The Hotdog Effect: Secrets of the World’s #1 Restaurants - Will Guidara
CChris Williamson
경영/리더십창업/스타트업맛집/외식
Transcript
00:00:00I started listening to emo music when I was 12 and 13, like everybody else, except I never
00:00:05grew out of it.
00:00:06So I'm permanently in band t-shirts that 14-year-old me would think are sick.
00:00:14And that's it.
00:00:16Isn't that like one of the greatest forms of success?
00:00:20If 14-year-old you would be proud of you now?
00:00:2414-year-old you thinks that you're cool.
00:00:26Yeah.
00:00:2614-year-old you is saying, gosh, he's like, he's done something with himself, but he's
00:00:31still wearing the bear tooth t-shirt.
00:00:33Yeah.
00:00:33What do you think 14-year-old you would say about you?
00:00:37I think 14-year-old me would be pretty psyched.
00:00:43I mean, man, when I was 12, I wanted to be in restaurants.
00:00:49It's literally the only thing I ever wanted to do when I was a kid.
00:00:52And so for 14-year-old me to see that I did that at the absolute highest level and then
00:00:58somehow managed to find another life to carve out for myself afterwards, I think he'd be
00:01:05pretty, I think he'd be pretty impressed.
00:01:07What a cool, what a cool concept of what would 14-year-old you think about adult you as basically
00:01:13the ultimate gauge of whether or not your life's gone.
00:01:15Not what do the people in your industry think of you, not even actually what your parents
00:01:21think of you, but what would 14-year-old you think of you?
00:01:25Or your spouse or your friends or all of those things are important.
00:01:33I think it's important to show up for the people that you care about and try to make sure that
00:01:36they're excited to have you in their lives.
00:01:41I mean, to this day, I want to make my dad proud based on the relationship I have with
00:01:46him.
00:01:46But, and honestly, until I made the joke about your bare-toothed t-shirt, I'm not sure.
00:01:51I've actually gone down this road before, which is...
00:01:55Me neither.
00:01:56I mean, 14-year-old me, his opinion of me is as important as anyone's opinion of me.
00:02:04Well, hey, with AI, you might be able to cement a 14-year-old version of you that you could
00:02:10just check in with as a performance coach every so often.
00:02:12Have a little hologram of him over there.
00:02:15Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:02:17Will, what do you think?
00:02:18Was that good?
00:02:19Was that good?
00:02:20Yeah, yeah.
00:02:20I know exactly what you mean.
00:02:24That trajectory that we all end up on and the way that we get captured by the opinions
00:02:28of people who, in many ways, we should.
00:02:31I think there's kind of two categories of people with this.
00:02:33There's one who don't serve others enough, sort of don't care enough about the way that
00:02:40they're contributing to those around them, the opinions of people, they're the egotists,
00:02:45they're the narcissists, they're the obsessives that don't take outside input.
00:02:52But then there's another group of people who care way too much about what other people
00:02:57think.
00:02:58And I get the sense that a lot of people that rise to the top of their careers are actually
00:03:03in the latter camp rather than the former, that they're trying to please, they're trying
00:03:07to, if only I can make myself enough, then the world will see.
00:03:10And is this okay?
00:03:12Am I okay?
00:03:13Do these people, do I look okay to them?
00:03:15And are they responding to me in the way that I want?
00:03:17And also when you start to achieve some level of success, am I continuing to earn it?
00:03:25Is this, am I doing everything I need to do to make sure that people aren't second guessing
00:03:29whether I was meant to be where I now, like all that stuff.
00:03:33Gold medalist syndrome.
00:03:34Do you know what's interesting?
00:03:35We were talking about 14 year old me versus now me.
00:03:40I was on a Zoom with some friends who have a company and they're going through this inflection
00:03:45point where they started up about six years ago and now they're starting to gain some real
00:03:49traction.
00:03:50They're growing.
00:03:51And one of the things they said to me is, it's time, we need to grow up.
00:03:57And I stopped them.
00:03:59I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:04:01I was like, can I offer a different perspective on that?
00:04:03And they're like, yeah, go ahead.
00:04:04I said, I don't think you should ever grow up.
00:04:07I just think you all need to learn how to act like an adult when you need to.
00:04:14And as we're talking about 14 year old me versus now me, I'd like to think that if, if that
00:04:22me was impressed with me now, it's that I don't think I've actually ever fully grown up.
00:04:28I've just gotten good at learning when I need to be an adult in a room and, and I hope I
00:04:34never grow up because what, what I love about not feeling like a grown up is that I still
00:04:41see so much wonder in the world.
00:04:43Like that childlike feeling of wonder that comes from everything feeling just a little
00:04:48bit magical from taking what you do seriously, but not taking yourself so seriously that you
00:04:53can't just relish in those moments.
00:04:56That's something that I fight to hold onto.
00:04:58You can speak adult in the right room, but you're, so you're pretending you're
00:05:03LARPing as an adult.
00:05:04It's your cosplaying as an adult, but secretly there's still a child inside.
00:05:08Or you can, you're genuinely an adult, but you still enjoy those moments like a kid.
00:05:14I hate it.
00:05:16No, go for it.
00:05:17I'm just, you sort of saying that you knew that you wanted to be in restaurants when you
00:05:21were 12 and then you end up having the number one ranked restaurant in the entire world.
00:05:27I mean, by design, there can only be a very small bucket of people that go from that dream
00:05:33to that reality.
00:05:35What is it that separated you apart?
00:05:37How did you get interested in unreasonable hospitality?
00:05:42I mean, I give a great deal of the credit to my dad.
00:05:47My dad was my hero growing up.
00:05:50My dad, my best friend, my greatest mentor for a bunch of different reasons.
00:05:56But close to the top of that list was that when I was a kid, my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer
00:06:01and went on to become a quadriplegic by the time I was like nine or 10.
00:06:06Dude, my dad, he would work restaurant hours, which anyone familiar with this industry knows
00:06:12that's a lot of hours.
00:06:14He was a great dad to me, but then he would also legitimately care for her, like get her
00:06:19out of bed, put her in her wheelchair, wash her, feed her.
00:06:23And so this was just the guy.
00:06:25I just wanted to be like him.
00:06:26Whatever he did for a living, that was likely the thing that I would have wanted to do.
00:06:30And because of how much I've always held him in such high esteem, I really, I had the wherewithal
00:06:38to just let him guide my career for a very long time.
00:06:45I knew I wanted to be in restaurants.
00:06:47I knew I wanted to go to Cornell to study hospitality.
00:06:49I knew I wanted to open a restaurant in New York City.
00:06:52But he really made me approach that in a very incremental way.
00:06:57I worked in kitchens of some of the best restaurants in America.
00:07:00I started as a busboy, a dishwasher.
00:07:02I did all of the steps all the way through.
00:07:07That's how I fell in love with restaurants.
00:07:09But how I fell in love with hospitality is different because for me, I think everything can be hospitality.
00:07:17Restaurants were just the mechanism that I pursued that craft through.
00:07:23And I fell in love with hospitality through my mom and my dad.
00:07:31I mean, watching him care for her and never once feeling bad for himself, but to the contrary.
00:07:37Even as a kid, I wouldn't have articulated it this way.
00:07:39But he, he drew joy and pleasure from getting to care for this woman.
00:07:47And then as I got older and had the ability to start chipping in and being a part of the team, as I fed her or as I cared for her.
00:07:56To this day, I will say there are a few things more energizing for me than when I get to look, see the look on someone else's face when they've received a gift I'm responsible for giving them.
00:08:08And I think I felt that for the first time caring for her.
00:08:12And then I got to work for Danny Meyer, who's like the greatest hospitality restaurateur ever.
00:08:17And through him, he gave me the foundation upon which everything I've built was, was set upon.
00:08:24What did you learn from him?
00:08:28So there's two fundamental things.
00:08:29One, when I was coming up, chefs were cool.
00:08:33The dining room guy, no one, no one cared about the dining room guys except for Danny.
00:08:39And I think it's important to have someone who is cool and celebrated, who's good at the thing that you want to be good at.
00:08:46So you have someone to aspire to one day want to be.
00:08:51That's not something I learned from him, but that's one of the things that made him so appealing to me.
00:08:55He, he was like a goalpost.
00:08:58I was like, gosh, I want to be like that guy.
00:09:01But of the many things I learned from him, one, the entire framework of how he built his culture was something he called enlightened hospitality, which you take care of the people that work with you first and then the customer.
00:09:19And it's the most scalable and thoughtful approach to take in running a business.
00:09:24If I invest in the people on my team, they're going to be well equipped to turn around and pay that investment forward.
00:09:31But the other thing I learned from him that I will never, I will try to never stop embodying is the power of language.
00:09:42Danny is a master of these isms, these short, succinct articulations of his core values.
00:09:50And in creating these things, it's a meta signal to everyone on the team that those things mattered to him and by definition needed to matter to all of us and gave us an established shorthand to use amongst one another to reaffirm these ideas.
00:10:05Whether it was the swan was the thing we'd always talk about, how you move through a room, you're elegant on the top.
00:10:13And it's better the fact that your feet might be kicking like crazy beneath the surface.
00:10:18Constant gentle pressure.
00:10:20This idea that if you want to be the best, you are constantly pushing those around you to be better, but you push them gently.
00:10:31And he had so many of these things, but people always say actions speak louder than words and they do, but words matter.
00:10:39And I think too many people invest too little time finding the right ways to articulate what matters to them.
00:10:49And in doing so, aren't communicating their ideas clearly enough to the people around them.
00:10:54Okay, so you managed to get from 12-year-old dreamer to busboy, pot washer, service lad, all the way up to working under Danny Meyer.
00:11:09And then there's still even further to go because the difference between no restaurant and an okay restaurant and an okay restaurant and the best restaurant in the world.
00:11:21Most of the journey is ahead of you once you've got the restaurant.
00:11:24Yes.
00:11:26You know, my dad, he gave me this paperweight when I was a kid.
00:11:28I still have it on my desk today on it.
00:11:31It says, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
00:11:36And I freaking love that question.
00:11:38I believe it can call you to greatness if you let it.
00:11:42I mean, listen, when I went to work out of the Madison Park for Danny Meyer, I bought the restaurant from him a few years later.
00:11:49And I was only meant to be there for a year or so because at that point in my career, I did not like fine dining.
00:11:55I didn't like the idea that I, as a hospitality person, as a dining room guy, increasingly found myself trying to convince the chef that what I cared about mattered as much as what they cared about.
00:12:08And so Danny offered me this job to go to 11 Madison and I said, yes, I'll do it for a year.
00:12:13But then I want to run Shake Shack.
00:12:17And he agreed.
00:12:19And I did it.
00:12:20But a year in, I had already started to realize that just because it was that way in other fine dining restaurants, it didn't need to be that way in hours.
00:12:31And I found myself having fun delivering this, like, really, really high-end level of service because we had created this space where we were challenging how things had been done and bringing a more casual, modern sensibility to the experience.
00:12:51And that really started to work for us.
00:12:52We were maniacally focused on excellence, but doing it in a way that was enjoyable.
00:12:58And eventually, we got four stars from the New York Times.
00:13:01We got three Michelin stars.
00:13:03And then we got added to the list of the 50 best restaurants.
00:13:07And I went there so excited.
00:13:10And that first year, we came in last place.
00:13:13And some would say, yeah, you were number 50 in the entire world.
00:13:17In that room, we were last.
00:13:19And that's just how I'm wired.
00:13:21That was the perspective I had on that moment.
00:13:26And my dad always says adversity is a terrible thing to waste.
00:13:29You can't control what happens to you always, but you can control what you let it teach you, how you let it fuel your competitive spirit.
00:13:36And that night, I wrote down on a cocktail napkin, we will be number one.
00:13:43But a goal without a strategy is nothing more than a pipe dream.
00:13:46I think you needed to articulate what the impact would be.
00:13:49And at that point, every restaurant that had been number one was run by a chef, people who were unreasonable in pursuit of the food they were serving, relentless in pursuit of innovation, what new ingredients, techniques, all that.
00:14:02And that night, we made the choice, we were going to be unreasonable, but in pursuit of people, and relentless in pursuit of the one thing that will never change, which is our basic human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, to feel a sense of belonging.
00:14:18And so underneath, we will be number one in the world, I wrote those two words, unreasonable, hospitality, and took a long time to get there.
00:14:26But that became the thing that ultimately got us to the top.
00:14:31What is the difference between service and hospitality, between simply making amazing food and making people feel seen?
00:14:41So, I think it's a great question, because far too many people conflate service and hospitality as being one and the same.
00:14:48And the extent to which you understand they are two very different things, I think has a lot to do with the approach you take to work and to life.
00:14:57One of the best answers I ever got to that question, what's the difference between service and hospitality, was service is black and white, hospitality is color.
00:15:05Service is the thing that you do.
00:15:08In my world, it's getting the right plate of food to the right person within the right amount of time.
00:15:12Hospitality is the extent to which that person feels a connection to you, feels seen by you, feels a sense of belonging, feels genuinely welcomed.
00:15:22There's this quote, it's my favorite about hospitality, many people have heard it.
00:15:26It's from Maya Angelou.
00:15:27She said, people will forget what you say, they will forget what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
00:15:34And I believe that to be so very true.
00:15:35When I think, and I'd imagine it's the same for you, back on the experiences that linger with me, it's not because of some little thing that someone did for me or a plate of food that was served to me.
00:15:49It's about something that a human being did for me that made me feel some level of genuine connection to them and the experience.
00:15:59Those are the things that I remember.
00:16:02Unreasonable hospitality is recognizing that to be true and choosing to be as relentless and creative and willing to do whatever it takes in pursuit of that.
00:16:10How you make people feel as relentless as most successful people are in pursuit of whatever product or service they're selling.
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00:17:15Okay, so you're in this room with 49 other restauranteurs who have been new, and presumably there were some that served food that was better.
00:17:25Well, what was better than you could have even served?
00:17:27Yeah.
00:17:27That there was access to ingredients because maybe New York doesn't have this particular access and level of freshness or something, a chef that's a once-in-a-generation talent, desserts that you can only get in this particular region of the whatever, whatever.
00:17:43What were the big levers that you did pull on?
00:17:48What were the practical things that you did that made the biggest difference from 50 to number one?
00:17:55You know, there were a few things, and they all center around this idea that I think when people think about hospitality, they think, all right, I just need to hire nice people and encourage them to be nice.
00:18:05And I just don't believe that to be true.
00:18:07I believe you can pursue it and systemize it and create conditions for it to thrive.
00:18:14The first thing we did was just look at the entire journey that we were extending to our customers, every single little touchpoint.
00:18:24In the same way that a chef obsesses over every ingredient on the plate, we obsessed over every moment of interaction, identifying each one of them.
00:18:32And then once we had, we got to dream about how we could make as many of them more awesome as humanly possible.
00:18:39I found that in any experience that someone serves, if you can elevate some of the most overlooked touchpoints, it can have the greatest impact on the experience as a whole.
00:18:49So whether it was how people were greeted when they walked through the door.
00:18:54Normally, you go into a restaurant, there's someone standing behind a physical barrier bathed in the glow of an iPad screen.
00:19:00They say, do you have a reservation code?
00:19:02Do you belong here?
00:19:03And if you do, they turn to the person to the side and say, take them to table 43.
00:19:08And then you're carted through the room like cattle.
00:19:11I compare that to what it feels like when you come to my house for dinner.
00:19:15Do I throw open the door?
00:19:17I greet you by name.
00:19:18I give you a hug.
00:19:19I welcome you in.
00:19:21And so we spent an unbelievable amount of time and energy creating something that looked rather effortless,
00:19:28which was moving a podium around the corner.
00:19:31There was just a person standing there when you walked in.
00:19:33They had memorized every name that was coming in 15 minutes later, googled everyone's pictures.
00:19:38If you ever had your picture on the internet, we knew what you looked like.
00:19:42There was sign language between that person and the person behind the screen.
00:19:46It just felt like you were engaging with a friend and then being walked into the room.
00:19:50I think in any experience, we used to talk about it.
00:19:55We'd articulate it as we needed to earn informality.
00:20:00Genuine connection happens the moment the other person lets their guard down.
00:20:03And that happens normally in a less formal environment.
00:20:11But yet someone walks into a restaurant like that and their guard is up.
00:20:15They might be a little bit intimidated.
00:20:16That might be their first big, expensive meal.
00:20:18They might have worked really, really hard to get that reservation.
00:20:21Everything we did was very meticulous and intentional to get people to let their guards down,
00:20:27to feel genuinely at home.
00:20:29You know that moment when you are getting to know your partner's dad and you call them Mr. So-and-so
00:20:39and then eventually they say, hey, call me by my first name.
00:20:42That's the moment you know that you've been invited in.
00:20:46And we tried to very intentionally get to that point with our guests as quickly as possible
00:20:49so that we'd have as much time to develop a genuine relationship with them.
00:20:58That's one.
00:20:59Like really looking at the experience and identifying every opportunity we could
00:21:04just to make it a little bit more awesome, more fun, more connective, more genuine.
00:21:12But then what we realized, and there's the story in the book about a hot dog,
00:21:18which is a big breakthrough moment for me.
00:21:21I was in the dining room on a busier than normal lunch service
00:21:23and I was helping out the team by clearing dirty plates.
00:21:28And I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of four.
00:21:31They were foodies, Europeans on vacation to New York City just to eat at great restaurants.
00:21:35And in fact, this was their last meal.
00:21:37They were going straight to the airport from the restaurant to head back home.
00:21:40And while I was there, I overheard them talking about the trip and they were raving about it.
00:21:44They'd been to Le Bernardin and Daniel and Jean-Georges, all the four-star restaurants,
00:21:48now 11 Madison Park.
00:21:49But then one woman jumped in and said, yeah, but you know what?
00:21:52We never got to have a New York City hot dog.
00:21:55And it was one of those light bulb moments.
00:21:57I ran to the kitchen, dropped off the plates, ran outside, grabbed a hot dog, ran back inside.
00:22:01Then came the hard part, which was convincing my fancy chef to actually serve it in our restaurant.
00:22:06But eventually he did and he cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces, put one on each plate,
00:22:12added a little swish of ketchup, one of mustard, a little scoop of sauerkraut, one of relish,
00:22:16topped it off with like a micro herb or something to make it look fancy.
00:22:20And then before their final savory course, which at the time was our honey lavender glazed
00:22:24Muscovy duck that had been dry aged for two weeks, I brought out what we in New York call
00:22:29a dirty water dog to the table.
00:22:32And I explained it.
00:22:33I said, hey, I overheard you talking.
00:22:34We couldn't let you go home with any culinary regrets.
00:22:36Here's that hot dog.
00:22:38And dude, they freaked out.
00:22:40I mean, at that point in my career, I'd worked in some of the best restaurants in America.
00:22:42I'd served tens of millions of dollars worth of lobster and wagyu beef.
00:22:47I had never seen anyone react to anything I'd served them.
00:22:50Like they did to that hot dog.
00:22:53And you know, athletes are always going to the tapes and they've had a bad game to see
00:22:56what they did wrong, to try to make sure they don't repeat those mistakes.
00:23:00We all need to get better at going to the tapes when we've had a good game to see what we did
00:23:04well, to make sure we keep on doing that thing.
00:23:06I think that's how you put intention to intuition.
00:23:10So we went to the hot dog.
00:23:11What happened?
00:23:13There's just a few simple things.
00:23:14It just required being present, caring so much about them that I didn't care about anything
00:23:18else I needed to do.
00:23:20It required taking what we were doing seriously, but not ourselves so seriously.
00:23:25That we were unwilling to do something that to others would feel off-brand.
00:23:31And it required this idea that genuine hospitality is one size fits one.
00:23:38And we resourced that.
00:23:40We added a position to our team.
00:23:42Someone whose only job was to help other people bring ideas like that to life over the course
00:23:47of service.
00:23:48And we did the craziest stuff that we were serving them, we were serving them amazing food.
00:23:58The service was about as close to technically perfect as possible.
00:24:00The dining room was remarkable.
00:24:02But the thing that people remembered were the things that we did just for them because we were
00:24:08willing to listen.
00:24:10And then we cared enough to try a little bit harder to do something with what we heard.
00:24:15What are some of the other most unreasonable things that you've ever done for a guest?
00:24:20Oh my gosh, we did so many crazy things.
00:24:24One of my favorites is there was a family of four from Spain dining with us, parents and
00:24:28their children.
00:24:29We had these big windows.
00:24:30It started snowing.
00:24:32We learned that it was the kids' first time seeing real snow.
00:24:35The Dreamweaver somehow found a store still open at 8 o'clock on a Friday night selling
00:24:39sleds.
00:24:39And when they left the restaurant, we had an Uber SUV parked out front with sleds in the
00:24:43back, a big thermos of hot chocolate in the front.
00:24:47Jimmy Fallon, after we became number one in the world, he sent us a note saying, first
00:24:52number one in America, now number one in the world.
00:24:55What's next?
00:24:56Space?
00:24:57And he had dinner with us like a week later and we had an elevator that went from the first
00:25:03floor to the second floor.
00:25:04It was an elevator that just went one floor.
00:25:06And halfway through his meal, we brought him and his friend back to the elevator and we had
00:25:11these two space suits and the elevator opened up and they went inside and we'd redecorated
00:25:16the entire inside of the elevator.
00:25:17It looked like a space shuttle.
00:25:19And all of the buttons were covered over except for one that just had an arrow that said space.
00:25:26And that's the one that went to the next floor.
00:25:27And then you got up there and there was dry ice and liquid nitrogen and we like replicated
00:25:31space food.
00:25:34Or we did one, there was a couple dining with us.
00:25:37They'd just gotten married at City Hall.
00:25:39Turned out they had a big wedding planned, but there was drama between the two families.
00:25:44They canceled the wedding.
00:25:45This was now their big night.
00:25:46And they were elated, but sad by that fact.
00:25:51The server, on her own, committed herself to figuring out what their wedding song would
00:25:55have been.
00:25:57And we slowed down the meal just enough where they were one of the last tables in the room,
00:26:01which meant most of my team was off the clock.
00:26:03Rather, they were up in the private dining room having an impromptu staff party, but it
00:26:08was not their staff party.
00:26:09It was that couple's wedding reception.
00:26:11And when they were done, we walked them upstairs.
00:26:13They set foot over the threshold.
00:26:14We played their wedding song, Lovely Day by Bill Withers.
00:26:18We'd given them the gift of a first dance.
00:26:21And dude, every time we did one of these things, the restaurant was transformed.
00:26:27I mean, for the people we were serving, obviously.
00:26:30But also for us.
00:26:33I'd worked in restaurants my entire life.
00:26:35I'd never been a part of a team where the morale was so high and the team was so consistently
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00:27:56And what was feeding that?
00:27:58Just the fact that you're doing something nice for other people that makes them feel good?
00:28:02Service?
00:28:03Well, hospitality, I suppose?
00:28:05Yeah.
00:28:06Listen, I think you get to a certain age, and a vast majority of us like giving gifts at the holidays
00:28:15more than we like receiving them.
00:28:18Right?
00:28:18Like, I like getting gifts, but my favorite gift, if you and I were celebrating something
00:28:23and I spent a lot of time on a gift for you, my favorite gift is when you open it,
00:28:26if you're genuinely excited about what I gave you, that's a very big gift for me.
00:28:32And those that don't feel like that, I think they just don't feel like that yet
00:28:39because they've never fully experienced how good it feels to feel like that.
00:28:45There's investments of energy that are depleting, and I think there are investments of energy
00:28:51that are energizing.
00:28:54And at least for me, bestowing graciousness upon others always falls into the latter camp.
00:29:01Why do you think so many companies forget the human element then?
00:29:07Well, I think far too many companies follow that old adage, what gets measured gets managed.
00:29:18What I'm talking about, it's harder to put a ROI to it.
00:29:24But just because it's harder to calculate the impact of this stuff doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
00:29:28In fact, in many ways, I believe it matters more.
00:29:33Every company I spend time with is, you talk to the CEO or the president, whoever,
00:29:38they're all trying to identify what is their competitive advantage.
00:29:42And yet those conversations always center around the strength of the brand or the quality of the product.
00:29:47But here's the thing, it doesn't just matter how good the product is or how strong the brand is
00:29:52because eventually, and this is not my opinion, it's a fact, time has proven it to be true,
00:29:57someone's going to build a better product, someone will create a stronger brand.
00:30:02The only competitive advantage that exists over the long term, I think that comes from hospitality,
00:30:07from consistently and generously investing in relationships, because we all know this,
00:30:11they take a long time to build, and if you build them in the right way,
00:30:15the loyalty you earn takes a very long time to erode.
00:30:18I think the reason why a lot of companies don't think this way is because, understandably,
00:30:24they're so focused on today dollars that they're not focused enough on tomorrow dollars.
00:30:29They're maximizing profits now at the expense of all those that lie ahead.
00:30:34It's very difficult to growth hack intimacy.
00:30:39It's really hard.
00:30:41There's no way to speed run it, right?
00:30:43Your chief growth officer is probably not looking at the intimacy metric.
00:30:47Yes, but they ought to be.
00:30:49Like, I really do believe there should be another line in the P&L.
00:30:56You know, in most companies, if you exceed revenue, you're celebrated.
00:31:00If you go below expenses, you are celebrated.
00:31:03But I think reinvesting in the community you are there to serve should be a line item in the P&L,
00:31:09and if you underspend on that line item, you should be penalized.
00:31:13Because you're reaping future benefits today,
00:31:17and you're selling your future colleagues down the river.
00:31:21Didn't you do some mad stuff with how closely you looked at your set of accounts as well?
00:31:28Yeah, I call it the rule of 95.5.
00:31:32Which is, manage every single dollar like an absolute maniac 95% of the time.
00:31:39And I mean like a maniac.
00:31:40No expense too small to be poured over.
00:31:43But you do that so that you earn the right to spend the last 5% foolishly.
00:31:49And I put foolishly in air quotes normally,
00:31:51because I don't think it's foolish spending at all.
00:31:53It's all this stuff that I'm talking about.
00:31:55I believe that spending actually carries the day.
00:31:59Because it's where you leave people with a lasting impression,
00:32:02and a sense of loyalty and connection to you and the brand that you are trying to create.
00:32:10What were the things that you were focused on?
00:32:12What were some of the places that you decided to scrutinize more closely?
00:32:18I mean everything.
00:32:18I mean everything.
00:32:19I mean everything.
00:32:19I mean everything.
00:32:20If anything was 5% over from the month before, we would do a deep dive into it.
00:32:26I think you need to do that.
00:32:28Because listen, everything I'm talking about, when I say you need to earn the right to do it,
00:32:32I mean that in two ways.
00:32:34One, you need to be cognizant enough with how you're managing your money that you have actual money to invest in this.
00:32:43Obviously, you need to legitimately earn the money to spend.
00:32:47But two, I think you better earn it because anyone not spending that last 5% foolishly, I really do believe in the long term, is being financially reckless.
00:33:00But where we went from there, which is cool, is those stories I told you about the wedding day or the sleds, they're amazing.
00:33:11And yet you can't scale them.
00:33:14Right?
00:33:15You need to hear someone say something.
00:33:16You need to come up with a good enough idea.
00:33:18You need to turn it around on the fly.
00:33:19You can't do that for as many people as you are invariably doing business with.
00:33:27But when you're doing something that's not scalable and it's really working, you need to ask yourself, can I put some level of system behind this?
00:33:34So we did an exercise that I think is transformational.
00:33:37I call it pattern recognition of recurring moments.
00:33:40Where we looked, not for the touch points, the things that happen always for everyone, but the things that happen sometimes for some people.
00:33:47As often as once a day, once every week.
00:33:49And by the way, every business has these, the good ones and the hard ones.
00:33:52And if you can name them in advance, decide what is the coolest way to respond every time that happens.
00:33:59Invest whatever's required to develop the assets needed for those reactions.
00:34:03You can start making magic all the time.
00:34:06What like?
00:34:07I'll give you one from my restaurant and I'll give you a couple from out in the world because I think they're so powerful.
00:34:13In my restaurant, a lot of people got engaged with us.
00:34:16Probably happened once, twice a week.
00:34:19And when that happened, we would pour them free champagne, like most good restaurants would.
00:34:25But once we had identified that as an opportunity, we said, how do we make this more awesome?
00:34:30Tiffany and co. had their offices across the park.
00:34:32One day I went over there and started knocking on doors until I met the chief marketing officer.
00:34:37Eventually convincing her to give me 1,000 of those iconic Tiffany blue boxes, each with two champagne flutes in them.
00:34:44Next time someone got engaged, we poured them free champagne like we always would have, but they wouldn't notice that their glasses looked just a little bit different from everyone else's glasses.
00:34:53And when they were done, we'd take them away, wash them, dry them, put them back in the box, and at the end of their meal, we'd gift them the glasses they toasted their engagement to.
00:35:01Was that less special because we had a bunch more in the back?
00:35:04No.
00:35:05Was it unbelievably easy for our team to deploy?
00:35:09Yeah, all they had to do was go into the back and grab a box.
00:35:12And I've talked to people who got engaged with us then, who don't remember a single thing they ate.
00:35:19But they will never forget how we made them feel when we gave them those glasses.
00:35:24Here's an example from out in the world of a similar thing.
00:35:29Four months ago, I got on a flight.
00:35:31We pulled away from the jet bridge, and that dreaded announcement comes over the speaker.
00:35:36Ladies and gentlemen, there's something wrong with the plane.
00:35:38We're going to be delayed here while they figure it out.
00:35:40We'll come back to you with more information when we have it.
00:35:43And those delays are the worst.
00:35:45A, you can't even go get a coffee anymore.
00:35:47B, there's always some dude three rows behind you that lets out that groan of exasperation,
00:35:53and the morale on the plane starts spiraling.
00:35:56But this time, something different happened.
00:35:59The pilot came out of the cockpit.
00:36:01There were three families on the plane, parents and their kids.
00:36:03The pilot goes up to the first family and says to the kids,
00:36:05Hey, you guys want a tour of the cockpit?
00:36:07The kids are so excited, which made the people sitting around them a little bit excited, right?
00:36:13It started to uplift the vibe.
00:36:15Does the same for the second family.
00:36:17Does the same for the third family.
00:36:19Now there's no more families.
00:36:20We're still delayed.
00:36:20The pilot just goes into the aisle and says loudly to the cabin,
00:36:23Do any adults want to tour of the cockpit?
00:36:26Adults started taking them up on it.
00:36:27Eventually, we take off.
00:36:29I'm a student of this stuff, so I asked the flight attendant.
00:36:32I said, Hey, what was that?
00:36:33She goes, He's the best.
00:36:35Every time we're delayed on the tarmac, that's what he does.
00:36:39There's a pain point.
00:36:41You can't control it.
00:36:42This guy recognized that this was something he could do every time that happened to make it at minimum less painful and, at least in the circumstance that I experienced, quite enjoyable.
00:36:56This stuff exists.
00:36:58I guarantee you, if you look at your business, there's these recurring moments.
00:37:03If you pick a good one and a bad one, figure out what would be the coolest way to respond.
00:37:08You can actually systemize graciousness.
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00:38:27Yeah, because it's too hard to build it on the fly, to have the specific server have that idea, enough time to be able to reverse engineer what their first dance was, and upstairs is actually, there's room, we can do that.
00:38:42I mean, I'm saying you should still do that stuff.
00:38:45Like, to be innovative in hospitality, do unscalable things all the time, but you can't just do those things.
00:38:51You need to have a foundation.
00:38:52You need to do innovative things that are scalable as well.
00:38:55Exactly.
00:38:56Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:38:57I was thinking about stuff.
00:38:58I'm about to open up my first studio here in Austin, and we've got a bunch of guests coming in, and we'll start recording in it pretty soon.
00:39:07I'm thinking about the sort of guest experience, about when they get met, and about what it's like when they leave, and we have some pretty cool merch.
00:39:14Well, maybe I could give them, maybe I could give them some merch, and maybe we could take a Polaroid, and maybe the Polaroid, there could be two copies of it, and they could have one, and I could, I could, we could have one for the wall, and then, wouldn't that be cool?
00:39:25So, yeah, I mean, we used to do, I ran nightclubs for a very long time, so technically I was in the hospitality industry, except for the fact that nightclubs are the least hospitable of all of the hospitality industry opportunities.
00:39:35Except that's one where you derive significant and genuine pleasure out of telling people they can't come in.
00:39:41Yeah, fuck off.
00:39:42Fuck off to everyone.
00:39:45And one of the things that we did, which was using the peak end rule from Daniel Kahneman, which you're probably familiar with from your time in restaurants, we realized that we were really great at peaks, but the ends of nights out are almost always the worst part.
00:40:01Especially, you're in the northeast of the UK, you've just spent all of this time in a club, maybe you met a guy or a girl, and now you've lost them, and whatever, I've had a bit much to drink, fuck, I've got work tomorrow.
00:40:12And then you get hit by this sort of wall of freezing cold wind and rain as you step outside, and you're reminded that maybe you need a kebab, but maybe I'm not sure, where's the cab, where can I get the taxi from, and I'm going to start chanting stuff.
00:40:24We were in the middle of a city, and there was residences everywhere, and we got noise abatement orders all the time, because the UK is so parochial in the way that it's put together that even the noise of your customers leaving the venue is apparently your responsibility somehow.
00:40:40Anyway, one of the things that we realized was that if we gave out lollipops, just little 10p lollipops in a big bucket with a nice smiley girl on the door, as people were leaving, it did a ton of things.
00:40:54It stopped them from going to the kebab shop, because they thought they'd got a little bit of something.
00:40:59It actually sobered them up a little bit, because they finally got some glucose in the system that wasn't in the Red Bull.
00:41:03It caused them to shut up, because they had something in their mouth, and it stopped people from fighting, because no two guys wanted to have a fight while they were sucking on a lollipop.
00:41:16No, by the way, that is an unbelievable example of the first thing I was talking about.
00:41:21Like, what is every touchpoint?
00:41:22Your touchpoint is leaving.
00:41:23Leaving sucks.
00:41:24How do we make it suck less?
00:41:26By giving them something to suck, yeah.
00:41:28Yeah, suck on theirs.
00:41:29Suck on theirs.
00:41:30Yeah, it was funny.
00:41:31It was funny.
00:41:31I mean, I tried, as I was starting to learn, you know, I was getting Rory Sutherland pilled and Richard Shorten pilled and understanding consumer behavior.
00:41:39I tried to implement as much of this as I could.
00:41:42I guess margins, in fine dining, it must be at least somewhat easier, because the margins may be a little bit nicer, I guess.
00:41:48But, you know, we tried.
00:41:51We did.
00:41:51Actually not.
00:41:52Like, people in our industry would say that fine dining has the worst margins.
00:41:57I've just learned a long time ago that, listen, you spend money somewhere.
00:42:06A lot of places have big marketing budgets.
00:42:09I think this is the best marketing you can do.
00:42:11Right?
00:42:11You give people stories like this to tell, what do you think they're going to do?
00:42:14They're going to tell them over and over and over again.
00:42:19And if you spend money on smart marketing, it's going to return itself to you over and over and over again.
00:42:25Are there any tricks, any hospitality tricks that you've seen at other fine dining places or even well-known restaurants that you experienced and you thought, fuck, I really wish that I'd thought of that one?
00:42:40I mean, coming up, there were all sorts of little things that I think in the beginning, like anyone, when you're building a business and you're trying to get to a certain level, the best thing you can do is be a really good curator.
00:42:56Just go around and study other people and if they do something really well, take it and do the same thing.
00:43:01And if they do something kind of poorly, try to do it a little bit better.
00:43:05But that only gets you to a certain point.
00:43:07Right?
00:43:07Then eventually, you're doing really well, but you need to start to develop your own point of view.
00:43:12I mean, I was inspired by Thomas Keller's restaurants and Daniel Balud's restaurant, all the big people here.
00:43:19And I'd borrow little bits and pieces from each one of them.
00:43:21And that got us, honestly, onto that list, just last place on the list.
00:43:27And it was from that point that we had to start developing our own stuff.
00:43:30But I will say this, even today, as I travel, I'm learning so much from different people.
00:43:40This is something I learned from a guy who read my book and was inspired by it and tried to figure out a way to put it to work in his world.
00:43:47But his world is very different from the one I came from.
00:43:49He owns two UPS stores in Sarasota, Florida, which are not the places anyone would immediately think of as being the most hospitable in the world.
00:44:01But he wanted to figure out how to put this into practice.
00:44:04And so he came up with an idea, and he shared it with me because he said it transformed his entire culture.
00:44:09He made a rule that everyone that worked for him, that worked the register, they were required to, once a day, one time during their shift, comp someone's order up to, whatever, 30 bucks.
00:44:23That one change transformed the culture of his stores.
00:44:27And it was a win, win, win.
00:44:29It was a win for the person on the receiving end.
00:44:31Imagine if you went to a UPS store to, like, send something to your mom, and they're like, sir, it's on us today.
00:44:36This one's on us.
00:44:37You'd be like, what the fuck is going on?
00:44:39Like, it would blow your mind.
00:44:41And you would talk about that.
00:44:42Like, you'd be like, dude, the weirdest thing happened.
00:44:44It was the UPS store.
00:44:47It was a win for the people that worked there.
00:44:49Because, listen, I don't care what you do.
00:44:52I don't believe you can do it well if you don't feel some level of genuine appreciation for doing it.
00:45:00And there are places that even the most generous among us aren't necessarily good at showing appreciation for the people that work there.
00:45:10And yet, the people that work there, when they did comp someone, they're like, oh, my gosh, they really appreciated that.
00:45:16This feels great.
00:45:17It's the freest gift ever, right?
00:45:19It's somebody else is picking up the check for you gaining the goodwill.
00:45:23Exactly.
00:45:24But that's what led to the third win.
00:45:26Because when he implemented the rule, they were required to do that.
00:45:29But after they started feeling that level of appreciation, now they were allowed to do it.
00:45:36But only one time a day.
00:45:39Which meant they had to now work to more deeply understand everyone that walked through the doors of that store
00:45:45to decide who deserved it the most.
00:45:48Was it someone having a good day that needed a cherry on top?
00:45:51Was it someone having a bad day that needed something to go right?
00:45:54Every customer was receiving better service and hospitality in pursuit of figuring out who was going to get that one gift.
00:46:02I was thinking about, I have this smarter energy drink called Nutonic.
00:46:09And one of the things that we did for the investors, we raised our first round and, you know, you never forget your first.
00:46:14Yeah.
00:46:14So we got metal cards made.
00:46:18And these metal cards have got a near-field communication chip in them.
00:46:24And what all of the investors were told to do is to keep the card in their wallet.
00:46:29And then if they were ever at a party and the topic of nootropics or brain health or cognitive function or energy drinks, it's like, oh, yeah, you know, I haven't been able to focus so much.
00:46:39Or my mood's been a little bit down.
00:46:41Or I've been thinking about trying to improve my dopamine.
00:46:43Or I want to get off using so much caffeine.
00:46:45I'm really, whatever.
00:46:46However, it sort of slotted in, they had this gold card that had their name on an investor.
00:46:51And all that they needed to do was take the card.
00:46:54And if they just tap it on someone's phone, it opens up a website on their phone where they just put their address in and we ship them a case.
00:47:03We ship them one case of everything for free.
00:47:05So it's like a business card, but it's a functional business card.
00:47:08All they do, tap it on the phone, boom, just put your address in there.
00:47:11And then two days later, they'll get one of everything.
00:47:14And by the way, it's a brilliant gift because you're giving your investors the gift of giving other people gifts.
00:47:19And invariably, they're now doing more consistent marketing on your behalf.
00:47:24Of course.
00:47:25These people are in room, these are the people who are investing in us.
00:47:28They're in the big rooms.
00:47:29So, yeah, it was, that was fun.
00:47:31I have no idea where mine is.
00:47:33One of the, we did need to put the kibosh on one of the lads that works for me because he had given away more money than he did, more money in stock than he'd invested.
00:47:43I was about to, I didn't want to like, I didn't want to like crush the vibe of that story, but I was about to say, did anyone take too much advantage of it?
00:47:50Yeah.
00:47:50We had to, we had to have an, we had to have an intervention with one of the, one of the lads that works for me.
00:47:55And I was like, look, mate, this is good, but the check size wasn't that big.
00:47:59Like don't, don't tip your Uber driver with a bunch of.
00:48:03Throwing them around and like, how many girls did you speak to at Soho house in LA?
00:48:08Fucking hell.
00:48:09Crazy.
00:48:10That's funny.
00:48:11Crazy.
00:48:11Um, you mentioned before about the difference between, uh, taking work seriously and taking yourself seriously.
00:48:16And, um, I've been kind of fascinated by this question myself.
00:48:19I, I, I like to take things seriously, but also, you know, that play and fun are where a lot of the enjoyment in life comes from.
00:48:29Um, so what does that look like?
00:48:33How do you avoid seriousness in pursuit?
00:48:37Uh, how do you stop that from bleeding over into seriousness of persona?
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00:49:42Well, I think it can be kind of addressed in two different ways.
00:49:47First, just in how you show up and do business.
00:49:52I think you need to take what you do seriously.
00:49:55But if you try to be so serious in how you do business,
00:49:58I actually think you're letting these self-imposed standards get in the way of you giving other people
00:50:03the things that will bring them the most joy.
00:50:06I think so many people, they're so focused on perfecting their own brands
00:50:12that they're not nearly focused enough on just pursuing people.
00:50:17And they're selling themselves and those around them short as a result.
00:50:20Like, joy and humor breaks down barriers.
00:50:26The more connected someone is to you, the more successful you will be in that relationship.
00:50:31And, like, a bit of levity goes a long way.
00:50:34And those that, and I think some people that take themselves so seriously,
00:50:38that's rooted in some level of insecurity,
00:50:41they feel the need to always have their guard up.
00:50:44But if your guard's up, how are you ever going to expect someone else to let theirs down first?
00:50:50Now, as it pertains to just living a life worth living,
00:50:55God, what are we doing?
00:50:57Like, nothing that any of us is doing is that important.
00:51:01We want to make an impact on the world.
00:51:02We want to put good out there.
00:51:04But, gosh, we should have some fun along the way.
00:51:08And if we think that we're doing such important stuff that we can't have fun,
00:51:15I think we just end up, A, not having a life that is nearly as enjoyable as it could be,
00:51:21and B, not being that enjoyable to be around.
00:51:27Oh, yeah, and ultimately, even though it's very difficult to measure,
00:51:34one of the big mediators between a customer's experience and what's going on is the vibe of the staff.
00:51:41What's it like?
00:51:41So, yeah, if it's this very stringent, dictatorial, sort of uptight procedural thing, it's not.
00:51:54I mean, I work at a UPS store where each of us gets one credit to give a customer a free package each day.
00:51:59Yeah.
00:52:00Like, that is so different to I work at a UPS store whose package sending error rate is below 0.001%.
00:52:08By the way, and I bet the two more often than not coincide, right?
00:52:14Like, I think you can feel joy in a room, and every single business I've ever engaged with,
00:52:20if the people that work there are having fun, the experience will be better.
00:52:25They will do a better job.
00:52:27And it's pretty hard to have fun if the person you work for doesn't allow themselves to.
00:52:33What's the line, ambitious in vision but patient in pursuit, mean?
00:52:38That was from my dad.
00:52:41My dad always wanted me, with that paperweight as a starting point,
00:52:46to be, like, crazy audacious in what I tried to achieve,
00:52:50with what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail.
00:52:52He'd always say, hey, ask yourself of that question.
00:52:54Whatever the honest answer is, just try.
00:52:57Try to do that.
00:52:58Saying that far too many people are scared to say their biggest goals out loud
00:53:03for fear that if they do and don't achieve them,
00:53:05they'll let themselves and those around them down.
00:53:07But, and you know this,
00:53:09if you don't have the confidence and the conviction to dream the crazy dreams out loud,
00:53:14it's pretty unlikely they'll ever come true.
00:53:16But that's only half of it.
00:53:19I think when you want to be the best,
00:53:22you need to understand that getting there takes time.
00:53:26And it's something that I find myself coaching younger people on all the time.
00:53:32Like, if you want to be the best at anything,
00:53:36it's going to take time to get there, enjoy the ride, celebrate each season.
00:53:41Like, allow the years to pass such that you can fully build the foundation you need to do something extraordinary.
00:53:50And so, audacity combined with patience, I think is the winning formula.
00:53:56Either one of those on their own, I think, can be disastrous.
00:54:00I'm interested in, it sounds very fun.
00:54:05The culture that you brought to this,
00:54:10the sort of almost childish rebelliousness against what I imagine,
00:54:15I haven't done much fine dining,
00:54:17but I have to imagine that when you get to the upper echelons of multiple Michelin stars,
00:54:20it can get pretty stuffy.
00:54:22And the opportunity to kind of turn that on its head with a bunch of play toys seems fun.
00:54:28But I have to assume that chasing number one must have put a kind of pressure on you
00:54:33that wasn't just a blue sky helicopter thinking vision.
00:54:41There is a degree of tension in that pursuit.
00:54:47There can sometimes be a hollowness in the victory of it.
00:54:50What did you learn about the joy of chasing number one?
00:54:56What did becoming number one actually cost you?
00:55:00Well, I think there's a couple of things you just said.
00:55:03One, we had a lot of fun, for sure.
00:55:08And it was also extraordinarily difficult.
00:55:11It wasn't all hospitable.
00:55:12I mean, you don't get there without pursuing excellence
00:55:14with the same rigor that you pursue hospitality,
00:55:17instead of the fact that they are not friends, right?
00:55:19Like, excellence and hospitality, they work together,
00:55:23but they're opposed to one another.
00:55:26Excellence is about control.
00:55:27Hospitality is about empowerment.
00:55:29Excellence is about holding people accountable.
00:55:33Hospitality is about celebrating their initiatives and affirming them, right?
00:55:38I'm talking not just literally with the product, but also culturally.
00:55:44And there was plenty of tension.
00:55:46I think anytime you work alongside like-minded people,
00:55:49who are as passionate as you are and wanting to be the best,
00:55:54there will be tension.
00:55:56And that's something to celebrate and embrace.
00:55:58Because if you can, if you can figure out how to navigate through those moments of tension thoughtfully,
00:56:04you grow closer to those around you and together can figure out what is the right next best step for the business as a whole.
00:56:14So, there was a lot of pain, there was a lot of exhaustion, there was a lot of tension alongside all the fun stuff I'm talking about.
00:56:23And yeah, the culmination of it all was wildly all over the board.
00:56:32I mean, in the moment where you realize you've achieved this thing that you've spent a decade of your life working intensely hard to achieve,
00:56:41there are a few feelings that could ever match that level of elation.
00:56:48In the moments that follow, yeah, there's an emptiness for a moment.
00:56:56Because when you've been so fixated on one thing and then you've achieved it, then what?
00:57:03But I think that was alleviated to a certain point because of this idea of unreasonable hospitality.
00:57:14Have you read The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek?
00:57:16Yes.
00:57:17So, I do love the central message in that book, which is if the entire game you're playing is in pursuit of an accolade or whatever,
00:57:29you're going to get to the point where you've achieved that and then what is your reason for doing that thing anymore?
00:57:36Now, the only thing I would add to what he wrote in The Infinite Game is I believe we should also have finite games we're playing.
00:57:43For me, The Infinite Game became unreasonable hospitality.
00:57:45I wanted to, alongside an amazing group of people, redefine what hospitality could look like.
00:57:54How far could we take it?
00:57:56How seriously and intentionally could we pursue human connection?
00:58:01That's The Infinite Game because there's no winning.
00:58:03There's no finishing that.
00:58:05It's a journey that never stops.
00:58:06It's a game I'm still playing today.
00:58:10But I think cultures need to win a game every once in a while, too,
00:58:15because when a team of people is working so hard, they need to feel that sense of victory from time to time.
00:58:21It's such a good point.
00:58:22I think the best version of the world where we're just driven by the love of doing the pursuit, it is not respecting the biology.
00:58:34It doesn't respect the way that human biology and psychology works.
00:58:37The reason we have dopamine is so if there's something really, really far off in the distance, and as you run toward it, you look at it, and you see it, and it slowly, slowly, slowly grows bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:58:52Each different time that gets bigger, you look up from your run, and you go, fuck, it's still so far away.
00:58:57It's a little bit closer than it was last time.
00:58:58It's a little bit closer than it was last time, but you're encouraged to keep going.
00:59:00I don't know.
00:59:02I've got this rule that model the rise, not the result, which is when you're – most people that have achieved a level of success that others go to them in order to ask them about how they achieved success are at a stage where they can't remember the issues that the people they're talking to are dealing with.
00:59:20And, you know, it's all well and good talking about your work-life balance and the importance of a strong meditation habit is actually where the competitive advantage lies.
00:59:29And you go, okay, just humor me for a second.
00:59:32What did you do 30 years ago when you were at my stage?
00:59:36Oh, oh, a lot of Adderall, actually.
00:59:38I did a lot of Adderall.
00:59:40I worked 16 hours a day for 10 years straight, and that was like –
00:59:45Correct.
00:59:45Don't fucking tell me what you do now, dude.
00:59:47Tell me what you did when you were at my stage.
00:59:48And that insight, I think the rule of it's all about the pursuit, don't worry about the accolades, are often proclaimed by people that have just achieved them.
01:00:04And I've got this – in fact, let me read you something.
01:00:07I wrote just a little – I was talking to a friend of mine, a coach, Joe Hudson, yesterday.
01:00:13I'm talking about this new show.
01:00:14So I'm going on tour, and I love my live show, and this new one that I'm trying to do is significantly more difficult than the last one.
01:00:22I think it's significantly more difficult, the lesson I'm trying to get people to take away.
01:00:28So I wrote this thing yesterday, which is this needle that I'm trying to thread.
01:00:32Here's the danger, and this is what I keep circling back to.
01:00:35If I tell a room full of people who are still climbing that greatness won't cure their pain, I risk sounding like I'm asking them to take their foot off their gas, even as they're still on the ascent.
01:00:44It can feel like I'm deflating the very thing that's keeping them moving.
01:00:47For someone who hasn't yet won, achievement still feels like oxygen.
01:00:52So if I stand there and talk about the hollowness of success, it can land like a luxury belief.
01:00:57It can feel premature, like I'm handing out a lesson designed for people at the top to people who are still trying to get out of zero, and that's the tightrope.
01:01:06The message can't be don't strive.
01:01:08It can't be slow down.
01:01:09It can't be none of this matters, because most of the audience are on their upward trajectory, and they need fuel.
01:01:15They need direction.
01:01:16They need momentum, and if I attack ambition, I alienate them.
01:01:21If I glamorize misery, then I trap them, and if I preach renunciation, I lose credibility.
01:01:27So the point that I'm trying to play with this new show is subtler than that.
01:01:31I'm not telling a starving man that food doesn't matter.
01:01:35I'm telling him that food isn't love.
01:01:37Achievement expands your life.
01:01:39It gives you resources, leverage, opportunity.
01:01:42It is important.
01:01:42I'm not trying to renounce that, but it doesn't repair your sense of worth.
01:01:47Greatness doesn't cure pain.
01:01:50It just makes the pain more expensive.
01:01:52So I want them to climb.
01:01:54I want them to encourage the ascent, and I want them to separate the fuel from the wound.
01:01:59I just don't want self-rejection to be the engine.
01:02:02I don't want I am not enough to be the thing that's doing the pushing.
01:02:06So I'm not warning anyone off ambition.
01:02:08I'm warning them off confusing ambition with self-acceptance, and that distinction is everything.
01:02:14Dude, I love that.
01:02:16Thanks.
01:02:17That's quite beautiful.
01:02:18Thank you.
01:02:19And it dovetails exactly to what we're talking about right now.
01:02:23Yeah, that line, greatness doesn't cure pain.
01:02:26It just makes the pain more expensive.
01:02:28I chuckled when you said that.
01:02:32I mean, but that's what I'm saying, like, listen, I am a competitive person.
01:02:37I like to surround myself with competitive people.
01:02:40I like to set crazy expectations for what we can do.
01:02:45And gosh, there better be moments where we feel the pleasure of a win, where we can stop working for a moment and just celebrate all of the effort we invested into doing something extraordinary.
01:02:59And yet, if we are not also at the exact same time pursuing an idea that is unwinnable, then those victories will always ring hollow.
01:03:10If you're playing a finite game and an infinite game, two of those things always concurrently, you get the pleasure of pursuing things that actually matter and all of the little celebrations that you can have along the way.
01:03:25Heck yeah.
01:03:26Will Godara, ladies and gentlemen.
01:03:27Will, you're awesome.
01:03:28I really appreciate you.
01:03:30Where should people go to keep up to date with whatever it is that your new life is doing now?
01:03:34You can go to unreasonablehospitality.com and sign up for my newsletter.
01:03:39That's the thing I love.
01:03:40I believe in creating practices.
01:03:41When I wrote the book, I created a practice of writing, and I keep it going through a newsletter that we release every two weeks.
01:03:48And then I have a new book coming out, Unreasonable Hospitality, The Field Guide.
01:03:53If Unreasonable Hospitality was the why, this is the how.
01:03:56And it really coaches individuals and businesses step-by-step on how to bring it to life.
01:04:00And that is out at the end of April.
01:04:04And so buy it where you buy books, and it would mean a lot.
01:04:08Well, Rory Sutherland put me on to you, and he has got fantastic taste.
01:04:13Not least in food, for a man of his corpulent stature.
01:04:19He's a legend.
01:04:20Will, you're great, man.
01:04:21I do.
01:04:22I'm really glad you're in the world.
01:04:23Thank you for having me.
01:04:25Congratulations.
01:04:26You made it to the end of an episode.
01:04:28Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet.
01:04:32Here's another one that you should watch.
01:04:36Go on.
01:04:36Go on.
01:04:36Go on.
01:04:37Go on.
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