619: Mike Maples Jr. - Practicing Reckless Optimism, Betting On Founders, Bill Gates Hiring Mike Sr at Microsoft, Being Overprepared, & What It Means To Do YOUR Best

29:05They just have such a core belief in the thing that they're doing that it just almost rubs off on you that they have this confidence and belief in something that doesn't because like looking back it's easy well obviously twitter works or obviously you should invest in uber or airbnb or you know all of them it's so easy looking back at the time though none of these things that you invested in were were quote working they they were just an idea with a person or people that's the thing that's so hard because then we're trying to look the future. We're trying to make these strategic bets in the future.

29:40It's easy looking back, but so hard looking forward. So you're saying a guy like Ev, you just felt was the right person at the right time with the right idea, with the right amount of conviction that the thing would work. Yeah. And, and, you know, if some of your fans are like NFL football fans, it reminds me of like, so unfortunately I rooted for the 49ers last year. I was at the Superbowl rooting for the Niners and we're playing against the Kansas City Chiefs and it's towards the end of the game and it's overtime and it's like the Chiefs have the ball and I'm sitting there thinking oh crap it's Mahomes what's he going to do to us this time I don't know what play he's going to run next but I know that I just am like my whole body is clinched up because oh god it's that Mahomes guy again.

30:30And it's like, you know, the great founders are kind of like that, right? You just want to hand them the ball and wait to be amazed. And they just have this ability to just overcome whatever circumstances are in front of them. And part of how they do that is through their authenticity. You know, they're just so obsessed with the idea that they're pursuing that they come up with the right product ideas because they're genuinely interested in what they're working on. But then they also just have this determined view of what the future needs to be. And that determination is contagious, right? And it gets, I'm sure part of why Mahomes succeeds is the players on his offense are like, okay, this is our time.

31:11This is our moment. We got this. Mahomes is going to take us there. Oh, we're in the red zone. Now we score when we're in the red zone. And I'm sitting there thinking, oh crap, now they're in the red zone. And it's like, He's got a score. No. It's like watching a slow motion train wreck. If you're on the other side, if you back founders who have that set of skills in their domain, you don't need to know how they're going to succeed specifically just that they will or that they're likely to. It's so cool to see the Mahomes type, the MJs back in the day, Kobe had it, where their belief in themselves, their preparation, their work ethic, their history creates, it almost raises the level of the people around them because they want to be able to hang with him, be a teammate who adds value.

32:03And so those people are so, I remember Pat McAfee made this great point when the Tampa Bay Bucks signed Tom Brady. They said, what I don't think everybody understands is he's going to raise the level of performance of every single person in the entire building. The equipment guy will be better. The trainers will be better. The person making the food in the cafeteria will be better. The general manager will be better. He'll go get more players. The coaches will raise their level. The people like that, not only are they excellent at their craft, but they're also really good at raising the expectations and their performance, I think, of others around them.

32:44And that is leadership. That is being a leader, is raising the level of performance and expectations of those around you. I feel like that's where you've probably got the experience in the startup world. Yeah, and it's really not fun to compete against people like that. I remember a few years ago, so I like Steph Curry a lot, the Warriors. And so they're playing against Oklahoma City, and there's this film of him going up. It's like the very end of the game. They're just barely down, and you hear a fan in the audience who's filming it saying, not him, don't let him have the ball. Not him, not him, not him.

33:24And he goes across the half court line. He's like, not him, not him. And he just heaves this ball up from downtown and hits a three on the buzzer. And he goes, no, not him, not him. Or, you know, that's what the French were saying, you know, in the Olympics. Why did they keep giving it to that devil? you know every he would just every time you know he would just heave it from you know he they'd be it's not like it wasn't occurring to them to try to stop him but it's just like he you know you get into that zone where you you just know you can't be stopped yeah and um you know and that you're right it feeds that energy feeds on everybody else on the team you know the team starts to develop a belief that they just can't be stopped and that's really hard to compete against yeah let's flip it to the opposite side of things i don't know this story brian chesky looking back obviously mike you should have invested in airbnb what are you thinking you're you're you're stupid what do you mean oh why not yeah so what happened there well so this was kind of a funny thing so um the prior week we've been pitched by a company called mojo mix which was um you go to a website and you specify ingredients that you want in your cereal and then it assembles those ingredients and ships it to you in a box.

34:41And my partner, Ann, and I are looking at this thing. And at the end of the meeting, Ann's like, why did we take this meeting? This isn't something we invest in. We don't invest in cereal companies. We have no business even talking to these people. I mean, I wish them well, but it's not our business. And I was like, well, it's technology-enabled cereal. She's like, come on. And so a week later, I take this meeting with, at the time, it's called Airbed and Breakfast. and we walk into the conference room and it's full of cereal boxes, Obama owes and Captain McCain crunch. And, you know, people don't remember this, but he financed the company in the early days by selling cereal boxes because he couldn't raise money.

35:23So we walk in there and Anne kind of looks at me like Maples, what the hell? Another cereal company. And I'm looking at her like, you know, they didn't say it was cereal, you know, like, so I'm like, Hey, Brian, what's like, what's going on here with his cereal? He goes, well, you know, we're funding the company by selling cereal. Would you like to buy a box at$30 for a box? And I made my first mistake. I declined. Uh, so, so then, then he says, okay, we're, you know, Michael Seibel who introduced us says that you don't really like slides. You like demos. So we're going to show you the software.

35:58I was like, great. That's right. So he tries to get the, the software to run and he can't get it to work. For some reason, the server's down. So I'm like, that's okay. Slides are okay. We'll just look at slides. He goes, well, I didn't bring any slides because I heard you like demos. So we're sitting there 20 minutes into the meeting, room full of cereal boxes, and I still have no idea what they do. We're just looking at each other, right? This conference room. And so then he says, you know, Airbnb, air bed and breakfast, we let you rent an extra room in your house and then you serve you you give the person an air mattress and you serve them pop tarts the next morning and so i'm like okay i'm like i'm not sure i get this isn't there something already called couchsurfing.com and it's free why are people going to pay for your thing that costs money when it's free with couchsurfing.com and he goes well because you know it's not about price, it's about trust.

36:58And people are going to want good pictures of the place that they're staying at. They're going to want a trust rating mechanism. And that's where I made the mistake. I didn't realize what his insight was. His insight was about the internet and trust mechanisms and Facebook Connect were going to make it possible for you to create a substitute for the trust that people had in hotels. He was right. It wasn't about price. It was about trust. But the meeting was just so convoluted and screwed up that I just didn't see it. And so I missed it. It was the biggest miss of my career by a wide margin. So I would have made, God, it hurts to say, I would have made over 5 ,000 times of my money if I had said yes to it.

37:47Yeah. Yeah. I guess there's the ones you learned from, but did you feel something special in Brian Chesky though? I mean, cause now you look at him like this dude's amazing. Like every time he speaks, we're all taking notes, every podcast he goes on, whatever he's talking. I think he's almost universally admired by all who study this stuff as being one of the best CEOs in the world. Could you sense that years ago in him? Yeah. I mean, I thought even then that he definitely had this X factor to him. And to kind of give you a sense of that, I ended up introducing him to Reid Hoffman, right? Who's the founder of LinkedIn.

38:22And I said, Reid, I don't, you know, I don't know if this is a fit for me, but this guy is interesting and he's somebody you should know. And I don't know if you're going to want to invest in air bed and breakfast or not, but I think this is somebody you need on your radar because he's, he's, he's going to do something. And, you know, I should have known, right. I just should have known better, but, But sometimes you have so many meetings and you meet with so many companies and the meeting was so convoluted and screwed up and I just wasn't awake enough to the possibilities. And I, you know, failure of imagination.

38:59Yeah. No, that's part of the game, though. That's part of the pain. And that's how we learn from that. Mike, I'm looking behind your left shoulder and I see a sign that says practice reckless optimism. What does that mean to you? Yeah, well, it was given to me by a founder, actually. So somebody that I worked with twice, a guy named Dominic Zane, gave it to me for Christmas one year. And, you know, kind of the idea is that you want to believe that a different future is always possible, always around the corner. And, you know, so I like to think of myself not as an investor, but as a co-conspirator.

39:38I think of a startup as an optimistic conspiracy theory to make a better future. and you know most people we haven't really talked about this but most startup ideas that are great are disliked by most people at first because if you know human beings are conditioned to like things so if everybody likes your startup idea it's too similar to what they already like the best startup ideas force a choice and not a comparison you know this is not a startup but it's an example of thinking the tesla cyber truck you know you may want one you may not want one you might think it's ridiculous. When I first saw the Cybertruck, I thought maybe Elon was joking.

40:16Is he really going to ship that? But nobody, when they see a Cybertruck, ever says, how does that compare to a Ford F-150? It's like, live in Elon's future or don't, but there's no comparison between the two. You can't reconcile the two things. And so that's what I find. Startups are that way when they're great. They start out by being non-consensus and right. So it's almost like you're the Ocean's 11 team trying to rob the Bellagio safe, right? You're like, you're trying to perpetrate something and most people don't believe that it should happen. And so you kind of believe that you're in on a secret about the future with a bunch of other like-minded crazy people.

41:01And I call that co-conspirators, right? And so I want to be more of a co-conspirator than an investor because I think that startup founders need a different kind of help. They don't need a buy low, sell high type of helper. They need someone who's in on the secret with them and who believes in the same crazy thing that they believe and wants to be part of the different future, wants to be a reckless optimist alongside them. Optimists are the ones who change the world, right? Pessimists sound smart. Morgan Housel said that on this podcast, but optimists actually make a difference. They're the ones who make it happen.

41:36They change the world. James Clear talked about on this podcast too about the fact that he wants to be around. I do too. People who are for things, people who bet on something. The only way to achieve or to experience the upside is you can't just hate on things or be a pessimist. Then you're not part of anything. You're just a hater. But if you want to be a part of the upside, if you want to have a chance to make a difference, to leave a dent in the world, you have to be for things. You've got to bet on something. You've got to commit to something. And that's why I've loved studying your work, Mike, because I feel like that's your life.

42:17that's like your ethos it kind of pours out of you even as we're just talking now that you're this guy who believes in crazy ideas changing something in a radical way and you're willing to put your money where your mouth is and that's how you've built your entire career well we try right and i guess it's kind of a version of doing your best right but like you know it's sort of like all right you don't know how much time you're going to have how do you want to use your time? Do you want to use your time succeeding by somebody else's conventional idea of success and conforming to their dogma about how things should be and trying to win within that status dominance hierarchy?

43:03Or do you kind of say, you know, like there's a book that I really like called The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. And he's this theoretical physicist who talks about how we're at the beginning of infinity of knowing what's knowable. But the good news is that all knowable things can be known. And so why not try? Why not always, you know, what is a theory? Really, it's a better explanation for how things work than all the explanations we have so far. Why not always seek a better explanation? Why not always believe that if this is the pattern that somebody can break the pattern and impose a new better one and then a better one after that and a better one after that.

43:45And so, you know, that's something I can get behind, right, is people who do that. Whereas, you know, the status quo has the word status embedded in it. And a lot of people try to protect the status quo because they're trying to protect their existing status. And I'm like, what fun is that? You know, that's not a fun way to honor the gift of your time. That's just passing the time. I spoke with your chief of staff, Sam Beskin, who, by the way, he played for my friend Rob Eson at Stanford basketball player. And Rob texted me and said, that dude might be my all time favorite player. And he's going to be the president of the United States someday.

44:26So just to just a heads up on Sam. Sounds like I'm not sure I would wish that on him, but, you know, I don't know if he wants that. But one of the things he said, he sent me a list of your favorite quotes. And I want you to respond to one of them. We could have a whole conversation about all of these, but one of them is there can't be a recipe for a breakthrough because by definition, breakthroughs haven't happened yet. Again, this is in line with what we've been talking about, but this mindset of there aren't really recipes. You have to, in a way, invent the new thing or create it, not follow somebody else's quote best practices.

45:06Can you talk more about breakthroughs and the fact that there isn't a definition because they haven't happened yet? Yeah. And when you think about it, it makes intuitive sense. So let's say that you and I follow a recipe to make a cake. We might make an awesome cake, but we're not going to invent something in so doing. We're following somebody else's playbook that's already been determined. Somebody else figured out how to create that cake and passed it down to us. And so if we're going to have a breakthrough, we have to do something nobody's ever done before. So there can't be a recipe by definition.

45:45So what I've learned is that it's the wrong question to ask, right? Like the question to ask is, how do I become the type of person who's likely to encounter a breakthrough, right? Right. And so, you know, you listen to some of the great people in history, the creative geniuses, Louis Pasteur, right, who said chance favors a prepared mind. Isaac Newton, the apple hits his head. Archimedes jumps out of a hot tub and says, Eureka, I found it when displacement occurs to him. The history is written in terms of them having this flash of insight, almost like a happy thought. You know, Einstein talks about how relativity crystallized for him when he was in a train and he was moving away from a clock and he saw it going off in the distance.

46:34But they asked Isaac Newton one time at a party, how is it that when that apple hit you on the head, all of a sudden gravity occurred to you? And he said, because I was thinking about it all the time. so that's the thing that people don't get about breakthroughs is that chance favors the prepared mind because when you're thinking about the edge of something new for its own sake independently because you're intrinsically motivated by it you're you're gonna get visited by luck often you know but the problem is most of us are just trying to get through the day we're trying to follow the recipe for what needs to happen next we all get visited by luck just most of us don't answer the door most of us don't realize that we've been visited by the muse the great founders the great scientists the great artists you know that people have studied people who create these breakthroughs.

47:39And I'm convinced that chance does favor the prepared mind. But the reason it does is that prepared minds say yes to luck more often, right? Like prepared minds know luck when they see it. Most people don't have enough agency to realize they're always being visited by luck, but they're too focused on what's in front of them to notice what's around them. And so one of my favorite verbs about entrepreneurship is noticing. And it's like the people that notice the surprising anomaly hidden in plain sight that change the future. But when you realize that, it's kind of inspiring. Inflections are all around us all the time.

48:27Opportunities to change the future are all around us, ever present. The Wright brothers didn't have any unfair advantage in inventing the plane. They were just more curious. And so, you know, I think that that's the key, right, is to not look for recipe or playbook, but to try to be the type of person that is going to be visited by luck more often and is going to be awake to the possibility of answering the door. I like to say that I think that luck has a little bit of a feminine quality. You know, the Greeks talked about being visited by the muse. I think that, you know, sometimes you're visited by the muse, but you have to be open to the possibility that she's going to knock.

49:11And she's usually not going to come through the front door. She's going to come through the side door. And so, you know, you kind of just got to be awake to the possibility that she's visiting today. I love your favorite verb. When I think about the most interesting people that I've ever met and the most interesting people in my life. I think they are far and away the best noticer of things, have great spatial awareness of the world and understanding. They're usually very funny. Stand-up comedians, I found, are probably to be some of the best noticers in the world. Nikki Glaser talked about that on this podcast.

49:50I feel like I'm name dropping the whole time, but that's just how my mind works is from these conversations because they're embedded in my mind. But she said that that's like her whole life is she'll be in the middle of a conversation with a friend at a party or something and notice something and say, hold on a second and take out her phone and put the note of the thing that she just noticed because the whole world at all times are there's just there's stuff happening that you're noticing. And I think if you almost rewire your brain to do that, that's how some of these breakthroughs can happen because you're always like chance favors the prepared mind, right?

50:26You're always on the lookout and noticing these things happening in the world. That's right. Most people don't have prepared minds. Unfortunately, most people let life come at them. Proactive again, right? Be proactive again. Yeah. And it's interesting. I love the standup comedy example. We've never talked about this before, but like I read this book where they talked about chris rock and his technique and comedy like all forms of creativity usually involves forming unexpected connections so like what you know when you're doing a startup you're you're forming an unexpected connection between a new form of empowerment and a set of desperations that people have but and you're usually harnessing something that pre-existed in addition you're just connecting the dots differently comedy from my understanding is very similar you're you're connecting sort of the mundane expected everyday life and you're juxtaposing it with something unexpected but the other thing that's similar to entrepreneurship if chris rock is any guide he'll practice his comedy lines on different audiences before he gets in front of a big audience.

51:40And startups are a lot like that too. Like you're not saying this product, it's either going to succeed or fail, better raise some money. And you're attached to whether it succeeds. You're sort of playing almost like a little kid would play soccer, just kind of kicking the ball forward without necessarily an idea of where it's going to go. And you're not attached to being right right away. You're willing to be just totally wrong. You're exploring a whole bunch of lateral possibilities because it's interesting. And if you're wrong, so what? It's a tiny little audience. The penalty cost isn't that high.

52:13You're not fixated on the cost of being wrong because you make the cost of being wrong zero. What you're focused on is finding a quicker path to being surprised about what's right. So then you can escalate your commitments as you increase your certainty that you're right. And that's true of comedy too. Right. Like once like Christopher Rock in this book I was reading was saying, like, you can just tell when it lands, you know, you just you could just see the way that their body language and their eye was on that one I'm going to use. And so I think risk-taking is a lot like that. You want to make it so that you could take risks where the cost of failure is as near zero as possible so that you could take as many risks as you want and then double down only when it works, only when you're surprised to the upside.

53:02But it's kind of a different way of thinking about risk, right? It's about thinking about, I'm going to make the cost of failure so low that I'm just going to keep trying until I massively succeed that that's the thing it becomes a quantity and endurance thing i was just reading about james dyson now sir james dyson right he got annoyed by the bag at his vacuum cleaner and so he's like i just got to get rid of this stupid bag i need to create a bagless vacuum cleaner well you know how many times it took him to get it right just over 5100 tries that he messed up but he learned after each one and eventually he got there and became a billionaire and i think he's the sole owner of that company.

53:42So it's like the combination of an idea, a willingness to experiment, a willingness to be okay when it doesn't go well, a willingness to be resilient and to respond and to learn from that failure so that when you go back the next time, you're a little bit closer, you're a little bit closer. And most people are just not willing to endure all of that. They'll quit. They'll stop. That's the difference between a James Dyson and everybody else. And I think that though is a key learning for all of us as leaders is whatever the thing is that we're doing, a big part of it is just being willing to continue on, to push through, and to make sure you learn from the small experiment before so that you're better the next time.

54:27And I have to guess though, that's got to be a commonality among the leaders that you have backed that have gone on to do really well. Yeah. But it's funny too, we're talking about noticing things and being awake to stuff. You know, earlier you mentioned my chief of staff, Sam Beskin, right? Who was on Stanford's basketball team. And he, I think he played, you know, on other teams as well, graduate school. Not long ago, I was working with him to chart out my time management strategy for 2025. And I had a very comprehensive way of thinking about it. he said you know when i was at stanford the the basketball coach that they would they would come up with a game plan and they would think about every play and all this intricate stuff but then they would create a one page three keys to winning summary and and sam said that the coach would say to us if we do these three things we will win this game today and he's like everybody on the team knew it.

55:31Everybody on the team knew the three things they had to do. The next team that he was on, the coaches would have this one page, but it would have like 20 things on it. And it would be like in tiny little, you know, footnote sized type. And he's like, the problem with that is there's no keys to winning then. If you have to win, if you have to remember 20 things, you remember zero things. And so I was like, dude, you're totally right. We need to redo this plan. We need to be thinking the three things because we've got a team at floodgate and like the associates need to know what they care about when they find the next Twitter, you know, the next thunder lizard startup.

56:14And if I have some comprehensive, you know, spreadsheet of 20 different things classified i might impress myself with how smartly arranged it is but but it's not executable right it's not executable in the same way that that one page three things to do game plan it's it's not enough to be smart about what should happen what you want is the thing that everybody is willing to get behind and do that's better than good enough right to win and and like you know sam like i mean you you could have just said okay yeah whatever let's do this spreadsheet right but like you have to be you have to be like wait a second here he's totally right right he's he's given me a helmet adjustment in a nice way but like he's just totally right that that's what we have to do my problem is not that i need to be more precise.

57:13My problem is it needs to be addition by subtraction. That's what I need to be focused on right now. It's like the old saying that the word priority didn't used to be pluralized. And if that's even the right word, it didn't used to be a plural word. It used to be singular. What is your priority? And now it's become, these are our 12 priorities. And if you have 12 priorities, just like if you have 12 values, you pretty much don't have any. You don't have to list everything out that that is important to you I think you have to focus I love that idea of the three keys to the game I heard I heard that's what the new New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel is very good at is three keys for the offense three keys for the defense and three keys for the special teams and everybody in the entire roster has to memorize those three keys before every game and they get quizzed on it and so they understand it just these three things we're focusing on these three things if I play offense defense or special teams and I think simplifying that also, it's hard.

58:12It's partially why Twitter works. The forced constraints ended up being a great, great thing for it. And the same goes for time management, for keys to winning a game, or just in life in general. Mike, if you have time for one more question, and we're a little bit over, but I have one more. You bet. Yeah. Let's say you're meeting with somebody who's a recent college grad, like Sam's age or maybe a little bit younger, and they come to you and they actually don't fully know what they want to do, but they do want to leave a positive dent in the world. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person?

58:50There's two. The first is to internalize what it really means to do your best. And so, you know, doing your best means being the best version of you that you can possibly be as a way of expressing gratitude for your time and comparing yourself to the best version of yourself you can be rather than comparing yourself to others. Avoiding the trap of mimetic desire and this tendency to define your thinking according to other people's thinking. People would be so much better off if they understood that early in life. People waste so many of their best years trying to succeed according to somebody else's idea of what success is.

59:35So that'd be the first thing. The second thing, and it took me a little while to figure this out, but eventually I got there. I call it the tea of knowledge. So I have a broad variety of worldly wisdom topics. I learned this from a guy named Charlie Munger. And so I try to know in the fields of art, physics, economics, game theory, system-level thinking, engineering, politics, what are the very best ideas that have ever existed in those fields? because that's kind of like getting worldly wisdom. And I just think that if you read Aristotle, if you read Machiavelli, if you read Sartre, if you read all these different people, Graham Wallace, The Art of Thought, all these different people, it's like they're your friend and you got to know them, you got to spend time with them, and you got to learn ideas that have stood the test of time for centuries sometimes.

1:00:47you know, Marcus Aurelius, you know, all these people. But then the reason it's a T is I think you want to have one area in life where you are fanatically obsessed with knowing more about it than anyone knows. So like for me, that's like startup greatness, right? Like I have a database of every company that I know of in history in tech that would have made more than 100x on the first check. And I try to get a time capsule of those companies. I try to get the seed round pitch deck. I try to understand what the founder was like at the time you would have had to decide. I try to figure out whether our frameworks would have caused us to say yes, or whether we need new frameworks or whether we need to discard some.

1:01:34But like, you know, is that going to lead me to the next great startup? I don't know. Probably not. Certainly not in the next week. But I just feel like if you do that, you know, over the course of 10 years, 20 years, you just have a gigantic database of greatness in the back of your mind of what greatness looks like. And if nobody else is willing to do that, I just think you have an advantage, right? You come by the advantage, honestly, but like the, you know, in England, you have these guys, they call them train spotters, right? They have these journals and they look at trains coming and going and everybody thinks that that they're socially maladjusted.

1:02:13Why would anybody be so interested in spotting trains? I think everybody should try to be a train spotter in something that matters to them. You know, like I'll, I'll talk about what makes a great startup. I'll talk your ear off and, and, you know, everybody around me would be like, Hey, Maples, we're supposed to be having a party here. We're watching a football game. You don't have to talk about these esoteric details of a startup nobody's heard of, but I'm just that interested. I care that much. And so I encourage everybody to have the broad worldly wisdom, but then the T of knowledge where they're a train spotter.

1:02:49And the advantage to that is that I understood when Bitcoin came out, I understood why a lot of what's profound about it could be understood by understanding equations of heat and energy and conservation of energy. And I understood that like fiat currency does not have conservation of monetary energy and that Bitcoin does. And I knew that because of that, it was a superior feedback loop system than any other currency that existed. You wouldn't have, you wouldn't have connected those dots, right? If you hadn't spent time understanding, you know, the equations that govern thermodynamics, but you would have never known that when you were studying it.

1:03:33You just had to decide it was worth your time to engage with that topic because it was a way to honor the gift of your time and do your best. Mike, I could talk to you all day, man. I really appreciate this. We definitely need to do a round two. The book that I highly, highly recommend is called Pattern Breakers, Why Some Startups Change the Future. The reason why I liked it, there's many reasons. One, the guy who should write this book, wrote this book. Mike Maples Jr., you're the guy to write this book, but also the combination of the fascinating stories. And I don't think this is just for people who are into the world of startups or investing.

1:04:14I think this is into people who care about humanity, who are leaders, who care about excellence, which is really the avatar of the Learning Leader Show, all about understanding excellence and becoming a better leader and impacting people in a positive way. And I think that's what Pattern Breakers is all about. And that you poured, you could tell your heart and soul. And I know you wrote it and rewrote it multiple times. I talked to Sam about that, that you weren't okay to release just a good book. It needed to be excellent. And that's what you've done, man. So thank you for being here. Thank you for writing Pattern Breakers.

1:04:45And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Cool. Thanks, Ryan. I really appreciate it. It was an honor to be on your show. Some of your guests are I'm big fans like coach Stoops not long ago huge fan so you know it's an honor to be included with that group of people oh man thank you so much I appreciate it man see you soon

1:05:10it 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 Mike Maples Jr. A few takeaways from my notes. I loved how emotional Mike got when he talked about his dad. If you want to see it, go to youtube.com slash Ryan Hawk. You can see the emotion pouring out of him as he talked about his dad and his message of do your best. There is only one you and it comes from a place of gratitude. How will you decide to spend the gift That is your time. Don't waste it trying to be someone else.

1:05:55Do your best. Internalize what it means to do your best. Avoid the trap of mimetic desire and copying others and figure out how you can make a positive dent in the world. And then chance favors the prepared mind. We are all visited by luck, but most of us don't answer the door. We need to become a professional noticer. Again, Mike's favorite verb, noticing. Most people don't have prepared minds. Be intentional about noticing the world around you and being prepared for when luck visits you. I love this story about his chief of staff, Sam Beskin. Sam played basketball at Stanford as well as other schools.

1:06:41And at Stanford, the coaching staff would hand them a sheet of paper that had three keys to winning the game. Just three. In another school he played four, they would hand him a same sheet. However, that would have 20 keys to winning the game. Nobody remembered any of the 20. Everyone remembered all of the three. And this is a great metaphor for life. If you try to value everything, you end up valuing nothing. And if you have 12 priorities, you have none. You have to decide what are those few things that absolutely must go right in order for you to win. And then focus on those. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Mike Maples Jr.

1:07:27I 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're rated hopefully five stars and you write a thought for you by doing all of that, you give 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.