Billionaire David Rubenstein on the Key Principles to Truly Becoming the One in Control

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am here today with david rubinstein who is the co-founder of carlyle group which is one of the most successful firms ever in terms of private equity really pretty extraordinary tale and the author of the new book how to lead david welcome to the show my pleasure thank you for having me absolutely man i am super excited to talk to you about the idea of leadership which is something that um i think is not only important in business but just generally in life if you had to put into a single sentence what leadership is what what its nature is if you will what would you say leadership is generally it's the effort of one or more people to convince a larger group of people to follow them in doing something that the leaders think is a good thing for everybody to do it could be social policy it could be a political effort it could be a business venture but basically leaders are people who try to convince other people that it would be in everybody's best interest to follow the leaders views on what should be done and do you so when i think about the military and their views around leadership there's a sense of distributed leadership where anybody should be able and willing to step into that role when it makes sense for you know a dynamic situation as it unfolds do you view leadership like that should everybody be developing that skill or is this something that you know hey if you have a particular path in life you're trying to follow it might be useful but otherwise you don't need to bother well there's seven and a half billion people on the face of the earth and in some respects almost everybody's a leader in some way if you're a parent you're a leader you might be a leader of a girl scout troop or you might be president of the united states so everybody has probably some roles where they play as a leader is it good for everybody to want to be a leader well i think leadership is good if we had everybody being a follower they have a lot of chaos now in the military uh leadership is more complicated because those people who are leading in the military they have people's lives at stake if you're in combat and you're not doing a good job in the military as a combat leader people can die not the same in other parts of life to some extent but i do think that uh people who want to be leaders can develop and mature and improve their leadership skills and that's part of what i wrote about how people became great leaders after some starts that were not so wonderful some mistakes and some failures and things like that so in the book you break down what are the sort of core tenets of or aspects of leadership um in the book were they in order of importance no they were not necessarily in the order of importance but they were you know i they were 13 that i kind of thought were important and just to review the examples of them luck is very important because you need some luck to get anywhere i think you need to have some persistence you need to have a focus on what you want to do you need to know how to cooperate with other people share the credit you need to how to communicate well with people either orally or writing or some other method you also need to i think be ethical i think some humility helps a lot obviously we know arrogant leaders that have succeeded but generally i think humility helps rising to the occasion when a crisis occurs is very important so there are many different skill sets that i think are common with the people i interviewed so in the book you start with luck just now you started with luck again uh which feeds into your notion of being humble as well which i know is one of the um the traits that you listed and i think that's really powerful but if you had to sort of rank order so for instance one of them that you mentioned specifically in the book is um hard work and long hours which i resonate with very much uh and i'm just sort of curious if you were to pick you know maybe the top three or four um what you think those are well look um nobody ever won a nobel prize working five days a week nine to five if you're gonna do something great it takes a lot of time and hard work is important so there aren't people there are not people sitting around just get lucky and all of a sudden the world goes to them and says i want you to be our leader it doesn't usually happen second i think it is focus you can't do a hundred things and do them all well you can do one thing extremely well maybe two or three reasonably well but focus on what you want to do and then i think you've got to just be willing to overcome failure because everybody's going to fail and if you give up if you fail and you don't persist in your idea you're not going to be a leader and those are things that are very very important which is to say uh be persistent uh focus on something and again you have to want to be a leader you can't sit in your home and say you know i don't really want to be a leader and all of a sudden people are going to say you know you're our leader that doesn't usually happen yeah your own story i find to be really um powerful when taking these principles and looking at what they look like in real life so i first think i had known of the carlisle group but to be honest i didn't know who founded it and i knew of you as an interviewer and so when i found out that they were sort of one in the same it was really kind of a thrilling moment you're you have a sort of a really fun personality a really your delivery is dry but your humor is really really fun and to catch you sort of at a later point in your life where i was old enough to be aware of you and what you were doing um and then to sort of look back at how you had approached life and become successful i'd love to talk about perseverance in your own life what that journey was like um you know some of the early i don't know if you'd categorize them as failings in politics getting out of that you know not loving your time in law getting out of that and then really finding your footing um how did you conceptualize that journey did you think i must persevere and you sort of already had that or were you just afraid of failure well it's you know when you look back at your life when you're my age i'm now 71 an age too young to run for president united states probably if you can say okay this is how it worked out and i can explain it but when you're living your life you don't look at those things that way so when you're living your life you're kind of living in the moment and one thing didn't work and i tried something else sometimes that worked sometimes it didn't and i got very very lucky in my life and then i tried to do many different things and some of them you know i was happy to do and i they worked out well some just were failed miserably and you know that's life and you know you just have to get used to it but i i think i attribute a lot of my success to luck and a lot of that uh to also coming from modest means if you grow up in an extremely wealthy family if your father is worth 10 billion dollars you might not have the drive to do the kind of things you need to do to win a nobel prize or a pulitzer prize or something else if you grow up in a modest family uh you know if you're going to get anywhere in life you got to do it on your own and so when you're growing up and not a wealthy family you might not think it's an advantage but actually is a big advantage because you know if you're going to get anywhere you've got to do it on your own and when you get to do it on your own and you do succeed people are going to say well you did it on your own not because your father your mother i'd love to push on that a little bit so i've heard you in interviews talk about that before and what is it about growing up wealthy that placates people and what is it growing up because i don't you've always said that one of the greatest things ever happened to you is having two parents that loved you unconditionally so you had that which i'm sure would have been incredibly beautiful so what was missing that made you so hungry and then if money isn't the sort of end-all be-all it doesn't deliver happiness why aren't people hungry when they have wealth well on that question i think if you know that you are not going to starve or you're not going to be on the street uh because your father or mother is very wealthy i don't think you have quite the drive now obviously there are exceptions there are people who are successful who come from wealthy families but mega mega wealthy families the wealthiest families in the in the country in any given country in any given time generally they don't produce the the the superstars so look at the people who are the most successful people today in our society in politics or business athletics whatever it might be usually they didn't come from a forbes 400 family as a general rule of thumb so in in my own case i came from modest means as you as you alluded to my father wasn't a high school graduate or nor was my mother um bill gates is gonna has three children they all seem to be well adjusted they all seem to be doing well whether they can produce the kind of great success that he produced who knows but if they they do people will say well sure his father was bill gates so my own case i have three children they're all extremely well educated in the best schools harvard duke stanford and so forth but you know whatever they achieve sometimes people will say well maybe it's because their father was helpful or your father was wealthy now they wouldn't say that's really fair and maybe they're right but there's no doubt that people will think that do you think that deflates them because i would think well now they have something to push back on to achieve at a level to show people i got out from under my dad's shadow why doesn't that drive them to do even more well i think it's complicated for a less complicated for a girl than a boy i think if you're a man and you have a son the son probably is going to be seen as more in the shadow of a very prominent father i think it's a little bit different for daughters for lots of reasons i could explain so maybe it's not quite as challenging but you know of course uh you've seen many times where famous men have children who say or sons and daughters who i say i don't want anything with a family business i want to be on my own i don't want anything to do with the family's wealth and sometimes these people to have nice lives they don't generally don't change the world in quite the way that maybe the father the mother did did you think about when you were raising your kids this is one of the reasons i don't have kids by the way was so growing up um my parents couldn't give me all the things that i wanted but i always had food my parents loved me to death so i'm beyond fortunate with how i grew up but there was something about not being able to have the things that i wanted that really pushed me to achieve more than anybody in my family had achieved and so when i generated wealth in my own life and thought about raising kids that grew up in a family that would have been affluent i really worried about having to artificially create an environment that was difficult for them in order for them to succeed i wasn't sure that i had the fortitude if i'm honest to create hardships for them where i didn't need to did you think about that like have you done things to sort of make it quote unquote difficult on your kids well uh i wasn't quite as wealthy as i later became when i was having my children i was reasonably wealthy by normal human centers but not by the standards of today so i tried very much to shield them from the wealth but eventually they figured it out and you know they you know they they kind of accepted it they know i wasn't giving them gigantic trust funds or buying them lots of things that they really didn't need so i think they got a good education and that's probably the best you can do but as you suggest raising children is complicated as you may have heard me say jackie kennedy liked to say that raising children is a complicated thing and if you mess up raising your children nothing else in life really matters and it's true your ultimate legacy is not a building named after you or a scholarship named after you or but it's your children in many ways and so they're going to be around a lot longer than you are in most cases and you know raising children is challenging for wealthy people as we have seen many people uh you live in california many people are very famous hollywood types they have famously had some let's say less successful children than they might have wanted in some cases because they have a lot of wealth a lot of uh things that that are not necessarily conducive to great success out of curiosity what are the things that are conducive to great success beyond money because you've talked very eloquently about you know billionaires being some of the most tortured people that you've met what what are those things that lead somebody to be quote unquote successful in my view success is happiness the most elusive thing in life is personal happiness thomas jefferson wrote about the pursuit of happiness he never told us how to actually get it but finding somebody that's happy with their life is really really good so if you ever meet a poor person and they are very happy with what they're doing why should you say your life isn't successful they're very happy with what they're doing if you meet a very wealthy person and he or she is tortured with their money and they don't know what to do with it their children hate them everybody hates them is that person successful i don't really think so i think success comes about when you're happy because that's the point of life to some extent is being happy that's why we're all here i guess to some extent we want to make the life better for other people but to some extent if you are making life better for other people you're going to be happy in my view how do you deal with the transient nature of happiness and do you distinguish between happiness and say fulfillment well sure happiness can be a momentary thing in some cases you're happy that something happened a big success happened here you did something you got an award or something your children call you up and say they're proud of you if that ever happens but fulfillment means that you're content and contentment really is a more long-lasting kind of thing you know to be fulfilled i think as being uh something that can goes on for quite some time happiness can be more transitory you're happy one day you're unhappy the next day but when you're fulfilled i think it's more long-lasting and probably a better thing so how did you craft that message for your kids one thing that it seems like you've really established yourself as in your career somebody who's deeply persuasive able to like you said a good leader get people to go somewhere that's going to be good for them how did you set your kids up for that for pursuing happiness or fulfillment there was a famous book that was written called presidential power and in it it was written by a man named richard neustadt and he said look president doesn't have that much power he only has the power to persuade and uh as i thought about it that's what life is all about persuading somebody to do something go on your show read your book uh greet it with your theories life is all about persuading people even albert einstein couldn't come up with e equals m c squared and everybody said you're right he had to go persuade people that he was correct about that so persuasion is very important so there are three ways to persuade and communicate one orally you're a good talker you're martin luther king you're abraham lincoln a good writer you're mark twain you write very well but the most powerful way is by leading by example persuading by example so with my kids i was a hard worker and i tried to educate them about the value of hard work i read a lot i try to educate them about the value of reading uh treating other people well i try to educate them but children learn by seeing what their parents do if your parents are are doing certain things and they're telling kids to do the opposite that's probably not going to work so you have to kind of do what you're you're trying to get your kids to do and lead by example now nobody's a perfect parent i'm certainly not but um you know trying to lead by example is probably what i tried to do and and to some extent uh it worked and you know my kids are not perfect i'm not perfect and everybody has their flaws but i think generally they're reasonably happy and generally they're reasonably successful by normal human standards at this stage in their life i'm glad you brought up lincoln so lincoln is somebody i've heard you talk a lot about um and if if i misquote you please let me know but i'm i'm almost certain i remember you saying that you consider lincoln the greatest american if not one of the greatest yes so what is it one for people that don't know you well your your um the way that you leverage your understanding of history and bring it into a context today i find really extraordinary what is it about him that makes him the greatest american well the time that he was elected he was of course not that well known he had never held any office other than after two years he was a congressman uh in any federal office except for a congressman for two years the country was falling apart seven states seceded before he even took office um just after his election and so the country was falling apart he decided to keep the country together now somebody else might have said hey you want to go to secede so south go away we take your slaves and you live that life we don't want that here he didn't say that i said i want to keep the country together and he fought a war we had 600 to 700 000 men and women die in that war very costly but he kept the country together and of course in the process of trying to win the war he freed the slaves through the emancipation proclamation subsequently for the 13th amendment so he held the country together and he did so with eloquence and enormous amount of humility had i met him which i never did i would have said uh tell us did you win the civil war and he would say no i didn't win it uh the american people won it in other words he wouldn't have bragged about himself i can't see him sitting down and say hey guess what i did today i won the civil war i don't see him saying that um very humble person and uh and i think that was really an admirable quality and and i think uh now had there been no civil war abraham lincoln would probably not be sending a great president you have to rise to the occasion if fdr had been president for eight years and we never went into world war ii i suspect he wouldn't be seen such a great president you have to rise the occasion when circumstances present it and so if you're abraham lincoln but nothing bad happens during your time as president probably you know there's not much you have to do that really earns you a great credit as a great great leader that's why i think he was the greatest leader that's interesting so i want to more understand so one why wouldn't it have been smarter to let the cell secede given how much loss of life there was and trust me i'm glad he held it together so this i i don't have an agenda in that direction i'm just curious as to um why wasn't it the right answer just to be like hey go do your thing and you know we'll avoid the bloodshed abraham lincoln had a uh i would say a uh fetish almost with the with the declaration of independence and the constitution he just believed that they were the holy writ and he therefore thought look this country was supposed to be one country that's what the declaration of independence was about that's what the constitution's about i'm not going to be the person that allows it to fall apart so i think he wanted to hold it together for that reason he as you probably know he was not interested in freeing the slaves in fact in his initial inaugural address he said i support the 13th amendment the 13th amendment at that time was something that james buchanan his predecessor was wanted to have become part of the constitution what did the 13th amendment say it said slavery is the law of the land and shouldn't be changed so lincoln endorsed that in his initial inaugural address later he realized that that it really wasn't going to be helpful to continue to have slavery and still be able to win the war he needed uh people to to leave the south slaves and ultimately join the union army among other things and the south and southern slaves were also helping fuel the war machine so that was another factor lincoln was not a uh i'd say lincoln was not an abolitionist during his lifetime really but he ultimately came to the conclusion it was the right thing to do though i should point out he didn't think that blacks and whites could live together he wanted to colonize them that was a euphemism for you move into another country and even when he was president united states even when he was doing the emancipation proclamation he was talking to blacks about moving to let's say panama or someplace else in central america he didn't think they could live together with whites you take a really unflinching look at history which has made you one of the most interesting voices in this space for me um you've you've done what you call patriotic philanthropy so you've gone in and um helped update national monuments and things like that um thomas jefferson's um ranch being one of them and i know a big thing for you was to um make sure that the the signs of his him being a slave owner were there and built up as well so that people didn't sort of begin to rewrite history um why do you think that's important why don't we sort of whitewash this stuff tell a better story about it that's more in line with values today well the theory of history is that if you study the past it will help you in the future as george santiano famous harvard philosopher said those people that don't remember history are condemned to relive it so the theory of civilization is you advance it's kind of darwinian we're theoretically advancing as we move forward well we're not going to advance if we don't know the mistakes of the past so that's the general premise second if you um if i buy the magna carta and i put it on a computer slide and you can look at it it's not going to have the same impact as if you go visit it you see it in person you have somebody telling you about it there but most likely after you see it in person you're going to go read about it so by preserving buildings or preserving documents or books you're likely to have more people see them in person and because the human brain treats that differently than seeing on a computer slide i think it's going to help people get educated about history and if you've read some of the things i've said it's amazing how little people know about our own history um and one of the examples i like to cite the most is this when you want to be a citizen nice you seem you're a native born american i don't know okay native born american so you're automatically a citizen of this country but if you're not native born and you want to be a citizen as eight hundred thousand people a year are becoming upcoming citizens you have to take a citizenship test there are a hundred potential questions you can study for them you then go to the court and they ask you 10 of those 100 you have to get six of them right if you're 65 or older they tell you the 10 questions in advance [Laughter] 91 of the people that take that test pass great the same test was given to um i think was 41 000 americans in all 50 states nato they were native born they were asked to pass the same test and in 49 out of 50 states the citizens couldn't a majority couldn't pass it these are questions like who was the first president united states how many branches are in the federal government and things like that so we don't know much about history and civics we don't you can graduate from any college united states today without having to take an american history course so people don't know much about our country's government and uh it's sad but that's the truth yeah that that is crazy i had never heard anybody quote that stat before you also have some terrifying statistics around literacy in the u.s um which i am absolutely startled by so when you think about um america when you think about sort of the state of where we are right now again i don't want to misquote you so please if i get this wrong but i think i heard you say that you believe america is the greatest nation on earth true false oh absolutely and i think most americans would agree with that uh in fact i'm writing a book now about what it means to be an american tell me more okay so i have a couple qualities i think when i say these are genes of being an american what is what are the american genes now every country by definition every country's citizens think it's the best country because they don't leave um you know for example less than five percent of the people on the face of the earth are living in a country that they weren't born in so yes hard to believe so uh think about this uh right now what would you say is the most important thing about being an american well there's many different things right to free speech the right to uh free freedom of religion separation of powers in our government things like that well in my book i'm talking about these what i call the genes of american dna but i had a survey done by the harris research organization they ask americans what they thought is the most important thing about being an american and interestingly the thing that just came back in the survey it'll be in the book is that the americans think that the most important quality of being an american is the right to free speech now i think that's a very important quality i'm not sure i would have said number one but certainly in the top ten but that's what people really are valuing about our country and then clearly um americans uh you know we have 800 000 people a year coming to united states to live how many people do you think are leaving the united states a year to go somewhere else you know maybe a few thousand probably for tax purposes that's the main reason so people think it is the best country and i think it's the best country but there's no doubt that the country with the highest uh happiness quotient is not the united states it's probably denmark or or finland or something like that so obviously small countries that have other appeals but if you're talking about a big country i think there's nothing comparable to united states oh man so we got to go we got to go a little deeper on that you've been all over the place all over the place and if people know your history raising money all over the world really sort of inventing that model um very extraordinary so for you to look back with the breadth of travel that you've done and still make that statement i'm super curious so if we're not scoring as high on the sort of happiness quotient is somewhere like maybe denmark um and you say that success really is happiness um what is it that we have here as a country and it sounds like part of it's just scale that we're able to you know what we're doing goes bigger um and and i'm asking all of this in the context of i think we're living through a time right now where some percentage i don't know what percentage some percentage are not sure that america is a great country full stop um and i i do it's given me so much and i feel such a deep sense of obligation to make sure that you know people have those opportunities and i'm i would love to see if you can articulate it in a way that i'm not sure that i could how that dna is serving americans well the dna is serving america in if you are probably like you or me white reasonably well educated reasonably prosperous and so forth but the reason that people in denmark are probably happier or happier overall or finland than the united states is they don't have an economic underclass the way we do so in our country we have a very large percentage of the population that is um let's say illiterate a large percentage of people who are are in jail higher than any percentage in any other country in the world we have a large percentage of people that have given up on their ability to rise from the bottom and social mobility is not available to them and of course income inequality is greater here than at any time it's ever been uh in our country's history probably even greater than the great depression now so a lot of people are not that happy with this country they're not leaving the country because they do believe in probably in the american dream that maybe they'll rise up but for some people at the bottom they think the chance of rising up is just not realistic but they don't have a chance to leave the country either so the country has a lot of great things we have we influence the world as you suggest i travel around the world a lot when i go anywhere people want to know what's going on in the united states because our culture has affected the culture of the world our technology our politics our government our military really is is influential all over the world so people want to know about this country and it's an extraordinary country but it has its flaws as we all know and so our job is to try to fix the flaws if we can okay so i definitely want to get to the flaws that are fixable but first um you said that in the poll people said that the thing they most valued about america was freedom of speech but you didn't think you would put that as number one what would you put as number one well the things i think are two most important ones and are freedom and lib and equality now the the founding fathers said and thomas jefferson effect said that's what the country's all about when he wrote that famous sentence in the declaration of penance saying that all men are quite equal he was a slave owner and he really meant all white men who were christian are are equal if they have some money uh but he didn't say it that way so we've taken that creed what something he didn't really mean and we've made it the country's creed and it's a goal we live to and i think many people have grown up thinking yes we should have equal opportunity for everybody equal rights for everybody we're not we haven't achieved that but that i think is what is the most important concept of america equality and then freedom to do what you want it can be freedom of speech freedom of religion uh freedom to pursue a career you want i think those two are the essence of what the country is mostly uh the backbone of which there are other things like separation of powers and and other important things in our country's history and the way it works you know uh for elections voting making your vote be meaningful those kind of things but i i would say freedom of speech is amazingly what people really really think is the highest and most important quality of our country so when you think about um a promise was made with the declaration of independence and and i'm curious so i've never thought this thought before so this may be totally ridiculous and i certainly don't have your understanding of history but as somebody who writes a lot one thing i know is when you go to write something oftentimes part of the reason i'm sure he left out the detail is it wouldn't have the sort of poetic impact that he wanted it to have and i do when i look at sort of the the the founding documents that this country is based on and how in my estimation no question there are flaws but in my estimation like we we have continued a march towards making things better making things more equal allowing more and more people to rise up um that there's there was dna implanted whether intentionally or unintentionally that opened the door to us sort of making good on that initial promise do you think that um there's there's two questions here one the one i was going to ask may not be as interesting but i'll just say it out loud do you think that thomas jefferson in trying to get the poetry of it right realized he needed a grander vision to capture the human spirit and that that was why he wrote it the way that he wrote it um and we obviously see the knock-on effect and then well we'll we'll stop let me answer that yeah thomas jefferson was 33 years old um his wife was very ill he didn't want to be at the second continental congress and he wanted to be back in virginia where he thought more important things were getting done and also he could tend to his wife but he's agreed to stay for a while they gave him the assignment they gave him 17 days to write up a some propaganda statement about why we're going to break away from england like most people he took the last three days and the first 14 days he was busy so with three days to go he's writing in his uh little rented house there with two slaves or with them and he didn't have any books with him really and he just kind of wrote it from memory and what he believed was the common sense so he didn't have footnotes and all kinds of other things after he submitted it to people and the congress voted on it they made 60 changes he said they mutilated it in fact he was so upset for eight or nine years he wouldn't tell people that he actually wrote it because he was embarrassed the way it was written but it turns out that the preamble which was ignored at the time became the most famous sentence in the english language we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that became the most famous sentence in the english language and at the time nobody paid attention to it because it was the preamble to the key the part they really wanted to talk about which is the sins of king george later um it became the creed of our country because people increasingly said all men are created equal well maybe we mean all men and all women maybe we mean all white men and all white women and all black men and all black women so it got to be expanded and maybe it also meant that people have freedom so that you have freedom for people who are gay lesbian jewish whatever catholic whatever everybody has certain freedom so it got it evolved and uh you know it just uh you know it became something that he was synonymous with and when he died he said on his tombstone that's what he really wanted us first the author of the declaration of independence well i don't know that he intended it to be as famous as it became in fact john adams hated the fact that he became so famous because john adams thought we he was the person who was most responsible for the revolutionary war declaration and he wanted july the second when that was voted on to be the day we celebrate but then we voted on we we we celebrate july the 4th why is that well uh uh one year after july the second in 1777 they were going to celebrate but they forgot it was july the 7th so they didn't get around to it then the third they said we're organizing on the fourth so when the fourth became the day they celebrate it was synonymous with the declaration of independence which would approve that day and not the july second thing and that's why adams and and jefferson didn't get along that well because they they fought over what was more important that's july second resolution or the july 4th declaration that yeah when you put it into the context where you can feel real humans behind the scenes doing this stuff it becomes i think far more interesting so country has flaws how do we go about fixing those and is that like do you see each of us needing to play a role and if so like how do you see you as but one example of how a person can contribute how do you see yourself contributing to that our country actually moves forward reasonably well by listening to people because we have enormous amounts of public opinion polling we have voting we have social media so i do think you can influence people in congress and influence governors and state legislators i think you can but it takes persistence you can't just write one letter to the op-ed page and think that's going to solve problems you got to really be persistent and those people that have persisted uh have succeeded for example uh when our country was created the idea that women could own property was considered ridiculous that they could vote or being government was even more ridiculous so uh the the the seneca falls convention of 1848 kind of began the effort to get women the right to vote 1848 and then the it wasn't until 1919 that we really got the right to for women to vote so it took a long time and anything that's heroic does take a long time to do and no one person can do it but i do think that the government is willing to listen it just takes time and now increasingly takes some money this idea that it takes more than one person that you need a team one of the things that abraham lincoln was so famous for and i have been very inspired by this as a business leader is the idea of a team of rivals um what was that how did he use that and do you think that kind of thing is important let me explain for those who may not be that familiar with it there have been more books written about abraham lincoln any other american by far and so when doris kearns goodman decided to write another book about abraham lincoln people rolled their eyes and she rolled her eyes too what can i do that's going to be so unique so finally she told steven spielberg she was writing this book about abraham lincoln she didn't know what it was going to be he said i want to do a movie but abraham lincoln he optioned the movie the book was finished 10 years later whoa ten years later and actually the movie lincoln that spielberg did is only about five pages of the book it's only about the 13th amendment passage in the house but the book is obviously more comprehensive but as she was reading the book and doing the research she realized wait a second lincoln was considered not very smart and oaf ill um you know illiterate in some ways and and not a very uh well-educated person let's say by the people that were going to be the nominee supposedly for the republican party in 1860 they were much more prominent people but they looked down on him they just didn't treat him very well they thought he was uh funny looking and so forth ultimately when he got the nomination was elected president he put these people in the cabinet so we had the security to say even though you think i'm not that smart or not that good looking or not that well-educated i want you to be my advisor in the end these people became his greatest friends now you need a lot of security to do that you can't be insecure if you're insecure you surround yourself with people that are not that good and great people surround themselves with people that are smarter than them and that's what he did yeah that concept so the way that it's played out in my business life is what i always tell people i want everyone to challenge my ideas if they think they have something to offer and not to give me any deference for being the ceo and my thing is if if it's a good idea it can withstand criticism and if it's a bad idea then that won't be able to withstand criticism which is why people wouldn't want it and i certainly would want to know if i have a weak idea how did he keep that from turning into chaos well in in the case of um of lincoln uh lincoln listened to people though i say in the emancipation proclamation his advisors really didn't think that was such a great idea so sometimes you have to be a leader and say i'm going to persist and you have to kind of support me if you can if you can't i understand but i have to go ahead and do certain things in the business world is true uh as well in the business world if you wait for consensus you'll never get done if steve jobs had waited for consensus on the uh personal computer uh he would have not got nothing if if uh mark zuckerberg i heard about our the idea when mark was in college and i said that that company's going nowhere who cares about a company like facebook uh when jeff bezos was doing his company i didn't think it was gonna get very far i had some stock at the beginning i sold it right away when he went public so i i just think that um you know you have to have the willingness to persist against the conventional wisdom so when you think about leaders and having the three different types of persuasion that you talked about earlier how does one cultivate that how can we recapture that spirit now i feel like what we need is that sort of galvanizing spirit something a bold thought like going to the moon or whatever um that we can rally around yes um well look i think uh a president like biden uh you know maybe he can come up with something that galvanate galvanizes us clearly if you have a 911 event that tends to galvanize the country the moon launch tended to galvanize the country around that effort the civil rights legislation tended to galvanize the country you need something like that i think you probably have to have a figure who's a leader who is seen as selfless who was seen as promoting the country not himself that would probably be helpful is there something that we can focus our attention our energies on that would galvanize us is there anything that we could move towards positively or is this one of those where the world's going to hand you what it hands you and you just have to be prepared to make the most of it well things sometimes happen by serendipity you can't anticipate a 9 11 event or things but clearly climate change has galvanized younger people maybe more than older people and younger people are more concerned about it maybe because they're going to be live longer but i think that's something that really has galvanized people the problem with it is it's hard to see progress because you can't really see the carbon in the atmosphere and one of the challenges with with climate change is that it may take decades before you actually see any real progress that's why all the goals are we're going to do something by the year 2050 well i'll be 101 years old and i'm not as focused on on things but i'm 101 if i lived that long so you need something that i think is different as a way to kind of show progress in a shorter period of time so climate change is one thing but i think um you know other kinds of things could be done as well what's the power of reading for you so i know that you aim to read a hundred books a year when you were a kid you were reading 12 books a week which is pure insanity um these are little children's books these they weren't they weren't worn piece but um reading i i came from modest circumstances and therefore um you know how do you ex learn the new world what how do you learn what's out there well reading and so reading open vistas for me and i just found that by reading a lot i could be informed about things i could be a better person and i just something i enjoy so it's a great pleasure for me to read books and i just you know the trick of it is i'm reading books of things i know reasonably well and reading history politics business uh things like that and and so it's not that complicated i had to read a physics textbook or a chemistry textbook it would take me you know a century to get through it now talk to me about that idea of specializing of finding something that's your niche um i know it seems to have played itself out pretty perfectly in the founding of carlisle what is that should we not be trying to be sort of the best at everything well i don't think anybody can be look i tell people focus the way an organization works is you get to be known in an organization for having one skill and whatever it might be in carlisle's case i was not an mba and i didn't know how to really invest when i started it so i figured out what can i do that would help the firm well i would go do the fundraise and nobody else wanted to run around the world begging for money so i did that and i kind of mastered that crap once you master something people say well person a is very good in skill a maybe person a can do skill b and you give people a little opportunity to do something else then gradually you do two or three or four more things and you get skill sets that are transferable so today i am doing lots of different things and i'm not as focused as i was uh 20 years ago but now i have developed skills in talking or writing or or other things that i can use and so while i'm not as great in one thing as i would like to be i'm doing many different things in part because at my age if i don't do them now when am i going to do them so i'm trying to do you know everything before i'm you know as i say i'm i'm rushing to the finish line i want to get stuff done before the time falls apart when i can't do this stuff so my job is to stay alive as long as i can with my brain and my body reasonably intact and is that passion you i don't remember you actually using the word passion but you talk a lot about if you want to be great at something it's going to have to be something that you really love that you enjoy doing um is that what keeps you because you're quite energetic well today because i have a fair amount of money by normal human standards not bill gates standards i can do anything or i can do nothing and so i'm only doing things that i really love doing and so it's great pleasure except that i only have a limited amount of time in the day so i can't do everything as you age you can't probably do as much as you did when you're younger so i'm only doing things i love but i love doing many things interviewing writing talking and so forth if you hate what you're doing you'll never be successful nobody as i've said before has ever won a nobel prize hating what they do and do you think you stumble into what you love is it a process can you create that that love and passion for something i don't think you can call up mackenzie or bane or bcg and say tell me what i love and i'm going to go do that now find something i'm going to love and let me know what it is you have to do it going based on your life and your experiences your expectation your skill set so it's just different than for everybody you have a different set of experiences so i happen to like reading i happen to like uh talking to people so i kind of said maybe i can do some interviewing i'll read people's books i'll interview them about their books and that kind of worked out or i like i just you know i'm uh interested in learning about people's lives so i do interviews about famous leaders or things like that it just kind of worked out and things evolved and sometimes things don't work out i tried some things in the investment area that didn't work out as well as i would have liked but you know you try and some things work some things don't now in the book how to lead you interview some of the world's most extraordinary business leaders leaders really from many different walks of life uh what were some things that surprised you you opened the book by saying hey here are my 13 traits of a leader this is basically what you're going to hear over and over from the different leaders i'm going to interview but i have to imagine every now and then somebody caught you by surprise with something people are most animated about talking about is their childhood and their young uh life and what mistakes they made what hardships they overcame because they realize they're successful people but they it gives a certain sense of humility you say look i was terrible at this but look i got better in life or i stumbled here but look i overcame it so people like talking about their failures uh some people are you know willing to just admit that they weren't perfect in other things now there are arrogant people that will never admit they ever made a mistake but those aren't generally the people i'm interviewing so when you think about your youth and you think about you know the mistakes you make some of what comes into that is framing it how you think about failure i mean you talk about that as one of the important things that a leader has to be able to do how in your life have you um talk to yourself about what failure means well i failed at lots of things and so you just have to say to yourself okay does the whole world know i failed or just i know i failed and then the whole world knows it's a little more embarrassing if you know then maybe you don't run around telling everybody how much you fail and then you realize sometimes you fail because you made a mistake or sometimes you don't have the ability that you wanted to have or sometimes there had some bad luck but everybody has failed at something in life and if you say you haven't failed at something you're not being honest everybody's failing something now do you think that we as the adage goes learn more from failure than we do from success um there's a there's a reason why that adage has been around for a long time i think it's true i you know if you're successful you think this is great and i don't have to learn anything from it but you learn a lot from your mistakes and i've learned a lot more from my mistakes than the things that i did that worked out so the things that i have done that have worked out i've improved them so when i started doing interviewing i don't think i was such a great interviewer in the first interview and it takes a while um i make a lot of speeches these days i wasn't such a great speaker when i first started so i've learned i you know improved you you improve and if you do something you know long enough and and you you apply yourself to it now when you wrote the book how to be a leader were you bringing some of that sensibility of what we can learn from history of look these guys have done these extraordinary things and i wanted to help distill their wisdom what was the impetus the goal is basically this my theory is that leaders are essential for society to move forward and not have chaos you can't have everybody be a leader and you can't have everybody be a follower you have to have some leaders and so i want to inspire younger people to read about people that have been successful and say i could do that or here's what that person did i'm going to avoid that so you really want to inspire younger people to kind of become leaders and that's part of what i was trying to do and when you think about unity um of leadership i know one thing you're doing with the i i will read it as a congressional book club i think you have a better name for it but um you encourage people to sort of cross the aisle and sit next to people that are across the aisle my first book was about that it was called the american story and i started a program about six years ago where i once a month i will bring all the members of congress to can come about two or three two or three hundred come each time where i will host a reception and then a dinner and i'll interview doris kearns goodwin or david mccullough or somebody like that about american history subject that is relatively apolitical and members like it because they get a nice meal they can sit with people in the opposite party which i encourage them to do and the opposite house which they they often don't know people from the opposite house we don't have as many uh um committees anymore that that are that are conference committees and so they like it and many people have told me members of congress started again now we haven't done it because of kovitz so we're going to try to put it together again soon in the new congress even if covered still around we'll have a socially distant way of doing it so members like it a lot and was that born of a belief that unity comes from sort of proximity and getting people to mix in new ways like was that strategic or just sort of a nice benefit um like most things in life it was by happenstance i had an idea of of uh interviewing historians and i've done that before and i said why don't we do in front of members of congress and maybe we can get people to come together library congress which is a convenient place it kind of stumbled into it and it worked out uh maybe the food was better than they anticipated or or i don't know what but members seem to like it and taking going back to the book for a second when you begin to sort of tease out patterns you broke people up into different groups you have your builders you have your creatives were there themes that began to play out in terms of what allows someone to have just a really unusual level of success well i think in the end it's uh persistence is more important than anything else and having a desire to do something you want to prove something so you have a vision of where you want to go you're willing to persist and overcome that's probably the key thing and then again having other qualities learning how to talk learning how to write learning how to be set an example there are many different things but in the end you have to have a vision of where you want to go you have to persist in it you have to be willing to overcome failures and not be afraid of making a mistake well david with that i think that's a pretty strong place to wrap up where can people engage with you more where can they get the book what actually i think you can buy the book any place i think and order it online and all the proceeds go to johns hopkins children's center so it's it's a non-profit operation for me but i want to thank you for uh giving me the time and i uh like your decor there and the batman in the back and everything quite nice so batman is your role model right yes that that would be a very fair thing that we could get into a whole thing about that but uh as a quick answer yes thanks a lot appreciate it thank you david guys if you haven't already be sure to dive into his world it is really extraordinary the way that he's bringing people together i think is amazing his insights into leadership and what he's gleaned from other people is really really phenomenal i think you're going to be deeply blown away and speaking of being blown away if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care you can never let the success make you think that you're better than anybody else or or more successful than the next guy and the same thing about your failures you shouldn't think that your failure to make you any less a person than the next person