The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham | with guest David Hunt

Sam Brown (0:01)

Welcome to Business Book Club, where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books.

I'm your host, Sam Brown, and today we're talking about The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham.

Cunningham's core philosophy is that success isn't about making brilliant decisions, it's about making fewer stupid ones. If you've ever looked at a decision that you made six months later and thought, what was I thinking? Then this episode is for you. Keith Cunningham isn't just an author, he's the real life rich dad having mentored Robert Kiyosaki prior to writing Rich Dad Poor Dad. He's made millions and he's lost millions and he's made them back again. The reason that he wrote this book is to help founders and CEOs avoid what he calls the stupid tax. It's the tax that kills most startups. How he suggests doing this is through a discipline practice he calls Thinking Time. Joining me today is David Hunt. David is a heavyweight in the clean energy space. A founder who built Hyperion Search and a strategic advisor to boards and VCs. He spent 30 years watching founders scale and fail in complex markets. Today, David is pulling back the curtain on how he uses Keith's principles to navigate the high stakes world of the energy transition. We're diving into why your own optimism can be your greatest enemy, why you might be outsourcing the one thing that you're actually paid to do, and the three pillars of success that turn a chaotic busy business into a focused profitable machine. So let's get into it.

David, why did you choose The Road Less Stupid as the book that's had the biggest impact on you?

David Hunt (1:39)

To me, The Road Less Stupid is a really practical book. It's one I've used at tough periods of time during my growth stages of the business that I founded. You can instantly put lessons into practice. It's a really practical solution for businesses which are quite young, and you don't necessarily have a mass of resources to support you. It's a way and a methodology of thinking in advance of problems or when they hit, to really come up with hopefully some relatively simple answers to what is quite a complex thing to do.

Sam Brown (2:09)

He's written it in such a way that you don't have to read it sequentially. You can just dive in and get the gold from each individual chapter. But because the core message of this book is around thinking time, and we're not going to cover those in the lessons, I wondered if you could just talk us through what thinking time is, and how you implement it.

David Hunt (2:26)

It's really tough to do, actually, as a founder, where you always think of doing and being busy. You have to be grinding all of the time. What it's saying is actually what you really need to do is step away and take some time to think. But do it in such a way that it becomes a really routine that you can fit into a week once, twice, three times at most. But having some time aside, 45 minutes to an hour, which sounds an awful lot when you think that there are so many plates that you're spinning. But actually what I found myself and from the people I've advised is it's so critical to be able to take yourself away. And within the book, there is some examples or a sort of a guidance on how to do this. But the long and short is to actually physically get away from your desk, get away from the office if you're sat in one. And being a different space, which really helps you then to be in a different space mentally as well as physically. Essentially, it's a discipline of taking one or two times a week, 45 minutes to an hour away from the chaos that is business at times and just giving yourself some time to breathe and thinking and sort of trying to be objective about your thoughts.

Sam Brown (3:25)

One thing he says is he isolates the question or questions that he wants to go deep thinking about before he actually gets into the thinking time to make the best use of it, doesn't he?

David Hunt (3:35)

Yeah, exactly. So for each chapter, there's some suggested thoughts after a summary of the problem. And you can use those I have oftentimes or sometimes you thought of your own question, which is why I think it's hugely practical because you can make it very relatable to your own situation that you're in. And it's not just a sort of a high level concept.