David Heimer: Do they suggest that you can engineer your own moments? I mean, the example you gave was engineering it for someone else, essentially. Can you engineer them for yourself?

Dave Rothacker: You can, and basically they talk about either engineering for yourself or engineering for others. And they talk about defining moments in from like a 64,000-foot view in four different elements or elements of these classifications and they call them elevation. And I’ll just, just briefly describe each one. The elevation is engaging with moments and emotions and sensory pleasures that rise above the daily light. Insight is where you get like the aha moment where that goes off. Pride is the third one and pride is based on people’s achievements. And then connection defining moments are social and we bond with others through these. But on an individual basis, there’s elements of either one or more of these elements in the defining moments of say, what we would engineer. So in other words, take insight, for example, we’re on a path to try to discover a career that we’re going towards.

And the book sort of helps you with how to look at, say the insight category so that after a period of time maybe a light bulb will go off. Anyhow that’s basically how it addresses the individual component of that. The Heath brothers provide an incredible amount of free resources that would help the business owner, help the manager get the most out of the book. And they provide details for where you can sign up for their newsletter, you get their newsletter, and then you basically get all these free resources. And as a side bonus, if the listener here likes the book, The Power of Moments, you will love the book Surprise. That’s another book that I recommend Surprise by Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger, and it kind of takes off with the whole Power of Moments and it parallels it well.

David Heimer: Number one, The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. Is that right?

Dave Rothacker: Correct, number one.

David Heimer: Okay.

Dave Rothacker: Number two is Principles by Ray Dalio and Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater and Associates, one of the most successful investment firms ever. Ray started his business back in the 1970s and Ray, he’s kind of like a Michael Jordan of that world, or also a Michael Jordan of building a business. And I’ve recommended Principles to folks before and they picked the book up and they look at it and they get a little bit intimidated. There’s a lot of material in the book, but it took Ray 40 years to put this all together and so when I recommend this book, I recommend it, taking it in small portions. The book is divided up into three parts. The first part is basically Ray’s story, his background. The second part is life principles and the third part is work principles.

And he defines principles as fundamental truths that serve as the foundation for behavior that gets what you want out of life. So, the book can be broken right off the bat into three parts, you can learn about Ray’s background, or you can start on the part of principles for your life, or start on the part of principles for your work and business. But Ray’s the kind of guy that moves forward. If he makes mistakes, he learns from them and then he puts processes and procedures in. So that those that are along with him will learn about those mistakes through the processes and procedures, a very process-oriented type of person. His company is built on what he calls radical truth and transparency to the point where every meeting, every conference, every call, everything is recorded and they’ll go back and they’ll dissect if they have to reference parts of the conversations or whatever. It’s all recorded.

There’s complete transparency in the company and he also believes that, as far as a company, the company is built of culture and the people. And basically, that’s like the way that he has put together his principles. Along the way, he created many tools that help them with the radical truth and transparency. They make decisions based on believability. It’s a factor that they weigh-in, but they have a tool to build the believability and he calls it the dot collector. It’s a little complicated to try to explain in detail. But basically what it is, is it’s a tool that measures his people’s believability. And so they’ll have a way to reference a person’s decision on a certain problem and go all the way to reference, well, how much believability do we put into this one person?

And that is answered by his tool because it’s already collected. Another thing that he built along the way he called it an error log and every error that was made in the company is documented and then torn apart and learned from. So, the way that he approaches business is somewhat restricting to the kind of person that kind of freewheels it out there. I mean, he will not let go of a problem until it’s dissected in every which way, and then documented. A lot of documentation and everything involved with what he does. So, like an example might be in the heating and Air Conditioning business, your dispatchers perform a debrief at the end of every service call. And let’s just say that there’s a lot of busy-ness going on and that the dispatcher is in a hurry. He wants to get the tech to the next call. We’ll skip the debrief that would bring Ray Dalio’s, you know, multi-billion dollar organization to a complete stop. He wouldn’t allow it, one little simple thing this guy has the internal fortitude of no one I’ve ever seen before. Because there’s no way your typical human being can create this sort of organization that he’s created. And there would just never be a time when they would not debrief the technician in comparison terms {inaudible 09:37}.

David Heimer: He has an amazing set of people that are endorsing this book. I mean, first of all, he’s spoken at the Ted conference, which is you have to be a fairly significant person to speak there. Secondly, the list of people that are endorsing this book are amazing, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, Mike Bloomberg, Tony Robbins. You don’t get those endorsements trivially so a good choice.

Dave Rothacker: I suggest doing a YouTube search for him to get his Ted talk, because that way you’ll get, the 18-minute version has basically what I’m relating here as well. He also put together a fascinating YouTube video called How the Economic Machine Works and basically it’s exactly what it sounds like and I highly recommend checking out that YouTube video, How the Economic Machine Works. Another interesting thing real quick here with Ray Dalio and in the book Principles is that it was very important for him to transition his business over to the next CEO. And it’s not a perfect roadmap for someone to follow, but for any business owner, that’s always a concern. You want your business to live on, and there’s some good material in the book for people who are interested in succession at their companies.

David Heimer: Good. Alright, so book number two, Principles by Ray Dalio sounds good. Alright, what’s book number three?

Dave Rothacker: Okay, book number three, it’s probably my favorite. This is The Biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.

David Heimer: So, this is the same guy that did the Steve Jobs biography, and he’s done several others. So, I think he did Einstein and Ben Franklin and a few others. Okay, good.

Dave Rothacker: Excellent biographer, I’ve read all those books and he’s my most favorite biographer Walter Isaacson. Leonardo da Vinci was so well-rounded in so many disciplines that when you read anything about him, you’re immediately attracted to the segments of what he was into, at different disciplines and so forth. And I recently heard another industry person talking about reading Leonardo da Vinci, and she was fascinated by the fact that he never finished projects, thousands of projects that he started, he didn’t finish. So, if you’re a painter, what is discussed in the book on painting is just off the charts with rich knowledge and information. But for me, what attracts me to Leonardo da Vinci, and this is probably my fourth or fifth book that I’ve read on him, and that is his power to observe out in the world and then to make notebooks in a journal on what he observed in the world, and then to use his notebooks, to evolve ideas and build stuff, even his paintings. His paintings were – and I don’t like painting at all.

I’m just really not into painting, but he would be out into the world. He wanted to paint people, and so he would dissect bodies to learn about the anatomy and people in general and then he would make meticulous notes on that and sketches and diagrams and all that would evolve as he kept going over his notes. And then he would make sketches and say a painting that he wanted, like, the Mona Lisa, that and the Last Supper, are probably his two most famous paintings. And in his notebooks, you can see how the painting evolves.

And for me, the most fascinating thing about Leonardo is that he would go out into the world, observe, make meticulous notes, and then I’ll let those notes cultivate and incubate and brew. And then you would start to see how he would take bits from one, discipline this from another discipline, mesh them together and come up with ideas that ended up becoming inventions and ideas that would be inventions 2 – 300 years after he even died. It’s just a fascinating book. And for me, as I said, the highlight was basically his powers of observation and how he would develop that based on his note-taking.

David Heimer: And so it strikes me that you see a parallel to business ownership that there are lessons that can be gleaned from Leonardo da Vinci that would be applicable to somebody who is running a business. Is that true?

Dave Rothacker: Absolutely. I’ve been doing this David for 35 years, 40 years when my older daughter was first in daycare; we’d be dropping her off. And I would just observe and watch how they handled the kids and I was making notes on that back then, and just various things of how they were accomplishing moving the kids or whatever you were trying to do. And then, I’d make notes on it when I go home and then inevitably they would end up in some sort of a management thing that I was trying to work on at the time.

So, it’s basically just being observant to the world, following your fascinations and thinking in terms of, well, how could that apply to my business. Now, I would recommend if anyone follows along with the notebook and all about that, there’s another book that’s called How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Gelb. And that’s an excellent book to pick up on after you’ve read that biography to help kind of develop your note taking skills, your observing skills, and kind of follow through on what I was just talking about. It’s called How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Gelb.

David Heimer: Sounds good. I like this you not only have three top books of the year, but then you’ve got the follow-ups to them as well.

Dave Rothacker: Yes. And actually I do have more resources available based on these three books and if anyone is interested, I’d be more than happy to give you those resources. Just drop me an email at david.rothacker@gmail.com and that’s david.ROTHACKER@gmail.com.

David Heimer: Yes, that would be terrific and I’ve seen the resources that you’ve prepared in the past they’re always top notch. So if you guys are interested, I think Dave always provides awesome stuff. So, david.rothacker@gmail.com.

Dave Rothacker: You got it.

David Heimer: Alright, Dave Rothacker, thank you so much for doing this, this was terrific. It’s always a joy to talk with you and we’re going to do this again. I think we’ll probably do this every year probably and maybe we’ll do another visit with you sometime during the year and find out what books you’re reading, it’s always fascinating. You’re probably the most well-read person that I know. So thanks for doing this with us.

Dave Rothacker: Thank you very much, David.

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