#261 Dee Hock's Autobiography of a Restless Mind Volume One and Two

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show, so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. As a young child born in a tiny cottage in a small farming village in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I discovered three principal loves of my life, nature, reading, and unstructured learning. With school and church came increasing confinement, demands for conformity, and crushing boredom, along with sharp, rising awareness of the chasm between how organizations profess to function and how they actually did. When I was 14, the fourth love of my life appeared, a beautiful brown-eyed girl. We married at 20 Side-tracked into business to support a growing family, I vowed to escape as soon as possible. It took 35 years. As partial recompense for a dislike of business, I continued to read and study voraciously. During my business years, I developed the habit of formulating short, graphic assertions, often in the form of aphorisms, maxims, and metaphors, to test and clarify my thinking. In 1980, I took the first steps to keep my vow to escape from business by purchasing 200 acres of ravaged land in coastal hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean with the intent to restore it to health and beauty through personal labor. Four years later, in 1984, I resigned as CEO of Visa, turned my back on the business world, and turned to my first loves, family, nature, books, contemplation, and the isolation of manual labor on the land. A house was eventually built there containing a poor boy's dream realized, a library containing 5,000 books accumulated over the years. Rising at 5.3 in the morning to write a thousand words or more before beginning the day's labor became an entrenched habit unbroken to this day. Each day's writing ended with four or five short reflections on subjects, then occupying my mind. By the late 1990s, my writing had grown to 5,000 pages containing several thousands of the short reflections. It occurred to me that a selection of them in the order written would constitute a history of sorts, an autobiography of a mind at work. Since the mind never works linearly by subject matter, but flutters from thought to thought and idea to idea with the agility of a butterfly, I selected one in five in the order written, then indexed them by subject matter for the convenience of readers with specialized interests. The contents of these two volumes of the Autobiography of a Restless Mind: were written in the decades spanning the turn of the millennium. Volume 1 contained selections from those written when I was in my sixties. Volume 2 contained selections from when I was in my seventies. I make no claim to have fully believed them when written, to believe them today, or to have fully lived those I do believe. Neither do I pretend that others have not thought or written about many of the same subjects over the centuries, for most reflect common concerns of mankind. The only claims asserted are that they then occupied my mind, seemed worth serious thought, contained some truth, or indulged my lifelong love affair with the music of words. So here is the Autobiography of a Restless Mind:. That is from the preface of the first of two books that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Autobiography of a Restless Mind: Reflections on the Human Condition Volume 1, and it was written by Dee Hock. So this is part two of a two-part series I'm doing on Dee Hock. Dee Hock was the founder and CEO of Visa. He just passed away recently at the age of 93, and I thought a way to honor him. I'm like, my own little small way is to reread three books of his that I have read before and make podcasts on them. And the primary reason I felt compelled to do that is because of the book that I'm holding in my hand. After I read, the first time I read one from many, it was probably like four years ago, I picked up, I went looking for other books that he wrote, and I found this one. It is a book of aphorisms and maxims, just like he said. It's about 200 pages long, and it has almost 1200 little short reflections. This book has been on my nightstand for years. And so I would say every week or so, and sometimes a few times a week, I would just pick it up, turn to a random page, read a few, you know, these are most of them are a sentence or two, just as a way to prompt my own thinking or learn something really rapidly. And the way I thought about it is like, hey, what if you had like this wise grandfather figure that could pull you aside for a minute or two, and just drop some knowledge in your ear. And so the format of this episode is going to be different than any other episode that I've ever done. There's a great YouTube channel that I really like. It's just called Quotes. And I'll leave a few links of some of the videos. I probably listen to, I don't know, maybe like 20 or 25 of their videos. But what they do is they hire voice actors. And they make usually short videos, usually like five, maybe 10 minutes long. And the voice actors just have, they sound fantastic. But what they do is they read quotes from historical figures. And in between each quote, they pause for maybe like five seconds or so, just to give you time to think about that sentence or the two sentences that they had just read you. And I find myself just re-listening to a bunch of these, of their episodes, on people like Mark Twain or Pythagoras or Socrates, Einstein, Churchill's in there, Voltaire, Da Vinci, Hemingway, Machiavelli, Cicero, people that you and I have covered in the past like Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt. And so I like that format so much, I decided that's the format I'm going to use for this episode. Most of these, I don't think I'll have anything to add if I do, obviously. If anything pops to mind, I'll let you know and I'll just jump right into it now. Happiness may be difficult, but it's not complicated. Dismiss desire, discard opinion, honor the past, trust the future, and treasure the moment.