701: Mark Pincus (Founder of Zynga) - Why We All Need a Coach, Maintaining High Standards, The Book of Life, Aggressive Ambition, and Why Your Instincts Are Almost Always Right

**Ryan Hawk** (0:03)
Welcome to The Learning Leader Show. Presented by Insight Global, I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now, on to tonight's featured leader, Mark Pincus founded Zynga in 2007 and built it into a $12.7 billion social gaming empire. He is a serial founder who sold his first company in seven months for 38 million bucks. He made an early seed investment in Facebook, and he's been teaching product development at Stanford for years. His new book is called Life at the Speed of Play. During our conversation, we discussed what Mark learned from his tennis coach that ended up helping him build a culture that wins over the long-term, a big focus on long-term winning. Then his, quote, Book of Life practice, what it is, where it started, why he does it, and how you can do it too. Then we got really personal, talking about how being obsessed with excellence and having high standards can impact us as parents, and the potential issue that creates.
Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Mark Pincus.
I was talking to your team to prep for this, and we were going back and forth on ideas, and one of the quotes I love is, I'm one of the most coached people in the world. So you've hired a surfing coach, tennis coach, chess coach, life coach. You've hired a legendary Bill Campbell to coach you from a business perspective. I'm sure there are many other areas where you get coaches. Talk to me about how much you value coaching and being coached.

**Mark Pincus** (2:06)
In a lot of ways, coaches are like cheat codes.
It's like you spend so many hours trying to do better in a game. I mean, some of us, and then finally you go on YouTube and you look for the cheat codes and the hacks because you just are so frustrated. I think in life, it's also like that. One of the times that I was in what I call the abyss, I said, okay, I have too much time in my hands.
Like I'm squandering it. What can I do with my time? And I said, I'm just going to see how good a tennis player I can be. And I'm just going to go as far as I can go. And I started training with a real coach five or six days a week. And I had a goal. I wrote down in my Book of Life that I was going to win a USTA match. And oddly, I mean, this is not a good way to hit a goal. But just before I started Zynga, I won a match. I went to a USTA tournament and I won, but only because my opponent didn't show up. So I technically won. Then I went on to the next round where I couldn't even get my racket on some of the balls that the person served to me. So I'll take that one. But I learned in committing to something, I mean, just in this case of tennis, I got so many lessons that helped me in life and helped me in leadership. And I can't remember if I get to them and my coach Jorge, who probably will one day be listening to this in the book. But one of them that Jorge said to me was to teach me to serve, he said, Mark, here's how you learn to serve. He said, you throw to where you swing, you don't swing to where you throw. Because in order to get your best serve in tennis, you need to have the natural movement of your body, and that is your natural swing. Okay? So you go up over your head and you just come across your body and it feels good like golf. And he said, once your brain knows that you're going to commit to that swing, it'll throw the ball in the wrong place and you hit it out of the court, you miss it, you look stupid.
But eventually your brain is like, holy shit, he's serious about this. The only way we're going to do this is if I put the ball in front of that swing. Okay, this will sound like, why is Mark going into all this detail? But what I learned from that, from committing to proper strokes, was that you play to get better, you don't play to win.
And there's so many lessons in that. You don't play to do anything you can just to win this point or this match. The question is, what am I doing that is making me better in the next game? And how do I kill my ego and get my ego out of the way of me actually being humble and curious and learning? And then that principle of throw to where you swing, don't swing to where you throw, came back at Zynga because we said, okay, you get these people who are such an amazing engineer, they're so good at something that you contort as an organization or a culture and you say, well, they're such a valuable individual contributor that we will deal with the fact that anyone who works for them quits or that they're bad for our culture. And Colleen McCreary, who taught me so much and was our Chief People Officer, said, no, you can't do that as an organization and she was right. When the organization sees you not willing to bend and contort just to win that one point, they start to build a muscle and a confidence too.