#168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography)

What I learned from reading Driven: An Autobiography by Larry Miller. ---- [1:01] I decided I had to be extremely good at something. [2:47] I’m sorry to say, neglecting my family to do all of the above. I worked and worked and worked, day after day, night after night, dawn to bedtime. [5:23] He owned movie theaters, auto dealerships, a motorsports park with a world-class racetrack, a movie production company, an advertising agency, ranches, restaurants, TV and radio stations, a real-estate development company, an NBA franchise, a professional baseball team, an NBA arena, sports apparel stores—nearly 90 companies in all, in six states, with 7,000 employees, all under the umbrella of The Larry H. Miller Group, which produces $3.2 billion in sales annually, ranking it among the 200 largest privately owned companies in the United States. [7:23] The chain of events that began my entrepreneurial career was sparked by three failures: I dropped out of college, got laid off, and got demoted. [35:22] It’s excellence for the sake of excellence. It just feels good being excellent, doing your best, learning everything you can about anything to which you apply yourself and then doing that thing well. [38:40] The insanely long hours that I worked were driven by fear, but then the success became intoxicating. Clearly, my motivation to work like that shifted from fear-driven to success-driven. [40:36] A bunch of people say, “I wanna have . . .” and “I wanna be . . .” but they’re not willing to pay the price. The price is time and effort and being a student of what you’re doing. [48:15] https://patrickcollison.com/fast. [56:15] Working all the time made me successful. It made me a failure, too. I missed most of my children’s youth. I missed ball games and science fairs and back-to-school nights. I missed the first day of kindergarten and playing catch in the yard. I missed dinner at home with my wife and kids. [1:00:53] I try to pass these painful lessons to others who might be tempted by the allure of professional success. Mine is a cautionary tale. ---- 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?

  I can remember the moment my life changed forever. I had an epiphany one morning, and nearly every detail of that moment is burned into the hard drive of my brain. It was March 1971, and I was at work, managing the parts department at a Toyota dealership in Colorado. I had just taken a parts order over the phone from a body shop, and I was checking to see what parts I had in stock when, like a bucket of cold water, it hit me. Here I was, 27 years old, married with two children and one on the way, and I was responsible for raising and supporting those children, providing food and shelter and college and

• 0:41David Senra?

  housing and much more, while preparing for old age and retirement. And I realized I had nothing to fall back on. I had no college education, no special training. All I had was my energy and whatever talent I'd been blessed with. It scared me. The feeling was so overwhelming that I stopped what I was doing to ponder the matter. I decided I had to be extremely good at something, and the thing I was best at was being a Toyota parts manager. That night, I worked until 10:00 PM. It was the start of my 90-hour-a-week work schedule.

• 1:22David Senra?

  From that moment on, I began working from 7:30 in the morning until 9, 10, or 11 at night, six days a week. I did this for 20 years. I reasoned that other dealers had the same parts and roughly the same prices to offer. I believed service and hustle were the things that would set me apart. I would simply outwork them. I would become so good that it could not be denied. I was obsessed with doing everything I could and accomplishing as much as I could. It was difficult for me to go home with work undone. I wanted it to be done for the next day. A lot of people go through the motions with little sense of urgency.

• 2:06David Senra?

  I had an extreme sense of urgency. A body shop would call and order 21 parts. If I could only find 19 parts, I was ticked off. If I was five minutes late, I was upset because I had created a system that wasn't more responsive. I became a student of everything. Ordering systems, delivery systems, hiring practices, training practices, retention practices. I decided I had to be incredible in all facets so that I could control the outcome. I needed to become the best. I begin my story this way because it is a useful backdrop for any discussion of my life. It colors so much of what I did and so much of what happened to me.

• 2:50David Senra?

  It was central to everything. Whether it was working as a delivery man, or building a private business, or growing into an entrepreneur, or buying the Utah Jazz. Or, as I'm sorry to say, neglecting my family to do all of the above. I worked and worked and worked, day after day, night after night, dawn to bedtime. I was driven to succeed. That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is "Driven," an autobiography by Larry Miller. And this is another book that was recommended to me by a listener. I was not expecting to read it right away. I actually downloaded the sample on Kindle.

• 3:30David Senra?

  And right away, instead of talking about, hey, I built this multi-billion dollar privately-owned business, right up front, Larry serves as a cautionary tale. He's like, don't make the mistake that I did. All I did was work, and as a result of that, I neglected my wife, my kids, everything came second to my work. So there's a lot of interesting and unique ideas and inspiring ideas in this book, but it is going to serve as a cautionary tale, both on neglecting his family and neglecting his health. And I'll obviously talk to you about that in a little bit. Let me give you first an introduction to Larry. It says, "99% of the people in Salt Lake City had done business with one or more services provided by Larry Miller.

• 4:15David Senra?

  Not bad for a man who was a D student in high school and who attended college for only six weeks. He also never took a business class in his life. After dropping out of college, he worked as a stock boy in an auto parts store. And through the sheer force of his personality, his native intelligence, and work ethic, became the most successful entrepreneur in the history of Utah. Sitting in his hilltop mansion that overlooks the entire Salt Lake Valley, he has literally risen above his working-class roots." And one of the most inspiring things is the fact that he didn't have a good education, came from a very terrible family. As he was just talking about in the introduction there, you know, 27 years old, has a normal job, you know, as parts manager at a dealership, but realizing, oh

• 4:57David Senra?

  my God, I'm, I need to be extraordinary. I have all this pressure on me. So there's a lot of, I think, a lot of inspiring takeaways from his early life. So I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about that. Let me go back to this real quick, though, and give you an overview of his business. So it says, "On May 1, 1979, he began operating a Toyota dealership in Utah, and he did, and he couldn't know what he was beginning. Upon his death, 30 years later, he owned movie theaters, auto dealerships, a world-class racetrack, a movie production company, an advertising agency, ranches, restaurants, TV and radio stations, a real estate development company, an NBA franchise, a professional baseball

• 5:39David Senra?

  team, an NBA arena, and sports apparel stores. Nearly 90 companies in all." That's a hell of a 30-year run, right? "Nearly 90 companies in all in six states with 7,000 employees, all under the umbrella of the Larry H. Miller Group, which is still in existence today. His wife, his widow actually runs the company, or owns the company, rather, which produces $3.2 billion in sales annually, ranking it amongst, among the 200 largest privately-owned companies in the United States." And this is his wife summarizing him after his death. He says, or she says, "He was an ordinary man, even though he did extraordinary things."

• 6:22David Senra?

  And what I particularly like is he spends a lot of his time in the book talking about his failures. He, you know, he definitely has an ego, definitely is very proud of what he accomplished, but he talks explicitly said, "Hey, if I could go back and redo things." And that's why he's writing this book as he's dying. Again, I'm gonna use the word cautionary tale. It's a warning from the grave. Don't do... You could take the good, what I did building the companies, because I do have some good ideas doing that, but don't repeat my failures. And so, he talks about that he has this idea that the river, is what he's calling it, all started from failures. So, let me read this section to you. That was very interesting. "I never saw myself doing any of these things.

• 7:04David Senra?

  I was a 41-year-old car dealer when I took my first step outside of the car business with the purchase of the Utah Jazz. It's funny how life is like a river sometimes. And if you do things a certain way, that river will just take you a certain direction. And you ride it out and you see where it takes you. People ask if I set out with a plan. No way. The chain of events that began my entrepreneurial career were sparked by three failures. I dropped out of college. I got laid off. And I got demoted." All right, we're not there yet. We'll get there. Let's go back to when he was a teenager and he's getting kicked out of his house. He says, "One night during the summer of my 16th year, I returned home to find my world turned upside down. As I approached our house,

• 7:49David Senra?

  I saw three sacks on the porch and wondered what they contained. I walked up to the stairs and onto the porch and peeked into the sacks. And I was stunned by what I saw. They were filled with my clothes. I was confused. What's going on? I tried the front door. It was locked. I walked around to the side of the house, to the basement door. It was locked. The house was dark, but I knew my family was in there. Slowly, the realization of what had happened washed over me. I had been kicked out of my house. But why?" And this story is gonna get even crazier here. So, he has to go live with his neighbor. And we see Larry obviously came from a very broken family. So, he's talking about the neighbor that he's crashing at his house. He says, "He came off as a gruff man,

• 8:34David Senra?

  but he really had a heart of gold. He made me feel welcome in his home. And I wound up living there for six months. During all that time, I never had any contact with my family, even though they lived just three blocks away. I felt empty and displaced. But I did not have longings to return home, probably because of the tension that existed there. As Christmas approached, I finally began to experience some of those longings. So, I called my mother and told her simply, 'I think it's time to come home.'" Her response was cool. "You have to talk to your dad," she said. "Two days before Christmas, I moved back home." It was 1963. "In the years since then, Gail," that's his wife, "has interviewed my mother twice

• 9:18David Senra?

  with a tape recorder to learn more about my family history. Both times, she asked my mother while I was kicked out of my house. She could never adequately answer the question to my satisfaction. It's still an issue for me today. I think about it more than I should. I look for answers, and there are none. Dad is gone, and Mom is unapproachable about it." So even before he gets kicked out of his house, his mom, his description of his mom is, she seems really unstable. The examples of her behavior in the book, I can't diagnose her, obviously, but she just reminds me of people that have schizophrenia.

• 10:00David Senra?

  And this is an example, his parents, and it's really his mom, because this is his stepdad. He refers to this guy as his dad. But his real dad, his mom, I think, has him when he's, she's like 16, 17. She's really young. She might be 20, but she's extremely young. And she breaks up with Larry's biological dad, and part of the divorce agreement is that you renounce, like, you're not going to have, they have two kids together, you're not gonna have any contact with them. So Larry's playing softball, and he's 35 years old, and this guy comes up to him and is like, "Hey, Larry, I'm your dad." So that's another just strange, another just strange example or experience that Larry had throughout his life.

• 10:41David Senra?

  But let me go back to this point, where his mom calls the cops on him more than once. And so let me just tell you a little bit about this, because this is just wild. "Even before I was kicked out of the house, the police took me from my home on two different occasions, though no one could ever tell me what crime I was supposed to have committed. One evening, a police officer knocked on their door. My mother answered and then stepped aside as he entered the house. It was immediately clear that she had been expecting him. The cop, whose name was Willie, was very cordial. 'You're Larry Miller,' he began. When I agreed, he said, 'I need you to come with me.'" I was confused. I followed him as we walked to his car, which is parked on another street.

• 11:24David Senra?

  He drove me to the juvenile detention center, which is another name for prison. Inside the building, Officer Willie told me, "The word your parents are using about you is incorrigible. You're impossible to manage." I ventured a question. "What have I done?" This question hung in the air and died. I was checked into the facility and there I stayed for three days. I never went to court and no one ever told me what I had done. My parents had simply called the cops and told them to haul me away. This reminds me of one of my favorite entrepreneurs I discovered through this podcast is Yvon Chouinard. And he has this great quote and he says, "If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is staying with his actions.

• 12:09David Senra?

  This sucks. I'm gonna do my own thing." In Larry Miller's case, this is literal. And if you want more, if you haven't listened to the two podcasts I've done on Yvon, The Founder's Number 18 and Founder's Number 60. And I have another book of his that I'll do again in the future. He's just, he's got a really, he's the guy that started Patagonia, which is one of the largest privately held businesses in the world. But he's got a very unique business philosophy that he expresses in those books. All right, let me go back to the second time. Now, I'm not done with going back to how dysfunctional this environment that Larry grew up in is. It says, this is another time that he went to juvie. And the reason I'm going to include this section is because now he directly ties this experience to how driven he becomes later in life.

• 12:53David Senra?

  And I think his realization or his takeaway from this experience might be, even though you might have never gone to juvenile or jail or prison in general, I think it's relatable to a lot of people and I'll get there in a second. It says, "I was taken again to the juvenile detention center for several days. I don't believe I broke a law and I was never charged with doing so. I have been bitter about it ever since." And this is such an important sentence to me. Whose parents called the police on them?

• 13:21David Senra?

  My childhood ended there. I had another epiphany of sorts. I realized that while I was in detention, that I did not feel compelled to regain my freedom and to return home. Although I didn't like detention, home was not much better. I wasn't overly stressed that I was there, and the realization of this disturbed me. I have wondered if this is now comes to what he's taking away from this experience that I think is translatable to a lot of other people. I have wondered if the things I've accomplished over the years in my typically maniacal and driven style didn't come about as a result of my not wanting ever to lose control of my own destiny again. And this is, of course, a main theme that runs through almost all of these biographies, is the desire for control, for independence and control.

• 14:06David Senra?

  Going back to Larry here. There have been many times in my life when I refused to leave any deal undone so that I would never again have to be subject to the whims of others, whether it was parents who wanted to jail me or a boss who wanted to fire me. And this is probably the most important sentence of this entire section. I had experienced vulnerability, and I didn't like it. So not only surviving this dysfunctional environment adds to its drive, but this is also something, unfortunately, when you're raised, and I think this may be more common than it is not unfortunate in our species, is that there's a lot of broken parents that are unable or unwilling to fix themselves, and so they pass through generations terrible habits.

• 14:50David Senra?

  So you might have been raised, some kids are raised in a terrible environment, and then they have kids and they just duplicate or copy what they see. And it only takes one person to break this generational curse, is the way I would see it. This is Larry's wife on Larry's relationship with his mother, and this is after Larry dies. Listen to this, this is wild. He struggled with his relationship with his mother all his life. In the end, his mother was not aware that he was dying. He wouldn't let me call her. He didn't want to deal with her. He didn't have anything to say with her. Now, here's the problem, though. This is now Larry's wife continuing about not Larry, because Larry obviously didn't grow up in a loving environment,

• 15:32David Senra?

  didn't realize that, yes, it's good to financially support your kids, but they also need you to be there. So he says, when he had children, he wanted to give them the very best of everything. He believed his role was to provide what they needed. He didn't realize how important he was as a father and role model because he hadn't had parents who did that for him. Okay, so that's enough about the terrible family relationships. He does say, "Hey, I screwed up with my own kids." He wants to have like 23 grandkids, but he says, "I was better with my grandkids." But again, he feels that the mistakes he made, when he talks later in the book about how he doesn't feel his children... He feels his children are better with their children than he was with his own.

• 16:11David Senra?

  So that, you know, this trend of poor family life seems to have ended. I want to go back to his early life though, because it's really important to understand. It was not obvious at all that Larry was going to be successful. And an indication of that, he starts dating his wife. I think they started dating in like high school. I think they met in middle school. And when he was in high school, and even soon thereafter, his future in-laws did not like him. They thought he was a loser. So it says, "Her parents didn't like me, and I didn't blame them. I wasn't the kind of kid a father and mother wanted their daughter to marry. They considered me a ne'er-do-well," which is just a complicated way to say a loser. "It was hard to argue otherwise.

• 16:56David Senra?

  They pestered Gail about me. Why don't you date someone else?" Even, now this is where it turns around though. "Even after we were married," now the first maybe decade of his marriage, you know, he still... It took him a long time to wind up turning in or changing, maybe evolving into the person he wanted to become, right? So he says, "Even after we were married, my mother-in-law didn't like me much." And, but this is where it shifts. This is very, very interesting. Which was ironic, because after we became successful, she would sometimes introduce Gail as Larry Miller's wife. Okay, so I didn't like him when he was a loser. Oh, now he's rich and successful, suddenly I like him a lot more.

• 17:36David Senra?

  Now, you can't really control the people's external views of you, but I always think about what I think a lot of people... From an internally driven perspective, right? I think a lot of people reverse this. It's important to note this because most people get the order reversed. Bill Walsh, in his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself, and there's been other examples of this, but he talks about this all the time, that winners know their winners before their winners. Champions behave like champions before they're champions. Most people don't understand that. They think it's reversed. It's like, oh, you became a champion, now you're gonna act like one. It's like, no, no, I had that belief and that drive way before other people could see it. And I think that's expressed in the difference between.

• 18:20David Senra?

  He probably didn't know it when they first got married, but he damn sure knew it once he made that decision. It's like, hey, I'm gonna do whatever I have to do to become extremely good at something. And even if that took a few years to manifest to other people, for other people to see, he knew it right then. Let's go, we're still not there, let's go to what he was doing before he starts working in the auto industry. So he says, "This is just a bunch of odd jobs." And really, the point that I'm bringing this up to you is it's very common for people to be unsure of what to do. So he says, "After dropping out of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And so I wandered aimlessly through a series of odd jobs that taught me what I didn't want to do. I worked in a book bindery, I framed houses, I mixed and carried concrete, I drove delivery

• 19:04David Senra?

  trucks, and I picked strawberries. None of these jobs held much interest for me, but a pattern began to emerge that would prove significant." And then now we get to the first actual idea of his that he uses throughout his entire career. So he says, "I discovered I had a knack of creating work systems that produced stunning results, and this had served me well throughout my professional career." So this section is a lot longer. I'm gonna skip over and just give you the punchline. He's working at a company, they have to pack records into boxes and then ship them out. So he figures out a way to 10x the amount of records they could pack per hour. And this is essentially what the main point is. "As I look back now, I realize I was practicing time and motion studies, although I didn't know it at the time.

• 19:48David Senra?

  It was simply a manifestation of my personality and would become the hallmark of my labor style. I was making efficient use of his time." So what he would do is if, he's got a lot of jobs that are just repetitive, right? They're low-paying, usually physical labor, and he realizes, I'm doing the same thing every day. So he actually does something that's really smart. He steps back and analyzes every single section of... Of the task that he has in front of him and realizes, hey, there's faster ways to do this. So he calls that time in motion study. There's a bunch of examples in the book. If you're interested, definitely read it about him doing time in motion study. What it made me think of is one of my favorite books I've ever read for the podcast was the autobiography

• 20:30David Senra?

  of Chung Ju Young. He winds up becoming this, he was one of the poorest boys in South Korea, founds Hyundai and a bunch of other businesses, becomes the richest person in South Korea. But he said something in that book that was very interesting. He's writing that, I think, when he was in his 80s. And he talks about, you need to make use of this evenly distributed capital. Evenly distributed capital. What is he talking about? He's talking about you, everybody has 24 hours a day. So he says, "Time is a form of capital, provided equally to everyone. If I can be considered a successful person, it's only because I made the best use of this evenly distributed capital." So Larry would agree with that statement as well. Best use of the evenly distributed capital for work. He definitely didn't use the best use of that for other areas of life, mainly family and health. Okay, so through

• 21:14David Senra?

  a series of these jobs, he just keeps getting, you know, normal, basic jobs. He doesn't have a college education. He's, you know, he doesn't consider himself that smart yet at this, at this point in his life. But he starts working for a, for auto parts store. And he's ventured, this is where he's, he gets the experience and eventually starts working for dealerships. And he's going to be promoted up the ranks of dealership. Then he's going to get demoted and then that's going to make him jump to buy his first car dealership. And that's going to lay the foundation for this gigantic private company that he builds. But I just want to pull out this one, a few sentences here, because I thought this was very interesting, how he framed why he was working so much. And this is before he decides, hey, I'm going to work 90 hours a week, whatever it was. So he says,

• 21:58David Senra?

  "I was soon working seven days a week, every hour they were open for four months." So he did this previous in his life, but he didn't always do this. Once he has that epiphany that I talked about the very opening, that then he, you know, carries that on for 20 years. But this is the reason, he says, he says, "Listen, I'm working all these hours." And he says, "I was doing this so I could learn." So he's putting in more hours so he can learn faster. And what was the result? Within a year, I was doing the hiring, firing, scheduling and ordering of parts. So he's going to jump around. He's dealing with a lot of poorly run businesses, a lot of, he's being taken advantage of. Essentially, he gets cheated by five different employers before he finds one that he's going to work for for eight years.

• 22:41David Senra?

  And a lot of the cheating comes to say, you know, usually has to do with pay or hours or promotions. So promises were made to him as an employee from his employer that are not kept. And so when that happens repeatedly, he'll jump. But really, the takeaways, as I discovered so often early in my career, businesses often don't take care of their employees or provide them with proper support. So having had that done to him when he was young, didn't have a lot of resources, he thought he was being taken advantage of. And in the book, he talks about, hey, if I ever get an opportunity to run up my own business or to have employees, I'm going to make sure I don't do that. So his next boss actually does what he said he would do.

• 23:24David Senra?

  And this allows Larry to stay with him for eight years and to actually develop the skill set that he's going to need to apply to his own business. So this is a very important part of his life. And he's managing the parts in a dealership. That's what he, that's his, was his specialty before he runs the entire thing. So he says, "We went from 961st in the nation in part sales to first in 28 months. We set records every month." And he's got some good ideas here, which I'm going to tie to some previous entrepreneurs, too. "We not only became the first Toyota parts dealership to reach 1 million in annual sales, but we reached 2 million before anyone else reached 1 million. And we became the first to reach 3 million in sales as well.

• 24:09David Senra?

  When I took over the job, Gene, my boss, told me, 'We're going to hand you the ball.' Well, I ran with it." Now, this is a really smart idea. Most parts managers are limited to their primary market, which is within 10 to 15 miles of where they work. So how the hell do you go from 961st to 28th, right? You're not just gonna do a, you can't do 10 or 15%. I mean, this is a commodity business. He just told us, he's like, everybody's got the basically same parts. Everybody's got basically same prices, right? So he does something that's really, really smart about how he expanded his market. So he says, "Most parts managers are limited to their primary market." So I got 10 to 15 mile radius. I can't, I'm not gonna go from 961st, 961st, excuse me, to first, right?

• 24:52David Senra?

  So he says, "I developed a national wholesale business. So now I went from a range of 10 to 15 miles to 3,000. I also hired a good staff and solicited businesses from body shops and independent mechanics." These are people, so now he's going from inbound. Maybe they pull out the Yellow Pages and they just call up the closest person. Now they're calling and visiting and saying, "Hey, I have, let me make a relationship with you. When you need a part, you call me." Essentially, the way he expanded the market reminds me very much of what William Randolph Hearst did, right? So William Randolph Hearst builds this gigantic media empire, right? He owns newspapers all over the country, takes the same stories that appear in the newspaper, repurposes them in radio, TV stations, and I think he might have, he has to built,

• 25:35David Senra?

  he has to have had built one of the biggest media companies ever. But before he did that, he had one newspaper. It was a San Francisco Examiner in San Francisco, and he realizes, "Hey, I got tons of other competition," right? It's very similar to what is happening to Larry. He's like, "They're offering a newspaper, I'm offering a newspaper." So what he does, he's like, "Well, there's only 350,000 people living in San Francisco at the time. So even if I was able to sell newspaper data to every one of them, I'm limited, a circulation of 350,000." I think before he dies, his circulation, his daily circulation at peak was like 15 million people. So what he does, he's like, okay, he starts shipping his newspaper by train to other cities in California. And therefore, his circulation increases rapidly.

• 26:19David Senra?

  Not only is he getting more money because they're buying it, but now his advertisers can advertise to more people. It's a very, very smart move, very similar to what Larry Miller's doing here. So going back to this, Larry says, "I worked tirelessly. I was driven to excel. I was working 14 or 15 hours a day, 16 days a week." And so this starts to pay off. His, the people, his two, there's two guys that own the dealership that he's working for is like, this guy just took us from 961st to first. Now we're doing 3 million a year. This is bananas. So it says, Gene called me into his office and told me, we're going to promote you to general manager. Larry says, I was surprised. Such promotions didn't happen to parts managers. They happened in the sales department. So why would they do that? Because who's going to make you more money? Sales, usually sales departments, right?

• 27:02David Senra?

  But his, his results were so extreme. We're like, well, what happens if we put Larry, Larry in charge of all of this? The plan called me to, the plan called for me to begin following Gene around for a few days, beginning January 21st to learn his job. I love what Gene does here. But on December 15th, Gene called me into his office and said, look, I've got some things to do at the Chevrolet store. If you need me, just answer my phone and open my mail and conduct sales meetings and call me if you have a problem. He never came back. It took me a long time to realize that this was by design. He decided that the best way for me to learn was simply to throw me into the job. I called, I called, and then this is another smart realization that, that Larry has here.

• 27:46David Senra?

  He's like, I'm learning from Gene, but I'm going to take the, the ideas and everything I learned from Gene and then I'm going to, I'm going to allow those, those ideas to meld in my mind with my own ideas. And the combination of those two, those two things are going to, the end result or the outcome is going to be a unique idea that I can apply that may be even better what Gene could do. So he says, I called Gene often in the beginning, but one day it occurred to me that in every situation I faced, I was always wondering how my mentor Gene would do it. I decided I couldn't worry about that anymore. I was going to do it how Larry would do it. It was the dawn of a new era for me. So he always says, in the book, over and over, he says, listen, I was a car guy. I turned myself into an entrepreneur.

• 28:28David Senra?

  So he said, and this is the beginning of that, I took the entrepreneurial ideas, talking about expanding market, all the stuff he did in the parts department, I had in the parts department and ran with them without being shackled by preconceived notions of what could and could not be done.

• 28:42David Senra?

  And so he does this for you. I'm skipping. I'm going through this, obviously, really, really fast. There's more detail in the book, but just three years later, look what happens as a result of this. Gene and Chuck came to me and said, hey, we want you to run all five of our dealerships. We're going to make you operations manager. After about a decade of wandering from one job and one employer to another, uncertain about what I wanted to do or for whom I wanted to work, I had found a home. Now, I need to pause here. This is extremely important. He has no, he's happy. He's making good money. He's running five dealerships. He has no desire to run a business. There's no need for it. So remember, go back to the river of failure, his idea he had, the river of failure, right? Something

• 29:26David Senra?

  is going to have to happen to change that. And if these guys never made the mistake, there might, you and I probably wouldn't be talking about Larry Miller right now. So it's very interesting, turning a negative into a positive. Something we all have to learn and to do in life. So it says, before I get there, I want to give you an insight into his personality because he does, you know, tons of people on this, that we've covered on the podcast, have similar personality types. They are driven to win. They have to win. When I did that three-part series on Larry Ellison, I was also watching the documentary, the documentary on Michael Jordan, The Last Dance. And I realized, as I'm reading all these books on Larry Ellison and watching, and you know, I was a huge Michael Jordan fan when I was a kid, still am to this day. But I realized, it's like, oh my

• 30:09David Senra?

  God, if Michael Jordan ever sold enterprise software, he'd be Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison talks about this, like, he's got this hole in his heart and it can only, it'll never be filled, but he's driven by competition and his maniacal desire to win. Larry Miller is very similar to that. A representative from another local car dealership called Miller every month to ask him how he was consistently beating them in part sales. Miller simply said he didn't know. But after the fifth or sixth call, he finally told the man, "Okay, I'll tell you. I come to work every day with the sole purpose of beating you guys." So he's, again, he's not going to want, his desire was not to go from 961st to second, to third. He had to be the best.

• 30:53David Senra?

  So everything's going well for a series of years. He's finally on solid footing. And then his boss tells him that he wants to groom his sons to take over the business. So this is the horrible thing that leads. I called him Jim. His name's not Jim. Leads, I'm reading my own notes. His name's not Jim, David. This is the horrible thing that happens for Larry, that leads Larry to entrepreneurship. He drew an organizational chart of his real estate and car businesses. He indicated that he was overseeing the real estate business himself. That brought us to the automobile side of his holdings. Chuck had eight sons and he wanted them to follow in his footsteps on the automotive side.

• 31:36David Senra?

  The bottom line was he was going to put his sons in charge of the automobile dealerships and I was being demoted to general manager of one store with no cut in pay. So here's Chuck's mistake. He's like, listen, I love Larry. He's great, but you know, my son's got to come in here. I want you to train him. I'm still going to pay you. Listen, Chuck might be thinking, this is going to be good for you. You have the same amount of pay, but less work. That's, that's not the kind of person Larry was. He wanted me to mentor some of his sons. I was blindsided by this. I thought I was going to be doing this for the rest of my career. But in reality, he had planned to give the business to his sons and never told me. I was churning inside. Think about this.

• 32:16David Senra?

  At this point, he, he gave these people eight years of his life. You can't get that back. I realized that the demotion would dead end my career. It closed off my horizons. I quickly realized that running one store was no longer enough for me. I had no, and this is, it gets even worse. I had no plan for my next move. Of course he didn't have a plan because he didn't think he was going to make a next move. After eight years of working there, I knew it was time to move on. What happened next was a major turning point in my life. And this is the main, the most important part of this section. Sometimes we must take a step back before we can move forward in a way we would never have imagined.

• 32:55David Senra?

  So as a result of being in this industry for so long, he was friends with other people that owned dealerships. So he goes out, you know, he's depressed at this time. He goes out to his friend named Gardner. So he says, I took Gardner to lunch. And Larry asked him a question. When are you going to sell me your dealership? It was an old gag between us, a ritual we had practiced for years. Gardner had always turned me down and we would laugh about it. This time I was stunned when Gardner replied, how about today? Are you serious? Yeah, we can put it together. We got in our cars and returned to the dealership and began negotiations immediately. I was 35 years old and I had worked for car dealers most of my adult professional life.

• 33:35David Senra?

  And just like that, on April 6th, 1979, I bought a car dealership for $3.5 million. We only had $80,000 in the bank. So that's the important part. He's like, okay, well, where did this guy get $3.5 million? He didn't. And so this is also going to be a crazy thing. There's a lot of founders that are going to caution you taking this route. But Larry leveraged, he says, we were leveraged to our eyeballs. So he has to get out a ton of loans. He does not have money for this. And in a sense, the way he explains this later, he's like, it has to work. You don't understand. I had, it had to work.

• 34:18David Senra?

  He says, if you go by the book, you're not supposed to be leveraged more than one to one, although some banks and manufacturers might go two to one. I was about 40 to one. And this is very interesting. This is how he thought, this is five words. This is how he thought about the loans. I was betting on myself. But keep that, keep that in your mind later on because he's going to over leverage himself several times. He's going to get eventually to the point where he never has to do that again. And again, if they, if when he's at that high leverage, if things go, don't go his way, he's wiped out, he's done. And he knows that. So let me talk a little bit about how he works and his mindset, because I think this is interesting. There are few great secrets to my professional success. Just hard work and a conscious attempt to draw lessons from things that happened to

• 35:01David Senra?

  me and around me to learn everything I can about my job and find a better way to do it. So he's saying, hey, listen, I'll just work hard. I'm going to learn all the time. And then it's not just sit here and learn all day. I was like, I'm going to apply what I learned. Whether something was a success or failure, I tried to understand why that happened and I tried to learn from it. This is an insight into his mindset. This is a note from his journal. It's excellence for the sake of excellence. It feels, it just feels good being excellent. Doing your best, learning everything you can about anything to which you apply yourself, and then doing that, doing those things well. And Larry, like countless other people that we studied, they read biographies of people,

• 35:44David Senra?

  of great people that came before them, and then they use what they learn and apply it to their lives. And one person that he winds up reading a biography on and really identifying with, surprisingly enough, was John Adams. So it says, "Miller considered John Adams a kindred spirit after reading David McCullough's biography of the man." He loved David McCullough's writing so much, and I did too, that he winds up hiring McCullough on two separate occasions. One time he pays him $40,000 to give a speech. I think that could have been to his company. And the second time, I think he paid him $50,000 to come speak, and I think that might have been to students or some kind of charity organization. But he really loved McCullough's writing. I'll get there in one second. So it says, "In Larry's copy of the book, he marked a quote that Adams made late in

• 36:29David Senra?

  his life." And this is a quote from John Adams. "I sleep well, my appetite is good, work hard, I work hard, my conscience is neat and easy. I'm content to live and I'm willing to die, and I'm hoping to do a little good." This perfectly described Miller near the end of his life. He also marked this passage, written by McCullough. "Through all his life, Adams would be happiest when there was a clear purpose to his days." And that was, he says, that, this was Miller too. So McCullough, the reason I recommend McCullough's books is because there's some biographers that just go way too deep with detail. You know, I don't need to know the colors of the subject's grandmother's curtains in her room. It's just too much, okay? McCullough has the ability to write succinct biography.

• 37:14David Senra?

  So I always say, a book that I could recommend to anybody doing, that wants to do anything hard in their life is The Wright Brothers. McCullough wrote a fantastic biography of the Wright Brothers, and you can read it in a weekend. I bet you it's less than 300 pages. I don't have it in front of me. It's Founder's number 21, 28, if you haven't listened to that. I just read, and then more recently, I just read McCullough's biography. It's a biography on Teddy Roosevelt, it's Founder's Number 156, but I think it's the fir- it only covers like the first 26 or 28 years of Teddy's life. And again, it's not 900 pages. So McCullough, I think that's what I appreciate about his writing, and I haven't read the John Adams book, he's got a bunch of other ones that I might read, but the ones I've read were succinct.

• 37:56David Senra?

  There's other historical individuals that Larry was inspired by and tried to pattern himself after. One of them is the person I just mentioned, Theodore Roosevelt. So the author of this book says Larry lived his life according to this quote from Theodore Roosevelt. "Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs and be checkered with failure than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight, which that knows no victory nor defeat." And right around this part Larry writes, "I decided that being mediocre is no fun."

• 38:40David Senra?

  I want to talk to you a little bit about why he's doing what he's doing. It's interesting that it changes, right? So his why, when you go back to his epiphany he had, his first why was fear, right? And then when he applies himself and he starts achieving success, that changes to exhilaration. "The insanely long hours that I worked were driven by fear, as I've mentioned, but then the success became intoxicating. Clearly, my motivation to work shifted from fear-driven to success-driven." So this is more of his thoughts on work. "It's about doing a job so meticulously and so in-depth that you really do control the outcome. It's about doing your best work

• 39:23David Senra?

  and discovering your own capacities. That passion and intensity drove me to work long hours. It drove me to find better time management systems. It drove me to learn everything I could..." How many times is he going to repeat this? He says this over and over again in the book. "It drove me to learn everything I could about whatever I was doing, whether it was understanding movie theater design or memorizing serial numbers of automobile parts."

• 39:46David Senra?

  He praises micromanagement, which again, this is, some of this is going to be in conflict because he's saying, hey, you know, other people warn you, don't be a micromanager. I think it's a big reason for my success. But then he also said, you know, to micromanage, that requires a lot more time. And then he, at the end of his life, he regrets giving that much time to his business and not his health and his family. So, you know, take this with, you have to, we have to put all these things in context, right? So he says, "I micromanaged for years and that was a great reason for my success. The hands-on style with which I worked was not about power or control. It was about doing it right. It was about my passion and intensity for whatever I was doing and the outcomes I sought with that intensity."

• 40:28David Senra?

  Then Larry talks about, you know, some people just really do want it more. He's in a commodity business. He's not, his product is not differentiated. So he says, "A bunch of people say, 'I want to have and I want to be,' but they're not willing to pay the price. The price is time and effort and being a student of what you're doing." So when I read that, I just recently reread my highlights from, I think it might be Founder's number 116, I'm not sure. It's Sam Bronfman, who, you know, that's, I think, the first time I realized a pattern that was emerging as I continued to read all these biographies. And there's this idea of being a generational inflection point, being the one person that's going to take your family from poverty and change that, literally change the direction of your entire family for generations, as Sam Bronfman did.

• 41:12David Senra?

  And before Sam Bronfman was able to achieve that, he's starting out in the liquor business in Canada, the whiskey business. And there's all kinds of bizarre laws in Canada and also during prohibition in the United States. And so the people that had, they're just called a liquor license for simplicity's sake. The people that had a liquor license, they were grandfathered in. So if you owned a hotel and it had a liquor license, that liquor license is transferred with the sale of the hotel. But you can't just get a new liquor license, like they weren't giving any more out. So this guy was selling a business, one of these hotels, and Sam wanted it, but he knew he had competition from this other person. And they're both They were both going to approach the person selling the hotel, the license.

• 41:57David Senra?

  When they got back, the guy's on like, uh, he's very far away, so like the, the very rural, uh, frozen Canadian wilderness. I think he may be on a hunting trip or something like that. And so Sam's competition is just like, okay, well, when he gets back, I'm gonna, you know, pitch him, maybe I'll offer him more than Sam wants to buy. Sam hires a person, again, this is rural frozen Canada, Canada, and he says, hey, I need you to, to take me by your dog sled to this remote location because I'm not gonna wait for this guy to get back. So again, some people want it more. And Sam Bronpan rode a dog sled in below freezing temperatures for six days. He gets to the guy's campsite, winds up doing the

• 42:42David Senra?

  negotiation and gets it. So by the time he, Sam gets back to the civilization, his, his potential competitor doesn't even know the deal's already done. So again, I think one of the benefits of reading barter is you realize that life can be as broad as you want to make it. And every single person we study here is an extreme, extreme person. Uh, this is a great, uh, little story. This is Sam, uh, Sam, this is Larry remembering a lesson that his grandfather taught him. Uh, I skipped over a part, but I, I gave you the, the main punchline where it was just like, hey, he keeps getting screwed over by all these, by all these, um, potential employers. And so he goes, while this is happening, this is many years in the past now, he meets with his grandpa and he's just like, okay, well, they want to screw me, like, they want to just pay me a dollar fifty or whatever. I'll give him a dollar fifty worth of effort. And his grandfather's

• 43:27David Senra?

  like, no, no. And this is, you know, this is the benefit of having wise or older people in your life. I often remember the discussion with my grandpa that had such profound influence on my life and the way I worked. You'll remember that I was discouraged because I was working very hard and had earned great responsibility from my employer, and yet I was paid like everyone else and was refused a raise. I told my grandpa that if they were gonna pay me a dollar forty-five an hour, then I would give them only a dollar forty-five in effort. This is so smart by his grandfather. That's when he told me that no one would know the difference except me.

• 43:58David Senra?

  And then he promised me that if I worked as hard as I could and learned all that I could in business, someday would pay off many times over. It was not about my employer. It was about me. Everything grandpa, everything my grandpa promised me had, has come to pass. This is more, this is another example of the unusual way he worked. So he owns the Utah Jazz at this point. He buys 50% of the team for $8 million. Could you imagine that happening now? Uh, winds up having to buy the rest of the team. This is, he's highly leveraged at the time. He does not have that much money when he's doing it. Um, his family, actually, they owned the Jazz for, I don't know, a long time. They just sold it, um, to a tech entrepreneur, I think is in his 40s. And this is recent, this may be the last like five, 10 years, something like that. And it was sold for over a billion dollars.

• 44:43David Senra?

  So it just gives you an idea of like how much the, uh, the, the appreciation and, and value. Um, but anyways, we're not there yet. He, he, he has to build, um, a new arena. Cause if he stays in the old arena, he's going to lose too much money. And it goes up because of something to do with the collective bargaining agreement. So he'd lose like $2 million the first year, $4 million the next, $6 million after that. He's like, I don't have, I can't lose $6 million. Like I don't have that money. So he winds up having to build what's called the Delta Center. I don't know what it's called now, but at the time it's called the Delta Center. He has to do it really fast. Uh, so I'll get there, but this is again, an example of very unusual way he, he worked. I thrive on work in the details. Instead of delegating, as I should have, I dived into the minutia of every project we undertook.

• 45:27David Senra?

  Even amid the great concerns about deadlines and costs and architectural issues when we were building the Delta Center, I was involved in every aspect of the project. Even the window blinds and the type of concrete block we would use. I worked for weeks to research what type of trees we should plant in front of the arena. I bought books on trees. I consulted several horticulturists, which I guess are experts on trees. I drove around town to see what various trees looked like when they were mature. I became an expert on trees. What CEO of a billion dollar company does this? I was that intense about everything.

• 46:03David Senra?

  Something to know about Larry, it's not ever explicitly mentioned in the book, but you can read between the lines. "He didn't really start, I don't think he ever started any dealerships. He bought existing dealerships and I think before, at his peak, he might have owned like 40 something. But this is what he learned from negotiations to buy another dealership. "I told him I didn't have several million and I was hoping that he would release me the property for a few years and let me get my bearings. He got very indignant." So this is a guy trying to sell his dealership, right? "Look," he said, "this is a Toyota franchise in a Sunbelt city. This store will be sold before the day is over. I've got guys coming in limos and private jets to buy this. I was more than a little offended, so I said, "When these high-budget guys get in their limos and fly home and you've still got this store to sell me, call me."

• 46:46David Senra?

  He responded, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out." Three weeks later, I get a call from this guy and he acted like we were long-lost buddies. He asked if I was still willing to make the same offer and I said yes. This transaction taught me a principle that I've employed many times since then. Establish what something is worth to you, whether you're buying a hubcap or a large dealership, and then stick with it. If you get in a bidding situation, you can let emotion carry you way past your limits of good sense. I made what I thought was a fair offer for both the buyer and the seller and I didn't let this guy pressure me into inflating what value I put on it." Now, this is very interesting. Again, he's writing this, he knows he's dying. He's in extremely poor health.

• 47:28David Senra?

  And this is, I have to bring this to your attention because it appears over and over again, when you have people writing their autobiography, it's inevitably going to come towards the end of their life and their business is vastly different than it was when they started and they always miss the early days. It's very unique, very interesting. "I loved those early years of my entrepreneurial career. I miss them. I had to be creative to put together deals to finance our many ventures simply because I couldn't get traditional financing in those days. Today, it's not nearly as much fun. Over the years, I've found that I became less interested in overseeing the day-to-day operations of the company and much more interested, excuse me, much more focused, rather, on

• 48:11David Senra?

  bringing ideas to life and building things."

• 48:16David Senra?

  So let's go back to the construction of the Delta Center because this is very interesting to me. And really, the takeaway from this entire section is things can always be done faster. So remember to push, push, push. There's a great website I go to all the time, the founder of Stripe, Patrick Collison, has a really interesting personal website. And one of, one page that I find so interesting on the website is patrickcollison.com/fast. I'll link it in the show notes, but I just told you the URL. And what will be interesting is he put together, Patrick also reads a lot, he has a great understanding of history. I found a lot of books on his website actually to read. But this particular page has examples

• 48:59David Senra?

  of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. So he lists all these historical ventures, examples rather, and then contrasts that with like our inability to do the same thing today. And then, then he further goes on, like he has a section called what's going on. And he's trying to figure out like, why can we no longer, why is it so much, why is it rare for us to be able to move fast and accomplish important things? And he's never said this explicitly, but I imagine his interest in this is because it's what he's doing. He's building, you know, Stripe is a, what, multi-billion dollar, private company at this point that I'm recording this, but he's trying to accomplish, he's trying to get

• 49:42David Senra?

  a group of, to get people together to quickly accomplish ambitious things together, right? Because every single, not every single one, but there's a lot of examples where you understand that success is a function of time, that we all have limited time and we need to go as fast as possible. That doesn't mean we're rushing through, which means we're taking it seriously. Think of Jeff Bezos' motto for his space company. It's Latin, it translates to step by step ferociously. It's like, we're going to be patient, but we're going to be very purposeful in the actions that we take and if we can get them done faster, we're going to do them as fast as possible. So take a look at that page, it's very interesting, but this is an example of that when when Larry's building the Delta Center, because again, if he doesn't get this done, this could be a multi

• 50:27David Senra?

  tens of millions of dollars mistake. So it says, "Now for the difficult part, construction. Time was not on our side. Every year we remained in the Salt Palace, I would lose lots of money because of escalating salaries. Two million of losses in the first year, four million in the second year, six million in the third year, and so forth and so on. There was no way around it. I could handle the losses for the first couple of years, even though I didn't like it, but I was not in a position to lose six or eight million dollars. I had to get the arena done before the start of the 1991 season, or I would take those those kind of losses. It was now May of 1990. We had 16 months to get this thing done, which I learned is nearly impossible for the construction of a 20,000-seat arena. I had assumed that once we had the go-ahead,

• 51:11David Senra?

  that once we gave the go-ahead to the architects, to begin designing the arena, the plans would be finished in six to eight weeks and we could start building. But it quickly became clear to me that such expectations were unrealistic. So I asked the architect, "If I locked you in a room and said, 'Don't come out until the plans are done,' when would I see you?" And he said, "14 to 15 months." "Well, we've got to build when we're designing then," I said. I didn't even know this was possible. This is known as fast-tracking. In other words, the owner's conception of the building, the architect's design, the engineer's designs and calculations, and the construction of the building all occur at the same time. You build while you plan, with the planning and design staying just one step ahead of construction.

• 51:54David Senra?

  For instance, when you pour the first level floor in one corner of the building, the other corner is being excavated. An hour before the concrete is poured, changes are being made." That just makes me nervous reading that. The crews worked around the clock during much of the project. They would build forms at night so they could pour concrete during the day. It got so cold that winter that we were unable to pour concrete and had to shut down for two weeks. But other than that, it was full speed ahead. We expected it would take 12 weeks to do the roof system. We did it in 29 days. The Delta Center was completed on October 4th, 1991. We built the arena in 15 months and 24 days.

• 52:36David Senra?

  By far the fastest construction of a major arena in the United States. And that included the two week shutdown for cold weather. It took longer to finance the building than it took to build it. And it's important to point out, this just wouldn't have happened if he just accepted everyone else's time limits. When he was building this construction, it reminded me of the conundrum that the Dodge brothers found themselves in when they were building their factory. So if you remember, this is back on Founder's Number 119. But the Dodge brothers are doing all this, almost their entire business is essentially a subcontractor for the Ford Motor Company. And they realize, hey, Henry Ford's clearly, like you can see piece by piece, he's one in control.

• 53:19David Senra?

  So every aspect that goes into his car, he eventually wants to own himself. And so one day we could wake up and find, hey, Ford doesn't need us anymore. So I think they had like 18 months on their contract, something like that. And they said, hey, we got 18 months to not only fulfill all the orders that Ford needs from us, but for us to design and build and manufacture an entirely new car from scratch. And we don't have a factory to make that car in. And so they wind up having to do this, they get it done, they're there every day. There's a lot of lessons in that book. If you haven't listened to that podcast or read the book, that I think are very valuable. But I just remember them being very, there's a quote by

• 54:00David Senra?

  One of the Dodge Brothers where he says, I'm thoroughly disgusted with them. So he's talking about the subcontractors they hired to build this factory. They seem to think that it makes no difference whether they finish the work this year or next year, as long as they get it done. And I think the reason I want to include that quote is because I think that's the attitude of most people. Most people don't understand that how important that speed is a function, like your success is a function of how fast you can go. That's my hypothesis on why Patrick spent time, you know, he's running this huge company, why he would spend time organizing all this information and using it as a resource not only for himself, but enabling that resource for other people. It's like, you know, things can always go faster than you think they can.

• 54:44David Senra?

  And by using historical advantages, or excuse me, historical examples, like it can motivate you, it gets you out of that, oh, you know, things just take as long as they think. Because like, no, you can manipulate how fast they go. You can speed them up. And the example in this book of Larry Miller speeding up the construction of the Delta, the Delta Center is an example of that. So after this, this is the last time he has to go all in. And he says, I marvel at the chain of events that changed my life so dramatically. I was a career car parts manager and general manager. I was steeped in the car business and thought that's where I would spend the rest of my professional life. Yet, within six years, almost the day after I bought my first car dealership, I owned half an NBA franchise.

• 55:29David Senra?

  A year later, I owned it all. Even then, even when I wasn't certain how I was going to accomplish something, such as pay off all the debt, I had developed enough confidence in my abilities to know that I would find a way. When David Stern, this was the commissioner of NBA at the time, when David Stern came to town for the arena topping, for the arena topping off party, he asked me, how long are you going to keep playing for table stakes? You put more than your net worth on the line when you, when you bought the first half. Then you put way more than your net worth on the line for the second half. And now you're building, building an arena by yourself and putting it all on the line again. And so this is Larry telling us, "I never had to do it again."

• 56:13David Senra?

  Okay, so even as interesting as all that is, I think now we've finally reached what, to me, is really the most important part of the book. And so he's gonna talk about the decisions he made during his life and what he would do differently. And this is on working every hour of the day. "It made me successful. It made me a failure, too. I missed most of my children's youth. I missed ballgames and science fairs and back-to-school nights. I missed the first day of kindergarten and playing catch in the yard. I missed dinner at home with my wife and kids. I didn't take any time off. I worked all the time. I worked six days a week and on Sunday, I played softball. As Gail likes to say, 'I didn't go to my kids' ballgames, they came to mine. And even when I was at home, I wasn't really there.

• 56:59David Senra?

  Greg, our oldest child, says he learned that when the door to my home office was shut, you didn't open it. And if it was a jar, you entered at your own peril. Gail says that if there was a family problem, I would get really angry and make it worse. So she didn't, so she just didn't tell me about it." So I wanna pause and interrupt. I just had this thought, too, cuz it's, you know, a guy living in 18,000-square-foot house overlooking the city, one of the most famous and widely admired entrepreneurs in his city and state, and yet his kids are realizing he's not happy. "Your kid can't even come into your office without you getting mad."

• 57:41David Senra?

  Okay, let's go back to this. "By the time a problem reached me, it had already spiraled out of control and I would step in and overreact. The kids were in bed when I got home from work. The only time I saw them was church on Sunday or at my softball games. When they were young, Gail would bring them to the dealership in the evening and we'd go out to dinner, and then afterward, they'd drop me off at work again." And then now he's gonna go into the effect now, okay, this is kids. What about his marriage? He's married for, you know, 40 years, something like that? Says, "When we dated, we were inseparable. Once we married, we hardly saw each other. When I came home at night, I would soak in the tub to unwind, and she would sit on the floor in the bathroom and listen to me talk and talk and talk. Or we'd go on a late night walk, which is another way for me to unwind and be with her.

• 58:27David Senra?

  I would have Gail walk me to the car in the morning to see me off to work. These were our dates. The great irony of my life is that I originally began working those long hours to benefit my wife and kids, but I wound up hurting them. The children suffered without a father figure in the home. Most of them were strong-willed and angry, and some caused trouble and did poorly in school. Four of our five children did not graduate in the traditional way. I look at it now and wonder, what was I thinking? After one of these belated realizations, I asked Gail, "Why didn't you tell me?" She said, "I did. You weren't listening." She tried so many times to get me to slow down or be home more,

• 59:11David Senra?

  but after a while, she decided two things. It made no difference, and it was actually easier not to have me home. I was all, I was so wound up all the time that I was difficult to be around. I didn't know how to be a father. As I achieved success in my career, I felt safe and confident in that environment. I knew what I was doing. As a husband and father, I viewed myself much more as a breadwinner than as an emotional leader. As long as I provided for my family financially, I fulfilled my role. Or so I thought. I didn't realize until my late 40s that not only did my kids and wife have an emotional need for a father and husband, but it was my responsibility. So I'm often asked these questions. Would I do it differently if I had to do it all over again?

• 59:57David Senra?

  I would have been there for the Little League games and scraped knees and the back to school nights. Instead of working 90 hours a week and missing all that stuff, I'd work a more balanced schedule, 55 or 60 hours. If I had to choose between working long hours and being closer to family, I would choose family. That has come to mean more to me now, but unfortunately, I didn't see it until after my kids were grown and gone. Let me interrupt here again. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, starts IKEA at 17, works on it till he dies in his 80s. And he says something in that book, his autobiography, that I've never forgotten. He says, "Childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered." Now, we're seeing Larry Miller say the exact same thing.

• 1:00:41David Senra?

  "I didn't see it until after my kids were grown and gone. It is too late. This is not a mistake you can rectify." I'm able to sit back and enjoy my grandkids more than I did my own kids. "I try to pass these painful lessons to others who might be tempted by all the allure of professional success. Mine is a cautionary tale. I missed all those years with my family and I can't have them back. In some ways, it's so simple. All you've got to do is be there." And here's an example of that. This is his wife after he died. Larry's co-author is interviewing her. He says, "A few weeks after Larry passed away, I met with Gail in her home. I asked her how she was doing.

• 1:01:24David Senra?

  With trademark Miller candor and tears, she said, 'I don't want to sound cold, but I've been waiting for him my whole life. It's not that different now.'" She began to cry as she added, "The only time we were really together was when he got sick and could no longer go to work." Okay, so that's a regret for his family. This is another regret. He did not take care of his health. You can see pictures of him. Didn't exercise, ate terribly, had diabetes, was stressed, and he just went through some horrific health consequences. So this section is really called the long goodbye. He says, "I was out for one of my walks when I suddenly became overcome by extreme fatigue. I returned to the house and told Gail, 'I don't feel good. Something is wrong with me.

• 1:02:07David Senra?

  This is different from anything I've experienced. In retrospect, it was a sign of trouble, but I ignored it the same way I ignored my health for years." And the note I left myself in all caps is, "Avoid this." Gail called my doctor and reported my blood pressure readings. He told her to call an ambulance. This was the start of a 59-day stay in a hospital, during which one problem after another manifested itself. It was as if all those years of neglect and abuse on my body had caught up with me at once. After about three weeks of hospital life, I told Gail I couldn't do it anymore. I began to suffer severe gastrointestinal bleeding. The doctor almost lost me twice that night.

• 1:02:51David Senra?

  This was my fourth time that I had a near-death experience. The truth is, my health had been declining for years, and I was paying for it. Looking back now, I realize that when I quit playing softball, I didn't replace it with anything except more work. And that is the biggest reason I got myself into health problems. I did not exercise, and it put me on a gradual downhill slide for 23 years. I made things worse by eating erratically. For years, I didn't even tell Gail that I had diabetes. I didn't want to admit that I had a problem, so I resisted doing anything about it. I was putting substantial stress on my whole system.

• 1:03:34David Senra?

  The lesson, of course, is to take care of yourself, to make time to eat and sleep and exercise. I learned that too late. Yes, I would do some things differently. Aside from regrets about not spending more time with family, I would enjoy life more. I would spend more time doing the things I love to do. See, we continue this theme, this cautionary tale. Yes, he's very successful. Yes, he built a multi-billion-dollar business. Yes, he had all the material things that you'd think would buy happiness. It's clear, at this point in the story, it's very clear that he did not get that. I was so busy working, I would have enjoyed things more along the way. Gail doesn't believe me. She thinks if I could do it all over again,

• 1:04:18David Senra?

  I'd do it the same way. Maybe she is right.

• 1:04:23David Senra?

  So now he's gonna talk about what was happening in the hospital. He, I mean, he just, oh, this is just terrible. They have to, first they, they start amputating like three toes. Then they're eventually gonna amputate both his legs. He has a heart attack. I mean, he just, oh, oh. He says, "Then the skin on my legs started to turn black and the, and the ends of his legs." Oh, I'm sorry, this is not him writing. This is the author writing. Then this, uh, the co-author. "Then the skin on his legs started to turn black and the ends of his legs were so painful that even to put the dressings over them were excruciating." Uh, that's, this is, so this is after they took the toes. Then they took both legs below the knee. "We realized that something was terribly wrong," said Gail. "Not only did his legs begin to blacken, but so did his fingers.

• 1:05:08David Senra?

  Three of his fingers actually died. Tests revealed that he had calycephalakis." Uh, there's no way I'm gonna pronounce that word. "And had it for some time." This is what it is. "It's a rare disease in which blood vessels fill with calcium, preventing oxygen from reaching the tissue." So that's why his, his extremities are dying. Uh, this is why his legs were beginning to blacken. They were dying. Larry received this news on Thursday, February 12th. This is after years of declining health, being in and out of the hospital, heart attacks, all that stuff. He had months, this is what the doctors are telling him. "He had months to live if he chose to continue the dialysis. Or five to nine days if he chose not to continue it." So he's gotta decide what he's gonna do.

• 1:05:52David Senra?

  He's just talking, just, right now, it's just him and his wife. "We spent the day talking about what to do," says Gail. "His biggest concern was how I was going to manage without him. He had a really hard time with that. Once I convinced him that I'd be okay, he said we needed to call the kids." So he's choosing to go home and die. And this is his death. "The family all gathered around the bed so they could be closer to Larry in his final moments. We stood around him and we said our goodbyes. He took a deep breath and sighed, and then he was gone. A tear fell from his left eye."

• 1:06:31David Senra?

  So Charlie Munger is known for reading hundreds of biographies. He calls it becoming friends with the eminent dead. And I think one of the benefits of that is the constant reminder that we're all temporary and to not waste the most precious resource and asset we have, which is our time. Larry goes to great length in his autobiography to make sure, to bring to our attention, to make sure we're asking ourselves the questions, are we spending the time how we actually really want to? Are we going to regret what we're spending time on? So when I got to this part of the book, it made me think of one of the most important quotes I've ever come across. It's in almost every biography of Steve Jobs. And so I'm going to close on this. And this is what Steve said before he died. "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered

• 1:07:15David Senra?

  to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment, or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." That's where I'm going to leave the story. If you want the full story, I recommend buying 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. That is 168 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.