Redoubtable was Dictionary.com word of the day.
With my third grade vocabulary I didn’t know what it means.
But I took it in with great meaning.
When you see “Re” at the front of a word it often means to do it again.
e.g. Remember. Reuse. Redo.
But here it means the opposite of doing doubt again…
Redoubtable—that is to be feared; formidable, especially as an opponent.
Great word, right?
Why again doubt when you can have…
It was the most magnificent surprise.
Friday, mid March.
Bonuses were due to hit our bank accounts Monday.
For some reason I had an instinct to check.
Woo-hoo!
My bonus landed early.
10 minutes later…
I’ll never forget the look on his face.
Priceless.
I wandered into his office.
Stood in front of his desk.
And started to explain that my bonus hit my account early.
Looking up to me as if to say, OK why are you in my office telling me this?
“So I came in here to quit.”
I turned around and walked away.
Really, why do we take our lives so seriously?
Of course we’ve got bills to pay.
And kids to raise.
And all those responsibilities at work and in our lives.
But why for so many of us does it all seem so hard?
You know that quote about all the world’s a stage…
I interpret it to mean it’s a play.
Like a lucid dream we’re directing this life on our own stage.
Here to play.
Believe me, for many years, well, basically, all but this one…
I couldn’t live this way.
I was king of…
Is a search that landed someone on my website.
Do you think that might be fun?
OK, let’s play with it.
Our minds are fabulous time machines.
Just by thinking you can travel anywhere in time, can’t you?
Like some time you were a kid running around playing.
Or an adult doing much the same.
Any time you enjoyed in the past.
Or see yourself enjoying in the future.
In fact anything you can imagine enjoying right now in your mind.
It’s a getting a little gnarly, isn’t it?
The political landscape is fractured like the desert after a quake.
Violence is erupting worse than a summer blockbuster.
Abuse is spewing to the surface from many fissures; Church, Scouts, the global pedo network showing their heads.
Stock market is swelling and dropping, perhaps closing out.
In times like these we can all get tossed around, can’t we?
Some of us are directly affected.
Most of us are whipsawed by the media storm.
I’ve trained myself to block out that noisy global catastrophe.
But like I’m sure many of you, some people around me are being battered by the storm.
That’s how long an average worker is productive each day…
That’s a yield of 36%.
Imagine a production line that was operating at 36% yield.
Where 64% of the inputs were wasted.
That’s the average workday.
The average life.
It’s not just routine jobs either.
In fact, someone sitting answering phones all day is certainly far more productive than most professionals.
Epstein…
No comment.
People are better off that way.
Those of us without eyes wide shut know where the stink hole goes, don’t we?
How quickly our society forgets.
For a while we’re outraged when another Weinstein snakes around.
But quickly we get back to our little screens forgetting like Spacey we demand a constant stream of beautiful boys, and girls.
We pretend not to know how they do it.
That the casting couch existed long before the latest crop of pervs and pedos.
In our society that vehemently fights for women’s rights…
We tune into the fashion shows ogling our super women prancing around in their shiny heels and underwear.
No care how they got there.
Nor how many others were picked over and left elsewhere.
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.