Sam shares business lessons from three history biographies he’s been reading: Undaunted Courage (Lewis and Clark), The Operator (SEAL Team Six and the Bin Laden raid), and Titan (John D. Rockefeller). He draws practical lessons on discipline, commander’s intent, finding your personal product-market fit, and how Rockefeller listened more than he talked.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host)
Cold Open [00:00:00]
Sam: He was vicious in business. I mean, he would basically go out and buy all these small oil refineries, and if they didn’t sell, he’d say, “Look, I’m going to write you a fair deal. If you don’t take my offer, I’m going to trust you — I’ll show you all my accounting and all my revenue so you know I’m going to crush you. So I think you should take this deal so we can get rich together. Otherwise, you’re dead.”
Introduction: Why Sam Stopped Reading Business Books [00:00:18]
Sam: All right, what’s happening. A lot of people have been asking me about what I’ve been reading lately, because I’ve read a lot of amazing books and I want to do a quick episode that explains what I’m reading and how it relates to business.
Sam: Most of these books — we’re only going to go through three or four of them — most of these books are not business-related, but there’s a lot of learnings for business people. I actually don’t read business books. I haven’t read a business book in like five years. They bore me.
Sam: Lately I’ve been reading a ton of adventure stuff. Things about when Americans expanded West, about people discovering North America, ship stories, pirates — I love that type of stuff. The reason I love that stuff is because it basically turns the volume down on my daily life. I like to get into adventures because it makes my day-to-day, which is mostly work and business stuff, way easier. I’m like, “Damn, I just read the story about Shackleton and how he got stranded on Antarctica for two years — this business stuff is easy.”
Sam: So here are three books I’ve read lately that have had huge impacts on my day-to-day in business. I’m going to explain how and why they did that.
Book 1: Undaunted Courage — Lewis and Clark [00:01:30]
Sam: The first one is called Undaunted Courage. It’s the story of Lewis and Clark. If you’re an American, you’ve heard that term — Lewis and Clark — and you know they were two guys sent to discover the West. This book dives deep on it.
Sam: In around 1804, a guy named Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were tasked by Thomas Jefferson to start in St. Louis and discover the western part of the country. Jefferson had just bought a huge portion of what is now the western United States from Napoleon. Of course, Native Americans knew all about it, but no American had been too far west of the Mississippi.
Sam: What’s amazing is that Meriwether Lewis was only 31 years old. He took 30 folks — him and William Clark — and they went to California and back. No one had ever done that. Imagine going off on a two-year hiking trip to a place you’ve never been, not knowing what you’re going to find, and hoping you come back. I found that to be such a good book.
Lesson 1: Punishment Is Necessary [00:02:45]
Sam: The first big thing I learned is that punishment is necessary. In today’s tech culture, I used to joke about HubSpot — the company that bought mine — I was like, “You guys are too nice, way too friendly.” And I think that’s a common theme with most tech companies. They’re way too nice, and I can’t stand that. I think I fall victim to it too.
Sam: When I read this book, there’s a bunch of different stories. Imagine just a 31-year-old Lewis with only 30 guys — it’s easy to get chummy with them. But he was really, really strict.
Sam: There’s a story about how they had to set up a fort during the winter. They set it up along with some Native Americans they’d gotten to know. They built this fort with a wall. One of Lewis’s men, at nighttime, hopped over the fence after hanging out with the Indians. An Indian saw him, also hopped the fence, and the guards said, “Hey man, you can’t be here — this is our space.” The next morning, Lewis heard about it, and they whipped their guy 500 times. It’s called lashing — they basically tied him to a tree and whipped him 500 times.
Sam: That sounds like an extreme punishment, and it is. But Lewis’s point was: A, you broke the rule — we said you can’t climb this fence. And B, now the Indians know they’re allowed to do that too. So he had really strict rules. His point was that discipline breeds excellence. You have to have strict rules and you have to punish people in front of others when they’ve done something wrong, so everyone knows where the line is.
Sam: There’s also this TV show I just started watching called The Bear. It’s about this guy who has a diner in Chicago — kind of a crappy diner — and he’s trying to step it up. He sends his cousin to work at a fancy restaurant known for its strict discipline. The cousin gets there and says, “Dude, I’m not following all these rules.” They have rules like: you can’t talk to co-workers in front of the guests, you have to pay attention only to the guests, and your first week you spend three hours polishing forks because they can’t have any watermarks on them.
Sam: Eventually at the end of the week he’s like, “Man, I love this. I crave this discipline, because it lets me know where the rules are, what the boundaries are. It gives me a straightforward path.” It creates a culture of discipline and excellence.
Sam: Big takeaway from this book: you have to have punishment in order to create discipline. In our culture right now — especially in tech — we are way too forgiving about certain things. Firing people and things like that, I actually think it’s necessary.
Lesson 2: Finding Your Personal Product-Market Fit [00:05:30]
Sam: The second thing is finding your personal product-market fit. Lewis was an outdoorsman his whole life, and then he eventually had something like an office job — he worked with Thomas Jefferson, just inside the house all day, helping him create laws and be diplomatic.
Sam: He has this great line in the book. The author says: on his 31st birthday, Lewis wrote in a famous passage — “The day I completed my 31st year, I reflected that I had yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race. I viewed with regret the hours that I have spent in idleness, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me, had they been judiciously expended.”
Sam: Meaning: he’s like, “I’ve wasted my time. I have to act. This is my mission.” And I really appreciate that — that he said, “Look, I’ve been a total waste up until now. Now I’m going to get after it.” Finding your personal product-market fit. We talk about product-market fit for your company. I think you have to find your personal product-market fit too. I found that to be incredibly inspiring.
Lesson 3: Know What Motivates Each Person [00:07:00]
Sam: The last thing from this book: Lewis understood that the people you’re leading each have individual traits, and you have to figure out those traits and use them to motivate people.
Sam: When I was first starting in business, I did a really bad job of understanding that every person is unique. I used to think I could just tell people what to do. That’s not the case.
Sam: In this book there’s a great line: “Lewis had a sense, a feel, for how his family was doing. He knew exactly when to take a break, when to issue a gill, when to push for more, when to encourage, when to inspire, when to tell a joke, when to be tough. He knew how to keep a distance between himself and the men, and just how big it should be.”
Sam: He did a really good job of figuring out what motivated each person. That has taught me that I should probably do the same. Before, everyone was kind of just human capital to me. Instead, in order to be a great leader — particularly like Lewis — you have to figure out what motivates people, create rewards and punishments that fit each person, and hopefully make your whole crew better.
Book 2: The Operator — SEAL Team Six and Commander’s Intent [00:08:30]
Sam: The second book is called The Operator, by Robert O’Neill. It’s about when SEAL Team Six was deployed to go and kill Bin Laden. I love reading army and military books.
Sam: There’s this great line. Basically, Robert O’Neill and SEAL Team Six were on a helicopter on their way to Bin Laden’s compound. He said: “Once we got on this mission, we knew we weren’t going to see our kids again or kiss our wives. We’ll never eat another steak or smoke another cigar.”
Sam: He’s on this helicopter knowing — or thinking — he’s never going to come back. He thinks it’s a suicide mission. And I found that so encouraging, because sometimes I’m afraid to tweet something, or I’m afraid to start a business, or I’m afraid to make a phone call. These guys are literally going on what they think is a suicide mission, dropping into Bin Laden’s compound. And I’m like, “If these guys can do this, I can do this other stuff — that’s no big deal.” I find a lot of inspiration from little stories like that.
Sam: There’s also this other story in the book. They figured out where they thought Bin Laden was — a compound, like an eight-room mansion surrounded by a big fence. So they built a model of this house and spent weeks running through it. They’d say, “All right, at this point you’re going to run this many steps, then the room is going to open. You’re likely going to find these people in the room. Then you’re going to do this.” They planned like crazy.
Sam: Here’s the thing: when they landed the helicopter into the compound, it crashed. From the second the mission started, the whole plan got thrown out the door. Everything got screwed up.
Sam: But there’s this thing called commander’s intent. Commander’s intent is when the desired outcome is clear — you verbalize it, you write it down. The reason you plan, even though you know the plan is going to go sideways, is: A, when something does go sideways, you have something to fall back on. And B, it gives your men — or your employees — confidence. Like, “Look, we’ve swapped the details, but we know what the commander’s intent is.”
Sam: For me, with my first business, I said by the age of 30 I want to have this much money. That’s my commander’s intent. The reason I wanted that much money was financial freedom — not to stress out. Once I had my commander’s intent, I created a plan and the rules I was going to follow to get there.
Sam: As expected, a lot of things changed. I said I want this much revenue by year two, this much by year five. I missed revenue sometimes, exceeded it other times. I had to fire people. I changed my values. Things happened along the way. But because I had my commander’s intent, I said no to everything that didn’t get me to my desired outcome. I had something to fall back on when making new decisions. I’d ask: is this going to get me closer to that particular goal? If yes, do it. If no, don’t.
Sam: So from The Operator, I learned about commander’s intent and planning.
Book 3: Titan — John D. Rockefeller [00:12:30]
Sam: The last book — I lied when I said I don’t read business books. This one’s kind of businessy. It’s called Titan, and it’s the biography of John D. Rockefeller.
Sam: Rockefeller was a businessman in the late 1800s all the way to around 1930. He created Standard Oil. It’s hard to compare to what it is nowadays because it was so big. Standard Oil was eventually broken up — in the 1930s, Teddy Roosevelt made monopolies illegal, and they did it because of Standard Oil. The offshoots of Standard Oil after the breakup were, I believe, BP, Exxon, Conoco, Mobil — all those companies came from Standard Oil. It was as if Amazon, Facebook, and Google were one company and accounted for a huge percentage of the economy.
Sam: You think of Rockefeller as this really vicious person, and he was kind of vicious, but he was very interesting in that he broke a lot of stereotypes in my head.
Lesson 4: One Percent of a Hundred People [00:13:45]
Sam: One great line from that book: “I would rather earn one percent off a hundred people’s efforts than a hundred percent of my own efforts.”
Sam: Right now on Twitter and in my world, we’re seeing lots of things about solo businesses. A lot of people take pride in solo businesses, and I think many times they’re great. But I have one big issue with them: if you’re a solo business, you’re the only one doing all the work. That line from Rockefeller — one percent of other people’s work versus a hundred percent of his own — kind of changed my thinking. It’s significantly better, even if someone isn’t as good as you, to have a handful of people doing a lot of the work versus only you doing the work.
Lesson 5: The Ability to Deal With People [00:14:30]
Sam: He has this other line: “The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar and coffee, and I pay more for that ability than any other under the sun.”
Sam: I thought that was interesting because I’m not the best manager. But I can hire good managers. That kind of removed the blocker in my head of: “Well, hiring people is good, but I’m not good at managing them.” Cool — I can hire people to manage them. That was really useful for me.
Lesson 6: Gain a Skill First [00:15:10]
Sam: He also has this great learning about gaining a skill. I’m a huge fan of telling people: before you start a company or go try to do your own thing, you need to learn a skill. In my case it was copywriting — I’m a big fan of copywriting.
Sam: Rockefeller has this great line about his time as an accountant. From ages 16 to around 19 or 20, he was an accountant for a small firm. That’s where he learned about operations — where does money come from, how should it be accounted for, what do great operations look like. He said: “Oh, how blessed the young men are who have struggled for a foundation in the beginning of life! I’ll never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years I spent as an apprentice.”
Sam: That’s where he learned the ability to overcome, to adapt, to gain a skill. That kind of changed my life.
Sam: There’s also this other great book called Mastery by Robert Greene. The whole book is about how you should develop a skill, because in learning that skill it teaches you how to master something, and it also opens doors for you. You can use that skill in other unrelated fields, and that’s how you become incredibly successful.
Sam: I’m a big fan of learning a skill, and Rockefeller is one of the guys who taught me the importance of that. I used to think being a generalist was good. Not anymore. And it’s because of Titan.
Lesson 7: You Can Be Kind and Vicious in Business [00:16:45]
Sam: I said previously that he was a nice guy — but he was also vicious in business. He would go out and buy all these small oil refineries, and if they didn’t sell, he’d say: “Look, I’m going to write you a fair deal. We can get rich together. Otherwise, you’re dead.” A lot of them took him up on that and did get rich. Some didn’t. So he was pretty vicious — but pretty much nice along the way.
Sam: There’s this famous story: once his company got big, Rockefeller had a piece of exercise equipment and was rolling it into the office. An accountant who hadn’t recognized him said, “Hey, you’ve got to get that out of here — you can’t have that here.” Rockefeller just looked at him and said, “Oh, all right, I’m sorry,” and politely took the equipment out of that room and moved it to another room. He didn’t snap back with, “Do you know who I am?”
Sam: I thought that was a really interesting, cool way of handling it. It shows that you can be a polite guy, you can be kind, and be vicious in business — they’re not opposites.
Lesson 8: Listen More Than You Talk [00:17:45]
Sam: Another thing: Rockefeller was famous for lying down during meetings and closing his eyes, because he said it was just easier for him to listen. They used to talk about him behind his back — “Man, this guy Rockefeller, it feels like he’s sleeping. He doesn’t even pay attention to what we’re saying.” And he would say, “No, I’m listening. I choose to let everyone talk. I want to sit back and say nothing. I’m going to sit in silence, and at the end of the meeting I’ll say thank you everyone.”
Sam: He would just sit and listen, barely talk. Someone asked him why, and he recited this poem he would say constantly:
Sam: “A wise old owl lived in an oak. The more he saw, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard. Why aren’t we all like that old bird?”
Sam: He would sit and listen, and then when he had to make a decision, he had all the information he needed. I used to think that when you’re a big successful businessman, you’ve got to be the one doing all the talking. No — it’s the opposite. You’ve got to be doing all the listening.
Lesson 9: Compliment Before You Correct [00:18:50]
Sam: Finally, Rockefeller was very good at complimenting people. Whenever he saw someone making a mistake, he was famous for complimenting them first.
Sam: For example, there was this accountant — and Rockefeller was a former accountant himself — who had made a mistake. Rockefeller said: “These books are very well kept. Very well indeed. However, I noticed one little small mistake right here.” It was actually a pretty big error. But he was really good at catching the mistake, complimenting the person first, and then getting them to correct it.
Sam: He knew that the way you motivate people is you make them respect you a little bit. You can’t insult them in front of a bunch of people. He did a really good job of handling people — as opposed to being like that guy on TV who’s like, “You made this mistake, you’re fired,” in front of everyone to make an ordeal out of it.
Wrap-Up [00:19:45]
Sam: So those are the three books: Titan, The Operator, and Undaunted Courage. Go check them out. I’m a big fan of all three.