YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Zschau

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80
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2024-05-28
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2024-05-28
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  1. “That final event, I remember the topic. It was what was the significance of the conflict between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. And I had an hour to prepare that one.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “But every afternoon he would do that. And by the end of the public speaking events that year, the contest that year, I'd become a state champion in extemporaneous speaking. You asked earlier, Tim, about preparation. This is just another example. I wasn't born to be a speaker. I wasn't born to be a teacher, but I learned to do both.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “So, well, this is the way it was when I was in high school, an extemporaneous speaking contest, each participant individually would be given a topic on which to speak for 10 minutes. And each contestant would have one hour to prepare the 10-minute speech. So my high school teacher said, well, come in after school's over every afternoon, and I'll give you a topic, I'll give you an hour, and then you come back and give your 10-minute speech on that topic. So the first time I did that, he gave me a topic. spent the hour preparing i gave my talk and when i ran out of words i said is the 10 minutes up yet and he says it's only been three minutes”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I think I became a better teacher by not being smart. And here's what I mean by it people who are really super smart, learning comes too easy. I believe you can be a better teacher when it's more difficult for you to learn so that you can explain to somebody else how to master some lesson. I also had the chance as a high school senior to take a course in debate. It was a full year course in debating. And that helped me with public speaking, but more importantly, the high school teacher who taught debate also taught the various individual events like oratory and extemporaneous speaking. And I wanted to compete in extemporaneous speaking.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Can you teach that course? I said, You bet. And that's how I began my teaching career. Again, there's a life lesson here. Opportunities unexpectedly happen. And many people say, gee, that's an interesting opportunity. But it only matters in life if you seize the moment. take advantage of that opportunity and commit yourself to do something that you've never done before. I find that I learn the most the fastest when I don't know what I'm doing. So I'd never taught a university course and all of a sudden I'm in front of a hundred second year MBA students 24 years old teaching a course but I did Okay, and then for Graduate School of Business said, would you teach another course? I taught different courses, and that's how my teaching career began.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Second year MBA student signed up to take business 366 electronic data processing this September and you don't have anybody to teach it. I am the solution to your problem. I can teach that course. And they said something like, don't call us, we'll call you And in late August, about three weeks before the course was to begin, I get a call.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “In the PhD program, the professor who had taught the most popular second year MBA course, electronic data processing. It was the only course at Stanford Business School at that time that had anything to do with computers. He left unexpectedly. I went to the dean of the business school and I said, Mr. Dean, you have a problem. You've got a hundred.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “That would change my life so dramatically. That's why I tell people who ask me about career planning, that career planning is overrated. You ask me the question, though, how did you get into teaching? Well, I was in the MBA program at Stanford University, and they are just like philosophy at Princeton, I discovered operations research, applying mathematics to real operating business problems, but operating problems in general. And I said, this is way cool. And so rather than looking for a job, as I was approaching my MBA degree, I applied for the PhD program to pursue operations research. And after my first year,”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “It wasn't up to Navy standards, so I was unable to enter OCS in September of 1961. Very disappointed. I did have an alternative. I had applied to Stanford Business School for the MBA program. I only applied to Stanford because it only had one essay in the application and all the others had three. So I focused on Stanford for that reason. I had been accepted and I never sent in the postcard that indicated that I was not coming. So I retrieved the postcard, sent it in, and within, I'd say six days, my whole life changed from going into the Navy to going to California and entering the MBA program I did not know. In that split second in April, when I heard”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Well, I knew what I was going to do after I graduated from Princeton. I had applied for and was accepted to the U.S. Navy officers Canada School in Newport, Rhode Island, to begin my training in September of 1961. I went back home to Omaha, Nebraska, worked in manual labor on the night shift in a can factory, and in late August was called to Fort Omaha to be inducted into the U.S. Navy. During that pre-induction interview, I was asked if anything had happened to me health-wise since I'd applied in February and had it physical then. And I said, well, I broke my leg in a rugby game at Princeton in April, but it's fine now. They didn't take my word for it. They ordered an x-ray and concluded.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Oh, way too challenging. That ended my figure skating career. I did not have the time to continue to practice. I tried to compete in my freshman year in the Eastern Championships and didn't do that well. And I began to realize that I wasn't going to make it. And looking back, I don't know whether I would have ever made the world team. But in 1961, many of the skaters that I had either competed with, trained with my skating coach all perished in a plane crash, the world team on their way to the World Championships in Brussels, Belgium in 1961. And we lost a whole generation of world-class figure skaters. And I don't know whether I would have Ever gotten to that point, but I'm glad I made the choice that I did to go to Princeton, to give up figure skating, and to focus on what's led me to be here talking to you.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Well starting from the time that I was about 12, I was an Einstein lover, I guess you'd say. I began reading about his theories and biographies and so forth. And so I applied to various colleges in the physics department, engineering physics in one case, and physics in all the others. And I was accepted to all of those schools and all of them provided me with a rather attractive scholarship, except Princeton. Princeton wrote to me and said, you can work in the dining hall as a bus boy. And I think I could make with 12 to 15 hours a week $400 a semester. And I chose Princeton because I concluded that must be the toughest school. They're not making a big deal out of me.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I knew what was inside Kant's head, and if he'd just known about Einstein and his theories, he would have had a different philosophy of space and time. That and $2.40 will get you a cup of coffee at your favorite coffee shop.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Cool stuff. And I decided that I would major in philosophy with, in those days, what was called a bridge program with physics. So I took all of the required courses in physics, but my department was the philosophy department. My independent work both as a junior and senior were on subjects that combined philosophy and physics. My senior thesis was describing what the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant's theory of space and time would have been had he been born 50 years later and had known Einstein's general theory of relativity. And I described in my thesis, this is what Kant's theory of space and time would have been. Unfortunately, He didn't know general relativity based it on Newtonian physics, but as a presumptuous 21-year-old, I figured.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Oh, I knew exactly what I was going to be. I was going to be a physicist. I came to Princeton in 1957 with a plan to major in physics. And then in my sophomore year, I discovered philosophy.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Well, I'm a chronic optimist. I believe that that is important to doing things that haven't been done before. You can imagine all of the things that can go wrong. And I guess there's some value in being a realist. But I don't think you do things that haven't been done before and succeed in that by being negative and focusing on. I would bless that way. Just look at the world, I don't think through rose-colored glasses, but I don't think so. When people say that's going to be hard I say it's going to be more fun then because doing something that's hard is a lot more fun than doing something that's easy.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Well, you probably remember this, Tim, from the course, but I assert that entrepreneurship isn't about starting companies. Entrepreneurship is an approach to life. And you can be an entrepreneur in anything. It's about starting something from scratch. It's about making good things happen that hadn't been done before. It's a combination of innovation. A lot of people get ideas and implementation. And that second part, implementation is the most important. A lot of people say, wouldn't it be neat? If we could do this, and that's as far as it goes, but entrepreneurs say, wouldn't it be neat if we could do this and then they do it?”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Then there were some tools that techniques that they learned from it. But I believe that everyone is born with the desire to do something beyond themselves. And as an entrepreneur, starting something from scratch, making it real, impacting the world in that way, it fulfills that desire to do something meaningful beyond themselves.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “That made the difference. And I think what it was, it's not so much what they learned in detail, but rather pointing out to the students that this is a possible life path, that you can create something from scratch and create value. And what great satisfaction you get from that. It also, and I attribute this to the case method, gave students the confidence they could do it. They'd read the case and say, I'm as smart as that person. I know I could do that too. And I tried to choose the cases with youthful founders rather than old people like me.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “And the students that I had had in my classes over 31 semesters. We had to cut off the responses in order for them to meet our thesis deadline after 400 responses of the 1600. But of those first 1,600 responses 160 had been founders of companies. Among the survey questions was the question what Princeton experiences have helped you in choosing your life path and succeeding in what you've pursued. And of the 160 founders, 95% said it was the course.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “When you're teaching and learning about starting enterprises or creating something new, you learn by doing. The case method helps in that. Projects that are real do that. One of the Princeton graduates, it's now four years ago, wrote her senior thesis on can entrepreneurship be taught? Or is it something you're born with? And there are articles that have been written that college courses in entrepreneurship are a waste of time. They don't matter. So in 2015, when she was working on this, I created an online survey instrument, which I sent out to all 1,600 prince.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I would come in and I didn't know exactly how the discussion would evolve, but I knew the lessons that would come out of it. And I'd find a way, regardless of what the students would say, to convey those lessons through their words.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I viewed my classes which were taught by the case method of teaching and learning where students would read about an actual company situation and put themselves in the position of the CEO or the founder or the technical person and describe what to do, I would ask questions and they would give the answers. I felt that that approach to teaching and learning putting someone in the position of the founder, the person who had to achieve the results rather than just listening and learning and reading from a book would not only help to learn but also build the confidence that they could do that kind of job. Well, in order to make that experience that Classroom experience Work the best It's like a performance.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “And so I had time then to call the audiovisual people and they'd come over and get it fixed rather than showing up right at the time the class starts and then finding that there are problems that disrupted the flow of the class. I think it was Benjamin Franklin who wrote failing to prepare, it's very important to me not to be surprised by things that go wrong and the way that you prevent that is through preparation and making sure everything is the way that it needs to be for success. As far as the class is concerned, even though I had taught the lessons, the sessions many, many times, I usually spent two to three hours prior to each class preparing again.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Well, I was a strong believer in Murphy's law. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And so I would come to the classroom typically 45 minutes early, make sure that the projector was working, and sometimes it wasn't.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “That I spent training, getting up at 6 a.m. or actually 5.30 a.m., being on the ice in Omaha at 6 a.m. in a cold winter, Nebraska winter, and then skating in the evening too, fitting in homework school to prepare for one competition where if you did well enough, you could go to the national championships. It taught me the power, the value of practice, of dedication, of persistence, and determination. Those are valuable lifeless and character building lessons. So when people ask me, well, how do I prepare to be a leader or to change the world? Through learning those values, you don't get a quick return creating value for the world. You get a quick return doing something that doesn't matter. But if you're going to make a difference in the society changing the world for the better, you better be prepared for a long journey.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Country went to the national championships and then my senior year in high school 1957 again I skated in the national championships in Berkeley, California. I never was a winner but it was a special experience to meet a lot of people throughout the country going to these championships and I still stay in touch with my dance partner and a gentleman who I competed against in the singles championships. It was a big part of my life Tim and as I think about it”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “And I passed the pre-test and then I passed the first test and the second test. And at that point, I was kind of on my way, but ICE was only available during the winter. So when I was 13, I began spending summers away from Omaha where there were ice rinks and continued to train and continue to pass tests. When I was 16 years old, I had passed the sixth test and I qualified for the national championships in men's singles in a lower group, not the world-class group, but a lower group. And I was also ice dancing with a partner. And in 1956, we won the Silver Dance Championship in the Midwestern sections. There were three sections in the...”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and we were fortunate to have an indoor skating rink where professional ice hockey team played. The Omaha Knights they were, probably a farm team for one of the... Hockey teams. And my mother took me to that ice rink when I was about seven years old. And I really enjoyed the challenge. And I remember coming back from one session when I was just beginning to skate. And I said, mom, I really had a good day today. And she said, what was so special about it? And I said, I only fell 40 times this time from what you might call small beginnings, I began to get more proficient and more interested. And in those days, figure skating was really figure skating where there were precise patterns on clean ice with turns and loops that you had to perform in order to pass certain tests.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “It's great to be here with you, Tim. I think back to the spring semester of 2000, when you contacted me after all of the other students had registered for my course and made such an impressive plea to be able to enroll in the course, committing if you were enrolled that you would clean the blackboards, clean the erasers, do whatever it took to make my life easier. And I almost cried when I heard those words and you took the course and I'm so proud of what you've done over the past 19 years. I don't blame the course for your success, but I do blame your enrolling in the course. course for our friendship.”

    2024-05-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT