Malcolm Gladwell

It's hard to do.

Well, let's talk about pulling the goalie and what that means as a leader, you know, and doing sort of the reputationally risky thing, even when you don't want to.

How do you remedy that?

How do you figure out when you should take more risks and if you're not taking enough?

Have you ever tried something really ambitious and had it fail miserably?

Yeah.

Yeah, we had Seth Godin on the other day and he was kind of talking about the same thing and about how, I'm going to butcher his beautiful words, but something to the tune of, you can either want to do a thing because you innately want to do it, or you can want something to be a massive success, but it's really problematic if you want to really want to do the thing and want it to be a massive success at all the time and not realize that there's a word and in between.

And it might also just be but instead.

And he talked about how he wrote a book on evolution that was like a massive flop and it sort of haunted him for a long time.

He's like, but I loved writing it, but it still was miserable when it flopped.

And so I think sometimes maybe people listening, they think that you always are okay with the failure.

And it doesn't mean it's not miserable when you do it, even when you've sold 23 million books or how many books you've sold by now.

That's cool, by the way.

I didn't know that.

Was it actually hard after you had a few books that sold millions of copies and were massive successes to do the follow-up act to that?

Do you like set a standard where you're like, well, if it's not tipping point level or, you know, outliers level?

Do you believe in the muse or getting struck by inspiration?

Yeah.

You did a project with Rick Rubin too, didn't you?

I'm curious your take on how do you continue to find creative inspiration?