A PODCAST HOSTED BY JUSTIN GORDON

Ambition

The most ambitious people in history, and what we can learn from them.

Ambition is a podcast about the world's most ambitious people from history, sharing lessons you can take from their lives and use in your own work and life.

LATEST EPISODE · OCT 11, 2026

Kobe Bryant

He started his workouts at 5 am to fit in an extra session a day, took up tap dancing to strengthen his ankles, and read the referees’ handbook to learn where the officials couldn’t see. Twenty seasons with the Lakers, five championships.

52m · Episode 9

Get the takeaways from every episode by email.

Plus a note when a new episode is out.

THE EPISODES

One life per episode, and what to take from it.

Each episode is deeply researched and built around the definitive biography of one person, with dozens of hours spent reading and pulling out what matters. Start anywhere.

09

OCT 11, 2026 · 52M

He started his workouts at 5 am to fit in an extra session a day, took up tap dancing to strengthen his ankles, and read the referees’ handbook to learn where the officials couldn’t see. Twenty seasons with the Lakers, five championships.

Source: The Mamba Mentality: How I Play by Kobe Bryant

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Greatness requires sacrifice. He wouldn’t give up his game or his time with his family, so he gave up sleep.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. He sought out the players who came before him and asked how they had handled what he was about to face.

08

OCT 4, 2026 · 1H 40M

By 31 he had been through a divorce and had just lost his nine-year-old son to leukemia. He went on to become Warren Buffett's partner for more than 40 years.

Source: Poor Charlie's Almanack, edited by Peter D. Kaufman

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Invert. “All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.” Start with what to avoid.

Be a learning machine. The people who rise “go to bed every night a little wiser than they were that morning.”

07

SEP 13, 2026 · 1H 50M

The son of a Toronto barber, still broke at 40. He bought a small-town radio station and a small-town newspaper with $200 down, and died owning more than 200 newspapers, including The Times of London.

Source: Roy Thomson of Fleet Street by Russell Braddon

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Timelines are different for different people. Broke at 40, he left Canada at 59 and started again in Britain.

No money is not no deal. He had no cash, so he bought his first newspaper with $200 down and a stack of promissory notes.

06

AUG 23, 2026 · 1H 46M

He arrived in America in 1891 at 14 with nothing and made his first fortune on bananas other companies threw away. Then he took over United Fruit.

Source: The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Know your business from A to Z. By 40 he had worked every job in the trade, from the docks to the fields.

Never lose faith in your own agency. Bad things happened to him like they happen to everyone. He never felt trapped, and he always looked for the countermove.

05

AUG 9, 2026 · 1H 33M

She started with four jars of cream and a concession in a beauty salon, and built a company that still carries her name. A story of obsession and persistence.

Source: Estée: A Success Story by Estée Lauder

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Show, don't tell. No ad agency would take her budget, so she spent all of it on free samples. Competitors scoffed, then copied her.

Create the category. She sold Youth Dew as a bath oil a woman could buy for herself, when perfume was something you waited to be given.

04

JUL 31, 2026 · 2H 30M

At 13 he looked up Bill Hewlett in the phone book and called him at home. Hewlett gave him the parts he needed and a summer job.

Source: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Deciding what not to do matters as much as deciding what to do. When he returned to Apple, he cut the product line down to four products.

The products are the motivation. Profit was what let him keep making great products. It was never the point.

03

JUL 16, 2026 · 1H 28M

At 38 he was a burned-out toothpaste salesman. Then he found a Thai energy drink, bet everything on it, and built Red Bull.

Source: The Red Bull Story by Wolfgang Fürweger

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Create the category, don't compete in one. “In Red Bull, there is no market. We will create one.” He priced it at double a Coke on purpose.

Trust your conviction over the research. The market test before launch was a disaster. He launched anyway.

02

JUL 8, 2026 · 1H 30M

Two bicycle mechanics from Ohio with no formal engineering training and no funding took on a problem that had stumped the best minds in the world. Four years later, they flew.

Source: The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Build your own data. When the published tables turned out to be wrong, they built a wind tunnel and tested 38 wing surfaces themselves.

Knowledge beats money. Their expenses from 1900 to 1903 came to less than $1,000, paid for by the bicycle shop. A government-funded rival spent $70,000 and crashed.

01

JUL 1, 2026 · 1H 20M

He dropped out of school at 13 to support his family and worked for a decade before buying his first newspaper. He spent the next 60 years buying more.

Source: Newspaperman by Richard H. Meeker

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Careers are long. Office boy at 13, a national figure at 55, the biggest deal of his life at 80.

Own the upside. At 21 he asked for a share of the profits instead of a raise, and got 20% of net.

THE NEWSLETTER

Every episode, in your inbox.

The Ambition newsletter is the written side of the show: what to take from each episode, and the things that don't fit in it.

THE HOST

Hosted by Justin Gordon.

Justin Gordon is an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles and the founder of The LA Grind and The SF Grind. For each episode he reads the definitive biography of one person and pulls out what they built, how they thought, and the struggles they overcame.