Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work. This quote explains why: "There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time." —Marc Andreessen
Building an addition onto their house. Right? And every time Walt would make a mistake, Elias would try to hit him with either the side of a saw or the handle of a hammer. And so the next time he made a mistake well, it's 14 when this is happening. Okay? Elias says, hey, go down to the basement. It's time for a beating. Now this is nuts. It says, Elias falls him down to the basement, grabs a hammer to try to strike him, but this time, Walt grabbed his father's hand and removed the hammer. Listen to what Walt Disney said about this. He raised his other arm and I held both of his hands. Now, again, this is a you're a young man going through puberty. You may not win a fight, a 1 on 1 fight with your father, but you can damn sure inflict some kind of damage back to him. In a way when you're 7 or 8 or 9, you can't. And so Walt says, he raised the other arm and I held both of his hands, and I just held them there. I was stronger than he was. I just held them, and he broke down and cried. His father never touched him after that. Elias was broken by work and now defeated in the family too. And that leads directly into another main theme of this book, into how Walt Disney created himself. He retreated into his own world and then built his own. Maybe more than any other entrepreneur you and I have studied, this is the most obvious because he literally built Disney World. Their Disneyland, I guess, was the was the one that was completed when he was alive. That is a fantastic metaphor for what he was trying to do his entire career. He wanted to escape and then control his environment. And this tendency was so pronounced. He only has, like, a 7th or 8th grade education. Okay? When he's in school, though, the teacher thought he was the 2nd dumbest person in the class. That is literally a quote, the 2nd dumbest. But if you would talk to him away from school, you're like, no. No. No. This guy's clearly quick witted. He's clearly smart. He's clearly driven. So why is the teacher saying you're the 2nd dumbest person in class? Because all he wanted to do all day in class was not class work. He wanted to draw. He would sit silently in a corner and draw. He was secluded in his own world. There's a line in the book that
Notes, when you get a subscription, you get access to all my notes, all my highlights, transcripts for every single episode. You can search by keyword, by person, by sub It's this giant database of the collective knowledge of history's great entrepreneurs. You can also read all of my notes and highlights by book. You can have all of my notes and highlights presented to you in a random order on the highlights I've been searching my keyword. I've been rereading my highlights by book, and I've been rereading my highlights in random order on the highlight feed for years. I built this tool for me. For I had this for half a decade before anybody else had access to it. I literally could not make the podcast without this tool. And now I've had a news feature that I'm super excited about that may have made it 1000 times more valuable. It's actually called Sage. It is the founder's notes, ai, and the name actually came because there's a bunch of existing founder notes subscribers. That were beta testing this feature for me. And one of them emailed me because he heard some of the names. I was like, I I this feature's incredible, but I can't figure out what to name it. And he said that none of the names were good enough because they don't actually describe feature does, and he said she should call it Sage, and he sent me the definition of Sage. Sage is a profoundly wise person that is often looked to for guidance and advice. And that's exactly what Sage does. It's like search on steroids. You can ask it a question, and it'll search every single note, every single highlight, every single transcript, meaning every single word I've ever uttered on this podcast, and it'll start making connections. It's been making connections that I've even missed. And so I mentioned last week after I relistened to the Steven Scoberg episode, I asking Sage. I was like, give me one of the most important ideas to learn from Steven Spielberg. And within 20 or 30 seconds, it gives me this outline. Of the top 9, what it feels is the top 9 most important lessons from Steven Spielberg. Now the interesting part is if you press on expand, it actually tells you what it searched to come up with the answer. So you could just read the outline. Or if you choose to, you can go deeper and see what it actually fetched and what it searched to come up with the answer. And, of course, it's gonna search the Steven Spielberg episode because I'd done the episode a few years ago. But what is fascinating is also included ideas when I mentioned Steven Spielberg on a Steve Jobs episode. When I mentioned Spielberg on the Christopher Nolan in the James Cameron episode, it pulled an idea from spill
I just relistened to this entire episode, and it's remarkable. Not only, like, the the filmmaking genius that Spielberg is, but the way that he built a business and the way he thought about building the business around his life's work. And the reason I went back and relistened to this and the reason I originally did this episode almost 3 years ago, the reason I'm republishing it now in case you missed it the first time or even if you'd listened to the first time, I highly encourage you to relisten to it. You'd be surprised how much you're gonna forget. But because I was working on the Tarantino episode last week, and he kept talking about multiple times in in Tarantino's book. He's talking about the fact that he thought that Spielberg's a natural born filmmaker genius, that he's made some of the greatest movies that in in film history. Tarantino would talk about Spielberg's gift of taking an idea they had in his mind and then making it real. And the other reason that I wanted to go back and study Spielberg is because in this episode, I talk about one of my favorite biographies of all time, which I covered, you know, 7 years ago on episode 35. And it was George Lucas, a Life by Brian Jane Jones. I have spent the whole week. I'm still in the processes of rereading and really diving deep into George Lucas's life and work again. And so while I'm working on that, I think Spielberg is the perfect bridge from Tarantino to Lucas. Because if you study Spielberg, Lucas is gonna play a role in his life, and if you study Lucas, Spielberg plays a role in his life. And what is fascinating is when you study all 3, they have an idea that they have in common. Right? And it's the fact that it talks about and this this episode is talked about in Tarantino episode or we talked about in Lucas episode. Spielberg in particular, he would watch and rewatch movies he loved. And then decades later, entire scenes from those movies would appear in Spielberg's own movies. That's just exact same thing as Edwin Land's ideas showing up in Steve Jobs' Companies and Products. It's the same thing as Sam Walton's ideas showing up in Jeff Bezos' companies and products. And a main theme that reappears for anybody gets to the top of their profession, anybody becomes great at what they do, is they are seeped in the industry, the history of their industry. They talk about over and over again. They don't just read a book one time. They don't just watch a movie one time. They don't just have one conversation. They do it over and over and
As well as a bit of legacy that he could have never imagined. What exactly Floyd did for a living all these years was open to wild speculation. Like everyone I've ever met like him, he always had stories of the days when he was living the high life. But if he's 37 years old and moving into his old girlfriend's best friend's spare room and made to keep a lookout on her teenage son, he couldn't have been doing so well. Floyd was a very personable guy, yet he never had friends from the old days visit him, which I can't say rang any bells back then. But now, I think it's due to the fact that he didn't have any old friends. People were in Floyd's life for a while and then they weren't. But Floyd did have an ambition. Floyd wanted to be a screenwriter. By the time he moved into my house, he had written 2 screenplays. Floyd's 2 screenplays were the first two screenplays I ever read. The script that I loved, the first script I ever read was Floyd's epic western saga called Billy Spencer. The story featured an incredibly cool black cowboy named Billy Spencer. The essence of what Floyd was trying to accomplish in that script, an epic western with a black heroic cowboy at center was the very heart of what I was trying to accomplish with Django Unchained. But even more influential than any script was having a man trying to be a screenwriter living in my house. Him writing, him talking about a script, me reading it made me consider for the first time writing movies. It would be a long road from that year of 1978 to me completing my first feature length screenplay, True Romance, in September 1987. So another theme, that's 11 years.
Way it was written was written for internal use only. I think it's why it's so hard to find. I paid, like, 80 or $90, for my copy, and when I looked at Amazon this morning, there was only a handful, and I think they started, like, $95 each. And they're worth every single penny. Go back to one of my favorite lines in Port Charlie's Almanac that he said. Yeah. There's ideas worth 1,000,000,000 in a $30 history book. Who cares if the book is a $100? Take one idea that you use in your career and the the return is a 1,000 times that. So it says, you know, when our dreams are little, we become little people. What is a little little dream? Meeting next quarter's target and not losing account. We're fit in another word, we're we're afraid. We're not on we're playing defense. We need to be on offense. When we focus our life solely on making a buck, it shows a poverty of ambition. Here is David Ogilby's take on the subject. One of the my favorite things that David Ogilby said tells an entire story here in 10 words. Raise your sights. Blaze new trails. Compete with the immortals. How great we become depends on the size of our dreams. Let's dream humongous dreams, put on our overalls, and go out there and build them. And remember, the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do. Nice little Steve Jobs reference that they added in there. Habit number 3, curiosity. An endless trail of ideas floats in the ether. You will only see them if you're curious. What do most of us do in this dazzling Aladdin's cave? It's like this is beautiful. What they're referencing there is it really made me think of Dee Hock, the founder of, Visa. He had this great line when he was much older man. He said that, life is a magnificent, mysterious odyssey to be experienced. Right? So that's very, to me, it relates to what the team at Ogilvy, the team at Ogilvy is saying here. Like, what are we're in this amazing wonderful world, this dazzling Aladdin's cave, and what do most of us do? We close our eyes. He who and this is what they're they're gonna quote Einstein here. He who no longer pauses to wonder and stand rapt in awe is good as dead. His eyes are closed. So how do we
