Dan Sullivan | The 10x Mindset: Why It’s Easier Than You Think

The interesting thing is that the size of goals that entrepreneurs have, if they don't know the who, not how formula, they limit themselves to the size of goal that they know that they can do it. But I said, if you free yourself up from the fact that you're going to have to be the person that achieves the goal, how big would your goals be? And that's where 10 times comes in. I said, you know, if it's a good goal and you're thinking doubling, it's just as easy to think 10 times because you're not the one who's going to do the work.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mol and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness, and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started.

What if scaling your business 10 times was easier than doubling? It sounds crazy, right? But that's exactly what today's guest, the legendary Dan Sullivan, has been teaching high performing entrepreneurs for decades. In this episode, Dan and I dive deep into the mindset shifts that unlock exponential growth. Why the gap and and the gain changes, how you measure success and how asking who instead of how can transform your business and your life. If you're ready to stop grinding and start scaling with clarity and freedom, this episode's for you. Let's get started.

My name is Dr. Fleet Mall and I'm thrilled to be here today with none other than Dan Sullivan. Welcome, Dan.

Thanks a lot, Fleet. Real pleasure, real pleasure.

And it's an honor and privilege to spend this time with you this morning. I'm always hesitant to ask someone like you to encapsulate a bit of their origin story in just a couple minutes, but we a lot of tory to cover this morning, so I will but maybe just some highlights before strategic coach became the powerhouse that it is today. And what got you started and then maybe what was one of the biggest obstacles you had to overcome on your way to developing yourself as a successful entrepreneur and coach of entrepreneurs.

Yeah, well, I'm a farm boy, so I started in Ohio. Those who know Ohio, there's a very famous amusement park called Cedar Point, which is right on Lake Erie, one of the older entertainment venues. But it was a, you know, really good farmland. You know, we were a produce farm. But I have an interesting birth order because I have four. Four older siblings. And then there's a big gap, and then there's. I was born. Actually, I was born during the Second World War. So this was actually two weeks before Normandy, before the, you know, one of the epic events of the Second World War. And then I have two younger brothers who are seven and nine years. So I'm actually sort of an only child in a big family. But the real key to, I think, of my lifetime really happened when I was about 8 years old. And I used to wander the fields, and we had woodlands, and I used to have a lot of freedom as a kid. And one thing I want to tell you, Feed. I was born happy. And so I'm basically just a happy person and a good parent. Great parents. We're all fifth children. My mom and dad are each fifth children. A fifth child in their family. I'm fifth child. So we. We really got along. About several days I was wandering in the fields, and all of a sudden I noticed I was thinking about my thinking. I was thinking about the thoughts that I had since left the house. It was about, you know, my wandering. I could wander for half a mile or so, and I was just really struck by something that I could actually see my thoughts. And I almost, like diagrams. I could see where my thoughts were leading. And, you know, and it just struck me as a marvelous experience. And then it went away. It went away, and I didn't know what had happened. And so it was just an amazing experience. And then maybe a couple weeks later, it happened again. And I tried to hold onto it, but I couldn't hold onto it. But it was very energizing. So very quietly, I began asking my parents whether they had that experience. And they didn't really know what I was talking about. And it was very enjoyable, but it was very frustrating. And it took me a long time to the point where I could actually make it happen, you know. But one of the ways that it changed my behavior was because I didn't have any children. I didn't really have any children my age around me until I was six years old, first grade. And that was a ways away. That was about six miles away. So we had to be driven to school and driven back. And I would talk to some of the children. Did they have this. Think that they could see their thoughts, and they didn't have it. They didn't know what I was talking about. But the other thing is that I suddenly realized I could talk to adults if I asked one question. And So I was 8 years old and there was a next door later. She was 78. She was sort of the matriarch of another farm family. So I was born in 44 and she was born in 1874. And I said, when you were my age, what was going on in the world? And all of a sudden she start talking and she talk about, you know, what farm life. And this is before all modern technology. There was no electricity, there was no running water. You know, it was all, you know, it was 1800s, 1870s. And I know she got real excited. She got real excited about. And that was worth one glass of milk, two glasses of milk, maybe four cookies. So there was an economic model there to doing it. And this was a very formative experience. The two formative experiences as one is that I could think about my thinking, but I could get adults to think about their experiences. And Mrs. Wetzel, the woman's. She would phone my mother periodically and she said, well, Danny was over again, you know, and he asked the most interesting questions. And she says, I think about things. I've never put them together. And he asked me about this. And then he says, and what was it like when you thought about this and what you thought about this? And then it took me 22 years to work out a business model, to get paid for this. But this is essentially what I do. Fleet. I've created all these different scenarios for entrepreneurs where they can. For example, I know you're really into transformative leadership, you know, and I'll ask them, where is it very clear that you've given great leadership to other people, that you're with clients, customers and everything else? And then I would create a sheet of paper where they could log these in. And then I'd say, what's the biggest thing you learn from this situation? And what I notice is they start making connections that they've not made before. And then I say, well, that's the way it's been up until now. What are you going to do next with this discovery you have? What are you going to do next? And they say, this, this, this, and it's all new. It's all new. They've not thought about this before then, whether it's in person. I mean, the vast majority of our coaching takes place in workshops, average maybe 30, 35 entrepreneurs. There's certain qualifications that allow them to be. This is all trial and error on our part, some of it being painful as you go along. And what you realize is that series of questions actually gets them to think about their thinking experience. That I had of thinking about their thinking, you can see, and they get very, very excited. They get very excited about this. And I don't need to know what they're thinking, I don't need to know what they're writing. But then we'll have a general discussion and the fireworks go off and that's it. And I've been personally at it for 51 years and the company, as we have it, workshop is. We're in our 36th year right now.

Wow, that's incredibly fascinating to me. The technical term for what you experienced as a young person, the ability to be aware of your own thought processes, to witness your own thought processes today is called metacognition and sometimes meta awareness. And I had similar experiences and it led me into the path of meditation long before it led me into entrepreneurship. But I can see that there's the foundation for the coaching process that you developed and strategic coaching process that you developed. One of the things that where your work has really inspired me and shifted my thinking in a big way was when I actually listened to your book on Audible. I listened to 10x is easier than 2x. And I'm going through, to read it through now a second time. And it really had a huge impact on me, this idea that 10x is easier than 2x and that it puts us in a completely different realm, landscape, playing field, and some of the examples that were used in the books of historical figures and everything. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how you landed into this distinction of 10x is easier than 2x and how you teach that. You could unpack that for us just a little bit.

Yeah, you know, just the process that we have that I described, that we have cheats. So, you know, and I played around with it. One is I never thought of the 10 times idea until we had actually done it, you know, and every entrepreneur starts. And if you take your first year as an entrepreneur, you have some numbers now that are attached to that revenue being a easy one. So, you know, in my first year as a coach, this is back in the 70s, 70, 74, 75, you know, maybe I made $9,000, you know, I don't exactly remember. But then later on, maybe 10 years down the road, I'd made $90,000, okay. And I struck it and I said, now how did I do that? You know, how did I do that? So I created an exercise where I said, I want you to go back in your entrepreneurial life. Not before your entrepreneurial life, but, you know, you made the decision that you were going to self finance and you weren't going to have a job and everything. And they do that. And I'd say, okay, so we're going to create a structure now, we're going to draw a curved line. And how in that first year you did this and then you over a series of growth, you're now where you are today. So you're back when you were one tenth of what you are today. And then just arbitrarily I broke it down, let's just break it down into five jumps that you made along the way. And then there were other factors. And once you begin to realize it wasn't smooth, it wasn't a smooth line, that there were jumps and usually one of the great discoveries that they made, usually they made their biggest jump after they had their biggest failure. And I said, you know, it's really interesting that failure is more of a motivator than success, you know. And I think the reason is your system comes fully alive. You know, you come fully alive and you have to get back on the right road, you have to get back on the right path. And then so they tell this story. So they've got this, you know, after about an hour and they've talked about it and everything else, they've got a really, really powerful self narrative that they've created for themselves. Maybe it's 15 years, maybe it's 20 years, but it's a big hunk of their lives. And I said, now back then when you were 1 10th, did you know exactly how you were going to get 10 times? And they said no, we didn't know. And I said, but are there some things that you did? And one of the great lessons is my value to other people. Took a jump. I was helping other people and creating solutions for them. And then I took a jump and I said, well, do you think it's going to be any different in the future? I said, do you think that factor that the moment that you become more helpful to someone else, you're going to take a jump and you know, and then I have them draw the next curve which is I'm now going to be 10 times. Well, if you hadn't gone through the previous thinking of actually giving their life a different meaning. I'm always struck by people say you can't change your past. Well, we first of all defense lawyers know you can do it, you can do it in five minutes. But I said, when you can't change the events, but you can change your interpretation of the events, you can change the relationship of the events. And they did it. And all of a sudden they said, well, I could do that, you know, I could do that, I could do that 10 times. But I said, is there things that you have to leave behind? They were useful for you to get to where you are now, but you can't keep doing those. You have to do other things. And then Fleet, there's this realization that their company and they all have companies and they have teams. One is that they have to do less and less. They're doing activities that they shouldn't be doing, someone else should be doing those activities. And gradually what they begin utilizing is much more skillful, much more motivated team members around them and they simplify in the center and then they get a lot of time back. Freedom of time is the big freedom. You have to have freedom of time before you can have any other freedom. I've got 250 of these different thinking solutions that I've created over the years. They're all documented and nicely illustrated and we've got good artistic production team and you know, so that's really interesting. It's just the eight year old now 80.

Well, I'm going to, and towards the end of our interview today, we're going to point to where people can learn about and access some of those resources. You know, when I first stumbled onto your book and then started listening to it, you know, I found the idea of 10x pretty daunting. And then fortunately in your book you instructed, well, look back at where you came from. Right. And I realized not only had I 10x myself many times in my life, but I had actually 10x my business. Last year we hit the Inc. 5000 list at number 578. And so we had 10x'd our business in three years. And now when I think about 10xing it again from where we are now, it's a little more daunting. But that is our goal. We have a three year goal to do that. And the one thing that I love about it is, and you get clear about the pathway, it's, it's not just, you know, it's not smoke and mirrors. You get really clear about, you know, the pathway and the steps and so forth. But essentially it does expand your mind. It gets your mindset in a completely different arena. So you're thinking differently about everything. And of course, as you said, at the center of that is really continuing to 10x yourself because there's a direct equation between the value we're bringing to the world and the value we're receiving.

Yeah, one of the real neat things that happens in coach, and it happens in the first hour. So we have right now, we're just shy of about 3,000 active entrepreneurs in the program. And I coach some of them at the very high level. I coach some of them. But we have 15 other coaches who coach. And as you mentioned, we're in three countries. We do about 150 groups, workshop groups of entrepreneurs now. But everybody, the very first hour, when they come into coach, and I could do it with you. And the first question we ask, at what age are you going to die? We gotta be clear about something. We just want to know at what age you're going to die. I'll give you an example. And, you know, I remember this person very, very distinctly because this happened in 1993, and he's still in our program, you know, 32 years later. So I said to him, at what age are you going to die? And he said, 84. 84. And everybody writes it down. You know, they say, nobody knows when they. Nobody knows when they're going to die. But I've asked the question to over personally 7,000 entrepreneurs, and I've never met one who doesn't have the number. And So I say 80. 85. 85. And I say, okay, do you mind if I just ask you some questions about the 85? So there I picked this one person out. They're in the whole group. And I said, we're not going to talk about 85. We're going to talk about 84. So it's a year before you're going to die. How do you want to be physically? Oh, great shape. Great shape. Mentally sharp. Financially, everything's taken care of. Relationships, lots of them. Warm, supportive relationships. And your assessment of your first 84 years, how do you want it to be? And they say, made the most of it. Made the most of it, did great job. And I said, okay. And I repeat back the answer because it's always the same. And they say, great fitness, great mental health, great finances, great relationships. So I said, if you were that way at 84, what do you think the chances are you would die at 85? And they said, oh, I went die at 85. And I said, well, how much. How many years beyond 85 would you go? I don't know, 15, 20. I said, well, which 15 or 20? 20? I said, you've been here for 25 minutes, and I just gave you another 20 years. And then I say, so these are extra years you didn't have these extra years in when you first came in. So if you had 20 extra years, what would you do with them? And it just pours out. I do this, I said, okay, next question. You've got your extra 20 years. Now, do you want them now or would you like to have them at the end? Oh, I want them right now. And then I say, okay, so you got 20 extra years, but we're just going to talk about the next three. So given your rethinking that you now have 20 more years and you're going to take the extra years right now, then what are you going to do with the first three years? You know, and then in the workshop we get down to these are three years you have, but we're going to break it into 12 quarters. So this will be the first 90 days. So based on this new assessment of what your lifetime is, then what's going to happen in the next 90 days? And then we have a whole series of exercises that are thinking tools that we go through. And it's really remarkable. In 90 days they come back, they're fitter, they've made all sorts of life decisions and I don't even know what they wrote down on the sheet of paper. But the moment you change that number of how long you think you're going to live, it changes every other thought in your brain.

That's really fascinating and so powerful. And then to build that into a plan, to build that into a three year plan, a 12 quarter plan, that really gives us a pathway and that's such a powerful way to see our lives. And you know, that idea of getting clear about where we want to be and then back casting, okay, what do I need to do right now? Right? What's going to get me there? So another thing you talked before about, you know, as we begin to embrace this 10x model and we start to execute and move in that direction and inevitably we're going to move from if we were a solopreneur or even if we were the place where I was stuck for many years, being the expert with many helpers, we're going to actually have to start growing a team and start attracting people that are smarter than we are ideally. And so your book who Not How I think is just such a powerful distinction because most of us, I think at some point in our entrepreneurial career, we're constantly thinking, well, how am I going to do that? How am I going to do that? And well, I got to figure out how to do it and I got to figure out how to do this. And I got to figure, and you can do that for a while. We learn a lot, and we do have to grow ourselves. The one thing we have to learn is how to be a leader at the next level, for sure. But at some point, that idea of that next thing your business needs to grow, focusing on the who can do that and bringing that person in, that just seems such a game changer to me. I wonder if you could talk about how you developed that idea in your own career and how you teach that to people.

Yeah. I've got a great friend who's a client, wonderful thinker by the name of Dean Jackson and anyone of probably, you know, the list of speakers that you have on your series, you mentioned the name Dean Jackson. I bet all them know. And just real quick, we've known each other for 20, 25 years. I'm not quite sure when we first met. So we would meet and have lunch. And I said, dean, I've been thinking about something. I've been thinking about something, and it has to do with procrastination. And I said, you know, it's kind of weird that we would have something in us that's uniformly considered bad. I've never met anybody that if you bring up the subject of procrastination, they don't like the idea, they don't like the experience and everything else. And I said, it just seems weird to me that we would have something inside of us, and I've never met anybody who doesn't have it, that they would have it. And I says, what if procrastination is actually a good thing? And he says, what? I said, yeah, this is what I'm thinking. I'm thinking that we get excited. We're, you know, Hodge, we can see the future. You know, we can see something in the future, and we see it with great clarity from an emotional standpoint. We're very excited about it. We're very energized by it. And so, you know, for a minute or five minutes or an hour, we're just totally excited about this new thing, but then we don't feel good about it because how are we going to do that? And now it just seems like we've introduced ourselves to a lot of work and not good work either. Not terrible work. And he said, have you known this for a long time and haven't been telling me? I said, no, I just thought of it. I just thought about it. And he says, well, he said we should do a podcast on this. He says, why don't we Call it. I said, so the big thing. Just to go a little further before I explain the podcast, I said, so the big thing is you don't ask how, you ask who. Okay, I've got this thing now. Who's the person who's got the skills that this would be an exciting project for them? And he says, oh, wow. Wow. I never thought of it. I mean, you know, and you might not get the idea right away, but you could write the idea down in such a way that. And we have a tool for that in Strategic Coach for doing that and just show it to someone. You say, do you know anybody who could help me with this? Could help me with that? Oh, wow. He says, that was amazing. So he started the podcast the next day. He says, we're going to start a podcast. He says, I've got a way of starting a podcast. It's called the Joy of Procrastination. And it just took off. And then we were going into one session. He says, I have it down. He said, it's who, not how. It's who, not how. I said, that's terrific. That's terrific. Yeah. And he was just coming in two days later to his workshop. He lives in Florida, so he was. Was up in Toronto. I said, dean, tell everybody this idea of who, not how. And I went up. I'm a good artist. I'm trained. I was an advertising artist and I was a advertising writer. And as he talked, I just drew the diagram up on the screen. And 90 days later, we had a book. We had a book on it, you know, and it just went wild. It just an idea like that. Just. And because since everybody procrastinates or thinks they do, this is a great. It's an intellectual solution, but it's a great emotional solution. When they do it, they just relieve themselves of. I said, at all those times you've been procrastinating, you've been. You've actually been wise. This is actually a form of human wisdom that you should not take on things that you don't have the appropriate skills. It's a good goal and it's appropriate for someone else to do it. But your joy now is just find the who's handled the job. That's how your team builds.

Well, this is so critical because one of the biggest stumbling blocks for entrepreneurs, I think, as we all know, is that ability to delegate and build a team, because we think nobody will do it like I will. Nobody knows how to do it as well as I do. If you want to do something right, do it yourself. All these kind of things a lot of us got inculturated into. And then there's also a sense, there's a sense of giving up control. And you know, there can be a lot of resistance to this, I think, where a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck. And I know I was stuck for a long time, even in the nonprofit that I built over the years, stuck in that expert many helpers, because I wasn't thinking big enough to bring on people that you know, at my peers to get involved with peers or even find people smarter than I was to bring on and really build the team to take things to a bigger level. And it takes a real mindset, shift and a leap of faith and courage, I think, to go there for a lot of entrepreneurs. Yeah.

And the interesting thing is that the size of goals that entrepreneurs have, if they don't know the who, not how formula, they limit themselves to the size of goal that they know that they can do it. But I said, if you free yourself up from the fact that you're going to have to be the person that achieves the goal, how big would your goals be? And that's where 10 times comes in. I said, you know, if it's a good goal and you're thinking doubling, I said, it's just as easy to think 10 times because you're not the one who's going to do the work. And a lot of this is, you know, humans are really unique, you know, and I think entrepreneurs, you see it even more so is that we have a world that we've constructed to make sense of the outside world. And we create a world of our ability to deal with the outside world. And after a while, sometimes that world becomes very rigid. You don't question the setup and answers don't break up that world. But questions do. So questions are much more powerful than the answers. Answers are temporary solutions. Questions have a really good shelf life. And the thing that I'm might becoming clear, as we say, all these tools are connected to each other. All these 250 tools we have, they're all very. They're close, agreeable cousins of each other and they each add something. And so for me at. I've been doing this for 50, 51 years. I'm more ambitious at 80 than I was at 50 because I keep seeing the possibility of these new thinking solutions coming through. And it's a neat feeling to be this ambitious.

Yeah, it's absolutely fabulous at your age and I'm not that far behind you to wake up in the morning with that kind of drive and ambition. I mean, it really. It makes life really exciting and worth living. You know, as we begin scaling, and that's our focus today is, you know, and the challenges of scaling, our businesses grow. You know, in my own case, in. Let's see, at the beginning of 2023, we were a team of four. Myself, my wife, my business partner. The three of us had launched our first online summit. As the pandemic lockdowns began in 2020, it was very fortuitous for the online summit business. And then In January of 2023, we had. We had hired one additional person, a wonderful team member who's still with us. And so there were four of us. And today we're 17. And things have gotten more. Fortunately, I've gotten a lot of good advice. We've been building our systems. We build all the playbooks. We've been doing all the things to systemize the company, and it's still complex. And we find profit getting squeezed. And, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty and, you know, so how do you coach entrepreneurs to sort of stay grounded and stay anchored and sort of keep the faith that they can continue to lead and grow with a company that's becoming more and more complex? Even if they are building a great team and they got good people, it's just more to manage. And it seems, in some ways, one would hope it gets to the point where you have an almost unstoppable momentum, but in other ways, it seems like the larger you are, the more vulnerable you are to various market forces and so forth. So how do you coach your entrepreneurs? I know you have many that have been with Strategic Coach for many years, immensely. That gentleman have been with you for 32 years to stay in the saddle as things get more complex.

Yeah. I make a sharp distinction between leadership and management. And management is maximizing what already exists. Okay. So you have a certain number of factors that are immediately available, and you're trying to maximize the, you know, the value of what you already have. Leadership is creating something brand new that's bigger and better than what already exists. The role of the leader is to be going out because it's not a equally distributed skill. There are far, far more people who are good managers than there are people who are good leaders. But since you're the lead person, the entire future success of your company is freeing up fleet. The number one job of everybody in Strategic Coach is to free up Dan and Babs, because we're a partnership. Okay. And so I work just as much at 80, as I did at 50. But I don't do many things. This is a prime activity, what we're doing, because there's a huge multiplier to the summit that you have. We spend an hour and could be thousands and millions with paths on. So this is a huge activity. And the other thing is we have three levels to our program. One's called Signature, and you can spend any number of years at each level if you want. You could spend as little as 1, or you could spend 10 if you wanted. Okay. Depends on who they are, where they are, what they want to do. But they're constantly encountering new tools. Then we have a second one, which is 10 times. Okay, so. And 10 times isn't just quantitative 10 times, it's qualitative 10 times. And the big problem with scaling is oftentimes it's at the price of quantity, quality, you know, yeah, you got more, but you're not producing as good an experience as you were before. So you have to think about qualitative. And then we have a top level, and this has been going for about seven years now, which is called Free Zone. And Free Zone is where the teamwork of doing, you know, like the who, not how you have a big thing and you have a great team that helps you do it. Here you're working with other companies. It would be an example of the two of us, and we both have a. What I call a hero target. We both are already creating value for a certain kind of person in the marketplace. And we say, but we're doing it differently. You're doing it this way. I might want to do a summit. But I said, you know, summit isn't my thing. Fleek really knows how to do summits. So why don't we combine, which we're doing right now, we're combining what we do in Strategic Coach with what you do in your summit. Let's put these two together, and we'll do double value, triple value for the person that we like the most. And there'll be money in it, and we'll figure out how that gets split up. So that's pure collaboration. So at the third level, it's all collaboration. My three books I wrote with Ben Hardy, Dr. Ben Hardy, and we did it with Hay House. And Hay House is a terrific publisher to work with. Reed Tracy, the president, who took over from Louise Hay when he started, and we got involved with Hay House right at the time that they had made sort of the decision that we've been a new age publisher, you know, you know, we started in the 70s and everything, but he says, I think entrepreneurship now is the new age way that we should be going. And I've written a lot of books, but we self publish and I'm add to a significant degree, and if the book isn't finished in 90 days, it's not going to get finished. So I write small books. And so right about that time, I was in Joe Polish. I'm a longtime member of Joe Polish's Genius Network, and Ben Hardy was there. And he said, do you ever have any thought about writing a bigger major market book? And I said, yeah, I'm starting to think about it. And he said, well, that who, not how book idea you have. I'd like to write a book with you. So we did a collaboration where Hay House was the publisher and Reed Tracy happened to be there the day that we were thinking about this. And so Tucker Max, who was scribe, he was the one who arranged the whole deal. But, you know, within two days we had a book deal, but Ben was the writer on the book, and then he would interview me continually. And books aren't the way that we make our money. So I said, ben, why don't you just get all the money, you know, the advance and the royalties and that way it's easier on the bookkeeping that way. And I said, we will have people sign up for the program and the three books. Not just the who, not how, but the gap and the gain. And the 10 times is easier than two times. But we're pushing 900,000, I think 900,000 books. And we've had roughly about 900 people sign up for Strategic Coach, which is where our money is and everything else. And that's a collaboration because I would just do interviews and Ben would take, you know, the results of the interviews, and he interviewed a lot of Strategic Coach clients to do that, team members and everything like that. So that's what we're looking for. Because when you can have a collaboration with another company, you just do what you do. You just make money the way you make money. And then you're combining the power of two companies. And actually, three is the best we've discovered after about seven years. If you put three companies together, it produces dynamite results. Well, I love that.

So that's the manifestation.

Yeah, but here's the thing. If Fleet just does what Fleet, you see, the whole thing is not having you do anything except what you're really great at. We call that unique ability. Yeah, that's the unique ability concept. Don't ask People to do things that they're not great at and that they don't love doing.

So you've kind of created a segue into this. And I wanted to talk about free. I know freedom. Entrepreneurial freedom is something you talk about and teach a lot. And there's four types of this freedom. And most entrepreneurs, I think, are looking for some kind of freedom. That's what draws us. And we didn't want to have a regular job. We didn't want to, you know, maybe we didn't want a boss or we didn't want to have to do that 40 hours a week time clock thing. So we want some kind of freedom. And I know you talk about four kinds of freedom, and you mentioned earlier that time freedom is the foundation of time.

Yeah.

Kind of roll that out in terms of how we develop entrepreneurial freedom and the four aspects of that. Yeah.

The first thing, we have an exercise called upping your game. And we have people do an inventory of in a quarter, what are all the activities that you would do? And, you know, it's surprising. It could be 25 or 30. You know, I said, I'm going to break those activities into three kinds. One of them is it's irritating. This is a very irritating activity. It's irritating while you're doing it. And the thought of doing it is even more irritating. Okay. It could keep you up at night. It could ruin your free day if you just think about. And then there's activities that are just okay, they're necessary, and you do them and they're okay. You've got the skill to do them, but not terribly exciting. And then there's activities that fascinate and motivate you that if you could just do those activities. What are those? So you create three columns. Then I say, what are the top three irritating? Top three. Okay. What are the top three fascinating? And I said, okay, one year from today. Then I say, this represents a hundred percent of your time. All these activities represent 100%. What percentage are irritating? Okay. And fascinating. And usually it's 70%, 20%, 10%, you know, something like that. And I said, so a year from now, it's 70% irritating. Now what do you want it to be? And people say, I'd like it to be zero. Okay? I said, but if it wasn't zero, what would be a very satisfying result? And they say 20%. I said, okay, so 20. Now we've moved 50 to the right. And I said, now, okay. And we say, I'll keep okay at 20. And so you're moving the 50% to fascinating and motivating. So that's 60%. So what would life be like a year from now if you did that and you made progress every quarter? And so mine right now, I would say if you were interviewing Dan 30 years ago, it would probably be 40, 40, 30, 30. Okay. And today it's 0, 10, 90. And you do. I mean, it's specific, it's measurable. But every time you're shifting, then who's that shift to? And that's where the who, not how comes in and everything like that. The other thing is our overall time system. We have three kinds of days. Entrepreneurs actually don't live in the corporate world. They live in the entertainment world. Corporate world, you have, you know, weekdays, weekends, you have work days, weekends, you have vacations. But in the entertainment world, you have performance day. Okay? And I'm including sports as entertainment here because sports is a form of entertainment. Those are everything's on the line days. You got to have total focus just on your performance. And I call it a day. It may be an hour for today. This is my big thing for today. I have this and I have a zoom workshop afternoon. And together they're not more than four hours. Four hours for doing this, but that. This is game day. So nothing else matters except these two activities. And then on another day, you know, I'll have creating new tools, but they haven't been tested yet. And writing books, you know, doing books and that. Basically, I do a lot of podcasting, so those are activities. So that would be lesser days, but there's behind the scenes. So it's like theater. You have front stage and backstage, but the entertainers have performance day, but then they have rehearsal or practice days to get ready. Okay. And then they have free days. They have free days. Okay. And this doesn't correspond to the corporate or bureaucratic calendar at all. Fleet, you could probably talk right now that you have days right now in terms of their impact that were worth three months of work at a previous time. Well, what are you going to do with the free time? You take free time, you know, so I take every year. My babs and I were married. We've been married for 40 years in 2026, and we've been business partners for one year less than that. We take 155 free days a year. That's equivalent to 22 weeks, 22 weeks on the calendar. And my focus days. So 155. I have 180 focus days, which are coaching. Actually, coaching are the Big ones. Number two is creating new thinking tools. Number three is writing books. And number four is podcasting. So those four activities, I do that.

So I've worked with your teachings around this and created a template for my week that I work with my executive assistant to try to build my life into. And it's incredibly powerful. I have a couple follow up questions here. One, it's just kind of aside for me. If I could have my 60 or 70%, you know, being what I find most exciting and joyful that I do, it would be interviewing you and folks like yourself and I. Fortunately, I do get to do a lot of that. You know, I tried if I could build those into a couple days a week. Although doing more than three interviews in a day would be a lot for me, I think. But I know somebody, I can't remember who it was talked about lining up like 12 podcasts they do in one day or something. That seems like a lot. But you know, I interview a lot of busy folks. So between my schedule and their schedule, it's tough to really get get it into that time. But I want to focus on the free day thing because I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs see that as a wonderful goal to aspire to and it could create so much quality of life and things we can do with our life and our relationships. And so I think, well, I'll do that when I get to X point. We imagine you're going to coach us to just put the free day in there and let the rest of your life evolve around that. So am I right about that?

Yeah. And the big thing about it is that you plan your free days the same way you plan your business life. In other words, fill it up with non work activities. Okay. And I start real small. And I said, truthfully, the way that I describe a free day, how many of you probably have never had one? And the hands go up, you know, and they say, well, what's a free day for you? And I said, I'm a fiendish detective story reader. I love detective stories. And so when I go on a free day, I start the detective story the night before because it's a story, the story grips you and the more dramatic and the more exciting, the better. And the other thing is, I love history. And so I always have great history books, especially if they're historical novels, which are a combination of fiction and nonfiction. I'm just a passionate reader about history and I love philosophy. I went to, my college was St. John's the Great Books College in Annapolis. Near the Naval Academy. And all you do is read the great books of the Western world for four years and talk about them. And I'm very passionate of where ideas come from. You know, I did there. So I've got a really pretty good grip on the last 25 years, 2,500 years of how thinking, you know, Plato, Aristotle and that stuff, you know, it plays a role in everyday life. My favorite was Euclid, who created the geometry, you know, and he just. Everything you see around you in western Massachusetts, everywhere in the world, that comes from rules that Euclid put together, you know, 23, 23 hundred years ago, you know, so I'm fascinated with that. And the other thing, I'm very fascinated with politics. And so I haven't watched television at all for seven years. But there's some wonderful aggregator sites like Real Clear is a site out of Chicago, and they're Real Clear politics, Real Clear policy, Real Clear markets, you know, and they just break down all the news of the day and they just give you the headlines of the articles that have been written and you punch on it and it takes you to the article. And I'm fascinated with politics and you know, so, you know, it's just pleasure. And then Babs and I were great buddies and we love going to theater, we have wonderful parties and everything else. But I don't do any business related during the free day. I don't think about business at all. And it takes muscle to do that because the, you know, entrepreneurs have been working for the most part. If you look at their lives, they started work much earlier in life and they've been at it much more intensively than other people. So they really know how to do a work day. But the day when they're not working, they haven't practiced that at all.

So your free days, you are active, but it's a completely different kind of activity. And I assume that even though it's not necessarily purely a rest day, but this is giving a certain part of your brain a rest. And I would assume then that you step into your work days with a lot more energy and creativity because you gave your brain something, a different kind of activity for that day.

It's really interesting. It's a much more. You come back with a much simpler and sharper focus. So I tested this out on myself one day. I had a lot to do. I just had, you know, a tremendous number of commitments, tremendous amount of work I do. And I have a tendency to over commit, you know, and it's fine if it's a commitment, but then it becomes an obligations. And obligations aren't fun at all. Commitments are great, your heart's in it. But you have things where your honor is at stake, your reputation at stake, but you're not really into it. So I wrote out a sheet and I wrote out a sheet of everything that if I didn't take the 10 day vacation, I would get this done during the 10 days. I would do this and this. You look at it to say by the end of 10 days I could have this done. And I said, okay, I'm just going to take a risk. I'm just going to bet that it's going to be okay. And I put the sheet in a drawer and I went and took the 10 days and do my normal activities. And I came back, I took the sheet out and five of them had been done by other people while I was away. Five of them didn't make any sense anymore. I had 10 left and I said, I can do these three. And I did about eight of them in the first four days when I came back because I came back with a different brain. Amazing.

So there's one other area I really want to explore with you because we're coming towards the end of our time and it's another one of your books, the gap in the game. Because it's a really different way of measuring the entrepreneurial journey and scaling altogether which we're talking about today. And I think it's a really important one because again, you bring in these completely different ways of looking at things, these different mindsets and different frames that really change the game. So if you would talk about the.

Gap in the game, one of my biggest observations, and first of all in myself, and I should say Fleet, I've never created a thinking process for other people that I didn't have the problem. So I always start with myself as does this work for me, this way of thinking? And what I've noticed was that I'm a real achiever, you know, and I like achieving it. I've achieved a lot, but it doesn't always make me happy. The achievement always doesn't make me happy. And I was wondering, well, you were excited about doing it and then you did it and then it didn't make you happy, so why not? And I came up with this idea that there's a switch in our brain, that if it's switched one way you can achieve and achieve. And it feels to you when you get to the end of it that you haven't accomplished anything else, anything at all. But people from the outside are looking at you and you say, you should just be incredibly happy with yourself because, you know, you achieve so much. Boy, if I was in your shoes, I would be very happy. I said, yeah, that's the problem. You're not in my shoes anyway, and I'm not in yours. And then I said, there's another switch that if you achieve the same amount, it does make you happy. So what are the differences between when the achievement makes you happy and when it does make it? It's what you measure by. And I realized that we have a thing called an ideal. And the ideal, I say, psychologically, is like the horizon line in the physical world. And that is you see the horizon, but you never get to the horizon. Yeah, I mean, you can walk for miles and you're still the same distance away from the horizon line. And I said, this is just a mental. An ideal is just a mental construct. You know, it's not real. It is real because it can make you happy or unhappy, but it's not real in the sense that you can actually get there. And then I notice that when I'm happy, I do the achievement. I turn around and I look backwards. Where did I start? And no matter what the progress is, it makes me happy. I said, one of them is you always have this gap between yourself and the ideal, and no matter how much you try, you're never going to get there. And on the other hand, you have the gain from the other side. You look backwards and there's a gain there. So I said, you know, the world of images and the world of other people selling things, they're always trying to get you to measure your progress by their ideal. And they want to. Their ideal. They want that to be your ideal. But the thing that you really own is what you gain from your own progress. And this is really. This has a huge impact on our entrepreneurs, but, boy, it has a even bigger impact on their families, on their person, that they're partner for life. And it has enormous impact on their children. So we call it the gap and gain. And I don't know if you've come across the writings of Martin Seligman. Have you ever heard from Martin Seligman?

Positive psychology?

Yes, positive psychology. And one of our clients was a student of his, and he sent him the Gap in the Ging book. And he said, boy, this is a terrific book. He said, I wish I'd known about this 40 or 50 years ago, but we've seen real shifts in happiness just because. And you Know, I created the concept and I've been with it for about 25 years. And people say, you must never be in the gap. And I said, I don't think more than four or five times a day. And I said, but I only spend about a minute there. I only spend. Because I can feel myself tightening up. I can feel the tension. I said, ah, really? But the moment I say, yeah, but where you are right now, how does this compare to last week? And all of a sudden, I said, it feels good. I'm making real progress.

Well, there's so much wisdom that such a secret to happiness is applicable across everyone's life.

I want to tell you a story just to finish this off. So I have this client, just brilliant guy. He had gone through medical school but decided not to become a doctor. And he went into the insurance business, and he began to realize that the doctors that insurance companies use to verify whether someone is insurable or not, they're not very good doctors. Okay? So when they say, no, this person is not insurable, he created a second opinion. And he would. On behalf of the person trying to buy the insurance, he would go in and he would argue the case. And he had, like, a 95% success record that he could get the insurance for them. So anyway, it was telling the story. His mother was dead, so he was about 40. His father was in his 60s, and he went home, and it was never a good experience meeting with his father. And they were sitting there, not really talking. They're having a meal, and the father said, what were you thinking? What were you thinking? And he says, what are you talking about? He said, you went through high school. You got 40 grades. You had 39 A's and one B. What were you thinking that you couldn't get that 40th A? This is something that happened 27 years ago. And his father was still upset that he didn't get that one more A. You know, they ended it, however they ended it. And on the way home, this client, he had to turn off the road and go into a parking lot. And he sat there breathing heavily, and he said, what my dad just did to me, I'm doing to my daughter.

Wow.

And he said, it changed our relationship.

So much human suffering is living in the gap instead of the gain. Yeah. Wow, that is so powerful. There's so much wisdom and freedom in that. For all of our entrepreneurs in the audience, even if we're able to create great success as entrepreneurs and we're not creating happiness for ourself and our family, there's something really missing there. And because I think ultimately, again, we're, we all get into this entrepreneurial journey seeking both freedom and happiness and joy and energy and all of it. So. And yet I think the happiness part is elusive. A lot of entrepreneurs and I think this gap in the gain thing is really the secret. So incredible. Well, thank you so much for this really illuminating conversation. I'd love to just keep going and going. You know, you recently put on your first big conference, I think recently. I want you to let people know where they can find out more about Strategic Coach and all of your work. Also, I know you have a gift to offer audience. It's a book that came out of this recent coach con 25 conference that you did. So tell us about that.

Yeah, well, our clients are real busy and we're real busy and anything but. Last year it was three anniversaries. It was my 50th year of coaching, so I started in 74. So it was the 35th year of the Strategic Coach program in the workshop form. I'd been a one on one coach for 15 years, but it was 35 years and it was my 80th birthday and they all came at the same time. So my staff surreptitiously sneaky and Eleanora, who's my handler today on the program, she and her, one of our other team members just designed this amazing conference in Nashville at the wonderful music center that they have there. And we had 350 of our clients come down and we said, you know, this be a neat time just to do a book that isn't just on the ideas of the program, you know, for marketing purposes, but just to celebrate that we've done this. And our. So we got each of our coaches to actually write an essay on their thinking about entrepreneurial growth, entrepreneurial success. And I was interviewed and I did one too and it was just a one off book just for that conference. But we have the PDF version and we've never given it out. So this is the first time that we've ever given it out to people who were not at the conference. And we got the request from you and you said got something to give out. And so there was a little huddle, you know, this high level thinking they wouldn't include me and planning on this. And they said we'll just put this in. So we're just giving it out just for this show. We haven't given it out to anyone else.

That's so wonderful. And the link to get this incredible resource which I Began reading this morning is quite incredible. Begins with an introduction from you. The link's right down below. So I encourage people to get a hold of that right away. And then where else do they go to find out more about the Strategic Coach?

Yeah, just, you know, we have really good site. It's just www.strategiccoach.com and we got lots of podcasts in there. We've got lots of stories, entrepreneurial stories, and then it'll take you directly. If you want to find out more about being in an actual participant as an entrepreneur and strategic coach, you can just go to the link. And we've got a great team that we are. Membership advisors are really good.

Absolutely wonderful, and thank you so much. I really encourage our audience to check that out. You're Talking about accessing 50 years of coaching experience and 35 years of building Strategic Coach as a very successful company. Dan, just last question. You know, as entrepreneurs, I think it is important to think in a lot of ways about our legacy. Not like a monument to ourself, but more like, you know, what's the value we've added and what do you want to be remembered for? And what do you hope your legacy is as an entrepreneur and a coach?

Yeah, I actually have a goal for 80, and my goal for 100 is that we'll have 10,000. We have just about 3,000 in the program right now, but we have 10,000. But the real thing is kind of with us as a role model, our thinking processes are becoming patents. And down the road, these are going to be, you know, massively available in the marketplace. And we're showing our entrepreneurs how they can take their creative decision making and give a name to the solution package the solution and get it protected. And we've created the complete structure for how you move from creating a new solution in whatever it is that you do. And then it actually becomes a patent asset that's totally protected, but it has value. And in 2044, I'll be 100. And my goal is that the value of the assets that our 10,000 entrepreneurs are creating is $15 trillion. And that would be just about the same size of China, but with really good books. Wow.

Wow. Talk about thinking big. Oh, my goodness. You know, that's really interesting because in this space, the space of personal development, entrepreneurship, and so forth, in the past, it's been so difficult to protect intellectual property. I mean, I think back to Stephen Covey and even his. I mean, everybody kind of takes everything from everybody. And, you know, there is a kind of sharing and an additive, you know, generative quality of that. But I think people do come up with incredibly creative frameworks and the possibility of creating that intellectual property and monetizing that, I think is a core part of business.

So the Patent Bureau has really come around to a totally new way of thinking about this. So we've, in the last 20 months, we've acquired 50 patents from, you know, work that we've done over 35 years. But there's a real pathway to do that. That's the third level of our program, the collaboration one, because it's hard to collaborate with people if you don't have solutions that are your solutions, but you have legal protection for them. Fabulous. Fabulous.

Thank you so much. Dan Sullivan, along with his wife, Bab Smith, co founders of Strategic Coach. Thank you so much for the incredible value you brought to our conversation today and that you continue to bring to so many entrepreneurs around the world.

Thank you, Fleet.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to you. Take care.