#253 Grant Williams – Following Your Curiosities, The Value of Listening, & Sharing Timeless Wisdom

Key Takeaways

The five words Grant would say to his younger self:

Listen more than you talk

“I’ve never learned anything listening to myself”

Grant’s Big Lesson:

The time you spend thinking about “how the hell did this happen”, is just wasted time. There’s a time to do that but it’s after you’ve dealt with the immediate situation.

“Having the wherewithal to sit back and analyze the now and not what’s happened is crucial”

Grant’s curiosity about others:

How do you do what you do?
Why do you do what you do?
What experiences have brought you to those conclusions?

“I distilled it down into the fact that there are things you can be taught, but there are things you can’t be taught, but you can learn. And that’s what I’m interested in, things that no one can teach you. But if you listen to them, tell their stories, you can pull the threads out of that yourself. And, that’s where the real timeless wisdom is that you can apply to so many situations in your life rather than a moment in time.”

00:45 Uncle Harry’s Influence

“Uncle” Harry was Grant’s idol growing up. Harry was a foregin exchange trader and was Grant’s introduction to finance.

Grant: Uncle Harry was the guy who would always sit and spend time. He would always have a joke for me. And he would always show me a card trick and he had this he would do this thing where he would, he could line up a whole set of different size Brandy glasses, and he would pour just literally straight down the line, pour, pour, pour, and you would tip all of them over. And the measure was perfect right up to the rim where the line of Brandy lands. It’s just little things like that. I was blown away by just how cool this guy was. I just wanted to be whatever Uncle Harry was. I had no idea what he was. He had this great house. He had like spice, Aveda machines and pinball machines, and this little barn and stuff. He was just like the coolest guy. So, I wanted to be him. I was asking my dad, what does Uncle Harry do? He’s something called a foreign exchange trader. So, I wanted to be a foreign exchange trader.

05:52 Fork In The Roads

“Life comes at you fast and things happen to you and what I’ve found over the years is it’s great to have a plan, it’s great to have somewhere you want to be in and a career path you want to follow. In the same way it’s very dangerous because if you get absolutely set on that and intent on following that course, you can be blind to things that come along that could take you in a completely different direction”

Grant: I think the biggest turning point for me really was something that happened to me in 2010. And this was, I left the business for a short time, moved to Singapore to help a friend set up a business. And unfortunately, that happened right in the teeth of the fallout financial crisis and that business didn’t work out. So I was kind of at a loose end and wondering what to do. And a dear friend of mine, Steve Conway who I’ve known for many years was in Singapore and he was looking to start a business and God bless him. He kind of gave me a route back into the business, which I’ll forever be grateful to. And because during that period of time, I’d been writing things that might go home just on my own and sending it out and kind of putting it out into the world. Really as a kind of pressure valve for me with all the stuff that was going on, I kind of reached this crossroads.

Grant’s Big Lesson:

The time you spend thinking about “how the hell did this happen”, is just wasted time. There’s a time to do that but it’s after you’ve dealt with the immediate situation.

“Having the wherewithal to sit back and analyze the now and not what’s happened is crucial”

13:45 Skill & Luck

Grant: I think skill without luck is really not much good to you. Frankly, you can be the most skillful person in the world, but you do need luck. It’s just that simple. And I think my Real Vision journey has taught me that, through finding people who are incredibly skillful at what they do, but no one’s ever heard of them. And I, through sheer luck would stumble across these people, be intrigued by what they do and intrigued by their writing or their thinking and ask them out of the blue to do an interview, and be lucky enough to be able to expose these brilliant people, to an audience that would be able to benefit from them.

“It’s those little moments that you don’t expect and you don’t recognize the time for what they are”

17:21 Importance of Listening

The five words Grant would say to his younger self:

Listen more than you talk

“I’ve never learned anything listening to myself”

20:35 Curiosity

All of Grant’s conversations have become about:

How do you do what you do?
Why do you do what you do?
What experiences have brought you to those conclusions?

Grant: I distilled it down into the fact that there are things you can be taught, but there are things you can’t be taught, but you can learn. And that’s what I’m interested in, things that no one can teach you. But if you listen to them, tell their stories, you can pull the threads out of that yourself. And, that’s where the real timeless wisdom is that you can apply to so many situations in your life rather than a moment in time.

23:12 Media Training

Grant started Real Vision with no real media knowledge, expertise, or training. He explains how their lack of expertise is really what he thinks built their true fans.

“We were just dumb enough to think, ’this might work!’”

Grant: We had no media experience and I think that’s part of the reason why it resonated with people. And I looked back at some of those early pieces we did, and they were incredibly amateur, they were very amateur. But they were about the conversations. They were about the content. They weren’t frills and special effects and guns. These were just two people in a room with minimal camera angles, but having interesting conversations to an audience that was interested in the substance of those conversations, not the graphics, and the flash and all that sort of stuff.

Create Content You Love

Grant says that he only produces and publishes content that he himself would enjoy to consume.

“By making my audience me, I then have to trust that the audience that has found my work or watched my interviews, they trust me and they know what they’re going to get.”

38:15 The Power of Storytelling

Grant tells the story of a presentation he did and the emotional interaction it led him to have with an audience member.

Grant: That’s what made me realize that there are people out there, who to your point earlier, are starved of this kind of conversation and it’s not a big audience. It’s not a lot. Okay. Most people do want to be told what to buy and when to buy it and when to sell it and how to make money and to do it quickly. But I think for the other people, short-term people are very well served. There’s plenty of people that will tell you what to buy and when to buy and when to sell it. That’s very easy, but to try and do something that a small audience would appreciate.

“That for me is what I am so energized to do is to try and have these conversations that won’t resonate with everybody but the people that they do resonate with, they’re incredibly powerful, they’re meaningful, and they have a timelessness about them that they can go back to”

45:00 Authenticity

Whatever you’re doing needs to be authentic to you.

Grant: I just think there’s this idea of authenticity and doing something for reasons that aren’t driven by either personal success or financial gain. It’s easy to say, but I’ve found them to be true. I’ve found that if you do that, then recognition, whether you want it or not, will come. And then it becomes a question of, okay, how do I kind of minimize that recognition? How do I avoid that? Becoming something bigger than I’m comfortable with? If the financial gain isn’t your ultimate motive, the creation of worthwhile and valuable content is, if you create something of value to people, no matter how big that audience is, I think people recognize it and they value it.

“This passion that I’ve had to try and learn and become smarter and become better at what I do, that passion has taken me down a path that has accidentally turned into a business”

If you create something of value, people will recognize it.

49:44 Delay Gratification

Grant and his audience have a ‘two way street of respect’ and they provide him with valuable feedback.

Grant: I’m genuinely curious, and I’ve joked about this many times, but people think it’s a hundred percent joke. It’s not, it’s 50% a joke. I said, every conversation I’ve had through all my interviewing, I’m the dumbest guy in the conversation. I acknowledged that, and so I just want to learn, I want to hear what other people have to say. I want to challenge it, but respectfully, if I have a different view and I’m not going to label the point to score any kind of win.

59:26 The Most Important Relationship in Finance

The relationship between a money manager and their clients.

“It’s become corrupted by this idea that gathering assets is the most important thing and so you compromise that relationship because you’ll say anything you need to say to get someone to invest with your firm so you can gather those assets”

1:01:47 Grant’s Interview Choice

If Grant could interview anyone dead or alive, just not a family or friend, he would choose Rudolf von Havenstein, Winston Churchill, Socrates, Plato, or Robert Frost among many of the people that he says have impacted him.