The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com
My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful.
Connect with me on Twitter/X: @RyanHawk12
Instagram: @RyanHawk12
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This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My guest: Danny Meyer is the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and one of the most influential restaurateurs of his generation. He built New York landmarks like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack... He's the author of the classic Setting the Table and the new What Could Possibly Go Right?
Key Learnings
"Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard."
"Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently." Shimon Peres. Danny prefers to live as an optimist.
Most people respond to hope. A few will come out of a dark closet hopping on a pogo stick and a few will walk on the shady side no matter what. Most people start the day intending to make it better than yesterday, and they'll follow someone who shows them how that could happen.
A growing business needs funding and leadership. It also needs soil. Like a plant needs sun and water and still needs something to grow in. The soil is the culture, and it determines whether anything you plant actually grows.
Be explicit about which behaviors you celebrate and which you won't tolerate. Then be relentlessly consistent about both. That's how culture survives you not being in the room.
Everyone is watching who gets hired, promoted, and paid. Every time you compromise on either the skills or the character, you send a message that you didn't mean any of the words. Probably unwittingly, but you send it.
Curiosity is the behavior Danny celebrates most. If you want a team that treats every day as a chance to be better than yesterday, someone has to actually wonder what could be done differently.
Entrepreneurs are upsighted. Danny's word. They only see what's up, only see what could possibly go right, and they look at existing problems that would make the world better if solved.
A bad salesperson answers questions you never asked. Danny remembers a shoe store that hauled out everything from the back room regardless of what he wanted. The only two questions that mattered were does it fit and do I like it.
A great one gets into your shoes and asks what you'd want. Sometimes they help you get to the question you actually have.
There's no job that doesn't benefit from good sales skills, and good writing skills.
Entrepreneurial athleticism is the trait Danny looks for in every leader. Talent gets you in the door. Athleticism is dedicating yourself to train plus the mental and emotional mettle to find a way to win.
Day one mentality. The day a restaurant opens, nothing is scratched, every door works, nothing is smudged, and you assume everyone might be a critic. Day one of year 10 should be better than the original, because you have ten years of learning. Without that, it only goes backwards.
The hiring formula is 49 and 51. Forty-nine percent is how well he thinks you can do the job, which is mostly technical and different for every role. Fifty-one percent is who you are.
That 51 percent is Hospitality Quotient. The composite of optimistic warmth, curious intelligence, determined work ethic, empathy, self-awareness, and integrity. Someone with a high HQ is happier themselves when they make someone else feel better.
"Cooking a great piece of fish only gets you to the 49-yard line." You need all 100, and it isn't just the servers who need it. It's everybody.
A high HQ is a liability in an interview. Danny sometimes has to park his own at the door, because his job isn't to make the candidate feel good. It's to assess how they'll make the staff and the guests feel.
Never ask if someone is self-aware. They'll say yes. Ask instead: "What's the greatest misperception other people have about you?" You can't answer it without self-awareness, because you have to know both what you are and what you're projecting.
When hiring a chef, Danny already knows they can cook. What he's testing is the feedback loop. Will they get defensive? Grateful? He may well be wrong in the feedback, and he still wants to know early what it's going to be like to lead this person.
Caitlin took a reservation and saved a woman's life. She was getting a phone number when the caller's voice started halting. Caitlin sensed something was wrong, asked permission to call 911, and got the address. It was a hemorrhagic stroke. The woman survived and had to relearn how to speak. Caitlin was so moved that she went back to school to become a speech therapist for people with aphasia. When the woman died recently, she left Caitlin the money to pay for it.
A good employee books the table accurately. A great one changes someone's night, or their life. Danny's point about Caitlin: nobody trained her for that. The culture did.
Mind share is what marketing earns. Heart share is what hospitality earns. Mind share means people know you exist and think of you first. Heart share means they love you and tell everyone they know.
The golden rule of hospitality is not the golden rule. Do unto others as you believe they would want done unto them. Service is one size fits all. Hospitality is one size fits one.
The salmon that changed everything. Soon after Gramercy Tavern opened, a Union Square Cafe regular told Danny what happened was inexcusable. Her salmon came well done when she'd ordered it rare. Danny's first reaction was that an honest kitchen mistake didn't seem so bad.
The mistake wasn't the problem. The response was. At Union Square Cafe, she said, the server would have noticed, quietly removed it, brought soup so her guests could keep eating, recooked it properly, and probably taken it off the bill. At Gramercy, nobody came over while she picked at it. A manager eventually took the plate, handed her a coat check, told her the rest would be waiting at the door, and left it on the bill.
"If you don't have language, you cannot teach." For ten years Danny led one restaurant by embodying the behavior he wanted. With two, wherever he was, he wasn't at the other one. It was the first time he had to lead by using his words instead of just embodying what he wanted to see.
Enlightened hospitality, in this order:
Each other first. How the team treats each other, with generosity and charitable assumption.
Then the guests.
Then the community and the suppliers.
Then the investors, who end up with more because of everything above.
Break it anywhere, starting with how people care for each other, and it doesn't work.
Lead with generosity. You're in business for tomorrow dollars, not today dollars. His staff charged that woman for the salmon because they were afraid she was working an angle. Danny's response: where is the charitable assumption that maybe we just overcooked it?
Nice and kind are different. Nice isn't a bad thing, but sometimes nice is how you avoid addressing a problem.
Kind means I'm on your side, which sometimes means holding up the mirror. If someone isn't measuring up and you let it go, that isn't kind and it isn't even nice. Kindness takes the courage to give honest feedback without demoralizing the person.
Laying people off during the pandemic wasn't nice. Doing it one at a time was kind. Several hundred people, and nobody got laid off by tweet or mass email. Everyone was spoken to by their own boss.
Shake Shack started because Danny asked what could possibly go right. An artist needed someone to run a hot dog cart under an installation in Madison Square Park. His team said they were too busy running four restaurants. Danny's argument was that the park was the front yard of two of them, and you take care of your front yard.
They staffed it with their coat checkers and served Chicago-style on purpose. The coat checkers had no work until the weather turned cold, so this gave them a summer job. Chicago-style has eight toppings, which let them find out whether four coat checkers could remember how every regular liked it. The point was proving hospitality isn't only for fancy restaurants.
They lost money two years running, and the community started calling it "our hot dog cart." Danny heard the word "our" and knew people felt shared ownership.
Then he gave away the building. He built a $750,000 kiosk and donated it to the park, so the park owns the building and his company owns the business. A percentage of every sale goes back into keeping the park beautiful and safe. That first Shake Shack still pays just under a million dollars a year in rent to the park.
Danny's champagne moment a year from now: that the book actually meant something to people. He wrote it to teach himself, because that's how he learns. If the lessons he picked up scraping his knees turn out to be useful to someone else, it was worth it.
Reflection Questions
Which behaviors does your team know for certain you celebrate, and which do they know you won't tolerate? If you asked five of them, would you get the same five answers?
Look at your last promotion. Did that person clear the bar on both the 49 and the 51? What did everyone else learn from watching it?
Where are you being nice right now when the situation calls for you to hold up the mirror?
Podcast Chapters
00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle
01:36 Meet Danny Meyer
03:23 "It's That Simple, and It's That Hard"
05:15 Optimists and Pessimists Die the Same Way
08:47 Culture Is the Soil
12:53 Why He Celebrates Curiosity
15:44 What Sales Taught Him
19:48 Entrepreneurial Athleticism
23:15 The 49 and 51 Hiring Formula
26:10 "What's the Greatest Misperception About You?"
28:32 Testing the Feedback Loop in an Interview
29:44 Caitlin Saves a Life
32:51 Mind Share vs. Heart Share
34:33 The Golden Rule of Hospitality
35:33 If You Don't Have Language, You Cannot Teach
39:10 Enlightened Hospitality
41:35 Nice vs. Kind
43:10 Laying People Off the Kind Way
45:03 How a Hot Dog Cart Became Shake Shack
50:08 The Champagne Question
52:08 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
www.LearningLeader.com
New Book: The Price of Becoming
www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My guests: 
Andy Stanley is the founder of North Point Ministries, which he started in Atlanta in 1995 and has grown into 8 churches across metro Atlanta and a network of more than 225 churches globally, serving over 200,000 people weekly. He's the author of more than 20 books, including Next Generation Leader, Visioneering, and Deep & Wide. His newest is What Great Leaders Do: 7 Essentials for Enduring Impact. He and his wife Sandra have three grown children and live in Atlanta.
Sam Kaufman is the Chief Revenue Officer of Insight Global, a $5.3B talent, technical, and AI services firm. He started as an entry-level recruiter in 2004 and rose through the ranks to lead the company's core sales divisions. He's played a central role in Insight Global's transformation into a global talent and technical services organization, helping the company double in size over the past five years, and in 2026, he was named to Staffing Industry Analysts' Staffing 100 North America list, recognizing the most influential leaders in staffing. He has a degree in electrical engineering from Bucknell.
Key Learnings
Somebody saw it in him before he saw it in himself. Andy and Louie Giglio were the troublemakers in his dad's youth group. One morning after they'd disrupted everything, Mother Mary sat them down and told them they were leaders and needed to lead. Andy's reaction at the time: then I don't want to be a leader.
She should have kicked them out, but she didn't. She kept giving them chances they didn't deserve and didn't handle well. She's about to turn 101 years old. She never had children of her own and to this day she calls them her sons.
Now Andy does it for others. When he sees someone with a leadership gear, he tries to speak life into it and fan the flame, because that's what was done for him.
Leadership is the most wonderful, dangerous gift. Every great thing that's happened in the world had a leader behind it. So did every terrible thing. People followed both for the same reason: the leader brought clarity to a dilemma, made a promise, and people leaned in.
Andy thinks leaders are born, not made. His evidence: he's never met a leader who accomplished anything extraordinary who said they weren't a leader, then read two books or went to a conference and became one. Anyone can get better. "But you can make him a better singer and still never hand him a microphone."
Problems to solve vs tensions to manage. Work-life balance is a tension. You don't solve it, you manage it. Every industry and every company has its own.
"When you solve a tension, you create a problem."
You can spot tension by the calendar. If it keeps reappearing on the agenda and somebody keeps saying didn't we just talk about this, you've been trying to solve something that was never a problem.
Naming it changes the conversation. Once a team agrees they're looking at a tension, nobody is right and nobody is wrong, and people stop treating each other like enemies. Andy's team asks the question out loud once a month.
Sam heard Andy teach this on a podcast and it moved through Insight Global in a week. He listened on the drive in, recognized the pattern live in his CEO's Thursday meeting, and shared it with 40 leaders in the room. It reached a 40,000 person company within days. Sam's read on why: they'd been having the same conversation for years and had never had the language for it.
Nobody can promise certainty. You can give clarity. The only way to promise certainty is to know the future in detail. And the greater the uncertainty, the more the need for clarity is heightened.
If there were no uncertainty, nobody would need a leader.
When COVID made his entire model illegal, Andy redeployed. Rather than doing a half-baked version of the old thing, he pulled everyone together and told them they were hitting pause, building a new plan, and staying busy doing something different.
Giving people something to do feels like clarity. You know what to do, you know when you've done it, and the organization keeps moving. Andy pairs it with Jim Collins on navigating fog: put one foot in front of the other and feel your way along.
Action absorbs anxiety. Ryan's phrase, and Andy's addition: even when it isn't progress, it usually leads to progress, because there's motion and momentum.
Think like a broadcast studio, not a live one. When they knew nobody would be in the room, they didn't film the old service. They rebuilt the auditorium into a television studio and talked to the camera. Sam, watching from home, still can't remember whether he was there in person.
They kept the habits. Andy's view is that hitting pause and waiting to reopen the old way would have been an enormous miss. Sam says Insight Global never went back to how they were before and has grown for seven years since.
"How long do you plan to stay?" Andy had lunch with John Maxwell carrying demographic research, expecting to be interrogated about how big to build. Andy said he thought this was his life's work. Maxwell said then build it as big as you possibly can.
They built 2,700 seats in the middle of nowhere. Three  years later they built another one behind it that seated 2,000.
That's what intuition looks like. Maxwell knew the answer without knowing how he knew it. Andy would never have connected his own tenure to the size of the building.
Andy's three questions for any big decision:
What's considered impossible in our industry, but if it could be done would fundamentally change it? From Joel Barker's Future Edge. The point isn't that you'll answer it. It's that if you don't know the question, you won't recognize the paradigm shift when somebody else answers it.
What would the next leader do? From Andy Grove at Intel, who asked Gordon Moore what a new team would do if the board threw them out. Moore answered instantly. Grove said then why don't we walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves.
What would a great leader do? Not what's expected, not the industry standard. What would a selfless, others-first, high-integrity, world-class leader do here?
The second question is terrifying because it produces instant clarity. Andy says it's how he's made the hardest personnel decisions of 31 years. You love the person and they can't keep up, and the next leader would have no emotional attachment and would see immediately what needs to happen.
The best leadership decision Andy ever made was going home at 4:00. He'd resigned from his dad's church with two kids in diapers, a pregnant wife, and no insurance. Then he started the church and worked constantly. He asked Sandra what she needed and didn't want her to hold back. She said be home between 4:00 and 4:30, because by then her energy with the kids was gone.
So he became the first one to leave the office. When people asked to meet after work, he said before work instead, and ate two breakfasts. He ran that routine for about ten years.
"I'm gonna cheat work. I'm not gonna cheat home."
The deadline made him better at his job. If you have an hour to do something it takes an hour, and if you have two it takes two. Walking out the door at a fixed time made him dramatically more efficient, and everything still got done.
We're supposed to be examples of the rule, not exceptions to it. Andy encouraged his staff to make the same call, and it set the organization's standard from day one.
"It's not a sacrifice, it's an investment." What he tells his kids now they're grown with their own families.. Sow and reap, and you only get one shot at it.
Parent towards the relationship, not towards compliance. Andy and Sandra had two rules: honor your mother, and don't tell a lie. You can dishonor me, but not her. Lying breaks relationships, and they wanted their relationships intact.
Discipline toward reconciliation instead of restriction. When his middle son Garrett was disrespectful to Sandra, Andy made Garrett call his mother, ask her on a date, take her to dinner, and pay for it. By the end of the dinner it was resolved.
Don't sweat the small stuff. Andy and Sandra were foster parents for ten years. Their biological kids came over one day and watched a five-year-old foster daughter roller skate across the hardwood floors, and pointed out they'd never even been allowed to run in the house. Andy's regret is that he wasn't that way when his own kids were young.
Do the eulogy exercise. From Stephen Covey. Write what you'd want people to say about you at your funeral. Andy spent several mornings on it in his early 30s. Covey's line at the end: you have just discovered your personal definition of success.
He reduced it to seven words, and he won't tell anyone what they are. He used to share them until he noticed people writing them down. His view: those are his, and you have to go get your own.
The exercise changed what failure means. Once Andy defined success as those values, stepping outside them wasn't just messing up. It was failing, by his own definition.
Don't let your identity shift from what you value most to what you're known for. Andy is grateful for the influence, but he didn't want to become the pastor of, or the author of. He says it's especially easy for men to center on what they're known for out in the world rather than who they are at home.
"I only have one unique role. That's father to my children." Sandra could get another husband. There will be another pastor and other authors. Nobody else can be the father to his children.
"Your ego is not your friend." Jeff Foxworthy's answer when Andy asked what one piece of advice he'd give Andy's son Andrew, a stand-up comedian, so that at 68 he'd end up where Foxworthy is instead of where many people in show business end up.
"The people I work with the most would quit before they followed me into something stupid." They'd be on his doorstep if he started doing something dumb, and Sandra wouldn't even have to call them.
Foxworthy fired his manager and hired his best friend from fifth grade. Same reason. That friend knew him as a middle schooler, so he's not Jeff Foxworthy the world-famous comedian. He's Jeff the goofball.
Andy's champagne moment: celebrating a year after he's gone. Not just that there's a successor, but that the global network of churches is thriving without his direct involvement. That, to him, is professional success.
And the second half: that his kids want to be with him and with each other when they no longer have to be. That was the goal of their parenting from the start. You sow and sow and then find out whether you get to reap it.
Reflection Questions
What's on your agenda every month that you keep trying to solve? Is it actually a problem, or a tension you need to manage?
Run your biggest current decision through all three questions. What's considered impossible in your industry? What would the next leader in your seat do? What would a great leader do?
Who has permission to show up at your door and ask who you think you are? If you can't name them, that's the first thing to fix.
More Learning
#687: Jim Collins - What to Make of a Life
#361: John Maxwell - The Essential Changes Every Leader Must Embrace
#358: Stephen Covey - The One Thing That Changes Everything (Trust)
 
Podcast Chapters
00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 
01:16 Meet Andy Stanley 
02:50 Mother Mary Saw It First
05:25 The Most Wonderful, Dangerous Gift 
07:08 Are Leaders Born or Made? 
08:37 Problems to Solve, Tensions to Manage 
11:44 When You Can't Offer Certainty, Offer Clarity 
15:43 The Messy Middle 
20:42 Lunch With John Maxwell 
24:16 The Three Questions 
28:54 What Would a Great Leader Do? 
30:01 AI and the Tornado of Transformation 
31:20 Putting Your Values on the Wall 
32:11 "I'm Gonna Cheat Work. I'm Not Gonna Cheat Home." 
36:55 Parenting Toward the Relationship 
41:02 The Eulogy Exercise 
45:35 Your Ego Is Not Your Friend 
51:58 The Champagne Question 
55:07 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com
The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly National Best-Seller!
www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My Guest: Daniel Lubetzky graduated from Stanford Law School. And then declined lucrative job offers to start his own business, only paying himself $24,000 a year for a decade. And then he founded KIND and grew it into a snack brand that Mars later valued at $5 billion dollars. Today he invests full-time on Shark Tank, and he's the son of a Holocaust survivor whose story shaped everything he's built.
Find work that gives you energy, purpose, and meaning. If you enjoy what you're doing, you're far more likely to be great at it. And you're already winning, because you get up every morning doing something satisfying.
The danger of loving your work is overworking. Daniel did it building PeaceWorks and KIND. You have to pace yourself.
His father survived a death march out of Dachau. Twelve and a half when he entered the camp, fifteen and a half during the march. Six feet tall and under 70 pounds, and no shoes. The Nazis were walking prisoners up a mountain to push them off a cliff because they didn't have enough bullets.
A snowstorm saved his life. His father, grandfather, and uncle hugged to say goodbye. The snow buried them and formed a kind of igloo that kept them warm through the night. They woke, dug out, and the Nazis were gone.
The soldiers who liberated them were Japanese American. The 442nd, the most decorated unit of its size in American history, was made up of men whose own families were being held in internment camps back home. Daniel's family had never seen an Asian person and didn't understand what they were witnessing.
Seventy years later, he got to say thank you. A friend called saying they were sitting with a doctor who had a postcard from Larry Lubetzky. That was Daniel's uncle, who had just died. Daniel reconnected with the captain, who had gone on to become a scientist at Harvard, and eventually gave a eulogy at his funeral.
The lesson he takes from it isn't perseverance. It's the power of one person to change another person's life.
You won't pull off a rescue every day. You can still look someone in the eye at the supermarket. "You have no idea what that person's been going through."
Human connection is what pulls people back. At a conference on fighting hate, Daniel heard how young people vulnerable to recruitment were pulled back by ordinary human connection. Being kind in your daily life makes it harder for the people trying to recruit them.
There's no such thing as failure or success. Daniel keeps shelves of successes in one office and shelves of failures in another, and now thinks the separation is a mistake. He never would have built KIND without ten years of mistakes at PeaceWorks.
PeaceWorks was a college thesis turned into a company. The argument: get neighbors on opposite sides of a conflict doing business together, and you shatter stereotypes, build relationships, and give both sides a stake in each other. He got Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks trading with one another.
Daniel turned down $86,000 out of Stanford Law to pay himself $24,000. That's what he could afford, and it's what he paid his team.
Grit, wit, and fit. Grit is the work ethic and refusing to give up. Wit is the strategy, the creativity to outthink competitors. Fit is whether the product actually matches what people want. Grit alone isn't enough.
Do not assume he was invincible. He cried alone in his studio apartment more than once, convinced he'd made a mistake and was wasting his life. He questioned himself multiple times a day.
The jerk who broke him was also right. At a trade show, a buyer told him to stop, that he was way too pushy, to give people space and get out of his life. Daniel was 25 and it broke him. Then he reflected and realized the man was correct.
Don't be the ultra-passive person watching the world happen. Don't be the person who only pushes. The job is to be persistent enough to win and be loved for it, which is very hard.
"I prepare for anything that I'm not prepared for." Daniel loves winging it and hates preparing. But if there's something he doesn't know, he'll put in the work today, tomorrow, and the day after.
Active listening takes real energy. Daniel needs an hour to decompress after every interview he conducts. He's blunt that listening isn't his greatest strength, which is exactly why he's leaning into it.
His dad was the best interviewer he ever knew, because he was a coach. When Daniel asked him a question, his father would answer with another question and let him find it himself. A great coach or parent doesn't tell you what to do. They help you ask the questions you need to ask yourself. Telling is the easier skill.
Kids keep you humble, and that's the point. You need someone in your life who can call you out when you start thinking too much of yourself, whether that's your kids, your spouse, or your team.
KIND started because the healthy snack aisle didn't exist. Training for the 2002 New York City Marathon, Daniel's options were food that tasted like astronaut rations or pure indulgence. Nothing was portable, wholesome, and convenient at the same time.
KIND was named after his father, who died the year they launched. Everyone who met him described him the same way. He saw his mission in life as bringing smiles to others. The name became the three pillars: kind to your body, kind to your taste buds, kind to the world.
They took a vote on whether to quit. Six or seven people around a table, ten hard years behind them, a major account just lost. The choice was one more shot or two months to go find jobs. They all voted to try again. Then KIND launched.
Sampling was the inflection point. Daniel had been treating it as a cost. It was an investment. They went from $800 in 2008 to $800,000 in 2009 to $20 million in free product within a few years, which is what let them scale.
Sampling only works if the mousetrap is right. If one in ten people like it, you'll lose your shirt. Nine in ten people who tried a KIND bar wanted to buy more. Those people became the ambassadors.
Scarcity, gluttony, and resourcefulness. A wasteful culture runs you into the ground. A scarcity mentality preserves every dollar but caps your potential, because everything looks like a cost center. Resourcefulness is the middle: think like an owner, spend less where you can, and invest where it compounds.
Nice and kind are not the same thing. "If you're nice, it doesn't cost you. It's easy. You can be weak and nice. But to be kind, you need to be strong."
Kindness requires you to be a protagonist.
What Daniel looks for in a founder:
Integrity. If he doesn't trust them, no amount of upside matters.
Someone worth helping. It's going to be a rollercoaster, and he'll be in the trenches with them.
Real passion. Enough that he can sense they'll outwork everyone else.
You don't find integrity by asking about integrity. You ask other questions and watch how the person performs. Daniel says Barbara Corcoran is the best on the show at reading people this way.
The four C's of a builder's mindset: curious, compassionate, creative, and courageous. Daniel credits them with building KIND, the OneVoice Movement, and everything since.
Daniel's champagne moment a year from now: the Builders Movement making real progress. His argument is that every industry has a lobby representing it, and the only group without one is the overwhelming majority of citizens who agree with each other on most issues and want problems solved. He wants a movement that holds all parties and all special interests accountable to that majority.
A scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset. Viewing something as a cost instead of viewing it as an investment. This was Daniel's early mistake with Kind bars. He only budgeted $800 a year for samples. He viewed it as a cost. He changed his mind and realized it was an investment. He upped it to $800,000 per year in samples. And eventually to $20 million a year. Scarcity versus abundance. View it as an investment instead of a cost
Daniel's 4 C's of a builder's mindset – curiosity, compassion, creativity, and courage for That's how you build both a company and a movement. 
The difference between being nice and being kind. Being nice avoids conflict to protect feelings in the moment. Being kind is about being willing to risk the moment, telling the hard truth because you actually care about them.
His dad, grandfather, and uncle – Near the end of the war, Roman, his father, and his brother were death-marched out of Dachau toward the mountains, where the guards meant to push them off a cliff. A freak overnight blizzard scattered the guards; by morning they were gone. The men who found the survivors were the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion — the only all–Japanese–American unit in the U.S. Army, many of whose own families were sitting in American internment camps at that very moment. Daniel has said those soldiers showed a tenderness that "had not been seen in 1945."
Magic – Daniel taught himself magic as a kid in Mexico City and actually worked as a traveling magician through Europe and the Middle East for the better part of a year. He still performs one magic show a year for his team... And he's said it's the only thing all year he genuinely prepares for. Everything else, he improvises. "My team is always very concerned that I just jump into stuff."
A scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset. Viewing something as a cost instead of viewing it as an investment. This was Daniel's early mistake with Kind bars. He only budgeted $800 a year for samples. He viewed it as a cost. He changed his mind and realized it was an investment. He upped it to $800,000 per year in samples. And eventually to $20 million a year. Scarcity versus abundance. View it as an investment instead of a cost.
Reflection Questions
Where in your work are you all grit and no wit or fit? What would change if you spent an hour on strategy before your next hundred hours of effort?
Think of the harshest feedback you've ever received. Set aside how it was delivered. Was any of it correct, and what did you do with it?
Where in your life are you being nice when the situation calls for you to be kind?

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com
My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful.
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My guest: Dr. Martin Seligman is one of the most influential psychologists alive. He's the founder of positive psychology and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Positive Psychology Center. His research reshaped how we understand optimism, resilience, and human flourishing. His books, including Learned Optimism, Flourish, and The Hope Circuit, have sold millions of copies. His latest is Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress.
Key Learnings
The three parts of agency. Efficacy is the belief you can hit a goal right now, and it drives whether you try. Optimism is the belief you can hit it in the future, and it drives persistence and grit. Imagination is the range of goals you can even picture, and it drives creativity. When a culture has all three, it progresses. When they fall, it stagnates.
"Depression and pessimism and happiness and optimism are too important to be left to happy people." Marty calls himself a born depressive and pessimist. He founded positive psychology and still wakes at 4:00 a.m. to a voice telling him he can't do the thing in front of him. What he's built over decades is the skill of arguing back, treating that voice not as truth but as a rival whose job is to make him miserable.
The techniques don't come naturally to anyone. A small number of people are born happy. Everyone else has to learn and practice the skills, which is why Marty spent much of his career testing them rather than assuming they work.
How you respond to good news matters more than you think. When his wife Mandy won first prize in the biggest black and white photography contest in the world, Marty could have said "congratulations, dear, you deserve it" and moved on. Instead, he named the exact photo that won, asked her to repeat what the editor said word for word, and tied her talent back to how they teach their kids. Ryan's summary of what made it work: specificity and curiosity. Marty calls it active constructive responding, and done consistently, it increases love and commitment and cuts divorce rates.
Marty's contrarian take on leadership. He thinks the whole hunt for "what great leaders do" is a wild goose chase, because the great leaders he's met all do completely different things. What good followers have in common is PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. His advice is to promote the leaders who create the most PERMA, and to hold managers responsible for their people's well-being, not just their output, because well-being predicts productivity.
Grit and agency. Grit, the idea made famous by his former student Angela Duckworth, feeds straight into optimism and increases how long people push through adversity. On Angela: "one of the best students I've ever had," and "it's great to be outdone." He credits her rare social intelligence, the ability to build allies instead of enemies.
Predicting elections by counting optimism. With his graduate student Harold Zullow, Marty studied a century of nomination acceptance speeches and found the more optimistic candidate usually wins. In 1984, they sealed their prediction of the two nominees in an envelope at The New York Times and got it right.
The $17,500 lesson. Convinced by Dukakis's optimistic acceptance speech, Marty flew to Edinburgh to place a legal bet and put his entire life savings on Dukakis at 2 to 1. Then he learned the speech was written by Ted Sorensen, and that Dukakis, in his own unscripted press conferences, was deeply pessimistic. He lost everything. The takeaway that shaped his later work: measure the unscripted moments, not the polished speeches.
The 2024 call. Trump and Harris were even on optimism in their convention speeches. But across September and October, tracking how each explained bad events in press conferences, Trump got steadily more optimistic. Marty's team sealed another prediction: Trump winning and possibly by a lot.
Why the fired-up CEO speech doesn't work great. After Marty published his method, both political parties asked him how to write optimistic speeches. He sent the protocol, and within a few elections everyone sounded optimistic, and it stopped predicting anything, because the optimism was shallow. People don't internalize a leader saying "we're going to crush it." Real agency shows up in the psychology of the team, and that comes from who you hire and how you train them, not from the speech.
What the Army taught him. As lead consultant on the Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, Marty helped train 40,000 drill sergeants and profiled 900,000 soldiers from their first day. Three traits predicted who would later earn awards for excellent work and heroism: optimism, high positive emotion, and low negative emotion. On the other side, catastrophizers were more than twice as likely to develop PTSD at every level of combat.
The hiring lesson. Hire optimists and happy people. Avoid catastrophizers. And when you can't pick your team, train the pessimists you already have in the skills of agency.
"Put It In Perspective." The tool Marty uses to retrain catastrophizers. Picture the ominous "come see me at 4:00" email. Write down the worst thing that could happen, then the best thing, then the most likely thing, then a plan for that most likely case. Catastrophizers skip straight to the worst case and get paralyzed. The exercise pulls them back to what's actually probable.
Marry an optimist. "If you're a pessimist, disaster is to marry another pessimist," because you'll both see the worst in every setback. The wine story makes the point about behavior change: after Mandy told him he'd wrecked a family engagement dinner by sending back a bottle, Marty realized that if she complained as much as he did, he wouldn't want to be married to her. He decided to stop. The critical thoughts never went away, but the behavior did.
The gratitude testimonial. Think of someone still alive who did or said something that changed your life. Write a 300-word testimonial in three parts: what they did, what you did because of it, and where you are now as a result. Then deliver it in person and read it out loud. Marty has run this with thousands of people. The usual result is that both people cry, and a month later they test as less depressed and higher in well-being.
Reading the minds of the dead. Marty's method for measuring agency across history is counting words. Agentic language like "choose," "compete," "can," and "do" versus language of constraint like "obliged" and "assigned." With Claude and ChatGPT, he can now do in one morning what used to take months: reading whole eras of writing and rating how agentic they are.
St. Augustine and a thousand years of stagnation. Before Augustine, around 400 AD, Christian thinkers were highly agentic and taught that you could take part in your own salvation. Augustine's doctrine that grace comes only from God set Church teaching for close to a thousand years, and progress collapsed with it. When agency climbs again, as it does under Charlemagne around 800, progress climbs too. The pattern holds when you line it up against GDP, population, and writing about freedom.
The manager's real job. "It's your job as a manager not just to keep productivity going, but to increase the well-being and agency of the people under you." Do that, and you get promoted. Fail at it and your time is up.
The Champagne Question... What he'd celebrate a year from now. Marty wants psychohistory taken seriously as a real field, one that measures psychological variables, uses them to understand history, and then changes them to raise future happiness and productivity.
Reflection Questions:
Marty is 84, founded the field, and still wakes at 4 a.m. to a voice saying he can't do it. What does your version of that voice say, and what does it usually say it about? When it shows up, do you accept it as fact or argue back?
Think about the last time someone close to you shared good news. Which quadrant were you in: active constructive, passive constructive, active destructive, or passive destructive? What did you actually say?
Marty says a manager's job is to raise the well-being and agency of their people, not just their output. If your team was measured on PERMA tomorrow, what score would they give you, and where's the gap?
If you liked this one with Marty, you should also listen to... Episode #703: Angela Duckworth - Why Grit Isn't Enough
Time Stamps:
2:34 Angela Duckworth, grit & social intelligence
6:05 Active constructive responding: the Mandy photography story
12:13 Why leadership is heterogeneous, and the case for PERMA
14:49 How grit and agency fit together
16:09 The born pessimist who founded positive psychology
21:20 What the book is really about: founding psychohistory
22:52 Predicting elections & the $17,500 Dukakis bet
25:34 The 2024 prediction
29:17 Why the rah-rah CEO speech doesn't help much
31:07 What the U.S. Army taught him: optimism & PTSD
35:19 "Put It In Perspective," the tool for catastrophizers
38:55 Marry an optimist, and the wine-snob story
42:19 The gratitude testimonial
44:49 Reading the minds of the dead & St. Augustine
48:37 The manager's real job
49:33 What he'd celebrate a year from now
51:05 EOPC

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com
My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful.
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
Key Learnings
All the greats have a coach. Strauss is one of the most disciplined humans alive, and he has had one since he was 30. His argument: Tom Brady is an amazing athlete, but would he have performed as well with no coach, or a lousy one?
A great coach is objective, encouraging, smart, and experienced. They warn you of obstacles you can't see yet.
Strauss doesn't want the Socratic method from his coach. He wants direct advice. He'll use questions when he's leading others. But when he brings a problem to his own coach, he wants to be told: "You have that wrong; you're missing this."
So What? Strauss was avoiding a confrontation because he knew the other person would be really upset. His coach said, "So what?" He had the conversation. The person was upset. They got to the other side, and it was better than leaving it out there.
Bad news doesn't get better with age.
The most effective people are the most open-minded and self-critical. The ones who insist they don't need a coach are usually the ones losing.
"Arrogance is the enemy of continued success."
Humility isn't pretending you're not good. Strauss says claiming he's bumbling through the job would be silly, and he's proud of what he does well. The humility is in staying open. His team's description of him: strongly held opinions, freely shared, and a mind that changes when the facts do.
"You're just a terrible speaker." Strauss was 31, newly president of Vestron, and had written an eloquent after-dinner speech he was proud of. He read it off the page. His boss pulled him aside afterward and told him it was terrible.
What two days of media training taught Strauss:
Talk about what the audience cares about, not what you want to say
Never deliver a written speech unless you're President of the United States
Inject your personality
Try to make them laugh
Be of service to the audience. Strauss opens his class at MIT Sloan by asking the students why they came and what they want out of it. It surprises them every time, because speakers never ask.
One meeting with 20 people beats 20 meetings with one person. A young CEO Strauss coaches was sleeping four hours a night and spending 20 hours a week on one-on-ones. Strauss told him to do one weekly meeting with all 20. 
Delegate with information. Everyone running a group is in the same room once a week and shares everything, including the problems. If it's business, it goes in the room. If it's personal, they can talk one-on-one. Politics shrink because nobody has information nobody else has.
Happy stuff doesn't reach the CEO's desk. If it landed on his desk, it's either bad or genuinely complex. That's the system working.
Align the words with the dollar signs. Mission, strategy, culture, and compensation all have to point in the same direction. Say you want to be the best in the world while paying people regardless of performance, and they will follow the money every time.
The worst comp structure is CEO discretion. It builds a culture where everyone is trying to please one person, and people think pleasing someone means telling them what they want to hear.
Hire the most talented people on earth, then support them through thick and thin. Strauss greenlit Dirty Dancing at Vestron on a $5.5 million budget. The first-time director was too scared to speak, so the team pitched it. They claimed the film would change how women dressed, produce an award-winning soundtrack, and win an Oscar. Strauss thought the pitch was nonsense. He didn't even like the script. He greenlit it anyway because he trusted the team over his own judgment. It became the biggest independent hit of all time to that date, a record it held until The Blair Witch Project.
Be a good judge of talent, not of products. Knowing which one you are is the whole thing.
Leave the escape hatches open. When competitors poured hundreds of millions into VR and the metaverse, Strauss said no. But Take-Two did enough experimentation to move fast if he was wrong, and got paid for every VR project they took on. They lost nothing on the wrong bet.
Be creatively risk-forward and financially risk-averse. A well-run film studio had a 30 percent hit ratio, meaning 70 percent of what it released broke even or lost money. So you build the balance sheet first, then take the creative swings. "If you can't afford to lose, you don't play the game."
Carl Icahn won because he was a good poker player with a huge stack of chips. When things went against him, he didn't sit around moaning. He went to the next game.
At 68, he's up at 4:45 and in the gym by 6:45, often twice a day. Looking your best is a form of respect for other people and for yourself. If you look sloppy and out of shape, it's harder to lead. The other half is simply feeling good enough to show up with energy and a smile.
He refuses to hold anyone else to his own personal standard. Everyone is on their own journey, and he doesn't want clones. Thirty minutes of walking five days a week is genuinely good for you. That person is showing up for themselves too.
No AI slop in Grand Theft Auto. Take-Two builds handcrafted, building by building. Their teams will use state-of-the-art tools to do great work more efficiently. What they won't do is push a button on someone else's model and call the output theirs.
"That's yesterday's headlines." Strauss's father-in-law's answer whenever anyone congratulated him. Take-Two doesn't do the who's-better-than-us party. They show sincere appreciation for great work, and then they get up the next morning and do it again.
Reflection Questions
Who is the person in your life who will tell you that you have it wrong? 
What is the confrontation you're avoiding right now, hoping it resolves itself? Have that conversation today.
Where are you taking real risk without the balance sheet to survive being wrong? And where are you so protected that you aren't taking any risk at all?
More Learning
#662: Nick Thompson - Move at an Uncomfortable Pace
#626: Rob Kimbel - The Power of Grit and Generosity
#525: Frank Slootman - Raise Your Standards & Push the Pace
Podcast Chapters
00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle
01:01 Meet Strauss Zelnick
03:00 President of Fox at 32
06:15 He Greenlit Dirty Dancing and Thought It Would Flop
09:55 How He Finds Talent
11:30 Align the Words With the Dollar Signs
18:56 One Meeting With 20 People
22:33 Up at 4:45, Gym by 6:45
26:20 No AI Slop in Grand Theft Auto
27:55 Why He Doesn't Feel Lonely at the Top
28:53 His Coach's Advice Was "So What?"
29:51 Every Great Leader Has a Coach
32:37 Direct Advice, Not the Socratic Method
35:31 What He Teaches at MIT Sloan
37:03 "You're Just a Terrible Speaker"
39:27 Arrogance Is the Enemy of Continued Success
41:03 Why He Said No to VR
43:52 Creatively Risk-Forward, Financially Risk-Averse
47:20 That's Yesterday's Headlines
49:51 EOPC