#381 I Had Dinner With Michael Ovitz

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/afd29797509c69ca

Something that Michael Ovitz had in common with people like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos is the belief that you must find and work with extraordinary people.
Even when Ovitz was a young man, he starts his company, he has no money.
He makes a list of people that he eventually wanted to work with.
And it was the best of the best.
And even though at the time it felt like a pipe dream.
He actually
makes that list into a reality.
and the importance of working with the very best people.
Uh, there's actually a great observation about this from Steve Jobs. And he says that the key observation was that I noticed
that in that that dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish.
Was fifty to one or a hundred to one.
So given that, you're well advised to build a team that pursues the A plus players. That's exactly what Steve Jobs did. It's exactly what Michael Ovitz did, and it is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp has the most talented
technical team in their industry.
Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.
In the last twelve months they hired only point two three percent.
of the people that applied.
So that means when your business is using ramp.
You now have access to top tier
technical talent and some of the best AI engineers on the planet working on your behalf twenty-four-seven.
to automate and improve all of your businesses.
financial operations.
Ramp invests heavily.
In creating new innovative products. In fact
I just uh sat down with the founder and a friend of mine.
who's the one of the co founders and the CO.
Uh
Ramp named Eric.
And he told me that fifty four percent of their payroll is now dedicated to R and D.
So the longer they use ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. That's very important because as Sam Walton
astutely pointed out in his autobiography.
He wrote, You can make a lot of different mistakes to still recover if you run an efficient operation.
Or you can be brilliant and go out of business.
If you're too inefficient.
Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Oh, its nose
They ramp.
built a team of A Plus players because Obit's invested in ramp.
So from a customer's perspective, what does a team of A plus players sound like?
Sounds like this.
customer review that I read.
Which said.
Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled.
So take the time, set up a demo of the product.
And you'll see why many of the world's top founders are running their company on ramp.
You can do that by going to ramp dot com.
go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com.
Okay, so last week I flew to New York to have dinner with Mike Govitz. We wind up having a very intense and entertaining three hour conversation.
And
I've made a list of things I learned from the dinner, so I'm just gonna run through some of these ideas. I I guess I should back up and tell you how I actually got connected.
Uh to to Obits.
Uh we wind up I didn't even know this, but we wind up having a a very close mutual friend.
I'm having breakfast with my friend Rick.
and his phone is on the table and it rings.
And it says Michael Lovis. It's like oh wow.
And so he picks it up and he's like, Hey, I'm actually here with my friend David Senra. He does this podcast you might have heard of. It's called Founders. And
There's a there's a short break and then Ovid says
I listened to four of them yesterday.
And so we wind up getting connected.
And
I w we were planning on having a a uh meeting and having dinner anyways, and I was like, Yeah, as you might know, I do these like I had dinner episodes. I've done one with Charlie Munger and Sam Zell and Brad Jacobs and John Mackie.
I think it'd be really interesting. Would you be up to doing it?
And he said yes.
So I flew up to see him.
Conversation was really intense. It flew by. Like I said, it was three hours.
I was shocked when I got up from the table and I thought, you know
Maybe we talked for an hour.
Um so
Right after dinner.
I don't record any of this and I don't take notes while we're having a conversation.
So I just write down some of the things that really stood out to me.
And then I try to expound on them. So I have a
Just a list of about ten ideas I wanna go over with you.
From this dinner.
And the number the the first one that's very obvious if you read his autobiography, which I'm o also doing an episode on, and I think I'll just release it at the same time.
And if you spend any time with them or hear'em speak in any capacity.
Uh there's this great line that
I kinda use this like a a guide to make sure that I'm on the the right path. And it says mediocrity is always invisible.
until passion shows up and exposes it.
And
This is very obvious if you look at his career, but he's still like this to this day.
And what I would say is like Obits does nothing in a casual manner.
And I don't either. I don't think any of the founders that you and I study or re read biographies.
uh about do either.
And like one of my favorite examples of this and he was like this when he was like a young kid.
He starts working in the mailroom at William Morris.
And
D the extra length, I think there was like I think in the book he says there was something like twenty other trainees, you know.
He's one of twenty.
And out of those twenty people, there's only one.
that did what he did and he noticed that hey
Uh there's just filing cabinet room. He says the length of a basketball court.
And it's lined with steel cabinets.
And he calls it the hard drives of the era. You know, there's no computers back then.
Uh, no internet and any anything like that.
And what he realized is like this this this these filing cabinets that are the length of a basketball court.
They actually hold seventy years of history.
On Hollywood.
And he says I view those
Files as
An encyclopedia of entertainment.
while other trainees wanted to be told what to do and read and learn each morning at seven
And every evening after work, for ten weeks, I made my way through every single file from A to Z.
How many other trainees did that? Zero.
He he does this over and over again, there's a bunch of different examples, but one of my favorite stories from the book, too.
Was
He's trying to sign this very important director.
and who the the director at the time was being revved by this aging and really apathetic agent.
And so what Ovitz does, keep in mind, mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.
Maybe the director thought, Hey that I've been with this agent for a while, seems to be going well, seems to be fine.
And then you have somebody with passion that's showing up and exposing how mediocre
Your alternative is.
And he winds up.
working on this director for two hours a day.
For two years.
before the director signs with them.
And one of the the smartest things that
that Orbit's dead he's like I made sure to get him.
Every single script.
The best scripts.
before his own agent got the scripts to him. So essentially working on his behalf and showing him how important it was and showing him that I can actually like
The difference between
You know, your your apathetic agent in me is vast.
So mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it. The second thing that popped to my mind.
Is
Don't put any ceiling on where you can push your profession.
So Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan actually shared the same
uh the same trainer.
Guy named Tim Grover, and he wrote two books about what it was like working very closely with them, you know, basically spending every day with them.
And there's two lines.
that popped in my mind when uh uh after I was thinking about the conversation I would ovitz
And Tim Grover writes the greats figure out what works for them regardless
Of what everyone else does.
And number two.
Everyone wanted to be like Mike.
Mike did not want to be like anyone else.
And so if you actually analyze
How

You know, Michaelovich was born.
There's talent agents to this day.
And yeah.
One of the things that y that is most fascinating about his story is like
He just he he figured out what worked for him. He didn't really care what other
Agents were doing. In fact
He maybe looked at what other agents were doing as what not to do or what to like.
basically attack areas that they weren't doing. So one of the innovations he had was
uh decide the the decision that hey we're all gonna service every single agent inside of CA is going to service
the clients together. We it's essentially like a giant swarm of of agents where
In the past.
You know, you were you were assigned to one person. You only worked with one person.
And that caused all kind of internal conflict and you weren't it was just a lot better five people servicing you than one person.
you know, wind up working out a lot better for for the talent that CA signed.
He and then he didn't just stay there. It's like oh okay, what are we supposed to do?
There's w there's a great story where it's like most talent agents what would they do? They would field
Offers.
Like, okay, there's ten offers, we have to choose between them, maybe we negotiate a little higher salary or the case. It's like, No, we're gonna cr we're not gonna feel.
opportunities, we're gonna create them.
And then that led to the next thing where hey, we're gonna create entire packages.
for the studios.
Which also helped him control prices.
and make more revenue for the agency.
And then from there.
He's like, what else can I do? I'm gonna get into corporate
M and A.
No other talent like no other talent agency, none of his other comp competitors were even thinking like this.
And the size and scope of his ambition, again, no s don't put any ceiling where you can push your profession.
Yeah, you just
Pursue the opportunities.
And and she's after them. He winds up brokering like
Multiple billion dollar deals.
I think one I think one of them was like six and a half billion dollars.
No again, no other none of his other creditors, no other agent was doing this.
He doesn't stop there.
says, Hey, we're gonna start being marketing and advertising consultants for giant companies like Coca Cola.
And one of the things that he said at dinner was like if you're going to do things like this
When you do new things, you will be criticized.
And in that case you'll be criticized.
By outsiders, by people outside of your company.
Now
Number two, no ceiling d don't put any ceiling on where you can push your profession is also related
to number three.
Because for number two, you're going to be criticized
out by uh by people outside your company.
Number three is I I grew up uh going to church, uh Christian church every week.
Uh, for my entire childhood.
And I remember one of the one of the lessons that they would repeat over and over again.
is the importance of not being they said, don't be unequally yoked.
And I think they meant just in in relationships in general, but I I specifically remember saying, like, you know, make sure you you're not married you don't marry people outside of the faith.
They have different, you know, beliefs in you.
And the advice from Obits is like you need to make sure that you're picking partners that have the same ambition as you.
And so when I think about that I think of don't be unequally yoked.
And
When you're when you have no ceiling on where you're gonna push your profession, you're gonna be criticized by outsiders'cause you're doing new things.
But if you
have picked partners that don't have the same ambition levels of you.
Uh and you try to do new things, like all the things I just listed.
You're actually also gonna be
criticized by insiders, which are people inside your company, your co founders.
I mean that's gonna lead to a lot of conflict and you know, there's all kinds of stories in his autobiography, which I'll go over in the episode I make on it.
It's a huge part of the story.
And he says this will manifest. He was saying at dinner, like the way this is manifest is like
Your partners will call it a distraction.
And
you know, if you believe in it, like it it's it's not it's probably not that it's a distraction. It's just they're not thinking as
Big as you are.
And you might find yourself, he didn't use this word, but une unequally yoked is the way I think about it.
when we talked about the you know the issues with co founders and and how to maybe avoid all this.
And really like what he learned from this.
What I found that was remarkable because I know now he has new partners and he's scaling other companies and he's and I know his partner.
I ask like
How are you able to trust because two of his partners
That screwed him over.
Uh were like two of his best friends too.
And so I asked him, like, how do you trust partners?
After being fucked over.
And I thought his answer was'cause you know, I I keep people at arm's length. I have a hard time trusting other people.
That may be a detriment.
And
He had a great perspective on this. He's like
You know, three people screwed me over my life.
He's like, but it's three out of a thousand.
And he's not gonna let three out of a thousand people.
you know, foreclane future opportunity.
And and being able to partner with people.
that aren't gonna screw him over.
Uh I thought that was really interesting. Number four.
Read biographies, know everything about the history.
of your industry. There's a line, this is tied to a line that um that Ovid said to me where he says only founders understand founders.
So the first thing that popped to my mind is
On page one seventy nine of his autobiography, he talks about that.
Uh Lou he modeled himself.
after Lou Wasserman. There's a biography on Lou I have. I think it's called like the last mogul or the last tycoon. The last thing was like the last Hollywood mogul.
And I asked Ovit's at dinner, I was like, Do you still
Like think Lou Wasserman was the best, and he said yes.
And
uh one of the benefits of reading biographies is obviously like over start doing this, you know, he starts working when he's like nine years old.
By the time he's high school, he's like re voraciously reading biographies of men that did great things.
And you know, he read the Carnegie and the Rockefeller and all these people.
He read all the biographies of all the pe the the people in Hollywood that came before him.
And I think the important thing is what he's saying is like only founders understand founders. And so as you understand these life stories, as you listen to this podcast, you read biographies yourself.
Like you'll just realize like, Oh, that's just like another me.
And we're going through the exact same thing.
He actually gave me advice too. He's like you should really lean into more the more unknown founders.
'Cause you know, he had read about the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's and the Fords.
But he thought it was an edge.
To introduce people to other incredible founders that very few people have heard of before. So like Daniel Ludwig, the Invisible Billionaire, Chang Ju Young, which is the craziest autobiography I've ever heard of my life.
Sam Zamurie.
S Day Lauder, another example. Like even if
You know the company name.
Very few people probably thought, you know, Oh, I should
See if that person
has built this massive company.
I wonder if they have an autobiography or a biography written about them. And then even less people would actually go and read it.
Um so again, read biographies, know everything about the history of your industry. Number five.
Have a profound sense.
Of belief.
And as you'll understand, like the world is also malleable. So
There's a reason this is number five and read robberies number four, because you learn this if you read a bunch of biographies.
And this is the things one of the things I most admire about Ovitz. There's a lot of things like
I I love the fact that this guy never gives up.
And he's still pushing himself. He's in his late seventies.
And he's got tons of energy.
And he's working really hard.
But he has got a great line in his autobiography where he says nothing in Hollywood is anything until it's something.
And the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief.
If you keep insisting insisting that a shifting set of possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one.
So Mark Andreessen, who actually modeled his venture firm
and Jason Horowitz on what Ovitz did at CAA.
had a very similar line and this is the way he describes uh what I feel is the same exact phenomenon.
And Mark wrote the world is a very malleable place.
If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion.
the world will often reconfigure itself around you
Much more quickly and easily than
Than you would think.
And so Ovitz doesn't see things as they are now.
He sees what they could be, and then he proceeds to make that idea into a real reality. And then number six, when you speak to him,
Uh you
I got the feeling that he just
thought that like there's unlimited opportunity in the world.
And surprisingly enough, I think something he learned earlier and I think it still applies to stay is like there's there's a lot of opportunity to just hiding in plain sight.
And I think you have some level of like self confidence.
When you're able to pick something up.
that off the ground.
like people kinda like threw away or didn't do anything with and you turn it into something that's in insanely valuable. And I think that's related to
Number two, which is you know, just don't put a ceiling on. There's really no ceiling where you can push.
Your profession?
So, you know, there's a ton of examples in the book, but like
He turned Shogun into this massive
mini series. I think it's the second most watched miniseries of all time.
And
that opportunity was sitting inside of another agency.
And the other agency wasn't doing any anything with it for years.
He finds
another script for this movie called Tootsie.
Again, six years it was considered dead. This is impossible. This isn't an opportunity.
winds up making makes a couple hundred million dollars in profit.
Rainman, which is one of my favorite movies.
I watched it I don't even know how many times when I was a kid.
Same thing.
Other people couldn't get it done.
Other people said no one's gonna watch this movie about this autistic guy.
makes well over four hundred million dollars. There's always opportunity hiding in plain sight.
And there's unlimited opportunity in the world.
And I feel like this has been coming up a lot if you look at the past few episodes.
Like think about Leon Hess, right?
Literally builds.
The the Hess family just sold
The business for fifty three billion dollars.
Right? What how does that business start? That starts with Leon Hess.
who realizes hey, you're throwing out a bunch of this oil.
And'cause you think it it's not valuable.
I'm gonna start my empire.
with the stuff that you're throwing away, just like Sam Zamurie did the exact same thing with
In his banana trade.
Right. You're throwing out the ripes. I w that's
You're throwing in a trash.
I see that I don't see as trash, I see his opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Jerry Jones.
Dallas Cowboys he paid a hundred forty million for. They're worth ten million today.
Seventy five people.
Turned down.
The opportunity to buy the cowboys.
Before Jerry Jones did.
If you're capable of thinking of yourself, if you have profound self belief.
There's always opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Number seven, by endurance we conquer. One of my favorite it's probably my favorite line in the entire book.
And I don't remember
What
the d the the context of the discussion we were having at dinner, but we did talk about this and we both look at this ex the exact same way.
But this line says
He stopped because it was hard.
It required discipline.
Dedication.
And hours and hours of time.
Everyone stopped.
I didn't stop.
That's related to one of my all time favorite
Observations and quotes by Steve Jobs where he says
Stief said I'm convinced that about half
Of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is pure perseverance, unless you have a lot of passion about this.
You're not going to survive, you're going to give up. And I actually think it's related
He was talking about the difference between like his mentality
And maybe some of the younger people
that work in their company today.
where they don't understand like how d uh th they just haven't gone through life enough. So you know, it's it's really hard to understand until you you go through yourself, like just how difficult and how much
adversity you're gonna have to constantly push through. And like what Steve just said.
Listen, you're gonna have to deal with all kinds of crap.
And most of you are just gonna wash out. I think in that trainee program.
that Ovit started as a young man. I think eighty percent of the trainees that all start in the mailroom.
They're trying to be talent agents.
from the time they start in the mailroom to the time they actually become an agent, like eighty percent wash out.
One of the things I think like he can uh that the young people that work with him today can benefit from.
is one they see how fast
he wants to move and how fast he he wants to push.
And there was an example
Where, you know, he asked for something.
And maybe it was on like a Thursday night.
And
It's still not there on Sunday.
And the person's like, Oh, I'll get in a few days And he's like when I said
When actually on Thursday night, I expected to have it on Friday morning.
And this person was shocked at the pace that Obitz wanted to move at. In fact, one of my favorite stories is in um Herb Kelleher, his biography. Herb Kelleher was the founder of Southwest Airlines. It's the most successful airline in history.
under Herb's leadership, they wanted being profitable for something like forty straight years.
And so I want to read this excerpt from Herb Kelleher's biography, which I think is absolutely
Excellent.
says her killer her illustrates the speed with which Southwest moves by telling a story about Don Valentine, the former that's a funny
That gives you an indication of where we're going here, right? The former VP of marketing.
Valentine had just joined Southwest from Dr. Pepper.
When the marketing group met in January to discuss a new television campaign.
Valentine was ready with his timeline for producing the spots. Okay, he just came over.
Come over from Dr. Pepper.
You're in out southwest.
You're gonna give a pr presentation to the founder.
The founder of South West.
We we have a great idea here, okay? This is what we're gonna do.
This is the timeline.
It's in January, okay? So we're in January.
I'm gonna have the script ready in March.
We're gonna do the script approval in April.
We're gonna cast the commercial in June and we're gonna shoot it in September.
When Valentine finished
Kelleher said, Don, I hate to tell you.
But we're talking about next Wednesday.
So again, a lot of people just don't know how fast you can move, and as the leader of your company, you should really be pushing the pace and showing what's possible.
Number eight. This is
Very, very interesting. And I wrote very few things down. I try to go into these conversations, obviously I'm prepared because I read about them and everything else.
But I don't have like a list of things I want to talk about.
But this was one of the things I wanna talk about. So
There was a
Young guy who Obits admired. In fact in fact, I think he started a talent agency even like a younger age.
than Ovitz did. I think this guy was like tw uh twenty three and and Ovitz was like twenty seven.
And wind up building a relationship. Ted, his name's Ted.
And
In the book, it talks about giving him advice and seeing how how you know, how much Ovitz is pushing.
He said, I have a piece of advice and knowing you, you're not gonna take it, but here it is. I could have worked ten percent less and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success.
But it would have been a lot happier.
Ted was absolutely right on both accounts. It was great advice and I didn't take it.
I see now
that it could have worked as much as twenty percent less.
And it wouldn't have cost me. And it wouldn't have cost me.
If I worked even ten percent less across thirty years, that's three extra whole years of life.
that I would have enjoyed. So this is one thing I did ask him at dinner. I was like, do you still believe that?
you know, he's he pushes the pace. Ovitz is still working an unbel uh an unbelievable amount of hours.
But he what he told me was fascinating. He's like yes.
But not on the rise.
You know, I think uh I forgot the number he told me, but I think within the first ten years.
Of CAA.
ten years after founding the company, they had like something like seventy five percent market share.
of you know, his industry.
And so he's like, then you could work, you know, ten percent less, and I should have worked ten percent less.
You might not be able to do that, especially as
You know he they they were completely under
Financed.
There's no venture capital. They're literally like they had no money. They were taking second loans out on their houses, for God's sake. They had like no furniture.
Um, so he was under intense financial pressure right from day one.
But he did this is the advice he would give now.
is you know, work ten percent less. And really I think what what
is stated there by Ted's advice and then Ovit's also agreeing with that advice is like
Really important to optimize for the long term.
Yeah, most of
the the profits in a business is very far out, you know, decade, two decades in the future. Think about the money that Microsoft makes today compared to what they made in nineteen eight nineteen ninety. Apple is the same way. Oracle, Walmart
You know, these things can compound for a long if all the value's out in the future, your the advice is like
Make sure you're not uh optimizing for growth at the expense of durability. You want to be your you want your company to be around. You want to still be doing what you're doing twenty years from now, thirty years from now, forty years from now. Some of the best entrepreneurs, I told you before,
I uh that I meet.
Are in their seventies and they've been running their business for forty five years. And if you see
It doesn't even look like a company. It looks like they have their own world. It's incredible.
And
All the profits are in the future, so
I think
What
The advice here is again, you really need to optimize for the long term.
And if that means you push back, you you cut back ten percent, but you're still there.
you know, two decades in the future, then it's obviously a trade that you want to make. Number nine.
This is very fascinating'cause he repeats the sermon over again.
Surround yourself with people who would tell you
The truth.
He said
I cannot stand yes men.
And
It will happen because
You know, Obits was in a glamorous business.
And then he did not like the publicity. It's mentioned over time over and over again in the book.
It causes problems with his partners.
it caused problems with his clientele because it's clientele or you know, they're obsessed with fame and they wanna be the ones getting the attention.
This happens with
any kind of success, whether it's in the the show business or even in in just a regular commercial business, you're gonna have people
Because it's in their best interest. They just they're gonna say
They're not gonna tell you the truth.
the close friend that me and over share, Rick.
Oh it's told me that he's fiercely loyal to him because he says Rick
Tell'em the truth.
That he is direct and truthful and he's
Not try and he he understands like he he's not telling me
Bad things.
To be
Neither see critical or to try to hurt my feelings or anything like that. He's telling'em because we're friends.
And your friends tell you the truth.
And Obits did this with me.
He actually told me a few things that he thinks I'm doing wrong or I could be doing better.
Um and he could be right about that and definitely would think about it. But
I went and actually pulled up I talked about this at dinner, but then I after dinner I went and um was I asked Sage
Like what did history's greatest entrepreneurs
say about the importance of getting unfiltered and truthful information about uh about
Oh about your business from the people that work with you.
And how did they ensure that they got the best and most accurate information about the state of their business? And there's a bunch of examples.
of this. One of them was in the early days of Amazon, Jeff insisted that customers could email him directly at jeff at Amazon.com.
And then he received unfiltered customer feedback because again
If you're just getting your information through your executives, right?
They want to tell you the good news. This is what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett were warned about over and over again.
And they would tell people it's like the good news takes care of itself.
I don't even need to hear about that. Tell me the bad news and tell me it fast because we don't let
We don't let bad news fester.
The founder of Kinko's Pa Paul Orphalia.
Same thing.
he had a voicemail system where any employee could leave him a message directly. He could he was dyslexic, so he he's not reading emails.
Says just call me, tell me what the hell was going on on the front lines. Sam Walton, he did not want to spend time in his office.
Right, there'd be hilarious stories in the in his autobiography and his biography.
Where
Sam uh would not adhere to a calendar.
And so
You know, his secretary would set up like, you know, some appointment at like seven A.
And Sam's not showing up and like, Where is he? And like, Oh, he left at five AM, gotten his little Cessna and you flew to another Walmart.
Door.
And he's like working and asking questions from the workers on the front line. That is how he knows he's getting unfiltered.
truthful information
about the state of his business. Jim Casey, same thing.
UPS founder.
What would he do? He made his driver
He
Instructor's driver. Every time we pass.
That these big brown trucks
Pull over.
And he goes and he talks.
Introduce himself and he talks directly.
gets direct information directly from the people that are actually delivering the service to
The customer.
And finally, number ten, retirement is lame. That's a quote from Jeff Bezos, who gave this interview.
at the deal book summit a few weeks ago and I made an episode on it.
He says retirement is lame.
Ovitz would say the same thing. He is still he talks about he's still very driven.
He feels it's very important that you need to have something that you can push forward, that you can wake up every day on.
He told me that he has a bunch of friends that
Yeah, it's sold out.
Are retired.
So I did they spend all the time playing golf or gardening.
And then you speak to them.
A year later and they just aren't as sharp.
They're just not as vibrant. They're just not as alive. There's a certain kind of personality type.
Uh, you know, if you're listening to this, you're probably one of them.
That you just you need something no matter what until death.
You need something to push forward.
Something to focus on and to improve.
every single day. And I think Ovitz has that trait.
in common with the other people.
that I've done in this I had dinner with series. So I'm thinking of Charlie Munger. He was still working until he died.
Sam Zell told me to my face.
I'll be doing deals till I die.
He did that.
Brad Jacobs, talk to him.
He's gonna be working until he dies.
John Mackie.
Same thing.
Retirement is lame. Retirement is fatal. You need something to push forward and focus on.
And improve every single day.
So before I go, I just want to review one through ten. Number one, mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.
Number two.
There is no ceiling on where you can push your profession.
Number three, don't be unequally yoked. Pick partners.
that have the same ambition as you. Number four, read biographies, know everything about the history of your industry.
Number five, have a profound sense of belief.
The world is malleable.
Number six, there's always opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Number seven By Endurance We Conquer.
Number eight.
Work ten percent less.
Optimize for the long term.
Number nine.
Surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth.
And number ten.
Retirement is lame.
That's everything I got for you now. Hope you listen to the next episode. I'll be going through Michael's excellent autobiography, which I hope you uh obviously buy and read as well.
And then
as I go through that biography, I'll also reference other things.
uh that relate to the dinner that Michael and I had
And that are in the book. That is three hundred and eighty one down, one thousand go.
And I'll talk to you again soon.