Mike Krupka : Redefining Success

In this episode, Mike Krupka and I dive into the growing disconnect between achievement and fulfillment in modern culture. We explore how young adults are constantly surrounded by pressure to succeed through money, status, image, and productivity, often without taking time to ask deeper questions about meaning and purpose. From social media and comparison culture to education and ambition, this conversation challenges the traditional definition of success and examines what it actually means to live a fulfilling life.

Through personal experiences, philosophy, and reflection, we discuss why self-awareness matters, how external validation can shape identity, and why many people reach their goals only to still feel empty. This episode is about slowing down, thinking critically, and building a definition of success that is personal rather than inherited.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Who on paper has achieved extraordinary success in his career. But after sitting down with him, it became clear that that's the least interesting thing about him. He is a man grounded in virtue, family, and service to others. This is someone who would shovel an entire field of snow just so his son could play in a playoff soccer game. Our conversation went far beyond business and success and became one of the most meaningful and genuine podcasts I've ever had the chance to record. I think it's relevant for the audience to understand why I reached out and why I was so excited to hear that you wanted to be on the show. And and it started with my freshman year. I was I was a freshman at Vale Mountain School, and your son Alex was a junior. And then this year we were we were making a run in the playoffs during soccer. And in October, when the playoffs started, we had finally had our first home game in a while. But then it snowed. It snowed like, what was it, eight inches, ten inches? And I remember being in school and I looked out the window, and there you were, Mr. Krupka, shoveling snow, and like you said, for 10 hours. And I and I thought to myself, this the humility on this man is astonishing. And I was really impressed. And I remember I was talking to my buddy Logan, and we were like, he does not need to be doing this, he could hire people to do this, and we ended up playing that game and we won. And I want to start with, and then I want to tie that into this quote, into the first topic, which is identity. And knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Aristotle. So my question to you, Mike, is how do your early experiences shape the way you see yourself today?

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Sure. So I I think that you know, part of who you are is you're born that way. And you're like that for the rest of your life. No matter what people trying to do to change you, you are who you are. And then part of it is what you have lived over the course of your life. And so I grew up with a dad who was a physicist and he emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1949 to Canada, then came to the States after that. And my mom also didn't have a lot of money. And so I grew up in family in New Jersey with not a lot of money, and a science person as my father, and a sports person as my mother. And so, in order to be successful in school and have some money and be successful in sports, I just had to work really, really hard. And so I just learned from a young age that hard work can really overcome pretty much everything, and that sounds like a simplistic cliche. But understanding what hard work is is more difficult than you think. And some people think they know what hard work is until they really have to do hard work, either to make the sports team or to get great grades or to make money, and then they realize they didn't know what hard work is.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

And so I learned early what hard work was because to make money, I started shoveling snow and raking leaves and painting houses and pulling weeds and cutting lawns and anything I could do starting at age 14, including I had a paper route where I got up at 5 a.m. at age 14 and rode my bike around the neighborhood with to throw newspapers because that's the only way I can make any money. So I think all these experiences early in my life around I was a small kid and I loved sports, so I had to work super hard to be competitive and play on varsity and to make money I had to work hard. And uh I I was smart, but like there was a lot of smart people out there. So to get great grades, I had to work hard. So hard work are to me really is the core of everything in your life. Because you most people think they're working hard, but if you outwork everyone, you're gonna get to where you want to get to.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

What would you say your definition of hard work is?

SPEAKER_02 3:39

Hard work, the the I would say the first 90% of whatever you do is pretty easy. The last 10% is really, really hard. And the last 10% of hard work is you're you're you're cutting a lawn and it's 95 degrees and it's humid, and you're like, I just don't want to do this anymore. But you have three more lawns to cut and just put your head down and you just do it. Hard work would be, you know, you got an A minus on the test and you want to get an A, and you go home and say, I'm gonna study three hours a night until I do it. So the last 10% takes like a huge amount of effort. And a lot of people just give up because they just say, I don't want to do it, it's uh it's too much. And you have to really commit yourself to that last 10%. But if you do, it takes you past most everyone else out there.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Trevor Burrus, Jr. It's easy to get started. It's hard to stay with it. You mentioned that you had a humble upbringing. How has that upbringing kind of influenced how you how you parent your kids today?

SPEAKER_02 4:35

It's been a core of what I tried to do, but it's been hard because I've been successful in my job, so I've made quite a bit of money, and trying to balance what my life was like with my kids' life is not easy. Because we had one small house in New Jersey and we didn't really go on much vacations, and I started buying my own clothes when I was 14. And so trying to manage that in today's world where not just our family, but the world has much more money in it in general. And so it it's just a different world. And like we didn't have sports in the summer, we didn't go to lacrosse camps, we didn't, you know, go to select team things. We worked in the summer and then we played at at night. And so it's just been really hard to do it, but I try the best I can by describing what my life was like and talking about the houses I painted and trying to manage the cost. So, an example when my oldest son, who's 27 now, got his first phone, it was a flip phone, and there was SMS and there was no all-in plans, and so every text after the like the first 25 cost 50 cents. And so I made him pay for half of any texts over the core amount, and so he kind of learned how to manage himself and money, but it's gotten harder with just the proliferation of technology and proliferation of sports that's pulled kids out of the ability to just have a job when they're young.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

I, from my experience, I have learned a completely different set of skills from my mom and my dad, and I think that's so awesome. I'm happy that my parents aren't the exact same person. From my dad, I learned humility and seeing the best in people, and my mom, I learned how to how to work hard and put my head down and get things done. You mentioned that your parents were fairly different. Your dad was an immigrant, and your mom was born in Canada, and your dad was a scientist, and you said your mom was in sports.

SPEAKER_02 6:26

Yeah, she loved sports, she was a very good athlete, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

What what two things from each parent did you learn as a kid?

SPEAKER_02 6:33

So I'd say the number one thing I learned from my father was how to teach people Socratically. And so he was and is a super smart physicist. And I would come down from my room working on a physics problem, and he would just ask me a bunch of questions, and then it'd go, Oh, I get it now. And he never once said, Here's how you do it. It was just all Socratic by asking questions. And so I've tried to, when I work with CEOs of companies I'm invested in, or even with my kids, ask them questions. So my my daughter tells a story. There was a big wind power generation tower in Massachusetts, and we would drive by it, and I would say, I wonder how fast the tip of the blade is moving.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

And then in the car, we would talk about their circumference of a circle and you know the time that would go around and therefore calculating the speed and all these things of just getting people to think differently by asking questions. So I'd say that's number one for my dad. Number one for my mom is no bullshit. Just you know, call it like it is, be open, be honest, be clear, be simple, and that goes a long way.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

And then how of those skills you mentioned that you you asked you ask a lot of questions of the CEOs and companies you invest in. What other examples, if you have any, do those skills you learned as a kid now apply to you in in this title of your job?

SPEAKER_02 7:57

I think it's another one is teamwork. I played a lot of sports and there are always people on the team who are better than you and people who are not as good as you. But if you want to win, you gotta have got to get everyone to work together in a positive way. And so uh the other thing I've learned when a kid was how do you lift people up above where they would have been otherwise or alone? And a lot of that is a combination of positivity, clarity, no games, no head games, and and making them feel better than they might otherwise. And and and you know, when you look at a company, whether it be a nonprofit or a for-profit company, it's just people. And the better the people can work together, the better the people can trust each other, the better better the people can be using data and being clear and not playing games, the more successful they're gonna be. And it's on one hand, it's not hard, yeah, right? But there's a lot of people who like to play games either because they're nervous or they're paranoid or whatever the reason. And as soon as that happens, people lose lose trust. And when they lose trust on a sports team or an organization, they don't perform.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

For sure. To transition to more your career and the things and the decisions that you have to make in your career, how did you you say originally you thought you were gonna be a chemist, how did you get into the world of finance at Bain?

SPEAKER_02 9:15

So I I wanted to be a chemist because I did a lot of science with my dad when I was young. And then I had an awesome chemistry teacher, like probably my favorite teacher of all time in high school. And I really loved chemistry. In fact, I was kind of an odd kid because I played the cross, played soccer, wrestled, and then did chemistry, and I was on the math team and the chemistry team, and we would go to other towns and do, you know, equations. Yeah. And then I would go in early and do chemistry experience experiments with my chemistry teacher. So I wanted to be a chemist and I went to college to do that. And then right around my junior year, I was doing quantum chemistry and physical chemistry, and physical chemistry and quantum chemistry are just math. And most people hated organic chemistry as my favorite class in college. But when I got to do quantum chemistry and physical chemistry, it just wasn't interesting to me. And but more importantly, I could do the equations and get an A, but I didn't feel like I really understood why I was doing the equations I was doing. Yeah. And so I decided that, you know, I'd watch my dad as like he he knew the stuff inside and out, and he knew why he was doing it, and I could do it. And I was like, I'm not going to be really successful as a chemist if I can just do the homework and get an A, but not really innately understand it. So I decided not to be a chemist. And then I was like, what do I do next? And I thought I'd be an orthopedic surgeon because I'd broken a lot of bones playing sports and I'd met a lot of interesting doctors, and I decided that I could use all my science for that, but that was a long road, so I held off on that decision. And then I ended up ended up at Goldman Sachs in the summer of 1986, between junior and senior in college, working in the MA department, and hated the job, but my boss there was a ex-consultant from Boston Consulting Group, and I knew nothing about consulting, but he taught me about it or told me about it. So I applied to a bunch of consulting jobs, got a job at Bain and Company in Boston, and then I started trading stocks on my own to make some money, and that led me kind of into the investment mindset, and that led me to Bain Capital.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

So in this position at Bain Capital, you're faced with decisions every single day. You have to be critical of people and of CEOs and the things they do on a day, day in, day out basis. What are some standards that guide those tough decisions in whether to invest in a company or to hold off on it?

SPEAKER_02 11:44

So there's people, who's the CEO, who's the founder, um, how good are they, what's the market size, what's the business model. There's a lot that goes into that. But I'll I'll just pick one of those things to focus on. I think around decisions in the company or with the company, going back to some of the things I said before, I always start with the data. Like what does the data say? And the data doesn't mean it's the answer, but at least it grounds you in something that's real as opposed to just opinion. And then the second thing is how do you have a non-emotional, strong debate around what does the data say? And a lot of people get defensive really quickly. It's kind of human nature. And so defanging people so they can feel like they can say what's on their mind with clarity and not get emotional about it and not feel like they're boxing a corner, and that takes a lot of hand holding. And so some of the things I learned on Team Sports is like if your teammate makes a bad shot and you lose the game, you can't get on them because then the next game it's not going to work. And so all these things to come together, and like, how do you how do you get people to work together and be really non-emotional about making decisions in a way that's fact-based, experience-based, and then you can create a vigorous debate and then walk away saying, okay, we got a good answer out of that, even though it was tense and it felt a little tough. We feel good about each other and we feel good about the decision.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

In your world, uh uncertainty is prevalent. And I know we we briefly talked about some things that I've been reading with the stoic mindset of being able to only control the things that you can control, and obviously that's a cliche, but there's a reason that there is. In a world where prediction models are everywhere and uncertainty prevails, how do you deal with those uncontrollables? And how do you deal when mistakes happen? And I'm like you said, I remember we had a conversation that you know mistakes happen every single day, but you just can't let it get to you. Right. How do you deal with the uncertainty?

SPEAKER_02 13:40

First, I think if it when we're making decisions or I'm making decisions, I start with what's the upside and what's the downside? And and a lot of humans start with one or the other. They're optimistic people, they're half full people, so they're like, look at all the great things that could happen if I did this. We can make this investment and we can make all this money and all this good stuff. And then there'll be the half-empty person who will say, Yeah, but you know what, this could go wrong, this could go wrong, this could go wrong. So they never make investments, and the other people make a lot of investments. And the trick is, how do you have a good mindset on what's the upside and what's the downside? And you have to look at both. And so I always look at everything in risk return, even decisions you're making that are life decisions, like what's the upside and what's the downside? And I look for asymmetric return decisions. That could be an investment, it could be something in sports, it's like what whatever it's, but you want things where the upside outweighs the downside. Because everything's got upside and everything's got downside. So you have to start with what are those. And then the best things to do are where there's a lot more upside than downside. And so a lot of times in life, there's not a lot of downside. So just do it. And so I have the expression that it's called why not. And it doesn't, it's not meant to be a cavalier thing, but it's like I tell people like if you take most decisions in your life, they don't have that much downside. You might think they do, but they really don't. And so why not do them? Because the out the upside outweighs the downside by quite a bit, but you have to think in that mindset, and most people think in one or the other, and training yourself to think in both, and then adding that data component to is a really important piece of it, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

I I might regret bringing this up again because I've brought up the last three podcasts, but this idea of negative capability, which is the idea of not irritably grasping towards the a truth and being able to, like you said, be in that middle ground of not being pessimistic or optimistic about an opportunity. I think that's it's a skill that people have to learn, and some people have the an innate ability to do it, but I think it's learned. In in your college and high school experience and your education, were those kind of those soft skills that you see and you use on a daily basis taught, or was it just the hard stuff about statistics and and quantum mechanics and whatever it was?

SPEAKER_02 15:56

Yeah, I mean I didn't take any classes in soft skills, uh none. And I think it really did come from some of it came from my parents, some of it came from probably who I am, just born that way, and some of it came, as I said, from playing sports. Because I really do think if you another cliche, you know, sports is about life. It really is. If you if you if you if you get think about how you're gonna be a great teammate and how you're even on an individual sport, like being positive when things aren't going well is hard to do. Yeah, you know, dropping the negatives. You know, I was a soccer goalie and like you you lose a goal by you lose a game by one goal. So you have two shots on goal, maybe, and one goes in and you lose the game, it's easy to get down. Yeah, but you just can't. You have to say, okay, what am I gonna do differently next time? And so it's it's really all these experiences that you have to be open to integrate into your mind and say, what can I take away from this? I could be down for a little bit, like I'm gonna be bumped. I lost the game, it sucks. But then what am I gonna take away to do differently the next time in a positive way? And how and to me, I look at how can I simplify the decision? Because your brain can only hold so many things. So one of my strong suits is taking complicated things and making them simple. And because then I can remember them, then I can do something with it in the future. But complicated stuff, it's like, what do I do with this complicated mash in my head? I don't know, it's not applicable anymore. But I can simplify it, then I can make it applicable to other circumstances.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

When you when you talk to the CEOs that you work with, and even on a lower level with your kids or with people who are interviewing at Bain, what do you look for in in these young, aspiring individuals? Are they the hard skills or are they the these soft skills that we don't talk about as much?

SPEAKER_02 17:41

It's both. And so on the on the hard skills, it's I I often ask these kids, and a lot of these kids were interviewed that you know, they had four-row in high school. They went to a grade high school, they had a great GPA in college, they had a hard major, and I say, Are you smart? And they kind of look at me and go, like in your mind, you're gonna think of it. I was like, Well, are you smart? And then I see how they answer the question. And some of the kids will say, Oh, yeah, I got great grades in here and great grades in that. Like, I don't really care, I mean, I care what your grades are, but I want to care like how do you take life, complicated things, decisions, and make them simple and make great decisions around them. Really smart people make things really simple. So there was there's this scientist, Dr. Langer in Boston. He's founded a ton of biotech companies. I I heard him talk one time, and he was describing what was really a pretty complicated scientific discovery that he had that he formed a company around. And at the end, I was like, wow, that was so simple. Why did no one think about it? Because it was actually really complex. He actually just made it really simple. So smart to me is a big piece of it, but smart is taking complicated things and coming up with an insight that other people don't have. And the second is soft skills. How can I deal with it? So often when I was interviewing, whether they be a CEO or a younger person, they would come through, they would talk to my assistant, they would come and meet me, they would leave, and I would ask my assistant, how did they treat you? Because some people treat upper people well and they don't treat the lower people well. And so I always ask my assistant, what what did you think about that person? How did they treat you? Because if they treated her well, then I had a pretty good sense that they were a good person.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Interesting. I see a lot, I see that a lot in in young people where they think that a conversation with someone who has higher status means a lot more than the the conversation they just had prior. And you see social climbing in these, and especially with you know LinkedIn and and the way that how competitive it is now to get a good job out of college. I think that there's a loss of humanity and humility, especially in the United States. I I read this one thing and people I've talked to where they thought where they said that you know the world of finance is is a pretty granular job. There's not much human connection into it. And then someone raised their hand and they said, no, actually. The whole thing is about humid humility and in talking to people. How would you describe these conversations you have with these CEOs? And how do you how do you provide that uh that criticism that they may need to elevate their company?

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Well, I try not to invest with CEOs who I don't think have humility. Because with humility comes the ability to question yourself, the ability to ask people to be part of your team on something you're not as strong, but where they're stronger than you on it. And humility is accepting mistakes, realizing that it was a mistake, being intellectually honest that it was a mistake, and doing something differently the next time. So I think humility is a huge thing. And I I say in different ways, but to everyone, like everyone is replaceable. You're not nearly as good as you think you are. Because something in the world conspired to help you be successful. No one did anything alone. And it's like, oh, I'm great, I did this, I won the game, or I was the CEO. It's like you were the CEO of a company with 6,000 people in it. Someone else clearly did something to help the company be successful. It wasn't all you. Well, I was the one who led it. I was like, Yeah, you had a killer CFO who made some really hard decisions for you that you didn't make, but they did. So you're replaceable. You're not as good as you think you are. So start with humility and realize that there's lots of really talented people in the world. And this goes back to my hard work thing. Like, the number one thing you control is how hard you work. Uh, the number two thing you control is not thinking you're greater than you are. Yeah. Because everyone has some combination of luck and other people that'll help make be successful. And once you start thinking it was about you, that's when you start losing the game.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

In a place of influence, what would you say your philosophy is around leadership?

SPEAKER_02 21:53

I would say number one, people need to trust you. They need to trust that you're doing things for the right reason. They may not agree with exactly what you're doing or what you're or how you're going to do it, but they got to know that you're doing it from you believe it's the right thing to do. Number one. Number two, that they believe that you as the leader have their interest in mind, their development, their success, their equity value in their stock. But that they're actually trying to help you be successful as well. And the third is they're not hiding anything from you. They're fully transparent. They're they're sharing things with you because in order to be successful, people gotta know what's going on. And so when you have leaders who have those kind of characteristics, that's a big part of it. Then I layer on top, they need to have passion because it working's hard. That's why they call work. It's really hard. And so if you have a leader who gets you fired up every day and you want to come to work and you wanna push the envelope and you want to spend the extra hour, that makes it a lot more easy to come to work and more successful. So passion is a huge piece of it. And finally, is that they have a desire to win. And win doesn't mean win at all costs. Win means to be as successful as you can possibly be doing all the things you're trying to do. And Lou Holtz, who was a famous football coach for Notre Dame, uh, I heard him talk one time, and he had this expression called win, and and he said it's an acronym. It's called What's Important Now. And so his description from football was if I'm the left tackle and the play calls for me to pull so the running back can follow me, what's important now is as soon as the ball is snapped that I pull in the right direction, that I make the block I need to block, and the running back can get through. That's what's important now. In business, it could be all kinds of things, the decision I need to make or so on. But I I love that expression because winning is what's important now. Yeah. And I think that leaders who have that kind of mindset get teams fired up. Yeah. And like, this is what we're gonna do to be successful. Let's let's let's make this happen.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Yeah. I'm trying to like sympathize the things that you're saying in in the win acronym is exactly making something complicated simple. Winning a game at Notre Dame is obviously hard. Winning four quarters is hard, but one play, that's an actionable step that you can get done. And then that compounding over four quarters might equal win. Right. And I I was talking to Dave Saunders the other day because we had a we had a tough soccer season, and it was tough to be the captain of a team that lost 14 games. And it's tough to be the captain on a lacrosse team that is getting shut out by Aspen and losing to Battle Mountain by close buddies, and it's tough, and it's tough to lead in a situation like that. And Dave was like, So what are you saying to these boys before the game? And I was like, you know, trying to rally them up and get them to care and get them to make big hits and stuff like that, and and do the things they can. He's like, nah, man, just tell it to make a good lacrosse play. Like one actionable step, and then that that little sense of confidence and that dopamine hit will make them do it again. And I think, and like like you said, sports is sports is life, and and how you can apply that to the business world. Do you look at kids or do you do you like seeing kids who played sports their entire life? And is that is that a big thing? Huge piece of it.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

And it's not exclusive. There are lots of kids who didn't play sports, who are great at what they do, great business, great other things. But when I see kids who played sports at a high level in particular, it's a good indicator that there's something in their mindset that enabled them to be successful with that and that they learn from that that they can carry through in the rest of their life.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

I like the idea of failure, especially because if this whole podcast is about success, there has to be something about failure. Where in life have you seen some failures, if you can be vulnerable about them, and what has that taught you?

SPEAKER_02 25:45

Yeah, it it's really interesting because I I think the as I've gone through life, people use the word failure, and the reality is there are not many things you fail at. There's things that you made bad decisions on, there's things that didn't go as planned, but failure feels to me like a really strong negative. And so I'll take ski racing. You know, there's a hundred people start a race, one person wins. Did 99 people fail? Yeah. No.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

No.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

They just didn't get as far as they wanted to get, and they probably learned something from it. They had a couple great turns, and they say, okay, I'm gonna do more of those turns the next time. And so I think the main thing is when you have every day you make decisions. Another framework I have for thinking about life is your life is pretty simple. It's options and decisions. And the more options you have in your life, getting good grades, being a great athlete, whatever, the being a good person, the knowing a lot of uh uh interesting people, these are all options. And the more options you have, the more places you can get to. And the better you are at making decisions, the farther you're gonna get along and where you want to go too. So if you have a lot of options and you're good at making decisions, you're probably gonna end up wherever you want to be in life. So your life is really pretty simple. It's like create options, be a good person, work hard in school, play hard sports, meet lots of good people and become friends with them, and then learn how to make decisions. So back to failure. How do you make decisions? You make mistakes and you make decisions that didn't work out as planned, and then you learn from them. And you have to be like we've said before, intellectually honest. I made a mistake, I'm gonna accept that. I'm gonna do something differently the next time. And so the only way humans really learn, in my view, is to feel pain. And they can feel physical pain or they can feel mental pain, emotional pain. And so until you feel pain, you don't really learn. And the analogy I give is like you're practicing on practice team for soccer and you missed a goal, it didn't hurt. Like you didn't lose the game, it was just practice. Yeah, you get in a real game in your state championship and you miss a goal, you're gonna feel a lot of pain. Yeah, and you're never gonna forget that goal. And so the more decisions you're willing to put yourself into, where if you get it wrong, you're gonna feel pain, and then you learn from that pain, and everything is pain but death, right? Yeah, but so learn from the pain, and and that's how humans learn. And so I don't consider it failure. I consider these are all learning experiences that create the next step if you use it the right way.

SPEAKER_00 28:11

Thomas Edison said that I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. And I like that. And like you said, that failure is harsh and it and it could lead people down a downward spiral. But if they can understand and they can reflect that that was just you know a piece of the puzzle and then they got now, and now they can you know figure out ways that work, I think that could be really cool.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

And I'll say this like a lot of parents these days, and it's hard not to do this, but like physical pain, don't ride your bike there. Don't do this. Don't like the kid's not learning anything. So the way you learn about riding your bike too fast down the hill is to crash, break your arm, and eight weeks later you're fine. Yeah. But uh the you know, people don't listen to their parents because they're not learning when they're doing that. They they kind of are, but until you feel that pain, the emotional pain of like, I wouldn't go out and drink that extra beer, or don't ride that bike. You know, until you do and experience it, you don't your brain doesn't really absorb it. Yeah. And so you have to make you have to have lots of experiences in your life if you're gonna learn a lot.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Yeah. That's kind of the point of being a kid, is you know, to to mess up and and to try and experiment and fall short of something and hurt someone and then have a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

And even if you're an adult in a company, if the if your boss doesn't let you try a bunch of stuff, you're not gonna learn anything. Yeah. It won't be fun, number one.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:28

But you're not gonna learn anything until you make mistakes. And hopefully the mistakes aren't so big that they're not gonna really hurt things, but you gotta make mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

A lot of people, when they make mistakes, it it sends them down that that downward spiral. And it's because of a lack of an ability to be able to reflect and then use it. How would you, you know, if you have a if you if you have a kid on your team that just keeps messing up and they just can't seem to get it, and the executives are, you know, obviously not happy with this kid, and then you can see this kind of confidence kind of dwindle. How do you help them in their confidence to kind of get that back up so they can, you know, perform at that highest level? Yep.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

It goes back to what you're saying before. It's like one step at a time. Let's figure out what they can be successful at. Let's get them to do a few of those things, prove to themselves that they actually can be successful, prove to other people they can be successful. And it's kind of finding the right role and starting small. So crawl, walk, run. Let's have them crawl again. Figure out what they can do that they're really good at, they can crawl at. And they're successful crawling. Let's get them walking, let's get them running. So finding what they can be successful at, showing them first in their own mind they can be successful, and then other people see that, and that starts to rebuild the confidence.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

I I like the idea of intention, and and there's some great philosophers who say that intention doesn't really matter as long as you're doing it. I would disagree. I would say that the in the why behind the action is unbelievably important. I in in your field, you must see people whose intention are you know thirsty, money-hungry people. How do you what's your intention behind the things that you do every day? From an investment standpoint, or but I think they could also kind of collide with every other aspect of life.

SPEAKER_02 31:17

I think you you gotta start with but there's a series of things. One is what make what's fun for you. Because uh most things are so that back to this 90-10 thing. Like the first 90%'s pretty easy. The last 10% is really hard. So if you're gonna do stuff that's gonna take you somewhere in whatever thing you're doing in life or business or sports, it's gonna be really hard if you're gonna be really successful. So you better enjoy it. Because if you don't enjoy it, you're not gonna put in the last 10%. That's the hardest piece to do, and you're not gonna be successful. You gotta focus on stuff you're gonna really enjoy. Often that's coincident with things you're really good at. Yeah. Because things you're really good at, you tend to enjoy, and they kind of go hand in glove. So find the things you really enjoy and work really hard at it. And that's intentional. Intentional would be often, you know, you hear people like you were saying, say, I just want to make a lot of money. I said, Well, there's lots of ways to make a lot of money. You know, there's teachers who teach in school who write books on the side who make a lot of money. There's people who trade commodities who make a lot of money. You know, you can make a lot of money at pretty much anything you do, yeah, if that's a parameter, but don't start with making money. Start with what you're good at, start with what you're really interested in and you're passionate about, and then layer the economic component on top of it, and you're way likely to both be successful in making money and enjoy it along the way.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

Yeah, I think intention's tough, especially uh for you know my audience, the 18 to 24-year-olds, and it's because of this pressure that they put on them. How have you dealt with pressure over the years in the investment world, but also as a as a father, that pressure?

SPEAKER_02 32:53

I think I got a great piece of advice early on in my career at Bang Capital, and I was working with a portfolio company, and I was just a junior person working on it, and the company was just not going well at all. And so I sat down with another partner who was not involved with it, and I was explaining the situation, and he said, I have a couple questions for you. Is anyone dead? Is anyone dying? And I said, No. I said, It's not that bad. It's all gonna be okay. And then let's break it down into pieces. Let's go one at a time and we'll work our way through it, and we're gonna get there on the thing. But like it's not that bad. Nothing's that bad. And I've I read a lot of World War II books and learn a lot about that and and a little bit on World War I. And like I think about what the soldiers went through in World War I and World War II and some of the wars now. It's like 99% of us will never experience anything nearly as bad as what they're going through. So it's just not that bad. So number one is like, don't just realize it's not perspective. Put perspective around it. And then, you know, with with kids, it's like figure out again, like don't worry about what everyone else thinks. And you can ha think about success in two ways. Success can be what what do you think you were successful at. Success can be what other people think you were successful at. Yeah. So if I want to be a really good lacrosse player and I try as hard as I can and on the third midfield line, and I got one goal all season, that might be really successful for me. Other people might look at that from the outside and say, you're on the third midfield line, you got one goal, you're not a good midfielder.

SPEAKER_03 34:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

And so you got to put perspective around what success means and start with yourself. Know who you are, believe in yourself, and don't worry so much about what other people think. Because once you start doing that, it pulls you away from who you are. And a lot of who you are is what you were born as, who your parents were. You can't like you can't control that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:45

So focus on what you can't control and what makes you feel successful. It's really hard because there's a lot, particularly now with all the social media, everyone like this is success, that's success, that's this is the best TikTok. Like, who are you? Like, what there's seven billion people in the world. There's a lot of way more successful people to themselves than what other people do. Everyone likes to put everyone down.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:09

Like, oh, they're not that good, they're not that good. It's like, well, who are you? Yeah, back to the humiliating. Like, tell me how great you are. Let me tell you why I'm great. Because I did this for myself. I got this done. I I did it. I worked as hard as I possibly could. Here's what I got. I'm successful.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

Over the course of the career, you've obviously been successful, but you you didn't stop there. You've been successful on a philanthropy level. What does giving back mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 35:34

So I I I've tried to give back in two ways. One is not not for profits, typically around inner city youth and then also in sports. And the first one, I didn't have a lot of money, and I'm making a lot of money. And so some of it's been just giving money, but more importantly, what I've tried to do is take all the business learnings I have from working with over 100 companies in my life and applying that to the nonprofit world and having them think about the same kinds of things that the the CEOs and the boards of the companies I was invested in thought about to make them more successful. Because for a nonprofit, it's just an operating company. It just happens not to try and make profit, but it's trying to utilize a dollar as effectively as possible. So a for-profit company takes a dollar of revenue and tries to make profit. A nonprofit takes a dollar of donation, tries to serve as many people or whatever they're trying to do as effective as possible. They're all the same thing. So I've tried to do that and take all my knowledge and experience on that side. And the sports, I had an unbelievable high school lacrosse coach. I learned a ton from about lacrosse sports and life. And so I've coached lacrosse and soccer, mostly lacrosse, but some soccer for a long, long time. And try to take everything I learned from that coach and impart it to the kids, hundreds of kids that I've coached over the years, and have them understand not just the sport of lacrosse, but sports in general, and then life on top of it.

SPEAKER_00 36:59

What were those what were some of those impactful things that you can remember from your high school coach that you try to implement on the other?

SPEAKER_02 37:04

Number one was work harder than anyone else, as we talked about before. Like we busted our butt all the time. Number two was fundamentals matter, like get the little things right. So little things like don't be offsides. Yeah. That that's that's just a bad mistake. Yeah. That it should never happen. You know, throw and catch with both hands all the time. You know, like if there's a pick, you know, don't move on the pick. Yeah. Like these are little things, but all these little things add up to winning and losing games. So that's another piece. Third is the team atmosphere. Like, how do we hold each other up and accountable to work together as a team to be successful? So those are some of the things from my lacrosse coach that are applicable for really any sports and for life.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

We talked about this before we started recording, but as some of the audience may know, and if there's any new listeners, that I have two traditions on the show. I mean, one of them is involving the audience. So they can go to my website, which is the search the search dash for success.com, and there's a place where they can leave a question. And I think like my philosophy around this entire thing is that I'm passionate about it and I and I want and I want to get it done, and I want to get it done right because I do genuinely believe that the things and these insightful things that I I've learned from my guests, and I'm so thankful for your insight, can really help some of these kids in in their in their pursuit of knowledge and a career and a family and a friendship and any other relationship. So a friend of mine, Jack, he asked, When in life have you made a mistake and what did you do to make amends?

SPEAKER_02 38:48

I've made a lot of mistakes. What have I done? You know, I'll I'll maybe I'll throw a couple. I don't know how old I was, but I was probably like 10, and I was playing with a bunch of kids, and we were all playing with sticks, and I whipped this kid across the back with a stick and he started crying. And I felt really badly. So I just went up to the kid and like immediately said, I'm so sorry, put my arm around him, and said, I didn't really mean it. We were just screwing around. But like I remember that because 10-year-old boys like they do that kind of stuff, but they just they just walk away. But like, I can't leave this kid like this. So that something reminded me that like they're just people, they're just humans. And if you hurt someone emotionally or physically, just immediately apologize. Like most of the time, people didn't intend it. And so I I take that away from that experience. Mistakes in business, it's the same kind of thing. Like, accept it, first of all. Acknowledge that you were the one who made the mistake. And a lot of people won't do that. It's like take responsibility. You can control almost everything in your life. You made a mistake, it was your mistake, accept it, talk to the person, move on. And you might not be able to fix it, but at least you can acknowledge it and accept that you had a responsibility in it. So, I mean, those are the kind of things that I've I've learned from mistakes. And I guess my summary of that is like accept that it was made, acknowledge that you had a role to play in it, and then do something about it to make it to make it better if you can.

SPEAKER_00 40:18

I think that we we all make a lot of mistakes, and and sometimes we struggle to to make amends to those mistakes because it takes vulnerability to tell someone that you probably do care about because you probably wouldn't be apologizing if you didn't care about it. And that's like the weird part about life is that you hurt the people that you love the most. And I always find that kind of absurd, but that's just kind of the way it is. And it's tough to you know put yourself out there and and and really apologize. And then there's there's a lack of control there. You don't know if they'll take you back, and you don't know if you'll be able to get through it. But I think like the only thing you can control is making sure that they know that you are sorry. Because we'll make a lot of mistakes in our life, and you have to give yourself.

SPEAKER_02 41:01

And what's the worst that's gonna happen? You go and apologize. So if you think that they're not gonna like you anymore, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

And you say, well, I'm not sure I want to apologize because they're not gonna like me. Well, they're not gonna like you anyway. So just apologize. And they may not like you, but you're no worse off. Yeah. And highly like you, you're better off. Yeah. Because most people don't do that. And so when you do it, people are like, Wow, you're the first person who's apologized for me on something like this. And so these are easy things to they feel hard, but they really are actually pretty easy.

SPEAKER_00 41:32

The the last tradition we have is a quote that I pick. I mean, today I have the purpose of life is to not make yourself happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, and to be compassionate. Wolf Waldo Emerson, like I said before, I tend not to, you know, talk a lot about that core. I tend to give it up, and I want people to to take it for what it is. And if they don't agree with it, great. If they do agree with it, great. But all I know is that I'm extremely grateful for this. I mean, I think this was awesome. Great conversation. Thanks, Mike. Great. I I loved it. It was great.

SPEAKER_03 42:06

Thanks for uh all the conversations, of course.