Passion & Pain

There is a filmmaker that worked for Pixar that put this beautifully, and he used the metaphor of doing anything difficult, but for your high purposes of building a company. He says, "If you're sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?" You have to embrace that sailing means that you ca... See more

Did Steve jobs ever say, "Hey, I want to make a $100 million company?" That was never in discussion. He said, "I want to make insanely great products. Then I want to get really good at marketing because I want everybody in the world to have an Apple device, and the way to do that is to get really good at marketing."

There's a cult. Anybody knows this. Go fly to LA and try to go to In-N-Out. Good luck. I was just in LA two months ago. Tried to go to In-N-Out twice because I read the book. I'm not waiting in that line. There's a cult around In-N-Out because the expression of the founder's soul is manifest in the product. People have In-N-Out tattoos. How many pe... See more

All these books, there is the decision you can make to compromise on the quality of your product or take a shortcut or do something you would never dare do it. I just read the biography of the guy that started In-N-Out. Compared to his contemporaries, the McDonald's and Carl's Junior and all this explosion of fast food that was happening at that ti... See more

So to answer your question, there's a quote I have on my phone. I've had this quote since 2017. I'm not a fan of moderation. I'm attracted to extremes. What do you want your life experience to be? Do you want to be exceptional? Do you want to push the boundaries of your capabilities? Do you want to walk around in a fog butting up against your poten... See more

The best description of a business I ever heard came from Richard Branson. He's like, "All businesses, it's an idea or service that make somebody else's life better. If you make other people's life better, you'll capture that value in return." So I don't find many of these people are moderate.

There's a great quote that Nick Saban said. He said that average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached, and great players want to be told the truth. Michael had a giant ego and a giant drive, but he would run up to the coach and tell me what I need to get better at.

Edwin said that there's no such thing as group originality or group creativity. He goes, "I do believe wholeheartedly in the individual capacity for greatness." And he says, "Originality are attributes of a single mind, not a group."

The reason I say, "Listen, man, you guys should be reading Estee Lauder's autobiography", is because it is my belief that if you were able to bring her back from the dead and let her start a company today, she'd be kicking most entrepreneurs ass, up and down the court, Edwin Land too. Edwin Land started working on what would become Polaroid when he... See more