Insights From History's Greatest Thinkers - David Senra

He's writing the book as a cautionary tale, right? And he says, "Listen, if I could do it all over again, I would still try to get rich, but I would've, instead of making, you know, hundreds of millions, maybe make $10 million or $20 million," whatever the case is. "But the most devastating part is, if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't have missed my kids growing up and I would've had fun." What is the point of living in a 30,000 square foot house owning a NBA team and you didn't even have fun? As he's trying to write this book, his co-author is interviewing his wife and she says the most devastating thing that, "If my family said this about me, I don't care if I have a billion dollars, I'm a failure." And she goes, "I miss him, but it's not like he was here when he was alive anyways." When you read a book like that, you get to the end and it's like, "I'm not going out like that."

(wind blowing) I, last night, was with one of the first esports performance coaches. So, he is a mental performance coach that is employed by an esports organization to train their mental athletes, as they call them-

(laughs)

... to maximize their performance.

Yeah.

And the stuff that they're- the stuff that they are doing with these kids is so cool. Taking across all of the stuff that we've seen from physical training now and importing it across into something which is actually, I think, the most mentally taxing sport that's- that- that exists-

Yeah.

... because you can move your avatar on the screen significantly quicker than you can move your body, which means that you're basically overclocking your brain. Your brain was meant to move limited by the pace of your body moving when it comes to reaction times.

Yeah.

And what you're doing now is you've managed to overclock the physical world and you're now trying to catch up mentally. This guy was fa- uh, Thanksgiving dinner, nerded out with this guy for, like, two and a half hours. It was brilliant.

That industry is very fascinating. Do you know Blake Robbins by chance?

No.

Okay. Blake Robbins, he's a venture capitalist. He's over at, uh, Benchmark now, but he actually incubated 40 Thieves, that- that, uh, esports team and the brand and everything else. But his focus and why he's been, uh, invited to take part in one of maybe, you know, maybe the most prestigious or one of the most prestigious venture capital firms at a relatively young age, I think Blake's, like, late 20s, whatever the case is. He's obsessed with the edge of the internet and, um, he has this great line that has actually taught me a lot, that everything is a game. And his point is- is like if you look at g- uh, gaming as an industry, it's bigger than music, movies, and all- and a bunch of other things combined. Um, so I do think, like, it doesn't surprise me that they- they're at the cutting edge. Of course they're gonna have some kind of performance coaches. I think everybody does. Like, e- almost all the top performers have somebody that they actually want to bring in. In fact, I just re-read, um, so I've done, I've probably done, I don't know, 10 or 12 bi- uh, biography, uh, uh, ep- episodes on Steve Jobs. And then not only do I- do I reread, uh, like I read every single book I could find about him and then I would reread my favorite ones and then make episodes every new time, because the words on the page don't change, but, like, everything that you've learned since the last time you read it has changed, right? And then I would map out in the book, um, all of the people that he was inspired by, 'cause none of these ideas are new. And I- I wound up mapping it out and I did, like, a little bonus episode called- called, uh, Steve Jobs and His Heroes, and it just traces, I've done 39 episodes on Steve Jobs and the people he actually mentions, whether it's Da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Edwin Land, the founders of HP, uh, all these people that, like, influenced the way he thinks about his work. And something Steve did on the second time he went to Apple, right? Uh, the time where he created all that value, c- um, 'cause if you think about it, he's kicked out of Apple, spends 13 years in the wilderness, right? From, like, age 30 to 43. Comes back and essentially the way you think about it is, like, Apple's in terminal decline. It's almost bankrupt, right? It's running out of money. They pay $500 million for NeXT, and you can think about it as, like, they paid half a billion dollars to rehire Steve Jobs and they got the deal of a fucking lifetime, right? Fast-forward, you know, now, what, uh, 20 years later, it's the most valuable company in the world. Worth, like, $2.4 trillion. But what he realized was it was very helpful and I actually heard a bunch of episodes you reference, me and you both share, uh, an admiration for Charlie Munger, he's like one of my personal heroes, and he says this. He's like, the role that he plays with Buffett, he's like, "It's very useful to have somebody else to organize your thoughts with professionally." Right? That's the role that he plays with Buffett. So, what Steve did is he hired this guy and he didn't have no official role inside of Apple. So he'd fly down, he lived in Seattle, he'd fly down to Cupertino on Sunday night. I think he would spend from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday all he would do is shadow Steve. He could not say, he had no authority inside of the company, he's just, he's with Sh- Steve a- all the time, and when they have a minute they'd have lunch together or they'd pull him to the side, they'd have one-on-one conversations. And it's that same thing. It's like, you might not call it a coach, but it's somebody that is not a part of your company, right? Doesn't technically work for you, but is very helpful to- to bounce ideas off of and to, like, organize your thoughts. So, whether you call it a coach, performance coach, you know, a friend, a confidant, I think that- that you see that idea over and over and over again.