Uncommon Moments: Your Success Depends on Your Enthusiasm

So I'm going to be traveling in the next couple of weeks and I wanted to do a quick couple of episodes on some notes and quotes that I pull from The Founders Podcast by David Senra. So what I do is I listen to a ton of episodes. You've probably heard it by now, and I've listened to over 230 episodes. It's about 270 hours now. I think for the year, this year I've listened to 64 hours of his podcast. And I love his podcast. I think it's one of the best podcasts out there. And if there was only one podcast you could listen to besides mine, it would be his. And he also started another podcast called David Sinra, where he interviews living founders. Because what he does is he reads a bunch of books and he's basically reflecting on all of these stories. Actually, something that I wanted to bring up is I'm going to actually be taking a different approach. Instead of— I admire David Senra tremendously, so much to the point where I want to start this podcast because I was so inspired from him. I got my inspiration from him. I even did a tribute episode back for my 1-year anniversary of my podcast. And now I'm going to actually be taking my podcast in a new direction where I want to study living founders and entrepreneurs. I want to study people that are making dents in the world right now. And David does some of that, but he studies a lot of older people from the 1800s, 1900s. I want to study people now, and I can't tell you any names because I don't want to give anything away. But there are some incredible people that I could be doing podcast episodes on, and I really want to pursue that. And these are people that don't have books. They don't have anything on them. It's just YouTube interviews, like interviews with news, with news outlets or magazines or whatever it is. I want to be that person where I'm going to go pursue that. And bring light to new people in a field that is ever-changing. So that's going to be my pursuit from now on. I'm still going to be reading books. I'm still going to be making podcast episodes on books that I'm reading, but it's going to be less of that and more of these new people. And I'm still discovering that style, like how am I going to do it, the format, everything. But I really want to pursue that. And there's some amazing people, just incredibly amazing people that I really want to study. So As a tribute episode, I want to go through a couple quotes and notes that I found. I actually put his his episode numbers in here, but just some quotes and notes that I found from David Sinner's Founders Podcast, and I even have the specific episode number numbers. But these are after listening to. I started doing this because Readwise, which is a partner of the podcast, I love Readwise, one of the best apps. But basically they started doing this thing called quick passages so you could get a note and just put it in real quick. And I kind of did a makeshift thing. And so I, you had to create your own book and there's all this like stuff within Readwise. But what I did is I did quick passages where I pulled just like anytime I hear something super profound, really, really profound, I take that and I put it into Readwise in my quick passages. And most of this is like the top Highlights of Founders episodes. So I really want to just go through some of these incredible quotes. So it says, "To do the best design, you have to live and breathe the product." This is from Johnny Ives, the Johnny Ives episode from I believe it was pretty recent. I think it was 420s, the 420s, which was in the last month or two. Johnny Ives is truly incredible. He is the Apple designer. He helped Steve Jobs, I believe, design the Apple iPod or the phone, or he designed Apple products. He's one of the best designers in the whole world. And so what he's saying here is to do your best design, to do your best, you have to live and breathe your product. So if you have a business, you have to live and breathe it. It's not enough to just work on it. You have to live and breathe it. You have to be the active salesman, right? Rockefeller has this great quote. Enthusiasm is often proportional to success, or success is often proportional to how enthusiastic you are. So if you're more enthusiastic, and I've talked about this before, but JD or not JD Rockefeller, Phil Knight, he was selling computers and he never could really sell a lot. He was never really enthusiastic about it. But when he started selling shoes, something about it just lit up. Like something about that. He found his passion and he was super enthusiastic about it and he started selling more. He's actually started selling more. So you got to live and breathe your product. And that's Phil Knight is the founder of Nike. So he started Nike. Of course, we all know it as this big, massive shoe company, redefining general, like the whole shoe industry. And you got to follow your passion. So success is often proportional to the outcome, or the success is often proportional to your enthusiasm. And I think Rockefeller has this quote where basically however much your enthusiasm is, it can affect the product and make it better 10 to 100 times more. I think he even goes up to like 1,000, like 100 to 1,000, which is insane, but in a good way, right? This is, you have to live and breathe your product. This is Founders Episode 284. Carnegie never wanted to know the profits. He always wanted to know the costs. Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie, in this Andrew Carnegie episode, it's like he didn't want to know the profits. He wanted to know your costs. He wanted to know the costs. So it's like you need to know your costs because you can get so enamored with the profits and you start not being minute about the details as you were when you first started the company. Now you're just so focused on making profits that you forget, oh, maybe there's a lot of unnecessary costs and cutting costs. Elon Musk has this great quote, delete, delete, delete. Right? You gotta delete to get to the subject. To, you know, if you delete more, you'll get to the essence of a product, the essence of a product. But that goes with business. You can delete, delete, delete, like when it comes to people or when it comes to, all right, let's remove that and add automation. All right, that's working well. Let's delete a little bit more. All right, that's not working at all. And JD Rockefeller had this story where There's a bunch of oil and essentially it's a cost control story. So they were doing like 40 drops of something and he tried 38. That didn't work. All right. They did 39. That ended up saving thousands and thousands of dollars later down the line, long-term. And so when you don't have cost control, you essentially are building up, it's like a compound, a compounding thing that you could have been saving thousands of thousands of dollars on. Beforehand, now in Founders episode 271, it he he has this great quote: Whenever he fancied something, he never did it halfway. I like that. I I forget who this was, but it's like whatever you do, don't do it halfway. Always like if you're going to commit to something, commit to it. And there was this interesting idea. I just finished Founders episode 280. 5. It was on Jay Gould, and there was this idea. So Jay Gould is this guy from the 1800s. He was— he basically was like the first guy of Wall Street, and he, he started out in leather. He was 18, you know, 4 of his, um— it's insane. His mother died, his dad remarried, his step— his first stepmother died, then his dad remarried again, his third stepmother died, and then In four years, four people died. His sister ended up dying. So it's like you have all these crazy things that happened to him. But this guy Jay Gold in the 1800s, he's super persistent. By the time he's 28, he's made about two and a half million dollars in our own money. So it was like a hundred thousand dollars in his money, and or in that time's money. And now Jay Gold died around he he got tuberculosis and he died around 52 years old. But what's really interesting about that story is this guy was super competitive. He was super persistent and he kept going and he never did it halfway. But there was this idea from Charlie Munger about multitasking. You don't wanna multitask. And I find that really interesting because we live in a culture nowadays where it's like, I can be listening to an audiobook while doing work, or I can be listening to an audiobook while driving. And while it's not all bad, and there's this idea of like optimizing your time, which is a really good idea. Sometimes Chris Williamson has this idea for Modern Wisdom of shower thoughts of like turning off all audio and you just have shower, like you're just in the shower and it's just shower thoughts. Like it's just you and yourself and you come up with your best ideas there. Now, I don't necessarily agree with that because I, you know, it's interesting listening to audiobooks and podcasts and continually learning, but there's this idea of like boredom. Chris Nolan has this great idea of like he doesn't have a smartphone and he's kind of gone viral on the internet because of that. But he doesn't have a smartphone. So what he'll do is he'll have this, like when he wants to contact someone, he'll have someone from his team reach out or whatever he does. But what's really interesting, it's like boredom brings way to creativity. Like boredom brings way to creativity. And I thought that was an interesting idea. Like he'll just sit in a room. If you just sit in a room, he can like start imagining certain things. Like it brings new ideas. So boredom's actually a good thing and not something to be like, if you're a time optimizer where I always have to be listening to a podcast, always Like, silence is a good thing most of the time. Now, on the other hand, you don't want to just start being lazy where you're not doing any of that. And so it is really important to actually go and like push yourself. All right, instead of listening to music, maybe I listen to a podcast. Instead of listening to music, maybe I listen to an audiobook, depending on the circumstance. So, um, I kind of got off on a tangent there, but I think it's really, really interesting. He says advertising doesn't exist to make you buy a product right away. It exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. I think that's really interesting. So with podcasting, like David Sinner's podcast, it's like, let's just take podcasting or books. It's like podcasts. You take the idea of you put your podcast out in the world or free content on Instagram or social media. You put content out in the world. Now, once you get more reputation, and reputation is a big thing that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger talk about, that's a huge thing. It's like advertising. You build up trust, you build up reputation. Once you build that up, then, then you can drive sales. That's the whole key. Like David Sinner's podcast, I've listened to a lot and like anything he says now, I would buy in an instant. If it's a book that's on my list, if it's, you know, a certain product that's on my list, like Readwise was a product from him. And I love Readwise. Now, Founders Episode 268, Listen Instead of Talk. Listen instead of talk. By listening and talking, you can really show a person respect, admiration, or you can just take it up all yourself. So you can talk as much as you want, or You can let them talk, ask them questions, and people love it when you ask them questions. People love it when you ask them so many questions that you know they can say, "Oh, that's a we just had a great conversation," and you've just asked them questions the whole time. But that's that's an interesting thing. Listen instead of talk. That was Founders episode 268. For this short episode, I just want to keep this super short. I'm gonna make another episode in the next couple of weeks, probably 2 to 3 weeks from now, where— and I'm gonna be traveling, so I'm gonna make a quick episode after this just on some more founders' notes and quotes and highlights and make it super quick. That way you guys can listen to this and just take away the best highlights. So thank you guys for listening, and I will talk to you guys again soon.