7 things MrBeast, Bezos & Thiel do that you don’t

Get Sam and Shaan's CEO lessons in one guide: https://clickhubspot.com/epmw Episode 857: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the extreme behaviors of the most legendary CEOs. — Show Notes: (0:00) CEO Moves (2:49) Move 1: Option Drop (10:39) Move 2: Friction Removal Service (12:55) Move 3: 1-bit communication (19:35) Move 4: Single-tasking (23:18) Move 5: Continuous culling (26:05) Move 6: Reward failure (27:06) Move 7: Clone yourself (30:18) Alternative: Give up on greatness (also fine) (35:59) Just be great — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  If this was a VHS tape, it would be labeled Sean Hardcore Part Two.

• 0:05Shaan Puri?

  People would not be getting what they thought they were getting.

• 0:09Shaan Puri?

  Like, there's this Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks.

• 0:13Sam Parr?

  CEO.

• 0:25Shaan Puri?

  What I want to talk about is basically, if you're a CEO of a company, if you're running a company right now, which I think a lot of people listening to this are, there's a good chance you're not being hardcore enough. And what I want to talk about is like six or seven real anecdote stories of what CEOs do, moves that CEOs do that sound wrong, sound almost illegal, but they actually work. The idea being, when you're a CEO, there's no CEO school, there's no CEO training, there's nobody there to manage you, you're the one managing everybody else. And most people don't even give you like real feedback because you're kind of their boss, you're in charge.

• 1:01Sam Parr?

  Is this like famous examples or your friends?

• 1:05Shaan Puri?

  I have a mix of examples you'll know, examples I think you won't know, but they're of famous companies. And then one or two from my friends. Okay, so I have, I have one, two, three, four, five. I have like seven.

• 1:19Sam Parr?

  And whenever you come up with ideas like this, which you do all the time, they interest me. But what also interests me is why do you care? Why do you care right now?

• 1:28Shaan Puri?

  Well, two things. One is in general, like I want to be better at what I do. And so if I ever hear of somebody else doing something that I think could be either I haven't tried, or I think like, wow, that sounds kind of crazy, but I guess I see how that might work. It's like I kind of found a new move in a video game and I like to know that. But the other is, we talk a lot about, almost to the point of it being obnoxious, this phrase frame breaking, which is you see the world a certain way and it seems like there's a, there's a border. Everything about the world fits inside that frame. And then you'll hear this story that will just be outside of the frame, it breaks the frame. The frame has to expand, now incorporate this new information. And I don't know why, I love it. I love it like dudes love Pokemon cards.

• 2:10Shaan Puri?

  I just want to collect as many of those frame breaking ideas and stories. And the reason why is, if you've ever heard that story of like the elephant, who at a young age, like they tether him to the stake in the ground and then he grows and now he's so powerful, he could easily rip out the stake, but he doesn't. There's many examples in my life where it feels like there's the illusion of control, that like I'm limited by something that in actuality I'm not limited by at all. The stories I'm going to tell you are sort of like elephant in the state things where you're like, oh, I couldn't possibly do that. Why not? Why can't you do that? Before I go into like kind of the famous stories of people you know doing this, I'll tell you the guy who I was having breakfast with that told me a story like this, that got me thinking, got me paying attention to these.

• 2:52Shaan Puri?

  So I was getting breakfast recently with this guy, Martin, who will come on the podcast, Martin Basiri. Now, Martin was, he was like the one that got away for me. The very first angel investment I ever wanted to do. 10 plus years ago, I started making like a little bit of money. I think I was making like, I don't know, 160 grand a year, not even that much money, not enough money to be, I would say, an angel investor, but I wanted to be. I was sitting in San Francisco and I thought, that would be the thing to do. I should start angel investing. And I had this kid, who was like this 13 year old kid, who was using one of our products. And he always used to hang out in the tech rooms and hang out on tech things. He emailed me and he said, hey, I'll be your scout. So here I was, this guy who had never made an angel investment, and now I got a scout.

• 3:34Shaan Puri?

  And he said, I'm going to send you three companies a week and you know, you don't have to invest in any of them, but it'll just be great practice for me. If you just give me feedback on those, I'd love to learn.

• 3:41Sam Parr?

  What age are you at this time?

• 3:44Shaan Puri?

  I'm probably 24, 25, maybe. Yeah.

• 3:47Sam Parr?

  All right.

• 3:47Shaan Puri?

  He sends me this email with the first, first company and he goes, this guy Martin Basiri, he's in Canada where I live. And already I'm like, I'm not trying to invest in a Canadian company. I want to invest in Silicon Valley companies. He's like, what he's doing is really cool. He's got this company called ApplyBoard. And what ApplyBoard was doing is very simple. They were letting international students who, you know, if you've ever lived internationally, the dream of most international students is to come to school in the United States.

• 4:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Shaan Puri?

  To go to university here. But imagine just being like a kid in Malaysia with Malaysian parents and it's like, great. Why don't you apply to, um, whatever, UC Davis? And they're like, what is UC Davis? Where is that school? How do I apply? How do I fill out this form? Like, it's very like, there's a huge gap between where you are and where you're trying to go. And you need a bridge and ApplyBoard became that bridge. They basically made it very easy for foreign students to apply to US universities. And what they did, they realized it was very smart, was that US universities absolutely rip off foreign international students. There's a reason they love international students is because they charge them three times the price to go to school. And this, to the same school, get the same education.

• 4:51Shaan Puri?

  So if you're a state school, you obviously charge less for in-state tuition, out-of-state tuition. And then there's a third tier called international tuition.

• 4:58Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 4:58Shaan Puri?

  Which is three times higher. And so he went to the schools and he got the schools to say, yeah, I'll pay you five grand or 10 grand per student that we admit, like as an affiliate fee, as a bounty. So it's like incredible, but and the international student is dying to go there. So it's not the hardest sell in the world. They just needed a bridge. So I hear this, I'm like, dude, this 13 year old might've actually sent me a good company. And I'm like, okay.

• 5:21Sam Parr?

  The guy was 13?

• 5:23Shaan Puri?

  The scout was 13.

• 5:25Sam Parr?

  Wow. Okay.

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  And so he, I'm like, dude, I think I'm going to do this deal. And so he, he comes out, I meet him in San Francisco and I agree on the spot, I'm going to invest 25 grand into this company. And I said it very confidently to him.

• 5:38Sam Parr?

  Which is a huge amount of money, by the way. Your annual savings in San Francisco on $170,000 was $20,000.

• 5:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I was basically putting all of my like post-tax disposable income into this one random Canadian startup. Well, guess what? A day later, your boys got cold feet. I'm like, oh man, that was a lot. I shouldn't have said that. I felt stupid coming down. I was like, do I go back to him and say five grand, 10 grand? That felt stupid. And you know what I did? I didn't back out, but I just didn't say anything. And like, I didn't follow up and he didn't really follow up and some time went by and then I got unavailable. And anyways, I missed out on this deal. ApplyBoard today, I think it does over like a billion dollars a year in revenue or something crazy. It's like a multi-billion dollar company. It's insane. I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it's a multi-billion dollar company. So huge miss for me on that, that's for the very first possible angel investment.

• 6:28Sam Parr?

  What was his valuation back then?

• 6:31Shaan Puri?

  Oh dude, it must've been like, I don't know, $10 million, something. Yeah, five, six. I would have been the first investor in it.

• 6:38Shaan Puri?

  First Silicon Valley investor in it. Yeah, there was, it would have been amazing. So last week, I'm having breakfast with him and I've now invested in his new company, Passage, which is doing some amazing things. But I'm saying like, dude, how's it, I was like, how is it, like, how do you operate? I was like, tell me like, we're having breakfast right now, you're going to go to the office, what are you doing? And he was, he was like, I work pretty hard. And he's like, I was like, okay, what does that mean? And so he's telling me his work schedule, the guy basically is like, I drop off my kids, you know, 8:00 AM. I'm in the office at 8:30 and I'm there from 8:30 to, you know, midnight, every night. And I'm like, midnight? Jesus Christ. I was like, are you the only one there? He goes, I used to be, but not anymore. I was like, well, what do you, what do you mean? Like, how'd you get people to start staying so late to work like extra like that?

• 7:23Shaan Puri?

  Like, what'd you do to inspire them, motivate them? He goes, option drop. I said, what? And he's like, option drop. I said, what's an option drop? He goes, at any time in my company, if anybody does something awesome, I just say, option drop. 50,000 options. I just give them share options of the company on the spot. Like if somebody has a great idea, they go above and beyond for a customer, they solve a problem in the meeting, right there, option drop.

• 7:51Sam Parr?

  It's like Dana White giving out a bonus.

• 7:53Shaan Puri?

  What I'll, he's like, it's a bonus, but stock in the company on the fly. And he goes, and then at night, he goes, if I'm there 10:00 PM and if there's like, let's say 12 people there, I'll just say, everybody here, option drop, 20,000 options, all of you. He's like, I don't do it every night, but I'll do it once every, you know, 50 days. And guess what? It got people to start doing the things that I cared about. They know if I solve a big problem, if I unlock some new growth, if I solve a customer's problem, if I'm working really hard, that's how I get more options, option drop. And I was, and so I'm sitting there and I'm like laughing. So I'm laughing at him first because I'm like, that's just hilarious, just the phrase and the way he said it, I just was cracking me up. And I was like, well, of course, of course that would work.

• 8:33Shaan Puri?

  Of course that would reinforce behaviors rather than saying, well, I put our company values on the wall once, six years ago. I sure hope they're doing it. You know what I mean? Like obviously a in the moment incentive, positive reinforcement for a behavior. The more specific, the more concrete and the more immediate a reward, the more of that behavior you're going to get. That's kind of basic behavioral science. So I was like, okay, I guess that does work. And I was like, is that legal? Could you, I was like, I don't know, I just can't feel like you can't just throw around options like that. He's like, why not?

• 9:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you could.

• 9:05Shaan Puri?

  He's like, I just sent a message to my assistant, option drop, these people, this amount. And then it gets papered, that's it.

• 9:11Sam Parr?

  Well, and it's an option, meaning they still have to buy it, right? So it's not like it's free money.

• 9:15Shaan Puri?

  Um, yeah, like this has a strike price. Yeah. So you can, you can exercise the option if you so choose. But there's that exercise window, you don't have to buy it right away. You can, you know, you can wait if you want. So, okay, option drop was the first one of, I was like, oh, obviously a way to incentivize the types of behaviors that you want right there on the spot, using your company's share options. Can I give you the next one?

• 9:37Sam Parr?

  Keep going. This is exciting.

• 9:38Shaan Puri?

  Any, any, you want to rate these? Maybe give me a, you know, give me a, you have a very simple, let's do Gladiator. Thumbs down, lukewarm, thumbs up or double thumbs up? That's your options.

• 9:48Sam Parr?

  Um, not a double thumbs up. So just one, one thumb up.

• 9:52Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 9:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's, that's very effective, good, not that like extreme.

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  Do you do it?

• 10:01Sam Parr?

  I don't do options, but because yeah, like I just give money.

• 10:04Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Do you do that on the spot?

• 10:06Sam Parr?

  No. But I'm also not the CEO and I'm also not extreme. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not playing that game.

• 10:13Shaan Puri?

  What, the game of trying to win? What do you mean? Of course you are.

• 10:15Sam Parr?

  Not, not at the price of being there at midnight. No, I'm more of a like.

• 10:19Shaan Puri?

  It doesn't have to be midnight, right? Like that's one, you just decide of the things I care about, do I on the fly reward the behaviors I want?

• 10:28Sam Parr?

  We do it via having a gong in the office and when someone does something awesome, we smack a gong. So.

• 10:34Shaan Puri?

  Auditorium reinforcement.

• 10:35Sam Parr?

  Well, well, it's just like, because everyone stares at it and you're like, we're going to like celebrate what is happening right now. But no, I don't give out money.

• 10:42Shaan Puri?

  Okay, here's the next one.

• 10:43Sam Parr?

  Hey everyone, really quick, if you're enjoying this episode on CEO stuff, so delegating, having hard conversations with your team, hiring, then I've got something for you. So the team at HubSpot, they actually went and put together a bunch of best practices that Sean and I use in our own companies. And they put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand. And so if you want to just save yourself 10 years of headache and heartache, then you should check it out. I wish we had this a long time ago, would have helped me a lot. But there should be a QR code on your screen that you can scan or a link in the description. So check it out. It's totally free and totally awesome.

• 11:18Shaan Puri?

  OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, they are trying to fight friction. So in every company, there's just a whole bunch of bullshit, especially as you grow. And when you're like them, you grow very fast. There's always just things that are just drag and bureaucratic drag in the company. Policies, procedures, you know, potholes, things that just start to trip you up as you're working in the company, just trying to do good work. So they created what they call the friction removal service. It's sort of like a Doge idea inside the company, but it's actually very simple, which is there's an email inbox called [email protected]. And you could just email friction with anything that's causing, that's causing you to not get your job done. So like, is there something slowing you down? Is there something that's missing? Is there something that's a problem?

• 12:02Shaan Puri?

  So anything that's there and there's a person assigned to the company whose job is to triage everything that comes in there. And if there's something that seems like, oh, that's actually a pretty like legitimate source of friction, we should get, we should eliminate that. It's going to help our people move faster. And then they go and they move, they, they remove that friction. And it creates a culture of saying like, look, we are going to actively fight the bloat that comes in companies that grow really big and grow really fast by having a janitorial crew for a bureaucracy. I was like, oh, I kind of love that idea. So friction.

• 12:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's brilliant.

• 12:34Shaan Puri?

  Give me a score.

• 12:36Sam Parr?

  Two, just two. Am I allowed to do two?

• 12:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, double thumbs up.

• 12:39Sam Parr?

  All right. Well, Caesar would never do that, but that's okay.

• 12:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's, it's sort of, it's sort of giving like Chuck E. Cheese.

• 12:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Sam Parr?

  No, two, because that is like less heroic and more systematic. Yeah, I'm on toward them board with that.

• 12:58Shaan Puri?

  All right. Next one is one bit communication. So do you remember this app Yo from back in the day?

• 13:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, hilarious. All the rage when you and I were 26 years old.

• 13:08Shaan Puri?

  So people, you don't, you'll only know if you know, which is back in the day in San Francisco, this app became the rage for like, I want to say 30 days.

• 13:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah. If there was like a one hit wonder, like song list for Silicon Valley, that would be Chumbawamba. I get knocked down by Chumbawamba and then Yo are both on that list.

• 13:26Shaan Puri?

  Describe what Yo did.

• 13:28Sam Parr?

  I think it was just an app where your friends downloaded and you clicked one button and it said Yo to the other person. I think that's it.

• 13:34Shaan Puri?

  And then if they click the button, it would say?

• 13:36Sam Parr?

  Yo.

• 13:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, right back. All you could say is Yo to each other. And so it seemed like the stupidest thing in the world. It was going viral for being almost so silly. And then Andreessen Horowitz wrote a big check into them. And we were like, what? This, you know, one of the smartest investors invested in Yo? Are you kidding me? It was like straight out of the TV show Silicon Valley. In fact, I think they, they mocked this by, with the bro app in the, in the show, whereas you said bro to each other. But I was like, why? And Marc Andreessen wrote this blog post called one bit communication. And he talked about how like, um, there are many forms of communication, right? You can write letters, you can write text messages, which have a hundred, whatever, 40 or 160 character limit. We had beepers back in the day and a beeper was just a way to get your attention and

• 14:21Shaan Puri?

  you kind of had to know if I'm beeping you with this code, that what that code means. And he goes, the smallest form of communication would be a one bit communication, just a single bit back and forth, Yo. But Yo can mean a lot. And he wrote this like, very like, this like thesis on Yo. And I just remember reading it and being like, honestly, kind of have convinced about this. You know, like a smart guy could really sell you anything. And he did, he sold me that. Well, I've learned that there's a couple CEOs who use one bit communication. So here's the first one, Siemens. The Siemens CEO came out and he said, yeah, I have a very specific management system. My management system is this, you email me anything you want to talk to me about and I will respond with okay or no. That's it. I'm just going to say okay or no to your email.

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  And if it requires more than that, then, um, you're going to come talk to me. And when do you come talk to me? We don't have weekly recurring like calendar meetings. We don't have like scheduling. If you need me, you'd come talk to me right now. And that's it. That's how I unblock everybody in the company and I will not be the bottleneck. I'm simply going to give you permission, rejection, or if there needs to be more detail, you'll find out that you need to come talk to me right now and we'll, we'll discuss more and then you'll get the okay or no, after more detail has been revealed.

• 15:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this guy's having like a moment right now. I think I saw a few articles about him. What happened with him?

• 15:36Shaan Puri?

  Well, he's, he's like a theoretical physics, uh, background CEO, but he's a CEO. And so they always kind of, if you come from a non-traditional background.

• 15:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're quirky and cool.

• 15:45Shaan Puri?

  And he goes, I love this quote. He goes, they go, so you don't have any recurring meetings with your direct reports? Like to, to sit and just catch up and discuss? And he goes, I don't entertain people and they don't need to entertain me. Which is, if you think about like, if you've ever been in a company, a lot of like the meetings you have are really theater, right? It's, it's progress theater. Like I would like to put on a little play for you of how good I'm doing. And then you, you sit in the back and you, you give me a little, you know, theater clap back to me and I feel good. And then I go on my way and we both just kind of wasted an hour of each other's time. It's not, the work isn't getting done there. That's just basically like, you don't trust me enough to just do the thing and I don't trust you enough to know that I can just show you the work and that's, that's enough for you to understand my, my value. So we'll, we'll tap dance for each other.

• 16:30Sam Parr?

  Is he German?

• 16:31Shaan Puri?

  It's a very German behavior.

• 16:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's German. I had to look him up because I, I think Siemens is a German company. This guy's great. Is this going to be like the new snowflake CEO?

• 16:43Shaan Puri?

  Maybe, maybe. Early signs. My scouts, my scouts are paying attention to this.

• 16:49Sam Parr?

  We have to get on this train early, uh, too.

• 16:53Shaan Puri?

  All right. Related, the Jeff B escalation. So this is Bezos. So Bezos famously would read any customer email, you know, his, his email was out there. So customers could email him and he would just be like a router. He would route the email to the team if there was a problem and it would only have one bit in it, one bit communication, just a question mark, which has got to be like the most annoying thing that any CEO could do. But he trained the team that the question mark has a very specific meaning. And the, if he sends you the question mark, it means, is this true? Why is this happening? And what are we going to do about it? All encoded into a one question mark thing, allowing him to actually like triage his email way faster than having to like take each thing, find a good time to bring it up. When can I bring this up with you?

• 17:37Shaan Puri?

  You know, then I delay and then I bring it up and then we're going to have to have this long conversation, just one question mark. And that's what he would do. And his take was this, he would say at the beginning, a lot of the teams would say, no, no, that's just, you know, that's just one loud, angry customer or something like that. Look, the data shows that we're 98% you know, success rate. And his take was, look, we're a very data driven company, but these customer anecdotes matter and they matter a lot. And I want you to investigate these because I'm not saying, when I send you this customer email, I'm not saying drop what you're doing and go satisfy Joanne in Wichita, this prime customer, you know, you don't need to solve her problem. What I'm saying is Amazon is a machine. The machine might be broken and this anecdote is a little bit of a signal, it's a squeak

• 18:22Shaan Puri?

  in the machine that I'd like you to investigate to see why this would happen. Cause that's not how the machine is designed to work.

• 18:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I tend to think those stories are more important than, than traditional data.

• 18:33Shaan Puri?

  And what he said was, he goes, look, you're not wrong that maybe 98% is happening the way you want. What I'm telling you is that the anecdotes typically show you that your metric is incomplete, that it's not capturing some part of the customer's experience that actually matters. And both the metric is right and the customer is right. The metric is just incomplete because it's not capturing this part of the customer's experience. I was like, oh, I kind of like that. That's a very, that would have been a very satisfying explanation for what would have otherwise been an absolutely infuriating thing of just getting this one question mark from your CEO forwarding a random customer complaint to you as the head of whatever, some part of the business.

• 19:08Sam Parr?

  And I think a question mark from you or I would come off incredibly douchey. There's something about Jeff that seems a little bit more polite and respectful. And so I don't take it as a douchey thing. Originally when I heard question mark, I was like, that's, that's pretty disrespectful, but I don't view him as a disrespectful guy. When I, if you see me send a question mark, assume it's disrespect.

• 19:27Shaan Puri?

  It is disrespect.

• 19:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Shaan Puri?

  It's because they don't have a backhand slap emoji.

• 19:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah, I can punch you through a screen.

• 19:38Shaan Puri?

  Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

• 20:05Sam Parr?

  All right. What's the next one?

• 20:06Shaan Puri?

  All right. Next one comes from Peter Thiel. Okay. So Peter Thiel famously, when he was the CEO of PayPal, he had this thing that I really loved, which he goes, we are going to be a single tasking company. You are not going to be a multitasker, which is great because PayPal was full of some of the biggest brains in the world, right? Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, the creators of YouTube, the creators of Yelp, the creator, obviously like a bunch of big brains in that room. You would think if anybody could multitask, it'd be those people. Well, no, Peter's take was this, everybody has one big problem that you're trying to solve at any given time. Like you might be fighting fraud from the Ukraine right now, and you might be trying to optimize virality of the PayPal button on eBay. And this other guy might be trying to, you know, um, lower our, you know, processing

• 20:51Shaan Puri?

  fees with the banks, right? So everybody's assigned one problem and his thing was this, they go, well, you know, how do you get people to actually do that? Right? Cause it sounds good in theory, right? Focus is always a word everybody nods and agrees on, but we were all pretty bad at focus. So how did you get your teams to actually do it? And Peter Thiel's answer was, oh, if, if they tried to talk to me about anything besides their problem, I would just simply walk out of the room. And the non-verbal communication was pretty clear how I felt.

• 21:22Shaan Puri?

  And people were like, did he really do that? And Keith, you know, Keith, your boy was like, yeah, he would literally do that. He would, if you tried to bring up anything else beside your problem, he would just turn around and he would just walk away. And then you got the signal of how important that was. And if you wanted to be valued by the CEO, you would stay on task of your problem.

• 21:40Sam Parr?

  He would just do like the autistic clop, just your feet just clopping away at the door.

• 21:48Shaan Puri?

  Did you think he was wearing shoes? No chance that he was wearing shoes in that office. So.

• 21:52Sam Parr?

  Dude, he's a loafer guy because he's the type of guy where you just hear it clomping around. I can tell.

• 21:57Shaan Puri?

  That's ridiculous. Focus is convex. Unfortunately, I'm too stupid to know exactly what that means, but it sounds very provocative. And I've used it three times since. The good news is nobody else I work with knows what it means either.

• 22:12Sam Parr?

  I don't know what this has to do with focus. That's what convex looks like.

• 22:15Shaan Puri?

  He explained it a little bit. He goes, if you are 80% focused on a task, that will only be half as good as if you were 90%. Meaning the jump from 80% focus to 90% focus will double your impact. And so you really want this, the last mile of focus, the last level of ruthlessness about your focus will, will double, you know, you'll get one or two more doubles in the output, which kind of makes sense. Like if you look at any field, right? If you're the 80th percentile swimmer, nobody knows your name and you work at a tire company. If you're the 90th percent swimmer, you know, people in your county might know your name, but you're still, you manage the tire company. If you're the 99th percentile swimmer, you might, you know, be able to swim professionally.

• 22:59Shaan Puri?

  But if you're the 99.99999, right? Like the final, it's that last leg, you're Michael Phelps and you know, you get all the gold medals and the millions of dollars and so on. And it's basically like your use of focus, that the last mile of it, the last level of obsession is what gets you like a disproportionate amount of the rewards.

• 23:16Sam Parr?

  So what's point number, um, three, or are we on four on Sean's hardcore?

• 23:25Sam Parr?

  If this was a VHS tape, it'd be labeled Sean hardcore part two.

• 23:30Shaan Puri?

  People would not be getting what they thought they were getting.

• 23:34Shaan Puri?

  Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks.

• 23:38Sam Parr?

  CEO.

• 23:43Shaan Puri?

  But the O and CEO. All right, here's what we got. What's left? I did one, two, three, four, five. I got five, I got three left. All right. Jack Welch, CEO of GE, when he ran, when you run a big company, it's very easy for, you know, all your children are sort of not equal. They're not loved equally, all the different business divisions. And GE was in very, a bunch of different business divisions. And he had two simple rules when he was running GE. One was every division, you need to be number one or number two in your market. Otherwise you have one year to fix it, sell it or close it. That's it. We will trim the business divisions unless you can be number one or number two, which is an incredible forcing function because it's a sort of Darwinian pressure to survive.

• 24:25Shaan Puri?

  And the other Darwinian pressure he applied was every year, Jack Welch would fire the bottom 10% performers in the company. Every year. And so a continuous culling of the herd, which sounds, I mean, I'm sure people interpret that different ways. Some people will think he's an asshole for that. When I first heard it, I was like, oh, that's, that doesn't sound that hardcore. But then you go try to do it. Go try to do that every year. It is incredibly difficult, or go look at your own track record. How much low performance have you tolerated? Because you don't fire people until push really comes to shove.

• 24:59Sam Parr?

  I think Jack Welch is, I think he's controversial. We actually should do a deep dive one day on him because people say that he was a horrible CEO, because if you look at like GE, it was kind of became this like amalgamation of like a bunch of like nonsense and it like owned a bunch of stuff that ended up not working out. But I don't know enough about Jack Welch to know if that was his doing or what happened. But, but I know that he was well loved as a leader, but at the same time I hear smart people say the exact opposite about firing, like Jensen from Nvidia. He was like, he was like, I'm going to smother you in greatness. I'm not going to fire you. Like, it's so funny how great people, assuming they both are great, have different opinions on firing as, I mean, as well as everything else.

• 25:38Sam Parr?

  Like, like total opposite, right?

• 25:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And you will find that for, for every single one of these, you will find people who are very successful doing the polar opposite, which is not meant to say that this is the way to be great. It's just meant to say, damn, I thought these stories were pretty hardcore, huh? That's really kind of all we're saying and that there are, it kind of pushes the boundaries of your thinking of what is acceptable, tolerable and potentially effective. You know, I think firing your low performers is a pretty, I would say, logical thing to do. Meaning.

• 26:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Shaan Puri?

  I could see why that works. I could definitely see why that works and I'm, I'm in support of that one. But yeah, I think others, you know, like, like I think Jensen, when he made that point, he was like, yeah, I don't fire them, but I turn up the intensity so much that you either become great or quit. Right? Which is more of a sink or swim version of like, yeah, they quit instead of getting fired, but either way you weed out the low performers one way or another. So last two, um, all right, I must give this last one. I'll tell you, I don't even really like it. The Ford CEO, this guy comes in, this guy Alan becomes the Ford CEO. They had just lost 17 billion the last year. And he came in and they did like the business review where they go through all the different business like projects and how they're on track or off track.

• 26:57Shaan Puri?

  And it was like color coded, like green is on track, yellow is at risk and red is off track and everything was green. And he's like, guys, we lost 17 billion the last year. How's everything green? And he realized they had like a culture where, you know, people were sort of afraid to admit failure. And so he's like, can't be afraid. You have to be honest. And so the next week they were all green again, except for one was red. And he stood up and started clapping and changed the, uh, the culture around failure. And I was like, it sounds a little bit like a Disney movie to me.

• 27:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that sounds like some core running shit.

• 27:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I think we're gonna, I think we're gonna thumbs down Alan together here.

• 27:34Shaan Puri?

  Nice try, Alan. Consider me uninspired.

• 27:39Shaan Puri?

  Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank.

• 28:24Shaan Puri?

  Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Callum NA, members FDIC. All right, the last one comes from Jimmy, AKA Mr. Beast, which was, I think you were there when he described his cloning strategy, which we were like, so dude, how do you train your employees? They're all really young. Seems like they're all new. You're growing so fast. Like, do you have like, I'm just curious, like you don't, you know, you never went to this college or business school or anything like that? Like, what do you do for your like kind of management? And he's like, oh, I just do cloning. And we're like, that sounds illegal. What does that mean? And he's like, well, if I hire you in one of like kind of the key roles, you just follow me everywhere. Like you literally shadow me every single place I go. And I think the guy who initially was doing it was like sleeping at the same house that he was in.

• 29:08Shaan Puri?

  Like, it was like that, that hardcore, like from morning to night. Like the guy, I remember one guy he hired, he was also Jimmy's alarm clock. Like he would go wake him up and from the moment Jimmy woke up, they were together till the moment Jimmy signed off to go to sleep. And he would do that for six months. And he's like, by the end of the six months, you know exactly how I think, because you've been with me everywhere. You know, you saw every decision I made. So essentially you're like a proxy for me. Like I can now be in two places at once because you know exactly what would Jimmy do in this situation? And yeah, cloning works great. And I remember there was like a room full of CEOs, like multi-billion dollar CEOs, as he was telling us this, who were like, I think that's awesome and illegal.

• 29:48Shaan Puri?

  People don't like get weekends? He's like, no, you come here to, you come here to win. I don't know if he still does it, but in the early days of his thing, I thought that was pretty, pretty awesome.

• 29:56Sam Parr?

  How is that going? Like it's, it's interesting to hear about extreme people and how it ends up, um, like if they, if they soften it when they have kids and stuff, it appears as though Elon is not a guy who has softened at all, as the company has gotten bigger and has, he has had more kids. I wonder if that's happened with Jimmy and what's it called? Beast Enterprise or I don't know what it's called. Industries. Industries.

• 30:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think both, right? I think he matured, right? When we met him, he was probably only like 25 or 24 years old or something like that, right? So like, you know.

• 30:26Sam Parr?

  He matured like hugely from year over year.

• 30:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're going to mature and his rate of learning, like he's, you know, pretty obsessive about learning from smart people. And so he is, the slope of his line is pretty crazy, right? So I'm sure a lot has changed. At the same time, if something's working and that's your edge, you gotta be pretty careful. You don't just dull out all your edges. And so, yeah, he does have a CEO now of Beast Industries. I'm sure they have more people and they're less like kind of business malpractice as, you know, you do in the early days when you're kind of rough and tumble and figure things out. But yeah, dude, I think they still go pretty hard and try to win. And I think that, you know, I think a lot of the fundamentals are probably still there of the stuff that works, right? Like, like anything, the stuff that's working tends to survive and the stuff that's ineffective tends to get pruned out over time.

• 31:15Sam Parr?

  I am not, compared to these guys, I've, we're not even in the same ballpark in terms of being like hardcore. I don't know where you are, but I know that when I hear this, I'm like, ah, it sounds like a lot of work. I'm not into that. I don't, I don't want the same outcomes. And I had a story for you today that is the exact opposite of hardcore. I didn't mean for this story to be a matter of hardcore or not, more so a matter of there's money everywhere.

• 31:41Shaan Puri?

  Can I give you an anecdote that like supports what you're saying about the, the other side of the, the coin here? David Perel, friend of the pod, had Kevin Kelly on the podcast and Kevin Kelly is this guy who I really like and admire. He had a really eclectic career. He like started Wired magazine and he wrote a thousand true fans, which really shaped kind of my thinking.

• 32:01Sam Parr?

  Is he like a, was he, I know he's like a thinker and a writer, but was he a successful business person too?

• 32:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think he's done well, like he's, I think he's done, done very well compared to normal standards, but like, you know, not, not like some crazy whatever billionaire type, but I don't think that was ever his goal. But he's just done a bunch of really interesting projects and his projects were very successful. He asked him a great question about this. He, he asked him something like, like what's been the cost of being Kevin Kelly? Like what have you given up to be Kevin Kelly, the way you, the way you have? And Kevin's like, you know, that's a great question. To have this life I have, I had to give up on greatness. And he goes, what do you mean? And he goes, well, I think the cost of greatness is some level of being extreme. And I just never wanted to be extreme. I didn't want the costs of extreme.

• 32:50Shaan Puri?

  And so he's like, I surrendered to the path of I'm not going to be as great as I possibly could be. Had I been obsessively focused on one thing, had I been more extreme, had I given up certain parts of my personal life? And he goes, I'll give you, I'll give you a very specific definition of greatness. And he goes, let's just, for lack of a better word, because I could say greatness and it means two different things in our heads. He goes, let's say greatness is being remembered by people other than your family, more than one generation from now. And he goes, I don't think I will be remembered for anything more than one or two generations from now, from anyone outside of my own family. And he goes, to be, to be able to be, he goes, like a gadfly, where I just kind of float from thing to thing and I,

• 33:34Shaan Puri?

  I get to dabble and explore and like, kind of see different projects and bring them to life in little ways, but I don't own any of them. Not any of them became the biggest thing in the world. To be the gadfly, I had to surrender and, and give up on the path of greatness. And I'm, I'm perfectly happy with that. And I thought it was just a very, I never really heard anyone say it that way. Like, I kind of respected his thinking on two levels. One, I don't think people ever define the words, what they mean. I just liked that he started by being like, I can't give you this answer if I don't define what this word means to me.

• 34:07Sam Parr?

  Was it grandchildren or great grandchildren?

• 34:10Shaan Puri?

  So let's just say grandchildren. Yeah.

• 34:12Sam Parr?

  Okay. That's actually interesting. I've always, I've had a similar definition of greatness, but it's always been way longer, where it's been like 120 or 150 years, which I guess would be a couple more, add a few more generations to that. But that's actually an interesting way to define it.

• 34:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Like you could, I mean, I don't know who you would consider to be great, but like whether it's, you know, Steve Jobs on the business side, right? Like you could go into like, you know, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, like people who did great in terms of their civic actions, or people like Houdini, people who are great artists and great creators that way, right? Like there's all these kind of people who are great. If you look at them, very few of them live very chill, balanced lifestyles, right?

• 34:55Sam Parr?

  Like there ain't normal people on the top of, uh, uh, Mount Everest. Like you're not gonna find well-balanced people. I actually think about that all the time because I love history and I'll see street names and it's clearly named after someone. And I'll go and research who that person is. Like for example, Fort Greene is named after Nathaniel Greene. Fort Greene's a neighborhood in Brooklyn and it's a, of it's a park. And it's named after Nathaniel Greene, who was a general in the American Revolution. And he's, he was a big shot in the American Revolution, one of the key generals. And it's like, does remembered mean his name is named after a park in which no one even knows that Fort Greene was Nathaniel Greene?

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  And I'm like, this guy was one of the key top 20 people in the American Revolution, which was one of the most consequential, consequential revolutions of all time. And I don't even know him. Um, and, and when you think about it, over the last 500 to a thousand years, there, of the billions and billions and billions in people who have ever existed, the ones who do, who we remember, more often than not, it has nothing to do with money. For example, if you and I do the best that we will ever do when it comes to business, the likelihood that we will be within like, maybe there's a world where we'll, we'll crack the top 5,000 or top 10,000 living Americans in terms of wealth. Maybe. That would be obviously point 000001% of like that, right?

• 36:18Sam Parr?

  And yet even that is not going to get you remembered for 500 years. You can't name who the 80th richest person was in the 19, in the 1930s.

• 36:26Shaan Puri?

  50 years.

• 36:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. You can't. So that's like, so therefore.

• 36:30Shaan Puri?

  Who's that person today? You don't know now.

• 36:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you don't know. And so, and then you're like, okay, so I won't know that. Okay. So money can't really be it. And then it's like, okay, what about business? It's like, well, there's some companies that have lasted that long, but like, it's basically, when you really think about it, it's like humanitarians, a handful of amazing like leaders or politicians, which would also include like the Mother Teresa's of the world, like someone who did something really special. And then it's like inventors, like it's like.

• 37:00Shaan Puri?

  Someone who discovered or invented something. Yeah.

• 37:02Sam Parr?

  Or an artist, occasionally, like occasionally an artist. And I'm like, so when I think about that, I'm like, well, the odds, if I defined greatness as me being remembered, like let's say 150 or 200 years, I'm like, A, I'm doing it wrong and B, the eyes are so low. And then I was like, therefore, maybe I just shouldn't care. Like I, like I felt like years working through this.

• 37:22Shaan Puri?

  Can I tell you where I landed with that same idea? Being remembered or legacy types of never really appealed. I think I was pretty quick to shed that one. In fact, there's a great, Hormozzi once said something that I really loved. He was like, you know, the queen died six months ago? And guess what? She was the queen. And I bet you haven't thought about her since she died. I was like, oh, it's so true. That's the queen, you know, uh, that's the queen of England after a hundred years, you know, dying. And so I never really cared about the legacy stuff so much, but I wanted to achieve greatness. And when I thought about achieving greatness, it was some version of success or, you know, building something that mattered in the world or, you know, like the, the number one of something, being the number one of something.

• 38:04Shaan Puri?

  And what I've realized is that achieving greatness was sort of like, not, not for me. It would be a fool's errand for me. It's not what I'm wired to do. It's not what I would enjoy to do. It's, it comes at a cost that I would not be willing to pay, once I knew the cost. But there's a big difference between achieving something great and being great. I know a lot of people who are great. Our buddy Ramon is great. He's a great friend. He's a great dad. He's a great guy. And he's a great hang. And you know what I mean? He, he is good at being great. You'd mentioned Ben Wilson. Ben Wilson right now is being great in handling such a difficult circumstance with absolute, you know, class and courage. And there's this being great, and my trainer, he's a guy, he's just great. He's, he is a great guy. He's a great uncle to my kids.

• 38:48Shaan Puri?

  He's a great, um, you know, great trainer. He cares about people. You know, he's so fun to be around. He's, he's always in a great mood. He's, that's called being great. And so I realized like, being great, the active tense, the day-to-day thing, that's the thing to chase. Cause you could do it right now. And in the moment, how you're showing up, you could be great right now. And you could also fall out of being great if you lose track of that. And you should get right back on the horse, try to be great again. And I think that was the, where I landed. I was like, okay, I think that resonates for me. I feel, I feel comfortable with that. And it's a, it's a far more holistic sense. It's, you could be great when you're exercising and you're in the last three reps of the set and you have to decide if you're gonna put the reps, if you put the weight down, or if you're gonna push yourself and try to really like, see what you're made of.

• 39:32Shaan Puri?

  That's a moment of being great. You know, you could just be courteous and kind to somebody. That's a moment of being great. You know, like, sometimes I'm with, I'm at the park and there's other kids and they're kind of like, you know, talking to me and I'm kind of just like, I don't know why this four-year-old is talking to me. And sometimes I brush him off and I just want to be on my phone. I don't really want to talk to this stranger kid about like, you know, this caterpillar that he found. And sometimes I indulge them and I'm like, no, I, I, you know, I'll say something to them that's plays back into them. Cause that's how I would want someone to treat my kid. It's a moment where I get to choose if I'm going to be great or if I'm not going to be great. And I'm not always, I'm not always the best at that, but increasing that hit rate is the goal. And that's one I can kind of get behind.

• 40:09Sam Parr?

  What's the phrase again? Say this again. I think this is good. Uh, instead of building something great, be great?

• 40:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Don't try to achieve greatness. Like just be great right now. Like just being great.

• 40:19Sam Parr?

  Did you see the guy who went viral, um, this week on Twitter where he was like saying like, someone was talking about like hard work and he was like, I think you should work hard, but, but there's a, there's this age between like three years old and 13-year-old where your kids don't dislike you yet and they're willing to spend time with you, you know, past 13, that doesn't happen. And they're out of diapers, so they're a little bit easier and they start having opinions and they can think. And for a lot of men who are ambitious people, what they notice is that their ambition goes away or dials down during this period because they love being around their kids. And it doesn't happen to everyone, but a lot of men do. And what I've noticed is that the people who are fearful of this, I just want to let you know that it tends to come back.

• 41:01Sam Parr?

  Ambition does come back. And the reason why this went viral is because I'm experiencing this and I think maybe you are and a lot of our, um, our folks listening are, but like, there is this moment where you start like experiencing these things with your kids when they start having opinions and they still like hanging out with you and you're like, I don't know if I care about the same things like ambition or these other things where I dedicated my life to them. I guess I'm not willing to pay that price. And frankly, I find it to be kind of a pain in the ass because you're like, life was so much simpler. Just climb the ladder, make money. You know, it's like, F chicks who get money. Like, like it's so much simpler that way. And then you have kids and you're like, shit, everything I thought to be true, it's not true right now.

• 41:43Sam Parr?

  And the, the poster was like, but it becomes true again later on. Like it does come back. But I remember reading that last weekend and it really hits, hit with me because when you're talking about these like guys who are hardcore, I'm like, I don't, I'm not staying till midnight right now.

• 41:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, no.

• 42:03Shaan Puri?

  My chair has lumbar support. I don't think I'm gonna be here till midnight.

• 42:08Sam Parr?

  That ain't happening.

• 42:10Shaan Puri?

  No option drops for us.

• 42:14Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I gave him a great idea at the breakfast and he option dropped me. I was like, yes. Immediately like hook, line and sinker. I was like, wow, how do I get that again? That was a really, I like that reward.

• 42:28Sam Parr?

  I was gonna bring up another story, but I'm not going to anymore. I think that was perfect.

• 42:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that'd be a little too hardcore for us too. We're gonna chill out at 55 minutes and not go to the 60.

• 42:40Sam Parr?

  No, I think this has a good bow tie to it. A bow tie, a good, you know, whatever that phrase is about. Rapid presents and rapid shit. It's all done. I don't know. All right. That's it. That's a pod.

• 43:04Shaan Puri?

  All right. Let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.