The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:04:21 · Scott Galloway
I have a lot of friends who are wildly successful coming out of business school in the 90s, went into the alternative investment space and their fund gets closed down or they start a fund and it doesn't work and they just get stuck. Like they've never known failure. So your ability to mourn and move on, think is really the kind of the attribute. Because if you start several businesses, many or most of them are gonna fail. So many moons have to line up for a business to be successful. And then the key is, what do you do after you fail? Do you get stuck? True entrepreneurs are sort of like, okay, this didn't work, next. So the undergrads at NYU typically make better entrepreneurs because if someone has decided to go to business school, means they're sort of risk averse in taking a more certain path. But yeah, my venture into entrepreneurship was a function of 70% of entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs because they have no choice. If you immigrate here from Korea without the certification of an education, you don't get to work go to work for Google or JP Morgan. You start a small business. So anyways, I think it's honest self awareness around if you're really cut out to be an entrepreneur. Any any thoughts before we move on to two, David?
00:05:36 · David Senra
[00:05:36] S2: Yeah. Think the my favorite quote on this again is comes from Steve Jobs. He just says that like half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones are just pure perseverance. It's exactly what you said. It's kind of they're impervious. It's like, yeah. This is a problem. That's okay. I'll just, get back up and try it again, do it over and over again. I'm a big fan of MMA, and I actually think there's lot of analogies from sports that that are helpful in business. And I heard one one of these guys in the UFC said one time was like, his strategy where he has his advantage is like, need to get my competitor on their back. So I need to do a takedown to get to my best position. Right? And my opponent's goal is to stop me from getting there. So they stopped my first takedown. That's fine. He's like, you stop the second one. That's fine. You stop the third one. That's fine. Get ready for four, five, six, seven, and eight. And his whole point is just like, I know what I need to do, and you can play defense on this, but I'm gonna keep doing this until essentially I die trying. And I think a lot of entrepreneurship... Entrepreneurs are like that. And I loved what the the point that you made where it's like, well, a lot of this is out of necessity. You know, if you immigrate here from Korea and you can't get a high paying job, then you might want to start, you know, a a restaurant or a car... Like start washing cars or doing something that anything that you can do on your own without permission, I think is the key there.
00:06:48 · Scott Galloway
[00:06:48] S1: Question number two comes from a listener who emailed us. A lot of founders seem to have given up their health, marriage, or kids for their company. Is it possible to build something big and also have a life outside it? Did?
00:07:00 · David Senra
[00:07:00] S2: Yes. But the same kind of personality type that wants to build something big usually doesn't want to do anything else. On my other show where instead of just reading histories... Biographies of history based entrepreneurs, I start having sit down conversations with them. And I just released an episode recently with this guy named Nick who runs Revolut, and it's the largest private company in Europe, like a $115,000,000,000 valuation. And in in the episode, he says, you know, 99.5 percent of my time is spent on work. And in the comments, some people are like, yeah. But he's missing, you know, time with friends and going for a walk in the park. And he's just like, well, that kind of personality type is not interested in going for, you know, barbecues and and ball games. He found his mission in life. He has excessively high agency. He's just kind of chasing after this with, like, this monomaniacal focus. There's a ton of examples of... From the history of entrepreneurship, people building big things. So Sam Walton is one of my favorite entrepreneurs. I think his autobiography is like a central reading for anybody. And, you know, he still found time in his day. He'd work from the time his eyes were open till the time they closed, but in... He would take breaks throughout every day. So he liked to to hunt with his dogs. He's like quail hunt during during the day, and he liked to play tennis. So if you look, let's say he's he's awake for, you know, seventeen hours a day. He's probably working fifteen of those hours, but he's still making time to try to have dinner with his family to, you know, get exercise, to do the activities he wants. It's much more of... Jeff Bezos has this line where he doesn't believe in work life balance. He believes in work life harmony, and I think that's what you see. Now with that being said, there's way more examples of people destroying every single other element of their life for business success. There's this book by this guy named Larry Miller, it's called Driven, an Autobiography. And he was writing it when he died. Larry Miller was the richest entrepreneur in Utah. The average Utah citizen could not go a day without spending a dollar in one of his businesses. So he owned things from car dealerships to movie theaters to restaurants. He just owned a ton of businesses.
00:08:54 · David Senra, Scott Galloway
And he wrote that book as a cautionary tale because he ignored his health. There... He was such poor health as he's writing the book. They're literally having to chop off parts of his body. He's having... Because his circulation is so bad. [00:09:05] S1: Diabetes. Yeah. [00:09:06] S2: Die... It's so much... It's so bad. And then he talks about, hey. I I don't know who my kids are. I don't have a relationship with my wife. And it's a devastating, devastating story. He's writing. He's like, I'm I'm in a 30,000 square foot house on top of a mountain overlooking the town... The city that he lives in. He's like, it's just... None of this made... Mattered. And I... And he goes, and the worst of I didn't even have fun. And the last chapter is actually written by his coauthor and his wife because he dies in the middle of that book. And his wife, I said, thinks... I think his wife says the most devastating thing you could ever hear. And she's like, yeah. I miss him, but it's not like he was here when he was alive anyways. Yeah.
00:09:47 · Scott Galloway
[00:09:47] S1: So through the lens of an entrepreneur. Look. I often joke that, and this is true, from the age of 22 to 42 for twenty years, maybe twenty five years, other than a two year respite in business school, I did nothing but work. I pretended to have hobbies, but I didn't. Occasionally I would work out or I've always tried to stay pretty disciplined about that. But I wasn't a very cultured interesting person. I just worked all the time. And I say it cost me my hair and it cost me my first marriage and it was worth it. And you know, it's just... Look, there's no... I don't think there is any balance. There's just trade offs. And the reason why I have so much balance now is because I had very little as a young person. And I don't think there's any getting around it. The market is very efficient in trading off stress and commitment for upside. And if you want tremendous upside or a shot at tremendous upside that entrepreneurship does offer, success is in the last 10%. And there's an equivalent entrepreneur and an equivalent small business down the street or down the state or down the country that is working harder than you. And it's not aspirational. It's like Brian Chesky says, you can have it all, just can't have it all at once. And occasionally, and this does create tension with my partners in my life, kind of the feedback I get is, where are you? You're just not present. And I'm like, okay, see this big fat fucking house we're in? The reason we're in this big fat fucking house is because I'm not present, because I'm thinking about business, because I am and going to be better than anyone on Monday morning. And that's come at a cost. I just don't wanna... This is not a... I'm not here with a message of hope. If you expect to have a successful small business or you expect to be very successful even in a corporation, in a capitalist economy, get ready to work your ass off, and it comes at a cost. Now having said that, that's my way. I'm not saying that's the right way. There's a lot of people who do well, don't need to be the CEO, don't need to start a hedge fund or a tech or a SaaS company, and they move to a lower cost area. They do well. Find someone who's also competent. They manage their finances well. They go to church. They coach little league. They take nice vacations. They have really nice lives.