15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders - David Senra - #878

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is David Senra. He's a host, a founder's podcast, and an investor. Every success story is like a unique song composed with different instruments. Yet, when you listen closely, many of them share the same underlying rhythms. So what are the core principles that play a key role in the lessons of the most successful individuals from history? Expect to learn why excellence is defined by the capacity to take and manage pain, why having high-powered relationships is the secret to running the world, if self-pity has any utility, the reason that bad boys move in silence, why the story of the father is embedded in the story of the son, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David Senra. Did you hear me say, when I was asked, who is the podcasters podcaster, the underground one that all of us listen to, is you?

**David Senra** (1:16)
Yes, I almost clipped it and then posted it. I appreciate it. I watch all your Q and A's, I love them.

**Chris Williamson** (1:20)
Thank you. Yeah, dude, I-

**David Senra** (1:21)
I would love a weekly Q and A from you.

**Chris Williamson** (1:24)
God, I don't know whether the internet's ready for that. There'll be a new one coming up soon. Anyway, today, I want to go through a bunch of lessons. You spend your entire time studying history's greatest founders, greatest leaders, thinkers, and I want you to go through some broad buckets of lessons that you've taken away from them. So we're going to do 15 today.

**David Senra** (1:43)
Okay.

**Chris Williamson** (1:43)
First one, excellence is the capacity to take pain. Persevering through pain is mandatory. Why?

**David Senra** (1:51)
That is probably my all-time favorite maxim from studying all of these histories of great centrators actually comes from the founder of Four Seasons, this guy named Izzy Sharp. Sometimes you're reading a book or you're listening to a podcast, or sometimes it's even like a music lyric. One sentence can stay in your brain forever. I haven't read that book in probably five years, and he's describing how difficult it was. He had no experience in the hotel industry when he found Four Seasons, and yet his goal was like, I'm going to make a collection of the greatest hotels in the world. He didn't disregard the fact that I've never made a hotel before. I don't have any money, I don't have resources, I don't have contacts. So the whole book, the audio autobiography, which I think he wrote when he was close to 80 years old, is now him recounting this for the reader. There's just so many times where he's just like, he hit a, there's a problem he can't figure out how to solve, problems with partners, with contractors, with financing, all kinds of basically unresolved issues, and he's laying up late at night, and there's interviews with his wife, which is fantastic because they were married through this whole time, they're still married to this day. And she recounts where she would wake up at 2 in the morning, and he's just sitting there right awake, hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling, just can't sleep, depressed, agonizing over this relentless pursuit of a goal. And so he's the one that said, that coined the term, excellence is the capacity to take pain, and I think by that point I had read 180 biographies and autographies of his just-gathered-suppressed, that's exactly what I see in every single book. There's never a book. There's no life story, no book starts at, hey, this guy had an idea, he did the idea, everything went well, end of story. It is all like, hey, I have this idea, I want to do something and it's just one problem, one obstacle.
It's essentially emotional and mental and in some cases, physical pain to persevere and push through to, till they can get to the other side and actually achieve what they're trying to achieve.

**Chris Williamson** (3:56)
Why is that the case? Is it just that achieving anything that is excellent requires you to negotiate with a world that's going to push up against you, and that means that you're going to end up feeling discomfort, therefore the capacity to deal with pain is important?

**David Senra** (4:08)
Yeah, there's no such thing as like an important goal or an audacious goal that comes easily. I think Jeff Bezos has his own way of saying this, and there's this great book called Invent and Wander, and it's the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. So they take his shareholder letters and they take transcripts of his speeches, and you really get to understand how he was thinking as he was building Amazon and all the stuff that he's learned. His whole thing was, I have unrelenting, uncompromising standards for excellence in the town and the people around me, and if you're coming to work at Amazon, I'm not going to bend, you are going to raise to my expectations, my standards. It is not easy to work here. I'm going to tell you that up front because we're trying to do something that we can tell our grandkids about, that we can be proud to say, this is what granddad did, this is how I spent my life. And he says, he's like, things that you can tell your grandkids about are not meant to be easy.