Michael Jordan In His Own Words

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/6e2ac9286a0ca73d

I wanted to make an episode on this book that Michael Jordan published when he was about halfway through his career.
And so I spent the week reading that book and I also read this long form piece about Jordan when he was fifty.
And when I was done with all that and I was just reviewing it all my notes and highlights, I didn't think I had
I just wasn't as excited about it. I didn't think I had enough good information to actually make an episode.
And so since that wasn't good enough.
What I'm gonna do instead is I'm republishing this episode that I made about Michael Jordan that I do love.
And it's based on a book that I absolutely love and highly recommend you buy.
It's called driven from within.
And so even if you listened to this episode when it first came out three years ago, I would listen to it again. And if you haven't heard it before,
Then you're in for a treat. This is
One of history's greatest competitors.
In his own words.
And I just want to tell you about two quick things before we get into it. I'm hosting two more conferences this year. The first one is July 29th through the 31st.
In Scots Valley, California, the venue is absolutely gorgeous. It is surrounded
By beautiful California redwoods.
The second one is in September
twenty seventh to the twenty ninth in Austin, Texas.
directly on the Colorado River River.
In a secluded spot.
15 minutes from downtown Austin. These events exist. I do this for one reason.
To help you build relationships with other founders, investors.
in high value people. The last event the event I did in March.
sold out and was a massive success. People traveled all over the world to be there.
And they left with new friendships, new business partners, new advisors, new customers, new investors.
and new energy and inspiration.
It is so important to invest time, energy, and resources into building these relationships.
The best way I've ever heard this put was from someone that designed in person relationship for family offices. He said
relationships between two people like this, these investor founder types, they produce nonlinear returns.
Here are a few details that you need to know before
you attend. Number one, I ran out
Every single event I do, I rent out the entire venue. That means every single person you see there is there for the same reason and has the same interest as you.
Number two, they are all inclusive locations. I mean you get yourself there and I take care of the rest.
Your lodging, your food, access to all the events, it's all taken care of.
Number three and four are related. Number three, these are events for already successful people that have already progressed in their career, that have already built a successful.
career, the price should not be a stretch to you. And if you were just starting out on your career,
The podcast is free. It's a world class education on demand for free. Listen to it, use those ideas to build your work, and then come to another event in the future.
So number f that leads us to number four.
These are smaller events. This is intentional.
The one in beautiful Scots Valley, California, among the redwoods is going to be around a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty people.
The one in Austin is going to be around a hundred and fifty people.
I will of course be there the entire time. The one change I'm making for the second and third event that is different from the first event, way less stage time for me.
And way more small group conversations. If you want to attend Do Not Dilly Dally.
I'm doing both of these events in partnerships.
These events are being advertised not only on this podcast.
But on business breakdowns I'm d and invest like the best. I'm doing that in partnership with them for the Austin, Texas event.
And then the Art of Investing podcasts as well.
For the Scots Valley, California event. So you are welcome to attend both events if you like. Some people have already bought tickets to both events.
You can see more details and apply to the event by going to founders podcast.
dot com forward slash events.
The second thing and I'll make this really fast. You're about to hear in the episode that you're about to hear, Michael Jordan talks a lot about
How his career was made better as a result of the studying that he did of the great people that came before him.
I have made myself a tool and now it's available to you. So I now have made you and me a tool that allows you to do the exact same thing. It is called Founders Notes. It's available at foundersnotes.com, Founders with an S, just like the podcast.
And it allows you to get access to every single one of my highlights, notes.
And transcripts for every single book.
An episode I've ever done.
It's in one giant database that you can search.
So you can search by keyword, you can have Sage, which is the AI assistant search and and synthesize the data for you.
Or you can read highlights by book.
An existing Founder Notes subscriber sent me this message this week. He says Founder Notes is literally
A compounding tactical advantage over my competition. So at the end of this episode.
Which you're gonna hear me, you're gonna hear me use founders' notes.
To answer the question.
How did history's greatest founders think about hiring?
What you hear was not.
Committed to memory. This is the the the the most important part. It came from me doing a keyword search on hiring in founders notes.
This becomes a superpower for you, or a compounding tactical advantage, as the one subscriber said, because it gives you the ability to tap into
The collective knowledge of history's greatest
Founders.
On demand.
So make sure you stick around to the end to hear that. I think the last twenty, thirty minutes is is remarkable. And of course, don't forget to subscribe at Founders Notes.
dot com that is founders notes dot com
And now I hope you enjoy this episode of Michael Jordan in his own words.
His relentless determination produced six NBA championships and some of the most spectacular performances in sports history.
While his enduring grace and unique sense of style made him equally famous in the worlds of fashion, business, and marketing.
In Driven From Within, Michael makes it clear that
that the basis for his phenomenal success came from the inside out.
Thanks in part to those who guided him along the way.
His skill.
Work ethic, philosophy, personal style, competitiveness, and presence have flowed from the basketball court
And into every facet of his life.
nearly three years removed from his last turn as an athlete.
Michael's 20th Air Jordan Shoe has helped push Nike's brand Jordan division to nearly$500 million in sales.
This is a book about the power of collaboration in teamwork.
The awe inspiring energy generated when people combine their creativity and passion and a fearless desire to lead.
Whether it's waking up at six AM to work on fundamentals as a high school junior
are spending hours with legendary designer Tinker Hatfield on the intricacies of state of the art shoe design.
Michael Jordan has never wavered.
In his desire to be the best.
Everyone knows the results.
And driven from within, Michael Jordan and those in his inner circle revealed a philosophy.
That made it all happen.
So that is from the inside cover of the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Driven From Within and it was written by Michael Jordan and Mark Vansel.
So I was not expecting to do this book right now. It's actually two hundred pages into another book that hopefully will come in in uh next few days.
But ever since I read that almost seven hundred page biography of Michael Jordan,
I couldn't stop thinking about it. Just the the uh the ability to look into
Michael Jordan's mindset and operating system really motivated me. It really moti uh really fired me up, actually.
And so I had read, uh like briefly the introduction to this book. And I was like, you know what?
I I I need to do this right now.
I feel compelled to
I can't put this book down. So in the the last few days
Not only did I finish reading I read this entire book
But also
would go on YouTube.
And every free moment, whether I'm washing the dishes, I'm in the car, I'm I'm going for a walk, whatever I've been doing.
I've been looking up videos
And listening to Michael Jordan speak. Not videos about Michael Jordan, but literally downloading into my mind
As much as I could
Just him talking.
And that is what also this book,'cause most of it there's there's a couple like little he calls them vignette, little like little stories from people like his mom, some of his oldest friends, sp uh the the shoe designer Tinker Hatfield that that he's worked with for twenty years.
uh on the the Jordan Shoe and you know his main business
But the vast majority of what I'm going to share with you today is just straight from the words of Michael Jordan and then
You and I will have
the ability to download his mindset straight from him.
And there's some ideas that I've learned from both these books that I don't think I'm gonna forget.
And I'll make sure I'll I'll point them out to you as we as we run over them today. So this is uh Michael talking like what why does this book exist and what it's about.
And when I'm about to read to you, remember he's talking he's not talking about his playing career.
He's talking about his business.
And um what's fascinating, so this book is, you know, almost what, twenty years old, something like that.
And I think it's a great illustration of what a lot of these other great minds that you and I've been studying
They always t tell us to never interrupt the compounding.
That it's hard for our minds to grasp that all the profits are far into the future. So twenty years ago.
It's already a f a br uh Jordan brand, which he refers to as brand so in the book he'll call it Brand Jordan. In modern day he says is a Jordan brand. So he um
I I don't want you to get confused about that, but I'm gonna read it as it appears in the book, which is Brain Jordan.
But the Jordan brand.
uh you know, over twenty years ago was doing five hundred million dollars of sales. Fantastic
business, right? You fast forward twenty years in the future, he did not interrupt that compounding.
And now they're doing seven times that amount, three point six billion.
Oh yeah. So let's go to this. He says no one and remember, he's talking about the business. No one could have predicted the outcome because I was never following someone's lead or operating off an existing model. There were no models for what happened at Nike.
As you remember, if you listen to the podcast I just uh the previous podcast
When he signs at Nike, they're doing twenty five million dollars a year in revenue.
And a large endorsement contract for an athlete at the time would be like a hundred thousand dollars.
So he says there was no models for what happened to Nike and certainly nothing close to what we have created with Bran Jordan. Looking back, so again, this is why the book exists and what it's about.
Looking back isn't about celebrating the results as much as it is about understanding the process that produced those results.
It's been about leading and staying true.
Authentic.
to those fundamental values that flow downstream from my parents and later coach Dean Smith.
That's his college coach at UNC. Moving through the business world full time, I recognize that the structure of success is no different there than it was on the basketball court.
Great companies have a lot in common with great teams.
Play who practice hard when no one is paying attention.
Will play well when everyone is watching.
And so right there.
His compl what what really surprised me is his complete dedication to practice, how much he br he talks about it over and over again. And that is one of the the main ideas I learned from Jordan that I don't think I'll ever forget.
It was so surprising to me.
And it's something he's gonna repeat over and over again. You know what? It just struck me when I was reading the um
The inside cover too.
A few minutes ago.
Um, and I didn't make the connection until uh for some whatever reason it just popped in my mind there. But if you go back, like uh you'll see, you know, I've done a an extensive amount of reading and studying of people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett are the three that popped in my mind.
Over
decades of their career.
Right, and what's fascinating to me is how much they they'll ha they have a handful of ideas that they repeat
Over decades.
Jordan shares that trait with with them.
There's a lot of things that he's saying.
When he's thirty five, when he's forty.
That he's still repeating when he's almost six years old today.
Uh so let's go back to this. There's no shortcuts. I've always believe in leading with action, not words. And I learned very early to follow my instincts. This is again these ideas he's gonna repeat over and over again. My standards have always been mine alone.
I've never tried to live up to the expectations of others.
And everybody knows the results.
This book is about the process.
The values that form the foundation of my playing career are the same values.
that define Bran Jordan.
I truly believe those values never go out of style.
So then he said it's the very beginning of the book saying with asking a question, Will there be another Michael Jordan?
Sure.
There is no doubt a player will come along who will be able to build on what I've accomplished, just as I built on the example of great players before me.
And then he talks a little bit about like the growth of the NBA in the game.
Since he's retired.
And that y there's a you know, obviously it's a w way more successful as a business in general, a lot more fans, and so the the the rewards to the players
are not only larger, but they come quicker, and he's not sure that's actually beneficial. So he's saying
Uh, there wasn't a line of corporations looking to invest in young NBA players in nineteen eighty four.
It's the it's often the other way around today, meaning that y y you could have he had to prove that he had the ability to play.
And then he got the rewards. He's saying that they're being uh players today are being rewarded on future potential.
And th that this is his uh
His opinion on why that could be potentially de detrimental. It's often the other way around today, which makes it a lot harder for young NBA players to realize the depth of their potential.
It's hard to spend all summer working on one aspect of your game when you've already received the payoff.
I never had that problem.
And so now he's gonna go into like what motivated him. I wanted to prove what I could do. This is something he repeats over and over again, too. When my place start when my place started providing me with rewards, then I wanted to prove I deserve them.
I never felt the desire to rest on what I had accomplished. I never felt like I deserved to drive drive a Bentley when I got my first contract or live in a mansion.
There's actually a story I'm gonna share with you later in the book which which talks about his
really surprised me how financially conservative he was. I that I was not expecting that from him.
And it's actually kinda funny what motivates him to be so uh conservative too,'cause he's just he was terrified.
uh the idea of ever having to get a an actual job.
Uh, those things might be symbols of success success to some people, but there are a lot of people who confuse symbols
with actual success.
What's left after you got all the money?
And buy the best car.
There's no way to go from there. There's nowhere to go from there.
And so his point he's like I just focus on achievement and I knew that the the financial rewards would come from that achievement. When we won one championship, I wanted to win two in a row. When we won two, I wanted to win three in a row because Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had never won three straight.
Nothing of value comes without being earned.
So I guess I should pause here. All uh everything I'm reading to right now is coming right after on one right after another. There's not really a narrative to the book. What I really feel is like uh so it goes in order of like the design of the shoes.
goes through all like the their thought process, the growth of the business as a result of all this.
But really a way to think about this book is just Jordan just speaking freely, like off the cuff, like if you're having a conversation with a friend, just downloading into your brain.
everything he learned from his not only his play his playing career, but building the brand.
and giving you his mindset and operating system himself. So
He's saying nothing of value comes without being earned. We're gonna get into his motto, which he which he got from his high school coach, which I think is fantastic.
But he he talks a lot about the you know, the fact that he looked at himself as a leader.
He says, That's why great leaders are those who lead by example first. You can't demand respect because of a title or position and then expect people to follow you. That might work for a little while, but in the long run, people respond to what they see.
I practiced hard every day because I wanted every one of my teammates to know what I expected out of myself.
If I took a day off, then I know they would too.
Just like my high school coach used to say.
It's hard.
But it's fair.
I live by those words.
And then a few pages later he's just got this great sentence, which really is just a an echo of
this idea that you and I have talked about over and over again, that the score takes care of itself.
Um
rather surprising thing I learned about Jordan.
He just focused on being as good as as g as great at his craft as possible and he knew if he did that then he'd get the rewards he he um he deserved.
I figured if I was good as I could be at playing sports, eventually it would pay dividends.
I didn't know how.
But my main focus, or excuse me, my focus was to be the best player in whatever sport I played.
That's all I ever thought about.
So at this point in the book he's still reflecting on his early life. This is about
what his dad like the th the we talked in the last podcast that you know the fact that his dad told him you're not you're not good at anything, go in the house with the women, get out of here like really burned
uh like a d uh extreme sense of like motivation in him.
And so there's two main ideas. He's gonna I'm gonna start this page.
on him talking about his father's opinion of him when he was a kid.
But really the thing about Jordan I think is too
he's got two really good ideas on this on this page that he shares with other people.
Uh, I'm gonna the the shorthand on the note I left myself was have one speed go. That is something I learned from Nolan Bush now.
the founder of Atari and Chucky Cheese, he was a mentor of Steve Jobs, hired a nineteen year old Steve Jobs.
And he said, he's like when I gave Steve Jobs a job at Atari, like he did there was no
He had one speed. He he was all out all the time.
And then this really
The second idea.
Really.
surprised me not because of the idea behind it, but because he was he said it explicitly, and this is an idea you and I have talked about over and over again.
If you want to be truly great at something, find work that feels like play.
Uh, so this is Jordan and his dad. He didn't think I'd amount to anything because I had no hand skills and no mechanical skills. The way my father looked at it, there was no guarantee I'd be able to make a living. Remember, they're just like a normal
You know, maybe lower middle class family
Country in Wilmington, North Carolina.
So his idea, his dad's idea is like you have to be able to be uh if you're a mechanic you can always, you know, fix things for other people, then you at least you're you're guaranteed some kind of way to to
to make a living and and to support yourself and your family, right?
So he's like that's that's uh what I did, that's what you should do.
Because I had no hand skills, no mechanical skills. That's the way my father looked at it. There was no guarantee I'd be able to make a living.
So if you if you didn't have those skills, there'd be no be guarantee I'd be able to make a living. But I never thought about that.
All my energy was focused on getting where I had to go.
And Jordan talks about one of the motivations to that. I wanted the freedom to do what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it my way.
to this day the and this is shocking because
Jordan is is widely known for one of the greatest work ethics of any sports any player in sports in any sport ever.
Right.
And so but he's saying, To this day I don't enjoy working.
I enjoy playing.
And figuring out how to connect playing with business. To me, that's my niche. People talk about my work ethic as a player, but they don't understand. What appeared to be hard work to others was simply playing for me.
We were playing a game.
Why not play as hard as you can?
And so it's on this page his mom is talking about stories from his childhood that this d this sentence might be surprising, right? Michael wouldn't have done anything if we didn't remind him, not not when it came to sports, but just in doing chores, going to look for a job. He would have laid around and looked at the TV all day.
And so I think a lot of people have that problem. Like, Oh, I don't feel motivated. You probably are you're probably a driven individual in general.
You just picked the wrong profession.
If there's somebody out there that has to, you know, that they're dragging themselves out of bed, like oh crap, I don't wanna go do what I'm about to do, then find something else to do. If you told Jordan, Hey I gotta go work as a mechanic, I gotta go sit in an office
from nine to five in answer emails. These are examples he's actually used in in conversations and I think they're also appear in this book.
You know, he's like to me that's torture.
I'd have to force myself to do those things, I wouldn't work very hard at them, but if you say, Hey, I gotta have an opportunity to make to be a pro athlete, then I will work from the time my eyes open in the morning'til I go to bed at night.
And no one will have to push me from behind.
But what's interesting is it wasn't always this way. So that that uh leads me into the next section where
This is about his first mentor.
and a constant desire to improve his skills. And this is his ki this is excuse me, his high school coach.
So there's a guy Coach Herring. Coach Herring is the guy that gave him
That life motto.
It's hard, but it's fair.
Coach Herring was the first one to see in me what I saw in myself.
He picked me up every morning my junior year, took me to the gym before school, and worked me out.
He was my pusher.
He was one of the coaches who would just talk to you.
You have to stay focused, MJ. You can't do this, MJ.
Get your grades up, man. Get your grades up.
Most days I enjoyed it.
Some days I didn't feel like going.
Remember this whole idea about I didn't feel like doing it,'cause he explicitly talks about your feelings don't matter.
Business is about service to others. When he is playing, he feels it's his obligation. Somebody paid their hard they worked all week, they paid their hard earned money to buy a ticket to watch me and to play to entertain them.
And to that degree I think it's smart to have a motivation that's bigger than yourself, right?
But his point's his point his point is it doesn't matter if my knee hurts, my ankle hurts, I don't feel good. I have an obligation because I'm serving other people to go out and give my best effort. So most days I enjoyed it, some days I didn't feel like going. But those are the days that coach air would push me.
eventually Michael's able to to to play that role for himself, right?
He made this big old poster with the drill with all the drills listed and we went through them every single day.
That's how it got started.
I wasn't a great athlete at the time, but I wanted to be.
I wanted to be admired. I wanted to be respected. I wanted the girls to respect me too.
All of that drove me a lot more than most people think.
I didn't have any status at the time.
If that's what you saw.
Meaning you know, I w wasn't the best player, wasn't i excelling.
I was going to prove you wrong.
Just watch me.
That was my mentality.
And then he has an idea that I think's very r again, surprising, that he starts with low expectations.
And then he'll tell you over and over again, you should be concentrating on the fundamentals. But what I found interesting is like he started with low expectations. But once he reached that low expectation
Uh he he
Didn't rest on his laurels.
Right.
He picks a the next target.
But as
he's moving up that progression, he's building confidence.
So let's go into this, you'll see what I mean. My expectations are very low.
I wanted to be the best player at a at the park in Wilmington.
Then I wanted to be better than my brothers.
Are the guys in my neighborhood.
These were my expectations.
May then he's he's talking about the progression.
Make the varsity team in high school.
Impress the coach.
Get a four year scholarship to a major college.
With each and then he he ends that sentence there.
But if you think about it, he's like
Go to college.
Win a championship in college.
Try again and win a championship.
Get uh go to the NBA.
Spend seven years trying to win one, then I'll win two, then I'll win three. And I was watching um this other interview with him.
And uh was like real quick with a reporter, but they're like, Hey, you've just won three, isn't that enough? He's like, Enough for who? Might be enough for you, but he's like no, there's always something else, something that's coming next
Um so it says with each progression I gain confidence.
Then he talks about what he learned in in from his college coach. Coach Deem s Dean Smith's system wasn't about excelling at one phase of the game.
It w he was about excellence in every phase of the game, scoring, rebounding, passing, playing defense.
And so part of the progression.
That had to occur.
to get him to the next level is the fact that his coach lies, his high school coach lies to get him into a five star basketball camp.
And before Jordan's just isolated in North Carolina. He doesn't know how good he is, but his coach sees other people playing. He's like, You can play with these guys.
So he winds up lying, gets him into the c uh into the
uh basketball camp. I'm not gonna repeat stuff I already covered in the in in the last podcast, but this was new information.
was the fact that the guy running the coach or running the camp
Was so impressed.
that yeah, originally Michael was only supposed to stay for one week.
And um so the the guy running the camp, his name is Mr. Garfinkel, calls his parents and like don't pick up Michael.
And so this is his mom, Michael's mom w relaying the memory.
Each week we would sit in there talking about, you know, they they
They their finances were tight.
They had to stick to a budget, stick to figure out
Yeah, which bills we can pay this week, which which ones we can't. So we got this guy calling saying, Hey, you know, come
Uh, Michael needs to stay for a second week, th we don't have the money for it.
And this blew my mind.
Each week we would sit down and figure out what uh what bills we were gonna pay. We had paid for one week of basketball camp when Mr Garfinkel called.
We told him we only had one week one.
um called to say hey, Michael needs to stay for another week. This guy's like you don't understand your your son's
going crazy.
Um so it says uh he called we told him we only had money in the budget for that one week. Mr. Garfinkel just let us have it.
He told us we didn't know the skills our son.
I said, Sir, that's okay.
We paid for one week and we're coming to get'em.
He said
I'll give'em the money.
And then Michael jumps in and talks about
what this camp gave to like his confidence and his ability, hey, I can play with the bet the best people around. I'm as good as they can. Or excuse me, I'm as good as they are. I was full of energy after that second week. I thought I must be doing something right.
All I wanted to do was to improve, to keep getting better.
I became a sponge.
I got a glimpse of
Of what success look like.
So I'm gonna fast forward in the book.
He's in Chicago.
rookie year right away, he's like, Okay, this guy's not playing.
And so there's gonna be some stories from friends.
Uh, two different stories from two different people in here. Let me give you the first one. You couldn't help but notice this guy was different from all of us who were already with there with the bulls.
His practice habits were unmatched.
And so that's an easy you know, that's the idea that he repeats over and over again. It's an easy idea for you and I to use.
In whatever field that we're in, we're we've just make the commitment. No one is going to prepare more than me. No one is going to practice more than me.
His level of effort, his level of competing stood out. He always wanted to take it to the next level. If the other guys didn't take their effort,
Uh, they're for up.
Then Michael had no problem embarrassing them.
And so then w we have another story on the same page from a different person. Really the not like myself on this page is practice.
Combined practice, effort, and education. You ever see Star Wars?
You notice this little ugly thing.
But he's the Jedi master. He's the guy who taught everybody.
Everybody went to the Yoda for knowledge. When you sit around talking to any older person who's lived their life to the fullest, they have great stories to tell because they've had great experiences.
Michael is Yoda.
He's always been an old soul.
That's probably attributable attributable.
to the education that he got from his parents, the education he got from Dean Smith in college, and then the education that he got in the Olympics with Bobby Knight.
He was more mature than the average twenty one year old kid coming into the NBA.
And you see that maturity too if you watched the last dance because his rookie season
You know, think about it. You're a kid from a small town, now you're dropped into Chicago.
you have a a nice contract, you know, not nearly like
comparable to what athletes today make, but you you're making a lot more money you've ever made in your life. You have more freedom.
You're playing you're you have people even though you know, at the time I think
They were like they didn't even sell half the arena in Chicago.
Um
But y you know, you have you probably feel good about yourself.
He goes uh looking for his teammates one day, knocks on the hotel room, goes in and he sees most of the bulls. Remember the bulls a crappy team.
bunch of, you know, average players not really serious about their craft.
Goes in there.
There's a bunch of girls, there's a bunch of alcohol, there's a bunch of people doing cocaine.
And he just turns around, he's like, All right, well, I'm leaving, I'm out.
And so this the the maturity for a twenty one year old person
to not give in to the temptations because those temptations would get in the way of what his goal in life was.
That is very rare.
So this next section is called uncompromised.
And I wanna pull before I read this to you, I wanna pull out I have a bunch of notes from the these these talks that I w was listening to the last few days. One of them comes there's like this long
It's like an hour long talk that's on YouTube where Michael's just sitting down
and being uh interview by the magazine Chicar Cigar aficionado.
And they're talking about
this is like two years before the last dance is released.
And they hear the rumor
And they're like, Well, it's not out yet, but he says Michael said something that was very interesting, I think ties into w this section of the book.
He's like, listen, if you're gonna watch the last dance, you're gonna it's gonna show my unwavering dedication to the game.
and really think that I think unwavering and uncompromised are similar ideas what he's talking about here. Some players look at me for all the wrong reasons.
Marketing, admiration,
Money made off the court.
They don't understand the foundation I had to create to support everything that came afterward.
They don't know about lifting weights at seven AM.
practicing hard every day, finding ways to motivate myself for every game.
game, sitting up half the night with an ankle of ice or hooked up to an electronic stimulation machine.
They don't know about any of those things.
In a sense, my experience created a vision that obscured the hard work and commitment.
With all the attention on the surface, it's easy to become confused about the source.
Of the money and glamour.
And the great maxim that uh that I think would condense or distill what he's telling us here is the fact that the public praises people for what they practice in private.
The public praises people for what they practice in private. They're seeing the money, they're seeing the private jet, they're seeing the commercials, they're seeing the championships. They don't see the hours of practice, the fact that I'm getting my knee drained, my ankles messed up. I woke up at seven AM this morning I wor I w uh lifted weights before practice. I worked on drill after practice.
And so he gets to his punchline here. You have to be uncomprom you have to be uncompromised in your level of commitment.
To whatever you are doing.
Or it can disappear.
As fast as it appeared.
So
continues to steam. Don't pay attention to the wrong things. Pay attention to the way I played the game. Pay attention to my passion. Pay attention to the idea of focusing on improvement every day. Pay attention to my commitment.
Commitment cannot be compromised by rewards.
Excellence isn't a one week or one year ideal.
It's a constant.
There will be days when you don't feel on top of your game.
But your commitment remains constant.
No compromises.
Look around and just about any person or entity achieving at a high level has the same focus.
The morning after Tiger Woods rallied to beat Phil Mickelson at the Ford Championship in 2005, he was in the gym by six thirty to work out.
No lights.
No cameras.
No glitz or glamour.
Uncompromised.
So something I learned that was surprising in this book is the fact that Jordan almost left Nike to set up another company.
And this is just a few years into his career. So this is Jordan talking about it, then I wanna talk about um
Then we have his agent David Falk talking about this time.
And I love comparing and con comparing, you know, the same die hard competitive spirit that Michael Jordan applied to his game, Phil Knight had that same competitive spirit in building Nike.
And so it says so when my contract was coming up
Uh he came to us and said, so he's talking about there's two executives in Nike, Peter and Rob.
There were really like Jordan's liaison liaisons to Nike. And so they went up dipping out and saying, Hey, you know, why don't we start our own company, like you'll own the equity, like you can build the business
And so Jordan's talking about this. So when my contract was coming up, they they came to us and said, Let's go out on the edge. Let's do something different. Let's start our own shoe company.
Peter was our lead designer and I had worked very closely with him, and Rob was a very good close uh c good friend of the family.
And so Jordan's really about loyalty and personal relationships. So he was contemplating this. And so this is his agent talking about that. But Michael was a Nike and it was becoming the most successful endorsement in the history of professional sports. To say that I was in shock would be an understatement of the century.
first I thought was a really close friend.
And to think that he would have done all this behind my back amazed me.
Second, starting your own company seems in at this point, seems the kind of thing
There's
It is the kind of thing that seems really sexy, rather, and exciting to a client because they're not seeing the downside.
I had a meeting with Michael's parents who were very, very competitive, and I said
You don't understand.
This is going to be like World War Three for Phil Knight.
And Phil is a very competitive guy.
That this is his number one talent leaving and he's not gonna say, No problem, you have my blessing, take my number one endorser, good luck.
Phil is a competitive guy. Nike wanted to take over the world. Michael wanted to take over the world of basketball. So that drive was mirrored from one another. They are parallel stories.
And I love that that's stated explicitly because if you read I've read uh I've done I've read re read Phil Knight's book uh I don't know, like probably like thirty podcasts back or something like that.
I did another episode on Shoe Dog.
Now I've read
two books on Michael. I've spent a long time
uh studying him. I do believe that like that is ex that is my understanding as well.
And I'm glad it's stated explicitly here. They are parallel stories. It's the same idea manifested in two different personalities and two different industries.
So what they wind up doing here that's smart is they're using the other offer as a leverage.
So
David and his parents talk Jordan out of doing this, but then they use that offer as a way to get equity and to actually get Brand Jordan. Nike put a bill on the table that expanded our line, gave me more creative control.
This is uh
Jordan speaking here.
Uh gave me more creative control and improvement rates. Within Nike it appeared we were expanding the line when in essence we were starting another company beneath the Nike umbrella.
Rob and Peter understood my feeling. They told us to use what they were trying to do and to get what we wanted from Nike, and that's what we did.
So then there's this great story about when Michael Jordan
uh gets to meet Warren Buffett and s and and um gets to hang out with and spend some time with him.
And they really realized like this is
Uh different animal, same beast.
And it has to do with how they come about making their decisions.
Uh I have always wanted to know what successful people used.
uh when they were evaluating deal or making decision. I was with Coca-Cola earlier in my career, and they would put me on a dog and pony show all over the country to meet bottlers.
Uh, it would take almost eight days. I'd go into supermarkets everywhere shaking hands.
On one of those trips I was in Omaha, Nebraska, and I had the opportunity to meet Warren Buffett.
He invited me out on his boat.
First of all, I don't like boats.
Now this is the richest guy in the world at the time and he's the largest shareholder of Coke.
I said, Mr Buffett, I don't mean to offend you, but I'm afraid of boats.
He said, Don't worry, we have life jackets.
I told him you're gonna have to give me two to get me on that boat.
And so then they have this decision.
Or excuse me, just discussion. I I asked him about his decision making process.
What do you think what do you think about when you're making your decisions? What is your thought process?
And he says
Whatever my gut tells me.
That's what I do.
And so Michael's like, Oh, I'm the same way.
I thought that was pretty wild.
Because up until that point, I was just when he's talking about making decisions, I was just asking myself, What do you feel?
Once I made a decision, I didn't think about it again. It was strictly off gut.
That's how I made the decision to go with David Falk.
That's how I evaluated deals before I sign my contracts.
I don't think about it again from that point forward. It's still amazing to me that given the decisions Warren Buffett makes and the money that transfers with those those decisions, that he still goes with his gut.
I just felt good hearing that.
From a guy like him.
Or excuse me, I just felt good hearing that from a guy like him.
And so now we got to the part where
I mentioned earlier how it's kinda surprising how how financially conservative it was. Um and so Tinker Hatfield
Main designer, uh like his he calls him his right hand man in the Jordan brand for the design of the shoes.
Goes to visit Michael.
So few years into his career.
And he goes to his house and he says his first house after he got married was a normal place.
It wasn't anything special whatsoever.
And he was a major superstar by then.
That was an interesting aspect to Michael. That r reminded me because um there's this great story.
Bill Gates to go to visit.
uh Steve Jobs and they're working on a on a deal.
And he goes to his house and Bill goes.
Yeah, he sees like his his house, he sees his family.
And you know, Bill at the time uh had had been living in I think it's called like Zanadu or whatever his uh
His his he's got like a sixty thousand square foot
house in uh on the lake in Washington, right? That, you know, got a lot of uh like attention'cause it's like leading technology of its day and all this other stuff that he built into it.
But he asked Steve Jobs, he goes he goes, Do all of you live here?
He couldn't believe he's like how mod relatively modest for the amount of wealth that Steve Jobs had.
that he didn't need to feel to do the same you know, what Bill was doing. So this is Michael talking about that. It's always been very conservative financially. That came from my advisors and I listened to them because I was scared.
You don't want to be like some of the guys at the end of uh end of their career with nothing to show looking for work.
That was scary to me.
The idea that at some point in time I'd have to go get a job.
I've seen a lot of of people who had opportunities to be successful and wealthy, but they made critical mistakes.
I pay attention to those things.
Money never drove me. Sure, I wanted to be successful. I wanted the nicest things that success brings, but my passion was pure. The way I played and the way I go about things has never had anything to do with money.
And part of this that motivated him was the fact that even when he was in his early days of his career, his mom would t r would repeat the story of Joe Lewis. I didn't know that. I heard the name Joe Lewis. I didn't know
What uh what she's about to tell us. I often told him about Joe Lewis, the boxer.
He died homeless. He didn't even have money to bury himself.
He had no discipline and no direction.
And then just a quick paragraph, two ideas that he repeats that I think are worth reiterating. One, blinders on focus. So just like when the horses they put the horses on the blind uh the blinders on the horses so they don't look left and right, they just look forward to whatever the their goal is.
I think a lot of successful people
uh in life have that mentality. And then the Steve Jobs quote that I repeat over and over again that remind me of, uh reminds me of
There's a lot of parallels between Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan. So you'd be a yardstick for quality. People are not used to an environment where excellence is demanded. So he's saying, I'm very secure in my ability to focus on what I want. If I have a goal, no one is going to deter me from what I want to do.
I'm going to get up and work out in the morning and do all the necessary things I have to.
I am not going to be uh talked into looking the other way.
When I got to the point where I was a senior partner on the Bulls, the guys
The guy who had been there the guy who had been there the longest, I started to exert z exert my leadership vocally.
I guess you could say I became a tyrant.
Or at least that's how some people chose to interpret those actions. That's not how I viewed it.
I knew what it took to come from where from where we were in 1984. I had put it on the line and I had earned the right to let my teammates know what I expected of them.
And it was no more than I expected of myself.
I played in front of eight thousand people night in the beginning.
That never determined how hard I played.
It's easy when eighteen thousand people show up to watch you to play and every game is sho sold out.
it's not hard to find your motivation in that environment.
I was playing when Chicago Stadium was half empty and my effort was exactly the same.
And a lot of what Jordan has to say, and he says this in interviews too, I need to start reading some of my notes to you,'cause I'm gonna get to like towards the end of the book and not
uh include the notes which I think are very valuable in just hearing'em talk as well, but it's about managing your mind and this mindset. So in addition to practice and just saying, Hey, no one is going to outprepare me, no one's gonna practice more than than I do in my craft, right?
That's another idea that I'm gonna take from Jordan. The other idea is
Another main idea that I think I I at least I definitely struggle with is like I'm constantly
Like worried about what's gonna happen in the future, or like, hey, I'll be happy or I'll be satisfied when I get to X, you know, and you then you get to X and you like play that game with you. And it's one thing I learned about Jordan that it's just shocking to me.
Is he just
lives and thinks about this moment.
He did it when he was playing in the Bulls. He did it when he became an NBA owner. He talks about it when he's building Brand Jordan. He talks about it now as almost a sixty year old person. And actually let me just read this to you now because this is when he's fifty eight.
And he says I want to go through
I wanna go through a day or a week.
Not worrying about what I have to do on Wednesday or Thursday.
Because I won't then enjoy Monday.
It's just this more living in the moment. He has different ways to say that same idea.
All is now, all you can focus on is this moment.
And the example I used in the the last podcast was the fact that, you know, he just won a six championship, he's playing the piano.
throwing champagne everywhere, they're smoking cigars.
And the guy's like hey
You got another one in you. He's like, It's the moment, man. Live in the moment. We're enjoying this now. We'll worry about that in October. That discipline it takes. And I think you'll be a lot happier. I think that's also why if you have little kids, like you know they're just usually happy and
even if they're upset, they get over it really fast,'cause it's all for for you know, an eighteen month old like my son is now, it's like everything is just whatever's happening at that moment.
And I think o everybody, like every human struggles with that, but ex especially driven, motivated people struggle more.
And I think we have to learn to live in the moment, because if not, you're compromising the present. Like you just said, if I'm worried about what's happening on Wednesday and Thursday, it means I can't enjoy Monday.
And I have limited Mondays left. He talks about you know, I'm f uh
F I me he might be fifty four.
I th I said fifty eight. I uh now coming to mind I think he said I'm fifty four I've f at this point in the interview he's like I'm fifty four years old.
You know, I have limited time left. Whatever it's fifty four, fifty eight, same same difference, you know, but his point is like I have limited Mondays left. I'm not going to ruin them by worrying about something. I'll worry about Wednesday when I get to Wednesday. I'll worry about Thursday when I get to Thursday.
So anyways, let's go into this page.
Uh, this is know what you want and don't rely
Oh, don't really pay attention to other people's expectations of you. Another thing I learned from Kobe Bryant too,'cause he was given this interview.
with a mod Rashad and you talk about, you know, when you go through struggles like
What you what about the fans' expectations of you? Is the the the the
this question Ahmad Rashad's asking Kobe and I love it'cause Kobe has like the stanky face. The stinky is like Ugh like if you're you taste it or you smell something really gross, you just hit him with the stanky face.
And he's like and he shook his head immediately, he's like, The expectations will never be higher than my own.
And I think that the idea there is like you've really messed up if you're people that have they're able they're capable of putting external expectations on you that are higher than your own.
Uh back to this note, focus on the present moment.
And then it's all you can control.
Oh, focus on the present moment is all you can control. And then why not me? So let's see what what Jordan's saying here. All I knew was that I never wanted to be average.
I just wanted to follow what I felt. My father put a challenge in for me, I uh in ch in in front of me. I knew what he expected, so back to you know, be a mechanic, be whatever.
Uh
the expectations I had for myself were beyond my father's expectations.
My thoughts were way beyond the idea of preparing myself for jobs so I could be like the guy down the street.
I had dreams. They were my dreams, and I had no fear of them.
And this is an important sentence. I knew going against a grain was part of the process.
I wasn't limited by someone else's view of how my dreams should look.
Or whether they were reasonable or not.

So then he talks about like what do you do after you identify the goal? Put all the work in and then let the future emerge.
That is a lot different than forcing the issue because you're worried about an outcome that hasn't been determined yet.
Anything can happen if you're willing to put in the work and remain open to possibilities. Dreams are realized by effort, determination, passion, and staying connected.
to that sense of who you are.
Why me?
Why not me?
And he's not saying, Oh, don't worry about the future, whatever will happen, will happen. He's saying the point is like if you did everything possible, if you know you put all the work in possible.
Then let the results land where they are.
That's not the same thing as just being, Oh what you know, w whatever maybe will be. No, it's like I'm going to do th my level best and then if I know I do that I will be okay.
With whatever happens.
And so let me give you a quote from another interview.
I never feared about my skills because I put in the work.
If you put forth the work
then what are you afraid of?
And then this is a line from his Hall of Fame speech. Limits like fears are
Are often just an illusion.
So then another idea that's gonna pop up in this book over and over again.
It's really an introduction in why he's worthy of study. It's his extreme mindset.
This is the extreme mindset.
of Michael Jordan.
So he says, If you want to win, you have to pay the price.
It's not complicated.
If somebody didn't want to hear that from me, fine.
Go play somewhere else.
Come on, man. You might be sick.
But you can still play.
I remember when we were playing Detroit and one of our guys was bent over after getting hit.
I said
Don't let them see you in pain.
You know why? Because they're gonna do it again.
And that's gonna take your mind off what you need to be doing.
Show you can stand up.
To whatever they have to give.
Let them know it's not affecting you and they won't do it again.
But every time you wimp out, you bitch about it, you cry to the ref.
All that all I'm going to
To say is shut up.
And play.
You know what they're trying to do.
Don't let it happen.
Play right on through that stuff.
And so that is one of his main criticisms about the players that came after him. The fact that they don't look at it. They look at like it's almost like uh there's an echo to what we learned from the great advertisers of the past, the fact that a lot of people say, Hey, I ha I made I made some tires. Buy my tires.
It's like no no you you think sir the good best ads is service first. It's like what can I offer you?
But Jordan's point was like they paid money for you
to to play, like you should show up and play.
Right.
And what he's saying right here about you gotta
learn how to play through the pain.
Don't let people see you struggle, whatever the case is. For some reason when I r got to this section, it made me think of a
Uh
of a a paragraph that takes place in Henry Ford's autobiography My Life and Work.
Because Henry Ford had the same mentality about service first. You're serving your customer first and your feelings and a and
Desires come second.
And so he's writing these words almost a hundred years ago. But it's it echoes exactly what
Jordan's mentality was when he was playing basketball.
I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have an atmosphere of good feeling around him before he can do his work.
There are such men, and in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on feeling, they
They are failures.
Not only are they business failures, they are character fail failures also.
It is as if their bones never attained a sufficient degree of hardness to enable them to stand on their own feet.
There is altogether too much reliance on good feeling.
In our business organizations.
And Michael's not just preaching this, like he actually lived this. So that's what gives his words, I feel, more weight. This is the continuation
of this extreme mindset of Michael Jordan.
A leader has to be willing to sacrifice to help everyone else get to where they need to go.
No d where the team needs to go over there.
No one could no one could take days off with the bulls because I never took a day off.
Horse Grant and I had a falling out because he wanted to day off here and there, and I would chastise him for it.
That's what leaders do. They set a standard and everyone has to live up to that standard.
It is the same in every great organization.
You have to rise to our level.
We are not going to drop down to yours.
I apply that standard to whatever I do.
And this is his mom.
on the same page reflecting on this. Michael earned every bit of this.
I tell people, do you know how many ice packs
Do you know about the ice packs on his knees? How he hobbled out of Chicago Stadium some nights, barely unable to uh barely able to make it home.
I remember that day in Utah w they call it the flu game, which we learned it's the food poisoning game.
I'll never forget that day I told him, Don't play tonight. You were too sick.
And what did he do?
The best came out because he you find that little bit uh strength where you keep going
When you keep going.
That's the termination of focus. The idea that he wasn't gonna give up until he had given his last.
That is life.
Give it your best and all other good things will come to you.
Then a few pages later there's just two sentences.
Two ideas that are conveyed in two sentences that I want to bring to your attention. And this is Tinker Hatfield describing what it's like to work with Jordan.
He's just deadly.
Cooly.
Efficient.
And then Jordan talking about how he approaches everything, which I love.
I focus on the little things.
Little things add up to big things.
And for some reason what I was reading.
this page in the book. It made me think of
I did this two part it's like a one of the longest episodes of Founders. It's uh the the Peter Tale episode. I think it's back in the thirties or something like that.
I read Ryan Holliday's book Conspiracy.
which I thought the storytelling of that book was fantastic and then and then Peter's book, Zero to One.
And there's something I heard Ryan on a podcast one time, he was doing like the book tour.
uh doing these interviews to to publicize that the release of that book.
I think that's probably how I found the book.
Um
Anyways, he said something about
Peter Tiel's approach to
The conspiracy to get revenge for against somebody that that he felt wronged him.
And he's describing the whole

and all the different decisions that that had to go into
uh from from Peter's uh uh perspective, the successful outcome.
And the sentence was
It was ruthless efficiency.
And hyper competence.
That's the same description of Michael Jordan as well.
Now remember, the point of studying
Michael Jordan and people like him, it's'cause you know, it's not like the person walking around the average person has anywhere close
To this extreme mindset that
That Jordan does. This is a s an example of that.
This guy telling a story has been Michael's friend for twenty five years.
And this is Michael Jordan's You Can't Ride the Fence Story.
This is crazy.
I was really close to Ralph Samson.
Ralph had a big Puma contract.
When I would go out to Boston with Ralph, we'd go to the Puma warehouse. I would do the same thing when I'd go out to Nike with Michael.
They'd say whatever you want, pick it out and we'll ship it to you.
I had my closet separated out, half Puma, half Nike.
Michael comes to my apartment.
We're getting the ready to go out and he says, Man, it's kinda cold.
Can I borrow one of your jackets?
I said sure, go in the closet.
He went in there and saw everything separated out.
He's in there a little longer than necessary.
And he comes out of my room.
He has taken all of my Puma stuff out.
brought it to the living room, and laid it on the floor.
He goes into the kitchen.
gets a butcher knife, and literally cuts up everything.
This was like his second or third year in the league.
He literally took a butcher knife to it all.
When he's done, he picks up every little scrap and walks it down to the dumpster.
He then says, Hey dude
Call Howard tomorrow and tell him to replace all of this.
But don't ever let me see you in anything other than Nike.
You can't ride the fence.
That's how Michael thinks.
Now we're gonna fast forward in the timeline. This is Jordan
Talking about
His time on the Dream Team.
And so one of the sentences that stuck out from last week's book, or a couple the book the last book rather
was that Jordan had been surprised to learn how m lazy many of his Olympic teammates were about practice.
And then he says something or the author says something that just gives me goosebumps, gives me chills. They were deceiving themselves.
about what the game required. Think about the extreme mindset of Michael Jordan.
This is not only like
You have multiple levels. Like it's extremely hard.
you know, what four hundred players, something like that, four hundred people?
For the exact number can get to the NBA.
Then s at a s the even smaller
pr uh number gets to be an all star. An even smaller number
gets to be chosen for the Olympic team. This is who Jordan is talking about.
And then he's saying even when you got to that level
They didn't understand the importance of practice. They were deceiving themselves about what the game required, but they already got to the Olympics. What are you talking about? And I was thinking about that. I was like, Well,
How many of those players? Yeah, they got to Olympics, they had individual accolades, they got deep in the playoffs.
None of a lot of'em none of'em won six championships on that team.
And uh a a lot of them never won a single championship.
So I think that really ta ties into like this extreme
Outlier.
mindset that Jordan possesses. So I'm just gonna read
nearly this whole section to you,'cause I thought it was very interesting. He says the nineteen ninety two Barcelona Barcelona Olympics was one of the best times of my life.
You're talking about the greatest players in the world. Guys who had every story written about how great they were.
all the things they could do and had done on the basketball court.
All I thought about was
I want to see this for myself.
I wanna see what those these guys are all about.
That was my motivation going to the Olympic Games in nineteen ninety two.
We were coming off back to back titles.
I was exhausted.
But I had to see these guys for myself.
I'd played against them.
But I wanted to see how they practised.
The best part of the whole thing turned out to be the practices. All we did was line up and play.
Chuck Daly, the coach of the Olympics, he'd just say, Come on, guys, let's go hard for an hour or two.
Let's get loose.
That's all he did.
He didn't coach, he didn't call fouls, he just threw the ball out there.
The games were competitive as hell.
It was up and down the court.
We had twelve players, but John Stockton had broken his leg
And Christian Laker Leightner was on the team, but he was still in college and no one would let him in the games.
We played five on five.
If magic got off to a good start or anyone else, the talking would start.
These were the teams.
Me and Scotty.
Chris Molin, Larry Bird, and Patrick Earing.
That was our five.
They had Magic, Drexler, Malone, Charles Barclay, and Robinson. Think about this. He beat Magic in the finals, beat Drexler in the finals, beat Malone in the finals, and beat Charles Barclay in the finals. That is crazy. I didn't realize that until I read the sentence. We whip their ass.
Every day.
In Monte Carlo we got into the most heated match of all time. Magic was telling us how great the Lakers were and how Showtime was the best basketball. Me and Pippen are listening to this on the way to practice and we say, Okay, we're gonna show you what the new kids are all about.
Me and Magic talked trash back and forth all day. I was guarding him.
And I'm saying you don't have Kareem now, you've got to do it all yourself.
At the other end he was guarding me and I blew right by him.
I'd be trash talking.
This isn't your old team.
We beat them so bad that when the game was over, Magic said, We ain't leaving.
We gotta keep playing.
Scotty and I looked at Bird and we said, We're ready to go.
Magic said
Why are you ready to go?
And we said.
Because there isn't any competition here.
Magic didn't speak to us for two days.
So another thing that's uh Jordan says in this book, I've also heard him in the interviews multiple times, is the the important
Like if you're being authentic to yourself, if you're making decisions from your instinct,
you that's the only way you're gonna have long term success because you can't you you if you're just following fads, you're trying to fake something, like you can only do that for a short amount of time.
And then he combines this with the ideas like
Skip the shortcut.
Like it's supposed to be hard.
It's hard, but it's fair. Remember his motto. This is gonna remind me of
There's a quote in that book, The Hour of Fate.
I forgot which Founders episode it is, but
You'll see it in the archive if you're interested,'cause it's about the um the partnership, like the
I guess the the feud and then the unlikely partnership between Theodore Roosevelt and Ch P Morgan, but Theodore Roosevelt's somebody I'm gonna read multiple books on the future. I've already done I think what, two or three podcasts on him at least?
'Cause he's just a very f fascinating
individual and he lived, I feel, multiple lifetimes.'Cause he dies, you know, relatively early, when he's sixty
uh The River of Doubt is a great book about like towards the end of his life and just the crazy things that he would do.
That's also in the archive, but in the the hour of fate it said um
Roosevelt was forever at it.
He was a curiosity, always pushing and straining and admonishing friends around him to do the same.
Theodore loved to row in the hottest sun over the roughest water in the smallest boat.
He's not one for shortcuts, Jordan isn't either. So he says
We have become a shortcut culture.
To a certain degree we define success on the basis of fictional attributes. If a guy has commercials, a lot of money, the girls, the car, then he's considered successful. Whether his performance matches all those things or not.
Success to me has nothing to do with how much money you have or what kind of car you drive.
I always wanted to know where I fit in with the best.
Authenticity is about being true to who you are.
Even when everyone else wants you to be someone else.
It is a lot harder to become the best you can be when you're focused on trying to be the best version of someone else.
There's nothing authentic in that.
And if it's not authentic, then it's not going to last.
And so that reminds me of something he said in this interview, this Shikar shigar uh aficionado interview,'cause it's like
You know, you're you own a NBA team, you got businesses going everywhere, like what what is most important to you?
And so Drint says of all the things I'm involved in.
My strongest passion is the Jordan Brand.
Because I can impact that
in a much greater sense than owning an NBA team.
To be able to continue continually talk to that consumer, to interact with that consumer. It's not dependent on how the season ends. This is the most important part.
If I pick up.
If I had to pick of all the things I'm involved in, the most important is the Jordan Brand
Because it's my DNA.
It's in my DNA.
It is who I am.
This is a story coming from the the preparation and his work ethic that he was a previously applying the basketball, now he's applying it when he's in the minor leagues trying to be a baseball player.
And really this is the Jordan doesn't have an off button story.
What Michael did to get himself ready to play baseball was grueling.
He would get up every morning and go to the complex
Uh before way ahead of the other players.
He'd get into the batting cage, swing the bat, and knock around the ball. He would do this for an hour to ninety minutes.
Then the team would show up and Michael would go through the regular practice, which ran about three hours.
Then he would go back out for another hour.
His hands were so raw that the calluses would rip open every day.
The trainers would wrap his hands in gauze and tape. He looked like a prize fighter.
The next morning Michael was back in the cage, swinging a baseball bat for hours.
He never missed a day.
Not only did he not miss a day, he never said a word about his hands.
That's how you get ready.
Once the on button is pushed.
There isn't an off button.
So another idea I love the fact that Michael was always talking about something he learned from his parents, something he played for the rest of his life, is that you gotta take negatives and turn'em into positives. So he's got this really famous commercial
uh Nike commercial.
Uh it's it's the Nike commercial about failure.
And I'm just gonna uh read to you real quick'cause I pulled up a script the transcript. Uh I've missed more than nine thousand shots in my career.
I've lost almost three hundred games.
twenty six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.
I've failed.
Over and over.
and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.
So he's asked, I'm gonna combine this with something else I heard him talk in this interview, he's like, What's your biggest regret? I don't have regrets.
To win you have to lose. To be successful, you have to have something that wasn't successful.
To be happy.
You have to have disappointment.
And to me that's the idea he's expressing. I just have one sentence for you here.
He's talking about the the the commercial that I just read to you. The idea of not being afraid to make mistakes or using negative outcomes.
To create positive ones.
Was great.
And so let's go back to this mindset. The reason I I I'm talking about hey, like you s you get you get close to Jordan, you hear his words, you you read books about him, you watch his interviews.
you're really downloading his operating system and the mindset that he approached his craft. And he talks about the mind over and over again. And he says, the mind will play tricks on you.
The mind was telling you that you couldn't go any further. The mind was telling you how much it hurt.
The mind was telling you these the you telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal.
How queer weird and twisted, right, and crazy this is, right? You have a goal, your own mind is trying to play tricks, so you don't get you don't accomplish that goal. The mind was telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal.
But you have to see past that.
Turn it all off.
If you're gonna get where you want to be.
I'm gonna read this again. The mind will play tricks on you. The mind was telling you that you couldn't go any further. The mind was telling you how much it hurt. This is Michael Jordan.
This is not a soft
Weak person.
And he's telling you the mind played my mind tried to do the same thing to me, right? This is extremely important.
The mind was telling you how much it hurt. The mind was telling you these things to keep you from reaching your goal.
But you have to see past that, turn it off if you're gonna get where you wanna be.
So there's a couple of quotes I'm gonna but before I go to the next page.
From um
my notes on the all these talks I've been watching.
So one of this I think
Yeah, it will help.
And Michael says.
Work ethic eliminates fear.
And actually, you know what, before I go back to my notes, th w what he's talking about the mind playing
Uh tricks on you.
that you you can be fearful w work work ethic.
Eliminates that.
Uh, Jeff Bezos in the next page, Jeff Bezos uh what Michael's about to tell us reminding me of what Jeff Bezos said. He says this uh Jeff says str stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over.
So Michael's saying
I was as prepared as I could possibly have been for that moment.
I couldn't go back and practice a little harder.
I knew I had done the right things to prepare myself for that situation.
one way or another I knew I was prepared to be successful. Now if you know you haven't prepared correctly, which is what Jeff is just saying, which d where is the um root cause of stress.
or you haven't worked that and then you haven't worked hard enough, that's when other thoughts and emotions creep into your mind. That is stress.
That is fear.
Pause here. Go back to this. Work ethic eliminates fear.
Right?
Back to Jordan's paragraph. It is the same process for doing anything in
anywhere in life, no matter how big or small, whether it's running a corporation, taking a test in the second grade, or taking a shot to win the game.
At that moment and I double underline this this sentence, this is fantastic.
At that moment
You were the sum total
Of all the work you have put in.
Nothing more and nothing less. If you are confident that you have done everything possible to prepare yourself, then there is nothing to fear.
Back to my notes on the talks. I have total confidence in my skill, so I am not afraid.
the same idea, he's expressing I think the like fifteen year gap between those two ideas. So it's obviously very fundamental if he's still talking about it.
More notes. I know I can play this game and I know I can play it at the highest level. You've got a lot of guys with the ability
But they don't have control of their mind.
I'm not making this up. How many times is Jordan saying the same idea over and over again? The importance of having control over your mind.
A lot of people can run and jump and shoot.
But they don't have the killer instinct and the confidence in themselves to perform those skills.
Let's go back to this the Z Zen.
you know he's heavily influenced by what he learned from Phil Jackson and from the psychologist of meditation the living in the moment, like the Zen Buddhism
Uh
Idea.
I want to allow whatever's going to happen to happen at its own rhythm. That is just there's a single
quote on an entire page. I want to allow whatever's going to happen to happen its own rhythm.
Something he told Oprah that's kinda similar to that thought. If you chase something you might not get it.
If you po put forth the work of
The next thing you know it's bestowed upon you.
Okay, so now he's got a bunch of ideas on this page. So my note is my driving force was to show people what I could do.
wake up and go on the attack. We are on the offense all the time. So there's a you can find these principles of Nike in the early days. They're f I think their first marketing manager's one that wrote it out.
But they said that we're on the offense all the time. Jordan was the same thing.
And then find ways to trick yourself. So let's see what this is about. My driving force, my passion was to impress people with what I could do.
It was the idea somebody might be sitting on
uh in the stands who had never seen Michael Jordan play before.
I thought about that person who had never experienced the excitement or the entertainment I could provide.
I would wake up in the morning thinking, How am I going to attack today?
And then the idea of you know, even how do you
How do you have that motivation every day?
Even after you now he's got the accolades. He's
All star gold medals, MVPs, championships.
You gotta.
trick your mind. You gotta play games with yourself. I never knew what my motivation would be until something during that day.
It wasn't easy as I went along because I had accomplished so much, but
I had to trick myself.
I had to find a test within the test. I look at these kids today and they don't know how to trick themselves. They don't even understand the need to find a way to get yourself ready to play at that high level every night.
And now we're gonna see that again, he's holding everybody else to a high standard, but not a higher standard than he held himself. And so this re this section reminded me of that quote I say to you all the time, because I think it's extremely important to know. Comes from F founder of four seasons, is Z Sharp excellence is the capacity to take pains. Before I read this section to you.
Let me read some more quotes that from these interviews that I think are echoing what I'm about to read to you.
Remember earlier he's saying, I'm not gonna fall down to your level, right? My competitive drive is far greater
than anyone else I've ever met.
We have a goal, a vision to obtain.
Sometimes you have to do it when you're tired.
It's a test of your will to succeed. So w how does this relate to what's happening?
He's talking about when he's playing on the Wizards.
goes from being GM to going down, trying to to get to get to know the players. At Washington, Quame Brown said it was hard on on
I was hard on him.
And I was
Because I never believe he had ever tried to push himself. He had developed bad habits and I don't believe in bad habits.
Tomorrow's kids are gonna have to see someone playing hurt, see someone practicing the day after winning a championship. We have to provide examples so they can relate to that ideal.
Otherwise we'll lose the gap.
That it starts to fade away, and twenty years from now you'll never see someone play sick or get out on the floor with a sore ankle.
So on the same section we have a a friend of his
Uh
like add to what Michael's saying here. I saw a guy sitting on the training table for two weeks with a sprained ankle.
Michael had a back spasm one day and we literally had to carry him off the floor and drive him home drive him home in a bed of a truck because he couldn't move.
They gave him treatments and uh they give him heat treatments and cold treatments all night long, and he played the next night.
He had fluid drained off his knee.
I don't know how many times.
One night
He had twenty two Cs of fluid drain.
Do you know how much that is?
And that was before the game.
So again, I think Michael's words resonate because they're not just words. It's not he's not telling you, Hey, g you know, Scott, do you have a migrant, get in here?
Hey, your your back's hurting the you know, uh'cause in the last dance th Michael and Curtish and play him like he's like, just go out there to be a decor.
He i that wouldn't work if he didn't do it himself.
And so what did he say? You have a goal, don't you? You have a vision to obtain. Well, sometimes you're gonna have to do it when you're tired, and sometimes you're you're not gonna feel well. You have to do it anyways. It's a test of your will to succeed.
Let me go back to my notes. There's another uh another thing he says in this other interview. If you love something
And your goal is to be successful, there's a certain price you have to pay.
There's a certain accountability you have to hold.
Later in that same interview he says, Everything comes with a price.
And I'm I'm gonna read uh the last note I have.
on this and then I've just finished with the book.
Um because
Really?
This is something he said about his dad and he's saying it twenty five years after his dad was murdered, right?
And
Part
Yeah, like
Part of the reasons founders exist is of course, like
We want to learn
like how they thought about work, the ideas they had, you know, they spent forty, fifty years over their career.
They've obviously picked up useful information that is useful for for future generations.
But work is just a a micro like a smaller part of life. It's really like how to l to learn how you have a great life.
And so outside of the work relationships, I think about the personal relationships a lot because
These are life stories. They're not just work stories, right?
And really
Something that has I I feel like I've
benefited greatly from reading these books is understanding the profound impact
That the your the relationships
how your relationships with other people affect their journey in life.
It could be your close friends.
Obviously your kids
your your your life partners, your spouses, whatever it is.
But there's two the he just has a few sentences there's there's just two ideas.
that jumped out on me is the fact that, you know, he's having this discussion
twenty five years after his dad died. So the impact that you're gonna have. If you if you have kids now or maybe you have kids in the future, like how important
that relationship is to your kid.
And know that's going to affect what you do with them. Your actions are going to affect
Their lives.
Long after you don't exist anymore.
And then Jordan's ability to process and to get control of his mind and to take a the one of the most negative things that could ever happen to a person and say, Hey, I'm gonna I'm they I didn't have control over it, I didn't want it to happen, but moving forward it's gonna have a positive impact on my life, he says. So this is him when he's asked about his father twenty years five years after his die after he died.
I had him for thirty two years.
I never look at it from a negative sense. We're talking about I'm not
Yes, I wish he was still here.
But I had him for thirty two years, right?
Obviously he was murdered.
I think about him practically every
Day.
So those two ideas. Like I yes, I didn't want that to happen, but I had him for thirty two years. I gotta relish in the fact that I did have him for that long, for that that period of time. I wanted more, but I didn't I don't get control of that. I had'em for thirty two years, and even almost three decades.
After
He's no longer with me.
I'm still thinking about'em every day.
So let's go back to the book.
This I almost ended on this because I thought it was so
Such a great
Thought. Like it doesn't have to be someone else. It could be you.
And so he says, For the for the twentieth anniversary shoe, we asked who's gonna be next.
Who's gonna come along and take Michael Jordan's spot?
In one way or another, just about everyone is gonna go through that kind of search.
The idea that it could be you is something all of us can relate to when we think about our goals.
It doesn't have to be someone else getting all the accolades.
It could be you.
And then we have uh Michael explicitly talking about the fact that
Building a team on a business is extremely similar to building a team in a sport.
Difference is one is negative sum and one is positive sum.
It's only one NBA champion. There could be m many, many successful businesses. And really he's gonna touch on one of his m another main idea. The I the ones that at least I'm gonna take away is the idea, okay, practice, right? The importance of practice. Believe in practice is the is the way I would distill that uh idea down to its essence. Believe in practice.
Live in the moment.
and then the importance that listening is a superpower.
How shocked were you when you if you listen to the podcast, like the fact that everybody around him talked about Michael's one of the greatest listeners. That is not from the outside does not look that way, right?
So let's go to what he says here. We bring our personalities, our visions, and our creativity to discussion. He's talking about the team uh at Jordan Brand, and we don't give a damn about getting credit.
We are there to create something beautiful, something representative of what the brand is all about.
What I think they like about me is I could admit when I'm wrong.
And I can accept criticism.
And I can accept creative insight coming from someone other than myself.
There are a lot of people who can't do that or won't allow themselves to do that.
They all feel like it's an attack on their intelligence or a negative comment on their ideas.
They want so much credit that they can't share the credit.
But that dynamic is just as destructive inside of creative team or a corporate setting as it is on the basketball court.
In its highest form, business is a team game.
The team can accept that philosophy. The teams that can accept that philosophy are the teams that get the best chance long term to be successful.
Team sports are no different.
Give me five guys who want to work hard and play together, and I'll take those guys every time over more talented players who can't come together for the good of the group.
For years people viewed me as an individual and not a team player because I scored so much.
But I was a team player. I was just filling my role in that at that time.
Brand Jordan is no different.
Even though my name is on the product, it's a collaborative effort.
I have the same kind of commitment to the brand that I had to basketball.
I have an intense focus and desire to make the brand successful.
But I'm not so dominant that I can't listen to the creative ideas coming. Remember, listen, he said that word, but I'm not so dominant that I can't listen to creative ideas coming from other people.
Successful people listen.
Those who don't listen.
Don't survive.
And then Jordan closes with just a reminder that you just have to focus on the moment.
All is now.
In all honesty, I don't know what's ahead.
If you ask me what I'm gonna do in five years, I can't tell you.
This moment.
Now that's a different story.
I know what I'm doing moment to moment.
But I have no idea what's ahead.
I'm so connected to this moment that I don't make assumptions about what might come next because I don't want to lose touch with the present.
Once you make assumptions about something that might happen or might not happen,
Then you open up the possibility of making mistakes.
You start limiting the potential outcomes.
I don't make assumptions.
I know what I know.
And I deal with my life based on what's happening.
Right now.
And that is where I'll leave it to get the full story by the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting podcasts at the same time. That is two hundred and thirteen books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.
Okay, so what you're about to hear is this question I was asked a few months ago. I actually recorded this a few months ago.
They asked how did history's greatest entrepreneurs think about hiring all the answers.
People think I have
A better memory than I
Than actually do.
You know, if people say, Oh, you David, you have a great memory, my wife would laugh at that'cause I forget things all the time.
It's not that I have a good memory, it's I reread things over and over and over again.
Every single answer.
Every single reference you're about to hear in this twenty minute mini episode.
came from me searching.
All of my notes and highlights.
That option.
Is now available to you.
If you like what you hear, if you think it's valuable, if you're already running a successful company.
And you want an easy way to reference the ideas of history's greatest entrepreneurs.
In a searchable database.
That you can go through at your convenience any time you want.
You can go to founders notes.
dot com and sign up.
I wanna start out first with
Why this is so important?
There's actually this book that came out in like nineteen ninety seven. It's uh called In the Company Giants. I think it's episode two oh eight of Founders.
It's two Stanford NBA students, if I remember correctly.
and they're interviewing a bunch of technology company founders. And
In there, Steve Jobs is one of'em. This is, you know, right I think even before he came back to Apple.
And
they were talking about well, yeah, we know it's important to hire, but in a typical startup a manager or a founder may not always have time to spend
Recruiting other people.
And
Sti I I first read this this Steve's answer to this, you know, I don't know, two years ago and I never forgot it. I think it's excellent. I think it sets up
Why
uh this question is so important and you should really be spending especially in the the early days, like
Basically all your time doing this.
Uh, in a typical startup manager may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people, then Steve jumps in. I disagree totally.
I think it's the most important job.
Assume you're by yourself in a startup and you want a partner.
You take a lot of time finding a partner, right? He would be half of your company. I'm gonna pause there.
This idea of looking at each new hire as a percentage of the company is genius.
Why should you take any less time finding a third
or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company.
When you're in a startup.
The first ten people will determine
Whether the company succeeds or not.
Each is ten percent of the company.
So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all a players?
If three
Three of the ten.
Uh we're not so great.
Why would you start a company where thirty percent of your people are not so great?
A small company
Depends on great people.
Much more than a big company.
Does okay, so
To answer this question.
The advantage that um
That
I have making founders and that you have as as a byproduct of listening to founders.
is not only that I've read, you know, three hundred something biographies of entrepreneurs now, but I have all of my notes and highlights stored in my ReadWise app.
And that means I can search for any topic. I can look at the past highlights of books.
Or I could search for keywords. So what I did is
First o of all, like what I've started to do with these AMA um questions is I read them.
decide which ones I'm gonna do next and then think about it for a few days.
I don't put any I just literally that m that I know that's the next question.
Just let my brain work on it in the background for a few days.
And then I'll go through
And start searching all my notes. And so that's what I did here.
And so there's a bunch of you know, I don't have I may have like ten or fifteen different founders talking about hiring.
The first idea is the most obvious, but I think
probably works best when you're already established.
So Steve Jobs is talking about hey, you know, the great way to f to hire is
Just fine, great work.
And find the people
That did that and then try to hire them.
When you're Steve Jobs
Yeah.
That's a lot easier. Right. Than if you're just somebody that doesn't have reputation, maybe don't have resources.
maybe your company's rather w uh new or not as well known.
David Ogie, I just did Confessions of an Advertising Man.
couple episodes ago, I think three oh six or something like that. Three oh seven.
And
He did the same thing.
But he's David Ogy at that point. So he would find he'd go through magazines, find great advertising, great copyright.
And he'd write the personal letter.
And then set up a phone call.
And he says he wouldn't he was so well known and you know, he's one of the best in his field.
That he wouldn't even have to offer a job.
Just the conversation, then the person would the the
he'd want to hire the person, never mention it, and the person would apply to him.
Um, and so again, I think if you can do that
Then of course it's
Straightforward. Fine for somebody who does great work.
Usually you can do this. I actually have a friend of I can't say who it is. He's doing this right now actually.
Um, I have a friend that's really good at doing this. He's finding people that do great stuff on the internet and then just cold
Yeah. Called DMing them. And then
Getting convincing them to work on things.
And
That usually works, especially with people like younger people earlier in their career.
There's a bunch of different ways to think about this and a bunch of different ways to prioritize. So
The first thing that that caught that came to mind that I found surprising is you read any biography on Rockefeller.
And he had a couple ideas where
He felt
The optimization
you know, table stakes that you're intelligent and you're driven and you're hardworking, right? We don't even have like if you're listening to this, you already know that. But he prioritized hiring people
With social skills.
And so this is what he said, the ability to deal with people
Is as purchasable.
A commodity as sugar or coffee.
And I pay for I pay more for that ability than any other under the sun.
There's a two the second part to this, though.
And this is also works well if you have access to more resources.
Rockefeller would hire people as he found.
As he found talented people, not as he needed them. It's not like okay, standard oil has
Six open spots. Let's go find six candidates, right?
He'd come across what he considered a talented person. It didn't even matter if he didn't know what they were gonna do. He's like, I'm just gonna stack his team.
And if you really think about the the his partners of standard oil.
He essentially built a company.
An executive team of
Founders.
Of course.
'Cause he was buying up all their companies. So it's very rare. But
Um, there's a line from Titan I want to read to you. Taking for granted the growth of his empire.
He hired talented people as found.
Not as needed.
And then I found another idea.
in the hiring like the actual interview process.
So there's this guy named Van Ever Bush.
I did two episodes on him, I think it's two seventy and two seventy one. He is the most important American ever.
uh in history uh in in terms of
Connecting the scientific field, private enterprise, and the government.
The most important person to keep alive for the American war effort was FDR. The second one was Van Ever Bush. Van Ever Bush uh is like the force gump of this historical period. He is involved in everything.
From the Manhattan Project.
to discovering like a young Claude Shannon to building
uh a mechanical computer like this guy literally has done it he's just he pops up in these books over and over again. If you were reading
about American business history during World War Two and post World War Two, you are going to come across the name Van Ever Bush over and over again.
Uh, I read his fantastic
autobiography called Pieces of the Action.
And I came across this weird highlight.
And so this is his brilliant and unusual job interview process.
And so he's talking about this organization he's running called Amrad.
At Amrad, I hired a young physicist
From Texas named CG Smith.
The way I hired him is interesting.
An interview of that sort is always likely to be
on on an artificial basis and somewhat embarrassing.
So I discussed with him a technical point.
on which I was then genuinely puzzled.
The next day he came in with a sol uh with a neat solution.
And I hired him at once.
Here's another idea. This is from Nolan Bushnell. Nolan Bushnell's the founder of Atari, founder of Chucky Cheese.
And Steve Jobs mentor. He hired Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs was like nineteen at Atari.
He
would ask people their reading habits in interviews. This is why.
Uh one of the best ways c his whole thing was he wanted to build a
all of his companies w laid on a foundation of creative people. So that's what he's looking for. He's like, I need creative people.
One of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question, What books do you like?
I've never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits.
Actually which
Books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read it all.
I've known many talented engineers who hated science fiction but loved
See books on bird watching.
A blatant but often accurate generalization, people who are curious and passionate read
People who are apathetic and indifferent don't
I remember w that that's such a great line, and I obviously agree with it.
I remember one
I'm going to read it again. A blatant but often
Accurate generalization.
People who are curious and passionate read people who are apathetic and indifferent don't.
I remember one particular woman who during an interview told me that she had read
Every book that I had read.
So I started mentioning books I hadn't read and she had read those too.
I didn't know.

That time.
This much time to read so much.
But I was impressed I was so impressed that I hired her right there and assigned her
to international marketing.
Which was having problems.
This is why. This is why I'm reading this whole section to you.
A job with a lot of moving parts.
benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving parts.
It wouldn't be possible to have read that many books.
without such a brain. So do you see what I mean? Like
Yeah.
We start with
Steve Jobs saying this is the most important thing that you your role as the leader of the company and the founder to do, right?
And you are in
It's so important to study and this is why I'm glad this this question exists and why I'm glad that I've I took the time and I had like the foresight to like, hey, I should really
Organized my thoughts and notes.'Cause there's no way
I would have remembered all this.
without being being able to search my read wise, right? But you have Rockefeller saying this is what's important to me.
You have
Bush saying this is how I hire.
Now you have Nolan Bush now.
Saying, Well here's another weird thing that I learned.
Um, let me go through uh what Warren Buffett says about this. So this is about the quality. One thing that is consistent.
Whether it's Jobs, Buffett, Bezos.
Uh, Peter Thiel, this just pops up over and over again.
they talk about the importance of trying to find people that that are better than you.
the the hiring bar constantly
has to increase. Now obviously the larger the company gets, that's impossible.
Uh, Steve Jobs has this great quote.
Where he's like, you know, Pixar was the first time I see I saw an entire team.
entire company of A players.
But they had four hundred players. They had four hundred
Team members.
He's like at the time Apple had three thousand. It's like it's impossible to have three thousand A players. So there is some
Number
that your company may grow to where it's just you're just not
You're not gonna have thousands of A players.
in my argument, I don't even know if you get a four hundred. I guess you I mean I'll take Steve's word for it on there and Pixar
definitely produce great products, but it's probably a lot lower than that as well.
So Warren Buffett would tell you to use
David Ogovies.
Hiring philosophy.
And so Warren said, Charlie and I know
That the right players will make almost any team manager look good.
Again, that is why it's the most important function of the founder.
maybe directly next to the product.
Right above the product actually,'cause those are the people building your product.
We subscribe to the philosophy of Ogie and Mather's founding genius, David Ogie.
This is what Ogie said. If each of us hires people who are small smaller than we are
We should become a company of dwarfs.
But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are.
We shall become a company of giants.
David or Jeff Bezos, rather, used a variation of Ogy's idea too.
Jeff used to say in Amazon, every time we hire someone.
He or she should raise the bar for the next hire.
So that the overall talent pool
is always improving. They talk about this idea on Amazon.
Where
The the the future hires that we do should be so good.
that if you had applied for the job you already have at Amazon, you wouldn't get in.
That's a very interesting idea.
Take your time with recruiting.
Take your time with hiring.
There's this great book on the history of
PayPal.
It's written by actually I've I've recently become friends with the author. His name's Jimmy Sony.
Um
And this is in his book.
the the most fascinating thing that I found was that PayPal prioritized speed.
So from the time they're they're founded to the time they sell to eBay?
It's like four years.
Jimmy spent more time researching the book than than for he spent six years researching the book.
I always tease them'cause like you took longer on a book than they took to start and sell their company.
It just speaks to like the quality he's trying to do. But
tha as a byproduct of that, like obviously they move fast, but they prioritize speed over everything else except
In one area.
Recruiting.
Max Sludgeon kept the bar for talent exceedingly high, even if that came at the expense of speedy sa staffing.
Max kept repeating.
A's higher A's, Bs higher Cs.
So the first B
You hire takes the whole company down. Let's read that again.
A players hire A players, B players hire C players, so the first B player you hire takes the whole company down.
Uh additionally, the team the company leaders mandated that all prospects here's another idea for you.
All prospects must meet every single member of the team.
Now the next one is the most bizarre.
It makes sense.
If you study I did this three part on Larry Ellison, three part series on Larry Ellison. I should read those books again.
'Cause the the podcast is like fifty times bigger than
than when I uh publish those episodes. And he's just he's crazy.
So he would hire
Based on
on the confidence the self confidence level of of the candidate. Listen to this.
I have tears in my eyes, I don't know why I'm laughing.
Okay. This is just so this is
W you read about Larry Ellison and
he's one of these people it's like really easy to interface with.

Yeah.
You just know exactly who he is and what's important to him. That's why I think it's so funny.
Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest
New college graduates.
When they were recruiting from universities, they'd ask people, Are you the smartest person you know?
And if they said yes, they would hire them.
If they said no.
They would say who is
And they would go hire that guy instead.
I don't know if you got the smartest people that way, but you definitely got the most arrogant.
Ellison's and this is why.
What?
The personality of the founder is largely the culture of the company.
Apple is Steve Jobs.
Apple's just Steve Jowels with ten thousand lives.
Right. I was just t texting a a founder friend of mine.
Uh, he listens to the podcast. I actually met him through the podcast.
And he's going through this like
uh process of self discovery. Like he's already started a bunch of companies that are really successful, but he's like
I think I'm more of this type of founder than the other type of founder.
And that's good that he's doing that because he's he's
Hopefully his next mission is like his life's mission, you know?
And you can't get to your life's mission unless you d you figure out who you are.
Ellison knew who he was.
Ellison's swaggering combative style became a part of the company's identity. This arrogant culture had a lot to do with Oracle's success.
Here's another odd idea for you.
Izzy Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons, actually could figure it out that in his business, which was hotels, right?
That hiring could hiring the right p person
could actually be a form of distribution for his hotel.
He gave me the idea.
Because of what? What do we know? What do you and I know in our bones.
That history's greatest founders all read biographies.
They all read biographies of people that came before them and took ideas from them.
Izzy Sharp is trying to build four seasons. What do you think he did? He picked up a biography of Cesar Ritz.
The guy that it Rith Carlton is named after the great arguably the greatest hotelier of all time.
And when he realized like oh shit.
Rits
He he says, uh remembering that Cesar Ritz made his hotels world famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs, we decided to do something similar. So what is he talking about? Caesar Ritz.
went out and partnered with August Escafier.
What Cesar Rich was ho to hotel to building hotels.
August Scafier was to French cooking. And so what happened is you partner with world famous chefs.
People come into your restaurant.
That's in the hotel.
Because the world famous chef and now they know about your hotel that leads to more gat that meet leads to more activity in your restaurant that you own, but also leads to m more brand recognition of your hotel. And then by as a byproduct of that, more people staying at the hotel.
So hiring as a form of distribution. This is fascinating.
That is a fascinating idea.
Okay, here's the problem.
You can
Identify great people.
Right.
Maybe they even want to come work. Like you've identified them
you've sold them, hey, uh this is what this is our mission, this is what we're sh we're doing.
And yet
Humans have have complicated lives.
They have spouses, they have kids, they have
A reason maybe they can't move across the country.
to work for you, even though they want to.
So
There's a problem solving element that you see in these books.
on you have to solve like you've already identified the person
You've recruited them.
They can't go for some other reason. Okay. Well,
The great founders are not going to take no for an answer.
I read in um
in this book called Lift Off, which is about the first six years of SpaceX, this is what Elon Musk did.
They had anticipated his friend's issue, having convinced Musk they needed to bring this brilliant young engineer from Turkey on board.
It became a matter of solving the problem. His wife had a job in San Francisco.
She would need one in Los Angeles, right? Cause that's where SpaceX is at the time.
They're these were solvable problems and Elon's better at solving problems than almost anyone else.
Must therefore came into his job interview prepared.
About halfway through Mus told the guy
That he wants to hire.
So I heard you don't want to move to LA and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google.
Well, I just talked to Larry and they're gonna transfer your wife down to LA, so what are you gonna do now?
To solve this problem.
Musk had called his friend Larry Page, the co founder of Google.
The engineer sat in stunned silence for a moment, but then he replied, Given all that
He would come to work at SpaceX. That's really smart.
There is another idea.
When you're promoting.
Are you gonna promote from within or from without?
You know, that's
dependent on you, depending on what what's going on.
I do think this is interesting though. There's a guy named Les Schwab.
Who built this?
this really uh valuable chain of uh t like tire companies in the Pacific Northwest. I actually found out about'em'cause Charlie Munger's like, hey
You should read this biography.
He didn't say it to me, personally.
He said it too uh in like one of the Berkshire meetings.
That
Les Wab had one of the most m uh
one of the smartest uh financial incentive structures of any company that that
Charlie Mugger had come across. So this is what Les Schwab did. He did not
want to hire from

other people from other companies'cause they might come with bad habits. He liked to train his own
Executives.
And so he says in our thirty four years of business, we have never hired a manager from the outside.
Every single one of our more than two hundred and fifty managers
And assistant managers started at the bottom changing tires.
They have all earned their management job by working up.
And then another thing, if you're gonna hire the best of the best and A players.
They're eight players don't like to be micromanaged.
Um, and so this came in Larry Miller's autobiography.
Call driven.
He owns like he owned like ninety three companies all throughout Utah, car dealerships, movie theaters, all kinds of crazy stuff, but he also owned the the the NBA team Utah Jazz.
And what was fascinating is he's trying to recruit Jerry Sloane as the coach at the pa at at the point, and Jerry Sloan would only take the job on one condition, and I really like it.
I really like this idea. If you hire me, let me run the team in business, right? That's what you're hiring me for.
One of the best things we had ever done was hire Jerry Sloan as coach. At the time he said, I'm only gonna ask you for one thing.
If I get fired, let me get fired for my own decisions. If you hire me, let me run the team slash
Business.
Here's another idea.
From
Thomas L uh Edison that I think is fascinating.
Really, th I th the way I think about a founder is like you're developing skills that you can't hire for.
you you're gonna hire for everything else.
But you shouldn't be hireable.
And Edison wasn't.
Edison expressing his views on the preeminent role of applied scientists, which that's what he considered himself.
Coin the expression I can hire mathematicians, but they can't hire me.
And so when I read that paragraph for the first time, the note I left myself was develop skills that you can't hire for.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable.
Uh Estee Lauder would give you advice that you need to hire people aligned with your thinking and values.
Hire the best people. This is vital. Hire people who think as you do and treat them well. In our business, they are to a top priority. So this idea is like
That seems kinda weird. Like hire people
Who think like
You.
There's obviously not one right way to build a business. I think the your business should be an expression of your personality and who you are who are as a person at the core.
And so I think there is an
Art.
To the building.
Of your business.
And the reason I use the word art, I don't mean in like a hoity toity, you know, pretentious manner. That's not me at all. I don't even care about I don't art at all, really.
I mean that you're making decisions not just based on economics.
Like there are non economic
important decisions based on how you're building your business. Like you could probably make more money doing a decision A.
But decision A is goes against who you are as a person.
Or you just don't like it, or it's just not as elegant or beautiful.
And so therefore you don't do it. So that's what I mean about you know, hire people who think it's you do.
And what for whatever reason when I read Essay Lauder say that, I was like, Okay, that there's like this art to what she's doing.
one thing that's gonna be helpful in recruiting.
Uh, this comes from Peter Thiel. I think this is the book Zero to One.
understand that most companies their
pitches to potential recruits and to hiring. So therefore like they're just gonna buy as a byproduct of that, you're gonna w wind up with a lower overall talent base.
And so he says, What's wrong with valuable stock, smart people are pressing problems? Nothing.
But every company makes us these claims.
So they won't help you stand out. General and undifferentiated pitches to join your company. Don't say anything.
about why a recruit should join your company instead of money uh instead of many others. So that idea of like your pitch
Your actual
He w he would tell you you're you you shouldn't be building a undifferentiated commodity business.
But
even above and beyond that. Like you're the the the mission that you're trying to engage everybody to join you in.
that pitch, that sale sale you're trying to make to potential recruit should be differentiated. It should not
If that person's applying to five other jobs.
There should not be like it's like
They may not like your mission, they may not like your pitch, but they shouldn't be able to compare it to anything else.
Uh another quote from Nolan Bushnell.
higher for passion and intensity. That's what he would do.
All right, that's what he did when he found Steve Jobs.
If there was a single characteristic that separates Steve Jobs from the mass of employees, it was his passionate enthusiasm.
Steve had one full uh one speed.
Full blast.
This was the primary reason we hired him.
And one thing all these founders have in common is that he know how important hiring is.
And when something's important.
You do it.
Yourself.
This is again Elon Musk on hiring. He interviewed
The first three thousand employees at SpaceX.
That's how important it was.
One of Musk's most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would fit his mold.
His people had to be brilliant.
They had to be hardworking and there could be no nonsense. There are a ton of phonies out there, and not many who are the real deal, must said, of his approach to interviewing engineers.
I can usually tell within fifteen minutes and I can sure
I can for sure tell within a few days of working with them. Musk made hiring a priority. He personally met with every single person the company hired.
through the first three thousand employees. It required late nights and weekends
But he felt it was important to get the right people for his company.
And then the close on this we started with Steve Jobs telling us
why it was so important and why it should be a large part of how you spend your time.
And now we'll close with what you do after.
What do you do after you hire the person? This is what he says. It's not just recruiting.
after recruiting, it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people.
And their work is bigger than they are.
the feeling that their work will have a tremendous influence
And it's part of a strong
Clear.
Vision.
So that is the end to that twenty minute
mini episode. I just re listened to the whole thing.
And it it really does, I think it's a perfect explanation and illustration of why I think
Founders notes is so valuable'cause tha some of those books I haven't read
In five, six years.
And just
the ability to have a searchable database of all this
These ideas like this collected knowledge.
of some of history's greatest entrepreneurs to reference and then contextually apply to our own businesses.
It's nothing short of
Like it's magic. That's the really the way I think about it. I think it's a massive superpower. It gives me a massive superpower. I couldn't make the podcast without it.
I also think if you have access to it, it'll make your business better.
And so if you're already running a successful business, I highly recommend that you invest in a subscription.
And you can do that by going to founders notes dot com.