Chapter 1: What influenced Bruce Springsteen's extreme work ethic?
I've been dancing around with this book on and off for probably like six months, maybe even longer. So I'd read parts of it. I'd put it down. I'd pick it back up. I wasn't even sure how to make an episode about it or even if I should make an episode about it. But what kept me coming back... was that Bruce is able to describe ideas that have been in my head.
There's stuff in this book that I have believed, that I have experienced, especially with the way he views his work, that I have been unable to articulate before. I have been unable to put into words the exact same feeling that Bruce describes in the book. And what is great about this book, and this is where I was really unsure, is he's unbelievably honest about things that most people hide.
He is writing the book as a nearly 70 year old man full of experience and hard earned wisdom that only comes from time and from living a full life. And so I want to tell you what made me pick up the book to begin with. I've told you over and over again that one of my favorite documentaries, one I've watched, I don't know, 10, 15 times. It's called The Defiant Ones.
It is a four-part series on the partnership between Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. To me, it's one of the best documentaries about entrepreneurship. And Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Iovine are very close friends. They work together. And in that documentary, I heard Bruce Springsteen say this. He said, I didn't want to be rich. I didn't want to be famous. I didn't even want to be happy.
I wanted to be great.
And what drew me to Bruce Springsteen was when in the documentary, Jimmy Iovine said it was Bruce Springsteen that taught Jimmy about work ethic.
And so I want to read a few quotes from Bruce Springsteen that's in the documentary that made me pick up his autobiography. And so he says, if you want to accomplish what hasn't been accomplished before, you have to be relentlessly and unapologetically determined.
When you're trying to push the boundaries on things and when you're moving into different types of frontiers, you need to be surrounded by people who really believe in what you're doing.
We were just very, very determined. If you were new to our club, the relentless pursuit of our idea would have exhausted you. It was simply understood that you're there because you believed what we were doing was worth it.
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Chapter 2: How did Bruce Springsteen's childhood affect his mental health?
He hand wrote the entire manuscript in his notebook, and then he rewrote it again and again in longhand. He was editing not just for accuracy, but for tone. He wrote it like he was composing a record. And you feel it when you read the book.
I think the lesson there for you and I is when you pour a lot of love and dedication and obsess over details and take the time to get it right in the product or service you're building, even if the customer or the person that's using your products or service
can't articulate it. They feel it. And so that's what drew me to pick up the book.
And the reason I was going back and forth on this, because if I just focus on his work ethic, which was originally the idea, I was going to name the episode, you know, the relentless work ethic of Bruce Springsteen, that would make perfect sense for an episode of Founders. But then I'd be ignoring the most important part of the book.
Chapter 3: What led Bruce Springsteen to seek professional help?
which is this insanely talented musical genius, hardworking, obsessive, getting everything that he ever wanted and being plunged deep into depression. I got to go to Jimmy Iovine's house. I spent a few hours at his house in Beverly Hills recently. It was remarkable. And to this day, Jimmy and Bruce are very close friends.
Before I left, Jimmy's like, you need to go see the new Bruce Springsteen movie.
It's called Deliver Me From Nowhere. I didn't even watch the trailer before I saw the movie. Jimmy Iovine says, go watch the movie. I'm going to go watch the movie. But what I was shocked, it wasn't about, I thought it was going to be an overview of his career. It wasn't about that. It was about a lot of the dark things that Bruce speaks about in this autobiography.
And so what I'm going to do is this. I'm going to go through the book in chronological order. His life story unfolds in chronological order. And I think that's a really important part of the book. And I think you'll identify, learn, and benefit from the way that Bruce Springsteen describes his life, the experiences that he had, what he learned from that, and how he changed over time.
And so I also want to do something different with regards to the sponsors of this podcast. Usually I try to weave the sponsors into the actual story of the podcast. I see no way to do that with the subject matter we're about to talk about. So I'm just going to tell you about the three very important partners that I have right now up front.
And then obviously, if you get value from my work and you need these services, these are the people I recommend that you use. And so the first one is obviously Ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast. As we were about to go through, I just told you this guy hand wrote his autobiography by hand. He's obviously obsessed with details.
That is something that a lot of history's greatest founders have in common. They know their business from A to Z and their costs down to the penny. And Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, bill payments, accounting and cost control. These corporate cards are fully programmable.
You can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact. With Ramp, you can stop it before it happens. The chief accounting officer of Notion just said this about Ramp. Ramp is the only vendor that can service all of our employees across the globe in one unified system.
They handle multiple currencies seamlessly, integrate with all of our accounting systems, and thanks to their customizable card and policy controls, we're compliant worldwide. Matt Paulson, who's the founder of MarketBeat, recently switched to Ramp, and this is what he said about it. Ramp is the best.
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Chapter 4: How did Bruce Springsteen's relationships evolve throughout his life?
That is ramp.com. The second partner I want to tell you about is Vanta. Vanta helps your company prove you're secure so more customers will use your product or service. Customer trust can make or break your business. This is one of the things that's most interesting to me about Bruce, by the way, is the fact that the trust that he earned and never violated with his customers, with his listeners.
have compounded for decade after decade to the point where he's almost 80 and he's still touring. He's still selling out giant stadiums. You should do everything in your power to make your customers trust your business the way that Bruce's customers or fans trust him. Customer trust can make or break your business.
And the more your business grows, the more complex your security and compliance tools will get. That can turn into chaos and Vanta helps you tame that chaos. You can think of Vanta as your always on AI powered security expert who scales with you. Vanta automates compliance, continuously monitors your controls and gives you a single source of truth for compliance and risk.
So whether you're a fast-growing startup like Cursor or an enterprise company like Snowflake, Vanta fits easily into your existing workflows so you can keep growing a company your customers can trust. Vanta will help you win trust, close deals, and stay secure faster and with less effort. Go to vanta.com forward slash founders and you'll get $1,000 off. That is vanta.com forward slash founders.
And finally, I want to tell you about Collateral. Collateral is all about storytelling. Most companies have a very hard time telling their own story. Springsteen is a master at this. This is what the book you and I are about to go over is all about. It's Springsteen telling his own story in the best possible way.
And this skill set is incredibly important for companies because it's a great quote from Don Valentine, who's the founder of Sequoia. He says that the art of storytelling is critically important. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that's how the money works. The money flows as a function of the stories. And that is exactly what collateral does.
Collateral transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. I will leave a link down below, but make sure you go to collateral.com and improve the way that your company tells its own story. That is collateral.com. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. And you can do that by going to collateral.com.
So we start right in the forward of the book and he tells us exactly what he's trying to do. I'm asked over and over again by fans on the street, how do you do it? In the following pages, I will try to shed a little light on how and more important why. And he also tells us who the book is for.
It's for people like you and I. He says, if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, you need a furious fire in the hole that just don't quit burning. He had that fire as a 15-year-old boy when he decides he wants to be a musician. He still has it as an almost 80-year-old man. And he jumps right into his childhood and he describes the way he grew up.
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Chapter 5: What role did music play in Bruce Springsteen's life and identity?
My grandparents fell into a state of poor hygiene and care that would shock and repel me now. My grandma slept on a couch with me tucked in at her side while my grandfather had a small cot across the room. That was it. This was where I needed to be to feel at home, safe, loved. It ruined me and it made me.
It made me in the sense that it would set me off on a lifelong pursuit of a singular place of my own, giving me a raw hunger that drove me, hell-bent, in my music. It was a desperate, lifelong effort to rebuild. For my grandmother's love, I abandoned my parents, my sister, and much of the world itself. Then that world came crashing in. My grandparents became ill.
Soon my grandfather would be dead and my grandmother would be filled with cancer. He describes the traits that he had as a child that he has for most of his life. I would say he's disagreeable, defiant, nonconformist and independent. And he was like that since he was a kid. He says, I will not conform to the way things are. I don't know shit nor care about the way things are.
And so he has two sides of his family. He's primarily Italian and Irish. The Irish side is full of these soft, kind of weak, demure men. So when he starts spending time with the Italian side of his family, he sees a different way of being. And so his Italian grandfather, this is very fascinating, says he was my grandfather. And he's able to tell an entire story in a few words.
Describing his grandfather, he says he served three years in the Navy, had three wives, spent three years in Sing Sing prison. And so he continues to talk about the influence of spending time with his grandfather when he was a very little kid. Right.
He says something made him seem grand, important, not part of the passive, aggressive, wandering, lost male tribe that populated much of the rest of my life. He was a force of nature. So what if he got into a little trouble? The real world was full of trouble. And if you wanted, if you hungered, you'd better be ready for it.
You'd best be ready to stake your claim and not let go because, quote, they were not going to give it to you for free. You would have to risk and to pay. His love of living, the intensity of his presence, his engagement in the day and his dominion over his family made him a unique male figure in my life. He was exciting, scary, theatrical, self-mythologizing, bragging. He was like a rock star.
And what you realize when you read this book is every single experience that Bruce encounters, he pulls into his work. There is no separation between him and his work. And so he talks about what he learned from his family and how it influenced his work. There is a strength, fear, and desperate joy in all of this hard spirit and soul that naturally found its way into my work.
We push until we can go no further, stand strong until our bones give way, reach and hold until our muscles fatigue, twist, shout, and laugh, until we can no more, until the very end. Now, what is masterful about the storytelling in this book is he's describing his family. I didn't understand this till I reread everything.
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Chapter 6: How did Bruce Springsteen confront his mental health issues?
Truthfulness, consistency, professionalism, kindness, compassion, manners, thoughtfulness, pride in yourself, honor, love, faith in and fidelity to your family, commitment, joy in your work, and a never-say-die thirst for life. These are some of the things my mother taught me. And that I struggle to live up to. And so he goes back to describing a childhood.
He knows he does not have the things that he needs. I never saw the inside of a restaurant until I was well into my 20s. My father was a misanthrope who shunned most of humankind. And so he knows he doesn't have what he wants. And then he sees a glimpse of a better life. And he describes this in such an incredible way. And this is when his life really begins.
His life begins when he sees Elvis Presley perform for the very first time on TV. Bruce calls Presley a human earthquake. And so he says, I don't know what his thoughts were. I don't know whether he thought about the broader implications of his actions. I do know this. He lived a life he was driven to live and brought forth the truth that was within him and the possibilities within us.
How many of us can say that we committed all of ourselves to something? I sat there transfixed in front of the television, my mind on fire. The next day, I convinced my mom to take me down to this small store. There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar. I took it home, opened its case, smelled its wood, still one of the sweetest and most promising smells in the world.
I felt its magic, and I sensed its hidden power. And it is very shortly after that he realizes he is different from other people. His response to things is almost always different. This is in the middle of Beatlemania, and this is what he says. I didn't want to meet the Beatles. I wanted to be the Beatles. So at 15 years old, he's going to join a band and he starts performing.
And he is so obsessed, he's willing to play any and everywhere. And so for the very first time he performs, it's at the Elks Club. And there's a series of bands that play for a crowd of about 75 locals. After this, his band was booked at a high school dance. Very shortly after that, his bandmates decide to vote him out of the band. They said his guitar was too cheap and it wouldn't stay in tune.
And he describes his response to being kicked out of the band. I was going to make it work. That night I went home, pulled out a Rolling Stones album, put it on, and taught myself the guitar solo from the song It's All Over Now. It took me all night, but by midnight I had a reasonable copy of it down. Fuck them. I was going to play lead guitar.
For the next several years, I would spend every available hour cradling my guitar, twisting and torturing the strings until they broke or until I fell back on my bed asleep with it in my arms. While other kids were hanging out, I would rush home to my room and I'd stay there and play until the early morning. I had a secret. There was something that I could do, something I might be good at.
I fell asleep at night with dreams of rock and roll glory in my head. This is the start of that determined work ethic. And so he forms another band. Their first gig is at a trailer park. And after that, they would take any gig they could get.
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Chapter 7: What realizations did Bruce Springsteen have about love and relationships?
I think you have to be to do anything important. Bruce Springsteen is the exact same age when he says we were cocky as hell and sure we were good enough to make our mark anywhere. We felt we were the best undiscovered thing we'd ever seen. And so a very important thing happens. We're dominating this like little section in the East on the East coast. We're going to go to California and hit it big.
And so they go to California, they start doing auditions and they realize there's other bands, undiscovered bands better than them. And so after losing, he goes and tries to go to sleep and he lays awake at night. And this is what he's thinking. They were better than us, and I hadn't seen anybody, certainly anybody who was still unknown that was better than us, better than me in a long time.
The guy doing the booking was right. My confidence was mildly shaken, and I had to make room for a rather unpleasant thought. We were not going to be the big dogs we were back in our little hometown. We were going to be one of many very competent, very creative musical groups fighting over a very small bone. Reality check.
I was good, very good, but maybe not quite as good or as exceptional as I'd gotten used to people telling me or as I thought. Right here in this city, there were guys who in their own right were as good or better. That hadn't happened in a long while, and it was going to take some mental realignment. And his response here was so important.
It is why he was able to sustain success for multiple decades. It's not that he didn't expect to come up against superior talent. That happens. It's the way God planned it. I was fast, but like the old gunslingers knew, there's always somebody faster. And if you can do it better than me, you earn my respect and admiration and you inspire me to work harder. I wasn't afraid of that.
I was concerned with not maximizing my own abilities, not having a broad or intelligent enough vision of what I was capable of. Listen to what he's saying. I'm not afraid that you're better than me. I'm afraid that I'm not going to reach my potential. I was concerned with not maximizing my own abilities, not having a broader, intelligent enough vision of what I was capable of. I was all I had.
This is why it's so important. I'm not done in the middle of this either. This is why it's so important to tie people's work and the ideas they come up with to their life story. I was all that I had. There is a quote that I save on my phone as a reminder to myself. It says, I cannot afford to give up. I don't have a backup. I am the backup. Bruce is saying the exact same thing. I was all I had.
I had only one talent. I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me, my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness, night after night to push myself harder to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive in the world that I lived in. As I sat there in the pitch black,
i knew when we got home there would have to be changes made and one of these things is he realizes he doesn't want to be part of a band he is not made for democracy he needs control he understands that about himself but he also understands about his industry he says only the luckiest bands don't grow apart everyone moves differently and no two musicians commitment is exactly the same he says i declare democracy and band names dead
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Chapter 8: How did Bruce Springsteen define success in life versus work?
He meets somebody that understands him. This is the beginning of his relationship with John Landau. John Landau was the first person I met who had a language for discussing these ideas in the life of the mind. Together, we shared a belief in the bedrock values of musicianship, skill, the joy of hard work, and the methodical application of one's talents.
We also had that instant chemical connection that says, I know you. John was better educated than most of my homeboys. I was interested in doing my job better and being great. Not good. Great. Whatever that took, I was in. Now, if you don't have the raw talent, you can't will yourself there.
But if you have the talent, then will, ambition, and the determination to expose yourself to new thoughts, counter-arguments, new influences will strengthen and fortify your work, driving you closer to home. In 1974, I was a young and developing musician. I was interested in forefathers, meaning the great people that came before him.
It's exactly what you and I get together every week and talk about. I was interested in forefathers, artists, brothers in arms, people who thought like this who had come before me. John knew who and where they were. This was very hard for Bruce Springsteen to do. He does not let people into his life easily. He says, I'm insular by nature and don't let new people in casually.
And even though it may have been uncomfortable, it's one of the best decisions Bruce made in his entire life. And it's also when he's working on Born to Run that he meets Jimmy Iovine. They're still friends to this day. And this is the other side of his life. He is no longer going to be unknown. He says from here on in, it was going to be a lot more complicated. Born to Run was the dividing line.
But listen to his reaction to this. This is wild. This is his most important album. And all he could see were the flaws to the point where he almost didn't want to release it. This is also why I think Jimmy Iovine has this great advice that he trained himself. When he feels fear, most people run. And Jimmy's like, what I've trained myself to do is when I feel fear, I go towards it. He...
He had brought the finished master out on tour, but to hear it, the two of us had to go to a stereo store and beg them to let us use one of their record players. I stood in the back of the store fretting, hemming and hawing as the record played. Jimmy's eyes plastered to every look on my face, begging, please just say yes and let it be done.
Jimmy, John, and Mike got crazy, but I still couldn't release it. All I could hear was what I perceived as the record's flaws. But this is why having somebody that understands you is so important. John tried to patiently explain to me that art often works in mysterious ways. What makes something great may also be one of its weaknesses, just like in people. That's excellent advice. So I let it go.
He is on the precipice of getting every single thing that he thought he wanted. And he's full of doubt and fear. I needed to find out what I had. 40 years later, I did not want to be sitting in my rocking chair on a sunny afternoon with the woulda, shoulda, coulda blues. All I could think of was my dad covered in a cloak of cigarette smoke lamenting.
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