“You are not your mind, and your mind can be programmed. One of the biggest life upgrades you can ever have is that understanding.” – Brett Goldstein
Brett Goldstein (@thatguyBG) is Co-Founder of Launch House, a private community focused on connecting and supporting top entrepreneurs. Brett was previously a product manager at Accenture, Google, and Clearbit.
To hear Brett''s full interview on building the next Y Combinator, click here.
Chapters
- DAOs and NFTs
- Principles and execution
- Meditation retreats
- On failure, success, and gratitude
Links
Books Recommended by Brett Goldstein
- The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking by Roman Krznaric
Transcript
Daniel Scrivner:
Brett, thank you so much for coming on 20-Minute Playbook. I'm thrilled to have you on the show.
Brett Goldstein:
Thanks.
Daniel Scrivner:
So this is going to be a little bit faster paced. We try to keep these episodes under 20 minutes. And the first question that we always ask is for a recent fascination. So this can be anything, it can be super close to what you're working on day to day which is Launch House. It can be much broader, much more esoteric about stuff in crypto or DAOs, whatever you're thinking about. What have you been fascinated about recently?
Brett Goldstein:
I have to say DAOs and NFTs because of course it's definitely been top of my mind, but I did watch a really amazing video that was explaining the dimensions, the 10 dimensions, so that was very interesting.
Daniel Scrivner:
Is that on YouTube?
Brett Goldstein:
Yeah.
Daniel Scrivner:
I'll try to find out. And in DAOs, NFTs, any projects in particular you're spending time looking at or that you're interested in and you're participating in?
Brett Goldstein:
Definitely, you know me. Definitely excited about Olympus DAO. It's rare to see a technology or a space or an energy that actually points to a very ambitious, exciting, crazy, brain-exploding future and that's basically what DAOs especially point to which is the progressive decentralization of organizations in the world or the back to decentralization and definancialization of everything. So it's just like this nerdy wormhole to go down.
Daniel Scrivner:
Do you think there will ever be a Launch House DAO?
Brett Goldstein:
No comment. No comment.
Daniel Scrivner:
We can come back to that in a future interview. When you think about your superpowers, so you're someone who've got deep experience in your background in product management. You've also spent some time in M&A. You worked at Accenture, doing consulting. You've done a wide range of things and now you're spending all your time building Launch House. So this could be almost anything, but when you think about your superpowers, the things that you're uniquely really gifted at what comes to mind and how do you use those things day to day in building Launch House?
Brett Goldstein:
I think the main thing is that I'm a first principles thinker. So this is important for not only diagnosing problems, coming up with strategies, communicating with people but also managing your own emotions and things. So just the ability to ask why and be able to string two different things together is very helpful. So when I think about community, I think that religion which is a really obvious parallel but not everybody is truly applying. And then also, it's like when people think about those two intersections, they don't actually think about what actually that means, "Oh, Christianity is a great community. You should use religion to understand how to build the community." What does that actually mean? So it's like the five whys, that exercise, that's something I do very naturally I would say.
Daniel Scrivner:
There's something you just said was around first principles thinker and that helps you manage your emotions. Talk a little bit more about that because that sounds really interesting.
Brett Goldstein:
So it's really funny. It's just most of our emotions are derived from things that are not super existential, so the idea is when you're unhappy, sad, whatever, elated, even, if you ask yourself why, you can often get to an answer that has nothing to do with whatever you're sad about. So you're feeling down one day and then you look at your sleep monitor or you realize you haven't eaten, you realize, you're tired, you realize it's all physically based. And so when you can realize that, you can actually just observe and come up with better solutions for dealing with it rather than unleashing it on people around you or other unhealthy things.
Daniel Scrivner:
It's almost like that's a way to address the symptoms as opposed to just staying focused on like, "Why do I feel this way? This is bad."
Brett Goldstein:
Exactly.
Daniel Scrivner:
On the flipside, what do you feel like you've struggled with and this could be anything. This could be organization. It can be, I don't know, a specific type of problem, specific ways of working with people. What have you struggled with and how have you improved or worked around those things over time?
Brett Goldstein:
Most people like me would probably say that most people who are very analytical and first principles-y may I say the same thing, but I've always been bias to action, but sometimes execution is harder than it needs to be. And honestly, the blessing of Launch House is that I have a really amazing cofounder, Michael Houck who is the hardest worker, most incredible executer I've ever seen. And so he basically picks up all my slack and he's just, "Top, top, top." So that's how I deal with it.
Daniel Scrivner:
By finding great people that can complement your strengths.
Brett Goldstein:
Exactly.
Daniel Scrivner:
On the habit and routine side, do you have a very structured daily, weekly, monthly routine or anything there that you've experimented with that has had a positive impact on your life, your performance?
Brett Goldstein:
I'm sure 80% of people here say meditation, but I actually don't meditate very regularly, but I have done these meditation, silent meditation retreats. I'm sure folks have mentioned this as well, but my biggest takeaway from these is that it's not so much, "Damn, meditation is really, really helpful," because it is, but the takeaway, again what we were talking about just earlier, is to deeply understand where feelings arise and being able to objectively look at them in a third person. That's, I think, the biggest value of those meditation retreats. And I would say also just learning that you are not your mind and your mind can be programmed. That's one of the biggest life upgrades you can ever have is that understanding. So as an example of something that I used to do is if I wanted to create a meditation practice, I love Oreos. It's just my guilty pleasure.
Daniel Scrivner:
It's a good one.
Brett Goldstein:
And so what I did is I bought a box of Oreos, and whenever I wanted an Oreo, I said I'm going to meditate for five minutes and then I'm going to eat the Oreo. If I want two, I'm going to do 10 minutes. And so what happened is it had this bidirectional effect where when I wanted an Oreo, I'd meditate, and then I get the reward and I'm like, "Dang, I love meditating." It's just a reminder that we're all just stupid monkey sometimes.
Daniel Scrivner:
And that you can play with that and control that in really interesting ways. That's fascinating. And no one is actually brought up doing extended meditation retreat. How many days have you done? I don't know, any advice for someone thinking about doing it for the first time?
Brett Goldstein:
Yeah, so I did a 10-day fully silent meditation retreat. It's 10 hours a day of meditation as well. It's one of these things where you shouldn't do it if you have a history of severe psychological mental illness, but basically everybody else, you should just do it. It is incredible. It is eye opening. Think of it like brainwashing in a literal sense. So washing is like cleaning, cleaning things out. You don't realize it, but your brain just accumulates, your mind accumulates a lot of gunk. And if you sit and actually let it rest, the gunk just starts evaporating from your mind and you just feel very refreshed, very clean afterwards, but you also start touching on these more deeper philosophical existential things around just like deeper connections with energy and all that cool stuff.
Daniel Scrivner:
10-day retreat, wow. It's definitely something on my list to do, although 10 days sounds ambitious. That's very ambitious for a first timer. On the fitness side, what's your approach to diet, exercise and sleep? And how much have you maybe optimized those things?
Brett Goldstein:
So this is something I'm just starting to work on. Again now, I've gone through fits and starts like I've run marathons and I've been in great physical shape and not great physical shape. One thing I've done on this front that I've kept to is I don't drink soda. I don't drink Coke or Pepsi or Sprite or anything like that. It's a modest upgrade, but I think there's this idea of 1% better. If you can figure out what the 80/20 is, what's something that you are doing consistently that is very bad, that is easy to cut out, then you're going to be in a good position.
Daniel Scrivner:
That's super interesting. On the personal growth side, do you have a favorite failure? When we asked this question, it's always a little weird, I think, if you've never thought about it before. I think we're trying to get out there is, one, get people talking about failures that they've had a little bit more openly, and then two, just this notion that failures are inherently bad and there's actually a lot of things if you look back through anyone's life that a certain goal not achieved might still be a wonderful thing to propel them in a better direction or teach them a valuable lesson. When you think about a favorite failure, anything come to mind?
Brett Goldstein:
Yeah, it's not so much a, "Oh, I failed at doing this thing," but it's in the ballpark, which is I got burnt out at Google and I went and did this nine-month trip around the world. It was amazing. On paper, it's a gift. It was amazing. It was like I went into Bali and I did three weeks of yoga and some music. And I went to Vietnam and I wrote a motorcycle down the whole country and I went to China, did the Trans-Siberian railroad, hung out with nomads in Mongolia and went to the World Cup. Saw my cousin married in the South of France and circumnavigated the globe multiple times, volunteered with... It goes on.
Brett Goldstein:
It was like this cinematic beautiful adventure, but I was miserable towards the end. It was terrible. And I was just like, "How can you fail at literally doing the thing that most people are never able to do in their lives? How can you fail at being happy doing that?" So I think that's honestly the biggest failure because it's like, "I learned that there's a lot more to it." And so my biggest takeaway from that is that personal growth start is an inward journey then an outward journey and a lot of people travel for the wrong reasons. And travel is overrated to a degree. It is great to expose yourself to new people. It is fun to be able to finally visit that restaurant or that site that you had dreamed about and stuff and also to show yourself that you've made it because that's actually what travel is for for a lot of people.
Brett Goldstein:
You ask people what they want. When they have infinite money, they would say, "Oh, I just travel." "Why? Why is that?" "Because that's how we show ourselves that we've made it," and I think there are more ways. I think there's creating things. There's learning things. There's discovering yourself. There's the meditation like the inward journey, there's psychedelics. There's a lot of stuff, you can gift yourself that is not travel that I think is much more rewarding from a personal growth perspective.
Daniel Scrivner:
It's fascinating in to reflect on that, it seems like you're ... At least the takeaway that I'm getting from that was you may be expected to go on this trip and have this big personal growth only to realize, it makes me think of that quote, which is somewhat depressing, but I think is also incredibly true, that anywhere in the world that you travel, there you are. You still are that same version of yourself, even if you're literally across the globe. Was that what you took away? Was that like that dissonance you are feeling?
Brett Goldstein:
Yeah, definitely. One of the songs I wrote while I was traveling was called Home and that one of the lyrics was similar. It's like, "Man may go, but trouble stays." It's not that I was really troubled. I was just contemplating where I was going to go in my career and my life and wandering around the world was almost an accidental distraction from it when I felt like the most growth that I had was sitting on my ass for hours and hours and hours a day for just 10 days or reading a good book.
Daniel Scrivner:
Well, it's super interesting. Thanks for opening up about that. On the flipside, when you think about success, what does success mean to you now and how do you feel like that definition has changed over time?
Brett Goldstein:
So success is like it needs to be defined in a context. So usually the questions about like, "What is success to you or what is a successful life to you?" because there's a way of being a successful founder, there's a way of being successful spouse or something like that. So for me, success, I think it's really about two things, it's impact and it's connection. So there's putting something into the world, creating something for humanity. This is like deeply ingrained in just what we are as animals. This is what our job is. Our job is to help progress the human race. It's like very primitive urge and the other very primitive urge is to have a deep sense of belonging and connection. This is what people think about when they're really old and they're on their deathbed, "Did I do something meaningful in my life for the world and do people love me?"
Daniel Scrivner:
Yeah, it makes me think especially on that first point, there's a great book I've been reading recently called The Good Ancestor. The book is prefaced a little bit on this idea, the inventor of the polio vaccines named Jonas Salk. And it's interesting to think about the polio vaccine, especially now where we have this COVID vaccine. There's been a lot of talk around, should Madonna own the IP to that, should this be this open thing. And Jonas Salk decided to make it ... Basically he didn't protect any of the IP, made it something so that everyone can get access to really freely. And the way they thought about it was his most important question that everyone needs to ask is, "Are we being good ancestors?" Anyway, it just really gets to that idea of building something for other people and building something that can be a gift, not just for yourself but hopefully for future generations as well too.
Brett Goldstein:
And it's interesting because you think about what's the standard career trajectory for a lot of people is build wealth, take care of yourself and your family by the relative standards for the people around you. So if your family is a bunch of lawyers and doctors and Goldman execs, then you have a different level of wealth that you need to achieve to feel like your basic needs are met. And that's actually related to the need to belong because you want to feel like you have a spot in your family, in your community and you need to do that by having a certain level of [inaudible 01:02:43]. But then what happens after that? People go into philanthropy. They start donating, they volunteer to be the kids' soccer coach. It's about giving back. And so it's like after your basic needs are met, it's literally about giving back.
Daniel Scrivner:
Well, and it seems like literally all roads lead to just the recognition that at the end of the day anyone that I know that's built wealth, I think it just gets very old. After a point in time and you realized that that's not anything to pursue in and of itself because there's really nothing there. Last question is around gratitude. What are you most grateful for in this phase of your life? And I know you're building a fascinating company. You're getting the chance to work with this wonderful friend, Michael, in building Launch House, you're having enormous amount of success. So I'm sure there's a lot to be grateful for there. So it could be there, it could be somewhere else. What are you most grateful for? What comes to mind?
Brett Goldstein:
I would say I have a really fun job. It's not B2B SaaS. There's a lot to it. It's very rewarding across the board. I get to meet amazing people and get to hang out in these beautiful locations. I get to help people level up in their careers and achieve success that they'd never thought they would achieve or maybe they thought it, but I get to play a role and I get to help people connect and stuff. So it's this magical thing where it's all those things that I was talking about roped into one and it's very creatively fulfilling as well. So every week, I'm just blown away that if something happens where I'm like, "What the heck? How is this possible? Is this my life?"
Daniel Scrivner:
It's the best place to be.
Brett Goldstein:
And also the view's never get old from Beverly Hills.
Daniel Scrivner:
From Paris Hilton's old house in Beverly Hills?
Brett Goldstein:
Yeah.
Daniel Scrivner:
Last question. Last, Last question. I just thought of this. So obviously, with Launch House, you guys are taking engineers, you're taking founders, you're taking people that want to build, that are potentially at the start of some sort of journey and helping them figure out where to go from there. If you could only give those people one piece of advice, one quote, something to read, what would you leave them with? What would you tell them?
Brett Goldstein:
Here we go. Cue the background motivational music. Let's go. Belief is the most important thing and it's not even in a like, "Oh, if you only believe in yourself," and then pat on the head like, "You can do anything," it is that. It is much bigger than that. Whether you're a scientist or you're LA spiritual healer, unanimously agree. Every great most successful person in the world from the religious leaders to the CEOs, they all agree that declaring what you want as if it happened, saying you will do something is the most powerful way to actually do something aside from actually putting in the work, but what happens is you basically wind up changing your brain to find ways to actually make it happen if you repeat it to yourself.
Brett Goldstein:
And what happens is you wind up believing it. So when you're pitching an investor and you believe in yourself, guess what? They're going to believe in you too. If you don't believe in yourself, guess what? They're not going to believe in you. So again look at yourself like an animal, like a computer to be trained and train yourself to believe in yourself, in your company, in what you're doing more than anything else.
Daniel Scrivner:
End motivational music. That's the perfect note to it, to end on. So anyone listening can follow Brett on Twitter, @thatguyBG, which was very hard to find you on Twitter. So anyways, I'm glad I can hopefully help point people to you to follow you there. And for anyone interested in Launch House, we just did a massive conversation all about what Brett and Michael are building with Launch House which is basically an entirely new reinvention of something like YC that's been around for quite a while. You can find out more information at launchhouse.co You can also follow Launch House on Twitter, @launch_house. Thank you so much for the time, Brett, this has been awesome.
Brett Goldstein:
Thanks.
On Outlier Academy, Daniel Scrivner explores the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class performers working at the edge—in business, investing, entertainment, and more. In each episode, he decodes what they've mastered and what they've learned along the way. Start learning from the world’s best today.
Explore all episodes of Outlier Academy, be the first to hear about new episodes, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.
Daniel Scrivner and Mighty Publishing LLC own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of the Outlier Academy podcast, with all rights reserved, including Daniel’s right of publicity.
