Pod Insights The Founders Podcast #36 Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent About this episode What I learned from reading Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent by Nolan Bushnell.
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A pong is a piece of advice designed to help enhance creativity. It applies to only where the advice is helpful. Unlike a rule which thinks itself applicable to every situation. (4:36)
Cherish the pink-haired. (16:53)
Hire the obnoxious: Steve Jobs believed he was always right and was willing to push harder and longer than other people who might have had equally good ideas but caved under pressure. (19:07)
Expect to be criticized. Everyone said Atari was nuts. When I explained Chuck E Cheese they laughed. "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad." President of Michigan Savings Bank, advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in Ford Motor Company, 1903 (20:23)
One of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question: What books do you like? (24:15)
When your company establishes that anyone can and should contribute, you will end up hearing some very good suggestions coming from unlikely places. (26:03)
I strongly believe that everyone who wants to be creative must find a place where their mind can be alone and untouched any the insanity of complexity. (30:20)
Champion bad ideas: WD-40 is called that because the first 39 versions of the product failed. WD-40 stands for “Water Displacement, 40th formula.” (32:11)
Any idiot can say no. There’s no mental process there. If you don’t like something, the trick is to think of something better. (37:04)
Invent haphazard holidays. Unplanned days off for the entire company (38:00)
Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had a good idea. The thing that matters is what you do with the idea once you get out of the shower. So if there’s only one thing you take from this book, it’s this: You must act! Do something! (41:29)
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Senra? In 1980, business at my company Chuck E. Cheese was thriving, and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house in Paris. At six stories, it spanned 15,000 square feet and featured marble staircases and a swimming pool in the basement. At the time, my wife and I didn't have any furniture, so we thought, "Why not fill it up with people instead?" We threw a huge party, inviting everyone I knew at Chuck E. Cheese and my other company, Atari, and all my old friends as well. At around 9:00 PM, I looked up and noticed that my former Atari employee, Steve Jobs, was at the door. I smiled, and Steve rolled his eyes.
0:44 David Senra? I think he was a little taken aback at the size of the place. While I was going through a grandiose period, Steve was the same as ever: not really a grand kind of guy. I asked how long he'd be in town, and he said a few days. "Let's have breakfast tomorrow then," I offered, and he agreed. At this time, his new company, Apple, was already quite successful, probably doing a little less than $100 million in sales. But nothing close to what Atari or Chuck E. Cheese was earning. In 1980, Atari was bringing in around $2 billion in revenue, and Chuck E. Cheese some $500 million.
1:27 David Senra? I still didn't feel too bad that I had turned down a one-third ownership of Apple, although I was beginning to think it might turn out to be quite a mistake. Steve Jobs offered Nolan a third of Apple for $50,000. Steve and I spent the next day together. We sat for hours and talked about creativity. We then walked around the city for hours. I continued to point out my favorite places to visit, but Steve was most interested in two things: all the creativity he sensed, and the architecture.
2:01 David Senra? "El ordenador va a permitir que más gente sea creativa", dijo Steve. Alrededor de este momento Steve había empezado a considerar el ordenador como el equivalente a una bicicleta para nuestras mentes. "Si miras los animales más rápidos, los seres humanos no están entre ellos", dijo. "A menos que les das una bicicleta, y entonces pueden ganar la carrera". La arquitectura de la ciudad le fascinaba también. "Vio la simplicidad y uniformidad del diseño en los edificios. Tantos de ellos, siete o ocho pisos de altura, y hechos de piedra de color amarillo similar. Exigiendo elegancia y consistencia que instaló un sentido de armonía en el cerebro". "Estaba teniendo dificultades pensando en París como una simplicidad y uniformidad.
2:46 David Senra? Pero el punto de Steve fue que se podía paralizar en cualquier lugar de la ciudad y darse cuenta de que no eras ningún otro que París. "No hay muchas ciudades donde puedas hacer eso", señaló. "La arquitectura aquí crea una signature única para toda la ciudad". "Esa simplicidad parisiana era algo que quería que Apple emulara". "Le pregunté cómo pensaba Apple, y confesó que preocupado que la compañía no estaba innovando lo suficiente. "No estaba feliz con los productos actuales, y se preguntó cómo iba a verse la próxima ola de ordenadores, y qué nuevas innovaciones surgirían. "¿Cómo en el mundo descubres lo siguiente gran cosa?", preguntó.
3:28 David Senra? Steve estaba totalmente ocupado con la evolución de los productos de Apple. "¿Cómo mantenemos a la vanguardia?", quería saber. "Entonces se ríe. "Todos esperan que me invente todas las ideas. "No es así como construimos una compañía fuerte". "Continuó explicando que necesitaba generar más creatividad dentro de la compañía. "Ambos reconocimos que la innovación era la clave para el futuro, y la innovación tendría que venir de la brillantez de todas las personas en Apple, no solo la persona superior". "Lo que me di cuenta entonces fue que el Steve Jobs original creía que tenía que encontrar su propio Steve Jobs". "Pasamos el resto del día hablando de temas relacionados con la creatividad.
4:10 David Senra? "En ese momento me presenté con decenas de sugerencias para Steve, muchas de las cuales escribía. "Seguí pensando que debería escribirlas también, y publicarlas en un libro. "Y ahora, tres décadas después, lo he hecho".
4:25 David Senra? One of the ideas Steve and I addressed was the concept of rules. Neither of us felt that creativity could thrive in the presence of strict ones. Thus, the book you're reading contains no rules. Instead, it has pongs. A pong is a piece of advice, and in the case of this particular book, advice designed to enhance creativity. It applies only where the advice is helpful or needed, unlike a rule which thinks of itself as applicable to every situation. That is probably why most rules don't work. Situations vary. Flexibility is always necessary. If you try to apply the same rules to every person or circumstance, you will find you've planted a field that is sterile and homogeneous.
5:10 David Senra? In that environment, creativity will wither and die. The constant application of inflexible rules stifles the imagination.
5:21 David Senra? Creativity must flow freely and liberally throughout the entire company, and will only succeed if a succession of many people is in place to guide it along, from the Steve Jobs at the top of the chain, all the way down to the potential Steve Jobs at the bottom, who will someday be the architects of your future. Without these people guiding your imagination and your company, there is no future. As management guru Peter Drucker said, "The only source of sustained competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than your competitors." I love that line, and I think that's in large part what we're all trying to do here, is just find a way to learn faster.
6:04 David Senra? So that was an excerpt from the introduction to the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is "Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent", by Nolan Bushnell, who is the founder of Atari, and Chuck E. Cheese, and about 18 other different businesses. So, this book is a little different from the other biographies. That we've read, it's a very, very quick read. It's almost like it's 50 chapters long and I feel like every chapter is basically like a short blog post. So what he was talking about, he calls them pongs, which is just a short little piece of advice that you should apply wherever you find necessary.
6:47 David Senra? So I just picked out a bunch that that I that stuck out to me and I think were very valuable. And so that's going to be the cadence and the flow of this podcast. But before we jump into the rest of the book, just a little updates on this podcast. So for the past month, I was trying, I was doing an experiment with like a Patreon paywall. And I think after 30 days, I'm going to move in a different direction. So I've re-uploaded all the podcasts that were behind the paywall. So you should have them, they're available for free for everybody now.
7:22 David Senra? So two things that I learned from that, one is after 30 days, there's only a few people that actually wanted to subscribe and actually pay for the actual podcast. And that's kind of understandable, it kind of reflects most people's opinion on like digital media nowadays. But the second thing that caught me by surprise was the level of intensity for some of the people that wanted to pay. So I was charging $5 a month to access every other podcast in the entire back catalog. But so you could pay $5 a month to get access. And I didn't say anything else, but almost everybody actually subscribed at a higher level.
8:05 David Senra? So some people were paying 10 on a voluntary basis, which is really crazy to me. 10, 50, and even $100 a month. That level of intensity really surprised me and actually like in a way is really motivating for me to keep doing this. Because I enjoy doing this podcast, I enjoy reading, but sometimes like it makes you question, like, think about all the stories we've seen in all these books. I think we're up to like, what, 36 books that we've gone over together? Almost every single example, like there's like doubt and sometimes I'm like, man, am I doing something that's valuable and useful? And a good way to tell that is if people are willing to like put up money for it.
8:50 David Senra? And for somebody to pay 50 or a hundred dollars, even $10 a month. To listen to a podcast about entrepreneurship that clearly, and that clearly to me demonstrates that, and then also like the reviews and the emails I've been getting. So I don't, I'm going to continue. I have a self-imposed deadline. You're going to get a new Founders Podcast every Monday. And so I'll just have to keep experimenting with ways to make this sustainable. And most podcasts don't talk to you about this. Like I've said before, I love breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to you because that's how the podcasts, like I want
9:32 David Senra? my podcast to be. It's like, I'm not talking at people, I'm talking directly to them. And, you know, podcasts are just businesses. And what are we doing here? We're studying businesses. So, most people keep their podcast business going through ads. And I will, you know, that's not my first choice, but I will if I run out of all other options, you know, to do that. But in the meantime, if you do want to support the podcast, a good way to do it is actually buying the books that I feature here. And the best way to do that is if you go to founderspodcast.com/books, you'll see all of the books that we've done so far. And if you click on one of those and
10:12 David Senra? buy something, then Amazon sends me a small percentage of the sale, and no additional cost to you. So that's a great way to do it. Another way to support, something that you guys have all been doing too, a lot of you guys have been doing is if you leave a rating, like a five-star reviewer rating, anywhere you listen to this podcast, you take a screenshot and then you email it to [email protected] . And I reply back to every email with a podcast, with a link to a podcast that I don't publish anywhere else. They're just created exclusively for people that have reviewed. I already have one done. Everybody that's emailed me so far, I've responded to every single email I've gotten. So if you've emailed me and didn't get a response, try again, make sure you have the email address correct. And it's
10:53 David Senra? in every, all the show notes, and you see it at founderspodcast.com too, if you want to make sure you have it down correctly. And then the last thing is, just like I take a lot of notes on all the books I read, I primarily use podcasts for learning too, so I take a lot of notes and have done for a long time on podcasts. And most of the podcasts I listen to are, they center around entrepreneurship. So I started exporting all of my notes and putting it in one place. And I realized that I actually might have something that's, that's pretty valuable to other entrepreneurs. And that's basically key ideas from podcasts with timestamps and links to every topic discussed.
11:32 David Senra? So right now, I'm calling it Founder's Notes. And if you want to, to support this podcast, a good way to do that is going to founderspodcast.com/notes. And you can buy the beta version of Founder's Notes. So what I did is I took all of my notes with the main ideas from a bunch of different entrepreneurship podcasts. And I was surprised that once I compiled them all into a Google Doc, it was over 60 pages of notes. And so what happens is, it's very similar to the idea of what Blinkist is, when I used to advertise for them on this podcast, what they're doing for nonfiction books. They, they take a book that might take you six hours or 10 hours to read,
12:15 David Senra? and they do a 15 minute summary. Well, I'm kind of doing the same thing for podcasts. But instead of just being as like wide and varied as nonfiction, I'm just focusing on interviews with entrepreneurs. I think that the, there's two, like the best way to learn about entrepreneurship is trying to sell something. That's the first best way. The second best way to learn about entrepreneurship is from entrepreneurs. And so what happens is you take maybe an hour long interview with an entrepreneur, and then I turn it into tweet sized bits of knowledge, and that you could read in probably less than a minute. And if you want to expand on a particular idea that I have listed in the Founder's Notes, why include timestamps to all them? So you can go directly to that part.
12:58 David Senra? So it's basically a way to accelerate learning. And then let's say they mention a tool, a piece of software, a book, something that was integral into like their development of their ideas of their company. Well, then I turn that into a link right in the, in the doc. If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can go to founderspodcast/notes, and go ahead and you can buy that there. That's basically it. That's, that's just an update on my thinking about the podcast. And let's get back into the book. Alright, so this Pong, as we're going to call them, this one is called Adopt Flexible Pongs. And let's go to the book. For example, when Steve Jobs first came to work at Atari, he wanted to be able to sleep overnight at the office.
13:42 David Senra? If people were sleeping under desks and moving about at 3 a.m., the alarms would have been blaring nonstop. So there were rules. No overnight sleeping at the office. But Steve was insistent. He had to sleep at work. Otherwise, he would quit. His friend Steve Wozniak felt the same way. Our chief of security, however, was equally insistent that we should not allow it. But in the end, we decided to permit overnight sleeping and rely on just the guards rather than the alarms for security. Because we wanted to create a comfortable environment for the two Steves. Okay, so that's an example of a pong. They're really, really fast. That pong goes on for about another page, but I'm just gonna...
14:25 David Senra? A lot of the, I guess the reading today is gonna be very similar to like maxims or aphorisms. They're almost, they're very like tweet sized ideas this guy has. Which is, it actually makes it really fun to read. Like I said earlier, this book is short. You could probably finish it in one day, but if not, definitely two days. Okay, so skipping ahead a little bit. I like this idea. And he's saying, listen, out of all the different things you could be selecting employees for, the most important is passion and intensity. Not, he was very, he's not really big on credentialing at all. If there was a single characteristic that separated Steve Jobs from the mass of employees, it was his passionate enthusiasm. This is one of my favorite quotes ever. Steve had one speed.
15:10 David Senra? Full blast. So I've actually heard Nolan on other podcasts and other books describe Steve's one speed as go. So I actually prefer go, but full blast works too. This was the primary reason we hired him.
15:29 David Senra? Okay, so, his first job, this pong, the title of the pong that he wrote was "Look for hobbies", and then my note was, "His first job came from hobbies", so this is before he started Atari, which I think Nolan is most well-known for. I knew he was the founder of Atari, I didn't know until I heard him talk in an interview that he actually founded Chuck E. Cheese as well. "My first job was at Ampex, the video and audio company that pioneered the use of the videotape recorder, and the place where I learned the craft of video engineering. My boss Kurt Wallace hired me in part because he was so impressed with my ham radio hobby. What unites creative people is their passion for diverse knowledge.
16:13 David Senra? It is the driver. Serious hobbies are a sign of this passion. Legendary innovators like Franklin and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities: a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity, but they also share one other defining attribute: they have a lot of hobbies." So remember, every pong is centered around how to create a, not only how to find creative people, but to keep them and to nurture their creative abilities. So, this next story, I love this, I wrote "Encourage the Eclectics", his title was "Cherish the Pink Haired", and I don't know if I'm gonna pronounce this word correctly,
16:58 David Senra? "Eclecticism is highly undervalued in today's job market. Don't let your company dismiss people who dress differently, dye their hair pink, or wear strange jewelry. Minor insanity in the clothing department is a benefit. Every company needs physical and intellectual diversity. As discussed, such people tend to be creative." This kind of reminded me, before I finish the paragraph, if you haven't listened to the podcast I just did on one of the founders of Pixar, Ed Catmull, go back because it's one of my favorite podcasts that I've ever done, because it's one of my favorite books that I've ever written. And I could have, I think the podcast is like 90 minutes long, it could have been 10 hours long,
17:41 David Senra? because there's just no fluff in Ed Catmull's book. If you're an entrepreneur, I think it's a must for you to read it, and it talks about, at Pixar, they're very...
17:55 David Senra? Similar vein of what Nolan's saying, they're not big on hard rules. And what was fascinating to me is the amount of effort. So the workstations that people work in, they can make it look however they want. And some people build like huge styrofoam castles that are like intricately painted. And it's just the amount of creativity that they're expressing in their workstations. I think is very one eclectic to tie back to this book. But also a sign of like, there's deeper things going on in their mind. I think that's very interesting. So some of the best people I ever hired might have been considered somewhat freakish. For instance, the man who created the chip for Pong, Harold Lee, was enormous,
18:38 David Senra? drove a great big tricked out Harley and had a huge graying beard and long straggly hair that I don't think he ever washed. Harold was a brilliant chip designer. I am sure that he would have had one hell of a time getting a job at IBM.
19:01 David Senra? Okay, so the next Pong is kind of counterintuitive. And I think, I don't know how many people would actually agree with this. And it's hire the obnoxious. And he's self-selecting for people that are willing to push harder and longer. I would say those people have, in general, a high degree of disagreeableness, which usually people find socially unacceptable or something they want to avoid. But, well, this has to do with Steve Jobs. So he says, "Steve Jobs understood that Atari was the kind of place that would allow him to flourish, no matter how arrogant he seemed.
19:44 David Senra? Perhaps everyone has creative potential, but only the arrogant are self-confident enough to press their creative ideas on others. Steve believed he was always right, and he was willing to push harder and longer than other people who might have had equally good ideas, but who caved under pressure." So that's actually a really good idea, or an interesting idea to me, presented in a very counterintuitive Pong.
20:13 David Senra? So moving ahead, oh, this is, so the, the book is mainly Nolan looking back on his life and the lessons come from his experience building all these companies, right? And so, uh, the critics don't know shit segment that we have in almost every single founders episode, um, he has a little bit about that here. Um, but I think the, the better way to say that instead of critics don't know shit is just expect to be criticized because that's really what it means. It's just a tongue in cheek way for me to say that. And it said, and you're going to see where he experiences this as well, like almost every single entrepreneur that, uh, we've studied does.
20:55 David Senra? Frankly, most of my life, people have told me I was crazy. Everyone thought my idea to found Atari was nuts. My associates at Ampex took me aside to tell me that the idea of playing game, this is hilarious, that the idea of playing games on a video screen was truly ridiculous. At the time, the only images on a video screen that anyone had ever seen were those on television. Even the idea of creating an image locally was considered nuts. And this is the funny part. I remember one very smart person asking me how the television station knew when someone turned the knob controller on Pong. And of course, the concept of talking animals inhabiting a giant pizza parlor was also
21:39 David Senra? thought to be a harebrained idea. Even now, when I use those words to explain Chuck E. Cheese, people laugh. And what I love here is at the end of this, he, he collects, um, he collects a series of quotes from people talking about create quote unquote crazy ideas. So let me just read, I'm going to read all of them to you because I think it's funny. And it's something to keep in mind because again, history doesn't repeat, but human nature does. It is quite impossible that the noble organs of human speech could ever be replaced by ignoble senseless metal. That was John Bulliard, member of the French Academy of Sciences at a demonstration of the phonograph in 1878. Heavier than, than air flying machines are impossible.
22:24 David Senra? Lord Kelvin, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.
22:30 David Senra? The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad. A president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Interesting to me. We've covered almost all these ideas. If you think the phonograph goes back to the founders' episode on Thomas Edison, flying machines, the one on Wright Brothers, and then, of course, the two other ones, two founders podcasts on Henry Ford so far. Oh, this is great. I think there's a market for about five computers. Thomas J. Watson, chairman of the board, IBM, 1943. Video won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months.
23:13 David Senra? People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night. Daryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox Studios, 1946. The world's potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most. IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, explaining why the photocopyer market was just not large enough to justify production, 1959. There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corporation at the Convention of the World Future Society in 1977. So that was the end of that section. It's just funny to me. It's just, humans will never stop making declarations of things. They have no idea.
23:55 David Senra? And that's something that had to be basically beaten out of me. The, like, we're human, speaking for myself and other, I guess, other humans, we're just very bad at prediction. So maybe we should just stop predicting. And I love that quote, like, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it yourself." So particularly, I'm going to be predisposed to, like, this next Pong. It's "Ask About Books." And this is Nolan's advice for all of us. "One of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question. What books do you like? I've never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits.
24:36 David Senra? Which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read at all. I've known many talented engineers who hated science fiction but loved, say, books on bird watching. A blatant but often accurate generalization: People who are curious and passionate read. People who are apathetic and indifferent don't."
24:59 David Senra? A job with a lot of moving parts benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving parts. It wouldn't be possible to have read that many books without such a brain. And he goes on to list some of his favorite books. A lot of them are science fiction, many of which you probably are familiar with. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is very popular, Lord of the Rings, obviously.
25:22 David Senra? Oh, this is not, The Republic by Plato, Hyperion by Dan Simmons. He's got Sherlock Holmes, he's got a bunch in here. And he says, he also says that his list of favorite books always changes. So I want to skip ahead to his idea of, so the Pong, the title of the Pong he put was institute a degree of anarchy. But what is particularly interesting to me is this idea of directed anarchy. And he says, "One of the best reasons to keep your company horizontal is that creative leaps do not always originate with your top players. Good ideas can come from assistants, janitors, part-time workers, people who are invisible in a strictly vertical company. When your company establishes that anyone can and should contribute,
26:06 David Senra? you will end up hearing some very good suggestions coming from unlikely places. Froggy and Ilya Garcia were a husband and wife team in their 70s, who worked on the Atari factory assembly line, staffed mostly by 20-year-olds." I love this story. "As often as possible, I'd walk to, I'd walk out to the production area and chat with the workers, trying to find out what was really going on. One day Froggy and Ilya told me that if we standardized certain components, we could build our product much faster. Once they explained how this would work, the solution was quite obvious to everyone, but no one else had noticed it. By implementing the Garcia's changes, we probably ended up saving $40 a machine."
26:52 David Senra? So he calls that directed anarchy. It's very similar to what Ed Catmull learned from Ed Deming, I think was the gentleman's name, who was integral in the innovations that Japanese companies were making on the assembly line in the 80s. It just comes from that everybody should be looking for problems because they're going to see problems that you don't see and therefore come up with solutions that you don't see. And I think one of the concrete ways to implement that was they encouraged any person, any worker on the production line to stop the assembly line at any time when they saw a problem, as opposed to trying to say, "Hey, there's a problem," and then going up multiple layers of the chain of command.
27:33 David Senra? Okay, so this pong is called Skunk It Up, and it's Atari's Skunk Works. In the 1940s, aerospace company Lockheed created a special branch and called it Skunk Works. It was enormously successful, and the name stuck. Today, the term describes any group within an organization that is given a high degree of autonomy and whose mission it is to work on advanced or secret projects. Atari had its own Skunk Works as well. Located in an unused WWII-era hospital in Grass Valley, California, the place had thick walls, a bizarre floor plan, and an emergency generator in the basement. At Grass Valley, we assigned a core group of engineers with unique skills in electronics
28:16 David Senra? or mechanics to special teams. Wildly creative people, these individuals had been withering at our headquarters. Out on their own, their imagination soon broke free. A significant number of Atari's best products were spawned here, including the driving games that represented a strong profit stream for Atari. We also created the core design for the Atari 2600, a multi-billion-dollar product that launched the home game console business. Oddly, it's often hard for many employees to understand that the future is also core to the business. Businesses tend to suffer from the tyranny of "now." People think "now" trumps "later."
29:01 David Senra? But if there is no "later," "now" won't do you much good.
29:10 David Senra? And we're gonna see another Steve Jobs anecdote. And this one is on individual isolation. And Nolan's personal opinion that this is very valuable, something that we all need on a weekly basis. And, well, let me just get into the anecdote and you'll see who else thinks it's important. "Steve was always a fan of keeping life simple and meditative. Case in point, usually he would visit me, but once in the 1980s when I was out riding my motorcycle, I decided to drop in on him and see the house he'd bought a year before. I knocked on the door and it took him a long time to answer.
29:53 David Senra? I had woken him up, although it was well after noon. He proceeded to ask me into a home that looked as though he had just moved in. There was almost no furniture and almost no food, just some tea and fruit. We then sat under a tree on a bench in the backyard where he told me that his house represented what he'd always wanted in life, as little clutter as possible. I strongly believe that anyone who wants to be creative must find a place where his or her mind can be alone and untouched by the insanity of complexity. There is a place, a state of mind somewhere between cognitive reasoning and dreaming,
30:35 David Senra? a place where you can find just before you go to sleep or just after you wake up. It is from here that imaginative thoughts spring." And the next poem I want to share with you is Champion the Bad Ideas. And I think a good way to think about this is just you have to turn critical instincts into creative instincts. And so, this is Nolan's experience with this. "I used to employ one of my favorite tricks for enhancing creativity. I would ask everyone to make a list of all the ideas that had been presented at our meetings and then have them rank those ideas from good to bad. I would then take the six items on the bottom of the list and say, 'Let's suppose we were
31:17 David Senra? restricted for the next few months to work on just these six terrible projects. How do we make them work?'" This process reversed people's normal mental dynamic. Instead of trying to figure out what's wrong with something which triggers people's critical instincts, they had to figure out what was right with something which triggers people's creative instincts. I adapted this particular technique from my high school debating coach, who told us on our first day of practice that we were going to have to learn to debate both sides of any proposition. We all soon discovered that arguing for something you don't believe can turn your understanding of the world upside down and help you see issues you had not been able to see before. I love that idea.
32:04 David Senra? Continuing this idea of celebrating failure, which he touches on a bunch. I just want to read you this one sentence that I didn't know and was really interesting. "One of my favorite failure stories is that of the ubiquitous household product WD-40. It's called that because the first 39 versions of the product failed. WD-40 stands for Water Displacement 40th Formula."
32:38 David Senra? So, he has another pong. It's actually one of the longer pongs. And it's the importance of mentor, or what I would say is just seeking like minds. "By definition, creatives are always working on something that's different, innovative, and new. That means most of the people around them aren't going to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, or where they're going with it.
33:04 David Senra? I've had great many mentors. One of the best was Bob Noyce. Dubbed the mayor of Silicon Valley, he co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation, and is also co-credited with the invention of the microchip. Longtime founders, listeners will know that I did a podcast on Bob Noyce based on the wonderful book, The Intel Trinity. So if you don't know who that is, just like we've talked about this many times, that books are the original links."
33:34 David Senra? Bob Noes pops up in a bunch of these books. He was a mentor to Steve Jobs, mentor to Nolan Bushnell, just a lot of people. Like, he links us to a lot of these other entrepreneurs. So, let's go back into this book. "Bob was enormously helpful to me, especially in terms of business advice. Back then, being only 29-years-old and running a large company was very unusual. Perhaps hard to believe considering all the high-profile young executives in business now. In fact, it was frightening. No one ever really knew how truly scared I was. My way of dealing with my fear was to fake it, which led to a great many blunders. It took me years to figure out it was acceptable not to know all the answers and to ask other people for help.
34:18 David Senra? Bob helped teach me this. He gave me the confidence to believe in myself because he believed in me."
34:28 David Senra? It's so interesting how just spending a little bit of time with people, whether in person, or maybe you just hear them on a podcast, or read a book, can fundamentally change your life. We just see examples of that over and over again. So, this was another counterintuitive point. He's really into, he calls it "thinking toys", and he encourages himself and his employees to play with toys, just like children do. And this is really interesting how this actually leads him to creating, in some way, paving the path for him to be able to found Atari. So, he says, "The first game I created was called Computer Space. And to realize it, I needed a spacey-looking cabinet.
35:11 David Senra? So, I sat down with my favorite toy at the time, modeling clay, added a piece of wood, cut out some plexiglass for the screen, and modeled what I thought was a cool shape. It was good enough for me to show it to my partner, who found someone who was able to scale it up into fiberglass. Three weeks later, it became the first video game. I licensed it to a company and did about $3 million in sales. The royalties allowed me to start Atari."
35:43 David Senra? And a common theme in this book is Nolan's really big on what he's calling "neutralized the naysayers." So if you want to foster a creative environment, you have to fight against humanity's natural inclination to be negative about change. So he's got an idea for us here. "There are many obstacles to creativity, but one of the most pernicious is other people. There's an old saying, 'The good ideas end up on the cutting room floor.' How do they generally end up there? Because other people have taken those good ideas and thrown them away. Who are these people? They are those naysayers who somehow manage to permeate every company, like termites infest old buildings.
36:25 David Senra? I have seldom seen a company that did not have its fair share of these people, including my own. The trick is not to let them in, but if they're already infesting your company, you need to find them and neutralize them." And this is how we're gonna spot them. "These naysayers are easy to spot because they're the ones who prevent projects from taking off, who quash creativity, who sap imagination. They've gained power and prestige by being the company curmudgeon. They pretend that they're doing this or that for the company good, but they're really saying no all the time because it's all they know how to do, and most importantly, because they have no ideas of their own. Any idiot can say no.
37:10 David Senra? There's no mental process there. If you don't like something, the trick is to think of something better. If people didn't feel comfortable with a new idea, I would allow them to think only about how the project could be better or come up with ways to turn their apprehension into enthusiasm. Not only did this policy save people from just stamping a no on projects, it forced an atmosphere of collective problem-solving. Suddenly, even the naysayers had to find ways to be imaginative, creative, and articulate enough to turn a no into a yes." That's a great idea.
37:50 David Senra? Skipping ahead, this is a, I don't think I've ever heard this before too. This guy's a, quite a character. I've read some other stories outside of this book about him and I don't know, he's, he's a very unique person. Find him very interesting. Okay, so he had this idea of inventing haphazard holidays. When people work too hard, they become tired, they make mistakes, they lose their equanimity. They also lose their perspective. The ability to separate the big problems from the little problems. Everything looks overwhelming, creating tension and anxiety. These are the enemies of creativity. Most of all, what distinguishes creatives from other people is their extraordinary judgment.
38:32 David Senra? Judgment is a delicate tool however, and works best when accompanied by sleep, food, and tranquility. I would announce, uh, this is the solution to it. I would announce a few days in advance that on the next Monday or Friday, the company would be closed. Besides the fact that they got a day off, employees love these holidays even more than those that were part of our planned schedule because they were unexpected. To add oddness to the gift, I would often pretend to link it to a hero's birthday or announce that they, that we were all taking the day off to celebrate, say, the birth of Blas, Blas Pascal and suggest that everyone should go learn about him.
39:17 David Senra? I've never heard that idea before, I love it. Oh, this is something really big that's kind of, it's weird that there's like these, these, uh, I mean, I guess it's not weird because humans are default tribalistic and we want other people to think like us. But, uh, this debate over in the entrepreneurial community about sleep. Which seems really silly to me. I don't think humans are smarter than nature and if nature designed sleep, we should probably utilize that tool. So, I think Nolan agrees with this. And in many cases, uh,
39:47 David Senra? Prolonged sleep deprivation has been shown, basically, you're just walking around with same faculties you'd have if you were drunk all the time. So he says, "Sleep as the body desires." "The idea that humans are supposed to stay up all day and then sleep for eight hours through the night is a modern one, invented with the advent of accurate timekeeping, clock-watching bosses, and the mattress industry. For almost all of humankind's history, we've actually been polyphasic sleepers, sleeping in multiple periods over a 24-hour period. Until recently, humans were at least biphasic, napping during the day and then dozing off again at night. Many of my other creative employees have performed best when allowed to sleep as their bodies desired,
40:33 David Senra? rather than as their workday required." And I think this idea is not going to take off in many companies. I do think with the continual march towards remote asynchronous work, that there's actually a way that works, but only in those environments.
40:52 David Senra? And, oh, so he's going to wrap up his little book of knowledge for us here. And I just love this part. This is actually probably the longest part.
41:04 David Senra? It is. And it's another great story of Steve Jobs. All right, here we go.
41:10 David Senra? Okay, so he says, "If you are able to abide by many of the pongs in this book, you too will be on your way to success." Thanks, Nolan. "However, there's one last pong to keep in mind." And it is a simple one, in my opinion, the most important one, I think is the most important one too, because he lets it to the last. "Act." "Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had a good idea. The thing that matters is what you do with the idea once you get out of the shower." So if there's only one thing you take from this book, it is this: You must act. Do something. This is one of the traits I admired most about Steve Jobs. He acted. In fact, he never stopped acting.
41:50 David Senra? He was constantly tackling new ideas, putting new concepts into play, looking for the next big thing. It was always that way. For example, in the early 1980s, I invited Steve to Chuck E. Cheese to see some of our research projects. We had just started our division to investigate computer-animated animation. Steve was very interested in the project, and we talked for hours about how the future of animation was computer-aided, although we knew we weren't there yet. Several years later, right after the Christmas holidays, Steve showed up at my home in Woodside. He wanted to talk more about computer-aided animation,
42:31 David Senra? a continuation of the same conversation we had years ago, which says something about his focus. He was especially curious about my opinion of the Lucas Division of Pixar, namely its animation technology.
42:47 David Senra? I told him that we were reaching the breakpoint, that point at which the technology was ready for commercialization on a larger scale, but still might be risky. After all, no one had yet used computer-based animation successfully for full-length cartoons. Once they did, I predicted, it would become the prevailing technology. Steve replied that since he had left Apple, temporarily, he had become fascinated with Pixar's work in this area and was thinking of investing in the company. I told him that his nose for such things was excellent, and that he should do what he always does. "Act," I said, "and then solve any problems that come along."
43:31 David Senra? He thanked me, and we talked about other things. Only a few months later, I found out that he had gone out and made a significant investment in Pixar. Sometime later, I received an invitation to the San Francisco premiere of the movie Toy Story. At the party afterward, we talked about how terrific the animation technology was. "Great work, Jobs," I said. He smiled. "I acted," he said, and moved off into the crowd.
44:06 David Senra? And that is where we're going to leave this story. If you want the full story by the book, there's a link that's in the description that's available on your podcast player and of course at founderspodcast.com. And again, I just want to end this podcast with a thank you for you. I love listening to podcasts. I love making podcasts. And if it wasn't for you, the listener, I'd just be sitting here talking to myself, which would be kind of weird. So until next time, I will see you next week with another book on an entrepreneur.
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