In a recent New York Times Dealbook interview Jeff Bezos said that the hardest thing he ever did was raise money in 1994 to build Amazon and he raised $1 million and gave up 20% of the company. Below are the direct transcripts from him:

But I only say because I remember it was very early. I remember watching on 60 Minutes. This is maybe 1999. And at the end of the interview they were asking you about whether this whole thing could work or not and you said it’s not a fear that it can’t work, it’s a fact that it might not work. Right. That is true. No, but I remember seeing that thinking and you just said it in this sort of matter of fact kind of way, which is to say, did you say to yourself, there’s a massive risk, this is not really going to happen?

To raise the first million dollars of seed capital for Amazon. So I sold 20% of the company, at a $5 million valuation, I sold 20% of the company for a million dollars to 22 angel investors, roughly $50,000 each. And I had to take 60 meetings, so whatever, roughly 40 of them said no, and a little over 20, 22 or so said yes. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Everybody said this was 1995-ish, 1995. And the first question was, what’s the internet?

Sometimes you learn that the not in my backyard can stop something that really is transformational for a country. Whats incredible is we would never know if the 1887 petitioners got their way. A petition by NIMBYs in 1887 against the Eiffel Tower sounds a lot like contemporary arguments against projects. Had opponents succeeded, nobody today would realize what had been lost. The cost of NIMBYism is in what is not built.

“A petition by NIMBYs in 1887 against the Eiffel Tower sounds a lot like contemporary arguments against projects. Had opponents succeeded, nobody today would realize what had been lost. The cost of NIMBYism is in what is not built. https://t.co/409WOwQc0d

Your actions express your priorities more than anything.

Now back to work!

After seeing thousands of complaints about biased obituary and news headlines about the passing of Sam Zell we asked ChatGPT to write up a kind obituary without bias. Here is what OpenAI Delivered:

Please find below a respectful obituary for Sam Zell, based on the information you provided:

In Memoriam: Sam Zell (1941 – 2023)

It is with great sadness that we mourn the passing of Sam Zell, a legendary figure in the newspaper industry, philanthropist, and visionary entrepreneur. Sam Zell breathed his last on Thursday, May 18, 2023, leaving behind a profound legacy that has shaped the media landscape and touched the lives of many.

Born in 1941, Sam Zell displayed an early passion for business and a keen eye for opportunities. He built a reputation for himself as a successful real estate investor, demonstrating an exceptional ability to identify undervalued assets and turn them into lucrative ventures. Zell’s entrepreneurial spirit and innovative mindset propelled him to great heights, making him a prominent figure in the business world.

Zell’s contributions to the newspaper industry are particularly noteworthy. He recognized the challenges faced by traditional print media in the digital age and took bold steps to revitalize struggling publications. His leadership and vision were instrumental in reshaping the landscape of journalism, ensuring its survival in an ever-evolving media environment.

Beyond his achievements as a business tycoon, Sam Zell will be remembered for his philanthropic endeavors. He believed in giving back to society and made significant contributions to causes close to his heart. Zell’s generosity and commitment to making a positive impact on the communities he served earned him respect and admiration from all corners.

As we reflect on Sam Zell’s life, we recognize his enduring influence and the indelible mark he has left on the world. His entrepreneurial spirit, unwavering determination, and philanthropic endeavors will continue to inspire future generations. Sam Zell’s legacy will forever be intertwined with the evolution of the newspaper industry and the resilience of the human spirit.

Our thoughts and deepest condolences go out to Sam Zell’s family, friends, and colleagues during this difficult time. May they find solace in the memories of his remarkable life and the lasting impact he has made. Sam Zell’s contributions will be cherished and remembered, ensuring his spirit lives on.

As a big seaweed eater it was really enlightening to see this business pop up as a suggested and supported company from the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. Based in Maine where the seaweed I eat comes from is this awesome company: https://www.runningtide.com/

For those who want to optimize their health and support the sea vegetable movement look into Dulse, Nori, Laver, Kelp, sea moss, and Bladderwrack (might have spelled this last one wrong). Since sea vegetables are grown in water and absorb more sunlight they absorb more minerals and are one of many reasons why you should eat seaweed and support great causes like Running Tide!

3 Actionable Takeaways

Take 60 seconds to answer one or more of the following questions — we also highly encourage you to try this with colleagues and/or loved ones! 

1. How can you better align your purpose with your career?
   At the end of a workday, write down all the things you did that day. Circle the things you did first because you were excited about them, as well as the things you did last because you waited to do them when your other annoying tasks were out of the way. Those things you circled are the things that give you energy. Those were the things that connected to your sense of purpose. Do this for a month, and compile all those things your circled. Then meet with the people you work with, and explore how you can sculpt more of your job around those things. See if they will allow you to focus your attention on what you’re best at and what makes you feel alive. Explore whether you can hand off some of the other things either to technology or to other colleagues. From there, support your colleagues as they endeavor to do the same. 
    
2. How can you supercharge your hiring practices to level up your adaptive advantage?
   Hire for cultural fit, cultural add, cultural evolution, and learning agility. Companies that hire based upon skill and past experience will be circling the drain. Many organizations that move fast realize it’s absurd to hire somebody into a position because, within 18 months, the job will change. Instead, you need people who align with what you believe, your why, and how you work. Attract people based on your beliefs, and screen people for that alignment. They have to have the baseline skills to do whatever the first job is, but you need to know they will just as quickly unlearn and relearn for whatever job’s going to be next. 
    
3. How can you better prepare yourself and your organization to embrace the future of work?
   This is the first time in history when we’ve been able to rethink work at every level, and it’s a profound opportunity. To understand the shifts taking place, we have to look toward the future through these five lenses:
    
   • Why We Work: We first worked for survival, then we worked for identity and status, and now we’re working for purpose. We want to join organizations that share our values, and we want to impact, especially after a pandemic that changed where work takes place and where work fits in our lives. How can we elevate our organizations to better deliver purpose? 
      
   • What We Do: We often train people to do routine and predictable tasks, even at high cognitive levels and mainly in isolation. Technology is stripping many of these routine tasks away. How can we elevate our team’s contributions with more meaningful work? 
      
   • How We Work: Successful leaders today inspire human potential. They’re connecting, coaching, removing obstacles, and helping people be successful. How can we ensure the leaders in our organization are best positioned and encouraged to help others to shine?
      
   • Where We Work: How often do we need to go to the office? How often do we need to meet in person? How can we elevate the location of our work to maximize our people’s ability to deliver consistently? 
      
   • Who Works: In the West, the workforce was built for the straight white male who had a wife at home to manage caregiving responsibilities, resulting in hurdles for anyone who doesn’t fit that profile today. How can we elevate our businesses to better suit everyone who is working today? 

5 Actionable Takeaways To Maximize your sales

1. How can you better address the “six why’s” to maximize your sales?
   There are six specific commitments when forming a buying decision; I call them the six why’s. If one of them isn’t satisfied, the sale never occurs. If a sale falls through, identify which commitments you didn’t fulfill. This practice is impactful to do together with your team because you’ll find one or two commitments are costing you over 50% of your lost sales. This allows you to strengthen your sales process to answer and gain commitments preemptively. When you do that, the sales cycles speed up, and buying behaviors increase because now you’re better aligning how you sell with how people buy. Which of these commitments are you missing from your potential buyers?
   • Why change? Until we create the curiosity for change, our potential clients usually aren’t very interested in engaging very deeply because they don’t think they need to be.
   • Why now? Why should they make this commitment right now and not wait?
   • Why your industry solution? Why do they need your industry or your direct competitors at all? 
   • Why you and your company? Why should they trust and invest with you?
   • Why your product or service? Why are you the right solution for them? 
   • Why spend the money? Why should they spend the money?
2. How can you better understand your customer’s pain points in order to better guide them through the buying process? 
   The key is knowing what to listen for. It’s challenging to get the commitments necessary to make the sale if you don’t know what will have an impact on your customer. When you glean what matters most, you are beautifully positioned to present solutions in ways that will resonate directly with their problems. This practice results in a buyer who trusts you and is more likely to buy from you than a competitor.
   
   First, you want to understand their problem. What is the reason you’re talking? Understand it in scope and in-depth to speak directly to it and connect the dots. Next, you want to understand their dominant buying motives. What would they get out of this if they moved forward? What would they lose if they didn’t Lastly, understand their buying requirements. This pertains to the buying unit. Who’s involved in the decision? It also gets into the specific product or service parameters they need. What are the timelines they have? What are the budget parameters they may have?
    
3. How can you gain your customer’s trust in an increasingly uncertain world? 
   War or economic turmoil creates uncertainty and fear in the market. Research shows that people in uncertain situations will often default to the status quo when it comes to decision making, which is ultimately to procrastinate and do nothing. As a salesperson, the goal is to disrupt that mindset and hyper-focus on creating certainty for our customers. Make a strong business case for why moving forward now, as opposed to waiting, is in their best interest. Certainty is critical – we don’t feel the need to mull it over if we are certain about the decision. Certainty and stability create a low-risk feeling, and potential buyers are more likely to proceed with a lower-risk decision when there is uncertainty around them and in the world in general. 
    
4. How can you better leverage a growth mindset to level up your sales success?
   A growth mindset matters greatly in sales. If you treat your sales skills and abilities like a muscle that can strengthen and improve, you will become more resilient when negative outcomes occur. A growth mindset will even give you an advantage over the competition because someone focused on growth will always win over time. Try using these four actionable steps to put your growth mindset into action:
   • Identify what you can learn from each situation.
     No matter if you win or lose a sale, ask yourself, what can I learn from this? How can I use this to make myself better?
   • Use the word “yet” to overcome negative self-talk.
     You can overcome self-sabotage by adding the word “yet” to your self-critiques and  allowing yourself room to grow. I’m not good at handling objections, yet. I’m not good at presentations, yet.
   • Set aside time for action.
     Schedule a dedicated time to work on areas you’ve identified you can improve. If you have a planned date and time to work on growth, you are 300% more likely to follow through. 
   • Stay hyper-focused on delivering for potential clients.
     In the sales process, everything you do should be about potential clients. You should be focusing on how every single detail matters to them, connecting all of the dots. The only person you should be focusing on when you’re selling is whom you’re selling to.
5. ​​How can you enhance your grit?
   Grit is one of the most accurate predictors of both retention and success for those working on sales. Grit is the ability to stay persistent even when facing major obstacles. You can increase your grittiness by thinking through the why. Why does this goal matter? If you can’t think of a reason, reframe that goal. Asking why helps you qualify goals so when you face difficult obstacles, you have a clear why to give you the extra oomph needed to press on. Any goal you pursue will have challenges. Recognize that the price of success is always paid upfront. You want to anticipate setbacks and not be surprised when they happen. Grit helps to push through these roadblocks and keep going. 

Jim Simons is one of the most brilliant living humans. He used his intelligence in mathematics to prove that you could beat the market and is the most successful hedge fund manager of all time in terms of ROI. He has been reclusive with the press and has never published any public material regarding his fund and for good cause to ensure it’s continued success.

At a recent dinner in Atlanta, Georgia I answered with Jim as being the person alive that I would like to have dinner with most while he is still here. A book written by the Wall Street Journals Gregory Zuckerman called The Man who solved the market had a few notes that I took and are putting here to remember.

Even Simons the worlds most successful trader wasn’t successful at first but with hard work and determination to keep on going and prove his theories right ensured his success. Let this be a reminder amongst the other notes below that you won’t always succeed at first but having conviction and the will to work hard to find a solution is one of the keys to success in this world. This is different than what I remember reading in Market Wizards about Steve Cohen who had a natural ability to trade right from the very beginning.

Matty Simons told his son Jim that “He wished he hadn’t forgone a promising and exciting career to do what was expected of him.”

“The lesson was: Do what you like in life, not what you feel you ‘should’ do. That’s something Jim never forgets and we’re thankful he got that advice and shared it.

At Age 14 Jim’s Boss Made Fun of Him For Wanting to Go to MIT

This may be the most important part of the book. A young 14 year old Jimmy worked at a gardening store in Massachusetts and when the owners asked him what he wanted to do with his life he said: “I want to study mathematics at MIT”

They burst out laughing, saying that the young lad who couldnt even keep track of gardening supplies would even have a chance to be a math major none the less be lucky enough to attend MIT.

The big lesson here is at a young age you should NEVER EVER let anybody discourage you from your goals or tell you that you can’t do something. People are cruel and will laugh at you and attack you but as Jim Simons proved it’s okay let that fuel you to succeed even further. Do not let any naysayers stand in the way of your goals.

Today he and his fund are as secretive as ever when it comes to publicity.

He has a great quote to boot:
“God gave me a tail to keep off the flies, but I’d rather have had no tail and no flies.”

Hire people for their brainpower, creativity, and ambition rather than a specific expertise or background. Researchers will find problems to work on and solve. As I said at SXSW Bad ideas is good, good ideas is terrific, no ideas is terrible.

While trying to keep the respect of Simons privacy the last note to share from the book are some pieces of advice he gave recently to a school audience in New York:

“Work with the smartest people you can, hopefully smarter than you…be persistent, and don’t give up easily.” Had Simons given up early on he woudl’ve went back to academia and not amassed the great wealth that he has today that will be plowed back into Math and Science grants that will further improve the world.

“Be guided by beauty..there’s a sense of beauty when something is working well, almost an aesthetic to it.”

1. How can you get closer to living in your sweet spot?
   I call my book The Sweet Spot because we have to find the right balance between our competing motivations of pleasure, purpose, status, morality, and spiritual transcendence. Ultimately, someone who prioritizes and makes choices just based on maximizing pleasure won’t end up as happy about their choices. Finding your sweet spot typically involves trial and error. It’s what we do as teenagers, even as preschoolers. Sometimes we forget and we get locked into something that evolutionary biologists might call a local maximum, where what you’re doing is fine, and you feel as if every way you could change might drop you down in pleasure, comfort, happiness. A lot of what really is valuable in life isn’t immediately pleasant. But what if right next to you is something much better? A way to get around this stuck place is to explore different things. Try an exercise program, try travel, try an extended difficult project, try more pleasure in your life. Most of us have some wiggle room to try these things on. I’m a big fan of what people call self-experimentation in this way. Explore what kind of balance most fits with you.
    
2. How can you find meaning in adversity and struggle?
   A good life involves difficulty–extending yourself, and struggling, and choosing hard things. Finding your sweet spot requires suffering. Some of the goals that will lead you to a sweet spot will pose difficulty. Some roots to pleasure involve pain. If you want to climb Mount Everest, you want to run a triathlon, if that’s part of your sweet spot, you’re going to have to work your ass off for them. Suffering will be part and parcel of that project. The idea of a comfort zone, sitting in the same spot comfortably, I don’t think is realistic for a life well lived. When we live our lives, the balance of different priorities is fluid. You can’t really stand still. Say you have devoted your life to your work and then boom, you have triplets, and all of a sudden things shift. You move, you get sick. It’s going to happen to everybody. You can’t sit for too long in a sort of accepted balance of these different priorities. Somebody’s going to move you. 
    
3. ​​​​​How can you enable your colleagues to be more fulfilled?
   People who are working with you don’t just want tangible things like money. They want other things. People want to be treated fairly and with respect, they want challenging and demanding work, they sometimes want variety. They want the sort of things that well-meaning managers might forget. They want things that aren’t in union negotiations and aren’t what people negotiate for when they get a job, but matter tremendously. Understanding what people want at this complexity, I think, is incredibly useful when figuring out how to deal with them and how to make their lives better.

These are the notes from the actionable interviews from joining YPO but there are other insights at my personal blog you can follow and read about.

The above was courtesy of 3 Actionable Takeaways from last week’s live session on how to master the search for meaning and happiness with world-renowned Yale psychologist and New York Times best-selling author Paul Bloom.

Politically exposed persons enter the world with great risk due to the nature in which their job operates. For the same reason Barrack Obama and George Bush need to have security detail to accompany them in the real world is similar to how PEP’s are needing help to be protected in social media and search engines from crazy people.

As there is no shortage of crazies out there and countries that are looking to rebound from their drop in tourism it was nice to see another feature for Richart Ruddie here: https://globaltimesng.com/2022/01/25/from-politically-exposed-persons-to-nigerias-best-hire-richart-ruddie-for-help-online/