The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming Connect on social: Twitter - @RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 My Guest - Matt Abrahams is one of the world's foremost experts on communication. He's a lecturer in strategic communication at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and bestselling author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter. His focus is the hardest kind of communication: not the rehearsed speech, but knowing what to say when you're put on the spot: in the interview, the Q&A, the hallway, the toast. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. What you'll learn in this episode: Matt's father was quiet but not shy. A lawyer, skipped a couple of grades so he was always younger than his colleagues, a man of few words and very detailed ones. Matt says what he most wants to live up to isn't the intelligence, it's that his father believed in being truthful and trustworthy. His parents asked two different questions about communication, and he's still answering both. His mother taught elementary school and wanted to know how you make it engaging and how you hold attention. His father wanted to know how you organize it and make it structured and understandable. They debated it constantly at home. Attention and structure are still the two halves of everything Matt teaches. When You're Interviewing Someone The best interview question he was ever asked: "If you were an onion and I peeled back the first several layers, what would I find?" It was the CEO's opening line, before anything else. Matt's answer: "Onions make me cry." He got the job. When he asked about the question months later, the CEO said he uses it to knock people slightly off center, and what he remembered was that Matt committed to an answer and connected it to something bigger. That's the whole move when you're put on the spot. Commit, then connect what you said to the larger picture. The content matters less than refusing to hedge. Warm call, don't cold call. Matt doesn't cold call at Stanford and won't do it in an interview either. He tells candidates up front: I'm going to ask you things that are difficult, the goal isn't a right answer; the goal is seeing how you process and how we'd collaborate. Then he asks the hard question. Blindsiding someone tells you how they handle being blindsided, which is not the job. Watch how they treat everyone who isn't you. Matt always asked whoever greeted the candidate how the interaction went, because plenty of people are rude to the front desk and flawless with the hiring manager. Teach candidates how to answer. Matt tells people at the top: answer the question, give me an example so I understand what it means, then connect it to what that would look like if you worked here. Otherwise people ramble, and you're left wondering why they told you any of it. He says it changed his interviews completely. When You're Giving a Talk Intention, attention, then relevance. How are you showing up, what energy and emotion are you bringing, and what will grab the room? Then, fast, why this is worth their time. "Attention is a gift people give you. If they don't see a return on that, they're gonna check out." Start like an action movie. How does an action movie start? With action. Not "hi, my name is, and today I'm going to talk about," which is also just reading your first slide out loud. Tell a story, ask a question, take a poll, give a startling statistic, and introduce yourself afterward if at all. The first thing Matt's students hear him say each term: "Communication is critical to your success in business and in your personal life." If you're a nervous speaker, NEVER pre-apologize. Saying you're a nervous speaker feels like buying empathy. What it actually does is prime the room to notice every piece of evidence that confirms it, and it pulls attention off what you're saying. Just start. How you end matters almost more than how you start. We remember what we hear last, and it recolors everything before it. A wonderful vacation gets remembered a little less wonderfully if the flight home is delayed and the luggage is lost. But the second you signal you're ending, people leave. Say "in conclusion" on a video call and, like Pavlov's dogs, they're opening their calendar. You don't have much runway, so know exactly what the last thing is. Know, feel, do. Every communication should have a goal in three parts: what you want people to know, how you want them to feel, what you want them to do. Build everything on it, then close by restating it in your own words. It summarizes and gives a sense of completion at the same time. Don't memorize. It's connection, not perfection. A memorized script means part of your brain is permanently comparing what you're saying to what you meant to say, like having too many apps open and each one running slower. That's the bandwidth you need for the actual goal. There's also research showing the more you memorize, the more you forget. Write it out, then distill it to a structure. Writing the whole thing out is fine, especially if you're new to the topic or not a native speaker. Then reduce it to a roadmap. Problem, solution, benefit is one, and most people already know it because television ads are built that way. Practice from the structure, not the script. What, so what, now what. The what is the information. The so what is why it matters to this particular person. The now what is what happens next. It fits an update, a teaching moment, an email, where the subject line becomes the now what and the body carries the rest. Structure isn't decoration; it's retention. Cognitive neuroscientists have found structured information is remembered at least 40 percent better. The goal is fidelity, and a leader's job isn't just to communicate but to deliver a message other people can repeat accurately. If a number or a quote has to be exact, read it and say you're reading it. "I wanna make sure I get this right." That's cleaner than memorizing, which just makes you more nervous and builds distance. Slides should simplify, amplify, or clarify. If a slide doesn't do one of those three for your audience, it doesn't need to exist. TED proved you can give a powerful talk with none. A slide full of words forces people to multitask. Spoken and written language run through the same part of the brain, so text on screen competes with your voice. Images and charts run through visual processing instead, and the two together make the point more memorable. Slides are for your audience, not a teleprompter for you. Humor is black belt level engagement. It's the riskiest tool there is. Never run a joke for the first time in a high-stakes room, and listen to what happens when you test it. Questions, stories, and asking people to do something physical are all safer ways to get the same engagement. And the rule that keeps you out of trouble: humor about yourself, not about others. Never lose your tour group. Matt was a campus tour guide in college, and the single most important thing they trained him on wasn't storytelling or vocal variety. It was not losing anybody. The same applies to an audience: set expectations so they know where they're going, connect where you've been to where you're headed instead of jumping between points, and keep them motivated to move. And notice where every campus tour ends. The bookstore. People need something to take away. When You're Making Small Talk Small talk leads to big things. Think about your actual friends, not your social media ones. At least one of them exists because of small talk. The goal is to be interested, not interesting. From Rachel Greenwald, who studies how people form relationships. Which means asking questions and then leaving room for the answer. Three words make you good at it: "Tell me more." Ask a question, listen, then ask for more, and mean it. Exit with a white flag. Not surrender. In auto racing, the white flag goes out on the final lap. Most people end small talk by reaching for biology, saying they need the bathroom or another drink, which backfires the moment the other person needs the same thing. Instead: "This has been great. In a minute I'm going to go talk to someone over there, but before I do, I want to hear more about..." They know it's ending, you get one more real question, and you both walk away clean. When You're Trying to Get Better A few filler words now make you sound human. Some disfluency is normal and natural, and in a world where anything can be polished by AI, a few verbal foibles are evidence a real person is talking. The problem is only volume. The breathing trick that kills the filler words. Try saying "um" while inhaling. You can't. Speaking is an exit-only event. The filler words that stand out are the ones sitting in silence between sentences, so if you train yourself to land every phrase out of breath, you're forced to inhale before the next one, and nothing can fit in that gap except a pause. To practice, read a list out loud once or twice a day, your calendar works, and run out of air at the end of every item. Watch and listen to yourself, and read out loud. Reviewing your own recordings is awful, which Matt compares to the dentist: nobody enjoys it, everybody's glad they went. Reading aloud builds vocal stamina the same way a treadmill builds a marathon. Nobody wakes up and runs 26 miles untrained, and most leaders aren't used to speaking for long stretches either. Costco credibility beats college and career credibility. Your background and your resume are real credibility, and they matter. But Costco hands out free samples because an experience of the thing beats a description of it. Most people over-index on listing credentials. Tell stories, give examples, use testimonials, and let people taste it. There is no right way to communicate, only better and worse ways. Matt resists the word expert. Early in his teaching, he'd gesture and watch an entire class decide that was the correct way to move your hands. Saying it out loud takes pressure off the room and off him. Matt's champagne moment a year from now: people being more confident, clear, and compelling in how they communicate. He thinks the world needs to hear everyone's voice and that clarity is what makes that possible. He knows it's working when an email arrives from a town he has to look up on Google. Daily reflection, one minute, for 16 years. Every night before bed, Matt writes down one thing that went well in his communication and one thing that didn't. Every Sunday he spends about five minutes reviewing the week and picks one thing to work on. Action Take the next talk or meeting you're running. What are the first fifteen words out of your mouth, and would they work as the opening shot of a movie? Who did you talk to today where you were trying to be interesting instead of interested? What would have happened if you'd said "tell me more" one more time?If you enjoyed this episode with Matt Abrahams, check out episode #709 with Vanessa Van Edwards: How to Connect With Anyone & Make Every Interaction Count Podcast Chapters 00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 01:36 Meet Matt Abrahams 02:56 What He Carries From His Father 04:53 "If You Were an Onion..." 07:16 Warm Call, Don't Cold Call 08:52 How He Got Better at Hiring 13:35 Going From Silence to Brilliance 16:20 Know, Feel, Do 19:04 Never Tell Them You're Nervous 21:34 Why Memorizing Backfires 23:50 Simplify, Amplify, or Clarify 25:34 Start Like an Action Movie 27:03 The Question That Moves a Room 29:56 Never Lose Your Tour Group 32:21 Humor Is Black Belt Engagement 33:44 Three Words: "Tell Me More" 36:51 One Minute Every Night for 16 Years 40:06 What, So What, Now What 42:42 Breathing Out Your Filler Words 46:00 Read Out Loud for Vocal Stamina 47:44 Costco Credibility 49:43 The Champagne Question 52:25 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Connect with me on socials Twitter/X - @RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 Join 10's of thousands of leaders, subscribe to Mindful Monday My guest: Ravi Gupta is the founder of RePublic Schools, whose flagship Nashville schools became the first in Tennessee to rank in the top 5% statewide for both growth and achievement. He co-founded Arena, which trained more than 7,000 political staffers, worked on the first Obama campaign, and wrote speeches for UN Ambassador Susan Rice. Today he runs The Branch, a media company fighting polarization. His new book is The Invisible List: One Passion a Year, Every Year. Key Learnings One new passion a year, every year. When Ravi left his job running schools, he decided to treat every year like a school year with himself as the only student. He's done it for seven years. Surfing, tennis, screenwriting, a novel, Italian cooking. Be an anti-dabbler. The seductive version is a little boxing, a little salsa dancing, a little cooking. You get fifteen years of sampling and none of the skill. Pick the thing, commit to the year, see it through even if you come to regret the pick. The rule that makes it work: no new thing midyear. You can maintain old passions. You cannot start a new one. He broke his own rule and learned why it exists. Bored one day and avoiding his cooking, Ravi walked into a Muay Thai gym on his corner. He loved the class, walked out, and told himself it was off the table until January 1. The pull wasn't interest. It was the rush of early wins, and that rush is the most convincing form of procrastination there is. Trying something and quitting can be worse than never trying. Once you've tasted it, you start seeing it everywhere, and you replay the version of your life where you stuck with it. Pair a reasonable goal with a delusional one. Ravi almost always hits the reasonable one. He almost never hits the unreasonable one right away, but he often gets there eventually. The pairing is the point. Tim Ferriss's observation on why that works: there's less competition for big crazy goals, because so few people think that way anymore. December is the meta-learning month. Thanksgiving to New Year's, Ravi wraps up the current year and pulls together the next one: the books, the experts, the sequence, what it actually means to be great at the thing. Don't start researching it in August. He has next year's candidates in his head by late summer, but he refuses to buy books or line up coaches until December. Planning next year's passion is an elaborate way to avoid this year's. Output goals need a skill set attached. Example: hiking an outrageous number of national parks. Ravi's counter: keep the output goal, but build the skills underneath it. Pitching a tent, starting a fire, navigation, survival prep. Then the year leaves you with something beyond a number. Each year becomes a chapter. 2020: surfing. 2021: tennis. Childhood is memorable because it's divided into grades with names attached. Adult years blur into one undifferentiated stretch, and Ravi thinks that blur is part of why people get depressed looking backward and forward. The reframe on aging: turning 50 in seven years is only grim if those are seven blank years. Seven more passions is a different sentence entirely. Join an accountability group. The Invisible Posse is a group of readers all pursuing their own skills at the same time, at readinvisiblelist.com. New challenge every two weeks, a leaderboard, points for doing the work. The list is a solo project. The accountability isn't. Do the thing publicly in the first two weeks. The group's first challenge was to do your new skill in front of people immediately. The winner was a man learning to sing who sat his cousins down on vacation and performed a whole song. Once you're past being judged, you're doing it instead of planning it. The second challenge is the one most people skip: get feedback from someone who actually knows how to do it, then do it again. Protecting your time is on you. From Neil Strauss, in a writing group Ravi joined during his writing year: "It's nobody's responsibility but your own to protect your time." The complaint that nobody respects your boundaries is a complaint about your own boundaries. Which means the conversation has to be explicit. You take Saturday, I take Sunday. One of us has mornings. I've carved out 45 minutes and you know about it. Writing is especially hard to defend because it doesn't look like work. Treat your session time like a flight. Strauss again, this time on writer's block. Nobody waits to feel motivated before going to the airport. You wake up early, sit in the security line, get wedged next to someone taking up too much room, and you never treat any of it as optional. Put the sessions on your calendar and defend them the same way, whatever your thing is. The question that ended writer's block for good: your mom is a nurse, does she get nurse's block? When Ravi still stalls, he falls back on Hemingway's one true sentence, and since the surgery, he dictates rather than types if that's what it takes to get words out. Teach tools, not answers. The book's dedication is to the teachers who gave Ravi tools instead of answers. He trained his own teachers not to be "the sage on the stage." He can't name a single fact those teachers gave him. He can name what they built in him. A doctor friend gave him a portable framework instead of an opinion. When Ravi tore his bicep, friends told him to take peptides. Rather than answering yes or no, his doctor friend walked him through the questions: what's the theoretical mechanism, what do controlled peer-reviewed trials actually show, what are the downsides? Ravi now uses it on everything. In a disagreement, show your process, not just your conclusion. If you lay out how you arrived at an answer, the other person may not accept the answer but can engage the method, or show you where you went wrong. It lowers the heat. The 10 out of 10 version of humility. Andy Greenwald wrote a piece ripping Anthony Bourdain, comparing him to a lion declawed and put in a zoo. Bourdain read it, told his staff, "This guy got me," then had the team invite Greenwald over for a conversation. Nurturing your own passions is not stealing from your family. The oxygen mask applies. Your kids will be more inspired by you and your spouse, more drawn to you if you're a person who is actually lit up by something. Presence alone is a thin theory of parenting. Ravi would rather have had a father who skipped a game to pursue something real and then talked about it over dinner than one who dragged himself to the bleachers out of obligation. Availability matters. So do wisdom, example, and energy. People are drawn to anyone who is fully activated. The musician playing a Nashville bar at 2:00 PM on a Wednesday who is completely in it, playing like the room is full. Ravi's champagne moment a year from now: settling down. Not flying airplanes, not the bestseller list. He says he needed the seven years of this process to come out a whole person capable of devoting himself to someone else again. A relationship or parenting year is a legitimate list item, but not the first one. Most people have been too selfless already and need the selfish pursuits first. And it only works if you attack it systematically, with real metrics, because that kind of goal gets squishy fast. Action What is your one thing for 2027? Name the reasonable goal you'll hit with consistent effort, and the delusional one that scares you a little. Look at your calendar for next week. Where is the time for that thing, and who in your life needs to know it's protected before Monday? If you enjoyed this episode with Ravi Gupta, check out episode #647 with Tim Ferriss: Chasing Your Curiosity Episode Chapters00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 01:36 Meet Ravi Gupta 03:09 Three Injuries, One Arm 05:03 Teachers Who Give Tools, Not Answers 06:58 A Framework Instead of an Opinion 10:36 Why Hosting a Show Changes Your Mind 13:59 Bourdain: "This Guy Got Me" 16:28 His Mom and the Yale Law Tour 20:31 One Delusional Goal, One Reasonable One 23:56 The Anti-Dabbler Rules 29:13 Nobody Protects Your Time But You 33:25 How He Actually Became a Writer 37:06 How He Picks the Year's Skill 38:50 Salsa and the Unfinished Ending 40:35 The Burnout Wake-Up Call 43:09 Your Passions Make You a Better Parent 48:19 The Invisible Posse Challenges 51:09 The Champagne Question 54:05 Make Relationships a Skill 55:55 Skills Underneath the Goal 01:00:19 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful. Connect with me on Twitter/X: @RyanHawk12 Instagram: @RyanHawk12 Sign up for Mindful Monday (it's free): This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Danny Meyer is the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and one of the most influential restaurateurs of his generation. He built New York landmarks like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack... He's the author of the classic Setting the Table and the new What Could Possibly Go Right? Key Learnings "Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard." "Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently." Shimon Peres. Danny prefers to live as an optimist. Most people respond to hope. A few will come out of a dark closet hopping on a pogo stick and a few will walk on the shady side no matter what. Most people start the day intending to make it better than yesterday, and they'll follow someone who shows them how that could happen. A growing business needs funding and leadership. It also needs soil. Like a plant needs sun and water and still needs something to grow in. The soil is the culture, and it determines whether anything you plant actually grows. Be explicit about which behaviors you celebrate and which you won't tolerate. Then be relentlessly consistent about both. That's how culture survives you not being in the room. Everyone is watching who gets hired, promoted, and paid. Every time you compromise on either the skills or the character, you send a message that you didn't mean any of the words. Probably unwittingly, but you send it. Curiosity is the behavior Danny celebrates most. If you want a team that treats every day as a chance to be better than yesterday, someone has to actually wonder what could be done differently. Entrepreneurs are upsighted. Danny's word. They only see what's up, only see what could possibly go right, and they look at existing problems that would make the world better if solved. A bad salesperson answers questions you never asked. Danny remembers a shoe store that hauled out everything from the back room regardless of what he wanted. The only two questions that mattered were does it fit and do I like it. A great one gets into your shoes and asks what you'd want. Sometimes they help you get to the question you actually have. There's no job that doesn't benefit from good sales skills, and good writing skills. Entrepreneurial athleticism is the trait Danny looks for in every leader. Talent gets you in the door. Athleticism is dedicating yourself to train plus the mental and emotional mettle to find a way to win. Day one mentality. The day a restaurant opens, nothing is scratched, every door works, nothing is smudged, and you assume everyone might be a critic. Day one of year 10 should be better than the original, because you have ten years of learning. Without that, it only goes backwards. The hiring formula is 49 and 51. Forty-nine percent is how well he thinks you can do the job, which is mostly technical and different for every role. Fifty-one percent is who you are. That 51 percent is Hospitality Quotient. The composite of optimistic warmth, curious intelligence, determined work ethic, empathy, self-awareness, and integrity. Someone with a high HQ is happier themselves when they make someone else feel better. "Cooking a great piece of fish only gets you to the 49-yard line." You need all 100, and it isn't just the servers who need it. It's everybody. A high HQ is a liability in an interview. Danny sometimes has to park his own at the door, because his job isn't to make the candidate feel good. It's to assess how they'll make the staff and the guests feel. Never ask if someone is self-aware. They'll say yes. Ask instead: "What's the greatest misperception other people have about you?" You can't answer it without self-awareness, because you have to know both what you are and what you're projecting. When hiring a chef, Danny already knows they can cook. What he's testing is the feedback loop. Will they get defensive? Grateful? He may well be wrong in the feedback, and he still wants to know early what it's going to be like to lead this person. Caitlin took a reservation and saved a woman's life. She was getting a phone number when the caller's voice started halting. Caitlin sensed something was wrong, asked permission to call 911, and got the address. It was a hemorrhagic stroke. The woman survived and had to relearn how to speak. Caitlin was so moved that she went back to school to become a speech therapist for people with aphasia. When the woman died recently, she left Caitlin the money to pay for it. A good employee books the table accurately. A great one changes someone's night, or their life. Danny's point about Caitlin: nobody trained her for that. The culture did. Mind share is what marketing earns. Heart share is what hospitality earns. Mind share means people know you exist and think of you first. Heart share means they love you and tell everyone they know. The golden rule of hospitality is not the golden rule. Do unto others as you believe they would want done unto them. Service is one size fits all. Hospitality is one size fits one. The salmon that changed everything. Soon after Gramercy Tavern opened, a Union Square Cafe regular told Danny what happened was inexcusable. Her salmon came well done when she'd ordered it rare. Danny's first reaction was that an honest kitchen mistake didn't seem so bad. The mistake wasn't the problem. The response was. At Union Square Cafe, she said, the server would have noticed, quietly removed it, brought soup so her guests could keep eating, recooked it properly, and probably taken it off the bill. At Gramercy, nobody came over while she picked at it. A manager eventually took the plate, handed her a coat check, told her the rest would be waiting at the door, and left it on the bill. "If you don't have language, you cannot teach." For ten years Danny led one restaurant by embodying the behavior he wanted. With two, wherever he was, he wasn't at the other one. It was the first time he had to lead by using his words instead of just embodying what he wanted to see. Enlightened hospitality, in this order: Each other first. How the team treats each other, with generosity and charitable assumption. Then the guests. Then the community and the suppliers. Then the investors, who end up with more because of everything above. Break it anywhere, starting with how people care for each other, and it doesn't work. Lead with generosity. You're in business for tomorrow dollars, not today dollars. His staff charged that woman for the salmon because they were afraid she was working an angle. Danny's response: where is the charitable assumption that maybe we just overcooked it? Nice and kind are different. Nice isn't a bad thing, but sometimes nice is how you avoid addressing a problem. Kind means I'm on your side, which sometimes means holding up the mirror. If someone isn't measuring up and you let it go, that isn't kind and it isn't even nice. Kindness takes the courage to give honest feedback without demoralizing the person. Laying people off during the pandemic wasn't nice. Doing it one at a time was kind. Several hundred people, and nobody got laid off by tweet or mass email. Everyone was spoken to by their own boss. Shake Shack started because Danny asked what could possibly go right. An artist needed someone to run a hot dog cart under an installation in Madison Square Park. His team said they were too busy running four restaurants. Danny's argument was that the park was the front yard of two of them, and you take care of your front yard. They staffed it with their coat checkers and served Chicago-style on purpose. The coat checkers had no work until the weather turned cold, so this gave them a summer job. Chicago-style has eight toppings, which let them find out whether four coat checkers could remember how every regular liked it. The point was proving hospitality isn't only for fancy restaurants. They lost money two years running, and the community started calling it "our hot dog cart." Danny heard the word "our" and knew people felt shared ownership. Then he gave away the building. He built a $750,000 kiosk and donated it to the park, so the park owns the building and his company owns the business. A percentage of every sale goes back into keeping the park beautiful and safe. That first Shake Shack still pays just under a million dollars a year in rent to the park. Danny's champagne moment a year from now: that the book actually meant something to people. He wrote it to teach himself, because that's how he learns. If the lessons he picked up scraping his knees turn out to be useful to someone else, it was worth it. Reflection Questions Which behaviors does your team know for certain you celebrate, and which do they know you won't tolerate? If you asked five of them, would you get the same five answers? Look at your last promotion. Did that person clear the bar on both the 49 and the 51? What did everyone else learn from watching it? Where are you being nice right now when the situation calls for you to hold up the mirror? Podcast Chapters00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 01:36 Meet Danny Meyer 03:23 "It's That Simple, and It's That Hard" 05:15 Optimists and Pessimists Die the Same Way 08:47 Culture Is the Soil 12:53 Why He Celebrates Curiosity 15:44 What Sales Taught Him 19:48 Entrepreneurial Athleticism 23:15 The 49 and 51 Hiring Formula 26:10 "What's the Greatest Misperception About You?" 28:32 Testing the Feedback Loop in an Interview 29:44 Caitlin Saves a Life 32:51 Mind Share vs. Heart Share 34:33 The Golden Rule of Hospitality 35:33 If You Don't Have Language, You Cannot Teach 39:10 Enlightened Hospitality 41:35 Nice vs. Kind 43:10 Laying People Off the Kind Way 45:03 How a Hot Dog Cart Became Shake Shack 50:08 The Champagne Question 52:08 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly National Best-Seller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Daniel Lubetzky graduated from Stanford Law School. And then declined lucrative job offers to start his own business, only paying himself $24,000 a year for a decade. And then he founded KIND and grew it into a snack brand that Mars later valued at $5 billion dollars. Today he invests full-time on Shark Tank, and he's the son of a Holocaust survivor whose story shaped everything he's built. Find work that gives you energy, purpose, and meaning. If you enjoy what you're doing, you're far more likely to be great at it. And you're already winning, because you get up every morning doing something satisfying. The danger of loving your work is overworking. Daniel did it building PeaceWorks and KIND. You have to pace yourself. His father survived a death march out of Dachau. Twelve and a half when he entered the camp, fifteen and a half during the march. Six feet tall and under 70 pounds, and no shoes. The Nazis were walking prisoners up a mountain to push them off a cliff because they didn't have enough bullets. A snowstorm saved his life. His father, grandfather, and uncle hugged to say goodbye. The snow buried them and formed a kind of igloo that kept them warm through the night. They woke, dug out, and the Nazis were gone. The soldiers who liberated them were Japanese American. The 442nd, the most decorated unit of its size in American history, was made up of men whose own families were being held in internment camps back home. Daniel's family had never seen an Asian person and didn't understand what they were witnessing. Seventy years later, he got to say thank you. A friend called saying they were sitting with a doctor who had a postcard from Larry Lubetzky. That was Daniel's uncle, who had just died. Daniel reconnected with the captain, who had gone on to become a scientist at Harvard, and eventually gave a eulogy at his funeral. The lesson he takes from it isn't perseverance. It's the power of one person to change another person's life. You won't pull off a rescue every day. You can still look someone in the eye at the supermarket. "You have no idea what that person's been going through." Human connection is what pulls people back. At a conference on fighting hate, Daniel heard how young people vulnerable to recruitment were pulled back by ordinary human connection. Being kind in your daily life makes it harder for the people trying to recruit them. There's no such thing as failure or success. Daniel keeps shelves of successes in one office and shelves of failures in another, and now thinks the separation is a mistake. He never would have built KIND without ten years of mistakes at PeaceWorks. PeaceWorks was a college thesis turned into a company. The argument: get neighbors on opposite sides of a conflict doing business together, and you shatter stereotypes, build relationships, and give both sides a stake in each other. He got Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks trading with one another. Daniel turned down $86,000 out of Stanford Law to pay himself $24,000. That's what he could afford, and it's what he paid his team. Grit, wit, and fit. Grit is the work ethic and refusing to give up. Wit is the strategy, the creativity to outthink competitors. Fit is whether the product actually matches what people want. Grit alone isn't enough. Do not assume he was invincible. He cried alone in his studio apartment more than once, convinced he'd made a mistake and was wasting his life. He questioned himself multiple times a day. The jerk who broke him was also right. At a trade show, a buyer told him to stop, that he was way too pushy, to give people space and get out of his life. Daniel was 25 and it broke him. Then he reflected and realized the man was correct. Don't be the ultra-passive person watching the world happen. Don't be the person who only pushes. The job is to be persistent enough to win and be loved for it, which is very hard. "I prepare for anything that I'm not prepared for." Daniel loves winging it and hates preparing. But if there's something he doesn't know, he'll put in the work today, tomorrow, and the day after. Active listening takes real energy. Daniel needs an hour to decompress after every interview he conducts. He's blunt that listening isn't his greatest strength, which is exactly why he's leaning into it. His dad was the best interviewer he ever knew, because he was a coach. When Daniel asked him a question, his father would answer with another question and let him find it himself. A great coach or parent doesn't tell you what to do. They help you ask the questions you need to ask yourself. Telling is the easier skill. Kids keep you humble, and that's the point. You need someone in your life who can call you out when you start thinking too much of yourself, whether that's your kids, your spouse, or your team. KIND started because the healthy snack aisle didn't exist. Training for the 2002 New York City Marathon, Daniel's options were food that tasted like astronaut rations or pure indulgence. Nothing was portable, wholesome, and convenient at the same time. KIND was named after his father, who died the year they launched. Everyone who met him described him the same way. He saw his mission in life as bringing smiles to others. The name became the three pillars: kind to your body, kind to your taste buds, kind to the world. They took a vote on whether to quit. Six or seven people around a table, ten hard years behind them, a major account just lost. The choice was one more shot or two months to go find jobs. They all voted to try again. Then KIND launched. Sampling was the inflection point. Daniel had been treating it as a cost. It was an investment. They went from $800 in 2008 to $800,000 in 2009 to $20 million in free product within a few years, which is what let them scale. Sampling only works if the mousetrap is right. If one in ten people like it, you'll lose your shirt. Nine in ten people who tried a KIND bar wanted to buy more. Those people became the ambassadors. Scarcity, gluttony, and resourcefulness. A wasteful culture runs you into the ground. A scarcity mentality preserves every dollar but caps your potential, because everything looks like a cost center. Resourcefulness is the middle: think like an owner, spend less where you can, and invest where it compounds. Nice and kind are not the same thing. "If you're nice, it doesn't cost you. It's easy. You can be weak and nice. But to be kind, you need to be strong." Kindness requires you to be a protagonist. What Daniel looks for in a founder: Integrity. If he doesn't trust them, no amount of upside matters. Someone worth helping. It's going to be a rollercoaster, and he'll be in the trenches with them. Real passion. Enough that he can sense they'll outwork everyone else. You don't find integrity by asking about integrity. You ask other questions and watch how the person performs. Daniel says Barbara Corcoran is the best on the show at reading people this way. The four C's of a builder's mindset: curious, compassionate, creative, and courageous. Daniel credits them with building KIND, the OneVoice Movement, and everything since. Daniel's champagne moment a year from now: the Builders Movement making real progress. His argument is that every industry has a lobby representing it, and the only group without one is the overwhelming majority of citizens who agree with each other on most issues and want problems solved. He wants a movement that holds all parties and all special interests accountable to that majority. A scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset. Viewing something as a cost instead of viewing it as an investment. This was Daniel's early mistake with Kind bars. He only budgeted $800 a year for samples. He viewed it as a cost. He changed his mind and realized it was an investment. He upped it to $800,000 per year in samples. And eventually to $20 million a year. Scarcity versus abundance. View it as an investment instead of a cost Daniel's 4 C's of a builder's mindset – curiosity, compassion, creativity, and courage for That's how you build both a company and a movement. The difference between being nice and being kind. Being nice avoids conflict to protect feelings in the moment. Being kind is about being willing to risk the moment, telling the hard truth because you actually care about them. His dad, grandfather, and uncle – Near the end of the war, Roman, his father, and his brother were death-marched out of Dachau toward the mountains, where the guards meant to push them off a cliff. A freak overnight blizzard scattered the guards; by morning they were gone. The men who found the survivors were the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion — the only all–Japanese–American unit in the U.S. Army, many of whose own families were sitting in American internment camps at that very moment. Daniel has said those soldiers showed a tenderness that "had not been seen in 1945." Magic – Daniel taught himself magic as a kid in Mexico City and actually worked as a traveling magician through Europe and the Middle East for the better part of a year. He still performs one magic show a year for his team... And he's said it's the only thing all year he genuinely prepares for. Everything else, he improvises. "My team is always very concerned that I just jump into stuff." A scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset. Viewing something as a cost instead of viewing it as an investment. This was Daniel's early mistake with Kind bars. He only budgeted $800 a year for samples. He viewed it as a cost. He changed his mind and realized it was an investment. He upped it to $800,000 per year in samples. And eventually to $20 million a year. Scarcity versus abundance. View it as an investment instead of a cost. Reflection Questions Where in your work are you all grit and no wit or fit? What would change if you spent an hour on strategy before your next hundred hours of effort? Think of the harshest feedback you've ever received. Set aside how it was delivered. Was any of it correct, and what did you do with it? Where in your life are you being nice when the situation calls for you to be kind?

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Key Learnings All the greats have a coach. Strauss is one of the most disciplined humans alive, and he has had one since he was 30. His argument: Tom Brady is an amazing athlete, but would he have performed as well with no coach, or a lousy one? A great coach is objective, encouraging, smart, and experienced. They warn you of obstacles you can't see yet. Strauss doesn't want the Socratic method from his coach. He wants direct advice. He'll use questions when he's leading others. But when he brings a problem to his own coach, he wants to be told: "You have that wrong; you're missing this." So What? Strauss was avoiding a confrontation because he knew the other person would be really upset. His coach said, "So what?" He had the conversation. The person was upset. They got to the other side, and it was better than leaving it out there. Bad news doesn't get better with age. The most effective people are the most open-minded and self-critical. The ones who insist they don't need a coach are usually the ones losing. "Arrogance is the enemy of continued success." Humility isn't pretending you're not good. Strauss says claiming he's bumbling through the job would be silly, and he's proud of what he does well. The humility is in staying open. His team's description of him: strongly held opinions, freely shared, and a mind that changes when the facts do. "You're just a terrible speaker." Strauss was 31, newly president of Vestron, and had written an eloquent after-dinner speech he was proud of. He read it off the page. His boss pulled him aside afterward and told him it was terrible. What two days of media training taught Strauss: Talk about what the audience cares about, not what you want to say Never deliver a written speech unless you're President of the United States Inject your personality Try to make them laugh Be of service to the audience. Strauss opens his class at MIT Sloan by asking the students why they came and what they want out of it. It surprises them every time, because speakers never ask. One meeting with 20 people beats 20 meetings with one person. A young CEO Strauss coaches was sleeping four hours a night and spending 20 hours a week on one-on-ones. Strauss told him to do one weekly meeting with all 20. Delegate with information. Everyone running a group is in the same room once a week and shares everything, including the problems. If it's business, it goes in the room. If it's personal, they can talk one-on-one. Politics shrink because nobody has information nobody else has. Happy stuff doesn't reach the CEO's desk. If it landed on his desk, it's either bad or genuinely complex. That's the system working. Align the words with the dollar signs. Mission, strategy, culture, and compensation all have to point in the same direction. Say you want to be the best in the world while paying people regardless of performance, and they will follow the money every time. The worst comp structure is CEO discretion. It builds a culture where everyone is trying to please one person, and people think pleasing someone means telling them what they want to hear. Hire the most talented people on earth, then support them through thick and thin. Strauss greenlit Dirty Dancing at Vestron on a $5.5 million budget. The first-time director was too scared to speak, so the team pitched it. They claimed the film would change how women dressed, produce an award-winning soundtrack, and win an Oscar. Strauss thought the pitch was nonsense. He didn't even like the script. He greenlit it anyway because he trusted the team over his own judgment. It became the biggest independent hit of all time to that date, a record it held until The Blair Witch Project. Be a good judge of talent, not of products. Knowing which one you are is the whole thing. Leave the escape hatches open. When competitors poured hundreds of millions into VR and the metaverse, Strauss said no. But Take-Two did enough experimentation to move fast if he was wrong, and got paid for every VR project they took on. They lost nothing on the wrong bet. Be creatively risk-forward and financially risk-averse. A well-run film studio had a 30 percent hit ratio, meaning 70 percent of what it released broke even or lost money. So you build the balance sheet first, then take the creative swings. "If you can't afford to lose, you don't play the game." Carl Icahn won because he was a good poker player with a huge stack of chips. When things went against him, he didn't sit around moaning. He went to the next game. At 68, he's up at 4:45 and in the gym by 6:45, often twice a day. Looking your best is a form of respect for other people and for yourself. If you look sloppy and out of shape, it's harder to lead. The other half is simply feeling good enough to show up with energy and a smile. He refuses to hold anyone else to his own personal standard. Everyone is on their own journey, and he doesn't want clones. Thirty minutes of walking five days a week is genuinely good for you. That person is showing up for themselves too. No AI slop in Grand Theft Auto. Take-Two builds handcrafted, building by building. Their teams will use state-of-the-art tools to do great work more efficiently. What they won't do is push a button on someone else's model and call the output theirs. "That's yesterday's headlines." Strauss's father-in-law's answer whenever anyone congratulated him. Take-Two doesn't do the who's-better-than-us party. They show sincere appreciation for great work, and then they get up the next morning and do it again. Reflection Questions Who is the person in your life who will tell you that you have it wrong? What is the confrontation you're avoiding right now, hoping it resolves itself? Have that conversation today. Where are you taking real risk without the balance sheet to survive being wrong? And where are you so protected that you aren't taking any risk at all? More Learning #662: Nick Thompson - Move at an Uncomfortable Pace #626: Rob Kimbel - The Power of Grit and Generosity #525: Frank Slootman - Raise Your Standards & Push the Pace Podcast Chapters00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 01:01 Meet Strauss Zelnick 03:00 President of Fox at 32 06:15 He Greenlit Dirty Dancing and Thought It Would Flop 09:55 How He Finds Talent 11:30 Align the Words With the Dollar Signs 18:56 One Meeting With 20 People 22:33 Up at 4:45, Gym by 6:45 26:20 No AI Slop in Grand Theft Auto 27:55 Why He Doesn't Feel Lonely at the Top 28:53 His Coach's Advice Was "So What?" 29:51 Every Great Leader Has a Coach 32:37 Direct Advice, Not the Socratic Method 35:31 What He Teaches at MIT Sloan 37:03 "You're Just a Terrible Speaker" 39:27 Arrogance Is the Enemy of Continued Success 41:03 Why He Said No to VR 43:52 Creatively Risk-Forward, Financially Risk-Averse 47:20 That's Yesterday's Headlines 49:51 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Blake Mycoskie founded TOMS Shoes in 2006 after a trip to Argentina, where he saw children without shoes and built a company around giving away a pair for every pair sold. TOMS went on to donate more than 100 million pairs of shoes and became one of the most copied business models in the world. What most people don't know is what happened after he sold it, and I'm grateful that he was open to talking about that on this episode of The Learning Leader Show. Key Learnings Make your gratitude specific. Not "I'm grateful for my family." Name the exact thing. Blake's example from that morning: the photos the camp posted of his daughter laughing in the lake, and knowing his stoic kid does not smile like that unless she is genuinely happy. He kept the practice going for five years when he couldn't feel any of it. Blake could not name five things he was grateful for, and he had all the same things in his life he has now. He did it anyway. He credits it as one of the things that kept him going. Surfing is a great thinking practice. Surfing is mostly just sitting on the board. Three hours in the water, ten waves, maybe five minutes standing. The rest is paddling and sitting. That's why it works as a thinking practice. Capture the idea in the moment or lose it. Blake programmed the side button on his Apple Watch to open a voice memo. Every idea he has sitting on the board, he records. They're all waiting when he gets out. He hit every marker and still felt worthless. "I did everything, and I still, deep down in my soul, had this feeling like I'm not worthy, I'm not enough, and I never will be." The external validation was the drug. Selling TOMS cut off the supply. The thing that had been holding up his sense of self was suddenly gone. If you get there and it's empty, don't panic. Panicking is what Blake did, and having money meant he could make expensive mistakes fast. Build the dream house. Get divorced. One thing after another. The emptiness may be the point. Blake's read on it: if achievement delivered what society promises, you'd never go inward. Feeling hollow at the summit is what forces the inner work. He re-patterned the sentence he'd been telling himself since childhood. The old one was "you're not enough." He replaced it with "I am enough. I've always been enough." Twenty minutes every morning and every evening. Forty straight days. It worked, and he no longer needs to do it daily. Sometimes you just need a physical cue to catch the loop. That's the whole idea behind the bracelet he wears. Not magic. A reminder on your wrist that interrupts the thought. Give the second one away. Blake found the bracelet's real power was handing one to a friend. Now you're both wearing it, you're both in on it, and there's an unspoken agreement that neither of you has to have a bad day alone. Men are worse at building that than women are. Tell your kids they're enough, and keep telling them. They're going to get the opposite message from everywhere else, which is exactly why it has to come from you repeatedly. Blake says the relaxation you'll see in them is immediate. Be brutally honest about how hard the job is. Try to talk them out of it. Blake is the last interview in the process now. If he can lay out every negative and they still desperately want it, the commitment is real. "How many people did you convince not to take the role before you got the right person?" Most leaders slip into sales mode, talk the candidate into it, and end up talking themselves into the candidate. What he screens for during the interview process: Integrity first. If it isn't there, it surfaces fast now. Attitude second. The person who never says "that's not my job." Whether they're building a resume or joining a movement. Find the people who cover what you're bad at. Blake is a storyteller, a vision-sharer, and high energy. He is not a supply chain guy, not a finance guy, and he has trouble saying no. So he hired around it. That's what let him actually be the chief shoe giver instead of pretending to be a CEO. Don't wait for permission. Most people stand in line at the front door. Blake looks for side doors. In Argentina he had no investors and no plan, just an idea and the words One For One. Ryan's version for his kids: everyone can apply online. Drive to the restaurant and go talk to the manager instead. Having no experience was the advantage. He'd never made a shoe, so he didn't know which rules he was breaking. Same with outdoor advertising. Same with driver's ed. He learned it from Richard Branson: ask forgiveness, not permission. Nashville wouldn't allow advertising, so he sold art instead. Blake spent two years with the city council and got there by removing the ad from the ad. No price, no call to action. Just album covers on the sides of buildings, called country music art. Once one artist had one, they all wanted one. He sold the company to Clear Channel. You don't attract what you want. You attract what you are. Want honest friends, be honest. Want peace at home, bring peace. Want trust, practice it when nobody's watching. Blake applies it to customers too: sloppy companies attract sloppy customers, and that's usually the real reason the business fails. Charlie Munger got asked how to get a great wife. He said: deserve one. Be known for doing what you said you'd do. Early on Blake didn't have the skills, so he built the reputation on execution instead. Move fast, keep it simple, do it with integrity. Momentum is a form of trust. The other half of that is not overpromising. Blake's own failure mode is getting excited, feeling falsely confident, promising something big, and missing. When it happens, own it fast and be honest, and the relationship usually survives. Be careful using a general-purpose chatbot as a therapist. Blake's warning, and the reason the founders of Sonia built a purpose-built tool instead: the big consumer models are designed to make you feel good about yourself. If you need to hear something hard, that's the last thing you want. He went from skeptic to advisor in six months. Blake met the Sonia founders at a mental health conference, tried the app to be polite, and by the third session was getting insights he hadn't gotten elsewhere. He now spends five to ten hours a week helping them. His reason for loving the work: "Now I get to be the coach instead of the athlete." Stop chasing balance. Design for harmony. Blake picked this up from an executive at Cannes who said she'd given up on balance. He goes hard in phases. Full dad mode with the office waiting on emails. Then all in on a launch and missing things at home. The measure isn't evenly split day to day. It's whether, over a year, everyone in his life feels like they got what they needed to thrive. Including him. Reflection Questions What did you actually feel grateful for today? Not the category. The specific moment. What is the sentence you've been repeating to yourself since childhood, and is it true? In your last hire, how hard did you try to talk them out of it? Or did you spend the interview selling them, and then sell yourself? More Learning #598: Sam Parr - Bold. Fast. Fun. Living by a Mantra & Building a Media Company #547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You #676: Jesse Cole - Built for The Fans (The Owner of the Savannah Bananas) Episode Chapters 00:00 Meet Blake Mycoskie 01:38 Surfing is Great for Deep Thinking 03:41 Make Your Gratitude Specific 05:39 Blake Sold TOMS and Fell Apart 11:20 Advice for Those to "Make It" and Feel Nothing 13:23 "I Am Enough" and the Bracelet on His Wrist 17:35 The No Magic Pill 19:41 The Risk of Chatbot Therapy 22:42 A Surgeon Dad, a Bestselling Mom, and the Pressure Nobody Said Out Loud 25:13 Telling Your Kids They're Enough 31:31 How He Got Country Music Art on the Side of Buildings 35:15 Learning to Be Proud of TOMS Again 38:49 Hiring Around Your Weaknesses 41:25 Try to Talk Them Out of the Job 45:07 You Don't Attract What You Want. You Attract What You Are. 46:54 Don't Wait for Permission 48:34 Be Known for Doing What You Said You'd Do 50:02 The Champagne Question: Harmony, Not Balance 52:28 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guests: My dad, Keith Hawk (also known as Pistol), spent decades leading sales teams at LexisNexis and has taught leadership and public speaking to audiences all over the country. He's the author of multiple books including Get Real Selling. Pistol has that rare ability to be both universally liked and 100% respected by all who know him. My brother AJ Hawk was an All-American linebacker at Ohio State, where he won a national championship. He played 11 years in the NFL, won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers, and retired as the franchise's all-time leading tackler. Now you'll see him every weekday on ESPN as a co-host of the Pat McAfee Show Notes: Key Learnings Be a consciously competent leader. Pistol's framework: you have to understand the processes of the work you're asking people to do, not just the end result. First-line leaders have to know the work at a great level of detail. One tactical way to get there: do after-action reviews on both wins and losses. Know why you win. Know why you lose. Describe both in detail. That's how you earn vivid clarity. Give people vivid clarity. Don't tell your team to "go get the ball carrier." Tell them precisely how to handle each situation. Great leaders are great because they give vivid clarity to the people they're leading on how to do the thing. Stack days. If I can't win by being brilliant, I can win by being able to endure. Just get up and do the thing day after day. Growing up, AJ and I had an unwritten rule: no matter what we did the night before, we were going to the first available lift. You don't have to go to bed early. But you're going to work no matter how you feel. When AJ knew he could do it. Freshman year at Ohio State. A tunnel screen play in camp. He read it perfectly, took off, and delivered a textbook hit on the receiver. That was the moment: "Football's football. These guys are all monsters. But I think I can find a way to make some plays." How to write a book: get up an extra hour early for 200 days in a row and never miss a day. Anybody can do it. You just have to be willing to make the decision, and then follow through, and then follow through again. My scout team Super Bowl. As a scout team QB at Ohio, I picked the Florida game to prepare like it was the real thing. I wore Rex Grossman's number and arm sleeve. Spatted my cleats. I rewrote the practice cards based on real Florida plays. We ended up being in a tight ball game against a national powerhouse. My teammates came back after the game and said practice that week was harder than the actual game. This is when I learned what is possible when prepared for the moment. The Mike Nolan $10 bill story. When AJ was in college, the 49ers head coach Mike Nolan needed to tip a valet and asked if he had any cash. AJ gave him $10. Weeks later, a handwritten note showed up at AJ's college house with a $10 bill inside and a thank-you note from Mike Nolan. Follow-through. Attention to detail. Paying people back. AJ never forgot it. AJ's delusional confidence in Tahoe. AJ had an unlucky drive that left him 254 yards from the pin, in the first cut. Jack Wagner was still on the green in front of us. AJ pulled out a four iron. I told him to wait. He said, "I'm just gonna go, and hit it on the green." He flushed it. Landed on the green 25 feet from Jack. There's power in belief, speaking things into existence, and then doing them. Irrational self-confidence isn't irrational. Pistol quoted Bill Simmons: "As long as you believe it's possible, it's possible." Regardless of what it is. My biggest risk: leaving corporate at the end of 2017. I had a VP of sales job, and I left it all to bet on this podcast. Miranda believed in it maybe even more than I did. That combination made it possible. Pistol's biggest risk: August 1st, 1999. He left LexisNexis after 14 years to go be a public speaker. Two years later, on August 1st, 2001, he came back. Both times on his birthday. His career jumped five notches on his return. Sometimes you have to leave to come back better. AJ's biggest risk: hiding a broken wrist during a Super Bowl run. AJ refused an X-ray or MRI so they couldn't shut him down. The trainer taped and casted it. He played the whole season, won the Super Bowl, and made the Pro Bowl. He had surgery to repair it days after the Super Bowl. The best players are consistent. When I'd talk to AJ's teammates in Green Bay about him, they used the unsexy words: "Most consistent guy on the team. First guy in the weight room. Will be where he's supposed to be on every play." He did that for eleven years. Show up. Every single day. Pistol said it: "Anybody that's been great at something didn't get great on the first day, but they did the right types of things along the way." Don't grade your kid's games. Grade the effort. "Did you play hard? That's all I care about." AJ said his family doesn't have good or bad games. There's only one question after the game: did you play hard or did you not? Show them what "hard" actually looks like. Sometimes kids think they're playing as hard as they possibly can when they're not. AJ's brother-in-law Jack Johnson reminded him of this. You can't just say "play hard." You have to describe it. You have to show them. Otherwise they don't know what the standard is. Model it. Don't tell. Leadership is caught more than it's taught. My primary role as a dad and a husband is to be the model. If I have low standards, my kids will have low standards. If I show up every day, they'll learn what showing up looks like. Do all the work. Then trust your instincts. AJ's approach to football. Reinstall the defense from scratch every year. Take fresh notes. So when it's game time, you don't have to think. You just play. The Dinner Guest Draft: Every hundredth episode, we do a draft. This one: pick five living dinner guests. AJ's table: Michael Jordan Charles Barkley Arnold Schwarzenegger Palmer Luckey Denzel Washington My table: (All dream guests for The Learning Leader Show) Dave Chappelle Dave Matthews Mike Rowe Doris Kearns Goodwin Michael Lewis Pistol's table: (All former guests of the show) Admiral William McRaven Dan Patrick Nikki Glaser Stephen M.R. Covey Oz Pearlman Champagne Moments a Year From Now My dad: Celebrating his 71st birthday dinner with all of us. AJ: To keep being present with his kids while they're still young. To slow down and enjoy it. Me: A good year of college for the older girls in our family. Reflection Questions Where in your work are you giving people vivid clarity? Or are you handing them broad general directives and hoping they figure it out? What is your version of the Mike Nolan $10 bill story? What small act of follow-through could you do this week that someone will remember for years? Where are you being performative right now, doing something for the audience instead of doing it because you want to be great? What would change if you only did it when nobody was watching? More Learning #600 - AJ, Pistol & Ryan Hawk - Setting the Standard #500 - AJ, Pistol, Ryan & Pat McAfee - Live Your Life as a Movie #400 - AJ, Pistol & Ryan Hawk - The Life Experiences That Shape Our Character Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Arena Invite 01:30 Meet Keith "Pistol" Hawk and AJ Hawk 03:34 What Everyone's Been Up To For the Past Two Years 05:09 What We Learned From Robert Saleh (head coach, Tennessee Titans) and Mike Macdonal (head coach of the defending Super Bowl Champion, Seattle Seahawks) About Tackling 08:50 Be a Consciously Competent Leader. Give People Vivid Clarity. 10:44 Inflection Point Stories: When AJ and Ryan Knew They Could Do It 16:33 How Pistol Spotted the Talent Early 21:32 Why Written Communication Is More Important Than You Think 25:21 The Power of Stacking Days 33:06 The Mike Nolan $10 Bill Story 35:24 Delusional Confidence: The Tahoe Golf Moment 42:51 Irrational Self-Confidence Isn't Irrational 43:15 The Biggest Risks Each of Us Ever Took 47:24 Playing Through a Broken Wrist to Win a Super Bowl 50:38 How to Raise Kids With High Standards 54:28 Regimented vs. Disciplined 59:30 AJ's Hack to Beat a Shellfish Allergy 01:06:00 The Dinner Guest Draft Begins 01:21:21 Draft Recap 01:23:43 The Champagne Question 01:26:33 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Joanna Stern is an Emmy Award-winning technology journalist, chief technology analyst for NBC News, and founder of the independent media company, "New Things." She is best known for her 12-year tenure at The Wall Street Journal, and for authoring the New York Times bestseller I Am Not a Robot. Key Learnings Joanna dedicated her book to her parents "who taught me to think for myself, and the AIs, robots, and machines that made me wonder if I really was." In an age when AI can do the thinking for us, the most valuable thing we can teach our kids is to think for themselves. Walt Mossberg invented tech journalism for humans. His first column: "Computers are too hard to use, and it's not your fault." Without Walt, we don't have a category where technology built for humans is reviewed by humans. AI won't replace the radiologist. It'll make them better. Joanna sat with her doctor while AI scanned her mammogram. The AI flagged three suspicious spots. Two the doctor had already dismissed as benign. But one was something the doctor hadn't caught. She marked it for follow-up. Then the doctor pointed to other cases where SHE had caught things the AI missed. It's not a replacement. It's a partnership. The same technology that finds cancer is the same technology that can autonomously send missiles. That's the great tension of our time. Every powerful technology has good and bad uses. AI colleagues are coming. Joanna has two employees and one AI agent. She predicts that within a year, she'll have full AI employees. Great management books haven't been written yet about how to lead a mixed team of humans and agents. Someone is going to write them. Concert ticket prices tell you everything about human connection right now. Every artist is selling out football stadiums. People are craving in-person interaction more than ever. Bot Girl Summer. Joanna tried to have an emotional relationship with a chatbot boyfriend named Evan for 48 hours. She didn't fall in love. But she noticed how easy it was to talk to something that only wanted to hear about her problems and told her she was great at everything. That's the danger. The AI therapist shut itself down when it realized there was a real therapist in the room. Joanna brought her AI therapist "Ash" into her actual therapy session. Halfway through, Ash said, "I'm sorry, I can't continue this conversation. It sounds like there are multiple people in the room." AI won't replace therapists. It'll help with the shortage and the stigma. Some people don't want to walk into a therapist's office. But they'll open their phones. That's a bridge to real help for people who wouldn't otherwise get it. Kara Swisher's career advice to Joanna: "Leave your fucking job." That was the shortest, cleanest advice Joanna got when deciding whether to leave the Wall Street Journal after 12 years. Joanna used AI as a co-founder for the biggest decision of her career. She uploaded 12 years of notes into ChatGPT and asked it to help her decide whether to leave the Journal. It didn't decide for her. But it structured the risk analysis, laid out the escape hatches, and helped her see the shape of the decision. The muscles atrophy if you don't use them. Writing is meant to be hard. Thinking is meant to be hard. If you outsource the hard work, you stop getting stronger at the hard work. Research is where you learn the most. If you have AI pull the memo for you and you get up and read it, you don't know what you're really talking about. You have to do the reps to know the material. AEI: Already Enough Intelligence. Sam Altman is obsessed with building superintelligence. Joanna proposes we already have enough intelligence to work with. Maybe the goal isn't to build smarter models. Maybe it's to figure out what to do with what we already have. The AI on-ramp for leaders: Take one document you make all the time (a memo, a PowerPoint, an email template). Upload it. Ask AI to make a template out of it. Next time you need it, you're twice as fast. Push yourself to do the harder work. Joanna's analogy: marathon runners are insane. They just want to run. Nobody wants to do the harder work. But that's where the growth is. Joanna's champagne moment a year from now: milestones for her new company. She's already hit 100,000 YouTube subscribers three months after her first video. But she also just wants a nap. Reflection Questions Where in your work are you outsourcing the thinking to AI? Are the muscles you actually need atrophying because you're skipping the reps? If you accepted that you already have enough intelligence to work with, what would you actually build with what's in front of you right now? More Learning #679: Kat Cole - The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs #605: Seth Godin - The Power of Remarkable Ideas #697: Dan Smith & Ryan Hawk - The Price of Becoming Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now! 01:44 Meet Joanna Stern 02:31 Teach Your Kids to Think in the Age of AI 03:25 The Parents and Mentors Who Shaped Her Career 04:16 Lessons From Walt Mossberg 05:55 Why Joanna Spent a Year Living With AI 14:47 How AI Can Make You a Better Leader 17:30 Why People Crave Human Connection More Than Ever 21:00 Bot Girl Summer: Dating a Chatbot Named Evan 25:13 The AI Therapist Trial 29:51 Using ChatGPT for a Career Change 33:29 Don't Let Your Thinking Muscles Atrophy 40:20 Sam Altman on Superintelligence, and Joanna's Case for "AEI" 42:51 Joanna's Advice for College Students 45:29 How Joanna Actually Uses AI to Write 47:17 Practical AI for the Fortune 500 VP 50:17 The Champagne Question 52:43 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Ezekiel J. "Zeke" Emanuel, MD, PhD, is a prominent oncologist, bioethicist, and health policy expert. Currently Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, he was instrumental in shaping the Affordable Care Act and served as the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. Key Learnings Zeke's dad was called "Speedy." He was a Chicago pediatrician who worked 24-hour call, walked so fast the nurses had to run to keep up, and had a rule: the fourth child in any family was free. He recognized the financial strain on families and just wouldn't charge. Zeke's mom was the definition of the anti-helicopter parent. At the playground, she sat on the bench. At the beach, she dropped the boys off with a blanket and a snack. "You go play. Something goes wrong? Okay, that's how it goes." That's how three future powerhouse leaders learned to negotiate, create, and figure it out. The Emanuel brothers' group text is full of bragging. Zeke posted his 51.9 VO2 max score at 68 years old, asking, "Do I win in the family?" His kids replied that they don't even read the articles Zeke and Rahm forward anymore. Close doesn't mean uncompetitive. A dozen years ago, Zeke wrote his most famous article, "Why I Hope to Die at 75." He still stands by it. The point wasn't that he wants to die. The point is that after 75, he won't take medical treatments meant to prolong life. By age 75, 30% of adults have Alzheimer's or cognitive impairment. By 80, it's 40%. Zeke doesn't want to be remembered as a doddering old man who can't recognize his own family. Living a long time is a means, not an end. It's not the goal of life. It's what allows you to be present, engaged, and useful for the years you have. Biohacking is a lie: It suggests you know better than millions of years of evolution and the entire medical profession. The body isn't about maxing. It's about balance. Too much immune response gives you autoimmunity. Too little makes you sick. The body finds health in the median. You're not going to be perfect over decades. Wellness isn't a four-minute figure skating routine graded on execution. It's a lifetime practice. So build habits you enjoy and can sustain without thinking about them. Zeke's six simple rules for a long and healthy life: Don't be a schmuck. Avoid activities riskier than driving. Smoking, vaping, base jumping, climbing Everest. Talk to people. The number one predictor of a long, happy life. Expand your mind. Travel. Talk to the chef. Learn something new. Eat your ice cream. Moderation over perfection. Fermented foods and fiber. Move. Aerobic, strength, and flexibility. All three. Sleep like a baby. You can't will it. But you can create the conditions. The Harvard Adult Development Study followed people for 85 years. John F. Kennedy was in it. Ben Bradlee was in it. The finding: close friends and being married correlated with the healthiest, longest, happiest lives. Not exercise. Not diet. Relationships. Having no close friends is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's how bad loneliness is for you. It's not just psychological. It's physical. Introverts get the same happiness boost from social interaction as extroverts. A University of Chicago study by Nicholas Epley found that introverts assume they won't enjoy talking to strangers on their commute. They were wrong. When they did it, they were just as happy as extroverts. Take the headphones off. Zeke has been telling people this since the iPod era. Random encounters increase your surface area for luck, learning, and connection. You never know who you're going to meet or what they might tell you. To be interesting, you have to be interested. Zeke asks to meet the chef at every great restaurant. He asks his Ethiopian Uber driver which tribe he's from. He talks to the person on the plane. It's virtuous. Good for you AND good for them. Zeke's hero is Ben Franklin. Franklin came back to America at 80 after negotiating the end of the Revolutionary War. The first thing he did was build a library for his curiosity and a dining room for his social dinners. That's the way to live. The wellness trifecta: hosting a dinner party with curious people. You're eating good food. You're getting together with people. Your mind is being stretched by great conversation. Three benefits from one activity. Zeke is anti-wellness-industrial-complex. Peptides from your corner store: disaster, unregulated, no idea what's in them. Testosterone replacement therapy without a real deficiency: bad idea, accelerates prostate cancer. Growth hormone for aging: promotes cancers. That's being a schmuck. Sleep is the one wellness practice you can't will yourself into. You can only build the conditions for it. Dark room. Cool temperature. No caffeine or alcohol eight hours before bed. Phone in another room. Read a book. Everything else is up to your body. Ice cream actually decreases your risk of type 2 diabetes. The fat content softens the glycemic response. Plus, you usually eat it with other people. Social eating matters. Zeke's champagne moment a year from now: finishing his next book on how to fix the American healthcare system, and turning 70. Reflection Questions Are you optimizing for length of life, or for the quality of years you actually get? When was the last time you turned your headphones off, introduced yourself to a stranger, or asked to meet the chef? Who are the friends you rely on for social interaction? Not casual acquaintances, but the ones who lift your health, longevity, and happiness. When did you last make plans with them? More Learning #607 - Dr. Meg Meeker - Raising Resilient Kids (Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters) #690 - Austin Kleon - Why Activated Leaders Win #682 - Will Guidara - Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Order my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Clark Lea is the head football coach at Vanderbilt University. He spent 14 years as an assistant coach, including three as defensive coordinator at Notre Dame, before returning to his alma mater in 2021 to inherit a program that had gone winless the year before. He's now the back-to-back SEC Coach of the Year and the architect of one of the great turnarounds in college football history. We recorded this conversation live at our 2026 Learning Leader Growth Summit in Nashville, surrounded by members of the Learning Leader Circle. Key Learnings Clark inherited a Vanderbilt program that went winless the year before. He says he probably screwed up 50% of his first year. The game is how quickly you can pivot. Losing is a powerful teacher. It cleanses and purifies you in ways you don't want but need. You can blame other people, sink into self-pity, or ask: "What am I meant to be learning right now?" Fast-forward 15 years. Look at this moment from a future place of breakthrough. What did you do now that allowed change to occur? "What do I wanna be proud of in the attempt?" Letting go of expected outcomes is what allows you to refine and simplify the way you see the world. Enter the building unguarded. The clearer you are about who you are and what you want, the more obvious it becomes who fits and who doesn't. Different ball, same problems. Clark spends time learning from the Milwaukee Brewers, the Baltimore Ravens, and others. Different industry, same human challenges. Sometimes the different ball is the gift, because you walk in without preconceptions. Knowledge is limiting. Questions illuminate. Once you know something, you stop pursuing it. The questions you ask are the first constraints you put on knowledge. Get past the touchy-feely. Ask: "Tell me what's screwed up here." Problems are always there. Your job is to be willing to look for them. Check the cabinets. Living in a 700-square-foot LA apartment with his wife, Clark would open the cabinets and find them swarming with roaches. The building was fumigated. Two months later, they were back. You can move the pots out and stop checking, or you can keep opening the cabinets. Leaders keep opening the cabinets. Tell people what TO do, not what NOT to do. Rick Neuheisel's lesson. Stop coaching against the bad thing. Manifest what you want to have happen. Hire bunker guys, not logo people. Logos are easy to change. Hire people who'll fight for you in the bunker when it's hard. The Michigan Reset. Before his first game as Notre Dame defensive coordinator, Clark told the team's mental performance coach: "We're gonna be down 50 to nothing at halftime. BK's gonna fire me on the spot. Jerome Bettis and Rocket Ismail will be screaming at me in the tunnel." She asked, "Why don't you trust your players? You think this is all about you?" Have more captains. Clark sits in a room each summer with around 25 players he identifies as leaders. If the people at the leadership table are good, the locker room will be good. The team votes. He draws the line wherever the vote naturally falls. When you try to go opposite of what you're trying to avoid, you eventually become it. Clark spent his first years at Vanderbilt rejecting the program's past. Going opposite. Then he realized it was just attaching his identity to the very thing he was trying to escape. Now he plots toward the vision instead. What got you here won't keep you here. As Clark has grown, the program has grown. Once he understood that, he could sit with a player and listen first, instead of looking to them for affirmation. The mission is winning. Clark scrapped a beautiful, eloquent, unclear mission statement and replaced it with three words. Now every dollar spent, every coach hired, and every player retained is measured against the same lens. Well-better-learned. Vanderbilt's after-action review for every game and every process. What did we do well? What do we need to do better? What did we learn? On Alabama week, Clark's team had the best practice he's ever been a part of. His job each week isn't to tell the team the challenges. It's to give them the plan to win. At halftime against the number one team in the country, he kneeled the team down and said, "It's on a platter for you. Go take it." They beat Alabama. Stewarding 17-to-22-year-olds means helping them decouple their worth from outcomes. Clark cries in front of his team. His kids are around. His wife is there. His dad is at every practice. The players see a man. A human. A son. "An asshole in a Nike Tech Fit is still an asshole." In the NIL era, Clark fights to keep the locker room from splitting into a million-dollar club, a $500K club, a $30K club, and a $0 club. What you drive doesn't make a man. NIL value doesn't make a man. The grounding is the work. Reflection Questions What are you holding too tightly right now? Whose job are you doing because you don't trust them to do it themselves? Which cabinet have you stopped checking because you're tired of finding the same problem? Fast-forward 15 years. Looking back at this moment from a place of breakthrough, what are you meant to be learning right now that you've been avoiding? More Learning #681: Clark Lea - Belief is a Practice #281: George Raveling - 8 Decades of Wisdom, from Dr. MLK to Michael Jordan #637: Tom Ryan - Chosen Suffering, Becoming Elite & Life & Leadership Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now! 00:47 Welcome Back, Clark Lea 02:38 Taking Over a Winless Vanderbilt Program 04:18 What Losing Taught Clark About Hiring 07:52 The Three Things That Light Clark on Fire About Coaching 10:27 Different Ball, Same Problems: Learning From the Milwaukee Brewers 13:14 Knowledge Is Limiting. Questions Illuminate. 18:09 The Introvert Who Had to Learn to Lead the Room 20:13 Brian Kelly and the Bet on Clark Lea 23:19 Why Clark Has More Team Captains Than Anyone in College Football 28:58 The Transfer Portal Pivot and the Culture Reset 33:58 The Mission Is Winning 34:51 "If We Don't Have $3 Million by December, We Won't Have a Program" 37:26 Why Candice Lee Took a Bet on Him 39:53 Inside Alabama Week: The Best Practice He's Ever Been a Part Of 44:03 The Bye Week Reset: Penalties, Third Down, and the Ball 46:11 Beating the No. 1 Team in the Country 49:50 Replacing Diego Pavia's Locker Room Leadership 51:39 Decoupling Worth and Identity From Outcomes 56:27 Hiring Bunker Guys, Not Logo People 01:01:47 "An Asshole in a Nike Tech Fit Is Still an Asshole" 01:04:47 EOPC

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Scott Harrison is the founder and CEO of charity: water, a non-profit that has raised over a billion dollars and funded tens of thousands of water projects to bring safe drinking water to millions. He previously spent a decade as a New York City nightclub promoter before a dramatic career shift led him into humanitarian work. Key Learnings Scott started a charity: water with $20 from a birthday party. Then $15,000... Twenty years later: over a billion dollars raised, 21 million people served. He says it should be 10 to 100 times more. The cure for water already exists. We're looking for water on Mars while 700 million people drink dirty water on Earth. We solved this hundreds of years ago. We just haven't implemented it. 25% of the money sitting in American donor-advised funds would give every human on Earth clean water. That's parked philanthropic capital. Already tax-benefited. Just waiting. The goal is always 10X what you're doing. If we raised a million last year, we want ten this year. If we raise $100 million, we should raise a billion. The opportunity is always orders of magnitude larger than the moment. Show, don't bullet. Scott shows 210 photos in a 45-minute keynote. No PowerPoint. Single images. A story unfolds frame by frame. Be early to the technology. First charity on Instagram. First to hit a million Twitter followers. First to use VR. The question is always the same: how does this new thing further the mission? The 100% model: solve for the cynic. Public donations go to one bank account that funds only water projects. Overhead is raised separately from entrepreneurs and business leaders. Then track every donation to a specific village. Don't be mid. Scott's 11-year-old daughter says nobody wants to be mid. Excellence is a core value. There's a lot of mid out there. Design everything. The fact cover sheet. The PowerPoint. The website. The package. "We're always dating." If the message comes in an ugly package, you're at a disadvantage before you start. Treat the donor like a Michelin three-star guest. If a restaurant can think that carefully about a meal, you can think that carefully about a donor who can save a million lives. The Goldman Sachs partner who changed Scott's paradigm. Before making an eight-figure ask, Scott asked a partner: "How does it feel when people ask for a lot more than you expected?" The expected answer was irritated, offended, put off. The actual answer: "I feel flattered that they think I would be that generous." People are generous. The well is there. You just have to drill deep enough. Scott has spent 20 years asking for too little. That might be his next obsession. People give to people, not causes. A dynamic leader who transfers their enthusiasm gets the donation. The cause doesn't. Most of the donations Scott and his wife give are to people, not topics they were already passionate about. Talk 10% of the time. When Scott meets a donor for the first time, he wants to know their whole life story. Their marriage. Their kids. What they wanted to be when they grew up. Be genuinely curious or don't bother. Hire for integrity, humility, curiosity, and energy... 16,000 applicants for 36 roles last year. Energy matters most. Someone who can get you fired up about pickleball, Patagonia, or a new running shoe is exactly who you want on the executive team. The dinner test for hiring: Can you imagine having this person at your home for two hours at dinner? And wanting to keep them for another hour? Get the whole life story. Scott wants the arc from the beginning to the present in an interview. If someone can't tell their own story coherently, they probably don't know themselves yet. The 11-year-old with the piggy bank. He told his parents he was going to fund a whole village. They told him to set a realistic goal. He went knocking on doors. He came back with $10,000. Scott's experience lab in Nashville. A 60-minute immersive tour. A 100-degree room with a treadmill where you carry a 40-pound water vessel. Microscopes that show you parasites. A VR film that ends in celebration. The "give shop," not the gift shop. 53% of visitors donate. 10,000 visitors. $3.9 million raised in year one. Scott's champagne moment: a single billionaire who picks water. The water sector doesn't have one. Republicans and Democrats agree on it. Atheists and people of faith agree on it. Everyone has to drink. Reflection Questions What is the 10X version of your current goal? Where are you asking for too little because the smaller ask felt safer? Who in your work or life is the Michelin three-star guest, the customer, donor, or partner who deserves your most thoughtful experience design? When was the last time you went 10% talking, 90% genuinely curious about someone else's story? More Learning: #290: Scott Harrison – Redemption, Compassion, & The Transformative Power Within Us #680: Scott Galloway - Don't Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Talent #682: Will Guidara - Adversity is a Terrible Thing to WasteAudio Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now! 01:18 Welcome Back, Scott Harrison 02:56 From a $20 Bill to Over $1 Billion Raised 04:59 Why the Goal Should Always Be 10X (or 100X) 07:54 Storytelling: How to Get People to Care About a Problem They Don't Feel 10:30 Being Early to Instagram, Twitter, and VR 16:10 Radical Transparency: The Bank Account That Built Trust 19:51 The Beauty of a Healthy Obsession 21:22 Drilling Deep for the Artesian Wells of Generosity 25:04 What It Feels Like in the Room When Generosity Breaks Through 27:01 "Nobody Wants to Be Mid." 30:56 Design Everything: We're Always Dating 32:13 Treat Your Donor Like a Michelin Three-Star Guest 35:39 Selling With Integrity: Talk 10%, Listen 90% 39:15 16,000 Applicants for 36 Jobs: What Scott Looks For 43:12 The Power of Vulnerability in Hiring 45:39 Inside the Nashville Experience Lab 50:34 The Champagne Question: A Billion-Dollar Vision 52:10 The 11-Year-Old Who Raised $10,000 Door-to-Door 54:25 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book -- The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Austin Kleon is the NYT bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. He's a writer who draws, a former librarian, and one of the most original thinkers on creativity working today. His new book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Key Learnings Stay light. Bill Murray told ballplayers that if you stay light, loose, and relaxed, you can play at the highest level. Same with acting, writing, anything. Austin keeps a photo of Bill in his studio as a reminder. Play is the work. A lot of Austin's best work requires a sense of play. It's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Go to the analog desk first. Austin has a digital desk and an analog desk. Nothing electronic is allowed at the analog desk. He starts there with nothing and sees what comes. Most people never give themselves the time, space, and materials to make something of what's swirling inside them. People want to watch someone who is activated. "People will pay every night to show up and see somebody believe in themselves." (Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth) The market for something to believe in is infinite. (Hugh MacLeod) The world is full of people just doing their thing. They're hungry to see someone on fire for something. The writer's job: take what everyone is thinking and put it into words. "You gave me the words" is the highest compliment a reader can give. Effortless is earned. People say the Friday newsletter looks easy. Austin's reply: Do it every Friday for 13 years, then call me. A place to put things makes you notice more. Thoreau took morning walks knowing he'd write later, so he paid closer attention. Carry a camera, and you start seeing shots everywhere. Live for the living, not for the writing. There's a tension between living your life and documenting it. Don't lose yourself to the feed. Your attention is the most valuable thing you have. Everyone wants to take it. The real challenge of modern life is making sure you're the one who decides where it goes. The best teachers are perpetual students. You realize what you know and don't know only when you try to teach it. Toggle between knowing and not knowing. The moment you think you know what you're doing, the work gets stale. You start running on routine instead of need. To be an amateur is to be a lover. The French root means "lover of." An amateur does it out of love, not material reward. Every great CEO should be put in a room with a four-year-old. They'd both learn something. Kids knock the pompous certainty right out of you. "I don't know. How do you think we should figure it out?" Austin's kids taught him it's less important to know everything than to know how to find out. The leader isn't the one who speaks while everyone listens. The leader listens, asks questions, stays curious, and wonders how everyone is doing. Look for who's having fun, not who's successful. Fun is underrated. Serious people have a serious time. Do it with lightness and it's contagious. "A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play." (Lawrence Pearsall Jacks) He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he's doing and leaves others to decide whether he's working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. Ask "What does the universe want to show me today?" A useful fiction. Tell yourself the world is trying to send you messages and suddenly you see a hundred of them. Have the toy before you know what you'll do with it. Austin buys typewriters, then asks what to make. Get the bicycle first. In six months you'll know what kind you actually want. Steal an idea someone only did once and turn it into a whole thing. Austin saw a single typewriter interview, made it a series, and has done more than 20. Put the human hand in the work. Austin decided 20 years ago to make it obvious a human made his stuff. In the age of AI, it stands out more than ever. People want the imperfection. Writing is thinking. People think you gather your ideas then write them down. The act of writing is the act of figuring out what you actually think. That's the hard part. Differentiate yourself by reading a book outside your field. Swim a little further out than everyone else and you find new water. Focus on what you can control. A writer controls only what's between the covers. Did you do a good job? Were you clear? Were you helpful? The rest isn't up to you. Austin's champagne moment a year from now: his kids flourishing. The older he gets, the less the books mean and the more his family does. Reflection Questions Where is your analog desk? Do you have a space with no screens where you go to make something of what's swirling inside you? Are you activated? When people watch you work, do they see someone on fire for it, or someone just going through the motions? What's one idea from outside your field you could steal this week? Where could you swim a little further out and find new water? More Learning #676: Jesse Cole - Built for the Fans, Obsession & Excellence#687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life#241: Austin Kleon - How to Steal Like an Artist Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now! 01:33 Meet Austin Kleon 02:53 The Bill Murray Photo: Stay Light 05:42 The Analog Desk: Where the Real Work Starts 08:51 People Want to Watch Someone Activated 15:22 Why "It Looks Easy" Is the Whole Point 16:28 The Newsletter as a Forcing Function to Notice 20:46 Who Owns Your Attention? 24:39 How Austin's Kids Became His Teachers 29:06 Why the Best Creators Stay Amateurs 31:33 Curiosity Is the Real Leadership Skill 34:09 What Does the Universe Want to Show Me Today? 35:02 Look for Who's Having Fun, Not Who's Successful 38:30 Do You Love to Write, or Love to Have Written? 41:00 The Typewriter Interviews: Stealing an Idea Done Once 47:18 The Interplay of Analog and Digital 49:02 AI and Why the Human Hand Wins 51:23 The Champagne Question: Family Flourishing 55:47 Walk-Ins Welcome 58:06 EOPC

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming for my new book, The Price of Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. His titles include Boundaries, Integrity, Necessary Endings, and Trust. For three decades, he has worked with leaders, helping them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. His newest book is Your Desired Future: The Five Essential Steps That Take You Where You Want to Go. Key Learnings Henry's five-step model for getting from here to there: Vision (clear and compelling) Talent (engaging the right people around you) Strategy and plan (how you'll win) Measurement and accountability (how you'll know) Fix and adapt (course-correcting in real time) At the age of 16, Henry's daughter asked, "Dad, how do people become singer-songwriters?" Henry went out to the garage and brought in his whiteboard. Lucy rolled her eyes. He gave her the five-step model. A couple years later, she published a song called "Crash and Learn" that got bought by CBS, the CW Network, and featured on Spotify and Apple Music. We tend to create departments and businesses in our own image. Of the five components, we're going to be good at two, maybe three. But the others still have to happen. That's where most leaders fail. Only humans can picture a desired future state. Finley is Henry's Doberman. When the FedEx guy comes to the door, she runs to it, and barks every time. Henry has never seen her stop and ask herself: "I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on Thursday." Most leaders are operating like Finley. Working hard. Doing what they've always done. Never stopping to ask if any of it is getting them where they want to be. You need an observing ego. The worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going. Tony Blair, while Prime Minister, spent half a day a week sitting by himself next to a pond in reflection. Warren Buffett spends an hour and a half a day at his desk staring out the window. A revenue number is not a vision. The single worst vision statement Henry ever heard: "We want to be a $50 million company." It provides no clarity of what the company is going to do. A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it's a metric, not a vision. Will Guidara created a "dream maker" role at Eleven Madison Park. Their job: listen for clues from guests, then create a personalized, unexpected, memorable experience the guest will never forget and tell everyone about. Trust Fuels Investment. People invest in leaders who feel like they understand them. You're taking your team into a war. They've got to have deep trust with you. The first thing a leader has to do is develop deep, deep trust and let their team know that they understand the pressure they're under. "A vision can die without a plan or without people." Alan Mulally's weekly 7:00 AM Thursday meeting at Ford. Every VP had to give every project a red, yellow, or green status. When Mulally first arrived, the company was hemorrhaging money. Everyone was holding up green. He said: "How can you be holding up green when here's the reality over here? I need some reality in here." When one VP finally held up red, Mulally moved him to sit next to him. The wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. The right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination. You get what you create or what you allow. Henry was working with a global CEO whose team had cultural problems. Henry kept asking, "Why is that?" After a few rounds, the CEO finally said, "I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I?" If you are the one actually in charge, you are ridiculously in charge. Either you're creating it, or you're allowing it. Accountability answers two questions: Did we do what we said we were going to do? If not, why not? Don't just tell people to "do better." Run a root cause analysis. Maybe they don't have the tools. Maybe you gave them competing goals. Maybe it's a leadership problem. If we executed perfectly, did we get the result we expected? If yes, pour on the gas. If no, go back up the model and adjust your strategy. Most leaders measure goals, not activities. Goals are lagging indicators. You can measure them after it's over. It's too late. Measure activities. Did we do this week what we said we were going to do? Micro drivers matter. Henry worked with a CEO who built multi-billions in valuation from a one-office company who was excellent with micro drivers. It's an atomic compression of the 80/20 rule. He knew the specific activities at each level of the business that actually moved the needle, and he made those objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, and deliberate practice. Peter Drucker said, "Nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things." The number one thing the greatest leaders share: character. Not moral or ethical character. Your makeup as a person. How you're glued together. Integrity comes from the word that means wholeness. The great performers are drivers of tasks and relationships. The highest performers utilize coaching the most. Henry expected the disastrous leaders to be the ones calling. It was the exact opposite. The ones crushing it are the ones who reach out. The struggling ones rarely do. The greatest leaders reverse the law of entropy: things get worse over time. But entropy only applies to a closed system. Open the system to a new energy source from the outside plus intelligence to organize it, and you can reverse it. That's what coaches, mentors, and advisors do. A leader is a closed system when the only voices they're ever listening to are the ones in their head. The greatest leaders embrace negative realities. They move toward problems. Not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better. Reflection Questions In how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door, working hard at activities without ever stopping to ask if any of it is getting you where you want to go? Is your current vision a metric, or a compelling picture of a future state that would make people want to sacrifice for it? Where in your life are you a closed system? Whose voices outside your head could open you up to new energy and intelligence? More Learning #229 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You #050 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Integrity is the Wake You Leave Behind #682 - Will Guidara: Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste Podcast Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming – Pre-Order Now! 01:13 Meet Dr. Henry Cloud 02:40 The Leadership GPS: Where Are You Going? 04:54 Step 2: Building the Right Team Around You 06:09 Steps 3-5: Strategy, Measurement, and Adapt 10:45 Why the Best Leaders Carve Out Time to Think 15:50 Why a Revenue Number Is Not a Vision 18:20 Crafting a Vision People Will Sacrifice For 23:12 The HVAC Story, Joe Girard, and the Dream Maker 27:38 Trust: The First Thing Every Leader Must Build 30:04 Alan Mulally's Red-Yellow-Green Meeting at Ford 32:38 How to Run Status Reviews That Actually Work 34:26 Accountability Should Be an Immune System, Not Autoimmune 38:18 Measure Activities, Not Goals 43:10 Micro Drivers: The Atomic 80/20 Rule 45:14 The Voices Outside Your Head: Peers and Accountability 47:47 The #1 Trait of Sustained Excellence: Character 50:39 The Greatest Leaders Reverse Entropy 56:17 EOPC