121: Luke Burgis, Author of Wanting

Romeen Sheth (0:00)

Welcome to Square One. This week, we took a turn on the normal type of episode we have. I chatted with the author of one of the most influential books I've read over the past year. It's called Wanting, and the author is Luke Burgis. We all want things in life, but it's hard to pinpoint where those desires necessarily come from.

Luke took a deep dive into the origins of desire in his book, and he shows frameworks that give perspectives on how we come to want certain things in life, and how we can transform our relationship with desire in ways that allow us to live a more aligned, fulfilling existence with other people.

This was an especially interesting episode to me because this mentality and mindset applies as much to our professional lives in thinking about how to operate a business or invest in a business as it does to our personal life in leading a fulfilling life. Welcome, Luke. Thanks so much for joining me.

Luke Burgis (0:47)

Hey, Ramin. Good to be here.

Romeen Sheth (0:49)

Yeah. So, Luke, we're going to talk about your book Wanting today and the concept behind it. It's this really interesting concept called Mimetic Desires.

But before we jump into that topic, I want you to set the stage with this experience that kicked off this exploration for you.

It's 2008 You're about to sell your company to Zappos. In your book, you have this line that really hooked me, and I'm going to read it. It's, there would be no life-changing exit, no windfall, no second home in Sicily. My company was on the rocks without the deal I'd be bankrupt. As the full import of how my life was about to change sank in, something changed. I felt relieved. It was those last three words that hooked me to read the rest of the 200 pages. Just unpack the context of kind of what was going on in your life at that point in time and how that kind of kickstarted this exploration into Mimetic Desires.

Luke Burgis (1:40)

Yeah, I felt relieved. It was a very unexpected emotion, which surprised me. And getting to the bottom of why I felt this unexpected emotion really drove me after that deal fell through. So just to take you back one step to the Zappos deal, my company, Fit Fuel, had grown really fast, but it was 2008 and we were just burning through cash.

And I knew that we needed to do something. We either needed to raise money or we needed to sell. And nobody wanted to give us money. In mid-2008, everybody was pretty spooked. So Tony and I had been knocking around the idea of joining forces for a while, and behind the scenes, I was feverishly negotiating a deal for Zappos to buy my company, and just hoping that it would happen soon enough. And meanwhile, I was totally immersed in sort of the Zappos life and culture. I was probably the person who was, I don't know, there's probably some Zappos employees that I thought that I was too. I was hanging out with around the company so much.

But something seemed kind of off for me. I'd sort of lost excitement about the company that I started. We were an e-commerce company, and we sold health and nutrition products. Something was off, and selling the company to Tony sort of felt like an out, or a way for me to sort of like not deal with deeper issues in my life. For instance, why is this now, you know, the second company that I've started, that I've grown, where I've lost my passion, you know, after a year or so? Like, I want to figure out what that's all about, because I don't want to keep starting companies that I don't want to run anymore. So to make a really long story short, you know, Tony and I, Tony gave me word that the board had approved this sale. We went and celebrated on the Las Vegas Strip. We were both based in Vegas at the time.

And the next day, I get this really strange phone call from Alfred Lin, who was the CFO of the company, telling me that the board had essentially changed their minds on the plane back to San Francisco. They had flown into Vegas for the board meeting. And that feeling of relief that I had was, it was sort of, I felt a freedom for the first time in a very long time.

Certainly, geez, I mean, the last time I felt that free was probably when I was a kid. I went through the hoops of high school was all about getting into the best college, and then college was all about getting the best job, and then right into the sort of startup mentality of constantly comparing myself and looking at everybody else's cap tables and who their investors were and how I was doing. And I felt this freedom, like I had been freed from some kind of compulsion, and I couldn't put my finger on what that was. And it seemed like something bigger than myself, like I wouldn't have had the power to stop and do this kind of introspection on my own. I was sort of given this opportunity to like, re-decide what it was that I really wanted to do. So it's like, okay, the deal fell through. This is not going to happen.