YouSaid · the spoken record

Polina Pompliano

lines on the record: 51
first: 2021-08-13
most recent: 2021-08-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Telling his bosses just like I was scared to, you know, he would disappoint people, whatever, but it would be dangerous if he stayed. Because in like 30 years, they'll be like, okay, so are you happy with your life? And he'll like, damn, I really regret not trying that beer thing. And so if that's the case, like you should absolutely go pursue the thing that you want to do, at least try it. You can always get another job or whatever. But if you don't try it, you live with the danger of like decade-long regret. And I think that that's worse than if you're just scared of jumping into something new.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With benefits to something unknown. And he says that the question that he asked himself that actually put him over the edge to do it is, is this decision scary or is it dangerous? If it's scary, you should do it. If it's dangerous like you shouldn't. But by looking through that frame is where you kind of realize like, okay, so what are you scared of?”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You approach it from a place of authenticity and like, this is who I am, and I'll build my own reputation rather than relying on somebody else's reputation. So when I decided to leave Fortune in March of 2020, like right at the beginning of the pandemic, it's very hard for me to like reach a final decision. So I was going back and forth for a while. And then I wrote a dossier on Jim Cook who started Samuel Adam Speer. And he used to work at Boston Consulting Group. And he was like, I was making good money. I was really comfortable. I was going to get promoted, but I really wanted to like try something on my own, which was like a brewery or like a brewing company, a craft brewing company. And he was like, I had no experience in beer. I didn't know what I was doing. So when he was like, he was in a position where he had a mortgage, he had a wife, and he had kids. Like, it's really hard to go from a well-paying job.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it's something that could be taken away from you. So in 2017, when I started the profile as a side thing just for myself, and it was very important to me at the time that it's independent and that it had nothing to do with Fortune and that Fortune didn't own it, that Fortune didn't sponsor it, none of that. Like I wanted it for myself. And the reason was because when you're at a place like Fortune magazine with such a storied history, it's easy to be like, I would go into a party and be like, I'm Paulina. I'm a tech reporter at Fortune Magazine. I interviewed Melinda Gates last week. Like, what's your name? And people would be immediately impressed and like respect me and all this crap that isn't actually real. So with the profile though, I did it under my own name and it had nothing to do with anything but me. And that's really a powerful place to be.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intern at CNN and USA, like all these impressive titles that people were impressed by for no other reason than I worked there. So when I graduated, I had nothing. I had no title. I was living at home. All my friends had jobs. And it made me realize like, who the hell was Paulina? Like I was like, I don't know. And I had this crisis and I promised myself then I will never again tie my entire identity as a human around something that external that I could lose. We do it with jobs. We do it with relationships. We do it with like sports. And then you get injured. That's why like so many Olympians go home after the Olympics and they are depressed. And it's because like suddenly, I mean, what? You're like has been. Like there's somebody better than you, somebody who can do your job better. Your ex-boyfriend gets a new girlfriend. Like it's just, you can't put your self-worth into somebody else's hand.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that every single person eventually gets to do something, whether it's a job or a career or something like that, where they are like this is my dream. And they love it so much that they end up tying their identity to their job title or something external that they do not control. I learned this when I graduated from college and all these professors and people had built up my ego so much to be like, of course you're going to get a job. You've done everything right. And one thing I learned is you can do everything right and things still won't work out the way you had planned them. So what I learned was when I graduated from college, up until that time, I always had sort of an external label that I tied my identity around. So whether it was student, editor of the college paper,”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start over time and time and time again. And I really do think like a lot of people are great, but the truly, truly, truly exceptional people, Kobe Bryant, not just the basketball player. He became an entrepreneur, an investor in the final years of his life. The things that people tell you, oh, you're just an athlete, you're not smart enough to compete with big dogs or whatever, and you do it anyway, when you risk failure to reinvent yourself and then find success, like those are, I think those are the most exceptional people.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business. And it was so fascinating, but people love to put her in a box. She was on top of the world. She had magazines, TV shows, books, et cetera. And then insider trading. And she went to prison. And people were like, this is suicide. Like, this is, you will, you will never come back from this. Not only did she come back, her brand came back stronger. And then she knew like, okay, we're going to be cutting edge. Her magazines were the first to lay things out digitally. She experimented with all sorts of stuff. And then she did a partnership with Snoop Dogg where she did CBD and things like that, appealed to my demographic. The reason I know who Martha Stewart is is because she still has great content. She's doing things that make sense for my generation. And just not afraid, no matter how old her brand is, to”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the people who are not afraid to reinvent themselves. And they don't see themselves as just one thing. The best example that I can think for this is Martha Stewart. I mean, nobody's done self-reinvention better than she has. And just purely out of, if you think about it, Martha Stewart was a brand that appealed to my grandmother and then my mother and then me like how is that possible? That's a multi-generational brand that's withstood the test of time. And the reason is because the woman behind the brand whose name is she's reinvented herself time and time again and she's taken those risks, right? Like there was a risk that it will fail, but she did it anyway. Martha Stewart took something that was considered women's work, gardening, cooking, cleaning, and made it into a building.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you believe that he's probably talking about the internal company problems just because you are there to be a problem solver, not a problem creator? So you should aim to solve like really, really thorny problems. It's kind of like when cases go all the way up to the Supreme Court, like those are the problems we need to focus on. Act as like people will use this as an example of future how to handle future problems and arguments. So it's the same within a massive company. Like the problems that make their way to the top to Daniel Eck, those are probably the ones that are worthy of his time and attention. And those will then go back down and back up for people to understand how to handle future problems like that.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it colors, he knows that it colors people's perception of, oh, Jeff thinks that, let me like try to impress him and say that I agree. I saw this in college when I was working at the college paper. I would cover these meetings where it was the president of the university and all of the deans around a table. And it was so funny because somebody would say something that they didn't yet know that it would contradict what the president believed. And then when the president of the university spoke and he said the opposite thing, the guy would reel it back and be like, oh, actually, you know what? You're right. And I was like, oh, just let everybody speak, see how they all feel and then you speak because you're very much coloring and biasing these people by offering your opinions so early on.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of the process, and he's enabling all the work that's being done at the company instead of telling everybody what to work on.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that. So, yes, he said that most leaders think of themselves at the very top of a pyramid. You hear this a lot. People say culturally top down, like leadership is top down. And he actually took inspiration from the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines who says that the right way is actually to flip that model. So as a leader, you should actually be at the bottom, you flip the pyramid. You're at the very, very bottom of the pyramid. And X says you should invert the pyramid and envision yourself as the guy at the bottom. You're there to enable all the work being done. That's my mental image of what I'm here to do at Spotify. So you kind of see some stuff as like a Sherpa more so than like a dictator and like I'm going to run this business and I'm going to tell you what's up. That's why these meetings, he actually enjoys being a participant and not the final approver because he feels like he's”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be like, all right, well, here's all the stuff on your calendar calculate how much money your time is worth. And when you break it down to like dollars per hour, you're like, oh, my God. Like I'm just giving this all away for free. So you have to be intentional about how you spend your time and whether the things that you're doing, you're just doing it to feel busy, not because they're actually productive for your business. Or you're doing them because you're like, all right. I'm spending Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, my mornings on diligence. I'm spending three hours of the day on solving a creative problem that I've been putting off for so long, but I just need time by myself without any distractions. And you structure your day like that instead of leaving your calendar for people to be like free for all. You can put as many meetings on there and then you end up not being effective at all.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you have to be very, very clear again about your intentions, right? So before anybody ever sends you a meeting invite, you need to say, this meeting is for this purpose and this is the role that I will play. So if you're playing the role of investor and an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur says, all right, join our Zoom for 30 minutes so we can talk about you potentially investing in our startup. You know I am here to A, ask questions. you decide for yourself am i going to come to a decision by the end of this meeting or not if not maybe it can be a shorter meeting it's just like just by being aware of those questions and of your time so recently like we talked about my husband's anthony pomciano and we talk about this a lot but for example i was spending a lot of my time with the profile doing things that i thought were interesting but they weren't necessarily growing the business so he made me”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Weigh in on certain issues. But if you don't know the role that you're playing, you're not going to be effective in any meeting. So basically here he says that a productive meeting consists of three elements. The desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time. Two, the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time. Like what are the options that we can take from this meeting? And three, the roles of the participants are crystal clear and very well defined. So he's very intentional about how he spends his time and he doesn't let other people dictate it.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makers, on the other hand, they have a lot of time, big blocks of time to work on big thorny creative problems that can be solved with a meeting. So he prefers to have like two or three hours for that block or half a day or something like that because it allows him to think for longer periods of time when his, if you look at your calendar and you only have 15 minute breaks in between meetings, it's very hard to be creative and to think of like long-term projects that you want to work on. And the other thing that Daniel Eck does that not a lot of people do, which is so smart, is before you go into any meeting, he suggests like you ask yourself, what role am I playing? Sometimes Eck is playing the role of CEO and approver and I need to go in this meeting and just approve a bunch of things. Other times he needs to be a participant. He needs to give feedback. Ask questions.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a maker schedule versus a manager schedule. So when you're operating on a manager schedule, your calendar has all these meetings that people put on there without asking for permission. They're like, okay.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Daniel Eck is the founder and CEO of Spotify. And you think, Daniel Eck, you're like, oh my God, that's a massive organization. He has thousands of employees. He must be extremely busy in every minute of his time must be taken out. That's actually not true. Like he makes time to go on a walk, an hour-long walk every day with his wife and kids. He spends time reading in the morning. He says, I actually start my day around 10 a.m. And that's pretty crazy to hear, right? Like you would think, like I start my day earlier than Daniel Eck and I'm nowhere near as important. The reason is he basically he limits his calendar to only three or four meetings per day. And the reason he does that is because he understands the value of unstructured time. So he got this like make or schedule idea from Paul Graham, who he's written about it, but it's you.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Until last year, I considered myself a writer, a writer, not an entrepreneur, not a business owner, not an investor. But recently, I made my first investment into this company. And I was like, whoa, it's so funny because it's the same skill. It's curiosity. It's asking good questions. It's doing due diligence. Like literally everything you need to do to be a good reporter is very similar of what you need to do to be a good investor. But it's like the label. That's why I'm so against like labeling yourself one thing is because it prevents you from being like, oh, I can be a writer and an entrepreneur, a writer and this other thing. People love boxes and I just, I hate it.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the biggest mindset shift because it shifts it from you being on the defensive to being on the offensive. So suddenly you're not waiting for opportunity to come. You're like, I am broke. I need to create opportunity. The rock calls them a hole in the wall moments where like, you see this like tiny, tiny, tiny inkling of possibility or opportunity. And then you start like making the hole a little bit bigger and bigger and bigger, but you know like you're in charge of that. You can't just sit around and be like, you know, I got five bucks in my pocket. Someone's going to come help me out. And I think like an investing, like you have to create opportunity for yourself in order to get returns. So there is no waiting around.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He beats them so bad, they're like, oh crap, like this is really bad. And the whole idea is that you'll get frustrated, you'll grow, you'll get better, and then eventually you'll win. And a lot of these finance guys, they want that because sometimes it's missing in their life. So they're getting it in other ways. Like, let's play chess and have you beat me so I can get pissed off and I can like learn to get better and eventually beat you.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, hate to use them as an example, but a lot of these kids on TikTok that became really famous, okay, you're famous now. You have all the social capital. But if you don't reinvent yourself, if you don't try to be successful at something else, eventually your 15 minutes of fam are going to be up and suddenly you have this like comfortable lifestyle and then it's going to be all over because you're not hungry anymore. And then there's this profile that I love rereading. It's about this chess guy. He's Russian. He's amazing. He's one of the best named Lev Albert. And a lot of people don't know him, but his clients who come to play chess with him are some of the highest profile figures in finance, including Carl Icon and Stephen Friedman. And they come to quote unquote to get frustrated, intimidated, and demoralized. And so the whole idea is like they go to this guy.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Her head, and then when she created sphinx, she has a really, really good quote where she says, spanks wouldn't exist if I had aced the LSAT. So in other words, like just because you failed this test that was your dream doesn't mean that you can't create something else and be just as successful. The rock, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, he has a lot of like ups and downs and his life to before he got to where he is, but he says like every single day in the back, no matter how successful he gets, how big his house gets, how nice his car's, he always thinks about the failures and he's always like in my mind, I am one week away from getting evicted. And the reason that's powerful and important is because when people get comfortable, they become complacent and they forget they're not as hungry anymore. They're not as driven. That's why you'll see.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That whenever she had a failure that like unless it was like big and juicy and whatever, her dad would genuinely be disappointed. He'd be like, oh, wow, like that's not really like he didn't really try that hard today, obviously, because you didn't fail that much. It taught the kids that you should on a daily basis be taking risks and putting yourself out there to achieve something. And if you fail, that's okay because you get to talk about it at dinner. So for her, all her life when she was growing up, she wanted to be a trial attorney, but then she bombed the LSAT. Then she went to be goofy at Disney World, but she was too short for the costume. Then she started selling fax machines. And then she was like, all right, listen, like, what do I actually want to do? But she saw every single failure is an opportunity to do something else. She didn't give up. So basically, instead of failure becoming an outcome, it simply became about not trying.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Speaking of Jesse Itzler, I'm a big fan of his wife, Sarah Blakeley, who founded Spanks and became a billionaire off of it. Most people see failure as something, oh, you failed, let's leave that alone and go do something else because you're not good at it. A good example for myself is in high school, I played soccer. I wasn't very good. So I just kind of like let it die. Outside, most people would say, oh, you failed at being a soccer player. Or I could reframe it and be like, did I fail? Or did I not try hard enough? And was I not as interested in it so I couldn't get better? So Sarah Blakeling, when she was little, her dad would sit the kids like at the dinner table and every single night at dinner, they would have to go around and say, what is one thing you fail that day? And so she”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's just the seal. There we go. And basically, yeah, like stress test him. And so at one point David Goggins is like, dude, you live such a comfortable life. Like it's really, really hard to get you to this again. He makes them sleep on the floor. He makes them sleep in a really uncomfortable chair. He makes them jump in a freezing lake. All those things where you want your mind to scream and to tell you to give up where you don't give up and then just builds credibility with yourself that, oh, I am good at like maintaining an emotional calm when I'm investing. I'm good at being rational when other people are being irrational. Things like that that kind of builds confidence within yourself.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In really stressful situations, whether that is physical, there's a book, Jesse Itzler, wrote a book, and he had David Goggins come live with him for like a month.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's why you hear a lot of these investors, like they have like mental coaches and like mindset coaches and things like that. The purpose of that is so you kind of get out of your comfortable thinking where investors go wrong is like following the crowd or doing what's always been done or things like that where you're not willing to expose yourself to more pain necessarily but if you start taking a little bit of risk that smart risk and calculated risk you can change your threshold for like what you can sustain like some people like for example I probably wouldn't be a good hedge fund manager because I don't have a lot of emotional control on a day-to-day basis but basically you can't change your psychological and physiological state just by sitting on the couch like you need to put yourself”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do the same thing to our brain. When we get uncomfortable, our brain gives us a way out, usually quitting or taking the easier route is what he says. So in other words, your brain has a threshold depending on how much pain you expose yourself on a day-to-day basis. For me, for example, when I was training for a marathon, that pain threshold went up a little bit. Now I've run three or four miles and be like, I cannot possibly go any longer. And then I remind myself like, you one time ran 26.2 miles. It's crazy. But it's like you can change that governor in your brain based on how much stress you expose yourself on a day-to-day basis.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People, he completed three Navy SEAL hell weeks, more than 50 endurance races, and he holds the Guinness World Record for most pull-ups in 24 hours. He did 4,030 pull-ups, which is like, I can't even picture it. But basically, the way he explains how do you stay calm in really crazy, taxing, stressful situations is that we follow the 40% rule. So that rule means that whenever your mind is telling you, you're absolutely done, you cannot handle more pain. Stop right now, like your mind is screaming. He explains it like, you actually only 40% done. You can handle another 60% more. And he explains it like this. A lot of cars have governors on them that, let's say, go 91 miles an hour. It may only go 91 miles an hour because the governor stops it from going 130.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quote unquote enter the pain cave. And when she does that, the reason it's so helpful to personify pain is an actual place is you picture yourself entering it and you're in control and you're also in control when you exit it. She knows like, okay, I'm going to encounter this. It's going to suck. It's going to be awful, but I also know that I'm going to eventually get out. Most of us kind of, when we encounter a really tough situation, we're like, this is going to last forever. I'm going to be in this much emotional pain forever. And we start making bad choices because we're blinded by the pain. David Goggins.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Watch the Olympics. We read about these ultra marathoners, but we ourselves have never put ourselves in a position where we've been stress tested unless you're an investor. And we can talk about that later. But Courtney Dahlter, she is this badass ultra marathoner who is absolutely insane, but her biggest strength and superpower is that she can remain calm under any circumstance. The way she does it is obviously when you're running more than 100 miles, things are going to hurt. and you're going to be in major pain. And so what she's done is she's personified the sensation of pain. And she calls it the pain cave. So whenever she's, I think right here, I wrote that she stayed calm through bouts of severe nausea, of bleeding head injury and temporary blindness. And so the way she's done that is she knows, like she's like, okay, I'm running 100 miles. I know that at some point, I'm going to.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This one is actually very, very interesting, and it is similar but slightly different from the one we just talked about. The one we just talked about is like you creating a different persona. This one is, do you know if under the most extreme stressful situation, you can keep that arousal control in check and like that emotional cool and things are just like absolutely falling apart? And the way I started this was like, do you know who you are after running for 19 hours straight with no sleep? Or when somebody's trying to manipulate your emotions or when somebody's just like trying to like poke you when you're like at rock bottom? This one is very good in terms of a lot of distance runners and ultra athletes have a lot of this and the reason that regular people don't is because a lot of us like read about”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It's all about like arousal control, right? So when you're an investor, you should be as logical and rational as possible in kind of separate that from your emotions. So let's say in your personal life, you're getting divorced like you have all sorts of problems, but then you can't go into your professional life with that baggage at the top of your mind. So you need to kind of compartmentalize and have like, okay, I'm dealing with this right now in my personal life, but in my professional life, I have a slight distance where I am now pulling the investor and I can't be approaching these entrepreneurs or whatever the stock market with these like emotions at the top of my mind.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And things like that. So he created the black mamba, which was a nickname inspired from the movie Kill Bill in which like a snake was known for its agility and aggressiveness. And you would embody that sort of persona on stage. So when he would hear boo Kobe, he would think, okay, but like this is not Kobe that you're about to see. This is a black mamba. It's called illiism. It allows you to self-distance a little bit from yourself. LeBron James does it when he talks in the third person. You've seen this. He's like, well, this is good for LeBron James. It's like, why are you saying that? It's because there's a slight distance between you personally and the persona that you want people to see when you have to perform at the highest levels. These are like tiny mental cues that allow people to either gain more confidence or appear to be more confident in situations that are really high stakes.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I would grow into this larger than life persona on stage that I was not off stage. And it was really cool to see it on video later and be like, damn, you look confident. So I noticed that a lot of actually successful people use this, Beyonce used to be really, really, really shy, but then she would have to do these tours where she would have to appear really confident on stage. And so she literally created someone called Sasha Fierce. It's a fake person or a fake persona, but it would allow her to express her confidence and be super flirtatious, etc. But it would be separate from herself. So that way she didn't feel personally attacked or shy or whatever when she stepped on stage. Same goes with Kobe Bryant when he was playing there was a point in his career where people were booing him on the court.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether they were leaning in or leaning out. And after you watch enough of that, enough of people doing something well, you start to adapt it yourself. So I wasn't looking for, I mean, obviously people have bad habits, whatever, but I was trying to err on the side of like, what do they do well and what can I take away from that? For example, I noticed they had very open body language on Sage. They would lean in and really listen to what the person was saying and have follow-up questions, not just the list of questions they had pre-written. Like they were willing to go wherever the conversation took them. Once I started practicing and I would sign up for anything and everything under the sun, any panel I got invited to, any small little event was 20 people there just because I wanted to practice being in front of a group of people. And then I kind of like became this Pauline Maranova, the interviewer, right?”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. Really successful people create alter egos or alter personas when they have to perform. I used to be painfully, painfully shy, and I would hate public seeking or God forbid I had to interview somebody on stage. But then I realized like I was holding myself back in my career because I would only be a writer. Whenever somebody said, hey, Berlin, can you do a video or can you interview Casper CEO on stage at this conference? I would literally have heart palpitations. So the way that I got over it is I did very practical things. I would watch some of my favorite interviewers, like literally sit down and for hours watch videos on YouTube of them interviewing people. And I would pay attention to their body language. I would pay attention to how they ask questions and their tone.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, you incrementally every day try to improve the process and you don't pay attention to the everyday volatility necessarily. You just look at like, what are the tiny incremental habits that I can adopt to become a better investor? Maybe it's asking better questions. Maybe it's doing better due diligence, like whatever it is that you do to become better and then like the results take care of themselves.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Small tiny everyday improvements is what makes a good habit sick or what makes a bad habit fall away. So yeah, you keep going until you get it right and then you keep going until you absolutely cannot get it wrong. And she's talking about in terms of a stunt or a cheerleading routine, but you can apply that to anything.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the weak spots and looks at players' individual process. So then you work as a team, whether it's in business or investing, you work like a well-oiled machine. It's not one person wanting all the glory. So basically what he says was, okay, so if you win, you got to start the process over so you don't get complacent. And if you lose, you got to start the process over to win next time.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second one is that the most interesting and successful people kind of focus on the process over the outcome. So most people, when they want to do something, they look at the goal, right? They're like, I want to be CEO of this company. But it's actually the process and the everyday reps that gets you there. And for example, Nick Sabin is Alabama's head football coach and he's one of the most championships ever. And he basically explains that he has this quote where he says, don't look at the scoreboard. Play the next play because his point is he has this philosophy called the process where he emphasizes that your preparation and your everyday reps and practice and hard work, like that should be a priority over the result. So he constantly”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so interesting, Tree, because people, when they look at the profile, they're like, oh, Paulina just picks a person and then she writes another person and they're all so different. But it's not that at all. I think very much like you and what you guys do is that, yes, you study the person, but the person is a vehicle of understanding how they think, which is a mental model. So I really like to learn about different types of people, but then be like, oh, interesting. Chris Jenner in the rock actually have something in common or Chris Jenner and Charlie Munger have this shared mental model that's helped them be successful over the years. So I try to every Wednesday, I write this thing called the profile dossier where I look at an individual person and try to extract the mental models that they apply to their career and their life. So I wrote about these five mental models that I've come across. The first one being first principals.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“something they get disinterested because they start from the details and they're like oh this is too much information I don't understand it rather than starting from the very very like simple thing and reading and learning and talking to experts about it before you get into the details”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I think the people who are the most successful definitely spend a lot of time learning about areas they're interested in, but they're not experts in. And when you learn so much, you kind of end up becoming an expert because you're learning so much. I think people like, for example, Elon Musk and like Chef Grant Ackettz, the whole idea of like thinking from first principles, it's not that it's necessarily like, oh, I want to learn about rockets. So let me like figure out understand physics. It's like you have an area that you're interested in. And like Elon Musk says, you think about it like a semantic tree. You start from the trunk of the base. Like let's learn about physics. And then you work your way up into the base of the tree and the details, which are the branches and the leaves. But most regular people, when they started to learn,”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of the most successful people think that way. They know, like Charlie Munger would say, like where their area of competence is or their circle of competence, but they're willing to be curious about it because they know it's going to be something bigger.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The type of person who doesn't really get star struck. And I think that has served me well in reporting because I'm able to go into it as like this is just another human and most of the time. They are very much misunderstood. Steve Schwartzmann was really interesting because I only had like 30 minutes with him. But I went in and we had such a great conversation and he actually liked my questions that his assistant kept coming in telling him like time is over. You need to call this person this person. He was like 15 more minutes, 15 more minutes. So 30 minutes actually turned into like an hour and a half of an interview and I got some really, really good material to be able to understand how he thinks. And like, for example, I asked him about blockchain and Bitcoin. And he was like, I just grew up in a world where the government needs to be able to control currency. So I don't understand it. This is not my area of expertise. And the fact that he was so honest about it, but he was still curious. I think.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Jeff Jordan, Steve Schwartzmann, Melinda Gates. I basically what I did was like, hey, like I work at Fortune. I'm going to try to interview some of these like super, super interesting people who you would have, it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to interview them. Jeff Jordan, I did a full profile on him in the magazine. I spent a day with him. We went hiking in the morning. Then I went to his office. interviewed him in a few different contexts, but he's one of those like, he was one of those really, really under the radar investors, yet he had invested in so many companies like Pinterest and Instacart and Airbnb super early on. And then they were all IPOing and he became one of the best investors. So it was really interesting to get in his head and like figure out why he is the way he is and why he's so effective.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to join Fortune magazine in 2014, which I thought was my dream job. I was like, oh, business, journalism. Like they broke Enron. It was everything that I thought was what I wanted to do in journalism. But I started as a, what was it? My official title was audience engagement editor, which meant like do their Twitter and Facebook. And then I realized that like it was a small team. I asked anybody if they needed help with anything. They would be like, yeah, do you want to write this article or help with this? So that's how I got my foot in the door with writing. And then I went on to become a tech reporter and I wrote term sheet, which is Fortune's daily deal making newsletter, like venture capital deals, private equity deals, who's raising what fund, all things venture capital. And in the beginning, it was really, really hard because I had no sources.”
2021-08-13 · We Study Billionaires · TIP369: How Exceptional People Think w/ Polina Pompliano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT