flâneur

Founders: #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography)

podscripts.co · 13,596 words · saved by 1 readers

What I learned from reading Driven: An Autobiography by Larry Miller. ---- [1:01] I decided I had to be extremely good at something. [2:47] I’m sorry to say, neglecting my family to do all of the above. I worked and worked and worked, day after day, night after night, dawn to bedtime. [5:23] He owned movie theaters, auto dealerships, a motorsports park with a world-class racetrack, a movie production company, an advertising agency, ranches, restaurants, TV and radio stations, a real-estate development company, an NBA franchise, a professional baseball team, an NBA arena, sports apparel stores—nearly 90 companies in all, in six states, with 7,000 employees, all under the umbrella of The Larry H. Miller Group, which produces $3.2 billion in sales annually, ranking it among the 200 largest privately owned companies in the United States. [7:23] The chain of events that began my entrepreneurial career was sparked by three failures: I dropped out of college, got laid off, and got demoted. [35:22] It’s excellence for the sake of excellence. It just feels good being excellent, doing your best, learning everything you can about anything to which you apply yourself and then doing that thing

[00:00:00] I can remember the moment my life changed forever. I had an epiphany one morning, and nearly every detail of that moment is burned into the hard drive of my brain. It was March 1971, and I was at work, managing the parts department at a Toyota dealership in Colorado. [00:00:18] I had just taken a parts order over the phone from a body shop, and I was checking to see what parts I had in stock when, like a bucket of cold water, it hit me. Here I was, 27 years old, married with two children and one on the way, and I was responsible for raising and supporting those children,…

related reading