The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book -- The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Austin Kleon is the NYT bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. He's a writer who draws, a former librarian, and one of the most original thinkers on creativity working today. His new book is Don't Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Key Learnings Stay light. Bill Murray told ballplayers that if you stay light, loose, and relaxed, you can play at the highest level. Same with acting, writing, anything. Austin keeps a photo of Bill in his studio as a reminder. Play is the work. A lot of Austin's best work requires a sense of play. It's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Go to the analog desk first. Austin has a digital desk and an analog desk. Nothing electronic is allowed at the analog desk. He starts there with nothing and sees what comes. Most people never give themselves the time, space, and materials to make something of what's swirling inside them. People want to watch someone who is activated. "People will pay every night to show up and see somebody believe in themselves." (Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth) The market for something to believe in is infinite. (Hugh MacLeod) The world is full of people just doing their thing. They're hungry to see someone on fire for something. The writer's job: take what everyone is thinking and put it into words. "You gave me the words" is the highest compliment a reader can give. Effortless is earned. People say the Friday newsletter looks easy. Austin's reply: Do it every Friday for 13 years, then call me. A place to put things makes you notice more. Thoreau took morning walks knowing he'd write later, so he paid closer attention. Carry a camera, and you start seeing shots everywhere. Live for the living, not for the writing. There's a tension between living your life and documenting it. Don't lose yourself to the feed. Your attention is the most valuable thing you have. Everyone wants to take it. The real challenge of modern life is making sure you're the one who decides where it goes. The best teachers are perpetual students. You realize what you know and don't know only when you try to teach it. Toggle between knowing and not knowing. The moment you think you know what you're doing,

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Read my NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming - www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, one of the most influential business books of the past 25 years, and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the first new U.S. exchange to both list and trade multiple stocks since NASDAQ launched 50 years ago. His new book is Incorruptible. Key Learnings The more successful a company becomes, the more valuable it is as a target. Companies are worth stealing and taking over. Most founders are naive about this and don't understand what's coming for them. They've been following the so-called best practices about how companies should be built, structured, and governed. Most of those best practices are value-destroying. Sol Price was a lawyer before he became an entrepreneur. He believed a lawyer had a fiduciary duty to put the client's interests before his own. So when he became a retailer, he asked: "Who's my client?" The customer. He treated the customer as the person he would rather die than betray. When competitors sold a product for less, he'd put up signs in his own store: "Don't buy this from me. You can get it cheaper somewhere else." He capped his margins at 14 percent. He paid above-market wages. It is so much easier to destroy than to create. One day, Sol came into work and couldn't get into his office because the locks had been changed. Investors had pushed him out and forced Fedmart to practice retail best practices. Within seven years, they bankrupted the company. We've built an economy that rewards people for cost-cutting without holding them accountable for the consequences to trustworthiness, brand, or culture. The origin story of Costco: Sol took two weeks off, then leased the office upstairs from Fedmart and started Price Club. One of the young guys who left with him, Jim Sinegal, had worked his way up from stock boy. Jim eventually started his own company using the Sol ethos. A few years later, their companies merged to form what we now call Costco. Wall Street routinely calls Costco the exception to every rule. Wall Street analysts say things like: "At Costco, they take money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invest it in the customer experience." As if that's a criticism. Costco endures because it's protected by a governance fortress. A series of worst practices that resist outside pressure structurally. The $1.50 hot dog has been the same price since 1986. A McDonald's Big Mac was $1.60 in 1986. Today that same Big Mac in California is over $7. Costco sells more hot dogs than every Major League Baseball stadium in America combined. If they raised the combo to $7, it would be a billion dollars of extra net income. They could do it. They choose not to. "If you raise the price of the effing hot dog, I wil

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming for my new book, The Price of Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. His titles include Boundaries, Integrity, Necessary Endings, and Trust. For three decades, he has worked with leaders, helping them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. His newest book is Your Desired Future: The Five Essential Steps That Take You Where You Want to Go. Key Learnings Henry's five-step model for getting from here to there: Vision (clear and compelling) Talent (engaging the right people around you) Strategy and plan (how you'll win) Measurement and accountability (how you'll know) Fix and adapt (course-correcting in real time) At the age of 16, Henry's daughter asked, "Dad, how do people become singer-songwriters?" Henry went out to the garage and brought in his whiteboard. Lucy rolled her eyes. He gave her the five-step model. A couple years later, she published a song called "Crash and Learn" that got bought by CBS, the CW Network, and featured on Spotify and Apple Music. We tend to create departments and businesses in our own image. Of the five components, we're going to be good at two, maybe three. But the others still have to happen. That's where most leaders fail. Only humans can picture a desired future state. Finley is Henry's Doberman. When the FedEx guy comes to the door, she runs to it, and barks every time. Henry has never seen her stop and ask herself: "I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on Thursday." Most leaders are operating like Finley. Working hard. Doing what they've always done. Never stopping to ask if any of it is getting them where they want to be. You need an observing ego. The worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going. Tony Blair, while Prime Minister, spent half a day a week sitting by himself next to a pond in reflection. Warren Buffett spends an hour and a half a day at his desk staring out the window. A revenue number is not a vision. The single worst vision statement Henry ever

NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming Buy it -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. Jim Collins is the author of some of the most influential business books ever written — Good to Great, Built to Last, and Great by Choice. His concepts have become part of the leadership vocabulary. Level 5 Leadership. The Flywheel. First Who, Then What. The Hedgehog Concept. He spent more than a decade at Stanford as a professor and has advised CEOs, four-star generals, and heads of state. His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. It is the product of ten years of research and is the most personal thing he has ever written. We flew to Boulder, Colorado, to record this one in person with Jim. Key Learnings Jim's grandfather wrote his own death story. Jimmy Collins was a test pilot in the 1930s. He told Jim's grandmother, Dolores, that if he died, she should pull the last chapter from his desk and publish it. He died in a test crash. After the service, she pulled out the chapter. The title was "I'm Dead." The last chapter, written in first person, described the plane coming out of the sky, the screaming wings, the crash. The final words, by his own pen: "I am dead now." For seven decades, his grandmother never cried. When Jim asked her in her nineties to tell the story of his grandfather, she cried and said, "Thank you for that. I've never cried before." She'd been a single mom in the middle of the Depression. Of all the things Jim feels good about in his life, asking her to tell that story before she died at almost 100 years old is one he's most proud of. A cliff is an event that alters the trajectory of your life and forces you to reconstruct everything that comes after. Jim's first big cliff: he lost his father while his father was still alive. Jim's father took the family to San Francisco in the 1960s. They lived a few houses down from Haight Street. When a man was shot dead on their doorstep, Jim's mom moved them to Boulder. They lived in a cold basement with cots and a hot plate. They couldn't afford a Christmas tree, so Jim and his brother rolled a boulder into the basement and called it their Christmas rock. The Greyhound bus moment. In high school, Jim took a Thanksgiving turkey on a Greyhound bus down to New Mexico, where his father was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor. He had this romantic vision: they'd cook the turkey, share Thanksgiving, bond as father an

Pre-Order new book, The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver My Guest: Dr. Nicole LePera is the creator of The Holistic Psychologist, a platform with over 12 million followers, and the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including her newest, Reparenting the Inner Child. Key Learnings: Nicole was good at everything, so struggling meant failure. Her family's message was clear: success in life meant financial security through academics or athletics. The implicit message: you're worthy when you're bringing home A's, when you're winning the softball game. She quickly learned to identify things she wasn't immediately good at and just not pursue them. She filtered life, staying on the path of comfort. Your childhood adaptations don't leave. Nicole calls it the inner child. It doesn't matter how old you are or how far beyond your childhood you think you've gotten. It impacts you in reactions, in identities, in your way of being. What was once your best attempt at safety, security, or connection still drives behavior today. Not all adaptations are problems. Many continue to benefit us. The question isn't whether the adaptation is good or bad. The question is: are you choosing it, or is it choosing you? Nicole's drive for achievement created opportunities. It led to massive impact. But she still has the overachiever who wants to blow past her limits and say yes when she's exhausted but means no. The Holistic Psychologist started in 2018, and Nicole had no idea it would explode. She was living in Philadelphia, operating within a private practice model. Within the first year, people from around the world were resonating, joining, and interested in working with her in this new way. But at the beginning, even learning how to speak on camera was such a big challenge. Her partner would say, "Say what you said to me earlier," and Nicole's mind would go blank. Just putting a camera in front of her was near debilitating. Boundaries are about knowing who and when to take feedback from. Sometimes the feedback from a loved one, while uncomfortable, is helpful to hear. Other times, it's a helpful boundary where you're not opening yourself up to the opinion of someone who has a different vantage point or is speaking from their own projection. That's allowed Nicole to create safety in herself, confidence in herself, which translates to flow. Several years in, Nicole's dad sat front row at her book event, crying with pride. In the beginning, her dad and mom

Read my new book, The Price of Becoming. www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: David Epstein is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene. A former investigative reporter at ProPublica and senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His new book is called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Notes Be part of "Mindful Monday" -- Text Hawk to 66866 Key Learnings The easier move is to let it go. David found a factual error in Ryan's new/my new book. David was supposed to read it and write a blurb on it - but went further and challenged a factual error. The kind move, what great leaders actually do, is being willing to point things out, even if it could cause a little friction. There is such a thing as too much autonomy. After Range became mega viral, David optimized for autonomy. He individualized his whole life. He no longer was writing about what others assigned him. A year later, he realized there is a thing as too much autonomy. He missed the structure of a work day, the deadlines, the annoyances of working with other people's schedules. This total freedom ended up feeling terrible. "The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living." This quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi hit David when he was on a dating app for book topics, just swiping and swiping. That day he said, "I'm really interested in constraints. I need some myself. I'm writing a book proposal on this." Two weeks later he was 10 times more interested because he decided to dive into it. Cal Newport says "system shutting down" at the end of his workday. It seems silly, but when you have all that freedom, you need something to close the workday so you can recover and be ready for the next day. Your brain is made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says thinking is energetically costly. So when your calendar is too open, all you'll do is what's convenient. Your brain will be lazy. The path of least resistance. The mere urgency effect: when schedule and structure is too open, people do things that seem urgent even if they're unimportant. When you're too unstructured, you end up doing huge volumes of low value stuff just to have checked off doing something. What David's workday looks like now: Batc

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment. He is a New York Times bestselling author of influential books, including First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Currently, he leads the People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute. Key Learnings When you start a business, it's all about love. Seven out of 10 businesses fail, so when you start a business as an entrepreneur, you love what you do, you love your clients, and you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important and it's gonna work. Marcus sold his company in 2017 and calls it the biggest mistake of his career. His company was broken down into silos, and the conversation became about maximization, compliance, and efficiency. "Love is born savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting." (Pablo Neruda) When you stop talking about love, you destroy it. Before you sell or scale, ask: Will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company and more employees saying they love working there? If the answer isn't obvious yes, then don't do it. Great companies protect the founder's flame. Walt Disney, Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Apple's passion for design, Southwest Airlines, and Herb Kelleher. When companies lose their connection to the founding passion, they become the machine. The machine doesn't have a soul, and people can all feel it. Love is the most powerful force in business. If you want to drive productive human behavior, repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, the precursor to that is love. But we don't say the word. Marcus was with 30 C-suite executives, and they spent two hours talking about data. They couldn't even say the word, love. They came to say it about customers, but never about their own employees. The job of a leader is to change human behavior. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. You've got two choices: directive (which works temporarily) or designing experiences. If you want sustainable behavior change, experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes. The best leaders are skilled experience makers. That email you just sent? It's an experience. That meeting? It's an experience. Onboarding? It's an experien

Order my new book, The Price of Becoming... www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Nir Eyal is a Stanford lecturer, behavioral designer, and bestselling author who has spent his career at the intersection of psychology, technology, and human behavior. He's one of the most rigorous thinkers alive on why people do what they do, and what it actually takes to change. Notes Julie introduced Nir to the Turnaround technique. Nir and Julie met the first week of college in 1997 and have been married since 2001. A big part of the genesis of Beyond Belief came from Julie introducing Nir to this technique called The Turnaround, which comes out of the work from Byron Katie, that she used with her mother to repair the relationship she had with her mom. A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation and increases suffering. It does that by creating short-term relief from discomfort. "I hate public speaking, I'm no good at public speaking, so I'm going to avoid public speaking." You reduce your motivation to go on stage, providing yourself temporary relief, but long-term suffering. The Turnaround helps you collect a portfolio of perspectives. The problem is that our minds hate changing beliefs. We use these beliefs to justify passivity. A turnaround helps you identify many different kinds of beliefs, and then you can choose the ones that serve you versus the ones that hurt you. Your conscious mind can only process 50 bits of information per second. Your brain is processing 11 million bits of information (the sound of a voice, light hitting your retinas, the ambient temperature of the room). Your conscious mind is not aware of all this. Your brain has to filter out and leaves you with 0.00045% of the information that's coming in. The brain sees reality through a tiny pinhole of attention. It's the difference between reading a simple sentence or War and Peace twice every second. In order to make sense of all this data coming in, the brain has to see reality through a tiny pinhole of attention, just a tiny fraction of reality you're actually consciously aware of. The brain makes predictions based on our beliefs. How does the brain make sense of all this information? It has to make predictions, and those predictions are based on our beliefs. We call this predictive processing. Everything you experience, everything you see, everything you feel, and everything you're inspired to do is determined by the three powers of belief. The three powers of belief: <

My new book is The Price of Becoming. To order, go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Will Guidara is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, the restaurant he took from a struggling two-star establishment to become the number one restaurant in the world. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, the host of the Welcome Conference, and a co-producer on the Emmy award-winning series The Bear. Notes: Key Learnings "Obsession is a beautiful thing when you can grab it by the tail." This quote is from chef Sean Brock when he opened his pizza place in Nashville. For Will, obsession is when you care so much about something that you give all of yourself to bring its most fully realized version to life. What obsession means to Will: "Loving with every ounce of my being the pursuit of something." He can't imagine a life where he doesn't have something to be obsessed about. When you lose yourself in the pursuit of something, that's when it gets ugly. Obsession is a beautiful thing if you can grab it by the tail. For those that can't, it becomes ugly. You need to hold onto yourself while obsessively pursuing whatever it is. Find a hobby to be obsessed with before you retire. Will is 46 and has seen people he's long looked up to finally retire in their late seventies without a hobby they're obsessed with. They're feeling listless and without purpose. He's thinking about this now for his future: start to become obsessed with a hobby so that when you do one day retire, there's something else to fall into. "Adversity is a terrible thing to waste." You cannot always control what life throws at you, but you can always control how you react to those things, what you choose to learn from them, how you allow them to fuel your competitive spirit, the perspective you glean from those moments. Allow yourself and your team to feel the weight of the disappointment. When there's a moment of adversity, leaders hear "adversity is a terrible thing to waste" and immediately shift into cheerleader mode. That is not the right thing to do. You need to allow yourself to be as human as humanly possible, and give your team the grace to fully feel the weight of that disappointment. Sometimes adversity sucks, and you just need to be able to say, "This sucks. I don't feel good. I feel bad. Let's feel bad for a moment." Suffer together. When your team is going through adversity, you want to know that your leader thinks it sucks, too. It's good to feel bad

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/becoming to learn more about "The Price of Becoming." -- My new book! Clark Lea is the head football coach at Vanderbilt… He's led one of the best turnaround stories in college football. He got hired as head coach in 2021 to inherit a program that had gone winless the year before. What he's built since is remarkable: a 40–35 upset of No. 1 Alabama, back-to-back SEC Coach of the Year awards, and Vanderbilt's first 10-win season in program history. He's won games and changed the culture. Key Learnings Better people make a better team. Development in one area is development in all areas. We're trained to see life in separate lanes (coach here, husband here, father here, student here, athlete here), but when you live that way, you're in constant conflict. Instead, see each person as a circle where all those roles define who we are, and development in one area is development in all areas. Show up on time, deliver on time, engage resources. If you show up on time, turn your work in on time, and engage the resources that are here to help you, you're not just going to survive, you're going to thrive. This is what it takes to be a great football player and a great student. "We are not victims in this process." After missing the playoffs, Clark told his team: This is the ground we stand on, this is who we are. Let's be really proud of what we accomplished, but also acknowledge we've fallen short, and that is no one else's fault. Vanderbilt football doesn't need to complain loud enough to get someone to change their mind. We need to play better football. The joy we can experience is equal and opposite to the pain we can experience. In athletics, you're suspended between the pain and the joy, and the depths of that pain can be excruciating. But the joy we get to experience together in a shared way is unbelievable. The entry fee is the acceptance of that. ?This is exactly where we're supposed to be because there are no mistakes." Driving into work the day Vanderbilt didn't make the playoffs, Clark realized: this is actually exactly where we're supposed to be because there are no mistakes. As a leader, they have to know who you are. How do you coach a team and make sure your personality shows up on the field? As a head coach, being open, honest, and exposed in front of the team is essential to leadership philosophy. Take new players through your entire story. Clark does an intake meeting with new players every year that runs an hour and a half. He starts with an image of himself as a kid and takes them through high school, college, his career journey, where he met his wife, where they got married, where each of his kids was born, the highs, lows, all of it. Then he takes them through the state of the program when he got here and every team si

Go to Go to https://www.learningleader.com/becoming to see the pre-order bonuses for The Price of Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Scott Galloway is the New York Times bestselling author of books including The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, Adrift, and The Algebra of Wealth. Notes: Key Learnings Routine speeds up time, novelty slows it down. If you want life to go fast, just spend it alone and have a routine and never bust out of that routine. What makes life interesting is diversity in people, because people are complicated, and relationships are complicated. Lean into your emotions to slow time down. If you see something that moves you, stop, think about it, ask yourself why it moves you, and try to cement that moment in your brain. Otherwise, you're not sleepwalking through life; you're sleep sprinting. "The greatest wasted resource in history is good intentions that don't get articulated." No matter how famous someone is, they love affirmation as much as anybody else. Good thoughts that don't get articulated are wasted. Absorb when you're upset and lean into emotions, good and bad. This sort of marks the day and slows things down. Otherwise, if you get up every morning, do the same thing, eat the same thing, have the same relationship, the week's just gonna go really fast. Reverse engineer your success to things that aren't your fault. What are the things that played a role in your success that you had no control over? Your luck, your good fortune. For Scott: big government, assisted lunch, Pell Grants, University of California, technology financed by middle-class taxpayers, DARPA, the internet, deep pools of capital, and acceptance of failure. His mom told him he had value every day. Scott's mom, every day, implicitly and explicitly, told him and communicated to him that he had value. That builds a basic confidence that manifests in different ways: the confidence to fail, approach strangers, believe you're worthy of love, that you'll add value to a company, and that you can ask for tens of millions of dollars from someone. When good things happened, he used to call his mom. Whether it was getting a bonus at Morgan Stanley or striking up a conversation with a w

Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Kat Cole is the CEO of AG1 (formerly Athletic Greens) and a renowned business leader known for a meteoric rise from Hooters waitress to Fortune 40 Under 40 executive. As former President/COO of Focus Brands (Cinnabon), she specializes in scaling global brands. Her career is defined by driving billions in sales, strategic innovation, and a strong, people-first leadership style. Key Learnings You can't market your way out of a bad product. AG1 has 3x'd the business in four years while being in only one channel (direct to consumer) for 15 years. 80% of retail is in brick and mortar, so they were doing that volume in less than 20% of where transactions happen. That only works when customers love the product, keep buying it for years, and tell their friends. Scale comes from trusted recommendations, not marketing spend. Real volume comes from people telling their friends, recommending it to their teams and companies. That's where real scale and sustainable growth comes from. Two questions guide every career decision. Is my work done here? Can someone else do what the company needs better than I can? If the answer to either is yes, that guides you toward pushing for change in your role, the way you show up, or finding the next opportunity. Sometimes the best move is the lesser-known role. Kat could have stayed running big franchise brands everyone knew (Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's), but becoming COO of the parent company, Focus Brands, was a bigger, more complex role. Lesser known, smaller team, bigger stretch, more learning. That bridged her into consumer packaged goods and got her ready for AG1. Consider financial needs, learning, and ego separately. Between financial needs, your ability to learn or contribute, and your ego or optics, there are questions you can ask yourself about a particular moment or opportunity that will help you be sharper in what you actually want versus what just looks like what's best next on the surface. The founder heard her on podcasts and asked for an introduction. AG1's founder heard Kat on a couple of podcasts, knew Sahil Bloom, and asked Sahil to make the intro. She just happened to be taking time off and had been a customer for two years. "You're interviewing for your next job every day." Whatever you do now, that choice of time, that tone of voice, that decision, how you show up or don't, creates an impact that leads to an experience and people's actions and then results. Eventually, it leads to the next thing. Showing ki

www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Jamie Siminoff is the founder of Ring, which he sold to Amazon for over a billion dollars. He's an inventor and builder who couldn't hear his doorbell while working in his garage, so he built a video doorbell. When his wife said it made her feel safer, he realized technology had changed, and home security needed a complete reinvention. Ring became the world's largest home security company with a mission to make neighborhoods safer. Key Learnings Jeff Bezos reads and writes his own stuff. When Jamie asked Jeff to write something for the book's back cover, Jeff actually read it and wanted his own curated quote that was from him. Jeff loves entrepreneurs, so they kept him out of negotiations. After the Whole Foods deal, Amazon learned to keep Jeff out of negotiations because he finds it tough to negotiate hard with someone he respects. Hardware companies can die while growing fast. Ring grew from $3M to $30M to $174M to $480M, which sounds amazing. But to go from $170M to $480M, you're buying hundreds of millions of dollars of product when you're selling less than that. If sales growth slows, you're basically going out of business. Going from $480M to over a billion in revenue was like being on a motorcycle at 200 miles an hour. If a leaf falls down and hits you, you're dead. At Amazon, when Ring said, "We need another billion dollars to order stuff for next year," Amazon said, "Okay, what else do you want?" There are different types of entrepreneurs. Jamie is an inventor/entrepreneur. There are business entrepreneurs who are maniacal business people we've never heard of that have just crushed it. Jamie is maniacal on product and brings invention into how they run the company. Hire marathon runners. Marathons are the dumbest thing any human could ever do. Even if you win, no one cares. Jamie finished the Boston Marathon in 22,000th place and he's so proud of himself. You want people that don't care about external validation; they just care about getting the mission done. AI has democratized all information. With AI making it so you don't even need to know C++ programming anymore, fill your business with passionate people who care about the mission and they'll crush anything. When building your team, start with the mission. Jamie tells people, "Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. Do you want to work on making neighborhoods safer? Because if you don't, you're going to be miserable here. You're going to hear it e

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader The Learning Leader Show Key Learnings Go out and dent the universe. Erin's parents didn't put pressure on her to get perfect grades or go to Harvard; they wanted her to use her privilege and beautiful upbringing to make the world a better place. Youngest child syndrome makes you quick. Being the youngest of six, Erin learned to speak very quickly to get her thoughts in at the dinner table, and she was given unsolicited advice her whole childhood (which is why she loves giving advice now). Your siblings' sole job is to keep you grounded. Erin's parents are proud and supportive, but her siblings roast her and beat her down (all in good fun) to keep her as humble as possible. Success is attributed to a sense of humor. Erin gave career advice that was funny, and nobody had ever really seen that before. You don't get that unless you're the slightly bullied youngest of six kids your entire life. Rejection rage is a choice. At a Women in Film networking event, the head of the organization paused Erin's documentary trailer 30 seconds in and said, "You need to be more realistic." Erin went on to get a Pulitzer fellowship and premiered a feature documentary at 23 with international distribution. When you get a rejection, you can either let it beat you down or say, "I'm going to show them." "Tell me about yourself" is the world's worst interview question. It's lazy, not specific, and hard for the interviewee to truncate their entire life into 90 seconds. Use the past-present-future template: 1-2 sentences about your past, 1-2 about your present role, then future (where the interviewer's ears perk up), connecting to why you're applying for this specific role. Specificity is the magic word. When sending cold emails, the chances of getting a good response dramatically increase if you're specific: specific praise, specific question. Instead of "Can I pick your brain over coffee?" say, "I watched your video about X, and when you said Y, it piqued my curiosity." Higher quality questions get higher quality answers. This isn't just for podcasts or job interviews; it's a life skill. Good professional communication is like chess, not checkers. Most people just play checkers (you said this to me, I'm going to say this to you), but chess is thinking 10 steps ahead about what your end goal is and how this person falls along the path to that goal. Don't ask for a rai

Go to www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My Guest: Jesse Cole is the owner of the Savannah Bananas. He went $1.8 million in debt, slept on an air mattress, and built a business that is now valued at over a billion dollars. I spent half a day with Jesse in Savannah watching practice, and Jesse gave me a personal tour of their entire operation. It was incredible. Notes: Fans First - The sign is on every locker. And leading out to the field, "Tonight is someone's first time seeing our show." Obsessed/Focused - Banana Ball/Serving people is his life. We didn't talk about hobbies, TV shows, or anything other than what they're doing now and in the future. He's obsessed with what he does and super focused. Transparent - Jesse just released their full P&L as a private company: revenue, expenses, player salaries, everything. Most businesses guard this religiously. He's completely transparent. I asked why, and he said, "Fans first. They deserve to know everything." Reps - We went to the field to watch practice. It looked just like a game. Players were dancing all the time. And every single rep they practiced as a trick play (behind the back, through the legs, etc.). They never play normal baseball. You wonder how they are so good on gameday at doing a backflip while catching a fly ball. Because they practice it thousands of times without fans so that when they're there, they put on a great show. Hiring – "Love your people more than you love your customer." 12,000 people on the waitlist to work for the Bananas. When you hire, have them do a "fans first" essay. Then they write a future essay. Always Be Caring, Different, Enthusiastic, Fun, Growing, & Hungry Fans First: The Counter-Intuitive Decision - Jesse sacrificed $6 million in ticket revenue after a system messed things up for fans. Merch – 787,000 fans purchased merchandise in 2025, totaling 1.96 million total items. That means the average person is purchasing ~2.5 items at checkout, with 80% of total sales taking place in person. 621,000 at live shows versus 166,000 online. It's a $50m business! TV: The Distribution Strategy - Giving Away Value - Jesse insisted on free YouTube streaming even when ESPN wanted exclusivity. Jesse is building a zero-profit secondary ticket market. He's literally giving away things other sports properties would monetize. So, even with all of the team's games still airing for

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Tom Hardin was known as "Tipper X" during Operation Perfect Hedge, the largest insider trading investigation in history. After making four illegal trades based on inside information, the FBI approached him on a Manhattan street corner and convinced him to wear a wire over 40 times, helping build 20 of the 81 cases. Key Learnings Ambiguity is where ethical lines blur. Tom's boss said, "Do whatever it takes," after the hedge fund lost money, and as a junior employee, Tom didn't ask clarifying questions. The undiscussable becomes undiscussable. Leaders give ambiguous messages, then pretend they weren't ambiguous, employees get confused and don't question the boss, and you end up with a culture of silence. Making decisions in isolation is dangerous. The information came to Tom and he didn't talk to his boss or his wife (who probably would've slapped him around for crossing ethical lines). Psychological safety requires muscle memory. You have to practice saying "I'm just going to ask some clarifying questions here" when your boss gives ambiguous orders. Bad decisions aren't mistakes. Mistakes are made without intent, but bad decisions are made with intent. Tom told himself for years he made "mistakes," but on a drive home from speaking at a keynote, he realized: "There's no way I made mistakes. I made bad decisions." Never say never. Tom argues you're more susceptible to falling down your own slippery slope when you think "that would never be me." 80% of employees can be swayed either way. 10% are morally incorruptible, 10% are a compliance nightmare, and 80% can be influenced by the culture around them. Tone at the top means nothing. Company culture isn't the tone at the top or glossy shareholder letters; it's the behaviors employees believe will be rewarded or put them ahead. Reward character, not just results. You can't just focus on short-term performance and dollar goals without understanding how the business was made and what was behind the performance. The question isn't "what?" but "how?" If you're just focused on the numbers and not on how you got there, you have the opportunity to end up in a slippery slope situation. Celebrate people who live your values. Companies that spend millions on trips for people who live out shared values (not financial performance) are putting their money where

Go to www.LearningLeader.com This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: PJ Fleck is the head football coach at the University of Minnesota. Before that, he transformed Western Michigan from one win to 13 wins and a Cotton Bowl appearance. Before his coaching days, PJ was a stud receiver at Northern Illinois and was a guy I played against in college. Coach Fleck has built one of college football's most distinctive culture-driven programs. You'll hear why he maintains an 80-20 split favoring high school recruiting over the transfer portal, how he runs practice with a 32-second clock to make it harder than games, and why he sees himself as a cultural driver rather than a motivational coach. This is a conversation recorded with all of our coaches inside "The Arena." That is our mastermind group for coaches in all sports. And it did not disappoint. Notes: Stop recruiting, start selecting. PJ doesn't chase the highest-rated players... He looks for fit and alignment with his values. Ask yourself: Are you trying to convince people to join your team, or are you selecting people who already want what you're building? Efficiency beats duration. PJ runs 95-minute practices with a 32-second play clock, always moving, always intense. The principle: Make practice harder than the game. Where in your work are you confusing time spent with intensity and focus? Internal drive trumps external motivation. PJ calls his ideal players "Nektons," always attacking, never satisfied. He's looking for people who prove their worth to themselves, not to others. If you need constant external motivation, you're not ready for elite teams. A leader must teach and demand. A team member must prepare and perform. These aren't opposing forces—they're two sides of the same commitment to excellence. My junior year at Ohio University. I was the quarterback of the Ohio football team. We lost to No. 17 Northern Illinois 30-23 in overtime on a Saturday night. P.J. Fleck caught the game-tying 15-yard touchdown pass late in the fourth quarter. PJ finished with 14 catches for 235 yards and a touchdown. (I threw a 30-yard TD pass to Anthony Hackett to put us up a TD right before halftime). Let your team see you played. They do"Guess that Gopher" before team meetings, where players guess which coach's highlights they're watching. Give them a peek behind the curtain. It builds credibility and connection. PJ honors his mentor, Jim Tressel, by wearing a tie while coaching. Who are

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Dan Coyle is a New York Times bestselling author who's spent the last two decades studying what makes great teams great. He wrote The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and now Flourish—books that have shaped how millions of people think about skill development, team culture, and meaningful connection. He works with the Cleveland Guardians as a special advisor on culture and performance. We recorded this one together in Cleveland. Notes: Find your yellow doors. Most of us go through life looking for green doors (clearly open paths) and red doors (obviously closed paths). But yellow doors are different. They're out of the corner of your eye, things that make you uncomfortable or feel brand new. That's where life actually happens. We think life is a straight line from A to B to C, but it's not. Life isn't a game... It's complex, living, shifting. Yellow doors are opportunities to create meaningful connections and explore new paths. "Life deepens when we become aware of the yellow doors, the ones we glimpse out of the corner of our eye." The craft journey always involves getting simpler. Simple is not easy. The great ones have their craft to where there's a simplicity to it. In this world of clutter and noise, it's easy to want to compete with energy and speed, but the stuff that really resonates is quieter and simpler. Be a beginner again in something. With climbing, Dan's at the very bottom of the craft mountain. With writing, he's somewhere in the middle. It's fun to have a couple of zones in your life where you're a beginner. It's liberating, but it also develops empathy. Some stuff looks very simple, but isn't. Every good story has three elements. There's some desire (I want to get somewhere), there's some obstacle (this thing standing in my way), and there's some transformation on that journey. Teaching teaches you. Coaching Zoe's writing team helped Dan, and then Zoe ended up coaching Dan. It was never "let me transmit all my wisdom to my daughter." It was a rich two-way dialogue that helped both of them. Suffering together is powerful. Doing hard things together with other people, untangling things together (literally and figuratively), and being vulnerable together. That's culture code stuff. Whether it's skiing with your kids, seeing them fall and get back up, or being trapped underground like the Chilean miners. Behind every individual success is a community. Dan dedicates all his books to his wife, Jenny (exc

Go to www.LearningLeader.com to learn more This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Brad Stulberg is a bestselling author and leading expert on sustainable performance and well-being. He's written for The New York Times, Outside Magazine, and The Atlantic, and his previous books include Peak Performance and The Practice of Groundedness. His latest book, The Way of Excellence, is great. Brad's writing combines cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, and stories from world-class performers to help people do their best work without losing themselves in the process. Notes: Never pre-judge a performance. When you're feeling tired, uninspired, or off your game, show up anyway. Remember the Beatles scene—they looked bored and exhausted, but Paul still wrote "Get Back" that day. You don't know what's possible until you get going. Discipline means doing what needs to be done regardless of how you feel. As powerlifter Layne Norton says, we don't need to feel good to get going... We need to get going to give ourselves a chance to feel good. Stop waiting for motivation. Start moving and let the feeling follow. Audit who you're surrounding yourself with. The Air Force study is striking: the least fit person in your squadron determines everyone else's fitness level. If you sit within 25 feet of a high performer at work, your performance improves 15%. Within 25 feet of a low performer? It declines 30%. Your environment isn't neutral... Choose wisely. Treat curiosity like a muscle. It's a reward-based behavior that gets stronger with use. When Kobe said he played "to figure things out," he was tapping into the neural circuitry that makes learning feel good and builds upon itself. Ask more questions. Stay curious about your craft. Excellence isn't about perfection or optimization... It's about mastery and mattering. It's about showing up consistently, surrounding yourself wisely, and staying curious along the way. To the late Robert Pirsig - one of the greatest blessings and joys and sources of satisfaction in my life is to be in conversation with your work. He's the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance— "gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going." Arrogant people are loud. Confident people are quiet. Confidence requires evidence. The neural circuitry associated with curiosity is like a muscle: it gets stronger with use. Curiosity is what neuroscientists call a reward-bas

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for more This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. After his daughter Kira's birth faced medical challenges and he couldn't find reliable information online, Jimmy launched Wikipedia in January 2001. In this conversation, Jimmy shares why extending trust before it's earned creates better outcomes, how to deal with bad actors, and the seven rules for building things that last. Notes: Key Learnings (in Jimmy's words) Wikipedia launched 20 days after my daughter was born. When Kira was born, I realized that when you go on the internet, and you've got a question like, "what is this condition my daughter has?" It just wasn't there. There were either random blogs or academic journal articles that were way above my head. Kira was born on December 26th, and I opened Wikipedia on January 15th. Nupedia failed because of the seven-stage review process. Before Wikipedia, we worked on Nupedia. We recruited academics to write articles. You had to send in your CV showing you were qualified before you could write anything. We had very slow progress. I was on the verge of giving up. This top-down approach with a seven-stage review process before you publish anything that's no fun, and nobody's doing it. We let anyone edit and figured we'd add structure later. We thought we'd have to figure out who the editor-in-chief of the chemistry section is. You're gonna have to have some kind of authority and hierarchy. But I thought, let's just not have too much structure for as long as possible. "It's fun. You could be the first person to create a page." There was a point in time when you could write, "Paris is the capital of France". That's amazing. It's not much of an encyclopedia article, but it was fun. It's like, oh, we can just start documenting whatever we know. People started just doing all kinds of stuff. The magic is when you come back and see others improving your work. You could just write a few facts down and hit save, and it's not very good yet. But you'd go back a few days later and see somebody dug in, and they added more information. That element has always been really important. Is it fun? Do you enjoy the activity? Do you meet interesting people? You spend one afternoon, you add a few facts, and then you think, you know what? The world's just ever so slightly better. Trust is conditional, not naive. Out of every thousand people, prob

Go to www.LearningLeader.com to learn more... This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My Guest: Mike Deegan just led Denison University Baseball to their first College World Series appearance in program history. He's been named Coach of the Year in back-to-back years and is the all-time winningest coach in school history. In this conversation, Mike shares how he uses Mudita to build culture, how to help people get out of slumps, and why discipline and consistency are superpowers. Key Learnings (in Mike's words) Mudita is a vicarious joy. Can I be happy for another's success as if it's my own? To me, that is like the secret sauce of life. Obviously, in a sports team, not everyone can be the star. One of the biggest misconceptions is that the star rotates. Yeah, you need a superstar to compete at the highest levels, but to win, you're going to need pinch runners, you're going to need the guy laying a big block. It's going to take everyone. It's really celebrating everyone's contribution. In recruiting, I ask parents: Can you be happy for another kid's success as if it's your own? If your neighbor gets a new car, are you happy for them? Or do you say, "Oh, I wish. I bet his parents bought that for him." There are just different ways to show up for people, where you can just have joy. By pouring yourself into others, especially in sports, I think it frees you up to perform your best. Envy is a natural feeling. I don't want anyone to feel that envy from me. I think what we're saying is that envy is a natural feeling. Wanting to do great yourself, those are very natural, and I want people to live in that space. But can we just stop it and be a little bit more intentional and just celebrate what other people are doing well? Spot the good first. As a consultant, there are two ways you can do things. One is to find the negative, and that's really easy to do. But I try to go and spot the good first. There's plenty of time to nitpick later on. Find some opportunities to help people grow. People love to talk about themselves. My wife is very quiet, a great listener, and people love her. She has a million best friends, and no one knows it because she doesn't talk a whole lot. She just listens. If you can just listen and get people to talk about what they're passionate about, it's a life secret. You can tell when someone's really passionate about what they're doing, and you can tell when they're on the fence because they speed up when they talk, they get a little excite

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for world-class notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Oz Pearlman is the greatest mentalist in the world. After leaving Wall Street to pursue his craft full-time, he's performed for Steven Spielberg's family, for Nobel laureates, and Fortune 500 CEOs. He ran a 2:23 marathon and holds the record for most laps around Central Park in a single day. With five kids and 250+ performances a year, Oz has mastered the art of reading people and understanding what separates good from world-class. Key Learnings (In Oz's words) Doug Anderson is the magician who got me into magic. When I was 13 years old, I went on a cruise with my parents. I got pulled up on stage and took part in a magic trick. (The sponge balls) After the trick, my dad and I started creating theories on how the trick worked. The people in every industry who make it to the top are the ones who are kind and respectful to others. As soon as you stop thinking that you can learn from others, you start dying. What is the recipe for success? It's getting through the tough times. When I walked up to someone at a restaurant, and I'm 14, and I have a very fragile ego, after three tables in a row at differing levels of rudeness go by, "Dude, get outta here, man. Like, I don't wanna see this," it hurts. That's a painful thing to experience. I had to learn a defense mechanism very quickly because carrying that pain, pain turns into anger. When I get to the next table, I'm angry at the next group, even though they haven't done anything wrong to me. I realized to get my goal, I needed tougher, thicker skin. Deflect the rejection onto someone else. Create separation between you and rejection. I created what I would call an agent in my own mind. When you're in showbiz, the conversations you don't wanna have, your agent has for you. I'm a 14-year-old doing restaurants. I don't have an agent, so here's what I decided. When they don't like me, they don't know me. They don't know Oz Pearlman. They know this guy Oz the magician, who walked up to them. Maybe my tricks aren't good enough. Maybe my approach wasn't good enough. Maybe they had a bad day at work or their kid's sick. I made it less about me, and I was able to deflect all of that pain and hurt to this other person. The fear of rejection is worse than the rejection itself. Once you experience rejection a few times, it's not that bad. It's like dating. It's a numbers game. You'll probably not meet your spouse on the first try. You gotta meet a whole lot of other people to realize what you like best in the p

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Brian Kelly is the founder of The Points Guy, which he built from a side hustle blog into a travel media empire that he sold for $28 million. At 42, he's now an angel investor in 15+ companies, including Bilt (valued at $11 billion). In this conversation, he shares lessons on manifestation, selling too early, building yourself into the brand, and why vulnerability beats wins in interviews. Key Learnings (in Brian's words) In 1995, I was 12 years old, and I was great with computers, so I started booking all of my dad's travel for work. He'd pay me $10 per booking. Then it turned into points, when my dad showed me all the American and US Air miles he had. "If you can figure out how to use all of them, we can go on a family trip." And the rest is history. That was my first real, oh wait, this points thing is amazing. Points were a way for us to live a fabulous lifestyle. I grew up thinking we were poor, but I really wanted to live a fabulous life. My parents were very humble and did not spend money lavishly. For me I always wanted to travel. When I was a kid, I would spin the globe and be like, This is where I'm going. I would actually research Oman. Somehow genetically, I got this gene of I need to be rich and travel the world. I used to call Mercedes, get all of their glossy pamphlets for all their new cars, and I would cut them out and stick them on my wall. Manifesting alone won't make you wealthy, but visioning helps. I do believe being able to visualize what it looks like and taste it and get close to it helps you take the smaller steps to actually achieve it. When I think of my investments, I actually envision what they're gonna be. I envision that they're multi-billion-dollar companies. I believe it unlocks a level of pushing you to reach these mini steps that you can't see throughout the process. I started The Points Guy in 2010, but there were already Titan bloggers. I for sure felt imposter syndrome, but I saw that what they lacked was creativity. Points and miles are very clinical. Very few people were translating that for an audience. I knew I had an opportunity. I'm in my twenties, living in New York City. I'm gonna explain what everyday people need to know. Building a media brand became my moat. No one else in the points world was doing media. Doing media's frightening. While it was scary going on TV the first couple times (I almost fainted), I knew that each time I did it, I got better.

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Nick Gray is the author of The Two-Hour Cocktail Party and founder of Museum Hack. He's mastered the art of hosting events that strengthen networks and build genuine connections. In this conversation, he shares practical systems for hosting gatherings, why every leader needs a personal website, and lessons learned from his viral blind date trip to Tokyo. The Learning Leader Show Key Learnings Two Great Ice Breaker Questions: What's a compliment that someone has given you that you've never forgotten about? If you could teach any class about a topic that you're an expert on, what would it be? The power of a network is real: As a leader, you're probably hiring people regularly or looking for investors. By hosting simple, lightweight meetups or dinner parties, or happy hours once a quarter, you can strengthen your network, build it, and keep those loose connections or weak ties warm. Mix professional and personal contacts: For me, a really boring event would be all work people. Look for occupational diversity. If you're hosting a work event, invite some other random folks who you know are gonna be good conversationalists and add to the energy. Don't reach for the top shelf first. Most important advice for leaders: do not invite your most impressive contact to your very first happy hour or meetup. Your first party should be for your neighbors, the parents of kids at your school, those LinkedIn connections, high school buddies you haven't seen in a while. Your first party should be a comfortable meetup for 15 to 22 people that you host at your home with just cocktails, not a dinner party. Then slowly, once a quarter, you'll be adding more people to it and filtering your list. Collect RSVPs to ensure attendance. New hosts are absolutely terrified that nobody will arrive. As long as you get a minimum of 15 people to show up, your party will generally be a success. Use platforms like Partiful or Mixily (not Paperless Post or Evite) to get people to RSVP, let them know what to expect, and send reminder messages. Ten days before, send a reminder message hyping up the party. About a week before, send another reminder message with a little dossier of who the attendees are. Write something little: "Ryan Hawk hosts a podcast. He wrote a book. He lives in Ohio. Ask him about the ski trip he went on with his family." This serves to make anxious p

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie's List (now called Angi). She started the company at just 23, going door-to-door as a self-described introvert and non-salesperson, and turned it into a national platform trusted by millions. During our conversation, we discuss what it takes to lead with authenticity and build lasting impact. Key Learnings Lead by listening and showing up. Whether it's knocking on doors as a 23-year-old or meeting employees during office hours as CEO, Angie reminds us that being present, paying attention, and seeking feedback is the heart of leadership. Focus on people and learning. Angie's career filter is simple: Do I like the people I'm working with? Am I learning new things? If yes, keep going. If not, it's time to reconsider. Excellence isn't just about results. It's about the environment and growth around you. Take your work seriously, but not yourself. Confidence, humility, and authenticity go hand in hand. Angie shows us that you can be ambitious and driven without losing sight of the human side of leadership. From Angie... My co-founder, Bill Osterle, came to me when I was a senior in college and said, "Hey, I've got a crazy idea. Your parents are gonna hate it. But why don't we start a business?" I talked to my parents, talked to my friends, and then I ended up talking to my grandfather who was incredibly conservative. He grew up in the Depression, very fiscally responsible. "What do you have to lose? You're 22, your parents aren't going to let you starve, and you're not trying to support a family, so why don't you try it?" I was so taken aback by his response that that comment was probably what pushed me over the edge. I think young people can do this a lot, as we tend to overthink decisions. Sometimes people see things in you that you don't see in yourself, and you've gotta have a little faith. What better time to have a little faith than when you're young and carefree? Work hard, and things will come your way. We started in 1995. It was an offline world. We started as a call-in service and a monthly newsletter. The first name of the company was Columbus Neighbors. We left it like that for a year, and people just didn't get it. They thought the newsletter was the list. We decided to do a rebranding nine months in. We had two options: The List or Jackie's List (Jackie was the mother of one of our investors who knew everybody). At the last minute, Bill said maybe it should be A

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Patrick Lencioni is the founder of The Table Group and a bestselling author of 14 books, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The 6 Types of Working Genius. Behind his achievements (valedictorian, straight A's, business success) were childhood wounds that drove him to prove himself. Key Learnings "I think I'm really good at anticipating people's objections." I think about what they might be thinking and what I need to put out there. Whether talking interpersonally, giving a speech, writing a book, or on a podcast, I like to think about what the other person might be objecting to. Lean into empathy. I always felt like I needed to prove myself in order to be successful and to feel safe. That's not healthy. "When people tell you they got straight A's and were the valedictorian, the student body president, and got accepted to all the schools they wanted to get into, there's a wound there." Based on my personality type, I shouldn't have done all those things, but it was out of the need to prove myself. Which wasn't healthy for me. My parents had a hard time being affirming because of their own lives. It wasn't until I was 55 years old that a friend who's a psychologist said, "You, my friend, have childhood wounds you've never dealt with." I got good Christian counseling and realized that the way I grew up, I wasn't supposed to grow up that way. It's common in athletes & CEOs to feel like they haven't done enough. They need to do more. "You're a noun, not a verb. You are enough, and you're not defined by what you do." Great achievements come out of fear, but "true greatness is best when it's only in the things that you're meant to be great at, and that you're doing it out of freedom and passion and love, not out of fear of failure." I remember seeing Tiger Woods on the Tonight Show when he was four years old. He was being groomed to be a golfer when he was four. It's best in life when we discover who God means us to be, then we do the things we're supposed to do and we're okay with not being good at the things we're not supposed to. Are we too affirming now as parents? People who are pretty darn good at everything it's usually because they're doing something out of fear. When I was a kid, my parents came from World War II and the Depression. It was like, hey, you got a roof over your head. There was a lot of suffering, and they we

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: David Adelman is the CEO of Campus Apartments, founder of Darco Capital, and co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers. During our conversation, we discussed how losing a basketball bet at age 11 changed his life, investing his bar mitzvah money in real estate, becoming CEO at 25, his grandfather's Holocaust survival story, and why it gives him perspective on struggle, embracing failure, the trade-offs of building something excellent, and what he looks for when hiring leaders. Key Learnings "Why not me? Why not now?" David's mantra cuts through all the overthinking and excuses we make. When he saw other people building national real estate portfolios, he didn't wonder if it was possible—he asked why he couldn't do it. Stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Ask yourself: why not me? Why not now? Make mistakes, just not the same one twice. David doesn't expect perfection from himself or his team. He expects learning. Fail fast, fail forward, but don't repeat the same failure. That's not growth—that's negligence. Embrace the suck, but evolve through it. David's grandfather survived the Holocaust after his wife and children were murdered. He escaped, joined the resistance, and rebuilt his life from nothing. When David thinks about that, he says: "No matter what, I don't know struggle." That's perspective. Most of what we call struggle is just discomfort. Understanding that doesn't make your challenges disappear... It makes them manageable. If your grandfather could survive the unthinkable, you can handle the hard day in front of you. At age 11, David challenged family friend Alan Horwitz to a basketball game and made a wager. Horwitz didn't let the kid win, and David lost his basketball, football, and baseball glove. To get them back, he had to go to Campus Apartments every Saturday to sweep sawdust and stack lumber. This losing bet became his entry into a billion-dollar career. At 13, David gambled his $2,000 bar mitzvah money by investing it with Horwitz in a building at 45th and Pine Streets in Philadelphia - a property his company still owns today. By age 17, he bought his first solely owned investment property. David was accepted into Temple University Beasley School of Law but chose to become a Property Manager at Campus Apartments instead. At age 25 in 1997, he became CEO of Campus Apartments. His grandfather, Sam Wasserman, was captured by the Nazis in 1942 and taken to the Sobibor concentration camp, where his wife an

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes Join tens of thousands of leaders pursuing excellence: https://ryanhawk.kit.com/profile This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Priya Parker is a master facilitator, conflict resolution expert, and author of the bestselling book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Priya has spent decades facilitating difficult conversations in boardrooms, communities, and conflict zones. In this conversation, she reveals the mechanics of meaningful gathering and why most of us are doing it wrong. Key Learnings A facilitator is interested in the life of a group. I think of facilitation as working with people who are interested in the infrastructure of three or more people who need to come together and are ideally changed for the better by what transpires between them. A facilitator thinks deeply about how to set up the conditions to increase the likelihood that transformation happens. Great facilitators are obsessed with language. There's listening to make someone feel heard, but the difference between green facilitators and seasoned ones is an obsession and ability to hear, recall, and play with language. You have to understand what people are actually saying and be able to reflect it back in ways that unlock new meaning. Understanding power is essential to facilitation. You need to know how decisions are being made, who is talking more than others, when to allow for that, and what your own relationship is to holding the group. When do you shut up? When do you pull people out? When do you push back? All of this is fundamentally about understanding power dynamics. I'm a third-generation ostrich. On both sides of my family, when conflict arises, we stick our heads in the sand. Nothing to see here, folks. But I've cultivated the ability to hold heat. Even now, when facilitating a reckoning and the heat rises, my palms still get sweaty, I can feel my heart racing, blood rushing to my cheeks. But I've learned how to stay present with that discomfort. Counterintuitively, having deep empathy for people who want to flee makes me more effective. "90% of the success of what happens in the room, and as a facilitator, happens before anybody arrives." This is what my mentor Randa Slim taught me, and it's absolutely true. The construction of the house happens before anyone gets there. Dr. Hal Saunders changed everything for me. He was an American diplomat who served five presidential administrations and was part of t

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic and former editor-in-chief of WIRED. He's the author of the best-selling book (and one of my favorites of the year), The Running Ground. Nick shares why great leaders must balance being decisive with staying open to being wrong, how to build teams that challenge your thinking without creating chaos, and why the most important skill for the next decade is knowing what questions only humans can answer. Key Learnings Consistency Over Intensity Creates Results - If you go out there every day, six or seven days a week, and a couple days you push yourself really hard, you get faster. There's no two ways about it. If you don't do that, you don't get faster. It's a very good reminder that you can get a lot done if you just go and allot time to pushing yourself. Recommendation letter written by the Stanford faculty about Nick's dad to be a Rhodes Scholar: "Scotty Thompson is the kind of young man that comes along only once in approximately ten years. I cannot recall ever having known a student who possessed the same combination of intelligence, creativity, energy, drive, and dedication. He has attempted more, achieved more, than anyone we have studied– including some who now hold high office. He is generally conceded among those who have observed the student body since World War II to be the outstanding leader of the era. I think it likely that in the entire history of Stanford campus life, he has had no near rival since Herbert Hoover as an undergraduate." Also about Nick's Dad: Tracy Bennett, one of his graduate students, said, "He was flamboyant, gently endearing, annoyingly arrogant, piercingly intelligent, entertaining, and more. I'd never met a man, nor had a professor, who was clearly so brilliant and at the same time so precariously insecure." His grandfather, Frank Thompson, placed second in the Southern California extemporaneous speaking contest held at Whittier College. First place was Richard Nixon. Parenting — "Nothing makes me more worried about failure than parenting." "Parenting is suffused with regrets, confusion, and mistakes. But when I run by, I know my children are rooting for me to succeed with infinite love and enthusiasm." Running hard... Pushing yourself. Why do it? "Discipline builds discipline. Discipline is cumulative." Sometimes You Have to Trick Yourself - I ran 10:48 because the track was bigger than I thought, and I didn't real

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Suzy Welch is known for co-founding the Jack Welch Management Institute and writing bestsellers like 10-10-10: A Life Transforming Idea. Her career includes roles as an editor-in-chief for Harvard Business Review, a crime reporter, and a professor. She teaches at NYU and is the best-selling author of Becoming You. Key Learnings Purpose Requires Realism, Not Just Passion - Everyone wants to be the drummer in Disturbed, but that guy's good at drumming. My whole methodology is about realism. You have to know what your values are, what your interests are, but you better be good at it or forget it. Otherwise, it's a hobby. Values Are Choices, Not Virtues - Most people confuse values and virtues. Virtues are things like integrity, courage, and thankfulness... Behaviors we all should have more of. Values are choices about how you want to live, work, and relate. It's a value if it would drive who you married, what job you took, and where you went on vacation. There are 16 Measurable Values - Values exist on a continuum like a DNA profile. Scope reflects how exciting a life you want. Radius is how much you want to change the world systemically. Belovedness is how important an intimate relationship is to you. Work centrism is whether you love work for work's sake or if it's just a means to an end. Men Over 32 Value Romantic Relationships Most - We just got data showing that for men over the age of 32, belovedness is their number one value. It's much lower for women. Only 50% of people have family centrism in their top five values—we assume everyone shares our values, but they don't. Your Authenticity Gap Reveals Your Pain - You could hold the value of scope as number one, but not be able to live it right now because of your job or family situation. That gap between what you value and what you're living—we call that your authenticity gap. If you've got a big one, you know it because it hurts. Gen Z's Top Value Is Self-Care - 75% of Gen Z have self-care, wellbeing, pleasure, and leisure as their top value. Their top three are self-care, authentic self-expression, and helping others. Meanwhile, hiring managers want achievement, scope, and work centrism. The overlap is 2%. Aptitudes Are Your Brain's Dominant Hand - We have nine cognitive aptitudes preset by age 15. Are you a generalist or a specialist? A future focuser or a present focuser? A brainstormer

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: James Clear is the author of one of the most influential books of our generation, Atomic Habits. He's sold over 25 million copies worldwide and has helped millions of people transform their lives through the power of small changes. We brought the podcast to the campus of Ohio University, where we recorded live in front of 250 of the most impressive college students I've ever met. Notes: I loved the Morgan Housel moment - It was cool to see James' reaction to it (you can watch it on YouTube.com/RyanHawk). Morgan said, "I have absolutely not a single cell of envy for him. Because he is the nicest guy you will ever meet. You will not meet a nicer human than James Clear. You will not meet someone as successful as he is and as humble as he is. He is a saint in my life. And because of that, I adore every bit of this guy, so I cannot envy him. I am just inspired by his success, full stop." We should all strive to be that for the people in our lives. Your WHO - "Every opportunity in life comes through a person. Relationships are usually the most important thing. If you want to achieve more, there is a relationship that can unlock better results. If you want to make a meaningful contribution, helping others is a great way to do it. If you sim Willpower – 'People with tremendous self-control aren't that different from those who struggle. They're simply better at structuring their lives in a way that doesn't require heroic willpower.' It's not about determination, it's about design. That's liberating. Fall in Love with the Process - "When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don't have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision." Make It Obvious, Easy, Attractive, Satisfying - The four laws of behavior change: make good habits obvious and bad habits invisible, make good habits easy and bad habits difficult, make good habits attractive and bad habits unattractive, make good habits satisfying and bad habits unsatisfying. Use the Two-Minute Rule - Scale any habit down to something that takes two minutes or less. Want to read more? Read one page. Want to run a marathon? Put on your running shoes. The goal is to master showing up and make the entry point as easy as possible. Standardize Before You Optimize - You can't improve

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Derek Sivers is the founder of CD Baby and author of "Hell Yeah or No" and "Useful Not True." He shared how he graduated from Cal Berkeley in two years instead of four because the "standard pace for chumps" - a lesson that shaped his entire career of institutional skepticism and unconventional thinking. From creating viral shipping emails to understanding why explorers make bad leaders, Derek shares why being busy means being out of control, how your first thought is an obstacle to your best work, and why you can't predict what the world will want from you until you try everything and listen closely to what it's telling you. Notes: No Speed Limit – Most things are paced so the slowest person can keep up. If you're driven and motivated, you can go so much faster than the standard pace. I graduated from Berkeley in two years by learning four semesters of harmony in one hour. "The standard pace is for chumps. You can do so much better than that." Question the Standard Process – When someone says you must go through usual channels or something will take a certain time, assume there's probably a hack. Develop institutional skepticism - there's usually a better way than how most people do it. Create Opportunities, Don't Wait for Them – You don't have to wait until a company is hiring. If you can see how to benefit them, walk in and show them what you can do for free first. Alan Tepper made Warner Brothers more money than anyone that year by just showing up with a plan. Make Everything Valuable to Others – The starving artist spends all their time on work valuable to them but not to others. Use money as a neutral measure - if you can make money with your art, it ensures what you're doing is valuable to other people. "It's almost impossible to predict what the world will want from you... Keep yourself out there and listen closely to what the world is telling you it wants from you." Stand Out by Being Different – Don't imitate what everyone else is doing. I wrote a silly shipping email in 10 minutes that became one of the most viral emails ever mentioned in business books. Ask yourself constantly: What has nobody done before? The First Follower Creates the Movement – We focus on the shirtless dancing guy, but the first follower is what made everything happen. Until then, people kept their distance from the freak. If you find someone doing something great, follow them and show others how to follow. Every Sentence Must Matter – My books

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Dave Berke is a retired US Marine Corps Officer, TOPGUN Instructor, and now a leadership instructor and speaker with Echelon Front, where he serves as Chief Development Officer. As a F/A-18 pilot, he deployed twice from the USS John C Stennis in support of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spent three years as an Instructor Pilot at TOPGUN where he served as the Training Officer, the senior staff pilot responsible for the conduct of the TOPGUN course. Notes: July 2001: Plans Don't Survive Contact - Dave's Top Gun graduation exercise as flight lead. Wingman yells, "Showtime one-one break right!" - an F-5 snuck into formation. Dave was staring at the radar instead of looking out, had to fall out of formation, and ended up at the back instead of leading from the front. Mission successful, but nothing like he planned. Dave: "The outcome was still really good... except it was nothing like I thought it was going to be." Lesson: You're planning for the success of the outcome, not how you're going to do it. The most important attribute in a leader is humility. To be effective, you must be able to listen, learn, be flexible, and admit you're wrong sometimes. One of the biggest issues they deal with when working with leaders is ego and/or the inability to be humble. As leaders, we need to be self-aware enough to realize when our ego is getting the best of us. And surrounding ourselves with people who will help us know when that is happening as well. Be Fluid with Plans, Deliberate with Outcomes - Be really fluid and loose with plans, but deliberate about aligning the team on outcomes. Dave grew up as a control freak, OCD planner. Dave: "In life, it's just not how life works... If you can align on the mission and outcome, and you are very open-minded that there are a lot of different ways to get there, you're far more likely to be successful." The military saying, "The enemy gets a vote." Ryan's quarterback coach after an interception: "He's on scholarship too, you know?" Process: How You Create It Matters Most - Process is important, but how you create it matters most. If you agree on the outcome, the conversation should be less about agreement, more about "When you talk about step one, what are you thinking? How does this lead to step two?" The process has to be organic. When you create it, you're mo

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Genius Myth: Great Ideas Don't Come from Lone Geniuses. Notes: Shakespeare: Talent + Luck + Timing - William Shakespeare died in 1616 at age 52, celebrated but not yet immortal. His icon status required massive luck: friends published the First Folio (saving King Lear), then 50 years later, Charles II reopened England's theaters after Puritan closures and needed content. Companies turned to Shakespeare's IP, adapting his work (including changing tragedies to happy endings). Helen: "If anyone deserves to be called a genius, it's him. But he died as a successful man of his age. Scenius Over Genius - Brian Eno coined "scenius" - places that are unusually productive and creative. Shakespeare moved from Warwickshire to London for the theaters and playwrights. Helen: "You don't just have to be Leonardo, you also need Florence... Where do you find the coolest, most interesting bleeding edge of your field?" Modern example: Joe Rogan's Comedy Mothership in Austin created an alternative to LA/NYC for comedians like Shane Gillis and Tony Hinchcliffe. Ryan: "Put yourself in rooms where you feel like the dumbest person... force you to rise up, think differently, work harder." Tim Berners-Lee vs. Elon Musk - Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Has knighthood, lives an ordinary life, kids named Alice and Ben. Most people have never heard of him. Elon Musk has a lot of children, talks about his genes needing to live on, and lives a very public life. Helen: "We overrate the self-promoters, the narcissists. We demand oddness and specialness... We don't call modest people geniuses because they're too normal." Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) and Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) exploited this - looked like a genius (Steve Jobs cosplay, messy math prodigy) but stood on houses of cards. Trauma and the "I'll Show You" Engine - Matthew Parris wrote Fracture after noticing how many "great lives" had traumatic childhoods - loss of parents, being unloved, bullied. Helen: "I don't think that's necessarily genius in objective achievement. It's more like a hunger for recognition or fame... a kind of 'I'll show all of you' engine." Stephen Hawking on IQ - Stephen Hawking: "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers." The Flynn Effect shows average IQ rose over the 20th century through better nutrition, schooling, and living conditions. Higher IQ correlates with be

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Guest: Dakota Meyer, a United States Marine Corps veteran and Medal of Honor recipient. At just 21 years old, Dakota's actions during the Battle of Ganjgal in Afghanistan saved many lives when he repeatedly went against his orders and drove into a Taliban ambush zone to rescue trapped soldiers. He became the first living Marine in more than 40 years to receive the Medal of Honor. Today, he's a firefighter, entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author. Dakota is dedicated to developing leaders who can handle crisis and complexity. In our conversation, you'll hear why Dakota believes his most heroic day was actually his greatest failure, what he was feeling the day he received the Medal of Honor from President Obama, and his practical blueprint for bringing our divided country together. Notes: The Three-Phase Life Cycle - Dakota's framework for wisdom: "You have an obstacle you face. You have to get through that obstacle and become better from it. And then the third piece is you have to share how you got through that obstacle." Leadership vs. Responsibility - "Leaders are just people too. You can lead from anywhere in an organization... Leadership comes in many forms." True leadership means choosing where your loyalty lies - with the people you're responsible for or with protecting your own position. September 8th, 2009: Leadership Failure - Dakota frames his Medal of Honor actions as "an absolute story of leadership failure at its best" - multiple levels of leaders avoiding responsibility while he went against orders to save his teammates. The Loyalty Question - "Where does their loyalty lie? Is it in the people that trust them to lead them and to protect them? Or is it in the organization in order for themselves to keep getting promoted?" This fundamental choice defines every leader. Risk vs. Results - "Organizations and leaders today are so risk-averse that risk comes before results... You can't be successful, do hard things, and stay comfortable and be safe. In no world does that exist." Mental Health Reality Check - Dakota challenges current mental health approaches: "We're giving people no hope because we're trying to accommodate their emotions and not bring them back to reality and logic." He distinguishes between trauma that needs addressing and self-induced mental health issues thro

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Morgan Housel is the New York Times Bestselling author of The Psychology of Money, Same As Ever, and The Art of Spending Money. His books have sold over 10million copies and have been translated into more than 60 languages. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Notes: Morgan dedicated The Art of Spending Money to "Kellie the Unicorn" (his sister Kellie) after she was diagnosed with colon cancer and asked him to fulfill her long-running joke request. Sometimes book dedications "mean nothing to the reader, but they can mean everything to the author." People Who Bet on You - Brian Richards (Motley Fool boss) bet on Morgan when he didn't have to, providing unconditional support for a mediocre college writer. Craig Shapiro (Collaborative Fund) pursued Morgan for months to join his tiny VC firm as a full-time blogger when it wasn't a business necessity. What money can't buy - Morgan once heard a story from a priest that he'll never forget… It's from a priest who delivers the last rites in hospitals. He described the difference between what kids say to their parents when they're about to die. The priest tells them to tell their parents what they're most grateful for… In families with lots of problems, the kids usually talk about something that costs money. In the best families, the ones with solid relationships, the kids say the same thing every time. "Thank you for believing in me." Making vs. Spending Money - "There are literally tens of thousands of books written on how to make money... There are virtually no books written about how to spend money." Most people assume spending needs no guidance, but wealthy people often demonstrate this isn't true. The Internal vs. External Scoreboard - Donald Crowhurst (fake sailor who killed himself seeking external validation) vs. Bernard Moitessier (expert sailor who quit before winning to avoid attention and live authentically). Modern society pushes us toward Crowhurst's external validation while we actually want Moitessier's internal satisfaction. The simplest formula for a pretty nice life: independence plus purpose. The independence to do what you want, and the wisdom to want to do meaningful things. Chuck Feeney's Wealth Example - The duty-free store billionaire first lived the stereotypical rich lifestyle, realized he didn't like it, then chose to live modestly and give away $10 billion. "I was happy when I was giving

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Guest: Jake Tapper is an award-winning broadcaster and chief Washington correspondent, currently anchoring The Lead with Jake Tapper every day on CNN. He's also the #1 New York Times best-selling author of 7 books, including The Outpost (which was later made into a movie), Original Sin, and most recently Race Against Terror. Notes: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. Jake: I'm in control of how hard I work. It is our responsibility to work so hard that we become the obvious choice for the job or the promotion. Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. "I had to be so good that even though maybe on a broadcasting level I wouldn't be the number one pick... they had to give it to me." The one leadership skill that is massively important to develop… Don't insulate yourself with "yes" people. You have to have truth tellers in your life. Who are your foxhole friends? Who are the people who are willing and able to tell you the truth? Who are the ones who love you and care about you enough to let you know when you've messed up? Those people are gold. We all need them. Rejection: Dr. Seuss was rejected by 47 publishers. Rejection is part of life. You have to stay in the game for a chance to win it. Keep going. And nobody will give you a job to be nice. What value do you bring to a company? How will you make your boss's life better? You get hired to solve a problem, not because someone wants to be nice. Pinned tweet since 2017 – "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." -- George Orwell. A reminder to see obvious truths being obscured by spin or wishful thinking. "You Can Always Tell Them No" - Ted Koppel's crucial advice to young Jake about maintaining journalistic integrity and not compromising values for opportunities. This became a career-defining principle that Jake still follows 20 years later. The Jar Jar Binks Theory of Leadership - Successful leaders often remove critics from their inner circle, creating dangerous echo chambers. "Great people often achieve as much as they can to the point that they are able to remove from their inner circle anyone who tells them they're being an asshole or making a wrong decision." Constructive vs. Destructive Criticism - Jake learned to distinguish between useful feedback and personal attacks: "Very few

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is the CEO of Xero. Xero is a cloud-based accounting software designed for small businesses. They did $2.1 billion in revenue last year. Over the past 25 years, Sukhinder has had leadership roles at Google, Amazon, and StubHub. Notes: Key Learnings Strategic CEO Job Search Criteria – Sukhinder had four non-negotiables: macro tailwinds/good market, customer she could be passionate about, strong business model, and a role where she could "learn for miles" for 5-8 years. Only two companies met her criteria in 18 months of searching. "Sell, Interview, Sell" Hiring Process – First meeting is 50% selling the opportunity to attract top talent. Only after candidates lean in do you shift to intensive interviewing with leadership team exposure. The Virtuous Cycle Framework – Customer at the top, supported by "high purpose, high performance, high people" culture. "It's an 'and,' not an 'or'" - you don't get to choose just one element. Back-Channeling is Critical – Reference checking happens throughout the entire interview process, not just at the end. "The most important thing is not just front channel... it's all the back channel." Values Alignment Over Pure Qualifications – "Go where my values fit and my strengths are valued." Cultural fit becomes the deciding factor in close hiring calls, not competence. The Layoff Leadership Test – Six weeks after joining, Sukhinder laid off 900 people based on McKinsey benchmarking. Showed consistency between the outside-in analysis presented to the board and transparent communication to employees. Portfolio of Bets Strategy – Balance growth, profitability, and customer happiness through diversified initiatives ranging from "safe moves" to "flyers," with clear probability assessments. Consistency as Culture Foundation – "Culture means consistency of message and what's important." Authenticity through change, not resistance to change. The 10-Slide CEO Interview Deck Framework: Vision statement (destination in 2-3 years) Outside-in market analysis Competitive landscape SWOT analysis of current position Five key strategic moves <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-lev

Apply to be in my next Learning Leader Circle - https://learningleader.com/leadership-circles/ This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Notes: Key Learnings The Mad Scientist Emotional Profile – High achievers typically have both high positive and high negative affect. "Hustlers, hard workers, strivers, entrepreneurs, ambitious people, they're in that quadrant of high positive, high negative affect." This creates intensity but requires management of negative emotions. Dangerous Negative Affect Management – People try to manage high negative affect through alcohol, excessive internet use/pornography, and workaholism. "The isms, the addictions, they're almost all negative affect management techniques." Two Best Ways to Manage Negative Affect: Faith, Spirituality, Philosophy - "Every day, go deep" into transcendent practices Physical Exercise - "Go pick up heavy things" - resistance training moderates negative emotions Arthur's 4:30 AM Protocol – Wakes at 4:30, works out 4:45-5:45, attends mass 6:30-7:00, then has high-protein breakfast with dark coffee at 7:45 for 4 hours of peak creative focus. "I get four hours of creative concentration with maximum dopamine." Exercise Reduces Unhappiness, Doesn't Create Happiness – "Working out hard... moderates negative affect. It makes you less unhappy" rather than directly increasing positive emotions. The Failure Journal Method – Write down failures/disappointments, return after 3 weeks to note learnings, return after 2 more months to identify good things that resulted. This installs learning in the prefrontal cortex rather than letting it "float around limbically." Early Success Can Be Dangerous – Scholars rejected for early research grants outperformed those with early success. "Much better is when you do the work and build yourself up... be a wholesaler before you become a retailer." Management Doesn't Provide Flow – "There's one kind of job where you don't get flow, and that's management... you're getting jerked from thing

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Shaka Sengor spent 19 years in prison for killing a man. He's transformed his life through not making excuses and taking full ownership of his decisions. Now, he's a New York Times best-selling author who has been called a "soul igniter" by Oprah. His latest book is called How to Be Free. Notes: The Permanence of Split-Second Decisions – At 17, shot three times on a Detroit corner. At 19, he killed a man in a conflict after creating a narrative that he would "shoot first." Sentenced to 17-40 years for second-degree murder. "I try to teach young people about understanding the permanence of a 30-second decision." Books as Portals to Freedom – Read over 1,500 books during 19-year incarceration, starting with street literature (Pimp, Black Gangster) as a gateway to philosophy (Plato, Marcus Aurelius). "Books allowed me to escape in the most literal sense... a portal into other worlds." Prison Mentors Changed Everything – Lifers became his guides: "These are men serving life sentences who came equipped with wisdom about what's on the other side... they guided me to books that shattered old narratives and opened possibilities." Reading Creates Writing Excellence – Speed-reading skill from age 8 (learned during punishments with encyclopedias) combined with voracious prison reading, led to becoming a NY Times bestselling author. "You have to be a practitioner of the craft every day." Journaling as Transformation Tool – "It was the most healing experience I've ever had to speak to my truth, speak to the pain points." Uses 20 different journals, writes everywhere - planes, shower thoughts on phone, margins of books. Hidden Prisons We All Carry – "The most powerful prisons aren't the ones made of concrete and steel. They're the ones we carry with us, built from grief, anger, shame, trauma." Everyone has internal prisons that can be opened. Vulnerability as Strength, Not Manipulation – Authentic vulnerability vs. weaponized oversharing. "Human beings have this innate ability to suss out the truth. Authen

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Michelle "Mace" Curran is a combat veteran, former fighter pilot, and only the second woman in history to fly as the Lead Solo for the Thunderbirds, the U.S. Air Force's elite demonstration squadron. Now on a new mission, she's using her story to inspire others. She is the best-selling author of The Flipside: How to Invert Your Perspective and Turn Fear Into Your Superpower. How to run "debrief" so that giving and getting feedback becomes embedded in your culture. The biggest mistake Michelle made when she became a new fighter pilot, and what you can learn from it. Early Exposure to Male-Dominated Environments – Michelle's dad took her hunting with guys starting at age 7, teaching her she "belonged in any room" she wanted to pursue. This early experience prepared her for being 1 of only 2% female fighter pilots. Parents Who Believed in Wild Dreams – Parents worked multiple jobs to afford camps (criminal justice, archaeology) whenever Michelle showed interest in something new. Taught her that opportunities weren't just possibilities - "I could go after it." The Lone Wolf Trap – When struggling in her first squadron, Michelle was afraid to ask questions because she thought it would show she didn't belong. "I wouldn't even ask questions because I felt like asking a question was just so uncomfortable." Three Years of Struggling in Silence – Despite performing well in the air, Michelle spent three years "belly crawling, pulling myself by my fingernails" because she felt pressure to represent all women perfectly. The Fresh Start Power – Moving from Japan to Texas gave her a reset: "No one here knows about my divorce. No one here knows all these struggles I've been going through." Sometimes you need a clean slate to rebuild. Curiosity + Vulnerability = Community – The breakthrough came when fellow pilots asked pointed questions beyond platitudes: "How are you actually doing?" Real curiosity that goes deeper than "let me know if you need anything." The Near Head-On Collision Story – Flying inverted at 500 mph, passing within 80 feet of another jet using only eyeballs for distance measurement. When her student pilot aimed stra

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My guest: Sam Lessin is a Partner at Slow Ventures, with prior experience as Vice President of Product Management at Facebook and CEO of Drop.io. His career highlights include serving as a key executive at Facebook, leading product management efforts, and successfully co-founding Fin. His current role at Slow Ventures involves investing in innovative startups across various sectors, showcasing his expertise in entrepreneurship and venture capital. Notes: Key Learnings The 4:30 AM Advantage – Sam's father would be at his desk by 4:30 AM every day, saying, "It's easy to look smart if you have a several-hour head start on everyone else." Early work creates compounding advantages over time. Either Be Early or Be Late, Don't Be On Time – Father's wisdom about timing and seasons. Start your career super early to get ahead, or strategically wait and come in later. Timing matters more than perfect preparation. Joy as the Ultimate Competitive Advantage – "I just don't think that in the long run, angry people win." Look for joyful people in hiring and partnerships because joy is sustainable while anger burns out. Type Two Fun Builds Resilience – Type 1 fun is enjoyable while doing it (rollercoaster). Type 2 fun "completely sucks while you're doing it, but there's joy on the other side" (climbing mountains, marathons). Entrepreneurs need Type 2 fun experiences. Practice Voluntary Hardship – Sam ran a sub-3-hour marathon and got a pilot's license not for love of activities, but for "practice moments" of perseverance. Creates evidence that you can handle business adversity. Right Person, Right Opportunity, Right Time – Don't ask "is this a great person?" Ask, "Is it the right person at the right moment?" Success requires all three elements to align, not just talent. Write Publicly for Intellectual Receipts – "If you can't write the check, write me the thesis and timestamp it." Writing creates accountability, proves thinking ability, and builds reputation over time. Nobody Knows What They're Doing – Workin

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My Guest: Ed Latimore is a professional heavyweight boxer, best-selling author, and veteran of the U.S. Army National Guard. He earned a degree in Physics from Duquesne University. Ed has gained recognition for overcoming personal struggles with addiction and poverty. We recorded this at our 2025 Learning Leader Growth Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. He's the author of Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business. Notes: Key Learnings The Heaviest Weight at the Gym is the Front Door – Starting is often the hardest part. "Zero to one is the hardest part" in any endeavor. Once you begin, momentum builds, but that first step requires the most effort. How You Feel is Irrelevant – "How you feel about doing something is irrelevant. If it is vital to your success, you've gotta bump to the wall a bunch of times." Discipline isn't about motivation—it's about doing what's necessary regardless of feelings. Sobriety: The Hardest Fight – 13+ years sober, describing it as "the hardest fight I've ever had." The turning point came during basic training when he built an identity completely free of alcohol for the first time in his adult life. From Being Liked to Being Respected – "When people like you, they want to party with you... When people respect you, you start getting invited back to family events." Shifted focus from seeking approval through partying to earning respect through character. The Baby Shower Revelation – Breakthrough moment when friends showed up with gifts for his unborn child, "all because he is my human." Realized people genuinely cared about him, which became the foundation for believing he mattered. Taking Ownership vs. Playing Victim – "A judge and a jury do not care about my terrible upbringing if I commit a crime." Despite growing up next to a crack house with family addiction issues, I chose accountability over excuses. Net Positive Impact Philosophy – Goal with raising children: "Make sure they are a net positive, they make things better. At the very least, let's make sure they d

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader My Guest: Tim Ferriss is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers (including The 4-Hour Work Week, Tools of Titans, and Tribe of Mentors). His podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, has been listened to more than a billion times. Tim was an early investor in Uber, Shopify, Twitter, Alibaba, and many others. He's the creator of a new card game called COYOTE. Decision making - How can I win even if I lose? He viewed angel investing like his personal MBA. Instead of paying for business school, he invested in companies and learned about business by working with actual businesses. He didn't expect to make money on those investments. That was just a bonus. Think, "How can I win even if I lose?" Tim won with those investments, regardless of whether he made money or not on them. Key Takeaways and Learnings: Parents Who Foster Curiosity – Tim's mother created a "books are always in budget" policy despite tight finances. Used remainder tables at bookstores to expose him to random, off-menu knowledge that sparked lifelong curiosity about unconventional topics. Curiosity-Driven Exploration – When Tim showed interest in marine biology, his mom found Frank Mundus (inspiration for Jaws character), arranged a meeting, and created low-cost adventures like crab fishing with chicken bones to fuel his interests. The Mask You Wear Becomes You – "Be very careful what you pretend to be" - spent years presenting as overly serious to be taken seriously, which created a recursive feedback loop. Now embraces more play and laughter to avoid burnout. Fiction and Poetry as Life Teachers – Shifted from non-fiction purist to reading more fiction/poetry. Recommends "Ozymandias" as a monthly reminder that all achievements fade: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty and despair. Nothing beside remains." Internal vs External Scorecards – Money and fame amplify whatever's underneath, like alcohol or power. "If you have certain insecurities or paranoia, all of those are going to be amplified. If you're generous, that's also gonna be the case." Effectiveness Over Efficiency – "Effectiveness is doing the right things, efficiency is doing things well, but doing something well does not make it important." Focus on choosing the right targets rather than optimizing everything. Strategic Slack in Systems – Mo

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Guest: Nick Maggiulli is the Chief Operating Officer and Data Scientist at Ritholtz Wealth Management. He is the best-selling author of Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth, and his latest book is called The Wealth Ladder. Nick is also the author of OfDollarsAndData.com, a blog focused on the intersection of data and personal finance. Notes: Money works as an enhancer, not a solution: Like salt enhances food flavors, money amplifies existing life experiences but has little value by itself without relationships, health, and purpose. "Money by itself is useless... without friends, family, without your health, it doesn't add much... it enhances all the other parts of life." Nick beat his dad's friends at chess when he was 5 years old because he practiced more than they did. He got more reps. He did the work. It's not that he was a chess prodigy. He just worked harder than his opponents did. And he still does that today. Practice creates expertise beyond intelligence: At five years old, Maggiulli could beat adults at chess not because he was smarter, but because he had more practice. Consistent effort over time can outcompete raw talent. "I could beat them, not because I was smarter than them, only because I had practiced something... In this very specific realm, I could beat them." Consistent writing builds compound advantages: Writing 10 hours every weekend for nine years created opportunities including book deals and career advancement. The discipline of regular practice compounds over time. "I've been writing for nine years... I spend 10 hours a week every single week for almost a decade now, and that helps over time." The most expensive thing people own is their ego. How do you add value when you're in a job that doesn't have a clear scoreboard (like sales)? Think... What gets accomplished that otherwise wouldn't have without you? Add value through time savings and efficiency: In roles where impact isn't immediately measurable, focus on how much time and effort you save others. Create systems that make your colleagues more efficient. "How do I save our operations team time? How do I save our compliance team time... I'm de

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, a technology-driven global logistics company. He's a leading voice in supply chain innovation and has been at the forefront of solving major trade and shipping challenges worldwide. Notes: "Arrogance is its own form of stupidity." The Tweetstorm That Saved Christmas: Ryan shares the now-legendary story of how he rented a boat, brought tacos, and took another high-powered CEO with him to tour the Port of Long Beach during the supply chain crisis. His viral Twitter thread sparked immediate action, California Governor Gavin Newsom called within hours, and the policy changed shortly after. A masterclass in "doing the thing." Frontline Obsession & Gemba Walks: Why Ryan frequently travels the world (visiting 19 countries last year) to meet employees and customers. He explains the power of Gemba walks, being physically present on the frontlines, and how it shapes his leadership. How He Runs Flexport: Ryan's leadership playbook includes: Managing through writing. Every one of his 26 teams writes a six-page memo monthly, followed by deep conversations. Daily conversations with 30-40 employees to stay connected. Living Flexport's values: Empower Clients, Play the Long Game, Act Like an Entrepreneur, Commit to the Vision, Ask Why 5 Times. Leadership & Decision-Making: He shares his "must-haves" for hiring leaders: Relentless Work Ethic Intellectual Curiosity Humility ("Even wise people are wrong 30% of the time.") Reliability Charisma Lessons from Mentors: Ryan talks about advice from Paul Graham (Y Combinator) and Brian Chesky (Airbnb), including how gathering your top leaders in person sparks innovation and alignment. Hard Decisions & Mistakes: He candidly discusses Flexport's CEO transition gone wrong, hiring Dave Clark from Amazon, and what he learned from that difficult chapter. Personal Growth & Life Philosophy: Ryan shares his approach to lifelong learning, inspired by Charlie Munger and René Girard. He

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Go to www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Guest: Blaine Anderson is a dating coach and matchmaker. She's helped more than 3,000 happy clients attract and build long-term relationships. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and she earned a deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. Notes: Someone asked Charlie Munger… How do I get a great wife? Deserve one. The best way to find a good spouse is to deserve one, he often said. In business, this translates to working hard and behaving with integrity consistently over time. "To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want." What is the #1 reason you don't get a second date? You talk about yourself too much. When you go out to eat with someone, what percentage of the time are you talking? Aim to talk 30% and listen 70%. The reason we don't get the second date or the follow-up meeting with the prospect is because we are talking too much. Pull conversational threads: Avoid rapid-fire questioning by following up on answers with related questions. Share brief personal connections to create dialogue rather than interrogation. "You want to pull the conversational thread... ask a follow-up question about that same thing. That's where you can start having a conversation." Marketing your trajectory matters: People want to know you're going places. Share your goals, dreams, and aspirations authentically to demonstrate upward momentum. "You want to find the balance of sharing things about yourself that indicate you are on an upward trajectory... from a place of getting to know one another." Nice guys need boundaries: Being overly accommodating to people you barely know signals weakness. Hold boundaries and don't put others before yourself too quickly. "The general problem with the nice guy is he's putting other people before himself, including people he doesn't know very well." Confidence must be genuine: Authentic confidence comes from actually becoming confident through mastery, not just faking body language. Get genuinely good at something. "You have to become that... get really good at something... picking something in your life and getting really good at it is gonna help you build confidence." Don't rush to the close: Whe

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for all show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Go to www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Anthony Scaramucci served as the White House Director of Communications for President Donald Trump from July 21 to July 31, 2017. He was at Harvard Law School with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. He's the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital. And he's the founder and Chairman of the SALT conference. Leadership through service: True leadership isn't about personal glory but about making others better and helping them succeed in their roles. Derek Jeter exemplified this by never caring about personal statistics, only team success. "If you're on the team, it's not about me, right? It's about you. How am I gonna make you better? Or how am I gonna make you feel good about your role? How am I gonna get you to think that I'm here to help you?" Flexibility and decision-making under pressure: Football taught Scaramucci the importance of reading situations quickly and making audibles at the line of scrimmage - skills that translate directly to business and life leadership. "You can't just say, okay, here's the game plan, right? Because that's what Mike Tyson says, right? You have the plan until you get punched in the face, or all battle plans go by the wayside with contact with the enemy." Resilience through adversity: Getting "your ass kicked" early in life builds the resilience needed for future challenges in business and politics. Early defeats teach you how to bounce back from failure. "That's called resilience, right? You gotta get over that... That's how you gotta get your ass kicked. Here I was... and I just remember feeling so puny... So how you gotta get over that." The confidence battle starts within: The first fight in life is with yourself - believing you're good enough and worthy to compete. Henry Ford's principle applies: "If you think you can or you can't, you are right." "The first fight is with yourself. Am I good enough? Am I worthy? Can I get to the game? Can I believe in myself enough so that I'm standing next to someone else who believes in themselves that I compete?" Accountability in relationsh

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Go to www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Jim Murphy is a mental performance coach for some of the most accomplished professional athletes in the world. Formerly a professional baseball player, he now focuses on helping others. You may have heard of him if you were watching the Philadelphia Eagles' playoff run last season, and star wide receiver AJ Brown was reading Jim's book Inner Excellence on the sideline between offensive series. Notes: The first 11 days of 2025, Inner Excellence (originally published 16 years ago) sold about 25 copies… What happened on January 12? AJ Brown was shown on TV reading it in between offensive series. It then sold 200,000 copies in 20 days. Fear is a concern about the future. Give the best of what you have today. Be present. Heart, will, spirit = the deepest part of you When we're at our best, there's no thought of self. 5 greatest needs That we have value Love and acceptance Integrity Purpose beyond self Growth Dick Vermiel's coaching style - Coach the person first. Then the sport (or the thing you're doing). The same is true for any leadership role. People won't care what you think unless they know you actually care about them. 4 Daily Goals Give the best of what you have today Be present. Fear is a future thing. Be grateful Focus on what you can control Anxiety is a mind with too many thoughts and concerns. Need to face our fears. 3 Key Areas: Belief - expand what you think is possible. Freedom - play like a kid (let it rip). Focus - Be fully present Status vs amazing experiences. Love is the most powerful force in the universe. Joy comes from love. Love can come from weaknesses. Ego - Always comparing, creates

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Larry Connor is an entrepreneur, non-profit activist investor, and adventurist. In business, he is best known for founding The Connor Group, a real estate investment firm, and growing it from $0 to $5 billion in assets. Outside of work, Larry lives an adventurous life. Within a 12 month period Larry did something that had never been done before. He completed 3 dives to the deepest part of the ocean (the Mariana Trench) AND traveled to the International Space Station as an astronaut. In addition to that, Larry is a private pilot and was part of a Le Mans racing team that has won championships. "At The Connor Group, we don't have, and never will have, a mission statement. We have culture. When you have the latter, the former is not necessary." The culture is built on 5 core values, on which we don't compromise: Do the right thing People count Live the Circle of Success Think long-term, not short-term Relentless pursuit of excellence "We exist, quite simply, to be the best." "We don't hire for experience. We don't hire for knowledge. We don't care where you went to school. We hire for personality traits. Especially in leadership roles. You have to have the big 6. You have to have all 6. They are: 1. Be able to motivate and inspire others. 2. Self-accountability and ability to hold others accountable in an honest, direct manner. 3. Organizational multi-tasking. The speed of the game is fast. 4. Cultural fit. 5. Grit. Doing the thing that others say are impossible. 6. Work orientation. If you want to come in at 8:30, take a 90-minute lunch, and leave at 4:30, The Connor Group is not for you. "People never outperform their own self-image. So aim high!" "Mediocre people don't like high achievers and high achievers don't like mediocre people." "B