Dan Sullivan, a veteran coach and author, shares the system he built at 70 to write a book every quarter through age 95. He uses an Impact Filter to crystallize ideas, partners with Dean Jackson for interviews, and standardizes each book to 8 chapters with cartoons and a small team, turning what used to feel lonely and fragmented into a repeatable process.
Chapters
Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast. Since 1994, I've been writing books. The coach program started in 1989. A lot of our early clients were in financial services. I had been a one-on-one coach for 15 years, and about half of my one-on-one coaching clients were in life insurance or they were financial advisors of one kind or another. They were what were called stockbrokers, you know, in the old days. So I had a lot of experience there, but I had developed some thoughts about the industry, especially life insurance industry. And I only made my money from people who are selling life insurance. I didn't have any contracts with companies or anything like that. So I've been pure all along, you know, forever as a coach. Is that I never accept money from an organization that a salesperson, someone who's a salesperson, services or products. And I never have any contracts with the company that they may sell for, just with them, because I have observations about whether they're working for the company makes any sense or being associated with the company. And I don't want to be inhibited in my advice by the fact that I'm getting money from the company, so you can't buy me. But I developed some thoughts about the life insurance industry, which was radically changing over a 15-year period. And I wrote books there, and then I started writing books, and it was a big hit. It was called The 21st Century Agent. I read it today, and it's as true today as when I wrote it in 1995. So I really nailed it. But writing a book was always a real chore. And I found it was a lot of lonely time for me. Do it at night. I had to do it on weekends, which violates our concept of free focus and buffer days. And I said, you know, there's got to be a better way of writing a book. Long story short, I got to my 70th birthday. So that was 2014. I got to my 70th birthday and I had 13 books under my belt by that point. But it had been done the very, very hard way. Hours, lonely hours. With me on the computer and ADD. I'm clinically diagnosed with ADD. And then my Kolbe is 2-2-10-4, which kind of tells you I don't like fact-finding. I'm not really good at following through, but I'm real good at coming up with new ideas. And I said, why don't I just write small books? I take a single idea that we've already tested in Strategic Coach people have already bought this idea, you know, so only write about things that people have already paid you for and you've already tested it out with entrepreneurs because the books are all for the entrepreneurs who are in the program. I'm not doing this for the general world or it's for friends of our clients that our clients can use to kind of tell them what Strategic Coach is about and they get interested in Strategic Coach and they end up as participants in the program. So I was 70 years old. I've got plans for living a really long time, and I want to keep being as much of a producer, you know, 25 years down the road as I am now. I said, you know, a real good trick that would keep me really active and really creative and really productive, I'll just commit that for the next 100 quarters. So this is age 70, so from 70 to 95, it's 100 quarters, and I'm gonna write a book every quarter, okay? So I just launch into it. The first one was called Wanting What You Want, but I was approaching this new project in the old way I'd done projects. I have to tell you, I got about 4 weeks in, and I said, I just jumped into the deep end of the pool, and I don't even know how to float here. And I said, help, help. Fortunately, Dean Jackson, who's a great friend of mine, and we have a podcast these days, He created a little company where if you wrote up your book idea in an impact filter and you sent it to him, he'd have an editor interview you on the impact filter. It's a great process because they interview you for 90 minutes. Then, they send you back a structure of the book and everything. I says, "Well, I'm going to have to get a who." You know, they're the who, who does the how. I think that for most entrepreneurs, it would be good, you know, go back and forth, but it just opened up all sorts of, deeper ideas that I could develop. Carrie Morrison, who is my personal editor inside of Strategic Coach, I said, Carrie, what do you think about this? And she came back and she said, I can finish this for you. She said, I know how you talk. And she says, it'll require some organization, but she says, I'd be happy to work with you to finish this book. I said, oh, I'm feeling oxygen coming into my system. And we did. We have artists at Strategic Coach. So what I established— this is an old trick if you're in the advertising business— you don't write a lot and then fill up the space, because advertising, you have to get whole stories over in 6 inches, or you got to get a whole story over in 30 seconds or 60 seconds. So I had been an advertising writer before I became coaching. Advertising really teaches how to write succinctly. So what I established was that every book with the Impact Filter is just going to have 8 chapters. So the success criteria of the Impact Filter is the 8 chapters of the book. I'd have an introduction and a conclusion, and each of the chapters would just have 4 pages, and we could lay that out ahead of time. So every one of the 100 books for 100 Quarters would be exactly the same size, laid out exactly the same way. We designed a cover that would be really good. And the other thing is I worked with our great cartoonist Hamish Macdonald for a number of years, and I said, we'll have 4 pages of copy and we'll have 2 pages of cartoons. So that became set. So pretty well worked out in the first 2 or 3 books. We experimented a bit, but then we got it and now it's just set. And then what I do is I use the things that just pop up in the workshop, either they're new thinking process for the Strategic Coach program, or it's an idea that suddenly gets identified in the Strategic Coach workshops. And I say, that's the next book. And we've added team members, so there's now 10, 11 team members, and each of us has a part of the book. And I launch it, and I'm the one who comes up with the idea. And I have a file, and I have roughly about 25 titles, future titles that I've already thought about. And I look at it at the beginning of quarter, and I said, okay, we'll do this one this quarter. And it doesn't matter because we're going to get to all the ideas. And it just seems to me this feels like the right idea right now. So I have a suspicion that this small book process is going to suggest books which can be major market books. It's a real winner. And you can kind of tell in the small book form, you know, if this got big and it had another writer, this would be a real hot number. So it's a nice process. You can take an idea from the workshop, you can turn it into a book, and then some books just want to go big. They want to go worldwide. And I can do this until I'm 95. I don't have any problem with this, you know, and I keep myself in great shape. And I said, remember, you have to write a book every quarter till you're 95. By that time, I'll think of something else to keep me going.
