Elliot Bisnow Energy

17 Ideas From THE Best Podcast I've Heard In A Year

Feb 22, 2021

☀️ Happy Monday from Tuscaloosa, AL ☀️

Welcome to the fifteenth week of Louis’ Learnings!

This weekend, I went to Orange Beach, Alabama and enjoyed a short vacation with a few friends. It was great to escape the college bubble for a few days before mid-term season completely takes over.

Last week, I recommended Craig Clemens’ interview with Elliot Bisnow in the “Quick Clicks” section of the email. Their conversation is the best podcast I’ve heard all year.

This week’s newsletter shares my 17 favorite ideas from that awesome episode.

Enjoy!

Elliot Bisnow Energy.

Who Is Elliot Bisnow?

Elliot Bisnow is a wildly high-energy and successful young entrepreneur.

He is the co-founder of Summit Series, an “organization best known for hosting global flagship events that unite the leaders of today and tomorrow.”

Bisnow is also a startup investor, having made almost 50 early stage investments, including Uber, Warby Parker, Allbirds, Coinbase, and Poshmark.

What is Elliot Bisnow Energy?

This is my own term to capture Elliot’s uncommon, infectious energy.

He is authentic, inspiring, accomplished, and radiates positivity. Listening to this interview recharged my dead batteries and made me want to tackle the world. If you watch the conversation, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Here are the best 17 ideas I jotted down when listening to the conversation.

1. Prioritize forming genuine friendships with interesting people over 'networking'

I call this building tribe. Your best mentors will be those 2-3 steps ahead of you.

Befriend PEERS doing awesome things.

2. Inject fun into everything.

Don't do normal meetings.

List the 25 most interesting things to do in your city (museums, trendy food spots, natural sights) plan meetings there.

3. Facetime by default.

We forget the magic of video chat. It is leaps and bounds closer to a real life interaction than a voice call.

Practically, you force attentiveness as you can tell if the other party is looking away. This also applies to you.

4. Put your phone away. Be Present.

Elliot joked that he wasn't sure if Jeff Bezos even had a phone because he's never seen him touch one. (for context, they spend a good amount of time together)

The most successful leaders

are FULLY present with the people around them
have systems that remove themselves as the bottleneck

5. You need short, medium, and long term goals.

No matter what you do, a garden won't grow in a year

This is the classic, "we overestimate what we can do in a year but underestimate what we can do in a decade."

David_Perell does this well here.

6. Decisions matter more than effort.

This is the essential 4-hour-workweek lesson.

Don't work for work's sake.

Build systems. Work smarter not harder.

We aren't puritans. Toil isn't a sign of virtue.

Value results. Accumulate leverage.

7. THE common success habit is reading.

You've heard it before and you'll hear it again.

Almost all top performers across all disciplines READ BOOKS.

Timeless ideas > Timely ideas.

25 books a year is a good baseline.

8. Action items vs inboxes.

Do your priorities before responding to everyone else's demands on your time.

A to-do list needs to be sorted in order of priority.

On the scale of a day, what are the 2-3 highest leverage things you can do?

Prioritize completing those things before managing minutia.

9. Build equity.

When you build a tribe of interesting people, you'll have opportunities to acquire ownership of great projects.

This is how Elliot invested in Warby Parker.

You don't want to show up to your 30s with relationships you only started building at 28.

10. How you tell a story matters more than the story itself.

This is a skill worth practicing.

Craig’s interview with Alex Banayan actually deep dives here. I would recommend that one as well.

11. Listen more. Ask more questions.

Everyone likes to talk about themselves and seem knowledgeable.

Spend more time listening and learning than talking.

Assume there is something to learn from everyone.

12. Learn Backgammon.

Apparently everyone over 50 loves this game.

If you want to “schmooze boomers”, roll the dice.

13. Survival skills.

We weren't meant to spend all day behind screens.

Take up woodworking, learn to cook, grow some plants.

You'll learn a surprising amount of practical knowledge from these "basic" skills.

14. Lateral moves.

Most people view themselves too narrowly.

Because of this, they miss opportunities for adjacent growth.

Two questions to find a way around this:

What additional value can I provide to same the people I'm serving?
What new people would benefit from what I'm already doing?

15. Read The Third Door by Alex Banayan

I read it twice in 2020.

I do not know a SINGLE person who took more than 2 sittings to read the whole book.

You won't be able to put it down.

I wrote a summary here: Skipping The Line In Life

16. Don't Underestimate Introverts

The loudest entrepreneurs aren't always the most successful.

Elliot explains that the founders at Google and Facebook aren't your typical socialites, but obviously their abilities shouldn't be discounted.

17. Always Find a Way

Think bigger.
Think without the box.
Think with a different box.
Figure it out.

This interview is worth your time, I promise.

Dial up your zest for life.

Remind yourself what is possible.

Watch it here
Listen here

LK Content Updates

LK Podcast #55 with Robbie Crabtree: Robbie Crabtree shares the most important skills for performative speaking learned from his career as a trial lawyer. This includes detailed breakdowns of storytelling, emotional communication, and active listening.

LK Podcast #54 with Tal Gur: Tal shares his accumulated wisdom from achieving 100 Life Goals in 10 Years. We discuss the nuances of achievement, emotions, purpose, and many of life's big questions.

LK Interviews Coming Soon!

Jake, author of the anonymous blog, Blog of Jake
Scott Young, author of Ultralearning
Nicolas Cole, Top Writer on Quora in 2015-2018

2 Quick Clicks

(1) Awesome Resource: SwipeFile.com

Swipe file has great examples of copy for landing pages, product pages, testimonials, and just about any other copy need. I had fun bingeing the site and will come back to it for inspiration.

(2) Awesome Article : The Complete Guide to Motivation by Scott Young

I interviewed Scott Young on Tuesday which was awesome. This is one of the best articles I read while researching the interview. It is a comprehensive introduction to the major academic theories on motivation. Highly recommend.

Photo of the Week

If you couldn’t tell from this photo of us from the beach, Kyle’s a lot taller than me.

Our other friends got extremely sunburnt, so I spared them from this week’s photo 🌞

Louis' Learnings

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