you'll go ahead and mention your first name, last name,
and then the business that you run and or the book.
Now, my name is Ed Hadrum.
I spent the best part of my life on Wall Street,
basically about 60 years,
and I ended up as a CEO of an investment bank.
I still am the non-executive chairman
of a money management company in Boston,
but my main effort is in communicating ideas.
And my latest book, The Island of the Four Peas,
is a fable.
I've always been fascinated by fables.
Fables basically have changed the world.
You could argue that the Bible is a group of fables,
asebs fables, color-based travels,
and of course more recent ones like Who, My Cheese,
or the Celestine Prophecies.
Fables are a way of communicating ideas
which are less preachable, more digestible,
and also I think a fable traps you
into doing your own thinking.
And this fable basically is part of my crusade,
which my crusade is to young people,
seniors in high school or freshmen in college,
to really focus on themselves.
I'm trying to do this through university courses.
They actually have a couple of now that I've started,
so that in the freshman year,
a student basically reads my book and other books
and says, who am I?
Where do I wanna go?
How do I wanna get there?
Why do I wanna get there?
And carries that through their four years of college
or other kinds of technical schools.
And at the end, graduation gets a diploma
and has what I call a life design written in pencil,
so you can erase it and change,
because the fork's in the road.
But this fable basically starts with a young man
arriving on an island,
and you can tell suddenly that he's about 18 years old.
He meets a young lady later on in the book,
this young lady and a man travel these four villages.
And really, they're the questions that I want young people
to ask themselves.
It's a vocabulary for preparing for life.
I'll stop there because my daughter always says
that I answer questions too long.
She's like-
No, no.
No.
So how can someone begin applying the principles of the,
first tell me the four principles of the P.
The four principles are, find your passions,
and passions is an overused word,
but it's your likes, your dislikes, your talents,
and also your context.
Are you in Greenwich, Connecticut, or in Kiev, Ukraine?
You can't put your passions,
you have to put your passions into a context,
but passions is what drive you really.
Passions allow you to get up in the morning
and leap out of bed, climb two stairs at a time,
do things that you wouldn't normally do
if you have a passion for something.
So try to find your passions,
and the only way you'll find them is by testing,
very testing different things.
And your passions evolve over time,
I could spend some time on that if you'd like.
And principles, the second P is the principles,
find your principles.
What do you really stand for?
What are the rules you wanna follow?
What lines won't you cross as a person?
And as the earliest possible you can decide that,
the better off you are.
I can go into that in my lifetime as well.
I went to Catholic school for five years as a youngster
and got many of the principles, which I still carry with me.
So principles are important.
Also they change over time.
Some are kept and some are eliminated.
For example, on Wall Street,
I had principle that to live happy was to live hidden.
Stay out of the press, stay out of off television.
Don't talk to anybody outside the firm,
run your firm as the CEO, because it's a big enough job.
Now, of course, when I'm trying to communicate ideas
to the public, I have to abandon that principle.
And I have a second principle of, you know,
communicating ideas.
The third P is partners.
And I found that I was only as good
as the people I surround myself with all my life.
Most important partners, P1.
P1 is someone who can share your life with you,
who will support you.
And of course, that in my case is Barbara.
We've been married for 59 years
and without her I wouldn't be here today for sure.
But you have all kinds of partners.
Partners basically, I found that,
I found partners to do things I couldn't do.
Very important, like technology,
technic, if you would get us on this webcast.
So find partners who can do things you can't do.
Find partners who can do things better than you can do them.
And what you're seeing in my case,
find partners to do things that you'd really do well,
but you don't wanna do.
If you find those three kinds of partners, basically,
you end up doing things you do well, that you wanna do.
And that's the golden thing.
The fourth P is a very important one, is it's plans.
And find your plans.
You should write down all of these things,
because writing is the only really
definite form of communication.
Thinking is very fuzzy, talking's pretty fuzzy,
you forget what you said.
But when you write things down and look at them.
And in writing things down,
look at the world you're going to exist in.
If you're 20, 18, 19, 20 years old,
what's gonna happen in the next 20, 30, 40 years?
What wave can you find?
What theme will take you in the right direction?
If you look at successful people,
personal in terms of happiness,
they always find a way that they can ride.
In my case, I spent 20 years on Wall Street
under enormous upward pressure on stock market.
I took over the CEO's job in 1983,
and in the next 20 years, we grew it 20 times.
But the stock market was up 10 times.
Had the wind in my back.
And you can go through all kinds of
non-profit and profit operations,
you'll find out you should really study
what's going to happen in the world.
And in my book, I go through that process.
And then there's a fifth very subtle P,
not mentioned in the book, called purpose.
When you get down on all these four Ps,
you end up with purpose.
And in the book, it also goes through
what I call the four realms of life.
It's self, family, work, and community.
Community is my work for giving back.
And what you do with these four realms,
you put the four Ps into each realm.
In itself, you find your passion,
your principles, your partners, your plans.
In your family, you do the same thing.
In your work, you do the same thing.
And of course, in community and giving back,
you do the same thing.
Now that gives you a matrix.
So what I'm trying to create is basically a vocabulary,
Srivanka, for your inner voice.
See, there's only two constants in the world.
It's not death and taxes, because death only happens once
and taxes only start when you're in your 20s,
I guess, if ever.
And what's really, two constants are your inner voice,
it's always there, childhood to death, and change.
And what I'm trying to give people is a vocabulary.
Simple vocabulary for handling change.
That's a long answer, again, to a short question.
So I've violated it for twice.
No, no, I love it.
I love it.
So starting with the first P, which you stated was passion.
When we think of passion, how can someone identify
and prioritize their passion in life?
Because it's easy to say it,
but how does someone identify that and prioritize it?
It's testing, basically it's testing, and they do change.
Let me just, the only thing you have is your own experience.
In high school, your passions start to come.
Some people, Tiger Woods got his passions at three years old,
and some of the people, you're not until 80
until you catch them,
but most people end up with their passions.
Srivanka, you can probably remember this.
In high school, somewhere 15, 18 years old,
I ended up with, my passions were baseball, basketball,
math, science, and girls.
That was my passion at the time.
When I got to college, those morphed,
baseball and basketball lasted through my freshman year,
and I found I wasn't gonna be a professional athlete,
so I let those go and moved into extracurricular activities.
The math and science started out in engineering.
We tested physics about it, that wasn't for me.
Got back in engineering, but that's what didn't happen.
And these extracurricular activities ended up,
I found some of my passions that I didn't know about.
For example, in my junior year,
we decided to start a humor magazine,
and this was against the principles of the president,
the provost, the librarian, just about everybody.
But I put 30 people together,
and we created a humor magazine like this,
the lampoon at Harvard University at the time,
because I felt that Rochester, especially engineers,
it was a place where fun went to die
because they were really serious.
I mean, we flunked out half the engineers almost every year,
and it was painful, but with a humor magazine,
a little humor wouldn't hurt anybody.
Well, I found that putting people together
was one of my passions.
And then inside that passion,
I found something, and I found this out later on in life,
I really got a kick out of helping people
do better than they thought they could.
And that was one of my successful passions
in my business career.
So that was my passions.
And I think everybody's gotta sort of study their passions.
And I had a passion for physics in my freshman year,
so I took an advanced physics course,
and sure enough, it didn't work.
I looked at the people, they were smarter than I was,
they worked harder than I was,
they weren't my people.
So I shifted back into engineering,
but that was a passion I thought I had.
And one of the problems with passions
is that you put words on them,
you've gotta find out what those words mean.
What is a physicist?
What does he or she do in the morning?
So that's the kind of thing that I expect to be able to do.
I had a violent passion when I went to business school
for international business.
I loved getting on a plane,
I loved going to a foreign country.
I had learned French and Spanish.
I really wanted to be an international businessman,
so I took a job in Belgium, 1963,
between my two years to business school.
I tested it out, turned out I had a good time,
but it was a bad place to be.
All the companies in Europe were,
you had to learn Flemish and French,
you had to speak very well.
Most of the companies in Europe
were basically family companies,
and you really couldn't get ahead.
And so then the second summer, I went to Central America,
and I learned Spanish,
and I worked with companies down there.
They were too small,
it was very corrupt and very difficult.
So I found out that I was very too early
being an international businessman,
so I tested that passion,
and I kept it the rest of my life,
because 20 years later, when I was running my own company,
we did expand internationally.
But I had to delay that passion for nearly 20 years,
because it was too early.
And so that's why I find people
should be testing their passions,
and trying them out,
and some people will find them,
like Tiger Woods found his passion,
spent his whole life playing golf.
Other people find passions at different points in their life,
also change passions.
Look at my passion.
My passion was running a company,
and now my passion is running, really writing books.
I've got a third book that I wanna put out eventually.
And it's, you pivot.
And by the way, people like you,
who're gonna live to 100,
are gonna have to pivot a number of times.
And this is a real change in the human experience.
Take my grandfather, not my grandfather,
but a grandfather,
built in the early 20th century.
They got their degree,
they went to a General Motors or Exxon,
spent the whole life there, retired, went to Florida.
They couldn't pivot, they just stayed.
Now you're gonna have to pivot,
because the world is changing so rapidly.
Absolutely.
So that's the passion part of it.
So in that, I hear that you're gonna have to test out
your passion,
and your passion also is based off of the experiences
that you have as well.
Defining the words, you say, I wanna be X,
I wanna do Y, test it out,
see whether or not it's what you think it is.
Absolutely.
So then when it comes to the principles,
what core principles should guide us to pursue our passions?
So-
No, again, might take my own personal experience.
And you know, I was raised in a Catholic school
as a youngster, you know, there was a simple passion.
One was the golden rule.
And she taught it with the golden ruler.
If you got out of line, you got smacked on your neck,
on your knuckles, I can still feel it.
They threw in the 10 commandments, you know,
and they've made it very clear
that if you do the right thing in life,
you know, you will basically go to the good place.
If you do the wrong things in life,
you're gonna go to the other place.
So that starts out with age, you know, seven, eight, nine,
so forth.
Religion is taking a little bit of a backseat
in our society, which is a mistake.
You know, I think it's a very good thing to have.
But all throughout my life, I collected these principles.
You know, they really helped me.
And then as you go through life, you pick them up
and you put them down.
I used to write them and put them on my wall.
For example, you know, the principle that I think
really helped me enormously with my work was,
once I found out I really enjoyed people, you know,
doing better than they thought they could,
the principle I established was you could do
almost anything, it's a cliche,
if you don't worry about who gets the credit.
That's very important.
And then the second thing that principle
even got more sophisticated, as well as I was concerned,
you start to deflect credit.
You know, when anybody says to you,
Ed, you did a good job, you immediately think of
who really helped you do it and make a point to say,
you know, it really was Jose and Mary.
It wasn't all me, you know.
That's very important.
That starts to reflect in your whole experience.
So principles became, you know, very important.
You collect them all, you know, you collect principles
like the lines that I won't cross,
the rules I'm going to follow, put them up on my wall,
and things I wanted to achieve.
And you know, what's my biggest principle right now?
It's gratitude.
You know, I really am grateful for everything
that has happened to me in my life.
And that's a very strong principle.
And when you're grateful about something,
you really feel better.
So there's a, but principles basically are collected
all through your life and they evolve, they change.
Some of us, the one in Wall Street,
so the happy is the hidden has been discarded
because it really doesn't fit with what I'm doing right now.
But it's something you have to collect.
And again, writing them down and looking at them
is very, very important.
I really like how you said that
you do almost anything when you forget
about who gets the credit.
And I believe that so many people are looking for credit,
you know, to be acknowledged when we tend to do something,
especially when we do something extremely well,
there is an acknowledgement of to, you know,
say it was me and I just really think
that that was really powerful.
When it comes to partners, which is your third one,
how do you choose the right partners
to support and enhance your journey?
I know that you said you've been married for,
you said 50?
59 years.
How can one do that?
Well, it's a little bit of, you know,
there's some luck involved, but there is obviously,
you know, you have to basically have some
of the same values.
I think my wife and I are very different in a lot of ways,
but our values are the same.
And here again is testing, and young people do do testing.
And you can't do much testing
because you're very different people
when you're 20 years old than when you're 40 years old.
So the first thing you do is you find someone
who is, you know, compatible, obviously.
And I, when my son asked my grand, my only son-in-law,
asked for the hand of my daughters,
I said to him, you have, there are four things, Jimmy,
that you have to have.
One, you gotta love my daughter,
and that's an emotional experience.
If you can pull that off, you start off way ahead.
Second of all, you gotta be committed.
That's an intellectual decision.
It's not emotional.
You say, I'm committed to this relationship.
And third of all, you gotta recognize
that you both will have to compromise at points in time
where she'll decide and you'll decide,
you come together on a decision.
Then finally, you have to sacrifice.
I said, Jimmy, someday you'll have to do something
you don't wanna do because she wants to do it.
If you can get away with those four things,
then basically you'll find the right partner.
And he agreed that those four things were kind of in place.
And I look at the people's lives.
Then the second thing you have to do,
you gotta, once you decide on a partner,
the part P1, different than business partners,
but P1, the most important part,
you've got to have one,
one of the young people asked me,
how'd you stay married so long?
I said, one very simple word, listen.
You've gotta listen to the person you're married to
or you're basically having a relationship with
and also spend time alone.
I recommend strongly when you're first married
for the first five or even 10 years,
so at least once a year, take a car trip
for four or five days or go to a place
where you're both alone where you can talk.
And cars are very good because you're sort of stuck together
for four or five days.
And my wife and I did that.
And we used to go every summer when the kids were in camp,
we'd go on a car trip and we spent four or five days.
Because the reason for that is very simple, people change.
I find being on Wall Street,
most of the divorces that I've talked,
I've had a lot of divorces on Wall Street,
they basically woke up one morning
and found they were living with a stranger
and it was all their fault
because they didn't pay attention.
You spent five or six or seven years working in a company
and went home at night and went to sleep,
this woman started or this man started to change
and you didn't pay attention to it, you didn't adjust.
So that's important.
Now that's the P1 partner.
The other partner is basically you try to find talents
that basically compliment yours.
Whenever you take a job, whether it's,
if it's a real work position, like I was,
I found a partner at Lehman Brothers when I was there,
six foot five Dartmouth fellow,
we spent 35 years together, he did things I couldn't do,
he did things better than I could do them,
he did things I did well that I didn't want to do.
He was a great partner, okay, then that was very important.
Now when you shift from work to community,
you're basically involved in very different kinds of partners.
They always say, well, get a good salesman
to raise money for a university.
No, no, no, no, totally different person,
totally different talents.
So each time you make a move on something,
make sure you recognize the requirements
of that particular position, of that partnership
and what you, and you personally also,
what you may do very well in certain kinds of things
in business and very poorly in certain kinds of things
in an emocenary or charitable experience.
So that's how you select your partners
and I think that's very important,
but I found also that only as good as the people
I surround myself with, my life shows us
when I had no partners, I failed.
When I had the wrong partners, I failed.
When I had the right partners, I succeeded.
That is amazing.
So partner one, luck is involved
and that's more on a relationship.
It's a little bit involved and it's definitely
an emotional, intellectual and a compromising
committed relationship and that P2 is finding talent
that you may not have, right, or that compliment yours
and those are two great points to that
because when you do find those, I think that things
tend to feel a little bit better about how you're going
through and how you're getting through.
So I definitely think those are, I'm learning so much Ed.
This is crazy.
So we got the last P which is plans.
What strategies do you recommend for creating
and executing effective plans?
Well, first of all, you obviously have to look at yourself
and see, but the plan starts off by looking basically
at history, as looking ahead, you've got your passions,
you've got your principles, you know, I think about
some of the partners that you wanna have.
How do those all fit in to the history?
That what's gonna happen in your lifetime?
And in my book, the person goes into a tunnel
and he can take the four drivers of what I call society.
There are many more drivers.
The drivers are the economy, the government,
technology and geography.
There are four of them that are very important.
And you can take each one of those and say,
what are they determining?
The government is moving in a direction.
Do you wanna follow that direction?
What wave does that give you?
Like, let's take geography, which is a simple one.
You know, my son was interested in real estate.
He got his master's degree in architecture.
He went to Denver in the 90s.
He's been there for 30 years.
Has he missed?
Couldn't miss.
Real estate went straight up, no problem.
All right?
I have a classmate from Harvard Business School
went to Hong Kong in 1964, went into real estate.
You know, my grandson just moved from Chicago
to Bellingham, Washington, where he basically
is much more comfortable.
So, geography has a problem.
Now, technology is the one that's really changed the world
since the beginning of time.
I mean, that's, so gotta say, what part of technology
would I like to play in?
Is it healthcare technology?
Is it electronic?
Is it now you have AI and all that sort of stuff?
What areas of those things are gonna grow very rapidly?
And it's not only business.
I use my own example.
I got into the mutual fund business in 1964.
It's a tiny little business, like the company I went for
had 300 million of assets under management.
Today it has two trillion.
So, you ride that wave.
But I take also a friend of mine who graduated
in a medical school with a specialty
in the curvature of the spine.
So, what did he pick out?
He could have gone to any hospital in America.
Went to Ethiopia, went to Mother Teresa's clinic,
and over the last 25 or 30 years, he had become,
he was one of the two doctors who could do curvature
of the spine in almost all of Africa.
And you can see his brochure.
He's changed and saved so many lives
because he found a wave.
The wave was the need, what I call latent demand
for what you could do really well.
And that makes happiness as far as I'm concerned.
If you get on a wave and you read any great,
most successful people you find out got on this wave,
that's what, I want you to write that plan,
write it down, and then put checkpoints in it
so that you say, this is what I'm checking out.
For me and for the system.
And sometimes you have to delay your enthusiasm.
Your passion may not fit for the particular point in time.
You have to take another road.
I was an engineer for a while
because that was the place I could get a job.
Then I went to business school.
I was able to change my direction and find a new wave.
Actually, in my engineering,
I picked an air hit called plastics.
And I was in plastics before Dustin Hoffman
because it was a new field.
In fact, the word that described plastics
weren't even in existence when I went in.
They said, I'm calling them polypropylene and polyethylene.
They called them high facts and pro facts.
So, you know, so people, I always have had a vision
of basically moving into something
that's gonna be bigger someday.
And I think that's one of the things you do in your plan.
But you also, you know, in my plans chapter,
there is a section on luck.
And you know, being born at the right time
in the right place is still pretty damn important.
And sometimes you have to move
and sometimes you don't have to move.
So in the plans chapter,
there's a number of processes you go through
to figure out what your plans are.
And then we make you in that chapter,
write down your plans.
Because I think, and also the plan should be written
in pencil because as you go through life, life changes.
You know, and you gotta race it and start over again.
But with a plan, I think you got a better chance
of making that turn on the road.
I have a cliche also, you know,
let's make sure the turn of the road
isn't the end of the road.
That's very important.
Sometimes people get a turn and they say, it's over.
No, no, you look at your plan,
you race a few things and you make the turn on the road.
I tell you the challenging part in all of this
is trying to get everything you're saying.
You say I'm the professional,
but I tell you this is learning you don't get anywhere
and I'm hearing it from you.
And you know what's interesting is that
there's a lot of things that you've spoken about, right?
In these four P's, but in the four P's,
you mentioned four other things at least three times.
So is four your favorite number?
Well, you know, you look back in history,
four has a sort of thing.
By the way, I haven't found anything about you.
Who are you?
I, I'm, interesting enough, when you said Denver,
that's where my home is.
I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.
And I decided to get out of there maybe around 22, 23.
I moved to Jacksonville, Florida.
I worked at the Mayo Clinic, which was,
I tell you something completely different,
but I had a whole different outlook on life.
And then moved back to Denver, Colorado.
And then I came out here in 2006, I believe, yes.
2006 to San Antonio.
Here is, where is here?
San Antonio, Texas.
Oh, San Antonio, Texas, okay.
Yes, yes.
So I've been here for 18 years now on August 6th.
I was here for 18 years.
And I have delved in a lot, I guess I could say.
Well, I mean, I'm only 45.
So enough, right?
I have some experiences.
One of my most favorite jobs was
I was an organ tissue and eye coordinator.
And I did that for about seven, eight years.
And that was actually just speaking
with families over the telephone only.
So I had the opportunity of speaking with them
and of course asking for their donations.
But the hours in which I had to reach them
was if someone was on a ventilator, I only had four hours.
And if someone had completely passed
and was not on a ventilator, I had 12 hours
in order for our procurement team to make it out there.
Wow. To retrieve the tissue, yes.
And so in that field and in that business,
I learned the art of listening to emotions,
their mindset and where they were over the telephone only.
And I tell you, Ed, that was something that I don't,
I would not be who I am today if I did not do that.
And then I would-
You had a passion for listening though too.
I still do as to the reasons why.
You're doing what you're doing, exactly right.
Exactly.
See, you have your passion for listening.
You gotta find a methodology of utilizing that passion
and you found it.
And you know what?
This was just by chance.
I met Jackson at a networking event because I am a realtor.
So I went all the way from that end all the way to this end
and it just fell into my lap.
And one thing I realized that every job that I have taken
was based upon people and not actually the job.
It's the love of people that I have.
And I really enjoy listening.
I really enjoy learning.
And I realized that that's imperative to my growth.
You're planning, you would put, when you make decisions,
people at the top of the list.
Other people would pick something else.
But also you're picking people
that are taking you in a direction too.
That's the other thing.
You're not just picking the people.
You pick the direction, then you find the right person.
Wow.
Okay.
And you know what?
I go through life.
I won't even say we.
I go through life just by faith, number one.
That's my first is by faith, number one.
But I realized when my faith is put first,
then everything else just follows.
And it follows in a direction
that I don't have to question.
Because if it just happens,
I realized that there's a purpose in that.
And me getting into this and being on Vision Pros Live,
there is an abundance of knowledge and information
that I'm learning.
And although I'm a podcast professional, which I am not,
I tell you that I don't take any of this for granted.
I take nothing for granted.
Ed, running into you, receiving this book
and knowing that I have some stuff I gotta do.
Yeah.
You got it.
Well, if you like it, you've got to give me a review too.
Absolutely.
It's so funny.
I was like, how can I get this in right when I get it?
And it was the weekend just flew by.
But Ed, I just want to thank you.
I know that we had a rough time getting on here.
And this book is going to bring value
to anyone who chooses to read it and or listen to it.
And I believe it is on Amazon.
Is it anywhere else?
Amazon, yeah.
Why don't you just put my name in
and you get the two books.
They're very nice.
They're the only agent in the world.
But you know, interesting, just one more minor thing.
I see what you believe as I believe.
Life is flow.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.