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Episode: #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:08:15

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode

features segments from episode #361 "Jim Collins — A Rare Interview with a Reclusive Polymath" and #380 "Ed Zschau — The Polymath Professor Who Changed My Life."Please enjoy!Sponsors:Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)LMNT electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any drink mix purchase)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[05:00] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:03] Enter Jim Collins.[06:28] How Jim’s students influenced his entrepreneurial path.[10:45] Why Jim carries a three-timer stopwatch.[12:21] Using a spreadsheet to optimize discipline in service of creativity.[13:42] Ideal minimum creative hours per year.[15:19] Avoiding a life-distorting “funk.”[17:41] Calculating an optimal end point.[19:27] Patterns discovered using Jim’s time-tracking method.[20:23] Three crucial components for living the life Jim wants to lead.[22:18] The bug book and the hedgehog concept.[30:31] Peter Drucker mic-drop lessons.[34:39] Enter Ed Zschau.[34:59] How I convinced Dr. Zschau to let me into his Princeton engineering course.[37:38] Ed’s background in competitive figure skating and the lessons it taught him.[41:45] The origin of Ed’s meticulous attention to detail.[45:31] The benefits of learning by doing through the case method.[49:21] Ed’s definition of entrepreneurship.[50:50] The role of optimism in entrepreneurship and life.[53:30] Ed’s aspirations as a teenager and young adult.[55:32] What drew Ed to Princeton as an aspiring physics philosopher.[58:21] How Ed got into teaching and his belief that career planning is overrated.[1:03:37] How Ed learned to become a good teacher and the influence of extemporaneous speaking.[1:06:53] Lessons from extemporaneous speaking competitions about preparation and adaptation.[1:11:04] Ed’s thoughts on focusing for extended periods versus opening himself to opportunities.[1:13:06] Ed’s decision to run for Congress.[1:17:57] Advantages of committing to a maximum of three terms in the House of Representatives.[1:21:29] Ed’s experience and self-reflection after losing his Senate race.[1:23:40] Ed’s decision process when transitioning from investor to CEO.[1:26:05] Differentiating between high-impact commitments and peer pressure.[1:29:41] Comparing Ed’s parenting style to his teaching style.[1:31:17] Ed’s belief in encouragement over direction and his own upbringing.[1:34:45] The origin of Ed’s goal to live a life that matters.[1:37:05] Influential books and recommendations for aspiring entrepreneurs.[1:42:05] Ed’s current excitement and efforts to make higher education affordable through technology.[1:48:37] The mantra by which Ed lives his life and his childhood nickname.[1:50:57] How Ed brings the sound of music to his endeavors.[1:57:34] Ed’s influence on others to continue his work of changing the world.[1:59:40] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
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00:02:19 Speaker_04
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00:04:29 Speaker_01
I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

00:04:45 Speaker_04
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:04:48 Speaker_04
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:01 Speaker_04
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:05:11 Speaker_04
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:05:23 Speaker_04
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:05:37 Speaker_04
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:05:47 Speaker_04
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:06:04 Speaker_01
First up, Jim Collins, author of iconic business books that include Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall, and Great by Choice, as well as Built to Last, and Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, which he co-authored with his mentor, Bill Lazier.

00:06:23 Speaker_01
You can find Jim at jimcollins.com.

00:06:28 Speaker_04
In the course of doing some of the homework for this conversation, I have come across different ways that you seem to measure your time and your days, and I'd love to explore that for just a little bit.

00:06:40 Speaker_04
The first was I read that you had, and this may have evolved or changed by this point, but a stopwatch with three timers in your pocket, and that it was sort of indicative of creative teaching and other.

00:06:52 Speaker_04
But could you explain that habit, please, for people who are not familiar?

00:06:57 Speaker_03
Well, so actually, let me tell you the story of how it began, what the three were about, and then how it's evolved into something a little simpler and a little more powerful than what I do with it every single day.

00:07:08 Speaker_03
So I don't want to pretend that I'm normal, okay? So what I want to describe is not normal behavior, but this is it.

00:07:16 Speaker_03
So when I was 36 years old, I made the decision, and we can come back to this later if you want to talk about big bets and doing scary things.

00:07:23 Speaker_03
such as betting our career betting our lives join and i on entrepreneurial path let me just kind of step back and sort of share the origins of this. So i was teaching at stanford and i was a marvelous journey and great mentors.

00:07:38 Speaker_03
Learn how to do my research there that's where jerry and i did built to last.

00:07:42 Speaker_03
But i had a another mentor who encouraged me to think about whether i wanted to do a self-directed path or not i used to say to my students could i talk about her ship and small business.

00:07:53 Speaker_03
I always said to my students, why don't you go do something on your own? Why give over all your creative energies for somebody else's thing? At least challenge them to think about that.

00:08:03 Speaker_03
And I would say, if you're really interested in business, you don't have to go to work for IBM to be in business. You can do your own. So my students, this is the wonderful thing about great students, they hold you to account, right?

00:08:15 Speaker_03
They said, well, what are you doing that's entrepreneurial? This doesn't look like a very entrepreneurial thing, teaching these classes and being here. And so I started thinking about it and I realized something about myself. I like betting on myself.

00:08:28 Speaker_03
So I had this idea. You don't have to be at IBM to be in business. Why do I have to be at a university to be a professor? So I said to Joanne, I said, you know, I think I have this idea. I'd like to be a self-employed professor to endow my own chair.

00:08:47 Speaker_03
So Joanne who we've done these things together through life she went along with this idea and the idea was to try to pursue really big questions that wouldn't be constrained by think you could do it only a year.

00:09:01 Speaker_03
And the first big bet on that was the research and built to last and it was coming out and i said let's just bet everything let's go.

00:09:08 Speaker_03
And so we launched this huge bet that everything on that book didn't know if it would work we're down to less than ten thousand dollars. We were actually really scared. We call it our Thelma and Louise moment.

00:09:19 Speaker_03
We were like launching off the cliff together, simply wanted to get to the other side. It was a huge bet, and we didn't know if it would work. But I was very clear about one thing. I did not want to have a half-life of quality in the work.

00:09:33 Speaker_03
One of the wonderful things about working on Built to Last with Jerry back at Stanford, no one knew who I was. No one called. No one paid any attention. So for six years of working on that research project i could just go into the cave.

00:09:50 Speaker_03
And work and work and work and that kind of deep work and you have to go deep into the data deep into the research deep into the thinking the long cycles of reflection that's how you get the idea and that's how you do good stuff.

00:10:05 Speaker_03
I was worried that what would happen is if i went from being invisible to being visible and that if.

00:10:12 Speaker_03
I was fortunate enough to have a success that I might wake up in five or six or seven years and have not gone back to the wellspring of the deep, quiet solitude of work. And then your second book is half as good, right?

00:10:30 Speaker_03
And then the next book after that is only half as good again. I wanted the quality to always get better. And so I thought, well, you know, what's interesting is

00:10:38 Speaker_03
A university is a place that really encourages that because it's sort of designed to allow you to spend your life in that tranquility.

00:10:45 Speaker_03
So I went to some faculty members that I greatly respect and I said, how do the people in the academy that you most respect in yourself spend their time? And I got a consistent answer. 50% of your time in new intellectual creative work.

00:11:00 Speaker_03
30% of your time in teaching. and 20% of your time in other stuff that just has to get done. Serving on committees, whatever it happens to be that you have to do. And so I thought, that sounds good. I'm just gonna start doing that.

00:11:19 Speaker_03
So I started, as I was heading out on the Thelma and Louise leap, counting my hours every day. And I would count how many hours in the day were creative, new, intellectual. The goal was that it had to be above 50%.

00:11:33 Speaker_03
Then how many hours would be in teaching, and how many hours would be in other stuff. Like, I mean, somebody got to balance the QuickBooks, right? And so I started counting, and that's where the triple stopwatch came.

00:11:46 Speaker_03
I found this wonderful triple stopwatch where I could constantly go back and forth, and at the end of the day, I would have the total. Later, I came to the realization that what really mattered was the first bucket, the creative work.

00:12:01 Speaker_03
And so I eventually simplified it. There's a concept in great by choice called the 20 mile march and so I had a 20 mile march I just didn't know that concept yet.

00:12:11 Speaker_03
And the idea being something you just do really consistently over time that imposes a very high level of discipline that accumulates to results.

00:12:21 Speaker_03
And so I simplified it and I just simply said, can I just simply count the number of creative hours I get every day and then hold myself to an account. So at the end of every single day,

00:12:33 Speaker_03
I open a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet has three cells on a line, and that's for the day. The first thing is just a simple accounting of what happened that day. Where did my time go? What did I do? Et cetera.

00:12:46 Speaker_04
Sorry to interrupt, but this is the stuff I love. What might a description for the day look like? Is it three sentences, four sentences?

00:12:52 Speaker_03
What might it look like? Actually, the very best days don't have much in it at all. They are got up early,

00:13:02 Speaker_03
two hours of really great creative work, breakfast with Joanne, five hours creative work, workout, nap, three hours of creative work, enjoy dinner with Joanne, bed. I mean, that's like a great day.

00:13:18 Speaker_03
But other days are full of lots of other choppy things. And so what I tend to do is to try to capture a bit

00:13:23 Speaker_03
of what happened with sleep what happened with the main tasks of the day if there were some really interesting conversations that happened or something that hit in those all note those their markers so that i can always go back to show you how i use those in a minute because i actually do these correlations with all of that.

00:13:42 Speaker_03
And then the second cell is the number of creative hours I got that day. Now there's no rule about how many you get in a day. Sometimes they're zero and sometimes they can be nine or 10, which would be huge number.

00:13:54 Speaker_03
But then it calculates back over the last 365 days. And the March, which I don't think I've missed for well over 30 years, and I hope to hit for a lot longer now, is every single 365 day cycle. Every single one, every single day.

00:14:15 Speaker_03
If you calculate back the last 365 days, the total number of creative hours must exceed 1,000. No matter what. It doesn't matter if you're sick. It doesn't matter if there's other stuff you'd like. 1,000 creative hours a year as a minimum baseline.

00:14:35 Speaker_03
It can be above that, that's fine, but never once. There can't be a single day. in any 365-day cycle, January 2 to January 2, July 22 to July 22, September 9 to September 9, doesn't matter. Always has to be above 1,000 creative hours.

00:14:51 Speaker_03
And you watch it, and I put it on the whiteboard here at the lab, the three-month pace, so you take the last three months, multiply it times four, the six-month pace, and then the current 365. And that is a way to kind of monitor.

00:15:05 Speaker_03
If I start seeing that those numbers start to go down, I'll change my behavior and sometimes I have a big buffer and sometimes I don't. And the idea is if you stay with that, eventually you're going to have work.

00:15:19 Speaker_03
Now there's a third cell that I put in there that most people don't know as much about because people know about the hours thing somewhat. All of us have dark times, difficult times. All of us have good times, right?

00:15:32 Speaker_03
But here's an interesting thing I noticed, which is that if you're kind of going through a funk, it colors your whole life. And you tend to think your whole life is a funk, because you're looking through that lens.

00:15:45 Speaker_03
And so I thought, well, you know, but actually, I feel like my life is really pretty good. But when you're in that other place, it doesn't feel that way.

00:15:54 Speaker_03
And so what I started to do is I started creating a code, which is plus two, plus one, zero, minus one, minus two. And the key on all this, by the way, is you have to do it every day in real time.

00:16:04 Speaker_03
You can't like five days later, look back and say, how did I feel that day? And what this is a totally subjective, how quality was the day? What was it? A plus two is a super positive day. This is emotionally speaking. Exactly.

00:16:19 Speaker_03
Just like, was it a great day? A plus two is a just a great day. It doesn't mean it wasn't, there might not have been a really difficult day. It might've been a day of a really hard rock climb. It might've been a day of really hard writing.

00:16:31 Speaker_03
But it felt really good right it might have been a day of an intense conversation but really meaningful with a friend or something that adds up to a plus two plus one is another positive day zero is a minus once kind of a net tone negative.

00:16:47 Speaker_03
And minus two is, those are bad days. And you put it in before you go to bed. If I were to ask you, Tim, right now, 17 days ago, or even five days ago, to give the score, you're gonna be distorted by how you're feeling today.

00:16:59 Speaker_04
Oh, for sure. I mean, memory, if you ask people what they ate two days ago, they're gonna be off by 40%, 50% calories for sure, yeah.

00:17:07 Speaker_03
So I wrote it down, and now I start to have, I've got the Creative Hours March, which is kind of discipline in service of creativity. and it's relentless, right? It just stays with me constantly. You never get a break from it.

00:17:20 Speaker_03
But that other has proved to be incredibly useful for me, because now what you can do is sort the spreadsheet. And you can say, over the last five years, what's going on in all the plus two days? Oh, and over the last five years.

00:17:33 Speaker_04
That's where the descriptions come in.

00:17:35 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. And over the last five years, what's going on in the minus two days? And now, as I navigate, it's kind of like the simplex method in operations research, where you find optimal by never really knowing what optimal is ahead of time.

00:17:50 Speaker_03
You do it by a series of iterative steps of the next best step.

00:17:53 Speaker_04
Hold on, can you explain that? I'm from Long Island, so sometimes it takes me a minute. Can you explain what that was one more time?

00:18:00 Speaker_03
Yeah, sure. So my undergraduate was a thing called mathematical sciences with a heavy dose of philosophy. And math sciences was pure mathematics, computer science, statistics. and operations research.

00:18:12 Speaker_03
And in operations research there's a method developed by a guy named George Danzig called the simplex method.

00:18:18 Speaker_03
And essentially the idea is that if you're really trying to find the optimal answer to a multivariate problem where there's lots and lots of variables, even the biggest computers couldn't basically do a giant spreadsheet and sort.

00:18:30 Speaker_03
There's just too many permutations. And what he showed was under certain conditions all you have to do is find the local optimum, like what's the best next step? And then you reset, and then what's the next best step?

00:18:44 Speaker_03
And that he showed that under certain conditions, that is mathematically guaranteed to navigate you to the optimal endpoint. And that was the simplex method. As I understand it, it was 30, 40 years ago when I was in the class.

00:18:58 Speaker_03
So I've always had that idea in mind. So you kind of navigate step by step. And so I think about it as in navigating life, I want more of the things that create the plus twos and less of the things that create the minus twos.

00:19:14 Speaker_03
But the difference that's helped me is I know what they are. It's not that life is never perfect, but you can do a simple more of this, less of that. then more of this, less of that. If that makes any sense.

00:19:26 Speaker_04
It makes perfect sense. What are some of the patterns that you've found for either the do more column or the do less column for yourself?

00:19:34 Speaker_03
So when I look at those patterns, I would say on the plus twos, there are almost two contradictory components. Not contradictory, but they're just really different flavors. One is the solitude of really hard work.

00:19:53 Speaker_03
And sometimes one of my favorite days will be I get up, I never leave the house, and I basically get to just lose myself in the research or in the writing or in the making sense of things. It's a very incredible simplicity of the day.

00:20:12 Speaker_03
I'm 61 now and I think about what comes next and I intend to keep creating. I want to stay in some version of that march for a really long time. My role models have all done that.

00:20:23 Speaker_03
But I think about life as having three things at least I think are really important. One of them is increasing simplicity, just sheer simplicity. Two is time and flow state. and flow state's not easy, and the third is time with people I love.

00:20:39 Speaker_03
And so when I look at those plus twos, a lot of the days would be days of high simplicity. Not much happened. There were very few moving parts. but a lot of deep, hard work and flow state.

00:20:51 Speaker_03
I might have been writing or doing a concept or creating something or, I mean, just, you're lost in the work. Or rock climbing, probably. Or rock climbing, exactly, exactly. It's arduous, but you're lost in it. Those are great.

00:21:03 Speaker_03
The other, though, for me is the time with people I love and the other dimension, while I wouldn't describe myself as a highly social type person, I love the solitude of the hard work,

00:21:15 Speaker_03
The other side is, the people in my life, and there are many, I have great friends, really great friends that, many decade friends, friends back to third grade, seventh grade, all my college roommates, I mean, my personal band of brothers, I mean, I have friends.

00:21:29 Speaker_03
And my wife, we've married 38 years, got engaged four days after our first date. What, four days after your first date? Yes, that's true.

00:21:38 Speaker_04
Wow, okay, we might come back to that.

00:21:41 Speaker_03
We might, but the thing is, When you have those days where you're really present and engaged with people you really love those are plus two days you may not have accomplished anything or in the case of climbing it might be that i.

00:21:57 Speaker_03
went out climbing with one of my best friends and I don't even necessarily remember the climb. It was with a friend.

00:22:03 Speaker_03
And so my plus two days are either very solitude or very connected, but connected to people that have these long enduring, really, really wonderful relationships in life. And those make plus twos.

00:22:18 Speaker_04
I love it. What is the bug book? Could you please elaborate on the bug book?

00:22:22 Speaker_03
I think a lot of us, I certainly was one of them, we struggle in our 20s to get clarity about how to deploy ourselves in the world.

00:22:31 Speaker_03
Because everything up until you kind of finish high school or college or graduate school or whatever, it's kind of structured. You don't really have to think about it. It's like, oh, I got to figure out how to do these math problems or whatever.

00:22:43 Speaker_03
But life isn't really like that. And then all of a sudden you hit life and life is much more ambiguous. And so you're trying to navigate through it.

00:22:51 Speaker_03
I, like a lot of people, was trying to figure out how best to deploy myself in my 20s, and I had multiple things that helped me do that.

00:22:58 Speaker_03
One of them, let me just introduce a concept, okay, and then I'll tie it into the bug book, because this is how I challenge young people to think about it.

00:23:06 Speaker_03
There's a concept in good to great called the hedgehog concept, and the idea of the hedgehog concept

00:23:12 Speaker_03
Is to sort of simplify down we found it by studying companies we found that when they really focus on one or a few really big things and made very disciplined decisions over time those would accumulate and begin to build some real results and eventually what would become the flywheel effect which will chat about a little bit later.

00:23:31 Speaker_03
And the hedgehog concept is the intersection of three circles for company it's doing what you're deeply passionate about because if you're not passionate about it you can't endure long enough to really really do something exceptional.

00:23:43 Speaker_03
The second circle is what you can be the best in the world and if you can't be the best in the world that leave it to others so for example. It doesn't mean being big, right? You could have a truly great local restaurant.

00:23:57 Speaker_03
It's never going to be big, but it's the absolute best in the world at a particular thing that it does in its specific community. And no large company could come in and be better than them at that. That's very hedgehog, even though it's not big.

00:24:11 Speaker_03
And then the third is that you have an economic engine and you know how it works. And so if you have the intersection of those three,

00:24:19 Speaker_03
Our energy is going to go into things that we're passionate about, and we can be the best in the world at, and a driver economic engine, you're in your hedgehog. Now, there's a personal analogy to the hedgehog. And this gets back to the bug book.

00:24:35 Speaker_03
I am not a big believer in sort of thinking of traditional careers. I'm a big believer in thinking of finding your hedgehog, and then really building flywheel momentum with that over time. And so as the personal version of the hedgehog,

00:24:48 Speaker_03
is again doing circle one, what you're passionate about and love to do. The second circle isn't best in the world because if you said, well, if I can't be the best orthopedic surgeon, I won't do it. Well, then we'd only have one, right?

00:25:00 Speaker_03
That's not good, right? So it's what you are encoded for. And what you are encoded for is different than what you're good at. So when I went to college, I thought I was going to be a mathematician because I was one of those kids that was good at math.

00:25:16 Speaker_03
That's why I majored in math sciences. But then I met, at Stanford, the people who are genetically encoded for math. They were not me. I was good at math, they were encoded for math.

00:25:31 Speaker_03
It's like being an athlete where you thought you were a good athlete until you met the incredible, natural, gifted athlete and you realize, I could never see to spin to the basket like he did.

00:25:42 Speaker_03
Or I could never see to put the ball there running down the field playing soccer the way she did. I just wouldn't have seen it. There's a gift. That's the encoding.

00:25:52 Speaker_03
And so you have to find what you're encoded for as distinct from just what you're good at. And then the third is, you have an economic engine. And you can fund your goals, your objectives, the things you're trying to get done.

00:26:03 Speaker_03
When you have all three of those, I'm passionate about it, I'm encoded for it, and I have an economic engine in it. Now you're in your hedgehog. Now when you're in your 20s, there's all these sort of Paint-by-numbers kids approach to life, right?

00:26:14 Speaker_03
You can be a professor, you can be a businessman, you can be a lawyer, you can be whatever, right?

00:26:19 Speaker_03
And the nice thing about a paint-by-numbers kid is you actually don't have to think about it that much because as long as you stay in the lines and you paint, you're going to end up with a nice picture at the end.

00:26:30 Speaker_03
But the only way to paint a masterpiece is to start with a blank canvas.

00:26:34 Speaker_03
And that is sort of picking up those three circles and then making your own unique series of decisions consistent with the hedgehog of those three circles and they may or may not fall into a traditional. Bucket. So i was trying to find my way.

00:26:49 Speaker_03
And i started this little book and it was inspired by a mentor named rochelle myers who suggested that what i do as i study myself like a bug.

00:26:59 Speaker_03
And imagine with this passionate objectivity as you're going through life, you're making notes, where you're observing the bug called Jim. But very scientifically, clinically.

00:27:12 Speaker_03
And so I remember I was working at HP for a couple years at a graduate school. Great company at the time for sure, but I wasn't really constructed to be in a large company. But I was trying to navigate my way.

00:27:23 Speaker_03
And one day I had to give a presentation on how network computers work. And this was back in the 1980s when it was early on in that. And I had to figure out how to communicate to everyone.

00:27:35 Speaker_03
Really the essence in our team of how network computing was going to work and how it fit together and I had to sort of conceptualize it and then I had to teach it and share with all of a sudden I had this day where it's like wow.

00:27:47 Speaker_03
That was really fun to figure it out to figure out how to conceptualize it to figure out how to put it in concepts. Everybody can understand to share it with everyone to teaching. My bug book when I'm then writing the bug Jim.

00:28:00 Speaker_03
Really loves making sense of something difficult. Breaking it down into understandable pieces and teaching it to others it was an observation in the journal the other thing is might be something like the bug jim.

00:28:16 Speaker_03
Really languish if he had to spend a lot of time in senseless meetings. this is not good.

00:28:24 Speaker_03
And so constantly observing and then eventually that allowed me to, that was that sort of observation, clinical, that allowed me to eventually sort of head back to teaching at Stanford when I was 30, which then became really the start of the real journey of what happened.

00:28:41 Speaker_04
With the bug book, did you write things in the bug book each evening? Did you do it, keep it in your back pocket, and when there was an outlying, impactful, or emotionally notable event, you'd write in it?

00:28:55 Speaker_04
What was the structure to how you used it, if there was any?

00:28:59 Speaker_03
At that time, I'm more now just kind of in a coding we described earlier, because I'm one of those really lucky people that I found this stuff early, and I remember the moment I hit

00:29:11 Speaker_03
the classroom at Stanford, first teaching the small business and entrepreneurship class, I just knew I'm home. I'm in the three circles.

00:29:18 Speaker_03
Like this is, I know it's going to guide in some version, some permutation of this probably for the rest of my life. And I just knew it. But until then I had to kind of get to where I could see that.

00:29:30 Speaker_03
And so for those years, I would say if I've been, if it went back and looked at them, I haven't done that there in my basement. I'll bet you that five out of seven days, there's reasonably thorough injuries in there.

00:29:42 Speaker_03
And those injuries would also be things like noting, sort of projecting out.

00:29:47 Speaker_03
And a lot of it was often what I would describe as pattern recognition, where you'd be noting things, but I would also always be scanning for people that I could see them, people much older than me. And the question is, I could somehow

00:30:02 Speaker_03
picture that some version of what they do somehow resonated. I would note that. What was it about it that resonated? Why did I look up to that person? I've spent a lot of it not just on my own experiences, but also very much on people that I admired.

00:30:18 Speaker_03
Not people from afar, people I knew and observed, not for their achievements, but something about the quality of what they were. And that was also a big part of that observation process.

00:30:31 Speaker_04
Can you give us one of the things, whatever comes to mind, that you learned from Peter Drucker?

00:30:37 Speaker_03
One is don't make a hundred decisions when one will do. And the idea of that is that Peter believed that you tend to think that you're making a lot of different decisions. But that actually, if you kind of strip it away, you can begin to realize

00:30:55 Speaker_03
A whole lot of decisions that look like different decisions are really part of the same category of a decision.

00:31:01 Speaker_03
And that what you want to do is to then be able to say, no, I'm going to make one big decision that will be replicated many, many times because it kind of conceptually captures it. So, for example, one version might be in my own case, right?

00:31:15 Speaker_03
I'm sure you encounter this too. You get lots of wonderful, interesting invitations.

00:31:20 Speaker_03
Things to go do this or to go do that or speak at this or whatever they're wonderful i mean never being grateful for those opportunities but you have to be very selective about what you do. So as i was struggling with how do you decide which to do.

00:31:35 Speaker_03
When you gonna say no to most of them and they all can look like a series of individual decisions but then actually know there's actually a couple of really big decisions is it a great teaching moment potentially and will you learn something.

00:31:47 Speaker_03
That's like a meta decision. And now you can sort of strip away, actually, the question is, is it a great teaching moment possibility? Or is it not? It's very different than, should I go to Austin and do this event? Or should I meet with this person?

00:32:01 Speaker_03
They look individual, but they're really part of a whole. That's one. And you can think of that as, you know, the simple thing like what you wear.

00:32:09 Speaker_03
You make a thousand different decisions, or you could make one big decision and wear the same thing all the time, I suppose. The second is, and I've shared this with some others, but it's so powerful.

00:32:20 Speaker_03
At the end of that day with Peter, I asked him how I could pay him back. And he said, first, I had already paid him back because he had learned. And you got to remember, this was when we were doing the Thelma and Louise thing.

00:32:34 Speaker_03
We were really scared, right? We didn't know if this was going to work. And I was launching out to try to do this self-directed path and genuinely scared.

00:32:45 Speaker_03
And Peter said to me, he said, but I do have a request that you change your question a little bit. It seems to me you spend a lot of time worrying about if you're going to survive. Well, you will probably survive.

00:33:00 Speaker_03
And you spend too much time thinking about if you'll be successful. It's the wrong question. The question is how to be useful. And that was the last thing he said that day. He just got out of the car and closed the door and walked away.

00:33:16 Speaker_03
That was the Peter Drucker mic drop.

00:33:19 Speaker_04
Yeah, it was.

00:33:22 Speaker_03
It was. But you know, I find that I go back to that over and over and over again.

00:33:35 Speaker_04
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1?

00:33:59 Speaker_04
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00:34:31 Speaker_04
Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.

00:34:40 Speaker_01
And now, Ed Hsiao, the polymath professor who changed Tim's life. Find out how this 17-year veteran of the tech industry, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Ivy League educator became one of Tim's most important mentors.

00:35:00 Speaker_01
Ed, welcome to the show.

00:35:01 Speaker_00
It's great to be here with you, Tim. I think back to the spring semester of 2000 when you contacted me after all of the other students had registered for my course and made such an impressive plea to be able to enroll in the course.

00:35:26 Speaker_00
committing if you were enrolled that you would clean the blackboards, clean the erasers, do whatever it took to make my life easier. And I almost cried when I heard those words and you took the course and

00:35:46 Speaker_00
I'm so proud of what you've done over the past 19 years. I don't blame the course for your success, but I do blame your enrolling in the course for our friendship.

00:35:59 Speaker_04
And you've taught me so much from the very beginning. I wanted to take the course for many, many reasons.

00:36:05 Speaker_04
This was ELE 491, High Tech Entrepreneurship, which was in the Electrical Engineering Department and the ORF Department, which I can never remember the actual full name for, Operations and Research.

00:36:16 Speaker_00
Operations, Research and Financial Engineering.

00:36:19 Speaker_04
There we go. Now, I have no business whatsoever being in any engineering school. But at the time, the Princeton courses, undergraduate courses, were only very recently being voted on by students. This was a very new thing. This was before Yelp and so on.

00:36:41 Speaker_04
And one of the standouts was this new course, High Tech Entrepreneurship, taught by Professor Hsiao. And I really wanted, like many people, to be part of this course.

00:36:52 Speaker_04
And when I finally was accepted to the course and began learning, I remember at one point I was cleaning the blackboard and cleaning the erasers, and you said to me, I don't know if you remember this, you said, Tim, don't get too good at cleaning the erasers.

00:37:07 Speaker_04
And there was a lot of direct Teaching and a lot of indirect teaching just observing you as you interact with your students and the world and there's certain things.

00:37:18 Speaker_04
That's when i describe you to my friends and i do that very often and a lot of your students i mean you're just telling me before we begin recording. Stay in touch with you and these are people from forty fifty years ago it's remarkable.

00:37:33 Speaker_04
One of the things I throw in that was not in the bio I read was figure skating. Could you please tell us about your background with figure skating?

00:37:43 Speaker_00
I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and we were fortunate to have an indoor skating rink where a professional ice hockey team played. The Omaha Knights, they were probably a farm team for one of the NHL hockey teams.

00:38:02 Speaker_00
And my mother took me to that ice rink when I was about seven years old. And I really enjoyed the challenge. And I remember coming back from one session when I was just beginning to skate, and I said, Mom, I really had a good day today.

00:38:20 Speaker_00
And she said, well, what was so special about it? And I said, I only fell 40 times this time. from what you might call small beginnings, I began to get more proficient and more interested.

00:38:37 Speaker_00
And in those days, figure skating was really figure skating, where there were precise patterns on clean ice with turns and loops that you had to perform in order to pass certain tests.

00:38:53 Speaker_00
And I passed the pre-test, and then I passed the first test, and the second test, And at that point, I was kind of on my way, but ice was only available during the winter.

00:39:06 Speaker_00
So when I was 13, I began spending summers away from Omaha, where there were ice rinks, and continued to train and continue to pass tests.

00:39:19 Speaker_00
And when I was 16 years old, I had passed the sixth test and I qualified for the national championships in men's singles in a lower group, not the world-class group, but a lower group. And I was also ice dancing with a partner.

00:39:39 Speaker_00
And in 1956, we won the silver dance championship in the Midwestern sections. There were three sections in the country, went to the national championships.

00:39:51 Speaker_00
And then my senior year in high school, 1957, again, I skated in the national championships in Berkeley, California. I never was a winner. But it was a special experience to meet a lot of people throughout the country going to these championships.

00:40:11 Speaker_00
And I still stay in touch with my dance partner and a gentleman who I competed against in the singles championships. It was a big part of my life, Tim. And as I think about it, the hours that I spent training

00:40:32 Speaker_00
Getting up at 6 a.m., or actually 5.30 a.m., being on the ice in Omaha at 6 a.m.

00:40:39 Speaker_00
in a cold winter, Nebraska winter, and then skating in the evening too, fitting in homework, school, to prepare for one competition where if you did well enough, you could go to the national championships.

00:40:57 Speaker_00
It taught me the power, the value of practice, of dedication, of persistence, and determination. Those are valuable life lessons and character building lessons.

00:41:16 Speaker_00
When people ask me well how do i prepare to be a leader or to change the world it's through learning those values you don't get a quick return. Creating value for the world you get a quick return doing something that doesn't matter.

00:41:34 Speaker_00
What if you're going to make a difference in the society changing the world for the better you better be prepared for a long journey.

00:41:45 Speaker_04
You to me is one of your standout characteristics have preparation. You very meticulous preparation i remember this because keep in mind people listening as we said i was showing up to.

00:42:01 Speaker_04
Potentially do my chalkboard duty in my eraser duty and so on so i would arrive to le 491 early. and you'd be arranging the name cards, so you had placards for the students, which is not common at Princeton.

00:42:14 Speaker_04
You'd have the name cards, you'd be arranging chairs, and reviewing potentially the case study materials, and I don't remember any TAs, any teaching assistants for that class.

00:42:28 Speaker_04
So could you talk about how you've thought about preparation outside of, say, figure skating? And did that come from your parents?

00:42:36 Speaker_04
Where did that attention to detail before the competition, whether that's a competition in business, sports, or otherwise, or just getting up in front of a class of students? Can you talk to where that comes from and how you think about preparation?

00:42:51 Speaker_00
Well, I was a strong believer in Murphy's Law. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And so I would come to the classroom, typically 45 minutes early, make sure that the projector was working. And sometimes it wasn't.

00:43:12 Speaker_00
And so I had time then to call the audio-visual people and they'd come over and get it fixed, rather than showing up right at the time the class starts and then finding that there are problems that disrupted the flow of the class.

00:43:30 Speaker_00
I think it was benjamin franklin who wrote failing to prepare.

00:43:35 Speaker_00
It's very important to me not to be surprised by things that go wrong and the way that you prevent that is through preparation and making sure everything is the way that it needs to be for success.

00:43:52 Speaker_00
As far as the class is concerned, even though I had taught the lessons, the sessions, many, many times, I usually spent two to three hours prior to each class preparing again.

00:44:09 Speaker_00
My classes, which were taught by the case method of teaching and learning, where students would read about an actual company situation and put themselves in the position of the CEO or the founder or the technical person and describe what to do, I would ask questions and they would give the answers.

00:44:33 Speaker_00
I felt that that approach to teaching and learning, putting someone in the position of the founder, the person who had to achieve the results, rather than just listening and learning and reading from a book, would not only help to learn, but also build the confidence that they could do that kind of job.

00:44:59 Speaker_00
Well, in order to make that experience, that classroom experience work the best, it was like a performance.

00:45:12 Speaker_00
I would come in, and I didn't know exactly how the discussion would evolve, but I knew the lessons that would come out of it, and I'd find a way, regardless of what the students would say, to convey those lessons through their words.

00:45:31 Speaker_04
The case method is something I'd love to talk a little bit more about because my first exposure to the case method was in your class.

00:45:41 Speaker_04
And it's a method that, as I understand it, is used at Harvard Business School, also at Stanford Graduate School of Business. What I also found so appealing about the case method

00:45:53 Speaker_04
is you'd, as a student, have these short modules, these case studies, and they would often be a part one with a cliffhanger.

00:46:02 Speaker_04
So the module one would end with some type of dilemma or disaster or big decision, and you didn't have the conclusion, you didn't have the answer, meaning what actually happened in that particular case, and it allowed you to

00:46:18 Speaker_04
think for yourself, but it also gave you an opportunity to speak to the class, to speak to you, and to be assertive also. Because you would have, I remember, at least in my class, many differing opinions, some of which were polar opposites.

00:46:33 Speaker_04
And it really struck me as a pragmatic way to allow people to be active in the way that they're going to have to be active if they're ultimately going to be entrepreneurs.

00:46:46 Speaker_00
When you're teaching and learning about starting enterprises or creating something new, you learn by doing. The case method helps in that. Projects that are real do that.

00:47:03 Speaker_00
One of the Princeton graduates, it's now four years ago, wrote her senior thesis on can entrepreneurship be taught? Or is it something you're born with?

00:47:18 Speaker_00
And there are articles that have been written that college courses in entrepreneurship are a waste of time. They don't matter. So in 2015, when she was working on this, I created an online survey instrument

00:47:37 Speaker_00
which I sent out to all 1,600 Princeton students that I had had in my classes over 31 semesters. We had to cut off the responses in order for her to meet her thesis deadline after 400 responses of the 1,600.

00:47:53 Speaker_00
But of those first 1,600 responses, 160 had been founders of companies. Among the survey questions was the question, what Princeton experiences have helped you in choosing your life path and succeeding in what you pursued?

00:48:21 Speaker_00
And of the 160 founders, 95% said it was the course. that made the difference.

00:48:31 Speaker_00
And I think what it was, it's not so much what they learned in detail, but rather pointing out to the students that this is a possible life path, that you can create something from scratch and create value, and what great satisfaction you get from that.

00:48:52 Speaker_00
It also, and I attribute this to the case method, gave students the confidence they could do it. They'd read the case and say, I'm as smart as that person. I know I could do that too.

00:49:05 Speaker_00
And I tried to choose the cases with youthful founders rather than old people like me. Then there were some tools, techniques that they learned from it. But i believe that everyone is born with the desire to do something beyond themselves.

00:49:29 Speaker_00
And as an entrepreneur starting something from scratch making it real. impacting the world in that way, it fulfills that desire to do something meaningful beyond themselves.

00:49:45 Speaker_04
Is that what an entrepreneur is to you? I mean, if you were to define entrepreneur, is that someone who built something from scratch, whatever that might be? How do you think about the term entrepreneur?

00:49:55 Speaker_00
Well, you probably remember this, Tim, from the course, but I assert that entrepreneurship isn't about starting companies. Entrepreneurship is an approach to life. And you can be an entrepreneur in anything. It's about starting something from scratch.

00:50:15 Speaker_00
It's about making good things happen that hadn't been done before. It's a combination of innovation, a lot of people get ideas, and implementation. And that second part, implementation, is the most important. A lot of people

00:50:36 Speaker_00
say, wouldn't it be neat if we could do this? And that's as far as it goes. But entrepreneurs say, wouldn't it be neat if we could do this? And then they do it.

00:50:50 Speaker_04
I want to say a few things and underscore a couple of things. The first is that there are only two courses I still have all the notes from, meaning

00:51:01 Speaker_04
courses, classes I took as an undergrad that I still have three-ring binders which contain all the notes from. One was the Literature of Fact with John McPhee, and the other was ELE 491. So I still have all of those notes, and it strikes me that

00:51:19 Speaker_04
First, from a tool perspective, if people want to find case studies that are used at places like Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School, you can actually find quite a few online and order them.

00:51:30 Speaker_04
So I would encourage people to look into that.

00:51:32 Speaker_04
The reason that I have notes from those two classes is, I think, in large part because I had, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, a very, very difficult and dark period in my life junior year.

00:51:47 Speaker_04
And took some time off of school very very hard time for me and what i found in. The literature fact and also a particularly in high tech entrepreneurship was. Teaching and reinforcing of optimism.

00:52:04 Speaker_04
which is very different from giving all of your students rose-colored glasses. You were showing that, I found this to be really personally very helpful.

00:52:13 Speaker_04
In these case studies, a lot of things go wrong, but you were able to show how people figured it out and how they learned to navigate around those things. How do you think about, if you do, the role of optimism in any of this?

00:52:28 Speaker_00
Well, I'm a chronic optimist. I believe that that is important to doing things that haven't been done before. You can imagine all of the things that can go wrong.

00:52:44 Speaker_00
And I guess there's some value in being a realist, but I don't think you do things that haven't been done before and succeed in that by being negative and focusing on all of the things that need to be done.

00:53:03 Speaker_00
Rather, it's having a vision and then committing to making it real. I would bless that way.

00:53:11 Speaker_00
I just look at the world, I don't think through rose-colored glasses, but when people say that's gonna be hard, I say it's gonna be more fun then, because doing something that's hard is a lot more fun than doing something that's easy.

00:53:32 Speaker_04
I'll ask two questions. I'll start with the one that I should probably ask first, which is when you were, say, 20 years old, 15 or 20, somewhere in that range. What did you think you were going to be when you grew up? What were you?

00:53:46 Speaker_00
Oh, I knew exactly what I was gonna be. I was gonna be a physicist. I came to Princeton in 1957 with a plan to major in physics. And then in my sophomore year, I discovered philosophy. And I thought, this is way cool stuff.

00:54:08 Speaker_00
And I decided that I would major in philosophy with, in those days, what was called a bridge program with physics. So I took all of the required courses in physics, but my department was the philosophy department.

00:54:25 Speaker_00
My independent work, both as a junior and senior, were on subjects that combined philosophy and physics.

00:54:35 Speaker_00
My senior thesis was describing what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's theory of space and time would have been had he been born 50 years later and had known Einstein's general theory of relativity.

00:54:54 Speaker_00
And I described in my thesis, this is what Kant's theory of space and time would have been. Unfortunately, he didn't know general relativity. He based it on Newtonian physics.

00:55:06 Speaker_00
But as a presumptuous 21-year-old, I figured I knew what was inside Kant's head. And if he'd just known about Einstein and his theories, he would have had a different philosophy of space and time.

00:55:23 Speaker_00
That and $2.40 will get you a cup of coffee at your favorite coffee shop.

00:55:32 Speaker_04
You mentioned Einstein. Princeton certainly has a storied history in some respects with physics. Einstein spent time not too far away from where we're sitting right now, and Richard Feynman and others certainly. Is that how you ended up

00:55:49 Speaker_04
focusing on Princeton and physics? Was the history, I guess at that point, I'm not sure what specifically would have drawn you here, but is that what drew you to Princeton?

00:55:58 Speaker_00
Well, starting from the time that I was about 12, I was an Einstein lover, I guess you'd say. I began reading about his theories and biographies and so forth. And so I applied to various colleges

00:56:18 Speaker_00
in the physics department, engineering physics in one case, and physics in all the others. And I was accepted to all of those schools, and all of them provided me with a rather attractive scholarship. Except Princeton.

00:56:38 Speaker_00
Princeton wrote to me and said, you can work in the dining hall as a busboy, and I think I could make with 12 to 15 hours a week, $400 a semester. And I chose Princeton because I concluded that must be the toughest school.

00:57:01 Speaker_00
They're not making a big deal out of me. And I wanna go where it's most challenging. I've never looked back. Did you end up finding Princeton challenging? Oh, way too challenging. That ended my figure skating career.

00:57:17 Speaker_00
I did not have the time to continue to practice. I tried to compete in my freshman year in the Eastern Championships and didn't do that well, and I began to realize that I wasn't going to make it.

00:57:32 Speaker_00
Looking back, I don't know whether I would have ever made the world team, but in 1961, many of the skaters that I had either competed with, trained with, my skating coach, all perished in a plane crash.

00:57:51 Speaker_00
the world team on their way to the world championships in Brussels, Belgium in 1961. And we lost a whole generation of world-class figure skaters.

00:58:05 Speaker_00
And I don't know whether I would have ever gotten to that point, but I'm glad I made the choice that I did to go to Princeton to give up figure skating and to focus on what's led me to be here talking to you. When did teaching enter the picture?

00:58:24 Speaker_04
What happened after, if you could just paint a picture for us, after your undergraduate experience?

00:58:29 Speaker_00
Well, I knew what I was going to do after I graduated from Princeton. I had applied for and was accepted to the U.S. Navy Officers Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island to begin my training in September of 1961.

00:58:46 Speaker_00
I went back home to Omaha, Nebraska, worked in manual labor on the night shift in a can factory, and in late August was called to Fort Omaha to be inducted into the U.S. Navy.

00:59:02 Speaker_00
During that pre-induction interview, I was asked if anything had happened to me health-wise since I'd applied in February and had it physical then. I said, well, I broke my leg in a rugby game at Princeton in April, but it's fine now.

00:59:20 Speaker_00
They didn't take my word for it. They ordered an x-ray and concluded it wasn't up to Navy standards. So I was unable to enter OCS in September of 1961. Very disappointed. I did have an alternative.

00:59:39 Speaker_00
I had applied to Stanford Business School for the MBA program. I only applied to Stanford because it only had one essay in the application, and all the others had three. So I focused on Stanford for that reason.

00:59:57 Speaker_00
I had been accepted, and I never sent in the postcard that indicated that I was not coming.

01:00:06 Speaker_00
So I retrieved the postcard, sent it in, and within, I'd say six days, my whole life changed from going into the Navy to going to California and entering the MBA program. I did not know

01:00:26 Speaker_00
in that split second in April when I heard a crack when I fell in the rugby game, that that would change my life so dramatically. That's why I tell people who ask me about career planning that career planning is overrated.

01:00:47 Speaker_00
You ask me the question though, how did you get into teaching?

01:00:50 Speaker_00
Well, I was in the MBA program at Stanford University and there, just like philosophy at Princeton, I discovered operations research, applying mathematics to real operating business problems, but operating problems in general.

01:01:09 Speaker_00
And I said, this is way cool. And so rather than looking for a job as i was approaching my mba degree i applied for the phd program to pursue operations research and after my first year in the phd program.

01:01:31 Speaker_00
The professor who had taught the most popular second-year MBA course, electronic data processing, it was the only course at Stanford Business School at that time that had anything to do with computers, he left unexpectedly.

01:01:50 Speaker_00
I went to the dean of the business school and I said, Mr. Dean, you have a problem. You've got a hundred Second year MBA students signed up to take Business 366, Electronic Data Processing, this September, and you don't have anybody to teach it.

01:02:10 Speaker_00
I am the solution to your problem. I can teach that course. And they said something like, don't call us, we'll call you, and In late August, about three weeks before the course was to begin, I get a call. Ed, can you teach that course? I said, you bet.

01:02:34 Speaker_00
And that's how I began my teaching career. Again, there's a life lesson here. Opportunities unexpectedly happen. And many people say, gee, that's an interesting opportunity.

01:02:50 Speaker_00
But it only matters in life if you seize the moment, if you take advantage of that opportunity and commit yourself to do something that you've never done before.

01:03:06 Speaker_00
I find that i learn the most the fastest when i don't know what i'm doing so i'd never taught a university course and all of a sudden i'm in front of a hundred second year mba students 24 years old teaching a course but

01:03:25 Speaker_00
I did ok and then stanford graduate school of business said would you teach another course i thought different courses and that's how my teaching career began.

01:03:38 Speaker_04
How did you become good at teaching or. study teaching, refine your teaching. How did you work on that?

01:03:47 Speaker_04
Because you're an excellent teacher, there are plenty of bad teachers out there, plenty of passable teachers, even at incredible institutions, but I would consider you a very, very adept teacher.

01:03:58 Speaker_00
How did you learn to teach? I think I became a better teacher by not being smart. And here's what I mean by it. People who are really super smart, learning comes too easy.

01:04:15 Speaker_00
I believe you can be a better teacher when it's more difficult for you to learn so that you can explain to somebody else how to master some lesson. I also had the chance as a high school senior to take a course in debate.

01:04:39 Speaker_00
It was a full year course in debating, and that helped me with public speaking, but more importantly, the high school teacher who taught debate also taught the various individual events like oratory and extemporaneous speaking, and I

01:05:01 Speaker_00
wanted to compete in extemporaneous speaking. Could you just define what that means in this context? So, well, this is the way it was when I was in high school. An extemporaneous speaking contest, each participant individually

01:05:19 Speaker_00
would be given a topic on which to speak for 10 minutes, and each contestant would have one hour to prepare the 10-minute speech.

01:05:31 Speaker_00
So my high school teacher said, well, come in after school's over every afternoon, and I'll give you a topic, I'll give you an hour, and then you come back and give your 10-minute speech on that topic.

01:05:48 Speaker_00
So the first time I did that, he gave me a topic, I spent the hour preparing, I gave my talk, and when I ran out of words, I said, is the 10 minutes up yet? And he says, it's only been three minutes.

01:06:04 Speaker_00
But every afternoon, he would do that, and by the end of the 10 minutes, public speaking events that year, the contest that year, I'd become a state champion in extemporaneous speaking. You asked earlier, Tim, about preparation.

01:06:27 Speaker_00
This is just another example. I wasn't born to be a speaker. I wasn't born to be a teacher. But I learned to do both.

01:06:39 Speaker_04
And there are tools also, as you mentioned in your own teaching, there are tools that you can give people and strategies, which is certainly part, was part of ELE 491 in my case, and in the cases of your students.

01:06:53 Speaker_04
With the extemporaneous speaking, what were some of the keys to getting better? Were there any techniques or strategies or ways of thinking about the topics you were given that were particularly helpful?

01:07:07 Speaker_00
In that final event, I remember the topic. It was, what was the significance of the conflict between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton? And I had an hour to prepare that one before Google.

01:07:30 Speaker_00
And so the style of presentation, it wasn't a sort of matter of fact. It was to prepare what might be called a 10 minute oration with drama, with stories, with life lessons and sort of end on a crescendo. And let's go back to teaching.

01:07:57 Speaker_00
I view teaching more about nurturing, about personal values, about inspiration. about recognizing that you can have fun doing great things and it's not so much the lessons or the facts but rather it's building a maybe even contagion

01:08:24 Speaker_00
this optimistic attitude and understanding that if you can change the world for the better, that's as good as it gets.

01:08:34 Speaker_04
I do think in retrospect it's maybe easier, well of course it's easier to see in retrospect, but

01:08:40 Speaker_04
how these various chance opportunities and encounters with philosophy, with the teaching, with the extemporaneous speaking, not necessarily in that order, but how they've combined into this alchemy that has enabled you to transmit and infuse these beliefs to your students in a way that is very, very memorable, right?

01:09:03 Speaker_04
It's not just the text in the book. Do you remember, I mean, you remember the topic, Aaron Burr, And so on. Do you remember any of the choices that you made in how you competed with that competition?

01:09:15 Speaker_00
In speaking? Yeah. Now, I remember my debate partner in high school and then at Princeton. He was one year behind me. We had started kindergarten together, and then I skipped first grade, so I was one year ahead of him.

01:09:32 Speaker_00
But when he was a junior and I was a senior, we were debate partners in a debate team. There were two on each side, and one, you were assigned whether you were the affirmative speakers

01:09:46 Speaker_00
supporting the resolution or the negative speakers against the resolution. And I remember he was the first affirmative speaker and I was sitting near while he was standing and he got confused and he gave the negative case.

01:10:11 Speaker_00
And I'm sort of making hand signals to him as he's giving the negative case against the resolution he's supposed to be speaking for, and I was going to have to follow up on this. And he finally realized what was happening, and he was so smooth.

01:10:32 Speaker_00
He said, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what our opponents would lead you to believe. However, and then he quickly switched to the affirmative case. That's incredible.

01:10:50 Speaker_00
But there's also a lesson in this that things sometimes don't work out exactly the way you plan, but you've got to adapt and figure out how to segue into what will work.

01:11:05 Speaker_04
You strike me as very, very adaptable in so many ways. I mean, you've spent time in so many different worlds. And you're very good at seizing opportunities. But you've also done certain things for periods of time.

01:11:18 Speaker_04
You've run companies for extended periods of time. You were in politics for an extended period of time. How do you, this is actually some phrasing that I heard from Rabbi Jonathan Sachs in the UK.

01:11:30 Speaker_04
He said, how do you differentiate between opportunities to be seized and temptations to be resisted? You focused for extended periods of time on single things when no doubt there were other opportunities being thrown at you.

01:11:43 Speaker_04
How do you think about focusing for extended periods or opening yourself to opportunities?

01:11:50 Speaker_00
This is really a simple question and it's answered with one word, commitment. I had situations where I had opportunities to leave companies that I was running. I would not leave

01:12:06 Speaker_00
until it was appropriate to leave, where there was a successor, there was success.

01:12:13 Speaker_00
When you're an entrepreneur and people are investing in you, when you're an entrepreneur and a CEO and employees and customers and suppliers are counting on you, you've gotta have a commitment to do the job until you're no longer necessary.

01:12:35 Speaker_00
When i took the company public my first company public and it was about a ten year period and there were times during that ten years where we almost went under.

01:12:50 Speaker_00
But when we had gone public and then did a secondary financing, so there was sufficient capital, and then did a search for a successor, I felt that then I could leave to run for the Congress. Perfect segue. Why did you decide to run for Congress?

01:13:09 Speaker_00
I thought I could be good at it. And here's why. It wasn't just, gee, that's Way cool, like philosophy and operations research. In 1977, I was on the board of directors of the American Electronics Association.

01:13:27 Speaker_00
Electronics companies during the 70s were unable to raise sufficient amounts of risk capital.

01:13:36 Speaker_00
The amount of capital committed to professionally managed venture capital funds during the nineteen seventies funds that would be investing in tech companies was only fifty million a year while fifty million a year.

01:13:53 Speaker_00
I was asked to chair a task force for the American Electronics Association on capital formation to figure out what to do. And I assembled a group of entrepreneurs and investors and we concluded the single

01:14:09 Speaker_00
An inhibitor to sufficient quantities of risk capital investment was the high rate of the capital gains tax at the federal level at that time, which was 50%. And looking at it, if an investor invested and lost money, they lost all the money.

01:14:28 Speaker_00
If they invested and made money, they gave half of it to the federal government. forgetting about what they'd have to give to the state government.

01:14:37 Speaker_00
So we felt that lowering the tax on capital gains was essential to stimulating the environment for risk capital investment, not just for electronics companies, but all kinds of job-creating ventures.

01:14:52 Speaker_00
the task force put together a white paper, and usually that's the end of the story.

01:15:02 Speaker_00
Well, we've proposed the lowering the capital gains tax, but keep in mind, Tim, that this is a group of entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs don't just talk about it, they make stuff happen.

01:15:15 Speaker_00
So the first thing we did is we did a survey of the electronics industry and documented the importance of more risk capital investment for job creation and for the ability of these companies to get started and grow.

01:15:33 Speaker_00
Then I went to Washington and testified before Congress, and there was a young congressman from Wisconsin, Bill Steiger, who was on the House Ways and Means Committee.

01:15:46 Speaker_00
He became intrigued with this idea of lowering the tax on capital gains, and so he introduced a bill to do so.

01:15:55 Speaker_00
And I worked with him and the whole electronics association worked in lobbying the Ways and Means Committee, worked with the Senate, and by November of 1978, about a year after we'd started this process with our survey, the federal tax on capital gains was lowered from 50% to 28%.

01:16:24 Speaker_00
And within about eighteen months one billion dollars of. Capital flowed into professionally managed venture capital funds compared to the fifty million a year that had been happening during the seventies and.

01:16:41 Speaker_00
Anybody who studies the 1980s, that number on an annual basis, four or five billion a year flowing into funds that were supporting new enterprises and job-creating enterprises.

01:16:58 Speaker_00
So that experience, particularly because Bill Steiger died of a heart attack within a month after this bill was passed. He passed away in early December of 1978. The bill was passed in November of 78. His example inspired me to for public service.

01:17:23 Speaker_00
He had changed the nature of the debate in Washington on tax policy from who pays and who doesn't to what will be the economic impact.

01:17:36 Speaker_00
And I felt, gosh, somebody who has built a company, somebody who's had the experience that I had with working with Bill Steiger to get the tax rate on capital gains reduced, perhaps I had a contribution to make in public service.

01:17:57 Speaker_04
It also strikes me, and I think you may have even said this in an interview that I read in preparing for this conversation, that in a very real sense you had an advantage in the sense that

01:18:12 Speaker_04
you could always go back to building companies, which means you weren't necessarily dedicated to being a politician as a career indefinitely from that point forward. You had some attractive plan Bs or plan Cs if it didn't work out.

01:18:28 Speaker_04
Did that enable you to think more aggressively or differently?

01:18:33 Speaker_00
I had a personal principle that I was only going to stay in the House of Representatives, at most, three terms, six years. And that gave me two advantages. One, a sense of urgency. I couldn't just kind of wait around and learn the ropes.

01:18:55 Speaker_00
I had to start making a difference as quickly as I was able. And secondly, it gave me the freedom to do what I thought was right. The worst could happen is I get retired, or maybe it's the best that could happen.

01:19:11 Speaker_00
I get retired after one term or two terms. Certainly, I wasn't gonna serve more than three. As it turned out, I only served two terms in the House because as a congressman from California,

01:19:26 Speaker_00
I think there were at that time 48 or 50 California members of the House of Representatives, and we were a dime a dozen. And it was very difficult for a single California congressman or congresswoman to get the message out.

01:19:46 Speaker_00
So I felt that if I have ideas, I not only need a message, I need a megaphone. And I decided that I could get a megaphone if I became a U.S. Senator from California. I ran for the U.S. Senate and started in 1985 for the 1986 campaign.

01:20:09 Speaker_00
I won the Republican nomination, but I was defeated in a very close election. about a percentage point, percentage point and a half by the three-term incumbent, Alan Cranston.

01:20:25 Speaker_00
Looking back, I was disappointed at the time because I felt I wasn't a good enough candidate. I had lots of support and I'd let people down. But looking back, I dodged a bullet.

01:20:41 Speaker_00
with that very close loss because since then I feel through leading companies and through, at least my view, changing lives for the better, my students over many, many years, that I may have through not

01:21:00 Speaker_00
just their lives, but how they've changed in a positive way the lives of others, that I may have made more of a contribution to a better future than I would have as a U.S. Senator.

01:21:13 Speaker_04
I believe that. I definitely believe that. And, or I shouldn't say and, but at the time, you were disappointed. And I would be very interested to hear, because we've been talking about a lot of your successes, and you've had a lot of successes, but

01:21:29 Speaker_04
At that time, when you got the news that you had lost, what did the next few days or weeks look like for you? What do you say to yourself when you experience a loss like that?

01:21:40 Speaker_00
What do i do next to make a difference and i'd never been out of a job i mean when you think about it it was from teaching the starting a company to running for congress and now i didn't have a next what am i gonna do next.

01:21:59 Speaker_00
I had the opportunity to join the venture capital firm that was the lead investor in my first company, and I accepted that assignment as a general partner of the firm.

01:22:14 Speaker_00
Brentwood Associates at that time was a Los Angeles-based venture capital firm, and I established the Silicon Valley office of that firm. I think my partners would agree that I wasn't really very good at being a venture capital investor.

01:22:32 Speaker_00
I'm too much of an optimist. Every deal I looked at, oh, gee, that's really interesting. I can see how to make that happen. And as a venture capitalist, you really have to be more realistic and maybe even super critical.

01:22:49 Speaker_00
But also at that time in my life, I viewed being an investor as kind of like a football coach. You walk the sidelines, you send in plays, you make substitutions, you rant and rave at halftime, but you never put any points on the board.

01:23:10 Speaker_00
And i was still in at that time of my life wanting to put points on the board meaning. Running a company not being the better in the stands but the jockey on the horse.

01:23:23 Speaker_00
And so when i had an opportunity to become ceo of one of the companies brentwood help to start. I took that opportunity and a company in the magnetic recording components business called send store.

01:23:40 Speaker_04
What is your decision process like for something like that? Because you mentioned with the venture capital general partner position, perhaps you were too optimistic. Everything sounded interesting.

01:23:51 Speaker_04
But when you make a decision to, say, become the CEO of a startup in the portfolio, You're saying no to other things, presumably. So what was the decision process like in evaluating that and saying yes to it?

01:24:07 Speaker_00
It's again, commitment. I mean, I was part of a firm, general partner of a firm that had made a significant investment in this company. And they felt that there was a need for a new c.e.o.

01:24:25 Speaker_00
And so when they talk to me about it it started out as well can you go in there and help out. And be on the board and it evolved into can you go in there and run it.

01:24:43 Speaker_00
And i wasn't gonna say no to my partners did you in your mind or explicitly with them.

01:24:51 Speaker_04
set expectations in the way that you did for yourself with the three-term limit as a congressman? Did you go in to it saying, I'm committing to this for X period of time and then we'll reevaluate or was it left totally open-ended?

01:25:06 Speaker_00
I was left open-ended. The goal is success rather than how long. And I think you're getting to an issue where I may not be like a lot of other people. I don't do things for me. I do things for others.

01:25:25 Speaker_00
So if you wanna get down to what motivates you, finding something that I think is meaningful that needs to be done and recognizing I can help do it. And it's not about the money. That's why I do things pro bono.

01:25:46 Speaker_00
My wife is not particularly thrilled with that approach, but on the other hand, I focus on where can I make a difference for the benefit of others rather than what's in it for me. And I don't know whether that's unusual, but it served me well.

01:26:06 Speaker_04
How do you differentiate between the things that will have the greatest impact for others and feeling peer-pressured to commit to something, if that question makes any sense.

01:26:22 Speaker_04
Because it seems like people-pleasing and committing to things that will help the greatest number of other people or deeply help other people are two different things. And I guess I'm just wondering if

01:26:34 Speaker_04
if there are times when you commit to, say, doing certain things because the general partners to whom you've made a commitment ask you to do it, may not always be the same thing that will have the greatest impact. Maybe it's not a good question.

01:26:50 Speaker_04
I'm just wondering if you've ever run into a position where people want you to do one thing, and you could be very good at it, but you feel like your abilities are better put in a different place.

01:27:01 Speaker_00
Usually the decisions that I make about how I'm going to spend my time and my life are made by me rather than responding to requests. When I came to offer my course here at Princeton.

01:27:19 Speaker_00
I hadn't gotten a phone call saying, hey, Ed, would you please come and teach a high-tech entrepreneurship course at Princeton. Rather, in June of 1997,

01:27:32 Speaker_00
I asked for a meeting with the then dean of the engineering school, James Way, and in that meeting I proposed that the engineering school would benefit from having a rather comprehensive program in entrepreneurship.

01:27:50 Speaker_00
It just made perfect sense to me that engineers innovate, But in order to make a difference in the world, that innovation has to then become real and commercialized and often in a startup venture.

01:28:06 Speaker_00
So exposing engineering students to that process and that opportunity seemed to make sense.

01:28:14 Speaker_00
That was the origin of the first offering of the only four ninety one in the fall semester of nineteen ninety seven again an instance where i decided that there might be some value that i could create and now.

01:28:33 Speaker_00
Entrepreneurship the Princeton way is pervasive across this campus, with many courses, with many co-curricular and extracurricular programs for the benefit of student entrepreneurs.

01:28:48 Speaker_00
And the survey that I mentioned before, out of 400 of the students that took my course, forgetting about, not including the courses, the many other courses that are now offered, to have 160 founders of companies from that cadre, it would suggest to me that out of the total of 1,600, that there may be 300, 400 founders.

01:29:16 Speaker_00
And I still, I'm touched when I get emails from students I may have had a dozen years ago saying, Ed, you planted the seed 12 years ago and it's finally sprouting. I've just founded my first company.

01:29:35 Speaker_00
It took me this long, but you gave me the confidence to do it.

01:29:41 Speaker_04
How have you thought about parenting and your own kids, because you're so deliberate in how you teach, and you've prepared so extensively, not just for the courses, but for each individual class.

01:29:56 Speaker_04
How have you thought about parenting, or how would you describe your parenting style?

01:30:02 Speaker_00
It's almost the same. that it's just that the students start a lot younger. I believe that the best way to help people find their way, nurture them, is through encouragement rather than direction.

01:30:23 Speaker_00
When our children were young, we have three children, I coached 13 soccer teams. All three of them played soccer at one time or another. I was a cub scout leader and a boy scout leader. We're really proud of the way our kids turned out. We were lucky.

01:30:46 Speaker_00
They were growing up in a good place at a good time.

01:30:50 Speaker_00
Probably not a lot of the challenges that all parents face today with the world more complicated, with communications technology more advanced, but loving them, caring, and letting them know that you love them and you care is kind of the secret of parenting.

01:31:17 Speaker_04
Could you speak to the encouragement instead of rather than direction a bit more? Does that mean that you're exposing them to a lot and whatever they gravitate towards naturally is what you then try to foster?

01:31:30 Speaker_04
What does that mean when you say encouragement instead of direction?

01:31:34 Speaker_00
They've got to live their lives. You can't live their lives. I think I benefited a lot from my own parents. They were proud of me, whether I did well or not.

01:31:48 Speaker_00
I learned, when I was maybe five, six, seven years old, how to build radios and build motors in the basement workshop from my father, who had a degree in electrical engineering.

01:32:03 Speaker_00
Sadly during the depression he lost his engineering job and got into an assignment that really didn't have anything to do with engineering but he stayed in it in order to provide for his family. One thing that I remember from my,

01:32:21 Speaker_00
I was, as we talked about earlier, a competitive figure skater. And sometimes I didn't do well in a competition. I may have fallen, I may have not done a school figure very well, not up to my ability. They never criticized me in those situations.

01:32:43 Speaker_00
They never put pressure on me. They were always supportive and proud, regardless of how well I did relative to what I could have done.

01:32:55 Speaker_04
What might they say? Let's just say on the car ride back after you've had, for you, a disappointing performance, what are the types of things they might say to you?

01:33:04 Speaker_00
Great job. Having been a soccer coach, I know that not all parents act that way. Sometimes parents are the problem. The players are just fine. Parents are a problem. Both of my parents weren't raised by their parents.

01:33:25 Speaker_00
My mother was raised by her grandmother. My father was raised by his mother's sister. His mother died when he was about 12 years old.

01:33:39 Speaker_00
His father was in the German newspaper business in Montana, but he and his sister grew up in Omaha, raised by his deceased mother's sister. And I think as a result of their not having parents, they wanted to be the best parents.

01:34:00 Speaker_00
And so my sister, we never had a whole lot of money. but my sister had ballet lessons and she was an exquisite ballerina. I had piano lessons and figure skating lessons and they just wanted to be the best parents ever.

01:34:21 Speaker_00
And I think they felt blessed to have two children who wanted to succeed. We both studied hard, we're both good students, we went to college, we did other things besides that, and we both wanted our parents to be proud.

01:34:45 Speaker_04
Where do you think that desire came from? Was it watching their example and perhaps the diligence with which your father showed you how to disassemble and reassemble these radios.

01:34:59 Speaker_04
Where did the desire to please them come from if what you most received was continuous positive feedback?

01:35:06 Speaker_00
I'm not sure it was the focus of my life was to please them. But I've had from the time I was in grade school, maybe even in kindergarten or first grade, an overarching goal

01:35:23 Speaker_00
And that is to live a life that matters, to make a lasting positive difference in the world. I call it leaving footprints. That's what drives me.

01:35:36 Speaker_00
So some people might say, well, my overarching goal is to be the richest person around, or my overarching goal is to have a whole lot of adulation and be a celebrity. My goal, maybe even in a quiet way, is to leave footprints on the world.

01:36:01 Speaker_04
Have there ever been times in your life where you've felt like you've wandered or been pushed away from that and then have corrected course? I don't recall.

01:36:10 Speaker_00
I don't recall. I've always sort of marched to my own drum. Yeah. You know, that's another thing. Maybe this is important for your audience. I always wanted to be different.

01:36:27 Speaker_00
There are people, particularly with social media these days, that want to be accepted, that want to be like, if someone has a new kind of shoe or shirt, you know, others want to have the same thing.

01:36:45 Speaker_00
And so I've always had a desire to be different from others and maybe that enables me not only to venture where others may not venture, but also to be satisfied doing something that nobody else is doing.

01:37:05 Speaker_04
Are there any books that have had a particularly large impact on your life or that you've given the most to other people or recommended?

01:37:15 Speaker_00
Well, the four-hour work week, for the four-hour body.

01:37:20 Speaker_04
You know, I've heard they're fine books. I've heard they're... Those are very fine books and everyone should read them.

01:37:29 Speaker_04
Besides those, of course, on the top shelf, are there any books that come to mind that have impacted you strongly or that you've recommended to students or other people?

01:37:40 Speaker_00
When I was little, when I'm talking about little, like 6, 8, 10 years old, there was a whole series of biographies written for children my age. Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin. And I would read those books over and over.

01:38:08 Speaker_00
because their lives and what they accomplished were what I hope to do. So it was that set of experiences. There was a book on the Wright Brothers, and these were written for somebody my age.

01:38:26 Speaker_00
Now you can read Walter Isaacson's book on Benjamin Franklin or on Steve Jobs or Walter Isaacson's book on Einstein. But it's the same thing. Yeah, or David McCullough's On the Wright Brothers. Yes.

01:38:43 Speaker_04
A fabulous book. Do you still read biographies?

01:38:46 Speaker_00
Is that – That's kind of all I care about. And it's the stories. The stories that are inspirational.

01:38:57 Speaker_00
And it gets back to what we were talking about before with the case method, where when I'm reading a biography, just like I'm hoping the students when they read a case that they think of themselves in that situation, and what would I do?

01:39:15 Speaker_00
and reading biographies, well there's the wonderful McCullough book on the Wright brothers, amazing lessons of they didn't just go out build a plane and fly it. A lot of setbacks and disappointments and struggles in order to do what they did.

01:39:40 Speaker_00
The same with all of those. It gets to what we were talking about before, the preparation, the commitment to excellence. It doesn't happen overnight.

01:39:53 Speaker_00
People who achieve great things, even though it may look like it happened quickly and easily and everybody can do it, most of those stories have a lot of sacrifice and difficulty and disappointments and setbacks in them.

01:40:12 Speaker_04
For entrepreneurs, whether students in your classes or people listening, are there any particular biographies or books that you would recommend in particular? Any standouts or just particular figures?

01:40:28 Speaker_00
Well, again, don't buy the books because they have lessons in them. Buy the books because they have stories in them. And there are a bunch of them.

01:40:40 Speaker_00
My colleague at Princeton, Derek Liddow, has written a couple of books, and his most recent is Built on Bedrock. And a lot of the book is about Walmart and Sam Walton and how it started.

01:40:57 Speaker_00
And he went to the Walmart archives and based his stories about Walmart on those facts. but it's filled with stories about companies that were built by people on solid foundations, built on bedrock.

01:41:19 Speaker_04
I had a chance, the stories are so important I think also for many reasons of course, but also because it's really the glue that we as humans are programmed to use to remember any of the lessons that might come out of those stories.

01:41:36 Speaker_04
And that's something that struck me when a few months ago I was invited to go to Bentonville, Arkansas, and interview Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart, for this podcast. But it was my first time in Northwest Arkansas, my first time in Bentonville.

01:41:52 Speaker_04
And I went to the, I was able to see Sam Walton's pickup truck and the keys and the stories are what stick. And it was a fascinating, fascinating experience. What are you most excited about these days?

01:42:08 Speaker_04
You seem to be moving as quickly, doing as many things as ever. You certainly don't strike me as someone who's ever idle. What are you personally most excited about these days?

01:42:19 Speaker_00
I'm focusing now on education, and my years of teaching are just part of it. But you look at higher education today, very expensive, a lot of students with debt, may not be prepared for first jobs, may not be prepared for a lifetime of contributions.

01:42:46 Speaker_00
And so just in the last couple of weeks, I volunteered to be the interim president of a wonderful small college, Sierra Nevada College, located in Incline Village, Nevada, right on the shores of Lake Tahoe in the midst of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

01:43:09 Speaker_00
This is a college that has a dedicated faculty with real-life experience in the areas they teach. They're not just teachers, they've done what they teach. It is a college in which entrepreneurship is pervasive.

01:43:31 Speaker_00
It has some real focused capabilities in environmental science right there on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Keep Tahoe blue. Environmental science is critical in that area. What a wonderful place to learn about that.

01:43:51 Speaker_00
It has a strong entrepreneurial-based business program at the undergraduate level. And then it has a marvelous fine arts and creative writing program. You don't go there to major in neuroscience. You don't go there to major in philosophy.

01:44:14 Speaker_00
But if you wanna go to a small college with small classes with dedicated teachers to be an entrepreneurial leader, both in your first job and for a lifetime of contributions in,

01:44:30 Speaker_00
establishing and building enterprises, or being a leading environmental scientist with entrepreneurial approaches to that scientific work, or If you want to be like a writer, you know Tim better than anybody.

01:44:51 Speaker_00
Writers aren't just writers, they're entrepreneurs. Creating content, but then getting their content read. And podcasting. That's a way of communicating with people. I have friends who are photographers.

01:45:12 Speaker_00
They became photographers, they didn't born photographers, but they became photographers, but they're entrepreneurs. So here's a small college that

01:45:24 Speaker_00
I volunteered to lead until a successor with entrepreneurial leadership capabilities is identified and takes office, and continue to promote this higher education approach.

01:45:39 Speaker_00
One of the challenges these days, as I just mentioned, was how do we do this less expensively? And I believe that there are ways in which education can use technology to reduce the cost.

01:45:58 Speaker_00
I'm not advocating there will never be any more classrooms, but a combination of that classroom experience with online learning can reduce the cost of providing a top-rated educational institution. I'm also attracted to

01:46:20 Speaker_00
income sharing agreements, perhaps your audience is not familiar with them, but rather than taking out student loans, there are sources of financing where the student signs an agreement to repay based on their income.

01:46:40 Speaker_00
above certain levels, and if they never make that much, they don't repay, but if they make more than that threshold level, then they pay more than the amount of the debt. But having students graduating with huge amounts of debt reduces their choices.

01:47:02 Speaker_00
And you asked me earlier, well, how do you choose what you want to do? Well, I want to change the world, I want to do things that will benefit others. Well, I have a lot of debt. you may not be able to make those choices in that direction.

01:47:17 Speaker_00
You have to focus first on, well, how do I make enough money to pay off my debt?

01:47:23 Speaker_00
So I don't know whether any of the people who are listening to this podcast are thinking about enrolling in a unique educational institution, but we do have a few openings left for entering freshmen, even this fall in late August.

01:47:43 Speaker_00
So if there are people who are interested in coming to get a uniquely valuable educational experience in a beautiful setting, look up sierranevada.edu.

01:47:59 Speaker_04
And I'll link to that in the show notes for everyone as well. So you'll be able to find those links really easily. The income sharing is very very interesting to me. I don't have much exposure to it but there are some programming schools for instance.

01:48:14 Speaker_04
I believe one is called Lambda School which has this exact model and has proven very very successful. It also puts a very productive onus on the educators

01:48:28 Speaker_04
to really think through the practicalities of what they're teaching and how effective they are, how effectively they're imparting these skills to their students. Ed, do you have any particular quotes or mantras, anything that you

01:48:45 Speaker_04
live your life by or remind yourself of often? Are there any particular... You mentioned, say, one earlier, if you're failing to prepare, you're preparing to fail. Do you have any other quotes that have really stuck with you?

01:48:59 Speaker_00
Do what you enjoy doing. Do it the best you know how. Good things will happen. I love it. I may be unusual. Well, I don't know whether I'm this unusual. I like to get out of my comfort zone, do things I haven't done before.

01:49:17 Speaker_00
I believe that doing so enables me to learn, but the more I learn, the more I'm able to contribute to others. So doing the same thing and being able to be the best at that, that's laudable. But my mother had a problem with me when she was alive.

01:49:39 Speaker_00
I started out with this teaching. I mentioned how I got into it, the Sanford Graduate School of Business. And after I'd done that for a while, I said, mom, I'm going to start a company.

01:49:52 Speaker_00
And she said, Buzzy, that was my nickname, and my sister still calls me Buzzy, and my high school friends call me Buzzy. Buzzy, you were just getting good at teaching, and now you're gonna start a company. You don't know anything about that.

01:50:10 Speaker_00
And then the company did okay, and we took it public, and I said, Mother, I'm gonna run for Congress. Buzzy, you were just getting good at running a company. You don't know anything about politics.

01:50:25 Speaker_00
And she lived long enough so that she saw me sworn in to the U.S. House of Representatives in January of 1983, and then she passed away that April.

01:50:42 Speaker_04
How did she respond to seeing you sworn in?

01:50:45 Speaker_00
She didn't express her emotions and her feelings a lot, but I believe she was proud. I'm sure she was.

01:50:55 Speaker_04
How could she not be? Yeah. You have an incredible tradition that I think is so suiting to you, and it's so memorable for so many of your students, and it has to do with singing.

01:51:12 Speaker_04
And it seems like there have been a few different versions of this, but where did the singing enter the picture with your teaching?

01:51:22 Speaker_00
Well, it started way before that. Started way before that. Oh yeah. When I was probably in grade school, I would write poems about things like, the busy bee is lively. All he does is buzz. But yesterday he stung me, and now he is a was."

01:51:47 Speaker_00
Is that something you wrote? Way back. And then I started composing using music that already existed. Then when i was in the first teaching at the stanford graduate school of business.

01:52:09 Speaker_00
There was a tradition there were in the spring in may they held a joint faculty student event called the spring flying. And the faculty would prepare a skit. It had, perhaps, acting. It had, perhaps, some songs.

01:52:33 Speaker_00
And I became the writer for the faculty skits. And then there were student skits as well. My most famous song, I wrote many for those skits about various courses and, well, primarily about courses.

01:52:53 Speaker_00
But then I'd also write the words, and we had a takeoff on Batman and Robin, and we had Mission Impossible skit, where I'd write the songs and the music. And even after I left the faculty as a teacher,

01:53:11 Speaker_00
And i started my company they kept me on the stanford business school faculty from the time i left which was nineteen seventy to nineteen eighty one so i could continue to be the writer of the faculty.

01:53:28 Speaker_00
Well, the most famous song I wrote was about the linear programming algorithm. It was called the simplex method, where poor students in 1966, when I was teaching the quantitative methods course, had to learn how to do this.

01:53:48 Speaker_00
And linear programming was abbreviated LP, linear programming.

01:53:54 Speaker_00
And so I wrote a song about the algorithm that was mathematically correct, that if you listen to the words, you could do the simplex algorithm to achieve an optimal solution to a linear programming problem. But I wrote it in the form of a dance.

01:54:14 Speaker_00
And it went something like this. Come on gang, now gather round. See what your math prof's putting down. Get in close and listen to me. I'm gonna show you how to do the LP. It's a new dance, but it's easily done. In fact, you learned it in 261.

01:54:32 Speaker_00
Just to make sure that you can do it, listen close while I review it. Do the LP. Come on baby, do the LP with me.

01:54:42 Speaker_00
we're going to pivot step day and night and optimize it out of sight and then it went through a series of verses with the details of the simplex algorithm first of all form a big strong line ah that's it you're looking fine fine behind that line

01:55:03 Speaker_00
Form one more. Come on, everybody, get out on the floor. Keep forming lines one after one. When you're out of cats, then you're done. Now you see how I get my kicks. I've got y'all in a big matrix. Do the LP. Come on, baby, do the LP with me.

01:55:22 Speaker_00
We're going to pivot step day and night and optimize it out of sight.

01:55:29 Speaker_04
Incredible. So you use stories, you use music. I feel like these are communication skills that sort of transcend the era in which you were born. I mean, you could have gone back a thousand years and used these.

01:55:48 Speaker_04
You could probably go forward a thousand years and use these. And your students remember these things. They really remember these things.

01:55:58 Speaker_04
I'd love for you to talk about another song that I certainly was exposed to, and that is My Way, and why you chose that song.

01:56:10 Speaker_00
I was teaching at Harvard Business School in 1996 a course called Entrepreneurial Finance, and for the last class, of the course, I wanted to end with a number of stories and share with students my philosophies and It was a captive audience.

01:56:33 Speaker_00
Attendance was mandatory. And I thought, what would be an appropriate message to convey? And that message, as we've talked about it earlier, parenting, teaching, the message is just do it your way.

01:56:56 Speaker_00
And so then I thought of the song, My Way, and I put some words to that song. This course's end is here, but I have in this final session a thought for your career. It is a most important lesson as you go down life's path.

01:57:24 Speaker_00
Whether slow or in a hurry, recall the Nike ad, just do it your way.

01:57:35 Speaker_04
Ah, it brings back the memories. It not only brings back the memories, but it just refreshes the mark that you had on me and continue to have. And I really just want to thank you, Ed, for doing things your way.

01:57:58 Speaker_04
It's really had such an incredible impact on so many people, and I'm not gonna mention him by name, but he's a mutual friend of ours.

01:58:04 Speaker_04
You introduced us because we were both students of yours, but he's a very, very, very successful entrepreneur, and we were going back and forth emailing in preparation for this interview with you, and he, in closing, says, please give my best to Ed.

01:58:22 Speaker_04
Any success I've had in business was due to him. That is an incredible sentence. And it's incredible also because he is not the only student who would write that. I've met students of yours from China, I've met students of yours

01:58:40 Speaker_04
from countries around the world who have some version of that sentiment. And it's so incredible and it's been such a privilege and such a great stroke of luck that I ended up in your class.

01:58:55 Speaker_04
And I just want to say that to you because it's had such a significant impact on the trajectory of my life. And certainly for me, that's a big deal. That's a really, really big deal. So I just wanted to thank you.

01:59:09 Speaker_00
Thank you, Tim. And now you know why I do what I do. I concluded a long time ago, I'm not going to be able to change the world alone. I said, my goal in life is to live a life that matters. I call it leaving footprints.

01:59:27 Speaker_00
But I can better achieve my goal, leaving footprints with your feet. And so that's why I do what I do.

01:59:40 Speaker_04
Well, Ed, I hope this is certainly, I mean, I can't wait to have dinner. We're going to have dinner after this and continue to catch up. I can't wait to see what you do next. And I'm so, so happy to have a chance to spend time together today.

01:59:57 Speaker_04
And this has been a real pleasure for me to do this.

02:00:03 Speaker_00
Well, I'm proud of you, Tim, and I'm proud of so many people who you refer to, who have taken my course, they've taken many other courses, they've had other experiences, but they go out and do great stuff.

02:00:21 Speaker_00
And deep down, I say to myself, well, I'm really glad I lost that Senate race. Because otherwise I may not have been able to do what I've been doing.

02:00:36 Speaker_04
Yeah, it sounds strange to say but I'm also glad, I'm really glad for my sake and for the sake of many people that you lost that center race and you've just done so much, so much good and you're gonna continue to do so much good.

02:00:50 Speaker_04
It's really inspiring and I think this is a great place to wrap up. Is there anything else you would like to say or close with? Anything you'd like to recommend to people? Anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up?

02:01:06 Speaker_00
Well, I've told you my story and with some detail based on Tim's questions, but most important thing for you to do, you speaking to the audience, is to do it your way. Don't just follow what is recommended. Don't just pursue what others are pursuing.

02:01:34 Speaker_00
But do what you enjoy doing. Do it the best you know how. Good things will happen. And if you're thinking more about doing something different than you're currently doing, it's time for a change.

02:01:53 Speaker_04
I could not imagine a better place to close. Ed, to be continued, we're going to go grab some food and continue the conversation, but thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

02:02:05 Speaker_00
Oh, this is a real treat, Tim. And oh, I noticed that There's a blackboard that's dirty and erasers that need cleaning. So get to it.

02:02:19 Speaker_04
Yeah, there is literally a whiteboard right behind me. So I'm going to get back to my other tasks, cleaning up for Ed and to be continued. And to everybody listening, I will include everything we've talked about in the show notes.

02:02:32 Speaker_04
which you can find as always at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And I hope you enjoyed this even half as much as I did. And thank you so much for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

02:02:45 Speaker_04
Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

02:02:55 Speaker_04
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page

02:03:06 Speaker_04
that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:03:14 Speaker_04
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

02:03:26 Speaker_04
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

02:03:40 Speaker_04
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T.

02:03:57 Speaker_04
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