#199 - The Secret to Being Great

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
I had this thought, oh, this is what it would have been like to talk to Bill Gates at 21

**Shaan Puri** (0:16)
So this episode is gonna be... It might be shorter than normal, right?

**Sam Parr** (0:20)
Yeah, I think so.

**Shaan Puri** (0:22)
Okay. I just drove like 30 hours, and I listened to a ton of content.
I want to tell you, Shawn, about some of the stuff that I listened to and why it's interesting. Is that what you want to do for this entire episode?

**Sam Parr** (0:34)
Yeah, let's do it.

**Shaan Puri** (0:35)
And I'm sure you'll have some stuff that you've consumed. Okay, the first one. I found this podcast that has like... Actually, let's see. How many reviews? I think like no reviews. I emailed the guy, he's amazing. But it's called How to Take Over the World.

**Sam Parr** (0:51)
We should just have this guy. We should just absorb this guy's podcast. We need to acquire this guy's podcast. This should just be on our feed.

**Shaan Puri** (0:58)
Wait, did you listen to it?

**Sam Parr** (1:01)
No, I'm just looking at the description of it. And then the gems that you just told me. And I'm like, this should be part of MFM. This is great.

**Shaan Puri** (1:08)
It's amazing. This guy, it's like his hobby.
They're so in depth. So it's called How to Take Over the World. What I think he's doing is, you know, a lot of biographies of great people like Napoleon, Julius Caesar, The Royal Child, they're like 800 to 1000 pages. So it's like a real commitment to read it. So he just reads it and he takes notes. In one episode, he did one on Napoleon. He goes, I have 60 pages, or Thomas Edison, he goes, I have 60 pages of notes.
And he just reads the book and takes notes and then just explains and tell stories from the book and does it in chronological order. And it basically turns, if you listen to a thousand page book on audible, it's something like 40 or 50 hours. But with him, I just listened to this two hour podcast and I feel like I've just read most of the book. It's pretty amazing. But he also gives his analysis about it. And so I listened to a few of them. I listened to one on Edison, one on Napoleon and one on the Rothschilds. And there's three commonalities that I want to tell you about these guys.
So do you know who Rothschild is? Rothschild. Am I saying it right?

**Sam Parr** (2:08)
Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (2:09)
So basically, it was started by this guy named Anshul Rothschild in the 1700s. He basically built like the Amazon of his little ghetto in Germany where he would sell like, he would mail you an item and if you wanted it, you would send him money.
And it wasn't like that big, but eventually he started, he grew that over 50 years and started investing in stuff and then his kids started the Goldman Sachs of Europe. So it was like a long, slow build up to building this family business. So I'm going to tell you three things that I've noticed that these folks had in common. The first, all of them enjoyed their work. So there's a story where Nathan Rothschild, this one woman was talking to him and he's like, you know, I hope you better hope that your kids aren't addicted to work like you are. And he goes, Oh, no, I hope they are because I love what I'm doing and I don't ever want to stop.
Same with Napoleon. Then someone said, Napoleon, what what's your heritage? What race are you? He goes, I'm of the race of men who found empires.
Like they're addicted to it. Like they love it. They can't they can't not do it. Same with Edison. Edison, he was like nice to his kids and nice to his wife, but he was really never around. And they called, he called his his studio, which was in Menlo Park, I believe it's called Menlo Park in New Jersey. And they said that it looked like a homeless encampment because there's these men in suits, but they were just like laying around on the floor and sleeping there because they would do their best work from midnight to six a.m. And they would just sleep below under their desk. And they're like, well, why are you doing this? He's like, because there's so much to do and we love it. Like we can't not do this. So they all enjoyed their work. The second thing, crazy, crazy high energy. So super high energy. So Napoleon, he went to Egypt to go conquer something. And on his way, he stopped in like some island where he like reorganized the government in three weeks and he changed their currency. They all have crazy high energy.