Episode 131: If You Want To Be Optimistic, Bet On Yourself

Hey, everybody. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to our next episode of Exponential Wisdom. I'm here with my dear friend and co host, Dan Sullivan. And Dan, on this episode, I'd like to continue a conversation we started just recently on mindsets and in particular the idea of scarcity and fear versus optimism and abundance.

And confidence. And confidence. Yeah.

Which, you know, optimism and abundance and confidence most definitely come together. You know, I often talk to individuals, whether it's, you know, room fulls of entrepreneurs, leaders, investors, and I asked the question of them and this was a lot of the premise and the basis for what I've been building in the Abundance360 year on community that I host is if you were to ask yourself what made the most successful leaders in the world successful, Was it the capital they had, was it the technology they had, Was it the people they knew, or was it their mindset? Everybody responds I think the same, saying their mindset.

Right.

If you took away from Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, whatever you want to use as your leader took away those elements, but they retained their mindset, they would most likely regain it. And if that's the case, then what mindset do you have? Where did you get your mindset and what mindset do you need for the decades ahead? So I want to start with that open ended question. Thoughts?

Well, I think both of us have a story to tell here because you've gone through periods of your life where you bet on something and you had, from an outside standpoint, people looking at you. You had no basis for being optimistic and you had no basis for being confident. It wasn't just a guess, it was a bet. You had invested time, money. There's an opportunity cost to anything you focus your mind on because there is a limitation of the human mind. We can't focus on more than one thing at a time. And if we put a lot of actual time behind, a certain concentration. And I can remember my second bankruptcy, first one was 78, happened the same day I had my divorce. And I arranged so that the divorce could be first because I could celebrate at lunch with my credit card, which I had to pass in, in the afternoon because when you're bankrupt, you have to give up all your credit cards. And my bankruptcies were all a result of receivables problem where I had done the work, I had billed for it, but I got stretched out to 90 days, 120 days, and I didn't have the cushion to do it. But I remember I had a guaranteed loan from the bank in Canada. The banks are big. The smallest of the five major banks has 800 branches. That's the smallest of them. These are really, really big operations and they're semi government. They are controlled in what they can invest in and they're generally solid banks, which you want a bank to be. The banker who was a nice guy, I remember he was Daniel J. Something and I was Daniel J. So I felt a kindredness with him, but he was cool. But he says, look, he says, you have skills, you're a writer, you're a layout artist. When are you going to stop this foolishness and go out and just get a really good job? And I said, well, I've had a really good job and it wasn't my future. And I says, I'm just not smart enough yet. So it's not that the opportunity I'm looking at, it's not the future I'm looking at that is faulty. It's that I'm not smart enough yet to know how to approach it and to capitalize on what's going to happen. So this is about eight years after I had gone out on my own. And you know, I was, for the most part, I was holding on by my fingernails. You know, I was hoping I had next month's rent, but there was no way I was not going to pursue this. So I think one mindset is that there's no alternative.

There's a lot of success that comes when you burn your ships and you have no other option.

For sure there's no alternative. First of all, my resume would show an eight year blank. It's not good on your resume, by the way.

I call this a moonshot mindset. When you set a big goal and you let everybody know and you're now exposed to your peers and everybody's like watching you. Yeah, it focuses the mind like nothing else. Yeah, yeah.

And I remember people I knew saying, you know, what if your whole life turns out to be a failure like you're experiencing right now? I said, well, it's just one human life and there's a lot of them. It's not like we're short of human beings. I said, plus it's the only life I have direct access to. And I said, but I'm so convinced that it's a matter of me getting smarter. And as it turns out, the coaching that I had developed, that was about a month before I came up with the strategy circle as a thinking process. And within six years I had gone from barely 25,000 a year. Just barely. I wasn't even tax eligible. I was making so little money.

That's one approach to paying low taxes.

Yeah, yeah. This is the ultimate tax dodge. Don't make any money anyway. But within six years, I was hitting $160,000. You know, but I needed a method. And I wouldn't have created the method if I didn't have the persistence and the dedication to the method. And, you know, now I've got hundreds of methods that have been the children of the strategy circle and just came up with a new one, the triple play, which I think is exponential. I think this one is really going through the roof. But the whole point was that if failure is a social problem for you, if failure is a status problem, don't become an entrepreneur. But if you have a sense of who you are and you have a sense of uniqueness, that this could make a big difference for the right check writer, then that's the bet I made. And I'm close to 50 years since I started. I'll be 20, 24. It'll be 50 years that I've been doing this. And, you know, bankruptcy was just an extreme form of market research.

You know, one of the things I teach, you know, the coach members through you and abundance360 is our brains are neural nets, right? Our brains are 100 billion neurons and they're shaped by what we see every day, the conversations we have. The challenge becomes our mindsets again, whether we're in fear and scarcity on one end, which by the way, is how we evolve. That's the evolutionary default. You will be in a fear and scarcity mindset by default unless you shift yourself to an abundance and optimism mindset. But the problem is that when you're hanging out with people who are in fear and scarcity, they will put you in fear and scarcity. When you're watching the Crisis News Network and all of the negativism on the planet, you'll be in fear and scarcity. And what people don't realize is you enjoy being around people who are positive minded, who are optimistic, who have an abundance mindset. And on your health as well, there is a definitive seven year advantage on healthspan if you've got a positive abundance mindset. And so these are all the things that, you know, you need to put yourself around people. That's why, you know, for me, one of the Greatest benefits of abundance360and strategic coach is the community that you're with, right? You're in a Community of people.

And it's a community that you've created.

Yeah.

There wasn't a community that came custom designed and was guaranteed by government mandate that you should have an optimistic community around you. Okay. It has to be created.

It has to be. And you have to proactively create it or choose into it. You know, for most of human history, you didn't have that option. It was where you were born, the village you were in, you know, the people that you related to that shaped all that. And today your community can be a digital community from, you know, a smattering of countries around the world. But that you're paying attention to how these people are taking big bets, the confidence that they have, the tools that they have, you're watching them fail, fail, fail, succeed. And that's inspiring you to do the same in your life. And that's an amazing world to be living in.

Yeah. And I think first of all, you have to have paid your dues. I mean, that there were little tests all along, that things were getting uncomfortable. But I remember the day that I had both my divorce and bankruptcy the next day. It wasn't like it was a five star day for myself at the end of the day. And I got up the next morning and I had a favorite restaurant that had terrific breakfast. And it was sort of a hotspot in Toronto. The movie industry came in there. I knew all the waitstaff. I had to pay cash that day. And I remember walking down the streets and nobody was particularly upset about my predicament. There was nobody who were having an unhappy day because I had just had two really bad report cards the day before. And I said, this is strictly my deal. It doesn't relate to anyone else. And if you're going to turn around, you're going to do the turning. I have a number of clients who've been through Special Forces in the military, one branch or another. And, and the Navy Seals are famous for their hell week. And it's the first six days, they just put you through horrendous time pressures. At most they let you sleep two hours out of every 24. You're not fed well, enormous amount of it. You're in the Pacific Ocean, which is cold on the hottest day of the year. It's a cold ocean. And I asked him, the person who went through it, and he made it through and he became a Navy seal. And I said, what gets you through that week? And he says, well, it's not thinking about yourself, but thinking about the other people who are going through the week with you that if you take your focus off yourself and you say, I want to be a good teammate, I don't want to let anybody down. He said, you find that the burden is a lot lighter. And I think it goes for entrepreneurship is the same thing that if your eyes aren't on yourself, but where's the value I can create in someone else's life? And that's a mindset. The most advanced higher education in the world won't teach you to think about things from other people's point of view. So that's a mindset. Joe Polish, our dear friend for both of us, he wrote a wonderful book and it's called, it's about them. And, and I said, yeah, I'm kind of handled, you know, at my age and what I've been through, I'm kind of handled. I don't have to spend much time thinking about Dan, But I've got three or 400 coach clients, I've got 130 team members in the company. And my emphasis is what do I do to guarantee that they don't have to worry about their jobs? What do I have to do to help the entrepreneurs jump to the next level? And takes the emphasis off me. And a lot of people don't think of entrepreneurism, but at the highest levels, entrepreneurism is just pure teamwork, especially with people who have skills greater than yours.

And in benefit to the planet.

Right.

I define an entrepreneur as someone who finds a great problem and solves it. And in fact, that's how the world gets better and better, by more and more entrepreneurs finding and solving problems. And I just, I want to take a second for those listening where, you know, you're bombarded by the negative news all the time, whether it's CNN or Fox or whatever you happen to be watching different part of the world. The challenge is you don't hear the amazing news going on. You don't see the constant parade of breakthroughs going on in AI and robotics and longevity and so forth. But they are, they are consistently, persistently. We're heading towards a world eventually and you know, listen, we're talking decades down of a post capitalism world. We're heading towards a squanderable abundance of energy, solar and fusion that's rapidly coming. So there's a direct correlation between the GDP of a nation and the availability and reduced cost of energy. Energy also drives health, it drives clean water, it drives all of these things. And the best education, the best healthcare on the planet, it's getting better across the board. And there'll be a state change when AI comes on board online. And so we have the potential to create an extraordinary world. I call it not a world of luxury.

Right.

But a world of possibility where every child has access to all the best resources. And that's a world which I think is going to be happier and safer. And the world that, you know, I know, many of the CEOs who I mentor in A360 are trying to create so we can get there. And if we can get there, I think that is something that we need to be doing. But if you're in fear, if you're watching all the politicians and gun shootings and all the negativism, you think the world is going to hell in a hand basket and you retrench and you're in a fetal position versus, you know, grabbing these incredible technologies and running with them.

Yeah. Well, here's what I think. I think that there's a lot of great people in bad systems. In other words, I believe there's a lot of really great teachers who are in bad schools. Okay. And if you look at scarcity around the world in the 21st century, it's mainly government engineered scarcity. In other words, there's massively more food on the planet to feed everybody nutritiously. But scarcity is engineered. If they're hungry, they don't rebel. The statistics prove that. That's when they do rebel, when they don't know when the food's coming. Revolutions don't happen because of theory. Revolutions happen because people can't guarantee food for their family. That's when people really rebel.

I agree. I think if people have access to food and health and education, life is good. If the mom knows that her children have access to all of these things, that's all we want for our children and our family and our friends.

Well, you're going back to what differentiates entrepreneurs from other people? Entrepreneurs more than I think probably any class of people in the marketplace bet on themselves. And the really best entrepreneurs I know bet on themselves more than they bet on something outside themselves. In other words, they're not betting on a particular technology, they're not betting on a particular financial circumstance or anything. They're betting on themselves in such a way that it doesn't matter what happens, they wake up positive in the morning and confident about what they can do for that day. I know a lot of people who are in love with people they don't know, but they're not actually in love with the people they do know. So I'm very Very leery of big movements of changing the world, especially people who can't change a tire or people who want to change the world. I mean, we all have this own take on it, and on election day, we all vote differently. But it's the people I actually know that I care the most of, people I really knew that I didn't care for are no longer in my life. I move on from people. I mean, there's enough people. So I don't need 8 billion. I just did it. But the big thing that I really find, Peter, about this whole thing, when you get up in the morning, are you betting on yourself or are you betting on external circumstances? And I think that's a very key central mindset, that optimism really is a function of how much that you bet on yourself.

Yes, I agree. That is one of the major differentiators of an entrepreneur and a belief that you can. And again, it's. You're leaning forward into it. You're not retrenching into a fetal position.

Yeah. You know, whatever your thoughts are about people, you know, the individuals, you know, I was watching the SpaceX launch.

Yeah. It's amazing.

And I said, it exploded. People said, musk's rocket explodes. And meanwhile, they're having a champagne celebration dinner at SpaceX headquarters. Okay. And the reason was they wanted to prove a couple of things about the takeoff. And everything else from that was a bonus. And of all the people I've ever seen of a guy who thrives and jumps forward by things failing, Elon Musk might be certainly in the technological world, he's the number. A lot of people just can't have failure attached to their name whatsoever. And he says, I guess all the failure is mine. Then I get to capitalize on all the failure. I'll fail at this, I'll fail at that. But as long as you do a good experience transformer on it and say, what'd we learn that was good? What we learned that was bad, next time we do it, how do we have it more of one than the other? I think he's really great. And I mean, he's a wild and woolly character in many respects, but I just look at the center of how the guy operates, and I find it amazing.

I will talk about Elon because I had dinner with him two weeks ago before the launch, and he said, listen, this is an incremental test. If it gets off the tower without exploding on the ground, it's a huge success. Right? And it got through maximum dynamic pressure, and it proved the way These things work is what's so amazing. And we're going to head there with medicine and so many others. They model everything and then they collect data during the test flight and they update the model. And then as the model gets better and better, the vehicle becomes more and more robust. And they know the margins there. And I tweeted out, I took photos of the front page of the newspapers out there, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times and so forth. It was like Starship Explodes. It's like absolutely the wrong message to be sending. It was a major success and Elon was thrilled. And if you're listening to the live stream, everybody at Hawthorne, their headquarters was cheering and yelling and it was way.

Beyond well, he had given them a measurable goal to measure backwards, he was measuring back. They didn't know that before and now they know it. So it's a win. And I think that very, very measurable, accessible goals is another part of being optimistic. This is what I can pull off today. I don't know what I can pull off a year from now, but I know by time. I go to bed tonight and by the way, go to bed so you get a lot of sleep because your mind works if you have good sleep. But Babs and I have been part of a hope it'll be a Broadway musical that opens the first week of June in Chicago and it's got a 12 week run and we've been with it for five years as not major donors, but we've certainly donated all along. Jeff Madoff, you know Jeff Madoff, he's a great friend. Jeff, when he was 71, said, I've always wanted to have a Broadway musical and I've decided to go for it. It's gotten rave reviews. We opened it in Philadelphia. We, I said, are part of the production started in Philadelphia, got rave reviews over a three week period. And it's about Lloyd Price, who was arguably the crossover artist who started rock and roll in the United States in 1951 and went through, you know, he's African American from New Orleans, went through all the hassle that one goes just to be an entertainer and all the hassle it has to do racial tensions that he went through. And I met him, he died two years ago at 89 and I met him and there wasn't a ounce of bitterness in him about anything. He says, look at, look at, look at where I am. You know, I was digging septic tanks when I was 17 years old. A month later he says, I was making $10,000 a month. You know, in 1951, which is a lot of money back then, you know, had 10 number one hits. But the story is not known because he was too early. But there were a lot of people who came in because of his leadership and he was very supportive of other artists. Little Richard came up through Lloyd Price when he made his first record in a radio studio in New Orleans. Fats Domino was an unknown piano player, you know, and he was the piano player. So all these really great stars from the 1950s and it's just a whopping good play. And Jeff said, I always wanted to do this and I put together a great team and everything. So that opens right downtown on Michigan Avenue at a terrific theater.

We also have our dear friend Charlie Epstein.

Charlie is going to at our summit next year. His live show is going to be the evening of the first cocktail party. We're going to have Yield of Dreams. Yield of Dreams.

Yes. Yeah, no, we'll definitely feature him.

Free zoners Scott Donnell and Chad Willardson are bringing out a gaming program for teaching children basic economics called Gravy Stack and it launches next week. I don't know the good that's going to do for children. That's going to do for a lot of their economically ignorant parents. I think it's going to do because first thing you check out is what are all the subscriptions that your parents have that should be dropped right away? I love that.

I love that.

All the different outlays from their credit card and they get points, they get points and everybody's in competition with each other. Then there's 100 games that you play and you build up in skill. You know, it's gaming applied to basic economic education. So it's really, really true. So everything's made up. Make it up. Nobody's in charge of innovation, so you can take charge and life's not fair. So don't worry about it. Just create something of value that helps.

A lot of people and your mindset matters. It's the most precious thing you have. So guard your mindset. You know, if you're hanging around depressed people and fearful and people who tell you it can't be done, you've got to put up the roadblocks. And like, for me, I think it's the same for you.

Right.

I've stopped watching television.

I've stopped five years in July 18, I haven't seen a minute of television.

Well, you and I change a little bit. I don't actually read the news other than filtered news that I get through my own apps. That I've built to search the world's information for the important breakthroughs and get it to me.

Yeah. Well, we're signed up with Joe Stulte. So our newsletter coming out.

Oh, that's great. Through Future Scope.

Future Scope, yeah. And I think that starts next week. The first newsletter.

I'm excited to subscribe to it.

Oh, yeah. Well, you're on the list. I mean, we. Contact list and you're on it. And the AI changes the usefulness of the newsletter every time you put it out there. This is. They're responding to. So more of this and everything else. I'm not running the project. Yeah, Yeah. I have two rules regarding technology. I always keep a smart human between me and the technology. I always keep the technology between me and stupid people.

I love that, Dan. That's a fantastic two rules for being.

Cool and calm in a world of technological tsunami.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, I wish everybody the opportunity to see the world in a compelling, abundant, optimistic sense and realize that the power you have to transform your life and the things that you care about in life is greater than ever before. You've got the power that kings and queens had and how you see the world. Your level of optimism and hopefulness has a direct correlation with your health span. So if you want to live a long and vital life, have a mindset that correlates with that.

Yeah. And I would say, just to wrap up our 11 years of collaboration here, I think it numbers in the thousands now. The Strategic coach entrepreneurs whose main introduction into the technological world has been your presentations and the guests that you have on. And we had over a thousand live streaming in addition to the actual coach clients who were in California. What's the name of that point out there?

The. I just.

Nice place. Nice place. You could get lost in the hotel, though. It was easy to get lost in the hotel.

It's a beautiful. It's a beach.

Yeah, it's great. And we're there again next year, I guess, Right, too.

Yeah. We're at Terranea Resort.

Yeah. Yeah. Nice place. Fortunately, we were about a mile away, so I got my steps in first thing in the morning.

Oh, you had one of these suites there.

Villas.

Yeah, the villas. Yeah. It's beautiful.

Yeah.

Next year we're March 17th through the 23rd, and usually in March, and we.

Weren'T anywhere near Rodeo Drive, so it was a much cheaper trip for us. Yeah, yeah.

You know, one thing I'm tracking that's interesting is we're going to bring some of the humanoid robots under development next year. Because of the labor. People are concerned about labor. And some of the robots under development are incredible. You know, you've got Optimus going on by Tesla, Bold Capital. Right. You're part of, just made an investment into robotics company called Figure. And so these are, you know, humanoid robots. They're typically in the 5, 7, 5, 8, 5 fingers walking around and so forth, driven by AI. And they're going to transform labor in every aspect. So I want to bring some of those robots for people to play and touch and feel.

Yeah. And just someone who was actually at a 360 and you may not have encountered him, Mike Wandler from Wyoming. And Mike got the first state contract for the new small modular reactor.

Oh yeah, I did, I did. The nuclear reactors, absolutely. So this energy revolution, right, People are fearful about fission reactors, nuclear reactors, because a Three Mile island of Fukushima, but that is such a thing of the past. It's like being fearful of the ENIAC computer and then foregoing computers from here on out. They're fail safe. They're safe enough to have literally in your backyard and they can power 60,000 homes.

Yeah, well, Three Mile island had two nuclear reactors. One of them became the cause of enormous fear. The other one has heated and lit 40,000 homes ever since the first accident. But Mike's partner in this is the firm that has been doing all the nuclear reactors for the last almost 70 years now on aircraft carriers and submarines. So they know the complete production routines and everything and how you test these out. But it's a safer form of nuclear energy. The new one, the ballroom we were in for the A360, you could fit five of these reactors in that room.

It's a game changer. And there is a direct correlation between access to low cost, reliable energy and every other aspect of our lives.

Reliable and abundant. Yeah, you have to check off all three. Doesn't matter which energy source it is, it has to check off all three.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

All right, buddy, listen, as always, I love spending time with you. Thank you for your coaching, thank you for your support.

Thanks for the collaboration.

Yeah. All right, buddy, be well. See you next time.