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How To Work Like A Top 1% CEO — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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How To Work Like A Top 1% CEO

Nic Munoz · 6,910 words · 35 min read · EN-ORIG

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of How To Work Like A Top 1% CEO by Nic Munoz on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

the greatest CEOs in the world, people like Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, all of them were [music] obsessed with biographies. And that's because when you read biographies, you get to see the patterns that truly make someone [music] great. So, what I did was I read the biographies of all the top CEOs in the

world. And what I found [music] were 10 specific habits that show up in all of them. In this video, we are going over those habits, starting with the first one. I'm not going to start with any fluff. The first thing all the great CEOs have is a superhuman work ethic. Obviously, that's true. It's not 12 hours a day or

16 hours a day even, but it's every single hour of every single day for weeks on end. Biography after biography shows this philosophy. When Elon Musk was starting Zip 2, he was literally living in his office. And one of his employees described him like this. Musk never seemed to leave the office. He

slept, not unlike a dog, on a bean bag next to his desk. Almost every day I'd come in at 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. and he'd be asleep right there on that bag. Halman said maybe he showered on weekends. I don't know. Must asked those first employees of Zip 2 to give him a kick

when they arrived and he'd wake up and get back to work. When you look at Bill Gates memoir, it's practically the exact same description when he was starting Microsoft. Life that fall was mostly a whirl of writing code for days on end and sleeping only when I had to and often wherever I happened to be. I'd

catnap at the terminal or just crawl into the floor next to it. Paul would finish his day at MITs, walk over to our part of the building, and put in a few hours on Microsoft, then go home to sleep for a bit before returning at 2:00 a.m. to find me still at the terminal.

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By that time, we had also set up a terminal in our living room that you could connect over the phone line to the school district computer. Most days, Rick rolled off the couch and planted himself at the terminal, hammering out the 6800 basic code. They were literally working every hour that they were awake.

So much so that they were practically living in the office. They were living their work. And the craziest thing is that when you take all the great CEOs and you read all their biographies, this is not the exception. This is the rule. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all at some point were living

in their office because they were working every single hour of the day. And even people like Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, and Jensen Huang are known to have spent weeks living at their office, even if they didn't live there full-time for a period. In this Facebook biography, it literally talks about how Zuckerberg would actually give

his employees a bonus if they lived closer to the office. And it talks about how they treated the office like home. It's actually an insane description. Just listen to this. Since the vast majority of the workforce consisted of people in their early 20s, including the boss, stepping into Facebook was like taking the SAT while playing a video

game version of Beer Pong. Employees were encouraged to basically consider the office their home. Zuckerberg even gave his workers a $600 a month bonus if they agreed to live within a mile of the office. It's the exact same philosophy at Nvidia. And Jensen Huang even takes it one step further, which I think is

insane because his employees started complaining. In this book, it says, "Landre mentioned to Jensen that some employees were griping about the long work hours. His response was typically discreet. People who trained for the Olympics grumble about training early in the morning, too." Jensen was sending a message. Long hours were a prerequisite for excellence. To this day, he has not

deviated from that view or altered Nvidia's expectations that employees adopt extreme work habits. This is the first key lesson and I know it goes against a lot of business practice that you can work six hours or 12 hours or I don't know how many hours other people say you should work but when you look at

the greatest of the greats the greatest CEOs they worked all of them every hour of their day especially in the beginning when it's a startup when you're fighting against the giants you have to be working all the hours and the reason for this is actually really interesting and it's something that Elon Musk talks

about in the book of Elon when the team is being asked to work super hard. I have to be right there with them and they have to see it. If I fall asleep in the middle of the factory floor at 4 in the morning and wake up 4 hours later, they see that. They are like, "If the

CEO is willing to take that level of pain, I can do it, too." It was a world of hurt. I would wake up smelling like oil and iron fillings. It was rough. But I was asking people to really go all out. I can't expect them to go all out if I'm not doing the same. This is a

principle of war. No one wants to follow a leader that leads from the back, from somewhere that's safe. People follow leaders that are leading from the front lines. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, they all led from the front lines, fighting alongside their men, and that's why their troops were willing to die for them. Elon Musk is applying the same

principle in the workforce. When you work past that 12 hours, the 14 hour mark, there starts to be a pain in your head. You start to lose focus. You don't produce your best work. But in those moments when you push past that pain, it's not about the work that you produce, but it's about the inspiration

that it gives the people around you. People are always inspired by someone who is willing to take on pain. So if you want to be a great CEO, especially in the beginning, work all the hours. So I'm going to start this section with one of my favorite quotes ever from the book of Elon. The best offense and

defense is speed. The SR71 Blackbird is a military plane with almost no defense except acceleration. It was never shot down, not even once. Over 3,000 missiles were shot at the SR71 Blackbird and none hit. All it did was go faster. The power of speed is underappreciated as a competitive factor. Speed is the essence

of war in business. I'm going to repeat that. Speed is the essence of war and business. Every founder knows this. It's really obvious, but very few founders actually apply it. And you can tell when you look at a company and things aren't being broken. This is actually one of my favorite philosophies that Mark

Zuckerberg talks about in Facebook where his motto is literally move fast and break things. That's how you can tell if you're moving fast enough, that you're breaking things. When Hannibal marched on Rome, he sacrificed everything for speed. By choosing to cross the Alps, he lost half of his entire army because the crossing was that difficult. But it

allowed him to move fast and surprise the enemy. And it ended up still working out. Think about it. This guy lost half of his army. Half of all his troops died on that crossing and they lost almost all their elephants and he still was able to make up for it simply because of

speed. The reason I'm talking about Hannibal is because Zuckerberg's takeover of the social media space is not all that different. While pushing out Facebook to different colleges, there was all sorts of problems coming up. Bugs in the app, privacy concerns, but it didn't matter because speed made up for all of it. And in this biography,

it says, "Zuckerberg's takeover of the virtual Harvard compared favorably with the overwhelming use force exercised by his classical heroes like Augustus, Alexander the Great, or one of the online avatars he adopted in the world of civilization." Like those ambitious warriors, he was already looking at future conquest. Instead of refining the Facebook in the laboratory of Harvard

and deliberately rolling it out to other campuses, Zuckerberg began plotting right away to colonize the nation's colleges with the Facebook. so easily. Zuckerberg could have absolutely perfected the Facebook at Harvard. He could have made it the best app in the world, but he chose speed because when you choose speed, you get to iterate at

other places. You get to fix the problems later. The point here is that whenever the greatest CEOs are faced with the option of perfecting a product with time or iterating on the go with speed, they always choose the latter. Speed makes up for so much, and I'm going to say this again, speed is the

essence of business and war. So, very simply, use it. And of course, you probably don't want to act with speed throughout your day on a terrible night's sleep. The greatest founders and CEOs in the world should get the best night's sleep. And that is exactly what the Somni Pods 3 are for. I personally

love to listen to podcasts and audiobooks before I go to sleep, which is why normal headphones and AirPods don't work for me. As soon as you lay down, it's extremely uncomfortable. That is exactly why I recommend Fit Nex's new Somnipods 3. These are tiny ear pods that slip right into your ear and sit

low enough to where you don't have to readjust on the pillow. They block out all background noise so I can really pay attention to the podcast and I can listen to white noise as well while I sleep. And on top of that, since I usually fall asleep in them, the app also shows me all these analytics for

how well I slept in the morning. You can check out the Somnipods 3 using the link in my description. And if you use that link, you will get $10 off your purchase. Now, on to the next principle. I want to start this section off with a quote from this biography, Bill Gates Memoirs, and it is genuinely one of the

best paragraphs I have ever read out of any biography I have ever read. It was clear to me by the end of 1976 that the ambition to be the first to get there, to be the fastest to build the best bridge to the other side, was stronger in me than it was in him. Like one of

those watertight hatches on a submarine, I could shut out the rest of the world. Driven by a sense of responsibility I felt for Microsoft, I had closed the hatch door and locked the wheel. No girlfriend, no hobbies. My social life centered around Apoll Rick and the people we worked with. It was the one

way we knew how to stay ahead. And I expected similar dedication from the others. We had this huge opportunity in front of us. Why wouldn't you work 80 hours a week in pursuit of it? Yes, it was exhausting, but it was also exhilarating. This entire paragraph is absolutely brilliant. It blows my mind

every single time. But the most important part is the first sentence. It was clear to me by the end of 1976 that the ambition to be the first to get there, to be the fastest, to build the best bridge to the other side was stronger in me than it was in him. This

is one of the main principles that separates the greats from the commoners. The great have a sense of urgency. When you read all these biographies, there's one phrase that you see at all of these companies. Tesla, SpaceX, Nvidia, Facebook, they all have this phrase, speed of light. If you don't believe me, here's a couple examples from a couple

different biographies from Nvidia. Jensen has insisted that all his employees work at the speed of light. He wants their work to be constrained only by the laws of physics. Each project must be broken down into its component tasks, and each task must have a time to completion that assumes no delays, cues, or downtime. At Facebook, it was the

exact same. And the Facebook biography says, "The attitude was, we don't give a how long it took you to write code in your previous gig. At Facebook, we want to move at the speed of light." And at SpaceX, Elon Musk said literally the exact same thing, just in slightly different words. The right way to grade

any technology is not comparing it to competitors too easy, but comparing it to the limit of physics. That is, for example, how we grade Starlink latency, which shows that there's still a lot of room for improvement. Same for dollars per ton to Mars. And of course, he's talked about the exact same thing for

his production lines. All three of these companies have something called the speed of light philosophy, which is really what separates them from any normal company. You see, what most businesses will do is they will look at their competitors to see what the time to make a product is and then go back and try to beat that time by making

their systems faster. But what a true great CEO will do before even looking at the competition at the market, at the industry, they reason from first principles. What this means is that they won't ask, "How can we beat our competitors?" But instead, they will ask, "Assuming we are only bound by the laws of physics, what is the absolute

fastest time we can make this product?" Let me give you an example. When they made McDonald's, they didn't do what most restaurants did and serve people food at their cars. But they completely redesigned the system. They figured out that if people got out of their cars and ordered right at the restaurant, the

time between burger and kitchen and burger in hand would be less than if they went out and distributed the burger to each car. This is really reasoning from physics. They have a burger and they need it to travel a certain distance to the customer. If you make people get out of the cars, the distance

between the burger and the customer is simply less. On top of that, they redesigned the kitchen to make that amount of burgers for a high amount of traffic. They check the distance between each section. And they made machines to make multiple burgers at once. This is the speed of light philosophy. They're not doing what their competitors were

doing. They're reasoning from first principles and literally only being bound by the laws of physics. The second part of having a sense of urgency is setting just extreme extreme deadlines. And Elon Musk always talks about this. He says, "I generally try to aim for a deadline that I at least think is at the

50th percentile. So, it's not like an impossible deadline, but it's the most aggressive deadline I can think of that could be achieved with 50% probability, which means that it'll be late half the time." And he continues on a different day. I want to emphasize that some dates are not dates that will actually be met.

For example, the initial release date for the Model 3 at Tesla was an impossible date because there are several unique components in the Model 3 and our deadline assumed all of them would arrive on time. That won't happen. But it was a date for us to hold ourselves internally and suppliers to see what he's doing. He's reasoning from

first principles because assuming everything goes right, which it probably won't, but assuming everything goes right, that is the standard they set. Human error is not bound by the laws of physics. delays, cues, they're not bound by the laws of physics. So, when you set your deadlines, don't include them. SpaceX is one of those companies that's

really able to succeed because they have a Silicon Valley culture even though they're a huge company. And what happens to a lot of companies is as they grow, they lose the speed of light philosophy. They lose that sense of urgency because they're big. And that is one of the worst things that can happen to a

company, complacency. And in the Facebook biography, it literally talks about how they were able to win because the big companies grew complacent. It said essentially Zuckerberg and Moskovitz were operating by the same rules as they did when Facebook was a dorm room project since they never worked at any other company. They didn't

realize how subversive their process was that it essentially violated the accepted best practices of software development. Even Google rebuilt their indexes only every 2 weeks or so, queuing up changes for the regular updates. We had no dogma, nothing to unlearn, says Agarwal. So it's obvious why would you wait? If veterans who lived under the previous paradigm felt

this to be blasphemy, they clearly weren't Facebookers. It's once again speed of light. They are building systems from the ground up that are only bound by the laws of physics. And I have to just share this thing at Nvidia because apparently speed of light is still not fast enough for some people. Later on in 2018, Jensen considered

replacing speed of light with a metaphor suggesting something even faster than light, a physical impossibility. He was frustrated with the increasing slowness across the organization as it grew in size. He yelled at his executive staff that they had to move faster than light and then turned to Robert Songore. Rob, what's the Star Trek Discovery

propulsion system that allows them to instantaneously travel somewhere? The spore drive. We need to be like the spore drive. The great CEOs all have speed of light philosophy. So, if you want to be a great CEO, apply speed of light philosophy. This is another one that you to see repeating over and over again, and

that's that the great CEOs usually have a high capacity for risk. I think the best example is Elon Musk. There's this incredible book by Eric Berger that goes over the beginning days of SpaceX and it has one of the best descriptions that I've ever read that shows you how difficult the path to greatness truly

is. What happened was that in 2006, the company had launched three rockets and all three of them had blown up and the company was running out of money. This description is right after the third rocket blew up. Musk felt as crestf fallen as the rest of his employees. Worse even, he had bet a lot on SpaceX

in time and money and emotional toil with little return. Now his personal fortune was running dry. He'd invested everything in SpaceX and Tesla. Beyond money, his personal life was falling apart. He and his first wife, Justine, had split that summer. They had been together since 2000, with Justine giving birth to six children. Their first son,

Nevada, had died from sudden infant death syndrome at just 10 weeks old. They had shared that horrible grief. Justine had also been with Musk at the beginning of SpaceX by his side when the internet millionaire met a dirty and disheveled Tom Mueller for the first time in an industrial park. 6 years later, it was all unraveling. He tried

to change the world and the world resisted. This was Elon's rock bottom. And the book goes a little bit over the state of his companies as well. Musk really had put all his net worth into his rocket and electric car ventures. And in August 2008, he had almost nothing to show for it. His rocket

company had produced a litany of failures. Tesla was equally cashrapped, only beginning to sell its first product, the Roadster, and an initial public offering was 2 years away. Any rational CEO would give up at this point. They're out of money. They would sell one of their companies and put all that money into the other company to

save it from ruins. But Elon didn't do this. He doubled down on both of these companies. I don't think people really understand how crazy that decision really was when you have the option to save one of your companies, but you choose the potential death of both of your companies. And the craziest part is

that he was betting everything on a fourth rocket. As Musk looked around the conference room in early August, he saw a chance for salvation. He had a good team. He personally hired all these people, judging them to be smart, innovative, and willing to give their all. He had driven them hard. So very

hard. They had made mistakes, but they were dedicated and had put their souls into SpaceX. So, in this dark hour, Musk chose not to play the blame game. Certainly, he could have dished out brutally honest feedback, crushing feelings without regard. Instead, he rallied the team with an inspiring speech. As bad as Flight 3 had gone, he

wanted to give his people one final swing. Outside that room in the factory, they had parts for the final Falcon 1 rocket. Build it, he said, and then fly it. When I talk about the greats, it's these moments that makes the greats. It's moments that will be remembered in a hundred years. And this moment is

really only possible because Elon decided to take the risk. Standard business practice will teach you the opposite thing to kind of minimize losses and maximize rewards. But a lot of these moments that will be remembered in a hundred years happen when you have your back against the wall. When it's either do it or die and that's the

situation that Elon put himself in. If that fourth rocket had blown up, it would have been game over. But it didn't. It's the exact same story during the dot crash when Jeff Bezos kept investing and expanding when the stock dropped 90% or when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and was 90 days away from

bankruptcy and he still chose to bet everything on the iMac. Or Walt Disney who spent $1.5 million on Snow White and almost got shut down by the banks because they were so overleveraged. None of these risks are very calculated. If they would have gone wrong, they would have been completely wiped out. But it

didn't because they had their backs up against the wall. It was either complete the task or die. And it's this extreme capacity to take on risk that allows you to think rationally and clear-headed in these scenarios. So, if you want to be a great CEO, you must have an extreme capacity for risk.

I'm going to start again from the book of Elon. It's just so good. There's so many quotes in here that are brilliant, but this one is really good. Wherever the smartest, most driven people are choosing to work, that company is going to win. My philosophy for companies in the startup phase is a special forces

approach. The minimum passing grade is excellent. I believe that's the culture companies need to have if they're going to become successful. This is definitely one of the most important principles when it comes to CEOs that they only want to work with a players and they are relentless about recruiting only A players at Amazon. This is actually one

of the foundations for why they grow so fast. And he talks about this in the Jeff Bezos biography, which I think has one of the best uh frameworks for hiring ever. For years, he interviewed all potential hires himself and asked them for their SAT scores. Every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar

for the next hire so that the overall talent pool is always improving. He said, a recurring Jeffism. This is the perfect way to look at hiring. You should always be trying to raise the bar so that the talent pool is always rising. On top of that, Bezos is even more ruthless because he ends up cutting

everyone who is not a player material. The book says managers in departments of 50 or more are required to top grade their subordinates along a curve and must dismiss the least effective performers. As a result of this ongoing examination, many Amazon employees live in perpetual fear. A common experience among Amazon workers is a feeling of

genuine surprise when one receives a good performance review. I know this sounds a little bit harsh and a bit insane, but that is simply how the most elite performers operate. They do not tolerate any sort of mediocrity. You can think about it like this. You can either not fire the B people who will

inevitably hire B people and have a company that's mediocre or you can have a great company with A players who will literally not tolerate B players. The choice is yours and it's actually completely yours because when you look at a lot of these biographies, the CEO is actually the one recruiting the first

couple thousand people, personally recruiting the first couple thousand people at SpaceX. Ewan personally hired the first thousand people. And it talks about it in the Ashley Vance biography. He interviewed almost every one of SpaceX's first 10,000 hires, including the janitors and technicians, and has continued to interview the engineers as the company's workforce swelled. It's

mind-blowing how many of these philosophies you can track through history because it says practically the exact same thing in this Rockefeller biography by Ron Chernow. So highly did Rockefeller value personnel that during the first years of Standard Oil, he personally attended to routine hiring matters. After conquering the other refining centers, the payroll ballooned

to 3,000 people and this became impossible. Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not as needed. And this work with a players philosophy just gets even crazier when you think about how these people go out and relentlessly chase the people that they want for their company. When Elon was looking for

someone to design his Tesla car, he literally went out and pursued the best guy relentlessly. Musk ramped up the charm and sold von Holeshen on the idea that he had a chance to shape the future of the automobile and that it made sense to leave his cushy job at a big proven automaker for this once-in-a-lifetime

opportunity. Elon and I went for a drive in the Roadster and everyone was checking it out. Von Hollesen said, "I knew I could stay at Mazda for 10 years and get very comfortable or take a huge leap of faith at Tesla. There was no history, no baggage. There was just a vision of products that could change the

world. Who wouldn't want to be involved with that?" Again, you see this in history with Steve Jobs and John Skolie where Steve Jobs chose John Skoloy and personally pursued him for months and talked to him about why he should join Apple. The simple fact is that a players are the life and blood of the company

because they make up the company. I mean Elon says I consider one of my core responsibilities as CEO is to have an environment where great engineers can flourish. I don't think I manage smart people. They manage themselves. If someone is smart and talented, they can go anywhere and do anything anytime. This is why A players are so important

because they manage themselves. So if you want to be a great CEO, hire only A players. Okay, so once you have a team of A players, what you now need to do is build an intense work culture. Every great army and business has an intense work culture. Starting from the Macedonians under Philip to the Romans

under Caesar to the French under Napoleon to Standard Oil under Rockefeller to the SpaceXians under Elon. The way to encourage an intense work culture in the modern day is to one set the standard and two a philosophy I love called honing the sword. This comes from this Nvidia biography because whenever there were people fighting in

the office, Jensen loved it and he encouraged it. Here's what the book says. Jensen saw more promise than peril in these explosive fights, too. He called them examples of honing the sword, just as a sword only becomes sharper when it meets grinding resistance. The best ideas always seem to come from spirited debate and

argument, even if the back and forth could get uncomfortable. Already, he was learning to embrace conflict rather than shy away from it. a lesson that would eventually come to define his philosophy at Nvidia. And this philosophy is the same at Amazon where in his biography it says, "Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when

they disagree. Even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit holy." This is really what a good business environment looks like. It's chaotic and it's messy and there's fighting. But out of that comes

something good, a new idea. And I love the name of this. It's called honing the sword. When you are crafting a sword, you put it under intense pressure. You repeatedly hit it over and over and over again until the metal is molded into something beautiful. You can think of discussions at your company in the exact

same way as honing the sword. They have to be hard and messy and there has to be differentiated opinions. But at the end of the day, your role as CEO is to encourage that while at the same time, once you are committed to a decision, you must get everyone on board and committed entirely. You can do that by

bearing responsibility of the decision. If you bear the responsibility of the pain that comes with bearing the responsibility, people will follow you anywhere. And then all you have to do is be right. Elon Musk once said, "A maniacal sense of urgency is a very big deal. You want to have an aggressive schedule. And then

you want to figure out what the limiting factor is at any point in time and help the team address that limiting factor. I actually think this is the best framework for how a CEO should operate because it's really just useful and it sorts out ideas in your mind in a really good way. And I actually got it from

this Jeff Bezos biography where it says Bezos is like a chess master playing countless games simultaneously with the boards organized in such a way that he can efficiently tend to each match. Some of these chess games get more attention than others. Bezos spends more time on Amazon's newer businesses such as Amazon Web Services, the company's streaming

video initiative, and in particular Kindle and the Kindle Fire efforts. In these divisions, stress levels are high and any semblance of balance between work and home falls by the wayside. Pretty much a CEO should be focused on two things. One is setting the vision and two is applying force on the bottleneck. This is the principle in

this one, the bottleneck. The bottleneck is a narrow point in a system that slows down or stops a project. So for a company, this can be things like not having enough engineers to build a software or part of the production line that is being slower than the rest of the line or anything else that if you

fix that problem will increase the returns the most. Like Steve Jobs would always say, you only need to get three things done in a day. That's it. In the 18 hours you're working, only three things, and that's called the signal. And everything that stops you from getting the three things done is the

noise. If you understand what I'm telling you, you'll be successful. And what Steve was trying to get at is that the only thing that a CEO really needs to focus on is the bottleneck and then solving the next bottleneck and the next one until you get the maximum amount of rewards for your time. Again, this is a

simple principle, but it's hard to execute because it's so easy to fall into all the different problems that are happening throughout the company. But the fact is that 90% of those problems will go away if you ignore them. The best founders are the ones who boots on the ground operate at the bottleneck.

Okay, from this invid biography, fear and anxiety became Jensen's favorite motivational tools. At each monthly company meeting, he would say, "We're 30 days from going out of business, guys. Fear and anxiety became Jensen's favorite motivational tools." Oh, that is such a brilliant line because it's the same for all of these guys. One of

Nvidia's employees actually described it like this. Dwight Derek said, "It always felt like we were at zero." And the reason is that no matter how much money we had in the bank, Jensen could explain why we were going to be at zero with three things happening. He would say, "Let me tell you how this could happen,

this could happen, this could happen, and all that money goes to zero." Robert Green has this philosophy called the death ground strategy, which I love, where he says that if an army has its back against the mountain or an ocean of some sorts and it has its front to another army, the army that is trapped

will fight twice as hard because their options are either fight or die. He calls this ground death ground. And he says that if you want to bring out your true potential, then you have to purposely put yourself on death's ground. A company fighting for survival will always beat a company that is playing for the love of the game. And

that is the mindset that Jensen Huang instills at Nvidia. You heard his employee. He's really good at explaining how the company could go to zero in three steps. And he reiterates this philosophy all the time to instill the sphere in people. At one point in the book, he even talks about this other

company as a competitor that's looking to take them down. It's one of the most insane things I've ever read, but it's brilliant. Jensen said, "Make no mistake, Intel is out to get us and put us out of business. They have told their employees and they have internalized this. They are going to put us out of

business. Our job is to kill them before they put us out of business. We need to go kill Intel." He is using fear as fuel. And he goes even further in another interview where he said, "I don't think they're trying to put me out of business. I know they are." The best CEOs are also the best military

commanders and they understand psychology. They understand that to get the true potential out of people, you need to invoke the use of fear. You need to use fear as a tactic. Whether that's using intense deadlines or creating some sort of survival mechanism in your brain to activate. And they do this. The best

CEOs have a culture of survival. If you watch this channel, you obviously know that this is my favorite principle because the whole motto of this channel is that the greats study the greats. This is of course true for CEOs. CEO study other great CEOs in history, but on top of that, a lot of great CEOs

studied great military commanders in history. At one point in the Facebook biography, one of Mark Zuckerberg's co-workers was describing him and he said, "Parker would later comment to me about how he was struck with Zuckerberg's obsession with the concepts of power and dominance, constantly citing books of ancient Greek and Roman conquerors. And in the book, there's a

really good paragraph that shows why it's important to study the greats and how it seeps into the work. Eventually, Zuckerberg got fairly comfortable addressing his troops and held weekly Friday meetings where anyone could ask him anything. When the session ended, he would shout out domination in the spirit of ancient leaders who had so long ago

captured his imagination. Invoking a hero's journey for Facebook to a Kool-Aid saturated workforce empowered a natural introvert to express the ambition he hid behind a poker face and do it with a bit of air quote irony that provided a measure of deniability. It was tongue-in-cheek, but he also meant it, says Ginder. And it was inspiring.

It was inspiring. I love that because Zuckerberg knew that he was part of the bigger picture, that they were part of a grander story and he was able to inspire people around him that they were also part of this grand adventure, a hero's journey. That that's what they were doing with Facebook. It's a very similar

mindset with Elon Musk where he talked a lot about Alexander and Napoleon. About Napoleon, he said, "Napoleon was incredible and if they see their general on the battlefield, they will be more motivated. I learned that by reading Napoleon." And about Alexander, he once remarked to investors during his Zip 2 days, I am the reincarnation of the

spirit of Alexander the Great. This is remarkable and the motto is simple. The greats steady the greats. So if you want to be one of the greats, study the greats. At the end of the day, the most important role for the CEO is to set the vision and then constantly reiterate that over and over and over and over and

over again. The most dangerous thing that can happen to a company is that it strays from the vision and it is the founders's job to keep it on track. There's a maxim that goes that the business is an extension of the founder. And that's exactly right. Which is why this principle is so important. Since

the time of Alexander the Great, this has been true. Alexander's vision was to conquer the known world. And so he told his army that they were going to march east and conquer anyone in their path. Eventually, the army got tired of fighting and would look to turn around. But Alexander was relentless about

reiterating the vision. He kept telling people that they were going to keep marching east and to gain more riches and gain more spoils and gain more land. And because he kept reiterating this vision, they followed him. The leader's role is to set and maintain the vision. One of my favorite quotes about Elon

comes from this biography. What Musk has developed that so many of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful world view. He's the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He's less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshalling his troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby

photos, Musk wants to well save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation. All great CEOs have this. They have a clear vision in their head. They're able to speak it aloud and they constantly constantly repeat it to their employees. Jeff Bezos making the most customer obsessed company in the world or Zuckerberg

making humans more connected or Elon's making humans a multilanetary species. I mean, how many times have we, the public, heard each of them say that? Imagine what it's like to their employees where they're just like a soundbox on the loop. They're doing difficult things and that means there's going to be setbacks and hardship and

pain. And it's the leader's job to reiterate that vision again and again to keep everyone from going back. If you can just do that principle, you're already 50% to a great CEO. Thank you so much for watching. If you like this video, you might like this video on how the greatest workaholics in history

worked. Check out my newsletter. I post weekly about the greats of history. That's it.