Great Quotes, Vol. 21: The Primary Pull is the Vision

0:01Serial Killers, Strange Disappearances, Unexplained Mysteries, Terrible Disasters I'm Nate Hale, and in my show The Conspirators, I'm here to tell you all the stories from history your teacher never told you about. Hear the real story behind the Bermuda Triangle, or about the serial killer operating in Nazi-occupied Paris, or what dark secret lurked within the walls of a Scottish castle. Listen to The Conspirators on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Recurring series are a staple of Rule Breaker investing inspired by David Letterman's top 10 lists and Saturday Night Live's weekend update.

0:41One of our originals is Great Quotes, where sometimes we theme it. We've had a Great Quotes with my favorite Shakespeare quotes, a Great Quotes with my favorite Buffett quotes, and sometimes it's a grab bag, a motley mix. And this time, well, this time we're theming it. Great Quotes volume 21 is for entrepreneurs. We'll be talking about investing and about life too, but this edition is especially for the risk takers, the dreamers, the visionaries, the people who dream it, build it. Let's get smarter, happier and richer for a while with one of our OG series only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

1:19It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner.

1:27Welcome back to Rule Breaker. Investing, those who know me well will detect my voice is not quite back to 100%. Last week, it was 82%. I'm going to say I'm about a 94 % right now. It may run down a little bit over this shorter episode, but I'm looking forward to having my voice 100 % back. You know, doing lots of interviews around my book launch, and then speaking in person, and then meeting with Motley Fool members, and then going away traveling abroad. All of these things have conspired to have me speaking, as I said last week, a little bit more like Deborah Winger than I usually do. This episode is a great quotes episode.

2:04I'm excited for this series to continue. It's volume 21. I want to mention RuleBreakerInvesting.com is now a wonderful place, a resource for this podcast and its listeners. if you want to go back and hear any of my other great quotes volumes, you don't have to search back through Spotify or Apple anymore. You can go to rulebreakerinvesting.com, go to the podcast tab, and you will see alphabetically laid out there for you, chronologically laid out as well, every one of my past 20 great quotes series. I'm not saying you should listen to any of them, but if you do want to find one or any one of a dozen or so other episodic series that we've recurred here over the years on Rule Breaker Investing.

2:48They're all now conveniently organized and linked at RuleBreakerInvesting.com. As we get ready for this week's five great quotes, I want to say this particular episode in the series, volume 21, is less about sort of the one-liner great quotes that I usually like to rock. I also fill my Rule Breaker Investing book with some of my favorite one-liner great quotes. This one's really more about sharing a short passage that will illuminate, especially for entrepreneurs, how to do business well, how to do business better. Some guideposts to have in mind. Now, I have said for entrepreneurs, but really this applies to business, to any working professional, for profit or not for profit in many cases.

3:34Yes, I especially aim this toward those who are starting businesses, who are founders, who are dreaming and building. But a lot of our thinking and quotes this week are for really you and me, for any of us who are working professionals. And also, before we get started, since we're at the start of a new month, I thought it would be fun just to lay out where we're headed in the weeks ahead. So next week on Rule Breaker Investing, we're going to do our second in the 10 years later series. So we'll be reviewing a five stock sampler that I picked 10 years ago next week. It was entitled Five Lesser Known Rule Breakers.

4:11We'll see how those lesser known rule breakers have done, which ones won, which ones lost. This is a fun news series. We just started with the first of our 35 stock samplers about 10 weeks ago, and the next one comes next week. And then every year on the third week of November, I do my Gratitude podcast. So Gratitude 2025, just before Thanksgiving week here in the U.S. And then, of course, we close with a mailbag at the end of this November. And I'm going to hype it up right now. We are going to have my annual Games, Games, Games podcast coming out the first week of December. So there for you, talking about my favorite tabletop board games, card games, word games, most of which would have come out in the last year or so, games that I want to draw your attention to, either because, A, you're an avid gamer, and if you are, God bless you, or B, you know some and want to have some good gift ideas around the tree this December.

5:10So we intentionally do our Games, Games, Games episodic series the first week of every December. 2025 will be no exception. I look forward to that as well. All right, on to great quote number one this week. As I mentioned at the top, this won't be a single line. This will be a few sentences. This is a short passage from Warren Bennis' wonderful book On Becoming a Leader. and he's quoting entrepreneur Larry Wilson. Now, I'm not familiar with Larry and this book was written some years ago now, but is listed as a founder of Innovative Learning Centers. Bennis is quoting him. So I'm quoting Bennis, quoting Larry Wilson.

5:48Here's great quote number one. For most entrepreneurs, certainly for me, the primary pull is the vision. You are simply passionately compelled to make it come about. I think that a compelling vision combined with the unique ability to manage risk is the magic behind successful entrepreneurs. It's as if you already handled the risk ahead of time in your mind, so you can go where angels fear to tread because you've already skipped ahead to the gain, end quote. So for entrepreneurs, I know you can relate. The primary pull is the vision. Wilson says you are simply passionately compelled to make it come about.

6:32You know, just my own little entrepreneurial story. I remember the first time I saw the words The Motley Fool in print in the Wall Street Journal. That was a magical moment where all of a sudden Tom and Dave and our motley band of early fools realized, wow, this is actually going to become a thing, a company. Look, our names in the Wall Street Journal. And, you know, not just any name. It's not like we were onlineinvesting.com or some other more generic name. It was the Motley Fool. It was specifically that we could take the position of a court jester and dispense advice as court jesters did using humor, whispering in the ear of the kings and queens, our members, you, our listeners, whispering in your ears our foolish advice with our floppy belled caps.

7:23What an amazing moment for me to think that something that started as a print newsletter for our parents, friends. I was the one who picked the name out of the Penguin Book of Quotations one night that that would actually manifest as a vision turned reality. That pull, I will always remember. And it isn't, again, only true of entrepreneurs. Roy Spence, another great entrepreneur who's been on this podcast before, said, you know, it's the greatest joy in life, putting something there that wasn't there before. And I can't quite imitate Roy's Texas twang as he says it. He says it better than I did right there with my 90 % something voice.

8:02But that feeling of putting something there, whether it's a building, if you're an architect or a child, if you're a parent, putting something there that wasn't there before. Making your vision manifest is what quote number one is all about. You know, I was looking back at my Rule Breaker Investing book and through the magic of computers today, you can count the number of times words show up in your manuscript. I wrote the word vision in Rule Breaker Investing 42 times. The word vision appears 42 times in Rule Breaker Investing. I mean, it's a stock market book, but it celebrates locating the visionaries and buying shares in their companies.

8:42And it also asks you, and this is important to point out as well, with principle number one of the Rule Breaker portfolio, I'm asking you to make your portfolio reflect your best vision for our future. So it's not enough to be a rule breaker investor to just seek out visionaries as CEOs and founders of the stocks that you want to buy. I'm actually asking you what your vision is. And I think it should be manifest in your own portfolio. And as Larry Wilson says in his quote, the more you're pulled by a vision, And I would even say the more passionately that you are pulled by your vision, the more likely you are to succeed at actually making it happen in investing, in business, my main context this week, and in life.

9:32I have a friend of mine who sometimes when we're talking about something in the future, in the near future for me, it might be something I'm not fully comfortable with or I've got some worries or anxieties about. He says, David, what's the best you can imagine here for yourself in this situation? And I realize that's such a wise question. Because when you envision what the best you can imagine for yourself in any given context is, you're much more likely to actually achieve it. If you can say it and think about it and dream it, you're much more likely to arrive at the completion of your dream than if you're not dreaming, if you're not actually stating or thinking ahead of time, what's the best you could imagine for yourself in this situation.

10:15And as I flew in on a plane tonight, flying back from Montreal just before doing a later recording of this podcast this week, just looking out the window of the plane, I was reminded, wow, we are part of a tiny percentage of historical humans that could ever get to fly on a plane. Of course, these days, we just sort of take it for granted, but we really shouldn't. The utter beauty of the clouds, there was a blood-red sunset, twinkling lights over the cities. As I flew into Washington, D.C. tonight, what's the best you can imagine for yourself? And what pulls you? And what vision do you want to make manifest, either as a brand new startup or in that portfolio that you're building for yourself?

10:58Again, I'll always remember the first time I saw The Motley Fool in print in the Wall Street Journal. Let's move on to quote number two. This next one is from a book called Utility, except utility in the book's title is not spelt starting with the letter U. It's spelt starting with the letters Y-O-U, utility. It's by author Jay Beyer, author and entrepreneur himself. author and marketing maven and coach and thinker about how to really win with your marketing. Rather than sell, help, Beyer says in his wonderful book, Utility. Again, this is probably written 15 or 20 years ago. One of those books that for me anyway, stands the test of time.

11:42Here's the quote. Beyer writes, you know that expression, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Well, Jay Beyer goes on, the same is true for marketing. If you sell something, you make a customer today. If you help someone, you make a customer for life. That really is summarizing the premise of utility in a lot of ways in this info-rich world. And The Motley Fool tries to do this well ourselves. but you're really especially thinking about free tools and free information that you as an entrepreneur, a business person, you might be running the division of a company, you might be the head of marketing, you might be a founder of your own startup.

12:29The more that you can provide true help for free in whatever cheap way you could manage to do so for people, the better off your startup is going to start in my experience anyway. So this one's really for the marketers first and foremost, the best companies, the best brands, the best people help. And really, when you think about the voluntary exchange of goods and services, I'm a buyer, you're a seller, then I'm a seller, you're a buyer, and we buy from each other. You're good at this. I'm good at this. I buy your stuff. You buy what I'm good at. That really, in large part, explains so much progress for the human race over thousands of years.

13:14And really, while I know a lot of marketing talk is about selling and how to sell, and we're all salesmen, et cetera, I think with Jay Byer, I want to say it's more about helping. And so I would say, for example, I hope this podcast is an example of free help that is offered to anybody who wants to take the time to listen. Occasionally, we hope that you will buy our services, and occasionally I'll mention a new product launch or something else that I'm happy or proud of, like my book this year, of course, there's selling involved in business. And yet, rather than just try to make a customer for today by selling whoever you are, selling whatever you're selling, you know, if you actually help that person, you really can make a customer for life.

14:01And again, I think the best companies, brands, and people help. I've often said my favorite products and services are those that solve an old problem in some new way. That would be helping. Or that create a new possibility, something that never existed before. That's also helping. So Utility, the book, which I recommend to all, is largely about asking yourself as a business person, what are some truly helpful things that I could offer my customers out front that's free? I would even say something as simple as a sampler at Whole Foods Market. it. Just go in and they put out a little piece of cheese or give you a taste of a drink and say, would you like to maybe buy this?

14:44That is free. That is helpful. And we appreciate the companies and brands that do that. So before I move on to quote number three, I do want to add one more part of this quote because I've been obviously speaking to the power of help and truly helping as opposed to just selling. But also there in buyer's quote is that concept of today versus for life. And of course, I know you know that you're listening to somebody who thinks we should always be playing the long game. We're living in a world where many people are playing the short game. My golly, most people are trading in and out of stocks in the market, whether we're talking about institutional professional money managers or just a lot of meme stock following crypto hype day traders.

15:31There are a lot of people who are so much in the moment with their money and they care too much about what happens today and not enough about what will happen tomorrow. And many times they don't realize if they just tried to hold, not just today and tomorrow, but well past tomorrow, they would do better and spend less time trading their way through life. So I would be remiss if I didn't point out a key part of this quote. If you sell something today, you make a customer today. And I would say most of your competitors out there in business are mostly focused on just making that customer today. But if you help someone, Jay Byer reminds us, you make a customer for life.

16:10And I think that's the time frame that puts you in a minority. And often when you're playing the game differently from others, you have much better shot at winning that game. So I will ask you rhetorically as we end quote number two, are you playing for today or are you playing for tomorrow? All right, on to great quote number three. This one is from the book Soft War, an intimate portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle. It's by journalist Matthew Simons. The book was written in 2004. This is one of those business books I read part of. I don't always finish every book. In fact, we've learned as nonfiction authors that the majority of readers do not go past page 50 of a nonfiction book.

16:55A lot of books are written in such a way that they put up front their frameworks or key concepts, knowing people don't keep reading. And I'm guilty in this case of not finishing this book, but I really did enjoy learning more about Larry Ellison, who has become one of the richest founding entrepreneurs alive today in the United States of America, obviously the founder of Oracle, and Oracle has been on quite a run itself recently. And in the book, Simons does indeed paint a pretty intimate portrait, getting to know Larry Ellison well, how he was thinking about business, where he came from, what his hopes were for his company Oracle, which has had its ups and downs, which any great stock or company will over the decades.

17:36But this particular quote is pulled from a short section about the tension that exists between software developers and salespeople. And I think, again, a lot of us are probably familiar with this kind of tension. So I'm going to just share the passage and then let's think about it together for a little bit. Here's the passage from the book Software by Matthew Simons. Quote, tensions between the development and distribution organizations in software firms are almost inevitable. Sales and consulting think that developers sit in ivory towers insulated from the real world of deals, implementations, and dissatisfied customers.

18:19They are the ones who suffer above all in their wallets when development is late in delivering anticipated functionality or when the products that do ship are buggy and unstable. For its part, development tends to believe that sales will say anything the customers want to hear to snag their fat commissions and then expect engineers to perform miracles to rescue them from the consequences of their overpromising. end quote. So the first thing I want to say about that is the struggle is real. I know a lot of us are sitting there nodding our heads because in your organization may not be software, might be an internet firm.

19:01Heck, it might just be, I don't know, a bagel manufacturer. I'm quite sure we could all relate to the idea of over-promising salespeople putting us in a difficult position because of the expectations that were created or the promises maybe that were made. At the same time, the salespeople can be sacrificed on the altar of, wait, you didn't get the work done. You're not ready to ship the product or we ship the product and it's buggy. So it's a very natural struggle. The struggle is real. A lot of us in the business world can relate. But let's step outside of this dynamic. Let's get above it for a sec to see the game for what it is and recognize that it's inevitable.

19:44It's going to be inevitable that people out front whose job is often on commission to sell whatever the company produces, whatever service is delivered. And the people who are actually making that product or service are not the same people. And there's always going to be a natural tension. Therefore, my advice is that you can make yourself extra valuable to your enterprise by getting above the game, as I just said, and seeing it for what it is. In fact, you can go one further. You can show awareness to the other side, that other team. Whichever side you're not on, you can show awareness to the other people that you know where they're coming from.

20:26You understand this dynamic. And in so doing, rather than be perceived as just another member of the other guys, the other team, the people that are creating problems for my team, you can distinguish yourself as somebody who's able to see empathetically and understandably that this is going to happen and that you know that, you know where they're coming from, and you're going to work on that. In fact, pulling a related quote from another great business book that I completely recommend to everybody listening, The Why of Work by Dave and Wendy Ulrich, and I quote,

21:17So this is going to be true of any leader, and a lot of you are listening to me right now. You can really set your teams up for success if they get to know the other side's viewpoint so well that they can eloquently, matter-of-factly, state the other side's viewpoint. I'm sure a lot of us have been in mediation sessions or other forms of counseling where you learn that listening to the other side and then being able to say back to them exactly what it is you hear them saying, to the point that you really are directly connecting what you're saying with how they feel, that is almost always a way to win.

21:56So you can personally make yourself valuable to your enterprise by getting above the game, seeing that natural tension between the salesmen and the techies, and then having those two groups be able to articulate to each other exactly where they think they're coming from. And I might just add one more before we move on to quote number four. And that is that as leaders, we can actually set our metrics, our incentives, our goals for our organizations that will actually reward the whole team when it wins instead of just one of the teams. Of course, if you're only setting incentives for salespeople and those are not shared by the techies or the product producers, then you're naturally creating a dynamic where only one side is going to be getting rewarded in a certain context if certain things happen or don't.

22:47So I think in the same way that football coaches, since we're in football season this time of year, don't draw big distinctions between their offense and their defense. They don't pit their own teams against each other, although some teams, no doubt, that have really good offenses and bad defenses, probably the guys on the offense are thinking, you know, I wish the defense was better because every time we score, they give up another touchdown and we have to go down and score again or vice versa. And yet great teams don't have that dynamic because they do have different people playing offense. They do have different people playing defense or sales and techies.

23:22There are different motivations, but there's a similar goal, and that is winning. Obviously, the best leaders and the best coaches are going to be speaking to the whole team, creating the whole win. Or sometimes, yes, we lose to the whole loss. So just to put a capper on this, a lot of the tension can be diffused not only by having people be able to state the intention or goal of the other side, but you can do it in the first place by giving a shared metric, shared incentive, shared goal toward an overall team win that diffuses that tension, as Matthew Simons writes in his book, Software, that tension between the development and distribution organizations, which he says is almost inevitable.

24:11all right on a quote number four this one is from warren burger's wonderful book the book of beautiful questions warren burger past guest on this show and author in august which reminds me if you want to find that quickly and easily you can go to rulebreakerinvesting.com go to our podcast tab and find my authors in august and see when i've talked to warren burger before about this wonderful book that i'm now quoting from and here it is i'm just going to call this quote, pick the better story. That's where it's headed, but it's a few sentences. Here's the passage. And I quote, Berger writes, the experiences you say yes to now will be the stories that are remembered and shared by future you.

24:53Which brings us to one more crystal ball question Berger writes, shared by the author and consultant John Hagel, who suggests that whenever you face a decision between two diverging paths, ask yourself the following. When I look back in five years, which of these options will make the better story? As Hegel explains, and he quotes, no one ever regrets taking the path that leads to the better story, end quote. John Hegel, The author mentioned by Berger is somebody that I've also met and I completely appreciated his book, Net Gain, Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities. John wrote that book in the late 90s, back when AOL was on top of the world and The Motley Fool was a small upstart company publishing on AOL.

25:47And what Hagel was basically advocating is that communities, discussion boards, chat rooms, if you will, thanks to the new technology, you can really expand your markets through the net. And that's why he called his book Net Gain. Anyway, it's that John Hagel that Warren Burger is quoting. But, you know, I, too, love stories. I bet you do, too. Most humans do. On this podcast, we have a whole series dedicated to stock stories, which we just did one of those last month. We've had our campfire stories that we've told. I was thinking about my book, Chapter One of Rule Breaker Investing. It's basically the story of NVIDIA.

26:25When I first picked it and why, and then why I re-upped it, and through incredible volatility, why I then re-upped it once again years and years later, and how well that's all worked out. It's really just, though, a story, chapter one of the book. And sometimes in this podcast, I'll have friends on and ask them to tell the story of their life in 10 sentences. So, yeah, we humans, we are a storytelling creature. We love stories. In another place in Warren Bennis' book on becoming a leader, I think I used this as a previous great quote in an earlier episode, Bennis says another study indicates that what determines the level of satisfaction in post-middle-aged men, this may be true of women as well, but this study is about men, what determines the level of satisfaction in post-middle-aged men is the degree to which they acted upon their youthful dreams.

27:19It's not so much whether they were successful in achieving their dreams, Bennis writes, as the honest pursuit of them that counts. And that makes me think about regret And it makes me think, back to our quote here, which of the options you're thinking about right now, when you look back in five years, which one is going to be a better story or with Bennis is going to involve less regret? Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, uses his regret minimization framework where Bezos has said he asks himself, you know, when I'm 80 or 90 years old, looking back to this moment right now, this decision that I'm asking myself, should I say yes or should I say no?

28:04So whatever it is, Bezos says, my aim is to minimize the regret that I will feel when I'm 80 or 90 years old. That means sometimes you decide you should do that thing because you'll have less regret when you're 80 or 90. With Bennis, your level of satisfaction will be higher because you're going to pursue a youthful dream. But in other cases, you're going to minimize regret if you say, no, I won't do that thing because I want to minimize regret with Bezos. when I hit the age of 90 years old. So I'm thinking again about this concept of which option should you pick in investing, in business, and in life.