Create a Great Yesterday (A 10x Talk LIVE on Time, Ambition, and Staying Human in an AI World) with Joe Polish and Dan Sullivan - 10xTalk Episode #245

Hello everyone. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to 10x Talk with me and Dan Sullivan. Before we officially get started, please put into the chat where you are Zooming in from. And if you are a Genius Network member, let us know you are a Genius Network member, or an ELF Coaching member, or a Genius Youth member. And if you are in Strategic Coach, let us know if you are in Strategic Coach or not. And then we will, uh, have a sense of who you are. And welcome, Happy New Year to everyone. And Dan, if you want to say anything before we officially do our introductions, I mean, feel free.

No, it's, uh, it's a real pleasure, uh, being here today. Um, just came off some great free days. We went to London, and London is a terrific place to visit at Christmas time and really hopping place. So, uh, no, I came back very fresh. I had a very busy week and, uh, looking forward to today. And, um, Bab, Joe and I are impro— improvisers, so we, we never quite sure what we're going to talk about, but we managed to talk about a lot. So yeah.

I actually have a couple of questions that I've jotted down for you, but beyond that, we are ready to roll. And so welcome everyone. We've got currently there's 386 that will have joined so far and people are coming on. So people all over the world. Rochester, Matt. I won't read everything, but I'm just buying myself a little bit of time here to scroll through. India. Awesome. Wyoming.

Oregon.

So Dale was just saying he went to London for, um, for the holidays. I actually went to Vancouver, uh, with our friend Garnett Morris and his wonderful wife Shirley and my partner Cherie. And then I came back to Arizona for just a handful of days, then I went to Cabo, Mexico, and that was pretty cool. So we got people from the UK, Guatemala, Dubai. Awesome. Caribbean. Greece. Vancouver Island. I went and saw Gabor Mate when I was in Vancouver also. He's a friend. Hawaii. Okay, awesome. Australia. Malaysia. Irish-based. Okay, we've got people from all over the world. Mexico City. Awesome. Bali. Wow, Strategic Coach alumni. Strategic Coach calling in from Seattle, Cedar Rapids, coached for 11 years at Lee Brower, that's Bert. Scottsdale, Arizona, of course, Kristin, who's our Executive Director of Genius Recovery. So, welcome everyone, Happy New Year. We now have 100 more people on here from the last time I said how many people we have on, so it's just growing. So, just post where you're from in the chat, and then with that said, That said, Dan, I'm going to officially start our podcast recording. And so, here we go. So, we'll just do what we normally do. Paul Colligan, who's the podcast master, I can see him on the screen here. My name is Joe Polish. I'm the founder of Genius Network for entrepreneurs and Genius Recovery for people struggling with addiction and Genius Youth for young people and young entrepreneurs. And I'm here with Dan Sullivan for 10xTalk, and I will let Dan introduce himself because he is just amazing.

No, that's a good way to start. I just want to start by— I see Peter Stewart on the call here, and Peter is the only person in our entire history whose first workshop was a one-on-one. And Really? Yeah, he had broken his back in a jungle trip and he said, "You know, I can't really come to the first workshop." So I said, "Well, I'll come to you." And so we actually launched it, and this was 1991, I think. Peter? Yeah, you're muted.

Yeah, I think we keep most people muted, but we'll see if Peter can unmute himself just because it could get very noisy.

August 12th, 1990.

1990. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was terrific getting to know, getting to know Peter. And, uh, yeah, it's been great. It's been really great. And he's been in ever since. And I have to make a visit to Vancouver to the workshop to see, catch up, catch up with you.

Yeah, awesome.

Well, any— anyway, uh, Joe and I have been great pals for 27 years, and, you know, we sort of clicked. We are unlike each other in every possible way, except we really like teamwork, we really like collaboration, and we really like improv. So I'm really happy to be here today, and we'll carry on as normal.

Yeah, so Dan, let's jump right into it. It's funny, there was a comment here.

Are—

is there going to be content? There will be absolutely no content whatsoever on today's Zoom. It'll just be us chit-chatting. No, so Dan, um, we—

I have a, I have a couple of diagrams I'd like to talk about. Gina has them.

And so you want to jump right into that?

No, no, you just, uh, start where you're just gonna start.

Let's do this, Dan. It's a new year and there's a lot of things changing. AI is, uh, you know, among us, I have continual conversations with all our entrepreneurs about how they're incorporating all kinds of things. The world has got its usual share of chaos, which has always been happening throughout history. But when you're living in the middle of it, you always think it's whatever it is right now. So, I've been doing TEDx Talk with you since 2012. We have known each other since 1997. We've had countless conversations, thousands of conversations about ambition and about unique ability and utilizing one's skills and talents in order to produce a result. You have a great line where you say entrepreneurs, they make it up and they make it real. And so, I think starting off the new year, I'd love to get Dan Sullivan's advice on wherever you're at, good or bad. In your life. Things are steady, things are chaotic. How do you approach making the most out of a new year? Most people create New Year's resolutions and never stick to them, and a very tiny percentage actually do use it as a catalyst. So, I want to get your advice on, for everyone listening here, how to make the most out of this year if you could offer them 3 pieces of advice.

Ja, well, it's interesting because a lot of coaching is playing around with time. And when in the very first workshop, now the way that the workshop has progressed, started coaching entrepreneurs in 1974. So, this is my, I'm in my 52nd year of coaching entrepreneurs. And before that, I was a copywriter in a big ad agency. But all of my life, I have really been very, very interested in what people are really unique at. And so I think I grew up— I'm a fifth child in a really big family, but I have 6 years older. The next brother is older. There's 6 boys, 1 girl, and I'm— so there were 4 right away. Our sister is the oldest person. She just turned 90, and 88, 86, and then there's me. I'm 81. And then I had 7 years to the next 2 brothers. So I grew up on a farm. I didn't have really any other children to play with. So I kind of took to adults at a very early age and I was really interested in adults. And I kind of got the feeling that being an adult was really complicated and I really wanted to be an adult. So I was talking, you know, in the '50s, early '50s, I was talking to people who had been born in the 19th century. People who had been in the First World War, people who had gone through the Roaring '20s, gone through the Depression, Second World War. And it was really interesting to me that if you could ask a question, I had a killer question, probably when I was about 8 years old, I would say to someone, "When you were my age, what was going on in the world?" And they'd talk. And I had next door neighbor, she was the grandmother in the farm next door. They had a dairy farm and we had a produce farm, so we got our milk from them. And I would go over and get the milk, sort of a cider jug, unpasteurized. And, um, and I would ask her, you know, she was born in 1874, no electricity, you know, no, uh, no tractors, nothing. And I, I was really interested in how do you run a farm without modern technology. And she would talk and talk and talk and talk, and, um, and I would just keep asking her questions about it. And she would phone my mother and she'd say, you know, Danny was over again and he asks all these questions, and I think about things I've never thought about before, or things that happened a long time ago that I remember, and She— so I was 8, she was 78, and she would phone and she says, you know, I feel a lot better after we have our conversations. And for me, that was worth 2 glasses of milk and 2 cookies. And so there was payment to it. And but it took me 22 years to actually work out the business model of asking people questions. About their experience. And so I jumped out in 1974 and had a really rough, really rough— your friend Jan, who's with Epoch Times, he said, you're an OG, aren't you? I said, I say, original gangster. And I said, well, I think I'm the only surviving one.

And yeah.

And anyway, I've just loved 50 years or so, 50 years of just asking people how people are thinking about their business. So, thinking about thinking, I get them thinking about their business, not about what their specialty is. There's so many people, you know, I mean, they know the business that they're in. And they know the industry that they're in. They're experienced entrepreneurs. But I ask them how they're thinking about it. And we've developed all these thinking tools, 250 thinking tools, and they're copyrighted. Joe and I practiced suing someone about 4 or 5 years ago for stealing our property. And I went through that experience and I said, this is never going to happen again. So, we've really tightened up our IP. And, you know, so we have 78 patents, and the patents are coming in about one every two weeks. So it's really interesting, the patent world. And so this is really what I'm doing. But Joe and I, we have this tag team routine that we do. Someone says, who should you come to? Should you come? Should I go to Genius Network or Strategic Coach? And I said, oh, you should go to Genius Network because you'll learn how to market, you'll make a lot of money, and then you'll be able to afford Strategic Coach. And then he says, oh no, no, you go to Strategic Coach first because you'll get your shit together and then you'll be able to market, market your shit.

And let me say something to that, Dan, because, you know, part of it is, um You know, my latest book is called What's in It for Them? And I've always tried to approach getting what I want out of my life by helping other people get what they want, which is a similar Zig Ziglar quote with a caveat. Zig Ziglar would say, you can get anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. And that sometimes is true, and other times you can help other people get what they want, but they won't do a damn thing for you. And some of those people will totally take advantage of you. And so it has to be alignment. So, when you find someone that you're aligned with, then go deep with that person, go deep with that relationship and nurture it. And me and you, even though we're completely different in many different varieties of ways, we have a very shared value system and we're both very reciprocal and we're both very much about value creation and we share similar ways of creating a great front stage experience for our clients. You know, we both don't ever want someone investing money with us that does not get a return, of course, but they have to participate. They have to be decent humans. They have to be caring. They have to be cool. And so one of the things here is we don't try to— we help each other grow. You know, instead of trying to increase our slice of the pie, we try to increase the pie. And I think that's the way me and Dan have always approached this. So when people ask, If I could only join Genius Network or Strategic Coach, I say, well, join Strategic Coach. And if someone asks Dan that, he'll say what he just said about Genius Network. But for the most part, we have a lot of shared clients that get value out of both of our groups, and that's how we work together. And part of it is collaboration. So, you know, my advice here, because I did ask you the question, you know, how would you start off 2026? One of the things I would suggest is take a look at all the results and outcomes you would like to get. And when I say all, it could be like 2 or 3. You don't need to be overwhelming here. What's really important to you and who would be a great collaborator? Like, who are you already working with that you like that is what I call ELF, easy, lucrative, and fun, versus who are the people that are hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating? And get rid of the halves and nurture the elves. I mean, that's the deal. So, I'll turn it back to you, Dan. I just wanted to say that because you just triggered that thought for me.

Yeah.

Well, I was mentioning that I really play with time in Strategic Coach because time, what I've discovered more and more talking to thousands of entrepreneurs, over the years. I think that every entrepreneur has sort of a unique time system that they handle time, past, present, and future, really differently. So, we have one, the very first when you come into Strategic Coach, it's called the Lifetime Extender. And what I've noticed is that, you know, people have sort of a loose sense about the question, at what age are you going to die? And they have family history to go by, you know, how long did your parents last and generally aunts and uncles. And then they've been around actuarial tables, which sort of indicates maybe around 80. But it's a thought that they think about, but not really consciously. In our very first, first hour when you join Strategic Coach, we get you to nail this down. And so I ask people, at what age are you going to die? And let's say someone says 85. And everybody has an answer. The interesting thing is that everybody has an answer, but it's never usually something that they actually focus on until they're asked the question. And it's not a sort of question you know, that is normally asked in polite society. It's great for parties, by the way. You can really get a party electrified with this question. And so they say 85, and I say, well, let's talk about 84. How are you going to be when you're 84? And I said, I'll ask you some questions. And so I've got one person, maybe there's 50 people in the room. And there's one person, and I say, "How are you gonna, when you're 84, not 85, but 84, how are you gonna be physically?" And everybody says, "Oh, great, great shape." I said, "Good. Mentally?" "Oh, sharp." You know, really sharp, alert, good memory, good concentration. "Financially?" everything taken care of really well, uh, relationships, a lot of relationships, warm, supportive, and, um, your assessment of how you've lived your life up until then. And they say, uh, yeah, I did, you know, really happy with the life I've lived. I said, that's really good. Then I repeat it back to them, and the answers are always the same, uh, the answers. I've— and then I have everybody else in the room while I'm working with one person, they're doing it. And then I say, okay, if you're that way at 84, I repeat back, what do you think the chances are you die at 85? And they said, well, I wouldn't. And I said, good. So if you were that way at 84, then how much longer than 85 would you live? And they say, I don't know, 20 years, 25. And I say, well, 20 or 25? And they'd say 25. So I said, here you are, you've been in the room for 20 minutes and I just bought you 25 years. And it's very interesting because it seems like a joke, but that number, the number when you think you're going to die, actually controls every other thought in your brain. And you've had a number which is sort of just below the waterline for most of your life. But when you actually state it and you write it down on a sheet of paper, your brain changes. And then when you extend the number, you know, some, you know, a lot of people don't, you know, go 50 years or something like that, but they'll do 10 years, 15 years. And you notice immediately that that affects every other thought in their brain because it tells you how much time you have left. You know, your assessment of how much time here. And then we go through a long, long process. You know, it's an hour-long process of asking them, you know, what they're going to do. I said, we just got you extra years. What would you do with the extra years? And then they start talking about, well, I do this, this, and this. And we say, that's great with the extra years. When do you want the extra years to start? At the end? Right now. And all of a sudden they really recalibrate their entire life. And I notice in the first 90 days that they get really interested in fitness and health and they start cleaning up things in their life. And that's just because they changed a number in their brain related to time. So, but I have a new time system I wanted to share. Those in Coach really know the Lifetime Extender. But can I tell you the new, Joe, the new time?

Absolutely, go for it. Yeah, I'm curious to hear this.

Yeah, so it came to me, um, July or August, past July or August, and I was sitting there and I was saying, you know, um, you know, you know, you know, it's really funny, all of us have known people who are trapped in the past that they spend today thinking a lot about what happened before today. But since I've been involved with a lot of entrepreneurs who are in the tech world, especially now that we have AI, I noticed that there's a lot of people who are trapped in the future. And what gets neglected, whether you're trapped in the past or you're trapped in the future, what gets neglected is today. So I began a process. I wonder if I started the morning, I said, today my whole purpose is to create a great yesterday. That's what I'm doing. My entire goal from getting up in the morning till going to bed at night is I'm going to create a great yesterday. Okay. And where this, where this came to me was from a terrific entrepreneur we have in the program, Lior Weinstein. And Lior was at a conference that we had in Nashville in '24, May of '24. And he was at a conference with a lot of married couples who had children and the children were at the conference. But the final night, they were all, the parents were all sitting around a campfire and they were going around you know, why they had come to the conference, why they're so interested in, you know, other people's stories about how they're raising their children. And parent after parent after parent said, "Well, I really want to create the best possible future for my children." And so, Lior got around to Lior. He said, "Well, I don't know anything about the future, and I don't really know what my children are going to do with the future." So, my goal is that I'm always creating a really great past for my children, really great past. And it was a thought that just really struck me. I said, "Wow, that is so true." You know, that's because if you give them a really great past, then you're creating the foundation for them to, you know, you're really stacking the odds in favor of them having a great future. So I began experimenting with it about— I'm just past 5 weeks, and every morning I get up and I say, my goal today is to create a great yesterday. And so everything— like when I'm talking, I got a note, you know, I say, talk to the podcast people. Today you're creating yesterday. And Yesterday always creates tomorrow. You know, that's my line. You can write that down. This is new, brand new, so I'm just experimenting. So today you're creating a great yesterday, so morning till night, and that yesterday that you create today will create a great tomorrow, and tomorrow you'll create a great yesterday, and that'll create a great tomorrow. So I've done it, and throughout the day I just write down what I'm doing to create a great yesterday. And every activity in the day, I said, you know, I'm going to do this in such a way to create a great yesterday. And I'm kind of on a roll, and I've been incredibly productive over the last 5 weeks.

I've just—

but, you know, I've got a schedule, I've got things to do every day, and it's in my— I got a great scheduler, a great person who helps me manage the activities. And I just go through and I just get them done. But each thing that I do for the last 5 weeks, I've done it so I'm creating a great yesterday. And it takes the pressure off. There's kind of a feeling, you know, when you're creating with the future, it's kind of like, well, you don't know the future, but today, you know today. I mean, the most you know about your life is what life is today. And the other thing is, I'm— Joe and I went to the Amen Clinic and were both diagnosed as significantly ADD. And I haven't been ADD anytime during the last 5 weeks because I'm just focused on today. And the whole concern about the future and everything like that is just lessened. So I'm, I'm just going to experiment before this goes you know, goes public. This is the first time I've ever talked about it. I'm going public with it. But I think there's some— I don't know, Joe, what do you think about this?

I love it.

I mean, I think it's great.

There's—

I mean, yeah, I'll be in strategic— I'll be at your house actually this upcoming Sunday.

Yeah, I'm going to mention it in the workshop on Tuesday, but it's really intrigued me that it really takes the pressure off because the future actually doesn't exist. You know, the future, you know, it's a thought and we have that thought, but it actually doesn't exist because you don't have access to next week. You don't have access, but you have access today. So, if you just focused on what you had and you're taking care of yesterday, and then tomorrow you'll take care of yesterday and tomorrow. After that. So I've had 35 great yesterdays in a row, and things are speeding up.

Yeah, no, totally. Uh, James, did you have any, uh, question or any comment on this? James Hillard, since I, I'm looking at you right now, you can unmute yourself if you want, or Gina can unmute you.

Well, I, I— can you hear me okay?

Yeah, I can hear you fine.

I am, uh, I'm a carnivore, so I'm sat in Wendy's after just eating some burgers. But, uh, no, I'm super glad to join you both. Um, and just talking about frameworks very quickly, and then I'll respond to your question. Both you and Dan are on my "Who You're Looking For Is You" graphic. And Joe and I have exchanged messages before, and we've never met in person yet, but we're good friends with Evan Carmichael and Brian Kurtz and friends of both of you, uh, who I've spent a lot of time with, and I love them both. But yeah, so I was just listening to what you were saying about leaving this future for the kids or leaving this yesterday for the kids. And my comment in the chat window was just to say, yeah, that's my entire life. I live my life for my son. And I live my life for my wife as well, because the likelihood is, given I'm 10 years older, although you've got me thinking crazy now, that I need to leave that yesterday for her too. That there's an incredible memory. And she will never, you know, she'll never say to somebody, you know, I wish we had more time, which you might say that, but she can say, wasn't it incredible? What a, what a picture-perfect life. And thank you, Dan, for all you do. Thank you, Joe, for all you do. I've really enjoyed being here. Thank you for calling on me. I did not expect that. But I appreciate you for doing so.

You're welcome. Totally. No, you know, I often will, where I can see it, or if I read a comment or something like that, this person may offer some good perspective. Perspective, or how does this sound with everyone? And one of the things too, uh, you know, yes, me and Dan both have programs, and we're also doing— we're testing this out. We said that on the last episode. In this recording of this, we're literally recording a live podcast. And I said, you know, Dan, there's so much AI slop in the world right now, uh, I'd rather just do stuff live and let's dialogue. And it's not going to be perfect, and there's people here that are, you know, you're on our list. We're not we're not doing advertising, paid advertising to drive people here. We've done a little bit of social, but not much. But for the most part, 98% of everyone that is here is subscribed to either my email list or Dan's or their clients, current or past. And so, I was like, "Well, let's do live podcasts. Let's interact and engage with people. Let's hear what's on their mind. Let's see how they're doing a pulse check." But we're going to continue to do these because there's so much stuff where people can make themselves look smart or caring or whatever with AI. But it's like, yeah, and if you're not in a financial position or even an entrepreneur for that matter, but you just want to garner this, listen to what it is we're saying of how can I use this in my life? How does this apply? Dan is the one who originally got me to understand where the original definition of entrepreneur came from, which is a French guy named Jean-Baptiste Say. And I learned all this from Dan, by the way. So, to give credit where credit is due, which I always do, I always credit people where I, if I can remember where I heard or learned something, I will say it even if the person has passed away and no one would even know who they are. I'm a big respecter of other people's ideas and other people's IP. And so, Dan, shared with me, 1997, you know, the original definition of an entrepreneur, 1804, Jean-Baptiste Say, he said, "An individual that takes resources from a lower yield to a higher yield, from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity." And everyone can do something that takes where they're at and makes it better. It could be products, services, experiences, themselves, their kids, their circle of influence. All of that, and that's what we're here for. And so, even if you never buy anything from me and Dan, we make a tremendous amount of information available to ambitious people that want to build and grow better lives. And that's our goal and our objectives. And if it resonates with some people, they're like, yeah, I want to be in one of these rooms, you can look at joining Strategic Coach. You can look at joining Genius Network. However, We're here. This is not some veiled sales pitch. We're just going to talk, and it may not apply to everybody, but other people, it absolutely will. And every week we get numerous messages from people that listen to our podcast. We've been doing this podcast since 2012 that has changed their lives. And so, I would say if this resonates with you and you're brand new, subscribe to our podcast, go back and listen to original episodes. I think Dean Jackson's even on here today. I've been doing a podcast with Dean Jackson since 2010, and Dan Sullivan and Dean, they do a podcast together. And we, you know, we started 10x Talk in 2012. Me and Dean started I Love Marketing in 2010. We even talked Tim Ferriss into starting his podcast, which he'll never admit that, but we were arguing with Tim, you know, probably in 2011, 2012, like "Why don't you just start a podcast?" "I don't want to start a podcast." Here you go. So, those are my thoughts on this. So, that was just to answer a lot of the comments that I read about, "What is this?" and "How do we listen to the— is this going to be recorded?" And so, 10xtalk.com is the website, but you can subscribe to 10x Talk on Spotify and we'll do other episodes too that you may not be part of. So, if you want to hear what we're doing, that's what it is. This is a bit of a testing ground. Now, Phil Randazzo, you're an awesome dude, and I know you didn't expect me to call on you, but Phil has run American Dream U for a while. Do you have any questions or comments or anything? You know both me and Dan personally, and we've done some work together. And tell people real quickly what you do.

Yeah.

Well, thanks, both of you, Dan and Joe. Great to see you all. Yeah. So, I've run for almost 23 years an organization that Dan acknowledged. Um, back in the day, about 10 years ago, to help those that are transitioning out of the military for what's next. And Dan's exactly right. The future doesn't exist. I mean, we can have an asteroid, we can have a war, we can have anything. So those yesterdays are critically important, especially when you have people that you care about. So no, I just, I just love both of you guys. You guys have been mentors forever. I constantly talk about both of you. And, uh, my mission is just to support those. That are mind traveling into the future, that, you know. So no, that's all I got to say, Joe. I appreciate you calling on me.

No, thank you.

You know, I was with Sheriff David Rhodes. He's the sheriff of Yavapai County here in Arizona, and I was there with Kristen, who is on this, and with Elijah, who's on our team, and he's currently in the Perryville Women's Prison right now running the prison program that we do for Genius Recovery, where we We actually help people that are incarcerated, you know, women a lot right now because, you know, the crazy stories. And we do trips where we take our members into the prisons and we can talk about it. I can show you videos, but there's nothing like walking into a jail or into a prison and the doors close behind you and you're not— you can't have your cell phone. There's no electronics. And the only, the only electronic access they have to the world is through tablets. And we have Genius Network entrepreneurial content and Genius Recovery content in, um, on 650,000 tablets throughout prisons in the United States. And that's headed up by Andre Norman, who, you know, he's spoken at, you know, American Dream U and all that. And I was talking with, um, with, um, David Rhodes, who's the sheriff, and, um, I sent a video to, to Dr. Phil, uh, who— Dr. Phil's become a good friend of mine, uh, in Dave Erickson has done this thing with the Innocence Project where they've got 250 people that were innocent that were incarcerated, got, got them released. And this sheriff has everyone do a variety of assessments when they get arrested. One of them is the ACE test, which is Adverse Childhood Experiences. And most people that are incarcerated commit crimes, depressed, anxious. It's, it's because something happened in their life, right? And for me, when I was a drug addict, when I was— I mean, I was a bad addict. I've been in recovery for many years. The way that I got better is I would listen to a lot of audios, I would read books, and I would seek out people. I've sat in, you know, got 1,000+ meetings, 12-step meetings, etc. And what's interesting is in 10 years with this facility that David Rhodes has, They've dropped recidivism. It's now currently around 18%. It used to be 50%. And they look at where people— what is the pain that happened in their life that caused them into a life of crime or where they're at? A lot of it is mental illness. And so, part of it, what the hell does that have to do with entrepreneurship and 10X? Is that everything? I mean, some people, they've had atmospheric conditions of their life that have made their life turn out the way it is. Dr. Don Wood says, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it would make sense why they do what it is they do. And I think a lot of people, you know, I know Tony Robbins personally. I've known him for many years. I think half the people that go to personal development seminars or things like that, they're struggling with addiction. They're struggling with something. The people that read books, that listen to podcasts, they're looking for some direction. And, you know, all that me and Dan, I think not all, but some of what we do, much of what we do is we try to we're students of what works and what doesn't work. What I love about Dan, Dan has coached more successful entrepreneurs than almost anyone in the world. I mean, the clientele of Strategic Coach members is very high level. And there's so many people that pontificate how to live a life. But when I first met Dan, he was the most congruent with living the message that he wrote about in his books. You know, free days, focus days, buffer days, you know, his previous time system. He lived it and he would take time off and he learned how to structure a life that worked in a particular type of way. And, you know, workaholism is a respectable addiction. And we are in a culture where we're more connected electronically and digitally, but we're more disconnected as humans. And that's going to be the negative side of AI. There's all kinds of different types of addictions that are going to surface and are surfacing as a result of AI. And at the same time, there are certain surveys and studies showing that people are getting more— We'll have to mute that person, Gina, please. There are people that are— Well, I shouldn't say person. That sounded like a baby that got a hold of a phone and unmuted. But that was funny. There are people that are actually getting more value out of an AI therapist than their current therapist. And it's like, my God, there's, there's just so much stuff. But I think the, the best thing that me and Dan want to do is just bring people together and have conversations with them. So I know I'm, I'm rambling a little bit. Uh, the reason I'm doing that though is that those of you that want to stay with us, we're going to continue to do this. And if you're brand new, you don't know who the hell we are maybe, or what this even is, but you will get to know it and we're going to get a rhythm down and we're going to find out what people want and how to best deliver it. But me and Dan do improv. I mean, you have some charts and some graphs, Dan, so I want you to be able to speak to those, what you wanted to share with everyone today. I wanted to just kind of set the stage though with my goal. My last name is Polish. And here's one thing that I figured out through AI, which is going to sound almost stupid as I think about I'm about to say this. So, one of the things I always talk about is I want to build a better entrepreneur. I want to build a better human, and I want to do it in 3 areas. And I say this, I want to do this for myself too. So, health, mental and physical, because there's nothing more important than health. You know, that whole saying, he or she who has their health has 1,000 dreams. He or she that does not has only one. And so, if you don't have your health, you can't do anything. I mean, if you're laid up in a hospital bed, you can't run a business, you can't do much of anything. So, health, mental and physical. Wealth, not just making money, but not losing it. Two different skill sets. Making money is one thing, managing it, protecting it, it's another. And then, the third is ELF, easy, lucrative, and fun. Find people that are— I used to think of E.L.F. is just how do you set up your marketing so it's easy, lucrative, and fun? How do you set up your sales so they're easy, lucrative, and fun? But then I realized there are people that are not very E.L.F. They're half hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. It could be hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating because everyone can think of something where they've made a lot of money, but my God, you had to trade and sacrifice so much to do it. It was painful. And so, I'm always looking for people, projects, and things that are ELF and how to set up my life in that way. And Dan has been with me the whole time because not because Dan wanted to be with me, it's because I wanted to be with Dan and vice versa. So, I joined Strategic Coach once I built my company up in a position where I could do that. Tried to put information out that helped people get the capabilities and the skills so they could ultimately invest in our programs, not afford it, but invest in it. One thing that me and Dan, we don't want people to spend money on our stuff. We want people to invest it so it never costs them anything if they use it. And we both run schools that pay people to attend. I mean, that's truly how we think about it. And we're also— Dan has, you know, 40— how many of the small books you have now? 48?

Or are you past it?

Yeah, I just finished 45. So when I was 70, we challenged our team. So we have about 120 team members. They're spread out, you know, they're United States, Canada, and Great Britain. And we said, you know, Babs and I, Babs and I, life partners, we got together in, you know, in the 1980s. And but we travel everywhere together. And I said, you know, we're almost every flight, you know, it could land badly. And I said, so we said to our team leaders, if you got the word today that Dan and Babs were gone, What would you do in the first 100 days? You know, they're not there anymore. And it was very interesting. We created a thinking tool for them to work out their thoughts. And then we met with 18 of them one-on-one, and we just talked through what their thoughts were. And they were remarkably similar in what they were personally going to do. And that is that they were just going to focus on what they did uniquely well, and they were going to work with their teams, and they couldn't really spend that much time what the other teams were doing. But they had requests for both of us. And one of the requests that came to me was, we wanted a lot of Dan on the shelf, if you're not here. Which sort of meant that I feed the program with new ideas every quarter for 36 years. I've created a brand new workshop for the lead people in our program. And so, they wanted a lot of material on the shelf, and I thought the best way to do it is write a book. A small book. And these are usually, you know, they're less than 60 pages and they're on a particular idea and there's chapters in it. So I said, you know, at 70, I said, I'm just in the next 100 quarters, I'm going to write 100 books. And we just finished quarter number 45 and it was book 45. So 55 to go.

Yeah.

And just what comes up, you know, I don't have these pre-planned. Beyond that, when you finish the one book, then within about a 2-week period, I said, okay, this is going to be the next book. And then we start immediately working on it. It takes about 2 months to produce it. Yeah.

Well, yeah, you know, Dan, like there's that saying, who said an unexamined life is not worth living? I should probably just do a quick AI search.

Well, I think it was Aristotle.

Yeah, well, someone could find out and post it.

Somebody like that. Well, you can find that stuff out really fast.

Oh yeah, yeah, like Socrates. Okay, who's that?

Socrates?

Yeah, yeah.

Jason, Jason Giles and, uh, Christopher Doyle. Look at that, two top addiction experts all one comment after the other. And that was great. And someone else said it was Carl Jung. Well, an unexamined life is not worth living. Well, an unlived life is not worth examining is the way that I would change it around. And when you write and when you read and when you share your stories and you create books, do it. And the thing I was about to say where I, before I said it's going to sound almost stupid doing this and I kind of went on my little tangent was health, wealth, and elf, Dan. And you have all these books that you've written. And so, there's all this information that's out there. And I'll tell you, if you, there's They don't take a lot of time and they're very, very impactful. And I could not encourage everyone here who has not been introduced to Dan Sullivan and his work at a deeper level to, you know, it will cost very little investment and just read some of his books. There's a variety of topics, you know, when there's so much to read or watch. Michael Aguilera, I was, I never say his last name right. He, I was doing a podcast with him years ago and we were talking about overwhelm. And when you're really overwhelmed, what do you do? And he said, well, I ask myself a question, what needs solved? And then we had a whole discussion about that question, what needs solved? And it's like, okay, if you start going down a scroll on YouTube as an example, or on Instagram or social or X or whatever, and you find yourself being sucked in from a dopamine hit and you've trained your brain to be distractible. And I say this because it's really easy for me to do that. I stop myself. My doorstop at times is, okay, what needs solved? What the hell am I doing? Should I be paying any attention to this book or this podcast or this video? What conversation do I need to have? And it's really helped me a lot. And so, if you were to look at what do you need solved, I can almost I promise you, if you're an entrepreneur, Dan has written a book about a particular area that is going to help you solve stuff. And the same thing, if you were to scroll through our podcast episodes and look at the different topics that we have, there are things that specifically speak to some of the issues that all entrepreneurs have in 10xing their business. Sometimes, 10x is money. Other times, it's free time. Other times, it's eliminating— bullshit out of your life. And, you know, there's other ways to 10x yourself. How do you solve one problem that solves 10 problems or 50 problems? And so, the stupid thing that I've gotten out of AI was I was feeding a bunch of things into what it is that we do and how we do it in my company, in my organization, not just with Genius Network with entrepreneurs, but with Genius Recovery, my addiction recovery foundation, which I do not pay myself a penny for. I do it because it helps me with my own recovery. And it helps other people. And I think one of the best ways to get what I want in my life is just be useful to other people. And you know what? Opportunities show up. And so our tagline for Genius Recovery is I want to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment and find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and share those with the world. So we do it through education and it's all about connection. So everything is a connection that works. So, what AI said is that, well, your last name is Polish. And what you do, because I said I'm always trying to enhance people. I'm not always trying to change them. I'm just trying to— and I don't want to tell anyone what success is. It's not my job to tell someone what success is. Success for me and Dan's the same way. He lets people— if you go to Strategic Coach, you'll get answers, but you're going to get a lot of questions. And when people— someone posted, what is Dan patenting? Well, he's patenting his tools and he's patenting his process.. And a lot of these have to do with questions. And if you ask a person the right question, you can come up with the right answer. So, I try to enhance people. I try to enhance connection. I try to enhance their marketing. And they're like, well, you polish things. That's what you do.

You're a polisher.

And I was like, that is really funny that, you know, it never probably 50 years would I have used my last name as a mechanism. But that's how, you know, so I start having this whole dialogue with AI. About what it is that I do and how do I do it. And it's like, yeah, you know, that's kind of what I try to do when I go out and meet people and connect people. I'm just trying to enhance them a little bit by doing this podcast. You know, I'm hoping that we can talk about some things and it will give people perspective. And that's what I hope. And then for this year, I hope to enhance this year so it's way better than last year. And so, oftentimes, you have the right ingredients. You just need to hone it. You need to just kind of work with it a little bit. You need to wrestle with things at times, and you need to unlearn as much as we need to learn, you know, because learning is great, but unlearning I think is more valuable than, uh, than that. So, uh, Dan, uh, let's, let's have you show what you were going to show earlier. Could you frame that first? And then how— because I want to I want to make sure you go through that.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I've been, for at least the time that I've been coaching, I've been very interested in technology as, you know, not a particular technology, but just the fact that our society has, the world has become more technological. And one of the things that prompted me to start coaching this is 1973, before I actually started coaching, that the word microchip was just being used for the first time. And there were— it had been, you know, the "what is a microchip" had been around for, you know, 15, 20 years. But the term microchip had just started. And there was this really great series of articles in The New York Times.. And the writer said, you know, this is probably the most transformative technology that we've ever created. And the reason is because— two reasons. One is microchips can be applied to everything that exists to make it more effective and more efficient. Even then they could see that. But the other thing is they can use microchips to make better microchips. So it's a self-evolving technology. And, and he said that it's going to be very disruptive. He said if you look ahead over the next 25, 30 years and the very large bureaucracies that had grown up in the 20th century both the factories, which are, you know, massive organizations, but also the management that went along with the industrial processes. They were all shaped like pyramids. And I remember General Motors in the '60s, there was like 18 levels of management between the CEO and the factory floor. And so a message gets sent from the CEO and it has to go through 17 layers. And humans aren't great really at passing on information. We alter it. You know, we get a message and we change— everybody's— some you've seen or you've played the telephone game where you have 10 people and one whispers a message in the second person, and it goes all the way to the tenth. And oftentimes the meaning is completely the opposite by the time you get to the end. Well, think of 17 levels of management passing information. So those big bureaucracies were just a first attempt to try to create a microchip where you're using human beings as the integrated circuits. You know, we're not very good at that, you know. And so he said the microchip, when it comes along, it's really going to disrupt these big organizations. And it's going to create a lot of confusion for these big organizations. But at the same time, there's going to be an enormous amount of entrepreneurial activity out of this, just in the industries that already exist. The microchip is actually— the use of it and the proliferation of the microchip is actually going to create all new forms. And so, and it's certainly happened. And then you have to think that, you know, this is before the personal computer, 1979, I think. You started getting the little ones, but then IBM came along and you got a personal computer. And then you began to realize in the '80s that it was software, not hardware, that really mattered. And then the internet came in early, you know, the early '90s, you had the internet, then in the mobile form. So there's been layer after layer after layer of technology. And it's interesting because the organizations have gotten a lot smaller. Over the— and there's been a lot more entrepreneurial activity. And I had these coaching ideas, you know, that if you just ask people a whole series of questions, not about their actual business, but how they were thinking about their business, there was an opportunity for coaching. And I got involved with that. And, you know, I had to learn how to run a business myself. And I went through 2 bankruptcies and a divorce and, you know, which is just extreme market research. You know, that's the way I look at it. And, you know, I survived and I met my partner. So when I look at AI, it's a continuum of something that happened 50 or 60 years ago. It's, yeah, it's brand new and it's got powers and it's got capabilities that we haven't seen before. But technology has always done that. So I was beginning to think that people, you know, people get freaked out by this. And there's— we can see that the application of the technology to social media has been very disruptive from a mental health aspect. You know, the teenage— especially among teenage girls, the amount of what they consider mental illness has gone right through the roof. And it's— and there's a lot of talk now about banning social media. I mean, it's not going to happen, but, you know, they're talking about social media being the new big tobacco, you know, that it's an addiction. And if you look at where— when big tobacco was shut down, you can't advertise, and they, you know, they restricted the the marketing of tobacco, where did the people who were studying the addictive effect of tobacco, where did they go when they left Big Tobacco? Two places. They went into the food industry. So, you know, Big Tobacco gets shut down in the '80s. In the beginning, Joe had Robert Kennedy and Kaylee Means as guests. And he was just talking about all of a sudden you get all these really weird food allergies, but especially mentally unstabling effects of food, fast food, processed food, you know. And these people know how to get people addicted to stuff, you know, they really know. But they also went into technology. I'm sure at Meta and Google they've got the experts on addiction. Right there. You know, how do we catch somebody and just hold on to them for the rest of their life? They have to have their, you know, they had this morning's hit, but they need another hit this afternoon. So, my sense is you got to learn how to think about things in a technological world. It isn't going to get less. It's going to get more. So, I came up with one of my little books and you can You can just go to strategiccoach.com and we have an ebook. It's easy to ebook and it has an audio, it has a video, it's got cartoons. And it's called Staying Cool and Calm, The Geometry of Staying Cool and Calm. And so, what I did is I just created a little triangle. I think of things in 3. Things are never one thing. 3 things. So, being cool and calm, it's 3 mindsets. Number 1, that everything in the world is made up. You know, everything that we live with, the environment, and it's been made up for thousands of years. But somebody made something up, and the reason why it exists today is because someone made it up. And so, we're born into a world that has vast long histories, you know, all of our political systems, all our economic systems, these were made up by someone, they were made up by groups of people. So that's the first mindset. So you just accept that everything is made up, so you can make things up because that's the way things advance. Everybody can, if everything's made up, then you have the you know, you're totally free to make things up too. The second one is that nobody's actually in charge of the making up things. You know, there's no head office for making up things. It's— now we have 9, somewhere around 9 billion people on the planet, and half of them have cell phones, and they get up every day and they talk about different things. And a lot of it is that they're just creating brand new things, new ideas, new processes, new sneaky ways to scam things and everything. Everything is being made up. And that's the second mindset. So, everything's made up, nobody's in charge. And number 3 is life's not fair.

Okay.

I mean, we can work to make life fair. When you have a world that is just filled with unpredictable change, it's not going to be fair. And what I find is that when people get these three mindsets, so, you know, somebody's got to do something about that. Well, you're the only one that can do something. If it's a big issue of yours, you're the one who has to do it. So, make up something like what Joe is doing with addiction, you know, addiction research. There's a lot of people say, well, somebody's got to stop this. And I say, well, who's the somebody? I mean, we have to do something. I said, who's we? You know, you can take action. You can come up with a better way of doing things. And but nobody's in charge. Nobody's going to stop you from doing this. Nobody's going to stop you. But the big thing is life's not fair. Okay, but you can be fair in your life with other people. So fairness can start with you, but generally life's not fair. And a lot of people have just looked at this triangle and they said, you know, this really makes me relax a little bit about the technological stuff going on. You know, I mean, you don't have to use it. You don't have to pay attention to it at all. If Dean Jackson is there, Dean is doing something very, very interesting. He's got now a 14-hour period of every day when his telephone, his iPhone, is in a box. And, you know, and so 10 o'clock at night, he puts it in the box, puts a, you know, puts a timer on it, and it won't open until noon the next day. And he— we, on our podcast, we talk a lot about that. And all of a sudden, Having that freedom, which, you know, freedom from interruption, freedom of, you have to be connected, you have to respond, you just free yourself up. And that's a really superb individual strategy for bringing calm and coolness back into your life. Wherever they said, well, everybody can connect to everybody all the time, and they can connect with you, and you have an obligation if they try to connect with you. And I said, no, you don't have any obligation at all. You can establish your rules for that. So this is just a way of thinking about the general world that we're living in, Joe.

Yeah, no, I love, I love it. I want to see if anyone has any questions related to, uh, what Dan had to share, because we can, uh, we can make this a little interactive. Uh, of course, can't speak with everyone because that would take us 2 weeks to— that'd be the longest podcast in human history. But, um, say what, let me go to the chat and see if anyone has a question, or if you'd like to unmute yourself.

Where did it go?

For both Joe and Dan, what's the most exciting opportunity for— what is the most exciting opportunity for entrepreneurs today? Uh, one of the things I responded to on that is, uh, I personally think for me and only me, it's, uh, it's in-person deepening and building communities to deal with all the AI slop that is out there. This podcast today is an example of that. But, um, yeah, so who has the hand raised? Okay, go for it, Dr.

Giles.

Better unmute myself there. Hey guys.

Yeah, there you go.

Hi Dan. Hi Joe. Totally, totally interesting. There's a lot of comments going by. I'm Jason Giles. There's a lot of comments going by about how interesting it is just to listen to you guys talk to each other. I get the sense that there's so many conversations and that you're just nicking by them in reference. Oh yeah, it's like the time we talked about. We don't get to hear that, but see the wisdom. I was looking at your tripartite diagram here of nobody's in charge, everything's made up, and what was the last one?

Life's not fair.

Life's not fair.

Life's not fair.

Yes, I think that's pretty— yeah, there it is. Life's not fair. I was thinking about this, and, you know, my specialty is addiction medicine. I'm in recovery myself also, and the recovery principles are kind of antithetical to this in some way. So my first reaction was, wait a minute, somebody's in charge. It's the higher power, right? And life is fair. Because there's actions and there's reactions, there's actions and there's responses, and everything is made up. Well, that's where it got me, because we do make up our stories as we go along. The stories that we tell ourselves about what matters— actually, our past is made up based on our present. The story we tell ourselves about what happened back then is depending on how things are going right now. So if you've got the success, if you've got the life that you want, and you tell yourself a certain story. If you don't, you tell yourself a different story. So that, that, that's where these two— the, the triangle of, uh, you know, unity, service, and recovery, and the Dan Sullivan triangle of everything's made up— sort of folds back in together. And I could see that you're actually saying the same thing.

Well, the way to let go— when I say nobody's in charge, the, uh, what is in charge is rules. So You know, we've created tremendous— over centuries, we've created tremendous number of rules, you know, political rules, economic rules. But there actually isn't anybody in charge. It's a set of agreements that people make and different places have different rules. But there is something in charge. And from an entrepreneurial standpoint, there's better ways, there's better places in the world. To be an entrepreneur than other places. You know, like, I can tell the difference just between doing business in the States, doing business in Canada, and doing business in the UK. The rules are very, very different about what kind of freedom entrepreneurs have and what kind of restrictions they have. And that would be true anywhere you go. And so, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I have my preference of where I'd like to do business.

Probably the US, I would guess.

I'd like to make my money in the US, but I'd like to spend it in Canada.

Arbitrage. Very nice. I think that this business about the story you tell yourself is really, really important. I thank you for highlighting that. That's great.

Yeah, well, there's someone who I think is thinking along the same lines as you are. Is Angus Fletcher, who's just come out with a really great book called Primal—

I just read his second book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Primal Intelligence is just an amazing book. We have a big conference coming up in June in Orlando, and he's going to be our keynote speaker. But I thought the book he wrote, Primal Intelligence— I read a lot, and I'm— And this is the most original take on life going on right now that I've read in the last 25 years.

And he— was that you, Dan? One sec. Was that you at the Genius Network annual thing that recommended Angus Fletcher's book?

Probably.

I read it. I totally agree. It's amazing. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But he said that, you know, not to get too deep into the into what he's saying, but he said about 2,500 years ago, he said up until about 2,500 years ago that the number one source of intelligence was storytelling. Okay, and he said that 25 years ago in Greece, they created a new form which was called logic. Okay, and he said that it's kind of taken over and we've We've sort of banished storytelling to entertainment. We've banished it to, you know, it's a lesser form of intelligence. But the one thing that's very, very clear when it comes to logic, AI is a lot better at logic than any human's ever going to be. And he said what this is going to do is to free us to go back to storytelling. And he uses special forces as his main example that in the Special Forces, Delta, you know, the Delta Group, the SAS in UK, they're taught that you're going to be thrown into chaotic situations and you're going to have to make good decisions and you're not going to have very much information. And the only thing you can do is be clear about what your story is on how you handle this type situation. So they constantly, constantly, they tell their story. And I think this is good, uh, this is good advice for entrepreneurs too. Make sure you know what your story is.

Brilliant. Thank you.

And Jason, uh, can I ask you a question?

Of course.

Yeah, so, uh, you're a doctor, you've been working with, uh, uh, I mean, you know, you're— I know you're not going to say the names, but you've worked with some very famous people and some very successful people. And you've also seen the byproduct of if you give a lot of money to someone that doesn't really kind of have control over their impulses, it can be— it could end very disastrously, right? So my question to you is, with all of the work that you're doing with— I mean, your work is now reaching thousands of people What do you see the biggest opportunities and the biggest dangers?

Ah, that's good. Well, that's a great question. Yeah, Jim Rohn, I think, said if someone gives you a million dollars, you'd better become a millionaire quickly so you can keep the money, right? The difference between having a million dollars and being a millionaire. So the field, there's interesting things. So I've been in the field about 20 years. And in the beginning, we were, we were saying, hey, listen, it's a, it's a problem. It's not that you've got a weak will or that you're morally corrupt or that you're a sinner or there's something wrong with you. Uh, it's just, it's a medical problem. That, that culminated in the, it's a brain disease stuff, which we tried, you know, trying to be helpful. But if you ask people privately if they'd rather have a, uh, you know, be thought of as morally weak or mentally ill, it's not much of a choice. It— so I don't, I don't think the idea that your brain is diseased has been all that well received or, or really helped. I do think that we're at a low point in my life for stigma. So when you find out that somebody has a problem and they go to, they go to rehab or they get some help, most people are like, that's great. Most people aren't backing away like they were 20 or 30 years ago. It's, it's just a, it's a normal part of life. And so as it becomes normalized and stigma goes away, um, we start— the stuff I'm interested in is the other 98% of people with this problem who never get treatment, right? Just don't go in. And this idea that, well, it's, it's because it's stigma and it's embarrassing and they don't want to go, so they prefer to keep destroying their lives by drinking or using— that just, that's actually, I don't think that's true. I think our results are not that great. Uh, you know, it's probably maybe double digits, but probably, probably low double digits for success in the, in the treatment paradigm. And it's too disruptive and people don't want to go. So I'm interested in the other 9 out of 10 or 95 out of 100 people that we need to come up with. We need to basically reach them where they are. And the other thing, and Jonah, you were talking about this the other day, the, the abstinence model which is what I grew up in and how I came into it. And I needed to get abstinent. I was a complete disaster. People don't want that either. So there's a study that came out. You may have seen this, Dan, but in the Addiction Medicine Journal last summer, that's— it was a confidential interview of several hundred people, actually. And they asked them, in the last 30— these are people in recovery, these are sober people in recovery— in the last 30 days, Uh, which of these substances have you used, or none of the above? Alcohol, cannabis, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, and sedatives, you know, Xanax or sleeping pills, or none of the above. And, um, think for a second, people listening, what percentage of people who are in recovery said none of the above? I'm sober, I didn't use any of those things. Yeah. Oh, that's pretty cynical, Dad. It's— it was actually about 25%. So 3 out of 4 people who, who reach what we would think are the— is the gold standard in the field are not, uh, sober by the classic definition. So we're selling something that people don't want, that doesn't work, and that they, um, you know, don't like. So we have to come up with something different. We have to come up with a different way to to incremental basis, get people to basically— it's what you said a minute ago, the examine life. I think if you look and, and you notice, there's a, there's a very old study where they put a, a mirror on the refrigerator and they found, you know, right at eye level, and as you're opening the door, you see yourself, and they found that people lost weight. So there's a personal accountability to your habits and to your behaviors. And I think if we can help people shine their own spotlight on their activities, then they can do different things.

That's great. And you know, there's that— that also reminds me, and I'll say this to the point of redundancy because there are often just ways to think about things that I think are helpful. And we have a friend we've known for years. He's— Dan and I— Richard Rossi. And he had this line, wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunity. And the people that will do the best in the world will be the ones that are able to see where there's pain, where there's anxiety. And pain is a messenger. Pain identifies and points out what you need to pay attention to. And we have a society that tries to numb it. And we were talking the other day, Jason, you just replace the word addiction with pain. You know, it's like my friend Gabor Mate says, you know, the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain. And if you just use the word pain instead of addiction, you could understand why someone's drinking or why someone is looking at porn or why someone is gambling or gaming or workaholism or what, you know. And so a lot of people try to numb the pain. And if you look at the pain in society or the pain in your community or the pain within your client base, they're basically telling you— I was talking to Gary Chapman, who wrote Five Love Languages years ago. And he said, if you want to understand what someone's love language is, listen to what they complain about because they're basically telling you, this is where I'm hurting. And some people are like, you should never complain. It's like, well, sometimes people that are complaining are crying for help and no one's— they don't know what else to do, right? So, yeah, but thank you. And we got a couple of questions there. So, let's do that real quickly since we might be limited on time here. And I do want to announce. That me and Dan next week, our Audible original is coming out and it is called— let me put a link here. I want to— maybe Gina can do it faster than I can. Yeah, Gina, if you could post in there below, we even registered the website, which I couldn't believe it was available, BuyTheBook.com, BuyTheAudioBook. .com, buytheaudiobook.com. And me and Dan recorded an Audible original published by Hay House, and it's going to be awesome. It is awesome, and it is all on ambition and connection. So let's go to— who had their— it says iPhone, so I don't know who that is, but we'll go to iPhone first. It looks like a candle or a glass of water that is pointed out, but Is that person there? All right, going once. Boris, you want to go? And then we'll go to Dr. Alan Barnard, which is great.

Sure. Um, I just want to go back to something Dan said earlier, but before I make my comment about it, I want to thank you and Dan because I have never been in a room with you guys that I've not learned something. You guys always show up transparent authentic, and I just love it. So thank you for that. Um, when Dan was talking about thinking in the present, about yesterday, right, and today I'm building yesterday, that really made me think about what I consider is the central question in life. And I ask myself this question every single day. It's on my productivity planner. It's how I operate. And the question is What decisions did I make and what actions did I take today to have the greatest impact on what matters to me most? And I thought about that from the standpoint of that's an after-action review. I asked myself that question in the afternoon when I'm done working. And I said, you know, maybe I should be asking that question in the morning. Maybe I should be priming myself in the morning for how to make today not what I just did, but what I'm going to do to make it the best day. So wonderful insight. Thank you so much, Dan, for that.

Thank you. Awesome.

Thank you. And Dr. Alan, how are you?

I'm doing very well. Can you hear me okay?

Yeah, I can hear you great.

Hi, Dan. Hi, Joe. I found Joe's observation and Dan's issue about being able to monetize the ability to ask questions fascinating. I made that discovery. I co-founded Goldratt Research Labs with, uh, Dr. Eli Goldratt, who created Theory of Constraints and wrote The Goal. And he was one that hammered that into my head, you know, the best solutions always starts with the right questions. So I thought, just in the spirit of 10x, um, what is the right question when it comes to 10x? And my big question I discovered quite early on was this question. When somebody thinks that something is impossible, just ask yourself, ask them, it's impossible unless— and it changes the brain from, you know, using impossible as an excuse not to even try to forcing the brain to start thinking about it. So when you ask the question like, why is in most people's mind, 10x impossible, is that they tend to think that in order to 10x my net profit, I have to 10x my revenue. And that sounds incredibly difficult, even if I give myself a couple of years to do. But what I did was I built a little calculator called 10xgrowthcalculator.com. If somebody wants to share the link, they're welcome to do that. And essentially what it, what it gives you an opportunity is to say, well, put in your goal of 10x your net profit in, say, 3 years, and then analyze it for me. Tell me by how much do I need to actually increase price and volume over the 3-year period? And if I can control my costs, so I'm not, I'm not growing my costs at the same rate as my revenues, what does it actually take? And this, the numbers are surprising. It's only a 6% increase in price on average per year for 3 years, a 12% increase in volume, and a 3% increase in cost. So you're growing your costs slower than the revenues, which is a combination of 18%, and that will 10x your net profit from— say if you've got a business of $10 million net revenue and $0.5 million of net profit, so you can take your profit from $500,000 to $5 million in just 3 years with those simple numbers. But what's even more surprising is if you grew your cost at the same rate as revenue, which most entrepreneurs end up doing, the multiple you get is not 10x but only 4x. And the other thing that's surprising that most people don't look at is they don't look at the impact that the 10x growth in net profit will have on your company valuation. So if you were valuing your company at maybe 5x at $500,000, so your company is worth $2.5 million. If you can achieve those numbers that I just shared and you, you grow your net profit from $500,000 to $5 million, that's growing it from a 5% margin to 30% margin. You'll probably won't get 5x, you'll probably get 8x. So you would have grown your own value from maybe 2.5 million to 40 million. And I, I know this is sharing a lot of numbers, you know, I'm, I'm, I love math, but it's, it's going back to this fundamental thing is, are you asking yourself the right question? And the right question when it comes to 10x is, how much will it actually take to 10x my net profit over 3 years' time? And it turns out that the answer is surprisingly Simple.

Well, first off, I love that. And I want to just highlight what you— your question that— so, it's impossible unless... And I would encourage everyone to write down, like literally physically write it down on like a Post-it note or somewhere that is in front of you, or put it as a screensaver on your phone. And play around with that question in your mind. So, when you come up against something that seems overwhelming, like, how am I going to climb this mountain or how am I going to deal with this situation or how am I going to grow my business? It's impossible unless... And I have a friend, Keith Cunningham, who wrote a book, an amazing book called The Road Less Stupid. And Robert Kiyosaki told me years ago, he's the one that taught him Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He's one of his rich dads. And he has a thing called Thinking Time. And I have a great interview on YouTube with Keith, a couple of them actually on my YouTube channel. And one of the greatest ways that he's— he lost over $100 million after the real estate crash in the first real estate crash. He spent 3 years in therapy just dealing with the— how to, the ramifications of losing all of his wealth, and then he built it all back. But the thing is, is thinking time. You literally just sit down and you think. And if someone took that question, "It's impossible unless..." and just started writing and just started writing, it's amazing what the brain can come up with. And I think you just demonstrated that. So, I think that's really— I appreciate it. It's really awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Dan, what else do we got before we start wrapping up this one? Other than I— again, I— because we do have an Audible original coming out next week, our first one ever. I do hope that it's called The Entrepreneur's Edge: Turning Purpose into Profit and Fulfillment. Me and Dan spent several hours at different times in a studio recording this, and it's— we're doing it with Hay House and we'll put the link in the chat. It's BuyTheAudioBook.com. BuyTheAudioBook.com is the domain name. But yeah, Dan, what have we not shared that we need to before we wrap up?

You want to talk about happiness?

Sure.

Okay, I've got another triangle. First of all, I think happiness really means different things to different people. And, uh, but for me, it's a way of, uh, being. And, uh, one of the things I've really worked on, and, uh, I, I got off to a good start. I had, uh, I really had a happy childhood. I, you know, uh, I'm a fifth child, and my parents are both fifth children, and this one they really knew how to raise. So I had very light supervision as, as a child, and I had a a farm to play, but I've always kind of liked who I was. So, I think one of the things being happy is actually just liking who you are. And one of the reasons for that is that you are the only person that you have direct access to. So, if you're fixing the world, you should, you know, you should work on the human that you're walking around in. So, so every day, you know, I mean, I have a real, very, very positive attitude toward— the big thing, Joe, is I've made the quota for a number of mistakes, and I've had the quota for a number of failures that I think most entrepreneurs do. But when you recontextualize your failures in terms of how you handled it after after it handled, you come up with different information. And I think that generally speaking, when I've screwed up, you know, when I've been blindsided and everything else, that generally I've handled it well afterwards and I've come back, you know, got back on my feet and everything. So I really, you know, one is I've never wanted to be anyone except myself. So I don't try to be other people. Oscar Wilde had a great line. He said, "Be yourself, everyone else is taken." And I think it's really good. Number 2 is measuring daily progress. And we live in a world where there's a lot of negative messages and we live in a world where there's a lot of ideal way of living being portrayed. Through advertising, through the movies and everything else. And if you compare your day with the ideals of the world, you're going to come up feeling negative about yourself. So, we have a concept called the gap and the gain. If you achieve a goal, but you're measuring against an ideal, you'll feel like you're not making any progress. But if you achieve a goal and you turn around and measure backwards, measure backwards, you'll see that you made a great deal of progress. So, I'm always at the end of the day looking back and I say, "I got this done, I got this done, I got this done, I got this done." And it feels really good. So, I constantly— this is a daily thing, liking who I am and measuring daily progress. And the other thing is being more useful to other people. You know, the reality of our lives is really measured by how we've been useful to other people. And so, the 3 of them together reinforce each other. 1 reinforces 2 and 3, 2 reinforces 3 and 1, and 3 reinforces 1 and 2. So, that's just generally speaking, you know, and I live day to day and I'm introducing my new activity of Spending today creating yesterday. So yeah, no, this is, this is great.

This is great. So what I'd like to do is ask you to post in the chat on a scale of 1 to 10, because this helps us gauge what we can talk about at the next episode. And next time we do this, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being very useful, 1 being you didn't like it at all, how would you rate today's session with me and Dan? Please go and post it there. Thank you. 10, 12, 12, 12. We got 1 8, 9, 10. Let's see, what's the lowest we got so far? I saw only 1 7, but almost all of them are 10s, 11s, 12s.

Let's see.

That's great.

Awesome, awesome.

Well, good. So I, I really appreciate it. And here's what I'm going to say. So, uh, it is a new year. We, uh, are going to have conversations on a regular basis. Me and Dan are going to do this at least, you know, once or twice a month. We will also post, uh, you know, podcast episodes on 10xTalk. So wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure you subscribe to 10xtalk.com. You will be notified about it. And if there's anyone that you want to share this with, uh, we should have the website, uh, that you, you use to register. Uh, we'll send out another email with you as a follow-up and to register for the next one, we will notify you about that. And then, Dan, I would like to talk about our new audio program coming out for just a couple of minutes so we can officially end this episode. And then if you guys need to jump, go ahead and jump. If you want to hear about the new audio program we have coming out next week, I'll have Dan, if you want to share a couple of things about it. It's on Ambition. It's called The Entrepreneur's Edge. And if you want to preorder, you can do that or you can get it next week. And if anyone's never read either of our many books that we have, you can go to Amazon and get the books. You can go to Strategic Coach. I also have a book called Life Gives to the Giver. You can get this book for free at Joe'sFreeBook.com. And I also have What's in it for them? This yellow book, it's on, and it's, it hit number 4 on Wall Street Journal bestseller. And it's my principles for connecting with other people and doing it in a way to where there's a value exchange because we all want something. Everybody wants something. There's nothing wrong with wanting something. It's just make sure that your give is equal to or greater than your want. And if you show up with a great give, you'll usually get you know, people often reciprocate. And then if people take advantage of you, because if you are a giver, you will have people take advantage of you. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Then it helps you hopefully set up boundaries. And I say this too, because one of the downsides— I have to say this to givers— you're just a magnet for takers. If you are a giver, there's a frequency that is picked up on by takers. And the more that you can develop your spidey senses the less likely that you're going to have some of these sharks that will try to swoop in and take advantage of you. But I'm yet to find a completely, you know, complete repellent from all of the, you know, the toxic vampires that exist. But most people are good, and most people want to do awesome things. And so, Dan, why should someone go and get our new audiobook published by Hay House? That I produced, our first Audible original.

Yeah, well, yeah, one thing it gives us, it gives you a couple hours. I mean, you, we in podcasts or, you know, when you're giving a presentation, you have very limited amount of time. But I think that The way that the audio is structured, it's that Joe does 3 20-minute, you know, where it's just Joe talking, and then we, then we have 20 minutes of Dan and Joe talking about what Joe talked about, you know, and we do the same thing on my side. But one of the, one of the ideas, like, uh, we're going through a real re- focusing of Strategic Coach. This is our beginning of year 37. And what I'm really interested in, there's kind of like a dirty word that entrepreneurs experience. And it's taken me a long time to kind of get in touch with this. But it's something that you're encouraged not to talk about. And the thing you're encouraged not to talk about is the ambition. And generally speaking, it causes trouble when you talk about your ambition. And what I've explored, and I've done a lot of talking with a couple thousand entrepreneurs on this, that it's a metaphor in the way that ambition is actually talked about in the world. And the metaphor is that Ambition is like a gas tank, and some people are given very small gas tanks and some people are given very big gas tanks at the beginning of life. So, there's a sense of inequality right off the bat that, "Oh, sure, yeah, but you have lots of ambition and everything like that." And then people make up reasons why someone has more ambition than someone else. And then, The negativity is attached to ambition in the sense that, yeah, but he walks over people and, you know, he's selfish and he doesn't really care about other people. And I think it has to do with the metaphor is wrong. So what we've done is we've repositioned that ambition as a muscle and it gets bigger from working out. And the way you work out is that you You take risks to create new capabilities, and every time you take a risk, you commit yourself, you go through a period of courage, and you create a new capability. Your ambition grows as a result of the new capability. And the thing is that there's no age limit on this. So, if it's a gas tank, even the person with the biggest gas tank thinks that, "Yeah, but it's going to run out at 60 years old, 70 years old." You know, my ambition gas tank is going to run out of gas and there's no refills. There's no refills once you run out of your ambition. And I think that age limits it or it puts it in a very tight period of time when you've got to get everything done. But what we're noticing with entrepreneur clients is that they're becoming more ambitious in their 60s and 70s. You know, and there's a lot of really great science and medicine now to keep you healthy. And so, my sense is that the whole notion of ambition is really being rethought through. So, and I talk about that in our Audible.

Yep.

And I talk a lot about connection and doing things because the number one question that people have always asked me is, "How do you meet so-and-so?" And people think that it's not it's not what you do, it's who you know. And that actually isn't really accurate. You can know a lot of people and that doesn't mean you do anything with them or that leads to opportunities. In a lot of ways, you can get consumed with going shallow with a bunch of people versus going deep with a handful of people. And I look at books and relationships very similar. It's like if you come across a book that really is life-changing or an idea, go deep with it, don't go shallow. I mean, I think you're better served listening to a really great podcast that you got value out of, you know, 2 or 3 times versus listening to 20 podcasts at double speed just so you can burn through a bunch of content. It could fry your brain out that way. And I think relationships could be the same way. And so, you're either communicating with someone, connecting, or you're trying to escape. And so, take a look at all of the types of activities and relationships that you're in and do an audit of which ones are you really— you're just into them. I mean, you would just want to hang out with the person. You know, difference between like an acquaintance versus a friend is you want to hang out with a friend, whereas an acquaintance, it might be, you know, you want to just not be alone at lunch, or you might want to go to a movie, you know, not by yourself, or you might want to do a business deal. But, you know, the relationships that you really feel connected with are the ones that I think increase intensity. And so I'm going to launch a contest for our members this year. I'm going to give away as part of the spokesperson position, a Storyteller Overland Sprinter van that is fully equipped as a podcast studio. This van, to purchase one is over $225,000. And then for Genius Youth, I'm going to give away my Tesla. To one of the Genius Youth kids, and we're going to run a contest. But the reason I'm telling you this, because, you know, many of you are not going to be involved in this. Some of you will because you're in Genius Network and involved in what we're doing. But the reason I'm doing it is that there's Pearson's Law, which Dan has talked about a lot for many years, which is everything measured improves, and everything measured and reported improves exponentially. And one of the ways to engage people is to give them a reason to pursue something. And that's why if you work out every day and you need to exercise, that is different than if you consider yourself an athlete. And if you're like, "I'm training for something." So, if you start thinking of yourself as an entrepreneurial athlete or a corporate athlete or whatever, you're going to engage with how you do things in a much, in a much different way. So, this is the year that I'm going to, because back in the '90s, I helped Bill Phillips launch the biggest fitness competition of all time. It was the book Body for Life and these Physique Transformation Challenges. And I was Bill Phillips' marketing consultant for 13+ years, and over a million people entered that competition. Beachbody modeled a lot of what it is they did. So, I've helped create contest models that have impacted millions of people. And I did them for over 10 years, gave away cars and everything. And I'm launching, 10 years later, I'm going to launch another contest. I'm going to see how it goes. And I'm going to do updates when we talk in the podcast about what I'm learning from people that have access to the same information. But what happens when they become more engaged in it? And I'm hoping that we can identify some ways to help you win at deeper levels. And of course, myself, because everything that I freaking do, I'm also a student in everything. I always try to approach things from a beginner's mind. So, I think that is it. Is there anything else we should say, Dan, or just give everyone the Thanks for being here.

And I think car dealers love you, Joe.

They actually do, because over the years I gave away 4 Range Rovers or Land Rovers, a Mercedes convertible, a Mercedes SUV, a Hummer, a Jaguar convertible as my very first prize that I gave away in 2001. I taught the model to Robin Robbins. Who for 19 years has been doing contests. At her last one, she had 3 of the actual, you know, Shark Tank members. I'm friends with a couple of the people on Shark Tank, and Robin is going to be helping me head up this contest. So, it's going to be pretty awesome. So, I'm bringing that up because I would like all of you to think of something that you want, some incredible audacious thing. Ask yourself, the, uh, what, what Alan discussed, which is it's impossible unless... and then think about that, chew on that for a bit. And, uh, yeah, and there's one other thing I wanted to say, but I damn it, I can't remember, it slipped my mind. So if there's any question in the future you would like me to ask Dan, post it in the chat real quick. And if— and then, uh, we'll wrap up in about a minute, I'll ask Gina to end the call and then pre-order our book or get it next week. And if you like it, please share it with a friend, someone you care about, and give us a review because we hope that book, that audiobook impacts a lot of people. And that's it for now. So, thank you guys and gals. I appreciate it. And Gina and everyone on our team, Strategic Coach and Genius Network, I appreciate you all. And, uh, I'm getting ready to hop on a Zoom with Alex Epstein and, uh, Vivek Ramasamy. Can you believe that? That's happening in 15 minutes. So, uh, have a wonderful day and, uh, tell someone that you love that you care about them. And if someone's a half-heart annoying, lame, lame and frustrating person, block them from ever texting you again. And we'll see you on the next episode of 10x Talk.

Thank you.

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