173 The 6 Skills Every Successful Entrepreneur Needs with Amy Wilkinson

"Speak the truth as you see it." - Amy Wilkinson If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/173. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 173 with Amy Wilkinson.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to today's episode, episode number 173. We've got Amy Wilkinson on, who is a strategic advisor, entrepreneur, lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Global Fellow at the Wilson Center. She frequently addresses corporate associate and university audiences on entrepreneurial leadership. She also advises startups and large corporations on innovation and business strategy. Now Amy has a new book out called The Creator's Code, which is the six essential skills of extraordinary entrepreneurs. And she talks about how to find out the secrets that over 200 top entrepreneurs already know. The six essential skills that when combined turn small notions into big companies.

• 1:18Lewis Howes?

  Now she interviewed some of the top leaders of today, and we talk about some of these stories and unique instances that happened from these interviews that she'll share in this episode. And again, these six keys are really powerful. And I told Amy in this interview, you know, it's always fun to interview someone that reconfirms a few of the things that you're already doing well, but also allows you to learn the things that you're still not doing well. So I think you're going to learn today, if you're doing these six things well or not, you should be paying attention to them. And Amy's going to walk us through exactly what this code is and how to crack it. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this episode with the one and only Amy Wilkinson.

• 2:01Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got Amy Wilkinson on. How are you doing Amy?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  I'm doing well. Pleased to be here.

• 2:09Lewis Howes?

  Very excited about this. We're talking about the Creator's Code, The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs. And being an entrepreneur myself, I was interested to see if I had any of these skills. And before we dive into them, I want to ask you, why did you write this book or feel compelled to write this book? And how long did it take you to complete it?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  So I was working in the White House. I was a White House Fellow, which is a nonpartisan designation. And I was in the international trade team and economics team. And I had come from Silicon Valley into Washington DC and I have a bunch of friends who are entrepreneurs. And when I was working in the White House, we had only big companies really coming in. That's where companies like Walmart or, you know, other really very large organizations come and talk about their businesses. But I was invited to a birthday party in New York and I looked around and there were the founders of like Google and eBay and the Guild Group and a bunch of people that were building concepts in real time, right?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  No bureaucracy, no red tape. And it just seemed to me, given my own background, I had started and sold a company at one point, that the people who would really create the future were entrepreneurs. And we didn't know, so many people go out and try to start a company on their own, right? It's like everyone is recreating the wheel. But if you could just talk to people who had done this really successfully and then identify the skills, then more people could create their ideas. So it comes with a very kind of public policy or public service idea in mind that for the economy, we need entrepreneurs. Companies less than five years old are creating all the net new jobs in the United States. So if you could just figure out what the greats did, then more people could do it.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  And that's the genesis of it. I'm trained as a sociologist. I also have an MBA degree. And so I thought it would be interesting to figure out what makes people tick that are really, you know, great entrepreneurs. And I spent five years doing it. So I interviewed 200 of the top entrepreneurs and then did a massive research process that distills six essential skills. So that's the quick background.

• 4:17Lewis Howes?

  Okay. And if you could do it all over, would you change anything about that process?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, for me personally, it'd be nice to have it move a lot faster. I didn't, you know, I didn't know that it was gonna take five years. I thought I would take a sabbatical. You know, finishing up at the White House before I would move back to Silicon Valley and co-found a company with a good friend, a girlfriend of mine, a good friend from business school. If you're gonna do a really research-based book, it takes a lot of time. So if I had known that in advance, I, you know, I might have scoped it differently. I might have staffed it up differently. As a business writer, I have done all of these interviews myself, and I have written every word of this book like multiple times.

• 4:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  And a lot of people don't do that. They outsource books, or they write about one man's experience, right? It's like one person's thing. This is 200 entrepreneurs' stories, and then it's distilled, you know, through this grounded theory methodology, which is a qualitative methodology. It's a big, heavy-lift research project. It's written as a narrative. So, you know, these are fast, easy-to-read stories. You can pick this book up in an airport. It's all over in airports in the US, and you can read it on a flight. And that's by design, so that people will learn by stories, and they'll learn, you know, something that they can absorb quickly. So, you know, if I knew how hard that would have been to do all the research and then

• 5:41Speaker 01

  make it really simple, you know, I might have taken a different approach, or, you know, I think that's the Steve Jobs. It's very hard to make something complex really simple and really intuitive. And if you can do it, then I think it's a contribution. Well, yeah, I mean, I hope it matters in the world. That would be the reason for me to do it, right? But it was a lot harder than I anticipated.

• 6:05Lewis Howes?

  Right. Okay, so Amy, how did you decide who you were gonna interview and how many number interviews you were gonna do? Why not 100 interviews, or 50? Why 200, and why those people you chose?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the larger the data set, the sort of more real the result. This is the largest data set of high-impact entrepreneurs. I spent five years at Harvard as a senior fellow. I'm teaching now at Stanford Business School on this material. This is the biggest data set that I know about in the country on people who have scaled companies zero to a hundred million in annual revenue. So that's the target. You have to be a founder of a company that's over a hundred million in annual revenue with five years of history so that we would eliminate like the tech companies that run up and run down, but not more than 10 years of a ramp. So companies like Under Armour. I know you're a former football player, so that was started by Kevin Plank out of the University of Maryland.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  And that's a high-impact company, but it took 10 years

• 7:05Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  to get to a hundred million in annual revenue. It's now a three billion in annual revenue company. But that was not a super fast-out-of-the-gate startup.

• 7:15Lewis Howes?

  You know, I remember. That's interesting. And I remember actually my junior year in high school, so 1990, what was this? 19, maybe this is 2000, 1999 or 2000, somewhere around there. I remember hearing about this company that my friend's like dad was selling as a retailer and it had just started and they were selling it to like high school football teams and lacrosse teams in like the Midwest and the Northeast. And it was called Under Armour. And I remember getting like my first Under Armour shirt and I was like, this is a game changer because it was so annoying wearing football pads with just a regular cotton t-shirt

• 7:55Lewis Howes?

  for how like much you would sweat and how heavy it would feel and just it was so uncomfortable. And when we got that, like I never wore anything else besides Under Armour, so.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so here's the little-known secret that Kevin loves to say and it's featured in the book. It's so great that. The original synthetic material to change from cotton T-shirts under football uniforms to synthetic, right, to wick away moisture. That is the same material as found in women's lingerie.

• 8:23Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  So you, my friend, like soft fabrics.

• 8:26Lewis Howes?

  Might as well just put a bra on, is what you're saying.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And that's what he didn't go around telling people. I mean, he was like, you know, putting these shirts on these huge, big, tough football players and not exactly telling, you know, where the manufacturing was coming from, what the fabric was. And of course, people liked it because it worked. It just made athletics and across sports now, lacrosse and baseball, and the fastest growing demographic out of the Under Armour brand now is women's sports athletic gear. So, I mean, it really is a great story. But it's, you know, a lot of people don't realize that Kevin Plank was looking in places other people might not have been looking.

• 9:02Lewis Howes?

  Sure. And that's probably one of the key ingredients, which is pretty cool. And what was the other criteria? So it was a hundred million in annual revenue or there was a social enterprise criteria?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Right. So there are some social entrepreneurs who are also featured in the data set. So founders of Teach for America, Ashoka Endeavor, Vision Spring, Acumen Fund, Room to Read, a bunch of the different startups, First Robotics, which I love. And you have to have reached more than a hundred thousand people as a social entrepreneur. So be a founder of a nonprofit that also goes to scale. And what I found is that, you know, whether you're doing a social enterprise, a social entrepreneurship endeavor, a business entrepreneurship endeavor, these skills are really very universal. And they're applicable to the big kind of aha out of it or cracking the code, right, is that you can create and scale your ideas anywhere you are.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  So you could be inside of a large company, you could be inside of GE or IBM, right, or HP or somewhere else, and also be a creator if you apply the six skills. So the data set is entrepreneurs, but the application is much wider.

• 10:08Lewis Howes?

  And why, we're about to get into the six skills here in a second, but why just six? Why not seven or 10?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  So it's it's just what comes out of the research. So, um, you know, 200 interviews, I have 10,000 pages of transcripts off of those interviews. And then I went out and reviewed, um, 5,000 extra pages of annual reports and 10 Ks and 10 Qs and everything else and 4,000, um, pages of academic studies across disciplines. So from cognitive psychology to creativity to behavioral economics and sociology, like different experiments that would also back up and pressure test the findings. Um, so the way that this kind of research works is you you start really big and then you distill down, you code things and you group into categories and you come up, um, with repeated patterns and then a new theory.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  And the six skills are what I continue to see repeated. So there weren't five, there weren't 10, there weren't seven. I mean, as the as the distillation goes forward in this kind of research, um, it just was clear that six things every single one of these entrepreneurs shared and, um, they just kept showing up over and over.

• 11:17Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. I like it. I want everyone to make sure they got a pen and paper out so they're taking notes because this is, uh, some powerful stuff. And as I went through these six, um, key ingredients with myself, you know, there's a lot of books that I read. And the ones I really like are the ones that are confirming what I'm already doing that's working. And, uh, and then the ones that teach me things that I that I need to learn still. And the six keys did both that for me. It was like, okay, it's confirming some of the things that have helped me get to where I'm at. And it's also reinforcing what I get to continue to work on every single day as an entrepreneur to get to the next level. So let's go with the first one, if you're cool with that, which is finding the gap. Can we talk about that? And there are three distinct techniques to finding the gap, right?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Right. So, um, the first skill is called find the gap and it's about how do you see opportunities that other people don't see? And there are three patterns that I can discover out of, um, the research. One is what I'm calling as a sunbird. So a sunbird is an Australian word for hummingbird. And it's the idea, like a hummingbird would, that you pick something up in one place and then you fly it over and you apply it in another place. And, um, you know, all of us have the ability to do that. We can lift and shift ideas. We can pick them up and put them down. And the kind of entrepreneur uh who does this, there's a man named Bob Langer out of MIT. He runs the largest biotechnology lab in the world. And he, for example, sees the Intel Inside chip inside of a computer.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And he says, hey, I can make a Intel Inside chip for the human body. And so he's done that and he's made a pharmacy on a chip to um emit osteoporosis drugs. So it's implanted in the body and then as of two thousand twelve, instead of taking injections for osteoporosis, you can wirelessly um sort of emit this drug in your system. So it's an example of seeing something in one place and then, you know, taking it or reapplying it somewhere else. Howard Schultz at Starbucks is an example that we all know because he didn't um come up with the idea of a coffee house. He saw it, right? He experienced this in Italy. He liked it. He saw it as the third place.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  If your home is the first place and office is the second place, it was the third place people were gathering. So he picked that up and he flew it back into Seattle and I grew up in Seattle. And what people don't know is he didn't do it right the first time. He actually lifted that concept, but you have to do the Sunbird thing with a twist. You have to make it relevant to what you're doing. And he brought in to Seattle this bow tie clad waiters and opera music. And, you know, Starbucks was like a stand up bar with little porcelain cups and everything else. And, you know, it didn't go down in Seattle because Seattle at the time was the grunge scene. It was Kurt Cobain. It was like, you know, it rains all the time, people are informal or they wear Gore-Tex. They're not really into like the opera stand up bar idea.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  So he had to take that and then twist it to Starbucks, what we know today as a place you can hang out, right? It's a third place and it's a coffee house and it's a gathering spot and everything else. But it's a idea that you can spot something, see a gap and then move an idea, but you have to often tailor it.

• 14:25Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  So that's one way of seeing and then. Another way of finding a gap would be, um, what I'm calling as an architect. So Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX and PayPal and SolarCity and a bunch of companies. He basically builds from the ground up. So just as an architect would build a building from the ground up, um. Entrepreneurs like this, they look for open spaces, they look for unaddressed needs. They look for friction points or things, um, irritations, right? And then they build piece by piece. It's, it's reasoning by first principles and that's a very physics way to approach things. Elon is a physicist by training. Um, and he, for example, with SpaceX, decided he could just build a rocket a different way.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And he started doing that in Hawthorne, California, and they are now resupplying the International Space Station at one tenth the cost that NASA did. Is extraordinary. So he has built it a different way. Um, and that's an example of an architect. You can, you know, see things and then just reason by first principles. Um, and then a third way of finding a gap would be like the Chipotle founder does. So Steve Els is a classically trained chef and he was, you know, from Denver, Colorado, but living in San Francisco. And working at one of the really elite restaurants in San Fran and loving burritos. He was like hanging out in the Mission District and eating, you know, Mexican food and burritos and stuff.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  And deciding that you could make fast food, not just hamburger patties that were frozen and reheated. You could make it fast casual, like a casual restaurant. So he integrated two ideas, this restaurant concept with fast food. You put that together and you get fast casual, you get Chipotle. It's cooking for the line. So people are cooking right in front of you. As the line gets longer, they cook more. As the line gets shorter, they cook less. But, um, it's seeing a gap in the marketplace by smashing, mashing and smashing two things together and creating something new. So that's the first skill. Yeah.

• 16:26Lewis Howes?

  Okay. And the second one is drive for daylight. What does that mean?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  So, driving for daylight is how a race car driver can manage speed. So, you, if you're, you know, driving really, really fast, you're not looking at the lines on the pavement or the competitors next to you. You're always looking for the light on the horizon. So, you're driving towards the light. And I actually tested this. I heard a lot of entrepreneurs talking about this kind of race car driver thing. And I signed up for NASCAR Driving School. I drove Road Atlanta and, you know, drove a car at like 155 miles an hour just to see if it would work. And sure enough, you're not looking in the rearview mirror. You're not, I mean, you have to be focused forward. And that's the basic concept here is that if you are in a fast-moving marketplace, a business marketplace, that you have to be looking ahead.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And a great example is the Theranos founder, a woman named Elizabeth Holmes. And she has been in stealth mode for 10 years. She dropped out of Stanford at age 19. She's just turned 30. And she has built a company that is going to revolutionize healthcare, basically. She's just signed a big deal with Walgreens and this technology will roll across all the Walgreens in the United States. And what it is, is a little pinprick with a few drops of blood, she can turn around 200 to 300 diagnostic tests in a couple hours. That's very different. And, and, you know, that's about the speed to solutions for diagnostic testing. It's very different than going for an annual physical, getting your blood drawn, waiting

• 17:57Speaker 01

  a few days, wondering what the result is, waiting a few more days, getting a few more tests and all of that. This is a really fast technology, but it's taken 10 years to build. So, the long horizon view here is that if you make it easy for people, accessible, cheap, painless, that people will get the data analytics out of their blood. They can walk into a Walgreens, get a little tiny pinprick, and we might detect cancer before it's a tumor. We might detect heart disease before you have a heart attack. Then we could actually see precursors to disease and detect and prevent. And so, that's taken a long time to build, but it is something that is always going to look forward. So, it's an example of driving for daylight.

• 18:42Lewis Howes?

  So, do you think it's, so are you saying essentially not to worry about what your competitors are doing? Or more, see what they're doing, but focus on your, you know, your game first?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's focus on your game first. I mean, you have to be aware. You can't be completely tunnel visioned, right? You have to be alert and aware. But Kevin Plank, so back to the Under Armour story, you know, he'll say, if Under Armour falls down, it's not because of the competition. And this is an athletics thing. It's because of how you play your own game. It's how you think about your own future. It's where you're gonna drive the ball, what you're gonna do, how you're gonna do it, and how the team's gonna come together to move forward. So a point in this chapter is really that you have to avoid nostalgia. You can't be emotional and you can't be looking back. And so Kevin, using Under Armour as an example, when they launched the women's business, their first women's business as a football player,

• 19:36Speaker 01

  he just did shrink it and pink it. It's a great story because they, all of their size smalls were selling out. He couldn't figure out why, so women were buying size small.

• 19:44Lewis Howes?

  That's hilarious.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  And, yeah. And so he was like, okay, great, I'm just gonna shrink it and pink it. I'm gonna make the same stuff, small and in pink. And then it totally didn't work, and he had to scrap all of it. He took a really big loss. He sent it all to the incinerator, right? He just did away with it. He had to hire in a women's team from Reebok and Nike and a bunch of other places. And he wasn't nostalgic about it. He's like, well, we made a big mistake there. That was big. But we'll just move it forward. Same thing with the idea that he made the anti-cotton. You know, Under Armour was the anti-cotton company. They hated cotton. It was all synthetic fabrics and how athletes would perform better with synthetic gear.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  But then, six years into his company, he looked in the closet of consumers and found that if they had thirty shirts, the twenty-four of them were still cotton.

• 20:38Lewis Howes?

  Right, so he's missing a big opportunity.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, huge. And so, again, he wasn't nostalgic about that. They now have a cotton t-shirt. They do all kind of cotton products. But it's charged cotton. So this is the idea that you can't look back and say, oh, I was defined as the anti-cotton company. No, you can't be nostalgic about it. It's only forward. So you know, at any moment in time, you just keep moving forward.

• 20:59Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting because I get a lot of questions from entrepreneurs, especially in the online marketing space. You know, I think it's like a fifty five billion dollar industry now is like the online education industry. And so a lot of my friends are creating educational courses and content and things like that. And some of them get hung up on what others are doing in the marketplace. You know, they have their product launched at a certain month, so they don't want to step on their toes, or you know, they're creating similar courses and the same type of topics. And they don't want to, you know, step on anyone's toes. And then I asked a good friend of mine, Brett Johnson, recently, who's doing really well in the in the space. And he was like, you know, we decided a long time ago that we were going to run our own race. We weren't going to be worried about which friends were coming

• 21:43Lewis Howes?

  out with what products at what time. We're going to run our own race because it is a small industry. And, you know, there's like, people on multiple different email lists and blogs that they follow. So, you know, some people get hung up on that. But I think it's cool that you talk about and drive for daylight and kind of run your own race. I like that.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's also research out of the University of Chicago that shows that to-go thinking, this is mentioned in this chapter, if you think about what's to go, the ground that is in front of you, that you're a lot more likely to accomplish a goal. So when you're committed to the goal, like, for example, the running the race thing, talk about a marathon, like, if you were in a marathon, and you're a mile eighteen, you could think, oh, my feet hurt, my legs hurt, you know, I'm so tired, I've already covered all this ground. You are less likely to complete the marathon. If you just focus ahead on what's left to go, you're a lot more likely to complete. And that research is shown across education. So students in a course, if they think, ah, I'm sixty percent done with the course. No, if they think, I just have forty percent left to go.

• 22:46Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Or losing weight, if you're like, ah, I want to lose thirty pounds, and you think, I already lost twenty pounds, isn't that great? Then you're not as likely, if you think, no, to have ten more to go.

• 22:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  So over and over, this research is shown out of the University of Chicago, that you focus on what's to go, and you throw more energy and commitment and resources and motivation behind a goal.

• 23:07Lewis Howes?

  I like that. Okay. So drive for daylight. And so number three then, what's number three?

• 23:12Speaker 01

  So number three is called Fly the Oodle Loop. And it stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. And this is a fast cycle iteration loop. It is originally, it came out of the Air Force. So it's a fighter pilot mantra where if you really want to outmaneuver a competitor, if you're sitting in the cockpit of a jet and you want to win a dogfight, you have to observe, orient, decide, and act faster than a competitor. And there was this guy named John Boyd, who's known as Forty Second Boyd. He could shoot down an opposing fighter jet in forty seconds or less. And he came out of the Korean War. The legend is that he absolutely never lost. And so the question that I'm interested in is how do you apply that into a business framework?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  And an example that you can look at is the PayPal mafia. So the PayPal team, they're called the PayPal mafia. The original guys at PayPal, they observe, orient, decide, and act faster than the competitor. They changed their business six times. They have six different models in eighteen months. And they sell PayPal to eBay when the tech bubble burst in 2001. Everybody else is shutting their doors, it's doom and gloom. I was in business school at Stanford at the time. And it was like, you know, everyone thought technology was over. Silicon Valley was done. And then the PayPal guys, the first twelve guys, they go on to launch the whole next iteration of the web, basically.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  They're the founders of Yelp and YouTube and LinkedIn and Slide and Tesla Motors and SpaceX. They're the first investors in Facebook. I mean, the list goes on and on of what they create out there. And so when you spend time with them and you ask like, what is it? Like, how do you do that? They inevitably say, well, they can basically observe, orient, decide, and act faster. They make decisions and they keep making quick decisions. When they see something that doesn't make sense, like Yelp, Jeremy Stopham, the founder of Yelp, he was an intern at PayPal. And what he learned at PayPal was when something doesn't make sense, jump on it. Like, go for the glitch, figure it out. And so when he started Yelp, that was an email referral system.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  And they had this tiny little feature that said, yeah, people don't know that. It was not a review site. They had this tiny little feature that they built in that said, would you like to write a review? And Jeremy didn't think anybody would think it was fun to review like the local dry cleaner or the restaurant or the nail salon or the hair salon, whatever. He's like, yeah, nobody cares about doing that. But what he found out, and the quote in the book that I love is like, he looks for a, quote, "counterintuitive blip of data." And if there's something counterintuitive and it's data-driven, he will just go for it. And that's what they found, was that people wanted to write reviews. They did think it was fun. Everybody wanted to review their local neighborhood and all the different stuff. And so Yelp became a review site.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  But it's the ability to observe that, orient to it, decide and act really quickly and build it.

• 26:14Lewis Howes?

  Now, what would you say to people who may feel like they are afraid to do that, to make too many changes because they're getting distracted from their original vision or their mission? And it kind of gets them off track and they go nowhere if they change too many times. What do you say to that?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Well, there's inherent tension between these skills. So, I mean, that's the exact tension between driving for daylight and flying the Oodle Loop, right? So you want to drive towards a long-term goal and you want to know. I think that, given the global economy now, it's too hard to anticipate where we're going. I think you might have been able to do that 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Now, you know, technology is accelerating really, really quickly and there's all the data around that. The global economy means that certain things that are happening in one place can affect you across the globe you can't even anticipate, right?

• 26:59Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So I think that you cannot be fixated on, you know, what my target is. You have to have a purpose-driven mission. You have to like think that you are driving for daylight towards something you want to achieve, but you have to, the inherent tension is you have to be able to iterate. So you have to find that balance. You can't be only spinning, you know, into different iterations and you can't be only fixated on a long-term goal. You have to somehow move between.

• 27:27Lewis Howes?

  And that's like a constant dance is what you're saying. You've got to learn how to dance.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, yeah. And then bringing back to the sports thing, you have to have all the techniques, but you also have to get in the flow. I mean, you have to be able to do both. So, yeah, I think that there's some trade-off back and forth.

• 27:42Lewis Howes?

  Which, which leads perfectly into the next point, which is fail wisely.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Right, so the third skill is about failing wisely. And that idea is that, again, we're not going to be able to be perfect. So in the past, people wanted to be a four-point student. They wanted to have

• 27:59Lewis Howes?

  Which I was not.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, zero risk in a system, in a business system, right? It was about taking ideas and scaling up and replicating a known model. That, again, because of the way the world is changing, is pretty impossible to think is gonna be the way today works or tomorrow works. So failing wisely is about knowing that you will be imperfect and then getting up one more time or honing the resilience, learning through. And it's what I'm calling setting a failure ratio. So, meaning, you think ahead of time, "Hey, I will get it wrong 20% of the time," or "One in three, one in three things I try won't work," and that's okay. You just don't want the ratio to be zero. Because if you have a zero ratio,

• 28:45Speaker 01

  you actually think that there's zero tolerance for failure. And it's impossible. So a lot of companies

• 28:51Lewis Howes?

  So you wanna fail.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do. You wanna fail incrementally and not catastrophically. So if you test a whole lot of little experiments, if you have a ratio that says, "I really do wanna get it wrong 20% of the time," or 40% of the time, or 10 or something, then you're building in an ability to push the envelope and not be blindsided.

• 29:13Lewis Howes?

  I like that. What would you say is one of the biggest fails you heard during the research you did?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Well, entrepreneurs fail for a lot of reasons. I would say two of the reasons are you run out of money, right? So people just don't have enough financing to stay alive long enough, to make an idea work. But the thing that I think is not talked about as much, but is definitely a big factor, is teams. So internal dynamics can destroy a startup, or any kind of a business, any type of a group. You have to be able to handle conflict and communicate well and have your team fly together, basically, through all the iterations of what's gonna go on. People think that startups fail because the product doesn't meet the market

• 30:01Speaker 01

  or because, you know, something shifts and they miss a target, whatever. It's really a team that can respond to that. But if the team doesn't respond to that, the team melts down, you just can't, you can't make it.

• 30:15Lewis Howes?

  What do you think is the best way to develop a great winning team internally?

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's the next skill. It's called network minds. It's perfect. It's a perfect setup. That's skill number five. And what I think is, so network minds is about bringing cognitive diversity towards you. It's about bringing other brain power to help you solve problems. And that's what makes really good teams. Not having the exact same point of view, but different people with different problem solving abilities. And then building on each other's ideas. So there are multiple examples of this. One I like to talk about is at GE. So I don't know, have you had an MRI? I bet you have.

• 30:58Lewis Howes?

  I've never had an MRI. I've had surgery, but I haven't had an MRI.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so the designer of the MRI machine at GE, it's a beautiful technology. They make absolutely fabulous screens. His name is Doug Dietz, and he was at a hospital and observing how great this technology was when a seven-year-old little girl came to get a scan. And like most children, she completely melted down. She was like holding the hands of her parents, and she came around the corner and she saw this big scary machine, which you have to be in the machine.

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  It's scary, yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the machine. It's loud, it's claustrophobic, it's cold. You have to be completely still in order for the scan to work. It's really hard to explain to kids. And so she had to be sedated. Eighty percent of children have to be sedated to take these scans, which then ups the medical risk and it makes the whole thing, you know, this kind of traumatic experience for people. So he felt like his technology, his great creation, hadn't worked. And what he did in response is he networked minds. He brought together really unusual people

• 32:05Speaker 01

  and talked to them about how to make it better. So he had a lot of kids. He had a lot of daycare providers. He brought together people who designed children's art museum exhibits. You know, how do kids engage with things? Certainly doctors and nurses and the GE medical designers. All these different people got together and started really trying to explore how to make it better for children. And the kids were talking about things like, you know, space odyssey trips and dressing up like their older sister and jungle safaris, like all the stuff the kids think about, right?

• 32:37Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And they designed that so it's now the adventure series for kids. And if you see a G E M R I machine for children, it's dressed up as one of seven adventures. So there's like, yeah.

• 32:50Lewis Howes?

  That's amazing.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  There's like a nautical adventure, there's a jungle adventure, there's a space adventure. There's all these different things. And so now when the kids go to the hospital, they meet a camp counselor. Instead of a nurse, they get a backpack with stuff. They get told this whole narrative about how they'll have to be quiet, it'll be loud. You know, in the space thing, there'll be aliens going around, they just have to be quiet and this and that and the other. And the sedation rate is basically down to zero.

• 33:15Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man, that's cool. Cause they want, they want to be in the experience now as opposed to.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so that's what Doug said, he, you know, he's such a great person to talk to about this because that's what he said. He's like, you know, he knew it was a win when he heard a little kid leaving the hospital say, I want to come back tomorrow. Like, that was fun because it's like this adventure, right? Instead of thinking that you're going to get this really scary medical screen. But in, in the world of, you know, networking minds is an example of how you can bring really different brain power together and solve a problem.

• 33:46Lewis Howes?

  That's really powerful. And this is a, you know, something that when I read this, it was reconfirming what I was doing was working because I've been joining and being a part of masterminds for, I don't know, five or six years now. And they always help me solve problems that I couldn't solve myself. When I bring a collective group of powerful, smart people together who know a lot more than I do, that can teach me things that I still don't know. Whenever I'm in, you know.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:13Lewis Howes?

  And whenever I'm unable to figure out what's in the gap, other people can figure it out for me.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:17Lewis Howes?

  I don't have to figure it out myself. So I, I highly recommend, um, you know, finding groups of inspiring smart individuals that you can collectively brainstorm ideas for whatever problem you have to solve that. So that's a great point, which leads to our next one, point number six, which is gift small goods. Can you talk about that?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Right, so this is a really important skill and kind of counterintuitive because what it is, it's called gift, small goods, and a small good in the workplace would be forwarding a resume, or writing a few lines of code, or critiquing a proposal, helping some, one of your colleagues in a way that's meaningful, like a small gift, but it's not that anyone is gonna throw themselves in front of the train for you. And that's a quote that Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn likes to say, like, nobody's gonna do these huge things, but they will do small, little, meaningful kindnesses to try to help others out. And this is the basis of LinkedIn itself. If we have a transparent system

• 35:19Speaker 01

  in which we can reference check each other and forward resumes and, you know, create business opportunities or professional opportunities, what it does, the counterintuitive point here is that it makes everyone more productive. So it used to be right, kind of morally right, to be a good guy, or to, you know, help others, but now it makes you more productive, and the reason is, your reputation is known. Like, it's transparent. So people who are gifting and generously supporting others, information comes to them, deal flow comes to them, talent comes to them. People wanna work with them, right?

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  And people who are cheating somebody, that's also known, so the inverse is also

• 36:00Speaker 01

  correct. And there's some research right now out of Harvard showing that in a dynamic and fluid economy, which is what we have, a networked economy, that people choose who they work with. And so this is different from a factory line. This is different from an assembly line where you might not have chosen the person at the front of the line if you're at the back of the line. This is really a world in which we choose and we reference check and we can communicate very rapidly about other people and their, you know, the way they treat us. And so the research out of Harvard shows, if you are a defector, is what they're calling it, like, if you don't collaborate, you will be cut off. And so you're cut out, and then you're isolated. And people who have experienced that are twice as likely to collaborate in the future.

• 36:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Because they learned their lesson. They don't wanna be cut out.

• 36:44Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Right? So it's all about gifting small goods and the fact that it's, it's kind of good behavior. There's pressure on better behavior is really great.

• 36:53Lewis Howes?

  No, that's powerful. And I remember when I, when I was first kind of just jumping into the entrepreneurial world. And I was sleeping on my sister's couch and I hadn't graduated college yet. It took me seven years to finish and I felt like I didn't have any skills. I didn't have any experience. I was a truck driver and a professional football player. That was the only things I'd done. And I remember thinking, how am I going to add value to anyone in this world? Um, after being injured and not playing football anymore, what am I going to do? And all I started doing was going to events, meeting people. I spent about six hours a day on LinkedIn for about a year and a half and connected with people. Yeah, I wrote a book about LinkedIn and hosted LinkedIn events for a couple of years and um,

• 37:34Lewis Howes?

  I remember thinking, I don't know, I don't have any skills to offer to anyone to, to like make money with or to build a company around. But what I could do was I could connect people with other people that could support them. Um, and, and figure out what their needs were, their challenges were, then find the others to connect to them to support that. And I just started doing those little small acts.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:54Lewis Howes?

  And I'll tell you what, it built up over time and it's been the most rewarding thing that's ever happened. Uh, is by connecting with so many people and supporting them through connections as well.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really a meaningful thing to do. So yeah, I, I completely agree.

• 38:07Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Um, okay. I want a couple of questions left for you, um, before we wrap things up, because I think this is fascinating. I want everyone to make sure to pick this up. The Creator's Code, The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs. I'll have it linked up for you guys here in a second where you can get this over on my site. Uh, but you can get it at any bookstore as well and on Amazon as well. Um, a couple of questions left for you. Amy, I've been asking a lot of people this on the podcast lately. I know that you, um, spent five years researching and writing this book. So now let's say it's the end of time for you, you know, in a hundred years from now, it's your last day.

• 38:47Lewis Howes?

  And this book and every other creation you've ever created has somehow vanished from the internet and the world. And you have a pen and a piece of paper and you get to write down three truths to leave behind to your friends, your family, to the world, for anyone to know about what you learned and the three things you know to be true about the world that you want to pass along. What would those three truths be?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Hmm, that's an interesting question. So what are the three truths? I would say one is that we're supposed to help each other by design. Right, I think that that's how humans are designed. Nobody does these things alone. Like, life is not meant to be lived alone. So I think that in a professional sense, really, we're supposed to be building ideas together. So that's one of them. I think another one of them is that kindness wins. So, I, you know, I think people used to think nice guys finish last. I don't think that's at all the, the truth. And I think actually with rapid connectivity, that nice guys really finish first.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  So I think kindness is, is paramount. And then, what would my third be? I guess, you know, it's for, it's always about people for me. So I think it's about speaking the truth as you see it. Right? And so I think coming with a point of view and that's important to try to know yourself well enough to know what your point of view is. Being very inclusive and listening to other points of view is important. But I think having your own voice and finding your own voice is also really important.

• 40:27Lewis Howes?

  I love that. Thank you for sharing. What are you most grateful for in your life recently?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  I would say all of the love exhibited and shown by all of my friends and colleagues and family as I launched this book. It's amazing. People are all putting up pictures. I mean, today I saw a picture from Indonesia where this book showed up. Yesterday, a friend spotted it on Good Morning America on a bookshelf. It's so funny. And so people are taking pictures of the book. I think because I've spent five years, a lot of people have seen me struggle for a long time to get this book launched. And so I'm extremely grateful for all the love around, you know, getting it into the world.

• 41:07Lewis Howes?

  Very cool. And I love your dedication to the book. You said dedicated to the things that haven't happened yet and the dreamers who will make them come true. And I'm curious, what hasn't happened yet that you dream about coming true?

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, I mean, well, the dedication of the book is because there's just so many ideas left to create, right? There's so many things we can't even imagine yet that I'm sure in one and two and five years are going to fundamentally change the way that all of us live. I guess I can't even tell you what they are. I just have the fundamental belief that there's, you know, the best is yet to come. People are continuing to build things that are marvelous, that are wondrous. I can hardly wait to see what they are.

• 41:51Lewis Howes?

  Right? In the last 10 years alone, it's been crazy how everything's changed and how everything's shifted in business and life and everything. Yeah. Okay. Well, one final question for you before I let you go, but I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Amy, for spending five years of your life dedicating to essentially cracking the code for all of us who struggle. And I think it's really valuable and important when people take the time and energy to learn how to solve problems in the world for the rest of us. And it's something that I try to do with this podcast, and I know how challenging it can be. So I want to acknowledge you for the gift that you have to extract this information, the most valuable information for entrepreneurs, so that the rest of us can have a little

• 42:36Lewis Howes?

  bit easier time executing. And I appreciate and acknowledge you for all that hard work and dedication you've had to completing it and coming out with a great product. So congratulations.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I really hope it helps people. That would be the whole reason for doing it.

• 42:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  So I hope it matters.

• 42:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's really powerful. Final question, Amy, and I appreciate you coming on. It's what's your definition of greatness?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  What is my definition of greatness? I think it's to, I think it's to help others in the world. I mean, I think, again, it's that we build things together. So my definition of greatness is to be helpful and to be forward looking and to be with other people in building and creating ideas. That's what I think is great.

• 43:23Lewis Howes?

  There you go. Amy Wilkinson, thank you so much for coming on.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Thank you. I appreciate it.

• 43:31Lewis Howes?

  And there you have it guys, I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, then make sure to go back to the show notes at LewisHowes.com/173 and make sure to subscribe to this podcast over on iTunes, over on SoundCloud, over on Stitcher. And let me know what you think. The best way to let me know what you think is by sharing it out with your friends over on Facebook and Twitter and social media, or even sending an email to someone. If you, if you know someone who's an entrepreneur, who's trying to take their business to the next level, and you know that these six keys will be helpful for them in doing that, then feel free to send them an email. Again, LewisHowes.com/173 and tell them to listen to this episode with me and Amy. Again, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode.

• 44:13Lewis Howes?

  We've got all the notes back at LewisHowes.com/173. And you guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.