Episode 162: Passion Isn’t Enough to Build Your Best Future

Hi everybody, it's Dan Sullivan here, and this is the next episode of Exponential Wisdom with Peter Diamandis. You know, creator of the XPRIZE, creator of Singularity University, creator of A360, creator of one of the really hot podcasts, 4-person podcast, well-known author, new book. How do you do it?

Good to see you, pal. Good morning to you. Actually, it's morning here, afternoon on the East Coast.

You

know, I do it the same way you do it, focused on my passion, my purpose in life. If you're playing, you can do a lot of things. If you're working, it's a grind.

Yeah. I remember the first time Palmer Luckey came on and he said something that he didn't think you should follow your passion, you should follow your capabilities. What do you think about that?

I'm not fully sold on that.

First of all, he's a terrific guest.

He's amazing. He's an amazing guest.

He's brilliant. He's an amazing guest.

He's brilliant. I think you should follow your purpose versus your passion. You know, a passion is a slight twist, right? A passion could be something that's fun. You're passionate about comic books, you're passionate about a sport, you're passionate about those things. When you transition to purpose, where you're adding real meaningful value into the world, where you feel like you're doing something for other people— like, a passion is something you're doing for yourself, but purpose in the right structure is something you're doing for a community of individuals. Anyway, that's the distinction I put. What do you think about that?

We had an online program on anti-aging for a couple years, and you mentioned something which I think Possibly encompasses purpose. It's called impact, that you have an impact that you wanna make. So would that be inside of purpose or is purpose inside impact?

I think having an impact you desire to make on the planet is part of your purpose, right?

You know,

when I'm trying to help people find their purpose, I'm saying at the end of your life, looking back, what have you done that you're so proud of, right? That gave meaning to your life. That's purpose. It's not passion. So I do think that impact and purpose are intertwined.

For me, I mean, I get my greatest joy out of growing entrepreneurs. You know, the original definition of entrepreneurism, this goes back to 1804, French economist, and he said an entrepreneur is someone who takes something, a resource from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. And I found that very useful because productivity can be measured Just within your own entrepreneurial company, you can say, I was here and now I'm here. But my impact in Strategic Coach is that they're at this level of revenue, they're at this level of net worth, but also in terms of what they're doing in the marketplace, they're creating new value in the marketplace and they've created something brand new that nobody else has created and it's working. They're getting paid for it. But they're also getting a reputation for it. So whenever that happens, I feel really great about what we're doing at Strategic Coach.

Can I give you my definition of entrepreneurship? It's someone who finds and solves a problem. And, you know, one of the things that really hits me strongly is if that's true, then the more entrepreneurs on the planet, the more problems being solved, and consequently the better the world begins. And can I ask you a question in return here, Dan, which is, can anybody be an entrepreneur or is this only for a unique group of people? Because I've talked about on the Moonshots podcast with my Moonshot mates there a bunch of times that the key profession of the future, the key, you know, I want to call it employment, is self-employment. It's going to be becoming an entrepreneur. And I get a lot of pushback from people saying, well, that's fine for you, but not for the vast majority of individuals. What are your thoughts about that?

Well, it's a question of whether someone chooses that or whether they're forced into it. In other words, if other employment is taken away, this may be the default position for a lot of people. But, you know, I've been with this question for about 50 years.

Which question? About whether everybody—

The question of whether someone— and I'm more inclined to believe that the entrepreneur, and I'll use you as an example, You did the minimum amount of formal education so that you would get probably a network, a community or a network. You had credentials, but you were already creating your rocket society. You were already doing things. Other people were going out and having a good time, but you weren't. You were having a good time in your terms, but not in the conventional sense. So my sense is it shows up early. I'm convinced that if you're going to be an entrepreneur, it probably shows up by 10 years old.

And

it's not that they have a business at 10, it's that they have something that they're really interested in that they double down on in a way where the other kids aren't doing that.

And so the question then begins, if you didn't have that in your earlier years, can you pivot to that? Can you pivot to being an entrepreneur? Because the tools of entrepreneurship, you know, as an example, I was in Morocco. I actually took some free days. A

free day?

No, no, no, no. It was actually 9 free days.

Oh, wow. Wow.

Yeah, it was great. I had Skippy, my AI.

See, that makes me feel good.

You know, I had Skippy, my OpenClaw AI doing stuff for me. And it's interesting, I can more easily take free time and free days if I assign Skippy to go do a bunch of stuff and work for me. So I feel like, okay, something's getting done while I'm enjoying and relaxing myself. Yeah, we can talk about that as well.

Well, first of all, I think the technological structure that's happened over the last 50 years has made it much more possible for people to become entrepreneurs and get paid. I grew up in the industrial age and entrepreneurs were these marginal creatures. There weren't a lot of entrepreneurs.

It was expensive to become an entrepreneur back then.

Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, you have capabilities that are almost free right now that you had to pay a lot of money. You just couldn't acquire them as an entrepreneur. Okay, and you more or less had to do it in industries that already existed. You couldn't create a new market. You couldn't create a new type of client or customer. You can do that today, but you have to be interested in other people. A lot of people aren't interested in other people. You know, they're not really interested in seeing things from other people's point of view.

So going back to the question, I'm in Morocco and one of the days my family and I take a bicycle tour with a tour guide of a particular area. We're on e-bikes and he's showing us around and we stop at a friend at his home for Moroccan mint tea. It was great. And in the conversation I said, so when did you start doing these bike tours and how do you decide to do that? And he said, well, you know, I came back here at my hometown and I didn't know what to do employment-wise. So I got on with ChatGPT and I said, this is who I am, these are my skills, can we brainstorm business ideas of what I could create for myself? And this came out of that brainstorming. And so I think that's a fascinating situation where people can in fact put up their skills, their passion, their ideas, what they enjoy, and start to brainstorm business ideas. So I found that facilitating entrepreneurship. But going back to the question of, this is something I'm having an ongoing discussion with my Moonshot subscribers. Yeah. Can anybody be an entrepreneur? What percentage of people out there listening to exponential wisdom right now could be an entrepreneur. You know, if jobs are going away and entrepreneurship is on the rise, what are your thoughts there, Dan?

Yeah, I have a book coming out in the fall, which is called Casting, Not Hiring. Basically is that you have to approach the marketplace like you're in theater and you're looking for an audience, but you have to create some sort of value. You have to create a unique role. I think the days of people defining job descriptions and then That's all the thinking you have to do is that you have to apply and you get a job. But a job is like 2-dimensional. Job descriptions tell you mostly what you have to do so you don't get fired.

Yes, to remain employed.

Yeah, that's what a job description actually tells you. From a theatrical role, you have to say, what kind of team will I be valuable to? And that team can be inside an organization or it can be out in the marketplace. But you have unique abilities, and there's something that you do uniquely that would be needed by a team. It would help a team. So I think there's going to have to be a lot more thinking. But I think you know people play chicken with the economy. As long as they can get by, they don't change. But the moment that the economy really changes, you have to wake up a little bit, and you have to say, "Well, how's this look from somebody else's point of view?" I was reading an article. This is the 250th anniversary. of the United States, but it's the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith creating the Wealth of Nations book.

Great point.

And that's considered pretty well the central book of capitalism. And he says, well, you know, it's not for your interest necessarily that the baker, the butcher, the candlestick maker actually does what they do. They're looking at their own self-interest. Then he's got another book which is called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he says, in spite of everybody having their own self-interest, We have to cross over and see what the world looks like from another person's point of view. And what kind of dangers do they have that need to be eliminated? What kind of opportunities that have to be captured? And what kind of strengths do they have? So in the coach program, we say, let's cross over immediately and look at things from other people's point of view, and then see if you could be useful to what they're looking for. And my sense is that AI is doing a great job of matching those 2 things up.

That's a great point. What's your advice to someone who says, you know, I'd love to be an entrepreneur, but I don't know where to start, or I don't know if I could be an entrepreneur. I've always had a job. You know, I can't get a job now. What's your advice to those individuals?

The first thing I can tell if they're asking me that, if they don't ask me any questions about myself, I know that they're not interested in being an entrepreneur. And say, you know, as Strategic Coach, what is Strategic Coach striving for? And what kind of skills do you have that would grow the company, that would make teamwork better? We go through about 5 stages when we hire someone right now, and we want to know what they could do for us just based on whether—

But that's offering them a job. I'm asking the question of someone—

We're creating a role for them.

Right. Okay.

We want to know if they're actually interested in just themselves or they're interested in Contributing something to other people.

I'm gonna bounce off what you just said to someone who says, listen, entrepreneurs are not for me. I don't know how to be an entrepreneur. I would maybe basically say, you know, can you find a problem that you care deeply about? Something that you wish were solved, right? Because everybody can identify problems. Yeah. And then second, can you identify what your unique ability is? Like what you're good at? Are you a storyteller? Are you a marketer? Are you a great coordinator? And then if you're not going to be the entrepreneur at the head, you know, how do you find a group of people who have, you know, deep desire to solve the same problem?

Yeah.

And then form an entrepreneurial team around that.

Yeah.

Is that fair?

Yeah. I ask you a question. Why are you interested in somebody who's not an entrepreneur yet?

Because I believe that one of the biggest challenges we're going to have in the near term is a rising unemployment rate. And that's the old social construct of doing well in high school and college and getting a job. And I think that that's going away.

Doesn't work anymore.

Doesn't work anymore.

Certainly at the entry level.

Yes. And the data's very clear there. And you're absolutely right. People aged 22 to 25, as they're exiting college, entering, quote, the workforce are not getting that work and it will fluctuate. But, you know, people who are experienced out there are upleveling their abilities with AI.

Yeah.

So in fact, if they're not getting work, then the question becomes, what should they do? How do they create their own work? You know, my example of this gentleman in Morocco, I think is a great example. It's like creating your own opportunities. but they need breadcrumbs. So the reason I'm interested in this is how do I support them, right? My massive transformative purpose is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant vision for the future. And, you know, I want to help more people become entrepreneurs if possible.

Yeah, I only work with already successful entrepreneurs. They have to be making more than $200,000 personal income before they can come into the entry level. I'm out to maximize people who are already good to become great. So I'm approaching it from more upscale than the question of somebody who's going to be an entrepreneur. But I will tell you something, this is an interesting statistic, and I don't know if it fits completely, but since 2020, so you have different decades that people are at today. The fastest growing decade of people becoming entrepreneurs is between 70 years old and 80 years old.

Really? Amazing.

Yeah. I'm not saying in numbers. I'm just saying if you went back 5 years, the number of 70 to 80-year-olds who became an entrepreneur was very, very low and a substantially higher rate now.

So what's happening there? I mean, where did they get the entrepreneurial chops?

AI.

Okay.

So they're acquiring the scaling skills now with AI. AI is allowing them to do something. For example, I write a book every quarter and usually it takes me about 3 weeks to get the structure of the next book. Yesterday I did it in 3 hours. I created the entire structure in 3 hours, just talking right back and forth with my AI who really knows my writing style. I just give them an idea and then I give them a master prompt, which is the structure of a book. And then I say, develop my structure of a book with the introduction, 8 chapters, and a conclusion. And right away it gives me the complete structure of the book. Usually I'm at 3 weeks out, now I'm 3 hours. So I think everybody's using AI for something.

Hopefully.

Good or bad.

Yeah. I mean, AI is accessible. I'll tell you one thing that I'm feeling, and I'm curious, I'm hearing it from a lot of other people. You know, we talk about going to a 3 or 4-day workweek. I think AI is driving me to a 9-day workweek, unfortunately, just that it's so exciting and There's so much.

As long as one of them is a free day. 10th day is a free day. It's, you're good. You have my approval.

Yeah, for sure. One of the things that I found fascinating is I'm more willing to relax, go out and do a workout, go out and take a hike with a friend because AI enables me now. I can talk to my OpenClaw Skippy and say, hey Skippy, I'm thinking about the following project, do the following research. Come back to me with a strategy. Basically, I can assign it 4 or 5 things to do, and I have a guilt-free lunch or a guilt-free hike because, you know, I'm feeling productive even though I'm not doing the work myself.

So would you say you're happier now? We're in year 3 of AI, essentially. Are you happier now because of AI?

I am. And I'm not typical because a lot of people are not happier. They're feeling scared. But yes, I'm feeling happier. I'm feeling more productive. I'm feeling far more capable. I'm feeling like my purpose in life can be accelerated, you know, whether it's in longevity or it's in entrepreneurship, whatever the case might be.

Your prompting is getting a lot better too, right?

It most definitely is.

Yeah.

There's another thing that's going on right now besides the AI getting better, my prompting getting better. My AI now understands me better.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So one of the things I did this last 72 hours was I ended up giving Skippy access to all my Granolas, all my WhatsApp, all my iMessages, all my documents, everything, so that it understands me at a depth greater than ever before. And in so doing, its level of impact in my life has gone up astronomically. Yeah.

You know, I'll go back to a theme that we've both shared right from the beginning, and that's mindset. Entrepreneurism is a mindset, and there's 2 decisions that you have to make to have an entrepreneurial mindset, that I'm going to take 100% responsibility for my own financial future.

Yes.

That's the first one. And I also accept the fact that I have to create value before I'm gonna get paid.

Yes. I mean, that second part, by the way, is very deeply true. And most people don't realize that.

Yeah.

Most people are trying to extract payment before they demonstrate and add value. And it's a mistake for sure.

Yeah. And I would say that some people can get the message just by you saying the message and some people really have to get beaten up.

Yeah. Well, they get beaten up because they fail, fail, fail. Like, what am I doing wrong? Yes.

Yeah. They don't have the mindset. It's all mindset.

Yeah.

You were an entrepreneur before I was age-wise. So I've been an entrepreneur for 52 years. I knew I could never have worked for somebody else. I'd had a job. I went to college late. I graduated late. But what I noticed was, and I'll bring it back to AI, some of my AI specialists, and you know, Mike, and there's other people in our program, Lior Weinstein, I don't know I don't know if you've met Lior. They said, you know, Dan, you need an avatar that they can ask you questions and you'll answer their questions. And we surveyed our clients and said, if I had an avatar, you know, you took all of Dan, you took all my books, you took all the tools and you put them into an avatar, would you want that? And the answer was no, they wouldn't want that. The answer was they want me asking the questions.

Sure.

But specifically to what they're doing, they don't want me to answer really general questions. They want very, very specific questions. So I'm going to suggest to you that the number one industry in the 21st century— I think managing was the number one skill set in the 20th century, but most of what managers do can be done by AI.

Okay. So what do you think it's going to be the number one?

Coaching.

Coaching.

IT is the fastest growing industry in the world. Coaching is the second fastest growing industry in the world, coaching for anything.

Okay. Now, interestingly enough, one of the things that is the—

You're a coach.

Of course. Yeah, I am. How would you define a coach? Someone who has a level of expertise and has taste or has an opinion. How would you define a coach?

Their greatest enjoyment is helping other people succeed.

Great. Yeah, I think that is true. I mean, when I'm doing my best coaching, I'm coming from an area of passion.

Yeah.

An area of excitement, an area of wanting people to learn so they can apply it to themselves.

Yeah,

for sure.

Remember when we first started talking about A360 and you said, well, what should the curriculum be? I said, everything that you're excited about.

Yes. I love that.

And do it for 25 years. Yes.

Yeah. Your coaching has been extraordinary. And you know, everybody who's new to Exponential Wisdom, when Dan and I first connected through the greatest connector on the planet, Joe Polish, Dan basically said, your level of excitement about all things exponential, AI, thereafter longevity, should be the basis for Abundance Summit, which is now entering year 15, buddy. And then Dan said, you should do this for 25 years straight. And of course—

Commit to 25 years.

Yes. And I did that instantly.

Yeah.

Because I know a great idea when I hear it. Yeah. And I know great coaching when I hear it.

Yeah.

And here we are, year 15 of 25.

Yeah.

And maybe renewed.

One of the things I'm thinking as we're going back to your original question is that I think right now you have the ability, and it's very, very clear on your Moonshot podcast.

Yeah.

Is that you're explaining the future to other people. That's what you did in A360. Look, In the next 10 years, this is what's going to happen. And people in the original audience, that was at Marina del Rey, the first one we had. And a lot of my clients were there. 2/3 of the room were Strategic Coach clients.

Yeah. You launched this for me.

Well, together. Yeah.

Yes.

It was a collaboration.

It was a collaboration. I just give you tremendous credit. Yeah.

I have an ability to put butts in seats. And I remember people after me, holy shit, I didn't know any of this stuff was coming. I think the biggest problem is of profound ignorance. They don't know what to do, but they don't even know what's coming.

Yes.

And I think that what you've done, you've become a master educator. And the first is, look, this is how things are changing. People who are doing this aren't going to be doing this anymore. They're going to be doing this and this. And you did that with XPRIZE. You said, look, one of the great models for developing new technology is really to put prizes up if people will solve this problem. You have to pay to be part of the game, but if you are chosen among the— in some cases it's number 1, some cases it's the top 5. I don't know how the exact structure of XPRIZE goes right now, but you're educating them that first of all, they have to have a mindset that things are really changing.

Yes.

This is disappearing and this is expanding. I think that's one of the things you have to do. So someone wants to be an entrepreneur, what they lack is a future. They've lost their future. I think young people have lost their future.

That's an interesting point. Could you say more about that?

Yeah, well, anytime there's a sudden change in the world, and I give you an example, when we had the '08-'09 subprime catastrophe, Wall Street almost went down. You know, if they hadn't taken some quick action and flooded the marketplace with money, they did the same thing with COVID What you don't want to do is restrict the amount of money that's in the marketplace. The government has to start giving us back some of our money to do that. I remember back when that happened, it really hit financial services. We have probably 20% of our marketplace is financial services of one kind or another. There's hundreds of different specialties. And I said, how many of you are okay for cash for the next If you didn't make any money the next quarter, it'd be okay. And most of my clients said, yes, we'd be good. Here's what I want you to do. The money's out there, but people only use money if there's a future to spend on. And I said, now have breakfast, lunch, or dinner with 20 people and say, if we were talking a year from now, what has to happen for you to be happy with your progress over the next 12 months? And they say this and this and this. And I say, okay, what are dangers that you have to get rid of in the next 12 months? What are the opportunities you have to capture over the next 12 months? And what strengths do you have that you have to utilize better over the next 12 months? But don't make it about you. Don't say anything about what your skills are. Don't say anything about your company. Don't say anything. Just have them picture what the next year is. Everybody who did this, they had the best quarter they ever had in their life. What happens when the world changes is that people were predicting and counting on a future that they had before, and their future's been taken away from them. They have to get their future back before they can make decisions and take actions. I think you're an excellent coach of giving people a new future.

Do you think that can be done for the person who has lost their job or hasn't been able to get a job in terms of putting them on a path towards entrepreneurship?

Yeah. Here's, again, it goes back to the mindsets. Do they want to solve the problem or do they want someone else to solve their problem for them?

That's a great point. Right. So I think an entrepreneurial mindset is someone who believes they can. If you believe you can't, then you're never going to dive in.

You're dead.

Yeah. And so mindset is the critical thing in my—

Marijuana Marijuana doesn't help with this clarity, by the way.

Neither does beer. Yes. Escapism doesn't help you get there. Yeah.

Yeah. What about your sons? You've got 2. What's the conversation like with them right now? They have some advantages. They have you.

They do. And it's interesting because they're 14, about to become 15, and I talk to them about entrepreneurship. I think they will both default to saying they want to be an entrepreneur, but they've not yet found That level of passion and purpose yet. And so my job is to just expose them to things. I remember my dad wanted me to become a doctor and it was expected of him to become a doctor. And of course I did the medical school thing, but then abandoned that. And I think that I need to put them into places where they're around entrepreneurs. So as a parent, you think about what do I want to do for my kids. And I think it's giving them enough experiences where they find purpose

and

where they see that future for themselves. What advice do you have for me?

Well, the big thing is that, I mean, is their education all paid for? They don't have to worry about their education.

They don't. I do think about the fact that a lot of the most successful people in life had a significant amount of hardship as a kid.

You know, it's really interesting that you say that. I think the greatest handicap is having lived a life up until now where everything was given to you and everything was paid for by someone else. That does not develop an entrepreneurial mindset, having that experience.

Yeah, it's true. So, you know, the question is, if you've got means as a parent, the last thing you want to do is, you know, make your kids have True hardship, you know, or even, you know, how do you create simulated hardship? But I look at most of the successful people, you know, I had this conversation with Elon and he's like in South Africa getting beat up and his life is, you know, extraordinarily painful. And he escapes to go to Toronto,

Canada, where he worked in a car wash.

You know, he arrives with very little, in his pocket. And he really is self-made in that regard. It's just his brilliance is extraordinary.

Yeah.

Right. And you look at all of the most successful entrepreneurs and they had a really tough life and they realized that if they wanted better, they'd have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like dealing with the future from the standpoint because I think people's goals for the future is actually a picture of who they are In the future. I don't think it's necessarily a thing that is their goals. It's that they're more successful, they're more confident. There's a certain status they have. Mm-hmm. And one of the things I've discovered, there's 2 types of entrepreneurs. There's status entrepreneurs and there's growth entrepreneurs. And what I mean by that is that, you know, especially if you don't have a lot when you're a child, you see the people in your locality where you're at, the town that you're in, and they have great houses. They belong to clubs and they have a certain status. And their goal is actually to have that kind of status sometime in their future.

Right.

If they're in their teens, they want this by the time they're 40. And they really grow. They have their wits about them. They do plans. They try to be really useful to people. They try to have other people open doors for them. And they get to that status and then they stop growing. And it took me a long time to figure out that their goals are only goals until they match the status. And there's nothing wrong with that. It helps the economy. They're bigger consumers, they're bigger voters and everything else. But the entrepreneurs that I'm looking for now, I actually am writing my quarterly book that goes to the printer next, is who we're looking for. I'll send you a copy of it.

Please.

And the big thing is that in 19— '74, when I started being an entrepreneurial coach with no degree, no practice whatsoever, I would go out and I would have a diagram. I would say, okay, what's a good point in the future that you can visualize where you have improved in 5 different ways? Okay, and they write that down. And I say, what's the date? They said 3 years would be good. So I put 3 years down. Now, what are all the obstacles that are getting in the way of you getting there in 3 years? So my sense is they have to have a vision that in their vision, they're operating at a much better level than they are right now, income-wise, but just what they're able to do that they can't do now. And then they say, now in the next quarter, you get 12 quarters in the next 3 years, in the next 90 days, What can you achieve? What are the obstacles that you can overcome? And what kind of opportunities do you want to have? What kind of income do you want to have 90 days from now of that self-created income? And then they get there and they come back and then you do a great review. And this is the way our strategic coach works. It's quarter by quarter. But most of my clients have 25-year frameworks.

Right.

So I didn't try that out just on you. I tried that out on a lot of people. They're already entrepreneurs, but they have to become useful. The biggest thing I You have to have a mindset of being useful to other people for the sake of being useful, because you have to create value before you get rewarded for the value you create. So I think we're at a point in history right now because of a technological breakthrough where if you're not useful, you're not going to get hired.

Right. I agree with that. But there's also another thing, which is, you know, I'm going to go back to my question because it's been a deep area of consideration for me because of the changes in hiring. And I think if you don't have the entrepreneurial drive, you can still join an entrepreneurial team.

Yeah.

Right. You still can find out what you're good at, what you're useful for, and what you're excited about and find others. Right. And I think what we're going to see in the future is a lot of companies, and we have data that supports this, that we've talked about in the Moonshots podcast. A lot of companies are going to reduce in size. By 80%, doing the same amount of stuff with a core team of 20 and a whole bunch of AI agents. But at the same time that that's going on, I think we're gonna have a 5 or 10x expansion in a number of companies that are being created, and these will be smaller teams. So you don't need to be the creator of the company, but you can search to join a company.

Join an entrepreneurial environment.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah. We're still doing entry-level at Coach. I mean, we're hiring. So that what's happening in the marketplace isn't happening to us. Okay. Because we have a way of just defining when this person comes in, in the first 90 days, they can be useful. They're worth their pay. And everybody's got a 90-day no-fault in the marketplace. I think California probably has that. We have it in Toronto. We have it in London. And we'll say, this is what we need to be done. But there's 4 things that you have to have when you show up. First thing is you have to be alert. You have to be alert and watch out what's happening around you with other people. You have to be curious when you're just in your ground floor. You have to be curious about how you can be really useful. And the 4 things, you have to show up on time, you have to do what you say, you have to finish what you start, and you have to say please and thank you.

Let me expand that one second in terms of what are the mindsets that if you're going to be an entrepreneur or join an entrepreneurial team that you need. We hit a couple of these. Curiosity, I think, is very important, right?

Curiosity. The second thing is that you're responsive. You respond to opportunities to be useful and you're resourceful. So you use all your experience to be useful.

I would add to that willingness to create value first.

Yes. Before you get any opportunity or before you get promoted or before you, you know.

For me, I would add having alignment with purpose of the company and that you're joining it, right? In other words, a purposeful alignment. Yeah. This is not a grind for you. You're there because you want to be there. You're there because you're excited about it and it's feeding an emotional driver or need. I would add to it, you know, in this day and age, sort of an exponential mindset or 10x mindset.

Yeah.

The ability to think bigger and to dream bigger.

Yeah. Read Peter Diamandis's books.

But if you're an entrepreneur, by definition, the cards are stacked against you.

Yeah, I think that's true.

So you need to let go of that. I think most people self-limit themselves, right, on what they believe is possible, what they believe is doable. And if you join an entrepreneurial team, And you don't believe their bold vision is possible, then you're going to self-sabotage.

Yeah, I had that. I wasn't necessarily entrepreneurial-minded. I think I'm more a coach. I just enjoyed listening to other people and their experiences, and I could spot something where I could be useful, and I did it. I worked for the FBI for 2 years as a file clerk. Pulling files for Communist Party USA.

Wow.

Yeah, we've seen all your family's files, Peter. I've seen, I know, I know the, you

know,

all the Marxists and Reds that you came from. Yeah, Greeks can go that way. But the thing that I find really, really interesting, I got a job as a copywriter and this is through personal connections in Toronto. And I knew the guy who hired me. He was a friend of a friend. So in the first 2 weeks, he says, how's it going? I said, I got some questions for you. You're paying me this amount of money for my job. How does the advertising agency make money that you're okay with paying me $8,000 a year? So how do the economics of the company work? How do I know when I show up in the morning that I can just concentrate because I'm earning my keep? I don't know that yet. Because it was like a personal favor.

What'd he say?

He laid it out. He says, look, the work that you're doing is for fee-for-service clients. If you wanted to get more pay, you have to be doing work that we get paid 17.5%. He explained the whole economic model. So after 2 weeks, I knew the whole economic model of the agency, you know, how they got paid and what they were looking for. And that just clarified my mind. I just have to be useful, useful, useful, useful, 'cause I'm new guy. So I showed up early, you know, I worked late and I'm a pretty good writer. So I had the writing skills. I just wanna make a distinction that you've made here. You will not work for a corporation. You will work for a small business. You'll work for an entrepreneurial business.

In the future.

In the future.

Yeah, agreed.

Corporate are the people who are gonna be firing everybody.

Yeah.

They'll be failing, but they think that one strategy is to fire everybody. You don't grow if you fire people.

All right, buddy. This was a good one. I appreciate it.

I'll think about it. I'll think about it.

Yeah, please.

Yeah.

All right, pal. See you next time.