#334 Oprah

I'm going to jump right into this episode, make sure you stick around to the end. There's two very important updates including the very first in person Founders only conference is taking place in Austin, Texas less than 60 days from now. I'll tell you more details stick around to the end. I'll see you on the other side.

In 1984 Oprah was riding high. She was already Chicago's most popular TV talk show personality and the local ABC affiliate that produced her show was paying her $230,000 a year. Her agent had negotiated a four year contract with annual salary increases of $30,000 a year. She was pleased at first but then began having second thoughts.

Three separate ABC people stopped me to tell me what a great guy my agent was Oprah said and that didn't make sense to me. Oprah's natural skepticism was aroused and she fired her agent. She replaced him with a Chicago lawyer named Jeffrey Jacobs. I had her Jeff is a piranha Oprah said. I like that piranha is good.

That key decision turned Oprah from employee to capitalists and vaulted her out of the ranks of the merely well paid into the Forbes 400. Her show now airs on more than 200 stations in the United States and in 117 foreign countries. Oprah earns more than $70 million a year. It is ownership that has made her rich. Oprah owns not only her show but also the studio in which it is produced and she owns a big stake in King World productions the company that distributes her show.

Oprah's previous agent had given the local ABC station the rights to syndicate the Oprah show no wonder they loved him. But Oprah and Jacobs sensed that they could do better and started looking for ways to retrieve her syndication rights. They then brought in King World productions as a distributor. Shortly after Oprah got a break she was picked to star in the film the color purple when her talk show went back on the air in the fall of 1986.

She was a bonafide Hollywood celebrity ratings for her talk show climbed rapidly with King World productions selling at heart Oprah show earned a hundred and 15 million in revenue during its first two seasons. Last year the Oprah Winfrey show took in a hundred and ninety six million dollars in revenue against production costs of thirty million dollars.

This part is fascinating talks about why this happens local stations are willing to pay top dollar for the Oprah show because it assembles an audience that tends to stay tuned to the same channel for the evening news in a market the size of Houston or Atlanta one rating point means about a million dollars a year for that new station right the news programs that follow Oprah are the highest rated in most markets.

And in a market the size of like a Houston or Atlanta or Washington DC these stations were paying over a hundred thousand dollars a week to carry her show Oprah sold her show to two hundred and ten stations last year which agreed to carry the program for the next five years and pay a three to five percent increase every year of the deal. This is so wild what they did in addition to that the stations will also give up an additional minute of advertising time King World the distributor.

And Oprah will share the ad revenues that that minute generates so think about it that's they're getting a minute of ad revenue that's two hundred because they sold the show for two hundred to two hundred ten different stations that's two hundred and ten minutes of advertising five days a week for five years and this is the end result a conservative estimate of this five year of the cat five year cash flow from that deal is four hundred million dollars.

Remembering her close call with becoming just another high paid celebrity Oprah said on my own I will just create. And if it works it works and if it doesn't I'll create something else I don't have any limitations on what I think I could do or be that was an excerpt from a Forbes four hundred article written all the way back in nineteen ninety five when Oprah was just forty one years old.

So I wanted to make a podcast about Oprah for a long time it's incredibly hard I would say almost impossible to find a good like a high quality biography on her and so let me tell you what I did instead and how this episode came to be there is a performance coach and a writer named Dr. Dr Julie Gerner she writes this fantastic newsletter called ultra successful that has a great tagline where it says start your week with the most successful people on earth.

And I was sending her messages on Twitter asking if she knew of any great biographies or autobiographies of Oprah Winfrey she actually gave me great advice she's like I can there's a bunch of like long form interviews of Oprah and her own words and I can't think of. You know a better source than Oprah herself and so I found too long form interviews with Oprah start watching them start taking notes on them like this doesn't feel right this isn't what I do.

And so what I did instead is I downloaded the audio from these interviews I transcribed them printed them out and essentially made my own book on Oprah Winfrey and it's essentially her speaking in her own words and so the first interview and I did this on purpose too the first interview is an interview she gave in nineteen ninety one she is thirty seven years old the second interview happened at Stanford business school and she is sixty.

So let's jump right into her telling her story when she's thirty seven years old this happens about four years before the four 400 article that I was just reading to you and so she says I think that success is a process and I believe that my first Easter speech in church at the age of three and a half was the beginning and that every other speech after that every other book that I read every other time I spoke in public was a building block so that by the time I sat down to audition in front of a television camera I was so it ease with the.

So it is so it is with myself and would allow me to read so comfortably and be it so easy with myself at that time was the fact that I'd been doing it for a while if I had never read a book or never spoken in public before I would have been traumatized so by the time we went on air with the Oprah Winfrey show in nineteen eighty six nationally people would say oh but you're so comfortable in front of the camera you can be yourself well it was because I'd been being myself since I was nineteen so much use nineteen she was co acre co acre for a lot of people.

So I was a co acre co acre for a local news station and so one thing she'll repeat over and over again is when even though she started out as a news reporter she did not think reporting was a natural fit to her she thought it was too scripted to in human and she feels her one of her most valuable assets is the fact that she was she didn't hide her imperfections she was relatable and she was perfectly human and the importance of this authenticity something she actually had to learn she started she's like oh I just want to be Barbara Walters this was not true when I first started out when I first started out I was pretending to be somebody I was not

I was pretending to be Barbara Walters and that is a thing that you and I have seen multiple times in biography after biography after biography it is extremely common the greatest maximum I've ever heard that describes this phenomenon comes from Stephen King's autobiography and you start writing but it applies to every other domain he says imitation proceeds creation imitation proceeds creation we imitate others first Oprah was imitating Barbara Walters first before she realized how to create her own authentic style and format

and so she's going to talk about this is just a learning process everybody goes to at the time I was more interested in how I phrased a question and how eloquent the question sounded as opposed to listening to the answer this always happens when you're interested in impressing people instead of doing what you're supposed to be doing and it took me a while to learn this it took me messing up on the air during a live newscast I was doing a list of foreign countries and so she's listening all these foreign names and she gets to Canada and she mispronounces it

proof that I'm not the only person that mispronounces words all the time by the way and she pronounced that Canada she says canada and then she just starts she thought it was hilarious and then she's she thought it was funny that she mispronounces she just starts laughing on air and it was actually important because she says I started laughing and she realized this is the first real moment I ever had on TV but the entire time that she's a news reporter she's just like this doesn't feel right this isn't me she talks about the importance of like understanding your intuition and listening to it

and she's making good money at the time what she thought was good money and she's being paid $22,000 a year but it's also obvious to the to her bosses that maybe you shouldn't be a reporter and so they're looking for other places to put her and they decide hey we're going to put you on an early morning talk show and it was obvious is this was a demotion instead of firing her and this is what she said at the time she didn't know this is going to be one of her biggest breaks I was 22 and I was embarrassed by the whole thing because I never failed before and this was a failure but this is a failure that led to the

talk show because they had no other place to put me this reminds me one of my favorite things that opportunity is a strange beast and it frequently appears after a loss or what appears at this point to her that this is a loss but right away she's like no actually this is what I'm supposed to be doing so they put me on a talk show one morning and I will never forget it I came off the air that day thinking this is what I should have been doing because it was like breathing to me like breathing you just talk you be yourself

being myself is really what I've learned to do from the very first day I knew it was the right thing to do I felt the same about acting as well and so she talks about why she loves acting as well acting is the essence of another being is the ultimate and understanding you understand things about people that you could never imagine it's it's like almost for a while getting to live somebody else's life I love that line because it's exactly how I feel about reading

biography it's almost like for a while getting to live somebody else's life and then this is how this came to be again there's just the constant thing of her trying to do the best job possible trying to listen to her intuition and she's constantly getting discovered and help by other people so one of the people that have a huge influence in her life was Quincy Jones and she says Quincy Jones had the most important role in my acting career and Quincy Jones discovered her because she was working as a television anchor and he sees her and says she should be in movement

movies and now the crazy thing is back when she was working a job before this she was going to speech coach trying to get better at becoming an anchor woman right and so she coaches almost like therapy and she was telling this coach of hers what I really want to do is act and she says something is

fascinating and she says something to Oprah she goes my dear you don't want to act because if you wanted to act you'd be doing it and this is the first hints because you're going to hear her response in a minute this is the first hint of one of the things that's very obvious if you read and study

Oprah just to speak she is intense very powerful belief in herself and she's had that since she was a young girl when she's four years old and being raised by her grandmother will get to that too you just see every

time she's in a situation she's like nope I don't belong in this situation I am better than this I will make my life better than this so she's having her speech coaching no you don't actually want to act if you want to act you'd be doing it and Oprah's response is said well I think this is going to happen I will be discovered because I want it so badly somebody this is before Quincy Jones to suffer so this is a crazy thing I will be discovered because I want it so badly somebody's going to have to discover me and then my speech coach said you just dream you're just a dreamer so when it happened when it finally happened

I called her up and I said you will not believe this I got discovered Quincy Jones was in his hotel room and he saw me on TV it was unbelievable the interesting thing about that is I truly believe that thoughts are the greatest vehicle to change power and success in the world

everything begins with thoughts I thought up the color purple for myself that is the movie that changed her life I know this is going to sound strange to you I read the book I got so this is before she got this is before she got cast in the movie I know this is going to sound strange to I read the book I got so many copies of the book I passed the book around to everybody I knew if I was on the bus I would pass it out to people and when I heard that there was going to be a movie I started talking it up for myself I did no

Jones. I didn't know Steven Spielberg or how on earth I would get in this movie. I had never acted in my life, but I felt it so intensely that I had to be a part of that movie. I wanted it. I wanted it more than anything in the world and would have done anything to do it. One of my favorite ideas

that I've recently discovered in the past maybe six months or so is, came from Josh Kushner. Josh Kushner was on this episode of Invest Like The Best and Josh Kushner's has built this massively successful business called Thrive Capital and in that episode on Invest Like The Best he said

that something was fascinating that he uses uses in his firm to make investment decisions or choose partners and he says if you have to choose between the most experienced person or the most educated person or the person who actually wants it more you always pick the person who wants it most highly recommend going and listening to that entire episode of Josh Kushner Invest Like The Best. It's excellent. I've listened to it twice. I wanted before I get into why she identified

she wanted the color purple so deeply. I want to get back to this idea where she's like listen, I truly believe that thoughts are the greatest vehicle to change power and success in the world. This I know people think this sounds like Willy Fufo, but I'm just telling you it comes up in these biographies over and over and over again the power visualization the power of positive thinking. I just want to read one one excerpt from Estee Lauders Autobiography and I'm going to read the note I

left on it when I read it. She said visualize in your mind's eye you see a successful venture a deal made a profit accomplished. It has a superb chance of actually happening projecting your mind into a successful situation is the most powerful means to achieve goals. If you spend time with pictures of failure in your mind you will orchestrate failure countless times before the event. I have pictured a heroic sale to a large department store every step of the way and the picture in my mind became

a reality. I have visualized success then created the reality from that image. This is episode 217 by the way Estee Lauders Autobiography if you can get a copy to it. They're very very hard to find. I'm working on making that not to hard to find. I can't tell you anything yet, but I am working on it because it's such an important book. But the whole book you can read in a weekend. It's excellent. I have visualized success then created the reality from this image great athletes, business people

and ventors and achievers from all walks of life seem to know this secret. And the note I left myself on this is this just a bunch of examples that I found in other biographies of people that have achieved great things. Doing the same thing Bob Noice found her fintell did this Edwin Land Founder Polaroid Steve Jobs Arnold Schwarzenger Estee Lauders Oprah you just see this over and over and over again now it's going to why she identified with color purple and it had to do with the fact that

she was molested and Oprah was molested and abused by people in her family. So you can go to YouTube and see this scene that Oprah does in the cornfield and she did that in one take because it was it was technically the story of the character that she is playing playing so the character's name is Sophia, but it's not it's exactly what happened to Oprah in her life and being nine years old

and being molested by cousins uncles family friends and we used a word molested it's raped. She was raped and then to have that happened to you when you're defenseless and to carry that with you and then to pick up a book and realize you see the words in the story and it's your story and so she says about this she goes all my life I had to fight. I had to fight my cousins I had to fight my uncles but I never thought I had to fight my own house. That scene was the essence of my life.

I thought people all my life and I'm not going to fight in my own house anymore in my own space anymore. She's talking about the fact that she was molested by her cousin, her uncle and a family friend and there is this intense intense work ethic that Oprah has. So the point where she thought

she could never get married she could never have kids. She she gave birth when she was 14 and her the baby never made out of the hospital as a premature baby that baby dies within a month after the birth right and she talks about this later in life how she just and I think these these things are related where it's like you are so poor defenseless and helpless and you you work yourself into a position of power where now you have money and influence and control and you no one can harm

her anymore and so it makes perfect sense to me that I've had to deal with this this stuff like this I'm not going to go into now but like in my family and never to me but people that I deeply deeply loved and so when Oprah says later on that you know she'd work a 12 hour day and she's like this

isn't enough like I get home after working on the show for 12 hours and I have too much time so I need to work 16 hours like where is that drive coming from you have to understand what happens to people early in life why are they making decisions they're making and usually they siphon off into

two separate paths where Oprah becomes a super achiever super driven person learning machine and then she has some some like half siblings you know one dies I think of like a coke crack overdose one dies of AIDS I mean usually you know siphons off into two paths like they they become these like

super achievers are usually they're destroyed by it so let's go back to this um because I thought people on my life I'm not going to fight them in my own house anymore in my own space anymore I am going to have what I deserve that is a direct quote from her and then she goes back

into telling more of the prehistory of Oprah right when she's sitting here giving this talk in 1991 right 1991 she is 37 years old and she already I already I already made more money than she's going to spend in her lifetime right that's not how it started out she goes I was raised on a farm

with my grandmother for the first six years of my life her dog her mom had Oprah I think when her mom was like 14 something like that and so she obviously way too you know young and inexperienced immature whatever the case is to raise a child and so her grandmother and her mom

is not around her mom's like in Minneapolis or something and Oprah's a minute Mississippi at this time of her life I was raised on a farm with my grandmother for the first six years of my life I knew somehow that my life would be different and it would be better so this is what I mean about intense

intense confidence and self belief this idea like this cannot be my life that feeling is such a powerful motivator that you see over and over and over again and so she's like I knew somehow that my life would be different and it would be better she's living in a house that has no indoor

plumbing and then so if you don't have indoor plumbing you sure as hell don't have a washing machine and so she's talking about one of her earliest memories is she standing on the back porch and at the time the clean clothes they would boil clothes so you put in this giant cauldron

heat up the water till boil and that's how you clean your clothes and it's like get you have to like dig in like a stick I'm sure it's not called stick but like how you get out the clothes and you move them around and so she's watching her grandmother do this I remember standing on the back

porch and my grandmother was boiling clothes at that time we didn't have a washing machine and so people would boil clothes in a great big iron pot and she was boiling clothes and I was watching her and I remember thinking my life won't be like this my life won't be like this it will be better

I will make a better life and so she talks about some of the stuff that she wanted to do when she was younger you know she's like maybe I'll be an actress because she wanted to be famous in rich and then for a while she wanted to be a school teacher and she did that because her fourth grade

teacher was an inspiration to her I was Mrs. Duncan I pretty sure she did a show I think Mrs. Duncan came on the Oprah show many many years later and she says Mrs. Duncan was my greatest inspiration she helped me believe in myself for the first time I believed that I could do almost anything

and so one of the talents that she had was that she she read a lot she had an extensive vocabular she's very smart and she was a great public speaker she's sitting in these like and I was raised in in similar churches like this too where it's like very it's like people are dancing and shouting and like speaking in tongues and so I know these like very charismatic southern preachers and so she's in the same environment and she's going to church every Sunday and she would listen to everything

the preacher said and then she'd go back to school on Monday morning and she'd just repeat the sermon to the teacher and to the other kids in the class at the point where her nickname in fourth grade was called preacher and so Oprah talks more about her childhood I was born in rural Mississippi 1954

I was born at home there was not a lot of educated people around and my name had been chosen from the Bible heard actual name under birth certificate is not Oprah it's orpa from the Bible but no one knew how to spell it so over time it just it instead of they they essentially reverse

the p in the r in her name so instead of being called orprah win free she's called Oprah win free I came to live with my grandmother because I was a child born out of wedlock and I was left with my grandmother and that saved my life because my grandmother taught me to read and that opened the door

to all kinds of possibilities for me I was taught to read at an early age and by the time I was three and a half I was reciting speeches at our local church they would put me up on the program and they'd let me render a recitation and all the sisters sitting in the front row would fan

themselves and turn to my brother grandmother and say this child is gifted she is public speaking at three so when she tells you that by the time she she gets a job at radio at 17 then she gets a she auditions for TV at 19 by the time she's 19 she is perfectly comfortable reading and speaking

in public she was not nervous at all and I heard that enough to start and I started to believe it other people saying that she's gifted and anytime people would come over to the house I would recite Bible verses and poetry and such it was such a what she's telling us is at anytime somebody came

over the house I would perform and then this is the the key to understanding her I think whatever God there is for my unconquerable soul think about how she ended that Forbes article let me pull the back up real quick so I get the the the the quote right right she's like on my own I will just create and if it works it works and if it doesn't I'll create something else I don't have any limitations on what I think I could do or be I don't have any limitations on what I could think I can do or be

she's saying I think whatever gods there are for my unconquerable soul and so people around me would use to say oh that child can speak and whatever you do if you do a lot of it you get good at doing it and that is how this whole broadcasting career started for me I was an orator for a long time

I've been an orator basically all of my life so when she's six she is sent now her mom thinks okay I'm old enough I think her mom is a 20 years old this time I can take care of her and her mom is not she's just not making good decisions I think she's got like

this three or four different kids all by different fathers from my mistaken she can't really as Oprah is getting older she she's not a good environment and Oprah is responding like Oprah is obviously smart and driven but she's not in the right environment and she starts to like skip school

and act out and like talk back and all this other stuff so she says I was living with my mother and living under circumstances that were not good if you'd ask me at the time if we were poor I probably would have said no because when you're living in it you don't know anything else you just

think that's the way life is when I was nine I was raped by a cousin and I never told anybody she keeps this hidden until her late 20 so when I had to found out about some of the stuff going on I could not understand like why it was like secret for so long and I started reading about this

a few years ago and this is essentially the standard response they it's so sad man I'm getting like choked up even thinking about it because obviously it like I make sure like that could never happen to my daughter right I put an environment that they could never happen but the crazy

things like when you start reading about this one it's a larger percentage of the human population when I when I was reading about this was like somewhere of estimates between like 10 to 15 percent of people are sexually molested by either a family member or close family friend which

I found shocking but how many of these people get away with it because of this like it happened when she was nine it happened repeatedly and she didn't tell anybody you know they feel so guilty they feel they're at their blame it took her till she was in her late 20s to realize like no no it's

never the fault of the person being sexually molested and so she does then I was sexually later on I was sexually molested by a friend of the family and then by an uncle it was just an ongoing continuous thing I started to think you know this is just the way life is listen to what we just

what Oprah just said about her life by the time she was nine she was already raped repeatedly from nine to 14 when she actually gets pregnant she happened so much that she just thought oh this is you know this is an ongoing continuous thing and her quote is I just started to think this is the

way life is and one of the crazy things is this may have never come out she may have never actually talked about this because again she had she had to learn like you're never responsible for male molestation in your life and she's actually interviewing somebody on the show and somebody else

that had a similar experience is talking about this and Oprah has a breakdown she's like I was going to have a breakdown on to on television and I told them we've got to stop rolling the cameras we've got to stop rolling the cameras and they didn't and it wanted to be really traumatic for her but

it's the first time she actually was able to work her way through and it's like oh this isn't this wasn't unique to me this wasn't my fault and me hiding this or not talking about this is not helping anybody else and then she talked about like her openness is the reason why she didn't do well

as a news reporter why she felt that the talk show was like breathing it was so easy for her and then she talking about this what I realized was I was always searching for somebody to say to look at me and say that you are worthy and for so much of her life she talks about that she had the disease

to please that she was living an inauthentic life because it's just one of the greatest lessons you ever lived is like you have to live your life to please yourself not living your life to please other people but doing what your heart says all the time and it's because that she's willing to

talk about this is that she can actually make a legitimate change to the people's lives that's all that's watch her show that I experienced that she's the greatest thing about what I do is that I'm in a position to change people's lives it's the most incredible platform for influence that you

could imagine and she's her own greatest example of that because of everything like look what she like imagine being born your mother's 14 you're dead they didn't she didn't have a relationship with your father you're raised by your grandmother there's no indoor plumbing you're boiling clothes

you're being transferred around like she goes from her grandmother to her mom back to her grandmother to her father to her grandmother to her mom to her father finally and so she says like this is I have this platform I can and it's one of the greatest things I have my intention is always for

people to see that you're responsible for your life there may be tragedy in your life but there's already always a possibility to triumph the ability to triumph begins with you always I always wanted to be a minister and preach and be a missionary and I think in many ways I have been able

to fill all of that I feel that my show is a ministry and so just like the bad things that happened to her in her life echo throughout the rest of her life so there are a lot of good things I loved books so much as a child they were my outlet to the world and I still do people ask me what do you

do in your spare time and I say I read I'm the same way if you can see my desk right now I have like I don't even know I have to count 40 30 books on my desk right now so she says I would read a lot this is her child again I'd read a lot of stories about these little peasant children and usually

peasants children that overcome adversity she says I wanted to be them then I discovered my angelos why I know why the cage birds sing then I read the color purple and I just I could not put the book down I could not believe that someone had put this in writing because she's saying it's

essentially her story but it's happening to me else it's unbelievable to know that you're not the only one you think nobody else in the world this is the same thing that you and I do when we study batteries it's like oh like I feel that way too this stuff has happened to me too not obviously the

the the molestation part but the difficulty of actually going through and figuring out what you want to do in life and then trying to do it and then getting knocked back and getting back up and so on and so forth you think you're not the to know that you're not the only one you think nobody

else in the world has it as bad as you and then you discover that you're not so bad after all it's an amazing thing and then she gets to the part where she's around 13 14 years old I think she's 14 at this time and she her mom essentially says you know I basically can't handle there you got

to take and raise our daughter and she says her dad saved her life I had a very strict father and I love him for it at the time I thought I cannot imagine a human being so stripped he was a big influence on me he cared about me and had concerns about me making the best of my life and would not

accept anything less than what he felt he was my best I remember my father saying to me you cannot bring seas on your report card in this house because you're not a sea student you're an a student and that is what we expect in this house it was just a matter of fact and she said

because she was held to a higher standard she started to perform better and it was very different when I was living with my mother I was very rebellious I was very promiscuous I did everything I could get away with I would run away from home I would lie to my mother all the time and I moved

to my father's house and I never told another lie I knew it wasn't going to be accepted I needed structure and attention and so that is at 14 by the time she is 17 she's getting good grades she's competing all these like beauty pageants and winning she's gonna compete in something that

was sponsored by our local radio station this is another important and flexion point of life it's called the misfire prevention contest I have no idea what's going on there but she actually wins the contest and she goes back and she says this is the beginning of my broadcast career because

I went back to the radio station to pick up like the the awards and stuff and they asked me what I like to hear my voice on tape and she's like oh that's kind of cool okay and so they give her something to read and they record her and she says I start to read but I've been reading since I was

three she's 17 when this is happening right and they couldn't the people the station could not believe how well I read and I was hired there they're like come here this girl read and so there's like three or four people that are working in the station calm and they're like you have a great

voice you read perfectly do you want to work in radio and so at and so I was hired at 17 years old to work at the radio station station two years later she's a sophomore in college and she says my sophomore year college someone heard me on the radio and said we heard you on the radio would you

be interested in working in television think about how crazy it is right so it's like remember the Quincy Jones story from earlier it's like okay I get on the radio then somebody hears my radio they could say do you want to be on TV then I got on TV Quincy Jones is in his hotel rooms like

you want to be in movies one of my favorite episodes I did last year was episode 314 which is on Paul Graham's excellent essay on how to do great work listen to this this is exactly he's going to talk about the exact phenomenon that you and I are discussing right now in the story of Oprah

this is how this is Paul Graham on how to make yourself a big target for luck when you read biographies of people who've done great work it's remarkable how much luck is involved they discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting or by reading a book they happen to pick up so you

need to make yourself a big target for luck and the way to do that is to be curious try lots of things meets lots meet lots of people read lots of books and ask a lot of questions Oprah and inadvertently is making herself a big target for luck and here is another lucky break this is

hilarious she tells the story later on when she's 60 so the other talk I'm going to talk to you about as well so she's a sophomore year in college you know somebody heard her on the radio said you know we heard your radio which we were interested working in television and at the first she turned

it down and she's in college at a college professor and she's telling them hey the like CBS keeps calling me to be on television and she goes but if I do television I'll never finish school meaning I'll never finish college and he says something in hilarious he goes full that is what school is for

you go to college so CBS calls you and she was you need to call them back and because her her professor called her full it's like what are you doing we got to call them back this is a great opportunity Oprah went and interviewed for the job and got it and so this is what I meant about

her intense work ethic this is her her schedule in college I would go to class from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon then I'd go to the TV station at work two to ten then I would get home and stay up and study until one or two in the morning and then just start to routine all

over again that is a 14 to 16 hour workday that she's describing and then she talks about even now undeniable success at 37 years old right when she's talking about this there's a great line from David Ogrevey that I love and he says we have a habit of divine discontent with our performance

it's an anecdote to smugness so no matter how good they are how big their businesses growing how many awards they win how much products they their advertising sells for their clients we have a we have divine discontent that is a great way it's like never good enough to see the exact same you see that with a lot of high performers it's very difficult this is Oprah it's very difficult for me to even see myself as successful because I still see myself as in the process of becoming successful I

demand only the best for myself and then the next part I particularly love she talks about how she makes her decisions now remember when she's saying that she's already very successful but most of her success is still ahead of her and yet even back then this is how she made her decisions on what to

do next the ability to understand the difference between what your heart is saying and what your head is saying I now always go with my heart even when my head is saying oh but this is the rational thing this is what you really should do she later on she talks about the fact that she would override

her head because it'd be like oh if you do this you'll make even more money and she's found herself doing things for money she's like I hate this I don't like my job anymore and she talks about the key to like everything everything that like the key that drove all her success is the

phenomenal like parallel outcome that the Oprah Winfrey show was the fact that the numbers are all different but like you know she had somewhere like one fifth of the entire United States population watching her every week she's something like 44 million 40 to 50 million people watching and

on like any given day you know it could be as high as from 10 to 20 million people it's just really boggles the mind but she says I don't see myself as a celebrity because people are so familiar with me as opposed to you know a list actors you may see them on screen because you have no idea who

they are what they actually care about how they actually are Obreg is leaned into her being an authentic human she goes it people it's not like with other celebrities I see people react to other people and it's not like they do to me they just come up to her and they'll be like hey like

you want to come over lunch or come over dinner she's just saying that they spend so much time with Oprah they get to know her because she doesn't try to hide who she is and as a result they treat her just like another friend and she's like listen a lot of critics don't actually understand

the relationship I have she was saying with her audience they just don't get it now she did that doesn't mean she she ignored criticism I was reading like random Ben Franklin Maxum's in Highlight the other day and I came across something at the same time I was reading all this research for Oprah

and Ben Franklin said critics are our friends they show us our faults and so this is what Oprah said if someone criticizes something and it strikes a nerve with me then I will move to correct it if the criticism is valid and if it comes from a point of being excuse me I come from a point of view

of being well thought out and not just attack then I accept it and I get better as a result of it critics have helped me to get better and then she says something that she repeats I found her say this over and over and over again again if somebody repeats something it's an indication that it's

really important to them I feel that luck it's preparation meeting opportunity she says that over and over again luck is preparation meeting opportunity and what she would she combines this with an idea that Steve Jaws would repeat to that asking for help is the superpower than no one uses

so he would all constantly help ask for help if he needed it and he's like if you just ask people will help you he talks about from early in his career when he would call up like David Packard for founder of HP when he was like 14 later when he asked Bob noise to mentor him later on when he

and when he asked help from Andy Grove or suppliers or anybody he was just like no one he's like asking for help has been a giant superpower than no one uses and so she's hired in television 1973 and she would just say they asked her hey do you know how to do this and she's like yes yes I do

she did not do it she's just like they asked if I knew how to edit and I said yes when I didn't they asked if I knew how to report on stories and I said yes when I didn't when I went to my first city council meeting I wasn't sure what to do but I had told the news director that I knew what to

do so I walked into the city council meeting and I said to everybody there this is my first day on the job and I don't know anything please help me and they did and then she goes into this idea why relationships run the world and so she talks about remember at the beginning we talked about the

fact that she had at the time she just worked for other people she's you know high paid celebrity and her manager or her agent is loved by the people he they're negotiating with that's probably not a good sign she fires him gets the piranha the piranha her and Jacob's wind up being

partners for the thing like multiple decades and so she talks about the fact that he helped her in raising the ceiling on her mind and so she goes I have a lawyer and he and I are now partners and he came to me and said you know you should own your own show and I thought on my own show

I just totally dismissed it how the hell am I going to own my own show I have a contract what am I going to do and he says you're going to own your own show and I just thought okay I'll let him dream on this and so that idea I'll let him dream on this is a reference to her dreaming members she's

talking to speech coach and she's like no I'm gonna you know I'm gonna be an actress and she's like oh you're just dreaming you're just dreaming so okay let him dream let's see what happens and we already know what happens because you and I've already talked about it about two years later she's

her show's doing a 115 million in the for her show does 115 million in revenue in the first two years and now she has complete control and ownership and so she talks about the fact that she grew up poor but now she's rich with material success what it does it provides you with the ability to

concentrate on other things that really matter being able to make a difference money allows you to focus it's because you no longer have to focus your attention on how you're going to pay your car note or whether or not you're going to sign your last name so that when the check gets there

they can send it back to you and you can say oh you forgot to sign it I've included that part because before my mother passed away she told me that they had to do that several times where like you mail a check and then they're like oh you didn't sign in and then they send it back to you

and essentially you have a couple more days to come up with the money this is this is where I identify completely with Oprah as well she goes the ability to read saved my life I would have been an entirely different person had an app and taught to read when I was an early age my entire life experience my ability to believe in myself even in the darkest moments of sexual abuse and being physically abused and so forth I knew there was another way I knew there was a way out I knew there

was another kind of life because I had read about it so that's why now focus my attention on trying to do the same thing for other people and then she talks about you know you're on the right path if what you're doing you would do for free and she says the money had never been the focus the reason

you know you're on the road success is if you do your job and not be paid for it I would do this job and take on a second job to make ends meet if nobody paid me for just just for the opportunity to do it that's how you know you're doing the right thing when my lawyer first came to me and said

you can own your own show it literally took the ceiling off of my brain I had never even thought that high before I never even thought that it was possible and everybody needs somebody like that in their life just like when my father said to me you are too smart to get seas and the

she talks about how she runs her business actually when I read this part it made me think of Henry Singleton Henry Singleton is had a huge influence on both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on the way they built Berkshire Charlie Munger said that Henry Singleton was the smartest person he ever met

and Warren Buffett said that it's a crime that more business schools don't study him I read his book there's not a lot written on him there's this book called distant force which is like the history of the company tell it down that he built this is where I'm going to read a quote from there

in a minute that actually found in and founders notes if you already have access to founders notes I'd highly recommend going and and reading all the highlights from distant force because the book is so difficult to find but Oprah saying one of the biggest lessons I've learned in business

is you have a responsibility to yourself to learn as much about your business as you can I sign every check it is very tedious it gets to be a lot I've got stacks and piles of checks I still have a tenement mentality I have been very very poor in my life and so the idea of having money and

not being responsible and knowing how much money you have and keeping control of it is not something that I personally can accept I watch the money very carefully I'm going to pause real quick go back to what she's saying I want to pull up this quote and it's describing a Henry Singleton

describing the fact that he did the same thing he would sign all the checks and he called it a form of discipline he pays all the bills and signs all the checks calling it a form of discipline though through the through the signing through doing the signings you know through doing the

signing it's amazing how much you learn about the business there's a reminder of each event or action behind each check Henry Singleton and Oprah arriving at the same conclusion when I first started being a business woman I worried how do you do this and I realize that you do it the same

way that you do anything else 14 hour days 15 hour days a 12 hour day is a short day for me I feel like after a 12 hour day what am I going to do with the rest of my day I get home and I don't know what to do with myself because I have all this time left over I feel most comfortable working

why why yes of course a lot of people are just inherently driven right they wake up and they want to do something but think about what we know about her early childhood I feel most comfortable working I feel the same way so I'm not like this is I I'm deeply uncomfortable when I get comfortable

so back to this a 12 hour day is a short day for me one of my favorite books I've ever read for the podcast is Arnold Schwarzenegger has two autobiographies they're both great and they're both some of my favorite books but the the first book first autobiography I read about him was he wrote

when he was like 70 and it's like huge by like 500 pages it's episode 141 in case you missed it the first time but he said something is very very similar he's going to say it in his own Arnold way he's going to use different words than Oprah does but he says the same stuff where she's just like

listen for me you know a 12 hour day like essentially her life was her show she gets home she's like what else am I going to do I guess I'll read you know that this basically I can do and so Arnold said something similar he says for me work just meant discovery and fun if I heard somebody

complaining oh I work so hard I put in 10 and 12 hour days I would crucify him what the fuck are you talking about when the day is 24 hours what else did you do it so I don't know why I just when I got to the section of this this transcript with Oprah I was like that just reminds me of Arnold

she goes when I go home I usually get in bed with a pile of books I have to read a lot for the show um I get she's like campily that she gets paid she goes I can't believe I get paid for doing this I would do this if I didn't get a dime for it it doesn't even feel like work it doesn't feel like

work and that is the last words that she has in this interview from 1991 so now we are going to fast forward 23 years later this is 2014 she is 60 years old and she goes and gives a talk at Stanford Business School and I want to go right back into the discipline and the high standards

of her father this is hilarious I started working in television when I was 19 years old and I became an anchor my father my father still had an 11 o'clock curfew can you believe such a thing I am the 10 o'clock news anchor in Nashville I'm on the newscasts reading the news and my father would say

be home by 11 and I would say the news is on at 10 and he says yes but it's off at 10 30 so be home at 11 and so she respected her father she responded to his high standards but that doesn't also mean that she always followed his advice her biggest message that you should listen for to

yourself I started listening to what I felt was the truth for me I started to feel that reporting wasn't for me but I had my father and I had my friends and everybody was saying oh my god you're an anchor woman you're on TV you can't give up that job and by the time I was making 25,000

dollars a year my father goes well you just hit the jackpot you're never gonna make any more money than that so I was torn between what the world was saying to me and what I felt to be the truth for myself I felt like an unnatural act for me reporting although I knew that to a lot of people it

was glamorous so again high status you're on TV oh my god this is you know pre-internet like you can't give up that job you're even making what at the time a lot of people think is a lot of money and I just started inside myself to think what I really want to do what do I actually want to do

how difficult like well how much self-confidence you have to have right but this is great to everybody else the external world saying this is great but it doesn't feel right to you and you actually act on this knowing what you don't want to do is the best possible place to be in if you

don't know what to do because knowing what you don't want to do leads you to figure out what it is that you really want to do and this is where she mentions her the way she makes decisions again this this listen to your intuition I have from the very beginning listen to my instinct all of the my

best decisions in life have come because she's listening to her instinct very similar Steve Jobs said something similar it later in his life he says intuition is a very powerful thing more powerful than intellect in my opinion intuition has had a big impact on my work so that Steve

Jobs back to Oprah and when I was in Chicago I was working in talk for sir talk like a talk show for several years and I knew that that was the right thing to do even if it didn't succeed because at the time there was a guy named Phil Donahue who was the king of talk shows and was on

in Chicago and every single person except my best friend Gail said you're going to fail so they're like hey don't compete don't go into this format this guy's winning you're never going to win and she go they said you're walking into a landmine you're going to fail and I said if I fail then

I will find out what is the next thing for me to do because she just thought talk shows was what she should be doing and not reporting and so I was thinking about this competition because you know she's gonna whip Phil Donahue's ass and he was seen as like untouchable to time and it reminded me

of the success and the confidence that Coco Chanel had early in her her career which is gonna lead to one of the greatest one of the greatest products she's ever made and that's the little black dress and she talked about the fact that in Paris at the time most other fashion designers were men

and their market is for women right Phil Donahue like daytime television at this point in history was mostly like the audience like 90% women and so he's making content for women that he thinks they want and Oprah's like well I don't have to guess what they want because there's just a

million me's in her case 40 million me's out there and I know what they want and Coco Chanel said that she had an advantage over the Christian Dior's and all the other men fashion designers at the time because she actually knew what women wanted to wear she has a line where they're like these other

fashion designers these boys she called them boys she shows these boys don't understand women they don't know how they live their idea is to make them some weird freaks and so she's talking about like you're building dresses like like a costume or something they're uncomfortable

they look funny again she says they look like weird freaks and her response to that was to move in the opposite direction she and she designed a little black dress which is still you know worn today almost a hundred years later and so I found the note to myself when I first had this thought

and this is what I wrote she smoked Donna you for the same reason Coco Chanel did Donna you is a guy making a show for women Oprah didn't have to guess what women want or would resonate with and so she talks about some of the stuff she had to deal with before she had her own show and so

she was working as a news anchor this is in Baltimore and she finds out like she is a co-anchor and you know we're literally doing the same job we sit next to each other why is he making so much more money than me and so remember she's very young most of the people in the industry are much older

and they're like well we have to pay them more because you know he's married he's got kids he's got to pay college tuition he's got a mortgage you don't have a mortgage you don't have you know kids anything else and she just couldn't believe it but her response was fascinating she goes I didn't

complain about it I did not file a lawsuit about it I knew that in that moment that it was time for me to go and that's when I started the process of preparing myself for to leave I told myself I will not be here long when I had dinner with Charlie Munger he's just something was fascinating too

he said that he wouldn't sue people when earlier in his career when they ripped him off or cost him money and his response was that you should expect it and you it's better to move on and so obviously a lot of one big thing is like if you're in a good business and you're on good people you know

you'll be able to prevent most of the problems that you actually need to solve and so wisdom is prevention is one of my favorite maxims of his but he's just like you know people let me off the cost me money I didn't waste my time I lawsuit I just learned from it and then moved on we say

similar sentiment here with Oprah I had a vision for what the future was even though I couldn't place exactly what my future would be I really do feel like I'm guided by a force that is bigger than myself and so one way she learned like what her path in life was was by doing a bunch of things

where she realized this isn't my path that is almost like a dishabuy subtraction I was in Baltimore same thing where she was getting stiffed on pay I was in Baltimore and I could feel this isn't it this isn't it and then in Chicago remember this is this conversation's happening a few years after she stops doing her show she does her show where they open for show for like 25 years I think and she goes and then in Chicago after 25 years of success on my show I started to feel it again this

isn't it I call it your emotional GPS system that allows you to make the best decisions for yourself and every decision that has profited me has come from listening to that inner voice first every time I've gotten into a situation where I was in trouble it's because I didn't listen to it I

overrode that voice that instinct with my own with my own head thinking I try to rationalize I try to tell myself but you know you're gonna make a lot of money no I sit here successful by all the definitions of the world but what really really resonates deeply with me is that I live a fantastic

life my inner life is really intact I live from the inside out and that is a main theme that she hits on over and over again that she was just authentic and the people resonated with that authenticity I talked to nearly 30,000 people on my show over the lifetime of the show right I talked

to nearly 30,000 people on the show and all 30,000 had one thing in common they all wanted validation I will tell you that every single person you ever meet shares that common desire the greatest thing in terms of I heard on sales and building businesses actually came from from Mary Kaye who founded

Mary Kayes Cosmetics and essentially like built this giant empire on like an army of salespeople selling her cosmetics and the way she trained her salespeople was fascinating it's very similar to what Oprah selling us and Mary Kaye would tell her salespeople that everyone that you interact with

every person you ever come across in your life has an invisible sign hanging from their neck that says make me feel important and so she goes back to more of understanding who her customer was who her audience was because she is that person the reason why the show worked is because I understood

I understood that audience people would come all over the from all over the world just to be there I knew the people who I was serving as a way to think about what she's saying I knew the people who I was serving one of the reasons why I live such a fantastic life is because I pay attention

I pay attention to my life and your life is your greatest teacher everybody knows my story as a poor black child growing up in apartheid Mississippi if it were not for education if for being born at the right time I was literally born in the year of desegregation my life would have been

very very different she's talking about reading saved her life again I was in kindergarten and I wrote my kindergarten teacher a letter her name was miss new I said miss new I do not belong here remember I said like she has this intense self belief you see her from a young age she gets in

these environments like I don't belong here I'm better than this I can make myself better in this I can make my life better in this I was in kindergarten I wrote my kindergarten teacher letter miss new I said I do not belong here because I know a lot of big words and then I wrote every big word I

knew elephant hippopotamus Mississippi Nicodemus and all these words from the Bible and Mrs. new said who did this and I said I did and then she marched me off to the principal's office and it was the only time I was ever in the principal's office the principal made me sit there and

write those words again and I got myself out of kindergarten into the first grade and then when I was in first grade they skipped me all the way to second grade and so when most kids were playing with blocks she talks about this most kids are playing with blocks she's three and a half years old

and she's reading and then she goes back to why she thought her business was so successful really she's describing her circle of competence in fact I called my friend David Rosenthal who does the acquired podcast with Ben Gilbert and they did a podcast I'll leave a link down below they did

a podcast on on Oprah's media business I asked him like what do you think is the most I was like I'm prepping for the sopah episode what do you think was like like stood out from your all the research you did and he said ownership the fact that she owned everything which again she talked

about in that talk from 1991 and so it's this self belief this ownership doing something for an excessively long time how many people do the same thing for 25 years right and don't interrupt the compounding and there's this staying in the circle of competence she understood who the

customer was she understood who the person she was serving because of his herself I stay in my lane I know what my lane is and I know what my lane is she repeats it and I knew that during the Oprah show I always knew during that show in our culture we value fame but for me fame was just

a foundation to be heard what I really wanted to do was ask the questions in life that really matter to get people thinking about what really matters in their lives and then this is the best thing she learned and what she really the advice that she gives other people find what feeds your passion

align your personality with your purpose and nobody can touch you when you do that you wake up every day and you're fired up you're just like oh my god another day it's so great your real job your real job is to figure out why you're really here and then get about the business of doing that

and that is where I'll leave it I will leave links to all the videos and all the sources down below in case you want to read or watch all of them that is 334 books or kind of the equivalent of books down 1000 ago and I'll talk to you again soon so I've told you this before but when I went to

Charlie Munger's house I got to see his library and one of the coolest things was obviously he you know he repeats over and over again that he's a biography nut that he thought you know spending a lot of time becoming friends with the M and the dead and reading biography so like has a huge

return like just makes your life better and one of the things I realized is like oh I'm just like I do this for a living and he just made me look like a biography amateur because he made his own biographies he had printed out there's like a 1700 page interview that Rockefeller did that's

almost impossible to find I got to find I'm gonna have to do an episode on it eventually and so anyways he couldn't find the book so he got a copy printed it out and put it into binders and so now I've done this several times so like a pogroms essays when I did that series I think it's like

275 276 277 if I'm remember correctly you know there's no book so I printed them up and binders I did the same thing for the opus and now because I couldn't find a good opera book so these transcripts that I just used to make that episode you just listen to they're now in binders so I

have my own my own opera book but the reason I was thinking about that just now is because I was reading over it and I listened to the episode that you just heard and I thought about how important like the certain relationships these people that come into your life and so what I want to update

you on is this the same idea that I talked about over and over again you see it in the books over again Charlie Munger talked about it when I met him Sam Zell talked about it when I met him it's in the biographies this is that relationships run the world the people that you build real

relationships real friends with friendships with you wind up doing business with and doing life with you know for multiple decades if you think about like how important was that meeting when Charlie I think was like what 35 and Warren Buffett's 28 like what was the value of that that

relationship that they built well billions I guess hundreds of billions in that case so um this is something I think I'm gonna spend a lot no I not think I know I'm gonna spend a lot of time and effort into because I found myself in a very unique position in the sense that I can

connect there's just a ton of founders very impressive people that listen to this podcast and I'm in a unique position where I can actually connect these people together so I've had this idea for a long time didn't know how I was gonna do it um the first founders only conference so

first of all you can just go to the website it is founders with an ass just like the podcast founders only dot com it'll tell you all the details of this conference is happening in Austin Texas uh March 12th through the 14th it is going to be limited to 150 people and I have to do that because I have to talk to I'm going to to uh review every single submission and talk to every single person before the conference starts because it's technically a conference right a business conference is a known

thing I've gone to them you've probably gone to them it's completely understandable but I'm really trying to think about this as uh a place to build relationships like it's a conference I can build in-person relationships uh with other founders and help other founders build in-person relationships

with other founders so I rented out in an entire venue it is a private venue it is not available to the public I've spent I've been there for a few I visited there last year I spent a few there they a few days there before I absolutely loved it uh what I like about is one it's private to not open to the public and it's an entire compound like once you get past the guard gated gate you never have to leave again um the if you sign up and you you want a 10 founders only one the price that you

pay it it's all inclusive everything is taken care of the only thing that you have to worry about is getting yourself to Austin Texas um and the venue is about a 15-minute drive um outside of downtown so it's not that far but once you get there every single thing other thing is taken care of

accommodations food the entire event uh you don't ever have to leave I've had a bunch of people email me hey did you get my submission yes I did it's gonna remember I'm going I'm so I have a world-class events team behind me taking care of all the logistics I I realized I have to back up

in case I announced this last week but you might have not listened to the last week's episode so I have a world-class events team behind me they're taking care of all logistics they'll be on site but I'm the one what I wanted to do and I wanted to do something different was I'm going to speak to

every single attendee first uh before the event I'm essentially building a map of the founder community and if I have an understanding of who you are what your uh what your business is and what's important to you then I can actually hand select and connect you to other founders and what

I'm going for to be very clear like this should be unlike any other conference that you've ever been to because the mission statement my north star is to help founders build relationships with other founders I went to this private invite only conference and I met a guy that was fascinating and he

said something that was interesting because he worked for a bunch of these super wealthy uh family offices in Texas and his job was to do these in-person events so connecting people in family offices with other people that work in family offices and the reason that they would put so much time and

energy and resources behind this was really fascinating he described it to me in one line he says because a relationship between those two people these two people like people like this they produce non-linear returns they produce non-linear returns is such a great line and I think that speaks to why

you see the the importance of relationships in the books that you and I cover on the podcast but also in the conversations that I got to have with you know absolute legends uh like sam zeal and charlie munger and like everything else that I do uh the podcast founders notes now founders only

like I'm the first customer for all of this stuff and I was an introvert I didn't know anybody I'm telling you nobody and the difference between before and after the the podcast gave me the network I have right I get to meet and become friends with and eventually become partners and do

business with all these world class incredible people it fills me with energy it makes my life better I get smarter I just cannot believe that I get up get get get to do this every day I wake up excited and so I know that this event and events like this and I will continue to do them assuming

I'm good at them and I you know anything I direct my time and energy to I will get good at but I think this is just incredibly important because it's not something that I have to I don't have to theorize over like think about in the Oprah episode right where it's like she's competing with

Phil Donahue he's making something that he thinks will be valuable but he's not the target audience where Oprah's like I am the target audience I am the person like I know this is valuable it's the same thing because I the before and after of my life before having these real relationships and

having this network that I have now compared the after is nothing like before cannot compare to it at all and I think it goes back to what that gentleman told me in Texas that relationships between these two type of people produce non-linear returns so if you're interested in building relationships

with other founders this is an event you have to be a founder of a company to come or you have to be CEOs with founder mentality are are welcome as well but you have to be at least a CEO or a founder of a company to go if you want to attend go to founders only dot com the second thing I want

to talk about I've done a couple updates to founders notes I really do believe founders notes and again that's founders notes dot com with an S founders notes dot com is the world's most valuable notebook for founders and I know that because I use the product every day it is literally every

single note and highlight that I've ever added to my read wise account which you get to see now you have access to and I'm going to explain how I use founders notes now the cool thing one of the features we've added recently is if you already have a subscription or if you're going to get a

subscription once you log in right go to billing and we're going to make this more obvious they're they'll fix this soon go under billing and you can actually every subscription to founders notes allows you to give a gift subscription for free to another person so I did this because what if

you're a founder and you have a co founder well your co founder should have access or one of one of the like your executives or somebody on your team or our friend of yours and so as long as your subscription is active then that person will also have a subscription for free to founders notes

the way I use founders notes is in it's up in my browser all the time they will eventually be an app version of this for now it's in the browser don't worry any feature that I add every new feature that I add will be included in your existing subscription for free once these features are

built out then the price goes up that's why I would sign up sooner than later so I keep founders notes up in my browser all the time I use the search highlights feature the most so any topic that I'm thinking about goes into the search search bar hiring patients obsession monopoly moat

incentives frugality these are just some of the recent examples of ideas that I was trying to find more information on so I searched by keyword search by name and then I read through all the highlights related to that keyword I use this feature constantly to make the podcast I could not make the

podcast without it you'll hear me reference it constantly over and over again on on the episodes the next feature I use the most this is probably searching being able to think about it to being able to compile a database of all these notes and highlights from history to founders and then

search search it is excessively valuable so that's why use it the most highlight feed it it's almost I want to say it's almost more valuable but but I guess searching it is the most valuable thing this is it's just really really unique feature so the highlight feed this is like a smart Twitter

feed my voice just cracked there so let me say it again this is like a smart Twitter feed instead of the random ramblings of these crazy people online right the highlight feed is a constant stream of ideas and thoughts from history's greatest founders it's presented to you though

in a random order okay so I use this feature to remind myself of past lessons are to prompt new thoughts it really is like history's greatest founders talking directly to you every single day so sometimes I read the highlight feed for a few minutes and sometimes I get lost in it for hours

I have never found anything else like it and every feature that I'm describing to you now keep in mind if you get if you listen to founders in general and if you got in this far you know that speaks to you have certain level of intelligence right founders notes just like a book like when you pick up a book and read it it's not going to do the work for you it's not going to put the it'll prompt your own thinking but in the end what you do with that thought with that quote with

that highlight makes all the difference and so with the highlight feed you know the reason I can get lost in it for a few hours because I'll read it and it'll maybe think of something and then I'll sit there and think about it for a little bit or maybe I put it down and I start writing something

out and then I go back to it it is very very unusual and I find it very very valuable I think it is the most valuable feature that I've ever found and I'm just it's fascinating to me so anyways how I would use that too and how I've tried to do it for myself is like if you replace some of

your social media scrolling with reading this feed your life and work is sure to improve as a result the books feature is just what it sounds like if you want to read all my highlights and notes from a specific book then that's the feature this is the feature that you use it's remarkable how much

you can learn spending 10 minutes or less reading highlights from an individual book and finally favorites so this is an order of what feature I use most at least so I use searching every day then use the highlight feed almost every day then the books feature less and then the favorites

feature so when I'm reading my own highlights right I'm going through the highlights feed or going through the book feed or I'm searching something and I come across something thought provoking something I don't want to forget something that I want to make sure I revisit in the

future I add it to favorites reading the favorites feed is kind of like peering into my soul so use careful it's put that way and then there's one more feature that you will see it is called latest highlights I don't use this feature but other people seem to like it and it's just me constantly

you'll see me add highlights from like random books in there and then the latest book I've done the podcast some people seem to like it but I never use that feature so the last thing and then I'll wrap up wrap this up because I got to get back to working on the next podcast and working on

founders only I am working closely with the team I read wise we're going to keep improving founders notes we have a bunch of new features coming soon every new feature will be included in your existing subscription for free and do not forget your subscription comes with the ability to give a gift subscription to another person a co-founder and executive a friend whatever you want to do so if you have not invested into a subscription what I think is the world's most valuable notebook for founders

you can do that by going to founders notes.com and if you want to come build relationships and see me in Austin Texas in 60 days go to foundersonly.com as always thank you very much for your support and I will talk to you soon.