Matt Breitfelder – Optimizing Investment Performance through Human Capital (Capital Allocators, EP.323)

27:10They often plateau because the confidence and ambition that got them there is exactly what holds them back from progressing any further. And Marshall Goldsmith has contributed a lot to this space. In his book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, I think captures this really well, which is the curse of successful people of congratulations, you made it. But if you want to keep deepening your craft, you actually have to push into harder territory and do harder personal work. Feedback is a breakfast of champions. Ask for more feedback and use more tools and put yourself in uncomfortable situations to get better and better and better.

27:48And I think sports psychology teaches us a lot about that peak performance issue of what are the habits that you need to keep pushing yourself and getting better at your craft. What did you learn from the world of sports psychology that you've transferred over? Over the years since I graduated HBS, one of my bucket list ideas was to co-author a case. And since I graduated, I've co-authored probably 20 cases. And it's just been a passion project. as a hobby more than anything else to just keep my thinking fresh. And I recently worked with a professor named Ranjie Gulati on a case on Pete Carroll.

28:30And I have a lot of respect for Pete. And he's been a real pioneer. He's been one of the most successful coaches in history. He's one of the few that's won a national championship in football and a Super Bowl. But he also had a really interesting journey and reflected a lot on his failures, was famously fired by the Patriots and replaced by Bill Belichick. And coming out of that, he really clarified his philosophy. He was inspired by John Wooden, who I think was one of the pioneers in this space. Pete also learned a lot from two of the iconic sports psychologists, Tim Galway, who wrote The Inner Game of Tennis, and Michael Murphy, who wrote The Kingdom of Golf.

29:08And if you look at those books, those are about clarifying your mindset, having a system, being really disciplined around that system, and understanding that the mental game and the inner game, as Tim describes so well in his work is just as important as the physical side. I think Pete has set up a system with the Seahawks that is all about competing at the highest levels for a long period of time. So if anything, my job and the task of HR is how do I help a company outperform over a long period of time? That's what Pete's doing in sports. His book literally is called win forever because the idea is you don't necessarily get to win the championship every single year.

29:50But if you implement the right system, you can compete at the highest levels over and over and over again. One of the most interesting things about his system is he's very focused on caring and competition as the two most important ingredients of his system. So if you're always competing with yourself to be better and better and better, then competing against other people kind of takes care of itself. And as the coach, if you care about your players, you create psychological safety for them and you help them do the inner game work to clarify their mind, then you're unlocking their full potential.

30:29So it's actually like a very human path into what you achieve on the field. And you either score the touchdown or you don't. And if you don't, that's not good. But I think Pete's idea is if that person feels psychologically safe, then they accept the coaching. They know exactly what they need to get done. And if they know I have their back and if they're doing the work on self-talk and all of these other techniques to clear your mind and get yourself into peak performance mode, then I don't want to leave anything on the table. And so I'm so inspired by that space and there's other coaches that have other techniques.

31:06But if in the corporate world, we have an 80 % failure rate of people rating themselves a five, why wouldn't I be in that space to try to equip every single person who works in our company with the tools that work for them? And the customization and personalization is really important because we're all unique humans. We all have different drivers and strengths. You have to honor that and respect that and focus on that if you really want to help that human unlock their full potential and for them to deliver what you need them to deliver in your company. Asset management has long had the mantra that money managers may not be good people managers.

31:46How did you find your way from doing this in a real business where leadership and management tends to be more valued than we've seen historically in asset management? After PwC, I spent five years at MasterCard for their CEO transition when Ajay Banga took over. And that was a big transformation in an industry that was more tech and financial services. And working with Ajay to help optimize that culture and drive more innovation, which he was spectacularly successful at. And he now just took over the World Bank, where I'm sure he'll do great things as well. It was a really good bridge into asset management.

32:22To your point, everything we're talking about is in relatively recently introduced in asset management. I found it really interesting that asset management was so late in considering these tools. And that's frustrating in a way because it's so surprising for such smart people in this industry to not be thinking about this. I think the fact that HBS and Wharton and Stanford and all the top business schools have also been late to it didn't help because most of the leaders of these firms were educated in the same era. So they just weren't exposed to it. And, you know, that's surprising and interesting, but it's also an unbelievable opportunity.

33:00And I put my energy around, okay, if I'm the first person to introduce some of these ideas, I'm happy to do that. What a privilege because these tools will knock their socks off because they work, not because I'm special or I'm doing anything particularly special. I'm just playing the role of coach and trying to understand what the company really needs, what drives it, and then say, okay, which tools might work for this particular strategy or this particular culture or this particular situation? And I've certainly banded together with the progressive, innovative HR leaders and coaches all across asset management since the day I started in this industry, because I just want to spend time with the people that are trying to to do the same type of work and we should help each other introduce these tools because they're really good for the industry and they're only going to make these companies more and more successful.

33:54So when you got to BlackRock, how did you get started bringing these tools into what was already a large organization? The great thing about BlackRock is it's a founder-led company. They had had a winning formula. I think part of BlackRock's story is about M &A. So I think like most startups, they were skeptical about HR and skeptical about what we're talking about. And that skepticism is actually really helpful in a way, because there's a really high bar to say, okay, BlackRock's been really successful. Why do they need to do any of this? Because it's basically working. I think the team at BlackRock became more and more open because as they were buying these big companies and integrating them, I think it became clear that the challenges were new and different and scaling required other tools.

34:42And I think it created more openness. The skepticism, I think, is one of their superpowers. So I embraced that skepticism and said, OK, great. You know, let's look at these spots where, you know, you need help and it's not working and we need to optimize. And let's just try some tools and they'll either work or they don't work. But if they work, we'll use them more. And if they don't work, we'll try something else. This industry has such smart people who are open minded, but they're also really skeptical. So it's a high bar. And like anyone, they have to use these tools, work with them, try them and see for themselves that they work.

35:14And then you create a pull and then they're your greatest advocates. So I think if anything, what I really learned there was this was all about co-creation. We didn't build anything alone. We had an incredible HR team. We attracted incredible HR talent who all wanted to be part of that because they could feel that we were doing something pioneering and different. But every single project we did was co-sponsored by the deep HR expert and a business leader who got it, who was interested in it, who was open-minded about it, who cared about it, who wanted to do something in that space and was willing to experiment with us.

35:50So everything was co-created, which also kept us honest because these things had to be really commercial and really focused and really tailored. So I was really good at the toolbox and always looking for new tools and testing new tools. But the business leaders cared about the company and wanted to make it better. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about SRS Aquium. Want to make sure your M &A processes aren't stuck in the past? Partner with a company that's been defining the future of dealmaking for nearly two decades instead. When it comes to M &A innovation, SRS Aquium has reshaped the way that deals get done, streamlining processes for maximum efficiency and minimum headaches.

36:38Professional shareholder representation? Online M &A payments? Digital stockholder solicitation? SRS Aquium pioneered each and continues to set the bar for game-changing innovation. So leave the days of disjointed deal management behind and define your future with SRS Aquium, the smartest way to run a deal. Learn more at srsaquium.com. That's S-R-S-A-C-Q-U-I-O-M.com. And now, back to the show. I'd love to have you walk through an example of a team, a business unit that you worked with that wasn't working that you saw through to some type of measurable impact? Because ultimately, this business is about performance.

37:29Two tools that work for every company on earth are an annual employee engagement survey and 360 feedback. And it sounds obvious. The employee survey is when your people tell you what they think is working and what's not working. And whether you agree with what they're saying or not, you should show them the respect to listen to that information and sit with it and really understand where they're coming from so you can be deliberate about the changes you want to make. And then 360 feedback is what are your peers and colleagues who work most closely with you? What are they seeing that works and doesn't work?

38:02And I'm a big believer in let's keep this really simple. How about pre and post 360 and how about pre and post employee survey? Great thing about both things is they flag the perceptions of people, which may not be a reality you agree with, but those are perceptions. That's really important and helpful information. So if an individual needs to change and they get a 360, come out of that 360. What are people validating that you should double down on? And what are people asking you to change? Don't ever focus on more than three things maximum, because you need to be able to walk around thinking about it all day long and staying really open.

38:39Do the work of change. Ask people for suggestions. And then six months, 12 months later, take another 360. and you either improve the perception or you didn't really helpful information on an employee survey. Very similarly, people will tell you, especially if they trust you and you keep the results confidential, they'll tell you exactly what they're thinking. And you can see on an employee survey, which teams appear to be struggling and which ones don't. And you can hone in where you see the team that's struggling. Why is that team struggling? What is going on in that team where they're not optimizing what they're capable of.

39:15And you go in and you reset it. You get the team to recommit to a new direction. And then six to 12 months later, you do the survey again and they tell you how it's going. Keep yourself really honest about it. You're normalizing that we're all a work in progress and we're actually trying to be the best in the world at what we're doing. And that's really hard. And you're saying, hey, it's okay to be stuck. that happens to all of us. Normalize it. I think another important part of this is clarity. When people are struggling, they can get stuck in that emotion. And I think our job as coaches is to say, okay, okay, let's honor that emotion.

39:50Let's listen to that emotion. But what's underneath that? Where's that coming from? What are you actually worried about? Ron Heifetz, who wrote Adaptive Leadership, has this wonderful phrase of like, you need to get on the balcony. So if you get on the balcony of what's happening, you're in the play. When you're in the play, it's kind of hard to see The task of anyone in a struggling team is how do I get on the balcony and try to look at this objectively from an arm's length perspective, clarify it, and then be really clear about are people willing to do the work and sign up for what we all agree needs to happen or not.

40:18And then even if there's people on the team where it's not going to work out or that person is struggling and they're just not a fit for a team or a fit for the company, if you do that work in the right way, they're the first people to understand that and to accept it and to be treated with care and respect and clarity that they don't want to go in that from to or that doesn't really work for them. They can't do their best work in that. What I'm trying to do as a coach is create a real sense of clarity, of caring that I care about these people. I want them to succeed. My intention is to help them do the best work of their lives and to figure out how do they do that here?

40:56How do they do that on that team in this company? How do you translate the improvements in how the team is functioning and the perceptions of how they feel about the team to performance in BlackRock's case in the public markets, where it's not clear that the stocks and bonds are talking to the team and how they're functioning? anything we're talking about in coaching for p carroll you're either winning the games or you're not winning the games and any business has a scorecard of that in investing we have a very clear scorecard and just like in sports i think what you're trying to do is to optimize the controllable factors and try to reduce your stress on the non-controllable factors surprise surprise a team that's firing on all cylinders and it's really working and has really good constructive conflict.

41:44In my experience, you just saw better invest in performance over and over again. I'm a big fan of Jim Collins' Good to Great. The goal for any company is outperformance over a long period of time. That book is so interesting because even though it's a bit, you know, it's 20 years ago or something, the concept is really durable because the goal of any company is to outperform over a long period of time. And Reversion to the Mean is an almost unstoppable force. And it happens to every company, it happens to every team, and it happens to every human. So if we know that happens, then we're fighting against that every single day.

42:23And when you look at good to great in that study, and there's been a number of other studies, and they basically show the same thing, is you want to create a flywheel that's constantly challenging and constantly reinventing. And when Collins looked at the behaviors underneath that, he's basically showing that the behaviors they saw in the CEOs and the leaders who outperformed over decades, the thing he isolated was fierce resolve and humility together. I think you just see in the highest performing people where they're more open than their peers because they're looking for where the edge is going to come from.

42:56And I think having worked in asset management for 10 plus years now, I think the best investors are obsessed with investing, but they're also obsessed with team construction and the tools of optimizing a team. What was the impetus for you of moving from BlackRock to Apollo? I'd been at BlackRock for eight years. We'd built something really special. I had a great run there. I think I was just ready for my next challenge. And I had learned this work at PwC. I'd helped build it with Ajay at MasterCard. I'd helped build it at BlackRock. I wanted to do it again. And I was really attracted to Apollo and the alternative space.

43:34What an extraordinarily smart group of people. And I felt like the alternatives industry's been late to this. So asset management was late, and I think Alts was also late as a group of companies. And I felt like, okay, after eight years at BlackRock, I think I've learned how to do this. This is a different business model, but it's in the same kind of family. You're applying human capital tools in service of great investment performance and great commercial performance. And I found my colleagues at Apollo really open-minded, much more humble than I would have expected in alternatives. Just like at BlackRock, need to see the data, need to see it actually work.

44:13The theory is kind of interesting. The impact is what we're looking for. I was just exhilarated by the opportunity to work with the folks at Apollo and take a run at this. How did you think about the different reputations of the firms coming into BlackRock, quite a different reputation than Apollo historically? Yeah, I mean, I think both had reputations for being challenging. And I think Larry had always been tough on HR and skeptical about all of this work. I think Apollo also specialized in complex investing and oftentimes investing in struggling companies that needed to be restored to health.

44:53So I just saw that as an interesting challenge and to say, wow, what an incredible track record. How do you achieve such great results? I want to help them figure out how do you keep evolving? What's missing in the culture? What does the next generation want? How is the industry changing? How's our business model changing? And I found an incredible group of people who are just so smart, so collaborative, so used to solving problems and debating things together and co-creating. So the co-creation point was really natural coming to Apollo and really high bar that you got to know what you're talking about.

45:29You got to be able to have real conviction. One of our values at Apollo is challenge convention. You know, our coffee bar is called the Contrarian Cafe. We love people with different ideas. We love people who are challenging our thinking. So when I figured that out about the culture, I said, oh, this is great because I'm challenging the thinking. and that's respected as long as you do the work, as long as you're prepared, as long as you approach those conversations in the right way, as long as you keep an open mind that we're gonna figure out the answer together as almost like a deal team mindset of how we crack these hard investment problems.

46:04The talent and culture problems can be approached in exactly the same way. And I think that's worked really well. What have you found since you've been here? Look, it's been an amazing run. I think merging with Athene and creating a whole new approach to the industry, bringing together alternatives, asset management and retirement services with Mark Rowan, our CEO's vision for the industry and for Apollo has been amazing because his vision for the future and how much we could grow in private credit and capital solutions and all of these new areas that are the Venn diagram between what Apollo is great at.

46:42Mark has a very clear sense of where he sees the puck going in the industry and where he wants Apollo to focus. And my job is to use all these tools to say, okay, great, how do we get the right people focused on that? And then how do we optimize at that company level, team level and individual level that we've got people fired on all cylinders that we're co-creating the culture that the next generation will thrive in. And that's humbling, just like the Marshall Goldsmith of what got you here won't get you there. How do we need to change and how do we need to evolve? And what's missing from the culture that would make it stronger and better.

47:16And if our goal is we wanna be the best place to work in this space, we wanna be the best in the world at what we do, we wanna be the best place to be a partner in financial services. The other thing is, when I joined, we had roughly 1 ,000 employees at Apollo, and today we have over 2 ,500. We've attracted incredible people with new ideas, and that's been great for the culture, especially in these new businesses where we needed more expertise. that's really exciting because you can harness all of that new energy and those new ideas into the co-creation process. We started talking about this as a five-person team and now you're talking about bringing in 1 ,500 employees over a couple of years.

47:57How do you go about making sure that when all these new people come in, they're inculcated into this culture that you're trying to help create? I'm obsessed with how to figure that out. Mark loves the Peter Drucker quote of culture, each strategy for breakfast. So as CEO, he's incredibly focused on your exact question. We're hiring all these new areas of expertise as we grow. How do we make sure we're not diluting what's special about the place and the magic of our model and our winning formula? We want it to still feel like a small village where you have a personal touch, where you know your colleagues, where you care about your colleagues, where it feels like a small company, but where we can take on some of the hardest, biggest investment challenges in the world?

48:44And how could both things be true? And I think a lot about personal touch. I think a lot about Pete Carroll's concept of, I need to learn the learner. I need to learn what makes this person tick, which reminds me so much of what my mom taught me. And it's actually not the golden rule. It's a higher bar than that. It's the platinum rule. The golden rule is treat other people the way you want to be treated. Great way to live your life. Even better, especially as we're striving to be more and more diverse. The platinum rule is actually taking the time to understand what that person needs from you.

49:17Like, what do they need? How do they want to be treated? What drives them? What's their story? What's coming from their background and what they're contributing? And how do you tailor your style as a manager to get the best out of that person for that person to feel like, okay, I belong here. I'm seen here. I can be authentic, be myself. And we love that at Apollo. We love difference. We love contrarians. We're still a small company. We're not that big. We can actually get this right. And as we become more global, we've got offices all around the world. And how do you create that culture in each place?

49:52What's the onboarding process for the individual new employee partner? It has a number of different elements. I think part of it is helping people understand how our business works. It's a complicated business. In some ways, it's getting more complicated. The world is changing, but people need to understand our business. So, you know, it's obviously training them about that, but it's just exposing people to it. We really want people to work across the platform. And if you're working in credit, you got to understand the magic of private equity and vice versa. That's one piece. The second piece is culturally, like the little things matter.

50:31The vibe we have in the cafeteria, the vibe we have in the coffee bar, the social events that we do, the ways in which we bring the team together so people can feel the power of, wow, it's incredible to work with such smart, passionate people. So connecting people together on a human level, that's really important. And then I think the work that happens on a team is everything. If you look at employee engagement surveys, everything correlates with the manager. So what's happening in that person's day job is really important. So you're trying to balance these three things of the curiosity of the business so they can understand what we're trying to do and how we're trying to do it, feeling the power of the culture, regardless of what group you live in.

51:13And then three, this sense of, are we getting the team dynamic right? And I think you have to tend to that. And I think it takes time. When you're talking to people that are at much smaller, say boutique asset management firms. What tools do you think a leader of one of those organizations can use effectively that may not have the breadth of resources or the depth of team that you see at an Apollo or BlackRock? Obviously, in a smaller firm, you're not going to have a big HR team. You might not even have an HR team at all. But the good news is everything I'm talking about is readily available to everyone.

51:50These books that I've mentioned are easily accessible. for a firm that doesn't have an HR team, you got to use executive coaching. There's a number of amazing executive coaches out there who really understand asset management, who know our business and can help you using 360s and employee surveys. In a small firm, you might say, oh, I don't need a survey because everyone just tells me all day long. You'd be surprised what they tell you when it's not attributed. You're just going to get more information. I call myself the walking suggestion box because I need people to trust me and to tell me exactly what they're feeling and to just take in that information in an unvarnished way so that I can understand and help figure out how do we make really good choices about what we want to do next in the culture.

52:33You can absolutely do that in the smaller firms. If you have a really great culture, you are getting that information. I'd still do a survey because you're going to get something a little bit extra that will give you the insights in the same way that when people who haven't had a 360 before, it's so helpful. Even when you're in a feedback rich environment, when you sit down and intentionally fill out a 360. And when you get debriefed with a professional coach who really knows what they're doing, it just hits you differently and you get a different depth of insight. My advice to anyone is, especially for people who've been really successful, don't wing it, have a plan.

53:09Be very specific about what you're working on to get better at. If you are not walking around with a list of one to three things where you know you need to get stronger and better and you're not being vulnerable, asking people for feedback and you're not working a plan, you're leaving way too much value on the table. From the investor, the allocator perspective, if you're looking at an investment management organization and trying to understand, are they doing the things internally with their people that are more likely to generate long-term success? What types of questions would you ask? Having written a bunch of HBS cases, I guess I'd start by saying, so what do you learn from your employee survey?

53:49Like, what do you guys think you're really good at? What are your employees asking you to focus on next? And then you'll find out if they have a survey or they have a point of view or if they're balanced in their thinking. Are they seeing clearly what's working in their culture and what needs to evolve? Because that tells me a lot about the hygiene of the company and are they doing the work to make me comfortable as an investor that they understand that the goal is outperformance for decades and that we're a work in progress on that. So I'd be asking about at the three levels, the organizational level, what are you doing as an organization to achieve outperformance over a long period of time?

54:27Like what are those practices? How do you run your investment teams? And how do you make sure you're mitigating your blind spots? How do your ICs work? Take me into that so I can understand your practices because as an investor, you're betting on those practices leading to outperformance. And then how does an individual stays sharp? How do your investors learn? What are your habits at those three levels? Because that's what you're investing in. And I think companies that are really good at this, and I've worked in some of the bigger ones. So at our scale, there's a number of these tools we can use.

54:59The smaller ones are really good at this because they take those things really seriously. An investor is betting on long-term outperformance. One of the other points I'd make is the toolbox is growing, but there's a lot of tools that can work. So I'm not that dogmatic about which tools you need in specific situations. The biggest question I'd be asking is, are you using tools or not using tools? And then which ones are you using? It tells you a lot. What's on the leading edge of the new tools that you see as you look out over a couple of years will have an impact on these organizations? I'm looking at sports psychology.

55:38I'm looking at what's happening in the valley. I'm looking at what's happening in the professional services firms because you're getting interesting information there. A friend of mine runs something called the Neuro Leadership Institute. He's doing a lot of brain research and high performance. And his name is David Rock. I really respect his work because there's a lot of science on feedback. Feedback is the breakfast of champions, but poorly delivered feedback oftentimes makes performance worse, not better, because we know how humans react. And if you're not tuning into that individual human and you're treating it like an engineering problem, you're just as likely to make performance worse, not better.

56:13So those insights are really important. And if we're scientific about it, we can actually crack it because it's pretty straightforward. I think people analytics is a really helpful piece of this. So inside of companies, we're getting better and better at using our own data to understand what really drives performance. And Google's been a pioneer of this. Prasad Seti at Google has taught me a lot about this. So they ran studies where at Google, there's a project called Project Oxygen, where their hypothesis was maybe managers are so bad, we should just eliminate the role. So let's test what are the characteristics of a great manager and does it even matter?

56:53And they found what I think we'd expect them to find, which is a great coder reporting to a good manager. If you move them to a bad manager, their performance collapses. So this actually really matters. And the number one thing in their study was managers who know how to coach, who play chess, not checkers, get better results. Their other study was called Project Aristotle, which was about what are the characteristics of a high-performing team? Psychological safety must be inherent for a team to fulfill its total potentials for performance. Seems like an obvious point. But if you have debate but not psychological safety, there's a lot of wasted energy.

57:31So some of this is about energy management. And how do you redirect that energy that could be wasted because you're triggering something psychologically in someone that's not being spent helping the team optimize or helping us invest better and better and better? I'm really interested in that. How do I reallocate that energy and move it from fight or flight or whatever is happening to something much more productive? So it comes back to Mezzo's hierarchy of needs. And a lot of people in the investing world would say, that's just warm and fuzzy. What does that have to do with anything? I'm talking about hard things.

58:06You can reframe that and say, actually, what we're talking about today is about the hard stuff, not the soft stuff. Like this is actually really hard. And if you care about being great, and if you care about being one of the best of all time, and if you care about performing over and over and over again, like Pete would say, win forever. Okay. If you want to be in the win forever business, all of this stuff is on the table. All right, Matt, I want to ask you a couple of closing questions. What is your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family? I am obsessed with music. My father is an amateur jazz musician.

58:42I grew up in Chicago, so I spent my whole childhood seeing the greats. So I find music incredibly relaxing. I love improvisational music. My father's 84 years old. He plays a Monday night gig in an Irish pub in Chicago every Monday night. He is the youngest member of his band and he's a great inspiration to me. I'm not particularly skilled at playing, but I'm seriously considering attempting to improve my skill because it gives me great joy to be around music, listening to music, participating in music. So I thank my father for that gift. What's your biggest pet peeve? My biggest pet peeve is people who patronize other people.

59:22How about on the investment side, your biggest investment pet peeve? On the investment side, my biggest pet peeve is following the crowd. I'm trained well at Apollo. For contrarians, the crowd is usually not interesting. What's one mistake that you made that you'd never make again? I would say ignoring my intuition and not listening to it. Intuition challenged by other people is gold. Ignoring my intuition because I started believing other people were right, and I had to set that aside. It was just a terrible error. It's such important information. I don't ever want to ignore my intuition. Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life?

1:00:01Two people that stand out. When I was growing up, my best friend's father had a really interesting career where he tried a bunch of different things. And he landed on his calling at the age of 63 as a Jungian therapist. And he was one of the older dads. And so he had already discovered this when I was growing up. And he would give me Myers-Briggs tests and other things and say, Matt, my one gift to you is I want to help you discover what really fits you so that you get energy from it and you can skip all the mistakes that he made to find it earlier. And that was such a great gift in my teenage years to have someone teaching me that and helping me see that and helping me find that.

1:00:47and making it very clear that that was the goal. I'd say the second person is my wife, Jen. She helped me unpack what I really wanted to do in my career and in my life at the pivotal moment. And she has this very unusual gift of warmth and care. And I know that she has my back, but also holding me to a higher bar than anyone else in my life and challenging my thinking. and I'm so grateful to her for that. But that mix, I also learn a lot from her and want to role model what I see in her that she's so good at. What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you? My father's from Iowa. I think what he instilled in me, which I use to this day, is doing things properly, the Midwestern humility and sensibility, and just like show up on time.

1:01:40Be on time. Get things done. Do things the right way. It's not about you. You're in service to something. I think that's what I took away from my father. My mom's from Sweden. And so she always taught me to have a global perspective, an open-minded perspective. She was raised by an immigrant carpenter who felt that his work was like the greatest calling of his life. And he instilled in me that you should find a job that gives you so much joy, that you're thinking about it all the time, and that you live to practice that craft. And my mom found that same thing that her father had taught her as a therapist.

1:02:21And she was a therapist in the Veterans Administration working with vets on really hard issues like PTSD. And she always used to tell me, I would pay them for this job. Like, this is such a deep sense of purpose. From my mom, you know, she taught me that work should be a calling and you should have a deep sense of purpose. My father taught me much more of work is an obligation and a duty that you need to fulfill the right way. And I think both lessons were equally helpful. All right, Matt, last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? To be very clear about how you want to show up in the world and don't over-rotate on other people's opinions.

1:02:59It's important to take in the information of other people's opinions, but be driven by your own authentic formula as your North Star. Matt, thanks so much for sharing all these lessons and maximizing teams and performance and everything you've done. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at CapitalAllocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.