Grit Happens w/Nancy Lublin

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I went to see epson's a doll's house at the theater tenth row Center sitting to my left Donald

Trump. Congratulations

thing to his left some skinny blond. I didn't recognize and he's emailed us like shoving them in his mouth fistfuls at a time and I look at him and I'm like, um, do you need to own the company or those available in the lobby nieces? Aha grabs the box from the skinny woman exome and hands them to me because I don't think she eats anything with tofu and water and so I developed a dummy strike up a conversation and he says so what do you do?

That's Nancy Lublin.

And what does she do? She builds nonprofits the way Donald Trump build skyscrapers, her organizations are huge tremendous big leagues stuff. Believe me when Nancy accidentally set next to Trump in that theater. She had just launched her first nonprofit dressed for Success the organization started as a clothing drive to help women on welfare dress for job interviews. She collected pantsuits pearls pumps. You name it Nancy had it piling up in her teeny apartment. She figured Trump might have a spare storage room somewhere.

His real-estate Empire so she started pitching

and I talked about dress for success and how amazing it is and he says, oh really, do you enjoy it? And I was like, yes, it's pretty amazing helping women like move from welfare to work and he says really it's not boring and I'm like, no it's not boring. So I say to him so what do you do and he says no one's ever asked me that before and I said, well, what do you do? How would you describe it? Really rich that I guess I'm a builder. I build things and I said, oh do you like it? I mean like I gave it right back to

Off to a rocky start no matter Nancy keeps

pushing and I call a friend and say you gotta get me the name of his personal assistant. She says it's Norma forwarder who was famously as this isn't for decades and I go to Blockbuster again. This was a long time ago and I got a giant box of Milk Duds and I get in a cab and I say take me to Trump Tower and I go up in Trump Tower and now I'm on the 26th floor and I look around it's all gold and glass and mirrors real the golden glass mirrors. I see the skinny blonde from the night before the feet are and I wave my

Arms, she comes over and she's like a woman from the theater. What are you doing here? And I said look, I will give him a box of Milk Duds a week for the rest of his life. If you can just find me like 500 square feet of space because everything's in my apartment and she says he's broke. I look around and I'm like I see times are rough and I shake her hand and say, okay. Well, thank you so

much. You have to love this about Nancy. She doesn't give up easily

now again, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm bitten by that book. I don't give up there. So I'm

Ring like Fox breakfast TV the next week and I look over and the woman sitting next to me recognize her and I say are you listen if the gossip columnist just as I am I say, you know, I have this story you might be interested in and I tell the story and that Sunday she writes it up in the New York Post and it runs in her column nationally and she tells it on TV Monday morning. I take that New York Post and I go to Trump Tower and I say to security, please tell Norma forwarder that Nancy Lublin is downstairs and I go up and Norma forwarder or says, it's EU. We saw it. He saw it. He thinks it's very

Funny but we have nothing for you. The ending of the story is I got the most beautiful rejection letter I've ever seen in my entire freaking life like on Trump Tower gold embossed letterhead as I've said before to you I could scrape off that logo and make fillings for everyone. I know I mean that the logos like a quarter of an inch off the page beautiful beautiful telling me that he had no money and sorry best of luck. It was working on something that PS is now in a hundred twenty cities around the world. So like it would have been a safe bet to give me 500 bucks instead I've got

Sorry that I tell everywhere.

The story isn't simply you can't take no for an answer anyone can do that and frankly. If you get too pushy, you're more likely to get a restraining order that an investor. The real story is about the power persistence and a good plan b or rather plans be just consider Nancy's multi-channel charm offensive. She deploys jokes multiple boxes of Milk Duds letters surprise visits and a New York gossip columnist.

This is what we call grit and grit is every entrepreneurs trump card. You got to have incredible Talent at every position. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe such an idiot? This is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways for so it's do I have no idea what it is. Sorry. I made a mistake. Would you have to time it right?

That's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it. This is masters of scale.

I'm Reid Hoffman co founder of LinkedIn investor Greylock and your host. I believe successful entrepreneurs need ideas money good timing and a hefty dose of luck. But none of those matter if you don't have Grit

some people mistake grit for sure persistence charging up the same Hill again. And again, that's not quite what I mean by the word grit the sort of great you need to scale a business is less reliant on Brute Force. It's actually one part determination one part Ingenuity and one part laziness. Yes laziness you want to conserve your energy you want to minimize friction and find the most effective most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy and

precious commodity so forget the tired cliché of running a marathon you want to be more like Indiana Jones some are salting under blades racing a few steps ahead of a rolling Boulder and Swinging your whip until you reach your Holy Grail, but if you ask me Nancy level in is the entrepreneurial equivalent of Indiana Jones, I wanted to talk to her for this episode because she's a 10 out of 10 when it comes to grit and she also does her work in the not-for-profit sector which has even more land mines than the

commercial World capital is harder to come by Talent. It's harder to recruit and our overall Society at least here in the US broadly rewards commercial people more than they were roared nonprofit people. So before we get to our guests the entrepreneurs who put the ger in the word grit, I'd like to open a bit uncharacteristically with a quote from the Bible.

The race is not to the Swift nor the battle to the strong or bread to the wise or riches to the Discerning or favor to the skillful, but time and chance happen to them all time and chance happens to us all except Nancy Loveland time and chance don't happen to Nancy grid happens. And once this quality kicks in she's Unstoppable.

Get her thinking about some social problem and she gets Restless. She can't tolerate it take for example her not-for-profit dressed for Success you'll recall she wanted to help women on welfare enter the workforce in style entertainingly Nancy never cared much for fashion. If anything she finds it

ludicrous my father growing up. It was a lawyer and he's told me that when he was hiring secretaries. He'd look out the window and watch them go from the car to the building and that he'd know before they reach the building whether or not he'd hire them. So I thought was the

Worst thing I had ever heard. I was like that's you just described discrimination to me. That's horrible. And he said and it's the truth. So go comb your hair. And so I mean I just kind of knew that the world works this way we discriminate based on a first look on everybody. And so that's where Dress for Success came

from. So Nancy has just identified a huge problem employers judge job applicants, especially women based on their physical appearance. She might have valiantly struggled for fair hiring practices.

But that's a struggle for activists the sort of people who can tolerate and incremental battle with history and human nature. But Nancy wants a solution now, she can't change the way that bosses think overnight, but she can level the playing field by giving women access to professional clothing. She has an idea. She has five thousand dollars in seed money from grandfather's estate and she's about to get her first unlikely

collaborators. And so I was in law school. I went to my law professor and said, hey I have this idea. What do you think and he sent me to assist

Ernie and Spanish Harlem and then she brought into others.

You may wonder why Nancy's law professor sent her to see nuns in Spanish Harlem about her idea for a non-profit Nancy had the same question

when I went to meet them for the first time. I like fully expected them to meet me in inhabit with locked arms singing like the sound of music.

And instead, they're really cool. They're like kind of like social workers are really cool women. The drawback was I took Financial advice from them. They told me to put the five thousand dollars into a six-month CD in the bank, which meant we start with no money. So like don't take Financial advice from people taking an oath of poverty is the lesson they are like whenever I have done a start-up the first thing I actually do is call my family and friends because you think wow, they love me and I love them. That doesn't mean they're going to love your idea dear. It sounds kind of risky.

And the thing about the nuns is they knew tons about moving people from welfare to work. They knew exactly what was going on in New York City and how to make this happen and how to get us started. They were actually the exact right people to start this with. So

how did Nancy and three nuns managed to scale this network worldwide. They didn't have much money aside from a five thousand dollar check from Nancy's great grandfather's estate. They didn't have connections the wealthy philanthropist and I'd certainly didn't have staff their only asset was their knowledge of the welfare system that system included a vast Network.

I work of government and private agencies dedicated to helping women Nancy Simply Built an organization that could tap into this Talent Network for free. The

challenge originally was we have these people who are moving from welfare to work. How do you get them into the system without passing a judgment on individuals? And then how do we solve our labor problem in the shop? So we combined that and what we did was we screened agencies, we would approve domestic violence shelters. We would approve job-training programs. We would approve homeless shelters and then they could send whoever they

Wanted to the shop as a barter. We required them to send someone to staff the shop one day a month. So we got free labor and high quality referrals and didn't ever have to pass any judgment on any individual. So everybody who came to us was worth dressing because one of our employees essentially had referred them and by the way this model of Staffing the shop and referring stays today in over a hundred locations around the world

notice what Nancy did not do she did not try to build an entire system from scratch.

By herself, which is a trap many entrepreneurs fall into she looked around for other sources of energy like a teeny Jiu-Jitsu artist. She redirected the energy of stronger heavier Fighters and this way she channel's the Collective Strength of the existing welfare system towards realizing this idea with her. You can think of this technique as a magnificent shortcut and it's the kind of shortcut Nancy finds again. And again, she darts ahead. She finds quick systematic fixes to Big gnarly problems. It's a pattern throughout

A story of grit and the same quality that help Nancy navigate the welfare system work just as well as she worked her way through New York's Upper Crust of

donors. So in the early days of Dress for Success, we would do these clothing drives. So women would give us clothes. So we would do a clothing drive it like Goldman Sachs when they go corporate casual and so would get beautiful beautiful suits and like the largest suit would be a size 8 and the average size American is actually 14 and the average size dress for success.

Giant was a 22 but we always did those suits anyway, because once you gave us your Armani suits you gave us money.

So we would take those suits and we might Warehouse them for two years, but we were happy to get those suits from those women at Goldman because then they would write us checks because they felt closest to us because we had that suit that they like interviewed somebody in or that they you know, like went on CNBC at the first time they were wearing that Armani suit and now we had it and so it was actually kind of a donor mechanism. It was part of the whole cycle of dress for success of like kind of wealthy business women connecting with women who are going to go out.

Their first jobs

notice how she keeps turning problems in this case piles are useless clothing into Solutions sources of funding. That's why I call the best entrepreneurs infinite Learners the more thorny patches. They hit the more effective. They become at hacking their way out. The only problem is that some CEOs like Nancy get a bit addicted to problem solving if there's no problem to solve. Well, they create some

I'm a wartime CEO once things get good. And it's peacetime. I get bored and I either want to like do something else while to it or I'll look it up because I'm like no, but we can do blah blah blah. And so I get bored. I move on

this is one of the byproducts of grit it's a sort of restless energy that eventually compelled Nancy to leave Dress for Success. Once it had

scaled if we talked about Scooby-Doo syndrome I talked about this year. Okay. So you've seen Scooby-Doo every Scooby-Doo episode is the same there is a church or a movie theater was going to be torn down to become strip.

Okay, and there's like a zombie or a ghost that's haunting it and so mr. E ink is called an to find the zombies or ghosts and Shaggy and Scooby are somehow the ones that always find the summer goes even though Velma new at the whole time, which is totally weird. But whatever and they unmask the zombie ghost. It's not a zombie ghost. It's like the grand daughter of the founder of the movie theater or like the janitor of the church. It's the founder. The founder is the zombie or ghost haunting the building. It doesn't want to leave and I had no desire to be a Scooby-Doo villain, right?

So I leave things I build things and then I move on I'm not particularly sentimental.

I'm clear. You watched a lot of

Scooby-Doo. So I mean come on. I'm an 80s kid. We watched a lot of that.

So Nancy found a new problem a nearly bankrupt organization called dosomething.org do something mobilizes young people to volunteer for worthy causes back in 2003. He was nearly defunct. What was the state of do something when you do

that? It was on fire Andrew Shue started it when he was on Melrose Place, but then

then he went off air and had three kids in New Jersey and do something fell on really hard times.

When I got there, they had just laid off 21 out of 22 people. They had lost their office space and everything was in boxes in storage in Queens. They were 250k in debt and had about seventy four thousand dollars in the bank. It was totally totally fine. Nancy was smitten. You know, what I thought the name was great. Do something was great. There was no organization that was cool and fun for young people and it was there needs to be something that made volunteerism and social change fun.

And energetic and so to me it was like a ficus plant, you know, like leaves fall off all the time. But like if the roots are good, you can probably bring it back and I thought this is interesting. I'd also just turned 30 and I was getting headhunted for a number of very serious roles. But what I realized was that the head under was only bringing in me to make the Headhunter look good. Like here's one crazy outside the box candidate. Look we're bringing you a 30 year old entrepreneur. No one was taking me seriously, and I wanted to take something that was totally screwed and

Prove that actually, yeah, I'm an entrepreneur and I'm also really smart. I think sometimes entrepreneurs are written off as wacky Visionaries. You know, we are we can be more than that. We are systems thinkers

before long Nancy got that Ficus plant flourishing the Breakthrough moment when her team identified a crucial shift in technology that made all the difference in reaching their adolescent audience. If you know a teenager, you already know to get their attention text them.

I think probably the biggest epiphany

Pivot attack and the best thing that I did was get out of the way. So I was on a conference call and I saw through like the glass door people in my office high-fiving each other and I was like like I didn't like what was what is going on? Why are you all so heavy and and it turns out that to like entry level employees had pulled 500 defunct users. Like people we hadn't heard from in six months probably emailed them 20 times and pulled her mobile numbers and texted them about a campaign. We had done and in nine minutes.

I saw a 20 percent response rate.

Holy crap, I was smart enough to say let's do that. And also I guess I was smart enough to create an environment where entry-level employees felt comfortable experimenting and like that's what you've got to do as an entrepreneurial. CEO is get out of the way sometimes and then when you see someone do something really smart rabbit and elevate it be like, let's do that. And so we pivoted and we became a membership organization and we did everything around text and grew rapidly. Thanks to that

Nancy's ability to tap every

every resource around her including her entry-level employees is one of her hidden strengths as a scale leader under Nancy's Guidance Do Something ads nearly 5 million teenagers as members and then she does something truly daring. She hatched an idea for our third nonprofit called crisis text line and she goes ahead and launches it at the same

time. I don't recommend having two

full-time jobs notice how Nancy doesn't relish holding down to impossibly demanding jobs at once, but you have to understand our motivation when she sees a problem she

The solve it fast the bigger the problem the gnarlier the solution the more she wants to solve it her irrepressible urge to launch crisis text line began with a single text from a single teenager. You see do something sent all of its Communications by text message and their volunteers would respond by text as well. Each campaign would unleash a wave of Goodwill and cheer for the most part but there are always a few teens who were applied to these texts asking for

help, but there would be a couple dozen messages out of flow.

You saying things like I'm being bullied my best friend's addicted to crystal

meth and we would triage them one day Nancy read a text message that she couldn't stop turning over in her head. It was in response to a do something

campaign. And then we got a message that put me on this other path that literally said he won't stop raping me. It's my dad. He told me not to tell anyone and then the letters. Are you there? Imagine? You're the CEO and someone brings that puts on your desk is like

Don't know what to do with this. It was like being punched in the stomach. So her if I couldn't leave this happening to like a real human and then how bad does it have to be to share that like to be so alone that you share that with an organization like this into you don't know where this is going. And so we build crisis text line really for

And here we come to the Wellspring of grit you have to have a mission a calling it so powerful. It makes you want to run through a Minefield on a foggy day with your shoelaces tied together. So Nancy and vision crisis text line as a hotline that would funnel text messages to crisis centers around the country. It would open up a whole new line of communication who preferred the convenience and anonymity of writing from their phones Nancy figured she could earmark some portion of do something's budget for the cause. They were averaging six.

Dollars a year in corporate sponsorships

and I went to the board went to you guys. I went to the board and said I want to do this and you guys I think rightly said brand confusion would do something do something as hopeful happy volunteerism crisis. Text line is a different thing will give it your blessing but you gotta do it on the side. And so I did at the same time for a long time. It was harder than I thought it was going to be it was maybe harder than it should have been the truth is it took me two years to secure the funding to do it and I would dial for dollars and I found

one friend. It was like you'll come into my office every week for an hour and go through my Rolodex and on the third week. I spoke to someone and in five minutes, I described in five minutes. He said stop stop stop. I'm going to give you $50,000 because someone needs to just give you money to see if this will go anywhere and I might never see you again, but it's worth putting this money down and I wanted to be anonymous so I refer to him for a long time as mr. X he's now fine being known it's actually is Peter Bloom. It was the board chair of donors shoes who has done this he's made bets on

People like that not expecting any return these early bets on social change ideas. It's awesome. And with that money became real I had to really do it. I hired our CTO and our chief data scientist, even though I only had 50 k so that wasn't going to keep them very long. And so then it meant I've really got to find the rest of the money and make this happen.

So Nancy once again was scaling on a shoestring budget. She figured crisis text line could piggyback on a patchwork of Crisis hotlines across the country. She would Supply the text messages that

Counselors would Supply the 24-hour support it was shaping up to be another one of her clever Jujitsu moves until Nancy found. She was channeling their energy to the wrong teens crisis counselors tend to specialize in specific issues like suicide or sexual abuse or eating disorders. And this led some counselors to write some rather awkward scripted

responses. We originally built this thinking we would just be the pipes. We would be the technology and we would farm this out to other crisis centers to do the counseling and we kept growing like fast.

Uh, so we went from 3 to 11 in like six months crisis centers. What we noticed was that they were incredibly diverse one crisis center would ask every single texture. Are you feeling suicidal today? No, I have a calculus final this afternoon. Should I be feeling suicidal like the quality was all over the place wasn't great. And so we called best practices from the platform and said, well what if we trained our own People based on what we're seeing and so we trained this magic 12th cohort and quickly saw that they outperformed Dan every kpi kpi stands for key performance.

Since indicator and pivoted so we dumped all of the crisis centers who we were paying. So we save that money moved and said to a volunteer model and basically became a Marketplace

Nancy has made a hugely risky decision here. She's scrambling for funding. She's just jettison her Partnerships with the experienced counselors who are supposed to help her scale and then she has any chance of keeping her idea float. She has to Now train an army of novices and the Art of texting with distress teens Nancy has a gift

For bringing other people Along on her hero's journey. She uses her own grit to emboldened and inspire people to join her and even do it for free. In fact, the greatest shortcut Nancy has ever found the one she turns to again. And again in her story of grit is the almost bottomless well of human industriousness what Nancy understand so well is that people love to help sometimes all you need to do is ask them. We'll be right back.

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If he is so confident volunteers will answer a call that she envisions a Marketplace for crisis hotline volunteers much in the way over built a Marketplace for drivers or Air B&B built a Marketplace for home rentals. But how on Earth does she match supply and demand she can't offer surge pricing to volunteers during a spike in teenage need she can't offer any pricing whatsoever. What she needs is a surge of Goodwill. It's a bold vision and there are handful of other scale leaders who will

Tell you that this works, I think as a rule we tend to underestimate people's hunger and desire to be helpful. That's Craig Baldwin president of volunteer match their website matches millions of volunteers more than a hundred thousand organizations that need their help the most scalable nonprofits. He says start with a plea for help that's ambitious verging on the unreasonable when Habitat for Humanity got started how unreasonable is it to think that you can invite millions of people.

To help build homes for other people. It's a crazy idea when you think about it, but it took somebody to ask to see how powerful that ask is to bring people into doing something that they think is important crisis. Text line is another amazing example of that. It's so unreasonable to think that people would willingly take time out of their busy lives to be on their cell phone texting with kids in

crisis. It just it almost doesn't make

sense. Why

Someone would do that and certainly you can imagine being reluctant to ask somebody to do that. But what we find so often is it's in those big bold asks those unreasonable ask that some of the most amazing things happen for this episode. We did a flash poll of the volunteermatch community the managers at nonprofits who are in the front lines of these crazy requests. We wanted to know just how hard they push their volunteers and how far was too far. So we asked

Have you ever heard of volunteer? Say you're asking too much of me more than 400 volunteer managers responded and statistically speaking. It was a resounding no only 11% of volunteer managers have ever heard that always says fascinating and then we asked whether they thought they could ask more of their volunteers and seventy percent of the users said, yes. So the real question is what's keeping people from making these requests that are you know, somewhat outside.

The norm it's a good question and John Lilly. The former. CEO of Mozilla has a theory Mozilla has an open source web browser powered almost entirely by volunteers. They do everything from coding to marketing to translation and John actually believes these volunteers working for free can run circles around paid professionals. You just have to know how to work on a sliding scale. There are ways for people to contribute an hour a week way to contribute 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week and it kind of scales up and down which most organizations don't know how

To do they know how to have you be an employee or not? So it's sort of binary open source, the successful ones figure out a way to be on the Spectrum. There's a guy I remember from Ulaanbaatar who translated Firefox and Thunderbird in Mongolian and for him, he did it because if he hadn't done that his parents wouldn't who only spoke on Goliad wouldn't have been able to understand software to access the internet. And so for these people they do it as a labor of love and you know, you all know this the root of the word amateurs is AMA, which means I love

I think that amateurs and Volunteers in many ways are more powerful than professionals because they do it for non-monetary. They do it do it despite all the challenges and all the hard parts and Nancy is an expert at whipping up that inner AMA that inner love she starts from the premise that she's not unique and caring plenty of other people could care as much as her she just has to find them and sell them on her cause and if you want to know what True Grit sounds like just listen to our multi-faceted approach to recruit

UND so recruitment sure zeroing in on like who are our best crisis counselors and figuring that out was gay and then now finding more of them it turns out that it shifts like post-election sad Liberals are great the United States Donald J Trump. We're loving sad liberals people really want to feel like they're having an impact on something and what's better than talking to another stranger in the most dire moments of their life. It's a real impact mom's of a certain age. Love them deaf and hard of hearing.

Phenomenal most organizations don't know what to do with them hard to volunteer. If you're deaf or hard of hearing. We love you veterans. I love veterans, especially when the heat is on and we're spiking the veterans are like we got this we can do it. Let's go

this swell of volunteers allowed crisis text line to scale quickly and meet the growing and spiking demand.

We've been zero marketing we've done over 700,000 conversations since launching that works out to be close to 30 million messages exchanged,

but those 30 million messages.

Has didn't arrive in a steady stream though it Spike and dip regardless of how many counselors were available the time. She started triaging the messages through a combination of grunt work and Big Data they had to identify the keywords and phrases and then rank those words on a scale of whirring to let's call 9-1-1 immediately. And when you listen to Nancy talk about it, you'll hear what grit sounds like in the digital age Leaders with grit are relentlessly inventive using every possible tool to accomplish their goals. They joyfully solve

Arms in ways that no one ever thought of before as Nancy describes the algorithm they built to better understand text messages and how it helped them better serve teenagers and crisis. You have a rock thrill of Discovery in her voice True Grit is relentlessly forward moving.

So we originally put into the algorithm words like die suicide and overdose and if you text in those words, you're number one in the queue and then we added a machine learning layer. What are the words people use in a high-risk case and it turns out that there are thousands of them.

Them that are more high risk than suicide. Apparently, it's 16 times more likely to end up in US calling 9-1-1 then the word suicide which I know I've already quiz on this one. So, you know, but whatever listeners can guess in it's actually it's ibuprofen aspirin Tylenol Advil. It's the most common drug in your house. So you not only have the idea and the plan but you have the means in the timing because it's right in your medicine cabinet. So those words and the unhappy face crying. Emoji is four times more powerful.

Four times more likely for us to end up calling 9-1-1 then the word suicide the hashtag KMS and idea what that stands for. Neither. Did we but the algorithm discovered that's kill myself. This is a perfect example of Science of data of Technology making an organization faster and more accurate

before long. Her team was equipped to handle huge influxes of messages soon. She was detecting waves of anxiety rolling across middle schools Nationwide the

The data was unprecedented in scope and timeliness. Oh gosh,

so the hard thing about marketplaces so you don't control Supply and you don't control demand everyone's well, they'll be like an unpredictable event. Now if Iran lift I could put surge pricing in place so you can handle that. So unpredictable events for crisis text line or things like Zayn leaving One Direction and we had just tons of people texting in with serious anxiety

for those

Hers who haven't heard of Zane or One Direction. I'll translate it into Old fogey. Terms. Zane would be Zayn Malik a British singer for the boy band One Direction and when he left the band it was a bit like Justin Timberlake living in sync or John Lennon leaving the Beatles.

I mean the hashtag cut for Zane trended worldwide for almost three days when Zayn left One Direction. These are girls cutting real skin hoping that he would see this and rejoin One Direction and that sent real traffic.

Back to

us and how do you build the capacity for that or how do you build a response to it

again as a Marketplace?

And also what's the size of the volunteer in our

yeah, that's over 3,000 and they take a lot of time and caring and love and they are who we are and can you imagine they do it all for free like they're giving us time at two o'clock in the morning. They're incredible incredible people.

They are who we are that one sentence sums up the approach to scale that Nancy has taken throughout her career. She identified the people and organizations.

You can take her idea forward and she makes them her own. There's a lot to be said about sticking with a vision and adapting It Through The Years weathering the rise and fall of luck. But I don't want to overstate the power of grit ultimately your plans are subject to luck. You may be thinking I thought Grant was my superpower my ability to overcome time and chance. It's a little bit more nuanced than that. I like the way Sam Altman president of silicon Valley's most successful accelerator y combinator unpacked.

This problem the way I have always tried to think about it for myself is that luck is a big factor, but I'm going to keep working and eventually, you know, because it's a random variable. It's going to swing my way. I think that's roughly the right mindset to have if you don't acknowledge the role of luck at all. Like I think you're wrong in a dangerous way where you sort of just are not a great human. And if you can't look it's I got really lucky at some points. It's probably bad. But if you're also like well, it's all about luck. And you know, I have no chance the

Against me and I'm just going to sit here and complain that's not going to work either. So I think the other roughly correct mindset is luck is important, but I'm eventually going to get lucky and I'm going to just work really hard until I do that. Maybe the one of the better definitions of optimism that actually I think I've heard I'm Reid Hoffman. Thank you for listening.

For additional insights and practical lessons based on my theories go to entrepreneur.com / masters of scale next week on Masters of scale. We try to constantly encourage the police to figure out how to improve the culture so not how to preserve it. So everyone is trying to add value by here's a place we can improve and what we do and so that keeps it very alive. It's not the golden tablets. It's a constantly evolving living both document and practice Masters.

Gail is a wait what original in association with Stitcher our executive producers are Joon: and Darren trif. Our producers are Dan cat me Jenny Cataldo and been Manila special. Thanks to Jessica. Johnston say it is sepia Eva Eliza Schreiber Chris Shea David Sanford J. Punjabi Stephanie Kent and rafina mod original music is by the holiday Brothers visit masters of scale.com to find the transcript for this episode.

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