Hamilton Helmer: preference

Transcript context

…What prompted you to decide to write the book? You've been doing this for so long. You could have just kept this to yourself. My ideas are my babies. The greatest compliment for me is other people using them and finding them useful. I wanted to get it out there, but I'm not a natural writer and I really hadn't published before or anything. It was a very hard journey because originally, I went to people and said, okay, business book. The advice was, don't do anything very conceptual. It's got to be a lot of stories and stuff. My first efforts, I think, I wrote a full book this way were fun stories and then occasionally, I kind of slip in a concept. I went to publishers and agents side, a very, very famous literary agent, for example, and I could get no traction at all. I felt like I was hitting a brick wall. Finally, I said, to hell with it. I'm going to write the book that I think needs to be written. The two of you face this all the time, the issue of want versus need, which I've always admired Steve Jobs for talking about. You don't do breakthrough stuff with market surveys. You have to understand what the need is and then invent. If you really meet the need, then it's useful. Oftentimes, you fall flat. For me, the need here was this metal model that was simple, but not simplistic. Of course, now you're alluding to Charlie Munger-isms here. My biggest question I'm dying to ask you, reading the book, and learning about power and this model that you've come up with, how does it relate to moats? Is power the means by which you create a moat for a business or is it something different?…

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