Building World-Changing Products, Vision and Success | Inventor of the iPod, Tony Fadell

Tony Fadell (0:00)

So you don't just build a product, or you don't just build a service, but you build a mentality, a mindset, a way of working and a network of people like that, so you can continue generation after generation to do that. To me, that's your soul.

I don't believe in the ethereal soul. I believe your soul is what you plant in each person on this planet, and they remember you even when you're gone, and they live and take those things that you imparted to them and build on top of it and instill it into the next generations and the next generations and the next generations. That is a person's soul.

Michael Gervais (0:36)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, a trade in training, a high-performance psychologist.

And today, I'm excited to sit with Tony Fadell. Tony is an entrepreneur, designer, engineer, an investor with 30-year history of founding companies and designing some of the most influential products of the 20th century.

And that is not an easy feat. We're going to understand how that happens, who he is, the principles that live just underneath the surface of how he's made choices in his life. And Tony, I've been following you in your work from a distance. I've been consuming just about all of the products I think that you've made. And I'm really excited to sit with you.

Tony Fadell (1:31)

Michael, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited for this conversation.

And hopefully your audience gets something out of it. I'm really, really, really anxious to be here.

Michael Gervais (1:41)

I think that that is what you just said. I hope somebody gets something out of it. I feel like that is right at the heartbeat of your purpose right now. Is passing a baton is a phrase that I read in your book that's meaningful to you. And so you have been wildly successful in your career, but it's clear that it didn't happen overnight in your words.

And you've held significant leadership positions across at least seven different companies that I'm aware of. And then you sold one of them, a small little project called Nest, to Google for multiple billions. I mean, my hope for this conversation is really to better understand how you organize your inner life, how you develop a vision.

So maybe we can start with this idea of failures and successes. How do you define success? Big question, I understand. But I'm equally interested in how you operationalize and define failure. So let's start with those two big heavy topics.

Tony Fadell (2:44)

Okay, big, big, big heavy. So how do we define success?

Well, I think success is first it starts with a mission. So you have to have a mission focus to be able to then drive yourself and drive others to get behind something that's big and bold and meaningful. So I don't think of success as just making money. People can define it by numbers. I define it on a mission that's going to change the world in some constructive, positive way. That's the way I think of success. And if you get there, the money follows, and the money follows 10x or 100x more than you could ever expect. So instead of chasing money, chase a mission that's worth chasing and then people will join you along the way.

So for me, it's reaching the conclusion of the mission. I don't think the mission, if it's a really well-defined one, ever ends. But for me, it usually takes about 10 years to realize the mission that I'm on, to truly bring impact. And then we create a culture or whatever, and that can follow on even if I'm not involved in it anymore.

So for me, success is really getting to that mission and that mission objective, even if it slightly changes over time. But that's what I would like to see. Now, when it comes to failure, failure is the only way we really learn.

OK, so if we understand how we are educated and how we grow up, for the most part, when we grow up, we go to school, we're told here's the things you need to learn, read these things, take these tests, and you either pass or fail.

It is a very, very much prescriptive, process-driven thing, and that is how your brain is trained in your most formative years, which is unfortunate because in fact, you learned to walk and talk before you learned to go to school and follow that process. And how did you learn to walk and talk? By failing thousands of times. When you wanted to walk, you failed a thousand times before walking. And you know what? You had an environment around you saying, I encourage you. Yes, go for it. You just stood up for one second.