Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

You. Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells

and this is the Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast, episode number

52. We are joined today by

our returning co host from episode number 21,

which, if you're counting or scoring at home,

which you should be, is our most downloaded episode

of the first 1st year of our August podcast.

There. We covered a book of Five rings by Miyamoto Massashi.

So I would like to welcome back to the podcast from episode 21,

John Hill, aka Small Mountain. How are

you doing, John? Dude, I am stoked to be back.

I had a blast last time. I couldn't wait to share it with all my

martial arts buddies. And I'm excited to dig in this because I

think there's as much greatness in this as there is in The Five Rings.

Well, we are going to cover a

whole plethora of topics today. We're going to talk

about chivalry and knighthood. We're going to talk about competency

and leadership, the need to be polite and cover

a number of other different areas in our book today by

Inazo Natobe, the Way

of the Samurai.

Now, I have a paperback version. John's got the

hardcover version. My version came

through or was published in 2022

by Arcturus Publishing Limited out of London,

out of Arcturus Holdings Limited.

However, this book was originally published

in 1900. And so we're

going to kind of go through this step by step. And if

you listen to episode 21, you know that that was one of our longest episodes,

our longest conversations. It came in at around 4 hours and 15 minutes.

If you have an opportunity to go listen to that, you should go listen to

that or you should go watch the YouTube video of that.

And it's still, like I said, our most downloaded episode.

And I'm hoping that The Way of the Samurai today will join

that episode. So reading from,

starting from opening from The Way of the Samurai,

we're going to go to the chapter again, if you are

paying attention on chapter six, that's where we're going to

start on politeness. And I quote

from in his own Natobe when

proprietary, when propriety sorry, pardon me. Was elevated

to the sin quandon of social intercourse, it was only to

be expected that an elaborate system of etiquette should come into vogue

to train youth in correct social behavior.

How one must bow and accosted others, how he must walk and sit were taught

and learned with utmost care. Table manners grew to

be a science. Tea serving and drinking were raised to

a ceremony. A man of education is, of course, expected to be master

of all these. I have heard sliding

remarks made by Europeans upon our elaborate discipline of politeness.

It has been criticized as absorbing too much of our thought and insofar a folly

to observe strict obedience to it. I admit that there may be

unnecessary niceties and ceremonious etiquette, but whether it partakes

as much folly as the adherence to ever changing fashions

of the west is a question not very clear to my mind.

Even fashions I do not consider solely as freaks of vanity.

On the contrary, I look upon these as a ceaseless search

for the human mind of the human mind for the beautiful. Much less

do I consider elaborate ceremony as altogether trivial,

for it denotes the result of long observation as to

the most appropriate method of achieving a certain result.

If there is anything to do, there is certainly a best way to do it,

and the best way is both the most economical and the most graceful.

Mr. Spencer defines grace as the most economical manner of motion. The tea

ceremony presents certain definite ways of manipulating

a bowl, a spoon, a napkin, et cetera. To a novice

it looks tedious, but one soon discovers that the way prescribed is, after all,

the most saving of time and labor. In other words, the most economical

use of force. Hence, according to Spencer's dictum,

the most graceful.

I have said that etiquette was elaborated into the finest niceties. So much

so that different schools advocating different systems came into existence,

but they all united in the ultimate essential. And this was

put by a great exponent of the best known school of etiquette the oga.

The oga Sara, in the following terms

the end of all etiquette is to so cultivate your mind

that even when you are quietly seated, not the roughest ruffian

can dare make onset on your person. It means,

in other words, that by constant exercise in correct manners,

one brings all the parts and faculties of his body into perfect order

and into such harmony with itself and its environment as to express

the mastery of spirit over the flesh. What a new

and deep significance the French word Beyonce comes

thus to contain. If the premise is

true that gracefulness means economy of force, then it follows as a logical sequence

that a constant practice of graceful deportment must bring with it a reserve

and storage of force. Fine manners, therefore, mean power in

repose. As an example of how the simplest thing

can be made into an art and they become spiritual culture, I may take

cha no, you? The tea ceremony tea sipping as

a fine art. Why should it not be? In the children drawing

pictures on the sand, or in the savage carving on a rock was the promise

of a Raphael or a Michelangelo.

How much more is the drinking of a beverage which began with the transcendental

contemplation of a Hindu anchorite entitled to

develop into a handmaiden of religion and morality?

That calmness of mind, that serenity of temper, that composure and quietness

of demeanor which are the first essentials of chad. No, you are without

doubt the first conditions of right thinking and right feeling.

The scrupulous cleanliness of the little room shut off from sight and sound of

the maddening crowd is in itself conducive to direct one's thoughts from the

world. The bare interior does not engross one's

attention like the innumerable pictures in Bricabrack of a western parlor.

The presence of kakemono calls our attention more to grace of

design than to beauty of color. The utmost refinement of taste

is the object aimed at, whereas anything like display is

banished with religious horror. The very fact that it was

invented by a contemplative recluse in a time when wars

and the rumors of wars were incessant is well calculated to show

that this institution was more than a pastime. Before entering

the quiet precincts of the tea room, the company assembling to partake

of the ceremony laid aside, together with their swords the

ferocity of the battlefield or the cares of government there to

find peace and friendship.

Cha no you is more than a ceremony. It is a fine art.

It is poetry with articulate gestures for rhythm.

It is a modus operandi of soul discipline.

Its greatest value lies in this last phase, not infrequently the

other phases, preponderated in the mind of its votaries.

But that does not prove that its essence was not of a spiritual nature.

Politeness will be a great acquisition if it does no

more than impart grace to manners. But its function does

not stop here, for propriety spring as

it does for motives of benevolence and modesty, and actuated

by tender feelings toward the sensibilities of others is

ever a graceful expression of sympathy.

Its requirement is that we should weep with those that weep

and rejoice with those that

rejoice.

Why be polite?

We live in a communication era

with an a on the end of that, or a roar R-O-R

at the end of the er, depending upon your perspective.

We live in a space in a time where the

hot take matters more than the slow burn,

where our Twitter feeds and who

said what, where on what social media platform, or who clapped

back on who very quickly seems to

matter more than politeness.

We can read these words from the way of the samurai and we can

absorb them. But to actually practice them, to actually walk them out

in our daily lives, is, quite honestly, becoming more and more difficult.

I picked this section to open and to have John and I talk

about it, because the samurai mindset and that

is one of the things that we are going to talk about today how to

adopt a samurai mindset. I'm not asking you to swing a sword

or to go caught off somebody's head. I am asking you

to adopt a mindset, adopt a way of thinking, a mode of behavior.

And when we adopt a mode of behavior,

we adopt modes of behaving. And one

of those modes of behaving is politeness, even politeness in communication.

A samurai mindset operates best, as was stated here

when he was talking about the tea ceremony. It operates best within

chaos. Vanality disorder and the conditions of spiritual

battle, which I think we can all agree upon if

we are operating with our eyes open anyway, that we are definitely

in a spiritual battle, at least in the west, if not

globally. And of course, some will say such

as it has always been, which is

why politeness is something that we have always needed in our conduct

and in our behavior.

Metal is heavier than feathers, he says

in a little piece there that I did not read. And that

is an important thing to remember. Because once attention to the parts

of communication engagement have been abandoned, once the small things have been left

behind on the road to the hot take on the road

to the quick and easy clap back. Once those things have been

left behind, we leave behind competency and

the rest the whole thing is sure to follow.

A building collapses once you remove the cornerstone from it.

Why be polite?

I want to thank John for coming on the podcast today. I want to open

up the door to him, open up the floor to him. If he would like

to reintroduce himself, he can. But let's

start off with this question for you today, John. And once again,

thank you for coming back on. I can't wait to sort of rip this book

apart and start talking about it and applying it to leadership.

Why is it important for leaders to hold on to politeness in a world where

rudeness seems to be linked inextricably to this idea of

not libertarian freedom, but almost libertine

freedom? So this

is probably the chapter I have the least notes and highlights in,

right? The other one being the chapter on, like, women.

But as we're talking about this, I'm a sales coach,

right? And so well known is the stigma of the salesperson,

right? Be anything, say anything, do anything to

get your money away from you, right? And to

me, when he's talking about the stuff at the top of this thing,

he's talking about the tea ceremony very specifically.

I don't see that as much politeness as I think about it as being very

intentional, like being very present, right? Okay. And I'm

thinking about this all the time because there are so many things that

try to attract my attention, right? They try to attract my clients attention.

And stuff like this. There's always a fire to put out. There's always someone who

wants your attention to try to sell you something. And so the idea that

you can go into a space and just enjoy the tea,

you can put everything else aside and just enjoy the tea,

is huge. Because I think that more people should cultivate

silence and disconnecting from social media and all these platforms that

are pulling for our attention and make it super easy to kind

of I call them Keyboard Commandos. These people who would never

say these things in person, but because they're behind a keyboard and

there's a certain level of anonymity, anything around politeness

just goes out the window. And that drives

me crazy, right? Because being an entrepreneur,

growing a business, one of the things that everyone talks about is go be

polarizing because it's a great way to get people

over to your side. I don't want to do that

in my marketing message. I don't go about it that way.

And I think the reason that we're here to talk

about is like, how does this apply to leadership?

Well, I think that right now there's

a whole bunch of organizations that are back in the office. Some people are still

doing remote. There's a bunch of stuff in between around hybrid and everything.

And there's all this electronic communication that leaves so

much room to be misinterpreted.

I've lost deals because I've done a follow up and they injected the wrong

tone. And because it was in the written word and not in a vocal communication

where I can control the tone, they have the ability to turn it

into a reason to not move forward or something like

this. And I think from a leadership perspective,

we have to be more mindful around the idea that everyone is

busy, there is less focus, right? So that politeness is being

present. My partner and I are trying very hard to

stop multitasking. So if we're working and we work together

and so she'll come in, she'll have a question for me. If I'm

looking at my phone, she's like, I'm just going to wait.

I'm like, okay. And now it's forcing me to be more polite and

just be more present in those conversations, which I need to be anyway.

So the big takeaway from here is

that with slack and email and so many ways to communicate,

many of them are not appropriate for certain things.

If you're trying to coach somebody, let's say that you're a

sales leader, right, and it just hits your

head that one of your reps had a deal and you

just send them a slack message, hey, when is that deal going to close?

That's not a great conversation. As a leader, you're putting your person back on their

heels. They're going to respond to you with a fabricated response and it might not

be real or on and there's no intention being put into this thing. It's just

like, I got to get this out of my head. I got to move as

quickly as I can because there's so much going on and I might forget about

this. So for me, as I was reading this chapter, I was

just like thinking about that idea,

how much can get misinterpreted because it's written down versus set aloud.

And as leaders, where are we falling down

on that job of just assuming that people understand our tonality? Well, they know

where I'm coming from, but they don't because it might be six

months between actual phone calls or meeting in person,

doing this kind of, like, very close human interaction that really forms these

bonds that we rely on when times are tough.

I'm thinking about multiple things and taking notes while you're talking.

Sure. Because there's multiple sort of

different threads that I want to play with a little bit here.

And I think we want to move both up and down the hierarchy

in this conversation. Obviously, we want to keep it grounded for leaders,

and we want to be grounded in the space of the way of the Samurai,

want to be grounded in what we're telling leaders. But we also want to I

always try to do with this on the podcast, and we do this in our

last conversation, try to go up and down, right?

Try to pull something down from the top, right? But also

bring something up from the bottom and try to try to get some synergy,

right. Some uniting together, right?

One of the spaces that's really interesting to me is a space of ethics and

morals that's really interesting to me.

I took a whole class, an online class last

year, late last year,

about ethics. And one of

the core questions that came towards

the end of it that was listed as a practical

sort of question to ask yourself, and I actually have it on my workstation

here in front of my microphone. It's a little sticky note

with two questions am I making the right ethical decision

right now? And then, am I doing the most ethical thing right now?

And I keep it here as a reminder, not because I'm unethical or not because

I need to be reminded of my ethics. I think I have

an okay, hold on that everybody's got cracks

and nobody's perfect.

But I tie ethics to politeness because I think that that

is one of the higher order virtues,

and it disturbs me as I think at

a larger cultural level, particularly in our politics

and in our culture, we've abandoned a lightness

in favor of rudeness

disguised as being, quote unquote, real. Now, this is not new,

right? I can remember before the Internet, back in the

good old days when people

would say, I want to get real with you, or you need to show your

real self, right? Or.

In the case of myself, coming off of Black History Month, I'd have other

black people ask me this, are you authentically black? I never knew what the

hell that meant. Oh, yeah, we could talk about that. I never knew what

the hell that meant. Now, by saying,

I don't know what it means, I'm rejecting the thing that I know it means.

I'm putting it on notice, right? Because I do actually know what it

means. But that's in the form of rudeness.

That's a form of impoliteness, right?

And I think we've scaled that up with our social

media usage and just with the ways in which we've

allowed personalities. And I won't name any names because I

don't need to. Everybody knows who the personalities are. We've allowed personalities

to sort of trump through our culture. I think that impacts

leaders deeply, and I

also think it impacts followers because followers expectations shift

around. Right? Yeah. It's not

the person who you talked to who was the decision maker who turned

down your deal. Although they may have given the

green light to say no or to say yes for sure,

it's the person who is three steps away from them

that sent you the email. It's the

person in that chain that's missing that tonality. And weirdly enough,

they're reflecting something from the leader's posture. They're reflecting

something from the leader's unstated behaviors and communications.

One of the things that I was thinking about as we're

going over this today, it didn't hit my radar whenever I was reading this the

first time, but, like, talking about this today is like,

I i think that politeness is tied

to empathy, right. Because I think yeah,

I think I think Natobi would agree, actually, because I. Think if you

I'm a I'm a nerd. Like, I'm a big nerd. And I remember

whenever I was first hitting this path of, like, really trying to be a sales

professional, like, really, like, embrace the craft and everything, and I went to go

work for or not work for a coach, but I went to go work with

a coach. I hired a coach. It's my kind of default mode of improvement.

Go find a coach. And I

was still going through there, like, looking for tactics and looking

for tricks and hacks and things like this. And it wasn't

really until I sat down and somewhere along the way

developed a whole lot of empathy around the idea that

not every person who ghosts me on a call is malicious.

He probably has some stuff to go going on because

I have a bunch of stuff going on. Okay, cool. I can respect that.

But I think until you go through it right.

Or develop a practice of putting yourself

in those shoes so that way you can be thoughtful about what they're going through,

I don't think you can be polite. Right. Which is why you have these people

who just love to go around and say, hey, no offense, but insert

offensive statement here, and it

doesn't even need to be said the majority of the time. So where

does this need come from? Right? It just comes from this idea that

you think you know better. Really.

Right. So you've not gone through the process, you don't actually know,

and you don't have any empathy.

I've heard this called empathy. I've heard it called EQ. I've heard it

all these various labels, but nobody wants

to deal with the person who doesn't have any of that.

That's why everyone hates their It guy.

Or Hazy Elon Musk.

So real quick, your sound changed pretty significantly, and you sound like you're underwater

now.

How about now? That's better.

Okay. Thank you.

It's still more than where it was when we started, but it's not

as bad as it was. It's not as bad as it was. Okay. Yeah,

that's better. Yeah. There you go. Okay. There we go. All right. I had to

readjust my mic. We're recording

in real time, folks. Absolutely. There's no editing.

There's no editing. These are not hot takes. These are slow burns

that we have put together and decided to share with everybody.

That's right. Is this

a function of us becoming more atomized as a culture, though?

Because here's how I see it. We had

a glorious 20th century and you don't get me

wrong, there were problems. But both

the more, shall we say,

libertarian or not libertarian libertine mode

of being more progressive. Let's frame it that way. Small progressive mode

of being looked at the 20th century and said we

made cultural progress in changing

our more rays and changing the human heart in

a Rusoian sense, and we

need to do more of that. And then a more conservative

mindset, small C conservative, and I'm not talking political, it just means

small C conservative looked at the 20th century and said

we had security and stability and a

framework where too much openness wasn't

prioritized. Right. We had a sense that something was solid in

the world. Even though you were bashing even though a small people progressive may have

been bashing up against that thing, it was solid. Right.

And so we came through a 20th century where the

sense of stability and by the way, in Azona, Toby, we're going to

talk about the literary life of innotobe in a minute. He was very much

a merging of these two ideas together.

Right. If you look at his biography and we will hear in a bit,

in merging those two ideas together in one man,

that's what enabled him to write The Way of the Samurai, which has Western

humanist elements to it, it has Buddhist elements to it, it has

Christian elements to it, it has hegelian elements to it. It's an

amazing fusion of ideas.

It's not fractal. It's not broken apart

coming out of the 20th century. We live in a time

of we live in a fractal time. We live in a time of atomization,

of people being having their desires and

their wants, atomized all

the way down to the smallest possible part.

And you know this in sales. The more data you can get on somebody,

the more you can specifically, narrowly sell to them as a

person who's passionate about marketing, marketers ruin everything.

They ruin everything. And they

ruin it because we want to tell more and more

persuasive stories to more and more single individuals rather than

the mass, because we can. Right. And so, of course,

we will.

I'm not quite sure that atomization leads to empathy.

I think I agree with you. Right. Because I think one of the things that

I love is that there's a community for everything.

If you're really into Jiu Jitsu, there's 1000 communities

for Jiu Jitsu, if it's guitar, if it's being an entrepreneur, if it's like

whatever it is, you can go find your tribe. Right. That was talked about out

there. And I think you

can get way too deep in any one of these things. And then there's

a fine line between like a community and a cult, right?

Yeah. And so if you are I

think if you're trying to apply everything I'm a huge fan of metaphor. I use

it constantly in coaching, but sometimes the metaphor doesn't stretch,

it doesn't fit. Right. And it shouldn't be used in your decision making

process. About does this, if this, then that kind

of situation. So I think because

we are so siloed, right, and there's so many communities and there's so many platforms

and all of this stuff is just like constantly ongoing. I think

if you're not very intentional with seeking out balance,

you're going to end up being a little bit of a feverish alkalite

no matter what community you're following.

Yeah. No matter what community you're in.

One other thought that came to me out of

your series of thoughts, there anonymity

the marketer. Seth Godin pointed out something back

in the days, back in the halcyon days between MySpace and

Facebook, way back in the day, way back

in the halcyon day when

everybody skipped through the trees and Twitter was

not even a dream yet, and no one really knew who Elon

was. And Peter Thiel had just capped out of PayPal

and my gosh, Reid Hoffman and LinkedIn hadn't even happened yet.

The good old days. That magical time

in the early aughts, as they sometimes call it.

He infamously wrote this in his blog, which, by the way, if you're not reading

Seth Godin's blog, you probably should be. Even as a salesperson,

you probably should be reading it. The philosophy that

that guy has is unbelievable. And he's just consistently

been dripping it out over the course of the last, now close to

35 years. Man's got a track record.

Anyway, one of the points he made that has stuck with me about anonymity

is this he says no. He has said no society has ever

survived anonymity and communication.

Dip.

It's funny, I'm a

big fan of being transparent, right? And so all these

different platforms that I'm on, I always try to show up as John Small

Mountain, right. So even when I'm gaming, my name

in game is also Small Mountain because I like a little bit of

pressure to act like an adult, to act with some civility

in all these different situations.

I've not heard that line before, but that makes complete sense, right?

If you take away the

feedback loop tied to

actual accountability,

go look at Twitter, it's already off the rails. Like, go look at any social

media that doesn't require like an actual transparency to

it. People will push back on this

who like anonymity, and they will say, well, you need anonymity

to call out powerful people so that you don't lose your position or you don't

lose your livelihood. I've often heard this pushback.

It's easy for people to talk about lacking anonymity who

are already financially protected from the results of not having

or being transparent. Right. And I

think that's a cop out, quite frankly. I agree. And I'm

going to say why this is a cop out.

And I've said this before on this podcast, I have 26,000 tweets

getting ready to be 28,000. I am

sure that there's something objectionable, and at least

I'm going to give a percentage. 15% of those tweets. Somebody someday,

over the course of the last ten to twelve years,

will find something objectionable in either something I tweeted or retweeted.

I'm not afraid of anybody finding anything objectionable in that 15%

of tweets. There's no fear there.

Because see, here's the thing. If you're judging

me by my Twitter feed and you're making a

statement about my character or an assumption about

my character, and you're anonymous on Twitter,

but I'm not, and you can find me, I think I have

the high ground. I 100% agree.

I have rules for who I connect with and who I network

with, because I'm always out looking for people connecting.

I'm a big networker. I run a community with 115 people

in it, and I'm always looking to add people to that. I network all the

time on social. And if you don't

have your picture, not your logo,

because I get that we're all in business, we're all trying to push our brands

and everything else like this, but if you don't have a photo of yourself,

no, can't do it. I don't even want to

have a conversation with you because I don't know who you are.

Right. I think it even

now goes past pictures because Facebook solved the real picture, real human

being problem. Kind of. Not totally, but kind of.

I think where we're at now is words.

We're at the shall I be biblical and

Greek in this a little bit here. We're at the problem of the logos

because words bring into flowering

reality. That's why you read books on this podcast, because we're

not only bringing into flowering ideas, but we are also bringing

into flowering avatars of reality. And we're putting those on, and we're

allowing ourselves to walk around in that avatar and

put ourselves in it without risk,

by the way, to us, because I can put down the way of the Samurai

and I can go off and live my life in Nazo.

Natobi is passed away, and yet I exist.

And I've written three books myself. When I pass away, the books

will exist in one form or another. Right? And so

the magic of books is the ability to put the avatar

on and take the. Avatar off and walk around in a mindset.

As another guest of ours once said way back in the beginning days

of this podcast, books are paper leaders,

right? And we put on their paper leadership

and we walk around in it. And then just like a child who puts on

his father's shoes or her father's shoes, we get to take those shoes off and

walk around in our own feet. It gives

empathy, it gives understanding. It allows us

to be anonymous, but not really.

It allows us to take on a new identity.

But when all words are

coming from a space of anonymity,

I'm not convinced that communication can survive that.

That's when you really have the test of whether or not metal is heavier than

feathers. I think, to push that metaphor, I agree.

I don't see myself going into a

social platform, not as me at this stage.

And that's fine. I know lots of people and their

Twitter is just for sports. It has nothing to do with their business.

Okay, that's totally fine. But to

me, it's why hide, right?

And you talked about hot takes and hot takes are there.

For a while, I was trying to be the hot take guy, and I just

realized, you know what, I don't want to be this guy. Right. I don't want

to just spout out the first instance of the first emotional

thing that I think about after I read that

stripe is no longer going to waive dispute

fees even if you win. Right? Yeah. That's garbage. Well, let's look at it from

the business perspective. There's probably a good reason. Okay.

And then I get to make a decision about whether or not I want to

continue to work with stripe, right? Exactly.

It doesn't take very much and this goes back to really what the chapter is

about. It doesn't take any time at all to go be

kind, to go be polite, to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Right.

It's how I think about it now, because that benefit of the doubt, like I

know some people who you go read their social stuff, you're going

to think they're the most hard edged,

heavy handed person you could possibly imagine.

But because I know them, I give them a little bit of grace,

right. And he talks about grace in the book. And I just think

it's really interesting because grace was like a very interesting word for me.

It wasn't really a word that was in my vocabulary until I really started to

kind of focus on empathy and giving people the benefit of the doubt.

And this is part of a bigger process of trying to walk back my

jaded sensibilities about being in sales. Right.

Because it's super easy to start thinking that everyone has it out for

you. Right. And it's not healthy.

You're not going to make it if that's your mindset.

Well,

the first take is probably no, not even the first take. I'll go even past

that. The hot take is probably wrong.

Yes. Agreed. The hot take about that person. The hot

take about that idea. The hot take about that interaction. I've had

several interactions over the course of just this week alone. And I'm

not only reading this book, I'm reading, like, four other books, too. So I got

a bunch of other different things, like mushing around together. In my head.

I'm involved in a number of different projects that are offline in the real

world doing solving what I call real problems for real people.

I'm getting more and more passionate about not being in the Internet space

and being out of the internet space and doing some interesting

things out there.

And in the course of those interactions,

the pause is the most powerful tool

you have. Yeah.

And it's either putting other people on pause,

or it's putting yourself on pause.

So we were talking about, before we came on,

one of my fellow Jujitsu players who

walks into the studio, and he's got a shirt on,

and it says something on. And my first take may

not be positive towards that. That may not be correct,

by the way. That may not be the correct take to have.

Maybe the second take is better. Maybe the pause is

correct. Now I've got an entire toolbox,

a leadership toolbox, such as it were, of options

as to how I communicate with that person. But if I'm just doing the Twitter

thing in real life, oh, man. Constantly on the edge

all the time, and I'm not getting anything accomplished, and other people find me to

be grading and irritating.

Yeah.

I think it took me a long time to get to the place to where

because I think about default modes a lot. Like, what is

your automatic response? Right? And being a Kung fu guy

and being prior service military,

I have a very definite vision of what I want my default response to

be in certain situations, you know? But now the thing that

I'm really trying to do, and and it's working, right? And this

is kind of crazy for me to talk about with, like, really close friends is

like, somewhere along the way, I became, like, a silver lining optimist guy who

gives people the benefit of the doubt. And five years ago,

ten years ago, I had none of that right. It was my way or you're

wrong. And I can remember being in basic training

and hearing a drill sergeant say that for the very first time,

you're either doing it right, which is my way, or you're wrong. There's nothing in

between. And I was like, finally, somebody gets it the way that I want to.

I want this world to go this way. But I

think about people who make stupid decisions at

a fundamental level. If those decisions don't match with mine, I want to take the

idea of, like, you know, what? You're doing the wrong thing.

But I can only come to that decision based

upon my perception of why they're doing these things.

What I try to do now as a coach is I try to ask,

okay, why are you doing it that way? Right?

Because if you have a reason, let's test.

Let's see if this is a better way. I'm totally down to put some volume

behind this, and then we can test our assumptions. Sample size is going to be

a big thing, especially in selling. But why

do you have an intention, or are you just winging it?

Intention is a really big thing for me. I think as

salespeople, we have to be very intentional with what we

want to talk about, who are we trying to target and have conversations with and

what's happening in those conversations. Right. Reason why salespeople have a

bad name is because they get very excited.

And then we have selective hearing, and you hear the things you want to hear.

And until you work with someone like me who can show you, hey, you need

to ask some additional questions around this thing because you're about to step in potentially

a bear trap. Right. Until someone works

with me and they understand frequent

situation, this looks amazing, right? And then everyone's like, oh, my God, we're going

to close this deal. Hey, thank you so much for letting me know what about

this is so amazing because most people don't like this. And then

you get to have a great conversation about what they like and you know what

it means. You're on the same page with them. You're going to miss less deals

on the backside of it because you were very present, very intentional,

and you were. Listening presence,

intentionality,

mindfulness, politeness.

This is a hierarchy of order. Right.

And I think it's

all summed up in when he talks about the tea ceremony in

this chapter, because I'll admit

I don't much think about the tea ceremony.

I just don't like it's not something that's really on my radar.

And at the same time, now that it's

on my radar, it bears looking at a

little bit closer as a result of Mr.

Natopi's analysis of it and how it relates to the way of

the samurai. Okay, I'm going to challenge you a little bit on this because

I think about this probably more than I should, right.

Intentionality and right place, right time, and different things like this.

And I love the idea of a tea ceremony, but I

also love the idea of sitting down and having, like, a really

great bottle of scotch, right? And I've got the big

ice cube, and you hear that clink as you drop it in there. It is

that whole process of setting up the experience

that creates the greatness of the experience. I don't care if it's wine.

I don't care if it's alcohol. I don't care if it's sex. It largely

doesn't matter. Right? Right. That warm up process puts

you into that mindset, which is why I think too many people

put I think too many people

are kind of over bragging around their morning routines.

Right. I get up at 05:00 A.m. And I do 17 things before, like,

anyone else all gets awake. Cool, that's great. But it's not for

everybody. I'm sorry. Warm up is

not going to be the right thing for everybody. It can't be. Right. But most

people need a warm up of some sort. And the older we get, believe me,

as a guy in my forty s and I try to go do something without

properly stretching or warming up first and then I'm miserable because I pulled something

for a couple of days later, those warm ups are helpful.

Right. We're actually moving

towards a weirdly enough we're moving towards a family stretching

routine. We're going to stretch together as a family man.

You're almost an Asian organization, right?

You're going to force everyone to come in and line up in front of the

house. Like do all the stretches in Calisthenics.

Yeah. Then we're going to break down an AK 47 and then we're going to

send the kids off. Absolutely. Your kids are

already like expert level gymnasts and horseback

archers and everything. Yeah, that's right. Oh my gosh.

No, I agree. It doesn't necessarily have to be around tea.

It could be around anything. I mean,

it goes back to that again, what we said at the opening, this whole

slow food movement. Right.

How are we taking things out of the chaotic,

the venal? As I said,

how are we pulling meaning

from disorder?

One of the huge things about the last 20 years in

the United States of America and for my international listeners, you may not know

this, but one of the huge things over the last 20 years in the

United States of America is how

big an uptick there has been in anxiety,

in stress, and in

mental health issues. And I'm not talking about kind

of stuff that you see on social media. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking

about practically diagnosed upticks right.

In all of these spaces. Because when

you have anxiety, you disintermediate,

you disintegrate, you fall apart, you fall into

your commensurate parts. Well, that is a decline into chaos.

That's not a rising to a pinnacle. There's another book that I'm reading

right now, which I won't say the name of it, but it's a book about

art history. And the writer talks

about the Apollonian and the Dionosian in

art, right? And Dionysian, she calls the

forces of cathodic nature.

Right? It's meaningless and it's

diffuse and it's a maelstrom and it's separated

and there's no lines, everything's mushed. And then the Apollonian comes

out of that and makes things sharp and

makes things distinguishable and makes things

definitive. It's weird because I've been thinking about this a lot,

like in relation to sort of where is this podcast going to go in the

next three to five years? Been thinking a lot about that, and we

definitely started out in sort of a mushy

Dionosian mess. But as we go along,

we're becoming more and more abalone in our focus. And by the

way, this is not something I'm consciously thinking about. This is something that's just sort

of happening, right? That energy

that's just on this podcast alone is the same energy that you

see in the tea ceremony. It's the same energy that

you see in dropping a couple of ice cubes

and having a great whiskey, right, and hanging out with your friends. It's the same

energy that you see you mentioned sex in all

of the stuff that we do in order to engage intimately and

sexually with our partners, right? The things we don't talk about.

We're pulling something out of that Dionysian

mess. We're pulling something out of it, and we're making it

sharp and clear and definitive. And people need that.

People need that in order to have structure out of chaos.

And Natobe understood that.

Speaking of Toby, let's talk a little bit about

in his own toby, let's sort of introduce you

to this man. Back to the way of the Samurai from

the introduction in his own adobe, 1862 to

1933, a distinguished

agricultural economist, author, educator, diplomat, and statesman

in his own adobe was born in Morioka in what is now the Iwata

Prefecture. His father, Gigiro Natobe, died when

Enizo was only five years old, and in 1869 he moved to

Tokyo to live with his adoptive uncle, tokitoshi Ota,

to whom he dedicated to the present book because he had taught him

at an early age to, quote, revere the past

and to admire the deeds of the Samurai unquote.

In 1877, Enizo entered the Sapporo Agricultural

College, now Hokkaido University, to study agriculture,

a decision that was probably due to Emperor Meiji's wish that the Natobe family

continue with their development of the once barren land near present day Tawada.

Sepora had been founded the preceding year by William S. Clark,

former president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, and Clark's influence

was such that some 30 or so students, including Inazo Natobe,

converted to Christianity. In 1883,

Natobe began studying English literature and economics at Tokyo University,

but left within a year to continue his studies in the United States at John

Hopkins University in Baltimore. While there, he became a member of the Religious Society

of Friends Quakers, through whom he met his future wife,

Mary Patterson Elkington.

From Baltimore, he went to Hale University in Germany, where he gained a doctorate

in agricultural economics and then returned briefly to Philadelphia to marry Mary

Elkington before taking up an assistant to professorship at Sapporo

in 1891. Appointments to full professorships

followed, first at Kyoto Imperial University and then at the law faculty at Tokyo

Imperial University. And in 1918, he was appointed founding

president of Tokyo Joshidai, tokyo Women's university.

In 1919, Natobi attended the Paris Peace Conference and in

the aftermath of World War I joined with other reformed minded Japanese

in setting up the Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

In 1920, he moved to Geneva, Switzerland, to become one of the Undersecretaries

general of the newly established League of nations. League of nations

was a precursor to the UN, which came out of World War II.

He also became a founding director of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation,

the precursor of UNESCO. On his retirement from the League of nations,

he returned to Japan and served in the House of Peers in

the Japanese Imperial Parliament, where he spoke out

against the increasing militarism of Japan.

In 1933, he attended a conference of the Institute

of Pacific Relations in Banff, Alberta.

On his way home from the conference, he succumbed to pneumonia and

died in hospital in Victoria, British Columbia, at the

age of 71.

The present book is perhaps the best known of Natobi's written

works, but he was such a prolific author that the Japanese edition of his complete

works extends to 25 volumes, while his works in English and

other Western volumes Western

languages, I'm Sorry have been published as a five volume set. His lifelong

goal to become a bridge across the Pacific is celebrated in

several biographies, both in English and Japanese and in two memorial

gardens in Canada one at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, British Columbia,

and the other at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden and center for Plant

Research in Vancouver. With its tea house

and stroll garden, the latter is considered to be one of the most authentic Japanese

gardens in North America and one of the finest outside of Japan.

The Natobe Memorial Museum in Towada City,

Japan, celebrates the life of Enzo Natobe as well as the lives of his

father and grandfather, whose irrigation canals brought new

life to the region. The museum's tribute to

the Natobe family's long samurai history includes a

collection of armor and other military artifacts.

Enzo Natobe received recognition of a different kind when

his portrait was figured was featured on the ¥5000

note from 1984 to 2004.

And this is a quote

from Enizo Natobe what is important

is to try to develop insights and wisdom rather than mere knowledge,

respect someone's character rather than his learning,

and nurture men of character rather

than mere talents,

revere the past and admire the deeds of the samurai.

This was the driving force of in his own toby this was

the fuel in his engine, probably from the time

he was not probably from the time he was a little boy until his death.

His lifelong goal in becoming a bridge across the Pacific came

during a time when the predominant drivers of interaction,

at least at an international level, and he surely saw this in the circles

he was running in. Those drivers were isolationism

in an American context. America refused to join the League

of nations. They proclaimed we proclaimed that

anything that happened between World War I and World War II was a European

problem for European people to solve.

So isolationism was driving it as well as

not racism. That's very specific and

individualized. Racialism was more the

driver. Racialism in Japan over the Chinese,

racialism in China over the Japanese, racialism in

Korea, over everyone racialism in

America that came in the form of isolationism. And of course, Jim Crow

and of course, racialism in Europe,

not just Germany. Russia, by the way, was struggling with

its own form of racialism during the interwar years between World War

I and World War II. As the man of iron from

Georgia, joseph Stalin

was busy with his five year plan to

make a better Soviet man and

woman.

Natobe, however, worked through all of these circles

and saw all of these things happening during a time I'm

sure he thought was chaotic. I'm sure he thought

was a time of little hope. And instead

of turning to despair,

he threw himself into action. He threw

himself into planting seeds. And with his background in

agriculture, he knew something that farmers know, that we industrialists and

we post post industrialists have forgotten. He knew that

you had to recognize and honor the natural rhythms of the earth in

planting sowing and reaping, and that acknowledging those

rhythms which operate in us today is important for

success.

There's so many things to glean from the life of in a zona.

Toby if you go to his Wikipedia article,

it's actually kind of thin. You've really got to go to

the Japanese Wiki to find out some information about him

and really go to some Japanese websites and

they honor him quite greatly. And it's interesting because of

everything that happened after the war, japan had to go back and have sort of

a reckoning with men like Natoby who

were against war and didn't

think that that was going to be the solution to the problem.

Laying out the life of in his own. Toby john,

what insights can leaders take from this man?

I'll be honest, I had no idea how great he was until I actually started

reading The Way of the Samurai and really started digging into him a little bit.

Same I spent a lot more time learning about Chinese

philosophy and martial arts stuff than I have Japanese stuff because

that's where my mother

tongue is a Chinese art. Right. As far as, like, kung fu goes,

I really love this quote.

Right. It is important to try to develop insights and wisdom rather

than mere knowledge. Right. It has never been

easier to do a Google search word that

Google search in a way that it confirms your biases and never challenge

any conventions that you have or that you're holding.

The thing that I think is really interesting around this is

just how much travel he did. Oh, man. Got him around,

how much he purposefully sought out probably

very uncomfortable situations. Right. Being an Asian man here

during that time probably was difficult.

And I think the

amount of effort and worldliness that he brings

to this discussion right. And you mentioned this before, right? He's pulling

concepts from his mother tongue

of confucianism and everything else like this, but he's also talking about Greeks and

nobility and English feudalism and all of this stuff.

And you have to give the man

the benefit of the doubt that he's got some knowledge here, which is

great because we have

people who were like experts after watching reading one

blog post or watching one YouTube thing, they've never tried it. They've never

done it, but they're more than willing to kind of shots

fired a hot take about why something doesn't work and you've

never tried it. And that's exactly what he's speaking to at the end of this

thing. Exactly.

I think the biggest lesson, and maybe this is kind of

just timeliness, is go travel,

go experience other cultures. Like, go do something outside of the norm.

I just got a pretty unique opportunity to go to

Dubai, and it's my first time to go out of the US. And I went

to a conference, and I think there was one other American in the entire

conference. And I'm out there, I'm networking,

rubbing elbows, trying to get meetings, and everyone was like, Why are you here?

I was like, well, this is where the cool people hang out. I want to

come hang cool people. And it was such

like an eye opening moment, and everyone talks about this. After you go experience

another culture for the first time, you feel a little bit more worldly, a little

smaller, like maybe some of the things that you knew to be right weren't

actually right. And you can see some of that stuff. I think everyone

should should travel, should go experience these things, because he wouldn't be talking about

these things had he not gone through his experiences.

And even if he did, no one would take him seriously because he wouldn't be

able to reference anything else that we could make sense of.

Right before we turned on the recording, we were both kind of, like,

going on and on about how the metaphor of equating

samurai to chivalry

and knights and squires and everything makes the rest

of the book so much easier to read and to you know what? I can

get a little bit behind that because of that metaphor that he starts with.

We wouldn't be able to appreciate that if the man hadn't spent time

learning all these different cultures and really understanding it.

Right.

The only way that you actually begin to appreciate

and see your own culture is when you leave it and have to look back

at it through another culture's eyes. I fundamentally

believe that it is a tragedy that

most Americans I would say most many Americans

don't have a passport right now.

I think COVID shook some people out of their nue in

ways that they had not expected. And I do believe fundamentally the great

American migration is still on. I mean, we went from a period

of time between, I would say the early ninety s to about

to about the time of COVID when the average number of people who actually moved

out of their localities dropped precipitously. I mean, we actually

moved more in the 1960s and 1970s for job opportunities,

for family issues, to live in different places.

I mean, immigration intercountry integrational

patterns were more robust in the

than they were at a time when we were at our height of technological progress.

But it kind of makes sense because if you're trapped in the phone,

you don't think you need to go anywhere. It's true.

Yeah. If you're talking to people on the Internet from Australia, why do

you need to go to Australia? I could talk to somebody on the Internet from

Australia. I don't need to see what's happening with somebody in Indiana

because I could just go read what the New York Times says is happening about

something in Indiana. Something happening in Indiana. Except the weird

thing is the local news has declined in America.

We're not going to get into all that. But that's a massively apocryphal

and apocalyptic thing

that has happened in America. And so there's

no connection to your own locality. Instead, there's this larger connection

to something that's global, but we don't even really know what that means.

Emmanuel Kant was once asked, what does a man of the world look like?

And he's like, I don't know what a citizen of the world look like?

And Emmanuel Kant, the, the philosopher, infamously said, I don't know what that looks like.

I don't even know how to answer that question. And he's sort of wandered over

there the way Germans sometimes do.

And this was a response or a pushback

against the Rousseauian notion at the same time that about the same time Kant was

around, that you could create this new man that would be a global man.

Localities still matter,

and in a country that's the size of a continent,

Americans, you got to get up and get after it. You got to go somewhere

else, even if it's only moving from Pittsburgh

to Iowa, go get on the move.

So I do think that's happening now. I think COVID again shook people out of

their inui. But the other thing that's happening is

Natobe was atobi's natobe,

as an avatar of a particular time existed during

a period of transitional change, similar to the period

of transitional change we are going through at a global level, global cultural level

now. So you said you went to Dubai. That's really interesting because

quite frankly, the world is deglobalizing.

There's a writer and demographer and geographer that

I follow. I've bought all four of his books. I read his stuff. I listen

to his read his blog, listen to his podcast. Guy named Peter Zehan.

By the way, those of you who are listening, you should check him out.

The least hair on fire analysis of what's happening in the world

today with absolutely no politics involved. It's kind of amazing,

right? And that's why I buy into him. I don't buy

all of his conclusions, but most of 80% of them are backed up by like,

okay, I see the numbers. I see what you're talking about. That makes sense.

And one of the points he makes is that since 1989, we've been in a

process of deglobalization. We've been in a process of

America ratcheting back, ratcheting back, ratcheting back,

and other regions of the world stepping up and

kind of being in a panic about America ratcheting back, but stepping into

that vacuum. And you most recently see this in the deal that China made with

Iran and Saudi Arabia to get oil. And the Americans had nothing to

we Americans had nothing to say about that. We're like, yeah,

China, you go ahead. You have a good time. Because we're actually going to

be a net exporter of oil next year. For, like, the second or

third time in our country's history,

the cries of no blood for oil doesn't

really work anymore because we just pump it out of our own ground.

Now, we could argue about the environmental aspects of that and whether or not that

could be clean or dirty and carbon and all that,

but that process of deglobalization

is already a pace and has been going on for quite some time. Okay?

I say all that to say this. Natobe existed during a time of colonialization

when the exact same chaos was happening. And the League of nations

was an early attempt to bring together the globe, was an

early attempt to unite people together, which, of course, really didn't work well

into the United States. Sat down with everybody at Brett Woods in 1945

and said, in exchange for you having the biggest consumer market

on the planet, which we had already been the biggest consumer market on the planet

since the end of the civil War. But in exchange for access to

that without tariffs, you'll appreciate this. As a sales guy. We will

guard your supply chains, and we will send our children to die in wars for

you. How about that? And all the rest of the world was in shock.

Because usually what happened at the end of

a war like an apocalyptic war like World War II, was the

victor came in and just dictated to everybody and said, we're going to put a

base here, here, here, here and here. And if you behave in such

a manner that irritates us, we'll come in and we'll smack

you so hard that you'll never get up again.

But America didn't do that again.

We could argue about whether that was good, bad, or ugly, but it did create.

The environment, a post war World

War II environment that Natobi, I think, would have appreciated, where Japan

was able to literally build itself out of the ashes and

start selling US cars that run forever along

with everything else.

I think there's an insight there for leaders, because as we

are moving into an area, I worry more of isolationism,

because in decalization, you get isolationism. You get that pulling away, you get that separating.

I worry that the temptation to stay home might be

too great. I feel that,

and that's a real concern for me. For leaders.

This is slightly tangential, maybe, but I'm. Curious,

right, because I'm going on about globalization, so go ahead. Yeah.

I can only really reference, like, the jokey version of this, right?

That no one really wants to be part of the Zoom Happy Hour and these

forced interactions with your team and stuff like that. So how

does a leader, in your opinion, do a good job of building

the right culture with the right amount of

balance between, hey, we need to be together so that way

we can be on the same page. Right. But we also don't

need, like, a business is not a family. And one of my

biggest red flags is whenever I'm talking to a founder and they're like, yeah,

we want to make the salesperson part of the family.

Nah, can't go with you. That's a nightmare for everyone

involved. So I'm curious,

how do people do that right now with hybrid environments,

remote environments, my team,

I get a really cool opportunity working with my partner. It's amazing.

We don't even work in the same room because she gets tired of hearing my

voice all day long. Understandably so. But, like, everyone else is global.

I work with people all over the world, which is awesome, and I

love it. And I remember the first time someone was mad at me

that I was choosing to work with overseas contractors,

because in their opinion, US was number one.

I was like, okay, based on what? Help me understand

where this is coming from, because these

people that I'm working with are solid. They know their stuff. They're capable

of working. They're accountable. They can get everything done,

and it's fine. I'm curious,

what are your thoughts on that? I think there's a bifurcation happening

right now, and it's a split

that started in COVID, but it's just

widened as time has gone on, and I don't think

the two splits can be put back together.

So Free 2020, only around 1% to 2%

of the white collar workforce worked remotely.

At the height of the pandemic, it was something like 60%. It was

ridiculous. Dang, I would honestly have pegged it higher

than 60, honestly. And you can go check my numbers, by the

way, listeners. You can go check my numbers, but the last thing I saw is

around 60%.

But among blue collar workers or workers that could not do

their job remotely, 100% of

them still showed up. Yeah, that's the bifurcation.

That's the split. So let me make this

very real. If you're leading garbage

men, they don't know what the

problem is. They showed up to work every

day. Yeah. Sometimes they had to wear masks, but most of the

time, most of those guys yeah.

Nobody cared about them. They just cared that the garbage went away.

And by the way, interestingly enough, in your community,

in my community, during COVID even though community I left,

garbage still got picked up. Yeah. Kind of amazing,

right? Not actually not amazing.

That's the bifurcation. That's the split. And so

what you will see happening I'm going to relate this to literature is sort

of a split, like an HG. Wells time machine. And this is what I worry

about. The Borlocks and the eloy. You're a geek. You'll appreciate this.

This is what I worry about. I worry that the Eloy

are all the white collar folks that are working remotely and are getting talent from

other places and are just sort of floating

along on the surface, not appreciating what the morlocks are doing underneath.

Man I had this realization because I

was delivering mostly via Zoom, mostly digitally

before COVID right. So my life didn't radically

change during COVID I had a big revenue swing, almost lost my business, and had

to figure out a bunch of stuff. But everyone was going

through that whole thing. And then I would see on social

media, everyone complaining about masks and not having to wear them and wearing them and

everything else like this, and fast forward

a month or something like this, and then I'm

going to go pick up food because things are kind of back opened up and

stuff like that. So I'm going to go pick up some food to bring it

back to the house. And I just have this realization of, like,

whoa, I don't have to do this anymore.

Because I came up in retail environments, I sold cell phones,

and then I worked in a bank. And you know those people are

being called in, right, that they have to be there even if it doesn't make

financial sense, right. From labor and revenue and all that other stuff.

It wasn't even on my radar that I

was like a unique person because I can work from

home, and I already was, and my life didn't really change. And so

when I was like, guys, masks really aren't that bad. I don't

have to wear one for 12 hours in a warehouse when it's very

hot, right. And breathing conditions are already rough and

kind of going back to empathy and being polite and giving

people the benefit of the doubt.

One of my favorite things to think about now is whenever someone cuts me

off forever, my default mode was, you know what?

Anger. Right? And you're a terrible person.

You got to be complete garbage and holy crap.

One of my favorite takeaways on my

sales development path was I was at a sales conference and this guy gets on

stage. His name is John Rosso. He's an amazing speaker

and he's in the Sailor Network. And he says this line,

we judge everyone else by their actions but ourselves, by our intentions.

Oh, yeah. And man, talk about right

place, right time. When the teacher or when the student is ready, the teacher will

appear. That line hit me like a ton of bricks, man. Because at

the time I was selling websites and I was like, man, these aren't expensive

websites. We're cheaper than these other people. And you're an idiot if you don't want

it. Like, you're dumb if you don't want us to come in and fix your

website kind of deal, man.

Now that I'm not in web, there's so many improvements I want to make on

my website. It took us forever to get version two of our

website out there because I was busy doing other stuff.

And make no mistake, I'm getting all the outreach from

everyone. I would love to fix your website

for you. We're only $30 an hour.

I think about that line all the time. And then my voyage into Stoicism

in the middle of COVID really reinforced all that stuff because

everything in my life kind of exists on some sort of line,

right? What's your favorite thing about that? What's the worst

thing about it, right? And I'm a very big nerd about this

stuff. I always try to put things on a line and process driven. That's just

how I think about everything. And I don't

have to have an opinion about everything, right? Which was like

a really kind of, like, oddly empowering moment of like,

you know what? I don't have to give a crap about that.

And now it shows up in the worst ways ever.

Now, I've done a fair amount of work to kind

of build a moat around myself, around news and media

and all this stuff because I don't think it helps me. It just roused me

up and I. Can'T do anything with it, right? And then there was some big

thing going on. I don't remember exactly what it was. And a friend of mine

was like, man, aren't you outraged? And I was like,

I don't have an opinion. And they were like, how can you not have an

opinion? And they were just so mad. And I was like, I have so

many other things I need to have opinions about my business, my family,

everything else. This thing that's going to happen with me or

without me can't be the thing.

And they're like, yeah, but you should be out there. You should be out there

speaking up, doing your thing or whatever. And I was like, my thing

is building a business profitable enough that I can then influence change

at that level. And leading other people yes,

in a way that actually role models the kind of leadership

that we need to see in the world. And this is where we go.

So the bifurcation I'm talking about is

the same bifurcation that's happening in companies right now,

and it's happening at that microcosmic level.

And the challenge that leaders have is exactly what you said.

How do I focus on this thing here that's happening

right now that's going to impact these people

right now? I've often said on the

podcast, and there's always new listeners. So I'll say it again.

No one that you are leading knows who the

President of the United States is. Sorry, they just don't.

I'm sorry, they just don't. And by the way, not that they wouldn't be able

to find him on a five by five card and a bunch of other presidents,

they probably would be able to do that. But for the most part,

this is the secret. Most people don't know who the president is.

Most people don't even know who the governor of their own state is,

and they have zero clue who the mayor is. They don't

know. But you know who they do know? They know john.

They know exactly who John is. They know hayson.

They know that guy or that woman. That's who they know.

You're the avatar for leadership, and I've been trying to impress this

upon leaders for the last five years.

If you want to fix,

quote unquote, the remote hybrid problem or you

want to try to figure out, how do I unite this team? Understand that

you're the most important person to that team member. Oh, man,

that's number one. Number two, if the zoom

happy hours aren't working, if the slack channel is

overwhelming, if the email tool you picked isn't work,

stop it. Stop having meetings that don't go

anywhere. And actually, instead, here's what you probably

need to be doing. If you have a fully remote team and I've done this

for years, if you have a fully remote team, have one meeting

one time a week with them for an hour, and then let

them go do their work. By the way, you know how much time

you'll have? They'll all of a sudden be freed. Up to do other things

the other 39 hours. The other 39 hours, right?

All of a sudden have, oh, my gosh, you'll be amazed at the amount of

things you'll be able to accomplish. And by the way, you can scale that up

to your team. Now, after a certain point,

obviously, it gets to be too much to handle. I would say probably

about five people, at which point you need to be telling those

five people to go out and hire two other people, and they have

meetings on their calendar for an hour with those two people twice a

week. And that's it. That's how you scale that out. But the bravery

that's required in doing that pushes back against the hierarchical

structure that exists, but that now no longer

serves us in a bifurcated world. Now, if you're hybrid,

here's the bigger challenge for you as a leader. If you're in a hybrid

situation where let's say you're middle management, you're the much put

upon middle manager those are my people, by the way.

And you've got the executive who's been out on his boat since 2020

sending you emails about how you got to get everybody back in the office.

And you've got the frontline people who you're

monitoring via keystroke, but you can't justify your

own managerial existence.

Again, to paraphrase some goodwill hunting. Number one, don't do that. Number two,

you should realize that you're getting paid $250,000 a year for a job that

you could probably do the same from home for about 125.

That idea of uniting or

not justifying managerial existence is

the part of the biggest challenge of hybrid. And if you'll note most

of the studies that are coming out about hybrid work, talk about

how hybrid impacts frontline workers and

impacts executives,

there's very little conversation, at least I'm not aware of it,

about how hybrid impacts manager leader

competency and how it impacts manager

leader work. And the reason why is because most

managers and leaders justify their existence

in face to face interactions.

So very real version of this

happened in my community, right? So a guy who really likes my

stuff is working at an organization, and they're doing

very much a volume plate of their sales, and everyone gets a proposal. There is

no DQing or qualification structure in place. And he's

struggling with some of that because he wants to be consultative. He wants to be

a sherpa, which is our methodology. And he

reached out to his boss's, boss around something because he knew his

boss was in a meeting and he was looking for a quick thing.

And so then he screenshots the interaction between his

boss, right? And he goes, out of curiosity,

why did you ask I think the guy's name is Dan.

Why did you ask Dan about this? And the guy in my community goes,

well, because I thought you were on a call, and I thought he might have

the information. And then he goes, okay, being that

I am your direct manager,

this stuff all needs to come to me in the future.

And he goes, okay, no offense intended, right?

And he comes into the community and he's like, can you believe this?

And I was like, Hold on a second.

Let's practice a little bit of empathy here. Let's pretend that

you're that manager and you get a ding from your boss,

hey, why is your guy messaging me about this? This is your job.

You need to fix it. Now, I'm a big fan of chain

of command. I'm prior service, right? Like, it has its place. I'm a big fan

of that stuff. Process matters. But he

just took it at the first glance. His hot take was,

can you believe this guy? I was like, man, hold on a second,

though. He could be getting

his attitude by his boss.

Or maybe he just feels that you're not doing a

good job, that you should be a little bit more considerate and stuff

like that and go to him first because there's a time and a place for

all of that stuff. I remember the first time I wanted

to tell a drill sergeant or a superior officer or even

an NCO no, because I had a problem with what

it was. And the lesson was you do it and

then you argue about it later. But right then in that moment,

you take the orders that you're given kind of situation. And I love the

whole I think it's Eisenhower on his first day in office, right? He just gets

inaugurated and someone brings him a sealed envelope, and he's like, Why are you bringing

me a sealed envelope? I have staff for this.

Put that in a slack message, you're going to sound like the

worst person on the planet. Right? Because there's no tonality included.

So it's a very interesting situation because

I'm a big believer that leaders need to take that extra step

and provide some context, provide a little bit of

hey, here's why kind of thing. Not because you

should have to explain and validate everything that you possibly should

have to do, but because it should be important enough that you're not

misheard or misinterpreted or that you're

being taken as just being a hard ass when you're really just trying to make

sure that, hey, these are standards and we need to do it this way.

Kind of.

Well, Natopi will talk about this in our next little section here,

but there's

so much loosey gooseiness in organizations, right,

mostly driven by politics and political considerations

yes, absolutely. That have little or nothing to do

with the actual work being done and have everything

to do with the maintenance of the edifice

around the work that's supposed to be getting done,

which is work in and of itself. Don't get me wrong, the politics is work,

but it's not the work that we

ever Transparently tell the frontline employee

or transparently tell the manager that they are doing.

And I would have thought in

my younger years that that transparency

would have already arrived in the year of our Lord 2023.

Apparently not. Apparently we have not arrived at

a spot where we can all be transparent and talk about what the real thing

is that's happening here. And it's

why shows like The Office are still referenced

usually by people younger than me. It's why

I think that Office Space is a much better movie than The Office

ever was a television show. But that's the

thing altogether. But my point is, those kinds

of things exist because those kinds of parodies exist

because we can't talk about the bald reality of what's happening

at a leadership level, much less a structural level.

And I wonder how long it's going to take for

us to be able to sort of have that

conversation. This is the thing that's really and the conversation is

really this is the thing that's really happening here.

And here's where you fit into the thing that's really happening here. So when

Eisenhower said that Eisenhower was operating out of

a spot where he didn't have to tell that person who

delivered him the letter what the thing was that was happening, that person

already knew, because that person was part

of a cultural milieu that already reinforced that we

don't live in that cultural milieu anymore. We live in an atomized cultural milieu where

no one knows what the deal is,

the same way they don't know who their mayor is. The same

way they don't know who their governor is. The same way they don't know who

the president is. Let's turn

the corner here a little bit. Let's get onto

the third beat back to way

of the Samurai, back to in

his own toby, I'm going to pick up a couple of pages here

and we're going to read a little bit about,

well, a loose business morality.

A loose business morality has indeed been the worst blot on our national reputation.

But before abusing it or hastily condemning the whole race for it,

let us calmly study it, and we shall be rewarded with consolation for

the future. Of all the great occupations of life,

none was farther removed from the profession of arms than commerce.

The merchant was placed lowest in the category of vocations,

the knight, the tiller of the soil, the mechanic, the merchant. The samurai

derived his income from land and could even indulge, if he had a mind to,

in amateur farming. But the counter and abacus were abhorred.

We know the wisdom of the social arrangement. Montanescu has

made it clear that the debarring of the nobility from mercantile pursuits

was an admirable social policy and that it prevented wealth from accumulating

in the hands of the powerful. The separation of

power and riches kept the distribution of the latter more nearly equitable.

Professor Dill, the author of Roman Society in the last century of the Western Empire,

has brought afresh to our mind that one cause of the decadence

of the Roman Empire was the permission given to the nobility to engage in trade

and the consequent monopoly of wealth and power by a minority of the senatorial

families. Commerce, therefore, in feudal

Japan, did not reach that degree of development which it would have attained under freer

conditions. The obloquy attached to the calling

naturally brought within its pale, such as cared little

for social repute. Call one a thief and he will steal.

Put a stigma on a calling, and its followers adjust their morals to it.

For it is natural that the quote unquote normal conscience, as Hugh

Black says, quote rises to the demands made on it and easily

falls to the limits of the standard expected from it,

and is unnecessary to add that no business, commercial or

otherwise, can be transacted without a code of morals.

Our merchants of the feudal period had one among themselves without which

they could never have developed, as they did in embryos, such fundamental mercantile

institutions as the Guild, the bank, the Boers, insurance checks,

bills of exchange, et cetera. But in their

relations with people outside their vocation, the tradesmen lived too true to

the reputation of their order.

This being the case, when the country was open to foreign trade, only the most

adventurous and unscrupulous rushed to the ports, while the respectable business houses

declined. For some time the repeated requests of the authorities to

establish branch houses was Bushido powerless

to stay the current of commercial dishonor? Let us see.

Those who are well acquainted with our history will remember that only a few years

after our treaty ports were open to foreign trade, feudalism was abolished,

and when with it the samurai's thiefs were taken and bonds issued to

them in compensation, they were given liberty to invest them in mercantile transactions.

Now you may ask, why could they not bring their much bolstered veracity into their

new business relations and so reform the old abuses?

Those who had eyes to see could not weep enough.

Those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize enough with the

fate of many a noble and honest samurai who signally and irrevocably

failed at his new and unfamiliar field of trade and industry through sheer

lack of shrewdness and coping with his artful plebeian

rival. When we know that 80% of the business

houses fail in so industrial a country as America,

is it any wonder that scarcely one among a hundred samurai who went into trade

could succeed in his new vocation? It will be long before

it will be recognized how many fortunes are wrecked in the attempt to apply Bushido

ethics to business models. But it was soon patent to

every observing mind that the ways of wealth were not the ways of

honor. In what respects were they different? Of the

three incentives to veracity that Leckey enumerates visa vis the

industrial, the political and the philosophical, the first was altogether lacking

in Bushido. As to the second, it could develop little in a political

community under a feudal system. It is in its philosophical and,

as Leki says, in its highest aspect, that honesty attained elevated rank

in our catalog of virtues.

With all my sincere regard for the high commercial integrity of the

Anglo Saxon race, when I ask for the ultimate ground,

I am told that honesty is the best policy that it pays

to be honest. Is not this virtue, then,

its own reward if it is followed because it brings in

more cash than falsehood? I'm afraid Bushido would rather indulge

in lies.

This is an interesting section, and the reason I picked it is

because john's in sales, and I am in

the leadership management space, and we both have worked in

businesses and with businesses trying to get them to change processes and

procedures and, of course, change their people.

I'm also a big fan of ethics, and one of the

things that jumps out here is a loose business morality leads

to a loose leadership morality.

It's interesting how he talks about Bushido as a code of ethics. It doesn't actually

match the history of Japan, and he ties a code of ethics to history,

and then he lays out the historical precedent in a very compact

way that I very rarely see writers do. One thing layers upon

another, and that's what makes this writing great.

All great failings. And we can see this in our current failures

in the financial system in the year of our Lord 2023.

I'm looking at you. Silicon Valley Bank. And now First Republic

and Credit Suisse and whoever may come next.

All great failings begin with greater ethical and moral failings

first. I don't really care about your virtue signaling.

I don't really care about your ESG score. I care about what you're actually doing.

I don't care about your intentions. I care about your behavior.

However, systems tend to devolve to their lowest level when it no longer

pays to operate a process at the highest level, which is why the

small things like politeness matter and

committing to the highest level of morality while others are not is the highest

form of leadership discipline. Do so consistently leads

not only to honor, but also to respect.

But I'm not quite sure anymore in our society and culture in

the year of our Lord 2023 if honor and

respect pays.

Which leads me to my question for John, right. How can leaders

develop and maintain a strong leadership

morality in the face of unethical behavior

or frame it another way. When everyone else around you is getting paid for doing

wrong, why does it pay to continue to do

right?

So I highlighted a lot in this chapter because

we did the Book of the Five Rings. And then in addition to that,

I was also reading the Musashi epic,

like the Gone with the Wind version and everything, and it talks about how

the samurais are paid in rice and land

and stuff like that. And I was just kind of like, oh, okay, what an

interesting form of commerce. And then I'm reading this, and it's talking about

how intentional they were around keeping

these things separate, right? If you're a samurai, you're not

a merchant, and the abacus is to be abhorred.

Right? Like, what a strong statement.

And then I love this thing. Those who had eyes

to see could not weep enough. Those who had hearts to feel could not sympathize

enough. And with the fate of many a noble and honest samurai who

signally and irrevocably failed in his new and unfamiliar field of

trade and industry,

what a unique situation to be going through that everyone

is excited about opening up and making these changes in the future of

our great country and everything. And you have this segment who

is probably sounding very much like the get off my lawn kind

of people whenever any new change is coming about, and just stay

the course, stay your lane and everything else that happens. And they

weren't hurt. Right? Which is a very interesting thing because I'm a big fan

of change that I see valuable and I'm remarkably rigid

around change that I don't see as something I should be doing.

But I love this that if you're only being honest because it pays

because someone told you that it was the right thing to do to get the

business, you're not being honest.

Right. And I struggle

with this idea because as a big networker and I'm out meeting people and

stuff and I'm hearing their stories and I'm constantly trying to figure out, is this

a fabrication? Is this really it? Is there more

substance to this? Are you just putting on a facade? Because if

I'm out there networking, one of the hardest things for me to do

is to make sure that I'm working with someone and there's good alignment because

people always tell me, John, I'm not a salesperson. That's what you do. But I

close deals. Why are you bragging about the outcome when you don't want to write

a label? That drives me crazy, first of all, and you're probably not closing that

many deals because if you were good, you wouldn't be here talking about it.

Let's just put that there. But we're

both entrepreneurs. We both run businesses. So how

much have you had to learn along the way to do this

well and stay afloat? And how many pockets of random

crap have you had to go learn and figure out because it

wasn't part of your normal track when you were able to

just stay in this one little lane and stuff. I have had call

it ego, but I honestly thought it was going to be just

hockey stick growth and easy and I wasn't going to have any concerns and it

was just going to be like perfect. No,

like taxes, payroll,

finance, these things matter, right?

I think of the line at the beginning of the poem,

the child roll into the dark tower came the poem that

undergirds Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which I'm a gigantic fan of,

not appropriate for this podcast, but definitely a good piece

of good piece of fantasy literature. And the

first line of that poem is my first thought was, he lied in every word.

And that how I think of people when they talk about entrepreneurship.

You're lying in every word or sales. You're lying in every

word because there's no possible way for you to tell me in sales,

all of the little, as the Joker would say,

in the dark night. All of the little moments,

you can't describe them, right?

And I'll frame it very practically. Like, for me, I just abandoned anxiety,

like, three years ago,

I abandoned anxiety about outcomes. I just said, no, that's it, I'm done.

Now. Saying it intellectually and then going through the whole process

emotionally of actually letting all that anxiety about outcomes go was

it took me three years. It's only been this year that I've been able to

go. I'm actually genuinely not anxious about that outcome and

actually mean that all the way down to the core.

Everyone talks about, like, fake it to you and make it stuff, right? When you're

an entrepreneur and just you're going to get there and everything. And I

think there's a good version of that, and I think there's the bad version of

that that most people adopt. But just

the purposefulness of keeping this fighting

class separate from all commerce fascinated

me, right? Because I think about my kung fu friends and the people who

I know who are really great teachers, not a single one of them has got

any kind of real business acumen, right? And they don't want it,

right? They just want to teach their art. They just want a

great school of students who are willing to put in the work and take action

and improve. But how do you get there? You got to

go out, you got to do the marketing thing. You got to do the sales

thing. You got to be able to talk in a way that gets people

excited about the thing that you're doing.

It's hilarious to me because I'm on LinkedIn a lot. I post on LinkedIn

a lot. I've got a big network on there. And occasionally me and

another sales nerd, someone else who's attached to revenue and growing sales and everything,

will get into a really great back and forth about all the psychology that

happens in a sales conversation, how to do it the right way. And then inevitably,

some founder will come along and be like, isn't it just about being honest and

having straight conversations? If that was what it was,

you wouldn't have a sales team, right?

You wouldn't need a sales team. You wouldn't be looking for one. We wouldn't have

owners putting themselves in terrible spots to get out of the sales

seat because they think that they're not enough, because they don't have it.

And they need someone who's got this innate skill that they don't possess or talent

that they don't possess that they can come in and flip complete

no's to complete yeses. What an absurd idea.

Well,

it's the idea that well,

I'll frame it this way. We've all been selling since

we were born. Agreed. Babies sell

to their moms. They just do.

Otherwise they're not going to eat. Moms sell to the babies.

Now, it operates at a much more biological level than

maybe an aesthetic level, but as you get

older, it moves up the ladder of hierarchy to more of

an aesthetic level. Right. But we're all selling.

My six year old boy just, like, ran in here before

we started recording today, and he was, like, doing a whole dance

because he's trying to sell me on, like, wrestling with him after we get done

with talking today. Like, he's trying to sell me. He's trying to make a sale.

He's selling all the time. Just like I teach negotiation

the great line from the Devil's advocate. Are we negotiating? The answer

is yes. We're always negotiating. Always.

Yeah. I'm negotiating with you. You're negotiating with me. We're negotiating with

the people who are listening to this podcast. We're negotiating in

a larger game across time this is Basic game theory or negotiating

a larger game across time for a year, two years,

five years, ten years from now, however long this podcast episode

is out on the Internet. Infinity. We're playing a game

across Infinity that's really scary

for people to think about. And so they have to

reduce it down to its smallest parts to be able to contextually

manage it. And then you have people who and it's interesting

to me how he talks about how Bushido would rather

indulge in lies. Yeah. Was a concept

that was injected into Japanese business management in the

Japan's economy. Collapsed in the Japan's birth

rate, collapsed in the japan is the ultimate example.

South Korea is the other one of the post post post

industrial society. A society where replacement

rates are so far into water they can't even see the

top of the water, where you have robots who take

care of the elderly because there just aren't enough people to do it.

And your society is demographically, at a people level,

dying on the vine.

There's a biblical admonition in the west,

in the Ten Commandments. It says, Thou shalt not lie.

Because lying is fundamental to well,

no, not fundamental. Telling the truth,

as far as it is on you to tell the truth is fundamental

to the shaping of reality. And so at scale,

we tell ourselves lies all the time. And so it doesn't surprise me

that people are lying to themselves about sales. It doesn't surprise you who are lying

to themselves about leadership. Doesn't surprise you. People lying to themselves about Bushido. None of

this shocks me because we

build systems around things that seem to be easy, but we

don't understand we actually really don't understand scale as human beings. We really

don't agree with that.

If I see you living in your family in a particular way,

it impacts my family. But how much it impacts my

family has to be socially negotiated between the two

of us. If I try to scale up the way I raise my

family to the nation state level, then I'm an authoritarian.

I just am. Just like you. You're an authoritarian. You're going to

make authoritarian decisions, and then there's going to be resistance and

it's not going to work. Just like in sales. Sales is a microcosm

of the nation state. If you try to just say, everybody do sales this way,

which by the way, there are sales trainers that say this. Oh, I know.

Very familiar with those.

Probably the

most damaging sort of sales myth,

which again is a totalitarian myth,

is in Glengarry Glenn Ross always be

closing Alec Baldwin. Talk about the Glengary leads,

right? Yeah. And you laugh, but how much of that totalitarianism

are you fighting all the time? Well, so I have a lot

to say on this topic. Obviously talking about

metaphors and trying to force Bushido into a business

management tool and stuff. My number one

pet peeve is whenever someone gets a little bit of

sales craft knowledge, they really understand the psychology of what's happening

in the conversation. And the first thing they want to do is they want to

use a martial arts metaphor, but they've never trained in martial arts.

Oh, man, nothing gets my goat more than

when I'm scrolling on LinkedIn and some person who's never worn

a gee, never stepped on a mat, never put hands with anybody

ever. Ever is like, oh,

I teach verbal akido.

Have you ever been thrown? Have you ever gone through the

process? Have you ever tried to throw someone else? Because yeah,

there is a bunch of back and forth, right? And there is a way to

kind of talk people out of things and stuff like that. But you shouldn't be

doing that to talk people into moving into your project because guess what? They're going

to churn. They're going to churn so bad and so

quickly when you don't hit those expectations. And I remember

when I was learning all this stuff right around negative psychology

and how to do takeaways and how to do all these tactics and everything,

and I did the same thing, but I thought

that that was all I needed. I didn't need anything else and it was going

to be okay. Well, it's the same people who use

combat metaphors in leadership.

We talked about this back in November when we read about

Face and when we read Lords of Arabia

and we read The Civil War memoirs of William

Tacumsa Sherman. And my personal favorite,

Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. Who names

their kid Ulysses? I love that. A buddy of mine has

got a little boy named Ulysses. And I was like, man, what a great name.

It's like a family tradition to have the boys named after you names,

right? And I was like, well, you're going to run out of those pretty quickly

because I don't know that many.

There's not that many.

But one of the ideas that we explored there with my guests and with

my co hosts in those books was this idea that no one who's

actually been through war uses a war metaphor to lead anybody.

Whenever Brady came out recently, and said that stupid moronic

thing about going to go play football is like being deployed.

Man,

you were dead to me with the whole ball deflating thing. I have no

respect. I don't care that you walked it back, because I don't actually believe

that. You don't believe the statement you said. The first time his wife left him

for a jiu jitsu player. Not even like a good combat one,

but a good competitor one. Just like not a Brazilian MMA guy. Just like a

regular Jujitsu guy, a regular Jujitsu black book guy. He's worried about

that he's got going on.

He has no idea what just happened. Yeah,

there was a guy, he's pretty well known in the sales space,

right? He does a bunch of technical sales and everything. And then a couple of

months back, he was like, so really good selling is like verbal akido.

And I was like, okay. And then

I did a little bit of research, a little bit of digging, because I'm like,

hey, I don't want to be the asshole who just like,

well, I'm the martial arts sales coach, and if I'm doing it because it's

wider than that, I do honestly believe that. And I do think that the

art that you train has an impact on how you think about the sales

metaphor and how all this stuff attaches. Right. I'm sure that if

we tried to equate your first art and the learnings and the philosophy

of that to my first art and the learnings and philosophy of that and how

that would impact how we would think about a sales function,

a lot of it would probably align, but there's probably going to be some big

differences there. And that's okay. So I'm not trying to say that

I'm the only person who's allowed to compare and analyze

how martial arts is like sales. That's not what I'm saying. If you've

not done it, though, don't make

it your thing because you don't even know what

you're talking about, honestly. Right. It's great that you saw a YouTube video

where someone was like, now watch me use their own strength against them.

But it's different once you

experience it in the lightness of it. Right? Because what happens is everyone just overdoes.

It is really kind of what it boils down to. You know this, I know

this, but it's just my number one

pet peeve, and I see every time I see it.

But every

martial art instructor I know doesn't want to be

a salesperson. Right. So I'm kind of interested in

was that like a conscious decision to keep the samurai away from commerce, or was

it or were they just so focused on this one path that they were like

money? I'm focused on the sword kind of deal. So I

came out of maybe this will give me some insight into this. I'll take a

couple of moments, address this a little bit from a different kind of

angle. So I came out of the fine arts area,

right? And when I came out of college, I had this

grand idea that I was going to go into fine arts management. That's a

whole field of dealing with gallery

owners and curators and artists and acting as a middleman between

all of them, because, quite frankly, Pablo Picasso actually,

I won't even use Picasso. He's Picasso a lot. I won't pick up Picasso today.

Salvador Daly doesn't really want to talk to a gallery owner

at all. At all. He just wants to

go off and be Salvador Dolly. Right. Gerhard Richter

doesn't really want to do a deal with a museum in Germany.

He just wants to go off and up and over the shark and put it

under glass or whatever he's doing. Right. Or was doing.

Whoever it is that's making art that you've never heard of in

some graphic design program in some state college

right now in four years or five

years or God help them, six to ten years when they get out.

Of that program. They don't want to really go deal with a

gallery owner in some Podunk area to try to

sell three pieces of art at $2,500 apiece so they

can make their rent. They can continue to live in New York City, because New

York City is expensive if you're an artist.

So arts management exists as sort of the middleman. It's like

kind of like agents, right? Yeah. Just like music management.

Yeah. It's the same thing, right? The same thing. Right. And the psychology of artists

is the same as the psychology of, I think, the psychology of

martial arts studio owners.

It's the same kind of psychology. I agree. And they're doing

their art. They care about their art. And all of these other things are

distractions from the thing they care about. And unfortunately,

what they don't understand is and I'm kind of working through this, actually,

with the well, I'm kind of working through this with some

people locally without getting into too many

details about that. But the thing

that you have to tell them is that

if you don't get the pieces in place, just like you would

tell an artist, if you don't get the pieces in place, you're not going to

be able to do more of your thing that you care about. You're actually going

to wind up doing less because you're going to wind up chasing all these other

things that you don't have. Optimized to work perfectly or at least

to work better than what they would work

if you just either a didn't do anything with them at all or b

were in them all the time and exhausted. And now you can't go on the

mat right now, you can't teach the akito,

or you can't teach the form, or you can't teach the kata,

or you can't teach the kick. Right. Which is the thing you really care about.

And it's interesting martial arts folks are kind of a weird combination of jock.

And you mentioned nerd. Jock and artists. I wouldn't necessarily

say nerd, but jock and artists. So they're creative and open, but they're also highly

conscientious and duty driven. So all this psychology that comes together,

does that make for good business owners and entrepreneurs?

Sometimes, but they have to get aligned in the appropriate

direction, and if there's no one around them to help them with

that alignment piece, then they struggle.

They struggle massively. Yeah.

I did a big project with, like, a music marketing group, and it was all

these people. I learned a lot about music marketing and why they all have agents.

And you don't really want someone

who is in charge of the artful creative direction of this thing.

Also the person asking for money. Right. It's kind

of a flawed situation, because otherwise let's just put this in

the context that I think about it the most, right? If you're out there to

make art, you're hopefully making art for yourself because it

speaks to you. Right? Now, some people will say, well, you sold out because you're

just making art that's going to sell whatever. And I think there's a time and

a place for that, because, once again, if you're not bringing in revenue,

you're going to have to go get a job, and you don't get to be

an artist at all. Right? And one of my favorite

rappers, Logic, talks about how much easier his life is

now that he has a team. Right? So he has a manager. He's got

people that can help with samples and clearances and all this stuff,

because it's a lot to manage. There's a reason why

this stuff is hard. My thing is

I love coaching those kinds of people because

I can show them that, hey,

no one is going to be able to sell this until you're able to sell

it. Right. Until you can navigate these conversations. And the value

and how does this value match to the thing that you do? If you can

do that, you have to hire someone like me to come in and

do this because I always use this kind of very short story

about chefs and cooks, right? And once the restaurant

is up and running and everything, and you have the menu and you've got a

great following and everything cool, you just need to make sure you've got great cooks.

But if you're opening a restaurant, you need a chef,

and the skill set is different. Right.

Has to be. Well, the people who figure that

out are the people like the Jerry Seinfelds or the Jay Z's,

the names you know? Right. Andy Warhol's. Right. Or even

I mean, we just mentioned Brady, who figured

out that the thing I do, if I want to do more

of that, I need structure around me to do more

of that. And the people who never get it are

still trying to sell out the Holiday Inn in Dubuque,

Iowa. And I wish it were easier

than that, and I wish the samurai had understood that. But again,

to his point, people confuse

shrewdness with good management,

and they confuse good management with shrewdness. That's an old line from Harry lying from

the Third Man. And it's true.

It's absolutely the truth. And so

there's just as much artistic integrity

in business as there is in the art of the samurai.

Agreed. If you do it correctly,

yeah. Very fair. Additional caveat,

my first business partner, he went to school at Parsons

in New York, right? Like, the big art school up there. And, man, he loves

art. And so we were hanging out one day, and I was like, hey,

man, why are you using the art stuff? You were

good at it. You really, really enjoyed it. Why aren't you an artist?

And he's like, Business is now my creative outlet.

That was really the first time I can point to a

handful of conversations with that business partner that just dramatically turned

my world upside down. Right. The first one was, Sales is like kung fu.

And I'm like, no, it's not. Sales is just something I do because it pays

for kung fu. And he was like, doesn't have to be that way in that.

Okay, cool. Now I want it.

But it's those little bitty things. But I now

think about it the same way. Right. I've always kind of felt like I wasn't

a really creative person because my grandmother was an artist, my brother's a musician.

He can make music with anything. And I'm just like this guy who likes charts

and graphs and linear functions and everything else like this, but didn't go to

school to be a developer. So I'm in this weird space. Well, now,

the ability to craft a story, the ability to write a book, the ability to

put out content that speaks to an audience and everything is a creative endeavor.

And if I had just kind of continued to not lean

into that, man, that would be brutal,

in my opinion. I wouldn't be here as an entrepreneur. I wouldn't be here,

having created a sales brand and written a sales book and everything, if I'm not

kind of clued into the idea that art has got many different directions

and most of them are okay as long as you can continue to keep

the bills paid and keep the lights on and do the things you need to

do. That's right. And that's basically what

Seth Godin says. We already referenced him earlier,

but one of the big principles that I always got from him was

you need to do enough during the day so that you can earn

enough money to continue to play the game tomorrow.

And if you just keep doing that, then you win.

That's the win. Right? And the win is not I'm

going to come with this great idea on a napkin. Someone's going to give me

a million dollars, and I'm going to be Jeff Bezos tomorrow. That's not the win.

That may be Jeff Bezos's win, but that's not your win.

Your win is going to look like, well, whatever your win looks like.

And so you have to do enough to play tomorrow.

And I've always kept that. When I talk about getting rid of

or letting go of anxiety,

like three years ago and then having the actual, like, okay, now it's actually gone

kind of thing, that's part of being able to play the game,

because what I realized is the cash in the bank

account is not the place where I have to have

the dollar to play tomorrow. It has to be in the mental or

the emotional bank account. That's where I have to have it to be able to

play tomorrow. And issues of scale,

issues of shrewdness, issues of good management, issues of

process, issues of people, all of these kinds of things.

If I don't have that first thing done again, it's putting

the things in the appropriate order. I'm a big fan of putting things in the

appropriate order. If you don't put it in the appropriate order, it doesn't happen.

Which to

the point here you're making about martial arts,

one of the things that fascinates me about Jiujitsu is you

have to put things in order first before you can even begin

to even consider competency. And one

of the big things at white belt is survival. And then

at blue belt, you can start thinking about, okay, how do I put things together?

And then at purple belt, you can start thinking about,

okay, now I'm a little bit dangerous. Now I can start doing some things.

At brown belt, you can start thinking about what type of naproxen

or aspirin you're going to take every night.

And then at black belt, you're not thinking about

your black belt. And that's

great to me because that's the ultimate

I don't really care what I think about this thing, but I

really don't care about what you think about this thing,

man. Both egos are just drained from the whole thing.

But it takes ten years. It takes you ten years to

get to that point of ego draining. And I love that. I love that idea.

So when a long time ago I don't know if we talked about this last

time. I was a professional poker player, right? So all of my income came from

playing cards and dealing in a poker room. It was

underground here in Fort Worth. And one of the things

that I took away from my poker coach was, what battle are you

fighting? Right. Are you willing to go broke to win this hand?

If so, why? What does that mean?

And are you trying to win the hand? Are you trying to win the day?

Are you trying to keep playing? Is how he would always kind of ask

me about it. And now that was a long time ago, obviously.

And a friend of mine is still a professional poker player. He has a World

Series of poker bracelet. He has a couple of rings. And he just always tells

people, don't go broke, because if you're not broke, you can continue on this path,

and there's going to be some bad days. There's going to

be some bad weeks. Luck invariance these things happen,

right? 95% sounds amazing until you're

on the other 5% of it, right? And even still,

I know people that have lost half a million dollars because someone

had a 5% shot to win two cards and one of them

hits. So there is still like, a luck element. So I

think about that all the time, right? Because especially as like, an entrepreneur,

when you're new and you're starting out and you don't really know who you're going

to be when you grow up and everything, you got to make it through.

And someone reached out to me recently because they tried to go out on their

own. It didn't really work. They're concerned about the burn rates and they're going back

to work. And I was like, Cool, man. You have forever to go out and

do this thing on your own. Don't put yourself in a terrible spot

because your ego is telling you that you have to do this thing right now.

Love that you mentioned ego, because that's a good turn into

our last section here.

Want to talk a little bit about the sources

of Bushido,

how ego can turn you upside down if you're not paying attention in

these fractured times. Back to The Way of the Samurai

by Anazo Natobe Chapter two sources

of Bushido. We're going to read a couple of different selections in here.

There's an overall point that I want to make.

I may begin with Buddhism. It furnishes a sense of calm,

trusted fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in

sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness with death.

A foremost teacher of swordmanship swordsmanship, when he saw

his pupil master the utmost of his art, told him beyond this, my instruction

must give way to Zen teaching. Zen is the

Japanese equivalent for the dayana, which represents human

effort to reach through meditation zones of thought beyond the range of verbal

expression. Its method is contemplation

and its purport, as far as I understand it,

to be convinced of a principle that underlies all phenomena,

and if it can, of the Absolute itself, and thus to put

oneself in harmony with this Absolute.

Thus defined, the teaching was more than the dogma

of a sect. And whoever attains to the perception of the Absolute

raises himself above mundane things and awakes to

a new heaven and a new earth.

What Buddhism failed to give, Shintoism offered in abundance such loyalty to the

sovereigns as reverence for ancestral memory and such filial piety

are not taught by any other creed, were inculcated by the Shinto doctrines

imparting passivity to the otherwise arrogant character of the

samurai. Shinto theology has no place for the dogma

over original sin. On the contrary, it believes in the innate goodness and godlike

purity of the human soul, adoring it as the attitude from

which the divine oracles are proclaimed.

Everybody has observed that Shintos tribes are conspicuously devoid

of objects and instruments of worship, and that a plain mirror hung in the sanctuary

forms the essential part of its furnishings. The presence of this article

is easy to explain. It typifies the human heart, which, when perfectly placid

and clear, reflects the very image of the Deity. When you stand,

therefore, in front of the shrine to worship, you see your own image reflected on

its shining surface. And the act of worship is tantamount to the old

delphic injunction, know thyself but

self knowledge does not imply, either in the Greek or Japanese teaching,

knowledge of the physical part of man, not his anatomy or his psychophysics

knowledge was to be of a moral kind, the introspection of our moral

nature. Momson, comparing the Greek and

the Roman, says that when the former worshiped, he raised his eyes to heaven,

for his prayer was contemplation, while the latter veiled his head for his was

reflection. Essentially like the Roman conception of religion, our reflection

brought into prominence not so much the moral as the national consciousness of

the individual, its nature. Worship endeared the

country to our most our inmost souls, while its ancestor worship,

tracing from lineage to lineage, made the imperial family the fountain head of the whole

nation. To us, the country is more than land and soil,

from which to mine gold or to reap grain. It is the sacred abode of

the gods, the spirits of our forefathers. To us, the emperor is more than

the arch constable of a rakstat or even

the patron of a culture sat. He is the bold, the bodily representative

of heaven on earth, blending in his person, its power,

and its mercy. If what Mbutumi says is true of English

royalty, that it is not only the image of authority, but the author and symbol

of national unity, as I believe it to be, doubly and trebly, may this be

affirmed of royalty in Japan. The tenets of Shintoism

cover the two predominating features of the emotional life of our race patriotism and loyalty.

Arthur Maynapp very truly says quote in Hebrew literature

is often difficult to tell whether the writer is speaking of God or the commonwealth

of heaven or of Jerusalem, of the Messiah or of the nation itself.

A similar confusion may be noticed in the nomenclature of our national faith.

I said confusion because it will be so deemed by logical intellect on

account of its verbal ambiguity still being a framework of national instinct

and race feelings. Shintoism never pretends to be a systemic

philosophy or. Irrational theology. This religion,

or is it more correct to say, the race emotions which this religion expressed

thoroughly, imbued Bushida with loyalty to the sovereign and love of country.

These acted more as impulses than as doctrines or shintoism.

Unlike the medieval Christian church,

prescribed to its voters scarcely any credenda, furnishing them at

the same time with an agenda of a straightforward

and simple type as to strictly

ethical doctrines. The teaching of Confucius were the most prolific source of Bushido.

His enunciation of the five moral relations between master and servant, the governing

and the governed, father and son, husband and wife, older and younger,

brother, and between friend and friend, was but a confirmation of what the race

instinct had recognized before his writings were introduced.

From China,

the writings of Confucius and Mensius formed the principal textbooks

for youths and the highest authority in discussion among

the old. A mere acquaintance with

the classics of these two stages was held, however, in no high esteem. A common

proverb ridicules one who is only an intellectual knowledge of Confucius

as a man ever studious, but ignorant of analytics.

A typical samurai calls a literary savant a book smelling SOT.

Another compares learning to an ill smelling vegetable that must be boiled

and boiled before it is fit for use. A man who has read a

little, smells a little pedantic, and a man who has read much smells yet more

so. Both are alike unpleasant. The writer

meant thereby that knowledge becomes really such only when it is assimilated

in the mind of the learner and shows in his character.

Bushido made light of knowledge as such. It was not pursued as an end

in itself, but as a means to the attainment of wisdom.

Hence he who stopped short of this end was regarded

no higher than a convenient machine which could turn out poems and maxims

at bidding. Thus knowledge was conceived as identical

with its practical application in life, and this socratic

doctrine found its greatest exponent in the Chinese

philosopher Wan Yang Ming, who never wearies of

repeating to know and to act are one

and the same. I'm going to skip forward

a little bit, and I'm going to bring this up. Thus whatever

the sources, the essential principles which Bashido imbibe from them and assimilated to itself

were few and simple. Few and simple as these were, they were sufficient to furnish

a safe conduct of life even through the unsafest

days of the most unsettled period of our nation's history.

The wholesome unsophisticated nature of our warrior ancestors derived ample

food for their spirit from a sheaf of commonplace and fragmentary teachings,

gleaned, as it were, on the highways and byways of ancient thought, and stimulated

by the demands of the age, formed from these gleamings a

new and unique type of manhood. An acute French savant,

M. De la Mazelier, thus sums up his impressions

of the 16th century. Quote for

the middle of the 16th century, all this confusion in Japan, in the government,

in society, in the Church. But the civil wars, the manners returning

to barbarism, the necessity for each to execute justice for himself.

These formed men comparable to those Italians of the 16th century,

in whom Tain praises the vigorous initiative,

the habit of sudden resolutions and desperate undertakings, the grand

capacity to do and to suffer. In Japan, as in Italy,

the rude manners of the Middle Ages, made of man a

superb animal, wholly militant and wholly

resistant. And this is why

the 16th century displays in the highest degree the principal quality of

the Japanese race, that great diversity which one finds there between

minds as well as between temperaments. While in

India, and even in China, men seem to differ chiefly

in degree of energy or intelligence,

in Japan, they differ by originality of character

as well.

Holy, militant and wholly resistant.

Circle back to politeness. We're going to close the loop here

with John.

This rudeness that we're experiencing right now in our culture

really bugs me. And the

technology and the communication patterns of the people of the early 20th,

1st century, particularly in the United States, have created

leaders, or at least have given space to leaders, who are wholly militant

and wholly resistant, mostly for the sake of clicks in

our time and hot takes.

But if you're not contextual enough, or if you're not wise enough

to pick up on that, you're not going to know. You're going to fall

for the trick.

2020 was an interesting year. There was a lot of genuine panic,

but there was also this idea of pedal panicking, which comes

from the real estate business, where you move somebody into a neighborhood

or yours. Real estate agent walk into a neighborhood and you tell

everybody, hey, those people over there or these people over here are getting ready to

move into the neighborhood. You might want to sell your house and then you cause

a bank run or a real estate run. And yes, real estate agents have

actually done that in the past.

There's a lot of panic pedaling that went on in 2020 and

that has created an environment where rudeness is now our highest

virtue. But there is hope.

This is why I do the podcast. There is hope for those who

want to grow in character, who want to abandon the ego,

and who want to become intentional and competent in the work of

leading without descending into the brutal in the short term.

I will admit, I do have a hobbesian view of man,

but it's tempered by optimism. I do think we

can be better because there's been times in history when we have been better,

but it's hard. And the ego would rather

do the lazy thing and be wholly militant and

wholly resistant, particularly when it's easy to get a click.

John how do we stay on the path?

How do we lead in these fractured times?

How do we lead without being militant and resistant.

How do we incorporate the way of the samurai into what we do in our

daily lives as leaders? I really liked

and I highlighted that kind of last section that you were reading about where they're

talking about someone who reads too many books is just a thought,

right? And it speaks to this idea, and I

see this in entrepreneurial groups where someone is like, hey, I read 75 books

last year, and then some person who didn't read one is like, but how many

have you implemented? Okay, well, at least they're,

like, trying. And I see this as a big reader and also someone who

tries to implement things that I think I can use in my in my business

and in my coaching. I think the other

side of this. Thing was Lex Friedman gets a bad rap.

Why does he get a bad rap? Well, he tweeted out

something. Oh, gosh, like, at the end of the beginning of this year about

reading, like, I don't know, 20 books in a year. And he tweeted out,

like, heavy duty books, and then Nicholas Haseem Talib came for

him. And I was like, Why? The man's trying something.

Yeah. And I like, Nicholas haseem talib. I really do.

I have all his books. I enjoy thinking about fractals, but come

on, dude, I understand you're in a corner of a room in Lebanon somewhere.

Like, I get it. You're better than all of us, but come on.

I think that the answer to the big question that we've been talking about

here is a chapter we've not talked about in the book.

And it's the self control chapter, right? Because from the

outside of this, the samurais are pictured as

these, like, the jockos of your if that makes sense.

Right. You know what I'm talking about. I've met Jocko, and he's

a very interesting guy. Lives what he preaches.

It's amazing. He's always talking about self control and being

disciplined and doing these things. And in this chapter,

there's a couple of things in here that highlighted and have just been

standing out to me since reading the thing. And I think it really comes down

to this. One of the things that I highlighted was calmness

of behavior, composure of mind should not be disturbed

by passion of any kind.

Yes. Right. So let's look at what that

means, right? Someone goes around you,

and you're mad about it because it's your guy should have come to you first.

Why are you so riled up? You're riled up out of fear,

right? You're fearful you're going to lose your job or you look like you're not

doing something, so you're just going to take it out on someone. That's ridiculous.

Right? Handle your stuff. You shouldn't be that concerned about it. I highlighted

that on the other side of it. I highlighted this

other passage that I thought was very interesting. Discipline and

self control can easily go too far. It can well repress the genial current

of the soul. It can force pliant natures into distortions and monstrosities.

It can beget bigotry breed hypocrisy and

hebitate affections be a virtue never so

noble, right?

I think we're talking about polar ends of this thing, right?

You've got people that are rankled every

time everything doesn't go their way. And then you have people who are making such

a big deal about how so disciplined that they are that they're like living kind

of like monks and there's a whole lot of room in the middle.

But I think the thing to really be thoughtful

about is the self control to not post

the hot take, right? The self control to not send that email

when you're fired up about it because you're ramped up. And poker players do an

amazing job of realizing tilt, right? Tilt is emotional thinking that causes

you to take subpar actions, right? And when

you're fired up about an email and you're going to fire it off to someone,

yeah, you're tilted, right. If you get off of a call where someone has

ghosted you and you're like, you know what? I'm not taking no from this next

person no matter what, that's tilted thinking, right? You are not

under control in those moments. And you and I know

this as martial artists, right? If all these guys were like, man,

when I'm mad at a C red cool, you're going to lose.

You're going to get destroyed by the person who has presence

of mind because they've been here before. They've normalized this whole

thing and they have a game and a program and you're just out

here winging it. They're going to destroy you. Right? It's that

self control that I think that people are missing, right? And it's

easy to thrive in because of the anonymity of some of these platforms and social

things. But I just think that most people I

think most people don't have enough self control, right? And I

think that the people who do. I love Jocko.

I like his book. I mean, his book is a top shelf book to me,

which means that recommend it to people, like as often as I possibly can.

I've met him, super solid guy. But I saw this tweet and I

laugh about it every time I think about this. If the only thing you're known

for is getting up at 430 in the morning, you probably need to be doing

something else, right?

He's probably had some amazing outcomes with the people that he's coached.

And I'm sure his book has had some amazing impacts on people.

He's got thriving businesses and everything. But still, the only thing that people talk about

with him is that he gets up at 430 and he does jujitsu and he

lifts weights and he surfs and that's it. No one

talks about the other parts of this thing because the only thing that people are

latched onto is the discipline that he talks about,

right.

When you're on a path. I firmly believe that if you want to be great

in something, it's about the trade offs you're willing to make on

that path to greatness. So, yeah, you're going to get up at 430.

No one cares, though. Yeah, you're going to go and

if you're on a martial arts path, you're going to get hit, you're going to

get hurt. It's going to suck occasionally. Right. And people aren't going to get

it. That's your thing.

You shouldn't be trying to sell the virtue of your martial arts path to

people who don't care about martial arts. Just talk about like it's just a way

of life for you. Because that's kind of the place that I got to because

for a long time I love martial arts. God,

the impact it's had on my life as far as becoming a better

human, I can't even begin to talk about it.

Right. I mean, every aspect of my life has been changed because of that path.

And I talk about it a lot in my coaching and my content and everything.

And I know that it's not for everybody, but I also know

if you've done something, you have a similar path

to my martial arts path. Like if you've been a musician,

cool. You know what, you've not gotten hit and punched, but you've had to grind

it out in front of crowds who didn't know who you were. I respect that.

Right. Comedians who will get up and bomb on purpose because

they've got some new material that they're dying to try out, but everyone

just wants the old stuff. I respect that. And these

people aren't walking around making big deals about it. This is just part of the

path of improvement. I think

that that self control thing, it's just most

people don't need a megaphone and all social media is a megaphone,

is how I think about it. So it's just easy to

hang in the crowd, right? You got miles of separation.

I'm going to say whatever I want. It's going to be great. And then you

can't understand why people are mad at you in person whenever you make the same

kind of comments. Because they're crappy comments.

They didn't need to be said. I game with all

these kids, right. They're people I don't know. Right.

And some of the voices you have to be a

kid to have a voice like that. That's just how it works. Yeah,

I'm old and I'm not super good at this game. And I'll have people be

like, bro, no offense, but you're terrible about this.

Cool. We're in the same game, man. Like in the same league

at the same level and everything. But, you know, so maybe, maybe not

needing to be said kind of deal. And it just baffles me

how they just no

offense, if I'm being honest. Self control is

and I highlighted the same pieces that you highlighted in that self control

chapter. And if we had more time today, that was actually going to be,

like, a little bit more than I was going to talk about because I thought

that was some real juice in there.

And it's a short chapter, too. It's one of the shortest

ones in the book and what it probably

should have been first. Probably. Yeah. Well, right.

The man was operating at a different kind. He was doing a different kind of

thing, for sure. Yeah. He's not trying

to turn people to that way of thinking. He's trying to

show this isn't that different than what you've

been through. And he does a masterful job of that.

Right. If he didn't bring in all those worldly references and

compare it in the way that he does, this book would be easy to

ignore. But if you choose to ignore it now, I think it's at your own

peril. I'd like to thank John

Hill, aka Small Mountain, for coming on the podcast

yet again today.

Always a good conversation. I could talk to this guy for hours.

Same. Please keep picking cool, like martial

arts books, and I'm down to be your

sparring partner over any of them, my friend. This is awesome. Awesome.

Yeah. We try to do at least one a year,

sometimes two.

One really gets information there.

I do want to go back, and I want to recover. Sun Zoo, I don't

really like how that episode came together. I'll be down for

that cover Art of War again. There's some things

in there that I'd really like to bounce off of another fellow

devotee of the Marshall Game and

examine those tactics and practices

that Sun Zoo talks about in

a different kind of way as we close.

I will say this self control is key to staying on the

path, but so is patience and veracity and courage.

So is understanding the role of women and the understanding of

how we fit into society with

our families and with our friends and

with our intimate partners and all the way up and all the way down.

There's an issue of scale, right? What's good

for me may not be good for you, and what's good for you may not

be good for me. But collectively, we can democratically.

This is the dream. Find a way that is good for everybody by

groping our way forward. And this is what Inazo Natobe believed in.

He had his entire life and his entire career during a

fascinating period of time in Japanese and in world history

when that groping, when that groping,

felt like groping, felt like groping in the dark, felt desperate.

Matches our own time, right? Look, we may

have a Third World war, or we may not. We may

have more economic strife, or we may not. We may have natural disasters that

rip apart our country, or we may not. We may have riots

or insurrections or we may not,

but one thing that it does remain we will

always need leaders. We will

need leaders who have not necessarily the

code of Bushido, but who have a

moral compass and an ethical focus,

who on purpose choose to behave in certain ways

and then follow through in those ways,

regardless of what the clearing at the end of the path might

be. Once again, I want to thank my guest co

host today for this episode, John Hill.

And with that,

I'm out.

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