Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you, and you can get it at FIRMSconsulting.com/overallapproach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. So you can take a look at it, see how you can improve your resume. And you can get it at FIRMSconsulting.com/resumePDF. And the last gift from me for today is a copy of a book I co-authored with some of our amazing clients, and you can get it at FIRMSconsulting.com/gift. And that book went to become number one best seller on Amazon, and it’s called Nine leaders in Action, and today we have with us an amazing guest, William Green, who has written for many publications in the US and Europe, including Time, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, The New Yorker, The Spectator, The Economist, basically all incredible brands. And he edited the Asian edition of Time while living in Hong Kong, and then moved to London to edit the European, Middle Eastern and African editions of Time. He was born and raised in London and studied English Literature at Oxford University and received a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University. He lives in New York with his wife and their two children. William, so great to have you with us.

William Green  02:23

Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here with you. My resume always sounds much more impressive than the reality, but I’ll try. I’ll try to live up to it.

Kris Safarova  02:32

I think you’re more than living up to it. What do you think was the earliest moment in your life when you realized that you are different, that you had a way of seeing the world in some way that others didn’t.

William Green  02:43

I think I always felt a little bit a little bit odd at school, and I didn’t really love school. I was pretty good student, but I I always felt a little odd. And I think it’s it’s only now when I look back as an adult and also see my own children, who are now 23 and 26 that it becomes clearer what it’s actually like to be a kid and to be slightly unconventional. And my daughter, Madeline, who’s 23 had this wonderful term for it, where she started to say, well, there are people who operate inside the box, then there are people who operate outside the box, and then there are people who don’t even see the box. And so she started to describe those people as trapezoidal, and she said, those people live in the trapezoid. And so I think, I think in some ways, being her parent and my son’s parent, I started to think, Oh, I was always kind of trapezoidal. I think that’s part of the problem. If you’re if you’re creative, and you’re a little bit eccentric, growing up is hard. You you don’t quite understand why people look at you like you’re a little bit weird, you know? And so you, you you try to say the right thing, and you try to fit in, and it doesn’t quite click. And I don’t know this is my experience, and then I think as an adult, it becomes a little bit easier, because hopefully you find your tribe and and the people you find who are also trapezoidal, who are also eccentric, turn out to be really interesting adults. So they were a little we were all a little bit awkward as kids, but actually as adults, you’re surrounded by writers and filmmakers and artists and entrepreneurs, and they’re all, they’re all a little bit strange and unconventional and and so I don’t know I found, I found adulthood Much, much happier than childhood.

Kris Safarova  04:35

I think I can resonate with that. Could you give us some examples of things you were doing that your daughter felt that you don’t even see the box?

William Green  04:42

Well. I mean, I guess when I was about 20, I graduated from Oxford, so I was pretty young, right? And and I, I didn’t, decide to go get a job. I went and started, I started to teach part time, a few hours. Hours a week, and I started to write. So here I was at 20, I sent an article off. Maybe it was like a few weeks before I turned 21 I sent an article off to the spectator in London, which is a great classic English magazine about the relationship between two great novelists, Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. And I sent it to four other publications, and those publications all rejected it, and then I get back this buff colored envelope from the spectator with a copy of my article printed in the magazine and a check for 70 pounds. And I don’t know what possessed me to think, having having not done very well at Oxford as an English literature student, what possessed me to think, Oh, well, this legendary magazine where people like Dr Johnson and Graham Greene and all of these great people had written for them. Why on earth would they want to publish this, this kid? And so I think I, I had some sort of delusions of grandeur. I thought I should be like some kind of great writer. And then not long after that, I’m I was trying to write a screenplay, and I discovered I wasn’t very good, actually, at writing a screenplay. I couldn’t really, I couldn’t really understand the dialog. I didn’t really have a touch for the dialog. And I also, I think, I think I discovered I was trying to write fiction as well. I didn’t really have anything to say. I was 2122 23 and and so when I was about 22 I moved to New York, and I just stayed and so that was pretty unconventional for a start, right? Just picking up and deciding, okay, I’m gonna move 3000 miles and I’ll start writing for American publications. And then I met my wife on a blind date when we were made with 22 and we got engaged at 24 we moved in together after about two weeks. That’s pretty unusual. We got engaged not long after we were married at 25 and have been married for, you know, more than 30 years now, so I don’t know. We were impetuous. Then later I came home and I said to her, Would you ever consider moving to Philadelphia? Because someone had offered me an editing job in Philadelphia? And she was like, No, no way I’d go to Philadelphia. And then I came home a couple of weeks ago and was like, How about Hong Kong? And she’s like, Yeah, okay, so we picked up and moved our young family to Hong Kong, having never been to Asia, so that I could become the deputy editor of the Asian edition of time. So, like, very impulsive, not very rational, open for adventure, embracing lots of uncertainty. Sorry, I think we were always a little bit unconventional, probably. And it’s very much to my wife’s credit that she could put up with this so much.

Kris Safarova  07:33

To unpack, I would love to know more. So when you decided to move to New York, what was the reasoning behind it?

William Green  07:41

It’s an elaborate story. What basically happened is my brother, Andrew, who’s now a very successful Barrister in England, was dating someone, and she was an American, and he decided, for some reason, he decided in his 20s that he was going to buy an apartment in New York, and I really didn’t like the idea of my brother getting rich without me, so I decided that I would buy a small stake in the apartment, and then, and then we were going to rent it out, and that would cover our mortgage. And then, of course, nothing worked out the way that we expect it because we were idiots and knew nothing. And so my my brother’s relationship with this lovely woman didn’t work out, although she’s remained a friend of mine and his ever since. Interest rates surged to something like 14 and a half percent, and the property market crashed in the late 80s, and so I actually moved in with his former girlfriend to the apartment because we couldn’t rent it. And that’s when I met my wife on a blind date. So there was so much randomness built into this stuff, so much luck. And I don’t really think it was that much randomness in retrospect. I mean, I, I’m sort of a little bit of a mystic about these things, and I think there are ways in which the pieces are just sort of moved around. I have no evidence for this at all, but that feels like it, it feels like you’re sort of, there’s some bigger force at work, whatever you want to call it, and and so I ended up staying there. I ended up staying in New York and so so much of my career has been actually based on bad judgment, mistakes, things that I expected to go one way, but actually went the other way, having to adapt to new circumstances or setbacks. And so I think I used to have a sense that you could control everything just by or at least attempt to control everything by just sort of thinking so hard and being smart and trying to agonize over decisions enough and then at a certain point, I think I just sort of let go to some degree, and I have much less of an illusion of control at this point. And maybe. That’s a happier place to come from just saying, all right, I’m going to work hard, I’m going to try my best, I’m going to try to be a decent human being, but I’m going to make tons of mistakes because I’m a fool and I’ve got biases and blind spots and and also because we’re operating in a world that’s so profoundly uncertain, and so how do you deal with that uncertainty. So some of the best decisions I made over the years were actually the least rational decisions that I made. And then sometimes I would think things through so carefully, and nothing would go to plan. So I don’t know. I think in some ways this is the theme of my book, richer, wiser, happier. Is just i? In some ways I’m wrestling with this question by by interviewing lots of investors, and wrestling with this question of, how on earth do we deal with uncertainty in a world where nothing is knowable, where the future is unknowable, where everything is changing all of the time, how on earth do you make decisions? How do you plan? How do you and so this really grows out of my own sense of confusion, vulnerability, uncertainty and disquiet over just how difficult it is to make good decisions and to in some ways, at least increase the odds that things will work out well. And so I think that’s sort of where I ended up coming down. Is, is, is believing, well, yeah, the future is totally uncertain, and everything is changing, and I don’t have control. And yet, there are things that I can do that are more likely to stack the odds in my favor of a happy outcome, and there are things I can do that are more likely to lead to disaster. And so it’s not that you have control, but you’re not powerless either. The quality of your thinking, the way you handle your emotions, the way you treat people, there’s still so much that’s beyond your control. I mean, you and I were talking right before we started about the fact that you’re you’re not in in Los Angeles at the moment because of the fires. I mean, that’s, that’s such an, you know, and I’m so sorry. It’s such an emblem of what I’m talking about, just the tremendous uncertainty that that we’re all living with. And so, in a way, that’s, that’s, in a sense, what I’ve been wrestling with all these years is, how, how on earth do we operate in such an uncertain world.

Kris Safarova  12:21

Very true. So you arrived to New York, did you had any job prospects? How did you support yourself?

William Green  12:29

That’s a good question I had. So I had the the apartment. I had my brother and I had sold an apartment that we had owned in London that wasn’t particularly valuable, but it meant that we had this apartment. And so at a certain point, I thought, oh my god, what am I going to do? I’m going to go bankrupt, because interest rates had soared so much. So I think I sold part of my share to my brother, if I remember rightly, and so that reduced the risk. And so I think also that that that gave me an early lesson in why you want to live with within your means and not scare the hell out of yourself by overreaching. And then I I was writing. And so I started to write for different magazines from there. And I think I had this hunch that, because a lot of these English magazines couldn’t afford to have writers in America, I could write for them, because I was just there. So I would do these things where, for example, I would write to this magazine. The Independent magazine was probably the best magazine in England at the time. It was sort of the equivalent of what the New York Times Magazine is, I guess. And I said to them, well, there’s this guy called Byron delay Beckwith, who’s a white supremacist who had killed Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader in the 60s, and had been acquitted by an all white jury, and now he’s being tried again in a different Mississippi, in a different era. And could I write a feature about it? And they would send me to Mississippi, and I’d write a 4000 word story, you know, an eight page magazine story about this. And so it was just kind of a dream, you know, I would go off to a place like Jackson Mississippi that was so exotic to me as someone who had grown up in London and traveled all over Europe and the like, but I’d never been anywhere like Jackson Mississippi, and I I would be trying to get visitation rights to go see Byron delay back with in jail, and and his wife, who was called Thelma Neff, said, yeah, you can, you can have my my visit and go see him. And then. And then he decided that, well, I guess he went on a hunger strike for a while. And they said, and he said that the reason he was on a hunger strike, because this is the explanation I got, because the Jews were poisoning him. And here I am as a young Jewish guy from London, you know, and they’re just assuming that I’m, you know, because I’m English, I’ve got to be, you know, sympathetic to their kind of Christian view of the world and and. You know, it wasn’t, I mean, it was just curious to me. I was just fascinated. And I just was so intrigued by the fact that these people would sort of let me into their world because they thought I was like them. And so for me, it was like being an anthropologist, you know, coming to America, going and telling these stories. And then my editor from the independent magazine, got a job at The New Yorker, so I started to write talk of the town stories for The New Yorker, and it it just one unlikely thing would lead to another. I ended up becoming weirdly obsessed with the stock market, much to my surprise, when I was about 26 so I just became really fascinated by these investors, I think, because I just wanted to make money. And so I went to Forbes, and I started to interview famous investors. And then I went to money, really, just because I was looking to shake down Forbes for more money for a promotion. And then I met the editor of money, and I was like, Wow, this guy’s great. And so I went there, and then one day, I’m, I’m out for lunch with a friend in the Time Inc building because Time Inc owned fortune and money and time and Sports Illustrated and was the biggest magazine company in the world back then. And this friend says to me, Oh, this other friend of mine just got promoted from deputy editor to editor of the Asian edition of time. And I said, so who’s becoming his deputy? And that led to me moving to Hong Kong, so there was so little planning in any of these I had a sort of vague sense of what target rich areas were. You know that if you moved to New York, you were going to be able to become a writer. And I was obsessed with I was obsessed with language. I mean, I really loved stories and language. So it wasn’t it. It wasn’t totally random, because I was doing, you know, I was really trying to become a successful writer. I knew, probably from the age of seven or eight, that I wanted to be a writer. So it wasn’t it. It wasn’t just luck. I mean, there was a degree of passion and intensity about the actual craft, and I was obsessed with the quality of the work. I mean, I always, I think that article that I wrote about Byron delay back with the white supremacist. It probably took me a month just for the writing. Just, you know, I remember just sitting there in my apartment in midtown Manhattan, just tearing my hair out, I would, you know, I write a paragraph in a day. I mean, it was torture, and so I found it, I found it really hard. None of it was easy. It all felt like a war of attrition, and I was very determined. I think I had a terror of failure and a terror of mediocrity. So So I would so I was working hard, I was pushing myself hard, but there was so much randomness at play in how one thing led to another. And you look back and in retrospect, it seems to have had some kind of logic, but when you’re actually living it. None of it feels logical at all.

Kris Safarova  18:03

Terror of mediocrity. I think that is very familiar feeling for high performance.

William Green  18:08

Yeah, I it’s funny. I talked to a famous historian a couple of weeks ago, and he had just flown in to speak at an event where I was speaking to and I said, Why do you drive yourself so hard? And he said terror and and he really resonated for me. And I wonder if, for some of us, if we, if we come historically from difficult places, like I read that you had emigrated from Russia. My family emigrated from Russia, and Ukraine and Poland. And I think if you have that, and this historian, he had this sense of the what if I fall back into poverty in the Scottish Highlands? And so I think it probably intensifies that terror of failure and mediocrity, if, if if you feel like you could slip back into some into something where you know you wouldn’t be able to support your family, God forbid, or something like that. So, so yeah, for me, that that’s I, I think I’ve tried, over the years to shift away from being motivated by negative emotions, if there’s such a thing, because I don’t think it’s a very happy way to live, to be motivated by your fear and your anxiety. I think it’s quite powerful, but it’s quite it’s quite brittle. It’s not a very solid foundation on which to build a career and a life. And so I think I I helped Tony Robbins with a couple of projects a while back, and I remember saying to him at one point, so wait, so if I, if I get rid of my terror of my fear of failure, what’s going to motivate me, like, well, what will drive me? And he was sort of silent, and I said, service. And he just said. Nodded at me, and I think that’s probably the key. Is in some way, if we can make the shift from it being driven by, you know, this fear and a desperate desire to survive, you know that that general survival mode, if you can shift from that to a desire to be a force for good in other people’s lives and a conduit for something beyond one’s own ego. I think that’s, I think that is kind of the master move to make. And I’ve, I’ve tried, increasingly, to do that. I have say, I’ve done it with mixed success. It’s much more of my motive. But I think sometimes you have to harness these very negative is the wrong word. But for lack of a better word, these negative aspects of our our character, the sort of darker emotions and motivations i i don’t i don’t think you can deny them. I think you want to know what they are and try to harness them in some way, in a helpful way, maybe I don’t know what what do you think.

Kris Safarova  21:04

I agree with you. I think it drives you. It allows you to do exceptional things for yourself or clients, for your family. When you were talking about terror of mediocrity, one memory that came to me was when I was studying again after immigrated first time and my degree could not be found anywhere. I remember I was writing an exam. It was multiple choice questions, and at the end they still had few minutes. I was just double checking, double checking, making sure that I didn’t, by mistake, put the wrong answer. And because I knew that I knew everything 100% but I needed to make sure that I did not made a mistake in answering things. And the lady who was watching of a student, she came to me and said, Why are you doing it to yourself? I did it to myself because I could not get a minus. It had to be 100% correct.

William Green  21:50

I think I often when I was a student, I I would either do very badly because I basically decided that I didn’t care, or I would do unbelievably well because I really cared. And if, if, if I was going to admit psychologically that I cared, it would be terrible if then I failed. And so I think when I was all in, I was really all in and and so I think I’ve taken that approach with my writing career and with my podcast. Now that I have a podcast as well, I think, I think there’s always this desperate desire to make every episode really good, to make every chapter really good, every word, every paragraph. You know, there’s a so I, I think my casualness that I had at school in certain subjects is totally gone. If I, if I, I think there’s a, there’s a, I swear, I was mentioning this to a principal of a charter school the other day who I met at a dinner. I still remember when I was a teenager at Eaton, this very posh English school, doing my math homework and and this teacher literally giving me back the paper, and it had a rip at the top, and you this was literally called a rip, and you had to take it to your housemaster and get it signed. And I remember this total confusion, because I had really tried and totally failed. And I had no idea as a 13 or 14 year old boy how to process that. It was such a complex thing to deal with. And I don’t think anybody really tells you how to deal with this stuff when you’re growing up. You know how I was used to failing at things when I didn’t care and didn’t try hard, but to try and then still, fail. I think that was so painful, I didn’t want to go through that again.

Kris Safarova  23:44

Tell us a little more about how did you get yourself into a position that you were considered as a candidate for deputy editor for time?

William Green  23:54

I had been a writer for different magazines, so I got into lots of good magazines when I was really pretty young. I mean, I think I was, I was probably 23 or so when I was writing for the talk of the town section of the New Yorker, which was this legendary magazine, and I didn’t have a byline, so I used to joke that I was anonymously famous and and so I would write these long features for different magazines. And then at a certain point, I think because I was so brutal to myself and so worried about not being good enough, I became almost paralyzed as a writer. It just was so painful the writing that I, I think I was a little burned out, and I decided to switch to editing. And so I was working at Money magazine at the time, we were doing these very long features, and I have a friend called John Gertner, who’s still a good friend, who’s an amazing writer, who wrote these books, like the Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, terrific writer, and the ice at the end of the world, about Greenland and global warming. And he was a he was an editor there, and I was a writer, and we went to our boss at the time. And said, Could we switch? And we did. We switched. And so I would start to edit John’s features. And I edited people like Jason Zweig, who’s an amazing writer, who is a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Now, I edited aravinder digger, who ended up I actually was the one who who hired him both money, and then later, at time, he won the Booker Prize with his book The White Tiger. So I just shifted to editing, partly because I found writing so painful. And then intimately, I would kind of ambush myself by writing an article, and I would sort of forget how difficult it was, and then I would go back to editing, which I found weirdly easy because I was doing it was, it was a similar craft, but there was no emotion involved, because your ego wasn’t exposed. You were editing someone else’s work. And so it was, it was much easier emotionally, but you weren’t really creating as much. You didn’t have the same thrill of creation. I mean, it was, it was amazing when I was at Time Magazine, and you would be covering things like SARS or avian flu or the tsunami that was so devastating back then, and and you would be able to send these incredible writers like like Aravind Adiga to Sri Lanka, or there was an amazing writer called Andrew Marshall, and you’d send him to arche to to write about the devastation from the tsunami. So there was a there was a great thrill to being an editor. I mean, you had it was more like being a conductor of an orchestra. You’re sort of sending these wonderful photographers and writers around Asia, and this is at a time when the magazine was very influential, Time magazine before the bottom fell out of the magazine business. So I really enjoyed that, and I was I was found it weirdly easy. I wasn’t good at the managing aspects of a magazine. I mean, I was, I think journalists tend to be terrible managers, and I didn’t really even understand things like the importance of buttering up your bosses and being nice to your bosses and stuff like, I, like, I, I don’t think, I sometimes think, what would my grade be out of out of 10 for things like that, for managing up? And I don’t even know that I would have got a zero. You know, nothing above a zero. I mean, I just didn’t even bother. It was like I just wanted to be left to myself to create really good stories and pick great photos and great layout. So in some ways, it didn’t really play to my strengths. It played to my strengths in terms of creating quality, but not in terms of the other complications of managing a magazine. And so I think one of the things that I learned over time, partly from studying great investors like Charlie Munger, is that you really have to play games that you’re equipped to win. And in retrospect, I feel like I was just good enough. Was just good enough at running a magazine that I could, I could fool myself into thinking that it was the right game, but actually, I think it was much better at things like interviewing, people, writing, speaking, editing and and so. So then part of what happened is that it all kind of fell apart during the financial crisis. So the magazine business got crushed, and I got laid off by time. So by then, I was editing the European, Middle East and African edition of time. And then got laid off in the middle of the financial crisis because I was very expensive, because they were paying for my kids education, and my house in London, and so, you know, it was a wonderful lifestyle, but it made you very vulnerable when, when the magazine business fell apart. So then I really had to figure out, at the age of 40, oh, my God, what do you do when your profession has collapsed? You know, the magazine industry just kind of fell apart. And you have two young kids in private school. We’re living in London at that point, my wife’s in New York, and I’d been on a, you know, I had a green card, and I’d been away from the US for a long time, and you start to think, well, I don’t know where to live, I don’t know what profession to do, and I got to raise my kids and support my kids. And so I think that probably also sort of, I guess, that revived that old sense of fear of, like, what if you’re not okay, you know, what if you actually can’t support your family? So I think there’s a So, I think the intensity, the intensity of drive, is partly a response to that. It’s like a survival instinct of just like, absolutely determined to take care of your your family and make sure you’re okay. So, so, so in some ways, I mean, I think I think again, like that. Theme runs through my writing in richer, wiser, happier I’m really dealing with like these themes like resilience and how do you deal with failure, how do you deal with shame, where things have fallen apart? How do you pick yourself up again and succeed when when things have gone against you. And so I think when I would go interview Great Investors who’d gone through periods that were absolutely brutal, one of the reasons why they would talk to me openly is because I was very open about what I’d gone through myself. So I think it’s none of this stuff is a, sort of, is a, is a sort of purely academic exercise. For me, I’m grappling myself with these questions of, how do you deal with getting you know the if you excuse my language, the crap kicked out of you along the way, and how do you adjust? And how do you find, how do you find a new path when your business has been disrupted by technology or your career has been disrupted by an economic crisis or by your own mistakes or by bad luck or political setback or or just the misfortune of your style of investing going against you for years, because that’s just out of favor. So I, I think that helps as a writer, if what you’re if what you’re actually writing about is something that deeply obsesses you, it’s, it’s not just, oh, let me publish a book, because this is a good idea.

Kris Safarova  31:41

And most books are not written that way. People are not writing about something that deeply obsesses them. So how does someone deal with shame? What advice would you give to someone who needs to pick themselves up after, for example, a difficult maybe a mistake they made they cannot forgive themselves for?

William Green  31:59

Yeah, I was thinking about this actually half an hour before we started, because I am wrestling with something difficult at the moment. And there’s a lovely line from this great meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, who is one of the great teachers of loving kindness, meditation in in the West, and I’m not a student of hers, but I I’ve listened to lots of talks to hers over the years, and she would say, let go with self compassion and begin again. And I think about that a lot that I mean, I think originally it was kind of an instruction for if you’re meditating and you lose track of the breath, and you’re trying to focus on the breath, and then you realize you’re lost. And she would say, let go with self compassion and begin again. But I, I think I actually in the building where I am at the moment, in in New York. She I ran into Sharon Salzberg because she came to an event where a great Tibetan Buddhist teacher was teaching. And I said to her, that line had a huge impact on me. So thank you. And she was saying, yeah, it’s very central to what I teach. So I think that’s part of it is really to understand that we’re deeply flawed, we’re deeply vulnerable, and we’re operating in a world that’s incredibly uncertain, and sometimes things are just hard, and sometimes you screw up through your own era or bad luck, and so the ability to give yourself some grace and say, you know, yeah, this happened because I’m human, and I think that’s really important. So I think part of what’s very difficult for people like us, who got ahead by being very hard charging and very tough on ourselves and driving ourselves in the way that you did when you were pushing yourself not to get anything wrong in your exam, or I did as a writer. Part of the difficulty of that is that you get in the habit of building this muscle of beating yourself up as a way to succeed, and it’s very effective, but there’s a lack of mercy to it. There’s a lack of self compassion. And so I think part of, part of what I think we have to do is to somehow balance the judgment and the mercy, you know, the toughness and strength and drivenness, with this self compassion where you’re like, Yeah, I still need to rest sometimes, and I still need to allow myself to have some fun. And I sometimes think my my daughter Madeline, who I mentioned before, when she was very young, did this amazing drawing of a lion, an incredible close up drawing of a lion in extraordinary detail. And she said to me, after she was describing she said, soft strength, that’s what it embodies. And so I think in some way that that’s the quality you’re after. Strength, but it’s soft strength and so but to go back in a bit more detail to this question of shame and failure, there’s a very extraordinary investor, a guy called Bill Miller, who I wrote about mostly in the Epilog of richer, wiser, happier, but who I’ve interviewed an enormous number of times over the last 25 years, and he was this utterly brilliant guy who beat the market for 15 years running. And so there was almost a sense that he was, he was defying gravity, right? Like he could do this thing that was impossible. And he got to a point where he was managing something like $77 billion and I interviewed him, really at the peak of his success, and I had written a long profile of him for fortune and the like. And then I would keep checking in. I wrote a story about him for time later on, and then during the financial crisis, he kind of blew up, and he made this huge mistake, and more than 100 people lost their jobs because of the mistake that he had made, and his assets under management went down from 77 billion to about 800 million. And so when I was talking to him about what I’d been through, and was asking him, how do you deal with it, part of, part of what made me admire him so much was that I saw this incredible kind of stoic attitude that he had, and and it, and it’s actually the right term for it. I mean, he had studied the stoics because he was a, he was a philosophy PhD student, and he came from a very, very modest background. And his father had been a taxi driver, and so he had been in the midst of this mayhem, when everything was falling apart. He would be going back to study Marcus, Aurelius and Epictetus and Seneca, and he said, Look, I don’t have control over how people are going to talk about me, what they’re going to say about me, what my reputation is I don’t really have control over the outcome, but I have control of my own attitude. I have control of my own intentions. I can be honest about the mistakes that I made. I can be gracious in accepting responsibility. I can have a sense of humor. I can have a sense of humility, and I just tremendously admired his ability to distinguish between what he could and couldn’t control. And I remember him once showing me someone, someone had tweeted something about him that said something like that, ass hat Miller just got lucky again. Now he’s rebounding. And he was like, Really, asshat. Like, this guy doesn’t know me. Like, what? Why is he bad mouthing me like that? And, you know, so he was having to deal with being publicly pilloried. And the amazing thing was that he had, he had this unbelievable recovery, then, over the next decade after the financial crisis, like, an incredible recovery. And it turned out, not only did he have an incredible rebound in terms of the fund that he managed, but he but he’d secretly, kind of built this enormous position in Amazon. I mean, a vast position. When I had first written about him, his Fund had bought 15% of Amazon back in like 1999 2000 around then, but he’d had to sell much of that stake in his fund because all of his investors had bailed out because they lost their belief in him. But privately, he just kept buying more and more. So at one point, he asked Jeff Bezos, are your financial statements right? And Bezos is like, yeah. And he said, Well, in that case, I’m the biggest individual shareholder of Amazon, not named Bezos. And so he’s become this multi billionaire again, um, having been so eviscerated and pillared. And so when, when I first knew him, I think I was just sort of stunned by his intellect, right? I mean, he was a guy who who would talk about how his biggest influences as an investor were Wittgenstein and William James. And now, as an older person in my 50s, in my mid 50s, 56 I look at him and I think, God, the resilience of the guy, you know, the fact that he, he took this beating with honor, is very powerful. And so in the Epilog, I write about resilience. In the Epilog of ritualize the happier. And there was one bit where I was talking about the lessons from Bill Miller’s life, and, and, and one of them is just the, you know, the great Buddhist truth, which is, everyone suffers. And this sense that I think some people look at these very rich people, and they assume that they’re living in some kind of cocoon, you know, protected from pain and sorrow. And I just I got to know so many great investors well, and to be inside their lives that I would see when they were sick or when their wife wouldn’t sleep with them anymore and didn’t want to share a room with. Them, or when their kid was anorexic, or, you know, just when they were so burned out, or when they were fighting with their partner at work, and and, and you start to realize, oh, they have, they have as much sorrow and pain and uncertainty as you know, the rest of us. I mean, I think they’re in some ways, this is something that Tony Robbins had once said to me, is that the money amplifies the issues. It doesn’t make the issues go away. So it should, in some way, make us more empathetic. I think once you know that, once you have a sense that even the richest people are going through their pain and sorrow it I think, I think it should make us tread a little bit more lightly, but also hopefully be more forgiving of ourselves and our own stumbles and failures and missteps and worries and the like. So I don’t know, I don’t know if any of that resonates for you.

Kris Safarova  41:00

Definitely resonates. So you mentioned Tony Robbins today, I was wondering, given you worked with him, what do you think is the reason why he is successful and impactful and so on, what are some of the things that maybe we don’t see, don’t know about him?

William Green  41:15

He has extraordinary personal qualities. There’s a sort of, there’s, there’s a kind of extraordinary combination of of characteristics that that he has, that I think it’s very easy to ignore. So I, I am, and I never look free to talk about projects that I’ve worked on in the past when I’ve but I mean, he’s been very gracious in the acknowledgements of projects where I’ve worked with him. So So I think I can say a bit about it, but he has an extraordinary brain. And I remember once asking him about something that he hadn’t thought about for ages, and saying, I don’t understand this issue. And in in total linear order, he was able to say, Well, look, there are like, six points or something. And then he goes through it in great order. And so I think, I think he has a he has a tremendous amount of brain power, and then he has this physical intensity to him. I mean, he’s just like this rock. And even though his body has taken this huge beating over the years, and he’s had lots of health issues that he’s written about and talked about, he’s he is this kind of mighty warrior, and he has this incredible, gravelly, powerful voice, which, again, is slightly a gravel, gravelly voice, because he’s wrecked it, I suspect you know, I mean, he’s he, he’s given so much of himself. And then there’s a sort of, there’s a somewhat, it can be easily misinterpreted, but my phrase would almost be this kind of Messianic quality to him, where he really deeply wants to take people out of their pain. And so I once said to him, when you, when you go up in front of a crowd of, say, 12 people, 12,000 people, or 15,000 people, because I had been to one of his Unleash the Power Within events in California. I said, when you go up there, what do you say to yourself as you’re going up and he said, he said, I tell myself, Lord, use me. I thought that’s very revealing with the with the inner that the inner conversation is. So he’s asking to be a channel, in some way, for something greater than himself. And so I think that’s one of the secrets of life is when, when I, when I was talking before about wanting to shift from being motivated by fear of failure or fear of mediocrity or or things like a desire for respect or a desire for honor or a desire to show people that you’re better than they thought you were. You know, if you can, if you can, shift from that to a desire to lift up other people. I think that’s kind of the master move. And I I don’t think you need to score perfectly on this. I mean, I think there’s still, if I’m honest about it, when I look at my own motives, there’s, there’s always mixed in with all of my altruistic motives. There’s a desire to to be respected and loved and honored, and, you know, all of the kind of, you know, the stuff that we have left over from childhood that’s like, you know, a desire to be approved of and accepted, and all of all of that stuff. But then increasingly mixed up with that, there is this sense of, you know, all right, well, please, let me just be a force for good in the world, like if, if I can be a force for good in. Other people’s lives, if I go on your podcast, or if I write something, or if I do a speech, or if I do a podcast. And so I think increasingly, there’s great importance to setting your intention in life. And so it’s so our behavior is constantly falling short of it. I mean, I, you know, I still behave crappy in all sorts of ways, but at least if I’m constantly setting the intention before I do anything in the same way that Tony was in some in some way that resonates for you. So I, I think, I mean for me, I I’ve that idea of just, please let me be a force for good. Is a very, it’s a very obvious way to set your intention before everything, and then just to think, you know if something helps one person in the audience, one you know, if you can make a profound difference to one person’s life, that’s enough. It doesn’t so. So these obsessions with things like, let me build my brand, you know, let me, let me build my following on x, or my following on LinkedIn, or whatever I I’m I’m definitely vulnerable to those things like, there. There are these, these ways we measure ourselves to to prove to ourselves that we’re loved and doing okay, and that the world appreciates us, but but there’s also a part of me that really sincerely, it’s like one person that that would be good.

Kris Safarova  46:32

William, I feel we need round two down the road, because there’s so much more that we can cover, and we haven’t even got yet to your current work. So I’m thinking, let’s wrap up for today. I have one last question. Sure open the door to continue down the road we started. So the last question for today. And first of all, thank you so much for being who you are. And I wanted to mention that you said that you’re really organizing about writing, and there’s place and time for it, definitely. And you are one of the best in the world that did. But I think also the way you speak, you already more than enough. Ah, thank you. The way you communicate. And I think also some of the beauty, some of the most incredible things that can really help someone on the other side come from being in the moment and just writing. So maybe a way for you to try writing differently sometimes where you’re not organizing of it, but instead just letting it come up.

William Green  47:28

Yeah, it’s okay. I know you wanted to ask another question, but I’ll, I’ll comment on that first, if I may. So. So I think part of what happened to me, also in my chronology of my career, is that after I got laid off by time, then I got another magazine job, and then I quit that, and then I started to ghost write books. And in some way, ghost writing books cleaned the pipes. And so the word started to flow through me much more easily. And so actually I was able to, I was able to get a much better, much a much better relationship with writing, because there was not so much ego involved. And so then, then I wrote a book called The Great Minds of investing, which was made up of short profiles. And in a way, a short profile is quite easy for me, because it’s much like writing a page or two pages in Time Magazine. And you could make that kind of perfect. But then I, then I went to write richer, wiser, happier, and that, that was five years of really, really intense struggle. But throughout that, I was really asking to be some I mean, it sounds, it sounds like such a pretentious and portentous thing to say, but I had a teacher at the time who said to me, William, are you is is this going to be a channel for the ego of William Green or something more? And he said to me, what you’re asking for is just to be a clean pipe. And that was incredibly helpful for me. So in some way, I think what’s happening is you’re you’re trying to get out of your own way. So I think in all of these things, whether it’s martial arts or public speaking or, you know, you you were a musician, right? I think there’s some, so I don’t mean to use the past tense, you are a musician. There’s some, there’s some, there’s some sense in which you’re trying to get out of your way. So something can flow through you. And so I think all of these emotions, like the fear, the fear of failure, the fear that you’re being judged, the desire for approval, they kind of, they kind of block the pipe in some way. And so the more you can get out of your way and ask to be a clean pipe, the better. And and so I think Rich always happy. It was an unbelievably difficult book to write because I was trying to synthesize and distill hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews with probably 50 different famous investors, and I don’t know. Very orderly brain, and so just to bring in all of these ideas and to go off and say, okay, so what did Bill Miller learn from stoicism and what, you know, say, you’re constantly going off in other directions and falling down rabbit holes, that was very hard, but there’s a tremendous joy to it. I mean, I think when I when I look back on that book, that that’s kind of the high point of my career, that’s that’s the that’s been a great source of fulfillment. So I do wonder if to achieve something that you’re deeply proud of, if there does have to be some element of overcoming your own ego involved in it, like, like, it’s not going to come easy to do something that you’re really enduringly proud of, that’s not going to be just handed to you. There’s a good book called something like The War of Art, as opposed to the art of war, that’s by this guy, Steven Pressfield, where he talks about that. And I remember at some point he said something like, you know, if you’re, if you’re, like, going into marketing for a cigarette company, don’t worry, there’s not going to be a great force of opposition internally or externally. But if you’re trying to do something, you know, create something really beautiful, there’s going to be a real force of opposition internally and externally that you have to overcome. So I don’t so, so I just, I didn’t want to give the sense that I still had exactly the same pained attitude to writing, but I’m still somewhat recovering from writing, richer, wiser, happier, I not ready to climb the mountain again. And one of the one of the joys of hosting a podcast, for me, I don’t know if it’s the same for you, is that you get to have these amazing conversations, but you don’t have to write afterwards, and so you do sort of the most fun part of of being a journalist without the most difficult part of actually sitting down on your own with a blank page.

Kris Safarova  51:54

I really enjoy the podcast for the same reason as you speaking to people, but I don’t have that issue with writing. I just write. It just comes through and but, of course, I have other issues to deal with. We’ll be all dealing with something. But I just wanted to mention to you, and I’m so glad that you already found a different way of writing, because I think you have such a beautiful way of saying things, and also not just beautiful way, but there’s a lot of wisdom in what you’re saying. Thank you. I would want you to write a lot and speak a lot, because the world needs to hear what you have to say.

William Green  52:29

I think at a certain point, first of all, that’s very kind of you. Thank you. I think at a certain point, I decided that I wasn’t going to play what I would call a volume game of writing lots of books or lots of articles, or, you know, when people say you should have a sub stack column and write two articles a week, it’s like, no, that is not what I’m built for. And so I think if there’s any takeaway for our listeners and viewers, it’s, it’s, it really is this idea from Munger of finding, finding a game that really deeply suits your talents and personality. And so for me, I’m I don’t want to write a lot of books, but if I, if I wrote a couple more really good books, I’d feel pretty fulfilled, but I’m not going to be able to relax my standards on them. And so I missed my deadline by two years on this book, and that was, that was really painful. I mean, that creates a lot of pressure when you’re two years late on a book, and so you feel almost like you failed before you even begun. And so I don’t know, so I’m not looking to do volume. I’m I’m incapable of relaxing the quality side. And so the thing that has to give is speed. I think if you’re if it doesn’t come super easily, it sounds like comes much more easily to you than it does to me.

Kris Safarova  53:49

Not in everything. I think that when it is a technical topic, yes, it is much harder to because you have to really focus on, how do you condense things into paragraphs and shorter chapters? But when it is writing, such as emails, for example, not emails to friends, but females, the community, then it just comes. This is one area where I don’t torture myself.

William Green  54:12

Yeah, yeah. I don’t torture myself that much about that stuff, either. But if, if, if it’s a book. I mean, particularly with this book I I was writing it also during COVID, and I had a sense that this is for keeps, and I want to create one thing that I’m deeply proud of, other than my kids. And so I so the stakes kept increasing as well, because I think we had an increased sense of our own mortality. And so I I, and I realized that I had a degree of access to great investors, and I’m not sure anybody else had been given and so I wanted to make it count so the stakes were high. So I don’t know. I am always torn. You know how people will say, you know, don’t, don’t. Make the great the enemy. Of the good and the like. And I just don’t really believe that. I sort of, I sort of feel like when I look at the super high performers that I write about, they’re a little bit crazy, like their intensity, their level of intensity and their desire for excellence is quite remarkable. And I remember one, one of the investors I wrote about, guy called Paul lances, he said to me, at one point he had, he had read a couple of different books, one of Ben Graham’s book something like 50 times. And when I ran into him a year or so ago, I think, I think he said to me, no, no, it’s up to about 70 times now. And another book he’d read only a little bit less than that. And he said to me, you know, you don’t get to be Roger Federer without playing a lot of tennis. And so I do think there has to be a kind of intensity. And so I think you can be very, very good at something by just being incredibly talented. But I think to be, you know, the absolute pinnacle there’s, there’s something I think often, often you have to be a little bit defective. Probably there have to be, there have to be parts of your personality that are a little bit unhealthy. I don’t know. And I, I do sometimes write about people who I think have managed to be incredibly successful while being good role models of, you know, having great families and the like. But I, you know, I’m shocked at how many of the great investors I’ve written about have ended up divorced. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Kris Safarova  56:31

Very true. So my last question for today, over the last few years, what were two, three aha moments, realizations that you’re comfortable sharing that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business?

William Green  56:43

One of the things that’s been surprising for me over the last probably 17 years is that I became increasingly spiritual. So having, I’ve done a sort of grand tour of different religious and spiritual positions. So I had, I kind of had a conventional Jewish upbringing. Then I became sort of agnostic in a kind of ornery, difficult way. So I refused to go home from boarding school to go to Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur or anything like that. And then I and then, then I became atheistic. And then when I was about 40, much to my surprise, there was some kind of weird awakening where just stuff shifted. And it was actually it was, it was almost exactly the same time as I got laid off from that job in the middle of the financial crisis. And instead of becoming bitter and embittered and deciding that it was all kind of meaningless and random and just Darwinian. There was some kind of strange spiritual awakening where I started to think, oh no, there’s so much that I can learn from this. And I need to start taking responsibility for my life, and I need to start building my life on a different foundation, a better foundation. And so, in a way, the last 17 years has been a progression of that, of just this tremendous surprise, of discovering that my spiritual life became more and more important. And so I think one of the great, one of the great lessons of that is that I don’t think we even know ourselves, let alone much else. I mean, I, you know, I I had no idea how I was going to change internally over the years. But I think in practical terms, one of the great questions is how, how to succeed in inverted commas in the world of business and finance and supporting your family and all of that, while also having something more than that, that there’s some kind of spiritual or philosophical underpinning that makes it amount to more, that that’s become a great area of exploration for me. And so it’s not so much that there’s an aha moment where you say, ah, that’s what it’ll what it’s all about. I’ve got it. But I think there’s a sense of unfolding, an exploration, of trying to figure out, Is there a different way to be successful? Is there a different way to build a truly abundant and rich life, and what would that look like? And so in some ways, in some ways, it’s all an exploration of that. When I’m interviewing people, I’m trying to figure out, so how do you think about the role of luck in your life? How do you think about the role of of family? How do you balance your family and your work? How do you think about giving back to society so you’re contributing something? How do you how do you think about money and and managing your time and your energy like, at what point do you actually become poorer because you you you got really rich, and you’ve got all of these toys and baubles, but you actually don’t. Have any time for your kids and the like, or you’re just not present in any way, because you’re always trying to become something else. So you can’t actually sit there and and be and relish the moment and so, so for me, that’s become a much bigger part of the exploration and and I don’t, I don’t know where that’s going to go, but I don’t know that that’s, there’s, there’s a, there’s a sort of deepening and an unfolding there that’s a very rich journey. And it’s, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not easy, it’s not like, oh, everything now makes sense. But I think I have pretty I think my views are very different than they used to be. I don’t really think any of it’s that random. I think there is some sort of deeper force that’s pushing us to evolve and elevate our consciousness in some way, and so then all of these trials and tribulations that we go through in some way are kind of, you know, dismantling the ego and the ego, I think it’s probably the big blockage anyway in life, you know, When we’re thinking about me, me, me. It’s not a it’s not a great way to live, you know, because you’re just always kind of filling this huge gaping psychological hole that can never really be filled. And so that, in a way, becomes the the big exploration is, how can you dismantle the ego, which is the thing that kind of we’ve been convinced is going to help us survive and get ahead in the world, and that’s helped us get where we are in so many ways. How can you dismantle that and shift to a better system, which is kind of scary in its own right, where you’re saying, Well, let me try to help other people and lift up other people and and then that’s not easy either, because you constantly fail at that and you stumble, and then, you know, you get back to being like, I’m such a schmuck, and I’m falling short of my idealistic words the whole time, and and yet you have to sort of pick yourself up again. And as we were saying before, say, All right, let me begin again with self compassion. And, you know, let go with self compassion and begin again. And so I think there’s a, it’s not an aha, it’s a sort of, it’s an unfolding, if that makes sense.

Kris Safarova  1:02:32

William, thank you so much. Thank you for everything you said. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book? Anything else you want to say?

William Green  1:02:41

Sure, I have a website called williamgreenwrites.com and I’m on Twitter @williamgreen72. I guess it’s no longer called Twitter X. I’m on LinkedIn. They’re welcome to follow me or befriend me there. And there’s my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, and then there’s a Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast, which you can find on Spotify and Apple and the like, and it and also on YouTube. And those are long conversations, often about two hours with everyone from Ray Dalio to Pico Aya to Daniel Goleman. It’s a really interesting, varied people, a lot of great investors, a lot of billionaires, but also a lot of really great authors and thinkers and with a with a big emphasis on people that I actually admire, who I think you can, you can learn from about how to live, and not just how to get rich, how to get rich in a deeper sense, I guess. Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Kris Safarova  1:03:40

Thank you, William. Our guest today, again, has been William Green. Check out his book. It’s called Richer, Wiser, Happier. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free gift to we prepared for you, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offered from both of those firms. So you can take a look at your resume, look at this example resume, and see what you can incorporate. And you can get it at FIRMSconsulting.com/resumePDF. And lastly, you can get a copy of a book we co-authored with some of our amazing clients, and it is called Nine Leaders in Action. It went to become number one bestseller on Amazon, and you can get it at FIRMSconsulting.com/gift. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.