Objectively Speaking with Peter Worrell Transcript

Being a successful entrepreneur takes more than strategy and execution, but draws on the deep, inner forces of intention, resilience, grit, and creativity. How to unleash these qualities is a question Pete Worrell explores in his latest book, INTENTION: Unlocking The Lifeforce Inside High-Performing Entrepreneurs. And it’s a topic that Worrell has had decades studying, having helped countless Entrepreneur Owner-Managers to build and ultimately capture the Enterprise Value they’ve tirelessly built, in his capacity as Managing Director of Bigelow LLC. Watch the interview HERE or read the transcript below.

‍

JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

PW: Pete Worrell

‍

JAG: Welcome to the 264th episode of Objectively Speaking. I'm JAG, CEO of The Atlas Society and I'm very excited to have returning guest Pete Worrell join us to talk about his new book Intention: Unlocking the Life Force Inside High-Performing Entrepreneurs. As you can see, I've got a lot of bookmarks here. I really enjoyed it and I'm very excited to talk about it with its author. Pete, thanks for joining us.

PW: JAG, it's fun to see you. Great to be with you.

JAG: Great. Well, when we first had you on this show, it was about two-and-a-half-years ago to talk about your book Enterprise Value: How the Best Owner-Managers Build Their Future, Their Fortune, Capture Their Company's Gains and Create Their Legacy. Bring us up to speed about what's been happening in the intervening years. When you and I caught up privately a couple of months ago, you said you're sensing in your weekly travels to go and meet with these entrepreneur owner-managers a new sense of optimism, a bubbling up of entrepreneurial energy. Tell us what you're seeing and what you've been up to.

Many of us who are business owners are playing poker right now. We're trying to understand what's going on and as is usual, there are a lot of changes in the external environment that entrepreneurs have to evolve with.

PW: That's definitely true. That's still continuing to be, when I'm traveling around, what I see is we live in a world of uncertainty and there's a lot of talk in the media about various kinds of uncertainty. Many of us who are business owners are playing poker right now. We're trying to understand what's going on and as is usual, there are a lot of changes in the external environment that entrepreneurs have to evolve with. But what I'm seeing today is an understanding that [for] 20 or 30 years, that we maybe are coming out of that time where we were asleep and we're really [flexing] entrepreneurial muscles again.

JAG: In your book you write that part of this shift in terms of revering the politicians or the generals or the scientists that’s now becoming more of a positive attitude towards entrepreneurs. What brought about the fall from grace? I had Martin Gurri, author of Revolt of the Public, on recently and he talked about the age of information. But is it that this more recent crop of public leaders has just not lived up to our idea of what they should be and how they should conduct themselves?

To me, comfort is overrated and safety is an illusion.

PW: My answer is that I don't know. But what I would see contributing is during these times, yours and mine, we live in this extraordinary time where the data, not opinions, but you look at the data, what you see is that worldwide poverty has gone straight down. What you see is that literacy is up. What you see is that lifetimes have extended from age 47 in 1900 to age 77, (I'm making it up in 2025) that the objective measures of our world are overwhelmingly positive. Yet as humans, we were evolved to live in a culture which no longer exists. We were these hunter-gatherers running around for 200,000 years. We had this great negativity bias which served us well. Today, however, our negativity bias doesn't serve us well and it causes us to be concerned and fearful and anxious about things that really can't cause us any harm. In a way, to me, our last 20 to 40 years has been a little bit about comfort zones, that we feel we want to make people comfortable. We want to have them be comfortable economically, health-wise, culturally, in every other way. We've spent a lot of our ammo doing that. I think maybe our leaders got a little bit off track. To me, comfort is overrated and safety is an illusion.

JAG: Well, that sounds very much like something that our mutual friend Peter Diamandis, who's been on this podcast and, of course, has come to many of our events, used to talk about: what you focus on is what you move towards. If you allow yourself to be ruled by your prehistoric evolutionary default then you're not going to be objective because you're going to exaggerate threats and problems and a certain amount of optimism and gratitude are necessary to rebalance that and stay more in touch with reality. Speaking of Peter Diamandis, you and I met at an XPrize Abundance360 event. Are you going to the XPrize Visioneering, by the way, coming up?

PW: I'm not, no, I'm booked.

JAG: I'll be there. I will represent you. I will represent the Rand contingent and I will report back. But when we met at Abundance360, I had my Atlas Shrugged bag and we struck up a conversation, for those who didn't catch our first podcast together. You have a company named after Dagny Taggart. Another one, I believe, named after John Galt. I'm just wondering why the characters resonated deeply with you.

It took the courage and the will and the self-belief and the self-confidence and the grit to continue to go after it time after time. To me, I've always held them out as my heroes.

PW: Critical thinker as you are and I am, you're trying to live in the mass popular culture that we currently live in. It can be a very isolating place to be, lonely even. It takes a lot of courage and will to persist under those conditions. To me, as a young person reading those books for the first time, I really resonated with the fact that they were these independent, critical thinkers in a mass popular culture, not necessarily like ours, but metaphorically like ours. It took the courage and the will and the self-belief and the self-confidence and the grit to continue to go after it time after time. To me, I've always held them out as my heroes.

JAG: Let's talk about the differences between your two books, Enterprise Value and your newest book Intention: Unlocking the Life Force Inside High-Performing Entrepreneurs. I found Intention less traditional, more meditative, equally engrossing. How would you describe the differences between the two and what were you trying to achieve with each?

PW: Enterprise Value is designed to be a learning about the professional journey of entrepreneurs from beginning to end. It's all about the professional inputs and outputs that entrepreneurs think about. Intention is intended to be the personal journey of entrepreneurs. Intention, as you pointed out, is actually physically structured differently. It's a book of essays. It's broken into five chapters. The chapter headings, I think, are illuminating, which are “Discovery,” “Discomfort,” “Dedication,” “Synchronicity,” and ultimately “Awakening Someone.” I think it was James Clear, the author, who said he thought that the entrepreneurial journey was a journey of personal development disguised as a business journey. In a way, I really resonate with that. Intention is really more about the personal challenges we have as entrepreneurs going through these various parts on our arc and ultimately ending up in the sense of awakening.

JAG: You wrote the book with a very specific audience in mind. Entrepreneurs, owners, managers, or EOMs. I don't precisely fall into that category as someone running a nonprofit, yet I found in the book a lot that I could apply to my own endeavors. Why the narrow focus?

PW: I think you are an entrepreneur. You're one of the most spectacular entrepreneurs I've ever met. You happen to be an entrepreneur in a not-for-profit. That's very possible. I have other friends. If you know the large university SNHU, the president has been for 20 years, my friend Paul LeBlanc, another superb entrepreneur who thinks differently and is willing to take risks and gauges risks differently. To me, the big difference is that this is written for people who have skin in the game and if you have skin in the game and you have an opinion, I'm very interested in it. If you have an opinion with no skin in the game, it means nothing to me. Entrepreneurs, of course, have skin in the game not only their capital at risk, not only the potential for upside of their capital, but the loss of all of their capital. They all have reputational risk and other risks in addition. To me, I'm most interested in writing to and speaking to those people who have skin in the game and I resonate with, and I really spend the most time with.

JAG: I have skin in the game and I definitely have heart and soul in the game. [PW: You do]. But you know, there was another part in the book that really illustrated this idea of skin in the game. It was the story of you going to have lunch with a friend and a client who's an EOM of a high-performing, tech-enabled manufacturing firm. You guys were driving out of the company's parking lot. She slams on the brakes, jumps out of the SUV and she starts going to the chain link fence surrounding the parking lot to pull out trash and she's dragging soggy cardboard and putting it in the trunk. How did that experience reinforce what you know about EOMs and skin in the game?

As she slammed the car into park, she looked at me and said, why is it that only the owner is the one who stops to get the plastic bag out of the chain link fence?

PW: As she slammed the car into park, she looked at me and said, why is it that only the owner is the one who stops to get the plastic bag out of the chain link fence? Because I have 550 employees in this plant who could all see the plastic bag in the chain link fence. Right. That actually illustrates exactly what I'm talking about. That's why I think you can't teach it. It comes from within. You either have it or you don't have it. But when you have skin in the game, she was not about to go by that plastic bag stuck in her fence and let that just be the level to which she felt her business descended. Rather by taking the bag out and throwing it in the back of her car, throwing it away later, she was lifting the business for herself and for everybody associated with it. I feel like that's a great story about how she wasn't cognitively processing that, JAG. That was coming from the heart.

JAG: Well, I remember a similar story of one of the greatest EOMs, who is my old boss, the late David Murdock. I remember working for him and him taking a broom and sweeping the hallways of Dole Food Company's headquarters. When I thought of him, I also thought about what you said regarding how EOMs represent a very highly neurodiverse group. He had dyslexia and he actually credited his dyslexia for his ability to think outside the box. What kind of neurodiverse traits do you find more prevalent among the entrepreneur owner-managers with whom you've worked?

I want to make sure that your listeners understand. I say it with great love. Most high-performing entrepreneurs are ADD, dyslexic misfits who don't fit right into other parts of our mass popular culture.

PW: I frequently say this, JAG, and I want to make sure that your listeners understand. I say it with great love. Most high-performing entrepreneurs are ADD, dyslexic misfits who don't fit right into other parts of our mass popular culture. Maybe they couldn't work for Bank of America, maybe they couldn't take the standardized test well, maybe they didn't go to the Ivy League school. Maybe they couldn't do whatever the things that our mass popular culture wants you to conform to. But frequently those people find that what they thought was a handicap in grades K through 12 actually ended up to be a superpower when they became an entrepreneur. Now there's a lot of research about this. Some of it's performed by those in the positive psychology community. Some of it. For example, there's an interesting book written by a researcher whose name is Doug Brackmann, B R A C K M A N N, whose book is called Driven. He talks about the DRD2 DRD4-driven gene. This is a gene which DRD, which would mean dopamine receptor, which he has tested. I think his latest research was on 9,000 high-performing entrepreneurs and found that those who had this gene allele or this gene variant had a dopamine reception that was less than the general population. 

Meaning when they had a success or a win, they didn't get that same hit of dopamine, that same success that the general population got. What results from this is that you probably have seen entrepreneurs, maybe yourself, even, maybe me, even, who when you've had a success or an achievement, you go okay, that was great, let's get on to the next thing. My wife would say, look, we've had this great success, why don't we celebrate? Well, I want to celebrate, but I'm really not getting that same dopamine hit because I have this gene variant that other people in the general population are missing. I think there's some very clearly defined, physical characteristics that entrepreneurs have and the DRD2 DRD4-driven gene is one of them. People who have that gene variant have lower dopamine receptivity, they have increased desire for risky behaviors, they have a very high risk of addictive behaviors, they have a high probability of having ADHD, and those same people have a huge evolutionary advantage as hunter-gatherers or warriors. Does that sound like anyone you know?

JAG: Yes, I think it applies to quite a few people, including the members of our board at The Atlas Society. You mentioned grit earlier defined as passion and long-term perseverance for goals. In applying the measurement of grit to EOMs, you uncovered some surprising findings. What were they?

PW: Grit, was popularized by the psychologist at Penn, Angela Duckworth, who's a good friend.The origin story of grit is that as she was teaching in Boston public school systems, she was trying to sort out what were the causes that allowed some students to be more successful than others. She controlled for family upbringing, she controlled for socioeconomic status. She did all those things. What she found was it wasn't the students who had the highest IQ, it wasn't the students who had the best grades, it wasn't the students who took the most AP classes. It turned out it was the students who had the most passion and persistence for long-term goals. But grit is on a spectrum, right? When we did our research with Penn about the GRIT scale of high-performing entrepreneurs, we found that entrepreneurs, high-performing entrepreneurs, are about 2 standard deviations higher than the general population on grit. 

Gritty people have passion and persistence for long-term goals and are willing to deliberately practice for those goals over long periods of time.

But there's a caution here, and the caution is that grit isn't always the greatest thing. Grit is a spectrum. Maybe at one end of the spectrum, I don't know where we would start: spinelessness, effort, tenacity, grit, stubbornness. Maybe what we get at the other end of the spectrum is ignorance. We've got to be a little careful because Angela never intended to say gritty people persist. Regardless. She was saying gritty people have passion and persistence for long-term goals and are willing to deliberately practice for those goals over long periods of time. But it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean that if something isn't going to work that you don't stop doing it and try something else. That's part of grit too.

JAG: It's interesting. I think about it with regards to Dagny Taggart and her character arc throughout Atlas Shrugged. She clearly had a lot of grit. She was going to find this destroyer. She was going to make the company work at all costs. At some point though, I think you begin to see sort of the dark side of grit and persisting in something which is not going to work and knowing when it's time to actually shrug. When you are pursuing something that is an impossible situation and you begin to sacrifice yourself and harm yourself rather than saying, you know what, back up, go a different route.

PW: The economist Albert Hirschman, I think he spent most of his career at Harvard, but it may have been at Chicago. He's deceased now. But he had a great book called Exit, Voice and Loyalty. I think that's it. It might have been Exit, Loyalty, Voice, but his point was you can be loyal to a concept, you can give voice that you are in disagreement with a concept, but ultimately you may need to exit. I think Dagny went through all those things.

JAG: In your book you noted the absence of agreeableness among certain high-performing EOMs, which you illustrated by contrasting the very different temperaments of two sisters who co-owned a large, successful, tech-enabled design firm. How can having an overly agreeable nature actually hamper entrepreneurs from realizing their outsized goals?

PW: There's a thing called the big five in personality characteristics in psychology, off the top of my head they would be openness, conscientiousness, extroversion/ introversion, agreeable/ not agreeable, and neuroticism. Agreeableness is actually quite defined. I don't tend to be viewed as being particularly agreeable. I would guess that you don't either because if you're an independent thinker, you're not quick to agree. Yet in our K through 12 education system, that's the kid who sits in the front row on the right hand seat and gets the A's, right? Is the one who conforms to what the teacher's wanting to get them to do and just before the teacher leaves the room they might say, “Is that going to be on the test?” They're very agreeable. 

There's this greater appreciation for the characteristics that those people have that actually allow them to stand out as entrepreneurs. It says something about our culture, doesn't it? When the guy who's furthest out on the spectrum is the guy who's the most wealthy person in the world.

The contrast in that example is of two sisters, one of whom is characteristically a good student and agreeable and conforming and she gets along fine. The other one is a little bit of a racy revolutionary who isn't as agreeable and, you know, who skips classes and who got a job at an early age and probably thought she could do the job better than she could with her boss. That's the person who we see as entrepreneurs. You know, luckily I think for us there's been an awareness, I guess I would draw it back to maybe the 1980s and ’90s for some of the reasons we talked about earlier, for some of the reasons why the playing field got leveled for the entrepreneurs, that there's this greater appreciation for the characteristics that those people have that actually allow them to stand out as entrepreneurs. It says something about our culture, doesn't it? When the guy who's furthest out on the spectrum is the guy who's the most wealthy person in the world.

JAG: Well, it's definitely true. Having attended one of Bigelow's retreats, I think I might have a clue who those sisters are, but I'm not going to tell anybody. We are going to turn to audience questions soon. But first, I want to get to my very favorite chapter in your book, which was entitled “Work, Life Balance, Schmallence.” This one resonated with me because I've always detested the phrase “Thank God it's Friday.” It makes me think when people say that maybe if you're just waiting the entire week to get to your weekend, you might not be in the right job. I didn't really understand why that rubbed me the wrong way until I read your book. 

You ask people to think about the construction of the term, simply allowing the question to be formed that way. You write, “We are creating an artificial duality where evidently work is not life and life is not work, but rather they are two separate elements to be balanced.” I made a connection with Ayn Rand's rejection of the mind-body dichotomy, right? That they're setting them apart as something that are pitted against each other rather than something that needs to be integrated and understood as a whole. Could you elaborate a bit and perhaps any observations about how successful EOMs with whom you have worked have thought about or managed this supposed balance.

PW: Yes, like you, I am bothered by people saying TGIF. I don't ever. I've never felt that way, and I can't imagine how it must be to feel that way. But the vast majority of the world that we live in goes to work, and 40 years later they hope to retire and have fun, enjoy themselves. I have watched entrepreneurs during my early career, and I always felt personally that no way was I going to work for 40 years and then only do the things that were of great interest to me. I wanted to do them all along the way. I could never understand why people would agree to that construct of work/ life balance. When I ask people about it, even people who are young people in their 20s, I ask them about work/ life balance. They all very seriously tell me, yes, they're very concerned about it. I guess I want to say work/ life balance, schmallence. I want to talk about work-life integration, because in work-life integration, we are living a whole life. We are whole people. Some of our work, some of our life is work. Some of our life is family, some of our work is play. Some of our life is just things that are finger painting. It's all living. Around here, some of our team is very amused. 

For successful entrepreneurs, our egos are usually very strong, very controlling...But it armored up a part of ourselves inside that maybe it's harder for us to see the love, the beauty, the joyfulness that we used to see when we were younger.

We have a saying, if you play dead, you are dead. We see a lot of people who are in the mass popular culture who accept that work/ life balance duality. Actually for the first 40 years of work, they played dead and it's a tragedy. I will say that your question makes me want to say that in the book, Intention, the last chapter is called “Awakening.” I just want to say that in “Awakening” there is a realization that for successful entrepreneurs, our egos are usually very strong, very controlling, and we want to control everything around us. To a certain degree that's helped us. But whatever caused us to create those egos to control everything around us, it armored up a part of ourselves. It armored up a part of ourselves inside that maybe it's harder for us to see the love, the beauty, the joyfulness that we used to see when we were younger, when we were kids; it's still in there, but it's armored up by all that coping that we had to do. Part of Intention is sort of asking the question, does it really have to be that way or can we find new levels of consciousness that allow us to get back to those beautiful virtues?

JAG: I sometimes think about Ayn Rand and this quality that helped her be successful, which was the ability to tune out the critics. Back in the ’30s and ’40s, she was saying some pretty controversial things that are still just as controversial today in terms of tackling altruism and socialism and self-sacrifice and all of that. But the ability to tune out your critics and follow your independent vision, if it becomes solidified, if you become armored up, as you're saying, to the extent that it's rigid, it's one thing to be walking across a tightrope and you want to tune out the people that are jeering at you and wanting you to fall and to fail, but you want to be able to let in the people that are saying maybe you need to think twice about this because they want to help you and they want to help you see things that you otherwise might not get. If you are tuning everybody out . . .

PW: I think that's a great example of frequently what happens with high-performing entrepreneurs. Right? They have had adversity in their lives. They've had challenges. I called them—again, I say this with great love because I'm one of them—an ADD dyslexic misfit who would be a crappy employee for someone. They see the world differently. It's usually not a choice. Usually they're not trying to see the world differently. They just do see the world differently. You're right, that armor is part of our defensive system that allows us to be great at what we do. But you're right to say that, wow, that same armor has kept us from experiencing the joyfulness, the love, the beauty, the gratitude, the awe that's part of being a Homo sapien. What part of this book attempts to do is to say, hey, there's ways that we can get back to that.

JAG: I am going to assume that you have not seen the popular HBO series Severance. I say assume because I know what kind of schedule you maintain. Your morning routine is laid out in here [holds up book], which is why you look fantastic and have much energy and are able to travel every week. But I'm assuming you have not seen it.

PW: I'm sorry, I have not seen it.

JAG: Okay. Well, it's just because I was watching it and it is about these employees in this massive company that it's taking the work-life dichotomy to the extreme. They go into the office, go up the elevator, and their memory of the outside world is severed. Then it's one person, but living two different lives. One is a work life and one is a home life. The series shows that taking that to the extreme, the characters actually, even though they don't know who their “innie” is or who their “outie” is, they have set up a conflict and it's quite interesting. For those who don't have quite the busy schedule that Pete has, I'd recommend it. All right, time for some questions and they have been piling up. Kingfisher21 asks Pete, “Have you ever thought about doing a video series about your book Enterprise Value? Too many young people really don't know what an entrepreneur is.”

PW: Thank you for that question. The answer is, yes, I've thought about it and, yes, I'm actually thinking about it right now. Enterprise Value is 10 years old this year and we're going to issue a new edition. It made me ask whether in order to appeal to some of the millennials and Gen Zs who maybe aren't quite as willing to pick up a whole book and read the whole book, can we make this into bite-sized pieces with videos? We very much are considering doing that and appreciate the question because it'll actually give me some fuel to go down that road even further.

JAG: All right. My Modern Galt asks, “What do you think is a piece of bad advice or a practice among new entrepreneurs?” He says he's reminded of a coffee shop that had a “pay what you can” or “pay what you think it's worth” model and how it closed quickly.

PW: I think that the worst advice I hear is work on your weakness. Many of us growing up were taught you're not good at this, you need to work on that. And in the fourth grade, I guess we work on our times tables and in the fifth grade we do something else. There's a certain amount that we need to be capable of and competent in in the world that we may be weak at, that we have to figure out and get through. I get that. But for the rest of our time, why would we be interested in working on our weakness? We just end up with a bunch of mediocre weaknesses. Rather, what if we found someone who was great at our weakness and we focused on our, what Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach calls, unique ability, which is a concept that we're super focused on here at Bigelow in our work with entrepreneurs. 

The best entrepreneurs  have a...unique ability that they pour themselves into. When they pour themselves into that...that results in them getting a better financial reward ...That's much more rewarding and better than trying to work on your weakness.

To me, as an entrepreneur, the best ones I find have a zone of genius or this area of unique ability that they pour themselves into. When they pour themselves into that, they provide a service or a product that makes their customers deliriously happy with them and that results in them getting a better financial reward than they would otherwise get. That's much more rewarding and better than trying to work on your weakness. To me, one of the things that happens with entrepreneurs is they get to a certain point, they have a unique ability. They sometimes can feel like, okay, I had that unique ability, but now I've built this business. Now I have to learn to be a general manager. Now I have to learn to be a CEO. My overwhelming coaching to them is, no, you don't. There's 1,500 people who graduate from the Harvard Business School every year. You can hire any one of them to be a manager for you or a CEO. But what you have is this unique ability that's bringing this great value to your customers. I really hope that entrepreneurs really just focus on that and put all their energy into that.

JAG: What you're saying about unique ability and discovering it and leaning into it and developing it, it reminds me of a very good friend of mine who I knew from the moment I stepped foot in Washington, D.C., back in 1990 or 89. We both came up together, we were doing television, we were in the same political circles. While I loved her dearly, one thing that did get on my nerves is that she was constantly criticizing everybody, everything, and definitely didn't make it very agreeable to be around. But rather than saying, I'm going to work to try to be less critical, she leaned into it. She's now making millions of dollars a year as a host for a major cable news network. I think that is something that comes from what you're saying is finding what you're good at, and she's fantastic at it and people are willing to watch her and pay her very big bucks to criticize.

PW: Look, it's got to be more than following your passion, right? If your passion is gardening, it's going to be challenging to build a business around that, although some have done it. It'll be challenging. But you have to ask yourself, what is your passion? But also, as importantly, or perhaps more importantly, where can I make the biggest contribution? Where can I bring the most value? It's the intersection of those two circles that really is where you can have entrepreneurial unique ability.

JAG: Speaking of entrepreneurial unique ability, you have another very edgy chapter which is entitled “Competition is for Losers.” I am reminded of how Ayn Rand said that the creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. Now, I get it. Intellectually, I'm still extremely competitive. But give me a little bit of advice on how that competitive instinct or practice, or comparing oneself to the guy who's snapping at your heels or the one that you're trying to catch up to, how that can distract us from discovering our unique ability.

Some games are win-win games where you're able to construct a game where I can win and you can win. Entrepreneurs are pretty good at that.

PW: The quote comes from a friend of mine and a neighbor of yours, Laird Hamilton, who is said to be one of, if not the, biggest wave surfer in the world. When I was with Laird, one day I asked him, “Well, do you have any competitions coming up?” He looked at me, he gave me what I call the Labrador look, tilted his head and said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Competitions.” He said, “I don't go to any competitions.” I said, “You don't go into competitions, surfing competitions?” He said, “No, why would I go in surfing competitions?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Pete, competition is for losers. Where the competition starts, the art stops.” I was struck by that, I've taken that on to become my own. Sorry, Laird. I really think about it and when I think about entrepreneurs in the following way, some games in game theory—von Neumann, great book—are negative-sum games. There's a winner and a loser. Tennis is an example. You have a winner and a loser. To be great at tennis you have to beat the other person. Some games are win-win games where you're able to construct a game where I can win and you can win. Entrepreneurs are pretty good at that. von Neumann talked about finite games as being those that are win-lose, the object of the game is to win it; and infinite games, the object of the game is to stay in the game. 

To me, what I see in entrepreneurs I didn't like, I didn't read a book about this, I just observed it over many decades, is that the best high-performing entrepreneurs are actually in the game to stay in the game. If you ask them, and some people have said, wow, you're really successful and you made all this money and when is enough, enough? For the entrepreneurs that I'm talking about, it's not about material enough, it's about unlocking their potential. When is enough enough? Well, what's my potential? I don't know. I'm going to continue to unlock it as long as I breathe. I think that competition is tricky. I appreciate that some people think it can bring out the best in you. But what I've observed is that competition is almost always merely a form of comparing. Even if you're a ski racer and you are going down the hill wanting to beat that person who went down either in front of you or behind you, what you're really doing is viewing their videos and you're imitating the same thing they did to make yourself better. Hell, no entrepreneur is going to do that. They're not going to imitate, they're not going to compare. For high-performing entrepreneurs, competition is for losers.

JAG: I remember we had Gabby Reese and her husband Laird at our 2020 gala in Malibu on a panel called “Atlas As Athlete.” I was struck by how he used a similar line at the time and talked about the only person that he's competing with is himself. All right, let's get to a few more Lock, Stock and Barrel asks, “Do you think there are particular variations of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that indicate people who are more inclined to excel in a business or entrepreneurial position?

PW: Yes. I know the Myers-Briggs MBTI scale, but I don't know it well enough to answer the question by saying, yes, I think it's this kind or that kind of person. I will say that I am guessing that there are identities or classifications in the MBTI which are correlated with being a high-performing entrepreneur and some are less correlated. But I'm not aware of any causation that we can say if this, then this. I see more correlation, if that's helpful.

JAG: Going back to the book, you shared a really remarkable memory and insight that came to you when you were in the first grade. Back in 1963, a world-changing event occurred. What happened and what was the takeaway that influenced the way that you relate to people in the years and decades that followed?

PW: I'm not sure if it made me more relatable or less relatable. Truly, JAG. But the event that you're referring to is that when I was in first grade in the fall of that year, I went to school probably in September and by November I didn't like school and I was angry that I had to go to school. I didn't see why I had to go to school to learn what the teacher wanted to teach, where I wanted to learn some different things. In November of that year, November 23rd, the president was murdered. No one knew who did it. Actually we don't clearly know even now who did it. But what happened that day was in my first grade class I saw some teachers come to the front of the class and they were crying. I realized, “Uh-oh, they're scared and they're adults and they don't have the answer. They don't really know what's going on here.” I realized nobody has the answer. It's all made up.

I realized at that very early age...that I had to be really careful when adults give me declarative sentences...I guess that was the early stage of being an independent, critical thinker.

I realized at that very early age, I may have even realized before then, but that cemented it in my head that “Oh, no one has the answers. It's all made up. I have got to be really careful when adults give me declarative sentences that I test in my own mind. Is this true? Does this apply to me?” I guess that was the early stage of being an independent, critical thinker, where I thought it sure would have been a lot easier if in my first grade, I saw the teachers in the front of the class and I thought, “Oh, good, they have the answers and all is going to be well.” Instead, what I realized was, “Wow, they're adults. They don't have the answers. They're scared. No one has the answers. They all made it up.”

JAG: Envy is a big theme of ours, as you know, here at The Atlas Society. It's an irrational, self-destructive vice that Ayn Rand called, “the hatred of the good for being good.” You write how, “all successful EOMs feel this lack of acceptance or even antagonism from mass popular culture.” But what about others that are closer to them? What negative reactions might they see being directed toward them, particularly as they begin to contemplate the next chapter and the opportunity to capture the value of the enterprise they've spent, in most cases, decades building?

PW: I think you're pointing at the chapter that I would call “Synchronicity” and maybe even a little bit of the chapter of what I would call “Awakening.” I'm not my brain, right? My brain has thoughts, but my consciousness back here behind my brain can see those thoughts. If you're a meditator, you're accustomed to watching your brain go off on side journeys and then come back to your meditation. You get what I'm talking about. I think what you're suggesting is that as we mature and we get more of an understanding of the world, that we begin to realize that actually some of these characteristics that I've built up, that have served me well, that have helped me cope with the world, are characteristics that may cause these false dualities, these false dichotomies. If I'm going to really enjoy the love, the beauty, the joyfulness, the gratitude, the awe that is out there, that's in us, that I'm going to have to overcome that. I think that's where I end up in this book. Intention is in the chapter called “Awakening” and being able to want, desire to get at those different levels of consciousness that allow us to access those beautiful virtues which we thought we've lost.

JAG: We talked a little bit before this interview about family businesses and those very interesting dynamics. I wonder if you have seen that when the founder of a business is thinking: This has been fantastic. I've set out, I've accomplished what I set out to do. Now I'm ready for my next chapter. Do you find that that moment can bring up tensions within a family where others don't want to see that big change?

PW: So, it's not a popular point of view that I'm about to say, but when I talk to family businesses, I frequently talk to families who have a desire to have their next gen continue with them in the business or join them in the business. I appreciate that desire, but I'm confused by it because let's think of someone who's high performing in their area. I'm not a really great sports guy, but let's pick Tom Brady. Tom Brady, some people think is the greatest quarterback of all time. Great. If Tom Brady, I don't know if he's got any children, but if he has any children, do we think that his son or daughter is going to become a great quarterback? Do we really think they're going to become one of the greatest quarterbacks in the world like Tom Brady? Or how about the singer songwriter, Taylor Swift? let's say Taylor Swift has a child, do we really think that person, that child, is going to become a great singer songwriter like Taylor Swift? Because if not, why do we think that our children are going to have the same dedication and passion and intensity about entrepreneurship that we do? It's crazy. Of course they don't. So, it could happen. It could be, I suppose by chance, that someone who's a great entrepreneur could happen to have a child that shared that same passion or intensity. 

If [entrepreneurs] want to take some chips off the table and go on to the next thing...go do that. If your kid has a passion where they want to start a software business, maybe you can invest with your daughter in her software business instead of trying to think that they would carry on your business.

But I think it's just sort of a tragedy that we see families that want to do that and what we end up with is the proverbial shirtsleeve-to-shirtsleeve family business. What I find is that frequently, a number of years into that, if I talk to the prior generation and say, how do you think the kids are doing in the business? They'll frequently say, “Oh, I'm worried that the kids aren't going to be able to carry on the business in the way that we did.” If I separately, confidentially, talk to the kids, I say, “Hey, how are you doing in the business?” They would often say, “I never wanted to be in this business. This is not something that I wanted to do. This is something I felt obligated to do. I felt disloyal if I couldn't come into the business.” I really view that as a tragedy. What I'd rather see entrepreneurs do is have a great arc of a career, personally and professionally. If they want to take some chips off the table and go on to the next thing, whether it's oil paint or sail around the world or write a book or write a novel, write a play, go do that. If your kid has a passion where they want to start a software business, maybe you can invest with your daughter in her software business instead of trying to think that they would carry on your business. I think it's a funny time, JAG. I'm not sure because I'm no historian if it's more challenging now to have the next generation carry on in the business. I suspect it is because of the velocity of change. But, for sure, we're seeing major dislocations between generations and family businesses.

JAG: All right, I'm going to take one more audience question. We've got eight minutes left. I want to leave enough time for closing thoughts. But Iliashin asks, “Thoughts on entrepreneurs aiming to cater their services primarily to the government or government-run institutions. Do you think these groups leave a black mark for other entrepreneurs?” I'll take just a little crack at that. I mean if you believe that there are legitimate functions of government which are to protect individual rights, namely defense and police and the courts for adjudicating differences, if you're a Palmer Luckey and you're seeing that the way that we're doing defense contracting is very messed up and that it's not taking advantage of AI and you are creating products that are going to probably save money over the long run and improve our military's lethality or, you know, if you're someone who's invented a new taser technology and you want to try to sell that to police forces across the country, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Have you dealt with businesses like that, Pete, where their primary client or customer was the government?

PW: Definitely. I think that I'm using this word very, very specifically. Disciplined entrepreneurs who have a vision and a mission. A mission to provide services or products to governments can be enormously successful. I think, however, that it's critical, it's essential to understand that the decision-making apparatus of those unelected bureaucrats is vastly, vastly different than the decision-making apparatus of entrepreneurs. I would say many entrepreneurs are ill-suited to do what you're talking about. But those who are super disciplined and understand the decision-making differences between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs can be successful and I'm glad they are. I think Palmer Luckey is a great example as are some others, whether it's his company Anduril or Palantir or others that are on the forefront of state of the art in advancing some of the needs that our government certainly has. But boy, they are really, really unusual.

JAG: In wrapping up, I wanted to touch on one of my favorite quotes in your entire book that comes towards the end, and I'm going to paraphrase it a little bit, “We won the lottery. We are basking in the warmth of our Founding Fathers, the guys who stormed the beaches of Normandy, of the works of thinkers like Ayn Rand, among a few others.” We can't pay it back, we have to pay it forward. It's almost like you're suggesting that there's an element of justice to gratitude and recognizing that there's debt. We owe those in the past who have contributed to who we are today. The right thing to do is to repay that debt with going towards the future because we can't repay it back to them. Am I getting that right?

Our Founding Fathers were fantastic entrepreneurs: Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton. Our country is the ultimate startup.

PW: Look, we're “the land of the free, home of the brave.” That's not accidental. Our Founding Fathers were fantastic entrepreneurs: Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton. Our country is the ultimate startup. We had these guys who, many of them, lived by their wits. Some of them were successful financially, many weren't. They sacrificed, I think they, in their own words, it would be, “Their life, their liberty and their sacred honor.” To me, as we think about the moment we're in culturally and historically, this is a moment for resourcefulness. This isn't a moment to hang back and count our pennies or count anything, but rather, and we're not being asked just to get through this moment, we're being asked really to transform ourselves, our businesses, our enterprises, our country through it. I feel very, very strongly that we were given this opportunity and that we owe a great debt and our way of paying it is to pay it forward.

JAG: Well, that's a great place to end. Again, the book is Intention: Unlocking the Life Force Inside High-Performing Entrepreneurs. Again, you see, I've got a lot of bookmarks here. I'll be publishing a review of the book and that'll be included in our newsletter. So, Pete, thanks much for joining us and I'm very excited to see you in Chicago in October.

PW: You'll definitely see me in Chicago in October and I'm going to bring some friends and, JAG, I just want to say it's always fun to be with you and all my time with you is always quality time.

JAG: Thank you. If you come back to Santa Barbara, you know where to find me. Okay. Thanks everyone who joined; appreciate everyone accommodating this last minute change to make sure that we could catch up with Pete who is a fast-moving target with his weekly travels. I want to make sure that you join us next week. We're going to have a very special interview with billionaire entrepreneur Thomas Peterffy. He's going to join us to share his extraordinary journey from growing up in communist Hungary to coming to America to become an early pioneer of electronic trading and how his experience led him to be an outspoken critic of the rising tide of collectivist thinking and an outspoken defender of the practical and moral superiority of capitalism. That is going to be rather a treat and I hope we'll see you again next Wednesday. Thanks.