Alle afleveringen
462 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
-
#211 Aristotle Onassis: An Extravagant Life
16 oktober 2021 · 1 uur 15 min
What I learned from reading Onassis: An Extravagant Life by Frank Brady.
----
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.
----
He became one of the richest men in U.S. history ever to be arrested.The epic life of Aristotle Onassis is as mysterious as a tale from ancient Greek mythology and is a study of paradoxes, altogether gripping because of their seeming inconsistencies.Onassis had long since begun to formulate a personal business philosophy. The key to success was boldness, boldness, and more boldness.He was constantly visiting and inspecting ships, talking to ship owners and other importers and quietly absorbing everything, making a very conscious attempt to learn as much as he could before going into ship-owning seriously.He was quite observant about what, to others, were trifles but, to him, were important details. He often quoted Napoleon: “The pursuit of detail is the religion of success.”Onassis was a man of the pier, but with the cocksureness of a king.She simply never knew anyone quite as free or exotic as Aristotle Onassis, a paradoxical blend of raconteur and ruffian.Onassis was a born orator. He could keep a dinner party of some of the world's most sophisticated conversationalists spellbound.Onassis spent almost all of his time working. He would pore over shipping journals from Antwerp, Vancouver, Hamburg, and New York, looking for intelligence, trends, and opportunities. He would scan, study and memorize tonnage, prices, insurance rates and schedules of the world's great and small steamship companies and then attempt to outbid his competitors. He read the maritime sections of at least six foreign language daily newspapers each day.And I, of course, will do exactly as I please. Lees meer----
Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entr… -
#210 Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
11 oktober 2021 · 1 uur 10 min
What I learned from reading Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King.
----
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.
----
My earliest memory is of imagining I was someone else.By the time I was fourteen the nail in wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all. I'm not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.There was also a work-ethic in the poem that I liked, something that suggested writing poems (or stories, or essays) had as much in common with sweeping the floor as with mythy moments of revelation.The realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit.If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I'd have a cigarette cough from too many packs, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. And of course. I'd lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn't too late.You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – t… Lees meer -
#209 Steven Spielberg: A Biography
7 oktober 2021 · 1 uur 11 min
What I learned from reading Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride.
----
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.
----Whatever is there, he makes it work.Spielberg once defined his approach to filmmaking by declaring, "I am the audience.""He said, 'I want to be a director.' And I said, 'Well, if you want to be a director, you've gotta start at the bottom, you gotta be a gofer and work your way up.' He said, 'No, Dad. The first picture I do, I'm going to be a director.' And he was. That blew my mind. That takes guts."One of his boyhood friends recalls Spielberg saying "he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy.” He was twelve.He was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own.Spielberg remained essentially an autodidact. Spielberg followed his own eccentric path to a professional directing career. Universal Studios, in effect, was Spielberg's film school. Giving him an education that, paradoxically, was both more personal and more conventional than he would have received in an academic environment. Spielberg devised what amounted to his own private tutorial program at Universal, immersing himself in the aspects of filmmaking he found most crucial to his development.At the time he came to Hollywood, generations of nepotism had made the studios terminally inbred and unwelcoming to newcomers. The studio system, long under siege from television, falling box-office receipts, and skyrocketing costs, was in a state of impending collapse.When Steven was very discouraged trying to sell a script and break in, he always had a positive, forward motion, whatever he may have been suffering inside.In the two decades since Star Wars and Close Encounters were released, science-fiction films have accounted for half of the top twenty box… Lees meer -
#208 Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Bill Hewlett
29 september 2021 · 1 uur 22 min
What I learned from reading In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz.
----
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.
----
A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. —Steve Jobs There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. —Steve Jobs Usually people never think that much about what they're doing or why they do it. They just do it because that's the way it has been done and it works. That type of thinking doesn't work if you're growing fast and if you're up against some larger companies. You really have to outthink them and you have to be able to make those paradigm shifts in your points of view. —Steve Jobs ————Steve Jobs answer to What advice would you give someone interested in starting their own company?A lot of people ask me, "I want to start a company. What should I do?" My first question is always, "What is your passion? What is it you want to do in your company?" Most of them say, "I don't know."My advice is go get a job as a busboy until you figure it out. You've got to be passionate about something. You shouldn't start a company because you want to start a company. Almost every company I know of got started because nobody else believed in the idea and the last resort was to start the company. That's how Apple got started. That's how Pixar got started. It's how Intel got started. You need to have passion about your idea and you need to feel so strongly about it that you're willing to risk a lot.Starting a company is so hard that if you're not passionate about it, you will give up. If you're simply doing it because you want to have a small company, forget it.It's so much work and at times is so mentally draining. The hardest thing I've ever don… Lees meer -
#207 Claude Hopkins (Scientific Advertising)
26 september 2021 · 51 min
What I learned from reading Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins.
----
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.
----Individuals come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a guide to all who follow.Genius is the art of taking pains. The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. The best ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They site advantages to users.Remember the people you address are selfish, as we all are. The care nothing about your interests or your profit. They seek service for themselves. Ignoring this fact is a common mistake and a costly mistake in advertising. Ads say in effect, “Buy my brand. Give me the trade you give to others. Let me have the money." That doesn't work.We learn that people judge largely by price. We often employ this factor. Perhaps we are advertising a valuable formula. To merely say that would not be impressive. So we state as a fact that we paid $100,000 for that formula. That statement when tried has won a wealth of respect.The weight of an argument may often be multiplied by making it specific. Makers of safety razors have long advertised quick shaves. One maker advertised a 78-second shave. The difference is vast. If a claim is worth making, make it in the most impressive way.The product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, and atmosphere, which you place around it. Samples are of prime importance. However expensive, they usually form the cheapest selling method. Samples serve numerous valuable purposes. They enable one to use the word "Free" in ads. That often multiplies readers. Samples pay for themselves in multiplying the readers of your ads.Mail order advertising tells a complete story if the purpose is to make an imm… Lees meer -
#206 Albert D. Lasker (the creation of the advertising industry)
23 september 2021 · 1 uur 37 min
What I learned from reading The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz.
----
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.
----Advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words: Salesmanship in print.Before he arrived on the scene, advertising agencies were mostly brokers of space in newspapers and magazines. With Lasker's prodding, the industry became a creative force and began earning substantial commissions.His rare ability to put troubled geniuses to work on challenging problems grew in part from the fact that he himself had been driven by "a thousand devils.”Albert measured himself against the man who had braved the privations and horrors of the Civil War, epidemics, and hurricanes and made several fortunes in a foreign and sometimes hostile land.Thomas was often taken aback by his young colleague's unconventional views and methods.He decided that he could represent as well as anybody, because at least as far as he could tell, nobody in his office really knew anything much about the business they were in.He was beginning to suspect that advertising agencies were leaving an enormous amount of money on the table. Lasker felt sure that he could build the business, and boost commissions if he could improve the agency's copywriting.You are insufferably egotistical on the things you know nothing about, and you are painfully modest about those things about which you know everything.Hopkins began imparting his theory of copywriting. We should never brag about a client's product, he said, or plead with consumers to buy it. Instead, we must figure out how to appeal to the consumer's self-interest.Lasker argued that rather than maintaining many modestly successfu… Lees meer -
#205 James Dyson (Invention: A Life)
18 september 2021 · 1 uur 52 min
What I learned from reading Invention: A Life by James Dyson.
----
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.
----
This is a story told through a life of creating and developing things, as well as expressing a call to arms for young people to become engineers, creating solutions to our current and future problems.I have tried to seek out those young people who can make the world a better place. I have seen what miracles they can achieve. This book is aimed at encouraging them. Some may well become heirs to my heroes—inventors, engineers, and designers—who make their appearance in these pages. Like them, they will not find it easy and they will need oodles of determination and stamina along the way. That was the last time I saw him. His brave cheerfulness chokes me every time I recall the scene. It is impossible to imagine my father's emotions as he waved goodbye knowing that he might be on his way to London to die. Sixty years have not softened these memories, nor the sadness that he missed enjoying his three children growing up.I felt the devastating loss of my dad, his love, his humor, and the things he taught me. I feared for a future without him.Running also taught me to overcome the pain barrier: when everyone else feels exhausted, that is the opportunity to accelerate, whatever the pain, and win the race. Stamina and determination, with creativity, are needed to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties.I admire Soichiro Honda greatly for his addiction to the continuous improvement of products.Craziest of all, during the first thirty years of our marriage, she agreed unselfishly to keep putting her signature to endless bank guarantee forms in front of solicitors, signing away our possessions. If we had defaulted on the bank loans, we would have been evicted from our home.At Dyson, we don't … Lees meer -
#204 Steve Jobs (Inside Steve's Brain)
14 september 2021 · 59 min
What I learned from reading Inside Steve's Brian by Leander Kahney.
----
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.
----
1. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that.2. He remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives.3. I'm looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. Am willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy, a bit of that 'vision thing' and I'm not afraid to start from the beginning.4. Good storytelling lasts for decades. I don't think you'll be able to boot up any computer today in 20 years. But Snow White has sold 28 million copies, and it's a 60-year-old production.5. Jobs has said the starting point is the user experience.6. In everything I've done it really pays to go after the best people in the world. 7. My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we've got to be a great marketing company.8. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.9. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea or a problem you're passionate about; otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.10. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that motives make so much difference. Our primary goal here is to make the world's best PCs—not to be the biggest or the richest. Lees meer----
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 acce… -
#203 Georges Doriot (Birth of Venture Capital)
8 september 2021 · 1 uur 27 min
What I learned from reading Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital by Spencer Ante.
----
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.
----
1. He was very important because he was the first one to believe there was a future in financing entrepreneurs in an organized way.2. He brought a unique style to everything he did. 3. He called his course Manufacturing, but it was really his philosophy of life and of business.4. At Harvard, Doriot became a Yoda-like figure, dispensing wisdom to an ever-growing group of disciples.5. He got me motivated to start a business.6. A real courageous man is a man who does something courageous when no one is watching him. 7. If any information is to be exchanged over whiskey, let us get it rather than give it. 8. You will get nowhere if you do not inspire people.9. Always remember that someone somewhere is making a product that will make your product obsolete.10. Decades before economists appreciated the value of technology, Doriot realized that innovation was the key to economic progress.11. He upset the conventional wisdom by proving that there was big money to be made from patient investing in and the nurturing of small, unproven companies.12. He believed in building companies for the long haul. 13. I don’t consider a speculator constructive. I am building men and companies.14. A creative man merely has ideas; a resourceful man makes them practical. I look for the resourceful man.15. When ARD liquidated its stake in Digital, the company was worth more than $400 million—yielding a return on their original investment of more than 70,000 percent. It was the young venture capital industry’s first home run.16. Doriot never figured out a way to appease government regulators, who repeatedly threatened to put ARD out of business.17. More than any oth… Lees meer -
#202 A Few Lessons From Warren Buffett
2 september 2021 · 1 uur 7 min
What I learned from reading A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett and Peter Bevelin.
----
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.
----
Big opportunities come infrequently. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it. —W. Somerset Maugham"Moats" —a metaphor for the superiorities they possess that make life difficult for their competitors. Business history is filled with "Roman Candles," companies whose moats proved illusory and were soon crossed.When a company is selling a product with commodity-like economic characteristics, being the low-cost producer is all-important.In a business selling a commodity-type product, it's impossible to be a lot smarter than your dumbest competitor.As a wise friend told me long ago, "If you want to get a reputation as a good businessman, be sure to get into a good business."The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph.Our managers have produced extraordinary results by doing rather ordinary things—but doing them exceptionally well.If we are delighting customers, eliminating unnecessary costs and improving our products and services, we gain strength.On a daily basis, the effects of our actions are imperceptible; cumulatively, though, their consequences are enormous. When our long-term competitive position improves as a result of these almost unnoticeable actions, we describe the phenomenon as "widening the moat."We always, of course, hope to earn more money in the short-term. But when short-term and long-term conflict, widening the moat must take precedence.Charlie and I are not big fans of resumes. Instead, we focus on brains… Lees meer -
#201 Isambard Kingdom Brunel (James Dyson's Hero)
30 augustus 2021 · 1 uur 14 min
What I learned from reading Isambard Kingdom Brunel: The Definitive Biography of The Engineer, Visionary, and Great Briton by L.T.C. Rolt.
----
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.
----
1. His career was to him a tremendous adventure.2. I have always made it a rule, which I have found by some years experience a safe and profitable one, to have nothing to do with newspaper articles.3. It is consoling to be thus reminded that the lunatic fringe is a hardy perennial and not a phenomenon peculiar to our day and age.4. The livelihood of anybody relying upon their penmanship is generally precarious.5. One whose high spirits seemed quite impervious to cold and discomfort.6. The ready wit and the gaiety concealed a fire and a power which would drive him, undeterred by repeated disappointments, to achieve fame and fortune.7. The name of Isambard Brunel would not mean what it does today if he had not displayed the same characteristics of dogged persistence and an unlimited capacity for hard work which distinguish the self-taught engineers.8. A great man achieves eminence by his capacity to live more fully and intensely than his fellows and in so doing his faults as well as his virtues become the more obvious.9. It is not in freedom from faults but in the ability to transcend and master them that greatness lies.10. Isambard Brunel threw into the work all that unsparing energy which was to distinguish his whole life. For as much as thirty-six hours at a time he would not leave the tunnel, pausing only for a brief cat-nap.11. The Brunels were not men to sit down with folded hands and bewail their misfortune.12. Spurred on by Brunel's unconquerable determination, the work went forward.13. Iť's a gloomy perspective and yet bad as it is I cannot with all my efforts work myself up to be down hearted.14. Neve… Lees meer -
#200 James Dyson (Against the Odds)
27 augustus 2021 · 2 uur 14 min
What I learned from rereading Against The Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson and reading A History of Great Inventions by James Dyson.
----
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.
----
1. I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears love on them. That is how I make a living and they are what have made nom my name at least familiar in a million homes.2. This is also the exposition of a business philosophy, which is very different from anything you might have encountered before.3. It has all happened, I really believe, because of the intrinsic excellence of the machine; because it is a better vacuum cleaner than anything that has gone before; and because it looks better than anything like it has ever looked.4. Perhaps millions of people, in the last few thousand years, have had ideas for improving it. All I did was take things a little further than just having the idea.5. My own success has been in observing objects in daily use which, it was always assumed, could not be improved.6. Anyone can become an expert in anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners. After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology. My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape long before I understood how it worked.7. The best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin, and in enormous volumes. For that you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing ones. That type of investment is long term and high risk. Or at least, it looks like a high-risk policy. In the longer view, it is not half so likely to prove hazardous to one's financial health as simply following the herd.8. Difference for the sake of it. In everyth… Lees meer -
#199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life
20 augustus 2021 · 1 uur 4 min
What I learned from reading Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie.
----
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.
----
'When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place; they feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar but that delights them: they are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend. For them this is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit. Legend is the consecration of fame.” —Coco Chanel, 1935
Her father soon left them, discontented with marriage and fatherhood.
The dead are not dead as long as we think of them.
I like talking to myself and I don't listen to what I'm told.
Gabrielle spent seven years in the orphanage, until she was 18. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings.
I was thoroughly unhappy. I fed on sorrow and horror. I wanted to kill myself I don't know how many times.
And having to hear people call me an orphan! They felt sorry for me. All this was humiliating.
She was one of the charity pupils who were provided with a free place, and therefore treated differently to those whose family could afford to pay for their education. It was here, too, that she was given further instruction in how to sew.
She sought to define herself by her idiosyncratic choice of clothes.
She distanced herself from the past in storytelling. For telling stories is a way in which to imagine a happy-ever-after.
What she did want was to earn her own living.
They didn't understand how important this was to me.
Coco made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills that she dismissed as weighing a woman down.
Coco began to edge her way to the centre of attention, elbowing past her rivals and competitors.
Paul Poiret, whose fame at the time was such that he dubbed himself the 'King of Fashion'… Lees meer -
#198 Nathan Rothschild (Rothschild Family Dynasty)
18 augustus 2021 · 1 uur 15 min
What I learned from reading The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets by Niall Ferguson.
----
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.
----
A business can only be managed well if one pays as much attention to the smaller business transactions as one does to the larger ones.All banks have histories, only the Rothschilds have a mythology. Ever since the second decade of the nineteenth century, there has been speculation about the origins and extent of the family's wealth; about the social implications of their meteoric upward mobility; about their political influence, not only in the five countries where there were Rothschild houses but throughout the world.Unlike modern multinationals, however, this was always a family firm.Perhaps the most important point to grasp about this multinational partnership is that, for most of the century between 1815 and 1914, it was easily the biggest bank in the world. In terms of their combined capital, the Rothschilds were in a league of their own. The twentieth century no equivalent.What exactly was the business the Rothschilds did? To answer these questions properly it is necessary to understand something of nineteenth-century public finance; for it was by lending to governments or by speculating in existing government bonds-that the Rothschilds made a very large part of their colossal fortune.It was war and the preparation for war which generally precipitated the biggest increases in expenditure.It was in this highly volatile context that the Rothschilds made the decisive leap from running two modest firms—a small merchant bank in Frankfurt and a cloth exporters in Manchester—to running a multinational financial partnership.The system they developed enabled British investors (and other rich "capitalists” in Western Europe) to invest in the debts of those state… Lees meer -
#197 Founder of the Rothschild Family Dynasty
11 augustus 2021 · 1 uur 17 min
What I learned from reading Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild by Amos Elon.
----
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.
----
Riches cover a multitude of woes.Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the dark, foul-smelling alley in Frankfurt where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty.Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy and ingenuity.He raised five famously gifted sons, veritable money-making machines, to carry on his work after him. Their names overshadowed his own and became synonymous with colossal wealth, extravagant living and hidden political power.A century after his death they would still ask, in all seriousness, if a great war was still possible in Europe if the House of Rothschild set their face against it.Rothschild's origins were certainly modest. There was little reason to foresee his destiny. The personal circumstances of his life were difficult throughout. They suggest a saga not only political and financial but also human and dramatic – more dramatic, perhaps, than that of his flamboyant sons. The sons were not persecuted human beings, legally confined to the squalor of a congested ghetto.The old ghetto where Rothschild lived his entire life was a narrow lane, more slum-like and overcrowded than any other tenements in Frankfurt. A closed compound, it was shut off from the rest of the city by high walls and three heavy gates. The gates were guarded by soldiers and were locked at night, and all day on Sundays. In it lived the largest Jewish community in Germany in conditions of almost total isolation, and apartheid.How they managed to survive under these circumstances and at times even to prosper was a mark of human enterprise and ingenuity.Every petty princi… Lees meer -
#196 Winston Churchill (Leadership during WW2)
7 augustus 2021 · 1 uur 19 min
What I learned from reading The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson.
----
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 wondered how on earth anyone could have endured it: fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months. In particular I thought about Winston Churchill: How did he withstand it? It is one to say "Carry on," quite another to do it.History is a lively abode, full of surprises.The only effective defense lay in offense.The king harbored a general distrust of Churchill's independence.He had lived his entire life for this moment. That it had come at such a dark time did not matter. If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite.At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.Churchill brought a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance.
Churchill knew that his challenge now was to make everyone else believe it too.He considered Churchill to be inclined toward dynamic action in every direction at once."If I had to spend my whole life with a man," she wrote, "I'd choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.”Churchill was flamboyant, electric, and wholly unpredictable.Churchill issued directives in brief memoranda.No detail was too small to draw his attention.Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. "It is slothful not to compress your thoughts,"… Lees meer -
#195 Sid Meier (Computer game designer)
31 juli 2021 · 1 uur 14 min
What I learned from reading Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier.
----
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.
----
Sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed.Each game taught me something, each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it.We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do.
If my gravestone reads "Sid Meier, creator of Civilization" and nothing else, I'll be fine with that. It's a good game to be known for, and I'm proud of the positive impact it's had on so many players' lives.There was no such thing as a retail computer game, only free bits of code passed between hobbyists, so it would have been difficult for me to harbor secret dreams of becoming a professional computer game designer."I could design a better game in two weeks." “Then do it," he insisted, "If you can do it, I can sell it."At the time it felt like a fun project, but not any sort of life-changing decision. The big moments rarely do, I think, and the danger of retroactive mythologizing is that it makes people want to hold out for something dramatic, rather than throwing themselves into every opportunity.
—As soon as the articles were published, Bill began placing calls to hobby stores that were farther than driving distance away."Hello, I'm looking to buy a copy of Hellcat Ace."Hmm, I don't think we carry that one""What?" he would fume. "What kind of computer store are you? Didn't you see the review in Antic?" Then he would hang up in a huff, muttering about taking his business elsewhere.A week later he would call again, pretending to be somebody else. And a third time a week after that. Finally, on the fourth week, he'd use his professional voice. "Good afternoon, I'm a representative f… Lees meer -
#194 Ernest Hemingway (Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy)
27 juli 2021 · 1 uur 18 min
What I learned from reading Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 by Nicholas Reynolds. Lees meer
----
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 -
#193 Arnold Schwarzenegger (Arnold's first autobiography)
22 juli 2021 · 59 min
What I learned from reading Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
----
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 knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest.I'm not exactly sure why I chose bodybuilding, except that I loved it. I loved it from the first moment my fingers closed around a barbell and I felt the challenge and exhilaration of hoisting the heavy steel plates above my head.
The only time I really felt rewarded was when I was singled out as being best.I had it tougher than a lot of my companions because I wanted more, I demanded more of myself.I was literally addicted.I learned that this pain meant progress. Each time my muscles were sore from a workout, I knew they were growing.I could not have chosen a less popular sport. My school friends thought I was crazy. But I didn't care. My only thoughts were of going ahead, building muscles and more muscles.I remember certain people trying to put negative thoughts into my mind, trying to persuade me to slow down. But I had found the thing to which I wanted to devote my total energies and there was no stopping me.My drive was unusual, I talked differently than my friends; I was hungrier for success than anyone I knew.Reg Park looked so magnificent in the role of Hercules I was transfixed. And, sitting there in the theater, I knew that was going to be me. I would look like Reg Park. I studied every move he made. From that point on, my life was utterly dominated by Reg Park. His image was my ideal. It was fixed indelibly in my mind.I had this insatiable drive to get there sooner. Whereas most people were satisfied to train two or three times a week, I quickly escalated my program to six workouts a week.With my desire and my drive,… Lees meer -
#192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS)
19 juli 2021 · 1 uur 8 min
What I learned from reading Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS by Greg Niemann.
----
Casey pursued a Spartan business philosophy that emphasized military discipline, drab uniforms, and reliability over flash.I had heard stories about the company's tireless founder. He was a living legend. Jim Casey started working from the age of eleven to support a family of five.Casey began at the bottom. He speedily delivered messages and packages on foot. Casey learned about efficiency by doing.Seconds saved become minutes over the day and a few minutes each day mean big dollars.To outsiders the UPS regime has always seemed excessive.People have always bought more than they could carry, and a hundred years ago they had no cars to help them out. When Jim Casey and his partners began their delivery service, it served only department stores, and the UPS role was to complete the stores' retail transactions.Humility was one of Jim Casey's most strongly held values.Our real, primary objective is to serve. To render perfect service to our stores and their customers. If we keep that objective constantly in mind, our reward in money can be beyond our fondest dreams.Service is the sum of many little things done well.Good management is taking a sincere interest in the welfare of the people you work with. It is the ability to make individuals feel that you and they are the company–not merely employees of it.Jim Casey watched the streets carefully. He watched movement. He watched what people sold and what people bought. He was an eternal puzzle solver, his mind constantly preoccupied by every sensory detail involving his core business, packages. He gravitated to them, mesmerized by how they were wrapped and how they were delivered.When traveling between meetings Casey would frequently tell his driver to stop when he saw a UPS delivery in progress. Without identifying himself, Casey would ask UPS drivers what they thought of their job. He'd listen carefully and consider their answers serious… Lees meer -
#191 Naval Ravikant (A Guide to Wealth and Happiness)
13 juli 2021 · 1 uur 6 min
What I learned from reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson. Read the book online for free here.
----
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.
----
Naval has changed my life for the better, and if you approach the following pages like a friendly but highly competent sparring partner, he might just change yours.Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.If you don't know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out.Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.Ignore people playing status games, They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers, Most people haven't figured this out yet.Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.Fortunes require leverage.Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.An army of robots is freely available-it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.If you can't code, write… Lees meer -
#190 Henry Ford and Thomas Edison
10 juli 2021 · 1 uur
What I learned from reading The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip by Jeff Guinn.
----
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.
----
Ford generally accepted the responsibilities of his celebrity-he'd worked diligently to cultivate it, realizing early on that his personal fame heightened demand for Model Ts.Ford's Model T changed everything. Thanks in great part to Ford's innovative assembly line, Model Ts were mass-produced on a previously unimaginable scale. In competitors factories, it took workers several hours to assemble an individual car. At the Ford plant, a completed Model T rolled off the line every two and a half minutes.Ford continued tinkering with the manufacturing process, aggressively seeking ways to cut production expenses and Model T prices even more. The best example fostered a popular joke that you could buy any color Model T that you liked, so long as the color was black. Few realized that Ford insisted the cars come in that color because black paint dried quickest, meaning Model Ts could be whipped through the assembly line and off to dealerships at an even faster pace, saving additional time and labor related dollars.The Model T alone would have established Henry Ford as a household name, but he'd further cemented his reputation as a friend of the working man with a stunning announcement. In an era when factory line workers were lucky to earn $2 a day for their labor and toiled through ten-hour shifts six days a week, Ford pledged to pay $5 a day, and to reduce workdays to eight hours. Everyone in America was talking about it.Over the years, as Ford founded and failed with two auto manufacturing companies before succeeding with his third, he endlessly reminisced about the meeting and Edison's words of encouragement: “Young man, that's … Lees meer -
#189 David Ogilvy (The book I've given as a gift the most)
5 juli 2021 · 59 min
What I learned from reading The Unpublished David Ogilvy by David Ogilvy.
----
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.
----
[0:01] Will Any Agency Hire This Man? He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college.He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing, and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year.I doubt if any American agency will hire him.However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.
[2:39] Words were what made him. Reading this collection, one is struck, piece after piece by how David's words surprise and seduce, tease and provoke.[2:58] His writing is opinionated, forceful, and urgent.[4:24] David was building his first-class business in a first-class way.[5:37] Every advertisement must tell the whole sales story.[5:41] The copy must be human and very simple.Every word in the copy must count. Concrete figures must be substituted for atmospheric claims; clichés must give way to facts, and empty exhortations to alluring offers.[6:08] Permanent success has rarely been built on frivolity. People do not buy from clowns.[7:38] The worst fault a salesman can commit is to be a bore.[11:49] I have a new metaphor. Great hospitals do two things: They look after patients, and they teach young doctors. Ogilvy & Mather does two things: We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people. Ogilvy & Mather is the teaching hospital of the advertising world. And, as such, to be respected above all other agencies.[12:44] I plead for char… Lees meer -
#188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes)
28 juni 2021 · 1 uur 15 min
What I learned from Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys by Joe Coulombe.
----
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.
----
[0:01] I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. That's why there's a lack of miracles and a surplus of marketing details including buying, advertising, distributing, and running stores; and lots of discussion of how we built a successful business on high wages.
[18:09] Chapter 11 was a possibility. But I was reading The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, with its implicit concept of multiple solutions to non-convex problems.
[19:07] This is my favorite of all managerial quotes: If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions. —Tex Thornton, cofounder of Litton Industries, quoted in the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s.
[22:33] The most basic conclusion I drew from her book was that, if you adopt a reasonable strategy, as opposed to waiting for an optimum strategy, and stick with it, you'll probably succeed. Tenacity is as important as brilliance.
[24:31] The one core value that I chose was our high compensation policies. This is the most important single business decision I ever made: to pay people well.
[30:30] The basic problem is that convenience store retailing is a commodity business that is hard to differentiate. What I needed was a good but small opportunity for my good but small company: a non-commodity, differentiated kind of retailing.
[33:38] As we evolved Trader Joe's, its greatest departure from the norm wasn't its size or its decor. It was our commitment to product knowledge, something which was totally foreign to the mass-merchant culture, and our turning our backs to branded merchandise.
[38:25] Most of my ideas about how to act as an entrepreneur are derived from The Re… Lees meer -
#187 Albert Einstein
22 juni 2021 · 1 uur 25 min
What I learned from reading Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson.
----
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.
----
[0:01] In a drama that would seem fake were it not so horrifying, Einstein’s brain ended up being, for more than four decades, a wandering relic.
[4:22] Einstein remained consistent in his willingness to be a serenely amused loner who was comfortable not conforming.
[6:49] “In teaching history,” Einstein replied, “there should be extensive discussion of personalities who benefited mankind through independence of character and judgment.”
[8:33] It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas.
[11:39] He had an allergic reaction against all forms of dogma and authority.
[14:37] It made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.
[20:24] It would be an astonishing nine years after his graduation and four years after the miracle year in which he upended physics before he would be offered a job as a junior professor.
[26:24] How To Win With People You Don't Like
[35:22] Had he given up theoretical physics at that point, the scientific community would not have noticed. There was no sign that he was about to unleash a remarkable year the like of which science had not seen since 1666, when Isaac Newton, holed up at his mother’s home to escape the plague developed calculus, an analysis of the light spectrum, and the laws of gravity.
[41:41] To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.
[44:30] He responded by saying that he planned to “smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.”
[54:25] The whole affair is a… Lees meer -
#186 Phil Knight (Nike)
16 juni 2021 · 1 uur 43 min
What I learned from rereading Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.
----
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.
----
[2:02] I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all...different.
[6:18] So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don't stop. Don't even think about stopping until you get there, and don't give much thought to where "there" is. Whatever comes, just don't stop. That's the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it's the best advice-maybe the only advice-any of us should ever give.
[10:32] They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares.
[16:48] Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it. I told myself there was much to learn from a guy like that.
[20:25] If I didn't, if I muffed this, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn't really care about.
[27:45] Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod.
[32:30] Bowerman didn’t give a damn about respectability. He possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness. Today it’s all but extinct. He was a war hero, too. Of course he was.
[32:49] The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach. He called himself a “Professor of Competitive Responses,” and his job, as he saw it, and often described it… Lees meer -
#185 César Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (The Hotelier and The Chef)
11 juni 2021 · 1 uur 22 min
What I learned from reading Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class by Luke Barr.
----
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.
----[1:00] The words echoed in his head, even now. The idea that they should be seen as servants was the cruelest of insults. César Ritz, Auguste Escoffier, servants?
[11:28] He hasn't the least idea how much work and care, how much imagination and effort, go into the proper running of a hotel. [20:44] This was the very heart of a world that had shaped him, a world of privilege and luxury in which he had forged a place for himself, against all odds. Ritz had not been born to this life. Raised in a tiny village (population 123) in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, he was the last of eleven children, and had left home at the age of twelve.[21:04] He was a self-made man. And beneath his placid, imperturbable Swiss poise lay enormous ambition. [22:26] Ritz knew better than anyone the importance of the kitchen in creating a truly luxurious hotel experience. He had built his success in the hotel business in tandem with the brilliant chef Auguste Escoffier. [26:48] Ritz had spent years working for others and was now, finally, a hotel owner himself. Yes, his hotels were small, but they were his. [27:48] Ritz was proud, but also full of insecurities: about his Swiss peasant family background, his lack of education. [30:20] "You'll never make anything of yourself in the hotel business," his boss at one of his very first jobs had told him. "It takes a special knack, a special flair, and it's only right that I should tell you the truth: you haven't got it." Well, he'd got it now. [40:18] Escoffier was not an educated man, but he had quickly discovered that he had a real talent for cooking, which he saw as both a science and an art. [40:37] He ha… Lees meer -
#184 Isadore Sharp (Four Seasons)
7 juni 2021 · 1 uur 17 min
What I learned from reading Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy by Isadore Sharp.
----
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.
----[0:01] When I built my first hotel I knew nothing about the hotel business.
[4:28] He refused to settle for the pragmatic dictum of maturity. Issy also skipped skepticism and "Let's be sensible." People said he was naïve, with a kind of glandular optimism. Perhaps. But as it turned out naïveté served him well. [6:32] Early on he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams. He told me once that his aim was to make the name Four Seasons a worldwide brand, synonymous with luxury, like Rolls-Royce.[8:39]Once, when Dad was excavating a basement with horse and plough, he broke his shoulder. But he shrugged it off and uncomplainingly kept on working, something I never forgot. [26:52] I decided to go ahead. I foresaw only one difficulty, but it loomed large: How do you build a two-hundred-room resort without any money? This was literal fact. My earnings barely covered my rising family costs. [35:23] I asked Sir Gerald Glover, "How do you keep your lawn so perfect?" “No problem”, he replied. “You just cut it every week for three hundred years.”
[43:48] I owe my success to my freedom. I think for me independence has an incalculable value.
[44:44] All business proceeds on belief: Trying to run a company without a set of beliefs is like trying to steer a ship without a rudder.
[56:03] The experience made me realize what I would really like to do: create a group of the best hotels in the world. And what we really want to do is usually what we do best.[56:51] We will not be all things to all people. We will specialize. Lees meer----
Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it… -
#183 Johnny Carson
4 juni 2021 · 1 uur 18 min
What I learned from reading Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin.
----
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.
----
[13:50] He often told me that all it took to turn the most electrifying film stars into dullards was to be around them for a while. But he felt that way around everybody. There were very few social scenes in which he was ever really comfortable.
[14:07] Johnny was comfortable in front of twenty million but just as uncomfortable in a gathering of twenty.[15:44] Carson grasped that he owned the camera the way Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra had grasped that they owned the microphone. That understanding made him more natural, more relaxed, cooler.[21:29] Johnny continued. “If a doctor opened up my chest right now, he couldn’t find a heart, or any goddamn thing. Just a lot of misery. My mother made sure of that. She deprived us all of any real goddamn warmth."[23:20] Facts revealed themselves. Curious facts. Disturbing facts. Like the fact that Johnny Carson wasn’t wealthy. Indeed, he had very little money. He had little money because the people around him, whom he trusted, were serving him poorly.[28:43] I was shocked to realize that he owned no equity interest in the new company. Instead, half was owned by the manufacturer and half by Sonny Werblin. Carson, in effect, was paid a salary to wear clothes from the company that bore his name, while the man he had entrusted with his affairs lined his own pockets.[29:39] “Look what’s going on,” I said. “His wife is cheating on him. His manager is screwing him, his agents are exploiting him, and his producer’s wife has been conspiring with Joanne to cuckold him. What a goddamn mess.”
[32:46] Johnny Carson lived comfortably in his own skin. He may have been troubled in certain areas, but he was never tormented by insecurity.
[42:57] Carson’s show wa… Lees meer -
#182 Warren Buffett (The Making of an American Capitalist)
29 mei 2021 · 1 uur 13 min
What I learned from reading Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein.
----
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.
----
His talent sprang from his unrivaled independence of mind and ability to focus on his work and shut out the world, yet those same qualities exacted a toll.
He emerged from those first hard years with an absolute drive to become very, very rich. He thought about it before he was five years old. And from that time on, he scarcely stopped thinking of it.
Most of us were trying to be like everyone else. I think he liked being different. He was what he was and he never tried to be anything else.
Warren disgustedly reported that he knew more than the professors. His dissatisfaction-a forerunner of his general disaffection for business schools-was rooted in their mushy, overbroad approach. His professors had fancy theories but were ignorant of the practical details of making a profit that Warren craved.
It seemed too good to be true; if the stocks were so cheap, Buffett figured, somebody ought to be buying them. But slowly, it dawned on him. The somebody was him. Nobody was going to tell you that an investment was a steal; you had to get there on your own.
Buffett knew more about stocks than anyone.
He was working virtually all the time, and loving every minute.
His talent lay not in his range—which was narrowly focused on investing—but in his intensity. His entire soul was focused on that one outlet.
He did not draw the usual line between "work" and other activities.
Wall Street's chorus, all reading the same lyrics, was chanting, "Sell." Buffett decided to buy. He put close to one-quarter of his assets on that single stock.
Buffett visited Walt Disney himself on the Disney lot. The animator was as enthusiastic as ever. Buffett was struck by his childlike en… Lees meer -
#181 Paul Orfalea (Kinkos)
23 mei 2021 · 1 uur 13 min
What I learned from reading Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinkos by Paul Orfalea.
----
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.
----
[4:23] I've never met a more circular, out-of-the-box thinker. It's often exhausting trying to keep up with him.
[5:21] I graduated from high school eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did.
[8:29] I also have no mechanical ability to speak of. There isn't a machine at Kinko's I can operate. I could barely run the first copier we leased back in 1970. It didn't matter. All I knew was that was I could sell what came out of it.
[10:24] Building an entirely new sort of business from a single Xerox copy machine gave me the life the world seemed determined to deny me when I was younger.
[13:04] The A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings.
[23:02] I learned to turn a lot of busywork over to other people. That's an important skill. If you don't develop it, you'll be so busy, busy, busy that you can't get a free hour, not to mention a free week or month, to sit back and think creatively about where you want to be heading and how you are going to get there.
[24:07] There's no better way to stay "on" your business than to think creatively and constantly about your marketing: how you are marketing, who you are marketing to, and, always, how you could be doing a better job at it. You'd be amazed what kind of business you can generate by a seemingly simple thing like handing out flyers.
[26:18] The phone rang. It was one of our store managers calling to ask me how to handle a bounced check. I held the receiver away from my face and looked at it, flabbergasted. If every st… Lees meer -
#180 Jeff Bezos (Invention of a Global Empire)
17 mei 2021 · 1 uur 4 min
What I learned from reading Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone.
----
Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes
----
[1:47] Every interesting thing I've ever done, every important thing I've ever done, every beneficial thing I've ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures. I'm covered in scar tissues as a result of this.
[6:19] I absolutely know it's hard, but we'll learn how to do it.
[8:30] Thinking small is a self fulfilling prophecy.
[12:13] Begin any conversation about a new product in terms of the benefit it creates for customers.
[19:08] Bezos deployed his playbook for experiments that produced promising sparks: he poured gasoline on them.
[22:41] You can regulate yourself quite easily or think about what you're going to do with your existing resources. Sometimes, you don't know what the boundaries are. Jeff just wanted us to be unbounded.
[25:48] If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time. It always yields a better result.
[27:19] Don't come to me with a plan that assumes I will only make a certain level of investment. Tell me how to win.
[35:50] He preached the wholesale embrace of technology, rapid experimentation, and optimism about the opportunities of the internet instead of despair.
[45:17] Bezos’ one constant edict: Go faster. Lees meer----
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 -
Jeff Bezos (Insights, Stories, and Secrets)
13 mei 2021 · 1 uur 3 min
What I learned from Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.
----
[3:58] What is best for the customer? Do that: "Amazon believes that long-term growth is best produced by putting the customer first. If you held this conviction, what kind of company would you build?"
[7:05] Jeff skips the conferences and dinners: "95 percent of the time I spent with Jeff was focused on internal work issues rather than external events like conferences, public speeches, and sports matches."
[25:08] Don't encourage communication—eliminate it: "Jeff said many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. When you view effective communication across groups as a "defect," the solutions to your problems start to look quite different from traditional ones." (There is nothing conventional about Jeff)
[27:29] Why companies must run experiments: "Time and time again, we learned that consumers would behave in ways we hadn't imagined especially for brand-new features or products."
[30:16] Jeff on the importance of making decisions quickly: "Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure."
[30:48] Great anything is rare: "Great Two-Pizza team leaders proved to be rarities. Although we did identify a few such brilliant managers, they turned out to be notoriously difficult to find in sufficient numbers, even at Amazon."
[34:30] A simple tip from Jeff on how to produce unique insights: "Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did, even though we were all reading… Lees meer -
#179 Jeff Bezos
10 mei 2021 · 1 uur 21 min
What I learned from The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone.
This is part one of a three part series on Jeff Bezos. The next two books are Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon and Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.
----
(0:54) It may very well be that the absolute intensity of drive and focus is essential and incompatible with all of the nice management thought about consensus and gentle demeanor.(2:07) Jeff’s clarity, intensity of focus, and ability to prioritize is unusual.(4:05) As I read the Steve Jobs biography I even had an insight and question about myself, that maybe I haven’t begun to really find my own limits.(10:49) You have to be able to think what you're doing for yourself. (11:42) There is probably no limit to what he can do. (12:34) People forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work. It kept piling up losses. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But Jeff was very smart. He’s a classic technical founder of a business, who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone.(13:45) Bezos has proved quite indifferent to the opinions of others. (13:58) Bezos is extremely difficult to work for. (15:58) Amazon's internal customs are deeply idiosyncratic. (16:15) He is highly circumspect about deviating from well established, very abstract talking points. (18:08) The financial community knew very little about D. E. Shaw, and its polymath founder wanted to keep it that way. (20:15) Jeff was not concerned about what other people were thinking. (20:26) Bezos had closely studied several wealthy businessmen. (21:13) Bezos was disciplined and precise. (22:14) Bezos seemed to love the idea of the nonstop workday. (22:23) The rest of Wall Street saw D. E. Shaw as a highly secretive hedged fund. David Shaw didn't view the company as a hedge fund but as a versatile technology laboratory who could… Lees meer -
#178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
3 mei 2021 · 1 uur 22 min
What I learned from reading Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney.
----
[4:43] Mike Ive influence on his son’s talent was purely nurturing. They were constantly keeping up a conversation about made-objects and hw they could be made better.
[6:39] I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.
[9:24] Take big chances. Pursue a passion. Respect the work.
[11:47] His designs were incredibly simple and elegant. They were usually rather surprising but made complete sense once you saw them. You wondered why we had never seen such a product like that before.
[15:52] Grind it out. You can make something look like magic by going further than most reasonable people would go.
[17:34] The more I learned about this cheeky, almost rebellious company (Apple) the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money.
[24:06] He was completely interested in humanizing technology. What something should be was always the starting point for his designs.
[33:29] Jony was very serious about his work. He had a ferocious intensity about it.
[41:52] It is very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.
[51:38] Jobs didn't want to compete in the broader market for personal computers. These companies competed on price, not features or ease of use. Jobs figured theirs was a race to the bottom. Instead, he argued, there was no reason that well-designed, well-made computers couldn’t command the same market share ad margins as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where you are going in the same way a Chevy that costs half the price, but there will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car. Why not make only first class-products with high margins so that Apple… Lees meer -
#177 Robert Campeau (Junk Bonds and Retail Bankruptcy)
26 april 2021 · 1 uur 9 min
What I learned from reading Going for Broke: How Robert Campeau Bankrupted the Retail Industry, Jolted the Junk Bond Market, and Brought the Booming Eighties to a Crashing Halt by John Rothchild.
----
[0:01] A stranger comes to Wall Street, borrows nearly $4 billion to acquire a company that six months earlier he'd never even heard of. This transaction is scarcely settled before he's allowed to borrow $7 billion more to acquire a bigger company, making him a major force in retailing, an industry he knows nothing about.
[11:16] Just a few weeks back, Randall had figured that Bob might be interested in attracting a single Brooks Brothers store into one of his malls. Now in a great imaginary leap, Bob had vaulted himself into the ownership of all forty-five Brooks Brothers stores.
[15:01 Neither Bob nor his advisers really knew one investment bank from another. "It was basically a matter of looking up names in the Yellow Pages."
[19:42] Lehman Brothers was impressed by two things: the man's obvious, if naive, enthusiasm; and the absurdity of his proposition. Those who doubted Bob could acquire Allied had grown into a large crowd that included Bob's brain trust, his advisers in Toronto, his Toronto bankers, his advisers from Paine Webber and his lawyer.
[21:45] This was Citicorp's first clue they were dealing with a volatile character, who soon acquired the in-house nickname Mad Bomber.
[29:26] The M&A department they established at First Boston helped the firm to a record $125 million in earnings in 1985, a long way from the $1 million it had earned in 1978.
[33:45] He think's he's destined to take over Allied. His fortune-teller says so.
[41:28] Bob understood that Citicorp and First Boston, who together had invested in $1.8 billion in the Street Sweep and who were going to make hundreds of millions in fees if this deal closed, were not about to let the deal fall apart because he didn't pony up his equity. They had more of a vested interest in this deal than he did.
… Lees meer -
#176 Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux)
18 april 2021 · 53 min
What I learned from reading Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond.
----
[0:01] From a party of one it now counted millions of users on every continent, including Antartica, and even outer space, if you count NASA outposts. Not only was it the most common operating system, but its very development model—an intricate web of its own, encompassing hundreds of thousands of volunteer computer programmers—had grown to become the largest collaborative project in the history of the world.
[1:08] Revolutionaries aren’t born. Revolutions can’t be planned. Revolutions can’t be managed. Revolutions happen. And sometimes, revolutionaries just get stuck with it.
[9:05] The Swedish language has no equivalent to the term “dysfunctional family.” As a result of the divorce, we didn’t have a lot of money. Mom would have to pawn her only investment—the single share of stock in the Helsinki telephone company. I remember going with her once and feeling embarrassed about it. Now I’m on the board of directors of the same company.
[10:13] Linus has no handlers, doesn’t listen to voice mail, and rarely responds to email.
[10:40] I found Linus to be unexpectedly knowledgable about American business history.
[13:19] Some of the smartest programmers out there are fifteen-year-old kids playing around in their rooms. It’s what I thought sixteen years ago, and I still suspect it’s true.
[13:46] Everybody has a book that has changed his or her life. As I read the book I started to understand. I got a big enthusiastic jolt. Frankly, it never subsided. I hope you can say the same about something.
[16:01] An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That’s what having a clean design is all about. It’s the same with languages. The English language has twenty-six letters and you can build up everything from tho… Lees meer -
#175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
11 april 2021 · 1 uur 20 min
What I learned from reading The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard. Lees meer
----
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 -
#174 Bill Gates (Overdrive)
5 april 2021 · 48 min
What I learned from reading Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace.
----
There would be an industry breakthrough unimagined at the time, and it would be made by a company that didn’t yet exist. [7:55]
Another corollary to Joys Law of Innovation was that the number of bright people in any company went down as the size went up. [10:47]
As Apple founder Steve Jobs liked to say: When you are at simplicity, there ain’t no complexity. [12:49]
Gates looks at everything as something that should be his. He acts in any way he can to make it his. It can be an idea, market share, or a contract. There is not an ounce of conscientiousness or compassion in him. The notion of fairness means nothing to him. The only thing he understands is leverage. [17:21]
I became convinced that Microsoft was building the last minicomputer. That the Microsoft Network was based on the notion that your competitors were the model — proprietary online services like America Online — and that the reality was that the Internet was going to be such a fundamental paradigm shift, that you needed to think about your strategies fundamentally differently. [28:08]
The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. — Zero to One [29:25]
Most college kids knew much more than we did because they were exposed to it. If I had wanted to connect to the Internet, it would have been easier for me to get into my car and drive over to the University of Washington than to try and get on the Internet at Microsoft. [31:12]
For years , Gates had Kahn in his sights. Kahn recalled that he once had found Gates at an industry conference in the late 1980s sitting alone in a corner, looking at a photograph in his hands. “It was a picture of me,” said Kahn. [41:16]
It’s not in Microsoft’s bones to cooperate with other companies. [42:47] Lees meer----
Founders Notes… -
#173 Louis B. Mayer (MGM Studios)
28 maart 2021 · 1 uur 9 min
What I learned from reading Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer by Bosley Crowther.
----
The reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead. [0:50]
He is in that phalanx of men of aggressive bent who seized on the opportunities that an expanding civilization exposed. With them, he ascended to high places along an upwardly spiraling route that was there to be ascended by those who had the necessary stamina and drive. And, with some of them , he was unsettled and rendered dizzy by the heights, so that he could not control his footing when the road itself began to narrow and fall. [2:07]
His own recollections of his early childhood were mercifully meager and dim. They were mainly recollections of being hungry. That was the only memory Mayer had of himself as a little boy. [7:01]
How powerful and violent were the urges in the depths of the growing boy to break out of his immigrant encasement. [10:27]
One of his favorite maxims had to do with behavior in adversity. “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on." [11:55]
He wanted to be a film producer. He wanted to get into that realm of fabrication and creation where glamour and excitement were. [27:00]
My unchanging policy will be great star, great director, great play, great cast. You are authorized to get these without stint or limit. Spare nothing, neither expense, time, nor effort. Results only are what I am after. [33:00]
It was not all sunshine and profits with Mayer’s company during these embryonic days. Mayer was far from being one of the top producers of Hollywood. He was a small, enterprising operator. There were many others like him, clawing to get minor stars and unattached directors to make their pictures and help them to get ahead. On some films they picked up profits, on others they definitely did not. The business was always a gamble for them, as it was for Mayer. [39:13]
The radical and profound transition (sound… Lees meer -
#172 Elon Musk (Early Days of SpaceX)
21 maart 2021 · 1 uur 6 min
What I learned from reading Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger.
----
[12:38] Numerous other entrepreneurs had tried playing at rocket science before, Musk well knew. He wanted to learn from their mistakes so as not to repeat them.
[20:55] He could be difficult to work for, certainly. But his early hires could immediately see the benefits of working for someone who wanted to get things done and often made decisions on the spot. When Musk decided that Spincraft could make good tanks for a fair price, that was it. No committees. No reports. Just, done.
[22:05] Most of all he channeled a preternatural force to move things forward. Elon Musk just wants to get shit done.
[27:42] The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs , bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt. This is what SpaceX did.
[41:24] It is perhaps worth noting that those launch companies that succeeded also took their lumps along the way, Musk wrote in a postmortem. SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.
[42:24] Musk’s management style: Don’t talk about doing things, just do things.
[43:15] If you’re trying to do something no other commercial company has ever done, you had better have some confidence.
[44:00] I make the spending decisions and the engineering decisions in one head. Normally those are at least two people. There’s some engineering guy who’s trying to convince a finance guy that this money should be spent. But the finance guy doesn’t understand engineering, so he can’t tell if this is a good way to spend money or not. Whereas I’m making the engineering decisions and spending decisions. So I know, already, that my brain trusts itself.
[45:37] He didn’t want to fail, but he wasn’t afraid of it.
[50:50] It’s not like other rocket scientists were huge idiots who wanted to throw … Lees meer -
#171: Chuck Feeney (The Billionaire who gave all of his money away)
15 maart 2021 · 1 uur 9 min
What I learned from reading The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune by Conor O'Clery.
----
He celebrated having divested himself personally of the vast wealth with which fate and his genius for making money had burdened him. [0:01]
Feeney was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life: thinking big and aiming to achieve the best result, even if it seemed unattainable. [3:27]
I all of a sudden realized, shit, you can sell this to anybody, anywhere. [12:45]
Feeney believed that there could be more lucrative opportunities in the less crowded Pacific. [21:53]
Chuck lived out of his briefcase. Everything was connected with business. We did a lot of screwy things. I became part of what he called his ‘teen age frontier’ approach to business, because he surrounded himself with smart college youngsters, mostly single and aggressive ‘conquerors of the world.’ I was the oldest, always the damper, saying to him, "Are you out of your mind?" [25:44]
We hadn’t spent any time on corporate structuring or anything like that, we were just simply busy selling cars, duty — free liquor, making the cash, putting the cash in the bank, cash in, and cash out. [28:06]
They were on the verge of going bankrupt, perhaps already were. Feeney and Miller were almost back where they started. They could perhaps boost the cash flow from the duty free shops in Hong Kong and Hawaii to clear off the debts. Feeney had moments of despair. “Of course. It goes with the territory. But there wasn’t much we could do. It was something we had started, and we thought we were going to make a million dollars out of it. We had no choice but to salvage the company or go over the cliff.” [31:21]
The duty free shops began to make substantial profits, the owners agreed to take 90 percent of the dividends in cash, a practice that would continue for a quarter of a century. [44:54]
Paradoxically, while Feeney became more frugal, he was pushing himself eve… Lees meer -
#170 Claude Hopkins (A Life in Advertising)
8 maart 2021 · 1 uur 19 min
What I learned from reading My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins.
----
Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others owes a statement to successors. The results of research should be recorded. Every pioneer should blaze his trail. That is all I have tried to do. [0:19]
There are few pages in “My Life in Advertising” which do not repay careful study—and which do not merit rereading. Before your eyes, a successful advertising life is lived—with all that went to make it successful. The lessons taught are taught exactly as they were learned. They are dished up dripping with life. It is not a book, it is an experience—and experience has always been the great teacher. [2:49]
The man who does two or three times the work of another learns two or three times as much. He makes more mistakes and more successes, and he learns from both. If I have gone higher than others in advertising, or done more, the fact is not due to exceptional ability, but to exceptional hours. [11:00]
To poverty I owe the fact that I never went to college. I spent those four years in the school of experience. [15:16]
If a thing is useful they call it work, if useless they call it play. One is as hard as the other. One can be just as much a game as the other. [20:27]
A young man can come to regard his life work as the most fascinating game that he knows. And it should be. The applause of athletics dies in a moment. The applause of success gives one cheer to the grave. [23:16]
A good product is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods, in print or in person, without samples. [27:02]
I consider business as a game and I play it as a game. That is why I have been, and still am, so devoted to it. [33:44]
I sold more carpet sweepers by my one-cent letters than fourteen salesmen on the road combined. [45:31]
No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration. [50:10]
We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in pers… Lees meer -
#169 David Ogilvy (The King of Madison Avenue)
1 maart 2021 · 1 uur 28 min
What I learned from reading The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising by Kenneth Roman.
----
One characteristic of geniuses, said Einstein, is they are passionately curious. Ogilvy’s great secret was an inquiring mind.In conversation, he never pontificated; he interrogated.
There were piles of books all over his house, most about successful leaders in business and government. He was interested in how they used their leadership. How they made their money. He was interested in people — people who had accomplished remarkable things.
Reading Ogilvy’s short autobiography is like having dinner with a charming raconteur.
His Scottish grandfather is portrayed as cold — hearted, formidable, and successful — and his hero.
When you write a book about advertising, you’re competing with midgets. When you write an autobiography, you’re competing with giants.
He took the occasion to remind everyone that he was not a big shot at school. I wasn’t a scholar. I detested the philistines who ruled the roost. I was an irreconcilable rebel — a misfit. In short, I was a dud. Fellow duds, take heart! There is no correlation between success at school and success in life.
If you can’t advertise yourself, what hope do you have of being able to advertise anything else?
Although he entered advertising to make money, Ogilvy had become interested — obsessively interested — in the business itself. He said he had read every book that had been written on the subject, and, as a young man, had reason to believe he would be good at it and would enjoy it. Since American advertising was years ahead of advertising anywhere else, he decided to study the trade where it was done best.
Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times (Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins). Every time I see a bad advertisement, I say to myself, “The man who wrote this copy has never read Claude Hopkins.”
In print, it … Lees meer -
#168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography)
22 februari 2021 · 1 uur 8 min
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 temp… Lees meer -
#167 Jackie Cochran (Aviation)
19 februari 2021 · 57 min
What I learned from reading Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography by Jackie Cochran.
----
[4:37] At the time of her death on August 9, 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history. Her career spanned 40 years, from the Golden Age of the 1930s as a racing pilot, through the turbulent years of World War Il as founder and head of the Women's Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) program, into the jet age, when she became the first female pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. She was a 14-time winner of the Harmon trophy for the outstanding female pilot of the year and was accorded numerous other awards and honors in addition to the trophies she won with her flying skills.
[6:15] Jackie was an irresistible force. Time and time again in the many, many interviews I was so kindly granted, the repeated theme was "Jackie just could not be stopped." And indeed, this driving, cussed determination is signally evident in Jackie's own writings. Her unremitting persistence is clear in everything she did, from regaining the doll of which she was robbed at the age of six to her need to be the world's top aviatrix. Generous, egotistical, penny-pinching, compassionate, sensitive, aggressive -indeed, an explosive study in contradictions—Jackie was consistent only in the overflowing energy with which she attacked the challenge of being alive. Always passionately convinced of any viewpoint she happened to hold (nothing Jackie ever did was by halves), she raced through life, making lifelong friends and unforgetting enemies, surely breaking all records in the sheer volume of her living on this earth—as she did in the air.
[8:07] To live without risk for me would have been tantamount to death.
[14:16] Whenever I turned on a light, I'd think of how my foster family had been able to sit back and sit around that goddamn mojo lamp. Not me.
[16:39] I always knew I was different from the others.
[24:02] "What are you… Lees meer -
#166 Robert Noyce (Intel)
8 februari 2021 · 1 uur 13 min
What I learned from reading The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin.
----
[0:01] Bob Noyce took me under his wing,” Steve Jobs explains. “I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.” Jobs continues, “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before.”
[2:00] He inspired in nearly everyone whom he encountered a sense that the future had no limits , and that together they could , as he liked to say, “Go off and do something wonderful.”
[3:15] Warren Buffett , who served on a college board with Noyce for several years said: “Everybody liked Bob. He was an extraordinarily smart guy who didn’t need to let you know he was that smart. He could be your neighbor, but with lots of machinery in his head.”
[12:01] Noyce was slowly gathering experiences that would anchor his adult approach to life, which was not so much an approach as a headlong rush into any challenge with the unshakable assumption that he would emerge not only successful, but triumphant.
[14:18] Every night before he fell asleep, Noyce would mentally rehearse each of his dives in slow motion until he could see himself executing them perfectly. He called this habit “envisioning myself at the next level,” and he carried it with him throughout his life. In his mind’s eye, he could always see himself achieving something more.
[21:16] Bob was not the type to slow down for much of anything.
[33:02] His approach was to know the science cold and then “forget about it.” He did not slog or grind his way to ideas; he felt they just came to him. When he heard Picasso’s famous line about artistic creativity — “I do not seek; I find” — Noyce said that he invented in the same way.
[35:31] “I don’t have any recollection of a ‘ Boom! There it is!’ light bulb going off, ”Noyce later said of his ideas. Instead, he concei… Lees meer -
#165 William Shockley (Creator of the Electronic Age)
1 februari 2021 · 1 uur 2 min
What I learned from reading Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age by Joel Shurkin.
----
[1:19] Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant as he knowingly and deliberately destroy himself?
[5:04] Dear Jean: I am sorry that I feel I can no longer go on. Most of my life I have felt. that the world was not a pleasant place and that people were not a very admirable form of life. I find that I am particularly dissatisfied with myself and that most of my actions are the consequence of motives of which I am ashamed. Consequently, I must regard myself as less well suited than most to carry on with life and to develop the proper attitudes in our children. I hope you have better luck in the future. —Bill. He took out his revolver, put a bullet in one of the six chambers, put the gun to his head and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. He put the gun away and wrote a second note.
[13:36] “My elation with the group’s success was balanced by the frustration of not being one of the inventors. I experienced frustration that my personal efforts had not resulted in a significant inventive contribution of my own.” Apparently his involvement was too passive to provide Shockley with the credit he craved.
[16:29] I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climbing by moonlight and unroped. This is contrary to all my rock climbing teaching and does not mean poor training but only a strong headedness. [24:21] The rise and fall of Bill Shockley’s company took less than a year and a half. It profoundly affected Shockley, but had even more impact on the world around him and on our lives today. In all of the history of business, the failure of Shockley Semiconductor is in a class by itself. [35:26] Shockley was often insulting, treating his employees the way he treated his sons, with no glimmer of sensitivity. His favorite crack, when he thought someone was wrong, was: ‘Are you sure you have a PhD?’ Worse of all, he could not keep … Lees meer -
#164 Robert Goddard (Rocket Man)
25 januari 2021 · 1 uur 5 min
What I learned from reading Rocket Man: Robert Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age by David A. Clary.
---
[18:16] For even though I reasoned with myself that the thing was impossible, there was something inside me which simply would not stop working.
[20:08] Anything is possible with the man who makes the best use of every minute of his time.
[20:18] There are limitless opportunities open to the man who appreciates the fact that his own mind is the sole key that unlocks them.
[32:55] It’s appalling how short life is and how much there is to do. We have to be sports, take chances, and do what we can. [35:57] There were limits to Goddard’s ability as a salesman, beginning with his failure to determine the interests of his potential customers. [44:18] Goddard must be given his due. The first flight of a liquid-propelled rocket may not have looked like much but nothing like it had ever happened on Earth before. [50:28] He explained his work was aimed at high-altitude research, not outer space. The Wright Brothers, he reminded his audience, did not try to cross The Atlantic the first time up. [52:32] Emerson says, “If a man paint a better picture, preach a better sermon, or build a better mousetrap than anyone else, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” I have had the misfortune not to be an artist, a preacher, or a manufacturer of mousetraps. I have never had any great talent for selling ideas.
[59:27] A boy of exceptional brilliance, of humble origins and poor health, who dreamed great dreams and pursued them throughout a dedicated life. He was a distinguished but absentminded professor, a saintly man of rich humor, an enthusiastic piano player and painter, loved by everybody who knew him. Although his own country failed to appreciate the importance of what he did, he continued in his work despite widespread ridicule and the attempts of others to steal it. He never complained, never evinced discouragement or frustration. Above all, he never gave up. [1:04… Lees meer -
#163 Alfred Nobel
18 januari 2021 · 1 uur 2 min
What I learned from reading Alfred Nobel: A Biography by Kenne Fant.
----
[16:24] The self-awareness that would become so characteristic of him was awakening and with it the determination to be the master of every situation. He was not going to throw himself into the world and let luck or chance lead the way.
[26:26] When it comes to serious matters, I have adopted the rule of acting seriously.
[28:09] Alfred never forgot poverty.
[30:04] Financial pressure was accelerating his development as an inventor.
[39:15] Alfred asked her what she wished as a wedding present. The quick-witted young woman astonished him by replying without hesitation, “As much as Monsieur Nobel himself earns in one day.” Impressed and amused, Alfred agreed. The girl received a monetary gift of such size that she and her husband could enjoy it as long as their marriage lasted. The bank draft Alfred signed was for $110,000.
[47:33] It would take many years for Alfred to accept the idea that sometimes business failures were inevitable, that steps forward in one market were very often followed by a decline in another. Alfred learned to steel himself so that the disappointments would not depress him into inaction.
[51:18] Never do yourself what others could do better or equally well.
[57:26] Nobel had a soul of fire. He worked hard, burned with ideas, and spurred his collaborators on with his contagious energy.
[58:04] When he went somewhere he liked to get there fast.
[59:17] Whatever a human being manages to accomplish during his or her lifetime, there are so utterly few whose names will remain on the pages of history for any extended amount of time. Rarer still are those whose renown grows after their death. Alfred Nobel belongs among these. Lees meer----
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 episo…