The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Podcast By Ryan Hawk cover art

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

By: Ryan Hawk
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As Kobe Bryant once said, "There is power in understanding the journey of others to help create your own." That's why the Learning Leader Show exists—to understand the journeys of other leaders so that we can better understand our own. This show is full of learnings taught by world-class leaders—personal stories of successes, failures, and lessons learned along the way. Our guests come from diverse backgrounds—CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies, best-selling authors, Navy SEALs, and professional athletes. My role in this endeavor is to talk to the most thoughtful, accomplished, and intentional leaders in the world so that we can learn from them as we each create our own journeys.Learning Leader LLC 062554 Career Success Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • 680: Scott Galloway: Action Absorbs Anxiety, Handling the Haters, Becoming an Excellent Storyteller, Reverse Engineering Your Success, The Importance of Novelty, and Why Praise Is the Most Underrated Leadership Tool

    680: Scott Galloway: Action Absorbs Anxiety, Handling the Haters, Becoming an Excellent Storyteller, Reverse Engineering Your Success, The Importance of Novelty, and Why Praise Is the Most Underrated Leadership Tool
    Mar 22 2026
    Go to Go to https://www.learningleader.com/becoming to see the pre-order bonuses for The Price of 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: Scott Galloway is the New York Times bestselling author of books including The Four, The Algebra of Happiness, Post Corona, Adrift, and The Algebra of Wealth. Notes: Key Learnings Routine speeds up time, novelty slows it down. If you want life to go fast, just spend it alone and have a routine and never bust out of that routine. What makes life interesting is diversity in people, because people are complicated, and relationships are complicated. Lean into your emotions to slow time down. If you see something that moves you, stop, think about it, ask yourself why it moves you, and try to cement that moment in your brain. Otherwise, you're not sleepwalking through life; you're sleep sprinting. "The greatest wasted resource in history is good intentions that don't get articulated." No matter how famous someone is, they love affirmation as much as anybody else. Good thoughts that don't get articulated are wasted. Absorb when you're upset and lean into emotions, good and bad. This sort of marks the day and slows things down. Otherwise, if you get up every morning, do the same thing, eat the same thing, have the same relationship, the week's just gonna go really fast. Reverse engineer your success to things that aren't your fault. What are the things that played a role in your success that you had no control over? Your luck, your good fortune. For Scott: big government, assisted lunch, Pell Grants, University of California, technology financed by middle-class taxpayers, DARPA, the internet, deep pools of capital, and acceptance of failure. His mom told him he had value every day. Scott's mom, every day, implicitly and explicitly, told him and communicated to him that he had value. That builds a basic confidence that manifests in different ways: the confidence to fail, approach strangers, believe you're worthy of love, that you'll add value to a company, and that you can ask for tens of millions of dollars from someone. When good things happened, he used to call his mom. Whether it was getting a bonus at Morgan Stanley or striking up a conversation with a woman at Starbucks and getting her number, Scott used to call his mom. Your parents can bask in your victory, and you can brag to your parents, and it's okay. If there's no one there with you, it's like it didn't happen. Scott travels for business and stays at really nice hotels, and inevitably gets upgraded to the penthouse or the George V in Paris when he's alone. But if there's no one there with you, it's like it didn't happen. Celebrate victories, tell people how much they mean to you. You have to call your friends, celebrate their victories, celebrate your own, and tell people how much they mean to you. Every day, no matter what, tell your kids you're proud of them and love them. No matter how much Scott's kids piss him off, at some point, he finds a way to say, "I'm proud of you, and I love you immensely. You know that, right?" He hopes they have that same kind of base or pillar of confidence he had his whole life. Having someone tell you they believe in you every day works. You don't have to be a baller or successful. Just having someone in your life and every day telling them they mean a lot to you, they can't help but not believe you after a while. Being a leader isn't about being the smartest person in the room. Scott used to think being a leader was being the smartest person in the room, and he had trouble, especially with other men, thinking if he acknowledged someone else was doing a good job, somehow that made him less impressive. You have so much currency as a founder or manager. If you're in a management or leadership role, much less a founder, you have so much currency to pull someone into a conference room and say, "You were outstanding in that meeting" or "I just read this, and I love this paragraph. God, where did you come up with this idea?" You literally see these people just light up. "If you're thinking it, say it." The instant you're thinking something positive about somebody, just tell them, text them, call them. Don't wait. We have a tendency to think other people are telepathic, that they must sense we think they're wonderful. No, they don't sense it. Articulate it. When you're on your deathbed, you're not gonna think "I gave too much praise at work and told too many people how much they meant to me." Young people need watering. If you don't give young people feedback and praise when they deserve it, it's like having a ton of capital and not spending it. Especially with young people, they need watering. Feedback is incredible compensation. Whenever someone ...
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • 679: Kat Cole - From Hooters Waitress to $500M CEO, You're Interviewing for Your Next Job Every Day, Learning vs. Ego, The Four Key Mindsets for Senior Leaders, and The Journey of Who You Become

    679: Kat Cole - From Hooters Waitress to $500M CEO, You're Interviewing for Your Next Job Every Day, Learning vs. Ego, The Four Key Mindsets for Senior Leaders, and The Journey of Who You Become
    Mar 15 2026
    Go to www.LearningLeader.com 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: Kat Cole is the CEO of AG1 (formerly Athletic Greens) and a renowned business leader known for a meteoric rise from Hooters waitress to Fortune 40 Under 40 executive. As former President/COO of Focus Brands (Cinnabon), she specializes in scaling global brands. Her career is defined by driving billions in sales, strategic innovation, and a strong, people-first leadership style. Key Learnings You can't market your way out of a bad product. AG1 has 3x'd the business in four years while being in only one channel (direct to consumer) for 15 years. 80% of retail is in brick and mortar, so they were doing that volume in less than 20% of where transactions happen. That only works when customers love the product, keep buying it for years, and tell their friends. Scale comes from trusted recommendations, not marketing spend. Real volume comes from people telling their friends, recommending it to their teams and companies. That's where real scale and sustainable growth comes from. Two questions guide every career decision. Is my work done here? Can someone else do what the company needs better than I can? If the answer to either is yes, that guides you toward pushing for change in your role, the way you show up, or finding the next opportunity. Sometimes the best move is the lesser-known role. Kat could have stayed running big franchise brands everyone knew (Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's), but becoming COO of the parent company, Focus Brands, was a bigger, more complex role. Lesser known, smaller team, bigger stretch, more learning. That bridged her into consumer packaged goods and got her ready for AG1. Consider financial needs, learning, and ego separately. Between financial needs, your ability to learn or contribute, and your ego or optics, there are questions you can ask yourself about a particular moment or opportunity that will help you be sharper in what you actually want versus what just looks like what's best next on the surface. The founder heard her on podcasts and asked for an introduction. AG1's founder heard Kat on a couple of podcasts, knew Sahil Bloom, and asked Sahil to make the intro. She just happened to be taking time off and had been a customer for two years. "You're interviewing for your next job every day." Whatever you do now, that choice of time, that tone of voice, that decision, how you show up or don't, creates an impact that leads to an experience and people's actions and then results. Eventually, it leads to the next thing. Showing kindness in the airport matters. A caring note to someone struggling, a teacher or stranger saying, "I see something in you," a compliment when someone's in a dark place. It helps people out of darkness. Or opportunistically, being the one who sent the email or made the ask means you're the one who got the opportunity. Don't burn bridges even when you feel wronged. When Kat was an executive at Hooters at 26, peers in their 50s and 60s would say things in meetings that weren't kind or appropriate. She would write letters expressing how it made her feel, but never sent them. She processed, reflected, and showed up professionally. Years later, those same people became advocates, partners, and references. Four key mindsets for senior leaders. Humility, curiosity, courage, and confidence. By the time candidates get to Kat, they've been vetted on technical capability. She spends time validating those four characteristics because leadership and style trickle far into the organization. Ask "if not for" questions to reveal humility. When someone tells you how they stood tall in tough moments, ask what enabled them to do those great things. They'll say, "I had access to this data, this team, this technical leader." Then ask: "If those people did not exist, if that resource did not exist, how would you have navigated that?" You peel back layers and see if they have the humility to acknowledge their success was due to critical factors. The best candidates do the job in the interview. When someone says, "If we're doing this, we'll absolutely need this person in this specific role," or they have people in mind they're bringing with them, that's a good sign. Hiring leaders who have people who are loyal to them shows something real. In reference checks, ask, "What does this person need to be successful?" It's a positive framing to get at what someone might lack or require around them to be effective. Help people answer "how should I think about this?" In a fully remote company, you have less context and fewer vibes. When you send a note about ending a product line or launching something you said you'd never launch, people's subconscious internal war is "how should I think about this?" ...
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    59 mins
  • 678: Jamie Siminoff (Ring Doorbell Inventor) - Shark Tank Rejection, Selling to Amazon for $1 Billion, Surviving $3M to $480M Hypergrowth, Hiring Passionate People Over Experts, and Jeff Bezos's Leadership Lessons

    678: Jamie Siminoff (Ring Doorbell Inventor) - Shark Tank Rejection, Selling to Amazon for $1 Billion, Surviving $3M to $480M Hypergrowth, Hiring Passionate People Over Experts, and Jeff Bezos's Leadership Lessons
    Mar 8 2026
    www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk 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: Jamie Siminoff is the founder of Ring, which he sold to Amazon for over a billion dollars. He's an inventor and builder who couldn't hear his doorbell while working in his garage, so he built a video doorbell. When his wife said it made her feel safer, he realized technology had changed, and home security needed a complete reinvention. Ring became the world's largest home security company with a mission to make neighborhoods safer. Key Learnings Jeff Bezos reads and writes his own stuff. When Jamie asked Jeff to write something for the book's back cover, Jeff actually read it and wanted his own curated quote that was from him. Jeff loves entrepreneurs, so they kept him out of negotiations. After the Whole Foods deal, Amazon learned to keep Jeff out of negotiations because he finds it tough to negotiate hard with someone he respects. Hardware companies can die while growing fast. Ring grew from $3M to $30M to $174M to $480M, which sounds amazing. But to go from $170M to $480M, you're buying hundreds of millions of dollars of product when you're selling less than that. If sales growth slows, you're basically going out of business. Going from $480M to over a billion in revenue was like being on a motorcycle at 200 miles an hour. If a leaf falls down and hits you, you're dead. At Amazon, when Ring said, "We need another billion dollars to order stuff for next year," Amazon said, "Okay, what else do you want?" There are different types of entrepreneurs. Jamie is an inventor/entrepreneur. There are business entrepreneurs who are maniacal business people we've never heard of that have just crushed it. Jamie is maniacal on product and brings invention into how they run the company. Hire marathon runners. Marathons are the dumbest thing any human could ever do. Even if you win, no one cares. Jamie finished the Boston Marathon in 22,000th place and he's so proud of himself. You want people that don't care about external validation; they just care about getting the mission done. AI has democratized all information. With AI making it so you don't even need to know C++ programming anymore, fill your business with passionate people who care about the mission and they'll crush anything. When building your team, start with the mission. Jamie tells people, "Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. Do you want to work on making neighborhoods safer? Because if you don't, you're going to be miserable here. You're going to hear it every day, and you're going to roll your eyes." Referrals work because people don't want to let you down. The best hires are when someone's referred by someone (uncle, friend, whatever) because they feel guilty. They don't want to let the person who referred them down. Find an infinite truth to work on. Amazon's core principles are infinite: Will customers always want lower price, more selection, and faster delivery? Yes. If you deliver in 30 minutes, they'll want it in 10 minutes. Making neighborhoods safer is an infinite thing to work on. Your wife saying one thing can change everything. Jamie built a video doorbell so he could hear the door from his garage. His wife said, "It makes me feel safer at home." That's when he realized technology had changed and home security needed a whole new approach. The hard part is bringing the infinite down to the tactical. When you have an infinite mission, you can get overwhelmed trying to solve it all at once. You have to figure out what to do every single day to work toward that infinite goal. Shark Tank was a disaster that turned into everything. Jamie went on Shark Tank desperately needing money. He got zero offers and cried in his car after. But when it aired, the boost in sales gave them cash to hire people and build Ring, which started the clock on their success. Sometimes you can't stop because you're in too deep. After Shark Tank bombed, Jamie couldn't back out. He'd already ordered too many products and owed too much money. He'd be personally bankrupt if he stopped. People think he's tough for keeping going, but he didn't have a choice. Being naive is a superpower. Great inventions are things people say can't happen because if they could happen, they'd already be out there. You have to be naive enough to say "I think I can do this" or "I don't even know that I can't." People said you couldn't build a battery-operated camera on WiFi. Jamie had never built anything before, so what did he know? They just went out and tried to put some parts together that seemed like they would work. Knowing too much gets in the way of doing the work. If you're thinking and analyzing the whole world, that's time you're not inventing, ...
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    50 mins
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This is the best podcast. Regardless of who you are or where you’re at in life, you’ll absolutely find incredible value. Literally every episode shared ways to just be a better person overall. And Ryan asks meaningful, impactful questions that drive to tactical approaches that we can actually use. Very grateful for him and this show.

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