#741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau

Tim Ferriss
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I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Ferris hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes, and internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode.

Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together, and for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim blog Combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, Jim Collins, author of iconic business books that include good to great, how the Mighty Fall, and great by choice, as well as built to last and beyond entrepreneurship 2.0, which he co authored with his mentor, Bill Lazear. You can find jim@jimcollins.com dot in the course of doing some of the homework for this conversation, I have come across different ways that you seem to measure your time and your days, and I'd love to explore that for just a little bit.

The first was, I read that you had, and this may have evolved or changed by this point, but a stopwatch with three timers in your pocket, and that it was sort of indicative of creative teaching and other. But could you explain that habit, please, for people who are not familiar? Well, so actually, let me tell you the story of how it began. Yes, please. What the three were about, and then how it's evolved into something a little simpler and a little more powerful than what I do with it every single day.

Perfect. So I don't want to pretend that I'm normal. Okay, so what I want to describe. Is not normal behavior, but this is it. So when I was 36 years old, I made the decision, and we can come back to this later if you want to talk about big bets and doing scary things such as betting our career, betting our lives, Joanne and I on an entrepreneurial path.

Jim Collins
Let me just kind of step back and sort of share the origins of this. So I was teaching at Stanford and it was a marvelous journey, and, of course, great mentors and learned how to do my research there. That's where Jerry and I did built to last. But I had another mentor who encouraged me to think about whether I wanted to do a self directed path or not. I used to say to my students, because I taught entrepreneurship and small business, I always said to my students, why don't you go do something on your own?

Why give over all your creative energies for somebody else's thing? I would at least challenge them to think about that. And I would say, if you're really interested in business, you don't have to go to work for IBM to be in business. You can do your own. So my students, this is the wonderful thing about great students.

They hold you to account, right? They said, well, right. What are you doing that's entrepreneurial? This doesn't look like a very entrepreneurial thing, teaching these classes and being here. And so I started thinking about it, and I realized something about myself.

I like betting on myself. So I had this idea, you don't have to be at IBM to be in business. Why do I have to be at a university to be a professor? So I said to Joanne, I said, you know, I think I have this idea of I'd like to be a self employed professor to endow my own chair.

So Joanne, who we've done these things together through life, she went along with this idea, and the idea was to try to pursue really big questions that wouldn't be constrained by that. You could do it only a year. And the first big bet on that was the research in built to last, and it was coming out, and I said, let's just bet everything. Let's go. And so we launched this huge bet.

Everything on that book didn't know if it would work. We were down to less than $10,000. We were actually really scared. We call it our Thelma and Louise moment. We were like launching off the cliff together, except we wanted to get to the other side.

It was a huge bet, and we didn't know if it would work. But I was very clear about one thing. I did not want to have a half life of quality in the work. One of the wonderful things about working on built to last with Jerry back at Stanford, no one knew who I was. No one called, no one paid any attention.

So for six years of working on that research project, I could just go into the cave and work and work and work. And that kind of deep work. I mean, you have to go deep into the data, deep into the research, deep into the thinking, the long cycles of reflection. That's how you get the ideas, and that's how you do good stuff. And what I was worried that what would happen is if I went from being invisible to being visible, and that if I was fortunate enough to have a success, that I might wake up in five or six or seven years and have not gone back to the wellspring of the deep, quiet solitude of work.

And then your second book is half as good, right? And then the next book after that is only half as good again. I wanted the quality to always get better. And so I thought, well, you know, what's interesting is a university is a place that really encourages that, because it's sort of designed to allow you to spend your life in that tranquility. So I went to some faculty members that I greatly respect, and I said, how do the people in the academy that you most respect in yourself spend their time?

And I got a consistent answer. 50, 30, 20. 50% of your time in new intellectual, creative work, 30% of your time in teaching, and 20% of your time in other stuff that just has to get done serving on committees, whatever it happens to be that you have to do. And so I thought, that sounds good. I'm just going to start doing that.

So I started, as I was heading out on the Thelma Louise leap, counting my hours every day, and I would count how many hours in the day were creative new intellectuals. The goal was that it had to be above 50%, then how many hours would be in teaching and how many hours would be in other stuff. Like, I mean, somebody got to balance the quickbooks, right? And so I started counting, and that's where the triple stopwatch came. I found this wonderful triple stopwatch where I could constantly go back and forth, and at the end of the day, I would have the total.

Later, I came to the realization that what really mattered was the first bucket, the creative work. And so I eventually simplified it. There's a concept in great by choice called the 20 Miles march. And so I kind of had a 20 miles march. I just didn't know that concept yet.

And the idea being something you just do really consistently over time, that imposes a very high level of discipline that accumulates to results. And so I simplified it, and I just simply said, can I just simply count the number of creative hours I get every day and then hold myself to an account? So at the end of every single day, I open a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet has three cells on a line, and that's for the day. The first thing is just a simple accounting of what happened that day. Where did my time go?

What did I do? What, et cetera, can you give. Sorry to interrupt, but this is the stuff I love. What might a description for the day look like? Is it three sentences, four sentences?

What might it sort of depends on. I mean, actually, the very best days don't have much in it at all. They are got up early, 2 hours of really great creative work, breakfast with Joanne, 5 hours creative work, workout, nap, 3 hours of creative work, enjoy dinner with Joanne, bed. I mean, that's like a great day. So.

But other days are full of lots of other choppy things. And so what I tend to do is to try to capture a bit of what happened with sleep, what happened with the main tasks of the day. If there were some really interesting conversations that happened or something that hid in those, I'll note those they're markers so that I can always go back and I'll share with you how I use those in a minute, because I actually do these correlations with all of that. And then the second cell is the number of creative hours I got that day. Now, there's no rule about how many you get in a day.

Sometimes they're zero, and sometimes they can be nine or ten, which would be huge number. But then it calculates back over the last 365 days and the march, which I don't think I've missed for well over 30 years, and I hope to hit for a lot longer now, is every single 365 day cycle. Every single one. Every single day. If you calculate back the last 365 days, the total number of creative hours must exceed 1000.

No matter what. It doesn't matter if you're sick. It doesn't matter if there's other stuff you'd like, 1000 creative hours a year as a minimum baseline. They can be above that. That's fine, but never once.

There can't be a single day in any 365 day cycle. January 2 to January 2, July 22 to July 22, September 9 to September 9. Doesn't matter. Always has to be above 1000 creative hours. And you watch it, and I put it on the whiteboard here at the lab, the three month pace.

So you take the last three months, multiply times four, the six month pace, and then the current 365. And that is a way to kind of monitor. If I start seeing that those numbers start to go down, I'll change my behavior. And sometimes I have a big buffer, and sometimes I don't. And the idea is, if you stay with that, eventually you're going to have work.

Now there's a third cell that I put in there that most people don't know as much about because people know about the hours thing somewhat. All of us have dark times, difficult times. All of us have good times. Right? But here's an interesting thing I noticed, which is that if you're kind of going through a funky, it colors your whole life, and you tend to think your whole life is a funk because you're looking through that lens.

And so I thought, well, but actually I feel like my life is really pretty good, but when you're in that other place, it doesn't feel that way. And so what I started to do is I started creating a code which is plus two, plus 10, minus one, minus two. The key on all this, by the way, is you have to do it every day in real time. You can't, like, five days later, look back and say, how did I feel that day? And what, this is a totally subjective.

How quality was the day? What was it? A plus two was a super positive day. This is, emotionally speaking, exactly. Just like, was it a great day?

A plus two is just a great day. Doesn't mean that it might not have been a really difficult day. It might have been a day of a really hard rock climb. It might have been a day of really hard writing, but it felt really good. Right.

It might have been a day of an intense conversation, but really meaningful with a friend or something, but it adds up to as a plus two. Plus one is another positive day. Zero is, eh, you know, minus one is kind of a net tone negative. And minus two is. Those are bad days.

And you put it in before you go to bed. If I were to ask you, Tim, right now, 17 days ago, or even five days ago, to give the score, you're going to be distorted by how you're feeling today. Oh, for sure. Memory. If you ask people what they ate two days ago, they're going to be off by 40%, 50% calories for sure.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah. So I wrote it down and now I start to have. I got the creative hours marked, which is kind of discipline in service of creativity. And it's relentless. Right?

Jim Collins
It just stays with me constantly. You never get a break from it. But that other has proved to be incredibly useful for me because now what you can do is sort the spreadsheet and you can say over the last five years, what's going on in all the plus two days. Oh, and over the last five years. That'S where the descriptions come in.

Yeah, exactly. And over the last five years, what's going on in the minus two days? And now, as I navigate, it's kind of like the simplex method in operations research, where you find optimal by never really knowing that optimal is ahead of time. You do it by a series of iterative steps of the next best step. Hold on.

Tim Ferriss
Can you explain that? I'm from Long island, so sometimes it takes me a minute. Can you explain what that was one more time? Yeah, sure. So my undergraduate was a thing called mathematical sciences with a heavy dose of philosophy and math.

Jim Collins
Sciences was pure mathematics, computer science, statistics, and operations research. And in operations research, there's a method developed by a guy named George Dantzig called the simplex method. And essentially, the idea is that if you're really trying to find the optimal answer to a multivariate problem where there's lots and lots of variables, even the biggest computers couldn't basically do a giant spreadsheet and sort. There's just too many permutations. And what he showed was under certain conditions, all you have to do is find the local optimum, like, what's the best next step?

And then you reset. And then what's the next best step? And that he showed that under certain conditions, that is mathematically guaranteed to navigate you to the optimal endpoint. And that was the simplex method as I understand them. It was 30, 40 years ago when I was in the class, but so I've always had that idea in mind.

So you kind of navigate step by step. And so I think about it as in navigating life, I want more of the things that create the plus twos and less of the things that create the minus twos. But the difference that's helped me is I know what they are. It's not that life is never perfect, but you can do a simple more of this, less of that. Then more of this, less of that.

That makes any sense. It makes perfect sense. What are some of the patterns that you found for either the do more column or the do less column for yourself? So when I look at those patterns, I would say on the plus twos, there are almost two contradictory components. Not contradictory, but they're just really different flavors.

One is the solitude of really hard work. And sometimes one of my favorite days will be, I get up, I never leave the house, and I basically get to just lose myself in the research or in the writing or in the making sense of things. It's a very incredible simplicity of the day. I'm 61 now, and I think about what comes next, and I intend to keep creating. I want to stay in some version of that march for a really long time.

My role models have all done that. But I think about life as having three things at least I think are really important. And one of them is increasing simplicity, just sheer simplicity. Two is time and flow state. And flow state is not easy.

And the third is time with people I love. And so when I look at those plus twos, a lot of the days would be days of high simplicity. Not much happened. There were very few moving parts, but a lot of deep hard work and flow state. I might have been writing or doing a concept or creating something or, I mean, just you're lost in the work.

Tim Ferriss
Or rock climbing probably. Or rock climbing. Exactly. Exactly. It's arduous, but you're lost in it.

Jim Collins
Those are great. The other though, for me is the time with people I love. And the other dimension, while I wouldn't describe myself as a highly social type person, I love the solitude of the hard work. The other side is the people in my life. And there are many, I have great friends, really great friends.

That many decade friends, friends back to third grade, 7th grade, all my college roommates, I mean, my personal band are brothers. I mean, I have friends. And my wife, we've married 38 years, got engaged four days after our first date. What? Four days after your first date?

Yes, that's true. Wow. Okay. We might come back to that. We might.

But the thing is, when you have those days where you're really present and engaged with people you really love, those are plus two days. You may not have accomplished anything. Or in the case of climbing, it might be that I went out climbing with one of my best friends and I don't even necessarily remember the climb, it was with a friend. And so my plus two days are either very solitude or very connected, but connected to people that have these long, enduring, really, really wonderful relationships in life. And those make plus twos.

Tim Ferriss
I love it. What is the bug book? Could you please elaborate on the bug book? I think a lot of us, I certainly was one of them. We struggle in our twenties to get clarity about how to deploy ourselves in the world because everything up until you finish, know, high school or college or graduate school or whatever, it's kind of structured.

Jim Collins
You don't really have to think about it. It's like, oh, I got to figure out how to do these math problems or whatever, but life isn't really like that. And then all of a sudden you hit life and life is much more ambiguous. And so you're trying to navigate through it. I, like a lot of people, was trying to figure out how best to deploy myself in my twenties, and I had multiple things that helped me do that.

One of them, let me just introduce a concept, okay. And then I'll tie it into the bug book because this is how I challenge young people to think about it. There's a concept in good to great called the hedgehog concept. And the idea of the hedgehog concept is to sort of simplify down. We found it by studying companies.

We found that when they really focus on one or a few really big things and made very disciplined decisions, over time, those would accumulate and begin to build some real results and eventually what would become the flywheel effect, which we'll chat about a little bit later. And the hedgehog concept is the intersection of three circles. For a company, it's doing what you're deeply passionate about, because if you're not passionate about it, you can't endure long enough to really, really do something exceptional. The second circle is what you can be the best in the world at. And if you can't be the best in the world at it, leave it to others.

So, for example, it doesn't mean being big, right? You could have a truly great local restaurant. It's never going to be big, but it's the absolute best in the world at a particular thing that it does in its specific community. And no large company could come in and be better than them at that. That's very hedgehog, even though it's not big.

And then the third is that you have an economic engine and you know how it works. And so if you have the intersection of those three, our energy is going to go into things that we're passionate about, and we can be the best in the world at. And a driver, economic engine. You're in your hedgehog. Now, there's a personal analogy to the hedgehog.

And this gets back to the bug book. I'm not a big believer in sort of thinking of traditional careers. I'm a big believer in thinking of finding your hedgehog and then really building flywheel momentum with that over time. And so as the personal version of the hedgehog is again doing circle one, what you're passionate about and love to do, the second circle isn't best in the world. Because if you said, well, if I can't be the best orthopedic surgeon, I won't do it, well, then we'd only have one that's not good.

It's what you are encoded for, and what you are encoded for is different than what you're good at. When I went to college, I thought I was going to be a mathematician because I was one of those kids that was good at math. That's why I majored in math sciences. But then I met at Stanford. The people who are genetically encoded for math, there were not me.

I was good at math. They were encoded for math. It's like being an athlete, where you thought you were a good athlete, till you met the incredible, natural, gifted athlete, and you realize I could never see to spin to the basket like he did, or I could never see to put the ball there, running down the field, playing soccer the way she did, I just wouldn't have seen it. There's a gift that's the encoding. And so you have to find what you're encoded for as distinct from just what you're good at.

And then the third is you have an economic engine and you can fund your goals, your objectives of things you're trying to get done. When you have all three of those. I'm passionate about it, I'm encoded for it, and I have an economic engine in it. Now you're in your hedgehog. Now, when you're in your twenties, there's all these sort of paint by numbers kits approach to life.

You can be a professor, you can be a businessman, you can be a lawyer, you can be whatever. The nice thing about a paint by numbers kit is you actually don't have to think about it that much, because as long as you stay in the lines and you paint, you're going to end up with a nice picture at the end. But the only way to paint a masterpiece is to start with a blank canvas, and that is sort of figuring out those three circles and then making your own unique series of decisions consistent with the hedgehog of those three circles. And they may or may not fall into a traditional bucket. And so I was trying to find my way, and I started this little book, and it was inspired by a mentor named Rochelle Myers, who suggested that what I do is I study myself like a bug and imagine with dispassionate objectivity.

As you're going through life, you're making notes where you're observing the bug called Jim, but very scientifically, clinically. I remember I was working at HP for a couple years out of graduate school. Great company at the time, for sure, but I wasn't really constructed to be in a large company, but I was trying to navigate my way. And one day I had to give a presentation on how network computers work. And this was back in the 1980s when it was early on in that, and I had to figure out how to communicate to everyone, really in the essence, in our team, of how network computing was going to work and how it fit together.

And I had to sort of conceptualize it, and then I had to teach and share with. All of a sudden I had this day where it's like, wow, that was really fun. To figure it out, to figure out how to conceptualize it, to figure out how to put it in concepts everybody could understand, to share it with everyone, to teaching it. My bug book, when I'm then writing the bug gym, really loves making sense of something difficult, breaking it down into understandable pieces and teaching it to others. It was an observation in the journal.

The other thing is, might be something like the bug. Jim would really languish if he had to spend a lot of time in senseless meetings. This is not good. And constantly observing. And then eventually that allowed me to, it was that sort of observation, clinical, that allowed me to eventually sort of head back to teaching at Stanford when I was 30, which then became really the start of the real journey of.

Tim Ferriss
What happened with the bug book. Did you write things in the bug book each evening? Did you do it, keep it in your back pocket? And when there was an outlying, impactful or emotionally notable event, you'd write in it. What was the structure to how you used it, if there was any at that time?

Jim Collins
I'm more now just kind of in a coding we described earlier, because I'm one of those really lucky people that I found this stuff early. And I remember the moment I hit the classroom at Stanford, first teaching the small business and entrepreneurship class. I just knew, I'm home. I'm in the three circles like this is. I know it's going to guide in some version, some permutation of this probably for the rest of my life.

And I just knew it. But until then, I had to kind of get to where I could see that. And so for those years, I would say if I bet if I went back and looked at them and I haven't done that, they're in my basement, I'll bet you that. Try five out of seven days, there's reasonably thorough entries in there. And those entries would also be things like noting, sort of projecting out.

And a lot of it was often what I would describe as pattern recognition, where you'd be noting things, but I would also always be scanning for people that I could see them, people much older than me. And the question is, I could somehow picture that some version of what they do somehow resonated. I would note that. What was it about it that resonated? Why did I look up to that person?

I spent a lot of it not just on my own experiences. But also very much on people that I admired. Not people from afar, people I knew and observed. Not for their achievements, but something about the quality of what they were. And that was also a big part of that observation process.

Tim Ferriss
Can you give us one of the things, whatever comes to mind, that you learned from Peter Drucker? One is don't make a hundred decisions when one will do. And the idea of that is that Peter believed that you tend to think that you're making a lot of different decisions. But that actually, if you kind of strip it away. You can begin to realize a whole lot of decisions that look like different decisions.

Jim Collins
Are really part of the same category of a decision. And that what you want to do is to then be able to say, no. I'm going to make one big decision. That will be replicated many, many times. Because it kind of conceptually captures it.

So, for example, one version might be, in my own case. Right. I'm sure you encounter this too. You get lots of wonderful, interesting invitations. Things to go do this or to go do that.

Or to speak at this or whatever. They're wonderful. I mean, never being grateful for those opportunities. But you have to be very selective about what you do. And so, as I was struggling with.

How do you decide which to do when you're going to say no to most of them? They all can look like a series of individual decisions. But then, actually, no. There's actually a couple of really big decisions. Is it a great teaching moment?

Potentially. And will you learn something that's like a meta decision? And now you can sort of strip away? Actually, the question is, is it a great teaching moment, possibility, or is it not? It's very different than, should I go to Austin and do this event.

Or should I meet with this person? They look individual, but they're really part of a whole. That's one. And you can think of that as, you know, the simple thing, like what you wear. You make a thousand different decisions.

Or you could make one big decision and wear the same thing all the time. I suppose the second is, and I've shared with some others, but it's so powerful. At the end of that day with Peter, I asked him how I could pay him back. And he said first, I had already paid him back. Because he had learned.

And you gotta remember, this was when we were doing the Thelma and Louise thing. We were really scared, right? We didn't know if this was gonna work. And I was launching out to try to do this self directed path and genuinely scared. And Peter said to me, he said, but I do have a request that you change your question a little bit.

It seems to me you spend a lot of time worrying about if you're going to survive. Well, you will probably survive. And you spend too much time thinking about if you'll be successful. It's the wrong question. The question is how to be useful.

And that was the last thing you said that day. He just got out of the car and closed the door and walked away. That was the Peter Drucker mic drop. Yeah, it was. It was.

But, you know, I find that I go back to that over and over and over again.

Tim Ferriss
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And now, Ed Schao, the polymath professor who changed Tim's life. Find out how this 17 year veteran of the tech industry, former member of the US House of Representatives, and Ivy League educator, became one of Tim's most important mentors. Ed, welcome to the show. Oh, it's great to be here with you, Tim. I think back to the spring semester of 2000 when you contacted me after all of the other students had registered for my course and made such an impressive plea to be able to enroll in the course, committing, if you were enrolled, that you would clean the blackboards, clean the erasers, do whatever it took to make my life easier.

Ed Zschau
And I almost cried when I heard those words. And you took the course, and I'm so proud of what you've done over the past 19 years. I don't blame the course for your success, but I do blame your enrolling in the course for our friendship. And you've taught me so much from the very beginning. I wanted to take the course for many, many reasons.

Tim Ferriss
This was Ele 491, high tech entrepreneurship, which was in the electrical engineering department, and the ORF department, which I can never remember the actual full name for. Operations and research. Operations, research, and financial engineering. There we go. Now, I have no business whatsoever being in any engineering school, but at the time, the Princeton courses, undergraduate courses, were only very recently being voted on by students.

This was a very new thing. This is before Yelp and so on. And one of the standouts was this new course, high tech entrepreneurship, taught by Professor Xiao. And I really wanted, like many people, to be part of this course. And when I finally was accepted to the course and began learning, I remember at one point, I was cleaning the blackboard and cleaning the erasers, and you said to me, I don't know if you remember this.

You said, tim, don't get too good at cleaning the erasers. And there's a lot of direct teaching and a lot of indirect teaching, just observing you as you interact with your students and the world. And there are certain things that when I describe you to my friends, and I do that very often, and a lot of your students, I mean, you were just telling me before we began recording, stay in touch with you, and these are people from 40, 50 years ago. It's remarkable. And one of the things I throw in that was not in the bio I read was figure skating.

Could you please tell us about your background with figure skating? I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and we were fortunate to have an indoor skating rink where professional ice hockey team played, the Omaha Knights. They were probably a farm team for one of the NHL hockey teams. And my mother took me to that ice rink when I was about seven years old, and I really enjoyed the challenge. And I remember coming back from one session when I was just beginning to skate, and I said, mom, I really had a good day today.

Ed Zschau
And she said, what was so special about it? And I said, I only fell 40 times this time, from what you might call small beginnings, I began to get more proficient and more interested. And in those days, figure skating was really figure skating, where there were precise patterns on clean ice with turns and loops that you had to perform in order to pass certain tests. And I passed the pre test, and then I passed the first test and the second test, and at that point, I was kind of on my way. But ice was only available during the winter.

So when I was 13, I began spending summers away from Omaha, where there were ice rinks and continued to train and continue to pass tests. And when I was 16 years old, I had passed the 6th test and I qualified for the national championships in men's singles in a lower group, not the world class group, but a lower group. And I was also ice dancing with a partner. And in 1956, we won the silver dance championship in the midwestern sections. There were three sections in the country, went to the national championship championships.

And then my senior year in high school, 1957, again, I skated in the national championships in Berkeley, California. I never was a winner, but it was a special experience to meet a lot of people throughout the country going to these championships. And I still stay in touch with my dance partner and a gentleman who I competed against in the singles championships. It was a big part of my life, Tim, and as I think about it, the hours that I spent training, getting up at 06:00 a.m. or actually 05:30 a.m.

being on the ice in Omaha at 06:00 a.m. in a cold winter, Nebraska winter, and then skating in the evening, too. Fitting in homework school to prepare for one competition where if you did well enough, you could go to the national championships. It taught me the power, the value of practice, of dedication, of persistence and determination. And those are valuable life lessons and character building lessons.

So when people ask me, well, how do I prepare to be a leader or to change the world, it's through learning those values. You don't get a quick return creating value for the world. You get a quick return doing something that doesn't matter. But if you're going to make a difference in the society, changing the world for the better, you better be prepared for a long journey. You, to me, as one of your standout characteristics, have preparation.

Tim Ferriss
You have very meticulous preparation. I remember this because keep in mind people listening. As we said, I was showing up to potentially do my chalkboard duty and my eraser duty and so on. So I would arrive to ele 491 early, and you would be arranging the name cards. So you had placards for the students, which is not common at Princeton.

You'd have the name cards. You'd be arranging chairs and reviewing potentially the case study materials. And I don't remember any tas, any teaching assistants for that class. So could you talk about how you've thought about preparation outside of, say, figure skating? And did that come from your parents?

Where did that attention to detail before the competition, whether that's a competition in business, sports, or otherwise, or just getting up in front of a class of students, can you talk to where that comes from and how you think about preparation? Well, I was a strong believer in Murphy's law. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And so I would come to the classroom typically 45 minutes early, make sure that the projector was working, and sometimes it wasn't. And so I had time then to call the audio visual people, and they'd come over and get it fixed rather than showing up right at the time the class starts and then finding that there are problems that disrupted the flow of the class.

Ed Zschau
I think it was Benjamin Franklin who wrote, failing to prepare. It's very important to me not to be surprised by things that go wrong. And the way that you prevent that is through preparation and making sure everything is the way that it needs to be for success as far as the class is concerned. Even though I had taught the lessons, the sessions many, many times, I usually spent two to 3 hours prior to each class preparing again. I viewed my classes, which were taught by the case method of teaching and learning, where students would read about an actual company situation and put themselves in the position of the CEO or the founder or the technical person and describe what to do.

I would ask questions, and they would give the answers. I felt that that approach to teaching and learning, putting someone in the position of the founder or the person who had to achieve the results, rather than just listening and learning and reading from a book, would not only help to learn, but also build the confidence that they could do that kind of job well in order to make that experience, that classroom experience, work the best. It was like a performance. Yeah. I would come in, and I didn't know exactly how the discussion would evolve, but I knew the lessons that would come out of it, and I'd find a way, regardless of what the students would say, to convey those lessons through their words.

Tim Ferriss
The case method is something I'd love to talk a little bit more about, because my first exposure to the case method was in your class, and it's a method that, as I understand it, is used at Harvard Business School, also at Stanford Graduate School of Business. What I also found so appealing about the case method is you'd, as a student, have these short modules, these case studies, and they would often be a part one with a cliffhanger so the module one would end with some type of dilemma or disaster or big decision, and you didn't have the conclusion, you didn't have the answer, meaning what actually happened in that particular case. And it allowed you to think for yourself. But it also gave you an opportunity to speak to the class, to speak to you and to be assertive also, because you would have, I remember, at least in my class, many differing opinions, some of which were polar opposites. And it really struck me as a pragmatic way to allow people to be active in the way that theyre going to have to be active if theyre ultimately going to be entrepreneurs.

Ed Zschau
WIlliam when youre teaching and learning about starting enterprises or creating something new, you learn by doing. The case method helps in that projects that are real do that. One of the Princeton graduates, it's now, four years ago, wrote her senior thesis on can entrepreneurship be taught, or is it something you're born with? And there are articles that have been written that college courses in entrepreneurship are a waste of time. They don't matter.

So in 2015, when she was working on this, I created an online survey instrument, which I sent out to all 1600 Princeton students that I had had in my classes over 31 semesters. We had to cut off the responses in order for her to meet her thesis deadline after 400 responses of the 1600. But of those 1st 1600 responses, 160 had been founders of companies. Among the survey questions was the question, what Princeton experiences have helped you in choosing your life path and succeeding in what you pursued? And of the 160 founders, 95% said it was the course that made the difference.

And I think what it was, it's not so much what they learned in detail, but rather pointing out to the students that this is a possible life path, that you can create something from scratch and create value, and what great satisfaction you get from that. It also, and I attribute this to the case method, gave students the confidence they could do it. They'd read the case and say, I'm as smart as that person. I know I could do that, too. And I tried to choose the cases with youthful founders rather than old people like me.

Then there were some tools that techniques that they learned from it. But I believe that everyone is born with the desire to do something beyond themselves. And as an entrepreneur, starting something from scratch, making it real, impacting the world in that way, it fulfills that desire to do something meaningful beyond themselves. Trey, is that what an entrepreneur is to you? I mean, if you were to define entrepreneurs, that someone who built something from scratch, whatever that might be, how do you think about the term entrepreneur?

Well, you probably remember this, Tim, from the course, but I assert that entrepreneurship isn't about starting companies. Entrepreneurship is an approach to life, and you can be an entrepreneur in anything. It's about starting something from scratch. It's about making good things happen that hadn't been done before. It's a combination of innovation.

A lot of people get ideas and implementation. And that second part, implementation is the most important. A lot of people say, wouldn't it be neat if we could do this? And that's as far as it goes. But entrepreneurs say, wouldn't it be neat if we could do this?

And then they do it. I want to say a few things and underscore a couple of things. The first is that there are only two courses. I still have all the notes from meaning courses, classes I took as an undergrad, that I still have three ring binders which contain all the notes from. One was the literature effect with John McPhee, and the other was Ele 491.

Tim Ferriss
So I still have all of those notes. And it strikes me that first, from a tool perspective, if people want to find case studies that are used at places like Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School, you can actually find quite a few online and order them. So I would encourage people to look into that. The reason that I have notes from those two classes is, I think in large part because I had, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, a very, very difficult and dark period in my life, junior year, and took some time off of school. It was a very, very hard time for me.

And what I found in the literature of fact, and also particularly in high tech entrepreneurship, was a teaching and reinforcing of optimism, which is very different from giving all of your students rose colored glasses. You were showing that. I found this to really personally very helpful in these case studies. A lot of things go wrong, but you were able to show how people figured it out and how they learn to navigate around those things. How do you think about if you do the role of optimism in any of this?

Ed Zschau
Well, I'm a chronic optimist. I believe that that is important to doing things that haven't been done before. You can imagine all of the things that can go wrong, and I guess there's some value in being a realist. But I don't think you do things that haven't been done before and succeed in that by being negative and focusing on all of the things that need to be done. Rather, it's having a vision and then committing to making it real.

I was blessed that way. I just look at the world, I don't think through rose colored glasses. No, but I. When, when people say, that's going to be hard, I say it's going to be more fun then, because doing something that's hard is a lot more fun than doing something that's easy. How did you.

Tim Ferriss
I'll ask two questions. I'll start with the one that I should probably ask first, which is when you were, say, 20 years old, 15 or 20, somewhere in that range, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up? Oh, I knew exactly what I was going to be. I was going to be a physicist. I came to Princeton in 1957 with a plan to major in physics.

Ed Zschau
And then in my sophomore year, I discovered philosophy. And I thought, but this is way cool stuff. And I decided that I would major in philosophy with, in those days, what was called a bridge program with physics. So I took all of the required courses in physics, but my department was the philosophy department. My independent work, both as a junior and senior, were on subjects that combined philosophy and physics.

My senior thesis was describing what the german philosopher Immanuel Kant's theory of space and time would have been had he been born 50 years later and had known Einstein's general theory of relativity. And I described in my thesis, this is what Kant's theory of space and time would have been. And unfortunately, he didn't know general relativity, based it on newtonian physics. But as a presumptuous 21 year old, I figured I knew what was inside Kant's head. And if he just known about Einstein and his theories, he would have had a different philosophy of space and time.

That and $2.40 will get you a cup of coffee at your favorite coffee shop. And you mentioned Einstein. Princeton certainly has a storied history in some respects with physics. I mean, Einstein spent time not too far away from where we're sitting right now, and Richard Feynman and others, certainly. Is that how you ended up focusing on Princeton and physics was the history?

Tim Ferriss
I guess at that point. I'm not sure what specifically would have drawn you here, but is that what drew you to Princeton? Well, starting from the time that I was about twelve, I was an Einstein lover, I guess you'd say. I began reading about his theories and biographies and so forth. And so I applied to various colleges in the physics department, engineering, physics in one case and physics in all the others.

Ed Zschau
And I was accepted to all of those schools and all of them provided me with a rather attractive scholarship, except Princeton. Princeton wrote to me and said, you can work in the dining hall as a bus boy and I think I could make with twelve to 15 hours a week, $400 a semester. And I chose Princeton because I concluded that must be the toughest school. They're not making a big deal out of me and I want to go where it's most challenging. I've never looked back.

Tim Ferriss
Did you end up finding Princeton challenging? Oh, way too challenging. That ended my figure skating career. I did not have the time to continue to practice. I tried to compete in my freshman year in the eastern championships and didn't do that well.

Ed Zschau
And I began to realize that I wasn't going to make it. And looking back, I don't know whether I would have ever made the world team. But in 1961, many of the skaters that I had either competed with, trained with my skating coach, all perished in a plane crash, the world team on their way to the world championships in Brussels, Belgium, in 1961. And we lost a whole generation of world class figure skaters. And I don't know whether I would have ever gotten to that point, but I'm glad I made the choice that I did to go to Princeton, to give up figure skating and to focus on what's led me to be here talking to you.

Tim Ferriss
When did teaching enter the picture? What happened after? If you could just paint a picture for us after your undergraduate experience. Well, I knew what I was going to do after I graduated from Princeton. I had applied for and was accepted to the US Navy Officers candidate school in Newport, Rhode island to begin my training.

Ed Zschau
In September of 1961. I went back home to Omaha, Nebraska, worked in manual labor on the night shift in a can factory, and in late August was called to Fort Omaha to be inducted into the US Navy. During that pre induction interview, I was asked if anything had happened to me health wise since I'd applied in February and had it physical then. And I said, well, I broke my leg in a rugby game at Princeton in April, but it's fine now. They didn't take my word for it.

They ordered an x ray and concluded it wasn't up to Navy standards. So I was unable to enter OCS in September of 1961. Very disappointed, I did have an alternative. I had applied to Stanford Business school for the MBA program. I only applied to Stanford because it only had one essay in the application and all the others had three.

So I focused on Stanford. For that reason I had been accepted and I never sent in the postcard that indicated that I was not coming. So I retrieved the postcard, sent it in, and within, I'd say six days, my whole life changed from going into the Navy to going to California and entering the MBA program. I did not know in that split second in April when I heard a crack when I fell in the rugby game that that would change my life so dramatically. That's why I tell people who ask me about career planning that career planning is overrated.

You ask me the question though, how did you get into teaching? Well, I was in the MBA program at Stanford University and they are just like philosophy. At Princeton I discovered operations research, applying mathematics to real operating business problems, but operating problems in general. And I said, this is way cool. And so rather than looking for a job as I was approaching my MBA degree, I applied for the PhD program to pursue operations research.

And after my first year in the PhD program, the professor who had taught the most popular second year MBA course, electronic data processing. It was the only course at Stanford Business School at that time that had anything to do with computers. He left unexpectedly. I went to the dean of the business school and I said, Mister Dean, you have a problem. You've got 102nd year MBA students signed up to take business 366 electronic data processing this September, and you don't have anybody to teach it.

I am the solution to your problem. I can teach that course. And they said something like, don't call us, we'll call you. And in late August, about three weeks before the course was to begin, I get a call. Ed, can you teach that course?

I said, you bet. And that's how I began my teaching career again. There's a life lesson here. Opportunities unexpectedly happen. And many people say, gee, that's an interesting opportunity, but it only matters in life if you seize the moment, if you take advantage of that opportunity and commit yourself to do something that you've never done before.

I find that I learn the most, the fastest when I don't know what I'm doing. So I'd never taught a university course, and all of a sudden I'm in front of 102nd year MBA students, 24 years old, teaching a course. But I did okay. And then Stanford Graduate School of Business said, would you teach another course? I taught different courses and that's how my teaching career began.

Tim Ferriss
How did you become good at teaching or study teaching? Refine your teaching. How did you work on that? Because you're an excellent teacher. There are plenty of bad teachers out there, plenty of passable teachers, even at incredible institutions.

But I would consider you a very, very adept teacher. How did you learn to teach. I think I became a better teacher by not being smarter. And here's what I mean by it. People who are really super smart, learning comes too easy.

Ed Zschau
I believe you can be a better teacher when it's more difficult for you to learn so that you can explain to somebody else how to master some lesson. I also had the chance as a high school senior to take a course in debate. It was a full year course in debating, and that helped me with public speaking. But more importantly, the high school teacher who taught debate also taught the various individual events, like oratory and extemporaneous speaking. And I wanted to compete in extemporaneous speaking.

Tim Ferriss
Could you just define what that means in this context? So, well, this is the way it was when I was in high school, an extemporaneous speaking contest. Each participant individually would be given a topic on which to speak for ten minutes, and each contestant would have 1 hour to prepare the ten minute speech. So my high school teacher said, well, come in after school's over every afternoon, and I'll give you a topic. I'll give you an hour, and then you come back and give your ten minute speech on that topic.

Ed Zschau
So the first time I did that, he gave me a topic. I spent the hour preparing, gave my talk, and when I ran out of words, I said, is the ten minutes up yet? And he says, it's only been three minutes. But every afternoon he would do that. And by the end of the public speaking events that year, the contest that year, I'd become a state champion in extemporaneous speaking.

You asked earlier, Tim, about preparation. This is just another example. I wasn't born to be a speaker. I wasn't born to be a teacher, but I learned to do both. And there are tools also, as you mentioned in your own teaching, there are tools that you can give people and strategies, which is certainly part, was part of Ele 491 in my case.

Tim Ferriss
And in the cases of your students with the extemporaneous speaking, what were some of the keys to getting better? Were there any techniques or strategies or ways of thinking about the topics you were given that were particularly helpful in that final event? I remember the topic. It was, what was the significance of the conflict between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton? And I had an hour to prepare that one before Google.

Ed Zschau
Before Google. And so the style of presentation, it wasn't a sort of matter of fact. It was to prepare what might be called a ten minute oration with drama, with stories, with life lessons, and sort of end on a crescendo and let's go back to teaching. I view teaching more about nurturing, about personal values, about inspiration, about recognizing that you can have fun doing great things. And it's not so much the lessons or the facts, but rather it's building, maybe even contagion, this optimistic attitude and understanding that if you can change the world for the better, that's as good as it gets.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah. I do think in retrospect, it's maybe easier. Well, of course it's easier to see in retrospect, but how these various chance opportunities and encounters with philosophy, with the teaching, with the extemporaneous speaking, not necessarily in that order, but how they've combined into this alchemy that has enabled you to transmit and infuse these beliefs to your students in a way that is very, very memorable. Right. It's not just the text in the book.

Do you remember, I mean, you remember the topic, Aaron Burr and so on. Do you remember any of the choices that you made in how you competed with that competition, in speaking? Yeah. No. I remember my debate partner in high school and then at Princeton.

Ed Zschau
He was one year behind me. We had started kindergarten together, and then I skipped first grade, so I was one year ahead of him. But when he was a junior and I was a senior, we were debate partners in a debate team. There were two on each side, and one you were assigned, whether you were the affirmative speakers supporting the resolution or the negative speakers against the resolution. And I remember he was the first affirmative speaker, and I was sitting near while he was standing, and he got confused, and he gave the negative case.

And I'm sort of making hand signals to him as he's giving the negative case against the resolution he's supposed to be speaking for. And I was going to have to follow up on this. And he finally realized what was happening. He was so smooth, he said, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what our opponents would lead you to believe, however. And then he quickly switched to the affirmative case.

Tim Ferriss
That's incredible. But there's also a lesson in this, that things sometimes don't work out exactly the way you plan, but you got to adapt and figure out how to segue into what will work. Trey, you strike me as very adaptable in so many ways. I mean, you've spent time in so many different worlds, and you're very good at seizing opportunities, but you've also done certain things for periods of time. You've run companies for extended periods of time.

You were in politics for an extended period of time. How do you. This is actually some phrasing that I heard from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in the UK. He said, how do you differentiate between opportunities to be seized and temptations to be resisted? You focused for extended periods of time on single things, when no doubt there were other opportunities being thrown at you.

How do you think about focusing for extended periods or opening yourself to opportunities? This is really a simple question, and it's answered with one word, commitment. I had situations where I had opportunities to leave companies that I was running. I would not leave until it was appropriate to leave. Where there was a successor, there was success.

Ed Zschau
When you're an entrepreneur and people are investing in you, when you're an entrepreneur and a CEO and employees and customers and suppliers are counting on you, you've got to have a commitment to do the job until you're no longer necessary. When I took the company public, my first company public, and it was about a ten year period, and there were times during that ten years where we almost went under, but when we had gone public and then did a secondary financing, so there was sufficient capital and then did a search for a successor, I felt that then I could leave to run for the Congress. Perfect segue. Why did you decide to run for Congress? I thought I could be good at it, and here's why.

It wasn't just, gee, that's way cool, like philosophy and operations research. In 1977, I was on the board of directors of the American Electronics Association. Electronics companies during the seventies were unable to raise sufficient amounts of risk capital. The amount of capital committed to professionally managed venture capital funds during the 1970s, funds that would be investing in tech companies was only 50 million a year. Wow, 50 million a year.

I was asked to chair a task force for the American Electronics association on Capital Formation to figure out what to do, and I assembled a group of entrepreneurs and investors. We concluded the single inhibitor to sufficient quantities of risk capital investment was the high rate of the capital gains tax at the federal level at that time, which was 50%. And looking at it, if an investor invested and lost money, they lost all the money. If they invested and made money, they gave half of it to the federal government, forgetting about what they'd have to give to the state government. So we felt that lowering the tax on capital gains was essential to stimulating the environment for risk capital investment, not just for electronics companies, but all kinds of job creating ventures.

The task force put together a white paper, and usually that's the end of the story. Well, we proposed the lowering the capital gains tax, but keep in mind, Tim, that this is a group of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs don't just talk about it. They make stuff happen. So the first thing we did is we did a survey of the electronics industry and documented the importance of more risk capital investment for job creation and for the ability of these companies to get started and grow. Then I went to Washington and testified before Congress, and there was a young congressman from Wisconsin, Bill Steiger, who was on the House Ways and Means Committee.

He became intrigued with this idea of lowering the tax on capital gains, and so he introduced a bill to do so. And I worked with him, and the whole electronics association worked in lobbying. The Ways and Means Commission Committee, worked with the Senate. And by November of 1978, about a year after we'd started this process with our survey, the federal tax on capital gains was lowered from 50% to 28%. And within about 18 months, $1 billion of capital flowed into professionally managed venture capital funds, compared to the 50 million a year that had been happening during the seventies.

And anybody who studies the 1980s, that number, on an annual basis, four or 5 billion a year, flowing into funds that were supporting new enterprises and job creating enterprises. So that experience, particularly because Bill Steiger died of a heart attack within a month after this bill was passed. He passed away in early December of 1978. The bill was passed in November of 78. His example inspired me for public service.

He had changed the nature of the debate in Washington on tax policy from who pays and who doesn't to what will be the economic impact. And I felt, gosh, somebody who has built a company, somebody's had the experience that I had with working with Bill Steiger to get the tax rate on capital gains reduced. Perhaps I had a contribution to make public service. It also strikes me, and I think you may have even said this in an interview that I read in preparing for this conversation, that in a very real sense, you had an advantage in the sense that you could always go back to building companies, which means you weren't necessarily dedicated to being a politician as a career indefinitely. From that point forward, you had some attractive plan B's or plan cs if it didn't work out.

Tim Ferriss
So did that enable you to think more aggressively or differently? I had a personal principle that I was only going to stay in the House of Representatives at most three terms, six years. And that gave me two advantages. One, a sense of urgency. I couldn't just kind of wait around and learn the ropes.

Ed Zschau
I had to start making a difference as quickly as I was able. And secondly, it gave me the freedom to do what I thought was right. The worst could happen is I get retired or maybe it's the best that could happen. I get retired after one term or two terms. Certainly, I wasn't going to serve more than three, as it turned out.

But I only serve two terms in the House because as a congressman from California, I think there were at that time 48 or 50 California members of the House of Representatives, and we were a dime a dozen. And it was very difficult for a single California congressman or congresswoman to get the message out. So I felt that if I have ideas, I not only need a message, I need a megaphone. And I decided that I could get a megaphone if I became a us senator from California. I ran for the US Senate in 19, started in 85.

For the 1986 campaign, I won the republican nomination, but I was defeated in a very close election, about a percentage point, percentage point and a half by the three term incumbent, Alan Cranston. Looking back, I was disappointed at the time because I felt I wasn't a good enough candidate. I had lots of support, and I'd let people down. But looking back, I dodged a bullet with that very close loss, because since then, I feel, through leading companies and through at least my view, changing lives for the better, my students over many, many years, that I may have, through not just their lives, but how they've changed in a positive way, the lives of others, that I may have made more of a contribution to a better future than I would have as a us senator. I believe that.

Tim Ferriss
I definitely believe that. I shouldn't say, and. But at the time, you were disappointed, and I would be very interested to hear, because we've been talking about a lot of your successes, and you've had a lot of successes, but at that time, when you got the news that you had lost, what did the next few days or weeks look like for you? What do you say to yourself when you experience a loss like that? What do I do next to make a difference?

Ed Zschau
And I'd never been out of a job. I mean, when you think about it, it was from teaching to starting a company to running for Congress. And now I didn't have a next. What am I going to do next? I had the opportunity to join the venture capital firm that was the lead investor in my first company, and I accepted that assignment as a general partner of the firm.

It was Brentwood Associates at that time was a Los Angeles based venture capital firm, and I established the Silicon Valley office of that firm. I think my partners would agree that I wasn't really very good at being a venture capital investor. I'm too much of an optimist. Every deal I looked at, oh, gee, that's really interesting. I can see how to make that happen.

And as a venture capitalist, you really have to be more realistic and maybe even super critical. But also at that time in my life, I viewed being an investor as kind of like a football coach. You walk the sidelines, you send in plays, you make substitutions, you rant and rave at halftime, but you never put any points on the board. And I was still, at that time of my life wanting to put points on the board, meaning running a company not being the better in the stands, but the jockey on the horse. When I had an opportunity to become CEO of one of the companies Brentwood had helped to start, I took that opportunity in a company in the magnetic recording components business called Sendstor.

Tim Ferriss
What is your decision process like for something like that? Because you mentioned with the venture capital general partner position, perhaps you are too optimistic. Everything sounded interesting. But when you make a decision to, say, become the CEO of a startup in the portfolio, youre saying no to other things, presumably. So what was the decision process like in evaluating that and saying yes to it?

Ed Zschau
Its again, commitment. I was part of a firm, general partner of a firm that had made a significant investment in this company, and they felt that there was a need for a new CEO. And so when they talked to me about it, it started out as well. Can you go in there and help out and be on the board? And it evolved into can you go in there and run it?

And I wasn't going to say no to my partners. Did you, in your mind or explicitly with them, set expectations in the way that you did for yourself with the three term limit as a congressman? Did you go in to it saying, I'm committing to this for x period of time, and then we'll reevaluate, or was it left totally open ended? Well, it was left open ended. The goal is success rather than how long.

And I think you're getting to an issue where I may not be like a lot of other people. I don't do things for me, I do things for others. So if you want to get down to what motivates you, finding something that I think is meaningful, that needs to be done and recognizing I can help do it, and it's not about the money. That's why I do things pro bono. My wife is not particularly thrilled with that approach.

But on the other hand, I focus on where can I make a difference for the benefit of others rather than what's in it for me. And I don't know whether that's unusual, but it served me well. How do you differentiate between the things that will have the greatest impact for others and feeling peer pressured to commit to something? If that question makes any sense, because it seems like people pleasing and committing to things that will help the greatest number of other people or deeply help other people are two different things. And I guess I'm just wondering if, if there are times when you commit to, say, doing certain things because the general partners to whom youve made a commitment ask you to do it may not always be the same thing that will have the greatest impact.

Tim Ferriss
Maybe its not a good question. Im just wondering if youve ever run into a position where people want you to do one thing and you could be very good at it, but you feel like your abilities are better put in a different place. Usually the decisions that I make about how I'm going to spend my time and my life are made by me rather than responding to requests. When I came to offer my course here at Princeton, I hadn't gotten a phone call saying, hey, Ed, would you please come and teach a high tech entrepreneurship course at Princeton? Rather, in June of 1997, I asked for a meeting with the then dean of the engineering school, James Way.

Ed Zschau
And in that meeting, I proposed that the engineering school would benefit from having a rather comprehensive program in entrepreneurship. It just made perfect sense to me that engineers innovate, but in order to make a difference in the world, that innovation has to then become real and commercialized and often in a startup venture. So exposing engineering students to that process and that opportunity seemed to make sense. And that was the origin of the first offering of ELA 491 in the fall semester of 1997. And again, an instance where I decided that there might be some value that I could create.

And now entrepreneurship. The Princeton Way is pervasive across this campus, with many courses, with many co curricular and extracurricular programs for the benefit of student entrepreneurs. And the survey that I mentioned before, out of 400 of the students that took my course, forgetting about not including the courses, that many other courses that are now offered to have 160 founders of companies from that cadre, it would suggest to me that out of the total of 1600, that there may be 3400 founders. And I still, I'm touched when I get emails from students I may have had a dozen years ago saying, Ed, you planted the seed twelve years ago and it's finally sprouting. I've just founded my first company.

It took me this long, but you gave me the confidence to do it. How have you thought about parenting and your own kids? Because you're so deliberate in how you teach, and you've prepared so extensively, not just for the courses, but for each individual class. How have you thought about parenting? Or how would you describe your parenting style?

It's almost the same that it's just that the students start a lot younger. I believe that the best way to help people find their way, nurture them, is through encouragement rather than direction. When our children were young, we have three children. I coached 13 soccer teams. All three of them played soccer at one time or another.

I was a Cub scout leader and a Boy scout leader. We're really proud of the way our kids turned up. We were lucky they were growing up in a good place at a good time. Probably not a lot of the challenges that all parents face today, with the world more complicated, with communications technology more advanced. But loving them, caring and letting them know that you love them and you care is kind of the secret of parenting.

Tim Ferriss
Could you speak to the encouragement instead of rather than direction a bit more? Does that mean that you're exposing them to a lot and whatever they gravitate towards naturally is what you then try to foster? What does that mean when you say encouragement instead of direction? They've got to live their lives. You can't live their lives.

Ed Zschau
I think I benefited a lot from my own parents. They were proud of me whether I did well or not. I learned when I was maybe five, six, seven years old how to build radios and build motors in the basement workshop from my father, who, who had a degree in electrical engineering. But sadly, during the depression, he lost his engineering job and got into an assignment that really didn't have anything to do with engineering. But he stayed in it in order to provide for his family.

One thing that I remember from my parents, I was, as we talked about earlier, a competitive figure skater. And sometimes I didn't do well in a competition. I may have fallen. I may have not done a school figure very well, not up to my ability. They never criticized me in those situations.

They never put pressure on me. They were always supportive and proud, regardless of how well I did relative to what I could have done. What might they say? Let's just say on the car ride back, after you've had for you a disappointing performance, what are the types of things they might say to you? Great job.

Having been a soccer coach, I know that not all parents act that way. Yeah, sometimes parents are the problem. The players are just fine. Parents are a problem. Both of my parents weren't raised by their parents.

My mother was raised by her grandmother. My father was raised by his mother's sister. His mother died when he was about twelve years old. His father was in the german newspaper business in Montana, but he and his sister grew up in Omaha, raised by his deceased mother's sister. And I think as a result of their not having parents, they wanted to be the best parents.

And so my sister, we never had a whole lot of money, but my sister had ballet lessons and she was an exquisite ballerina. I had piano lessons and figure skating lessons. And they just wanted to be the best parents ever. And I think they felt blessed to have two children who wanted to succeed. We both studied hard, were both good students.

We went to college. We did other things besides that, and we both wanted our parents to be proud. Where do you think that desire came from? Was it watching their example? And perhaps the diligence with which your father showed you how to disassemble and reassemble these radios?

Tim Ferriss
Where did the desire to please them come from if what you most received was continuous positive feedback? I'm not sure it was. And the focus of my life was to please them or for them to be proud. But I've had, from the time I was in grade school, maybe even in kindergarten or first grade, an overarching goal, and that is to live a life that matters, to make a lasting, positive difference in the world. I call it leaving footprints.

Ed Zschau
That's what drives me. So some people might say, well, my overarching goal is to be the richest person around, or my overarching goal is to have a whole lot of adulation and be a celebrity. My goal, maybe even in a quiet way, is to leave footprints on the world. Have there ever been times in your life where you felt like you've wandered or been pushed away from that and then have corrected course? I don't recall.

I don't recall. I've always sort of marched to my own drum. Yeah, that's another thing. Maybe this is important for your audience. I always wanted to be different.

There are people, particularly with social media these days, that want to be accepted, that want to be like, if someone has a new kind of shoe or shirt, you know, others want to have the same thing. And so I've always had a desire to be different from others. And maybe that enables me not only to venture where others may not venture, but also to be satisfied doing something that nobody else is doing. Are there any books that have had a particularly large impact on your life or that you've given the most to other people or recommended? Well, the four hour work week for the four hour body.

Tim Ferriss
You know, I've heard they're fine books. I've heard they're. Those are very fine books, and everyone. Should read them besides those, of course, on the top shelf. Are there any books that come to mind that have impacted you strongly or that you've recommended to students or other people?

Ed Zschau
When I was little, when I'm talking about little, like 6810 years old, there was a whole series of biographies written for children my age. Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin. And I would read those books over and over because their lives and what they accomplished were what I hoped to do. So it was that set of experiences. There was a book on the Wright brothers, and these were written for somebody my age.

Now, you can read Walter Isaacson's book on Benjamin Franklin or on Steve Jobs or Walter Isaacson's book on Einstein, but it's the same thing. Yeah. Or David McCullough's on the Wright brothers. Yes. A fabulous book.

Tim Ferriss
Do you still read biographies? Is that. That's kind of all I care about. And it's the stories, the stories that are inspirational. And it gets back to what we were talking about before with the case method, where when I'm reading a biography, just like I'm hoping the students, when they read a case, that they think of themselves in that situation, and what would I do?

Ed Zschau
And reading biographies, well, there's a wonderful McCullough book on the Wright brothers, amazing lessons of they didn't just go out, build a plane and fly it. A lot of setbacks and disappointments and struggles in order to do what they did. The same with all of those. It gets to what we were talking about before, the preparation, the commitment to excellence. It doesn't happen overnight.

People who achieve great things, even though it may look like it happened quickly and easily, and everybody can do it, most of those stories have a lot of sacrifice and difficulty and disappointments and setbacks in them. For entrepreneurs, whether students in your classes or people listening, are there any particular biographies or books that you would recommend in particular? Any standouts or just particular figures? Well, again, don't buy the books because they have lessons in them. Buy the books because they have stories in them, and there are a bunch of them.

My colleague at Princeton, Derek Lidow, has written a couple of books, and his most recent is built on bedrock. And a lot of the book is about Walmart and Sam Walton and how it started. And he went to the Walmart archives and based his stories about Walmart on those facts. But it's filled with stories about companies that were built by people on solid foundations, built on bedrock. I had a chance.

Tim Ferriss
The stories are so important, I think also for many reasons, of course, but also because it's really the glue that we as humans are programmed to use to remember any of the lessons that might come out of those stories. And that's something that struck me when a few months ago, I was invited to go to Bentonville, Arkansas, and interview Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart, for this podcast. But it was my first time in northwest Arkansas, my first time in Bentonville. And I went to the, I was able to see Sam Walton's pickup truck and the keys, and the stories are what sticks. And it was a fascinating, fascinating experience.

What are you most excited about these days? You seem to be moving as quickly, doing as many things as ever. You certainly dont strike me as someone whos ever idle. What are you personally most excited about these days? Im focusing now on education, and my years of teaching are just part of it.

Ed Zschau
But you look at higher education today, very expensive. A lot of students with debt may not be prepared for first jobs, may not be prepared for a lifetime of contributions. And so just in the last couple of weeks, I volunteered to be the interim president of a wonderful small college, Sierra Nevada College, located in incline Village, Nevada, right on the shores of Lake Tahoe in the midst of the Sierra Nevada mountains. This is a college that has a dedicated faculty with real life experience in the areas they teach. They're not just teachers.

They've done what they teach. It is a college in which entrepreneurship is pervasive. It has some real focused capabilities in environmental science. Well, right there on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Keep Tahoe blue.

Environmental science is critical in that area. What a wonderful place to learn about that. It has a strong entrepreneurial based business program at the undergraduate level, and then it has a marvelous fine arts and creative writing program. You don't go there to major in neuroscience. You don't go there to major in philosophy.

But if you want to go to a small college with small classes with dedicated teachers, to be an entrepreneurial leader both in your first job and for a lifetime of contributions in establishing and building enterprises, or being a leading environmental scientist with entrepreneurial approaches to that scientific work, or if you want to be like a writer, you know, Tim better than anybody, writers aren't just writers. They're entrepreneurs to creating content, but then getting their content read and podcasting, that's a way of communicating with people. I have friends who are photographers. They became photographers. They didn't born photographers, but they became photographers.

But they're entrepreneurs. So here's a small college that I've volunteered to lead until a successor with entrepreneurial leadership capabilities is identified and takes office and continue to promote this higher education approach. One of the challenges these days, as I just mentioned, was, how do we do this less expensively? And I believe that there are ways in which education can use technology to reduce the costs. I'm not advocating, well, there will never be any more classrooms, but a combination of that classroom experience with online learning can reduce the cost of providing a top rated educational institution.

I'm also attracted to income sharing agreements. Perhaps your audience is not familiar with them, but rather than taking out student loans, there are sources of financing where the student signs an agreement to repay based on their income above certain levels. And if they never make that much, they don't repay. But if they make more than that threshold level, then they pay and may pay more than the amount of the debt. But having students graduating with huge amounts of debt reduces their choices.

And you asked me earlier, well, how do you choose what you want to do? Well, I want to change the world. I want to do things that will benefit others. Well, if you have a lot of debt, you may not be able to make those choices in that direction. You have to focus first on, well, how do I make enough money to pay off my debt?

So I don't know whether any of the people who are listening to this podcast are thinking about enrolling in a unique educational institution. But we do have a few openings left for entering freshmen even this fall in late August. So if there are people who are interested in coming to get a uniquely valuable educational experience in a beautiful setting, look up sierranevada.edu, and I'll link to. That in the show notes for everyone as well. So you'll be able to find those links really easily.

Tim Ferriss
The income sharing is very, very interesting to me. I don't have much exposure to it, but there are some programming schools. For instance, I believe one is called Lambda school, which has this exact model and has proven very, very successful. It also puts a very productive onus on the educators to really think through the practicalities of what they're teaching and how effective they are, how effectively they're imparting these skills to their students. Ed, do you have any particular quotes or mantras, anything that you live your life by or remind yourself of often?

Are there any particular you mentioned, say one earlier. If you're failing to prepare. You're preparing to fail. Do you have any other quotes that have really stuck with you? Do what you enjoy doing, do it the best.

Ed Zschau
You know how good things will happen. I love it. Yeah, but I may be unusual. Well, I don't know whether I'm this unusual. I like to get out of my comfort zone, do things I haven't done before.

I believe that doing so enables me to learn, but the more I learn, the more I'm able to contribute to others. So doing the same thing and being able to be the best at that, that's laudable. But my mother had a problem with me when she was alive. I started out with this teaching. I mentioned how I got into it, the Stanford graduate school of business.

And after I'd done that for a while, I said, mom, I'm going to start a company. And she said, buzzy. That was my nickname. And my sister still calls me Buzzy. And my high school friends call me Buzzy.

Buzzy, you were just getting good at teaching and now you're going to start a company. You don't know anything about that. And then the company did okay, and we took it public. And I said, mother, I'm going to run for Congress. Buzzy, you were just getting good at running a company.

You don't know anything about politics. And she lived long enough so that she saw me sworn in to the US House of Representatives in January of 1983, and then she passed away that April. How did she respond to seeing you sworn in? She didn't express her emotions and her feelings a lot, but I believe she was proud. I'm sure she was.

Tim Ferriss
How could she not be? Yeah. You have an incredible tradition that I think is so suiting to you, and it's so memorable for so many of your students. And it has to do with singing. And it seems like there have been a few different versions of this.

But where did the singing enter the picture with your teaching? Well, it started way before that. Started way before that? Oh, yeah. When I was probably in grade school, I would write poems about things like the busy bee is lively, all he does is buzz.

Ed Zschau
But yesterday he stung me and now he is a. Was.

Tim Ferriss
That something you wrote? Going way back? And then I started composing using music that already existed then. When I was in first teaching at the Stanford graduate School of Business, there was a tradition there where in the spring, in May, they held a joint faculty student event called the Spring Fling, and the faculty would prepare a skit. It had perhaps acting, it had perhaps some songs.

Ed Zschau
And I became the writer for the faculty skits. And then there were student skits as well. My most famous song. I wrote many for those skits about various courses and, well, primarily about courses. But then I'd also write the words, and we had a takeoff on Batman and Robin, and we had mission impossible skit, where I'd write the songs and the music.

And even after I left the faculty as a teacher and I'd started my company, they kept me on the Stanford business school faculty from the time I left, which was 1970 to 1981, so I could continue to be the writer of the faculty skit. Well, the most famous song I wrote was about the linear programming algorithm. It was called the simplex method, where poor students, in 1966, when I was teaching the quantitative methods course, had to learn how to do this. And linear programming was abbreviated LP linear programming. And so I wrote a song about the algorithm that was mathematically correct, that if you listen to the words, you could do the simplex algorithm to achieve an optimal solution to a linear programming problem.

But I wrote it in the form of a dance, and it went something like this. Come on, gang. Now gather round. See what your math props putting down. Get in close and listen to me.

I'm gonna show you how to do the LP. It's a new dance, but it's easily done. In fact, you learned it in 261. Just to make sure that you can do it, listen close while I review it. Do the LP.

Come on, baby, do the LP with me. We're gonna pivot step day and night and optimize it out of sight. And then it went through a series of verses with the details of the simplex algorithm. First of all, form a big, strong line. I.

That's it. You're looking fine. Find behind that line. Form one more. Come on, everybody, get out on the floor.

Keep forming lines one after one. When you're out of cats, then you're done. Now you see how I get my kicks? I've got y'all in a big matrix. Do the LP.

Come on, baby, do the LP with me. We're gonna pivot step day and night and optimize it out of sight.

Tim Ferriss
Incredible.

So you. You use stories, you use music. I feel like these are communication skills that sort of transcend the era in which you were born. I mean, you could have gone back a thousand years and used these. You could probably go forward a thousand years and use these.

And your students remember these things. They really remember these things. And I'd love for you to talk about another song that I certainly was exposed to. And that is my way. And why you chose that song.

Ed Zschau
I was teaching at Harvard Business School in 1996, a course called entrepreneurial finance. And for the last class of the course, I wanted to end with a number of stories and share with students my philosophies. And it was a captive audience. Attendance was mandatory, and I thought what would be an appropriate message to convey? And that message, as we've talked about it earlier, parenting, teaching, the message is, just do it your way.

And so then I thought of the song my way, and I put some words to that song. This course's end is here. But I have in this final session a thought for your career. It is a most important lesson as you go down life's path, whether slow or in a hurry. Recall the nike ad.

Just do it your way. It brings back the memories. It not only brings back the memories, but it just refreshes the mark that you had on me and continue to have. And I really just want to thank you, Ed, for doing things your way. It's really had such an incredible impact on so many people.

Tim Ferriss
And I'm not going to mention him by name, but he's a mutual friend of ours. You introduced us because we were both students of yours, but he's a very, very, very successful entrepreneur. And we were going back and forth, emailing in preparation for this interview with you, and he, in closing, says, please give my best to Ed. Any success I've had in business was due to him. That is an incredible sentence.

And it's incredible also because he is not the only student who would write that. I've met students of yours from China, I've met students of yours from countries around the world who have some version of that sentiment. And it's so incredible, and it's been such a privilege and such a great stroke of luck that I ended up in your class. And I just want to say that to you because it's had such a significant impact on the trajectory of my life. And certainly for me, that's a big deal.

That's a really, really big deal. So I just wanted to thank you. Thank you, Tim. And now you know why I do what I do. I concluded a long time ago I'm not going to be able to change the world alone.

Ed Zschau
I said my goal in life is to live a life that matters. I call it leaving footprints, but I can better achieve my goal leaving footprints with your feet.

And so that's why I do what I do. Well, Ed, I hope this is certainly, I mean, I can't wait to have dinner. We're gonna have dinner after this and continue to catch up. I can't wait to see what you do next. And I'm so, so happy to have a chance to spend time together today.

Tim Ferriss
And this has been a real pleasure for me to do this. Well, I'm proud of you, Tim, and I'm proud of so many people who you refer to who have taken my course. They've taken many other courses, they've had other experiences, but they go out and do great stuff. And deep down I say to myself, well, I'm really glad I lost that Senate race because otherwise I may not have been able to do what I've been doing. Yeah, this sounds strange to say, but I'm also glad.

I'm really glad for my sake and for the sake of many people, that you lost that Senate raise and you've just done so much, so much good. And you're going to continue to do so much good. It's really inspiring. And I think this is a great place to wrap up. Is there anything else you would like to say or close with?

Anything you'd like to recommend to people? Anything at all that you'd like to, to say before we wrap up? Well, I've told you my story and with, you know, some detail based on Tim's questions, but most important thing for you to do, you speaking to the audience, is to do it your way. Don't just follow what is recommended. Don't just pursue what others are pursuing, but do what you enjoy doing.

Ed Zschau
Do it the best. You know how good things will happen. And if you're thinking more about doing something different than you're currently doing, it's time for a change. I could not imagine a better place to close. Ed.

Tim Ferriss
To be continued. We're going to go grab some food and continue the conversation. But thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Oh, this is a real treat, Tim. And, oh, I noticed that there's a blackboard that's dirty and erasers that need cleaning.

There is. So get to it. Yeah, there is literally a whiteboard right behind me. So I'm going to get back to my other tasks, cleaning up for Ed. And to be continued.

And to everybody listening, I will include everything we've talked about in the show notes, which you can find, as always, at Tim blog podcast. And I hope you enjoyed this even half as much as I did. And thank you so much for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim. Again.

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#741: Jim Collins and Ed Zschau

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