The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 579: David Perell - Setting The Standard, Cultivating Your Taste, Pursuing Excellence, Becoming a Sloganeer, Always Working/Never Working, & Lessons From a Mysterious Billionaire

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

Read our new book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3VFVYAm Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Episode #579: David Perell - Setting The Standard, Cultivating Your Taste, Pursuing Excellence, Becoming a Sloganeer, Always Working/Never Working, & Lessons From a Mysterious Billionaire Notes: Set the standard – "It's your job to have the highest quality standards of anybody you work with. Every day, you'll face pressure to lower them. Don't do it. If you can set a high standard and simply maintain it, you'll do very well for yourself." Have a high-quality bar. Do three things: Define it: Clearly state the standards. (read The 11 Laws of Showrunning) Maintain it: This is hard to do. Raise it: Keep pushing. You need to define what quality looks like. Set the true north. David worked with a coach to establish his core values. And he was going to narrow it down to five and the coach said, "Nope, it's just one. It's the one that everything in your life orbits around... It's The Pursuit of Excellence. The biggest piece of low-hanging fruit for leaders is getting funnier: Nobody trains themselves to get funnier though. It's strangely taboo. That's why it's such an opportunity. "Laughter is the sound of comprehension." Say something memorable. Humor is memorable. A good way to think... Deconstruct something funny. David spends a lot of time understanding why Theo Von is so funny. The key to excellent storytelling: a moment of change. Conflict and suspense carry stories. Robert Caro writing the LBJ books... "What would I see if I was there." He moved to where LBJ lived to see what it was like to be there. How to cultivate taste: Make a list of things you love/hate. Look for things you love (but aren't supposed to), and things you hate (but are supposed to love). Make things. Don't be a passive consumer. Be a connoisseur. Be discerning about what you consume. Amor Tolles - History is bad for knowing what's good now. Consume old things. Museums - Pay attention to what elicits a reaction. Why is it a 10? Why is it a 1? What do you love? What do you hate? Why? Archegos is David's favorite Greek word, and it gets to the heart of good leadership. Four meanings: Author, founder, pioneer, leader America's founding fathers are the canonical example Lessons from a mysterious billionaire mentor: David asks very specific questions, listens, and takes lots of notes. When meeting with a mentor, show up with energy and specific questions. They are tired of hearing the boring generic questions. Be specific. The mentor talks 98% of the time and David just types what he says. He now has 18,000 words worth of notes. Some lessons: CEOs are Sloganeers: CEOs shouldn't write strategy memos. They should drive slogans.  Three lines. Three words each. (Bezos: Focus on the Customer) CEOs should tell the same stories over and over again, refining their pitch like a comedian. Gauging reactions Asking questions Listening to push-back Seeing what makes people's eyes light up Your message is only landing once people start making fun of you. Good goal in life: Always working, never working Story from Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He was asked how much time he spent preparing. Initially, he said, "not much." Then he thought for a while, and said, "I'm preparing all the time. My whole life is preparing to ask these questions."

It's your job as a leader to set the true north and to define it for people. What is the biggest low-hanging fruit for leaders? Nobody works on this. It's kind of taboo to talk about. This is the ultimate question. David Perrell, the writing expert. Leadership often begins with writing. Suspense and conflict, those are the things that carry stories.

You know exactly what to say, but you don't say it because you're afraid of how it'll make you look. You meet with a secret, mysterious billionaire. The art of great leadership is to say the same things over and over. and over again and never lose enthusiasm. What does that say about the mark of a great leader? Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here.

Text Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help. you start your week off right you'll also receive details about how my new book the score that matters will help you become a more effective leader text hawk to 66866 now on to tonight's featured leader one of my favorites david perrell is the founder and CEO of right of passage he's taught thousands of people for more than 70 countries around the world how to become a more effective writer Additionally, he's the host of the How I Write podcast where he interviews the world's greatest writers and goes inside their process.

I love it. David is simply one of my favorite thinkers and writers and someone I've paid attention to for a long time. During this conversation we discussed, the biggest piece of low-hanging fruit for leaders. Why it's our job as leaders to set the standard and continue pushing it. What and how he learns from a mysterious billionaire mentor he regularly meets with, how to cultivate your taste, the number one job of CEOs, and we close by discussing his favorite Greek word. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with David Perel.

A quick note before we get to this one with David, you will hear towards the middle of our conversation, David, give his email address and ask you, you to send him a note with what you learn from this one. Hello at Perel.com, H-E-L-L-O at P-E-R-E-L-L-L-com. I want you to flood his email inbox and be very specific. That's what we talk about you'll hear soon during this conversation. Be specific with what you're learning and send him an email.

Hello at Porell.com. Okay, here we go. David, man, it's awesome. Have you back on the learning leadership. show. Welcome, dude. Welcome, man. You spent four years since we last recorded. A lot has happened in both of our lives since then, so it's great to have you. But one of the things that's happened is you talked about the fact that you've worked with a coach to establish your core values, and you're trying to narrow them down. I believe it was to five. And your coach said,

nope, it's just one. And it's the one thing that everything else orbits around. What is that one thing? It's the pursuit of excellence. And that has been something that's driven me for many years, whether it started with baseball, then it went to golf when I was in high school trying to play at the collegiate level. And I've always been somebody that's in my DNA who is going to work like crazy to try to get really good at whatever I set my mind to. And I didn't choose that. That was just gifted to me. And I'm now trying to figure out how to take that energy and the positives and the negatives that come with it and channel it in the healthiest direction. How do you personally define excellence?

I think it depends on the domain. Excellence in golf is shooting as many under par as you can. Excellence in writing is a sense of quality that's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. excellence in a podcast is something with a lot of life and a lot of insight that is teaching people or entertaining them. And I think excellence depends on what it is that you're going for. And also the fact that it feels, and we were talking briefly before we were recording, that you just have set a standard for everything that you do. And I don't want to speak for you, so I want you to speak on the importance of high standards, whether it's the fact that you have

beautiful lighting and a great studio here for our Zoom podcast or that you do all of your podcast in person, which is sometimes a logistical nightmare and cost a lot. But if you have these standards, then that's excellence. At least it feels like it to me. Can you share more about excellence in having high standards in all that you do? Yeah, I have a mentor that I work with in town. And he's one of the more successful entrepreneurs in Texas. And he's taught me a lot. But I think the best thing that he's taught me is the importance of having a high quality bar. And that means three things. The first is defining what quality is. The second thing is maintaining that standard that you've defined. And then the third thing is, what is the work that you do in your day-to-day life to

raise your bar for what quality looks like? And I'll go through all those. The first is defining. There's a paper that really influenced me. It's called the 11 laws of show running. It's this obscure PDF. I actually found it on a Reddit forum called obscure PDFs. And one of the things that it says is that if you are producing a film, a movie, you can't be a leader who says, oh, I'll know it when I see it. You can't do that. What you got to do is define what quality looks like from the beginning. Now, of course, you have to leave room for surprises and all that, but it's your job as a leader to set the true north and to define it for people. Now, you can do that with words. And then one of the other things that I do is I collect a bunch of mood boards. And I have thousands of photos that I've collected

of art and architecture and film scenes, book covers that I love. And then a lot of what I do is I'll take things from my design library and I'll mesh them together and I'll say, I want the synthesis of these things. So that's the first thing, setting the standard. The second thing is maintaining the standard. That's hard to do. And you're constantly going to feel entropy against that when you're leading anything. Because there's time pressures, there are money pressures, and there are cultural pressures, and so much of the work of being a leader is having an intuitive sense for when to move on speed,

when to hold back so that you can increase quality. and I think it's your work to have the highest quality bar in the organization for whatever it is. That is what a leader does. They set the quality bar. And then the third thing is how do you then increase your sense for quality? And that comes back to cultivating taste, which is a whole art in itself that I try to do every single day. I think that that is the fundamental thing that I do from the time I wake up in the morning to the time I go to sleep at night is how do I refine my my taste, my taste in people, my taste in writing, my taste in how to speak well, my taste in

how to design things that look beautiful, my taste in so many different things. And I think that if you can really master those three, you end up with the stuff of a quality leader, a quality organization over time. But it's hard work. One of the notes that you sent me before that I was thinking about a lot and how I think I'm good at it some of the time and need to be good at all of the time is, quote, it's your job to have the highest quality standards of anybody you work with. Every day, you'll face pressure. As you said, you'll face pressure to lower them. Don't do it. If you can set a high standard and simply maintain it, you'll do it very well for yourself. I want to highlight and go even deeper here because you're right. It is easy. Maybe you're even

working with somebody you admire and they're like, well, it's okay if we let it slide here, or it's okay if that's like kind of subpar, because it'll be good over here. And I found myself saying, yeah, okay. And I've just lowered the bar of quality. I've lowered my standards because maybe somebody influenced me. And as the leader, if you want that great responsibility, you can't allow it to happen. And a lot of times, that's very uncomfortable. How do you maintain that, especially when it's uncomfortable. It's kind of like running a marathon. There's an apocryphal story that Seth Godin tells really well,

where there's this guy and he runs this marathon, he wins the marathon. He gets to mile 26.2 and this little kid runs up to him. And he goes, oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness. I'm so impressed with how fast you ran. How do you not get tired? And the marathon runner goes, of course I'm tired. I just know where to put the tired.

And it's the same thing with this. it is uncomfortable. You just know how to contend with the discomfort and how to dance with it. And you just expect that that's part of doing the work. So it's not about running away from the discomfort. It's about dealing with the discomfort and learning how to communicate in a way that is direct and loving, but still is pushing people to be better than they thought they could be themselves, which is the essence of good leadership. How do you do this with, let's first talk about how I write. podcast. It's beautifully shot, as mentioned, it's in person, great lighting, amazing guest,

really well prepared. But you also have other people who help you that I don't know those people, but maybe there are certain things where they let it slide or their quality bar isn't as high, and you have to push them. So can you maybe share an example from a time where you had to push somebody to raise their standards for how I write? Yeah. I mean, I do it every day. And I also want to be really clear, I've struggled with this and I haven't done as good of a job over the past few years as I would like. This is something that I'm actually working on. I am nowhere close to a black belt. I'm like a green belt here, but I used to be a white belt. One of the things I do in writing is that if I read a piece of writing and we're in the Google Doc and I'm making edits,

I will make edits just like everybody else will. But there's a few things that I do. The first thing is I make sure to be very encouraging about the things that I like in the writing. And that's fine. That works. I didn't used to do that. I used to be too, I used to condemn the writing too much and I regret that. But the other thing that I do is after I read the writing, I will send a two to five minute loom video about what it is that I'm seeing. And they can hear my care in my voice.

And I really make sure that I don't come in hard. I say, this is where you're at. This is where I see that you're going. And if you can say, we're going to the same place, we're on the same team. You get way better outcomes. Gotcha. That's part probably takes repetitions, right? And you've gotten some reps over the years now running right of passage, now your show,

which could be a TV show as a podcast in the video, which is how I write. How important have those repetitions been for you? What do you mean by repetitions? Well, the fact that you're doing it day after day after day now for years, right, if passage has been going on for years, when we first talk, it was still relatively new. And now you've had five, six plus years of reps of having those conversations with members of your team. Yeah, I think I've really picked it up in the last year and a half to two years. I had a bunch of people close to me who said, David, your biggest weakness is an aversion to conflict.

actually the specific line that one of my best buddies said to me, he said, dude, you always have the same damn problem. He said, you know exactly what to say, but you don't say it because you're afraid of how it'll make you look. And it's one of the best, most perceptive pieces of feedback I've ever gotten from somebody. Think about it every single day. And one of the things that you see in repetition when it comes to being more direct, giving better feedback, is you watch what happens when it doesn't land. So I'll give you an example. I was recording a podcast with a really big name,

and we're about 45 minutes before the show. And before a podcast, I am in another state. I am not kind. I am not present with other people. I am in the zone. So we've actually had to come up with sort of David Pre-show and David Post show. David Post Show is a completely different human being.

But pre-show, I try to put their entire worldview in my head as much as I can, and it takes 100% of my processing power. So about 45 minutes before the show, and we recorded an episode that morning, and my producer comes up to me and says, I have some feedback. You could do this better, you could do that better, you could do this better, you could do that better. And I went right back at him. I said I was really unkind, really insensitive. And my assistant was there.

And she said to me the next day, she said, if you ever spoke to me like that, I would never give you critical feedback again. So I'm sitting there. And one of the things I've learned is that when I need to take really critical feedback with people who are close to me, I like to lie down. something about lying down really calms my nervous system. So people know this. So lie down or going FaceTime or something like that. And it just helps me process a lot better. And the next day, I went on a walk with my producer and I just apologized.

I said, I'm sorry for being a jerk. And I was a total jerk. This is why I was a jerk. Here's how we need to change. Here's what I need so that I'm not a jerk to you in the future. Let's work differently. And we got through it. We totally got through it.

Our relationship is far better for it. Dealing with that is so key. I want to shift gears to talk about the biggest piece of low-hanging fruit for leaders. This is your idea, and I love the idea because you're so right. What is the biggest piece of low-hanging fruit for leaders? Being funnier. Being funnier. It's crazy.

I actually had dinner with a comedian in town last night, and we were talking about getting funnier. because it is crazy to me that there's no class at Harvard Business School about being funnier and making people laugh. So much of the art of getting people's attention, so much of the art of likability, so much of the art of having people see your vision is saying things that are memorable. And getting people to enjoy themselves and open up laughter is a way to release a kind of nervous energy. It also makes things way more memorable.

Tom Stoppard once said laughter is the sound of comprehension. And I think that if you're serious about being a leader, whether you're the president of the United States or you are part of some committee inside your company or you're a leader inside your local church, being a better communicator begins in a lot of ways with being funnier. And if you just make people laugh when you show up, people are going to enjoy being in your presence so much more. Nobody works on this. It's kind of taboo to talk about.

And that's why I think it's awesome. Do you work on it? Yeah, totally. How? What do you do? I have a few things. There's a few books that I'm beginning to get into, but what I've done is I really like deconstructing things that I enjoy. So I'll listen to, I've been listened to a lot of Theo Vaughn and trying to figure out what is it that Theo Vaughn does really well. And I will write out specific sentences, think are funny. I really like browsing the YouTube comments to see after I do my own analysis of why Theo Vaughn resonates so much, what are people on YouTube saying? it. And then you can just sort of test different things in in conversation when you're talking to people. And you can just mess around. Do you test like a story? Do you actually test a joke? Do you write jokes? And then prepare to like, hey, maybe I can bring this up at the next dinner I have.

Like how do you actually put it into practice? Yeah, totally. So last night with my buddy, we're at dinner. We're just trying to make each other laugh going back and forth with some banter. And he had his notebook out. So we're kind of sketching around with little jokes. jokes, trying to figure out, okay, these words are going to be funnier than those words. And then sometimes you'll be telling a story and you'll say, all right, how do I make this story funny? You'll be with a friend. You're like, all right, I'm going to kind of mess around with this.

And you'll follow some funny thought pattern where you're just goofing off and you try it with people who you're comfortable kind of stumbling with. And then you begin to pick up what are the different patterns. And then you go back and you listen, you try to say, okay, why was that? so funny and you just deconstruct. I think that a lot of what makes this easy is that all the content is there. The Theo Von jokes exist in spades, but what makes it hard is this isn't a place where you can just read a book and implement it.

It's much more subtle and it's a felt sense for what humor is. It's sort of like a clever or an intelligent surprise a lot of the time. And yeah, you just sort of mess around and, find out where you end up. How much of that are you born with versus how much can you learn? I think humor is far more learnable than we think. I also think the same thing about storytelling. I think the same thing about speaking. And the edge here is that people think that these things are completely innate and they're not. They think that it's all nature, no nurture. And I disagree with that. because you just look at comedians who go up and from year one to year 25, they get way better.

And I like things. I learned this from Sean Perry. I like things that are almost taboo to try that other people don't try that you can practice that you can get better at. And humor is totally one of them. Every leader is going to be better if they're funnier. Would you do improv, go up open mic nights? you try to like put together a set is that something you think about doing yeah totally i would also

say that i've been recording solo podcast episodes and i would say that those are a set that is what i'm doing with uh with a podcast i went up to my comedian friend last night and i sat down i was like it hit me that you and i have the exact same job we have the exact same job what we do is we work on little bits and they're bits for you about good stories that say something about the human condition that make people laugh. For me, they're good stories that say something about the human condition that make people say, ah, that's interesting. But the base level, working on the bits, refining them, talking them out, doing some writing, the exact same thing. So I spent a lot of time learning from the craft of comedians. What do they do? How do they refine their jokes? And then how do I

bring that to the intellectual world? It feels like storytelling has been a big topic on how I write from all I've been listening to, multiple, a lot of your guests, either focus on it solely or focus at least part of the conversation when it comes to writing on storytelling. What are the keys to becoming an excellent storyteller? One of the keys is to really focus on the moment of change and to draw a contrast between the before and the after. I was down in dumps. It's going for a walk.

All of a sudden, there was somebody in front of me got hit by a car. The car was going 40 miles an hour. They got hit. They went, flew 40 feet forward. I'm standing there. Oh, my goodness. Did this person just pass? I'm making this up, by the way.

As fate would have it, there was a paramedic right there, grabbed him up. I couldn't believe it. This person just flown 40 feet, got up and walked. What's going on there? You start off with something mundane, something happens. So now we have some drama, we have some conflict, we have some suspense. Suspense and conflict, those are the things that carry stories, open loops. So now you're like, oh my goodness, what happened?

Then you tell some detail. There's this car. I probably could have told the story better by saying there was 85 Mercedes-Benz, hits this person. They fly 40 feet forward. They roll and tumble. Okay. So now we see that. Then we're now at peak drama.

And then the end of the story sort of resolves that tension. And we have the contrast between the beginning of the story and the end of the story. And I think that if you can really understand what is that moment of change, what is the contrast, then you can paint one side of the story black and the other side of the story white. And then you have the contrast between A and B. Yeah, I think it starts with movement, right? I think you and Sean were talking about Matthew Dick's book, and I've had Matt on the show and talked to him probably a number of times because he talked about the book Storyworthy, that one of the big keys are that we start time and place and movement, whereas most people, when they tell you the story of their vacation, they literally just take you through every single moment of the boring vacation, which is not exciting really to anybody as opposed to starting with maybe a moment in the vacation, that there was a funny or interesting story. and you start immediately right in the action with time, place, and action as opposed to saying, well, this is what we did over the course of nine days in Florida.

We're like, okay. And that seems to be the difference between really good storytellers and those who are, in fact, quite boring. Yeah, so much of the art of communication is the art of leaving things out. Yes. And then taking the things that you put in and making sure that you're very intentional about those, giving them as much color as you can. And you could take, this is a writing tip too, you could say, I drove in my car,

or you could say, I drove in my dad's 68 Mustang. All of a sudden, you think about the 68 Mustang. You think of the dad's car. You think of the smell of that thing. You think of the shape of that thing. All of a sudden, the 68 Mustang is precious, whereas like you think of the car, now you don't have a very solid image.

And when you're communicating, what you're doing is you're planting images in people's brain. So much of our minds are dedicated to site. And when you communicate, if you can help people see what you're saying, you're going to be better off. So Robert Caro, great biographer. He wrote The Power Broker about Robert Moses. Then he's spent the last 45 years writing these biographies of President Lyndonid Me Johnson. And when he was getting started on the first LBJ biography, he'd fly down to the hill country where

LBJ grew up and he would ask to do interviews. And the people there, these old, you know, Texas country people, they'd say, get out of here. We don't want to talk to you. So he decided to move down, him and his wife. And he would do these interviews and he would ask, what would I see if I was there? What would I see if I was there? What would I see if I was there? And the people that he was interviewing would kind of get annoyed.

They'd be like, why you ask me this question so many times? But what Kara realized is that if you can unlock the electricity of sight for your readers, it's going to be so much more vivid. It's going to be so much more vivid. And I get really into these things. So I drove out to LBJ's ranch where he grew up so that I could see these things firsthand. And if I said, oh, there was a cabin on a ranch, you'd say, okay, I guess I can kind of see that. But now if I were to say, there was a cabin on the ranch and the dishes were never washed, there were rats crawling along the ground, there are wooden panels falling through the ceilings.

it smelled like grandma's house and the entire cabin creaked as you walk through it. Now you have the sense of this sort of haunted, decrepit place. And all I did was give you five really quick things and you have the whole cabin pictured. And I think that that's a lot of what we're doing when we're communicating to go back to your vacation story. If I was to say, this hotel was like that fancy country club

that you could never go to as a kid is very different from this was slightly better than a Motel 6, which is very different from I felt like I was in a scene from Lost. And all I've done is I've given you one sentence, three completely different ways to think about it. And now that vacation story is so much more vivid. Let's say, David, we're working with a senior leader who runs a company and they do town halls, they do quarterly business reviews. They have these regular times where they communicate

with their companies. And oftentimes, I mean, I've worked at companies like this. And oftentimes, the leaders, they may say a little something to, hey, good to see you. You know, like, thanks for being here. And then they start showing up like the graphs of how we did over the past quarter. And people start falling asleep. And then they finish and people clap for them. So they think it's good because they showed that we grew X percent over the past quarter. whatever. We want to do it better than that. We want to be different. What advice do you give to that person who's preparing for their Q1 town hall they're going to have with their team so that people are like, whoa, they're alive. They're excited. Yes, you do have to get across some of the

information about performance. I get it. But what's a better way than all of the boring talks that most of these people give? Yeah. We've spoken about two of them. And storytelling. But we'll go into a third one. Teach people. Teach people. I did this yesterday. Had some bad news to share, got the whole team together. We talked about it.

And I said, this is how I see things. Frameworks, broke it down. This is what I'm seeing with what's happening right passage. This is what I'm seeing that's happening with the market. So I see the world. I'm going to break it down for you. And I'm going to show you what I'm seeing. And I'm going to do it with the same enthusiasm.

enthusiasm that I feel. When I look at the world, business is exciting. I don't care if you run a lawn-wing business. Business is going to be exciting. I don't care if you're building swimming pools. There are a bunch of things that I'm sure are super interesting about swimming pools. I have never found a single topic that I've learned about that I didn't think was absolutely fascinating as I as I got into it. So much of the problem is that when a leader is giving a presentation, Like that, they sound bored. The second that I start talking like this, and I'm speaking like this, you're now not nearly as interested as if I'm doing this because it's exciting. And I'm not saying that you should be inauthentic.

I'm not saying that you should be trite. But the world is interesting. And it is your job as a leader to communicate ways that are interesting to do the to serve them and to teach them. if you do that, you'll hold people's attention. You meet regularly with a secret, mysterious billionaire. This person is a mentor for you. First, I know you're going to share who the person is, which is completely fine because it's more about the learning that happens.

One, can you give me your overall process for how you approach this mentor in your life? Yeah. He approached me. That's the process. Okay. And this is what I think is the gift of writing online is that it challenges the very premise of how people think about networking. People think about networking as now is about let the others find you. And how do you do that?

You put your frequency out of the world and people reach out to you. My email is hello at perell.com. If you listen to this podcast and you think it's interesting for whatever reason, send me an email. Send me a well-written email and tell me something specific. about what you liked about the podcast, what you want to chat about, send me an email. I would love that because that's what I'm doing

whenever I'm creating content, whenever I'm writing, whenever I'm producing a podcast, is I'm saying these are the things that I'm interested in. This is the frequency that I'm operating on. If you're on the same frequency, reach out to me.

And this guy is super passionate about education, super passionate about education. He's building a school. And because I had written so much about writing and about modern writing, he looked at that and he said, oh my goodness, this is how writing should be taught. So he enrolled his daughter and write a passage. And then we ended up meeting through that. And that's why I was able to do it. All the people who I've gotten to meet almost who were really high level, they reached out to me in some form. I didn't reach out to them. And I did that

by sharing things on the internet. When you meet, what happens? I just ask a bunch of questions. I'm super curious, so I show up and I say, I want to learn a bunch from you. Those sorts of people tend to be really smart. And when I meet with this guy, we did it the very first time I brought my iPad. And we were at the proper hotel in Austin, sat down at the bar. And I started asking questions. He just started answering them over and over. And I just typed and I typed and I typed and I typed and I typed.

I now have about 18,000 words distilled from his worldview from all the hours that we've spent together. And every night after dinner, I go home, after we've had dinner, I go home and I'll just write out all the high-level things. And it's all bolded and highlighted and systemized into different frameworks. And I just have basically his operating system codified in a giant Evernote document. One of the key takeaways there, David, that I want to. highlight because you probably get this too where somebody says, I'd like to buy you lunch and they want to take you out because I want to pick your brain. And I don't love that phrasing,

but I get that people use it. So I'm not going to harp on it right now. But anyway, they say that and then you show up for the lunch and they end up just kind of vomiting their story to you and without asking any questions. And what you do is you meet with this person who was impressed by you and you're impressed by them. So there's a mutual admiration society here. But you are showing up with a curious mind and just listening and then asking questions and probably follow up questions. And I think that is a skill that more of us need to develop to show up with a curious mind to ask and then listen and then ask and listen. And in your case, write all the stuff down too that for whatever reason, it seems there's a big miss in the world with this, but you have

figured this out. I'm guessing that's why you're really good at connecting with people. Let me get even more specific. It's not enough to just ask questions. They have to be specific questions. Yes. Unlock an insight in the mind of the person who you're speaking with. So I was looking through your guest list last night and you have knocked it out of the park. If we sat down for lunch, what I would do is I would sit down with you and I would say, Ryan, here's how I reach out to people. How do you do it? All right, let's compare notes. All right, so how did you get Tony Robbins on the show?

What did you learn from Matthew Dix? How did you prepare for Matthew Dix? Here's how I prepared for Matthew Dix. So what's going on there? Super specific. I've done my homework. I'm asking questions. What I'm not asking you is, hey, Ryan, how do you do a successful podcast?

I'm saying this is, I'm going to zoom all the way into this aspect of a successful podcast, and I'm just going to ask you a bunch of different questions. And they're going to be so specific that now I'm going to unlock an insight in your mind because the questions are the kinds of questions that most people haven't asked because I've done my homework. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a trade. Now, with you and I, I feel like we'd be peers. I feel like you and I'd be good friends. We'd sit down and we'd say, all right, I'm going to share some stuff with you. You're going to share some stuff with me.

As I share more with you, you're going to want to share more with me, vice versa. Now, there's other relationships where there's a clear power. Our differential. This is like me and billionaire guy. Okay. So now that is a different trade. And this trade is old people who have wisdom and money teaming up with a young people who have energy and vision.

That pair is a tale as old as time. So what you do is you come with ideas. You come with energy. Yeah. Let's get after it. I'm happy to implement that. Let's go. Good idea.

Let's do it. Hey, here's a vision for I think how the world can get better. Can you sort of help me shape it? But you have to come in with something concrete. And then what they have is they will be able to show you some of the landmines on that road. And then in this case, he ended up becoming an investor in what I was doing. But that pair, if you're a young person looking for mentors, come with interesting questions that are really specific because you've done your homework. And then you come in with energy, ideas, vision, all that jazz.

and then you listen, you listen, and you do not, you remember the power differential and you say, all right, that's the way it is, and there's no issue there. The key word is specificity. When it comes to praise, like, I don't, it is lame to give like a cookie cutter generic praise. What's cool and better is to give very. specific, whether you're talking to your child playing soccer or to a mentor who you admire, to praise them on a specific question they ask or the way they approached that person or anything specific. So praise is, I think specificity is huge. And absolutely when it comes to questions,

it's like you get those emails from people, I hope when they follow up and send it at hello at porell.com, that they don't say, oh, David, that was amazing. You were energetic and it was fun. I hope they say, I loved it when you shared that. one specific story about the billionaire and your lunches and how you take notes and how you prepare for those. I want it to be as specific as possible. And the people who do that, it always seems that those are the much more enjoyable and fruitful conversations and transformational relationships in your life because they're thinking about it as opposed to just kind of wandering around hoping for the best. So specificity is a crucial word there. That is the word. One of the pieces of advice that

you told me that he gave to you, I assume it's a he, was CEOs need to be sloganeers, right? They shouldn't write strategy memos. They should drive slogans. What do you mean by this? So this is my favorite leadership lesson that I've learned from him. So in the 90s, he managed a bunch of people, and his strategy was recruiting the smartest people who he could get from different Ivy League schools and places like Stanford. Because he had such smart people, he said, I'm going to write these big strategy memos, 25 pages, and that way people are going to have a sense where the company's going. They're going to think I'm smart. That's like my duty as a good leader.

And he hired this director of HR from a Fortune 500 company. Director of HR comes into his office and says, I don't think you should write these 25-page strategy memos. They actually are worse for aligning your company than better. says, here's what happens. People take one or two sentences and they say, I agree with that sentence and they turn that into their focus for the quarter. So he's with his director of HR and he goes, get the hell out of my office. I don't want to talk to you. Guy leaves, goes away for a month, calls him back in and says, come here. It's like Bradley Cooper from, what is it, 21,

the movie about poker when he's got all those things on the wall sort of looking around and there's all of these printed out white pieces of paper and he goes, what is this? He goes, I talk to your team members and this is what

they think that the priorities are for this year. And he goes, what the hell? These aren't the priorities at all. Are these people even listening? It just goes, calm down.

This is what happens when you write long strategy memos. Everybody can pick and choose one thing that they like and they ignore the rest. He goes from now on, you get three lines, three words each, three lines, three words each. And those three lines are clear and unmistakable. And you're going to get every single person to focus on those things. And if you do that, that's how you align an organization. It's been 25 years.

He said it's the best leadership advice he's ever gotten. How do you get good at compressing your ideas down to three lines and three words? There's a few things. One is communication, talking to people. And a lot of what you're doing when you are a leader, I've noticed this with Bezos, I've noticed this with him, I've noticed this with Peter Thiel. They tell the same stories over and over and over again. How many times has Jeff Bezos talked about focus on the customer, focus on the customer. I bet if he was sitting with you and I right now, he'd say, well,

should have set up more, should have set it more. And part of the art of great leadership is to say the same things over and over and over again and never lose enthusiasm. But you're always paying attention to people's eyes. Where are they drowning out? What are the things that really resonate? And over time, you begin to refine that story. And then what you're doing is you're trying to say, with those three lines, three words each, you're just talking to people about them. Are they repeating them back to you? So one way that you know that you're nailing it is once people start making jokes and making fun of you as the leader. If you say something and now everyone's laughing about it, oh, Hank always says this.

Ha ha. Oh, Hank's about to say this. That means you've nailed it. That means you've absolutely nailed it because it's deeply embedded, not just in people's subconscious, but the social fabric of the organization. And then what you do is you say, all right, how do I make these things clear? How do I make them falsifiable? And how do I review them at the end of the quarter at the end of the year and say, where do we do well? Where didn't we do well?

And I think that there's just some sort of sense of reps that you need to get. Dan Coyle in the Culture Code writes about Danny Meyer. And that's one of the big elements of building an excellent culture is the fact that people, like Danny Meyer was so good and still is so good at repeating it over and over and over and over. as people started making fun of him and Dan Coyle saw that this seemed to be a commonality in companies or Navy SEALs are all over the place of companies and leaders who sustain excellence over time is that they make fun of each other. Not only like it's okay to do that, but it's easy to do that because the leaders say the same stuff so much that that is a, that is what he's like, oh, this is interesting. And all these good companies and good places,

good organizations, the people make fun of the leaders for what they say because they say it so much. Totally. So cool. You mentioned earlier, and I wanted to drill down then, but I'm going to do it now, because I think this is something that you've become really good at. I've noticed over the last five plus years, and that is cultivating your taste. And I never really thought of it until I've read your notes about how to do this. So can you share one, why it's important to cultivate your taste instead of just being kind of a lemming and going along with the crowd?

And then how are some ways that you get better at cultivating your taste? Yeah, this is the ultimate question. The reason that it's important is this is even more true now with AI is what is happening with modern writing is the words are being given to you. and it's your job as a writer to discern what small percentage you want to keep. It's sort of like when you go shopping, you'll go to Nordstrom. And what you're doing is you're looking at a bunch of different clothes. You're not actually creating anything, but people have a good sense of style, know how to look at all the different clothes on the rack and to say, I like that one,

I like that one. And if I pair them together, good things will happen. Tom Ford was once asked about how he built Gucci. And he basically said, I just said, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, a thousand times. a trillion times, and that's how Gucci became Gucci. I'm really good at yeses and knows. Fundamentally, that's kind of what it takes to build a great organization to deliver something great is you get a bunch of options and you're saying yes and no. Now, you can improve the quality of your yeses and knows. And I know this because editing, a piece of writing is just a

bunch of yeses and knows, playing around with different words, playing around with, should I keep this, should I remove that? And I've noticed that all I'm doing when I'm editing is I'm making quick decisions about what, I just have three options. Should I keep it? Should I delete it or should I change it? And one of the things I'd always wanted in my career was I wanted a beautiful production studio. So when I was working on that, I'd just gotten back from Paris and Paris was wildly inspiring to me, going to Versailles, seeing the bridges in town, super cliche, but it was, it's just the most beautiful man-made place that I know of. And it really meets my aesthetic with Rococo and Pio Arts.

And I got back and I wanted to design the studio. So I reached out to a friend and I said, hey, do you know any designers in town? And she said, oh, actually, my best friend is a designer. She would love to work with you. So she comes in, it's like a Friday afternoon, the whole apartment is empty, white walls, wooden floors, no ornamentation, just like what you would see in any standard apartment. And she struts in and she's like, Miss Frizzle meets Anna Winter on acid. She has just crazy personality. And she struts in, she's got like these five inch heels.

And she's all over the place. She's sort of helping me with my design. And we worked and worked and worked to try to articulate what it is that I wanted. And we're about a month and a half into the project and she looks at me and she goes, here's your problem. You have very strong opinions, but you have no ability to communicate what it is that you like. And I don't even think you know what you like because you haven't spent enough time around great art and design. And I heard that.

It was like a punch to the gut. It was a punch to the gut. because here I wanted to be somebody who could design beautiful things, who had that sense of taste, and she said, you don't have it. So we worked together to produce the studio, and then I started doing more design projects. I designed the other rooms inside the studio. I designed my apartment. And now I'm kind of always working on a design project. And I think that this is how you have to think about cultivating your taste.

First, you got to make things. You have to be making things. You can't just be a passive consumer. You have to be making things in some way. Another thing is to be a connoisseur. And a connoisseur is somebody, it's not just about consumption. This word has gone very out of style. But to be a connoisseur of something is to not just consume,

but to really be discerning and reflective about what it is that you've consumed, to consume a lot of those things, and then probably to have whatever it is that you really like embedded inside of your social circles so that you're talking a lot about it. For example, I'm a croissant connoisseur. I love croissants. Whenever I'm in New York, whenever I travel,

the croissants aren't very good in Austin. I have a croissant every single day. And I'm like Dave Portnoy with the barstool pizza reviews with the croissants. I can talk about the bread quality, the butter, the way that the chocolate melts and a chocolate croissant, the way that it goes or does. doesn't go with the cappuccino that it's delivered with. And I love croissants. That's what it

means to be a connoisseur. I've had hundreds of croissants over the last few years and every single one I analyze. I look at what is the feeling of on my fingertips. What is the aftertaste on my tongue? And if you do that, whatever domain it is, then you end up improving your taste. So make things, consume a bunch. Don't just consume. Reflect on it. If you can talk to other people about it and do it over and over and over again. And one of the other things that you can do really well to do this better is I learned this from Amor Tolls on my How I Write podcast. He said that history is very bad at knowing what is quality for things that have been

recently made were very bad at it. So anything that is being created right now has the things that are the most popular don't actually have a major correlation with the things that will stand the test of time. but history is very good at looking at things that are more than 50 to 100 years old and saying these are the things that are really of quality. And one of the worst things that traps us when it comes to trying to cultivate our taste is we're so caught in what's been created recently that we're not consuming the old things. And because of that, we're not getting nearly as high a percentage of quality things delivered

to us. So just by consuming old things that are still popular and have stood the test of time, you will raise the average quality of things that you consume and improve your taste as a result. You've also talked about that you should make a list of things that you love as well as what you hate and then look for things you love but aren't supposed to and things you hate but are supposed to love. Can you share more about that? That's a piece, that's an action we could do immediately. Yeah. This is what I love about museums.

Museums have gone way out of style, and I understand why. No one says, oh, yeah, let's go to the museum, as if that's going to be really fun. It always kind of feels like that day out with your parents, where your mom is like, hey, we got to go do this. And you're like, okay, mom, fine. But museums are awesome.

And the thing that's great about museums, at least a really good museum, is you get so many things that are filtered to you. The thing that people miss about museums is the reason that they do museums wrong is they try to see everything. And they treat it, it's almost like a gluttonous experience. What they do is you got your all you can eat buffets and you got your all you can see museums. And they're like, we're at the museum. We need to see as many things as we possibly can.

So you end up going from here to there, from here to there. You leave sort of exhausted. You're tired with your feet. Don't do museums like that. what you should do is walk into a museum and just say, what is interesting to me right now? So we're, let's say we're going to the Met. Well, I'm in the mood to go to the Japanese wing. Okay, so we'll go to the Japanese wing, and I'm just saying, okay, that's what I'm in the mood to do.

And then all I do is I just walk and I pay attention to what elicits a reaction in me. And that reaction, there's only two reactions that you get. It's the tens and it's the ones. Basically, everything else, your brain just won't register. And when you see a 10 or a 1, you stop and you ask, why do I either love this thing or why do I hate this thing? And if you love this thing, why do I love it? Breakdown, is it the quality of the mahogany wood? Is it the detail of the actual painting?

Is it the way that the scroll is actually displayed? What is it that is really moving me? And you're trying to figure out if you can define that thing, maybe take a photo of it, and do a little write-up. one paragraph, this is what I really like, or just to a bunch of bullet points. And then maybe even the more interesting question is, I hate this. I hate this. This is disgusting to me. How then did it end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

What? How did this thing that I despise end up in this museum? Once again, you're saying, what do I hate about it? And what you're looking for, if you're trying to get really good in any craft, is high quality, high distinctiveness. High quality is fine and it's good, but it doesn't really have that sense of personality that I think is intrinsic to all good brands. And then a lot of modern art is just high distinctiveness without the quality.

You go for that shock value, right? This is like the banana on the wall at the museum and people just roll their eyes because it's very distinctive, but there's no sense of quality there. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to think is how do I create things that are distinct and of quality. And by doing that, I'm trying to think through where is there a mismatch between the things that I think are excellent and the things that culture thinks are excellent, knowing that right now there is a mismatch. All throughout history, there's been a mismatch between what people

think is the best thing that is made now and what actually ends up standing the test of time. I love thinking about goals, David, and one of the goals you've talked about for your life, and that is always working and never working. And I believe this is a story from Patrick O'Shaughnessy. What's this goal when it comes to always working and never working? Yeah. So I was at the Main Street Summit in Columbia, Missouri, hosted by my friend Brent B. Shore and Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

And Brent was interviewing Patrick. It was sort of this private interview. I hope Patrick's okay with me sharing this. But he was at. how do you prep for your interviews? Patrick is such a good interviewer. And the guy was like, you must have so many questions that you ask before the interview where you're writing things down

and you have everything planned and then you can interview these people. And Patrick goes, no, no, no. And Brent sort of pops in. He goes, yeah, you know, one time we're on the phone. It was like, we're like an hour, 55 minutes into the call. And Patrick is helping me work through something, really helping me out. And Patrick goes, hey, I got to go. And Brent's like, where do you need to go?

And Patrick's like, I'm interviewing Michael Ovitz. And Brent goes, what? You weren't prepping? He's like, no, not really. I just kind of went and I went for it. And everyone's really confused. Like, okay, so you don't do any prep at all. How do you ask such good questions?

And he's like, well, you know, I guess that actually what I try to do is I, I try to ask one good question. And it's the first question that I ask and then I'm just sort of responsive the rest of the way. And everyone's sitting there and they're like, dude, how are you such a lazy schmuck? And you do such good interviews. We're all super confused. And there's this long pause, this moment of stillness. And he goes, wait, actually, I'm always prepping for my interviews.

From the second I wake up, I'm learning about ideas. I'm trying to think about how do I actually understand people? Whenever I interview somebody, I've just on my own, I've read so much. of their work. And I've always thinking through this question of how do you ask better questions? How do you pull out more interesting ideas from people, developing my taste for interesting ideas and great questions, questions that deliver insight? So I'm always prepping for the podcast. Every single waking second of my existence, I'm prepping for that podcast. And I was like, this is one you found when you're always working and you're never working, where you can just be talking

to a friend, helping them out, you got a few minutes of prep, you're ready to go, and you are this perfectly made knife to like cut through that piece of fruit. And then at the same time, you're just always working on your craft. And that's how you're sharpening your blade day in and day out. And I took a step back and I reflected on that. And I was like, once I find that, I will have found the work that's right for me. As Patrick would say, That's his life's work, right? He's looking to surround himself with the people who's doing their life's work. And he obviously, there's one more, David, before we run.

There's so much more to get to. But I love the way you tell stories into your enthusiasm. I really appreciate this. But I love to know more about your favorite Greek word. What is your favorite Greek word? And why is it your favorite Greek word? Yeah. So one of the things I do every single day is I do a Bible study.

And I became a believer about a year ago. And so I'm really new to the fake and I'm trying to figure out, okay, what is it? How does this all work? And the way that I do it is I'll read scripture and I'll look at a translation that allows me to see the original Greek. And there was one time I was reading, it was Acts chapter three, and there was this word archagos. And it has four different meanings. author, founder, pioneer, leader. Now, let me be really clear.

I'm taking a little bit of creative license here, but there was this insight that popped into my brain. How could author, founder, pioneer, leader all be the same word? What does that say about leadership and the mark of a great leader? And I went away because I was like, those are completely different words. But then I began to think of people like the founding fathers of America who wrote the Declaration of Independence. They were authors, Jefferson, Franklin. They were writers. They were these very scholarly, erudite people who sat down and they debated in the Federalist papers and they wrote the Constitution.

They wrote the Declaration of Independence. They built on ideas from people like Thomas Payne and John Locke. They wrote out what this country was going to be. And then they founded a new country. By doing that, they pioneered a new way of living, a new mode of government, new ways to think about democracy and the nature of the good life. And then by doing that, they were leaders. Jefferson was a president, I think, right? And they were the people who led America in the early days. And I think that that's a really good way to think about my work, which is what I want to be doing is helping people become authors so that they can go found whatever it is that they want to start so they can pioneer new ways of thinking and leading so that then they can become leaders in the world.

And that's how I see the synthesis between my work, which is writing and your work, which is leadership. I think that leadership often begins with writing. And with a little bit of creative license, the connection between those things has become really clear to me through those words. And I love the word archa-gose. So good. I want to publicly acknowledge, man, that you sent me one of the best prep notes, ideas that I've ever gotten in the history of 500, whatever, 75 plus of these in nine years.

I usually get stuff from PR people that are. like sample questions and they go through a book and the fact that you've took the time to write out these really cool ideas about how our worlds collide from a writing perspective and a leadership perspective. It just proves like you're walking the talk when it comes to having a high bar for quality and living a life in pursuit of excellence. It's not talk. Like it's real. It's happening. And I didn't ask you to do that and you proactively did. And it made this much better. And it makes me want to have more and more and more conversations with you. So I just want to thank you for that, man, because it makes a huge difference and nobody does it.

Nobody does it. And there's so many things out there that nobody does. You talk to anyone who's really good at their craft and they say, yeah, there are these things that are really low-hanging fruit. And I think that, first of all, thank you. And I think that one of the nice things about getting a little older is, and I'm not an old guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that when you're a kid, you look at things that are good and you say, oh, my goodness, that's magic. How did they do that? And then you sort of end up much closer to where Steve Jobs ended up, which was everything in this world was created by other people.

Those people were no smarter than you and they just made it. And there's real rewards for trying and for being reliable and for just going the extra bile here and there. And just for asking, how do I? do this well and learning from precedent but not copying precedent and every single industry, every single industry from recording podcasts to making post-it notes to making pasta in Italy. I'm just making stuff up. Has low-hanging fruit.

And I think it's our job as people who want to be excellent at what we do to say, what are the opportunities that are right in front of us and what's the low-hanging fruit that we can just tackle and execute on and, you know, it shows up in something as basic as a podcast, I guess. I love it. Well said, man. Thanks again for doing this. Write of Passage, your school as well as your podcast, How I Write. It's beautifully done. I'm a huge fan of both. So thank you so much for that. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Me too. Awesome. Thank you. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club.

If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learning leader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with David Perel. Also, it's really important we do this. Let's flood his email inbox. He asked us to his email is hello at perell.com, H-E-L-O at P-R-E-L-L-L.com. Hello at Perel.com. Let him know what you learn. And give specifics like we talked about.

Let him know what you learn from this great conversation. A few takeaways from my notes that maybe you'll email him about. Set the standard. As leaders, it is our job to have the highest quality standards of anybody we work with. And every day, we'll face pressure to lower them. Don't do it. If we can set a high standard and maintain it, we'll do really well for ourselves in the long run. Set the standard, right? Then David's favorite Greek word, archegos, it gets to the heart of good leadership. The four meanings are author, founder, pioneer, and leader.

America's founding fathers are a prime examples of this. And then towards the end, the good goal to have in your life. He was watching Brent B. Shore interview Patrick O'Shaughnessy at an event. And when asked how he's so prepared for his interviews, and Patrick is one of the best, he's actually always working, but never working. He's always thinking about it. And I think this is a message and a signal that you are doing your life's work when it's something you're always thinking about. You wake up excited to do it.

You go to bed thinking about it. And I feel really fortunate that that's what I'm doing with my life. And a prime reason for that is because of you. You continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with David Perel. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you do that, you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and you subscribe to the show and you rate it, hopefully five stars and you write a thoughtful review. And by doing all of that, you continually give me the opportunity to do my life's work.

And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can we?