The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Price of Becoming

My guest: Angela Duckworth is a psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient. Her book Grit was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and her TED Talk is among the most-watched ever. Her new book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best.

Key Learnings

She almost lost her mom in the Atlantic. Angela took her 87-year-old mom snorkeling miles offshore. Her mom had not swum in decades. Within minutes, she had aspirated water into both lungs and was unconscious. Angela treaded water, held her mom's head up with one arm, and waved the other until help came. Her mom is 91 now and painting.

No amount of grit would have saved them. Angela could not have swum her mother to shore. What saved them was changing the situation, which meant getting other people to their side.

The situation is the ocean. It's that powerful, and most of us don't know what water we're swimming in.

Grit isn't wrong. It's incomplete. Angela hasn't renounced anything. She's expanding it. Effort is what you bring. The situation determines whether that effort compounds or gets swallowed.

Angela was a striver, and it worked for a long time. She knew she wasn't the most talented kid, but nobody was going to outwork her. She wanted to make the cheerleading squad without being able to do a split. She wanted a solo in choir while barely able to carry a tune. She worked her way to both. Most people would be surprised how far sheer effort can take them.

Then it stopped being enough. To get as far as she actually wanted to go, and to do it sustainably for herself and the people around her, ignoring the situation was a mistake.

The shift: stop making the best of your situation through effort alone, and make the situation better first.

"Of all the ways you can change your behavior, willpower is the absolute worst."

You can white-knuckle a donut. You just can't do it forever. Resisting works in the moment and reliably leaves people exhausted, which is why it fails on day three.

Your urges come from your thoughts. Your thoughts come from your surroundings. Donut, delicious. Then your hand moves. Instead of fighting the urge, ask where the thought came from.

The better question: what situation would give me different thoughts? Not "how do I resist," but "where can I be so that the thought never arrives?"

Three inputs shape what you think: the people around you, the physical objects within reach, and the place you're in.

Situational agency. Angela coined the term. The situation isn't given to you. It's taken.

Leon Marchand was already sixth in the world. His parents, both former Olympians, didn't tell him to train harder or wake up earlier. They told him to change his situation. He emailed Bob Bowman, moved to Arizona, and within two years cut more than eight seconds off his personal best and broke Michael Phelps's last-standing individual world record. A year after that, he won four golds in Paris.

What actually changed for Marchand: the best coach in the sport, a lane full of people who all believed they could win it all, better facilities and nutrition and physical therapy, and a culture where world-class was the baseline rather than the ceiling.

The situation isn't a given. The situation's taken.

Control the controllables. The situation is one of them. Angela agrees with the mantra. Her objection is that most people apply it only to what's between their ears: mindset, attitude, goals. Marchand didn't rethink his attitude. He got on a plane.

Get the outside game right, and you get much of the inside game for free. Change the room and the thoughts change with it.

Every reason you can't change your situation is probably true, and beside the point. When Angela told people what she was writing, they immediately listed the reasons they were stuck. The mother-in-law, the spouse's job, the kids' school. None of it is wrong. All of it ignores the list of things they could change.

Her late father-in-law's whole philosophy was two words: show up. Wedding, funeral, baseball game. Show up.

John Wooden taught high school English for 14 years. He kept an apple on his desk. He thought of himself as a teacher first, which is also why he sat high in the bleachers during games instead of courtside. He'd taught them in practice. The game was theirs.

What Wooden's players took with them: to be your best at anything, find a great teacher. Angela sees a DIY culture pulling the other way. When she tells young people to email someone, the answer is often that they'll just learn it on YouTube or ask a chatbot. You can teach yourself a lot of guitar that way. You will not become a great guitarist alone.

Belief is borrowed more than you'd think. Nobody tries hard at anything without the thought "I can do this" somewhere in their head. That thought usually arrives from someone else first.

Angela was a self-described ditzy cheerleader throwing keg parties. Her 10th- and 12th-grade English teacher, Mr. Carr, saw a writer. He handed her books. He took time on her pages. By graduation, she was the rare Harvard freshman who signed up for a second semester of the required writing course, just to keep going.

The Pygmalion effect. Bob Rosenthal made up a test, told elementary teachers which kids were about to bloom, and picked the names at random. The teachers called on those kids more, listened harder, encouraged more. By year's end, the kids fulfilled the prophecy they'd been randomly assigned.

Every single person she has interviewed has a Mr. Carr. Olympic athletes, Olympic coaches, CEOs, world leaders. Someone who could see farther than they could see.

Confidence is a half-filled helium balloon. It has to get batted back up again and again. Which means you don't need your mentor once. You need them on the bad days.

Angela forwards her rejection letters to her team. The journals she submits to reject over 90 percent of submissions, and the rejections run eight single-spaced pages. She sends them around so the younger scientists watch her fail, hear that she's angry and discouraged, and then watch her get back up.

She failed writing this book the first time. Up before dawn seven days a week through an entire sabbatical, and the clock ran out. She called her publisher and her agent to give the money back and asked whether she owed interest. They called it a pause. She said remote controls have separate buttons for pause and stop.

Burnout and imposter syndrome were abstractions until they weren't. She had taught both. She had never lived either. Not eating, not sleeping. What got her out was not more effort. It was a better situation: additional editorial support and mentors to get her back on track.

Frankl and Maslow argued about this for decades, and Maslow conceded. Self-actualization aimed only at yourself leaves you unfulfilled. Maslow's final writing added a level above it and named it self-transcendence.

There are only two types of people: those who are humble, and those who are about to be humbled.

Angela's champagne moment a year from now: celebrating the people around her. Erikson called this stage generativity, and the question it asks is how everything you've learned can help the next generation do better than you did. Her students should excel her. They should be the ones on podcasts. She wants to cede the spotlight on purpose rather than have it taken.

Her core identity is psychological scientist. Not speaker. Not author. The stage is a flow state, and she's good at it, but take away the research, and it isn't her anymore. Worth knowing which one yours is.

Reflection Questions

Pick the goal you've been grinding on the longest with the least to show for it. Is that an effort problem or a situational problem?
Who is the best in the world at the thing you're trying to learn? What would it take to send the email this week, and then get on the plane?
What is your purpose, in one sentence, written down? Mine is to inspire others to value and pursue excellence. What's yours?

More Learning

#679: Kat Cole - The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs

#591: Ryan Holiday - Do The Right Thing Right Now

#673: Dan Coyle - Flourish. The Transformative Power of Creating Community

Podcast Chapters

00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle

01:39 Meet Angela Duckworth

02:57 The Dedication to Her Mother

04:17 Her Mother Nearly Drowned

07:08 Grit Isn't Enough

09:47 Willpower Is the Worst

12:26 Where Your Urges Come From

14:31 Marchand Got on the Plane

19:57 The Excuses That Sound True

22:27 Wooden Taught English for 14 Years

26:25 The Confidence You Borrow

32:22 Five Minutes With Pete Carroll

34:27 A Half-Filled Helium Balloon

35:29 She Forwards Her Rejections

37:05 What Success Feels Like

40:28 Frankl, Maslow, Self-Transcendence

45:59 The Book She Failed to Write

52:57 The Champagne Question

54:03 She Wants to Be Surpassed

57:27 Scientist First, Speaker Second

01:01:34 EOPC

702: Blake Mycoskie (Founder of TOMS) - Hitting Every Goal & Still Feeling Worthless... Gratitude, Mantras, and Hiring Like a Champion

2026-08-23 23:00:0055:19

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller!

This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.

Blake Mycoskie founded TOMS Shoes in 2006 after a trip to Argentina, where he saw children without shoes and built a company around giving away a pair for every pair sold. TOMS went on to donate more than 100 million pairs of shoes and became one of the most copied business models in the world. What most people don't know is what happened after he sold it, and I'm grateful that he was open to talking about that on this episode of The Learning Leader Show.

Key Learnings

Make your gratitude specific. Not "I'm grateful for my family." Name the exact thing. Blake's example from that morning: the photos the camp posted of his daughter laughing in the lake, and knowing his stoic kid does not smile like that unless she is genuinely happy.

He kept the practice going for five years when he couldn't feel any of it. Blake could not name five things he was grateful for, and he had all the same things in his life he has now. He did it anyway. He credits it as one of the things that kept him going.

Surfing is a great thinking practice. Surfing is mostly just sitting on the board. Three hours in the water, ten waves, maybe five minutes standing. The rest is paddling and sitting. That's why it works as a thinking practice.

Capture the idea in the moment or lose it. Blake programmed the side button on his Apple Watch to open a voice memo. Every idea he has sitting on the board, he records. They're all waiting when he gets out.

He hit every marker and still felt worthless. "I did everything, and I still, deep down in my soul, had this feeling like I'm not worthy, I'm not enough, and I never will be."

The external validation was the drug. Selling TOMS cut off the supply. The thing that had been holding up his sense of self was suddenly gone.

If you get there and it's empty, don't panic. Panicking is what Blake did, and having money meant he could make expensive mistakes fast. Build the dream house. Get divorced. One thing after another.

The emptiness may be the point. Blake's read on it: if achievement delivered what society promises, you'd never go inward. Feeling hollow at the summit is what forces the inner work.

He re-patterned the sentence he'd been telling himself since childhood. The old one was "you're not enough." He replaced it with "I am enough. I've always been enough." Twenty minutes every morning and every evening. Forty straight days. It worked, and he no longer needs to do it daily.

Sometimes you just need a physical cue to catch the loop. That's the whole idea behind the bracelet he wears. Not magic. A reminder on your wrist that interrupts the thought.

Give the second one away. Blake found the bracelet's real power was handing one to a friend. Now you're both wearing it, you're both in on it, and there's an unspoken agreement that neither of you has to have a bad day alone. Men are worse at building that than women are.

Tell your kids they're enough, and keep telling them. They're going to get the opposite message from everywhere else, which is exactly why it has to come from you repeatedly. Blake says the relaxation you'll see in them is immediate.

Be brutally honest about how hard the job is. Try to talk them out of it. Blake is the last interview in the process now. If he can lay out every negative and they still desperately want it, the commitment is real.

"How many people did you convince not to take the role before you got the right person?" Most leaders slip into sales mode, talk the candidate into it, and end up talking themselves into the candidate.

What he screens for during the interview process:

Integrity first. If it isn't there, it surfaces fast now.
Attitude second. The person who never says "that's not my job."
Whether they're building a resume or joining a movement.

Find the people who cover what you're bad at. Blake is a storyteller, a vision-sharer, and high energy. He is not a supply chain guy, not a finance guy, and he has trouble saying no. So he hired around it. That's what let him actually be the chief shoe giver instead of pretending to be a CEO.

Don't wait for permission. Most people stand in line at the front door. Blake looks for side doors. In Argentina he had no investors and no plan, just an idea and the words One For One. Ryan's version for his kids: everyone can apply online. Drive to the restaurant and go talk to the manager instead.

Having no experience was the advantage. He'd never made a shoe, so he didn't know which rules he was breaking. Same with outdoor advertising. Same with driver's ed. He learned it from Richard Branson: ask forgiveness, not permission.

Nashville wouldn't allow advertising, so he sold art instead. Blake spent two years with the city council and got there by removing the ad from the ad. No price, no call to action. Just album covers on the sides of buildings, called country music art. Once one artist had one, they all wanted one. He sold the company to Clear Channel.

You don't attract what you want. You attract what you are. Want honest friends, be honest. Want peace at home, bring peace. Want trust, practice it when nobody's watching. Blake applies it to customers too: sloppy companies attract sloppy customers, and that's usually the real reason the business fails.

Charlie Munger got asked how to get a great wife. He said: deserve one.

Be known for doing what you said you'd do. Early on Blake didn't have the skills, so he built the reputation on execution instead. Move fast, keep it simple, do it with integrity. Momentum is a form of trust.

The other half of that is not overpromising. Blake's own failure mode is getting excited, feeling falsely confident, promising something big, and missing. When it happens, own it fast and be honest, and the relationship usually survives.

Be careful using a general-purpose chatbot as a therapist. Blake's warning, and the reason the founders of Sonia built a purpose-built tool instead: the big consumer models are designed to make you feel good about yourself. If you need to hear something hard, that's the last thing you want.

He went from skeptic to advisor in six months. Blake met the Sonia founders at a mental health conference, tried the app to be polite, and by the third session was getting insights he hadn't gotten elsewhere. He now spends five to ten hours a week helping them. His reason for loving the work: "Now I get to be the coach instead of the athlete."

Stop chasing balance. Design for harmony. Blake picked this up from an executive at Cannes who said she'd given up on balance. He goes hard in phases. Full dad mode with the office waiting on emails. Then all in on a launch and missing things at home. The measure isn't evenly split day to day. It's whether, over a year, everyone in his life feels like they got what they needed to thrive. Including him.

Reflection Questions

What did you actually feel grateful for today? Not the category. The specific moment.

What is the sentence you've been repeating to yourself since childhood, and is it true?

In your last hire, how hard did you try to talk them out of it? Or did you spend the interview selling them, and then sell yourself?

More Learning

#598: Sam Parr - Bold. Fast. Fun. Living by a Mantra & Building a Media Company

#547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You

#676: Jesse Cole - Built for The Fans (The Owner of the Savannah Bananas)

Episode Chapters

00:00 Meet Blake Mycoskie

01:38 Surfing is Great for Deep Thinking

03:41 Make Your Gratitude Specific

05:39 Blake Sold TOMS and Fell Apart

11:20 Advice for Those to "Make It" and Feel Nothing

13:23 "I Am Enough" and the Bracelet on His Wrist

17:35 The No Magic Pill

19:41 The Risk of Chatbot Therapy

22:42 A Surgeon Dad, a Bestselling Mom, and the Pressure Nobody Said Out Loud

25:13 Telling Your Kids They're Enough

31:31 How He Got Country Music Art on the Side of Buildings

35:15 Learning to Be Proud of TOMS Again

38:49 Hiring Around Your Weaknesses

41:25 Try to Talk Them Out of the Job

45:07 You Don't Attract What You Want. You Attract What You Are.

46:54 Don't Wait for Permission

48:34 Be Known for Doing What You Said You'd Do

50:02 The Champagne Question: Harmony, Not Balance

52:28 EOPC

702: Blake Mycoskie (Founder of TOMS) - Hitting Every Goal & Still Feeling Worthless... Gratitude, Mantras, and Hiring Like a Champion

2026-08-23 23:00:0055:19

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller!

Blake Mycoskie founded TOMS Shoes in 2006 after a trip to Argentina, where he saw children without shoes and built a company around giving away a pair for every pair sold. TOMS went on to donate more than 100 million pairs of shoes and became one of the most copied business models in the world. What most people don't know is what happened after he sold it, and I'm grateful that he was open to talking about that on this episode of The Learning Leader Show.

Key Learnings

Make your gratitude specific. Not "I'm grateful for my family." Name the exact thing. Blake's example from that morning: the photos the camp posted of his daughter laughing in the lake, and knowing his stoic kid does not smile like that unless she is genuinely happy.

He kept the practice going for five years when he couldn't feel any of it. Blake could not name five things he was grateful for, and he had all the same things in his life he has now. He did it anyway. He credits it as one of the things that kept him going.

Surfing is a great thinking practice. Surfing is mostly just sitting on the board. Three hours in the water, ten waves, maybe five minutes standing. The rest is paddling and sitting. That's why it works as a thinking practice.

Capture the idea in the moment or lose it. Blake programmed the side button on his Apple Watch to open a voice memo. Every idea he has sitting on the board, he records. They're all waiting when he gets out.

He hit every marker and still felt worthless. "I did everything, and I still, deep down in my soul, had this feeling like I'm not worthy, I'm not enough, and I never will be."

The external validation was the drug. Selling TOMS cut off the supply. The thing that had been holding up his sense of self was suddenly gone.

If you get there and it's empty, don't panic. Panicking is what Blake did, and having money meant he could make expensive mistakes fast. Build the dream house. Get divorced. One thing after another.

The emptiness may be the point. Blake's read on it: if achievement delivered what society promises, you'd never go inward. Feeling hollow at the summit is what forces the inner work.

He re-patterned the sentence he'd been telling himself since childhood. The old one was "you're not enough." He replaced it with "I am enough. I've always been enough." Twenty minutes every morning and every evening. Forty straight days. It worked, and he no longer needs to do it daily.

Sometimes you just need a physical cue to catch the loop. That's the whole idea behind the bracelet he wears. Not magic. A reminder on your wrist that interrupts the thought.

Give the second one away. Blake found the bracelet's real power was handing one to a friend. Now you're both wearing it, you're both in on it, and there's an unspoken agreement that neither of you has to have a bad day alone. Men are worse at building that than women are.

Tell your kids they're enough, and keep telling them. They're going to get the opposite message from everywhere else, which is exactly why it has to come from you repeatedly. Blake says the relaxation you'll see in them is immediate.

Be brutally honest about how hard the job is. Try to talk them out of it. Blake is the last interview in the process now. If he can lay out every negative and they still desperately want it, the commitment is real.

"How many people did you convince not to take the role before you got the right person?" Most leaders slip into sales mode, talk the candidate into it, and end up talking themselves into the candidate.

What he screens for during the interview process:

Integrity first. If it isn't there, it surfaces fast now.
Attitude second. The person who never says "that's not my job."
Whether they're building a resume or joining a movement.

Find the people who cover what you're bad at. Blake is a storyteller, a vision-sharer, and high energy. He is not a supply chain guy, not a finance guy, and he has trouble saying no. So he hired around it. That's what let him actually be the chief shoe giver instead of pretending to be a CEO.

Don't wait for permission. Most people stand in line at the front door. Blake looks for side doors. In Argentina he had no investors and no plan, just an idea and the words One For One. Ryan's version for his kids: everyone can apply online. Drive to the restaurant and go talk to the manager instead.

Having no experience was the advantage. He'd never made a shoe, so he didn't know which rules he was breaking. Same with outdoor advertising. Same with driver's ed. He learned it from Richard Branson: ask forgiveness, not permission.

Nashville wouldn't allow advertising, so he sold art instead. Blake spent two years with the city council and got there by removing the ad from the ad. No price, no call to action. Just album covers on the sides of buildings, called country music art. Once one artist had one, they all wanted one. He sold the company to Clear Channel.

You don't attract what you want. You attract what you are. Want honest friends, be honest. Want peace at home, bring peace. Want trust, practice it when nobody's watching. Blake applies it to customers too: sloppy companies attract sloppy customers, and that's usually the real reason the business fails.

Charlie Munger got asked how to get a great wife. He said: deserve one.

Be known for doing what you said you'd do. Early on Blake didn't have the skills, so he built the reputation on execution instead. Move fast, keep it simple, do it with integrity. Momentum is a form of trust.

The other half of that is not overpromising. Blake's own failure mode is getting excited, feeling falsely confident, promising something big, and missing. When it happens, own it fast and be honest, and the relationship usually survives.

Be careful using a general-purpose chatbot as a therapist. Blake's warning, and the reason the founders of Sonia built a purpose-built tool instead: the big consumer models are designed to make you feel good about yourself. If you need to hear something hard, that's the last thing you want.

He went from skeptic to advisor in six months. Blake met the Sonia founders at a mental health conference, tried the app to be polite, and by the third session was getting insights he hadn't gotten elsewhere. He now spends five to ten hours a week helping them. His reason for loving the work: "Now I get to be the coach instead of the athlete."

Stop chasing balance. Design for harmony. Blake picked this up from an executive at Cannes who said she'd given up on balance. He goes hard in phases. Full dad mode with the office waiting on emails. Then all in on a launch and missing things at home. The measure isn't evenly split day to day. It's whether, over a year, everyone in his life feels like they got what they needed to thrive. Including him.

Reflection Questions

What did you actually feel grateful for today? Not the category. The specific moment.

What is the sentence you've been repeating to yourself since childhood, and is it true?

In your last hire, how hard did you try to talk them out of it? Or did you spend the interview selling them, and then sell yourself?

More Learning

#598: Sam Parr - Bold. Fast. Fun. Living by a Mantra & Building a Media Company

#547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You

#676: Jesse Cole - Built for The Fans (The Owner of the Savannah Bananas)

Episode Chapters

00:00 Meet Blake Mycoskie

01:38 Surfing is Great for Deep Thinking

03:41 Make Your Gratitude Specific

05:39 Blake Sold TOMS and Fell Apart

11:20 Advice for Those to "Make It" and Feel Nothing

13:23 "I Am Enough" and the Bracelet on His Wrist

17:35 The No Magic Pill

19:41 The Risk of Chatbot Therapy

22:42 A Surgeon Dad, a Bestselling Mom, and the Pressure Nobody Said Out Loud

25:13 Telling Your Kids They're Enough

31:31 How He Got Country Music Art on the Side of Buildings

35:15 Learning to Be Proud of TOMS Again

38:49 Hiring Around Your Weaknesses

41:25 Try to Talk Them Out of the Job

45:07 You Don't Attract What You Want. You Attract What You Are.

46:54 Don't Wait for Permission

48:34 Be Known for Doing What You Said You'd Do

50:02 The Champagne Question: Harmony, Not Balance

52:28 EOPC

701: Mark Pincus (Founder of Zynga) - Why We All Need a Coach, Maintaining High Standards, The Book of Life, Aggressive Ambition, and Why Your Instincts Are Almost Always Right

2026-08-16 23:00:0052:48

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming My guest - Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, the social… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller!

My guest - Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, the social gaming company he built from zero to $12.7 billion, pioneering a category that generated over a billion app installs and introduced hundreds of millions of people to online play. He's a serial founder who has started ten companies, taught product development at Stanford, and made early seed investments in Facebook and Twitter. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play.

Key Learnings

Coaches are cheat codes. Mark has hired a surfing coach, a tennis coach, a chess coach, a life coach, and the legendary Bill Campbell. None of them were assigned to him. He went and found them.

"You throw to where you swing. You don't swing to where you throw." His tennis coach, Jorge, on learning how to serve. Commit to the natural swing first. You'll miss. You'll look stupid. Eventually your brain realizes you're serious and puts the ball where it belongs.

You play to get better. You don't play to win. Not this point. Not this match. What am I doing right now that makes me better in the next game?

Kill the ego so it gets out of the way of you being humble and curious.

Don't contort the organization around one talented jerk. Colleen McCreary, Zynga's chief people officer, kept a sign on her wall: "No jerks allowed." She once vetoed an acquisition because she believed the founder was toxic. When the organization sees you refuse to bend just to win one point, they build muscle and confidence too.

You'll have periods out of alignment. That's okay. Sometimes the person is in a crucial seat and you can't swap them tomorrow. What matters is that you're aligned with the philosophy.

Bill Campbell's two lessons: intellectual honesty and courage. Be committed to the deep truths above everything else, and say them to your team even when it hurts. Then have the courage to stand up to your own team, your own board, and your own investors.

A well-run company is a democratic dictatorship. Campbell leaned heavily on the dictatorship half. Unapologetically.

The flip side of ambition is sacrifice. Everyone says they're a ten out of ten on ambition.

Mark's test: would you toil in obscurity for the next ten years, nobody respecting what you're doing, for an 80 or 90 percent chance at something bigger than your wildest dreams? Or take the 80 percent chance at a respectable single and a pat on the back?

Nobody believes in us as much as we do. That's why we become founders. At 41, VCs who had already backed Mark twice told him he was too old, too rich, and too settled to go all in on Zynga.

Mark isn't all in until he is. He calls it a lazy on-ramp to curiosity. Lots of projects. Looking for signals in a lot of places. Processing. Then it flips. "When the fish are running, we're up all night throwing nets until they're done running, not until we're tired."

The chess lesson: play boring. His chess coach told him if you want to beat a player rated much higher than you, play boring and conservative and let them make the mistake. He started doing it. He started winning.

Your kids don't follow what you say. They follow what you do. Mark set out to be a different kind of dad than his own, who measured people by their résumé. Then he watched his 15-year-old daughter spend every waking minute with math tutors before leaving on a service trip. "How did we get here? Oh, I know how we got here. They're not listening to what Dad says. They're following what Dad does."

Happiness comes from feeling useful to a community you care about. Not from being useful. From feeling it. That's Alfred Adler, by way of The Courage to Be Disliked.

There are two levels of success. A life well lived is a life in alignment with what only you can bring to the world. You don't have to build Google to feel like you went for it. The ultimate success is the greatest instantiation of your talents.

Use money as freedom, not lifestyle. When Freeloader sold and 28-year-old Mark had more money than he'd ever imagined, he made a list of everything he was going to buy. It totaled about $9,000. He put leather interior in his Pathfinder. He still has the vehicle.

He set a $500 million goal that had nothing to do with buying things. At a net worth around $15 million, working with a life coach, he wrote it down because that's the capital required to run a studio of teams chasing many ideas without going to anyone else with hat in hand. "Creatively, that's freedom."

Retirement is spiritual death. The stretches between building things are what Mark calls the abyss. Once you've felt the high of building with a great team and shipping something into users' hands every week, it ruins you. You can't be happy with less.

Over-fund the things that matter. Not every day is the same. Not every life moment is the same. When one of those moments comes, put all your best players on the ice.

The Allen & Company investor tour. They told Mark it was a dog and pony show. Just shake some hands. He told his team: this is our IPO, this is our roadshow, and we are going to use every minute of it the way we want. He gave the biggest public market investors a full presentation, handed them his numbers, and told them to judge him against those numbers in a year. He met with them a year later and had crushed them.

King for a day. Carol Bartz brought Mark in to talk to Yahoo's entire senior management. He spent two weeks building a presentation on how he'd run Yahoo if he were king for a day, stood up, and took over the room for an hour. They got a deal done and one person in that room came to work for him. He ran the same play on the CEO of AMEX with a credit card that competed on fun. Amex spent $75 million with them.

Seven minutes with Obama became 45. Mark was told the President would ask about his kids and then the meeting would be over. He walked in with a PowerPoint on the ten bold objectives he'd run on if he were president. Obama went through the entire thing and then asked what else he had.

Prepare as hard for everything going right as you do for everything going wrong. Mark had under-prepared for the version of where Obama said, "Yeah, I'm buying. What else you got?"

We sleepwalk through our own biggest moments. The question isn't what's the agenda or why they want to meet with you. It's: I have five minutes with the king. What is theoretically possible here?

The Book of Life. Every year during the Jewish New Year, Mark writes in the same book. Only during that window. It isn't a journal. It's a spiritual board meeting with himself. He reads back through every previous year first, then writes.

Partner with your future self. "What will Mark 2030 thank me for doing right now?"

It started with quitting smoking. October 19, 1994. "I pulled my own power back. If I can quit smoking and really commit to it, what else can I do?" A year later he quit his job and did something bigger.

Even if you missed the big goal, ask what you actually did toward it. Did you talk about it? Did you do real things? Did you turn the boat toward it? If not, maybe you don't believe in the goal.

When Mark is at his lowest, he's humbled, he picks achievable goals, and he finds the most grit. When he's winning, he picks stratospheric goals and does the worst. After his biggest successes, he isn't humble enough to succeed again, and he has to go through failure to reel himself back in.

Mark's champagne moment a year from now: that the book connects for hundreds of thousands of people, and that he's built a product people find real meaning in.

Reflection Questions

If you went and hired a coach, who is the person who could most change your life right now?
What is your next high-stakes moment, and are you treating it like the dog and pony show or like your IPO?
What is the one habit your future self would most thank you for making this year? What would it unlock if you actually committed to it?

More Learning

#688: Dr. Henry Cloud - Your Desired Future: 5 Steps to Take You Where You Want to Go

#689: Eric Ries - Why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great

#687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life & The 3 Types of Luck

Episode Chapters

00:00 Meet Mark Pincus

01:40 Why Mark Hires So Many Coaches

02:25 Lessons From Tennis In Leading People

04:56 Refusing to Bend the Culture for One Great Player

07:03 Lessons From Bill Campbell

09:17 On Being Called a Control Freak

13:38 The Ambition Question Mark Asks Founders

14:53 What High Standards Do to Your Kids

20:55 How Mark Defines Success

23:26 Money as Freedom, Not Lifestyle

29:45 Why High Achievers Can't Retire

32:39 Over-Fund the Things That Matter

34:35 Treating a Handshake Tour Like an IPO Roadshow

35:36 King for a Day at Yahoo and Amex

38:14 Seven Minutes With Obama That Became 45

41:39 The Book of Life

45:21 Why Mark Does His Best Thinking at His Lowest

46:48 The Champagne Question

48:40 EOPC

701: Mark Pincus (Founder of Zynga) - Why We All Need a Coach, Maintaining High Standards, The Book of Life, Aggressive Ambition, and Why Your Instincts Are Almost Always Right

2026-08-16 23:00:0052:48

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller!

My guest - Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, the social gaming company he built from zero to $12.7 billion, pioneering a category that generated over a billion app installs and introduced hundreds of millions of people to online play. He's a serial founder who has started ten companies, taught product development at Stanford, and made early seed investments in Facebook and Twitter. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play.

Key Learnings

Coaches are cheat codes. Mark has hired a surfing coach, a tennis coach, a chess coach, a life coach, and the legendary Bill Campbell. None of them were assigned to him. He went and found them.

"You throw to where you swing. You don't swing to where you throw." His tennis coach, Jorge, on learning how to serve. Commit to the natural swing first. You'll miss. You'll look stupid. Eventually your brain realizes you're serious and puts the ball where it belongs.

You play to get better. You don't play to win. Not this point. Not this match. What am I doing right now that makes me better in the next game?

Kill the ego so it gets out of the way of you being humble and curious.

Don't contort the organization around one talented jerk. Colleen McCreary, Zynga's chief people officer, kept a sign on her wall: "No jerks allowed." She once vetoed an acquisition because she believed the founder was toxic. When the organization sees you refuse to bend just to win one point, they build muscle and confidence too.

You'll have periods out of alignment. That's okay. Sometimes the person is in a crucial seat and you can't swap them tomorrow. What matters is that you're aligned with the philosophy.

Bill Campbell's two lessons: intellectual honesty and courage. Be committed to the deep truths above everything else, and say them to your team even when it hurts. Then have the courage to stand up to your own team, your own board, and your own investors.

A well-run company is a democratic dictatorship. Campbell leaned heavily on the dictatorship half. Unapologetically.

The flip side of ambition is sacrifice. Everyone says they're a ten out of ten on ambition.

Mark's test: would you toil in obscurity for the next ten years, nobody respecting what you're doing, for an 80 or 90 percent chance at something bigger than your wildest dreams? Or take the 80 percent chance at a respectable single and a pat on the back?

Nobody believes in us as much as we do. That's why we become founders. At 41, VCs who had already backed Mark twice told him he was too old, too rich, and too settled to go all in on Zynga.

Mark isn't all in until he is. He calls it a lazy on-ramp to curiosity. Lots of projects. Looking for signals in a lot of places. Processing. Then it flips. "When the fish are running, we're up all night throwing nets until they're done running, not until we're tired."

The chess lesson: play boring. His chess coach told him if you want to beat a player rated much higher than you, play boring and conservative and let them make the mistake. He started doing it. He started winning.

Your kids don't follow what you say. They follow what you do. Mark set out to be a different kind of dad than his own, who measured people by their résumé. Then he watched his 15-year-old daughter spend every waking minute with math tutors before leaving on a service trip. "How did we get here? Oh, I know how we got here. They're not listening to what Dad says. They're following what Dad does."

Happiness comes from feeling useful to a community you care about. Not from being useful. From feeling it. That's Alfred Adler, by way of The Courage to Be Disliked.

There are two levels of success. A life well lived is a life in alignment with what only you can bring to the world. You don't have to build Google to feel like you went for it. The ultimate success is the greatest instantiation of your talents.

Use money as freedom, not lifestyle. When Freeloader sold and 28-year-old Mark had more money than he'd ever imagined, he made a list of everything he was going to buy. It totaled about $9,000. He put leather interior in his Pathfinder. He still has the vehicle.

He set a $500 million goal that had nothing to do with buying things. At a net worth around $15 million, working with a life coach, he wrote it down because that's the capital required to run a studio of teams chasing many ideas without going to anyone else with hat in hand. "Creatively, that's freedom."

Retirement is spiritual death. The stretches between building things are what Mark calls the abyss. Once you've felt the high of building with a great team and shipping something into users' hands every week, it ruins you. You can't be happy with less.

Over-fund the things that matter. Not every day is the same. Not every life moment is the same. When one of those moments comes, put all your best players on the ice.

The Allen & Company investor tour. They told Mark it was a dog and pony show. Just shake some hands. He told his team: this is our IPO, this is our roadshow, and we are going to use every minute of it the way we want. He gave the biggest public market investors a full presentation, handed them his numbers, and told them to judge him against those numbers in a year. He met with them a year later and had crushed them.

King for a day. Carol Bartz brought Mark in to talk to Yahoo's entire senior management. He spent two weeks building a presentation on how he'd run Yahoo if he were king for a day, stood up, and took over the room for an hour. They got a deal done and one person in that room came to work for him. He ran the same play on the CEO of AMEX with a credit card that competed on fun. Amex spent $75 million with them.

Seven minutes with Obama became 45. Mark was told the President would ask about his kids and then the meeting would be over. He walked in with a PowerPoint on the ten bold objectives he'd run on if he were president. Obama went through the entire thing and then asked what else he had.

Prepare as hard for everything going right as you do for everything going wrong. Mark had under-prepared for the version of where Obama said, "Yeah, I'm buying. What else you got?"

We sleepwalk through our own biggest moments. The question isn't what's the agenda or why they want to meet with you. It's: I have five minutes with the king. What is theoretically possible here?

The Book of Life. Every year during the Jewish New Year, Mark writes in the same book. Only during that window. It isn't a journal. It's a spiritual board meeting with himself. He reads back through every previous year first, then writes.

Partner with your future self. "What will Mark 2030 thank me for doing right now?"

It started with quitting smoking. October 19, 1994. "I pulled my own power back. If I can quit smoking and really commit to it, what else can I do?" A year later he quit his job and did something bigger.

Even if you missed the big goal, ask what you actually did toward it. Did you talk about it? Did you do real things? Did you turn the boat toward it? If not, maybe you don't believe in the goal.

When Mark is at his lowest, he's humbled, he picks achievable goals, and he finds the most grit. When he's winning, he picks stratospheric goals and does the worst. After his biggest successes, he isn't humble enough to succeed again, and he has to go through failure to reel himself back in.

Mark's champagne moment a year from now: that the book connects for hundreds of thousands of people, and that he's built a product people find real meaning in.

Reflection Questions

If you went and hired a coach, who is the person who could most change your life right now?
What is your next high-stakes moment, and are you treating it like the dog and pony show or like your IPO?
What is the one habit your future self would most thank you for making this year? What would it unlock if you actually committed to it?

More Learning

#688: Dr. Henry Cloud - Your Desired Future: 5 Steps to Take You Where You Want to Go

#689: Eric Ries - Why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great

#687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life & The 3 Types of Luck

Episode Chapters

00:00 Meet Mark Pincus

01:40 Why Mark Hires So Many Coaches

02:25 Lessons From Tennis In Leading People

04:56 Refusing to Bend the Culture for One Great Player

07:03 Lessons From Bill Campbell

09:17 On Being Called a Control Freak

13:38 The Ambition Question Mark Asks Founders

14:53 What High Standards Do to Your Kids

20:55 How Mark Defines Success

23:26 Money as Freedom, Not Lifestyle

29:45 Why High Achievers Can't Retire

32:39 Over-Fund the Things That Matter

34:35 Treating a Handshake Tour Like an IPO Roadshow

35:36 King for a Day at Yahoo and Amex

38:14 Seven Minutes With Obama That Became 45

41:39 The Book of Life

45:21 Why Mark Does His Best Thinking at His Lowest

46:48 The Champagne Question

48:40 EOPC

700: Keith Hawk & AJ Hawk - Conscious Competence, Delusional Confidence, Stacking Days, After-Action Reviews, Taking Big Risks, The Power of Compounding, and Modeling High-Standards

2026-08-09 23:00:001:29:31

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller!

My Guests:

My dad, Keith Hawk (also known as Pistol), spent decades leading sales teams at LexisNexis and has taught leadership and public speaking to audiences all over the country. He's the author of multiple books including Get Real Selling. Pistol has that rare ability to be both universally liked and 100% respected by all who know him.

My brother AJ Hawk was an All-American linebacker at Ohio State, where he won a national championship. He played 11 years in the NFL, won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers, and retired as the franchise's all-time leading tackler. Now you'll see him every weekday on ESPN as a co-host of the Pat McAfee Show

Notes:

Key Learnings

Be a consciously competent leader. Pistol's framework: you have to understand the processes of the work you're asking people to do, not just the end result. First-line leaders have to know the work at a great level of detail.

One tactical way to get there: do after-action reviews on both wins and losses. Know why you win. Know why you lose. Describe both in detail. That's how you earn vivid clarity.

Give people vivid clarity. Don't tell your team to "go get the ball carrier." Tell them precisely how to handle each situation. Great leaders are great because they give vivid clarity to the people they're leading on how to do the thing.

Stack days. If I can't win by being brilliant, I can win by being able to endure. Just get up and do the thing day after day. Growing up, AJ and I had an unwritten rule: no matter what we did the night before, we were going to the first available lift. You don't have to go to bed early. But you're going to work no matter how you feel.

When AJ knew he could do it. Freshman year at Ohio State. A tunnel screen play in camp. He read it perfectly, took off, and delivered a textbook hit on the receiver. That was the moment: "Football's football. These guys are all monsters. But I think I can find a way to make some plays."

How to write a book: get up an extra hour early for 200 days in a row and never miss a day. Anybody can do it. You just have to be willing to make the decision, and then follow through, and then follow through again.

My scout team Super Bowl. As a scout team QB at Ohio, I picked the Florida game to prepare like it was the real thing. I wore Rex Grossman's number and arm sleeve. Spatted my cleats. I rewrote the practice cards based on real Florida plays. We ended up being in a tight ball game against a national powerhouse. My teammates came back after the game and said practice that week was harder than the actual game. This is when I learned what is possible when prepared for the moment.

The Mike Nolan $10 bill story. When AJ was in college, the 49ers head coach Mike Nolan needed to tip a valet and asked if he had any cash. AJ gave him $10. Weeks later, a handwritten note showed up at AJ's college house with a $10 bill inside and a thank-you note from Mike Nolan. Follow-through. Attention to detail. Paying people back. AJ never forgot it.

AJ's delusional confidence in Tahoe. AJ had an unlucky drive that left him 254 yards from the pin, in the first cut. Jack Wagner was still on the green in front of us. AJ pulled out a four iron. I told him to wait. He said, "I'm just gonna go, and hit it on the green." He flushed it. Landed on the green 25 feet from Jack. There's power in belief, speaking things into existence, and then doing them.

Irrational self-confidence isn't irrational. Pistol quoted Bill Simmons: "As long as you believe it's possible, it's possible." Regardless of what it is.

My biggest risk: leaving corporate at the end of 2017. I had a VP of sales job, and I left it all to bet on this podcast. Miranda believed in it maybe even more than I did. That combination made it possible.

Pistol's biggest risk: August 1st, 1999. He left LexisNexis after 14 years to go be a public speaker. Two years later, on August 1st, 2001, he came back. Both times on his birthday. His career jumped five notches on his return. Sometimes you have to leave to come back better.

AJ's biggest risk: hiding a broken wrist during a Super Bowl run. AJ refused an X-ray or MRI so they couldn't shut him down. The trainer taped and casted it. He played the whole season, won the Super Bowl, and made the Pro Bowl. He had surgery to repair it days after the Super Bowl.

The best players are consistent. When I'd talk to AJ's teammates in Green Bay about him, they used the unsexy words: "Most consistent guy on the team. First guy in the weight room. Will be where he's supposed to be on every play." He did that for eleven years.

Show up. Every single day. Pistol said it: "Anybody that's been great at something didn't get great on the first day, but they did the right types of things along the way."

Don't grade your kid's games. Grade the effort. "Did you play hard? That's all I care about." AJ said his family doesn't have good or bad games. There's only one question after the game: did you play hard or did you not?

Show them what "hard" actually looks like. Sometimes kids think they're playing as hard as they possibly can when they're not. AJ's brother-in-law Jack Johnson reminded him of this. You can't just say "play hard." You have to describe it. You have to show them. Otherwise they don't know what the standard is.

Model it. Don't tell. Leadership is caught more than it's taught. My primary role as a dad and a husband is to be the model. If I have low standards, my kids will have low standards. If I show up every day, they'll learn what showing up looks like.

Do all the work. Then trust your instincts. AJ's approach to football. Reinstall the defense from scratch every year. Take fresh notes. So when it's game time, you don't have to think. You just play.

The Dinner Guest Draft: Every hundredth episode, we do a draft. This one: pick five living dinner guests.

AJ's table:

Michael Jordan
Charles Barkley
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Palmer Luckey
Denzel Washington

My table: (All dream guests for The Learning Leader Show)

Dave Chappelle
Dave Matthews
Mike Rowe
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Michael Lewis

Pistol's table: (All former guests of the show)

Admiral William McRaven
Dan Patrick
Nikki Glaser
Stephen M.R. Covey
Oz Pearlman

Champagne Moments a Year From Now

My dad: Celebrating his 71st birthday dinner with all of us.

AJ: To keep being present with his kids while they're still young. To slow down and enjoy it.

Me: A good year of college for the older girls in our family.

Reflection Questions

Where in your work are you giving people vivid clarity? Or are you handing them broad general directives and hoping they figure it out?
What is your version of the Mike Nolan $10 bill story? What small act of follow-through could you do this week that someone will remember for years?
Where are you being performative right now, doing something for the audience instead of doing it because you want to be great? What would change if you only did it when nobody was watching?

More Learning

#600 - AJ, Pistol & Ryan Hawk - Setting the Standard

#500 - AJ, Pistol, Ryan & Pat McAfee - Live Your Life as a Movie

#400 - AJ, Pistol & Ryan Hawk - The Life Experiences That Shape Our Character

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Arena Invite

01:30 Meet Keith "Pistol" Hawk and AJ Hawk

03:34 What Everyone's Been Up To For the Past Two Years

05:09 What We Learned From Robert Saleh (head coach, Tennessee Titans) and Mike Macdonal (head coach of the defending Super Bowl Champion, Seattle Seahawks) About Tackling

08:50 Be a Consciously Competent Leader. Give People Vivid Clarity.

10:44 Inflection Point Stories: When AJ and Ryan Knew They Could Do It

16:33 How Pistol Spotted the Talent Early

21:32 Why Written Communication Is More Important Than You Think

25:21 The Power of Stacking Days

33:06 The Mike Nolan $10 Bill Story

35:24 Delusional Confidence: The Tahoe Golf Moment

42:51 Irrational Self-Confidence Isn't Irrational

43:15 The Biggest Risks Each of Us Ever Took

47:24 Playing Through a Broken Wrist to Win a Super Bowl

50:38 How to Raise Kids With High Standards

54:28 Regimented vs. Disciplined

59:30 AJ's Hack to Beat a Shellfish Allergy

01:06:00 The Dinner Guest Draft Begins

01:21:21 Draft Recap

01:23:43 The Champagne Question

01:26:33 EOPC

700: Keith Hawk & AJ Hawk - Conscious Competence, Delusional Confidence, Stacking Days, After-Action Reviews, Taking Big Risks, The Power of Compounding, and Modeling High-Standards

2026-08-09 23:00:001:29:31

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller!

My Guests:

My dad, Keith Hawk (also known as Pistol), spent decades leading sales teams at LexisNexis and has taught leadership and public speaking to audiences all over the country. He's the author of multiple books including Get Real Selling. Pistol has that rare ability to be both universally liked and 100% respected by all who know him.

My brother AJ Hawk was an All-American linebacker at Ohio State, where he won a national championship. He played 11 years in the NFL, won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers, and retired as the franchise's all-time leading tackler. Now you'll see him every weekday on ESPN as a co-host of the Pat McAfee Show

Notes:

Key Learnings

Be a consciously competent leader. Pistol's framework: you have to understand the processes of the work you're asking people to do, not just the end result. First-line leaders have to know the work at a great level of detail.

One tactical way to get there: do after-action reviews on both wins and losses. Know why you win. Know why you lose. Describe both in detail. That's how you earn vivid clarity.

Give people vivid clarity. Don't tell your team to "go get the ball carrier." Tell them precisely how to handle each situation. Great leaders are great because they give vivid clarity to the people they're leading on how to do the thing.

Stack days. If I can't win by being brilliant, I can win by being able to endure. Just get up and do the thing day after day. Growing up, AJ and I had an unwritten rule: no matter what we did the night before, we were going to the first available lift. You don't have to go to bed early. But you're going to work no matter how you feel.

When AJ knew he could do it. Freshman year at Ohio State. A tunnel screen play in camp. He read it perfectly, took off, and delivered a textbook hit on the receiver. That was the moment: "Football's football. These guys are all monsters. But I think I can find a way to make some plays."

How to write a book: get up an extra hour early for 200 days in a row and never miss a day. Anybody can do it. You just have to be willing to make the decision, and then follow through, and then follow through again.

My scout team Super Bowl. As a scout team QB at Ohio, I picked the Florida game to prepare like it was the real thing. I wore Rex Grossman's number and arm sleeve. Spatted my cleats. I rewrote the practice cards based on real Florida plays. We ended up being in a tight ball game against a national powerhouse. My teammates came back after the game and said practice that week was harder than the actual game. This is when I learned what is possible when prepared for the moment.

The Mike Nolan $10 bill story. When AJ was in college, the 49ers head coach Mike Nolan needed to tip a valet and asked if he had any cash. AJ gave him $10. Weeks later, a handwritten note showed up at AJ's college house with a $10 bill inside and a thank-you note from Mike Nolan. Follow-through. Attention to detail. Paying people back. AJ never forgot it.

AJ's delusional confidence in Tahoe. AJ had an unlucky drive that left him 254 yards from the pin, in the first cut. Jack Wagner was still on the green in front of us. AJ pulled out a four iron. I told him to wait. He said, "I'm just gonna go, and hit it on the green." He flushed it. Landed on the green 25 feet from Jack. There's power in belief, speaking things into existence, and then doing them.

Irrational self-confidence isn't irrational. Pistol quoted Bill Simmons: "As long as you believe it's possible, it's possible." Regardless of what it is.

My biggest risk: leaving corporate at the end of 2017. I had a VP of sales job, and I left it all to bet on this podcast. Miranda believed in it maybe even more than I did. That combination made it possible.

Pistol's biggest risk: August 1st, 1999. He left LexisNexis after 14 years to go be a public speaker. Two years later, on August 1st, 2001, he came back. Both times on his birthday. His career jumped five notches on his return. Sometimes you have to leave to come back better.

AJ's biggest risk: hiding a broken wrist during a Super Bowl run. AJ refused an X-ray or MRI so they couldn't shut him down. The trainer taped and casted it. He played the whole season, won the Super Bowl, and made the Pro Bowl. He had surgery to repair it days after the Super Bowl.

The best players are consistent. When I'd talk to AJ's teammates in Green Bay about him, they used the unsexy words: "Most consistent guy on the team. First guy in the weight room. Will be where he's supposed to be on every play." He did that for eleven years.

Show up. Every single day. Pistol said it: "Anybody that's been great at something didn't get great on the first day, but they did the right types of things along the way."

Don't grade your kid's games. Grade the effort. "Did you play hard? That's all I care about." AJ said his family doesn't have good or bad games. There's only one question after the game: did you play hard or did you not?

Show them what "hard" actually looks like. Sometimes kids think they're playing as hard as they possibly can when they're not. AJ's brother-in-law Jack Johnson reminded him of this. You can't just say "play hard." You have to describe it. You have to show them. Otherwise they don't know what the standard is.

Model it. Don't tell. Leadership is caught more than it's taught. My primary role as a dad and a husband is to be the model. If I have low standards, my kids will have low standards. If I show up every day, they'll learn what showing up looks like.

Do all the work. Then trust your instincts. AJ's approach to football. Reinstall the defense from scratch every year. Take fresh notes. So when it's game time, you don't have to think. You just play.

The Dinner Guest Draft: Every hundredth episode, we do a draft. This one: pick five living dinner guests.

AJ's table:

Michael Jordan
Charles Barkley
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Palmer Luckey
Denzel Washington

My table: (All dream guests for The Learning Leader Show)

Dave Chappelle
Dave Matthews
Mike Rowe
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Michael Lewis

Pistol's table: (All former guests of the show)

Admiral William McRaven
Dan Patrick
Nikki Glaser
Stephen M.R. Covey
Oz Pearlman

Champagne Moments a Year From Now

My dad: Celebrating his 71st birthday dinner with all of us.

AJ: To keep being present with his kids while they're still young. To slow down and enjoy it.

Me: A good year of college for the older girls in our family.

Reflection Questions

Where in your work are you giving people vivid clarity? Or are you handing them broad general directives and hoping they figure it out?
What is your version of the Mike Nolan $10 bill story? What small act of follow-through could you do this week that someone will remember for years?
Where are you being performative right now, doing something for the audience instead of doing it because you want to be great? What would change if you only did it when nobody was watching?

More Learning

#600 - AJ, Pistol & Ryan Hawk - Setting the Standard

#500 - AJ, Pistol, Ryan & Pat McAfee - Live Your Life as a Movie

#400 - AJ, Pistol & Ryan Hawk - The Life Experiences That Shape Our Character

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Arena Invite

01:30 Meet Keith "Pistol" Hawk and AJ Hawk

03:34 What Everyone's Been Up To For the Past Two Years

05:09 What We Learned From Robert Saleh (head coach, Tennessee Titans) and Mike Macdonal (head coach of the defending Super Bowl Champion, Seattle Seahawks) About Tackling

08:50 Be a Consciously Competent Leader. Give People Vivid Clarity.

10:44 Inflection Point Stories: When AJ and Ryan Knew They Could Do It

16:33 How Pistol Spotted the Talent Early

21:32 Why Written Communication Is More Important Than You Think

25:21 The Power of Stacking Days

33:06 The Mike Nolan $10 Bill Story

35:24 Delusional Confidence: The Tahoe Golf Moment

42:51 Irrational Self-Confidence Isn't Irrational

43:15 The Biggest Risks Each of Us Ever Took

47:24 Playing Through a Broken Wrist to Win a Super Bowl

50:38 How to Raise Kids With High Standards

54:28 Regimented vs. Disciplined

59:30 AJ's Hack to Beat a Shellfish Allergy

01:06:00 The Dinner Guest Draft Begins

01:21:21 Draft Recap

01:23:43 The Champagne Question

01:26:33 EOPC

699: Jack Raines - How to Build Your Career, Increase Your Surface Area For Luck, and Find Your Purpose | Why Memories Compound Faster Than Money

2026-08-02 23:00:0049:21

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My Guest: Jack Raines is a writer and investor. At 24, he quit his corporate finance job at UPS, bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona, and spent the next year traveling through 25 countries while writing a newsletter that grew to hundreds of thousands of readers. He went on to earn an MBA from Columbia, help build Sherwood News at Robinhood, and join the venture capital firm Slow Ventures, where he invests in creators. His first book, Young Money: A Field Guide to Finding Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties, is out now.

Key Learnings

Jack's Grandma Ruth took him to Africa when he was 11. She was in her late 60s. She had the money. She said: "I can spend it on you now or leave it to you when I'm dead. This is better."

Money has no value until you exchange it for something. We need to decide what we want that to be.

Every year of your 20s is worth $10 million. (Nikita Bier) You'll never have this window of flexibility again.

Say yes to interesting experiences in your 20s. Your income is going to climb exponentially anyway. Don't save $500 at the cost of a memory.

Move to where the action is. Jack moved to New York for business school. Then San Francisco for a job. Then back to New York. High slope of learning. High slope of contact with good people.

Network amplifies ability. It doesn't create it. A million times zero is still zero. A million times two is two million.

The only real risk is not doing anything.

Every opportunity in life comes through a person.

The best networking tool is doing great work. How did Gracie Abrams open for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour? She wrote great music. Taylor noticed. Taylor called.

In your 20s, potential is valued at a premium. In your 30s and beyond, proof of work matters more.

Experimenting when you are young speed-runs the learning curve. You develop the skill of taking shots. That skill compounds.

It's much harder to start being risk-on at 35 if you weren't risk-on at 25.

Personal finance is simple. Spend less than you make. Build a six-month emergency fund. Take the 401(k) match. Contribute to your IRA. Don't gamble on individual stocks. Stay invested. Stay employed. Don't go into credit card debt. Don't get divorced.

User error interrupts compounding more than anything else. Set up the boring foundation. Then stop touching it.

Most retirees never touch the principal. (Nick Maggiulli) They stack money out of fear, then die with more than they started with.

Daniel Kahneman on loss aversion: the pain of losing $100 is twice as strong as the joy of gaining $100. That's why people over-save.

Your burn rate at 70 is way lower than at 45. No kids at home. No tuition. Less energy to do stuff. Plan accordingly.

Bill Perkins' Die with Zero philosophy... A useful insight was in the first chapter: his best friend took a payday loan at 23 to backpack Europe for three months. Same career trajectory as Bill. Just way more fun at 24.

People don't want to think about their mortality. So they focus on making the number go up. If you actually internalized that you're going to die, you'd be more intentional about your time and money.

Jack's champagne moment a year from now: He sells a ton of copies of it. And it's still relevant.

Reflection Questions

Where are you spending your best years earning money you'll never actually enjoy? What would change if you accepted that your peak-energy window is closing?
Where are you standing still because the risk of moving feels bigger than the risk of staying? What does the only real risk (not doing anything) look like in your life right now?
What is the great work you could do that would make the right person notice you?

More Learning

#539: Jack Raines - Playing Infinite Games, Living Life Backwards & Building Your Platform

#548: Nick Maggiulli - The Power of Compounding

#373: Bill Perkins - How To Get All You Can From Your Money & Your Life

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:38 Meet Jack Raines

03:27 Grandma Ruth Took Him to Africa When He Was 11

08:04 Why Every Year of Your 20s Is Worth $10 Million

12:12 Quitting UPS at 24 for a One-Way Ticket to Barcelona

15:10 How to Increase Your Surface Area for Luck

20:00 Where You Live Is Who You Become

22:00 Why Memories Compound Faster Than Money

26:23 The Financial Stability Basics Nobody Wants to Hear

29:00 Get the Boring Stuff on Autopilot

31:15 Why Retirees Never Touch the Principal

34:02 The Bad Trade of Saving During Your Best Years

37:36 The Bill Perkins Die With Zero Debate

39:15 Experimentation, Agency, and the Only Real Risk

42:53 The Best Networking Tool in the World: Do Great Work

44:10 The Champagne Question: Making the Book Matter a Year From Now

45:53 EOPC

699: Jack Raines - How to Build Your Career, Increase Your Surface Area For Luck, and Find Your Purpose | Why Memories Compound Faster Than Money

2026-08-02 23:00:0049:21

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My Guest: Jack Raines is a writer and investor. At 24, he quit his corporate finance job at UPS, bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona, and spent the next year traveling through 25 countries while writing a newsletter that grew to hundreds of thousands of readers. He went on to earn an MBA from Columbia, help build Sherwood News at Robinhood, and join the venture capital firm Slow Ventures, where he invests in creators. His first book, Young Money: A Field Guide to Finding Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties, is out now.

Key Learnings

Jack's Grandma Ruth took him to Africa when he was 11. She was in her late 60s. She had the money. She said: "I can spend it on you now or leave it to you when I'm dead. This is better."

Money has no value until you exchange it for something. We need to decide what we want that to be.

Every year of your 20s is worth $10 million. (Nikita Bier) You'll never have this window of flexibility again.

Say yes to interesting experiences in your 20s. Your income is going to climb exponentially anyway. Don't save $500 at the cost of a memory.

Move to where the action is. Jack moved to New York for business school. Then San Francisco for a job. Then back to New York. High slope of learning. High slope of contact with good people.

Network amplifies ability. It doesn't create it. A million times zero is still zero. A million times two is two million.

The only real risk is not doing anything.

Every opportunity in life comes through a person.

The best networking tool is doing great work. How did Gracie Abrams open for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour? She wrote great music. Taylor noticed. Taylor called.

In your 20s, potential is valued at a premium. In your 30s and beyond, proof of work matters more.

Experimenting when you are young speed-runs the learning curve. You develop the skill of taking shots. That skill compounds.

It's much harder to start being risk-on at 35 if you weren't risk-on at 25.

Personal finance is simple. Spend less than you make. Build a six-month emergency fund. Take the 401(k) match. Contribute to your IRA. Don't gamble on individual stocks. Stay invested. Stay employed. Don't go into credit card debt. Don't get divorced.

User error interrupts compounding more than anything else. Set up the boring foundation. Then stop touching it.

Most retirees never touch the principal. (Nick Maggiulli) They stack money out of fear, then die with more than they started with.

Daniel Kahneman on loss aversion: the pain of losing $100 is twice as strong as the joy of gaining $100. That's why people over-save.

Your burn rate at 70 is way lower than at 45. No kids at home. No tuition. Less energy to do stuff. Plan accordingly.

Bill Perkins' Die with Zero philosophy... A useful insight was in the first chapter: his best friend took a payday loan at 23 to backpack Europe for three months. Same career trajectory as Bill. Just way more fun at 24.

People don't want to think about their mortality. So they focus on making the number go up. If you actually internalized that you're going to die, you'd be more intentional about your time and money.

Jack's champagne moment a year from now: He sells a ton of copies of it. And it's still relevant.

Reflection Questions

Where are you spending your best years earning money you'll never actually enjoy? What would change if you accepted that your peak-energy window is closing?
Where are you standing still because the risk of moving feels bigger than the risk of staying? What does the only real risk (not doing anything) look like in your life right now?
What is the great work you could do that would make the right person notice you?

More Learning

#539: Jack Raines - Playing Infinite Games, Living Life Backwards & Building Your Platform

#548: Nick Maggiulli - The Power of Compounding

#373: Bill Perkins - How To Get All You Can From Your Money & Your Life

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:38 Meet Jack Raines

03:27 Grandma Ruth Took Him to Africa When He Was 11

08:04 Why Every Year of Your 20s Is Worth $10 Million

12:12 Quitting UPS at 24 for a One-Way Ticket to Barcelona

15:10 How to Increase Your Surface Area for Luck

20:00 Where You Live Is Who You Become

22:00 Why Memories Compound Faster Than Money

26:23 The Financial Stability Basics Nobody Wants to Hear

29:00 Get the Boring Stuff on Autopilot

31:15 Why Retirees Never Touch the Principal

34:02 The Bad Trade of Saving During Your Best Years

37:36 The Bill Perkins Die With Zero Debate

39:15 Experimentation, Agency, and the Only Real Risk

42:53 The Best Networking Tool in the World: Do Great Work

44:10 The Champagne Question: Making the Book Matter a Year From Now

45:53 EOPC

698: Joanna Stern - How to Think for Yourself in the Age of AI, Why Deep Work Still Matters, Making Career Decisions With ChatGPT, and How to Stay Human on Purpose

2026-07-26 23:00:0055:10

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

New Book - The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest: Joanna Stern is an Emmy Award-winning technology journalist, chief technology analyst for NBC News, and founder of the independent media company, "New Things." She is best known for her 12-year tenure at The Wall Street Journal, and for authoring the New York Times bestseller I Am Not a Robot.

Key Learnings

Joanna dedicated her book to her parents "who taught me to think for myself, and the AIs, robots, and machines that made me wonder if I really was." In an age when AI can do the thinking for us, the most valuable thing we can teach our kids is to think for themselves.

Walt Mossberg invented tech journalism for humans. His first column: "Computers are too hard to use, and it's not your fault." Without Walt, we don't have a category where technology built for humans is reviewed by humans.

AI won't replace the radiologist. It'll make them better. Joanna sat with her doctor while AI scanned her mammogram. The AI flagged three suspicious spots. Two the doctor had already dismissed as benign. But one was something the doctor hadn't caught. She marked it for follow-up. Then the doctor pointed to other cases where SHE had caught things the AI missed. It's not a replacement. It's a partnership.

The same technology that finds cancer is the same technology that can autonomously send missiles. That's the great tension of our time. Every powerful technology has good and bad uses.

AI colleagues are coming. Joanna has two employees and one AI agent. She predicts that within a year, she'll have full AI employees. Great management books haven't been written yet about how to lead a mixed team of humans and agents. Someone is going to write them.

Concert ticket prices tell you everything about human connection right now. Every artist is selling out football stadiums. People are craving in-person interaction more than ever.

Bot Girl Summer. Joanna tried to have an emotional relationship with a chatbot boyfriend named Evan for 48 hours. She didn't fall in love. But she noticed how easy it was to talk to something that only wanted to hear about her problems and told her she was great at everything. That's the danger.

The AI therapist shut itself down when it realized there was a real therapist in the room. Joanna brought her AI therapist "Ash" into her actual therapy session. Halfway through, Ash said, "I'm sorry, I can't continue this conversation. It sounds like there are multiple people in the room."

AI won't replace therapists. It'll help with the shortage and the stigma. Some people don't want to walk into a therapist's office. But they'll open their phones. That's a bridge to real help for people who wouldn't otherwise get it.

Kara Swisher's career advice to Joanna: "Leave your fucking job." That was the shortest, cleanest advice Joanna got when deciding whether to leave the Wall Street Journal after 12 years.

Joanna used AI as a co-founder for the biggest decision of her career. She uploaded 12 years of notes into ChatGPT and asked it to help her decide whether to leave the Journal. It didn't decide for her. But it structured the risk analysis, laid out the escape hatches, and helped her see the shape of the decision.

The muscles atrophy if you don't use them. Writing is meant to be hard. Thinking is meant to be hard. If you outsource the hard work, you stop getting stronger at the hard work.

Research is where you learn the most. If you have AI pull the memo for you and you get up and read it, you don't know what you're really talking about. You have to do the reps to know the material.

AEI: Already Enough Intelligence. Sam Altman is obsessed with building superintelligence. Joanna proposes we already have enough intelligence to work with. Maybe the goal isn't to build smarter models. Maybe it's to figure out what to do with what we already have.

The AI on-ramp for leaders: Take one document you make all the time (a memo, a PowerPoint, an email template). Upload it. Ask AI to make a template out of it. Next time you need it, you're twice as fast.

Push yourself to do the harder work. Joanna's analogy: marathon runners are insane. They just want to run. Nobody wants to do the harder work. But that's where the growth is.

Joanna's champagne moment a year from now: milestones for her new company. She's already hit 100,000 YouTube subscribers three months after her first video. But she also just wants a nap.

Reflection Questions

Where in your work are you outsourcing the thinking to AI? Are the muscles you actually need atrophying because you're skipping the reps?
If you accepted that you already have enough intelligence to work with, what would you actually build with what's in front of you right now?

More Learning

#679: Kat Cole - The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs

#605: Seth Godin - The Power of Remarkable Ideas

#697: Dan Smith & Ryan Hawk - The Price of Becoming

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:44 Meet Joanna Stern

02:31 Teach Your Kids to Think in the Age of AI

03:25 The Parents and Mentors Who Shaped Her Career

04:16 Lessons From Walt Mossberg

05:55 Why Joanna Spent a Year Living With AI

14:47 How AI Can Make You a Better Leader

17:30 Why People Crave Human Connection More Than Ever

21:00 Bot Girl Summer: Dating a Chatbot Named Evan

25:13 The AI Therapist Trial

29:51 Using ChatGPT for a Career Change

33:29 Don't Let Your Thinking Muscles Atrophy

40:20 Sam Altman on Superintelligence, and Joanna's Case for "AEI"

42:51 Joanna's Advice for College Students

45:29 How Joanna Actually Uses AI to Write

47:17 Practical AI for the Fortune 500 VP

50:17 The Champagne Question

52:43 EOPC

698: Joanna Stern - How to Think for Yourself in the Age of AI, Why Deep Work Still Matters, Making Career Decisions With ChatGPT, and How to Stay Human on Purpose

2026-07-26 23:00:0055:10

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

New Book - The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest: Joanna Stern is an Emmy Award-winning technology journalist, chief technology analyst for NBC News, and founder of the independent media company, "New Things." She is best known for her 12-year tenure at The Wall Street Journal, and for authoring the New York Times bestseller I Am Not a Robot.

Key Learnings

Joanna dedicated her book to her parents "who taught me to think for myself, and the AIs, robots, and machines that made me wonder if I really was." In an age when AI can do the thinking for us, the most valuable thing we can teach our kids is to think for themselves.

Walt Mossberg invented tech journalism for humans. His first column: "Computers are too hard to use, and it's not your fault." Without Walt, we don't have a category where technology built for humans is reviewed by humans.

AI won't replace the radiologist. It'll make them better. Joanna sat with her doctor while AI scanned her mammogram. The AI flagged three suspicious spots. Two the doctor had already dismissed as benign. But one was something the doctor hadn't caught. She marked it for follow-up. Then the doctor pointed to other cases where SHE had caught things the AI missed. It's not a replacement. It's a partnership.

The same technology that finds cancer is the same technology that can autonomously send missiles. That's the great tension of our time. Every powerful technology has good and bad uses.

AI colleagues are coming. Joanna has two employees and one AI agent. She predicts that within a year, she'll have full AI employees. Great management books haven't been written yet about how to lead a mixed team of humans and agents. Someone is going to write them.

Concert ticket prices tell you everything about human connection right now. Every artist is selling out football stadiums. People are craving in-person interaction more than ever.

Bot Girl Summer. Joanna tried to have an emotional relationship with a chatbot boyfriend named Evan for 48 hours. She didn't fall in love. But she noticed how easy it was to talk to something that only wanted to hear about her problems and told her she was great at everything. That's the danger.

The AI therapist shut itself down when it realized there was a real therapist in the room. Joanna brought her AI therapist "Ash" into her actual therapy session. Halfway through, Ash said, "I'm sorry, I can't continue this conversation. It sounds like there are multiple people in the room."

AI won't replace therapists. It'll help with the shortage and the stigma. Some people don't want to walk into a therapist's office. But they'll open their phones. That's a bridge to real help for people who wouldn't otherwise get it.

Kara Swisher's career advice to Joanna: "Leave your fucking job." That was the shortest, cleanest advice Joanna got when deciding whether to leave the Wall Street Journal after 12 years.

Joanna used AI as a co-founder for the biggest decision of her career. She uploaded 12 years of notes into ChatGPT and asked it to help her decide whether to leave the Journal. It didn't decide for her. But it structured the risk analysis, laid out the escape hatches, and helped her see the shape of the decision.

The muscles atrophy if you don't use them. Writing is meant to be hard. Thinking is meant to be hard. If you outsource the hard work, you stop getting stronger at the hard work.

Research is where you learn the most. If you have AI pull the memo for you and you get up and read it, you don't know what you're really talking about. You have to do the reps to know the material.

AEI: Already Enough Intelligence. Sam Altman is obsessed with building superintelligence. Joanna proposes we already have enough intelligence to work with. Maybe the goal isn't to build smarter models. Maybe it's to figure out what to do with what we already have.

The AI on-ramp for leaders: Take one document you make all the time (a memo, a PowerPoint, an email template). Upload it. Ask AI to make a template out of it. Next time you need it, you're twice as fast.

Push yourself to do the harder work. Joanna's analogy: marathon runners are insane. They just want to run. Nobody wants to do the harder work. But that's where the growth is.

Joanna's champagne moment a year from now: milestones for her new company. She's already hit 100,000 YouTube subscribers three months after her first video. But she also just wants a nap.

Reflection Questions

Where in your work are you outsourcing the thinking to AI? Are the muscles you actually need atrophying because you're skipping the reps?
If you accepted that you already have enough intelligence to work with, what would you actually build with what's in front of you right now?

More Learning

#679: Kat Cole - The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs

#605: Seth Godin - The Power of Remarkable Ideas

#697: Dan Smith & Ryan Hawk - The Price of Becoming

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:44 Meet Joanna Stern

02:31 Teach Your Kids to Think in the Age of AI

03:25 The Parents and Mentors Who Shaped Her Career

04:16 Lessons From Walt Mossberg

05:55 Why Joanna Spent a Year Living With AI

14:47 How AI Can Make You a Better Leader

17:30 Why People Crave Human Connection More Than Ever

21:00 Bot Girl Summer: Dating a Chatbot Named Evan

25:13 The AI Therapist Trial

29:51 Using ChatGPT for a Career Change

33:29 Don't Let Your Thinking Muscles Atrophy

40:20 Sam Altman on Superintelligence, and Joanna's Case for "AEI"

42:51 Joanna's Advice for College Students

45:29 How Joanna Actually Uses AI to Write

47:17 Practical AI for the Fortune 500 VP

50:17 The Champagne Question

52:43 EOPC

697: The Price of Becoming - The Compounding Practices of High Performance (My New Book is Now Available!). "Have a Plan. Work the Plan. Plan for the Unexpected."

2026-07-19 23:00:001:14:24

Go to www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Buy my new book, The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Buy my new book, The Price of Becoming

Get The Price of Becoming: The Price of Becoming is available now wherever books are sold.

"Have a plan, work the plan, plan for the unexpected." From my old Miami football coach, Terry Hoeppner. It was posted in the locker room. He said it every day. I still think about it all the time.

There is no hack. There is no one thing. At many keynote Q&As, someone asks me for a quick fix. The only answer is the power of compounding. Consistency, dependability, and reliability are the least sexy words of all time. And they're the whole game.

Take your work seriously. Don't take yourself seriously. The best leaders go hard at the work but laugh at themselves. It's important to be able to laugh with your team.

Optionality is overrated.

"I'm trying to beef up my obituary. I'm not going to dabble." - Ed Latimore (Ep. 648)

Live like a hawk. Hawks have eyesight eight times better than humans. They glide and observe constantly. But once they see what they want, they commit with everything they have. Be a professional noticer. Then commit fully.

Talk to your people before big decisions. My dad. Miranda. And the wide network of high-caliber people I've built over 700 podcast episodes. Be specific. Off the record. Long conversations. Then trust your gut.

Take bits and pieces from the best. Then find your own voice. As a brand new sales rep at LexisNexis, Rex Caswell had me interview and sit with the ten best reps in the company. I took a piece from each, mashed it together with my own personality, and eventually found my own voice. I still use that formula today.

Use social media to create in-person moments. Organize dinners, meetups, coffees. Get in the room with people. Concert ticket prices and The World Cup tell you everything you need to know about how much people are craving in-person connection right now.

Don't outsource your thinking to AI. You can't walk into the weight room, look around, and expect to build muscle. You have to move the weights. Use AI as a tool. Don't let it do the thinking for you.

Your job is to add value to other people's lives. Coach Hoeppner sat 19-year-old me down with the other quarterback and pointed at both of us: "He adds more value to our team than you do. He gives us a better chance to win. That's why he's going to play." It was brutal. It was a very lucky moment for me to experience that in my formative years.

I fell into the AI trap. The Be a Pro section originally started as a LinkedIn post that was heavily influenced by Claude. It went well on Twitter too. People DM'd me praising it. It felt great. And it scared me. I was getting the rewards without doing the work.

The good old days are right now. I try to work hard when my family is asleep or at school. Between those hours, I go as hard as I can. Outside those hours, I try not to work too much. I've talked with so many dads who are older now, and their kids are out of the house. They miss the time when they were with their kids so much. I try to think of that daily.

Making positive dents in the world. Leave people, places, and things better than you found them. That's how you make a positive dent, one person at a time.

My philosophy on keynotes and writing: story, science, and practical application. Great storytelling to move people to the edge of their seat. Empirical evidence to make it true. Practical application to answer, "So what? Why should I care?" You have to have all 3.

Our edge in coaching leadership teams: my coaches actively live what they teach. They didn't attend a seminar and get certified. They're still active coaches themselves, still leading teams in real time. That's what separates authentic teaching from performance.

Push your edges. Find your Goldilocks zone. James Clear told me you don't get better at tennis by playing Roger Federer. He'll destroy you. But you also don't get better by playing a five-year-old. You need to be uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that you break.

Shane Gillis walked off stage looking exhausted. Dan saw him live in Cincinnati. On stage, effortless. The second he stepped behind the curtain, his shoulders slumped like he was ready to fall asleep. That's what the great ones do. They make it look easy because of the price they paid to get there.

My productive paranoia. Our team has to earn it every session. It creates a productive paranoia knowing that continuous improvement is necessary.

The reward is bigger than the cost. It's the greatest gig in the world. I bet on myself and the team every single day because if we keep adding value, I like our chances.

Reflection Questions

Where are you dabbling right now? What would 100% commitment actually look like, and what's stopping you from making the call?
My end-of-day prompts: What did I do today to add value to others' lives? What did I do today to push my edges?

Get The Price of Becoming: The Price of Becoming is available now at learningleader.com/becoming or on Amazon.

More Learning

#529: James Clear - Becoming an Optimist & Building Better Habits

#648: Ed Latimore - Discipline Over Feelings, Don't Dabble Your Way Through Life

#602: The Learning Leader Squad - Helping Teams Become Elite & People Become Excellent

Episode Chapters
00:00 A Special Launch Episode: The Price of Becoming

02:29 Have a Plan, Work the Plan, Plan for the Unexpected

05:15 There Is No Hack. Just the Power of Compounding.

08:04 Take Your Work Seriously. But Not Yourself

12:31 Optionality Is Overrated: Why You Should Stop Dabbling

16:13 How I Make Big Decisions

20:34 Using Social Media to Build Real In-Person Relationships

23:27 The Danger of Using AI to Write

34:16 How I Structure My Work Days

40:47 The One at a Time Moments That Signal a Positive Dent

42:04 Leave People, Places, and Things Better Than You Found Them

50:52 Story, Science, and Practical Application

55:14 What Makes The Learning Leader Team Different

57:39 Push Your Edges: The Goldilocks Zone

01:06:24 The Real Cost of Betting on Yourself

01:10:45 EOPC

697: The Price of Becoming - The Compounding Practices of High Performance (My New Book is Now Available!). "Have a Plan. Work the Plan. Plan for the Unexpected."

2026-07-19 23:00:001:14:24

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Buy my new book, The Price of Becoming

Get The Price of Becoming: The Price of Becoming is available now wherever books are sold.

"Have a plan, work the plan, plan for the unexpected." From my old Miami football coach, Terry Hoeppner. It was posted in the locker room. He said it every day. I still think about it all the time.

There is no hack. There is no one thing. At many keynote Q&As, someone asks me for a quick fix. The only answer is the power of compounding. Consistency, dependability, and reliability are the least sexy words of all time. And they're the whole game.

Take your work seriously. Don't take yourself seriously. The best leaders go hard at the work but laugh at themselves. It's important to be able to laugh with your team.

Optionality is overrated.

"I'm trying to beef up my obituary. I'm not going to dabble." - Ed Latimore (Ep. 648)

Live like a hawk. Hawks have eyesight eight times better than humans. They glide and observe constantly. But once they see what they want, they commit with everything they have. Be a professional noticer. Then commit fully.

Talk to your people before big decisions. My dad. Miranda. And the wide network of high-caliber people I've built over 700 podcast episodes. Be specific. Off the record. Long conversations. Then trust your gut.

Take bits and pieces from the best. Then find your own voice. As a brand new sales rep at LexisNexis, Rex Caswell had me interview and sit with the ten best reps in the company. I took a piece from each, mashed it together with my own personality, and eventually found my own voice. I still use that formula today.

Use social media to create in-person moments. Organize dinners, meetups, coffees. Get in the room with people. Concert ticket prices and The World Cup tell you everything you need to know about how much people are craving in-person connection right now.

Don't outsource your thinking to AI. You can't walk into the weight room, look around, and expect to build muscle. You have to move the weights. Use AI as a tool. Don't let it do the thinking for you.

Your job is to add value to other people's lives. Coach Hoeppner sat 19-year-old me down with the other quarterback and pointed at both of us: "He adds more value to our team than you do. He gives us a better chance to win. That's why he's going to play." It was brutal. It was a very lucky moment for me to experience that in my formative years.

I fell into the AI trap. The Be a Pro section originally started as a LinkedIn post that was heavily influenced by Claude. It went well on Twitter too. People DM'd me praising it. It felt great. And it scared me. I was getting the rewards without doing the work.

The good old days are right now. I try to work hard when my family is asleep or at school. Between those hours, I go as hard as I can. Outside those hours, I try not to work too much. I've talked with so many dads who are older now, and their kids are out of the house. They miss the time when they were with their kids so much. I try to think of that daily.

Making positive dents in the world. Leave people, places, and things better than you found them. That's how you make a positive dent, one person at a time.

My philosophy on keynotes and writing: story, science, and practical application. Great storytelling to move people to the edge of their seat. Empirical evidence to make it true. Practical application to answer, "So what? Why should I care?" You have to have all 3.

Our edge in coaching leadership teams: my coaches actively live what they teach. They didn't attend a seminar and get certified. They're still active coaches themselves, still leading teams in real time. That's what separates authentic teaching from performance.

Push your edges. Find your Goldilocks zone. James Clear told me you don't get better at tennis by playing Roger Federer. He'll destroy you. But you also don't get better by playing a five-year-old. You need to be uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that you break.

Shane Gillis walked off stage looking exhausted. Dan saw him live in Cincinnati. On stage, effortless. The second he stepped behind the curtain, his shoulders slumped like he was ready to fall asleep. That's what the great ones do. They make it look easy because of the price they paid to get there.

My productive paranoia. Our team has to earn it every session. It creates a productive paranoia knowing that continuous improvement is necessary.

The reward is bigger than the cost. It's the greatest gig in the world. I bet on myself and the team every single day because if we keep adding value, I like our chances.

Reflection Questions

Where are you dabbling right now? What would 100% commitment actually look like, and what's stopping you from making the call?
My end-of-day prompts: What did I do today to add value to others' lives? What did I do today to push my edges?

Get The Price of Becoming: The Price of Becoming is available now at learningleader.com/becoming or on Amazon.

More Learning

#529: James Clear - Becoming an Optimist & Building Better Habits

#648: Ed Latimore - Discipline Over Feelings, Don't Dabble Your Way Through Life#602: The Learning Leader Squad - Helping Teams Become Elite & People Become Excellent

Episode Chapters00:00 A Special Launch Episode: The Price of Becoming

02:29 Have a Plan, Work the Plan, Plan for the Unexpected

05:15 There Is No Hack. Just the Power of Compounding.

08:04 Take Your Work Seriously. But Not Yourself

12:31 Optionality Is Overrated: Why You Should Stop Dabbling

16:13 How I Make Big Decisions

20:34 Using Social Media to Build Real In-Person Relationships

23:27 The Danger of Using AI to Write

34:16 How I Structure My Work Days

40:47 The One at a Time Moments That Signal a Positive Dent

42:04 Leave People, Places, and Things Better Than You Found Them

50:52 Story, Science, and Practical Application

55:14 What Makes The Learning Leader Team Different

57:39 Push Your Edges: The Goldilocks Zone

01:06:24 The Real Cost of Betting on Yourself

01:10:45 EOPC

696: Dr. Zeke Emanuel - The Six Rules for Health & Longevity, The Harvard Study on Happiness, The Truth About Biohacking, Social Connection, and How to Avoid Being a Schmuck

2026-07-12 23:00:0054:51

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

New Book - The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My guest: Ezekiel J. "Zeke" Emanuel, MD, PhD, is a prominent oncologist, bioethicist, and health policy expert. Currently Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, he was instrumental in shaping the Affordable Care Act and served as the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.

Key Learnings

Zeke's dad was called "Speedy." He was a Chicago pediatrician who worked 24-hour call, walked so fast the nurses had to run to keep up, and had a rule: the fourth child in any family was free. He recognized the financial strain on families and just wouldn't charge.

Zeke's mom was the definition of the anti-helicopter parent. At the playground, she sat on the bench. At the beach, she dropped the boys off with a blanket and a snack. "You go play. Something goes wrong? Okay, that's how it goes." That's how three future powerhouse leaders learned to negotiate, create, and figure it out.

The Emanuel brothers' group text is full of bragging. Zeke posted his 51.9 VO2 max score at 68 years old, asking, "Do I win in the family?" His kids replied that they don't even read the articles Zeke and Rahm forward anymore. Close doesn't mean uncompetitive.

A dozen years ago, Zeke wrote his most famous article, "Why I Hope to Die at 75." He still stands by it. The point wasn't that he wants to die. The point is that after 75, he won't take medical treatments meant to prolong life.

By age 75, 30% of adults have Alzheimer's or cognitive impairment. By 80, it's 40%. Zeke doesn't want to be remembered as a doddering old man who can't recognize his own family.

Living a long time is a means, not an end. It's not the goal of life. It's what allows you to be present, engaged, and useful for the years you have.

Biohacking is a lie: It suggests you know better than millions of years of evolution and the entire medical profession. The body isn't about maxing. It's about balance. Too much immune response gives you autoimmunity. Too little makes you sick. The body finds health in the median.

You're not going to be perfect over decades. Wellness isn't a four-minute figure skating routine graded on execution. It's a lifetime practice. So build habits you enjoy and can sustain without thinking about them.

Zeke's six simple rules for a long and healthy life:

Don't be a schmuck. Avoid activities riskier than driving. Smoking, vaping, base jumping, climbing Everest.
Talk to people. The number one predictor of a long, happy life.
Expand your mind. Travel. Talk to the chef. Learn something new.
Eat your ice cream. Moderation over perfection. Fermented foods and fiber.
Move. Aerobic, strength, and flexibility. All three.
Sleep like a baby. You can't will it. But you can create the conditions.

The Harvard Adult Development Study followed people for 85 years. John F. Kennedy was in it. Ben Bradlee was in it. The finding: close friends and being married correlated with the healthiest, longest, happiest lives. Not exercise. Not diet. Relationships.

Having no close friends is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's how bad loneliness is for you. It's not just psychological. It's physical.

Introverts get the same happiness boost from social interaction as extroverts. A University of Chicago study by Nicholas Epley found that introverts assume they won't enjoy talking to strangers on their commute. They were wrong. When they did it, they were just as happy as extroverts.

Take the headphones off. Zeke has been telling people this since the iPod era. Random encounters increase your surface area for luck, learning, and connection. You never know who you're going to meet or what they might tell you.

To be interesting, you have to be interested. Zeke asks to meet the chef at every great restaurant. He asks his Ethiopian Uber driver which tribe he's from. He talks to the person on the plane. It's virtuous. Good for you AND good for them.

Zeke's hero is Ben Franklin. Franklin came back to America at 80 after negotiating the end of the Revolutionary War. The first thing he did was build a library for his curiosity and a dining room for his social dinners. That's the way to live.

The wellness trifecta: hosting a dinner party with curious people. You're eating good food. You're getting together with people. Your mind is being stretched by great conversation. Three benefits from one activity.

Zeke is anti-wellness-industrial-complex. Peptides from your corner store: disaster, unregulated, no idea what's in them. Testosterone replacement therapy without a real deficiency: bad idea, accelerates prostate cancer. Growth hormone for aging: promotes cancers. That's being a schmuck.

Sleep is the one wellness practice you can't will yourself into. You can only build the conditions for it. Dark room. Cool temperature. No caffeine or alcohol eight hours before bed. Phone in another room. Read a book. Everything else is up to your body.

Ice cream actually decreases your risk of type 2 diabetes. The fat content softens the glycemic response. Plus, you usually eat it with other people. Social eating matters.

Zeke's champagne moment a year from now: finishing his next book on how to fix the American healthcare system, and turning 70.

Reflection Questions

Are you optimizing for length of life, or for the quality of years you actually get?
When was the last time you turned your headphones off, introduced yourself to a stranger, or asked to meet the chef?
Who are the friends you rely on for social interaction? Not casual acquaintances, but the ones who lift your health, longevity, and happiness. When did you last make plans with them?

More Learning

#607 - Dr. Meg Meeker - Raising Resilient Kids (Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters)

#690 - Austin Kleon - Why Activated Leaders Win

#682 - Will Guidara - Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste

696: Dr. Zeke Emanuel - The Six Rules for Health & Longevity, The Harvard Study on Happiness, The Truth About Biohacking, Social Connection, and How to Avoid Being a Schmuck

2026-07-12 23:00:0054:51

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

New Book - The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My guest: Ezekiel J. "Zeke" Emanuel, MD, PhD, is a prominent oncologist, bioethicist, and health policy expert. Currently Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, he was instrumental in shaping the Affordable Care Act and served as the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.

Key Learnings

Zeke's dad was called "Speedy." He was a Chicago pediatrician who worked 24-hour call, walked so fast the nurses had to run to keep up, and had a rule: the fourth child in any family was free. He recognized the financial strain on families and just wouldn't charge.

Zeke's mom was the definition of the anti-helicopter parent. At the playground, she sat on the bench. At the beach, she dropped the boys off with a blanket and a snack. "You go play. Something goes wrong? Okay, that's how it goes." That's how three future powerhouse leaders learned to negotiate, create, and figure it out.

The Emanuel brothers' group text is full of bragging. Zeke posted his 51.9 VO2 max score at 68 years old, asking, "Do I win in the family?" His kids replied that they don't even read the articles Zeke and Rahm forward anymore. Close doesn't mean uncompetitive.

A dozen years ago, Zeke wrote his most famous article, "Why I Hope to Die at 75." He still stands by it. The point wasn't that he wants to die. The point is that after 75, he won't take medical treatments meant to prolong life.

By age 75, 30% of adults have Alzheimer's or cognitive impairment. By 80, it's 40%. Zeke doesn't want to be remembered as a doddering old man who can't recognize his own family.

Living a long time is a means, not an end. It's not the goal of life. It's what allows you to be present, engaged, and useful for the years you have.

Biohacking is a lie: It suggests you know better than millions of years of evolution and the entire medical profession. The body isn't about maxing. It's about balance. Too much immune response gives you autoimmunity. Too little makes you sick. The body finds health in the median.

You're not going to be perfect over decades. Wellness isn't a four-minute figure skating routine graded on execution. It's a lifetime practice. So build habits you enjoy and can sustain without thinking about them.

Zeke's six simple rules for a long and healthy life:

Don't be a schmuck. Avoid activities riskier than driving. Smoking, vaping, base jumping, climbing Everest.
Talk to people. The number one predictor of a long, happy life.
Expand your mind. Travel. Talk to the chef. Learn something new.
Eat your ice cream. Moderation over perfection. Fermented foods and fiber.
Move. Aerobic, strength, and flexibility. All three.
Sleep like a baby. You can't will it. But you can create the conditions.

The Harvard Adult Development Study followed people for 85 years. John F. Kennedy was in it. Ben Bradlee was in it. The finding: close friends and being married correlated with the healthiest, longest, happiest lives. Not exercise. Not diet. Relationships.

Having no close friends is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's how bad loneliness is for you. It's not just psychological. It's physical.

Introverts get the same happiness boost from social interaction as extroverts. A University of Chicago study by Nicholas Epley found that introverts assume they won't enjoy talking to strangers on their commute. They were wrong. When they did it, they were just as happy as extroverts.

Take the headphones off. Zeke has been telling people this since the iPod era. Random encounters increase your surface area for luck, learning, and connection. You never know who you're going to meet or what they might tell you.

To be interesting, you have to be interested. Zeke asks to meet the chef at every great restaurant. He asks his Ethiopian Uber driver which tribe he's from. He talks to the person on the plane. It's virtuous. Good for you AND good for them.

Zeke's hero is Ben Franklin. Franklin came back to America at 80 after negotiating the end of the Revolutionary War. The first thing he did was build a library for his curiosity and a dining room for his social dinners. That's the way to live.

The wellness trifecta: hosting a dinner party with curious people. You're eating good food. You're getting together with people. Your mind is being stretched by great conversation. Three benefits from one activity.

Zeke is anti-wellness-industrial-complex. Peptides from your corner store: disaster, unregulated, no idea what's in them. Testosterone replacement therapy without a real deficiency: bad idea, accelerates prostate cancer. Growth hormone for aging: promotes cancers. That's being a schmuck.

Sleep is the one wellness practice you can't will yourself into. You can only build the conditions for it. Dark room. Cool temperature. No caffeine or alcohol eight hours before bed. Phone in another room. Read a book. Everything else is up to your body.

Ice cream actually decreases your risk of type 2 diabetes. The fat content softens the glycemic response. Plus, you usually eat it with other people. Social eating matters.

Zeke's champagne moment a year from now: finishing his next book on how to fix the American healthcare system, and turning 70.

Reflection Questions

Are you optimizing for length of life, or for the quality of years you actually get?
When was the last time you turned your headphones off, introduced yourself to a stranger, or asked to meet the chef?
Who are the friends you rely on for social interaction? Not casual acquaintances, but the ones who lift your health, longevity, and happiness. When did you last make plans with them?

More Learning

#607 - Dr. Meg Meeker - Raising Resilient Kids (Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters)

#690 - Austin Kleon - Why Activated Leaders Win

#682 - Will Guidara - Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste

695: Andy Stumpf - Leadership Lessons From SEAL Team Six, Discipline vs. Motivation, Team Guy vs. Navy SEAL, High Standards, and How To Be Drownproof

2026-07-05 23:00:001:06:29

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Book - The Price of Becoming -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com

Book - The Price of Becoming -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My guest: Andy Stumpf is a retired Navy SEAL who spent 17 years on active duty, including assignments with one of the most elite special operations units in the U.S. military. He's a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book is Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water.

Key Learnings

"What you allow in your presence is your standard." It doesn't matter what your corporate ethos is. It doesn't matter what's tattooed on the wall behind you. If your actions don't align with your speech, it means nothing. Speech is debatable. Actions have impact.

You can control almost nothing in your life, but you can control the boundaries you set and your willingness to maintain them.

There's a difference between a SEAL and a team guy. A SEAL is there for the title and the individual journey. A team guy is there for the mission and the team. They wear the same uniform. From the outside, you can't tell them apart. Internally, everyone knows.

Andy would rather have a group of team guys than a group of SEALs. Your ability to accomplish unbelievable things is 100% aligned with what group of people you bring into your organization.

You'll get fooled in the interview process. People wear masks. That's just how it works. The reps come after. Set up consistent feedback. Bi-annual after-action reviews on performance and how they're showing up as a person.

80/20 the interview. Talk 20%. Make them talk 80%. The more they speak, the harder it is to keep the mask on.

Let people go faster, not slower. It's way easier to solve this problem six months in than six years in, when they've already catastrophically impacted the culture.

Drown-proofing is not an exercise in being drown-proof. It's an exercise in self-control. You bob up and down in a pool for an hour with your hands tied behind your back and your feet bound. If you panic, you sink. If you stay calm and control your breathing, you can do it indefinitely. The test occurs in the water, but it has almost nothing to do with the water itself.

The world is chaotic. That doesn't mean you have to be. When everything around you is going sideways, walk yourself back. What can I actually control? My breathing. My self-talk. My priorities. My next move.

The circle of influence vs. the circle of concern. Draw a line down the middle of a legal pad. On the left, write everything you're worried about, working on, occupied by. That column will be huge. On the right, write what you actually have direct control over. You'll only be able to write one thing: yourself.

The most effective leadership tool is mentorship. Andy's mentor Dave Hall gave him "just the perfect amount of rope to hang myself, and then maybe he'd help me get it around my neck just a little bit." Dave would let him fall short, then crush him, then sit there and facilitate what he needed to fill the gap.

A high standard is a finely sharpened blade. It can cut in both directions. Andy's mentor, Dave Hall, ultimately died by suicide. One reason Andy believes it happened is Dave couldn't hold himself to the same standard anymore, and it destroyed him. Have grace for yourself. Not every goal is worth your life.

Focus on post-traumatic growth, not post-traumatic stress. Trauma doesn't have to destroy you. If you take the time and energy to work your way through it, it can turn you into a better version of yourself.

Motivation can be outsourced. Discipline cannot. Motivation is like the tide. It comes in and out. Discipline is doing the things you need to do regardless of how you feel.

Win the micro-battles, not the war, in one fell swoop. If you try to attack 10 bad habits overnight, you'll fail. Pick one for a week. Build momentum. Stack days. You win the war via the micro-battles.

If you don't think of yourself as a leader, you'll never step into a leadership void. You'll tell yourself you're not the person. Not qualified. Not capable.

Stop treating leadership like the DMV. You don't show up at the window and challenge the test with no preparation. You crawl, walk, run. You practice. Every interaction is either a micro-deposit or a micro-withdrawal of leadership capital.

Sustained high performers master the basics. They make no attempt to be flashy. They make no attempt to gain 50 yards at a time. They'll do one yard 50 times in a row. If they see a real opportunity with managed risk, they'll go big. Otherwise, one yard. Over and over.

Andy's champagne moment a year from now: being there with the people he loves. "Would you rather have all the things you think you want in life and enjoy them by yourself? Or be surrounded by people who truly love you for who you are? I'm taking the latter every time."

Reflection Questions

What are you allowing in your presence right now that contradicts the standard you say you hold? What's the cost of letting it continue?
If you drew the line down the legal pad today, what would be in your concern column that shouldn't be? Where is your energy going to things you cannot control?

More Learning

#234: Jocko Willink - Why Discipline Equals Freedom

#363: Admiral William McRaven - The Bin Laden Raid, Saving Captain Phillips, & Leadership Lessons for Life

#633: General Stanley McChrystal - On Standard: Choices That Define a Life

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:13 Meet Andy Stumpf

02:45 "What You Allow in Your Presence Is Your Standard"

04:30 What You Walk Past in Your Personal Life

05:59 Why He Wanted to Be a Navy SEAL at 11 Years Old

08:54 The Difference Between a SEAL and a Team Guy

11:38 How to Hire Team Guys, Not SEALs

16:34 The Story Behind Drownproof

18:23 What Drownproofing Actually Is

22:09 The Real Lesson Is Self-Control

25:55 Getting Shot in Iraq

30:38 Two Years of Rehab and the Return to Combat

33:58 Learning to Be a SEAL from Dave Hall

37:31 High Standards Are a Double-Edged Sword

40:05 Post-Traumatic Growth, Not Just Post-Traumatic Stress

42:45 Motivation Can Be Outsourced. Discipline Cannot.

47:20 Win Small Battles, Not the War Overnight

48:33 If You Don't See Yourself as a Leader, You Never Will

51:29 How to Practice Leadership Every Day

54:15 Getting Tricked Into Writing the Book

55:48 The Joe Rogan Blurb on the Front Cover

57:38 What the Best Leaders Have in Common

59:03 The Champagne Question: Being With the People You Love

01:03:53 EOPC

695: Andy Stumpf - Leadership Lessons From SEAL Team Six, Discipline vs. Motivation, Team Guy vs. Navy SEAL, High Standards, and How To Be Drownproof

2026-07-05 23:00:001:06:29

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com

Book - The Price of Becoming -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My guest: Andy Stumpf is a retired Navy SEAL who spent 17 years on active duty, including assignments with one of the most elite special operations units in the U.S. military. He's a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book is Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water.

Key Learnings

"What you allow in your presence is your standard." It doesn't matter what your corporate ethos is. It doesn't matter what's tattooed on the wall behind you. If your actions don't align with your speech, it means nothing. Speech is debatable. Actions have impact.

You can control almost nothing in your life, but you can control the boundaries you set and your willingness to maintain them.

There's a difference between a SEAL and a team guy. A SEAL is there for the title and the individual journey. A team guy is there for the mission and the team. They wear the same uniform. From the outside, you can't tell them apart. Internally, everyone knows.

Andy would rather have a group of team guys than a group of SEALs. Your ability to accomplish unbelievable things is 100% aligned with what group of people you bring into your organization.

You'll get fooled in the interview process. People wear masks. That's just how it works. The reps come after. Set up consistent feedback. Bi-annual after-action reviews on performance and how they're showing up as a person.

80/20 the interview. Talk 20%. Make them talk 80%. The more they speak, the harder it is to keep the mask on.

Let people go faster, not slower. It's way easier to solve this problem six months in than six years in, when they've already catastrophically impacted the culture.

Drown-proofing is not an exercise in being drown-proof. It's an exercise in self-control. You bob up and down in a pool for an hour with your hands tied behind your back and your feet bound. If you panic, you sink. If you stay calm and control your breathing, you can do it indefinitely. The test occurs in the water, but it has almost nothing to do with the water itself.

The world is chaotic. That doesn't mean you have to be. When everything around you is going sideways, walk yourself back. What can I actually control? My breathing. My self-talk. My priorities. My next move.

The circle of influence vs. the circle of concern. Draw a line down the middle of a legal pad. On the left, write everything you're worried about, working on, occupied by. That column will be huge. On the right, write what you actually have direct control over. You'll only be able to write one thing: yourself.

The most effective leadership tool is mentorship. Andy's mentor Dave Hall gave him "just the perfect amount of rope to hang myself, and then maybe he'd help me get it around my neck just a little bit." Dave would let him fall short, then crush him, then sit there and facilitate what he needed to fill the gap.

A high standard is a finely sharpened blade. It can cut in both directions. Andy's mentor, Dave Hall, ultimately died by suicide. One reason Andy believes it happened is Dave couldn't hold himself to the same standard anymore, and it destroyed him. Have grace for yourself. Not every goal is worth your life.

Focus on post-traumatic growth, not post-traumatic stress. Trauma doesn't have to destroy you. If you take the time and energy to work your way through it, it can turn you into a better version of yourself.

Motivation can be outsourced. Discipline cannot. Motivation is like the tide. It comes in and out. Discipline is doing the things you need to do regardless of how you feel.

Win the micro-battles, not the war, in one fell swoop. If you try to attack 10 bad habits overnight, you'll fail. Pick one for a week. Build momentum. Stack days. You win the war via the micro-battles.

If you don't think of yourself as a leader, you'll never step into a leadership void. You'll tell yourself you're not the person. Not qualified. Not capable.

Stop treating leadership like the DMV. You don't show up at the window and challenge the test with no preparation. You crawl, walk, run. You practice. Every interaction is either a micro-deposit or a micro-withdrawal of leadership capital.

Sustained high performers master the basics. They make no attempt to be flashy. They make no attempt to gain 50 yards at a time. They'll do one yard 50 times in a row. If they see a real opportunity with managed risk, they'll go big. Otherwise, one yard. Over and over.

Andy's champagne moment a year from now: being there with the people he loves. "Would you rather have all the things you think you want in life and enjoy them by yourself? Or be surrounded by people who truly love you for who you are? I'm taking the latter every time."

Reflection Questions

What are you allowing in your presence right now that contradicts the standard you say you hold? What's the cost of letting it continue?
If you drew the line down the legal pad today, what would be in your concern column that shouldn't be? Where is your energy going to things you cannot control?

More Learning

#234: Jocko Willink - Why Discipline Equals Freedom

#363: Admiral William McRaven - The Bin Laden Raid, Saving Captain Phillips, & Leadership Lessons for Life

#633: General Stanley McChrystal - On Standard: Choices That Define a Life

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:13 Meet Andy Stumpf

02:45 "What You Allow in Your Presence Is Your Standard"

04:30 What You Walk Past in Your Personal Life

05:59 Why He Wanted to Be a Navy SEAL at 11 Years Old

08:54 The Difference Between a SEAL and a Team Guy

11:38 How to Hire Team Guys, Not SEALs

16:34 The Story Behind Drownproof

18:23 What Drownproofing Actually Is

22:09 The Real Lesson Is Self-Control

25:55 Getting Shot in Iraq

30:38 Two Years of Rehab and the Return to Combat

33:58 Learning to Be a SEAL from Dave Hall

37:31 High Standards Are a Double-Edged Sword

40:05 Post-Traumatic Growth, Not Just Post-Traumatic Stress

42:45 Motivation Can Be Outsourced. Discipline Cannot.

47:20 Win Small Battles, Not the War Overnight

48:33 If You Don't See Yourself as a Leader, You Never Will

51:29 How to Practice Leadership Every Day

54:15 Getting Tricked Into Writing the Book

55:48 The Joe Rogan Blurb on the Front Cover

57:38 What the Best Leaders Have in Common

59:03 The Champagne Question: Being With the People You Love

01:03:53 EOPC

694: Clark Lea - LIVE! At The 2026 Learning Leader Growth Summit: The Mission Is Winning, Checking the Cabinets, Leading as an Introvert, Alabama Week, Decoupling Worth From Outcomes, and Building a Championship Culture

2026-06-28 23:00:001:07:24

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Order my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Order my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest: Clark Lea is the head football coach at Vanderbilt University. He spent 14 years as an assistant coach, including three as defensive coordinator at Notre Dame, before returning to his alma mater in 2021 to inherit a program that had gone winless the year before. He's now the back-to-back SEC Coach of the Year and the architect of one of the great turnarounds in college football history. We recorded this conversation live at our 2026 Learning Leader Growth Summit in Nashville, surrounded by members of the Learning Leader Circle.

Key Learnings

Clark inherited a Vanderbilt program that went winless the year before. He says he probably screwed up 50% of his first year. The game is how quickly you can pivot.

Losing is a powerful teacher. It cleanses and purifies you in ways you don't want but need. You can blame other people, sink into self-pity, or ask: "What am I meant to be learning right now?"

Fast-forward 15 years. Look at this moment from a future place of breakthrough. What did you do now that allowed change to occur?

"What do I wanna be proud of in the attempt?" Letting go of expected outcomes is what allows you to refine and simplify the way you see the world.

Enter the building unguarded. The clearer you are about who you are and what you want, the more obvious it becomes who fits and who doesn't.

Different ball, same problems. Clark spends time learning from the Milwaukee Brewers, the Baltimore Ravens, and others. Different industry, same human challenges. Sometimes the different ball is the gift, because you walk in without preconceptions.

Knowledge is limiting. Questions illuminate. Once you know something, you stop pursuing it. The questions you ask are the first constraints you put on knowledge.

Get past the touchy-feely. Ask: "Tell me what's screwed up here." Problems are always there. Your job is to be willing to look for them.

Check the cabinets. Living in a 700-square-foot LA apartment with his wife, Clark would open the cabinets and find them swarming with roaches. The building was fumigated. Two months later, they were back. You can move the pots out and stop checking, or you can keep opening the cabinets. Leaders keep opening the cabinets.

Tell people what TO do, not what NOT to do. Rick Neuheisel's lesson. Stop coaching against the bad thing. Manifest what you want to have happen.

Hire bunker guys, not logo people. Logos are easy to change. Hire people who'll fight for you in the bunker when it's hard.

The Michigan Reset. Before his first game as Notre Dame defensive coordinator, Clark told the team's mental performance coach: "We're gonna be down 50 to nothing at halftime. BK's gonna fire me on the spot. Jerome Bettis and Rocket Ismail will be screaming at me in the tunnel." She asked, "Why don't you trust your players? You think this is all about you?"

Have more captains. Clark sits in a room each summer with around 25 players he identifies as leaders. If the people at the leadership table are good, the locker room will be good. The team votes. He draws the line wherever the vote naturally falls.

When you try to go opposite of what you're trying to avoid, you eventually become it. Clark spent his first years at Vanderbilt rejecting the program's past. Going opposite. Then he realized it was just attaching his identity to the very thing he was trying to escape. Now he plots toward the vision instead.

What got you here won't keep you here. As Clark has grown, the program has grown. Once he understood that, he could sit with a player and listen first, instead of looking to them for affirmation.

The mission is winning. Clark scrapped a beautiful, eloquent, unclear mission statement and replaced it with three words. Now every dollar spent, every coach hired, and every player retained is measured against the same lens.

Well-better-learned. Vanderbilt's after-action review for every game and every process. What did we do well? What do we need to do better? What did we learn?

On Alabama week, Clark's team had the best practice he's ever been a part of. His job each week isn't to tell the team the challenges. It's to give them the plan to win. At halftime against the number one team in the country, he kneeled the team down and said, "It's on a platter for you. Go take it." They beat Alabama.

Stewarding 17-to-22-year-olds means helping them decouple their worth from outcomes. Clark cries in front of his team. His kids are around. His wife is there. His dad is at every practice. The players see a man. A human. A son.

"An asshole in a Nike Tech Fit is still an asshole." In the NIL era, Clark fights to keep the locker room from splitting into a million-dollar club, a $500K club, a $30K club, and a $0 club. What you drive doesn't make a man. NIL value doesn't make a man. The grounding is the work.

Reflection Questions

What are you holding too tightly right now? Whose job are you doing because you don't trust them to do it themselves?
Which cabinet have you stopped checking because you're tired of finding the same problem?
Fast-forward 15 years. Looking back at this moment from a place of breakthrough, what are you meant to be learning right now that you've been avoiding?

More Learning

#681: Clark Lea - Belief is a Practice

#281: George Raveling - 8 Decades of Wisdom, from Dr. MLK to Michael Jordan

#637: Tom Ryan - Chosen Suffering, Becoming Elite & Life & Leadership

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

00:47 Welcome Back, Clark Lea

02:38 Taking Over a Winless Vanderbilt Program

04:18 What Losing Taught Clark About Hiring

07:52 The Three Things That Light Clark on Fire About Coaching

10:27 Different Ball, Same Problems: Learning From the Milwaukee Brewers

13:14 Knowledge Is Limiting. Questions Illuminate.

18:09 The Introvert Who Had to Learn to Lead the Room

20:13 Brian Kelly and the Bet on Clark Lea

23:19 Why Clark Has More Team Captains Than Anyone in College Football

28:58 The Transfer Portal Pivot and the Culture Reset

33:58 The Mission Is Winning

34:51 "If We Don't Have $3 Million by December, We Won't Have a Program"

37:26 Why Candice Lee Took a Bet on Him

39:53 Inside Alabama Week: The Best Practice He's Ever Been a Part Of

44:03 The Bye Week Reset: Penalties, Third Down, and the Ball

46:11 Beating the No. 1 Team in the Country

49:50 Replacing Diego Pavia's Locker Room Leadership

51:39 Decoupling Worth and Identity From Outcomes

56:27 Hiring Bunker Guys, Not Logo People

01:01:47 "An Asshole in a Nike Tech Fit Is Still an Asshole"

01:04:47 EOPC

694: Clark Lea - LIVE! At The 2026 Learning Leader Growth Summit: The Mission Is Winning, Checking the Cabinets, Leading as an Introvert, Alabama Week, Decoupling Worth From Outcomes, and Building a Championship Culture

2026-06-28 23:00:001:07:24

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Order my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest: Clark Lea is the head football coach at Vanderbilt University. He spent 14 years as an assistant coach, including three as defensive coordinator at Notre Dame, before returning to his alma mater in 2021 to inherit a program that had gone winless the year before. He's now the back-to-back SEC Coach of the Year and the architect of one of the great turnarounds in college football history. We recorded this conversation live at our 2026 Learning Leader Growth Summit in Nashville, surrounded by members of the Learning Leader Circle.

Key Learnings

Clark inherited a Vanderbilt program that went winless the year before. He says he probably screwed up 50% of his first year. The game is how quickly you can pivot.

Losing is a powerful teacher. It cleanses and purifies you in ways you don't want but need. You can blame other people, sink into self-pity, or ask: "What am I meant to be learning right now?"

Fast-forward 15 years. Look at this moment from a future place of breakthrough. What did you do now that allowed change to occur?

"What do I wanna be proud of in the attempt?" Letting go of expected outcomes is what allows you to refine and simplify the way you see the world.

Enter the building unguarded. The clearer you are about who you are and what you want, the more obvious it becomes who fits and who doesn't.

Different ball, same problems. Clark spends time learning from the Milwaukee Brewers, the Baltimore Ravens, and others. Different industry, same human challenges. Sometimes the different ball is the gift, because you walk in without preconceptions.

Knowledge is limiting. Questions illuminate. Once you know something, you stop pursuing it. The questions you ask are the first constraints you put on knowledge.

Get past the touchy-feely. Ask: "Tell me what's screwed up here." Problems are always there. Your job is to be willing to look for them.

Check the cabinets. Living in a 700-square-foot LA apartment with his wife, Clark would open the cabinets and find them swarming with roaches. The building was fumigated. Two months later, they were back. You can move the pots out and stop checking, or you can keep opening the cabinets. Leaders keep opening the cabinets.

Tell people what TO do, not what NOT to do. Rick Neuheisel's lesson. Stop coaching against the bad thing. Manifest what you want to have happen.

Hire bunker guys, not logo people. Logos are easy to change. Hire people who'll fight for you in the bunker when it's hard.

The Michigan Reset. Before his first game as Notre Dame defensive coordinator, Clark told the team's mental performance coach: "We're gonna be down 50 to nothing at halftime. BK's gonna fire me on the spot. Jerome Bettis and Rocket Ismail will be screaming at me in the tunnel." She asked, "Why don't you trust your players? You think this is all about you?"

Have more captains. Clark sits in a room each summer with around 25 players he identifies as leaders. If the people at the leadership table are good, the locker room will be good. The team votes. He draws the line wherever the vote naturally falls.

When you try to go opposite of what you're trying to avoid, you eventually become it. Clark spent his first years at Vanderbilt rejecting the program's past. Going opposite. Then he realized it was just attaching his identity to the very thing he was trying to escape. Now he plots toward the vision instead.

What got you here won't keep you here. As Clark has grown, the program has grown. Once he understood that, he could sit with a player and listen first, instead of looking to them for affirmation.

The mission is winning. Clark scrapped a beautiful, eloquent, unclear mission statement and replaced it with three words. Now every dollar spent, every coach hired, and every player retained is measured against the same lens.

Well-better-learned. Vanderbilt's after-action review for every game and every process. What did we do well? What do we need to do better? What did we learn?

On Alabama week, Clark's team had the best practice he's ever been a part of. His job each week isn't to tell the team the challenges. It's to give them the plan to win. At halftime against the number one team in the country, he kneeled the team down and said, "It's on a platter for you. Go take it." They beat Alabama.

Stewarding 17-to-22-year-olds means helping them decouple their worth from outcomes. Clark cries in front of his team. His kids are around. His wife is there. His dad is at every practice. The players see a man. A human. A son.

"An asshole in a Nike Tech Fit is still an asshole." In the NIL era, Clark fights to keep the locker room from splitting into a million-dollar club, a $500K club, a $30K club, and a $0 club. What you drive doesn't make a man. NIL value doesn't make a man. The grounding is the work.

Reflection Questions

What are you holding too tightly right now? Whose job are you doing because you don't trust them to do it themselves?
Which cabinet have you stopped checking because you're tired of finding the same problem?
Fast-forward 15 years. Looking back at this moment from a place of breakthrough, what are you meant to be learning right now that you've been avoiding?

More Learning

#681: Clark Lea - Belief is a Practice

#281: George Raveling - 8 Decades of Wisdom, from Dr. MLK to Michael Jordan

#637: Tom Ryan - Chosen Suffering, Becoming Elite & Life & Leadership

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

00:47 Welcome Back, Clark Lea

02:38 Taking Over a Winless Vanderbilt Program

04:18 What Losing Taught Clark About Hiring

07:52 The Three Things That Light Clark on Fire About Coaching

10:27 Different Ball, Same Problems: Learning From the Milwaukee Brewers

13:14 Knowledge Is Limiting. Questions Illuminate.

18:09 The Introvert Who Had to Learn to Lead the Room

20:13 Brian Kelly and the Bet on Clark Lea

23:19 Why Clark Has More Team Captains Than Anyone in College Football

28:58 The Transfer Portal Pivot and the Culture Reset

33:58 The Mission Is Winning

34:51 "If We Don't Have $3 Million by December, We Won't Have a Program"

37:26 Why Candice Lee Took a Bet on Him

39:53 Inside Alabama Week: The Best Practice He's Ever Been a Part Of

44:03 The Bye Week Reset: Penalties, Third Down, and the Ball

46:11 Beating the No. 1 Team in the Country

49:50 Replacing Diego Pavia's Locker Room Leadership

51:39 Decoupling Worth and Identity From Outcomes

56:27 Hiring Bunker Guys, Not Logo People

01:01:47 "An Asshole in a Nike Tech Fit Is Still an Asshole"

01:04:47 EOPC

693: Tina Seelig - Fortune vs. Luck, The Power of Curiosity, Why Your Words Change Lives, Failure Résumés, Thank You Notes, and Creating Luck Through Relationships, Observation, & Daily Action

2026-06-21 23:00:0055:24

Order my new book - The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Order my new book - The Price of Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My Guest - Tina Seelig has spent 27 years at Stanford teaching some of the world's most ambitious people how to see and seize opportunities. She's a neuroscientist, the executive director of Knight Hennessy Scholars, and the author of 18 books. Her TED Talk on luck has been viewed over 3.4 million times. Her newest book is called What I Wish I Knew About Luck: A Crash Course on Turning Aspirations into Achievements.

Key Learnings

Tina's dad died at 99 and a half. Three weeks before his first great-grandbaby was born. He was still driving, going to three dinner parties a week, and talking to Tina every day. His curiosity was his superpower. He gave 66 lectures in his retirement community over 20 years, on topics ranging from nuclear weapons to climate change.

Train yourself to be a professional noticer. When Tina's dad walked his grandkids into a new room, he'd give them a minute, then say "Shut your eyes." How many doors? Windows? What color is the carpet?

Assume there's a million dollars in every room. It's up to you to find it. Opportunities are ubiquitous. You just have to look.

Take the headphones off. The most powerful things happen when you engage with strangers. Standing in line. On the plane. Walking through campus.

Tina sat next to a stranger named Mark on a plane. He was a publisher. He said no to her book proposal. She kept the relationship going. Years later, his editor approved the same proposal she had given Mark. Within two weeks, she had a contract.

Wear something that invites conversation. A logo. A backpack from a conference. A college baseball shirt. Give the world a hook to start with you.

Fortune is what happens to you. Luck requires action. Most people confuse the two and miss the chance to claim their agency.

"With my luck, it's gonna rain." Reframe it: "With OUR luck, it's gonna be a beautiful sunny day." The reframe changes what you see.

Luck seldom sails solo. Most luck comes through other people. Cultivating meaningful relationships is the most underrated lucky behavior.

You don't get a job. You get the keys to the building. The visible work isn't what gets you ahead. The invisible work is.

Between stimulus and response is a choice. (Viktor Frankl) Within the constraints of fortune, agency is everything.

"Tina, you think like a scientist." One sentence from a professor changed Tina's life. Leaders, know the weight of your words.

Twenty years later, Tina wrote that professor a thank-you note. Twenty years after that, his granddaughter wrote back. They had read part of Tina's letter at his funeral.

When a student made a bad decision, Tina's first instinct was to punish. She paused. Said, "Help me understand what happened." The whole community learned what empathy and humility look like in leadership.

Unresolved conflict sucks the energy out of your day. Resolve it. You become taller, lighter, more open to lucky things.

Oliver Greenwald sent Tina a list of 10 ways he could help her with her book. Nothing on the list was exactly what she wanted. She hired him anyway, because of the initiative.

Build the sail to catch the wind.

Build the ship. Your internal work. Values. Story. Goals.
Recruit the crew. The people in your world.
Hoist the sail. What you do every single day.

Your core values are the keel of your ship. Without them, the first strong wind capsizes you.

Keep a failure resume. Document what didn't work and what you'll do differently. Don't perseverate. Move on.

"It's all good in the end. If it's not good, it's not the end." We're always in the middle of the story.

Tina sends thank-you notes every single day. Five or ten minutes. Three or four sentences. Closes the loop. Builds the relationship.

Don't end the dinner without making the next date. Most people drop the ball. Get it on the calendar before you leave.

The instant you think something positive about someone, tell them. Be specific. Text. Email. Call. The instant.

Tina's champagne moment: her newborn granddaughter at one year old. She just learned to turn over and looks so proud of herself.

Reflection Questions

What's on your failure resume right now that you haven't yet extracted the lesson from? Are you perseverating, or moving on?
Whose thank-you note are you going to send today? Specific, genuine, unprompted.
Where in your life are you waiting for fortune and calling it bad luck? What is the action you've been avoiding because it requires you to put yourself out there?

More Learning

#679: Kat Cole: The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs

#669: Oz "The Mentalist" Pearlman: Overcoming Rejection, Getting the Reps, and Always Follow Up

#663: Priya Parker: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet & Why It Matters

Episode Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:09 Meet Tina Seelig

02:39 Tina's Dad: A Life of Curiosity at 99 and a Half

05:14 Becoming a Professional Noticer

06:54 The Stranger on the Plane Who Became Her Publisher

11:03 Wear Something That Invites a Conversation

14:11 Fortune vs. Luck: The Difference Most People Miss

16:08 The "With Our Luck" Reframe

21:09 Take the Earbuds Off and Get Out the Door

23:21 You Don't Get a Job, You Get the Keys to the Building

27:58 The Sentence That Changed Tina's Life

28:49 The Thank-You Note Read at a Funeral

31:52 The Student Who Made a Bad Decision

34:03 Oliver Greenwald and the List of Ten Ways to Help

37:04 The Sail Metaphor: How to Catch the Winds of Luck

39:41 What to Tell the Cynic Who Says "I'm Unlucky"

43:01 Core Values: The Keel of Your Ship

45:05 Why You Should Keep a Failure Resume

47:15 Send a Thank-You Note Every Single Day

52:06 The Champagne Question: Her Granddaughter at One

53:36 EOPC

693: Tina Seelig - Fortune vs. Luck, The Power of Curiosity, Why Your Words Change Lives, Failure Résumés, Thank You Notes, and Creating Luck Through Relationships, Observation, & Daily Action

2026-06-21 23:00:0055:24

Order my new book - The Price of Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My Guest - Tina Seelig has spent 27 years at Stanford teaching some of the world's most ambitious people how to see and seize opportunities. She's a neuroscientist, the executive director of Knight Hennessy Scholars, and the author of 18 books. Her TED Talk on luck has been viewed over 3.4 million times. Her newest book is called What I Wish I Knew About Luck: A Crash Course on Turning Aspirations into Achievements.

Key Learnings

Tina's dad died at 99 and a half. Three weeks before his first great-grandbaby was born. He was still driving, going to three dinner parties a week, and talking to Tina every day. His curiosity was his superpower. He gave 66 lectures in his retirement community over 20 years, on topics ranging from nuclear weapons to climate change.

Train yourself to be a professional noticer. When Tina's dad walked his grandkids into a new room, he'd give them a minute, then say "Shut your eyes." How many doors? Windows? What color is the carpet?

Assume there's a million dollars in every room. It's up to you to find it. Opportunities are ubiquitous. You just have to look.

Take the headphones off. The most powerful things happen when you engage with strangers. Standing in line. On the plane. Walking through campus.

Tina sat next to a stranger named Mark on a plane. He was a publisher. He said no to her book proposal. She kept the relationship going. Years later, his editor approved the same proposal she had given Mark. Within two weeks, she had a contract.

Wear something that invites conversation. A logo. A backpack from a conference. A college baseball shirt. Give the world a hook to start with you.

Fortune is what happens to you. Luck requires action. Most people confuse the two and miss the chance to claim their agency.

"With my luck, it's gonna rain." Reframe it: "With OUR luck, it's gonna be a beautiful sunny day." The reframe changes what you see.

Luck seldom sails solo. Most luck comes through other people. Cultivating meaningful relationships is the most underrated lucky behavior.

You don't get a job. You get the keys to the building. The visible work isn't what gets you ahead. The invisible work is.

Between stimulus and response is a choice. (Viktor Frankl) Within the constraints of fortune, agency is everything.

"Tina, you think like a scientist." One sentence from a professor changed Tina's life. Leaders, know the weight of your words.

Twenty years later, Tina wrote that professor a thank-you note. Twenty years after that, his granddaughter wrote back. They had read part of Tina's letter at his funeral.

When a student made a bad decision, Tina's first instinct was to punish. She paused. Said, "Help me understand what happened." The whole community learned what empathy and humility look like in leadership.

Unresolved conflict sucks the energy out of your day. Resolve it. You become taller, lighter, more open to lucky things.

Oliver Greenwald sent Tina a list of 10 ways he could help her with her book. Nothing on the list was exactly what she wanted. She hired him anyway, because of the initiative.

Build the sail to catch the wind.

Build the ship. Your internal work. Values. Story. Goals.
Recruit the crew. The people in your world.
Hoist the sail. What you do every single day.

Your core values are the keel of your ship. Without them, the first strong wind capsizes you.

Keep a failure resume. Document what didn't work and what you'll do differently. Don't perseverate. Move on.

"It's all good in the end. If it's not good, it's not the end." We're always in the middle of the story.

Tina sends thank-you notes every single day. Five or ten minutes. Three or four sentences. Closes the loop. Builds the relationship.

Don't end the dinner without making the next date. Most people drop the ball. Get it on the calendar before you leave.

The instant you think something positive about someone, tell them. Be specific. Text. Email. Call. The instant.

Tina's champagne moment: her newborn granddaughter at one year old. She just learned to turn over and looks so proud of herself.

Reflection Questions

What's on your failure resume right now that you haven't yet extracted the lesson from? Are you perseverating, or moving on?
Whose thank-you note are you going to send today? Specific, genuine, unprompted.
Where in your life are you waiting for fortune and calling it bad luck? What is the action you've been avoiding because it requires you to put yourself out there?

More Learning

#679: Kat Cole: The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs

#669: Oz "The Mentalist" Pearlman: Overcoming Rejection, Getting the Reps, and Always Follow Up

#663: Priya Parker: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet & Why It Matters

Episode Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:09 Meet Tina Seelig

02:39 Tina's Dad: A Life of Curiosity at 99 and a Half

05:14 Becoming a Professional Noticer

06:54 The Stranger on the Plane Who Became Her Publisher

11:03 Wear Something That Invites a Conversation

14:11 Fortune vs. Luck: The Difference Most People Miss

16:08 The "With Our Luck" Reframe

21:09 Take the Earbuds Off and Get Out the Door

23:21 You Don't Get a Job, You Get the Keys to the Building

27:58 The Sentence That Changed Tina's Life

28:49 The Thank-You Note Read at a Funeral

31:52 The Student Who Made a Bad Decision

34:03 Oliver Greenwald and the List of Ten Ways to Help

37:04 The Sail Metaphor: How to Catch the Winds of Luck

39:41 What to Tell the Cynic Who Says "I'm Unlucky"

43:01 Core Values: The Keel of Your Ship

45:05 Why You Should Keep a Failure Resume

47:15 Send a Thank-You Note Every Single Day

52:06 The Champagne Question: Her Granddaughter at One

53:36 EOPC

692: Scott Harrison - Make a Bigger Ask, Design Everything with Excellence, Raising a Billion Dollars, Nobody Wants to Be Mid, and Why the Best Leaders Are Great Sales Professionals

2026-06-14 23:00:0056:31

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming."

My Guest: Scott Harrison is the founder and CEO of charity: water, a non-profit that has raised over a billion dollars and funded tens of thousands of water projects to bring safe drinking water to millions. He previously spent a decade as a New York City nightclub promoter before a dramatic career shift led him into humanitarian work.

Key Learnings

Scott started a charity: water with $20 from a birthday party. Then $15,000... Twenty years later: over a billion dollars raised, 21 million people served. He says it should be 10 to 100 times more.

The cure for water already exists. We're looking for water on Mars while 700 million people drink dirty water on Earth. We solved this hundreds of years ago. We just haven't implemented it.

25% of the money sitting in American donor-advised funds would give every human on Earth clean water. That's parked philanthropic capital. Already tax-benefited. Just waiting.

The goal is always 10X what you're doing. If we raised a million last year, we want ten this year. If we raise $100 million, we should raise a billion. The opportunity is always orders of magnitude larger than the moment.

Show, don't bullet. Scott shows 210 photos in a 45-minute keynote. No PowerPoint. Single images. A story unfolds frame by frame.

Be early to the technology. First charity on Instagram. First to hit a million Twitter followers. First to use VR. The question is always the same: how does this new thing further the mission?

The 100% model: solve for the cynic. Public donations go to one bank account that funds only water projects. Overhead is raised separately from entrepreneurs and business leaders. Then track every donation to a specific village.

Don't be mid. Scott's 11-year-old daughter says nobody wants to be mid. Excellence is a core value. There's a lot of mid out there.

Design everything. The fact cover sheet. The PowerPoint. The website. The package. "We're always dating." If the message comes in an ugly package, you're at a disadvantage before you start.

Treat the donor like a Michelin three-star guest. If a restaurant can think that carefully about a meal, you can think that carefully about a donor who can save a million lives.

The Goldman Sachs partner who changed Scott's paradigm. Before making an eight-figure ask, Scott asked a partner: "How does it feel when people ask for a lot more than you expected?" The expected answer was irritated, offended, put off. The actual answer: "I feel flattered that they think I would be that generous."

People are generous. The well is there. You just have to drill deep enough. Scott has spent 20 years asking for too little. That might be his next obsession.

People give to people, not causes. A dynamic leader who transfers their enthusiasm gets the donation. The cause doesn't. Most of the donations Scott and his wife give are to people, not topics they were already passionate about.

Talk 10% of the time. When Scott meets a donor for the first time, he wants to know their whole life story. Their marriage. Their kids. What they wanted to be when they grew up. Be genuinely curious or don't bother.

Hire for integrity, humility, curiosity, and energy... 16,000 applicants for 36 roles last year. Energy matters most. Someone who can get you fired up about pickleball, Patagonia, or a new running shoe is exactly who you want on the executive team.

The dinner test for hiring: Can you imagine having this person at your home for two hours at dinner? And wanting to keep them for another hour?

Get the whole life story. Scott wants the arc from the beginning to the present in an interview. If someone can't tell their own story coherently, they probably don't know themselves yet.

The 11-year-old with the piggy bank. He told his parents he was going to fund a whole village. They told him to set a realistic goal. He went knocking on doors. He came back with $10,000.

Scott's experience lab in Nashville. A 60-minute immersive tour. A 100-degree room with a treadmill where you carry a 40-pound water vessel. Microscopes that show you parasites. A VR film that ends in celebration. The "give shop," not the gift shop. 53% of visitors donate. 10,000 visitors. $3.9 million raised in year one.

Scott's champagne moment: a single billionaire who picks water. The water sector doesn't have one. Republicans and Democrats agree on it. Atheists and people of faith agree on it. Everyone has to drink.

Reflection Questions

What is the 10X version of your current goal? Where are you asking for too little because the smaller ask felt safer?
Who in your work or life is the Michelin three-star guest, the customer, donor, or partner who deserves your most thoughtful experience design?
When was the last time you went 10% talking, 90% genuinely curious about someone else's story?

More Learning:

#290: Scott Harrison – Redemption, Compassion, & The Transformative Power Within Us

#680: Scott Galloway - Don't Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Talent

#682: Will Guidara - Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Audio Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:18 Welcome Back, Scott Harrison

02:56 From a $20 Bill to Over $1 Billion Raised

04:59 Why the Goal Should Always Be 10X (or 100X)

07:54 Storytelling: How to Get People to Care About a Problem They Don't Feel

10:30 Being Early to Instagram, Twitter, and VR

16:10 Radical Transparency: The Bank Account That Built Trust

19:51 The Beauty of a Healthy Obsession

21:22 Drilling Deep for the Artesian Wells of Generosity

25:04 What It Feels Like in the Room When Generosity Breaks Through

27:01 "Nobody Wants to Be Mid."

30:56 Design Everything: We're Always Dating

32:13 Treat Your Donor Like a Michelin Three-Star Guest

35:39 Selling With Integrity: Talk 10%, Listen 90%

39:15 16,000 Applicants for 36 Jobs: What Scott Looks For

43:12 The Power of Vulnerability in Hiring

45:39 Inside the Nashville Experience Lab

50:34 The Champagne Question: A Billion-Dollar Vision

52:10 The 11-Year-Old Who Raised $10,000 Door-to-Door

54:25 EOPC

692: Scott Harrison - Make a Bigger Ask, Design Everything with Excellence, Raising a Billion Dollars, Nobody Wants to Be Mid, and Why the Best Leaders Are Great Sales Professionals

2026-06-14 23:00:0056:31

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming."

My Guest: Scott Harrison is the founder and CEO of charity: water, a non-profit that has raised over a billion dollars and funded tens of thousands of water projects to bring safe drinking water to millions. He previously spent a decade as a New York City nightclub promoter before a dramatic career shift led him into humanitarian work.

Key Learnings

Scott started a charity: water with $20 from a birthday party. Then $15,000... Twenty years later: over a billion dollars raised, 21 million people served. He says it should be 10 to 100 times more.

The cure for water already exists. We're looking for water on Mars while 700 million people drink dirty water on Earth. We solved this hundreds of years ago. We just haven't implemented it.

25% of the money sitting in American donor-advised funds would give every human on Earth clean water. That's parked philanthropic capital. Already tax-benefited. Just waiting.

The goal is always 10X what you're doing. If we raised a million last year, we want ten this year. If we raise $100 million, we should raise a billion. The opportunity is always orders of magnitude larger than the moment.

Show, don't bullet. Scott shows 210 photos in a 45-minute keynote. No PowerPoint. Single images. A story unfolds frame by frame.

Be early to the technology. First charity on Instagram. First to hit a million Twitter followers. First to use VR. The question is always the same: how does this new thing further the mission?

The 100% model: solve for the cynic. Public donations go to one bank account that funds only water projects. Overhead is raised separately from entrepreneurs and business leaders. Then track every donation to a specific village.

Don't be mid. Scott's 11-year-old daughter says nobody wants to be mid. Excellence is a core value. There's a lot of mid out there.

Design everything. The fact cover sheet. The PowerPoint. The website. The package. "We're always dating." If the message comes in an ugly package, you're at a disadvantage before you start.

Treat the donor like a Michelin three-star guest. If a restaurant can think that carefully about a meal, you can think that carefully about a donor who can save a million lives.

The Goldman Sachs partner who changed Scott's paradigm. Before making an eight-figure ask, Scott asked a partner: "How does it feel when people ask for a lot more than you expected?" The expected answer was irritated, offended, put off. The actual answer: "I feel flattered that they think I would be that generous."

People are generous. The well is there. You just have to drill deep enough. Scott has spent 20 years asking for too little. That might be his next obsession.

People give to people, not causes. A dynamic leader who transfers their enthusiasm gets the donation. The cause doesn't. Most of the donations Scott and his wife give are to people, not topics they were already passionate about.

Talk 10% of the time. When Scott meets a donor for the first time, he wants to know their whole life story. Their marriage. Their kids. What they wanted to be when they grew up. Be genuinely curious or don't bother.

Hire for integrity, humility, curiosity, and energy... 16,000 applicants for 36 roles last year. Energy matters most. Someone who can get you fired up about pickleball, Patagonia, or a new running shoe is exactly who you want on the executive team.

The dinner test for hiring: Can you imagine having this person at your home for two hours at dinner? And wanting to keep them for another hour?

Get the whole life story. Scott wants the arc from the beginning to the present in an interview. If someone can't tell their own story coherently, they probably don't know themselves yet.

The 11-year-old with the piggy bank. He told his parents he was going to fund a whole village. They told him to set a realistic goal. He went knocking on doors. He came back with $10,000.

Scott's experience lab in Nashville. A 60-minute immersive tour. A 100-degree room with a treadmill where you carry a 40-pound water vessel. Microscopes that show you parasites. A VR film that ends in celebration. The "give shop," not the gift shop. 53% of visitors donate. 10,000 visitors. $3.9 million raised in year one.

Scott's champagne moment: a single billionaire who picks water. The water sector doesn't have one. Republicans and Democrats agree on it. Atheists and people of faith agree on it. Everyone has to drink.

Reflection Questions

What is the 10X version of your current goal? Where are you asking for too little because the smaller ask felt safer?
Who in your work or life is the Michelin three-star guest, the customer, donor, or partner who deserves your most thoughtful experience design?
When was the last time you went 10% talking, 90% genuinely curious about someone else's story?

More Learning:

#290: Scott Harrison – Redemption, Compassion, & The Transformative Power Within Us

#680: Scott Galloway - Don't Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Talent

#682: Will Guidara - Adversity is a Terrible Thing to WasteAudio Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:18 Welcome Back, Scott Harrison

02:56 From a $20 Bill to Over $1 Billion Raised

04:59 Why the Goal Should Always Be 10X (or 100X)

07:54 Storytelling: How to Get People to Care About a Problem They Don't Feel

10:30 Being Early to Instagram, Twitter, and VR

16:10 Radical Transparency: The Bank Account That Built Trust

19:51 The Beauty of a Healthy Obsession

21:22 Drilling Deep for the Artesian Wells of Generosity

25:04 What It Feels Like in the Room When Generosity Breaks Through

27:01 "Nobody Wants to Be Mid."

30:56 Design Everything: We're Always Dating

32:13 Treat Your Donor Like a Michelin Three-Star Guest

35:39 Selling With Integrity: Talk 10%, Listen 90%

39:15 16,000 Applicants for 36 Jobs: What Scott Looks For

43:12 The Power of Vulnerability in Hiring

45:39 Inside the Nashville Experience Lab

50:34 The Champagne Question: A Billion-Dollar Vision

52:10 The 11-Year-Old Who Raised $10,000 Door-to-Door

54:25 EOPC

691: Dr. Ron Friedman - The Science of High-Performing Teams, Chevy Chase, Toxic Teammates, The Succession Writers' Room, Deleting Recurring Meetings, Why Side Hustles Are Good, and Why Only 8% of Teams Make the Cut

2026-06-07 23:00:0056:59

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Ron Friedman is a psychologist and researcher who has spent his career studying what separates great teams… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

New Book - The Price of Becoming

Ron Friedman is a psychologist and researcher who has spent his career studying what separates great teams from average ones. His research, which has surveyed thousands of professionals across dozens of industries, became the second most-read article in Harvard Business Review history. He is the author of three books, including his latest, Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams.

Key Learnings

Ron's dad threw himself into impossible challenges and taught his family the dignity of hard work. A physician in Israel, he didn't want his son in the army, so he picked up the phone and started dialing hospitals in New York City until he landed a job at NYU. He pulled his family out of a country he knew, didn't speak the language fluently, and succeeded anyway. Ron dedicated Super Teams to him. He recently passed away.

Only 8% of teams qualify as super teams. Ron's team polled thousands of workers and asked two questions: How effective is your team at meeting its goals? And how does it compare to others in your industry? Super teams hit the perfect score.

The only office amenity that statistically drives performance: quiet space for focused work. Not the gym. Not the ping-pong table. Most offices are an attentional war zone. That's why people prefer working from home.

How a team works matters more than where a team works. Remote, hybrid, in-office. The data shows none of those predict performance. Intention does.

Don't make meetings the default. Make them the last resort. Super teams are 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings and 54% less likely to schedule recurring ones.

Recurring meetings are insidious. Once they're on the calendar, removing one feels like breaking up with someone. So they just live there forever.

Ron's rule: no decision, no meeting. Have a question? Pick up the phone. Have an update? Record a video or send an email. Don't pull people away from their work.

The average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings. And another 11 hours to messages. That's three-quarters of the week gone before they've achieved a single task.

Meeting-free days cut stress in half and increase productivity by 71%. People go home feeling satisfied because they were able to actually do the work.

Three pillars of super teams:

They get more done by managing time, energy, and attention.
They don't just collaborate. They actively make each other better.
They're never satisfied. They're constantly building skills and improving.

Recovery isn't passive. Scrolling Instagram or binging Netflix helps you wind down, but it doesn't restore your energy. Mastery experiences do. Learn a new song. Try pickleball. Cook a new recipe.

When leaders recover, their teams perform better. A well-rested leader shows up in a positive mood. That mood lifts the team. Investing in your own recovery isn't selfish. It moves your team forward.

The best leaders support their people's side hustles. Not because they assign them, but because their people feel they have permission to grow outside the job. That's a signal you care about the person, not just the output.

Three factors predict trust in a leader: competence, caring, consistency. Any one of them breaks down and trust breaks down.

"How was your weekend?" is lame. Be specific. Ask about the kid's soccer game by name. Specificity proves you actually thought about the person.

People need to be appreciated for who they are, not just what they do. That's how they feel cared for.

The top three characteristics of toxic teammates: unreliable, bad attitude, and arrogant.

The top three characteristics of the best teammates: knowledgeable, dependable, and a good communicator. Notice what's not on the list. Funny. Good listener. Caring. Those are nice-to-haves. They don't move the team forward.

The best teammates make excellence the norm. On super teams, 94% say their teammates motivate them to do their best work.

On super teams, 82% say they feel worse about letting down their teammates than their manager. When people know their teammates are counting on them, they work harder.

Constant togetherness is not collaboration. The Succession writers' room cycled between solo writing and group critique. Real collaboration protects focus time first.

Brainwriting beats brainstorming. Have people generate ideas alone first, then bring them to the room. You get higher quantity and higher quality ideas.

97% of feedback fails to lift performance. Over a third actively makes it worse. What does the 3% do differently? Focus on one thing at a time. Future-oriented, not past-oriented.

Top performers want to know what they did wrong. Confidence allows them to absorb criticism and correct it. Most people aren't there. Gauge the feedback to the person.

Great football coaches give feedback differently to the quarterback than the lineman. Know your people. Adjust your approach.

Comedians get better at the Comedy Cellar because of what happens next door. Seinfeld, Chappelle, and Schumer gather at the Lemon Tree Cafe after sets to critique each other. Ryan calls it the "see it, say it" mentality, an ethos his teammate Geron Stokes brings every day. Great compliment, say it. Falling short of the standard, say it. The best teammates care enough to tell you how you can improve.

Ron's champagne moment a year from now: his 19-year-old daughter landing a finance internship she earned on her own.

Reflection Questions

What's your recurring meeting that should be a breakup conversation?
When was the last time you asked a teammate something specific about their life, by name? Or are you defaulting to "how was your weekend?"
What's your version of the Comedy Cellar's Lemon Tree Cafe? Who do you go to for the candid feedback that makes you better?

More Learning

#422: Ron Friedman - How to Reverse Engineer Excellence

#535: Geron Stokes - Maximizing People

#647: Tim Ferriss - Effectiveness Over Efficiency

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:09 Meet Ron Friedman

02:41 Ron's Dad and the Dignity of Hard Work

03:47 Two Workplaces, Two Cultures, One Lesson

06:01 The Super Teams Methodology

07:13 The Only Office Amenity That Drives Performance

08:50 How a Team Works Matters More Than Where

13:06 The Three Pillars of Super Teams

16:11 Meeting Guidelines That Actually Work

18:42 The Power of Meeting-Free Days

22:23 Why Guidelines Beat Rules

23:40 Side Hustles, Recovery, and the Goldman Sachs CEO Who DJs

28:53 The Three Factors of Trust: Competence, Caring, Consistency

30:13 Why "How Was Your Weekend?" Is Lame

31:02 Get Specific or Don't Bother

31:22 The Manager Who Asked About Miranda by Name

32:08 The Spreadsheet for Remembering People

33:09 What Makes a Toxic Teammate

35:05 Chevy Chase and the Cost of Burning Bridges

35:52 The Best vs. Worst Teammate Traits

37:08 How Tom Brady Lifted an Entire Organization

38:06 Why Super Teams Hold Each Other Accountable

39:39 Inside the Succession Writers' Room

40:46 Brainwriting Beats Brainstorming

41:41 The Candid Feedback Culture That Drives Improvement

43:06 Painting in Red: The Power

691: Dr. Ron Friedman - The Science of High-Performing Teams, Chevy Chase, Toxic Teammates, The Succession Writers' Room, Deleting Recurring Meetings, Why Side Hustles Are Good, and Why Only 8% of Teams Make the Cut

2026-06-07 23:00:0056:59

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

New Book - The Price of Becoming

Key Learnings

Ron's dad threw himself into impossible challenges and taught his family the dignity of hard work. A physician in Israel, he didn't want his son in the army, so he picked up the phone and started dialing hospitals in New York City until he landed a job at NYU. He pulled his family out of a country he knew, didn't speak the language fluently, and succeeded anyway. Ron dedicated Super Teams to him. He recently passed away.

Only 8% of teams qualify as super teams. Ron's team polled thousands of workers and asked two questions: How effective is your team at meeting its goals? And how does it compare to others in your industry? Super teams hit the perfect score.

The only office amenity that statistically drives performance: quiet space for focused work. Not the gym. Not the ping-pong table. Most offices are an attentional war zone. That's why people prefer working from home.

How a team works matters more than where a team works. Remote, hybrid, in-office. The data shows none of those predict performance. Intention does.

Don't make meetings the default. Make them the last resort. Super teams are 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings and 54% less likely to schedule recurring ones.

Recurring meetings are insidious. Once they're on the calendar, removing one feels like breaking up with someone. So they just live there forever.

Ron's rule: no decision, no meeting. Have a question? Pick up the phone. Have an update? Record a video or send an email. Don't pull people away from their work.

The average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings. And another 11 hours to messages. That's three-quarters of the week gone before they've achieved a single task.

Meeting-free days cut stress in half and increase productivity by 71%. People go home feeling satisfied because they were able to actually do the work.

Three pillars of super teams:

They get more done by managing time, energy, and attention.
They don't just collaborate. They actively make each other better.
They're never satisfied. They're constantly building skills and improving.

Recovery isn't passive. Scrolling Instagram or binging Netflix helps you wind down, but it doesn't restore your energy. Mastery experiences do. Learn a new song. Try pickleball. Cook a new recipe.

When leaders recover, their teams perform better. A well-rested leader shows up in a positive mood. That mood lifts the team. Investing in your own recovery isn't selfish. It moves your team forward.

The best leaders support their people's side hustles. Not because they assign them, but because their people feel they have permission to grow outside the job. That's a signal you care about the person, not just the output.

Three factors predict trust in a leader: competence, caring, consistency. Any one of them breaks down and trust breaks down.

"How was your weekend?" is lame. Be specific. Ask about the kid's soccer game by name. Specificity proves you actually thought about the person.

People need to be appreciated for who they are, not just what they do. That's how they feel cared for.

The top three characteristics of toxic teammates: unreliable, bad attitude, and arrogant.

The top three characteristics of the best teammates: knowledgeable, dependable, and a good communicator. Notice what's not on the list. Funny. Good listener. Caring. Those are nice-to-haves. They don't move the team forward.

The best teammates make excellence the norm. On super teams, 94% say their teammates motivate them to do their best work.

On super teams, 82% say they feel worse about letting down their teammates than their manager. When people know their teammates are counting on them, they work harder.

Constant togetherness is not collaboration. The Succession writers' room cycled between solo writing and group critique. Real collaboration protects focus time first.

Brainwriting beats brainstorming. Have people generate ideas alone first, then bring them to the room. You get higher quantity and higher quality ideas.

97% of feedback fails to lift performance. Over a third actively makes it worse. What does the 3% do differently? Focus on one thing at a time. Future-oriented, not past-oriented.

Top performers want to know what they did wrong. Confidence allows them to absorb criticism and correct it. Most people aren't there. Gauge the feedback to the person.

Great football coaches give feedback differently to the quarterback than the lineman. Know your people. Adjust your approach.

Comedians get better at the Comedy Cellar because of what happens next door. Seinfeld, Chappelle, and Schumer gather at the Lemon Tree Cafe after sets to critique each other. Ryan calls it the "see it, say it" mentality, an ethos his teammate Geron Stokes brings every day. Great compliment, say it. Falling short of the standard, say it. The best teammates care enough to tell you how you can improve.

Ron's champagne moment a year from now: his 19-year-old daughter landing a finance internship she earned on her own.

Reflection Questions

What's your recurring meeting that should be a breakup conversation?
When was the last time you asked a teammate something specific about their life, by name? Or are you defaulting to "how was your weekend?"
What's your version of the Comedy Cellar's Lemon Tree Cafe? Who do you go to for the candid feedback that makes you better?

More Learning

#422: Ron Friedman - How to Reverse Engineer Excellence

#535: Geron Stokes - Maximizing People

#647: Tim Ferriss - Effectiveness Over Efficiency

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:09 Meet Ron Friedman

02:41 Ron's Dad and the Dignity of Hard Work

03:47 Two Workplaces, Two Cultures, One Lesson

06:01 The Super Teams Methodology

07:13 The Only Office Amenity That Drives Performance

08:50 How a Team Works Matters More Than Where

13:06 The Three Pillars of Super Teams

16:11 Meeting Guidelines That Actually Work

18:42 The Power of Meeting-Free Days

22:23 Why Guidelines Beat Rules

23:40 Side Hustles, Recovery, and the Goldman Sachs CEO Who DJs

28:53 The Three Factors of Trust: Competence, Caring, Consistency

30:13 Why "How Was Your Weekend?" Is Lame

31:02 Get Specific or Don't Bother

31:22 The Manager Who Asked About Miranda by Name

32:08 The Spreadsheet for Remembering People

33:09 What Makes a Toxic Teammate

35:05 Chevy Chase and the Cost of Burning Bridges

35:52 The Best vs. Worst Teammate Traits

37:08 How Tom Brady Lifted an Entire Organization

38:06 Why Super Teams Hold Each Other Accountable

39:39 Inside the Succession Writers' Room

40:46 Brainwriting Beats Brainstorming

41:41 The Candid Feedback Culture That Drives Improvement

43:06 Painting in Red: The Power

690: Austin Kleon - Why Activated Leaders Win, The Analog Desk, Don't Call it Art, Stay Light, Professional Noticers, Lead with Curiosity, and How To Steal Like an Artist

2026-05-31 23:00:001:00:57

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book -- The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Austin Kleon is the NYT bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. He's a… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

New Book -- The Price of Becoming

Austin Kleon is the NYT bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. He's a writer who draws, a former librarian, and one of the most original thinkers on creativity working today. His new book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again.

Key Learnings

Stay light. Bill Murray told ballplayers that if you stay light, loose, and relaxed, you can play at the highest level. Same with acting, writing, anything. Austin keeps a photo of Bill in his studio as a reminder.

Play is the work. A lot of Austin's best work requires a sense of play. It's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Go to the analog desk first. Austin has a digital desk and an analog desk. Nothing electronic is allowed at the analog desk. He starts there with nothing and sees what comes.

Most people never give themselves the time, space, and materials to make something of what's swirling inside them.

People want to watch someone who is activated. "People will pay every night to show up and see somebody believe in themselves." (Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth)

The market for something to believe in is infinite. (Hugh MacLeod) The world is full of people just doing their thing. They're hungry to see someone on fire for something.

The writer's job: take what everyone is thinking and put it into words. "You gave me the words" is the highest compliment a reader can give.

Effortless is earned. People say the Friday newsletter looks easy. Austin's reply: Do it every Friday for 13 years, then call me.

A place to put things makes you notice more. Thoreau took morning walks knowing he'd write later, so he paid closer attention. Carry a camera, and you start seeing shots everywhere.

Live for the living, not for the writing. There's a tension between living your life and documenting it. Don't lose yourself to the feed.

Your attention is the most valuable thing you have. Everyone wants to take it. The real challenge of modern life is making sure you're the one who decides where it goes.

The best teachers are perpetual students. You realize what you know and don't know only when you try to teach it.

Toggle between knowing and not knowing. The moment you think you know what you're doing, the work gets stale. You start running on routine instead of need.

To be an amateur is to be a lover. The French root means "lover of." An amateur does it out of love, not material reward.

Every great CEO should be put in a room with a four-year-old. They'd both learn something. Kids knock the pompous certainty right out of you.

"I don't know. How do you think we should figure it out?" Austin's kids taught him it's less important to know everything than to know how to find out.

The leader isn't the one who speaks while everyone listens. The leader listens, asks questions, stays curious, and wonders how everyone is doing.

Look for who's having fun, not who's successful. Fun is underrated. Serious people have a serious time. Do it with lightness and it's contagious.

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play." (Lawrence Pearsall Jacks) He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he's doing and leaves others to decide whether he's working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

Ask "What does the universe want to show me today?" A useful fiction. Tell yourself the world is trying to send you messages and suddenly you see a hundred of them.

Have the toy before you know what you'll do with it. Austin buys typewriters, then asks what to make. Get the bicycle first. In six months you'll know what kind you actually want.

Steal an idea someone only did once and turn it into a whole thing. Austin saw a single typewriter interview, made it a series, and has done more than 20.

Put the human hand in the work. Austin decided 20 years ago to make it obvious a human made his stuff. In the age of AI, it stands out more than ever. People want the imperfection.

Writing is thinking. People think you gather your ideas then write them down. The act of writing is the act of figuring out what you actually think. That's the hard part.

Differentiate yourself by reading a book outside your field. Swim a little further out than everyone else and you find new water.

Focus on what you can control. A writer controls only what's between the covers. Did you do a good job? Were you clear? Were you helpful? The rest isn't up to you.

Austin's champagne moment a year from now: his kids flourishing. The older he gets, the less the books mean and the more his family does.

Reflection Questions

Where is your analog desk? Do you have a space with no screens where you go to make something of what's swirling inside you?
Are you activated? When people watch you work, do they see someone on fire for it, or someone just going through the motions?
What's one idea from outside your field you could steal this week? Where could you swim a little further out and find new water?

More Learning

#676: Jesse Cole - Built for the Fans, Obsession & Excellence

#687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life

#241: Austin Kleon - How to Steal Like an Artist

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:33 Meet Austin Kleon

02:53 The Bill Murray Photo: Stay Light

05:42 The Analog Desk: Where the Real Work Starts

08:51 People Want to Watch Someone Activated

15:22 Why "It Looks Easy" Is the Whole Point

16:28 The Newsletter as a Forcing Function to Notice

20:46 Who Owns Your Attention?

24:39 How Austin's Kids Became His Teachers

29:06 Why the Best Creators Stay Amateurs

31:33 Curiosity Is the Real Leadership Skill

34:09 What Does the Universe Want to Show Me Today?

35:02 Look for Who's Having Fun, Not Who's Successful

38:30 Do You Love to Write, or Love to Have Written?

41:00 The Typewriter Interviews: Stealing an Idea Done Once

47:18 The Interplay of Analog and Digital

49:02 AI and Why the Human Hand Wins

51:23 The Champagne Question: Family Flourishing

55:47 Walk-Ins Welcome

58:06 EOPC

690: Austin Kleon - Why Activated Leaders Win, The Analog Desk, Don't Call it Art, Stay Light, Professional Noticers, Lead with Curiosity, and How To Steal Like an Artist

2026-05-31 23:00:001:00:57

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

New Book -- The Price of Becoming

Key Learnings

Stay light. Bill Murray told ballplayers that if you stay light, loose, and relaxed, you can play at the highest level. Same with acting, writing, anything. Austin keeps a photo of Bill in his studio as a reminder.

Play is the work. A lot of Austin's best work requires a sense of play. It's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Go to the analog desk first. Austin has a digital desk and an analog desk. Nothing electronic is allowed at the analog desk. He starts there with nothing and sees what comes.

Most people never give themselves the time, space, and materials to make something of what's swirling inside them.

People want to watch someone who is activated. "People will pay every night to show up and see somebody believe in themselves." (Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth)

The market for something to believe in is infinite. (Hugh MacLeod) The world is full of people just doing their thing. They're hungry to see someone on fire for something.

The writer's job: take what everyone is thinking and put it into words. "You gave me the words" is the highest compliment a reader can give.

Effortless is earned. People say the Friday newsletter looks easy. Austin's reply: Do it every Friday for 13 years, then call me.

A place to put things makes you notice more. Thoreau took morning walks knowing he'd write later, so he paid closer attention. Carry a camera, and you start seeing shots everywhere.

Live for the living, not for the writing. There's a tension between living your life and documenting it. Don't lose yourself to the feed.

Your attention is the most valuable thing you have. Everyone wants to take it. The real challenge of modern life is making sure you're the one who decides where it goes.

The best teachers are perpetual students. You realize what you know and don't know only when you try to teach it.

Toggle between knowing and not knowing. The moment you think you know what you're doing, the work gets stale. You start running on routine instead of need.

To be an amateur is to be a lover. The French root means "lover of." An amateur does it out of love, not material reward.

Every great CEO should be put in a room with a four-year-old. They'd both learn something. Kids knock the pompous certainty right out of you.

"I don't know. How do you think we should figure it out?" Austin's kids taught him it's less important to know everything than to know how to find out.

The leader isn't the one who speaks while everyone listens. The leader listens, asks questions, stays curious, and wonders how everyone is doing.

Look for who's having fun, not who's successful. Fun is underrated. Serious people have a serious time. Do it with lightness and it's contagious.

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play." (Lawrence Pearsall Jacks) He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he's doing and leaves others to decide whether he's working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

Ask "What does the universe want to show me today?" A useful fiction. Tell yourself the world is trying to send you messages and suddenly you see a hundred of them.

Have the toy before you know what you'll do with it. Austin buys typewriters, then asks what to make. Get the bicycle first. In six months you'll know what kind you actually want.

Steal an idea someone only did once and turn it into a whole thing. Austin saw a single typewriter interview, made it a series, and has done more than 20.

Put the human hand in the work. Austin decided 20 years ago to make it obvious a human made his stuff. In the age of AI, it stands out more than ever. People want the imperfection.

Writing is thinking. People think you gather your ideas then write them down. The act of writing is the act of figuring out what you actually think. That's the hard part.

Differentiate yourself by reading a book outside your field. Swim a little further out than everyone else and you find new water.

Focus on what you can control. A writer controls only what's between the covers. Did you do a good job? Were you clear? Were you helpful? The rest isn't up to you.

Austin's champagne moment a year from now: his kids flourishing. The older he gets, the less the books mean and the more his family does.

Reflection Questions

Where is your analog desk? Do you have a space with no screens where you go to make something of what's swirling inside you?
Are you activated? When people watch you work, do they see someone on fire for it, or someone just going through the motions?
What's one idea from outside your field you could steal this week? Where could you swim a little further out and find new water?

More Learning

#676: Jesse Cole - Built for the Fans, Obsession & Excellence#687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life#241: Austin Kleon - How to Steal Like an Artist

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:33 Meet Austin Kleon

02:53 The Bill Murray Photo: Stay Light

05:42 The Analog Desk: Where the Real Work Starts

08:51 People Want to Watch Someone Activated

15:22 Why "It Looks Easy" Is the Whole Point

16:28 The Newsletter as a Forcing Function to Notice

20:46 Who Owns Your Attention?

24:39 How Austin's Kids Became His Teachers

29:06 Why the Best Creators Stay Amateurs

31:33 Curiosity Is the Real Leadership Skill

34:09 What Does the Universe Want to Show Me Today?

35:02 Look for Who's Having Fun, Not Who's Successful

38:30 Do You Love to Write, or Love to Have Written?

41:00 The Typewriter Interviews: Stealing an Idea Done Once

47:18 The Interplay of Analog and Digital

49:02 AI and Why the Human Hand Wins

51:23 The Champagne Question: Family Flourishing

55:47 Walk-Ins Welcome

58:06 EOPC

689: Eric Ries - The Costco Hot Dog, Why Good Companies Go Bad, Financial Gravity, Building Incorruptible Organizations, and The Lean Startup's Unfinished Business

2026-05-24 23:00:0057:36

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Read my NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, one of the most influential business books of the past 25 years, and the… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Read my NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, one of the most influential business books of the past 25 years, and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the first new U.S. exchange to both list and trade multiple stocks since NASDAQ launched 50 years ago. His new book is Incorruptible.

Key Learnings

The more successful a company becomes, the more valuable it is as a target. Companies are worth stealing and taking over. Most founders are naive about this and don't understand what's coming for them. They've been following the so-called best practices about how companies should be built, structured, and governed. Most of those best practices are value-destroying.

Sol Price was a lawyer before he became an entrepreneur. He believed a lawyer had a fiduciary duty to put the client's interests before his own. So when he became a retailer, he asked: "Who's my client?" The customer. He treated the customer as the person he would rather die than betray. When competitors sold a product for less, he'd put up signs in his own store: "Don't buy this from me. You can get it cheaper somewhere else." He capped his margins at 14 percent. He paid above-market wages.

It is so much easier to destroy than to create. One day, Sol came into work and couldn't get into his office because the locks had been changed. Investors had pushed him out and forced Fedmart to practice retail best practices. Within seven years, they bankrupted the company. We've built an economy that rewards people for cost-cutting without holding them accountable for the consequences to trustworthiness, brand, or culture.

The origin story of Costco: Sol took two weeks off, then leased the office upstairs from Fedmart and started Price Club. One of the young guys who left with him, Jim Sinegal, had worked his way up from stock boy. Jim eventually started his own company using the Sol ethos. A few years later, their companies merged to form what we now call Costco.

Wall Street routinely calls Costco the exception to every rule. Wall Street analysts say things like: "At Costco, they take money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invest it in the customer experience." As if that's a criticism. Costco endures because it's protected by a governance fortress. A series of worst practices that resist outside pressure structurally.

The $1.50 hot dog has been the same price since 1986. A McDonald's Big Mac was $1.60 in 1986. Today that same Big Mac in California is over $7. Costco sells more hot dogs than every Major League Baseball stadium in America combined. If they raised the combo to $7, it would be a billion dollars of extra net income. They could do it. They choose not to.

"If you raise the price of the effing hot dog, I will kill you. So figure it out." Jim Sinegal said it to his COO in 2008 when costs were rising. Figure it out. Costco vertically integrated the hot dog supply chain. They own hot dog production plants in multiple cities. They worked deals with soda vendors. They did all that extra work for the privilege of not making more money on the hot dog.

Harder is easier. "When you take the hard road, when you make a principled commitment, you get these almost unbelievable values. Because you're generating the most underrated and most valuable asset in all of business: trustworthiness."

"Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life." Jerzy Gregorek, Olympic weightlifter.

"Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder. Nobody wanna lift these heavy ass weights." Ronnie Coleman, eight-time Mr. Olympia. Everyone wants the outcome. Nobody wants to do the actual thing.

Culture and mission can be cultivated, not commanded. Most leaders get this wrong. They say "I'm in charge of my team." But can you command your team to have integrity? Can you command it to have a particular culture? You have to make consistent, responsible choices, just like cultivating health in your body.

Get reps. Eric gave practice talks at a Hobee's restaurant at 7 AM to six people just to get the reps. Caring and trying to do a good job is so unbelievably rare. That alone is a competitive advantage.

Feedback tells you something about the person giving it, not about yourself. If someone reads Eric's manuscript and says, "This book sucks," he hasn't learned anything about the book. He's learned this person doesn't like this kind of book. When he stopped arguing with negative customer reviews and started studying who they came from, he noticed patterns. People 16 and younger loved the product. People 16 and older hated it. He learned who his product was for.

Separate qualitative from quantitative feedback. Qualitative is for hypothesis generation. Quantitative is for hypothesis validation. When test readers told him a chapter wasn't working, that was qualitative. When the platform data showed nobody was getting past that chapter, that was quantitative. You need both to know what to fix.

It is always too early until it's too late. Eric tells the story of a multibillion-dollar founder he warned before his IPO. The founder talked to his bankers, lawyers, and CFO. They told him Eric was a downer. The founder went public anyway with conventional governance. Five months later, his stock dropped 90 percent, and he was ousted. The best time to plant a tree is 40 years ago. The second-best time is today.

Eric's checklist for building an incorruptible company:

Encode your mission into the corporate charter. Most founders have never read their charter. If your mission statement says one thing but your legal charter says another, you're lying. The easiest fix: file a public benefit corp filing (PBC). Two pages. 44 states. Your lawyer can do it tomorrow.
Identify your fiduciary commitments. Who would you rather die than betray? Is it your customers? Your employees? Product quality? You decide. If your answer is nobody, you're a sociopath. The whole book is for the people who actually want to accomplish something.
Align your employees to that mission. Make sure everybody on the team is committed to the same fiduciary priority.
Create a director's oath. Like the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, but for your board. They must pledge to commit to the company's mission. Board betrayal and investor pressure are leading causes of death of companies in the modern world.
Make the directors accountable to somebody. Power without accountability is corrosive to the human spirit. Novo Nordisk is governed by a nonprofit foundation. Patagonia is governed by a perpetual purpose trust. John Lewis Partnership in the UK is governed by an employee ownership trust. IKEA, Vanguard, and REI all have these structures. The data shows these companies are dramatically more stable and higher performing than conventional structures.

You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. People love to blame the system. But you're not just a passenger. You're part of what creates the system. Where you work. What you buy. What you give your attention to. Every one of those choices is fueling somebody's company, somebody's algorithm, somebody's bonus. The richest people in the world spend billions on PR because they know your individual choices matter. Use that power.

Eric's champagne moment a year from now: a grassroots movement around Incorruptible. This book won't get wall-to-wall media coverage. It's antagonistic to people in power. So Eric hopes readers will hand it to their founders, their bosses, their friends. If consumers and employees start demanding, "I want to work in an incorruptible company," that's the toast.

Reflection Questions

What is your equivalent of Costco's hot dog? The one commitment you'd defend even when it's financially painful, even when the easy move would be to abandon it?
Have you ever read your corporate charter, or the foundational document of your team or department? Does what's actually written match what you say you stand for?
Where in your work or life would the harder short-term path build something more durable in the long run? Are you willing to lift the heavy weights?

More Learning

#258: Jesse Itzler: Creating Your Life Resume & Living Outside the Box

#529: James Clear: Setting Up Your Future Self & Becoming an Optimist

#565: Noah Kahan: The Art of Asking For What You Want

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:03 Meet Eric Ries

02:55 Is It Possible to Build an Incorruptible Company?

04:04 Why Culture Alone Won't Save You

05:13 Sol Price, Fedmart, and the Locks That Got Changed

07:56 Why Wall Street Calls Costco the Exception

09:11 The $1.50 Hot Dog Story

13:59 Harder Is Easier: The Principle Behind It All

16:48 Why Governance Is Just Soul Craft

19:50 Building the First New Stock Exchange Since Nasdaq

22:33 Eric's Communication Style: Reps, Not Talent

30:52 The Opportunity Hiding in Broken Markets

31:59 How to Know Which Feedback to Listen To

35:39 Qualitative vs. Quantitative: Why You Need Both

37:23 The Whole Foods Cautionary Tale

40:25 The Founder's Checklist for Building Something Durable

43:44 Encode Your Mission Into the Corporate Charter

47:35 You Are Not Stuck in Traffic. You Are the Traffic.

52:37 The Champagne Question: A Grassroots Movement

55:27 James Clear, Author's Equity, and the Future of Publishing

56:43 EOPC

689: Eric Ries - The Costco Hot Dog, Why Good Companies Go Bad, Financial Gravity, Building Incorruptible Organizations, and The Lean Startup's Unfinished Business

2026-05-24 23:00:0057:36

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Read my NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, one of the most influential business books of the past 25 years, and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the first new U.S. exchange to both list and trade multiple stocks since NASDAQ launched 50 years ago. His new book is Incorruptible.

Key Learnings

The more successful a company becomes, the more valuable it is as a target. Companies are worth stealing and taking over. Most founders are naive about this and don't understand what's coming for them. They've been following the so-called best practices about how companies should be built, structured, and governed. Most of those best practices are value-destroying.

Sol Price was a lawyer before he became an entrepreneur. He believed a lawyer had a fiduciary duty to put the client's interests before his own. So when he became a retailer, he asked: "Who's my client?" The customer. He treated the customer as the person he would rather die than betray. When competitors sold a product for less, he'd put up signs in his own store: "Don't buy this from me. You can get it cheaper somewhere else." He capped his margins at 14 percent. He paid above-market wages.

It is so much easier to destroy than to create. One day, Sol came into work and couldn't get into his office because the locks had been changed. Investors had pushed him out and forced Fedmart to practice retail best practices. Within seven years, they bankrupted the company. We've built an economy that rewards people for cost-cutting without holding them accountable for the consequences to trustworthiness, brand, or culture.

The origin story of Costco: Sol took two weeks off, then leased the office upstairs from Fedmart and started Price Club. One of the young guys who left with him, Jim Sinegal, had worked his way up from stock boy. Jim eventually started his own company using the Sol ethos. A few years later, their companies merged to form what we now call Costco.

Wall Street routinely calls Costco the exception to every rule. Wall Street analysts say things like: "At Costco, they take money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invest it in the customer experience." As if that's a criticism. Costco endures because it's protected by a governance fortress. A series of worst practices that resist outside pressure structurally.

The $1.50 hot dog has been the same price since 1986. A McDonald's Big Mac was $1.60 in 1986. Today that same Big Mac in California is over $7. Costco sells more hot dogs than every Major League Baseball stadium in America combined. If they raised the combo to $7, it would be a billion dollars of extra net income. They could do it. They choose not to.

"If you raise the price of the effing hot dog, I will kill you. So figure it out." Jim Sinegal said it to his COO in 2008 when costs were rising. Figure it out. Costco vertically integrated the hot dog supply chain. They own hot dog production plants in multiple cities. They worked deals with soda vendors. They did all that extra work for the privilege of not making more money on the hot dog.

Harder is easier. "When you take the hard road, when you make a principled commitment, you get these almost unbelievable values. Because you're generating the most underrated and most valuable asset in all of business: trustworthiness."

"Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life." Jerzy Gregorek, Olympic weightlifter.

"Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder. Nobody wanna lift these heavy ass weights." Ronnie Coleman, eight-time Mr. Olympia. Everyone wants the outcome. Nobody wants to do the actual thing.

Culture and mission can be cultivated, not commanded. Most leaders get this wrong. They say "I'm in charge of my team." But can you command your team to have integrity? Can you command it to have a particular culture? You have to make consistent, responsible choices, just like cultivating health in your body.

Get reps. Eric gave practice talks at a Hobee's restaurant at 7 AM to six people just to get the reps. Caring and trying to do a good job is so unbelievably rare. That alone is a competitive advantage.

Feedback tells you something about the person giving it, not about yourself. If someone reads Eric's manuscript and says, "This book sucks," he hasn't learned anything about the book. He's learned this person doesn't like this kind of book. When he stopped arguing with negative customer reviews and started studying who they came from, he noticed patterns. People 16 and younger loved the product. People 16 and older hated it. He learned who his product was for.

Separate qualitative from quantitative feedback. Qualitative is for hypothesis generation. Quantitative is for hypothesis validation. When test readers told him a chapter wasn't working, that was qualitative. When the platform data showed nobody was getting past that chapter, that was quantitative. You need both to know what to fix.

It is always too early until it's too late. Eric tells the story of a multibillion-dollar founder he warned before his IPO. The founder talked to his bankers, lawyers, and CFO. They told him Eric was a downer. The founder went public anyway with conventional governance. Five months later, his stock dropped 90 percent, and he was ousted. The best time to plant a tree is 40 years ago. The second-best time is today.

Eric's checklist for building an incorruptible company:

Encode your mission into the corporate charter. Most founders have never read their charter. If your mission statement says one thing but your legal charter says another, you're lying. The easiest fix: file a public benefit corp filing (PBC). Two pages. 44 states. Your lawyer can do it tomorrow.
Identify your fiduciary commitments. Who would you rather die than betray? Is it your customers? Your employees? Product quality? You decide. If your answer is nobody, you're a sociopath. The whole book is for the people who actually want to accomplish something.
Align your employees to that mission. Make sure everybody on the team is committed to the same fiduciary priority.
Create a director's oath. Like the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, but for your board. They must pledge to commit to the company's mission. Board betrayal and investor pressure are leading causes of death of companies in the modern world.
Make the directors accountable to somebody. Power without accountability is corrosive to the human spirit. Novo Nordisk is governed by a nonprofit foundation. Patagonia is governed by a perpetual purpose trust. John Lewis Partnership in the UK is governed by an employee ownership trust. IKEA, Vanguard, and REI all have these structures. The data shows these companies are dramatically more stable and higher performing than conventional structures.

You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. People love to blame the system. But you're not just a passenger. You're part of what creates the system. Where you work. What you buy. What you give your attention to. Every one of those choices is fueling somebody's company, somebody's algorithm, somebody's bonus. The richest people in the world spend billions on PR because they know your individual choices matter. Use that power.

Eric's champagne moment a year from now: a grassroots movement around Incorruptible. This book won't get wall-to-wall media coverage. It's antagonistic to people in power. So Eric hopes readers will hand it to their founders, their bosses, their friends. If consumers and employees start demanding, "I want to work in an incorruptible company," that's the toast.

Reflection Questions

What is your equivalent of Costco's hot dog? The one commitment you'd defend even when it's financially painful, even when the easy move would be to abandon it?
Have you ever read your corporate charter, or the foundational document of your team or department? Does what's actually written match what you say you stand for?
Where in your work or life would the harder short-term path build something more durable in the long run? Are you willing to lift the heavy weights?

More Learning

#258: Jesse Itzler: Creating Your Life Resume & Living Outside the Box

#529: James Clear: Setting Up Your Future Self & Becoming an Optimist

#565: Noah Kahan: The Art of Asking For What You Want

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now!

01:03 Meet Eric Ries

02:55 Is It Possible to Build an Incorruptible Company?

04:04 Why Culture Alone Won't Save You

05:13 Sol Price, Fedmart, and the Locks That Got Changed

07:56 Why Wall Street Calls Costco the Exception

09:11 The $1.50 Hot Dog Story

13:59 Harder Is Easier: The Principle Behind It All

16:48 Why Governance Is Just Soul Craft

19:50 Building the First New Stock Exchange Since Nasdaq

22:33 Eric's Communication Style: Reps, Not Talent

30:52 The Opportunity Hiding in Broken Markets

31:59 How to Know Which Feedback to Listen To

35:39 Qualitative vs. Quantitative: Why You Need Both

37:23 The Whole Foods Cautionary Tale

40:25 The Founder's Checklist for Building Something Durable

43:44 Encode Your Mission Into the Corporate Charter

47:35 You Are Not Stuck in Traffic. You Are the Traffic.

52:37 The Champagne Question: A Grassroots Movement

55:27 James Clear, Author's Equity, and the Future of Publishing

56:43 EOPC

688: Dr. Henry Cloud - The Difference Between a Dream & a Vision, Why Revenue Is Not a Goal, the 5-Step Model for Achieving Any Goal, and Why the Highest Performers Seek the Most Coaching

2026-05-17 23:00:0059:25

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming for my new book, The Price of Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming for my new book, The Price of Becoming

Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. His titles include Boundaries, Integrity, Necessary Endings, and Trust. For three decades, he has worked with leaders, helping them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. His newest book is Your Desired Future: The Five Essential Steps That Take You Where You Want to Go.

Key Learnings

Henry's five-step model for getting from here to there:

Vision (clear and compelling)
Talent (engaging the right people around you)
Strategy and plan (how you'll win)
Measurement and accountability (how you'll know)
Fix and adapt (course-correcting in real time)

At the age of 16, Henry's daughter asked, "Dad, how do people become singer-songwriters?" Henry went out to the garage and brought in his whiteboard. Lucy rolled her eyes. He gave her the five-step model. A couple years later, she published a song called "Crash and Learn" that got bought by CBS, the CW Network, and featured on Spotify and Apple Music.

We tend to create departments and businesses in our own image. Of the five components, we're going to be good at two, maybe three. But the others still have to happen. That's where most leaders fail.

Only humans can picture a desired future state. Finley is Henry's Doberman. When the FedEx guy comes to the door, she runs to it, and barks every time. Henry has never seen her stop and ask herself: "I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on Thursday." Most leaders are operating like Finley. Working hard. Doing what they've always done. Never stopping to ask if any of it is getting them where they want to be.

You need an observing ego. The worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going.

Tony Blair, while Prime Minister, spent half a day a week sitting by himself next to a pond in reflection. Warren Buffett spends an hour and a half a day at his desk staring out the window.

A revenue number is not a vision. The single worst vision statement Henry ever heard: "We want to be a $50 million company." It provides no clarity of what the company is going to do.

A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it's a metric, not a vision.

Will Guidara created a "dream maker" role at Eleven Madison Park. Their job: listen for clues from guests, then create a personalized, unexpected, memorable experience the guest will never forget and tell everyone about.

Trust Fuels Investment. People invest in leaders who feel like they understand them. You're taking your team into a war. They've got to have deep trust with you. The first thing a leader has to do is develop deep, deep trust and let their team know that they understand the pressure they're under.

"A vision can die without a plan or without people."

Alan Mulally's weekly 7:00 AM Thursday meeting at Ford. Every VP had to give every project a red, yellow, or green status. When Mulally first arrived, the company was hemorrhaging money. Everyone was holding up green. He said: "How can you be holding up green when here's the reality over here? I need some reality in here." When one VP finally held up red, Mulally moved him to sit next to him.

The wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. The right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination.

You get what you create or what you allow. Henry was working with a global CEO whose team had cultural problems. Henry kept asking, "Why is that?" After a few rounds, the CEO finally said, "I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I?" If you are the one actually in charge, you are ridiculously in charge. Either you're creating it, or you're allowing it.

Accountability answers two questions:

Did we do what we said we were going to do? If not, why not? Don't just tell people to "do better." Run a root cause analysis. Maybe they don't have the tools. Maybe you gave them competing goals. Maybe it's a leadership problem.
If we executed perfectly, did we get the result we expected? If yes, pour on the gas. If no, go back up the model and adjust your strategy.

Most leaders measure goals, not activities. Goals are lagging indicators. You can measure them after it's over. It's too late. Measure activities. Did we do this week what we said we were going to do?

Micro drivers matter. Henry worked with a CEO who built multi-billions in valuation from a one-office company who was excellent with micro drivers. It's an atomic compression of the 80/20 rule. He knew the specific activities at each level of the business that actually moved the needle, and he made those objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, and deliberate practice.

Peter Drucker said, "Nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things."

The number one thing the greatest leaders share: character. Not moral or ethical character. Your makeup as a person. How you're glued together. Integrity comes from the word that means wholeness. The great performers are drivers of tasks and relationships.

The highest performers utilize coaching the most. Henry expected the disastrous leaders to be the ones calling. It was the exact opposite. The ones crushing it are the ones who reach out. The struggling ones rarely do.

The greatest leaders reverse the law of entropy: things get worse over time. But entropy only applies to a closed system. Open the system to a new energy source from the outside plus intelligence to organize it, and you can reverse it. That's what coaches, mentors, and advisors do. A leader is a closed system when the only voices they're ever listening to are the ones in their head.

The greatest leaders embrace negative realities. They move toward problems. Not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better.

Reflection Questions

In how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door, working hard at activities without ever stopping to ask if any of it is getting you where you want to go?
Is your current vision a metric, or a compelling picture of a future state that would make people want to sacrifice for it?
Where in your life are you a closed system? Whose voices outside your head could open you up to new energy and intelligence?

More Learning

#229 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

#050 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Integrity is the Wake You Leave Behind

#682 - Will Guidara: Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming – Pre-Order Now!

01:13 Meet Dr. Henry Cloud

02:40 The Leadership GPS: Where Are You Going?

04:54 Step 2: Building the Right Team Around You

06:09 Steps 3-5: Strategy, Measurement, and Adapt

10:45 Why the Best Leaders Carve Out Time to Think

15:50 Why a Revenue Number Is Not a Vision

18:20 Crafting a Vision People Will Sacrifice For

23:12 The HVAC Story, Joe Girard, and the Dream Maker

27:38 Trust: The First Thing Every Leader Must Build

30:04 Alan Mulally's Red-Yellow-Green Meeting at Ford

32:38 How to Run Status Reviews That Actually Work

34:26 Accountability Should Be an Immune System, Not Autoimmune

38:18 Measure Activities, Not Goals

43:10 Micro Drivers: The Atomic 80/20 Rule

45:14 The Voices Outside Your Head: Peers and Accountability

47:47 The #1 Trait of Sustained Excellence: Character

50:39 The Greatest Leaders Reverse Entropy

56:17 EOPC

688: Dr. Henry Cloud - The Difference Between a Dream & a Vision, Why Revenue Is Not a Goal, the 5-Step Model for Achieving Any Goal, and Why the Highest Performers Seek the Most Coaching

2026-05-17 23:00:0059:25

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming for my new book, The Price of Becoming

Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. His titles include Boundaries, Integrity, Necessary Endings, and Trust. For three decades, he has worked with leaders, helping them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. His newest book is Your Desired Future: The Five Essential Steps That Take You Where You Want to Go.

Key Learnings

Henry's five-step model for getting from here to there:

Vision (clear and compelling)
Talent (engaging the right people around you)
Strategy and plan (how you'll win)
Measurement and accountability (how you'll know)
Fix and adapt (course-correcting in real time)

We tend to create departments and businesses in our own image. Of the five components, we're going to be good at two, maybe three. But the others still have to happen. That's where most leaders fail.

Only humans can picture a desired future state. Finley is Henry's Doberman. When the FedEx guy comes to the door, she runs to it, and barks every time. Henry has never seen her stop and ask herself: "I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on Thursday." Most leaders are operating like Finley. Working hard. Doing what they've always done. Never stopping to ask if any of it is getting them where they want to be.

You need an observing ego. The worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going.

Tony Blair, while Prime Minister, spent half a day a week sitting by himself next to a pond in reflection. Warren Buffett spends an hour and a half a day at his desk staring out the window.

A revenue number is not a vision. The single worst vision statement Henry ever heard: "We want to be a $50 million company." It provides no clarity of what the company is going to do.

A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it's a metric, not a vision.

Will Guidara created a "dream maker" role at Eleven Madison Park. Their job: listen for clues from guests, then create a personalized, unexpected, memorable experience the guest will never forget and tell everyone about.

Trust Fuels Investment. People invest in leaders who feel like they understand them. You're taking your team into a war. They've got to have deep trust with you. The first thing a leader has to do is develop deep, deep trust and let their team know that they understand the pressure they're under.

"A vision can die without a plan or without people."

Alan Mulally's weekly 7:00 AM Thursday meeting at Ford. Every VP had to give every project a red, yellow, or green status. When Mulally first arrived, the company was hemorrhaging money. Everyone was holding up green. He said: "How can you be holding up green when here's the reality over here? I need some reality in here." When one VP finally held up red, Mulally moved him to sit next to him.

The wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. The right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination.

You get what you create or what you allow. Henry was working with a global CEO whose team had cultural problems. Henry kept asking, "Why is that?" After a few rounds, the CEO finally said, "I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I?" If you are the one actually in charge, you are ridiculously in charge. Either you're creating it, or you're allowing it.

Accountability answers two questions:

Did we do what we said we were going to do? If not, why not? Don't just tell people to "do better." Run a root cause analysis. Maybe they don't have the tools. Maybe you gave them competing goals. Maybe it's a leadership problem.
If we executed perfectly, did we get the result we expected? If yes, pour on the gas. If no, go back up the model and adjust your strategy.

Most leaders measure goals, not activities. Goals are lagging indicators. You can measure them after it's over. It's too late. Measure activities. Did we do this week what we said we were going to do?

Micro drivers matter. Henry worked with a CEO who built multi-billions in valuation from a one-office company who was excellent with micro drivers. It's an atomic compression of the 80/20 rule. He knew the specific activities at each level of the business that actually moved the needle, and he made those objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, and deliberate practice.

Peter Drucker said, "Nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things."

The number one thing the greatest leaders share: character. Not moral or ethical character. Your makeup as a person. How you're glued together. Integrity comes from the word that means wholeness. The great performers are drivers of tasks and relationships.

The highest performers utilize coaching the most. Henry expected the disastrous leaders to be the ones calling. It was the exact opposite. The ones crushing it are the ones who reach out. The struggling ones rarely do.

The greatest leaders reverse the law of entropy: things get worse over time. But entropy only applies to a closed system. Open the system to a new energy source from the outside plus intelligence to organize it, and you can reverse it. That's what coaches, mentors, and advisors do. A leader is a closed system when the only voices they're ever listening to are the ones in their head.

The greatest leaders embrace negative realities. They move toward problems. Not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better.

Reflection Questions

In how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door, working hard at activities without ever stopping to ask if any of it is getting you where you want to go?
Is your current vision a metric, or a compelling picture of a future state that would make people want to sacrifice for it?
Where in your life are you a closed system? Whose voices outside your head could open you up to new energy and intelligence?

More Learning

#229 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

#050 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Integrity is the Wake You Leave Behind

#682 - Will Guidara: Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Podcast Chapters

00:00 The Price of Becoming – Pre-Order Now!

01:13 Meet Dr. Henry Cloud

02:40 The Leadership GPS: Where Are You Going?

04:54 Step 2: Building the Right Team Around You

06:09 Steps 3-5: Strategy, Measurement, and Adapt

10:45 Why the Best Leaders Carve Out Time to Think

15:50 Why a Revenue Number Is Not a Vision

18:20 Crafting a Vision People Will Sacrifice For

23:12 The HVAC Story, Joe Girard, and the Dream Maker

27:38 Trust: The First Thing Every Leader Must Build

30:04 Alan Mulally's Red-Yellow-Green Meeting at Ford

32:38 How to Run Status Reviews That Actually Work

34:26 Accountability Should Be an Immune System, Not Autoimmune

38:18 Measure Activities, Not Goals

43:10 Micro Drivers: The Atomic 80/20 Rule

45:14 The Voices Outside Your Head: Peers and Accountability

47:47 The #1 Trait of Sustained Excellence: Character

50:39 The Greatest Leaders Reverse Entropy

56:17 EOPC

687: Jim Collins - What To Make of a Life, The 3 Types of Luck, Inflection Points, Cliffs, Encodings, Navigating the Fog, the Art of Getting People To Want To Do What Must Be Done, and Reconnecting with an Old Friend

2026-05-10 23:00:001:44:22

NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming Buy it -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming

Buy it -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Jim Collins is the author of some of the most influential business books ever written — Good to Great, Built to Last, and Great by Choice. His concepts have become part of the leadership vocabulary. Level 5 Leadership. The Flywheel. First Who, Then What. The Hedgehog Concept. He spent more than a decade at Stanford as a professor and has advised CEOs, four-star generals, and heads of state. His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. It is the product of ten years of research and is the most personal thing he has ever written. We flew to Boulder, Colorado, to record this one in person with Jim.

Key Learnings

Jim's grandfather wrote his own death story. Jimmy Collins was a test pilot in the 1930s. He told Jim's grandmother, Dolores, that if he died, she should pull the last chapter from his desk and publish it. He died in a test crash. After the service, she pulled out the chapter. The title was "I'm Dead." The last chapter, written in first person, described the plane coming out of the sky, the screaming wings, the crash. The final words, by his own pen: "I am dead now."

For seven decades, his grandmother never cried. When Jim asked her in her nineties to tell the story of his grandfather, she cried and said, "Thank you for that. I've never cried before." She'd been a single mom in the middle of the Depression. Of all the things Jim feels good about in his life, asking her to tell that story before she died at almost 100 years old is one he's most proud of.

A cliff is an event that alters the trajectory of your life and forces you to reconstruct everything that comes after.

Jim's first big cliff: he lost his father while his father was still alive. Jim's father took the family to San Francisco in the 1960s. They lived a few houses down from Haight Street. When a man was shot dead on their doorstep, Jim's mom moved them to Boulder. They lived in a cold basement with cots and a hot plate. They couldn't afford a Christmas tree, so Jim and his brother rolled a boulder into the basement and called it their Christmas rock.

The Greyhound bus moment. In high school, Jim took a Thanksgiving turkey on a Greyhound bus down to New Mexico, where his father was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor. He had this romantic vision: they'd cook the turkey, share Thanksgiving, bond as father and son. The whole weekend, his father had no interest in him. He spent it trying to convince Jim to convince his grandmother to give him money. On the bus ride home, looking out the window into the fog, Jim realized: there will never, ever be a father there. No male role models. No frameworks. No guidance. "I've got this one life. What do I do with it?"

The inflection point in Jim's life is Joanne. They got engaged four days after their first date. He'd admired her from afar for years but never had the courage to ask her out. Once they were together, Jim began a conscious process: I need to become a person worthy of being married to her. He didn't know exactly what that meant or how to get there. But he knew that was the work. Forty-six years later, it's still a never-ending journey.

What Joanne does brilliantly: she sees what needs attention. Jim is encoded to hear it. Someone once asked Joanne what she thought Jim's greatest strength was. She said: "Jim takes critical feedback better than any person I've ever met." Joanne sees what needs attention. Jim hears it. Then they adapt and adjust. That's the inner flywheel of their marriage.

Circle the wagons together. Guns pointing out, never at each other. When life gets really difficult, whether it's disease or other cliffs. You are always together. Always on the inside of the wagons. Never aimed at each other.

Joanne won the 1985 Hawaii Ironman by 92 seconds. With a hamstring injury that limited her running training to 16 miles a week, she came off the bike with a 10-minute lead. Then mile by mile, the lead shrank. Nine minutes. Eight. Seven. With a few miles left, she stopped in the middle of the lava field, massaging her legs, almost pleading with them to run. She looked up at the sky. Then her gaze fixed somewhere down the road. She started to run.

You're racing for self-respect. Joanne told Jim afterward: in the end, you're racing to know that you couldn't have run a step faster. Only you'll know. If you know you couldn't have run a step faster, that's actually winning.

When Jim writes, he's on the lava fields. When he finishes a book, he wants to know he couldn't have written one sentence better. When you're on the lava fields, this is the moment you want to quit. Don't.

Writing is thinking. When the writing isn't working, the thinking isn't clear. Go back to the data. Find the through-line.

There are three types of luck:

What luck. A cancer diagnosis. A guitar left in an empty house. An event that breaks your way.
Who luck. The people who walk into your life. Joanne. Morten Hansen. Jerry Porras. Bill Lazier.
Zeit luck. When what you're doing intersects with the surrounding zeitgeist. Jimmy Page was in Surrey when the British rock explosion happened.

Luck is an event you didn't cause, with significant consequences, and an element of surprise.

The big winners weren't luckier. They had a higher return on luck. What you do with luck events matters more than the luck itself.

Bill Lazier: the closest thing to a father Jim ever had. Jim ended up in Bill's class at Stanford because the class he was trying to take was full. The random course-sorting mechanism threw him into the first class Bill ever taught. Pure WHO luck. Jim did not cause that.

Discover your encodings. An encoding is a durable capacity of your intrinsic construction that resides within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life.

Jim has done over 300 online courses on every imaginable subject. Constitutional law. Napoleon. World War I. The history of China. He started them to learn how to teach. Then his curiosity took over. That's what an encoding looks like in the wild.

You have a constellation of encodings. Like stars. When your life captures a bright set of those encodings, you're in frame. When it doesn't, you're out of frame. The same person can look amazing in frame and not very amazing out of frame.

The most important finding from this book: don't follow anyone else's advice. Their advice is well-meaning. It may have worked beautifully for them. But it worked for them because it flowed from their encodings. And their encodings are not your encodings.

Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper. Two women who won the Nobel Prize and shaped computer science. McClintock was encoded for solitary work. She didn't even have a phone. She heard about her Nobel Prize on the radio. Hopper was encoded to work through people. She kept a pirate flag in her office and once stole furniture for her team in the middle of the night. Two completely different encodings. What they shared: their lives were in alignment with their encodings.

Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. It's not a trait. It's a choice. Anyone in any organization can lead, depending on their desire to make a difference. Nobody needs to wait for a title.

Ryan's encoding is "the relentless persistence of invitation." Jim observed that Ryan has incredible encodings for what he'd describe as attractive persistence. Not pushy. Not aggressive. But persistent and welcoming. The invitation never goes away.

The way you lead should be different from everyone else. Because you are encoded differently. Trust your encodings, not their playbook.

Roger Sherman saved the U.S. Constitution. Twice. He created the bicameral legislature compromise. He insisted the Bill of Rights be amendments, not rewrites. Yet most people don't know his name. He almost never spoke. He listened in committees and waited for the precise moment to introduce just the right point to turn American history. Quiet. Behind the scenes. Uncharismatic. Unglamorous. Enormously effective. That was his encoding.

You should largely ignore what other successful leaders did. It's marvelous to listen to. It might give you ideas. But everything that worked for them reflected their encodings, not yours. The work isn't to copy their playbook. The work is to discover your encodings and trust them.

The color of Jim's fire changed. When he was younger, his fuel was rage, fury, and a sense of terror with no safety net. He used to worry that if he ever lost it, he'd lose his drive. What replaced it was a different kind of fire: the joy of curiosity, of being lost in giant projects, of marvelous conversations, of sharing what he's learned. His drive is higher than ever. It just feels a lot better now.

The 3x3 reflective practice. After almost any conversation, teaching moment, or significant interaction, Jim writes down three things that went well and three things he could have done better. He's done it for years. He's now systematizing it. He doesn't pause to celebrate. He pauses to learn quickly and move on.

At the top of Jim's notes for this conversation: "The biggest reminder for today, reconnecting with an old friend." That's the celebration. What could be a better celebration than reconnecting with somebody you've had marvelous conversations with?

Reflection Questions

What is your most significant cliff? What did you reconstruct on the other side, and what are you still rebuilding?
What are your encodings? Not what you've been told you should be, but what genuinely flows from your intrinsic construction. When have you felt most in frame?
Like Jim with Joanne, is there a person or purpose you are actively trying to become worthy of? What would that work look like this week?

More Learning

#397: Jim Collins - Creating Your Generosity Flywheel, Make the Trust Wager (Part 1)
#398: Jim Collins - Creating Your Generosity Flywheel, Make the Trust Wager (Part 2)

#216: Jim Collins - How to Go From Good to Great

687: Jim Collins - What To Make of a Life, The 3 Types of Luck, Inflection Points, Cliffs, Encodings, Navigating the Fog, the Art of Getting People To Want To Do What Must Be Done, and Reconnecting with an Old Friend

2026-05-10 23:00:001:44:22

NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming

Buy it -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

Jim Collins is the author of some of the most influential business books ever written — Good to Great, Built to Last, and Great by Choice. His concepts have become part of the leadership vocabulary. Level 5 Leadership. The Flywheel. First Who, Then What. The Hedgehog Concept. He spent more than a decade at Stanford as a professor and has advised CEOs, four-star generals, and heads of state. His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. It is the product of ten years of research and is the most personal thing he has ever written. We flew to Boulder, Colorado, to record this one in person with Jim.

Key Learnings

Jim's grandfather wrote his own death story. Jimmy Collins was a test pilot in the 1930s. He told Jim's grandmother, Dolores, that if he died, she should pull the last chapter from his desk and publish it. He died in a test crash. After the service, she pulled out the chapter. The title was "I'm Dead." The last chapter, written in first person, described the plane coming out of the sky, the screaming wings, the crash. The final words, by his own pen: "I am dead now."

For seven decades, his grandmother never cried. When Jim asked her in her nineties to tell the story of his grandfather, she cried and said, "Thank you for that. I've never cried before." She'd been a single mom in the middle of the Depression. Of all the things Jim feels good about in his life, asking her to tell that story before she died at almost 100 years old is one he's most proud of.

A cliff is an event that alters the trajectory of your life and forces you to reconstruct everything that comes after.

Jim's first big cliff: he lost his father while his father was still alive. Jim's father took the family to San Francisco in the 1960s. They lived a few houses down from Haight Street. When a man was shot dead on their doorstep, Jim's mom moved them to Boulder. They lived in a cold basement with cots and a hot plate. They couldn't afford a Christmas tree, so Jim and his brother rolled a boulder into the basement and called it their Christmas rock.

The Greyhound bus moment. In high school, Jim took a Thanksgiving turkey on a Greyhound bus down to New Mexico, where his father was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor. He had this romantic vision: they'd cook the turkey, share Thanksgiving, bond as father and son. The whole weekend, his father had no interest in him. He spent it trying to convince Jim to convince his grandmother to give him money. On the bus ride home, looking out the window into the fog, Jim realized: there will never, ever be a father there. No male role models. No frameworks. No guidance. "I've got this one life. What do I do with it?"

The inflection point in Jim's life is Joanne. They got engaged four days after their first date. He'd admired her from afar for years but never had the courage to ask her out. Once they were together, Jim began a conscious process: I need to become a person worthy of being married to her. He didn't know exactly what that meant or how to get there. But he knew that was the work. Forty-six years later, it's still a never-ending journey.

What Joanne does brilliantly: she sees what needs attention. Jim is encoded to hear it. Someone once asked Joanne what she thought Jim's greatest strength was. She said: "Jim takes critical feedback better than any person I've ever met." Joanne sees what needs attention. Jim hears it. Then they adapt and adjust. That's the inner flywheel of their marriage.

Circle the wagons together. Guns pointing out, never at each other. When life gets really difficult, whether it's disease or other cliffs. You are always together. Always on the inside of the wagons. Never aimed at each other.

Joanne won the 1985 Hawaii Ironman by 92 seconds. With a hamstring injury that limited her running training to 16 miles a week, she came off the bike with a 10-minute lead. Then mile by mile, the lead shrank. Nine minutes. Eight. Seven. With a few miles left, she stopped in the middle of the lava field, massaging her legs, almost pleading with them to run. She looked up at the sky. Then her gaze fixed somewhere down the road. She started to run.

You're racing for self-respect. Joanne told Jim afterward: in the end, you're racing to know that you couldn't have run a step faster. Only you'll know. If you know you couldn't have run a step faster, that's actually winning.

When Jim writes, he's on the lava fields. When he finishes a book, he wants to know he couldn't have written one sentence better. When you're on the lava fields, this is the moment you want to quit. Don't.

Writing is thinking. When the writing isn't working, the thinking isn't clear. Go back to the data. Find the through-line.

There are three types of luck:

What luck. A cancer diagnosis. A guitar left in an empty house. An event that breaks your way.
Who luck. The people who walk into your life. Joanne. Morten Hansen. Jerry Porras. Bill Lazier.
Zeit luck. When what you're doing intersects with the surrounding zeitgeist. Jimmy Page was in Surrey when the British rock explosion happened.

Luck is an event you didn't cause, with significant consequences, and an element of surprise.

The big winners weren't luckier. They had a higher return on luck. What you do with luck events matters more than the luck itself.

Bill Lazier: the closest thing to a father Jim ever had. Jim ended up in Bill's class at Stanford because the class he was trying to take was full. The random course-sorting mechanism threw him into the first class Bill ever taught. Pure WHO luck. Jim did not cause that.

Discover your encodings. An encoding is a durable capacity of your intrinsic construction that resides within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life.

Jim has done over 300 online courses on every imaginable subject. Constitutional law. Napoleon. World War I. The history of China. He started them to learn how to teach. Then his curiosity took over. That's what an encoding looks like in the wild.

You have a constellation of encodings. Like stars. When your life captures a bright set of those encodings, you're in frame. When it doesn't, you're out of frame. The same person can look amazing in frame and not very amazing out of frame.

The most important finding from this book: don't follow anyone else's advice. Their advice is well-meaning. It may have worked beautifully for them. But it worked for them because it flowed from their encodings. And their encodings are not your encodings.

Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper. Two women who won the Nobel Prize and shaped computer science. McClintock was encoded for solitary work. She didn't even have a phone. She heard about her Nobel Prize on the radio. Hopper was encoded to work through people. She kept a pirate flag in her office and once stole furniture for her team in the middle of the night. Two completely different encodings. What they shared: their lives were in alignment with their encodings.

Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. It's not a trait. It's a choice. Anyone in any organization can lead, depending on their desire to make a difference. Nobody needs to wait for a title.

Ryan's encoding is "the relentless persistence of invitation." Jim observed that Ryan has incredible encodings for what he'd describe as attractive persistence. Not pushy. Not aggressive. But persistent and welcoming. The invitation never goes away.

The way you lead should be different from everyone else. Because you are encoded differently. Trust your encodings, not their playbook.

Roger Sherman saved the U.S. Constitution. Twice. He created the bicameral legislature compromise. He insisted the Bill of Rights be amendments, not rewrites. Yet most people don't know his name. He almost never spoke. He listened in committees and waited for the precise moment to introduce just the right point to turn American history. Quiet. Behind the scenes. Uncharismatic. Unglamorous. Enormously effective. That was his encoding.

You should largely ignore what other successful leaders did. It's marvelous to listen to. It might give you ideas. But everything that worked for them reflected their encodings, not yours. The work isn't to copy their playbook. The work is to discover your encodings and trust them.

The color of Jim's fire changed. When he was younger, his fuel was rage, fury, and a sense of terror with no safety net. He used to worry that if he ever lost it, he'd lose his drive. What replaced it was a different kind of fire: the joy of curiosity, of being lost in giant projects, of marvelous conversations, of sharing what he's learned. His drive is higher than ever. It just feels a lot better now.

The 3x3 reflective practice. After almost any conversation, teaching moment, or significant interaction, Jim writes down three things that went well and three things he could have done better. He's done it for years. He's now systematizing it. He doesn't pause to celebrate. He pauses to learn quickly and move on.

At the top of Jim's notes for this conversation: "The biggest reminder for today, reconnecting with an old friend." That's the celebration. What could be a better celebration than reconnecting with somebody you've had marvelous conversations with?

Reflection Questions

What is your most significant cliff? What did you reconstruct on the other side, and what are you still rebuilding?
What are your encodings? Not what you've been told you should be, but what genuinely flows from your intrinsic construction. When have you felt most in frame?
Like Jim with Joanne, is there a person or purpose you are actively trying to become worthy of? What would that work look like this week?

More Learning

#397: Jim Collins - Creating Your Generosity Flywheel, Make the Trust Wager (Part 1)#398: Jim Collins - Creating Your Generosity Flywheel, Make the Trust Wager (Part 2)

#216: Jim Collins - How to Go From Good to Great

686: Dr. Nicole LePera (The Holistic Psychologist) - The Hidden Cost of Being Good at Everything, Self-Medicating at 13, Why Awareness Isn't Enough, Healing the Body Not Just the Mind, What a Real Boundary Actually Is, and How Vulnerability Makes Love Rea

2026-05-03 23:00:001:00:34

Pre-Order new book, The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Pre-Order new book, The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest:

Dr. Nicole LePera is the creator of The Holistic Psychologist, a platform with over 12 million followers, and the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including her newest, Reparenting the Inner Child.

Key Learnings:

Nicole was good at everything, so struggling meant failure. Her family's message was clear: success in life meant financial security through academics or athletics. The implicit message: you're worthy when you're bringing home A's, when you're winning the softball game. She quickly learned to identify things she wasn't immediately good at and just not pursue them. She filtered life, staying on the path of comfort.

Your childhood adaptations don't leave. Nicole calls it the inner child. It doesn't matter how old you are or how far beyond your childhood you think you've gotten. It impacts you in reactions, in identities, in your way of being. What was once your best attempt at safety, security, or connection still drives behavior today.

Not all adaptations are problems. Many continue to benefit us.

The question isn't whether the adaptation is good or bad. The question is: are you choosing it, or is it choosing you? Nicole's drive for achievement created opportunities. It led to massive impact. But she still has the overachiever who wants to blow past her limits and say yes when she's exhausted but means no.

The Holistic Psychologist started in 2018, and Nicole had no idea it would explode. She was living in Philadelphia, operating within a private practice model. Within the first year, people from around the world were resonating, joining, and interested in working with her in this new way. But at the beginning, even learning how to speak on camera was such a big challenge. Her partner would say, "Say what you said to me earlier," and Nicole's mind would go blank. Just putting a camera in front of her was near debilitating.

Boundaries are about knowing who and when to take feedback from. Sometimes the feedback from a loved one, while uncomfortable, is helpful to hear. Other times, it's a helpful boundary where you're not opening yourself up to the opinion of someone who has a different vantage point or is speaking from their own projection. That's allowed Nicole to create safety in herself, confidence in herself, which translates to flow.

Several years in, Nicole's dad sat front row at her book event, crying with pride. In the beginning, her dad and mom would ask, "Why do you have to use us as the example? Why do you have to share about our family?" Nicole would explain: " This is the only experience I can speak from, and our family's experience is so common. To see her dad, who came from a family largely shut down emotionally, crying in understanding and pride, was overwhelming and validating for why she does this work.

At 13, Nicole was getting straight A's but unraveling on the inside. She was socially shy, struggled to order food at restaurants, and had very few friends. Then she discovered alcohol and pot made her feel comfortable. That anxiety she lived with suddenly felt freer. She would stumble through the living room at night, her parents already in bed, then wake up at 6:00 AM the next day, pitch a softball tournament, win it, and seemingly be fine.

Her parents had no idea. She was very good at suppressing her emotions and coping. By contrast, on the surface, it seemed like she was doing well. They were a family who didn't really talk about emotions, so they had no indication.

The drive itself isn't the problem. It's the energy that inspires action. Nicole's dad worked into the night to support the family. Her mom would say, "why not 100?" when Nicole brought home a 96. That translated into drive and ambition. That's not a problem. For a lot of us, it's the energy that inspires action and translates into impact. It can become a problem when we have no limits to our working, where we exhaust ourselves and burn out, where we don't feel worthy in moments of inaction or rest.

The marker of a healthy relationship with drive is flexibility. When you're forced to stop because you're sick, exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, or someone else needs you, can you be flexible enough to do that without feeling terrible about yourself? The ability to choose to say, "Okay, contextually speaking, I need to pause," and still feel okay about yourself, that's the marker.

Hold space for both: acknowledging harm and taking agency. Other people have contributed to our discomfort. Maybe parents didn't meet our needs. If we don't acknowledge that, we suppress. But we also can't stay stuck in anger and resentment.

A true boundary isn't demanding that someone else be different. That's still giving away your agency. A true boundary is saying: you've hurt me, and I'm gonna take responsibility that I'm allowing it. I'm gonna show up differently now to limit the impact of what you're doing.

Talking about trauma can keep it alive in your body. Trauma doesn't live in logic and understanding. It lives in your body. It lives in habits and reactions. Your mind is so powerful that you can think something and feel as if you're living it in that moment. If you're going week after week talking about all the things that are hurting you, you're continuing to keep that alive in your body.

Holistic psychology bridges the gap between mind and body. Traditional psychology focused solely on the mind. The CBT model says if we think differently, we produce different feelings, then different actions. But Nicole was missing the body. Our nervous system, our earliest environments, neurobiologically created patterns wired into us. Science now shows we maintain the ability to change throughout our lives.

Drop into your body. Where is your attention right now?

Are you feeling your muscles, your heels impacting the earth, where you're sitting?
Or are you so lost in thought you're disconnected?
Jaw clenched? Fists clenched? Shoulders up to your ears?
Holding your breath? Breathing short and quick from your chest?

These are markers that your body is under stress right now.

Once you have that information, make small shifts. Slow and deepen your breath. Elongate your exhale just a little longer than your inhale. If your movements are quick, slow them down. If you're holding tension, release it. Now you're regulating your body so you can show up differently.

Meditation is just awareness. It's not sitting cross-legged trying to make your mind quiet. Life can be a meditative experience. Thoughts are helpful. They're where we create things, have insights. The goal isn't a blank, quiet mind. The goal is awareness.

Nicole calls it her spaceship. Her protective habit for so long has been to dissociate, to disconnect. She pursued clinical psychology where she can live in her mind. When what she's feeling in her body is too uncomfortable, the quickest path out is to distract herself with someone else, with the next achievement.

This work has made Nicole's relationships more real. More authentic. More grounded in vulnerability, messiness, emotion as opposed to curated versions of who she thinks she needs to be. What she's most familiar with is dealing with all her feelings alone.

The Harvard study found one thing leads to a happy life: love. Ryan referenced the longitudinal Harvard study that has gone on for 90 years studying what leads to a happy life. At the end of the day, it's love. The ones who live the happiest, longest, most fruitful lives are surrounded by people they love and who love them.

What a gift it is to be loved for all of yourself, not just the perfect parts. When you can show someone all of yourself, your messiness, the things you hid and kept secret, and still be loved. The overachiever gets to show more parts of herself, and people don't abandon her. They stay. That's the love most of us are striving for.

We are all a bunch of messy humans trying to figure it out as we go.

Nicole's champagne moment a year from now: presence and beingness. Whatever is happening or not happening in her life, she's celebrating the celebration of that moment. Being alive. Feeling the gratitude, the joy. Not focusing on what was produced to give her the opportunity to celebrate, but being present to the life around her. The taste of the champagne, the humans surrounding her in that moment.

Reflection Questions

Which childhood adaptations are still driving your behavior today? Are you choosing them, or are they choosing you?
When was the last time you actually dropped into your body and checked: am I tense? Am I holding my breath? Am I stressed?
Who in your life sees all of you, not just the polished version, and loves you anyway?

More Learning

#547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What People Think of You

#140: Dr. Carol Dweck - The Power of a Growth Mindset

#229: Dr. Henry Cloud - Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

Podcast Chapters

00:00 Book Announcement

01:08 Show Intro and Guest Setup

02:36 Good at Everything: The Hidden Cost

06:47 When Therapy Stopped Working

09:32 How The Holistic Psychologist Started on Instagram

11:20 Purpose, Fame, and Setting Boundaries

15:06 How Her Family Reacted to the Spotlight

19:21 At 13: Straight A's and Self-Medicating

22:12 What Her Parents Missed

23:48 Drive vs. Worthiness: Where It Becomes a Problem

29:20 Why Flexibility Beats Rigidity

31:03 Agency vs. Blame in Therapy

31:57 When Therapy Becomes an Excuse

33:47 What a Real Boundary Actually Is

35:44 The "Bad Therapy" Debate

38:50 What Holistic Psychology Actually Means

41:35 Daily Body Practices, Not Retreats

44:06 How to Drop Into Your Body

46:38 Meditation Is Just Awareness

49:36 Why Vulnerability Makes Relationships Real

52:07 The Harvard Study: Love Is Everything

55:36 The Champagne Question: Being Present

57:33 EOPC

686: Dr. Nicole LePera (The Holistic Psychologist) - The Hidden Cost of Being Good at Everything, Self-Medicating at 13, Why Awareness Isn't Enough, Healing the Body Not Just the Mind, What a Real Boundary Actually Is, and How Vulnerability Makes Love Rea

2026-05-03 23:00:001:00:34

Pre-Order new book, The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest:

Dr. Nicole LePera is the creator of The Holistic Psychologist, a platform with over 12 million followers, and the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including her newest, Reparenting the Inner Child.

Key Learnings:

Nicole was good at everything, so struggling meant failure. Her family's message was clear: success in life meant financial security through academics or athletics. The implicit message: you're worthy when you're bringing home A's, when you're winning the softball game. She quickly learned to identify things she wasn't immediately good at and just not pursue them. She filtered life, staying on the path of comfort.

Your childhood adaptations don't leave. Nicole calls it the inner child. It doesn't matter how old you are or how far beyond your childhood you think you've gotten. It impacts you in reactions, in identities, in your way of being. What was once your best attempt at safety, security, or connection still drives behavior today.

Not all adaptations are problems. Many continue to benefit us.

The question isn't whether the adaptation is good or bad. The question is: are you choosing it, or is it choosing you? Nicole's drive for achievement created opportunities. It led to massive impact. But she still has the overachiever who wants to blow past her limits and say yes when she's exhausted but means no.

The Holistic Psychologist started in 2018, and Nicole had no idea it would explode. She was living in Philadelphia, operating within a private practice model. Within the first year, people from around the world were resonating, joining, and interested in working with her in this new way. But at the beginning, even learning how to speak on camera was such a big challenge. Her partner would say, "Say what you said to me earlier," and Nicole's mind would go blank. Just putting a camera in front of her was near debilitating.

Boundaries are about knowing who and when to take feedback from. Sometimes the feedback from a loved one, while uncomfortable, is helpful to hear. Other times, it's a helpful boundary where you're not opening yourself up to the opinion of someone who has a different vantage point or is speaking from their own projection. That's allowed Nicole to create safety in herself, confidence in herself, which translates to flow.

Several years in, Nicole's dad sat front row at her book event, crying with pride. In the beginning, her dad and mom would ask, "Why do you have to use us as the example? Why do you have to share about our family?" Nicole would explain: " This is the only experience I can speak from, and our family's experience is so common. To see her dad, who came from a family largely shut down emotionally, crying in understanding and pride, was overwhelming and validating for why she does this work.

At 13, Nicole was getting straight A's but unraveling on the inside. She was socially shy, struggled to order food at restaurants, and had very few friends. Then she discovered alcohol and pot made her feel comfortable. That anxiety she lived with suddenly felt freer. She would stumble through the living room at night, her parents already in bed, then wake up at 6:00 AM the next day, pitch a softball tournament, win it, and seemingly be fine.

Her parents had no idea. She was very good at suppressing her emotions and coping. By contrast, on the surface, it seemed like she was doing well. They were a family who didn't really talk about emotions, so they had no indication.

The drive itself isn't the problem. It's the energy that inspires action. Nicole's dad worked into the night to support the family. Her mom would say, "why not 100?" when Nicole brought home a 96. That translated into drive and ambition. That's not a problem. For a lot of us, it's the energy that inspires action and translates into impact. It can become a problem when we have no limits to our working, where we exhaust ourselves and burn out, where we don't feel worthy in moments of inaction or rest.

The marker of a healthy relationship with drive is flexibility. When you're forced to stop because you're sick, exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, or someone else needs you, can you be flexible enough to do that without feeling terrible about yourself? The ability to choose to say, "Okay, contextually speaking, I need to pause," and still feel okay about yourself, that's the marker.

Hold space for both: acknowledging harm and taking agency. Other people have contributed to our discomfort. Maybe parents didn't meet our needs. If we don't acknowledge that, we suppress. But we also can't stay stuck in anger and resentment.

A true boundary isn't demanding that someone else be different. That's still giving away your agency. A true boundary is saying: you've hurt me, and I'm gonna take responsibility that I'm allowing it. I'm gonna show up differently now to limit the impact of what you're doing.

Talking about trauma can keep it alive in your body. Trauma doesn't live in logic and understanding. It lives in your body. It lives in habits and reactions. Your mind is so powerful that you can think something and feel as if you're living it in that moment. If you're going week after week talking about all the things that are hurting you, you're continuing to keep that alive in your body.

Holistic psychology bridges the gap between mind and body. Traditional psychology focused solely on the mind. The CBT model says if we think differently, we produce different feelings, then different actions. But Nicole was missing the body. Our nervous system, our earliest environments, neurobiologically created patterns wired into us. Science now shows we maintain the ability to change throughout our lives.

Drop into your body. Where is your attention right now?

Are you feeling your muscles, your heels impacting the earth, where you're sitting?
Or are you so lost in thought you're disconnected?
Jaw clenched? Fists clenched? Shoulders up to your ears?
Holding your breath? Breathing short and quick from your chest?

These are markers that your body is under stress right now.

Once you have that information, make small shifts. Slow and deepen your breath. Elongate your exhale just a little longer than your inhale. If your movements are quick, slow them down. If you're holding tension, release it. Now you're regulating your body so you can show up differently.

Meditation is just awareness. It's not sitting cross-legged trying to make your mind quiet. Life can be a meditative experience. Thoughts are helpful. They're where we create things, have insights. The goal isn't a blank, quiet mind. The goal is awareness.

Nicole calls it her spaceship. Her protective habit for so long has been to dissociate, to disconnect. She pursued clinical psychology where she can live in her mind. When what she's feeling in her body is too uncomfortable, the quickest path out is to distract herself with someone else, with the next achievement.

This work has made Nicole's relationships more real. More authentic. More grounded in vulnerability, messiness, emotion as opposed to curated versions of who she thinks she needs to be. What she's most familiar with is dealing with all her feelings alone.

The Harvard study found one thing leads to a happy life: love. Ryan referenced the longitudinal Harvard study that has gone on for 90 years studying what leads to a happy life. At the end of the day, it's love. The ones who live the happiest, longest, most fruitful lives are surrounded by people they love and who love them.

What a gift it is to be loved for all of yourself, not just the perfect parts. When you can show someone all of yourself, your messiness, the things you hid and kept secret, and still be loved. The overachiever gets to show more parts of herself, and people don't abandon her. They stay. That's the love most of us are striving for.

We are all a bunch of messy humans trying to figure it out as we go.

Nicole's champagne moment a year from now: presence and beingness. Whatever is happening or not happening in her life, she's celebrating the celebration of that moment. Being alive. Feeling the gratitude, the joy. Not focusing on what was produced to give her the opportunity to celebrate, but being present to the life around her. The taste of the champagne, the humans surrounding her in that moment.

Reflection Questions

Which childhood adaptations are still driving your behavior today? Are you choosing them, or are they choosing you?
When was the last time you actually dropped into your body and checked: am I tense? Am I holding my breath? Am I stressed?
Who in your life sees all of you, not just the polished version, and loves you anyway?

More Learning

#547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What People Think of You

#140: Dr. Carol Dweck - The Power of a Growth Mindset

#229: Dr. Henry Cloud - Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

Podcast Chapters

00:00 Book Announcement

01:08 Show Intro and Guest Setup

02:36 Good at Everything: The Hidden Cost

06:47 When Therapy Stopped Working

09:32 How The Holistic Psychologist Started on Instagram

11:20 Purpose, Fame, and Setting Boundaries

15:06 How Her Family Reacted to the Spotlight

19:21 At 13: Straight A's and Self-Medicating

22:12 What Her Parents Missed

23:48 Drive vs. Worthiness: Where It Becomes a Problem

29:20 Why Flexibility Beats Rigidity

31:03 Agency vs. Blame in Therapy

31:57 When Therapy Becomes an Excuse

33:47 What a Real Boundary Actually Is

35:44 The "Bad Therapy" Debate

38:50 What Holistic Psychology Actually Means

41:35 Daily Body Practices, Not Retreats

44:06 How to Drop Into Your Body

46:38 Meditation Is Just Awareness

49:36 Why Vulnerability Makes Relationships Real

52:07 The Harvard Study: Love Is Everything

55:36 The Champagne Question: Being Present

57:33 EOPC

685: David Epstein - The Freedom Trap, Narrative Values, General Magic, The Nobel Prize Winner Who Simplified Everything, Wearing the Same Thing Everyday, and Why Constraints Are the Secret to Your Best Work

2026-04-26 23:00:0057:12

Read my new book, The Price of Becoming. www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Read my new book, The Price of Becoming. www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My guest: David Epstein is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene. A former investigative reporter at ProPublica and senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His new book is called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.

Notes

Be part of "Mindful Monday" -- Text Hawk to 66866

Key Learnings

The easier move is to let it go. David found a factual error in Ryan's new/my new book. David was supposed to read it and write a blurb on it - but went further and challenged a factual error. The kind move, what great leaders actually do, is being willing to point things out, even if it could cause a little friction.

There is such a thing as too much autonomy. After Range became mega viral, David optimized for autonomy. He individualized his whole life. He no longer was writing about what others assigned him. A year later, he realized there is a thing as too much autonomy. He missed the structure of a work day, the deadlines, the annoyances of working with other people's schedules. This total freedom ended up feeling terrible.

"The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living." This quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi hit David when he was on a dating app for book topics, just swiping and swiping. That day he said, "I'm really interested in constraints. I need some myself. I'm writing a book proposal on this." Two weeks later he was 10 times more interested because he decided to dive into it.

Cal Newport says "system shutting down" at the end of his workday. It seems silly, but when you have all that freedom, you need something to close the workday so you can recover and be ready for the next day.

Your brain is made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says thinking is energetically costly. So when your calendar is too open, all you'll do is what's convenient. Your brain will be lazy. The path of least resistance.

The mere urgency effect: when schedule and structure is too open, people do things that seem urgent even if they're unimportant. When you're too unstructured, you end up doing huge volumes of low value stuff just to have checked off doing something.

What David's workday looks like now:

Batching work: people at work check their email on average 77 times a day. The way people are usually doing that is they're toggling all the time between email and something else. When you do that, it lowers your productivity and massively increases your stress.
David doesn't start his day with his inbox. He'll check it at the end of the workday because emails can take him away from the most important work at the beginning of the day.
Stress + Rest = Growth. The workday ends when David's son gets home. When writing, you have to program in rest, just like you would if you were an athlete in training.

Daniel Kahneman said writing "Thinking Fast and Slow" was the worst few years of his life. David had lunch with Kahneman and praised the book. Kahneman said, "Never again." He said it was so isolating. He was used to working with a partner or multiple partners and colleagues. He felt so isolated that he said he'd never write a book again, or if he did, he would write it with somebody else. And that's what he did. And David could empathize with that.

David made a one-page architectural outline for how "Inside the Box" would look. If it's not on that page, it is not in the book. He wrote as small as possible to try to defeat his own system. The book's 20% shorter than his other two. He thinks it's much tighter writing. He was so much more efficient that he doesn't feel nearly as burned out.

After a mega hit book, two things matter: (1) A lot is out of your control, and (2) Identify as a craftsman. David's colleague at Sports Illustrated told him, "If a book about genetics and vampires comes out the same day, you're screwed, and there's nothing you can do about it." He was right. But David very strongly identifies as a writer now, as a craftsman. He's taken fiction writing courses just to learn about craft. With Inside the Box, he did a structural experiment that he found so engaging because he was focused on the craft itself, not just the commercial outcome.

"Docendo discimus" - by teaching, we learn. This is a quote from Seneca. If people think they're going to have to teach certain material, they organize it more coherently in their own mind. They start pulling out main ideas and attaching different ideas together. Teaching it is even better, but just making someone think they're going to have to teach it makes them learn in a much more coherent way.

Narrative values: the recurring themes that give coherence to a life. David went back and looked at his life and identified: curiosity, open-mindedness, diligence, and resilience. Now that he's started telling his story in that way, it shows up everywhere. But going forward, he also wanted some things in his story that he didn't have. So he identified forgiveness in particular because that has not been a strong suit for him.

Ben Helfgott: the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp. Almost everybody in his family was killed in the Holocaust. He just preached forgiveness all the time. When David saw what Ben did, these petty grudges he's holding are nothing. You're just poisoning yourself when you hold these grudges. So David decided he wanted forgiveness to become one of his narrative values.

Herbert Simon won the highest award in computer science, psychology, and the Nobel Prize in economics. His quote serves as the epigraph of the book: "It is a myth, widely believed but not less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they're most free."

Simon coined the term "satisficing." It's a combination of satisfy and suffice. It means having good enough decision rules. He contrasted that with maximizing. From a mountain of psychological research, it is almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret. There's not much evidence they actually make better decisions most of the time.

Simon was a proactive satisficer. He said you need three sets of clothing: one on your back, one in the wash, and the next one ready to wear. He simplified all the decisions in his life so he could save cognitive bandwidth for the really important ones. He famously said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

Choose when to choose. Choose when to save and when to use your cognitive bandwidth.

Good enough doesn't mean you have low standards. It means you're saving your bandwidth for the most important things.

"How you do anything is how you do everything" is completely wrong. This is one of David's least favorite quotes. It's wrong. Herbert Simon did the same mundane thing, the same breakfast every day, the same socks, so he could crush it in his work. He wasn't doing everything the way he was doing his work.

The Fredkins Paradox: We spend the most energy on the least important decisions because we agonize when the options are really similar.

General Magic: They invented the smartphone in 1990. The iPhone would not exist without them. They had infinite degrees of freedom. They could do anything. When the device came out, it didn't solve a clear customer problem. It had a 200-page manual. They sold 3,000 units in the first six months.

Meanwhile, people inside General Magic who bit off much smaller chunks had success. One low-level engineer started Auction Web. His bosses said no, too small. He left and changed the name to eBay. Another created Graffiti. He said "I'm going to solve a clear customer problem. Busy professionals want contacts and calendars on the go." He did just a calendar, contacts, and a memo pad. That was the Palm Pilot. By doing way less. By doing something, not everything.

Tony Fadell (the "podfather"): "If you don't have constraints, make up constraints."

Bill Gurley said, "We have a saying in venture: more startups die of indigestion than starvation." When Tony co-founded Nest, he made his team work inside a literal box. He made them prototype the box before they had the product. If it didn't fit in that box, it was not a priority.

Reflection Questions

What area of your life has too much freedom right now? Where could you add a constraint (a deadline, a ritual, a boundary) that would actually make you more productive or creative?
If you had to pick three narrative values that run through your life story, what would they be? Are they the ones you want, or do you need to add an aspirational value like David did with forgiveness?
What's one decision you're maximizing (trying to find the perfect choice) when you should be satisficing (good enough and move on)? How much time and energy would you free up if you applied Herbert Simon's approach?

More Learning

#310 - David Epstein: Why Generalists Will Rule the World

#582 - Cal Newport: Obsess Over Quality

#660 - James Clear: The 4 Laws to Behavioral Change

Podcast Chapters
00:00 The Price of Becoming - Ryan's New Book

01:15 Meet David Epstein

02:39 The Fact Checker: What Great Leaders Do

04:27 Dedication Easter Eggs

05:50 The Problem With Too Much Autonomy

10:47 Why You Actually Need Constraints

12:29 Batching Work: The 77 Email Checks Problem

17:20 Lunch with Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow Was Miserable

22:18 What To Do After A Viral Book

27:07 Docendo Discimus: By Teaching, We Learn

29:13 Why Leaders Should Regularly Teach

31:09 Desirable Difficulties

31:56 Narrative Values: The Themes That Define Your Life

34:31 Adding Forgiveness As an Aspirational Value

36:13 Chips on Shoulders vs. Proving People Right

39:10 Herbert Simon: The Man Who Won Everything

40:20 Satisficing Over Maximizing

42:40 Choosing When To Choose

44:29 Good Enough Doesn't Mean Low Standards

46:13 Why "How You Do Anything" is Completely Wrong

47:25 General Magic: Do Something, Not Everything

52:49 One Year From Now: What Are You Celebrating?

54:54 EOPC

685: David Epstein - The Freedom Trap, Narrative Values, General Magic, The Nobel Prize Winner Who Simplified Everything, Wearing the Same Thing Everyday, and Why Constraints Are the Secret to Your Best Work

2026-04-26 23:00:0057:12

Read my new book, The Price of Becoming. www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My guest: David Epstein is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene. A former investigative reporter at ProPublica and senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His new book is called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.

Notes

Be part of "Mindful Monday" -- Text Hawk to 66866

Key Learnings

The easier move is to let it go. David found a factual error in Ryan's new/my new book. David was supposed to read it and write a blurb on it - but went further and challenged a factual error. The kind move, what great leaders actually do, is being willing to point things out, even if it could cause a little friction.

There is such a thing as too much autonomy. After Range became mega viral, David optimized for autonomy. He individualized his whole life. He no longer was writing about what others assigned him. A year later, he realized there is a thing as too much autonomy. He missed the structure of a work day, the deadlines, the annoyances of working with other people's schedules. This total freedom ended up feeling terrible. "The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living." This quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi hit David when he was on a dating app for book topics, just swiping and swiping. That day he said, "I'm really interested in constraints. I need some myself. I'm writing a book proposal on this." Two weeks later he was 10 times more interested because he decided to dive into it.

Cal Newport says "system shutting down" at the end of his workday. It seems silly, but when you have all that freedom, you need something to close the workday so you can recover and be ready for the next day.

Your brain is made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says thinking is energetically costly. So when your calendar is too open, all you'll do is what's convenient. Your brain will be lazy. The path of least resistance.

The mere urgency effect: when schedule and structure is too open, people do things that seem urgent even if they're unimportant. When you're too unstructured, you end up doing huge volumes of low value stuff just to have checked off doing something.

What David's workday looks like now:

Batching work: people at work check their email on average 77 times a day. The way people are usually doing that is they're toggling all the time between email and something else. When you do that, it lowers your productivity and massively increases your stress.
David doesn't start his day with his inbox. He'll check it at the end of the workday because emails can take him away from the most important work at the beginning of the day.
Stress + Rest = Growth. The workday ends when David's son gets home. When writing, you have to program in rest, just like you would if you were an athlete in training.

Daniel Kahneman said writing "Thinking Fast and Slow" was the worst few years of his life. David had lunch with Kahneman and praised the book. Kahneman said, "Never again." He said it was so isolating. He was used to working with a partner or multiple partners and colleagues. He felt so isolated that he said he'd never write a book again, or if he did, he would write it with somebody else. And that's what he did. And David could empathize with that.

David made a one-page architectural outline for how "Inside the Box" would look. If it's not on that page, it is not in the book. He wrote as small as possible to try to defeat his own system. The book's 20% shorter than his other two. He thinks it's much tighter writing. He was so much more efficient that he doesn't feel nearly as burned out.

After a mega hit book, two things matter: (1) A lot is out of your control, and (2) Identify as a craftsman. David's colleague at Sports Illustrated told him, "If a book about genetics and vampires comes out the same day, you're screwed, and there's nothing you can do about it." He was right. But David very strongly identifies as a writer now, as a craftsman. He's taken fiction writing courses just to learn about craft. With Inside the Box, he did a structural experiment that he found so engaging because he was focused on the craft itself, not just the commercial outcome.

"Docendo discimus" - by teaching, we learn. This is a quote from Seneca. If people think they're going to have to teach certain material, they organize it more coherently in their own mind. They start pulling out main ideas and attaching different ideas together. Teaching it is even better, but just making someone think they're going to have to teach it makes them learn in a much more coherent way.

Narrative values: the recurring themes that give coherence to a life. David went back and looked at his life and identified: curiosity, open-mindedness, diligence, and resilience. Now that he's started telling his story in that way, it shows up everywhere. But going forward, he also wanted some things in his story that he didn't have. So he identified forgiveness in particular because that has not been a strong suit for him.

Ben Helfgott: the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp. Almost everybody in his family was killed in the Holocaust. He just preached forgiveness all the time. When David saw what Ben did, these petty grudges he's holding are nothing. You're just poisoning yourself when you hold these grudges. So David decided he wanted forgiveness to become one of his narrative values.

Herbert Simon won the highest award in computer science, psychology, and the Nobel Prize in economics. His quote serves as the epigraph of the book: "It is a myth, widely believed but not less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they're most free."

Simon coined the term "satisficing." It's a combination of satisfy and suffice. It means having good enough decision rules. He contrasted that with maximizing. From a mountain of psychological research, it is almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret. There's not much evidence they actually make better decisions most of the time.

Simon was a proactive satisficer. He said you need three sets of clothing: one on your back, one in the wash, and the next one ready to wear. He simplified all the decisions in his life so he could save cognitive bandwidth for the really important ones. He famously said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

Choose when to choose. Choose when to save and when to use your cognitive bandwidth.

Good enough doesn't mean you have low standards. It means you're saving your bandwidth for the most important things.

"How you do anything is how you do everything" is completely wrong. This is one of David's least favorite quotes. It's wrong. Herbert Simon did the same mundane thing, the same breakfast every day, the same socks, so he could crush it in his work. He wasn't doing everything the way he was doing his work.

The Fredkins Paradox: We spend the most energy on the least important decisions because we agonize when the options are really similar. General Magic: They invented the smartphone in 1990. The iPhone would not exist without them. They had infinite degrees of freedom. They could do anything. When the device came out, it didn't solve a clear customer problem. It had a 200-page manual. They sold 3,000 units in the first six months.

Meanwhile, people inside General Magic who bit off much smaller chunks had success. One low-level engineer started Auction Web. His bosses said no, too small. He left and changed the name to eBay. Another created Graffiti. He said "I'm going to solve a clear customer problem. Busy professionals want contacts and calendars on the go." He did just a calendar, contacts, and a memo pad. That was the Palm Pilot. By doing way less. By doing something, not everything.

Tony Fadell (the "podfather"): "If you don't have constraints, make up constraints."

Bill Gurley said, "We have a saying in venture: more startups die of indigestion than starvation." When Tony co-founded Nest, he made his team work inside a literal box. He made them prototype the box before they had the product. If it didn't fit in that box, it was not a priority.

Reflection Questions

What area of your life has too much freedom right now? Where could you add a constraint (a deadline, a ritual, a boundary) that would actually make you more productive or creative?
If you had to pick three narrative values that run through your life story, what would they be? Are they the ones you want, or do you need to add an aspirational value like David did with forgiveness?
What's one decision you're maximizing (trying to find the perfect choice) when you should be satisficing (good enough and move on)? How much time and energy would you free up if you applied Herbert Simon's approach?

More Learning

#310 - David Epstein: Why Generalists Will Rule the World

#582 - Cal Newport: Obsess Over Quality

#660 - James Clear: The 4 Laws to Behavioral Change

Podcast Chapters00:00 The Price of Becoming - Ryan's New Book

01:15 Meet David Epstein

02:39 The Fact Checker: What Great Leaders Do

04:27 Dedication Easter Eggs

05:50 The Problem With Too Much Autonomy

10:47 Why You Actually Need Constraints

12:29 Batching Work: The 77 Email Checks Problem

17:20 Lunch with Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow Was Miserable

22:18 What To Do After A Viral Book

27:07 Docendo Discimus: By Teaching, We Learn

29:13 Why Leaders Should Regularly Teach

31:09 Desirable Difficulties

31:56 Narrative Values: The Themes That Define Your Life

34:31 Adding Forgiveness As an Aspirational Value

36:13 Chips on Shoulders vs. Proving People Right

39:10 Herbert Simon: The Man Who Won Everything

40:20 Satisficing Over Maximizing

42:40 Choosing When To Choose

44:29 Good Enough Doesn't Mean Low Standards

46:13 Why "How You Do Anything" is Completely Wrong

47:25 General Magic: Do Something, Not Everything

52:49 One Year From Now: What Are You Celebrating?

54:54 EOPC

684: Marcus Buckingham - Design Love In, The 5 Feelings Leaders Must Create, The ABCs of Authentic Leadership, and How to Unleash The Most Powerful Force in Business

2026-04-19 23:00:0059:52

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment. He is a New York Times bestselling author of influential books, including First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Currently, he leads the People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute.

Key Learnings

When you start a business, it's all about love. Seven out of 10 businesses fail, so when you start a business as an entrepreneur, you love what you do, you love your clients, and you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important and it's gonna work.

Marcus sold his company in 2017 and calls it the biggest mistake of his career. His company was broken down into silos, and the conversation became about maximization, compliance, and efficiency.

"Love is born savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting." (Pablo Neruda) When you stop talking about love, you destroy it.

Before you sell or scale, ask: Will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company and more employees saying they love working there? If the answer isn't obvious yes, then don't do it.

Great companies protect the founder's flame. Walt Disney, Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Apple's passion for design, Southwest Airlines, and Herb Kelleher. When companies lose their connection to the founding passion, they become the machine. The machine doesn't have a soul, and people can all feel it.

Love is the most powerful force in business. If you want to drive productive human behavior, repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, the precursor to that is love.

But we don't say the word. Marcus was with 30 C-suite executives, and they spent two hours talking about data. They couldn't even say the word, love. They came to say it about customers, but never about their own employees.

The job of a leader is to change human behavior. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. You've got two choices: directive (which works temporarily) or designing experiences.

If you want sustainable behavior change, experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes.

The best leaders are skilled experience makers. That email you just sent? It's an experience. That meeting? It's an experience. Onboarding? It's an experience. Every touchpoint is picking up what you're putting down.

Culture is just a series of experiences.

Either you are getting people to say "I love that," or you've failed to change their behavior.

"If you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it, and I don't want to follow it." Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs, and they better be coherent with who you authentically are. Your customs are the living manifestation. The things you customarily do have got to flow from your authenticity and your beliefs. The best leaders have their ABCs line up beautifully - they are authentically who they are, you know exactly what they believe, and their customs bring those authentic beliefs to life.

The biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader, not the culture of the company. The culture is like the river, but there's a lot of different eddies. You join a company, but the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. The most important decision you make is who you make the leader of that team.

A, B, C: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection; we want authenticity because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you. I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable.

The definition of love to Marcus: Love is an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time. Which is flourishing. Most of us go through life balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armor plating. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside and express it. Love is a forward-facing emotion. We're anticipating goodness, and we have to take the armor off one plate at a time.

A question for all leaders: What are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team?

The five sequential feelings of love:

Control: "What's this world you've invited me into, and how does it work? "
Harmony: "You have to tell people that you know what they're feeling."
Significance: "Do you know my story?"
Warmth of Others: "Who's with me? How can they help?"
Growth: "How will this experience make me more capable?"

If a leader understands the five feelings, they have a blueprint to get your team where you want them to go.

Marcus's Audi story: he loved his Audi, then at the end of the lease, he got a robocall. "You are at the end of your lease. You have not turned in the car. You have one week remaining, or you will be charged $500." He wasn't planning to turn it in. He was planning to get another one. Next week, same robocall. He leaned out. It was jarring because he was excited, and Audi was pissed off. They lost him for five years.

Audi didn't take harmony seriously. They don't design for experiences; they design for processes. The person at the dealership is in a different silo than the person writing the script for the robocall. No one creates a holistic experience map.

We don't design for experiences; we design for processes. Go to a hospital. It's one handoff after another. The person who's supposed to hold the narrative together is you, the patient. The whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience. Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes.

Disney builds a berm around the whole park so you can't see out. You can't see the Red Roof Inn next door. Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why? Because Disney is trying to create a holistic experience. These companies think holistically about a human having an experience.

The best leaders, when you ask "How do you motivate people?" always say "It depends." It depends on the person. At some point, the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. Start with control, then harmony, then significance. Tell them you understand their story and what will change because of that story.

The hospitalist movement in hospitals produced the best patient outcomes. They give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process. Their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. As a result, you feel held.

If you love anyone, you don't imagine they're ever finished. Love is a forward-facing emotion. Growth is the fifth feeling, not the first. We get this wrong when we think about designing love. We build it backwards. We start with growth and warmth. No. What's happening is feeling by feeling, we're taking off one plate of armor. If you haven't taken off the first four, you can't hit them with growth.

The simplest thing leaders could do: check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one, every week. Ask them:

How'd you feel about last week?
What are you working on this week?
How can I help?

Do that 52 times a year with each person individually, and you'll hit control, harmony, and over time significance.

Marcus is creating an app with an AI design partner. He doesn't want his kids to grow into a world accepting loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. The app will have a slider: loving/unloving. Let's call it what it is. It's love or not love. It's not okay to live in a loveless world, and we should call out unloving when we see it.

Reflection Questions

What would happen if you asked yourself before every major decision: "How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more?"
Are you designing experiences or just optimizing processes? What's one touchpoint in your customer or employee journey that feels mechanical and could be redesigned to feel more human?
Which of the five feelings (control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth) are you strongest at creating for your team? Which one are you weakest at, and what's one thing you could do this week to improve it?

Time stamps

00:00 Marcus Buckingham Intro

02:21 The Biggest Mistake: Selling My Company

05:55 Can You Scale Without Losing Love?

07:59 Protecting the Founder's Flame

12:03 Why CEOs Can't Say the Word "Love"

15:42 Your Job: Change Human Behavior

17:55 Experiences Drive Behaviors Drive Outcomes

21:42 Love Is Five Sequential Feelings

25:40 Jesse Cole and Josh D'Amaro: Real Love in Action

29:50 How Do You Prove ROI?

31:32 The Local Leader Drives Everything

32:09 The Scatterplot: Same Company, Different Experiences

33:43 ABCs: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs

35:41 What Love Actually Means: Flourishing

38:28 The Five Feelings Blueprint

39:00 Feeling #1: Control (What World Am I In?)

40:28 Feeling #2: Harmony (Do You Know What I'm Feeling?)

43:43 We Design for Processes, Not Experiences

47:34 Feelings #3, #4, #5: Significance, Warmth, Growth

53:04 The Simplest Practice for All Leaders: Weekly 15-Minute Check-Ins

57:37 EOPC

More Learning

#467: Marcus Buckingham - How Love and Work Must Be Forever Linked

#305: Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall - A Leader's Guide to the Real World

#676: Jesse Cole - Built for the Fans (Obsession & Excellence)

684: Marcus Buckingham - Design Love In, The 5 Feelings Leaders Must Create, The ABCs of Authentic Leadership, and How to Unleash The Most Powerful Force in Business

2026-04-19 23:00:0059:52

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment. He is a New York Times bestselling author of influential books, including First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Currently, he leads the People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute.

Key Learnings

When you start a business, it's all about love. Seven out of 10 businesses fail, so when you start a business as an entrepreneur, you love what you do, you love your clients, and you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important and it's gonna work.

Marcus sold his company in 2017 and calls it the biggest mistake of his career. His company was broken down into silos, and the conversation became about maximization, compliance, and efficiency.

"Love is born savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting." (Pablo Neruda) When you stop talking about love, you destroy it.

Before you sell or scale, ask: Will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company and more employees saying they love working there? If the answer isn't obvious yes, then don't do it.

Great companies protect the founder's flame. Walt Disney, Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Apple's passion for design, Southwest Airlines, and Herb Kelleher. When companies lose their connection to the founding passion, they become the machine. The machine doesn't have a soul, and people can all feel it.

Love is the most powerful force in business. If you want to drive productive human behavior, repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, the precursor to that is love.

But we don't say the word. Marcus was with 30 C-suite executives, and they spent two hours talking about data. They couldn't even say the word, love. They came to say it about customers, but never about their own employees.

The job of a leader is to change human behavior. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. You've got two choices: directive (which works temporarily) or designing experiences.

If you want sustainable behavior change, experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes.

The best leaders are skilled experience makers. That email you just sent? It's an experience. That meeting? It's an experience. Onboarding? It's an experience. Every touchpoint is picking up what you're putting down.

Culture is just a series of experiences.

Either you are getting people to say "I love that," or you've failed to change their behavior.

"If you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it, and I don't want to follow it." Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs, and they better be coherent with who you authentically are. Your customs are the living manifestation. The things you customarily do have got to flow from your authenticity and your beliefs. The best leaders have their ABCs line up beautifully - they are authentically who they are, you know exactly what they believe, and their customs bring those authentic beliefs to life.

The biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader, not the culture of the company. The culture is like the river, but there's a lot of different eddies. You join a company, but the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. The most important decision you make is who you make the leader of that team.

A, B, C: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection; we want authenticity because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you. I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable.

The definition of love to Marcus: Love is an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time. Which is flourishing. Most of us go through life balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armor plating. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside and express it. Love is a forward-facing emotion. We're anticipating goodness, and we have to take the armor off one plate at a time.

A question for all leaders: What are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team?

The five sequential feelings of love:

Control: "What's this world you've invited me into, and how does it work? "
Harmony: "You have to tell people that you know what they're feeling."
Significance: "Do you know my story?"
Warmth of Others: "Who's with me? How can they help?"
Growth: "How will this experience make me more capable?"

If a leader understands the five feelings, they have a blueprint to get your team where you want them to go.

Marcus's Audi story: he loved his Audi, then at the end of the lease, he got a robocall. "You are at the end of your lease. You have not turned in the car. You have one week remaining, or you will be charged $500." He wasn't planning to turn it in. He was planning to get another one. Next week, same robocall. He leaned out. It was jarring because he was excited, and Audi was pissed off. They lost him for five years.

Audi didn't take harmony seriously. They don't design for experiences; they design for processes. The person at the dealership is in a different silo than the person writing the script for the robocall. No one creates a holistic experience map.

We don't design for experiences; we design for processes. Go to a hospital. It's one handoff after another. The person who's supposed to hold the narrative together is you, the patient. The whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience. Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes.

Disney builds a berm around the whole park so you can't see out. You can't see the Red Roof Inn next door. Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why? Because Disney is trying to create a holistic experience. These companies think holistically about a human having an experience.

The best leaders, when you ask "How do you motivate people?" always say "It depends." It depends on the person. At some point, the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. Start with control, then harmony, then significance. Tell them you understand their story and what will change because of that story.

The hospitalist movement in hospitals produced the best patient outcomes. They give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process. Their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. As a result, you feel held.

If you love anyone, you don't imagine they're ever finished. Love is a forward-facing emotion. Growth is the fifth feeling, not the first. We get this wrong when we think about designing love. We build it backwards. We start with growth and warmth. No. What's happening is feeling by feeling, we're taking off one plate of armor. If you haven't taken off the first four, you can't hit them with growth.

The simplest thing leaders could do: check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one, every week. Ask them:

How'd you feel about last week?
What are you working on this week?
How can I help?

Do that 52 times a year with each person individually, and you'll hit control, harmony, and over time significance.

Marcus is creating an app with an AI design partner. He doesn't want his kids to grow into a world accepting loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. The app will have a slider: loving/unloving. Let's call it what it is. It's love or not love. It's not okay to live in a loveless world, and we should call out unloving when we see it.

Reflection Questions

What would happen if you asked yourself before every major decision: "How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more?"
Are you designing experiences or just optimizing processes? What's one touchpoint in your customer or employee journey that feels mechanical and could be redesigned to feel more human?
Which of the five feelings (control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth) are you strongest at creating for your team? Which one are you weakest at, and what's one thing you could do this week to improve it?

Time stamps

00:00 Marcus Buckingham Intro

02:21 The Biggest Mistake: Selling My Company

05:55 Can You Scale Without Losing Love?

07:59 Protecting the Founder's Flame

12:03 Why CEOs Can't Say the Word "Love"

15:42 Your Job: Change Human Behavior

17:55 Experiences Drive Behaviors Drive Outcomes

21:42 Love Is Five Sequential Feelings

25:40 Jesse Cole and Josh D'Amaro: Real Love in Action

29:50 How Do You Prove ROI?

31:32 The Local Leader Drives Everything

32:09 The Scatterplot: Same Company, Different Experiences

33:43 ABCs: Authenticity, Beliefs, Customs

35:41 What Love Actually Means: Flourishing

38:28 The Five Feelings Blueprint

39:00 Feeling #1: Control (What World Am I In?)

40:28 Feeling #2: Harmony (Do You Know What I'm Feeling?)

43:43 We Design for Processes, Not Experiences

47:34 Feelings #3, #4, #5: Significance, Warmth, Growth

53:04 The Simplest Practice for All Leaders: Weekly 15-Minute Check-Ins

57:37 EOPCMore Learning

#467: Marcus Buckingham - How Love and Work Must Be Forever Linked

#305: Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall - A Leader's Guide to the Real World

#676: Jesse Cole - Built for the Fans (Obsession & Excellence)

683: Nir Eyal - How to Break Limiting Beliefs, Create Your Own Luck, Transform Your Relationships, and Start Seeing Opportunities Everyone Else Is Missing

2026-04-12 23:00:0058:15

Order my new book, The Price of Becoming... www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Order my new book, The Price of Becoming... www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest: Nir Eyal is a Stanford lecturer, behavioral designer, and bestselling author who has spent his career at the intersection of psychology, technology, and human behavior. He's one of the most rigorous thinkers alive on why people do what they do, and what it actually takes to change.

Notes

Julie introduced Nir to the Turnaround technique. Nir and Julie met the first week of college in 1997 and have been married since 2001. A big part of the genesis of Beyond Belief came from Julie introducing Nir to this technique called The Turnaround, which comes out of the work from Byron Katie, that she used with her mother to repair the relationship she had with her mom.

A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation and increases suffering. It does that by creating short-term relief from discomfort. "I hate public speaking, I'm no good at public speaking, so I'm going to avoid public speaking." You reduce your motivation to go on stage, providing yourself temporary relief, but long-term suffering.

The Turnaround helps you collect a portfolio of perspectives. The problem is that our minds hate changing beliefs. We use these beliefs to justify passivity. A turnaround helps you identify many different kinds of beliefs, and then you can choose the ones that serve you versus the ones that hurt you.

Your conscious mind can only process 50 bits of information per second. Your brain is processing 11 million bits of information (the sound of a voice, light hitting your retinas, the ambient temperature of the room). Your conscious mind is not aware of all this. Your brain has to filter out and leaves you with 0.00045% of the information that's coming in.

The brain sees reality through a tiny pinhole of attention. It's the difference between reading a simple sentence or War and Peace twice every second. In order to make sense of all this data coming in, the brain has to see reality through a tiny pinhole of attention, just a tiny fraction of reality you're actually consciously aware of.

The brain makes predictions based on our beliefs. How does the brain make sense of all this information? It has to make predictions, and those predictions are based on our beliefs. We call this predictive processing. Everything you experience, everything you see, everything you feel, and everything you're inspired to do is determined by the three powers of belief.

The three powers of belief:

The power of attention changes what you see
The power of anticipation changes how you feel
The power of agency changes what you do

Limiting beliefs hide themselves. A limiting belief, by definition, is hidden because we think that what we see is accurate. We all think that what we experience is a fact. "I saw it for myself. I'm stating my truth. This is the way things are." But that's not true at all. The way the brain processes information is woefully inadequate to put that burden of truth on it.

The Turnaround uses four questions to challenge limiting beliefs.

Is it true?
Is it 100% absolutely true?
Who am I when I hold onto this belief?
Who would I be without this belief?

Nir's story: "My mother is too judgmental and hard to please." Nir sent his mom flowers for her 74th birthday. She said, "Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead. Don't order from that florist again." Nir instantly became his 13-year-old self and blurted out, "Well, that's the last time I order you flowers again."

Venting is terrible. It does nothing but reinforce your beliefs about people because not only do we not see reality clearly, we certainly don't see other people clearly. We see our beliefs about people. We don't see reality as it is. We see reality as we are.

The Turnaround opened up new possibilities for Nir. In 30 seconds, he determined: (1) that belief may not be true, (2) it doesn't really serve him, and (3) there might be a better way to be. He could actually be happier without that belief.

The brain hates changing its mind. The turnaround asks you to look at the diametric opposite of your belief. We have a psychological immune system. Just like if you get a splinter in your finger, your body will mount an immune defense. The same happens in our minds. The more you feel "that's crazy, I don't wanna think that way, that can't be true," the more you need to explore it.

Nir found four beliefs instead of one:

My mother is too judgmental and hard to please
My mother is NOT too judgmental and hard to please (maybe she was just conveying information)
I am too judgmental and hard to please (I had rehearsed a script of effusive praise I wanted)
I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself (I felt incompetent that the flowers didn't work out)

"Beliefs are tools, not truths." This is the most important thing Nir can convey. Which one of those four beliefs is true? All of them. None of them. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths.

Facts, faith, and beliefs are three different things.

A fact is an objective truth about reality. It is so whether you believe it or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. That is an objective fact.
Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence.
A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.

Most problems come from thinking faith is a fact. Too many people think that their faith is a fact, and the things they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs, which are changeable. That's where most of our problems come from: interpersonal problems, personal problems, geopolitical problems.

The original belief left Nir powerless. "My mom is too judgmental and hard to please" only has one way out: she has to change so I could be happy. Good luck. The other three beliefs, Nir could do something about. They were in his control. That enabled him. It freed him. It was liberating.

Misattribution of emotion: hurt people hurt people. When we feel bad inside, if you've ever been bullied or been a bully yourself, this is always what happens. When you feel crappy on the inside, the first person you can find, you're going to punch him in the face, either physically or verbally, because you feel crappy. That's what Nir did to his mom because he felt bad. So now she should feel bad.

How to handle narcissists: acknowledge they're operating with the best tools they have. That person is a narcissist? Awesome, because you don't have to be around them. But narcissists are operating from the best tools they have. It doesn't mean you have to include them in your life, but how do you stop suffering because of them? Acknowledge they are, and reduce your suffering around them.

Nir called his mom and apologized. He said, "I'm so sorry for my behavior. I realize that you were trying to help me. You were conveying information about the flowers, so I wouldn't order from that florist. Thank you for that." That call completely changed their relationship.

We expect people to change, but we can't even change ourselves. We can't do the simplest habits like eating better, exercising more, and managing our time. Why are we expecting other people to change?

"Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt." When Nir's daughter was born, and he held her for the first time, he felt overwhelming adoration. Five minutes ago, she didn't exist, and now he loved her more than anything. He gave her complete, total benefit of the doubt. Why? She didn't do anything. She never sent him flowers. Babies poop, they need food all the time, they cry. But he never said, "she's crying to annoy me." We give babies the ultimate benefit of the doubt.

Why don't we give adults the benefit of the doubt? When those babies grow up and become adults, we don't give them the benefit of the doubt. The narcissist in your life, the person who offends you, the person that hurts you, those are the best tools they have. It doesn't mean you have to be with them or include them in your life. The requirement is: how do you figure out how to stop suffering, to be at peace?

We're constantly judging everything. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. Jerk. There's a line at the burrito place. The business thing didn't work out. The stock market goes down. Judging, judging, judging all day long. Good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Expecting things to be different than they are. These are all limiting beliefs, and all they do is make us suffer.

"We don't have relationship problems. We have belief problems." The problem is your belief that something should be different from what it is. It's like asking Nir's daughter to speak Russian. She can't speak Russian. What am I expecting? She doesn't have that ability. Why should I have expectations that people should meet my expectations?

Nir and Julie now collaborate instead of argue. Since they started using the Turnaround technique, they used to have disagreements. Now they collaborate. If there's a very smart person, much smarter than Nir, who has an opinion, who he respects deeply and loves and admires, why would he fight with that person? He would collaborate with that person.

Different perspectives are an asset to collect. If Nir sees things one way and Julie sees them differently, that's amazing. A new perspective. It's like collecting Pokémon cards. You've gotta get 'em all. Now with more perspectives, he can pick the best one.

Writing sessions with Tim Urban, Shane Snow, and Mark Manson. Nir would work on his own and get distracted. But when he had other authors around him, they would sit down, write for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break, write for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break. They'd do that for three hours every morning. Not only is it inspiring, it keeps you on track.

Find a focus friend. Somebody you can go to a coffee shop with and say, "I really need to focus. Let's keep each other accountable. Let's just work next to each other." Just like working side by side and seeing that other person also working on the stuff they should be working on keeps you accountable.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Sometimes it can be tricky to be in a room with people who are super successful. Nir was the least successful author there at the time. You have to put it in perspective and know it's not about the outcome, it's about the journey. The best thing you can do is do the work.

Time boxing is better than to-do lists. To-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for personal productivity because there's no constraint. You can always add more things to a to-do list. You come home from work every day and say, "I still have all these things I haven't done on my to-do list."

A time box calendar is the most well-researched time management technique. What's much more effective than a to-do list is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. This is called an implementation intention. The goal now becomes not to finish anything. The goal is to work on that task for as long as you said you would without distraction.

Make time to do the work, to turn your values into time. That's the secret to avoiding comparison. You put in the time to do the work. When you have it on your calendar, the goal is doing the work, not finishing the work.

Lucky people literally see reality differently. They did a study where they asked people who were self-described lucky or unlucky to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. The unlucky people took on average two and a half minutes. The lucky people took 11 seconds. Why? On page two, one of the images said in big, bold text, "There are 43 images in this paper. Collect your prize." The unlucky people never saw it. Their brains took in the information, but it never became part of their conscious awareness.

Entrepreneurs see $100 bills on the ground when everybody's walking over them. That is driven by beliefs. You believe you can will things to change. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, talked about his reality distortion field. That's exactly what this is. Entrepreneurs tend to be way more optimistic. They believe that lucky things happen to them, and so they see opportunities.

"With our luck, it's going to be a bright, beautiful, sunny day." So many people say "with my luck" and follow it with something bad or negative. This belief and mindset of saying "with our luck" followed by something extremely positive is contagious and enjoyable.

"Everything good happens to us." Nir's family says this whenever something good happens. There's no line at the TSA. "Everything good happens to us." The food was good. "Everything good happens to us." Little things, big things. Do more good things happen to them than bad things? Maybe, maybe not. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. When you believe those things, you notice them more. Your life actually does seem magical, blessed, like you're always lucky.

60% of opportunities are provoked luck. They studied super successful entrepreneurs and VCs and found that 60% of their opportunities provoked luck. They provoked the lucky thing that happened. How? Something as simple as sending a note of gratitude. Never hold back on a compliment. They're free. You get so much back from them.

Thank you notes create provoked luck. Tina Seelig writes thank you notes compulsively. She wrote a thank you note to somebody. The thank-you note landed on someone's desk. You're sitting at your desk with things to do, and here's a thank you note, and to the right is your laptop with an email about a new opportunity. Who is going to get the call about that opportunity? You're top of mind. "Ryan's such a nice guy. He sent me that note. I'm going to call Ryan about that opportunity."

Changing Nir's relationship with his mom changed his relationship with his daughter. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. When Nir started giving his daughter the benefit of the doubt, it pushed him to figure it out with his mom because he needed to give her the benefit of the doubt as he would want his daughter to give him the same. He's doing his best. He's not perfect. He makes mistakes. Those are the tools he's got.

You go from loving your kid to liking them. Nir and his daughter went skiing together for his birthday. The entire three hour car ride up, the entire three-hour car ride back, they were chatting. They wrote an article together in the car. You always love your kid. As soon as your kid's born, you love them. But if you do your job right and things fall into place and you're very lucky, you like them. And that's a game changer.

Reflection Questions

What limiting belief are you holding onto where someone else has to change? What are three other ways to look at that same situation that would put the control back in your hands?
Are you treating your beliefs like facts or like tools? Which beliefs are you holding because they're true, and which ones are you holding because they serve you?
Who in your life are you not giving the benefit of the doubt? What would change if you gave them some grace?

More Learning:

#554 - Tim Urban: Become a High Rung Thinker

#342 - Shane Snow: The #1 Leadership Skill is Intellectual Humility

#596 - Arthur Brooks: The Art & Science of Happiness

Podcast Chapters

02:19 Julie Introduced Nir to The Turnaround

04:28 Limiting Beliefs: How They Sap Motivation

07:51 Your Brain Filters 99.99% of Reality

10:17 The Flower Story: When Nir Became His 13-Year-Old Self

12:41 The Four Questions That Change Everything

15:25 Finding Four Beliefs Instead of One

19:08 Beliefs Are Tools, Not Truths

22:52 Narcissists Are Using Their Best Tools

27:53 Focus Friends: Writing with Tim Urban, Shane Snow, and Mark Manson

31:09 Comparison Is the Thief of Joy

32:04 Time Boxing Beats To-Do Lists

35:04 We Don't Have Relationship Problems, We Have Belief Problems

35:59 Why Nir and Julie Don't Fight Anymore

38:25 Explaining Worlds vs Changing People

42:03 You Can't Write Clearly If You Can't Think Clearly

43:23 Lucky People See $100 Bills on the Ground

46:29 "With Our Luck, It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Day"

49:38 Thank You Notes Create Provoked Luck

52:42 From Loving Your Kid to Liking Them

56:16 EOPC

683: Nir Eyal - How to Break Limiting Beliefs, Create Your Own Luck, Transform Your Relationships, and Start Seeing Opportunities Everyone Else Is Missing

2026-04-12 23:00:0058:15

Order my new book, The Price of Becoming... www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest: Nir Eyal is a Stanford lecturer, behavioral designer, and bestselling author who has spent his career at the intersection of psychology, technology, and human behavior. He's one of the most rigorous thinkers alive on why people do what they do, and what it actually takes to change.

Notes

Julie introduced Nir to the Turnaround technique. Nir and Julie met the first week of college in 1997 and have been married since 2001. A big part of the genesis of Beyond Belief came from Julie introducing Nir to this technique called The Turnaround, which comes out of the work from Byron Katie, that she used with her mother to repair the relationship she had with her mom.

A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation and increases suffering. It does that by creating short-term relief from discomfort. "I hate public speaking, I'm no good at public speaking, so I'm going to avoid public speaking." You reduce your motivation to go on stage, providing yourself temporary relief, but long-term suffering.

The Turnaround helps you collect a portfolio of perspectives. The problem is that our minds hate changing beliefs. We use these beliefs to justify passivity. A turnaround helps you identify many different kinds of beliefs, and then you can choose the ones that serve you versus the ones that hurt you.

Your conscious mind can only process 50 bits of information per second. Your brain is processing 11 million bits of information (the sound of a voice, light hitting your retinas, the ambient temperature of the room). Your conscious mind is not aware of all this. Your brain has to filter out and leaves you with 0.00045% of the information that's coming in.

The brain sees reality through a tiny pinhole of attention. It's the difference between reading a simple sentence or War and Peace twice every second. In order to make sense of all this data coming in, the brain has to see reality through a tiny pinhole of attention, just a tiny fraction of reality you're actually consciously aware of.

The brain makes predictions based on our beliefs. How does the brain make sense of all this information? It has to make predictions, and those predictions are based on our beliefs. We call this predictive processing. Everything you experience, everything you see, everything you feel, and everything you're inspired to do is determined by the three powers of belief.

The three powers of belief:

The power of attention changes what you see
The power of anticipation changes how you feel
The power of agency changes what you do

Limiting beliefs hide themselves. A limiting belief, by definition, is hidden because we think that what we see is accurate. We all think that what we experience is a fact. "I saw it for myself. I'm stating my truth. This is the way things are." But that's not true at all. The way the brain processes information is woefully inadequate to put that burden of truth on it.

The Turnaround uses four questions to challenge limiting beliefs.

Is it true?
Is it 100% absolutely true?
Who am I when I hold onto this belief?
Who would I be without this belief?

Nir's story: "My mother is too judgmental and hard to please." Nir sent his mom flowers for her 74th birthday. She said, "Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead. Don't order from that florist again." Nir instantly became his 13-year-old self and blurted out, "Well, that's the last time I order you flowers again."

Venting is terrible. It does nothing but reinforce your beliefs about people because not only do we not see reality clearly, we certainly don't see other people clearly. We see our beliefs about people. We don't see reality as it is. We see reality as we are.

The Turnaround opened up new possibilities for Nir. In 30 seconds, he determined: (1) that belief may not be true, (2) it doesn't really serve him, and (3) there might be a better way to be. He could actually be happier without that belief.

The brain hates changing its mind. The turnaround asks you to look at the diametric opposite of your belief. We have a psychological immune system. Just like if you get a splinter in your finger, your body will mount an immune defense. The same happens in our minds. The more you feel "that's crazy, I don't wanna think that way, that can't be true," the more you need to explore it.

Nir found four beliefs instead of one:

My mother is too judgmental and hard to please
My mother is NOT too judgmental and hard to please (maybe she was just conveying information)
I am too judgmental and hard to please (I had rehearsed a script of effusive praise I wanted)
I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself (I felt incompetent that the flowers didn't work out)

"Beliefs are tools, not truths." This is the most important thing Nir can convey. Which one of those four beliefs is true? All of them. None of them. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths.

Facts, faith, and beliefs are three different things.

A fact is an objective truth about reality. It is so whether you believe it or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. That is an objective fact.
Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence.
A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.

Most problems come from thinking faith is a fact. Too many people think that their faith is a fact, and the things they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs, which are changeable. That's where most of our problems come from: interpersonal problems, personal problems, geopolitical problems.

The original belief left Nir powerless. "My mom is too judgmental and hard to please" only has one way out: she has to change so I could be happy. Good luck. The other three beliefs, Nir could do something about. They were in his control. That enabled him. It freed him. It was liberating.

Misattribution of emotion: hurt people hurt people. When we feel bad inside, if you've ever been bullied or been a bully yourself, this is always what happens. When you feel crappy on the inside, the first person you can find, you're going to punch him in the face, either physically or verbally, because you feel crappy. That's what Nir did to his mom because he felt bad. So now she should feel bad.

How to handle narcissists: acknowledge they're operating with the best tools they have. That person is a narcissist? Awesome, because you don't have to be around them. But narcissists are operating from the best tools they have. It doesn't mean you have to include them in your life, but how do you stop suffering because of them? Acknowledge they are, and reduce your suffering around them.

Nir called his mom and apologized. He said, "I'm so sorry for my behavior. I realize that you were trying to help me. You were conveying information about the flowers, so I wouldn't order from that florist. Thank you for that." That call completely changed their relationship.

We expect people to change, but we can't even change ourselves. We can't do the simplest habits like eating better, exercising more, and managing our time. Why are we expecting other people to change?

"Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt." When Nir's daughter was born, and he held her for the first time, he felt overwhelming adoration. Five minutes ago, she didn't exist, and now he loved her more than anything. He gave her complete, total benefit of the doubt. Why? She didn't do anything. She never sent him flowers. Babies poop, they need food all the time, they cry. But he never said, "she's crying to annoy me." We give babies the ultimate benefit of the doubt.

Why don't we give adults the benefit of the doubt? When those babies grow up and become adults, we don't give them the benefit of the doubt. The narcissist in your life, the person who offends you, the person that hurts you, those are the best tools they have. It doesn't mean you have to be with them or include them in your life. The requirement is: how do you figure out how to stop suffering, to be at peace?

We're constantly judging everything. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. Jerk. There's a line at the burrito place. The business thing didn't work out. The stock market goes down. Judging, judging, judging all day long. Good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Expecting things to be different than they are. These are all limiting beliefs, and all they do is make us suffer.

"We don't have relationship problems. We have belief problems." The problem is your belief that something should be different from what it is. It's like asking Nir's daughter to speak Russian. She can't speak Russian. What am I expecting? She doesn't have that ability. Why should I have expectations that people should meet my expectations?

Nir and Julie now collaborate instead of argue. Since they started using the Turnaround technique, they used to have disagreements. Now they collaborate. If there's a very smart person, much smarter than Nir, who has an opinion, who he respects deeply and loves and admires, why would he fight with that person? He would collaborate with that person.

Different perspectives are an asset to collect. If Nir sees things one way and Julie sees them differently, that's amazing. A new perspective. It's like collecting Pokémon cards. You've gotta get 'em all. Now with more perspectives, he can pick the best one.

Writing sessions with Tim Urban, Shane Snow, and Mark Manson. Nir would work on his own and get distracted. But when he had other authors around him, they would sit down, write for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break, write for 45 minutes, take a 15-minute break. They'd do that for three hours every morning. Not only is it inspiring, it keeps you on track.

Find a focus friend. Somebody you can go to a coffee shop with and say, "I really need to focus. Let's keep each other accountable. Let's just work next to each other." Just like working side by side and seeing that other person also working on the stuff they should be working on keeps you accountable.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Sometimes it can be tricky to be in a room with people who are super successful. Nir was the least successful author there at the time. You have to put it in perspective and know it's not about the outcome, it's about the journey. The best thing you can do is do the work.

Time boxing is better than to-do lists. To-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for personal productivity because there's no constraint. You can always add more things to a to-do list. You come home from work every day and say, "I still have all these things I haven't done on my to-do list."

A time box calendar is the most well-researched time management technique. What's much more effective than a to-do list is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. This is called an implementation intention. The goal now becomes not to finish anything. The goal is to work on that task for as long as you said you would without distraction.

Make time to do the work, to turn your values into time. That's the secret to avoiding comparison. You put in the time to do the work. When you have it on your calendar, the goal is doing the work, not finishing the work.

Lucky people literally see reality differently. They did a study where they asked people who were self-described lucky or unlucky to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. The unlucky people took on average two and a half minutes. The lucky people took 11 seconds. Why? On page two, one of the images said in big, bold text, "There are 43 images in this paper. Collect your prize." The unlucky people never saw it. Their brains took in the information, but it never became part of their conscious awareness.

Entrepreneurs see $100 bills on the ground when everybody's walking over them. That is driven by beliefs. You believe you can will things to change. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, talked about his reality distortion field. That's exactly what this is. Entrepreneurs tend to be way more optimistic. They believe that lucky things happen to them, and so they see opportunities.

"With our luck, it's going to be a bright, beautiful, sunny day." So many people say "with my luck" and follow it with something bad or negative. This belief and mindset of saying "with our luck" followed by something extremely positive is contagious and enjoyable.

"Everything good happens to us." Nir's family says this whenever something good happens. There's no line at the TSA. "Everything good happens to us." The food was good. "Everything good happens to us." Little things, big things. Do more good things happen to them than bad things? Maybe, maybe not. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. When you believe those things, you notice them more. Your life actually does seem magical, blessed, like you're always lucky.

60% of opportunities are provoked luck. They studied super successful entrepreneurs and VCs and found that 60% of their opportunities provoked luck. They provoked the lucky thing that happened. How? Something as simple as sending a note of gratitude. Never hold back on a compliment. They're free. You get so much back from them.

Thank you notes create provoked luck. Tina Seelig writes thank you notes compulsively. She wrote a thank you note to somebody. The thank-you note landed on someone's desk. You're sitting at your desk with things to do, and here's a thank you note, and to the right is your laptop with an email about a new opportunity. Who is going to get the call about that opportunity? You're top of mind. "Ryan's such a nice guy. He sent me that note. I'm going to call Ryan about that opportunity."

Changing Nir's relationship with his mom changed his relationship with his daughter. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. When Nir started giving his daughter the benefit of the doubt, it pushed him to figure it out with his mom because he needed to give her the benefit of the doubt as he would want his daughter to give him the same. He's doing his best. He's not perfect. He makes mistakes. Those are the tools he's got.

You go from loving your kid to liking them. Nir and his daughter went skiing together for his birthday. The entire three hour car ride up, the entire three-hour car ride back, they were chatting. They wrote an article together in the car. You always love your kid. As soon as your kid's born, you love them. But if you do your job right and things fall into place and you're very lucky, you like them. And that's a game changer.

Reflection Questions

What limiting belief are you holding onto where someone else has to change? What are three other ways to look at that same situation that would put the control back in your hands?
Are you treating your beliefs like facts or like tools? Which beliefs are you holding because they're true, and which ones are you holding because they serve you?
Who in your life are you not giving the benefit of the doubt? What would change if you gave them some grace?

More Learning:

#554 - Tim Urban: Become a High Rung Thinker

#342 - Shane Snow: The #1 Leadership Skill is Intellectual Humility

#596 - Arthur Brooks: The Art & Science of Happiness

Podcast Chapters

02:19 Julie Introduced Nir to The Turnaround

04:28 Limiting Beliefs: How They Sap Motivation

07:51 Your Brain Filters 99.99% of Reality

10:17 The Flower Story: When Nir Became His 13-Year-Old Self

12:41 The Four Questions That Change Everything

15:25 Finding Four Beliefs Instead of One

19:08 Beliefs Are Tools, Not Truths

22:52 Narcissists Are Using Their Best Tools

27:53 Focus Friends: Writing with Tim Urban, Shane Snow, and Mark Manson

31:09 Comparison Is the Thief of Joy

32:04 Time Boxing Beats To-Do Lists

35:04 We Don't Have Relationship Problems, We Have Belief Problems

35:59 Why Nir and Julie Don't Fight Anymore

38:25 Explaining Worlds vs Changing People

42:03 You Can't Write Clearly If You Can't Think Clearly

43:23 Lucky People See $100 Bills on the Ground

46:29 "With Our Luck, It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Day"

49:38 Thank You Notes Create Provoked Luck

52:42 From Loving Your Kid to Liking Them

56:16 EOPC

682: Will Guidara - Obsession, Adversity, Learning From Danny Meyer, and The Only Competitive Advantage That Lasts... Unreasonable Hospitality

2026-04-05 23:00:0058:10

My new book is The Price of Becoming. To order, go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

My new book is The Price of Becoming. To order, go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest: Will Guidara is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant he took from a struggling two-star establishment to become the number one restaurant in the world. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, the host of the Welcome Conference, and a co-producer on the Emmy award-winning series The Bear.

Notes:

Key Learnings

"Obsession is a beautiful thing when you can grab it by the tail." This quote is from chef Sean Brock when he opened his pizza place in Nashville. For Will, obsession is when you care so much about something that you give all of yourself to bring its most fully realized version to life.

What obsession means to Will: "Loving with every ounce of my being the pursuit of something." He can't imagine a life where he doesn't have something to be obsessed about.

When you lose yourself in the pursuit of something, that's when it gets ugly. Obsession is a beautiful thing if you can grab it by the tail. For those that can't, it becomes ugly. You need to hold onto yourself while obsessively pursuing whatever it is.

Find a hobby to be obsessed with before you retire. Will is 46 and has seen people he's long looked up to finally retire in their late seventies without a hobby they're obsessed with. They're feeling listless and without purpose. He's thinking about this now for his future: start to become obsessed with a hobby so that when you do one day retire, there's something else to fall into.

"Adversity is a terrible thing to waste." You cannot always control what life throws at you, but you can always control how you react to those things, what you choose to learn from them, how you allow them to fuel your competitive spirit, the perspective you glean from those moments.

Allow yourself and your team to feel the weight of the disappointment. When there's a moment of adversity, leaders hear "adversity is a terrible thing to waste" and immediately shift into cheerleader mode. That is not the right thing to do. You need to allow yourself to be as human as humanly possible, and give your team the grace to fully feel the weight of that disappointment.

Sometimes adversity sucks, and you just need to be able to say, "This sucks. I don't feel good. I feel bad. Let's feel bad for a moment."

Suffer together. When your team is going through adversity, you want to know that your leader thinks it sucks, too. It's good to feel bad alongside a community, but then after a measure of time, that's when you say, okay, now how do we grow from this? How do we use this to compel us forward?

Be thankful for the tough moments. Will can look back at every tough moment with gratitude. The girl who broke his heart two years before he met his now wife, he's so grateful that she did. Breaking up with his business partner and selling his restaurant company felt like the worst thing ever, but he wouldn't have written Unreasonable Hospitality had that not happened.

"Who is a restaurateur without restaurants?" COVID forced Will to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next. When he sold the company, two days later, he had a full-blown identity crisis. COVID gave him the gift of forcing him to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next, as opposed to running back to do the thing he'd always done.

Team first. "The best way to make sure that you are taking care of your customers is to start by taking care of your team." This is what Will learned from Danny Meyer.

The power of language to define a culture. How beautiful and impactful it is when you take the time to clearly and succinctly articulate your values through language. Danny spoke in "isms." Every time he gave them an ism, it was clear that thing mattered to him, so it needed to matter to the team as well.

Cult is short for culture. Will's friends from college joked that he worked for a cult, but cult is short for culture. The funny thing is, they worked for companies that lacked a culture. Every great team feels a little cultish, and that's because of the leader.

Hospitality is the advantage. The only competitive advantage that exists over the long term comes through hospitality. Every company is trying to identify its competitive advantage: what is the thing about the business that will prevent someone else from coming in and taking away its customers? Those conversations almost always center around the quality of the product or the strength of the brand. Here's the thing: it does not just matter how good the product is, and it does not just matter how strong the brand is, because eventually someone's going to come around and build a better product or create a stronger brand.

Relationships matter. Hospitality comes through consistently, generously, and creatively investing in relationships. Those take a long time to build, and if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you will earn takes a very long time to erode.

McDonald's vs. Chick-fil-A. The hospitality difference. McDonald's does some of the coolest marketing things in the world. Their product is consistent, and there was probably a season for a very long time where they were the best burger chain out there. Compare that to Chick-fil-A: if you ask 10 people who makes a better chicken sandwich, a lot of people would say other people make better chicken sandwiches than Chick-fil-A. But people are still loyal to Chick-fil-A, not because of the brand, not because of the product, but because of the way that they make people feel.

Little gestures go a long way. Chick-fil-A does things like "my pleasure" and refilling your drinks in the dining room. These little gestures go a long way because we are much less likely to leave one company and go to another, even if the other company is better priced and the product is a little bit better.

Food is just a conduit through which to express hospitality. As many stories as you hear about Chick-fil-A doing little and big things to make people feel seen, you don't hear those stories about McDonald's. And that's not an accident. One company has chosen to invest all of itself in pursuit of that. The other one has not. If you're in the business of serving other people, these opportunities exist for you in an endless way.

Find the smallest touchpoints. Every experience you're serving is filled with lots of big and little touchpoints. The problem is so many companies focus on only the most obvious touchpoints without realizing that there is impact to be made with each one of them.

Hospitality is a craft, a muscle that you can strengthen. Will created the Welcome Conference because he wanted someone who was a server at a restaurant who had dreams to own their own restaurant to have a place where they could learn about the craft of hospitality.

What you can't afford to do with money, you can afford to do with time. Will can't afford the kind of speaking fees that people who inspire others on stage at his conference deserve, so he came up with a more creative way to show appreciation: a dinner the night before. It's about community, because the people who take that stage have the responsibility to create the conditions through which attendees can come together and form community. And it's impossible to form a community for others until you first feel a sense of community amongst yourselves.

There needs to be a good reason for the event to exist. Will created the Welcome Conference years ago because there were chef conferences all over the world, and he was always the only dining room person speaking at them. He wanted a place for the dining room people to have community.

Gift bags are a terrible idea. People think the more they put in the bag, the more hospitable they are. It's usually junk.

"I look at something, design the version of that I wish existed, work obsessively to bring that vision to life, and then welcome others into my imagination."

What makes a great conference is meeting the people at those events. The best events are about the people in between the meetings. That time matters.

Energy in a room is so important. Will is one of the most extroverted people in the world, but if he walks into a cocktail party and he doesn't know anyone, he seizes up. He doesn't like it. He likes to be around people he knows.

Be a connector. A month before Will's event, he realized many people were coming alone, which he wasn't expecting. They sent an email to all of them and said, "We saw that you're coming alone. We have an idea. If you'd like to meet some people, let us know." They set up dinner reservations at Will's favorite restaurants in Nashville and did some matchmaking. Those 40 people ended up coming into the beginning of the conference the next day already like this one big, awesome community.

Make the "yes" as easy as possible. Will gets Emmy screeners, and some people send DVDs (which he doesn't have a player for), while others send QR codes, which make it very easy to watch. The lesson: make it easy for people to say yes to what you're offering.

Shop your own business. Stay in your own hotel. Until you've actually been on the receiving end of whatever you're serving, you have an inability to see all the things you're doing wrong or the opportunities you have to do more things right.

"Never let a gracious impulse pass." There's the devil and angel on your shoulder. The devil will tell you how hard it will be. Don't listen to that. If you are going to shop your own business, when an idea pops up, do something about it. Get out of the sea of mediocrity.

The Unreasonable Hospitality Guide is the "how." There are exercises on how to build a team, how to build a culture of hospitality, how to work with your team to create magic, daily huddles to move the needle, the dreamweaver concept, etc.

"I've never once regretted caring more. I have regretted not caring enough." People can't always notice things, but they can feel it.

Reflection Questions

What are you obsessed with? If you had to retire tomorrow, what hobby would you fall into? If you don't have one, what can you start becoming obsessed with now?
What adversity are you currently facing? Have you allowed yourself and your team to fully feel the weight of that disappointment before shifting into problem-solving mode?
Map out every single touchpoint in your customer experience. Which ones is nobody else thinking about? How can you make those more awesome?

More Learning

#545 - Will Guidara: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

#372 - Will Guidara: The Nobility of Service

Podcast Chapters

01:00 The Price of Becoming
02:16 The Correlation of Obsession and Excellence
08:06 Adversity Is Fuel
11:38 COVID Identity Reset
15:19 Lessons From Danny Meyer
20:36 The Hospitality Advantage
26:01 Touchpoint Experience Audit
28:55 Welcome Conference Preview
30:44 Creating Community Over Dinner
32:02 Creating A Magical Event
33:35 Why Events Must Exist
35:30 Designing Hospitable Touchpoints
40:42 Make It Easy To Say Yes
45:58 Never Let a Gracious Impulse Pass
47:29 Unreasonable Hospitality Field Guide: The How To
51:20 Obsession, Care, And Excellence
55:53 EOPC

682: Will Guidara - Obsession, Adversity, Learning From Danny Meyer, and The Only Competitive Advantage That Lasts... Unreasonable Hospitality

2026-04-05 23:00:0058:10

My new book is The Price of Becoming. To order, go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

My Guest: Will Guidara is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant he took from a struggling two-star establishment to become the number one restaurant in the world. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, the host of the Welcome Conference, and a co-producer on the Emmy award-winning series The Bear.

Notes:

Key Learnings

"Obsession is a beautiful thing when you can grab it by the tail." This quote is from chef Sean Brock when he opened his pizza place in Nashville. For Will, obsession is when you care so much about something that you give all of yourself to bring its most fully realized version to life.

What obsession means to Will: "Loving with every ounce of my being the pursuit of something." He can't imagine a life where he doesn't have something to be obsessed about.

When you lose yourself in the pursuit of something, that's when it gets ugly. Obsession is a beautiful thing if you can grab it by the tail. For those that can't, it becomes ugly. You need to hold onto yourself while obsessively pursuing whatever it is.

Find a hobby to be obsessed with before you retire. Will is 46 and has seen people he's long looked up to finally retire in their late seventies without a hobby they're obsessed with. They're feeling listless and without purpose. He's thinking about this now for his future: start to become obsessed with a hobby so that when you do one day retire, there's something else to fall into.

"Adversity is a terrible thing to waste." You cannot always control what life throws at you, but you can always control how you react to those things, what you choose to learn from them, how you allow them to fuel your competitive spirit, the perspective you glean from those moments.

Allow yourself and your team to feel the weight of the disappointment. When there's a moment of adversity, leaders hear "adversity is a terrible thing to waste" and immediately shift into cheerleader mode. That is not the right thing to do. You need to allow yourself to be as human as humanly possible, and give your team the grace to fully feel the weight of that disappointment.

Sometimes adversity sucks, and you just need to be able to say, "This sucks. I don't feel good. I feel bad. Let's feel bad for a moment."

Suffer together. When your team is going through adversity, you want to know that your leader thinks it sucks, too. It's good to feel bad alongside a community, but then after a measure of time, that's when you say, okay, now how do we grow from this? How do we use this to compel us forward?

Be thankful for the tough moments. Will can look back at every tough moment with gratitude. The girl who broke his heart two years before he met his now wife, he's so grateful that she did. Breaking up with his business partner and selling his restaurant company felt like the worst thing ever, but he wouldn't have written Unreasonable Hospitality had that not happened.

"Who is a restaurateur without restaurants?" COVID forced Will to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next. When he sold the company, two days later, he had a full-blown identity crisis. COVID gave him the gift of forcing him to find the space to decide what he wanted to do next, as opposed to running back to do the thing he'd always done.

Team first. "The best way to make sure that you are taking care of your customers is to start by taking care of your team." This is what Will learned from Danny Meyer.

The power of language to define a culture. How beautiful and impactful it is when you take the time to clearly and succinctly articulate your values through language. Danny spoke in "isms." Every time he gave them an ism, it was clear that thing mattered to him, so it needed to matter to the team as well.

Cult is short for culture. Will's friends from college joked that he worked for a cult, but cult is short for culture. The funny thing is, they worked for companies that lacked a culture. Every great team feels a little cultish, and that's because of the leader.

Hospitality is the advantage. The only competitive advantage that exists over the long term comes through hospitality. Every company is trying to identify its competitive advantage: what is the thing about the business that will prevent someone else from coming in and taking away its customers? Those conversations almost always center around the quality of the product or the strength of the brand. Here's the thing: it does not just matter how good the product is, and it does not just matter how strong the brand is, because eventually someone's going to come around and build a better product or create a stronger brand.

Relationships matter. Hospitality comes through consistently, generously, and creatively investing in relationships. Those take a long time to build, and if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you will earn takes a very long time to erode.

McDonald's vs. Chick-fil-A. The hospitality difference. McDonald's does some of the coolest marketing things in the world. Their product is consistent, and there was probably a season for a very long time where they were the best burger chain out there. Compare that to Chick-fil-A: if you ask 10 people who makes a better chicken sandwich, a lot of people would say other people make better chicken sandwiches than Chick-fil-A. But people are still loyal to Chick-fil-A, not because of the brand, not because of the product, but because of the way that they make people feel.

Little gestures go a long way. Chick-fil-A does things like "my pleasure" and refilling your drinks in the dining room. These little gestures go a long way because we are much less likely to leave one company and go to another, even if the other company is better priced and the product is a little bit better.

Food is just a conduit through which to express hospitality. As many stories as you hear about Chick-fil-A doing little and big things to make people feel seen, you don't hear those stories about McDonald's. And that's not an accident. One company has chosen to invest all of itself in pursuit of that. The other one has not. If you're in the business of serving other people, these opportunities exist for you in an endless way.

Find the smallest touchpoints. Every experience you're serving is filled with lots of big and little touchpoints. The problem is so many companies focus on only the most obvious touchpoints without realizing that there is impact to be made with each one of them.

Hospitality is a craft, a muscle that you can strengthen. Will created the Welcome Conference because he wanted someone who was a server at a restaurant who had dreams to own their own restaurant to have a place where they could learn about the craft of hospitality.

What you can't afford to do with money, you can afford to do with time. Will can't afford the kind of speaking fees that people who inspire others on stage at his conference deserve, so he came up with a more creative way to show appreciation: a dinner the night before. It's about community, because the people who take that stage have the responsibility to create the conditions through which attendees can come together and form community. And it's impossible to form a community for others until you first feel a sense of community amongst yourselves.

There needs to be a good reason for the event to exist. Will created the Welcome Conference years ago because there were chef conferences all over the world, and he was always the only dining room person speaking at them. He wanted a place for the dining room people to have community.

Gift bags are a terrible idea. People think the more they put in the bag, the more hospitable they are. It's usually junk.

"I look at something, design the version of that I wish existed, work obsessively to bring that vision to life, and then welcome others into my imagination."

What makes a great conference is meeting the people at those events. The best events are about the people in between the meetings. That time matters.

Energy in a room is so important. Will is one of the most extroverted people in the world, but if he walks into a cocktail party and he doesn't know anyone, he seizes up. He doesn't like it. He likes to be around people he knows.

Be a connector. A month before Will's event, he realized many people were coming alone, which he wasn't expecting. They sent an email to all of them and said, "We saw that you're coming alone. We have an idea. If you'd like to meet some people, let us know." They set up dinner reservations at Will's favorite restaurants in Nashville and did some matchmaking. Those 40 people ended up coming into the beginning of the conference the next day already like this one big, awesome community.

Make the "yes" as easy as possible. Will gets Emmy screeners, and some people send DVDs (which he doesn't have a player for), while others send QR codes, which make it very easy to watch. The lesson: make it easy for people to say yes to what you're offering.

Shop your own business. Stay in your own hotel. Until you've actually been on the receiving end of whatever you're serving, you have an inability to see all the things you're doing wrong or the opportunities you have to do more things right.

"Never let a gracious impulse pass." There's the devil and angel on your shoulder. The devil will tell you how hard it will be. Don't listen to that. If you are going to shop your own business, when an idea pops up, do something about it. Get out of the sea of mediocrity.

"I've never once regretted caring more. I have regretted not caring enough." People can't always notice things, but they can feel it.

Reflection Questions

What are you obsessed with? If you had to retire tomorrow, what hobby would you fall into? If you don't have one, what can you start becoming obsessed with now?
What adversity are you currently facing? Have you allowed yourself and your team to fully feel the weight of that disappointment before shifting into problem-solving mode?
Map out every single touchpoint in your customer experience. Which ones is nobody else thinking about? How can you make those more awesome?

More Learning

#545 - Will Guidara: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

#372 - Will Guidara: The Nobility of Service

Podcast Chapters

01:00 The Price of Becoming
02:16 The Correlation of Obsession and Excellence
08:06 Adversity Is Fuel
11:38 COVID Identity Reset
15:19 Lessons From Danny Meyer
20:36 The Hospitality Advantage
26:01 Touchpoint Experience Audit
28:55 Welcome Conference Preview
30:44 Creating Community Over Dinner
32:02 Creating A Magical Event
33:35 Why Events Must Exist
35:30 Designing Hospitable Touchpoints
40:42 Make It Easy To Say Yes
45:58 Never Let a Gracious Impulse Pass
47:29 Unreasonable Hospitality Field Guide: The How To
51:20 Obsession, Care, And Excellence
55:53 EOPC

681: Clark Lea (Vanderbilt Football Coach) - Rebuilding a Program, Belief as a Practice, Leading Misfits, Ownership Mentality, and Why Relatedness Is Your Edge

2026-03-29 23:00:0038:46

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/becoming to learn more about "The Price of Becoming." -- My new book! Clark Lea is the head football coach at Vanderbilt… He's led one of the best turnaround stories in college football. He got hired as head… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/becoming to learn more about "The Price of Becoming." -- My new book!

Clark Lea is the head football coach at Vanderbilt… He's led one of the best turnaround stories in college football. He got hired as head coach in 2021 to inherit a program that had gone winless the year before. What he's built since is remarkable: a 40–35 upset of No. 1 Alabama, back-to-back SEC Coach of the Year awards, and Vanderbilt's first 10-win season in program history. He's won games and changed the culture.

Key Learnings

Better people make a better team. Development in one area is development in all areas. We're trained to see life in separate lanes (coach here, husband here, father here, student here, athlete here), but when you live that way, you're in constant conflict. Instead, see each person as a circle where all those roles define who we are, and development in one area is development in all areas.

Show up on time, deliver on time, engage resources. If you show up on time, turn your work in on time, and engage the resources that are here to help you, you're not just going to survive, you're going to thrive. This is what it takes to be a great football player and a great student.

"We are not victims in this process." After missing the playoffs, Clark told his team: This is the ground we stand on, this is who we are. Let's be really proud of what we accomplished, but also acknowledge we've fallen short, and that is no one else's fault. Vanderbilt football doesn't need to complain loud enough to get someone to change their mind. We need to play better football.

The joy we can experience is equal and opposite to the pain we can experience. In athletics, you're suspended between the pain and the joy, and the depths of that pain can be excruciating. But the joy we get to experience together in a shared way is unbelievable. The entry fee is the acceptance of that.

?This is exactly where we're supposed to be because there are no mistakes." Driving into work the day Vanderbilt didn't make the playoffs, Clark realized: this is actually exactly where we're supposed to be because there are no mistakes.

As a leader, they have to know who you are. How do you coach a team and make sure your personality shows up on the field? As a head coach, being open, honest, and exposed in front of the team is essential to leadership philosophy.

Take new players through your entire story. Clark does an intake meeting with new players every year that runs an hour and a half. He starts with an image of himself as a kid and takes them through high school, college, his career journey, where he met his wife, where they got married, where each of his kids was born, the highs, lows, all of it. Then he takes them through the state of the program when he got here and every team since.

Share your family with them. Clark's kids are around all the time, his wife comes out to practice, and they talk about things in an open and honest way. That's a gateway to really meaningful relationships, and that's been the bedrock of this program build.

"Change is hard. Change is painful. Are you willing to go to the hard places?" This job has been a personal evolution for Clark, which has allowed for program evolution. He had to change, and he didn't know about going to the hard places until he took this job.

When you get so obsessed with long-term goals, you leverage the moment in such a way that makes it impossible to breathe. Clark thought he was going to be a major league baseball player. He went to Birmingham Southern, won the NAIA World Series, but his skills were diminishing. He was experiencing the yips, a mental block, because he was holding it too tight.

Even though you change places, your problems will follow you. Clark transferred to Belmont for a fresh start, but his skills diminished even further. It was humiliating and challenging to his identity. That year was really difficult.

"Relatedness is our edge." Brotherhood is the most overused word; family is overused. Relatedness is this shared experience we have, a sense of belonging and community, a deep respect, a foundational respect. Once we learn how to see each other at that depth and understand one another and care for one another and fight for one another, we carry that as an edge in our performance.

"Belief is a practice." Clark said four years ago that they're building the best program in the country, and everyone laughed except people internally. The phrasing is important: "We are building the best." That means it's early stages. Hope is passive; belief is an active decision.

Hope is passive; belief is an active decision. When you hope for something, you kind of sit back, and you go, man, I hope that's the case. Belief is, I believe this is the case, so here's the thing I'm going to invest in that puts me on the pathway to actualizing that outcome.

If the belief isn't there, your tolerance for sacrifice won't be there. You're going to see the entry fee, and you're going to hope that it happens. When we take belief into a practice, we make it happen.

"I don't have to be bigger, faster, stronger in my role anymore, but I need to suffer." Anyone on an aspirational journey makes sacrifices. Clark's tolerance for suffering shows up in getting in the weight room and training, eating habits, social habits.

"Make sure before you give the thumbs up that you get your skis up." Clark's dad taught him water skiing: if your skis are parallel or pointed downwards, you're going to go up and over those skis and just be dragged in the wake of the boat. As a leader, once Clark gets in the building, his time belongs to everybody else. He has to have his skis up in the morning.

If you're late at night drinking, you're not going to be able to have that time in the morning to prepare yourself to be what I need to be for others. There's sacrifice, but it's also joyful. Sacrifice isn't something you have to do; it's actually what makes us special.

"Head, body, head, body." This is from the movie The Fighter. This is Clark's mantra that puts you in the present: no matter what's happened, I'm not going to focus on what's come before, we're not going to forecast, we're going to be right where our feet are, and we're gonna remember the plan. Body shots accumulate. You can't knock the opponent out in one punch.

Be the chief alignment officer and the chief reminding officer. Mike McDonald (Seahawks HC) said these are two of his primary roles. Clark uses the spear as a representation of alignment: the spear has to move in one direction to be effective.

It doesn't matter what you say as a head coach in the team room if it's not taken into the tightest echo chambers. That environment's not powerful enough to inspire action. The culture of a school is defined in the classroom. For Clark, if what he says isn't taken to the position groups and reinforced, then driven into behavior, they're going to lose alignment and lose focus.

"The culture of a school is defined in the classroom. Good teachers make for a good experience. Poor teachers make for challenging experiences."

You can never tire of driving the standards and behaviors. The reminding part is: how tired can you get of driving the standards and behaviors? The skill becomes, can we focus on the things that impact winning?

Let me focus on the things that are most important and let me be relentless in making sure those show up. Clark is reminding coaches, players, staff, all of it, and helping them and guiding them into driving accountability within their spaces. Then he has to let the program breathe a little bit.

Performance can't be tight, it can't be restrictive. Clark needs his guys to bring their unique personalities and their creative energy that makes it so much more fun, and it shows up on the field. Let me remind you of who we are and what we do and how we do these things and how it impacts winning. But then let me let you be yourself and bring your personality and help us elevate this program, not just be a part of it.

"Coach, I look forward to coming to Vanderbilt to help you win championships." When Diego Pavia got off the phone with Clark after their first conversation, he said this in the most genuine way. Clark had spent a lot of time trying to convince a lot of people of what was possible at Vanderbilt, and that felt like the first time that someone was meeting him right where he was.

"The world doesn't need a watered down Diego Pavia." When Diego's at his best, he's being himself. It's also important to have boundaries, and without conflict, there's erosion. So you have to fight for those boundaries.

"We really are a group of misfits." Brian Longwell, one of their linebackers, commented during a team building exercise. A five star coming to Vanderbilt is not your typical five star. That choice in and of itself is the acceptance of a challenge. The misfit ignores the external and tends to the internal."

As we elevate our people, we don't ever lose our identity. As long as they're true to who they are, the people they accept in this program will quickly get in lockstep with where they're moving.

Reflection Questions

What area of your life are you treating as separate from the others? Development in one area is development in all areas. How would this shift change your approach?

Are you practicing hope or practicing belief? Hope is passive, belief is active. What would change if you made the shift?

Do you have your skis up in the morning? What sacrifices do you need to make the night before to be what you need to be for others?

More Learning:
#062: Jim Tessel - Servant Leadership Through Coaching

#325: Ron Ullery - Demanding Excellence & Delayed Gratification

#503 - Sherri Coale - The Art of Asking & Winning On & Off the Court

Audio Chapters:

00:00 The Price of Becoming

01:10 The Turnaround at Vanderbilt

02:48 Coaching Network and Mentors

04:48 Winning with Academic Standards

07:48 Have a No Victim Mindset

11:56 Leaders Must Share Your Story

17:27 Relatedness Is Our Edge

18:44 Belief Is a Practice

21:30 Belief As Practice

23:13 Sacrifice And Suffering

24:30 Do You Have Your Skis Up?

26:05 The Head-Body Mantra

27:35 Leaders Must Align And Remind

31:53 Quarterback Diego Pavia

34:33 Misfits And Five Stars

35:48 EOPC

681: Clark Lea (Vanderbilt Football Coach) - Rebuilding a Program, Belief as a Practice, Leading Misfits, Ownership Mentality, and Why Relatedness Is Your Edge

2026-03-29 23:00:0038:46

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/becoming to learn more about "The Price of Becoming." -- My new book!

Clark Lea is the head football coach at Vanderbilt… He's led one of the best turnaround stories in college football. He got hired as head coach in 2021 to inherit a program that had gone winless the year before. What he's built since is remarkable: a 40–35 upset of No. 1 Alabama, back-to-back SEC Coach of the Year awards, and Vanderbilt's first 10-win season in program history. He's won games and changed the culture.

Key Learnings

"The culture of a school is defined in the classroom. Good teachers make for a good experience. Poor teachers make for challenging experiences."

As we elevate our people, we don't ever lose our identity. As long as they're true to who they are, the people they accept in this program will quickly get in lockstep with where they're moving.

Reflection Questions

What area of your life are you treating as separate from the others? Development in one area is development in all areas. How would this shift change your approach?

Are you practicing hope or practicing belief? Hope is passive, belief is active. What would change if you made the shift?

Do you have your skis up in the morning? What sacrifices do you need to make the night before to be what you need to be for others?

More Learning: #062: Jim Tessel - Servant Leadership Through Coaching

#325: Ron Ullery - Demanding Excellence & Delayed Gratification

#503 - Sherri Coale - The Art of Asking & Winning On & Off the Court

Audio Chapters:

00:00 The Price of Becoming

01:10 The Turnaround at Vanderbilt

02:48 Coaching Network and Mentors

04:48 Winning with Academic Standards

07:48 Have a No Victim Mindset

11:56 Leaders Must Share Your Story

17:27 Relatedness Is Our Edge

18:44 Belief Is a Practice

21:30 Belief As Practice

23:13 Sacrifice And Suffering

24:30 Do You Have Your Skis Up?

26:05 The Head-Body Mantra

27:35 Leaders Must Align And Remind

31:53 Quarterback Diego Pavia

34:33 Misfits And Five Stars

35:48 EOPC

680: Scott Galloway: Action Absorbs Anxiety, Handling the Haters, Becoming an Excellent Storyteller, Reverse Engineering Your Success, The Importance of Novelty, and Why Praise Is the Most Underrated Leadership Tool

2026-03-22 23:00:001:03:33

Go to Go to https://www.learningleader.com/becoming to see the pre-order bonuses for The Price of Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

Go to Go to https://www.learningleader.com/becoming to see the pre-order bonuses for The Price of Becoming

My Guest: Scott Galloway is the New York Times bestselling author of books including The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, Adrift, and The Algebra of Wealth.

Notes:

Key Learnings

Routine speeds up time, novelty slows it down. If you want life to go fast, just spend it alone and have a routine and never bust out of that routine. What makes life interesting is diversity in people, because people are complicated, and relationships are complicated.

Lean into your emotions to slow time down. If you see something that moves you, stop, think about it, ask yourself why it moves you, and try to cement that moment in your brain. Otherwise, you're not sleepwalking through life; you're sleep sprinting.

"The greatest wasted resource in history is good intentions that don't get articulated." No matter how famous someone is, they love affirmation as much as anybody else. Good thoughts that don't get articulated are wasted.

Absorb when you're upset and lean into emotions, good and bad. This sort of marks the day and slows things down. Otherwise, if you get up every morning, do the same thing, eat the same thing, have the same relationship, the week's just gonna go really fast.

Reverse engineer your success to things that aren't your fault. What are the things that played a role in your success that you had no control over? Your luck, your good fortune. For Scott: big government, assisted lunch, Pell Grants, University of California, technology financed by middle-class taxpayers, DARPA, the internet, deep pools of capital, and acceptance of failure.

His mom told him he had value every day. Scott's mom, every day, implicitly and explicitly, told him and communicated to him that he had value. That builds a basic confidence that manifests in different ways: the confidence to fail, approach strangers, believe you're worthy of love, that you'll add value to a company, and that you can ask for tens of millions of dollars from someone.

When good things happened, he used to call his mom. Whether it was getting a bonus at Morgan Stanley or striking up a conversation with a woman at Starbucks and getting her number, Scott used to call his mom. Your parents can bask in your victory, and you can brag to your parents, and it's okay.

If there's no one there with you, it's like it didn't happen. Scott travels for business and stays at really nice hotels, and inevitably gets upgraded to the penthouse or the George V in Paris when he's alone. But if there's no one there with you, it's like it didn't happen.

Celebrate victories, tell people how much they mean to you. You have to call your friends, celebrate their victories, celebrate your own, and tell people how much they mean to you.

Every day, no matter what, tell your kids you're proud of them and love them. No matter how much Scott's kids piss him off, at some point, he finds a way to say, "I'm proud of you, and I love you immensely. You know that, right?" He hopes they have that same kind of base or pillar of confidence he had his whole life.

Having someone tell you they believe in you every day works. You don't have to be a baller or successful. Just having someone in your life and every day telling them they mean a lot to you, they can't help but not believe you after a while.

Being a leader isn't about being the smartest person in the room. Scott used to think being a leader was being the smartest person in the room, and he had trouble, especially with other men, thinking if he acknowledged someone else was doing a good job, somehow that made him less impressive.

You have so much currency as a founder or manager. If you're in a management or leadership role, much less a founder, you have so much currency to pull someone into a conference room and say, "You were outstanding in that meeting" or "I just read this, and I love this paragraph. God, where did you come up with this idea?" You literally see these people just light up.

"If you're thinking it, say it." The instant you're thinking something positive about somebody, just tell them, text them, call them. Don't wait. We have a tendency to think other people are telepathic, that they must sense we think they're wonderful. No, they don't sense it. Articulate it. When you're on your deathbed, you're not gonna think "I gave too much praise at work and told too many people how much they meant to me."

Young people need watering. If you don't give young people feedback and praise when they deserve it, it's like having a ton of capital and not spending it. Especially with young people, they need watering.

Feedback is incredible compensation. Whenever someone does something good, Scott tries to remind himself via email. Then, when he does their review at the end of the year, it's like, " Wow, this dude is paying attention. That is a form of compensation.

Give thoughtful reviews that show you understand them. Tell them what they need to develop to get to the next level. Pay for the courses they need. They're a single mom who needs flexibility and wants to make more money. That's compensation.

"Become a clip machine." Certain people are clip machines: James Clear, Morgan Housel, Kat Cole, Scott Galloway. These are people who communicate ideas in ways that are instantly shareable and memorable. For leaders, becoming an effective communicator isn't optional anymore. You need to be able to inspire and move people.

The ability to write well is the stem of storytelling. It forces you to manage your thoughts and think things through. It's difficult to be a great storyteller if you can't write at a competent level.

Rank yourself across every medium and go deep on one. Look at every medium (texting, LinkedIn, short form video, TikTok, long form writing, speaking), rank yourself, listen to yourself, decide what your specialty is, and then go very deep into one.

Figure out your medium and commit to being in the top 1%. Challenge yourself to be in the top 10% within a year, the top 1% within three years. Identify which medium you have skills in, then challenge yourself. If you're in the top 6,000 podcasts out of 600,000 that put out content every week, you're in the top 1%.

"Social media may make you want to shower after you use it, but it's frightening how powerful it is." In terms of economic power and influence, it's frightening how powerful social media is right now. If you're a young person and you want to be influential or economically secure, you need to master it.

Storytelling is the enduring skill to give your kids. Scott's core competence is storytelling. His superpower is attracting and retaining people who help leverage his skills.

The most radical act in a capitalist society is not participation. Scott started Resist and Unsubscribe because action absorbs anxiety. He was sick of being virtuous and courageous on a keyboard or a mic and wanted to do something.

"Ready, fire, fucking aim on this thing called life." Scott wants to dance like no one is watching. He's gonna be dead soon, and it's all going really fast. He doesn't want to look back and think about losing sponsors or what people thought was stupid. He wants to think, "Right on, I tried to do something." He wants to be that guy who was unafraid, who showed up with a carpool to try and make a difference.

Your spending or lack thereof is a weapon hiding in plain sight. The government most quickly responded six years ago during COVID, not because tens of thousands of people were dying, but because the GDP crashed 31%. The president backs away from plans when the bond market or stock market goes down.

Even a gnat on an elephant matters. Even if it's just a gnat on an elephant, enough gnats will take down an elephant.

If you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, you have an obligation to speak out. Sam Harris has this great saying: if you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, then you have an obligation to speak out and speak your mind, because most people don't have that luxury.

Do what makes you feel good about yourself. It's not easy being mediocre-looking; it takes real effort. Scott grew up very skinny with bad acne and thinks maybe he's a little too focused or self-conscious about his looks.

America is ageist, and looks matter. New York is the ultimate tip of the spear for a capitalist society, and it's optimized for two people: hot women and rich guys. For everyone else, it's a soul-crushing experience. We can talk about the way the world should be and the way the world is. That's the way the world is.

Start working out. Scott coaches young men: start working out. It's good for your head. It shows women and employers you're in shape, not just because it looks good (which it does), but because it reflects how you show up, that you have discipline, that you can commit to something.

The rule of threes puts you in the top 5% of attractiveness. If you work out three times a week or more, if you spend at least 30 hours a week working outside of the house, and put yourself in the company of strangers (church group, nonprofits, sports league), just by doing those three things, you put yourself in the top 5% of attractiveness of young males.

Anyone who's had great yeses has had a shit ton of no's. If you can be in the top 5% and learn how to mourn and move on from rejection, at some point, you'll be voluntarily celibate, which is awesome. There were hundreds of no's for you to get to a top podcast. You get used to no.

No one has the right to a living or to reproduce. If you want to score above your class economically or romantically, get out a big spoon and get ready to eat shit. It's what everyone of us has done.

"I'm constantly worried about my boys now." Scott didn't worry about his kids when they were little unless they were sick - they were safe and home. Now he's worried about them all the time: are they doing okay at school? Is the quiet one okay? His champagne toast moment would be celebrating his son's first year of college going well - having fun, a good friend group, a couple of dates, football games, and gearing up for sophomore year.

Reflection Questions

What things played a role in your success that you had no control over? Your luck, your good fortune. How does reverse engineering to those things change your perspective?
Who in your life needs to hear that you're proud of them and that they mean a lot to you? When's the last time you actually said it?
Rank yourself across every medium you participate in (texting, LinkedIn, video, writing, speaking). What's your specialty? Are you willing to commit to being in the top 1% of that medium within three years?

More Learning

#578: Scott Galloway - The Algebra of Wealth
#492: Scott Galloway - Finding What You're Good At
#396: Scott Galloway - Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

Podcast Chapters

00:00 Preorder my new book!

02:45 Meet Scott Galloway

04:13 Resilience To Criticism

05:43 Slowing Time With Novelty

08:43 Scott's Mom Building Confidence

14:52 Use Praise As a Leadership Currency

24:27 Becoming A Great Storyteller

31:06 Resist And Unsubscribe Origins

35:35 What Comes Next

37:13 Facing Both Backlash and Support

39:45 Living Unafraid

41:23 Why Sell Prof G?

42:37 Building Enterprise Value

46:46 The Openness of Cosmetic Surgery

48:47 The World's View on the Physical

50:42 Rule of Threes for Men

53:11 Scott's Champagne Toast

56:52 The Belief of Reasonable Politics

58:10 Where to Find Scott Online

01:02:14 EOPC

680: Scott Galloway: Action Absorbs Anxiety, Handling the Haters, Becoming an Excellent Storyteller, Reverse Engineering Your Success, The Importance of Novelty, and Why Praise Is the Most Underrated Leadership Tool

2026-03-22 23:00:001:03:33

Go to Go to https://www.learningleader.com/becoming to see the pre-order bonuses for The Price of Becoming

My Guest: Scott Galloway is the New York Times bestselling author of books including The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, Adrift, and The Algebra of Wealth.

Notes:

Key Learnings

Routine speeds up time, novelty slows it down. If you want life to go fast, just spend it alone and have a routine and never bust out of that routine. What makes life interesting is diversity in people, because people are complicated, and relationships are complicated.

Lean into your emotions to slow time down. If you see something that moves you, stop, think about it, ask yourself why it moves you, and try to cement that moment in your brain. Otherwise, you're not sleepwalking through life; you're sleep sprinting.

"The greatest wasted resource in history is good intentions that don't get articulated." No matter how famous someone is, they love affirmation as much as anybody else. Good thoughts that don't get articulated are wasted.

Absorb when you're upset and lean into emotions, good and bad. This sort of marks the day and slows things down. Otherwise, if you get up every morning, do the same thing, eat the same thing, have the same relationship, the week's just gonna go really fast.

Reverse engineer your success to things that aren't your fault. What are the things that played a role in your success that you had no control over? Your luck, your good fortune. For Scott: big government, assisted lunch, Pell Grants, University of California, technology financed by middle-class taxpayers, DARPA, the internet, deep pools of capital, and acceptance of failure.

His mom told him he had value every day. Scott's mom, every day, implicitly and explicitly, told him and communicated to him that he had value. That builds a basic confidence that manifests in different ways: the confidence to fail, approach strangers, believe you're worthy of love, that you'll add value to a company, and that you can ask for tens of millions of dollars from someone.

When good things happened, he used to call his mom. Whether it was getting a bonus at Morgan Stanley or striking up a conversation with a woman at Starbucks and getting her number, Scott used to call his mom. Your parents can bask in your victory, and you can brag to your parents, and it's okay.

If there's no one there with you, it's like it didn't happen. Scott travels for business and stays at really nice hotels, and inevitably gets upgraded to the penthouse or the George V in Paris when he's alone. But if there's no one there with you, it's like it didn't happen.

Celebrate victories, tell people how much they mean to you. You have to call your friends, celebrate their victories, celebrate your own, and tell people how much they mean to you.

Every day, no matter what, tell your kids you're proud of them and love them. No matter how much Scott's kids piss him off, at some point, he finds a way to say, "I'm proud of you, and I love you immensely. You know that, right?" He hopes they have that same kind of base or pillar of confidence he had his whole life.

Having someone tell you they believe in you every day works. You don't have to be a baller or successful. Just having someone in your life and every day telling them they mean a lot to you, they can't help but not believe you after a while.

Being a leader isn't about being the smartest person in the room. Scott used to think being a leader was being the smartest person in the room, and he had trouble, especially with other men, thinking if he acknowledged someone else was doing a good job, somehow that made him less impressive.

You have so much currency as a founder or manager. If you're in a management or leadership role, much less a founder, you have so much currency to pull someone into a conference room and say, "You were outstanding in that meeting" or "I just read this, and I love this paragraph. God, where did you come up with this idea?" You literally see these people just light up.

"If you're thinking it, say it." The instant you're thinking something positive about somebody, just tell them, text them, call them. Don't wait. We have a tendency to think other people are telepathic, that they must sense we think they're wonderful. No, they don't sense it. Articulate it. When you're on your deathbed, you're not gonna think "I gave too much praise at work and told too many people how much they meant to me."

Young people need watering. If you don't give young people feedback and praise when they deserve it, it's like having a ton of capital and not spending it. Especially with young people, they need watering.

Feedback is incredible compensation. Whenever someone does something good, Scott tries to remind himself via email. Then, when he does their review at the end of the year, it's like, " Wow, this dude is paying attention. That is a form of compensation.

Give thoughtful reviews that show you understand them. Tell them what they need to develop to get to the next level. Pay for the courses they need. They're a single mom who needs flexibility and wants to make more money. That's compensation.

"Become a clip machine." Certain people are clip machines: James Clear, Morgan Housel, Kat Cole, Scott Galloway. These are people who communicate ideas in ways that are instantly shareable and memorable. For leaders, becoming an effective communicator isn't optional anymore. You need to be able to inspire and move people.

The ability to write well is the stem of storytelling. It forces you to manage your thoughts and think things through. It's difficult to be a great storyteller if you can't write at a competent level.

Rank yourself across every medium and go deep on one. Look at every medium (texting, LinkedIn, short form video, TikTok, long form writing, speaking), rank yourself, listen to yourself, decide what your specialty is, and then go very deep into one.

Figure out your medium and commit to being in the top 1%. Challenge yourself to be in the top 10% within a year, the top 1% within three years. Identify which medium you have skills in, then challenge yourself. If you're in the top 6,000 podcasts out of 600,000 that put out content every week, you're in the top 1%.

"Social media may make you want to shower after you use it, but it's frightening how powerful it is." In terms of economic power and influence, it's frightening how powerful social media is right now. If you're a young person and you want to be influential or economically secure, you need to master it.

Storytelling is the enduring skill to give your kids. Scott's core competence is storytelling. His superpower is attracting and retaining people who help leverage his skills.

The most radical act in a capitalist society is not participation. Scott started Resist and Unsubscribe because action absorbs anxiety. He was sick of being virtuous and courageous on a keyboard or a mic and wanted to do something.

"Ready, fire, fucking aim on this thing called life." Scott wants to dance like no one is watching. He's gonna be dead soon, and it's all going really fast. He doesn't want to look back and think about losing sponsors or what people thought was stupid. He wants to think, "Right on, I tried to do something." He wants to be that guy who was unafraid, who showed up with a carpool to try and make a difference.

Your spending or lack thereof is a weapon hiding in plain sight. The government most quickly responded six years ago during COVID, not because tens of thousands of people were dying, but because the GDP crashed 31%. The president backs away from plans when the bond market or stock market goes down.

Even a gnat on an elephant matters. Even if it's just a gnat on an elephant, enough gnats will take down an elephant.

If you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, you have an obligation to speak out. Sam Harris has this great saying: if you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, then you have an obligation to speak out and speak your mind, because most people don't have that luxury.

Do what makes you feel good about yourself. It's not easy being mediocre-looking; it takes real effort. Scott grew up very skinny with bad acne and thinks maybe he's a little too focused or self-conscious about his looks.

America is ageist, and looks matter. New York is the ultimate tip of the spear for a capitalist society, and it's optimized for two people: hot women and rich guys. For everyone else, it's a soul-crushing experience. We can talk about the way the world should be and the way the world is. That's the way the world is.

Start working out. Scott coaches young men: start working out. It's good for your head. It shows women and employers you're in shape, not just because it looks good (which it does), but because it reflects how you show up, that you have discipline, that you can commit to something.

The rule of threes puts you in the top 5% of attractiveness. If you work out three times a week or more, if you spend at least 30 hours a week working outside of the house, and put yourself in the company of strangers (church group, nonprofits, sports league), just by doing those three things, you put yourself in the top 5% of attractiveness of young males.

Anyone who's had great yeses has had a shit ton of no's. If you can be in the top 5% and learn how to mourn and move on from rejection, at some point, you'll be voluntarily celibate, which is awesome. There were hundreds of no's for you to get to a top podcast. You get used to no.

No one has the right to a living or to reproduce. If you want to score above your class economically or romantically, get out a big spoon and get ready to eat shit. It's what everyone of us has done.

"I'm constantly worried about my boys now." Scott didn't worry about his kids when they were little unless they were sick - they were safe and home. Now he's worried about them all the time: are they doing okay at school? Is the quiet one okay? His champagne toast moment would be celebrating his son's first year of college going well - having fun, a good friend group, a couple of dates, football games, and gearing up for sophomore year.

Reflection Questions

What things played a role in your success that you had no control over? Your luck, your good fortune. How does reverse engineering to those things change your perspective?
Who in your life needs to hear that you're proud of them and that they mean a lot to you? When's the last time you actually said it?
Rank yourself across every medium you participate in (texting, LinkedIn, video, writing, speaking). What's your specialty? Are you willing to commit to being in the top 1% of that medium within three years?

More Learning

#578: Scott Galloway - The Algebra of Wealth
#492: Scott Galloway - Finding What You're Good At
#396: Scott Galloway - Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

Podcast Chapters

00:00 Preorder my new book!

02:45 Meet Scott Galloway

04:13 Resilience To Criticism

05:43 Slowing Time With Novelty

08:43 Scott's Mom Building Confidence

14:52 Use Praise As a Leadership Currency

24:27 Becoming A Great Storyteller

31:06 Resist And Unsubscribe Origins

35:35 What Comes Next

37:13 Facing Both Backlash and Support

39:45 Living Unafraid

41:23 Why Sell Prof G?

42:37 Building Enterprise Value

46:46 The Openness of Cosmetic Surgery

48:47 The World's View on the Physical

50:42 Rule of Threes for Men

53:11 Scott's Champagne Toast

56:52 The Belief of Reasonable Politics

58:10 Where to Find Scott Online

01:02:14 EOPC

679: Kat Cole - From Hooters Waitress to $500M CEO, You're Interviewing for Your Next Job Every Day, Learning vs. Ego, The Four Key Mindsets for Senior Leaders, and The Journey of Who You Become

2026-03-15 23:00:0058:55

Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around… Show full show notes Hide full show notes

My Guest: Kat Cole is the CEO of AG1 (formerly Athletic Greens) and a renowned business leader known for a meteoric rise from Hooters waitress to Fortune 40 Under 40 executive. As former President/COO of Focus Brands (Cinnabon), she specializes in scaling global brands. Her career is defined by driving billions in sales, strategic innovation, and a strong, people-first leadership style.

Key Learnings

You can't market your way out of a bad product. AG1 has 3x'd the business in four years while being in only one channel (direct to consumer) for 15 years. 80% of retail is in brick and mortar, so they were doing that volume in less than 20% of where transactions happen. That only works when customers love the product, keep buying it for years, and tell their friends.

Scale comes from trusted recommendations, not marketing spend. Real volume comes from people telling their friends, recommending it to their teams and companies. That's where real scale and sustainable growth comes from.

Two questions guide every career decision. Is my work done here? Can someone else do what the company needs better than I can? If the answer to either is yes, that guides you toward pushing for change in your role, the way you show up, or finding the next opportunity.

Sometimes the best move is the lesser-known role. Kat could have stayed running big franchise brands everyone knew (Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's), but becoming COO of the parent company, Focus Brands, was a bigger, more complex role. Lesser known, smaller team, bigger stretch, more learning. That bridged her into consumer packaged goods and got her ready for AG1.

Consider financial needs, learning, and ego separately. Between financial needs, your ability to learn or contribute, and your ego or optics, there are questions you can ask yourself about a particular moment or opportunity that will help you be sharper in what you actually want versus what just looks like what's best next on the surface.

The founder heard her on podcasts and asked for an introduction. AG1's founder heard Kat on a couple of podcasts, knew Sahil Bloom, and asked Sahil to make the intro. She just happened to be taking time off and had been a customer for two years.

"You're interviewing for your next job every day." Whatever you do now, that choice of time, that tone of voice, that decision, how you show up or don't, creates an impact that leads to an experience and people's actions and then results. Eventually, it leads to the next thing.

Showing kindness in the airport matters. A caring note to someone struggling, a teacher or stranger saying, "I see something in you," a compliment when someone's in a dark place. It helps people out of darkness. Or opportunistically, being the one who sent the email or made the ask means you're the one who got the opportunity.

Don't burn bridges even when you feel wronged. When Kat was an executive at Hooters at 26, peers in their 50s and 60s would say things in meetings that weren't kind or appropriate. She would write letters expressing how it made her feel, but never sent them. She processed, reflected, and showed up professionally. Years later, those same people became advocates, partners, and references.

Four key mindsets for senior leaders. Humility, curiosity, courage, and confidence. By the time candidates get to Kat, they've been vetted on technical capability. She spends time validating those four characteristics because leadership and style trickle far into the organization.

Ask "if not for" questions to reveal humility. When someone tells you how they stood tall in tough moments, ask what enabled them to do those great things. They'll say, "I had access to this data, this team, this technical leader." Then ask: "If those people did not exist, if that resource did not exist, how would you have navigated that?" You peel back layers and see if they have the humility to acknowledge their success was due to critical factors.

The best candidates do the job in the interview. When someone says, "If we're doing this, we'll absolutely need this person in this specific role," or they have people in mind they're bringing with them, that's a good sign. Hiring leaders who have people who are loyal to them shows something real.

In reference checks, ask, "What does this person need to be successful?" It's a positive framing to get at what someone might lack or require around them to be effective.

Help people answer "how should I think about this?" In a fully remote company, you have less context and fewer vibes. When you send a note about ending a product line or launching something you said you'd never launch, people's subconscious internal war is "how should I think about this?" Leaders should start communications with "here's how I think about this" or "here's how we should think about this."

Sometimes the answer is to shut up and speak last. As teams get stronger, there's more weight on the few things the CEO says. Leave space for other leaders to lead. Kat removed herself from some meetings entirely because she has such great leaders and a strong culture.

Pay attention to themes in criticism, not individual attacks. When competitors attack you, ask: Are there patterns? Is there something reflective of industry questions? Sometimes criticisms point to things you already do well but aren't communicating well enough.

Comparison ads work short-term but don't build credibility long-term. Challenger brands use the playbook of "we're like the leader, but better/cheaper." Consumers see through it. People tell AG1, "I saw an ad comparing their product to yours, and they're clearly saying you're the leader."

The rage bait is brief; the truth is long. Algorithms reward dopamine hits and rage bait. Something untrue or negatively spun can quickly become widely seen because the critique is brief and witty, but the explanation and truth are long. AG1 has more human trials on a single SKU than any other multi-ingredient product ever in the space, but that's harder to say in a sound bite.

Don't criticize a car for not taking you to the moon. Someone criticized one of AG1's products for not doing something the product isn't supposed to do. When addressing criticism, clarify what the product is actually designed to do.

Her husband will be the fourth person ever to row across three oceans. He's already rowed the Atlantic (set the US record as a pair) and the Caribbean. Now he's training for the Pacific. If he completes it, he'll be only the fourth person to have ever done it in the world.

It's about who you become while striving for the big thing. After her husband got rescued in the Caribbean, he questioned why he was doing this with two kids. But this pursuit is who he is, what drives him, it's inspiring for the kids, and it makes him a better person when he's home. It's about the journey and who you do it with.

More Learning

476: Kat Cole - Raise Your Hand, Raise Your Voice

078: Kat Cole - Courage, Confidence, Curiosity, and Humility

Reflection Questions

Is your work done where you are? Can someone else do what the company needs better than you can?
When interviewing someone, ask what enabled them to succeed in a tough moment. Then ask: if that team or resource didn't exist, how would you have done it differently?
What communication this week needs context? Start with: here's what this means, what it's not about, and how we should think about it.

Audio Timestamps

00:18 Meet Kat Cole
02:42 AG1's Growth Story: $160M to $500M+
03:28 Product-Led Growth Wins
05:57 Kat on Writing and Reflection
07:39 Two Questions for Every Career Move
12:25 How Kat Joined AG1
16:09 You're Always Interviewing
18:47 Neutralizing Opposition at Hooters
24:19 Hiring Great Leaders
27:43 Inside Executive Interviews
31:56 Reference Checks That Reveal Truth
32:52 CEO as the Storyteller
34:16 "How Should I Think About This?"
35:46 Speak Last, Empower Leaders
37:41 Handling Public Criticism
39:59 Separating Signal from Noise
44:49 Staying Focused Through Criticism
48:00 Champagne Question: Family First
48:45 Rowing Three Oceans
51:37 Who You Become on the Journey
56:14 EOPC

679: Kat Cole - From Hooters Waitress to $500M CEO, You're Interviewing for Your Next Job Every Day, Learning vs. Ego, The Four Key Mindsets for Senior Leaders, and The Journey of Who You Become

2026-03-15 23:00:0058:55

My Guest: Kat Cole is the CEO of AG1 (formerly Athletic Greens) and a renowned business leader known for a meteoric rise from Hooters waitress to Fortune 40 Under 40 executive. As former President/COO of Focus Brands (Cinnabon), she specializes in scaling global brands. Her career is defined by driving billions in sales, strategic innovation, and a strong, people-first leadership style.

Key Learnings

You can't market your way out of a bad product. AG1 has 3x'd the business in four years while being in only one channel (direct to consumer) for 15 years. 80% of retail is in brick and mortar, so they were doing that volume in less than 20% of where transactions happen. That only works when customers love the product, keep buying it for years, and tell their friends.

Scale comes from trusted recommendations, not marketing spend. Real volume comes from people telling their friends, recommending it to their teams and companies. That's where real scale and sustainable growth comes from.

Two questions guide every career decision. Is my work done here? Can someone else do what the company needs better than I can? If the answer to either is yes, that guides you toward pushing for change in your role, the way you show up, or finding the next opportunity.

Sometimes the best move is the lesser-known role. Kat could have stayed running big franchise brands everyone knew (Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's), but becoming COO of the parent company, Focus Brands, was a bigger, more complex role. Lesser known, smaller team, bigger stretch, more learning. That bridged her into consumer packaged goods and got her ready for AG1.

Consider financial needs, learning, and ego separately. Between financial needs, your ability to learn or contribute, and your ego or optics, there are questions you can ask yourself about a particular moment or opportunity that will help you be sharper in what you actually want versus what just looks like what's best next on the surface.

The founder heard her on podcasts and asked for an introduction. AG1's founder heard Kat on a couple of podcasts, knew Sahil Bloom, and asked Sahil to make the intro. She just happened to be taking time off and had been a customer for two years.

"You're interviewing for your next job every day." Whatever you do now, that choice of time, that tone of voice, that decision, how you show up or don't, creates an impact that leads to an experience and people's actions and then results. Eventually, it leads to the next thing.

Showing kindness in the airport matters. A caring note to someone struggling, a teacher or stranger saying, "I see something in you," a compliment when someone's in a dark place. It helps people out of darkness. Or opportunistically, being the one who sent the email or made the ask means you're the one who got the opportunity.

Don't burn bridges even when you feel wronged. When Kat was an executive at Hooters at 26, peers in their 50s and 60s would say things in meetings that weren't kind or appropriate. She would write letters expressing how it made her feel, but never sent them. She processed, reflected, and showed up professionally. Years later, those same people became advocates, partners, and references.

Four key mindsets for senior leaders. Humility, curiosity, courage, and confidence. By the time candidates get to Kat, they've been vetted on technical capability. She spends time validating those four characteristics because leadership and style trickle far into the organization.

Ask "if not for" questions to reveal humility. When someone tells you how they stood tall in tough moments, ask what enabled them to do those great things. They'll say, "I had access to this data, this team, this technical leader." Then ask: "If those people did not exist, if that resource did not exist, how would you have navigated that?" You peel back layers and see if they have the humility to acknowledge their success was due to critical factors.

The best candidates do the job in the interview. When someone says, "If we're doing this, we'll absolutely need this person in this specific role," or they have people in mind they're bringing with them, that's a good sign. Hiring leaders who have people who are loyal to them shows something real.

In reference checks, ask, "What does this person need to be successful?" It's a positive framing to get at what someone might lack or require around them to be effective.

Help people answer "how should I think about this?" In a fully remote company, you have less context and fewer vibes. When you send a note about ending a product line or launching something you said you'd never launch, people's subconscious internal war is "how should I think about this?" Leaders should start communications with "here's how I think about this" or "here's how we should think about this."

Sometimes the answer is to shut up and speak last. As teams get stronger, there's more weight on the few things the CEO says. Leave space for other leaders to lead. Kat removed herself from some meetings entirely because she has such great leaders and a strong culture.

Pay attention to themes in criticism, not individual attacks. When competitors attack you, ask: Are there patterns? Is there something reflective of industry questions? Sometimes criticisms point to things you already do well but aren't communicating well enough.

Comparison ads work short-term but don't build credibility long-term. Challenger brands use the playbook of "we're like the leader, but better/cheaper." Consumers see through it. People tell AG1, "I saw an ad comparing their product to yours, and they're clearly saying you're the leader."

The rage bait is brief; the truth is long. Algorithms reward dopamine hits and rage bait. Something untrue or negatively spun can quickly become widely seen because the critique is brief and witty, but the explanation and truth are long. AG1 has more human trials on a single SKU than any other multi-ingredient product ever in the space, but that's harder to say in a sound bite.

Don't criticize a car for not taking you to the moon. Someone criticized one of AG1's products for not doing something the product isn't supposed to do. When addressing criticism, clarify what the product is actually designed to do.

Her husband will be the fourth person ever to row across three oceans. He's already rowed the Atlantic (set the US record as a pair) and the Caribbean. Now he's training for the Pacific. If he completes it, he'll be only the fourth person to have ever done it in the world.

It's about who you become while striving for the big thing. After her husband got rescued in the Caribbean, he questioned why he was doing this with two kids. But this pursuit is who he is, what drives him, it's inspiring for the kids, and it makes him a better person when he's home. It's about the journey and who you do it with.

More Learning

476: Kat Cole - Raise Your Hand, Raise Your Voice

078: Kat Cole - Courage, Confidence, Curiosity, and Humility

Reflection Questions

Is your work done where you are? Can someone else do what the company needs better than you can?
When interviewing someone, ask what enabled them to succeed in a tough moment. Then ask: if that team or resource didn't exist, how would you have done it differently?
What communication this week needs context? Start with: here's what this means, what it's not about, and how we should think about it.

Audio Timestamps

00:18 Meet Kat Cole
02:42 AG1's Growth Story: $160M to $500M+
03:28 Product-Led Growth Wins
05:57 Kat on Writing and Reflection
07:39 Two Questions for Every Career Move
12:25 How Kat Joined AG1
16:09 You're Always Interviewing
18:47 Neutralizing Opposition at Hooters
24:19 Hiring Great Leaders
27:43 Inside Executive Interviews
31:56 Reference Checks That Reveal Truth
32:52 CEO as the Storyteller
34:16 "How Should I Think About This?"
35:46 Speak Last, Empower Leaders
37:41 Handling Public Criticism
39:59 Separating Signal from Noise
44:49 Staying Focused Through Criticism
48:00 Champagne Question: Family First
48:45 Rowing Three Oceans
51:37 Who You Become on the Journey
56:14 EOPC

678: Jamie Siminoff (Ring Doorbell Inventor) - Shark Tank Rejection, Selling to Amazon for $1 Billion, Surviving $3M to $480M Hypergrowth, Hiring Passionate People Over Experts, and Jeff Bezos's Leadership Lessons

2026-03-08 23:00:0050:01

www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight… Show full show notes Hide full show notes