Kevin Systrom — Tactics, Books, and the Path to a Billion Users | The Tim Ferriss Show

[Music] Kevin welcome to the Tim Farriss show thank you I excited to be here and for people who don't know Kevin allow me to introduce Kevin Systrom at Kevin on Instagram as an entrepreneur and co-founder of Instagram while at Instagram Kevin served as the CEO where he oversaw the company's vision and strategy and daily operations that is a whole lot which we will talk about under his leadership Instagram grew to over 1 billion users that's with ABI and launched dozens of products including video live direct messaging creative tools stories and IG TV the company also grew to more than 800 employees with a campus in Menlo Park new offices in New York City and a new headquarters in San Francisco prior to founding Instagram Kevin graduated from Stanford University with a BS in management science and engineering he currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter where to begin so we've spent a little bit of time together we have a little bit of time fortunately not three minutes on morning television to explore all sorts of things and I thought we could start with one since you seem to read not just why a widely but intelligently and we'll hopefully get into that are there any particular books that you have gifted often to other people yeah totally on of course now all my friends are having kids I give kids books but the one I give people that are are trying to learn actively as principals by Ray Dalio it's interesting actually someone gave me the PDF it was a PDF before his book gave me the PDF and I like skimmed over I was like I was pretty good and they were like no I seriously think you're gonna love this and I for some reason I didn't get around to it for maybe a year and a half and then I read the actual book and I was blown away it's both a guide to life a guide to business and also I think an insight into Ray and and someone who's built an amazing business if you guys listening don't know what he does he runs a hedge fund called Bridgewater and he's he's so much more than you know just a finance thinker he's also just a brilliant philosopher so I give that a lot because I think it's a great guide to life hmm yeah he's fast I have I have actually and Ray's been on the show oh really and for those people were wondering just just how many commas are involved in bridgewater capital they think they have a hundred and sixty billion dollars under management something along those lines a little bit and he has a lot of very in some respects controversial and unusual practices within Bridgewater like recording yeah meetings and so on and allowing all employees to have access to the the minutes and so on of such meetings are there any other books that helped you in the early days from an entrepreneurial standpoint or that you found inspiring totally early on we read Mike and I both read the Lean Startup I think is called Lean Startup method or Lean Startup care remember everybody Eric Ries and I remember very early on I was I went to like one of his like book talks I was like one of like 13 people sitting in this little room in Palo Alto and I was like a super fan still am actually and so I don't know that I've read the entire thing but the principles from Lean Startup I still apply today one of which is like do the simple thing first and that was our number one value at a well actually community first was our number one value at Instagram number two was do the simple thing first and still to this day I come back to that so if I were reading two books I'd probably read those two books and if we if we if we look at do the simple thing first from a practical standpoint could you give us an example and I love that you brought up Eric because I remember also has he also have been on the show he has not okay but I remember starting he's a great he's a great guy I would have none I remember going also to I think some hotel conference room probably in Palo Alto when he was initially testing out the material that later became the book in these workshops yeah yeah it was like that yeah talking about avatars and all sorts of different things doing the simple thing first the cope of your responsibilities Instagram at least reading even just your bio kind of makes my head spin to imagine what is involved and how easily distracted you could become what did what are some examples or any examples of doing the simple thing first putting that into practice yeah the first thing the first thing I'll say about doing the simple thing first is people love to make their lives more difficult than it needs to be it's like you know you talk to people who are saving for retirement and you know you don't have to go figure out a hedging strategy right like for currencies to save for retirement turns out just like generally putting in a mutual fund is like not a bad idea and the returns you get for ever more complex strategies either in life or finance they're like it's harder to eke out the incremental value and I think what I found in a start-up is when you're small and you're two people it's me and Mike we're coding late into the night like you don't have time to make things complex you have time to make things work and what ends up happening is you over optimize so you might think you know how it's going to break so you end up trying to build a bunch of things before it breaks and and then it breaks in a different way and you're like why did I spend all that time on you know that fix when actually I needed to be doing something else I feel like that that's true in life I think it's true in business turned finance but so some examples early on I may be the best example at Instagram was we were here's the layman's term version we were on one computer basically one server and we had enough space to store the data on that one server and Instagram became popular right and it turns out all the data couldn't fit one server anymore and we were like this is a novel problem let's figure out how to split it among two servers or three servers or four and instead of just like writing a single file that said like hey listen if your user ID is you know even you're on this server and if it's odd you're on that server which would have charted the data across two servers very well and deterministically one ended up happening was we threw everything out we were like you know what let's adopt this crazy new technology that does Auto sharding it was fancy and had all these bells and whistles I won't name it because I don't want to throw them under the bus but we spent I don't know four months trying to rewrite our system to be on this new database and eventually after crashing a bunch of times and us having issues with it we were about to run out of space Mike was like screw it and he literally spent maybe two hours in the afternoon writing that file that we should have written to begin with and it all just worked so I'm oversimplifying things a little bit for a fact but like that's basically what happened and I still think about that story to this day in terms of an executive making a decision with his co-founder about what to do always do the simple thing first and it's amazing to me how many people think the quality of their management they think is judged based on the complexity of their decisions or the outcomes and it turns out actually the right thing to do is sometimes the simplest and it's the most effective so I live that as a value both of life finance and and at work as well so I'm going to rewind the clock a little bit please because I think this ways you could do that in editing but yes I can and we can slice and dice but this will be like watching the movie memento okay I got it it's basically usually what it's like when I do an interview yeah exactly so a pretty pretty standard protocol I would love to talk about and we won't spend a ton of time on this because as we chatted before recording I think you've talked about the origin story I've Instagram a lot but for people who don't have any context I think it's worth diving into a little bit doing this simple thing first makes me think of a common problem that I see in startups and in software development of any type really which is feature creep and these products that start off with a focus lose focus and it seems to me that you effectively did the opposite in some ways for the creation of Instagram could you give people a little bit of background on how Instagram came to be and you can tackle that short version medium sized however you like well first of all I'm happy to talk about where Instagram came from I just it's such an interesting story in my life and that I've talked about it a bunch of times but I forget that it's actually super interesting to hear for people who might have signed up for Instagram a couple years ago think it's been around forever right but also I think it has some interesting lesson so I'll combine both talking about the storage and storage but also know how we kept it simple Instagram came out of one wanting to be my own boss I was like you know what I want to work for myself I want to work on ideas I really hope I'm gonna make money and I remember telling at the time my mom I was like hey I'm gonna go do this thing and she was like what about health insurance I was like oh what about health insurance you're like I totally forgot so my point is I was a little naive but I wanted to do my own thing and I had a bunch of different ideas one of which was a terrible idea for a check and app actually wasn't terrible but like for at the time there were a bunch of check-in apps and we're sitting in Austin right now it's South by Southwest you know zoom back six seven eight years ago it was all about Gowalla and Foursquare right everyone was all about a shirt so I had to have my version and it wasn't bad but you know it wasn't good either and okay so what catchy name yeah it was called bourbon and bu rbn I still I think I own the domain name somewhere but anyway we what what happened I was working on that I left my job and I happened to be able to raise money for it and I'm not sure how or why but checking apps were all the rage so we raised some money it was you know a couple well-known firms in the valley and I had just enough money to work on it and I met my co-founder Mike at the time and I know I needed a bunch of help because I'm like I'm technical but not like you know I'm not a true engineer in the sense like I didn't study it formally so I met Mike and he was one of the power users of bar and he was like yeah this'll be super fun so we decided to join up we worked on bourbon for maybe three months and it was clear it wasn't working okay it was like very clear the startup was going nowhere and we decided to pivot and this is we're keeping it simple comes in we actually got to the idea for Instagram by taking away features from Bourbon not by changing at all so a bunch of the features of bourbon one you could check in at a place but two you could add a photo of what you were doing at that place so you and I were out to drink somewhere I check in at the bar I could post a photo of the beer I'm having on the cocktail or whatever right and it turns out people kind of like the check-ins the thought was pretty lame because it was a me-too thing but they loved showing people what they were doing they loved taking a picture of the bar the restaurant that whatever and and we realized to keep it simple we were gonna have to cut every other feature of bourbon which we did and we just kept the photo part how did you decide on that feature because we made a list and we asked ourselves what exists in the world what sucks meaning you look out in the world and you say what opportunity is there to fill if stuff doesn't exist and it's a problem that can be solved aka like the experience sucks then that's what you should go do there were a lot of check-in apps there were a lot of planners and meet up things and group chat things but there was no solution for posting great photos to like lots of friends all at once so we made the list we crossed off the things we thought were pretty boring or just there was no opportunity in them and we circled the photos thing because we saw the confluence of both mobile phones being pervasive like again go back in the day not everyone had an iPhone like maybe the iPhone had been out for a couple years at that point 2078 right so we knew that cameras were going to be pervasive in people's pockets that people are going to be carrying these camera phones you know wherever they went but we didn't know if it would be successful or not to capitalize on that but it was the only thing that looked like a greenfield opportunity everything else felt crowded that's a different way of saying it so we got to the idea by cutting everything away from bourbon circling the one thing that we felt like was the biggest opportunity because it didn't exist yet and it was a big need and we built the first version of Instagram note by the way the first version of Instagram did not have filters and people forget the only reason Instagram worked early on was because of the filters and filters came about because I was on this walk with my wife we were taking a small vacation I had been working on bourbon for a while I was exhausted and we were taking this walk along on the beach and I was like oh so you're excited about this new app we're building we haven't called it Instagram yet she was like yeah but I don't think I'm gonna use it because my photos aren't that good it's like okay well why don't you think your photos are good and she's like well all your friends you know you post these amazing photos and they're all like filtered and stuff and I was like oh that's because they use filters and she goes oh well you should probably add filters and we came back from that walk I went straight to the room and I just like got on my laptop and I made the first filter which was ex-pro - this is a long way of saying we cut features we focused on what we thought the world needed and then we got to the heart of the issue of why people wouldn't use it because people didn't feel comfortable sharing their photos by solving those things right in a row and keeping it uber simple I mean even that first filter could have been written in OpenGL and could have been a lot faster you tap on that filter it took like three seconds to show you the filter no one cared it was fine yeah keep it simple keep it super simple now you mentioned you mentioned Eric Ries his book is perhaps one of the influences I'd like to look at or dig for lessons learned best practices observed anything at all that you took away or very difficult times anything from a few previous experiences so we'll go back to the Mayfield Fellows Program was there anything in that that you found particularly useful and then the next that I'll hit so we could certainly do them in order or not would be oh do yeah I mean where do I start I okay so and what because they feel solos program yeah Mayfield Fellows program it's a program at Stanford where they take I think they still take 12 a year 12 typically graduate students although I snuck in on all explain that in a second who are interested in entrepreneurship and they they focus on what is called an entrepreneurship education so they do three months of case studies kind of like going to Harvard Business School but case studies on just entrepreneurship then three months you spend at a real startup getting real experience and then you come back in the last three months so it's a year-long program meaning three quarters of the school year you come back and you debrief on your own experience and you actually write basically a case on your experience over the summer so I did that I my junior year I snuck in by like I don't know I basically I I was like hey but like I founded this startup not really a startup it was a website at the time that was like a competitor to Craigslist but for Stanford students only and I prayed that they would take me because I was so excited about entrepreneurship and they let me in years later by the way one of the people who ran the program still runs the program actually pulled me aside and was like just so you know we were barely about to let you in I was like thank God you did and she was like but the thing that made the difference was that you were out there actually trying to start something and I guess lesson number one is like never expect you're gonna get a no like always put your name in write number two is actually do the thing like actually start the start of it don't just go to conferences about it don't just like write articles about started do something and that carries a lot of weight um but that was the Mayfield Fellows program and maybe the last lesson on the Mayfield Fellows program that I I got from it was really there's nothing in the all that can substitute for real experience doesn't matter what we're talking about if you want to be a chef working in a kitchen is the only way you're gonna learn going into culinary school whatever I'm sure is great but working in a kitchen is the way to do it if you want to be gosh like a like a tech founder right you got a star to start up you got to know what it feels like to put it all on the line lose everything and then come back right you can't learn about investing unless you invest I mean name whatever profession it's like real experience is so much better than what's in a book that doesn't mean the books aren't helpful but you got to do it but they're an adjunct yeah yeah very hard to become a professional soccer player by reading books on the physics of soccer although I got to tell you I took this personality test and the results came back but one of the main takeaways was like prefers learning by reading and I was reading my results to my family because I thought I would be entertaining and my mom was like oh my god like I remember when you were a kid you just read everything and my dad was like yeah like you said you were gonna be interested in playing baseball so I was like I bought a mitt for you and we were gonna go play catch and you're like dad I got to go to the library and I my dad was like what he's like I got a read about it so I literally went to the library I read about how to pitch and then played and I think that's my mo it's just I'm wired that way do you remember the there was an okay page the name of the personality test or the assessment they didn't yes it was the golden personality tests golden personality yes I think it was golden yeah mm-hmm why did you take that test it's a it's a variant on the myers-briggs test but it actually gives you very specific breakdowns of every dimension so for those of you listening that don't know the myers-briggs test there are basically four main dimensions of the personality test and tells you for instance whether you're more casual or if you're like very calculated and punctual that kind of stuff I wanted to know more about what I was like i talked about Ray Dalio before I spoke with him and he was saying yeah everyone who joins Bridgewater we give this personality test I was like well can I take it like I want to know what I am and my co-founder took it a bunch of our senior execs took it and it was illuminating to learn see on paper which you know in the back of your mind and then of course it helps you work with others but a big part of it was reading on paper what you're actually like and realizing for instance I do learn by reading so I'm not someone who likes to sit in a lecture hall I want to have the book so if I'm gonna learn something new like the way to learn is not for me to go to like a conference it's to like sit down with the best book possible and that might not apply to you right like if you took it maybe you like learning some other way but I wanted to know what my API was so that was helpful your API yeah I like it that's true yeah we all are an application programming interface all right Houston is some acronyms on reading there are different ways to read books and I had found in some of the research for this conversation a mention of Mortimer Adler's how to read a book yeah could you talk about how you read how weird is it that I'm like so into reading that I have to find a book that's how to read like where does it stop how to read how to read a book okay have you ever read the book I haven't okay it's fine I can save you some time yeah basically the idea behind this book is its how to read a book most effectively most people open the first page and they start with the first word and then they go until either that they get bored or they push through or whatever and the claim in the book is basically that that is not correct that instead what you should do is familiarize yourself with the structure of the book first so the most important I say his thesis the the mo is that the most important part of reading a book is to actually read the table of contents and familiarize yourself with like the major structure of the book and then familiarize yourself by skimming the book and figure out what the main arguments are in fact that one of the secrets that I love and I can still do to this day is most authors in the last paragraph of every chapter especially the last paragraph of the book will not only summarize their main arguments but make the points they actually have been waiting to make the entire chapter and by reading just those paragraphs you get a pretty good idea of what the books about then you go back and you read like you normally read but with the context of knowing the overall arc of the story rather than guessing where it's gonna go I don't recommend doing this with a thriller because you'll ruin your experience but with nonfiction I think it's fantastic but that's that's how to read a book and by the way for those of you Mortimer fans out there I probably didn't do it justice but go by the block yeah go by the book which will encourage you to buy yet more books I have this seriously if I could show you my room right now my bedside table is just stacked with books I've got a book called mathematics politics because I'm interested in both politics and also the math behind elections and that stuff I think how to read a book is probably there one of the books do I have I've got books on on flying because I'm learning to be a pilot it like it ranges oh I've got a quantitative finance books I've got but like it's the most fun I've ever had just like plowing through books I guess it's good I don't know the job right now I don't know it does create a little space okay cries how quickly it gets filled out it does well I mean you're not I don't think is it yeah especially the long ones no it's okay oh do mm-hmm what was oh do and and what did you learn there what did you observe yeah oh do is the precursor to Twitter so you we were talking about Mayfield Fellows Program my internship was oh do so that three months over the summer I spent at oh do I remember I showed up the first day I brought my own computer because I thought when you worked at a comedy you bring your own computer because I was like I don't computers are expensive right like you bring your own and they're like oh good you brought your own computer I think they were thrilled and it was Evan Williams and and no glassware the cofounders of oh do and they're like oh I forgot you started today and I was like yep Here I am and actually it was one of the best experiences learning from EV who's brilliant and Noah who's also brilliant and like just seeing that startup tried to take off it was a podcast directory believe it or not maybe a little early yeah it was the right way but they just Pat a literally yeah which by the way another lesson and this whole thing timing is everything like the number of amazing ideas and teams that either came too early or too late it's like you got to have that essential element of timing and it's the hardest to predict but it was a podcast directory and you know honestly a lot of the the famous podcast folks got started on audio and there are a bunch that are still around but turns out back then there wasn't exactly a business around podcasts and it didn't go so well and they ended up pivoting to an idea started by an engineer there Jack Dorsey who by the way also started I think like maybe my first or second day and I remember him walking in and I'm like on the intern he's like oh I'm Jack and I learned actually he gave me a couple of coding assignments over the summer I remember learning some JavaScript from him so it's a small world it turns out yeah super small but that's what Odia was and that was my experience it was awesome and I'm very thankful to all those guys what do you view as some of say just as an example of superpowers you know he's very impressive guy very understated in a lot of ways what did you what did you observe in the secret sauce of of F because he's also a repeat player right I'm in this yeah he's not a one-hit wonder yeah so what what have you observed in him turns out blogging and communication is a thing and doesn't go away and there are lots of companies that can be started around it what did I observe was a really long time ago but or what superpowers do you think yes you could talk present tense to so I think he's super determined and super calm under fire there are a lot of there are a lot of CEOs that are very like emotionally volatile and at least in my experience is not one of those people in fact he's determined and hardworking and I can't remember his background story but he's like yeah you know I went to this college it wasn't that great and I just worked my ass off to get here and to build this thing and then eventually sell it to Google that was blogger and then to be able to start this thing and I remember his work ethic because at one point I'm pretty sure he was convinced we all weren't working hard enough so he sent us he didn't send us he offered for us to go to this seminar by David Allen the getting things done things done so I remember sitting in the audience and just like the OTO crew they were like I don't know six or seven of us at the time at the David Allen getting things done you know NOC conference but seminar I still try to use that stuff today by the way but the signal was like we work hard here and we get stuff done and he was there you know he was the first one in last one out and as a CEO I understood what that model meant one that I could learn from the CEO that if they had ways of getting things done you could you can learn that as an employee and I tried very hard at Instagram to learn stuff and then pass it on but also just the work ethic that is required to get startups off the ground it's incredible plus willing to call it like he was willing to call OTO and pivot to this thing called Twitter and trust me when we were calling it on Bourbon and pivoting to Instagram I was thinking about that moment I wasn't there in the room when they did it but I can imagine you know the the bravery that it takes to switch like that it's hard but uh but paying attention to people like eV and entrepreneurs like that and entrepreneurs like Jack I think you begin to learn that there are patterns and you have a little faith in their ways and and you you end up trying to mirror it in many ways I completely agree on the the ev having calmness as a competitive advantage he's very good pausing and not jumping to respond so he's better able to choose his response I suppose instead of being reactive I think you're very good at that as well Thanks and I want to talk about since its come up a few times pivoting or ending projects yeah because there's a in some aspects a fetishizing of perseverance in a lot of places including Silicon Valley and the world of tech and yet if you if you look at a lot of the largest public successes many of them had some type of pivot or shutting down of something that wasn't working how do you know it's the right time to stop and when how does one go about making that difficult decision like are there telltale signs that this is just it's not that another 50% of effort is required another X number of hours per day but like this is fundamentally flawed in some way that is gonna prevent it from working I think let's take this question in two parts first is let's just talk about the premise that most successful things are pivots which I believe is true one of the really fun things to do is actually do you know the Wayback Machine I - right I think it still exists I haven't tried in a long time but you can go and type in it any wet web address and then I think it allows you to like select the date of that website so you can basically see the history of the web it's super interesting go to YouTube and figure out when YouTube was founded I can't remember but like you can look it up on Wikipedia right and go to that date like around the beginning you will see YouTube was a dating site before it became YouTube what we know as YouTube right do that for most major things that you get excited about or like look up the history of Facebook when it was you know it was Facemash before and it was something before that the only one that I don't think was a pivot was Google and they've done pretty well so that's the one counterexample like that literally was their project and they made it a company and it worked really well so I don't know but most other projects are our pivots from an original idea and I think that's because one it's really hard to tell what works a priori like doing it before anything before you actually you know put it into into people's hands it's really difficult like you don't know if it's gonna work the key to entrepreneurship is failing really quickly so putting it out there seeing if it works if it doesn't then diagnosing why and then like focusing on how to improve it from there so one I agree with the premise that most things are in fact like second runs and then to the importance of pivot I think is that most of the time you get it wrong so the question is knowing you're gonna get it wrong how equipped are you to deal with that failure really quickly before you run out of money and the entrepreneurs that I've seen do very well are the ones that are equipped and engaged on the change from something that's not working to something that is far too many people because of ego or whatever stick with idea is far too long and I think you know it ends up really poorly yeah or look at something it isn't working that might have a different application right if you look at post-it notes I'm actually a failed adhesive right yeah and then you look at say viagra which was failed it was a a failure from the perspective of whatever it was initially tested for or intended for which I think was lowering blood pressure and normalizing blood pressure and then the they're like excuse me can you check off all the side effects of this blood pressure pill the the like ah there's a pattern here well the the recipients were asked to send back their samples and all the women sent their samples back and almost none of them Endon they're like wait a second what's going on here I can't tell if this is a family friendly show and we should dive into this or we get weakened uh you know it is family friendly but modern family used to be the director Scott this will be the director's cut this is like anyway pivots are important pivots are important and how do you train if you do the to recognize say confirmation bias or this is something certainly ray thinks a lot about is identifying from the perspective of an investor where you might have be succumbing to some cost fallacy or any of these other things that could steer you to make bad decisions or or not stop things heads is that something that you've you've trained in yourself or is that innate from birth or upbringing I think I was talking with my wife the other day and I was like Nicole I think one of my failures is that like I always think things are not gonna work out or I'm wrong in some way and and we were going back and forth I was she was like oh well maybe that's actually a strength because like you're so hard on an idea that you're like trying to prove yourself wrong to test the integrity of your idea or test the integrity of your thesis or and like so you mentioned Ray like I think a big part of knowing that you're right is working as hard as you can to prove that you're wrong and if you can't well there's only one option left which is you're probably right but a lot of people I think are afraid to gather feedback well I think Mike and I and Instagram very early on tried our best to be open to feedback I think as a young executive I was like no on the boss like all ideas are great all my ideas are great right and after a couple failures I think you learn really quickly that like hey listen I know there's this myth that like the best founders just have like the Midas touch and every idea they have is perfect you know like Steve Jobs he touches everything and it just becomes gold and it's right but it turns out there are a lot of failures in these people's lives they just usually get written out of history and then what you see is as a trail of amazing ideas I mean someone should write a book on all the bad ideas amazing people have had right over the years and just ten volumes said totally but like I think people get the wrong idea there is no Midas touch like that one of the things I hated most working in tech was the idea that there's like a product guy our product girl right like that you're like somehow someone who just knows what's gonna work most the successful people I know have tons of bad ideas and it's about editing them out and figuring out which one is actually right because honestly what is the Mendoza line it's like if you bat 200 like above 200 you're like a pretty good batter right like in a world where your average is gonna be 1% you got to generate a ton of ideas before you get one roughly 100 right yeah so and 1% would be like way higher than the average so how do you figure out which is the one it's I think it's by being super not mean to yourself a critical on the idea in a in a constructive way and pressure testing it with other people but I just I like always have I don't know I'm just wired in a way that assumes every whether it's idea or thesis or whatever I have is wrong and I'm I'm more worried about being wrong than I am looking bad you don't I mean no I get it do you have any particular questions that you ask yourself or other people on your stress testing an idea or alternatively how you solicit feedback and I give an example since I write I have all these books I want people to act as proof readers but I don't want them since they are my friends to be unnecessarily nice because what the whole white yeah and so I one of the questions on my is in a given chapter I'll say if you had to cut 10 to 20% yeah gun to the head which 10 to 20 would go nice right and it forces their hand in a that's smart so are there other approaches that you like to use or like others to use on your ideas for stress testing well first off I think it's important to realize how people are just wired not to be honest not that they lie I mean I guess technically Alai but i don't think it like comes from a bad place they're wired to avoid conflict so like you go in a restaurant and the server comes by you know maybe you didn't like a dish the server comes by when's the last time you actually literally told them like everything was great but that thing was too salty that was you know I like to eat by the way that thing was too salty that was undercooked like next time you go out to eat and they're like how is everything and you're like you instinctively just respond great thanks if it is that actually what you thought like most people have one or two things they wish could be better and what's crazy is I think of myself in that situation every time I was sitting down there I'm like men if I were on the other side of this I'd really want to know the truth because without the truth you can't improve right and you have to be careful because sometimes people have opinions and they're not always right but if you don't know you can't act on it and I've been surprised how many people I've met at least in the food industry right where at least if you do it in a nice way you're like listen I just if I were on the receiving end of this I'd want to know so I'm giving this to you do whatever you want with it and it's always interesting to see the people that are like grateful for that feedback and you're like that person's gonna go kick some ass totally and the people who are like what's supposed to be that way you know and you're like well okay like but like what if it isn't and I think it's really important as you mature as an executive like I definitely start in the place where I just like didn't listen to feedback I was you know headstrong and then as you have more and more failures that by the way everyone has you begin to realize it's really important to collect that data and that information from people no one would tell me like when I was presenting on stage everyone would be like great ah great awesome job great you killed it there's like that's not possible like like a few talks in a row that happened and then we hired someone and I'm not gonna pick on them and tell you who they are but we hired someone who came up to me after and gave me three pieces of feedback like you need to smile more you need to do that like I know you're a happy person but you're not smiling when you're talking about this really happy subject like smile and I was like oh my god that person's right they literally watched every single interview I had done for like the last two years and just had a list of things and I was so grateful for that because it was feedback that no one else would give me do you remember any of the other points it was slowed down pause right it was smile more not because you're trying to give off a vibe that but just what's funny is you can't overdo smiling it turns out like it's hard and I'm just like I'm a serious person so I don't think smile as much what were the other things I'd have to go back to my notes but those are the two things that stood out yeah it's people don't give you feedback it's crazy and by the way the whole thing is the more important your company gets the higher up you go the less people are willing to do it yeah so you actually have to like dig for it and that's one of the weirdest feelings ever is please tell me something negative but you asked a specific question which is like what are the tools to do it I don't know that they're any like specific tools so much is like when's the last time you the listener did that when's the last time you went out of your way and you said hey like I really want honest feedback on this and when someone gives you feedback you don't respond in a defensive way you say thank you and you encourage the behavior if you could do that man like the self-improvement that comes with that you know and the honesty that comes with it if depending on the format can be really remarkable I you may have done this before but I had not done a 360 interview oh yeah I avoided doing the first one they wanted me to do ever it was like hah this is just like a management thing and then the second one I did I literally tried like hard to do it like I asked people to participate I said please be as honest as possible yeah and I remember setting with Joe Gebbia about his first 360 interview and for people who do not know what that is there are different ways to approach it but in effect your superiors peers / colleagues and subordinates are all interviewed so the people you into with most are all interviewed about your strengths and weaknesses and so on and very frequently at least in my case with my employees and so on it was anonymized to ratchet up the like allowable honesty and it was a great example of how valuable honesty can be and also how difficult it can be to digest if it's really full frontal yeah and i think joe said 'i like windows car in the park like Heidecker words I had a tough time I had a really tough time with it but it ended up being very helpful when I was able to look at it with a cooler head not because I was angry but I was really sort of like cut down at the knees by some of the comments and it was really important I mean if you have spinach stuck in your teeth you need somebody to tell you I think the hardest part is how to tell when you've got spinach stuck in your teeth or someone just doesn't like you and but you have to be willing to get both yeah and then ask yourself which of these have merit and not to write things off but you have to be able to go through it and just ask yourself but yeah that was hard yeah I remember my first one and I just but now I think about it and like no matter what I do whether it's another company whether I'm doing a writing project or a podcast whatever like so I just walked off the stage at South by Southwest and I could see the screen that was displayed after we left and they asked people to rate the rate everything like rate the speakers or at the host like and I was like oh I really want that data I'm gonna ask him for it because I want to know like was it interesting to people what topics didn't they like like did we come off as authentic inauthentic like where were we on but it's funny because no one ever tells you anything James it's unless you dig for it you won't find it but honestly I think letting people know that it's safe to give feedback asking for it proactively etc etc is important I just the amount people go out of their way to avoid conflict is pretty wild yeah which which often works in the short term but can be caustic and erode relationships in the long term and if you're avoiding that and your comment on the rating on screen made me think of Kyle Maynard who is an incredible incredible guy is I was also been on the podcast but he had learned at one point or was given a piece of advice from very successful CEO of a large company that if you ever asked somebody to write something from one to tend to disallow 7 because 7 is this like semi pipe is all three-and-a-half stars you're like yeah no exactly so you're mentioning restaurants so and I'll very often ask people in restaurants if they're giving me the everything is good response which is gives me no information to act on as I'll say all right on any I'll give them two options and I'll say 1 to 10 but no 7 how do you rank and it's it's sort of bared then they're they're forced if they're struggling that to do a barely passed which is a six I'm not gonna order that or an 8 which is strong that's a that's a confident endorsement and so that can be applied to all manner of things that's really cool let's do that from now on you know sevens let's let's talk about tough times because you mentioned there are none the life of an entrepreneur is old and true it's you know it's it has been it has been said that your life is all highlights no I'm kidding that hasn't been said company made that happen I wanted to I want to talk about I want to talk about some of the may be tougher times that that you willing to share if any some of the maybe of course darker periods tough decisions were any time you had kind of self-doubt or felt lost because and where I'm going with this I'm very curious how you then recontextualized it found the silver lining I just got through it because it's some people get knocked down and they have a really tough time getting back up so when people are able to do that I like to look look inside and see what actually happened yeah so yeah any any at all that you're willing to talk about first thing I'll say is a lot of people assume that like businesspeople entrepreneurs like whether they make money like a lot of money or they sell a company or they go public or whatever and they're SEOs for a long time or world leaders whatever a lot of people assume these people don't struggle right that somehow they're inhuman or whatever like I I feel like I wake up every day with a lot of the same worries I did before Instagram was a thing am i working on the right thing did I do enough today is that idea the right idea and I still have just as many failures as I did before Instagram and well inside of Instagram as well now don't get me wrong there are structures around me now that allow me to like come back from those failures but I guess my point is like getting knocked down is like a really common thing no matter where you are in your career no matter where you are in your progress of building something and in fact it usually happens more the more important thing you're doing right so early on at Instagram I think there were a bunch of times I remember pitching the idea and having really smart intelligent folks look at me like I was a crazy person for working on anything related to photos I remember trying to hire some of like the most amazing designers early on who just like wouldn't join because they didn't believe in the app I remember press stories or investors investing in competitors even though they had invested in us so choosing the other which is fine listen like it's up to like investors should be able to choose who they think the winner is that's their job but it's tough right to think you're not the winner all of these things happened along the way and we were knocked down multiple times whether that was in our heads or actually there in reality but the thing that kept us going was realizing it wasn't other people we were trying to impress I mean of course we wanted a community for the app the reason we got backup each and every time was because we loved what we were doing right like if your goal is to gain people's approve like the startup business is a terrible business to get into heck like if you're a singer like it's the worst business to be in in the world because everyone's gonna tell you your stuff stinks until maybe a dozen right but you have to believe in what you're doing and love what you're doing that itself has to bring you the most amount of excitement otherwise getting knocked down is gonna knock you off the horse and you're all forever and I often think like was it determination that got us to where we got or luck or some combination of both of them because I don't know if you have a bad idea and you're determined on it and don't listen to anyone it's like not great right yeah but at the same time we wouldn't be where we are if I had listened to most people it's crazy yeah so I don't know if there's a secret to getting back up otherwise other than maybe creating no choice but to get back up like I didn't have another job what was I gonna do like sign up for business school I don't know like I had quit my job and raised a bunch of money and I really loved what I was doing so every time one of these failures would occur what was the other option can you think of one desk job a desk job can you think of an example of a tough time a tough decision a tough rejection from an investor a designer anything and what you then said to yourself I'm very curious about self-talk right so it's like whether it's like Shaun White on the final run in the Olympics and I asked him what he said before he left the gate to himself and it was who cares and he like explained why it's like who cares and I didn't expect that answer and I found it really interesting I mean in the sense that like he's done all the preparation he could possibly do he's either ready or he isn't and there was an entire explanation for it and what fighters say before they get in the ring if there is some type of self-talk I got one yeah yeah let's go straight to the interesting topic selling our company yeah so we sold our company and it was April of 2012 and by all accounts if you start a company for a lot of entrepreneurs winning quote-unquote and by the way I don't agree with this definition but but winning is quote unquote either selling your company or you know having a public offering an IPO for a lot of people that's like the traditional outcome for a start-up and we had sold and we were 13 people and it was a billion dollars it was really exciting and and I remember like right afterwards everyone being like so it's over and I feel like that was the most painful thing to hear because I had no intention on you know not doing Instagram I like wanted to work on it for the next you know whatever years but everyone I met was like so you're done now so it's over I was like no no no no and like we would try to hire people and they'd be like no it's over and I remember people working at the company telling me it was over and a couple of people ended up leaving pretty soon after that and I remember one of them saying yeah there's like nothing else to learn here like work we go from here mind you at the time we had about 50 million users we got to a billion by the way we had no revenue we got to a lot more than no revenue we grew to a thousand people on the team we opened up multiple offices all around the world I got to do everything we're meeting the Pope to meeting some idols like I got it was crazy so the idea that in 2012 we sold our company and then everyone just kind of counted us out that was painful what how did you contend with it like what was your response to that I think with me it usually comes with the competitive nature of proving people wrong if you look at that like histogram sorry to use that word but of how long founders stay after they saw their company I'm pretty sure there's like a giant like lump around one month to one year right we were there for six years after we sold which I think goes to show how incredibly determined we were to show people that Instagram wasn't done that we were at the beginning not the end and that it didn't matter if we sold the company we were gonna make something out of this thing and for me I think the motivation comes with proving people wrong because I hate when people discount us I hate when people you know tell us we're not gonna be something we weren't you know that because we've sold it's all over but looking from the outside I get their perspective I just wanted to prove them wrong yeah yeah it's not all motivator yeah I think and part of taking that personality test we talked about is understanding what your motivators are because if you know what your motivators are then you know how to get yourself up in the morning how to work hard had it right and you know what things are not motivating but competition is one actually it's interesting there were two dimensions of the personality test there was competition and then there's challenge and I didn't I always thought I was competitive it turns out I'm actually not competitive at all I mean I'm a little competitive but not that competitive I have very high scores on challenge which means setting goals for yourself and trying to meet them but it's like self-imposed rather than comparative right in sort of an intrinsic yeah motivator it's an internal motivator of like I want to go get this thing done so for me I think at that moment it was more about self challenged to prove to myself that I could do it and that we could build this thing it worked how did you learn to manage that's that's a man and I had to yes how does one learn to manage because you and it's not just time within a larger company right because you can you can find plenty of people who make the same mistakes for 20 years in a row yeah and somehow managed to limp along and sort of do decently despite their weaknesses but when you sold the company how many employees do you 1313 yeah that's I think I manage like three of them right so so that you then went through why do you think companies of hierarchy they're like I don't want to manage people you manage them and before you know it you've got like a tree you know 90 layers deep I'm joking well I be I don't mean there is some truth to that I think but how did you learn a manager were there any particular lessons resources so I have to say anything at all well I was gonna say my job was different than most which obviously is an understatement but like I'm gonna tell you the philosophy I subscribe to you and then I think you're the listeners can decide if it makes sense for them it might I decided that I had nothing to lose because at least I didn't think I had anything to lose because I had my job I was excited about it I was running this thing and I knew what I didn't know or at least knew that I didn't know a bunch of stuff my philosophy was hiring the smartest possible people were way better than me to work for me and that feels weird because you're like I have no experience I've been doing this for two years how do I hire someone that has maybe 15 years of experience in engineering or 15 in you know operations or the list goes on but the ironic thing is by hiring people that were way better than me but like I would see myself working for some day if they started a company that actually you end up creating the best possible team and I think that works because I felt like I had job security so a lot of people are worried well if I hire great people beneath me then then maybe one of them will take my job and I don't know where like the reality is on that spectrum in the real world like I don't know but I think that's actually one of the issues I looked for most in the company which was people hiring down on purpose like people do it reflexively they hire down they're like no I need someone with less experience than they should be younger they should have let fewer years of experience right because I should coach them and actually if everyone hired up you'd have like the most badass company in the world so how do you manage that that I guess my point is I found people that were way better than me and the way I managed was by managing the vision and direction of the company and then asking those people how to get there and making sure those two things were connected at all times but I didn't have the regular job of like you know managing a bunch of new grads out of college and like coaching them on their careers which exists in mass in Silicon Valley so I'm not sure my management like experience mirrored that of most but I think there's a lot to learn which is hire really great people that someday you want to have you know they should have your job so you hire these people if you subscribe to this philosophy and then I imagine there are different strategies and routines and rules and so on they put in place to give structure and direction to this team of all-stars and so so one that I can ask about it would be meeting structure so in the course of prepping for this and I found this a few places but in the New York Times feel free to fact-check this but I'll just read this briefly and then we can I'd love to hear you elaborate on what the meeting actually looks like and and how you handle it so some of the bottlenecks this is from the air time some of the bottlenecks the company's addressed in the last in the past year are internal for example mister system and his co-founder realized that one of the primary holdups was their own decision-making so in the past three months they started holding meetings in which they just make a bunch of decisions and then this is quoting mister sistrum we have a dock in which we list out the inventory of decisions on products as if it's stacked up in front of the machine waiting to be processed mister sistrum said and then we have sessions where we sit down we decide you just work through the decisions so so this is something that you might be able to do in an informal unbanned you have three direct reports or 13 employees but as a Rose it seems like this type of systematizing could be really important could you describe how a meeting like this functioned totally and whines it's really funny for me to think of myself as being referenced as mr. sister it's very it's very formal mr. system with inventory of decisions okay so here's the context have you ever read the book the goal the goal the goal I have not yeah it is a book about basically manufacturing and supply chain management it sounds really boring but I promise you it's really good last name is gold rat I think it's gold rat yeah who wrote the book and it's kind of and in fact if you talk to business people a lot of people will say it's their favorite book like I wrote and one of my weekly updates to the team I wrote that I was reading this book and that I loved it and a bunch of people were like oh I love that book too so it's a business book that talks about how to optimize supply chains basically but it's written in narrative form which is kind of cheeky right yeah it's a it's not like a business it's a business book but it's like written with a narrative like there are characters and and it's actually pretty fun so I say go have a read but what I realized in reading this was that any system is most constrained or at least the thesis of the book is most constrained by the slowest process I think they called it a Herbie Herbie have you ever heard that I have yes it's because the beginning of the book kind of like always Scouts yeah exactly if you want to explain I know we're getting there how many times our Boy Scouts gonna come up in a podcast right so the narrative is that they're on some trip and they like have these Boy Scouts lined up I think it's like you know the main characters son or something is in the line of Boy Scouts and an Herbie it might not be PC to talk about now but Irby is a little overweight and he's at I see at the back I don't basically they figure I think it the way it goes is no matter where they put him in the line the line can only move as fast as the slowest process that's kind of the take away okay again people who are superfans the goal can correct me on this but the essence of it is your slowest your slowest part in the chain is always going to limit output in this case the slowest boyscout limits the progress the troop makes which isn't actually all that isn't all that intuitive until you read this book and you go through it so with decision-making what we realize is a lot of things we're coming to us but unless we would decide on an important decision it was basically like inventory stacking up in front of a machine that wasn't moving and of course the machine can output products that people want to go use until those decisions get made so it sounds again really intuitive but if you think about a company as you know if the raw materials go in and raw materials are ideas okay and they go through machines that transform them into reality so they go from an idea to a mock to a you know a final a final draft to a version to out testing with beta testers out to the real world that actually what you need to do is make sure all machines are running at highest capacity including the one that moves ideas from the idea pile to mocks from mocks to actual right so you work down the chain and we realized very early on in reading this book that a lot of the lessons that usually apply to manufacturing actually apply to making decisions at a company as well I had actually forgotten about that book until you mentioned it I'll have to pick it up yeah the goal have a long list of books to tackle how do you choose books that you're going to read I know you given a few examples of things that you're interested in but how do you filter the universe of books to those who end up reading and I mean you can maybe just pull up you could pull a few real examples from from those you've read and it can indicate how you got to those but is do you have a process for selecting books well first or describe well first I don't read fiction not that there's anything wrong with fiction and I know people that read a lot will be like what you don't read fiction come on there's so many greats I don't know it just doesn't get me up in the morning so there we go there goes you know a good portion of books down to non fiction non-fiction books then I asked myself what topics I care deeply about or what things I really want to learn so for instance learning to fly like okay what are the best books to learn to fly or if I want to learn about investing or finance what are the best books or if I want to learn about productivity what are the best books and obviously Amazon is great for that and you can read through reviews and but honestly a big part of me reading is just like there's usually some outcome I want like I want to be able to do X what do I have to read that will teach me as fast as possible because like with a book okay so with a class you gotta like wait until the class happens go to a class and then wait until the next class with a book you can literally like just get through it in a week or a day or and then you can reread it and then reread it and I just I find that like if you want to learn a new skill there's nothing like sitting down with a nonfiction book on that topic that's you know well laid out and but sometimes you know you gotta call it I've been a quarter way through a bunch of books on topics that I thought I was gonna like and just thrown them out cuz I think these are trash so they don't it doesn't always work that way do you read and if you don't this isn't a value judgement biographies do you ever read biographies okay so I have not read no but I really want you okay so the one area that I want to spend way more time on this history including biographies which I consider a form of history although biographies can be fairly selective in the history they tell that's true of all history books I feel like they're how are you 41 pretty sure that's okay well factory I'll get back to I'm 35 okay our lives are really short compared to the history recorded history and it turns out if you look back in history things patterns emerge I read this great book called lessons of history it's just have you read it will an aerial address yeah it has it's short it's excellent it's like a leaflet like you could read it in a day it's great there's some parts that I disagree with but for that I read that because read ollie recommended it it's a great book yeah yeah I the number of people I meet that are like they've read it and anyway the takeaway is that things happen over and over again or at least certain patterns emerge and I guess what I'm saying is if you look back at history you can learn a lot from reading people's history whether it's a biography or a history of a specific segment of companies so for instance I think if you want to study the acquisitions of companies and where those founders have gone and what they've done and more importantly what do most founders do next after selling a company and taking some months off how many take one month off how many take a year how many take five years how many never emerge again right like but how what are the differences between those who that decide to do something and those that don't so even in my own exploration of what's next in my life I find myself not reading necessarily biographies but I do read accounts of you know entrepreneurs that have launched big things and none you know new things in the future and those who haven't and I start asking myself like what are the patterns that emerge so no I don't read biographies yet but I want to and in history I think more generally is a super interesting topic there's some excellent biographies out there I I think you might enjoy Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world ok excellent excellent book for a lot of reasons I'm trying to think of the ones that have been recommended to me yeah I'll have to get back to you on that David McCullough has a lot of really good biographies and the Wright brothers and so on was actually given to me by very very successful consumer packaged goods entrepreneur here in Austin which turns out to be sort of ground zero or the epicenter of a lot of CPG stuff so cool yeah and this is an interesting how many people have so many similar patterns in their lives and I think there's this like great equalizer when you realize what you are doing or going through or whatever well it might be super unique to you and you're 35 or 41 years it actually turns out like it happens over and over again to people on their lives not everyone but like it's occurred in the past and you have a lot to learn from it that's basically my point and that that I think it's a hundred twenty page book lessons of history is a fantastic place to start I expected it I actually downloaded it as a Kindle book and let it sit there for months because I expected it to be very dry and it's beautifully written book it's very impressed and then if if you like that as a taste test and then you can go into there what is it like 10 or 20 volume and summary of their volumes right that's right yeah it's like the cliff notes the cliff yes I'd like to ask you this is one of the questions that I'd been hoping to ask ever since we book the podcast and that is about advice that you give to entrepreneurs that very few actually take and I'll explain just by way of example I'm asked all the time how how various folks should launch books where people come to me asking how should I launch a book how should I write a book how should I get a book published and I might tell them for instance don't try to write for the entire world if your goal is to the New York Times bestseller list write for like 10 to 20,000 people per week in other words you really only need to get the flywheel spinning because people use the bestseller list as a shopping list to to write a book that at least 20,000 people will love but they end up writing something too general they end up writing something too general and I tell them to give themselves a ton of buffer before the book is published and to write it in such a way that for instance it can be read module early and then they don't do that and they wonder why they can't run excerpts and it's it's it's been incredible to me how you know I put together a blog post just like how to write a best-selling book this year where I lay out the exact playlist or not playlist rather but playbook and nonetheless it's like one out of a hundred who actually implement even a portion of the steps are there any particular bits of advice or recommendations that you give to on Ferrer's that you're surprised aren't taken more seriously or actually followed yeah number one advice I always give is to solve a problem so many people when they found a company found a company just to found a company or they're like I've got an idea ideas are not company's ideas are not products like you're like well I'm gonna combine this thing with this trend and we're gonna do this it's a cool idea and you know usually the warning signs are that includes some element of a current fad like AI or something not that AI is a fad but like you know it's a wave that's happening right now that I think it's easy to make your company sound more interesting if you're just like and it uses AI or like crypto or like there are always warning signs that I see with the pitches that I that I hear from people when they include those words and it's not backed up by a clear problem that you're solving for the person on the other side or the company on the other side the counterparty right so I always say make sure you're actually solving a problem now there are different ways that can be wrong it could be solved already really well in which case you're not solving a problem the idea might be great but you're not solving a problem it can be a really neat idea with not a lot of people that need that problem to be solved in which case it's not really a problem for the world right maybe we could broaden this by saying solve a problem for the world or it just misunderstands what people need or it doesn't even take into account what people need you're just like ah it sounds really cool I'm gonna do this this and it's a hot market so I'm gonna figure it out and the number of times I've seen entrepreneurs go that direction because it feels good to be part of the trend it feels good to say you have a cool idea without asking yourself does this actually solve someone's problem like if I go talk to people does this literally like relieve people that this now exists the number of times I've seen people ignore this advice that's countless what's crazy to me is I feel like it's our secret sauce at instrum and I'm like this is great like we could just keep doing this right like every product we work on hopefully is solving someone's problem and I feel like I'm giving this advice away for free but no one's taking it that's that's it's also true for nonfiction books right yeah the number of books you pick up and it's like I bought the book because I have the problem you don't have to spend eighty percent of the book describing the problem you got it yeah what are other common mistakes that you observe among entrepreneurs or creators so we could make it make it broader it doesn't have to be broader but people who are trying to do their own thing entrepreneurs are otherwise what are some common mistakes you see and it could be it could be within the venture-backed startup world but it could also be broader than that I think going it alone is often a mistake and that doesn't mean you have to have a co-founder but not having a team is a mistake I see a bunch people feeling like oh I'm just gonna do this by myself I'm just gonna there's an incredible power and having people around you even individuals who are like maybe the face their company I have an incredible team around them and I think trying to do it all yourself is like not only a recipe for getting it wrong but also a recipe for not being able to get back up I mean how do you get up when you get punched down well sometimes having someone else in the room with you to be like yeah let's get up and get them you know yeah it helps I think that's a mistake I see a lot you know the crazy thing is that having gone through it and making mistakes yourself it's not clear to me that like those are all mistakes in every other situation so I'm trying to be careful in over prescribing my situation because there are counter examples is water that's the really important point actually that I think is worth underscoring for folks and that is for for nearly every rule that someone might prescribe there's probably a counter example you know the say leader of which would prescribe the exact opposite yeah right and so it's it's I suppose in part finding the rules that are compatible also with what you hold to be the core values or philosophies that guide you like being passionate about the product or the service with the company because that has some real practical implications if you're not passionate are you in fact going to be able to summon the endurance like you said to sort of walk through or around or climb over the various walls are gonna pop up probably not right so then you can find the examples that sort of suit your personality and the set of values that you've set out for giving company what this is this is a metaphor question but if you could in just a few more questions and then we'll yeah we'll wrap up if you could put a message quote a word a question anything non-commercial on a billboard and really what I'm asking is to get a message to billions of people which it's crazy to think that you you can't actually do that now and so these platforms like like Instagram but to get a message simultaneously to billions of people could be an image what what might you put on that billboard I don't know if it sounds cheesy but the advice that I got that has driven me the entire way is follow your passion like I cared so deeply about social media and so deeply about photography and there are so many people that were like social media is crowded photography is lame you don't mean that like the only way to get through those is by loving the thing are the mission that you're on and well again it sounds kind of cheesy maybe we could wordsmith this follow your passion thing but like the number of people that don't follow their passion because people talk them out of it and I think that's a crime yeah right but of course you can't follow your passion and not expect consequences like listen if your passion is to go fly-fishing and you want to do that all the time that's great but you often know okay like can I pay my bills right like can I there are there are constraints but if you've thought through it and you love it there should be no one standing in your way yeah and like the number of people that tried to stand in our way like they still like listen even long into Instagram there were people you know predicting our demise and so I don't know like at a certain point it's not like ignore the haters that could be the other billboard by the way um it's it's like you got to follow your passion as long as you've thought through it you've done the math you think about it like go for it and don't let people stand in your way you know like it's just so sad when people don't do that and life is short like you said I mean our lives are so short relative to sort of the span of human history and I think that's another benefit of reading history as it puts that in perspective like these lives are sort of the the flicker of I thinking of all raava competent like the flicker of a Firefly in the scope of history it's really short really tiny and I had this uh this one coach who said to me he's like often people wake up when they have someone close to them that dies or or they come down with some really serious illness and they realize all the little things they were spending all this time worried about don't matter compared to these like grave big things in life and it's important to keep that perspective so I'm not trying to get all like serious here but like I think it's really important to keep things in perspective and I think that I don't know like I guess it's another word for maturity right but um the faster you can get there the faster you realize a lot of what you think matters doesn't matter and the things that you're not thinking about matter a lot more than you're giving them credit for yeah which is why you should follow your passion and love what you do every day don't get me wrong by the way I want to clarify a lot of people are like you should love what you do and I agree but I think it's more you should love what you're shooting for yeah because work is hard yeah it can be miserable at times I mean nothing great in this world ever came easy like if you want to be an amazing guitarist you're not gonna get there easily trained really hard get shot down a bunch right like they're all like it's a universal law in the world that great things come with a lot of work yeah and what you have to do is I think love the thing you're shooting for rather than the everyday of the thing but I think a lot of people are like I should love every day it's like no no every day can be there are a lot of hard days ahead the thing that gets you through those days is loving the outcome you're shooting for and being excited to get there someday well Kevin I'm excited to see what you had next thank you I'll see if after you've done your pattern recognition on this down meta-analysis of founders who do various things of various points I'll be curious to see where you end up but give any closing remarks anything you'd like to ask people to do any thing at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up no pressure right you don't you don't have to tell your friends about this podcast I like that recommendation awesome thanks for having me this was a lot of fun yeah good to see you again and to everybody listening for links to everything that came up the and all sorts of other things the names of people and so on we will provide links to all of that in the show notes as always at tim dot blog forward slash podcast you can just search kevin or system and it will pop right up and until next time thank you for listening you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 69,237

Rating: 4.9550562 out of 5

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, Kevin Systrom

Id: 5x912QLs5uY

Length: 82min 57sec (4977 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2019