#741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau

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Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

This episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about and past 1 billion downloads to celebrate. I've curated some of the best of the best. Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade.

I would not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes enjoy the household names the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle perhaps you missed an episode just trust me on this one we went to great pains to put these pairings together and for the bios of all guests you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo now without further ado please enjoy and thank you for listening.

First up Jim Collins author of iconic business books that include good to great how the mighty fall and great by choice as well as built to last and beyond entrepreneurship 2.0 which he co authored with his mentor Bill azir you can find Jim at Jim Collins dot com.

And of course of doing some of the homework for this conversation I have come across different ways that you seem to measure your time and your days and I'd love to explore that for just a little bit the first was I read that you had and this may have evolved or changed by this point but a stopwatch with three timers in your pocket and that it was and sort of indicative of creative teaching and other but could you explain that habit please for people who are not familiar.

Well so actually let me tell you the story of how it began yes please. What the three were about and then how it's evolved into something a little simpler and a little more powerful and what I do with it every single day.

So I don't want to pretend that I'm normal okay so what I want to describe is it's not normal behavior but this is it so when I was 36 years old I made the decision and we can come back to this later if you want to talk about big bets and doing scary things such as betting our career betting our lives

and I on entrepreneurial path let me just kind of step back and sort of share the origins of this so I was teaching at Stanford and I it was a marvelous journey and of course great mentors and learned how to do my research there that's where Jerry and I did built to last but I had another mentor who encouraged me to think about whether I wanted to do a self directed path or not I used to say to my students because I taught entrepreneurship and small business I always said to my students why don't you go do some research there.

Why don't you go do something on your own why give over all your creative energies for somebody else's thing at least challenge them to think about that and I would say if you're really interested in business you don't have to go to work for IBM to be in business you can do your own so my students this is the wonderful thing about great students they hold you to account right they said well right what are you doing that's entrepreneurial.

This doesn't look like a very entrepreneurial thing teaching these classes and being here and and so I started thinking about it and I realized something about myself I like betting on myself so I had this idea who don't have to be at IBM to be in business why do I have to be at a university to be a professor so I said to Joanne I said you know I think I have this idea I'd like to be a self employed professor to end down way on chair.

So Joanne who we've done these things together to life she went along with this idea and the idea was to try to pursue really big questions it wouldn't be constrained by think you could do it all the year and the first big bet on that was the research and built to last and it was coming out and I said let's just bet everything let's go and so we launched this huge bet bet everything on that book didn't know if it would work we were down to less than $10,000 we were actually really scared.

We call it our Thelma Louise moment we're like launching off the clip together so we wanted to get to the other side it was a huge bet we didn't know if it would work but I was very clear about one thing I did not want to have a half life of quality in the work. One of the wonderful things about working on built to last with Jerry back at Stanford no one knew who I was no one called no one paid any attention so for six years of working on that research project I could just go into the cave.

And work and work and work and that kind of deep work you have to go deep into the data deep into the research deep into the thinking the long cycles of reflection that's how you get the ideas and that's how you do good stuff and what I was worried that what would happen is if I went from being invisible to being visible.

And that if I was fortunate enough to have a success that I might wake up in five or six or seven years and have not gone back to the well spring of the deep quiet solitude of work and then your second book is half as good right and then the next book after that is only half as good again I wanted the quality to always get better.

And so I thought well you know what's interesting is a university as a place that really encourages that because it's sort of designed to allow you to spend your life in that tranquility so I went to some faculty members that I greatly respect and I said how do the people in the academy that you most respect in yourself spend their time and I got a consistent answer 50 30 20 50% of your time in new intellectual creative work.

30% of your time in teaching and 20% of your time and other stuff that just has to get done serving on committees you know whatever happens to be that you have to do and so I thought that sounds good I'm just going to start doing that so I started as I was heading out on the Thelma Louise leap counting my hours every day and I would count how many hours in the day were creative new intellectual the goal was that had to be above 50%.

Then how many hours would be in teaching and how many hours would be in other stuff like I mean I got somebody got a balance the quick books right and so I started counting and that's one of the triple stop watch came I found this wonderful triple stop watch where I could constantly go back and forth and at the end of the day I would have the total later I came to the realization that what really mattered was the first bucket the creative work.

And so I eventually simplified it there's a concept and great by choice called the 20 mile march and so I kind of had a 20 mile march I just didn't know that concept yet and the idea being something you just do really consistently over time that imposes a very high level of discipline that accumulates to results.

And so I simplified it and I just simply said can I just simply count the number of creative hours I get every day and then hold myself to an account so at the end of every single day I open a spreadsheet and that spreadsheet has three cells on a line and that's for the day the first thing is just a simple accounting of what happened that day where did my time go what did I do what et cetera can use give it sorry to interrupt but this is the stuff I love what might a description for the day.

Look like is it three senses four senses what might it sort of depends on I mean actually the very best days don't have much in it at all they are. Got up early two hours of really great creative work rectus with Joanne five hours creative work work out nap three hours of creative work.

Enjoy dinner with Joanne that I mean that's like a great day so but other days are full of lots of other choppy things and so what I tend to do is to try to capture a bit of what happened with sleep what happened with the main tasks of the day if there were some really interesting conversations that happened or something that

hit in those all note those their markers so that I can always go back and show you how I use those in a minute because I actually do these correlations with all of that and then the second cell is the number of creative hours I got that day now there's no rule about how many you get in a day sometimes there's zero and sometimes they can be nine or 10 which

are the huge number but then it calculates back over the last three and 65 days and the March which I don't think I've missed for well over 30 years and I hope to hit for a lot longer now is every single three hundred and 65 days cycle every single one every single day if you calculate back the last three hundred and 65 days the total number of creative hours must exceed one thousand no matter what it doesn't matter if you're sick it doesn't matter if there's

other stuff you'd like a thousand creative hours a year as a minimum baseline they can be above that that's fine but never once there can't be a single day in any three hundred and 65 days cycle January 2 to January 2 July 22 July 22 September 9 to September 9 doesn't matter always has to be above a thousand creative hours and you watch it and I put on the whiteboard

here at the lab the three month pace so you take the last three months multiply times four the six month pace and then the current 365 and that is a way to kind of monitor if I start seeing that those numbers start to go down all change my behavior and sometimes I have a big buffer and sometimes I don't and the idea is if you stay with that eventually you're going to have work now there's a third cell that I put in there that most people

most people don't know as much about because people know about the hours things somewhat all of us have dark times difficult times all of us have good times right but here's an interesting thing I notice which is that if you're kind of going through a funk it colors your whole life and you tend to think your whole life is a funk because you're looking through that lens and so I thought well you know but actually I feel like my life is really pretty good

but when you're in that other place it doesn't feel that way and so what I started to do is I started creating a code which is plus two plus one zero minus one minus two in the key on all this by the way you have to do it every day in real time you can't like five days later look back and say how did I feel that day and that what this is a totally subjective how quality was the day what was it what a plus two is a super positive day

this is emotionally speaking exactly just just like was it a great day of plus two is just a great day doesn't mean it wasn't there might not have been a really difficult day might have been a day of a really hard rock climate might have been a day of really hard writing but it felt really good right it might have been a day of an intense conversation

but really meaningful with a friend or something but they adds up to is a plus two plus one is another positive day zero is yeah you know minus one's kind of a net tone negative and minus two is those are bad day and you put it in before you go to bed

I would ask you Tim right now 17 days ago or even five days ago to give the score you're going to be distorted by how you're feeling today oh for sure I mean yeah I mean memory if you ask people what they ate two days ago they're going to get off by 40% 50% calories for sure yeah

I wrote it down and now I start to have I got the creative hours March which is it's kind of discipline and service of creativity and it's relentless right just stays with me constantly and you never get a break from it but that other has proved to be incredibly useful for me

because now what you can do is sort the spreadsheet and you can say over the last five years what's going on in all the plus two days oh and over the last five years that's where the descriptions come in yeah exactly and over the last five years what's going on in the minus two days

and now as I navigate it's kind of like the simplex method in operations research where you find optimal by never really knowing that optimal is ahead of time you do it by a series of iterative steps of the next best step hold on can you explain that what I'm from Long Island

so sometimes it takes me a minute could you do you explain what that was one more time yeah sure so my undergraduate was a thing called mathematical sciences with a heavy dose of philosophy and math sciences was pure mathematics computer science statistics and operations research

and in operations research there's a method developed by getting George dancing called the simplex method and essentially the idea is that if you're really trying to find the optimal answer to a multivariant problem where there's lots and lots of variables even the biggest computers couldn't basically do a giant spreadsheet and sort there's just too many permutations and what he showed was under certain conditions all you have to do is find the local optimum like what's the best next step

right and then you reset and then what's the next best step and that he showed that under certain conditions that is mathematically guaranteed to navigate you to the optimal end point and that was the simplex method as I understand him

it was 30 40 years ago when I was in the class but so I've always had that idea in mind so you kind of navigate step by step and so I think about it as in navigating life I want more of the things that create the plus twos and less of the things that create the minus twos but the difference that's helped me is I know what they are it's not that life is never perfectly you can do a simple more of this less of that

then more of this less of that what makes any sense it makes perfect sense what are some of the patterns that you found for either the do more column or the do less column for yourself so when I look at those patterns I would say on the plus twos there are almost two contradictory components that contradict me but they're just really different flavors one is the solitude of really hard work and sometimes one of my favorite days will be I get up I never leave the house

and I basically get to just lose myself in the research or in the writing or in the making sense of things it's a very incredible simplicity of the day I'm 61 now and I think about what comes next and I intend to keep creating I want to stay in some version of that march for a really long time

my role models have all done that but I think about life as having three three things at least I think are really important and one of them is increasing simplicity just sheer simplicity two is time in flow state and flow state is not easy and the third is time with people I love and so when I look at those plus twos a lot of the days would be days of high simplicity not much happened there were very few moving parts

but a lot of deep hard work and flow state I might have been writing or doing a concept or creating something or I mean just you're lost in the work or rock climbing problem or rock climbing exactly exactly it's arduous but you're lost in it those are great the other though for me is the time with people I love and the other dimension

while I wouldn't describe myself as a highly social type person I love the solitude of the hard work the other side is the people in my life and there are many I have great friends really great friends that many decade friends friends back to third grade seventh grade all my college roommates I mean my personal band or brothers I mean I have friends and my wife we've married 38 years got engaged four days after our first date

yes that's true wow okay we might come back to that we might but the but the thing is when you have those days where you're really present and engaged with people you really love those are plus two days you may not have accomplished anything or in the case of climbing it might be that I went out climbing with one of my best friends and I don't even necessarily remember the climb it was with a friend

and so my plus two days are either very solitude or very connected but connected to people that have these long enduring really really wonderful relationships and life and those make plus two's I love it what is the bug book could you please elaborate on the bug book I think a lot of us I certainly was one of them we struggle in our 20s to get clarity about how to deploy ourselves in the world

because everything up until you've kind of finished you know high school or college or graduate school would have just kind of structured you don't really have to think about it it's like oh I got to figure out how to do these math problems or whatever

but life isn't really like that and then all of a sudden hit life and life is much more ambiguous and so you're trying to navigate through it I like a lot of people was trying to you know figure out how best to deploy myself in my 20s and multiple things that help me do that one of them let me just introduce a concept okay and then I'll tie it into the bug book because this is how I challenge young people to think about it

there's a concept in good to great called the hedgehog concept and the idea of the hedgehog concept is to sort of simplify down we found it by studying companies we found that when they really focus on one or a few really big things and made very disciplined decisions over time those would accumulate and begin to build some real results and eventually what would become the flywheel effect which will chat about a little bit later

and the hedgehog concept is the intersection of three circles for a company it's doing what you're deeply passionate about because if you're not passionate about it you can't endure long enough to really really do something exceptional the second circle is what you can be the best in the world at and if you can't be the best in the world at it leave it to others so for example it doesn't mean being big right you could have a truly great local restaurant it's never going to be big

but it's the absolute best in the world at a particular thing that it does in its specific community and no large company could come in and be better than them at that that's very hedgehog even though it's not big and then the third is that you have an economic engine and you know how it works

and so if you have the intersection of those three our energy it's going to go into things that were passionate about and we can be the best in the world at and the driver economic engine you're in your hedgehog now there's a personal analogy to the hedgehog and this gets back to bug book

I'm not a big believer in sort of thinking of traditional careers I'm a big believer in thinking of finding your hedgehog and then really building flywheel momentum with that over time and so as the personal version of the hedgehog is again doing circle one

what you're passionate about and love to do the second circle isn't best in the world because if you said well if I can't be the best sort of the beat of surgeon I won't do it well then we'd only have one right that's not good right so it's what you are encoded for and what you are encoded for is different than what you're good at so when I went to college I thought I was going to be a mathematician because I was one of those kids that was good at math and that's why I majored in math sciences

but then I met at Stanford the people who are genetically encoded for math there were not me I was good at math they were encoded for math because like being an athlete where you thought you were a good athlete till you met the incredible natural gifted athlete and you realize I could never see to spin to the basket like he did or I could never see to put the ball there running down the field playing soccer the way she did

I just wouldn't have seen it there's a gift that's the encoding and so you have to find what you're encoded for as distinct from just what you're good at and then the third is you have an economic engine and you can fund your goals your objectives of things you're trying to get done when you have all three of those I'm passionate about it I'm encoded for it and I have an economic engine then it now you're in your hedgehog

now when you're in your 20s there's all these sort of paint by numbers kits approach to life right you can be a professor you can be a business man you can be a lawyer you can be whatever right and the nice thing about a paint by numbers kid is you actually don't have to think about it that much because as long as you stay in the lines and you paint you're going to end up with a nice picture at the end but the only way to paint a masterpiece is to start with a blank canvas

and that is sort of beginning out those three circles and then making your own unique series of decisions consistent with the hedgehog of those three circles may or may not fall into a traditional bucket and so I was trying to find my way and I started this little book and it was inspired by a mentor named Michelle Myers who suggested that what I do as I study myself like a bug and imagine with this passionate objectivity you should going through life

you're making notes where you're observing the bug called Jim but very scientifically clinically and so I remember I was working at HP for a couple years not a graduate school great company at the time for sure but I wasn't really constructed to be in a large company but I started to navigate my way and one day I had to give a presentation on how network computers work

and this was back in the 1980s when there's early on in that and I had to figure out how to communicate to everyone really the essence in our team of how network computing was going to work and how it fit together and I had to sort of conceptualize it and then I had to teach it and share with all of us and I had this day where it's like wow that was really fun to figure it out

to figure out how to conceptualize it to figure out how to put it in concepts everybody can understand to share it with everyone to teaching it my bug book when I'm then writing the bug Jim really loves making sense of something difficult breaking it down into understandable pieces and teaching it to others it was an observation in the journal the other thing is might be something like the bug Jim really languish if he had to spend a lot of time in senseless meetings

this is not good and so constantly observing and then eventually that allowed me to that was that sort of observation clinical that allowed me to eventually sort of head back to teaching it Stanford when I was 30 which then became really the start of the real journey of what happened

and then I got the book and I was like, did you write things in the book book each evening, did you do it, keep it in your back pocket and when there was an outlying, impactful or emotionally notable event you would write in it what was the structure to how you used it if there was any

I'm more now just kind of in a coding we described earlier because I'm one of those really lucky people that I found this stuff early and I remember the moment I hit a classroom at Stanford first teaching a small business and entrepreneurship class I just knew I'm home I'm in the three circles like this is I know it's going to guide in some version some permutation of this probably for the rest of my life and I just knew it

until then I had to kind of get to where I could see that and so for those years I would say if I benefit went back and looked at them I haven't done that there in my basement I bet you that try five out of seven days there's reasonably thorough injuries in there and those injuries would also be things like noting sort of projecting out and a lot of it was often what I would describe as pattern recognition where you'd be noting things

but I would also always be scanning for people that I could see them people much older than me and the question is I could somehow picture that some version of what they do somehow resonated I would note that what was it about it resonated why did I look up to that person to spend a lot of it not just on my own experiences but also very much on people that I admired

not people from afar people I knew and observed not for their achievements but something about the quality of what they were and that was also a big part of that observation process can you give us one of the things whatever comes to mind that you learned from Peter Drucker one is don't make a hundred decisions when one will do and the idea of that is the Peter belief that you tend to think that you're making a lot of different decisions

but that actually if you kind of strip it away you can begin to realize a whole lot of decisions that look like different decisions are really part of the same category of a decision and that what you want to do is to then be able to say no I'm going to make one big decision that will be replicated many many times because it kind of conceptually captures it

so for example one version might be in my own case right I'm sure you encounter this too you get lots of wonderful interesting invitations things to go do this or to go do that or speak at this or whatever they're wonderful I mean never be in grateful for those opportunities

you have to be very selective about what you do and so as I was struggling with how do you decide which to do right when you're going to say no to most of them they all can look like a series of individual decisions but then actually no there's actually a couple of really big decisions

is it a great teaching moment potentially and will you learn something that's like a meta decision and now you can sort of strip away actually the question is is it a great teaching moment possibility or is it not is very different than should I go to Austin and do this event

or should I meet with this person they look individual but they're really part of a whole that's one and you can think of that as you know the simple thing like what you wear you make a thousand different decisions or you could make one big decision or were the same thing all the time I suppose

the second is and I've shared with some others but it's so powerful at the end of that day with Peter I asked him how I could pay him back and he said first I had already paid him back because he had learned and you got to remember this was when we were doing a

Thelma Louise thing we're really scared right we didn't know if this is going to work and I was launching out to try to do this self directed path and genuinely scared and Peter said to me said but I do have a request that you change your question a little bit it seems to me you spend a lot of

time worrying about if you're going to survive well you'll probably survive and you spend too much time thinking about if you'll be successful it's the wrong question a question is how to be useful and that was the last thing he said that day he just got out of the car and closed the door and walked away those the the Peter Drucker mic drop the actual us and but you know I find that I go back to that over and over and over again

just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by AG1 the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG1 it simply covers a ton of bases I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road

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so learn more check it out go to drink AG1 dot com slash Tim that's drink AG1 the number one drink AG1 dot com slash Tim last time drink AG1 dot com slash Tim check it out and now Ed Shaw the polymath professor who changed Tim's life find out how this 17 year veteran of the tech industry former member of the US House of Representatives and Ivy League educator became one of Tim's most important mentors Ed welcome to the show

now it's great to be here with you Tim I think back to the spring semester of 2000 when you contacted me after all of the other students had registered for my course and made such an impressive plea to be able to enroll in the course committing if you were enrolled that you would clean the blackboards clean the erasers do whatever it took to make my life easier

and I almost cried when I heard those words and you took the course and I'm so proud of what you've done over the past 19 years I don't blame the course for your success but I do blame you're enrolling in the course for our friendship

and you've taught me so much from the very beginning I wanted to take the course for many many reasons this was ELE 491 high tech entrepreneurship which was in the electrical engineering department in the ORF department which I can never remember the actual full name for operations and research

operations research and financial engineer there we go now I have no business whatsoever being in any engineering school but at the time the Princeton courses undergraduate courses were only very recently being voted on by students this was a very new thing this is before Yelp and so on and one of the standouts was this new course high tech entrepreneurship taught by professor shall and I really wanted like many people to be part of this course

and when I finally was accepted to the course and began learning I remember one point I was cleaning the blackboard and cleaning the erasers and you said to me I don't know if you remember this you said Tim don't get too good at cleaning the erasers

and there's a lot of direct teaching and a lot of indirect teaching just observing you as you interact with your students and the world and there's certain things that when I describe you to my friends and I do that very often and a lot of your students I mean you're just telling me before we began recording

stay in touch with you and these are people from 40 50 years ago it's remarkable one of the things I throw in that was not in the bioirad was figure skating could you please tell us about your background with figure skating I grew up in Omaha Nebraska and we were fortunate to have an indoor skating rink where professional ice hockey team played the Omaha Knights they were probably a farm team for one of the NHL hockey teams

and my mother took me to that ice rink when I was about seven years old and I really enjoyed the challenge and I remember coming back from one session when I was just beginning to skate and I said mom I really had a good day today and she said what was so special about it and I said I only fell 40 times this time from what you might call small beginnings

I began to get more proficient and more interested and in those days figure skating was really figure skating where there were precise patterns on clean ice with turns and loops that you had to perform in order to pass certain tests

and I passed the pre test and then I passed the first test and the second test and at that point I was kind of on my way but ice was only available during the winter so when I was 13 I began spending summer away from Omaha where there were ice rinks and continued to train and continued to pass tests and when I was 16 years old I had passed the sixth test and I qualified for the national championships in men's singles in a lower group not the the world class group but a lower group

and I was also ice dancing was a partner and in 1956 we won the silver dance championship in the Midwestern sections there were three sections in the country went to the national championships and then my senior year in high school 1957 and again I skated in the national championships in Berkeley, California

I never was a winner but it was a special experience to meet a lot of people throughout the country going to these championships and I still stay in touch with my dance partner and a gentleman who I competed against in the singles championships it was a big part of my life Tim and and as I think about it the hours that I spent training getting up at 6 a.m. or actually 5.30 a.m. being on the ice in Omaha at 6 a.m. in a cold winter Nebraska winter

and then skating in the evening to fitting in homework school to prepare for one competition where if you did well enough you could go to the national championships it taught me the power the value of practice of dedication of persistence and determination those are valuable life lessons and character building lessons so when people ask me well how do I prepare to be a leader or to change the world

it's through learning those values you don't get a quick return creating value for the world you get a quick return doing something that doesn't matter but if you're going to make a difference in the society changing the world for the better you better be prepared for a long journey

you to me is one of your standout characteristics have preparation you very meticulous preparation I remember this because keep in mind people listening as we said I was showing up to potentially do my chalkboard duty and my eraser duty and so on so I would arrive to e.l.i. 4.91 early and you would be arranging the name cards so you had placards for the students which is not common at Princeton

you would be arranging chairs and reviewing potentially the case study materials and I don't remember any TAs and teaching assistants for that class so could you talk about how you thought about preparation outside of say figure skating and did that come from your parents where did that attention to detail before the competition

whether that's competition and business sports or otherwise or just getting up in front of a class of students can you talk to where that comes from and how you think about preparation well I was a strong believer in Murphy's law whatever can go wrong will go wrong yeah and so I would come to the classroom typically 45 minutes early make sure that the projector was working

and sometimes it wasn't yeah and so I had time then to call the audio visual people and they'd come over and get it fixed rather than showing up right at the time the class starts and then finding that there are problems that disrupted the flow of the class

I think it was Benjamin Franklin who wrote failing to prepare it's very important to me not to be surprised by things that go wrong and the way that you prevent that is through preparation and making sure everything is the way that it needs to be for success

as far as the classes concerned even though I had taught the lessons the sessions many many times I usually spent two to three hours prior to each class preparing again I viewed my classes which were taught by the case method of teaching and learning where students would read about an actual company situation and put themselves in the part of the class

in the position of the CEO or the founder or the technical person and describe what to do I would ask questions and they would give the answers I felt that that approach to teaching and learning putting someone in the position of the founder the person who had to achieve the results rather than just listening and learning and reading from a book

would not only help to learn but also build the confidence that they could do that kind of job well in order to make that experience that classroom experience work the best it was like a performance yeah I would come in and I didn't know exactly how the discussion would evolve but I knew the lessons that would come out of it and I find a way regardless of what the students would say to convey those lessons through their words

the case method is something I'd love to talk a little bit more about because my first exposure to the case method was in your class and it's a method that as I understand it is used at Harvard Business School also at Stanford Graduate School Business what I also found so appealing about the case method is as a student have these short modules these case studies and they would often be a part one with a cliffhanger so the module one would end with some type of dilemma or disaster or big decision

and you didn't have the conclusion you didn't have the answer meaning what actually happened in that particular case and it allowed you to think for yourself but it also gave you an opportunity to speak to the class to speak to you and to be assertive also

because you would have I remember at least in my class many differing opinions some of which were polar opposites and it really struck me as a pragmatic way to allow people to be active in the way that they're going to have to be active if they're ultimately going to be entrepreneurs when you're teaching and learning about starting enterprises or creating something new you learn by doing the case method helps in that projects that are real do that one of the Princeton graduates

it's now four years ago wrote her senior thesis on can entrepreneurship be taught or is it something you're born with and there are articles that have been written that college courses in entrepreneurship or waste of time they don't matter so in 2015 when she was working on this I created an online survey instrument which I sent out to all 1600 Princeton students that I had had in my classes over 31 semesters

we had to cut off the responses in order for to meet our thesis deadline after 400 responses of the 1600 but of those first 1600 responses 160 had been founders of companies among the survey questions was the question what Princeton experiences have helped you in choosing your life path and succeeding in what you pursued and of the 160 founders 95% said it was the course that made the difference

I think what it was it's not so much what they learned in detail but rather pointing out to the students that this is a possible life path that you can create something from scratch and create value and what great satisfaction you get from that it also and I attribute this to the case method gave students the confidence they could do it they read the case and say I'm as smart as that person I know I could do that too

and I tried to choose the cases with youthful founders rather than old people like me then there were some tools that techniques that they learned from it but I believe that everyone is born with the desire to do something beyond themselves and as an entrepreneur starting something from scratch making it real impacting the world in that way

it fulfills that desire to do something meaningful beyond them so is that what an entrepreneur is to you mean if you were to define entrepreneurs that someone who build something from scratch whatever that might be how do you think about the term entrepreneur you probably remember this team from the course but I assert that entrepreneurship isn't about starting companies

entrepreneurship is an approach to life and you can be an entrepreneur in anything it's about starting something from scratch it's about making good things happen that hadn't been done before it's a combination of innovation a lot of people get ideas and implementation and that second part implementation is the most important a lot of people say wouldn't it be neat if we could do this and that's as far as it goes but entrepreneurs say wouldn't it be neat if we could do this and then they do it

I wanted to say a few things and underscore a couple of things the first is that there are only two courses I still have all the notes from meaning classes I took as an undergrad that I still have three ring binders which contain all the notes from one was the literature fact the John McFee and the other was ELE 491

so I still have all of those notes and it strikes me that first from a tool perspective if people want to find case studies that are used at places like Harvard Business School or Stanford Business so you can actually find quite a few online in order them so I would encourage people to look into that the reason that I have notes from those two classes is I think in large part because I had and we were talking about this

a little bit earlier a very very difficult and dark period in my life junior year and took some time off of school very very hard time for me and what I found in the literature fact and also a particularly in high tech entrepreneurship was a teaching and reinforcing of optimism right which is very different from giving all of your students rose colored glasses

you are showing that I found this to really personally very helpful in these case studies a lot of things go wrong but you were able to show how people figured it out and how they learned to navigate around those things how do you think about if you do the role of optimism in any of this well I'm a chronic optimist I believe that that is important to doing things that haven't been done before

you can imagine all of the things that can go wrong and I guess there's some value in being a realist but I don't think you do things that haven't been done before and succeed in that by being negative and focusing on all of the things that need to be done rather it's having a vision and then committing to making it real I would bless that way I just look at the world I don't think through rose colored glasses no but I when when people say that's going to be hard

I say that it's going to be more fun then because doing something that's hard is a lot more fun than doing something that's easy how did you ask two questions as I'll start with the one that I should probably ask first which is when you were say 20 years old 15 or 20 somewhere in that range what did you think you were going to be when you grew up

I knew exactly what I was going to be I was going to be a physicist I came to Princeton in 1957 with a plan to major in physics and then in my sophomore year I discovered philosophy and I thought this is way cool stuff

and I decided that I would major in philosophy with in those days what was called a bridge program with physics so I took all of the required courses in physics but my department was the philosophy department my independent work both as a junior and senior were on subjects that combined philosophy and physics

my senior thesis was describing what the German philosopher manual can't theory of space and time would have been had he been born 50 years later and had known Einstein's general theory of relativity and I described in my thesis this is what can't theory of space and time would have been unfortunately he didn't know general relativity based on Newtonian physics but as a presumptuous 21 year old I figured I knew what was inside can'ts hit

and he just known about Einstein and his theories he would have had a different philosophy of space and time that and $2.40 will get your cup of coffee at your favorite coffee shop

and you mentioned Einstein Princeton certainly has a storied history in some respects with physics I mean Einstein spent time not too far away from where we're sitting right now and Richard Feynman and others certainly is that how you ended up focusing on Princeton and physics was the history I guess at that point I'm not sure what specifically would have drawn you here but is that what drew you to Princeton

well starting from the time that I was about 12 I was an Einstein lover I guess you'd say I began reading about his theories and biographies and so forth and so I applied to various colleges in the physics department engineering physics in one case and physics and all the others

and I was accepted to all of those schools and all of them provided me with a rather attractive scholarship except Princeton Princeton wrote to me and said you can work in the dining hall as a bus boy and I think I could make with 12 to 15 hours a week, $400 a semester and I chose Princeton because I concluded that must be the toughest school they're not making a big deal out of me and I want to go where it's most challenging I've never looked back

did you end up finding Princeton challenging oh way too challenging that ended my figure skating career I did not have the time to continue to practice I tried to compete in my freshman year in the Eastern championships and didn't do that well and I began to realize that I wasn't going to make it and looking back I don't know whether I would have ever made the world team

but in 1961 many of the skaters that I had either competed with trained with my skating coach all perished in a plane crash the world team on their way to the world championships in Brussels Belgium in 1961 and we lost a whole generation of world class figure skaters and I don't know whether I would have ever gotten to that point but I'm glad I made the choice that I did to go to Princeton to give up figure skating and to focus on what's led me to be here talking to you

when did teaching enter the picture what happened after if you just paint a picture for us after your undergraduate experience I knew what I was going to do after I graduated from Princeton I had applied for and was accepted to the U.S. Navy officers candidate school in Newport, Rhode Island to begin my training in September of 1961

I went back home to Omaha Nebraska worked in manual labor on the night shift in a can factory and in late August was called to Ford Omaha to be inducted into the U.S. Navy during that pre-induction interview I was asked if anything had happened to me health wise since I'd applied in February and had it physical then I said well I broke my leg in a rugby game at Princeton in April but it's fine now

they didn't take my word for it they ordered an extra and concluded it wasn't up to Navy standards so I was unable to enter OCS in September of 1961 very disappointed I did have an alternative I had applied to Stanford Business School for the MBA program I only applied to Stanford because it only had one essay in the application and all the others had three

so I focused on Stanford for that reason I had been accepted and I never sent in the postcard that indicated that I was not coming so I retrieved the postcard Senate in and within I'd say six days my whole life changed from going into the Navy to going to California and entering the MBA program

I did not know in that split second in April when I heard a crack when I fell in the rugby game that that would change my life so dramatically that's why I tell people who asked me about career planning that career planning is overrated

you asked me the question though how did you get into teaching well I was in the MBA program at Stanford University and they are just like philosophy at Princeton I discovered operations research applying mathematics to real operating business problems but operating problems in general

and I said this is way cool and so rather than looking for a job as I was approaching my MBA degree I applied for the PhD program to pursue operations research and after my first year in the PhD program the professor who had taught the most popular second year MBA course electronic data processing it was the only course that stands for business school at that time that had anything to do with computers he left unexpectedly

I went to the dean of the business school and I said Mr Dean you have a problem you've got a hundred second year MBA students signed up to take business 366 electronic data processing this September and you don't have anybody to teach it I am the solution to your problem I can teach that course and they said something like don't call us we'll call you and in late August about three weeks before the course was to begin I get a call

Ed can you teach that course I said you bet and that's how I began my teaching career again there's a life lesson here opportunities unexpectedly happen and many people say gee that's an interesting opportunity but it only matters in life if you seize the moment if you take advantage of that opportunity and commit yourself to do something that you've never done before

I find that I learned the most the fastest when I don't know what I'm doing so I'd never taught a university course and all of a sudden I'm in front of a hundred second year MBA students 24 years old teaching a course but I did okay

and then stand for graduate school of business several do you teach another course I taught different courses and that's how my teaching career began how did you become good at teaching or study teaching refine your teaching how did you work on that because you're an excellent teacher

there are plenty of bad teachers out there plenty of passable teachers even that incredible institutions but I would consider you a very very adept teacher how did you how did you learn to teach I think I became a better teacher by not being smart and here's what I mean by it people who are really super smart learning comes too easy I believe you can be a better teacher when it's more difficult for you to learn so that you can explain to somebody else how to master some lesson

I also had the chance as a high school senior to take a course in debate it was a full year course in debating and that helped me with public speaking but more importantly the high school teacher who taught debate also taught the various individual events like oratory and extemporaneous speaking and I wanted to compete in extemporaneous speaking could you just define what that means in this context so well this is the way it was when I was in high school

and extemporaneous speaking contest each participant individually would be given a topic on which to speak for 10 minutes and each contestant would have one hour to prepare the 10 minute speech so my high school teacher said well come in after schools over every afternoon and I'll give you a topic I'll give you an hour and then you come back and give your 10 minute speech on that topic

so the first time I did that he gave me a topic I spent the hour preparing I gave my talk and when I ran out of words I said is the 10 minutes up yet and he says it's only been three minutes and then he said every afternoon he would do that and by the end of the public speaking events that year the contest that year I'd become a state champion in extemporaneous speaking

you asked earlier to him about preparation this is just another example I wasn't born to be a speaker I wasn't born to be a teacher but I learned to do both and there are tools also as you mentioned in your own teaching there are tools that you can give people and strategies which is certainly part was part of ELE 491 in my case

and in the cases of your students with the extemporaneous speaking what were some of the keys to getting better were there any techniques or strategies or ways of thinking about the topics you were given that were particularly helpful and that final event I remember the topic it was what was the significance of the conflict between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton and I had an hour to prepare that one before Google

and so the style of presentation it wasn't a sort of matter of fact it was to prepare what might be called a 10 minute oration with drama with stories with life lessons and sort of end on a crescendo and let's go back to teaching I view teaching more about nurturing about personal values about inspiration about recognizing that you can have fun doing great things

and it's not so much the lessons or the facts but rather it's building a maybe even contagion this optimistic attitude and understanding that if you can change the world for the better that's as good as it gets

I do think in retrospect it's maybe easier of course it's easier to see in retrospect but how these various chance opportunities and encounters with philosophy with the teaching with the extemporaneous speaking not necessarily in that order but how they've combined into this alchemy that has enabled you to transmit and infuse these beliefs to your students in a way that is very very memorable

it's not just the text in the book do you remember I mean you remember the topic Aaron Burr and so on do you remember any of the choices that you made in how you competed with that competition in speaking yeah now I remember my debate partner in high school and then at Princeton he was one year behind me we had started kindergarten together and then I skipped first grade so I was one year ahead of him

when he was a junior and I was a senior we were debate partners in a debate team there were two on each side and one you were assigned whether you were the affirmative speakers supporting the resolution or the negative speakers against the resolution I remember he was the first affirmative speaker and I was sitting near while he was standing and he got confused and he gave the negative case

and I'm sort of making hand signals to him as he's giving the negative case against the resolution he's supposed to be speaking for and I was going to have to follow up on this and he finally realized what was happening and he was so smooth he said and that ladies and gentlemen is what our opponents would lead you to believe however and then he quickly switched to the affirmative

that's incredible but there's also a lesson in this that things sometimes don't work out exactly the way you plan but you got to adapt and figure out how to segue into what will work you strike me as very very adaptable in so many ways you spent time in so many different worlds and you're very good at seizing opportunities but you've also done certain things for periods of time you've run companies for extended periods of time

you're in politics for extended period of time how do you this is actually some phrasing that I heard from rabbi Jonathan sacks in the UK said how do you differentiate between opportunities to be seized and temptations to be resisted you focused for extended periods of time on single things when no doubt there are other opportunities being thrown at you how do you think about focusing for extended periods or opening yourself to opportunities

this is really a simple question and it's answered with one word commitment I had situations where I had opportunities to leave companies that I was running I would not leave until it was appropriate to leave where there was a successor there was success when you're an entrepreneur and people are investing in you when you're an entrepreneur and a CEO and employees and customers and suppliers are counting on you you've got to have a commitment to do the job until you're no longer necessary

when I took the company public my first company public and it was about a 10 year period and there were times during that 10 years where we almost went under but when we had gone public and then did a secondary financing so there was sufficient capital and then did a search for a successor I felt that then I could leave to run for the congress perfect segue why did you decide to run for congress I thought I could be good and here's why it wasn't just g that's

way cool like philosophy and operations research in 1977 I was on the board of directors of the American electronics association electronics companies during the seventies were unable to raise sufficient amounts of risk capital the amount of capital committed to professionally manage venture capital funds during the nineteen seventies

funds that would be investing in tech companies was only fifty million a year 50 million a year I was asked to chair a task force for the American electronics association on capital formation to figure out what to do and I assembled a group of entrepreneurs and investors and we concluded the single

inhibitor to sufficient quantities of risk capital investment was the high rate of the capital gains tax at the federal level at that time which was fifty percent and looking at it if you invest invested and lost money they lost all the money if they invested and made money they gave half of it to the federal government

forgetting about what they have to give to the state government so we felt the lower in the tax on capital gains was essential to stimulate in the environment for risk capital investment not just for electronics companies but all kinds of job creating ventures the task force put together white paper and usually that's the end of the story

well we propose the lower in the capital gains tax but keep in mind him that this is a group of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs don't just talk about it they make stuff happen so the first thing we did is we did a survey of the electronics industry and documented the importance of more risk capital investment or job creation and for the ability of these companies to get started

and grow then I went to Washington and testified before congress and there was a young congressman from Wisconsin bill stiger who was on the Houseways and Means Committee he became intrigued with this idea of lowering the tax on capital gains and so he introduced a bill to do so and I worked with him and my the whole electronics association

worked in lobbying the Mayways and Means Committee worked with the Senate and by November of 1978 about a year after we started this process with our survey the federal tax on capital gains was lowered from 50% to 28%

and within about 18 months 1 billion dollars of capital flowed into professionally managed venture capital funds compared to the 50 million a year that had been happening during the 70s and anybody who studies the 1980s that number on an annual basis 4 or 5 billion a year flowing into funds that were

supporting new enterprises and job creating enterprises so that experience particularly because Bill stiger died of a heart attack within a month after this bill was passed he passed away in early December of 1978 the bill was passed in November of 78 his example inspired me to for public service he had changed the nature of the debate in Washington on tax policy from who pays and who doesn't to what will be the economic impact

and I felt gosh somebody who has built a company somebody said the experience that I had with working with bill stiger to get the tax rate on capital gains reduced perhaps I had a contribution to make in public service

it also strikes me and I think you may have even said this in an interview that I read in preparing for this conversation that in in a very real sense you had an advantage in the sense that you could always go back to building companies which means you weren't necessarily dedicated to being a politician as a career indefinitely from that point forward you had some attractive plan b's or plan c's if it didn't work

out said did that enable you to think more aggressively or differently I had a personal principle that I was only going to stay in the house of representatives at most three terms six years and that gave me two advantages one a sense of urgency I couldn't just kind of wait it round and learn the ropes I had to start

making a difference as quickly as I was able and secondly I gave me the freedom to do what I thought was right the worst could happen as I get retired or maybe it's the best that could happen I get retired after one term or two terms certainly I wasn't going to serve more than three as it turned out I only serve two terms in the house because as a congressman from California I think there were at that time 48 or 50 California members of the house of representatives and we were a dime a dozen

and it was very difficult for a single California congressman or congresswoman to get the message out so I felt that if I have ideas I don't not only need a message I need a megaphone and I decided that I could

get a megaphone if I became a US senator from California I ran for the US Senate in nineteen started in 85 for the 1986 campaign I won the Republican nomination but I was defeated in a very close election about a percentage point percentage point and a half by the three term incumbent Alan Cranston looking back I was disappointed at the time because I felt I wasn't as good enough candidate I had lots of support and I'd let people down but looking back I dodged a bullet with that very close

loss because since then I feel through leading companies and through at least my view changing lives for the better my students over many many years that I may have through not just their lives but how they've changed the in a positive way the lives of others that I may have made more of a contribution to a better future than I would have as a US senator I believe that I

definitely believe that and I shouldn't say and but at the time you were disappointed and I would be very interested to hear because we've been talking about a lot of your successes and you've had a lot of successes but at that time when you got the news that you had lost what did the next few days or weeks look like for you what do you say to yourself when you experience a loss like that what do I do next to make a difference

and I'd never been out of a job I mean when you think about it it was from teaching to starting a company to running for Congress and now I didn't have a next what am I going to do next I had the opportunity to join the venture capital firm that was the lead investor in my first company and I accepted that assignment as a general partner of the firm it was Brentwood associates at that time was a

Los Angeles based venture capital firm and I established the Silicon Valley office of that firm I think they my partners would agree that I wasn't really very good at being a venture capital investor I'm too much of an optimistic every deal I looked at oh gee that's really interesting I can see how to make that happen as a venture capital issue really have to be more realistic and maybe even super critical

but also at that time in my life I viewed being an investor is kind of like a football coach you walk the sidelines you send in plays you make substitutions you rant and rave at halftime

but you never put any points on the board and I was still in at that time of my life wanting to put points on the board meaning running a company not being the better in the stands but the jockey on the horse and so when I had an opportunity to become CEO of one of the company's Brentwood had it help to start I took that opportunity in a company in the magnetic recording company

recording components business called send store what is your decision process like for something like that because you mentioned with the venture capital general partner position perhaps you are too optimistic everything sounded interesting but when you make a decision to say become the CEO of a startup in the portfolio you are saying no to other things presumably so what was the decision process like in evaluating that and saying yes to it

it's again commitment I mean I was part of a firm general partner of a firm that had made a significant investment in this company and they felt that there was a need for a new CEO and so when they talk to me about it it started out as well can you go in there and help out and be on the board and it evolved into can you go in there and run it and I wasn't going to say no to my partners

did you in your mind or explicitly with them set expectations in the way that you did for yourself with the three term limit as a congressman did you go in to it saying I'm committing to this for expirytive time and then rule reevaluate or was it left totally open ended I was left open ended the goal of success rather than how long and I think you're getting to an issue that where I may not be like a lot of other people I don't do things for me I do things for others

so if you want to get down to what motivates you finding something that I think is meaningful that needs to be done and recognizing I can help do it and it's not about the money that's why I do things pro bono my wife is not particularly thrilled with that approach but on the other hand I focus on where can I make a difference for the benefit of others rather than what's in it for me

and I don't know whether that's unusual but it served me well how do you differentiate between the things that will have the greatest impact for others and feeling pure pressured to commit to something if that question makes any sense because it seems like people pleasing and committing to things that will help

the greatest number of other people are deeply help other people are two different things and I guess I'm just wondering if if there are times when you commit to say doing certain things because the general partners to whom you've made a commitment ask you to do it may not always be the same thing that will have

the greatest impact maybe it's not a good question I'm just wondering if you've ever run into a position where people want you to do one thing and you could be very good at it but you feel like your abilities are better put in a different place usually the decisions that I make about how I'm going to spend my time and my life are made by me rather than responding to requests

when I came to offer my course here at Princeton I hadn't gotten a phone call saying hey Ed would you please come and teach a high-tech entrepreneurship course at Princeton rather in June of 1997 I asked for a meeting with the then dean of the engineering school James way

and in that meeting I proposed that the engineering school would benefit from having a rather comprehensive program in entrepreneurship it just made perfect sense to me that engineers innovate but in order to make a difference in the world that innovation has to then become real and commercialized and often in a start-up venture

so exposing engineering students to that process and that opportunity seemed to make sense and that was the origin of the first offering of VLA for 91 in the fall semester of 1997 again an instance where I decided that there might be some value that I could create and now

entrepreneurship the Princeton way is pervasive across this campus with many courses with any co-curricular and extracurricular programs for the benefit of student entrepreneurs and the survey that I mentioned before out of 400 of the students that took my course forgetting about not including the courses the many other courses that are now offered

to have 160 founders of companies from that cadre it would suggest to me that out of the total of 1600 that there may be 3 400 founders and I still I'm touched when I get emails from students I may have had a dozen years ago saying Ed you planted the seed

12 years ago and it's finally sprouting I've just found it my first company it took me this long but you gave me the confidence to do it how have you thought about parenting and your own kids because you're so deliberate in how you teach and you prepared so extensively not just for the courses but for each individual class how have you thought about parenting

or how would you describe your parenting style it's almost the same that it's just that the students start a lot younger I believe that the best way to help people find their way nurture them is through encouragement rather than direction when our children were young we have three children

three children I coached 13 soccer teams all three of them played soccer at one time or another I was a Cub Scout leader and a boy scout leader we're really proud of the way our kids turned out we were lucky they were growing up in a good place at a good time probably not a lot of the challenges that all parents face today

with the world more complicated with communications technology more advanced but loving them caring and letting them know that you love them and you care is kind of the secret of parenting could you speak to the encouragement instead of rather than direction a bit more does that mean that you're exposing them to a lot and whatever they gravitate towards naturally is what you then try to foster what does that mean when you say encouragement instead of direction

they've got to live their lives you can't live their lives I think I benefited a lot from my own parents they were proud of me whether I did well or not I learned when I was maybe five six seven years old how to build radios and build motors and the basement workshop from my father who had a degree in electrical engineering but sadly

during the depression he lost his engineering job and got into an assignment that really didn't have anything to do with engineering but he stayed in it in order to provide for his family one thing that I remember from my parents I was as we talked about earlier competitive figure skater and sometimes I didn't do well

in a competition I may fall on I may have not done a school figure very well not up to my ability they never criticize me in the situation they never put pressure on me they were always supportive and proud regardless of how well I did relative to what I could have done what might they say let's just say on the car ride back after

you've had for you a disappointing performance what are the types of things they might say to you great job having been a soccer coach I know that not all parents act that way sometimes parents are the problem the players are just fine parents are a problem both of my parents weren't raised by their parents my mother was raised

mother was raised by our grandmother my father was raised by his mother's sister his mother died when he was about 12 years old his father was in the German newspaper business in Montana but he and his sister grew up in Omaha raised by his deceased mother's sister

and I think as a result of their not having parents they wanted to be the best parents and so my sister we never had a whole lot of money but my sister had ballet lessons and she was an exquisite ballerina I had piano lessons and figure skating lessons and they just wanted to be the best parents ever

and I think they felt blessed to have two children who wanted to succeed we both studied hard we're both good students we went to college we did other things besides that and we wanted both wanted our parents to be proud we think that desire came from was it watching their example and the perhaps the diligence with which your father

showed you how to disassemble and reassemble these radios where did the desire to please them come from if what you most received was continuous positive feedback I'm not I'm not sure was the focus of my life was to please them right for the paper I had from the time I was in grade school maybe even in kindergarten of her first grade an overarching goal and that is to live a life that matters to make a lasting positive difference in the world I call it leaving footprints that's what drives me

so some people might say well my overarching goal is to be the richest person around or my overarching goal is to have a whole lot of adulation and be a celebrity my goal maybe even in a quiet way is to leave footprints on the world

have there ever been times in your life where you felt like you've wandered or been pushed away from that and then have corrected course I don't recall I don't recall I always sort of marched to my own drum yeah you know one of that's another thing maybe this is important for your audience I always wanted to be different there are people particularly

with social media these days that want to be accepted that want to be like if someone has a new kind of shoe or shirt you know others want to have the same thing and so I've always had a desire to be different from others and maybe that enables me not only to venture where others may not venture but also to be satisfied doing something that nobody else is doing

are there any books that have had a particularly large impact on your life or that you've given the most to other people are recommended well the four hour work where for the four hour body you know I put their fine books I heard there those are very fine books and everyone should read them besides the course on the top shelf are there any any books that come to mind that have impacted you strongly or that you've recommended to students or other people

when I was little when I'm talking about little like six eight ten years old there was a whole series of biographies written for children my age Thomas Edison Abraham Lincoln Benjamin Franklin and I would read those books over and over because their lives and what they accomplished were what I hope to do

so it was that set of experiences there was a book on the right brothers and these were written for somebody my age now you can read Walter Isaacson's book on Benjamin Franklin or on Steve Jobs or Walter Isaacson's book on Einstein but it's the same thing yeah or David McCullough's on the right brothers yes fabulous book do you still read biographies is that that's kind of all I care about and it's the stories the stories that are inspirational

and it gets back to what we were talking about before with the case method where when I'm reading a biography just like I'm hoping the students when they read a case that they think of themselves in that situation and what would I do and reading biographies

well that's just a wonderful McCullough book on the right brothers amazing lessons of they didn't just go out build a plane and fly it a lot of setbacks and disappointments and struggles in order to do what they did the same with all of those it gets to what we were talking about before the preparation

the commitment to excellence it doesn't happen overnight people who achieve great things even though it may look like it happened quickly and easily and everybody can do it most of those stories have a lot of sacrifice and difficulty and disappointments and setbacks in them for entrepreneurs whether students in your classes or people listening are there any particular biographies or books that you would recommend in particular any standouts or just particular figures

and well again don't buy the books because they have lessons in them by the books because they have stories in them and there are a bunch of them my colleague at Princeton Derrick Liddell has written a couple of books and his most recent is built on bedrock and it's a lot of the book is about Walmart

and Sam Walton and how it started and he went to the Walmart archives and based his stories about Walmart on those facts but it's filled with stories about companies that were built by people on solid foundations built on bedrock I had a chance the stories are so important I think also for many reasons of course but also because it's really the glue that we as humans are programmed to use to remember any of the lessons that might come out of those stories

and that's something that struck me when a few months ago I was invited to go to Bentonville Arkansas and interview Doug McMillan the CEO of Walmart for this podcast but it was my first time in Northwest Arkansas my first time in Bentonville and I went to the I was able to see Sam Walton's pickup truck and the keys and the stories are what stick

and it was a fascinating fascinating experience what are you most excited about these days you seem to be moving as quickly doing as many things as ever you certainly don't strike me as someone who's ever idle what are you personally most excited about these days

I'm focusing now on education and my ears of teaching are just part of it but you look at higher education today very expensive lot of students with debt may not be prepared for first jobs may not be prepared for a lifetime of contributions

and so just in the last couple of weeks I volunteer to be the interim president of a wonderful small college Sierra Nevada college located in inclined village Nevada right on the shores of Lake Tahoe in the midst of the Sierra Nevada mountains this is a college that has a dedicated faculty

with real life experience in the areas they teach they're not just teachers they've done what they teach it is a college in which entrepreneurship is pervasive it has some real focused capabilities in environmental science well right there on the shores of Lake Tahoe keep Tahoe blue environmental science is critical in that area what a wonderful place to learn about that it has a strong entrepreneurial based business program at the undergraduate level

and then it has a marvelous fine arts and creative writing program you don't go there to major in neuroscience you don't go there to major in philosophy but if you want to go to a small college with small classes with dedicated teachers to be an entrepreneurial leader both in your first job and for a lifetime of contributions

in establishing and building enterprises or being a leading environmental scientist with entrepreneurial approaches to that scientific work or if you want to be like a writer you know Jim better than anybody writers aren't just writers they're entrepreneurs yeah to the creating content but then getting their content red and podcasting that's a way of communicating with people I have friends who are photographers they became photographers they didn't

born photographers but they became photographers but there are entrepreneurs so here's a small college that I've volunteered to lead until a successor with entrepreneurial leadership capabilities is identified and takes office and continue to promote this higher education approach one of the challenges these days as I just mentioned was how do you

do this less expensively and I believe that there are ways in which education can use technology to reduce the cost I'm not advocating will there will never be any more classrooms but a combination of that classroom experience with online learning can reduce the cost of providing

a top rated educational institution I'm also attracted to income sharing agreements perhaps your audience is not familiar with them but rather than taking out student loans there are sources of financing where the students signs an agreement to repay based on their income above certain levels

and if they never make that much they don't repay but if they make more than that threshold level then they pay and may pay more than the amount of the debt but having students graduating with huge amounts of debt reduces their choices and you asked me earlier well how do you choose what you want to do well I want to change the world I want to do

things that will benefit others well if you have a lot of debt you may not be able to make those choices in that direction you have to focus first on well how do I make enough money to pay off my debt so I don't know whether any of the people who are listening to this podcast are thinking about

and rolling in a unique educational institution but we do have a few openings left for entering freshmen this even this fall in late August so if there are people who are interested in coming to get a uniquely valuable educational experience in a beautiful setting look up Sierra Nevada dot E.D.U

and I'll link to that in the show notes for everyone as well so you'll be able to find those links really easily the income sharing is very very interesting to me I don't have much exposure to it but there are some programming schools for instance I believe one is called lambda school which has this exact model and has proven very very successful

it also puts a very productive onus on the educators to really think through the practicalities of what they're teaching how effective they are how effectively they're imparting these skills to their students

and do you have any particular quotes or mantras anything that you live your life by or remind yourself of often are there any particular you mentioned say one earlier if you're failing to prepare you're preparing to fail do you have any other quotes that have really stuck with you do what you enjoy doing do it the best you know how good things will happen

I love it but I may be unusual I don't know whether this unusual I like to get out of my comfort zone do things I haven't done before I believe that doing so enables me to learn but the more I learn the more I'm able to contribute to others

so doing the same thing and being able to be the best at that that's lot of but my mother had a problem with when she was alive I started out with this teaching I mentioned how I got into it the same for graduate school business and after I done that for a while I said mom I'm going to start a company and she said buzzy that was my nickname in my sister still calls me

buzzy in my high school friends call me buzzy buzzy you were just getting good at teaching and now you're going to start a company you don't know anything about that and then the company did okay and we took it public and I said mother I'm going to run for Congress

buzzy you were just getting good at running a company you don't know anything about politics and she lived long enough so that she saw me sworn in to the US House of Representatives in January of 1983 and then she passed away that April how did she respond to seeing you sworn in she didn't express her emotions and her feelings a lot but I believe she was proud I'm sure she was how could she not be yeah you have a an incredible tradition that I think is so

so so many of your students and it has to do with singing and it seems like there have been a few different versions of this but where did the singing enter the picture with your teaching well started way before the start way before that oh yeah when I was probably in grade school I would write poems about things

like the busy bee is lively all he does is buzz but yesterday he stung me and now he is a was I said that's that's something you wrote failure going way back and then I started composing using music that already existed then when I was in first teaching at the Stanford graduate school of business there was a tradition there were in the spring in May they held a joint faculty student event called the spring fling and the faculty would prepare a skit

it had perhaps acting it had perhaps some songs and I became the writer for the faculty skits and then there were students skits as well my most famous song I wrote many for those skits about various courses and primarily about courses

but then I'd also write the words and we had take off on batman and robin and we had mission impossible skit where I'd write the songs and the music and even after I left the faculty as a teacher and I started my company they kept me on the Stanford business school faculty from the time I left which was 1970 to 1981

so I could continue to be the writer of the faculty skit well the most famous song I wrote was about the linear programming algorithm it was called the simplex method where poor students in 1966 when I was teaching the quantitative methods course had to learn how to do this

and linear programming was abbreviated LP linear programming and so I wrote a song about the algorithm that was mathematically correct that if you listen to the words you could do the simplex algorithm to achieve an optimal solution to a linear programming problem but I wrote it in the form of a dance

and when something like this come on gang no get around see what your math profs puttin down get in close and listen to me I'm gonna show you how to do the LP it's a new dance but it's easily done in fact you learned it in 261 just to make sure that you can do it listen close while I review it do the LP come on baby do the LP with me

we're going to pivot step day and night and optimize it out of sight and then it went through a series of verses with the details of the simplex algorithm first of all form a big strong line I that's it you're looking fine fine behind that line form one more come on everybody get out on the floor keep forming lines one after one when you're out of cats then you're done

now you see how I get my kicks I've got y'all in a big matrix do the LP come on baby do the LP with me we're going to pivot step day and night and optimize it out of sight incredible

so you you use stories you use music I feel like these are communication skills that sort of transcend the era in which you were born I mean you could have gone back a thousand years and use these probably go forward a thousand years and use these and your students remember these things they really remember these things and I'd love for you to talk about

another song that I certainly was exposed to and that is my way and why you chose that song I was teaching at Harvard Business School in 1996 of course called entrepreneurial finance and for the last class of the course I want to I want to end with a number of stories and share with students my philosophies and it was a captive audience attendance was mandatory and I thought what would be an appropriate message to convey and that message as we've talked about it earlier parenting teaching

the message is just do it your way and so then I thought of the song my way and I put some words to that song this course is end is here but I have in this final session I thought for your career it is a most important lesson as you go down life's path whether slow or in a hurry recall the Nike and just do it your way

it brings back the memories it not only brings back the memories but it just refreshes the mark that you had on me and continue to have and I really just want to thank you Ed for doing things your way

it's really had such an incredible impact on so many people and I'm not going to mention by name but is a mutual friend of ours you introduced us because we're both students of yours but is a very very very successful entrepreneur and we were going back and forth emailing in preparation for this interview with you and he in closing says please give my best to Ed any success I've had in business was due to him that is an incredible sense

and it's incredible also because he is not the only student who would write that I've met students of yours from China I've met students of yours from countries around the world who have some version of that sentiment and it's so incredible and it's been such a privilege and such a great stroke of luck that I ended up in your class and I just want to say that

to you because it's had such a significant impact on the trajectory of my life and certainly for me that's a big deal that's a really really big deal so I want to thank you thank you Tim and now you know why I do what I do I concluded a long time ago I'm not going to be able to change the world alone I said my goal in life is to live a life that matters

I call leaving footprints but I can better achieve my goal leaving footprints with your feet and so that's why I do what I do well I hope this is certainly I mean I can't wait to have dinner we're going to have dinner after this and continue to catch up I can't wait to see what you do next

and I'm so so happy to have a chance to spend time together today and this has been a real pleasure for me to do this well I'm proud of you too and I'm proud of so many people who you refer to who have taken my course they've taken many other courses they've had other experiences but they go out and do great stuff and deep down I say to myself well I'm really glad I lost that center race because otherwise I may not have been able to do what I've been doing

it sounds strange to say but I'm also glad I'm really glad for my sake and for the sake of many people that you lost that center race and I've just done so much so much good and you're going to continue to do so much good it's really inspiring and I think this is a great place to wrap up is there anything else you would like to say or close with anything you'd like to recommend to people anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up

well I've told you my story and with you know some detail based on Tim's questions but most important thing for you to do you speaking to the audience is to do it your way don't just follow what it's recommended don't just pursue what others are pursuing but do what you enjoy doing do it the best you know how good things will happen and if you're thinking more about doing something different than you're currently doing it's time for a change

I could not imagine a better place to close ed to be continued we're going to go grab some food and continue the conversation but thank you so much for taking the time to do this oh this is a real treat too and oh I notice that there's a blackboard that's dirty and a racer sitting need cleaning

so get to it yeah there is literally a whiteboard right behind me so I'm going to get back to my my other task cleaning up for ed and to be continued and to everybody listening I will include everything we've talked about in the show notes

which you can find as always at Tim. Blog forward slash podcast and I hope you enjoyed this even half as much as I did and thank you so much for tuning in hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two

million people subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles I'm reading books I'm reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on it gets sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast

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