Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well

“Sully gets on the microphone and says, this is your captain, brace for impact. 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, but this is a minute and a half to basically 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.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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90 seconds to sign off from life

“In life things are good. People are, I'm good, or business is good. That's a reflection of externalities. I've been through some pretty difficult personal things, and people will ask me, how are things? They're good. I'm like, I'm lying. They're not good. They're horrible. But 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. Well is that feeling of peacefulness inside, that connection to your soul.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Good is external, well is internal state

“We literally said, let's go try to figure that out. We built a core tech where we can map a couple million toll-free numbers to an online experience and give you a phone experience that was quasi-personalized by how you navigated online. We could go to any brand and say, we can outconvert whatever you're doing. If that's not true, don't pay us, but if it's true, give us a piece of the upside. Don't pay us as an agency or a service provider.”— Ric Elias

Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution

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Only pay if we outperform baseline

“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. So a lot of this is just decomposed risk of what you're investing in.”— Ric Elias

Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Variable count determines investment viability

“At some point, if you keep trading all your time for money, 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. In the last couple years, I realized that time is actually a subcomponent of something more interesting or more important, which is our energy. I only want to invest my energy in things that give me multiple currencies back.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Energy trumps time as allocation framework

“Early on, we would meet with our 80 employees and 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. We have never competed against anybody. I never thought that our competition was somebody else.”— Ric Elias

Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution · Psychology & Behavior

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Compound against self, not competitors

“One of the real unique things is we didn't raise outside capital until 2010, a decade of bootstrap. When we raised capital, we didn't need capital. We didn't need it for anything. We did it because our employees wanted a little liquidity. We ended up in a structure where we have permanent capital. We don't have a clock, we don't have a photo-op moment where we're going to go public or sell the business. This gives us license to invest in things that others wouldn't.”— Ric Elias

Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets

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No exit clock enables long-term investment

“The pursuit of more robs you from inner peace. You can't take it with you. It becomes a responsibility the more you have. When they're replacing happy with happier, that's when they get in trouble. There's no such thing. I've stopped pursuing more. I don't want to compound capital. I want to use my capital to compound other things that matter to me. Capital for capital what? You're never going to be Bezos or whoever else. That's a silly game.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Stop compounding capital, compound meaning

“You don't ever let anybody else love you back. You 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. Letting people in, your true friends, because in part what I was doing was letting them love me by me loving them. It's a language of trust. Give them a chance to love you back.”— John Woods via Ric Elias

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Always giving prevents receiving love

“There was this sense of almost embarrassment of how much I had allowed my ego to be who showed up in the world. I hate it. I hated what that meant in that I didn't realize that that was a mask that I was putting on. When you have tremendous forgiveness for yourself, your conversation with yourself changes. You become incredibly kind. You become a lot more light, but you then find forgiveness in everything.”— Ric Elias

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Self-forgiveness enables universal forgiveness

“We started with two principles in mind. One was let's build a company we would want to work for. And the second one was a company that would outlast us. What I have come to realize is it will outlive us through the people that get trained in our platform, not as a company itself.”— Ric Elias

Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Legacy through trained people, not institution

“We can't teach you values, we can't teach you things that you learned at home, but we can tell you what we believe. And if those things resonate with you, then you may want to work here. When we do performance reviews, when we do evaluations, we come back to that framework. The beliefs evolve and will continue to evolve because the core belief is everything is written in pencil.”— Ric Elias

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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State beliefs, not values; evaluate against them

“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. A little bit of this is incentive structures. We took this B2B business and said, wow, we can do this and buy assets to do this ourselves. And the value is now we get all that richness of data to take to our B2B business. Using the private equity head, we're like, we think we can do this in other places.”— Ric Elias

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

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Incentives explain competitive landscape

“If a high-integrity builder were to study this place for a year, what I hope we leave as our legacy is thousands of people that were better at what they're doing and did more meaningful work wherever they went because they were here. The amount of emails I get from people saying, holy cow, I did not know I was this good because now I'm not competing against everybody that is this good, and I would have never been this good if I had not been there. That's really cool, that opportunity.”— Ric Elias

Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Legacy is trained people, not institution

“There's been so much kindness, but instead of finding the one person, I'll tell you the thing, and it's forgiveness. I have been forgiven by many people ultimately for being human. I've been forgiven by my wife for not being as committed in terms of being at home in that first decade of our kids. The grace that you give somebody when you forgive them is the most beautiful things we do as humans.”— Ric Elias

Philosophy & Reasoning · Psychology & Behavior

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Forgiveness as greatest gift received

“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. We literally just hunkered down, hustled, sold marketing programs, sold anything anybody to hire us to do consulting things. In 2004, we had enough money to pay our investors back and said, look, we made a commitment to you. Here's your money back times 10%, but we're done.”— Ric Elias

Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior

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Survival mode forcing creative hustle

“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

“When you spend the first 4 years with 2 little kids, both of us, not taking any money home, you gain humility, understanding that this could change easily. We would say, oh, enjoy this, these are the good old days, someday this will end. 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. At some point it affects how people treat you and it affects your kids.”— Ric Elias

Psychology & Behavior · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Money's impact plateaus, then corrupts