[00:02:24] Polina Pompliano: It’s a great question because I was on the subway when I read this speech by Anna Quindlen, and it talked about how she defines success. She says something like, “If success looks good to everybody else, but it doesn’t feel good in your heart, then it is not success at all.” And I think when people hear that the book profiles successful people or features successful people, I think most people just kind of scoff and brush it off, and they’re like, “Ugh, another book about success.” But that’s because I think most of us define success as a measure of wealth, fame, or status of some sort. But that’s not at all how I define it.

[00:03:11] Polina Pompliano: And if you read the book, you’ll see that a lot of the people are not your traditionally successful people. To me, success means that you’ve had a life well-lived. When I think of a successful person, I think of somebody who’s been through the ups and downs of life and they’ve made it out on the other side with lessons to share with other people.

[00:03:38] Polina Pompliano: And that’s why in the profiles, you’ll notice in my newsletter, I share stories of failure, persistence, and redemption. I want to see the people who have succeeded, failed, learned, succeeded again, and then explain to others their missteps, everything. Because I think as you learn about successful people, you always have to ask yourself the question, “Am I willing to make the same missteps, the same sacrifices, the same trade-offs as this person?” Because if not, then that is not success to you. If you want to be like Al Pacino, but you don’t want to have failed marriages and whatever, then you won’t follow in those same footsteps. But it’s because that’s not what success looks like to you.

[00:04:26] Clay Finck: It reminds me a lot of Warren Buffett’s living by an inner scorecard and judging yourself by your own values and what you truly believe in, rather than seeking these external validations from others.

[00:04:40] Clay Finck: And in your newsletter called The Profile, you profile all of these successful people in various walks of life. I’d like for you to talk about what you call people-focused learning and touch on why you dove into this approach to learning, studying great people, and trying to emulate what they do well.

[00:05:01] Polina Pompliano: People-focused learning, to me, is the notion that people and their stories are at the center of any learning pursuit. So whenever I want to learn about something, I don’t just go learn about the idea. Instead, I pick a person who best embodies that idea that I want to learn about. So, if I want to learn about decision-making, for example, or decision-making in times of chaos and uncertainty, maybe I look at Annie Duke, who’s a former poker player. She has to make decisions quickly with limited information in times of uncertainty. And you can learn so much from people, I believe, because people trigger emotion in you, and empathy and emotion trigger memory.

[00:05:47] Polina Pompliano: So every time that, if you think about the memories that you have of something going on in your life, it was probably tied to some sort of emotion, whether it’s excitement, sadness, whatever. So that’s how I learn. When there’s an idea I want to learn about, I go through the people and try to put myself in their shoes and be like, “Hmm, what was that person feeling when they made this decision? Or what was that person thinking? And how did they evaluate this?” It’s just so much more helpful to me, and it makes more sense to me, to learn from people’s stories.

[00:06:30] Polina Pompliano: Because as humans, we love stories and storytelling, then it is to just dive into cold hard facts about an idea that may not stay with you.

[00:06:41] Clay Finck: Then your book starts out by discussing creativity. And I generally think a lot of people associate creativity with something you’re either born with or you’re not born with.

[00:06:53] Clay Finck: And you talk about how creativity is actually a skill that can be learned and improved upon. And you tell the story of a chef named Grant Achatz, who would create this element of surprise and build an experience off of the meals he served because he was a chef. In our modern world, creativity seems to be more and more important with things like the rise of AI, computers, and technology. Many of these technologies lack creativity. So, what were some of the breakthroughs you discovered in studying creativity in the people that you profiled?

[00:07:31] Polina Pompliano: Okay, so Grant is absolutely an incredible chef. His restaurant, Alinea, is kind of this super innovative, super cutting-edge restaurant in Chicago, and it’s so fascinating to me.

[00:07:42] Polina Pompliano: So there are three things that I think I learned about creativity in general, but they all apply here. One time when I was studying Malcolm Gladwell, he said something that really stuck with me, and I think it’s why AI is not very good at creativity. He says that people are often drawn to things that are done imperfectly and that kind of leave a taste in your mouth.

[00:08:10] Polina Pompliano: So whether it’s art, movies, books, or music, people talk more about the flawed things than they do about the super perfect, you know, obvious things. He has a great quote here. He says, “You want an aftertaste, and that comes from not everything being perfectly blended together.” And that aftertaste, obviously, is something that a human creates. There will be imperfections no matter how hard you try. AI may create something, quote-unquote, perfect, but according to whose standards? Like, what is perfect?

[00:08:43] Polina Pompliano: So I love this example because Taylor Swift had this song called “Blank Space,” and she had a lyric in there called, it was like, “Got a long list of ex-lovers,” but people kept mishearing the lyric as “all the lonely Starbucks lovers.” So it was really funny because that’s literally what it sounded like. But that imperfection in her song led it to become super popular, and it was on the charts for nine weeks in a row. So it just shows you that imperfect things are things people talk about, people want to discuss.

[00:09:22] Polina Pompliano: Like, it’s much more human, and I think that’s why we’re drawn to it. The second thing I learned, and this is something I definitely learned from Grant, is that a lot of the most creative people in the world borrow ideas from different disciplines and apply them to their own industry. It’s really interesting because the human brain, based on research, naturally forms relationships between two different inputs, no matter how dissimilar they are.

[00:09:52] Polina Pompliano: So if you think of two things, after a while, your brain will naturally start making connections between the two. Grant, for example, yes, he is a chef. He deals with food and the restaurant business, etc. But he’s always looking at the world through this kaleidoscope of food, as he calls it.

[00:10:13] Polina Pompliano: So if he’s in a museum and sees a large-scale painting, he thinks, “Wow, that’s beautiful. I want to eat off of that.” Suddenly, that thought turns into the tablecloth at Alinea becoming a piece of art. They draw on it with all sorts of different sauces and make it look like a piece of art that you’re eating off of.

[00:10:37] Polina Pompliano: Or another time, he was listening to a song by Rage Against the Machine, and he thought, “Wow, all these peaks and valleys, the way the song flows, kind of mirrors what I want the dining experience to be. I want it to be a story. I want it to have these really high highs and these really low lows.”

[00:11:01] Polina Pompliano: And as you’re going through it, I want it to tell a story. So he’s using music, art, and whatever to take ideas from those disciplines and apply them to his own. And I think everybody in a creative field who is considered very original actually does a lot of that.

[00:11:22] Polina Pompliano: The third thing is that I think a lot of people think of creativity as inspiration or a muse or something divine that just happens to you, and you have to be in the right mindset to create. But actually, I learned that creativity is less a fleeting moment of inspiration and much more like a muscle that can be trained or a skill that can be learned. And it’s something that’s developed through consistency.

[00:11:52] Polina Pompliano: So the more consistent you are in your work, the more ideas you’ll generate. Grant, at one point, was considered the best chef in the world. Ironically and crazily enough, the best chef in the world got stage four tongue cancer. Like of all the places he got tongue cancer. It was interesting because suddenly he couldn’t taste, he was going through chemotherapy, and he lost a bunch of his taste buds.

[00:12:21] Polina Pompliano: What he learned from that experience is that taste is actually a very small portion of the taste buds in your mouth. A lot of it is from visually how you see the food and the smell too. So taste is kind of an all-encompassing experience. Your mouth and your tongue are just one part of it.

[00:12:43] Polina Pompliano: He became even more creative because he started thinking about how he could not think his way to creativity, but how he could use everything he’d learned to make the menu even crazier, even more innovative. He started playing with visual things, like visual illusions. He would take a strawberry and make it look like a tomato but taste like a strawberry, and then he would take a tomato, make it look like a strawberry, and have it taste like a tomato.

[00:13:16] Polina Pompliano: So all these things, he’s learned over the years, not just from the taste in his mouth, but through studying every day, day in and day out in this industry. And I think that’s probably the biggest misconception about creativity. It’s not a muse, it’s just “butt in chair” doing the work.

[00:13:37] Clay Finck: And one of the other interesting insights I found related to creativity is that those who have the true breakthroughs in a field are the creative types, whereas everyone else is just the followers. To use this food analogy, the trailblazers are the ones who create the new recipes, and then everyone else just kind of uses those recipes and applies them in their own lives. I think that’s really interesting. You also talk about Steve Jobs in this chapter, and he has been a trailblazer in all of what Apple has done, while everyone else is just kind of following their lead and trying to replicate what they’ve already done.

[00:14:21] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, it’s like what Tim Urban said about Elon Musk. He said there are chefs and then there are cooks. The chefs create the original recipes, and then the cooks follow that blueprint. But even if they make a new dish, it’s a dish that’s already derivative of what’s been done before, based on the chef’s recipe. It’s really hard to be a chef.

[00:14:47] Clay Finck: Another common theme you discovered in your profiles was high levels of mental toughness, and naturally the first person that pops into my mind is David Goggins, and you talk all about him in your book. He’s a former Navy SEAL and someone who has built a brand around mental toughness. What are the three tools that Goggins uses to master this skill of mental toughness?

[00:15:13] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, so the three tools that I talk about in the book that I found personally useful when I was training for a marathon, but also I think you could apply them to everyday life. The first rule that David learned came from the Navy SEALs. He dubbed it the 40% rule, and it’s basically why, you know, it’s the reason that when most people hit a wall while running a marathon, you know how they say, “You’re gonna hit the wall at like mile 18 or 20 or whatever.” Once you hit a wall, even though you think there’s absolutely no way I can run six more miles, you still do. And that is, he says, basically when your mind is telling you that you’re done, that you’re exhausted, that you cannot possibly go any further, you are actually only 40% done. So he’s trying to say that a lot of times your mind has these exit ramps where it’s like, “I’m exhausted. Let’s just take the easy route.” But then he knows this and he knows that he still has, he’s only 40% done, so he doesn’t stop. He compares it to kind of like a governor on a car. A lot of times the governor will stop, will prevent you from going like 120 miles an hour, even though the car can go 120 miles an hour. So depending on where your governor is set in your mind, you can push past that. But that’s kind of when you’ll feel, “Oh my gosh, I’m done.” The second tool that he talks about is the accountability mirror.

[00:17:01] Polina Pompliano: So it’s kind of a way that he uses to undergo controlled emotional duress. So before he became a Navy SEAL, David actually had crushingly low self-esteem, asthma problems, and was overweight. All of the things he personally didn’t like about himself. So he wanted a change and to become a more confident version of himself.

[00:17:23] Polina Pompliano: So he created this thing he called the accountability mirror. What that meant is he went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and said to himself, “You’re fat, you’re lazy, you’re dumb. What are you gonna do about it?” To most people, that sounds really harsh to say to yourself, but he says, “You can’t change unless you tell yourself the truth.”

[00:17:49] Polina Pompliano: To him, that’s what he saw in the mirror. To begin to change those habits, he started posting little post-it notes all around the mirror, stating the tiny goals he wanted to achieve in order to become a different person. So it would be like, “Go on a two-mile run,” “Go one day without lying to people for affirmation or validation,” or whatever other little habits he wanted to change. He just posted them around the mirror. So every time he looked at his reflection, he would think, “Yep, did that today. Did that today. Did that today.”

[00:18:28] Polina Pompliano: I think he also talks about going into this dark room, and he says, “In this dark room is where metamorphosis happens. When you go in, you’re one person. When you come out, you’ve transformed.” He says, “If you don’t break, you’ll transform.” That’s his whole message: mental toughness. It’s hard for a reason because a lot of us buckle under pressure, especially when it concerns our self-image or how we think people perceive us.

[00:18:58] Polina Pompliano: But his hidden genius is very much in that radical honesty with himself, which has allowed him to completely change the trajectory of his life. The third thing he does is he says, “You have to get up every day and do one thing that sucks, that you don’t want to do.” So, a lot of times, it means acting against your first instinct.

[00:19:23] Polina Pompliano: If you wake up and think, “Oh, it’s 6:00 AM, I’d rather sleep one more hour. I don’t want to go on a run,” he says to go on a run anyway, to do the opposite of your first instinct. For example, if your house is a mess and you’re too tired, clean it anyway because those little moments build trust with yourself. You’re keeping your promise to yourself.

[00:19:51] Polina Pompliano: He says that he basically brainwashed himself into craving discomfort. It’s possible because he has done it, but it’s really, really hard. I think these three things are practical steps you can take to sharpen your thinking and increase your threshold for mental resilience.

[00:20:09] Clay Finck: Two things that really stick out to me here related to the physical aspect, ’cause you know, Goggins is an endurance athlete. It’s what he does. I think that when it comes to the physical aspect of working out and pushing your body to its limits, I’m reminded that it’s very much a mental game. You know, training your mind and training that mental toughness muscle.

[00:20:35] Clay Finck: It carries over into other areas of life. So, you know, if you’re sticking to your plan, whatever you do, and running a marathon, going to the gym, whatever it is, a lot of that mental toughness I think really carries over well into other areas of your life. And it teaches you that you can do hard things and you can endure the suck.

[00:21:01] Clay Finck: And the other thing that ties into that, I think, is when you train yourself to be able to endure very hard things, it can prepare you for, you know, really difficult things that can come in the future. And that just puts you in a much better position relative to a lot of other people because, you know, our world’s just highly uncertain and you never know what sort of things can come across, whether it be personal, like losing a job or going through a recession or things like that.

[00:21:38] Clay Finck: So yeah, those are two things that really stuck out to me when you’re talking through Goggins framework here. 

[00:21:44] Polina Pompliano: Exactly. It’s like, it’s kind of like your future self will thank you for the work you’re doing today because, I mean, we cannot escape. There will be recessions and downturns and crazy things.

[00:21:58] Polina Pompliano: Like when I was leaving my job at Fortune to work on my newsletter full-time, I made a list of the risks that could pop up, including like, “Oh, we’re at the tail end of a 10-year cycle. There might be a recession on the horizon,” all this stuff. And I had a solution for every single one of them. And then I gave my three weeks’ notice.

[00:22:25] Polina Pompliano: And in those three weeks, the entire world fell apart, and there was a global pandemic. Like, that was not on my list. But if I was a little bit more mentally resilient, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered as much. You know what I mean?

[00:22:43] Clay Finck: And sometimes you just get really unlucky, you know, no matter how good you are, you just get really unlucky with things.

[00:22:52] Clay Finck: Tying into what you mentioned there, when people are going through difficult periods of their life or reflecting on how we can improve, I think it can be difficult to work through some of the internal chatter or self-talk since no one’s really perfect from the beginning. I think there’s always this imperfection inside of us that we’re dealing with internally.

[00:23:16] Clay Finck: A lot of imposter syndrome. And to help with this, you propose another tool that Goggins uses, which is to develop an alter ego. So, could you describe what an alter ego is and why it works for him? 

[00:23:32] Polina Pompliano: Yes, like the way I think about an alter ego is kind of like your aspirational self, like who you would love to become one day and who you may not be today.

[00:23:45] Polina Pompliano: So the alter ego is basically a lot of people do this, athletes, performers. Beyoncé was really, really introverted in real life. Like she is an introverted person, but then she had to perform for audiences of thousands and tens of thousands of people. So to overcome that, she needed to be this powerhouse on stage.

[00:24:07] Polina Pompliano: How do you do that? You create a so-called alter ego. Hers was called Sasha Fierce, and so she was like, when I am on that stage, I wear things I wouldn’t normally wear, I dance in ways I wouldn’t normally dance, and have a presence about me. That is Sasha Fierce. It’s not Beyoncé. Kobe Bryant used to do this, like you said, in really chaotic situations.

[00:24:35] Polina Pompliano: At one point in his career, every time he stepped out on the court, he would get booed by the audience. So he was like, “Alright, when I’m hearing ‘Boo Kobe,’ that’s not me. I come out here as the Black Mamba,” and it’s like this long snake, whatever. So he created this version of himself on the court.

[00:24:58] Polina Pompliano: Because you’re not attacking me, you’re attacking Kobe, which is a different version of myself. So David Goggins likes to say that he was built, not born, and a lot of times he refers to himself in the third person and he refers to himself as Goggins. Not David Goggins. Just Goggins. That’s because he says David Goggins was a weak kid.

[00:25:23] Polina Pompliano: Goggins is who, like, I want to be proud of personally. That’s who I want to embody because I built him. He wasn’t born as David Goggins. So there’s this notion that I learned about called illeism, and it’s when you refer to yourself in the third person. Usually, it’s not well received. LeBron James does this a lot. Trump does this a lot. It’s usually not well received because people think that you come off as very egotistical and kind of condescending. Like, “Why? Why are you afraid? Just say ‘I.'” But Goggins does this too. The reason is because it adds a little bit of distance between you and your identity. And a lot of times, like in therapy for people with trauma or PTSD, it’s sometimes helpful because it gives a little bit of distance between what happened to you and who you are and who you want to become.

[00:26:24] Polina Pompliano: So, it’s really interesting because Goggins does this a lot, and I realize why now. He says that over time, your identity and the alter ego are very distant for a long period of time, but as you work to become your aspirational self, they kind of meet at some point, and at some point, you become your alter ego or your aspirational self. I watched an interview with Beyoncé, and she said, “Oh yeah, I killed Sasha Fierce a long time ago because basically, I don’t need her anymore. I am this confident version of myself. I don’t need to pretend to be that anymore.” But I think it’s really interesting because personally, I used to be very shy and introverted, and doing this interview would never happen because I would be way too worried and way too in my head.

[00:27:21] Polina Pompliano: But as I started, like being in journalism and doing interviews, I had to be like, “Okay, I may be really introverted here, but on stage, I gotta put on a show, you know? Like, this is my job, it matters, whatever.” So over time, though, my personality itself became more extroverted and more confident.

[00:27:43] Polina Pompliano: So now I don’t know, I don’t think I have an alter ego anymore, but you know, maybe.

[00:27:50] Clay Finck: Since our listener base is mainly in the investing world, I wanted to kind of tie this into investing a bit, and when I study the great investors, the alter ego is kind of separating you from your emotions in a way.

[00:28:07] Clay Finck: And I think investors, we need to look at our decisions and look at our mistakes as objectively as possible, and that’s the only way to really learn from it. I love this James Clear quote you included in your book as well. It’s your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity.

[00:28:29] Clay Finck: What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are, either consciously or unconsciously. So if you want to be a great investor, a great writer, a great journalist, or whatever, then you need to start thinking and acting as if you already are one. And I just love that framework as well from Clear.

[00:28:54] Polina Pompliano: Yes. It also reminds me of Francis Ngannou. He is a world heavyweight champion, but when he was young and little, he was living in poverty in Cameroon, and he was convinced that he would become a professional boxer. But to be a professional boxer, you need certain habits. So even as a child, he knew.

[00:29:17] Polina Pompliano: “I’m not gonna drink, even though a lot of the people around me are drinking. I’m not gonna smoke because professional boxers don’t smoke,” like he was doing. “I’m gonna work out every day.” He was doing all the things that he envisioned he would be doing in his life as a professional boxer. So I think it’s the same thing.

[00:29:41] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, it distances you from your emotional self, but it also makes you live now as your aspirational self. So whether it’s taking responsibility for the mistakes you’ve made in the past or evaluating risk as dispassionately as possible, it allows you to do those things in a different part of your brain that is not you.

[00:30:04] Clay Finck: Now, developing this alter ego, I’m sure you could resonate with, for sure. You used to work for very large companies, CNN and Fortune, working full-time with them before going full-time on your newsletter. Was that a really difficult transition for you, or what sort of challenges did you have to overcome to become fully confident?

[00:30:26] Clay Finck: With that new path, especially, you just mentioned how it was right around COVID when it struck, so what were some of the biggest things you had to overcome, and how did you manage to work through those?

[00:30:41] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, so for me, the tool that I used the most was probably the accountability mirror.

[00:30:48] Polina Pompliano: I really had to look at myself in the mirror and be like, “All these people that I really admire and respect want me to be some version of myself that I know I am not.” To me, working at a place like Fortune, the obvious next step would be for me to become an editor and then another editor, and so on. That was the ladder to success. But I was super honest with myself and I was like, “That’s not what I want to do. I don’t like editing. I like writing. I like interviewing people. That’s not how I want my career trajectory to go. Also, I don’t only like writing. I like writing and being an entrepreneur and doing other things.” It’s really hard for other people to understand that you don’t want to be pigeonholed.

[00:31:44] Polina Pompliano: So when I told people that I wanted to leave Fortune and do my newsletter full-time, people thought I was absolutely insane. But to me, it wasn’t insane. I had thought it through. I knew what I wanted to do. I write about entrepreneurship, venture capital, and startups every single day. But it’s hypocritical because I haven’t done it myself. So really, really being honest with yourself about what you want to do, what makes you happy, and screw everybody else’s opinion was really, really hard for me to do. But once you do it, independence and freedom are just… Once you have a taste of that, it’s really hard to go back.

[00:32:29] Polina Pompliano: For example, yeah. I worked at CNN and I did not like it. I thought that my life, I, I grew up in Atlanta. CNN is based in Atlanta. That was my dream since I was little. I was like, “I’ll be at CNN, I’ll be on TV,” like all this stuff. And then you get there and the reality is so much different from how you envisioned it.

[00:32:57] Polina Pompliano: So it wasn’t for me, for sure. I knew that at a very young age when I was an intern there. Then USA Today, I really enjoyed, but then I was like, “I don’t want to work for a large national newspaper. Like that doesn’t give me any sort of excitement.” Then at Fortune, I loved Fortune. Like I absolutely loved it.

[00:33:21] Polina Pompliano: It had everything I wanted: long-form profiles of people. I ended up sort of writing those while I was there, and then I was like, “Why would I leave something so perfect?” And then you realize, it’s because you love something else more. And if you don’t pursue it, you’ll always live with the regret of like, “What if?”

[00:33:45] Polina Pompliano: And that’s what David Gogan says, like, “If you’re not living for yourself and making yourself better, then what are you doing anyway?”

[00:33:54] Clay Finck: I wanted to jump to the part of your book where you share Morgan Housel’s three sides of risk. You just talked about how people thought you were totally crazy doing something really risky, but maybe they don’t see the sort of risk in taking the other path.

[00:34:13] Clay Finck: It’s just a really interesting topic and something I’ve come across in my own life as well. Could you please describe and expand on this framework of Housel’s, where he talks about the three sides of risk?

[00:34:28] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, I found this absolutely fascinating because once you learn it, you can’t stop thinking about it in your own life.

[00:34:37] Polina Pompliano: But he says that there are three distinct sides to risk. There’s the odds you will get hit, the average consequences of getting hit, and the tail-end consequences of getting hit. And it’s the tail-end consequences of risk that matter in the long run.

[00:34:54] Polina Pompliano: And those are the ones he calls the low probability, high impact events. So these are the hardest to control, but probably the ones that matter the most, like a global pandemic, like a black swan of some sort. Very hard to foresee, but probably the ones that will reshape your strategy the most. One example of this is Conrad Anker.

[00:35:19] Polina Pompliano: He’s a legendary mountaineer, and he and his two best friends were scaling Mount Shma. They were well-trained, competent, and aware of the risks they were taking. They had foreseen everything they could to the best of their abilities.

[00:35:34] Polina Pompliano: But the low probability, high impact event that they didn’t foresee was an avalanche that came out of nowhere. Ultimately, what happened was the avalanche came down, Anker went to the left, and his friends went to the right, and Anker suffered a number of injuries. He broke his collarbone.

[00:35:54] Polina Pompliano: He suffered a bunch of injuries, but his friends’ bodies weren’t even discovered for a number of years just because of a simple, dumb luck decision. They went to the right and he went to the left. So I think it’s important to remember that a lot of times we look at these successful people, we try to study their paths, and we’re like, “Okay, they did this here and this there. Maybe if I emulated exactly like that, I will end up in the same spot.” But sometimes it’s the tail-end of risk that you just cannot foresee, and it hits you in a way that you just did not expect. And then it comes down to just one decision that makes absolutely no logical sense, and it changes your life.

[00:36:47] Clay Finck: I wanted to jump to leadership here. We talk a lot about different companies on the show that have a very decentralized and robust business structure. Berkshire Hathaway being one of them, and we even apply a similar structure here at the Investors Podcast Network. I’ve experienced firsthand the benefits of such an approach.

[00:37:09] Clay Finck: Now, in your research, what have you found with implementing this sort of decentralized, bottom-up leadership approach to business, rather than a top-down approach where you have the authority figure making a lot of the decisions?

[00:37:23] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, so I think in very small organizations or startups, it’s really easy to have a bottom-up approach, right?

[00:37:31] Polina Pompliano: Because it’s a small company, it can pivot easily and move quickly. But as you grow and become massive, a top-down approach might seem to make more sense, as it’s easier for one person to give directions to multiple layers of people. However, I have found that some of the most successful large companies employ a bottom-up approach.

[00:37:54] Polina Pompliano: For example, Daniel Ek at Spotify is a big proponent of this leadership style. In a bottom-up approach, the ideas, values, and strategies come from the employees, and the CEO’s role is to support and help them execute quickly to achieve their goals.

[00:38:11] Polina Pompliano: An interesting example is when the product team at Spotify approached Daniel Ek with an idea to create personalized playlists for every user based on their listening habits. Initially, Ek wasn’t convinced and didn’t see the potential of the feature. He even stated that he would have killed the idea if it was solely up to him. However, the product team continued working on it without his support and launched it to the public without him knowing.

[00:38:42] Polina Pompliano: Ek discovered it through the press, which was a risky move for the employees. To his surprise, the personalized playlist feature, known as Discover Weekly, became one of Spotify’s most beloved features.

[00:38:55] Polina Pompliano: People love that they use it all the time—the personalized playlist. So, it’s just that so many ideas get killed in the process of pitching to a CEO or leadership because many companies don’t employ a bottom-up approach.

[00:39:10] Clay Finck: Some of the key takeaways for me are that the entrepreneurial spirit sort of gets killed when people don’t get to, you know, have autonomy over their work.

[00:39:21] Clay Finck: You want to have people connected to the actual day-to-day operations, sort of making decisions for the business because they know the customer best, and I wanted to tie into something that’s pretty similar here. You also lay out many examples of leaders who simply just want to do the right thing for their employees.

[00:39:43] Clay Finck: Bruno Cucinelli, who started a luxury brand, stated that if I give you the right conditions to work, and I’d put you in a beautiful place where, you know, a place where you feel a little bit better about yourself because you know your work is being used for something greater than producing a profit. He thought maybe eventually that would get people to be more creative.

[00:40:10] Clay Finck: And you also mentioned the former CEO of Bridgewater Associates. A quote from him: he believed that employees were the cornerstone of any organization and that the employees’ needs, you know, have to be known and have to be fulfilled. And I think the key distinction here is that leaders who see their employees as a long-term investment end up doing much better in the long run.

[00:40:37] Clay Finck: And I think this approach not only benefits the employees, but it also benefits the employers long-term. So it’s just a win-win relationship. So I’d love for you to touch on this as well.

[00:40:50] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, so Mark Barini, who is now the COO of Bridgewater, was previously the CEO of Aetna, and he shepherded Aetna through the sale of the company to CVS.

[00:41:02] Polina Pompliano: What was interesting with him is that he’s had a really crazy life. But anyway, he turned to kind of more Eastern philosophy at one point, and he developed something he calls the four levels of Taoist leadership, and it goes like this: He says the first level is that your employees hate you. The second is that they fear you.

[00:41:26] Polina Pompliano: The third is that they praise you. And the fourth is that you are invisible because the organization takes care of itself. So it’s like the ultimate leader has invested in his employees to such an extent that his ultimate goal is to be replaceable. And I think that goes against what a lot of corporate America and many CEOs believe, because they’re like, “I want to prove that you need me. I’m irreplaceable. You know, this company will fail without me.” But actually, it’s counterintuitive in that if you truly are investing in developing your employees, you are putting them in a position where this company will be successful without you there.

[00:42:11] Clay Finck: You have another chapter in your book about clarifying your thinking, and you’ve referenced this Charlie Munger line of thinking in your book that we shouldn’t fall slaves to our existing beliefs. And you also referenced another James Clear quote that convincing someone to change their mind is really a process of convincing them to change their tribe. And profiling all these successful people, what’s your interpretation of what they mean by this?

[00:42:36] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, so I think our biggest challenge as human beings is to battle blind belief and figure out whether our beliefs are our own or we’re just parroting what we’ve heard from people we admire, respect, or our family members. Things we heard as children.

[00:42:54] Polina Pompliano: You wouldn’t believe how many times I say something and I’m like, “Hold on a second. Do I actually believe that, or am I saying that because I heard my dad say it 20 years ago?” So, Charlie Munger, James, like all of them, I think it’s once you start clarifying your thinking and taking the emotions out of the recipe, you are left with the bare bones of your beliefs.

[00:43:23] Polina Pompliano: And I think a lot of people who argue passionately and are very opinionated about things, when you dig deeper, they don’t know why they believe what they believe, and they don’t actually have a good reason. I remember reading Educated, the memoir by Tara Westover, and she was talking about how she never went to school. The first time she set foot in a classroom was when she was 18 in college, and she remembers. She was like, “I held misogynistic, homophobic, racist beliefs. But that’s because those weren’t actually my beliefs. Those were my father’s beliefs, and I just absorbed them as a child. I never questioned them. You don’t question that as kids, and then when you are in a classroom and your opinions are being tested and challenged.” But the key here is, I think we live in a world today where you say one wrong thing and then you’re just canceled off the internet.

[00:44:26] Polina Pompliano: I think you need to create an environment that’s somewhat safe. I’m not sure if schools are necessarily a safe place to do this anymore, but if you have a group of people that you trust to try out these beliefs and voice these opinions that may be kind of like, “eh,” and have them in a non-judgmental way explain to you why you may be wrong or present other information, I think that’s the only way that you can really change your mind.

[00:45:00] Polina Pompliano: I remember Tim Urban. He wrote a post, and he was like, if you really want to see if you are in an echo chamber at your next family gathering, voice an opinion that you know, the political party that you’re normally against is making some really valid points lately, and see how they react. Because if they react with absolute shock and terror and horror and whatever, you are in a cult and you’re in an echo chamber.

[00:45:31] Polina Pompliano: So it’s like you have to work really, really hard to get out of all the cults that we are currently part of ideological cults.

[00:45:41] Clay Finck: One of the tricks that Stig here at TIP has used with us is, you know, asking us a question and just not giving his opinion at all. Because once someone does this to you, you know, asks you without giving your opinion, you’ve realized all the times in the past where someone asked you a question and then they just gave their opinion before they gave you a chance to respond. And Annie Duke actually talks about this as well, where, you know, you want people to put out their true beliefs without being biased or swayed by, especially someone that’s higher up or someone that’s superior to them in an organization or whatever the situation is. I think that’s a really powerful insight to just show how biased we really are.

[00:46:35] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, so she recommends that if you’re interviewing a candidate and let’s say there are five people around the table, after the candidate leaves, one person shouldn’t state their opinion. Instead, you should all write it down, and then someone should review all of them because you’re not swayed by anybody else’s opinion.

[00:46:56] Polina Pompliano: Because as humans, we want consensus. We want everybody to agree and for there to be some sort of consensus. And I used to really struggle with this because I was very little when we moved from Bulgaria to the US. I was eight, and it was almost like I didn’t want to be the center of attention. So whatever you said, I’d be like, “Yes, I believe that too.”

[00:47:24] Polina Pompliano: I agree a hundred percent when inside, I’d be like, “This guy’s an idiot. This is not true. I do not agree.” Like I just didn’t want to rock the boat. Why do that? And I think it takes a level of bravery and courage to be, when somebody asks you a question, to give them your honest opinion because we want to be likable.

[00:47:50] Clay Finck: Let’s shift to Chapter Nine of the content diet, titled “Optimizing Your Content Diet.” You write, “One of the biggest realizations I’ve had in the last few years is simple but overlooked. What you eat is who you are, and what you read is who you become.” So what’s your framework for ensuring that you have a healthy content diet?

[00:48:14] Polina Pompliano: You know what’s really funny, Clay? Like, okay, so when we were talking earlier about Grant AKIs and how he sees the world through this kaleidoscope of food. So anywhere he goes, he just sees it through this one singular lens. It’s kind of similar with content. When I was in my early twenties, living in New York, the only television and content I would consume was reality TV.

[00:48:41] Polina Pompliano: It was “The Bachelor.” It was these dating shows. So then when I went out into the world, I would look at the world through the singular lens of relationships. Does this person like me? Did I piss that person off? Is this person talking about me? And it’s so stupid because that’s not at all like a distorted reality because of the things that I was putting in my brain.

[00:49:10] Polina Pompliano: At some point, I realized this and started asking myself, “What do I read? What do I watch? What do I listen to, and who do I hang out with?” I think that’s a huge portion of your content diet that you may not even realize is very important. So then I started making some ground rules for myself.

[00:49:33] Polina Pompliano: I would read fewer surface-level clickbait articles and read more long-form features, long-form stuff that adds context and nuance. This is partly the reason I started the profile in 2017. It was right after 2016, which was an election year. It was chaos. It was awful. It was like everything you didn’t want to read was just in your face all the time.

[00:49:59] Polina Pompliano: So I was like, “I’m tired of the clickbait and the black-and-white headlines. I want context and I want nuance, and I want to make my own opinion. I don’t want people telling me what to believe.” So I kind of, I did that. Then I would pick better podcasts. Like, I was listening to interesting things, but they weren’t really enriching my life.

[00:50:24] Polina Pompliano: So when I would go on runs, I would listen to podcasts like yours or something where I actually learned. And after my run, I could be like, “Huh, I actually learned something here.” And then I also made it practical. So these are nice things theoretically, but practically, how can you do them? So I deleted some social media apps off my phone.

[00:50:50] Polina Pompliano: I would only check them if I had to log in on my computer. Then I used Pocket to save articles so I could read them on the subway when I didn’t have service. I used Notion to write the profile. I added a section to the profile called “Videos to Watch” and “Podcasts to Listen to.” So that would force me every week to find high-quality content for this section, which would force me to listen to high-quality content.

[00:51:22] Polina Pompliano: So there’s this idea of David Brooks. He was a columnist and he gave this speech, I think it was in 2020. And he was like, he didn’t give the speech, he wrote it because in 2020, everything went to hell. But he proposed this idea of the theory of maximum taste, and basically, he says, each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit or by the content that it’s capable of consuming, like the highest-level content.

[00:51:53] Polina Pompliano: So if you think about it, when we were in college or when we were younger in school, you were forced to put difficult ideas into your brain and grapple with them and debate and think, actually think about it. But then as you get older, you don’t do that stuff. You stop reading the hard stuff, and you start putting lower-level, easy ideas into your brain, and so it doesn’t make you think as much.

[00:52:23] Polina Pompliano: So he’s like, “How many people have you met that were more interesting in their twenties than they are now at 40?” Probably a lot of the people that I know. So if you want to improve your content diet, you just need to conduct an audit, look at your day, and be like, “What percentage of my day am I watching reality television? What percentage of my day am I doing this?” And then just look at it like, maybe you don’t want to alter anything at all. Maybe there are slight tweaks you can make where you are forcing yourself to put more substantive ideas into your brain by reading more difficult content.

[00:53:09] Clay Finck: Another question that comes to mind here, related to the content diet:

[00:53:14] Clay Finck: You mentioned Notion, and earlier we talked about the idea of connecting pieces that aren’t related, but the creative part of our mind kind of links things together. Do you use Notion or what sort of tools do you use to make these connections and link things together?

[00:53:33] Polina Pompliano: It’s interesting. I’m very low-tech when it comes to writing the newsletter.

[00:53:38] Polina Pompliano: I use Notion, but I used to use Google Docs. Honestly, I like Google Docs a lot. So my writing process is really interesting, actually. I don’t write in order, so I don’t go from start to finish. The way I get ideas is like, I may be texting with a friend and she’ll say something, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

[00:54:03] Polina Pompliano: And then I’ll put that in a document, and then I’ll read something, and that’ll remind me of that thing, and then I’ll put it underneath. So the way my book was written truly was a lot of throwing random, kind of dissimilar ideas into a Google Doc. And then as I would walk away, like I would go on a walk, it would marinate a little bit, and then I’d be like, “Oh yeah, that’s like this.”

[00:54:34] Polina Pompliano: And if you read the book, you’ll notice that I make a lot of connections between people that you may not necessarily group together. Like in the mental toughness chapter, yes, there’s an ultra runner, but there’s also a person who was wrongfully in prison for 30 years. It’s voluntary suffering plus involuntary suffering. We have both in our life. So yeah, that was kind of how I found links through all these people, not because of the type of person they were, but maybe because of the idea that they developed and how they got to that idea.

[00:55:14] Clay Finck: Another interesting concept, I think related to the content diet, is the people we surround ourselves with in our lives.

[00:55:22] Clay Finck: You know, ever since I joined TIP as a host here, I’ve personally connected with so many people from all over the world who live nowhere near where I live. And I’m sure you’re in a pretty similar situation since you’ve started your newsletter and you have subscribers all over the world. I’m curious, how do you find a healthy balance between your in-person relationships and those that are digital and live online?

[00:55:51] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, so I would say that all of my best friends, including my husband, I’ve met on Twitter. But I love turning online friendships into real-life ones. Like, there’s just no… I don’t care about virtual reality and whatever. We still need in-person relationships.

[00:56:09] Polina Pompliano: And it’s like, I love the fact that I can talk to somebody in Kenya right now, and I love that there’s a reader in London or India. But the reason that in 2019, I did these kind of decentralized meetups all over the world with people who read the profile. They just met up on the same day in different cities, and the only thing they had in common was that they subscribed to this newsletter.

[00:56:39] Polina Pompliano: And what I loved about it is that we have these friendships online, but once you meet in person, it’s solidified. I remember these people. We had amazing conversations, and we will forever be linked in that way. So yeah, I love the internet, and I think like yesterday, I met Rob Henderson, who’s another writer that I really like, but I had only talked to him online for like two years. And then I met him in person, and I was like, “Whoa, this is so crazy.”

[00:57:15] Polina Pompliano: But it’s really cool.

[00:57:16] Clay Finck: I think it ties into what we talked about at the very beginning with people-focused learning, where there’s some sort of emotional and psychological piece where you make that connection, and then your relationships just change forever. I wanted you to also tell the story of Francis.

[00:57:35] Clay Finck: In the final chapter of your book titled “Hidden Genius,” you tell his story that I just thought was absolutely incredible. So I’d love for you to tell that story and share what you discovered from him that helped you discover your own hidden genius.

[00:57:53] Polina Pompliano: Yeah, so Francis Ngannou, first of all, I know nothing about MMA or the UFC or anything like that, but when I heard his story on a podcast, I was just like, whoa.

[00:58:06] Polina Pompliano: How do more people not know this man’s story? And it’s just in a nutshell, it is. Francis was born in Cameroon. He was like digging sand mines as a nine-year-old for a dollar eighty cents a day. He lived in poverty, many of us could never even imagine. And then, like I said earlier, he had aspirations of being a professional boxer, so he was determined to get out of Cameroon and go to America and become a professional boxer, to the point where he would be working at these sand mines and he’d be daydreaming about the United States and all this stuff.

[00:58:48] Polina Pompliano: To this day, he signs everything “sf.” And people were like, “Why are you saying it ‘sf’? Your name’s Francis Ngannou?” And he was like, “Oh, for San Francisco.” ‘Cause that used to be his nickname. Kids would be like, “Yo, San Francisco.” ‘Cause, you know, he would go to America one day. So at the age of 28, he was like, “Alright, I gotta get outta here.”

[00:59:15] Polina Pompliano: I can’t become a professional boxer in Cameroon. So how do I get to America? So he decided, first, he had to get to Europe. He went from Cameroon to Niger, Nigeria to Algeria, Algeria to Morocco. This is 3,000 miles through the desert, guys. It’s insane. And then from Morocco to Spain, he would get on a raft and cross the Strait. And once he was on the other side, the Red Cross would be there, and he could seek asylum. But it was really hard to get there. Obviously, it took him 14 months to make that tiny trek. Well, tiny, but you know, a really treacherous trek from Morocco to Spain. He got pulled out of the water six different times, and when Moroccan police would pull refugees out of the water, they would drop them back in the middle of the desert or put you in a Moroccan jail for an indefinite period of time.

[01:00:19] Polina Pompliano: So this happened to him five times. And then, on the sixth attempt, they were able to cross, and he was detained in Spain a little bit, but he didn’t care ’cause he was like asylum’s basically guaranteed. From there, he went to Paris. In Paris, he was homeless, living in a parking garage, but he said this parking garage, after what I had just been through, was like a five-star hotel.

[01:00:48] Polina Pompliano: He found a gym immediately, and then there was a trainer there. It was a boxing gym, and there was a trainer who, you know, saw the potential in him. He was really, really strong and really tall, but then the gym shut down, and the trainer was like, “You know what? You should try MMA.” In the MMA factory, I believe it was called, there was another gym there.

[01:01:16] Polina Pompliano: And he was like, “You can go train there.” He’s like, “I don’t know what MMA is.” So long story short, he trains, he gets really good, he becomes the heavyweight champion of the world, comes to the United States, is in the UFC, and he became at the top of a sport he didn’t even know existed nine years prior, which is wild.

[01:01:41] Polina Pompliano: So when I talked to him, I had so many questions about like, “Okay, but how did you bet on yourself, like your entire life?” And he was like, “The entire time that I was doing this,” he was like, “I kept asking myself, ‘What do I have to lose?'” And the answer was like, “Nothing. I can just keep trying and betting on myself and gaining the skills and learning the lessons.”

[01:02:11] Polina Pompliano: So from him, I learned that it’s the hardest thing, but the most important thing is at some point in your life to bet on yourself, whatever skills you have, whatever you really love. At some point, you just gotta jump and be like, “I’m doing this.” A lot could go wrong, but I’m willing to take the risk. And he said he told me that he’s not afraid to fail because he knows that he has the skills to course-correct no matter what happens. And he said, “I know that if I fail, I can start over and over and over and over. I have that skill, and you can take everything from me, but you cannot take that.” And when I asked him if he identifies as, like, if that’s his identity, the heavyweight champion of the world, he was like, “Absolutely not because there’ve been many before me and there’ll be many after me.”

[01:03:13] Polina Pompliano: That’s not what makes me me. But what makes him him is that he’s a relentless risk-taker, and he’s constantly evolving in his identity, and I found that just fascinating.

[01:03:25] Clay Finck: There are so many great takeaways there. When you read these incredible stories that you know, and you compare them to your own life, you’re just like, “Yeah, my goals really aren’t that scary, and I should be, you know, chasing and pursuing them.”

[01:03:43] Clay Finck: And I really like how he was in Cameroon, and he was just constantly putting in the mental reps. Like, he thought he was going to be a boxer, ended up in MMA. He had the mental reps, like he was going to go to the US, he was going to do X, Y, Z, he was going to be a world champion. And it ties back into the James Clear deal where he knew he wanted to be a professional athlete.

[01:04:16] Clay Finck: So then he started behaving like one. And that’s, you know, what you have to do to be at the top of anything: start behaving like you already are and identify with that.

[01:04:29] Polina Pompliano: Exactly. Yeah. So Francis says that to know who you are, you first have to know who you are not. And I think that’s something we don’t talk enough about.

[01:04:41] Polina Pompliano: We’re always aspirational, like, “Yes, I wanna be this person, I wanna act like this.” But you have to first define who you do not want to be. So for Francis, growing up, his father had a really bad reputation as this violent street fighter. He was abusive to his mom. He had just this reputation in the city where he lived.

[01:05:06] Polina Pompliano: So Francis was like, “For one, this is not who I want to be. I will not be like my dad in this way, this way, this way.” And that’s what led him to the aspirational, like no drinking, no smoking, no fighting in the streets, whatever. But I do think that before you embark on any endeavor, you have to first identify like, “These are the things I will not compromise on, and these are the things I will not be.”

[01:05:39] Clay Finck: Now, like I mentioned, our show is primarily focused on investing, and the greatest investor in the world, Warren Buffett, said that the best investment one can make is in themselves. And you hit on this idea at the end of your book. You encourage your readers to create something that ties their identity to their name. It could be a newsletter, creating content, and in the acknowledgements, you said that your husband, Anthony Pompliano, who I’m sure many of the listeners know, told you, “Never let others believe in you more than you believe in yourself.”

[01:06:17] Clay Finck: So to round out this conversation, I’d love for you to share any thoughts related to betting on yourself, and then why did you encourage readers to do something that ties their identity to their name?

[01:06:32] Polina Pompliano: So this kind of arose from a personal experience I had. When I graduated college, all these professors and people around me had told me that I was set. I had interned at CNN, USA Today, and this magazine. Who wouldn’t want to hire me? And I believed them. So when I graduated in 2013, media was going through one of its cycles, as it always does, and nobody was hiring, and nobody was hiring me. I could not get any job, not just a job I liked. I could not get any job in media. So it was super deflating, and my ego took an immense hit. But it taught me something really important, which is that up until then, I had always attached my identity because I wasn’t comfortable with just being me.

[01:07:26] Polina Pompliano: I had always wrapped it around something external. Whether it’s a job or a relationship or something that gives you status, right? So in college, the status would be, “Oh, you know, I’m the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper.” Like, who cares? Nobody cares. But in my mind, that’s what gave me status.

[01:07:47] Polina Pompliano: So I had been so focused on, like, “Okay, when I graduate and I get this job, it’s gonna be a great job. So I’m gonna be Polina Marinova, at the time, with, you know, editor at whatever, or reporter at whatever.” What I didn’t foresee is that I would be Polina Marinova, unemployed. So from that, I kind of gathered that when you create something for yourself that you’re proud of, nobody can take that away from you.

[01:08:19] Polina Pompliano: Like right now, when I work on The Profile, nobody can fire me or because there’s a recession, I can’t get laid off. You know what I mean? I think you see this a lot, especially with career CEOs. When they get fired and then because they’ve identified as being a leader and as a CEO of this particular company, then they kind of lose their mind and go through this massive shakeout and mental turmoil because they’ve identified one way.

[01:08:51] Polina Pompliano: Suddenly, they have nothing to tie their identity around. And they’re like, “Whoa, who am I? What do I like? What do I enjoy?” And they have this massive meltdown. So when I got the job at Fortune, I could tell that I was going down the same path. I was really proud to work there. I thought it gave me some sort of respect that I myself never earned. It was the institution of Fortune. And then I was like, “Mm, yeah, I don’t know. I shouldn’t do this again.”

[01:09:27] Polina Pompliano: So I started The Profile while I was still at Fortune, but it was something that I only did for myself. I never thought about, “Oh, could it make money? Could it do this?” No. It was literally just something I enjoyed doing. So I think whether you like knitting or running or whatever it is, just make sure that in your day, you have something that you only do for yourself.

[01:09:56] Polina Pompliano: If you’re thinking about, “Should I do something for myself personally?” selfishly, I think the answer is yes because no one can take that away from you. So when Oprah walks into a room, nobody asks her, “What do you do?” She’s just Oprah. Her name is her brand. I think the way to know if you’ve fallen into this trap is if you’re at a party and somebody asks you, “So, what do you do?” You’re going to answer with your most impressive identity.

[01:10:30] Polina Pompliano: So think about that, whatever that is for you. Maybe it’s something that you do for yourself, or maybe it’s something external.

[01:10:39] Clay Finck: Well, Polina, this was amazing. I am super grateful you joined me on the show. I’d encourage the listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, to go buy Polina’s book, The Hidden Genius.

[01:10:52] Clay Finck: Before we round up this episode, I want to give you the chance to give a handoff to The Profile, The Hidden Genius, and any other resources you’d like to touch on.

[01:11:05] Polina Pompliano: Thank you, Clay. Yeah, if you want to sign up for the profile, which is my newsletter, you can do that at readtheprofile.com. And if you want to buy the book, it is available at hiddengeniusbook.com.

[01:11:19] Clay Finck: Great. Thank you, Polina. 

[01:11:21] Polina Pompliano: Thank you. I had a great time. 

[01:11:23] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing by The Investor’s Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or re-broadcasting.