Read The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3zbDGhi

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

Notes: 

• How to create a learning organization - Set the tone at the top. The senior leader needs to model this behavior. Create peer groups at your place of work. Team learning is important. Give people the responsibility to lead training sessions. Support your teammates. Pay for them to go to conferences, hire coaches, and learn.
• Commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence: They are curious. They have no confirmation bias. They have high standards. They respect all members of their team. They have a vision and goals and they share them with their team.
• GPS - Goals, Perspectives, Strategy.
• Process -- Full transparency, one meeting per week. Start with a story about a member at each meeting.
• "If you know what to do, what would you do?"
• Help high-integrity leaders make good decisions for their company, family, and community.
• Hiring "must-haves"
  • They believe in the mission
  • They don't think they're better than others
  • They listen
  • They collaborate well
• Advice:
  • Give back what you can to help others.
  • Be generous.
  • Learn.
  • Get away from bad bosses.
  • Be balanced.
• The power of being part of a peer accountability group – I’ve learned firsthand the impact this has on leaders through my Learning Leader Circles.
• The differences between leading, managing, and coaching, and why you must do all three...
  • Leader - Set direction, make sense of the outside world
  • Manager - Know the details
  • Coach - Help you activate what you already know

Order our new book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3VJoYFZ

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

This episode is supported by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing company dedicated to empowering people. Please CLICK HERE for premier staffing and talent.

• Rejection is a learned skill. Tara has gone through rejection therapy. Go out and ask for something crazy big. Get comfortable with being rejected. Hearing the word no. Go big.
• Confidence is about keeping promises to yourself. Create evidence for yourself.
• Create magical moments for the people you’re leading. Show them how much you care for them. The small touches are a big deal. The magic is in the small details.
• How to have fun at your company: Fun (and culture) cannot be outsourced. You cannot delegate “culture carriers." You (the leader) are the ultimate culture carrier. It has to come from you.
• "Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money."
• "If it's too easy, you get soft."
• It's important to set high expectations for the people you're leading. "The boss I respected the most was a hard ass and very demanding."
• The difference between nice and kind:
  • Nice = Soft, easy.
  • Kind = Set high expectations. Hold you accountable to them. You're better long-term being kind.
• Tara's "must-haves" when hiring a leader:
  • Raw intelligence - How quickly can you learn? Must be a clear and critical thinker.
  • Fantastic communicator
  • Intensity, drive, hunger
  • Sense of humor - Need to be able to laugh and have fun.
• Values:
  • Business owner
  • Kid at heart
  • Design thinking - Craft for the end-user
  • Peak performance
  • Be human
• Keys to a great off-site retreat
  • Craft for the people
  • High energy
  • Sense of connection - get to know each other
  • Peak performance workbook - set goals
  • Small touches - personalized gifts for the team (like picture frames with personalized pictures in them)
  • Create magical moments to connect
  • Focus on the arrival - make it special
  • Eliminate loneliness - Assigned seats, name tags, conversation prompts (especially helps introverts)
• Tara worked at LuluLemon while in grad school at Stanford. It was a useful learning experience for her. She worked for a world-class manager.
• What Tara learned from her parents:
  • Leadership is about modeling the right behaviors.
• Advice - "If you want to be extraordinary, you can't fit in."
• "Give way more than everybody else."
• "Follow great people and be around greatness."
• Tara created a 50-slide PowerPoint while going for a role as a part-time content writer. Going above and beyond for that leader left an impression and that woman who Tara impressed remains a mentor, investor, and friend to this day more than a decade later. You never know what will happen if you consistently over-deliver for people.

Read our new book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3VlZHCA

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

This episode is supported by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing company dedicated to empowering people. Please CLICK HERE for premier staffing and talent.

Notes: Daniel Negreanu has earned over 52 million dollars at the poker table, which ranks him as the highest-earning player in live tournament poker history. He’s won 6 world series of poker bracelets, two world poker tour titles, and Daniel was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2014. He’s often referred to as “Kid Poker” and is known for his charismatic personality at the table.

• Commonalities among the greatest poker players in the world:
  • Self-Awareness
  • Humility
• In order to avoid criticism, “say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”
• Daniel is obsessed with the Rocky movies and the lessons learned from each one. Rocky 3 - Don’t get complacent. Rocky 4 - It’s heart versus machine. Rocky Balboa - But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!
• The luck factor... Dealing with things outside of our control. A victim versus an owner mentality. Victims will complain, give up, sulk, be passive-aggressive, or procrastinate. Owners will seek solutions, take action, or ask for help. Victims will focus on things they cannot control, while owners will focus on things they can control.
  • "A big mistake is a beautiful opportunity." It's easier to be a victim and not take responsibility.
  • "Failure builds muscle."
• "I don't care what others think anymore. I do not have that fear."
• Rounders (the movie) is the greatest poker movie of all time.
• Why Daniel is inspired by Sylvester Stallone...
  • He's not complacent
  • In Rocky IV it was heart versus machine. Rocky (Sly) was all heart.
• Outspoken and direct – “If you have a problem with me, text me. And if you don't have my number then you don't know me well enough to have a problem with me.” – Christian Bale
• Phil Ivey said about Daniel: “I can't think of too many people who have done more for the game of poker than Daniel.”
• When was Daniel happiest? “I would say in very high-stress situations. During the World Series of Poker main event [in 2015], when I actually was eliminated in 11th place and felt a gut punch.”
• Early life – Be Rich – At an early age, Daniel was ambitious: "From the age of four, I thought I'd be rich. I told my mom I'd build a house out of Popsicle sticks and move to California."
• Sharing both the wins and the losses with his fans: “This is what holding yourself accountable looks like. I could lie, right…or B. I could just not share this with you but then that wouldn’t be authentic and real, right? I’m not just going to share my winning years, I’m going to share my losing years."
• Daniel is willing to go outside of his comfort zone... Head's up matches with Doug Polk (a head's up specialist): On July 29, 2020, after a years-long feud, Daniel publicly accepted a challenge to a high-stakes grudge match with Doug Polk. They played 25,000 hands of No-Limit Texas Hold'em at $200/$400 stakes. The duel ended on February 4, 2021, with Polk winning approximately $1,200,000 over 25,000 hands. Then in 2023, Daniel got a rematch with Doug and beat him for $200K and a championship belt.

Read our book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3VrogOC

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

This episode is supported by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing company dedicated to empowering people. Please CLICK HERE for premier staffing and talent.

Notes:

• What Erika learned from her dad: “He loved his work and was so full from it. Three weeks before he died he was doing Zoom calls with students from the ER even though it was beyond unnecessary and impractical to do so. If you love what you do it can add so much dimension to your life and the lives of others. He liked people and to learn from them. There’s something to learn from everybody. And the best control was no control - let things happen and learn from them & adapt.
• Career advice: Know what your company is paying you to do. And the better you make your boss look, the better it will be for you. Find problems and clear the path for your boss. Make their life easier. Make them look good. That’s the role when you have a boss.
• Must-Haves When she’s making a hiring decision:
  • Be able to share stories of how you’ve gone for something that failed, and learned
  • Be curious, ask thoughtful questions
  • Do research on the company. CARE. 
  • Test the product. Be able to demonstrate that you know what it does.
  • Bring a point of view. Articulate what you could bring to the role and how you could make the company better.
• Joanne— I wanted to be you until I realized I couldn’t, so I decided to be me. I studied you for twelve years. You are the architect of all my work dreams, and you are the scaffolding I built myself on. You put force into my nature, and for that I am so grateful.
• Getting the Barstool CEO role: She earned the job over 74 male candidates. “I wanted this job because they were considered too rogue, too untouchable, too badly behaved, too unproven. Dave Portnoy (the founder) was powerful, seemingly unmanageable, and volatile.”
• In 2012, when Chernin bought a majority stake in Barstool, the company was worth $12 million. You sold it to Penn Entertainment seven years later for $550 million.
• Make Your Own Luck – When Erika was nearly graduating college, she applied for an internship at Converse no less than 45 times. She never got an interview. Why? “I didn’t do anything unique enough, passionate enough, or memorable enough to deserve a chance at the job.”
• “It was a heart attack every day for nine years,” Erika said of being Barstool’s CEO.
• As the first-ever CEO of media magnate Barstool Sports, Ayers Badan led the company through explosive growth (+5000% in revenue and significantly more in audience), expanding the company from a regional blog to a national powerhouse brand and media company. During her 9 years steering the company, Barstool became a top ten podcasting publisher in the US, with the world's #1 sports, hockey, golf, and music podcasts, and a top 6 brand globally on TikTok.

Read our USA TODAY Best-Selling Book, The Score That Matters

https://amzn.to/4bNbVcO

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

Notes:

• John Quincy Adams once said, “Gratitude… when it takes possession of the bosom, fills the soul to overflowing and scarce leaves room for any other sentiment or thought.”
• Ask yourself the question, “What good shall I do today?” When you’re upset that your social media post didn’t get as many likes as you thought it would stop and think, ‘What good shall I do today?” It can reframe how you approach others and be more servant-based (which is a mark of a great leader)
• The fox mindset versus the hedgehog mindset. A hedgehog has a single lens. It’s more rigid thinking. A fox sees the world through many different lenses. It’s more flexible and adaptive. That is a theme of this conversation. Be open, be less judgemental, and be more curious about the way others view the world. “The older I get, the less certain I get of my opinions.”
• “It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.” AJ shared that when he was dedicated to the thank you project even on a bad day when he was focused on saying thank you, his mind eventually caught up to his body.
• Change Your Mind – the founding fathers did this a lot. Daniel Kahneman said, “No one enjoys being wrong, but I do enjoy having been wrong because it means I am now less wrong than I was before.”
• Be Humble In Your Opinions – Ben Franklin told a short parable. He said, there was a “French lady, who, in a dispute with her sister said, I don’t know how it happens, sister, but I meet nobody but myself that is always in the right. The point is that we are all that French lady. We all believe we have a monopoly on the truth. (Remind yourself that you’re wrong sometimes)
  • Flexibility of mind: Many of the Founding Fathers were open to the idea that they might be wrong, and more willing to change their minds than leaders are today. At the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin summed up this open-mindedness: “The older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment.”
• Think Slow – There are parts of modern life that would benefit from an enforced speed limit. We need fewer hot takes and more cold takes. We need more slow thinking. Writing in depth letters by hand forced ideas to be more nuanced. Thumb-texting acronyms have the opposite effect. Slow down consumption. Forced self to read the news just once a day.
  • The value of slow thinking: For the year, AJ wrote a letter with a quill instead of using social media or texts. It was a revelation. It led to a less impulsive, slower style of thinking – a waiting period for his thoughts.
• Embrace Virtue – In the founding era, virtue was a cherished ideal (now it’s often used in the phrase virtue signaling which is not a compliment). “A virtuous person puts the interests of others before their one. They focus on those two key words in the Constitution’s Preamble, “General Welfare.”
• We Control the Sun – The sun carved on the back of George Washington’s wooden chair at the Constitutional Convention. The sun was cut in half by the horizon. Was it rising or setting? At the end of the convention, Ben Franklin said he was convinced it was rising. America had a bright future (the world is built by optimists) Whether the sun sets or rises on democracy, that’s up to us, we the people.
• In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin tells a story about his father criticizing his writing."About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator," Franklin wrote, "I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it."
• AJ’s goal was to try to understand the Constitution by adopting the mindset and lifestyle of the Founders for a full year. He committed to living as the original originalist as a new way of searching for answers to one of the most pressing questions of our time: How should we interpret America’s foundational document today?