“I talk to CEOs all the time, and I say, ‘Listen, the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. If it wasn’t a crazy idea, it’s not a breakthrough; it’s an incremental improvement. So where inside of your companies are you trying crazy ideas?’”
Dr. Peter H. Diamandis (TW: @PETERDIAMANDIS, DIAMANDIS.COM) has been named one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune magazine. Peter is founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, best known for its $10 million Ansari XPRIZE for private spaceflight. Today the XPRIZE leads the world in designing and operating large-scale global competitions to solve market failures. He is also the co-founder (along with J. Craig Venter and Bob Hariri) and vice chairman of Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI); and the co-founder and executive chairman of Planetary Resources, a company designing spacecraft to prospect near-Earth asteroids for precious materials (seriously). He is the author of books including Bold and Abundance, which have endorsements from Bill Clinton, Eric Schmidt, and Ray Kurzweil, among others.
Spirit animal: Eagle
This is highly related to the “scratch your own itch” thread that pops up throughout this book. Peter expands: “I think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.”
“I saw this the other day, and this comes from Scott Belsky [here], who was a founder of Behance.”
Peter co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil. In 2008, at their founding conference at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, Google co-founder Larry Page spoke. Among other things, he underscored how he assesses projects:
“I now have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999% of people is ‘no.’ I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.”
“The fact of the matter is I read this book, The Spirit of St. Louis, that my good friend Gregg Maryniak gave me … and then I thought, ‘Hey, if I can create a prize [Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic to win a prize], maybe I can motivate teams to build private spaceships and that’s the means to get my ass into space.’
“I start noodling on this as I’m reading the book. 10 million bucks is enough money. I’m going to call it the ‘XPRIZE’ because I had no idea who was going to put up the $10 million. The ‘X’ was going to represent the name of the person who would eventually put up the money, as a variable to be replaced. So, I’m scrambling for it back then, $100 here, $1,000 there, getting the seed money to get this going. I end up in St. Louis where an amazing man, Al Kerth, says, ‘I will help you raise some seed money,’ and he was driven and connected with my passion, my commitment to this.
“Long story short, over the course of a year and a lot of worn out kneepads, I end up raising a half a million dollars in $10K and $20K checks, and then our fundraising stalls.
“We make the very bold decision that we’re going to announce this $10 million prize anyway with no money in place … [and] how you announce a big bold idea to the world really matters…. We all have a line of credibility around ideas. We judge them constantly.
“If you announce it below the line of credibility, people dismiss it out of hand, and then we have this line of supercredibility. If you announce it above the line of supercredibility, people say, ‘Wow, when’s it going to happen? How can I be involved?’
“[So, it’s] May of 1996. I have half a million dollars. I decide to spend all of it on this launch event, and we do it under the Arch of St. Louis. On the dais, I don’t have one astronaut, I’ve got 20 astronauts standing on stage with me. I’ve got the head of NASA, the head of the FAA, and the Lindbergh family with me onstage announcing this $10 million prize. Did I have any money? No. Did I have any teams registered to compete? No. But around the world, it was front-page news this $10 million prize was [on]….
“I’m thinking, ‘Who wouldn’t want to pay $10 million after a person did it? It’s paid only on success.’ The challenge is, 150 CEOs later, over the next 5 years between 1996 and 2001, everyone’s turning me down.
“I finally meet the Ansari family. There’s a lot more detail here. Listen, the fact of the matter is there were many times at 3 a.m. when I was tempted to give up, and it was only because I was being driven by my own massively transformative purpose that kept me going, and we’re here today having this conversation because I did not give up. I’ll leave it at that.”
TIM: “I love that story, and I think what I’d love to underscore, as much for myself as anyone else, is that you also had the public accountability….”
PETER: “I burned my ships, dude.”
TIM: “Who was the hardest person to convince to be on that stage with you?
PETER: “Oh, the head of NASA, for sure.”
TIM: “What was the pitch? How did you convince him?”
PETER: “The pitch was, ‘Listen, wouldn’t you want entrepreneurs around the world to be working on new technologies so that this is off your balance sheet?’”
TF: Peter is a master pitchman. I’ve seen some greats, and he’s right at the top. One of the books he recommends for cultivating dealmaking ability is actually a children’s book and a 10-minute read: Stone Soup. “It’s a children’s story that is the best MBA degree you can read. Between [the concept of] supercredibility and Stone Soup, [you have a great foundation]. If you’re an entrepreneur in college or 60 years old and building your 20th company, Stone Soup is so critically important.”
Peter stretches during his morning shower:
“It’s mostly my lower body, and then I’ll go through a breathing exercise as well, and [an] affirmational mantra…. [The breathing exercise] is an accelerated deep breathing just to oxygenate and stretch my lungs. There are two elements that tie very much to human longevity. It’s strange…. One is those people who floss and, second, those people who have a higher VO2 max.”
TF: Peter’s breathing exercise focuses on expanding the lungs with fast, large inhales. His affirmational mantra, which he repeats a number of times, is “I am joy. I am love. I am gratitude. I see, hear, feel, and know that the purpose of my life is to inspire and guide the transformation of humanity on and off the Earth.”
Peter’s breathing is similar to some of Wim Hof’s exercises (here), which I now do in a cold shower (state “priming” per Tony Robbins, here), right after my morning meditation.
As for the flossing-longevity connection, Peter is the first to admit this might be correlation instead of causation: People anal retentive enough to floss regularly probably have other habits that directly contribute to longer life.
Before bed, Peter always reviews his three “wins of the day.” This is analogous to the 5-Minute Journal p.m. review that I do (here).
TIM: “To get out of that 2-day funk [after one of his early startups failed], what does the self-talk look like? I mean, what is the ritual that you use?”
PETER: “The self-talk, in all honesty, was probably more like 2 weeks than 2 days. It’s going back to ‘Why do I believe this is important?’ It’s, ‘Look how far I’ve taken it so far.’ It’s a matter of reminding yourself what your purpose in life is, right? What you’re here for. If you haven’t connected with what your purpose and mission in life is, then forget anything I’ve said. That is the number-one thing you need to do: Find out what you need to be doing on this planet, why you were put here, and what wakes you up in the mornings.”
Peter recommends Tony Robbins’s Date with Destiny program, which he feels helps people improve their “operating system.” This is how he developed his affirmational mantra. Peter also poses the following three questions:
“What did you want to do when you were a child, before anybody told you what you were supposed to do? What was it you wanted to become? What did you want to do more than anything else?
“If Peter Diamandis or Tim Ferriss gave you $1 billion, how would you spend it besides the parties and the Ferraris and so forth? If I asked you to spend $1 billion improving the world, solving a problem, what would you pursue?
“Where can you put yourself into an environment that gives maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people? Exposure to things that capture your ‘shower time’ [those things you can’t stop thinking about in the shower]?” [Peter recommends environments like Singularity University.]
TF: Still struggling with a sense of purpose or mission? Roughly half a dozen people in this book (e.g., Robert Rodriguez) have suggested the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek.
“I interviewed Astro Teller [for my book Bold]. Astro is the head of Google X (now called ‘X’), Google skunkworks…. He says, ‘When you go after a moonshot—something that’s 10 times bigger, not 10% bigger—a number of things happen….’
“First of all, when you’re going 10% bigger, you’re competing against everybody. Everybody’s trying to go 10% bigger. When you’re trying to go 10 times bigger, you’re there by yourself. For me, [take asteroid mining as an example]. I don’t have a lot of asteroid mining competition out there, or prospecting. Or take human longevity, trying to add 40 years in healthy lifespan with HLI. There are not a lot of companies out there [attempting this].
“The second thing is, when you are trying to go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a clean sheet of paper, and you approach the problem completely differently. I’ll give you my favorite example: Tesla. How did Elon start Tesla and build from scratch the safest, most extraordinary car, not even in America, but I think in the world? It’s by not having a legacy from the past to drag into the present. That’s important.
“The third thing is when you try to go 10 times bigger versus 10% bigger, it’s typically not 100 times harder, but the reward is 100 times more.”
“One of the questions is: ‘Is there a grand challenge or a billion-person problem that you can focus on?’
“Three to five billion new consumers are coming online in the next 6 years. Holy cow, that’s extraordinary. What do they need? What could you provide for them, because they represent tens of trillions of dollars coming into the global economy, and they also represent an amazing resource of innovation. So I think about that a lot, and I ask that.
“The other question I ask is, ‘How would you disrupt yourself?’ One of the most fundamental realizations is that every entrepreneur, every business, every company will get disrupted. I’ve had the honor of talking with Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, in his leadership team meetings. The same thing for Muhtar Kent, chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, and for Cisco and for many companies. I ask them, ‘How will you disrupt yourself, and how are you trying to disrupt yourself? If you’re not, you’re in for a real surprise.’ Find the smartest 20-somethings in your company. I don’t care if they’re in the mail room or where they are. Give them permission to figure out how they would take down your company.”
Peter has a set of rules that guide his life. His 28 Peter’s Laws have been collected over decades. Here are some of my favorites:
Law 2: When given a choice … take both.
Law 3: Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more.
Law 7: If you can’t win, change the rules.
Law 8: If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them.
Law 11: “No” simply means begin again at one level higher.
Law 13: When in doubt: THINK.
Law 16: The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.
Law 17: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. (adopted from Alan Kay)
Law 19: You get what you incentivize.
Law 22: The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.
Law 26: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.