The Ultimate Risk: Why Not Chasing Your Dreams Is the Biggest Gamble
About This Episode
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed on the Business Innovators Radio. Drawing from my experience in building and growing over 100 businesses in medicine and science, as well as my academic positions at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, I shared insights on success, willpower, and entrepreneurship.
During our conversation, I emphasized that while willpower and grit are important, they aren't the only tools for achieving success. I’ve found that goals are easier to achieve when broken down into smaller milestones rather than relying solely on perseverance. I also introduced my "3 P's of Success" - being prepared, passionate, and personable - which have been crucial in my journey from borrowing $10,000 from my parents to managing billions in venture capital.
I discussed the inevitability of failure and the need to reframe our understanding of risk. In my view, the ultimate risk is knowing what you want and not going for it. I shared my perspective on the importance of taking action and being willing to iterate on plans, noting that success often comes after multiple attempts and adjustments. At the end of the day, success is mostly about mindset, creativity, and consistently finding ways to make things easier in life and business.
Episode Outline
(02:02) Discussion on willpower and persistence
(03:46) The importance of positive self-talk
(05:03) Alternative entry points to success
(06:41) My 3 P's of Success (Prepared, Passionate, Personable)
(09:56) The importance of learning how to fail
(12:08) First steps towards a grand and sustainable journey
(13:50) Lessons learned from starting over 100 businesses
Resources
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Learn more about Business Innovators Radio
About This Podcast
Business Innovators Radio features interviews with Industry Innovators and Trendsetters sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Mark Stephen Pooler is a Professional Speaker, International Bestselling Author, host of Business Innovators Radio and contributor to Small Business Trendsetters and Business Innovators Magazine covering Influencers, Innovators and Trendsetters in Business.
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Announcer 00:01
Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now.
Mark Stephen Pooler 00:15
Welcome to the Brilliance Business Show, conversations with leading experts in business. I am your host, Mark Stephen Pooler we have a wonderful guest on the show today. Mike Rubin. Mike is founder and CEO of North pond ventures. Mike, welcome to the brilliance business show.
Mike Rubin 00:41
Thank you, Mark. It's a privilege to be here today with you.
Mark Stephen Pooler 00:44
I'm really looking forward to a conversation with you, Mike, can you start just sharing a little bit about yourself and what you do? Absolutely
Mike Rubin 00:54
My name is again, Mike Rubin. I'm the founder and CEO of North pond ventures. We are a multi billion dollar science driven venture capital firm. Over the years, I've been involved in building and growing over 100 businesses that impact medicine and science in commercially meaningful ways. I am also an academic. I have staff positions at three universities, Harvard, MIT and Stanford, where I'm engaged in in research, as well as teaching and translating science into new businesses.
Mark Stephen Pooler 01:36
Nice, that's quite an impressive profile you've got going there, Mike and I've got a really in question, a really interesting question to ask you, because willpower, well, it's a thing that we all have to gain through mindset. So let's talk a little bit about willpower persistence so our listeners can avoid getting burnt out
Mike Rubin 02:02
Absolutely. It is certainly conventional wisdom and correct wisdom that willpower and grit and perseverance are important to success, and it would be news if it weren't. However, it is not the only tool that we have at our disposal to achieve our goals, and the challenge with willpower and perseverance is, in the end analysis, there's only so much of it that we have to go around. There's only so long we can persistently grit and bear it and fight through every single thing that we aim to do, and in reality, the more sustainable way to achieve our goals is rather than fighting through, is actually to make them easier, to make the barriers to success lower so that we can achieve the same outcome, but but do it in a way where it's it's far more sustainable.
Mark Stephen Pooler 03:09
That's really, really interesting, Mike, and also, I think I've done so much programming on my mind to become who I am now, because from where I was to where I am now, it's a very, very big jump. So I viewed use tools like hypnosis and psyche, so so many different modalities. But I think if you've got the right programming in your mind as well, it makes willpower so much easier, because you've got all that programming in your mind that's supporting what you're working towards as well. Do you agree with that?
Mike Rubin 03:46
Very much. So even starting with a simple statement to yourself of this is not that hard. I've got this. This is pretty easy. Already changes your mindset and your physiology and orients you in the direction of feeling like success is in your hands and you're able to achieve whatever it is that you're going after with with far greater ease, and that could just be a simple habit of telling yourself, either quietly or out loud, if you so choose, that this this task is well within your region. It's actually not, not that hard for you.
Mark Stephen Pooler 04:27
That's a really, really good point. Actually, I also work with the neuro scientist, and self talk, the way you're talking to yourself is so important. So always saying things like, you can will, avoiding things like can't, and instead it can't. If you do say can't, you can say things like yet. So if you catch yourself saying, I can't do that, always put a yet at the end of it. But self talk is really, really important. Let's talk about alternative entry. Points to success.
Mike Rubin 05:03
Absolutely, you know, sometimes the front door, so to speak, is is crowded. And this really dovetails with the previous point that that we discussed, is there can be side doors, and there can be open windows that you can climb through, and there can be many different paths to achieve your aims. And it's always important to reconcile, on one hand, persevering on the path that you're on, and on the other hand realizing maybe your ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, and that if you moved it to the right wall, you'd actually get there a lot, a lot quicker. And that's a really important principle in life to learn. Is so many times people told me something is impossible, or if I want to achieve a certain outcome, I have to do it a certain way. And invariably, I've I've realized that there are actually alternative ways to do things that may be better suited for me and my skill set or or just might be easier than than other people would have thought. And that's really helped me achieve a lot of things in in my life, certainly more so than I ever would have imagined if I didn't take the time to figure out what would be the most expeditious way to go about things,
Mark Stephen Pooler 06:28
the word impossible actually says I'm possible. So that's a good one for our listeners as well. Now I know you have 3p of success. Can you share those with us, please,
Mike Rubin 06:41
absolutely you know when I when I started my venture capital business, I borrowed $10,000 for my mom and dad, and that's how I got going, and I was competing against firms that were much larger than mine. Had long standing track records and I had to compete for opportunities to work with the best entrepreneurs and prospective clients would always ask me, Well, why would we back you? We have a universe of much bigger firms, much more established, have much more scale and infrastructure. How do you win? How do you compete in that kind of environment, and my my answer to them was fairly simple.
Mike Rubin 07:26
Number one was, I show up. And while that may seem like a simple principle, the reality is, most people in life don't show up. They don't show up for themselves, they don't show up for their families, they don't show up for their peers. They don't show up to compete for a given account. So just the fact that I show up in a perspectives client's office as an example already puts me ahead of all the other people who have come up with reasons not to show up. But showing up is important. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. And my paradigm for going from that first $10,000 to now billions of dollars hasn't really changed, and it's predicated on that platform that you alluded to, which are the three P's, is when you show up number one, you show up prepared.
Mike Rubin 08:18
So if you're meeting with an entrepreneur, you're meeting with a client rather than come to that meeting not knowing anything about who you're talking to make sure that you show the appropriate level of respect for them by preparing for that meeting. Most people, believe it or not, either don't prepare or under prepare, and that makes a big difference when you're talking to someone, the second P is to be passionate. I work in the world of entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs are often people who give up stable careers in order to found new businesses.
Mike Rubin 08:51
And I'm a prospective backer of these businesses, and they want to see someone who is as passionate about what they're doing as they are, and being with someone who's truly passionate is a huge competitive advantage. And the third thing is personable at the end of the day, while qualifications are important, most people actually make decisions based on liking people. Are you personable? Are you nice? Are you gracious? Are you kind? These are the kinds of basic things that when you do over and over again, turns out it actually gives you a bigger competitive advantage than when what you might think, even though they sound simple, most people don't implement them well, and that paradigm is really served me well and in my entrepreneurial pursuits,
Mark Stephen Pooler 09:39
yes, it reminds me of that, saying that people do business with who they know, like and trust, as well learning how to fail. Why is it important we need to learn how to fail.
Mike Rubin 09:56
Failure is an inevitability. It's not a possibility you will fail, sometimes publicly and sometimes even humiliatingly. And that is something that once we accept and we realize that failure is a part of life, it's a part of learning, it's a part of growth, then we move beyond failure and we allow ourselves to take, quote unquote risks that we otherwise wouldn't take, because we're no longer being constrained by our fear of quote unquote failure, but rather, we're inspired by the art of possible, and you know that, to me, really dovetails with a topic that's sort of a cousin of failure, which is risk.
Mike Rubin 10:45
You know, oftentimes people don't take certain risks in life because they're concerned about about failure. And to me, risk isn't the possibility of failure, because we just established failure at times is going to be inevitable, not every time, but sometimes it will be. But to me, risk is, what if I could succeed? What if I could achieve my goals, my dreams, my aspirations, and I don't give myself the opportunity to do that, that is risk. And so you know, to me, the ultimate risk in life is knowing what you want and not going for it. And so I think just having that change and orientation on how we define risk and embracing failure as an inevitability gives us permission to go after the things that we truly care about.
Mark Stephen Pooler 11:37
I agree totally. I think when you're building success, failures are part of it. And if you're doing prospecting, every no is leading you to the Yes, but we can also turn that round, and it's your success is in it inevitable. That's the that's the belief I like to have anyway. But you have to take all those failures to get to success. So that's very, very great words of wisdom. Let's talk about the first steps towards a grand and sustainable journey.
Mike Rubin 12:08
Yeah, you know, I'm fond of saying you you can't win a game that you don't play, and so it's important to put yourself in the game and to take a first step. And in my experience, as it turns out, Plan A is probably unlikely to work if you're doing something that's particularly challenging, and plan B and Plan C may not work either. And then when you're on Plan D, you may be on tactic two, three and four before you get the outcomes that you want. And so at some level, it's interesting, but Plan A may not even matter. It doesn't even necessarily matter what you do. First all that really matters is putting yourself in the game and taking that action and learning, you know, and if you get it right the first time, congratulations.
Mike Rubin 12:58
But rarely does success, especially repeated success a product of having the perfect plan out of the gate. And so it's really those people who take action are able to learn and iterate and expect that they're going to have to traverse across multiple plans and multiple tactics till they get what works. You know, those are the people who ultimately find success. And that model is much more reproducible than thinking you have to get it right out of the gate or concerned as to whether you know your first plan is really the right one.
Mark Stephen Pooler 13:39
Great words of wisdom. Again, Mike and what starting out over 100 businesses. What has it taught you about success?
Mike Rubin 13:50
Yeah, you know a lot. You know. The interesting thing is, even though I've been involved in building and growing over 100 businesses over over the years, I still make a lot of mistakes, and I still do things that I tell myself, geez, I should know better. And you know what I've what I've learned is, number one, there's always another way. Number two is you actually, unlike you learn in school, in the real world, you actually get as many chances at something as you're willing to take. And when people talk about, you know, having failed or things didn't work out, in actuality, most people take themselves out of the game. You know, at a certain point in time they say, you know, geez, I'm done. I haven't gotten the feedback that I want yet, and that's fine at times.
Mike Rubin 14:47
You know, you make decisions that this is no longer a path that you want to persevere along. But the reality is, you know, you can persevere as long as, as as you want, as long as you're willing to go down it, and you can. Iterate as many times as you want, as long as you're willing and able to sort of endure the challenges along the way. And enduring the challenges are really just a mindset. It's how do I interpret what's happening to me along this path, and seeing it as a part of part of the growth, the growth curve. So it's really mostly about mindset, about creativity, about iteration, about finding new paths, about consistently finding ways to make things easier in your life rather rather than harder.
Mark Stephen Pooler 15:34
Those are great, great words. We all want to make our lives easier and not harder. Let's hope people take your advice there, Mike, and who should reach out to you? Mike, and can you share who you're looking to connect with today and share details of how people can connect with you as well?
Mike Rubin 15:52
Absolutely, the best way to connect to me is through my LinkedIn account, which is north pond mic. That's my my handle. That's one word, N, O, R, T, H, P, O, N, D, M, i, k, e, i have a weekly newsletter there, and I interact with people on LinkedIn quite frequently. So that's a great way to reach me. You can also check out my website, both my professional and personal website. My professional is npv.vc that stands for North pond ventures dot venture capital, and you can get some perspective on the types of businesses that we help build and grow and partner with, as well as my personal website, which is north pond mike.com, and that will give you a constellation of a bunch of my writings and give you some further perspective on who I am and what I do and my my mission is really to be of use to people, to support people I've been I've been fortunate to to build a business that really resonates with me, and I get to teach these outstanding students at Harvard, MIT and Stanford, and we have resounding attendance in our courses, but that's a really small fraction of the people who I think could benefit from from the work We do and the learnings that we have, and so I try to utilize forums like these to reach out to a broader audience.
Mark Stephen Pooler 17:28
Mike, thank you so so much for being my guest today. I'd encourage everyone to check out all of those websites, and they will be in the attachment with this interview as well. Mike, thank you so much for being my guest today.
Mike Rubin 17:42
Thank you, Mark. It's been a pleasure and a privilege. The
Mark Stephen Pooler 17:44
pleasure has been all mine. Thank you everyone for listening to brilliant business conversations with leading experts in business until next time. Bye for now.
Announcer 17:54
Thanks for listening to business innovators radio to hear all episodes featuring leading industry influencers and trendsetters. Visit us online at business innovators radio.com, today you.
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