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

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming My guest - Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, the social gaming company he built from zero to $12.7 billion, pioneering a category that generated over a billion app installs and introduced hundreds of millions of people to online play. He's a serial founder who has started ten companies, taught product development at Stanford, and made early seed investments in Facebook and Twitter. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play. Key Learnings Coaches are cheat codes. Mark has hired a surfing coach, a tennis coach, a chess coach, a life coach, and the legendary Bill Campbell. None of them were assigned to him. He went and found them. "You throw to where you swing. You don't swing to where you throw." His tennis coach, Jorge, on learning how to serve. Commit to the natural swing first. You'll miss. You'll look stupid. Eventually your brain realizes you're serious and puts the ball where it belongs. You play to get better. You don't play to win. Not this point. Not this match. What am I doing right now that makes me better in the next game? Kill the ego so it gets out of the way of you being humble and curious. Don't contort the organization around one talented jerk. Colleen McCreary, Zynga's chief people officer, kept a sign on her wall: "No jerks allowed." She once vetoed an acquisition because she believed the founder was toxic. When the organization sees you refuse to bend just to win one point, they build muscle and confidence too. You'll have periods out of alignment. That's okay. Sometimes the person is in a crucial seat and you can't swap them tomorrow. What matters is that you're aligned with the philosophy. Bill Campbell's two lessons: intellectual honesty and courage. Be committed to the deep truths above everything else, and say them to your team even when it hurts. Then have the courage to stand up to your own team, your own board, and your own investors. A well-run company is a democratic dictatorship. Campbell leaned heavily on the dictatorship half. Unapologetically. The flip side of ambition is sacrifice. Everyone says they're a ten out of ten on ambition.  Mark's test: would you toil in obscurity for the next ten years, nobody respecting what you're doing, for an 80 or 90 percent chance at something bigger than your wildest dreams? Or take the 80 percent chance at a respectable single and a pat on the back? Nobody believes in us as much as we do. That's why we become founders. At 41, VCs who had already backed Mark twice told him he was too old, too rich, and too settled to go all in on Zynga. Mark isn't all in until he is. He calls it a lazy on-ramp to curiosity. Lots of projects. Looking for signals in a lot of places. Processing. Then it flips. "When the fish are running, we're up all night throwing nets until they're done running, not until we're tired." The chess lesson: play boring. His chess coach told him if you want to beat a player rated much higher than you, play boring and conservative and let them make the mistake. He started doing it. He started winning. Your kids don't follow what you say. They follow what you do. Mark set out to be a different kind of dad than his own, who measured people by their résumé. Then he watched his 15-year-old daughter spend every waking minute with math tutors before leaving on a service trip. "How did we get here? Oh, I know how we got here. They're not listening to what Dad says. They're following what Dad does." Happiness comes from feeling useful to a community you care about. Not from being useful. From feeling it. That's Alfred Adler, by way of The Courage to Be Disliked. There are two levels of success. A life well lived is a life in alignment with what only you can bring to the world. You don't have to build Google to feel like you went for it. The ultimate success is the greatest instantiation of your talents. Use money as freedom, not lifestyle. When Freeloader sold and 28-year-old Mark had more money than he'd ever imagined, he made a list of everything he was going to buy. It totaled about $9,000. He put leather interior in his Pathfinder. He still has the vehicle.  He set a $500 million goal that had nothing to do with buying things. At a net worth around $15 million, working with a life coach, he wrote it down because that's the capital required to run a studio of teams chasing many ideas without going to anyone else with hat in hand. "Creatively, that's freedom." Retirement is spiritual death. The stretches between building things are what Mark calls the abyss. Once you've felt the high of building with a great team and shipping something into users' hands every week, it ruins you. You can't be happy with less. Over-fund the things that matter. Not every day is the same. Not every life moment is the same. When one of those moments comes, put all your best players on the ice. The Allen & Company investor tour. They told Mark it was a dog and pony show. Just shake some hands. He told his team: this is our IPO, this is our roadshow, and we are going to use every minute of it the way we want. He gave the biggest public market investors a full presentation, handed them his numbers, and told them to judge him against those numbers in a year. He met with them a year later and had crushed them. King for a day. Carol Bartz brought Mark in to talk to Yahoo's entire senior management. He spent two weeks building a presentation on how he'd run Yahoo if he were king for a day, stood up, and took over the room for an hour. They got a deal done and one person in that room came to work for him. He ran the same play on the CEO of AMEX with a credit card that competed on fun. Amex spent $75 million with them. Seven minutes with Obama became 45. Mark was told the President would ask about his kids and then the meeting would be over. He walked in with a PowerPoint on the ten bold objectives he'd run on if he were president. Obama went through the entire thing and then asked what else he had. Prepare as hard for everything going right as you do for everything going wrong. Mark had under-prepared for the version of where Obama said, "Yeah, I'm buying. What else you got?" We sleepwalk through our own biggest moments. The question isn't what's the agenda or why they want to meet with you. It's: I have five minutes with the king. What is theoretically possible here? The Book of Life. Every year during the Jewish New Year, Mark writes in the same book. Only during that window. It isn't a journal. It's a spiritual board meeting with himself. He reads back through every previous year first, then writes. Partner with your future self. "What will Mark 2030 thank me for doing right now?" It started with quitting smoking. October 19, 1994. "I pulled my own power back. If I can quit smoking and really commit to it, what else can I do?" A year later he quit his job and did something bigger. Even if you missed the big goal, ask what you actually did toward it. Did you talk about it? Did you do real things? Did you turn the boat toward it? If not, maybe you don't believe in the goal. When Mark is at his lowest, he's humbled, he picks achievable goals, and he finds the most grit. When he's winning, he picks stratospheric goals and does the worst. After his biggest successes, he isn't humble enough to succeed again, and he has to go through failure to reel himself back in. Mark's champagne moment a year from now: that the book connects for hundreds of thousands of people, and that he's built a product people find real meaning in. Reflection Questions If you went and hired a coach, who is the person who could most change your life right now?  What is your next high-stakes moment, and are you treating it like the dog and pony show or like your IPO? What is the one habit your future self would most thank you for making this year? What would it unlock if you actually committed to it? More Learning #688: Dr. Henry Cloud - Your Desired Future: 5 Steps to Take You Where You Want to Go #689: Eric Ries - Why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great #687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life & The 3 Types of Luck Episode Chapters 00:00 Meet Mark Pincus 01:40 Why Mark Hires So Many Coaches 02:25 Lessons From Tennis In Leading People 04:56 Refusing to Bend the Culture for One Great Player 07:03 Lessons From Bill Campbell 09:17 On Being Called a Control Freak 13:38 The Ambition Question Mark Asks Founders 14:53 What High Standards Do to Your Kids 20:55 How Mark Defines Success  23:26 Money as Freedom, Not Lifestyle 29:45 Why High Achievers Can't Retire 32:39 Over-Fund the Things That Matter 34:35 Treating a Handshake Tour Like an IPO Roadshow 35:36 King for a Day at Yahoo and Amex 38:14 Seven Minutes With Obama That Became 45 41:39 The Book of Life 45:21 Why Mark Does His Best Thinking at His Lowest 46:48 The Champagne Question 48:40 EOPC

Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. Mark Pinkis founded Zinga in 2007, in Pond, and built it into a $12.7 billion social gaming empire.

He is a serial founder who sold his first company in seven months for $38 million. He made an early seed investment in Facebook, and he's been teaching product development at Stanford for years. His new book is called Life at the Speed of Play. During our conversation, we discussed what Mark learned from, his tennis coach that ended up helping him build a culture that wins over the long term, a big focus on long term winning. And then his quote, book of life practice, what it is, where it started, why he does it

and how you can do it too. And then we got really personal talking about how being obsessed with excellence and having high standards can impact us as parents. and the potential issue that creates. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Mark Pinkus. I was talking to your team to prep for this, and we were going back and forth in ideas, and one of the quotes I love is, I'm one of the most coached people in the world. So you've hired a surfing coach, tennis coach, chess coach, life coach.

You've hired a legendary Bill Campbell to coach you from a business perspective. I'm sure there are many other areas where you get coaches. Talk to me about how much you value coaching and being coached. In a lot of ways, coaches are like cheat codes. You know, it's like you spend so many hours trying to do better in a game. I mean, some of us. And then finally you go on YouTube and you look for the cheat codes and the hacks because you just are so frustrated. I think in life it's also like that. One of the times that I was in what I call the abyss, I said, okay, I have too much time in my hands. Like, I'm squandering it.

What can I do with my time? And I said, I'm just going to see how good a tennis player I can be. And I'm just going to go as far as I can go. And I started training with a real coach, five or six days a week. And I had a goal. I wrote down my book of life that, I was going to win a U.S.TA match. And oddly, I mean, this is not a good way to hit a goal,

but just before I started Zinga, I won a match. I went to a U.S.TA tournament, and I won, but only because my opponent didn't show up. So I technically won. Then I went out to the next round where I couldn't even get my racket on some of the balls that the person served to me. So I'll take that one.

But I learned in committing to something, I mean, just in this case of tennis, I got so many lessons that helped me in life and help me in leadership. And I can't remember if I get to them and my coach Jorge, who probably will one day be listening to this in the book. But one of them that Jorge said to me was to teach me to serve. He said, Mark, here's how you learn to serve. He said, you throw to where you swing. you don't swing to where you throw because in order to get your best serve in tennis, you need to have the natural movement of your body,

and that is your natural swing. Okay? So you go up over your head, and you just come across your body, and it feels good, like golf. And he said, once your brain knows that you're going to commit to that swing, it'll throw the ball in the wrong place,

and you hit it out of the court, you miss it, you look stupid. But eventually your brain is like, holy shit, he's serious about this. The only way we're going to do this is if I put the ball in front of that swing, okay, this will sound like Wisemark going into all this detail. But what I learned from that, from committing to proper strokes, was that you play to get better, you don't play to win. And there's so many lessons in that.

You don't play to do anything you can just to win this point or this match. The questions, what am I doing that is making me better in the next game? and how do I kill my ego and get my ego out of the way of me actually being humble and curious and learning? And then that principle of throw to where you swing, don't swing to where you throw, came back at Zinga because we said, okay, you get these people who are such an amazing engineer. They're so good at something that you contort as an organization or a culture. and you say, well, they're such a valuable individual contributor

that we will deal with the fact that anyone who works for them quits or that they're bad for our culture. And Colleen McCreary, who taught me so much and was our chief people officer, said, no, you can't do that as an organization. And she was right. When the organization sees you not willing to bend and contort, just to win that one point,

they start to build a muscle and a confidence too. It feels like, yeah, these coaches, a commonality among them is a willingness to commit to the long game instead of just winning this one point. Or, okay, we have this high performer who's going to crush it, even though they may be bad for our culture or not treat people with the type of respect that we want here,

but they won that deal. They'll probably win the next one. And instead, you're playing the longer, game instead of just winning the short game. Is that accurate? Yeah, 100%. And you might go through periods where you're out of alignment with that because you have someone in a position and it's crucial and you can't switch them out tomorrow and that's okay. What really matters is that you are aligned with that philosophy and Colleen had a sign on her wall that said no jerks allowed. And she actually vetoed an acquisition

we were going to do because she thought that the founder and CEO was toxic and it was going to, you know, be harmful. So they're tough decisions. And some of those hard decisions where you say no to a person or opportunity does come back to define you positively. I've read a lot about Bill Campbell. What's one or two things that you've taken from his coaching? I'd say that that guy lived and breathed and preached founder mode before Chasky. and others so beautifully put a name on it.

He swore a lot. He brought so much heart. He had such a big heart. He was such a big hugger. And really, what I'd say, the number one thing that I got from him, I'd say two things. He sat in and listened to some of my management meetings

and whatever, and he would talk to me afterwards and he would just cut right through it all. And the number one thing was like this, commitment to absolute honesty, you know, to what I call intellectual honesty and just calling bullshit bullshit or more colorful language. So the first was, are you as a leader going to be committed to these deep truths beyond all other things? Are you going to say them to your team and people even when it hurts? And then the second thing that goes with the first,

was courage. The most courageous thing a leader has to do often is standing up against their own team, their own board, their own investors. And he just espoused that. He's just, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, if I could say that on this. He'd be like, Mark, your team is all over the place. Like, you need to reel them in. Like, it's too much democracy in that room. I like to say that I think a well-run company is like a democratic dictatorship. He leaned heavily on the dictatorship part in unapologetically. I think he wanted the people he coached to be more grounded, more heartfelt, and more unapologetic, including to the press, because at the point that he was coaching me, it was just before we went public,

and I was just getting skewered in the press for being a harsh environment. and culture. And I think he was pained how much I was kind of apologizing for it. I read this a while ago. So maybe things have changed. I'm curious to get your feedback on it. This is a 2013. So this is 13 years ago, profile. They cited you as being fearsome and a control freak. And one analyst described you as a reputation that he is driven to the point of a madman. Now, I kind of admire that. Like, that feels to be like you're obsessed. and you want to get after it and you have high standards. And I think that's what it takes a lot of the times to micromanage things like crazy.

And again, over the course of 700 of these and 11 years that I've been doing it, I've found that to be a commonality of obsession with excellence, of getting after it, of having high standards and not being afraid to voice that and hold yourself certainly to that standard as well as others. Are you still that guy that you were when you were described that way in 20, 13? Well, I like to say the more things change, the more they stay the same. And as we get older, you know, hopefully we become more of ourselves. I would say, hopefully I have a little less of the harsh edges. I don't feel as much chip on the shoulder to poke VCs in the eye as I did. But I think

with that passion does come a fierceness and a depth of commitment. And I think we do lead by example. And I think that when our teams, and I also think, look, the world and the culture has changed since then. And during that period, if you were called a micromanager, that was a bad thing. And now Elon has maybe given all of us a little more permission to be micromanagers in this era. There's also a movement against, you know, middle management and some real positives. But I'm that person, and I'd say probably like so many of the founders listening, I find that I'm so often underestimated in the world. And even when I was starting Zinga, VCs who knew me for years, VCs who had backed me before, said,

Mark, you're 41, you've made all this money. I just don't get it. I just don't believe you're going to be really in this and committed. And, you know, you're not going to work as hard as a 20-something person. You know, you're having a family now. And they were wrong, it turns out. And that's part of why we become founders because nobody else believes in us as much as we do. But every time I find the investors come up with some reason why this is a little too good to be true,

and you're out of fashion in some way. And it's funny that when I was in my 20s, that was not in fashion. You know, you were supposed to have gray hair. So you just got to like go for it and then the world reshapes around you. like, oh shit, you're too fierce. Like they went from, oh, I think you're too soft. I think you're a retired guy. And I also will tell you, I'm the first one to own that I have actually a lazy on-ramp

to curiosity, okay? If I unpack that, this is not a humble brag. I have lots of different interests, and I am not one of these people who has work ethic with no reason. So I won't just sit in an office. I won't just go do meetings just because I'm not. I'm trying to like turn over every stone. I like to do a lot of different projects, and I'm looking for signal in a lot of different

places, and I'm processing it all. But I don't go all in. You know, it's like in poker, I'm just willing to just be boring. You know, chess too. It turns out I have a chess coach now. My chess coach is like, you want to beat a player who's rated much higher than you? You want to annoy the shit out of them? Just play boring and conservative and let them make a mistake.

And I started doing that and I started winning. You know, he was right. And so I just think that some people just have work ethic and they're just going to work no matter what. And I'm not one of those people. I'm not all in until I am. And then when I'm all in, people are shocked. It's like with a fierceness,

there's so much pent-up demand in me because I've been in this abyss. And I like to say when the fish are running, we're up all night throwing nets, you know, until they're done running. you know, not until we're tired. How motivated are you to prove people wrong? I think that's a secondary motivation.

That's not enough for me. I have proven them wrong a few times, but that's not enough by itself. I think it's helpful. You know, I think it's also in vogue to, oh, we want to back people of a chip on their shoulder because it seems like they're a little more committed or they work harder.

That's true, but I end the book by saying how ambitious are you? And that's a question I asked so many founders because I'm sure every one of your listeners, Ryan, would say, I'm a 10 on a 10. I'm an 11 on a 10. But the flip side of ambition is sacrifice. So I like to say, well, okay, let's test this. Are you so ambitious that you would toil in obscurity for the next 10 years? No one respects what you're doing, but you have an 80 or 90% chance of being more successful than your wildest dreams, building something bigger than you ever imagined, or would you take an 80% chance that you just hit a nice single, it's respectable, everyone says you did a good job and pats you on the back. That's kind of what we've got to answer for

ourselves. Maybe speaking from experience, as well as talking to other fellow obsessed people who have very, very high standards. How does that affect you outside of work? How does it affect you in a marriage as a dad. I know your kids, your wife, you dedicate your book to them. They obviously are the most important thing. In my experience, as well as experience, talking to mentors and others on this podcast, that's where it can become an issue because you're obsessed. You have really, really high standards, maybe a perfectionist. I know personally, this is a thing. And you then take that home with you and apply it, and maybe it could be misplaced or could create friction, to put it nicely.

How has that been for you? There's a lot in that. Since I have five kids, and they're all so different, and I talk a little in the book about it, but my dad was a very strong figure in my life in other people's lives. And I was kind of determined to be a different kind of dad than my dad, and I'd probably gone to an extreme.

This may sound a little Northern California, but there's a question of, like, how are we passing on generational trauma? And I think being Jewish, there's like a whole different kind of generational trauma that goes back a long time and that maybe is like really in my DNA around achievement. But at least in my own family history, my dad was so focused on kind of valuing you by your achievement in the world, kind of by your resume. And I didn't want to put that pressure on my kids.

yet somehow my twin girls who are 15, I just kissed my one daughter goodbye today, and she's going off on a service trip to Africa. And she spent every waking minute until that with math tutors because she's trying to place out of geometry math for next year. And I'm like, what have I created? I'm like, I love that she's doing this, but I'm like, you're two achievement-oriented.

I want you to have fun. You're passionate about surfing. You know, where is surfing this? summer for you. You're sitting with Zoom tutors and now you're going to go get all this life. I love that you're going to Africa, but what are you doing to feed Carmen and feed your passions? And it was really funny because I'm like, how did we get here? I tried to encourage my girls to listen to themselves and pursue their passions. And they're doing it, but they seem pretty achievement focused. And I was like, oh, I know how we got here. They're not listening to what

dad says, they're following what dad does. And so there's that. Leadership is caught, not taught, right? They see what dad does and how you... Yeah, and they hold themselves to such high standards. Right. And I don't think it's, to be honest, I don't feel like it's completely healthy. And Carmen's sister Georgia, their fraternal twins, is just this overachiever. She just has one of these brains that just does so well in school and she's self-taught in check. And she's self-taught and check. And she's just, and guitar and she's an artist. She's just, I wouldn't want her as a twin because she just is always doing and achieving,

and I think it makes it harder on Carmen, who puts all this pressure on herself. So I just want them, I don't know, to also just take a break and have fun. It's the thing we think about all the time. I can see it in your eyes. As a fellow dad, it's wild, because we do all these crazy things work-wise to build stuff,

and you've obviously have success in multiple life categories, done it over and over again, and yet you're still a dad who's thinking about their kids and wanting them for it to go well. It's wild, isn't it? Yeah, it is. And we, that pit in our stomach, that anxiety of like, oh, she's so innocent and how is it going to go socially?

And is she going to make the wrong friends? And is she going to be sad and, depressed and not tell us, you know, like all those things and just we just have to hope and try to communicate enough that they'll tell us some of what's going on. But it's a different kind of fear. I want to get to more of your story. So you mentioned your dad. He built a business. Correct me if these facts are wrong. Yeah. 38 years. He eventually sold it for 38 million. You built your first business or one of your first businesses called Freeloader. It took you seven months and you sold it for wait for it, $38 million.

Okay. Was that just a coincidence or what happened here? Yeah, I can't say it's like a number like 420 for Elon or something. Yeah, it's, and it didn't even occur to me for a while. And then I started saying, oh, that's weird. I mean, and it was, and it was weird for my dad. It was a real shift in our relationship and his views on the world because my dad, like your resume was how you did in business and he was like work for Goldman Sachs or

McKinsey or he was all about the brand names or the achievement. And yeah, I think I talked about my book how I was like his biggest disappointment at one point because I didn't take this path that he thought was going to make me happy and had made him happy. And then 10 years later, I was like a success on a level that he, that was too much. I went from being like his biggest disappointment to almost a level of success that broke him. Like it didn't break him spiritually anything, but kind of broke his frameworks on the world because it's not the world he understood that he built this amazing business over 38 years. And then he was like, there's something going on the world that he just felt like he didn't

understand when that happened. And that was odd for both of us. How do you define success? I love this book, The Courage to Be Disliked, which I think I talk about it in the book. And it's based on this Adlerian psychology. And Alfred Adler, who kind of never got the fame he deserved, he said that we get happiness from feeling useful to a community that we care about, not being useful. And that has really stuck with me. And I think you asked about success, which I think happiness and satisfaction come with it. And for me, I want to achieve my greatest state of usefulness in the world. And to me, I believe it's theoretically possible that I or so many of your listeners, in this era,

we have the chance to build an internet treasure, a service people can't remember life before, or imagine life without. It's in your digital life stack. I like to say that the homepage of my phone is half empty, and the half that's full is mostly generic utility apps. And for me, success is that I invent one of these services that really brings new meaning to millions of people's lives. It hopefully makes them feel seen.

connected. You know, for me it's probably something social. But I think success is number one. It's about knowing ourselves. You know, Alfred Adler kind of talks about what's, what are you only at in the world? What could only you, you know, Ryan or Mark, bring to this world? And how do we bring that to the most people that we care about in the world? And then I'd even within that rate two levels of success. To me, a life well-lived is a life that I'm living in alignment with that, okay, that I don't have to build Google or GPT to feel like I went for it and was successful in my life, but I have to be aligned with trying. If I really, really went for it in a way that I know, and I was all in on it, and I came up less, I'm not going to feel like a failure. But

But the ultimate success is the greatest instantiation of our talents in the world. What is the role of, or the achievement, accomplishment of becoming a billionaire? How does that play into being, quote, a success, happy, fulfilled? Okay. Money is such a weird thing. And especially for men, you know, in our culture, it's so hard for men not to see their self-worth in the world by their net worth. And it's sad. And I can't say that I was any better in that. To me, from the point that I made this split with my dad when I was 18,

money took on a new meaning for me, which was freedom, not lifestyle. I said, I want to have enough money that I can pursue what I want to do in the world and not strings attached to my dad to a job I don't like. And when my first company was acquired at 28, I made more money than I had ever imagined. I funded the company I talked about in the book with the old-fashioned way with credit cards and a friend loaning me money was living my couch. And then seven months later, I had more money than I could imagine, and I couldn't come up with anything to do with it. When I made the list of what I was going to do now that I was rich,

it totaled like $9,000. I mean, it didn't even occur to me to buy a new car. I just put leather interior in my Pathfinder, which I still have. Not to say I'm like some foxy guy. I just kind of love keeping some of these cars, but people from the outside look at money as being about material wealth and lifestyle. And I don't think for many founders and people, I mean, look at Elon, I think they said he's homeless.

I heard he made just now on one home, but he famously lived on everyone's couches around us in the valley. To me, it was more and more freedom. And I'll say back to the coach's question, I spent all these years when I was in the abyss working with a life coach starting in 2003. We came up with a vision of my future. What did I want the chess board? I call it the imagination chess board. And I said, and I'm sorry if this sounds toned out to people, but I had some real money when I was doing this, but not like huge.

It could sound like a lot of money, but maybe I had a net worth of around $15 million or something when I was doing this visioning. And I said, I want to make $500 million, not to spend it on any material things, but because to me I thought at $500 million, that's so much capital, that I can have a huge studio and have teams working on tons of different ideas,

and I don't have to go to anyone else hat in hand or with a cup asking them to fund me. I can think longer term and be more creative. And I said creatively, that's freedom. And I just kept focusing on that, but not on, I want to make $500 million because I want to buy something or other, but it was I want to have $500 million in capital to be able to really go for it and pursue things. And it's so weird that we're in this cultural moment where a billionaire is like a bad tag that is like someone's tagging you with that in a way that's negative. Because now more than ever before, the people who are billionaires got there because they built things, that delivered value in the world.

I mean, value for consumers, jobs. And I start the book talking about Elon. Thank God, we live in the era of Elon. And thank God that there are people like Elon who are dreaming big, betting it all. My editor and publisher said, you talk about Elon too much from the book, and it's like a love letter or fanboy.

And I just call it like, I see it. And I'm like, this guy isn't just accelerate accelerating the timeline for space travel or, you know, reducing carbon emissions or putting technology in our brains. I mean, he's also just raising the bar on entrepreneurship because he's showing us all what's possible and we all reframe our own ambition. And not on that you can become a trillionaire. Who gives a fuck about that? It's what can you do? How bold can we think about reshaping this world for the better. So I just think, thank God, Elon came along and that he has the capital. And who better to have a trillion dollars than Elon? I mean, the guy doesn't even want to

spend it on a house. He's just going to put it all back into doubling down on the future. When you look at how you earn something, so let's say you want to earn a job or you want to earn more money, the number one way, and almost the only way to do it, is to add value to other people's lives. You add enough value, they will pay for your product. You add enough value, you will get promoted. That's it. Now, you can inherit money if you want to just get money. That's a version of that. But how do you earn money? I think inheriting and earning are two separate things. How do you earn money? How do you earn a job? How do you earn something? You must add value to people's lives. And so I don't know what it's like in your shoes and maybe potential hate that you get. But to me,

when I look at leaders who earn that type of living, what I admire most is obsession is being a value added person that creates jobs and that creates valuable products that make other people's lives better. And if you do that a lot, you then reap the rewards and you earn every single penny of it. And it's even cooler than if you put back into our ecosystem to help build more stuff or help other people build stuff, investing in them. And so to me, like, I think most people, other than some of the haters online, most people are down with that. We love that. I think it's great. We're all trying to do that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, all this other stuff is just weird distraction and noise. And I grew up in Chicago. People in Chicago are pragmatic.

and they don't want to get into all of this other social identity stuff. And I think to me it's very Midwestern pragmatism to say, like, okay, what's going to help the economy and jobs? And yes, this other stuff is just really awful. And I think about something like Jeff Bezos who sailed off into the sunset and thought we wouldn't hear from him again, you know, other than like the party circuit or something. But he can't help himself. He's back with an even bigger idea and he's probably motivated by Elon. I'll bet he wouldn't admit this publicly, but I'll bet that he just can't sit there and just watch

the cool, amazing stuff that Elon's doing and just he can't feel good on the party circuit knowing that he could be doing so much more. And it drove him back. to work, you know, which is great. The people who put a dent in the world, I would put you in the same box, they are not able to just sit on a beach and chill. They're just not. You're not able to do that. You can do it for a little bit, just like a little bit.

But then you've got to get back to your purpose. You've got to get back to inventing. You've got to get back to building. You've got to get back to being an value-added person. And you're not adding that much value when you're sitting on a beach tipping well. Like, that's not how it works. And so the people who make it happen, they're not capable of retiring and going away. I really feel this big time.

You see them all. Because I have friends. They're like, why doesn't he just go chill or whatever? I go, you're not able to do what he's done, what Mark has done. You're not able to do what you do and then just go do nothing. It's just you're not capable of that. You're capable of so much more. And it's such a high, no, retirement to me is just death.

just spiritual death. And look, these periods in between building things I call the abyss, and they're hard. And my greatest high is when I'm in the middle of Zinga, working with amazing teams, and I see everything. Like I'm teaching and training new people. I'm learning. I'm creating things that we're iterating. We're creatively productive. And every week, we are getting things out in our user's hands and lighting people up. And once you do that, you've felt that, it ruins you. You can't go to anything else. You can't be happy with less. Yeah, I love it. This has gone by quicker. And I thought, okay, a couple things I want to get to high standards. I got this note. So can you talk to me out to the Allen & Company investor

tour? Somebody said, you, hey, you don't got to prepare. You don't have to do anything. And yet you overprepared and made it count. What happened here at the Allen & Company investor tour? I love that. So there's one of my life philosophies that I say overfund things that matter. And what I mean by that is not every day is the same. Not every life moment is the same. So there's times that you really, it pays off to really surge. Kind of put all your best players on the ice mentality. And when these moments come, being bold, I can give you a few examples of somebody's overfunded moments. But they've been incredibly life-changing for me.

I mean, one of them was when I came in EA early on, Electronic Arts, wanted to sue us because they said, you're making games. We have the license to these Hasbro games. And I actually sat down my life coach and said, God, this sucks. I don't know why. It's just a room full of lawyers, you know, sharks.

And she said, well, what would be amazing? How would you like that meeting to go? And I said, well, I would like it if EA sauce is their Walmart. Like, they should see casual social gaming as a way to bring EA to the mass market because they're losing Walmart. And she's a, well, why don't you say that? And so I spent two days going day and night all in on this presentation why Zingan Social Gaming is the new Walmart for EA.

And I walk into this room of lawyers. They used to call them business affairs, because they knew you wouldn't meet with a lawyer, and it just turns out that this guy, Bing Gordon, is there, who's one of the founding team members of EA. He wasn't supposed to be in the meeting. He heard me give this pitch, and he took over the meeting. He said, I've been waiting for you to show up. With the Allen tour, they said,

oh, we're just doing this dog and pony thing. We just bring fidelity and the biggest public market investors through the valley, and we want them to just say hi and shake hands with some of the hotter early startups. and we'd love for them to meet you. I said, guys, this is our IPO. This is our roadshow. We are going to prepare for this

like it's a roadshow. If they're going to give us 45 minutes with the biggest public market investors, we are going to use every fucking minute the way we want, not the way they want. We're not going to shake hands. We are going to give them our roadshow presentation.

And I said, I plan to meet with all of you again in one year. I want you to take these numbers, and I want you to look at these numbers when we meet in a year, and you tell me if I beat them or not, and if I'm a trustworthy CEO. And I did meet them again in a year, and I crushed those numbers. So take those moments. I'll just give you one other. There's somebody else I call King for a day. When I get to talk to a company, Carol Bartz called me in to interview me in front of Yahoo, their entire senior management. I spent,

two weeks building a presentation. And I said, Carol, do you mind? Could I just do a presentation of how I would run Yahoo for King for a day? And she kind of sat there in the chair. I stood up and took over like Oprah's style and presented for an hour. And we got a deal done with Yahoo out of that. And one of the people in the room came to work for me because of that. There was one last one I'll mention because I love these. The CEO of Amex came through for Dog and Pony. And I made presentation on the fun card. And I said, if I was running AMX, I would compete on fun. I would make a credit card, which is basically like legalized gambling. And he said, I love that. And we made a card together, and they spent $75 million with us. So we all have these moments, but we're kind of

sleepwalking through life. And we're like, oh, I know I have this big meeting tomorrow. And the question is not why do they want to meet with you, what's the agenda, but it's what is theoretically possible that I have my five minutes with the king. How do I want to use that? And these people will give that to you because they don't want to use their time badly and they might as well. And they're like, shit, you prepared? So it's one of my favorite things that all of us can do. Put another way, you're interviewing for your next opportunity every single day. Sometimes you don't know how, but it's on us as leaders, as people who have high standards of people who are obsessed with excellence,

to be prepared, to go over the top. And so that when you get your five minutes, you make the absolute most of them. I think that's one of the coolest parts and most inspiring parts of your story is that people say, oh, this is just a dog and pony show, all this is five minutes, just no big deal. Mark, no need to prepare, don't need to do anything. You're good, you're good.

And you go, what? Are you kidding me? Like, this is my shot. This is our IPO. And maybe it flops. Maybe it doesn't work. But not because I didn't give everything I had to that moment to try my best to make the most of it. It also blows them away.

I mean, I redid the whole Yahoo homepage with my team. I had our designers work on it. I love it. I did the whole artwork of what my Amex fun card would look like. I handed it to them. One more is I got a seven-minute meeting with Obama because I had been a big donor. And even when I heard I had this meeting at the White House, I went into IPO roadshow mode again. And I said, what at all I want to pitch this guy?

And I said, King for a day. If I were president of the United States, I would, he was running his second campaign. And I said, I wouldn't run a normal campaign. I would compete on 10 bold objectives for America. and I'd say what is unassailable. The other side can't even say that's wrong. They just say, it'll do that idea better. These are things like America's cash flow positive.

America is a beloved brand around the world. And I went in and they said, he's going to ask you about your kids. You're going to be mesmerized. You're seven to 12 minutes will be over and you'll walk out. I said, okay, got it. I had the PowerPoint. I walked in.

He asked me about my kids. I said, thank you for asking. You're a busy guy. I happen to make a PowerPoint of what I would do if I were in your job. Are you open to going through it? And he was like, yeah, I'm open to that. And the meeting went on for 45 minutes. It went so long that I got through the PowerPoint,

because I kind of gave myself 20 minutes for it. And he's like, what else you got? And I was like, okay. And that gets another principle I've got in the book, which is make sure you spend as much time preparing for what if everything goes right, as everything goes wrong. And it's like, well, I underprepared for what happens if Obama is into this? And he's like, yeah, I'm buying.

What else you got? What was the feeling like in that moment? I mean, you prepared for it. You almost like set an expectation for it. But then to actually pull it off in front of like the busiest guy in the world, also the most powerful person in the world. How did you feel? It's fun.

It's such a high that you're like, okay. Like, yes, he's a busy guy. but he's having the same human experience. I am, like I said to him, I think we met on a Tuesday, and I said, I don't know about your job as CEO, but I'll just, if it's anything like mine, I said, I come in every Monday full of hope and fire.

I want to, like, change the world. And I end every Monday, tired and on defense, because my team has thrown so many things in front of me and I'm just not motivated the way I started the day. and I said, so much of winning in this job is about playing offense, not defense. And Valerie Jarrett was sitting there, and she said, he just said that to our team yesterday.

We all threw everything, and he said, I don't want to hear it. We got to play offense, not defense. It's fun when you're like, holy shit. He actually has some of the same challenges I do as CEO. It doesn't matter whether you're running the U.S. government or American Express or your 35-person business.

we're kind of going through the same things. And I think when we can get grounded and get past the zeitgeist or the power of it and kind of get into like the first principles, it's a lot of fun. And we can get through to people. Okay. I want to get to something that I meant to do at the very beginning. And it's only taken me 54 minutes to get here. Sorry about that.

And I appreciate that because that's like how this would sound if we were going on to lunch. I would be asking you these questions just chasing down my curiosity. It's fun to use your words. Book of Life, okay? This book of life ritual, because I think this is applicable to anybody. It's something you've been doing for a long time. Let's first talk about what is it and how is it helpful for you? Okay. So the idea of the book of life is every year during the Jewish holiday, the Jewish New Year, which is 10 days, I go through this practice of writing in this book. And everybody can pick their own. time of year, it could just be New Year's. Your birthday, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you write in the same book or a set of notebooks. You only write in that book during that time. This is not your journal, your everyday, whatever. This is like your spiritual board meeting with yourself. And you can have other people coach, do this with friends or family partners, but the idea is you're

going to take an accounting of how am I doing against what I wanted to do in this life? So you read back, I read all my previous years, all my hopes and dreams, what I hoped, I call it partnering with your future self. What do I hope Mark 2030? What will Mark 2030 thank me for doing now? And it's a combination of things. There's very pragmatic things that we can sign up for, like elective surgery, hard things that you wouldn't necessarily do this year. For me, it started with quitting smoking. You know, October 19th, 1994 was the first day of the rest of my life. I pulled my own power back because I took this little thing that I had lost control of. And I said, if I can quit smoking and really commit to it, what else can I do? And a year later, I quit my job.

It did something bigger. So I combine a little thing like that that makes life change that compounds with really big audacious things. And I pick what's theoretically possible. And you learn over time. And if you have like a gigantic goal every year and you're not getting anywhere about it, it's a dialogue with yourself over time because you go back and you're like, come on, Ryan, let's be real. You've written the same shit in your book every year. You haven't done shit about it.

And it gets this point about aligning with your path. Even if you haven't achieved that big goal, what did you do last year that was serious against that goal? Did you talk about it? Did you do some real things? Did you turn the boat towards that? If not why?

Maybe you don't believe in that goal. And so to me, it's been literally life-changing, and it's, and I don't, sometimes I do better than others. The weird thing is when I'm in the deepest, darkest part of the abyss, when I am full of, like, self-loathing, and I'm like, God, why can't you fucking do anything? Why can't you, you know, beating ourselves up, whether you do it nicely or badly, it's up to you, but we usually do it in some way. When I'm in my worst place is usually where I find the most grit and readiness to commit to things. And when I'm really happy and really achieving, I do the worst. And then I find another thing. When I'm in the lowest points, I'm humbled and I pick much more achievable goals,

which is part of the path out of that abyss. And when I'm winning and I'm on top, I pick stratospheric goals. and I see that pattern playing out. In fact, even with my companies, in my career, I've found that after I've had my greatest success, I'm not humbled enough to be successful again, and I have to go through a lot of failure. And it's in that failure that I reel myself back in

and I get less ambitious, and I find connection points with the world. You have the self-awareness to realize that when things are going well, it seems like your actions are going to create something bad, if I'm hearing you right. Now that you've had some reps at this, why are you not able to string together, hey, it's going really well, let's keep this thing going. Let's not make it so that I have to experience some sort of failure in order to get out of it.

It's a great question. I mean, there are practices that we can do to keep ourselves in a more humble, curious place. But I don't know. You can't intellectualize. There's a lot of parts of the life experience that you just got to go live. And, you know, it's part of the curse of being over-resourced or over-funded

that if you can pursue lots of things, you will. If you are on your last dollar and you can't afford to get it wrong, you're going to be a lot more careful with that dollar. It's just part of the human mentality. And I wish I could get better at it.

Yeah. Sometimes optionality can be overrated. I got one more question mark. It's actually kind of related to this. So we're going to fast forward exactly one year from today, okay? You are surrounded by all of the people you love, and you guys are popping bottles. You're celebrating like crazy, spraying whatever it is you want all over each other, okay? What are you celebrating?

I'd say, you know, on a professional, what do I want to do in this world level, not a family level, I'd say we're celebrating two things. One is that my book, Life of the Speed of Play, really resonated and connected for hundreds of thousands of people, of founders, stay-at-home moms, people who, wanted to pursue an idea but didn't know how found something helpful in my book. That would be amazing and a payoff on four and a half years of work. And for my own internet treasure path, I'd say that if a year from now I have created a product that connects the dots, ideally around this social cocktail party that has delivered on the promise of the potential of

AI and agents and this amazing network that we're all part of. And it's delivered on a product that people are finding real meaning in, and it's helping people find themselves and find each other. and it's clearly hitting and resonating, that would be my happy place, my win state. Love it. The book's called, as you mentioned, Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. It's really fun read, and also the stories are incredible,

but also practical, I think, very useful for people. So it's hard to hit that combo with an incredibly interesting life that you're living, the stories of all the stuff you've built, to the highs, the lows, and then a lot of practical tools for someone who wants to live a better life to accomplish things to put a positive dent in the world. I think you hit all of that. So I really appreciate it.

Thank you and your team for sending that. And by the way, your team should be commending because this isn't always the case. They were very fun to go back and forth with, you probably don't even know this, but they were very fun to go back and forth with leading up to this, sharing notes back and forth of ideas. We got to like 10% of them, but still, it was awesome to go back and forth with a great group of people.

You could tell when a leader has done a good job of surrounding themselves with high caliber, high character people. It's enjoyable and speaks a lot about you. So thank you for making that happen as well. And certainly, man, I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, maybe even end up on the same ski mountain someday. I think that would be so much fun. Yeah, let's do it. We could do this from the gondola. I love it.

Thanks so much, man. Thanks. 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 learningleader.com. Let me know what you learn from this great conversation with Mark Pinkis, a few takeaways from my notes. Hire a coach.

Think about the coach who could most change your life right now. Then go find that person and hire a coach. them. Mark hired a surfing coach, a tennis coach, a chess coach, a life coach, and the legendary CEO coach, Bill Campbell. None of them were assigned to him. Mark went on offense and hired them because he wanted to get better. We all should go look for a coach to hire in the areas where we want to improve. Then be over prepared. The next time you get a high stakes meeting, get after it. Over-prepared. Do not show up and just wing it. Even if others say, hey, oh, it's not that big of a deal. If you get five minutes, treat those five minutes as an opportunity to make an impact. Just like Mark did with Yahoo or even with President Obama, he got five minutes and ended up getting 40.

Also, be prepared for it to go well. Act like your king for the day. Do not be afraid to show them how much. you've prepared for that moment. Make the most of it. Then your book of life. It's your spiritual board meeting with yourself. Partner with your future self. Write down the one habit or change that your future self would most think present you for making. Like Mark did, he said, I got to quit smoking.

And he credits that one single commitment with unlocking everything that came after your book of life. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Mark Pinkus. I think he'll help you becoming a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and you write a thoughtful review. You subscribe to the show. You rated five stars, hopefully. By doing all of that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis.

And for that, I will forever. Be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to soon. Can't wait.