Books I've Loved on the Tim Ferriss Show is exclusively brought to you by Audible. There couldn't be a better sponsor for this series, my dear listeners and readers. I have used Audible for so many years, as long as I can remember. I love it. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. I listen when I'm taking walks. I listen while I'm cooking. I listen whenever I can. And if you're looking for a place to start, I can recommend three of my favorites.
The first is The Tao of Seneca by Seneca, if you want to hear my favorite letters of all time. Touches on Stoic philosophy, calmness under duress, etc. The next is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, G-A-I-M-A-N. One of my favorites, even if you're a non-fiction purist, this is the fiction book that you need to listen to. Neil also has perhaps the most calming voice of all time. And third, Greg McKeown's Essentialism, subtitle The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. This is one of my favorite books of the past few years. Combines very well with the 80/20 principle.
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Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types, startup founders, investors, chess champions, Olympic athletes, you name it, to tease out the habits that you can apply in your own lives. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a short-form series that I'm doing simply called Books I've Loved.
I've invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books, describe their favorite books, the books that have influenced them, changed them, transformed them for the better. And I hope you pick up one or two new mentors in the form of books from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life. I had a lot of fun putting this together, inviting these people to participate, and have learned so so much myself. I hope that is also the case for you. Please enjoy.
Hi, I'm Cindy Eckert and I'm an entrepreneur who's built and sold two successful pharmaceutical companies. I'm perhaps best known for my last, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, that broke through with the first and only FDA-approved pill for women's low libido. That's right, I said low libido. I sold that business for a cool billion dollars up front and went on to put my money where my mouth is. So, today I invest in other disruptive female founders and disruptive technologies in health inside of my Pinkubator. That's right, I said pink. I had a little pink pill. I love pink.
But perhaps the biggest twist and turn of my unconventional story is that the company that I sold for a billion dollars, well, I got it back for nothing last year. So, how does that happen? I fought to get it back because the company I had sold it to never launched it. And that was not going to happen on my watch when we'd won one for women. Guys have had 26 options. I thought it was about damn time that women had one of their own. So we went after getting it back and I'm delighted to say we were successful in doing that. And the shareholders kept the billion. So, now I'm on a mission to launch Addyi as well as many other firsts for women.
But, I should say of all the career highlights, maybe one of the top ones is being interviewed by Tim Ferriss. So, when he called and said, 'All right, Cindy, what are books you love?' I got to thinking, the first one that came to mind, no-brainer for me, Purple Cow by Seth Godin. It is such a good book. So, what's it about? Well, it's right there in the title for you. There are tons of brown cows out there, but it takes a purple cow to grab your attention. And his book is a marketing book. It talks about the model of marketing. It talked about how the old model of marketing was the huge companies with giant budgets who got to have the Super Bowl ads, like they were going to win. They were even going to win through money and exposure, and how that model really has been disrupted. And that we have these remarkable brands that attract remarkable to them. That's the Purple Cow philosophy.
So, as I was reading it in the context of marketing, it really struck me, but isn't that a philosophy with which to build a business? So, I said I've built two companies, dial back to my first one, Slate, and really Purple Cow from a philosophical standpoint, the standing out in a sea of sameness, was so fundamental to the core of what I was trying to accomplish that literally, if you go back and look at email signatures from people, instead of saying best regards, cheers, whatever your sign-off is, many times when you look at my original team that worked with me, the sign-off is moo. Moo, because I talked about it so damn much, the Purple Cow philosophy. How are we going to go out there and stand out in a sea of sameness?
I'd been in big environments. I was in those big environments, and I was successful, but totally uninspired. I was in environments that believed the only way to be successful was to homogenize, was to make us all brown cows, and we had to follow the certain way. And really, the hunch was, when I started Slate, wait a minute, there are other people out there just like me. They're in those environments, they are successful because of their own drive and determination, but they're not inspired, and you're actually not tapping into this purple cow aspect of them that will make you remarkable.
And so, I hired against it, I fired against it, I incentivized, we dressed up at Halloween, some of my employees came in dressed as purple cows. I mean, we really got it, because if you come into my office, let's just say hiring, for example, by the time somebody gets to my desk and has been vetted by my team, they're abundantly qualified to have the job. What I was looking for was purple cow characteristics. How did they stand out from everyone else? How were they remarkable in a way that was going to attract remarkable to them? And so those were really what I was torturing.
Purple Cow, I believe, is an outstanding read for everybody, not only if you're in marketing and you want to understand how the old rules don't apply anymore, but really philosophically for how you embrace, how you show up in this world. You know, I show up in pink, hot pink, to be exact. And that was born out of irreverence, if I'm being quite honest, because people would pat me on the shoulder when I was trying to get the first ever pink pill approved for women, and the pink became a symbol, if you will, of what I was fighting for. I like pink, by the way. I've always liked pink. I look back at childhood photos, I'm almost always in pink, and that was the signal to me that you have to show up really loudly, exactly as you are. And I will say though, despite my best efforts, Seth Godin has still not released the pink cow, but I'm counting on that coming out maybe 2020, Seth? I don't know.
So, love Purple Cow, highly recommend it. Let's talk about another book that I love, and Tim and I haven't talked about it before, but I bet you this one is on his list, too, and that is A Curious Mind by Brian Grazer. And if you don't know his name, I got to tell you, you definitely know his award-winning movies. I mean, he's worked with Tom Hanks on so many projects. He's partnered with Ron Howard. These little names, and he's had all of these 40-plus, I think, Academy Awards he has won. And A Curious Mind is about this one thing that has the ability to connect us all, and that is curiosity.
And like, I cannot agree more enthusiastically with that concept, because if I think about all of the successful people I've had the privilege to meet over the years, I do feel like that's it. They are wired with curiosity to the core. And in his book, Brian in A Curious Mind, he talks about really techniques in which you can cultivate your own curiosity. So, he gives very practical tips, but one of his is that he schedules a curiosity conversation with somebody he doesn't know who's outside of his own discipline, and he really sits down as a discipline on his calendar. He puts aside time really for a curiosity endeavor, because he knows that when he sits down and learns from others, he can apply that to what he's doing.
And I think that's it, right? The hallmark of the best and most successful entrepreneurs is that they are almost insatiably curious. It allows them the ability to not only be constantly learning and applying those new lessons, but open-minded enough to be able to do that because I got to tell you, it is not a straight line to success. And if you're not open-minded enough to listen and make the turn slightly to the left or slightly to the right, you'll never get there. It inspired in me a lot of thinking about why did I become an entrepreneur? And what laid the foundation for that? Maybe very early on in a way that I wasn't even conscious of. And what I think in that regard is my parents cultivated my curiosity.
And I have two big brothers. We laugh about this. We share this story. And this is when we were little and we would go to our parents for help with homework. You know, you want the leg up. You want the quick fix and the answer. Regardless of the question. It could have been a math question. It could be an English question. When we asked them the question, they would reply with the same four words. And they were, 'What do you think?' It was infuriating, by the way, at the time in which you just wanted the assist from your parents, make it a little bit simpler. But really what they were doing, I give them a lot of credit for this. I think sometimes they genuinely were just tired. But I think at the core of it, the 'what do you think' was cultivating curiosity.
And that curiosity showed up in this way. So, if they weren't going to give me the answer, I was going to have to be willing to go and ask others and get their point of view. I was going to have to develop my own point of view and independent thinking along the way. And all of that cultivation of the approach of constant learning, the approach of forming your own opinions, the approach of realizing that it's not going to be handed to you by someone all knowing above who's going to pass down the perfect answer, really is foundationally so very helpful to me as I've gone through my career, as I have built businesses from scratch, as I have sold them, the curiosity is what has kept me showing up for more.
So, if I'm thinking about two books that I truly love and I couldn't recommend them more highly, it would be Purple Cow from Seth Godin. For all of you listening, I hope you always show up as the purple cow and separate yourselves in the sea of sameness. Let's be honest, there's a lot out there today. We get a lot of messages coming at us fast and furious. You got to stand out and really the simplest way to stand out is to be authentically you. That separates you from everybody else. And A Curious Mind by Brian Grazer. The curiosity factor is the difference between good and great. It will be, I don't know, the recipe in my mind for the most successful and frankly fulfilling life. Do yourself a favor and have a curiosity conversation. Put it on your calendar if that's how you roll or just open up your mind to the thought that mentors don't come just looking up. Mentors come to your left and your right every single day and you should be challenging yourself to learn from them. Thanks so much for having me, Tim.
