Sean Delaney: Blas, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?
Blas Moros: I’m doing great, Sean. Thanks for having me.
Sean: Yeah, this is it. One of those conversations that I’m so excited for other people to take part in, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know you and learn about some of just your thinking processes, your business philosophies, everything like that. So this is honestly a true honor for me, so this is going to be fun, but I would love to start at your back story, and I know you’re a huge competitor, big into tennis, I would love to know how you first got into tennis.
Blas: Yeah, I got a tennis racket from my uncle when I was just three, and it was too big so it dragged on the ground when I walked around with it, and the story is that I sort of slept with it and it was just love at first sight, and I played pretty much every sport until I was 12 or 13, and then I decided to go all in on tennis, and that meant practice every day after school, tournaments on the weekends, all that good stuff. But it’s been a huge part of my life, and I think it shaped a lot of who I am and how I think about the world by pushing myself and trying to become the best version of me, and that was one of the key lessons I got out of the whole thing is it’s hard to and destructive to compare yourself to other people. There’s always gonna be someone more talented, somebody better than you, but are you a little bit better than who you were yesterday, the one you go to yesterday, and that has shaped a lot of who I am today.
Sean: Oh, I love hearing about that.
So I would love to know, were you more focused on becoming your best or becoming one of the best?
Blas: Yeah, absolutely, my best… And again, I ended up being a pretty good tennis player. I ended up being captain of the Notre Dame tennis team my senior year, and I had a pretty good season and all that, but becoming a pro and making that a full-time living wasn’t really in the cards for me. And it was okay, I felt like I really got to become the best version of me, and that’s a really good feeling. And of course, there’s things I felt like I could have done better than maybe I didn’t max out my potential totally, but I got pretty close and that whole process was really, really informative. And I learn a lot from that.
Sean: Why did you select tennis? You mentioned all the other sports, I’m wondering why you didn’t go forward in one of those as opposed to tennis.
Blas: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think some combination of I enjoyed it the most and I just felt better at it. There’s some aspect of the individual that I really enjoyed that it was on me whether I won or lost them, there’s great things with that, and there’s bad things with that. Tennis, golf, swimming attracts a certain type of person, I would say, a little bit different from a team sport and love the team sports, loved everything about that. Again, like I mentioned, I did most sports until I was relatively 12-13 or so, but I love that aspect of it being all on me. Putting myself out there, seeing what I had that day dealing with the nerves, and that really attracted me. So it wasn’t a really, really cautious choice when I was 12 or 13, but it ended up shaping my life in a lot of ways.
Sean: I always love talking to people with athletic experiences, and I’m always interested about the narrative in their head, and a lot of times around practice, and I would love to know what that was like. And when you were there just by yourself, grueling drills, what was the narrative in your head?
Blas: Yes, I love practice, I loved every minute of it. And it was a grind. It was hours and hours a day and growing up and playing in Florida, that humidity during the summer was pretty brutal, but it prepared me. It made me better and made most match days relatively easy. It’s not three, four hours on the court, it’s a couple of hours and you’re relatively… You’re relatively fresh at the end of it, so… Practice was the difficult part for me. Matchday was a little bit easier and different stresses, different emotions, different pressures, all that good stuff, but I think I enjoyed the process. I enjoyed the craft, I enjoyed honing my skills over time, and I don’t want to make this out more than it was, right? I was a really good junior player, and I was a decent college player, nothing more than that, but again, that process of coming to know yourself, that self-realization, that authenticity, getting to know what pushes you, what buttons you have, what makes you better, what makes you worse. I think, sport or art, craft, whatever that is, pushing yourself to that highest level, it’s really beneficial.
Sean: Have you found reoccurring themes that you discovered during your time playing tennis that now are applicable, both being a father, husband, leader, business entrepreneur, all of those things?
Blas: It’s a great question, and yes, absolutely. I think you as a person, you get to know who you are pretty clearly, and again, it takes pushing yourself to that extreme level to really find that, but I know who I am, what I enjoy, what I don’t enjoy, my weaknesses, my faults, my strengths, and that applies whether you’re talking sport or you’re talking business now, or learning, or being a husband and being a father, so again, I think that self-knowledge is self-mastery. I really believe that, and when you get to know yourself over time through that process, it’s helpful.
Sean: Blas, you’re teasing out the really hard stuff. Looking in the mirror, facing some of those harsh realities. And this is one of those things I just love so much.
So how early on did you start to tease out and understand, okay, these are my strengths, these are my weaknesses, and then really focusing and distilling out which ones you’re gonna focus on?
Blas: Tennis wise, really early, and I think because the feedback loop is so quick, right? You do something for a match and you lose you get to learn that pretty quickly, but over time, through practice, you get to hone those strengths and you know, I was kind of just a baseline bringer, you really had to beat me, I didn’t have any overwhelming strength, but I was never gonna lose. I was not gonna lose, so I was never gonna beat myself, and I built my game around that, but these other things that maybe we can dive into a little bit later, but most of it just came through self-reflection, and it came after I graduated from college, and really for the first time ever had time to think and be bored, and through juniors and through high school, my days were so busy. Practice in the mornings, school, some more practice, some homework, bed, repeat. I’m sure you can relate with your lacrosse experience, but after college, I changed a lot, gave me a little bit of space and time to think about all those things that I had learned and really how it applied and… Yeah, it takes a lot of self-reflection. A lot of it is not immediate whatsoever, it takes time for it to sink in, to digest it and to really understand how these things apply to you.
Sean: Yeah, that’s gonna be a large part in this conversation, and really what I wanna distill down was about what you did after college, but I would love to just know what made you decide on Notre Dame?
Blas: Yeah, I don’t know how intellectual it was. I was recruited by a couple of really good schools. I ended up going out to visit three or four of them. And some of the top schools in the country, but when I went to Notre Dame it just felt right. The coaches were really down to earth, the team was great. Yeah, I’d never been there. I didn’t really grow up knowing Notre Dame football, so it wasn’t any of those traditions. It was just the team in some combination of tennis and business school that I knew I wanted to do that really captured me. I know, I had a great time, I learned, I learned a lot, that team, they’re some of my best friends still today. So I’m happy with my choice. It’s hard to know what other scenarios would have looked like, but nothing to complain about.
Sean: No, that’s fantastic to hear. I always love people that when they make one of those big decisions, it’s gonna be essentially making one of the big decisions in your life when you’re 16, 17-year-olds and having it work out. It’s always good to hear, ’cause I think you and I are familiar with many of the people that didn’t work out for unfortunately, but let’s talk about that graduation, and you bring up one of the most interesting points in what we’ve both been able to see this amongst other athletes. Once you graduate, you’re no longer a student athlete, and that athletic component from the majority of those people is no longer there, and where is that focus? Where is that drive? Where is that energy? Where is that going to? And you have an amazing essay that distilled down what you wished you had when you graduated, and I would love for you even just to step back and start, what were you thinking about when you graduated? And then maybe we can tease out some of those key things you brought up in your essay.
Blas: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s how you’re referring to, I call it “The Infinite Game,” and one of the key lessons I learned, and we’ve touched on this already, actually, is that through this process of craft, through honing and your mastery through through that process, you get to learn a lot about yourself, and that’s helpful no matter what you end up doing after sport or after music or whatever it is that is your passion, and it’s no longer a finite game, which James Carse does a beautiful job talking about where you’re playing to win or you’re playing for the sake of playing. And sport by definition, and a lot of other games are finite games. There’s a winner and a loser, it’s zero sum, it’s hierarchical, it’s data seeking, and when Carse talks about Infinite Games it’s bigger than that. You’re playing just for the joy of it. And of course, I didn’t have these words and I didn’t have these thoughts to reflect on at the time of graduation, but looking back, so much of this is applicable and I find really powerful. So that essay, “The Infinite Game,” I wrote it, like you said, as something I wish I had when I had graduated myself and had gone through a lot and put a lot of thought into what I wanted to do with my life and what that looks like and what I would never regret. So at the time, you know, I graduated and I kind of thought about what I wanted my life to look like when I was 80 years old, what would I never regret? And of course later I come to know Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework and all these beautiful things, but I didn’t have those words at the time, so it was just a simple exercise in my head, and I got to the point that I figured I would never regret reading I would never regret learning, traveling, meeting fascinating people.
So since that point, six or seven years from now, I’ll go, excuse me, that’s what I structured my life around and what you see with the Rabbit Hole and the project that we’ll talk about soon, that’s the culmination of that effort where those three to four hours that would spend plan tennis, they’re now dedicated to my new pursuit, to my new “sport,” and that was reading and learning.
So every day after work, instead of going to practice, going to tennis, going onto the court, training, going to gym, it would be going to the library and sitting down and reading and learning, and that’s the only thing I knew for a really long time. That was my structured life, and I fell into that habit, I think positively rather than… I think you would know also from across, once you lose that sense of mastery, once you lose that structure from sport, it’s pretty easy to just let everything unravel and then you have no structure in your life. You don’t really know what direction you’re going, you don’t know what your passions are anymore, at least that was the case for me where so much was tied up with tennis and school, and then almost from one day to the next, that all disappears.
So this structure of every day before work and after work, taking a couple hours to sit down and read and learn and think and write has been hugely beneficial for me. And again, some of that is what you see with the Rabbit Hole and other projects.
Sean: Yeah, I love you bringing up James Carse approach and the Infinite Games and everything you laid out there, and no matter what point you are at your life or in your life, it’s gonna be beneficial, and there are so many long-term benefits, not only for you, but also the other people in your life that you surround yourself with. So I love hearing about that. I would love even just to dig into your process a little bit, just to realize that you could step back, ’cause we have a lot of young college athletes that have just graduated, just finished up, and they’re thinking, dow do I even approach this? So were you just sitting down in your room journaling? What did that look like for you?
Blas: Yeah, it was a lot of… A lot of mistakes, a lot of false paths went down, and at some level, I think everyone has to go through that a little bit to figure out a process that works for them, and there’s no… I don’t think there’s any one right way to do it, but what do you enjoy? What do you get something out of? Is that scifi to start or do you like biographies? Are you into business? Are you into history? And I think you just start with what interests you, and eventually that pie will expand as we get to know more and more, and as you get more and more curious, but it’s a muscle like any other, Sean. I think where you can start small, you can start a light, but start with what’s fun for you. And from there, you can expand a little bit, but yeah, it’s a scale, it’s a muscle.
So at the beginning, I started reading and a couple of books in, a couple of months in, I figured I’m not smart enough to remember absolutely everything I read. So at some point in the future, I’ll probably have to re-read all these books that I’ve already read, so I started doing that, I started taking notes, I started highlighting, I started using Evernote and sharing some of that with my friends and yeah, it takes a little bit longer in the moment, but three, four, five, seven years from that day, like I am today, instead of having to re-read an entire book, I can just go back to my notes and get the majority of what I got out of that book relatively quickly, and so that’s one of the key benefits, but it also helps you see patterns and connect these threads between books, between themes, between time really, and pick up on some of these larger patterns that I think are really important. And that process of synthesizing and distilling these core ideas from all these various books, again, has been really helpful for me, and it’s across the board. It’s investing, it’s business, it’s life, it’s relationships. So that’s a bit of my process and happy to go into any more detail that you want.
Sean: Yeah, I would love to go even deeper, but you bring up one of those really interesting points just about how applicable these are in so many avenues, whether that be sport, business, personal life, everything, and that’s what I love, and I think that’s what resonates so much is that you’ve distilled down and discover these patterns. You were mentioning it just kind of like your overall framework a second ago, and how clear does your vision need to be, because I think when a lot of people are trying to answer some of these big questions, they focus so much on the details. I would just love to hear about your approach with that.
Blas: Yeah, I think it needs to be crystal clear, and that doesn’t mean easy, that doesn’t mean it comes right away. It takes years and years and years, and I don’t even know if I have a crystal clear vision yet, but Richard Hamming has been another intellectual hero for me in his book, Learning How to Learn, all the YouTube videos are fantastic, and Stripe Press just released a new book that is beautiful. But he talks a little bit about this, and what I got from what some of what he said was, if you don’t know what you’re looking for is pretty hard to know what to find, and he talks about this and you and your research and you get what you measure in a couple of those beautiful essays, but if you don’t know where you’re going, again, it’s hard to know if you’re on the right path, and I think of these as little goals and threads in a lot of ways where if you have a crystal clear vision, you’ll recognize it when it passes you and you can pull on it. But again, if you’re wandering a little bit and you’re not really sure what you’re looking for, where you’re going, those opportunities come by pretty often, but you don’t recognize them. That takes hard work, it takes a lot of self-reflection, a lot of getting to know yourself and who you are and what you wanna be and what you wanna do, and again, I don’t think I’m there, but it’s the process and that part’s been really fun.
Sean: Yeah, it’s that ongoing process for sure, and Hamming, one of my favorite things that he brings up is talking about what’s the most important thing in your field, and then why are you not focusing on that, and so Hamming just has some beautiful stuff, we’ll link that up in the show notes.
And like you just mentioned, and his book is now re-released and that’s… Now you don’t have to spend $1,000 on it, so that’s absolutely fantastic to hear.
I would love to know though, ’cause you went deep in distilling all this down, were you a huge learner and reader prior to this, or was this kind of an epiphany-esque moment where once you graduated you became one?
Blas: Not at all. I was always really good in school, but I did the minimum I could possibly do to do both, and that meant no extra credit, that meant no books for fun, it meant skimming the book to get the general idea. So it was really tennis was the focus, and then my parents from a pretty young age made it very clear that if I didn’t do well in school there would be no tennis, so I understood that pretty quickly. But school was something I had to do, and not something I ever enjoyed. And it was really only after the fact, after tennis was gone and I had space, I had a moment, I had energy to devote to other things, because for 10 years or so, 12 years or so, it was all tennis, after-school, weekends. I think a lot of people relate to that.
So, all of a sudden I had this energy physically, mentally, emotionally, to dive into other things to explore new curiosities, so it really was… I don’t know if it was an epiphany, I would say it’s more of a gradual, slow incline than something that just happens over night, but it was definitely an after graduation moment for me.
Sean: Blas, you bring up another one of those things, you keep mentioning space and come on, we’re in 2020. Social media, we’re constantly connected. There is no such thing anymore, so I’m wondering, how do people find the time to get that space and is there anything you recommend?
Blas: I don’t think any of it’s rocket science.
Nature affords a vacuum, so any time there’s a little bit of space, something wants to fill it, that’s just the nature of the world, and it takes effort, it takes effort to give yourself at that time in that space. So I don’t think I’m gonna say anything that’s revolutionary here, but it’s setting aside a couple of hours for yourself as often as you can. If it’s everyday, amazing, if it’s on the weekends, if it’s at night, but finding that space that you get to pursue something that you really enjoy and that can be writing or reading. It could be anything, but it’s something that allows you to go deep and start get it to flow and disappear from the world and you get rid of notifications, you put your phone away for a little bit and you just give yourself that ability to be in your own head, and it’s not easy, but again, I think it’s a muscle. It’s a habit, it’s a system you can develop over time that for me, again, has proven hugely beneficial.
Sean: Yeah, you mentioned it’s not rocket science, but it’s not easy, and I think it’s one of the key things, and a lot of this comes down to game selection, because you mentioned you’re gonna escape in time and flow is going to hit you, and if this is not something that you’re really, truly true by, I think it’s gonna be tough to come into those zones at time. But I would love even jumping into the Rabbit Bole, which is your website, blas.com. But I would love to know what was the first book you picked up after school that just something clicked and it was, oh, there’s something here, something much bigger?
Blas: It’s a really simple, really short book, but it’s The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, and again, it’s maybe a 40 or 50 page book. Language is super simple, but it struck me at the moment, and still today, it’s one of my favorite books. Just how powerful some of those ideas are. And like you said, they’re all simple, but not necessarily easy, right, it’s trying your best, it’s being impeccable with your word, it’s not taking anything personally, and I just… I think it just is a beautiful job laying these ideas out in a simple framework, and to me, it just seemed obvious that if you could abide by most of the time, that it would improve my life. So that’s one book that early on had a pretty big impact on me.
Sean: I would love to know just the evolution process for the Rabbit Hole, and you mentioned just kind of starting off, distilling things down, sharing them amongst your friends, maybe some family members, how did that become to a much bigger thing that it is today? And I’ve said this over and over again, and so I’m just gonna say it again, your website is my favorite thing on the internet in terms of distilling down the lessons, 500 plus books, your essays, all of it, I’m just obsessed with, and I share it more than anything else. I wanna thank you first and foremost. But how did that come to be? How do you make the leap and turn it into something much greater?
Blas: Thanks, Sean. That means a lot, and I think it gets done from laziness. I was writing all these notes and sharing them one by one on email, and it grew from friends and family and maybe 10 or 12 people to 50 to 100 and just became unwieldy, so I said, enough with this, let’s just create a simple website. I never did that in my life, WordPress made it super simple, and six or seven years later, again, this gradual incremental progress, I ended up to a lot of books, and it feels like a lot of people have done some value out of it. So that part of it feels good, but there was no master plan, there was no… I wanna build an audience. I’d never thought that there would be an audience. I was just putting out my… My summaries and things that I found interesting on there, and in the last year or two, started writing some essays, which I think have resonated with some people as well, so there was no master plan at all going into it. It was sharing the things that I thought were worthwhile. That was interesting, and that’s the beautiful thing about scale about the internet, that you can find a community, you can find a niche no matter how nerdy or esoteric you are, like I might be, but it attracts a certain type of person that’s been really fun to see that grow and people to reach out saying that they’ve gotten value out of it, so that makes me feel good.
Sean: Yeah, another beautiful thing as well is just what that’s evolved to be, and you mentioned there wasn’t some grand master plan, but now just sitting back, distilling down, looking at it, I would love to even hear your thoughts when someone first goes on to that website, what are you hoping they’re getting out of that?
Blas: Yeah, I think a lot of it is a choose your own adventure.
So there’s over 600 books summarized there now, philosophy, business, history, architecture, psychology, philosophy… There’s all these different areas that I found interesting, and again, there’s no rhyme or reason to a lot of the books that I’ve read, but they interested me in the moment, and it felt like the most important, most interesting thing to me when I picked that book up, and that’s a lot of how I’ve approached this process. I’d mentioned in school, I can’t remember reading too many books in high school, in college, and again, I did well, but it was because I went to class and listened and not because I was doing all this work, but I really only started reading for fun after school, and something I realized was, when I’m being forced to learn something, I push back, I really don’t like it. But when it’s self-education, when it’s something that I’m choosing to learn about, what I’m educating, yeah, myself, I have all the energy and passion in the world to go do it, but if somebody told me to go read these books that you see on the website that I voluntarily chose… If they told me to do that, I don’t think I’d do it, and maybe that’s just my nature and maybe that’s a flaw in my personality, but I don’t like having being forced to do any of these things, so… Anyway, I think there’s no hope, there’s no hope that people get a certain thing out of this website, it’s just things that I found valuable and if people stumble on it, find some value there, amazing. And if not, I understand this is a strange little corner of the Internet that maybe not too many people are too excited about, but it fuels my fire. And the people who are excited can seek to find it.
Sean: Maybe that’s a flaw in both of our personalities because I’m the exact same way. Let me discover it on my own, and I will put every ounce of energy I have towards that, and I think that’s what I love so much about your site. There’s so many different things to pick on, to pull out, to look at, to read, and I would even love to know, how do you select what you’re going to go next? You mentioned just kind of what’s curious, and it’s pulling out your curiosities, how do you select the signal versus the noise with everything out there now?
Blas: Yeah, there’s a principle and biology, this exploration versus exploitation, and if you’re in a very stagnant environment exploiting the resource that you know is there makes sense. Not too much changes, you know, there’s a sure fire food source or water source to keep exploring that over and over again. But in an environment that’s constantly changing that’s dynamic, exploring is far more valuable. So you go try new areas, you try to find new water sources, there’s no food, food sources to go different… You go to different places.
So there’s some balance there between exploration and expectation, and call it serendipity, call it luck, call it structure, call it order, all these different words get a lot of the same things, but that’s how I have come to think about a lot of these book selection process, there’s some balance. And the other books, the 600 or so other book summaries that you see on the website is some balance of the exploration. So a little bit random, a little bit of serendipity falling in there and a… Sometimes there’s a really good reason, a couple of friends have recommended a book, sometimes there’s a footnote in a book I loved that led me on to something else. So it’s a little bit all over the place, but rough background.
Sean: No, I love hearing about that. And Michael Mauboussin is someone who even hit on that exploration versus exploitation a little bit more. We can dive into your process for what you read, because I know you distilled it down in one of your essays, but I would love for you just to get a little preview into what that looks like, because I think so many people, when they pick up a book, they explore a new concept, they’re not exactly sure how to tease out the key concepts, so I would love to hear your process on that.
Blas: Yeah, for sure. And again, I think it’s a muscle, it’s a skill that gets built over time, and when I started this, there was no rhyme or reason, there was no process I could talk about… So it just takes time, but the way that I go about it is, again, I have a relatively high filter for what I read at first. I have a couple of friends that I trust that they recommend it, or if it comes from couple of different sources. I tend to just buy it and it sits on my shelf and at some point I get to it, but what I do if I’m not captivated by it right away, if I can’t read the epilogue and the conclusion and know from a big picture what this thing is about and I’m not excited by it, I just put it down and I have no… No problem with that. But the books that I do get excited about, I go pretty deep.
And it feels like a conversation with the author where there’s highlights, there’s notes, there’s things I wanna ask them if I ever have the opportunity, things that weren’t clear to me, things that I wanna understand a little bit deeper, and for me, what took a long time and I think is a pretty difficult step, at least it was for me, was moving from the intellectual to the real world. So how can I take these ideas that are really exciting to me on paper and apply them in my day-to-day life so that they’re not just beautiful ideas that, again, sound good on paper, they’re a concrete, they’re actionable, they’re tangible that I can take to work that I can pick to my relationships, I can take to my broader life and it helps them improve. So for me, just having those questions in the back of my mind as I’m reading has been really, really helpful.
So it’s not a purely intellectual exercise, it’s a pragmatic one, and I think the… The definition of a good book is how much it impacts your life, how much it changes your life, and if it doesn’t, I would argue that the value of reading that book wasn’t that great, but you could read a simple book like Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements, like I mentioned earlier, and it could have a tremendous impact on your life, so a little bit about my process there.
Sean: No, I love hearing about that. And it’s always just funny to hear different people’s processes, so I’m wondering just even in the broader context of your life, busy work-life, family, how do you balance all of this then find the time to really focus in on some of these key lessons and learnings?
Blas: Yeah, I make it a priority.
So I get up early, I’ve always been an early riser, and those two hours in the morning before work is kind of my sacred time, it’s when I have my space and almost nobody bothers me at that time in the morning, so I really get to de-couple and to do these things that I really enjoy with, whether it’s writing or reading or just doing these notes, but just make it a priority, and it doesn’t mean I get up at 5:30 or so, so it’s not four, it’s nothing really, really ridiculous. But I need to make sure that I have that time for myself. And the beautiful thing with this, Sean, is it bleeds over and helps every other aspect of my life. So it’s not like it’s sacrificing family life or sacrificing work, it’s all interconnected, it’s all one, and the benefits of sitting down and reading and synthesizing these ideas, benefits each of them.
So it’s a habit, it’s a system I created over time, but it’s one number for me, and some people might do it over lunch or they might do it at night after work, if that works for them, but for me, it’s first thing in the morning.
Sean: It’s really important, I think is to hit on that you said it’s a system you’ve built over time, so I think a lot of people will read an article about the most productive people or how they get this done, and unfortunately they think all of this needs to happen overnight, and it’s a never-ending ongoing process, which I think is really, really important, but I would love it even hit… You’ve got a list on there of books you wanna read or books that you recommend rereading, and I would love for you just to distill down and pull out just a few of your favorite all-time reads.
Blas: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So every December, I do a recap of the books that I’ve read in that year, and for me, it’s helpful to take a step back and not add more information, but to try to distill down and again, see those connections. And last December, I noticed that, and I come out to about 5% of books I’ve read fall into this worth re-reading list, and I don’t think if I read only those books from the beginning that they would have the same impact. I think it takes a lot of content. I think it takes a lot of ideas and maybe bad books or books that you don’t really love to be able to understand a really good book and what those things mean, so I think that content that structure, those extra books that didn’t fall into the worth re-reading list are still incredibly valuable, but anyway, that worth re-reading list or no-brainers, that when I was reading it and when I finished it had humongous impact on me, and it could be a bunch of different ways, but some of the lessons of history, Poor Charlie’s Almanac, and I’m a little bit more off the beaten path, but there’s a book by Henry Ford that is just fantastic, and another one by Mr. Firestone that I haven’t seen on too many lists but Men and Rubber is the one by Mr. Firestone, and it’s just fantastic, and it’s interesting after time, after a little bit of time, I’ve noticed that a lot of business books from the early to mid 1900s strike a cord with me, and I think it’s because of the simplicity with which they’re written.
There’s no fancy language, there’s no MBAs who are writing this, these are the men who created these incredible companies who maybe they have a ghostwriter, but it’s their words. And it’s just simple, and it’s raw, and I find them beautiful. But that’s kind of what the types of books that fall into my worth re-reading list.
Sean: It’s funny you mentioned Ford and Firestone. So I’m about a half mile right now from where they spent their winters, so it was Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and then Firestone.
So all throughout where I’m at, they’re just these beautiful pictures of the three of them, and you’re thinking three of the greatest generational Titans to build businesses, all just hanging out, so yeah, I’m a fan of their books, they’re back on the bookshelf as well. What about some of just the big essays you’ve written? It’s funny, your essays, I tend to go back to again and again, because I think you cut out all of that signal, or all that noise, it’s just pure signal.
I would love to know just sitting back, stepping and looking at some of the essays you’ve written, are there any for listeners of this show that you think, hey, if you’re gonna give this a try, this would be a great one to start with?
Blas:Yeah, first thank you. I was never really a writer in college, and it’s somewhat of a painful process in some ways kind of going back and refining and editing, and it’s been a fun process, but I think making… Becoming a good writer makes you a clear thinker, a sharper thinker, and that’s kind of what I’m hoping to get out of that process, and I think it depends a little bit, Sean, but the “Infinite Game” that we talked about a little bit earlier, it’s geared more towards doing athletes just because of the ego, the identity that we’ve sort of built around our sport, and at least for me, the transition from sport to not sport, it was somewhat difficult. So if you’re a student athlete, I think that’s a really good place to start. But there are a couple of different ones that I found fun. “The Inverted Hierarchy,” “Challenging * Mattering = Meaningful.” There’s some interesting ones that we can dive into, but I don’t know if the… There’s no right place to start. Absolutely, I think one thing that we’ve talked about already, but what do you find joyful, what sparks your curiosity? What sparks your interest? Everyone’s a little bit different, so I think it’s up to the reader to choose your own adventure, see what resonates with you.
Sean: Yeah, plenty there. And the thing is, there’s not an overwhelming amount in the essays, and I think that’s what you do really well. It’s not overly complicated, it’s just beautiful, and distilled down, but you mentioned just some of your favorite themes throughout some of them. Any come to mind now that you really love, and maybe it might be non-traditional and a lot of people haven’t heard of, but once you start exploring really can peak someone’s interest and open their eyes?
Blas: Yeah, we can go into maybe into “The Inverted Hierarchy.” I think that’s a relatively simple idea, but hierarchies are a fundamental organizational structure of nature. They’ve evolved over time, and if you think about it, it’s a simple logic chain, you have to have square one in order to build off of that to get to square two, and that’s how you end up with this hierarchical pyramid structure, and I think that’s just a natural by-product of evolution, but we’re no longer in a world of scarcity. We’re no longer in this zero sum world anymore, and I think that’s shaped a little bit how we should think about how we interact with others and how we shape organizations, and the core of that essay inverts that hierarchy. So it says that what used to be the top of the hierarchy is now the bottom. So there are a bunch of different terms for it and servant leadership, and I think is the key one that comes to mind, but I think if you flip it and you understand that the CEO or the leader has the responsibility of taking care of everybody, what used to be on below that hierarchy, that’s not on top of him, you got very different status structures. You get very different goals, you get very different behaviors from everybody in the organization, so I think Danny Meyer does a really good job talking about some of this.
At Glenair we do a really good job thinking through and talking about a lot of this, so it’s a topic that hits home in a lot of different ways because I’m living it and I’ve read from a couple of different people and learned from a couple of different people, but it was my take on it and why from maybe an evolutionary biological perspective, this inverted hierarchy might be the correct route to go in today’s day and age.
Sean: Yeah, I’m a big believer in that as well, and you mentioned Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group and his book, Setting the Table. He does a great job really, really pulling this out and saying how they do it, or your organization. What about some of these teacher reference guides? So you have the books, you have the essays you do, and then you also have these teacher reference guides. I would love for you just to even describe what they are, and then we can dive into one or two of them.
Blas: Yeah, absolutely.
So this teacher’s reference guide is just a deep dive on a particular topic, subject or person, and mentioned a little bit ago, but everything from complexity, which has probably had the biggest impact on me and how I think about the world, to Bruce Lee, who is a beautiful philosopher and thinker, to Walt Disney, to Paul Graham, kind of all over the map, and I think that encapsulates my learning process. There’s no real theme that you can pull between all of them, again, it’s just things that I found incredibly interesting in the moment that I went really deep on, and again, I know I’m not smart enough to just recall everything I ever read, so putting these things together serves as a useful guide for me, three, five, 10 years out to be able to look back and really see the threads that I pulled on and what were the key takeaways. And again, the book is always there, it’s always highlighted that sitting on my shelf or if I wanna go back to the source material, but this teacher’s reference guide was my attempt at synthesizing and distilling these important ideas in these various books into one manageable resource.
Sean: You mentioned complexity, I’m sure there’s a lot of listeners that are just unfamiliar with that as a whole, and for them wanting to even explore it further we had on Brian A. Arthur, I’ll link that up. So what drew you to complexity?
Blas: At the beginning, not much, to be honest with you. I had gotten to know… I read a little bit about the SantaFe Institute, and they had a couple of fascinating people and read a couple of white papers on them, and read one book by a Mitchell Waldrop called Complexity that just blew my mind, and that led to probably 10 other books on the same topic, and I just went really deep. And I think the language, chaos theory, order, complexity, balance, emergence, all these things have such a deep and important role in our day-to-day lives, and again, at least for me in my formal education, I have never heard any of these terms, and it seemed crazy to me that so many of these important topics were, at least in my experience, never covered, and that felt like such a fruitful and deep dive from me.
Sean: I always love hearing the topics that just garner people’s attention and interest. You mentioned writing being a difficult process for you, so what is that creative writing process like for you?
Blas: Yeah, it’s a good question, and I don’t know if I’m good enough of a writer or have been doing this enough to really offer anything helpful here, but for me, the topics of the essays come about somewhat organically over time. It’s an idea that I’ve had in the back of my head, or it’s a pattern I’ve recognized from a couple of different books or different experiences that I want to try to understand better, and it’s a little bit different, I can’t say that the same process every time, but usually I just build… I create a Word document with a bunch of different notes and questions and quotes that I know I wanna tie in together somehow, and when I have the energy and the mental space of the joy of sitting down and creating and trying to write one of these essays it comes about, but painful might have been the wrong word. It’s a long process, I enjoy every part of it, but writing definitely isn’t natural to me, and one thing that I learned from Paul Graham and a couple of others, is just simplify, simplify, simplify. And if I notice that I’m repeating a message or that I’m using the wrong word or trying to be too fancy or whatever it is, just to go back and make it as simple as possible, so that simplification, that reduction process is what takes time for me.
Sean: So you distill everything, you pulled all together into a Word document. Are you sitting down at one time, then once all that’s compiled and essentially coming out with that end product essay?
Blas: I would say once it’s all compiled, I get the overarching theme, kind of the overview that I wanna cover and how I wanna cover it, but then I might write it from start to finish, but it’s probably five, six, seven, 10 different times I need to reread the whole essay from start to finish, and that process helps me reduce, reduce, reduce. And share with a couple of people I trust and they give me good feedback, but it’s definitely not a sit down for three hours and crank this thing out, it’s more sit down for an hour, half an hour, five, six, seven different times and getting a slightly different perspective and different mindset on it before I share it.
Sean: I would love to hear about just sitting down at different times with those different mindsets. I’m telling you, there’s times that I’ve written something and then even within the same week, I sit back, I say, well, where was I when I was writing this? What’s going on here? Does that ever happen to you?
Blas: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And something that feels amazing and inspirational, and so deep in the moment, you come back even later that day or tomorrow, and like you said, you know what was I thinking? That doesn’t make any sense. So yes, that… That absolutely resonates. It doesn’t just come out fully formed and well-written, at least my attempt at well-written it, consider a whole effort and time to get there.
Sean: Yeah, I think anything meaningful in life, I usually take some time in some re-visiting there.
So one of the things I love is just around your growth mentality, taking on new challenges, and we’re gonna get into the Latticework here in a second, but where does that mindset come to take on new challenges?
Blas: Yeah, I learned in my senior year of college, and it’s a really short TED Talk that I learned, but it got me excited and I wanted that monthly challenge. It was exciting to me to try to learn new things on and systematic basis, and only in hindsight would I really be able to sort of understand this and explain it, but it’s also given me an excuse to try and fail things. Right, so these things that I do every month, they’re not part of my ego and they’re not part of my identity, they are things I’m trying to learn, and if I fail and never do it again, that’s okay too. It was just a monthly challenge, and it gives me that space, and we talked about space a couple of times now, but it gives me space to try and fail. It gives me space to try something new, something that I otherwise probably would never give myself the time to do.
So, it’s been really fun, and I think it’s resonated with a lot of people when I share the monthly challenges. It’s fun to see how many people reach out and say, oh, I’ve always wanted to try that, or, and you should check out this resource or did you do this or look at this, and it’s a fun way to build a little bit of a community around something relatively silly, joyful little pursuit like that.
Sean: Yeah, I think those little things are so important that the beginner’s mind, the shoshin, and just having that ability and willingness to fail, but I wanna take and dive in one of the big things you’re doing now, and that’s the Latticework, which I just think is gonna be one of the fundamental learning keys for everyone moving forward, so I’d love for you just to give even a high-level overview of what the Latticework is, and then we can dive into some of the fun we’re gonna have with it.
Blas: Thanks, Sean. So yeah, I am really excited about this. So on a really high level, the Latticework is a multidisciplinary resource and community that’s looking to interconnect and explain valuable ideas.
Now, on a high level, what we’re looking to do is create a learning road map. What are the big ideas from the big disciplines? That’s our timeline, and they’re really fun thing about this, Sean, is by hosting it online and by making it an organic, dynamic, breathing organism in a lot of ways, it doesn’t become static and outdated. So if there are ideas or even entire disciplines that we don’t cover today with the community’s involvement and people engaging with it, we can shape this together over time. So I am no expert in any of these ideas, I’m just someone who’s curious and I read a lot, and the disciplines and the ideas that are covered today, they evolved or they were gotten from patterns that I saw emerge from all these books and all these things I’ve read and learned, but I’m hoping that together with the communities engagement and involvement that we can create something really beautiful every time. Something that adds a ton of value, a learning roadmap that shows people where to start. How do you focus your time? What should you learn about when it comes to physics or math, or chemistry, or game theory or any of these things? So that’s my high level overview and hope for this project is that it becomes a useful resource, a useful guide for people to understand how to spend the time and what to learn.
Sean: Why is it called the Latticework?
Blas: Yeah, so this is taken from Charlie Munger, and he has this idea that you need a Latticework of mental models in your head in order to make them useful, in order to make them applicable. And for me a Latticework wasn’t something I intuitively understood, but if you imagine a criss cross pattern that is sometimes used in gardening or home improvement, it allows vines to grow up in and allows you to hang things off of it, and what he means with the Latticework is just a structure to hang ideas. So it’s really hard to understand and recall anything if ideas are just floating around aimlessly in our heads, so what we need to do with this Latticework for this mental structure framework, whatever you wanna call it, is create the structure that we can hang new ideas off of. So previous knowledge allows us to learn new things, and that’s where this idea of compound learning really starts to take off, where the more we learn, the more we can learn. It’s not magic, it’s just that we have more hooks to hang ideas off of, and that’s what the Latticework is hoping to help people to achieve. It’s not just a one-discipline-focused area or just focus on physics, it’s really interconnecting all these different disciplines, helping us to understand how they’re interconnected. Why they’re important, how they apply to our lives, so making these on paper, these theoretical ideas, tangible, concrete, applicable to your day-to-day life, that’s a huge and core part of what we’re trying to help solve here.
Sean: Yeah, two of the really big things there are just the broad frameworks that allow us to compound that knowledge. I think that’s been really helpful for me, especially with the previous site, the Rabbit Hole, which is obviously gonna be on going here, but just tying in some of those big mental models and then seeing how they apply across all different fields, where we’re concepts from physics that I thought had no applicability to my life, all of a sudden once you become aware of these these fundamental shifts of, oh my gosh, I see this everywhere it’s so helpful.
So you mentioned some of these broad themes, and then you hit on some of these mental models, what are some of the broad concepts that when someone goes on to the Latticework they’re gonna see and come across right away?
Blas: Sure, so the one that we’re giving away for free right now, and we’re doing an early release with a wait list, so all you need to do is give your name and email and you’ll get access to what I think is one of our most valuable disciplines, which is called worldly wisdom.
So one step back, a discipline is the overarching theme, and then there are ideas within the discipline. Right, so within worldly wisdom, we have things like the Latticework that explains what a Latticework even is and why it’s important, we have mental models, we have something called the three buckets, we have advantageous divergence, we have … effects, we have all these ideas that fall into that Worldly Wisdom discipline, and that’s just the start. And we start with that, and we’re giving that away again, I really believe it’s one of the most valuable things that were… And we’re gonna always give it away for free, but it serves as the foundation for our Latticework. If we can understand these core ideas, I think it helps pave the way for future understanding for a more seamless path that we can come to understand some of these disciplines and ideas and how to learn them and how they’re applicable and why they matter.
So that’s why we start with Worldly Wisdom, but after that we’re going into things like physics and talking about Galiel and Relativity and velocity, and the laws of thermodynamics and motion, and again, we learned about a lot of these things in school, but at least in my experience, I never understood why they were really important. They seemed isolated, they seemed esoteric and it was, okay, I’m gonna learn these ideas good enough to pass the test, and then they’re sort of out of my brain, but with the Latticework, what we’re trying to do is help you understand how they connect to different ideas. So how does velocity tie into business? How does velocity tie into relationships? And when you see those interconnections and you understand these ideas at a basic level, you don’t have to be an expert, but at a basic level, it helps you see why they matter, and again, core to this whole thing is making it applicable to your day-to-day life, so not just beautiful on paper, not just theory, but pragmatic, helpful solutions that you can use every day of your life.
Sean: Yeah, that’s the key. It’s gotta be applicable and be able to be used.
It’s funny, you mentioned some of those terms, I’m sure some people are like, what are they talking about? This has no relevance to my life, and a number of years ago, I thought the same thing, and then I explored these further and further and this is what the Latticework does, and it’s so funny, I’d bring up some of these concepts, like Galiel and relativity to my wife and at first she’s looking at me like I have four heads. And now she’s just like, yes, these are everywhere, these are so applicable to me as a mom, as I learn all these different things. That’s what I love, and you’re bringing this to light, and you mentioned a word a few minutes ago, and we both are huge admirers of Charlie Munger. So I would love for you to dive further just to give the listeners a preview of what some of these things are, and that’s the lollapalooza effect. Can you hit on that for a second?
Blas: Yeah, absolutely. So in a lot of ways, lollapalooza comes from a term that we’ve covered just really briefly in a teacher’s reference guide on complexity, but this idea of emergence.
So the idea is that sometimes one plus one does not equal two. Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s what Mr. Munger gives a fun and easy to remember name, the lollapalooza effect. So it happens in nature all the time and in business, that’s what a beautiful culture does, right. You might not have a team of superstars, but they gel together. And the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And in a lot of ways, that’s what I’m hoping to achieve with the community that is built around this, so this is not meant to be, and I don’t want it to be Blas’ Latticework, I want this to be the Latticework, something that’s co-owned and used and engaged with by a broader community that cares about these ideas and lollapalooza effects I think can come in if we get the right culture and the right people involved and how people engage with it, so that this, again, is a dynamic, living, breathing thing that continuously is refined and made better over time, and not just a static blog post with a couple ideas that people don’t visit. I want people to feel ownership of it, I want them to feel like they’re part of something. A lot of hopes and a lot of ifs. We have a long way to go to build something that can be that robust, that valuable, but that’s the mission, that’s what I’m hoping to achieve with this thing.
Sean: Yeah, it’s exciting to hear about and just even understanding evolution and then how we hope this can come to be as a broader part of this community. The community element, can you even go a little bit deeper there and how people can get involved and what does involvement look like?
Blas: Yeah, absolutely.
So this first phase of our release is just the resource. So I want people to get walk away from this, but the wrong idea, but right now it’s just the resource and worldly wisdom everyone has access to, but you get a really good sense for who we are and what we’re hoping to achieve and a sense for our aesthetic and our goals, and some of the ideas that we cover.
The next phase, Sean, is the community aspect that you’re talking about, so we’re building a tool right now that will allow people to highlight, comment, engage, create groups, be able to really make their own work. It’s like reading the book, like we talked about earlier, you’re having a conversation with the author. It’s not just a passive learning experience, it’s active, and the additional benefit that we have by posting this online is that you turn a single player game sitting down by yourself and reading a book into a multi-player one, and again, so many of these beautiful threads, we’ve touched on Sean, like Infinite Games, you know this multiplayer game and zero sum, positive sum. It feeds into everything that we’re doing. And that’s what I’m so excited about with this is we really do have the opportunity, I think, again, right community, right culture, right incentives, to build something that is continuously improving. Something that’s always evolving and iterating, and again, with this tool that we’re building and getting the right people involved early on, making sure we set those cultures, the culture and the incentives properly from the early days that I think I might lead to those lollapalooza effects.
Sean: Get the structure right early on.
You mentioned just that active learning and the continuing improvement, and that’s something you’ve actually really helped me do, and I think that’s why the community element in this is so important, it’s one thing to read a book, sit there with your own thoughts, you can only tease out so much, so actively being engaged with that community, hearing others perspective, triangulating those views is so important, and one of those things recently, you’ve actually really helped me see just a little bit differently was a term you mentioned a minute ago, and that’s Galilean relativity, so I would love for you, ’cause I’m sure a lot of the listeners are unfamiliar with this concept, can you hit on what that is?
Blas: Yeah, absolutely. So this is a bit of a sneak peak since we’re not releasing physics yet, but I think it’s… Maybe it’s one of the top five most important ideas I would say that we cover in this whole thing, and we talk about physics, and you mentioned it at first. Most people hear Gailelian relativity and physics. And they turn off, right? Again, I’m not a physicist. Not a scientist. Why does this apply to me? I don’t get it. I understand that and I was there recently too, but I think there’s so much to be gained from learning the core basic, the basics, the fundamentals, the core ideas of these different disciplines.
So with Galilean relativity, very simply is you can never really truly grasp a system that you’re a part of, so imagine you’re on the hull of a ship or on an airplane, you’re sitting there and it feels like you’re not moving at all. Maybe airplane is the better example, of course, you’re moving hundreds of miles an hour, but when you’re sitting there on the airplane, it feels like you’re sitting still, but anybody on the ground sees you moving, again at hundreds of miles an hour. And the same thing happens in our day-to-day life, and it’s become sort of cliche. What do you wish you knew at 20 years old? What do you wish you knew at 30 years old? It’s the same phenomenon, and I think the beautiful story here is you look back to your 18, 20-year-old self, and there’s of course things regret. Nobody has the perfect life for every decision they’ve made is proper. And you look back now at 30 years old and you say, oh, Blas you’re such an idiot. How could you do that? And without a doubt, a 40-year-old Blas will look back at 30-year-old Blas like, oh, you’re such an idiot. How could you do that?
And it’s this Galilean relativity. We all fall into the same trap. We can’t ever fully understand or grasp a system we’re a part of. And that’s where having a community, that’s where having people who love you, and that’s where having a support system, that’s where honestly being multi-disciplinary really helps because you’re changing your perspective, you’re getting fresh eyes, you’re getting a new look at the same situation. So you have different frames, you have different filters, you have different ways of looking at the same problem and coming up with a either a novel solution, a creative solution, or just something that works. It doesn’t need to be rocket science, it could be a very simple solution but is overlooked because people are entrenched or they’re experts, or there’s only one right way to do it, but by giving yourself a multi-disciplinary view, you give yourself at least a greater chance of escaping Galilean relativity, of seeing different people’s perspectives, different ways of approaching problems.
Sean: No, absolutely. Beautifully encapsulated there, and I think that’s so important even just the broader theme there of being open to other views and not just being so hard and steadfast on ours, and I think being able to look at some of these models and these frameworks really help tease that out.
So I’m really hoping that a lot of the listeners are excited about this. They wanna learn more, so where can we direct them because I’ve said it, I’ll say it again, you were fortunate, or I was fortunate enough to see a beta version, and I truly believe this is fundamentally gonna change how many people learn moving forward, so how can the listeners stay connected, learn more about the latest work?
Blas: Thanks. Yeah, we’re really excited. The website is LTCWRK dot com, and the same Twitter handle, and that’s sort of our main places to discover rest right now. But you’ll get a really good understanding of who we are and what we’re going for if you go to the website. We’re really excited about this, and again, it’s early days and we have a lot to do, but we think there’s a ton of optionality here, and again, we’re biased, but I think there’s really a lot of value to be gained from this and looking forward to building the community around it.
Sean: Yeah, no, absolutely. But Blas, I’m not gonna let you go that easy because you’re one of my favorite thinkers, so there’s a few things I would love to just nerd out with you on for a few minutes here, and so a recent person we both became really deeply fascinated with was Dee Hock, but I would love to know and you mentioned in Ford, Firestone, who are some of the other thinkers, leaders throughout the years that you just have really taken a lot from?
Blas: Yeah, I think this idea of exemplars is incredibly important, and we can learn from the living or the dead, there’s no… That’s a beautiful thing about books, it allows you to peer into somebody else’s mind, so Lincoln, Franklin, …, Paul Graham, Naval Ravikant, all of these people have had a deep, deep, lasting impact on me. Richard Hamming we talked about earlier, Mr. Munger and Mr. Kaufman with Poor Charlie’s Almanac.
All these things are deeply influential on me, and sometimes it’s just embedded deep on my psyche and I can’t point exactly to why or when or what it is about them that has done so, and sometimes it’s pretty explicit, but I think that’s one of the key things with being able to read and dive deep, is it informs your thinking, your operating system, your kernel at such a deep level, and again, sometimes you can pinpoint it and other times you can’t, but exposing yourself to these different thinkers, these different ideas, and really getting a peek into their brain and how they think about things, to me has been so exciting, and that’s what the book summaries, that’s what these reference guides help me do is it gives me a way to understand how different people think and that to me is really exciting.
Sean: Yeah, so it’s one of my favorite things to do as well, which was probably why your work resonates so much with me, and so many of these leaders just have these unique skills as well, and so I know you’ve teased out a lot within yourself. What do you feel are just some of your greater strengths because you certainly have things you do incredibly well, and I would just love to hear you self-assess what you think those might be?
Blas: Thanks, Sean. I guess I would give myself two things. I’m not afraid of hard work, whether it’s tennis or reading or learning, or I’m just not afraid to sit down and do the work.
My dad has this beautiful saying that I grew up with, he’s Venezuelan, and so the saying is …, and very simply it means “the lazy man works twice as hard,” and I never really understood that, but there was a simple example, we’re flying to some junior tennis tournament, and you weren’t allowed to have liquids in your bag, and I said, I can sneak through security, it’s just one bottle of water. I left the bottle of water in my bag, let it go through the scanner, and of course they caught it and put me towards the back of the line. That line was now an hour and a half long, and it caused us to miss our flight and it was a huge pain, so I was lazy in the moment. It would have taken me a minute to throw out that water and refill it up, and instead of try to beat the lazy man, and I had to work twice as hard. I had to go through the line twice and miss a flight that was stressful as annoying, and that simple anecdote has stayed with me for a really long time, and I see it in myself, and I see it in other people that the inclination is to try to find a way around the hard work, and so often if you just sit down and do it, it’s actually less effort and… Anyway, so I’ve taken that to heart. And rather than, oh, how can I get around this? Is there a way I don’t really need to do this, I just sit down and do it. And again, I’m in a fortunate position where I get to choose a lot of that, which a lot of people aren’t, and I recognize that, but being in that position is certainly helpful.
The other thing is… I’m not smart enough to make things really complicated. I see things really simply, and I think it’s a benefit in a lot of ways, and maybe it comes through some of the essays, and it’s definitely been honed over time as I’ve read all these books and written a lot to get to the essence of something. So I keep things really simply, I try to, at least, I think relatively simply. And I think those two things kinda come through trying to get to the essence, and there’s so much noise out there, and one thing the Rabbit Hole, and definitely the Latticework is trying to accomplish is getting down to the essence of these things.
What do these ideas really mean? And as simply, as simply as possible and as approachable as possible, as applicable as they could possibly be. So I don’t know if I have any superpowers, but I guess if I were to get myself to those two might be top of the list.
Sean: Those are the two very good strengths to have. Yeah, you mentioned your father, you also have a big life take away from your mom and pretty sure I… You’re mom’s name is Karen, correct?
Blas: That’s right, yeah.
Sean: I would love for you to hit on this because I think when other people hear this is just, oh, so simple, but this could really change your life, I’d love for you to hear or describe Karen filling up other people’s cups first.
Blas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s funny when I asked my mom about this, she hardly remembers ever saying it, but it was one of those things that just stayed with me forever, and again, like you said, it’s a really simple idea, but her whole thing is, you need to fill your cup before you can possibly fill other cups. And what she means by that is you need to have self-love, self-compassion in order to be able to give any of that away to other people, and I think… At least for me, when I had this idea or mental model or this framework all out, call it whatever you want, it was pretty easy to see other people whose cups weren’t full. They had this scarcity mentality where they’re recording things all the time, whether it was love, or attention, or compliments, or knowledge or whatever it is. Their cup was half full, so they have this scarcity mentality.
But these people with a full cup, they’re playing an Infinite Game, they have a non-zero sum mentality, meaning that just because I have an idea, if I share it with you, it doesn’t take away from what I have. In fact, it increases it, and again, such a simple idea, but for myself, I think it can help me think about these things that I do for me that helped me become a better person, or at least what I think is a better person. I thought of that as selfish in a lot of ways at first taking all this time just for me to improve myself, to dive deep into me, but this changed the frame a little bit where what I was doing for me actually would end up helping others and that’s why I think Mr. Munger and a lot of people say that education is actually a moral act, and I think it ties together with what my mom was saying with her full cups. We need to improve ourselves, we need to fill our own cups before we could possibly fill others. So simple anecdote but it resonated a lot with me and just seems like it’ll help with you too a little bit, so that makes me happy.
Sean: Yeah, absolutely. It’s such a beautiful visual. You can think about your cup being overflowing and you can just fill so many others, and believe me, you’re filling others cups, you’ve been so kind with your time. When I’m trying to tease out an idea or something, jumping on the phone and talking things through, and then just the amount that you’ve put out there in the world, I know it’s been incredibly helpful for me, a lot of my loved ones, and I know there’s so many people out there that it’s also impacted greatly.
So I would love to hear though, as we’re ending this and wrapping it up, you’ve mentioned a lot of people, if you just had to sit down with one of them for an evening, just relaxing conversation, dead or alive, can’t be a family member though, who do you think you elect to sit down with?
Blas: It’s a hard question, Sean, it’s a good question. Off the top of my mind, a Lee Kuan Yew comes up, and I lived with my family and Singapore for three or four years, and my dad actually overlapped with him a little bit, so we… I couldn’t say we got to know him, but I got to meet him, and I just think he’s the greatest nation builder of the last couple of centuries, and what he’s been able to do with this tiny wastewater of an island in Southeast Asia and turned it into really, a powerhouse in a lot of ways for their size and for their natural resources, I think is just fascinating. And he’s such a pragmatic, a beautiful thinker. There is no BS, there was no… You know, beating around the edges, he was a harsh guy in a lot of ways, but I think learning from him and how he came to be and how he thought would be really fascinating.
Sean: I would love to be able to sit in on that conversation. You might know this, did he just come out with a new book that just hasn’t been translated in English yet.
Blas: I don’t know.
Sean: I thought I saw something, but I hope so.
This has been so fun for me. This is something that I’ve been looking forward to, I’ve learned so much, like I said, both with the Rabbit Hole and then obviously the Latticework, only seeing the beta version and what’s gonna come, but I love that your cups full. You love life, you love exploring new things, ideas, and that just continues to overflow into so many other people’s lives, so I just wanted to thank you, I know I’ve said that, but it really has been a lot both to my life, my family’s life, my friends, deeply influenced by you, so thank you for that.
Blas: Thanks a lot, Sean. That’s what I’m hoping to do with all this, right, is add value to other people and help in any small way that I can. So I sincerely thank you, that means a lot.
Sean: Yeah, so as we wrap up here, where should everyone be going? I know we linked up a few things, anything you wanna leave the listeners with and direct them towards?
Blas: Yeah, again, nothing done by brute force, I really believe that, but if the Latticework really resonates with you and you wanna learn a little bit about it and who we are and what we’re going forward, that’s my labor of love, my passion project these days, and I’m excited about it. I think the optionality is pretty huge, we can draw together a fascinating group of people, and if there’s one ask, it would be just to check it out and if it interests you to dive in, but that’s it.
Sean: Yeah, absolutely, and like you mentioned, Blas, the worldly wisdom, it’s up there for free, so I truly recommend everyone should dive onto that website, check it out. We’ll have it linked up in the show notes. But once again, Blas, I cannot thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.
Blas: It’s a pleasure, man. Thanks for having me.