The Pomp Podcast - #1213 Polina Marinova Pompliano On The Hidden Genius Behind Millionaires and World Champions

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Polina Marinova Pompliano is the founder of The Profile, the author of a brand new book Hidden Genius, and also my wife & best friend. In this conversation, we talk about her book Hidden Genius, and all of the lessons and insights that she packed into the book. There has been years and years of her reading thousands of profiles on the world's most successful people and companies, in order for her to distill it all down into the book. Order Book: https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Genius-secret-thinking-successful/dp/1804090034 ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 235,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Polina Marinova-Pompliano is the founder of The Profile, the author of a brand new book, Hidden Genius, and also happens to be my wife and my best friend. In this conversation, we talk

about her book, Hidden Genius, and all of the lessons and insights that she packed into this one book. There's been years and years of her reading thousands of profiles on the world's most successful people and companies in order for her to distill it all down into this one book. I've read the book multiple times. She's read it to me more times than I want to admit. And in this conversation, we talk about all of those lessons and insights, but also have a little bit of fun at the end to make sure you stay for that. Here is my conversation with Polina Marinova-Pompliano. This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investment. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement

to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Plina here, my wife, my best friend, and also the author of Hidden Genius, The secret ways of thinking that power the world's most successful people before we talk about the book uh we went to barnes and noble over the weekend and when we went to barnes and noble

you went right i went left we were looking for the book because someone had messaged you and said that they saw a book that was in their barnes and noble which it wasn't supposed to be the book technically comes out today but barnes and noble cheated they jumped the gun they pump faked everyone to put some of the books out so we went of course because we gotta go see is it in our local Barnes & Noble. And when you went right, you ended up empty handed. That is a lesson for life, actually. I went left and I found the book and I caught on video you walking over and seeing it for the first time. What were you feeling? It was crazy, mainly because I was not only was I not expecting to see it because I was like, oh, like one local Barnes & Noble made the decision

to put out some books because they got a shipment early. I was like, surely it's not going to be here and i was in the non-fiction section so like i was looking at the books i didn't see it so i just started perusing and i wasn't looking at my phone and then you came over and you're like i just texted you and i saw the text that's like a normal thing in our relationship and i went over and i was like i thought i thought you were messing with me that's why i was like wait what why would i ever do that for the record the reason why when you went right you were wrong and i went left and i was right is you went to the old non-fiction which of course the book wouldn't and be there. I went to the new nonfiction, the releases. Yeah, I found it. All right,

let's get into the book. I just want to throw out a bunch of people that are in the book and a bunch of topics. I've heard over the years you talk about some of these things, but this is the first time you've put it all together into one single resource. Alter ego. I always tell people this and I never give you credit because I want to feel smart. Explain what's going on with alter ego and why so many successful people have an alter ego. Yeah. So I discovered this when I personally started doing a lot more like public speaking and interviewing people on stage. And I had never done that before. And I was really nervous. But then I started doing this kind of thing where like, I was like, okay, well, I'm really, you know, shy and introverted and kind

of nervous, like in my real life. But when I'm on stage, I have to like put on a show for the audience. Audience doesn't want to see somebody who's like nervous and not confident. So I kind of had in my head this idea of like confident paulina on stage and it's funny because like when i went on stage and i started interviewing the person it felt almost as if like this other thing took over and suddenly i had the confidence and it was easy and whatever um so i was like i wonder if this is actually a thing and when i started researching a lot of these people i found that for example beyonce who you think is like this powerhouse we went to her concert you saw fire fire uh she jay-z was there two boys don't worry yeah but beyonce was the main um show uh

she uh the the way she presents on stage i mean she's super confident you would never ever think that she's actually incredibly introverted and shy in real life and she's like to create that persona and dress like that and dance like that i would never do that in my normal life so i had to create this version um this aspirational almost like ideal version of herself called sasha fears sasha fears she gave her a name yeah so sasha fears on stage beyonce offstage uh kobe bryant during the lowest moments in his career when he was like being booed on the court he was like you know what i'm when people are saying boo kobe he's like i'm not going out there as kobe i'm going out there as the black mamba this like snake killer yeah exactly so he it didn't affect him in

the same way as if he identified as kobe david goggins same thing he doesn't identify as david Goggins because he says David was a weak kid. He was bullied. He was insecure, whatever. I'm Goggins. And he said he likes to say that he was built, not born. And that just attests to the fact that like you can create your identity and the person you are today does not have to be the person you are tomorrow. And yesterday you actually introduced me to a new person who had an alter ego. Brian Dawkins. That's right. Last night, Polina was talking about alter ego. I said, sit down right here, young child. Let me pull up YouTube. Let me show you from the archives of the internet. And I pulled up some Brian Dawkins highlights where he has two lockers. One is

the Brian Dawkins locker. He physically has two lockers. And the other locker is Weapon X. And he talks about how when he goes on the field, he is in Brian Dawkins. That's Weapon X. Yeah. But I will say something really interesting. Over time, it's possible for yourself to get closer to your aspirational self to where they are one. So for example, Beyonce was being interviewed by Oprah and she told her, by the way, like I killed Sasha Fierce. Sasha Fierce doesn't exist anymore because this is who I am now. Like I am confident. I don't need this extra psychological crutch to carry me on stage. I'd like to report a homicide. All right. Let's talk about NIMS Persia. In the book, you talk quite a bit about the ability to

handle risk. And especially in times of uncertainty, uh, NIMS is probably one of the best examples of this in the world where, uh, he continues to climb these mountains. He's probably one of the best mountaineers climbers, whatever you want to call them, uh, in the world. And in the book, he basically says like nothing that you plan goes as planned on the mountain. So what can we take away from him specifically? Yeah. I want to talk about him. And then I want to talk about like another mountaineer that's the flip side of that exact idea so nims um summited 14 death zone peaks it had never been done before in the in the amount of time i think the last time it took like 14 years or something insane but it took nims six months and six days to summit all 14 peaks which

is absolutely insane if you haven't seen the netflix film it's great well he also did crazy stuff during it like he was climbing the mountains and he was doing it for time but i think at least once maybe twice they would call him and be like hey nims i know you're like in the middle of this uh race essentially against yourself but like there's somebody stuck on the mountain will you go back and get them and he would go back and actually get them and carry them down yeah he uh he like gave some of his oxygen to someone who was who needed oxygen on the mountain and that's really really dangerous because if you miscalculate something it's he he calls it a suicide mission um but yeah he he's done all of that uh but nim's like his whole idea is that you have to be

incredibly competent and prepared before undertaking something like this because nothing ever goes as planned so if your body's not right if your mind's not right and one tiny thing goes wrong again a suicide mission um so so his whole thing is like competence is the key to doing these insane challenges. And is it competence is the mitigator to risk? Yes, in his mind. And I agree. But there's also a flip side to that. Morgan Housel talks about how risk has three sides. He says that there's the odds you will get hit, the average consequences of getting hit, and the tail end consequences of getting hit. So you can mitigate the first two. The last one is kind of like if you're an investor, if you're just a human living life, there will be unforeseen

risk. And that risk could be a black swan event. It could be a global pandemic. But he talks about how that tail end risk has the least likelihood to happen, but the most impact. And it's the one you cannot really prepare for. So another mountaineer is Conrad Anker, who I talk about in the book he incredibly competent he's a legendary mountaineer him and two buddies were climbing mount shishapingma and they were i believe close to the top when all of a sudden an unforeseen event happened an avalanche just came down and um it was so close and they had so little time to prepare that he went to the left and his buddies went to the right so there's three people standing there and they saw the avalanche coming and they basically like run run and like

pick a side yeah like i'm out like that's a nightmare scenario exactly so so it's like so conrad had like a broken collarbone he suffered head lacerations but his buddies weren't found their bodies weren't found for a number of years so it's like that one stupid dumb luck decision that you made in that really really consequential uh event saved his life so it's like yes you can prepare all you want you can be as competent as you want and you can make all the right decisions but that doesn't mean that you will get the outcome that i'm playing 3d chess with you you know how oh god because i went left in the store and you went to the right i know i went left you went right survival death i'm just saying hey i'm just making the connections all right let's talk

about amelia boone and courtney doll walter uh both of them they love pain yeah this is like this is crazy both of them are these like ultra marathon runners uh i think that amelia boone if i remember correctly she talks about like becoming friends with pain and courtney doll walter calls it like the pain cave what's going on with these women yeah i think amelia boone's nickname is the queen of pain um so they both kind of uh are masterful at separating pain and suffering but amelia and they both personify pain which i think is really important amelia um when she talks about like during a mud a tough mudder race she'll have something go wrong her ankle her you know whatever um and she's like instead of listening to myself i start talking to myself

and the distinction here is when you listen to yourself you're like oh my god my foot hurts oh my god how am i going to get through the next 10 miles whatever but when you talk to yourself you're giving yourself the thoughts that you want to think um and put into your head so you're like uh hey my foot hurts but um but like your good foot like you literally personify the foot is a is a separate entity from you. So it doesn't feel as personal. Courtney is fascinating. I mean, she takes, I watched this interview with her with Joe Rogan, where Joe kept trying to get her to like, talk in depth about like, oh, but tell me philosophically. And she's like, nope, I just do it. She's very matter of fact, and she sees pain as a place. So she's like, when I'm running these

hundred mile races she's had severe nausea she's had a bleeding head injury she's had a broken foot she's had it all but she's pushed through it and they're like how how is that even possible and she says that in her head she visualizes like the pain cave is there i know i'm approaching it as she approaches it she's like okay it's i'm in it uh things hurt really bad but by thinking of it as a place you're in control of when you enter it and you're equally as in control when you leave so she's like i i know that eventually i'm gonna be on the other side so she doesn't and can i just add something here the personification of pain is really really important uh because it builds mental toughness and i've noticed that courtney don walter does this with the pain cave um david

Goggins does this with again a place a dark room he's like I go in the dark room as David Goggins I look at myself in the mirror and I face myself and I say you're fat you're lazy you're a liar what are you going to do about it he there's a transformation that happens in there and then he leaves and becomes Goggins uh Anthony Ray Hinton he was somebody who wasn't seeking out pain voluntarily he was shoved in there against his will when he spent 30 years on death row um and he was something he didn't do or something he didn't do he was wrongfully yeah uh in prison but he watched 54 men walk past his cell to get executed by electrocution and he managed to keep his mind sane and he was in oftentimes in solitary confinement in a tiny tiny cell by himself again

a place of suffering and pain um and he says that in that place he used his mind for good So he would visualize traveling to England, having tea with the queen, winning Wimbledon, marrying Halle Berry, things like that, that allowed him to escape his current reality. And the importance of this is that by visualizing pain as a place, it's almost like you're one type of person, you go into this place of metamorphosis, and you transform into somebody else. And David Goggins says, basically, in that dark room, if you don't break, you'll transform. And that's the case of all these people. So let's talk about Bob Bowman and Michael Phelps. This is the craziest thing, I think. Is it the craziest?

I mean, Michael Phelps jumps in the water, I think at the Olympics. And while he's in the water, he gets water in his goggles. Now, I'm not a goggles guy. But if I was wearing goggles and I got water in my eyes, I'm done. I'm going to stand up, put my feet on the ground. I'm going to take the goggles off. i'm gonna you know dangle them out there get the water to drip out gentlemen is why anthony isn't at the olympics yes exactly and then i put the goggles back on i would kind of do each nose

make sure i get my the water out of my ears and i'd keep swimming yeah and i would lose but he kept swimming with the water in his goggles explain how he did that and why he was so prepared he basically did it blind right like the reason he was able to do a blind is because his coach bob bowman for many many years basically his main coach throughout his career um and wanted Michael to undergo uncertainty and create these rehearsals for what could go wrong and how could he how he could react. So during practice, he would break his goggles. And Michael Phelps was like, what the hell? He's like, I want you to know how to pace yourself with breath and counting strokes instead of using visuals to get you to the other side. So in again, like at the

Olympics, the unexpected happens. He gets water in his goggles. Now he knows, oh yeah, I did that when he broke my goggles. So now I can like count strokes and know exactly where the wall is and where I need to turn. It's, it's really hard to do, but that's why he's the best. He won the gold medal. So he did this blindfolded essentially and won the gold medal. Yeah. Which tells you that he's just one dominant, but two also is prepared. It's competence builds confidence. Competence builds confidence i like that all right jim coke uh cook cook coke coke cook whatever whatever his name is boston beer company uh he basically took this like big leap of faith to start a business but he was rich before and he was making what like the equivalent of a million bucks in

today's dollars he just quit his job i was like i'm gonna go like be a beer brewer so they call beer brewers all right what's his story um his story is basically jim cook was in his late 30s making 250 000 a year at boston consulting group which is a million dollars which is equivalent thanks inflation um but he he was um so so at the time he was the only one in his lineage of people because the cooks came from germany in the 1840s to the u.s and each eldest son um became a beer brewer and there were big beer people in germany and at the time in the 90s there was a joke that uh water is stronger than america tell the real joke come on let's go there you're giving us the water down version no pun intended tell us the real joke but like some people don't get

okay i'll say trust me my audience will understand the audience is the right they like sex jokes um so they said uh she's so uncomfortable the joke is the joke is um okay so the joke is that american beer is like making love in a canoe too fucking close to water so american beer basically it was very close to water so it didn't have flavor it wasn't like german beer and it was um known that european beer was so much more dominant uh so jim was like well what if we change that what if we make american beer that's flavorful and and good and like people really like it so he was rummaging through the family attic when he found his great great grandfather's original beer recipe from germany and he was like whoa what if i take this and create an american

beer um he told his dad his idea and his dad was like jim you're making 250k at boston consulting group this is the dumbest effing idea i've ever heard so um so he was like okay but he was really bored at BCG. So then, but he had a hard time. He had a kid, he had a wife, he had a mortgage. He was like, am I really going to quit this amazing salary and go start something that I don't even know if it's going to work? So he started asking himself the question, is what I'm doing scary or is it dangerous? And the difference between scary and dangerous, and I use this framework all the time in my life, is that if you do the scary thing, the scary thing is only scary for like a few days you're scared to tell your boss you're scared your college professor will be disappointed

in your decision you're scared what your friends will say but dangerous is you looking back when you're 80 being like damn i wish i started that beer brewing company so he ended up deciding that he didn't want to stay in the dangerous situation he wanted to take the scary risk let's talk storytelling there's this uh famous profile i guess uh or article that was written uh gay talese i think is how you pronounce the guy's name who wrote it uh he went out he was gonna go uh meet frank sinatra legend frank to profile to profile him but he had a cold and uh he writes this line i wrote it down to make sure that i don't forget it because it's perfect he says sinatra with a cold is picasso without paint ferrari without fuel fire like gay talese if he had twitter be

viral every single day uh explain like the importance of storytelling he could have just been like yo frank sinatra had a cold so i didn't get to talk to him right but instead he hits us with fire lines sinatra with a cold it's picasso without paint ferrari without fuel yeah how important is the storytelling today's day and age where everyone seems to have very low attention spans this episode is brought to you by accenture when your advertising operations fall out of sync everything else follows spotify and accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business the result less time spent on operations more time connecting

brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most learn more at accenture.com spotify yeah so um so frank sinatra has a cold is like the gold standard of profile writing uh gay talese actually uh pioneered a new form of journalism called narrative non-fiction what is that huh what is that yeah before before this before that profile the way that profiles and just news articles were written where it was very formulaic and it was very dry he introduced fiction elements to tell a non-fiction story so that's why it reads like that it's very full of detail um and context and nuance and he it's so ironic that the best profile the gold standard of profiles he never talked to the subject but it shows like how it can be done he talked to like a hundred people in frank

sinatra's orbit so he was able to get even a better portrait of the man than if he just talked to him um and then uh and then i in in terms of storytelling i think a lot of us think that this day and age there's like i was talking to anthony scaramucci yesterday and he was like you know today the mooch the mooch uh he said today we can barely agree on what the facts are let alone like anything else and i was like but that's not because we're not agreeing on what the facts are that's because we have conflicting stories of what we believe the facts say in our interpretation of the facts not the facts themselves um and so in the book i talk about these like incredible storytellers one of them being um aaron sorkin he's very well known for um the the social network

the film and which is mark zuckerberg in the inception of facebook and the way he uh talks about it he was interviewed about it and he was like i wasn't particularly interested in tech or startups or venture capital anything like that what drew me to this story in particular were that there were um three different or two different lawsuits that had three different versions of the truth so eduardo was suing him the winklevoss twins were suing him and then mark had to defend himself all three parties had different stories and um the way he and he was like and by the way with the film i didn't want to be like here's the ultimate source of truth he was like i wanted to show all these competing versions of the truth which i think he does very

well in the film um and he says to get a great story basically story equals conflict plus intent so he says the best stories have conflict that is laced with intent when you tell a good story and you only talk about the problem but not what the protagonist's intent is it makes no sense so he's like mark zuckerberg his goal wasn't you know money or wealth it was freaking social status And he was willing to plow through anything to get that and any obstacle, the obstacle of the Winklevoss twins, his friend Eduardo, his girlfriend at the time, or the institution that is Harvard. He was willing to get through anything to get to his final destination and make Facebook this thing because he didn't get an invite to a fancy social socials club. For those that don't know about Aaron Sorkin's early life, they should go and learn about the guy was just. he was an addict he never slept he was doing cocaine like every night and basically he would

go to like a different uh like world essentially and he would sit there and he all night would just write and he said that he was scared that it without his addiction he wouldn't be good but the thing that actually stopped him if i remember correctly is that he got caught at the airport at tsa with his child there and that's kind of what yeah it reminds me a lot of like Hunter S. Thompson's life. That guy's a legend. There's a lot of writers who are addicts. Yeah. Well, Hunter S. Thompson addict would be one description. But if you ever look at Hunter S. Thompson's daily schedule, it's insane. Like how the guy live. All right. Let's move to somebody who's an addict, but not for drugs. Tom Brady. He has a quote in the book. You got to

limit inflation in the body, whether it's through your diet. Inflammation. Inflammation. What'd I say? Inflation. You got to limit inflation too. That is an important thing to see how my brain works. You got to limit inflammation in the body, whether it's through diet, nutrition or your thoughts, right? Diet and nutrition. Cool. Got it. But thoughts is an interesting thing. You got to limit inflammation in your body through your thoughts. What's that mean? It's, um, I have this idea of like a content diet, um, that actually you helped me develop. Uh, but the idea that like helped is is kind for you go ahead for example when we met i was watching a lot of like reality television which included like the bachelor the bachelorette like all these all these

shows that basically when you put that garbage in your brain um it like you see the world through a different lens so you're constantly like is he mad at me is she mad at me uh did i say something wrong did i have it's like through the lens of relationships in a very negative way and then you realize that like you're not putting difficult um material on your brain so you're just kind of like consuming junk food content and what the example just so people are clear because i got you on my show now so i can i can hold you hostage and roast this is really is uh no if you sit and you watch a bunch of people arguing on television all day long then naturally whether you realize it implicitly or not or explicitly or not is that then you go argue a lot with the people

in your life because you're basically mirroring what you just watched on television so if you just put in your head all day long idiots you know 25 women chasing one dude and then you go into your real life you start arguing with people it's like wait hold on a second like take the garbage out of your brain right let's put good information in which i had to learn too right like i would read stupid stuff or watch stupid stuff whatever and then you quickly learn like oh if there's like high quality stuff that goes in then actually your actions the output ends up being high quality as well yeah and it's not just um it like it that's not to say that all you read and all you listen to and whatever is just really difficult material that makes you think it's okay

to have a sliver of that but just don't make it like your entire food content pyramid it's like dessert you can do it like once a week and you're good yeah yeah and um i i i want to touch on this thing that so yes like a content diet is determined by what you read what you listen to what you what you watch but one thing that I actually learned from you is that is that um a part of your content diet is also who you hang out with because those conversations then lead to thoughts which then lead to beliefs so if you surround yourself with people who maybe like are your high school buddies that you know don't you don't have that much in common with anymore you end up staying on surface level conversations but when you have friends who you can actually talk about really

interesting subjects with you get new ideas it's it's a much healthier uh content and way to live but um and can i add something real quick since you said that i taught you that okay okay okay help to me is well i think that there i think that there's a somewhat acceptance of this thing like don't surround yourself with people who talk about people surround yourself with people who talk about ideas, right? It's been talked about often. But it's also surround yourself with people who have different life experiences. And so one of the things throughout my entire life is I kind of feel like I made bus stops, right? Like I was on the bus and I went and okay, cool. I was in high school. I met a bunch of amazing people still to this day. I think very highly of them,

and they all had a similar experience to me in high school. But then I got on the bus and they all went to a lot of the same schools. I went to a completely different school, to a different bus stop. Right. Met a bunch of people there that I went into the army and then I went to Silicon Valley and then I went, you know, and I kind of went to all these different bus stops and I kind of collected friends. So I'm still in touch with many people at those different bus stops, but I never was like all in on one bus stop. I never thought of, okay, this is the only thing that I'm going to do. I want the variety of experience and I want the different knowledge to take with me. And in some way, like the bus got smarter as we kept going down the road. Right. Yeah. And

there's another um put that in your book well i did but no there's another thread in that that i don't know if it's in your little you know questions to ask but i have a chapter on clarifying your thinking and i you know how i'm like fascinated with cults and like the people who join cults i definitely think that if you want to admit that publicly yeah it's in the book so um so i think like i think that a lot of people who uh right now we live in a very tribal society and and james clear one time was like you know why it's so hard for people to change their beliefs even if they think that like their beliefs are absurd it's because uh when you're asking somebody to change their beliefs you're essentially asking them to change their tribe and very few people are

like oh I'm gonna these are my friends I'm gonna go like make friends with another group that's not how it works and I think what you just said about the bus stops is like the reason that you and I don't have really strong beliefs about one thing is because for example for me like I was born in Bulgaria I grew up in Atlanta Georgia I moved to New York as an adult I kind of always feel like an outsider but also not just that I've had a multitude of experiences and I've seen how different people think so I can understand why they make the decisions they can make therefore I like Aaron Sorkin I don't see something as like the ultimate source of truth I see it more of like a gray scale based on your past experiences and I think what you just said

like if you hadn't had those experiences where you went to one school you went to war you came back like those are all things that shape your mind and you're like oh i this one tribal group isn't the only source of truth there's so many other ways to think i went to six schools in 12 years it's crazy i never even thought of it that way all right uh i want to talk about one more thing uh bruno cucinelli which you found real early in our relationship lifetime whatever and the king of cashmere the king of cashmere uh not to be confused with our boy the wolf in cashmere oh god who is that uh lvmh guy oh but i don't think he's called the wolf is he called the wolf and i think so i'm just looking i got a big brain some stuff stays in there i think that's one of them uh all

right so bruno cucinelli says that he rereads uh what is his name brunello brunello sorry cucinelli he rereads every year marcus aurelius's uh meditations famous book been around for thousands of years this dude got the same problems that we got today trying to figure out himself and obviously he's writing his meditations down on uh probably parchment at the time now we have a digital um but he says that the reason why he reads it every single year is because each year he's a different person and he gets different things out of it so in his 20s he learned some things. In his 30s, other things were more important. In his 40s and 50s, whatever. Explain how people can use that in their everyday life to actually improve and compound over time.

Yeah. Well, again, if you read a certain book, a lot of us, when we're excited about a book, we tend to speed read through it. And you're like, oh my God, this was the best book ever. But how often do you go back and reread it? And I found myself the same thing that Brunello talks about is like when you reread a book at a different stage in your life you're able to pull out different things that you never saw the the time before uh for example let's say you read it the first time in your 20s and then when you read it in your 30s now you have kids and you're like looking at it through the lens of a parent and you're taking away different um things that you might as you might have when you were 20 all right now that we're good with the uh book let me close my uh

notes here. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. So Hidden Genius, the secret ways of thinking

that power the world's most successful people. This is Polina's first book. It says Polina Marinova-Pompliano on the cover. Very long name now. Welcome. And there's James Clear.

It says a goldmine of actionable ideas and useful advice from top performers in all fields. James Clear, for those of you who don't know, author of the number one bestseller Atomic Habits. We then go on the back here. We've got Morgan Housel,

brandon stanton danny meyer patty sellers cat cole and james known as jim o'shaughnessy i like to use james though and so the book as of today is on bookshelves before i let you go i want a prediction or a guess how many books do we think get sold in the first week and in the first year i will also guess and then we will see who's closer this is i know this is like your worst nightmare but we're we're gonna do it why would i ever do that what do you think it's like i don't do price for it you don't do price predictions i don't do book predictions book sale prediction can we hit number one on amazon i would love to hit number one on amazon what's the highest in pre-sales did you get on the pre-sales yeah during the pre-sale period

what was the highest you got on the list oh i got to number 500 oh all right that's easy now of the books live let's go people let's go people yeah i would love to all right so all people have to do is they go either on amazon and they buy it or the local bookstore go to local bookstore support local i got it support independent that's right and if they do it and they take a photo and they tweet it at you do they get anything um well you could offer something for the people i'm busy i already for uh let's take it from the end back to the beginning nice little storytelling here um when we went to barnes and noble you went right death i went left life and uh we found those books you were taken over with emotion i on the other hand being the amazing being the

amazing husband and father that i am was chasing our daughter around the store as she tried to grab every book off the shelf i would dive and knock it back in so that there was no damage to the store because i want to buy all these stupid books that i didn't want uh i wouldn't let you leave the store until you sign them yeah and you because i thought you didn't ask for hold on hold on hold on i just want people to understand the pain the pain cave i live in every day sinatra with a cold pump at the bookstore don't worry listen to this this is not i went and i got a pen from the people and to get a pen i said hey my wife wrote a book the book's over there. She's going to sign them. Can I have a pen, please? They said, oh, no problem. Here's

the pen. I took the pen. I brought it to you. And then you, because you're a nerd. You are a nerd. I was like, I have to ask for permission. Hold on. You sat there and you're like, I can't sign the book unless I go and I ask for permission. I said, it's your book. Sign the book. Put it back on the shelf. Nobody knows that. You said, but I need to ask for permission. What if they get mad at me? Tell them it's my book. No, but I have to ask for permission. And we stood there for five minutes of my life. I was in the pain cave negotiating with basically a book terrorist who wouldn't sign the books until she got permission yes for the record i triumphantly convinced her to sign the books you signed them i tweeted it and was like hey go get it

and next you know people were like hey i went and i picked it up yeah that was really cool thank you so much i people did go and they did buy the signed books um it was really cool now that's what we call in the showbiz a setup because i just want everyone who's watching on video to know that the book that I have right here is also signed. Excited to take you on a learning adventure. Any last words for the people? What did you think of the book? I thought the book was fantastic. I'm only offended for two things throughout this entire process. One, I was not asked for a quote for the front or back cover. My quotes were relegated to in private. I think it's excellent. I would have had some fire to put, but you know, it's all right. I'm not as big as

james clear and all these other fine people uh and then the second thing is uh i've actually read the book about 17 times uh but i never actually picked up the book and opened it until now when it was about to be and i have listened 17 times do you read it to me every single individual chapter if you want to improve your writing read it out loud because your your ears catch mistakes that your eyes miss correct so i got read the book 17 times but then i went to another pain cave and for the last four months every day polina has asked me are you going to read the physical book yet are you going to read the physical book yet and now i have the reason i have is because i was waiting for now it's showtime now it's showtime you were doing the

pre-sale stuff now it is time to sell books oh man we're going to get this book in every single person's hands and i think that the measure of success is if people put it on their little bookshelves and when they're on zoom you see you see it there and it's like a status symbol like yeah i read the book yeah but see like to me it's more like i don't know i when you read the book i would love to hear your feedback but like if it if something resonated with you and it genuinely changed something that you do or a habit or something for the better let me know like those are the that that means so much more to me it is the difference between you and i it's like i see a number and i'm like oh there's a game to play how many books can you sell and you're like i don't

care about the book sales i just want people to like learn yeah i really do all right where can we send people to find the book hidden genius book.com or amazon or amazon but like you have to search there you just click and it goes right there buys all right uh my book says uh no price on it how much is it um well uh it depends where you live okay twenty seven dollars damn y'all trying to get smart euros dollars all right and where can we find uh you on the internet you can find me on twitter at at what do you call that it's an at symbol oh okay paulina underscore marinova because freaking i have a long thing with twitter that's how i found pulling in my dms all right guys great episode i really appreciate i appreciate you coming and

doing this it was a very far walk for you uh it's just a pleasure to get to meet you and learn from you so i hope everyone goes and buys the book it was a pleasure um getting to answer your questions we could work on your uh presence a little bit on your podcasting um presence you need an alter ego you do that is your i do i didn't want to bring it up earlier but just real quick maybe we'll end on this you probably don't realize this but every morning when i wake up yeah i got white pants on yeah look at that i'm not sad but i am sad i got white pants on the chair or is it the pant you don't know you don't realize this but every morning when i get up out of bed i know it's dark and everything right but you don't see me i pick up my left leg and then i pick up my

right leg you never seen me do this and put your pants white pants on no one leg at a time anthony woke up i had to get in my pop suit let's go hit the day she's so embarrassed she's so embarrassed this is like i love you congratulations the book's amazing everyone go get it hidden genius see you guys next time thank you