Snack: Master Class Founder and CEO David Rogier

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**Dan Bova** (1:55)
Everyone, welcome to another snack size edition of our show How Success Happens. I'm Dan Bova, writer and editor at entrepreneur.com.
So more than a decade ago, David Rogier co-founded MasterClass. And since then, the platform has sat down with more than 200 of the world's top performers from Serena Williams to Mark Cuban, to Martin Scorsese to capture how they think and work. So today, David is going to share some of the habits, mindsets and decision making frameworks that are common among these top performers, as well as break down some of the biggest myths that people get wrong about success. So welcome, David.

**David Rogier** (2:42)
Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

**Dan Bova** (2:44)
It's an honor to have you. And I don't have to describe what MasterClass is, as everybody knows with MasterClass is. So let's get into it. You've heard from a lot of people, a lot of top performers, as we said. What are some of the common threads that you see in some of these top performers?

**David Rogier** (3:02)
We have sat across from, as you said, at least 200 of the best in the world. From Steph Curry to Richard Branson to Martha Stewart.
Here are some of the more, I think, surprising things that I learned from them. One of the most surprising things I learned from them is that the best in the world are just not chill.
I assume that if you're as good as a Christina Aguilera, as a Serena Williams, as Steph Curry, that once you reach that level of mastery and fame, that you just chill. You do what you want, you appear when you want to, and that's it.
But from the very first shoot that we've done, and it's been the same on all of them, every time that we cut, the instructor pauses and wants notes on how they are doing. Once a class is in testing, they all want to see all the test results, what parts people loved, what parts people did not like. Once a class is live, almost every instructor has sent somebody on our team a note saying, you know what, I really need to update this part here. And it really made me think, if they're so obsessed with improving and getting input on their craft at this stage, then what am I doing? I have no excuse. And I think that really changed my approach from something, I think, when I started out, there was an insecurity to ask how I'm doing, to now I ask it all the time. And what you learn is, you don't always have to take that input, but it's really helpful to know how somebody responds to it. So that is one thing I've been really surprised and that really, I think, changed how I approach this. The second thing I learned was from Richard Branson.
Richard Branson has this approach that if you have a problem, you make it a bigger problem. Okay, I don't know about you all, that never crossed my mind to do. So the example he gives of this is, this was now a long time ago. He wanted to put a television on the back of every seat in an airplane. And he goes, this is how people want to fly. If I do that, I'm going to increase how many people come on my flights. I'm going to increase how much they enjoy the flight. So I want to put a TV screen on the back of every free chair. He goes to his lender and asks, I think he needed about 10 million bucks to do this. And the lender goes, no. And Richard's, no, trust me, this is going to work. And they're like, no, it's not. We aren't giving you 10 million. Why people want to travel is just to get from place A to place B. So we aren't doing that. So he's trying to think this through. How can I solve this? How can I get a TV on the back of every seat? And he says, it was 3 a.m. in the morning, and he's in bed, and all of a sudden he jumps up, and he realized he needed to make this a bigger problem. So he calls his sales rep at Boeing, and he goes, look, I want to upgrade my fleet. I'm thinking of buying over 25 planes, but I need one small thing. Now think about this, if I'm a sales rep, and somebody just called me for a 25 plane order, I am ecstatic. I've reached every goal I had for the entire year. So the sales rep's, of course, anything you want. And Richard's like, I need a TV screen on every seat back. And this guy was like, okay, yeah, fine, deal. And so what Richard learned from that is, if you scale up how big the problem is, different solves appear. And so that's one thing. I think about when I'm stuck. How can I make this a bigger thing to find an easier solve? Third thing I learned, and this was from Issa Rae and Kim Kardashian, is to build your own focus group.