Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well - [Invest Like The Best, CLASSICS]

“I love to bet. I hate to gamble. And I think life is about understanding odds and edges and risks. When I look at a business model, if the business has 3 variables for it to work, I will never invest in it. If the business has two variables, then you're compounding the risk. So you better be fairly certain that one of those variables you have high confidence on and the other one you have some visibility. And if the business has one variable and you have an inkling, lean right in.”— Ric Elias

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Count critical variables before betting

“Well is actually that feeling that you get of peacefulness inside, that connection to your soul, that sense that you are showing up the way you want to show up, that you're in control, that you're your own best friend, that no matter what's happening in the world, nothing can change that feeling inside. Being is a place where there's nothing to do, where you're actually doing things for no reason at all. You're doing it because you feel connected to whatever it is.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Well-being: internal peace plus purposeless action

“One of the beauties of true friendships is allowing the other party to feel that they can love you back. You don't ever let anybody else love you back. And you'd suck all the love out of every interaction because that's how you feel good about yourself. And I don't want to be friends with somebody who is not able to be a receiver. If there's somebody out there that you think loves you, give them a chance to love you back.”— Ric Elias

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Receiving love completes the circuit

“I let go of all guilt. Not that I don't take responsibility, but the forgiveness happened to myself at the moment. And I think guilt drives a lot of our ego, a lot of our comparison set, a lot of this notion of having to be right versus choosing to be happy. True forgiveness is when you forgive when the other person doesn't apologize, because the forgiveness comes from love and comes from a language of accepting the humanity of all of us. That was to me super liberating.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Forgive without apology equals liberation

“I think in life things are good. People are, 'I'm good,' or, 'Business is good,' and all these things. And that's okay. That's a reflection of externalities or what's happening in the world. Even though they were not good, I felt well. I felt well because I was dealing with all the circumstances in the best way I could, and I was finding a tremendous amount of insight and peacefulness in that growth that I was having on how I was showing up.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Well is internal, good is external

“For whatever reason, we have never competed against anybody. I never thought that our competition was somebody else, and we've really never competed. Maybe it's because of our near-death experience as a business so early against the fear of something. We always thought, look, if we can compound our performance a little bit every month, and our business model gave us the fruits of that, It was all performance-based deals.”— Ric Elias

Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior

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Compete with self, not competitors

“We trade all our time for money. That's what we're doing. We work our butts off for money. And at some point, if you keep doing that, you'll end up realizing that you completely missed the point, and that when you make enough money, you use that money to give you back your time. One of the things I realized that time is actually a subcomponent of something more interesting or more important, which is our energy.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Economics & Markets

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Energy trumps time, time trumps money

“Sully gets on the microphone and says, this is your captain, brace for impact. At that moment, I look back at the flight attendant and then all of a sudden it's complete terror in her eyes. The great gift of that day was 90 seconds to literally say, it's over. I am sitting there going like, oh my goodness, it's over. Not only is it over, this is a minute and a half to basically sign off from life.”— Ric Elias

Psychology & Behavior

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90 seconds to sign off from life

“When the plane landed, I am going to live with intense purpose every day. I am going to ask for forgiveness the moment I do something wrong. I'm going to drink my best wines whenever the person is there. I'm going to say I love you to anybody I love. I am going to try my very best every day to try to like not regret not doing or saying something. I live out loud, so to speak, because I know it's going to change in an instant.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Live with no regrets, life changes instantly

“How much I had allowed my ego to be who showed up in the world, how much I had spent energy being wronged by people or being more or less than, better or worse than, how much my ego played a role in how I showed up every day. And it was this notion that I hate it. I hated what that meant in that I didn't realize that that was a mask that I was putting on and that I didn't need to have that mask on.”— Ric Elias

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Ego is unnecessary mask revealed at death

“I've stopped pursuing more. I don't invest anymore in funds. I don't invest in anything. I don't want to compound capital. I know that sounds like sacrilegious of what you would ever think. I want to use my capital to compound other things that matter to me. So I'm using my capital in Puerto Rico to do things that really matter to me. This whole notion of purpose. Capital for capital what? You're never going to be Bezos or whoever else. That's a silly game.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Economics & Markets

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Compound meaning, not money

“Tell me how someone gets paid and I'll tell you how they behave. Most people that are in this space are here to grow something to sell it to somebody else. We've been able to prove is we've been able to do this across 7 or 8 different industries. The notion that we don't have a clock, that we don't have a photo-op moment where we're going to go public or we're going to try to sell the business, for good and for bad, is just giving us license to invest in things that others wouldn't.”— Ric Elias

Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets · Psychology & Behavior

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Incentives determine behavior, clock determines incentives

“When you spend the first 4 years, 2 little kids, both of us, not taking any money home, humility, understanding that this could change easily. Early on, we would meet with our 80 employees and we were now making millions of dollars of profit. And I will say, oh, enjoy this, these are the good old days, someday this will end. It was this constant belief that this was a moment in time, and if we didn't work as hard as we worked the last 3 years, this will end.”— Ric Elias

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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Near-death memory drives permanent hunger

“Two principles: let's build a company we would want to work for. Dan and I are not typical. We're very different in hopefully good ways, but we both are of the same opinion that life is to be lived with enjoyment and that we would want to work at a place or build a place that we would want to go work every day so we never have to work. True definition of being an entrepreneur. And then a company that would outlast us.”— Ric Elias

Business & Entrepreneurship · Philosophy & Reasoning · Leadership & Management

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Design life you want, not just company

“My big dream is to live in a state of wellbeing most of the time and to have a sense of lifelong satisfaction when the end comes. So it's really very internal versus something that gets accomplished or left behind.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Internal satisfaction over external achievement

“After a certain amount of money, and everybody's a little different, but it's a lot less than people think, it doesn't really affect your lifestyle. And at some point it affects how people treat you and it affects your kids. It affects what you're going to do with it, your responsibility with it. Money is one of those things that is a privilege to have. But if you're not careful, it can change you.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Money corrupts beyond diminishing returns point

“Red Ventures at a high level: an operating private equity platform with permanent capital, hyper-focused on the digital world, with different business models under the belief that culture really matters and that if you use that as the connective tissue inside of the portfolio companies, you can get some level of alpha vis-à-vis these companies being separate.”— Ric Elias

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management

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Culture as competitive moat in portfolio

“By November, we had $117,000 left, no revenue, and this crazy thought of like, I will never attend my reunions because all the capital came out of my business school friends. And I'm a proud guy. I can't. So we literally just hunkered down, hustled, sold marketing programs, sold anything anybody to hire us to do consulting things.”— Ric Elias

Psychology & Behavior · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Fear of shame drove survival hustle