Comfort Is the Trap Keeping You Average. Here’s How to Break Out

First I engage, then I figure out what to do. I call that the Rockefeller Principle. Have you failed at least twice as much as any reasonable person could expect before you decide to move on? At least twice as much. But zeal had this specific meaning in ancient Greek. Zeal is a pain that is felt when we see in others great and admirable accomplishments that we are capable of but do not yet have. Don't assume that you have one passion in life and that when you find it, there's nothing else you can do. But you should follow passion. When you find something that you love, then doing it gives you energy rather than take energy. It's like a perpetual energy machine. We have more than enough everything. We just have a lack of vision. You would be shocked at how much you can get done with vision and nothing else.

We're zooming out a little bit today, and if you stick around, I promise you're going to be extremely inspired and motivated to get off your butt and to do something. I interviewed my friend Ben, who has a podcast that does nothing except dives deep on some of the greatest world leaders, conquerors, business people, CEOs, exceptional people that this world has ever known. And we break down today all the commonalities that he sees between all of them, from Julius Caesar to Steve Jobs and everyone in between. What is their playbook? What did they do differently that we can learn from today? So if you've ever been curious about what separates the good from the great, you will learn it in this podcast. Please enjoy what are like some common threads. So, first of all, you profile business leaders, world leaders, people in the arts. What would you say the buckets are of the people that you profile in your podcast?

Yeah, I was actually just thinking about this. I would say the big buckets are entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, conquerors and artists. You could break those down into smaller categories, but those are kind of the three bread and butter.

What ties all three of those categories together? What traits?

Well, I mean, on the most basic, what traits ties them together? I would say there are a few. Right. But the one that I've been thinking about a lot recently is communication at scale. Because you don't become great by working hard, you become great by getting other people to work hard.

What a good one liner. I need to marinate on that.

You can produce as a single person, no matter how great you are at what you do is very, very small, Right? You become great by inspiring others and by being a leader. I mean, leadership is really what connects all of them, right? And I think that is very true. I mean, artists, what they do is communication at scale, right? Which is why I think it's the one that people think kind of seems less intuitive than the others for taking over the world. But I think they share that trait, right? That is exactly what they do. They communicate at scale. They leave, they inspire others. So I think people don't understand the extent to which that is true. You look at someone like Julius Caesar, and he is the best, or the second best, depending on how you want to define it, but either the best or the second best writer of his day. It's either him or Cicero, right? Great, great writer. You look at Napoleon and the way that he got his start was actually not with a battle. It was by writing this pamphlet. He wrote this political pamphlet, and it gets the attention of people in Paris of the revolutionary government, and they say, hey, this guy's smart. Look at this. They start passing it around, and Robespierre says, hey, let's give this guy a shot. That's how he gets his start. Same thing with Alexander Hamilton. So, like great, great leaders, no matter the domain, learn to communicate effectively at scale. Whether that's through writing, whether that's through public speaking, they have a way to communicate with and inspire others.

Man, I've just never. I've never tied communication to, like, wealth. In this case. I just can't think of an exception where you wouldn't need to excel at that. Like, I'm just thinking of the 33 million businesses, not small, the 33 million businesses in America, like 30 or 32 of them have zero employees. It's why. Because most of them are not great in this sense. In the context of this conversation, they don't know how to communicate well enough to scale their idea, to scale their processes. You hear them saying things like, nobody wants to work anymore. Like, maybe you saw that viral tweet with this Guy went to newspapers.com and he searched for the phrase nobody wants to work anymore. And we've been saying that since newspapers were invented, you know, we still want to work. You just can't communicate what you want them to do or what you need them to do. Or what's that quote where it's like, if you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Who's that by?

Antoine de Saint Ex. I don't even want to try to.

Say his last name. Some French Author, French author. Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's exactly right. So you think about someone like Steve Jobs, right, And what he was so good at, among other things. You read, if you've read that book, Make Something Wonderful, Steve Jobs in his own words. It's just an entire book of his interviews, his emails, him in his own words. And one of the things he's so great at is capturing the context of what he's trying to do. He talks about things like, if you heard the bicycle of the Mind quote, he's talking, this is in the 1970s, and Apple, it's either the Apple one or the Apple II is launching. And so the idea of a personal computer is not obvious. And so he's on this interview and they're saying, you know, why a personal computer? Why should people even want a computer? And he talks about, he was reading in some magazine that they measured the efficiency of various animals. In other words, calories spent per mile moved. And humans are nowhere near the top. We're not in the top 20 in terms of efficiency of movement. Some swallow is number one, some bird. He says, but if you put a human on a bicycle, they shoot up to number one. They have the most efficient movement of any animal in the world. And he says a computer is just a bicycle for the mind. And such a good job of communicating in one little story the value of a personal computer. And he's doing exactly what you're saying. He's not telling people to go chop the wood. He is getting people excited about the vastness of the sea.

He's describing it in a way that they'll understand or comprehend. Using an analogy in this case. Oh, man, that is so good. Why do people like Elon Musk find so much success when he's like, admittedly has on the autism spectrum and is kind of a jerk sometimes and is very blunt and kicks people out of the room? Like, how does that translate to this point that you're making?

Well, I think if you look at someone like Elon in particular, he is great at this, right? He found SpaceX because he wants to go to Mars. And so you get some of the best rocket scientists in the world who, frankly, probably on an IQ level, are smarter than Elon Musk, but they buy into that big vision. The same thing with Tesla. Tesla was not just a cool car. Let's see if we can make a nice car. It was, no, let's save the world by transitioning to electric energy versus gasoline energy. I feel like that's maybe not as emphasized quite as much anymore. But that was really the pitch, and it was making electric vehicles cool. And Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney are buying early Teslas because they buy into this early vision. And so he is kind of autism spectrum. And you listen to him talk and he's not a great public speaker. And yet he has. This is why he is one of the world's most prolific tweeters, because he is great at communication at scale. He is great at getting that vision across. He's just learned to work within those limitations of not being a great public speaker. And you can see that across many, many people that you don't need to be a great communicator across every medium. You just need to find one way that's really effective for you that you can get your vision across.

I find that very encouraging because I'm an introvert and I do best with the written word. So a lot of times, if I need to have a difficult conversation with someone, I will just. I'll write them an email that's a mile long, right? And I'll rewrite it and I'll reread it and rewrite it. And by the time I send that email, it is the most beautiful piece pros that you've ever seen, Right? And it's like, if it's a. If I'm telling them something hard or difficult, I'll soften it and I'll smooth it and I'll make an analogy and it's kind of like this, and it's kind of like that. But if I just have like an on the spot argument or conversation with someone, I'm not great. You know, I'm not. That's not my wheelhouse. And so I do find it refreshing to know that, like, all right, even the best communicators that have ever lived may not have been great with different mediums. Right. And so they just, over time, they gravitated to the medium that was their bigger strength.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you can look at like Julius Caesar. Actually, Julius Caesar was a pretty good public speaker as well, but he was a phenomenal writer, as I said before. And so one of the things he was famous for at the time was he would be. The Coliseum wasn't built, but he'd be at gladiatorial games and he would not be watching the games. He would. He would be writing letters. The most prolific letter writer of his generation, Right? And he found that same thing. He was good at writing. And so he would just write and write and edit. And it was basically through all of these written letters that he managed, created and managed his empire.

Believe it or not, 67% of the people that watch my YouTube videos don't subscribe to me. And over 90% think that they're subscribed to me. So do me a quick favor and check that you're subscribed to me. If you're not, please do. It would mean a lot. Have you noticed a correlation between, like childhood events and how someone turned out, like basically what happened before they were 15 years old? Is there a correlation there?

You don't have the desire to take over the world if you're a completely well adjusted, normal, happy person. The way I phrased it is that people who achieve great things are often what I call insider outsiders. So they are in some way an insider. They do have access to the highest levels of authority. They have great opportunities. But in some ways they're an outsider. So you look at someone like Napoleon. Napoleon comes from a family of nobility, but very minor nobility. He's not even French, he's Italian. He comes from Corsica, a little island off the coast of France. And so he's got, you know, he's got an in with the government, he gets a royal education, but he is sort of an outsider. Alexander Hamilton, who's basically the same person as Napoleon, same thing. He comes from a small Caribbean island, Nevis, but he's also an insider. He gets to King's College now Columbia University. Julius Caesar is the same way. Genghis Khan is the same way. Even like an artist, like Picasso, who. His father is an artist and so he comes up with a great artistic education. But where does he make his way? Not in Madrid. Not in Barcelona. He starts in Barcelona, but it's in Paris. Right. Where he is sort of an outsider. And so they do have this kind of common background of insider outsiders.

Yeah. Are they trying to prove themselves, like in that, in that new sphere, or is there a chip on their shoulder that they're driven by?

Yes, there often is. But I don't want to overstate that too much. It's very obvious that they are. But sometimes I think these people are just addicts. So you look at someone like Thomas Edison. He did have a hard upbringing and his father was kind of hard on him. But I don't know. I don't know how far that can take you and how far it took him of like trying to prove daddy wrong to me. You look at Thomas Edison and it's just someone who's addicted to inventing. He just loves it the way that, like someone on the street is addicted to heroin.

I'm addicted to starting businesses.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He. He's reading this biography of Michael Faraday, who's a great inventor from the generation previous. At the time, he's unmarried, He's a telegraph operator. And so he kind of travels around and he boards with other telegraph operators. And so they get back from a late night of working and his roommate goes to bed and he's reading his biography of Michael Faraday. Comes out in the morning, Edison, still awake, still reading the same biography of Faraday, throws down the biography in disgust and Sundays, I'm already 23 and I haven't accomplished as much as Faraday. I'm going to hustle. And from that is when his entire perspective changes. And you can look at letters from his family from, like, the year after and they're worried about him. You can look at pictures from him.

You can.

He's gone. He's clearly not taking care of himself. He's not bathing, he's selling his possessions in order to fund his habit of, like, getting more wood, more wiring, more components to invent with. Like, this is a person. If you substitute inventing with anything else, it'd be very clear what he is, which is an addict. Like a literal addict. And so I think that is often. I think people want to look for childhood traumas because it makes a nice, nice movie, and that can be the case. But I think more often than not, these people are literally just addicts to what they do. And that addiction, that obsession, is what drives them over the top to become these great larger than life figures.

And there's a trade off, right? That addiction could manifest in not having a good family or having seven different spouses, or being addicted to alcohol, also drugs.

And I think that's one of the things that's troublesome about our era is that great personalities are addictive personalities. And we have never lived in a time period where it's more easy to get addicted to unproductive things, right? These are addicts to productive things. And so it's the type of personality who. You know, I grew up in the Bay Area, and you would sometimes meet these homeless people and you would hear their story and it was like, yeah, I have a PhD in physics from Berkeley, and now this guy's literally on the streets, right? And it's because it's that same type of personality. It's a very addictive personality. And they could have accomplished something great, but someone introduced them to one drug or another, and that's the direction that their addiction went. So I think if you have that type of addictive personality and you maybe could accomplish that kind of thing, you have to be very careful to cut those other things out of your life that could be distracting addictions as well.

Yeah. Well, I think of it also along the lines of dopamine, where I heard a quote that was like, chase the dopamine. That leads to action and not that leads to inaction. Right, right. Because we talk about dopamine and with a negative connotation. Oh. But it's like dopamine also causes you to go build a house or to, you know, chase a positive feedback loop and to do good things.

Right, right, exactly. I mean, you. They do lab experiments with rats where they can completely block their dopamine receptors and the rat doesn't do anything. Right. So dopamine is an extremely important cycle for human achievement. You just have to get it right. Focused on the. On the right flywheel.

Yeah. How much does confidence play a role with all these people?

Huge. Huge.

Is it everything or is it a major factor?

It's an essential factor. It's necessary. I was talking to someone about the essential elements of great leadership, and they said, humility. And I said, that's interesting because I don't see a lot of humility from the people that I cover on my podcast. But I thought about it some more and it's not that they're egotistical per se, but it's, you know, we just talked about, you don't become great by working hard. You get. You become great by getting others to work hard. And if you are not completely solid as the center of that universe that everything is orbiting around, then everything flies apart. If you don't have 100% confidence in yourself, then you never going to be able to get the buy in from other people to work on the project that you have in mind. So you need to have that just utter, unshakable confidence. Like one of my favorite confidence stories is Napoleon the Battle Marengo. Right. Which is he makes this big blunder. He thinks he's chasing an army and just attacking the rear guard, but really they've deceived him and it's their entire army. And so he splits his army to try and chase them. And so he accidentally attacks an army with like 100,000 people and he's only got 40,000. He quickly learns early in the day, oh, I'm pretty screwed. And so he's running all over the battlefield for the entire morning sends a message as soon as he can to the other half of his army, hey, come back. We need you. Come back. And so for the. The entire battle is just an entire day of Napoleon running along the line saying, don't break, don't break, don't break, don't break.

Yeah.

You know, don't turn and run. Because as soon as one person turns and runs, this entire line is going to crumble.

He.

Because he has that confidence and can inspire that confidence in others. They don't turn and run. So they, they're retreating the whole day, but they aren't turning and running. And then, of course, at the very end of the day, the other half of his army returns and they've been pushed off this battlefield over the course of an entire day. And then the other half shows up, they countercharge, and they, they win the battle in like a half hour. Again, if he doesn't have that supreme self confidence, then the whole thing kind of falls apart. That's true of conquerors and it's true of battle, but it's obviously true of entrepreneurship, it's true of art, it's true of athletes. It's true of everything. That self confidence is definitely essential.

You can't have a half measure. Like, he couldn't have done that just for like a little bit and then called it quits because he knows they would have bounced. Right. You almost have to be a little strategically delusional, if you will, like, 100%.

That is one of the things that you see. I call it strategic selective irrationality. Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

You've heard of the hot dog. Everyone knows the Costco hot dog and drink combo, right?

Yeah. It's irrational. Yes.

It's not rational. Right. Raise it to 50. It's still a great deal, right?

Yeah.

But it's selectively irrational. And all great leaders have that of if you're just rational in the narrow context, then you just end up compromising on your values and the whole thing falls apart. But you have to have that selective irrationality of like, no, we're keeping the hot dog and drink combo to a buck fifty, even if it doesn't make sense. And that's why you look at an airline like Southwest, and for the longest time it's been, hey, people finding their own seats is irrational. This is irrational. It doesn't make sense. And now they've done the rational thing and people can pick their own seats. And I think it's just going to, is going to go down the tube.

Because I didn't know they did that.

Yeah, yeah, they just, they got bought up by a, this private equity company, took a major minority stake and then forced them to do seat selection. But if you don't have that selective irrationality any business, you know, I know this is for small entrepreneurs, but you look at like, you can think of great restaurants, something like In N Out, and I would say the amount of man hours they spend cleaning the tables at In N Out is irrational. You go look at In N Out, tables are always clean. You think about how much that takes of someone's time to keep all those tables clean. It's irrational. But that's their values. That's what makes it differentiated and that's what makes them successful.

You have to be willing to play the long game and to believe chief shareholder needs to believe in that mission. And it kind of goes back to the reality distortion field that people said that Steve Jobs used to have where he would just say something ridiculous and own it. And it's kind of like Elon Musk saying in 2014, he's like, yeah, self driving cars will be ready in two years. Everyone's like, you're insane. And, and like he might even know he's insane. But he doesn't care that people think he's dumb. He cares about his employees and the mission. Like I'll run ultra marathons and I'll be like 87 miles into it and, and feel dead. And I'll be lying to myself the whole time saying, you're fine, you're fine, you're fresh, everything's good. And I'm lying, I'm out. I'm overtly lying to myself because I need that.

There's this great study. I believe it was swimmers. I believe it was college swimmers and they asked them embarrassing questions that everyone does. Okay. So for example, they asked them, do you ever pick your nose? Okay. And they had like a dozen questions like that. And what they found is that people who lied about all these like little embarrassing things had significantly faster swim times than people who were not willing to lie. And it is, it's just like you need to be able to hold those untruths in your head. That irrationality of. I know from an objective perspective that we can't do it, but we have to have the self driving car in two years. And so I'm going to will it into existence. I'm going to believe like I believe this lie. There's a small part of my brain that knows it, but there's a bigger part of my brain that believes it, even though I know that maybe it's kind of my imagination.

There's just so much power in saying anything with a lot of confidence and conviction.

Yeah.

Whether it's a complete lie. Because I could say there is a dinosaur at my front door right now, a real dinosaur, and I could just say it in the most convincing way and you'd be like, 80%. He'd be like, that's full. He's full of crap. What are these? And then be like, I don't know though. I don't know. He seems pretty serious.

I'm like, I really think this is true. Even of kind of small businesses, the types of things that people in your audience are probably looking at starting. But you see just the guy with the home services business who really has that conviction, that belief of, no, we are going to be the best. The most professional window install business in Texas or whatever it is. We are going to provide the best value for your buck. For car washes in northern Arizona, whatever. But they have this like delusional belief and other people look at it from the outside and they say, how are you galvanizing people around this? This is a car wash business. But.

But he doesn't care about those other people at all.

Exactly. He's just got that delusional belief of, no, we, we have to do it the right way. We have to be the best. And then they, they achieve remarkable success in those markets because they have that delusional belief.

Yeah. Well, just imagine Elon musk if like 10 years ago they had extra subsidies for selling electric cars and then they did away with it. Imagine if he stands up at an all hands meeting is like, well, guys, they did away with the subsidy, so our cars overnight are $7,500 more expensive. And our mission to not rely on fossil fuels anymore. I don't know, it's kind of in question. We'll do our best. We'll see what we can do. Like, how would they take that?

Right, right, right, right.

He can't say that. He doesn't even believe that.

Right.

He's gonna be like, I don't care. Oh, you think I care about that? That's fine. Good. Bring it. You know, Changes nothing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

If someone's listening or watching this and they don't feel like they have that confidence, don't tell me it's nature. How can someone nurture that? How can we build that?

Well, I think it's one of those things where sometimes action precedes belief, where you just act like you believe and going through the motions on some level helps you to believe. If you don't have it within yourself, I really think that's the best way to do it. Act like you believe and you act like you believe for long enough. And I think it seeps into your bones. I basically think that's the answer.

You find your testimony in the bearing of it, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Now, this is like a total leading question because I'm obsessed with the, with the concept of having a bias for action. So is that a common thread amongst all these people having a bias for action, or are some people more thoughtful about it and more like they're better planners and that planning is directly correlated to their success?

I think one of the great examples of bias for action is the Wright brothers because they're the first to fly. Right. Late 1800s and a lot of people are working on flight. And if you had been betting on someone to be the first to fly, you would have bet on this guy. What's his first name? Charles. I think Charles Langley. And Langley is. He's the head of Smithsonian. He's got tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, which at the time is millions and millions, millions of dollars in 20, $25. And the Wright brothers are these bike shop mechanics. And the one thing that they did that was so different from everyone else was they had this insane bias for action, which was, okay, we can't fly, no one can fly. Everyone's coming up with these complicated plans, but what is the smallest thing that we can do?

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And so they come up with these kites, with these human sized kites, which is essentially, they go to North Carolina, where there's a ton of wind all the time because it's right on the. On the ocean. And they basically have an airplane with no engine and it's attached to a rope, and they go to a hill and so they can just kind of like get a person on a kite. So that way they can feel the wind, they can feel what it's like to fly. And so they start iterating, iterating and iterating. And they go through dozens of iterations on kites and then on gliders. Once again, just kind of getting pushed off a hill and gliding down. And then once they have gone through all these dozens of iterations, they slap an engine on it and what do you know? It flies. And so everyone else is step one, plan research. And their step one is just build something, get in the air, and their approach wins. And no one else is even close, right? So, yeah, it is this common attribute of they have this insane bias. Racking Napoleon has this great quote. It's one of the ones I try and remember the most, which is, he says, first I engage, then I figure out what to do. So his step one was not like, plan, this incredible battle plan. It was, okay, make contact with the enemy, engagement. Okay, are we engaged? We're fighting the enemy. All right, now, now let's see what to do. But because that was his, his approach, he was always wrong footing the enemy, right? Because he was always the one with the initiative. He was the one that's like, can the guy just chill? Right? He's always engaging us before we're ready. Because he didn't have a battle plan yet, but he engaged and then he figured out what to do.

Well, I used to have an LLC that was RFA Ventures, and it stood for Ready, fire, aim.

Yeah, yeah, perfect.

What you said reminds me of this image of what a minimum viable product should look like. And if you're listening, the top image is a wheel, two wheels, a car, and then like a car with a roof. And that's the wrong way. A minimum viable product is a skateboard. Skateboard with a handle to a bike, to a motorcycle, to a car, right? Like, what is the base thing that we can do today to remove friction and to just if. If nothing else, like show ourselves and prove to ourselves that we're making progress. Because that momentum just compounds, Right?

Yeah, exactly. It's getting something in the air. It's getting a product in people's hands. It's making contact with the enemy and getting some battle experience.

Do you have any examples of someone that has been the best in their field and has not, like, traded everything for it? Right. Like the cost of greatness? Who had the best work, life balance, so to speak?

Well, one of the ones that I've been thinking a lot about recently is Roger Federer, the tennis great. And one of the quotes I like, I can't remember who it's by, but someone talking about his game, and he said, roger Federer is one of the few people who doesn't just play the ball, he plays with the ball. And he seems to be the only tennis great who remembered that tennis is a game. I think that's one of the things that can substitute for this just sort of maniacal focus is a sense of play. And I think that when great founders, great conquerors, great artists have that sense of play, then it allows them to not give up everything because. Because they don't have to. Right. Because it's play. So they. They find themselves coming back to it and enjoying it.

Yeah. It reminds me of me just like tinkering with all kinds of business ideas, you know, and just being mad at myself because I couldn't focus on just one thing. And then over time, as compounding does its trick, like you build something cool, you know, let's talk about the timing. Like, how important is timing when it comes to these people? Or if you take Andrew Carnegie and plop him down today, is he going to be just as, if not more successful?

Timing is everything. Timing is everything. Like, if you want to be da Vinci today, you know, I'm sorry, but that's just. The visual arts is not where you're going to make your name as an eternal artist like Michelangelo or da Vinci or even Picasso. And so I do think you have to find that match of your abilities and the market that makes sense right now. Again, if you want to be Genghis Khan, go hang out in Mongolia and see what trouble you can make. But it's just not going to happen. The timing is really essential. History is littered with people who had the wrong idea or the right idea at the wrong time. That's the same thing as having the wrong idea. Having the right idea at the wrong time just really. It doesn't get you anything.

Yeah, on one hand, it's like you could say, take more time to figure out, like, what you should do based on the timing of things. And on the other hand, you could say, test everything and the timing is going to hit on one of them. Right?

That's exactly right. I think when you find the thing that makes sense, there's a sort of natural attraction. There's this pull that you feel. And when the timing is not right, then you just feel a continual, like barriers, Right?

Yeah.

Never clicks. You think about the company Polaroid, and Polaroid is called Polaroid because it was founded on creating and manufacturing polarized material. And everything that Edwin Land, the Polaroid founder, had in mind for that just didn't work. He wanted to polarize windshields and airplanes and like, and all this stuff. He wanted polarized material everywhere. And it just, you know, he made some money just because he was so determined, but it never turned into what he hoped or believed for it. And then the second he finds instant photography, it's like the world opens up for him and he's just raking in cash. So the timing is everything.

It's interesting because you hear a lot about focus. And Steve Jobs said focus is saying no to hundreds of things. Right? And I used to look at focus in the entrepreneurship sense as like focusing on one thing, right? But what if you're focusing on the wrong thing, right? Or the wrong timing of a thing, right? Then the opportunity cost of that focus is very, very high, very expensive, right? Or you could look at focus as focusing on the superpower. Focus focusing on your ikigai, something that you love, something that you're good at, something that you could charge for instead of trying to spread yourself too thin. I'm doing payroll. I'm doing my accounting stuff. I'm doing this like I'm doing marketing. Whether that's in this business or that business, I am a really, really good marketer. I'm going to focus on that. It brings me energy, it pulls me. It doesn't feel like a chore. I'm just recently, I'm obsessed with the principle of focus with regards to your skill and your super power, as opposed to a thing that you're doing, right? Yes.

But I also think that focus focusing on the wrong thing can be great because what you see from a lot of these people. So for example, the Wright brothers, they get insanely focused on two or three things before they find flight. So the first one is actually newspaper printing. And so they. They go all in on that. They're completely focused. The Timing is not right for that type of business in that area of Ohio they're in. And then they go to the bicycle shop and actually they do do really well in cycling, but there's kind of a fad of cycling. It becomes huge, and then it becomes not quite as big for a while. And so they go through cycling and then they get into flight. You can see the same thing with, like, Thomas Edison, who has a business selling newspapers on trains at first, and then, you know, the next thing and the next thing. So a lot of times people think, oh, well, I don't want to focus on the wrong thing, so I need to dabble in a lot of things. But when you dabble in a lot of things, you never really figure out any of them. And so what you see is these people are serial focused. They do focus on just one thing, but they don't have any trouble when they realize that the opportunity is not right, the timing is not right, or it wasn't exactly what they thought, and they're maybe not. It's not as good of a fear they thought. They just leave it behind and then they move on and focus on something new until they find the right thing.

But would you say the Wright brothers were focusing on newspapers and bicycles partly because they loved it and it brought them energy?

Yes. Correct. 100%.

It made it. It was easy to focus on it.

Correct. Yeah.

I think people should pay, pay attention to those signals, like, all right, I'm going to buckle down, I'm going to. I'm going to write all these cold emails. I'm going to focus on this. And like, you just get nothing from it. You're not getting signals that they're working. You don't enjoy doing it. And it's like sometimes we watch things on social media and, like, I got to stick it out, I got to grind it. Yeah. Maybe if you directed that marketing focus on a different channel.

Yeah.

You would love it and. Or it would be more effective. That's right.

That's right. Yeah. I can't think of a single person that I have covered and I've read about who has achieved true greatness by gritting their teeth and sucking it up and doing something they hated. You can find some success doing that, you know, but you're never going to be great.

Yeah. I hope that's encouraging to people listening to that. Like, maybe it's discouraging to some based on the stage of life that they're in, but, like, we should like what we're doing in 2025 we should especially like what we're doing. We have more optionality than we've ever had.

That's right. And you're just going to find more success because you talk about focus. And if I were to look at a single physical attribute of what makes people great, is it they're taller, they're short? Obviously not. Okay. Is it that they're the most intelligent? That's a physical attribute. Like, do you literally just have the smartest brain? And that's not the answer, actually. Generally the people who take over and are the greatest in any given domain are extremely intelligent. But they're not always or even usually the most intelligent. What they are is the most energetic, they have the most energy. They are just relentless in the amount of energy. And when you find something that you love, then doing it gives you energy rather than taking energy. Right. It's like a perpetual energy machine. And so that's why people who find what they love always win, is because the amount of energy that they can dedicate to the thing is so much greater than people who are doing it for other reasons.

That is so good. Conversely, it makes me think every now and then we run across someone. What did Trump call Jeb Bush? Low energy. Jeb.

Yeah, right.

We run across those people and it's like we just feel tired after talking to them. And it's like, holy crap, do you find joy in anything? And it's like, maybe they, maybe they just hate what they do.

Yeah.

And what they do has zapped all that energy from them. And maybe if you put them in front of a Rubik's Cube or something, they light up the room like something random. They just find so much joy from it. It's like their energy is a signal that, that signals out. Do they actually love what they do or not?

Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.

I mean, it answers the age old question of do you follow the profit or do you follow passion? Right. Because I've heard both. Are you follow your pat. Like that's the old trope, right? Follow your passion. Hey, when you graduate from high school, just follow your passion. And then it's like, no, no, no, don't follow your passion. There's no money in that. I don't get a liberal arts degree. There's no money in that. Well, it's like, sure, not following your passion is not scalable. Okay. Can you do it forever? Yeah, but it's probably going to be a sucky life. And like, we don't live in the 1400s. Like, especially if you're born in America, there's not a lot of excuses to have a perpetually sucky life anymore, period. Right?

Right.

I'm in the middle of nowhere, Missouri, and I pull into a hardware store, and these. This. There's no opportunity in this town. And this couple's making $700 a day selling homemade pizzas from a $400 pizza oven. They have so many excuses to be poor and to live in a trailer park, and they're making six figures. Right. Like, anyway, I'm rambling, but we should chase the energy, Follow the energy. And, like, you literally should follow your passion. Like, you might need to eat crap for a while. I knocked doors for two years. Like, that was hard. But, like, now I can follow my passion, and I do because it gives me energy.

I think the problem with saying follow your passion is the assumption that you have a passion, that you have one passion. I think follow passion is a better way to put it. Like, you lean into things that you're passionate about and look for more opportunities there. But don't assume that you have one passion in life and that when you find it, there's nothing else you can do. But you should follow passion.

Oh. And you should. You should experiment with more stuff. Like, you should find out what you're passionate about. I just started mowing the lawn. I've been hiring out my lawn care for 15 years, and I bought my own mower, and I fricking love it. It's awesome.

Yeah.

I have a new passion. Like, I started playing chess just, like, two years ago. It's awesome. If I never tried chess, I never would have known that, you know.

Exactly. Are you following your passion when you're doing those things? Well, I think what you're doing is. And the better way to frame it is you're living a passionate life. You have many things in your life that you are passionate about, and I think that's important.

I'm chasing energy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Grit and resilience. Surely that's high on the list of commonalities, right?

Yeah. My favorite grit story is from John D. Rockefeller, which is he just knows. Okay. I come from kind of this podunk background. I had a hard family life. My dad's not around and can't show me the way I want to work. He lives in Cleveland, which is like a big. It's a boom town at the time, and he just knows he wants to work in a big affair is what he says in a big business. And so he qualifies what he thinks are the big businesses.

Quick question. What if there were a private community out there of people that were building businesses based on this podcast? Well, I just made it. And it's only for business starters and business builders, it's called TK owners. And it's basically like having me and 100 other business geniuses as your business partner. Also, there's going to be exclusive new trends, growth hacks, business ideas, and a database of everything I've ever talked about. You'll find thousands of startup case studies. You'll have weekly ask me anythings with me while I'll answer your questions directly. You can join now@tkowners.com link in the show notes.

So he says, you know, you have to be in X or Y or Z industries and you have to make this much money. And so he lowers it down to the, like, 30 companies in Cleveland that are big businesses that he'd like to work for. And so he goes and he interviews with every single one, and every single one says, not interested. You just have to think about, like, what the average person does in that circumstance, which is, all right, I had a plan and the plan did not work. So what's plan B? That's what most people start doing. They start thinking about plan B. Instead, he goes, all right, I know this is what I want. Goes interviews with him a second time. All of them say no again on his third go through. Finally, one of them says, all right, like, more than anything, so that you'll stop knocking on our door. We'll give you a chance. Sure. Have a little internship. And that's, you know, then he becomes John D. Rockefeller, starts his rise. It's literally a straight line from there to becoming the wealthiest man in the world. So I call that the Rockefeller principle, which is if you know what you want, and that's a big if, but if you know what you want, have you failed at least twice as much as any reasonable person could expect before you decide to move on? At least twice as much. Like, just think about what a reasonable person would say, all right, now you should move on just two, three times that much failure before you move on. So grit and resilience is like a huge part. Every single person has a business near death experience. All these great achievers, right. All of them have unbelievable setbacks that they make their way through. And so you just have to be willing to embrace the suck and fight through it.

Yeah. Which is like the opposite of follow your passion, but it's not one or the other. Right.

I don't think it is the opposite, because like, if what you're fighting through for is more suck, you're never going to do it, you know?

Yeah.

If the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is just like another is a job you hate is just money, I don't think you're willing to do it. But if you are passionate about it, then you're going to be relentless and you are. You are going to fight through.

And if you find yourself not being relentless in your job or whatever it is, then it's a signal that you're not passionate about it.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

Oh, man. How can someone build grit or resilience? Like, what do you do? You just go fail.

Like, that's one of the ways. So both of us are LDs, both of us serve missions. Right. One of the things that really helped me was as a missionary, you experience a ton of failure and rejection. Like, that's the biggest shock, I think, for most missionaries is just the amount you get rejected. And I was really struggling with that early in my mission. And one of the things I did early on that really helped me was I set a failure goal, which was literally, I need to get rejected 20 times today. And what it does, rewires your brain a little bit. Where you knock on a door and a person says, not interested, slams the door. And where before that gave you, like, yeah, it was pain. Now like a small part of my brain is like, oh, check, I'm one step closer. Right. I got. That's one of my 20 rejections that I need. And so I think that understanding that rejection is a part of the process, embracing it as a part of the process can really help.

Especially when you learn that, you know, every 20 no's equals one yes. Then it's like, all right, I had 40 no's. Statistically speaking, two yeses are right around the corner.

Exactly.

Right?

Yeah, that's right.

If. If someone wanted to start or grow a local business, like very specifically, what one or two or three historical figures would you have them really just dive deep on?

Rockefeller would be one. Right. Because this is someone who basically starts with a local concern, very blue collar, very like working with your hands. And you can see how that goes from that to scaling what was the largest business in the world at the time. I would say John D. Rockefeller. Who else would I say? I would say Phil Knight. Once again, it's literally importing someone else's shoes and selling them out of the back of your van at track meets. Then to Nike becoming one of the biggest businesses in the world. And then I would just say, whoever inspires you.

And if that's wherever you find energy.

From, wherever you find energy. And if that's Alexander the Great and it has no bearing on your business whatsoever, I think that's gonna be a worthwhile pursuit that's gonna give you more energy to like go out there and do great at your shoe shining business. Even though it has no resemblance to what Alexander the Great accomplished in his life. I can't remember if it's Socrates or Aristotle, but he has a quote about zeal. The word zeal, okay? And we have a certain. When we think of the word zeal, we just mean someone who's zealous, someone who's like really passionate about something. So I'm fired up. But zeal had the specific meaning in Greece, which was. He defines it as zeal is a pain that is felt when we see in others great and admirable accomplishments that we are capable of but do not yet have. There's this feeling you get when you read about great people, especially great people, that you resonate with, that you think that's someone who's kind of like me in character. They've accomplished way more than I have. But, like, I kind of do. I feel a connection with this person. And it's this, this insane energy that. That's one of the other things that links all these great achievers is all of them have looked to history and found an example that they were competing with and that they really believed with and drew a ton of inspiration from. So I think finding that feeling of zeal again, he just describes it as a pain. You hear that in Thomas Edison. He's reading about Michael Faraday and he goes, oh, he accomplished so much by 23. I'm already 23 years old. I haven't accomplished anything. Julius Caesar does the same thing. He's looking at a statue of Alexander the Great, breaks down in tears, says, you know, I'm already. How old is he? He's like 34. Alexander the Great had conquered the world by my age. I haven't done anything. And then he starts his rise. You can see it. You know, Steve Jobs was obsessed with Edwin Land. Everyone has this person that they're looking to this. This historical inspiration that they draw their energy from.

Alex Hormozy talks about seeing, like, Kylie Jenner on the COVID of Forbes and seeing that she was like the youngest billionaire ever. He's like, what? Freaking Kylie? Like, how? What did she do? And he's like, oh, she had an audience. I need an audience because he. He wanted to be a billionaire. I need. And then like, he went on this warpath of building an audience.

You know, while we're talking about inspirations, I also really like the idea of anti inspirations, where there are podcasts that I will listen to just because they will sometimes pass me in the charts and I think they're terrible. This is something Bach would do. The great composer Johann Sebastian Bach, which is before he sat down to compose, he would always rifle through some music that he didn't think was very good because he would start generating ideas in his head of like, I would do this better, I would do this better, I would do this better. And then that just starts to juice. Whereas if you're looking at music that you think is great, you know, like the generation before him are kind of concurrent with him is like Handel. If he's looking at Handel or Vivaldi, he's going to start thinking, well, this is kind of tough to compete with. And so he would look at bad music to get his creative juices flowing. And the same thing sometimes, not all the time, not that often. But I will listen to bad podcasts because as a podcaster, it gets me thinking, like, oh, okay, I can do better than this. I can do better than this. And it gets me creatively inspired.

Yeah, that's so true. I mean, I used to have an e commerce fulfillment business and like the. The big name was Shipbob, and they did everything right, seemingly from the outside. And I would just look up to them. Man, I should be more like them. And then there were all these fly by night guys. He's like, this guy doesn't have a website. This guy didn't. And like, half of the things that, like, I was criticizing him for, I wasn't doing either. And it was like kind of like this passive aggressive reminder to myself, like, yeah, Chris, you're not doing that either. And then it kicks my butt in the gears. I don't want to be like that guy. I want to be like that guy.

Right, right. Yeah, you need to have both perspectives.

It's kind of like in racquetball or like in any like one on one sport, you want to. You want a partner that's about your level. You want someone that kicks your butt every time, and then you want someone that you kick their butt every time.

Exactly. Yes.

And you can kind of, if you always play someone that's about at your skill level, then neither one of you will really improve.

Right, right. And it's like, it's so true. You see it in all three that they have respect for the greats, they have derision for those that they think are not professional and don't have standards. And then they have this group of peers that they compete with. You can think of that with someone like Bach or Picasso in art. You can think of that with someone like Napoleon or Caesar in conquering. You can think of that with like Phil Knight or Steve Jobs in entrepreneurship. You think of it in sports, like at every level. You need all three of those.

That's so good. Well, Ben, is there anything that I should like, Any story you wanted to tell that I missed or any question that I should have asked? I didn't.

I just want to like touch one more time on this idea of. I think the greatest resource constraint in the world is vision. Like that is the thing. We have more than enough money and we have more than enough energy and we have more than enough everything in the world. We just have a lack of vision. And you would be shocked at how much you can get done with vision and nothing else. And to me, the greatest historical example of that is Joan of Arc who she comes along in the 1400s. England has taken over half of France. And the France that is left is like they don't even hold Paris. It's just like a little rump state. And she believes that she has seen visions and she has no experience. She's 16 year old girl, she has no experience, she has no martial ability, she has no strategic ability. She has nothing except for incredible vision and just 100% commitment to her vision, which is actually the English are winning and we're losing and we have nothing. But our strategy is we march straight at the English in every battle and all she has is vision, but it gets everyone marching to the beat of the same.

Reality distortion field is a reality distortion field.

Everyone buys in, everyone's behind her and she wins, she wins. You know, she's the one, she's standing right by the, the dauphin, the, the prince when he gets king, crowned king of France. And she has nothing going for her except for vision. I think that's just so true in whatever you do. It can be the smallest thing. You can be an entrepreneur with the smallest business. But vision is the thing that makes the difference between great achievement and great success and failure. So whatever you're doing, just if you really buy into and believe in that vision, I think that's the, that's the difference.

How do you flex that muscle? How do you build that? I think you have to start with something that you truly believe in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it has to start from a sincere place.

Yeah.

And then I think you.

Let's say you have that.

I think you just have to get in the habit of repeating it to others too.

I think it's important to put yourself out there and maybe first to yourself.

Maybe that's where you start. But to others, and I think that takes courage. It can be embarrassing at first.

Yeah.

To admit that you have, you know, like, let's say that you are a small service provider and you do say, like, no, I want to be the best. I want to be the most professional. I provide the most value. I want to. Whatever, whatever your vision is, it can be embarrassing. But I think you just have to get in the habit of just doing it, of just repeating it.

I mean, like, imagine if you have like a pressure washing business and you go to a dinner party and like, oh, what are your goals? It's like, I don't know, like, I kind of like to be like the biggest pressure washing business in dfw. Oh, okay. That guy's gonna walk away from me. Like, I don't know if he's got it right or. Same conversation, same two people. What are your goals for your business? I'm going to be the biggest pressure washing business in dfw. That guy, he might freaking do it. This guy might just do it. All it is, is like how he said it right.

But it's, it's. There's a great example of this in Mission Impossible 3 where Tom Cruise, you know, a secret agent, and so he's pre. He's pretending at this dinner party with his wife, like a traffic analyst. He works for the government and he analyzes traffic patterns. And he's talking with this group and this girl says, all these couples, she says, what do you do? He says, I'm a traffic analyst. He says, it's the most amazing thing. He's using all his Tom Cruise charisma. It's amazing. One tap of the brakes can affect traffic patterns for miles and he walks away. And all the women go, I'd marry him. Me too. You know, and you bring that, like, that vision, that passion to something, even if people otherwise consider it boring. And passion is, is always infectious. Vision is always infectious.

Oh, that's so good. And if that man truly loves his job analyzing traffic patterns, he's probably going to describe it that way.

Yeah.

And if he doesn't, then he won't because it's not authentic. Right? That's right.

So that's it.

That's.

That's my last thing.

Man, that's so good. So many clippable moments of this. I just kept hitting that button on Riverside. Well, Ben, where can we find you? Where should we listen to you?

How to Take over the World. Wherever you get your podcasts. And that's it. Follow me on X Wilson tweets, which I guess is an outdated handle at this point, but that's what it is.

Okay. The Walt Disney episode is my personal favorite.

Awesome. That's one of my favorites, too. I love the story of Walt Disney.

Well, thanks for coming.

All right. Thank you.

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