7 Millionaire Mindset Hacks for Daily Success and Wealth ft. Brian Tracy & Dan Sullivan

Let me say this though, Brian. You, you, um, I mean, I'm looking at your Instagram right now. So, you got 756,000 followers on Instagram. You got millions of people that watch you on YouTube. Uh, you've got all these books. You're the top-selling audio author in the world. Every day, literally, your ideas reach millions of people every single day. And, uh, I mean, what advice would you give for the creation of Of the content, because one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is, people say content is king. Well, I think content is obviously valuable, but I think context is more important than content. And communication is one thing, but comprehension is another thing. You know, being able to put content out there, not having people comprehend it, is a whole nother thing.

Right.

And you have just put out so much, so many people's lives have been impacted and changed by your ideas. And we have many people here that would love to multiply that and to share their wisdom, their knowledge, and reach people not only for the selling and promotion of their products and services, their own companies, but literally just to impact people. So, what advice would you give to be productive in that area? Because, I mean, you're literally one of the most productive people on the planet in this particular area. So, you obviously have a process and a system for writing books.

Yeah.

For putting information out there. You've been doing it for many, many years. How do you do it? I mean, what have you learned that if you were to be able to download, here's how to get, here's how to write a book, here's how to put your ideas together, here's how, you know, I mean, because I'm, I don't know, out of all the books, have you written any books that you wish you would have not written, that you would have not put out there? Are you pretty happy with everything?

Well, I'll tell you 2 funny things, but I wanna start with the second thing. Is many years ago I was writing books, and I'll tell you why in just a second. And my people in my coaching classes, people in my seminars would say, well, how do you write a book? And how do you write so many books? And how do you have so many books? And I say, well, you just do this and you just do that and so on. And finally I said, look, I'll write it down. I'll write down my book writing system. So I wrote down 20 steps to write a book and get published. And, uh, and I put it on my website, briantracy.com. And I say, look, if you want to learn how to write a book, go and get those 20 steps. And then my partners— you know Eric Berman, don't you?

Oh yeah, yeah, very well.

Eric has been my partner for 20 years. He said, Brian, we should create a really first-rate course on how to write a book and get published because 64% of adults dream of writing a book. They fantasize about writing a book. They, they plan to write a book and less than 1% will ever do it. And then less than 1% of those will ever get published. Why? And they always say the reason is because they don't know how. I just don't know the process. So anybody here who's watching who wants to write a book, go to my website and there's a download. It's called Brian's Formula on How to Write a Book. 20 steps and it's free. Just go and take it. And here's the steps. Step 1, step 2, step 3. What I call it is like a recipe. And again, it's one of the things that I've learned from you and from other people in the Genius Network is a recipe has a series of ingredients. And what you do is you combine the ingredients correctly. You don't cheap on this ingredient and ignore or delete this ingredient. You follow the recipe. And you get a good dish. And if you practice enough, eventually you'll be able to prepare a beautiful dish over and over again. And so, for example, when I was single, I found that I was going out to restaurants to have Caesar salad. And so I would meet a girl and I would invite her out for dinner and we would go to a restaurant where they served Caesar salad. And one day, and I still remember this, I noticed that the guy making the Caesar salad, and this is where they brought all the ingredients to the table and they mixed it all up in a bowl and they put it on your plate. And so he's mixing up the salad and it was a very good salad, very good restaurant, good salad. And I said, how do you make this salad? He said, well, they give me a recipe and the ingredients in the kitchen and then they just have me do it. So I come to you to come to the tableside and make it. Well, if this guy who was not very smart If this guy can make a delicious Caesar salad, so can I. So I decided I'm going to get a recipe and I'm going to make a Caesar salad. And I did. But what I did is I tried to cheat. Instead of using fresh romaine lettuce, I used butter lettuce. Instead of using freshly squeezed lemon juice, I used lemon juice out of a bottle. Instead of using fresh garlic, I used minced garlic from, from a bottle. Instead of this, I did that. And the salad just tasted crummy. And so finally, I made this decision. I remember this because it affected everything else in my life. I made this decision. I'm going to stop screwing around. I'm going to follow a good recipe exactly. And then I'm going to work with that recipe. And I did. And now I have a recipe to make Caesar salad. I am probably, immodestly, probably the best Caesar salad maker in the world. Or very, or very close. Everybody who has Ever tasted my Caesar salad say it's the best Caesar salad they ever had in their life. And it has 14 parts, 14 steps, ingredients, the way that you mix them, and so on. And I have people who beg me, please make a salad, come to my house at Christmas and make a salad. Can I come to your house? Because once they've had my salad, they'll never be satisfied. So people say, well, how do you make your Caesar salad? I say, well, you do this and you do that, and you put this and you put that and everything else. And I said, oh, what the heck, I'll just write it down. So I wrote it down because I, I have this passionate desire like you to help people. I just want to help people. I don't want to make money. If I make money, good, but mostly I want to make a difference in people's lives. So I said, okay, I'll just write it down. So I wrote it down and I put on my website, briantracy.com. You go there, Brian's Caesar Salad Recipe, and you can download it. It's free. And everybody who's ever done that, they communicate with me and they say, I made that salad. I've never made a Caesar salad in my life. I followed the recipe and everybody in my family said it was the best Caesar salad they ever had in their life. So therefore, if you like Caesar salad, go and download it. So I used to tell this story just the way I just told you. I used to tell this story in my big seminars, some of my Peter Lo seminars with 10,000, 20,000 people. And I say, here's an example. And the example is that people don't follow the recipe for success. If you want to sell successfully, by the way, there's 7 steps that I have discovered and developed, which I teach in 1,000 different ways. I've taught more than 2 million salespeople my recipe for selling. And many of those people have become millionaires. Chip Wilson is also a friend of mine. And he told me, he booked me, he told me, he said, He said he was working as a yoga instructor in a small yoga studio in Vancouver, in Kitsilano, which is a neighborhood, and somebody put him through my course. And I had the course on video with workbooks and everything else. And he said he suddenly realized that there's no future being a yoga instructor. And so then he looked around, because we teach the superconscious mind in that course, Psychology of Achievement. He looked around and he said, the money is in yoga clothes. That's where the money is. And the quality of clothes being produced, generally speaking, was very poor. So he just came up with this idea of producing high-quality yoga clothes made with high-quality fabrics, well put together. And the rest is history. As you say, he's worth almost $5 billion today. He told me when he brought me up to speak, We spent 2 days together. He told me that basically these ideas made him rich. Very, very simple ideas. Just set a goal, work on your most important goal, unlock your creativity, and so on. He's a super guy. He's one of those guys that deserves to be successful. You're happy for his success when you talk to him. So this is— so the key is get the recipe. If you want to be excellent in sales, 20% of salespeople earn 80% of the money in sales. Why? It's because there's a recipe for selling. It has 7 parts, 7 ingredients. If you follow the 7 ingredients, what will happen is it'll come out at the other end, sale after sale after sale. And if you don't, it won't. If you want to be successful in business, you have to have a marketing plan. As, as our friend Dan Kennedy says, is that whatever business you're in, you're in the marketing business. And your success or failure, income, the size of the house you live in, car you drive, what happens to you in life is determined by how good you are at marketing your product. And marketing is attracting qualified people who can and will buy your product or service within a reasonable period of time. And what I just told you is the result of thousands of hours of research. Marketing means attracting people who can and will buy and pay for your product or service within a reasonable period of time. And so therefore, once you learn how to market, you can market any product if it is a sellable product. So people have to learn how to market. In selling, by the way, and I'll just give you this quickly, because I produced, after Psychology of Achievement, I produced a program called Psychology of Selling. And Psychology of Selling, according to their research, has made more salespeople millionaires than any other single training influence in the world. Psychology of Selling. And how do you get Psychology of Selling? You go to Audible. You go to Audible and there it is and you download it. You download it on Audible and listen to it. There's nothing hard about that.

Well, I got— let me do this. Don Cooper, go ahead and let me see if I can pin your video. If you can put that up on the screen again, he's got the Let me see if I can pin— well, I'm trying to, but—

Psychology of Selling. And by the way, it's in book form. And I decided it was such a big program, I decided to divide it into 2 books. One is Psychology of Selling, the other is The Art of Closing the Sale. And countless people write to me and tell me, OMG, OMG, it made me rich. It made me rich. You changed my life. You made me rich. I hear that so many times. You changed my life. You made me rich. It's not because I'm a genius. It's just I found the recipe and worked with the recipe.

Procrastination is a very, very interesting mindset, and the reason is that it's largely secret. It's a largely secret experience that most people have, you know. So you watch Peter up here, or you watch other Performers over the next 2 days, and you'll sit there and you have a tendency— we all have a tendency to compare what's going— our insides against someone's outsides. How many of you have ever noticed that you compare your inside— outside? So you would look at a guy like Peter or Joe, and he's up here and he's really cool, and both of them are really composed and they have their act together, and you would That person does not procrastinate. Absolutely does not procrastinate. Okay. And I'm not sharing any secrets here, but if you interviewed them, they would say, there's enormous areas in my life where I'm just running ahead as fast as I can, but there are some areas that I'm actually procrastinating. And so what I'm going to show you, and this is just what— one of the things that we in Strategic Coach, call a mindset gateway. So I have, over the years, I've created about 100 of these, and these are general-purpose thinking processes that will actually take you through a mindset, mindset scale.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or Or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Now, what we're going to actually do is I'm going to show you how to actually use your biggest procrastinations to actually be the vehicle for telling you what the most important things are that you want to do. And you're going to take on 3 of your biggest procrastinations right now. Where you are today, and within about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, we're gonna flip them and we're gonna turn them into an area of motivation. We're gonna turn them into an area of energy and an energy of focus. Okay? And by doing this today, I'm hoping that you can see that you can do this on any day, that you could actually for the rest of your life— You could actually, in thinking about what's most important tomorrow, you could actually say, well, what are the 3 biggest things that I'm procrastinating on? And those 3 biggest things that you're procrastinating on are actually your best indicator on what you should work on tomorrow. And therefore, for the rest of your life, you never have to worry about whether you're doing the right things because you're procrastinating on the wrong things. Procrastination will actually tell you that these are the most important things. Okay? And for each of you is unique, but the general principle is actually something that we can all master. And there's a great deal of loneliness with procrastination. One of the things I notice is that generally speaking, when I talk to people about their procrastination, it's like it's a secret that's buried in the basement, but it's not just in the basement, it's in a secret room in the basement. And they actually do not want— they said, I can't talk about my procrastinations. Okay, because the way it's set up is that procrastination is kind of like— it's an indication that you're a lesser human being.

You're—

You know, you don't have your act together. And, you know, there's a moral failing here. Actually, it's a moral failing. You're a sub. You know, it's not very, very good. And if you'd only get your act together, you could live up to your potential. I don't know if any of you have ever had that. Okay, so let's talk about procrastination. First of all, how do I know if I'm procrastinating? So I'm just going to give you the 2 guides to know what constitutes a procrastination for you. And the first one is that it uses the word should and it's something that you should do. So should is the giveaway. I think words are very, very important and I think that the word should, the moment you hear the word should, you know that someone's talking about a procrastination. It's should do or the second one is Shouldn't do. Okay, should do or shouldn't do. And the should do is you should do but you haven't done. Okay, so that's the first procrastination. Okay, and the second one is you shouldn't do but you haven't stopped. Okay, so that pretty well covers the field. And I find that generally speaking, if you just hear, you know, listening, if someone in talking to you uses word should, you know they're procrastinating. Okay? If you use the word should— and should is a guilt word. Should is a manipulation word, and it always indicates that procrastination is going on. It's just a general indicator. I think it's good for 90% of the procrastinations. 2 places where you can procrastinate. The first one is work and the other one is your personal time outside of work. And just generally speaking, so I can include the whole room in the area of work procrastination, it would fall into these areas. First of all, planning, deciding, initiating, communicating, informing, implementing, responding, completing. Okay?

So those—

General areas. And so when you think about your work and you think about these activities, then these activities would sort of indicate to you where you could be procrastinating. We're going to do a quick sprint, what I call sprint thinking, where I'm just going to have you brainstorm for about 3 minutes and actually write down a whole bunch of procrastinations that you're doing right now. And then that, in your personal life, it's sort of similar, but it's informing, helping, supporting, organizing, participating, discussing, deciding, solving, and completing. Okay? And so you can think of all the different situations. As entrepreneurs, there's a particular indicator of what constitutes your biggest biggest procrastinations. And I've got an organization, Babs— Babs Smith is here, she's my partner. We have about 120 team members. And when I'm procrastinating, I'm being a bottleneck that's preventing teamwork. And I noticed that my biggest procrastinations is where Teamwork can't really be triggered using the skillful people that we have in the company, and the reason is because I'm being a bottleneck of one kind or another, and it generally falls into the category of the first, first line. How many of you, the rest of you, when you think of the procrastinations that really keep you awake at night or not enjoying your free time, usually is where you're kind of a bottleneck that's preventing—

Preventing teamwork.

Preventing teamwork, yeah. It falls into that. And at home, you know, in personal life too, you know, happy personal life requires enormous amounts of teamwork with other people. And so doing it— so I'm just trying to give you the general landscape of procrastination. And what I'm trying to do here is saying that this is an enormous source of potential energy for you. This enormous sense of potential motivation, but right now it's trapped. So whatever you write down where your procrastination is, it's energy, but you don't have access to the energy. It's actually trapped energy. And how many of you have procrastinated on something for quite a long time, and then when you finally acted on it and broke through, there was this huge burst of energy? There was this enormous burst of energy. And so the one thing I want to get across to you here is that the time you spend procrastinating is never wasted time once you get through it. And the energy that you feel that you've wasted procrastinating is never lost. It's just not available to you right now.

Okay?

And this is one of those areas too Where, you know, you get manipulated around the issue of procrastination. You actually get manipulated.

Okay?

And I'm very—

being a happy person, I'm very resistant to manipulation. You know, Joe spoke about the theme of the conference. Freedom is actually freedom from being manipulated by external circumstances or external messages. So I'm very sensitive. I have, you know, I have a spidey sense for anything where I sense that someone is trying to manipulate me in a particular direction. And so I go after any thought form or any mindset which actually seems to be a manipulative— a manipulation. And then I come up with a counter— an antidote to it. I counteract. Manipulation so that people really are free in their own minds and they can, they can think very, very freeing thoughts. So I really, really love helping people get a real sense of freedom about their life and not being manipulated by thoughts that come from the past or in the present or possible future. And, and once they're freed up in that aspect of their life, then they're Their time gets freed up, their money gets freed up, their relationships get freed up, and also their purpose in life, your purpose in life. See, one of the things you discover when you come to Genius Network and also Abundance 360 is that there's a lot of very, very smart people in the world. Okay, there's a lot of very, very smart people in the world. And so, You don't want to have a goal that you want to be the smartest person in the room. Okay? Say, I'm not the smartest person in the room, but for something that I've really taken a look at for 40 years, I'm probably the smartest person regarding that particular thing. And each of you has a special thing that you're working on, and in that area, you're actually the smartest person. smartest person, but the vision that Peter's talking about is a lot of really smartness all being available to everybody else. Okay, so my goal from a very early age is that I just want to be in a room where everybody's getting smarter.

Okay?

That's all I really wanted, and therefore my best usefulness in life as a strategic coach is to just show people how their performance and their achievement can continually go up just by thinking about their mindset ceilings and then freeing themselves up from it. So this is my life work on the planet. I don't know what I've done in previous lifetimes or in future ones, but for this lifetime, this is it. So I'm— This is great. What I'm doing today is, you know, what I was put here to do.

All right.

Now, I'm going to give you a form. We're going to go through this quite quickly. And the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to go to a first column. So if you just look at this, and I've got mine filled out, so you can see what one of the forms looks like when it's all filled out. This is called— The procrastination priority. Okay, it's called procrastination priority. And that is your procrastination on any day that you choose to do this will actually establish your priority for the next day. Will actually establish your priority for the next day. And it's really, really neat because how many of you have, you know, and just raise your hand, how many of you have Generally looked at procrastination as a negative in your life, generally speaking. Me too. I mean, me too. And I want to tell you, I've got a real partner on this in the room, and it's Dean Jackson. And Dean and I have been working on this nonstop for the last 2 and a half months. And both of us, you know, if there was a big room, I would introduce myself. Hi, Hi, my name's Dan and I'm a procrastinator. And you would say?

Hi, Dan.

Yeah. Hi, Dan. I'm just, I mean, people look at me and they say, Dan, if there's one person in the world who doesn't procrastinate, it's the king of the mindsets. And I procrastinate just as much as anyone else does. Okay? But we all have our unique things where we get caught up. So first of all, there's a, You know, the general transparency. The other thing is, I'll tell you this just because of the experience that I've had with Dean over the last couple months, is that the single most interesting conversation that you'd ever— that'll get— if you meet a total stranger and you want to talk about something and it immediately becomes interesting, is saying, do you procrastinate? And people go, huh. Yeah, yeah, I do. I could write the book on it, you know. And what I notice is that there's 7.3 billion people on the planet who could write the book on it. We're all master procrastinators. Okay? There's a reason for this. The only way that you could not be a procrastinator is to simply cease having goals. That'll cut it off. And if you're going to do that anyway, Death is a quick way of not thinking about goals. So don't do that. So the first thing I'd like you to do very quickly, and we're just going to take 3 minutes, and the first column, what I'm going to have you do is just write down as fast as you can in no particular order, just write down every area where you're procrastinating, big or small, you know, and just get it out there because I just want you to— Write it down. Actually write down everything that's in your mind where you know you're procrastinating, where there's a should word, you should do or you shouldn't do, personal life or business life, and just write those down. Okay? And if someone will give me the timer on— well, I've got it right in front of me, so I'll keep a track on you. And don't worry about the ranking. Don't worry about which comes first. All we're trying to do is get some some things down on paper. How many of you have 4 or 5 and you can work with them? How many right there? Yeah, we got enough. So what I want you to do very, very quickly, and this is all emotional because procrastination is a very emotional thing, just pick the 3 which if you got them out of the way would give you the biggest burst of energy. Like if you got through it, This would actually give you a real burst of energy. And the other thing is other people are depending upon it. I find that things where other people are depending upon me and I'm procrastinating, those are really big payoffs if I actually take my action. Then as soon as you get them circled, just go to the Next column where it says the top three priorities, and in the three boxes one two three just put write down again what the procrastination is. Just write it down. Just write down what the procrastination is. Yeah. Raise your hand if just writing them down and ranking them actually, you can start feeling the energy, the energy is starting to come back. Yeah. And because you're telling the truth, you know, you're just telling the truth. Telling the truth always has big energy boost, you know, about anything. And then once you get the 3 of them written down, I'd like you very quickly just to give a first statement of why you're procrastinating. So I've got these. You know, for example, I made a commitment to my team when I was 70 that over the next 25 years I was going to write 100 books. 100 books in 100 quarters. And the first 7 quarters, I'm good so far. And, but I always notice that there's a period during the quarter when I get kind of frozen. Can I pull it off again? And that's one of the things I really noticed was I would procrastinate even though I've done it 7 times before. There's always that thing, can I pull it off again? And anyway, and that's one of the ways I keep my mind alive, by the way, is— It makes me really scared about the next 25 years, and I think fear makes you young. I believe that when people start desiring a courage-free future is the moment that they send the universe out— they send a message out to the universe to actually take the parts back. You know, the moment you want a courage-free future is the moment you start dying. So I have a motto in life not to give death any assistance. And yeah, Peter and I are— I thought I was a big deal because I want to— my goal is living to 156. And then the first podcast I did with Peter, his was 700. And I immediately felt like a lesser human being. And I began procrastinating even on things That would get me to 156. Never get into that type of sword fight. Now he's got swords. This is even worse. Now he's got swords. And I didn't know that. I didn't know about the sword. Anyway, okay, so let's— I just want to do this. But how many so far, this is very, very useful? I mean, just doing this. Yeah, and so this is one of those mindset gateways because one of those mindsets coming along that is stopping performance and achievement is actually procrastination and looking at procrastination in a negative way rather than as a source of enormous energy and direction. So I'm going to just show you I divide basically every person who's a performer, every person who's an achiever, there are 4 boxes that contribute to performance achievement. And a lot of people will say, for example, you'll come to a session like these 2 days and you'll say, I would take action on that if I had the—

Time.

If I had the confidence. How many of you, when you feel confidence, it's no problem to actually take action? Yeah. And then I'll say to them, but you probably need something else to have confidence, because I've noticed that people are only confident when they have capability. And they say, right, when I have the capability and confidence, I would take action. I said, do you have the capability and confidence right now? And they said, no, I don't. So what that means, you're not going to take action, right? And they said, right, when I get the capability and confidence, I'll take action. And I say, you know, it's kind of like saying, if the government would give me a loan, I would become an entrepreneur. Okay? With the proviso that if it was a failure at the end of the year, the government would forgive all my debts.

Okay.

I mean, that sounds pretty reasonable, doesn't it?

Yeah.

So anyway, but it's that type of demand. And what I've noticed actually, that this is not how capability and confidence actually happen. Actually, there's something that happens that has to happen first when you're up against something where you don't have the capability and confidence. And the thing is, it requires courage. It requires courage. And courage is never triggered unless you have commitment. So what a commitment actually is, is where you say, I'm going to move forward toward a breakthrough, toward something bigger and better, where I don't yet have the capability and confidence. That's actually what courage is. That's what courage is. The difference between courage and confidence is that courage doesn't feel good. How many of you have noticed the sharp difference in emotion between confidence and courage? The reason why we call it courage is because it doesn't feel good, and that's one of the main reasons why we admire it so much in other people. You know, so I was— I had a very enjoyable Army career during the 1960s. And I'm saying that truthfully. I had one of the dream Army careers that you can have. But I was drafted right when Vietnam started. Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin was 1965 in April, and I got drafted in June, July, and ended up 2 years as the entertainment director for about half of South Korea. Very, very enjoyable. I was actually sorry to come back. I really liked the Koreans.

Okay.

But in basic training, basic training for the most part, if you're reasonably fit, is just kind of boring except for one thing, practice with live grenades. Okay. And the Army is very, very intelligent that you actually understand the seriousness that these are weapons that can turn you into hamburger in about 5 seconds. So They would take us out the night before and they would show us what we're going to do the next morning. And you get down into a pit with one of their instructors and you take the pin out and as long as you have the handle down, it won't release. But 5 seconds after you throw it, then it explodes and it explodes on the other side of a big mound. And so they let you see this so that you'll sleep really well that night, which I did not do. And, uh, and there was accidents. There was actually in the, in the group before us, there was actually someone killed and the instructor badly injured because someone dropped the grenade in the pit. So we got out there and the first sergeant, who was a World War II Korean War veteran, he said, uh, anyone here scared? My hand went right up. Yeah, understanding that I'm a happy person, so of course I'm going to put my hand up. And he said, well, Sullivan's the only one I trust here because he's the only one telling the truth. And he said, I want to tell you the difference between fear and courage. He says, fear is wetting your pants. Courage is doing what you're supposed to do with wet pants. And that's what I've really, really noticed, that entrepreneurism is really, you know, it really is marked by a lot of wetting your pants over, you know, at least, you know, psychologically over time, and requires courage. So you cannot wait until you have capability and confidence to start upward movement. You have to start with commitment. And commitment requires that you establish a deadline when something's going to be true, and you put a measurable result to it. The bigger you have a measurement to it, the better you have a measurement to it. Now this is what happens when you— so this is really what you want to do if you're leading a really great upwardly progressing life as an entrepreneur. You want a 4-way system where you're continually Committing to a bigger and better, you have courage. The combination of commitment and courage actually creates the new capability, which gives you a higher confidence, and then you do it again. Okay? And that's how you constantly grow. But when you are procrastinating, what happens is that all 4 of these disappear. It's like sensory deprivation. Okay? You're not in contact with capability, you're not in contact with confidence, you're not making any commitment, and you have no courage. And so you are in the no zone, and the no zone is no capability, no confidence, no commitment, and no courage, and you're paralyzed. You're procrastinating, and it feels like you're paralyzed and you can't move How many of you have experienced that? And in some part of your life right now, you're a bit paralyzed from moving forward right now. And what I want to say is this is completely normal. Every human being on the planet does it. There's nothing wrong with procrastinating except not telling the truth that you're procrastinating. That's the only thing that's wrong with procrastinating is not telling the truth. The moment you tell the truth, you can start the process. So what we have to do is we have to go from the no zone to the grow zone. And the way you grow is by going right back to commitment and courage. And then you're back into the cycle and you'll be creating new capability and confidence. And going back to our sheet now, what I'm going to have you do— and this will take about 4 or 5 minutes— I'm going to have you Take each one of your procrastinations and I'm going to have you write down what the commitment is. Remember, you have to have a deadline and you have to have a measurable result. Okay? And so I'll just take you through this. So these are— this is real stuff for me. This is my actual— and I do this all the time. So I'm naming names here and I'm naming projects. And what I want you to do is just take each of the commitments and say what your commitment is. This next Thursday, so I was totally ready for something next Thursday. It was a measurable result. I was totally ready, and it was next Thursday, and that was it. The courage is that I had to do about 4 days of nose-to-grindstone work, you know, for about 30 hours to get ready for that interview. And, you know, I'm clinically diagnosed as ADD. I want you to know I'm fully medicated as I'm talking to you for this. And doing something continuous for 4 days requires a lot of courage on my part. How many of you in this room doing one activity continuous? Yeah, it requires a great deal of courage, but the payoff was huge. If I do that, the team gets triggered. So I'm always thinking teamwork. I'm always thinking teamwork. And so Kerry, Shannon, and I are able to do our best ever first interview 3 weeks earlier than normal. Big gain, big breakthrough. Everyone on the team is far, far more clear, focused, and energized from start to finish with no slowdowns. And what I do day by day, the night before I say, what am I procrastinating on? And I go through this process the next morning. And I always have my 3. I'm always motivated. I'm always focused. And these procrastinations are just enabling me to make very, very rapid progress. My performance increases and my achievement. And, you know, at age 72, none of this matters. There's nothing slowing me down except not telling the truth about my procrastinations. So, question is on focus, man. I am fairly newer to marketing. I've always been into prospecting, you know, cold calling and built business doing that. So, now with the marketing, you know, I'm part of your Genius Experience. I'm working with Tim. I feel like there's so many different things coming at me now. So, between, you know, the stuff you guys share with the Genius Experience and then with Tim's coaching and Ben Hardy has a coaching program and Michael Bernoff has this challenge and it's all, it's like all these things are coming and I'm just like, okay, what, what do I focus on anymore? I'm almost like backing off now. Like, wow, there's just so much.

Yeah.

Um, do you get what I'm saying?

Oh, believe me, I'm, I'm a master at putting myself into an overwhelmed state and to biting off more than I can chew. I've done it for many, many years. And, uh, like my, my buddy Gary Halbert, you know, used to say, what, as we get older, what, uh, a lot of people consider wisdom as simply fatigue. And so, there's a lot to be said about— there's a lot of things to choose from. And the more that the world becomes convenient and the more options we have, if you have 1,000 options, you don't have any options. And that's one of the challenges. It's the paradox of choice. And so, I think it all— here's what I would say. So, BJ Fogg, who You'll see a short clip of him in The Social Dilemma. Have you seen that movie, Social Dilemma? Watch it on— watch it, it's on Netflix. And Tristan Harris is one of the main guys in The Social Dilemma. He runs the Center for Humane Technology. He was actually one of BJ Fogg's students in 2006. And so BJ runs the, you know, the behavior design lab at Stanford. And I actually went there last year and spoke to his students, which was great, and we filmed it and I'll eventually put that out. BJ wrote a book called Tiny Habits. And so what, what I'd like everyone here to do, if you have— oh, thank you. Wow, Giselle, actually. So here is the book Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg. This has been voted the best book of the year, best business book of the year at Amazon, even though he never wrote it to be a business book. This explains all behavior, right? And behavior is— behavior equals MAP, which is motivation, ability, and prompts. And so the reason it's so easy to get sucked into news or apps or anything is because all the prompts have been built into the apps, right? It doesn't take much Motivation or ability to look at porn. I mean, it's just built in, right? And to look at anything that gives you a continual dopamine hit. And for entrepreneurs, they get excited by new ideas, you know, especially quick-start entrepreneurs. And I'm one of those people. I'm like a kid in a candy store. And so, what I found is whenever I get super overwhelmed, the one thing that brings relief to me is to add a new project to my plate. And from a dopamine standpoint, it's whenever I say yes, I get a little dopamine hit. When I look at a new course or a new book or a new piece of learning, I'm like, wow, wow, wow, wow. And it's, it's, it creates frenetic, crazy opportunity intoxication. And so in order to address this, usually, you know, I have, I've spent many years doing recovery work, so I've learned a lot about powerlessness. And I learned a lot about addiction. And so there are habits and then there are true addictions, which are a whole nother thing. But with tiny habits, um, you know, you're obviously a motivated guy. You're, you're pursuing these things to learn stuff, right? And you're trying to get abilities in order to produce a result. But there's these prompts. Everything that's happening is pulling you in. And so we have to create rituals. So when Shane and, uh, and Angie were talking about breathing, Great ritual, like to pause. I've got— Giselle, do you mind coming up here? Maybe we can do something crazy and just— we'll invite them to one of our yoga sessions. So Giselle has been doing private yoga with me for 5 years now. And how do you slow— how could you recommend that someone slows and calms the mind? Because I'll tell you, yoga will do more for you— for me, I should say me, not you, because how do I know that, right? Depends on if you do it. I think it'll— it does— these sort of things do more for me than reading books on priority management and time management. Seriously, it's— the issues are in the tissues. So it's—

I mean, I think the, the easiest, simplest task you could do is, um, it's called equal part breathing. Basically, you could just sit right where you are, and it's just the way— it's a meditative technique. It's also a breathing technique. Uh, basically, you would just close your eyes on your own, and when you inhale, you're just going to count up to a number, and whatever number you get to, you stop. And then you take that same number and count back down on your exhale and just do that 3 or 4 times. I mean, you could do it right after this ends and make— takes maybe 2 or 3 minutes. And that's a really great way to, you know, create presence, calm the mind, and, and those deep, slow breaths will start to stimulate that parasympathetic nervous system, which is where you're trying to rest and calm. But that's just one really simple technique you can do any time in the day, 2 minutes. All day.

We just did, uh, we just did our first yoga session. We're doing one tomorrow for Genius Network members. And yeah, and because I, I'm always apt to try to be like, open it up for everyone, but we probably should do that since we just started this. But we're literally taking these very successful entrepreneurs that are in Genius Network and introducing them to a way, because they're all dealing with this, David. Like, the world is dealing with this right now. It's one of the biggest things for entrepreneurs. They're so much stuff. There's so many books to read, there's so many things to pay attention to, and when you're, you know, an ADD, you know, the best thing about being your own boss is you're your own boss. The worst thing about being your own boss is you're your own boss, right? There's that accountability mechanism. And so, I've always loved the line, when you're looking at the mirror in the morning, you're staring at the problem and you're also staring at the solution. So, the question becomes that. So, developing the rituals and what I, the story I tell about Giselle, I had a breakup you know, back in 2016 that was really painful for me. And I was talking with Giselle, you know, about it and she said, you know, this line she said to me which I've repeated, I've gotten many, many people to start a yoga practice as a result of this conversation I had with Giselle, was, she said, if you do yoga 3 times a week, it'll change your body. If you do it every day, it'll change your life. And so, I made a commitment to do yoga every day for like a month even though I was busier than heck, traveling everywhere, and it wasn't a YouTube video. It was like, go to a class or do a, you know, a private session. And so, I did that for like 31 days and then, I took a day off and over a 90-day period, I did 82 or 83 sessions of yoga and it completely changed the way that I respond to life versus reacting to life. And what I found is, when I'm super overwhelmed, when I'm really stressed out, I react. And that's just, and you see a whole world right now reacting. Even last night after the debates, if you look at the news, a bunch of fucking people reacting, right? And to shit that they can't even control. And so, when people are really stressed out, they're not responding with ability. They're not being responsible. They're reacting. So, whatever can, you can look at your schedule, the to-dos, the opportunities in a state of responding and saying, do I, You know, the best time management advice that I've ever learned from very successful people, because I know quite a few billionaires and I know some very successful people, is time management by attitude, which is, I don't need to do any of this shit. And so, you pick the stuff that you really want to do. And so, my filter, is it ELF or is it HALF? Is it easy, lucrative, and fun? Is it hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating? Or is it hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating? That's helped me quite a bit. a bit to view people, projects, books, courses. And, you know, there's a chapter in my, uh, you know, like, with this will explain all behavior. There's a chapter in, uh, you know, Life Gives to the Giver, my book. You can get it at Joe's Free Book. You know, I'm gonna read it if I can.

Yeah.

Uh, hold on, it's right back here. Let me find that because we just redesigned the COVID By the way, I'm gonna ask you guys, which cover do you like best? Put in the chat, put either blue cover This will be blue cover or yellow cover. I'd like to get what cover you guys like the best. Can you see those? So yellow cover, or this is blue. I'm looking in the reverse camera. This is blue.

This is—

yeah, let's call this one yellow. Just type which one you like the best in terms of the COVID because I'm—

all right.

So there's a chapter in here. Let me see if I can find it. Boy, because— oh, look at this one. When you're overwhelmed. When you're overwhelmed, think about everything on your plate as possibility, probability, time, and money. Here's how it works. Dump all the projects and things on, on your mind onto a list. Then for each, ask how— number 1, how possible is it that this will work? 2, how probable is it that this will work? 3, how much time is this going to take? And 4, how much money will this actually make me? So, whenever I get super overwhelmed and I do like, you know, Dean Jackson's 50-minute focus finder, you just dump every to-do and then you put next to it, is this possible? And the problem with being an entrepreneur is everything's freaking possible. Oh yeah, I can build a rocket and go to the moon. You know, people do that. How probable is it? You know, what's the probability? Like, is it possible that I could play NBA basketball if I really— yeah, it's possible if I somehow managed to buy a team. Is it probable? Not likely. How much time is it going to take? A lot. How much money will it actually make me? So, I look for things that high possibility, high probability, low amount of time, lots of money involved, if you're looking at it simply for money. But then, for me, I look at it as ELF. Is it easy? Is it lucrative?

Is it fun?

Does that help?

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

Thank you. Yeah.

And so, there's another one here about books. I actually flipped through this. This is actually okay. The best way to read a book: get dirty. Okay, so, uh, so I'm gonna read this chapter. And people that read their own stuff are usually got a lot of dysfunctions, by the way. I'm just pointing that out. I remember Eben Pagan mentioning a great way to get the most out of a book. He didn't say this to be sexist, but he basically said your book is your bitch. A lot of people read books cover to cover even when they aren't into books and they aren't finding it as useful as they thought it would be. They have this guilt they put on themselves about finishing the book. You may even pick up a book recommended by someone and you get 20 minutes into it completely unimpressed, yet you keep reading it. Stop that. If you don't immediately resonate with something, forget it. You don't need to read the whole thing. That's what's— take what's useful, leave the rest. And don't be afraid to get the book dirty. Write in it, highlight what's important to you, jot stuff down in the margins, circle what pops out, rip pages out. This way, when you look at your notes, the important points stand out. The same logic applies to ebooks, whatever else you read on your tablet, Kindle, iPad, smartphone, whatever. Mark it up, make notes, and highlight it. Just don't write on your computer with a big marker because that would be pretty idiotic. So, yeah, that's a chapter. But I look at things that way, you know, ask yourself what needs solved and that's where, you know, if you're gonna sign up for a group, will it help you solve what needs solved? You know, I think people come here because they're looking to solve marketing problems. But my thing is, I just try to sell people what they want and give them what they need. And I'll tell you, like, one of the best ways to make decisions is get better sleep, get sun in the morning, don't stare at computers at night. And I violate all of these things, and I'm continuously working on just getting better at it, you know. And I'll tell you, like, I put— we just went through the Thank you. Yeah, this is great. So, Giselle made me this daily non-negotiable. She just handed it to me. It's a card. We learned this process from a BJ Fogg training. So, non-negotiables: sun in the AM, meditation in the AM, exercise, gratitude journal, vitamins and water, and 1-minute drills. Okay, so, it's— And then, what I'll do is, I do them. I will put this into the back of the card. Like that, and then I know which ones I've done and then which ones need to be done for the rest of the day. It's simple little card, little Post-it notes. Learned it from BJ Fogg. He does it with household chores, you know, things he needs to do over the weekend, and he has a weekend thing. He pulls it out and he just gets done and he never forgets. Jason Campbell, tell people about Zen Wellness because it kind of ties into the things I was just talking about.

Yeah, it ties into a lot that you're, that you're talking about, about the meditation and making meditation A habit. You can go to everyonecanmeditate.org and we have a whole program. It's a free meditation challenge. We have a whole portal that you can do and that you can build a habit. You can start a very tiny habit of meditation in just 5 minutes a day. You can even do it less, but I suggest starting with the 5 minutes a day. And it also ties into really everything that you've been talking about, all All the breathwork, the breathing and the meditating. We call it sit, stand, and move, the 3 different types of meditation.

Well, let's talk about energy management. And I don't just mean like from a physical sense, but just like a mental sense, because you've done a lot of programs on— one of your programs, Wake Up Productive, and you've done a lot of ways to accelerate, advance, advance your ability to get things done, gain clarity, be more persuasive. You've dwelled a lot into that world. If anyone— what are the things that you have found that for the most part an entrepreneur that has ambition and drive, I mean, as stupid as that sounds, let's use that as the caveat.

Sure.

drive, you must gain that if you're going to— because if I give a strategy to someone that is driven to build their business, and that strategy would work if it was used, if I give that to someone that has ambition, they can do something with it. If I give that tool to somebody that does not, they in many cases will blame the tool versus blaming themselves because they're like, well, this didn't work. Well, it does work when it's Used. And if it's not used, it does not work. So with that being said, I'm going to just assume, which is always dangerous, but I'm going to assume that the person listening or watching us right now is doing that because there is enough in them to say, yeah, I want to learn something that I can then use to gain perspective, get a result, that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

So what could you share that if the person listening or watching that does have ambition, if they did it, it would improve their life in anything you want to talk about, from their sleep to their income to their marketing to their relationships, whatever, because you've studied a lot.

Great.

So I'll talk to that person that has the— what you're saying, ambition and kind of drive. Also, if someone doesn't, I'll make distinctions here. I'll talk to that. I also want to make sure and include the other type of folk, because I've been learning lately that a lot of people, some people, and it's actually kind of the minority, have this ambition drive that you're talking about. There are a lot of folks who, they need to be around one of those type of people, and then that's what activates them.

Gotcha.

They're— and neither is better or worse. They kind of can collaborate, but you and I do work around a of the more drive, ambition kind of people. I just want to say that. Then as you were talking, I was thinking about Wyatt Woodsmall, who's a mentor of mine. He taught me the distinction between a motive and motivation.

Okay.

Motive is that thing that you're going for, that thing you're moving either toward or away from. Then the motivation is the thing inside. is the feeling. There's like the inner game and then the outer game. So to feel motivated, you usually need a motive, right?

Mm-hmm.

And when you have a motive, that's what kind of helps you feel motivated. And there are a lot of models around this. David McClelland, he broke down motivation into power, affiliation, and achievement. And we either move toward or away. So we either move toward success or away from failure. We move toward love and affection and approval, or away from rejection. We move toward having power and influence, and we move away from loss of significance. When you figure out which one of those you are, you can start using that to motivate yourself more. I think you need to know what your motive is, and if you don't know what your motive is, it's hard to get yourself motivated.

Right, makes sense.

A lot of people talk about the why, and there's this whole notion of if you have a big enough why, and this, I think, is a little, There's a finer distinction there of what the why is. Looking into motivation is important here. You talked about energy management.

Right.

When we're talking about productivity and time management and just getting more things done, there are different strategies for this. Some people are machines. They wake up and they just get shit done. They can't stop getting lots of stuff done. the tiny minority of humans. When we look at those people, we all just kind of— they make us feel bad because they're just getting— they're whatever. They're the CEO of a rocket company and the coolest car company in the world, like each one is their spare time or something.

Right.

Holy shit, how does that person do all this stuff? Some people, they're just kind of that way. I remember reading an article with Elon Musk's mom, and she was saying, oh yeah, my kids, And she's like, Elon, I don't know what happened with him. He's just— I don't know what happened. You get one of those once in a while.

Do you think he's an alien?

No, he could be the first instance of AI, but we don't know.

I've met him twice. He's an interesting guy.

Basically, if you're not one of these wake up and just are productive all by yourself, you have to figure out how to make yourself be that way. You've got to figure out how to program yourself or habituate yourself. like, put habits in place and kind of ritualize it, kind of.

Right.

Anyway, so the ideas for this, you know, I've learned a lot of this stuff from other kind of masters here. I think the first one that made a really big impact on me was Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive, and right in there he says, work in focused blocks of uninterrupted time on single-focused projects, minimum a couple of hours.

Yes.

Ideally longer than that, because if you stop and start things, it's very unproductive. This idea that if you get interrupted while you're doing something like a focus project that takes a while to do, if you get interrupted and then you come back to that project and you start again on the project, from when you start again, it takes about 20 minutes just to get to where you were when you got interrupted, because you've got to get back up to speed and get your mind back So if you get, on average, if you get interrupted every 20 minutes, there's no way to get anything done. So this idea of focus blocks, uninterrupted time, that was really influential to me because that's not intuitive. A lot of this stuff around multitasking, a lot of people say, I'm a multitasker, but that's super inefficient. I saw an article recently that said on average a human has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Did you see that one?

Yes.

The 8-second goldfish attention span or whatever. We're dealing with all that kind of stuff. I was also very influenced by Jim Lehrer and Tony Schwartz and this idea of, in order to manage your energy, you move from managing actions to creating habits. This is kind of a profound insight of, we only get a little bit of willpower. There's a lot of research that shows that we get a little bit of willpower and we burn it up. A lot of the burning up of the willpower is in internal conflict. We're all in a lot of internal conflict for the most part. Most of us are. We've got this cognitive dissonance and we've got these things that we're worried about. As you grow up and become more of an adult, there are more and more things pulling on your attention and time and conflicting values that you have. I mean, this idea that we were talking about earlier of being selfish or generous, and you've got to make the decision, am I going to do for other here? Am I going to do for self? We burn a lot of our willpower in there trying to make decisions, because decisions are one of the biggest energy drains that we have. Making decisions is extremely draining on us. What do you do? How do you get yourself to do another thing? Because you can't just keep trying to will yourself into it. That doesn't work. creatures of habit, and so the idea is to create a ritual that is a specific set of steps that will put a new habit into your life, and then every day for 30 days do that at the exact same time of day. If you do that same thing, then you ritualize it. You actually put it into yourself as a habit. That's great energy management, I think. Focus blocks of uninterrupted time, and then create rituals and use your willpower to do the ritual over and over until it It's a habit.

When it comes to habits and conditioning, it is just not an intellectual choice for people to just say, oh, I'm just going to— if you're so revved up, I mean, if I could stand up, which I'm not going to, I could stand up, but if I was going to run across the room as fast as I could, I couldn't just stop. There's sort of like a body in motion tends to stay in motion. A frenetic person tends to stay frenetic. There's a period where you actually have to recondition yourself, where you have to— now, certain things can just be— I mean, what's that other Peter Drucker quote? If someone tells me what they value, I might believe them, but show me your calendar and your bank account and I'll show you what you value. Based on people saying, oh, I want this. I want that. Well, show me your calendar, show me your bank account, and we'll actually see if you really value success and making money, if it's that sort of thing.

Yeah.

So what are your thoughts about just building rituals that work? Because you have studied and learned and identified, you know, and I've talked to numerous people about productivity. I mean, I can, you know, I I can't imagine how many hundreds of hours that I have spent in the study and the research of these sort of things, and even how difficult it is to change— getting your— are you trying to be funny here?

Okay.

If you're going to be funny, just try to just be funny. Getting your body to do the things your mouth is saying it's going to do are 2 different things. How does one do that?

In a sense, the most powerful force for a human being is their social circle, their social group. We're all hearing this research that if you average out the people that are closest to you, you're that person. You take the 5 people closest to you, that's your level of self-esteem and health and income and all that kind of thing. In a certain way, the self-sculpting or the self-development game, it reaches, I think, It's the pinnacle when you figure out where you want to go in a particular line or developmental vector of your life, whether that be your physical health or emotionally how you want to feel or your relationships or your success or money or whatever it is, where you want to live, how you want to live. Figure out that one thing and then go and add a social influence to your life who already has that in their life. That's the formula. If I'm bad at marketing, I don't know marketing, I don't know how to get customers, I could go read books, and that works. I can get that knowledge, but it's nothing like coming and sitting down like with you, for example. We had lunch with— remember we had lunch with that woman, what, a month ago or something in LA? We were both at a conference.

Oh, yes.

We had lunch with your friend. We sat down with her. She said, here's this whole thing. She really didn't understand marketing kind of at all. We wound up having lunch with her for maybe an hour and a half.

Yeah.

We gave her a bunch of feedback, and by the end of it, it's not just that she got what to do, because she did. We gave her some ideas on what to do, but we're so far to the next level in our own marketing development, our own lives, we're saying it's what we're communicating, what our kind of body language and the cultural little milieu that was set up there is communicating is, it is totally normal to have the kind of success that you're trying to get here. It's not that big of a deal. Just go do the things you need to do, and then, you know, can I, can I get some more water?

Right.

That's—

and that, that transmission is what you need to get for yourself when you're trying to achieve something, because you read it in a book and it's like, I don't know, this person could have They've just written that down because they wanted to, whatever, or it's abstract, or maybe it's not taught the way that you want. But when you go watch another human being do something and you go, oh, oh, you can do this. Dan Kennedy, I heard him talking and he said this great thing. He said, I think we should have National Bring a Poor Person to Work Day. I thought that was really a great insight so that someone that doesn't do as well financially could come to work for a day with someone that does and watch what they do, not to learn what they do, but to just realize, I could do this.

Right.

Just to raise their esteem and like what's possible. So the social influence is such a big deal because the ritualization— so there's like focus blocks of time, there's the ritualization and the habit building, which is, you know, very self-empowering and so forth, but it's not— these are nothing like adding social influences. To your life. If you're saying, like, well, I want to go work out every day, and you know, you could do these other things and it's great. You could focus on that block of time, you could create the ritual, you could set it up, you could start doing it. But man, make friends with 2 or 3 people who work out every day and have been doing it for 10 years, and who that's an absolute rock-solid cornerstone of their life. If you don't do that, something's wrong with your life. And you go make friends with them, you start hanging out with them, you figure out other ways to add value to each other's lives. But being around them, you're going to start going to the gym every day, not because you ritualized it or you had willpower, but because there's freaking no choice.

That is a huge insight. I mean, now, because thinking back at that lunch, because we talked to her yesterday, and she said, that thing you talked to me about worked, and she talked about.

I got my clients.

Yes, the session you had. It was like a game changer for me, blah, blah, blah. That also gave me some insight as to what happens with Genius Network because I'm now running the highest level marketing group in the world and it's an expensive group. People pay $25,000 for Genius Network. They pay $100,000 a year for Genius X. It's the being around all of the— there are people that show up there that are really successful, and I've heard this dozens of times, when I came to my first meeting, I felt like in my world I'm this really successful person. I came here and I feel like this. I always think that's a funny statement because it's like, no, you're a total badass.

Yeah.

Then once they come to a few meetings, they realize, oh, this is kind of like a family. I feel comfortable around these people. It's given me a deeper understanding of what I've actually created without even thinking about it that way because people will be like, well, I already got too many ideas, or I don't have time. It's not about that at all. It's about the relationships. It's about— I always say that what I do in Genius Network, all of the great content, the 10-minute talks, the $250,000 ideas, all this thing that's structured around sell people what they want, give them what they need, they usually want more money. money, but when they show up there, we talk a lot about workaholism. We talk a lot about hiring amazing people. We talk about getting in much better physical shape, taking free days, all of these things that aren't as appealing initially as, I want to have a lot more money. What happens though is I come there and we put on as good of a curating an amazing discussion around important issues as we can, but I always say that the speeches, the talks, those are just excuses for me to bring amazing people together so they can meet each other. Once they meet each other, all kinds of stuff happen. You gave me an idea because right now I do my best not to do consulting. I'm not saying that jokingly. I make more money when I do a Genius Network meeting than I do—

Yeah.

I'm an expensive consultant. I want $25,000 for half a day. If someone wants a whole day, it's $50,000. That's a lot of money. I have it that way because for one, I'm not willing to do consulting for less than that. Secondly, it's worth it if it's the right sort of person. I try to direct people, but here's what I want to put out there as a test, at least people that listen here. I love that idea of come to work. If anyone If someone wants to come to work with me, and I'm not like, I'm going to spend the whole day with you, but just wants to mirror and see the environment and see what I do. I mean, I'm going to think this through, but I'm just throwing it out there because I was like, this is a great idea.

I could come and I could just be making fun of you the whole time while they're watching you.

That would be great.

They would get both of us at the same time, but you would pay because I'm thinking about that.

They'd get more value from me though.

No, but here's the thing. If someone really wants to do this. It's $5,000, but I don't want the $5,000. I want it to go to either Artists for Addicts, or I want it to go to Joe Volunteer, which are 2 things.

Get a group of people. Do this with like 10 people. Yeah, really have a group of 10, maybe once a quarter, come and just follow you around for a day and just watch what you do.

Yeah, and I'll point out things. I mean, and no, I'm not watching, but I'm not gonna do it for free because I want a person at a certain level.

But it's like, have them Have them, like I said, donate, or like you said, donate to the thing. Watching Joe, Joe is one of the people who— I'm not totally certain of this, but I'm pretty sure— who's one of the bigger geniuses in the world who doesn't actually know what he's doing to be a genius, but if you hang out with him and you observe him doing what he does, he pulls you into it. And you kind of get changed by it. Yeah, I think that would be great. It would be great for you to mentor people in a group like that.

Yeah, I mean, and now that's probably not as maybe noble as to bring a poor person to work if I'm going to ask people to make a $5,000 contribution, but the point is, you know, it'll cause me to have to figure out how to set it up and at least block some time, and I think it would be a very interesting model.

You know what you could do is, you know, maybe 1 out of 3 of them or something You could get a group of young people and just give them scholarships. Maybe once a year or twice a year, just have that day be a group of 18-year-olds who are just kind of getting into their career, and they just come and—

Yeah, that's interesting. Yes, well now, see, my contribution to help people like anyone is this, putting out knowledge. That's assuming that anything you're saying is useful to people, but assuming it is and just putting it out there. I think that in and of itself is a good contribution because I don't need to do this. I'm doing it because it makes me feel good that it's going to help other people and stuff. If anyone likes that idea, then I would ask that you just— how would I—

You can contact me.

Yeah, contact Eben.

You'll pay for this, right?

Send me the money, but go to his office and I'll give it to the favorite charity.

No, send an email to support@joe polish.com, support@joe polish.com, and just reference that you interviewed with Eben and heard this idea, and you are absolutely not like you're going to talk about it, but you will cut a check for $5,000 to joevolunteer.com. You could look at that one, or artistsforaddicts.com. You can buy art. You could buy $5,000 worth of art. We could do it that way so you even get some art for it if you prefer that one. You'll get something for the money. And you'll get one hell of an interesting perspective and education. And I'll play around with that. I might do one or two of those in the next year depending on if anyone responds.

You got a group together like a brainstorm day almost, 10 or 12 folks. You can do a brainstorm as part of it with them.

Yeah. So if you know any friends that want to do it, $5,000 a person. You can't do $5,000 and bring 10 friends. So it's like, I want to be careful.

And Joe is the best. Joe's the best at putting together brainstorm meetings. Making meetings that you just get a tremendous amount out of.

And that I will agree with. Without even being a smartass, I am really good at that. That's one thing that I'm— there's a lot of things I'm not good at, but I'm really good at that one.

He's good at that one.

So yeah.

Most of us had a blank whiteboard in our offices and we took a bunch of the words and threw them up on the whiteboard and then eliminated words and we ended up with our little mission statement, right? Go team. The reason that that doesn't work and has never worked is it's never really given our employees enough of a full picture of what we're thinking about. So 18 years ago, I was invited to a lunch. 120 entrepreneurs in Vancouver, Canada were invited to a luncheon and we were told to look into a crystal ball. Well, we thought that was a really flaky idea looking into the crystal ball. We didn't know how to apply it to the business world, but it was a high-performance sports psychologist talking to us about visualization. And he was talking about how athletes will visualize themselves performing the event, how athletes will roll themselves through the event. They'll close their eyes and picture themselves going over and over and over through the event. And that process of visualization helps them compete completely on instinct. So we didn't know how to take that analogy into the business world, so we looked for another analogy. And he told us about Brooke Shields. He said when Brooke was getting married to Andre Agassi, she didn't like her legs. So she put a picture of what she wanted her legs to look like up on the refrigerator. Well, we know that the marriage between Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields didn't work out. He ended up getting married to Steffi Graf. The crazy thing was those were Steffi Graf's legs on the refrigerator. So the process of visualization did work. Unfortunately, it worked for Andre. So the number one thing you're learning today is go home and take down all the photos off your refrigerator. Okay, so that still didn't help us. We didn't know how to take the concept of visualization, bring it into the business world, but we found out that home builders use visualization every day. So a quick show of hands if you've done— if you've built a house or done a renovation. Okay, almost all of you.

Great.

Think back to that process, that time when you were first meeting with the contractor. You were the CEO of the home building project. You were the one that had the vision of the home. You didn't give the contractor a one-sentence statement and say, build me my dream home, here's $2 million and leave. That's a vision statement. That one sentence, build me my dream home and I'll go away for a year, they're going to screw it up because they can't read your mind. So you gave them sketches and drawings and pictures. You talked about how your family entertained and how you'd use the home and how many kids you would have and where your friends would be. Like, you told them more so they could take your vision and go away and create blueprints. and come back with the blueprints and hand the blueprints to your employees and the employees could recreate your dream. That's where the analogy of the Vivid Vision started to come from. The Vivid Vision becomes a 4 or 5 page written document describing your company 3 years and only 3 years from now in the future. You roll your camera ahead December 31st, 3 years from now and I want you to think about what your business looks like, acts like and feels like. And I've given you 2 sample I have 2 copies of Vivid Visions for 2 of my businesses. When you read through those, I want you to ask yourself if you understand my business better than your employees understand yours.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Who's seen the movie The Sound of Music? Okay, who's never seen the movie The Sound of Music? Who has no idea what the movie The Sound of Music's about? Anybody? Kevin? No idea? Jason, you have no idea?

Is it about music?

Okay, but you've never seen it. So don't say anything. There's a really famous scene in the movie, and I need to tease you a little bit for this to work, but there's a really famous scene in the movie where they're actually having a picnic. Now I want you to recreate the picnic scene for me perfectly like the movie The Sound of Music. Should it be in a park, in the mountains, or at a lake?

A park.

Okay, a park. Perfect. Where do we get the food? Should we get it at a grocery store, at a hut in the park, or should we bring it in a basket?

Bring it in a basket.

Bring it in a basket. Let's bring kids to the picnic as well. Should the kids be dancing, playing baseball, or playing croquet?

Croquet.

Playing croquet. Thank you, Jason, but you completely screwed up my picnic. See, I said, and you're the smartest guy, why aren't you in the $100K group? I said I need it to be just like The Sound of Music, but because you've never seen the movie, you can't recreate it. It's in the hills are alive in the Alps, not in a park, and they're dancing. There was a theme, The Sound of Music. It wasn't the sound of croquet. But most of us in our businesses give a one-sentence statement to people and expect them to read our minds and we get frustrated because we're intuitive and they're not. The reason they're not intuitive is they can't see what we can see. Your only real job as the CEO is to communicate the vision, to communicate the picture of what your business looks and feels like. And the one-sentence vision statement isn't enough. Even in Traction when they give you the vision traction organizer, a list of a bunch of bullet points, that doesn't explain The full picture of what your company can look like. Imagine doing a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture would be like. You could do it, but it would take a lot longer. If you're writing a vivid vision, you've got to get out of the box. You can't sit in your office and write this. You have to go somewhere where you're inspired, somewhere around nature. Go to a park, go to the mountains, go sit up at the top of Camelback. Go sit somewhere where you're not in your business. No laptop, No iPad, no technology. Take a notepad and I want you to pretend like you're traveling in the future. You're hopping into a time machine and you're going 3 years out into the future to 2020. And I want you to start doing a mind map and describing your entire company. Describe operations, 3 bullet points about operations, 3 about marketing, 3 about IT, about engineering, about sales. I want you to write down 3 or 4 bullet points about what your customers are saying about you. What the media is writing about you, what your employees are saying. I want you to talk about your supplier relationships. I want you to talk about the buzz that you feel when you walk in. I want you to talk about the culture and your meeting rhythms and your dashboards. But don't worry about how it comes true. Remember, the homeowner's job is to describe what the home looks like. The contractor's job is to figure out the plans. And the employee's job is to execute the plans. As Annie pointed out yesterday, your leadership team is to The group that figures out the plans to make your vision come true. You articulate the vivid vision and then you grow leaders so they can actually put the plans in place and then you can coach them and they can coach the team to execute. You get all the bullet points written down from a mind map and you organize them into rough notes. You pull a bunch of the rough notes together and then you can create your first draft of your vivid vision. Now Jennifer Hudej, she's not here today, but Jennifer has actually written dozens and dozens and dozens of the final drafts of Vivid Visions for CEOs all over the world. I get requests all the time from all of my books about Vivid Visions. They all get directed to Jennifer's team and she helps polish them off the page because you give it to a professional writer and they can pop it. They can take your rough work and really make it pop. Then you add some graphic design elements to it. This is a client who I've coached for 4 years from 50 employees up to 700 employees. They just raised $255 million from Warburg Pincus, one of the top-tier investment banks, who bought into the company at about a $2 billion valuation because of the dream of the vivid vision. When you can raise $255 million and you're only doing $200 million in revenue, they're buying into something, and it's not your business plan. They're buying into the dream. Now, your vivid vision, when you write it, has to be like a magnet. It has to completely compel people. and pull them towards you. Now if it's like a magnet, what else does a magnet do? It attracts, what else does it do?

Repels.

It repels. It has to be able to push some people away as well. This is not a kumbaya group hug. Your job as the CEO is to articulate what you see, what you can feel, and then attract the potential employees, the customers, and the suppliers towards you because they vibrate with you. I ran this session years ago, I went into a conference And CEO brought me in to speak to all of his employees. We ran a big session around it, then he read his vivid vision to all of his employees. And he said, you know, about 15% of you hate what you just heard. And he said, that's okay, it's the right time for you to quit. But the 85% of you that love what you just heard, he clicked to the next slide, he said, tomorrow go to this office address. Because today while we've been offsite as a company, a moving company came and packed up our entire company and moved all 70 of us. to this new location. Now if you're excited by that idea, it was like, hell yeah, let's do this, right? But if you weren't, 15% of his employees did quit, and a year and a half later he ranked as the number 2 company in British Columbia to work for. Another client that I coached, Nurse Next Door, ranked as number 1. The alignment around vision is critical, and the one-sentence mission statement has never worked, and we know it's never worked, because whenever we created it with our teams, We all walked out saying, they just don't have the same alignment that I want them to have. Your call, right? We can try to create picnics like The Sound of Music and end up playing croquet, or you can craft your vivid vision and have everybody on the same page.

Thank you.

I've been in a space where I've been committed all year long to like acting out of courage, and I've been traveling different places like Um, making money, going broke again, making money, going broke again. And I've been operating like out of courage and not fear, but I'm getting really like, uh, a little bit exhausted of that process, to be honest. I like want to create stability in myself. And just listening to the limbic system note and like all the things you've been saying, um, I've been reflecting because I'm at a point where— by the way, I'm staying in Phoenix long enough to have a conversation with that gallery person that you, you know, connected with me, and thank you for that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I just don't want to be in a position where I'm constantly like, okay, then, then what? And I'm like being in a position where I, you know, I am very elf, but I found myself at times being half too, and I don't want to ever do that again. And, um, um, especially not to people that I really care about. I don't want to ever put like the people I love into compromising positions ever.

Right.

And so I'm just realizing like that comes from me not feeling capable or me not feeling confident. And I'm like trying to find what's my plan going to be, you know, after that meeting, right? Like, so I'm not just like shit out of luck. And I'm curious, like, is it possible to break these cycles in the same atmosphere as you experience trauma? Because I've been sitting here like, hmm, maybe I should like go back home and just sit and get really clear, um, and, and, and understand like how I want to show up in this world and who I want to work with and all of that. But I am a little bit afraid because home is not a safe place for me energetically. And so I figured this is probably the safest place I could ask a question like that. Um, I also am starting to see really, really clearly just how capable I am and how much I do have to offer the world, but I just don't want to ever like be in a position where anyone even feels like I'm taking advantage of anything because I'm so much better than that, and I want to be around people who are better than that too and, and foster those relationships in real life.

Yeah, here's—

no, well, thanks for asking the question. Here's— I, I can speak for myself of what— when I was in the worst times in my life, uh, I could not seem to function without, uh, falling into holes. And I was an addict, and I was a really bad, um, addict. I was a functional addict.

Yeah.

But I, you know, I was talking to, you know, Dr. Anna Lembke, the one that wrote Dopamine Nation, earlier today, and we had just recently met. And I was telling her about when I was, you know, the worst state of, of being a drug addict when I was 18 years old. I weighed, one week I weighed 105 pounds, and my average weight at that time was 120 pounds. And when you're an 18-year-old male and you weigh 120 pounds, that's pretty skinny.

Yeah.

But one week I was not eating hardly at all. I didn't have any money to buy any food. I was just doing drugs. And I got down to 105 pounds. And I told her there was one day where I weighed, you know, I weighed 105 pounds and I was smoking pot, smoking cigarettes, snorting cocaine, smoking cocaine, snorting crystal meth. And I took LSD all on a single day. And I said, you know, it's amazing I didn't frigging die. Um, and that was just in a really dark place, right? And how the hell I pulled myself out of that is, you know, grace of God, luck. I mean, whatever. But what ended up really helping me, cuz I was really messed up for a long time, and, uh, is, is I had to find other people. And where I found the community is 12 steps, right? And I will often tell people, that 12 steps, even if you're not an addict, even though most people are, there's lots of support groups that cost no money and that are often better and more useful for human connection than therapy can be, even though I'm a big fan of the right therapy and the right therapist in the right community. But it's just being able to, whenever we feel like giving up or wherever we feel like our energy reserves are exhausted, Uh, there's ways to replenish them. Now, if one has money and means, you can, you know, pay for massages, you can go to gyms, you can have a nice house, you can do all that. But if you're limited, uh, then that's where it's, you know, necessity is the mother of invention sort of thing, where you just start tapping into resourcing yourself and saying, okay, if I was— what would I do for me if I was my own best friend? How would I reach out? Where would I look for And I cannot tell you how many times I've suggested, and few people do it, but the ones that do usually give me really good feedback, is to go to a group, you know, go to a 12-step group and help other people that are struggling. Because when I feel like shit and I think my life sucks and I feel like, oh, I don't— I'm so drained, and I find someone that is in a painful situation, and I can often lend advice. Sometimes if someone's dying, because I've sat with people, I've been the primary caretaker for 2 people that while they were dying, one of them being my father and another being my friend Dr. Janice Dorn. And then I've been kind of around people that were dying where I wasn't their primary caretaker. And there's times where you can't— you're not going to stop someone from dying, especially if they have a debilitating disease, nor it's, it's that, that time, right? So a lot of times all you can provide is you can provide companionship. All you can do is sit there and love them or listen to them. And even if they're people you had a very difficult time with, and I'm not talking about hanging out with people that it's toxic and destructive for you, I'm just talking about it's interesting how, how we can replenish our energy when it feels like we've given everything, when we're sitting down with people that are just really struggling.

And, and I'm saying this not that I'm, you know, again, none of this is—

this is for entertainment purposes only. Take what you— treat it like a 12-step group. Take what you like and leave the rest.

It's this—

I, for me, uh, I often feel really encouraged by encouraging other people. I seem to get more when I give, and that's different than sacrificing yourself. That's different than, you know, giving your last penny or neglecting sleep, or you're already starving and you're trying to help someone, you're giving, you know, your last meal away. I mean, you can't fix the world with broken hands. So you have to be able to, you know, keep yourself in a certain place. But all of us as humans are going to go through stages where we're selfish, self-centered, desperate, broken, and that's where we need to go and ask for help. And when someone's really down and out, they will walk into 12-step rooms. You know, that 12 steps is interesting because they'll say built through attraction, not promotion. But no one is attracted to walking into a 12-step group. It's really desperation. You know, people that walk into a 12-step group, their life is not working and they don't know where else to go. And thank God they walk into the— into that room. And there's a lot of people that are anti-12-step, and I understand, I could argue for both ways. It's not the end-all and be-all of everything, but what it is, is it's community. And so what I would say, even my whole— in my book, you know, I talk about your genius network. Like, if you need to figure something out, make a list of who are the people that you could reach out to that could help you in a particular area where you feel you need the most help. And if you can't come up with a name, at least come up with who that person could be, and then do your damnedest to go and find them or to talk to someone to reach out and do it, you know, kind of like what you're doing now. You know, the, you know, that person and, and, and making those calls. So that's what I would say. And, and, and oftentimes the reason I even bring up 12 steps is almost everywhere in the world— there's rural areas and there's parts of the world where you can't— but in most places, it, it's usually within driving distance to go to any sort of 12-step meeting. And I've even told people that don't identify as addicts is go to an open meeting.

Yeah.

And just listen to what these people are saying. And it's— sometimes you, you'll hate it, but other times you'll be like, wow, that, that actually is really useful, just being around other people. Because there's a lot of people that your love and your care and your concern and your art and your skills will rejuvenate them. And by doing that, it will rejuvenate you. And all— and that being said, also sometimes you just got to go sell something. You know, sometimes it's like, you know what, I got something to pitch. I think it's going to be good. Let me find and let, you know, let me market it. Let me sell it. Let me shoot a video. Let me ask other people to refer me. And, you know, so I don't want to take any of that away. So those are, those are my thoughts. I hope that helps.

That helps a lot. I mean, that's how I got myself in the position I'm in was I literally gave my last penny away. So If I did that, then I can do all the other things you're saying. I'll probably incorporate several of those things. Thank you, Joe.

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead.

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Do it now.

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Thank you.

Watch them.