The Pomp Podcast - #449 Polina Pompliano on The World’s Most Successful People

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Polina Marinova Pompliano is the founder and author at The Profile, which is a community that studies the world’s most successful people and companies.  In this conversation, we discuss the world���s most successful people, including Elon Musk, Sara Blakely, Martha Stewart, Grant Achatz, Anthony Bourdain, and many others.  ======================= Want to sell your wonderful internet business? Tiny partners with founders to give them quick, straightforward exits that protect their team and culture. We’ll make an offer within a week, close the deal within a month, and keep your business operating for the long term. Get in touch at tinycapital.com, and we’ll let you know within a couple of days. http://www.tinycapital.com ======================= LVL is a new crypto investing platform that I'm an investor in. They allow anyone to trade an unlimited number of times per month for free. They have no trading fees and no spreads in the spot market. If you buy or sell more than $500 in Bitcoin on any exchange, you're spending too much on trading fees. Use LVL to save money and trade as many times you want. https://lvl.co/pomp ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 90,000 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://www.pompletter.com =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Polina Marinova Pompliano is the founder and author at The Profile, which is a community that studies the world's most successful people and companies. In this conversation, we discuss the world's most successful people, including Elon Musk, Sarah Blakely, Martha Stewart, Grant Atkins, Anthony Bourdain, and many others. I really enjoyed this conversation with Polina, and I hope you do as well. It doesn't hurt that she's also my wife. But before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Tiny. Do you want to

sell your wonderful internet business? Well, you should go talk to Tiny. I've had Andrew Wilkinson on the podcast multiple times, and I'm a really big fan. Tiny partners with founders to give them quick, straightforward exits that protect their team and culture. They'll make an offer within a week, close the deal within a month, and keep your business operating for the long term. You can get in touch with them at tinycapital.com, and it'll let you know within a couple of days their level of interest. If you're a founder who's built something that has value, and you want it to be in good hands, but you want to sell it, you might want to go do something else, or maybe you just think you need help, I would highly suggest going to talk to Andrew, his partners at Tiny. Tiny just

takes care of the business. They understand what founders go through because they're founders themselves. They speak in your language and they treat you the way that you want to be treated. That's all you can really ask from somebody in their position. So go check them out. There's literally hundreds and hundreds of companies that have engaged with them and the reviews are all positive. Go check them out at tinycapital.com. Again, tinycapital.com. If you're looking to sell your wonderful internet business, your first stop should be tiny. Next up is Level. It's a new crypto investing platform that I'm an investor in. They allow anyone to trade an unlimited number of times per month for free. That's right. They have no trading fees and no spreads in the spot

market. It is free. If you buy or sell more than $500 in Bitcoin on any exchange, you're spending too much on trading fees. So you can use Level to save money and trade as many times as you want. Many people have asked me, how do they make money? How is this sustainable? Well, Level makes money on other products. So withdrawal fees, or they have a cash account that's FDIC insured, right? there's all these other products is where they make their money. But their crypto exchange is completely free, no trading fees and no spreads in the spot market. So stop having any sort of fee drag, hurt the performance of your crypto investing and go check out Level. That's LVL.co slash Pomp. LVL.co slash Pomp. The first free, completely free, no hidden fee crypto exchange.

L-V-L dot C-O slash Pomp. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 90,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Polina. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement

to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang i didn't think that you would ever see me and my beautiful wife oh hey plena here we're gonna do an episode all about the profile dossiers that she's been writing she's been analyzing and studying some of the world's most successful and interesting people so let's get into it maybe let's just start with you telling us what is the profile and how's it been going since you left your job in March? The profile is a media company that I started working on in February of 2017. It started off just as a weekly newsletter and then it

evolved into more properties, including the profile dossier, which is an individual deep dive into a single person who is super interesting, whether they're in business or entertainment, sports etc um so yeah the profile studies the world's most successful people and companies all right and so when you first started doing the dossier what's kind of the point of a profile dossier somebody put it as um it's kind of like a better cliff notes what do you mean so let's say you want to learn more about elon musk you can go down a rabbit hole of the internet that is you can look up his podcasts, videos he's done. You can read articles on him. You can read books on him, all of that. Instead, what I do is kind of, I compile and put together all of that

information for you. And I give you little snippets about like, Hey, here's Elon Musk on a podcast with Joe Rogan. Here's what it's about. But then the one thing that I do, I think that's really helpful to people is I put together a section called techniques to try. And that's super, super specific techniques specific to that individual person that i've learned from them and they're very um they're not mushy you know what i mean they're not like elon musk says be original okay well how are you more original so that's kind of the premise so speaking of elon musk let's just jump into him what exactly did you write about for him so elon musk the way i kind of start get the ideas for these uh dossiers is I start with an idea first so for me for Musk

the idea was okay he's the most original innovative and radical thinker possibly of our time um he's a self-made billionaire like I want to learn more about how he uh develops his ideas and independent thought and I wanted to delve into things like that so he has the following companies that he's founded and or is the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, SolarCity, Starlink, The Boring Company, Hyperloop, OpenAI, Future of Life Institute. So basically he's taking on the thorniest, biggest problems of humanity. Okay. And so as you're doing this, like the process, as you read as many books, articles, listen to as many podcasts, YouTube videos, et cetera on him, and what were the kind of takeaways that you took after consuming every single piece of content you

could find about Elon Musk? So the fascinating thing about Elon Musk is that when he looks at you, when he looks at another human, he doesn't see a human being. He sees a computer. In other words, he looks at your brain as a computer and he distinguishes your hardware, your mental hardware from your mental software. So your hardware is kind of like a ball of clay that's handed to us at birth but it's the software that determines the the what kind of tool the clay gets shaped into so that's why you have to be very very mindful of the type of content you're consuming on a daily basis because if you're consuming junk food or you know love island and the bachelorette and shows like that your hardware will be shaped in a certain way whereas if you're reading things

like the profile and the pomp letter it you will be dangerous with knowledge so i thought that was really interesting. And do we feel like that's why he's so smart? It's just because he read so much information and he basically just consumed more than everybody else. So, no, I think that Elon is he's a very interesting person because he basically challenges the status quo in ways that most people don't. He has something he calls first principles thinking where he keeps asking why until you can get down to the nitty gritty of like, what is scientific fact behind this? Why can't this be done um and i also think that he's just very curious so as a kid he used to be afraid of the dark for example so he would ask like oh my god you know why does it get dark why do i get

scared and then somebody he says this is a quote but then i came to understand dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength 400 to 700 nanometers then i thought well it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons so like that's literally how his brain works i mean it's just fascinating to me that he's so scientific yet he's also considered one of the best marketers as well so he's able to balance that did you find anything in there about the balance yeah so um there's a really really great um it's kind of a series of articles it's basically a book it's it's very in depth it's in wait but why tim urban wrote this thing about elon musk and he characterized the difference between how Elon thinks and the way most people think is being the difference

between a chef and a cook. So the reason that Elon is logical, original, but also creative is because he, he, he's a trailblazer. He, the chef invents the recipe. The cook just follows the recipe. Most people are cooks. He's a chef. He's able to, through his logic, through his questions, through his curiosity, he's able to concoct a recipe that's never existed before. And that's also what makes them creative. Okay. So speaking of a chef, Grant Atkins, who is, uh, I think at one point the number one chef in the world, or at least was the chef at the number one restaurant in the world. Uh, he's has a wild story. What'd you learn about him? Oh, okay. This is probably my favorite profile dossier that I've ever worked on just because

I think Grant Ackett is one of the most creative people in restaurants, but also maybe in the world. So Grant Ackett is fascinating because he'll go to a museum, he'll look at a piece of art on the wall and he'll say, why can't I eat off of that? And most people don't cross their industries like that. One chef might be inspired from another chef, et cetera, but he's inspired by everything. And so he looks at a piece of art and he's like, I want to eat off of that. And who says we have to eat off of a tablecloth? Who says we have to eat out of plates and use forks and use this motion to eat? Like these are things that we just take for granted. And we are like, of course you eat from a plate. What do you what else are you going to eat from? But he considers his cooking

and his dining experience a he calls it it's called a linea. It's in Chicago. He calls it one third laboratory, one third sensorium, and one third theater. So he looks at the whole idea as a story. And I think the part that's so interesting about Grant is if you get to know his story, he basically got cancer on his tongue and he couldn't taste anything, which as a chef, it's kind of difficult, but he not only continued being a chef, but it really forced him to focus. I think you said like, not on what does the food taste like, but from memory, remembering what it taste like but and then that allowed him to focus on the other aspects of eating not just taste but experience how it and not just memory also uh we think that the majority of taste comes from the

taste buds on our tongue but what he discovered is that actually they uh the majority of your taste comes from your sense of smell and sense of uh vision so the way something looks so one of his favorite things that he does in his restaurant is he makes a tomato that looks like a strawberry so you're in your brain you're like i'm about to eat a strawberry i'm about to eat a strawberry and you're like oh my god i think this tastes like a tomato but it's it it's it's tricking you you know what i mean it's magic that's magic all right uh sarah blakely who is one of the best entrepreneurs in the world um what did you learn about her so sarah blakely story super interesting because she's one of those people that she's she was so naive when she started her entrepreneurial

journey that she always saw opportunity in failure when most people would see failure as just plain failure. So growing up, she wanted to be a trial attorney, but then she bombed the LSAT. After college, she auditioned to be goofy at Disney World, but she was too short. So she ended up at 27 years old, moving back to Atlanta, living with her mom, selling fax machines. And so that was kind of a dead end job. And she was like she kept telling herself, like, you're better than this, like you're meant to do more than this. It's all about mindset for her. And one night she decided to wear her new white pants to a party, but her underwear left unflattering panty lines. So if you're a woman, you know exactly what I mean. And so when she when she saw how good her butt looked,

she was like, this is an opportunity. So she cut the feet off of her pantyhose, created Spanx, became the youngest self-made billionaire. And so when you read through kind of all of her story and her content and everything what do you take away in terms of like those tips and techniques the the thing that's interesting about sarah blakely is that when she was growing up her dad would make the whole family as they sat around the table and had dinner to go through and tell him all the kids had to tell their dad one thing they failed at that day and she said that he'd be genuinely disappointed if it wasn't like a good meaty failure and i think that that shaped her brain, again, the software and the hardware to think, oh, something's a failure. That means like

I'm trying, I'm taking a risk. So that's, that's why she started Spanx with, um, no business experience, um, no business background, uh, no investors. She didn't even tell the idea to her family and friends until she launched. So, um, I think just being naive, uh, can be good. And she also says that being an outsider to the fashion industry, she, she didn't know anything about fashion but she said that allowed her to see things with fresh eyes where everybody's like this is how it's always been she was like but why does it have to be this way another person that you covered that's uh an original thinker and talks a lot about kind of the way they think is malcolm gladwell what did you learn about him so malcolm gladwell's possibly one of the best

storytellers i've come across um you know him for books like outliers and the tipping point right that's one of them he he um talking to strangers recently came out he he basically says what i'm really interested in is joy and intellectual play the unexpected turns that ideas can make is to my mind one of the greatest pleasures of being alive so he talks a lot about idea generation when you don't have an idea he he recommends like go on a walk take like make make it a point to notice things in your neighborhood you've never noticed go to the library he says that when you use google it kind of makes it it kind of makes it like google recommends things that it thinks you will like or that are the most relevant so the the most common

ideas come up first when you go to the library you search books things that are around but like you can get um fresh and original ideas one of the my favorite things that i learned from malcolm gladwell is you know me you know how much i care about like things being perfect and things being done well and right and okay and like me and I just really care and what you always tell me is forget perfect just get it done get it out the door and then you can evolve the idea right so he says that people are actually often drawn to things that are done imperfectly so it's art movies books people talk more about the flawed things that get stuck in their heads than the very very perfect things right so he says you want an aftertaste and that comes from not everything

being perfectly blended together the question is what is interesting and that's what has to drive any creative act i love that and he's written how many amazing books so many of the way that he takes these ideas and basically articulates them back for people to read uh somebody who i knew nothing about until you covered uh them was tara westover let's maybe start with just the story first and then what you learned. Tara is, uh, she wrote educated, which is one of my favorite memoirs. Um, she was born to Mormon parents in the mountains of Idaho, uh, Mormon survivalist parents. So that means that they didn't believe in anything government funded. So she didn't get to go to a hospital when she almost like cut her hand off and she didn't get to go to school. Um,

so so her family life was incredibly turbulent she was she decided to self-educate and take the sats because she had an older brother who had gone to college so she was inspired by him she was 17 years old when she first set foot in a classroom and that was at brigham young university um i mean it's incredible and there that's where she studied history and learned for the first time um about world events like the holocaust and the civil rights movement there's a point in the book where she raised her hand she's like holocaust like well what do you mean by that and all her classmates are like oh my god she doesn't believe the holocaust happened she's like i genuinely don't know what that is and it's it's it's kind of sad it is sad but like what do you think about

when you heard her story i think it's just you know there's people like that all around the world that we just don't consider living in the united states or north america with internet access and great education and things like that yeah uh but at the same time you know if you kind of think back to, I knew people who had never traveled outside of the state they grew up in or the city they grew up in. And so this is like that on steroids, but I think it's more common than we probably realize. And for most people who are listening to this podcast, for example, you are likely to be seeking out new ideas or kind of new pieces of content, trying to really just build an understanding and educate yourself. And so it's no different. It's just done in a different format,

you know kind of what she went through in the story so and and one thing that's really interesting that i learned from her story and i always remind myself of this is to consider your echo chambers right so because of her upbringing uh she held racist homophobic and sexist views because of her her views were her dad's views like she didn't know anything else um the only way she says she was able to change her mind was that people let her express her beliefs out loud which allowed her to hear the way it sounded when they would challenge why she thought that she would get to explain, etc. So she says they weren't really my words. They came from somewhere else. But here's what she says about education that I really love. She says, education, I really

believe, is a privilege. We always need to be attacking the bigotry and the prejudice, but I don't think we should be attacking people for not having an education that there's no way they could have possibly had i think that's so important one of the people who has had uh the most education in the world via experiences and not a traditional classroom is anthony bourdain yep he anyone who's seen his story who's watched his work i think is a general fan uh because of the way that he carried his life out the sad part of the story is obviously he passed away um and so you went down this deep rabbit hole and i remember when you told me you're gonna do it i was like wow you're gonna learn so much uh basically tell me everything and then you wrote this uh piece and

it's a grand slam so like what were the tips and tricks that you took out of anthony bourdain and kind of the way he lived his life at 100 miles an hour all the time he did and even though he he lived his life at 100 miles an hour he always knew and appreciated the position that he was in he knew that he got lucky he got chosen to be in this position whereas you know lots of other people wouldn't so he he really did live life to the fullest if you will but um he traveled to more than a hundred different countries and um one of the things that he says is you should go rogue when you travel. So he once said that traveling to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower is lethal to the soul because you're actually it's the places that are off the beaten path and the ones that put you

out of your comfort zone that, you know, are the ones that teach you something. Right. So he says we tend to be over concerned with safety and with cleanliness in ways that stand between us. So he had a rule whenever he went to a different country, whatever they gave him, he would eat. he he didn't it doesn't matter what there was one can i tell you yeah okay so they ripped a snake uh through the middle grabbed it still beating heart put it in a thing and then you just chase not chase it shoot it like a shot he did it it's it's wild but he always did that and and he says that it's the human awkward moments when you don't speak the language of somebody else when there's a little, uh, miscommunication like, like, uh, Malcolm said, it's the, it's the

imperfection, the things that leave an aftertaste. Those are the memories that you probably have. Yeah. Basically he's like, look, I'm not going to travel around the world and just go see all the places everyone else sees. I want to go actually experience them as if I was a local living here. And I think anyone who's traveled before knows that is the best way to travel. Um, and then talk a little bit about his thoughts around like sharing memories with people, uh, over a meal yeah so one of the biggest lessons i learned from him is that he says no matter where you go the one tip as a traveler as a tourist you should have is that you shouldn't be a snob a lot of people are they go somewhere they're like oh i don't do that oh i don't like that

this isn't environment isn't clean enough for me he says the dish you're eating is nowhere nearly as important as where you are sitting and with whom you are eating it with that's a great piece of advice uh somebody who did a fantastic job in their life minus one big situation where maybe they could use some better advice uh is martha stewart now you haven't published this one yet but we're going to talk about it um give you a little sneak peek what did you learn about martha stewart so long before there were social media influencers there was martha freaking stewart and she was more powerful like imagine martha well i guess you can't because there is social media today but when she started if there was social media she would be everywhere so in the

year 2000 she had two magazines 27 books a weekday radio show a syndicated ask martha newspaper column a tv show on cbs a website a merchandising retail partnership and a catalog like in in and she actually is um america's first self-made female billionaire that's crazy yeah but then she became something nobody ever thought she would be, a convicted felon for insider trading. A lot of people say that, you know, they kind of wanted to make an example out of her, but she actually voluntarily served that sentence before she was, uh, anyway, it doesn't matter. So what did you learn? I think that, I think that Martha Stewart's super interesting because there's a lot of people who can reach the top, right? Like they can build the empire. It takes a lot to stay on top. And

she's been able to do it and redo it with generation after generation and she went from she took something called women's work which is cleaning gardening cooking and turned it into a billion dollar empire and the way she did that is she kept innovating and she kept trying new things even when it could have been dangerous for her brand she did a partnership with snoop dogg like and they're best friends and that went really well for her she got into cbd at a time when it was still like, oh, and it turned out really well for her. Her magazine, Martha Stewart magazine, was one of the first to use a digital layout to lay out the pages and to go digital on the internet. Whereas other magazines were like, oh, we're just going to stick with print.

She is not afraid to do that. And one more thing that I learned that I think is actually very valuable. Learn how to not give a damn. She does not care if you like her. Her brand is about helping educate you. Right. So there's a column, um, that explains how Stuart's success is completely isolated from the need for likability. And unlike some of her like contemporaries at the time, like Oprah and things like that, she was just like, you know, I don't care if you like me. And I think that that's why her going to prison actually didn't damage her brand. Yeah. It's absolutely nuts to think about just how long she's been around, how relevant and how many times she's reinvented herself and been innovative uh speaking of she had a thirst trap

on instagram coming out of a pool i don't know she has thirst traps on the internet uh brandon stanton is uh all over instagram facebook and everywhere else he's the guy behind humans of new york uh he's fantastic what did you learn when you did a deep dive on him and you also interviewed yeah man brandon stanton this is one of those people that i've been admiring his work for so long so to get to actually speak to him uh was really cool for me but he's a cool guy he's a cool guy he um he spent the so basically here's his quick bio in 2010 he was uh he had graduated from the university of georgia like me and he was a bond trader he was working as a bond trader in chicago and then uh the financial crisis happened he got fired and he was like he took a

walk, a long walk. And he was like, what do I actually like to do? And he realized, like, I just really like taking pictures of people. Like, that's what I like to do. So he picked up his camera, went out and started photographing people, moved to New York. What I learned. And so, by the way, he started doing that just because he liked it, not because he thought that there would be a business. So the biggest thing I've learned from Brandon is like when you go to business school, a lot of people say, OK, you're going to start a company. What's your business plan. And I think a lot of times the best businesses actually don't have a clear path to profitability or business plan or blueprint of any sort. I, when I started the profile in 2017,

I never thought it would become a business. And Brandon, when he started photographing strangers on the street, he never thought he would make money off of it. And that would be his living. Um, so sometimes I think just the passion overwhelms that. And it just naturally pushes you to, you're going to make money somehow. Yeah. And I think also it's just like, you know, that if you can have people pay attention, right, you'll always be able to monetize that in some way, whether it's ads, whether it's, um, you know, kind of audience supported, whether it's selling physical products. Um, if you're an entrepreneur and you've got attention, then you can always monetize in some, uh, some way. Uh, I want to talk about, uh,

Courtney Dahlwalter, I think is how you pronounce her name. Um, absolute legend. She's a savage. All right. Tell her story. So Courtney was a tough one to do, actually, because she went on Joe Rogan's podcast. She's done a few, but she's just one of those people that's very matter of fact. like for example if so she she's a she she's a really long distance runner um she won the moab 240 which is a 240.3 mile foot race through some of utah's most challenging terrain it took her 58 hours and she beat the second place finisher by more than 10 hours so she's gone through hallucination blindness sleep deprivation vomiting um i think if those things had ever happened to me my interviews would be so full of color and exaggeration and craziness and that's the thing she doesn't need to exaggerate because she's been through this craziness so when like

you on the joe rogan podcast actually there's a point he's like he's like courtney like you're a savage like tell me how do you and she was like no i just run i'm fine like she's very matter of fact um the the thing that i like about her is that she's mastered she she believes that her strength is being able to master the art of suffering. So she's managed to stay calm through bouts of severe nausea, a bleeding head injury and temporary blindness. And here's how. So she calls she this is something that she calls it the pain cave. So she's an endurance runner. So she talks about pain is an actual place. And I think that's really interesting because it's helpful to personify pain because it it um kind of serves as a reminder that you can enter it and you can

leave it but like you're in control you're not just like i'm in pain i can't go on and and that's and she says she literally says it's not a place i'm scared to enter it's a place i'm excited to find the entrance to so she's actively looking for that i kind of like that why i don't know i just feel like if you've got control of it and you know where you're going uh there's this element of like you're addicted to the pain so you can put yourself into it do you think that because you know that there's gonna be pain you're kind of like eager to like your brain isn't as shocked when it happens of course but it's also i think that part of what the training does is they train for the pain right yeah it almost becomes meditative at some like weird like way right

yep what is not meditative is arguing with your significant other and uh the last person we're I'm talking about Mr. John Gottman basically tries to prevent that on a daily basis. So explain John Gottman and what I thought was voodoo science that ends up being pretty, pretty effective. So the reason I like John Gottman is because he's been called the Einstein of love. But every time you talk about love and marriage and relationships, things tend to be pretty mushy, right? Like people are just like, oh, you got to be, you know, do the best you can, except Gottman's very scientific and mathematical in his approach. So he he's developed models, scales and formulas to better predict marital stability and divorce in couples. His research focuses on the process of conflict within a marriage, the way couples fight and reconcile and less on the content of the actual argument.

And I thought that was so interesting. He and his wife, also a researcher, they teamed up and did this like love lab, which was essentially an apartment. And they put different couples in this apartment over a period of time and they filmed them, their interactions. And they divided them into two groups, the masters and the disasters. So they were able within like 94 percent accuracy predict whether a couple would stay married or get divorced. Isn't that insane? What were the signals? So, OK, the most important signal. There's something he calls the force, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So these are certain negative communication styles that are absolutely lethal. Their criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling and contempt, which is the most dangerous one. look them up they're they're amazing the other thing that he believes it's not about the grand gestures of romance that really make a relationship solid it's the tiny little mundane moments so he

always says that happier couples had a ratio of five positive interactions to every one negative interaction so literally a head nod a smile like a pat like something small counts towards that and that can enhance positivity, there's one that I love and I really believe this is true. It's called answering the bid. So when your partner, throughout the day, they make requests for connection and that's what he calls a bid. So say that your partner is a bird enthusiast, which I am, and they point out a pretty bird as you're on your walk. If the other person turns their head to look at the bird that can signify whether your relationship is going to work or not because over a long period of time decades and decades just you know giving that

other person that little bit of attention builds connection over time like what are the odds that you're on a walk look at that bird the other person's like i'm not gonna look what are the no no it's it's a lot more about like the ignoring and the neglect like if i'm like right now hey anthony look at this cool like meme if you ignore me i like i feel a little bit slighted right like and over time that just builds resentment and it kind of tears apart that makes sense all right we've got over 10 of these man i talked a lot you've done a ton of them what would you say is your favorite part about doing the profile dossier i think it for me it's i've always been a big like observer of people i i don't like being the center of attention i like observing other people and i

think that this really by listening to so many of their conversations and reading about them and and seeing them do interviews it lets you kind of be in their brain for a little bit and see how they think you know i agree what have you learned because you've read every single one of them I think that everyone's more similar than they are different. And the world's most successful people, success can be measured by happiness, crazy feats like running 240 miles, being the richest people, whatever. There's no secret sauce. You just got to do the work. And once you realize like literally nobody has a magic bullet, nobody has a secret and everyone just does the work that ends up being successful, then you just realize like, OK, well, what work do I have to do? Let's go do it. And it kind of focuses you on work rather than like the dream of being successful. Out of the ones that you've read, which like lesson or thing has stayed with you? there's probably not just one um i just like grant atkins uh actions

because like he was a chef that lost taste in his tongue and he was like nah i'm still gonna be the best in the world and it made him better yeah and sorry one more thing about grant atkins that i found a thread across all every single dossier that i've ever done The one thread is that you can always reinvent yourself and sometimes you shouldn't wait. So Grant Ackett's, he blows up his entire menu every three months and makes everyone at the restaurant start over and come up with new ideas. And they're like, Grant, this is the best menu we've ever had. And he's like, yeah, but that's what brings complacency and makes you just average.

Like we have to keep reinventing and keep trying new things. Yeah. And I think the other piece of this, too, that's really interesting is when you think about the best way to learn, to me, it's studying people who are successful in whatever they do, because it's just actionable things like you don't need to know, you know, I mean, yes, you need to know two plus two, but like there's a calculator. Right. And learning two plus two isn't necessarily going to make you successful, but understanding the philosophy, the mindset, and then incorporating those things into your own approach to solving a problem. It's usually the things that are outside the box. So the direct application ends up being, you know, something about the world that other people don't know. It's the philosophy and kind of the persistence and that type of stuff that ends up being the differentiator. in my opinion and for me it's actually that we're able to relate more to people and their stories and identify with them be like oh i've been through something similar instead of like these

abstract concepts where like i never liked history because history was like well world war one but if you gave me a person in world war one in their life journey and how it affected them i would remember it would stick with me for much longer than just world war one guns where can we send people to find you on the internet and uh find out about the profile read the profile.com read the profile.com yes do you have a twitter account um i do wait for the profile for myself for yourself i do it's at paulina underscore marinova do you want to promote anything else oh i'm gonna give an update on my tomato plant and how that's doing for all of you who's who are curious i've been getting a lot of those messages okay at polina underscore marinova on twitter and then

readtheprofile.com yes awesome thank you for doing this thank you so much