Elliot Bisnow Energy
17 Ideas From THE Best Podcast I’ve Heard In A Year
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.
