Introduction

Sean: [00:00:00] I’m Sean Delaney. You’re listening to What Got You There. What Got You There is a must follow for entrepreneurs, creatives, high achievers and change makers. Each week I sit down with some of the world’s most influential people and focus on the journey behind their success. We uncover the strategy, tactics and routines that help them get there. Now it’s your journey, so it’s time to learn what’s going to get you there. 

Speaker 1: [00:00:26] William Digby is a former Green Beret commando with the Australian army special forces, and now is a growth capital investor and entrepreneur. This conversation dives deep into the lessons he’s learned in the most extreme environments, how he makes and improves his decision making process, how to achieve mastery in multiple domains and so much more. If you’re into high performance and becoming a voracious learner, then you will love this episode with William Digby.

Sean: [00:00:52] For the high performers, looking to improve their leadership abilities, listen up and get ready to discover the path to becoming a better version of yourself. Let’s face it, the best leaders, they’re always on the hunt for insights, wisdom, looking for ways to get better, ways to make other people better. They see the gap between who they are and who they could be. For three decades, thousands of the world’s most elite leaders have turned to admired leadership for insights, for the behaviors and routines of true leadership excellence, how to make decisions, build relationships, and how to motivate and inspire. Now for the first time, these rare insights are available online. Admired leadership has this incredible video platform that focuses on 10 areas that are critical for all leaders. In each video module, you’ll learn the 10 specific behaviors of the very best leaders.

I’ve had the pleasure of taking this course, and it is hands down the best course I’ve ever taken on leadership. If you’re looking to better yourself or raise the team or company you’re working with, then you have to check out Admired leadership. I’m also excited about the new admired leadership field notes, email. This is a daily email from the front lines of leadership. It’s free and even better when you sign up, you’ll get a special 16 page guide to motivation and inspiration that will change the way you lead. So you need to ask yourself the question, are you ready to become an even better leader? If so, find out more at Admiredleadership.com.

This podcast is all about uncovering the lessons and wisdom high performers are using to better their life. And one of the most important elements of high performance is your sleep. That’s why I’m thrilled to tell you about Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep is revolutionizing what a great night of sleep means. 

The pod pro by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market. And what it does is the pod pro has dynamic, cooling and heating with biometric tracking. So, you know, the exact amount and quality of the sleep you’re getting. It comes in the form of both a mattress or a cover. You can put on your existing mattress, get the pod and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees for those people who would like a nice chilly room or mattress, and as hot as 110 degrees. I’m one of the fans of the cooler mattress, so this is perfect for me. The temperature of the pod pro will adjust each side of the bed based on your sleep stages, biometrics and bedroom temperature, reacting intelligently to create the optimal sleeping environment for you.

So what’s the result of all this? Eight Sleep users fall asleep, 32% faster. Reduce sleep interruptions by 40% and get an overall more restful night of sleep. The pod pro by Eight Sleep is so popular it garnered the attention from CEO’s, pro athletes and overall high performers like yourself. Go to eightsleep.com/sean. To check out the pod pro and save $150 at checkoff that’s eightsleep.com/sean. 

William, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today? 

William: [00:03:47] I’m doing very well, Sean. How about yourself?

William’s Non-negotiables

Sean: [00:03:50] I’m doing very well. I am so excited for this one. I always love talking to people who have conquered multiple domains and that’s something you’ve certainly done.  I would love to know when someone who is able to accomplish a lot in multiple arenas, do you have any non-negotiables you do throughout the day? Just the sort of big buckets you like to take care of and accomplish that just makes everything else go better for you. 

William: [00:04:14] Yeah. Good question. So definitely exercise has been the key lifeblood to my success, and we’ve got to look at all the things that I’ve achieved. I think there is a physical element to all of them. We don’t do that early morning training session as a minimum then, for me, the day is not off to the right start. So that is my non-negotiable. I’m glad you asked that question. I’m just about to have my first baby. We’re probably days away from happening. Hopefully it doesn’t happen during this podcast. That’s one of the things that I think no matter what happens, I will try to maintain, but I guess for those who are more experienced and yourself included maybe you can tell me whether or not that is something that you can maintain once your life changes in that way.

Sean: [00:05:08] I think when the child comes, it’s sort of like “Bruce Lee’s be like water”. That schedule, you’re going to have to be someone malleable and flexible there. But I’ve seen that as a father of two, if I’m able to get that physical element, that’s going to help me be a better father, is going to help me throughout the day. So, that’s something I’ve tried to stick with as well. For you those early morning training sessions, what specifically, what type of physical activities are you getting into right now?

William: [00:05:35] So I’ve gone through lots of phases in my life. It’s interesting, I’ve definitely been one of those people that’s fallen into the trap of overtraining and I think maybe because I just really enjoy it. But I’ve got to the point where I think I’m getting the maximum bang for my buck and you probably won’t be surprised to hear this. That none of it is really reinventing the wheel, but I’ve had periods where I’ve been a long distance runner, and that’s not today, but where I was doing ultra marathons competitively, but not exceedingly well. And on those days I’ll get up and run maybe sometimes two hours. Sometimes I run in the morning and I run in the evening, but I enjoyed that, but really the return on that amount of time put in wasn’t there compared to what I do at the moment. CrossFit first thing in the morning and CrossFit sort of had its craze and I think my navy is tapering off a little bit in terms of its popularity.

I’m not sure, but I still love it. And then in the evenings I do some boxing training, just circuit training. My days of fighting which we might come back to obviously to talk about. Well, my days are fighting in the ring competitively. I’ll sort of be long behind me now. So I just have to get the fitness element out of it.

Addition By Subtraction

Sean: [00:06:58] I love how you hit on the time during the long distance runs sometimes you weren’t getting the bang for the buck. I love that addition by subtraction. I’m wondering, are there other things that you’ve just eliminated throughout the years that you realized aren’t really bringing the benefits I was hoping for?

William: [00:07:13] You definitely. I’m an avid reader and I’m sure you are too. And one of the great books I read along this topic that I really enjoyed recently is one called Deep Work. I think by Cal Newport. He has a lot of great messages in his book. And then in addition to that, there are a few other authors that have said similar things. I thought the return you get from reading the news, the daily news, it’s quite a lot of shock value, has a lot of sort of buy into the drama value. For some people that’s important for their job, but for others, and specific to the investment industry that sort of daily update on what’s happening isn’t necessarily that important for your day-to-day decision-making. It can be very intoxicating. It can be time-wasting. 

I don’t think it compounds that well over a lifetime. So that’s something I’ve shaved off greatly. I tend not to dive into the sort of broad sheets or all the tabloids or anything that has anywhere near what I used to. And I replaced that time now with reading something much more thoughtful, usually in the form of a book, because to me the return you get from reading someone’s thoughts that have been distilled into something that they’ve sort of grown a few hundred pages. You can put in for the investment of a day’s work, essentially. Sometimes you can understand someone’s lifetime experience, the payoff can be that big. So to answer your question, I’ve shaved off the day-to-day buying into what’s happening and I’ll replace that with something more deeper.

Sean: [00:08:55] Yeah, I’ve tended to do the same thing. Eliminate most of that noise, that’s just the news there. And it seemed the lab guy got a great framework. The Lindy effect, the things that have been around the longest tend to stick around the longest. So there’s some of those great books, if they were around 5,000 years ago they might still be there in the future.

They’re probably worth reading. You mentioned a great part there about how authors have taken sometimes years to distill down their thinking into such a concise framework and thought process. I love that. We’re going to dive more into reading later. I know you’re an avid reader, but is there anything else you do just to distill down your thinking or what you’re coming up with?

William: [00:09:29] I probably won’t be surprised to hear, I do a bit of meditation, although that’s definitely been something that has been a work in progress over the years. I wouldn’t say that I’m a believer in the effects, but I haven’t really unlocked the power entirely. In fact, my meditation is only a small amount of time each day. I think it’s a benefit, but it’s definitely something that I’m working on. If you do something along those lines, I’d love to hear your thoughts. But I think it is definitely about trying to continually find the most efficient and the most compounding way of doing things, extracting the most out of each day. And I think with something like a baby coming along, I think that it’s, the emphasis on that is even more in terms of being efficient and getting the message. 

William’s Army Career

Sean: [00:10:18] Yeah, I do some meditation. I don’t want to pretend I am at all qualified to talk about that. It’s more for me,  just trying to be in the moment and capture just awareness, even if it’s stepping back a few deep breaths during the time. Yeah, I don’t want to pretend like I’ve got any insights here. But before we dive too far into the details, I’d love just getting just a bit of a better grasp on you and how you got here. I know you were a Green Beret commando. How’d you get into that? 

William: [00:10:44] Good question. I was  a commando for many years. That’s Australian special forces for those listeners out there or readers or watchers. Australia’s army is divided into normal infantry and then we have our special forces within that SAS, which is similar to British. And we have our commandos similar to British Royal Marines, but different from the US Marines. Different from US commandos, but in some ways we all sort of share the same lineage. I think that’s like a lot of things in life, it’s fitted with an incremental sort of challenge. When I was younger, I had sold my business that I’d been working on for many years. I hit a point in life where I had some free time, in a weird way, sort of in my mid twenties. I, all of a sudden, didn’t have anything to do the next day so to speak.

I’d always been interested in the military. I’ve sort of, at school, done some military type things. My grandpa, or great-grandfather had been to world war one and world war two, a little bit of lineage. And I just dipped my toe in and then yeah, I loved it. It was one of those things where you sort of start off with your basic training and that’s kind of challenging. But then when you look back on that, it is so easy compared to what went on to be up that. I remember standing after sort of being in the army for a year having put my application in for special forces with a hundred and forty, a hundred forty three, I think other candidates and this exactly what you would imagine that you’re standing there on day one of selection course.

There’s this overwhelming sense of how I got myself into this position. Looking around there’s this huge bubble. Guys, who’d been in the army for five, 10 years. You don’t really come in fresh, so to speak usually, you’ve been put up by your commander to represent your unit. They don’t like to send the sort of people that we know won’t at least have some limited success within that process. So you’re standing there amongst all these sort of men mountains. And I did think to myself, I could be out of my depth here a little bit. I mean, confident, but at the same time, definitely there’s a sense of foreboding. And then at the end 10 months later,I love to go into the details if you want to. But 10 months later there were only 11 of us left standing. The attrition rate was extraordinary. Within that 10 months you really only have a day or two off and there’s like a weekend here and there and it’s just this sort of journey of self discovery, mental and physical anguish. Not only do they put pressure on you in every possible way you can imagine, but they’re extremely good at it. Now they have this honed system for doing it. At the end of that, it does really make you a lot stronger, I feel I’ve really made a big difference in my life. 

Sean: [00:14:01] Are there any specific moments during those 10 months that are still fresh in your mind? 

William: [00:14:07] There’s a lot. So just to cover off, sort of, in the broadest possible way, there’s everything you could imagine in that course. There’s all sorts of things, there’s special weapons, explosives, there’s survival, they’re sort of amphibious, insertion and airborne insertion and there’s hotwiring cars. There’s interrogation, resistance to interrogation, there’s like the whole spectrum of man skills. I should say women skills because some obviously have women now, but not much. But there’s this whole spectrum of raw skills that you pick up. Things like resistance to interrogation that is as fresh in my mind today as it probably was when it happened. Sadly, I can’t talk too much about the details of that, but it’s as horrible as it sounds.

There are many confronting moments throughout that journey. One in particular, there’s a course that’s called amphib, which is where you are training to do insertion by the ocean. And it is just this sort of relentless week after week of being not quite at sea, actually you’re off the coast, but every day up on the boats doing missions and mission practices. You’re cold, everything’s wet here. And then maybe you’ll sort of finish it like two or three or 4:00 AM back up at six. I mean, it’s like two, three hours of sleep a night, night after night, week after week. It’s like all that stuff you see in the movies times a hundred really horrendous.

Sean: [00:15:47] It sounds like you’re perfectly trained then for a new baby on the way. No sleep, wet cold.  You mentioned a few things there, I would love to dive further into. You mentioned watching the movies, these are so much more intense than you could imagine. I’m wondering what can’t you read about, what can’t you watch, but once going through that, you just walk away with a different mindset at different mentalities. There’s something like that come to mind?

William: [00:16:13] Yeah, definitely. Sounds a little bit cliche, I guess, but one thing that I was very impressed by was the fact that… I did that commando training. It was a good cloth badge with my grand Ray. And then I went pretty quickly on to pre deployment training then Afghanistan. So pre deployment training is another sort of 10 or 12 months of simulated things in a country like in Australia where you’re practicing what the job is going to be. So you do that and that’s less intense and you’re with your team. And then I remember flying from Australia through the Middle East landing in Afghanistan.

We got to our base, we got our first sort of briefing, and then that night we were out on target stacked up against the door there in Uruzgan Province. With explosive charges on the door, weapons ready to go at night, vision bang, explosives through the door, and then straight into the compound. And I had the sense that I had done it like a hundred times, complete comfort, heart rate sort of elevated, but not jacked, just a sense that this was just a continuation of training that I’ve done a million times before. Reflecting on that is such an interesting thing. You hear of “train hard and fight easy” and a lot of those sort of cliche sayings, but they are extremely true at that moment.

Probably not in that moment, but reflecting on that moment, it definitely taught me about the sort of the power of preparation or exposing yourself incrementally to things to the point where you can barely recognize how you got there and even who you are and how you’re capable of doing something when you look back to the starting point. But it really is that sort of compounding game across that time. So I would say that’s one of the most profound things I got out of deploying and it’s a real testament to the system and to the power of training very hard.

Building Confidence From Incremental Exposure

Sean: [00:18:15] Yeah. That incremental exposure, I view this as a superpower. You can even think about some of the most extreme things, call it, just like fighting or flying a jet pilot. If you’re able to do that, you train it so well, it’s almost like driving a car, your subconscious takes over just thinking you can take the most complex tasks and essentially have your subconscious take them over. It’s just a great framework to think about with anything you want to conquer it. It’s funny, you were talking about the training. I was recently talking with a Navy seal. He’s a good friend. And I was just asking about when you’re actually on deployment and he was saying, Sean, you don’t understand. I ripped this out so many hundreds of times, it was just so clear what was going to go on there.

So it’s just interesting hearing about that. You mentioned something I would love to dive into and that’s around confidence. And I’m wondering what your confidence was like throughout that progression in the Green Berets. And then what it’s like today, are you still experiencing the same level of confidence you had a decade ago?

William: [00:19:14] Yeah. Interesting question. I’m not sure I’ve reflected on that before. So having gone through that process and having been successful, I definitely have a sense. And then, being on the sort of instructing side a little bit, I’ve never formally instructed a course for a very long time, but just by virtue of being in an environment like that, of course you didn’t get put on the course. And then you do things that you see people who are in the position you were in previously, although you’re seeing it now from the other side. And you definitely get a feeling for what, the type of personality that they are looking for and the type of personality that will be successful in that environment going forward and confidence.

It’s certainly the sort of perfect medium between someone who’s very confident, but has a lot of humility and understands that they make mistakes. It’s just about making a mistake and then just getting straight back onto the job, not being distracted by the fact you’ve made a mistake. Overconfidence is a disaster. Under confidence is a disaster, but somewhere in the middle there where you believe in yourself, but not so much that you are arrogant to the point where you won’t listen and you won’t accept that you’ve made a mistake. And so you see that a lot actually in that environment, people selecting themselves out because first of all, maybe they’d be too confident or maybe they won’t accept that they’re wrong in some situation or someone will say like, you’ve done that the wrong way, and they don’t agree with that. And so then some sort of pushback occurs and that is not what they’re looking for. Now to answer your question about confidence.

Yeah. I certainly think that that course is full of self doubt. They’re structured in that way to test that about you. There’s barely any time where you sort of… maybe towards the end, but there are many, many, many long torturous hours of feeling I don’t know if I belong. I don’t know if I’m going to succeed. And then I have this sort of quite cruel structure where in the very earliest stage, in the first two months, that was the anchor, the Bazemore studies. People are doing things and getting themselves kicked off from time to time. Other people are pulling out a little piece of paper and you keep it in the top locker, which says, I want to go home please. Effectively, as soon as you pull out, you’re instantly in a hot shower and you can never come back. And now you, they push you to pull that out all the time. And then there is another third category where behind the scenes they meet and they make an assessment and then they will come and unceremoniously call out a few numbers of people who are now off the course. It happens more on a sort of, as a cadence that’s like every Friday.

I sort of lost my point. I think what I was coming into was in terms of your confidence, you always have this sense that like you might be kicked off any minute. And that really plays into your mind, but having looked back on all of that, I think it does give you an extreme amount of confidence when you get through everything. But I don’t think I ever lost that humility and I still don’t think I have lots of humility. I think that’s very important in the investing side of the world. And I’ll take it a lot, no doubt, this conversation we’ll get there. We’ll draw the parallels between, I think a lot of these things out then how they’ve gone to help you in the investment world and what I know now. But I think confidence has always been something, well, without sounding too self-serving, I’ve been squarely confident, but not arrogant and not over confident, not getting myself into too much trouble, but we’ll see.

William’s Transition Into An Investor

Sean: [00:22:54] Well, I would actually love to know how this transition into being an investor. Like you have to have conviction towards those investments, but I’m wondering when those are dropping down, do you stay in, do you sell. I would just love to know how you think through all of that, where you’ve done the work. I know you dive deep into the data and if data is telling you something else, I would just love to know your thought process through this all.

William: [00:23:17] sure. On the investment side. So my investment career has taken a few years. It’s evolved over time, of course. And I’ve done slightly different things. So just to give some background, I started a fund in about 2012 with another Australian. So my business partner at the time and sort of the story about how we got that started is quite interesting. Maybe we’ll come back. But to answer your question about conviction, I still think you have to have humility at every stage. We started off by making a lot of investments in emerging markets. We had sort of a broad philosophy that you could invest time and effort understanding those markets and the people and the businesses you want to invest in. And then you’d have some edge that other people didn’t have.

So listed, think about the U S markets, the listed markets are incredibly deeply analyzed, very hard to get sort of an informational edge or even a sort of analytical edge or more difficult than say places where you don’t have as many sort of hype qualities. I quite want to be that way, but you just don’t have as many minds thinking about that. We thought we could get a competitive value by going there and doing that. I think even when we have conviction about our company or a management team or investment, there’s always a sense of the ability to be wrong. And having to challenge your own thoughts throughout the entire holding period. So you’re right, it is exactly that. It’s exactly a combination of conviction because without that you really can’t get anything done, but at the same time, maintain that humility that you could be wrong and you have to sort of reassess your own conclusions all the time. And I think that it takes a lot of discipline to say when you’ve been wrong and to accept when you look at some data and say, you know what, I am able to do something about it.

Sean: [00:25:17] Have you gotten better at being able to say that you’re wrong? 

William: [00:25:20] Probably not. If I had to pick out a floor halfway, hopefully you haven’t got too many people reading or listening to your podcast. I’ll know if I have to get a floor. It would probably be that I should delegate. I should get more opinions than I do. I don’t have a problem saying, I don’t understand. Can you explain this to me? What do you think about this and drawing and opinions, but I quickly arrive at what I think is my understanding of it and then usually I sort of stop there. 

My business partner is sort of, smarter, better looking, more charismatic of the two, of course. He’s better at that. He’s quite good at just continually soliciting opinions. There’s no problem just sort of presenting to someone, as a CEO knows absolutely nothing and extracting all that information, right? I tend to want to go in a little bit on the offensive and say, look, I understand, can you explain this last little bit to me? I think that’s why it’s good to have more minds in the decision-making process. 

Sean: [00:26:24] At least it sounds like you know yourself, and we’re definitely going to cover that. I’d love to know more about that self-discovery process for you, but I can’t pass up. This started the fund in 2012. Well, you said it was a good story. I would love to hear this story. 

William: [00:26:37] Yeah. It’s really just peppered with dozens of quite interesting stories. Let me just tell you one quick investment story, which I find funny and it just really just personifies the whole firm, the whole journey for us. So early on, we basically pitched to investors that we knew that we thought there was this dislocation where emerging markets were full of opportunity to bring business models that have existed in developed countries and see where the gaps were in these emerging markets. Usually it’s technology driven. Usually it’s a business model where you’re leapfrogging and you’re changing the way things are done and you’re dislocating. And then there’s all sorts of very abstract high-level ideas, but that’s sort of what we pitched them on. And we raised enough capital to do that race to the moon USD, which is relatively small, very small for the US. But, it’s a decent amount of buyer power in these markets where companies are quite small and growing quickly.

So one of the things that we’ve gone on to earlier, doesn’t fit exactly on that basis, but we got onto the fact that most of the roses that are supplied to Europe, especially the UK,  all come from Kenya that will come from this small little area in Kenya. It’s the perfect nexus of altitude and air pressure, sunlight and all these things sort of come together to make it like the haven for growing roses there. And so another place in Ecuador, the two places on earth where it’s best. They get put in seven, four sevens and flown to the markets in Amsterdam, where they get an auction and then they go straight to the shops that’ll happen sort of within seven or eight hour. Windows every morning are 77% full of roses.

Oh, fascinating. So we went down there and we’re going to get into the rose business. And so we knew this hotelier in Kenya. So he put us up, we were friendly with him and he knew a few people in the rose business game. He was related to someone who was perfectly rural. We sort of know these guys and it sounds like you’ve got a good business on paper. Sounds good. So we stayed there and in the evening of the next day, we’re going to go and have a look at the farms. The restaurants are sort of out of town, you have to fly. So that evening where you ‘re having some drinks with him and we’re having a good time. He’s telling us about the roses. He’s not in the rose business, knows a bit about it. He runs this hotel and he’s having what we think is some mineral waters and Chris and I are having a beer or two. And we sort of think like, let’s get an early night, when Kenya says how exciting very early on in the fun stage, maybe like probably were the first due diligence trip we had ever done.

We’d done some roads. We’d never been down to Africa, looking at a deal yet. And then he’s drinking, probably two or three of these mineral waters, like every quarter now so to speak, was really like hydrating himself quite aggressively. And then in the morning we woke up. His wife said he had gone to the airstrip to get the plane ready. So you guys will get some yellow sandwiches. Boy, you guys got to meet him at the airstrip now, and he got to fly and see roses. So we get the airstrip and this little tiny little plane comes puttering around in this little sort of fixed wing Cessna thing, the door opens and there’s our pilot and a hotelier, who’s like masquerading as a pilot as well, but he hasn’t been on the mineral waters. It’s clear, he’s been on the gin and tonics all night and the plane smells like you’re stepping into a bar the night after and it was horrendous. So Chris and I jumped in, Chris is in the back, I’m in the front and you know what?

These little planes are incredibly loud. So I have to put the headphones on so you can talk, Chris doesn’t have his headphones. It’s just going to be the pilot and the copilot. The plane takes off and we fly about an hour. And then the pilot, he sort of starts making a passing out motion. His head’s rocking back and forth, eyes rolling to the back of his head. Now I’ve got the flight controls, I’m sort of trying to keep it level as he is sort of making it dive a little bit with his passing out. And then within about 10 minutes, he’s completely passed out. I’m flying the plane now, and I’m not a pilot. I’ve been in the military, but haven’t been in the air force and Chris is in the back. It doesn’t have any com to talk to him. It was very loud, I’m giving him a few hand signals concerning our situation. We flew for about 40 minutes. And then I finally looked below us, it’s like the African Savannah. As far as I could see… 

Sean: [00:31:21] You’re not getting rescued if you guys go down. 

William: [00:31:25] I said to him I’m going to have to try and land.  We’re not going to have any other option. I can’t just fly.  We don’t know where we’re going. So over the course of like 10 minutes, I sorta just start losing altitude. And then it had big sort of industrial tires. It must’ve been playing nights and sort of landing on Philly, tough, tough ground, but we sort of bounce along the ground for about what feels like a kilometer. There’s elephants and giraffes, like just sort of off to the side. Finally we bring it to a stop. There’s a pride of lions just off the one side, there’s this passed out pilot on the other side. And there’s Chris and me looking at ourselves, how did we end up thinking we’re getting into the rose business? We definitely did not do that investment, but that was the beginning of what became many diligence trips, similar to that, some of which where we did invest, but it was really just incredible. It was very fun. 

Sean: [00:32:24] Unbelievable stories along the way. I’m wondering, clearly you’re driven by something. I mean, like into Muay Thai, Green Beret, entrepreneur, investor, like what’s at the heart, like what’s driving you there. There’s something going on underneath the hood of this car.

William: [00:32:38] I wish I had a really sort of interesting answer for that either. I’ve got a great buddy of mine from school who’s gone on to become this incredibly successful musician. And when we were young and hanging out and doing a lot of things together and just being kids, we were both driven just by what we refer to as just the story. It’s just having good stories in life, like having, doing things and having at the end of those things, some interesting tale to tell. I don’t know if I had actively sought out to go and do those types of things, but there’s certainly how my life has panned out. A lot of things haven’t been just for the sake of it, but I just have massive, vast interests and like to pursue the things that interest me, and get to a certain point where I’m young just slightly more than a an adult, but not so much that I can’t just go on off and do something else, but you’re absolutely right.

There have been periods where I was fighting professionally in Thailand, there’s been periods of the army. There’s been periods of running my own business and this investment fund that I was just talking about, which took me and Chris to, … we have investments in sort of 12 or 13 different countries all around the world. And it has just been a very interesting journey. And I don’t know if there’s been like one core catalyst to do it all other than wanting to have a sort of an interesting life. 

Maintaining The Focus

Sean: [00:34:09] So someone who’s also has vast interest, I’m wondering for you, how do you get focused enough to skill up in that proficiency that you need in order to understand that enough without then quickly seeing the next thing that you’re interested in?

William: [00:34:24] That’s a very good question. And that is in a lot of ways, also my fatal flaw. I can intensely focus on something because I find it so interesting that it’ll be at the cost of everything else that tends to be. I’m 40 now, but it was a bit of a late starter on family, bit of a late starter on marriage. Or if I look back to all my schoolmates and they all have kids who are starting to become teenagers. I’m a good 10 years behind in that sense. So I think there’s two parts, one is a deep focus and drive in whatever I’m doing at the time. I have noticed a tendency to get to a certain point where I say to myself, okay, look, I think there’s something, actually, I think I’ve achieved what I set out to do here and now I’m going to want to do the next thing.

And I think lots of people have a similar approach, a lot of the energy comes from learning and succeeding by failing. And then maybe once you get to a certain point that starts to become less interesting for some reason. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it seems by looking back on my life. I don’t think I was ever going to be a career soldier, but I definitely wanted to achieve what I did there. I don’t think I was going to be in emerging markets forever. I mean, it’s incredibly taxing but the learning curve was so severe in both of those examples that I really relished the fact that I’ve got to do them. And I think that’s sort of how I view every chapter intensely but relatively short. I mean, it’s still talking about a five-year viable plan.

Sean: [00:36:11] I have not distilled down my thinking enough on this, but it is so intriguing, those environments with incredibly steep learning curves, where you can skill up, get to say 80, 90% proficiency in that. And then it’s like, all right, I’ve got the majority there for me to edge out, that extra 10% is not going to be worth the time. And then you can take those lessons, learnings and transfer them over into the next domain. It’s a thread I’ve seen pop up again and again, with different people on this show. You mentioned just that deep focus, I’m wondering for you then, like right now, what’s just consuming your time and energy. What are you trying to learn and understand?

William: [00:36:52] So well I’ve got a few new things as you might expect, but I’ve got a new fund. I’m at a real watershed. We have just raised a brand new fund to Jameson Capital. That’s my current shop. It’s a real estate credit fund. It’s in special situations, essentially driven by COVID Jameson has been around for five or six years or seven, maybe not seventh year, but I haven’t been there the whole time, but I have been there throughout this pre COVID and then leading into COVID and it’s great. And we’ve turned a massive corner where…  We have had institutional capital prior, but we’ve never had discretionary institutional capital. Just for the people who are listening, who may not be familiar with those terms. We have been doing a lot of investing where we find the investment we want to do then we go out and talk to investors. We say, “would you like to invest in this? We will be the manager, and will take fees.” We will manage the investment once it’s all done, the return of capital, but investors essentially get to choose. Yes. I like to invest in that. And you guys, and I know for me, once you get to discretionary capital, then what happens is you say to investors, we have this strategy. We don’t have the investments yet, but give us your commitment to give us money when we ask for it and we’re going to invest it in the strategy. But once you’ve made that commitment, then we can invest in whatever we want within that strategy. So there’s a sort of a big difference between those two things, in terms of your ability to execute and also the trust level that investors have to have.

We’re now very much in that latter category. We have a large institutional pension plan. And I’ve been at a FTSE 100 asset manager, which is a big deal for a smaller shop who has given us that commitment. So they’ve given us a hundred million dollars and said, we’d love your strategy for special situations in Australia.  You need the capital 10 days’ notice. It’s yours to go and find the investments you want to do so that’s, that’s been a lot of work over COVID, but very exciting to get to that point where now we’re going to be deploying. So that’s taking my focus at the moment, obviously, a lot of hard work. It’s not quite as interesting. Of course, I’m dedicated to it. It’s not quite the same as what I had been doing where real estate is a sort of narrow aperture, really very local, whereas being typically a more global investor I’m more interested in the humans and their behavior within sort of the context of the investment, rather than the assets and the market, and sort of the structuring, which has a bit more on that now. 

Behavioral Edge

Sean: [00:39:32] I would love for you to double click on that, the human behavior element. I know this is something you and I are both obsessed with.

William: [00:39:39] Yeah, definitely. It’s funny. So I am, me, everyone has their investing style and a lot of people sort of come from a top down macro approach and bottom up fundamentals. And for me, Keith red is much more on the human side of things. You and I have conceived of similar interests and you’ve probably done similar reading. And so what I’m about to say will resonate with you, not sure, but having in this current era, having a behavioral edge, both in yourself and being able to identify people that have a behavioral edge, I think is more important than a lot of other things that were very important. Having sort of access to things where other people didn’t know, being in the right market where other people couldn’t come in. We’re so globalized now there’s so much information.

There’s so much distraction that actually the people who aren’t distracted and it’s their management teams that are overwhelmed and it’s individuals that aren’t sort of pulled and pushed by every bit of, as you put it earlier in the conversation, the noise, they, then my view, they are the ones that are going to be the most successful. So it’s kind of, it’s almost done a flip now. So I am trying to gather as much information that you can have previously so that your ability to sort of, block out a lot of it. So I’m always on a hunt for managers who think that same way. And yeah, I find that to me in a lot of ways, it’s my sort of investing approach amongst of course the frameworks and all the other things that you need. I mean, nothing in of itself is enough. We need it, we need all aspects. But to me, that’s cute. 

Sean: [00:41:15] I don’t even know if you can articulate this. I’m sure. This is just a bit of that fingertip feel of really like, just sitting down with someone and understanding what’s going on underneath their hood. But is there something, in addition to what you just mentioned that just kind of like a light bulb goes off that, you know what, this person might have that behavioral edge I’m looking for. 

William: [00:41:36] Good question. I’m not sure I can answer that in an intelligent way, but I can give you some examples. I’ve had a lot of exposure to management teams over the years and then one and I’m not sure this story is going to exactly answer what you’re looking for, but one investment that I made. And one very humbling moment definitely was a property portal business overseas. I just love the real estate portal businesses, so imagine all listings on a website of real estate assets. And once they become the dominant player in a market, and they’re very hard to dislodge and they’re very out of account, they’ve become very valuable.

Ton of examples globally. So I had been on the hump for the best, one of these that people didn’t know of, the next up and coming in a particular market. I found this small team in Pakistan. And there were about 80 guys. It sounds like a lot, but they’ll actually, a lot of them were sort of entering data, was probably a core team that was 28 and the tiny at that stage really in Lahore Pakistan, and it was sort of like an obscure place, 400 managers. And just having this up to speeding, just having this sense that, oh, these guys are just so obviously incredibly smart. Every question I ask them, they know the answer to every element of their business, every element of the market. They’re incredibly focused, very diligent guys.

And so we invested and I’ve just been compounding our business a hundred percent for years now. It’s massive. We invested at a valuation about $65 million now, sort of 1.2 billion or something. It’s just been so successful. There’s been points along the way where I’ve sat in with management. They’ve described something about the market and what they intend to do. One of them was the change, fundamentally changed the business model and I just took this sort of academic approach where it’s managing and distracted, that’s you’re sort of trying to go off track. The business model is this way to try and bring in this new element and that’s gonna affect how you get…  This is a sort of a subscription business name moving into a sort of a non-scripted business.

And just over and over these guys have the confidence and the clarity to say, no, this is where we understand this. And that’s all going to do. I was each time sort of humbled by their insight. So I think the point I’m really coming to now is, when you’re on the board of companies, it gives you a lot of power to use as an investor. Your voice is actually quite strong in that context. I think you have to have the humility to be able to say… to understand what when you’ve really got a team that is . And that a lot of the time you should be listening to them rather than you trying to tell them what they should do. That for me, was a good lesson in sort of my own behavior more than anything, I think. 

“Not Confusing Motion For progress” Framework

Sean: [00:44:49] There goes humility popping up again, that team makes me think about a framework that you and I both work off of. And that’s not confusing motion for progress. You’ve got a memo where you talk about Buck Baker and Tony McNamara. I would think that’s a great story too, to really synthesize this framework of not confusing motion for progress. I’d love to, if you could tell us that. 

William: [00:45:11] Yeah. Sure. So that’s one, that’s a reference to like two to two people sort of tackling the world in parallel. interesting. I mean, so those memos to me, they’re just sort of a little bit of a creative outlet. They’re a little bit of self-discipline where I try to take something perennial and put it into words that I understand and then share it with people and see if they find it interesting. And in that example, I think actually the core of it might not be the answer you’re expecting. I think that the core of that when I was writing was more about your own silent song of not wasting your life on things that aren’t that important to know. Sometimes I have those self-reflecting moments meant what you said earlier on, in the core of the discussion.

Have intensely gone after like a number of things and achieved a number of interesting things and made good conversation. But stepping definitely aware of getting to a certain point and then saying, oh, I have been so buried in this, now coming up for air and like the world has sort of passed me by. So that was kind of the spirit of that memo. And then I think at another time level, it was certainly about the difference between sort of compounding things in the right direction versus not. And there’s just umpteen examples of that. I mean, the latest one that I’ve sort of been thinking about more and more is the barrier or the competitive advantage or, any sort of these words, whether you use it, the compounding effect of just being a good citizen in business over a lifetime, it’s incredibly hard to replicate that in a short period of time.

If you are just one of those people that consistently sort of deliberately treats people well, it gives people the benefit of the doubt, it gives investors or other people the benefit of a conflict of interest. I think over a sort of a lifetime or not even that over a decade or two, you can be in this position where you have something that others just cannot obtain. Not necessarily about that, but it’s incredibly powerful that sort of I mean another way to put that, it’s just sort of reputation, which I think that summarizes it, but I’ve been thinking more deeply about how it is that you sort of build that and just how powerful it is and why you shouldn’t be frustrated when you’re younger, that people won’t give you money when you’re pitching to them to invest in your fund or people won’t give you these opportunities.

Things just keep compounding. And you will just like that last few years of your pension, of your super fund, where you get all that return in the last few years, and it’s taken all that time to get there. But now you’re compounding something that’s massive. I think you get the same effect in business and relationships. 

Sean: [00:48:06] It’s funny. You can find those fat tails in life. Just like what you’re doing with your capitals. 

Improved Decision-Making

Well, one thing I’d love to dive into a bit further cause it’s probably a bit of an obsession for both of us and that’s just around decision-making as a whole. And I know you’ve mentioned a few things around your decision-making, I’m wondering for you, like what has improved your decision making process the most? 

William: [00:48:28] I’ve always been a big fan of the checklist of the flight lists. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but  as we both do a lot of reading, I love a systematic approach. I love starting with the end in mind. Devil’s advocate is not quite the right word, but sort of looking at it in reverse is key. And when I think the fellow who also has Farnam Street names just escaped me now, 

Sean: [00:48:36] Shane Parrish. 

William: [00:48:38] He writes a lot on mental models and on decision-making and I really admire a lot of his writing and a lot of his thought process on decision-making. In a lot of ways, the investment business is really just the business of decisions. I wish I had a more eloquent answer for you on that. It is obviously a key part of what we do. I think It is a discipline and it is something that you can learn and try. And I think over time you become better at it innately, but also certainly just like practice by being at the gym or trying to be a fit athlete. I think trying to be a hub for decision makers is key, especially in this business.

Sean: [00:49:44] I know. You’re always trying to overcome those biases and those cognitive errors too. So it always makes me think about Daniel Kahneman who wrote the classic Thinking Fast and Slow. It was in an interview, I’m pretty sure someone asked him like out all these years, studying this, have you improved? And he said, no, I still make the same errors. I don’t know. I feel like I always wrestle with that. I’m wondering your thoughts clearly, you’re putting a ton of time into overcoming these biases and these cognitive errors. 

William: [00:50:09]  I definitely do. I wrestle with that too. I know the pitfalls that I fall into, I tend to. I really like Howard Marks and a lot of the stuff he’s written. I like one of the ways he eloquently puts it, is that we can’t necessarily judge the quality of the decision by the outcome. The investment world is so much about rewriting history, about how you are such a genius, this can sound a bit disparaging. But maybe just to illustrate my point, I’ll put it in these words: I was such a genius and had the foresight to make this investment look how well it’s gone.

And similarly to say all of that, I made that investment, but it’s entirely out of my control why it went wrong and that constant sort of rewriting and marketing. Marketing yourself that the decision was perfect and the outcome itself was really just luck and if it went badly and it was all useful went well. But I certainly agree with  Howard Marks’ thesis that the quality of decision isn’t necessarily can’t necessarily be judged by the outcome. And it’s just, how good was that decision at the time? And so the discipline I undertake is to go back and look at all my investment decisions after the fact, and then analyze them. And I haven’t ever, I think, to score them and to sort of show it to myself and my team about the quality of decisions. We’re trying to give them some sort of quantitative and qualitative feedback and divorce them from the outcomes and so that you can make better decisions. I think that’s a key part of this business. 

Sean: [00:51:58] You don’t have to dive too far into the scoring process. I would just love a high level overview of what that scoring process is like on those past decisions. 

William: [00:52:05] We try to just quantify the number of decisions that we’ve made. We just try to give some sort of idea about what we thought, the quality of the decisions at the time. And then we sort of put them all into basically a table and say, what are the decisions that we’re making and are they wrong? And then what outcome do they have when they were wrong? It’s more along those lines. I’ll share with you an example, if you like after the library mountain, you might be interested.

Insightful Books 

Sean: [00:52:37] I would love to check that out. So you mentioned multiple books throughout this,  Farnam Street blog, Howard Marks which fortunate enough Howard was a guest on the show. And just his writing has just been so profound for me. I know you’ve tweeted this out. You should always be carrying two books, one to read and one to write in. I’m going to link up. I know you’ve listed some great books on your website, I’ll have those linked up. Anything recently that you’ve just enjoyed or maybe you can revisit it again because it provided so many insights.

William: [00:53:05] Yeah. So what have I enjoyed lately on the investment front…  I’ll start on the non-investment front. I really enjoyed the Bomber Mafia by Gladwell. That’s a very new book. It’s not completely consistent with what we’ve been talking about, but it’s a very good book.

Sean: [00:53:23] I have not read that one. I recently heard him talking about it because I know it’s a new release for him, but  I’ve enjoyed all of Gladwell’s stuff in the past. 

William: [00:53:31] Yeah, that’s right. You can’t really get past it. I read a book called Unbeatable Mind which you don’t want to be surprised about, probably read something like that by Mark Divine. Good book. I liked it. Yeah, it sort of resonated with me a lot. I think it’s very accessible and a good amount of sort of humility as well. I really like Richer, Wiser and Happier by William Green. That’s valuable for  investors. It’s just got a really nice narrative on a sort of a dozen investors and how it’s in there. And a lot of other big names that were heard of, and a few that you might not love. It’s just really well-written and accessible. I didn’t know that book. 

Sean: [00:54:12] William was a past guest. So he gives a bit of a preview into that. William’s a friend. He’s a very interesting thinker as well. Richer, Wiser and Happier. By William Green, I recommend it as well. It’s a great book.

William: [00:54:20] Yeah, really good. And then The Score Takes Care of Itself which is a book that I come back to and reread quite regularly. I love the NFL. I think that book’s got so many lessons in it and it uses sport as a sort of analogy for life and for business. If I had to write, I often recommend that to people who hitting me up for things that they should read. I love that book and everything about it.

Sean: [00:54:49] Bill Walsh, the legendary San Francisco 49ers coach. It was funny. I had Tom Peters who wrote the legendary business book In Search of Excellence and he was actually neighbors with Bill Walsh at the time. So you had this guy who’s been obsessed with studying business, all of the different models, and then you have Bill Walsh and they used to just love understanding each other’s different domains and learning from each other.  The Score Takes Care of Itself is an excellent book by Bill Walsh. 

William: [00:55:15] Yeah, that’s excellent. So then that’s probably the ones that come to mind amongst the cool few. Yeah. I try to set a goal to try to get to 20 books a quarter. And I’m usually pretty on track, but it’s quite a lot of work.

Deconstruction Process

Sean: [00:55:30] So talk about this work. You mentioned carrying two books, one to read one to write in, or are you taking notes highlighting, distilling down or is it kind of just reading it and then letting your mind take over? I would just love to know more about that process for you. 

William: [00:55:44] Yeah, sure. No, certainly the format. So one thing about writing memos and what just to go through the discipline of putting out. So, even if no one reads them and actually probably, I don’t know how many people really read the stuff that I write, but that discipline really focuses your reading. If you’re thinking about, okay, what are the key points in this that I’m reading and how can I sort of then bring them in maybe to some narrative that I want to bring or use them in some way, it’s a bit like when you teach something to someone, you really have to understand it, forces you to understand something.

And that’s kind of the same principle that I take with both reading and then writing a little bit. And then you’re almost an avid note taker. I think the two things, you find that it’s a bit like the very beginning of our conversation, how you use that. You try to optimize the things that are important in your life. The way I learn is always about sort of taking the information centers, asking me if there’s something that I could then explain to someone else. So it’s part of that process. 

Sean: [00:56:46] I’m wondering about that deconstruction process. I love studying mastery. It seems like you’ve reached a very high and proficient level across multiple domains. I’m wondering for you, have you found those parallels in terms of deconstructing the process across multiple domains? Is that something that you do or I guess broad question, I’m trying to understand how you reach mastery across multiple domains so well. 

William: [00:57:08] Another very good question. I think so. I think at the core, it’s a balance. I think it’s understanding those first principles. It’s understanding what really fundamentally drives things and keep asking that sort of, why does this lead onto this and getting down to the core thing. I’ll put myself in this category. But when I speak to two people who I really admire, especially on the investment side, and I show them some investment that I’m looking at and they just immediately pinpoint on the thing that is crucial. The key thing that this business is doing or how it made it profitable or thing that will, … imagine modeling it and a financial model that variable that actually really counts. 

That skill is to me so valuable in everything that you do in life. And that’s what I’m constantly aspiring to be. Immediately and quickly and rapidly getting to one of the key things, stripping away all the excess leather, the noise, and getting to the signal, to borrow a phrase from Sean and many others.  I think to me that’s the key and then of course, mastering things. Again this humility has become a sort of thing about chats for some reason. But learning from others that have already mastered things, it’s just the best way I think to come up the curve. You need practice, has to be delivered practice, a sort of well-established, but deliberate practices are the way you get better at things.

And I think to get delivered practice, you really benefit massively from following in the footsteps and learning from people that have already done it. So I follow as much as I can. I sort of follow that mantra and I actually get frustrated when I’m not learning from someone else who is significantly better than me at whatever it is. I feel like this is not efficient. I need to tap somewhere. I try to construct my life in that way where I can.

Sean: [00:59:08] I love the point you bring up around those people that you respect that can just hone in on the crucial elements of it. One of the tests I try to do is just trying to understand how good the questions are that they’re asking after I lay out a certain investment. You can really see the people who understand what truly matters and what drives that based on the questions that they ask you, those follow up questions.

You mentioned just kind of studying other masters. Who would you love to just sit down with? Or this could even be a specific environment. Like a lot of people would say, Hey, I would love to just join the Navy seals, just to develop mental toughness. Is there a person, a team, a company that you would say, what if I could go there for six months? Wow. That would really help me improve it. 

William: [00:59:51] Yeah, that’s a very good question and at the risk of dropping some cliche names, there are so many brilliant people that you’d love to get some time with. It would be amazing to sit down and have dinner with Jeff Bezos.  Every time I read a really good book, I write them a little note, a little handwritten note about what I enjoyed about the book, probably doesn’t even get reported by the secretary and then goes into the bin. But I hope one day one of those authors or one of those people that I really admire will read it and then reach out and say, Hey, next time when you’re in the same city come, let’s have a coffee. To answer your question I think the list is long, usually it’s authors or investors that are written things that I’ve read, and I am forever trying to make that happen in a lot of ways. I think the list is huge. 

Compounding Goodwill

Sean: [01:00:53] You mentioned the handwritten notes.  Guy Spier wrote the book Legend of Value Investors. He’s written thousands at this point handwritten notes. But by the time this episode goes out, guys will have gone out. And then he always talks to me about that, the notes are so important and most of the time you never ever hear back. But then like we were talking about earlier, compounding goodwill, those fat tails will show up later in life. You never know where that might pop up. So I love hearing that example as well. We’re going to close up here in a minute. But I feel like all of this is all part of that self discovery process and knowing myself. I’m wondering for you people along their journey, it’s trying to continue to develop. Is there anything you would recommend to them around just being able to discover yourself and know yourself a bit better on this journey? 

William: [01:01:39] Very good question. So well that’s a really hard one to answer. If they wanted to emulate anything that I’ve done, and I’m not saying that you should, but I think I tend to try to treat my life like being some sort of performance athlete, no matter what I’m doing. That comes from being in that sort of world, but having that sort of the physical and the mental and the behavioral, they’re all inextricably linked.

I think, what you’re doing and where you’re trying to succeed, being physically fit and having emphasis on that, reading a lot and learning from other people, the mistakes that they’ve made as much as you can. I think that would be the two things that I can’t imagine being successful without. That is being physically good and doing a lot of reading. Without those two things, I feel like it’d be a fraction of the person that I am.  

Sean: [01:02:40] You and I subscribe to the same thing there. This has been too much fun. I’m so glad we were able to share some of your journey with the listeners here. I could go on for hours talking with you about this. I want to make sure we link you up with the listeners anywhere you want them going and checking out. We’ll have everything linked up in the show notes for you. 

William: [01:02:57] Yeah, sure. I’d love to hear from any of your listeners. And I’ve got my own website, which is distinct from my business and my investing. As you mentioned before, I just posted a few memos on there with my books and a few investments that I’ve gotten. I encourage people to have a look at that, reach out if they want to have a conversation or know anything at all. 

Sean: [01:03:20] Fantastic. We’ll have that linked up, but Wil, l I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.

William: [01:03:25] It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it. 

Sean: [01:03:30] You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you find value in this, the best way you can support the show is giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends and also sharing on social media. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.

.