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The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Written 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 Careers Economics Management Management & Leadership Personal Success
Episodes
  • 711: Seth Godin - Creating Tension, Solving Problems, the Savannah Bananas, Leading Without Authority, Using AI, Hidden Entanglements, and Getting Unstuck (The Knot)

    711: Seth Godin - Creating Tension, Solving Problems, the Savannah Bananas, Leading Without Authority, Using AI, Hidden Entanglements, and Getting Unstuck (The Knot)
    Oct 18 2026
    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. Deeply stuck on everything else. It's the word "but" that traps you. We only feel stuck when we want one thing and another, and won't be happy without both. Swap the but for an and, or admit which one you're trading away. Six to nine ideas a day, one gets published. Most never get past three words. If you need the perfect idea before you begin, you will never begin. Find the room inside the system, then leave when the system is the obstacle. Jesse Cole inherited minor league baseball's constraints and worked inside them: ridiculous name, puns, a cheering section of seventy-year-old women called the Nana Bananas, players recruited for charisma over hitting. Years of sellouts, home and away. Then the league itself became the thing in the way, so he left it. Multiple things fail at every Bananas show, every single night. That's the price. The question worth sitting with is what it actually costs you to not be perfect. If Seth's book The Practice were one page long, it would say give up your commitment ...
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    47 mins
  • 710: Ravi Gupta - The Anti-Dabbler's Guide to Mastering One New Skill Every Year, Why Presence Isn't Enough, Bourdain's Masterclass in Humility, and Pairing Reasonable Goals With Delusional Ones

    710: Ravi Gupta - The Anti-Dabbler's Guide to Mastering One New Skill Every Year, Why Presence Isn't Enough, Bourdain's Masterclass in Humility, and Pairing Reasonable Goals With Delusional Ones
    Oct 11 2026
    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. The second challenge is the one most people skip: get feedback from someone who actually knows how to do it, then do it again. Protecting your time is on you. From Neil Strauss, in a writing group Ravi joined during his writing year: "It's nobody's responsibility but your own to protect your time." The complaint that nobody respects your boundaries is a complaint about your own boundaries. Which means the conversation has to be explicit. You take Saturday, I take Sunday. One of us has mornings. I've carved out 45 minutes and you know about it. Writing is especially hard to defend because it doesn't look like work. Treat your session time like a flight. Strauss again, this time on writer's block. Nobody waits to feel motivated before going to the airport. You wake up early, sit in the security line, get wedged next to someone taking up too much room, and you never treat any of it as optional. Put the sessions on your calendar and defend them the same way, whatever your thing is. The question that ended ...
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • 709: Vanessa Van Edwards - How to Connect with Anyone, Master Small Talk, and Ask the 9 Power Questions That Deepen Every Relationship

    709: Vanessa Van Edwards - How to Connect with Anyone, Master Small Talk, and Ask the 9 Power Questions That Deepen Every Relationship
    Oct 4 2026
    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 re-storying questions. Who am I now? Who do I want to be? How do I get from here to there? How do I make change stick? Who can help me? Be a loud liker. A friend asked Vanessa to assess a date named Tim. Her read: meh. Before she could say so, the friend told her Tim had loved her, thought she was fun, and bought all her books. Vanessa's opinion of Tim reversed on the spot. She was embarrassed by how fast. The lesson from Tim: when someone clearly likes you, you feel at ease, you feel more likable, and you like them back. Very few of our impressions of people are fixed. You can't like too loudly if it's authentic. Vanessa's hot take. Gushing is fine. The only failure mode is inauthenticity, or liking so loudly you prevent the conversation from happening. Warmth, then competence. Susan Fiske's research, quoted directly: "Competence without warmth leaves people feeling suspicious." Leading with data and numbers reads like you're hiding something. Warmth is the lubricant that lets people accept your ...
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    53 mins
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