So, I'm going to start. There's a little preamble to my question because I think your writing and publishing this book is a crazy good turn of its own. Because if you had asked me, okay, Bill Gurley, one of the world's most successful investors ever, is going to write a book, I would assume that book would be, you know, heavy on bibliography, your biography, what you did, all the rest, and how you did a lot of investing tips and that kind of stuff. Instead, you wrote a book and you can correct me, but as I read it, I think your book is really about giving people the courage and confidence to pursue a career they love. So, if that's a right reading, why and why that topic?
I kind of fell into the idea about 10 years ago. I was reading a bunch of biographies. I think a lot of people go through a phase. Well, first of all, you get addicted to reading. And then I think if you're addicted to reading, people go through a phase where they read biographies. And I read these three biographies of people from seemingly far away fields from each other who all started on the bottom rung and were highly successful. And maybe part of the reason why I love being a venture capitalist, seeing the company, you know, at PowerPoint stage turn into a big global phenomena and being along for that ride. I've always had this closet obsession with American Idol. I like this kind of, you know, from zero to wild success kind of story.
And I put it together as a presentation and I gave it at the University of Texas to the MBA program. They put it on YouTube and a few people noticed it. One of which was James Clear. And so I had a few people and then I started getting feedback from people that saw it and how it impacted their lives. When I decided to declare victory and hang up my cleats from the venture world, I was thinking through a lot of different things I would do with my time. I stumbled on this book, Strength to Strength. I don't know if you've seen it from Arthur Brooks. And I just decided that it would be way more fun and exciting to go do this book, which could touch a lot more people than to write a book that would help tomorrow's VCs be better VCs, which I just didn't have a calling to that. There's this great quote that life begins where your comfort zone ends.
And this was more of that for me. So combination of wanting to give back, wanting to try, I mean, an artistic expression, try something I haven't done before, all those things I just felt a calling to this versus that. The other thing I had zero interest in doing, zero intellectual interest.
Well, it's a great giving back and I was shocked by the statistic early on in your book that something like 60% of people are dissatisfied with what they're doing. Is that right?
The question we posed was if you could go back in your career, start over again, would you do something, you know, quite different? And 60% said yes. So people are getting to the end of their lives or the poll was actually done across adults, across ages, but people get out there and they're in a career and they don't necessarily love what they're doing. And on top of that, I think as we get older, and Daniel Pink has written about this a lot, we tend to work the regrets of inaction weigh more on our brains than the regrets of action. A regret of action is I did something, it didn't work out, I made a mistake. Humans are amazing at forgiving themselves for those things, but the thing you never tried eats away at you. This kind of path untaken. And I certainly one of my core objectives of the book is to give people the permission, the confidence, and the methodology to go try that thing they've always wanted to do.
So, it feels like we've gone full circle on the advice of follow your dreams and passion. You know, that was advice and then everybody started, not everybody but a lot of people started debunking that advice including people that you highlight in your book and it was yeah for God's sakes don't follow your dreams that's not going to take you anywhere and then you're coming back at it and what do you think how do you view that round trip? What was what's missed in the debunking or misunderstood the initial principle?
Well, I see two things happen, Frank. One, we built this kind of college industrial complex that and I think every parent that's been on this ride knows something's quite not right with it. You know, by the time you're in sixth grade, a parent's worried about what your college application's going to look like. And so, you're taking chess lessons and lacrosse lessons and foreign languages, and you're volunteering at the local dog pound. Like you're doing all and these kids are scheduled beyond belief and you know there's a chapter in Jonathan Haidt's Coddling of the American Mind called the decline of play and we're just not allowing the time for the young children to really find what they're fascinated with and then we push them towards safe jobs and that thing. You know, as a parent myself, I don't think you can get that voice out of your head that oh you want them to be economically stable. And so you push, you know, you push the sure thing jobs, the lawyers, doctors, used to be computer scientists. There's a really weird thing now where the jobs that felt safe may not be so safe. But I think the whole notion of pushing someone to a safe job may have, you know, in addition to the data from our survey, the Gallup data from this 2023 poll said over 50% of people don't feel they're engaged at work. This was the whole quiet quitting meme that was out there. And so you have a lot of people that are in roles that they're not particularly, you know, excited by. And it's just not a great and those may be the ones that are really the sitting ducks for this AI wave. Like because if you don't have passion for what you're doing, then you're not really, you know, searching for the nuance in your field. You're not pushing yourself to the edge. The other thing I would say is all the methods in the book, which once again I borrowed from people, wildly successful people that thrived in all these fields, they're all 10 times easier if you're fascinated by what you do. Like connecting with mentors or peers or continuous learning, all these things make you excited. If you're fascinated by what you do, if you're kind of bored with what you do, are you going to continuously learn? Are you going to go home at the weekend and try and, you know, I guess it was Stephen Covey had the sharpen the saw habit. Like, are you going to do that? Are you really going to do that if you don't love what you do? I don't think you're going to do it. You're going to go watch Netflix, right?
One of the things I mean there are great stories through the whole book and that I know all our listeners will learn from but the parts that at least for me were the most impactful because you go from you know famous musicians like Bob Dylan to restaurateurs. I mean, you cover a lot of different fields, but the most interesting stories were the people I'd never heard of. And the people that, you know, you'd go, 'Okay, well, this person isn't going to be an actress, but they could do something that they're passionate about in and around that field.' Talk a little bit about some of those folks and what you learned from them.
I'm smiling for the audio listeners. I'm going to tell an inside baseball story based on what you just said. But let me, the book is written in a, we hope, innovative form which is it's full of profiles which are stories of success and principles which are tools of success and we interleave them right so you get one chapter of one and one chapter of another and it's meant to make the book more readable. Totally. It moves right along and they're great stories and you get the, I mean it's very, it's great as a learning tool because you're not even knowing you're learning.
Yes. And Morgan Housel who wrote Psychology of Money talks about how important narrative is and so all that was intentional.
But the reason I'm smiling is I early on I'm fortunate enough to know Malcolm Gladwell and early on I had an outline structure. I was talking to him and he said, for the rest of the, Bob Dylan was in the original presentation. He says for all the incremental stories do someone people don't know as well. So he intentionally guided me in that direction which is why I'm smiling. Look all the stories I had, I probably read with a researcher over a hundred biographies after the video to try and make the book better. And we threw out things that, we threw out anyone that was successful in consulting, lawyer, doctor, Wall Street. Like we didn't want these jobs that everyone knows are safe. Like none of those. They were all in fields that your parents would probably tell you not to go.
All wisdom would be steer clear.
Yeah. Every one of them we took from those.
You may be tall, but you're not making it to the NBA.
Yeah. The other thing we wanted was someone who had high intent. So they had made a decision to go do this because I think that's helpful to someone who's starting a new. You want to know that it wasn't an accident, right? That there was intention. And then we wanted people that started on the bottom rung of the ladder, you know, at the very bottom. Two of the people, Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, and Jen Atkin, the famous hair stylist, they both took a trade level course. Danny Meyer found a restaurant management course in a magazine on a street corner in New York. Jen went to a cosmetology class offered by the city of LA for free. That means anyone could sign up and walk in the door, right? And so that starting on the bottom rung I thought was just super powerful also for people to believe, to take believability away from this and that you can work your way up from the very bottom. So that is the common thread that went through all the stories, those things.
I think there's also, I mean my reading of it is there's also a lot more room than you'd think. I mean, if you have something you're really interested in, you don't necessarily have to be the person who'd be on the stage.
Absolutely. And you were hitting it that yes, there are fields where people perceive that in order to be a part of them, you need to be this hypertalented individual. And I would include athletics, the restaurant business, if you think you have to be a great chef, and Danny kind of entered with that original thought and moved away from it. Hollywood, sports, all of these fields are super interesting and there are probably hundreds of jobs for every talent role in those businesses. And so if you're interested in them, you shouldn't be afraid of them just because you're not that talent. There's so many jobs in all of those fields where you can make an impact. And the other thing I would say that I think this could be a factor of how competitive it is to get into college and whatnot, but some people come out pretty sharp-elbowed and they're kind of climbers through the system. In anyone in almost any field out there other than maybe downhill skiing, there are tons of winners. There are just lots and lots and lots of winners. And if you recognize that it's not a zero-sum game, it opens up your mind in terms of how much you connect and share and collaborate with others in a way that wouldn't be your instinct if you've been taught to kind of step on everyone and climb to the top on your own.
One of your, so your book has six principles, six themes that you work through. I'd say the first two relate very much directly to gee if you love what you're doing, working on it is going to be a pleasure for you but the one that I don't, there are a couple that I don't know that people would trip to easily and one was embrace your peers. It was exactly the point you were making and that knowledge sharing pays off where our instinct is no for God's sakes I want to hold as close to the chest as I can the knowledge that I have.
Yeah. And look, many of the greats are sharing ideas constantly. So Warren Buffett has his annual letter. Bezos had an annual letter. Howard Marks, a great bond investor, writes constantly. I was fortunate in my VC career to have a blog post where I was constantly sharing. And I think part of the reason that people share is when they write things down, they tend to get the ideas more well thought out. But the truth of the matter is the notion that you have this kind of proprietary content that you're going to use to execute above and beyond everybody else, it's a bit silly. And information moves so fast. Ideas really are, it's very easy. I saw this with founders all the time. They'd be, 'Oh, they stole my idea.' No, they're just 10 people that thought of the same thing, the same guy. Like you don't have a monopoly on insight. And if you open up and share, people will share back. People respect you for being informed. You'll have more connectivity. And these peer groups that I recommend. And basically what I'm saying is even if you're at the very bottom, find four or five people that have the same dream that you do, that are fascinated by the same thing that you are and are trying to climb the same career ladder and connect and constantly share ideas and share your network. All of a sudden, your learning is going to accelerate. Your network is going to be four times bigger than it was. Your chance of having a luck event go way up. If you have that kind of situation, those groups will be remarkably helpful on bad days as a support group which everyone will run into and everyone needs and we have some great stories in the book.
Terrific stories and I got to say, borrow from this concept. Terrific stories and I think that is a principle you're not going to find remotely in any other book on this topic.
It's the one I'm most proud of just because I think and the detail with which we go into how to do it and then showing these people that used it to get to unbelievable success. I mean you were a great CEO as a venture capitalist. One of the things that I tell the founders that are learning to be CEOs because it's a hard journey is this very thing like find four or five others that are on that exact same journey as you and connect because you're going to have questions constantly. You're going to run into problems constantly and you know a mentor is a bit of a weighty relationship. You don't want to just hit them constantly. The peer group can have a text channel on WhatsApp and just go bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb no dumb questions all the time.
And interesting, you do wait until the very very end of the book to give any biographical information on yourself but that section was also very interesting but it's interesting that your kind of peer group at a young age were people who all sort of individually went off and became very successful.
That's true. And that's the group that I hung out with in college. And yeah, I think you're bringing up a good point. I think there's this other element of having a peer group that you root for. Success begets success. And when you see other people, you know, being successful, and that you truly respect and like, not only do you root for them and you get kind of emotional energy from them being successful, but I think it also raises your own game internally. Like there's this peer, I don't want to call it pressure, but I think when you see other people being successful, you think, you know, I can do that, too. I think it gives you optimism.
So, another one of your themes is the value of mentors. You touched on it briefly. I love the fact that you add in a quote that there's a moral urge to be a mentor. That is, I think, a really important point. I'm curious, who do you choose to mentor? Because you must get a lot of folks who would say, I would love to have Bill Gurley as a mentor.
So one thing I did, I early on would just get hit constantly by people that wanted to get into venture and I wrote a three-page PDF that was titled 'So You Want to Be a VC' and I first of all told them all the things about the job that, you know, the old metaphor of an iceberg where people see the tip but there's 90% of it's underwater and you don't see it. I kind of pulled the curtain back on the job because I think it's misperceived what your day-to-day activities really like. But I put that in there. But then I said, you know, if you really want to get into venture, you need to do step one, step two, step three, step four. And when you get through all those steps and you have refined questions, come back to me and I'll talk to you. And that letter was quite filtering. You'd be surprised how few people made it back. That wasn't really the objective, but it was a useful way to kind of filter down to the people that really cared. And there were some that made it through, and those are the ones that I spent the most time with.
So, I always look on a book on what the, when they have a quote, what's the opening quote in the book? What's setting the tone of the book? And your opening quote is a really interesting one. It comes from a song as did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
