We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's episode, I sit down with Polina Pompliano. Helena is the founder and author of The Profile, which is a newsletter that profiles highly successful individuals in business, science, storytelling, sports, and more. In this episode, we dig deep into how exceptional people think, five mental models that are the common denominators for success across nearly every discipline, how to run a maker versus manager schedule, and a whole lot more. I'm a big believer that investing is primarily about temperament and psychology, so it's important

Starting point is 00:00:33 to add these tools to your investing tool belt. Kalina has a wealth of knowledge from her many experiences interviewing everyone from Melinda Gates to Jeff Jordan and more. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Helena Compliano. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerby, and today I have with me,

Starting point is 00:01:15 Paulina Pompliano. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Trey. I'm so excited to be here. Well, I'm really excited to talk to you, Paulina, because I am a big believer in the saying, success leaves clues, and you're one of the people I follow most closely to learn about how exceptional people think. If you can determine how successful people think, I think it great improves the chances that you yourself will be successful. And beyond that, I'm a big believer that in investing mindset is so important. So I think there's a few topics that you've covered in your newsletter that apply to investors. But before we dig into all that, you have a really interesting background that I wanted to touch on

Starting point is 00:01:55 because at one point you became an editor at Forbes. So how did you come to get that position? Basically, I graduated from the University of Georgia in 2013 with a degree in journalism. So I always thought that I would be this great big time journalist. And then reality hit me when I graduated in 2013 and nobody wanted to hire me. So I had no job. Then I started like freelancing from my mom's couch. I was the stereotype.

Starting point is 00:02:24 And I freelanced for about a year working at both USA Today and CNN because I was young. They were like, can you do social media? I was like, I guess so. I did social media, wrote a few articles here and there, but nothing big. And then I moved to New York or to the media startup called Ozzy at the time I didn't know what startup was at all. But luckily, I was so early that they were just raising their first round of capital. So I kind of get to see that process from within. I was there for six months. And then I went to join Fortune Magazine and 2014, which I thought was my dream job. I was like, oh, business, journalism. Like, they broke Enron. It was everything that I thought was what I wanted to do in journalism. But I started

Starting point is 00:03:11 as a, what was it? My official title was audience engagement editor, which meant, like, do their Twitter and Facebook. And then I realized that, like, it was a small team. So I asked anybody if they needed help with anything. They would be like, yeah, do you want to write this article or help with this. So that's how I got my foot in the door with writing. And then I went on to become a tech reporter. And I wrote term sheet, which is Fortune's daily dealmaking newsletter, like venture capital deals, private equity deals, who's raising what fund, all things venture capital. And in the beginning, it was really, really hard because I had no sources. I didn't really have a background in that. But it's amazing how much you can learn when you want to learn

Starting point is 00:03:57 something. So give our audience an idea of some of the people you were able to interview at your time at Fortune. Yes. Jeff Jordan, Steve Schwartzman, Melinda Gates. I basically, what I did was like, hey, like I work at Fortune. I'm going to try to interview some of these like super, super, super interesting people who you would have, it's a once in a lifetime chance to interview them. Jeff Jordan, I did a full profile on him in the magazine. I spent a day with him. We went hiking in the morning. Then I went to his office, interviewed him in a few different contexts.

Starting point is 00:04:33 But he's one of those, like he was one of those really, really under the radar investors. Yet he had invested in so many companies like Pinterest and Instacart and Airbnb super early on. And then they were all IPOing. And he became one of the best investors ever. So it was really interesting to get in his head and figure out why he is the way he is and why he's so effective. And for those who don't know, Jeff Jordan is a managing partner over at A16Z or Andreessen Horowitz. With all of those conversations, I mean, Jeff Jordan, Melinda Gates, what is the most memorable moment from that experience or that time there? I'm the type of person who doesn't really get starstruck.

Starting point is 00:05:14 And I think that has served me well in reporting because I'm able to go. go into it is like, this is just another human. And most of the time, they are very much misunderstood. Steve Schwartzman was really interesting because I only had like 30 minutes with him, but I went in and we had such a great conversation and he actually liked my questions that his assistant kept coming in telling him like, time is over. You need to call this person. This person, he was like 15 more minutes, 15 more minutes. So 30 minutes actually turned into like an hour and a half of an interview and I got some really, really good material to be able to understand how he thinks. And like, for example, I asked him about blockchain and Bitcoin and he was like,

Starting point is 00:05:56 I just grew up in a world where the government needs to be able to control currency. So I don't understand it. This is not my area of expertise. And the fact that he was so honest about it, but he was still curious. I think though, like some of the most successful people think that way. They know, like Charlie Munger would say, like, where their area of competence is or their circle of competence, but they're willing to be curious about it because they know it's going to be something bigger. Yeah, you've studied all these people and you seem to find this common denominator of sorts. One of the common denominators I've noticed is that the people at highest level are continuous learners. Is that something that you've seen, like voracious readers? Is that something you've come across as well?

Starting point is 00:06:38 Absolutely. I think the people who are the most successful definitely spend a lot of time learning about areas they're interested in, but they're not experts in. And when you learn so much, you kind of end up becoming an expert because you're learning so much. I think people like, for example, Elon Musk and like Chef Grant Atkins, the whole idea of like thinking from first principles. It's not that it's necessarily like, Oh, I want to learn about rockets. So let me like figure out, understand physics. It's like you have an area that you're interested in. And like Elon Musk says, you think about it like a semantic tree. You start from the trunk of the base. Like, let's learn about physics. And then you work your way up into the base of the tree and the details, which are the

Starting point is 00:07:30 branches and the leaves. But most regular people, when they started to learn something, they get disinterested because they start from the details. And they're like, oh, this is too much information. I don't understand it rather than starting from the very, very simple thing in reading and learning and talking to experts about it before you get into the details. So, you know, I'm a big believer in this idea that investing is 5% knowledge and 95% temperament. And through profiling all of these exceptional people, you've narrowed it

Starting point is 00:08:03 down to about five mental models. So why don't we start with you just laying out the five mental models, first principles being the first one, walk us through the other four and let's dig into them one by one. It's so interesting, tree, because like people, when they look at the profile, they're like, oh, Paulina just picks a person and then she writes another person and they're all so different. But it's not that at all. I think very much like you, and what you guys do is that, yes, you study the person, but the person is a vehicle of understanding how they think, which is a mental model. So I really like to learn about different types of people, but then be like, oh, interesting. Chris Jenner and The Rock actually have something in common. Or Chris Jenner and Charlie

Starting point is 00:08:46 Munger have this shared mental model that's helped them be successful over the years. So I try to, every Wednesday I write this thing called the Profile Dossier, where I look at an individual person and try to extract the mental models that they apply to their career and their life. So I wrote about these five mental models that I've come across, the first one being first principles. The second one is that the most interesting and successful people, they focus on the process over the outcome. So most people, when they want to do something, they look at the goal, right? They're like, I want to be CEO of this company. But it's actually the process and the everyday reps that gets you there. And for example, Nick Sabin is Alabama's,

Starting point is 00:09:35 head football coach. And he's one the most championships ever. And he basically explains that he has this quote where he says, don't look at the scoreboard, play the next play. Because his point is he has this philosophy called the process where he emphasizes that your preparation and your everyday reps and practice in hard work, like that should be a priority over the result. So he constantly examines the weak spots and looks at players individual process. So then you work as a team, whether it's in business or investing, you work like a well-oiled machine. It's not one person wanting all the glory. So basically what he says was, okay, so if you win, you got to start the process over so you don't get complacent. And if you lose, you got to start the process over to win next time.

Starting point is 00:10:30 You also covered Monica Aldama, who's the head coach of Navarro Junior College. And there's this quote there that I just loved, which was, you keep going until you get it right. And then you keep going until you can't get it wrong. Small, tiny everyday improvements is what makes a good habit sick or what makes a bad habit fall away. So yeah, you keep going until you get it right. And then you keep going until you absolutely cannot get it wrong. And she's talking about in terms of a stunt or a cheerleading routine, but you can apply that to anything. So sometimes when we talk about mental models, it can feel a lot like a to-do list.

Starting point is 00:11:10 And I'm kind of thinking if we could examine these and compare it to a not-to-do list. As Nick Sabin says, as you mentioned, don't look at the scorecard. So in the example of an investor, I take that to say, you know, I'm not watching my brokerage account every day. I made an investment in a stock. I'm not checking it, the price action every single day. Is there anything else that comes in mind for investors maybe as to how to apply this mental model? Basically, you incrementally every day try to improve the process and you don't pay attention to the everyday volatility necessarily. You just look at like, what are the tiny incremental

Starting point is 00:11:53 habits that I can adopt to become a better investor? Maybe it's asking better questions. maybe it's doing better due diligence, like whatever it is that you do to become better and then like the results take care of themselves. I think that last point is especially crucial because I'm a big believer that money is almost like a byproduct of the process. And too many people, whether it's their entrepreneurial endeavor or investing, they fall into maybe day trading too early or to an experience because they're just looking for that monetary validation. And whereas I think you're on to something here by talking about the process

Starting point is 00:12:32 and getting almost like a checklist in place that you just execute on very consistently, and the money is a byproduct of that. Yes, exactly. Really successful people create alter egos or alter personas when they have to perform. I used to be painfully, painfully shy, and I would hate public speaking or, God forbid, I had to interview somebody on stage. But then I realized, like, I was holding myself back in my career because I would only be a writer. Whenever somebody said, Hey, Blina, can you do a video or can you interview Casper CEO on stage at this conference, I would literally have heart palpitations. So the way that I got over it is I did very practical things. I would watch some of my favorite interviewers, like literally sit down and for hours

Starting point is 00:13:26 watch videos on YouTube of them interviewing people. And I would pay attention to their body language. I would pay attention to how they ask questions and their tone and whether they were leaning in or leaning out. And after you watch enough of that, enough of people doing something well, you start to adapt it yourself. So I wasn't looking for, I mean, obviously people have bad habits, whatever, but I was trying to air on the side of like, what do they do well and what can I take away from that? For example, I noticed they had very open body language on stage. They would lean in and really listen to what the person was saying and have follow-up questions, not just the list of questions they had pre-written, like they were willing to go wherever the conversation took them.

Starting point is 00:14:11 Once I started practicing and I would sign up for anything and everything under the sun, any panel I got invited to, any small little event with 20 people there, just because I wanted to practice being in front of a group of people. And then I kind of like became this Polina Marinova, the interviewer, right? And I would grow into this like larger than life persona on stage that I was not off stage. And it was really cool to see it on video later and be like, damn, you look confident. So I noticed that a lot of actually successful. that's where people use this. Beyonce used to be really, really, really shy, but then she would have to do these tours where she would have to appear really confident on stage. And so she literally

Starting point is 00:14:59 created someone called Sasha Fierce. It's a fake person or fake persona, but it would allow her to express her confidence and be super flirtatious, etc. But it would be separate from herself. So that way she didn't feel personally attacked or shy or whatever when she stepped on stage. Same goes with Kobe Bryant. When he was playing, there was a point in his career where people were booing him on the court and things like that. So he created the Black Mamba, which was a nickname inspired from the movie Kill Bill, in which a snake was known for its agility and aggressiveness. And he would embody that sort of persona on stage.

Starting point is 00:15:39 So when he would hear boo Kobe, he would. he would think, okay, but like, this is not Kobe that you're about to see. This is a black mamba. It's called Iliism. It allows you to self distance a little bit from yourself. LeBron James does it. When he talks in the third person, you've seen this, he's like, well, this is good for LeBron James. It's like, why are you saying that? It's because there's a slight distance between you personally and the persona that you want people to see when you have to perform at the highest levels. These are like tiny, Mental cues that allow people to either gain more confidence or appear to be more confident in situations that are really high stakes. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year,

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Starting point is 00:20:30 Back to the show. Well, perhaps I need to come up with an alter ego because when I'm interviewing professional interviewers like you, I have a bit of imposter syndrome myself. But again, if we're talking about investing, what I take away from this one is basically to make things unemotional, to somehow find a way to detach yourself from the results. And especially when it comes to money, I mean, so many people get their whole identities wrapped up in the performance of their portfolio. If the stocks are down one day, that could mean your whole day is down. So I think the general takeaway is just the stoicism you can apply to anything in life, just putting that little bit of

Starting point is 00:21:05 between you and the performance. Exactly. It's all about like arousal control, right? So when you're an investor, you should be as logical and rational as possible and kind of separate that from your emotions. So let's say in your personal life, you're getting divorced, like you have all sorts of problems. But then you can't go into your professional life with that baggage at the top of your mind.

Starting point is 00:21:33 So you need to kind of compartmentalize and have like, okay, I'm dealing with this right now in my personal life. But in my professional life, I have a slight distance where I am now pulling a other investor and I can't be approaching these entrepreneurs or whatever you're the stock market with these like emotions at the top of my mind. That's a big one for entrepreneurs as well. I think there's this element of fake it till you make it, which is so true because a lot of times when you're new in an industry especially, you have to to go raise money, you have to go convince people that you're the right person to do something. And very rarely does someone have the whole roadmap figured out from day one about how they're going to execute exactly on their vision. The details can change, but the destination stays the same. Yeah, so I think that that's especially a good one to apply in that arena as well.

Starting point is 00:22:23 Let's talk about mental resilience. This one is somewhat similar, but distinct in a lot of ways. And this one is probably the one I'm most fascinated by because it's something that, I don't know, maybe I wish I had more of in my life, you know, when you compare it to the people you've interviewed. So let's dig into this one a little bit. This one is actually very, very interesting. And it is similar, but slightly different from the one we just talked about. The one we just talked about is like you creating a different persona. This one is, do you know if under the most extreme, stressful situation, you can keep that arousal control and check and like that emotional cool and things are just like absolutely falling apart. And the way I started this was like,

Starting point is 00:23:12 do you know who you are after running for 19 hours straight with no sleep? Or when somebody's trying to manipulate your emotions, or when somebody's just like trying to like poke you when you're like at rock bottom. This one is very good in terms of a lot of distance runners and ultra athletes have a lot of this. And the reason that regular people don't is because a lot of us like read about, we watch the Olympics, we read about these ultra marathoners, but we ourselves have never put ourselves in a position where we've been stress tested unless you're an investor. And we can talk about that later. But Courtney Dalwalter, she is this badass ultra marathoner who is absolutely insane. But her biggest strength and superpower is that she can remain.

Starting point is 00:23:58 calm under any circumstance. And the way she does it is obviously when you're running more than a hundred miles, things are going to hurt and you're going to be in major pain. And so what she's done is she's personified the sensation of pain. And she calls it the pain cave. So whenever she's, I think right here I wrote that, she stayed calm through bouts of severe nausea, a bleeding head injury and temporary blindness. And so the way she's done that, is she knows. She's like, okay, I'm running 100 miles. I know that at some point I'm going to, quote, unquote, enter the pain cave.

Starting point is 00:24:37 And when she does that, the reason it's so helpful to personify pain as an actual place is you picture yourself entering it and you're in control and you're also in control when you exit it. She knows, like, okay, I'm going to encounter this. It's going to suck. It's going to be awful. But I also know that I'm going to eventually get out. Most of us kind of when we encounter a really tough situation, we're like, this is going to last forever.

Starting point is 00:25:04 I'm going to be in this much emotional pain forever. And we start making bad choices because we're blinded by the pain. David Goggins is another one of these like really, really crazy people. He completed three Navy SEAL hell weeks, more than 50 endurance races, and he holds the Guinness world record for most pull-ups in 24 hours. he did 4,030 pull-ups, which is like I can't even picture it. But basically, the way he explains how do you stay calm in really crazy, taxing, stressful situations is that you follow the 40% rule.

Starting point is 00:25:42 So that rule means that whenever your mind is telling you, you're absolutely done, you cannot handle more pain, stop right now like your mind is screaming. he explains it like you're actually only 40% done. You can handle another 60% more. And he explains it like this. A lot of cars have governors on them that, let's say, go 91 miles an hour. It may only go 91 miles an hour because the governor stops it from going 130. We do the same thing to our brain.

Starting point is 00:26:13 When we get uncomfortable, our brain gives us a way out, usually quitting or taking the easier route, is what he says. So in other words, your brain has a threshold. depending on how much pain you expose yourself on a day-to-day basis. For me, for example, when I was training for a marathon, that pain threshold went up a little bit. Now, I've run three or four miles and be like, I cannot possibly go any longer. And then I remind myself, like, you one time ran 26.2 miles. It's crazy. But it's like, you can change that governor in your brain based on how much stress you expose yourself on a day-to-day basis.

Starting point is 00:26:54 Yeah, I think the athletic examples are the most common for this one. Another one being, you know, Tiger Woods. I just watched his documentary where that guy would actually go train with Navy SEALs. And you're thinking, this guy plays golf. But he would go and do Hell Week with these Navy SEALs, basically. And if you think about him, he's under so much pressure and has to perform. You've got millions of people watching as you're swinging a club. You have to block all of that out and zone in.

Starting point is 00:27:22 And another thing I'm reminded of is an old stoic, Seneca, the younger, who used to go out into the streets. I mean, he was one of the wealthiest people in Rome at one point, and he would still spend a week and go out and live as a peasant on the streets, just to remind himself how unimportant the materialism of life is. I've even heard about hedge fund managers who hire people who trained them in this way. They mentally train them to achieve these, quote unquote, like optimal levels of performance or focus.

Starting point is 00:27:49 So I guess my question to you is, how do I apply this to my own? life. Do I need to go run a triathlon or sleep outside in the cold? How do we apply this to our own lives? I think that's why you hear a lot of these investors. They have like mental coaches and like mindset coaches and things like that. The purpose of that is so you kind of get out of your comfortable thinking where investors go wrong as like following the crowd or doing what's always been done or things like that where you're not willing to expose yourself. to more pain necessarily. But if you start taking a little bit of risk, that's smart risk and calculated risk,

Starting point is 00:28:29 you can change your threshold for what you can sustain. Like some people, like, for example, I probably wouldn't be a good hedge fund manager because I don't have a lot of emotional control on a day-to-day basis. But basically, you can't change your psychological and physiological state just by sitting on the couch. Like, you need to put yourself in really stressful situations, whether that is physical. There's a book. Jesse Itzler wrote a book and he had David Gagins come live with him for like a month.

Starting point is 00:29:04 Living with a seal, I think it's just going. There we go. And basically, yeah, like stress test him. And so at one point, David Gaggans is like, dude, you live such a comfortable life. Like it's really, really hard to get you to this again. He makes him sleep on the floor. He makes him sleep in a really uncomfortable chair. He makes him jump in a freezing lake.

Starting point is 00:29:25 All those things where you want your mind to scream and to tell you to give up, where you don't give up, and then just builds credibility with yourself that, oh, I am good at maintaining an emotional calm when I'm investing. I'm good at being rational when other people are being irrational, things like that, that kind of builds confidence within yourself. Well, I love Jicely Itzler, and I love that book. And that reminds me, actually, one of the things he's incorporated into his life lately is just intermittent fasting. I think he's fasting one day a week, always trying new things to keep his mind sharp.

Starting point is 00:29:58 You know, he's a really good example also of this last mental model, which is basically learning from your failures. And you've written about this extensively. So what are some other great examples of this? Speaking of Jesse Itzler, I'm a big fan of his wife, Sarah Blakely, who founded Spinks and became a billionaire off of it. most people see failure as something, oh, you failed, let's leave that alone and go do something else because you're not good at it. A good example for myself is in high school, I played soccer. I wasn't

Starting point is 00:30:33 very good, so I just kind of like let it die. But outside, most people would say, oh, you failed at being a soccer player. Or I could reframe it and be like, did I fail or did I not try hard enough and was I not as interested in it so I couldn't get better. So Sarah Blakely, when she was little, her dad would sit the kids like at the dinner table and every single night at dinner, they would have to go around and say, what is one thing you fail that day? And so she said that whenever she had a failure that like, unless it was like big and juicy and whatever, her dad would genuinely be disappointed. He'd be like, oh, wow. Like, that's not really, like you didn't really try that hard today, obviously, because you

Starting point is 00:31:17 didn't fail that much. It taught the kids that you should on a daily basis be taking risks and in putting yourself out there to achieve something. And if you fail, that's okay because you get to talk about it at dinner. So for her, all her life when she was growing up, she wanted to be a trial attorney, but then she bombed the LSAT. Then she went to be goofy at Disney World, but she was too short for the costume. Then she started selling fax machines.

Starting point is 00:31:45 And then she was like, all right, listen, like, what do I actually want to do? But she saw every single failure is an opportunity to do something else. She didn't give up. So basically, instead of failure becoming an outcome, it simply became about not trying in her head. And then when she created Spanx, she has a really, really good quote where she says, Spanx wouldn't exist if I had aced the LSAT. So in other words, just because you failed this test that was your dream doesn't mean that you can't create something else and be just as successful.

Starting point is 00:32:19 The Rock, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, he has a lot of ups and downs and his life before he got to where he is. But he says like every single day in the back, no matter how successful he gets, how big his house gets, how nice his cars, he always thinks about the failures and he's always like, in my mind, I am one week away from getting evicted. And the reason that's powerful and important is because when people get comfortable, they become complacent and they forget they're not as hungry anymore. They're not as driven. That's why you'll see like, I hate to use them as an example, but a lot of these kids like on TikTok that became really famous, okay, you're famous now.

Starting point is 00:33:02 you have all the social capital, but if you don't reinvent yourself, if you don't try to be successful at something else, eventually your 15 minutes of fame are going to be up. And suddenly you have this like comfortable lifestyle and then it's going to be all over because you're not hungry anymore. And then there's this profile that I love rereading. It's about this chess guy. He's Russian. He's amazing. He's one of the best named Lev Albert. And a lot of people don't know him, but his clients who come to play chess with him are some of the highest profile figures in finance, including Carl Icahn and Stephen Friedman. And they come to, quote, unquote, to get frustrated, intimidated, and demoralized. And so the whole idea is like, they go to this

Starting point is 00:33:49 guy, he beats them so bad. They're like, oh, crap, like this is really bad. And the whole idea is that you'll get frustrated, you'll grow, you'll get better. And then eventually you'll win. And a lot of these like finance guys, they want that because sometimes it's missing in their life. So they're getting it in other ways like, let's play chess and have you beat me so I can get pissed off and I can like learn to get better and eventually beat you. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform.

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Starting point is 00:37:33 This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. In your dossier on Dwayne the Rock Johnson, there was this amazing quote that he threw out there about basically like, at that point in my life, I knew two things. One, I was broke and two, that I wouldn't be for long. or something like that. So that one especially resonated for me as an entrepreneur

Starting point is 00:37:56 because I look back at, there was early days in my career where I was literally living off of the Trader Joe's lentil soup every night, which because it was like $1.99. And there was a drive home one night in my life where I had, I didn't even have $5. Anyway, I bring it up because even in that moment, I had that exact same thought that he said.

Starting point is 00:38:16 And it was basically like, yep, I'm broke today, but one day I won't be. I think it's such an important takeaway or mindset to learn from because even with things like investing, it can seem so daunting to learn or study something like the stock market. And you just have to take the first step. You can say to yourself, yep, I don't know anything about the stock market, but one day I will or one day I'll know more. Too many people, I think, get caught up on that instant gratification piece where they're like,

Starting point is 00:38:47 I'm not going to know everything today, so therefore I won't start. or I'm not going to have the money I need to start my business today, so therefore I won't start. And I think this is one of the biggest lessons in life that you could probably learn from. It's the biggest mindset shift because it shifts it from you being on the defensive to being on the offensive. So suddenly you're not waiting for opportunity to come. You're like, I am broke. I need to create opportunity. The Rock calls them a hole in the wall moments.

Starting point is 00:39:19 where like you see this like tiny, tiny, tiny inkling of possibility or opportunity. And then you start like making the whole little bit bigger and bigger and bigger. But you know, like you're in charge of that. You can't just sit around and be like, you know what? I got five bucks in my pocket. Someone's going to come help me out. And I think like an investing, like you have to create opportunity for yourself in order to get returned.

Starting point is 00:39:43 So there is no waiting around. Yeah. And again, it's funny because a lot of my friends. are people like musicians who think, oh, finance is like this whole other thing that I will never understand. But actually, some of the best investors I know are musicians. So it's interesting how we just get kind of compartmentalized into these, how we look at ourselves that can be expanded. Absolutely. Until last year, I considered myself a writer, a writer, not an entrepreneur, not a business owner, not an investor. But recently, I made my first like investment into this

Starting point is 00:40:18 company and I was like, whoa, it's so funny because it's the same skill. It's curiosity. It's asking good questions. It's just doing due diligence. Like literally everything you need to do to be a good reporter is very similar of what you need to do to be a good investor. But it's like the label and that's why I'm so against like labeling yourself one thing is because it prevents you from being like, oh, I can be a writer and an entrepreneur, a writer and this other thing. People love boxes and I just, I hate it. I especially dug into the dossiers you wrote on billionaires, given that we study billionaires on this show.

Starting point is 00:40:57 And one of the billionaires that stood out to me was Daniel Eck, the founder and CEO of Spotify, and he uses this mental model called Maker versus Manager when scheduling his day. Walk us through what the Maker versus Manager framework is. So Daniel Eck is the founder and CEO of Spotify. And you think Daniel Eck, you're like, oh my God, that's a massive organization. He has thousands of employees. He must be extremely busy. And every minute of his time must be taken up.

Starting point is 00:41:28 That's actually not true. Like, he makes time to go on a walk, an hour long walk every day with his wife and kids. He spends time reading in the morning. And he says, I actually start my day around 10 a.m. And that's pretty crazy to hear, right? Like, you would think, like I start my day earlier than Daniel Eck, and I'm nowhere near as important. The reason is he basically, he limits his calendar to only three or four meetings per day. And the reason he does that is because he understands the value of unstructured time.

Starting point is 00:42:01 So he got this like maker schedule idea from Paul Graham, who he's written about it, but it's, you have a maker schedule versus a manager schedule. So when you're operating on a manager schedule, your calendar has all these. meetings that people put on there without asking for permission. They're like, okay, we need you in this meeting. We need you in this other meeting. Makers, on the other hand, they have a lot of time, big blocks of time to work on big thorny creative problems that can be solved with a meeting. So he prefers to have like two or three hours for that block or half a day or something like that because it allows him to think for longer periods of time.

Starting point is 00:42:45 If you look at your calendar and you only have 15 minute breaks in between meetings, it's very hard to be creative and to think of long-term projects that you want to work on. And the other thing that Daniel Eck does that not a lot of people do, which is so smart, is before you go into any meeting, he suggests like you ask yourself, what role am I playing? Sometimes, ECH is playing the role of CEO and approver, and I need to go in this meeting and just approve a bunch of things. Other times, he needs to be a participant. He needs to give feedback, ask questions, weigh in on certain issues.

Starting point is 00:43:21 But if you don't know the role that you're playing, you're not going to be effective in any meeting. So basically here, he says that a productive meeting consists of three elements. The desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time. Two, the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time. Like, what are the options that we can take from this meeting? And three, the roles of the participants are crystal clear and very well defined. So he's very intentional about how he spends his time and he doesn't let other people dictate it. Intentional is one of my favorite words.

Starting point is 00:43:55 And for a long time, I didn't realize what that word actually meant. And the best example that kind of clarified it for me actually came from when my wife started dabbling in interior design, because that's when I realized she was making choices, let's say, about a couch or a fabric for a couch, not because she just loved that fabric, but it also went really well with the paint on the wall and this lamp on the other side of the room, and everything tied together. Everything had a purpose, but not in a vacuum. Everything had a purpose within the grander scheme of the whole design. And you can apply this to life. We call it lifestyle design, which I'm a huge believer in. And so what I think you're ultimately touching on

Starting point is 00:44:38 there is something that is simple, but not easy. And you find that a lot with investing. Investing can appear to be very simple, but it's not often easy, especially if you follow the Warren Buffett way, right, just buy and hold. He definitely follows this maker principle because I've heard that his entire calendar is blank. He doesn't schedule any meetings. So he very much leaves room for himself to just explore and read and discover his next venture. So what might be some other examples of how we can incorporate this into our own lives? I think you have to be very, very clear again about your intentions, right? So before anybody ever sends you a meeting invite, you need to say, this meeting is for this purpose and this is the role that I will play.

Starting point is 00:45:22 So if you're playing the role of investor and an entrepreneur says, I join our Zoom for 30 minutes so we can talk about you potentially investing in our startup. You know I am here to a ask questions. And then you decide for yourself, am I going to come to a decision by the end of this meeting or not? If not, maybe it can be a shorter meeting. It's just like just by being aware of those questions and of your time. So recently, like we talked about my husband's Anthony Ponsiano and we talked about this a lot. But for example, I was spending a lot of my time with the profile doing things that I thought were

Starting point is 00:45:58 interesting, but they weren't necessarily growing the business. So he made me be like, all right, well, here's all the stuff on your calendar. Calculate how much money your time is worth. And when you break it down to like dollars per hour, you're like, oh my God. Like, I'm just giving this all way for free. So you have to be intentional about how you spend your time and whether the things that you're doing, you're just doing it to feel busy, not because they're actually productive for your business, or you're doing them because you're like, all right, I'm spending Monday, Wednesday, and Friday my mornings on diligence. I'm spending three hours of the day on solving a creative problem that I've been putting off for so long. But I just need time by myself without any

Starting point is 00:46:47 distractions. And you structure your day like that instead of leaving your calendar for people to be like, free for all, you can put as many meetings on there and then you end up not being effective at all. Daniel Eck also had a saying about basically flipping the corporate hierarchy pyramid on its head. What do you mean by that? I love that. So yes, he said that most leaders think of themselves at the very top of a pyramid. You hear this a lot. You're like, People say, culture is top down, like leadership is top down. And he actually took inspiration from the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines, who says that the right way is actually to flip that model. So as a leader, you should actually be at the bottom.

Starting point is 00:47:35 You flip the pyramid. You're at the very, very bottom of the pyramid. And X says, you should invert the pyramid and envision yourself as the guy at the bottom. You're there to enable all the work being done. That's my mental image. of what I'm here to do at Spotify. So he kind of sees himself as like a Sherpa, more so than like a dictator and like,

Starting point is 00:47:55 I'm going to run this business and I'm going to tell you what's up. That's why at these meetings, he actually enjoys being a participant and not the final approver because he feels like he's part of the process. He's enabling all the work that's being done at the company instead of telling everybody what to work on. Interesting.

Starting point is 00:48:13 I heard something similar about Jeff Bezos recently where he was usually the last, person to speak in a meeting. You'd have, you'd go around the table and have everyone give their opinion and their mind and then give his at the very end. It's just another interesting style of leadership. Because it colors, he knows that it colors people's perception of, oh, Jeff thinks that. Let me like try to impress him and say that I agree. I saw this in college when I was working at the college paper. I would cover these meetings where it was the president of the university and all of the deans around a table.

Starting point is 00:48:47 And it was so funny because somebody would say something that they didn't yet know that it would contradict what the president believed. And then when the president of the university spoke and he said the opposite thing, the guy would reel it back. I'd be like, oh, actually, you know what? You're right. And I was like, oh, just let everybody speak, see how they all feel. And then you speak because you're very much coloring and biasing these people

Starting point is 00:49:13 by offering your opinions so early on. There's another quote by Daniel Eck that I was curious about. He says, the value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve. Is he referring to solving the customer's problems, or is he talking about the internal company's problems? I do believe that he's probably talking about the internal company problems just because you are there to be a problem solver, not a problem creator. So you should aim to solve like really, really thorny problems.

Starting point is 00:49:43 it's kind of like when cases go all the way up to the Supreme Court, like those are the problems we need to focus on because they will act as like people will use this as an example of future, how to handle the future problems and arguments. So it's the same within a massive company. Like the problems that make their way to the top to Daniel Eck, those are probably the ones that are worthy of his time and attention. and those will then go back down and back up for people to understand how to handle future problems like that. So I'm interviewing Jim Collins pretty soon, and so I'm rereading good to great. And I found it interesting that you've taken it a step further in this article where you're talking about going from great to exceptional.

Starting point is 00:50:31 So who are the people that stand out as exceptional to you the most? It's the people who are not afraid to reinvent themselves and they don't see themselves as just one thing. The best example that I can think for this is Martha Stewart. I mean, nobody's done self-reinvention better than she has. And just purely out of, if you think about it, Martha Stewart was a brand that appealed to my grandmother. and then my mother and then me. Like, how is that possible? That's a multi-generational brand that's withstood the test of time.

Starting point is 00:51:12 And the reason is because the woman behind the brand whose name is, she's reinvented herself time and time again and she's taken those risks, right? Like there was a risk that it would fail, but she did it anyway. Martha Stewart took something that was considered women's work, gardening, cooking, cleaning, and made it into a billion-dollar business. And it was so fascinating, but people love to put her in a box. She was on top of the world. She had magazines, TV shows, books, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:51:42 And then insider trading. And she went to prison. And people were like, this is suicide. Like this is, you will never come back from this. Not only did she come back, her brand came back stronger. And then she knew like, okay, we're going to be cutting edge. Like, her magazines were the first to lay things out digitally. She experimented with all sorts of stuff.

Starting point is 00:52:07 And then she did a partnership with Snoop Dog where she did CBD and things like that appealed to my demographic. The reason I know who Martha Stewart is is because she still has great content. She's doing things that make sense for my generation. And just not afraid, no matter how old her brand is, to start over time and time and time again. And I really do think like a lot of people are great, but the truly, truly, truly exceptional people. Kobe Bryant, not just a basketball player. He became an entrepreneur, an investor in the final years of his life.

Starting point is 00:52:40 The things that people tell you, oh, you're just an athlete, you're not smart enough to compete with the big dogs or whatever, and you do it anyway. When you risk failure to reinvent yourself and then find success, like those are, I think those are the most exceptional people. And talk about reinventing yourself. Kobe went on to win an Oscar. Yes.

Starting point is 00:53:02 Storyteller, investor, entrepreneur, athlete. Like, it's a lot of things. Wrapping all this up, you've learned all of this from some amazing people, and you've gone on to start your own endeavor called The Profile. What has been your own personal learning through that experience? I think that every single person eventually gets to do something, whether it's a job or a career or something like that, where they're like, this is my dream. And they love it so much that they end up tying their

Starting point is 00:53:34 identity to their job title or something external that they do not control. I learned this when I graduated from college and all these professors and people had built up my ego so much to be like, of course you're going to get a job. You've done everything right. And one thing I learned is you can do everything right and things still won't work out the way you had planned them. So what I learned was when I graduated from college, up until that time, I always had sort of an external label that I tied my identity around. So whether it was student, editor of the college paper, intern at CNN and USA, like all these impressive titles that people were impressed by for no other reason than I worked there. So when I graduated, I had nothing. I had no title.

Starting point is 00:54:25 I was living at home. All my friends had jobs. And it made me realize, like, who the hell was Paulina? Like, I was like, I don't know. And it had this, like, crisis. And I promised myself then I will never again tie my entire identity as a human around something that external that I could lose. We do it with jobs.

Starting point is 00:54:44 We do it with relationships. We do it with, like, sports. And then you get injured. That's why, like, so many Olympians go home after the Olympics and they are depressed. And it's because, like, suddenly, I mean, what? you're like, has been. Like, there's somebody better than you, somebody who can do your job better. Your ex-boyfriend gets a new girlfriend. Like, it's just, you can't put yourself worth into somebody else's hands, right? When it's something that could be taken away from you. So in 2017,

Starting point is 00:55:12 when I was, when I started the profile as a side thing just for myself, and it was very important to me at the time that it's independent and that it had nothing to do with fortune and that fortune didn't own it, that Fortune didn't sponsor it, that none of that. I wanted it for myself. And the reason was because when you're at a place like Fortune Magazine with such a storied history, it's easy to be like, I would go into a party and be like, I'm Paulina, I'm a tech reporter at Fortune Magazine. I interviewed Melinda Gates last week. Like, what's your name? And people would be immediately impressed and like respect me, all this crap that isn't actually real. So with the profile, though, I did it under my own name and it had nothing to do with anything but me.

Starting point is 00:56:00 And that's really a powerful place to be because you approach it from a place of authenticity and like, this is who I am and I'll build my own reputation rather than relying on somebody else's reputation. So when I decided to leave Fortune in March of 2020, like right at the beginning of the pandemic, it's very hard for me to like reach a final decision. So I was going back and forth for a while. And then I wrote a dossier on Jim Cook who started Samuel Adams Beer. And he used to work at Boston Consulting Group.

Starting point is 00:56:33 And he was like, I was making good money. I was really comfortable. I was going to get promoted. But I really wanted to like try something on my own, which was like a brewery or like a brewing company, a craft brewing company. And he was like, I had no experience in beer. I didn't know what I was doing. So when he was, but like he was in. a position where he had a mortgage, he had a wife, and he had kids. Like, it's really hard to go from

Starting point is 00:56:57 a well-paying job with benefits to something unknown. And he says that the question that he asked himself that actually put him over the edge to do it is, is this decision scary or is it dangerous? If it's scary, you should do it. If it's dangerous, like, you shouldn't. But by looking through that frame is where you kind of realize, like, okay, so what are you scared of? He was scared of, telling his bosses, just like I was, scared to, you know, he would disappoint people, whatever. But it would be dangerous if he stayed because in like 30 years, they'll be like, okay, so are you happy with your life? And he'll like, damn, I really regret not trying that beer thing. And so if that's the case, like you should absolutely go pursue the thing that you

Starting point is 00:57:43 want to do, at least try it. You can always get another job or whatever. But if you don't try it, you live with the danger of like decade-long regret. And I think that that's worse than if you're just scared of jumping into something new. I love that. Okay, Polina, so before I let you go, I want to give you a chance to hand off to our audience where they can learn more about you. So your newsletter, your dossiers, your Twitter account, where can people fall along with all of this that you're writing?

Starting point is 00:58:11 Where can people follow along with your writing? You can find the profile, read the profile.com, or you can follow me on Twitter at Paulina underscore Maranova. This is fantastic and I can't wait to do it again. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. I love this and I love this podcast in general. All right, everybody, that's all we had for you this week.

Starting point is 00:58:32 If you're loving the episodes, please go into your favorite podcast app and follow us. That way you get it automatically on your phone every week. And don't forget to go to the Investorspodcast.com to check out all the amazing resources and courses we have for you there or just simply Google TIP Finance. And with that, we'll see you again next time. Broadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano

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