what? The world's just ever so slightly better. Trust is conditional, not naive. Out of every thousand people, probably a small handful are gonna be really annoying. But it's really rare to have somebody who's actually malicious. The idea of assuming good faith, as we call it in Wikipedia, is extending trust first before it's been earned. It's conditional. You extend that friendly hand of trust. And if the person proves themselves to be super problematic, then you have to deal with it. To get trust, give trust. Most people are decent. It also creates an environment where trustworthy behavior is rewarded. As a boss, wouldn't it be fantastic if you said, I'm going to go off and do this other thing, but I just trust my people are so good, they're gonna crack on with the work? Sometimes they'll make a call I would've made differently. That's okay. They're smart. Sometimes they're going to get it better than I did. "You haven't earned my trust." When somebody looks you dead in the eye and says, "You haven't earned my trust," that's destruction. It's the opposite of building a culture where people can thrive. Extending trust works in parenting, too. When teenagers say, "Well, it doesn't matter what I do, they're going to think the worst anyway, so I might as well do the bad thing." That's really unfortunate. As opposed to saying to your teenager, "Yeah, you want to go out and stay a little later than before. I want you to do that. I trust you, but you gotta do it the right way." You give that trust and believe me, they come home right on time because this is my chance to actually nail this. Give your children an opportunity to live up to building trust. When trust is broken, you can rebuild it faster than you think. Frances Fry is a Harvard professor who had a huge job at Uber when they had an enormous crisis of trust. People say once you've broken trust, that's it, you can never get it back. But is it really true? No, it's actually not true. She thinks companies can rebuild trust faster than you think. A teenager who's broken a rule can rebuild trust pretty quickly. And our job is to let them rebuild that trust. The eighth rule is walk the walk. The rules of trust aren't just a lot of good words. You actually have to walk the walk. If you say "I screwed up" and you own that, but then you go back to being the same as you were before, you're n
670: Mike Deegan - Building a Championship Culture, Mudita (Joy for Others), Systems Thinking, Curiosity = Love, Getting Out of a Slump, and The DNA of Great Teams
Go to www.LearningLeader.com to learn more... This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My Guest: Mike Deegan just led Denison University Baseball to their first College World Series appearance in program history. He's been named Coach of the Year in back-to-back years and is the all-time winningest coach in school history. In this conversation, Mike shares how he uses Mudita to build culture, how to help people get out of slumps, and why discipline and consistency are superpowers. Key Learnings (in Mike's words) Mudita is a vicarious joy. Can I be happy for another's success as if it's my own? To me, that is like the secret sauce of life. Obviously, in a sports team, not everyone can be the star. One of the biggest misconceptions is that the star rotates. Yeah, you need a superstar to compete at the highest levels, but to win, you're going to need pinch runners, you're going to need the guy laying a big block. It's going to take everyone. It's really celebrating everyone's contribution. In recruiting, I ask parents: Can you be happy for another kid's success as if it's your own? If your neighbor gets a new car, are you happy for them? Or do you say, "Oh, I wish. I bet his parents bought that for him." There are just different ways to show up for people, where you can just have joy. By pouring yourself into others, especially in sports, I think it frees you up to perform your best. Envy is a natural feeling. I don't want anyone to feel that envy from me. I think what we're saying is that envy is a natural feeling. Wanting to do great yourself, those are very natural, and I want people to live in that space. But can we just stop it and be a little bit more intentional and just celebrate what other people are doing well? Spot the good first. As a consultant, there are two ways you can do things. One is to find the negative, and that's really easy to do. But I try to go and spot the good first. There's plenty of time to nitpick later on. Find some opportunities to help people grow. People love to talk about themselves. My wife is very quiet, a great listener, and people love her. She has a million best friends, and no one knows it because she doesn't talk a whole lot. She just listens. If you can just listen and get people to talk about what they're passionate about, it's a life secret. You can tell when someone's really passionate about what they're doing, and you can tell when they're on the fence because they speed up when they talk, they get a little excited. Curiosity is a great way to show love. If you approach it from envy, we don't unpack the cool story. But if you lead with curiosity and not envy, it unpacks everything. I do think it takes a level of self-awareness and comfort in your own skin. How to build self-awareness: Read, write, and get around wise people. If you read a decent amount, if you write (and that was my forcing function, to actually write and put thought to paper), and then get around wise people and just have conversations, I think you'll start building out the awareness of who you are and what you value. A systems thinker builds frameworks that outlast individuals. It's someone who can build out frameworks that are built to put people and the organization in the best spot to win and be successful. It's a framework that outlasts individuals. Coaches may leave or players may leave, but if you have a system built out that it can sustain losing certain individuals, because things are cranking and you can repeat the work. You can do iterations and quickly test if you're getting closer or further from your goals. I almost try to talk people out of coming here. The most underrated thing in our recruiting is when they sit with me, I almost try to talk people out of coming here. I'll say, "Hey, what's the main driver?" If they say playing time, I'm like, "Hey, that's great. That's an awesome goal, but I wouldn't come here for that. We're going to play our best players. But that's not why you come to Denison. You come to be a part of something bigger than yourself, and there are all these other places where you're going to have a much better shot at that." I'm always listening in on what they value and trying to challenge it. Almost get people to self-select out. The better your culture is, you can take chances on people. It's like Randy Moss and the New England Patriots. Tom Brady was an alpha, and you could bring people in and take a risk and see if they can conform to the culture a little bit. When you have things in place, our locker room was phenomenal. People would say, "Hey, I don't know, this kid has some red flags." I'm like, "Red flags, like he's a serial killer? Or like red flag,s like he's super competitive?" The locker room would
669: Oz Pearlman (Oz The Mentalist) - Overcoming Rejection, Getting the Reps, Always Following Up, Living with Gratitude, America's Got Talent, The Curiosity of Steven Spielberg, and Making Others Feel Seen
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for world-class notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Oz Pearlman is the greatest mentalist in the world. After leaving Wall Street to pursue his craft full-time, he's performed for Steven Spielberg's family, for Nobel laureates, and Fortune 500 CEOs. He ran a 2:23 marathon and holds the record for most laps around Central Park in a single day. With five kids and 250+ performances a year, Oz has mastered the art of reading people and understanding what separates good from world-class. Key Learnings (In Oz's words) Doug Anderson is the magician who got me into magic. When I was 13 years old, I went on a cruise with my parents. I got pulled up on stage and took part in a magic trick. (The sponge balls) After the trick, my dad and I started creating theories on how the trick worked. The people in every industry who make it to the top are the ones who are kind and respectful to others. As soon as you stop thinking that you can learn from others, you start dying. What is the recipe for success? It's getting through the tough times. When I walked up to someone at a restaurant, and I'm 14, and I have a very fragile ego, after three tables in a row at differing levels of rudeness go by, "Dude, get outta here, man. Like, I don't wanna see this," it hurts. That's a painful thing to experience. I had to learn a defense mechanism very quickly because carrying that pain, pain turns into anger. When I get to the next table, I'm angry at the next group, even though they haven't done anything wrong to me. I realized to get my goal, I needed tougher, thicker skin. Deflect the rejection onto someone else. Create separation between you and rejection. I created what I would call an agent in my own mind. When you're in showbiz, the conversations you don't wanna have, your agent has for you. I'm a 14-year-old doing restaurants. I don't have an agent, so here's what I decided. When they don't like me, they don't know me. They don't know Oz Pearlman. They know this guy Oz the magician, who walked up to them. Maybe my tricks aren't good enough. Maybe my approach wasn't good enough. Maybe they had a bad day at work or their kid's sick. I made it less about me, and I was able to deflect all of that pain and hurt to this other person. The fear of rejection is worse than the rejection itself. Once you experience rejection a few times, it's not that bad. It's like dating. It's a numbers game. You'll probably not meet your spouse on the first try. You gotta meet a whole lot of other people to realize what you like best in the person that hopefully ends up spending your life with. "Never let someone else be in charge of your destiny." When I do a gig, I don't wait for someone to go, "Oh man, that'd be great. Let me get your business card." I go, "Amazing. Let me get your number and your info. I'll have someone from my team call you." My team is you, me, myself, and I. There's no team. But it sounds fancier. Fake it till you make it. Branding is so important. When I went on America's Got Talent, I made a conscious decision to separate myself from the guy from the year before. (Matt Franco) He won. I thought we were too similar. I had to do something unique or do something better than anyone else. That's when I branded myself as a mentalist and not a magician. Mentalism is much harder than magic to practice. Magic can be practiced in front of a mirror until you get almost perfect at a trick. Mentalism is near impossible to practice at home without an audience. It's like comedy. You can't tell jokes to a mirror and find out if they're funny. You need the audience to do it. Charm takes the sting out of so many things in life. It allows you to win people over quickly. What is charm? Just the ability to smile, to make someone laugh, to be vulnerable in a certain moment. That's a skill that's developed, and if you study it well, you can develop it quicker because everyone thinks it's natural. What I've learned from comedians: It's the purest form of entertainment that exists. You, the audience, and a microphone. I think you start to get a feel for timing. Where to pause, what's funny, how to get people on your side. With a heckler, there's a very fine line between punching down and offending your audience versus having them on your side and laughing with you at someone as opposed to laughing at someone. I'm a slightly more exaggerated version of myself when performing. The volume is turned up a little. The charisma is turned up a little, the ability to joke around, but it's me. I think that resonates. Walking into a room smiling, having no hesitation, connecting with somebody, remembering their name, giving them a compliment. Such easy, low-hanging fruit, separates you from 90% of o
668: Brian Kelly (The Points Guy) - Building a Media Empire, Crafting a Big Vision, Relentless Leaders, Hiring Well, Scaling Up, & How To Win at Travel
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Brian Kelly is the founder of The Points Guy, which he built from a side hustle blog into a travel media empire that he sold for $28 million. At 42, he's now an angel investor in 15+ companies, including Bilt (valued at $11 billion). In this conversation, he shares lessons on manifestation, selling too early, building yourself into the brand, and why vulnerability beats wins in interviews. Key Learnings (in Brian's words) In 1995, I was 12 years old, and I was great with computers, so I started booking all of my dad's travel for work. He'd pay me $10 per booking. Then it turned into points, when my dad showed me all the American and US Air miles he had. "If you can figure out how to use all of them, we can go on a family trip." And the rest is history. That was my first real, oh wait, this points thing is amazing. Points were a way for us to live a fabulous lifestyle. I grew up thinking we were poor, but I really wanted to live a fabulous life. My parents were very humble and did not spend money lavishly. For me I always wanted to travel. When I was a kid, I would spin the globe and be like, This is where I'm going. I would actually research Oman. Somehow genetically, I got this gene of I need to be rich and travel the world. I used to call Mercedes, get all of their glossy pamphlets for all their new cars, and I would cut them out and stick them on my wall. Manifesting alone won't make you wealthy, but visioning helps. I do believe being able to visualize what it looks like and taste it and get close to it helps you take the smaller steps to actually achieve it. When I think of my investments, I actually envision what they're gonna be. I envision that they're multi-billion-dollar companies. I believe it unlocks a level of pushing you to reach these mini steps that you can't see throughout the process. I started The Points Guy in 2010, but there were already Titan bloggers. I for sure felt imposter syndrome, but I saw that what they lacked was creativity. Points and miles are very clinical. Very few people were translating that for an audience. I knew I had an opportunity. I'm in my twenties, living in New York City. I'm gonna explain what everyday people need to know. Building a media brand became my moat. No one else in the points world was doing media. Doing media's frightening. While it was scary going on TV the first couple times (I almost fainted), I knew that each time I did it, I got better. That was the moat I would build. I would build The Points Guy into a brand more so than any of the others who had come before me. I saw from the beginning to double and triple down on that strategy of building something that's more than just a blog, but a lifestyle that people want to achieve. "I made a million bucks in my first six months of just blogging, but using affiliate links." In 2011, within six months of learning about affiliate marketing, I made six figures a month using the credit card links in my blog. I was still working at Morgan Stanley. My mom was like, this sounds too good to be true. You can't leave Morgan Stanley. I was making like $300,000 a month in affiliate. Meanwhile, at Morgan Stanley, my salary is $70,000 a year. But it didn't pay right away. My parents actually lent me $10,000 just to pay my rent. I remember where I was in Madrid when that first Chase deposit of $490,000 hit from months of back pay on the blog. I sold for $28 million because I thought the industry would collapse. When Bankrate offered me $28 million in May 2012, I kind of had this negative mindset over where the industry was going. About a hundred blogs started when people knew they could make money on affiliates. Most bloggers have zero business sense. They were writing stuff like, "Cancel your Amex, cancel your Chase, cancel, cancel. Then get new cards." I saw this really bad business sense, very shortsighted greediness. I'm watching this thinking they're gonna pull the rug. Do I regret selling? Yes, the company is way more than what I sold it for. But at the time, you always have to remember what the landscape was. We're coming out of the recession. There were still a lot of weak indicators. Building myself into the brand gave me leverage. I had a three and a half year earnout. Over that time, the business really started to grow, but then I realized, well, I am also the business. So, the more press I did, when I negotiated with that parent company to stay on, they paid me a lot of money and still a cut of the business to grow it as CEO. It's kind of crazy to think 13 years after selling, I'm still here. But because I built myself as a core part of the business as T
667: Nick Gray - How to Host World-Class Events, Why Leaders Need a Personal Website, Writing Like You Talk, Mastering Introductions, the Viral Tokyo Trip, & Adding Value Before Taking It
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Nick Gray is the author of The Two-Hour Cocktail Party and founder of Museum Hack. He's mastered the art of hosting events that strengthen networks and build genuine connections. In this conversation, he shares practical systems for hosting gatherings, why every leader needs a personal website, and lessons learned from his viral blind date trip to Tokyo. The Learning Leader Show Key Learnings Two Great Ice Breaker Questions: What's a compliment that someone has given you that you've never forgotten about? If you could teach any class about a topic that you're an expert on, what would it be? The power of a network is real: As a leader, you're probably hiring people regularly or looking for investors. By hosting simple, lightweight meetups or dinner parties, or happy hours once a quarter, you can strengthen your network, build it, and keep those loose connections or weak ties warm. Mix professional and personal contacts: For me, a really boring event would be all work people. Look for occupational diversity. If you're hosting a work event, invite some other random folks who you know are gonna be good conversationalists and add to the energy. Don't reach for the top shelf first. Most important advice for leaders: do not invite your most impressive contact to your very first happy hour or meetup. Your first party should be for your neighbors, the parents of kids at your school, those LinkedIn connections, high school buddies you haven't seen in a while. Your first party should be a comfortable meetup for 15 to 22 people that you host at your home with just cocktails, not a dinner party. Then slowly, once a quarter, you'll be adding more people to it and filtering your list. Collect RSVPs to ensure attendance. New hosts are absolutely terrified that nobody will arrive. As long as you get a minimum of 15 people to show up, your party will generally be a success. Use platforms like Partiful or Mixily (not Paperless Post or Evite) to get people to RSVP, let them know what to expect, and send reminder messages. Ten days before, send a reminder message hyping up the party. About a week before, send another reminder message with a little dossier of who the attendees are. Write something little: "Ryan Hawk hosts a podcast. He wrote a book. He lives in Ohio. Ask him about the ski trip he went on with his family." This serves to make anxious people or socially awkward feel like they're welcome and they have a conversational access point. Practical hosting tips on event day: Label your trash cans and your bathrooms. As people arrive, greet and welcome every single person, and make them a name tag. Write it out right in front of them, first name only. Do not pre-write your name tags. Force collisions through structured activities. Your job as a leader is to go through life collecting the interesting people that you meet and helping them meet each other. Can you become a connector? One way to be a connector is to host these meetups and force the collisions. Lead two or three rounds of introductions at your meetup. Make a little announcement 30 minutes after it starts: "There are so many interesting people here. I want you all to meet each other. We're gonna split into small groups. It might seem silly, but I promise the purpose tonight is for you to talk to as many new people as possible. We're gonna split into small groups of three or four people, and you're gonna go around and tell your life story in two minutes." End on time, especially for weekday events: Host from 6:30 to 8:30 PM with a hard stop on Tuesday or Wednesday nights. People appreciate having an end time because they have responsibilities. Having that end time makes them more likely to RSVP yes and actually attend. "I get more compliments on my party ending on time, and they leave with a positive experience, so they want to return for another." Why every leader needs a personal website. If you have a blue check verified on Instagram, if you post at least once a month on LinkedIn, you probably need your own personal website. It's proactive reputation management. People are out there searching for you on Google and on ChatGPT. It may not happen every single day, but it probably happens every week. Whether it's parents of your kids at school, whether it's new employees, people are googling you. You want to have a personal website to put your best foot forward and make a good impression. Carrd.co to create a simple homepage or cloudflare to set up your domain name. Keep it simple: You don't need a Gary Vee type page. Your page can look like a Google Doc. Feed these large language models your story and bio. My website is plain text, simple homepage. I
666: Angie Hicks (Founder of Angie's List) - The Power of Selling Door-to-Door, Executive Presence, Being Told She Was 'Too Nice,' and Her 2-Question Career Filter That Kept Her at One Company for 30 Years
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie's List (now called Angi). She started the company at just 23, going door-to-door as a self-described introvert and non-salesperson, and turned it into a national platform trusted by millions. During our conversation, we discuss what it takes to lead with authenticity and build lasting impact. Key Learnings Lead by listening and showing up. Whether it's knocking on doors as a 23-year-old or meeting employees during office hours as CEO, Angie reminds us that being present, paying attention, and seeking feedback is the heart of leadership. Focus on people and learning. Angie's career filter is simple: Do I like the people I'm working with? Am I learning new things? If yes, keep going. If not, it's time to reconsider. Excellence isn't just about results. It's about the environment and growth around you. Take your work seriously, but not yourself. Confidence, humility, and authenticity go hand in hand. Angie shows us that you can be ambitious and driven without losing sight of the human side of leadership. From Angie... My co-founder, Bill Osterle, came to me when I was a senior in college and said, "Hey, I've got a crazy idea. Your parents are gonna hate it. But why don't we start a business?" I talked to my parents, talked to my friends, and then I ended up talking to my grandfather who was incredibly conservative. He grew up in the Depression, very fiscally responsible. "What do you have to lose? You're 22, your parents aren't going to let you starve, and you're not trying to support a family, so why don't you try it?" I was so taken aback by his response that that comment was probably what pushed me over the edge. I think young people can do this a lot, as we tend to overthink decisions. Sometimes people see things in you that you don't see in yourself, and you've gotta have a little faith. What better time to have a little faith than when you're young and carefree? Work hard, and things will come your way. We started in 1995. It was an offline world. We started as a call-in service and a monthly newsletter. The first name of the company was Columbus Neighbors. We left it like that for a year, and people just didn't get it. They thought the newsletter was the list. We decided to do a rebranding nine months in. We had two options: The List or Jackie's List (Jackie was the mother of one of our investors who knew everybody). At the last minute, Bill said maybe it should be Angie's List. "She does answer the phone." Going door to door was hard. There was a lot of crying, I will be honest. I was selling something that wasn't concrete. "Hey, so when you need a plumber, you're gonna call me and I'm gonna help you find a plumber. And then when you hire someone, you're gonna tell me about it." I viewed it as a numbers game. I need to knock on so many doors every day, and that's just what I'm going to do. Hopefully, if I stay on my pitch and I knock on enough doors, I will sell the right number of memberships. If I was selling one or two memberships a day, that's great. No business was gonna be built on me selling one or two memberships a day, but that's where we were. Sometimes you have to do the hard stuff. Sometimes you have to do the stuff you're not good at, and you have to figure out ways to work around it. Because no matter what you do in your career, there's gonna be stuff you don't love. I broke it down by like, I'm gonna do it for these two hours. I'm a believer in the you can do anything for a year philosophy. I could do anything for an hour a day. So you have to kind of disconnect and treat it that way, as this is like taking my medicine. But you do win every once in a while. And it is fun when you win. It is fun when you sell something. The day Patty gave me her church directory was the best day ever. You gotta celebrate the little wins as well in life. Starting a business is a long journey. It is more of a marathon than a sprint. There's usually not this burst of momentum where everything rolls your way. It's building blocks along the way. If you don't celebrate those little wins and you only focus on, oh, I'm not gonna be happy until we're at 10,000 members, that could be years. You need things to keep you going every day. Patty lived near Bill, so she kinda liked him too, but I think there was a little bit of entrepreneur in Patty. Patty needed nothing from us. She had lived in Columbus her entire life. She had renovated a 1920s house. All she was able to do was give. She knew everybody. But I think she just loved the spirit. You don't know whether that's door seven, door one, door 57, you don't know. But there is typically a breakthrough. Staying true and persi
665: Pat Lencioni - Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Fear-Based Success, Working Genius, Anticipating Objections, and The Hidden Cost of Proving Yourself
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Patrick Lencioni is the founder of The Table Group and a bestselling author of 14 books, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The 6 Types of Working Genius. Behind his achievements (valedictorian, straight A's, business success) were childhood wounds that drove him to prove himself. Key Learnings "I think I'm really good at anticipating people's objections." I think about what they might be thinking and what I need to put out there. Whether talking interpersonally, giving a speech, writing a book, or on a podcast, I like to think about what the other person might be objecting to. Lean into empathy. I always felt like I needed to prove myself in order to be successful and to feel safe. That's not healthy. "When people tell you they got straight A's and were the valedictorian, the student body president, and got accepted to all the schools they wanted to get into, there's a wound there." Based on my personality type, I shouldn't have done all those things, but it was out of the need to prove myself. Which wasn't healthy for me. My parents had a hard time being affirming because of their own lives. It wasn't until I was 55 years old that a friend who's a psychologist said, "You, my friend, have childhood wounds you've never dealt with." I got good Christian counseling and realized that the way I grew up, I wasn't supposed to grow up that way. It's common in athletes & CEOs to feel like they haven't done enough. They need to do more. "You're a noun, not a verb. You are enough, and you're not defined by what you do." Great achievements come out of fear, but "true greatness is best when it's only in the things that you're meant to be great at, and that you're doing it out of freedom and passion and love, not out of fear of failure." I remember seeing Tiger Woods on the Tonight Show when he was four years old. He was being groomed to be a golfer when he was four. It's best in life when we discover who God means us to be, then we do the things we're supposed to do and we're okay with not being good at the things we're not supposed to. Are we too affirming now as parents? People who are pretty darn good at everything it's usually because they're doing something out of fear. When I was a kid, my parents came from World War II and the Depression. It was like, hey, you got a roof over your head. There was a lot of suffering, and they weren't really attuned to that. Now we are hyper worried of our own kids suffering. No, suffering is actually good. They need to know they're loved and safe, but they're not gonna be protected from what is necessary for their development. The mistake I made was, oh no, I don't want them to feel like I did. Thankfully at my age, I'm now interacting with my mostly adult children and explaining to them what I did wrong. The Teammate Trifecta - How should we use it?: When I wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team right after 9/11, I thought, "That's the book on teamwork." Then we realized you need The Ideal Team Player (humble, hungry, and smart) to hire people that fit on teams. Years later, we came up with Working Genius: Are they in the right seat? 3 steps to building a team: Don't let people on the bus if they're not humble, hungry, and smart. Make sure you have them in the right chair based on their gifts. Then teach them the Five Dysfunctions. Pat's Two Working Geniuses: Invention and Discernment "Invention means I love to come up with ideas out of nothing. Discernment means I love evaluating things, curating things. God wired me to do that kind of thing." When people say, "Pat, we have five minutes, and we need a new idea," I just take a deep breath and smile. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Every new idea I've come up with has been in the field, working with people. I asked Jim Collins, "Jim, you do all this research with data. I go into a room with leaders and just think, What's going on here?" He said, "Pat, that's just as valid as what I do. That's called field research and face validity." What is Pat terrible at? Finishing things. People say, "Well you finished 14 books." And that's because I had the help of others to make me finish those. I got a 4.0 in high school. That wasn't my personality. I went to every class in college, never blew off classes. My personality is the kind that should blow off classes that don't matter. But I was so afraid of failing and disappointing my parents and teachers that I did anything they asked. That was not natural; that was fear-based. Can we use fear as useful fuel? "You can use it in the short term, but if you're doing it in your life, no." "We should celebrate what other peop
664: David Adelman - 664: David Adelman - Campus Apartments CEO and 76ers Co-Owner on Losing a Big Bet, Bar Mitzvah Real Estate Deals, His Grandfather's Holocaust Survival Story, and Building Philadelphia's New Arena
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: David Adelman is the CEO of Campus Apartments, founder of Darco Capital, and co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers. During our conversation, we discussed how losing a basketball bet at age 11 changed his life, investing his bar mitzvah money in real estate, becoming CEO at 25, his grandfather's Holocaust survival story, and why it gives him perspective on struggle, embracing failure, the trade-offs of building something excellent, and what he looks for when hiring leaders. Key Learnings "Why not me? Why not now?" David's mantra cuts through all the overthinking and excuses we make. When he saw other people building national real estate portfolios, he didn't wonder if it was possible—he asked why he couldn't do it. Stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Ask yourself: why not me? Why not now? Make mistakes, just not the same one twice. David doesn't expect perfection from himself or his team. He expects learning. Fail fast, fail forward, but don't repeat the same failure. That's not growth—that's negligence. Embrace the suck, but evolve through it. David's grandfather survived the Holocaust after his wife and children were murdered. He escaped, joined the resistance, and rebuilt his life from nothing. When David thinks about that, he says: "No matter what, I don't know struggle." That's perspective. Most of what we call struggle is just discomfort. Understanding that doesn't make your challenges disappear... It makes them manageable. If your grandfather could survive the unthinkable, you can handle the hard day in front of you. At age 11, David challenged family friend Alan Horwitz to a basketball game and made a wager. Horwitz didn't let the kid win, and David lost his basketball, football, and baseball glove. To get them back, he had to go to Campus Apartments every Saturday to sweep sawdust and stack lumber. This losing bet became his entry into a billion-dollar career. At 13, David gambled his $2,000 bar mitzvah money by investing it with Horwitz in a building at 45th and Pine Streets in Philadelphia - a property his company still owns today. By age 17, he bought his first solely owned investment property. David was accepted into Temple University Beasley School of Law but chose to become a Property Manager at Campus Apartments instead. At age 25 in 1997, he became CEO of Campus Apartments. His grandfather, Sam Wasserman, was captured by the Nazis in 1942 and taken to the Sobibor concentration camp, where his wife and two children were immediately executed. Wasserman escaped during an organized revolt, joined the resistance, was wounded in battle, and was cared for by a woman named Sophie, who became his second wife. David said, "I feel a deep connection to him and what he went through. It's more like a sense of duty to honor him." David says, "I bet on jockeys, not horses. I ask, 'If the thing fails, would we support them again?' To be clear, a lot of our [investments] are going to fail.' He learned the hard way: "Friends would say, 'Here's a deal, put in X amount,' so you know, it's $250,000 or $500,000 or $1 million. I realized very quickly that it's probably a money-losing prospect to just invest in a friend of a friend's idea or because someone at your country club is investing in it." "It's called working off your debt." I literally lost everything to my "Uncle" Alan in 30 minutes when I was 11. My baseball glove, football, basketball, even my bank book. Every Saturday, I had to stack lumber and sweep sawdust to get one item back. Two years later, at my Bar Mitzvah, my parents asked if I wanted to give my gift money to my grandfather, who was good at picking stocks. I said no, I want to give it to Uncle Alan and buy real estate. At 13, I drove around with him, picked the biggest building he owned, handed him $2,000, and became a partner. My grandfather was in Poland with a wife and two kids when the Nazis rounded him up. There were two lines. One for men, one for women, and children. He never saw his wife and kids again. He escaped from the Sobibor prison camp, became a freedom fighter, got shot, and was in a hospital recovering when a woman checking on her brother saw this lonely soldier and went over to check on him. That was my grandmother. My mother was born in a displaced persons camp after the war. "No matter what, when I'm getting the crap kicked out of me in business or anything else, I don't know struggle." I think about my grandfather and what he went through. "That guy knew pressure and made it through the other side. So I have to stop being a little bitch about it and lean in." Uncle Alan always said, "Whatever you do in life, it shouldn't feel like work."
663: Priya Parker - The Art of Gathering with Purpose: Power, Preparation, Magical Questions, and the Psychology of Bringing People Together
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes Join tens of thousands of leaders pursuing excellence: https://ryanhawk.kit.com/profile This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Priya Parker is a master facilitator, conflict resolution expert, and author of the bestselling book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Priya has spent decades facilitating difficult conversations in boardrooms, communities, and conflict zones. In this conversation, she reveals the mechanics of meaningful gathering and why most of us are doing it wrong. Key Learnings A facilitator is interested in the life of a group. I think of facilitation as working with people who are interested in the infrastructure of three or more people who need to come together and are ideally changed for the better by what transpires between them. A facilitator thinks deeply about how to set up the conditions to increase the likelihood that transformation happens. Great facilitators are obsessed with language. There's listening to make someone feel heard, but the difference between green facilitators and seasoned ones is an obsession and ability to hear, recall, and play with language. You have to understand what people are actually saying and be able to reflect it back in ways that unlock new meaning. Understanding power is essential to facilitation. You need to know how decisions are being made, who is talking more than others, when to allow for that, and what your own relationship is to holding the group. When do you shut up? When do you pull people out? When do you push back? All of this is fundamentally about understanding power dynamics. I'm a third-generation ostrich. On both sides of my family, when conflict arises, we stick our heads in the sand. Nothing to see here, folks. But I've cultivated the ability to hold heat. Even now, when facilitating a reckoning and the heat rises, my palms still get sweaty, I can feel my heart racing, blood rushing to my cheeks. But I've learned how to stay present with that discomfort. Counterintuitively, having deep empathy for people who want to flee makes me more effective. "90% of the success of what happens in the room, and as a facilitator, happens before anybody arrives." This is what my mentor Randa Slim taught me, and it's absolutely true. The construction of the house happens before anyone gets there. Dr. Hal Saunders changed everything for me. He was an American diplomat who served five presidential administrations and was part of the Camp David Accords. After leaving government, he realized that while governments can create peace treaties, people's perceptions of each other on the ground haven't necessarily changed. He trained me as a teenager in sustained dialogue, and I learned facilitation the way it should be learned—through apprenticeship. Even in his seventies and eighties, he always believed he had something to learn. The first questions people ask you signify what they value. When I arrived at the University of Virginia, people kept asking, "What are you?" I learned quickly that they meant racially. My mother, an anthropologist, had taught me that the first questions a community asks reveal what matters most to them. Race was clearly very important there. I made myself a conflict resolution facilitator. Growing up between two vastly different households—toggling every two weeks between a vegetarian, Buddhist home where the word "God" was never mentioned and an evangelical Christian home where we never ate before saying Grace. I became deeply interested in when and why and how people come together, what they think of as normal, how they create and change cultures, and how they come apart. Your highest real estate is when people are together in the same place at the same time. Wasting time in the room figuring out what to say or do is actually wasting everyone's time. A huge part of preparing for any gathering is figuring out what the right conversation is for this group to have, and how to equip them to have it well. Think of military pre-mission briefs. They're really good at setting mission objectives. This is the goal, this is what we're striving for. Then they debrief afterward to learn and do better next time. That same discipline applies to any gathering, whether it's a leadership retreat or hosting dinner at your house. Every gathering is a social contract. You're creating a temporary constitution. At a dinner party, there's an implicit rule: bring a bottle of wine. People find out they've broken the constitution when someone says, "Wow, they didn't even bring a housewarming gift." We have all these implicit norms, and in diverse groups... Which is every group, not just racially, but people with different assumptions about how things work—you need to ma
662: Nicholas Thompson - The Atlantic CEO on Growing Up With a "Precariously Insecure" Genius Father, Hiring Leaders with an Edge, How Running Builds Discipline, and Why Moving at an Uncomfortable Pace Built a Million-Subscriber Media Empire
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic and former editor-in-chief of WIRED. He's the author of the best-selling book (and one of my favorites of the year), The Running Ground. Nick shares why great leaders must balance being decisive with staying open to being wrong, how to build teams that challenge your thinking without creating chaos, and why the most important skill for the next decade is knowing what questions only humans can answer. Key Learnings Consistency Over Intensity Creates Results - If you go out there every day, six or seven days a week, and a couple days you push yourself really hard, you get faster. There's no two ways about it. If you don't do that, you don't get faster. It's a very good reminder that you can get a lot done if you just go and allot time to pushing yourself. Recommendation letter written by the Stanford faculty about Nick's dad to be a Rhodes Scholar: "Scotty Thompson is the kind of young man that comes along only once in approximately ten years. I cannot recall ever having known a student who possessed the same combination of intelligence, creativity, energy, drive, and dedication. He has attempted more, achieved more, than anyone we have studied– including some who now hold high office. He is generally conceded among those who have observed the student body since World War II to be the outstanding leader of the era. I think it likely that in the entire history of Stanford campus life, he has had no near rival since Herbert Hoover as an undergraduate." Also about Nick's Dad: Tracy Bennett, one of his graduate students, said, "He was flamboyant, gently endearing, annoyingly arrogant, piercingly intelligent, entertaining, and more. I'd never met a man, nor had a professor, who was clearly so brilliant and at the same time so precariously insecure." His grandfather, Frank Thompson, placed second in the Southern California extemporaneous speaking contest held at Whittier College. First place was Richard Nixon. Parenting — "Nothing makes me more worried about failure than parenting." "Parenting is suffused with regrets, confusion, and mistakes. But when I run by, I know my children are rooting for me to succeed with infinite love and enthusiasm." Running hard... Pushing yourself. Why do it? "Discipline builds discipline. Discipline is cumulative." Sometimes You Have to Trick Yourself - I ran 10:48 because the track was bigger than I thought, and I didn't realize how fast I was going. If I had known I was running at a 5:23 pace, I would've shut down. My body would've started to hurt. Sometimes you can't let yourself know what you're actually doing, or you'll get scared. Hiring at The Atlantic - The people he hires at The Atlantic share four must-have attributes: A spirit of generosity. A force of ideas. They're relentlessly hard workers. And they have an edge: an anxiety about getting great work done. That last one stuck with me. The best people aren't just talented... They're driven by a productive anxiety to do work that matters. Becoming CEO of The Atlantic: The Search & Selection: The Atlantic conducted a yearlong search after President Bob Cohn left in fall 2019. When owners Laurene Powell Jobs and David Bradley announced Thompsont in December 2020, they said "Nick is singular; we've seen no one like him" and that he brought "a surround-sound coverage of relevant experience." Move at an Uncomfortable Pace - You don't get anything you want by being comfortable. If you're working in a way that feels easy and setting deadlines where everything seems smooth, you're not growing, you're not learning, you're not getting there. That's a lesson from running, and it's a good lesson for work. Set Audacious Goals - We're setting two extremely big goals at The Atlantic. Our projections don't suggest we're going to hit them. But the same was true last time when I said we're gonna get profitable and a million subscribers in three years. We got there. Sometimes having a really big goal motivates you and forces all the tough choices. Continuous Forward Motion Matters Most - When I realized yesterday's marathon was going badly, I kept telling myself: continuous forward motion. Sometimes the goal becomes just finishing. It's better to make a full drop in pace and hold that than to slowly slide backwards every mile once you know you won't hit your goal. Every Extra Word Is an Opportunity to Lose People - Every extra word, every extra thought, every extra detail that doesn't propel the story needs to be removed. This book is 75,000 words, but there's 60,000 words I cut. Is this sentence absolutely essential? No? It's gone. That's storytelling, and that's leadership communication. T
661: Suzy Welch - How to Identify Your Core Values, Close the Authenticity Gap, and Live with Purpose
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Suzy Welch is known for co-founding the Jack Welch Management Institute and writing bestsellers like 10-10-10: A Life Transforming Idea. Her career includes roles as an editor-in-chief for Harvard Business Review, a crime reporter, and a professor. She teaches at NYU and is the best-selling author of Becoming You. Key Learnings Purpose Requires Realism, Not Just Passion - Everyone wants to be the drummer in Disturbed, but that guy's good at drumming. My whole methodology is about realism. You have to know what your values are, what your interests are, but you better be good at it or forget it. Otherwise, it's a hobby. Values Are Choices, Not Virtues - Most people confuse values and virtues. Virtues are things like integrity, courage, and thankfulness... Behaviors we all should have more of. Values are choices about how you want to live, work, and relate. It's a value if it would drive who you married, what job you took, and where you went on vacation. There are 16 Measurable Values - Values exist on a continuum like a DNA profile. Scope reflects how exciting a life you want. Radius is how much you want to change the world systemically. Belovedness is how important an intimate relationship is to you. Work centrism is whether you love work for work's sake or if it's just a means to an end. Men Over 32 Value Romantic Relationships Most - We just got data showing that for men over the age of 32, belovedness is their number one value. It's much lower for women. Only 50% of people have family centrism in their top five values—we assume everyone shares our values, but they don't. Your Authenticity Gap Reveals Your Pain - You could hold the value of scope as number one, but not be able to live it right now because of your job or family situation. That gap between what you value and what you're living—we call that your authenticity gap. If you've got a big one, you know it because it hurts. Gen Z's Top Value Is Self-Care - 75% of Gen Z have self-care, wellbeing, pleasure, and leisure as their top value. Their top three are self-care, authentic self-expression, and helping others. Meanwhile, hiring managers want achievement, scope, and work centrism. The overlap is 2%. Aptitudes Are Your Brain's Dominant Hand - We have nine cognitive aptitudes preset by age 15. Are you a generalist or a specialist? A future focuser or a present focuser? A brainstormer or someone who comes up with one fully baked idea per year? It's painful to be a generalist in a specialist job. Your Personality Is How The World Experiences You - Your personality is not the list of adjectives you write about yourself. It's how the world experiences you. When I did my 360 feedback, people said I was the hurricane, not the calm at the center. I had to learn to communicate better the thoughts I had, and learn to be less chaotic. Everyone Writes Themselves As The Hero - A police lieutenant once told me: everyone writes the story of their life with themselves at the center as the hero. No matter what story we tell ourselves, we always cast ourselves as the hero. That's why self-awareness is so hard and why we need testing, not just self-reflection. The Aperture Problem: Kids Only Know Five Jobs - When kids come out of high school, they only know about five jobs, two of which are their parents. By college it goes up to seven. By grad school, MBAs are thinking about two or three options—banking, consulting, or tech. There are 135 industries and thousands of types of work nobody tells them about. Great Leaders Don't Do It For The Money - I've been blessed to know many of the greatest leaders. They're doing it for love of people, excitement, work, or impact. I've never met a great leader who was doing it for the money. Jensen Huang and Jeff Bezos are examples—clarity, vision, excellence in everything, no shortcuts. Better To Be The Author Than The Editor - When you're ambitious, you end up surrounded by voices and can become the editor of your life. You have to become the author. Paint a self-portrait of yourself standing still so that when you start running, you know where you're going and why. Reflection Questions What would the 5 people closest to you say about how you show up? Would their description match how you see yourself, or do you have a self-awareness gap you haven't addressed? If you mapped your actual daily behaviors against your stated top values, would they align? Or are you living someone else's version of success while calling it your own? Are you the author of your life or the editor? Whose voices are loudest in your head when making big decisions, and have you given yourself permission to write your own story? Former Episodes Re
660: James Clear (Live at Ohio University!) - The Four Laws of Behavior Change, Systems vs Goals, Building Better Habits, Mastering the Two-Minute Rule, Having a Great Marriage, & The Plateau of Latent Potential
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: James Clear is the author of one of the most influential books of our generation, Atomic Habits. He's sold over 25 million copies worldwide and has helped millions of people transform their lives through the power of small changes. We brought the podcast to the campus of Ohio University, where we recorded live in front of 250 of the most impressive college students I've ever met. Notes: I loved the Morgan Housel moment - It was cool to see James' reaction to it (you can watch it on YouTube.com/RyanHawk). Morgan said, "I have absolutely not a single cell of envy for him. Because he is the nicest guy you will ever meet. You will not meet a nicer human than James Clear. You will not meet someone as successful as he is and as humble as he is. He is a saint in my life. And because of that, I adore every bit of this guy, so I cannot envy him. I am just inspired by his success, full stop." We should all strive to be that for the people in our lives. Your WHO - "Every opportunity in life comes through a person. Relationships are usually the most important thing. If you want to achieve more, there is a relationship that can unlock better results. If you want to make a meaningful contribution, helping others is a great way to do it. If you sim Willpower – 'People with tremendous self-control aren't that different from those who struggle. They're simply better at structuring their lives in a way that doesn't require heroic willpower.' It's not about determination, it's about design. That's liberating. Fall in Love with the Process - "When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don't have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision." Make It Obvious, Easy, Attractive, Satisfying - The four laws of behavior change: make good habits obvious and bad habits invisible, make good habits easy and bad habits difficult, make good habits attractive and bad habits unattractive, make good habits satisfying and bad habits unsatisfying. Use the Two-Minute Rule - Scale any habit down to something that takes two minutes or less. Want to read more? Read one page. Want to run a marathon? Put on your running shoes. The goal is to master showing up and make the entry point as easy as possible. Standardize Before You Optimize - You can't improve a habit that doesn't exist. Master the art of showing up before worrying about optimization. Build consistency first, then work on increasing the dose or improving performance. Track Your Habits Visually - I use a paper clip strategy: start each day with 120 paper clips in one jar, move one to another jar each time I complete a writing session. Visual tracking provides clear evidence of progress and makes the habit satisfying. Habits Need to Match Your Personality - There's no one-size-fits-all approach. Morning people and night owls need different strategies. Work with your natural tendencies, not against them. Choose habits and contexts that align with who you already are. Create Commitment Devices - Make bad habits difficult through commitment devices. I had my assistant change my social media passwords every Monday and only give them back on Fridays. This eliminated mindless scrolling during my productive work hours. Focus on Systems, Not Goals - Winners and losers have the same goals. The difference is their systems. Goals are about the results you want to achieve; systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Fall in love with the process, not the outcome. Build Habits That Align With Your Desired Identity - I wanted to be a writer, so I wrote every Monday and Thursday for years. Eventually, I had proof. I couldn't deny I was a writer because of the body of work I'd created. Your habits are how you embody your identity. The Plateau of Latent Potential - We expect progress to be linear, but it's not. Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. You need to persist long enough to get through the plateau and break through to the other side. Reduce Friction for Good Habits - I want to work out more, so I lay out my workout clothes the night before. When I wake up, they're the first thing I see. The easier you make the habit, the more likely you are to do it. Increase Friction for Bad Habits - Want to watch less TV? Unplug it after each use and put the remote in another room. The added friction makes the bad habit less appealing and gives you a moment to make a better choice. Automate Good Decisions - Technology can lock in good behavior. I set up automatic transfers to m
659: Derek Sivers - Not Waiting for Permission, Hell Yeah or No, Leadership Lessons From The Dancing Guy, & Why The Standard Pace is for Chumps
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Derek Sivers is the founder of CD Baby and author of "Hell Yeah or No" and "Useful Not True." He shared how he graduated from Cal Berkeley in two years instead of four because the "standard pace for chumps" - a lesson that shaped his entire career of institutional skepticism and unconventional thinking. From creating viral shipping emails to understanding why explorers make bad leaders, Derek shares why being busy means being out of control, how your first thought is an obstacle to your best work, and why you can't predict what the world will want from you until you try everything and listen closely to what it's telling you. Notes: No Speed Limit – Most things are paced so the slowest person can keep up. If you're driven and motivated, you can go so much faster than the standard pace. I graduated from Berkeley in two years by learning four semesters of harmony in one hour. "The standard pace is for chumps. You can do so much better than that." Question the Standard Process – When someone says you must go through usual channels or something will take a certain time, assume there's probably a hack. Develop institutional skepticism - there's usually a better way than how most people do it. Create Opportunities, Don't Wait for Them – You don't have to wait until a company is hiring. If you can see how to benefit them, walk in and show them what you can do for free first. Alan Tepper made Warner Brothers more money than anyone that year by just showing up with a plan. Make Everything Valuable to Others – The starving artist spends all their time on work valuable to them but not to others. Use money as a neutral measure - if you can make money with your art, it ensures what you're doing is valuable to other people. "It's almost impossible to predict what the world will want from you... Keep yourself out there and listen closely to what the world is telling you it wants from you." Stand Out by Being Different – Don't imitate what everyone else is doing. I wrote a silly shipping email in 10 minutes that became one of the most viral emails ever mentioned in business books. Ask yourself constantly: What has nobody done before? The First Follower Creates the Movement – We focus on the shirtless dancing guy, but the first follower is what made everything happen. Until then, people kept their distance from the freak. If you find someone doing something great, follow them and show others how to follow. Every Sentence Must Matter – My books are 90-100 pages, but start as 1,000-page rough drafts. I spend 1-2 years full-time chopping every sentence that doesn't absolutely need to be there. "I'm not gonna put a single sentence out into the world that doesn't need to be there." Make every word count - eliminate everything that doesn't add value. Hell Yeah or No is Context-Dependent – This tool is for when you're overwhelmed with options and need to raise the bar. Straight out of college, say yes to everything because opportunities are like lottery tickets. Once something rewards you, then say no to other things and double down. Busy Means Out of Control – "Busy to me implies out of control. You're busy if you've let other people shove shit into your schedule." Leave space instead of filling it - that time to think is what creates valuable insights others don't have time to develop. Your First Thought is an Obstacle – Don't honor the thought that came first. In brainstorming, acknowledge the first idea, then keep going - don't stop at two or three. Even silly ideas can seed great ones you'd never reach without that stepping stone. All Beliefs Are a Myth – People worshiped Zeus for centuries; now we call it mythology. But we say our own beliefs are true while others' are superstitions. I expected China to be awful from American news, but found it wonderful - question what you've been told. Use Prejudice as Your Compass – If you notice you're prejudiced against something, that's exactly what you should explore. Burning Man sounds awful to me; therefore, I should probably go. Steer into your biases to overcome them and gain new perspectives. Explorers Make Terrible Leaders – Explorers try everything and change direction constantly, which frustrates teams. Leaders go in a straight line to a clear destination, unwavering in mission even if the path changes. I loved changing my mind, which made me a bad leader until I learned the difference. Set projects with clear missions, even if you're personally exploring other things. Try Everything Until the World Says Yes – I had a booking agency, a record label, a recording studio, and my own music - all failures. Then, a side project to help friends (CD Baby) took off. You can't pre
658: Dave Berke - From Top Gun to Extreme Ownership: Managing Ego, Building Humility, Emotional Detachment, Agile Planning, and Leading Teams Through Chaos
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Dave Berke is a retired US Marine Corps Officer, TOPGUN Instructor, and now a leadership instructor and speaker with Echelon Front, where he serves as Chief Development Officer. As a F/A-18 pilot, he deployed twice from the USS John C Stennis in support of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spent three years as an Instructor Pilot at TOPGUN where he served as the Training Officer, the senior staff pilot responsible for the conduct of the TOPGUN course. Notes: July 2001: Plans Don't Survive Contact - Dave's Top Gun graduation exercise as flight lead. Wingman yells, "Showtime one-one break right!" - an F-5 snuck into formation. Dave was staring at the radar instead of looking out, had to fall out of formation, and ended up at the back instead of leading from the front. Mission successful, but nothing like he planned. Dave: "The outcome was still really good... except it was nothing like I thought it was going to be." Lesson: You're planning for the success of the outcome, not how you're going to do it. The most important attribute in a leader is humility. To be effective, you must be able to listen, learn, be flexible, and admit you're wrong sometimes. One of the biggest issues they deal with when working with leaders is ego and/or the inability to be humble. As leaders, we need to be self-aware enough to realize when our ego is getting the best of us. And surrounding ourselves with people who will help us know when that is happening as well. Be Fluid with Plans, Deliberate with Outcomes - Be really fluid and loose with plans, but deliberate about aligning the team on outcomes. Dave grew up as a control freak, OCD planner. Dave: "In life, it's just not how life works... If you can align on the mission and outcome, and you are very open-minded that there are a lot of different ways to get there, you're far more likely to be successful." The military saying, "The enemy gets a vote." Ryan's quarterback coach after an interception: "He's on scholarship too, you know?" Process: How You Create It Matters Most - Process is important, but how you create it matters most. If you agree on the outcome, the conversation should be less about agreement, more about "When you talk about step one, what are you thinking? How does this lead to step two?" The process has to be organic. When you create it, you're more likely to maneuver around challenges. Book Dedication: Chris and Kat - Book dedicated to Corporal Chris Leon and his mother, Kat. Chris was a radio operator on Dave's 13-man Anglo team. June 20, 2006, Chris was killed by an enemy sniper in Iraq - first Anglican Marine killed there. Dave's son is Matthew Leon Burke - took Chris's last name. Chris's mom Kat is Aunt Kat to Dave's family. Dave: "I always say I really deep down wish I didn't know Kat, because that would've meant Chris came home and life just went on. But that's not what happened." Chris taught bravery. Kat taught strength. Top Gun Reality: It's About the Team - 1986 Top Gun most impactful movie on Dave's life at 14. But the movie depicts a lone wolf. Marine Corps teaches: Your contribution to the team matters most. A really good pilot who's self-centered will do more damage than a slightly less capable pilot who's a real team player. Dave: "If there's ever a team sport, it's going into combat... It's not about you. It's about the team." Trust: Action, Not Description - Echelon codifies relationships: Trust, respect, listening, influence. Trust is the cornerstone. Dave: "If you don't trust me, I could be good at so many things. If there is a trust gap, there's going to be a problem in the relationship and team." Trust is action you take. Ego: The Universal Challenge - When Echelon works with companies, challenges are almost always connected to ego. Dave: "Our egos tend to wreak havoc at each level of organization." From birth, the ego drives us down the wrong path. When debating plans, ego says, "You're right, he's wrong." Building good leadership is managing egos. Dave: "Humility is the most important attribute in a leader. All the attributes, humility is number one, and we don't waffle on that." Humility Enables Everything Else - Dave worked with the biggest, toughest SEALs. Attribute most critical to success: humility. Ability to listen, learn, be flexible, change, admit you're wrong, and go with someone else's plan. It even affects fitness. Humility touches everything. Doesn't diminish other attributes, but allows you to strengthen them. Teaching Humility: Subordinate Your Ego - You can't tell someone with a big ego to be humble. Dave: "The biggest challen
657: Helen Lewis - Why Genius Is a Myth, Edison Needed Teams, Self-Promoters Are Overrated, Conspiracy Theories, Shakespeare Needed Luck, and How To Build an Excellent Career
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Genius Myth: Great Ideas Don't Come from Lone Geniuses. Notes: Shakespeare: Talent + Luck + Timing - William Shakespeare died in 1616 at age 52, celebrated but not yet immortal. His icon status required massive luck: friends published the First Folio (saving King Lear), then 50 years later, Charles II reopened England's theaters after Puritan closures and needed content. Companies turned to Shakespeare's IP, adapting his work (including changing tragedies to happy endings). Helen: "If anyone deserves to be called a genius, it's him. But he died as a successful man of his age. Scenius Over Genius - Brian Eno coined "scenius" - places that are unusually productive and creative. Shakespeare moved from Warwickshire to London for the theaters and playwrights. Helen: "You don't just have to be Leonardo, you also need Florence... Where do you find the coolest, most interesting bleeding edge of your field?" Modern example: Joe Rogan's Comedy Mothership in Austin created an alternative to LA/NYC for comedians like Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe. Ryan: "Put yourself in rooms where you feel like the dumbest person... force you to rise up, think differently, work harder." Tim Berners-Lee vs. Elon Musk - Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Has knighthood, lives an ordinary life, kids named Alice and Ben. Most people have never heard of him. Elon Musk has a lot of children, talks about his genes needing to live on, and lives a very public life. Helen: "We overrate the self-promoters, the narcissists. We demand oddness and specialness... We don't call modest people geniuses because they're too normal." Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) exploited this - looked like a genius (Steve Jobs cosplay, messy math prodigy) but stood on houses of cards. Trauma and the "I'll Show You" Engine - Matthew Parris wrote Fracture after noticing how many "great lives" had traumatic childhoods - loss of parents, being unloved, bullied. Helen: "I don't think that's necessarily genius in objective achievement. It's more like a hunger for recognition or fame... a kind of 'I'll show all of you' engine." Stephen Hawking on IQ - Stephen Hawking: "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers." The Flynn Effect shows average IQ rose over the 20th century through better nutrition, schooling, and living conditions. Higher IQ correlates with better outcomes. But at the top end, every IQ point ≠ is one success point. Christopher Langan (the highest IQ guy) thinks he has a theory to overturn Einstein, and that Bush did 9/11 to cover it up. No history of achievement. Helen: "Smart people don't always prosper. You need the gears that connect the engine to the wheels on the road." Conspiracy Theories: Narcissism as Driver - Narcissism is the most correlated personality trait with conspiracy thinking. Helen: "The sheeple, the NPCs think this, but I alone have seen the truth. It positions you as the protagonist of reality." The Internet is a "confirmation bias engine." But conspiracies are sometimes true (Epstein's corrupt plea deal), which is why conspiracy thinking persists. Researcher Karen Stenner's solution: Get back to depoliticized conspiracies like Bigfoot, crop circles, Area 51 - harmless things that got people outside instead of "shoot up a pizza restaurant." The Beatles: Finiteness Creates Legend - Psychologist Han Isaac said geniuses should either die before 30 or live past 80. Middle is "eh." The Beatles had both: a short career that ended definitively, then John Lennon was shot at 40, frozen in time. Paul McCartney lives on, performs at Glastonbury with John's vocals. Craig Brown: "The Rolling Stones just go on and on, but there's never as much of the Beatles as you want." Quality Over Quantity - Helen: "Incentive now is producing constantly for algorithms... That's neither fun nor produces the best work." Early career: say YES. Later career: "The most important thing you can say is no." Her metric: "Can I say honestly, that was the best I could do? I didn't cut corners. That's the metric." Podcast: advised to do 2-3 episodes weekly for rankings, has been doing weekly for 10.5 years. Shows that went daily? He stopped listening. "I'm gonna increase the quality bar, not the quantity." Robert Greene: "Do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence." Improving the Silence - "My dad's not the loudest at family gatherings, doesn't have the most words, but when he speaks, we all stop and listen. That's who you want to be." Applies to meetings: people vomit garbage to show how smart they are instead of waiting for something valua