#2 Excellence Is The Capacity To Take Pain (Isadore Sharp)

**Alon Michael** (0:00)
The struggle is not failure, but it causes failure, especially if you are weak, always if you are weak. Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the struggle, and struggle they did. So you're not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is a struggle.
These lines, we're going to definitely go back to them, are from the book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and it explains our lesson today in as direct way as Ben Horwitz, who wrote the book, can. We'll get back to his struggle, but first, let's read our key lesson today in detail. So excellence is the capacity to take pain. The person who coined it is Isadore Sharp. We'll in a second, reveal who he is.
And this key lesson, or this line rather, has been called the best maxim in the history of entrepreneurship. And today we'll try to break it down and understand why. You know, the more you and I study history's greatest achievers, the most successful people on earth, and the most important observation on success. What do we see? That everything worth doing, everything they did, is hard, right? Becoming the world number one in anything will surely come with a high cost and a lot of suffering. The best athlete in the world will spend most of her life practicing, taking her body through excruciating pain. The most successful rider will spend days on end in front of a blank page, telling themselves they've lost it, only, hopefully, to push through and come up with a single page. Then repeat this until they have a book. That's painful. The best businessman and woman will spend their life focusing on one thing and one thing only, the business. They will go through business betrayals, bad economies, failing product launches, competition and loss, only to remind themselves that this time, that last failure will not break them. They must try one more time. If you've been there, you know. And the capacity to take physical pain or mental pain, social pain, which I think is shame mostly, is the only way we can push through. Life is full of struggle, of misery, of pain, and eventually, if we push through, success.
The reason there are so many average people and so few successful ones is, I believe, our human tendency to avoid pain.
Those few who can sustain, endure, overcome, and even use pain, those few will succeed. For the rest of them, I don't know. So today, you and I will walk to understand what Isadore Sharp meant by this brilliant line, which is, by the way, from his book called Four Seasons, The Story of a Business Philosophy, and how we can use pain to help us achieve success and mastery.
So of course, Isadore Sharp was the founder of the five-star hotel brand, The Four Seasons, obviously. Now we need to understand who Isadore was and what kind of person he was to understand his ideas and that line. And I think there are a few ways to understand a man or a woman for that matter. First, look at their actions. Actions reveal a lot. Second, listen to their loved ones and what they have to say about them. But for me, the most important way, which I always use, is try to look at their childhood. We must start with the child before we understand the man. And luckily, in most of biographies, you have all of these combines. So I want to start, actually, with part of the introduction to the book, which is from Isadore's wife, Rosalie.
Let me read this to you. As he grew up, Isadore drifted into the business world, still carrying the illusions of the dreamer, which he has never lost. He refused to settle for the pragmatic dicta of maturity. Is he also skipped skepticism and the let's be sensible stuff.
People said he was naive with a kind of glandular optimism. Perhaps, but as it turned out, naiveté served him well. Is he trusted everyone? He still does.
He made a lot of rash decisions against the trends and the pundits' advice, stubbornly trusting in intuition, an intuition born of long experience. The only thing you can control, Isadore says, is your attitude. He has a strong belief in his decisions, which to him are just common sense. Again, from experience, backing the namesayers can be a lonely responsibility, but his parents taught him to welcome responsibility at any cost.
Throughout the years, I've watched, this is again his wife, I've watched in disbelief as his aspirations have come to fruition. Early on, he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams. He told me once that his aim was to make the name Four Seasons a worldwide brand, synonymous with luxury, like Rolls Royce. Sure, I thought, with only about 10 hotels, hardly likely, but I didn't let on. My most, this is beautiful, my most valuable contribution to his success has been my silence. After 55 years, my husband, Isadore, continues to be very kind and very wise, an unbeatable combination. As long as there is Four Seasons, Isadore Sharp, the founder, will be remembered as the man who made the company.