11 Business Lessons I Learned From History Biographies (#478)

Sam Parr

He was vicious in business I mean he would basically go out and buy all these small oil refineries and if they didn't sell he goes hey look I'm gonna write you a fair deal if you don't take my offer I'm gonna crush you I'll show you all my accounting and all my revenue so you know I'm gonna crush you so I think you should take this deal so we can get rich together otherwise you're dead alright what's happening a lot of people have been asking me about what I've been reading lately because I've read a lot of amazing books and I wanna do a quick pod a quick episode that explains what I'm reading and how it relates to business most of these books we're only gonna go through 3 or 4 of them most of these books are not business related but there's a lot of learnings for business people I actually don't read business books I haven't read a business book in like 5 years they bore me and lately I've been reading a ton of like adventure stuff so things about like oh when americans expanded west or about people discovering north america or ship stories and pirates I love that type of stuff the reason I love that type of stuff is because it basically makes my daily life it turns the volume down it's kind of like I like the box and I like to like get into adventures and things like that because it makes my day to day which is mostly work and business stuff it makes it way easier because I'm like damn I just read the story about shackleton and how I got deserted on antarctica for 2 years this business stuff is easy so I like things like that and so here are 3 or 4 books that I've read lately that have had huge impacts on my day to day with business and I'm gonna explain how and why they did that so the first one is called on undaunted courage it's a story of lewis and clark if you're an american if you're not american I actually don't know what you know about lewis and clark if you're an american you've heard that term lewis and clark and you know that they were people 2 guys that kinda like were sent to discover the west well this story kinda dives deep on it and it's a story about in like I believe 1804 so it's this guy named meriwether lewis and william clark they were tasked by thomas jefferson to start in saint louis and to discover the the the west of the country at this.

Sam Parr

Jefferson had just bought a a bunch of what is now the western part of america from napoleon and of course indians and native americans they knew all about it but no american had actually been really too far west of the mississippi and so what's interesting is that lewis who is the main guy lewis was kind of the captain of the ship he took 30 folks so him and william clark took 30 folks and they went to california and back but no one had ever done that at the time and what's amazing is that meriwether lewis was only 31 years old and I thought that that was incredibly impressive and they took 2 years to do it so imagine going off on like a 2 year hiking trip in a place you've never been not knowing what you're gonna find and hoping that you come back and I found that to be such a good book the first big thing that I learned is punishment is necessary and so in today's kinda like tech culture I think I used to joke about hubspot the company that bought mine I was like you guys are too nice man you guys are like way too friendly and I think that that's like a common theme with like most tech companies is they're way too friendly they're way too nice and I can't stand that and I think I fall victim to that as well the reason being is when I read this book there's just some like a bunch of different stories so imagine just a 31 year old lewis and only 30 guys it's easy to get like chummy with them but he was really really strict and so there's a story about how they had to set up a a a fort during the wintertime and they set it up along with these native americans who they got to know and they set up this fort and they built this wall and one of lewis' men at nighttime hopped over the fence after he had just gotten done hanging out with the indians and an indian saw him and also hopped the fence and they're like hey man you can't be here this is just our space whatever and the next morning lewis heard about it and they whipped their guy 500 times it's called lashing so they basically tied him to a tree and whipped him 500 times and which is like a horrible punishment and that's like an extreme punishment but the reason he did it was because he's like look you just a you broke the rule we said you can't climb this fence and b now they know that they're allowed to do that too and so he had really really strict rules but that sounds like crazy like why would you do something like that that bad but basically his.

Sam Parr

Was look discipline breeds excellence and I have to have strict rules and I have to punish people in front of others when they've done something wrong so everyone knows here's the line don't cross it but also by enforcing these strict rules it's gonna make people know that like what our standards are and so there's just another tv show I've just started watching it's called bear the bear it's about this guy who's got this diner in chicago and he basically it's kind of like a crappy diner and he's trying to like step it up and so he sends his cousin to work at this fancy restaurant that's known for their strict discipline and the cousin gets to the restaurant that's really strict and he's like dude this is bullshit I'm not following all these rules they have all these rules about like you can't talk to you can't talk to your coworkers in front of the guests you have to be you only can pay attention to them or I don't want you or you have to like polish the forks your 1st week of work and you gotta spend 3 hours polishing the forks because the forks can't have any watermarks on them and eventually at the end of the week he's like man I love this I wish I I crave this discipline because what this does is it lets me know where the rules are what the boundaries are and it gives me a straightforward path that I can go on and it creates this this this culture of discipline and excellence and I love that and so a big takeaway from this book is you have to have punishment in order to trade discipline I think that in our culture right now with tech we are way too forgiving about certain things and it just reminded me that like firing people and things like that I actually think it's necessary the second thing is finding your personal product market fit so lewis was an outdoorsman his whole life and then he eventually had somewhat like an office job so he worked with thomas jefferson where he like was like his I don't remember what his title is but he would just be inside the house all day with jefferson like helping him create new laws and how to be diplomatic and things like that and he has this great line in this book he says the the author says on his 31st birthday lewis wrote in a famous passage the day I completed my 31st year I reflected that I had yet as done but little very little indeed to further the happiness of the human race I viewed with regret the hours that I've spent in idleness and now sorely feel that the want of that information which those hours would have given me has been judiciously expended meaning he's like I've wasted my time I have to act and I really appreciate that that he like said look I've been a total waste up until now now I'm gonna get after it and this is my mission and so finding your personal product market fit we talk about finding your product market fit with your company I think you have to find your personal product market fit and so I found that to be incredibly inspiring and the last thing from this book he understood that the people that you're leading each of them have individual traits and you have to figure out those traits and use that to motivate people when I was first starting in business I did a really bad job of understanding that every person is unique and I used to think that I could just tell them what to do that's not the case and so in this book there's this great line where he says lewis had a sense a feel for how his family was doing he knew exactly when to take a break when to issue issue a gill when to push for more when to encourage when to inspire when to tell a joke when to be tough he knew how to keep a distance from himself and the men and just how big it should be and he did a really good job of figuring out what motivated each person and that has taught me that I should probably do the same before I was like you're kind of all just a bunch of robots to me it's just human capital instead in order to be a great leader particularly like lewis you have to do a good job of figuring out what motivates people in creating rewards creating punishment in order to fit each person and hopefully making your whole crew better the second book that I recommend it's called the operator and it's by robert o'neil and it's about the time when seal team 6 was deployed to go and kill bin laden and I love reading these these like army and military books but there's this great line so basically robert o'neil and his and team seal team 6 they were deployed on this helicopter and they were on their way to bin laden's compound and he said once we get on this mission we weren't we knew that we weren't gonna see our kids again or kiss our wives we'll never eat another steak or smoke another cigar and there's this like thing about like he's going to on this helicopter and he knows or he thinks that he's never gonna come back and survive or see his family again and I found that like so encouraging because sometimes I'm afraid to tweet something or I'm afraid to like start a business or I'm afraid to make a phone call when these guys are like going to like they it's a suicide mission they think that they're getting dropped off at bin laden's compound and they're gonna kill him and but then they're gonna die and I was like man if these guys could do this I could do this other stuff that's no big deal and so I find like a lot of inspiration from little stories like that there's this other thing in the book where there's other story in the book where basically they figured out where they thought bin laden was and it was like this compound imagine like an 8 house an 8 room mansion surrounded by a big fence and so they did this thing where they built a a a model of this house and they spent weeks running through the house and like saying alright at this.

Hubspot

You're going to run this many steps then that's when the room is gonna open here you're likely gonna find these people in the room but then you're gonna do this and they like did it so much that they knew how many steps they were gonna take they knew how many seconds each thing were was gonna take and they planned like crazy but here's the thing when they landed the helicopter into the compound it crashed so from the second the mission started the whole plan got thrown out the the door and everything got screwed up but there's this thing called commander's intent a commander's intent is when the intent of the outcome is clear so you have to verbalize it you have to write it down you have to say I'm going to or the out the desired outcome is x y and z and the reason you plan even though you know the plan is gonna go to shit the reason you plan is because a when something does go to shit you have something to fall back on and b it gives your men or your your your employees it gives them confidence that like look it's gonna be okay we've we've swapped the details but when it doesn't go okay you know what the commander's intent is and I think that for me with my first business I remember starting it and I said by the age of 30 I wanna have this much money great that's my commander's intent the reason I wanted this much money was I wanted like financial freedom and not to stress out and then once I had my commander's intent I created a plan and I created the rules I was gonna follow when I created what input I needed to get to my commander's intent and as expected a lot of things changed so I said like I want this much revenue by year 2 this much revenue by year 5 which means I could probably sell I miss revenue on sometimes I exceeded revenue other times I had to fire people I changed my values sometimes like things happened along the way but because I had my own commander's intent I said no to everything that didn't get me to my desired outcome and I had something to fall back on when I was making new decisions so I thought to myself is this gonna get me closer to that particular goal if yes do it if no don't do it and avoid it and so with the operator I learned about commander's intent and planning our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crms are a cobbled together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous I think I love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better in the last book I lied and said it I didn't read a lot of business books this one's kind of business y it's called titan and it's about the biography of john rockefeller john rockefeller was a businessman in the late 1800 all the way to like 1930 or so he created standard oil so standard oil it's hard to compare to what it is nowadays because it was so big but the offshoots of standard oil so standard oil was eventually broken up and so in the 19 thirties teddy roosevelt made monopolies illegal and they did it because of standard oil the offshoots of standard oil which they broke up it's like b I believe it's bp it's exxon it's conoco it's mobil all those companies came from standard oil it was as if amazon facebook and Google were one company it basically accounted for a huge percentage of the economy and john rockefeller though you think of this guy or you think of a business person nowadays as being this like really vicious person and he was kind of vicious but he was very interesting in that he broke a lot of stereotypes in my head a few interesting lines from that book 1 he said I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people's efforts than a 100% of my own efforts and so right now on twitter and in my world we're seeing lots of things about solo businesses and so a lot of people take pride in solo businesses and I think many times they're great but I have one big issue with them which is if you're a solo business that means you're the only one doing all of the work and john rockefeller in that line where he talks about 1% of other people versus a 100% of his that kinda changed my thinking where it's significantly better even if someone isn't as good as you it's better to have a handful of those people doing a lot of the work versus only you doing the work that like kinda changed my thinking on on on what it means to be a sole business because I'm like I would way rather have a bunch of people doing a little bit of work and then he has this other line that says the ability to deal with people is a perch is as purchasable a commodity as sugar and coffee and I pay more for that ability than any other under the sun and I thought that was interesting because I'm not the best manager but I can hire good managers and so that kinda like got rid of the the blocker I had in my head of like well if he says that hiring people is good but I'm not great at managing them oh cool I can hire people to manage them so that was like really useful for me he also has this great learning about gaining a skill so I'm a huge fan of telling people look before you start a company or before you go and try and do your own thing you need to learn a skill in my case it was copywriting I'm a big fan of copywriting but he's got this great line where he talks about his time as an accountant so from the ages of 16 to like 19 or 20 he was an accountant for a small firm that's where he learned about operations and where he learned about like where does money come from how should it be accounted for how do great operations look like he's got this great line where he goes oh how blessed the young men are who have struggled for a foundation in the beginning of life I'll never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years I spent as an apprentice and so that's where he learns all about the ability to overcome to adapt to get a skill and so that kind of changed my life there's this other great book called mastery by robert greene and the whole book is about on how you should develop a skill because in learning that skill it teaches you in how to master something and it and it also opens doors for you and you could use that skill in other unrelated fields and that's how you become incredibly successful I'm a big fan of learning a skill and john rockefeller is one of the guys who taught me the importance of that I used to think being a generalist was good not anymore I don't think that anymore and it's because of this book titan and the last thing I said previously that he was a really nice guy he was vicious in business I mean he would basically go out and buy all these small oil refineries and if they didn't sell he goes hey look I'm gonna write you a fair deal if you don't take my offer I'm gonna crush you I'll show you all my accounting and all my revenue so you know I'm gonna crush you so I would think you should take this deal so we can get rich to get rich get we can get rich together otherwise you're dead a lot of them took them up on that and they did get rich some of them they didn't and so he was pretty vicious but he was pretty much nice along the way there's this famous story about how once his company got big rockefeller had this piece of exercise equipment and he was like rolling the exercise equipment into the office and this accountant who hadn't recognized rockefeller said hey you gotta get that out of here you can't have that here and so rockefeller just looked at him and goes oh alright I'm sorry and he politely took the exercise equipment out of that room and moved it to another room he didn't like snap back like do you know who I am and I thought that that was really interesting and like a cool way of handling it and show that you can be a polite guy you could be kind and vicious in business they're not opposites another thing is that he was famous for like laying down during meetings and closing his eyes because he just said this is just easier for me to listen and they used to like talk about him behind his back and they would say man this guy rockefeller feels like he's sleeping like he doesn't even pay attention to what we're saying in the meetings and he would say no I'm I'm listening like I I choose to let everyone talk I wanna sit back and say nothing and I'm just gonna sit in silence and at the end of the meeting I'll say thank you everyone but he just would sit and listen he would barely talk and someone asked him why and he recited this poem that he would say constantly he said a wise a wise old owl lived in an oak the more he saw the less he spoke the less he spoke the more he heard why aren't we all like that old bird and so he would like just sit and listen and then when he had to make a decision he had all types of information that he needed in order to make that decision and so I used to think that when you're this big successful businessman you gotta be the one doing all the talking no it's the opposite you gotta be doing all the listening and finally he did a very good job of complimenting people so whenever he saw someone who was making a mistake he was famous for complimenting them first so like for example there was this accountant that who he had and rockefeller was an old former accountant he saw a mistake and he goes these books are very well kept very well indeed however I noticed one little small mistake right here and it was like actually a pretty big air but he was really good at catching the mistake complimenting him first and then getting them to correct it because he knew that the way that you motivate people is you kinda gotta make them respect you a little bit you can't insult them in front of a bunch of people and he did a really good job of of handling people and I thought that that was a really fascinating thing for him to do as opposed to being like this guy on the tv show who's like you made this big error you're fired in front of everyone to make an ordeal out of it so I thought that was interesting so these are the 3 books titan the operator and undaunted courage go and check them out I'm a big fan of them