Biography Edition: Leading Like a Legend: Entrepreneurial Insights from Alexander the Great

Welcome to the Profitable Painter Podcast, Biography Edition, where we delve into the lives of some of history's most successful individuals to uncover the strategies, tactics, and mindsets that propel them to greatness. Today, we're exploring the extraordinary life of a figure whose unyielding ambition has allowed his name to carry on for over 2,000 years. So join me as we navigate the journey of this remarkable individual and extract invaluable lessons you can apply to elevate your professional painting business. Get ready to be inspired, to learn, and to transform the way you think about success and leadership in your own entrepreneurial journey. So over the last week or so, I've been reading Alexander the Great by Arrian. So Arrian was a Greek historian back in Roman time, and he was infatuated with Alexander the Great, and he wrote this biography of Alexander the Great. And Alexander the Great was an ancient Macedonian ruler, and one of history's most legendary military leaders. He was born in 356 BC in Macedonia, and his dad was King Philip II and his mom was Queen Olympias. And he became a king at age 20 after his father was assassinated, and he's been renowned for his unparalleled ambition. Alexander ended up embarking on an unprecedented military campaign through Asia and northeast Africa, and by the age of 30, he had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from Greece to northwestern India. Alexander was not only a military genius, but he was also a student of Aristotle, and he embraced learning and culture. Despite that, uh, his untimely death at 32, Alexander's conquests spread Greek culture throughout the known world significantly influencing the subsequent history of Europe and Asia, and his legacy endures as a symbol of visionary leadership and tactical brilliance. He's a pretty interesting character to dive into. One of the key things is that he has just this insatiable hunger for, for fame just from the early onset. And this is a quote from, from the book: His passionate desire for fame implanted in him a pride and a grandeur of vision which went far beyond his years. And this started, you know, in his teenage years. He was— he had these seeds of greatness in him. He wanted to basically take over the world from an early age, and he had a huge vision. So I think that's one of the things we can take away from Alexander the Great is don't limit your vision. I think Grant Cardone, he wrote the book 10x, The 10x Rule. And that's what he kind of says, you know, take your goal and always 10x it. I think Alexander the Great probably like 1,000x'd it. But, uh, one of the quotes from the book: he had no desire to inherit a kingdom which offered him riches, luxuries, and the pleasures of senses. His choice was a life of struggle, of wars, and unrelenting ambition. So he just never stopped. He just was always going, which we'll get into here in a second. But as far as his early life, this is a quote from the book: Philip, his dad, had noticed that his son was self-willed and that while it was very difficult to influence him by force, he could easily be guided towards his duty by an appeal to reason. Philip actually, you know, he saw this in his son and he wanted to foster the capability of being able to reason. And so he actually got like the— he got the best person he could find to tutor his son, which was Aristotle. So that's pretty crazy. You get like the most famous Greek philosopher to tutor your son one-on-one. Alexander got that one-on-one tutorship from Aristotle. And one of the quotes from the books, it says, and so Philip sent for Aristotle, the most famous and learned of the philosophers of his time, and rewarded him with the generosity that his reputation deserved. You know, this kind of fostered the, the love of literature that Alexander had. He, he loved The Iliad by Homer, and he always carried around that book with him throughout his life. He would take it on him on the campaigns he went, and he actually had a copy that was annotated by Aristotle himself that he would just have with him all the time and refer to. And he was very inspired by the characters in The Iliad. Especially Achilles. He also— his mom kind of told, basically encouraged that kind of thinking, and even told Alexander that he was, you know, a part god. So he had this kind of otherworldly sense of himself and that he was destined for big things. Education was huge for Alexander. So not only did he have this big vision, but he was, he was very smart, and he he knew a lot of things. He had studied, you know, the, the great military commanders of the past and, and battles and things. So he knew, he knew a lot. So his, his dad is, is assassinated when he turns 19, and at this point Alexander becomes the king. However, whenever there's any kind of transfer of power during these days, it's, it's a, it's a time of great risk. So he basically goes, takes the army and starts to quell some uprisings throughout Greece. So he's up in Macedonia, he goes down to, down south to Thebes, Athens, and all these different places, and he's basically fighting other Greeks and getting his own territory under control. And his plan is basically to get home straightened out so he can go to the east and take over Persia, which is— Persia was like the biggest enemy of Greece back in these days, and he had this goal of taking over the world, and it started with Persia. But first he went to Greece and got things under control. And that was something about Alexander— he faced challenges head-on. And here's a quote from the book: Nevertheless, Alexander believed that these difficulties actually made the capture of the city even more essential as such unexpected success would strike terrible fear into his enemies, whereas failure would bring disgrace upon him. So basically, whenever there was a challenge— and there was many challenges because he went, he conquered this vast area from Greece all the way to India— there was all these different challenges, and he would, oh, he would kind of get excited with the challenge, and he would face it head-on. He would never shy away from things that were really hard. I mean, he was taking on the Persian army, for example. Whenever he went into the battle against the Persians, they often outnumbered him at least 2 to 1 using the low estimates of the Persian force. It was like the Persians would always outnumber the Macedonian and Alexander by 2 to 1. And then he would also just take over crazy places that you would think would be impossible to take over. For example, there's this one area off the coast of Lebanon, modern-day Lebanon, it's called Tyre Island, and it's basically, it's an island and it has these huge walls that surround the island. Alexander had a great army, but he didn't actually have really a navy. He kind of had a navy, but not really. The Persians had a way better navy than he did, But he had to take over this, this island, and he didn't have a navy to really attack it, so he had to use his, his land force. And so what they ended up doing was he tried to get them to submit to him without doing a battle, but they wouldn't. The Tyre Island leadership was like, no, you can't take us over anyway. Nebuchadnezzar tried, and we were able to withstand that, so we're, we're good. We're not gonna you know, submit to you. So Alexander the Great ended up building this bridge out. It was like a mile from the mainland out to the island. And during this process, you know, he had to problem solve so many things because the Tyre Navy started attacking the people who were making the bridge. And so he had to build protection to protect his guys who were building the bridge. And then the Navy started throwing firebombs at the bridge and burning it. And so then he had to to go and actually get a navy to attack the Tyre navy. And then it was just problem after problem that he had to problem solve. So he wasn't afraid of challenges, and then he was always problem solving these challenges. He ended up taking over that island even though he didn't really have a navy to start with and there was no bridge to get there. One example of many where he's just going around and doing these crazy things that nobody is expecting. Very bold maneuvers, and people are always super surprised of the things that he's doing. And he also had a tremendous resilience. And here's one of the quotes from the book: For besides all his other hardships, he had recently been wounded below the knee by an arrow which splintered the shin bone. And so he was always getting hurt in these battles because he's leading from the front. I mean, he's not like just in the back like doing the strategy or whatever. He's actually leading the main part of his force, and he's getting wounded, but he's fighting through wounds. He's constantly just dealing with that. Here's another quote from the book: Alexander just kept coming on and on. The freezing cold and the starvation made it a tremendous task, but they couldn't stop him. So he, you know, they're going through the deserts, they're going through huge mountains, it's cold. And he's always pushing his, his, his troops. And that's another thing, is that every army that he's facing as they're taking over all these different places, they're always surprised. Every single time, they're always surprised at the speed at which Alexander would show up or do a counterattack. They were always surprised. And, and that was one of the things that made him successful, was that his ability to just surprise people at which the speed at which he's moving and making decisions. And that's one of the things we talked about Jeff Bezos in a prior podcast. Jeff Bezos kind of, he also values speed in decision-making. He said something to the effect that the best workers won't want to work with you if you're slow to make decisions because they want to get things done. And that was absolutely something that Alexander did was use speed to his advantage, speed and decision-making. And also just speed in the movements that he was doing. He was pushing his troops, leading from the front, inspiring them to keep going. And that was, that was quite a task because they went a very long way from Greece to India. So, and as far as just to go back to the ambition that Alexander had, one of the quotes from the book is, as far as I can see, true men need no reward for their labors aside from those labors themselves. As long as these have noble consequences. Nevertheless, if anyone should wish to know what limit is set for our campaign, let me tell them that is only the whole of the, of the earth. So basically, the reward for labor is labor itself, and that this campaign is gonna— we're gonna take over the world. And that was working for many, many years. Basically, this campaign was lasting like almost basically a decade. He started at 20 and he was still going at 30, 31, 32. So it was well over a decade, and he would have kept going, but he started making some mistakes, and this kind of led to his downfall. One of the things that he started doing later on, he had taken over Persia, killed the Persian king, and he had all of Persia. And then he was going even further east through Afghanistan, modern-day Afghanistan, and into Pakistan. One of the things that he started doing was drinking alcohol a lot. And during one of that time, he actually ended up killing one of his friends, which is a general. They got kind of in an argument and he ended up killing him, and he felt really bad about it. But, you know, that's, uh, that's not a good thing to do, killing your friends. And, you know, I think part of it was attributed to the alcoholism that I think he was falling into, and he made some bad decisions. He burned down some cities he probably shouldn't have burned down, and I think that kind of attributed to his eventual downfall. Another thing I think that led to his downfall was his arrogance. He started to force his men to prostrate themselves, basically to bow down to him. And that was not something that the Greeks really did to their kings. They would only— they said, basically said that you should only really bow down to gods, not to men. But he was starting to force his men to bow down to him after he took over Persia, and they didn't like that too much, and he kind of lost the trust of his men. So they ended up mutinying against him in the modern-day Pakistan. And so they had to turn back, and this is after 10+ years of fighting together and taking over, you know, a good part of the world. And it wasn't actually the fact that Alexander the Great lost any battles. I mean, he was just— they were still winning. It was just that he kind of let it get to his head and he started drinking And then that's what kind of stopped his progress. So some things I think we should take away from Alexander the Great, studying him, is he had a huge vision for his life. And I think that could help us, you know, think, hey, maybe I can have a bigger vision, because sometimes we put limits on ourselves, on our beliefs, and that kind of impacts what we can actually accomplish. Whereas if we increase our vision, you know, we can accomplish even more than what we might actually think. He was also very focused on education and learning. I think that's something that greatly assisted him in taking over a good part of the world. His— he was very tactically sound. He was outthinking other very accomplished generals, and so that, that's something we can take, take a in our own lives is constantly learning and innovating so we can have that competitive edge in the marketplace. The other thing is resilience. He went through so many hard, difficult things, whether it was starvation, getting stabbed in the shoulder, through the leg, you know, dealing with his troops. And he, for the most part, uh you know, kept it together and was able to push through. And then also, he also led by example. So he led his troops by example. He didn't ask his troops to do anything that he wasn't doing. He was always in the front. He was leading the charge. And I think that's one of the reasons why his army fought so long with him, you know, over 10 years not going home. You know, they're all— their wives and their children, they're back in Greece, and they're still fighting with him years and years later because they really admired him. And he, he was a leader that led by example. And that's something that I think as leaders, that's something that we need to take to heart as well, because the folks that we lead definitely pay attention to what we're doing. And if we're kind of resting on our laurels and not really engaging, they see that and they're not going to give you their all if they see you not giving your all. Those are, I think, are some key notes for Alexander's life and what we can do to take that in our own businesses. And with that, I'd love to hear your thoughts for future episodes, future biographies. Definitely go to Grow Your Painting Business on Facebook. If you type that into Facebook and go to the group, and love to hear your thoughts or ideas for future podcasts. With that, I'll see you next week.