608: Anthony Pompliano - (How To Live an Extraordinary Life) Luck Is Not Real, Surround Yourself With Compounders, Fire Your Boring Friends, Get On The Plane, Practice Simplicity, & Taking Big Risks608: Anthony Pompliano - (How To Live an Extraordinary Li

24:24They're implementing something. They're trying something. It doesn't always work, but they're moving. They have action. And I think having that bias for action, again, gives you a better odds of something going well versus sitting on the couch. I could not agree more. And it really comes back to this idea. I think it was John Rockefeller was famous for finding smart people, not even having a role for them, but just saying, come work with me. We'll figure something out. And when I read that, I said, I'm going to start doing the same thing. I'm just going to steal that idea. And there are multiple people who work with us who we just met them.

24:57We really liked them. We thought that they had huge asymmetry to their career. And we said, we want to work together. Let's figure out a role for you. And they're probably some of our most productive, valuable teammates. And so the more that we can do that, obviously we want to. A collector of amazing people. On the flip side of that, You got to fire your boring friends. If you are optimizing for living an extraordinary life, you have to fire all the boring friends and find people living extraordinary lives. Some people might not like this. Oh, Pomp, aren't you loyal to your elementary school friends?

25:31No, they're boring. I'm not. I'm curious, how do you juxtapose loyalty with long-term friends if they're boring? You can be loyal and still fire them. And so if you think about, I have a lot of friends that I've known for 20 plus years. And if they called me, I would do anything for them. I'd literally give them the shirt off my back. The loyalty runs so deep because it's not about money or any degree of success or anything. It's just like, I genuinely care about these people. But I also understand I can't hang out with them every day. I can't see them six times a week. I can't talk to them because the things I want to accomplish require me to be surrounded by people who are the compounders, and maybe some of these people aren't.

26:19And so what I need is I need to strike the balance between having a lifetime of loyalty for people even if I don't talk to them frequently. And so I have friends who I didn't talk to for five or 10 years. And then they called me and they needed help with something. Done. Easiest ask of the day. But I don't talk to them every single day because they're not the type of person that's going to help me get where I need to go. And so having that balance is very hard. But if you can figure out how to do it, it's very powerful because it allows you to continue to serve the people you've met throughout your life.

27:01but also understand who are the people I need around me right now to help me grow to where I need to be. And maybe the best example of this is like, think of a company. We have people who have worked with us over the years. They don't work with us anymore. They wanted to go work somewhere else. It wasn't a fit, whatever. Every single one of them knows they can call me and I will do whatever I can to help them. Reference calls to give them advice, whatever. But they're not on the team today. And so your friends are similar. Who's on the team today isn't necessarily every person you've ever met, but you can still be loyal to the former players, right?

27:40Like you can still look out for them. You can still make sure that everything's good. You just know like they're not at practice today. They're not playing in the game on Saturday. And so that difference of kind of what is the role or what is the relationship can evolve, but it doesn't mean that you get rid of them. It just means that they just shift to a different kind of position. And that's okay. That's actually a good thing. It means you're growing. There's a Naval tweet about this. It's a signal and a marker for growth, right? That there are some friends who just are growing at a different trajectory or even going in the opposite direction.

28:13It doesn't mean you still wouldn't do anything for them if they called, but you're probably not going to see them as much, probably not going to talk to them as much because you're choosing to surround yourself with compounders. And that's a signal and a marker for growth, that that's just part of life. Again, it doesn't mean you're not a loyal friend or a loyal person. You're just not going to spend as much time with them. I think that's, that's like a part of an audit you can do for yourself is thinking about that. Am I surrounding myself with compounders or not? Are these people pushing me?

28:39They're lifting me up. I remember I had a, just had a one-on-one six months ago with the CEO of Insight Global named Bert Bean. Bert's an amazing dude. And I had this like big report written up. This is what all the things I've done. I'm really, you know, it's really impressive. And here's what I'm doing in the future, all this stuff. And I was expecting him to be impressed when I met with him. Wow, dude, this is really good. big growth, good stuff happening. This is great. And he looked at it and he goes, he kind of put it down and he goes, dude, you're not thinking nearly big enough. I was expecting you to ask me for a few million dollars to make a Netflix show out of your podcast.

29:10What are you doing? Why aren't you thinking bigger? And I thought that's a CEO. That's a leader. That's what you should be doing. He was, I'm sure like he knew I need to push. I need to push. This guy has a higher capacity to do more, but almost not a lot of people are willing to do that. So when you find them, they are such gold that they're willing to challenge and push you. I encourage people that same thing. That's why that struck me so much of surround yourself with the compounders and fire the boring friends, because it will literally change your life. It's also, it's contagious. yes right and so um literally yesterday in our office somebody said to me uh be realistic and if there's one phrase i hate it's that phrase but i explained to this person i said you know why do you think that it's not realistic and they said well we're we're working with this other company they're our partner on something and they have a lot of experience and they said that that's not realistic.

30:11And I said to this person, I said, you know, experience is a liability when it comes to setting expectations. If you think about that experience is a liability when it comes to setting expectations, because what do people do? They just fall back on what are the previous results that they got. And so if you had gone to the rocket companies and said, let's build reusable rockets, they would have all told you, come on, be serious, be realistic. You needed somebody who had no experience to have a different set of expectations. And so I think that a lot of that lesson can be applied to just everyday parts of your life when it comes to what is the expectation you have of yourself, of the people around you, the things that you're going to do, et cetera.

30:59Yeah. This is why I think it's good to have a mix of less experience slash younger people mixed with others. Because I remember I was a sales rep in 2008. And when I was interviewing, I was selling at LexisNexis, like legal information tool, I remember. And as I was going for interviews to get promoted or other jobs, they were like, oh my God, how did you handle 2008? And I was like, what do you mean? They're like, that was just such a terrible year for the economy. Everything was brutal. I was like, honestly, I watched the sports center. I worked at, I worked out all the time in the gym. And then I, I, I tried really hard to sell a ton because I wanted to make money and be first on the stack rankings.

31:38I didn't even know the economy was bad. This ignorance was bliss in the fact of there was no expectation that it should be hard. It was like, I'm just going to go and do the thing. And I think that part of it, that inexperience or a little bit of ignorance didn't say, oh, well, well, it's just bad economy. So let's just ride this out and wait till it gets better. It's no, you got to go. We don't have the choice to not hit the goal or to not get after it, regardless of what's happening in the world. I'm going to keep at it. And I think sometimes that can be a really useful way to go about your business as opposed to putting these self-imposed lower expectations because of something that's outside of your control.

32:21I do think that one of the things I'm fond of saying to people who work with us is that fear is a silent killer. It can kill your dreams. It can kill your goals. It can kill your action. And it's because you're scared of actually being rejected, of actually taking action and not working. And so if you think of it, it's like a weird self-censorship. How many people have something to say they don't want to say it online and they self-censor themselves? Yep. Well, fear does the same thing in your life, which is I want to do this thing. What if it doesn't work? What if my friends think that I'm not cool?

32:57What if my family makes fun of me? And so fear is a silent killer is this idea that just reminds you like if luck's not real, neither is fear. It's just something you made up in your mind. And so just go do it. This just came to be based on you have four boys in your family. Is that right? Five. Five. So you have four brothers? Yes. Okay. And they're all, from what I can see, I don't know them, but doing quite well. What did your parents do to raise such hardworking, gritty, tough, resilient, get-after-it type kids? I've talked to them about it because, frankly, when you're growing up in a family like that, you don't have other data points.

33:44So you don't know what's the same or different. You're just like, hey, this is how everyone's life gets lived. I think that my parents did a couple of things that probably were, in hindsight, valuable. One was they spent time with us. And really, it was my mom. She spent a lot of time with us. Two, if you ask my father, he would tell you that the single most important thing they did is they just loved us. They genuinely cared. They wanted us to be successful. They wanted us to figure things out. They were mad when we did something that was dumb. but they also took it through the lens of, you know, we learn from this.

34:16And so I think that just like having good parents usually leads to having good kids, which is simple, but powerful. On top of that, I think that they did a great job of really instilling in us hard work. And a huge reason why they were able to instill that is because we saw them work hard. And then on top of that, probably one of the best decisions they ever made was we lived in an area where every kid was constantly asking their parents for an allowance. Or I grew up in an age where we got cell phones in high school. All of a sudden you can drive, you got a phone. They get a little bit more freedom than maybe, you know, just 10 years before.

34:54Yeah. The internet, you know, had just like hit. And now all of a sudden people had Facebook came to high school when I was a senior. Like that was a big deal, you know, all that kind of stuff. And my parents always took the approach of, if you want$20 to go to the movies, like you have to do something. And we're not talking like Herculean tasks, right? You know, rake the leaves, do this, do that, whatever small thing around the house. But it tied the idea of if you want X, you got to do Y to get it. And it was an implicit lesson, right? It wasn't something that they like harped on it. They didn't rub it into us like you don't have any money or anything like that.

35:29But it was very much this belief that like kind of capitalism works maybe was the lesson. And then probably the single greatest thing that my father really, I think, used to explicitly say is he would say to every single one of us in some form or fashion, you know, I genuinely believe you can do anything that you want in the world. No matter what you pick, I think that growing up in this house, the way that you guys are, how you guys act, you can accomplish anything. And I think some parents say that to their kids, and maybe they almost say it because they feel like they're obligated to say that.

36:08For whatever reason, when my dad said that, I believed it. And so that's really empowering for a young – especially a young man, right, where you're like, oh, you know what? Dude, this guy that we look up to, he really believes that we can do anything. What can we do, right? And I think that those types of things are – it's not what do you buy your kids or what school do you send them to or like all that kind of stuff is probably more so like just don't make a mistake. But if you raise good kids, you can pretty much send them to any school and they should be able to navigate it. Now, sure, some schools are better than others or whatever, but I do think that there's something about the way that you teach them to think has probably the most asymmetric payoff in terms of how your kid actually ends up performing in the world.

36:56It's an ultimate act of leadership too. That last one, especially we were talking about with your dad. Do you think about that both as a dad, but as a leader of a business, when you genuinely let somebody know that you believe in them and you tell them explicitly and you give some specifics as to why, God, is that powerful. I think of my parents. I think of two of my high school football coaches, the people who you could tell had that genuine belief in you. They raised the level of expectations that maybe you even had for yourself. That is leadership. That's an act of leadership. And I think that's what all of us in leadership roles, whether it's as a parent or as a business leader, that's what we should be striving to is to raise the level of expectations and belief in people.

37:46Okay, one that you learned from a sales professional that I really wanted to hit on. And it's simple, it seems obvious, but people don't do it. And that is get on the plane. Get on the plane, go see them. Can you tell a story about how you learned that when in doubt, get on the plane? Yeah, this was a hard lesson to learn. Part of growing up as like a digital native is you got the internet. Like why would we ever spend all day to go to the airport, sit there, get on the plane, get off the plane, get a rental car and Uber, drive to a place, do all that, come back. It's crazy. It's just, let's do it, you know, 30 minutes of Zoom.

38:26And I learned it when I was fundraising for the first large fund from an investment standpoint that we were fundraising for. There's nothing that replaces the in-person conversation. But more importantly is getting on the plane signals a seriousness to the person that you're going to meet. I've been fortunate to meet some very, very successful, multi-billionaire type investors. And I've literally seen it. they will talk to someone over the phone and they'll say i'm gonna come see you tomorrow how serious do you think they are if they're going to get on a plane and literally come see you tomorrow now it helps that they have a private jet right it helps that they you know like you know they got a lot of money and they the cost isn't a problem but there's an element of i just talked to somebody on the phone yesterday now they're going to fly here tomorrow to see me to catch your attention.

39:22And so again, it doesn't mean that you got to do that for every single person, but remembering that sometimes it is worth getting on the plane. Sometimes it's an advantage to do that is pretty important. Have that bias for action. Do you think, because I've met with companies, specifically their sales organizations where they learn to sell in COVID via Zoom and Teams, and they're like, dude, I can crush it that way. I learned how to do it. People are fine not meeting in person. In fact, some of them prefer Zoom and Teams just because they don't have to whatever. They can be at home. What do you say to those people who maybe crushed it during COVID and they're still doing well, having those types of meetings, and they don't want, they never had to get on the plane because they started it earlier in their career not doing it.

40:12What about for that person? I think that if you're good over Zoom, imagine what you could do in person. Right? Right. It's like. Imagine you're in a boxing ring and you learn to box with one hand tied behind your back. Imagine if they gave you a second one. Right. Like you'd be better. And so a similar idea here is if you learn to sell and you're good at it in the impersonal kind of virtual world. Yeah. Imagine how good you're going to be in person. And so I do think that it's just an element of the last couple of years made it harder. And so just take what you learned and then go apply it and play the game on easy mode.

40:55Go meet people in person is much easier, especially in sales. You don't get what you don't ask for. I love the story about, was this your first date with Polina? Yes. It wasn't even a date really, but yeah. Okay. So you met Polina in the morning. this is your now wife for coffee. Is that right? Can you tell the story of how that went and then what happened next? Well, I can tell you my version, which obviously is the truth. But no, we met, she was a reporter at Fortune Magazine. I'd made a number of investments in private tech companies. And we met because she was looking at some of them and I'd sent her a list beforehand of, Hey, you know, here's all the companies.

41:42And during the conversation, I think it became pretty clear to both of us that, Hey, this is either going to be a work relationship or, you know, something else. It's a little weird when you're like, am I thinking what she's thinking? I don't know what she's thinking. You know, like, it's kind of like this like awkward thing, whatever. And after we left, I messaged her and I just said, Hey, you know, this may be a little weird, but she had told me she was leaving. It's on a Thursday and she was leaving, I think on Saturday morning. And so I just said to her, I said, Hey, do you want to go to dinner tonight, right?

42:09You want to go to dinner or can I see you tomorrow or whatever? And she said, yes, thankfully, maybe the story turns out differently if she's been like, no, you weirdo, right? You know, or something like that. But it was just like, I wanted to see her. I genuinely was like, Hey, I enjoyed that conversation. I thought she did as well. And if I don't ask her, we don't get dinner that night. Who knows? Maybe we don't actually end up getting married. Maybe I don't have, you know, two kids. Maybe I never write the book like that. You know, one thing had a huge impact on my life. But at the time, it was just like, hey, I want to go to dinner with her.

42:41Let me ask. And what's the worst is she going to say? No. Okay. I'm in the same spot I am right now, which is currently, I'm not going to dinner with her. And so maybe that's kind of a simplistic example, but it's true of everything, right? If you think in business, how many times do you read a contract? And people are just like, okay, fine. I tell our team all the time, if you review a contract and there's something in there that you want or something that's not in there that you want, ask. And maybe 50 % of the time they say yes. And 50 % of the time they say no. But still 50 % of the time we got something that we wanted in the contract.

43:17And so I do think that there's an element of just like being willing to kind of put yourself at risk because it goes back to that idea of fear is invented. You're like nervous to ask why. Because you've invented something in your head. And so when you can kind of distance yourself or get rid of that, it really empowers you. I learned that early on as a sales professional that you're asking and getting rejected constantly. So you like work the rejection muscle. And I think that's useful for basically anything you're going to do in your life. And it feels like this, what you did asking for the second date, the day of the first date, and you had it that night.

43:55I guess the first one's not maybe considered a date, but it turned into one is not as common maybe as maybe it used to be. and that could go to all different areas of your life. If you don't ask, the answer is no. And even if you do ask and you get a no, it's not that big of a deal, right? You just move on. You get to the next one. You get to the next one. I think that's what's critical. Okay. Next one is, now this could be a little bit sensitive, but I wanted to bring it up because it's also common. childhood is not a crutch using this victim mindset as a crutch for poor behavior. I realize some people have a lot worse childhoods than I did and probably you did.

44:40And I had a great childhood, but you quote Cameron Haynes and he says, it's easy to use your childhood as a crutch instead of seeing it as a chisel. Can you share more about not using childhood as a crutch? It's the whole idea of like a luck and agency, right? Is if you look at your childhood as a crutch and you constantly say, oh, I do X because this happened to me or this situation I was born into, or this person was mean to me or whatever, that doesn't mean that you're condemned to that life forever. You can absolutely change your circumstances. And I know a lot of people who have done that.

45:19I have some friends who had horrific childhoods, and they're some of the highest agency, most powerful people I know because they use that as fuel. And so the example I always use here is that there's this great saying of there's a drunk father, like an alcoholic father. And in that conversation with his two sons, somebody says, hey, you're a drunk as well as a kid. So there's a father and two sons. One of them is an alcoholic. One is not. They go to the alcoholic son. They say, hey, why do you drink? I say, well, because my father's an alcoholic. That's where I learned it. And then they go to the son that's not an alcoholic and doesn't drink at all.

45:55And they say, why don't you drink? And he goes, because my dad is an alcoholic. And so it is, again, two kids grew up in the same household with an alcoholic father. One chose to repeat. The other chose to learn from it. And so it's this idea that one of them is basically got the mindset that they're condemned to the life that they were born into. And the other is saying, this was a chisel. It taught me something. I am not going to allow myself to fall into the same trap. It doesn't mean that either son is right or wrong. It just means that if you want to be a high agency empowered person that gets what you want out of life, there's only one of those two sons you can be.

46:32You have to be the one that says, my childhood is a chisel. And so again, it goes back to, it's a mindset thing, right? It's a different way to view the world. And so I'm always intentional about telling people, you can't change what already happened in your life. What you can do though, is you can change the way you think about it. And so if you can change the way you think about it, you can either use it as a weight that holds you down, or you can use it as fuel that propels you forward. And I think that's what Cameron's getting at there is he's saying, use it as a chisel. Use it as the fuel to propel yourself.

47:09Take all that thing, the anger that you have, the sadness, whatever kind of nasty, bad things, and use it to motivate you to accomplish something good. Turn the bad thing into a good thing. and we all have certain things that have happened in our life that we would point to and there's a varying degree of severity for some people it's absolutely horrific and other people it's it's like a bad day at the country club but every person has something that they look at on a relative basis that was the worst thing that happened in my life and it all is how do you choose to think about it and the people that i know that are highly successful choose to look at it as fuel or use it as a chisel as cameron talks about ed latimore said on this podcast i vividly remember, he had a brutal, brutal upbringing.

47:56And he said, if I commit a crime, the judge and the jury, they don't care about my upbringing. They're going to throw me to jail. Ed having this high agency with, yes, it happened, but it's in the past. Now it's on me to choose how I'm going to respond, how I'm going to live my life, realizing that if I inflict harm or do bad things to other people, they do not care about how bad my upbringing was. I need to be a productive member of society. And that's a high agency thing, which I love that one. Okay. Simplicity signals mastery. God, I love this one, Pomp, because the writers and the communicators that I really appreciate and respect, the Morgan Housels, the Tim Urbans, the James Clears of the world, they are so good at taking complex ideas and writing in a way that makes the reader smarter.

48:52And that to me shows they have absolute mastery over the stuff that they're writing about. And so I love that this is a letter that you're writing to your kids saying, you have to learn the stuff enough to make others feel wiser for having been in your presence or reading what you're writing because you're writing at a level that they can understand. that takes ultimate mastery. So yeah, talk more about this idea of simplicity signals mastery. What you find is I talk to a lot of people. I interview people for jobs. I interview people for content. I work with a lot of people. We have a lot of partners and clients.

49:29I have a lot of investments. I've got a lot of investors. And one of the core themes of my life is learning. and so I, for better or worse, tend to grill people when I meet them. And if you've ever been on the other side of it, it's probably not as fun as I think it would be, but if I meet somebody, I will just start asking them, what industry? Okay, how did you learn this? What did you do with the company? What was the biggest decision that you made? What was the biggest mistake? What would you do differently? What did you learn about hiring people? I just like fire away. And certain people like it, some people don't.

50:05But what you find is the people who have true mastery explain things so simply that you kind of are like, duh. And a great example of this is let's say that you own a small business and you're trying to build a chain of restaurants maybe. And you say to yourself, okay, I need to be in places where there's high foot traffic. And so one person would say, okay, let me go do a bunch of studies. Let me go do surveys. Let me have somebody stand on the street corner and count cars. Let me look at maps, do all this kind of really big intelligence stuff. But if you go talk to the multimillionaire restaurant owner who's been in business for 30 years and you ask them, hey, how do you do site selection?

50:50They'll just be like, I put my restaurants next to Walmart, right? That's it. Just if there's a Walmart, I put my restaurant there. And that's what we do. We just look for the Walmart and we put the restaurant there. And why do we do that? Because we know it's high foot traffic. Like they did all the work, like their big brains, whatever. And like, we just put a restaurant next to it. And so it goes back to this idea of like, who's really mastered site selection? Is it the people who are going and doing all the studies and have a whole site selection team and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff? Or is it just the guy who's, you know what?

51:18I just find Walmart and I put my restaurant next to it. So that's a good kind of exercise of, it's not just language. It's not just the way you describe things. It's also the way that you think about things. And so this idea of simplicity equals mastery is that guy really, really, really understands what is the thing that drives value for his restaurants. And so he has identified what's the one thing that's going to pay off 90 % of the value. Find Walmart, put my restaurant there. I'm done. I didn't spend money on surveys, car counting. I don't have a big team, any of that stuff. But I got 80%, 90 % of the same result.

51:53And so I think about that a lot because when I talk to people, the other like big side to this is what are the red flags? And it's people who use huge, big words. And I always tell them, I said, look, if I don't understand what you're saying, I just – I got questions, right? Like I talk to so many people, and people who know what they're talking about can explain it to me so simply that even I can understand it. Okay. why can't you do that? And so one of the things that you can learn from this is if you want to master a subject, be able to explain it to a five-year-old. And if you can't explain it to a five-year-old, you probably don't understand it.

52:37And so I think that is, you know, kind of just a huge lesson, both in terms of evaluating people in situations, understanding kind of, you know, business and boiling things down, but then also kind of aspiring to have a degree of mastery yourself and topics you care about to then be able to communicate those ideas to other people. I remember my 10-year-old, she was eight at the time. She's like, what's your book about? And it caught me off guard for a second because I realized I needed to speak in a language that was more understandable. And that response, I ended up quickly writing it in my phone and using it as sales copy because this is better than anything else I've done because it's is it was just so much more simplistic so that's actually a good exercise whether you have kids or not is whatever the thing is you're doing what's your speech about well explain it to somebody like it's like it's one of your six-year-old kids that is asking you and then oh now you got to the through line you got to the gist of the thing is try to explain it to them and i i think that really shows that you know what you're talking about we're right at the end of our time pump so i i really appreciate you being here uh one more is let's say you're meeting with somebody, you probably do this regularly, a recent college grad, they want to make a dent in the world, right?

53:50They're willing to work hard. They don't necessarily know what they want to do yet, but they do want to do something of significance. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you give to that person? Seek risk. Everything in your life has been beat into that risk is bad. Volatility is bad, but the greatest returns are on the other side of risk. And so in your career, especially when you're young, what is the riskiest thing you could do? Joining that really hot startup that is growing super fast, going and starting your own business, taking a leap into an industry that was going to be really valuable but you're not yet quite sure are you prepared for it.

54:32Going and going to a bunch of networking events and building out your network even though you don't have any friends that want to go with you. Anywhere where you see risk, run towards it. It's true in your investment portfolio as well. All of the value gets created in the things that are deemed risky. They're deemed risky because they're volatile. And as volatility comes down, it's because risk is coming down. But the secret in investing is you get paid the return for the risk you take. And so if you're buying the S &P 500, which is pretty de-risked, you get about 8%. But if you buy the thing that's deemed more risky and you're right, then you get paid a higher return.

55:13And so I think that seeking risk is something that you almost have to like unlearn the opposite of to be able to do. And you have to get comfortable being able to identify this is risky. Let me run towards it. And if you really think of a firefighter, it's insane to run into a burning building. That is dumb for 99.9 % of people. But for a firefighter, that's their job. And so if you can think of the kind of intellectual equivalent of that is go find risk and run towards it, it will set you apart because the competition of people who are willing to do that is so low compared to all the people who are running away that you probably have better odds of actually being successful.

55:55So good. By the way, what do you think of Domino's pizza? Domino's is amazing. I've been told that I should not eat it every week, but not only do I think it's pretty good. I do at times like to order Domino's living in New York City because a lot of people are not so pumped about me doing that, which makes me like to do it even more. This is so good, Pop. I really appreciate you being here. I've followed your work for quite some time. How to Live an Extraordinary Life. These are 65 letters that you've written to your kids. I think we cover four or five of them. So there's so many more that I highly, highly encourage people to get this book and read it.

56:27Super useful. It's entertaining and you could implement this stuff immediately. So well done, man. Say hi to Polina. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. I would love that as well. Thank you so much for doing this.

56:45It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Anthony Pompliano. A few takeaways from my notes. Luck is not real. Luck is something we conjure in our minds to grapple with the consequences of whatever life may throw our way. Luck is a physiological concept. It's determined by how we view a situation. In fact, academic studies show that you can become luckier simply by telling yourself that you are lucky. Pessimists sound smart, but optimists change the world.

57:25It's worth it to believe that it will go well. It's worth it to have optimism, to have agency, to strive to make something happen. And also, surround yourself with compounders and fire your boring friends. Being around other ambitious people who are willing to push you will make you better. And we have to work to strike the balance between being loyal to longtime friends who may happen to be boring. We'll do anything for them, as Pomp said. Give the shirt off your back. but we're going to spend the bulk of our time around people who will push our edges and make us think bigger. Surround yourself with compounders and then you don't get what you don't ask for.

58:11I love his story when Pomp talked about meeting Paulina, his future wife for coffee, and then learning that she would be going out of town. So he said, well, let's just go to dinner tonight, You don't get what you don't ask for. The answer is no if you don't ask. I think it's worth the potential rejection because the upside is so great. In this case for him, they got married and have two children. So the people who sustain excellence, I've found, are not afraid to make the ask. You don't get what you don't ask for. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling your friend or two, Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Anthony Pompliano.

58:53I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and you subscribe to the show. And you write a thoughtful review and rate the show hopefully five stars. By doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.

59:19Thank you.