How many of us would like more energy?
With more energy, what more might be possible for you?
How much more might you get done?
Better might you feel?
What’s more important to living your ultimate life?
No energy…
No life.
Yet how we build and consume energy each day is still considered a mystery…
What’s the right amount of sleep?
How do you best fuel and hydrate the body?
What ways do you build and deplete energy?
“Why would I want that?” a top hedge fund manager asked.
“Exactly,” my partner replied.
“So why are you going at the capital raise that way?”
Or not…
More like fizzle for most new managers raising capital.
They start off hot.
Coming from a big firm, feeling like winners.
They’ve made it.
Crushed it.
Kings of Capitalism, and all that stuff.
Emboldened to build their firm of dreams.
Don’t let people who gave up on their dreams talk you out of yours is a common self-help phrase.
It’s cheesy, but it well captures most people.
And most investors.
How many really want to be working for their old shop, versus building their own?
Risk averse.
Fearful.
How many go for what they truly want?
Let alone, how many are standing there beside you yelling…
You’re meeting with a potential client.
They love the team.
Are really into what you’re talking about.
You’re delivering them massive value but something stands in the way.
What do you say?
How do you blow out that “objection?”
There’s lots of ways to get it wrong.
You start talking about how much Morgan sucks…
When everyone knows they’re great and your not-client is already invested in them.
You talk up yourself and how much better you are…
When your not-client already thinks they work with the best.
So, what do you do?
How do you blow out the objection?
And perhaps Morgan too?
Last name ever
First name greatest
Like a sprained ankle, boy, I ain’t nothin’ to play with…
Drake raps in Forever.
But understand nothin’ was done for me
So I don’t plan on stoppin’ at all
I want this shit forever, man—ever, man—ever, man…
Yeah I’m about my business
Killing all these rappers you would swear I had a hit list
Everyone who doubted me is asking for forgiveness
If you ain’t been a part of it at least you got to witness
2020 is a joke.
A sad, old, angry, only kindof funny joke.
And the laugh is on us.
Is this the best they can do?
It’s been laughably obvious since the beginning how this will go down.
So obvious I shut up talking about it.
I’m just as bored of myself saying—
Obviously the Dems will just tear each other down, and the one left standing all the way left, Trump will easily finish.
…As we are of seeing them doing their little public displays of disaffection.
No top Democrats I’ve spoken to see it any other way.
One said to me last week, I wish we’d followed your advice and run this goat…
How did the Democrats get so DoA?
Where are the great hopes like Barack and Kennedy who stand to drive us forward?
Trump is obviously a highly flawed candidate.
So why is it so hard to find a candidate who can actually beat him?
He’s easily beatable…
But only by a beater.
The Dems have put up some two dozen no choices.
They can’t even stand up their own not-fun-party let alone take Trump down.
Top bankers are born, not made…
He didn’t use those words, but that’s what one of Goldman’s top execs implied.
We talked about if Tiger was born to play.
Or did honing his craft from 6 months old make him a champion of the game?
That said, he was right, Goldman doesn’t need this.
When you’re the market leader.
The business card pulls the sale.
You attract top talent.
Long, deep relationships.
Enormous resources.
Market dominance.
Some celebrity execs.
Talking up recent deals.
It’s a winning formula, but no top franchise endures that way.
Back in San Francisco I worked with a rockstar associate.
This guy would crank all night.
Be in all the details.
Leave rapid fire, all over it sounding voicemails.
15 years later he’s a middling senior-ish banker.
When I was the Business Unit Manager (yes, BUM, aka staffer) at Goldman…
I got the inside scoop on what the business is really about.
In that one year by far I learned more about the banking business than the rest combined.
Stepping back from the day-to-day of being a banker…
I was responsible for managing bankers seeing clearly what was valued.
A teacher told me a tale about two fisherman.
One was just a lowly fisherman.
He grew up by sea, his father was a fisherman, so too was he.
The other was a successful merchant.
One of the richest and most respected men in the kingdom.
Through a twist of fate he lost it all.
His business collapsed.
Wife left.
Friends jumped ship.
Desperate. Broken. Nowhere to turn.
He turned to sea.
Oh, that’s tragic, one might think.
How awful it must be to lose it all.
Yet, as the storyteller, perhaps Seneca, was pointing out…
At Goldman it’s called the Junior Banker Problem.
Specifically, junior bankers lives get destroyed.
Banks have tried plenty things to solve it.
It’s all pig lipstick…
Because the root cause of the Junior Banker Problem is…
Because few senior bankers get their job is selling.
They fail to build winning processes and skills.
The best they know is to wind up the printing press producing those awfully big, boring banker books.
Burning down forests and junior banker lives…
They run around having “Great Meetings.”
Mostly failing to drive results.
They produce too little value for the firm.
Too little success for themselves.
And after all those years in the business, still fail to succeed.
That’s the second step in the Ultimate Days System.
It’s real leading edge, isn’t it?
Life-saving…
I mock myself, but I’m also being semi-semi-serious.
Wake up. Get up.
Is a real basic tool for getting your day started right.
Yet many of us also know how hard it can be, right?
Laying there hitting snooze.
Thinking about all the things you’ve got to do today.
Claws reaching for that device we cradle at night.
Those precious few seconds, those few bad moves, our day is already shot.
I didn’t get it.
For years at Goldman I still didn’t get the job.
I was good at doing it.
But I still didn’t get what the business was really about.
In some ways I’m naive.
And I may have been a total dimwit starting at Goldman.
But my sense from 20+ years around the business is that many bankers still fail to get their job is selling.
A great aspect of working at Goldman and some shops is it’s a team culture.
At least up until the senior ranks, it’s all about what we’re doing together in best serving our clients.
That’s a powerful mindset for delivering your best service…
But it leaves many bankers confused what the business is actually about.
“You need to think smaller,” her boss said.
5 minutes later my friend was typing into google, When do you apply to business school?
3 years later she graduated HBS.
Today she’s building big.
About dreaming big.
Waking up every day eye on the prize.
Taking actions that keep breathing it life.
Plenty of people pretend to encourage thinking big, but few do.
Even fewer teach you how.
All alone at the end of the evening when the bright lights have faded to blue…
After the credit crisis there was lots of noise about banker compensation.
For good reason, people questioned bankers’ role and how much they’d been paid.
There’s certainly lots wrong with compensation in our society, including…
Fact is…
Most bankers didn’t join the industry expecting little reward.
If you’d told them decades ago, give your life to this and one day you’ll be making 0.25X, many would have chosen a different path.
Of course relative to the average worker bankers are ridiculously paid.
But relative to others providing such massive value to our society as reading lines or catching balls, not so much.
Nor relative to what bankers give to get paid.
You may have seen an article on the app DeepNude.
Another massive leap in technology the app uses an artificial neural network…
To remove the clothing in any photo of a woman.
It doesn’t take artificial intelligence to see women have boobs.
But with enough computing power you can better imagine what they look like.
No longer do we have to so desperately await the next iPhone hack to see celebrity boobs.
Or go to strip clubs.
With 50 bucks and the press of a button, all boobs are free.
Push up bras ruined boobs.
Promising so much, revealing less than.
Technology ruined them more.
Fake boobs.
Sexdoll boobs.
Insta “model” boobs.
Porn infested, boob injected Internet.
Technology promised so much, yet what boobs we’ve become.
I see it time and time again.
No matter what success we achieve it’s hard to feel like we’ve made it.
We are yet to do.
Or make happen.
A problem that first needs to be resolved.
We might be like Atlas having hoisted the world on our shoulders.
But maybe we shrugged a little on the way up.
Still not good enough.
Then I’ll be happy.
When we’re no longer bothered by this.
Worried about that.
Concerned for what else might happen.
There’s too often something that stands in our way.
There are lots of ways leaders quickly fall.
When you’re standing on the pedestal it’s easy to lose your footing.
People are constantly analyzing you.
Looking for cracks, figuring out if you’re really who you stand to be.
In the presidential debates just one question can end a candidate.
And the stakes can often be this high in business too.
A CEO speaking poorly on a shareholder call.
Failing communicating to the Board.
Delivering the wrong message to employees.
Sometimes leaders mess up badly and fail quickly.
But most the time we fail by leaving opportunities on the table.
My Fakebook birthday is always a nice surprise.
It’s like some of us men on our anniversary.
We completely forget until we wake up to the well in that case less pleasant surprise.
I’m getting on with my day.
Making it ultimate.
And then it starts…
With a text message, “Happy birthday!”
Then I remember, ha, of course it’s my Fakebook birthday.
I punch the air.
After all these years you’d think I might remember my Fakebook birthday.
Maybe even do something about it, like change it.
But I let it go on.
As I wrote about on my last Fakebook birthday I gave up telling people, “No it’s just my Fakebook birthday.”
Birthday wishes bring so much joy to people.
And of course I love people celebrating every day.
Working from home I’m often wearing a gun belt loaded with two pistols.
Glock 17 on my right.
M&P left.
Spare clips in front.
Neither shoot brass.
Just a laser I’m constantly drawing and painting targets left and right.
When I first started shooting with these retired SEALs I was surprised they carry hot.
Not just a holstered gun.
A round in the chamber; ready to draw and kick.
Back then I didn’t know anything about guns, nor get why someone would carry at home.
I still know jack about guns.
But I’ve quickly got skilled at shooting because I practice how I play.
I’m not yet American.
But I feel it through and through.
There is much wrong with this country, but no other place on Earth stands for what we do.
When my Dad first visited America he dropped to his knees and kissed the ground.
Born in England, having migrated to Australia, he felt he was meant to be born here.
Since I landed nearly 20 years ago I haven’t imagined living anywhere else.
It’s easy for others to find fault with America.
Easy for those of us living here to imagine better ways it could be.
But there’s still no place on Earth that stands for more of what it means to be free.
There are plenty of studies that show America is far from the most free.
Upward mobility. Infant mortality. Education rates. Incarceration. Standard of living, etc.
You can tick down a list of the things that are wrong with this place.
But still no other country in the world is more free.
With more diversity of thinking, and being.
Where there is desire, there is gonna be a flame
Where there is a flame, someone’s bound to get burned
But just because it burns, doesn’t mean you’re gonna die
You gotta get up and try, and try, and try
But we all know she’s talking about something more.
We all have dreams.
Things we burn for.
It’s better to have loved and lost, they say.
But the fear of loss can be so scary that we never try.
Ever worry that it might be ruined
And does it make you wanna cry
When you’re out there doing what you’re doing
Are you just getting by
Tell me are you just getting by, by, by…
You gotta get up and try, and try, and try