Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Michael Sonnenfeldt - Founded A Billionaires Club ($165 Billion) | The Hidden Curse of Early Success

Transcript

Michael Sonnenfeldt - Founded A Billionaires Club ($165 Billion) | The Hidden Curse of Early Success · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  Sometimes it's the success of a parent that drives somebody to success, and sometimes it's the lack of success of a parent that drives somebody to success.
• 0:09
  In my case, my father, he did fine, but he did not amass great wealth. I think that pushed me to want to prove that I could do well in my own right.
• 0:18
  He's an entrepreneur, an investor, and a visionary who's built success across industries from pioneering one of the largest commercial real estate projects in US history to launching ventures in clean energy and technology.
• 0:29
  One of the problems with first-time entrepreneurs who are successful, they assume it's all their skill, and they'll just keep doing it again.
• 0:37
  So there's a false confidence that comes when luck is miles on you, and you have a great first fortune. It just doesn't work out that way.
• 0:45
  Michael W. Seinfeld has never stopped pushing boundaries, but perhaps his most impactful creation is TIGER21.
• 0:52
  The world's leading peer learning network for high net worth entrepreneurs and investors. Through it, he's helped some of the most successful leaders on the planet navigate wealth, risk and legacy.
• 1:01
  His story is about building, giving back, and redefining what true success really means.
• 1:05
  Sometimes children of parents of extreme success are overwhelmed and assumed they could never do better than their parents, and it can be demotivating.
• 1:14
  When you're starting something from scratch, when a seller is selling something, the buyer can see something completely different. That's where great opportunity lies.
• 1:24
  Michael, first of all, thank you so much for coming on. This is going to be a lot of fun, and you have an incredible story.
• 1:41
  But I have heard the story of your father, and I think that just to tee up what shaped you as a person and what made you so resilient, just living with this man, I think it would be good for the audience to just discuss the man whose house you grew up in, because it's a remarkable story.
• 2:02
  So my father was a German Jewish refugee from Germany during World War II in 1938. His mother was able to get he and his brother out of Germany to England.
• 2:18
  They had tried to come to the United States, but we had closed our borders. And as Hitler was approaching the family literally considered a kind of mass suicide of all of the family members, but my father says that he convinced his mother not to do that.
• 2:37
  She was by stroke of luck, able to get him to England. And then in England, just like we did with the Japanese, the English interned all Germans, whether they were Jewish or not, and sent them to a prisoner of war camp if they were 16 or older.
• 2:57
  My uncle was 14, so he stayed at the school in England while my father was interned and sent to Australia to a prisoner of war camp in the middle of Australia.
• 3:09
  This was September 1940. He was 17 years old. And when he got to the prisoner of war camp within a week, he was able to convince the common dunt that in fact, he wanted to fight the Nazis.
• 3:24
  And he was not one. And because he had been in England for about a year, his English was apparently quite good and convinced him to send him back to England.
• 3:36
  And the boat that they had come on had 3000 prisoners of war.
• 3:42
  And going back to England, it was dead heading back with four people on the boat and the boat for passengers and the boat was bombed in the Indian Ocean by an Italian marauder, if you will.
• 3:57
  Nobody had told the people on the boat that the boat was being used as a decoy to have the Italian boat come out. And then there was an English frigate behind the Italian that they didn't know it.
• 4:09
  And that's how they were able to take out the Italian pirate boat, if you will. But his boat was hit and he was let off in Bombay, India at the age of 17 with nothing.
• 4:23
  And somehow it's a longer story, but he was able to become the manager of an electronics factory for six months, if you can imagine that in 1940 and eventually made his way to the United States.
• 4:37
  And then his parents in the meantime had escaped to Germany and they were both doctors and he was able to reunite with them in Baltimore, where he spent a year to when he then enlisted the beauty then, particularly with all the issues of immigration today.
• 4:55
  If you enlist in the army, you got automatic citizenship. And so he became a citizen in 1942. He was a private in the army, but at the end of the army, he was tapped by General Bill Dunovan, the founder of the OSS, which then became the CIA.
• 5:14
  The OSS was tasked with managing the Nuremberg trials. And my father was tapped at the age of 23 to be the chief interpreter of the US prosecution.
• 5:29
  He was one of the first privates in history to be carrying orders signed directly by the president. He went behind the enemy lines to Himmler's home to gather some evidence.
• 5:41
  But he quickly became Garing's personal interpreter. Garing was the number two Nazi after Hitler. And the most important part of that was that many people know the history that Hitler came to power when the Reichstag was burned down.
• 6:00
  And he claimed that it had been the communists that had burned it down. And that's why he needed to be given dictatorial powers. One day my father was sitting in the prison with Garing and Garing said, Richard, would you like to hear a little secret? And my father said, yes, Herr Garing.
• 6:19
  He said, I burned down the Reichstag. Hitler told me to do it. And it changed the perception of history and all that happened because clearly Hitler used that as the pretext for coming to power when Hindenburg abandoned his powers.
• 6:35
  Well, if that wasn't enough, my father, after Nuremberg came home, became a world famous engineer, finished the color TV. I have the final patents on 17 patents on color TV at home.
• 6:48
  But in those days, he was working for a corporation. It happened to be our CA. Unlike today, if you were an engineer, you'd probably get royalties. He was paid a salary, but he got the pleasure of finalizing color TV. We had literally TV number one that came off of the production line in our home when I was growing up.
• 7:08
  He then sent the first satellite into orbit. It was a weather satellite, became the dean of a business school. And for a while was in charge of all of NBC's operations.
• 7:20
  And then his last invention was something called a video disc. Before DVDs came out, there was a competing product that was tried in the market developed called video disc. It was a technological triumph, but a commercial failure.
• 7:36
  So with all of that, I had a brilliant father who was a bit of an inflexible German personality. So on the one hand, it's nice to tell you the story. It wasn't as easy growing up with him as my father as the accomplishments might suggest.
• 7:55
  What does that, was that pressure that's put on you? Is there expectation that's put on you to succeed to do certain things to pursue particular career paths out of your father's life and legacy? How did that impact you as a young child?
• 8:11
  You know, it's interesting because if you look at Tiger, we have 1600 members around the globe. And some of our members success came because they were competing, if you will, with their parents and wanting to show that they could outshine them.
• 8:28
  And some of our members success came from because they came from homes that were broken homes and their parents had not amounted to much and they wanted to prove to the world that they could do better than their parents.
• 8:42
  So sometimes it's the success of a parent that drives somebody to success and sometimes it's the lack of success of a parent that drives somebody to success. Obviously, in my case, my father was he did fine, but he was not he did not amass great wealth, but he had extraordinary stature and accomplishments and his mind was quite extraordinary.
• 9:09
  And you know, I think that pushed me to want to prove that I could do well in my own right. Sometimes children of parents of extreme success are overwhelmed and assume they could never do better than their parents and it can be demotivating.
• 9:27
  So one of the real challenges with anybody who's achieved any kind of success, whether it's material or a great author or cured cancer, whatever it is, is trying to encourage your kids to find their own way to be successful in their own right not feel that they have the shadow hanging over them of a parent who they could never match.
• 9:53
  You know, you have it with every president's children and you know, it's unusual. That's why when for better or worse, whether you are a fan or not, when George Bush came to power after his father had been power, that's a very unusual story of a child of somebody so successful being able to match that as well.
• 10:16
  When you think about sort of the path that you took in life, you had a very, I mean, at 31, it was 31 correct when you sold harborside financial center for over 100 million, those numbers are correct and that age is correct.
• 10:29
  That is still remarkably young. I know I know that there are some, some people that have built massive amounts of wealth at an even younger age, but I would say that objectively 31 is a pretty good age to have 100 million dollar sales.
• 10:44
  Obviously you were quite ambitious, quite aggressive with your career. Do you think that you in particular were doing that because of what your father had achieved over his lifetime, even if not financial success, but just the stature and just the acclaim that he achieved or was it something internal that drove you in particular?
• 11:05
  Well, one of the things that I remember growing up was that I was raking lawns, shoveling snow, I was slinging milk at the local dairy barn, working at the tennis academy. I always was ambitious to want to earn money that I could do what I want with.
• 11:27
  And one of the things that stuck with me is sometimes when I would earn a fair amount of money, I would spend it on something that my mother with thought was foolish.
• 11:38
  And I remember my father saying, you don't have a right to tell him that if he earned it fairly and honestly, he can do any damn thing he wants with it as long as it's honest and okay.
• 11:51
  And there was sort of this notion that when you have accumulated wealth, it creates options that you might not have without it.
• 12:03
  And so I think the combination of that sort of being drilled into my head that the road to freedom, the road to the possibilities that I would control came from achieving success along with the example that he had set.
• 12:21
  And by then, by the way, I had married somebody and her father was also an incredibly successful man. And so having a father and a father in law whose shadows were overshadowing me probably was a pretty powerful motivator, although I think I was pretty motivated even from before that.
• 12:42
  So that your first success, that was a $100 million plus exit, incredible. What did that really teach you about what is required to be successful, just based on your own experience, obviously a little bit of risk, a little bit of a lot of action.
• 12:59
  But what do you think allowed you to have a $100 million exit at 31 years old outside of your parents influences?
• 13:06
  First of all, I had a partner. So we had to split that. I should say that. But my partner was twice my age. My partner was actually my father's age.
• 13:18
  And we were 50, 50 partners. We started when I was 25 and he was 57. And in a sense, he became the father I didn't have, although I had a father, he became the brother I didn't have, although I had a brother and he became my best friend and mentor too.
• 13:34
  So probably one of the most powerful lessons from that experience was the power of partnership. Most of the things that I've accomplished in life, I've done in one type of partnership or another.
• 13:51
  And I think part of that is that I'm aware that I have certain skills that are either unique or in short supply. But I'm also aware that I have blind spots and weaknesses.
• 14:07
  And when I can find a partner that I can divide and each of us can complement the other very often that's a one plus one equals three kind of situation.
• 14:21
  So the first was that I had an amazing partner. The second, which is proven to be true over my life is you have to have real conviction.
• 14:34
  You have to have a point of view when we bought that project, we lost money for the five or six years that we owned it, but we knew we were creating value or we believed we were creating value.
• 14:47
  And in time and time again, what distinguishes many of the greatest entrepreneurs is the ability to delay gratification because you have to keep investing back in a business where you have to stop looking elsewhere, you have to just focus on what you're doing.
• 15:06
  In one case, I owned a solar lighting business for 25 years and I had an unblemished track record of 25 years of straight losses, but eventually I found a company to merge it with and then during the next five years that new new combined business made up for all those losses and more.
• 15:28
  But not many people have the fortitude to wait 25 years to do something so delayed gratification and the other thing is that for people who've gone to business school or read business literature, there's this notion of efficient markets and efficient market says if this was such a big opportunity, the market would have already reflected it.
• 15:54
  Therefore, it must not be a big opportunity, but anybody who's been a successful entrepreneur realizes that they've seen opportunities, perhaps that nobody else has seen and you have to really convince yourself that there's something there.
• 16:10
  The last thing I would say is that when you're starting something from scratch, an idea like an apple in a garage or a bill gates or whatever it is, that's what real estate people would call green field development starting with an empty piece of lot and doing something that's different than buying an existing building.
• 16:34
  I was buying a building that was the largest building of its type in the world when it was built in 1930, but it was a white elephant as an industrial building.
• 16:44
  I think the way that I've tried to explain it to people is I was buying an unfinished office building and the sellers were selling underutilized warehouse when a seller is selling something because of how they understand that product and the buyer can see something completely different and see the value.
• 17:09
  Our value was made on the buy because if you figured out what it took to upgrade and renovate an old warehouse, it was a lot cheaper than building the building from scratch in this particular case.
• 17:23
  We were looking at what it would be worth as a finished office building and what it would take to get there.
• 17:31
  Very often, particularly in real estate, but not only when you can buy something that the seller is in selling, they think they're selling one thing and you see another use for it. Sometimes that's where great opportunity lies.
• 17:45
  This is always an interesting conversation because I work with and work with, I interview a lot of exited entrepreneurs and they all more or less echo the same sentiment that you've spoken about where you feel like after the exit, you feel like the rugs pulled out from underneath you and you try and figure out what's next in your life.
• 18:02
  This is the premise for Tiger, obviously at the time Tiger did not exist yet, but I'm curious what that walk through for people that are listening for entrepreneurs that are building what you experienced when you sold for over 100 million obviously.
• 18:21
  Yeah, you split at 50, 50, but still an incredible amount of wealth is created, all of a sudden now you have more money in your bank than you've ever had before, but you're still going through this transition period.
• 18:38
  When that happens, when the transaction happens, what do you feel?
• 18:43
  So what I want to say is that for entrepreneurs who have had the good fortune of having a successful exit, something magic happens in the moment that the deal closes and it's like going through the looking glass because you go from having 100 or 1000 employees to maybe having an assistant or no one.
• 19:09
  And as we like to say everybody used to laugh at your jokes and now there's nobody to laugh at your jokes anymore and you go from owning a business to having a large bank account, but all of a sudden issues of legacy, health, meaning and what's next all come into being.
• 19:28
  And what we've created tiger 21 for is primarily that moment when all of these changes occur in my case.
• 19:40
  Obviously a big difference when you have a liquidity when you're 31, then when you're almost 70 and when I was 31, I wasn't thinking I didn't have any children.
• 19:55
  I wasn't thinking about legacy. I wasn't sure I'm not even sure I'd heard the word wealth preservation. I just assumed if I had had this extraordinary success by 31, I could just keep doing it again and again because how we how hard was that.
• 20:15
  And of course life taught me a few lessons. It's not as easy as you think. So one of the biggest decisions that entrepreneurs have to make is after they have one success is do they have another one in them. Do they have a desire to do it again.
• 20:32
  65 or 70 or 80. You're not likely to be doing it again. If you're 30 or 35, you might be, but in my case, I just assumed I would keep doing deals and I didn't think much about wealth preservation.
• 20:47
  So I invested in a couple of deals and one of those deals when South, you know, nobody bats a thousand and one of the problems with first time entrepreneurs who are successful is they rarely appreciate how lucky they've been they assume it's all their skill and they'll just keep doing it again.
• 21:07
  So there's a false confidence that comes when luck is a smiles on you and you have a great first fortune. So after I had my first fortune in in harbor side, I tried to create a new company that didn't work and after five years I had to throw in the towel of that company and realize why was I successful in the first case, but not successful in the next case.
• 21:35
  And it took a lot of personal introspection to think about what the product services the way I manage people where my strengths were.
• 21:45
  And so when I did it a third time, then it was the third times the charm because that was even more successful than harbor side.
• 21:54
  But there's nothing more dangerous than a young entrepreneur who's been incredibly successful who thinks it came so easy.
• 22:04
  It'll just keep going easy. It just doesn't work out that way.
• 22:08
  Was there a specific incident or thing that went wrong or investment? I mean, you mentioned your second company didn't work out, but was there a really, really traumatic event that made you realize, okay, I need to create a community for people that have had exits to support each other.
• 22:28
  Was there like one particular event that led to tiger 21?
• 22:32
  What happened was I tried to build that second company. It wasn't a real estate company. It was a real estate information company.
• 22:44
  You know what Zillow is today. We basically created something similar to Zillow, but before the internet and instead of Zillow, whose customers are consumers who are looking at the price of a home, our customers were the real estate brokers who were serving.
• 23:02
  So brokers could look up one line for much of that information. And the problem was that registered brokers were our customers and during the Iraq war.
• 23:17
  The economy went backwards in America and half of the real estate brokers in America delisted meaning they weren't making enough money to keep their licenses going.
• 23:30
  Real estate brokerage community shrank by half in a one or two year period. Well, our customers were real estate brokers. It's hard to build a business when half your customers go away.
• 23:42
  So one thing that it taught me is sometimes markets just work against you. It's tough to fight a market. Some companies will succeed in anything.
• 23:55
  But others are dependent on having markets and many people who have been successful because the market has been kind to them. Don't realize how lucky they've been to have been doing whatever they were doing in a period where the market was very kind to them.
• 24:12
  And then all of a sudden it turns and the market isn't as kind. And so that second business, the market turned against us. And you know, I'm not sure I managed it all that well. I'm not suggesting it was perfectly run. In fact, I learned that I was not as good a manager as I was an entrepreneur.
• 24:33
  I had a remote business in Atlanta and I didn't have any of the skills that worked for me when I was managing people in person to be able to influence people that were a thousand miles away.
• 24:46
  And so what happened was I went backwards. I had made a lot of money when I was 30 and now I had less of it by the time I was 35 because I had lost money on this company.
• 24:59
  And I woke up one day and realized that while none of these things were all that likely to happen, I could imagine 10 things that if they all went wrong, I would have lost most of my money, whereas I had just given up a small amount of it.
• 25:16
  And it scared the bejeezus out of me. I didn't know what I couldn't imagine that I would go that far backwards.
• 25:23
  So I started a company called MS EMMES. My initials are MS. It also means truth in Hebrew and started buying distressed real estate and built a billion dollar portfolio where we delivered 38% returns to our investors.
• 25:44
  And had an extraordinary success that was one of my career highs. But when I sold MS, I said, you know, I had that first success when I was 31 and then I went backwards during the middle part of my 30s and now I'm 43 and selling my second success.
• 26:03
  I don't want to ever have to go backwards again. I don't want to ever have to start a fourth company to try and make up the losses.
• 26:12
  Had a smart people when they've been smart enough to have a great success. Learn had to both pursue new opportunities after they've sold their business, but preserve capital.
• 26:25
  Balance those type of issues. And that was really what Tiger was about. It was trying to learn from people who were smarter than me or it had experiences that I hadn't had.
• 26:38
  How do we how do we learn so that I could continue moving my career forward, but not jeopardize the wealth that I had created so that I went back to square one.
• 26:50
  Net suite is a success story partner. Now what does the future hold for business? If you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising. They're falling.
• 27:00
  Honestly, at the end of the day, we just need a crystal ball, but until then over 42,000 businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with net suite by Oracle.
• 27:09
  The number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite.
• 27:18
  There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting.
• 27:25
  You're pairing into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I needed this kind of business management system, net suite is exactly what I do.
• 27:38
  So whether or not your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions net suite helps to respond to immediate challenges in your business and seize your biggest opportunities and speaking of opportunity, you have to download the CFO's guide AI and machine learning.
• 27:51
  The guide is free for all listeners. That's net suite.com slash Scott Clary indeed is a success story partner. Now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast.
• 28:01
  How can you find amazing candidates fast? It's easy. Just use indeed when it comes to hiring. Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job posting on other job sites.
• 28:10
  Indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference.
• 28:23
  Indeed data sponsor jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsor jobs. Plus with indeed sponsor jobs, there's no monthly subscription, no long term contracts, you only pay for results.
• 28:36
  There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to get your jobs more visibility. Just go to indeed.com slash Clary right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com slash Clary terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need.
• 28:59
  It's really interesting because that out of every single person I've spoken to that sells a business that is such a common sentiment just the absolute fear that they're going to screw it up somehow.
• 29:13
  And it's ridiculous to think that you could screw everything up, but you get in your head about what was this a one time thing. Is there a chance that it's going to go to zero. What if I make the wrong investment and this is I don't think before tiger 21 there was really a group. I think it was very lonely on the other side of an exit.
• 29:33
  And it's hard for people to understand. It's really hard for the listeners. Yeah, it's it's terribly lonely because all of a sudden, you might have created a lot of wealth and some people may know what you created, but you're having all these challenges.
• 29:51
  And they're really quite daunting, but everybody is saying, Oh, I wish I had those problems. Well, maybe, but when you have those problems, those are your problems. And first and foremost is children. How do you not allow your success to screw up your children.
• 30:09
  And how do you give your children a chance to grow and mature on their own without being overwhelmed by their parents success so that they can enjoy it on their own.
• 30:22
  So there's and the other thing is that, you know, one of the things that we've learned over the years is if you're neither an entrepreneur nor an investor, they seem like the same thing. They're just people managing money and assets, making money.
• 30:41
  It's kind of like the Eskimos have nine words for snow to you and I, maybe it's just that white fluffy stuff, but the Eskimos have real expertise to distinguish between different types of snow.
• 30:55
  And the difference between an investor and an entrepreneur is night and day if you're an investor or an entrepreneur, but not to anybody else who is not involved in either.
• 31:06
  You know, investors are quite dispassionate. They have to be across a portfolio of things. An entrepreneur is generally quite emotionally tied up in the one thing that they're working on.
• 31:19
  So they over concentrate, but they're lucky enough not all entrepreneurs who concentrate on one thing are successful, but most of the successful entrepreneurs have concentrated on one thing and milked it for all its worth for 10 or 20 or 30 years.
• 31:37
  So concentration risk is a problem every investor knows, but the most successful entrepreneurs think that's the way to go.
• 31:47
  And you know, most entrepreneurs who love what they're doing and that's where the most successful entrepreneurs are really don't want to sell their asset.
• 32:00
  And it happens and they might be forced to sell or there might be an health issue or it just might be an offer that you can't refuse, but it's a very emotional decision.
• 32:11
  For most investors, they try not to get too emotionally involved in any one of their positions so that when it reaches the level it's supposed to, they say it's time to sell and move on to the next investment.
• 32:25
  So there are a lot of differences, you know, one of the little secrets of tiger is that we should really say we take some of the world's best entrepreneurs and turn them into mediocre investors.
• 32:38
  Because if we didn't, they turn out to be terrible investors as it turns out we have a lot of great investors in tiger and some of the entrepreneurs have figured out how to be great investors, but on average, the transition of being a great entrepreneur to becoming a competent, if not great investor is a huge shock.
• 33:01
  It takes one average three to five years for a really great entrepreneur to become a competent investor and obviously within their, there's some great investors that come out of that.
• 33:14
  When you, when you speak to an entrepreneur that's had that first exit, what's your advice to them to help them transition from entrepreneur into investor so they don't make foolish mistakes when they join tiger 21.
• 33:29
  So first of all, you have to do some personal introspection, it doesn't matter whether it's psychiatry or meditation or whatever it is that allows you to learn more about yourself, but you really have to ask yourself, do I think that the skills that I brought to this entrepreneurial success would allow me to do it again.
• 33:55
  Or was I lucky enough that maybe I should count myself lucky and now think about being an investor, so you have to know yourself, do you, first of all, if you're a 30 that question might be very different than if you're 70, if you're 70, even if you thought you could do it, you might not want to do it.
• 34:13
  So this, this notion of knowing yourself, are you fundamentally an investor on entrepreneur in your personality type is really important to kind of explore.
• 34:26
  And the other is to say, you know, part of what we're talking about is something that we call sticker shock most entrepreneurs over estimate the value of the money that they'll have after they sell they forget that they'll have to pay taxes and then they forget that once they pay taxes, they're going to earn a return that's so much less as an investor than they earned as an entrepreneur.
• 34:54
  That's sometimes their income literally goes down 50, 60, 70% simply because if you were earning 20% as an entrepreneur and then you pay taxes and you're earning three or four or five%.
• 35:07
  It's obviously an awful lot less income and your lifestyle changes. So when you sell a business, it's not necessarily to give you more annual free cash flow, it's to take risk off the table.
• 35:22
  And would you rather have risk off the table, but not as much cash flow, the business doesn't cover your expenses. If it did, it doesn't send you on vacations. If it did whatever, whatever that was going on in your business.
• 35:37
  But obviously at different levels, you might have enough one of the big surprises people learn is that tiger members on average live on about 2% of their net worth.
• 35:51
  Obviously, there are many different variations because some people have different types of income, but as a rule of thumb, 2% is a number. Well, that's a real shock. If you sold your business for $10 million, you probably were living on an awful lot more than $200,000 a year.
• 36:10
  But once you have $10 million, if you're living on more than 200,000 a year, you won't be able to preserve your capital. You might spend down. And if you're 70 and you say I'm going to live to 90 over 20 years, well, maybe you can live on 250,000 or 300,000 and still have a dollar when you die.
• 36:31
  But it's quite shocking to most people what the change is when you're living off passive income. I'll just give one other example.
• 36:40
  Being an entrepreneur breeds lousy investors because when you own a business and it's throwing off money each year and then you invest that money.
• 36:52
  If the investment went bad, you don't care about it because next year the business will throw off more money and you can make an investment. So when you're at a cocktail party, you don't have to tell anybody about the bloopers that you made, you can just talk about the winners as if you're a genius.
• 37:09
  But once you sell your business and there's no repetitive fountain of cash, when you lose principle by losing money and an investment, there's no way to replenish that cash. There's no business to fill that up.
• 37:23
  So the skills that many people as entrepreneurs have as investors are sloppy, undisciplined investing and that's sure to get you in a lot of trouble once you no longer have the business to replenish your losses.
• 37:40
  When I know that you do a portfolio defense with all your members, maybe describe what that is briefly, but also I want to understand what comes out of that portfolio defense in terms of best practices, percentage allocations, just averages, obviously everyone's going to be different.
• 37:58
  But for the most successful, the people that have figured it out, I know that all the different asset classes, the crypto, the private equity, the real estate, everything I want to understand what the best in the world are doing.
• 38:09
  Yeah, so once a year, if you're a tiger member, you belong to a group, there's 12 or 15 people in the group, you meet once a month and therefore each month one person does a portfolio defense, they've worked on it for a month, they've pulled all their information together.
• 38:28
  Many times people are understanding this information literally for the first time you can't imagine people don't know what they're worth, what all their assets are, how they're allocated, they often don't share it.
• 38:42
  Excuse me with their spouse or even their advisors because they don't want their advisors to know what they have or whatever, but in tiger, this is the opportunity to get 12 people whose agenda there is to share their knowledge with you to not to not sell you on anything, but to employ the collective knowledge.
• 39:05
  So when you show a portfolio and you talk about the philosophy of how you've constructed your portfolio, two amazing questions in the portfolio defense, who is this wealth meant to support?
• 39:19
  Well, some people say my family, that's my husband or my wife and I, some people say it's from my wife or husband and I and our children, some people say, oh, well, we're supporting our in-laws or we're supporting our sisters and brothers, everybody and others say it's to support the people in my church or my synagogue or at my college alma mater, people define the purpose of their wealth very differently.
• 39:48
  And you have to start with understanding what people's purpose is for their wealth and a second question is if the markets were to go down or your net worth were to go down 20% or 50% what would you do?
• 40:06
  And some people say I wouldn't change anything because I live conservatively and some people would say, well, I'd have to do this that or the other, these are the kind of questions.
• 40:16
  But basically when you show your portfolio, it reveals in almost every case a bias or a blind spot.
• 40:27
  Some person might not have enough cash because they're just assuming the equities will be fine, but in a market crash, maybe you need to have cash.
• 40:37
  That's why Tiger members on average over the last 15 years carry about 12% cash, very little debt and 12% cash and if you go back to the 2% I was talking about, that means in the worst of cases, you might have six years of living.
• 40:56
  It doesn't quite work out that way, probably three or four years in any case, but the point is that history has shown that when you're forced to sell assets to raise cash, when the market is down, that's the worst time to sell.
• 41:14
  And if you can have enough cash to weather the storm, then you're not forced to liquid liquidated discounts, which really takes a hit to your portfolio. And obviously, if you have cash, when the market goes down, you can buy opportunities, you couldn't not otherwise buy.
• 41:30
  So in simple answer, our members have 10 or 12% cash, our members have 28% in private equity, 28% in real estate and only 24% in public equity.
• 41:46
  That's a very unusually low allocation, but our members are all the great entrepreneurs, so they made it in private equity or private ownership of businesses or private real estate.
• 41:58
  So it's no surprise that even if they sell, that's what they want to invest in. But I think the bigger thing that is important is between the 28, 28 and 24, that adds up to 80% of our members' assets are in long biased assets.
• 42:15
  That's a very long term bullish feeling doesn't mean anything about what they think the market will be this year or next. It just says over the long term, owning businesses in real estate is where wealth has been preserved and created.
• 42:30
  Are there any alternative investments that the wealthiest? And actually, you know, it's really good because we didn't even pin a number on it. What is the average net worth of a tiger member? So people can just really understand the amounts we're dealing with here.
• 42:45
  To be a tiger member, you have to be managing between 20 million and a billion of personal net worth and the average tiger member is managing about 130 million of personal net worth. Do you see a high net worth ultra high net worth investing in alternative assets like I mentioned crypto before or anything else that anything else that would be interesting to them.
• 43:08
  Totally. First of all, the fact that 28% is in private equity is out of all proportion to what a typical wealth management firm would recommend because our members are entrepreneurs who created wealth.
• 43:23
  They're more comfortable having the illiquid investments and within private equity. Of course, the biggest part, the reason it grew over 15 years from 10% of our portfolios to 28% is that venture capital has been a growing section.
• 43:43
  I guess is 15 years ago venture capital was almost nothing. And today it probably is quarter or a third or a fourth of the total private equity allocation. So percentage wise, it's grown tremendously. So that's one area.
• 44:01
  Gold is typically been a one to three percent asset. Obviously this year it's done something extraordinary in the last year because of concerns about the dollar and the US economy.
• 44:14
  And we have some real Bitcoin and digital currency rock stars who are members, some of the members leading funds that are in crypto and some of the world's leading experts.
• 44:26
  We have many many members who have millions and tens of millions and likely hundreds of millions of Bitcoin and some of the other crypto currencies.
• 44:39
  But it's still at this point as best we can tell if of the 1600 it would be a small percentage of it who are real devotees. So in the aggregate it's about a one to three percent asset as well.
• 44:55
  And because our members have about 200 billion under management, you know, a 3% that would suggest we own about 6% I'm sorry 6 billion of cryptocurrency, not insignificant.
• 45:10
  But you know there's a race going on now between Bitcoin and gold, which is the better storehouse of value.
• 45:20
  The traditionalists tend to lean towards gold, probably our younger members, but not only younger members, like the digital features of Bitcoin and the fact that you can put it in a Bitcoin wallet and it's totally portable and is really a way to protect against currency devaluations and other state concerns.
• 45:48
  When you think about coming into a significant amount of wealth, you mentioned one of the major concerns is children and you know how do you make sure you don't screw up your kids.
• 46:01
  So I think that what would be really interesting is just to understand for people that have made a significant sum of money from an exit.
• 46:08
  When you think about family and legacy and children and even you mentioned before, which I find super interesting, some people don't even talk to their partner or their spouse about how much money they've made or I guess how they allocate it.
• 46:21
  What are some of the biggest concerns outside of investment? We've covered investment, obviously that's major, but family, kids, wife, husband, what are people worried about?
• 46:32
  Without doubt, the number one concern across tiger members is how do I both not screw up and at the same time provide for my children and those are conflicting the more you provide the more you might be screwing up your kids.
• 46:49
  So what's that perfect balance and it generally breaks down into two very different approaches. One approach is to give your kids very little in their early years so that they can become independent and successful in their own right.
• 47:11
  And in that philosophy, probably you're waiting till the kids are somewhere between 25 and 30 maybe even older than 30 before you fully disclose to them what you're worth.
• 47:26
  The philosophy being that if I told them how much I'm worth and how much they're likely to inherit, it would disincentivize them from finding their own path to success.
• 47:40
  There's not a lot of evidence that that's exactly right, but it might be approximately right. And just to give you an idea, my best guess is about 70% of tiger members follow that approach because they don't want their wealth to get in the way of their children forming their own identities, their own careers, their own success.
• 48:03
  About 30% of our members and it probably skews towards the wealthier end of our membership say that our kids are going to inherit so much money that I'd rather teach them about money teach them how to be stewards of the wealth they'll eventually inherit.
• 48:23
  And you have to start that from an early age because it takes a long time for people to really master the concepts and understand the impact.
• 48:34
  If you're of the 70% and you never tell your kids what they're going to inherit, maybe they're making decisions that stop them from becoming a priest or a rabbi or a community service or a researcher or a public servant because they don't know how the resources, they don't know they have the resources that would allow them to do that.
• 49:00
  On the other hand, if you give your kids too much money, maybe it could demotivate them from having the passion to try and create success on their own.
• 49:12
  So there's no perfect answer. Part of it is your own philosophy and part of it is knowing your kids.
• 49:19
  But there's obviously successes where kids created their own independence and only later found out they were inheriting wealth and there are also great successes where kids learned what they were going to inherit and that enabled them to make decisions that could benefit society or make their lives fuller and that it didn't in any way stunt their growth.
• 49:44
  So it really depends on what your philosophy is, but the one thing that we know from kids is that at least in your will, you better be treating your kids equally or you're going to leave some deep emotional scars if you leave more to one or the other with one exception.
• 50:05
  If you have a deeply held family value and you talk about that value over many years with your children, then they can understand why the value overwhelms the equality.
• 50:18
  So if you want to leave a trust for children who go into the clergy or a trust for children who become public school teachers or a trust for somebody who preserves the family farm.
• 50:32
  There are a number of these kinds of exclusions where you talk about our family value is the farm that your grandfather or great grandfather had or we would love you to become a public servant the Kennedys were reported to have trust for any Kennedy that went into public service.
• 50:50
  So if you can do that, but during your children's life, it's not as clear that it has to be equal.
• 51:00
  It's some some family say it's each kid according to his need.
• 51:04
  One kid wants to start a business and you want to lend the money to start a business and another one wants to buy a home.
• 51:11
  Each is according to their need and as long as there's a basic equity and the kids feel that they're being addressed, it doesn't leave the kind of emotional scars that if one kid is treated one way and another kid treated another.
• 51:25
  What about the spouse because that's also hopefully everyone's happy but I'm assuming that there's still some some things that people have to think about or at least want to think about when they come into a huge amount of money.
• 51:38
  I think what I want to say is that there's no way to answer what kind of information should be shared between spouses without getting into how many variations of a marriage or a relationship are there because we have many members who have created significant wealth.
• 51:59
  Sometimes before they got married, sometimes after and their spouses have no idea whatsoever of what they're worth. I was in a portfolio defense of a man who was in his mid 60s and it only told his wife recently that the level of wealth that they had.
• 52:18
  Obviously she knew they had enough wealth to support their lifestyle but had no way to put a number on it and apparently was never interested to know that's curious to me I would I personally would want to know but that's that's that's my own predisposition.
• 52:34
  But I hear stories about Tiger members whose spouses have no idea what the scale of their wealth is and spouses who are 100% partners in the sense that they know everything and they actually jointly feel like the sacrifices they made in title them both to that wealth.
• 52:56
  And it's harder for me to draw any perfect conclusions. You all want a perfect marriage but we know that over half the marriages in America end in divorce today anyway.
• 53:08
  So I'm a little it's a little tougher I know that in my case my spouse has access to everything that I have and I have access to everything that she has that's the nature of our relationship and most of the people I know but I do see it all over the place.
• 53:28
  NetSuite is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're going to get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over 42,000 businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with net suite by Oracle the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting financial management inventory and HR into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite there's one source of truth giving you the
• 53:58
  visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting you're peering into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next if I needed this kind of business management system net suite is exactly what I do so whether or not your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions net suite helps to respond to immediate challenges in your business and sees your biggest opportunities and speaking of opportunity you have to download the CFO's guide AI and machine
• 54:28
  learning the guide is free for all listeners that's net suite dot com slash Scott clary indeed is a success story partner now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast how can you find amazing candidates fast it's easy just use indeed when it comes to hiring indeed is all you need stop struggling to your job posting on other job sites indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want
• 54:58
  faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsor jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long-term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsor job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash clary right now and you're going to get your job
• 55:28
  support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash clary terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need just interesting I feel like I think the lessons are with a lot of these a lot of these like learnings because again
• 55:44
  there's so much there's so much variation across the board but I think the lessons are a lot of introspection and I would say a lot of communication and I think that those two things are just good habits I know that you I mean even I think at some point in your life you practiced a lot of meditation and
• 56:01
  then you abandoned it came back to it but you mentioned meditation you mentioned introspection these are all great tools to understand yourself and if you don't understand yourself when you come into a massive windfall a massive amount of wealth I'm assuming that that is the most dangerous situation when you don't know what you would be happy with what you would not be happy with what you'd like to communicate to your spouse what they want to hear what I don't know I just feel like a lot of introspection is needed if you thought about this like this cycle
• 56:31
  logical work have I thought about it that's what I've been doing for 26 years going to save you just give you a give you an example of a member who did a portfolio defense and when I met him 10 or 15 years ago it could be any number but let's say he was worth 10 million dollars and then he said you know I just for whatever reason I'd like to be worth 20 million and then everything will be okay and when he got to be worth 20 million all he wanted to be
• 57:01
  worth was 40 million and the minute he was worth 40 he was reaching for 100 and you know we can all find ourselves on that endless rat mill you know the the circuit what's the called the track red mill yeah rat race
• 57:18
  and you know there's this fundamental question is when is enough enough and it has nothing to do with the number because you could leave a great lead a great life if you had a million dollars or 10 million or 100 million or a billion and I can give you many examples of people who have the 100 or a billion who aren't leading a great life so it's not it's all about how you think about it but some of us are sort of
• 57:48
  programmed for whatever reason that wherever we are we're just striving for a little more it's not a bad thing that's what makes great entrepreneurs keep going
• 57:59
  is balance important or are there seasons of your life where it is required to be imbalanced to achieve this level of success meaning I've
• 58:07
  always thought that at some point it is good to focus on your health and your relationships but I know a lot of people that
• 58:14
  don't while they're in the throws of building they seem to put everything else to the side just in pursuit of the business
• 58:20
  school do you see that to be the the norm it's such a great it's such a great question I think it affects each person
• 58:27
  differently you know you I hope the analogy I'm going to make make some sense because I've known people who were not
• 58:38
  philanthropic during their life and yet when they died they left a foundation and either their
• 58:45
  children or their heirs allowed that foundation to do extraordinary good you know Warren Buffett for
• 58:52
  many years said he was going to keep his money because he was earning more than any foundation could
• 58:58
  and when he died he'd leave the money to the foundation but then his friend Bill Gates convinced him
• 59:04
  yeah but if your money saves the life today how much more valuable is it than saving another life 20 years
• 59:11
  from now and apparently Warren Buffett gave about half of his wealth I don't remember the exact number
• 59:16
  to the Gates foundation many years ago so the answer is you know a life well lived follows many
• 59:27
  definitions but one of those lives is you know a relationship what what's the nature of your
• 59:34
  relationship I was very fortunate to have a wife whose father was also an entrepreneur and I worked
• 59:42
  extraordinary amounts traveled and wasn't home for dinner and was on the road and she was incredibly
• 59:49
  supportive so one of the big lessons that comes out of the book that I wrote about entrepreneurs is
• 59:55
  whose whose your significant other if you're pursuing goals one way and your significant other
• 1:00:03
  is not digging that liking that then that's harder for you to do it so one of the things you have
• 1:00:10
  to look at in choosing a life partner is will that person accommodate to your ambitions and you
• 1:00:19
  to theirs it takes two to tango obviously so the the question that you're talking about a balance
• 1:00:30
  I don't one of the most depressing things that ever happened to me in a tiger meeting is we were
• 1:00:36
  talking to a man who was worth 30 million dollars and we were asking him about we talk about philanthropy
• 1:00:44
  we try not to judge but we try and share information and when I asked him what his philanthropic
• 1:00:51
  budget was he said oh I don't have a philanthropic budget philanthropy is for the wealthy people
• 1:00:58
  and I wanted to say you're worth 30 million dollars how much more wealthy do you have to be I know
• 1:01:04
  some great philanthropists who aren't even worth a million dollars but they give a portion of their
• 1:01:09
  income and they give a portion of their time so I think philanthropy in particular when you're
• 1:01:15
  talking about balance I'm always more interested in meeting somebody who has some element of gratitude
• 1:01:23
  because if they've made it to a tiger table and they haven't achieved some level of gratitude I don't
• 1:01:31
  think that they're appreciating how much good fortune they've had to get to that table you always
• 1:01:36
  meet people with a chip on their shoulder but when somebody thinks that their wealth that they've
• 1:01:42
  created doesn't come because they've been helped along the way and because they've had some luck
• 1:01:49
  I find to be sometimes one dimensional and I want to work with people who have a certain
• 1:01:57
  modicum of gratitude and a sense of wanting to have an impact on the community that they're in
• 1:02:03
  and appreciate even the workers who supported their success and that makes for a more whole
• 1:02:11
  person in my mind but you know comes comes with all all different stripes no I agree I mean I
• 1:02:20
  think that you're very you worded that very nicely I also I also really dislike when people
• 1:02:27
  consider themselves self-made because that means that they didn't have customers or investors or
• 1:02:32
  friends or peers or and it doesn't in my opinion that doesn't exist it doesn't exist there's always
• 1:02:38
  someone else who's been part of your journey but if you think about you know I forget to forget the
• 1:02:46
  forget the people I'm sorry to interrupt no no you're fine I'm sorry when you when you talk about
• 1:02:51
  part of your journey one of the greatest lessons that I've learned is the role of mentors and
• 1:02:59
  if you take a hundred people in any profession and line them up from least successful to most
• 1:03:08
  successful using any reasonable definition of success money number of papers published friends I
• 1:03:15
  don't know what it is any reasonable the half that are most successful will overwhelmingly have had
• 1:03:21
  mentors in their life and the half that are least successful will overwhelmingly have excuses for why
• 1:03:28
  they don't have mentors in their life and something you just said reminded me that when you asked
• 1:03:35
  me before about some of the lessons that I learned I've been blessed with five or six or seven mentors
• 1:03:42
  in my life that every one of them sort of lifted me up one rung on the ladder in terms of my ability
• 1:03:50
  or my perspective and I try and do that with younger people as well how would you for somebody who's
• 1:03:57
  listening right now how would you advise them on finding mentors do you recommend they find people
• 1:04:02
  that are far more advanced people that are have just accomplished what they're looking to accomplish
• 1:04:09
  people that are you know kind of in their peer group that are on the same level to hold them accountable
• 1:04:13
  how do you look at mentors and peers mentors come in all stripes and all colors and all flavors but
• 1:04:22
  basically it's generally within the human spirit to want to have a mentor and to be a mentor and
• 1:04:33
  what people say when they can't find a mentor they just haven't been looking because I think that
• 1:04:41
  if you're somebody who yourself who you are a decent honorable person of integrity and ambition and
• 1:04:52
  kindness for lack of a better way of saying it it's almost inconceivable that if you ask
• 1:04:58
  two or three or four reasonable candidates one of them won't in one way or another
• 1:05:04
  want to become your mentor and that's just the nature of the human experience and mentors can
• 1:05:13
  make all the difference in a person's life I always mostly had mentors that were very
• 1:05:22
  approximately my father's age whether that's a coincidence or not I don't know but I was looking for
• 1:05:29
  people who had achieved some kind of success in some field and had some persona to me that felt
• 1:05:40
  balanced or insightful or kind and I just wanted to know what made them tick but I was looking for
• 1:05:49
  people that had really different kinds of success that I could learn from and I just think it's
• 1:05:57
  one of the most one of the least understood most important phenomenon of almost any young person's
• 1:06:04
  success young or old you're never too old for a mentor I have a I have a close friend of mine
• 1:06:11
  who's 96 years old and I'm going to be 70 we met because we were both on the board of an
• 1:06:19
  organization called business executives for national security that was trying to help frame our
• 1:06:26
  national security and I I can't do the math but when I was 30 I guess he was 56 and we spent the
• 1:06:33
  weekend on an aircraft carrier sharing a bunk and here we are 40 years later from that weekend
• 1:06:41
  that started on a bunk and I still go out to see him every couple months to be showered with his
• 1:06:49
  perspective and wisdom it's been a source of inspiration for many years for me first of all how
• 1:06:55
  important is meditation for an entrepreneur somebody who's trying to be successful and if not
• 1:07:00
  meditation then what other practices do you think are very useful I think you have to start
• 1:07:07
  with a kind of perspective of the way our minds work it's it's when somebody says I'm of two
• 1:07:14
  minds or there was a very famous book by Danny Coniman who's a Nobel Prize winner called Thinking
• 1:07:24
  Fast and Slow the way we've evolved is our brains is actually the combination of a reptilian brain
• 1:07:33
  that evolved into a mammalian brain and then human aspects so they're different parts of our brain
• 1:07:39
  sometimes it's the conscious and unconscious but the point is most people there's some aspect of
• 1:07:49
  their thinking where there's a process going on in the background where you're kind of thinking
• 1:07:55
  about problems but it's not in the foreground and the two are quite separate but when you can find
• 1:08:02
  ways to connect that background or that unconscious to the conscious and sometimes it happens through
• 1:08:10
  meditation sometimes it happens through therapy very often it happens when people are taking a shower
• 1:08:18
  have you ever heard the story oh I was in the shower and I got an idea came into my head
• 1:08:23
  there are different ways some people do it with exercise and so the the the point is that anything
• 1:08:34
  that allows you to connect the different parts of your brain into a functioning hole sometimes
• 1:08:43
  is like a bridge that connects two ideas when I'm meditating it's not like I'm thinking about a
• 1:08:50
  problem I'm trying to have my mind blank but that blankness opens a door to that part of the brain
• 1:08:58
  that's thinking about that problem that I wasn't even aware of and a solution comes in to a problem
• 1:09:04
  that's I'm working on but not at that moment but in my life it's no different than somebody says
• 1:09:10
  I had an idea for a new product in the shower well in the back of their mind their their brain
• 1:09:15
  was working so it doesn't really matter whether it's you take a hot shower every morning or you
• 1:09:21
  and and spend a half an hour just relaxing or you're meditating or you're in therapy
• 1:09:28
  some people say there's some aspect to it for a runner's eye when the endorphins occur so there's
• 1:09:35
  lots of ways to access the whole mind most of the time we're conscious we're just in the conscious
• 1:09:44
  mind and that's not where our best thoughts or our deepest connections come from and when you can
• 1:09:51
  access that deeper connection sometimes you're able to have levels of creativity or problem solving
• 1:10:00
  that wouldn't otherwise occur to you and I found that there's another aspect in meditation
• 1:10:08
  that probably is elsewhere too the Buddhists have a term called the observing mind and that's
• 1:10:15
  when you're in an experience most of us are in it at the moment but a well-trained Buddhist
• 1:10:21
  is both in it and observing it and sometimes you experience an emotion I'm sure I'm not the only
• 1:10:29
  person that sometimes comes into a room and for one reason another and feel a little insecure
• 1:10:35
  because people there are more successful than me or better looking or more accomplished or whatever
• 1:10:43
  it is and that creates a nervousness and I start talking blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
• 1:10:49
  an observing mind says are you aware that you're behaving in a way that is consistent with insecurity
• 1:10:57
  and when you can name it it tends to dissipate so this notion of having an observing mind
• 1:11:04
  in interactions when you're talking to people when you're with people is just a way
• 1:11:10
  to allow people to master their emotions so that their emotions don't drive them to behave
• 1:11:17
  in ways that might be seen as counterproductive do you feel like that is something that you've developed
• 1:11:23
  at a later stage in your life or is this something that you've pursued purposefully to help sort
• 1:11:29
  of optimize your cognitive performance your your reaction there's obviously many successful people
• 1:11:36
  who don't meditate and haven't been to therapy and again there's many unsuccessful people that have
• 1:11:43
  so they're no absolutes but I believe that the people who I know who try and access these
• 1:11:52
  subconscious unconscious hidden thoughts and integrate them into their behavior and their thinking
• 1:12:00
  are generally happier people are people who have more gratitude and I'm not going to say more
• 1:12:09
  successful but I'd like to believe that it aids in success it certainly has for me if I
• 1:12:16
  tell you the number of times I'm I happen to be a almost daily meditator I often get up at 4
• 1:12:23
  30 in the morning not to meditate I just get up and I can't go back to sleep so I'll go meditate
• 1:12:29
  for 45 minutes and during those sessions I can't tell you how many times I've been on that for
• 1:12:36
  about the last 15 years I think and I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a problem
• 1:12:43
  but not that day it wasn't even on my mind when I was meditating but out of the blue a solution comes
• 1:12:51
  and I said oh my god why didn't I think of that before that's so clear and you know it could be
• 1:12:57
  do I take this direction or that direction or I'm in a negotiation and I can't break a break
• 1:13:03
  it up and and get it going and it just it's happened dozens and dozens of times and when I say
• 1:13:10
  dozens of dozens of times that mean it doesn't happen every day it doesn't happen every week
• 1:13:16
  sometimes it doesn't happen every month but I've had so many breakthroughs in getting such perfect
• 1:13:22
  clarity that whether again it's meditation which works for me analysis it's a form of therapy I've
• 1:13:31
  done that as well for many years different people do it for different reasons but I find it's
• 1:13:38
  just a way to be in touch with who I am and maximize my performance have you ever fallen into the
• 1:13:44
  trap of having your identity so wrapped up into your business that it actually hurts your
• 1:13:53
  how do you and what's your recommendation for entrepreneurs that do have their identity wrapped up
• 1:13:57
  in their financial success I've had my identity wrapped up in every business I've been involved
• 1:14:03
  with at Harborside I used to think of the word Harborside with a vine growing around it that was
• 1:14:11
  my identity because that's how wrapped up I was in it and the you know it tigers different because
• 1:14:20
  I'm lucky to be surrounded by a team of 150 people of extraordinary talents 1600 incredible
• 1:14:27
  members but I'm the face of Tiger I'm the one who does the TV and most of the new shows and
• 1:14:36
  podcasts as well and so I'm associated with Tiger a lot but I am finding that
• 1:14:45
  when I was 30 and I was tied up with Harborside which was the largest commercial development in
• 1:14:51
  the country at the time I thought appropriate for my first real estate project I found that a
• 1:14:59
  real loss of identity when I sold it Tiger while I'm very involved with it it feels different I'll
• 1:15:08
  be 70 in October feels differently when I think about all the things that I've done although Tiger
• 1:15:15
  is probably the one that will have the most lasting legacy of course other than my children but the
• 1:15:23
  the this issue most entrepreneurs are tied up because as I said before they're emotional they're
• 1:15:32
  this is their baby they're they're they're wrapping themselves around it and the only the only
• 1:15:39
  thing is just like any love affair it can be healthy and it can be unhealthy and trying to figure
• 1:15:47
  out when that identity that's tied up is healthy because it's making the business more successful
• 1:15:56
  while making you feel better about yourself that's good but if it's you know if it's sucking the
• 1:16:02
  life blood out of you and causing you to do bad things or counterproductive things or unhealthy things
• 1:16:10
  then it's not good it's it's all very case-specific and it's a trap that's too easy to fall into
• 1:16:18
  what are the biggest regrets of the members of Tiger 21 that they when they look back on their
• 1:16:24
  life you know I I'm sure that there's it's fantastic question I I think that what I would say is
• 1:16:34
  I hate to use the word regret if you second guess what the mistakes where you can't ever know whether
• 1:16:44
  history if you got if if you did the thing you forgot you did or you wanted to do whether it would
• 1:16:50
  have been turned out better or not there's you know life is you know unexpectedly good things happen
• 1:16:57
  and and bad things happen and you have to make the best of it but I when somebody asked me
• 1:17:05
  I don't ask many people who out regrets but for me I don't have any because if I told you I
• 1:17:12
  wish I did this or I wish I did that I actually have no basis to know that it would have turned out
• 1:17:17
  any better I'll just give you one example I am an entrepreneur I'm a small time entrepreneur
• 1:17:24
  that's been successful a couple times but each time I start I restart with planting a new seed
• 1:17:31
  I don't buy large companies I start something over and over again and what that means is I pretty
• 1:17:36
  much sold every business I ever built too soon because once it grows into a tree I'm not that
• 1:17:45
  interested in pruning trees I'm interested in planting seeds and growing new trees and another
• 1:17:51
  way of saying it is that my particular passion is around the act of creation what I love to do
• 1:18:00
  is to create things to have an idea that people say couldn't be done I'm like many entrepreneurs
• 1:18:07
  and to prove them that it can be done Tiger was an example people can't imagine you could build a
• 1:18:14
  business off of what we do and bankers said it wouldn't happen when I did that first project it
• 1:18:19
  was an old warehouse and an abandoned area and nobody believed you could turn it into a modern
• 1:18:26
  office complex so my point is that sometimes people say you know if you hadn't sold each of those
• 1:18:33
  businesses you'd be a lot wealthier today and I'd say maybe that's true but I wouldn't have had
• 1:18:38
  the quality of life I've had and I wouldn't have had the ability to start the next thing and have
• 1:18:44
  the pleasure and the pain of starting things and seeing what's successful so I think there's just
• 1:18:50
  so many situations where regret is just a counterproductive thing that you have to weed out wherever
• 1:19:01
  you are you can make the best of where you are and look forward not backwards because that's all
• 1:19:07
  you can affect I love it where I know that your book think bigger that's available everywhere you
• 1:19:13
  can get books Amazon etc etc if people want to connect with you where would you want to send them
• 1:19:18
  any social website that we can put in the show notes below you know the Tiger 21 website I don't
• 1:19:25
  do a lot of social media per se I barely have enough time to brush my teeth at the end of a day
• 1:19:31
  and I'm not of that ilk I also think that I have some questions about whether all of social media
• 1:19:42
  particularly among teenagers but also among voters is a productive force in our society and as a
• 1:19:49
  personal habit I don't engage in a lot of social media but I'm at you know www.tiger21.com and
• 1:20:03
  I'm easy to get a hold of I'm Googleable last thing I like to ask you given over so much
• 1:20:08
  to say so thank you for coming on I really appreciate it I always like to ask the last question
• 1:20:13
  out of all the things that you've learned in your life say you could only pass on one lesson
• 1:20:17
  to your children it's the most important lesson that you've ever learned what would that lesson be
• 1:20:21
  and why what comes to mind is it's sort of be grateful
• 1:20:33
  find the wonderful things that you can you have can and can benefit from and be true to yourself
• 1:20:42
  I think that I think so many people imagine that there are truths that are independent of who
• 1:20:51
  they are as opposed to who they affect them each of us is different each of us has an identity
• 1:20:56
  and the extent to which we can know ourselves and then act accordingly I think is a pretty great
• 1:21:04
  guide for moving forward