May 24, 2024 - Can Leadership Be Taught? Dr. Elias Aboujaoude and Can Golf Be Taught Online? Eric Cogorno

School for Startups Radio

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, MD, MA – Psychiatry Professor, Researcher at Stanford University and Author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference

There is a leadership industrial complex that is selling us the notion that essentially
anyone is reasonable raw material for leadership. You just have to sign on the right
executive coach or take the right readership course and leadership is for the taking.
As a psychiatrist and mental health professional who works with personality and
character, I know that temperament is not something that can be easily molded. You
can’t take someone who is in it for himself and put them through a leadership boot
camp and expect them to turn into a phenomenal leader.

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, MD, MA is a psychiatry professor, researcher and author at Stanford University, where he directs the Anxiety Disorders Section and the OCD Clinic. Dr. Aboujaoude has conducted pioneering research on the interface between technology and psychology. His book Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality (New York Times Editors’ Choice) sounded an early alarm in the heart of Silicon Valley about the psychological and cultural costs of runaway internet technologies. More recently, his work has explored the limits of the coaching and leadership development industry when it comes to making successful leaders, resulting in his latest book, “A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality and Character Make All the Difference.” On the entrepreneurial side, long before the COVID-19 pandemic reinvented mental health treatment delivery, Dr. Aboujaoude co-founded the first US-based company to offer remote video-enabled care. Dr. Aboujaoude has lectured in over 20 countries, and his work has been widely covered, including by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, Fortune, TIME, Newsweek, NPR and CNN. We’ve been sold the concept that anyone can be taught to be a leader, primarily by a $15 billion leadership training industry. But Dr. Aboujaoude shows that leadership can’t be learned from TED Talks or via the ever-more-popular executive coaching. Instead, leaders emerge from a combination of personal, psychological, and situational factors that vary from person to person. Personality, he illustrates, is sticky, not malleable, viciously resisting attempts at manipulating it into something it is not. And, to a large degree, great leaders arise from innate factors—temperament, talent—mixed with opportunity, timing, and circumstance. So what do we do if we don’t have what it takes – or if we don’t want to lead? Dr. Aboujaoude advocates for “a total and urgent rethinking of leadership.” “We need to question the conveyor belt system manufacturing leaders today and suggest a different way forward,” he writes. “The whole cultural narrative must change to be in sync with an inescapable reality: the world also needs followers. There is a moral imperative to end the hypocrisy and start respecting people who can be good at something other than a leadership position, and it plays out on several critical front lines, including parenting, education, and professional life…We need to start celebrating human productivity in all its forms and at all its levels, starting with the followers, without whom no successful leader has ever been possible.”
Eric Cogorno – Founder of Cogorno Golf and Lessons I’ve Learned with Eric Cogorno

You want to build something that is scalable online, that you can give to many
people at once. My problem with golf coaching is that it is one to one, one student
paying per hour, and then a new student. I could not scale it. My goal was monthly
recurring revenue!

Eric Cogorno is a golf teaching professional who took his business from $80K/year teaching one-on-one lessons by the hour. He made a transition and now has a multimillion dollar golf instruction brand utilizing these same skills (and strategies)! In the process, he was able to also transform his entire lifestyle – from working on the lesson tee 7 full days a week, to having freedom to work when/where he chooses – splitting his time between Pennsylvania and Florida. While Eric Cogorno is best known for the golf instruction he provides on his YouTube channel and Instagram page, he’s actually spent nearly two decades building a reputation as a highly respected Performance Golf Coach. He is intuitively able to combine the art and science of golf to design (seemingly) simple strategies unique to each individual student that lead to significantly improved performance for golfers at all levels. In 2017 Eric took the experience he gleaned from giving more than 20,000 in-person golf lessons to YouTube. His distinct style of clear language and simplified concepts have attracted more than 200,000 followers across his channels and many millions of views from all across the globe. Looking to bring his golf instruction into the digital age, Eric launched cogornogolf.com in 2018. He’s on a mission to make world-class golf instruction available to everyone and – through the process – create the biggest and best online golf school in the world. Born and raised in the Lehigh Valley, PA, Eric was a scratch golfer by the age of 15. He golfed throughout high school and while attending Lehigh University. Eric has been featured on Forbes.com and was voted as a Golf Digest Best In State Teacher.