The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com
My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful.
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My guest: Dr. Martin Seligman is one of the most influential psychologists alive. He's the founder of positive psychology and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Positive Psychology Center. His research reshaped how we understand optimism, resilience, and human flourishing. His books, including Learned Optimism, Flourish, and The Hope Circuit, have sold millions of copies. His latest is Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress.
Key Learnings
The three parts of agency. Efficacy is the belief you can hit a goal right now, and it drives whether you try. Optimism is the belief you can hit it in the future, and it drives persistence and grit. Imagination is the range of goals you can even picture, and it drives creativity. When a culture has all three, it progresses. When they fall, it stagnates.
"Depression and pessimism and happiness and optimism are too important to be left to happy people." Marty calls himself a born depressive and pessimist. He founded positive psychology and still wakes at 4:00 a.m. to a voice telling him he can't do the thing in front of him. What he's built over decades is the skill of arguing back, treating that voice not as truth but as a rival whose job is to make him miserable.
The techniques don't come naturally to anyone. A small number of people are born happy. Everyone else has to learn and practice the skills, which is why Marty spent much of his career testing them rather than assuming they work.
How you respond to good news matters more than you think. When his wife Mandy won first prize in the biggest black and white photography contest in the world, Marty could have said "congratulations, dear, you deserve it" and moved on. Instead, he named the exact photo that won, asked her to repeat what the editor said word for word, and tied her talent back to how they teach their kids. Ryan's summary of what made it work: specificity and curiosity. Marty calls it active constructive responding, and done consistently, it increases love and commitment and cuts divorce rates.
Marty's contrarian take on leadership. He thinks the whole hunt for "what great leaders do" is a wild goose chase, because the great leaders he's met all do completely different things. What good followers have in common is PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. His advice is to promote the leaders who create the most PERMA, and to hold managers responsible for their people's well-being, not just their output, because well-being predicts productivity.
Grit and agency. Grit, the idea made famous by his former student Angela Duckworth, feeds straight into optimism and increases how long people push through adversity. On Angela: "one of the best students I've ever had," and "it's great to be outdone." He credits her rare social intelligence, the ability to build allies instead of enemies.
Predicting elections by counting optimism. With his graduate student Harold Zullow, Marty studied a century of nomination acceptance speeches and found the more optimistic candidate usually wins. In 1984, they sealed their prediction of the two nominees in an envelope at The New York Times and got it right.
The $17,500 lesson. Convinced by Dukakis's optimistic acceptance speech, Marty flew to Edinburgh to place a legal bet and put his entire life savings on Dukakis at 2 to 1. Then he learned the speech was written by Ted Sorensen, and that Dukakis, in his own unscripted press conferences, was deeply pessimistic. He lost everything. The takeaway that shaped his later work: measure the unscripted moments, not the polished speeches.
The 2024 call. Trump and Harris were even on optimism in their convention speeches. But across September and October, tracking how each explained bad events in press conferences, Trump got steadily more optimistic. Marty's team sealed another prediction: Trump winning and possibly by a lot.
Why the fired-up CEO speech doesn't work great. After Marty published his method, both political parties asked him how to write optimistic speeches. He sent the protocol, and within a few elections everyone sounded optimistic, and it stopped predicting anything, because the optimism was shallow. People don't internalize a leader saying "we're going to crush it." Real agency shows up in the psychology of the team, and that comes from who you hire and how you train them, not from the speech.
What the Army taught him. As lead consultant on the Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, Marty helped train 40,000 drill sergeants and profiled 900,000 soldiers from their first day. Three traits predicted who would later earn awards for excellent work and heroism: optimism, high positive emotion, and low negative emotion. On the other side, catastrophizers were more than twice as likely to develop PTSD at every level of combat.
The hiring lesson. Hire optimists and happy people. Avoid catastrophizers. And when you can't pick your team, train the pessimists you already have in the skills of agency.
"Put It In Perspective." The tool Marty uses to retrain catastrophizers. Picture the ominous "come see me at 4:00" email. Write down the worst thing that could happen, then the best thing, then the most likely thing, then a plan for that most likely case. Catastrophizers skip straight to the worst case and get paralyzed. The exercise pulls them back to what's actually probable.
Marry an optimist. "If you're a pessimist, disaster is to marry another pessimist," because you'll both see the worst in every setback. The wine story makes the point about behavior change: after Mandy told him he'd wrecked a family engagement dinner by sending back a bottle, Marty realized that if she complained as much as he did, he wouldn't want to be married to her. He decided to stop. The critical thoughts never went away, but the behavior did.
The gratitude testimonial. Think of someone still alive who did or said something that changed your life. Write a 300-word testimonial in three parts: what they did, what you did because of it, and where you are now as a result. Then deliver it in person and read it out loud. Marty has run this with thousands of people. The usual result is that both people cry, and a month later they test as less depressed and higher in well-being.
Reading the minds of the dead. Marty's method for measuring agency across history is counting words. Agentic language like "choose," "compete," "can," and "do" versus language of constraint like "obliged" and "assigned." With Claude and ChatGPT, he can now do in one morning what used to take months: reading whole eras of writing and rating how agentic they are.
St. Augustine and a thousand years of stagnation. Before Augustine, around 400 AD, Christian thinkers were highly agentic and taught that you could take part in your own salvation. Augustine's doctrine that grace comes only from God set Church teaching for close to a thousand years, and progress collapsed with it. When agency climbs again, as it does under Charlemagne around 800, progress climbs too. The pattern holds when you line it up against GDP, population, and writing about freedom.
The manager's real job. "It's your job as a manager not just to keep productivity going, but to increase the well-being and agency of the people under you." Do that, and you get promoted. Fail at it and your time is up.
The Champagne Question... What he'd celebrate a year from now. Marty wants psychohistory taken seriously as a real field, one that measures psychological variables, uses them to understand history, and then changes them to raise future happiness and productivity.
Reflection Questions:
Marty is 84, founded the field, and still wakes at 4 a.m. to a voice saying he can't do it. What does your version of that voice say, and what does it usually say it about? When it shows up, do you accept it as fact or argue back?
Think about the last time someone close to you shared good news. Which quadrant were you in: active constructive, passive constructive, active destructive, or passive destructive? What did you actually say?
Marty says a manager's job is to raise the well-being and agency of their people, not just their output. If your team was measured on PERMA tomorrow, what score would they give you, and where's the gap?
If you liked this one with Marty, you should also listen to... Episode #703: Angela Duckworth - Why Grit Isn't Enough
Time Stamps:
2:34 Angela Duckworth, grit & social intelligence
6:05 Active constructive responding: the Mandy photography story
12:13 Why leadership is heterogeneous, and the case for PERMA
14:49 How grit and agency fit together
16:09 The born pessimist who founded positive psychology
21:20 What the book is really about: founding psychohistory
22:52 Predicting elections & the $17,500 Dukakis bet
25:34 The 2024 prediction
29:17 Why the rah-rah CEO speech doesn't help much
31:07 What the U.S. Army taught him: optimism & PTSD
35:19 "Put It In Perspective," the tool for catastrophizers
38:55 Marry an optimist, and the wine-snob story
42:19 The gratitude testimonial
44:49 Reading the minds of the dead & St. Augustine
48:37 The manager's real job
49:33 What he'd celebrate a year from now
51:05 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com
My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful.
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
Key Learnings
All the greats have a coach. Strauss is one of the most disciplined humans alive, and he has had one since he was 30. His argument: Tom Brady is an amazing athlete, but would he have performed as well with no coach, or a lousy one?
A great coach is objective, encouraging, smart, and experienced. They warn you of obstacles you can't see yet.
Strauss doesn't want the Socratic method from his coach. He wants direct advice. He'll use questions when he's leading others. But when he brings a problem to his own coach, he wants to be told: "You have that wrong; you're missing this."
So What? Strauss was avoiding a confrontation because he knew the other person would be really upset. His coach said, "So what?" He had the conversation. The person was upset. They got to the other side, and it was better than leaving it out there.
Bad news doesn't get better with age.
The most effective people are the most open-minded and self-critical. The ones who insist they don't need a coach are usually the ones losing.
"Arrogance is the enemy of continued success."
Humility isn't pretending you're not good. Strauss says claiming he's bumbling through the job would be silly, and he's proud of what he does well. The humility is in staying open. His team's description of him: strongly held opinions, freely shared, and a mind that changes when the facts do.
"You're just a terrible speaker." Strauss was 31, newly president of Vestron, and had written an eloquent after-dinner speech he was proud of. He read it off the page. His boss pulled him aside afterward and told him it was terrible.
What two days of media training taught Strauss:
Talk about what the audience cares about, not what you want to say
Never deliver a written speech unless you're President of the United States
Inject your personality
Try to make them laugh
Be of service to the audience. Strauss opens his class at MIT Sloan by asking the students why they came and what they want out of it. It surprises them every time, because speakers never ask.
One meeting with 20 people beats 20 meetings with one person. A young CEO Strauss coaches was sleeping four hours a night and spending 20 hours a week on one-on-ones. Strauss told him to do one weekly meeting with all 20. 
Delegate with information. Everyone running a group is in the same room once a week and shares everything, including the problems. If it's business, it goes in the room. If it's personal, they can talk one-on-one. Politics shrink because nobody has information nobody else has.
Happy stuff doesn't reach the CEO's desk. If it landed on his desk, it's either bad or genuinely complex. That's the system working.
Align the words with the dollar signs. Mission, strategy, culture, and compensation all have to point in the same direction. Say you want to be the best in the world while paying people regardless of performance, and they will follow the money every time.
The worst comp structure is CEO discretion. It builds a culture where everyone is trying to please one person, and people think pleasing someone means telling them what they want to hear.
Hire the most talented people on earth, then support them through thick and thin. Strauss greenlit Dirty Dancing at Vestron on a $5.5 million budget. The first-time director was too scared to speak, so the team pitched it. They claimed the film would change how women dressed, produce an award-winning soundtrack, and win an Oscar. Strauss thought the pitch was nonsense. He didn't even like the script. He greenlit it anyway because he trusted the team over his own judgment. It became the biggest independent hit of all time to that date, a record it held until The Blair Witch Project.
Be a good judge of talent, not of products. Knowing which one you are is the whole thing.
Leave the escape hatches open. When competitors poured hundreds of millions into VR and the metaverse, Strauss said no. But Take-Two did enough experimentation to move fast if he was wrong, and got paid for every VR project they took on. They lost nothing on the wrong bet.
Be creatively risk-forward and financially risk-averse. A well-run film studio had a 30 percent hit ratio, meaning 70 percent of what it released broke even or lost money. So you build the balance sheet first, then take the creative swings. "If you can't afford to lose, you don't play the game."
Carl Icahn won because he was a good poker player with a huge stack of chips. When things went against him, he didn't sit around moaning. He went to the next game.
At 68, he's up at 4:45 and in the gym by 6:45, often twice a day. Looking your best is a form of respect for other people and for yourself. If you look sloppy and out of shape, it's harder to lead. The other half is simply feeling good enough to show up with energy and a smile.
He refuses to hold anyone else to his own personal standard. Everyone is on their own journey, and he doesn't want clones. Thirty minutes of walking five days a week is genuinely good for you. That person is showing up for themselves too.
No AI slop in Grand Theft Auto. Take-Two builds handcrafted, building by building. Their teams will use state-of-the-art tools to do great work more efficiently. What they won't do is push a button on someone else's model and call the output theirs.
"That's yesterday's headlines." Strauss's father-in-law's answer whenever anyone congratulated him. Take-Two doesn't do the who's-better-than-us party. They show sincere appreciation for great work, and then they get up the next morning and do it again.
Reflection Questions
Who is the person in your life who will tell you that you have it wrong? 
What is the confrontation you're avoiding right now, hoping it resolves itself? Have that conversation today.
Where are you taking real risk without the balance sheet to survive being wrong? And where are you so protected that you aren't taking any risk at all?
More Learning
#662: Nick Thompson - Move at an Uncomfortable Pace
#626: Rob Kimbel - The Power of Grit and Generosity
#525: Frank Slootman - Raise Your Standards & Push the Pace
Podcast Chapters
00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle
01:01 Meet Strauss Zelnick
03:00 President of Fox at 32
06:15 He Greenlit Dirty Dancing and Thought It Would Flop
09:55 How He Finds Talent
11:30 Align the Words With the Dollar Signs
18:56 One Meeting With 20 People
22:33 Up at 4:45, Gym by 6:45
26:20 No AI Slop in Grand Theft Auto
27:55 Why He Doesn't Feel Lonely at the Top
28:53 His Coach's Advice Was "So What?"
29:51 Every Great Leader Has a Coach
32:37 Direct Advice, Not the Socratic Method
35:31 What He Teaches at MIT Sloan
37:03 "You're Just a Terrible Speaker"
39:27 Arrogance Is the Enemy of Continued Success
41:03 Why He Said No to VR
43:52 Creatively Risk-Forward, Financially Risk-Averse
47:20 That's Yesterday's Headlines
49:51 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
www.LearningLeader.com
The Price of Becoming
www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
My guest: Angela Duckworth is a psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient. Her book Grit was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and her TED Talk is among the most-watched ever. Her new book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best.
Key Learnings
She almost lost her mom in the Atlantic. Angela took her 87-year-old mom snorkeling miles offshore. Her mom had not swum in decades. Within minutes, she had aspirated water into both lungs and was unconscious. Angela treaded water, held her mom's head up with one arm, and waved the other until help came. Her mom is 91 now and painting.
No amount of grit would have saved them. Angela could not have swum her mother to shore. What saved them was changing the situation, which meant getting other people to their side.
The situation is the ocean. It's that powerful, and most of us don't know what water we're swimming in.
Grit isn't wrong. It's incomplete. Angela hasn't renounced anything. She's expanding it. Effort is what you bring. The situation determines whether that effort compounds or gets swallowed.
Angela was a striver, and it worked for a long time. She knew she wasn't the most talented kid, but nobody was going to outwork her. She wanted to make the cheerleading squad without being able to do a split. She wanted a solo in choir while barely able to carry a tune. She worked her way to both. Most people would be surprised how far sheer effort can take them.
Then it stopped being enough. To get as far as she actually wanted to go, and to do it sustainably for herself and the people around her, ignoring the situation was a mistake. 
The shift: stop making the best of your situation through effort alone, and make the situation better first.
"Of all the ways you can change your behavior, willpower is the absolute worst."
You can white-knuckle a donut. You just can't do it forever. Resisting works in the moment and reliably leaves people exhausted, which is why it fails on day three.
Your urges come from your thoughts. Your thoughts come from your surroundings. Donut, delicious. Then your hand moves. Instead of fighting the urge, ask where the thought came from.
The better question: what situation would give me different thoughts? Not "how do I resist," but "where can I be so that the thought never arrives?"
Three inputs shape what you think: the people around you, the physical objects within reach, and the place you're in.
Situational agency. Angela coined the term. The situation isn't given to you. It's taken.
Leon Marchand was already sixth in the world. His parents, both former Olympians, didn't tell him to train harder or wake up earlier. They told him to change his situation. He emailed Bob Bowman, moved to Arizona, and within two years cut more than eight seconds off his personal best and broke Michael Phelps's last-standing individual world record. A year after that, he won four golds in Paris.
What actually changed for Marchand: the best coach in the sport, a lane full of people who all believed they could win it all, better facilities and nutrition and physical therapy, and a culture where world-class was the baseline rather than the ceiling.
The situation isn't a given. The situation's taken.
Control the controllables. The situation is one of them. Angela agrees with the mantra. Her objection is that most people apply it only to what's between their ears: mindset, attitude, goals. Marchand didn't rethink his attitude. He got on a plane.
Get the outside game right, and you get much of the inside game for free. Change the room and the thoughts change with it.
Every reason you can't change your situation is probably true, and beside the point. When Angela told people what she was writing, they immediately listed the reasons they were stuck. The mother-in-law, the spouse's job, the kids' school. None of it is wrong. All of it ignores the list of things they could change.
Her late father-in-law's whole philosophy was two words: show up. Wedding, funeral, baseball game. Show up.
John Wooden taught high school English for 14 years. He kept an apple on his desk. He thought of himself as a teacher first, which is also why he sat high in the bleachers during games instead of courtside. He'd taught them in practice. The game was theirs.
What Wooden's players took with them: to be your best at anything, find a great teacher. Angela sees a DIY culture pulling the other way. When she tells young people to email someone, the answer is often that they'll just learn it on YouTube or ask a chatbot. You can teach yourself a lot of guitar that way. You will not become a great guitarist alone.
Belief is borrowed more than you'd think. Nobody tries hard at anything without the thought "I can do this" somewhere in their head. That thought usually arrives from someone else first.
Angela was a self-described ditzy cheerleader throwing keg parties. Her 10th- and 12th-grade English teacher, Mr. Carr, saw a writer. He handed her books. He took time on her pages. By graduation, she was the rare Harvard freshman who signed up for a second semester of the required writing course, just to keep going.
The Pygmalion effect. Bob Rosenthal made up a test, told elementary teachers which kids were about to bloom, and picked the names at random. The teachers called on those kids more, listened harder, encouraged more. By year's end, the kids fulfilled the prophecy they'd been randomly assigned.
Every single person she has interviewed has a Mr. Carr. Olympic athletes, Olympic coaches, CEOs, world leaders. Someone who could see farther than they could see.
Confidence is a half-filled helium balloon. It has to get batted back up again and again. Which means you don't need your mentor once. You need them on the bad days.
Angela forwards her rejection letters to her team. The journals she submits to reject over 90 percent of submissions, and the rejections run eight single-spaced pages. She sends them around so the younger scientists watch her fail, hear that she's angry and discouraged, and then watch her get back up.
She failed writing this book the first time. Up before dawn seven days a week through an entire sabbatical, and the clock ran out. She called her publisher and her agent to give the money back and asked whether she owed interest. They called it a pause. She said remote controls have separate buttons for pause and stop.
Burnout and imposter syndrome were abstractions until they weren't. She had taught both. She had never lived either. Not eating, not sleeping. What got her out was not more effort. It was a better situation: additional editorial support and mentors to get her back on track.
Frankl and Maslow argued about this for decades, and Maslow conceded. Self-actualization aimed only at yourself leaves you unfulfilled. Maslow's final writing added a level above it and named it self-transcendence.
There are only two types of people: those who are humble, and those who are about to be humbled.
Angela's champagne moment a year from now: celebrating the people around her. Erikson called this stage generativity, and the question it asks is how everything you've learned can help the next generation do better than you did. Her students should excel her. They should be the ones on podcasts. She wants to cede the spotlight on purpose rather than have it taken.
Her core identity is psychological scientist. Not speaker. Not author. The stage is a flow state, and she's good at it, but take away the research, and it isn't her anymore. Worth knowing which one yours is.
Reflection Questions
Pick the goal you've been grinding on the longest with the least to show for it. Is that an effort problem or a situational problem?
Who is the best in the world at the thing you're trying to learn? What would it take to send the email this week, and then get on the plane?
What is your purpose, in one sentence, written down? Mine is to inspire others to value and pursue excellence. What's yours?
More Learning
#679: Kat Cole - The Four Mindsets Every Leader Needs
#591: Ryan Holiday - Do The Right Thing Right Now
#673: Dan Coyle - Flourish. The Transformative Power of Creating Community

Podcast Chapters
00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 
01:39 Meet Angela Duckworth 
02:57 The Dedication to Her Mother 
04:17 Her Mother Nearly Drowned 
07:08 Grit Isn't Enough 
09:47 Willpower Is the Worst 
12:26 Where Your Urges Come From 
14:31 Marchand Got on the Plane 
19:57 The Excuses That Sound True 
22:27 Wooden Taught English for 14 Years 
26:25 The Confidence You Borrow 
32:22 Five Minutes With Pete Carroll 
34:27 A Half-Filled Helium Balloon 
35:29 She Forwards Her Rejections 
37:05 What Success Feels Like 
40:28 Frankl, Maslow, Self-Transcendence 
45:59 The Book She Failed to Write 
52:57 The Champagne Question 
54:03 She Wants to Be Surpassed 
57:27 Scientist First, Speaker Second 
01:01:34 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
www.LearningLeader.com
The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller!
www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
Blake Mycoskie founded TOMS Shoes in 2006 after a trip to Argentina, where he saw children without shoes and built a company around giving away a pair for every pair sold. TOMS went on to donate more than 100 million pairs of shoes and became one of the most copied business models in the world. What most people don't know is what happened after he sold it, and I'm grateful that he was open to talking about that on this episode of The Learning Leader Show.
Key Learnings
Make your gratitude specific. Not "I'm grateful for my family." Name the exact thing. Blake's example from that morning: the photos the camp posted of his daughter laughing in the lake, and knowing his stoic kid does not smile like that unless she is genuinely happy.
He kept the practice going for five years when he couldn't feel any of it. Blake could not name five things he was grateful for, and he had all the same things in his life he has now. He did it anyway. He credits it as one of the things that kept him going.
Surfing is a great thinking practice. Surfing is mostly just sitting on the board. Three hours in the water, ten waves, maybe five minutes standing. The rest is paddling and sitting. That's why it works as a thinking practice.
Capture the idea in the moment or lose it. Blake programmed the side button on his Apple Watch to open a voice memo. Every idea he has sitting on the board, he records. They're all waiting when he gets out.
He hit every marker and still felt worthless. "I did everything, and I still, deep down in my soul, had this feeling like I'm not worthy, I'm not enough, and I never will be."
The external validation was the drug. Selling TOMS cut off the supply. The thing that had been holding up his sense of self was suddenly gone.
If you get there and it's empty, don't panic. Panicking is what Blake did, and having money meant he could make expensive mistakes fast. Build the dream house. Get divorced. One thing after another.
The emptiness may be the point. Blake's read on it: if achievement delivered what society promises, you'd never go inward. Feeling hollow at the summit is what forces the inner work.
He re-patterned the sentence he'd been telling himself since childhood. The old one was "you're not enough." He replaced it with "I am enough. I've always been enough." Twenty minutes every morning and every evening. Forty straight days. It worked, and he no longer needs to do it daily.
Sometimes you just need a physical cue to catch the loop. That's the whole idea behind the bracelet he wears. Not magic. A reminder on your wrist that interrupts the thought.
Give the second one away. Blake found the bracelet's real power was handing one to a friend. Now you're both wearing it, you're both in on it, and there's an unspoken agreement that neither of you has to have a bad day alone. Men are worse at building that than women are.
Tell your kids they're enough, and keep telling them. They're going to get the opposite message from everywhere else, which is exactly why it has to come from you repeatedly. Blake says the relaxation you'll see in them is immediate.
Be brutally honest about how hard the job is. Try to talk them out of it. Blake is the last interview in the process now. If he can lay out every negative and they still desperately want it, the commitment is real.
"How many people did you convince not to take the role before you got the right person?" Most leaders slip into sales mode, talk the candidate into it, and end up talking themselves into the candidate.
What he screens for during the interview process:
Integrity first. If it isn't there, it surfaces fast now.
Attitude second. The person who never says "that's not my job."
Whether they're building a resume or joining a movement.
Find the people who cover what you're bad at. Blake is a storyteller, a vision-sharer, and high energy. He is not a supply chain guy, not a finance guy, and he has trouble saying no. So he hired around it. That's what let him actually be the chief shoe giver instead of pretending to be a CEO.
Don't wait for permission. Most people stand in line at the front door. Blake looks for side doors. In Argentina he had no investors and no plan, just an idea and the words One For One. Ryan's version for his kids: everyone can apply online. Drive to the restaurant and go talk to the manager instead.
Having no experience was the advantage. He'd never made a shoe, so he didn't know which rules he was breaking. Same with outdoor advertising. Same with driver's ed. He learned it from Richard Branson: ask forgiveness, not permission.
Nashville wouldn't allow advertising, so he sold art instead. Blake spent two years with the city council and got there by removing the ad from the ad. No price, no call to action. Just album covers on the sides of buildings, called country music art. Once one artist had one, they all wanted one. He sold the company to Clear Channel.
You don't attract what you want. You attract what you are. Want honest friends, be honest. Want peace at home, bring peace. Want trust, practice it when nobody's watching. Blake applies it to customers too: sloppy companies attract sloppy customers, and that's usually the real reason the business fails.
Charlie Munger got asked how to get a great wife. He said: deserve one.
Be known for doing what you said you'd do. Early on Blake didn't have the skills, so he built the reputation on execution instead. Move fast, keep it simple, do it with integrity. Momentum is a form of trust.
The other half of that is not overpromising. Blake's own failure mode is getting excited, feeling falsely confident, promising something big, and missing. When it happens, own it fast and be honest, and the relationship usually survives.
Be careful using a general-purpose chatbot as a therapist. Blake's warning, and the reason the founders of Sonia built a purpose-built tool instead: the big consumer models are designed to make you feel good about yourself. If you need to hear something hard, that's the last thing you want.
He went from skeptic to advisor in six months. Blake met the Sonia founders at a mental health conference, tried the app to be polite, and by the third session was getting insights he hadn't gotten elsewhere. He now spends five to ten hours a week helping them. His reason for loving the work: "Now I get to be the coach instead of the athlete."
Stop chasing balance. Design for harmony. Blake picked this up from an executive at Cannes who said she'd given up on balance. He goes hard in phases. Full dad mode with the office waiting on emails. Then all in on a launch and missing things at home. The measure isn't evenly split day to day. It's whether, over a year, everyone in his life feels like they got what they needed to thrive. Including him.
Reflection Questions
What did you actually feel grateful for today? Not the category. The specific moment.
What is the sentence you've been repeating to yourself since childhood, and is it true?
In your last hire, how hard did you try to talk them out of it? Or did you spend the interview selling them, and then sell yourself?
More Learning
#598: Sam Parr - Bold. Fast. Fun. Living by a Mantra & Building a Media Company
#547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What Other People Think of You
#676: Jesse Cole - Built for The Fans (The Owner of the Savannah Bananas) 
Episode Chapters
00:00 Meet Blake Mycoskie
01:38 Surfing is Great for Deep Thinking
03:41 Make Your Gratitude Specific
05:39 Blake Sold TOMS and Fell Apart
11:20 Advice for Those to "Make It" and Feel Nothing
13:23 "I Am Enough" and the Bracelet on His Wrist
17:35 The No Magic Pill
19:41 The Risk of Chatbot Therapy
22:42 A Surgeon Dad, a Bestselling Mom, and the Pressure Nobody Said Out Loud
25:13 Telling Your Kids They're Enough
31:31 How He Got Country Music Art on the Side of Buildings
35:15 Learning to Be Proud of TOMS Again
38:49 Hiring Around Your Weaknesses
41:25 Try to Talk Them Out of the Job
45:07 You Don't Attract What You Want. You Attract What You Are.
46:54 Don't Wait for Permission
48:34 Be Known for Doing What You Said You'd Do
50:02 The Champagne Question: Harmony, Not Balance
52:28 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
www.LearningLeader.com
The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller!
www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
My guest - Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, the social gaming company he built from zero to $12.7 billion, pioneering a category that generated over a billion app installs and introduced hundreds of millions of people to online play. He's a serial founder who has started ten companies, taught product development at Stanford, and made early seed investments in Facebook and Twitter. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play.
Key Learnings
Coaches are cheat codes. Mark has hired a surfing coach, a tennis coach, a chess coach, a life coach, and the legendary Bill Campbell. None of them were assigned to him. He went and found them.
"You throw to where you swing. You don't swing to where you throw." His tennis coach, Jorge, on learning how to serve. Commit to the natural swing first. You'll miss. You'll look stupid. Eventually your brain realizes you're serious and puts the ball where it belongs.
You play to get better. You don't play to win. Not this point. Not this match. What am I doing right now that makes me better in the next game?
Kill the ego so it gets out of the way of you being humble and curious.
Don't contort the organization around one talented jerk. Colleen McCreary, Zynga's chief people officer, kept a sign on her wall: "No jerks allowed." She once vetoed an acquisition because she believed the founder was toxic. When the organization sees you refuse to bend just to win one point, they build muscle and confidence too.
You'll have periods out of alignment. That's okay. Sometimes the person is in a crucial seat and you can't swap them tomorrow. What matters is that you're aligned with the philosophy.
Bill Campbell's two lessons: intellectual honesty and courage. Be committed to the deep truths above everything else, and say them to your team even when it hurts. Then have the courage to stand up to your own team, your own board, and your own investors.
A well-run company is a democratic dictatorship. Campbell leaned heavily on the dictatorship half. Unapologetically.
The flip side of ambition is sacrifice. Everyone says they're a ten out of ten on ambition. 
Mark's test: would you toil in obscurity for the next ten years, nobody respecting what you're doing, for an 80 or 90 percent chance at something bigger than your wildest dreams? Or take the 80 percent chance at a respectable single and a pat on the back?
Nobody believes in us as much as we do. That's why we become founders. At 41, VCs who had already backed Mark twice told him he was too old, too rich, and too settled to go all in on Zynga.
Mark isn't all in until he is. He calls it a lazy on-ramp to curiosity. Lots of projects. Looking for signals in a lot of places. Processing. Then it flips. "When the fish are running, we're up all night throwing nets until they're done running, not until we're tired."
The chess lesson: play boring. His chess coach told him if you want to beat a player rated much higher than you, play boring and conservative and let them make the mistake. He started doing it. He started winning.
Your kids don't follow what you say. They follow what you do. Mark set out to be a different kind of dad than his own, who measured people by their résumé. Then he watched his 15-year-old daughter spend every waking minute with math tutors before leaving on a service trip. "How did we get here? Oh, I know how we got here. They're not listening to what Dad says. They're following what Dad does."
Happiness comes from feeling useful to a community you care about. Not from being useful. From feeling it. That's Alfred Adler, by way of The Courage to Be Disliked.
There are two levels of success. A life well lived is a life in alignment with what only you can bring to the world. You don't have to build Google to feel like you went for it. The ultimate success is the greatest instantiation of your talents.
Use money as freedom, not lifestyle. When Freeloader sold and 28-year-old Mark had more money than he'd ever imagined, he made a list of everything he was going to buy. It totaled about $9,000. He put leather interior in his Pathfinder. He still has the vehicle. 
He set a $500 million goal that had nothing to do with buying things. At a net worth around $15 million, working with a life coach, he wrote it down because that's the capital required to run a studio of teams chasing many ideas without going to anyone else with hat in hand. "Creatively, that's freedom."
Retirement is spiritual death. The stretches between building things are what Mark calls the abyss. Once you've felt the high of building with a great team and shipping something into users' hands every week, it ruins you. You can't be happy with less.
Over-fund the things that matter. Not every day is the same. Not every life moment is the same. When one of those moments comes, put all your best players on the ice.
The Allen & Company investor tour. They told Mark it was a dog and pony show. Just shake some hands. He told his team: this is our IPO, this is our roadshow, and we are going to use every minute of it the way we want. He gave the biggest public market investors a full presentation, handed them his numbers, and told them to judge him against those numbers in a year. He met with them a year later and had crushed them.
King for a day. Carol Bartz brought Mark in to talk to Yahoo's entire senior management. He spent two weeks building a presentation on how he'd run Yahoo if he were king for a day, stood up, and took over the room for an hour. They got a deal done and one person in that room came to work for him. He ran the same play on the CEO of AMEX with a credit card that competed on fun. Amex spent $75 million with them.
Seven minutes with Obama became 45. Mark was told the President would ask about his kids and then the meeting would be over. He walked in with a PowerPoint on the ten bold objectives he'd run on if he were president. Obama went through the entire thing and then asked what else he had.
Prepare as hard for everything going right as you do for everything going wrong. Mark had under-prepared for the version of where Obama said, "Yeah, I'm buying. What else you got?"
We sleepwalk through our own biggest moments. The question isn't what's the agenda or why they want to meet with you. It's: I have five minutes with the king. What is theoretically possible here?
The Book of Life. Every year during the Jewish New Year, Mark writes in the same book. Only during that window. It isn't a journal. It's a spiritual board meeting with himself. He reads back through every previous year first, then writes.
Partner with your future self. "What will Mark 2030 thank me for doing right now?"
It started with quitting smoking. October 19, 1994. "I pulled my own power back. If I can quit smoking and really commit to it, what else can I do?" A year later he quit his job and did something bigger.
Even if you missed the big goal, ask what you actually did toward it. Did you talk about it? Did you do real things? Did you turn the boat toward it? If not, maybe you don't believe in the goal.
When Mark is at his lowest, he's humbled, he picks achievable goals, and he finds the most grit. When he's winning, he picks stratospheric goals and does the worst. After his biggest successes, he isn't humble enough to succeed again, and he has to go through failure to reel himself back in.
Mark's champagne moment a year from now: that the book connects for hundreds of thousands of people, and that he's built a product people find real meaning in.
Reflection Questions
If you went and hired a coach, who is the person who could most change your life right now? 
What is your next high-stakes moment, and are you treating it like the dog and pony show or like your IPO?
What is the one habit your future self would most thank you for making this year? What would it unlock if you actually committed to it?
More Learning
#688: Dr. Henry Cloud - Your Desired Future: 5 Steps to Take You Where You Want to Go
#689: Eric Ries - Why Good Companies Go Bad, and How Great Companies Stay Great
#687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life & The 3 Types of Luck
Episode Chapters
00:00 Meet Mark Pincus
01:40 Why Mark Hires So Many Coaches
02:25 Lessons From Tennis In Leading People
04:56 Refusing to Bend the Culture for One Great Player
07:03 Lessons From Bill Campbell
09:17 On Being Called a Control Freak
13:38 The Ambition Question Mark Asks Founders
14:53 What High Standards Do to Your Kids
20:55 How Mark Defines Success 
23:26 Money as Freedom, Not Lifestyle
29:45 Why High Achievers Can't Retire
32:39 Over-Fund the Things That Matter
34:35 Treating a Handshake Tour Like an IPO Roadshow
35:36 King for a Day at Yahoo and Amex
38:14 Seven Minutes With Obama That Became 45
41:39 The Book of Life
45:21 Why Mark Does His Best Thinking at His Lowest
46:48 The Champagne Question
48:40 EOPC