Billionaire Mindset, Leadership & Living A Great Life with David Rubenstein

High-Level Overview

David Rubenstein, co-founder of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group, philanthropist, TV interviewer and author of How to Lead, joins Lewis Howes for a conversation about what he has learned from building a firm and from interviewing many of the world's best-known leaders. His core message is plain: leadership depends on communication, because nothing gets done alone and people can only be influenced by someone who can write, speak or lead by example. Around that he lays out his views on long-term thinking, reputation, focus, relationships and the search for personal happiness.

The tone is dry, self-deprecating and reflective. Rubenstein, in his early seventies, keeps returning to age and time, joking about his handwriting, his lack of social media followers and the investments he passed on, while Lewis, at 37, treats the hour as a mentoring session. The conversation runs from role models and work habits to regrets, aging, networking and confidence, and ends with a plea to honor your parents and to give something back to the country.

The Discussion Explores:

• Rubenstein's leadership role models and what "far-sighted" leadership looks like
• Why reputation is a personal brand that takes a lifetime to build and minutes to destroy
• What self-made wealthy people have in common, and why money is a by-product
• Finding what makes you happy, and what he would do differently
• Aging, purpose and "sprinting to the finish line"
• Communication, constant learning and practice as the skills young leaders need
• How relationships and luck built his career, and how he keeps a network without social media
• Self-doubt, confidence, honoring parents, and patriotic philanthropy

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Role models and far-sighted leadership

Asked for his ultimate model of leadership, Rubenstein names Abraham Lincoln, who held the country together in a way he doubts anyone else could have. In business he points to Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, and in government to James Baker, a former Carlyle colleague who served as Treasury Secretary, Secretary of State and White House Chief of Staff. He thinks aspiring leaders should study people inside and outside their own field, because the traits he describes in his book, such as learning to fail and come back, communicating well and sharing credit, apply everywhere.

Far-sighted leadership, he says, means looking years down the road when public companies are fixated on the quarter. His example is Bezos after the internet bubble burst, when Amazon's stock fell to about $6 a share and Wall Street demanded earnings. Bezos kept building the customer base and the brand and said earnings would come later, and he was right.

Reputation is your brand

On brand versus revenue, Rubenstein says revenue follows brand, and that a brand is slow to build and quick to ruin. He recalls his first day as a young lawyer, when the head of the firm told the new arrivals, "the only thing you really have in life is your reputation. It takes a lifetime to build it and five minutes to destroy it." He applies the same idea to individuals, and remarks that some politicians who expected to run for president had, in his view, recently destroyed their brands.

Habits, hard work and what the wealthy have in common

Lewis asks which habits of the people he has interviewed Rubenstein does not follow himself. He cites Bezos, who told him he gets eight hours of sleep, avoids decisions before 10 a.m. and after 5 p.m., and makes only a couple of big decisions a day. Rubenstein says he has practically never slept eight hours and suspects Bezos was exaggerating a little. His own rule of thumb is that hard work beats modest work and that reasonable intelligence, not genius, is enough.

Self-made wealthy people, in his experience, tend to be focused, hardworking, reasonably intelligent and persistent, and fixed on one or two objectives. The money is a side product of wanting to prove an idea works. He is careful to add that there is nothing wrong with a modest life built around family. For the first hour of the day, his advice is to catch up on what happened overnight, see what is going on in the world, and decide on the handful of things you want to accomplish before calls and emails pull you off course.

Happiness, regrets and what he would do differently

The hardest and most important task, Rubenstein says, is working out what makes you happy: "Personal happiness is the most elusive thing in life." He was happy working in the Carter White House, unhappy practicing law afterward, and happy again once he started his firm in 1987 at age 37. He says he grew up in a blue-collar family with no interest in making money and came to business as a mid-course correction. He encourages his children to experiment and thinks that by the mid-thirties most people should know their skills and pursue something that uses them, while keeping outside interests.

He jokes that he is always regretting things. At Carlyle he passed on investing in Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, on a large piece of Amazon, on Netscape, and recently on Moderna before its IPO. Asked for three things he would change, he lists exercising and looking after his body more, learning something creative such as music or painting, and spending more time with his children when they were small. All three of them have MBAs and work in private equity, which he says can be read as success or failure depending on your point of view. He has come to believe that "the most important thing in the world is relationships." And he says that in his experience wealthy people do not wish for more money; they wish they had spent more time smelling the roses and with their children.

He also notes that the giving pledge, which he signed, has about 215 signatories, and that he does not want to overstate it. Philanthropy, he reminds listeners, comes from a Greek word meaning loving humanity, and time is the most valuable thing anyone can give.

Aging and sprinting to the finish line

Rubenstein was once the youngest person in the room, an adviser in the White House at 27, and now finds himself the oldest. He recalls thinking Eisenhower was an old, old man and assuring President Carter that Ronald Reagan, at 69, was too old to be a threat, both at ages younger than he is now. He observes that people he has known died soon after retiring, while role models like Warren Buffett, still working at 90, seem sustained by purpose. He describes his own approach as "sprinting to the finish line": getting things done while body and mind hold up, living to give his money away and to see grandchildren.

Communication, learning and practice

For young people who want to lead in uncertain times, his first advice is to keep learning. Commencement means beginning, he says, yet by his figure 30% of college graduates never read another book. His second is to sharpen the skills that move other people. "Remember, communicating is the only way to influence people," he says, and the ways to do it are writing, speaking and leading by example. As he puts it later, "Everything is communications. You can't do anything by yourself."

These skills come from practice. He says he was not considered a good speaker years ago and took every invitation he could get. He prepares extensively for interviews, writes out his questions and more or less memorizes them so he can work without notes; he does the same with speeches, including commencement addresses. Lewis shares that after his football injury he was afraid to speak in front of five people and went to Toastmasters every week for a year. Rubenstein adds that becoming very good at one or two things makes people assume you can do related things, which brings more opportunity.

Relationships and happenstance

"You can never meet too many people," Rubenstein says. His interviewing career began when Vernon Jordan asked him to lead the Economic Club of Washington; the business speakers were putting people to sleep, so he tried interviewing them, and after several years Bloomberg noticed. He calls it a concentric circle: one thing leads to another. He is candid that he was Carlyle's fundraiser, strategist and public face, not its great investor. That was Bill Conway, whom he found only because a woman who turned down a job offer mentioned his name on the way out the door.

His network grew from traveling some 240 days a year raising money, from about 30 nonprofit boards and from chairing fundraising campaigns. He advises joining only boards whose mission you care about, and wishes he had started before his fifties. He avoids social media, joking that it would be embarrassing to have six followers, and calls himself "a last adopter" of technology; when his iPhone would not work in a meeting, Tim Cook fixed it, saying, "David, I normally don't do tech support for people. I'll do tech support for you." He says he handles 600 to 700 emails a day with help from a team.

Self-doubt, parents and giving back

On confidence, Rubenstein recalls interviewing Donald Trump before his presidential run and asking whether he ever had self-doubt; he says Trump's reply was, "what do you mean, self-doubt? What is that?" Rubenstein believes everyone has insecurities, that the people who seem most arrogant often have the most, and that secure people can joke at their own expense. His remedy is to become truly good at one or two things and let that confidence spread.

He speaks with feeling about his parents. His favorite investment was Dunkin' Donuts, because his mother got her coffee there, and he gave her coupons to use at her local shop. After she died, he found that her scrapbooks contained only his philanthropy and nothing about Carlyle. His father, a Marine, died suddenly at 85 before Rubenstein had done anything to honor him, so he restored the Iwo Jima Memorial in his name. His advice: "it's easier to honor your parents when they're alive and harder when they're not around." What he is proudest of is that his parents lived to see what he became, and that people value what he has given back, such as buying the Magna Carta for the government and repairing the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

Asked what question he wishes people asked, he settles on whether he is lucky, and answers yes. His three truths are to be true to yourself, to find ways to help other people, and to leave the world better than you found it. He closes by asking listeners to set aside the partisan divide and think about what they can contribute to the country.

Conclusion

Rubenstein's advice is unglamorous and consistent: figure out what makes you happy, work hard at one or two things until you are very good at them, learn to write and speak well, meet as many people as you can, and guard your reputation. He credits much of his own path to luck and chance introductions, and he is frank about what he would trade back, including time with his children, his health and a creative outlet. From the vantage point of someone who feels the clock, his deepest points are about relationships: honor your parents while they are alive, help other people, and use whatever you have built to make things a little better.

This is a summary of "Billionaire Mindset, Leadership & Living A Great Life with David Rubenstein" from The School of Greatness, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.