15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders - David Senra

Did you hear me say, when I was asked, "Who is the podcaster's podcaster?" The underground one that all of us listen to? It was you.

Yes. I almost clipped it and then posted it. I appreciate it. I watch all your Q&As. I love them.

Thank you. Yeah, dude, I, uh-

I would love a weekly Q&A from you. (laughs)

(laughs) Oh, God. I, I don't know if the internet's ready for that. There'll be a new one coming up soon. Anyway, today, I want to go through a bunch of lessons. You spend your entire time studying history's greatest founders, greatest leaders, thinkers, and I wanted to go through some broad buckets of lessons that you've taken away from them. Uh, so we're gonna do 15 today.

Okay.

First one, "Excellence is the capacity to take pain. Persevering through pain is mandatory." Why?

That is probably my all-time favorite maxim from studying all of these history's greatest entrepreneurs. It actually comes from the founder of Four Seasons, this guy named Izzy Sharp. And he... Sometimes, like, you're reading a book or you're listening to a podcast, or sometimes it is even, like, a, a music lyric that it just, the one sentence can stay in your brain forever. I haven't read that book in probably five years. And he's describing how difficult it was. Like, he had no experience in the hotel industry when he founds Four Seasons, and yet his goal was like, "I'm gonna make a collection of the greatest hotels in the world." And he didn't... Kinda disregarded the fact that, "I've never made a hotel before. I don't have any money. I don't have resources. I don't have contacts." So the whole book, the audio- autobiography, which I think he wrote when he was close to 80 years old, is now him recounting this for the, for the reader. And there's just so many times where he's just like, he hit a, uh, like there's a problem he can't figure out how to solve, uh, you know, problems with partners, with contractors, with financing, uh, all kinds of like, you know, basically unresolved issues. And he's laying up late at night, and there's interviews with his wife, which is fantastic 'cause they were married through this haultang- uh, this whole time. They're still married to this day. And she recounts where, like, she would wake up at like 2:00 in the morning, and he's just sitting there right, wide awake, hands behind his head, looking up at the, at the ceiling, just like can't sleep, depressed, agonizing over this r- like, this relentless pursuit of a goal.

Mm-hmm.

And so he's the one that said that, that coined the term, you know, "Excellence is the capacity to take pain." I was like, that, and I think by that point I had read like 180 biographies and autobiographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, was like, "That's exactly what I see in every single book." Um, there's never a book, there's not a, a... No, no life story or no book starts with, "Hey, uh, this guy had an idea. Uh, he did the idea. Everything went well."