In today's episode, we're going to spend 24 hours with Guilherme Benchimol. At 24 years old, he was fired. Man, in my head, I wasn't a competent guy.
My father didn't think I was competent.
He rented a 25-square-meter office in Porto Alegre and founded XP in 2001.
For 10 years of my life, it was Monday to Monday.
How many hours a day did you work? I only worked.
In the early years, he could barely get clients. In 2010, he received the first external investment.
So, until 2010, I knew everything about investing. After that, I started to get to know every detail of people's lives.
In 2019, he went public on Nasdaq in the largest IPO of a Brazilian company in the United States.
It's really cool to see that from a tiny little office in Porto Alegre, we can launch shares on Nasdaq and have the clear feeling that this is just the beginning.
Today, with more than 2 trillion under custody, 4.8 million clients, and 8,000 employees, Benchimol is among the 20 richest Brazilians in the world and was named by Bloomberg as one of the 50 most influential people on the planet. This is the 24 Hours of Guilherme Benchimol.
Well, I've already recorded.
Look at Benchimol's elevator.
We're arriving at Benchão's apartment in São Paulo.
The most beautiful elevator I've ever seen, man.
Yeah, it was the most beautiful elevator. It already has details, man. It has carved details.
Wood, right?
Good morning.
Good morning. How are you?
Hey, what's up? All good?
Good, and you? I'm good. Hey, Guilherme?
Everything good, Lucas? Everything well?
Damn, there's a whole crew here. How are you?
Good morning. How are you?
Everything good. Come on in, come on in, come on in. The idea here was to go to the gym, right?
Guilherme, what time do you wake up every day?
I wake up every day at 6.
Then 6 o'clock. Then I have coffee. Then I go down around 6, 6:15, 6:20. So, here in the building there's a gym, there's a tennis court. I train for an hour, an hour and a half sometimes. Then I go up, have breakfast with my wife, and then I go to the office around 8:30, 8:45, more or less.
Every day, every day. My daily ritual is to exercise.
Hello. Good morning. Good morning. No, everything's fine.
We already scared a resident here.
But do you train weightlifting every day or do you do cardio?
No, I do weightlifting. I do weightlifting about four times a week, I do one or two days of Pilates, and I play tennis about four times a week, four or five times a week. So on the weekend I do more exercise. I do it from 7 to 9, to 10 in the morning, like, I go play tennis, I go for a longer run.
This thing of being able to connect with my own body, of sweating, that puts me in the present. The thing of going, of being in the present.
Do you think that helps you in business too?
Good morning. How are you? Look, I think that first, when you exercise at that hour, you become another character in a good way, right? You become an athlete, right? So when you have such an intense life at work, right? At work you're the Benchimol, confusion. Yes. Lots of meetings, lots of presentations, etc. And when you go play tennis, go running, go do another exercise, you become another character, right? So I think that helps you decompress from normal life, right?
Yes. The big drama we live in society today is that you get very anxious with so much information, with social media, etc. So sport puts you in the present, right? When you're in the present, you're more balanced.
Yes. That's what I always seek, physical activity, feeling good about my body and feeling in the present, and getting out of this crazy life that is the day-to-day of an entrepreneur. You manage to balance things. So you have a pendulum that takes you in the direction of business, entrepreneurship, and another that takes you in the direction of sport. I think I'm even a bit extreme. I've done many adventure races, I've done ultramarathons, I've done super difficult races, but at the same time that puts me in the middle, right? Because there's an extreme here, another extreme there, and I think that balance makes me more centered, right?
We can talk a bit more about marathons and tennis too. Let's let you train today. We'll let you train there.
Weightlifting is something that until a few years ago I didn't really like, right? I liked free sports more, running, cycling, swimming, etc. But when you understand the power of weightlifting, you can improve your performance a lot, you can gain lean mass, you can gain vitality. Sometimes you only focus on the sport you like and don't do this foundational work.
But now you take good care of your health, take supplements, but it wasn't always like that, right? There was a time, put up some photos, there's the chubby Benchimol, there's the Benchimol, right? The Benchimol I met in 2017 didn't take such good care of himself.
Oh no, in '17 I was already doing well. Already doing well.
You were doing well, but there must have been some craziness. There are some photos from the beginning that are different. Did you have a moment where you were detached from that, or because of work you couldn't do both things, couldn't take care of yourself?
Yeah, it was mostly that. I always really liked sports. I've said a few times that my dream wasn't to be an entrepreneur, it was to be a tennis player, right? I was always very athletic. But when I started working, the way I was fired, the way that happened to me, in a way made me feel incapable, right? And maybe my father didn't handle the situation very well. I think a father has a very big influence, right? So I always tell the story that when I was fired, I had arrived home a few weeks earlier and said: 'Dad, I heard some rumors at the brokerage where I work that they're going to cut heads.' He said: 'Son, relax, good executives like you are never let go.'
And then, right? A few weeks later I was let go. Man, in my head I wasn't a competent guy, but remember, I was always a very competitive person. I always brought that from sports. And then when I had the opportunity to start my own business, I dove in headfirst. So that feeling of not wanting to suffer that pain again, of starting to realize that you do something well, in the end you like what you do well, right? So when I started to realize that I found a path, saw financial education, that people were trusting me, etc., I dove into it headfirst. And really, I went 10 years without doing sports. 10 years of my life was Monday to Monday.
How many hours a day did you work?
I only worked. My life for 10 years was like this: for 10 years I didn't have vacations. During the week we did education, we did courses, right? We had a commercial model where we taught people about investments. So the courses were Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights, and Saturday and Sunday. So there was no free weekend, a free weekend was working, and the courses were from 9 to 5 and I was at all the courses, right? So that was it for 10 years.
That, on one hand, is good, right? I think every company that starts, you need to have someone super obsessed who starts, who pulls the train, who is a fanatic, right? And who moves mountains with brute force, right? But at some point that starts to get in the way, that account starts to arrive.
And the account arrives in that you stop having a social life. I had a child in 2009, so how are you going to deal with your wife, with the family, etc. So, in 2010 I had a breakdown, literally. In 2010, after 10 years of having started the company, having taken no more than three weekends off here, being conservative about vacations, already having a young daughter, and I said: 'Damn, I want to sell this business, I can't take it anymore,' because since I was very centralized and you're centralized without realizing it, because you were creating yourself, Darwin only allowed you to get to that point because you were a person who did things well, so you were molding your habits, having that style, and later your habits molded you.
Right? And it's hard to later realize that, to look from the outside and change your personality, because you've been doing that for 10 years.
Right? And then at one point I separated from my wife, I said: 'I want to sell this business, I can't take this anymore, because without entrepreneurship, this hell, I don't want it anymore,' because I couldn't see myself working, having a family, having quality of life, etc. And then, I was lucky to meet Chu Kong, who was a partner at a British private equity fund, who approached me and convinced me to buy a part of XP. He is an extremely experienced person. He said: 'Look, we're not going to sell any business, you're going to calm down. You're going to learn now to really transform into a leader.' I said: 'No, but I am a leader, I lead this team.' He said: 'No, you're going to lead in a different way.'
How big was XP? Just a parenthesis here. How big was XP around that time, near 2010?
From an employee standpoint, we must have had around 200-something employees. We were billing around 150 million reais a year, more or less.
That was our size. Maybe a bit more, a bit less. And he said: 'Now you have a very good thesis, which is really to change the financial environment in Brazil. You have good international references, but your execution is very bad, man. You can't be Superman, you have to build a team.' And without realizing it, because you don't realize these things, right? I thought I was a super open leader. I had an office with the door always open, but that doesn't mean you're open, right? But I was so obstinate and so obsessed with running the company that I knew the details. I worked 16 hours a day, 17. I arrived at the company at 7 in the morning. I lived literally across from the company. I left home, took the elevator down, crossed the street, entered the company. So I arrived at the company at 7, 8 o'clock, left at 10 at night, every day. Every day. You can't know more than your directors. You have to focus now on building a team. Man, that finance director of yours, he's not that good, Guilherme. Let's get a finance director that you're going to admire.' And then little by little, he convinced me to change the team. But in the beginning, how was it for you to hear these things?
It's that when you're living the confusion, you don't see the confusion.
You're used to it, you've been working with those people for 9, 10 years. So those people complement you. That group had been homogeneous for many years.
So we got used to it, the team got used to having Guilherme pulling the train, Guilherme getting into everything, and people asking me all the time if those things were necessary. So that was our dynamic.
And everyone inside understood that was the correct dynamic. So it's hard to realize there's a much smarter way to run that day-to-day. When I had this breakdown, again, that I separated from my wife, and obviously, how am I going to stay married if I don't have weekends, if I don't have days, if I can't see my daughter properly, etc., etc., right? So you start paying a very expensive price in life, right? And he convinced me to change a director. And then an area that wasn't working started working very well.
And I started to admire that person. I thought, wow, imagine if my whole team worked like that new person who joined the company, who knows much more than me, is a specialist, brings good ideas, is proactive, knows how to assert themselves, knows how to set limits with me. Wow, I think I found the path, I'm going to have to change my entire board. I changed the entire board. And that's when I realized that there's a stage of entrepreneurship that is pure execution. You have to be obsessed with executing, you have to know the details, you have to make things happen. You're going to work 16 hours a day, Monday to Monday. You're going to have to earn those 10,000 hours of flight time, etc. But at some point, this management style is going to start, what worked is going to start getting in the way, because the company starts getting bigger and if you keep being who you were, you start becoming a bottleneck. You can't run an ever-larger company being like that.
But at the same time, how do you... you spent 10 years being that, you can't change without it. You can't. You have to take some hits in life, right?
And the hits in my case were: I want to sell the company, I separated from my wife, and I remarried the same wife six months later. So everything worked out in the end. But you have to take those hits from life so that you can... actually, I even think not, right? I even think there are lighter ways to start realizing this, but in 2010 you didn't have this thing of investment funds, mentorships, experience exchanges. That's not what existed back then. So I learned a lot from books, I learned a lot by going to talk to other entrepreneurs, but you didn't have social media so widespread, people weren't so open. So I learned by reading Jim Collins, devouring his books, the classics, and trying to put things into practice. And then, in this second stage, where I realized that the path was no longer execution — actually, it was execution, but execution through people better than me — I really started to transform into a real leader, a leader who started focusing on long-term plans, on good people in the right positions, on culture, on partnership, on how I really get the best out of each human being and whether that human being is the person who should occupy that chair, right? How do I build that unity? And that's the fun part of entrepreneurship, where you start focusing on people. So, until 2010, I knew everything about investing, I knew every detail of the company's machinery. After that, I started to know every detail of people's lives, I started to know what each person's goal was. I no longer knew how to execute that activity, but I knew very well how people executed, who the people were, what their skills were, what motivated them, what inspired them. And I think to scale a business, to take it from zero to stage 3, 4, 5, you have to be great at execution. But to take it from stage 3, 4, 5 to stage infinity, you have to be good with people, you have to lead, you have to be a person people want to be around. And you have to be able to make them believe in a very cool story. A good leader is a good storyteller.
A good storyteller in a good way, right? You have to tell good stories, you have to make teams believe in apparently impossible things, because nobody wants to get in a van that goes to the corner bakery. You want to get in a rocket that goes to Mars, build a compatible plan and get there. That's when you become a real leader, and then you form new leaders, and then more and more your thesis, your vision becomes concrete, right? And then all those stories you told about one day competing against the banks, you get there, you hit the goals, you start hitting them and you start forming a legion of people who experienced things that also seemed impossible, and they start doing that with their own subordinates, and the thing scales.
It's really cool, right? Everyone doesn't believe it and it happens, and you say: 'Wow, man, it's real, it's impossible. What he says is true.' Everyone buys the idea, things start happening, right?
Yeah, they start building, they start having internal legends, right? It's cool to have internal legends, right? Things like, man, there was something going really wrong and suddenly Guilherme together with the team came here and transformed the business and we managed to score that spectacular goal in the corner, you know? You managed to transform something that was all wrong into something super right. Or then, I remember that right at the beginning of the company — I think I already told you guys this way back, right? — right at the beginning of the company, I couldn't, I didn't have money, so I could only hire people by talking them into it. I had to tell a story. And I remember we had an intern, it was me, Marcelo, my partner who started the company with me, Thiago, and Ana Clara. Thiago graduated from college and like all interns, you want to be made permanent.
But I couldn't make him permanent because I couldn't cover the labor costs, and his salary, the internship stipend was, I don't know, 300 reais, the category floor was 1,000, but in cargo it became 2,000. I didn't have that money.
Damn. The cash register already blew up.
The cash register already blew up.
Blew up. Thiago, look at that, man.
And in the beginning it was: look, believe in us, this is going to work out. He said: 'Man, Guilherme, put yourself in my chair, I studied, I want to be made permanent, I want to have a signed work card.'
25 years ago, being an entrepreneur wasn't a cool thing, it wasn't prestigious, right? What mattered was building a career. And he said: 'Guilherme, I really like you, but I'm going to work at an American bank here in Porto Alegre and I'm going to earn — it's not even 1,000 reais, it's 3,000 reais.' I was jealous of him, I said: 'Man, if a spot opens up, call me, okay?' So the company that was four people became three. We had another intern who was going to graduate six months later. I said: 'Damn, if she also leaves and if I don't convince her that the path is different here, the company is finished.' So I sat down with her and said: 'Ana, look, I know you want to be made permanent in six months, but I'm not going to make you permanent. You're going to be my partner, you're going to be 10% of... you're going to have 10% of the company. In my logic, along with Marcelo, the following: 10% of nothing is nothing, and 10% is a nice number.'
'And you're going to be my partner and we're going to build the largest brokerage in Brazil. Trust me. We have a plan here. We're going to do this, this, this, this. But you're going to be my partner. But look, 10% is the following: you earn 300 reais in internship stipend, you're going to start earning 10% of the profits. We don't have profits, so after you graduate, you're going to be a partner and you're going to earn nothing.' And she said: 'No, I'm in, I'm in with you.'
Wow, what a good decision, right?
Yeah. And then 9, 10 years later, and I started saying this every day or every week. I said: 'Guys, look, whoever comes to work here with XP, we're going to build the largest brokerage in Brazil, because we have an American benchmark called Charles Schwab. Brazil doesn't have the investment culture of stocks. At that time we were basically a stock brokerage. We didn't talk about investing like a turbo, which is basically accessing the stock market. And we started creating a methodology that helped people enter and exit the market. We started specializing in the stocks segment.' And I would say: 'Look, you're going to work here, you're going to make history with us, we're going to build the largest brokerage in Brazil.' And people would say: 'Okay. Man, this place is kind of crazy, but it's a nice guy, good people, etc.' And I kept saying it, saying it, saying it, saying it. In 2010, in April 2010, we... we bought the brokerage in 2000, for 7 years we were autonomous. In 2007 we bought the brokerage American Invest, which became XP Corretora. In 2010, in April 2010, we became the largest brokerage in Brazil. And for 10 years only one person left the company, there were 200 employees and only one person left.
Nobody left, nobody left, everyone grew. So everyone kept listening to me say maybe those crazy things I said that we would be the largest brokerage. Nobody left. And in May 2010, that month, we became the largest brokerage in Brazil. I remember... Oh, wait, let me grab something here. I think I have it here. Ah, here it is. Sorry, I said it wrong. January 2010. Here, look, look at the coincidence, okay? 29/01/2010, XP number 1.
So this was a milestone where I popped this champagne. Up to here. Here's the champagne, okay? This champagne was the first champagne I popped in 2010. It was when we became, that month we became the largest securities brokerage in Brazil.
That's amazing, very good.
And then people would say: 'Man, this guy is crazy, but he delivers, he makes things happen.'
Yeah, the difference between being crazy or not is results, right?
But then, so, no, then these things start forming a competitive culture, a culture of believing in impossible things, because people experienced it. They saw a guy saying that for many years, working hard, arriving late, sacrificing his life, giving up vacations, giving up weekends to be together with the team, and 10 years later that dream starts being delivered. And that marks, that marks. But at the same time, at this moment here, my life was chaotic. My life was completely chaotic. Like, success in business, but personal life no. Success in business, but you mentioned the photo, I was chubby, right? I reached 97 kg, 97, 98 kg, I was fat, right? I went 10 years without exercising. And it wasn't that I didn't allow myself, because all my competition, all that competitive spirit I mentioned about wanting to be an athlete in my youth, I channeled into this because I didn't want to fail, and here I realized I did it well. And in the end, in life, you don't have to do what you like. You like what you do well. And I started doing this well. And then when you do it well, you dive in headfirst. And I kept doing it and molding myself that way. And obviously the bill came due. And then you have to have a lot of humility to realize it.
And who helped me with this was this investor named Chu Kong, who by the way works with us today. He runs our private equity funds. He's a brilliant person. So he was the one who got me out of that loop and channeled my energy, which was very large, very intense, in another direction.
And in those moments it's hard to do it alone. Maybe nowadays, with more information, it might be easier. Look, get out of this confusion. Now you're going to focus on really being a leader. You're going to study leadership books, you're going to bring in people, and you're not going to be an execution person anymore, you're going to be a management person. And then the company went from revenue of 150 million reais in 2010 to revenue of 20 billion last year.
So, in 10 years we went from zero to 150 million reais, and in 15 years we went from 150 million reais to more than 20 billion in revenue. In 2010 we were a company that didn't have 1 billion in client assets. We probably managed, I don't know, 5, 10 thousand clients, more or less. In 10 years. In 10 years we captured 100,000 clients. 15 years later, more than 2 trillion and more than 5 million clients.
Wow, what was the key change?
In the beginning you have to be very good at execution, you have to know the machinery very well, you have to be obsessed with making that machinery work, but after that, in some way, you have to learn to change your character and learn to be a people manager, learn to lead, learn to tell stories, and in fact you have scale, and then you make that leap, that brutal leap.
But what can you tell them? Because many entrepreneurs who watch us here, sometimes they're at an earlier stage and exactly, they might be feeling collapsed right now. Like, I'd like you to send a message to those people watching us, like, man, I don't know, it's going to work out, or man, try to change this now.
Ah, yes. Like, even working very hard, it can go wrong, right? So you have to have a little luck too. I had a lot of luck, right? I focused, I started the company focused on the variable income product at the moment when Brazil had a bull market. So like, yes, from 2002 to 2007, our stock market went from 7, 8 thousand points to 80 thousand points. So that was luck, right?
So, like, I think as an entrepreneur, my way of doing things, I always thought it was less risky to seek references. So I think I'm a great, I think I'm a great copier of good businesses. So in the end, XP wasn't something I invented out of nowhere. I simply looked, studied, I was always very curious, always very studious. I studied cases of companies I liked. And since I came from the financial market, I knew the brokerage Charles Schwab and I said: 'Wow, there's an opportunity here, in the United States people invest differently. Here in Brazil people invest through the bank, the manager, and savings. Something is wrong, because banks aren't focused on clients, they're focused on product targets. Wow, let me start building a story.' 99% of everything invested in Brazil in 2001 was concentrated in banks.
Today the financial sector makes 1.4 trillion in revenue. Man, we make 20 billion in revenue. 95% of that is concentrated in five banks. Wow. When you look at this as an entrepreneur, there's a reference. Someone blazed this trail, it worked. You go to Brazil, you look at the TAM, it's a big TAM, 1.4 trillion, right? Wow, there's a company listed out there, so I can understand a bit how the entrepreneur out there did things and I keep trying to tropicalize that business. So like, I like to create that framework to make it easier. I think it's much riskier to obviously be Steve Jobs. I know in the end the reward is much bigger, but having the vision to build something nobody has ever done. I'm going to build the iPod, the iPhone, that's much harder, right? You don't have many references, right? So I think the entrepreneur has to try to seek these things. And if he sees these things like, man, when I say that XP last year made 20 billion in revenue from a segment that makes 1.4 trillion in revenue and I basically compete against five banks that I understand aren't focused on clients, wow, if I keep improving more and more, I'm going to win more and more market share. So there's a game, there's an infinite game, there's an infinite game. So like, and it's like, you have to know if you're not punching at the tip of a knife, because there are many entrepreneurs in a segment that has no alpha, no beta, no expansion.
Right? You're competing in a segment where you have no differentiation, and something that's small, and then it gets harder, right? So, what always inspired me in the company was having a lot of awareness of the numbers. The numbers were always my greatest motivation. I thought: 'Hold on, man. 99% banking concentration, delicious. And this is a pot of gold,' right? So, I don't know, if you're an entrepreneur who sells chocolate, just as an example, right? What's your TAM? How much does the industry bill in Brazil? Yeah, we know, there's Copenhagen, there's Cacau Show, there are so many other entrepreneurs. Okay, there's a TAM in this business, right? How much is this TAM? Ah, 20 billion reais. Wow, 20 billion reais. Okay, I think I can create market, I can gain market, I can gain share. How do I build this strategy so that I realize I'm in an attractive segment, right? So if you're in a segment that's shrinking, you're going to have more difficulty. The competition is harder, perfect, right? And you have to believe that the game is resilience, which is where people struggle the most, this entrepreneurship journey.
Entrepreneurship... when you deal with the investment theme, right, you always use the efficient frontier of Markowitz, right? I know it's a technical term here, right? But as an investor you're always seeking the best investment for the lowest possible risk. You're always optimizing your efficient frontier, right? I'll only accept more risk if I have more return in proportion. As an entrepreneur, the entrepreneur has to...
To seek your frontier, Markovic. He has to be able to organize his movements so that he does first what brings the most result and requires the least effort. An entrepreneur has to be lazy, in quotes. He has to know how to pick low-hanging fruit. It's just that usually the entrepreneur starts doing the cool things, the things he likes to do, ahead of the most important things.
So, you have to have a clear view of your target, who you compete against, who your competitors are, their trajectory, etc. And how am I going to do today the most important thing? Because here there's easy money. Here there's easy money, with little effort. Then later I do something that has a little more difficult money, with a little more effort. And then I go connecting these points with a lot of discipline.
But it's common for the entrepreneur who's starting out to say: "Hey, you know what? I'm going to set up a branch in Miami." Man. A branch in Miami, I skip 147. You have to do 146 things first, because otherwise you'll be outside your efficient frontier. You're going to spend a ton of money, you're going to take risks.
An entrepreneur has to be conservative. Has to be conservative. He has to take solid steps the whole time. It's one step after another. And with that he goes capturing money. It's a little game, this business. It's a little game of capturing money, of capturing cheap money, of obviously enchanting your customer.
Every company has some customer, so you have to do that solidly, enchanting your customer. Then you go capturing money with a lot of discipline, so that after a while you start reaching for higher fruits. The time will come for the Miami branch. But there's the right time, you know? And then in that sequence that demands resilience and discipline, because if you don't have that very well done, you start doing whatever comes up in front of you and then you let the tail wag the dog.
And how does the dog wag the tail? I have my sequence, I'm going to allocate capital to that sequence, I'm going to put energy into that sequence, and that's exactly what will allow me to get where I want.
But that's going to take a long time, for example, 10 years killing yourself to get here and 15 more years. But that's entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is about loving it. It's like when you talk to athletes, right? And I love it. We're sponsoring João Fonseca. Uh-huh. And so many other athletes who help inspire Brazil. The athlete, he loves the journey. What is the journey? He loves waking up early, doing physical therapy, he even loves defeat, he loves training, he loves having butterflies in his stomach, he enjoys the journey because he knows he'll get there many years from now.
So the entrepreneur has to understand that if he stays focused on short-term money — obviously money is super important — but he can't be focused on "one day I'm going to sell a business." No, he has to be focused on the plan and he has to enjoy that journey, that stressful journey, because I spent 10 years in the grind, but between you and me, I loved it, it was wonderful, because there's nothing more — obviously the bill is steep —
but there's nothing more enjoyable than feeling that you're building something different, that you're impacting an industry, that you're making people grow. Obviously you can't do only that in life, right? At some point the bill comes due, you have to change. But that journey was made with a lot of discipline. 25 years ago the company was just me. 15 years ago the company was 200 people. Today there are 8,000 employees and 20,000 external advisors.
Back then you had to convince a guy to open an account. Today people come to you to open an account.
We don't want to — we have more questions to ask, but we also don't want to disrupt your routine too much. Let's have breakfast, and what's the next commitment?
We're going to have some meetings at the company now between 9 and 10 o'clock, and anyway, there are some events. Come on, you guys follow along. I wanted to show you this because I think it's something —
Because even you, you showed this memory you have from 15 years ago. What else do you have here in terms of stories to tell us?
This is my office, this is my little corner, where at night I always spend about half an hour here. So my daughters call it daddy's museum. So all the things that inspire me in a way stay in here, right? So there's João Fonseca's racket, there's Ayrton Senna's glove.
That glove there is Senna's glove, it's the real thing.
Official. This glove was from a race that — this glove here, Senna raced the Monza race in '84.
How cool is that. Did you get it at an auction?
At an auction, yes. So here are three tennis balls that Nadal and Federer gave me signed. Here's a surfboard from Kelly Slater that he gave me signed. This here was a day I went with Carlos Burle to surf in Barra da Tijuca. Anyway, there's a lot.
And what are you — I see some books here, is there something you're reading right now?
What am I reading now? Ah, I'm reading, I'm reading this book here about Churchill. Churchill managed to change the history of a war. So the West is what it is today because the Germans didn't dominate —
Uh-huh. They couldn't advance.
Overall, right? Because they couldn't advance into England, etc. And Churchill managed to change the course of the war with speeches, with words. So, well-placed words, in a nice way, impact a lot of people, right? So he managed, with his speeches, to convince the English to keep fighting, even though the Nazis kept dropping bombs, etc. "No, we're going to keep fighting," etc. So, understanding his speeches and the way he communicated with the people and the words he used, etc. Yeah, yeah. Very, very cool.
That's important. It's lacking a lot today, right, in leaders' communication, right?
And I also see here that there are even some geeky things. Do you like that stuff?
I like Star Wars.
No, this stuff, this here reminds me of my childhood, right? I used to watch a lot of Star Wars. So this box here, my dad gave me when I was 5 years old.
Wow. Lucas really likes it too, you know?
I keep it to this day. Anyway, every little thing here reminds me of a part of my life, and so this place here is where I connect. So I get home around 7:30 at night and spend half an hour here every night planning my next day. That's my habit, right? My routine is to get home at night, then I sit here calmly and plan the next day.
And then on the weekend, when I'm in São Paulo, I spend about two hours, Saturday and Sunday, planning my week, looking at what the important things are, defining two priorities. Because, and again, this is maybe an important insight, right? When you're in a company, when you're a CEO of a company, a lot of problems arrive — customers, things that don't work, real problems, etc. So if you don't know what you're going to do that day, you'll work a lot anyway, but you won't necessarily take the company in the direction you defined that you would.
So knowing what needs to be done is the grain of sand that's necessary so that you go connecting the points and after a few years you arrive where you defined. So if you don't have the discipline to define what the important things are, you won't be able to advance. And by defining what the important things are, you know what you're NOT going to do. So, the thing I say most is: "No, I don't want to do it, it's not for me, I'm not interested, thank you very much." So that discipline of how am I going to optimize my day, how am I going to optimize my routine, what are the important things, what's the sequence, what do I do first, what do I do after, what do I not do. So, every day I start with — I have eight to ten daily things. Eight to ten things that are important.
Well, here's number seven, right, which is my lucky number. So, I was born on 07/07 and —
Ah, man, so close, hit the post.
By one. But that's it, like —
The office is really cool. There are some watches here, right? I see there are some watches here. You're wearing a Garmin there —
