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A Century of Learning from Bernie Marcus, Summed Up


Today I finished reading Kick Up Some Dust: Lessons on Thinking Big, Giving Back, and Doing It Yourself by Bernie Marcus, cofounder and longtime CEO of Home Depot. The book is about Marcus’s life. It describes his upbringing, career in corporate America, transition to entrepreneur, and transition to philanthropist. Marcus is almost 95 and has accomplished (and failed at) many things over the years. I was eager to hear about his experiences and the lessons he learned from them.

Marcus shares what he calls “core lessons in business and life.” He makes it clear that lessons are easy to grasp but hard to put into action. Here are the lessons:

  • Confidence – You won’t get anywhere if you don’t believe that you can “do it yourself.” You must be confident that you have the skills and abilities to accomplish any task or solve any problem. If you don’t have the skills, you can learn most of them without going to school.
  • Teamwork – On the other hand, you don’t have to do hard things by yourself. Some people will help if you give them the opportunity.
  • Full-time – You must be committed and determined to make whatever you’re pursuing work. Marcus says “[t]here is no such thing as part-time passion.”
  • Risk taking – If you find a problem or need that isn’t being met, you must take big risks to meet the need or solve the problem. Consider taking the biggest risks when you’re young; there’s less downside.
  • Failure – “Failure is the price you pay on your way to success.” Marcus describes his ninety-plus-year journey through life as "stumbling" fueled by optimism.
  • Storytelling – Marcus considers this the most important lesson. You must be able to articulate what you’re doing and why it adds value in a compelling story that’s easy to understand.

I’m glad I found this book. I learned a lot about Marcus that I wasn’t aware of. He’s a driven person who’s had a significant impact as both an entrepreneur and a philanthropist.

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Bernie Marcus on Failure

After reading the book by Home Depot cofounder Ken Langone, I decided to go deeper on the other cofounders. Bernie Marcus was the CEO for many years, and I discovered that within the last few years, he wrote Kick Up Some Dust: Lessons on Thinking Big, Giving Back, and Doing It Yourself. Bernie is almost 95 years old, so I was curious about the wisdom he’d accumulated after almost a century. I ordered his book.

I’m not finished with the book yet, but so far as I can tell, Bernie has a strong personality and entrepreneurial fire inside him.

Bernie shared his thoughts on failure, and they got me thinking:

"I think how you respond to failure comes down to whether your fear is stronger than your passion. People driven by passion see setbacks as unpleasant, but inevitable challenges. What they know that quitters do not is that failure can be eaten in small pieces."

I never enjoyed failing when I was younger, but my mindset shifted when I started being entrepreneurial. I was passionate about what I was doing and driven to see it succeed. This meant I was trying a bunch of things and a lot of it didn’t work. But I noticed a pattern. Going through the things that didn’t work led me to the things that did work. Instead of looking at things via a success-or-failure construct, I began looking at them as either a success or a lesson that got me closer to success. Failures became expected. Many were still painful, but I focused on what I could learn from each failure instead of the pain.

Failure is part of life. As they say in baseball, nobody bats a thousand. Even the best players strike out at the plate. But a single strikeout doesn’t stop them from winning the World Series as long as they don’t give up and keep playing the game to the best of their ability.

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Takeaway from Bull! A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982–2004

I recently finished reading Bull! A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982–2004 by Maggie Mahar. The book was published in 2004, not too long after the dot-com bubble burst. I’ve seen the book recommended a few times and noticed that the cover includes an endorsement by Warren Buffett, so I ordered it. Also, the book’s narrow focus on the period when interest rates started what ended up being a forty-year decline through 2004 was intriguing to me.

I enjoyed reading the book. Given the focus on a very specific period, it provides lots of details about the economic environment, who the main figures were who had an impact on the stock market, and the key decisions they made. Mahar does a good job of describing her perspective on the impact those decisions had on inflating and bursting the internet bubble.

One thing that caught my attention was her explanation of the role the inclusion of high-flying technology companies in stock market indexes (e.g., the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite) played in valuations reaching levels that were hard to justify. She believes that this, combined with the rise of the 401k and index funds, contributed to a significant amount of capital being allocated to these highfliers even though valuations were hard to justify. The valuations of companies kept rising because capital kept flowing into the index funds until the stock market bubble burst around 2000.

This caught my attention because last month, I listened to an interview of David Einhorn, founder of Greenlight Capital. Einhorn shared his opinion of the impact that passive investing is having on the valuations of certain companies in today’s stock market. Essentially, he believes that valuations of companies continue to rise because they’re part of one or more stock market indexes (e.g., the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite). Passive index funds track indexes, which leads to the funds buying more shares in these companies, regardless of the valuation, as more investors allocate capital to the passive index funds. For this section of Einhorn’s interview, listen here.

I found this interesting because there’s a twenty-year gap between this book’s publication date and Einhorn’s interview.

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Ken Langone on Home Depot’s IPO

Yesterday I shared a key concept I took away from reading Home Depot cofounder Ken Langone’s book I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. Today I read a section where Langone shared the details of how he orchestrated Home Depot’s successful IPO in 1981. It was a tough environment in which to raise money from public-market investors. The economy was in a recession, inflation was through the roof, and interest rates were surging. But Home Depot was just a start-up and needed cash.

One week before the IPO date, bankers said they could fill only $3 million of the target $6 million the company needed to raise. Langone got to work and figured out a way to craft a creative deal and sell it to the existing investors (who ended up not being able to sell shares in the IPO). Everyone agreed to the new terms, and the company raised the $6 million it badly needed.

Langone’s reflection on this difficult situation stuck with me:

If there’s anything I would take a bow for throughout this whole process, it would be this: never giving up, and thinking creatively, instead of reactively, when the chips are down . . . . You get to enjoy lemonade instead of the lemons God gives you . . . .

Langone was in a tough spot. Home Depot cofounders, employees, and existing investors were all counting on him to remove the IPO roadblocks before the deadline. He was in a high-pressure situation, and he kept pushing. He focused on figuring out how to accomplish the goal given the hand they’d been dealt. His solution was unorthodox but ended up working. Absent Langone’s persistence and resourcefulness, Home Depot might not have gone public in 1981 or, worse, survived.

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Ken Langone on Over-Delivering

A few weeks ago, a friend suggested that I learn about the founding of Home Depot, since I’m in Atlanta. I did, and one of the cofounders wasn’t what I expected. His name is Ken Langone. He’s a colorful character from humble beginnings, a hybrid between entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and investment banker. I watched a few YouTube videos of him and got more interested in his story.

I discovered that Langone wrote a book called I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. It’s about his life and adventures in business. I bought it as soon as I found it and started reading. I’m not finished yet, but so far I’m enjoying it.

One concept that Langone shares in the book is over-delivering to cement relationships. Langone was the banker who IPO’d Ross Perot’s company, Electric Data Systems (EDS), in 1968. Langone had never taken a company public before and had a lot riding on the EDS IPO being successful. He thought highly of Perot. He wanted this transaction to be a success, and he also wanted to build a long-term relationship with Perot. Because of EDS’s uniqueness and growth potential, he was sure the public markets would be receptive to the IPO. He told Perot he could take EDS public at 100 times earnings (a number far higher than other bankers thought possible), or $15 per share.

The IPO was a success, and Langone was able to deliver Perot 115 times earnings, or $16.50 per share. Perot was ecstatic. He publicly praised Langone whenever the opportunity arose. Perot’s praise and the publicity about the EDS IPO got Langone a flood of new business. It also cemented his relationship with Perot because he far exceeded Perot’s lofty expectations.

Langone watched others over-promise and under-deliver. They’d close a transaction but ruin relationships because they’d lost people’s trust. Langone didn’t want to ruin relationships, so he took a different approach. To build a relationship and trust, he set what he thought were reasonable expectations and worked doggedly to over-deliver.

Fun fact: Because of Perot’s relationship with Langone, Perot was one of the first people who got the chance to invest in Home Depot when it was an early-stage company in 1978. Perot came close to investing $2 million and would have owned 70% of Home Depot if the transaction had been completed. As of the writing of this post, Home Depot has a market cap (i.e., valuation) of roughly $375 billion.

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Reviewing Highlights in Physical Books: I Need a Good Method

This weekend I began reviewing some of the highlights in books I’ve read. I realized that I have a lot of physical books with highlights. The best ideas I’ve read are scattered across tons of physical books, which adds friction to my goal of regularly reviewing the best ideas from these books.

Having my highlights centralized in one digital repository that I can access from my phone would be valuable. I’ve been playing with a reading app that does this, but the process of getting text from a book into the app isn’t efficient. I must take a picture of each highlight, which the app converts to text. The conversion is suboptimal, so then I have to correct the text before storing the highlight. Once the highlight is digitized it’s great, but getting to that point is painful.

If I want to regularly review the important concepts from what I’ve read, I’ll need to either find a better way to digitize highlights from physical books or read digital books (e.g., on Kindle). I enjoy physical books, so the former is my preference.

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Learning Friction

I read a quote this weekend from Charlie Munger that got me thinking:

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

I believe what Charlie is getting at is that continual learning increases your chances of success in the long run. Learning leads to acquiring wisdom, which improves decision-making and changes behavior. Knowing what to do and when to do it increases your chances of achieving your goals in the long run. Regular learning is something the average person can do to achieve outsize results.

From my learning survey results, I see a desire among driven people to learn and achieve their goals. But I see lots of friction along the path to the wisdom that helps improve their decisions and actions. I’m wondering if some of that friction could be removed and what impact that would have on these people’s lives. Would it materially improve their lives long term?

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Another Learning Survey Takeaway

I’m continuing with my learning survey, which has turned into customer discovery. This week I had a chat with someone working at a late-stage venture capital firm. He shared a helpful insight: the amount of information available has skyrocketed because of the internet, but its quality is questionable. A high percentage isn’t value add. It takes time and energy to distill all this information down to the knowledgeable pieces that add value and align with learning goals. This friction frustrates him and slows his learning.

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Interest: The Price of Time

Warren Buffett once said, “Interest rates power everything in the economic universe, and they have some effect on the decisions we make.” I decided I wanted to learn more about interest, so I bought a few books.

This week I finished reading The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor. Chancellor’s main points are that interest is necessary to allocate capital to its best uses and valuing assets would be impossible without interest. He provides historical content on interest, going back to Babylonian times. I enjoyed how Chancellor detailed the interest-rate environments of various time periods and the impact they had on society and the economy at the time.

I’m glad I read the book. I highlighted many sections I want to revisit someday.

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Learning Survey Takeaway

I’m continuing with my learning survey. It’s turned into more of a customer discovery exercise than a survey. This week I had a call with an entrepreneur who’s also an investor. One thing he shared stuck with me:

“My learning is curiosity led but application driven.”

In other words, he’s looking to learn something to a level of competence sufficient to apply it. I like his wording—it’s a succinct and accurate description of how I and the entrepreneurs I’ve surveyed approach learning.

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