Founders - #216 Paul Van Doren (Founder of Vans)

Episode Date: November 14, 2021

What I learned from reading Authentic: A Memoir by the Founder of Vans by Paul Van Doren. ----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----The way we deal with hardship is our legacy. You can accept defeat, or you can overcome it.Quitting Randy's had probably been the biggest stroke of luck in my life. Opportunity is a strange beast.Whenever a situation went sideways and things looked dire, I always called up my one superpower: focus.I believe honest self-evaluation and the ability to listen to others has been one of my greatest strengths, one that has served me well over the years. If someone had a better idea than mine, of course I would adopt that. I really didn’t care if I didn’t get credit. I didn’t need credit; I needed success.The very best thing that occurred during that first decade of Vans was that we truly became a family business. Without exception, family has always been the most important thing in my life.Most of the kids in the early skater crews came from single-parent households, from the wrong side of the tracks. They were idiosyncratic, creative, independent—they were seen as the “freaks” of the sport. In so many ways, they were our people.If you do something no one else can do, or do something better than most, the odds are in your favor for success.Shit happens—it really does. Letting yourself get stuck in it doesn’t do any good. Acknowledge it and then move on. Don’t let it weigh you down—just cope. Tackling things in a positive way will help you succeed more often than not. Shit happens: these two words fully acknowledge the difficulties in life, but you can put them firmly in the rearview mirror, without letting them mess with your head or your path in life.To me, the more critical the situation, the better I’ll perform. I don’t create clutch situations just to feel the rush—I’d prefer to eliminate risk than encourage it—but I for one have always found defeat intoxicating, especially when it's someone else's. And when it's mine, I can’t say it's ever done anything but make me think smarter and behave differently, even courageously. Hell, it's only after I lost something or when something didn’t go my way that I was afforded the opportunity to shine.I’ve learned that what makes a successful entrepreneur is the same thing that makes a good skateboarder or good surfer: you need grit and determination to get back up every time you’re knocked off the board.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

My entire life, I've never had one big idea. I'd like to think I woke up one day, figured out how to make the world's best canvas and rubber waffle sole deck shoes, how to distribute said shoes, and thus create the first vertically integrated tennis shoe company in the world. But the fact of it is, I could have been growing potatoes. Actually, shoes has nothing to do with my success. What I've accomplished comes down to one thing, my knack for identifying and then solving problems. What I do better than anyone else is cut out distractions. If a system isn't working efficiently, I can see where it's jammed, eliminate the problem, and find a way to

keep everything moving forward. Everyone has something that they naturally do better than anyone else. This just happens to be mine, and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to leverage it. Then there's everything I learned by doing. Much of Vans' early success was the happy result of hard work and creative troubleshooting. It helps that at Vans, we used vulcanized rubber on the soles of our shoes. It helps that we identified retail spaces. It helps that we dialed in production like Lee Iacocca on his best day at Ford or Chrysler. It helps that we knew our customers, especially the skaters and the surfers and the moms. It helps that I handed over the reins in 1980 when I got burned out and was able to return in 1984 per an order from a judge in bankruptcy court. It also helps that we were tenacious. I learned that what makes a successful entrepreneur

is the same thing that makes a good skateboarder or a good surfer. You need grit and determination to get back up every time you're knocked off the board. In the world of successful entrepreneurs, I'm not Phil Knight. I'm not Yvonne Chouinard. I'm not Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos

or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. My guess is I'm unlike any other founding CEO. I'm just a small business owner who did well and found the right partners. When I was approached to write a business memoir, I wondered how I could explain my life as a series of tidy lessons learned. Eventually, I realized that what I could offer to other businessmen and women is less formula and more whatever the opposite of formula is. Let's call it fluidity. I don't know where to draw the line between the business me and the personal me. It's something that I failed to teach my children. The lines have always been so damn

blurred. The way I've run my business is the way I live my life. The one thing that has always been sacred to me, and this goes for life as much as business, is just this. Always try to do what's right. I learned early on what's right is right and what's wrong is wrong. If you put thought into something and do what's right every single time, you won't be far off from doing the best you can. The best any of us can. Many of my guiding principles are equally simple, and they've served me equally well. Don't rest on your laurels.

Do the work. Don't just look to others to do it. Get your hands dirty. If a young entrepreneur came to me today and asked how to start a company, I would say right off the bat, know what goes into making what you're selling. If you sell from a place of total confidence in the quality down to the details, you will succeed. I also say, find honorable people to be your partners. Work with creative people and be fair. Be kind. Give a shit about how you treat people and be aware of how your actions might disturb or distress them. In other words, don't be a jerk. Until our last breath, we can do something good for someone else.

I've had one hell of a ride, and in telling my story, I tell Vans. But that isn't the whole of it. Without my kids, Vans wouldn't exist. They, alongside their mother Dolly and me, got their hands dirty and worked for tacos. My in-laws dropped everything to help us launch. Bob Cohen listened to me when I was a 16-year-old supply boy at the Randolph Rubber Company. Serge Delia handed me a parachute when Bob left me no options but to jump. Gordon Lee and my brother Jimmy took the flying leap alongside me. My debt to each is as obvious as the words on this page.

I've experienced a lot of joy. I am also all of what I've lost. While my kids, their kids, and their kids' kids are healthy, I outlive my wife, Drina, and a number of my peers. I've lost brothers, business partners, colleagues, and friends. Everyone I knew from my shoemaking days is gone. Suffice it to say, no one is around to fact-check most of what I offer herein. You'll have to take my word for it. And as you read,

keep in mind, I wrote from memory, recreating situations from the near and far past as best I could. Five decades after I started the Van Doren Rubber Company, our brand is associated with expressive creators. The artists, musicians, skaters, and surf surfers the trendsetters the ones who go their own way i could not be prouder because that's how i always did things too that is an excerpt from the book i'm going to talk to you about today which is authentic a memoir by the founder of vans written by the founder of vans paul van doren this is an absolutely fantastic autobiography i don't think i ever would have found it if it wasn't for the fantastic book recommendations. This book recommendation actually came from a subscriber. As soon as I got the recommendation, I downloaded

the sample on the Kindle app, started reading it. The introduction is fantastic, so I bought the book right away. It's taken me a few months to circle back around and actually do a podcast on it. And one of the most remarkable things about this book is the fact that he's writing it when he's 90 years old. It was published last year, seven days after the book was published, Paul passes away. And so to pick up the book, to read it is to have a one sided conversation with an extremely wise 90 year old entrepreneur that had a very full life and a lot of good lessons to pass down to future generations. So let's jump right into it. And the book flows in mostly chronological order. I do want to pull out something though, that is not in chronological order that I think makes him so unique. Paul was a reluctant

entrepreneur. He had no desire. No, he says, I didn't have a grand ambition to start my own company. He was kind of forced into it. So he's also high school dropout, grew up in the depression. I'll cover a lot of this. I'm just trying to give you an overview. So what I'm about to read to you makes sense. But really one of the main advantages that I think Paul had over other shoe company founders is the fact that he worked in the industry at a shoe factory that used to actually produce shoes in America, if you can believe it or not. And he did that for 20 years. So he's a great example of that lesson we learned a long time ago from Sam Zemuri, the guy that started out selling bananas. He was a banana peddler and he did every single job in the banana industry. So by the time he's running his own company, there's not a person in

the entire world that knew more about bananas than he did. And it gave him a massive advantage. You could think that Paul's very similar. So he says, all I know, all I needed to know about making canvas shoes, I learned at the Randolph Rubber Company in Randolph, Massachusetts. My mother got me a job. My mother got me my first job at Randy's as a service boy. When I was 16, I went on to spend the first 20 years of my career learning the trade. So the Randolph Rubber Company that he's working for, he's going to work for for 20 years. It's a family owned business. There's a son of the owners, this guy named Bob, who's a very important person in the story. He's actually the one that's going to push Paul out of the company later on and force Paul into a life of entrepreneurship, which as you come to get to know Paul, you realize that he was destined to be an entrepreneur. He just didn't know it. There's a story he tells in the first chapter, though, that I think is really illustrates the fact that he was just I'm determined to go my

own way. I'm willing to put in the work, but I don't like people having control over me. And then he's really big on respect. He does not like he didn't disrespect his employees and he didn't like people disrespecting him. And so he sees this is a main theme that you can learn the right way to do something by seeing it done the wrong way. And so Paul is going to go with his boss, this guy named Bob, who's the son of the owner of the company, and they're going to go to this conference, like a shoe conference is the way you can think about it. And most of the Randolph's business, they were the factory for other brands, for just a handful of brands like Keds and Converse. So the majority of their business is coming from a very few amount of customers, which means the customers have a lot of, essentially, you're not really working for yourself.

When you only have two or three main customers, you're basically working for them, right? And so we're going to see the level of disrespect that he sees that happens. He's like, I don't care what I have to do in my life. I'm never going to let somebody do this to me. And so they're meeting. He says, one of the people Bob made a point of talking to was a major buyer named Harry, who worked for a big retailer that represented more than 50% of Randy's business. That's a dangerous spot to be in. You do not want to be in that spot. He and Bob left at some point in the

afternoon. And when they returned much later, when it was time for Bob to collect me and drive home, Harry was sideways. They're drunk. They're both drunk as hell. Bob was tipsy, but Harry was smashed. If Bob wanted to call it a day and hit the road, he didn't show it, and Harry certainly didn't seem as if he was ready to part ways either. He stumbled around for a while, then he got right up in Bob's face and slurred, Bob, I want you to go out to the Boston Common and catch me a pigeon. Bob might have been baffled, but he replied good-naturedly, come on, Harry, let's go do something else, something more fun. Harry was not having it. This Harry guy's a jerk.

There was no convincing him otherwise. Damn it, son, Harry insisted. I want you to catch me a pigeon. I was stumped. These men were around about the same age. Paul's personality jumps off the page right at the very beginning. We're going to see it right here. These men were around about the same age. In present company, nobody was anybody's son. Besides, surely Harry was joking. Surely he'd come to his senses. Or barring that, Bob would knock some sense into him. And yet the next thing I knew, I was leaning on a lamppost on the side of a street, watching a man

I admired nearly as much as my father falling over himself trying to catch a pigeon. My reaction was visceral. This is really fundamental to understanding who Paul is as a person because he puts this story right at the beginning of the book, before we really even know much of his background or anything. Maybe Randy's would have lost half the profits that year if Bob had told Harry to take a flying leap. We'll never know. Clearly, Bob wasn't about to jeopardize the account. He was intimidated. Try as I might, I could not put myself in Bob's position. I could not imagine letting some jerk humiliate me. It wouldn't have mattered to me that Harry bought more than half the shoes Randy's made. He could have brought every last one. I would never let

one person have that sort of control over me. In fact, damn it, there had to be a better way. Why were we depending on a handful of buyers anyway? Someday, someway, somehow, I would figure out how to get rid of the middleman. Remember in the introduction, he says that he invented, or excuse me, he founded the world's first vertically integrated tennis shoe company. And he's going to do that many years after the story that I'm telling you right now takes place. I would figure out a way to get rid of the middleman because no amount of business would ever be worth my integrity. I will never forget that hour in Boston Common watching Bob Cohen chase pigeons. Not only did it help me figure out what sort of

folks I wanted to work with, but it crystallized for me what I would be willing to work my ass off to avoid. I would never work with jerks. I also credit this experience with giving me courage many years later to start my own company. By then, I had worked my way up to run Randy's most successful factory. I had learned the essentials of shoe manufacturing and a thing or two about business. He knew shoe manufacturing from A to Z. Didn't know about sales, but he taught himself that later didn't know so he'll talk a lot about not understanding retail um and he started a retail company anyways one day in an effort to appease management bob still my boss many years later decided to promote to top positions a bunch of guys who had just driven an entire manufacturing operation into the ground so now he's talking

about how this story relates to him taking the jump reluctantly. He didn't, before he got this call from Bob, he was not expecting to quit. And then once he quit, he's not the kind of person that's going to go back. So it says he decided to promote a bunch of basically guys that didn't know what they were doing. And as we learned and over Steve Jobs talks about it, but really every single founder that we study talks about this, like you cannot have incompetent people in your company because the competent, your A players, if you want to use Steve Jobs terminology, A players do not like working with what David Ogilvie calls incompetent amateurs. Bob would promote. Bob didn't, you know, he wasn't, this, the business where he winds up taking over from his father, eventually firing or letting Paul go.

He winds up going bankrupt. Bob didn't really know what he was doing. And you can kind of read through the lines and understand Bob didn't know what he was doing because he's promoting people that are incompetent. And then what happens, you have Paul who's no doubt, like you can't read this book and not realize, okay, this guy's extremely talented and an A player if there ever was one. He's not going to work with a bunch of incompetent amateurs. And so that winds up, not only does Bob promote people that are potentially dangerous to the prosperity of his business, but then he loses, if not his best, I would say his best asset that he had at the time. So he says Bob decided to promote a bunch of guys who had

just driven over, just driven an entire manufacturing operation to the ground. As far as I was concerned, asking my team to report to people who didn't know how to run a business, who in fact had proven only that they knew how to ruin one, sounded a lot like a request to go catch a pigeon. See how he tied everything together there? There's a line that I'm not willing to step over, that you clearly are. Okay. Guy tells me to go catch a pigeon, not happening. You caught a pigeon. Now you're doing the same thing to me many years later. I can't accept that. So it says, it sounded like a lot, a lot like a request to go catch a pigeon. That was my last day at Randy's. So now he's going to talk about what being an entrepreneur meant to him at the very beginning. He says, I suddenly had the luxury of being 100%

myself, free to do things exactly as I saw fit and with abandon. For once, I didn't need to check with corporate or ask the owner or listen to some Harvard graduate who was timing production workers with a stopwatch about what was efficient. That's a story that comes later. I don't know if I actually have highlights on it, but what he's talking about is Bob and his dad would hire these people. And remember, Paul knew everything about, he was the one that would, he started out in one factory or one line in one factory. And eventually his, he keeps getting promoted because the line he's in charge of keeps outperforming everything other, every other, other line in the company. Then he's eventually running two lines and they, like that, that, that trend continues.

Then he's running a factory and then his factory is performing better than, than all the other company factories. And it keeps going so on and so forth that way. But what he realized about these so-called productivity, like not gurus, experts, I guess they were called. Executives would bring them in, executives that never worked the line. And he's like, don't you realize what you're doing? You're timing, you're optimizing rather for a variable that you think is important. And they would literally stand behind people with a stopwatch to see how long it took them to do their line in the production. And Paul's point to them is like, you're optimizing one variable,

you need to optimize for the entire whole. This is a system and it all works together. And you're focused on this one point. And so eventually, Paul reorganizes the entire system and then fires these guys to get out of here. And he also thought it was really demeaning. He put himself in the shoes of his employees. Would you want somebody sitting behind your desk or the table or the factory that you're in standing behind you with a stopwatch? Like, come on. So he says, my business would be a business that felt authentic, hence the title of the book. And that's his approach to business, but also the fact that he said there's no really line

between business Paul and personal Paul. So he says, my would be a business that felt authentic, not just making a quality product, but by operating in a way that was true to who I was. I can say with conviction that building the company that became Vans was a personal expression all the way. And maybe the main point that Paul would give advice to future entrepreneurs is you got to put people over everything. It's people first. He's still an introduction, but he ends the book this way. One of my credos, which still stands at Vans decades later, is that we weren't a shoe company, but a people company that made shoes. That distinction may sound like nothing, but believe me, it's everything. So then he tells us a little bit about his early life, by far the most

influential person. If there's one single influential person on him is his dad talks about later in the book just being absolutely devastated uh because his dad dies i think he is i think paul's still in his 20s when that happens he winds up having another 20 years with his mom but he was just completely depressed when that happened so says so much of who i am what i believe in and what i know how to do i learned from my parents my father so his dad's an inventor, an entrepreneur, somebody that was willing to fix problems, work extremely hard, almost like Paul mirrored a lot of the traits he saw. He says, my father was the kind of gambler who more often bet on himself, taking calculated risks that required skills and smarts. A lifelong entrepreneur. He invented and built things for

a living, wooden things, things that popped and exploded, things like toys and fireworks. He could engineer anything, build anything, fix anything, and outsmart just about anybody. His projects were endless and he loved doing them. Dad was a very wise, gifted, and creative man. And I just want to pause there because I think it's really important to point out that Paul is writing these words 60 years after his father has died. So if you stop and think about that just for a second, it's clear whether you have kids now or you have them in the future, how important, how impactful you can be on their lives. You can influence their lives for the rest for long after you're gone he is talking about his father and the importance of the role that his father played in his life 60 years after his dad died so i just sit there and think all right this is my chief like a chief uh importance

obligation i don't even know the right word to use right now but i gotta make sure i'm not slacking on that job at all but like most successful creators he was never satisfied with the status quo while he was making uh tracer bullets this is in world war ii so a lot of people as we've talked about before they're pulled off their jobs in uh during world war ii and assigned to you know everybody's got to do their part for this giant war and so he's i think he was selling fireworks at the time if i'm not mistaken or sparklers um and so actually paul's going to learn a lot about business and manufacturing helping his dad do that but anyway so his his dad what he's talking about there is his dad was pulled off um he had to serve the the war effort the country called him to to serve in a factory so they have

to make tracer bullets says my father devised a new formula for making sparklers rendering them safer and longer lasting he went on to an an illustrious career in sparklers for two decades, which just goes to prove if you do something, this is he, he is one of the most popular highlights. I'm working off the Kindle version of this book. And this is something I think is fantastic advice that we've seen over and over again. So it says it just goes to prove if you do something no one else can do or do something better than most, the odds are in your favor for success. So really the way, I guess, to distill what he's saying is we need to strive to be the best at something. Naval Ravikant from that book I did, Naval Almanac, I think.

I can't remember the name of the book, but he talks about the same idea that Paul has there. But that you have to keep redefining what you do until you can say that you're the best in the world at it. All right. So this is now Paul giving his background. I'm not going to spend too much time here because I got a ton of highlights. It's this book. It's about it's a little less than 300 pages. You can read it pretty fast because the writing is very simple. Like I just love autobiographies are probably my favorite things to read because I think entrepreneurs instinctively know how to edit, right? A big part of success in running a company is editing, whether you're editing the product

line, the team, but they seem to know how to just, this is the stuff that's important. I'm about to die. I'm throwing all the good ideas at you and the mistake, and he's going to tell us the mistakes to avoid. And this is just what you need to know. I'm not going to give you any other fluff. But he says, born in 1930, I'm one of a generation who, could you imagine being born at a worse time? I'm one of a generation whose childhood was bracketed by the Great Depression and the World War II. I was born into a world in flux

where the only constant was hardship and hard work. I don't remember any talk of the American dream when I was a kid. We talked about droughts and sandstorms and the dust bowl. The only housing growth that I knew about was the expanding shanty towns. And yet he talks about if this is all you knew, like you just you learned to adapt. He thought he had a great childhood. He says, yes, I shared an owl house with seven people. No indoor plumbing.

How crazy is that? And no, we didn't have hot water on tap. We bathed in a basin with a cup and a half of water we would heat on the stove. It was a pain. I knew no one had much of anything, but we had what we needed. We had electricity. We had a furnace. We had running water. I don't think we ever went hungry or went without, but then I wouldn't have known any different. And so it's very common at this time his the entire family every single kid is going to help in the family business this is actually something i've seen over and over again these biographies like i think it's really smart what they're doing now in this case it's out of

necessity so it's not like they had a choice but you're most likely are in a different position and you could have a choice i think work is one of the best forms of education and i'm not trying i'm not saying like abuse child labor laws have, have a little kid working in the mines and stuff like they used to. But explaining the value in your business set up to serve other people. And the kids learn not only to serve other people at a very young age, but also the ability to solve problems, which they can use their entire life. So it says, my father put us all at work by age five or six. I knew I could do things to help support my family, even if it was just to sweep up after my father and his workshop. He does the same thing.

Every single, his kids, one of his kids starts working at Vans at 10 years old, you know, doing whatever he can. He's still working there to this, when his book was published, 50 years later. And so then he talks about, Paul talks about one of his heroes when he was a boy, somebody he wanted to copy and emulate was the famous baseball player Ted Williams. And so he talks about this for a little bit. Ted Williams was a lot like my old man in that he played his own game. He didn't tip his hat for anybody. And so he talks about what he learned from Ted Williams the year,

I think this record might still stand, although I haven't paid attention to baseball in multiple decades. But he winds up batting over 400. And this is what he learned about Ted refusing to sit out. So he says Ted didn't have to step up to the plate. He had a 3.39999 hitting average on the year. The statistician would have rounded the score up to 400. But Ted Williams refused to take the bench. If he was going to break a record, he wanted to earn it. I like that. This is a crazy sentence.

He'll refer to this idea he's about to tell us multiple times in the book in the future. I recognize the thrill of potential failure. And I think what he's implying there, I recognize the thrill of potential failure, that unless something is difficult to do, there's not a lot of satisfaction at the end when you actually complete it. But when he struggles and fans is a massive struggle, including even after they were successful going bankrupt, his brother runs the company to the ground, he's got to come back. And within four years, he turns it around and they wind up selling it. But that idea, I recognize the thrill of potential failure. That's a very interesting sentence to me. The day-to-day family dynamic left an imprint on me. Sometimes I can't say why I do something a certain way, except it's how my mother or father did it and how they loved us and how their love unrelentingly demanded that all of us be the best versions of ourselves. My parents taught me so much more than I ever learned in school. My parents taught me long ago more than I ever learned in school.

My parents taught me long ago that people were the most important thing in your life, more important than money or prestige or possessions. My father believed that family always came first, and so do I. And this is something he copies for the rest of his life. This guy's got an extreme work ethic. There's multiple times when there's crises in not only when he was working for somebody else, but in his own business where he's working days in a row, no sleep. My parents taught me the principle of working hard by example. Remember, he's growing up in the depression. It's just these are, if you're able to survive an environment like that, you're not going to come on the other side as a soft person, right? My parents taught me the principles of working hard by example. They both put in long hours on the job and at home. My mom worked in a factory.

She actually works in the shoe factory. She's the one that gets them the job. And dad labored in his workshop every single day. He was the most hardworking man I have ever known. There was never a question that the kids wouldn't work equally as hard. We all participated in the family business, and there was dignity in being of service, dignity and pride in a job well done. And so not only would his father have them, all the kids help out in the family business, but then he talked to me to educate them through conversation. And I thought this was very smart that his dad did and talked about.

Well, let me just read what Paul says. He always pushed me to come up with the why. Why is something happening? And that's really there's not a lot of like fancy stuff here at all. And I think that's very instructive to us. Like Paul just asked, like, why are we doing it this way? Why is this process this way? Is there a way that we can do it, do it better? And most of the people just around him are on autopilot. So he says he, and this is, it comes from what he learned from his father when he was, he starts working, you know, he's six years old, sweeping up. He's working, like making clothes, manufacturing clothes, pins and sparklers when he's 12 like he's working full-time essentially from the time maybe he's like 10 11 12 then he's working full

time for the rest of his life he always pushed me to come up with a why and i've always had a knack for figuring out the how those two skills have served me well my entire life and so then he describes the the extreme level of autonomy that his parents gave him. This would never happen in today's age. And just essentially, I mean, his brother runs away at 12 years old to go. I think they're in Massachusetts. His brother runs away to New York City. They wind up finding him. So if he's 12, this might be the 1940s, right? And they bring him back. Then he runs away again. And his mom is begging his father, please go get him.

He's like, he's just going to keep running away. And so he runs away at 12 and just survives in New York City for two decades on his own. And they never go back and get him. I mean, they'll visit with him, but they never make him come home. So this is what I mean about an extreme level of autonomy. The extraordinary thing about being kids was that we were allowed to stretch out in any direction that pleased us. We were allowed to explore our whims on any given day, to have goals by noon we hadn't considered over breakfast, to spend the day adventuring, and to come home dirty. No one questioned how we planned

to spend our day. No one micromanaged our time. No one set boundaries or perimeters or directed us to how to entertain one another. The expectation was that we would figure it out and that nature, through patterns or connection or wonderment, would be our teacher. That kind of freedom proved instructive in ways I couldn't have anticipated. So moving ahead, just know that he's constantly working. Whether he's working for his family, again, he's working his entire life. i think i've already told you that so i'm going to move ahead i want to breathe to you i want to go back to this idea where he just mentioned earlier that he was excited by the potential the risk of potential failure i'm going to read a paragraph or two to you now and this is where you know i'm still when

i took these notes i'm only you know 30 pages into the book whatever it is at this time and i just wrote down i'm liking the way that this guy thought. And what's interesting is as I read over my notes, I realized the deeper I get into the book, I would go in present tense. I'd be like, oh, I like what this guy does. And then realize, oh, wait, he's not here anymore. Because when you're reading the autobiography of somebody, you really get to feel like you know that person and that they're still alive. And I had to remind myself, I was like, no, this is past tense. This is the way he thought.

This is not the way he thinks. It's true that I've always liked the adrenaline of a do or die play. As my hero, Ted Williams said, I'd like to have the bases loaded every time I come up. To me, the more critical the situation, the better I'll perform. I don't create clutch situations just to feel the rush.

I prefer to eliminate risk than encourage it. But I, for one, have always found defeat intoxicating, especially when it's someone else's. And when it's mine, I can't say it's ever done anything but made me think smarter and behave differently. Hell, it's only after I lost something or when something didn't go my way that I was afforded the opportunity to shine. So a few pages on, he continues this very similar thought. He was obsessed with going to, so he's talking about this idea of he would like to go watch the horse races. This is something when he retires from vans, he buys horses and races them and likes to bet on them. But anyways, this ties into just his unique personality and that I want the pressure.

I want the stress. I want these situations that cause me discomfort because that's where I'm going to grow and learn. I can't imagine anything worse than not caring if I win or lose. I care. I'm emotional. Hell, I have too much emotion. I could win seven races in a row, but if I lost the eighth race, I was down in the dumps. I was inconsolable. Winning seven out of eight races would never be good enough.

I'm not wired that way. I am really bad at losing. After ninth grade, I dropped out of school. This is when he's going to start working the shoe industry. I was 16. I had decent enough grades and I was in top of my class in math and science, but I just didn't see the point. School didn't challenge me. The idea of being a high school dropout, but I just didn't see the point. School didn't challenge me. The idea of being a high school dropout, the idea that I would rather work, never bothered me. A friend of mine asked me recently if I was a rebel. That summer after I dropped out of school, I would say I had been more of a delinquent. So he's going to start working in the shoe factory. This is his full-time job for the next 20 years, more than full-time because this guy's insane. But it's really interesting. He takes lessons from his earlier experiences that he learned from his father when they were producing clothes pins and sparklers and he just thinks of

in systems and that's really all he ever does for the rest of his life while making clothes pins and sparklers i learned the importance of logical progression in setting up manufacturing systems i it did not take and then when he realized that well, if I can make a shoe, I certainly can sell them. Like, why are we just being middlemen? Let's just set up our factory stores. And so that's what Vans was famous for. And so the very beginning, they were just, he was eventually going to make the move to Southern California.

They were just local Southern California company. Their first, I think, 70 stores were just in California. So it says, well, I learned the importance of logical progression in setting up manufacturing systems. It did not take a rocket scientist. And that's, while I learned the importance of logical progression in setting up manufacturing systems, it did not take a rocket scientist. And that's, I just love books like this. Like, yes, I'm interested in technology.

I think it's fascinating. But some of my favorite stories to read is stuff like this, like high school dropout, spent years learning, you know, people have been selling shoes forever, way before Paul was alive.

They'll sell shoes way after he died. But I just love the idea of somebody mastering an industry or just having a way. Hey, I can I can come up with a way to make a better shoe and come up with ways to sell a better shoe. And as long as I'm making a product that other people want and I'm serving my customers, then I can create a wonderful, wonderful life. This guy's going to sell his company for I think for like $75 million in the eighties. Like that's a lot. I mean, there's still a lot of money today, but in the eighties is a considerable sum of money. He's a ninth, ninth, uh, ninth grade dropout. Like I find these, these stories, it's just basic, you know, just common sense question what you're doing stories,

extremely inspiring because there there inspiring because it just opens up entrepreneurship for such a larger amount of people than trying to create like a next Google or something like that. You know, it's just, there's so many more people that can do things like this and build fantastic lives. Not only do you build a fantastic life for himself, builds a fantastic life for his kids. I think two or three of his kids worked in vans for many, many years. Some of which I think still do, one least, still does. The second one might as well. So he builds a great environment for his family, himself, provides employment for a ton of different people. Like, that's just, that's amazing to me. All right. So I'm getting way ahead in the story. So this is what he's

realizing. Okay, wait a minute. You know, it's just a lot of the stuff that you're doing doesn't make sense. So let's ask why, right? It Did not take a rocket science to figure out that Randy's routines, methods and procedures did not make sense. This realization was strange and exhilarating. And so right from the very first day, he starts making suggestions. Actually, I think he actually starts redoing when the factory is. He stays after his first day. So it's redoing like the layout and the boss's son. This is the guy, Bob.

That's he's going to he's going to be his mentor and then fire him later on. It's like, what are you doing? And then he's just explaining his thought process. And then Bob's like, OK. And he actually helps him redo this. He says to have the boss or the boss's son, which in my limited experience, but the same thing. Listen to me.

A 16 year old on his first day on the job was striking. I believe that in that split second, I began to take my work and my future seriously. And so this is what, this is going to be an example. So they develop a relationship. They'll go out after work and start, you know, having go to go to the bar, have some drinks or whatever the case is. And this is what I mean about like, I think we've all fundamentally underestimate how much of life is just on autopilot, how much of human behavior is just not thought at all. And so they're talking, he says, we grabbed a pint after work and we're kicking around ways to improve the factory. I asked, why does Randy's only make the upper? So not entire shoe, just a part of the shoe.

Why not make the whole shoe? He stared blankly. Then he said, well, hell, I have no idea. To the day, one month later to the day, Randy's announced that they would stop stitching uppers for Keds. Remember, they're just a subcontractor in order to manufacture whole shoes for themselves. And so this sounds unbelievable that they never stopped and asked this question themselves. But it's not a single example. We can never underestimate how much of human behavior, human behavior occurs on autopilot. Go back to Albert Lasker, a couple of podcasts back, the man who sold America, the biography of him. He starts working in the advertising industry right around the turn of the century. So like it's 1900, 1901, something like that. And he realizes like no one in the advertising business actually knows what business they're in. So he's like, he's working for one of

the largest advertising agencies at the time. And their slogan, their tagline is advertised judiciously. And so he's asking people, he's like, what does that mean? I was like, I don't know what that means. And he's asking all the people. So all these people are working there, never questions like, what are we actually doing? And then what Albert discovers as a young man realizes, hey, why are we just acting as brokers for publications and newspapers? Because at the time they would just go to businesses, say, hey, I can find, give me your ads and and I'll place them in the best publications for you, and I'll get 5%. I forgot the exact number.

I think it was 5%. 5% of what you spend. And Albert's the first person in advertising history who was like, hey, why don't we actually make the ads ourselves? If we increase the amount, the effectiveness of the ad, we can demand a higher percentage. And so his boss lets him run this experiment. And so he goes to one of the customers. At the time, they were making like $1,000 a year off this guy's company. And they were only getting, you know, that's 5% of whatever they're placing.

He's like, hey, let's do a no risk trial. I'll run the ads. If they perform better, then you pay me 15%. If my ads bring you more customers than your ads do, and I'll still place them for you, you'll pay me 15%. It winds up working so well that, of course, what happens if you're from the business perspective, you're going to spend more money on advertising because now it's more effective. This guy, Albert, is coming here and he's lowered your acquisition cost. And so just on that one customer, they go from making, I think, sort of $1,000 a year to something like $10,000 or $15,000 a year.

And so, okay, overnight, because Albert's the only one that's not on autopilot, I just increased what the company can make per customer by 10 or 15x. What do you think that's going to do to the overall business? And that's why Albert Weinstein is making $50 million in advertising in the early 1900s. He becomes so wealthy off that idea, just stop and questioning it. He winds up having this estate, like a summer estate somewhere outside of Chicago, if I remember correctly. It's like some examples because these are so – now I think about my own process. I know I'm not being as efficient as possible or maybe not even efficient. It might not be the right way, but I know there's better ways to do things

that are in my workflow. If I just pause for a minute, I'm like, why am I doing this? Is there a better way to do it? It's a very simple idea, very powerful though. You had to switch to the dipping tank every time you wanted to do white shoes, which took five to ten minutes to accomplish. We changed tanks back and forth three or four times a day, depending on the orders. Changing tanks all the time.

This is very, see how it has very simple logic, yes? Changing tanks all the time made no sense to me. I told Bob it made more sense to make all white shoes on one day and all color shoes on another day. Sure enough, we tested that change. Making that one change, saved enough time to noticeably edge up production because people are not, if you have to do this multiple times a day,

you start the production line, then you're paying all these people hourly and they're just sitting there. Bob was pleased and I got a promotion. So that's what I was explaining to you earlier. It's like, okay, he starts off, his line performs better than the other line. Then he gets charged with two lines.

Then he gets put in charge of an entire department, an entire factory. And it just goes on and on. In factory work, there's a lot of absenteeism. And so this is, I guess I should just back up. This is another example of just pay attention and then ask why. It really is what I, that is my interpretation of what the value that Paul brought to almost every endeavor. Pay attention and then ask why. In factory work, there's a lot of absenteeism.

As a supervisor, I noticed whenever someone was absent on conveyor number one, the supervisor borrowed people from conveyor number two to fill the spots, which stands to reason that it threw off my crew on a pretty regular basis. To solve this, what amounted to a bigger problem, I suggested that Bob hire a couple of utility people who would substitute whenever someone was out. Production increased, of course, because all the positions along both production lines were always filled. So he combines with this very simple, like logical process and a really good system design with the next sentence.

My work ethic was my calling card in business and in life. And so one big theme in the book too, is the fact that since he knew his business from A to Z, he executives that sat from like ivory towers and didn't know what the hell they were talking about really rubbed Paul the wrong way. And so what he's about to do here is fantastic. And again, another example of just never underestimate human's ability to like lie or to act like they know something that they don't actually know. And they're just not questioning things. So he's going to prove that the quality assurance, the QA process that this factory is using is subjected, subjective rather, and thus worthless. So why are we engaging in this? going to lead him to realize that, okay, I have a massive edge over other shoe company executives,

just like Sam Zimuri in the book, The Fish That Ate the Whale had a massive edge over other banana. Remember, he goes on later in life, I think it's like Founders Number 37, something like that, but I'd read the book. It's so good. I'm probably going to read it. I know I'm going to reread it at one point, but towards the end of his life, he already got bought out. He's fabulously wealthy. Then he's pulled back into the business, and he winds up having to compete. It's him versus a bunch of banana executives that are up in the northeast somewhere while Sam's down in Honduras. And it's like, have you ever worked in the banana industry before? Do you know anything about it?

And it turns out they didn't, and you know how that story's going to end. Sam kicks their ass up and down the street. All right, so it says the top executives handled quality inspections and graded the shoes i told bob i wanted to conduct a test because he's just sniffed out bs when you know something a to z that's a good way to tell i mean that's why one of the uh one of the best reasons i heard for somebody like why would you want to be well read in general and somebody i forgot who said this heard on a podcast one time and i thought it was a really good idea it's like it's like not only do you like learn stuff but it's just when you're well read like you have the ability to just sniff out things that just don't like it's like a bs like a built

in a way to build up like a bs detector right so and we see this in in and uh in this example that paul's going to give us like i just know too much about this process i don't actually think you do and i think it's obvious when i that I know it and that you don't. And I'm going to prove that what you're doing is just a giant waste of time. I told Bob I wanted to conduct a test with executives in charge of the inspections. He said, okay. I took 25 shoes and displayed them for the group of executives to inspect and grade. So they have four categories that they had.

Just reading this process is absurd that they thought that was going to make any sense. So one, they were going to reject it. Two, it's poor quality. Three, it's acceptable quality. And four, it's excellent. I gave each person a piece of paper. Then we pass the shoes around one shoe at a time to be graded. Naturally, I threw in a ringer, one perfectly made shoe. I passed through the ringer twice. Now, this is hilarious. No one noticed that it was a repeat. It's the same shoe. You're going to judge the same shoe. You already know where I'm going with this. They're going to give different ratings to the same shoe.

So what the hell are we doing? The vice president of sales first graded that shoe as poor when he said it's perfect, right? And the next time it went around, he graded it as excellent. Even Bob gave that shoe a different grade each time. My experiment proved that we did indeed have a serious quality control problem. The people in charge of quality control had no idea what they were looking at. And this is where he gets into his advantage. I don't even think he states this, but he says, if those executives had started out as workers on the floor, they would

have been able to grade those shoes correctly with ease. They would have known exactly what flaws to look for. As it was, they didn't have a clue. The average factory worker often dislikes top executives because they are almost never willing to get their hands dirty. Most haven't worked their way up in a company. They are not familiar with the actual work being done and aren't interested in learning. They prefer to stay in the comfort of their ivory tower. So he's still working in a factory at the time.

He needs to make more money. And to know that myself is this guy is relentless. So it says, I had a second job at night on Saturdays and on Saturdays. I'd bring my family and we would wash windows and floors in the supermarket. The regular staff used to go in and wash the floor in the market in two and a half hours. We did it in 56 minutes. So he's obsessed with the system design, which I know I've repeated, but it's really important to understand the work that he does. And you can obviously provide a massive advantage if you pay attention to that too, because now he's doing it, what, two and a half times faster than the other one. Why would somebody who washed, and he asked these questions, and it kind of makes my job easier. It's just like, why are people not interested

in improving the work they're doing every day? It doesn't make any sense to Paul. Why would somebody who washed floors all their life not want to do it more efficiently? I did it that fast by organizing the family force. All of us, including the kids, pitched in. Who's on water? Who's on the scrub? We found the most efficient ways to wash floors. Bob found out about the job and he gave me a raise so I wouldn't have to wash floors anymore. And so he's about to say something now that I think ties into one of the most surprising things I learned from doing those two biographies on Michael Jordan. And it's the fact that every single person that ever ran into Michael Jordan, whether it's high school level, college, professional trainers, it does not matter. They said he listened better than anyone,

that we would tell him something that could improve his game. He would listen and apply it immediately. I don't think I'm ever going to forget that idea that I learned from him. And we see Paul kind of echoing that. I have always been aware of my own shortcomings and had never had a problem admitting them or taking advice of experts. I believe honest self-evaluation and the ability to listen to others, the ability to listen to others specifically, has been one of my greatest strengths, one that has served me well over the years. If someone had a better idea than mine, of course I would adopt adopt that i didn't care if i didn't get credit i didn't need credit i needed success so eventually he he does so well that they they're

like hey our factory on the west coast in california it's not doing well we're going to send you over there so this is where he's going to be until the day he quits and then starts vans and so that's also why vans was uh started in south and in southern cal this is where he's going to be until the day he quits and then starts Vans. And so that's also why Vans was started in Southern California, where it's still headquartered today. But he really does something smart here. He really is analyzing the... They're having production issues. So he's like, okay, well, let's see if we can realign the incentives. And so this is also something we saw, we learned from the founder of FedEx, Fred Smith. When they were having a hard time, they had that hub and spoke idea. So all all the packages I think at the time in FedEx history was going through like Memphis if I remember correctly and you'd hire all these people usually like

college students to work overnight and they were if you were slow down in this main in the main area then all the flights that were waiting the spokes of the hub is the way to think about that I guess couldn't take off. So he's like, OK, instead of paying like we're paying by the hour. So the more the longer this job takes, the more money they make, they're incentivized to take longer. What if we paid by the job? We say, hey, no matter what, I don't know what the number is. I'm just gonna make it up. What if we say, hey, we're going to pay you 300 bucks a night and you can leave as soon as the job is done. And that one switch saved FedEx's business. And so we see

that Paul's going to use the same idea. And so he says, I decided to create an incentive plan for the benefit of the workers. Essentially, if they could complete eight hours of work in six hours, they could be free to go home. This was a system I had used several years earlier on the East Coast. The reason I had developed this idea of incentives in the first place was because I had a problem with production quotas versus quality. When I focused on production numbers, quality goes down. When I worked on quality, production went down. It was frustrating. Finally, I convinced the workers that if they produced a quota of eight hours of work and made whatever parts they were assigned to produce at top quality, but they did it in fewer hours, they were free to go

home early that day. And so it works so well, they wind up saying, hey, do you want to do instead of doing five day work weeks, let's do four day work weeks. I just have a production number. As long as you hit my number, and the quality doesn't decrease, I don't care when you do this. And we're seeing I think a lot of modern companies are experimenting with this as well. We eventually reached the point where we agreed that if the workers accumulated enough hours, we'd allow them to take Friday off. The goal was to make in four days what used to take five days. This meant they worked a four-day week but were paid for five days. I put the same plan in motion in California. Again, it didn't take very long for the workers to realize I would deliver what I promised.

They embraced the new system. And when they were given the – oh oh and so this is really interesting the the people that were um in charge of the factory before he showed up were they focus again on production quality and and paul focuses on people and so there was a threat to unionize and so paul comes in and he tells him first he explains why he's doing what he is so it's constant communication they see he's busting his ass on the floors with them he's not in the office and then he keeps doing things like this is like, let's work together. And so this this change winds up when they have the chance to vote on unions. They're like, no, no, no, we're going to go with this guy. They embrace a new system. And when they were given the opportunity to vote on whether or not to be controlled by the union, the result was unanimous. They voted the union out. And we see more of uh paul's personality here pretty shoot pretty soon uh randy's west factory he's running now was killing it in eight short months we had turned the place around

completely and our fledgling factory was now doing better than the east coast factory when bob told me that bit of news you can bet i was proud as hell take that you pompous management assholes and this is where we see bob was not the right person for the job he just said you're killing it you were you just turned this around a few months later Paul's no longer working at the company so this is where he Bob's calling him saying hey I'm gonna promote these guys Bob and Paul's like no don't do this he says after I got over the shock I said Bob you can't do that you have loyal employees who've worked at Randy's for more for a dozen years or more how can you promote the two guys we had to show how to do everything right and who were never successful at their previous jobs?

They lost millions of dollars. Bob, and at this point, Bob had taken over the company from his father. Bob replied simply, it's my company, my decision. God knows why he made that stupid decision. Go back to that pigeon story, right? He's like, he's asking me to chase pigeons. I'm not going to do that. The reason didn't matter matter bob was making a giant mistake on many levels a mistake i couldn't live with i told bob this is wrong i will not let you do it his response was i'm sorry you feel that way paul but it's my company i'm going to do it and i'm going to do it and then paul's taking a shot at him right here this coming from a guy who went to work in the morning was home before noon all right bob i said in that case, I quit.

If I had expected Bob to change his mind or somehow talk me out of leaving, as he'd always done before, I was destined to be sorely disappointed. He didn't say a word other than, Okay, Paul, if that's what you have to do. That was the end of my career at Randy's and the start of the biggest adventure of my life. So then he has to go home and tell his family, I'm unemployed now. Don't like, we're going to tighten our belts. They had a little bit of savings,

but it's like, don't ask for things. We can't have new, we're not going to buy new things. And he says, I knew with certainty I had done the right thing by quitting, but I won't lie. I was more than a little scared. The future was one immense black hole of the unknown. So one of the suppliers, uh the suppliers, he lived in Japan. He was a supplier for the raw materials, for some of the raw materials for the shoes that Randy's used.

And he'd worked one-on-one with Paul for quite a bit. And he finds out that Paul left the company. And he's like this rich investor as well. And so this is, you can think of him as, he's going to be the one

that gives Paul seed funding for Vance. What is eventually become Vance. What's crazy is pictures in the book. I think his name is Serge. Maybe Sergei. I'm not actually sure how to pronounce it. But Paul and Sergei, when they're like their 80s and they're still hanging out. I thought it was really cool. He sends Paul a letter. He says, listen, as you already know, there's practically unlimited potential for trade between Japan and the U.S. And with a good man on either side of the line, there's no reason why part of its potential could not be turned to our mutual advantage.

So he sends him a ticket. He's like, hey, why don't you come visit me in Japan? And we figure out if we can arrange and maybe start a business together. And so he goes to Serge's house in Japan in Kobe. So it says, for for five days we tossed around ideas, the most obvious being sneakers. Making canvas shoes was what I knew best. Hell, making canvas shoes was the only thing I knew. After 20 years, I learned every aspect of the sneaker business. I told, excuse me, I could make them in my sleep and suggested starting a small sneaker factory in Southern California. And he says he trusted my abilities. Most important, he believed in me.

I was somewhat astounded by all that was happening and flattered, not to mention a little bit more, mentioned more than a little terrified at the thought of starting my own business. But I knew I'd be completely insane not to seize the opportunity with both hands and run before he changed his mind. He agreed to invest $250,000 I needed to start up the business. We shook on it, and the Van Doren Rubber Company was born. I had to admit that I never dreamed

of opening my own shoe business and competing with Randy's, not to mention Keds and Adidas, companies that had been around forever. I never had that kind of lofty ambition, so that's what I mean about he was kind of a reluctant entrepreneur. He was kind of forced into this.

If Bob didn't mess it up, there's no reason to think that Paul wouldn't have just stayed at Randy's forever. And so Serge or Sergei, whatever his name is, he gets 40% of the business for $250,000. Paul's going to get 40% of the business to run it. And then he's going to bring in two partners at 10% each. And then they're going to be off and running. So it says, we settled on making whole shoes and making them shoes and making them right in the beginning our manufacturing and fulfillment process was simple our employees would make the shoes in the factory and we would sell them straight out of the attached factory

store so this is what he means what he mentioned earlier about i was we created the very first vertically integrated tennis shoe company this is what they're gonna the how vans is going to be for the first probably like decade of their life eventually uh new owners come in and they're gonna i mean you know what's gonna happen people they actually um you know unfortunately paul's really distraught at the time they wound up firing and moving the factory i think to korea or something like that but i like the idea that they have here there's a line in the steve jobs biography of walter isaacson that i that i kept and says the this is steve talking he says, and I love this, the way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this. Let's make it simple,

really simple. And I just, you can understand Paul's business plan here. We're going to make them in a factory. We're going to sell the shoes ourselves. That's it. And from Paul's perspective, he's like, there's very few people in the world that know more about shoe manufacturing than me I'm sure I can learn how to sell what I make so there's a lot of I mean it takes them over a year to set up and to get started they're doing almost all the work themselves I think him and his son his son's probably like 11 at the time they spend like 15 hours a day painting the factory and then really I just want to tell you a short story because his Paul's entire career is like asking if there's a better way to do something. And sometimes we have to be reminded to use our own ideas.

And so it says they're talking about this. This painting is taking us forever. Luckily, I happen to mention our whole exhausting painting ordeal to my brother. And he says he asked, why don't you just rent a paint sprayer? I said, what? What is that? This windfall of information was just was an epiphany. My brother had taught me one of the most important business lessons. he says, he asked, why don't you just rent a paint sprayer? I said, what? What is that? This windfall of information was just an epiphany. My brother had taught me one of the most important

business lessons. You don't know what you don't know. And if you don't know, ask. I had no idea such a thing as a paint sprayer existed, but you can believe that first thing the next morning, I tracked one down at a local rental place. It was too late to do the inside walls with it, but we banged out the building's entire exterior in a single day with that sprayer. And so we also see his former friend and mentor. It's kind of a scumbag as well. Bob winds up finding out that Paul set up his own shop. So he calls all the suppliers because, you know, Paul's got relationships with suppliers. So, OK, you used to deal with me when I was at Randy's. Will you deal with me now that I'm running my own company?

So his old boss calls all the suppliers and says, if you work with vans, I'm going to take my business away. And so this leads to Paul to learn a lesson that he's going to pass on to us. There wasn't a single material we needed to craft a pair of sneakers that he didn't try to keep us from acquiring. To his credit, he made this known. A lot of suppliers had empathy, but no one crossed the picket line to help. To this day, when it comes to supply chains, my advice is to control as much as you're able to and stay nimble. Never get too comfortable or complacent. So main theme of the book, I think you've picked up by now. If it's important to your business, control it. It comes down to the ability to make decisions, which is extremely important to Paul, but not only the ability to make your own product, to sell your own product, the less you have to rely on other companies and other people, the better. And he continues, controlling my supply chain, he eventually figures this out, controlling my supply chain made all the difference in both quality and service. So the factory's up, they start producing, and he says something that's really interesting. I was

like, well, I figure I can learn how to sell, right? In the beginning, as a numbers and production man, I had plenty to learn about dealing directly with the buying public. In the end, my best teachers in the art of retail were the customers themselves. And so that's another main lesson that he would tell you is like never give up the direct connection to your customer. He hated middlemen. Most other shoe companies were sold. They didn't have their own stores. They were sold through retailers or in some cases, wholesalers, whatever the case was. He's like, if I didn't have a direct connection with my customer, I would have never learned how

to sell my shoe because I learned as I talked to them, I learned exactly what to do and what not to do. It opened up potential huge markets. So at the very beginning of vans, one thing they were really well known for, and the company got away from it later on and then they go back to it i think a couple decades later is this idea of customization um and so they're struggling they don't have a lot of business at the time somebody comes in they're trying to match like i forgot what it was some kind of pink fabric with they were making pink shoes but it was like a different color and so the the customer had their own fabric and he asked her it's like well do you want me to just make you a custom pair of shoes real quick? The factory is right next door. If you come back in a few hours, it'll be done. And so it says, after successfully making the two custom

pairs for that first customer, I called a meeting and discussed the idea with my partners. They agreed that offering custom shoes as a service was a terrific idea. Essentially, the point of the story is that he found ways to get more customers. We immediately saw a huge potential market. Not only would women who sewed their own clothes be delighted to get a pair of exactly matching shoes, but drill teams, and this is the days he talks about, this is well before the days of fast fashion, and fabric was really inexpensive. So you have a huge market of people actually making their own clothes, which I didn't even know. And so he's like, all right, let me just piggyback onto this already existing market. They don't know how to make custom shoes, but they're making their own clothes which i didn't even know and so he's like all right let me just piggyback onto this already existing market they don't know how to make shoot custom

shoes but they're making their own clothes bring me some fabric i'll make shoes to match it so that's what he does and he's like who else would want this really smart just ask like who else would want this how can we sell a lot more at one time well let me go and talk to sports teams so he says um drill teams cheerleading sports teams private schools and choirs would all jump on the idea of being able to have shoes that perfectly match their uniforms or outfits. So he's like, all right, well, I'm, then he's like, who else can I contact? I printed up some postcards and I sent them around to all the local high school and college physical ed departments, letting them know we now offer custom made shoes for teams. And a lot of this, he's getting getting customers which is really funny because people they they sometimes

you could dismiss a simple uh technique even though it's effective it doesn't matter it's simple it's effective and he got a bunch of his business just doing like direct mail postcards handing out flyers having somebody in front of his store dancing or like trying to draw attention to the fact that there's a shoe store i mean what's really crazy is like people think oh you know that doesn't work today well go read that book that book, How to Lose a Billion Dollars. It talks about the first few years of Snapchat. Evan Spiegel, who I think by now is, you know, probably worth $20 billion or whatever crazy number it is. He used to go to local mall, I think in the Pacific Palisades, wherever he's at in California, and he'd hand out flyers asking

people to download Snapchat. Obviously, you don't want that to be your main, like you don't want that to be your customer acquisition strategy forever. But don't dismiss these simple, but effective techniques just because they seem simple. It's a way to build a little bit of momentum. So there's a ton of the book that's beneficial to read, because it's all about the struggle, right? How the heck does he get from one factory to one factory store, to vans now, 60 years later? I think they say in the book they're selling 2 million pairs of shoes a week or some crazy number like that. And so he's realizing, like everybody else is going to realize, okay, my initial idea, not working.

We've got to rethink this. And the way what he comes up with is counterintuitive. I don't think I would have figured it out. So he says, eventually I came to realize that there was a limit to how many shoes we could sell straight out of the factory. I've been more than naive to think we could sell our entire production using that one small outlet meeting with his partners like what the heck are we going to do why don't we just open another retail store i blurted out one in a totally different location i was met with stunned silence we were we were all aware that no other shoe

manufacturer had opened a factory store to sell their shoes let alone an entirely separate retail store dedicated exclusively to selling their own products. At the time, most shoes were sold in separate sections of places like department stores. A standalone shoe store was unprecedented, but was it a crazy idea? By providing the best customer service and products that were available in difficult-to-find sizes, we could turn the tables, open our own branded retail store, and claim all of that profit for ourselves. We were still struggling to get our new operation into the black on our balance sheet. We could have easily ended up bankrupt, as most new businesses do. So once they say, okay, let's do it, this guy doesn't play around.

He moves extremely fast. I've never been one to drag my feet. So just one short week after that meeting, our first true retail store opened its doors. This is funny. The company was still in the red. We decided to open even more locations. And so this next thing he's about to do is if you read about Paul online, it's what he's most famous for. And this is what I meant about this extremely counterintuitive idea. I think they have what, 10 stores maybe at this time. So it says, I routinely got together with the company accountant to review the financial status of our stores. I was anxious about our retail sales numbers and wanted to keep close tabs on

how they were doing. His name is Marvin, the accountant. Marvin told me that in his opinion, we should close down two out of our 10 stores. Why? Six of our 10 stores were still in the red. These two that he's suggesting to close down were our least productive locations. They are not even close to being profitable. And so Paul was like, I don't want to close any. I want to build another 10. Well, maybe on paper, it might have been a good idea, but not in the real world. Not as I saw it anyway.

He's talking about Marvin's idea. I grinned. We need to put in an additional 10 stores. Marvin was about to fall off his chair. Look at it this way, I went on to explain. If we put in 10 new stores, and even if they do as badly as our current 10 stores are doing right now, the company will still make a profit. So what he's talking about is, listen, I have 10 stores. Overall, the company is making a tiny, tiny profit, even though six of those 10 stores are not profitable on an individual basis and two are nowhere close to being profitable.

So he's saying if we put in 10 new stores, and even if they do as badly as our current 10 stores are doing right now, the company would still make a profit. This would also increase our volume, and more volume would mean less cost per unit. And then I thought this next part was pretty funny. Neither of us point out the obvious. There was no guarantee that the next 10 stores would even do as well as our first 10.

Better to ignore that little dark cloud in the sky. It was a risk I was willing to take. So Vans is going to slowly but surely get into the black. The growth is obviously a lot slower at the beginning of a company than it will be when it matures. But he's got a great story here towards the end. Because as he's doing well, his old company collapses. And I love his tagline here the punchline is i guess it's a better way to put it it's like opportunity is a strange beast

so let me read this section to you i thought it was really good not only that but randy said he also got out of business though i'd been mightily upset with bob in those early days when he tried to short circuit my operation i was still unhappy to hear this news. Bob and I may have not parted on the best of terms, but I had never wished Bob or his company ill. Certainly, I never wanted or expected them to fail. I'd worked for Randy's for 20 good years, and I'd poured a lot of my own blood, sweat, and tears into that company. That Bob and I became enemies when I quit Randy's and started my own venture was a shame. Later on, to our surprise, we managed to become friends again. Before he passed away at the age of 62, Bob said to me,

the biggest mistake I ever made was letting you go. Hearing him say those words was bittersweet. For me, quitting Randy's had probably been the biggest stroke of luck in my life. Opportunity is a strange beast. And so we're deep into the book now, and we still haven't even talked about skateboarding, which I was really surprised. I was like, so I get to this part, I was wondering when he's going to get to skateboarders. So his niche, the tiny niche that they're going to dominate that eventually leads to more mass appeal later on is with skateboarders and surfers. And what's interesting is they didn't target them.

The skateboarders came to them. So usually, like, you've identified your—the identification of your product niche or the market niche, rather, usually comes internally, right? Which I found surprising reading this book. It was an external thing. In the early days, skateboarders were the renegades, the badasses of the sporting world. And I think Bob thinks of himself as that too. I mean, he is. He's definitely a renegade, a misfit, a rebel for sure.

In the early days, skateboarders were the renegades, the badasses of the sporting world. With their innovative moves, creative vernacular, and their unusual practice spots. And so he's going to explain the skateboarding term off the wall, which is also becomes a tagline for Vans and how it's the perfect metaphor for how he approaches company building. As an American idiom off the wall had been around for decades, but when it was picked up by other skaters, the phrase caught on as, as slang evolving to mean something new and maybe strange or even a little nuts.

Paul is definitely nuts. Say what you will. To me, it screamed opportunity, a chance to push things to make the most of every moment. It captured Van's spirit and became Van's anthem, mantra and rallying cry. Looking back, I can see that part that part of my company's success was that that willingness to go off the wall from day one. We were always speeding forward into the unknown, trusting that skill and agility would bring us safely back to earth. Until the skateboarders came along, Vans had no direction, no specific purpose as a business other than to make the best shoes possible. When skateboarders adopted Vans, this is what I meant

about it being external instead of internal, when they adopted Vance, ultimately they gave us an outward culture and an inner purpose. Most of the kids in the early skate crews came from single-parent households from the wrong side of the tracks. They were idiosyncratic, creative, independent. They were seen as the freaks of the sport. In so many ways, they were our people. Now, what's fascinating, so I highlighted that, put the note, misfits.

I promise you, I wrote that before I saw what's going to come about a couple paragraphs later. Skateboarders discovered our shoes at a moment in time when the shoe industry was changing, and they helped us find a niche, an identity we maintain to this day. My daughter Cheryl, who's worked for fans forever. My daughter, Cheryl describes our partnership as a band of misfits coming together to make something great. Now watch what he does here. That's really, really smart. He's going to learn something from Nike and Adidas. I got a couple highlights here. You know, I should probably just tell you at the beginning. This is just, it's really smart what he does here. And it's a perfect, perfect example of this idea that appears over and over again.

Don't copy the what. Copy the how. So this is what he learns from Nike and Adidas. He's at the 1972 Olympics. So he says, during that week, I took note of the connection between star athletes and the companies that made specialized shoes engineered for their sport. At the time, it was often Adidas.

They were also a fair number of athletes wearing a new brand of more casual running shoe when they weren't competing called Nike. It turns out, earlier that year, Phil Knight had handed out the shoes to five runners at an Olympic trial event in Eugene, Oregon. I didn't know how many of Nike's 12 styles are being worn competitively, but the Nike Cortez

had been released the year before and the distinctive look of these track shoes had already set them apart. I started thinking about what I'd seen at the games. I started to wonder, should we expand our ways of thinking? And so now he gets really specific about copying. Do not copy the what. Copy the how. Now I started to rethink my approach. I had seen firsthand how fiercely Adidas and Nike competed for sponsorships among big name athletes. Skateboarders may not have been an Olympic sport yet, but what about the skateboarding championship? Might vans have or create an opportunity to support those. So the same idea that Adidas and Nike are using for track and Olympic athletes,

he takes that idea and he applies it to skateboarders and surfers. And he combines this with another important point because since he was vertically integrated, people would come in and be like, hey, can I buy one shoe? And they're like, why are you buying one shoe? And he says they wanted to buy one shoe at a time because skateboarders regularly wore out the toe and the heel of the shoe that met the street. So the shoe that's on the board is fine.

It's very minimal wear. But they're destroying this other shoe. And so his flexibility, the fact that he was the only vertically integrated shoe company around, and he's doing this at the birth. He's also in Southern California, which is like the birthplace of these extreme sports. He combines that. He's like, okay, well, yeah, we'll make you one shoe. And it's like, okay. And then he gets to know all these soon-to-be, I guess,

I don't even know if professional skateboarding was a thing. I'm pretty sure it wasn't. They were like the, what eventually would become professional skateboarders. So taking that idea that he first saw used at Adidas and Nike, presented with the opportunity to make one shoe, and he's like, okay, well, you know what, I'm just going to give you pairs of shoes. And so they start signing up all of the skateboarders that are going to be extremely famous in their niche. So think about that.

He builds his entire business off that. That's the beginning of their business. Would he have built his business off of that if he didn't first observe what Adidas and Nike was already doing? How important was him learning that idea? Like, how important was it to the outcome of his business off of that if he didn't first observe what adidas and nike was already doing how important was him learning that idea like how important was it to the outcome of his business extremely important how if he could buy that idea in a store how much would he have paid for it it's priceless and so now he's he's giving them shoes then he he's communicating with them and he starts to do custom just like you know know, Jordan advised what he needed from Nike. Like, the skateboarders start telling him that he does shoes specific for their sport,

so he's able to improve even better because he's the only one in that niche. He's going to dominate that niche. And really, you think about this, he's using the Adidas, the Nike playbook, Puma also used this playbook. Van soon became an important partner and sponsor of the sport in the end the consistency and longevity of van's commitment to these signature signature sports really paid off they did things differently and we met them where they were so he talks about one of the first fans athletes this guy named stacy perala i don't know how to pronounce his last name i don't know how to pronounce anything you already know that by now uh but really don't

this is another example i gotta this is so important don't copy the what copy the how in retrospect one could argue that space stacy peralta did for vans and skateboarding what michael jordan did for basketball and nike stacey became a role model for other kids to emulate and Vans were a signature part of his look. So I'm fast forwarding in the book. Really, one of the most valuable things is, I mean, the note I left myself here is, this is advice from a 90-year-old.

Think about how much knowledge you build up in that many decades. And so some of this is just life advice he talks about. And so he says, another lesson my father taught me, and without question, this is one to commit to memory. Life is only partly about how you hold and handle your cards. Don't ever be so goddamn sure of anything because nothing in life is given. No matter how good the odds, no matter who's the favorite, no one but no one wins every race. Even when we pay attention, when we hope and pray and prepare and double and triple check, things will go sideways.

People lose their health and hard-earned businesses and the loves of their lives, and no one sees it coming. That's the hard scrabble of life. Sometimes you have to know when to fold your cards and call it a draw. And so he's going to finish this advice. It reminds me of something I learned from Charlie Munger, that self-pity has yet no utility. Sometimes opportunity just means that when faced with defeat or loss, a person refuses to say, woe is me, but instead looks forward and asks, what can I accomplish now? The way we deal, this is one of the most popular highlights in the book, the way we deal with hardship is our legacy.

You can accept defeat or you can overcome it. And so now we get to the point where we're fast forwarding. He's been running Vans for 15 years. And this is where he quits. He's burned out. By 1981, after 15 years in business, days went round and round. I could have gone on giving 100%, but this is hard to admit. I'd become burned out.

I was 51. I had been working my tail off for more than three decades, working more than full-time since he was 16, from 16 to 51 in the same business, shoe business that is. I decided it might be the right time for someone else to take over the reins of the Vans Doran rubber company and usher Vans into the future. And this was really surprising because then he gets to his real-life dream. He's going to let his brother run the company. His brother's going to run into the ground. And I think it destroys the relationship.

He mentions that he never heard from him again, which is crazy. For my whole life, I'd really just one dream. Right behind the let me craft the world's best sneaker dream and let my kids be healthy dream, right behind what I call those two essential dreams, was one in which eventually I'd be able to do whatever I wanted financially. For me, this meant being able to go to the races, the horse races he's obsessed with, which is really surprising to me. So the horse races, anytime I felt like it. As a kid, I never wanted to be a fireman or a doctor or even a businessman.

I just wanted to go to the races. So he's going to get involved in the horse industry, buys a farm, raises horses, runs horses, gets remarried. He went to divorcing his wife and a few years later gets remarried. So he's married to 25 years to one wife and I think 30 something to the 32 or something, 36 to his last wife. But he's going to his entire chapter called Shit Happens. And so that's really his like parting life advice to us, by the way. But he's talking about something, the idea of like what's going to befall. Like he was focused when he started his company. His brother loses focus.

So he says, if you ask me one of the biggest problems with many businesses, lack of focus kills. Complete lack of focus kills. It's usually a matter of focus. For me, whenever a situation went sideways and things look dire, I always called up my one superpower, focus. When I focus, I tend to forget about anything else or everything else. Excuse me me i'm driven to get the job done and just keep doing what i'm doing until it's finished it stands to reason when someone focuses all their attention on one thing they do a better job frankly he talks about the comparison between the idea of this is what they know this for horses like he's in horse racing you have to put blinders on so they don't get distracted by

everything that's going on on the track they don't get distracted by everything that's going on on the track. They don't get distracted by looking at their competition. They just look straightforward. And his takeaway from that is, frankly, we could all use blinders to help us focus. And so his brother does the opposite. He says everything Jimmy did, he did over the top. Jimmy was trying to make Vans into something he was not. We were a company devoted to indie sports, skating and surfing sports, such as wrestling,

skydiving, team sports, like football and baseball. We're very far afield from our core market and mission. The key factor focus was being lost. Not only that, he starts trying to compete directly head on with Adidas and Nike and their focus is running and basketball.

So what are you doing? Like you're getting, it doesn't make sense. Main message. If you study the life of Herb Keller, founder of Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines is the only airlines to be profitable for 47 straight years. And part of that is he tells you over and over again, don't be tempted to stray from your niche. Focus on your niche. Stay in your niche.

Don't chase everything else that other companies are doing. You already have your goal, your focus. Just keep going down that path. So as Jimmy's expanding, Jimmy doesn't really know what he's doing. Paul did not like to have a lot of debt. He had one loan that he would take out every year because in the shoe industry, there's a huge sales spike for back to school. And so he'd have like a credit line, but he'd pay it off every October. Jimmy does the opposite. In two years, between 1982 and 1984, right before they go bankrupt,

he lost more than $3.5 million in operating expenses. And then that's in addition to racking up another $12 million in debt. So this is what's going to cause him to go into bankruptcy. The schmuck, Paul says, who fails to consider what things cost never stands a chance. And so they're pushing to bankruptcy. The court is about to, they're deciding whether to liquidate the company or not. Since Paul is one of the largest shareholders and the former CEO, he's asked to go meet with the bankruptcy attorneys. This is very interesting. I like what he says here because his whole thing is like, stop being focused on competitors.

Focus on your customers. Your competitors do not give you any money. My initial meeting was with the lead attorney. He asked, Paul, who's your competition? In my entire 25 years I ran vans, I never made a list of competitors. Not once did I consider which share of the market we might corner. It sounds a lot like Herb Keller. Not once, not ever. No, what I thought about was vulcanized rubber and how to do what I enjoyed doing to perfection for my family's business in Southern California. And so his response here is really surprising. He says, sir, it is my opinion that we don't have any. The attorney nodded. Yeah, he said, I was kind of thinking the same thing. And so it says our chapter 11 bankruptcy

reorganization called for the removal of Jimmy from the company leadership. The judge then ordered me back to lead Vans out of bankruptcy. I returned with reluctance. This was surprising. I really liked living out on the farm. I had officially been countryfied. And he follows that up with, but what could I do? Vans was my baby. And so this caused a huge rift because Jimmy wasn't taking responsibility. As you can imagine, when Jimmy left Vans, he made it known loudly and clearly that without him, we didn't stand a chance. And then we see a little bit of Paul's self-belief and ego here. Was he kidding? I've been outperforming expectations at every stage of my career. I shook my head and thought, just you watch. You know what? Go ahead and take notes. So he goes on in detail about what he thinks Jimmy made a mistake. The note of myself here is

perfect. Jimmy ignored what Michael Jordan was obsessed with. The second mistake Jimmy made was one he was destined to make more than once. He ignored the fundamentals. Jimmy had moved away from the core. Vance had no business making wrestling shoes or running shoes. What the hell was he thinking? We had Reebok for that. He's talking about wrestling shoes. We had Reebok for that.

And we had a whole slew of shoe dogs designing track shoes. And I love what his son does here because his son's been working in the company for a long time. This reminds me of what Warren Buffett does because if you go to Warren Buffett's office he has on the wall newspaper clippings from the depression as a reminder to how bad things can get so when it looked like they were going to liquidate they go in and they put like stickers on everything because they have to sell it off it says they even went as far as to send people into our offices and factories and put stickers with an inventory number on every single piece of furniture

and equipment in preparation for the liquidation sale. To this day, in his office at headquarters, Stevie, that's his son, has stubbornly kept the same old wooden desk with that white sale tag still on it to remind him of what can so easily happen and stand guard against ever landing in a similar situation. And so his response to this, this is, I just wrote more advice from a 90 year old that

he repeats over and over again. It's like, you got to learn how to get stronger because the idea that you're going to live a long time and not bad and bad things aren't going to happen to you is it's not true. It's not impossible. He says he says trust me the only thing i will ever say with any certainty is that at some point for all of us shit happens so i'm fast forwarding a couple years later he turns everything around as you could probably guess by this point in the story he's just really good at these at turning things around or making and making things and solving problem solving so then he's just like, man, I'm burnt out. I want to go back to my horses and everything else. So they're like, hey, they're trying to figure out now that they have a large sales growth.

So the partners are meeting with an acquisition. They call him an acquisition expert. So I guess somebody that sells businesses. And he says, if we're going to sell, we want three duffel bags with $25 million in cash in each bag. Would your people do that? So $25 million in cash in each bag. Would your people do that? So $75 million. Remember, this is $75 million. It's $75 million in the 80s money.

And so there's a, I think it's a venture capital firm. What is it called? They call it a venture banking firm. It's a venture banking firm in San Francisco called McCown DeLue and Company. So they're going to pay pay 75 million for Vans they're gonna sell it I think like eight years in the future something like that for 400 million and so even though he sells the company he's on the board but there's a little bit of like

if you learned what we from the biography of Trader Joe's there's a little bit of like a Trader Joe's vibe he's kind of sad because they stopped listening to him and asking like he basically has no influence. He says, the acquisition marked an end of my leadership of Vans as chairman. I continued to preside over board meetings, but found that more and more often,

no matter the topic, the board rarely decided to go my way. Was it tough for me to walk away from a leadership position at the company I founded? There's no denying it. And even when he moves to Kentucky, he's obsessed with horse racing he does for a while

eventually vans like vans management brings him back they do something smart because he kind of loses that they don't he's just watching from afar and so they later on i think he's in the 70s at the time they come back and like he becomes like a front man for vans again he's involved in it and they just go back to celebrating their roots and their founder. Even while relegated to Sidelines, I was an avid follower of everything Vans and I never stopped considering myself

part of the Vans family. And so there's a bunch of ups and downs in the Vans history after he sells the company. And he goes through talking a lot about it. I want to get to one point because he was very sad like he was very he thought it was a mistake to to outsource to offshore rather and they wind up having a boost in in profit because i think he says they're starting to pay people like 16 cents an hour or something in korea and he says one sad reason for the associated

financial boost was van's shift from american made to overseas manufacturing the factories in asia were simply able to produce shoes and clothing much more cheaply and quickly than the United States. I was totally heartsick at this development. Remember, he's a factory guy his entire life. Helpless to do anything but watch in horror as they systematically undermined everything I had believed in and everything I felt Vans had stood for. Vans no longer made the best shoes possible, but the cheapest shoes possible. Because the company was buying all their shoes from overseas factories, some of the Vans styles were exactly the same

as every other shoe brand was selling. You literally couldn't tell them apart. And so his son is working at this company when this is happening. And he's like, this is ridiculous. So he's trying to do a form of protest, even though his son doesn't have much power in the company. So this is before a staff meeting.

Stevie bought 100 different shoes from a variety of brands and lined them all up on the shelves of the conference room wall. This is really fascinating. I defy anyone here to stand up and point to me which of these are Vans. Nobody could. Think about the indictment of the leadership of the company at the time. Eventually, they bring different people back. But anyways, not one person could the person the people running the company could not even tell their own shoes from those of their competitors and so there's gonna be a change of

ownership so it says a north carolina-based fashion conglomerate called vf bought vans for 400 million so in 1988 it was sold for 7575 million. In 2004, I was wrong by the date, by the way. 2004 was sold for $400 million. And this is where they start changing to get back to their roots. VF seemed keenly aware of what it takes for a brand to be successful. Authenticity, hence the line, the name of the book, right? What I always saw as authenticity in the way I did business now anchors the brand. I can think of no better legacy so this is when he's brought back into the company he travels them he meets like he starts going and meeting like some of the professional skateboarders they had signed 40 years earlier now they're like more mellow and everybody's you know a lot more chill and

not as crazy as they were when they were in their teens and 20s. And then he just goes through a personal tragedy. And this is why I think reading biographies is just so fundamentally important. Business books don't hit this way because you feel like you know this person. And so at this point, he'd been married for 30-something years to his second wife. They had moved out of California. And and it's just he's just he gets so boring his life and this is why he was giving us advice you know a few chapters earlier it's like there's going to be bad things that happen um and you got to keep moving forward but there are going to be times where you just feel like giving up she had lost 40 pounds she may have been weak but the treatment but uh but the treatments

awful as they were seemed to be working until the day they weren't. She's got some form of cancer and she had a bypass surgery, heart trouble too. Suddenly she couldn't move her arms or legs. In the emergency room, they told us that she had developed an infection. Antibiotics weren't working. Days later, when she asked to go home, her doctor advised against it. Then he acquiesced saying it wouldn't make any difference. I stared at him until it hit me. She wasn't going to make it. Two days later, she died, and our love story of 34 years had an ending I had not anticipated.

I was in shock, utterly devastated. Over the years, I've known sadness. My father dying in 1958 was especially tough, but then I had two sons and a daughter and Dolly to lean on. If I'm being honest, the only thing that helped me navigate his death was my second daughter, Janie's birth, and then Cheryl's, which followed not too long after. If the day of my father's funeral was one of the darkest of my life, at least I had another 20 years with mom, so I felt less cheated. Burying my wife left me rudderless in a black hole of despair. Writing this now fails to convey that in her absence,

everything was wrong, nothing mattered, and my grief was filled with fear. The dread of it masked everything that had ever brought me joy. You hear people coach one another on how life goes on, that we are somehow duty-bound to do so, and that everything had a purpose. That's a crock of shit. The whole Drina's absence left in my life is just a big, gaping, hungry abyss. And I will miss her forever.

So he starts leaning on his kids. He eventually is going to move back to Southern California so he's not by not by himself so he can be near vans be near his kids but he says from this is this is wild because if you think about what he's about to tell us like this is the book that we get to read he is not here anymore for months i didn't care about anything because I felt nothing. And yet, I found myself clinging to stories. The narrative of my life. The whole of it. The tidbits. The toil.

The crazy exuberance. There is something in human nature that compels us to pass on the information we learn to the next generation. And I think you see that in the stage of life when people decide to write an autobiography, whether it's Phil Knight, Sam Walton, whichever one you want to pick. They don't do it when they're 30 or when they're 40. They're inevitably, whether they're in their 60s, 70s, 80s,

maybe in the case they know they have a terminal illness. That's when it's like, okay, I'm compelled. Listen to what he just said here. I found out he's more depressed than he's ever been in his life he's saying it's a crock of shit i'll never get over this i have what do you call it a huge unrelenting abyss and he's like i found myself clinging to the stories the narrative of my life the whole of it that's crazy the narrative i didn't wasn't expecting to say this but like let's pause there like we're all creating narratives of our life.

Maybe the narratives of our life are not going to be as wide read as Paul's or Sam's or Phil's or Steve's or anybody else's. But your friends that you leave behind, the family that you leave behind, that is your legacy. Whether it's written down in a book or not, we are all writing a narrative of our own life. And this is a 90 year old man telling you that is important when you get to this stage that when you get to where i'm at this is going to be important to you i found myself clinging to the stories the narrative of my life the whole of it the tidbits the toil the crazy exuberance and this is the book that now we get to read and then this change you can see that he's almost he doesn doesn't say it, the implication is he's preparing himself for death.

I felt a measure of relief or release or whatever it is that allows a man enough grace to accept that there are things we can't control and cannot change. And so for the rest of his life, he's involved in vans. He visits stores, travels all over the world, gives talks. This is just fantastic life advice from a 90-year-old. During my talk, I was asked, if you could sum up your advice on how to find the right track and succeed in life,

what would it be? My answer? Shit happens. Shit happens. It really does. Letting yourself get stuck in it doesn't do any good. Acknowledge it and then move on. Don't let it weigh you down.

Just cope. Tackling things in a positive way will help you succeed more often than not. Shit happens. These two words fully acknowledge the difficulties in life, but you can put them firmly in the rearview mirror without letting them mess with your head or your path in life. but you can put them firmly in the rearview mirror without letting them mess with your head or your path in life. Yes, shit happens, but we can all recognize that we need one another. I said it at the outset of this book, and I'll say it again. No one gets anywhere alone.

And in the final analysis, what you make will never be as important as how and with whom you make it. Vans is a people company that makes shoes, not the other way around. So let me leave you with this parting thought. When you have good people with you, the odds are with you too. And the longer I live, the more I see the truth of it. And that is where I'll leave it. Highly recommend reading the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you want to buy a gift subscription, there's a link in the show notes

as well. If you buy a gift subscription on an annual basis, let's do this, at least for the rest of the year, the rest of this calendar year. If you buy an annual subscription for a friend, I'll extend it. I'll go in and upgrade it to a lifetime access so you can do that. If you're interested, the link for the gift subscriptions is always in the show notes on your podcast player. That is 216 books down, 1,000 to go. I'll talk to you again soon.