#226 Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle

What I learned from reading Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle by Paul Johnson. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [0:55] I have always had a soft spot for those who speak out against the conventional wisdom and who are not afraid to speak the truth, even if it puts them in a minority of one. [1:20] 4 traits of heroes: 1. Absolute independence of mind. Think everything through yourself. 2. Act resolutely and consistently. 3. Ignore the media. 4. Act with personal courage at all times regardless of the consequences to yourself. [2:25] Churchill by Paul Johnson [2:47] Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky by Paul Johnson and Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney by Paul Johnson. [3:34] Founders #196 Book link: The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitzby Erik Larson. “It’s slothful not to compress your thoughts.” —Churchill [4:58] They carved out vast empires for themselves and hammered their names into the history of the earth. [5:04] Each was brave, highly intelligent, and almost horrifically self-assured. [6:09] Founders #208 In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World "People are packaged deals. You take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same thing." —Steve Jobs [10:22] Alexander the Great read Homer all of his life and knew the passages by heart. It was to him, a Bible, a guide to heroic morality, a book of etiquette and a true adventure story. The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer. [11:50] Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins [12:15] The most important factor, as always with men of action, was sheer will. [15:56] Caesar appreciated the importance of speed and the terrifying surprises speed made possible. [16:15] Founders #155 Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos “You can drive great people by making the speed of decision making really slow. Why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done? They look around after a while, and they're, like, "Look, I love the mission, but I can't get my job done because our speed of decision making is too slow." [18:33] Caesar was a man of colossal energy and farsighted cunning. He aimed to conquer posterity as well as the world. [19:42] You should avoid an unfamiliar word as a ship avoids a reef. —Julius Caesar [20:55] You train an animal, you teach a person. —Sol Price [23:02] Caesar’s approach to difficulty was all problems are solvable. [24:36] Caesar was a man of exceptional ability over a huge range of activities. Among his qualities: great mental power, energy, steadfastness, a gift for understanding everything under the sun, vitality, and fiery quickness of mind. Few men have had such a combination of boldness shrewdness and wisdom. [26:30] George Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow [27:14] Founders #191 The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness [27:25] George Washington was a vigorous and active man, an early riser about his business all day. And by no means intellectually idle, he accumulated a library of 800 books. [29:57] The best talk on YouTube: Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love [35:08] His (Washington) strategy was clear, intelligent, absolutely consistent, and maintained with an iron will from start to finish. [36:12] All that counts is survival. The rest is just words. [37:18] A lesson from the history of entrepreneurship: Why you start your company matters. Doesn’t have to be complex. A great example: Phil Knight said he started Nike because he believed if everyone got out and ran a few miles every day the world would be a better place. [42:06] Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin [45:23] Words and the ability to weave them into webs which cling to the memory are extremely important in forwarding action. [53:01] Founders #200 Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson: This is part of my anti-brilliance campaign. Very few people can be brilliant. Those who are, rarely do anything worthwhile. You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can't of be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers." — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

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

• 0:00David Senra?

  America prepared the way for the cult of the entrepreneur. In due course, the public applauded the outstanding steelmaker Andrew Carnegie and the oilman John D. Rockefeller. This new kind of hero was controversial, and it is a fact that throughout history, one person's hero has been another's villain, not only in his own day, but later. The heroes of America's emergence as the world's largest industrial power were clearly genuine in one sense, since Carnegie's cheap, high-quality steel benefited everybody. Rockefeller's slashing of the price of kerosene by 90% was a godsend, and Ford's cheap, reliable Model T ended the isolation of the farmer.

• 0:44David Senra?

  But to others, such men were robber barons, or in the words of President Theodore Roosevelt, "malfactors of great wealth." People must agree to differ about heroes. I have always had a soft spot for those who speak out against the conventional wisdom and who are not afraid to speak the truth, even if it puts them in a minority of one. I think we appreciate heroism most if we have a tiny speck of it ourselves, which might be fanned into a flame if the wind of opportunity arose. So how do we recognize the heroes and heroines of today? I would distinguish four principal marks. First, by absolute independence of mind, which springs from the ability to think everything

• 1:28David Senra?

  through for yourself and to treat whatever is the current consensus on any issue with skepticism. Second, having made up your mind independently, to act resolutely and consistently. Third, to ignore or reject everything the media throws at you, provided you remain convinced you are doing right. Finally, to act with personal courage at all times, regardless of the consequences to yourself. All history teaches that there is no substitute for courage. It is the noblest and best of all qualities, and the one indispensable element in heroism in all its different manifestations.

• 2:10David Senra?

  That is an excerpt from the epilogue of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Heroes, from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle, and it was written by Paul Johnson. I wanted to hop on here real quick and do a bonus episode for you because this is the same author. The last episode was on Winston Churchill. Churchill's book was the first book of Paul Johnson's that I've ever read. Wind up doing a little bit of research on him, and I realized he's written biographies on everybody, like Socrates, Mozart, Eisenhower, Churchill. He's written a bunch of history books with a collection of historical figures around different classifications. So he's got one, like this one's heroes, he's got creators, he's got intellectuals. And so

• 2:55David Senra?

  this book has 13 chapters in it. Each chapter has anywhere from like one to three different historical figures. So the ones I'm going to talk to you about today is George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Winston Churchill, and de Gaulle. And I'm going to do Alexander the Great first, but I want to review what he was saying in the epilogue. I want to give you these four traits that he feels the people that he profiled in the book that were separated by time, lived in different countries, yet they all arrived at similar traits. And there's so many notes that happen to myself in this book where it just says, "Great writing, great writing, great writing," because he's just very to the point. I really appreciate that. Ever since I read that book, The Splendour and the Vile, and I love that, that's where I discovered this quote from Churchill, where

• 3:38David Senra?

  he's like, "It's slothful not to compress your thoughts." And I feel that's why I'm going to wind up ordering a bunch of Paul's books, because he compresses his thoughts. He analyzes all, he takes in all this information and then gives us the most valuable parts. So let's go through these four, and I edited them down even more. So they're four bullet points of traits that we can emulate in our own mind. Number one, absolute independence of mind. Think everything through yourself. Treat current consensus with skepticism. Number two, act resolutely and consistently. Number three, ignore the media. Number four, act with personal courage at all times, regardless of the consequences to yourself.

• 4:22David Senra?

  Okay, so I want to skip to Alexander the Great. This might be the best, the best chapter name in the entire book. He puts Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar in this same chapter, and the chapter is called "Earth Shakers." And again, the note I left myself on this page is, this is great writing. It's a celebration of words. That's exactly what Churchill was known to do and de Gaulle. They just loved language. So it says, "With Alexander and Caesar, we come to the two principal actors of antiquity, who operated in the theater of the entire known world and became prototypes of the heroic character for the next thousand years." This next sentence is crazy. Ready? "They carved out vast empires for themselves and hammered their names into the history of the earth.

• 5:05David Senra?

  Each was brave, highly intelligent, and almost horrifically self-assured." So he's talking about conquerors, right? 200 and something, 200-plus biographies into, reading biographies of entrepreneurs. "Each was brave, highly intelligent, and almost horrifically self-assured." The founders that we sit in this podcast have those same traits. "Whose ambitions knew no bounds. They were also cruel, selfish, without scruple, and fundamentally unlovable. But they were admired, inevitably, more perhaps than any other two men of their kind. They were giant-like, almost superhuman in every respect." And that's actually a really important point that he's making in that entire paragraph

• 5:50David Senra?

  is, we are studying the most extreme humans that have ever lived, which means, by definition, their great traits are going to be more extreme than average, but so are their negative traits. And so as I was reading this section, it brought to mind this quote that I discovered a few months ago, maybe a few weeks ago, in the book, "In the Company of Giants." And it was this interview that Steve Jobs is giving in 1997. And he was asked, "What do you think your weaknesses are when it comes to management?" And he says, "I don't know." That's the least interesting part of his answer, though. This is the most interesting part. "People are packaged deals. You take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin."

• 6:32David Senra?

  And that's one of the amazing things that I discovered about Steve Jobs. I read, what, 10 books on him so far for the podcast, something like that. Watched countless interviews with him. Every time I find something new, there's always useful information that he has in his interviews and his talks and his writing that's just useful to future generations of entrepreneurs. Okay, so it says Alexander the Great was the son of a tyrant. His dad was Philip II, king of Macedonia. And now he's talking about his dad. He was a man of formidable achievements. He was highly creative. He built up a formidable professional administration with the capacity to raise money in vast quantities and to stretch its communication almost indefinitely. He also created a permanent professional army based on the infantry phalanx, which was

• 7:17David Senra?

  without equal in its own age. So I'm going to pause there because they're going to talk about how Philip was murdered. I want to recommend an episode of a podcast because I learned a lot about Alexander. And I'm eventually going to read a few biographies on him. But if you search for Hardcore History Addendum, this is not Dan Carlin's main Hardcore History feed, it's a separate feed. It's episode nine, it came out last year, or, excuse me, it came out almost two years ago now. And it's called Glimpses of Olympias. And it's a three and a half hour podcast on Alexander's mother. But in the beginning, and if you've listened to Dan Carlin's podcast, you know this, he has to add context before he gets to the story. In the beginning, he talks a lot about Philip and the early days of Alexander's childhood.

• 8:00David Senra?

  This is where I learned, which I'll get into here in a minute. It blew my mind that Alexander didn't go to school, he had a tutor. Philip had hired Aristotle to tutor his son one-on-one. It just blew my mind. But it was an interesting, it's a fantastic podcast, episode in general. But it's very interesting hearing about this time in history and all the different characters. Philip being the main character in there, Alexander's mom, which we'll get to in a minute. And then, of course, Alexander. So Philip's gonna die. And it just said he's a formidable, he had a formidable man, had formidable achievements, built up this, one of the greatest armies that has ever existed. And that is Alexander's inheritance. And so this is what the author of this book says.

• 8:42David Senra?

  "It was the most magnificent inheritance an aspiring world conqueror could possibly hope for. And he also inherited Philip's ambition. And there was zero limit to their ambition. And once Alexander sets out to conquer, he doesn't stop until he dies. He does die from a very young age, though." It says, "So it says, 'If Alexander's father was a tyrant of genius, his mother Olympia was passionate, ambitious, unscrupulous, and violent.'" And I don't want to ruin it in case you listened to the other podcast, but she also has a violent end to her life. "Alexander had a sinister parentage." More good writing there. "He was well-educated. Philip chose as his son's tutor Aristotle.

• 9:25David Senra?

  Alexander's years under Aristotle formed one of the most intriguing relationships of all antiquity." And so now, this is a description of Aristotle. "His sheer knowledge was encyclopedic. He was a born teacher, and it is hard to imagine an instructor more qualified to prepare a clever, ambitious young prince for world responsibilities." And so now we get an overview of Alexander. Says, "He rose early. His diet was spare. He learned to drink heavily. He did not water his wine, but drank it neat, Macedonian style. He was a superb writer and audacious hunter, especially of lion. He wrestled, but otherwise did no athletics.

• 10:05David Senra?

  He was skilled with the sword and spear, and an expert at all forms of arms drills. His trade," so it talks about his trade, "is violence." This is a crazy statement. "His trade from boyhood. He dressed to be seen." So he's not here to fit in, right? "He read Homer all of his life and knew the passages by heart. It was to him a Bible, a guide to heroic morality, a book of etiquette, and a true adventure story." So they're referencing the Iliad and the Odyssey. And then it goes into his mindset, and we're going to see Alexander the Great has like Kanye West levels of self-belief. And the note I have for myself on this page, because it's going to go over a couple pages.

• 10:48David Senra?

  "The mind is a powerful place, and what you feed it can affect you in a powerful way." So it says, "Alexander believed he was descended from Hercules. This mythical ancestry, which was very real to Alexander, had an important impact on his life, inspiring him, inspiring in him, a spirit of emulation and courage and daring, and a longing to perform comparable marvels. Hercules' horrible death also gave him a certain fatalism, which made the risk of death unimportant to him." And let's assume that statement is true. "It made the risk of death unimportant to him. Imagine what you can achieve if you had no fear." And most people, rightfully so, fear death. If you don't fear death, there's very other things, very few other things that you could actually fear, right? So what could you achieve if you just did not have fear? Now, there's a bunch going on.

• 11:33David Senra?

  I have a bunch of highlights on these pages. So it says, "This is an astounding story, quite unprecedented," they're describing Alexander's life story, okay? "This is an astounding, astonishing story, quite unprecedented, and never again equaled." So like a year or two ago, I bought David Goggins' audiobook, which is called Can't Hurt Me. And he says something that was really interesting. He says, "You want to be uncommon amongst uncommon people." That's exactly what the author is telling us about Alexander. It's, listen, he had an astonishing story, it was unprecedented, and never again equaled. And so it goes into everything he accomplished in his very short life. "Alexander traveled over 20,000 miles, much of it on foot in difficult mountain and desert terrain. How did he do it?

• 12:16David Senra?

  The most important factor, as always with successful statesmen and men of action, was sheer willpower." There is no substitute for will. "He had a pre-natural self-confidence and persistence, the feeling that if, that it was right to do what he planned, and that he could certainly do it." There is no substitute for will. And then he goes even into deeper into the idea of what you put in your mind is very important. It's a very powerful place because it's going to affect you. So then he's like, I'm a god. Alexander began to assume divine honors and to believe that he was the son of a god, possibly Zeus himself rather than Philip.

• 12:56David Senra?

  His self-confidence was continually reinforcing itself, both by success and by imitations of immortality, or immortality, excuse me. I read a quote one time that was fantastic, and I think Alexander would agree with it. And he says, "At the end of the day, you've got to feel some way. So why not feel unbeatable? Why not feel like the best to ever do it?" And so then Paul, what I like about Paul's writing too, is he does like list form. So this is, he identified 10 reasons, 10 important factors in Alexander's success. But there were 10 important practical reasons why Alexander succeeded. First, although he inherited a superior military machine, he continually improved it by intensive training, and above all, by leading it. He always marched with the men. He led from the front.

• 13:41David Senra?

  And that part, of course, I had to double underline. If you could somehow transcribe every single episode of Founders and then search through, how many times has that come up over and over again in these books, over and over again in these life stories? Leading from the front. It appears over and over again. Second, his battle leadership had a record written on his body. He was wounded nine times. Four wounds were superficial, but they left interesting scars. Four were serious and one was nearly fatal. When the men grumbled or threatened mutiny, he told them, "I've been hit by a sword, a lance, dart, arrow, and a catapult missile." He would strip down and show them his scars. Third, if need be, he could change his tactics in mid-encounter.

• 14:23David Senra?

  That again, is something very common in the history of entrepreneurship. The idea of optimizing for adaptability, of being flexible, of being able to react to the changing environment that you're operating your company in. Fourth, his battles were well-planned, thanks to his thoroughness in getting the best maps and his ability to read them. Fifth, he understood the technology of the day. Sixth, he understood the importance of sea power and used it on a large scale with skill, which was a form of technology in his day, if you think about it. Seventh, he grasped the vital role played by good, safe harbors. And I think the closest parallel to the history of entrepreneurship with that is making sure that your company is financially strong, that you're not on the edge, you have a giant margin of safety, to use Warren Buffett's words.

• 15:06David Senra?

  Eighth, he turned the whole expedition into a continual adventure by stressing camaraderie. His cavalry were his companions. He usually knew them by name. So then Paul talks about, there's a bunch of other people in history like Shakespeare and all these other people that picked up the same point. And then one example he uses is that Churchill also used this idea of Alexander's. It says Churchill picked up this point for his Battle of Britain with the fighter pilots. He would know them by name. He treated them like his companions. Ninth, there were more material rewards. The booty secured during the conquest was colossal. And so, yeah, in the days of Alexander, in the days of Caesar, that's how you got rich. You went and you killed other people for their stuff.

• 15:51David Senra?

  And finally, number 10, Alexander thought, decided, and above all, moved swiftly. He appreciated the importance of speed in war and the terrifying surprises speed made possible. His enemies were nearly always stunned and shocked by his arrival. He invented the blitzkrieg. And so, the importance of speed, again, another idea that you and I talk about over and over again. Just want to quote from that book, Invent and Wander. This is Jeff Bezos talking about that. So this quote is from Jeff Bezos talking about the importance of speeding up. And in this case, you've got to make decisions fast, right? You can drive great people, you could drive great people away by making the speed of decision making really slow. Why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done?

• 16:36David Senra?

  They look around and after a while, they're like, look, I love the mission, but I can't get my job done because our speed of decision making is too slow. And now he's going to wrap up this section on Alexander, saying he's both a hero and a monster. Alexander became the prototype hero because of the extent of his achievement and his personal courage. He left his mark in many ways. He founded 70 cities, many of them named after him. He thoroughly understood the art and technology of war and in its most advanced forms. But he had many other interests, too. Art, architecture, science, gastronomy, energy, energy sources, and many other curiosities. He poked his nose into everything. This is the positive side. Against this, Alexander's territorial greed, which was insatiable, and his love of war

• 17:19David Senra?

  and the actual business of fighting, which was the passion of his life, set the worst possible example for future generations. Many evil and ambitious men took heart from his record. In truth, he was never content with his conquests, and he wanted to rule everybody. He was the first man to aim realistically at world rule at any cost. And so that is an example of what is in this book. Those highlights all came from about 10 pages. Each person has about 10 to 15 pages where he gives this overview of these people's lives, which I thought was interesting. I want to jump into Julius Caesar now. Caesar effectively transformed the Roman Republic into an empire. Thereafter, the emperors were all Caesars, the name of the man having become synonymous

• 18:03David Senra?

  with world authority. And so on the next two pages, there's a bunch of different lessons for us. Here's my summary. Words are the only things that last forever. That's a quote that I learned from Paul's other book on Churchill. The value of clear and simple language. And then the idea that you must control the telling of your own story, and it gives him more personal traits that Caesar had that we can emulate. He was energetic, he was fast, and he was fit, and he was also obsessed with the details. So it says Caesar endures in another important way. He was a man of colossal energy and far sighted cunning. He aimed to conquer posterity as well as the world he lived in. That is another wild sentence. Not only is he going to conquer, when I'm alive, the world I'm in now, but I want to conquer all of history.

• 18:48David Senra?

  And he knew that to do this, he must get in his own version of events in good time. And what better way to do that than to write it yourself? So amid all of his other activities and worries, in camp and in moments of hurried repose, he wrote and wrote and wrote. He finished seven books. It says his account, I don't know the name of the book, but it says his account of his conquest of Gaul. And he wrote seven books, one covering each year of this battle. He also contrived to produce three books about the civil war that he started and won. These books, written at speed and under pressure, have the supreme merits of simplicity and clarity. And I love that those are supreme merits. I'm glad that Paul wrote that. They have the supreme merits of simplicity and clarity.

• 19:33David Senra?

  Caesar's simplicity was deliberate. He wrote not to show off or to astonish, but to get his point across. And I love this quote by Caesar. I've never heard it before. He said, "You should avoid an unfamiliar word as a ship avoids a reef." So his works were widely read. And so then he gives us a little bit of background about Caesar's early life. His father died when Caesar was a teenager, and the family was poor anyway. So Caesar, hugely ambitious, had to do it all himself. He had an obsession with cleanliness. His physique was good, and he kept fit. His energy was colossal, and he spent his life transmuting it into speed. There's that word again. He thought fast, decided promptly, Jeff Bezos would be proud, right? And above all, was quick to move.

• 20:18David Senra?

  His ability to move fast was the key to his success, or was one key to his success, and the despair of his enemies. He was born to soldier. He loved the life of the camp. He possessed the patience. He also possessed the patience to train his men with infinite care. He said of his men, "These legions can tear down the sky." He trained his staff and senior commanders as meticulously as he trained the legionnaires. And as a result, he could delegate authority with confidence. But he also led from the front. And so that idea that he was, he wanted to move fast, but he had the patience to train. We go back to Sol Price, the most influential retailer that's ever lived.

• 20:58David Senra?

  People like Sam Walton, Jim Senegal, the founder of Costco, the guys that founded Home Depot, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, all these people stole ideas from Sol Price. And he famously said, my favorite quote of his is that you train an animal, you teach a human. And so his mentor, because Jim Senegal, founder of Costco, wound up working for Sol Price. And he said he learned everything that he knows he learned from Sol Price. And he said the same thing when he was giving advice to other company founders. He's like, if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. And this is more about Caesar's early life. This is an insane story. I didn't know this story. So it says Caesar made his way slowly up the official hierarchy. This is the Caesar pirate story. And a reminder that there's just some people that you do not want to mess with.

• 21:43David Senra?

  Caesar being one of those people. So it says he's making his way slowly up the official hierarchy. To further his career, he went to Rhodes to study rhetoric. And when returning, he was captured by pirates. Caesar raised the money to pay his ransom, then a further sum with which he equipped a pirate navy, captured the pirates that had kidnapped him, and then crucified them all. Whoa. He was obsessed with war. Of course, he wanted to conquer the world. And he also saw war as a way to get rich. Fighting meant loot. Caesar was so successful that he returned rich. The conquest of Gaul was the fulcrum of Caesar's life. It made Caesar, in cash terms, the richest man in Rome.

• 22:26David Senra?

  It was done without any authority from the Senate. Indeed, it was done against the rule that no further territory was to be conquered without specific permission. So if this is a guy that gets kidnapped, then gets released, and then comes back and crucifies his kidnappers, it's highly likely that if you wrote down some words on a piece of paper that say, hey, you can't do this, he's not really going to care. And so we see that with the conquest of Gaul. Because again, he saw that as a way, this is the way I'm going to achieve great wealth. And with great wealth can come great power, which is really what he was after, right? This is a trait that we can copy from him. His approach to difficulty was, all problems are solvable. But then he goes back into the fact that he too is both a hero and a monster.

• 23:11David Senra?

  Yet, we have to say that the eight-year conquest of Gaul was, from an ethical viewpoint, one of the great crimes of history. And that his lessons reverberate downstream of the generations, right? So it says throughout the history of Europe, princes and future kings would be taught about Caesar's battles, all of which he won, in order to learn about war and ruling. But these struggles can be seen in the harsh light of gangster criminality, as well as the soft glow of historic grandeur.

• 23:40David Senra?

  And so Paul just does a fantastic job throughout this book. He's constantly saying hero, monster, hero, monster. And it's not the case for everybody he profiles, but when you're going to have conquerors and people that are leading nations and engage in battle, of course, it depends on the perspective. In Caesar's case, if you're a Roman, you think it's fantastic. If you're Gaul, then you think he's a monster. It's just obviously a matter of perspective, like most things in life are. There is no doubt that Caesar was a man of exceptional ability over a huge range of activities. Among, I guess, to add to that, too, because in the book, Paul talks about it's like, it would be fantastic if we didn't have these characters throughout history. But the fact that we do have these characters, these world conquerors, these tyrants, in many cases, these dictators, that have the power of violence behind them, the fact that

• 24:23David Senra?

  they appear over and over again, leads one to believe that this is a fundamental part of human nature that that's not going to change. So the reason I tell you this is because hopefully, if you find this interesting, you read the book, you'll see he's very balanced about this. So he says, "There's no doubt that Caesar was a man of exceptional ability over a huge range of activities. Among his qualities, listed as foremost, great mental power, energy, steadfastness, a gift for understanding everything under the sun, vitality, and fiery quickness of mind. Few men have had such a combination of boldness, shrewdness, and wisdom. But if he was the model of kingship for two millennia," which he was, "he was also the inspiration for dictators and tyrants." See what I mean about that?

• 25:05David Senra?

  Like, he's bringing us, he's trying to present as complete a picture as possible, and then lets you make up your own mind. He doesn't really push forth his opinion too much. So he says, "Napoleon, at the height of his power, said, 'You should write about the death of Caesar in a worthy manner. It could be the greatest task of your life,'" continuing this quote from Napoleon. "The world should be shown how happy Caesar would have made it, and how much better everything would have been if only he had been given time to bring his sublime plans to fruition." So that's Napoleon's reaction to Caesar being assassinated, right? And then this is where the author comes in. "That is one view. Another might ask, how many more would Caesar, had he lived, had killed?

• 25:47David Senra?

  Napoleon killed five times as many as Caesar. Mao, another admirer of Caesar, killed 70 million. These things need to be weighed when we tell the stories of heroes." And that's a point I really appreciate because when we're reading these biographies of these great people in history, for our purposes, we're studying people that reached the very top of their profession. So they obviously learned a lot of things on the route to the top of their profession that are beneficial, these ideas that we can use in our work. That's the main point. But we're not trying to idolize these people. In many cases, they're extremely flawed people. Like Steve Jobs said, you have to take the good with the confused. So I want to go to George Washington. And I've had a few people ask me over the years to do a podcast episode. There's a biography on Washington that's highly regarded. I think

• 26:32David Senra?

  the author is Ron Chernow. So I will eventually get there. I just don't know when. But this is an overview or an intro to George Washington. Washington was six foot three. That made him enormous in his day. He stood out. This had a powerful influence on his character as a leader of men. He was relaxed, statuesque and formidable by nature. He radiated calm and quiet authority. And then we go into the fact that he, what I didn't know I left myself on this page is he had a great schedule. And then we'll see that Washington had specific knowledge that few others had. And the idea, the importance of gaining specific knowledge in this age of infinite leverage we're in, that was covered from the Almanac of Mivol.

• 27:15David Senra?

  It's actually Founder's Number 191. If you haven't listened to that, and I would order the book immediately. It's fantastic. So it says, this is his schedule. I do not mean he was in any way passive. He was a vigorous and active man, an early riser, about his business all day, and by no means intellectually idle. He accumulated a library of 800 books. So that's really, I'm trying to be a vigorous and active person. I wake up early. I try to be about my business all day. And I really don't want to be intellectually idle. I don't think I have 800 books. Maybe I do if you factor in my Kindle. Definitely not 800 physical books, though. But I think that's just a fantastic mini blueprint for you and I. Washington, so this is about his specific knowledge. Washington, this is before, he's obviously

• 27:59David Senra?

  the first president and plays a huge, important role in the founding of America. So it says, Washington took the obvious course of going into surveying, thus making himself useful to members of his family. And this is what I don't understand, I got to read more about. But they said his members of his family were theoretical owners of hundreds of, or thousands of acres. Excuse me, hundreds of thousands, not hundreds or thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres. Most of it was unsurveyed. So it talks about why is this, the knowledge of surveying so important at this point? This proved of value. It taught Washington method, keeping of daily accurate records, map reading and map making, knowledge of the country. At the time of the revolution, so he's gaining this knowledge before the revolution, right?

• 28:42David Senra?

  He knew more of America than all but a handful of his fellow revolutionaries. So I'm going to pause there because that's a very interesting idea, especially, again, this applies to the, why I think Naval was so dead on in the fact that you're collecting and cultivating, might be the better word, cultivating specific knowledge is so important in the age of infinite leverage. So in Washington's case, he had a very unique set of knowledge that almost nobody else had. He developed it before the opportunity arose where he could use it to his great benefit. Without that knowledge, maybe he doesn't have as much success in the war. We don't know who he is. So that's how important it is, right? But the reason Naval would tell you that this is so important is because, let's say there's 10 other people that do exactly what you do, right?

• 29:25David Senra?

  In the age of infinite leverage, the gains accrue to the very best. It's not like, okay, there's 10 people doing what I do, 10, all 10 of us are going to split 10% equally of the market. So maybe there's $10 million a year that's spent on whatever product or service. There's 10 of us, we're each going to get $1 million a year. That's not how it happens. You'll find one person gets 90 or 95% of all the value. So let's take this idea that we're learning in Paul Johnson's book about Washington, combine it with the one we learned from Naval Ravikant. Now let me quote from what I consider the best talk on YouTube for entrepreneurs. It's called Runnin Down a Dream. It's by Bill Gurley. I'll link it in the show notes. I'd watch it over and over again. And this is what he says, because he's giving a talk at University of Texas, I think it's MBA students.

• 30:09David Senra?

  And he profiles five different people that all approached their craft very similarly. Okay? And so this is one of the, and then he talks about like the highlights. He compares the lessons that he learned from these five people and take those lessons and trying to tell us that we can copy this, right? We can emulate and use these ideas in our craft as we try to get to the top of our profession. And it's very, very similar to what George Washington did in his life, what Naval taught in his, like in the book and his speeches and tweets and everything else.

• 30:41David Senra?

  And he says, this is Bill Gurley talking. Be obsessive about learning in your field. Hone your craft. Constantly understand everything you possibly can about your craft. Consider it an obligation. Hold yourself accountable. Keep learning over time. Study the history. Know the pioneers. This is the punchline right here. Strive to know more than anyone else about your particular craft. You should be the most knowledgeable person. It is possible to gather more information than someone else. And then he's got another great, Bill Gurley's got another great statement here. I'm going to interrupt it, though. I talked about how I heard Bill's words, right? And try to apply it to founders.

• 31:26David Senra?

  And I talked about that on Founder's number 217. The autobiography, when I reread the autobiography of Estee Lauder. So I think at the beginning of that podcast, if you want to hear more about that, about how I'm trying to apply those ideas, Bill's ideas and really Washington's ideas and Naval's ideas to founders. You can, I'm pretty sure it's at the beginning of 217. But what I liked about Bill's talk is he doesn't like, he's not going to let you off easy. He puts a very high bar. And so he's going to force you to ask yourself questions like, am I doing, am I doing the most I can possibly do? Am I actually living a full life? Am I approaching my profession, my, my job, my passion with 100% of what I am capable of? So he says, the good news, if you're going to research something, this is your lucky day.

• 32:11David Senra?

  Information is freely available on the internet. The bad news, you have zero excuse for not being the most knowledgeable person in any subject you want. The information is right there at your fingertips. And I think later on, he gives the example of like, let's say you want to learn most about esports or something like that. He's like, you should be able to be, you know, top, I can't remember the exact, and I don't know why I didn't, don't have them in my notes. But going off memory, he says something like, you know, within six months, you dedicate this and you're really hustling. You should be able to get maybe the top 5% or 10%. And then he says, you know, within two or three years, whatever the timeframe was, he's like, it's very possible to get to the very top. You can be in the top 1%. And why is being in the top 1% of knowledge, having a specific knowledge so important? Because we live in the age of infinite leverage and we're not, all the gains are not divided

• 32:56David Senra?

  up equally. And so as this project continued and as I heard Bill's lessons and I'm reading all these books, I was like, okay, I simply will not, I will not allow anyone else to know more about the history of entrepreneurship. I will, and I'm not going to quit, you're going to have to kill me to get me to stop. But I think if I keep going at the pace I'm going, let's say a decade from now, I completely understand it's going to take a very, very long time of being focused on one thing for overall, working on every day for a very long time to achieve this. I'm not saying it's easy by any means, but I know I'm able, I will be able to do that. And two, that is what I'm shooting for. And that is not my idea. That is my synthesis of all these other great minds, their ideas. I'm like, hey, I can use that too. I can gain specific knowledge that's valuable to other people. So I just love, and again, I didn't even know this book existed before last week.

• 33:41David Senra?

  And I love the idea that all of these ideas that we're learning together, they find a way to influence and interlock and affect each other. And that's extremely, extremely exciting. And again, it kind of, there's like this giant flywheel happening. It's like just, it makes me, as the excitement, like when you discover these ideas, you get more excited and then this excitement leads to even more motivation. And then you realize, hey, motivation's good, but you also need discipline. And so just use motivation as a way to reinforce the discipline you have and just do it every day for a long period of time. And as we know, most people quit. And what we just learned from studying Churchill and de Gaulle and all these other people, you have a massive, massive advantage if you just refuse to give up. So let's go back to Washington. This also surprised me.

• 34:24David Senra?

  Washington in time became one of the largest landowners in Virginia. I think that this had to do with inheritance though. And one of, this is the surprising part, he was one of half a dozen richest men in America. So then it goes into the fact that his, he was a general and I wrote down here, he'd make a great entrepreneur because you see how he approached his, in his case, his work as being a general. As a general, he was primarily a strategist rather than a battle commander. He was always outnumbered, up to the final showdown at Yorktown. He had to fight with amateurs against professionals. He was always short of weapons, uniforms, ammunition, supplies, and responsible officers. So he could never afford to force a battle, or even often to fight a full-scale defensive one.

• 35:08David Senra?

  Yet his strategy was clear, intelligent, absolutely consistent, and maintained with an iron will from start to finish. Is that not the traits of the great entrepreneurs? They're outgunned, outbattled, they start where they have way less resources than whoever they're competing against, and yet their strategy is clear, intelligent, absolutely consistent, and maintained with an iron will from start to finish. He believed he represented the legitimate government of the 13 colonies whose traditional powers Britain was trying to usurp, so he also believed in his mission. It did not matter how many skirmishes or even battles he lost. This same section is why I thought he'd be a great entrepreneur. It did not matter how many skirmishes or even battles he lost, or how often he had to withdraw, or how much territory he had to sacrifice, so long as the army held together. This is a war of attrition!

• 35:51David Senra?

  This is exactly what we were just talking about, the fact that you just have a massive advantage if you don't quit, and that's what he's talking about. "I just gotta survive." He forced his opponents always to address him as General Washington and treat him as a lawful opponent rather than a rebel. That's more to do with the belief in his mission. Washington fought a war of attrition. It was his belief that provided he and his army remained in the field, all that counts is survival, the rest is just words. That's what Charles de Gaulle just taught us, right? The financial and human cost of the war to Britain would mount, and the will to continue on Britain's part would weaken. I'm still on the same page, I wrote another note to myself. These are founder traits! All this proved to be true. Washington's strategy succeeded, and in due course, at Yorktown, the opportunity arose

• 36:35David Senra?

  for a decisive stroke. He seized it eagerly and delivered it with speed, resolution, and complete success. He could not have pursued this long-term strategy through many weirsome years without a hard, inner core of self-confidence, that in turn had to be based on a firm conviction of the justice of his cause.

• 36:59David Senra?

  And that really, I thought of something the other day. Because it's talking about, you know, the fact that he believed his cause was righteous. Like, he's giving a lot to his life, a lot of his life over, based on that belief, right? There is, um, there's something that I learned, like, really, it's a lesson from the history of entrepreneurship altogether, but I want to use a specific example to illustrate this point to you. It's why you start, we're not talking about, in his case, like, he's fighting, literally, for the survival of his country, right? Or soon-to-be country. Why you start your company matters. And it doesn't, that reason doesn't have to be complex. And so, I don't know why this popped into my mind, or where it even came from.

• 37:42David Senra?

  But in the book Shoe Dog, Phil Knight talks about, like, you know, Nike's this gigantic company today, it's one of the best brands that's ever been created, and he's like, "Well, listen, I just started Nike because I believe that if everyone got out and ran a few miles every day, then the world would be a better place." And that kind of blew my mind. Like, this simple idea, this belief, and he really believed this because running was a passion of his, right? And the very first shoes at Nike, you know, Nike does a lot of stuff now, but they were all, it was all running shoes. He sold the first, in this case, even before he had his own Nike brand, he would travel throughout the state of Oregon to different track meets, and he'd sell sneakers, running shoes, excuse me, out of his trunk, out of the trunk of his car. And so, he had that belief.

• 38:26David Senra?

  He's like, "Listen, if, like, running has been a great," and he even talked about, which is, you know, weird now because everybody runs, but at this time, I think this is the 1960s, if I'm not mistaken, if I have the timeframe correct, and he's just like, people were, thought that you'd go out and run, like, something was wrong with you. It wasn't like this beloved activity, this sport, and people didn't realize the benefits that it provided. And so, that idea is just like, "I am starting this company, and I'm doing this because I sincerely believe that if people go out and they run a few miles every day, the world will be a better place." And so, in my own tiny, small way, I truly believe, like, if people, if I could encourage people to read biographies, and we had more people learning from great people of history, and then sharing those lessons, like, the world will definitely be better, be a better place.

• 39:11David Senra?

  While I'm reading this book on heroes, I was also watching the series on Netflix. It's called like Tyrants or How to Be a Tyrant, something like that. The narrator is actually the actor that played Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones. And it's really interesting because the series is interesting. I don't even know if it's that good. Like, what I liked about it was they compare all the common traits that these tyrants throughout history had to one another, which I thought that was the value in watching the series. So they have people like Stalin, Hitler, the people, the Kims, the people in North Korea, Gaddafi, all these other people. But they really pick up on the fact that like, it's really almost impossible for humans,

• 39:55David Senra?

  for a certain segment of humans, to resist absolute power. And in these cases, like, they had absolute power, they could kill without retribution, they wind up having like a harem of, you know, women, they had access to state level of wealth, and then when you have like unrestricted power and you get these really weird, over time, you get really weird behavior. And the reason I bring that up now is because Washington resisted that desire for absolute power. And it wasn't at all clear at this time in history, like, that could have been a route he took, but he wasn't interested in that. So it says, "Washington won the war, and that is his primary claim to be, to heroic status. But it is his conduct afterward which is sublime.

• 40:36David Senra?

  How difficult it is for a successful revolutionary general to extricate himself from political responsibilities or to push ambition firmly down." So the King of England picks up on this. "It is to George III's credit that he spotted the fresh element of heroism which Washington's victory opened up for him. He asked the American-born president in the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, 'What will General Washington do now?'" West said he believed he'd go back to his farm. George III said, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man on earth." And remember, this is the last paragraph in Washington, and I'll read to you, but remember, the author is British, because he's gonna talk. He's talking about America here like Americans talk about America, which is interesting

• 41:21David Senra?

  to me. Washington was not only the obvious choice for president, but essentially the only one. He had no alternative but to accept a task unanimously assigned to him by the new nation. And he says, and he did it very well. "The United States of America has been fortunate in many ways, especially in the magnificent endowment of nature. But not the least of its blessings was the man who first led it to victory, then made the new nation that emerged law-abiding, stable, and prosperous, as well as free." And this is just, this is the best sentence of this entire section. "This double achievement is without parallel in history." Now we go to what may be my favorite president, Abraham Lincoln. I read a book on him, a great biography.

• 42:06David Senra?

  It's by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It's called A Team of Rivals. I may reread it and turn it into an episode of Founders in the future, but the note of myself is what it means to be a good man. Abraham Lincoln comes high on the list of enduring popular heroes. There is, I think, one word that explains Lincoln's heroic preeminence in the hearts and minds of so many people: goodness. He was a good man on a giant scale. A man who raised goodness into a political principle, into a way of public life, and into a code of government activity. And the fact that he came from nothing and nowhere, had little form of education or parental guidance, had taught himself morality and made himself a good man entirely by the intelligent

• 42:49David Senra?

  cultivation of sound, deep-rooted instincts, makes his character all the more appealing. And so Lincoln is going to share a trait that many historical figures have, the fact that he was self-educated and a master of words. In scrutinizing his record, it is impossible to point to a particular episode and say, "Here, he was morally wrong. There, he was inexcusably weak. Or in this case, he demeaned himself." This is what I mean about the extremely high bar that Lincoln puts for us on how to be a good person. All this despite the fact that his life is remarkably well documented, and all evidence has been sifted over again and again. So this is wild. It says there's a public bibliography of all these books written about Lincoln.

• 43:34David Senra?

  He says there's 3,958 books on Lincoln, and thousands more have appeared since this collection was put together, because that collection is 60 years ago. And so now he gets into the fact that he was a master of words. If ever a statement was a, if ever a statesman was a master of words, he was. Perhaps the fact that he was largely self-educated brought him to words with a freshness and sense of discovery so easily lost in the academic pursuit of literary excellence. But there is something, there, excuse me, there is nothing, but there is nothing naive or primitive about Lincoln's use of English. It's simple, but also extremely sophisticated. He chose words not for their grace or glory, but for their fundamental accuracy, accuracy and truthfulness. Here is a simple example.

• 44:18David Senra?

  Lincoln rose from nothing to the White House through the law. From being a manual laborer in a variety of humble occupations, he acquired enough book knowledge to set up as a lawyer. He did sufficiently well in his profession to be able to do that, to do what it taught him was an overwhelmingly necessity, to change bad laws by political action. And learning all these skills obviously came, were like the foundational level that allowed him, the foundation he built around, rather, that allowed him to accomplish what he accomplished later on when he was president. He became a skilled lawyer, lawyer, but remained a good man. Here is a letter which sums him up. And so this is Lincoln writing. It says, "Dear sir, I have just received your check for $25.

• 45:02David Senra?

  You must think I am a high-priced man. You are too liberal with your money. $15 is enough for the job. I send you a receipt for $15 and return to you a $10 bill. Yours truly, A. Lincoln." And so this is going to echo what Steve Jobs told us, that he said that the storyteller is the most powerful person in the world. And so it says, "Words and the ability to weave them into webs which cling to the memory are extremely important in forwarding political action." So it's also important in company building. Repetition is persuasive. And if you go back and listen to like a Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs talk, they repeat the same things over and over again. They have a handful of ideas and they're, they're known.

• 45:44David Senra?

  So in Jeff's case, they're referred to by people internally in Amazon as Jeffisms. It's these little maxims, these little ideas that he's trying to transmit to you into your brain, repeats them over and over again. He's trying to persuade you, trying to teach you at the same time. But this idea, it's like words and the ability to weave them into webs which cling to the memory. That's why they're called Jeffisms. And one of the greatest things, an example of that in Steve Jobs' career. Is he would use it, what was he trying to accomplish? And this is something he would talk about in 2010 before he died. Talk about back, you could read when he was in his twenties in the eighties. And he says, I want to make insanely great products. Those three words tell Steve Jobs' entire story. Insanely great products.

• 46:25David Senra?

  And so I think that's a definite takeaway for all these histories, from history's greatest entrepreneurs, is that you have to craft the narrative of your mission. And the best person to craft that narrative is the person that founded the company, right? It was even more important in the third quarter of the 19th century in America, where most of the population was aggressively literate. I didn't know that. I thought it was the opposite. And they were brought up to read and relish key documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. And so it says, this was the way Lincoln himself was brought up. And he added to the canon, two of the first of its documents, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Entire books have been written on these speeches and their evolution. But it seems to me that the key phrases within them came to Lincoln in intuitive flashes.

• 47:10David Senra?

  Leaping up, this is more great writing here. "Leaping up from a mind that had brooded so long in the nature of political truth and justice, and the frailty of man in promoting them, that it was composed of hot coals from which sparks might be emitted at any instant." And it talks about him as a person. He did not let his personal melancholy stop him. He was always active. This is something I learned by reading that book. He was an untypical hero in that there was a streak of melancholy in his character. He suffered from occasional bouts of depression, and some historians have even argued that he was a lifelong depressive. Lincoln was always busy, and almost always busy doing things he wanted to do and which were worth doing. He had time for thought, and no one thought harder than he did, but no time for brooding.

• 47:52David Senra?

  And then I'll wrap up this section with, on Lincoln, with the fact that he did the right thing even when he could easily avoid it. Lincoln was a strong man, and like most men, quietly confident of their strength without vanity, he was without vanity or self-consciousness. There was a little incident towards the end of his life, which to me is full of meaning. After the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital, on the same day Robert E. Lee finally surrendered, Lincoln went to see his Secretary of State, with whom he often disagreed. And so that's why the book, The Team of Rivals, is so unique, because he realized that even, he went and staffed his cabinet with people he disagreed with and people from other political parties. And he thought their differing points of view would actually make the country stronger. This is what, like, it's like maybe the least egotistical leader we've ever had.

• 48:36David Senra?

  So it says, you know, the fall, so the war's ending. He, Lincoln went to see his secretary of state with whom he often disagreed and whom he did not particularly like. Seward had somehow broken both his arms and his jaw. Lincoln found him not only bedridden, but unable to move his head. Without a moment's hesitation, the president stretched out at full length on the bed and resting on his elbow brought his face near Seward's. And they held an urgent whispered conversation on the next steps the administration should take. Then Lincoln talked quietly to the agonized man until he drifted off to sleep. Lincoln could have easily used the excuse of Seward's incapacity to avoid consulting him at all. But that was not his way. He did the right thing, however easily it might have been avoided.

• 49:22David Senra?

  Of how many other great men might this be said? If you do wind up picking up this book, the good thing about this book is you don't have to read it in one sitting. You don't even have to read it in order. You could read a chapter at a time and say, hey, I want to learn more about. In this case, I'm just fast forward to the chapter on Churchill and the Gaul. But it's all like this, it's like very compact writing, interesting stories. There's a bunch of people in the book that I didn't even know who they were. I think it's a useful tool to have, to have in your house, to have around you, maybe on your desk or whatever the case is. So this is, it's interesting. So this title is called A Generous Hero and a Heroic Monster. So we, we already know that Paul loved Churchill, right? He was a British citizen. He actually asked a question to Churchill when he was a young boy.

• 50:07David Senra?

  So the generous hero is going to be Churchill and he calls the Gaul a heroic monster. Let's go to Churchill first. Churchill was the archetype hero of the 20th century and his life was long and full. Most people believed he drank too much, especially of whiskey and brandy. But he sipped the brandy very slowly and he took his whiskey heavily diluted with water. He never gulped liquor, so maybe that's how he's able to drink all day long because it's all watered down. It's more on his activity levels when he's a young man. Churchill was both very active and a very inactive man. He spent an extraordinary amount of his time in bed. This was not sloth, but method. So he talks about, he asked him a question. The first time I met Churchill, it was in 1946 as a schoolboy.

• 50:50David Senra?

  And I asked him, Churchill, what do you attribute your success in life to? He replied instantly, conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down and never sit down when you can lie down.

• 51:00David Senra?

  Churchill followed his axiom. If possible, he spent the morning in bed, but he was not inactive. He read letters, dictated answers, went through a newspaper and did a great deal of telephoning. He also received visitors. Churchill's record of activity is unlikely to ever be equaled. Churchill built walls, made lakes, painted over a thousand canvases, made thousands of speeches all over the world, some of the finest ever delivered, and mastered the art of broadcasting in a way that was never, that has never been surpassed. He is the only member of the House of Commons who, after sitting in the cabinet, commanded an infantry battalion in action. He also survived a number of personal and political crises of great ferocity. At one time or another, Churchill was viciously attacked from every quarter of the political spectrum. And part of his fierce activity and the fact that he lived an entire full life, I think,

• 51:45David Senra?

  has to do with the fact that he was underestimated by his own family from a young age. Next to energy, Churchill had intelligence. This aspect of his armory for life has generally been underestimated, not least by his parents. So now he's going to give us another example from history. He recalls Lady Mornings' foolish dismissal of her son, the future Duke of Wellington, another highly intelligent man, as "food for powder, nothing more." Imagine your mom saying that about you. Lord Randolph, which was Churchill's father, Lord Randolph and Lady Randolph, disappointed by Churchill's poor academic performance, thought him "fit only for the army, and in the army, fit only for the cavalry, which demanded fewer brains." Imagine your parents thinking that about you, that's terrible.

• 52:26David Senra?

  But Churchill abounded in natural intelligence and was almost entirely self-educated. And this is so important, and this is going to remind me of what James Dyson's, James Dyson gave some of the best advice. And it sounds crazy. It's like, listen, don't, like, you might, there's value in being obtuse. So it says, "The truth is Churchill had a fine mind, and the fact that it was an undisciplined and uneducated mind sometimes worked to his advantage." Again, uneducated and formal schooling, right? He obviously read and wrote and studied a ton on his own. When I read that section, there's a weird quote, one of the most bizarre quotes I've ever come across in any of these books. And it comes from the first, if you've never read any of the books on founders. This is the first book he should read.

• 53:11David Senra?

  It's the one I would recommend the most for entrepreneurs. Because it's all about, it's an entire story about insane persistence. And it's how James Dyson struggled for 12 years, built 5,127 prototypes before he found any modicum of success. The 99.99999999% of all humans that ever lived would have quit way before James did. And so just reading that book, and the fact that it's short, you can read in a weekend, he's funny. Anyways, this is a quote from him. And so he's talking about, at the end of the book, he's talking about like now running Dyson, like what does he do? And he's, his whole thing is like, difference for the sake of it. Right? I'm not, he's not gonna build, if somebody else has already built a product, he's just not gonna come up with a me too product, none of that. So he says, "Encourage employees to be different on principle. This is part of my anti-brilliance campaign." What does that mean, Dyson?

• 53:56David Senra?

  "Very few people can be brilliant. Those who are rarely do anything worthwhile. You are just as likely to solve a problem," which he considers what products are, right? Products are a solution to the customer's problem. "You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse." And I'll get to his punchline first, I wanted to find that word, just so we're on the same page. "Obtuse. Annoyingly insensitive or slow to understand." And why is James saying be obtuse? And he, remember, this book is rather old, like 20 years old, so at that time, or maybe 30 years old? Might be like 35 years old, actually. There was only 5 billion people on the planet at this point.

• 54:38David Senra?

  So he says, "Be deliberately obtuse because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks. And thinking the way they've been taught to think." And what he's saying is they're not actually thinking, they're just copying. And so if you be obtuse and unconventional and determined, you're gonna derive insights that the people that are just thinking in tracks, copying what everybody else is doing, not doing much thinking at all, you're gonna arrive at better insights, you can use those insights to build better products. And the idea, the truth is Churchill had a free, fine mind, and the fact that his undisciplined and uneducated mind sometimes worked to his advantage. It's the same idea expressed in vastly different ways.

• 55:16David Senra?

  More on Churchill the person, he loved power and sought it greedily always. He was most anxious to possess it in all its plenitude. That's a favorite phrase of his, the fact that he wants to possess power in all its plenitude, and was most reluctant to relinquish it. He said that the campaign in Gallipoli was a failure because I did not possess the power to make it a success. And he applied that lesson in the Second World War, insisting that he be invested with sufficient power to direct the war effort. Really, the war effort effectively, really, it's the same thing that we see over and over again in studying these histories of the company founders and, excuse me, the founders of the company and the companies they create. The best companies are led by a single formidable individual with almost absolute control. You can think of the best companies as benevolent dictatorships.

• 56:00David Senra?

  Another example of something that comes up over and over again, people who study history have a massive advantage over those who don't. This is what Paul says about Churchill's love of history. History to Churchill was the great teacher, and he remained under her iron rod all of his life. He was willing to not hold grudges, which I think was another strong attribute of him. Churchill bore rancor at the time, but seldom afterward. He said himself he was not a good hater. The moment victory came, I ceased to hate Germany. And then this is his, it says this was a central maxim of his life. So this is Churchill writing now, okay? In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity. In peace, goodwill.

• 56:44David Senra?

  So another thing that comes up over and over again, companies should follow suit. You should be the one telling your own story. I think we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs and companies doing this, they're like creating media arms, they're writing, they're making podcasts, they're getting their, they realize like we have the tools of communication now, we can, we should be the ones telling our own story. In Churchill's day, those tools of communication were speech, giving speeches and writing books. And so it's the same idea, and it's just companies should follow suit. There's no reason not to take, to not use this good idea. In this book, I've drawn attention to the efforts of some great actors in history to get posterity on their side. So how do they do that? Alexander arranged for writers to put his case. Caesar wrote his commentaries on his wars. But Churchill was by far the most thorough and successful in ensuring that his tale was told.

• 57:28David Senra?

  The work, now it's going to break, this is his most successful book, the one I told you last week that he made like $50 million in today's dollars on. And this is five points about his most successful book. The work has five remarkable characteristics. First, the book was a documentary history as well as a personal memoir. Second characteristic was size. Thanks to all the documentary element, all the important episodes in the account and many minor ones are described in detail. The third point, by any standards, this was one of the most successful books ever written, both financially and in terms of readership. Fourth, the work was both a personal achievement and a team effort. He had entire, he had copy editors and researchers.

• 58:11David Senra?

  It's just, it was not, it was not solely authored by his pen. Number five, and this links up with the first point, the work had an impact on how we see the history of the war and its aftermath, and it still helps to shape that received history. And so now he moves on to de Gaulle, who he views very differently, for sure. So it says Churchill's younger contemporary, Charles de Gaulle, was a national hero too, who saved the country twice, first in 1940 from shame, and second in 1958 from civil war. He also gave France the first successful constitution in its history after 12 failed attempts, which still serves well after half a century.

• 58:51David Senra?

  So I think he was, like, my interpretation of the author's opinion on de Gaulle is that his achievements were really not up for debate, but he was a flawed person that didn't really like humans. And so this is an overview of de Gaulle. He made a virtue of his singularity and turned it into a philosophy of life. That's also why I think entrepreneurs should study Charles de Gaulle. That fact right there, and I think this was Arthur Rock, one of the first VCs, picked up about Henry Singleton. It's the singular, singular purpose that Henry approached to his building of his company. As he put it, and this is a quote from de Gaulle now, solitude was my temptation. It became my friend.

• 59:33David Senra?

  What else could satisfy anyone who has been face to face with history? So that's why de Gaulle was very much a person of his mind, spent time, most of his time reading, would love to be alone. So that's what he's referencing there. And he also had a dim view on, he was an elitist. He had a dim view on most humans. To get close to somebody, and he was an extreme character. So all these combinations produce this very unique personality in human history. To get, and this is an example of that, to get close to somebody was seen as a possible source of weakness. He demanded intense loyalty from his followers and usually got it, but he gave none in return. And so he talks about one of his most dedicated people. It's this guy named Sustel, most likely pronounced incorrectly.

• 1:00:16David Senra?

  And so he says, after, he, he went, he's what, Paul had wound up talking to him. He says, after de Gaulle's death, I asked him if this anecdote, he's just referencing an anecdote, and we skip over, was true. He replied, yes, he did say that. He was a terrible man. And this is somebody who's most dedicated to him. This terrible man was an intellectual. By this, I mean, he thought ideas were more important than people. And his main dedication of his life is that certain idea of France, right? More particularly, he thought the idea of France infinitely more important than individual Frenchmen, whose role in life was simply to work, fight, suffer, and if need be, die for France, which he was also willing to do, though. You saw how many times he'd put his life on the line for France.

• 1:01:00David Senra?

  So it talks about, this is Patan, the guy that was his mentor, who they wind up having falling out later in life. So Patan gets him to give a course of three lectures on leadership at the Military Staff College. And this is why, again, you may not like him as an individual, but he, he had extensive knowledge on history and useful ideas for this point in French, France's history. Everyone present at this lecture was senior to de Gaulle, and the lectures were an astonishing display of historical knowledge, delivered without a note. They discussed the nature of the hero in war and in the need on occasion for the hero to disobey foolish or cowardly orders from above. This is like two decades before he does this in real life.

• 1:01:45David Senra?

  He published them later in a book called The Edge of the Sword, and they are an uncanny adumbration of his later role. What are we doing here? We just, Caesar just said, to avoid unfamiliar words, like a ship avoids a reef. So I had to look up that word. That means to foreshadow. So he could have just said, and they are an uncanny foreshadowing of his later role.

• 1:02:07David Senra?

  That whole section, though, I think about the fact that, hey,

• 1:02:11David Senra?

  on occasion, the hero has to disobey foolish or cowardly orders from above. That's why de Gaulle definitely fits into this idea of being a misfit and a rebel, because he definitely did that later on in his life. And it really talks about his central, like, what was his main benefit? The role that he played, aside the fact that he refused to give up. It was his attempt in writing and speeches and studying his whole career to, it was his attempt to propagate novel military ideas. He was one of the first people to realize that with the mechanization, so to think about the technology has changed war forever. We have old generals in place that are using the same playbook that they used in World War I, which is all about defense, setting up trenches, waiting for the people to come

• 1:02:52David Senra?

  over top, and then we'll just machine gun down one wave after another. He's like, this doesn't make any sense. He realized what the use of tanks, of aggressive nature, of speed, of movement. The same thing that Hitler winds up copying, the ideas of de Gaulle and using it. Same thing Patton, General Patton, used for the Allies, for the Americans as well. It's like, we're not holding anything, we're not digging trenches, we're on the offense all the time. And so this idea is, he was one of the first people to realize, hey, you're using an outdated playbook that's no longer working. And so, again, the attempt to propagate novel ideas, I think that's really interesting. De Gaulle was not a warm and friendly man. He was not generous or forgiving or magnanimous. I hate, I can never pronounce that word. He was quite unlike Churchill in these respects.

• 1:03:36David Senra?

  He was an egoist on a monumental, indeed, a superhuman scale. And this is also, now, this is where Paul's going to criticize him a little bit, but this is also what de Gaulle saw as his main benefit. There could not have been on this planet in the last two centuries a human being more difficult to deal with or those, or who came so close to the abstract quality of intransigence.

• 1:04:00David Senra?

  And so that word is a refusal to change one's view or to agree about something. This is, de Gaulle saw that as an asset. He has a quote in that giant 800-page biography I read of him where he says, he says something like, listen, being as weak as I am, this is after the fall of France, right? Being as weak as I am, intransigence is my only weapon. And so it says, he was essentially, what Paul is telling us here is he's intransigence, intransigence personified. De Gaulle made himself particularly difficult to those in Britain who befriended and helped him, notably Churchill. Indeed, if there was one characteristic even more prominent in de Gaulle than his egotism and selfishness, it was his ingratitude.

• 1:04:39David Senra?

  He saw gratitude as a weakness in a general, actually, in general, and to a man in his position as a fatal weakness. There was also, in de Gaulle, a streak of ruthlessness. That is definitely true. There's a situation in that book where he's, there's a potential rival that's being backed by the Americans and the British to lead the Free French. And de Gaulle uses three formulas that I talked about in that de Gaulle podcast. It was ruthlessness combined with brilliance, combined with an absolute, being absolutely clear about what he wanted to do. And he winds up making quick work of this guy, not relinquishing the power or his insistence

• 1:05:21David Senra?

  on being the leader of the Free French movement. And yet, even after all the criticism that Paul has about the person he is, really what I'm about to tell you is the fact that de Gaulle kept, the fact that he isolated himself from other people is what made him more interesting because he's able to derive insights that other people are not coming up with because he's isolated from them. This is very similar to what Singleton did. They talked about, hey, he just sits in his corner office with his Apple II computer and that corner office is a cornucopia of ideas. So if you're just reading all the same stuff as everybody else and just listening to the same stuff and being exposed by the same stuff, and it's very hard to come up with unique insights. So this is where Paul just wraps up de Gaulle. He says, yet his views were always interesting. So a flawed individual, maybe a selfish person, maybe not somebody you want to be friends

• 1:06:05David Senra?

  with, but it is something, somebody you could learn from. He had his views were always interesting. And so he's going to wrap up this entire section. Both Churchill and de Gaulle were old-style national heroes with the limitations of such, but both had a transcendental gift of reflecting upon the process of history.

• 1:06:26David Senra?

  And that is where I'll leave it. There's about 25 other heroes in the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. I'll leave a link in the show notes, too. If you want to buy a gift subscription, you can buy, I think, up to a year subscription. You can also do a few months. So if you haven't done that yet and you want to, that's the very best way you can support founders. You have somebody in mind, maybe a friend, coworker, loved one, send them a few months, send them a year. It's totally up to you. Whatever you choose, I deeply, deeply appreciate it. That is 226 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.