In Search Of Excellence - Extreme Preparation: The Key To Your Success | E48

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

The episode today is a special one – I took the best segments about Extreme Preparation to highlight the importance of using preparation as the key to our success. Extreme Preparation was the most important determinant of my success, as it was for all my guests – they out-prepared their competition by always being the most prepared person in the room!As you can see, Extreme Preparation is something very close to my heart – it has opened doors that were closed and even closed doors that would’ve ended in disaster – deals that would’ve gone wrong if I had prepared 1 hour less. Let Extreme Preparation be the one factor that leads to your success – harness it and out-prepare all your competitors.Thank you for joining us for this incredibly special episode. Some of our best guests ever found their success through preparation and hard work. Tell us what you think about this kind of episode in the comments below!(5:04) Mark Cuban(10:43) Ed Mylett(11:48) Sharon Stone(17:55) Jimmy Pitaro(25:04) Rachel Zoe(28:54) Kevin O'Leary(35:30) Daymond John(39:33) Giada DeLaurentiis(41:25) Mike Horn(46:32) Sammy Hagar(51:43) Bob Pittman(53:42) Sarah Friar(57:31) Caryn Seidman-Becker(1:01:01) Tony FadellSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

Welcome to In Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings. We all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. This episode of In Search of Excellence is a very special one.

It's my 50th episode. To celebrate this milestone, I'm dedicating it to a topic that has been one of the core ingredients of my success, and to the success of every single one of my guests and to hundreds of people I have coached and mentored for the last 20 years, which is something that only a very small percentage of people do, but which is something that every single person who strives for excellence should do.

It's something that I call extreme preparation, and it's a completely different kind of preparation than most people think about when some amount of preparation is required to achieve a successful outcome. For starters, it's something that requires a completely different mindset than most people have, where instead of preparing 30 minutes to 60 minutes for a meeting, which is something most people do, we should be preparing between 5 hours and 40 hours or even more for that single meeting. When many people hear this advice,

they say to themselves, really? Preparing 40 hours for a single meeting? Isn't that completely crazy and a complete waste of time? The answer is a definite no. It's the exact opposite of crazy. It's one of the sanest, smartest, and most effective things we can do to achieve successful outcomes. Why does extreme preparation matter? Because it leads to substantially faster results, a dramatically improved win rate, and outcomes that would not have otherwise been possible. When you add up all the time, we have all spent 100,000 hours in classrooms, on homework, on travel getting to and from school, and in other clubs or other school related activities from kindergarten through college graduation. There are a lot of reasons to go to college, to educate ourselves, to grow as people,

to experience life. But the main reason most of us go to college is to get a job when we graduate. And to get that first job and start our career, we need to get interviews. It's pretty simple. If we don't get an interview, we're not getting a job. So if we spend 100,000 hours to get that interview, why can't we spend 40 hours to prepare for one? If you spend 40 hours preparing for an interview, that means you spend 2,500 times more to graduate college than you do for that interview. So why don't we prepare for these interviews the way we should when our first job is going to put food on our tables, pay our rent and other expenses, and start our career? But extreme preparation isn't just critical for that first interview.

It's the most important thing you can do for any meeting, presentation, sales pitch, employee review, future interview speech, or hundreds of other situations where some amount of preparation is required to achieve your goal of having a successful outcome, where that one interview, one job, one meeting, one presentation, one sale can change our lives forever. But don't just take my word for it. I'm very grateful and fortunate to have had some of the most successful and iconic people in the world on my show, and Extreme Preparation has been a critical element of their success. I put together some highlights of what my amazing guests have said about extreme preparation, which is something that I hope every single one of you will adopt in your search of excellence. I want to talk about the famous author and philosopher Ayn Rand, who wrote an incredible

book called The Fountainhead. For those of you who haven't read it, it's about a young architect who fights against conventional standards and refuses to compromise with an establishment that's unwilling to accept change and innovation. You said you've loved the book. It was incredibly motivating to you and encouraged you to think as an individual, to take risks and reach your goals, and is partly responsible for both your successes and failures. You've given a lot of advice on how to achieve excellence in business, to focus on sales, to just get the fuck up off your ass and do it instead of asking for help, and among other

things, to be prepared. When I look at my own career and some of the ingredients of my own success, the most important one is that I was always and am always the most prepared person in the room. I got my job working for Eli Broad by writing a very unique and detailed letter. It took five hours to write. Then I spent another 40 preparing for the interview. That was my goal, to be the most prepared person in the room he'd ever met for a job interview. And I succeeded. It's exactly what he said when I walked out the door and he hired me six months later for a job I was completely unqualified for. There's a famous music composer who once said we should practice until we can't get it wrong. How important is work ethic and preparation of all the elements of success and being the

most prepared person in the room? And can you tell us how being the most prepared person in the room played a role in your success? I mean, it's everything. I've got all these stupid sayings, but one of them is practice until you can't get it wrong. The one thing in life you can control is effort. Everybody's got the will to win, but it's only those with the will to prepare that do win. How you do anything is how you do everything. These are the things that I repeat in my own mind all the time to keep me focused because there's always somebody competing with you. Business is the ultimate sport.

In the NBA, I've said this to our players, we play 48 minutes on the clock and then there's another game. You practice two hours, but after the season's over, you get some time off and then you prepare for the next season. In business, that's not the case. You're working 24 by seven by 365. And there's always somebody there trying to kick your ass. You know, when I was the youngest in the room, it was like, okay, they're not taking me seriously. When I was the oldest in the room. Okay. They're not taking me seriously because I'm either too young or too old or whatever but i do the motherfucking work you know it it doesn't matter and and so if whatever it takes and you know the interesting thing um is that technology in particular is kind of like a ball of yarn creating the beginning of that ball is really hard right because there's

nothing you got to use your finger and da da da da da but once you have a foundation just rolling the yarn around and making it bigger and bigger gets easier and easier and easier because you learn how to learn you learn how to understand the underlying principles and how to pick up on things and where what's the signal what's the noise but you don't get to that point unless you go the extra mile you know another one of my work like someone's working 24 hours a day to take it all away because it's true you know not but not everybody's cut out to commit themselves like that not everybody's come cut out for what you have to give up to do it i went through relationships i i went that 70 without a vacation I was on a mission,

right? I wanted to be in a position where I could retire. I wanted to be in a position where my time was my own. I wanted to be in a position by the time I got married and have kids, I wouldn't have to worry about all those things because I knew what it could do to our relationship. And so if you want to be successful, you have to decide what you're willing to do. I'm not saying one way is right and one way is wrong, right? You have to make your choices on how you want to live your life. You have to make your choices on what's most important to you. There's nothing wrong with having a nine-to-five job.

There's nothing wrong with driving an Uber or whatever it may be because there's other things you want to do. You want to be a composer. You want to just spend time with your kids. That's all wonderful, but you get to make that choice. If your choice is to be an entrepreneur, if your choice is to make as much money as possible, if your choice is to at some point have enough to control your own time, you're going to have to make a commitment because no one's handing you any of that. You know, in your search for excellence, you know, people always ask me, you know, what do I have to do? You know, everybody's got something that they're great at. The hard part is finding it. And then when you find it, being honest with yourself to make sure

it truly is something you can be great at, and then doing it so you're the best at it or as close to being the best as you can. Because you don't always have to be the absolute best. Neither one of us is the absolute best at business, but we're going to outwork 99% of the people that are out there. And that's going to put us in a position to have more success. And so, you know, not lying to yourself is probably the most fundamental underpinning of success that there is because we all do. Our idea is the best. I have what it takes.

I'm a winner. I know I'm a winner. We all are winners. We all have what it takes. But unless you find out what that one thing is you can be great at or pretty damn good at and bust your ass to get there. You're just a statistic. You're just one more person that tried. And you may not fail, but you won't get to where you really want to go unless you're lucky.

The average podcast host will probably spend one hour preparing for a show. And if it's a popular show, they probably have a team doing the research themselves. I don't. I do all of my own research. And on average, I spend 22 hours preparing for each of mine. And for our podcast today, Ed, I spent 37 hours preparing for this. I don't want to get an A on my performance or for the quality of my show. And I don't want an A plus either. I want an A triple plus. I want my podcast to stand out by providing substantially more details than any other host and ask a unique question that no one else has before me, both of which bring me closer to my guests and earns their respect, gets them to tell their friends about it, which in turn makes me incredibly happy and incredibly fulfilled because I'm motivating, inspiring other people

and making a difference in their lives, which is the goal of In Search of Excellence. Let's go back to your first speech. You bombed. And then you had as much anxiety and fear going into your second speech, but you had a different approach. What was your approach to that second speech

and In Search of Excellence? Can you tell us how important preparation has been to your success and give us a few specific examples and going a step further, how important is extreme preparation going way and above and beyond what would consider normally great preparation? I'm talking about the kind of preparation that you would spend nearly a week on for a single event or meeting. The separation is in the preparation, period. And so I only separate myself through my preparation. My second speech, what I shifted was two things. One, I made it about them and not me, took all the pressure off me. I didn't have

to think about what it was about me. I made it about them. I made it my intention to be about them. Extreme preparation means this, that after I prepared all that I can, I prepare one more time. And that's the power of one more. So, and then after I've done that, typically I'll do even one more after that. For me, my confidence comes from my preparation, not my ability. And that when I come out there, I've thought through every possible scenario, every glitch, every single element that could possibly happen.

When I work with athletes of mine, I want to go to extreme places of, okay, what if you break your right wrist? What if you do that? We're going to go through every single possible element. Everybody I know that's great at anything, I said Brady earlier, he just out prepares everybody. And so for me, my respect level for like what you've done today, I want to do better because you've done better to prepare than anybody that's ever interviewed me before. So the separation is in the preparation. It is the key to me and about every single business I've ever had. When I auditioned for the part, he said, my performance depends on you. This is a very different kind of part.

This character is very much, his whole behavior is affected by what she does. And I have to count on you. And you have to promise me that you're going to deliver that. And when you have someone like that say that to you, for me, because I am, I'm a person that really takes direction. Like if you tell me, you know, stand on your head and fart the national anthem, I'm going to figure out how to do that. You know what I mean? I'm not going to go, oh, I don't, you know. I'm the person that's like, oh, wow, how do I figure that out, you know? So with Bob, I mean, it was everything to me, just everything that I

absolutely delivered everything that he needed and everything that was needed for the film. And that my focus was, you know, a% every single second. And I really pushed Marty. I pushed him and followed him around. He told me I was like a terrier on the back of his pant leg, you know, until he finally just turned around one day and was like, what do you want? And I was like, I want you to treat me like you treat Marty and Jimmy and Joey. I want you to come in my trailer in the morning and tell me exactly what you want. I want you to push me till you break me. I want you to get everything out of me you can possibly get. That's what I want. And he's like, really? And I'm like, yes, really. That's really what I want. And he's like, really? And I'm like, yes, really. That's really what I want. And he's like,

and then he just kind of looked at me like, I didn't really realize that you were up for it. And I'm like, yeah. And he goes, well, then I'll be in your trailer in the morning. And I was like, okay, how do you take your coffee? And he told me and I'm like, okay. And like, well, then I'll be in your trailer in the morning. And I was like, okay, how do you take your coffee? And he told me and I'm like, okay. And like, so that night I went home and I knew he was ate a particular way and what he ate and didn't eat. And so I baked what he liked in the morning and I started baking what he liked so that he would want to come to my hair and makeup trailer because I would have what he liked so that he would want to come to my hair and makeup trailer because I would have what he liked for breakfast ready because I was going to get Marty Scorsese in my damn trailer,

whatever it took, because I was going to make sure that he was going to see me and push me and direct me if I had to stay up half the night baking, whatever it took. So I got him in my makeup trailer and I got him to talk to me and I got him to tell me his most magnificent dreams for the character so that I could deliver them. And so you worked so hard doing so many movies up to that point. I think at that point you had done something like 30 movies. You get Basic Instinct, then you do Casino two years later, and you're working with one of the best movie casts ever, one of the best directors ever.

Ever. Best editor ever. And the score, best score ever. And the... Best score ever. One of the best movies ever, by the way. Let's just... We'll call it like it is. It was one of the best movies of all time.

You did a great job in that. But there's a message there to people listening and watching this today, which is you never rested on your laurels. You didn't just sit there and say, I'm here. All right. I belong and I'm going to do this. Here you are. You're proactively asking the best of the best of the best. How do you make me better? Tell me how to get the most from me. I got in the town. I got in the building, but I had to get in the room. You know what I mean? You have to understand that I'm not Hollywood royalty. I'm not from here and I'm not part of the machine. And then let's face it, I'm Irish still. So still an outsider. And so you just keep having to break through all the barriers.

And then you have to keep proving yourself. And when you're pretty, again, you're probably stupid and you're probably a jerk and you're probably inconsistent and you're probably a diva and you're probably unprofessional and you're probably mean to people. And, you know, so you go into every job, not even once you're established that that's not who you are. Every single job, you have to go through this all over again. And someone who doesn't get acknowledged will continue to say that's how you are. You know, you are someone that you didn't have time to deal with because you were too busy being professional. You know, there's always going to be these things. So, you know, it's a constant, and I know some of the biggest movie stars in the world, and they're 75 saying,

I still got to get in there and fight for it. How important has extreme preparation been to your success? And as part of this, can you tell us about the three-hour hikes with Jeannie and your dogs every Sunday, rehearsing the interviews with her that you were going to have with Bob

and different people at the company, the six interviews that you did have with Bob, the materials you presented to him, and whether you were of the mindset that you did have with Bob, the materials you presented to him, and whether you were of the mindset that you wanted to be or had to be better or more prepared than anybody else who was interviewing for the position. You and I have a lot in common, Randy. I know that there are many people better than me, many people smarter than me, but I don't want anyone to outwork me. And I feel like that's my advantage. It always has been since I was a kid.

The process at Disney on the ESPN side was arduous. I'm not going to lie. I had been working for Bob Iger directly. He was my boss starting in 2010. I was very fortunate in that when I left Yahoo and joined Disney, I was immediately reporting to Bob. And so people spend years, decades working up the corporate ladder. Now I had spent many years working up the ladder at Yahoo, but at Disney, I was fortunate in that when I joined the company, I had a seat at the table, the leadership table. So I had an opportunity to get to know the rest of the leadership team,

including the current CEO, Bob Chapek. I got to work very closely with him over the years and just really got to know and understand the company. And when John Skipper resigned end of 2017, I'd be lying if I told you that I didn't think I was the leading candidate. And that's because, again, every single year when Bob and I sat down for my annual review, 90% of the conversation would be ESPN. Oftentimes throughout the year, when we would get together, Bob and I would talk about ESPN and me somehow ending up at ESPN. And so when, when the opportunity presented itself, I said to myself, okay, here's another time where, because I've been clear about what I want to do, uh, it's gonna, it's gonna pay off. And it ultimately did, but it was, um, a three or maybe even four month, actually three month process

where I had, I don't know, five, six interviews specifically with Bob. I met with several members of the Disney board of directors. I met with several people at corporate and it was a tough process. And I spent a lot of the time preparing with my wife. My wife is fantastic in terms of helping me present myself. Again, that's what she does for a living. Although it's not presenting herself, it's presenting publicly, speaking publicly, crispness, making sure that you know what the message is when you walk in. And so my wife and I went on hikes every single weekend, yes, with our two dogs in Runyon Canyon on the Hollywood Hills. And we would go on several hour hikes and she would interview me. We would do mock interviews. And she would drill me on various aspects of the sports industry, various aspects of ESPN. And I would use it as a rehearsal for my interviews with Bob and with others.

And it was incredibly valuable to me. And as a part of that, I put together my vision. I put together what I thought should be the core strategic business priorities for ESPN. And I presented them pretty thoroughly to Bob and others during the process. And then when I ultimately did get the job, my first town hall at ESPN, thousands of people, most, I didn't grow up at ESPN as you know, and as we've talked about, many people were like, are you nervous? This is a big moment, one chance to make a first impression. And I'll be honest with you, Randy, I was not nervous. And I was not nervous because I had spent so many months putting together my thoughts. And I was

actually excited to speak to this large group of people and convey to them what I thought the vision and the priorities were. And that was because of my over-preparation, just like you. Sometimes people will come into my office for a meeting and they'll just look at my website. And the first question is, what's my dog's name? If they don't know my dog's name is Karma, the meeting's pretty much over because it just means that they didn't even read my website.

But what's your advice to people who really will think, why should I spend 10 hours or 20 preparing for a job interview when I may not even get the job that there's 100 other people who are competing for that same job? Or if you want to work at Goldman Sachs, next person. If you really want something, you can't, you can't miss any opportunity to, to impress. And, you know, there's no topic or no item that's too small, nothing that that's too large. You can't, you know, if you're going to err, err on the side of over-preparation, not under-preparation. Again, this goes back to our bar classes where we just studied for months, our bar prep courses where we studied for months. And you walk out of that bar exam frustrated because you're tested on 5% of what you learned. Well, it's no different with a job interview. You'd rather walk out of that job interview having gotten everything right and feeling like, okay, maybe you could have cut out 50% of that prep time than walking out saying, damn, I wish I had prepped more. I missed a couple

of things. That would be a shame. And so, you know, just to use the sports analogy, you got to sprint to first base. You got to be good at the easy things, right? If you can hit a 99 mile an hour fastball, you got to sprint to first base. That's the easy part. And so my advice to anyone who asks would be just be good at the stuff that you control. You control how much prep you put into an interview. If you over-prepare, what's the worst that's going to come out of that? Maybe you lost a few hours of watching the Game of Thrones prequel. I don't know, but my advice is always to over-prepare.

How important has preparation been to your success? Going a step further, how important is extreme preparation? I'm talking about going way and beyond what would be considered regularly great preparation. I'm talking about the kind of preparation you spend 30 or 40 hours on for a single event or meeting? It's such a good question, honestly. And it's the thing that I actually stand by as being probably the most important part of my career. And my team would probably say the biggest differentiator between myself and some others. And that when I would start working with a client, they would come in and say, I've never experienced anything like this.

And I was like, I don't understand what you mean. Because obviously I didn't work with other stylists, right? So I didn't know what they were comparing it to. And they would just say like, if I was coming in for a look, I'd have six options. And I refused to ever have less than 40 to get to one. And so, when I was doing Backstreet Boys and stuff, I mean, there were five of them, I would literally have 50 racks of clothing because they each needed five looks, there

was 10 shots, like da-da-da. But ultimately, I always use the example, I would get hired for these ad jobs, right? That would pay me the most money and it was the least creative. And it would be like, okay, she needs to wear a white t-shirt and jeans. Okay. So you might bring in, I don't know, three t-shirts, four pairs of jeans, maybe see which ones fit. I would 100% have 40 pairs of jeans of every wash, of every length, of every possible type of denim you could have. I would have every variation on a white t-shirt from ivory to stark white to crewnecks, v-necks, tank tops, ruffles on the sleeves, you know, like the, I mean, you name it, I would have it. Because nine times out of 10, they would change the direction.

And when they changed the direction, I had what they needed. Because there's nothing that was worse for me than being in the middle of nowhere on a job. And they're like, actually, we actually changed. We actually want to do a navy blue or an off-the-shoulder white instead of just a basic t-shirt. And then you're in the middle of nowhere. Where on earth am I getting this? Where is this actually happening? And those moments for me were like, it was like that panic. I felt like, this is on me. Why don't I have this? I'm not prepared. And that was a feeling that I never wanted to be familiar with. And it created 10 times more work

for everybody. My assistants would bitch and moan, pardon my French, but they would be like, why do you need this, Rachel? It's a white tank top they need. That's it. It's going to be waist up. You know what, guys? Go work for someone else. This is how I roll. You know this is how I roll. And then always the same thing with a gown. They thought they wanted one thing. They would tell me, oh, I'm feeling like a black long dress with a train. And they'd end up in a short pink cocktail dress. So for me, it was like making people step outside their comfort zone and having those options there to do so, but also having what they ask for. And I think preparation to me is actually the most important part of what I do in every aspect

Everything I do I will say this I don't prepare for things like this And the reason is is because I like to wing it because i'm much better at speaking from the heart or just Instinctually just responding and being conversational than I am like writing a script or taking notes or things like that. So whenever I give a speech or anything like that, I'm just like, no. Or whenever I'm on a show or anything like that, I don't like to meet the person before. I like it to be very organic. But I think as it pertains to any other aspect, 100% over-prepare. What age did you learn the value of hard work and get a work ethic? And what's your view on that? Where does work ethic rank in terms of ingredients to success?

I did not have a traditional path to work because I had a very jolting experience. And I've since learned that entrepreneurs have almost to a T have had these seminal moments in their life where they choose the path of entrepreneurship for various reasons, but it's almost like destiny. And mine was a, was a unique situation. And it really was was it was the moment that I learned that you might have to live a life underneath someone in other words not controlling your own

destiny and I've told this story many times but I'll never forget it I was working in high school now in the evenings in an ice cream store it was my first job, actually. It was called Magoo's Ice Cream Parlor. It was owned by a woman and she hired me. It was the first time I had a job and the first day I had a job. And when you are scooping ice cream, people want to take samplers and you use a little piece of wood, like a wooden stirring thing. You put a

little bit of chocolate ice cream on it and let them taste it. And they make a decision based on what they like. But when they do that, they often take their gum out of their mouth and throw it on the floor. And at the end of the day, there was quite a bit of gum and it turned black. It was stuck on the Mexican tile in that store. And the woman said to me, before you leave, you've got to get down on your knees and scrape all this gum off. And I didn't want to do that because the only reason I took the job was the girl I was interested in, grade 11, was working at the shoe store right across. And she was watching me, and I was hoping that we could go out afterwards and, you know, just hang out. That was my strategy. And by working there every day, I'd see her every day

because she was working at the shoe store every afternoon. So I said to the woman, you hired me as a scooper, not a scraper. And I don't scrape, I scoop. And you probably have to hire somebody else to do that. And she said, no, no, no, no, no. I own the store. You're my employee. You'll do anything I ask you to do. You work for me. That's why I pay you. And I said, well, I'm not getting down on my knees and

scraping that gum off because I knew she was looking at me from the shoe store right then. And she said, you're fired. And I said, what does that mean? She said, leave. I'll send along your eight hours or four hours of pay, whatever it was, and don't come back. Now, that was very humiliating for me. And I didn't, till that moment,

understand the difference in the world. There are people who own the store, and there are people who scrape the shit off the floor. And at that moment, I made my mind up which one I was going to be, and I never worked again for anybody else. And so, now, I'm not dissing employees. I mean, you can have a great life working for someone else, and the majority of the population does that. And they have time for soccer and picnics and all the wonderful things that life offers. But that's not my life. I work 20 hours a day, 18 hours, crazy amount of work. I work harder now than I ever had in my life. That is who I am. And that's how I define myself. And it has nothing to do with money work. I work harder now than I ever had in my life. That is who I am. And that's

how I define myself. And it has nothing to do with money anymore. I don't need any more money. I need more time. And the whole idea of that moment. And years later, we went back to that mall with a camera crew to find her. And I wanted to thank her because at that point, I could afford to bulldoze the mall if I wanted. But it was all because of her. She was the one that tilted my path and pushed me in the direction of entrepreneurship. And I'm forever in debt to her. So I just, you know, that was an incredible moment. In fact, a couple of months ago, I got a FedEx package that had a brick in it. That mall had been demoed and turned into condominiums.

And someone who knew that story found me and sent me that brick. It sits on my desk. Great story. I lost my job after moving to LA. I was a lawyer. I hadn't passed the bar yet. 1993, firms were laying off people. I get called in. Well, I actually found out. I got an email from the library in Chicago where the firm was based. I was in Los Angeles.

Please turn in your library books today. Not the way you want to learn that you may be getting fired. I went out to try to find somebody. All the doors were closed. I got pulled into the conference room. And there was the office manager and my boss saying, we don't have any work for you. You can leave today. And like you, that was humiliating. I read that you went home and you cried. Your stepdad and you had a talk and I went home. I didn't cry in the office there. I went back to my office, closed the door for three minutes, cried. It was my mom's birthday. I said, Mom, happy birthday.

I've got some bad news. The irony is that October 27th is my mom's birthday. And through a lot of hard work, I didn't have, I always wanted to, I was, I had a business in college. I sold t-shirts. I went door to door, went through the dorms, got kicked out on one floor, went through the other floor. And I did this for all 12 dorms at Michigan. And I did okay, but I couldn't start a company then.

I was new in LA. I had $3,000 in the bank, but I did well. My career, I worked hard. I saved money to take a risk to bet on myself. The irony is on my mom's birthday and on October 27th, 1999, our company went public. And that was, for me, one of the most important days of my life and obviously changed my future forever. So we all have to bounce back. We all have to work hard and we all have to realize what we want to do at that point in time. How important has preparation been to your success? And going a step further, how important is extreme preparation, going way above and beyond what would generally be considered

great preparation? I'm talking about the kind of preparation that you spend 30 or 40 hours on for a single event or meeting. I think because of the dyslexia, I have a hard time narrowing in and getting granular on concentrating on things. I have a massive amount of respect for those who do that. I feel that if I did that, I would suffer from a little bit of analysis paralysis. I would feel that I don't think I'm ever well prepared enough. Or if I over educate myself on something, I may I may not see outside of whatever else could be done because I'd be so laser focused on the route that I'm

going to take and not be able to pivot. But on the flip side, I know that I need somebody who is an over-prep person around me to back me up because I also can't come in the room without information on the topic or the person or the industry. I also can't come in the room without information on the topic or the person or the industry. I also can't come out and say some ridiculous things that even if I had a great concept or an idea or value, the things that I said prior would say they would say this person doesn't know what he's talking about or doesn't know our industry or me. And even though this sounds great, I don't want to do it with that person. So preparation is key, but I know my weakness and I know that I need to have other people. Now, that being said, when I did not have anything, taking these small little steps of standing on corners and selling hats or cold

calls, that gave me the preparation to be able to talk, you know, and convey what I was doing because I had actual boots on the ground and can relate what I had experienced. So when I didn't have anything, the experience was really vital to try and to do it. And then now where I'm at in this part of my life, I have a little bit of both experience as well as bringing people in to back me up. But no matter what, preparation is key. You can't walk in there and just wing it.

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notes. In 2001, you catered a huge high-profile charity event for Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge with hundreds of people in royalty there. You had no idea they were coming and you were seen on TV checking every single plate before they left the kitchen. Hundreds of plates. You killed it that day. Everybody loved your food. How important has preparation been to your success? And going a step further, how important is extreme preparation? Going way above and beyond what would normally be considered great preparation. I'm talking about the kind of preparation that you spend 30 or 40 hours on for a single event or meeting. I am incredibly type A. I prepare for everything. I am over the top. If you ask people who work with me or people who work in my restaurants, I taste everything. I look at every plate. I'm a detail-oriented person

in every single thing I do. And I expect perfection from myself. And there's times I expect perfection from others, which I know is not politically correct or is not the way we should be. But I do expect perfection because I expect it from myself. So yes, you know, that is part of who I am. And I do it endlessly. I mean, there's times at my restaurant where I go in and if the seats are dirty or the tables are dirty, the floor is dirty, I'll start cleaning it myself. I'm not going to wait for somebody else to do it. I'll just do it. And I also, I think that that is important when other people are watching you that they can see that you're in it with them. We're all in it together and together we can make this an unbelievable experience. And so,

and I watched that with Wolfgang. I watched it with my grandfather. I think it's ingrained deep in me. You've talked about reading three-foot-high stacks of snake information training with special forces. You spent two years of preparation before your trip down the Amazon River. You prepared two years for pole-to-pole, which was your two-year circumnavigation

of the globe via the poles you we already talked about you trained with brazil jungle warfare center crazy stuff but necessary stuff how important has extreme preparation been to your success and in search of excellence can extreme preparation make the impossible possible? I believe it can, but you must never stick to your plan, 100%. There's a couple of times in life that how I planned it at home when things happened, the outcome was completely different than what I thought I would, the action that I should take.

And I believe that it's important as well in life to not have too many options, meaning that stopping is not an option to me. I've got to find a way of not stopping While people believe that as soon as they have a little bit of resistance They think of stopping While I think of continuing So the way that my brain I program my brain to reach excellence Is to be able to not go to find the options of trying, this is not working, now I'm going to try this,

and if that doesn't work, I'm going to try this, and if that doesn't work, I'm going to try something else. And you're not moving forward, you're just moving sideways in your life. And a lot of people move their whole life sideways, and they would never reach excellence because we're not heading anywhere in a direction. So I believe by removing the options, there's one option, you've got to go. And when I often get to that point where you have to come overcome obstacles and things like that, I'm not looking for other options.

I'm confronting the problem. And by confronting the problems, you overcome these obstacles. By saying that life is difficult, by saying that, oh, now we've got inflation, now the market has crashed, doesn't mean that it's difficult. It just means that you have more challenges.

And the best way to overcome that challenge is if you better your life, if you better who you are, then the obstacles become smaller. By complaining, it will never become smaller, it just becomes bigger. And that is how I solve my problems. I go out to find a solution not to try a different option because those options are all going to face the wall at the end of the day and I'm not moving forward when I went to the North Pole the ice was moving back and for 11 days I walked to stay in one position and a lot of people can't even imagine to walk for one day on moving ice that drifts back imagine walking 20 hours a day on ice drifting back and you're not making one kilometer progress and when people ask tell you that you're not making progress,

they're not thinking in the right way. Because indirectly, if I stayed in the tent and I didn't walk for those 11 days, I would be minus 500 miles, but now I'm at zero. So I've made progress. I'm not at minus 500 miles, I'm at zero. And that gives me a chance of success. Let's talk about the importance of being prepared and its huge role that it plays in our success. One of the hallmarks of my own career has been to be the most prepared person in the room. It started in college.

I'd go to the library at least three hours a day when I had nothing going on. I'd study for finals more than a month before I had any way ahead of time for at least eight hours a day, starting two weeks before finals. And with very limited exceptions, there wasn't a test in college I took where I didn't know I was going to get an A. I got one B plus in all of college. I graduated top 1% of my class. Then I went for a job interview with Eli Broad, who at the time was one of only

two people in the world who had started two Fortune 500 companies from scratch. I went into that interview with the goal that I'd be the most prepared person ever to meet with them. I knew if I landed that job, it would change my career and my life forever. I spent 40 hours, 40, preparing for that job interview. my goal despite a horribly unsuccessful legal career who had three jobs in seven months after I graduated from law school as completely unqualified for the position and they hired me at age 27 to be the assistant to the chairman. So now when I coach people looking for a job or whatever they do, I tell them that preparing doesn't mean spending five minutes on a couple of Google searches. It means studying and preparing for whatever you do, like it's a final exam or like your future depends on it, which it often does

no matter what you're doing. Being the most prepared person in the room has served me incredibly well. It's allowed me not only to achieve these results in a much, much faster way, but it's also allowed me to achieve results I never would have been able to do without it. How important was preparation to you for your own success? And can you give us a couple examples? Well, so much different from yours, but same. Prep is the most important thing. If you're not prepared, you're just not going to succeed unless you're some kind of magician. I prepped so much different. As a musician, I picked up my guitar and I sat in my room every second of my waking hours when I wasn't eating or doing something, driving a car, something I had to do, I had that guitar in my hand, and I was prepping for, you know, learn how to play them licks, learn how to understand what I'm doing,

write a song, you know, writing songs. Prepping for an album, to me, would be writing 28 songs for a 10-song album. You know, I'd spend three months in the studio writing and writing and writing and writing. And, uh, that was my style of prep. And, but you know, it's so much different than what you had to do. I mean, what, what you have to do on a tour business thing, the thing I didn't prep for was my tequila business. I didn't prep for that, but I did spend a lot of time there drinking tequila. And I don't mean getting drunk. I just mean tasting and tasting and tasting until I had

one that I said, this is it. Don't distill it three times. I like it better distilled twice. I like it when you cut the agave a little closer, lose product, it's going to be more expensive, but you're losing 30%, like what we do with Santo and what I did with Cabo Wabo towards the end. I said, how are we going to make this better? How are we going to make this better? That's the same thing. It's really just learning your craft and finding out what makes it the best,

which is, once again, a great product. And then my heart is in it. When I tasted Santo Blanco, when we, once again, a great product. And then my heart is in it. When I tasted Santo Blanco, when we got it right, when we trimmed that agave more and more and more, and said, I don't care. They said, well, it's going to be expensive. I don't care. I don't need to make the same margin as somebody like Casamigo. They're making mediocre tequila.

I'm sorry. They are. And I'm not going to do that. I'd really have the best tequila in the world than the biggest tequila in the world. I'm not trying to make Jose Cuervo or Salsa. I'm trying to make Sammy's Santo tequila or Sammy's Cabo Wabo, Cabo Uno, the last one I made. The best tequila ever made. The best Añejo ever on the planet.

No one will ever make a better tequila. And it's because I just don't cut corners. And so my prep was tasting and going back and saying, what else can we do? it. No one will ever make a better tequila. And it's because I just don't cut corners. And so my prep was tasting and going back and saying, what else can we do? What else can we do using other people's knowledge to make the best product so that when I said, when I stand and talk to you and tell you that this is the best tequila where I can look you right in the eye, I can say, okay, buddy, blind tasting, Pour mine in one glass. Pour your favorite three over here and mix them up, and I'll tell you which one's mine. And I can do that, and I can still do it right now with confidence because I know what it tastes like because that's the prep. That's the thing, and I'm a big believer.

You've got to do the homework. You don't just go down to there and find some guy that will put your name on it, let you put your name on his shit like every one of these people are doing. I'm sorry. Some of it's good. Some of it's better than others. Some of it's mediocre. Some of it's crap. They probably don't even know what good tequila is.

But if you just go put your name on it, you ain't taking the ride. Going down there and finding it and working with the guy, how can we make it better? And you learn and you learn. And then you eat the food that they're feeding the pigs. They're feeding them the pulp the pigs are eating at. And then you roast one of them pigs and you're drinking tequila and making tacos. I mean, come on, brother. If you miss all that by just go slapping your name on it down at the lawyer's office,

you can make all the money you want. It ain't going to make you happy like this. This makes me happy. Tequila is awesome, by the way. Your partner, Miles Scully, is passing it out like nobody's business. He sent me some bottles here. I have it behind me. I encourage everyone to go out and buy it. It's phenomenal. It's the best tequila in the world. Straight up. I just told you why, and you can make it yourself too if you want to but most people are greedy and they would rather uh make more money per bottle than have better product per money but whatever let's talk about i'm getting arrogant i'm getting areas arrogance got anything to do with fame no it'll bite you in the ass eventually people hate you therefore

hate your product you're you're confident and you have the track record and resume to say that. I don't take it that way at all. And you may or may not be biased about your product. It's selling very well. People love it and the proof will be in the pudding, but it is really awesome. So congratulations on the launch of that, Brad. How important has preparation been to your success? And going a step further, how important is extreme preparation going way above and beyond what would be considered, what others consider great preparation? I'm talking about the kind of preparation that you can spend 30 or 40 hours on for a single event or meeting. And can you give us a few examples of how extreme preparation has contributed to your success?

I think there are two kinds of extreme preparation. I'm a believer in one and not a believer in the other. I'm not a believer in preparing for any possible questions someone may have or how they might ask about it. I'm a great believer in preparation, meaning know your business, know the issues. And then you can talk about anything people want to talk about.

But I see a lot of people squandering their time anticipating what people may ask them and trying to find a specific answer for that question. That sounds to me like kids who are trying to study for a test. And then there's the other group of people just make sure they know their topic inside and out. I think that's the winner for people. That allows you to have the flexibility that you need to really go left and right and constantly pivoting and moving. Can you give us some examples of how extreme preparation has led to your success? Well, it's interesting. Almost everything I do, I just try and become a student

of the issues. When we have a crisis, a problem, an opportunity, this sort of answer pops in my mind. Oh, here's what we should do because I know my topic well. I'm always worried about people want to say, well, what should we do? And they go, I don't know. Let me go ask some people. Or what's going on with that? And they go, I don't know. I'll ask somebody.

Well, wow, you're sitting at the top of the company or top of the group you have, and you have to go ask somebody. That's not information at your fingertips. To me, that's what's important is I expect people to really know their business inside and out and to have a conversation at any moment about anything there. If you don't, you're missing all the opportunities that are sort of drive-by opportunities. Can you tell us how important preparation has been to your success and give us a few very specific examples? And going a step further, how important is extreme preparation, going way above and beyond

what would normally be considered great preparation? I'm talking about the kind of preparation that you spend 30 to 40 hours on for a single event or meeting. Yeah, I love that you do that. And I'm experiencing it right now in this podcast. And it really, it's proving like this, the kind of distance we're traveling is far beyond anything I've gone through in another podcast.

So, you know, kudos. And you see it in action here, everyone who's listening. To me, I love the statement of, you know, luck is opportunity meets preparation. I fully buy into it. So I am also an extreme preparer. I'll give you an example of just even how we run our company. So we write a lot of stuff down.

We buy into the prose memo. Now, some of that is I'm an ex-research analyst, so I like the written word, not just slides. But I really fundamentally believe in having a pre-read for every meeting because it gets everyone closer to being on the same page. That way you don't waste half the meeting just bringing people up to speed and the other people are, I don't know, multitasking. The second thing I really love about intense preparation going into meetings and that pre-read is it allows the extroverts and the introverts to find a balance, right?

A lot of, particularly in tech, you'll find a lot of the more technical people tend to be a little bit more introverted in meetings, right? They've not been schooled in the way to present as a salesperson. And so you're getting the best of them when you're giving them that prose pre-read. They can comment in documents on the side, but you're really starting to see the way they brainstorm, the way they want to respond in a meeting. It's actually great for diversity as well, because the people who are loudest don't always

just win in the argument. But there is that moment now you're in the meeting where great preparation moves you much more quickly to what really matters. Most recently, if I give an example, again, back in the UK, ahead of every trip I take, I am quite maniacal about making sure that if I'm going to make the trip, I'm going to make every hour count. So I want to see customers. I want to get out.

I did all of those meet and greets with neighbors. But then I want to go in and meet government officials that I should be meeting with, I want to go meet our potential regulators. There's a new bill in the UK around online safety. So it's a good example where I have definitely I'm not in that meeting winging it, I have read everything that's been sent ahead, I'll often go back and forth with the team to get a little bit more information. Because then in the meeting, I think you're able to very quickly credentialize yourself, not as just a talking head or what they're used to, which is kind of a CEO or a leader who's clearly, you know, gotten the briefing, literally walking in the door and is now going

to do a lot of kind of chitty chats and, you know, then at the end we'll all shake hands and feel good, I'm going to get to the substance with you. And I think that just puts me in a different place in terms of respect, recognition for someone who cares about the issue, and then the follow-ups are so much more meaty than just a bunch of like, great to meet you. I'm sure I'll meet you next time I'm here. And so my career, it's really served me well. It's interesting to hear how much you prepare. I think women prepare a lot more than most men. I think we have to, because I think there's a higher bar for us. But it's often my secret weapon is like, I am definitely going to

have done more work for you ahead of you. I'm going to be much more on point and you better bring your A game. Otherwise, I am going to take everything that I can from this meeting to kind of get more for next door or whatever institution I'm kind of working on behalf of. How important is extreme preparation going way above and beyond of what would be considered great preparation? I'm talking about the kind of preparation that you spend 30 to 40 hours on for a single event or meeting. So I love that you said that. And that was evident because I didn't remember what I was up in February of 2008. So I was like, oh, that was impressive, Randy. It's everything. So, I think if you read the book Grit by Angela Duckworth, it talks about Kevin

Durant and the practice time that Kevin Durant puts in before games. The game is an hour. That is just the showtime of the tens and hundreds and thousands of hours of preparation. And it's not just practice, right? It's diet. It's mental. It's all sorts of things. I always say in a meeting that I want to know you better than you know yourself when I go in.

And by the way, Google, incredibly powerful. That wasn't there 20 and change years ago when you were going into meetings, or at least not to what it is today. And so I think preparation is crucial. The meeting, the conversation, the game is just the showtime of the preparation. And it is the gritty hard work. I remember when I was an intern at WRC TV and we would go out for the 11 o'clock p.m. news to some sort of, you know, seeing something usually terrible like a murder or something like that. And I was like, this is not a glamorous job.

This is a hard, gritty job. But you see the reporter on television, you know, giving their report for 120 seconds. But it is all the people behind that. It is all the work behind that. It is, you know, it is gritty. It is not glamorous. And I think people just see the glamour, the glamour of the actor actress on the tv show or the movie well I live here in New York City you watch them shooting a scene on the streets at midnight it is tons of people and tons of work and um it is really hard and I think people today perhaps look at the shiny stuff and not the hard work that it takes. And winning is in the research, is in the data, right? The half a page discussion

when I ask someone to come have with me, you better have all the data behind it, right? Why do you want to do this thing? Here's the 25 pages of research behind it, but you need to synthesize that to a half page to make your case. You think about the hard work and research when lawyers go into court to defend people, to make your case. You think about the hard work and research when lawyers go into

court to defend people, to get something changed or turned over on death row. I saw Bryan Stevenson speak a few weeks ago and what he's done at the Equal Justice Initiative. That is years of work, years. We just launched the San Diego airport at Clear. I tell people, depending on when you want to start the start clock, it took us seven to nine years to do, right? It is the hard, gritty work. It is the research. It is the data analysis. It is the synthesis of it. It is, you know, coming up with plan A through F. It is the pivoting. If you're in the stock market and you buy something and the stock goes down 30%, you can't start your research then to decide whether or not you were right or wrong. You had to have had a thesis. And maybe at that moment, the right thing to do is to not just double down,

but quadruple down, right? Dollar cost averaging. But you had to have done the work. You can't just wake up and be like, I don't know, let me start doing some work here. Obviously, there's incremental work to do. Well, it's the same thing in business and in sports and in life. In search of excellence, how important is extreme preparation and has it been to your career? And can you give us two specific examples where you've spent 40 or 100 hours preparing for a single meeting? So, you know, you have your definition of extreme preparation preparation i think of it as not preparation for

a meeting i think of is understanding the details of everything that you're supposed to be in your purview or what it is your function is so understanding all those levels of detail is important a lot of times what i see is managers especially managers of managers directors whatever they just get a report from whomever it is who's working for them, and then they just parrot that report out. They don't really understand the details. So to me, it's understanding the details, being in the weeds, asking the questions, so you really have a great grasp of that. That is not extreme preparation.

That means it's going into detail. So when it comes time for the meeting, you can then be able to answer most questions, not all questions, but 90% of all the questions that will get thrown at you in an intelligent way so that you can not just answer the first question, but the second and third order questions as well. And so that's what I would call being in the details. And then you don't have to worry about extreme preparation. Where I see extreme preparation, and this also goes into details and where we would do rehearsals and stuff, is in VC pitch meetings. So when we go to venture capitalism, we want to pitch and make

sure we have our story right and make sure everybody's aligned on what we're saying and how we're saying it and trying to find holes and having other investors in the meetings to try to help us shoot holes in our story to make sure we're answering it either on the slides or in our dialogue. That stuff, you know, and I also did extreme preparation for like my TED talk, right? 45 or more, you know, rehearsals. So there is extreme preparation for certain kinds of specific presentations. But in general, you should be in the details for the day-to-day, for every day, because that's how you do the best job you can

to deliver the results you need to deliver.