I’ve been lucky to hang out with incredibly successful people because of my job.
Additionally, I spent the weekend speaking at a conference in Austin, Texas.
Plus, I used to live in Austin. I have a ~30 person friend group there who I love like family. Most of them are entrepreneurs. And those who aren’t are incredibly successful at whatever they do.
So, because of the conference and my friend group, I got an extra heavy dose of being around winners.
My personal definition of “successful” doesn’t involve money or your job. A poor teacher can be successful to me. But for the take of this post, I’m defining successful as “rich” business types.
A few observations:
- I don’t like cut throat people. I prefer kind people. I’ve meet 100’s of people with net worth’s ranging from $100m to $20 billion. They come in all flavors. Some are organized, others not. Some nice, come mean. Some, but not all (not even the majority, perhaps) are cut throat. They care about numbers. Spreadsheets. Metrics. Whatever. And they put that above everything. I know one guy who brags about brutal he is to work for. “Perform or die,” he’ll say. I think Elon Musk falls into that category. I do not enjoy hanging out with those people. The successful people I hang out with are incredibly kind. My buddy Noah Kagan is very successful. I tease him for sounding like a cringy therapist because when I talk about business too much he’ll interrupt me and say “So how’s Sam?”
- I like successful people who talk more about life than business. I hung out with George Mack and Paddy Galloway this weekend. George is maybe 30 years old. He is incredibly smart. Paddy’s only 29 and a YouTube savant. Both wildly successful, particularly given how young they are. We talked for 2.5 hours. Most of the conversation was on strange, cool theories George has on life, my thoughts on the importance of family, or Paddy’s Irish Catholic background (we have that in common). I’m a client of Paddy’s. I was supposed to ask him a bunch of business questions. I forgot about that and the entire dinner was mostly talking about ideas. I LOVED it.
- I like people who were poor. I grew up in a working class family from Missouri. The successful people I tend to get along with grew up in a poor or middle class family. I went to a dinner recently with a bunch of venture capitalist. They were smart, kind, and interesting. They were also these vest wearing, fancy education types. That’s not the type of person I get on best with.
- The best ones are humble and self-deprecating. One of the reason’s I like hanging out with Codie Sanchez and Chris Petkas is because of how they’re hot shit but still make fun of themselves (and me).
Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking about this morning.
