#343 The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness: David Ogilvy

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/4c2d0e850d6d9587

This book is about philosophy. It's about ethos, beliefs.
And all those things which gentlemen love to yap about.
If it's any consolation, though.
This book is also about sex.
As it's written primarily to address a rather awkward question.
Can a two billion dollar gorilla
Like Og V.
Ever be svelted?
Sultry and sexy again.
The Og V agency of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties was far hotter than WK, CB, these are all these other competitors that they're listing at the time.
And the rest of them combined.
The question is, can we still be gorgeous now that we're several hundred pound heavier?
The answer to our dilemma can be summed up in two pithy words.
Divine discontent.
decades before advertising profits were preaching good enough and good enough.
Ogy was already practicing it.
But what did David actually mean by divine discontent?
Here's an interpretation.
Don't bow your head.
Don't know your place.
Defy the gods.
Don't sit back, don't give in.
Don't give up.
Don't win silver medals.
Don't be so easily happy with yourself.
Don't be spineless.
Don't be gutless.
Don't be toys.
Don't go gentle into that good night.
And don't ever.
ever allow a single scrap of rubbish out of this agency.
This handbook
Well tell us how to make David's
Divine discontent.
A habit.
By the daily practice.
Of the following creative
Habits.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is the internal pursuit of unhappiness.
The subtitle is being very good is no good.
You have to be very, very, very, very good.
and is written by the team at Og V and Mather.
and David Ogie.
Before jumping back into the book, I'm gonna tell you how this unexpected episode came about.
I've been spending the last like week and a half
uh deep in study on one of my favorite filmmakers. I'm making an episode on him right now.
Uh it's Quentin Tarantino. I get to the end of the book on Tarantino.
The epilogue of that book blew my mind. I'm sitting on my desk. I put the book down.
And on my desk to the left of my computer monitor has been this book. I've read
This book, The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness. And it you can't even really call it a book. It's sixty five pages. You can read it.
I don't know, in an hour.
And for some reason I decided to pick it back up. And then I just in one sitting
Read through.
Uh the book again.
And even though I read it before and I'm obsessed with David Ogy, I consider him one of my personal heroes. And I didn't even know who he was until I read Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. And he kept referring to Ogree as a genius. And so I was like, I gotta find out who this guy is. And so I bought every book that I could find on him. And then uh somebody actually told me, they're like
I'm sure you have every book.
But are you gonna do an episode on the internal pursuit of unhappiness? I was like, What is that?
So months ago I wind up buying this book. So anyways, long story short.
Uh, I had this idea in my mind, it's like, Oh, I like this book, but you know, I can I can't ever do an episode on it. You know, it's it's too small.
And for some reason after I read it this time, I thought of an idea I learned.
A long time ago, and this is probably because a main story uh the next episode will be obviously on Quentin Tarantino.
And what's remarkable about reading this book is, you know, there's all these ideas that Tarantino is finding in like the 1970s that he doesn't use until like the early two thousands.
And
I finished this book and I think of this this idea I learned about seven or probably seven years ago.
Uh when I read Danny Meyer, Danny Meyer's uh famous uh New York restaurant tour.
And the founder of Shake Shack.
And in Danny's autobiography, he's constantly coming up with like new ideas that no other restaurants have used before.
And he has this idea where he would prompt himself with five words.
Because people would say, Oh, you can't do that, like no restaurants done that before.
And so he he would say, Whoever wrote the rule and then he would just say like whoever wrote the rule, for example
You can't make
A high quality hot dog cart.
that it was actually the very first version of what would come into Shake Shack. Shake Shack is now, you know, a four and a half billion dollar company today and started off as a hot dog cart in a park in New York City.
And so I realized by refusing to even attempt to do a podcast on this book.
that I was making up just fake rules. Like whoever wrote the rule that the book has to be, you know, three hundred pages for me or 100 pages or whatever it is.
So
I'm gonna jump into this book.
It was written because uh it's trying to solve the problem. It's like what do you do
when you know the the foun it's not a founder led company anymore, the founder has passed away, but we still want to use his ideas to create to craft the company culture.
to make sure we're doing the best job possible. That David Ogilvy would be
Uh proud of. And
It starts with this idea they kept r referring to one of my favorite ideas that David Ogie had.
And he has this idea of divine discontent.
And you find this in a lot of top performers.
And so he says we have a habit, this is David Ogabe speaking now, we have a habit of divine discontent with our performance.
It's an anecdote to smugness, so
That idea is that you're always slightly
Discontent with the quality of your work.
quality of your company, you're always constantly trying to prove it. Steve Jobs, uh you'll see this appear over and over again in the people that you and I study. Steve Jobs has a great uh quote on this. I'm gonna paraphrase, but he says something like, you know, what do you do when you do something wonderful? Like you you just wake up the next day and try to do something wonderful again.
That is very similar to the idea that David is trying to teach us with divine discontent.
And so they come up with eight habits of highly creative communities.
And each short chapter is on one of these eight habits.
And so before I jump into the first chapter, I just want to give you the overview that they give us.
To the ancient Greeks, a good habit was called a virtue.
While a bad habit was known as a vice.
Each of these eight habits has a corresponding
Evil twin.
While we work at adopting the eight creative virtues, we have to work equally hard to replace the old patterns.
of self defeating behaviors. Why?
Because there's an old Latin proverb that tells us
A nail is driven out by a nail. A habit
is overcome
By another habit.
It is important to note that all these eight habits are required in all of our disciplines.
and are by no means proprietary to just an advertising agency, meaning it's applicable to any business, any craft, any discipline.
These eight habits belong to the whole church. And so
It gives you the virtues that they're trying to make sure that every single person up and down
The organizational chart he's using.
and the vices that they want you to avoid and how they uh and how they relate to each other. So I'm gonna start with the vices.
Right, because that's a
bad habit, a a habit that you're gonna see reoccur
More frequently than the good virtue that needs to replace it. So companies operate out of fear. We do not want to operate out of fear, we want to operate with courage.
Companies optimize for expedients.
We want to optimize for idealism.
Companies stick to the status quo, we want to be curious.
Most companies are boring. We want to be playful.
Most companies have a tyranny of politeness, which means you just lie to each other.
We want to have a culture of candor.
Most companies are run on cold arithmetic. We are going to optimize for our intuition.
Most companies fall into bureaucracy. We want a culture of free spirit in us.
Most people give in, and we will persist.
So let's take these habits, these cornerstones of good
Company culture in order. Habit number one is courage.
Under each habit at the beginning there's usually a short quote that illustrates the idea that they're going for.
This sounds like Ogre, but it doesn't say it was Ogre V. There's no shortage of brains in the industry.
It's the vertebrae column that tends to be missing. When I read that, it made me immediately think of something I read.
in Peter Tele's book Zero to One, episode two seventy eight, if you haven't gone back, I think this is the second or third time.
I did an episode on that book.
Uh Peter says, it's very similar to what I'm doing.
uh what they're saying right here about courage.
Brilliant thinking is rare.
But courage.
is an even shorter supply than genius.
And the one vice that usually crowds out courage is fear. So they start here. I've been obsessed with Dune.
And I love how
The main character in Dune Paul.
His mother's constantly
uh repeating this like maximum or this affirmation to herself. She's just fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the mind killer. Fear is a demon that devours the soul of a company. It diminishes the quality of our imagination. It dulls our appetite for adventure.
And it sucks away our youth.
Fear.
Leads to self doubt.
Which is the worst enemy of creativity when I got to that line.
Thought of
Arnold uh young Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said this when he was young, he said this when he's older.
When you start doubting yourself, that is very dangerous.
The team at Ogrevi says that fear is the enemy of creativity. If if fear is our principal adversary
Then courage is our chief ally.
It is the first of the eight creative habits for good reason.
It is the habit that guarantees all the others.
In the absence of courage, nothing worthwhile can be accomplished. That's because anything on the cutting edge needs to be constantly fought for and defended.
Ideas are magical.
But they're fragile seeds that require protecting.
We clearly need a spine.
And I love the use of the word we there, right?
It's not we, me and you, it's we as a company.
Our company needs a spine.
Only with the spine will we stop double guessing the
And express an opinion, and that's very fascinating.
Because
Founders know that in inherently, right? Again, the founder in this case has been dead.
I think fifteen years by the time this book is written or something like that.
So it says, you know, only with the spine will we stop double double guessing.
And expressing an opinion.
That's not even I don't even think that needs to be said to a founder because a founder's opinion is expressed in the product and company.
That they built.
One of my favorite ways to express that idea or the intent behind that idea.
Came from this random book, one of the like, you know, 10 or 11 books or whatever it is that I've read on Steve Jobs. And it says Apple
Is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives.
You saw Steve's opinion in the products in the company that he built.
Only by standing up for what we believe in will we begin to build the most precious commodity in the world. Trust. So trust with your customers, trust with the team, right?
Then
The virtuous cycle begins.
Courage leads to trust.
Which leads to courage, which leads to trust.
And upwards and onwards.
We go, that idea.
I didn't understand until this is like recently, you're talking like maybe two months ago how important it was. At least I didn't understand it explicitly.
How important trust was.
And of course
As usual, Charlie Munger puts that idea into my mind better than almost anybody else.
Where he said that
Trust.
Episode three twenty nine, which is
the new version, the updated version of poor Charlie's almanac.
And he said trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth.
And it's the trust that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger establish with each other.
Very early on that
provided the ground for which everything else that they did in the future was built upon. In fact there's a great line about this
I'm gonna read from poor Charlie's almanac. And they talk about the very first time they ever met.
And it says uh during that dinner, Charlie and Warren realized they they shared many ideas.
It also became evident to the others at the table that this was gonna be a two way conversation.
think four or five other people and they quickly wind up leaving and Charlie and uh Warren talked all night.
As the evening progressed, the two young men, Warren was twenty nine years old at the time and Charlie was thirty five.
became engrossed in a wide ranging dialogue covering many aspects of business, finance, and history.
Where where one was knowledgeable, the other was just as excited to learn.
Warren was unenthusiastic about Charlie's continued practice of law. That's candor.
Right? We're gonna talk about candor.
Well you just met somebody's like yeah.
Uh the job that you have sucks. You should do what I do.
How many people would do that?
He said that while law might be a good hobby for Charlie, it was far less promising business than what Warren was doing.
Warren's logic helped Charlie to decide to quit law practice at the earliest point he could forge to do so.
When Charlie returned to Los Angeles, the conversations continued over the telephone and lengthy letters sometimes as long as nine pages.
It was evident to both.
That they were meant to be in business together.
There was no this is the the trust part, right?
Th in the in the last paragraph I'm gonna read to you from this. There was no formal partnership or contractual relationship.
There was no formal partnership or contractual relationship. The bond was created by a handshake and backed by two Midwesterners who understood and respected.
The value of ones.
Word.
Again, trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth. Quote from Charlie Mugger. Habit number two idealism.
Love this uh quote under it.
We are the people that we've been waiting for.
Helen Keller.
Was asked by a journalist what she thought would be worse than being born blind.
She replied to have sight and no vision.
When our dreams are little, we become little people.
Our aspiration becomes meeting the next quarter's target.
And not losing an account. Remember the
I'm pretty sure this book, based on the way it was written was
written for internal use only.
I think it's why it's so hard to find. I paid like eighty or ninety dollars.
uh for my copy and when I looked at Amazon this morning
Uh, there was only a handful and I think they started like ninety five dollars each, and they're worth every single penny. Go back to
One of my favorite lines of poor Charlie Dominac that he said.
Yeah.
There's ideas worth billions in a thirty dollar history book. Who cares if the book is a hundred dollars? You take one idea that you use your career and the the return is a thousand times that.
Uh so it says, you know, when our dreams are little, we become little people. What is a little little dream?
meeting next quarter's target and not losing account. We're fe in another word, we're we're afraid. We're not on
We're playing defense. We need to be on offense.
When we focus our life solely on making a buck, it shows a poverty of ambition.
Here is David Ogie's take on the subject. One of the my favorite things that David Ogie said tells an entire story here in ten words.
Raise your sights.
Blaze new trails.
Compete with the immortals.
How great we become depends on the size of our dreams.
Let's dream humongous dreams, put on our overalls, and go out there and build them.
And remember, the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do. Nice little Steve Jobs.
reference that they added in there. Habit number three, curiosity.
An endless trail of ideas floats in the ether.
You will only see them if you're curious.
What do most of us do in this dazzling Aladdin's cave? It's like this beautiful
What they're referencing there is really made me think of D Hawk, the founder of uh Visa.
He had this great line when he was a much older man.
He said that uh life is a magnificent mir mysterious Odyssey to be experienced, right? So that's
Very
Uh it to me it it relates to what the team at Ogvey uh the team at Ogvey is saying here. Like what are we in this amazing, wonderful world
This dazzling Aladdin's cave, and what do most of us do? We close our eyes.
He who and this is what they're g they're gonna quote Einstein here.
He who no longer pauses to wonder and stand wrapped in awe is good as dead.
His eyes are closed.
So how do we fix this? For a start, we have to ask stupid questions, like a six year old does.
Once again.
Einstein has something to say on this matter. I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted, he said.
I'm only very, very curious.
I'm gonna pause there. One of my favorite episodes I've ever done.
It's on a single episode written or single essay, rather, written by Paul Graham. The essay's call and the the episode is called
How to do great work. It's episode three fourteen, one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite essays.
That is also one of my favorite episodes, right?
Is this
If you asked an oracle
The secret to doing great work.
And the oracle had to reply with a single word.
My bet would be on
Curiosity.
When we've lost the capacity to see the world and everything in it as new
unreasonable and something that should give rise to astonishment.
We have become dim sighted.
And stooped with age.
Ray Crock, founder of McDonald's.
I love he's he's got a gr bunch of great quotes, which is hilarious. Uh his
I read his autobiography twice. The last episode I did on it's two ninety three, if you want to check that out. But Ray Croc summed it up nicely when he said
When you're green we grow.
When we're ripe, we rot.
That is from a man who found his life's work when he was in his fifties.
Uh, habit number four, playfulness.
We are all born children, the trick is to remain one. That is a quote from Picasso.
David Ogy never entirely grew up.
He would heckle in meetings, throw chocolate cakes at dinner parties, and roll down grassy slopes in brook climb.
Brooks Brother suits.
He told us to develop our eccentricities while we're young.
So people would not think that we've gone crazy as we've gotten older.
Like all creative people, David knew that necessity
Maybe the mother of invention, but horseplay
is most certainly the father.
In the nineteen sixties, the Los Angeles Times.
Asked David how he felt about people going to work in jeans and tennis shoes.
When the norm of the day was suit and tie for men.
And dr and address her suit for the ladies.
This is what David told the paper.
I don't care if people come to work in their pajamas.
As long as they get the work out.
The day after the article appeared.
An entire department inside of Ogee and Mather showed up in pajamas.
The office rocked with laughter.
David said, Make it fun to work at your company.
Kill grimness with laughter.
Encourage exuberance and get rid of sad dogs.
Who spread gloom.
When people aren't having any fun.
They don't produce good work.
The idea behind what David Ogie is telling us there.
Reminded me of
An answer Kobe Bryant gave one time.
In an interview and he was asked like what is the quality, what is the one quality that all the great ones have, regardless of discipline.
And he says without hesitation, Kobe said, It's love.
It's not rocket science to me, man.
The quality that we all share is that we love what we do.
We absolutely love it.
And it's a pure love.
It's not the fame, it's not the money.
It's not even the championships.
It's loving what we do, and we do it all the time.
We study all the time.
And as a result, the championships come.
Habit number five candor.
Only dead fish go with the flow.
That's another great line.
Our job requires us to be brutally honest and totally dedicated to the truth.
The tendency to be nice and avoid telling the truth is so omnipresent in human beings
that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature.
David warned us about the tyranny of politeness. Again, this is why I'm obsessed with David, and this is why one of the reasons I'm obsessed with him.
And I think it's why Buffett called him a a a genius. It's the way he's a unw like he's the best writer I've ever read for the podcast by far.
And he has this way to brand ideas so not only they get immediately into your mind, but yeah, they they stick in there.
You will remember them.
And he talks about this idea, the tyranny of politeness. That is a great phrase.
David warned us about the tyranny of politeness and how we can to be too agreeable for our own good.
If we avoid candor, we destroy trust.
We only get a spark when the stone and the flint are moving in opposite directions. And so I was thinking about this is like we only get a spark and the stone
We only get a spark when the stone and flint are moving in opposite directions. And I was like, Oh, we're talking about conflict, inner conflict there.
And the quote that came to my mind from there.
Came all the way back from episode one eighty. This is from Jeff Bezos. I love it.
So Jeff said.
Uh if I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time.
It always yields a better result. I will take conflict o every time.
it always yields a better result. If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict.
Every time that is.
Advice from Mr. Bezos to you and I. Habit number six, intuition.
This is one of my favorite parts. Dreams, premonitions, gut feelings.
Are all temps by our unconscious to guide us.
We are wiser than we think and intuition is the art of listening to the guru within us.
All of our finest thoughts and best ideas are not the work of the logical mind, but gifts from the un
Conscious.
Right, in a world dominated by quarterly reports and numbers. It's logic
They gets all the air time.
But we are in the business of creativity and discovery. Again.
Talking about intuition, the power of intuition.
Steve Jobs talked about this. Intuition is a very power very powerful thing, he said.
More powerful than intellect, in my opinion.
Intuition
has had a big impact on my work. That is the end.
of Steve Jobs quote on intuition. Now we're gonna pick up with David Ogie
had to say about the importance of using intuition in managing your company and the talent within it.
David said, Managing isn't all beer and Skittles. I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principal responsibility.
To provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.
To be successful, you must out of necessity
accumulate a group of creative people.
This probably means a fairly high percentage of high strong
Brilliant.
Ecentric nonconformists.
Some of these agencies
that he's competing with when he wrote this was say nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, right?
Now he's a founder led agency. He is wiping the floor with all w with a lot of these old agencies. He's taking business from them.
They're creating great work. Why?
Because some of these mammoth agencies are now being managed by second generation caretakers.
Who have floated to the top of their organizations.
Because they were smooth contact men.
These kind of caretakers cannot create potent campaigns.
Our business needs massive transfusions of talent.
And talent.
is most likely to be found among nonconformists
dissenters and rebels. Town again, that description more and much more likely. He's he's not saying this, but
It's uh I think implied here.
Uh much more much more likely to be hired.
by a founder led company, right? Big companies are not hiring
Nonconformist dissenters and rebels.
And then the team at Ogie
summarizes this chapter, which is great. It's the cracked ones.
It is the correct ones, in other words.
That let light into the world.
Habit number seven, free spiritedness.
Rule number one, there are no rules.
Rule number two.
Never forget rule number one.
The business of producing ideas is both tedious and terrifying.
Most companies fail to grasp the fragility of the idea generation process.
The notion that bureaucratic sausage factories, which they're talking about, right, right?
Ogy was talking about that's the he if you really think about what just happened, right? From from habit to habit right now.
He was essentially saying hey
We're competing as these second generation caretakers. A second generation caretaker is going to turn into this bureaucratic sausage factory. Now think about this. They're writing this.
Where
They're writing this entire book as a way to try to remind everybody in their organization in the company to avoid coming into that. We no longer have the founder. The founder is no longer with us. He's passed on.
But ideas are immortal and we can still use them. We've got to figure out systems so we don't turn into
What we just competed with
And overcame.
The notion that bureaucratic sausage factories pumping out fodder for meetings will solve
problems is ludicrous.
Bureaucracy has no place in an ideas company, they just told you.
Maintain free spiritedness and rule number one is there are no rules, and rule number two is for
Never forget rule number one.
Step inside a free spirited idea centric company and you'll notice
that the air itself is different. So again, we call that great company culture.
That's not the word that David Ogreby's gonna use. He's gonna come up with his own term.
Step inside, a free spirited, idea centric company, and you'll notice that the air itself is different.
David called this atmosphere.
An atmosphere is permission to practice magic.
David made the management of these intangibles the principal responsibility of the top man, of himself, right?
Inside a company with atmosphere.
The people are not servants.
To the system.
They are alchemists. Let's define
Alchemist, that is a person who transforms or creates something through a seemingly magical process.
What else is left to do but trust the people we work with and set them free?
That brings us to habit number eight, persistence.
This is how a problem solver goes to work.
Dead ends, cabin fevers, blind spots, zigzags, u-turns, roundabouts.
and loop de loops are all part of the creative process.
You see
Those who live by their wits.
go to work on roller coasters. That's excellent. You see
Those who live by their wits go to work on roller coasters.
The ride is exhilarating, but one has to have a stomach of titanium.
For starters, you're never a hundred percent certain you'll ever get there.
And if you even get to your destination
You sometimes wonder why you've ever bothered.
Other times.
The scenery.
pleasantly surprises you.
Self doubt comes with the territory.
And ignorance, believe it or not, is an asset.
Experience and knowledge make us sensible, predictable, and dull.
But if you don't know that you don't know, you're ideally poised for a leap across a chasm. So again
There's a million entrepreneurs that would tell you, hey, if I knew how hard it was gonna be, like they got to the other side of success, right? Build a successful company. Like if I knew how hard it was gonna be, there's no way in hell
I would have tried. So that's my interpretation of what they're saying here, that that that ignorance can be an asset because if you knew how difficult it was going into it.
There's no way.
that you would actually have done it.
You open your eyes wide and you shut them again to see. Ooh.
It's a a fabulous idea.
You do not assume you look, and you look and you look and you look and you look and you look. They're writing this. I'm not I'm not stuck on I'm not I'm not
having an aneurysm here.
You look, you look, you look, you look, and you look.
You look at the clouds, you look in the closet, you look at the ceiling.
You look in libraries, you look in magazines, you look at old advertising magazines, you look at the Bible, you look in cinemas, you look in art galleries.
You look at people.
You look at the edge of your desk, you look in the mirror.
You look at your dreams, you look for patterns, you look for the tiniest similarities, you look for microscopic differences, you look under every stone, you look to heaven.
You look for bloody anything.
After all, the
Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.
You're not proud. You beg, you borrow, you steal, you build on other people's ideas.
Someone
was once asked, Where do you get your ideas? He replied, I don't, they get me.
And you never give in, never give in, never give in, never, never, never.
God is with those who persevere. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Before them, obstacles vanish into thin air and mountains crumble into atoms.
Dogged determination.
Is often the only trait
That separates a moderately creative person from a highly creative one.
That's because great work is never done by temperamental geniuses.
But by obstinate
Donkey men.
Now that is a chapter on persistence.
I love that line, dogger determination is often the only trait that separates a moderately creative person from a highly creative one.
Again.
My still my number one all time recommendation has not changed after three hundred and forty three of these
These books, biographies, autobiographies.
If you could only read one of'em, and shame on you if you only read one of'em.
But if you can only read one of them, my number one recommendation would still be James Dyson's autobiography Against the Odds. He's written two autobiographies.
The first they're both great. The first one is my top recommendations. It's episode twenty five, episode two hundred, episode three hundred. It'll be episode four hundred, it'll be episode five hundred.
Every hundred episodes I'm gonna reread that book again and again, make new episodes on it so important.
And one of my favorite lines in that.
He says there is no such thing as a quantum leap.
There's only dogged
Persistence.
And in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap.
This is the conclusion for this little handbook.
So you see the eight habits are really David Ogy's big ideal
Broken into practical bite sized pieces.
They are predicated on the principle that it's impossible to improve our reputation before we improve.
And meaningless to put our personality ahead of our character.
We are what we repeatedly do.
We are what we repeatedly do is an Aristotle quote. The reason I know that is because Steve Jobs, right before he died, he said his favorite quote of all time.
was that quote by Aristotle where he says we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.
So we are what we repeatedly do. Our character is a composite of our habits.
They constantly daily express who we really are.
Only.
If we are eternally unhappy with compromise.
Only if we leave no room for excuses, only when we show appropriate disdain for expedients and absolute respect for the work.
Only when all of us resolve to relentlessly practice these eight habits on every job.
And every project.
Well, we begin to prove
That we are not Goliath.
But a company of David's
Never.
The end.
And that is the end of this excellent little book for the full story highly, highly, highly, highly
recommend buying cop I'd buy it, keep it close, keep it on your desk, keep it on your nightstand.
Read, reread, constantly refer to it.
And it'd probably be a good idea as you're building your own company culture to write a little book like this for everybody inside your company as well.
So if you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time, I will leave a link down below.
The link is available in the show notes on your podcast player and at founderspodcast.com.
That is three hundred and forty three books down, one thousand to go.
And I'll talk to you again soon.
Real quick before you go, if you have access to founders notes already, you now have a new feature waiting for you. It is my favorite feature by far.
It is out of private beta and now in public beta, so every single person has access to founders notes.
already has access to what I am calling sage
I went to a bunch of different names.
But someone who's actually in the private beta gave me the name.
uh he thought it would it was a better description of what I actually am building.
uh because he says sage has two main definitions. The noun is a profoundly wise person.
This refers to someone with a deep understanding of life, accumulated knowledge, and sound judgment. They are often looked to for guidance and advice.
And then the adjective is a wine is somebody that's wise.
discerning or prudent. This describes someone who shows good judgment and makes well considered decisions.
Another person said I should call it Charlie after Charlie Munger, which is hilarious because that is exactly
who I think of when I hear the word sage. In fact
when you when you log in, you'll see that Charlie is the icon.
For the Sage feature. And as you might already know, I was able to have dinner with Charlie Munger, and for three hours I could ask him any question that I could imagine.
And he answered using his ninety nine years of life and business experience.
And a lot of his answers were based on the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of biographies.
Of great people that he read.
And Sage is like that. It automatically searches all
All of my highlights for every book that I've read for the podcast.
His searches.
every note that I've made on any book that I've read for the podcast.
And it searches every single transcript.
For all the episodes, which means that Sage searches
Every word.
that I've ever uttered on the podcast to answer your question.
So to review this really quickly, if you sign up for Founders Notes, which is the best way to support the podcast, you get access to all my notes and highlights for every book.
All the transcripts
For every episode.
You can search all notes, highlights, and transcript by keyword.
That gives you the ability to see how all of history's greatest entrepreneurs thought about the same topic, like
hiring, patience, obsession, monopoly, moat, incentives, frugality. Those are just some recent examples that I've searched for myself.
But you can also read
All my notes and highlights by book if you choose so.
You can also read all my notes and highlights on
The highlight feed. Don't worry about remembering all this. You're get a welcome email after you sign up with all the ways that you can use founders notes.
But the highlight feed is like a smart Twitter feed. So instead of the random ramblings of these crazy people online.
This feed is actually a constant stream of ideas and thoughts from history's greatest founders.
And it's presented to you in a random order.
I use this feature to remind myself of the and review like the past lessons that you and I have
Talked about on the podcast, but also to prompt new thoughts.
It's like history's greatest founders talking directly to you every single day. I've talked to multiple people that have replaced
Like reading the news in the morning, instead they're just reading the highlights feed and they like it a lot better.
And now in addition to all that you can have Sage
read all the notes and highlights and transcripts for you and give you ideas
that you can use in your work based on everything that I've ever covered on the podcast.
I will leave a list of some suggested questions that I and other people that have been in the private data have been using, or private beta rather, have been using and ones that produced excellent results.
Over time I'm gonna collect the best prompts and questions.
So there'd be a section where you don't even have to type in your own question. You can just review what other people are asking.
Which I have found very helpful because people have been emailing them to me.
And then the main point that I'm trying to get across to you is what I'm trying to build here is like the North Star is
Over time, I want founders' notes to be this ever increasing giant valuable curriculum and tool.
that you can use your entire career.
With the goal of condensing and clarifying the collective knowledge of history's greatest founders. You can't use the ideas that you learn on the podcast if you don't remember them. And I think Founders Notes help you helps you remember them. So you can subscribe on an annual basis if you choose.
Or you can do a one time option, which means you get
Every note, highlight, transcript I have ever done, and every note, highlight, and transcript I will ever do.
Plus any new feature that I add.
as I add more notes, highlights, features, the price will go up. So make sure you sign up now. And you can do that by going to foundersnotes.com. That is founders with an S, just like the podcast.
So it's founders notes dot com.
Founders Notes dot com. Thank you very much for your support. Thank you for listening and I'll talk to you again soon.