Sahil Bloom - The Qualities Of A Great Coach | The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

[Music] [Applause] what are the commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence over an extended period of time [Music] one of the reasons that i first uh you first peaked my curiosity i saw a thread you've written on twitter and then i looked at your bio and it said a couple things that i really liked one writing threads to demystify the world investor advisor and creator and then this next part really got me gave up a grand slam on espn in 2012 and still waiting for it to land so i was like okay this guy i like this guy and i don't know him yet because you share more about a little your back story i guess going to stanford and being a baseball pitcher and why you thought let me just uh jab myself a little bit with uh with my twitter bio yeah yeah well i appreciate you having me on this is awesome been a big fan of the content you're putting out so i'm excited to to be a part of it now but um no i mean the genesis of all of that was like i i generally think that people take themselves too seriously and we all have a tendency to do it right like especially while you are pursuing something that you think is meaningful um you know you're achieving things that you think are meaningful there's just a tendency to like get really buttoned up and serious along the way and stop you know stop having the ability to make fun of yourself and so i um you know i have this like great group of friends a lot of my baseball teammates from back in the day who like no matter how far any of us make it in life the exclusive purpose of when we get together is making fun of each other and so i sort of just like have adopted that ethos in my own life that i just can't take myself too seriously ever um and so the bio is kind of a uh you know a jab in that direction of like you know i was accomplishing something that i thought was great i was playing on this you know big stage and um and at this great level and i you know i had this horrible moment i gave up a grand slam on national television lost us you know a chance at playing in the college world series it was like one of the worst moments of my life at the time but being able to laugh at yourself kind of on the back end of that stuff i think is such a powerful thing you know and there's also a lesson there and like never getting too high never getting too low the week before that i mean the context to it is like the week before that we had played in the regional championships um and i had closed the regional championship game got a got a save in the regional championship game like 10 000 people in the stands you know the highest moment of my baseball career to date and i remember coming away from it being like man i am so good like i really thought you know it's like the giannios quote from a few weeks ago like when you think about the past that's all about your ego and that was how it was i was like man i did this i did this like look i'm coming i'm getting better i'm gonna get drafted and then the next week i gave up this absolutely massive grand slam to lose my team a chance at going to the college world series and it was that exact example of like you get too far ahead of yourself you get too high you get knocked down it's just what happens and so you need to be able to focus on the present and never get too high and never get too low so that's always just really resonated with me how do you uh i so i have a somewhat similar college story coming out of high school i went to miami of ohio here in ohio obviously the mid-american conference and um i happened to go at the exact same time and play the same position as ben roethlisberger and uh you know a bunch of people college coaches others called me back after because ben committed about a week after i did and they said hey dude you you don't want to go there it's not going to work out for you and of course like i'm sure you're the same way when you're 18 you're like you guys have no idea what you're talking about i'll beat them out and i think though the the great lesson uh that i learned from that experience of battling it out for two years and maybe having this this belief in myself that i somehow could win this job even though i like from the first day i probably was never going to win that job but i thought i was but i think it it's that you you know you do everything you can to make it happen and the world doesn't necessarily care because the coach is going to play the guy who gives the team the best chance to win in this case the late great terry hepner made the obviously the right decision when he named him starter during our second year at miami and i think there's those are awesome lessons like and so i'm curious from giving up that grand slam it sounds like one of the toughest moments of your life at up to that point at least but but especially in your formative years having to bounce back from things like that like what have you learned from that grand slam that has made you better in what you do today yeah you know it's interesting it's like you hear about those big public failures and those moments right like i talked about that one because it was a big moment it was on tv it was you know big game whatever i actually think the like private failures are even more impactful in terms of how they how they kind of create you and shape you um i think about one of the most impactful ones for myself was like the day i showed up at stanford campus i was a freshman since 2009 and um you know i had grown up in a small town in massachusetts i was like the ultimate big fish small pond syndrome like you know i thought i was hot man i mean like excuse my language but like i you know i thought i was really smart i thought i was a great baseball player i you know got a scholarship to go to this great school and i got to campus the first day and just got like kicked in the gut um academically athletically i mean everything right like i went to class and realized i wasn't that smart uh you know i went to baseball practice and realized i wasn't that good at baseball um and so i remember like freshman year was such a grind because it was like the first time in my life that i had really had to experience on a daily basis failures and in hindsight you realize that that kind of stuff is crucial to forming and shaping who you are as a person later the fact that you were able to like just keep pounding your head into a wall keep pounding your head and walk keep pounding your hand well until finally you break through and you didn't really know when it was going to happen there was no end in sight it might have never happened um it's like that idea of are you willing to sprint when the distance is unknown which i've always loved it's resonated with me it gives me chills even when i like see people talk about that or quotes um because it's so powerful like how much are you willing to just keep running when you have no idea how far you're gonna be running um and those were the moments i mean none of it was public it was like practices or going to class on a daily basis and just like being willing to just get knocked down every day and get back up um there's nothing more powerful than that in the long run than if you can kind of like form your character around those type of that that type of ethos has anything like that happen now uh because i think sports and especially going to a school like stanford for you probably were great learning tools but as then you you transitioned to post athletic career you're into the business world you're investing you're you have a job you're doing things on the side can you think of like a moment how where you drew from that and it made you better in this more professional world that most of us are in now since we can't play sports forever yeah i mean every day it's like your career your life like it's all about how you bounce back from failures that no one has the privilege of only succeeding if anyone tells you they do they're lying or you know they're in such rare air that i can't even relate to them so i mean i remember like my first job uh all of the failures that came with it you screw stuff up like what was your first job uh after playing i went straight into the investing world um i i got hurt my last year at school and thought i was gonna go play professionally it got taken away from me um probably for the better because i wasn't all that good you know in the grand scheme of things but i went and took this job in the investing world didn't know a lick about investing and so i knew i was just gonna have to do the same thing like you know pick up you know pick up and just start grinding with it and um i just remember like every day there was something i was screwing up i'd forget to do something or make the same mistake twice and the ability to actually like take those um pieces of feedback in and not crumble from them is such a massive advantage in life like so many people that i saw and still see a lot of young people entering the work world they can't take critical feedback you like give them one piece of constructive feedback not even critical constructive like hey i want to make you better here's one two three things that you could do to make your you know performance better and it's like they crumble almost because their whole life they've been only succeeding at things and they've only gotten straight a's and they've been at the top of their class and they went to x school or whatever it was they never had to deal with that like i'm bad at something how do i pull up and and and get better um and so i just think that like those moments especially as a parent i think about it for you know when i eventually god willing have children and i'm raising them what do i want to instill in them and that's one of the biggest things to me is like let them fail let them fall on their face and it's terrifying as a parent i imagine easier said than done but like those moments of failure and those things that i had to you know get smoked by are now like the greatest experiences the things that i wouldn't trade for the world in terms of forming my day-to-day perspective and uh and character um you are an active angel investor um so first you can for those who don't know anything about that i'll ask you to kind of define that for a second but the second part of the question which i'm going to ask at the same time is when you're looking to make an investment like what are some of the must-have qualities and or behaviors in a person that you're going to invest in i know the idea is probably important or their product or whatever it is that they're doing product market fit or if you're so early you might not even have that yet but i'm really because i think of like the best investors when i hear what they say they usually say something like i invest in the person first before whatever it is that they're doing i believe in that person regardless of what they were doing so i'm curious ceo from your perspective what are some of those must-have qualities in a person to back yeah yeah so i mean first off to your first question angel investing i think it's like this term that people start throwing around a lot it's like um you know effectively it's just that you are an individual not a investment fund and you are providing money to startups um is the right way to think about it and i don't know where the term angel officially got coined but you know you're like supposed to be like they're saving grace it's far from that you know you're just you're buying into a person and an idea and you're providing capital for them to go and execute in the very early days generally before they can go get a venture fund to back them or whatever private private fund um and then to your question on what you're looking for i mean i think the like resilience and grit is probably the number one thing um and the reason i say that is because uh startups and entrepreneurship and small business in like all of these areas you're just gonna get knocked around like it's just the reality of life is that nothing is ever up into the right in a straight line and so if you're investing in a person and you're investing in their idea the idea can be as good as you want but it's gonna have struggles along the way jeff bezos like the struggles along the way of amazon when you look at how much wealth he's accumulated it's because he was literally the only person that has held amazon stock for that entire time no one else could stomach those like 60 drops that the stock had because of massive business you know like issues over time um it was resilience it was like you stick with it and you continue to find a way to win in the long run you like zoom out of the short term issues and and are able to kind of see the vision and see where it's headed and what i'm supposed to be doing um and when you find that an entrepreneur it's really hard to like ask the question that makes you figure out that they have it or not but you can feel it like when you talk to someone you can really feel it and i'm by no means some expert i'm the you know there are legendary investors who i'm sure have this like sixth sense figuring out whether an entrepreneur has that it factor um but i think that is just like the most critical thing like is this person just willing to die before they fail at this business um and there are just people out there that have that that are just like that and you just know um that's not even an option for them like the business this business that you're backing could completely collapse and they will somehow find a way to like phoenix out of the ashes and start something else that ends up being even more impressive um so yeah that a lot long way of answering your question but i think resilience and grit you know are the two you've done this more than 25 times from what i've read yeah um so when you think think to each of those 25 plus decisions like can you take us inside the room like i don't know or or zoom or the calls or like how do you go from oh okay this is an opportunity to all right i'm giving them money like can you can you i i'm fascinated by that process like how does it work yeah i think it depends on like first off it depends on if you're in the covid you know pre-coveted or postcoded world because a lot of the okay maybe sure both yeah yeah i mean pre-covid a lot of this stuff is driven by relationships and in a sense it was easier as an investor then because you got to spend time building relationship with these individuals that you were going to eventually back and so you had more data points right like you saw how they interacted with other people you saw how they responded to different questions challenges things that were happening over just like a longer duration um in the post covet era a lot of this has been done by a zoom it's like this you're on a zoom with someone and so they have their like you know an entrepreneur that's really seasoned has their pitch and they know how to run through it and so i i've personally found like if i'm doing a call with someone i already understand the idea i'm interested in the idea in the business i believe in the long term vision of it so i personally try to take it more towards like i want to get to know you um you know tell me about a time you got your ass kicked type thing um but the other reality to it is like i'm not an investment fund i don't have you know limited partners lps that have given me their money to invest on their behalf um it's my money and so you know when i do it i want to get comfortable and the burden of that is different and i reach that kind of burden of proof in different you know amounts of time depending on the person hey i've gotten on a call with someone in like two minutes in said to myself holy crap i gotta back this person i don't care what the idea is almost because like i need to back this person and they're gonna figure it out i had that with a with an entrepreneur recently um and i actually didn't even think the idea is that good what he's working on but i just want to invest in him um because i think that he's such a killer in the long run um but it just depends it just depends what um you know kind of what the circumstances are around it how long it actually takes you to go develop that comfort around an idea the other thing to mention which people have probably seen in the news is like the market is so frothy and hot right now yeah and there's so much capital out there that these things like the time frames around them have just compressed and compressed and compressed to the point where you know most of them if you can't make a decision quickly you're just you're not going to have an opportunity to invest in the thing um you know the like investors that are stealing everyone's lunch right now are the ones that can just move really quickly um you know and send us decisions and say let's go totally like they've done the work they've done the prep in advance um they know the industry they know the market they know the business you know like you know the competitive landscape and so they're basically just like check the box on a couple of things that they really want to figure out and then they can just roll and make a move on it so how about let's make it personal so my current kind of investing strategy is i have set set amount of money that goes to my financial advisor every month and and it's kind of automated and i don't really think about it um and then i just let compounding go to work right the best best way to to get wealthy right is just don't interrupt it as charlie munger or warren buffett might say and i know that's and i'll continue to do that no matter what but i am curious about this and i think other people are too so let's say sahil i called you i'm like dude i want to do this i have this set amount of disposable money that if i lose it i lose it it's okay uh how can i get started so so what advice would you give to me if i'm like i want to do this part of what you do yeah i mean look the uh my first advice would be don't do it just keep compounding okay um because the reality of most of this most people want to um say they are an angel investor and it's become this like it's like a flex almost it's like a linkedin flex where you're like um you want to say that you're an angel investor the reality is like the vast majority of those investments go to zero because they're startups and they're like really risky and so for most people um probably myself included the like value maximizing thing to do over the long run would be to take all that money that you were going to angel the best and just put it into the s p 500 and let it just go up over the next 40 years of your life and you're probably like on an expected value basis that'll leave you the best off my personal opinion on it always and why i do a lot of it is i learn so much from these conversations from the people that i get to associate with because of it um from being around these businesses from helping them i mean i like for me i could lose all the money that i've invested in all this stuff every single dollar and i think it would be a net positive return to me because of the like the intel like the the actual intellectual returns that i've gotten on that capital that i've put out beyond the financial returns but on a purely financial basis i think it's like the burden of wanting to get into that is very high um the challenge so if you said okay i understand that and i want to do it right um it's all about deal flow what are you actually seeing and so therefore what can you execute against the challenge with the venture world and with angel investing in general is that it is the ultimate game of adverse selection the deals that uh want you to invest in them are typically not the ones you want to be investing in because they're the ones that no one else has backed right like if if there's some unbelievably hot company that can raise money from anyone in the world like five years ago maybe not now but five years ago if they had come to me and said like sahil we want you to put in some money into this my first reaction would have been like why like why do you want me to i'm like some random analyst at a you know fund at the time like what about what is making you want me to invest and that would almost like set off alarm bells now it's a little different because i can help them with a bunch of things you know i have a platform i can talk about them publicly i can get them exposure and so now it's like i'm in more of a you know real position to add value to them and so i might be able to get into things that way but like for a new person starting angel investing every deal that you see you almost have to have your initial reaction be like why am i so lucky is this actually a really good opportunity or are they just showing it to me because they can't get the money from anyone else interesting yeah it's like uh the very beginning of when people started asking me to like come give talks uh i would talk to other more experienced speakers and i would say uh hey you have a speaking agent you know should i should i get one of those and they said trust me the speaking agents will start reaching out to you the moment you don't need a speaking agent anymore meaning like the book you get so it's just weird how it how the things work and that's exactly how this has worked now that multiple years have passed where i don't need the inbound person or the person out there doing it it'd be just kind of like an admin person it's not worth giving all that percentage for that so i handle it myself it's kind of interesting how the world kind of works that way totally yeah it's i mean that's a great analog but there's like there's so many analogs like that right actually a lot i mean it's funny because the uh the like common adage within the financial world is that like dentists have made the best marks for like some of these funds to go and try to raise money from because they had they met the accredited investor thresholds which are what require you you're required to meet in order to invest in these private placements but they weren't particularly knowledgeable about financial things because they had pursued a life of science and medicine um and so those were the people that were like typically falling victim to and it was obviously generalized but that was like the the thing that everyone would talk about where like dentists were the most prone to falling victim to these like random scams that were coming up within the finance world uh shifting gears a bit and i want to talk about writing um there's a great boston globe story uh that talks about this written about you great picture with you and tim cook but a lot of i feel like i mean i i became aware of you because of your willingness to ship work publicly to learn in public to share what you're learning and to be a fantastic storyteller whether it's through tweet threads or um your sub stack can you first from a leadership perspective let's talk about from a leadership perspective why should every leader have some for some form of a writing practice whether they decide to publish it or not great question um simple answer when you write you think better uh i just think that writing is the best way to expose gaps in your thinking and where your thinking is falling short um it is impossible virtually impossible to write down everything you know about an idea and not immediately see the gaps in what you know about that concept um and so for me i mean to make it real like when i want to go write a thread or write a newsletter piece about some new topic say inversion like this mental model that i use quite a bit i can go and write down a piece about it and then i'll read it and realize oh my god there's like these massive gaps in how i'm understanding this and i wouldn't have known that i would have thought i understood inversion like yeah i understand it because your mind tells you that you're just like oh i get it i don't need to read more about this and when you write it down suddenly it becomes very clear to you where those gaps exist and how you can go fill them in and so as a leader i just think the it's one of the most important things you can do for clarifying your thinking on any given topic the other piece is it makes you better at everything you do when you write clearly you communicate more clearly you're able to be more succinct in everything that you're putting together i mean my twitter writing habit started with twitter it's become a newsletter writing habit has made me a better investor it's made me a better uh husband it's made me a better friend i just because i think more clearly and i think in more concise terms um i have more value-add and conversations that i have with people because i'm able to just like draw upon these things that i've written about and so i've learned them more effectively it just has this massive spillover effect across all these realms of your life i uh sold a book deal on management to my publisher mcgraw-hill i remember and in the book proposal you know you write like a sample chapter but the a lot of it's kind of the marketing that's what that's what how a proposal sells like can this dude sell books that and we're going to say yes or no they the idea yeah they want it to be good enough but then you get the deal and then you have to actually write the book and i didn't fully realize how little i actually knew about the topic that i had just sold a deal book deal until i was forced to go really deep and so this is why i push all leaders that was one of the greatest learning tools in the world and so i push all leaders right you don't i mean i like if you're going to publish but even if you're not you should still write and second put yourself in the position of being a teacher so any time like you're going to give a speech or you're going to meet with a mentee or you're going to try to help let's say a founder in your case you're not going to want to not be a value ad so leading up to that meeting you're probably going to really like what do i think about this how am i going to help this person what can i do that process of preparing so much learning happens then you share the advice and you get immediate feedback if it was useful or not and you can adjust moving forward i feel like you're you seem to always be in the mode of being a teacher and that seems to be a great learning tool for for you i i gather 100 i mean i it's funny like people have um told me over the course the last year that they've learned a lot from the things that i've put out in the writing and i like i think that's amazing um first off i'm absolutely like i have so much gratitude um for the era that we live in that i can like put things out there and that globally it can have an impact on people i mean like the responses i get from people in india and in africa and all these places like it's just incredible to me and i am still blown away by it every day the thing i always say back is like i'm actually learning alongside you about all of these things because i i can't even describe how much smarter i have gotten in the last year from doing all of this writing that was from the outside looking in looked like me teaching it was actually me learning and it's the most selfish thing i've ever done in candidly because i've done all this writing and you know people view it as all this time that i've put out to help others and that was a huge inspiration and motivation around it but i've learned so much from doing it that like the downside to me of writing all of these pieces and doing all this was that i learned a lot and the upside was limitless and so it always just felt like that's a pretty good asymmetric trade i can i can make there one of the things that you're really good at is writing great threads so those who are i guess not everyone's on twitter i find twitter to be one of the greatest learning tools in the world it's also been a great networking tool for me to meet people that's how we met yeah um and part of what makes your thread so good is that you're you've become a phenomenal storyteller so i do want to get specific on the threads thing but i know not everybody cares about that i do but i know not everybody does so let's start with the storytelling aspect of it how have you worked on and what is the makings of someone who is a great storyteller how can we do this yeah i mean for me storytelling is a kind of built skill um a lot of people think that you're either a good storyteller or you're not and i just push back on that um i read i just spent a lot of time reading all of these different pieces on the principles of great storytelling from disney and pixar and the these places that i consider to be um foundational storytellers and i think honestly you can study that i have no i don't write about fantasy worlds and you know different realities but those principles run through every area of your life if you're an entrepreneur and you're uh running a business and you're you're constantly telling stories you're doing it to your investors to tell them to give you money you're doing it to your employees to give them that vision of what you're building and why it's so exciting and so it's just a foundational skill on a day-to-day basis and i just focused on how can i just keep getting better at it my mom is an incredible storyteller everyone that knows her will say that about her she just has this like air about her where she she just kind of captivates a room and i think maybe i had a little bit of that from her naturally like i was always the guy in the locker room that was telling stories and like you know had people laughing i wasn't like a clown but always had some story that i would like to be telling um and so i've kind of tried to take that and like put it into my writing like when i'm writing about a topic how can i infuse a degree of personality of emotion of novelty something that just makes it more than a dry educational piece um because you think about like as a child you have all these textbooks and these things that they're making you read and it's really hard to absorb stuff that feels that dry mundane it's much easier to absorb something when it feels relatable it feels like it has wit it feels like it has novelty or emotion and it's grabbing you in some different way and so i think it's just so important to develop that to hone that skill and really to just keep improving upon it i mean i started this a year and a half not even a year and a half ago i started it i'm looking at the date i started it may 12th of 2020 i started writing publicly that was when i started my twitter writing as wow really it's only been that amount of yeah yeah 14 months or 15 months whatever that is i had 500 twitter followers like started yeah started putting stuff out and i like i objectively think my early stuff was like pretty bad it was well researched and well thought through but it didn't have that like extra kind of it factor and that just comes from storytelling what so let's let's get to the let's go a step further then let's break it down someone who says i'm not a good storyteller what what how can i get better like what are some of the practical applications or practical things they could take away from this conversation to implement immediately to to become a better storyteller yeah i think the three biggest ones for me and maybe i'm gonna end up running over on that but i think um something that elicits an emotional response from the audience um you need like emotion woven into the fabric of what you were writing saying speaking what whatever it might be it needs to grab people in some way and so when you're writing it or when you're sketching out your notes for something that you're going to publicly say and it's the storytelling aspect of it you need to know what that emotion is going to be like what are you trying to elicit is it happiness is it hope is it inspiration um and the best writers do that naturally i wasn't one of those like best writers i had to force it i would have to think before i wrote something what is the emotion that i'm going for here and how do i weave that in and make sure that it's kind of creating that reaction and creating that response um the other piece is novelty to me it's um what is like the oh wow moment that i'm triggering in my audience um that's kind of taking them out of their normal just like humdrum life that i'm hitting them with because that's when you grab someone and then they remember it then they're telling that story and they're sharing it with somebody and now you're bigger than just your one-to-one of you telling a story to someone else it becomes like you have this k factor of like shareability of the things that you're putting out there um so i think those are the two biggest i mean the other one which is just like table stakes for all writing and speaking is you need to be punchy and concise about how you tell a story telling a great story isn't about writing a million words and winding it in 40 directions and like making it complicated and using big words it's actually the opposite it's like the mark twain quote it's one of my favorite quotes um i didn't have time to write a short letter so i wrote a long one instead and i just love that quote because it's so true like it's much harder to simplify and write something very clear and short than it is to write some long winding verbose piece um and that plays through to storytelling the best storytellers in the world are the most concise every single word is considered it's thoughtful um and that's i mean i think that is just table stakes if you want to be a great storyteller and you want to improve your storytelling it's like uh stand-up comedians talk about the economy of words the best of the best they make it feel like they just kind of just kind of stumble out on stage and start talking and yet the great ones have hand crafted every single word they say when they get on that stage so may 9th 2020 is this the first thread that helped you blow up and and this is i just want to give an example for people who haven't read this or heard of your stuff yet and this is how it starts and it piqued my curiosity a thread on markets it is the year 1500 and you enter a market in renaissance era italy there are buyers and there are sellers prices of the various goods are determined by the interaction by and among these individuals now in walks mr federico a man of endless means tweet two mr federico climbs a tower in the center of the market and proclaims quote i am a buyer of any and all goods in this market regardless of their price he climbs down off the tower and exits the market to return to his mansion what happens in the market when he leaves and then the thread continues so this is what i'm talking about like i'm like wait it's like in a book where the good authors make you turn the page you gotta go to the next one and the next one and the next one you can't put it down so this is at the beginning of you you probably had no followers at this point and now you have 242 000 plus um so so what's going through your head as you're putting this together now that i shared a real example yeah that was my first one so i had near and dear to my heart um i uh that this is like so it's may 2020 um markets are soaring while the economy is still shut down everyone's stuck at home and basically everyone in the world myself included was like what the hell is going on like how is the market ripping right now while everyone's stuck at home and no one's spending money um and i was trying to find a way to explain the concept that like what the federal reserve is doing which is they're going into the market and basically just buying a bunch of stuff and the impact that has on prices in a market and i was like how can i do this in a way that is going to make it digestible it's not going to be technical things about buying bonds and what they're doing and it's going to be accessible to anybody and so i basically i sat down i had a few friends for my baseball days texting me asking me these questions and i was like i need to figure out something that i can just send them and i can just be like here this explains it you'll get it um and that was how that came to life and i created that fictional character mr federico yeah yeah admittedly not my best humor but it got the point across that that's what i was talking about and um and i wrote that like on the floor of my garage just because i had an idea right then and i wanted to write it down and i posted it you know first off i called my shot because i told my wife that it was gonna go viral and she like rolled her eyes at me and walked away um you know i had 500 followers at the time so there was no reason to think so um and i really believe that though you really what's that you really believed that i did yeah i wrote it and i was like i basically just wrote it and i was like this is really good this i mean if this is a meritocracy um which i believe twitter effectively is um this should go viral like this is really good it's thoughtful it gets the point across i think it's really good and so i tweeted it and um you know i didn't have many followers so it didn't really get much traction at first and then i sort of hustled a little bit like i commented it under a couple big accounts posts and chamath who has this massive following saw it and retweeted it and said like this is good and retweeted it and so all of a sudden like my phone just went bananas you know like i went from having 500 followers to 2000 or something that day and um that was kind of the start of it i realized like oh there's something to this concept of um breaking these concepts down in an easy digestible way for people um and that it wasn't out there like in general i had this perception that the market had split where in the world of finance in the world of business you have like the really low end like the tick tockers that are giving you nonsense advice about buying options and like all of that stuff and then you had the like really high end of people who are just talking over your head they're like you know basically trying to make you feel dumb because they want you to pay them to manage their money whatever it might be and so my decided was like if if this end is the like really crappy like you know bicycle and this end is the like ferrari i was like i'm gonna be the like toyota camry just like good old faithful gets you from point a to point b sell tons of those cars because they're just very you know they're like a good price point quote unquote um and that's what i wanted to be i wanted it to be accessible digestible i wanted anyone to be able to share it and get value out of it um and i think i've generally met that you know met that burden that i tried to set out for reminds me a little bit of tim urban he's been on the show he writes at weight but wyatt dot com takes a huge fan of tim yeah i think everyone who writes loves tim because he takes the super complex makes it simple and is funny and um i the i think the best writers have that that ability to take the complex they then digest it and synthesize it and retell it in the form of a story they add some humor and they make the reader feel smarter after having read them not dumber because they speak like listen to my big words and that is what i strive for i think that's what leaders in general should strive for regardless of your title regardless of your job and one of the best ways i think to get better at this one first and foremost jack anything else you just got to do it right you got to get the reps but then two and i think a close second is you've got to be reading this stuff constantly that's why twitter has been a great learning tool for me and i push people towards it because there are some negative things just like anything else in life but there's so much positive that comes yeah and there's so much out there to learn and i feel like this is something you've really it's become part of you yeah yeah i mean to me it's just about being positive some you clearly have that mentality but the world in my view is positive is a positive sum game when other people win and we have a rising tide and a groundswell of people getting smarter and feeling empowered and inspired by things i'm putting out there that makes me better off like the economy starts getting better people are making better decisions they're spending money on things they're investing in things and um and when that happens we all win and so like i just have this general positive some mentality around this stuff where if i can empower people and if i can spend a few hours writing something that i don't know i mean the recent things i'm putting out there are like it's two million three million impressions in 24 hours it's like that's an unbelievable number of people that i can reach and if one percent of those people feel empowered and inspired or learn one thing i'm like that's the best university teaching teacher in the world like you can't reach that many people and so we live in this era where i can do that and i just am blown away by that fact and so that's kind of what inspires me to continue doing it is just this like general positive sum mentality that i feel around all of it you know i tweeted something about like starting to genuinely root for others to succeed is this massive unlock in life and i really believe it like the people who i look at who have helped me along the way who had no reason like i was giving them no benefit and i may never give them a benefit but they still just rooted for me along the way that just blows me away and i want to be that person to tens hundreds thousands of others you know in their lives so that they feel that same way yeah one of the things i wanted to talk to you about since we have the similar background of playing um a sport in college is that we've all we've had experiences with coaches both on the field and maybe like a boss can play the role of a coach as well i'm curious from your perspective what have you found like when you compare and contrast like the excellent coaches who have made your life better in more ways than just maybe throwing the ball harder um or more accurate um but they've they've made you better what what's the makeup of a great coach yeah both sports-wise and maybe outside of the sporting world too in your mind yeah i think the two things for me are in the trenches with the team um that's a common thread in everything whether that's sports or life the best leaders the best coaches they're in the trenches with their guys like they're never it's um i think it's the new zealand all blacks like the the um the concept of like never be too big to do the small things and the the team the captains of the team are the ones that have to sweep out the locker room at the end of a game and i was always taken with that concept and it's it's um it's really powerful and i think the best coaches do it naturally you can learn that but it's just being in the trenches with with the guys or girls on the team and and um you know feeling like you're fighting alongside them you just do so much and you want to work for that coach that's there with you and then the other one is someone that's willing to challenge you um call you out when you're wrong on something tell you that you're you know what you did is not good enough um because otherwise you're just never gonna get better i mean i had i've had coaches in my life that were you know sort of just um sort of just there and like you know not gonna call you out if you didn't put in the effort you should have because you were the star or whatever they don't want to call out the star the best coaches i found were the ones that were like literally just say to your face that's not good enough you know it's not good enough as well as i do and if you're okay with that as your level of effort there's i don't know i don't know who you are as a person um those kind of things you're just like whoa it kind of like knocks you back when someone calls you out like that but those are the moments where you get you might get pissed and you might be like how dare they say that to me but if it triggers that response and you kind of jump in and you're working harder because of it i mean man the the impact that can have on a full team when you're doing that um and i always found that i mean we i've had some amazing coaches and been privileged to have some amazing mentors people that have been around me in my life and the common thread among the most amazing ones is they just push my thinking they just push me and push me and if i say something that's unfounded they're like oh you really believe that you think you've done the work to to really believe that or to make that assertion in that confidence of a manner and normally you realize that you haven't and you're like oh crap you know you know they're right i need to i need to dig in further i need to spend more time on that but i think it's i think it's those two it's being in the trenches um and then it's just being willing to challenge challenge the people that are under you i i i like that um i know for for me from a coaching perspective they're the ones who pushed me to levels that i didn't even realize i was capable of and that's because they weren't afraid for me to temporarily dislike them um i i grew to love them deeply sometimes after the fact but i loved the fact that they cared so much that they were willing to upset me because they knew that's what it took to get me to perform at a level and i i would say i don't think i get a college scholarship without my two of my high school coaches i'm in the exact same boat my um my high school baseball coach who i'm still extremely close with to this day i was this guy coach john beverly a small public high school in massachusetts and i remember like my freshman and sophomore year of high school i had two great seasons but i was throwing i don't know 78 80 miles an hour but i was good i was like you know dicing guys a little little breaking ball yeah i was doing the whole dance um and i remember at the end of that sophomore season he called me in and he was like what do you want to do like what's your vision for baseball do you want to play in college and i said like yeah i think maybe i could play in an ivy league and um you know that's kind of lower end d1 baseball i think i could go do that and he looked me straight in the face and he was like how about stanford how about rice and i remember thinking like this dude crazy i mean that was like the first thought that went through my mind was just like this guy's nuts i'm like a 5 10 165 pound right hander from massachusetts public high school in massachusetts i'm throwing 80 miles an hour what do you mean stanford like stanford's one of the best baseball programs in the country um and he was dead serious he looked i mean like i kind of laughed and i looked at him and he was just staring at me and he's like if you're willing to put in the work you have the talent to do this it's going to be hard but that's what i expect from you is doing that and all of a sudden it was like oh wow someone believes in me at that level like this guy who is an informed individual incredible believes in me at that level and a year later i had a scholarship offer from stanford and i was signing a letter of intent to go to stanford and i attribute so much of that to just that one moment where he kind of challenged me and he was like what about stanford what about rice um it still blows me away to think about it now like i mean one of the most impactful moments of my whole life i mean in terms of setting the trajectory and i owe him a massive debt of gratitude um but it's uh it's just amazing there's like one person that believes in you on some level like that and is willing to challenge you and kind of push you to that level can totally change the trajectory and and your path doesn't that make you want to do that for other people totally i mean i mean it's what i try to do every single day like i want to mentor people i want to be that person that had that impact it's why i think coaches teachers we're some of the most underpaid people in the world um everyone has that one high school teacher or some person that you know again for no benefit for no monetary benefit helped you and like completely change the course of your life um and we pay our teachers like crap we pay these like high school coaches like crap and the impact they have on young men and women in the course of their life it's um it's truly remarkable i i think it's it's it's it's got to be such a fulfilling and rewarding feeling for them to do it uh and i've i've gone back and interviewed some even had had had a couple on this podcast because as a way to say thank you and just to deconstruct how their mind works and um to me i love the thought of like seeing something in someone who they believe in themselves but they maybe their level of expectations are just right like here you know they're kind of realistic but they're they've got like a ceiling that they've put that it's not intentional there's nothing bad they just they just don't really think bigger and for for you or me or anyone to to to say actually stanford rice that that is realistic for you that it i know it is and here's here are some things to do to do it but it is an actual it's actually in play and all of a sudden your mind changes your mind shifts your expectation level changed and to me like he set a standard of excellence for you that we can do we can do this for people if we care that's hard like it's much easier for your coach to be like wow i'm glad you're on our team don't transfer don't go somewhere else i love you i'm here for you instead he's like no i'm gonna push you and raise your level of expectations like what an awesome moment of leadership yeah insane i mean it's like the pygmalion effect i just wrote about this the cognitive bias like high expectations lead to improved and higher performance someone vocalizing that they have these amazing high expectations for you um has this impact where you just want to live up to those expectations that the person has set for you want to work hard um and achieve those things i i don't know it's funny like we go through life and we don't necessarily vocalize our thanks for the people that that gave us those moments i mean i'm like i'm going to send my coach this this podcast because i i want him i want him to hear it and you know like publicly kind of hear the the word of thanks but you know maybe i've said it to him over the years but it's just funny to think about like how impactful one moment i don't even know if he remembers that moment but it's so impactful for me yeah he probably doesn't you know he probably doesn't i've said those things to my coaches like oh because it's just the way they are yeah you know like the great ones and they've done it for other people too because that's just their standard mode of operation and i think i'm glad you said that this is a good kind of signal for people if there is somebody like that in your life and i'm and hopefully there is or hopefully there's more than one i would urge you to tell them call them email them try to see them if possible i would urge you i did this recently with my high school offensive coordinator who became a head coach i asked him go to dinner this was months ago and uh we went out to eat and i just wanted to look in the eye he was with his wife and i wanted his wife to hear it too i wanted her to hear like the impact he had on me and i just was like honestly told him exactly how i felt and he had this like look in his eye it's like emotional even thinking about this this look in his eye of like okay like good like i still wanted to impress them though you know how weird those coaches where you still want to impress them but i just want to make sure he knew it and then we had like hours and hours of conversation storytelling a follow-up meeting afterwards it just i urge people to do that like to call somebody see them tell them even text them whatever maybe to let them know like thank you for what you've done for me like i don't know if you fully realize how much you've impacted me and that can be really powerful yeah absolutely i love it i love it um one more thing uh i know we have to run but i'm gonna talk about the power of learning circles could you briefly describe like the power of learning circles because you you're a lifelong learner i'm a lifelong learner i'm i'm fans of leaders who are learning leaders yeah and you've written about learning circles and i i get to do this too in my in my daily life what can you tell talk about the power of learning circles yeah maybe i need to write more about this too because it's something people a lot of people ask me about i my my hypothesis is that the best learning is communal it's not an individual activity and what i mean by that is when you read something new you read a new concept you can sit there and think about it and it's in your head and you've learned something a little bit but it gets really cemented it gets much more dynamic and usable when you go talk about it with a bunch of people and you riff on it you you know push and pull it in different directions this idea becomes much more than just a concept that you've read about you've only heard it one way and so one thing that i always encourage people to do and that i've adopted in my own life is develop these like circles of friends like whether it's a group chat or a you know hang out every now and then in person but groups of people that you can collectively learn with about these things and bring up these ideas it doesn't have to be formal and you're like saying hey this is my learning circle but groups of friends that push your thinking on things where you can throw out an idea and say hey i'm really thinking about you know the future of work what does it look like i read this cool article about x y or z and what do you think about that and they totally disagree and then you kind of you know go at it a little bit and push in different directions and suddenly you're just like you have this unbelievably dynamic set of thoughts about a concept that you never would have had if you had just read the article and then said oh yeah i know about the future of work now it's just a different degree you were here and now you're up here um and that's brought about by that collective learning and so i always encourage people like find your learning circle find people that you can kind of collectively come together with and learn together learn in that same way i love it um thanks so much man for being here um where there's so much out there to learn more about you where would you send people uh online yeah i mean my twitter is at sahilbloom um just my name it's the benefit of having a uh having a weird name so it's at saaho bloom and then my uh my newsletter is uh i don't know sahilbloom.substack.com i think the curiosity chronicle i love the name yeah yeah just exploring my own curiosity and sharing it with others so hi highly recommend people checking it out because both your threads and your um your sub stack because i've i've learned a ton from it personally so every time like a new thread comes i am ready um so i really in your uh subsec i really appreciate it man thanks so much for being here i'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress would love to appreciate it thanks so much thanks man [Music]

Channel: Ryan Hawk

Views: 147

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Leadership, Learning, The Learning Leader Show, Learning Leader, Business, Entrepreneur

Id: l-dOig2NQNE

Length: 55min 18sec (3318 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021