708: Danny Meyer - How You Make People Feel: The Founder of Shake Shack & Union Square Hospitality Group on Culture as Soil, the 49/51 Hiring Formula, and Leading With Generosity

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Connect on socials: Twitter/X - https://x.com/RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 LinkedIn - @RyanHawk My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! I think you'll find it useful. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Seth Godin is the author of more than 20 bestselling books, including Purple Cow, The Dip, and This Is Marketing. He has written a blog post every day for more than two decades, and it remains one of the most widely read blogs in the world. Before the books, Seth founded Yoyodyne, one of the first internet marketing companies, and sold it to Yahoo in 1998. He later created the altMBA. His new book is The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. Key Learnings Being early is a courtesy, not a personality trait. "I don't understand why someone would willfully waste somebody else's time." The knot is the point. You can't have a pretzel without the knot, and if you try to undo it you end up with crumbs. Real life isn't like that. Our knots can actually be untied. Teach so that people teach themselves. Seth builds everything around a metaphor that gives people scaffolding, because "the only kind of learning that really happens is autodidact self-learning." Give someone the structure to figure it out and they'll never forget it. Name the baggage, drop the baggage, ship the work. The easiest thing to do with our freedom is pretend it doesn't exist. A man with nine million dollars in the bank told Seth he has to keep doing the work he's known for, because he needs to make a living. No, you don't. Same with the student three years into a four-year degree he hates who says he has to finish. You can choose to finish. Nobody is making you. We stay stuck because it's comfortable. It keeps us safe, guarantees an excuse, takes us off the hook. No agency means no responsibility. It isn't friction, it's hidden entanglements. Friction sounds like a law of nature you can't argue with. Entanglements are long-told stories about how the world is, who we are, what we fear, where our status sits. They form an invisible web, and unlike physics, they're ours to cut. The tell is when a problem gets treated like a situation. In Canadian Inuit territory, people are 500 times more likely to contract tuberculosis than someone in Toronto. We know how to cure it, for a tiny fraction of the healthcare budget. Calling it a situation is what lets everyone off the hook. The blue sweater. As a high school sophomore, Jacqueline Novogratz wore her favorite sweater, a gift from her uncle, blue and white wool with the Alps on it. Cheerleaders teased her for it. She went home and dropped it in a Goodwill box. Fifteen years later, running through the streets of Rwanda at 7:00 in the morning, she saw a seven-year-old boy wearing it. She chased him down, looked in the collar, and found her own name on the tag. That was the moment she let go of being the Stanford grad on the fast track at a New York bank. She has spent the decades since building Acumen and its patient capital model, and by Seth's last count, 600 million of the poorest people on earth live better because of it. What makes someone a leader: they decide to. It has nothing to do with your title. You can lead from anywhere in an organization. Seth gets stuck every single day, and most of the time he stays stuck. That's fine. What matters first is clarity: who is this for, and what is it for? Getting unstuck always means leaving something else behind. The woman with more figure skating gold medals than anyone in history didn't get them by having a life. She got them by having no life for fifteen years. Completely unstuck on gold medals. De

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Connect with me on socials Twitter/X - @RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 Join 10's of thousands of leaders, subscribe to Mindful Monday My guest: Ravi Gupta is the founder of RePublic Schools, whose flagship Nashville schools became the first in Tennessee to rank in the top 5% statewide for both growth and achievement. He co-founded Arena, which trained more than 7,000 political staffers, worked on the first Obama campaign, and wrote speeches for UN Ambassador Susan Rice. Today he runs The Branch, a media company fighting polarization. His new book is The Invisible List: One Passion a Year, Every Year. Key Learnings One new passion a year, every year. When Ravi left his job running schools, he decided to treat every year like a school year with himself as the only student. He's done it for seven years. Surfing, tennis, screenwriting, a novel, Italian cooking. Be an anti-dabbler. The seductive version is a little boxing, a little salsa dancing, a little cooking. You get fifteen years of sampling and none of the skill. Pick the thing, commit to the year, see it through even if you come to regret the pick. The rule that makes it work: no new thing midyear. You can maintain old passions. You cannot start a new one. He broke his own rule and learned why it exists. Bored one day and avoiding his cooking, Ravi walked into a Muay Thai gym on his corner. He loved the class, walked out, and told himself it was off the table until January 1. The pull wasn't interest. It was the rush of early wins, and that rush is the most convincing form of procrastination there is. Trying something and quitting can be worse than never trying. Once you've tasted it, you start seeing it everywhere, and you replay the version of your life where you stuck with it. Pair a reasonable goal with a delusional one. Ravi almost always hits the reasonable one. He almost never hits the unreasonable one right away, but he often gets there eventually. The pairing is the point. Tim Ferriss's observation on why that works: there's less competition for big crazy goals, because so few people think that way anymore. December is the meta-learning month. Thanksgiving to New Year's, Ravi wraps up the current year and pulls together the next one: the books, the experts, the sequence, what it actually means to be great at the thing. Don't start researching it in August. He has next year's candidates in his head by late summer, but he refuses to buy books or line up coaches until December. Planning next year's passion is an elaborate way to avoid this year's. Output goals need a skill set attached. Example: hiking an outrageous number of national parks. Ravi's counter: keep the output goal, but build the skills underneath it. Pitching a tent, starting a fire, navigation, survival prep. Then the year leaves you with something beyond a number. Each year becomes a chapter. 2020: surfing. 2021: tennis. Childhood is memorable because it's divided into grades with names attached. Adult years blur into one undifferentiated stretch, and Ravi thinks that blur is part of why people get depressed looking backward and forward. The reframe on aging: turning 50 in seven years is only grim if those are seven blank years. Seven more passions is a different sentence entirely. Join an accountability group. The Invisible Posse is a group of readers all pursuing their own skills at the same time, at readinvisiblelist.com. New challenge every two weeks, a leaderboard, points for doing the work. The list is a solo project. The accountability isn't. Do the thing publicly in the first two weeks. The group's first challenge was to do your new skill in front of people immediately. The winner was a man learning to sing who sat his cousins down on vacation and performed a whole song. Once you're past being judged, you're doing it instead of planning it. T

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book: The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Connect with me on X: @RyanHawk12 Instagram: @RyanHawk12 LinkedIn - Ryan Hawk Receive "Mindful Monday" (free) This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral researcher, Harvard instructor, and founder of Science of People. Her books Captivate and Cues have been translated into 18 languages, and her work reached more than 300 million people last year. Her new book is Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone and Make Every Interaction Count. Key Learnings Small talk is required for big talk. You can't skip it. You can do it better. Conversation is a skill with micro skills underneath it, and small talk is one chapter. Two traps make small talk painful. Autopilot (asking questions without actually connecting) and going for facts instead of stories. Awe is the best small talk ingredient. "Wow, that's amazing," or "What is that?" Positive awe is wow. Negative awe is compassion: "Everything okay? Can I help?" Both solicit stories. Both work only if you mean it. Awe beats a compliment. A compliment lands. Being visibly wowed by something invites the story behind it. Be story ready. When someone asks how you are, don't hand back good, fine, busy. Have something loaded: "Today the craziest thing happened." You break the script with your answer before anyone has to break it with a question. Flip your questions into story hunters. Not "how are you" but "What's been good?" or "Tell me something good." Slight change, big shift toward optimism. Or check in on something specific from before. "I noticed you dedicated the book to your daughters. How old are they now?" The update question does the work that the generic one can't. Katie Couric never asks "what do you do?" She asks "What do you like to do?" Vanessa found it in Couric's memoir. One-word swaps have major potential. Turn small talk into a treasure hunt. Everyone has gold. You don't know what it is yet. Your job is to ask the questions that find it. Treasure hunting also kills the awkwardness. Vanessa calls herself a recovering awkward person. Her problem for years was that her goal in conversation was to be impressive. No good conversation comes from that. Curiosity has to be innate. Vanessa thinks nearly everything is teachable. Not this. If you aren't actually curious about the person, the techniques will read as manipulative, and eventually you get found out. The rule on using someone's name: if you're already thinking about it, use it. If you're not thinking about it, don't. That's the whole test. Three levels of connection, and you have to go in order. From Dr. Dan McAdams. Level one is general traits: occupation, hometown, family status. Level two is personal concerns: goals, motivations, values, what drives and worries someone. Level three is self-narrative. Put your work relationships in level two. That's the practical instruction. Most people stall at level one and assume level two isn't work-appropriate. It is, and conversations get more engaged, collaborative, and productive once you're there. Level three is about frames, not facts. Two people can have identical facts and completely different stories about what those facts mean. Self-narratives are self-creating. People who see themselves as lucky approach the world as lucky people. They spot more opportunities, think more laterally, and create more surface area for good things. Unlucky people do the same thing in reverse. Narratives are editable. They're not Enneagram or Myers-Briggs. They shift, usually on an annual scale, most often through conversation with someone you trust. Journaling alone rarely does it. The five r

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book: The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guests: Andy Stanley is the founder of North Point Ministries, which he started in Atlanta in 1995 and has grown into 8 churches across metro Atlanta and a network of more than 225 churches globally, serving over 200,000 people weekly. He's the author of more than 20 books, including Next Generation Leader, Visioneering, and Deep & Wide. His newest is What Great Leaders Do: 7 Essentials for Enduring Impact. He and his wife Sandra have three grown children and live in Atlanta. Sam Kaufman is the Chief Revenue Officer of Insight Global, a $5.3B talent, technical, and AI services firm. He started as an entry-level recruiter in 2004 and rose through the ranks to lead the company's core sales divisions. He's played a central role in Insight Global's transformation into a global talent and technical services organization, helping the company double in size over the past five years, and in 2026, he was named to Staffing Industry Analysts' Staffing 100 North America list, recognizing the most influential leaders in staffing. He has a degree in electrical engineering from Bucknell. Key Learnings Somebody saw it in him before he saw it in himself. Andy and Louie Giglio were the troublemakers in his dad's youth group. One morning after they'd disrupted everything, Mother Mary sat them down and told them they were leaders and needed to lead. Andy's reaction at the time: then I don't want to be a leader. She should have kicked them out, but she didn't. She kept giving them chances they didn't deserve and didn't handle well. She's about to turn 101 years old. She never had children of her own and to this day she calls them her sons. Now Andy does it for others. When he sees someone with a leadership gear, he tries to speak life into it and fan the flame, because that's what was done for him. Leadership is the most wonderful, dangerous gift. Every great thing that's happened in the world had a leader behind it. So did every terrible thing. People followed both for the same reason: the leader brought clarity to a dilemma, made a promise, and people leaned in. Andy thinks leaders are born, not made. His evidence: he's never met a leader who accomplished anything extraordinary who said they weren't a leader, then read two books or went to a conference and became one. Anyone can get better. "But you can make him a better singer and still never hand him a microphone." Problems to solve vs tensions to manage. Work-life balance is a tension. You don't solve it, you manage it. Every industry and every company has its own. "When you solve a tension, you create a problem." You can spot tension by the calendar. If it keeps reappearing on the agenda and somebody keeps saying didn't we just talk about this, you've been trying to solve something that was never a problem. Naming it changes the conversation. Once a team agrees they're looking at a tension, nobody is right and nobody is wrong, and people stop treating each other like enemies. Andy's team asks the question out loud once a month. Sam heard Andy teach this on a podcast and it moved through Insight Global in a week. He listened on the drive in, recognized the pattern live in his CEO's Thursday meeting, and shared it with 40 leaders in the room. It reached a 40,000 person company within days. Sam's read on why: they'd been having the same conversation for years and had never had the language for it. Nobody can promise certainty. You can give clarity. The only way to promise certainty is to know the future in detail. And the greater the uncertainty, the more the need for clarity is heightened. If the

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com The Price of Becoming is a USA Today, LA Times, and Publishers Weekly National Best-Seller! www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Daniel Lubetzky graduated from Stanford Law School. And then declined lucrative job offers to start his own business, only paying himself $24,000 a year for a decade. And then he founded KIND and grew it into a snack brand that Mars later valued at $5 billion dollars. Today he invests full-time on Shark Tank, and he's the son of a Holocaust survivor whose story shaped everything he's built. Find work that gives you energy, purpose, and meaning. If you enjoy what you're doing, you're far more likely to be great at it. And you're already winning, because you get up every morning doing something satisfying. The danger of loving your work is overworking. Daniel did it building PeaceWorks and KIND. You have to pace yourself. His father survived a death march out of Dachau. Twelve and a half when he entered the camp, fifteen and a half during the march. Six feet tall and under 70 pounds, and no shoes. The Nazis were walking prisoners up a mountain to push them off a cliff because they didn't have enough bullets. A snowstorm saved his life. His father, grandfather, and uncle hugged to say goodbye. The snow buried them and formed a kind of igloo that kept them warm through the night. They woke, dug out, and the Nazis were gone. The soldiers who liberated them were Japanese American. The 442nd, the most decorated unit of its size in American history, was made up of men whose own families were being held in internment camps back home. Daniel's family had never seen an Asian person and didn't understand what they were witnessing. Seventy years later, he got to say thank you. A friend called saying they were sitting with a doctor who had a postcard from Larry Lubetzky. That was Daniel's uncle, who had just died. Daniel reconnected with the captain, who had gone on to become a scientist at Harvard, and eventually gave a eulogy at his funeral. The lesson he takes from it isn't perseverance. It's the power of one person to change another person's life. You won't pull off a rescue every day. You can still look someone in the eye at the supermarket. "You have no idea what that person's been going through." Human connection is what pulls people back. At a conference on fighting hate, Daniel heard how young people vulnerable to recruitment were pulled back by ordinary human connection. Being kind in your daily life makes it harder for the people trying to recruit them. There's no such thing as failure or success. Daniel keeps shelves of successes in one office and shelves of failures in another, and now thinks the separation is a mistake. He never would have built KIND without ten years of mistakes at PeaceWorks. PeaceWorks was a college thesis turned into a company. The argument: get neighbors on opposite sides of a conflict doing business together, and you shatter stereotypes, build relationships, and give both sides a stake in each other. He got Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks trading with one another. Daniel turned down $86,000 out of Stanford Law to pay himself $24,000. That's what he could afford, and it's what he paid his team. Grit, wit, and fit. Grit is the work ethic and refusing to give up. Wit is the strategy, the creativity to outthink competitors. Fit is whether the product actually matches what people want. Grit alone isn't enough. Do not assume he was invincible. He cried alone in his studio apartment more than once, convinced he'd made a mistake and was wasting his life. He questioned himself multiple times a day. The jerk who broke him was al