Welcome to Mindful Monday!

This week, we focus on the attributes of winners, impact/agency/taste, culture, doing things that don't scale, and wise words from Malcolm Gladwell. And... CLICK HERE to read our USA Today Best-Selling book, The Score That Matters.

#632: Nick Huber - The Attributes of Winners

​Nick Huber is an entrepreneur who owns stakes in 11 companies, including a real estate private equity firm and several agencies. His portfolio of companies employs over 325 people living all over the world. Nick lives with his wife and 3 children in Athens, Georgia. He’s the author of the book, The Sweaty Startup: How to get rich doing boring things. We discussed: the attributes of winners, the 4 truths of life, sales, sweaty startups, and more. You can also WATCH our conversation on YouTube.

Impact, Agency, and Taste

Finding high-leverage work has two interrelated components: Agency - Some combination of the initiative/proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentless resourcefulness to make sure you’ll succeed. Taste - You need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try. Taste is important both “in the large” (picking important problems) and “in the small” (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); you usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former. CLICK HERE to learn more.

Culture Is The Last 50 Days

Culture simply happens. It's emergent behavior. There's nothing to do, it just is. A company's culture is a 50-day moving average. It's what you've been collectively doing as a company over the last 50 days. Jason Fried and I had a good conversation about this on episode #538. He also wrote this short essay about it.

Do Things That Don't Scale

Companies take off because the leaders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going. I love these examples of leaders doing things that don't scale to grow a business.

Wise Words...

“That’s your responsibility as a person, a human being... To constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.” - Malcolm Gladwell​

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Ryan Hawk Author: The Score That Matters, Welcome to Management, & The Pursuit of Excellence​ Host: The Learning Leader Show​