How, Not How Much

Kicking off a new series going deep on Builders & their behaviors.

A Stroke of Insight

In 2017, as I was walking on 53rd street after having drinks with my good friend Marianne Williamson, I said to myself, “if I ever wrote a book, it would be about people who do things, not trade things. It could be called The Builders and it could cover the most incredible value creators of all time — starting from the very beginning.”

I went on amazon, which I later found out would nearly be called relentless.com, and saw that miraculously, there was no pre-existing book called The Builders. It had an “instant classic” feel to it — and then suddenly, the table of contents just started downloading.

Part of it was informed by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outsiders, which had a league table of the inflation-adjusted wealthiest people of all time. But then it went so much further.

Source: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

At my firm’s last investor day — I briefly described the experience in the following video.

Content Source: GreenWood Investors

How, Not How Much

While net worth may arouse some people’s interest — I’m much more interested with how they did it. And that’s where my natural curiosity in psychology came in. While I didn’t have a unifying psychological theory until a few years later — it ended up coming to me as I surpassed my 100th biography of the cast of characters.

And it’s basically this: the most incredible value creators have an uncanny mastery of their entire brains. This is both System 1 and System 2, using Daniel Kahneman’s framework. They are also both left and right brained, as Iain McGillchrists’ book Master & His Emissary wonderfully details.

They are top (system 2) and bottom (system 1), left and right. This means that they know which tools, or which parts of the brain to use, and when. They also know when NOT to use them.

While you want to appeal to people’s system 1, as >70% of decisions are made with them, you do not want to go into business leading with your System 1 — otherwise you look a lot like Donald Trump. For some that will suffice. But for those focused on creating real and meaningful value, it will not.

The Framework

As many readers will know, all good creative ideas often come when your left-brained ego (dominated by the voice inside of your head) is turned off. That gives the wordless but intuitive right brain time to feel, intuit, and work on abstract ideas. This often comes in showers, on walks or runs, during yoga, or when you’re in a state of “flow.”

For those that get to experience flow regularly — you know how dang good it feels.

For those of you that don’t, try more things that make you lose your sense of time. For right brains have no sense of time, no sense of past or future — they live in the present.

For a great crash course on how the right brain experiences much of what spiritual masters have been telling us all along, check out one of the most watched Ted talks in history — Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight.

So on a run in Central Park, when I was making sense of this new theory of whole-brained mastery (oddly enough, JBT was writing Whole Brain Living when I had this idea). The yin and yang of opposites inspired me to overlay this onto a map of the brain — and the I drew the following.

Great ideas start from the pre-frontal cortex — or the System 2 part of our brains if you’re a Danny Kahneman fan — but scaling that idea into a commercial or real-world success requires you to partner with your ego in order to make the proposition irresistible to other System 1’s.

However - System 1 is a consumer. It’s not a creator.

The builder lives at the intersection of creation and consumption.

A New Substack Series

So once this unifying theory came to me — I started writing. It was less than a year of writing >300 pages, when I realized that profiling dozens and dozens of heroes in a row didn’t make for a great novel. But I had >300 pages of case studies on these Builders.

My literary agent friend Nena has told me no publisher wants to see a book of >400 pages. Unfortunately that makes it impossible to delve deeply into the behavioral qualities of these Builders.

So in anticipation of The Builders coming out, likely in late 2025 or early 2026, let’s go a bit deeper together on some of the characters — both in the book and out of the book — and understand how they pulled off some of the greatest feats of economic history.

Many of the characters you will recognize already.

But just like Wicked told the tale of the Witch of the West in a whole new light — these case studies focused on the behavioral economic aspects of the stories — and will hopefully shed light on how timeless and effective whole-brained building can be if we balance ourselves every day.

As I’m still writing the book, please do give feedback as we go along — tell me what resonates, what doesn’t, and always — please challenge the ideas that I bring to you.

I look forward to the journey ahead.

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