Unlock A Fourth Level Of Thinking That Elite Entrepreneurs Rely On

Hi, Shannon Waller here, and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. Dan, I'm excited because today we are going to talk about an article that you have written about what you do and what we're doing here at Strategic Coach. And you've called it metacognition.

Mm-hmm.

So let's do a deep dive because this is very cool. It's actually metacognitive thinking is what you called the article. And we are attaching that to the show notes. So make sure that you listen and get download that so you can get the big picture. So Dan, in terms of metacognitive thinking, this started with you really young. Before we jump into that, what is metacognitive thinking? It's— everyone's familiar with cognitive, but maybe not with metacognitive.

Well, basically what I've noticed over time— I'm over 80 now, 82— that people do different types of thinking, and I've been able to identify 4 different ways, and they're kind of levels of thinking. And the first one is they think about things. This, I guess, is what contributes to rampant consumerism. People like things, you know, they like useful things, they like frivolous things, and they use that as a basis of communication. You know, it's one way to establish common ground with other people, the people who have the same things.

Mm-hmm.

You know, I mean, one of the things I've noticed is that you don't notice that other people have things until you buy one of them and then you see it all over.

Yeah.

One of the things I've really noticed is when someone buys a dog and they think their dog is really unique, but the moment they buy their dog, they notice that 50 other people have the same dog, but they never noticed it before. So there's something about objects. Just to give you an idea, when I'm in Toronto, I always have my haircut every Saturday, you know, and that's been from childhood. You know, I always have had a short haircut. I was in sports, you had a short haircut. I was in the military, you had a short— I just like short haircuts. Never went through the hippie stage. I was born before the hippies. I outlived them, but I never went through their stage.

Mm-hmm.

But when I'm in, every Saturday there's a woman having her hair done. She annoyed me at first because she just talks nonstop about all of her things. And then I said, I wonder if she ever talks about anything except her things. And the only time she talks about something else besides things is other people who have things. She's not talking about the people, she's talking about other people who have things. So her basis for communication is things. And it's just interesting to me that probably most of the communication on the planet with a possible competitor is people talking about things.

Mm-hmm.

That's what advertising is about, really. It's about merchandise. Okay, so that's number one level. That's thinking about things. The next level is thinking about people. And this is why social media has been such a phenomenon, I think. And that is, if you go to TikTok, for example, For example, it's about watching TikTok, you're watching other people, what you're doing, but then texting is about people and it's technological gossip, really what it is. And people have friends and some people have hundreds of friends and they make sure that they're in touch with their friends. So if you put the two together, if you take the first level, which is thinking about things and then the other one thinking about people, that uses up all the time that people have.

Oh.

There's no other thinking. They don't have time for any other thinking except talking about things and people. The third level is a really interesting one because most people confuse this with thinking, real thinking, and that's thinking about thoughts, okay? And the entire world of higher education, the entire world of high-level media, newspapers, television, everything, is thinking about thoughts, but they're not your thoughts, they're other people's thoughts.

Yeah.

And higher education professors can spend 40 or 50 years teaching a subject, but it's about a particular thinker, but it's not their thinking, it's somebody else's thinking. Most people say that's the height of thinking is where you're talking about Plato, you're talking about Aristotle, you're talking about Freud, you're talking about Karl Marx,— but it's their thoughts, but this is what you're focused on. You're arguing, "Did he mean this? Did she mean that? If you go deeper into her thought, what do you come up with?" It's your thinking about somebody else's thoughts, but it's not anything original.

Mm-hmm.

But what I noticed— go back to the start of the story. So we got these 3 levels of thinking about things, thinking about people, and thinking about thoughts. And that's pretty well what most people think thinking is. But what I notice is really creative people, people who are inventors, people who are artists, people who are playwrights, they operate in another realm, especially entrepreneurs. Possibly, possibly entrepreneurs are coming up with new solutions that solve existing problems.

Mm-hmm.

And my sense is they're not actually thinking about things and people and thoughts, they're just thinking about their own thinking. Mm-hmm.

Okay.

And they have an ability to go right to their experience and say, how am I thinking about this? Wow. Wow. This is really interesting how I'm thinking about this. Now, how could I think differently about this? So the object isn't a thing. The object isn't another person. The object is not somebody else's thinking. It's your thinking. And you're observing your thinking as if it's a movie. And it's called metacognition because you're getting above your own thinking and looking down at your own thinking. Now, I know that at 82, but when I was 8 years old, 1952, I lived on a farm in northern Ohio. I had a birth order in the family such that my older siblings were significantly older than me, so I didn't really play. You know, there was a big jump to 4 older and there were no younger. Well, I did have one younger and had just been born, so newborns don't count. I loved going into our woods. So we had a narrow farm that went a long way, but at the back of the farm we had woods. And I used to love to go to the woods because our woods were connected to the woods of about 5 other farms, and I could jump the fence and I could explore my woods and their woods. You know, it was this world of my own. But one day I was walking back to the woods and I noticed that I was thinking about my thinking and I was thinking about the thinking I had done since I left the house. And it surprised me.

Mm-hmm.

You know, it just surprised me. I said, wow, I'm actually thinking about how I'm thinking. And it's very energizing. And then it went away. I couldn't get back into it. It just surprised me to do that. So I went along, that was a neat experience. And then maybe a couple of weeks later, it's a long time ago, it happened again. And it was very energizing, but it was very depressing when it went away.

Right.

Okay. And I said, how did I do that? So I checked it out with my mother. I said, "Can you see yourself thinking?" And she didn't know what I was talking about. So I said, "I gotta be careful here," you know, and I started sort of feeling around with other people. "Do you think about your thinking?" And they said, "What are you talking about?" I don't know what the progression was after that, but one day I said, "If I ask myself the question, 'What am I thinking about right now?' I could do it." Mm, okay. Oh, you know, I just discovered fire. And I was in school at that time, and I checked it out with other kids, and none of the other kids even knew what I was talking about. I think I tested it out with teachers, and they didn't know what I was about. And right away, I was on a separate path in life. You know, and then at the same time, I came up with a great question because I had mostly adults around. Most of my childhood was growing up with adults. And I came up with this great question, which was, I'm 8 years old. When you were 8 years old, what was going on in the world?

Mm-hmm.

And I noticed there was this amazing change in them. First of all, they would look away and they'd say, wow, you know, and I had next door neighbor. I've talked about this a lot, Mrs. Wetzel, and she was exactly 70 years older than me. I was born in 1944 and she was born in 1874. It was really cool.

Yeah.

But she was describing life in 1874 and I know she got really excited and she got very, very animated. And my sense is she was thinking about her thinking. To make a long story short, it took me 22 years to figure out what the business model was of selling thinking about your thinking because that's what we do in Strategic Coach.

I love that. I love that. Well, it's powerful. In most philosophical systems I've ever seen, they try to get you to that point of thinking about your thinking, but no one else, Dan, has like the question. Even something sounds simple, but what am I thinking about right now? You're like, oh, that's like the key to the secret. Very few people do that, but that's exactly what we do in coach. And just to relate,— a similar story. When I went to university, I was really disappointed because I thought that that's where I was going to go to think new thoughts. And then, it was probably the first 6 months, I went, "Oh, that's not what university is about. University is about learning what other people already know." In other words, other people's thoughts.

Mm-hmm.

So, my conclusion was, if I'm going to think my own thoughts, that's going to happen in my own time. That's not going to be educated into me, right? Then, I could be at peace actually with what I was learning in school and other people's thoughts. And it's useful to have that commonality in terms of conversation. But it wasn't till I met you that I was like, that's actually what I was looking for. And then when I met you 35 years ago, I was like, aha, this is what I've been looking for, which is so fun. And I only had to wait 5 years to find it. So that was a good— I got to shorten that one a little bit. So Dan, let's talk about how this works with entrepreneurs, because as you said, entrepreneurs have the— Yeah. Possibility of being people who think about their own thinking. Doesn't always happen. So talk to me about how you do this at Coach or how we do this at Coach and what you see is the benefit to entrepreneurs. Like, why is this important? And this is a very different approach than any other coaching company I've ever heard of. So what's the significance of it for our clients?

Yeah, well, first of all, you know, I have a hunch that entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs is because they do think about their thinking, but don't realize the distinctions that I made, the 4 levels of thinking. One little thing I'd like to add in this, that when you're thinking about thinking, it's not that you don't think about things, people, and thoughts, it's that from your ability to think about your thinking, you end up with really, really good things, really, really good people, and really, really good thoughts.

Right.

Other people have really great thoughts. These are not worthless, But if you have the ability to think about your thinking, then you develop an enormous sense of discernment about which things, which people, and which other people's thoughts.

Mm-hmm.

So I'd just like to put that there because this is, with entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs have bet their life on their ability to create new forms of income, create new forms of value in the marketplace. Most people, they have to have a job. Somebody else has to create the economic opportunity. And, you know, I think I'm good enough that I can just hit a problem in the marketplace head on. And by thinking about my thinking, I can come up with entirely new ways to solve it, you know, to create a better solution.

Right.

So to give you an idea, the very first thinking tool that we have in Strategic Coach is called the Lifetime Extender. I noticed a strange thing, that everybody dies, but nobody knows when they're going to die.

Yeah.

Seems to me kind of crucial. Life and death, you know, it doesn't get any more binary than that. And I won't give the backstory, that's a subject for a whole nother podcast, but it really livens up really boring social events. You meet someone and you say, I'd just like to ask you I ask you a question, at what age are you going to die? And they say, what? I said, well, everybody dies. I just wonder at what age you're going to die. And it sort of stuns them. And everybody knows. What I notice is their eyes look away. And that tells me they're thinking about their thinking.

Mm-hmm.

If they're looking directly at you, they're not thinking about their thinking. They're thinking about your reaction to them. But if they look away, And the person says, 85, 85. And I don't ask them why 85. And I said, okay, 85. I want you to tell me when you're 84, a year before you die, how do you want to be physically? How do you want to be mentally? How do you want to be financially? How do you want the quality of your relationships? And the person, let's say they're 50. You know, it's 35 years in the future. And then, what do you want to be able to say about the life you've led when you're 84 years old? And they talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. And you can just see they're totally in the realm of their own thinking. I've probably done it thousands of times. I have easily done it with thousands of people because oftentimes I'm talking to a number of people at the same time, but they've done an amazing amount of work with their own brain and it's all their experience. They're taking their entire lifetime experience to come up with a number. And I say, so being that way, and I repeat back to them, you're going to be really, you know, good shape when you're 84. Mentally, you're going to be sharp and not any loss of ability to think. Financially, everything's taken care of. You're really well off. Relationship-wise, you have great supportive relationships, you're really proud of what you've done, you feel very, very fulfilled, you've contributed an enormous amount, you've had great experiences. So that being the case, what are the chances are you'd die a year later?

Hmm.

And they say, oh, not at all. I wouldn't die. You might get hit by a truck, you never know. But it wouldn't be as a result of your —failure, it would be an accident.

Right.

So then I say, so if you were that way at 84, how much longer than 85 could you live? Then they say, 15, 20 years. And I said, which? 15 takes you to 100, 20 takes you to 105. They say 105. Their life just changed. Because my sense is that each person has something just below the surface. They have a number but don't know they have a number. It's based on family history. There's actuarial tables, there's mortality tables. They're checking out old people that they knew, you know, older relatives and everything like that. They have this number, but it's a floating, hazy number. And just by asking them the question, all of a sudden they say the number. The number that they come up with has great meaning. And my sense is that everybody has this number and where they are right now, their whole sense of their future, they're bouncing whether they do this or not do it based on the number they have, but they don't know what the number is. So they don't know why they are not certain about a lot of things. —this is a thinking tool. You know, this is just one of 250 thinking tools we have.

I love it. You said something which I think is really key, is that it's underneath the surface.

Yeah.

So it's there, but it's unconscious, and you're making it conscious. And again, based on their own experience. So it's not something out there, it's not theoretical, it's not abstract. It's there. And if you look at any one of our 250 thinking tools, it is that reflecting back on your experience from this particular context. This week it was failure, actually, failure to break through, and then looking at it from this context and then what can you learn? So at no point, and you say this in your article too, are we telling people what to think.

Mm-hmm.

You're helping pull that out of them. So can you talk about the multidimensional ways that our tools do that? Because that's what you have. They're thinking tools. In no way, shape, or form are they forms. Right? People get caught up in that. I'm like, "Dit, dit, dit. There's no forms in coach other than maybe the registration." I always call it putting my brain on paper. And I love it because I always feel smarter at the end than when I started. Based on your question.

The point you just made about being on paper, it's always just on paper. We live in a world where people have digital tools. And I say writing with your actual physical hand, especially with your dominant hand— I'm right-handed, as many people are— but you have an opposable thumb, and you can only write because you have an opposable thumb. Humans are very gifted with their opposable thumb. That thumb and the use of your hand has an enormous impact, direct relationship, on your brain.

Uh-huh.

I had a neurologist in the program. He says it's amazing how much our brain operates according to our dominant hand. You know, some people are ambidextrous. I haven't looked too deeply into that. There's generally one hand that they use more than the other hand. But that hand— so much of your doing in life is dependent upon the use of your hand. And I say that when you're thinking and you're writing down your thoughts, your brain really pays attention to this.

Mm-hmm.

You know, we have a little box on the sheet where they write down 85, you know, like in the example I'm giving you here. They write down 85 and then they write down 84. Their brain has never done that before. A number of things I'd just like to say happen immediately. All of a sudden, their notion of life just got bigger. And this takes about an hour, the very first hour of Strategic Coach. They came in, an hour later, their whole sense of their life and the possibilities and their plans just changes. And then we get everybody to talk about it. So everybody shares their experience of doing this exercise.

Right.

And they notice that everybody's very, very excited about this. And I don't know what they've written down. I mean, if they tell me, I know what they've written down, but For the most part, I don't know what they've written down. And my job isn't to know what they wrote down. My job is to help them, whatever it is they're thinking about, to actually record it.

You say here, which I think is really well articulated, you create these tools by listening to entrepreneurs, recognizing patterns of confusion or opportunity, and designing structured frameworks that help people access their own consciousness in new ways. And as you talked about at the very beginning, Dan, it's so energizing. And I know, because my closing question for whether or not I joined the company was, "Do I get to do the program?" I didn't qualify back then. So I've been in the program since July of 1991. So I've gone through almost 35 years of this. Is that all of a sudden you have a new perspective on yourself, on your future, on your experience, and that can create a new different path that you hadn't had access to before.

Mm-hmm.

And it's all just lying there, just the waterline, which is kind of magical. And your questions and your frameworks help pull that out. What's cool is there's no right way to do it. There's no best practice anything. It's best practice for you as an individual. There's no overall, which I find very liberating, to be honest. So it's very personal, and everyone's growth path becomes very unique.

Yeah, one thing about this, and this came up in a conversation that we just had yesterday, that this isn't social thinking at all. The Level 4 thinking is completely not social.

Okay.

You're not saying what's acceptable, or will other people think I'm weird, or what if people knew that I was doing that? You're completely separated from any social You're not comparing it with anything outside your experience. I think that's just an absolutely rare experience for anyone to be thinking completely out of social implications.

Right. Yeah.

Some people are just totally dominated by what other people think. Their whole brain is filled up with other people's judgments and opinions and disagreement. And this completely frees your brain up from what anybody else would think or say or do. And you're just saying, what do I want here?

Well, and I appreciate that, Dan, because I think we've all had the experience, or most people have, of following someone else's path and like, this is the right way to do it. This is the path to success, money, happiness, relate, whatever. They like, here's the right way. If you haven't figured out your own way, you might follow along with that. But It was the right way for them. It wasn't the right way for you. You end up feeling empty and kind of lost and disconnected. And there's sunk cost because you put some time, effort, energy, and attention into that. And you'd end up no further ahead in terms of what progress actually looks like for you. So the thinking tools, which are everywhere, which I love, just allows you to create some immunity to that.

Mm-hmm.

There's no animosity, by the way, but it allows you to go, oh, these are my thoughts. My husband and I took a fabulous trip on a river cruise up in Europe. We explored lots of history and other people's thinking. But because I have my own thoughts, I can go, "Oh, I like that way of thinking. I don't like that way of thinking. That makes sense for me. That doesn't make sense for me." Mm-hmm. Coolest place ever, Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam. That's where people have been thinking about their thinking. It was pretty cool to see that. But you end up with this sense, once you put these tools into practice, that you do have your own thoughts and you can figure out what is best for you. For you and it's going to be unique to you. But then when you're also with other people who are also figuring out what's unique to them, there's a camaraderie, I would almost say, Dan.

Mm-hmm.

Or we can support each other on our own individual paths, which is really fun. And all of us are solving our own problems, which is kind of cool, or maximizing our own opportunities. So there is a collective thing to it, just no one's dictating to me what I'm going to be doing. So it's just a very creative process is what it feels like.

I was just thinking about your trip, and my sense is that, you know, as I've gotten older, I've done more thinking about my thinking, to the point that I'm not very much influenced by other people's things, you know, other people's behavior. I mean, I'm interested. I said, "Well, that's interesting behavior," but it doesn't really relate to me.

Yeah.

The other thing is I have an enormous appreciation for my own experience. And I don't feel I'm lacking anything. I don't feel there's any deficiencies or anything. As a matter of fact, as I get older, I just realize the vast amount of experience that I haven't really processed yet.

Hmm.

One of the things it does— I think children have this, and I think it's probably 10, 11, 12 years old that they move out of their Well, relationships with their parents and family, for one thing. But they've done a lot of playing. They've done a lot of play. And I think that thinking about your play is very much thinking about your thinking.

Mm-hmm.

Christmas time, oftentimes, the most interesting thing about Christmas wasn't the gifts I got, but what I could do with the boxes that everybody's gifts came in. All of a sudden, there were all these boxes around. The new toy was interesting for about an hour and then it was old.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, because the toy is somebody else's thinking. The toy is somebody else's creation. But the boxes are supposed to be thrown away. And I said, the interesting thing is the boxes. You could put them inside each other and you could do everything else. My toys were sticks that I fashioned into rifles or spears or anything like that. So it was far more interesting to me as a child what I could do with the things that weren't designed for me.

Right. So that's interesting, Dan. You're taking the raw material that's around you— boxes, sticks, what have you— and then accessing your own creativity, right? So that's perhaps to think about your thinking is then you can come up with new things and then you could change the stick into something else in the next 5 minutes. Like it didn't have to stay static or stuck in that particular idea. So there's just this, you know, experience of your own creativity that is refreshing, energizing. I want to keep circling back to that word you mentioned at the beginning, and it's fun. But you're totally right, the toy is someone else's idea. It's someone else's thinking. And so it's fun for a bit, and then you're like, "Hmm, I'd rather play with my own." Right?

Well, it's not only somebody else's thinking, but they did extensive focus groups about the toy. They're asking what people's reactions are to it, but creativity doesn't lie at the level of reaction. Creativity is you own the experience and then you start doing what you want with the experience. One of the things I think is that we could have 20 hours on this, but I think that artificial intelligence, the newest technology, is kind of taking away all the things that people were interested in, and they're putting it into code. Everything that's ever been written down will be available to you on AI. A lot of the thinking that you might have done before, Levels 1, 2, and 3— things, people, and thoughts—

Right.

All of a sudden doesn't become as interesting. And I think there's a lot of mental illness right now because people's identity has been their things and their people and other people's thoughts, and it's being taken away from them by AI. But they never developed this fourth type of thinking.

Mm-hmm.

There's a lot of mental illness right now. The more that technology fills up our lives, people have a hard time establishing, well, who am I and what am I and what does all this mean? So my sense is that what we're doing in Strategic Coach is that we're establishing this new form of thinking where you'll say which things are interesting, which people are interesting, which thoughts are interesting, but you're not dependent upon them. You're using them as expansions of capability.

Right.

So anyway, I mean, these are all the— Interesting thoughts that this brings up.

It's true. You know, as you were talking about mental illness, it's like if your identity is hooked into your things, right, or the people, social status, or how much of an expert you are on someone else's thoughts, right? A lot of experts out there. And those things are all of a sudden available to anyone, just with a few strokes on the keyboard. Your identity is lost because you haven't figured out for yourself what is true. What I'm hearing is that this is actually an even more important important skill right now. And I would say that's also true with social media because there's so much input coming in. For your own well-being, I'm going to suggest it makes sense to have your own consciousness of yourself to be able to meet that, to go, yes, that makes sense. No, that doesn't. You used the word discernment earlier so that you can actually be discerning. Otherwise, you don't have a framework through which to assess this makes sense for me or this doesn't, right?

Yeah.

So Dan, I've said this to you numerous times. This is really more of a philosophy. Than anything else. Can you talk about that? Because I've always agreed, and first thing I signed up for in university was philosophy degree, of all things. This makes sense to me, but it's a philosophy rather than something else.

Yeah, you know, to go back to the definition of philosophy, it's a Greek word, philosophia, and what it means is love of wisdom. And I don't think thinking about things or people or thoughts is philosophy. Okay, it's knowledge, but it's not necessarily wisdom.

Not timeless knowledge.

And I think wisdom is understanding how you tick. If you do thinking about your thinking, my sense is that one of the outcomes is that you really like being with yourself. You really enjoy your own company because you have this magical ability to not see thoughts, but actually see the process of your thinking. And you can say, well, I'm thinking this way. And there's emotional responses that come with thinking. So much of what we are is we're emotions. And people get into situations where they just have the most negative emotions. But the emotion is just a response to how they're thinking.

Mm-hmm.

Envy, jealousy are very emotional. But it's not your feelings of emotion or envy that are at the center of this. It's how you're thinking about things.

Right.

You're optimistic or you're pessimistic, and there's feelings that go along with optimism and pessimism, positive and negative. Your emotions are not to something that's happening outside of yourself. Your emotions are a response to how you're thinking.

And so when you can get distance from your thoughts or look at them, you can then choose, is this thoughts serving me? Because if you talk about gen V jealousy and envy— gen V, that's a new word— that's you comparing yourself.

Yeah.

Right? So again, where's your internal structure here? And when you look at that, you can go, oh, those thoughts aren't serving me. I'm not enjoying the emotions that go with them. And then you can consciously change your thinking, and then you'll have a different experience showing up. Powerful. I love it.

Yeah. If you have this ability to think about your thinking, then what's the best situation in life for you where, number one, you can get paid for this? I mean, capability is a wonderful thing. A lot of people have capabilities and talents, but the problem is they don't get paid for it.

Right. Yep.

That was, I think, the next stage of my life after 8 years old until I was 30. I said, how do I get paid for doing this type of thinking? You know, I had a lot of trouble with— it's not that I haven't been employed, but wherever I was employed, I was feeling tension and friction because they wanted me to do something in a particular way.

Mm-hmm.

And I would go into thinking about my thinking. I said, I think there's a better way of doing that. So I'll suggest to them that there's a better way. Than what they told me, and they didn't want to pay me for that.

Like any true entrepreneur, not really an employer.

I wouldn't pay anybody, you know. If I was the employer, I don't know if I would pay for that. But then, you know, I tried with all sorts of other people, and I found entrepreneurs are the ones you did this with. One is they really liked it.

Right.

And the reason is that they've been doing this all along, and not really realizing this is what they're doing. So I think what Strategic Coach does is we introduce people formally to their own brain.

Ooh, I love that. We introduce—

We actually introduce you to the uniqueness of your own brain and allow you to be really happy with that.

And one of the things you say here that really struck me is that you teach that true entrepreneurial growth comes from being useful, creative, and energized by the act of creating value. In your own unique way.

Yeah.

So can we touch on, just to wrap up this conversation, 'cause you end the article with talking about unique ability and when you get introduced to your own brain and especially the way that it is uniquely put together to create value in the world, it's just like, that's the jet stream.

And get highly paid for it.

And get highly paid for it. And trying to do anything else, less so. 'Cause this to me is kind of the call to action or the how to take action on what we've been talking about is to really discern your own unique ability.

But I had to go out into the marketplace, declare myself an entrepreneur. This is 1974. And then I realized that the best way to get paid is to ask questions to people about their own experience. You know, the first experience that we say is what you're thinking about dying, which, you know, that wasn't right off the bat. That came a long time afterwards. But it's basically, what do you want a year from now if we were having this discussion and you're sitting here, what achievements do you have over a 12-month period for you to feel happy with your progress? Bang. And that's the first. I want this. And I said, so a year from now today, what are 5 things that would represent progress that would make you really happy with your progress? Choo-choo-choo-choo. What are the obstacles right now that have to be transformed in order to get that, and I was away to the races.

It's such a powerful question. And then that just gives you all the fuel you need to come up with additional thinking tools, which is so great. Awesome. Dan, this is a fascinating conversation about thinking about your thinking. There's one last thing I just want to capture to make sure that you just really appreciate what entrepreneurs do if they stay focused on being useful, creative, and energized by the act of creating value. And to do that, It's understanding who you are, understanding what the world needs, what you're going to be highly valued for, get paid lots of money for it, and stay in that energizing— I'm going to add the word creative— path to be able to do that. It just clears away all the clutter. You know, we work with people every quarter, and in the 89 days in between workshops, there's a lot of things, there's a lot of other people, there's a lot of other people's thoughts. And having at least that one day a quarter to help focus in on what's your approach to it, even just 1 day out of 90, regardless of any other connections with us, is so transformational.

There's a point where they're like going to a gas station and their tanks run out in between— from one 90-day, you know, time-wise, the gas stations are 90 days distance apart.

Right.

And they start running low on gas and they can get very, very confused. You know, they can get sidetracked, they can get distracted, they can run into obstacles and everything like that. And my sense is that it takes a lot of muscle to think about your thinking.

Yeah.

Because you have to start ignoring a lot of other things in your life. I mean, one of the things that I noticed, which was a tremendous breakthrough of just being someone who creates thinking tools for other entrepreneurs, to make them more capable of thinking about their thinking. And it's not my line, I just heard it from someone: "What other people think about me is none of my business." I love that. But we spend too much thinking about what other people think about us. And it's paralyzing. First of all, you have no way of knowing. They don't even know. And the truth is, they don't spend much time thinking about you at all. No, they're thinking about themselves. Yeah, they're—

Yeah.

Yeah, you're invisible.

Yeah, they're worried about what other people are thinking about them.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, thanks for doing this. I saw a lot of new things in answering your questions, but I'm struck by the concept that if you don't want to be freaked out about AI, get in touch with your own brain. Take ownership of how your own brain— because My feeling is that AI is a capability, but it's how your brain thinks about AI and how your brain thinks about your own thinking. That's the real issue here. It's not AI that you have to think about.

It's your own thinking.

Yeah.

Fantastic conversation, Dan. Thank you so much.

Thank you.