UCLA Professor Reveals Why Most Leaders Fail (And How 500+ CEOs Fix It)

There's a misconception about what bad leadership looks like. Oftentimes we think of a toxic leader as being a toxic person. We think of a toxic leader as being someone who is incredibly negative, destructive, just a bad, rotten human being. And there are a lot of toxic leaders out there like that, but most bad leaders Aren't actually bad people. They're just bad leaders. They're people who are decent people who in many cases are well-meaning, but simply don't know how to lead.

Welcome to Big Hitters. I'm Larry Weidel, and this show is for people who are done playing small. Each week we break down what it actually takes to win at a high level. The decisions, the discipline, the adjustments that separate those who almost do it from those who do it. No theory, no fluff, just straight talk from someone who spent 50 years building winners. If you're serious about momentum, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Hello everybody. We are talking with today from UCLA area professor, a native of Los Angeles, Adam Mendler. And Adam, you're going to find out, is a guy who has interviewed over 500 top CEOs, athletes, generals, athletes, Olympic gold medal winners. And the thing is that from his bio, I can see that Adam has got an inquisitive mind and he doesn't just listen. He probes because he's a great student of greatness. And he shares with me the common belief that, you know, winning is a skill you can learn. And if other people are doing it, you probably, if you pay attention, can learn a whole lot. And so what I like about Adam is that he's focused in on the people at the top and why listen to anybody else? Because the people at the top, Obviously know what they're talking about. And we've got 24 hours in the day, so why don't we use the ideas that drift down from the people at the top? Because ideas are a dime a dozen. They don't really care who uses them, but the people who do use them are the ones who really change the world. And that's the theme, Adam, of my podcast is The Big Hitters. And so I know that without even talking to you, I know that you will believe the way I do, that the world needs more big hitters. The world needs more winners, and the world does not really appreciate the impact that these people make in the world because at every walk of life, that arena is dominated by the impact of the people at the top. And you, it's easy to see in sports, like the NBA was a really crap organization, could not get a TV contract or anything until Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came along. And then after that, Michael Jordan came along and all of a sudden now everybody's talking about it, everybody's watching it. And can you imagine what golf would be if Tiger Woods had not come along after the Nicklaus era and reenergized that sport? And so Adam is, for some reason, and we're going to find out why, he has been obsessed to get into the thinking of these top people. And the great thing is he has learned the value of passing this information on because he turned it— he's written articles, he's professor at UCLA, he spoke, he's been on boards. But I think makes Adam special, and we're just going to get into it, is the fact that he's done big things himself. So he has his own experience base. He's not just a noder. He's not an empty-headed professor from a college that goes out and interviews and just takes, you know, thinks the answers interpreted with his own filters from never having done anything. Adam's interpreting all this information from somebody who's done big things himself. And so really precise. What I love is precise insight. And that's what Adam excels in. He's got his own podcast where he continues to develop that. And the podcast right now, right now I've got all this information in front of me. The name of the podcast is 30 Minute Mentors. And I went in there and I'm a subscriber now. I went in there and very impressed the quality of his people and the way he went about unraveling what makes them think. Adam is an expert at how High Achievers Think. So thanks so much for coming, Adam. Let's get into it. That's a long-winded introduction, but I think you deserve it. I want people to appreciate what they're getting ready to hear. So how did you get into this world of high achievers and where did that fascination come from?

Wow, Larry, thank you so much for that introduction. That was awesome. I don't know how much I agree with what you shared about me, but I'll take it. I might ask you to follow me around the country whenever I do a speaking engagement and just give you the first couple minutes and say whatever you just said right then and there. And maybe, I guess if you say things like that, people will hopefully believe they're true. Hopefully I believe they're true. But all joking aside, I love the name of your podcast. One of the reasons why I love it so much is because Growing up, I played a ton of baseball, and when I was in high school, I was the captain of my baseball team, and I was the opposite of a heavy hitter. So my philosophy as a batter in the batter's box was hope and pray that the pitcher would throw 4 pitches outside of the strike zone, and if one of them hit me, even better. I just wanted to get on first base and I knew I wasn't going to get on first base by crushing the ball. I certainly wasn't going to hit the ball out of the ballpark. So a heavy hitter in the batter's box, I was not. Now, once I got on the base paths, then I could run. All bets are off. I was pretty good in the field, but no one, there was no major league scout that ever came up to me after any of my high school games. And said, Adam, you're a heavy hitter. So it's been some time since I was a high school baseball player, but I will take it. So thank you, Larry.

Yeah. And how did you get intrigued with the idea of, you know, peak performance is something that's passed around a lot, but you have like obsessed over unraveling this thing. And I think it deserves to be unraveled because the world does need more people. And there's so many people that are wasting their potential. There's so many people going, listening to podcasts, Going to conferences, you know, thou— they'll pay $1,000, they'll pay $25,000 to go to Hawaii and firewalk. They'll do all these things. When they go come home, they just cannot put 2 and 2 together, make something happen for themselves. You know, they're great students, they're a great audience for high achievers, but they have trouble flipping the switch. And it's a matter of developing skills and specificity. You know, the people that that you've talked to, you unravel, you pull out specificity. I mean, they have skills. And what I've been saying a lot, reminded myself a lot of during my training era of recruiting, training, developing people to take over their own offices. And you'd have people in there that weren't doing well and they'd come to you and say, hey, why is this not working for me? I've always thought that truth is the best mirror. And I always thought, well, it's because you're no good. And if you go in the basement, It's just like, you know, you try sitting down at the piano and you don't have the lessons, you haven't practiced, you're not going to be any good. Nobody's going to ask you to play a concert somewhere. And so if you're not getting results, you know, well-run business grows, dadgummit. Eventually, you know, if you're a farmer and you're doing the practices every year, you're not going to have a drought every year. You're not going to have disasters and everything. Usually you're going to have some good crops. So if you run a good business, Eventually going to have some results. And so what I would tell them is, when I started, I was no good either. But the good thing is you can get better. You can develop the skills. But the people who get paid extraordinary amounts of money, the people that go through life and you look at them as a professional, they know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and they do it whether they feel like it or not. And as a result, they get paid extraordinary amounts of money compared to the average person. And so the idea of greatness is very intriguing and very rewarding, and it's worth the pursuit. And I'm sure you found that.

Yeah, Larry, you shared a lot there that we can unpack, and I don't know how much time we have to unpack all of it, but something that I would get started with is the importance of just getting started. Oftentimes what happens is, and you use the example of people going to conferences and spending a lot of money, And hoping to walk away with some kind of formula that they can apply that will magically allow them to become better. And whether that formula does or doesn't exist, I hope that I've been able to identify patterns that are indeed highly valuable that I do share with audiences that they can apply and become better right away. But it really starts with having the mindset that I just need to get started. And when you're across the room from someone, whether you're a keynote speaker or whether you're a teacher or whether you're a leader working with people you're leading, a mentor mentoring mentees, so much of it is communicating your message in a way that is clear, concise, And actionable, and where the person across from you feels not only the sense of clarity, the sense of understanding in terms of, I know exactly what I need to do next, but feels inspired and motivated to act on what they're receiving. So they're really those 2 pieces of it. And if you can do both, if you can communicate both, if you can Again, whether you're a keynote speaker or whether you're a leader working with people, teams, your entire organization, if you can share clear, practical, tangible information that is applicable and actionable, and then communicate it in a way where people who you're communicating to feel inspired and motivated to act on what you're sharing, That's where the magic happens. And it's all about getting started. It's all about taking that first step. You can share highly complex formula, you can share a quadratic equation, but it's less about that and it's more about the small things, the small steps, and those small steps adding up to that one big result. But it starts again with getting started.

And the thing is, how did you fall into this insight and everything? How did that develop inside What motivated you on your launch? You know, coming up, you know, I really feel like we wind up a lot of the things we trace back, like Steve Jobs at his commencement speech. You look, you could connect the dots going backwards, things that happened to us early on that really got us moving in a certain direction. What would you say is a, like a trigger point or something formative that kind of drove you and has driven you over the years to pursue what you're doing? Because what you just said right there is what you've learned and what you are sharing with people.

So from a very early age, I've always been interested in leadership and I've had a number of different formative experiences over the course of my life, leading people in different settings long before I was in the workforce, long before I had a job, but as a kid being class president Being the captain of my baseball team, coaching youth sports, a number of experiences like that where I've been in the position of leading people and have been around other leaders who were good leaders and other leaders who are bad leaders. And that's always interested me a lot. And the way that I have been impacted even from thinking back to my grade school days by really bad leaders, gives you the inspiration and motivation to want to understand what it takes to lead people in an inspirational and uplifting manner. And I don't want to harp too much on the negative because there's so much positive, but it was really the mix of those experiences. And again, I'm happy to share negative, but there were a lot of positive experiences. When I was in high school, I coached youth basketball and that experience of bringing a team to get, building a team, bringing a team together, getting them from where they were the season before I started to being at a completely different level the next season. That sort of transformational experience was incredibly fulfilling to me. And those types of experiences drove my interest in leadership. I've also always been a huge sportsman and I've always been deeply passionate about baseball, basketball, football, but baseball most of all. And I knew I was never good enough to play Major League Baseball, but I always had, as a kid, I always had an interest in working in baseball and my interest was around building and leading teams. Now I don't work for a baseball team, although I've interviewed a lot of legendary baseball players over the years. So I've kind of figured out how to apply my passion in a little bit of a different way. But what I realized is that that interest around people, teams, leadership, Traces back to a very early age.

Probably a lot of us growing up that play sports, our first introduction to good and bad leadership has to do with the coaches, the coaches of our teams. Do you recall any experiences from your growing up, the coaches you ran into?

Yeah, I definitely had good leaders and bad leaders who are coaches. When I think about some of the leaders who I was around who were most formative. I had a coach named Coach Schiff who was the PE coach when I was a kid in grade school. And I wound up going to summer camps and Coach Schiff was, man, I mean, I didn't really understand exactly at the time, but talk about a great leader. Talk about a great mentor. He was the guy and the impact that he had on me, on my life, Immeasurable. So that's someone who I think of as an exemplary leader. And I first met Coach Schiff when I was probably 8 or 9 years old. And I had other coaches who, on the flip side, were terrible leaders. I had one coach, and I won't name his name, who was an awful coach, was an awful leader, but was an extremely nice person. And there's a misconception about what bad leadership looks like. Oftentimes we think of a toxic leader as being a toxic person. We think of a toxic leader as being someone who is incredibly negative, destructive, just a bad, rotten human being. And there are a lot of toxic leaders out there like that. But most bad leaders aren't actually bad people. They're just bad leaders. They're people who are decent people who in many cases are well-meaning, but simply don't know how to lead. And when I think of that baseball coach, I think of a person who was more or less well-meaning. I would actually even take that a step further and say he was well-meaning. But he didn't have the expertise or the skillset or the qualities to really do what he was doing. And so unfortunately, so many leaders in the workplace fit that exact same profile where they're pretty good people, but really bad leaders.

Talk to me about how you noticed that at a young age, the like, That distinction, that's a pretty clever distinction that you figured out. I don't know if I would be that shrewd even in high school to say, to me, the bad coach was a bad guy. By the way, if you're still listening right now, you're different. You don't just consume content, you're actively looking for an edge. And that's who I built the Big Hitter Community for. Not people chasing motivation, people chasing momentum, not theory, proximity, proximity to operators who are actually in the arena making real decisions and winning at a high level. Inside Big Hitter, you get conversations we don't have on the podcast, direct access to people who build what you're trying to build in a room that holds you to a higher standard every single week. This isn't a hype group. It's not networking for the sake of networking. It's where serious people go to sharpen their thinking and compress their timeline. If you're done just listening, And you're ready to be in the room where it actually happens, head to joinbighitters.com or click the link in the show notes. The right room changes everything. I'll see you inside. You know, he's just a tough guy. This, the fact that the differentiation between, yeah, he's a pretty nice guy, but he's just incompetent as a coach or a leader. That was pretty shrewd differentiation that you picked up at an early age.

He's a really nice guy, but when you lose every game, You get blown out in every game and you're the captain of the team. From a very young age, I knew baseball and I knew what good was and I knew what bad was and I knew we weren't good and we weren't getting better. And you know, when someone is qualified, competent, and you know, when someone isn't, and there's certain things in life that you can fake and there are many things in life that you can't fake. And someone can show up and give a good halftime speech. There are oftentimes in professional sports examples, or college sports or high school sports examples where teams will bring in outside voices to come into the locker room and fire the team up with the motivational talk. But that's just one little element of coaching. And again, not to say this coach was initially Not really motivational or rah-rah kind of guy. But, and again, I don't mean to be negative on this coach who was a super nice guy, but again, an example of a formative experience where you're around a leader who you learn from. And we very rarely have the opportunity to choose the leaders who we're led by.

Simple.

Now we live in a democracy and we get to vote, but we're one vote among millions and millions and millions of people. So we don't even get to do that. Even when you do have a vote, you're just one vote. So you're ultimately subject to who you're being led by. And again, another reason why Leadership is so important. We need more good leaders and we need people who are in leadership positions to be better. The most successful leaders are always trying to get better. Leadership is a skill that the people who possess recognize that I may be a great leader, but I can be an even better leader. And it's the people who are not interested in improving, not interested in getting better, lack that curiosity, don't have the growth mindset, think they know it all. Those are toxic leaders.

I don't know who all agrees with me, but when confronted, when you push me into a wall, a corner, back me into a wall and say, what, how do you tell if it's a good leader or not? Is my thing is results. What kind of results are you getting? You know, we can talk and we could train and we could love one another and we could go out. You can name your kids after me, But does, you know, do you improve? Do you have satisfaction being in my team? Are we accomplishing things? Because, you know, my idea is if you're the leader at the end of the month, if there's not growth, there was no reason for you to be there because they could have been average. They could have had a slump. They could have gotten beat without you being there. And the only way a leader can, to me, measure the real value is if you're adding enough to the equation to where there's some growth in there. And I see you as a, you know, and the thing about improving. As we all know that if you're going to beat your team, the good leaders are always improving because they want their teams to grow. They take it personally. You know, the good leader's going to take the results of the team personally. They're not going to la-dee-da, love one another, tell jokes, and we just got beat 13 to nothing. Let's go get pizza, kids. No, no, you just, no, no. And so the thing, you're just not going to accept it because you take responsibility for it and you want the team to get better. So And you realize, if I don't get better, team's not going to get better next year. We might've gone 16-0 or 20-0 this year, but it's not going to happen next year unless I get better. I bring more to the table. And as you go through, you know, CEOs, we all want to keep winning. And I think it's the smart guys who keep improving because they realize if they don't keep improving, they're going to start getting beat. And I learned through sports, winning You know, I never was good enough to get the college scholarship and play pro and all of that stuff either, even though in high school, up through high school, I played every sport every season. But the one thing I did have a takeaway is winning is better than losing. If you want to keep winning, you got to keep improving.

It's very true, Larry. You shared a lot of wisdom there. And one thing that you shared that I would love to build on, we oftentimes judge coaches and we judge leaders by their record, but what is their record? Is your record your win-loss record? So going back to the example of sports, if you coach a high school baseball team, are you a good coach or a bad coach based on your team's win-loss record? Maybe, but that's just one way of measuring a coach's performance. I really like what you shared, which is That you need to look at other metrics, which are the people who you're leading growing, are the people leading developing, are the people who you're leading getting better? Is your team getting better? Is your team improving or are you stagnating? If you take over a team that was 15 and 10 last year, and next year you go 16-9.

Okay. Like, are you—

we have a winning record, but are we really improving? If you take over a team that goes 15-10 and you go 16-9, but the team from last year lost the 3 best players. Yeah, we're improving a lot because I, we were able to get a little bit better with a team that Wasn't nearly as good. So what are the metrics under the hood? And no matter what organization you're leading, it's really important to understand what are those metrics that you can evaluate to allow you to understand what does success really look like. And it's a lot harder to achieve success when you don't define success. Once you define success, then you can achieve it. What are those metrics? Is the metric, do we make the playoffs? Do we win a World Series? Do we have a winning record? Or is the metric, if last year the team had this batting average with runners in scoring position, and this year we have a batting average that's 25% higher, well, that's success. So What is success? And that's a topic we can't talk about enough.

There's one thing is the, you know, like the stock price, you know, is the stock price up or down? But your winning and losing record can go up and down like the stock price. But the idea is, are the fundamentals growing? You know, is the framework being put in place for continued growth? You know, are the people stronger? You know, is the infrastructure developing along the way? And so, and it's Part of the leader's job to identify those key metrics and make sure everybody understands the importance of it and how they contribute to it. But I want to go back and probably annoy you with a question, and that is, what in the world did you do growing up? I have the idea that you probably take it for granted and you don't give yourself credit for it, but what were you doing as being the captain of your baseball team at a young age like that, and then you're president of the school. And why are you always running things?

I was the student body president of my junior high school, and I was the captain of my baseball team in high school. They're 2 very different experiences. And I, what's interesting is I never had, like in junior high school, I never had any political ambition. When I was in high school, I always had a natural tendency to lead. And I realized that when I was playing high school baseball, I realized we talk about self-awareness and when you're playing the piano, which I don't know how to play, you can either figure out really good, really quickly, am I good or am I bad? There's no faking it. And it's the same thing with playing sport. You know, are you good or are you bad once you get on the field? And I thought I was good. And then once I got in the batter's box, I realized that I was the captain of my baseball team, not because I was good at baseball, but because I was a good leader. So just always had that inclination and always had that desire to step up and to help where I was interested and where I felt like I could make impact and where I felt a natural calling and where it felt enjoyable to me. I, when I was, again, like there are other phases in my life where I didn't raise my hand and say, I want to do this. I want to do that. I was never the kind of person that stepped forward for the sake of stepping forward. But if I felt like I could make an impact, I never hesitated.

But somehow people realize you could do that job. What do you think gave off those vibes? What do you think you brought to the table? That caused people wanted, wanted you to be in that situation?

I love this question because it's a question that I don't really think about a lot. I don't really spend too much time thinking about my childhood, but it was a great childhood. So maybe I should spend more time thinking about it. But when I was in grade school and I ran for student body president, I ran unopposed. I was friends with everyone. I was friends with the kids my age, the kids younger than me. I was, as a kid, I was friends with people my parents' age, people 20 years older than my parents. It was really just a natural desire to get to know people, get to the opportunity to connect with people. That is something that I've had from the time I was a really, really little kid. So by the time I was in 8th grade and I decided to run for president, I ran unopposed. No one wanted to run against me.

Why?

I wasn't some kind of master campaigner. I didn't have James Carville or Karl Rove on speed dial back then, but it was the fact that I was just friends with everyone. And I wasn't friends with everyone in some kind of conniving political way. I was just friends with everyone. And when I was in college, I tell the story oftentimes when I give talks. When I was in college, I was friends with my professors. Your professors are friends with you. Your professors know your name. They give you an A. It's the easiest way to get a— I didn't, I didn't have a 4.0, but I had pretty close to it. And it wasn't because I was the smartest. It wasn't because I was the best at studying. I was just friends with my professors and friends with my academic advisors who told me what professors to take and friends with the deans who helped guide me along the way. And that has been something that has really followed me throughout my life. And with what I do now with my interview work, so much of it is connecting with people and connecting with people Of all ages, of all backgrounds. So that trait, that characteristic has been something that's carried me. And there have been different moments in my career where I didn't really understand that that was something that I should be leaning into and took jobs that didn't accentuate that strength. And was unhappy and unfulfilled and candidly wasn't that great at that. I was average, good enough, but not exceptional. And if you want to be exceptional at something, it comes down in large part to, and I talk about this in my keynotes, but it comes down in large part to unlocking and unleashing your superpower. What is it about you that makes you special? What is it you that makes you unique? What is it about you that makes you different? And how can you get to a place where you are utilizing that in your life, in your career every single day? When you're doing that, it doesn't feel like work. It's flow. And there are many times in my career where I didn't have that, but fortunately with what I do now, Man, whether I'm giving a keynote or whether I'm doing an interview or teaching a class, man, it's not work for me. It's fun.

And that's what people should realize. Well, what I tell people, I look, you're not an accident. You're here for a purpose on earth. You do have abilities and you need to, whatever your instincts are telling you inside, driving you forward, Follow that because you need to get into that arena to where you can demonstrate that superpower. You can develop that thing, you know, you can come into your own, you know, and that's going to be, give yourself a chance to be great. And that's going to be something you're interested in one way or the other, something that you can, you know, do a service or help people out or invent something. But how far along were you when you co-founded the Velos Group for people to know you've Successfully co-founded and built 3 distinct companies across wildly different industries. How far along were you coming of age before you started that?

That's a great question. I was, I think we're all coming of age at all times. It's never too early or too late to get started. And like I said earlier, the most successful people are continually evolving. Continually growing, continually finding ways to reinvent themselves no matter how successful they are. In my case, I spent the first chapter of my professional career doing everything that is expected of you in life. So my first job out of college, I worked for a really big hedge fund. And then from there I got my MBA at a really good business school. And then I went back into financial services and worked for A really big bank. And when I was in my late 20s, I realized that I never really taken any kind of risk in my life. Everything that I ever did was exactly what was expected of me, but wasn't necessarily what was right for me. Wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do or what I should be doing. And it was at age 28, that for the first time in my life, I took a risk and it was a risk that was significant. And I don't think I even realized how significant it was, but I had left my job. I left my career and became an entrepreneur, started these different businesses with my brother and did that for about a decade. And over the course of that decade, came to understand that there was another path for me that was a lot better for me for a variety of reasons. But I would say when I started those businesses, I was maybe beginning to come of age, but I'd certainly not yet evolved, certainly not yet understood a fraction of what I came to understand over the time that has since passed. Running those businesses taught me an enormous amount. Way more than I ever learned in going to 4 years of business school in college, 2 years of business school as an MBA. Multiply that by 10 and maybe you start scratching the surface of what you learn by running small businesses. That was certainly a step in getting to where I am and what I do now.

I used to tell my training managers, I just can't wait until you get out of here and you get your own office so you can find out how stupid you really are. You're sitting in here in my training thing, Criticizing the meetings I do, saying we should have this office, we should have this sign up here, spending my money, and we should have this, we should be doing that. I said, I just can't wait till you're out on your own and you could find out. Because the thing is, we don't know what we don't know. And education can only give you fundamentals, folks. And it's when you use the fundamentals that you start to really realize the information that you have. Now, when you went out there and starting these businesses, that's 10 years. I think those are the formative years where you really found out some things about yourself. You found out things you didn't know. And, but once you find those out, you do know 'em. And then when you, you know, in your career where you've interviewed 500+ CEOs, whatever, you know, when you're talking to a phony, you know, when you're talking to somebody who's limited or warped You know, they're not motivated the right— you know, people are going to continue to be successful or people are headed for a fall because you've been there, because you put in your 10 years. And so the thing is that those instincts, you know, are really priceless. You know, in terms of skills, you know, most entrepreneurs— hopefully you've avoided this, but I heard early on most entrepreneurs go bankrupt 2 times before they're 40. And if you— you know, in other words, it's not that uncommon to go bankrupt because we don't know what we don't know and we trust people. And everything. And of course it happened to me too, you know, somewhere in the mid-30s, because my 16-year most trusted personal assistant was helping take care of the money when my CPA left. And during that period of time, she got her hands on about $1 million and got into my tax money. And when it happened, it cost me about $2.5 million to learn that lesson. What I said, which you have to say at this point, Is my fault, my bad. I let it happen to me. I'm not the first one, but the lessons I learned from losing $2 million is going to save me $25 to $50 million down the road because I'm developing that skill. That was a blind spot for me. And so a lot of times we have disasters that happen to us along the highway. Did you, do you have any kind of really surprising negative things happen to you in those starting those companies that really got to you emotionally and challenged you?

I'm going to steal this from someone who I interviewed recently. I interviewed him about a week ago and he said this to me when I asked him a question. I asked him about specific experiences that he had, and that was like a Monday. So yes, absolutely. Like every day is an emotional rollercoaster. As an entrepreneur. And anyone who thinks that entrepreneurship, it's smooth sailing, anyone who thinks that entrepreneurship is easy is extremely naive. And I was that extremely naive person back when I was leaving corporate America and starting these businesses. And I remember a good friend/mentor of mine said to me, You don't understand how hard it is to start business and run a business until you start it. Trust me. And my friend is a successful entrepreneur. So trust me, this is way, way, way, way harder than you think. And he, it was like a very sobering talk. And it was a person who I, at the time, I really trusted and really Like anything you told me, I would take in and internalize, but you can only internalize that so much because we have this sense of bravado and self-confidence and I can do this and I believe in myself. And oftentimes that's totally misplaced, but when we're younger, that seems to come in very, very high supply. And I was like, I'm not betting against myself. And there were plenty of times where I should have bet against myself. And I know on some of these, I don't go on any of them like Kalshi or I don't touch that stuff. But if there's a platform where you could bet against yourself, oftentimes that's a much better bet. But entrepreneurs don't think that way. We don't think about betting against ourselves. We Think that we can do anything and everything. And one of the big learnings for me was realizing that there are certain things that I can do at a mediocre level or at a satisfactory level or at a good enough level. But what can I do that I'm exceptional at? What can I do that I am one of the very best at, if not the best at? And having that mindset, figuring out what are you going to be great at? What are you going to do that will allow you to be extraordinary, not just be Serviceable. So like I said earlier, I had jobs at big companies where I was good enough. Like I did my job and was fine, but I wasn't exceptional. And the work that I did in hindsight could have been done by, you pick the person off the street, they could have done the same work that I did. And you're not going to attain greatness that way. You're not going to attain greatness by being in a position where you're doing replacement-level work. And similarly, if you're running a business and you're not really the best person suited to run that business, then the business is never going to achieve the kind of greatness that it can with the right person running it. And in my case, I realized that Again, I'm like, okay, I'm a good enough entrepreneur. Our businesses, there are certain metrics you could look at that people will say, yeah, you were successful from the outside looking in. There was a perception that we were achieving this great success and we built businesses that customers love and we sold a lot of product and yada, yada, yada. But on the inside, I knew that I wasn't achieving what I was capable of.

Here's the thing that we're going to wrap up the public portion of this time together, and I can't thank you enough. It's really gone fast. And so as a parting thing, what would you leave with the people that have stayed with us this long? What is the main thing that you would have them take away from this? Because people look to you as an expert on how to overcome How to win in business, how to be successful. You know, they're looking for answers. And I know you get these questions all the time, either at UCLA or when you're speaking, doing keynotes. And so they're looking at you as an authority figure on winning. That's kind of a big responsibility. The thing is, what would a takeaway, just one takeaway that you would like to wrap this up with?

Yeah, so Larry, that's a great question. And what I would say is just being completely honest over the course of this conversation, we just barely scratched the surface.

We just got started. Yeah.

Right. If even that, we just barely, barely, barely started talking about what it takes. So what I would tell now with that said, what I would tell anyone who is still listening, who's still watching and has invested the time and made it this far is even though we've spent the past 45 minutes just sort of scratching the surface, we did talk about a lot of different things and there's so much out there. There's so much that we talked about over the course of this conversation. There's so much that we didn't talk about over the course of this conversation. I'm going to go back to what I started with, which is get started. Pick one thing. What's one thing that you heard from this conversation that resonated with you? There had to be one thing from Larry, from me. Maybe there wasn't something that either of us said, but there's something that one of us said that triggered an idea for you. What is one thing, one thought, one action that you can internalize And adopt and get started.

That's fantastic because really all you can do is take the next step, folks. You know, if you got pages of notes and this, that, and the other, that's great. But on that, those pages, what are you thinking of? What, what can you think of that you heard today that you don't have to look at your notes to get? So I'm gonna wrap this up with Adam and ask him to stay around for a couple of minutes where I ask him a few questions for our green room segment afterwards. I do this, Adam, for our pro-level members inside our training center.

Larry, I'm around, man. Whatever you need.

All right. Well, thanks so much for this portion. And we just got started. We're going to have to do it again, Adam. We're going to have to do it again.

Name the time and place. Maybe next time we'll do it in Aspen or in Palm Beach.

I love it. I love it. If you do it with me, that's where we'll do it because that's where I'll be. All right. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Larry.

Appreciate it. That's it for this episode. If this resonated with you, do me a favor, share it with someone who's ready to level up. Winners find winners, and the right conversation at the right time can change everything. Want to go deeper? Join us inside the Big Hitter Community at joinbighitters.com. That's where the real work happens. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. Thanks for listening. the next one. Remember that you're either growing or dying, and there's no standing still. Keep winning, and I'll see you next week.