#665: Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack — How to Win, The Art of The Graceful “No,” Overcoming ...

I know, it's about time. It's great, great to see you and to be with you, Tim.

I think I was about 20 years old. I got to work for my dad who was in the travel business and he was selling these group tours to airline employees and their families. It was this crazy idea he had that he had this niche market and he was going to aggregate all of the benefits and discounts that you would get as an airline employee and package them all together to create these tours. And so by the time my brother, sister, and I each turned 20, we were each invited by my dad to go work as a tour guide in the city of our choice. And my sister had picked Denmark, Copenhagen, I picked Rome, my brother would later pick Paris.

So I'm in Rome. And this was one of the most pivotal parts of my entire life experience that would probably direct where I ended up in my career. And so I was the guy that would wake up every single morning early, go pick up these cranky tourists. They were pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers, because keep in mind they were all airline employees. I'd pick them up at the Rome airport, collect all their luggage, get them on the tour bus. I'd get on the microphone as a 20-year-old, tell them all about what the next three days were going to be like. Here's how you got to hold your purse so you don't get it stolen by someone on a motorcycle. Here's what you should or shouldn't do.

So anyway, I was supposed to be taking these tours to all the typical places like the Cameo factories and the Vatican Museum, all the stuff that was on their itinerary. But instead, I was looking at this as an opportunity to get an education in food. So I kept going to these trattorias. I found three different trattorias that would actually pay me 1,000 lire per head of every guest I brought in. So I'd go get free food at these really good restaurants and I'd end up with 25,000 lire in my pocket afterwards.

Well, so one of the restaurants, which was called La Tavola di Giovanni, started calling me Meyerino, Little Meyer, because they knew it was my dad's company. And I thought that was kind of cute. And somehow over the course of that summer, without my inexperienced ear really picking it up, Meyerino, Little Meyer, had somehow changed to Maialino, which means little pig. And the reason they did that, and the joke was on me, but every single time I went to this restaurant, my favorite thing to order was the maialino, the roast suckling pig.

And so fast forward many, many years later on my 50th birthday, my wife Audrey, she knows I hate surprises, so the party was not a surprise. But what was a surprise to me is that she had co-created a logo for my birthday, which was Maialino, and she had my picture as a little kid with a pig underneath it and made these stickers for bottles of wine that everybody was drinking that night. And it was such a damn good logo that when it was time to open a new restaurant, I couldn't come up with a better name or logo.

So we ended up naming a restaurant Maialino after this whole experience. So you can call me Little Pig or Little Meyer. I'll answer to either one.

I think underneath it, I'm a little bit of a control freak, and I realize that there's this great expression my grandfather taught me many times, which is man plans and God laughs. So, as much as you think that you're planning for success or planning for the stuff that's going to work out, the world usually has another idea for you. So, on the other hand, look, if we're driving, I like to be behind the wheel. It's just my wiring. So, I never mind not knowing where the story is going to end, but I like to have some, at least it may be a false sense, but I like to have some sense that at least I had some say in the matter.

So I mean, I'll be flying on an airplane, and it's not that I need to get in the cockpit with a pilot, but for example, I'm the absolute world's worst sleeper on airplanes. I've got the window open. It's almost as if I'm afraid I'm going to miss one of the clouds outside the window if I don't keep paying attention.

With a polysci degree. And the reason that I did study political science is as a child of pretty much the 1970s, middle child of three in the middlemost state in the country, Missouri, Republican dad, Democratic mom. Every night at the dinner table, there was a quote-unquote discussion about politics. It could have been Watergate. It could have been Vietnam.

And the dinner table was where our family, we could agree on what we wanted to eat and that was kind of about it. The food was the comfort. And I, as a middle child, I was the one who wanted to make everybody feel good and bring everybody together and keep the family together. And on the other hand, as much as my dad and I were best pals, played a lot of sports together, we cooked together all the time, it was the time I spent with my mom hanging out, watching the news every night that I found most interesting.

So I knew I loved what we used to call current events. I just was taken by it. And so after I graduated with my polysci degree, I was either going to be interested in going into politics because what else do you do with that kind of degree, or maybe I was going to go into journalism. I just liked either writing about or impacting the events of the day.

So after I spent a few years being a salesman just to make some money selling electronic tags to stop shoplifters of all things, I said, you know what? That's not what you want to do the rest of your life. It's been good. You made a bunch of commissions and I actually invested all those commissions in that company's stock which was a good thing but I said you got to do something right now.

So I did take the LSATs. I decided law degree instead of journalism degree. And first of all, I think anyone who knows me knows I would have made the world's worst lawyer. I don't wake up every morning saying I'm looking for a fight. I'm looking to prosecute. Kind of the opposite. I think hospitality is the opposite, which is how do we bring people together?

But it was on the eve of taking my LSATs. I had taken the Kaplan course, preparing for them and everything. Hated every minute of it. And the night before going to take this test, it was a Friday night and I was out to dinner with my aunt and uncle and my grandmother in New York City at an Italian restaurant I still go to called Ilio's. And I was in a foul, just awful mood because first of all, I didn't want to take the test. Didn't want to be a lawyer. And my tablemates were all having a great time eating good pasta, drinking lots of wine, and I couldn't do it.

So at a certain point, my uncle Richard turns to me and he says, what the hell is bothering you anyway? And I said, well, I've got to take my LSAT tomorrow morning. And he said, of course you do. You want to be a lawyer, don't you? And I said, actually, no. And he basically, he wanted to throw his pasta spoon at me at that moment.

And he asked me what was to this day the most impactful question of my whole life, which was one I was not expecting. He said, do you have any idea how long you're going to be dead anyway? And I said, no, I hadn't really thought about that. Why? And he said, I don't know either, but I'll tell you one thing. You're going to be dead a hell of a lot longer than you're going to be alive. Why in the world would you do something that you have no passion around?

And I stopped and I said, because I guess I don't know what else I could do. And within a second, he said, you got to be kidding me. All I've heard you talk about your entire life is food and restaurants. And I said, so what am I supposed to eat in restaurants the rest of my life? It was so obvious and yet I could not see this.

And he said, no, you fool. You should go open a restaurant. It had never dawned on me that that was a valid thing to do because that's not what you ever heard about in college back then. You didn't hear about going to open a restaurant. Now I'm really, really glad that all these years later, being in the food business has become a validated entrepreneurial career choice for people with an education. But it wasn't back then.

And it's still, I'll cut to the chase. I did take the LSAT the next morning. I had already paid for it for God's sakes. Never applied to one school.

But what I did do is the following Monday morning, I connected with one of my best buddies from Trinity College who I used to go out to eat with all the time. He was a fraternity brother. And I said, I got this idea. I'm going to open a restaurant. You be the money guy. I'll be the food guy. What do you think?

And he was in a bank training program at that point and he said, okay, I'll do it. So we enrolled in the New York Restaurant School, which was all you had to do was pay your 150 bucks and you got in. And we took a restaurant management class. And he promptly dropped out after two sessions because he made the mistake of telling his parents that he was thinking about leaving banking to go into the restaurant business.

Bottom line is he felt so bad about leaving me all alone that he said, look, our bank has one restaurant client, which was a big deal because mostly banks would run the other way if they heard the word restaurant back then. And he said, I'll be glad to see if I can get you an interview with that. Would you like that?

So I got the interview. The interview pretty much consisted of the owner sitting midway down his bar. I'm at the front door. He waves me down the bar, tells me to stop and stand right in front of him. He looks me up and down from my Wallabees up to my Brooks Brothers shirt and he goes, you'll do. That was my first job interview. I got the job.

And I was assistant lunch manager, which meant nothing, which meant I was getting 250 bucks a week to answer reservation lines and set up the reservation book for lunch and be on the front door.

Here's the good news. Out of that deal, I figured out in seven months that I love this business. I met the woman who would become my wife. She was a waitress, an actress. She actually left on day two to go get an acting job. And I couldn't stop thinking about having just seen her for one second. I met the neighborhood in which Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern and so many of our restaurants have been and I met my career.

And that was a major, major pivot point. But it just shows you so many things in life are those moments. I mean, the fact that none of this ever would have happened if I had not gone to Trinity College, for example, because that's where I met my friend.

And I was 0 for 3. I was such a screw-up in high school. I applied to only three colleges. I was rejected from two and waitlisted at Trinity. And I had to get down on my hands and knees and write the best letter of my life to get off the waitlist at Trinity.

So first of all, that had to happen. And the only reason that Trinity happened is that when my dad's business was in Rome, his travel business, he met Trinity College's lawyer at dinner one night and the lawyer said, hey, your son should consider Trinity College, which none of us had ever heard of. So, all that stuff.

And then by the way, this friend of mine who introduced me to his restaurant client, the only reason we ever met is on the first night that I was at Trinity College, there was a pickup softball game and there weren't enough baseball gloves to go around. And so I lent my glove and I went up to this guy and accused him of stealing my baseball glove and somehow we became friends after that.

So you just, all these moments that didn't have to happen and that it happens in life every day and you just got to pay attention and just be grateful if you're fortunate enough to have a good choice based on stuff that never should have happened in the first place.

I was probably in five different schools growing up in St. Louis. So there was a nursery school, then there was a public school, then we moved. So there was another public school. Then I went to an all-boys school because I wanted to play football on their team. And then 10th grade came and I wanted to go to school with girls. So I went to a co-ed school after that. So that was five schools.

And then by the time I was 18, now I'm going to college. So now I'm in six schools by the time I'm 18. You got to learn a lot of social cues along the way. And I just found that I was really good at kind of understanding what made people tick and a really good observer of body language, moods, etc. And it's not that I didn't have a sense of myself. I wasn't like Zelig or a chameleon changing who I was, but I knew what people needed.

And you know, kind of a blessing to have found a career where that is a really useful thing to be able to do. And as I said, even before going into the restaurant business for three years, I was the top salesman in this company. You as a young 20-year-old selling against hardened salesmen from around the country. I loved it. I loved like getting into my little blue rabbit and traveling to the worst neighborhoods in New York where there was the worst amount of shoplifting and meeting these people, these shopkeepers who own drugstores, bookstores, clothing stores, fur stores, supermarkets, and learning to speak their language and making the sale. I just loved it.

So I just think that I'm cut out to do this. And the fact that I happen to love food and wine as much as I do has certainly helped a lot.

Well, the first thing is keep in mind this was before we had the internet, but I would still do a lot of research and I would still learn as much as I could possibly learn not only about the business that I was trying to sell, but the person who I'd be meeting with. And what I came to learn very, very quickly in the New York retail world, and keep in mind I was primarily selling to retailers because that's who had the shoplifting issues, is that many, many, many of them were either related to each other.

There was a huge Syrian Jew population that was not the only population, but I started to develop a sense for the family trees of either real families or relationships and I got to know who knew who and I would take that as far as I could possibly take it.

So I learned early on something that has been something that I teach our teams even in the restaurant business. We call it ABCD so you can ABCD. Always be collecting dots so you can always be connecting dots.

And I learned early on that people will take exactly as much interest in you as they believe you're taking in them. No more and no less.

And so I don't want to give away all my trade secrets here, Tim, but I've listened to your show for a long time, but I listened to a couple more segments much more recently because I really want to understand more about what makes you tick. I don't look at it as gaming the system. I think it's genuinely being curious and being interested. And so if you're looking for one tip, it's curiosity.

And I throw in one other thing. The real trick was that I would pick my, since I was largely cold calling people or often cold calling people, I would actually make my own schedule for where I was going to go that day based on a restaurant that I wanted to try in that particular borough or neighborhood of New York. And I would organize my day around my lunch. I even organized it around some guy who would bring in lobsters in Brooklyn at exactly 2:00 in the afternoon and I'd go get his lobsters and bring them home to cook.

But in a weird way, I was developing two careers at the same time without even thinking about it. You're collecting dots in a few different areas at the same time.

Well, it was easy at first because I didn't tell them. I kind of sidetracked and sidestepped and I finally at one day got the courage to say that I wanted to be a chef.

They knew I loved to cook. Now you may say well how would you get the courage to say you want to be a chef but not to be a restaurateur. Well in fact I thought I did want to be a chef and I had seen at that point there were a number of really well-educated people who had gone into the culinary profession and chefs were starting to become kind of well-known.

We keep in mind this was way before the Food Network, but you know, you had people like Alice Waters who had gone to Berkeley. You had Jeremiah Tower who had gone to Harvard, Joyce Goldstein on the West Coast, Mark Miller, on and on and on. There was probably like 15 of them. And Wolfgang Puck had become a household name. Paul Prudhomme in New Orleans had become a household name.

So I finally gathered the courage to say, I think I want to be a chef. And by the way, I was in these days, I spent almost all of my time walking around the city looking at menus on restaurants. I memorized every menu. I ate at many of the restaurants. I would go back to Italy many, many times. Not just when I was a tour guide working for my dad, but till I was 21 years old. I could travel anywhere Pan Am flew for $44 round trip thanks to my dad's travel business.

And so I was constantly going to restaurants and learning and learning and learning. I finally said, I'm going to be a chef. And so my dad was kind of open to it. My mom maybe a little bit less so, but you know, I went for it.

My dad actually connected me with two of the Relais and Châteaux colleagues of his in Bordeaux. He said, look, I know you want to go to Italy, but in Italy they basically cook food with three ingredients. And that's the genius of Italian cooking. But if you really, really want to learn to cook, you got to go to France. So I said, well, let me do both.

So I spent time in Rome, Bologna, Sardinia, Milan. And then my dad did connect me with a restaurateur in Bordeaux named Roland Furon. And he had two restaurants in Bordeaux. One was called Le Reserve. The other restaurant was called Le Barron. The day before I got to Le Reserve, they had lost their second Michelin star.

Now chefs have actually gone off the deep end for less because the Michelin stars were everything for the French. And so I get there and everybody in the kitchen is like completely dejected and I'm this guy who doesn't know anything about cooking and who is he and how did he get in our kitchen and why are they letting him live with the chef?

The good news was that after a couple days, a bunch of people in that kitchen left because they did not want their resume to say one star. They figured if they left with two stars on the resume, they'd be fine.

And so all of a sudden, I started to get some opportunities, some really big opportunities like chopping shallots and opening oysters and pulling feathers out of pigeons to prepare them. And here was the big one. I got to cook family meals. That's a big deal to get to cook for all the other cooks.

And I was doing some of my family's favorite recipes. I'll never forget when I made barbecued ribs. They didn't even know how to eat these things. Cototto pork. You know, it was just a great, great experience.

They took me to oyster beds. They took me to châteaux in Bordeaux. They took me to places where they made sausage. They took me on one of my favorite days of my life, a day that the restaurant was closed to go hunting for wild pigeons called palombes. Just a great life experience.

In our industry, there's a sense that if you really want to dig your roots and build a career, you should learn from the best. And how do you get your foot in the door with the best? So, you were willing to work for nothing.

The only time I ever had to pay anybody was this cooking teacher in Milan who told me that she was the Julia Child of Italy, which she certainly was not the Julia Child of Italy. I paid her my money and moved on. But I did many, many stages where I was not paid anything.

And as I told you, the one that I did in New York City, I was paid 250 bucks a week, which is kind of laughable. That's what a waiter makes in half of a night in New York City these days.

So I just think that it took me 10 years to open a second restaurant and today we'll probably open two Shake Shacks somewhere in the world. If I've learned any one thing is that there's a benefit to being a little bit patient and try to grow where you're planted.

And I think that as life has accelerated for so many reasons, technology being primary amongst those, I think that people feel like there has to be a beginning, middle, and an end that all gets resolved within a 30-minute sitcom. And that's just not how life works.

And I think that if you can do time paid or not, but really learn what it is you're trying to do and not scratch the surface and move on too quickly, it really pays big dividends.

Now, there were reasons it took me 10 years to open a second restaurant. Primary one was I didn't want to go bankrupt. And since I had seen my dad go through two different bankruptcies, one in my teens and one when I was about 20-some, I forget how old I was. And I always associated his bankruptcies with expansion. And I assumed that that was the business thing you wanted to avoid was expansion. And I didn't want to end up like my dad. I just said there's no way I'm ever going to open a second restaurant. I don't want that to happen.

The silver lining in that even though I eventually after my dad died, I got some therapy and the first thing I learned was, hey, guess what? You're not your dad. And number two, there's a whole lot of businesses that have expanded and that wasn't the reason they went bankrupt. In fact, they didn't go bankrupt.

But the silver lining was I really learned my business. I really learned it. You know, that's probably the reason it took us five years to open a second Shake Shack. I didn't want to expand too quickly and I did not want anything bad to happen. But guess what? We learned our business.

Every business is made up of five stakeholders and so when I say learning the business it's learning as much as you possibly can about how to motivate all five of your stakeholders to root for your success. That's what you want. And so the best way to motivate all five of those stakeholders to root for your success is to make sure that they believe you're on their side first.

So it was learning who's our staff. That was our first stakeholder. Who are they? Who are the best staff we could possibly have? Who are our guests? And I mean really learning about them. And to this day, to this very day, I end every single night reading all the reservation reports for all of our restaurants so I know who's dining in our restaurants tomorrow.

And then I either, if I stay up really late, I read all the after-service reports or I'll do that first thing in the morning to find out how did all those experiences go and I weigh in. And to this day, I'm connecting dots because I care about who our guests are. This one knows that one. Seat them near each other. This one has just published a book. Make sure to go buy that book and have it on the maître d' stand so they can sign it. I care about that stuff as much as I've ever cared about it.

But it also means getting to know the community in which you do business because why should your community root for your success if you're not investing in your community?

Same thing goes true of our suppliers. Get to know your suppliers. You want the best product. You can't have the best business if your raw products are no good. I learned that lesson, by the way, from my grandmother. Very, very important.

I love the cooking in her home. And I'll never forget when I asked for her tomato sauce recipe, and she said, I'll give you the recipe, but I'll tell you one thing right now. It's never going to be any better than the worst ingredient you put into it.

And number two, those ingredients themselves won't be any better than how well you treat them after you buy them. You better get the best tomatoes, which in New York is like a two-month season, right? It's like August and September. And even if you get the best tomatoes, you better not throw them in the back corner of the walk-in refrigerator and bruise them so that they lose their sugar. Treat them the right way.

People. You can have the best recipe in the world for how you hire people, but you better pick the best tomatoes. You better treat them the right way if you want the best sauce. So, I've just learned so many lessons. It's amazing how many life lessons actually apply to learning your business. Another great one that my grandmother taught me when I was a little kid growing up in St. Louis. My favorite moment was March and April because spring came kind of early to St. Louis and that's when my grandmother would plant her flower garden. She had an amazing green thumb. Well, keep in mind she lived in an urban apartment building. It was a skyscraper in St. Louis at six stories tall. And her apartment building gave her a plot of land in the parking lot that was probably 20 ft long by about 4 ft wide. And she called it carbon monoxide gardens. And so every spring she would invite me to come help her plant her garden for the summer. And this would always be probably late March, something like that. And you know, this probably started when I was 6 years old or something like that. And she gave me my gardening gloves. And she taught me early on to figure out which were the weeds. And I kind of like that scene from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. She was basically having me do all of her free labor weeding the garden. So I learned to pick all the weeds. So now by the time I'm about nine, I go down there for my annual spring visit. And now it's probably April or May because I would do this, you know, as the garden would keep growing. And she said, 'Now I'm going to teach you the real secret to how you have a great garden.' So I'd go for the weeds dutifully. And she said, 'Nope.' She takes my hand, gently pulls it off the weeds, and she hands me a watering bucket with something in it. I have no idea what was in it. And she said, 'I'm going to teach you how to water the flowers because if you really want to get rid of the weeds, the best thing you need to do is water the flowers because the flowers will provide a canopy that will actually prevent the weeds from getting the sunlight that they actually need.'

So, voila. Best business lesson ever because I spend the first 10 years of my career almost exclusively focused on trying to motivate problem employees to be better, like the weeds, right? And what I learned was that our employees are like sunflowers. They will turn wherever the sun is. And if I'm spending all of my attention on the weeds, I'm actually pulling the gravitational force that way. My grandmother's lesson was right. If I water the flowers and spend more time with the people who maybe I've taken for granted because they're doing such a great job, they actually crowd out the weeds and the weeds take care of themselves.

Exactly. Exactly that order. It took a long time to figure that out. Every business has those same stakeholders. You get to pick in which order you're going to prioritize them. And when I went to college, I took exactly one econ, Econ 101, and of course, you learn about Adam Smith and we studied Milton Friedman, the guy from the University of Chicago, and it was like, take care of the investor and everything else takes care of itself. So, I had that voice on my shoulder. But I also, you know, one of the first jobs I had after college, I was the Cook County field coordinator for John Anderson's independent run at the presidency in 1980. And leave it to me to work for the independent guy, not the Republican, not the Democrat. But 100% of the people who reported to me, that job, by the way, I got 214 bucks a week. But 100% of the people who reported to me were volunteers. And most of them were older than I was because I was only 22. And I didn't have any way to motivate them with money. I couldn't give them a raise. Couldn't dock them their pay. So I learned such a crucial lesson, which is that if someone's volunteering, the only way to motivate them is to have a higher purpose. We're all doing this because we agree with this bigger idea. And so basically took that idea to work with me when I first became a restaurateur. And again, everybody was getting paid, but at least half the people were older than I was. And I was learning what it was like to be a leader, to be the boss.

And I basically to this day treat all of our employees as if they are volunteers, which is not in the real sense. You're going to get paid, but if you're working for me, it means you're probably good enough to have gotten another 25 job offers at least. And so, as far as I'm concerned, you're volunteering to share your gifts with us. I better give you a higher purpose and reason for wanting to be here. And that's when it became clear to me that our first stakeholder had to be our own employees. And by the way, I look at this, Tim, like it's a virtuous cycle. It's not a totem pole where the employees on the top and the investors on the very bottom. It's a virtuous cycle where one input leads to something even better. So if you want to have really happy customers, they shouldn't be the input. You should have really happy employees, which I think then leads to a greater chance you're going to have really happy customers. If you want to have really happy investors, you wouldn't want that to be the input, Mr. Milton Friedman. You'd want that to be the outcome. And by the way, what's ultimately the best way to have happy employees? Have really happy investors because that's the only way people are going to get promotions and raises. And I've run a business where nobody was getting promotions and raises and it was not happy and we had to go out of business when that happened.

I can't believe you pulled that letter out. That's wild. [laughter] And you know what? I do that almost every day. But I wouldn't do it if it weren't genuine. I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of saying all that stuff if it weren't genuine. You know, I've always loved writing. My dad was an amazing editor. He was actually the managing editor of the newspaper at Princeton, the Daily Princetonian, and he took great pride in marking up anything I ever wrote. And I, you know, I care. I love writing. I love expressing myself. But I also, I think more to your point, it's not the quality of the writing as much as it is the sentiment behind it, which gets back to what we were saying earlier. If somebody cared enough to reach out their hand and say, 'I want to shake hands with you.' That's what that was. Or they reach out to give you a hug. What are you going to do? Just become a tree and not hug them back. And I think that I've learned a very, very important lesson. In fact, I'd be curious and you'll probably know. I care so much about letting someone know if I do appreciate an invitation, but I just genuinely can't do it. I care that they know that their invitation mattered to me. So much so that I sometimes procrastinate writing that note. And I've learned the hard way.

That sometimes my mind and my heart are at war with each other. My mind knows I shouldn't do it. My heart really wants to do it. And if that translates to making you or Jeffrey wait too long to get that response, it doesn't really matter what I wrote. So, I'm really curious to know when Jeff's invitation came and how many days went by before I responded. My bet is more days than there should have been.

It's just really hard. It takes time because what most people do sadly is they just delete the invitation or they just ignore it. And I think it kind of falls into a couple camps here. So number one is, is this something I really want to do? Number two, if I really want to do it, can I do it? So that's easy. Look at your calendar. And number three, is this something that I feel like I should do? And then of the shoulds, there's another couple buckets, which is is it a should because I have to or is it a should because it's good. I've gotten into most trouble on the shoulds. If I really, really want to do something, like I really wanted to have this conversation with you today. I'm the guy that reached out to you. I love when I get a spark of something that I really want to do. But many, many times the invitations come in. I get a lot from politicians. Will you support this or that? I get a lot from, you know, speaking opportunities, etc. And I'm not complaining. I'm very, very fortunate. But if it's a should, I learned this lesson from the restaurateur Jeremy King, who's in London, great guy. He said, 'The shoulds are what have gotten me in the most trouble.' And I asked myself a simple question. If this thing were tonight, because it's generally something, you know, four, five, six months from now, but if this thing were tonight, is this something I would be excited to do or would I roll my eyes and go, 'Oh man, look what I have to do tonight.' And so by making it in the very present, that's really helped me a lot with the shoulds. And then I just feel like it's not my obligation to say yes to everybody, but I do care. I genuinely care if somebody had the courtesy to invite me to do something. They deserve the courtesy of a gracious response. All they're guilty of is saying, 'I'm interested in you.' How bad is that? That's a compliment.

I would absolutely look for those things. In fact, I've checked them with myself year after year and there's not one of them I would take off the list. I want to work with people who are kind people who genuinely are optimistic people. I'm not really excited working with skeptics who just see what could go wrong all the time. You do need to surround yourself with—I'm a cockeyed optimist. I'm, you know, I'm so damn optimistic. I basically see the wine glass half full even before I pull the cork on the bottle. But it's important for me to surround myself with people who at least ask me some tough questions. So, I want kind optimists. I definitely want curious people. I don't want know-it-alls. I want learn-it-alls. I don't want someone who's already a finished product. It's not fun, especially if you're trying to make your business better every day. I definitely want people who have an excellent work ethic. I don't mean to the point of being sick, because we can all push it too far. But it's not fun to be on a team where everybody's really bringing their best and there's a couple people just putting in a lackluster effort. That doesn't work. And I definitely want empathetic people, people who understand the wake they leave in their path, who care about how they make other people feel just as much as they care how other people feel. And definitely I want self-aware people and I want people with integrity. So 100% of those. The one thing I would add that has really, really come to light for me: I want people who just love to win because that's not really captured in any of the six that I mentioned earlier. Wanting to be a champion. You look at the best athletes in sports. Sure, they have god-given physical ability, but they also had to train like crazy. You don't get to be the Kentucky Derby winner without—you got your bloodlines, but you also had to train like crazy. You don't get to be Serena Williams without the bloodlines, but you don't also get to be Serena Williams without working incredibly hard or Michael Jordan, whoever it is you want to talk about. So, I look for that. I'm really interested to know the motivation behind what makes someone competitive. And I basically have four buckets. First of all, there's the non-competitive people. They're great people. They just don't wake up every day saying, 'I got to win. I'm dying to win.' Tim Ferriss did not get to be Tim Ferriss without desiring to be the best. I know that.

Then the other three buckets I look for, and this helps me with someone's self-awareness as well, is to understand, assuming that you are motivated to be a champion at what you do, what is your primary motivation for wanting to compete to win? And I find there's basically three buckets. Sometimes people have a little bit of each. You know that picture of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over Sonny Liston whose back is on the mat with his fist up in the air. So I can pretty much tell you that Muhammad Ali was primarily motivated by a love for beating someone else. That felt really good to him. It's not a bad thing or a good thing. It just is what it is. Then you got, imagine this photograph of John McEnroe with his headband on and his long curly hair yelling at the umpire, 'You've got to be kidding me.' That man hated to lose. It wasn't so much I'm motivated by who I'm going to beat. It's like I will not be seen losing. The third image I would have would be a great Olympian, let's say Usain Bolt, and his leg is outstretched with the veins popping trying to get that extra inch or that extra half second off of his time or whatever. And that guy is—he's out there, his primary motivation, he wants to exceed his own personal best. He's competing with himself. So by knowing these questions, this is something that I would absolutely want to add today because I know that I want to be the best and I can't do it by myself. So I got to stock my team with people who look at every day as an opportunity—not for perfection because I think perfection is stupid. It's impossible. It's a recipe for unhappiness. But I do look for people who look at every day as an opportunity to honor whatever they did yesterday and figure out how to do it a little bit better today. That's the journey of excellence.

I basically define it as you've now learned how to do the job, but only you can determine if it matters to you to do it as well as it can be done. And you can see it in people. There's so many ways we can all take shortcuts. The obvious things are, did you show up? Did you show up on time? Did you show up shaven if that's what your job is in the dining room? Let's say, did you press your shirt or just take it easy and get that extra third use out of your shirt where you don't really care what it looks like? And you see this in sports all the time. And I think sports has so much to teach us. Number one is I think hospitality is a team sport. We rely on each other. It doesn't matter whether you had a bad night or not. You're not expected to go strike out if you're a baseball player. It doesn't matter whether you woke up on the wrong side of the bed or not. You're not expected to let a ball roll through your legs at shortstop. Well, it's the same thing in my business. Your job is to make the rest of your team better. And your job is to make the rest of your team better, whether you're on the field or in the dugout. And I got a quick story that I learned so much from other people. You probably heard of Theo Epstein. In fact, maybe you've even interviewed him at some point.

Well, so Theo Epstein is the youngest general manager in, I think, the history of Major League Baseball. And he was hired at a very, very young age to take over being the general manager of the Boston Red Sox who had not won anything for decades and decades and decades. And, you know, they talked about the Yankee curse or whatever the hell it was, but for whatever reason, they couldn't win. He comes, he's the general manager, revamps the team, and of course, they win their first title. I want to say it was in 2004. Actually, I don't want to say that because if that's the case, it was against my St. Louis Cardinals. But he then went on to go win a couple others for them. And then he leaves to go to the Chicago Cubs. And the Chicago Cubs, guess what? They have not won a World Series forever. He revamps their team. Chicago Cubs win a World Series for the first time in all these years. So now this wunderkind Theo Epstein is asked by a lot of people basically what's the secret here? And you got to understand baseball is a game of statistics. They measure everything. There's statistics I don't even begin to understand. But 100% of those statistics are what's happening on the field. So, running, caught stealing, your fielding percentage, your batting percentage, your batting percentage with runners on base, your batting percentage against left-handers, right-handers, on and on and on and on. Half the game of baseball is played while you're sitting on the bench. Your team is in the field, you're on the field. When your team is at bat, you're on the bench. And so, the real question is, how do you measure what your impact is on the rest of the team when you're in the dugout? Did you help the rest of your teammates get better?

So, I've been watching this guy Theo Epstein, trying to learn from him, and finally I have the chance to meet him once and he had given a talk at a conference I attended. It was the year that there was a big hurricane in Houston. I want to say it was Hurricane Maria, but I'm probably wrong about that. And this was like a week after the World Series. Houston won the World Series that year, beating the Los Angeles Dodgers, and he was still with the Cubs. The Cubs had lost to the Dodgers in the Championship Series that year. So, the team that the Cubs lost to went on into the World Series and lost to Houston. So, I go up to Theo Epstein. I finally get a chance to talk to this guy who I've been learning from from afar and I ask him the stupidest question in the world. And I go, 'Who are you rooting for?' I got to know, 'Who are you rooting for in the World Series? Were you rooting for Houston because you felt bad for the city because they just had this hurricane and you wanted to see something nice happen for Houston or were you rooting for the Dodgers because it would make the Cubs look better if the team they lost to went on to become the champion.' And he looks at me like I'm from Mars and he goes, actually, very politely, he goes, 'Actually, neither one of those things. I was absolutely rooting for the Dodgers to win, but not because it would make the Cubs look better. It's because if the Dodgers win the World Series, I know that the Cubs have to face them eight times next year during the season. And if they win the World Series, they're going to be like every other team that wins the championship and they're not going to do the things they need in the off season to improve their team. And that's going to make them easier for us to compete with next year.' And I went, 'Shit, that is such a great lesson because it's like when you think you're doing well or you think you're on top of whatever profession, that's the time you got to break the glass and you got to start over.' And that's when I think most of us, and it's not just laziness and it's not just sitting on your laurels, it's you think it's great. The world keeps moving and if you don't keep moving with it, you will definitely not keep up.