My First Million - 7 things MrBeast, Bezos & Thiel do that you don’t

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Get Sam and Shaan's CEO lessons in one guide: https://clickhubspot.com/epmw Episode 857: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the extreme behaviors of the most legendary CEOs.  — Show Notes: (0:00) CEO Moves (2:49) Move 1: Option Drop (10:39) Move 2: Friction Removal Service (12:55) Move 3: 1-bit communication (19:35) Move 4: Single-tasking (23:18) Move 5: Continuous culling  (26:05) Move 6: Reward failure (27:06) Move 7: Clone yourself (30:18) Alternative: Give up on greatness (also fine) (35:59) Just be great — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/  Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

If this was a VHS tape, it would be label Sean Harkor Part 2. People would not be getting what they thought they were getting. You're an Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks. CEO. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days on. What I want to talk about is basically, if you're a CEO of a company,

if you're recommending a company right now, which I think a lot of people listening to this are, there's a good chance you're not being hardcore enough. And what I want to talk about is like six or seven real anecdote stories of what CEOs do, moves that CEOs do, that sound wrong, sound almost illegal, but they actually work. The idea being when you're a CEO,

there's no CEO school, there's no CEO training, there's nobody there to manage you. You're the one managing everybody else. And most people don't even give you, like, feedback because you're kind of their boss. You're in charge. Is this like famous examples or your friends? I have a mix of examples you'll know. Examples I think you won't know, but they're of famous companies. And then one or two for my friends. Okay. So I have, I have one, two, three,

four friends. I have like seven. And whenever you come up with ideas like this, which you do all the time, they interest me. But what also interests me is why you care? Why do you care right now? Well, two things. One is, in general, like, I want to be better at what I do. And so if I ever hear of somebody else doing something that I think could be either I haven't tried or I think like, wow, that sounds kind of crazy. But I guess I see how that might work. It's like I kind of found a new move in a video game. And I like to know that. But the other is we talk a lot about almost to the point of it being obnoxious, this phrase frame breaking, which is you see the world a certain way. And it seems like there's a border. Everything about the world fits inside that frame. frame. And then you'll hear this story that will just be outside of the frame. It breaks the frame. The frame has to expand, now incorporate this new information. And I don't know why. I love it. I love it. I love it.

Like, dudes love Pokemon cards. I just want to collect as many of those frame-breaking ideas and stories. And the reason why is if you've ever heard that story of like the elephant who has a young age, they tether them to the steak in the ground, and then he grows and now he's so

powerful. He could easily rip out the steak, but he doesn't. There's many examples in my life. where it feels like there's the illusion of control, that like I'm limited by something, that in actuality I'm not limited by at all. The stories I'm going to tell you are sort of like elephant and the steak things where you're like,

oh, I couldn't possibly do that. Why not? Why can't you do that? Before I go into like kind of the famous stories of people you know doing this, I'll tell you the guy who I was having breakfast with that told me a story like this that got me thinking,

got me paying attention to these. So I was getting breakfast recently with this guy, Martin, who will come on the podcast, Martin Besseri. Now, Martin was, he was like the one that got away for me. The very first angel investment I ever wanted to do, 10 plus years ago, I started making like a little bit of money.

I think I was making like, I don't know, 160 grand a year. Not even that much money. Not enough money to be, I would say an angel investor, but I wanted to be. I was sitting in San Francisco and I thought, that would be the thing to do. I should start angel investing. And I had this kid who was like this 13-year-old kid

who was using one of our products. And he always used to hang out in the tech rooms and hang out on tech things. He emailed me and he said, hey, I'll be your scout. So here I was, this guy who had never made an angel investment, and now I got a scout. And he said, I'm going to send you three companies a week.

And, you know, you don't have to invest in any of them, but it'll just be great practice for me. If you just give me feedback on those, I'd love to learn. What age are you at this time? I'm probably 24, 25, maybe. Yeah. All right. He sends me this email with the first company,

and he goes, this guy, Martin was here. He's in Canada where I live. And already I'm like, I'm not trying to invest in a Canadian company. I want to invest in Silicon Valley companies. He's like, what he's doing is really cool. He's got this company called a plywood. And what a plyboard was doing is very simple. They were letting international students who, you know, if you've ever lived internationally,

the dream of most international students is to come to school in the United States. Yeah. To go to university here. But imagine just being like a kid in Malaysia with Malaysian parents. And it's like, great, why don't you apply to whatever, UC Davis? And they're like, what is UC Davis? Where is that school? How do I apply?

How do I fill out this form? Like it's a very like, there's a huge gap between where you are and where you're trying to go and you need a bridge. And a pli board became that bridge. They basically made it very easy for foreign students to apply to U.S. universities. And what they did, they realized it was very smart was that U.S. universities absolutely rip off foreign international students. There's a reason they love international students is because they charge them three times the price to go to school. And to the same school, get the same education. So if you're a state school, you'll obviously charge less for in-state tuition.

out-of-state tuition. And then there's a third tier called international tuition, which is three times higher. And so he went to the schools, and he got the schools to say, yeah, I'll pay you five grand or ten grand per student that we admit, like as an affiliate fee, as a bounty. So it's like incredible.

And the international student is dying to go there. So it's not the hardest sell in the world. They just needed a bridge. So I hear this. I'm like, dude, this 13-year-old might have actually sent me a good company. And I'm like, okay. The guy was 13? The scout was 13.

Wow. Okay. And so he, I'm like, dude, I think I'm going to do this deal. And so he comes out, I meet him in San Francisco, and I agree on the spot. I'm going to invest 25 grand into this company. And I said it very confidently too. Which is a huge amount of money, by the way. Your annual savings in San Francisco on $17,000 was $20,000. Yeah, exactly.

I was basically putting all of my post-tax disposal income into this one random Canadian startup. Well, guess what? A day later, your boys got cold feet. I'm like, oh, man, that was a lot. I shouldn't have said that. I felt stupid coming down. I was like, do I go back to him and say five grand, 10 grand? That felt stupid.

And you know what I did? I didn't back out, but I just didn't say anything. And like, I didn't follow up. And he didn't really follow up. And some time went by. And then I got unavailable. And anyways, I missed out on this deal. Applyboard today, I think it does over like a billion dollars year in revenue or something

crazy. It's like a multi-billion dollar company. It's insane. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it's multi-billion-dollar company. So huge men. for me on that that's for the very first possible angel investment. What was his valuation back then?

Oh, dude, it must have been like, I don't know, $10 million or something. Yeah, five, six. I would have been the first investor in it. Oh, yeah. First Silicon Valley investor in it. Yeah, it would have been amazing. So last week, I'm having breakfast with him. And I've now invested in his new company passage, which is doing some amazing things.

But I'm saying, like, dude, how is it? I was like, how is it, like, how do you operate? I was like, tell me, like, we're having breakfast. right now, you're going to go to the office, what do you do? And he was like, I work pretty hard. And he's like, I was like, okay, what does that mean? And so he's telling me his work schedule. The guy basically is like, I drop off my kids, you know, 8 a.m. I'm in the office at 8.30 and I'm there from 8.30 to, you know, midnight, every night. And I'm like, midnight. Jesus Christ. I was like, are you the only one there? He goes, I used to be, but not anymore.

I was like, well, what do you mean? Like, how'd you get people to start staying so late to work, like, extra like that? Like, what'd you do to inspire them? motivate them. He goes, option drop. And he's like, option drop. I said, what's an option drop? He goes, at any time in my company, if anybody does something awesome, I just say, option drop, 50,000 options. I just give them share options at the company on the spot. Like if somebody has a great idea, they go above and beyond for a customer, they solve a problem in the meeting right there, option drop. It's like Dana White giving out a bonus. It's a bonus, but it's a bonus, but stock in the company on the fly and he goes and then at night he goes if i'm there 10 p.m.

And if there's like let's say 12 people there, I'll just say everybody here. Option drop. 20,000 options. All of you. He's like, I don't do it every night, but I'll do it once every, you know, 50 days. And guess what? It got people to start doing the things that I cared about. They know if I solve a big problem, if I unlock some new growth, if I solve a customer's

problem, if I'm working really hard, that's how I get more options, option drop. And I was, and so I'm sitting there and I'm like laughing. So I'm laughing at him first because I'm like, that's just hilarious. Just the phrase and the way he said it. I just was cracking me up. And I was like, well, of course. Of course that would work. Of course, that would reinforce behaviors rather than saying, well, I put our company

values on the wall once six years ago. I sure hope they're doing it. You know what I mean? Like obviously a in the moment incentive, positive reinforcement for a behavior. The more specific, the more concrete and the more immediate reward, the more more of that behavior you're going to get. That's kind of basic behavioral science. I was like, okay, I guess that does work. And I was like, is that legal? I was like, I don't know. I just feel like you can't just throw around options like that. He's like, why not?

Yeah, you could. He's like, I just send a message to my assistant. Option drop, these people, this amount. And then it gets papered. That's it. Well, and it's an option, meaning they still to buy it, right? So it's not like it's free money. Yeah, like this has a strike price. Yeah. So you can exercise the option if you so choose. But there's that exercise window. You don't have to buy it right away. You can, you know, you can wait if you want. So, okay, option drop is the first one. I was like, oh, obviously a way to incentivize the types of behaviors that you want right there on the spot using your company's share options. Can I give you the next one? Keep going. This is exciting. Any, any, you want to rate these? Maybe give me a, you know, give me a, you have a very

simple. Let's do Gladiator. Thumbs down, lukewarm, thumbs up or double thumbs up. That's your options. Um, not a double thumbs up. So just one, one thumb up. Okay. Yeah, that's very effective, good. Not that, like, extreme. Do you do it? I don't do options, but because, yeah, like, I just give money. Okay.

Do you do that on the spot? No. But I'm also not the CEO and I'm also not extreme. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not playing that game. What do you mean? Of course you are. Not at the price of being there at midnight.

No, I'm more of a like... It doesn't have to be midnight, right? Like, that's one... You just decide. of the things I care about, do I on the fly reward the behaviors I want? We do it via having a gong in the office. And when someone does something awesome, we smack a gong. Well, it's just like, because everyone stares at it.

And you're like, we're going to like celebrate what is happening right now. But no, I don't give up money. Okay, here's the next one. Hey, everyone, really quick. If you're enjoying this episode on CEO stuff, so delegating, having hard conversations with your team, hiring, then I've got something for you. So the team at HubSpot, they actually went and fit together a bunch of best practices that Sean and I use in our own companies.

And they put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand. And so if you want to just save yourself 10 years of headache and heartache, then you should check it out. I wish we had this a long time ago. It would have helped me a lot. But there should be a QR code on your screen that you can scan or a link in the description. So check it out. It's totally free and totally awesome. Open AI, the makers of ChatGPT, they are.

trying to fight friction. So in every company, there's just a whole bunch of bullshit, especially as you grow, and when you're like them, you grow very fast. There's always just things that are just drag,

bureaucratic drag in the company. Policies, procedures, you know, potholes, things that just start to trip you up as you're working in the company. Just trying to do good work. So they created what they call the friction removal service.

It's sort of like a doge idea inside the company, but it's actually very simple, which is there's an email inbox called friction at openaI.com. and you could just email friction with anything that's causing you to not get your job done. So, like, is there something slowing you down? Is there something that's missing?

Is there something that's a problem? Anything that's there. And there's a person assigned to the company whose job is to triage everything that comes in there. And if there's something that seems like, oh, that's actually a pretty legitimate source of friction, we should eliminate that. It's going to help our people move faster. And then they go and they move, they remove that friction. And it creates a culture of saying, like, look, we are going to actively fight the bloat that comes in companies that grow really big and grow really fast

by having a janitorial crew for a bureaucracy. I was like, oh, I kind of love that idea. Yeah, that's brilliant. Give me a score. Just two. Am I allowed to do two? Yeah, yeah, double thumbs up. All right. A Caesar would never do that, but that's okay. Yeah, it's sort of giving like Chuckie cheese. Yeah. gladiator.

No, two, because that is like less heroic and more systematic. Yeah, I'm on top. All right. Next one is one bit communication. So do you remember this app, yo, from back of the day? Yeah, hilarious. All the rage when you and I were 26 years old. So people, you don't, you'll only know if you know, which is back of the day in San Francisco,

this app became the rage for like, I want to say, 30 days. Yeah, if there was like a one hit, one. like song list for Silicon Valley, that would be Chumbawamba. I get knocked down by Chumbawamba and then Yo are both on that list. Describe what Yo did? I think it was just an app where your friends downloaded and you clicked one button and it said yo to the other person. I think that's it. And then if they clicked the button, it would say,

Yo. Yo right back. All you could say is yo to each other. And so it seemed like the stupidest thing in the world. It was going viral for being almost so silly. and then Andresen Horowitz wrote a big check into them. And we were like, what? You know, one of the smartest investors invested in, yo, are you kidding me? It was like straight out of the TV show Silicon Valley.

In fact, I think they mocked this by with the bro app in the show, whereas you said bro to each other. But I was like, why? And Mark Andreessen wrote this blog post called One Bit Communication. And he talked about how like there are many forms of communication, right? You can write letters, you can write text messages, which have 100,000. whatever, 40 or 160 character limit. You had beepers back in the day, and a beeper was just a way to get your attention,

and you kind of had to know if I'm beeping you with this code, what that code means. And he goes, the smallest form of communication would be a one-bit communication, just a single bit back and forth, yo, but yo can mean a lot.

And he wrote this, like, very, like, this, like, thesis on yo. And I just remember reading it and being like, honestly, kind of have convinced about this. You know, like, a smart guy could really sell you anything, and he did. He sold me that.

Well, I've learned that there's a couple CEOs who use one-bit communication. So here's the first one, Siemens. The Siemens CEO came out and he said, yeah, I have a very specific management system. My management system is this. You email me anything you want to talk to me about and I will respond with okay or no. That's it. I'm just going to say okay or no to your email. And if it requires more than that, then you're going to come talk to me.

And when do you come talk to me? We don't have weekly recurring like calendar meetings. We don't have like scheduling. If you need me, you'd come talk to me right now. And that's it. That's how I unblock everybody in the company. And I will not be the bottleneck. I'm simply going to give you permission, rejection.

Or if there needs to be more detail, you'll find out that you need to come talk to me right now. And we'll discuss more. And then you'll get the okay or no after more detail's been revealed. Yeah, this guy's having like a moment right now. I think I saw a few articles about him. What happened with them? Well, he's like a theoretical physics background,

but he's a CEO. And so they always kind of, if you come from a non-true, traditional background. Yeah, they're quirky and cool. And he goes, I love this quote. He goes, they go, so you don't have any recurring meetings with your direct reports like to sit and just catch up and discuss? And he goes, I don't entertain people and they don't need to entertain me. Which is, if you think about, like, if you ever been in a company, a lot of like the meetings you have are really theater, right? It's progress theater. Like, I would like to put on a little play for you about how good I'm doing. And then you, you sit in the back and you, you give me a little,

you know, theater clap back to me and I feel good. And I'm. then I go on my way. And we've both just kind of wasted an hour of each other's time. It's not, the work isn't getting done there. That's just basically like, you don't trust me enough to just do the thing

and I don't trust you enough to know that I can just show you the work and that's enough for you to understand my value. So we'll tap dance for each other. Is he German? It's a very German behavior. Yeah, he's German. I had to look him up because I think Simmons is a German company.

This guy's great. Is this going to be like the new Snowflake CEO? Maybe, maybe. Early signs. My scouts are paying attention to this. We have to get on this train early, too. All right, related, the Jeff B. Escalation. So this is Bezos. So Bezos famously would read any customer email. His email was out there so customers could email him.

And he would just be like a router. He would route the email to the team if there was a problem. And it would only have one bit in it, one bit communication, just a question mark. Which has got to be like the most annoying thing that any CEO could do. But he trained the team that the question mark has a very specific meaning. And if you send you the question mark, it means, is this. true? Why is this happening? And what are we going to do about it? All encoded into a one question mark thing, allowing him to actually like triage his email way faster than having to like take each

thing, find a good time to bring it up. When can I bring this up with you? You know, then I delay and then I bring it up and then we're going to have to have those long conversation. Just one question mark. And that's what he would do. And his take was this. He would say at the beginning, a lot of the teams would say, no, no, that's just, you know, that's just one loud, angry customer or something like that. Look, the data shows that were 98% success rate. And his take was, look, we're a very data-driven company. But these customer anecdotes matter, and they matter a lot. And I want you to investigate these because I'm not saying when I send you this customer email,

I'm not saying drop what you're doing and go satisfy Joanne in Wichita, this prime customer, you know, you don't need to solve her problem. What I'm saying is Amazon is a machine. the machine might be broken, and this anecdote is a little bit of a signal, it's a squeak in the machine that I'd like you to investigate it to see why this would happen

because that's not how the machine is designed to work. Yeah, I tend to think those stories are more important than traditional data. And what he said was he goes, look, you're not wrong that maybe 98% is happening the way you want. What I'm telling you is that the anecdotes typically show you that your metric is incomplete,

that it's not capturing some part of the customer's experience that actually matters, and both the metric is right. right and the customer is right. The metric is just incomplete because it is not capturing this part of the customer's experience. I was like, oh, I kind of like that. That's a very, that would have been a very satisfying explanation for what would have otherwise been an absolutely infuriating thing of just getting this one question mark from your CEO forwarding a random customer complaint to you as the head of whatever, some part of the business. And I think a question mark from you or I would come

off incredibly douchey. There's something about Jeff that seems a little bit more polite and respectful. And so I don't take it as a duchy thing. Originally what I heard question mark, I was like, that's pretty disrespectful. But I don't view him as a disrespectful guy. If you see me send a question mark, assume it's disrespect. It is disrespect. Yeah. It's because they don't have a backhand slap emoji.

Yeah, I can't punch you through a screen. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data.

So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. All right, what's the next one? All right, next one comes for Peter Thiel. Okay, so Peter Thiel famously, when he was the CEO of PayPal, he had this thing that I really loved, which he goes, we are going to be a single-tasking company. You are not going to be a multitasker, which is great because PayPal is full of some of the biggest brains in the world, right?

Max Levchen, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, the creators of YouTube, the creators of Yelp, the creator, obviously like a bunch of big brains in that room. You would think if anybody could multitask it would be those people. Well, no. Peter's take was this. Everybody has one big problem that you're trying to solve at any given time. Like, you might be fighting fraud from the Ukraine right now, and you might be trying to optimize, right? of the PayPal button on eBay. And this other guy might be trying to, you know, lower our, you know, processing fees with the banks, right?

So everybody's assigned one problem. And his thing was this. They go, well, you know, how do you get people to actually do that, right? Because sounds good in theory, right? Focus is always a word everybody nods and agrees on. But we were all pretty bad at focus. So how did you get your teams to actually do it? And Peter Thiel's answer was, oh, if they tried to talk to me about anything besides their problem,

I would just simply walk out of the room. And the nonverbal communication was pretty clear how I felt. And people were like, did he really do that? And Keith, you know, Keith Rabeau was like, yeah, he would literally do that. If you tried to bring up anything else

besides your problem, he would just turn around and he would just walk away. And then you got signal of how important that was. And if you wanted to be valued by the CEO, you would stay on task of your problem. He would just do like the autistic clomp,

just your feet just clomping away at the door. Did you think he's wearing shoes? No chance that he was wearing shoes in that office. No, dude, he's a loafer guy because he's the type of guy where you just hear it clomping around. I can tell. That's ridiculous.

Focus is convex. Unfortunately, I'm too stupid. I don't know exactly what that means, but it sounds very provocative and I've used it three times since. The good news is nobody else I work with knows what it means either. I don't know what this.

has to do with focus. That's what convex looks like. He goes, if you are 80% focused on a task, that will only be half as good as if you are 90% meaning the jump from 80% focus to 90% focus will double your impact.

And so you really want this, the last mile of focus, the last level of ruthlessness about your focus will double, you know, you'll get one or two more doubles in the output, which kind of makes sense. Like if you look at any field, right? If you're the 80th percentile swimmer,

nobody knows your name and you work at a tire company. If you're the 90th percent swimmer, you know, people in your county might know your name, but you still, you manage the tire company. If you're the 99th percentile swimmer, you might, you know, be able to swim professionally. But if you're the 99.99.99, right? Like the final is that last leg, you're Michael Phelps.

And, you know, you get all the gold medals and the millions of dollars and so on. And it's basically like your use of focus, that the last mile of it, the last level of obsession, is what gets you like a disproportionate amount of the rewards. So what's point number three or are we on four on Sean's Hardcore? If this was a VHS tape,

it would be labeled Sean Hardcore Part 2. People would not be getting what they thought they were getting. You're an Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks. CEO. No. I put the O and CEO. All right.

Here's where we got. What's left? I did one, two, three, four, five. I got five. I got three left. All right. Jack Welch. CEO of GE.

When you run a big company, it's very easy for, you know, all your children are sort of not equal. They're not loved equally. All the different business divisions. And GE was in a bunch of different business divisions. And he had two simple rules when he was running GE.

one was every division you need to be number one or number two in your market. Otherwise, you have one year to fix it, sell it, or close it. That's it. We will trim the business divisions unless you can be number one or number two, which is an incredible forcing function because it's a sort of Darwinian pressure to survive. And the other Darwinian pressure he applied was every year, Jack Welch would fire the bottom 10% performers in the company. Every year. And so a continuous culling of the herd, which sounds,

I mean, I'm sure people interpret that different way. Some people will think he's an asshole for that. When I first heard it, I was like, oh, that doesn't sound that hardcore. But then you go try to do it. Go try to do that every year. It is incredibly difficult. Or go look at your own track record. How much low performance have you tolerated?

Because you don't fire people until push really comes to shove. I think Jack Welch is, I think he's controversial. We actually should do a deep dive one day on him because people say that he was a horrible CEO. Because if you look at like GE, it kind of became this like a match. of like a bunch of like nonsense and it like owned a bunch of stuff that ended up not working out. But I don't know enough about Jack Walsh to know if that was his doing or what happened. But but I know that he was well loved as a leader. But at the same time, I hear smart people say the exact opposite about firing like Jensen from Nvidia. He was like, he was like, I'm going to smother you in greatness. I'm not going to fire you. Like it's so funny how great people, assuming they both are great, have different opinions on firing as I mean as well as everything else. Like, total opposite, right? Yeah, and you will find that for every single one of these. You'll find people who are very successful doing the polar opposite,

which is not meant to say that this is the way to be great. It's just meant to say, damn, I thought these stories were pretty hardcore, huh? That's really kind of all we're saying, and that there are, it kind of pushes the boundaries of your thinking of what is acceptable, tolerable, and potentially effective. You know, I think firing your low performers is a pretty, I would say, logical thing to do, meaning, yeah, I could see why that works.

I could definitely see why that works, and I'm in support of that one. But yeah, I think others, you know, like, like I think Jensen, when he made that point, he was like, yeah, I don't fire him, but I turn up the intensity so much that you either become great or quit, right? Which is more of a sink or swim version of like, yeah, they quit instead of getting fired. But either way, you weed out the low performers one way or another.

So last two. All right, I'm going to skip this last one. I'll tell you it. I don't even really like it. The Ford CEO. This guy comes in. This guy Alan becomes the Ford CEO. They had just lost $17 billion the last year.

And he came in and they did like the business review where they go through all the different business like projects and how they're on track or off track. And there was like color code. Like green is on track. Yellow is at risk and red is off track. And everything was green. And he's like, guys, we lost $17 billion last year.

How was everything green? and he realized they had like a culture where people were sort of afraid to admit failure and so he's like can't be afraid you have to be honest and so the next week they're all green again except for one was red and he stood up and started clapping and changed the culture around failure and I was like it sounds a little bit like a Disney movie to me yeah that sounds like some cool running shit yeah it's I think we're gonna thumbs down Alan together here consider me uninspired. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury.

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Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column N. And a. member's FDIC. All right, the last one comes from Jimmy, aka Mr. Beast, which was, I think you were there when he described his cloning strategy, which we were like, so, dude, how do you train your employees?

They're all really young. Seems like they're all new. You're growing so fast. Like, do you have, like, I'm curious. Like, you don't, you know, you never went to college or business school or anything like that. Like, what do you do for your, like, kind of management? And he's like, oh, I just do cloning.

And we're like, that sounds illegal. What does that mean? And he's like, well, if I hire you in one of, like, kind of the key roles, you just follow me everywhere. Like, you literally shadow me, every single place I go. And I think the guy who initially was doing it was like sleeping at the same house that he was in.

Like it was like that hardcore. Like from morning to night. Like I remember one guy he hired, he was also Jimmy's alarm clock. Like he would go wake him up. And from the moment Jimmy woke up, they were together till the moment Jimmy signed off to go to sleep. And he would do that for six months. And he's like, by the end of the six months, you know exactly how I think. Because you've been with me everywhere.

You saw every decision I made. So essentially you're like a proxy for me. Like I can now be in two places at once because you know exactly what would Jimmy do in this situation and yeah cloning works great and remember there was like a room full of CEOs like multi-billion dollars CEOs as he was telling us this who were like I think that's awesome and illegal people don't like get weekends he's like no you come here to you come here to win I don't know if he still does it but in the early days of his thing I thought that was pretty pretty awesome how is that going like it's it's interesting to hear about extreme people and how it ends up um

like if they softened it when they have kids and stuff, it appears as though Elon is not a guy who has softened at all as the company has gotten bigger and has had more kids. I wonder if that's happened with Jimmy and what's it called Beast Enterprise or I don't know what it's called? Industries. Yeah, I think both, right? I think he matured, right?

When we met him, he was probably only like 25 or 24 years old or something like that, right? So like, you know, matured like 30 years from year over year. Yeah, you're going to mature. And his rate of learning, like he's, you know, pretty obsessive about learning from smart people. And so the slope of his line is pretty crazy, right? So I'm sure a lot has changed. At the same time, if something's working and that's your edge,

you've got to be pretty careful. You don't just dull out all your edges. And so, yeah, he does have a CEO now of these industries. I'm sure they have more people and they're less like kind of business malpractices. You know, you do in the early days when you're kind of rough and tumble and figure things out. But, yeah, dude, I think they still go pretty hard and try to win. I think a lot of the fundamentals are probably still there of the stuff that works, right? Like anything, the stuff that's working tends to survive and the stuff that's ineffective

tends to get pruned out over time. I am not, compared to these guys, we're not even in the same ballpark in terms of being hardcore. I don't know where you are, but I know that when I hear this, I'm like, oh, it sounds like a lot of work. I'm not into that. I don't want the same outcomes. And I had a story for you today that is the exact opposite.

of hardcore. I didn't mean for this story to be a matter of hardcore or not, more so a matter of there's money everywhere. Can I give you an anecdote that supports what you're saying about the other side of the coin here? David Perel, friend of the pod, had Kevin Kelly on the podcast. And Kevin Kelly is this guy who I really like and admire. He had a really eclectic career. He like started Wired magazine and he wrote a thousand true fans, which really shaped kind of my thinking. Is he like a, was he, I know he's like a thinker and a writer, but was he a successful business person too? Yeah, I think he's done well. Like, he's done very well compared to normal standards, but like, you know, not like some crazy, whatever billionaire type.

But I don't think that was ever his goal. But he's just done a bunch of really interesting projects. And his projects were successful. He asked him a great question about this. He asked him something like, like, what's been the cost of being Kevin Kelly? Like, what have you given up to be Kevin Kelly the way you have? and Kevin's like, you know, that's a great question. To have this life I have, I had to give up on greatness.

And he goes, what do you mean? And he goes, well, I think the cost of greatness is some level of being extreme. And I just never wanted to be extreme. I didn't want the cost of extreme. And so he's like, I surrendered to the path of I'm not going to be as great as I possibly could be. Had I been obsessively focused on one thing, had I been more, extreme had I given up certain parts of my personal life. And he goes, I'll give you a very specific definition of greatness. And he goes, let's just, for lack of a better word, because I could say

greatness and it means two different things in our heads. He goes, let's say greatness is being remembered by people other than your family more than one generation from now. And he goes, I don't think I will be remembered for anything more than one or two generations from now from anyone outside of my own family. And he goes, to be to be a, to be a able to be, he goes, like a gadfly, where I just kind of float from thing to thing, and I get to dabble and explore and like kind of see different projects and bring them to life in little ways, but I don't own any of them. Not any of them became the biggest thing in the world. To be the gadfly, I had to surrender and give up on the path of greatness. And I'm, I'm perfectly

happy with that. And I thought it was just a very, I never really heard anyone say it that way. Like, I kind of respected his thinking on two levels. One, I don't think people ever define the words. what they mean. I was like that he started by being like, I can't give you this answer if I don't define what this word means to me. Was it grandchildren or great-grandchildren? So let's just say grandchildren. Yeah. Okay. That's actually interesting. I've always, I've had a similar definition of greatness, but it's always been way longer where it's been like 120 or 150 years, which I guess would be a couple more, add a few more generations to that. But that's actually an interesting way to define it. Yeah. Like you could, I mean, I don't know who you would consider to be

great, but like whether it's, you know, Steve Jobs on the business side, right? Like, you could go into, like, you know, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and like people who did great in terms of their civic actions or people like Houdini, people who are great artists and great creators that way, right? Like, there's all these kind of people who are great. If you look at them, very few of them live very chill, balanced lifestyles, right? Like, there ain't normal people on the top of, uh, Mount Everest. Like, you're not going to find a well-balanced people. I actually think about that all the time

because I love history and I'll see street names and it's clearly named after someone. And I'll go and research who that person is. Like, for example, Fort Green is named after Nathaniel Green. Fort Green's a neighborhood in Brooklyn. And it's a park. And it's named after Nathaniel Green, who was a general in the American Revolution.

And he was a big shot in the American Revolution, one of the key generals. And it's like, does remembered mean his name is named after a park in which no one even knows that Fort Green was Nathaniel Green. And I'm like, this guy was one of the key top 20 people in the American Revolution, which is one of the most consequential revolutions of all time. And I don't even know him. And when you think about it, over the last 500 to 1,000 years, of the billions of billions and billions of people who have ever existed, the ones who do, who we remember, more often than not,

It has nothing to do with money. For example, if you and I do the best that we will ever do when it comes to business, the likelihood that we will be within, like, maybe there's a world where we'll crack the top 5,000 or top 10,000 living Americans in terms of wealth. Maybe. That would be obviously 0.0001% of, like that, right? And yet, even that is not going to get you remembered for 500 years. You can't name who the 80th richest person was in the 1930s.

50 years. Yeah. yeah, you can't. So that's like, so, so therefore, who's that person today? You don't know now. Yeah, you don't know. And so, and then you're like, okay, so I won't know that. Okay, so money can't really be it. And then it's like, okay, what about business? It's like, well, there's that some companies that have lasted that long. But like, it's basically when you really think about it, it's like humanitarian, a handful of amazing, like leaders or politicians, which would also include like the mother Teresa's of the world, like someone who did something really special. And then it's like, inventors. Like, it's like, or it occasionally or invented something. Or an artist.

Occasionally an artist. And I'm like, so when I think about that, I'm like, well, the odds, if I defined greatness as me being remembered, like, let's say, 150 or 200 years, I'm like, A, I'm doing it wrong. And B, the odds are so low. And then I was like, therefore,

maybe I just shouldn't care. Like I felt like years working through this. Can I tell you where I landed with that same idea? Being remembered or legacy types of never really appealed. I think I was pretty quick to shed that one. In fact, there's a great Hormozi once said something that I really loved. He was like, you know, the queen died six months ago? And guess what? She was the queen. I bet you haven't thought about her since she died. I was like, oh, it's so true. That's the queen of England after a hundred years, you know, dying. And so I never really cared about the legacy stuff so much. But I wanted to achieve greatness. And when I thought about achieving greatness, it was some version of success or, you know, building. something that mattered in the world or, you know, like the number one of something, being the number one of something. And what I've realized is that achieving greatness was sort of like not for me. It would be a fool's errand for me. It's not what I'm wired to do. It's not what I would enjoy

to do. It comes at a cost that I would not be willing to pay once I knew the cost. But there's a big difference between achieving something great and being great. I know a lot of people who are great. Our buddy Ramon is great. He's a great friend. He's a great friend. He's a great dad. He's a great guy and he's a great hang. You know what I mean? He is good at being great. You'd mention Ben Wilson. Ben Wilson right now is being great in handling such a difficult circumstance with absolute, you know, class and courage. And there's just being great. My trainer, he's a guy, he's just great. He's a great guy. He's a great uncle to my kids. He's a great trainer. He cares about people. You know, he's so fun to be around. He's always in a great mood. That's called being great.

So I realized being great, the active tense, the day-to-day thing, that's the thing to chase. Because you could do it right now. And in the moment, how you're showing up, you could be great right now. And you could also fall out of being great if you lose track of that. And you should get right back on the horse, try to be great again. And I think that was where I landed. I was like, okay, I think that resonates for me. I feel comfortable with that.

And it's a far more holistic sense. You can be great when you're exercising and you're in the last three reps at the set and you have to decide if you're going to put the weight down or if you're going to push yourself and try to really like see what you're made of. That's a moment of being great. You know, you could just be courteous and kind to somebody. That's a moment of being great. You know, like sometimes I'm with, I'm at the park and there's other kids and they're kind of like, you know, talking to me and I'm kind just like, I don't know why this four year old is talking to me. And sometimes I brush him off and I just want to be on my phone. I don't really want to talk to this stranger kid about like, you know, this

caterpillar that he found. And sometimes I indulge them and I'm like, no, I'm, you know, I'll say something that plays back into them because that's how I would want someone to treat my kid. It's a moment where I get to choose if I'm going to be great or if I'm not going to be great. And I'm not always the best of that. But increasing that hit rate is the goal. And that's one I can kind of get behind. What's the phrase again? Say this again.

I think this is good. Instead of building something great, be great. Yeah, don't try to achieve greatness. Like, just be great right now. Like, just being great. Did you see the guy who went viral this week on Twitter where he was like saying, like, someone was talking about like hard work and he was like I think you should work hard but but there's a there's this age between like three years old and 13 year old where your kids don't dislike you yet and they're willing to spend time with you you know past 13 that doesn't happen and they're out of diapers so they're a little bit easier and they start having opinions and they can think and for a lot of men who are ambitious people what they notice is that their ambition goes away or dials down during this period because they love being around their kids and it doesn't happen to everyone. one, but a lot of men do. And what I've noticed is that the people who are fearful of this,

I just want to let you know that it tends to come back. Ambition does come back. And the reason why this went viral is because I'm experiencing this. And I think maybe you are and a lot of our folks listening are, but like there is this moment where you start like experiencing these things with your kids when they start having opinions and they still like hanging out with you. And you're like, I don't know if I care about the same things like ambition or these other things where I dedicated my life to them, I guess I'm not willing to pay that price. And frankly, I find it to be kind of a pain in the ass because you're like, life was so much simpler. Just climb the ladder, make money. You know, it's like F checks and get money. Like it's so much simpler that way.

And then you have kids and you're like, shit, everything I thought to be true, it's not true right now. And the poster was like, but it becomes true again later on. Like it does come back. But I remember reading that last weekend and it really hits hit with me because when you're talking about these like guys who are hardcore, I'm like, I don't want, I'm not staying until midnight right now. Yeah, no. My chair has lumbar support. I don't think I'm going to be here until midnight. That ain't happening.

No option drops for us. Yeah. Dude, I gave him a great idea at the breakfast and he option dropped me. And I was like, yes. Immediately like hookline and sinker I was like wow How do I get that again? That was a really

I like that reward I was going to bring up another story But I'm not going to anymore I think that was perfect Yeah that'd be a little too Hardcore for us too Yeah We're gonna chill out at 55 minutes

And not go to the 60s No I think this has a good bow tie to it Or bow tie a good You know Whatever that phrase is about Rapid present and rapid shit. It's all done.

I don't know. All right, that's it. That's a pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, let's take a quick break.

I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Sue. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it. This is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcast.