a sensation was caused by an unknown designer named Christian Dior he was producing long full dresses using prodigious quantities of precious materials and thumbing his nose at wartime austerity his new collection electrified Rich fashion conscious
ladies in all nations but who is Christian Dior and where did he come from his father was a successful businessman who ran a fertilizer Factory specializing in liquid manure the foundation of the Dior Empire was [ __ ] in the literal sense 50 years from now
Dior would be the beginning of Bernardo n's lvmh Empire which I talked about on episode 296 if you haven't listened to the episode already it's one of my favorite episodes I've ever made the profits of liquid manure allowed the
Dior family to maintain a house in Paris and a young Christian Dior took full advantage of it he would love to draw love dressing up with the help of his adoring mother and he enjoyed designing dresses for his sisters he's a kid when he's is doing this this is another
example of something you and I talk about all the time that true interest is revealed early but he did not start out working in the fashion business one of his first jobs he actually became a partner in an art business his father
putting up the money on behalf of the son this is the prehistory of dior's fashion business then troubles came his brother was locked up in an aane asylum his mother died and then in 1931 during the Great Depression his father went bankrupt virtually all of the art
galleries including dior's failed without this financial disaster Dior would probably have spent his life as a middle ranking art dealer and died unknown that's another example of one of my favorite ideas that comes up in these biographies over and over again that
opportunity is a strange Beast it frequently appears after a loss at this time this is the best thing him failing as an art dealer is one of the is the best thing that ever happened to him he just didn't certainly didn't feel so at
the time and so after this Christian Dior gets a job working for the designer Lucian Leong and he actually spends about 10 years working for him before he gets his break and they describe this as hovering on the fringes of the fashion
industry then came a unique stroke of Fortune that transformed his life something that would allow a frustrated wouldbe Creator to fulfill his Destiny Dior certainly believed in luck and that is even an understatement Christian Dior believed in fortune tellers he believed
what they told him when they forecast his Destiny to be true a wise woman as he called him that is a fortune teller had told him that women will be very lucky for you you will earn much money from them and travel Wily as of July
1946 however this is one of the craziest sentences when you think about the life of Christian Dior as of July 1946 however Dior was a nobody in his 40s with nothing in his designed career to suggest genius then that month he met Marcel busac so I'm G to pause right
there one of my favorite paragraphs I've ever read and anything I've read for the podcast so far came from this excellent essay by Paul Graham I covered it all the way back on episode 314 the essay is called how to do great work this is what
Paul Graham uh noticed because he's read a bunch of biographies and I notice the same as I read a bunch of biographies when you read biographies of people who've done great work it is remarkable how much luck is involved they discover
what to work on as a result of chance meeting or by reading a book they happen to pick up so you need to make yourself a big Target for luck and the way to do that is to be curious Christian Dior is going to meet Marcel busac because of
the relationships that he developed in the previous decade working in the Paris fashion industry so it says that that month he met Marcel busac a textile magnet who was called King Cotton busac wanted to own a big Paris fashion house to give Prestige to his booming but hum
drum business someone told him that Dior might be able to produce ideas hence their meeting so they went at meeting and this is Dior did something that was genius and then as you understand his personality so far outside of his normal
personality he was when you read his autobiography most of the people you and I talk about they have a lot of self-confidence Christian is the opposite he is constantly plagued by imposter syndromes and doubt and uncertainty and so looking back at his
life the fact that he said this to busac what I'm about to read to is a a a miracle so Christian Dior takes a tour of bus's Factory he's like I don't want to run this at all and so he says I am not interested in managing a clothing Factory what you need and what I would
like to run is a Craftsman work Workshop in which we would recruit the very best people in the trade to reestablish in Paris a salon for the greatest luxury and the highest standards of workmanship it will cost a great deal of money and
entail much risk busac liked the idea and offered to set up Dior with an investment of 10 million Franks This was later increased to 100 million Franks for the investment that busac is going to make in Christian Dior and it's going
to pay off handsomely at the last minute this is what I meant about him constantly struggling with impostor syndrome he had never started a business before his first experiment as an entrepreneur is going to be the Christian Dior brand that still exists
to this day at the last minute Dior was frightened and almost turned down the offer but he was persuaded into it by his fortune teller Dior doubled the risk of opening a new fashion house with his revolutionary new look a deliberate and
defiant return to the most extravagant use of material he spat in the face of postwar egalitarian democracy and said I want to make the rich feel rich again his first collection turned out to be the most successful in fashion history Christian Dior recruited and continued
to employ the best people to be found in France men and women who would rather die than turn out a piece of clothing which was in the tiniest degree below the best in the world when I first read this the note I left myself was this is
the Pixar of fashion houses when Steve Jobs he said the first first 400 employees at Pixar was the only company he ever came across in his entire life that was an entire company of a players when he went back to Apple in 97 I think
he said they had around 3,000 employees and he's like of course you can't have a collection of 3,000 a players but Pixar proved to Steve Jobs that it's possible to have 400a players inside of one company the success of the fashion house
was immediate and prolonged and the volume of business continued to grow steadily in the 10 years up to dior's death in 19 1957 by which time the house of Dior employed a thousand of the finest experts ever gathered together Under One Roof during this decade Dior
sold over 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 design sketches and using a th000 miles of fabric okay so that was an excerpt not from the book I'm going to talk to you about today that was actually this book called creators is written by one of my
favorite authors this guy named Paul Johnson it is like a 15 I think it has 15 chapters on some of History's Greatest creat so people like Picasso Walt Disney Balenciaga Christian Dior Shakespeare Mark Twain it is an excellent little book I highly recommend
you pick up a copy for yourself but the reason I wanted to start there is because I had previously attempted to read Christian dior's autobiography which came out almost 80 years ago and Dior is very much an Eclectic a very he's an odd duck the way I described
this book before was that Christian gor writes like Willie Wonka speaks even the structure of the the book is bizarre he puts his the last chapter is on his his childhood like his early life but reading Paul Johnson's overview of the
life and career of Christian Dior inspired me to pick up his autobiography and reread it and I'm glad I did because Christian Dior is maybe one of the most unique people he he just stands out to think about like you and I study uncommon people and even Christian Dior
is uncommon amongst uncommon people because how many people do we study that had no entrepreneurial leanings at all that other people would describe what by the time they're in their 40s that they had they were no buies and they had
nothing to suggest any kind of Genius there's a lot of people that become successful and achieve their greatest work later in life but you'll hear from people when they were younger that they showed signs of talent or obsessiveness
or drive that was unusual compared to the people around them no one describes Christian Dior like that he doesn't even describe himself like that so I want to go through his autobiography and I want to see if you and I together can figure
out the mystery that is Christian Dior I have to start with something that was very fascinating because again like I'm pretty sure you don't believe in fortune tellers just like I don't believe in fortune tellers but the important thing
is like that Dior believed in them and that sometimes it's helpful to have something outside of yourself that pushes you even though you're you're filled with with doubt Dior was Rife with insecurities and uncertainties certainly before he was successful but
even after he was successful and I I he does credit the multiple visits to his fortune tellers with helping him move forward forward in times of doubt and this is so important to him that the very first chapter the very first chapter very first paragraph listen what
he says I must acknowledge my debt to the fortune tellers who have predicted it and there's several examples in the book where he quotes what they tell him this is way before he had any success and this is what one of them said you
will suffer poverty but women are lucky for you and through them you will achieve success you will make a great deal of money out of them and you will travel widely do you want to know when that happened to him that happened to him in 1919 he was 14 he was 14 years
old when she's reading his palem and she gave him that prediction for his future success and so it's obvious from a young age that he was Rife with insecurities and doubts about himself and his talents he was also as he as he ages and he goes
through his career he's also Pack full of hypocrisies and you'll see this because he says listen I had spent 10 happy years as a designer at Lucian L long and it was a delightful existence why cuz he just had a job he did not want to be an R preneur he did not want
the stress that comes from leading your own fashion house he says I had none of the responsibilities of putting my designs into practice nor the burden of an executive job but yet 10 years in he's like well maybe I'm just making
another man Rich The Good the interesting thing about uh the Paris fashion industry at this point in history it's like a lot of the other there's this this idea of Senus that the these a like the highest quality people
tend to Cluster together in very important times so if you are young mechanically inclined talented person interested in automobiles and this is your 1900 you're living in Detroit if you love making handbuilt cars to race in the 1940s and 50s you're
living in Italy if you're interested in computers and softwares in the last 50 years you're probably in Silicon Valley in this part if you're interested in fashion and you're alive in the 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s you are in Paris and
so he sees other people working inside of his same company leaving so one of these guys uh I I'm not a fashion person so I can't never pronounce any of these names but this these a lot of these brands are still around obviously Christian gor eain lauron Balenciaga but
there's a guy named Pierre Balman and so he leaves and he decides to start a new house under his own name this company is still it's 78 years old and it's still in existence to this day and so this is why I'm telling you all this because
this is what's going on inside the mind of a young Christian Dior this had the effect of making me think seriously about my own future for the first time I wondered whether I was really devoid of any personal ambition up until this point he didn't think he was ambitious I
was working all the time to achieve the financial success of another man I was toiling in the bonds of his creative inspiration and so there's a friend of his that is saying hey everybody know who Marcel busac was it's like you know
he's like one of the most famous entrepreneurs and financiers at this point and they're like they're looking for this uh somebody to to make a fashion house and meekly and with great reservation Christian Dior offers himself up and he says would I do and
that took a lot for him to do because this is how he describes what happens these harmless words were scarely out of my mouth when I was overcome with horror I suddenly foresaw the Dreadful consequences of my rashness this is not a self-confident man this is not a risk
taker he is terrified of risk he just saw his entire family fortune which goes back to his great great grandfather his great- great-grandfather was one of the first people in France to ever import uh bat guano which is just batshit he's his
great great grandfather think In 1832 is was the first person in France to import bat [ __ ] from Chile and use it as fertilizer in Europe that was the beginning of the Dior family Empire which had just collapsed a 100 years later in the Great Depression so it
makes sense that he was terrified of being an entrepreneur or taking any kind of risk because he saw his family fortune that lasted 100 years disappear in one decade and so what Christian Dior has at his core is imposter syndrome and
the way he got around this is he literally invented a character an alter ego this is very similar if you ever heard Kobe Bryant talk about when he plays when he played basketball he's like Co there's Kobe Bryant is only off the court when I'm on the court I'm the
Black Mamba and so throughout this book Christian Dior talks about this there's Christian Dior the person and then there's Christian Dior the designer the cortier the fashion house that is over time at the very end of the book which
is published he's writing right before he dies he doesn't know he's going to die because he dies relatively young he dies at 52 from a from a heart attack but he's like over time they merged together but at the beginning he saw
them as complete completely separate entities having entered very late into this profession where others spent a lifetime learning and having had no training to guide me except my own instincts I had always been afraid of betraying my ignorance of it he does not
think he has talent perhaps it was this very fear of remaining the Perpetual amateur that spurred me on to brush aside my doubts at last and invent the character of Christian Dior and so this is his description of going to meet
Marcel busac and at this point he was trying to restore uh this brand called Gaston to its former glory and Christian thinks oh this might be a good opportunity then he takes a tour and he's he's depressed he's like I don't want to do this and this what he
says my heart sank at the thought of the hazards involved the cobwebs which would have to be swept away the difficulties of coping with a staff which had been set in its ways for so many years and would certainly resent changes so
essentially saying I don't want to come in and fix this decaying company I want to start from scratch and I want to do it my ways what he's what he's uh saying in short it's the impossibility the impossibility of making something new out of something old in a trade where
novelty is all important I decided that it was not meant by nature to raise corpses from the dead I was not meant by nature to raise corpses from the dead my answer to him was no as I sat down facing him I suddenly realized what my
true ambition was here was a famous financier who was at the same time a man of wide and cultivated intelligence I suddenly heard myself telling him that what I really wanted to do do was not resurrect Gaston but create a new cour cordier house I don't know how to
pronounce any of these French words I'm sorry but create a new fashion house under my own name I wanted a house in which every single thing would be new I described to him the house of my dreams I envisioned my house as a Craftsman's
Workshop rather than a clothing Factory and so that's when he lays out this hugely ambitious project completely different with Marcel busac had in mind and Marcel busac being obviously a very formidable individual very he he an entrepreneur through and through took a
lot of risk he's like okay let's do this and here's the unexpected problem that's not what Christian Dior wanted him to say when he hears that busac is definitely interested in his project he spends several days in what he calls a
tortured state of doubt he is terrified of taking a risk he says on my side uh this was not in in transigence from conceit it was from a secret unacknowledged desire to escape from the whole thing this feeling of Panic eventually led me to send a telegram
breaking off negotiations completely now this is why it's so important it was at this juncture that I went to see my fortune teller now this is again the mind is a powerful place which you feed it affects you in a powerful way he believed this to be true it doesn't
matter that other people you and I from this vantage point it's like obviously probably don't believe in fortune tellers that's irrelevant Dior believed it to be true this conversation with the fortune teller actually convinces him
regardless of of your self-doubt how terrified you are you must do this she ordered me sternly to accept the busac offer at once you must create the house of Christian Jor whatever the conditions nothing anyone will offer you later will
compare with the chance which is open to you now I therefore resign myself to the inevitable listen to that advice you must create the house of chrisan Dior whatever the conditions nothing anyone will offer you later will compare with
the chance which is open to you now so once he decided to go ahead this is when he starts to the way I think about this he starts building like the P the Pixar or fashion houses he's building a team of Fanatics and Christian D is
definitely a fanatic and so he he talks a little bit about his thinking behind this I knew that if I were to emerge Victorious I had to be equipped with a first class staff so he's he's just going to go over a few of the the first people that he hires so Raymond was to
become my second self she is my exact compliment she plays reason to my fantasy order to my imagination discipline to my freedom foresight to my recklessness she has supplied me with all the qualities which I have never had
time to acquire for myself another early hire is Bard Bard is one of those people increasingly rare who make Elegance their sole reason for being she is superbly indifferent to such mundane considerations as politics Finance or social change all she cares about is
fashion and elegance and this is one of the most important sentences uh in her in him describing her her high standards are inflexible he finds and hires yet another fanatic this is how he describes margarite margarite is so much in love
with her work that our partnership has had the character of a Grand Passion if the world came to an end while she was pouring over a dress I really do not believe that she would notice nothing is ever beautiful enough or perfect enough for her she will Stitch un Stitch cut
cut again a 100 times and she still will not be satisfied she was exactly the sort of person I needed someone whose love of clothes equaled my own and so in addition hiring only the most talented people he could find he also of course
studied uh the history of the industry he's operating in he's got a he he talks about Balenciaga he calls Balenciaga the master of Assa I go into more detail about that on episode 3:15 the episode I did on Balenciaga because it's hard to believe that they consider him the
greatest all the Paris fashion designers given the state of the brand today but I just want to pull out one thing he's talking about Coco Chanel and I love what he said about her here outstanding among them all was coko Chanel who
dominated all the rest in her personality as well as in her taste she had style elegance and Authority I've done two episodes on Coco Chanel the one I'd recommend listening to though if you haven't listened to it already is episode 199 Coco Chanel is very
different from Christian Dior in the sense that there is all these people that run into a very young young Coco Chanel even before she was rich and famous and just saw an unbelievable amount of talent and drive where obviously that's not true for people to
interact with Christian Dior earlier in his life in fact one of my favorite things uh one of my favorite like historical anecdotes about Coco Chanel was the fact that I think she's dating uh the Duke of Windsor at the time and
Duke of Windsor was uh friends with Winston Churchill this is way before World War II this happened in 1927 and we have copies of Churchill's the letters he's writing to his wife and he talks about meeting Coco Chanel for the first time and he says this in 1927
about her and he said that Koko Chanel was fit to rule a man or an Empire I just love that idea of Churchill writing about young kokoo so he goes back to hey this is I'm going after uh he's designing it for the rich he wants to
people to feel rich again he wants to fight against this postwar postar War II austerity so he says I aimed at a fairly restricted clientele there's a great line about Dior and Balenciaga that Dior was for the rich and that balancio is
for the wealthy but he's talking about his relationship with busac busac realized that he was dealing with a conscientious Craftsman and not a megalomaniac craftsmanship the important of being a Craftsman is something that Dior repeats over and over again a few
pages later he repeats this far from wanting to revolutionize fashion I was chiefly concerned with producing a high standard of workmanship I aimed at be being considered a good Craftsman he uses that word again that idea of craftsmanship something you and I talk
about over and over again Steve Jobs talked about it a bunch my my favorite description of this actually came from this biography of George Lucas I read I think it's episode 35 of hounders I read it years ago I need to reread it because
it's such an excellent book uh it's called George Lucas of life and is written by this author who does he's a great biographer his name is Brian J Jones but in that book this is what George Lucas said my thing about art is that I don't like the word art because
it means pretention and [ __ ] and I equate those two directly I don't think of myself as an artist I'm a Craftsman I don't make a work of art I make a movie I just did Christoper Nolan's biography I think it was episode maybe 317 he said
the same thing I feel more of a Craftsman than an artist genuinely with people that get excessively good at what they do we see that theme over and over again same thing Brunell Cinelli in his autobiography my goal is to produce highquality items manufactured with
Italian craftsmanship and manual skills this is not a new idea Socrates would go around Athens constantly asking people he love to question people about how they did their work and there's a there's a great line in his biography it
says craftsmanship fascinated him and something Christian deor talks about is the amount of work and time and effort that goes into building something that you can be proud of Steve Jobs echoed that same sentiment he says they have no
conception of the craftsmanship that is required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product as Christian Jorge building out his first collection he says an idea that's really fascinating that a lack of information and an incre
increase in mysteriousness can actually cause speculation and that this gossip is actually free advertising he calls it free propaganda it is widely and quite erroneously believed that when the house of chrisan dur was launched enormous
sums were spent on publicity on the contrary not a single penny was allotted to it the relative secrecy in which I chose to work aroused a positive Whispering Campaign which was excellent free propaganda gossip malicious rumors are worth more than the most expensive
publicity campaign in the world and yet here's the interesting part he was doing his best to avoid publicity and yet it found him likely influenced by the fact that he was avoiding it so this is likely influenced by gossip and Whispers
And this is really important because he's going to get profiled in Life Magazine his biggest customers by far were not the French they were not the Europeans they were the Americans think about where we are in world history this is post World War II America economy is
booming and so this was an unbelievable lucky break my most for piece of publicity was quite unplanned Life Magazine asked me to do a piece at the time I had no idea of the importance of an article in life in launching anything like Fortune the goddess of publicity
often seems to smile most favorably on those who Court her the least and what's fascinating is the closer he gets to the launch the more nervous and the more tortured he becomes uh his collections he's got really talented people he likes
what he's making he's getting starting to get a lot of publicity and he's constantly trying to like I need to run out of here I'm he's just there's just constant self-doubt that he has he's got to force himself to overcome I felt that
too many hosts were being pinned on me and I was incapable of fulfilling them it was only with the greatest possible reluctance that I was finally persuaded to show my dresses to my friends one evening just before their formal presentation to the public and so the
next day is when he launches uh what they said was the most successful fashion uh La line launch in fashion history and there's a few sentences from here the entry of each model was accompanied by gusts of Applause I stuffed my ears terrified of feeling
confident too soon it was an immediate success the response by all the people inside of his fashion house couldn't be more enthusiastic and this is what he says as long as I live whatever triumphs I win nothing will ever exceed my
feelings at that Supreme moment and throughout the book you just can't help but root for his success uh because really it just comes down he just he he was obsessed with he what he was doing he loved it he was fanatical about it
and at the end of the day he essentially when I'm reading this there's a bunch of notes where I have to myself which is like my interpretation of what he's telling us I just wanted to make something that people love and he says all my pleasure arose from the fact that
my dresses were being appreciated by the public and he has a very unique way of describing the way he views his work design is definitely his entire life and then everything he experiences fuels his designs I must admit that clothes are my
whole life life ultimately everything I know see or hear every part of my life turns around the clothes which I create they haunt me until they are ready to pass from the world of my dreams into the world of practical utility this continues I know exactly what I must
give my designs care trouble and enthusiasm when I read that sentence I was thinking of uh James Dyson's Mentor maybe the most influential person on his entire career was this guy named Jeremy fry that gave James Dyson one of his first jobs and one of the most important
things that Jeremy fry taught James Dyson was that you should believe most of all in the power of enthusiasm you should believe most of all in the power of enthusiasm Christian Dior is saying hey I'm going to give everything I have
to my designs I'm going to give them care I'm going to give them trouble and I'm going to give them enthusiasm the most passionate Adventures of my life have been with my clothes I am obsessed with them they preoccupy me they occupy
me and they post occupy me this makes my life at the same time heaven and hell he is described the fact that there is no off switch for entrepreneurs which again he was 41 years old until he discovered uh it for himself goes back to this idea that
everything he experiences the world is a classroom for Christian Dior just like it is for Da Vinci which he's going to get to in a minute everything he experiences fuels ideas that he can use and Designs I scribble everywhere
constantly putting ideas on paper is what he's talking about I scribble everywhere in my bed in my bath at meals in my car on foot by day and by night as Leonardo da Vinci walked in the Florentine Countryside he observed the patterns in the sand or the sky and
transpose them into his pictures my dresses take shape all around me as my fancy works on whatever it happens to see and what's fascinating is that Christian Dior had one of the greatest assets which is humility in the presence of a good idea he says I give way to my
instinctive reaction so this idea it's like I have an idea in my mind I'm going to get it on on paper as soon as possible you don't over intellectualize that it's like oh this isn't a good idea just get it down on paper there was a
advice that David olvy got from this's guy named Albert Lasker I did a podcast on him as well Albert Lasker is one of the most important advertising agency Founders ever Liv he made more money in his advertising agency than any other
advertising agency founder ever did and this is what he told David ogy uh when asked what the best asset a man could have Lasker replied humility in the presence of a good idea and ogi says it is horribly difficult to recognize a
good idea I shudder to think of how many I have rejected research cannot help you much in this domain because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea tie that into what Christian Geor just said I give way to my instinctive
reactions back to this internal battle that's happening like he just loves it he's completely obsessed with it but it also torments him I will follow the progress of each dress like an anxious father they have absolute power over me and I live in Perpetual dread that they
will fail me I find myself in a terrible mood all the time what he's describing is every year he has to make new products every day the fever mounts new crisises arise which I have to calm down I nearly kill myself repeating over and
over and over again that if the models go wrong it is after all my fault and nobody else's and the only way he deals with this intense stress and the torture that he imposes on himself I would describe him he's not really a grinder uh he has to in certain periods when
they're getting a new collection and then once it releases he takes long extended vacation so I would say the way he works is Sprint rest Sprint rest Sprint rest to me peace and quiet are a necessity of life if I am in one sense a very busy man in another sense I'm a
very lazy one the application and care which I devote to my work are rooted in my desire to be finished with it as soon as possible I am innately conscientious and therefore never stop until I'm altogether satisfied with my work and
maybe the most important theme like if I was going to remember one thing from his autobiography is I just love people that truly care about what they're doing I don't care what that is I'm not interested in designing fashion dresses for God's sake but I am intensely
interested in people like Christian Dior the the most common note I have that I leave to myself over dozens of pages in this book is he gives a [ __ ] he truly truly car you can tell by the effort the time the enthusiasm he puts into this
and then I just like the way that he he thinks about his work in very intense and passionate terms I think of my work as Emeral architecture dedicated to the beauty of the female body that reminds me of Enzo Ferrari there's a new movie
coming out uh on one of the biographies I've read three biographies of Enzo Enzo Ferrari and they're turning one into a movie but it's exact like I would the way I describe the obsessiveness and Enzo Ferrari is no doubt one of History's Greatest obsessives is he had
soul in the game and he describes his products the way you might describe your lover let me read uh two two sentences you and this is Enzo talking about his cars does this sound like somebody describing a car this kind of love which
I can describe in almost a sensual or sexual way is probably the reason why I no longer want want to see my cars race to think about them to see them born and see them die because in a race they're always dying even if they win it is
unbearable he spoke about his cars as if they were alive cars possess unique behaviors they breathed through their carburetors they were skinned with metal the engine of a car was both its heart and soul its Rumble the heartbeat of the
creature he said Ferrari's aim was to perfect an ideal to transform raw material into to a living machine this is incredible right we have Enzo saying I can't even watch my cars race that's that's why he created them how crazy is that because they're always dying and it
hurts me because it's my I see my creation dying listen to this listen to this this is a completely different industry I'm pretty sure Christian Dior and Enzo fari didn't not even know each other yet there to both of them their
Creations are alive my poor dresses my poor dresses what a fate is there as the right to buy my dresses includes that of examining the dress thoroughly they're measured they're turned inside out they're unstitched sometimes literally pulled to pieces this is how he
describes what's happening during this Slaughter I prefer not to enter the salon in order to spare myself the spectacle which would upset me almost as as much as it upsets the dresses clearly the words of somebody that cares deeply
about what they're doing Mark and Jon has one of the greatest quotes I've ever heard about the emotional state of being an entrepreneur it says the entrepreneur only ever experiences two states that of your Foria and Terror the highest highs
and the lowest lows and usually they can occur in the same day or one right after another so Christian Dior is now launching another collection which to some degree is a Finish Line or a temporary break and this is how he describes it I remain alone and ask
myself over and over again have I imported enough novelty is this novelty wearable are the models sufficiently striking in fact I am no longer capable of judging the most exacting jury in the world is assembling on is assembling to
conduct my trial he's talking about the market the game has now passed out of my hands I am in a Perpetual state of tension I want to shout out it's done it's finished it's over at last at the same time I realize that tomorrow I shall feel an intolerable void my life
in fact revolves around the preparation of a collection with its torments and happiness with its Euphoria and terror is another way to say that I know that in spite of all all the Delights of a vacation it will seem an intolerable Gap
my thoughts stay with my dresses it is now that I like to sit down in front of my dresses gaze at them a last time alt together and thank them from the bottom of my heart and that is where I'll leave it what I would do my first
recommendation if you want to learn more about Christian D I would actually buy Paul Johnson's book I'm going to leave links for both down below so I'd buy Paul Johnson's book creators and I'd read chapter 13 which is on Balenciaga and Dior and then if you want more I
would buy I would read them in the order in that order then if you want more I would buy the autobiography of Christian Dior I will leave a link down below to both of those books and if you buy them using that link you'll be supporting the
podcast at the same time that is 331 books down 1,000 ago and I'll talk to you again soon okay so what you're about to hear is this question I was asked a few months ago I actually recorded this a few months ago they asked how did History's Greatest
entrepreneurs think about hiring all the answers people think I have a better memory than I than I actually do you know if people say David you have a great memory my wife would laugh at that because I forget things all the time it's not to have a good memory it's I
reread things over and over and over again every single answer every single reference you're about to hear in this 20 minute mini episode came from me searching all of my notes and highlights that option is now available to you if
you like what you hear if you think it's valuable if you're already running a successful company and you want an easy way to reference the ideas of History's Greatest entrepreneurs in a searchable database that you can go through at your
convenience anytime you want then you go to Founders notes.com and sign up I want to start out first with why this is so important there's actually this book that came out in like 1997 it's a called in the company of giants I think it's episode 208 of Founders it's two
Stanford MBA students if I remember correctly and they're interviewing a bunch of technology company founders and in there Steve Jobs is one of them this is you know right I think even before he came back to Apple and they were talking
about well yeah we know it's important to hire but in a typical startup a manager or a Founder may not always have time to spend recruiting other people and I I first read this this Steve's answer to this you know I don't know two years ago and I never forgot it I think
it's excellent I think it sets up why uh this question is so important and you should really be spending especially in the early days like basically all your time doing this uh in a typical startup manager may not always have the time to
spend recruiting other people than Steve jumps in I disagree totally I think it's the most important job assume you're by yourself in a startup and you want a partner you take a lot of time finding a partner right he would be half of your
company I'm going to pause there this idea of looking at each new hire as a percentage of the company is genius why should you take any less time finding a third or fourth of your company or a fifth of your company when you're in a
startup the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not each is 10% of the company so why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all a players if three three out of the 10 uh we're not so great why would you start a company
where 30% of your people are not so great a small company depends on great people much more than a big company does okay so to answer this question the advantage that um that I have making Founders and that you have as as a byproduct of listening to Founders is
not only that I've read you know 300 something biographies of entrepreneurs now but I have all of my notes and highlights stored in my readwise app and that means I can search for any topic I can look at the past highlights of books
or I could search for keywords so what I did is first of all like what I've started to do with these AMA um questions is I read them decide which ones I'm going to do next and then think about it for a few days I don't put any just literally that that I know that's
the next question just let my brain work on it in the background for a few days and then I'll go through and start searching all my notes and so that's what I did here and so there's a bunch of you know I don't have I may have like
10 or 15 different Founders talking about hiring the first idea is the most obvious but I think probably works best when you're already established so Steve Jobs is talking about hey you know great way to to hire is just find great work
and find the people that did that and then try to hire them when you're Steve Jobs that's a lot easier right than if you're just somebody doesn't have reputation maybe you don't have resources maybe your companies rather new or not as well known David ogy I
just did confessions of an advertising man a couple episodes ago I think 306 or something like that 307 and he did the same thing but he's David olvy at that point so he would find he'd go through magazines find great advertising great copyrighting and
he'd write the personal letter and then set up a phone call and he says he wouldn't he was so welln and you know he's one of the best in his field that he wouldn't even have to offer a job just the conversation then the person
would the he'd want to hire the person never mention it and the person would apply to him um and so again I think if you can do that then of course that's straightforward who find for somebody does great work usually you can do this
I actually have a friend I can't say who it is he's doing this right now actually um I have a friend that's really good at doing this he's finding people that do great stuff on the internet and then just cold cold dming them and then getting convincing them to work on
things and that usually works especially with people like younger people earlier in their career there's a bunch of different ways to think about this and a bunch of different ways to prioritize so the first thing that that that came to
mind that I found surprising is you read any biography on Rockefeller and he had a couple ideas where he felt the optimization you know table Stakes that you're intelligent and you're driven and you're hardworking right we don't even have like if you're listening to this
you already know that but he prioritized hiring people with social skills and so this is what he said the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I pay for I pay more for that ability than any
other Under the Sun there's the two the second part to this though and this is also works well if you have access to more resources you Rockefeller would hire people as he found as he found talented people not as he needed them it's not like okay standard oil has six
open spots let's go find six candidates right he'd come across what he considered a talented person he didn't even matter if he didn't know what they were going to do he's like I'm just going to stack his team and if you really think about the his Partners at
sard Oral he essentially built a company an executive team of founders of because he was buying up all their companies so it's very rare but um there's a line from Titan I want to read to taking for granted the growth of his Empire he
hired talented people as found not as needed and then I found another idea in the hiring like the actual interview process so there's this guy named Van ever Bush I did two episodes on him I think it's 270 and 271 he is the most
important American ever uh in history uh in terms of connecting the scientific field private Enterprise and the government the most important person to keep alive for the American war effort was FDR the second one was vaniver bush vanie bush is like the Forest Gump of
this historical period he is involved in everything from the man hat project to discovering like a young Claude Shannon to building a mechanical computer like this guy literally has done he's just he pops up in these books over and over
again if you were reading about American Business history during World War II and post World War II you are going to come across the name vanever Bush over and over again uh I read his fantastic autobiography called pieces of the action and I came across this weird
highlight and so this is his brilliant and unusual job interview process and so he's talking about this organization he's running called amrad at amrod I hired a young physicist from Texas named CG Smith the way I hired him is interesting an interview of that sort is
always likely to be on on an artificial basis and somewhat embarrassing so I discussed with him a technical point on which I was then genuinely puzzled the next day he came in with a with a neat solution and I hired him at once here's
another idea this is from Nolan Bushnell Nolan Bushnell's the founder of Atari founder of Chuck-E-Cheese and Steve Jobs Mentor he hired Steve Jobs when Steve Job was like 19 at Atari he would ask people their reading habits in interviews this is why uh one of the
best ways his whole thing was he wanted to build a all of his companies laid on a foundation of creative people so that's what he's looking for he's like I need creative people one of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a
simple question what books do you like I've never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits actually which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that
they read it all I've known many talents Engineers who hated science fiction but loved say books on bird watching a blatant but often accurate generalization people who are curious and passionate read people who are apathetic in a different don't I
remember that's such a great line and I obviously agree with it I remember one I'm going to read it again a blatant but often accurate generalization people who are curious and passionate read people who are apathetic and indifferent don't
I remember one particular woman who during an interview told me that she had read every book that I had read so I started mentioning books I hadn't read and she had read those too I didn't know how someone in her late 20s found that
time this much time to read so much but I was impressed I was so impressed that I hired her right there and assigned her to International marketing which was having problems this is why this is why I'm reading this whole section to you a
job with a lot of moving Parts benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving Parts it wouldn't be possible to have read that many books without such a brain so do you see what I mean like we start with Steve Job saying this is the most important thing that you
your role as the leader the company the founder to do right and you are and it's so important to study and this is why I'm glad this this question exists and why I'm glad that I've I took the time and I had like the foresight to like hey
I should really organize my thoughts and notes because there's no way I would have remembered all this without being being able to search my readwise right but you have Rockefeller saying this is what's important to me you have Bush saying this is how I hire now you have
Nolan Bush now saying well here's another weird thing that I learned um let let me go through what Warren Buffett says about this so this is about the quality one thing that is consistent whether it's jobs Buffett Bezos uh Peter
teal this just pops up over and over again they talk about the importance of trying to find people that that are better than you the the hiring bar constantly has to increase now obviously the larger the company gets that's impossible uh Steve Jobs has this great
quote where he's like you know Pixar was the first time I see I saw an entire team entire company of a players but they had 400 player they had 400 team members he's like at the time Apple had 3,000 it's like it's impossible to have
3,000 a players so there is some number that your company May grow to where it's just you're just not you're not going to have thousands of a players in my argument I don't even know if you get a 400 I guess you I mean I'll take Steve's word for it on there and Pixar
definitely produce great products but it's probably a lot lower than that as well so Warren Buffett would tell you to use David olgy's hiring philosophy and so Warren said Charlie and I know that the right players will make almost any
team manager look good again that is why it's the most important function of the founder maybe directly next to the product or right above the product actually because those are people building your product we subscribe to the philosophy of Oggy and Ma's founding
genius David ogy this is what Oggy said if each of us hires people who are small smaller than we are we should become a company of dwarfs but if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are we shall become a company of giants David or Jeff Bezos rather used A
variation of AG's idea too Jeff used to say in Amazon every time we hire someone he or she should raise the bar for the next hire so that the overall talent pool is always improving they talk about this idea on Amazon where the the the
future hires that we do should be so good that if you had applied for the job you already have at Amazon you wouldn't get in that's a very interesting idea take your time with recruiting take your time with hiring there's this great book
on the history of PayPal it's written by actually I've recently become friends with the author his name is Jimmy Sony um and this is in his book The the most fascinating thing that I found was that PayPal prioritize speed so from the time
they're they're founded to the time they sell to eBay it's like four years Jimmy spent more time researching the book then for he spent six years researching the book I always tease him because like you took longer on a book than they took
to start and sell their company it just speaks to like the quality he's trying to do but that as a byproduct of that like obviously they move fast but they prioritize speed over everything else except in one area recruiting Max lechin
kept a bar for talent exceedingly High even if that came at the expense of Speedy sa Staffing Max kept repeating A's higher A's B's hire C's so the first B you hire takes the whole company down let's read that again a players hire a
players b players hire C players so the first B player you hire takes the whole company down additionally the team the company leaders mandated that all prospects here's another idea for you all prospects must must meet every single member of the team now the next
one is the most bizarre it makes sense if you study I did this three-part on Larry Ellison three-part series on Larry Ellison I should read those books again because the podcast is like 50 times bigger than than when I uh publish those
episodes and he's just he's crazy so he would hire based on the confidence the self-confidence level of of the candidate listen to this I have tears in my eyes I don't know why I'm laughing okay this just so because this is you read about Larry Ellison and he's one of
these people it's like really easy to interface with because you just you just know exactly who he is and what's important to him that's why I think it's so funny Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest and cockiest new college graduates when they
were recruiting from universities they'd ask people are you the smartest person you know and if they said yes they would hire them if they said no they would say who is and they would go hire that guy instead I don't know if you got the
smartest people that way but you definitely got the most arrogant Ellison and this is why the personality of the founder is largely the culture of the company Apple is Steve Jobs Apple's just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives right I was
just texting a a Founder friend of mine uh he listens to the podcast I actually met him through the podcast and he's going through this like uh process of self-discovery like he's already started a bunch of companies are really successful but he's like I think I'm
more of this type of founder than the other type of founder and that's good that he's doing that because he's he's hopefully his next mission is like his life's Mission you know and you can't get to your life's mission unless you
you figured out who you are Ellison knew who he was Ellison's swaggering combative style became a part of the company's identity this arrogant culture had a lot to do with oracle's success here's another odd idea for you Izzy sharp the founder of Four Seasons
actually could figure it out that in his business which was hotels right that hiring could hiring the right person could actually be a form of distribution for his hotel he gave me the idea because of what what do we know what do you and I know in our bones that
History's Greatest Founders All read biographies they all read biographies of people that came before them and took ideas from them Izzy sharp is trying to build Four Seasons what do you think he did he picked up a biography of Cesar
Ritz the guy that Ritz Carlton is named after the great arguably the greatest Hotel year of all time and when he realized oh [ __ ] Ritz he he says uh remembering that Caesar Ritz made his hotels World Famous by hiring some of the foremost chefs we decided to do
something similar so what is he talking about Caesar Ritz went out and partnered with August escoffier what Caesar Ritz was to hotel to building hotels August es scaf was to French cooking and so what happened is you partner with world
famous chefs people come into your restaurant that's in the hotel because the world famous chef and now they know about your hotel that leads to more G that me leads to more activity in your restaurant that you own but also leads to more brand recognition of your hotel
and then by as a byproduct that have more people staying at the hotel so hiring as a form of distribution this is fascinating that is a fascinating idea okay here's the problem you can identify great people right maybe they even want
to come work like you've identified them you've sold them hey this is what this is our mission this is what we're we're doing and yet humans have complicated lives they have spouses they have kids they have a reason maybe they can't move
across the country to work for you even though they want to so there's a problem solving element that you see in these books on you have to solve like you've already identified the person you've recruited them they can't go for some
other reason okay well the great Founders are not going to take no for an answer I read in um in this book called liftoff which is about the first six years of SpaceX this is what Elon mus did they had an anticipated his friend's issue having convinced mus they needed
to bring This brilliant young engineer from Turkey on board it became a matter of solving the problem his wife had a job in San Francisco she would need one in Los Angeles right because that's where SpaceX is at the time there these
were solvable problem s and elon's better at solving problems than almost anyone else mus therefore came into his job interview prepared about halfway through mus told the guy that he wants to hire so I heard you don't want to move to LA and one of the reasons is
that your wife works for Google well I just talked to Larry and they're going to transfer your wife down to La so what are you going to do now to solve this problem musk had called his friend Larry Page the co-founder of Google the
engineer sat and stunned silence for a moment but then he replied given all that he would come to work at SpaceX that's really smart there is another idea when you're promoting are you going to promote from within or from without you know that's dependent on you
depending on what's going on I do think this is interesting though there's this guy named Les Schwab who built this this really uh valuable chain of uh like tire companies in the Pacific Northwest I actually found out about him because
Charlie Monger is like hey you should read this biography he said it in um he didn't say it to me personally he said it to uh in like one of the birk meetings that to study lesw had one of the most uh one of the smartest uh Financial incentive structures of any
company that that Charlie M had come across so this is what Les Schwab did he did not want to hire from he didn't want to hire other people from other companies because they might come with bad habits he liked to train his own
Executives and so he says in our 34 years of business we have never hired a manager from the outside every single one of our more than 250 managers and assistant managers started at the bottom changing tires they have all earned their management job job by working up
and then another thing if you're going to hire the best of the best in a players they a players don't like to be micromanage um and so this came in Larry Miller's autobiography called driven he owns like he owned like 93 companies all
throughout Utah car dealerships movie theaters all kinds of crazy stuff but he also owned the the the NBA team Utah Jazz and what was fascinating is he's trying to recruit Jerry Sloan as the coach at the at the point and Jerry Sloan would only take the job on one
condition and I really like it I really like this idea if you hire me let me run the team in business right that's what you're hiring me for one of the best things we had ever done was hire Jerry Salone as coach at the time he said I'm
only going to ask you for one thing if I get fired let me get fired for my own decisions if you hire me let me run the team SL business here's another idea from Thomas ell Edison that I think is fascinating really I the way I think
about a Founder is like you're developing skills that you can't hire for you you're going to hire for everything else but you shouldn't be hirable and Edison wasn't Edison expressing his views on the preeminent role of Applied scientists which that's
what he considered himself coin the expression I can hire mathematicians but they can't hire me and so when I read that paragraph for the first time the note I left myself was develop skills that you can't hire for capitalism rewards things that are both rare and
valuable uh Estee Lauder would give you advice that you need to hire people align with your thinking and values hire the best people this is vital hire people who think as you do and treat them well in our business they are top a
top priority so this idea is like that seems kind of weird like hire people who think like you there's obviously not one right way to build a business I think that your business should be an expression of your personality and who you are who are as a person at the core
and so I think there is an art to the building of your business and the reason to use the word art I don't mean like a hoyy toyy you know pretentious manner that's not me at all I don't even care about I don't art at all really I mean
that you're making decisions not just based on economics like there are non-economic important decisions based on how you're building your business like you could probably make more money doing a decision a but decision a is goes against who you are as a person or
you just don't like it or it's just not as elegant or beautiful and so therefore you don't do it so that's what I mean about you know higher people who think as you you do and what for whatever reason when I read Este Lauder say that
I was like okay that there's like this art to what she's doing one thing that's going to be help recruiting uh this comes from Peter teal I think this is the book 0 to1 understand that most companies don't even differentiate
their pitches to potential recruits into hiring so therefore like they're just going to BU as a byproduct of that you're going to wind up with a lower overall Talent base and so he says what's wrong with valuable stock smart people are pressing problems nothing but
every company makes this these claims so they won't help you stand out General and undifferentiated pitches to join your company don't say anything about why a recruit should join your company in instead of money instead of many others so that idea of like your pitch
your actual he would tell you you're you shouldn't be building on differentia a commodity business but even above and beyond that like you're the the the mission that you're trying to engage everybody to join you in that pitch that
sale sale you're trying to make to potential recruit should be differentiated should not if that person's applying to five other jobs there should not be like it's like they may not like your mission they may not like your pitch but they shouldn't be
able to compare it to anything else uh another quote from Nolan Bushnell hire for passion and intensity that's what he would do or that's what he did when he found Steve Jobs if there was a single characteristic that separat Steve
Jobs from the mass of employees it was his passionate enthusiasm Steve had one full one speed full blast this was the primary reason we hired him and one thing all these Founders have in common is that they know how important hiring
is and when something's important you do it yourself this is again Elon Musk on hiring he interviewed the first 3,000 employees at SpaceX that's how important it was one of musk's most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would fit his mold his
people had to be brilliant they had to be hardworking and there could be No Nonsense there are a ton of phonies out there and not many who are the real deal must said of his approach to interviewing Engineers I can usually tell within 15 minutes and I can sure I
can for sure tell within a few days of working with them musk made hiring a priority he personally met with every single person the company hired through the first 3,000 employees it required late nights and weekends but he felt it
was important to get the right people for his company and then the close on this we started with Steve Jobs telling us why it was so important and why should be a large part of how you spend your time and now we'll close with what
you do after what do you do after you hire the person this what he says it's not just recruiting after recruiting it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are the feeling that
their work will have a tremendous influence and is part of a strong Clear Vision so that is the end to that 20 minute mini episode I just relisten to the whole thing and it it really does I think it's a perfect explanation and illustration of why I think Founders
notes is so valuable because that some of those books I haven't read in five six years and just the ability to have a searchable database of all this these ideas like this collected knowledge of some of History's Greatest entrepreneurs
to reference and then contextually apply to our own businesses it's nothing short of like it's magic that's really the way I think about it I think it's a massive super power gives me a massive superpower I couldn't make the podcast
without it I also think if you have access to it it would make your business better and so if you're already running a successful business I highly recommend that you invest in a subscription and you can do that by going to Founders notes.com