Episode #618 - Learning Lessons From Bill Gates with Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Let me disabuse people of this idea that the new generation is lazy. Of course they're lazy kids out there, but they always have been. I mean, there's a thing you can read where this essay where the youth of today, you know, are basically slackers and don't take anything serious and you know, dragging society down and was written by Socrates. Okay? So, you know, the youth have always been accused of being sorry, but there are some unbelievable young people out there coming up in just about every company I look at. So anybody who's hanging on to that idea, you know, let it go because there's some really sharp people out there and I'm sure you run into them.

Let me add something to that, Larry. So, you know, there's a, I read about this Before World War I, Germany, a German general was saying this, he's like, bring me to soldiers that are, that not necessarily ones that work hard but are like average, average intelligence. But you want the ones that are lazy and smart. And even I think even Bill Gates said this before, the truly deadly people are the ones that are lazy and smart because they're going to figure things out and they're going to figure out shortcuts.

Yeah. Remember, reminds me of our mantra we had when I was at Georgia Tech. You know, we're casting forward, saying we're looking for jobs. And mine was, I want one where you go to work at 11am you have lunch, you have a two hour lunch at 12, then you come back in for a nap in the afternoon and then go home. You know, I was never impressed by the people that are working the hundred hour work weeks, which we all have. That doesn't impress me. In fact, anybody gets up and said in a conference or someone speaking, you got to work hard, it's like, what are you, an idiot? Of course you think you're giving news to people. You've got to work hard. But the people I'm impressed by is the ones who can get tons of it done. And they don't seem to be breaking a sweat because those are the people that are going to keep doing it and they've got even bigger capacity in the future, you know, so I'm kind of, I've always had the same viewpoint, Eric, when you, you're coming up now, you're learning Things, and, you know, you're excited, but you're working with people. What are you learning about? Did you. Were all of your people experiences positive, you know, coming up, or did you go through some things? You know, when I was. My first job out of tech, I went to work for. I. I learned about people. In fact, I learned what a manic depressive personality was and not. Not a fun experience. I learned that by having acid in my stomach every time I got around my boss, you know, and.

You learn.

To survive in those situations. Did you, you know, where I'm sure you most of most, all your experiences were. Were positive. But did you learn about some life lessons working with people along the way?

Absolutely. And I think anybody that says they haven't is probably. Well, their brain's probably not very active. And I say that in a kind way because, you know, sometimes medical conditions. Right. So.

Right.

I would just say, yeah, for the most part, I believe that the vast majority of people are kind and, you know, everyone's going through something. But yeah, absolutely. I've learned lessons not. Not even just from other people working with other people, but also myself, you know, being the quote, unquote, boss. Right. Like, that's still a term to me. But, you know, the main thing I've learned is that every personality is different. And also not only just Larry, there's like, not just one version of you, there's millions of versions of you or hundreds of thousands of versions of you because you met that many people. And so, you know, people are getting you at different times. You might be in a different mood, different point in your career. And so, you know, I've learned that all I can do on my end is try to put my best foot forward and that I'm going to be wrong sometimes. And that's okay because we're human.

Yeah. And so where, you know, did you have any experiences that really stung early in your career? You know, the old football coach at Ohio State, Woody Hayes, said there's nothing that sobers you up quite like getting, you know, going out in a game and getting your head knocked off and beat by three or four touchdowns. You know, there's nothing quite so sobering is going through one of those experiences. But did you have any kind of really sobering type experience like that where things did not work out the way you expected and. But you, you know, a great learning experience.

Yeah. I mean, anybody that says they haven't, they haven't really been through much, just being honest. But one of the ones that I can recall earlier in my career was when I was around, I think it was 25 or so. That was when I was leading marketing at this startup and a month into the job, the CEO pulled me aside and said, hey, if you don't hit numbers this month, we're going to have to let you go. And that was a crossroads in my career where it's like one on one side, it's like I can be like, are you freaking kidding me? Like, I just got here. Like, are you. Like, are you dumb? Like it takes time to figure this stuff out. And then the other side is like, well, like you can figure it out and you know, and it'll be a great lesson, it'll be a great story. And so what did I do exactly? Okay, you're going to let me go. I bet the Entire company on YouTube advertising. And that skyrocketed us. It skyrocketed our. We were acquiring way more users, like 10 times the amount of users that we were acquiring before. And that led to us raising our series B and the company continue to grow. So that was one instance. And then I'll share one more real quick. It's, you know, when I took over the ad agency Single Grain when I was 27, it might sound amazing, but no, I actually made the company go from bad to worse because when I came into the company, I thought my poo poo didn't stink because I worked in tech and I didn't try to build any rapport with anybody. I read a book called Let My People Go Surfing from the Patagonia co founder, which is a great book, by the way. But then I took it too literally. I was like, oh yeah, let my people go surfing. I stopped showing up to the office. And what ended up happening next is everything fell down and we dropped all the way down to one employee. And my outside accounting firm called me and said, hey, I think it's time to shut it down. And that was another moment.

So, yeah, and so as you're you, you move on. You know, we learned some of these things, you just have to go through them or they, you know, and either you're going to come up with the idea, the half baked idea, or someone's going to try and talk you into it. So a lot of these things and, and let's face it, there may be a time where it's smart for you not to go to the office, you know, and I know I switched gears back in 83, where every time I went to the office, everybody was like, it seemed like when I Pulled into the parking lot two levels down and we were up on the fifth floor. By the time I pulled into and the car came to a stop in the parking lot. People would rush out of air and come to me with problems. What do I do about this? What do I do with that? I've got someone over here I want you to talk to. How do we handle this? You know, and it just all over me. And so, you know, you get there in the morning and by the time you raised your head, you notice it's like 8 o' clock at night and you. And you got nothing done that you want to do. So I shifted at that point. I shifted where I made a decision. I'm never in the office unless it's a meeting. And I had my secretary bring all the mail and meet me over at the breakfast place. And she would shove. If there was something, she would tell me what she needed to tell me. It was something for me to shut side. She would push it across the table to me. I'd sign it and I'd push it back. But I didn't have any paper around me. But that's the only way I could stay in control of my life. So there are times where don't go to the office is the right thing, but not without having controls in place and rendezvous. But you have to go through that and learn what's going to work for you. And I noticed there's a but. Are those games behind you on your shelves? Are those books?

Would be. Those would be books.

Okay, books. Okay. I can't, I can't tell. And so you must be quite a reader, Eric.

Yeah, I mean, well, going back to your point real quick, it's, you know, you eventually you learn how to delegate and eventually you learn how to coach people. It's like instead of bringing all the problems to you, oh, what would you do about it? If they can't figure it out, you probably have the wrong person. Right. But I'll. I digress. So these are all, these are all books back here. I actually have, you know, I have these two statues of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger over here that I'm supposed to put back up. But I, you know, one of my core values is where do you get.

Those statues, by the way?

One of my friends sells them for. They're like 1500 each. But if you just type in Warren Buffett bronze bust, you should be able to find it. I like it.

Sell some of those. That sounds like a pretty cool idea.

Yeah, it reminds me to be Patient and, you know, and have fun. Right. Because they're still. They're in their 90s and they're having fun, so.

And to drink Coca Cola and have McDonald's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so these books back here, I mean, one of my core values is improvement, obsession. And so that's literally why I wrote a book called Leveling Up. And, you know, I don't look at these books, as my coach would ask me this. He's like, he's trying to make a point about me loving the learning. He's like, you know. Yeah. Like, I'm sure, like, you know, you had the library back. I'm sure you've read everything. I was like, absolutely not. Because I look at this, each of these books as reference points, and so each chapter is a blog post. And when I need to call on this knowledge, I can call on it. It's not a badge of honor to say, oh, you've read everything here. Like that, to me, is actually very inefficient. So. But that's why I have the books.

Yeah. And it's reference. And the thing is that you. You can't remember all the stuff anyway. I mean, you and I have read books, and we went back later, and it's all new to us, you know, so.

The.

That's where Bob Dylan got a lot of the lyrics from in the 60s. He got over in, what, Allen Ginsberg, wherever the poet was. He let him into his house, became buddies, and he could stay there when Ginsburg was out of town, and he would just flip through things. He said, things got better when I realized you didn't have to read the whole thing. And so he flipped through, he'd see lines. You know, he was in the storytelling thing and the, you know, looking for lyrics and things like that. So it's like a comedian, you know, looking for punchlines and things like that. But pretty smart way of accumulating a lot of material that he turned into some incredible songs. But that's what, you know, the idea is, feed your brain, stay stimulated. We only have 24 hours in the day. And as you came up through this thing, how important was it for you? Or did you think, you know, just say, gaming, how driven are gamers? I mean, did you run up those totals and things like that? Is that just as important in gaming as it is in sports?

Yeah, I don't really look at the score. And so there's a couple different ways to look at this, but one I think what you're comparing to is, for example, if you're playing football or if you're playing basketball, at the very end of it you have one team that wins. It's a zero sum game. It's the same thing with competitive gaming too. You have teams five on five, and at the very end you have a winner versus a loser. And so that's, that's how you would look at it. And so I think, Sorry, just how would you. Could you rephrase your question again about.

The competition and the desire to be, to work your way up to the top and to be known as, you know, top in your field or somebody who's really worth paying attention to.

If you want to be the best in any game, you have to play with the best people. You have to be a part of a team. And the team also has to be really motivated too. It's just like when you go work for like a, like a Google or Amazon or something like that, they have certain standards and they have certain values. And so when I remember I used to play this game called World of Warcraft, we had a team of 40 of us and our guild leader, who is basically our CEO, he would wake everyone up, call everyone up at 3am, okay, so that's how competitive we were when, let's say something popped up where, like there's a monster like a boss that popped up at 3am he'd be monitoring it, he'd call everyone on their cell phones, we'd all wake up and we get, we get in and we'd fight. And there would be one of our rival teams that, that was against us. They would be there waiting to fight us, right? And we'd have to kill them first, over and over and over. And then once they gave up, then we'd go kill the boss. So when it was all said and done, maybe we're done at 5 or 6am but that's the level of competitiveness, that's the level of drive that you need to win. Sometimes when you're playing at the top.

The word obsession comes in. Which if you're, you know, if you're going to build anything special you're going to turn into anything special, you, you're going to have to go through at least a phase where you're a monomaniac on a mission.

You know, you gotta, you gotta do unreasonable things to get unreasonable results, right?

And you, the key word is results. You know, that's how you, you know, look at it. And that's what I like about the gaming thing is you're looking for results and you Know, nobody comes in. And for many of the kids I've seen learning how to play, you know, games, they're not taking a six month course and how to master the newest game that came out, they get some of the basics and then they're starting to play and advance that way. They learn by doing. And really that's how other than the fundamentals, I've always said that you go to greatness, you got to have fundamentals, got to have fundamentals, but you go to greatness by using the fundamentals. You learn how those fundamentals work in ways that maybe other people haven't figured out yet and maybe didn't weren't obvious to you when you started, but you started with the fundamentals and then magic started to happen. But magic can't happen out of thin air. It has to be by some kind of design. And what I like about your book, the title, I haven't read the book, I just saw the book reading up on your bio is the title Leveling Up Mass how to. Basically the way I explained it and I think we're, we're coming at it from the same way as people like you can never guarantee success. But what I tell people is you can change the odds, you know, and you can start stacking the odds in your, from against you to, in your favor to where you can put the odds where you're never guaranteed success, but it becomes almost inevitable. And this leveling up thing is what I like about it Eric, and that what you've tapped into is you can control your situation, you can change those odds, you can increase your opportunities for our likelihood of being successful by taking action. And that's what it sounded like you were getting at in that title and then in your book, is that correct? Would that be right?

Yeah. So the book is, it's really an introduction to personal growth and habit building for gamers or for people that have a gaming mindset. And so if you, the one thing you can control or the things that one of the few things you can control in your life are the inputs. And so you choose when to go to bed, you choose if you want to eat healthy, you choose whether you want to train or not. And a lot of those inputs are within your control and if you keep compounding those inputs over time, then it's pretty, it'd be kind of crazy to assume that you wouldn't have at least results that you're happy with.

Right.

So most people give up too easily, they stop. And so that's all it is, it's really just habit building and habit stacking.

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