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Hi, I am Lacey Lamar. And I'm also Lacey Lamar. Just kidding. I'm Amber Revin. What? Okay, everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're back with season two of the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. This season, we make new friends, deep dive into my steamy DMs, and we'll be right back.
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I'm Lauren Lapkus, voice of Teresa and host of Haunting. In this series, we'll be bringing you different totally true ghost stories each week straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. I'm excited to share that you can now get access to all new episodes of Haunting 100% ad-free and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.
Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.
Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? Does it mean you quit your job and start a business? Sometimes. But I know entrepreneurs who work in big companies too. The reality is that entrepreneurial spirit is more common than we realize. In fact, the number of young employees that also have a side hustle, I would argue they're entrepreneurs.
So if you want to be really good at your hustle, if you want to be really good at being an entrepreneur, you really need to listen to Jeff Rosenthal. He's one of the founders of Summit Series, which is a community of and for remarkable entrepreneurs. And we talked about the enthusiasm it takes to do something completely unreasonable. This is a bit of optimism.
Jeff, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. You're one of my favorite people because you are charming and funny and engaging and the consistency with which you bring magic.
Wow, that is incredibly flattering. Thank you so much, Simon. Let's start right at the beginning. For those who don't know you, you are the co-founder of something called Summit Series. And for those who don't know Summit Series, how do you define it? Well, Summit Series and Summit is an organization that I started with my co-founders actually now.
15 years ago. So we started it when we were 24 years old. The initial intention was simply to meet and connect with other entrepreneurs and makers and creators. We were young entrepreneurs. We didn't have a peer group. And we thought, man, what better way to create it than invite people to an event? Our first event was 19 people in Park City, Utah. Second event was 60 in Mexico. And third was at the Obama White House a month after they took office. So we had very exponential success.
And we were also the youngest, dumbest people in the room, which made us real servant leaders. It was pretty easy to grow and build a community with the incredible advice and mentorship that we got from the very beginning. And so today, Summit spans our flagship events around the world, these multi-thousand person thought leadership events that connect people.
entrepreneurs and impact leaders and musicians and architects and scientists from different generations. And we also own and operate Powder Mountain, the largest ski resort in the US, in Eden, Utah, which we bought in 2013. And I've been building a town dedicated to these same generational ideals of community and entrepreneurship and collaboration. It spans so many things now, Simon. At its core, it really is a community company that's looking to connect and inspire thought leaders of our time to hopefully help them accomplish more
of the exceptional work that they were already doing. What is a young generation of capitalists, young generation of entrepreneurs doing differently than previous generations that you think gives capitalism hope? I can't speak to generations just because I think that there are exceptional leaders in every generation that end up defining what it's all about. And there's a lot of people that are
just pure capitalists. And there's a lot of people that don't really enter the ballgame. Unless you're afflicted by creation, you typically don't build things to scale. I just can speak to the summit version of capitalists. I'm a firm believer that market-based solutions are typically the only thing that can really change the world at scale. Here's the problem when I hear people say, oh, market forces, libertarian, let the market decide, which is without checks and balances, human greed...
And the pressures of short-term gains sometimes overwhelm our desire to do things ethically. Absolutely. Well, on that end, I mean, like you can look at East Palestine, Ohio, and this train crash and, you know, the chemical spills, or, I mean, I completely agree with you. And I'm not saying by any means that markets should regulate themselves. I think that sentiment drives policy and policy can change everything. And, you know, we have to all
collectively decide that it's a future that we want so our elected leaders will seek our best interests versus just getting reelected. And I'm certainly not speaking to the biggest publicly traded companies whose ultimate responsibility is short-term shareholder wealth. I'm simply saying that if you want to change the world at scale, things that make money tend to grow and things that lose money tend to shrink over time. Yeah.
That's really it. It's super simple. We're in a fucked up time in the world where it is like a greased wall of capitalism, where your money shrinks in your bank account through inflation, where it's incredibly challenging to achieve anything in this world. But I think that the beauty of entrepreneurship is that you don't have to have the right answers.
Like if you have a big idea and you have enthusiasm and you start sharing it with people, this is my experience. They'll tell you where you're wrong. They'll tell you how to refine it. And, you know, the job is just to punch through wall after wall for a decade. That's the job. It's not sexy. It's so romanticized, you know, in media and in television. But the reality is, is that you just have to be willing to be deeply responsive and take a lot of shrapnel on your way up the mountain. I think it's worth defining what an entrepreneur is.
because I try and make the distinction that there's a small business owner and there's an entrepreneur. Small business owners own small businesses. Entrepreneurs solve problems and you can find entrepreneurs in large companies.
And they tend to be rabble-rousers and they tend to sort of push upstream. And you talk about how the entrepreneur lifestyle is sort of – it's not very glamorous and it's about smashing through walls for some greater gain, some greater good. And you find those people inside large bureaucratic organizations as well. And just because somebody starts a small business doesn't mean they're an entrepreneur. It just means they're a small business owner. And so it raises the question. We can teach people how to start a small business. We can teach people how to run a company.
But can we teach entrepreneurship or is it a personality? Well, you have to be unreasonable. Whether you're an entrepreneur or you're an executive in a bigger organization, you
pragmatists, realists, people that want to like handicap the exceptional potentialities, they never make great work because they're not unreasonable and delusional enough to do so. They can make good work. They can be more consistent than the sort of entrepreneurially mindset, you know, person. That's not,
grammatically correct, but you know what I'm saying. We don't require perfect grammar here and a bit of optimism. Okay, good. It's just you got to stay optimistic, but not grammatically correct. I just love this idea that an entrepreneur, by definition, must be unreasonable, must be unreasonable in their expectations, their drive, and their idealism. The entrepreneurial adventure is romanticized, to your point. It's a slog. And I think people who truly live that lifestyle, there's a grit and a stupidity to it. Yeah.
In retrospect, that's how you see it. Just because there's always a better way to do it. I think about your work and you framed it so perfectly with the infinite game. It's an infinite game. It's 360 degrees. You can always make a different play. You can always bring in better wisdom or advice. There's always an optimal way in retrospect that you could have handled the problem. The key is to stay alive and the key is to keep moving forward. Just incrementally making whatever you do better every day.
The big Eureka idea, certainly there are people who do that. They're in the shower and they're like, wow, what if toasters ran backwards? I don't know. I don't have an example off the top of my head. So they have some brilliant idea in the shower and then they go and they raise money against the deck and then suddenly a great team just comes around them and they build a billion dollar business. I just don't know that example.
There's 30,000 people in Summit. There's a dozen that can do this all by themselves and have the great idea and plan the strategy and execute the business. Typically, it's the resiliency and it's the commercialization of something that already exists. It's taking a great idea and thinking about how people actually will use it. Often that is the big sort of chasm between things that happen and don't happen.
So that's the other piece I would demystify. It's the hard part is like building a championship team and then performing at a very high level for a consistent period of time. That's what gets it all done. And at the front, I,
I've learned, you know, I was 24 when we started Summit. I'm 38 now. Now, when I think about things that we're building, I measure 10 times before we cut once. I think about strategy endlessly before we start producing and putting people in place and building structure.
Whereas when we were young entrepreneurs, it was very ready, fire, aim. When you're a kid, you have all the energy in the world to have the hustle. And then as you get older and you're a tired old fart like myself, you just have to utilize the wisdom around you and just scope and cite your moves very differently.
I want to keep pulling on the string because I think this is really interesting. I think for people who are either on a new entrepreneurial venture or have entrepreneurial ambitions, A, to demystify some of it, but B, to sort of prep them to not make the same mistakes that we had to make. I can tell you the biggest mistake that I made as a young entrepreneur, and I started my business when I was 28. I quit my job and thought they have me on the new business team for their company. Why don't I just go the new business team for my company?
Which was stupid because I forgot when you pick up the phone and say, hi, I'm from this big company, people take the call. When you call up and they don't know who you are, they don't take the call. But the biggest mistake that I made was that I had the false belief that I had to know all the answers just because I was the founder of the company.
and the false belief that if I didn't know the answer, I had to pretend that I did because I wanted to project confidence having all the answers. And when I started to learn to say, can you help me and I don't know, things profoundly changed for the better. For sure. One of the things I wish I did earlier was harness the power of mentors. I was in my early 20s, a lot of confirmation bias. Things kept working for us. So we would think our ideas were great ideas.
The truth is, is that almost every path has been walked before by somebody in a previous generation. And, you know, I really learned how to be a good mentee through our mutual friend, Ben Vandabon, in our early meetings. And Ben was the CEO of Guthrie Ranker and a founder of Cypress Creek Renewables, our chairman. And early, I mean, I think it was our first hang at the end of the dinner. He was like, hey, just by the way,
If you're just going to tell me everything's good and things are cool and we're just going to hang out, I don't really need any more friends. I have plenty of friends. But if you're willing to tell me what's really challenging for you and really hard, then that's fun for me. And I enjoy supporting young entrepreneurs like that.
And I just never really knew that until then. I always would project that confidence like you just described and tell them about all the stuff that's happening that's awesome and then sneak in the one favor I needed or the one thing I needed help with because I thought that that was the perception I needed to create where in reality, if I was just like, hey, thank you. Let me tell you about all the things that I can't figure out right now. Can you help me do these things? Do you have these relationships? So much of that work would have been done for us. I mean, prime example is Powder Mountain.
We thought that we needed to be the guys to develop it and do the massing studies and do the land planning. And we literally designed the roads, like so unnecessary. We had no experience. You're 28 years old. Now, we're lucky that the final product came out really wonderfully. But in terms of just like the brain damage and the time spent,
And frankly, the pace of the project would have been different had we had somebody with 30 or 40 years experience shoulder to shoulder with us. When you were a young entrepreneur, how did you resist the good idea fairy, the shiny object syndrome that so many entrepreneurs suffer from, much to the frustration of anybody who works with them? Ooh, we have to do this. Ooh, we have to do that. And they're all good ideas, but my goodness, they're distracting. So with Summit, early on, there were four of us.
And then we hired like four other people and we would all live in a house together and travel around the world and build dinners and events and small stuff so we could attract a global community to our big annual flagship event.
By say 2010, 2011, we had like 20 people in the house. So we had like a full-time chef and we were eating breakfast, lunch and dinner together and we'd work together all day. And then we would like exercise together and hit the spa together and hang out at night together. And so there was a constant opportunity for ideation.
what entertained us the most was just talking shit and coming up with crazy ideas. And so we would say like the most outlandish possible thing. And nine out of 10 of them, 90 out of a hundred of them would be pretty stupid and they'd be outside of the balance of reality. But a couple of them,
A couple of them would be interesting and incredible and differentiated enough to where we knew that if we told anyone about it, any of our customers, any of our supporters, any of our partners, they would go, wow, that's a crazy idea. Is that possible? That's not possible. Wow, it's possible. And so that was sort of like the minimum viable threshold approach.
bar of what we would then go and pursue. We would be like, okay, we just did two of these conferences. What would be crazy enough? Do we do it in a volcano? Do we get a hot air balloon? Maybe we charter an ocean liner. And then that third one, we were like, hey, we actually could charter an ocean liner. Ultimately, we never got into the sort of like shiny object syndrome, let's do 40 things. We always were kind of like, let's make sure we do one thing right.
And our one thing with the live events or with building a mountain town were so hard that it really didn't give us the bandwidth or the leeway to go and chase a bunch of fairies. But when it came to buying the mountain or building crazier events, that was sort of how we did it. You're making a very strong case for going back to the office.
But you're also making a very strong case for partnership. And I think the entrepreneur, whether they have a team or not, who is making all of the decisions or at least has very little pushback, that's where shiny object syndrome settles in. I'm a great believer in partnerships rather than individual entrepreneurs. If I meet a young entrepreneur, I always want to know who's your partner, whether they have formal title or not, whether they're your 50-50 partner or not. Who's the person who's going to tell you, that's stupid, you're an idiot? So this is a
It's a Star Wars reference because I can't help myself. If you're a true Star Wars fan, you don't like episodes one, two, and three. But you realize that the original Star Wars episodes four, five, and six were made very differently than episodes one, two, and three, which was the more modern ones. And it wasn't just about technology that was available. I saw a documentary about the makings of episode one, two, and three. And
George Lucas went to see some of the creatures that they were designing, some of the models that they were designing at Industrial Light and Magic. And here you had the most powerful special effects people in the entire industry, these executives from ILM. And they were following George around hunched over like when you see clips of
Kim Jong-un with his generals around him where they're all sort of with their little notebooks and George would be like, I like this one. I don't like this one. Make this one green. Make this one blue. And they're all going, yes, George. Yes, George. Yes, George. And you realize that nobody was pushing back and saying, that's stupid. And if you go watch any footage of the original making of Star Wars, it's
They ignored him and he was just like wandering around by himself sometimes and they respected him and they knew he was the director and the writer, but they would push back and they would say that's stupid or here's a better way. And that push me pull you to your point about constant improvement.
I think is absolutely essential for social animals like human beings to advance greater goods or advance good ideas. And when it's left to one person, as you said, the number of people that I've met who can do it by themselves, we'd like to say it's precious few, but it's probably zero because they probably have somebody lurking in the background that we don't know about.
I love that example. You have to have a visionary. You have to have somebody who can shoot for the stars so the organization can land on the moon. George Lucas is a great example. I think about Guy Laliberte, the founder of Cirque du Soleil. Sometimes they would create the costumes and the dances and the backdrops and 75% of a $100 million show before Guy would look at it. And then Guy would sit down and watch it and say, oh, 50% of this needs to get changed. It would drive people crazy.
They'd say, hey, why can't he be in these meetings earlier? Why can't he come and tell us? He's seeking a feeling. He's not looking for what color the shoes that their shoemaker makes. He's thinking about cohesively, comprehensively, how does this make him feel? And then how can he shift it to create the feeling he wants the audience to have? So in certain cases, when it's managed properly in an organization, that George Lucas example with the right team of people, with the right understanding of what his true talents are,
George's true talents are he's the visionary. He's the guy that built the hero's journey into the biggest film franchise of all time. Name another franchise that's had a greater effect on people. Sure. One, two, three, whatever. I hear you. The reason that there was that fealty to the king was because of probably all of their obsessions with the earlier Star Wars. And they weren't sharing in the...
Enthusiasm. I love the word entheos. It's the root of enthusiasm. It means with God. Like when you feel that feeling that you like, you know, are totally enthusiastic, then you crush it, man. Like if it's fun for me and it's my passion and it's work for you, I'm going to run circles around you. Going backwards really quickly, because I was thinking about you at 27 when you left and you were like, I can do this on my own. The thing that's missing actually is not just the brand name on the masthead, it's the apprenticeship.
So if you were saying, hey, I'm 22 and I'm coming out of school and I want to run a startup, it's like, probably don't do that. Figure out what space you want to be in and then go and work for the person that you admire the most. And if you pick 10 people or five people and you honestly know why you want to be at their side, you're going to get one of those jobs because people that are like run through walls for you and really want to learn what you do that you can pass on your expertise. It's so rare. And there's two stories that come to mind. You know, when I was young and interviewing for jobs in the ad business, I was
I would sit down with these HR people who were interviewing me and they
they would always ask me the same question. What are you looking for? I had a stuck answer, which was 100% true. I said, what I'm looking for might be akin to looking for love, but I'm looking for a mentor. What a great answer. But it was true. And I would take jobs for companies that weren't glamorous on accounts that nobody in my business wanted to work for because everybody would work in all the glamorous accounts like Nike and Apple and all those. And I worked on Oppenheimer funds by choice. Mm-hmm.
But that's because I was less concerned about the glamour of what other people thought about my career. And I wanted to work for a person.
that I believed could teach me. I remember I was assigned on this new business pitch and they had me work for a guy I didn't know in the company. And I had to write some deck. I don't remember what the details were. And he told me the briefing and I went and wrote it. And I came back and showed him my work and he literally ripped into it. He just told me how bad it was and everything that was wrong with it. And I looked at him and go, all right, I'll do it again. And I went back to my office and worked another three days and
and came back and he ripped it to shreds again. By the fourth time, he's ripping it to shreds and I'm laughing my head off. I'm like, come on, you got to say it's a little better. By seven rounds, I nailed it.
But the point was, he wasn't pushing me because he thought I was dumb. He was pushing me because he thought I could do better work than I was doing. And he was teaching me because I didn't know what I was doing. To your point about running through walls, I think that entrepreneurial mindset is not just running through walls over the course of years to build a vision, but it's sometimes very, very short term running through walls and doing something over and over and over again, trying to make it better and better each time and being able to have the grit
to withstand that criticism and not take it as an attack, but take it as an education. The greatest gift. That was the guy in your office. He cared more about you than anybody else in that office. 100%. Silence and apathy is where you really know people don't care about you. And after that, his respect for me was so high and my respect for him was so high at the end. And after that project...
Like I would go to him all the time for advice and he would give it to me because I knew he was an honest broker and he knew that I cared about what he was telling me. Didn't always agree with it, but I always went to listen. Well, one trick that we ran with Summit, and it's definitely something I still do today. We always were like a complaint is a gift, right? And if you're willing to give us honest critique, you're our best friend.
And it feels negative for you and it can feel negative for the person receiving the criticism, but it's typically something you've only thought about a little bit. It's not your business. This isn't as important to you as it is to me. So anytime I would get that critical feedback, we would typically spend more time on it and
and try to overcorrect for it. Because that way, when I would come back to you, you said, hey, the food wasn't good at this event. I'd go, Simon, you were absolutely right. This time, now I have this amazing chef and we're sourcing the produce from this place. And it could be on gender equity in terms of the product we were creating.
Or it could be in terms of the types of scientists or life scientists that we would have representing next generation technology. Ultimately, I would give me critique. I'd go, I'd overcorrect for it. I'd come back and I'd show you my work. I'd say, hey, look, you said you wanted this thing. I did 2x what you said you wanted. So now this really feels like it's yours. And that was the ambition always.
Because we're not geniuses, we're socially talented and we have voracious capacity for learning. And so it was really essential for us to build as many relationships as possible that made Summit feel like it was theirs, right? And that's how we would do it. I think there's another component to this, which is a moral compass, knowing your values. Because I can tell you all the worst decisions I made throughout my whole career were when I deferred to people who knew much more than I did
but what they were telling me didn't feel right. It's not that it didn't feel right because I thought they were dumb. It didn't feel right because it somehow shape or form violated my ethical compass, my moral compass, or my values.
But I would defer to them and sometimes push away that feeling because they're smarter than I am. They're more successful than I am. They've done this before. They're experts in their field. I guess I should listen to them. And every bad decision I've ever made was when I ignored that feeling. I love the quote, write your ethics in stone and your opinions in sand.
Yeah. You know, again, how you do anything is how you do everything. I do think that, you know, one operate from your own ethics as it's the most valuable asset you'll ever have. But two, when people don't meet your expectations, your version of friendship, your version of ethics, you can't really blame them for it. You can't let that like throw you off because anger really just corrodes the vessel it's in. It won't affect them at all. It'll only affect you. One other thing that I admire about you and the way you do business is
is you embody doing business with generosity. I've seen you do it a hundred times and it's real. You give with no expectation of anything in return. And you are willing to share every resource you have, every connection you've got with someone else without any prerequisite, which is sadly not the norm. You're like, hey, you need to meet this person. And that spirit of generosity is
When you believe that there's mutual benefit to creating a connection is, like I said, sadly not the norm. Where does that come from? Well, I mean, I just believe our liberation is bound up together, man. It's more fun to do it with a crew. The one piece I will say is I am like chemically oriented to this.
I started doing it earlier in my career and this whole idea of giving without the expectation of return. It used to be a bit spray and pray where I would just make like a hundred introductions. Let me be honest, five introductions, six introductions for somebody who was like a new friend that I was meeting through summit. I'd say, Oh, you're doing this, you're doing this. Maybe you'd like this person, whatever. And then over time I got a lot more scoped and sighted with it. Um, and I enjoy it deeply. And frankly, I get, you know, perhaps more pleasure out of it when it's truly generous and without some sort of vested interest. I,
Look, I reflect on why did I build Summit? I clearly needed the admiration and respect or camaraderie with people that I looked up to. I had some kind of hole in my ego where I needed that. Why else would I have done it? I wouldn't have gone and run around and built a global community company. So when I think about this action of generosity...
It reinforces the security that I was seeking to begin with, and it makes me feel great. And it does create the conditions to where I know that if I'm here or not, my family's good. I know that whatever the need is that I have in my business, I have a dozen relationships I can hit up where I'm winning the giving competition. But the key here is that if you think of it as a game of trades and you think of it as a scale that
that your friends or the people around you should be equal to you in the giving, you're going to always be disappointed because your perception is always that you're giving more, whether you are or not. And if you are like me and you get deep pleasure out of giving and you think about it all the time and it makes you happy, that's not how everybody works. And so you can't apply that prism to other people around you. So the best
language I've heard for this, and it was a gift from my friend Hayes Barnard from Good Leap, who also worked with Ben Vandermint for a long time, is the giving competition. It's that you have to intend to win. Everybody can play, but the point is to win the game. I love that. How do you manage stress and disappointment? I've had enough final Fridays now and enough moments of impending doom that I've gotten past to where it really doesn't bother me anymore. I
I have two children. And so like the idea of losing a child, like that's real stress and a possibility. You love people and you'll likely lose some of them in your lifetime. That's really a problem, right? If a loved one has a disease or if somebody is really hurt or injured. The business stresses when, again, when you're young and you're like, oh my God, in two weeks, this is going to happen. If we can't figure this thing out, it seems like the end of the world.
and it can be the end of your venture, but you get past it. And then that happens another two dozen times and you keep getting past it and you keep finding ways to get past it, then the stress doesn't really hit you anymore.
And I've just gotten accustomed to it. Now I also, you know, I hit the sauna, I exercise, I eat well, I sleep well. I'm very conscious about spending time with people that I love and enjoy. I do all the things to keep myself in a condition to where I can keep the work stress in perspective. And I think that if you just do one thing 80 hours a week and you don't do any other stuff and that becomes your whole life, of course it can become crippling when that thing is threatened.
So I would say, you know, taking great care of yourself is focusing on the tool that will do the work. I also always say the answers to the problem are
They're essentially on the inside. You're not going to listen to a TED Talk and be like, Eureka, that's what to do. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but you have to know what you're seeking. And then once the search is in progress, something will be found. Here are the two things that I'm walking away from this conversation. And the frustrating thing about talking to you is I never want it to end, but alas. One is you just elegantly reinforced the importance of
that the entrepreneurial adventure is a team sport. And to call yourself an entrepreneur is to say I'm a member of an entrepreneurial team, you know, and you call it community. And everything about what you've built has been built with and for people. The better we are at building community and creating trusting and meaningful relationships, the more likely we are to succeed in whatever it is we do, like stress, courage, success,
craziness, bright ideas, all that idealism and unreasonableness, it takes a group of people. And I love that. I love that.
The other thing that I'm walking away with is the idea that you said of enthusiasm, entheos, with God, that we can be excited about things, we can be energized about things, but to feel, to feel enthusiasm, we have to believe that what we're looking at or what we're building is literally something bigger than ourselves. It is with God. I'm doing this in service to something greater. And when I feel that enthusiasm, that is the test that I am on the right path.
dare I say, a righteous path. It's both for you and for the people you serve. Feeling moves faster than logic.
So if you're identifying what your feeling is when doing something or thinking about something or working in something, that's the breadcrumbs for you to do the thing that you'll excel at. Ultimately, I think that focusing on that feeling is huge. And then, yeah, on the community piece, dude, a lot of people call bullshit on it. You know, a lot of people are like, oh yeah, community, but it's self-serving this and that. I just don't care because my life is the proof, right? Like we live this. It's not a theory. It's not a thesis. This is
explicitly the way that this happened for us. And frankly, it shaves down our pedestal. We were like, "Oh yeah, we did this all alone. We're brilliant. We're the geniuses, blah, blah, blah." It's just not true. The way that we got here is 100% standing on the shoulders of everybody who came before us. And it's the greatest cheat code. You don't have to be a genius. You just have to recognize when you're around bright people that are passionate about what they do, and then you ask them what they think.
Pay attention. That's the path of entrepreneurship for me. The Marine Corps drills into their recruits history.
the history of the Marine Corps, the important battles, their heroes. And the reason they do this is because they have learned that when somebody is connected to their past, that they feel they will make better decisions in the future, that they will make better decisions because they don't want to let down those who came before them. One of the reasons you maintain high standards and do good things is because you don't want to let down those who believed in you and those who supported you and cared about you.
Totally. Well, for you, I'm just curious. I know we're at the wrap up moment or, you know, close to it. But who are those that came before you? Who are the people in your line of work that you really respect and admire and see as yourself standing on their shoulders? My grandfather was a remarkable human being that was very misunderstood.
And he just marched the beat of his own drum and just didn't care. I got to see an example of somebody who was a weirdo and different and was totally fine with that. And it sort of helped me be okay being confident being different.
I'll leave you with one final thing, which is I think it's important to have a reference. You talked about enthusiasm and theos. I think to have something to go back to, to remind you of why you're doing this and what you're doing. And I hadn't thought about this in a long time, to be honest. And your question prompted it, which I'm very grateful for. But when I was – I think when we had to read Emerson –
in high school, there was one paragraph in his essay, Self-Reliance, that I remember reading over and over and over and over and over. And I would go back to it regularly and read it. And I'll read it to you now. "Of foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do.
He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. Ah, so you shall be misunderstood.
Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
What a paragraph. It's not just about being misunderstood and it's not just about standing out and being a misfit, although it speaks to that quite clearly. There's a line in there that I think is important, which is speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today. In other words, you have to have a growth mindset.
And you have to be willing to be wrong or say, I was wrong and I think differently now. That to be misunderstood means you're growing. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. This sums up for me the difference between a corporate mentality and an entrepreneurial mentality, which is a corporate mentality seeks consistency every day no matter what. And the entrepreneur, driven by passion and vision and unreasonableness, underperforms.
understands that everything's going to change. The entrepreneurial, I'd say, mantra that aligns with this that you hear a lot is strong opinions held loosely. But I think that ultimately, life is short. You should do something that you enjoy.
If you don't have that luxury, try to learn the lessons that are emergent from the thing that you're doing. Even if it's what not to do and how not to operate, you still build your philosophy, your values. You mentioned a team of entrepreneurs. I completely adhere and believe in that. And this idea that our liberation is bound up together. The idea that if you really do want to change the world, find three other people that share a vision for what you'd like to see manifest.
And collectively, that's how the world has always been changed, just with small bands of idiots and unreasonable people that believe deeply in an outcome and then make that thing so. And my ambition is to continue to do that. I deeply appreciate how kind and how generous you are with your compliments of me. And I hope to be in the game for another 50 years. And I hope to create really meaningful work over that period of time. Well, I can tell you, whenever I talk to you, I feel enthusiasm.
Thanks so much for joining me. What a gift. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at simonsenik.com, where you can get access to more than 35 on-demand classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself.
Take care of each other. Hi, I am Lacey Lamar. And I'm also Lacey Lamar. Just kidding. I'm Amber Revin. Okay, everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're back with season two of the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. This season, we make new friends, deep dive into my steamy DMs,
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I'm Lauren Lapkus, voice of Teresa and host of Haunting. In this series, we'll be bringing you different totally true ghost stories each week straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. I'm excited to share that you can now get access to all new episodes of Haunting 100% ad-free and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.
Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.
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