Ted Leonsis
Ted Leonsis traces his remarkable path to success and self-actualization. He is the CEO of Monumental Sports, a former AOL executive, and the author of The Business of Happiness. Find him at monumentalsports.com.
Transcript
Ted Leonsis:
And who defined winning as making you happy? Making money as making you happy? That's a societal more that we know is wrong. And as you get older, you want to be able to look back and say, "I've arrived now."
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today I get to talk to Ted Leonsis, an incredibly successful businessman who embodies the American dream. He's the son of immigrants who fled Greece and sought a new life here in the United States. His career has been filled with fascinating twists and turns, but now he owns multiple sports teams, including the Washington Wizards and the Capitals. He's quick to point out luck played a role in his personal story, but make no mistake: he worked hard constantly putting himself in the arena as a true leader. Ted shares what has guided and fueled him in his book, "The Business of Happiness: Six Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Work and Life." He reveals these secrets and more, and I learned a ton from this conversation. I'm excited for you to hear his story.
Thank you very much for joining us today. We really appreciate you taking the time.
Ted Leonsis:
Where are you now? Where are you located?
Ted Roosevelt V:
I am in your--- not your actual birthplace, but your birth borough of Brooklyn.
Ted Leonsis:
Yeah?
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yeah. Not as much awards and footballs and various sports memorabilia as you have behind you.
Ted Leonsis:
Well, I just took this off the wall to show you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Ah! I love it.
Ted Leonsis:
This is "the man in the arena." "It's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles." Honestly, this is such a meaningful thing for people in sports where every moment of every day you are failing and you are booed, right? You make the Hall of Fame. If you bat 300 in baseball, it means you've failed seven times. And I have that as a constant reminder on what our life is about, but at the end of the day, it's--- "who neither the no victory nor defeat"--- I said, those are sports writers and business writers.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's true. It's amazing how often that speech comes up or that speech gets referenced, particularly in sports. It really sings to athletes in a lot of ways.
Ted Leonsis:
It sings to owners too.
Ted Roosevelt V:
[laughter] Let's start with sports then. You own a number of sports teams, including the Wizards, the Caps, the Mystics... and I'm wondering about your inspiration as a child. I know Lowell, Massachusetts is part of your story, but you spent really the formative years in New York City.
Ted Leonsis:
I grew up in Brooklyn. I went to public school, PS 169, and both my mom and dad worked. And so you'd get out of school at three o'clock, your parents wouldn't get home 'til six or six-thirty, so you'd go into the park and you'd play basketball or baseball. And so at an early age, sports became very endemic to my worldview and competition, teamwork, discipline.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What were the early sports for you? What were the ones that you really gravitated towards?
Ted Leonsis:
Well, basketball was my game. The city parks would have the rims up and all you needed was a ball and sneakers. That's why soccer is so popular, football around the world---you don't need much. And you had a team and a coach. You did okay in school and then in your life's pursuits. If you participated as a spectator and you sat outside the arena, bad things happen.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And could you have imagined in those early days--- I mean, were you the type of person that thought sort of great success might come to you, that you could own a sports team, a professional sports franchise, or was that just kind of way beyond the horizon for a 12-year-old version of you?
Ted Leonsis:
Oh, that was very laughable. My dad was immigrant from Greece and he did serve in the war and then when he got out, did not pursue the GI Bill and got a job as a waiter.
And my mom, who's also Greek, was 10 years younger than my dad. She grew up in Lowell and she was a high school grad as well. We rented an apartment on 44th Street between fifth and sixth avenues in Brooklyn. And so all the people around us, our community, they were truck drivers, or they worked in the delicatessen and my neighborhood got very, very rough. At some point, my best friend, next door neighbor--- you know, I walked to school with him---became addicted to drugs and was shot and killed by a policeman. He was trying to rob a pharmacy and my parents said, we've got to get you out of this neighborhood. And we moved back to Lowell. I was just a sophomore in high school, so that was a real big change for me. And sports was really the only thing that kept me together.
Ted Roosevelt V:
When I've heard you talking about your childhood, hard work's been a part of you for a long time. Even at a very young age, would somebody have described you as a hard worker?
Ted Leonsis:
Yeah, I'd say productive worker.
Ted Roosevelt V:
There is a difference!
Ted Leonsis:
Yeah, the saying, if you want something done, give it to the busiest person. I think that's always been my outlook. The way that you did well in school was you did extra credit, extra work, and so being able to juggle a lot of things. My mom and dad didn't let me watch television. I read a lot. I was very productive with my time and frankly, it's powered a lot of my career pursuits, like: how can you own multiple teams? I get asked. How can you have a private equity fund? How can you make movies? How can you write books and keep it all going? And it's, well I sleep five, six hours a day. So you just do the math. If you got 18 hours a day to be productive and there's seven days a week, you can do an incredible amount. I remember when I came, when we moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, we lived in a suburb, if you will, and I didn't have a car, and so it's when I started my entrepreneurial career. I had no skills. I went to the library and I found a book, "How to Mow Lawns." Black and white drawings and---
Ted Roosevelt V:
The precursor for "Mowing Lawns for Dummies"?
Ted Leonsis:
Yeah, exactly. So I was knocking on people's doors and asking if I could mow their lawn, and one guy answered the door and he was intrigued by my pitch and that I had this book and he said, have you ever mowed a lawn before? And I said, no, but I've been reading this book and would you like the Wembley cut? And he said, go ahead, knock yourself out. Be careful though, and if you do a good job, you can do it once a week. 25 bucks. His name was James Shannon and I was determined to be the best mower of lawns on the planet. I probably took me five hours to mow this guy's lawn and I had a scissors and I was on my knees cutting the edges and I'd see him looking out in the curtain. One time he had his wife come and they were kind of smiling and looking, and probably six weeks into it, he said, you thinking about college? And I said, not really. And he said, you are fastidious and you're hardworking, and Georgetown could use a boy like you. The Jesuits would admire your stick-with-it-ness. And so he got me an application. I filled out the application, but I got accepted. And the first time I ever stepped foot in Washington DC and on the campus of Georgetown was the day I enrolled basically.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's amazing.
Ted Leonsis:
So that guy isn't at home when I knock on the door and then I don't exceed his expectations. I don't go to Georgetown. I probably don't go to college and I don't own the teams. So I look at that little break that man gave me really had unbelievable repercussions, and it's powered a lot of my mentoring and offering opportunities to people. And what's the differentiator? If they're earnest and they work real hard and exceed the expectations, right, then you want to say, oh, I'll go an extra yard for you to help.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm interested because you mentioned that you wanted to be the best mower of lawns on the planet, and that's in sharp contrast I think to a lot of people who might've approached that as, I need to make a few dollars to buy a car or whatever the sort of motivation is and get out of here as quickly as possible and maybe do as many as I can until I can get the car. Where did that impulse or where did that instinct come from for you? Do you have a sense?
Ted Leonsis:
I think it's the immigrant culture, if you will. My last name is Leotsakos, that's the original name. And back in the day when the Ottomans were invading Greece, people didn't have names and the invading prince told his men, who are these guys? They fight like lions. And so everyone in Sparta took the name Leo, "lion," and so that set like the etymology, if you will, of the whole village's names. We fight like lions. We have to be strong. And I think the ethnic culture was work really, really hard. Nothing bad will come from you working hard and take advantage of the opportunity. So I think culturally that's how it was brought up through the family and that carried over well into college. And I had some very wealthy roommates. Their grandfather went to college and their father and mother went to college and they had careers. And I'd look at my roommates sometimes and they'd sleep and miss a class, and I would say, I've had to take out loans to go to school that I'm going to have to pay. Why would I want to miss a class that I'm paying for? But their moms and dads were legacies and they were paying the bills. So I learned that kind of value at a young age.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Are you the type of person that can sort of blend into any room you walk into? Did it put a chip on your shoulder? I'm sort of trying to get into your head in that moment when you show up on campus, and this is a different world in many ways in terms of what you grew up with.
Ted Leonsis:
I had huge imposter syndrome, that's what you would call it now. I was really scared. Could I compete at this level? And at Georgetown, you have to do a junior thesis, a multidisciplinary thesis. So, because I worked in the library, I said, okay, my number one job today will be find the smallest book in the library to read. And I had a mentor, Father Joseph Durkin, and I went to see Father Durkin, I said, I read Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. He grilled me on it, I wasn't very articulate, he told me to read it again and read something else by Hemingway. And I found another book Across the River and Into the Trees, and it was 300 pages instead of a hundred pages. Old Man and the Sea, he got all these accolades, won Pulitzer Prizes. It was his bestselling book. He made a lot of money, but it was written at the end of his career, right before he took his own life. But I bet you he was failing later in his career and he had written this early on, maybe as a long form article, and he took it out and freshened it up, and that's how he made his money. Father Durkin said, that's a really original idea. I said, yeah, but how am I going to prove it? Father Durkin said, why don't you use a computer?
Let's do a computer analysis of the prose of all of these books. There was one computer on the campus of Georgetown University, it was an IBM 360 in the registrar's office, and basically we asked the computer, when was Old Man and the Sea written? And the computer said in the thirties, not the fifties. And I ended up winning best in class and I think I got a thousand dollars prize or something, but it really was thrilling that I could do something original using technology and win.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Ted, I'm really struck by that story, which is an amazing story. It's an amazing arc...but that it started with you pulling the shortest book off the shelf, that you were like, I don't have time for this. But there's something innate about you that you kept sort of pulling on the threads until you went into some very unexpected places writing, using a computer in a way that may seem commonplace today, but I'm old enough to know that that was a very, very unusual way to use a computer. There is that common thread of your kind of persistence and hard work throughout.
Ted Leonsis:
Yeah, I think having a liberal arts education, the emphasis was always on connecting the dots and seeing things differently. When I graduated, I went to work at a big tech company, Wang Laboratories. I was the first liberal arts major they had ever hired. Now I am working in the tech industry, and I met Steve Jobs early on and Bill Gates early on. I quit my job and started my first company when I was 25 years old. And I had the idea, I'm going to make the TV guide for the software industry.
I started a company called List the Leonis Index to software technology. Right out of the gate, the magazine sold out. IBM gave us a lot of ad business. Steve Jobs, unbeknownst obviously to me was developing the Macintosh and Steve Jobs was the most demanding partner ever, asking for things that couldn't be done. He said, I will buy 2 million of these publications from you, a dollar a copy, but you have a hundred days to do it and you've got to create it on a Mac. And so we were having to create the future, but with a hundred day deadline, and we did it. The first 2 million Macintoshes that shipped had a copy of the Macintosh Buyer's Guide in it. So they kind of put us in business, right place, right time, lucky, maybe seeing around the corner before other people did. But having vision is good and important, but you got to do the work. You got to execute.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yeah,
Ted Leonsis:
That company, my publishing company, it was acquired and I made a lot of money at a very young age.
Ted Roosevelt V:
One thing you haven't talked about in these stories, but I've heard you talk about quite a bit more recently is the role of happiness in your success. And I'm wondering if this is the moment where you start to recognize the role of happiness in your own success.
Ted Leonsis:
Very much so, because I sold the company, I was very young, and you're not prepared for this overnight success and accolades and you think that money is a way of winning. I thought I was all that and I kind of lost myself for a couple of years. And the thing about having now a wife and a child and a career, I said, I want to be a great dad, be available to my son and daughter. And so I took them on a field trip, took them to the Library of Congress and the Library of Congress has digitized the Declaration of Independence. And the only paragraph that had no edits was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And it really pissed me off because I had never once thought of happiness as an end product. So I'm very diligent and earnest. I said, well, what do they mean by happiness?
Is there a science around happiness? Are there studies on happiness? And I created this body of research for happiness. And what's the outcome of happiness? Happy people live longer lives, happy people have lower divorce rates, happy people have healthier relationships with their children. And what were the signs of commonality of happy people? One was you are an active participant in multiple communities of interest. The second was that you have high levels of empathy. Listen, respond, be empathetic. The third is that you have high levels of self-expression--- that you are doing a podcast. That's why I started to make movies, write books, collect art. Fourth is that you are a part of something bigger than yourself, you're within a team and that you can find the higher calling. I always said when I bought the teams, yes, I want to sell a lot of tickets, but really the higher calling is unite the community. Nothing brings a community closer together than a winning sports team. These traits that make people happy, if you could translate them into your organizations and your businesses, you'd have world-class businesses populated by employees that were culturally aligned. They would intrinsically get it. And if you have happy employees and happy customers, you'll have a great business.
Ted Roosevelt V:
The implication is the answer to this question is going to be yes, but I want to be explicit about it. Are you happier now that you've spent this time studying happiness and incorporating it into your business practices?
Ted Leonsis:
The answer obviously is yes, but because I've been a student of it, the outcome of happiness is to live a self-actualized life.
That's the higher state. Happiness is a false economy because you can't always be happy. Stuff is happening around us that is---can make you feel blue, and the sugar rush from happiness needs to power you on the way to self-actualization and understanding. "The Man in the Arena"--- this is a self-actualized document because it basically says when you win, you are really happy, but you're going to fail a lot more than you're going to win. "At worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place small shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." And that's a self-actualized statement. You can't always be happy. You can't always win. And who defined winning as making you happy? Making money as making you happy? That's a societal more that we know is wrong. And as you get older, you want to be able to look back and say, I've arrived now.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Ted, as you've been talking, I've been thinking of this story. Edmund Morris wrote a trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt, and at one point he's talking to a bunch of fifth graders and he asks them, who's Teddy Roosevelt? And they come up with various answers, but one of them says, "he was a doer of deeds." And Edmund Morris later recounted that story as the best summary of who Teddy Roosevelt was. And I find myself listening to you thinking you are a doer of deeds at the core. You are somebody who's living a self-actualized life, and I think I'm really quite impressed with your marriage of hard work and doing and happiness and this idea of self-actualization. It's really quite profound and relatively rare in the upper echelons, or at least from my experience in the upper echelons of success.
Ted Leonsis:
It's an unbelievable compliment. I mean that of all the presidents, Teddy Roosevelt was the man of action, and I'm fond of telling people, "Just do the work." Just, stop. No more meetings, no more decks, no more why you can't. Let's just do the work. We have problems. What are the problems? We'll deal with them. But the only way you can deal with the problem is to identify it and then take action to solve it. So I'm proud of you for doing this. I mean, you have quite the namesake to live up to. Ted Roosevelt---are you the fifth?
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm the fifth.
Ted Leonsis:
The fifth. You're making everybody proud. This is a great thing that you're doing with the podcast and the foundation. Terrific. I'm pleased to have spent all this time with you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, Ted, thank you so much for spending so much time with us today. It has been a fabulous conversation. I really appreciate it.
Ted Leonsis:
Thank you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Ted, I want to recognize that you lead not just a very productive life, but a very purposeful one. And I really appreciate you joining me here on this podcast. Listeners, we should all take to heart this idea that achieving financial success doesn't guarantee happiness, but that the pursuit of happiness can lead to great success. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.