7 CEO moves that sound illegal (but actually work)

Key Takeaway

Create a visible, fast path for people to remove friction this week. Set up a dedicated channel or form where anyone can submit a process, approval, tool, or policy that slows work down; assign one owner to review it daily; and publish what gets fixed. This turns complaints into operational improvements, signals that speed matters, and prevents bureaucracy from quietly becoming normal as your team grows.

Episode Overview

The hosts examine seven unconventional CEO practices—from spontaneous equity grants and friction-removal inboxes to single-tasking and radical transparency—that challenge conventional management norms. They close by contrasting extreme ambition with a more sustainable definition of success: choosing to “be great” in daily actions rather than pursuing legacy at any cost.

Full Transcript

Transcript of 7 CEO moves that sound illegal (but actually work) from My First Million. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

If this were a videotape, it would say "Sean: Hardcore, Part Two." People wouldn't get what they expected. You would just see an Indian guy shouting about management life hacks at his desk. CEO What I want to talk about is that if you're the CEO of a company, if you're running a business right now—and I think a lot of people listening to this are—there's a good chance you're not " hardcore" enough. I want to tell six or seven real stories about what CEOs do, about steps that sound wrong, almost illegal, but actually work.

The idea is that there is no school for CEOs, no special training, and no one to control you. You manage everyone else yourself, and most people don't even give you real feedback because you're their boss; You are the boss. Will these be famous examples or stories from your friends? I have a mix of examples that you know, some that I think you don't, but they're about well-known companies, and a couple of stories from my friends. Okay, so I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…I have seven.

And every time you bring up ideas like this—and you do it all the time—I'm interested in them , but I'm also interested in why you care. Why are you worried about this right now? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that I just want to get better at what I do. So if I hear someone doing something that I haven't tried before, or that sounds crazy but I understand how it could work...It's like I've found a new trick in a video game, and I want to know about it .

And the second—we use this expression “ pattern-breaking” very often, ad nauseam: you see the world in a certain way, and it seems like there are certain boundaries. Everything in the world fits into this framework . And then you hear a story that just goes beyond that framework. This breaks the pattern. The framework must expand to accommodate this new information. And I don't know why I like it so much. I love it the way boys love Pokémon cards. I just want to collect as many of these ideas and stories that break the mold as possible.

And the reason is that you've probably heard the story about the elephant that is tied to a stake in the ground from a young age, and when it grows up and becomes so strong that it could easily pull that stake out, it doesn't . There are many examples in my life when it seems as if there is an illusion of control, that something is limiting me, although in reality I am not limited by anything. The stories I'm going to tell you are like that elephant and the stake, where you say, "Oh, there's no way I could do that." Why not?

Why can't you do this? Before I get into the famous stories of people who did this, I'll tell you about a guy I had breakfast with who told me a story that made me think and pay attention to this. So, I recently had breakfast with a guy named Martin, who's going to be on the podcast, Martin Basiri. So, Martin was the one who slipped out of my hands. The very first angel investment I ever wanted to make. Over 10 years ago, I started making some money.

I think I was earning, well, I don't know, 160 thousand a year. Not even that much money, not enough to be an angel investor, but I wanted to be one. I was sitting in San Francisco and thinking this was exactly what needed to be done. I should start doing angel investing. And I had one teenager, about 13 years old, who used one of our products and was constantly hanging out in the tech rooms and being interested in technical things. He wrote me a letter. He said, "Hey, I'll be your scout." Here I am, a guy who has never done angel investing, and now I have a scout.

He said, "I'll send you three companies a week, and you don't have to invest in any of them, but it would be really helpful for me just to get feedback from you ." "I would really like to learn." How old were you then? I was probably 24 or 25. Understandable. Yes. Good. So, he sends me a letter with the first company and writes: " This guy is Martin Basiri, he's in Canada, where I live." And I'm like, "I'm not going to invest in a Canadian company." "I want to invest in Silicon Valley companies." He says, "What he's doing is really cool." He has a company called ApplyBoard.

And what ApplyBoard did was very simple. They allowed international students, and you know, if you've ever lived abroad, the dream of most international students is to study in the United States. Yes. To enter the university here. But imagine you're a kid in Malaysia with Malaysian parents, and they say, "Great, why do n't you apply to , say, the University of California, Davis?" "And they're like, "What? What is the University of California, Davis? Where is this establishment? How do I apply? How do I fill out this form?

That is, there is a huge gap between where you are and where you are trying to get to, you need a bridge, and ApplyBoard has become that bridge. They have, in fact, simplified the admission process to US universities for international students as much as possible. And what they did, and it was very smart, was they realized that US universities were just ripping off international students. There's a reason they love international students: they charge them three times the tuition fees to study at the same institution, for the same education.

If it's a public university, then, of course, they charge less for tuition for their residents, more for out-of-towners, and then there 's a third category— fees for foreigners. It is three times higher. So he went to the universities and arranged for them to say, "Yes, we will pay you 5 or 10 thousand for each student you accept as an affiliate commission or reward." So it's incredible, but an international student really wants to get there anyway. So it's not the hardest sell in the world. They just needed a bridge.

I hear this and think, "Dude , this 13-year-old might have actually sent me some good company." And I'm like, "Okay, was it 13?" Scout was 13. I know why. OK. And I'm like, "Dude, I think I'm going to go for this deal." He arrives , I meet him in San Francisco and agree on the spot to invest 25 thousand in this company. And I told him this very confidently. By the way, this is a huge amount of money. For example, your annual savings in San Francisco with a salary of $170,000 were $ 20,000.

Yes, that's right. I was essentially investing my entire net income after taxes into this random Canadian startup. So what do you think? A day later I was scared . I'm like, "Oh, man, that was too much." " I shouldn't have said that." I felt awkward as I went down . I was thinking, " You know, should I go back to him and offer him five thousand, ten thousand?" It seemed absurd. And you know what I did? I didn't refuse, but I just didn't say anything. I didn't call back, he did n't really insist either, time passed, then I became unavailable, and in general, I missed this deal.

Today , ApplyBoard seems to have over a billion dollars in revenue per year or something incredible like that. This is a multi-billion dollar company. This is just madness. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it 's a multi-billion dollar company. So for me, it was a huge loss because it was an opportunity to become my first angel investor. What was his assessment then? Oh, man, it was like, I don't know, ten million, maybe. Yes, five, six. I could be the first investor there. This would be the first investor from Silicon Valley.

Yes, that would be incredible. So last week we had breakfast and I had already invested in his new company, Passage, which is doing amazing things. But I asked, " Dude, how is it? How do you even work?" I said, "Tell me, we're having breakfast right now." You are going to the office. What are you doing? And he replied, "I work pretty hard." And I said, "Okay, what does that mean?" And he started telling me about his work schedule. The guy says, "I pick up the kids, you know, at 8:00 in the morning.

I'm in the office at 8:30 and I sit there from 8:30 until, you know, midnight every night." And I say: " Midnight?" My God. I asked, "Are you alone there?" He says, "I used to be alone, but I'm not anymore." I said, "Well, what do you mean?" How did you get people to stay up so late and work overtime? What did you do to inspire or motivate them? He says, "Option drop." I asked again: "What ?" And he says again: " Option drop." I said, "What is an option drop?" He says, "At my company , if someone does something cool, I just say, 'Option rain.' 50,000 options.

I just give them stock options in the company on the spot. So if someone has a great idea, they do more than expected for a client, they solve a problem right in a meeting -- 'Option rain.' It's like Dana White bonuses. Well, he said it's like a bonus, but the company's stock is on the move. And he says that at night he's like, "If I'm here at 10:00 p.m., and there's, let's say, 12 people here, I just say, 'Everyone here, option rain. 20,000 options. All of you.'" And he 's like, "I don't do this every night, but I do it about once every 50 days." And guess what?

It's motivated people to do what's important to me. They know that if I solve a serious problem problem, open a new path to growth, solve a customer problem, or work really hard—that's how you get more options. Option rain. And I'm sitting there laughing. At first I laugh at him because it's just ridiculous. The phrase itself and the way he said it just made me laugh out loud . And I thought, well, of course. Of course, that would work. Of course, that would reinforce the behavior, not something like, "I put our company values ​​on the wall 6 years ago." I hope they follow them." You know what I mean?

Obviously, instant reward, positive reinforcement of behavior -- the more specific and immediate the reward , the more you're going to see that behavior. That's basically the basics of behavioral psychology. So I'm like, okay, I guess it works. And I said , is this legal? Can you do that? I don't know. I felt like you can't just throw options around like that. He's like, "Why not?" "'Yes, you can.' He says, 'I'm just sending a message to the assistant.'" Optional rain "." These people, such and such an amount." And then it's put up in paper.

That's it. Well, it's an option, so they still have to buy it, right? So it's not exactly free money. Um, yeah, it's like a strike price. Yeah, you can exercise this option if you want. But there's a certain period of time to exercise. You don't have to buy it right away. You can wait if you want . So, okay. The " option drop" was the first one. I thought, this is an obvious way to incentivize the desired behavior right there, using your company's stock. Can I suggest the next option?

Go ahead. That's exciting. Do you want to rate these ideas somehow? Maybe give a simple rating: thumbs down, neutral, thumbs up, or two thumbs up. That's your choice. Um, not two thumbs up . So, just one thumbs up. Okay. It's very effective, good, but not something extreme. Do you do that? I don't work with options, because it's just give money. Sure, you do it on the spot? No. Sure. But I'm also a CEO , and I'm not a fan of extremes. You know what I mean?

I'm not playing this game. What? A game where you have to win? What do you mean? Of course you do. Not at the cost of being in the office at midnight , no. I'm more of a fan of ... Not necessarily doing it at midnight, right? Is that one option, or do you just decide: Do I reward the behavior that I want on the fly? We have a gong in the office, and when someone does something cool, we hit it. So, Auditory Reinforcement. Well, it works because everyone is watching, and you're like, let's celebrate what's happening right now.

But no, I'm not giving money away. Here's the next option. Hey guys, real quick: if you like this episode about CEOs, delegation, difficult team conversations and hiring, I have something for you. HubSpot has compiled the best practices that Sean and I use at our companies and laid them out in a very easy-to- understand format. So if you want to save yourself 10 years of headaches and problems, be sure to check it out. If only we had this sooner. That would have helped me a lot , there should be a QR code on the screen that you can scan or a link in the description.

So check it out. It's completely free and it's just amazing. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, are trying to combat friction. There's a lot of nonsense in every company, especially when you're growing, and when you're like them—growing really fast. There's always things that just hold you back, bureaucratic ballast in the company. Policies, procedures, you know, "potholes," things that get in the way of you working in the company when you're just trying to do your job well. So they created what they call a friction removal service. It's kind of like the idea of ​​a dojo inside the company, but it's actually very simple: there's an email at friction@openai.com.

You can just write to friction about anything that's stopping you from doing your job. Like, is there something that's slowing you down? Is there something missing? Is there a problem? Anything, and there's a designated person in the company whose job is to sort through everything that comes in. And if something looks like a pretty significant source of friction. We have to eliminate it. That helps our people move faster. And then they go and eliminate that friction. It creates a culture that says, " Look, we're going to actively combat the bloat that comes into companies that are growing fast by having cleaners for the bureaucracy." I thought, "Oh, I love this idea." So friction is brilliant.

Rate me. Two, just two. Can I, can I give you two? Yeah, yeah. Two thumbs up. Okay. You like Caesar would never do that, but that's okay. Yeah, it's like Chuck-E-Cheese instead of gladiators. No, two, because it's less heroic and more systematic. Yeah, I totally agree with that . Okay, next up is one-bit communication. Remember that Yo app from back in the day? Yeah, it was funny. It was really popular when you and I were 26. People, you only understand if you know: back in San Francisco, this app became incredibly popular for, like, 30 days.

If there was a list of "one-hit" songs for Silicon Valley, it would be Chumbawamba. Chumbawamba's "I get knocked down" and the Yo app are both on that list. What Yo did. It seemed like it was just an app: your friends downloaded it, you pressed a button, and the other person got a "Yo" notification. That seemed like it. And if they pressed the button back, it would go? Yo. Yo back. All you could say to each other—it's "Yo." And it seemed like the most ridiculous thing in the world.

It went viral because of its absurdity. And then Andreessen Horowitz wrote them a big check. And we're like, what? You know, one of the smartest investors invested in Yo? Are you kidding me? It was straight out of Silicon Valley. Actually, I think they made fun of it on the show with the "Bro" app. Where you said " bro" to each other. But I was like, why? And Marc Andreessen wrote a post called " One-Bit Communication." He was thinking about how there are many forms of communication, right?

You can write letters, text messages, and they have a limit of 140 or 160 characters. There used to be pagers—it was a way to get attention, and you had to understand what this code meant when I sent it to you. And he says that the smallest form of communication would be one-bit communication. Just one bit back and forth. back. Yo. But "Yo" can mean a lot of things. He wrote a whole dissertation on " Yo." I remember reading it and thinking, to be honest , he pretty much convinced me.

You know, a smart guy can " sell" you anything, and he did. He convinced me. By the way, I learned that there are a few CEOs who use one-bit communication. So the first one is Siemens. The CEO of Siemens said, "Yes, I have a very specific management system." My management system is like this. You write me an email about anything you want to discuss, and I say "okay" or "no." That's it. I just say "okay" or "no" to your email, and if you need more, you come and talk to me in person.

And when do you come to talk to me? We don't have a weekly calendar meeting. We don't have any scheduling. If you need me, you can talk to me right now. And that's it. That's how I unlock work for everyone in company. And I won't be a "bottleneck." I'll just give you permission , or denial, or if you need more details, you'll understand that you need to come and talk to me right now. And we'll discuss more, and then you'll get a yes or a no after the details are out.

Yeah, this guy's having a stellar time right now. I think I've seen a few articles about him. What happened to him ? Well, he has a background in theoretical physics, you see, but he's a CEO , and people like that are always treated differently if you're from a non-traditional background. Weird and cool. And he says, I love that quote. He says, they ask, "So you don't have any regular meetings with your subordinates? Well, to sit down, just chat and talk things over?" And he says, "I don't entertain people, and they shouldn't entertain me." If you think about it, if you've ever worked in a company, a lot of meetings are real theater, right?

It's " progress theater." Like, I want to put on a little show for you about how good I'm doing, and you sit back and give me your "theatrical applause," and I feel good and move on. And we've both just wasted an hour of each other's time. There's no work getting done. It just means you don't trust me enough to just do the work, and I don't trust you enough to know that I can just show the work and that's enough for you to understand my value.

So we're going to tap dance in front of each other . Is he German? That's very German behavior. Yes, he's German. I had to check him out because I think Siemens is a German company. This guy is great. Will he be the new CEO Snowflake? Maybe. Maybe. Early signs. My scouts, my scouts are paying attention to this . We have to get on this train on time too. Okay. On topic. Jeff B. Escalation. So this is Bezos. Bezos was known to read any customer emails, he, you know, his email was public, so customers could write to him.

And he just acted as a router. He would forward an email to the team if there was a problem, and it would just have one bit of information, a one-bit message—just a question mark. Which is probably the most annoying thing any CEO can do . But he taught the team that this question mark has a very specific meaning. And if he sends you a question mark, it means, "Is this true?" Why is this happening? And what are we going to do about it? "It's all encoded in one question mark.

It allowed him to sort through his mail much faster than if he had to go through each case and find a good time to discuss it. When can I discuss this with you? You know, then I put it off, then I bring it up, and then we end up having these long conversations. Just one question mark—and that's all he did. And his position was this: He said that in the beginning, a lot of teams would say, ' No, no, it's just one loud, angry customer or something.'" Look, the data shows that we have a 98% success rate." And he said, "Listen , we have a very data-driven company, but these customer stories matter, and they matter a lot." I want you to research them, because in sending you this letter, I'm not telling you to drop everything and run to please Joan from Wichita, this Prime customer; You know, you don't have to solve her problem.

I say that Amazon is a mechanism. The mechanism may be broken, and this story is a signal, a creak in the system, which I ask you to investigate to understand why this happened, because the machine is supposed to work differently." Yes, I tend to think that these stories are more important than traditional data. And he said, "Listen , you're not wrong that maybe 98% of it works the way you want it to. I'm telling you, these stories usually show that your metrics are incomplete, that they don't capture the part of the customer experience that really matters.

Both the metric is correct and the client is right. The metric is just incomplete because it doesn't capture that part of the customer experience." I thought, "Oh, I love that." That would be a very comprehensive explanation for what would otherwise be just incredibly annoying: getting that question mark from your CEO who forwards a random customer complaint to you, as the head of some department in the company. And I think a question mark from you or me would be perceived as incredibly impertinent. There's something about Jeff that seems a little more polite and respectful.

So I don't see it as, uh, impertinent. At first, when I heard "question mark," I thought, well, that's pretty disrespectful. But I don't think he's a disrespectful person. If you see me sending a " question mark," consider it disrespectful. It's really disrespectful. Yeah. That's because they don't have a slap emoji. Yeah, I can't punch you through the screen. Okay, what's next? Yeah, next—from Peter Thiel. So Peter Thiel, when he was CEO of PayPal, had this thing that I really liked: he said , "We're going to be a single-tasking company." "You're not going to multitask." Which is great, because PayPal was full of some of the brightest minds in the world, right?

Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Reed Hoffman, the creators of YouTube, the creators of Yelp, the creator of... Obviously, there's a lot of genius in this room. You would think that if anyone could multitask, it would be these people. Well, no. Peter's position was, "Everyone has one big problem that you're trying to solve at the moment." For example, you could be fighting fraud in Ukraine right now, or you could be trying to optimize the virality of the PayPal button on eBay. And the other guy could be trying to, you know, um, reduce our, uh, bank processing fees, right?

So, everyone is assigned one problem, and his approach was like this. They say, well, you know, how do you get people to really do it, right? Because in theory it sounds good, right? Focus is a word that everyone nods and agrees with, but we were all pretty bad at staying focused. So how do you get your teams to actually do it? And Peter Thiel's response was, oh, if they tried to talk to me about anything other than their problem, I would just walk out of the room.

And the nonverbal communication was very clear about how I felt. And people would ask, did he really do that? And Keith, you know, Keith Rabois, he literally did that . If you tried to talk about anything other than your problem, he would just turn around and walk away. And then you would get a signal of how important it was. And if you wanted the CEO to value you, you had to focus on your problem. He just did this "autistic stomping." You could just feel your feet already pounding towards the door.

Do you think he was wearing shoes? No way he was wearing shoes in back office. So, No, man. He's the guy in the loafers. You know, he's the kind of guy you can just hear him slamming his shoes on the floor. I can see it. He told me his focus is convex. Unfortunately, I'm too stupid to know exactly what that means, but it sounds very provocative, and I've used it three times since then. The good news is that no one I work with knows what that means either.

I don't know what it has to do with focus. That's what convexity looks like. Or is it? A little bit. He says, "If you're 80% focused on a task, the outcome is going to be half as bad as if you were 90% focused." So the jump from 80% to 90% focus doubles your impact. So you really want to go that "last mile" of focus, that last level of ruthlessness to your concentration, which double it—you know, you get another doubling or two of that , which makes sense, in principle.

Well , look at any field, right? If you're an 80th percentile swimmer, nobody knows your name, and you work for a tire company. If you're a 90th percentile swimmer, well, people in your district might know your name, but you still run a tire company. If you're a 99th percentile swimmer, you can, you know, swim professionally. But if you're 99.999999, right? Like the final push, you're Michael Phelps, and you get all the gold medals, millions of dollars, and so on. And that's essentially the same thing as your use of focus.

That last mile, that last level of obsession—that's what gives you a disproportionately large reward. So what's the point, uh, number three? Or Are we on the fourth episode of "Hardcore from Sean"? If this was a VHS tape, it would be labeled " Hardcore Sean, Part 2." People wouldn't be at all thrilled with what they expected to see. Like, you're just some Indian at a table shouting about management hacks. CEO . Add an "O" to "CEO." Okay, okay, that's what we got, what's left. I did 1 , 2, 3, 4, 5.

I got five. I got three left . Okay. Jack Welch, CEO of GE. When you run a big company, it's very easy to realize that all your kids are not equal. They're not loved equally. All these different business units. And GE was made up of a bunch of different business units. And he had two simple rules when he ran GE. Number one: Every division has to be number one or number two in the market. Otherwise, you have a year to fix it, sell it, or close.

That's it. We'll cut the units if you can't be first or second, which is an incredible incentive , because it's Darwinian pressure for survival. And another Darwinian pressure that he used was that every year Jack Welch would fire the worst 10% of the company . Every year. So, constantly thinning the herd, which sounds like... I'm sure people interpret that differently. Some people would think he was a scumbag for that. When I first heard that, I thought, "Oh, that doesn't sound so tough." But then try to do it yourself.

Try to do it every year. It's incredibly difficult. Or look at your own experience. How many underperformers have you tolerated? Because you don't fire people until it's critical. I think Jack Welch... I think he's a controversial figure. We really need to take a hard look at him, because they say he was a terrible CEO. Because if you look at GE, it became a bunch of crap, had a bunch of things that ultimately didn't work out; but I do n't know enough about Jack Welch to say whether it was his fault or what happened.

But I know he was very well-liked as a leader, but at the same time I hear smart people say the opposite about layoffs. Like Jensen at Nvidia, he said, "I'm going to shower you with greatness." "I'm not going to lay you off." It's funny how great people, assuming they're both great, have different views on layoffs, like everything else. It's like it, it, it, it, it's like the complete opposite, right? Yeah, yeah. And you'll find that for every one of those, you'll find people who are very successful doing the exact opposite.

Which doesn't mean that's the only path to greatness , it just means, " Wow, I thought those stories were pretty cool, huh?" "That's really all we're saying, and it kind of stretches your thinking about what's acceptable, permissible, and maybe effective. You know, I think firing underperformers is a pretty, I would say, logical step. I mean, yeah. I understand why it works. I definitely understand why it works, and I, I support it. But yeah, I think other, you know, like Jensen, when he was talking about it, he said, yeah, I do n't fire them, but I turn up the intensity so much that you either get tough or you leave.

Yeah, it's more like a survival of the fittest: yeah, they get fired instead of being fired, but either way, you're weeding out the underperformers one way or the other. So, those last two. Um, okay, I'll just say the last one. I-I'll tell you, I do n't even really like it. Ford CEO, this This guy comes in, this Alan, becomes the CEO of Ford. They had just lost 17 billion last year, and he comes in, and they do a business review where they go through all the different business projects and see if they're on schedule or not.

And it was color-coded: green, on schedule, yellow, at risk, red, behind schedule. And everything was green, and he's like, "Guys, we lost 17 billion last year." How can everything be green? And he realized that they had a culture where, you know, people were kind of afraid to admit failure. And so he says, "You can't be afraid; you have to be honest ." And the next week they were all green again except for one red one, and he stood up and started clapping, changing the culture of failure.

And I thought, "That sounds a little bit like a Disney movie." Yeah, it sounds like some of that "Cool Bends" nonsense. Yeah, so I think we'll probably go dislike Alan together. Nice try , Alan. I'm not inspired by that. Okay, the last one is from Jimmy, aka Mr. Beast. I think you were there when he described his cloning strategy , and we're like, "Dude, how do you train your employees?" They're all very young, they're all newbies , and you're growing up so fast. I mean, I'm just curious, you never went to college or business school or anything like that.

So what do you do in terms of management? And he says, "Oh, I just do cloning ." And we're like, "That sounds illegal." What does that even mean ? And he says, "Well, if I hire you for one of the key roles, you just follow me everywhere." Like, you literally follow me everywhere I go. And I think the guy who started it even slept in the same house as him. Like, it was so intense. From morning to night. I remember one guy he hired was also Jimmy's alarm clock.

He would come in and wake him up. And from the moment Jimmy woke up, they were together until he went to bed. And he did that for Six months. He says, " In six months, you'll know exactly how I think." Because you've been with me everywhere. You've seen every decision I've made. So, you're basically my proxy. Now I can be in two places at once, because you know exactly what Jimmy would do in this situation. And so, cloning works great. And I remember there were a room full of CEOs, billionaires, who were listening to this and saying, " I think this is cool and illegal." Don't these people have days off?

And he says, "No." You come here to win. I don't know if he still does that, but in the early stages of his business, I thought it was pretty cool. How are things going now? It's interesting to hear about extreme people and whether they change when they have kids and so on . It doesn't seem like Elon has softened up, even though the company has gotten bigger and he's had more kids. I wonder if that's what happened with Jimmy and his, what they call, Beast Enterprise.

or I don't know what it's called. It's Beast Industries. Yeah, I think both, right? I think he's grown up, right? When we met him, he was probably only 24 or 25, something like that, right? So, you know, he's grown up. He's changed a lot over the years. Yeah, you grow up, and the speed of his learning... he's just obsessed with learning from smart people, so his timeline for success is just incredible, right? So, I'm sure a lot has changed. At the same time, if something works, and you're that old, you have to be careful not to lose your individuality.

And yeah, he now has a CEO , Beast Industries. I'm sure they've got more people and less business mistakes that usually happen in the beginning when you're just learning and getting your bearings. But yeah, man, I think they're still working really hard to win, and I think the fundamentals of all of that , What works, stays, right? Like everything, what works stays, and what doesn't work gets weeded out over time. I... compared to these guys, we're not even in the same league as hardcore. Um, I don't know about you, but when I hear that, I think, "Oh, that sounds like a lot of work." I'm not interested in that.

I don't want the same results. And today I have a story for you that is the complete opposite of hardcore. I wasn't going to do this story about hardcore or not hardcore, but rather about the fact that money is everywhere. Can I tell you an anecdote that supports your point about the other side of the coin? David Perell, a friend of our podcast, invited Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly is someone I really respect and admire. He's had a very diverse career. He founded Wired magazine and wrote " A Thousand True Fans," which really shaped my thinking.

And was he... I know, that he was a thinker and a writer, but was he also a successful businessman ? Yeah, I think he was successful. I think he was very successful by normal standards, but not like some crazy billionaires. But I don't think that was his goal at all. He just did a bunch of interesting projects, and they were very successful. He asked him a great question about that. He asked him something like , what was the price of being Kevin Kelly? What did you have to sacrifice to become the Kevin Kelly that you are?

And Kevin said, "You know, that's a great question." To have the life that I have, I had to give up greatness. Hmm. He says, "What do you mean?" And he says, "Well, I think the price of greatness is a certain amount of extremity." And I never wanted to be extreme. I didn't want to pay the price of extremeness. And he says, "I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to be as great as I could be if I were more focused on one thing, if I were more extreme, if I were to give up certain parts of my personal life." And he goes on, "I'm going to give you a very specific definition of greatness." He says, "Let's, for lack of a better word, define it, because I can say 'greatness,' and we can mean it differently." He says, " Let's say greatness is being remembered by people, not just your family, for more than one generation." And he goes on, "I don't think I'll be remembered for more than one or two generations, by anyone, except my own family." And he says, " To be, as he puts it, a kind of blip that just flies by." from one place to another, I can try a little bit of everything, explore, see different projects and bring them to life in my own way, but none of them are mine." None of them have become the greatest thing in the world.

To be this geezer, I just resigned myself and gave up the path to greatness, and I'm perfectly happy with that." And I thought that was very... I've never heard anyone say it that way . I liked his thinking on two levels. First, I don't think people ever explain what they mean by words. I like that he started by saying, "I can't answer unless I define what that word means to me." Were they grandchildren or great-grandchildren? Well, let's say grandchildren. Yeah. I understand. It's really interesting. I've always had a similar definition of greatness, but much longer— like 120 or 150 years, which is probably adds a few more generations, but it's a really interesting way to define it.

Yeah, well, you could, I mean, I don't know who you would consider great, but it's, you know, Steve Jobs in business, right? You could think of, like , Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, people who did great civic acts, or people like Houdini, great artists and creators, right? There are all these people that we consider great. If you look closely, very few of them live peaceful, balanced lives , right? Well, like, there are no ordinary people on the top of Mount Everest. You won't find balanced people there.

I think about that a lot because I love history, and when I see street names named after someone, I go and research who they were. For example, Fort Greene is named after Nathaniel Greene. Fort Greene is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, there 's a park named after Nathaniel Greene. Greene, who was a general in the American Revolution. He was a major figure in the American Revolution, one of the key generals, but does " remembering" mean that a park is named after him, even though nobody even knows that Fort Greene is Nathaniel Greene?

And I think, if this guy was in the top 20 most important people in the American Revolution, one of the most significant events in history, I do n't even know about him . And when you think about it, over the last 500 to 1,000 years, out of the billions of people who have lived on earth, the ones we remember most often have nothing to do with money. For example, even if you and I were to reach the top of business, we would probably be able to make it into the top 5,000 or top 10,000 of the richest Americans.

Maybe. That would be, obviously, 0.000001% of the total, right? And even that wouldn't make people remember you. 500 years. You can't name the 80th richest person in the 1930s. 50 years. Yeah. Yeah, you can't. So does that mean this person today? You don't know now. Yeah, you don't know. And then you think, okay, I'm not going to know. So it's not about the money. And then it becomes, okay, what about business? It's like, well, there are, of course, companies that have been around for that long, but basically, if you think about it, they're humanitarians, a handful of incredible, let's say, leaders or politicians, and you could also include the mothers of this world, well, people who have done something really special.

And then there's inventors. Like, or someone who has invented something. Yeah. Or an artist. Occasionally, well , every now and then an artist. And I'm like, when I think about it, I realize that the odds -- if I define greatness as something that that I'm going to be remembered in 150 or 200 years, well, first of all , I'm doing it wrong, and second of all , the odds are slim. And I'm like, "Well, maybe I just should n't worry about it ." I've been working on this for years .

Can I tell you how I came up with this very idea? Being remembered or legacy has never really appealed to me. I think I gave up on it pretty quickly. In fact, Hormozi once said something that I really liked. He said, "You know, the queen died six months ago? And you know what? She was the queen, and I never thought about her after she died." I'm like, " Oh, that's true." She's the queen, you know? Uh , she was the queen of England, after 100 years of reign, you know, she died.

So I've never really cared about legacy, but I wanted to achieve greatness. And when I thought about achieving greatness, it was kind of version of success, or, you know, building something great in the world, or being number one at something. And I realized that achieving greatness is not for me. It would be a waste . I'm not built that way. It's not something that would bring me pleasure. It comes at a price that I would n't be willing to pay if I knew it. But there's a big difference between achieving greatness and being great.

I know a lot of people who are great. Our buddy Ramon is great. He's a great friend. He's a great father. He's a great guy. And he's great to hang out with. And he... you know what I mean? He's great at being great. You mentioned Ben Wilson. Ben Wilson is doing a great job right now , with absolute, you know, class and courage. He's just great, and my coach is a guy who's just great. He's a really great guy. He's a great uncle to my kids.

He's a great, you know, great coach. He cares about people. You know, he's so much fun to be with. He's, he's always in a great mood. That's what being great is. And I realized that being great is a verb, it's an everyday thing. It's something to strive for, because you can do it right now. And in this moment, the way you're showing up, you can be great right now. But you can also stop being great if you lose sight of that. And then you have to pick yourself up right away and try to be great again.

And I think that's where I came from. I thought, "Okay, I think this resonates with me." That's totally fine with me. It's a much more holistic feeling. You can be great when you're training, doing the last three reps of a set, and you have to decide whether to drop the weight or push yourself and see what you're really capable of. That's the "being great " moment. You know, you can just be polite and kind to someone. That's also the "being great" moment. You know, sometimes I'm at the park, and there are other kids, and they're saying something to me , and I'm like, "I don't know why this 4-year- old is talking to me." And sometimes I just brush them off because I want to just sit on my phone.

I don't really feel like talking to a stranger's kid about, you know, that caterpillar that he found. And sometimes I pay attention to them and say something nice, because that's how I want someone to treat my kid. And that's the moment where I have to choose whether I'm going to be great or not. And I'm not always the best at it , but the goal is to increase that success rate. And that's something I can support. What was that phrase again? Say that again . I think that's good.

Instead of building something great, just be great? Yeah, don't try to achieve greatness. Just be great. Right now. Just be great. You saw that guy who went viral this week on Twitter where he said that someone was talking about a difficult work, and he's like, "I think you have to work hard, but there's a time between 3 and 13 when the kids don't hate you and they're willing to spend time with you." "You know, after 13, it's not like that anymore." They're out of diapers, they're a little easier, and they're starting to have their own thoughts that make them think.

And a lot of ambitious men find that their ambition goes away or diminishes during that time because they enjoy being with their kids. It does n't happen to everyone, but it happens to a lot of men. And I've noticed that people who are afraid of that -- I just want to say that it usually comes back. The ambition does come back. And the reason it went viral is because I'm going through it myself , and I think maybe you are, like a lot of our listeners.

But there comes a point when you start going through these things with your kids, when they start to have their own thoughts, and they still want to spend time with you , and you're like, "I don't I don't know if I care about the same things, like ambition or everything I've dedicated my life to." I guess I'm not willing to pay that price. And frankly , it's a hassle, because you think, " Life was so much easier." Just climbing the career ladder, making money. You know, like, partying and making money.

It's so much easier. And then you have kids , and you're like, "[ __ ], everything I thought was true is no longer true." And the author of that post was like, "But then it becomes true again." Like, yeah, it really does come back. But I remember reading that last weekend, and it really hit me, because when you talk about these hardcore guys, I'm like, "I don't want to, I'm not going to sit up until midnight." Yeah, no. My chair has lumbar support. Yeah, I think I'll be here until midnight.

It's not happening. No options for us. Yeah. Dude, I pitched him a great idea at breakfast, and he just threw it away. I was like, "Yeah." Right off the bat. I was like, " Wow." How do I get that again? It was really, I love this award. Um, I was going to tell another story, but I'm not going to. I think it was perfect. Yeah, that would be a little too hard for us. We're going to relax at 55 minutes and not go to 60. No, I think it's a good finale.

A good finale, well, as they say, is like going to a gala and wrapping it up. Everything's done. I don't know. Okay, that's it. That was a podcast.

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