A World Renowned Human – Jeremy Barr

What makes a world renowned founder and human who can go on to impact billions of human lives?

This is the question I have decided to base my entire life around and so I have a deep science for it which I will give a deep highlight of. My life goal is to impact 3 billion people so I spend every waking minute towards this goal. One quick sentence on my experience that brought me to this…I’ve been an operator at million $ and billion $ companies, CTO, COO, 2x CEO, VC Investor, AI for the FBI & Secret Service, managed teams of teams of people, written algorithms and billion scale code and became a bit of a socialite. This uniquely shaped my world, my goal and my plan. The idea is that to impact 3 billion people you need scalable initiatives. Scalable initiatives are typically run by groups of people we call companies.

Running companies to high scale success cannot be based on product or product lineup because that mutates based on employees, customers and market. High company success cannot come down to founder skills like engineering, marketing, etc because those skills dwarf when you have 5 employees, 500 employees, etc. So the core of a company is the founders ability to be what I call a “gravity ball” (there is a 10 minute video on my LinkedIn about it). At a high level a gravity ball founder is one who has the ability to attract high quality variety partners, customers, employees and investors particularly at scale. In order to do that one must be able to “communicate to” and “relate to” a wide variety of people…people of different genders, ages, income levels, education levels, countries, cultures, political parties, personalities and more.

But what makes someone able to “communicate to” and “relate to” that much global variety? It’s the ability to listen in a conversation and I don’t just mean listen to the verbal. I mean listen to the non-verbal as well. Listen to their eye movement, body language, tone of voice and micro expressions. You can’t communicate anything of value to someone until you FULLY listen. And you can’t listen until you have quieted your insecurities and become aware of the many colored lenses that you see the world with and hear people with.

So we start with listening and from listening we develop empathy (a key leadership trait). With listening and empathy we see differences between how we see and interpret the world and how others see and interpret the world.

We hear the same words and go through the same experiences…yet experience things differently. We start to understand different life journeys instead of just getting caught up in our own very small universe. This allows us to see beneath the words people use and understand the life journey they have been through that leads them to use the language and actions they do. This allows us to truly communicate and relate to them more.

Through seeing all the beauty and pain across people we develop a pattern recognition that can bring about conviction towards some version of increasing beauty and decreasing pain in the world. Through seeing people on a deeper level we are also now forming long lasting relationships as we traverse their insecurities, understand their life WHY and find alignments. Relationships, camaraderie and community is one of the ways we develop resilience (combined energy forces)…another key trait needed in a founder journey.

Most companies fail today, not from product or market issues, but from insufficiently skilled teams that were formed by insufficiently skilled founders at a “human seed trait” level…listening skills in the non-verbal being a highly important core one that has a cascade to all the others.

So with listening being one of the most core human traits…how do we identify who has it. It doesn’t exist sufficiently in people that cut you off (wait 0.5 to 1 second after someone says a statement for you to say your thing). It does exist in people that have listening eyes. It also exists in people that ask lots of questions…particularly deeper questions. We “hear” listening when someones tone of voice changes in response to the emotional tone of the other person. We “hear” listening when we see micro expression changes in alignment with what is being said by another person.

This listening to listening is adaptive to ADHD, introverts, extroverts, cultures and more because you establish a new baseline with every person (the first 15 seconds of a conversation can be a baseline for the next 45 seconds if you want to get really nuanced) and you confirm with questions in the verbal space.

It’s also defensible when you practice it because you can tell if someone is faking. I call it the “consistency five” when words, tone, body language, actions and time all align in high fidelity. Authenticity has defensibility levels…it’s not binary.

So if we wrap up this “deep highlight” of the much “deeper people science”…we would say THE MOST IDEAL founder (for a massive vision) is one with extreme vision clarity, great A/B testing science (from great experiment listening), great listening skills in the verbal and non-verbal space, is a really well rounded human who can communicate and relate to a global variety of people, has delusional positivity (mathematically supported but not enough space to explain here), has insecurities solved, has conviction, enjoys the process of the founder journey challenge (not get caught up in mental stress that can come from always being focused on a goal in the future vs the present moment now), can put aside the product focus and keep the focus on the humans being affected, can embrace “timeline oneness” (understand that just like your past is all part of you so is your future and in this lens your entire timeline being one shows you that you have everything you can ever want because it’s already part of you (your timeline) and what’s better is you still have space to create more of what is part of you…yet it is already part of you…of your timeline – you can use that positive emotion to propel you further as well as allow you to breathe and enjoy the moment).

The best thing a founder can do to become better at any point in time…is not read another book, listen to another podcast or cram in another task…it’s to go talk to another human on planet earth and connect.

Go forget about you, your company, your product, etc and just listen to another human. Take in their world. It is through others that we understand our selves deeper and we understand the universe deeper.