90% of Business Success Comes From THIS One Thing (Must See) Ft. Dan Sullivan & Brian Tracy

Karl Schramm of the Marion and Ewing Coffin Foundation, the preeminent foundation on entrepreneurship, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal 2 days ago, and what he said was that there have been very few empirical studies into what actually makes a successful business, that most of what is taught in the entrepreneurship faculties of the universities is nonsense. In fact, if you— he said that there's something like 1,687 professors of entrepreneurship, and their primary focus is drinking their own bathwater and telling that entrepreneurs have to start, have a business plan. And if you have a business plan, you'll be successful. And they spent 2 years in their faculties teaching people how to set business plans, and 49 out of 50 businesses are started without a business plan, including some of the most successful businesses in the world today. So we are now just starting to learn what we really need to do to build successful businesses. And what Joe Polish is doing here is absolutely marvelous because it can save you years of hard work, hundreds, even thousands of hours of hard work to understand how to do it much, much faster, to shortcut. We say there's always a learning curve in anything, and what we want to do is we're going to jump the learning curve. We don't want to spend years and years learning what we need to learn to reach a certain level of income. And so I have majored now in the last few years on doing seminars and talking and books and articles and programs for owners and would-be owners of small and medium-sized businesses. Now I've got 45 minutes, so I'm going to have to condense what sometimes I share in seminars for days, but I understand you're some of the smartest people in the world, so that you can take a lot of information in a short period of time. Is that true?

Mm-hmm.

Did anybody not understand the question? So I'm going to try to bottom line several of the concepts. One of the first concepts which I thought was interesting was a little story that was in the papers recently. Warren Buffett, who is one of the richest men in the world, and Bill Gates, who is the richest man in the world, and Bill Gates Sr. were at a dinner party. and the three of them are good friends and they were talking. And a gentleman came up to them and said, you know, I was looking at you and you gentlemen are very successful. What would you say is the most important quality of success? And all three, according to a bystander, all three broke off their conversation and turned and simultaneously said, focus. Focus is the most important requirement for success in our fast-moving world today. If you can focus, you can succeed, and if you cannot, you cannot. It's almost a black and white thing. Well, I thought that was interesting because the way Joe and I met is I put together a program some years ago called the Focal Point Program, which basically brought in business owners like yourselves and taught them to focus. And we spent 3 years going through every single aspect of life, did 82 exercises that dealt with family and business and marketing and product and service and competition and positioning, and it was focus, focus, focus. And my offer—which is not as good as Joe's—but my offer was that you will double your income and double your time off within 12 months or there'd be no charge for this program. And I never had to give a refund. In fact many people doubled and tripled their income within 30 days just by learning to focus and just by thinking in terms of focus. So it's really, really important. Uh, I read an article about myself—there was a very successful entrepreneur in New Zealand—and the article was sent to me last week. I'm reading in this article, and he said the turning point in his life was when he went to a Brian Tracy seminar and learned how to focus. He was broke, he was unemployed, he had no money, and he walked out of the seminar a completely different person, and he had written goals. He then looked around, and as it happens, he saw an article on coffee shops and Starbucks' success in the United States, and it said coffee shops are a good business to be in because more and more people like the idea of a specialty coffee shop, and if it has a Wi-Fi, then they go there, it becomes a social center and so on. He knew nothing about coffee, and before the dust had settled, he owned 80 coffee shops in Australia and New Zealand. And then he says he got into a divorce and had to sell it for $50 million to share the proceeds with his wife. But he did not share, he did not sell off the worldwide rights to it, so he's rebuilding. Anyway, his point was at the end of the article they said, well, what would you say to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to be successful? And he said just two things. He said, focus and fail fast. Focus and fail fast. Learn quickly, try something new. And I thought I would just pass that on because it's sort of what I have discovered over the years is the faster you fail and learn, the faster you succeed. You actually learn to succeed by failing. You know, Thomas J. Watson's famous line, if you want to increase your rate of success, you must double your rate of failure. Because success lies on the far side of failure. Well, over the years I've done a good deal of reading and I came across a concept that I want to share with you. And we were talking about this a little bit earlier. And the concept is, the question is, what is the most valuable and highest paid work that you do? It's a really interesting question because when I heard the question I didn't know what the answer was. What do you think the highest paid and most valuable work is that you do? And the answer is thinking. Thinking is the most valuable work. Now I am the best-selling author in the world in time management, also on goals, also on some other subjects, but, but I began studying time management about 30 years ago and I came across a word in my studies and the word was consequences. And what it basically said is that something is important if it has big potential consequences. And something is unimportant if it has low or no potential consequences. Number one reason for success is people focus on things that have high potential consequences. Number one reason for failure is people focus on things that have low or no potential consequences. Exactly what Joe Polish was saying earlier, the famous Drucker quote, very worst use of time is to work intently on something that need not be done at all. And one of the things that is holding back entrepreneurs, business owners, it's killing them by the way, and it's wiping out an entire an entire generation is this obsession with technology. I see people that are walking with their phone. It's almost like drug addicts that are mainlined. They cannot stop staring at their screen. They cannot stop pushing their buttons. I hate to say there are people in this room that had that problem, but the fact is that this obsession with looking at the screen and staying connected is killing people because it stops them from focusing. You cannot focus if you are distracted like an attention deficit disorder dog. So you're constantly ringing and responding to bells almost like a crazy person in a toy factory. And so just as a quick aside, if thinking is the most important thing you do because of the consequences of thinking determine the entire quality of your life, then the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. And so the more time that you spend thinking and thinking well and thinking clearly, the more successful you are. Over the years, I've worked with some very powerful people, billionaires and multi-billionaires, people who are on the Forbes 400 list repeatedly, over and over. And I've had a chance to be with them during crises and at times where something was happening that was serious. It was a major problem. And I noticed that they all had one quality in common, is they all went calm. It's just, pooh, they went calm. People around them were angry and upset and worried about what happened and who did it and so on, and they would just go calm, almost like a pond would go calm. And they knew, and I learned later, I didn't know why this was. I admired it, but I didn't know why it was, is that when your mind is calm, your entire cerebellum, the thinking and deciding brain, functions at its highest level, like turning up all the lights on a dimmer switch. It's functioning like a, Christmas tree. But when you get upset and angry, what happens is your thinking reverts to your limbic or emotional system, and your ability to think clearly diminishes dramatically, and you make a lot of mistakes. That's why when you are facing a difficult situation, you have to use every skill, trick, game, whatever it is, stay calm. And that's why they teach you to meditate. And they find that meditators in business are far more successful because they can automatically trigger their mind into the calm of meditation when they're facing a crisis. It enables them to think with greater clarity. Now, a couple of years ago, a man named Daniel Kahneman, a very fine man from reading him, who had won a Nobel Prize in psychology and neuroscience, wrote a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow. And this book was a very esoteric book, and I don't recommend that you read it. It's 500 pages of hard slogging. I will give you the essence of— I will give you the essence. I do the reading. Pass it on. I will give you the essence of the book. He said that there are two types of thinking. There's fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is intuitive, it's instinctive, it's automatic, it's reactionary. It's— I think of it very much as how you would drive through busy traffic. Choo-choo-choo-choo. You're not giving a lot of thought, you're just interacting. He said the other type of thinking is slow thinking. And slow thinking is where you just slow down the thinking and take time to think through issues. Now, if an issue has little or no consequences, then you can think quickly. You know, what do you have for lunch? What do you pick up on your plate from the buffet? Where do you park your car? These are— the consequences of these decisions are almost nonexistent. But if it's a major issue, then you say, "Wait a minute. This requires slow thinking." Here is his contention that made the book a bestseller. Is that the biggest problem that people have is that where they should use slow thinking, they use fast thinking. And entrepreneurs are extremely guilty of that. As we make important decisions that have long potential consequences, including affecting the lives of people and costing money and even leading to the bankruptcy of a business, we make those decisions with fast thinking when in reality we should be making them with slow thinking. Now, I'm a great Drucker fan, as many people are, and Mike was saying something about hiring the right people, and hiring the right people to work with you is very important. And the biggest mistakes you make is hiring fast. You hire people quickly. The best decisions you make are when you really take your time to hire slowly. And Peter Drucker said that fast people decisions are invariably wrong people decisions. Hiring an important person for an important job has tremendous potential consequences. So therefore you need to take a long time. One of the things I teach, which is in my book, How to Hire and Keep the Best People, is a simple rule that will increase your hiring accuracy to 90%. And I've taught it to Fortune 500 companies, and they make it a rule within their companies to use Brian's rule. Is to— this is the— you cannot hire except by doing this. And I didn't invent it, I just studied the hiring practices of the companies that hire the best people and keep them the longest, and they all at the beginning have a certain process that they follow and they follow it religiously, no exceptions. And so their accuracy in hiring goes up to 90% or better because they think more. An interesting professor at the University of San Diego last year wrote a book on sort of thinking fast and slow, but it was on decision-making. What he said is the longer that you take to make an important decision, the better the decision will be. The higher quality decision. And Lord Acton once said, when it is necessary— when it is not necessary to decide, it is necessary not to decide. In other words, he, the professor, said buy as much time as you can for a decision. Put it off. If you can put it off for a day, a weekend, a week, a month, put it off. Some of the best decisions that you make will be decisions that you will allow to steep for a while, like water in tea. So thinking is the most important thing you do. We call it thinking fast and slow. So remember, anything that is important that has long-term consequences is a candidate for slow thinking— discussing it with other people, sitting quietly, going for a walk, letting it ruminate in your mind, sleeping on it. You know, they say if it's a big deal, sleep on it.

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.

There's 3 thinking tools I want to give you and then 7 ideas. So the 3 ways of thinking, which I start off— the first way I start off every seminar is what I call zero-based thinking. And everybody who knows me for any period of time knows that I harp on this. Zero-based thinking is— comes from zero-based accounting. Where you, instead of increasing an expense in the next accounting period, you ask, should we be engaging in this expense at all? Now with zero-based thinking, you look at your entire world and you ask this question: knowing what I now know, is there anything that I am doing that I would not start up again today if I had to do it over? This is one of the greatest thinking tools I've ever learned, because in a time of turbulence, you always have an answer for this question. Each person has an answer. Some people have multiple answers. There's lots of things that they're doing today that knowing what they now know, they wouldn't get into today. They wouldn't start them up. Products they wouldn't offer, people they wouldn't hire, investments they wouldn't make. And these are the greatest drags in life. These are sort of like a sea anchor, you know, that you drop it and it drags, it slows down the boat. Well, how do you tell if you have a zero-based thinking situation? And many of you were asked to write your problems, challenges, opportunities. The answer is stress. Is whenever you experience chronic stress, it's something that buzzes around. When Joe Polish is talking or somebody else is talking, you're busy thinking about that. You drive around and you think about it. Keeps you awake at night. It's something that pisses you off. It's something that irritates you and angers you and frustrates you. Whenever you have chronic, which means ongoing, continuous, this is a candidate for zero-based thinking. So you ask yourself the question, if I was not now in this situation, knowing what I now know, would I get into it again today? If the answer is no, the next question is how do I get out and how fast? How do I get out and how fast? If ever the answer comes back that I would not get into this again today, it's too late to resolve it. It's over. The only question now is how long do you suffer? How much emotional suffering, how much financial suffering do you make before you walk. And so the most important requirement for practicing zero-based thinking, which a lot of people don't like to practice, is courage. I call it the C word. You need the C word. You need to have the courage to look at every part of your life and say, is there anything that I'm doing that knowing what I know now I wouldn't get into? Now the starting point of zero-based thinking is always with your relationships, and those are both personal and business. Whenever I've given this talk, by the way, within a short period of time, divorces take place all over that city. People go home and say, geez, if I hadn't married this person, I would never marry them again today. And that's what's making me miserable. And many people are working their heads off on the outside to achieve success, but inside they're frustrated and unhappy because they're in a situation that knowing what they now know, they would never get into. So I call this a quinc analysis, and I'm going to ask you to do this for the rest of your life. And do help other people do it. K-W-I-N-K, knowing what I now know. Do a KWINK analysis on everything. Do a KWINK analysis. In my company, what they, we say is, we look at every single person and on a regular basis and we say, if we had not hired this person and they walked in today to apply for their current job, knowing what we now know, would we hire them? If the answer is no, they're gone that day. There's a little rule, by the way, that in one of my books. It says the first, the best time to fire a person is the first time it crosses your mind. And because after that it's only pain and suffering. And if you, the longer you keep them in place, the more likely they are to sue you. And the longer they sue you, the more it's going to cost. So therefore, if you, if you find that you've made a mistake, belly up to the bar, have the courage to admit I made a mistake, and cut your losses. There was a great book by an author called the Zurich Axioms some years ago, and it was Principles of Success. And anybody who's in finance has probably read the book because a very successful New York financier, and he was talking about the gnomes of Zurich, whoever they are, and the rules that they go by. And he said the number one rule for success in business, personal life, is cut your losses. When you realize you've made a mistake, Bad investment, bad hire, bad relationship, cut your losses quickly. What do they say in Las Vegas? You know, cut your losses, let your winnings ride. So in life, that's what we do. And the faster you cut your losses, fail fast, the faster you can start doing things that are much more productive. The other, the secondary has to do with every part of your business. Joe Polish and I were talking about what I think is a revolutionary new field, though it's not revolutionary, and it's not new, but it's business model innovation. And it's based on the concept that whatever business model you're using today is probably obsolete. If you're in any kind of a business that uses technology to market it, especially an information-based business, a knowledge-based business, consulting services, training, anything else, chances are your business is obsolete. The way that you— and the business model is your method, your step-by-step process of generating profitability. Now there are some companies that struggle along, struggle along, struggle on, then find a new business model and the next year their business is up 5 or 10 times. Profits are just overwhelming. They're living in big houses on the hill, driving Cadillacs and flying private jets. And you say, what on earth did they do? They changed their business model. And if you don't change your business model, if it's the wrong business model, two things are going to happen. Your competitors are going to come up with a new business model and eat your lunch and/or you're going to go broke. So it doesn't mean that your business model is wrong. It just means that you must be open to the possibility that your business model is obsolete, and that just means that there is a better business model. There's a superior business model, and your job is to find it. And, uh, again, there's no fixed answer to it, but I think that this is a great area of thought. I think this is a great area, and it's sort of like a tool for you to have. I wonder if I need to change my business model, which is your way of generating sales, producing and delivering products and services, getting payments and achieving profitability. Well, so coming back to the second is look at anything in your business. Look at your products, look at your services, look at your people, look at the way that you advertise market and ask, is there anything that you're doing today that knowing what you now know you wouldn't start up again today? And the only question that you ever ask is, does it work? Does it work? Does it work? If it's not working and you can tweak it, then that's fine. If it's not working, have the courage to admit this isn't working and abandon it. Now the third area has to do with investments in zero-based thinking, investments of time, which people hate to lose. Someone said earlier that people hate to lose. It's one of the greatest emotions. We hate to lose time if we've invested a lot of time in a course of action, a project, a business, a relationship. The second is emotion. If we put a lot of emotion into a course of action, a product, course of study, a relationship, or money, we hate to admit that we made a mistake and that what seemed like a good idea at the time has turned out not to be a good idea, and knowing what I now know, I wouldn't get into it, and have the courage to cut your losses and run. Now the reason I teach this first is because you can't make any progress unless you clear the decks, unless you get this 800-pound gorilla that's holding you back out of your life. And then many companies that I've worked with literally transformed, became multimillion-dollar companies when everybody said, alright, we're going to go through and do a Quinc analysis on this whole company and realize that half the things that we're doing and half the people working here are not the right people for us at this time. And half the products that we're offering aren't selling and never will. They've been replaced by better, cheaper, faster products in the marketplace. So cut your loss. What happens when a big, big company gets into trouble? They bring in a quick analysis man, and he comes in with a chainsaw, and he shuts down all the factories and all the stores that are not profitable, and the company goes from profits to losses in one year. Anyway, the second thinking tool that I teach people is WPO thinking, which is worst possible outcome. In everything that you're doing, always ask yourself, what is the worst possible outcome? Of this course of action, and what— and can I survive it if it were to occur? And if not, what could I do to make sure it doesn't happen? One of the number one reasons that we worry about anything in life is because of fear. And when you ask yourself, what is the worst thing that could happen in this particular situation? And then if you could say, all right, if that happens, I'll live with it, then your worry goes away. And your mind goes clear and calm, and now you say, now what can I make, do to make sure that the worst does not happen? And then you become proactive and you take charge of your life. The third thinking tool, I hope I'm not going too fast for you. The third thinking tool is called the Principle of Constraints, and it's one of the most important thinking tools ever discovered. It says between you and anything that you want to accomplish, there's always a constraint, a limiting factor, or a choke point that sets the speed at which you accomplish your goal. So, and I was just talking, doing a teleconference a few minutes ago. So the question I said is, let's always set the goal of doubling our income. You want to double your income? Okay, you want to double your income, then why isn't your income already twice as high? Now in business, we don't think of doubling our income, we think of doubling our profitability. What we're concerned with is net cash flow. We're concerned with the amount that we take home to our family. At the end of the day, not the gross, but the triple net. So we say, if I want to earn twice as much, and everybody in here can and can and will earn 2, 3, 4, 5 times as much sometime in the future, if I want to earn twice as much, why aren't I already earning twice as much? And the number one reason for, for most people is distraction. So they're so distracted, they're doing things of low or no consequences. But we found the 80/20 rule applies to constraints. 80% of the constraints that are holding you back from achieving your financial goals are within yourself and within your business. They are not on the outside. They are not the competition. They are not the market. They are not the people in Washington or the taxes or regulation. 80% are within yourself. So the mark of the superior person is whenever they have a problem, they say, what is it in me that's causing this problem? Mike and I know this very, very clearly. What is it in me that's causing this problem? In illness, by the way, 85% of illness is psychosomatic. As Dennis Waitley said, it's not what you're eating, it's what's eating you that's causing the problem. And so the starting point, and the first thing a doctor will tell you, or a psychologist, is what is it that you're not dealing with? And you go back to zero-based thinking. What is it that you have in your life that that if you had to do over, you wouldn't do it. So ask yourself what's holding you back, and usually it's the quality of self-discipline or it's a skill. Now one of the things that changed my life forever was when I learned that all business skills are learnable. You don't have to be a genius to learn any business skill. You can learn any form of technology, as Mike has proven that with his products. You can take a person who's basically shoveling shoe polish in Shebokan, and teach them how to be technologically sufficient, superior enough to earn a living from it. Every business skill is learnable. And so I say, what one skill, if you were absolutely excellent at it in your business, would help you the most to double your income? What one business skill? If you could wave a magic wand and wake up tomorrow morning superb in this area, what skill would it be? And you know, when you ask that question, everybody knows the answer. They know what it is. But here's the challenge, you don't like the skill because it involves rejection, embarrassment, ego, potential failure, loss, you've tried it in the past, you haven't been good at it. But nobody asked you what would be an easy skill to learn. They just asked you what skill would help you the most to double your income. And here's what we have found is that most of us are only one skill away from doubling our income. And all business skills are learnable. And if you study the people who go from the top to the bottom in the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000, they found in 25 years of research, these people learn one skill at a time. By climbing the ladder of success and the ladder of income, like sniper, one shot, one kill, they don't try to learn 50 skills, they learn the one skill, focus, the most important skill, and they get their company focusing on the one skill that can help you the most to generate sales and profitability.

The basis for my three diagrams is an ability that everybody is born with. And most people don't look at this as an ability. They don't actually look at this as a skill. But it's three time senses, and the three time senses are called past, present, and future. So, how many of you are familiar with past? Present? How many have present? How many of you are shaky about one of them or the other? And what I find from coaching entrepreneurs is that there tends to be frustration with the future and impatience with the present and a lot of regret about the past. Okay, so there's a weirdness that I notice that everybody has with these three time senses. And my feeling is that the number one problem of why people have trouble with past, present, and future is they don't see them as capabilities. So if you think when a baby is born, there are some built-in potential capabilities that come with just being human. And for example, we now know that children are wired for mathematics. That it is— in a very, very short time, children begin to be mathematical in relationship to their surroundings, and it actually shows up very early, like 3 or 4 months, children can start to distinguish and actually start differentiating things in terms of numbers and, you know, and so we have that built-in ability. And of course, how many of you have discovered that some people are better at math than others? How many? I mean, I mean, you're probably better at math than some people, but there's people who are way better than you are at math. The other one is language. We have a hardwiring to be able to speak, okay? And so language comes to it. We don't have it right away, and it makes a huge difference, the environment that you grow up with, whether you get language or not. And for example, they find children who are born in very, very disadvantaged neighborhoods in the United States, inner-city neighborhoods, never develop the future the future tense of the verb. They only speak in terms of the present. And so, if you don't have a word, you also don't have the idea. Okay, so words are actually ideas. And so children who are very disadvantaged and, you know, do not have people talking about the future actually don't develop a sense of the future. On the other hand, children who are born into very educated families of goal-setting parents tend to develop that future sense very, very powerfully, okay, and they start thinking powerfully, and it's a reinforcement, and if it doesn't happen early, it's very, very hard for it to happen at all. Spatial recognition, three-dimensionality, we're born with that. The one I would like to talk to you about though has to do with looking at the past as a skill and a capability, looking at the present as a skill and a capability, capability, and the future as a skill and a capability. So, and I say that if you get these 3 capabilities right, then all the other capabilities that you develop are right also. And so what we're going to do is we'll just put these up on the screen. So we have past, present, and future. And what I'm going to show you is 3 diagrams. So the 3 diagrams, one of them is called the Freedom Cycle. The second one is called the Captivity Cycle, and then I have a really neat one at the end which is called the Four C's. And I'm going to show you the Freedom Cycle first because this is the right way of actually arranging the time senses of past, present, and future so that these three time senses really work for you. They're always on your side. And then I'm going to show you the Captivity Cycle, which I would say that the vast majority of people on the planet are actually— have a relationship to time that I call the captivity cycle. And you will know personal— people personally who are involved in the captivity cycle. And when I give you the conditions, you will immediately have dozens and dozens of examples of individuals and groups and organizations and even countries that are in the captivity cycle. And then I'm going to show you the 4 conditions for actually creating a really great future. And this is also a capability. And so that more and more you have the ability to actually use the past, present, and future in a way that constantly creates a bigger and better future. So the right way to proceed With the time senses, you start— we always have to start in the present. And you start in the present and you move to the future, and this is called choosing. So a distinction I like to make— I'm very passionate about words. And so when I was about 15 years ago, my team, not knowing what else to get me for Christmas, actually got me the Oxford English Dictionary, which consists of 20 volumes, okay, and each volume is 1,000 pages. Okay, so the S's in the Oxford English Dictionary cover 2.5 books. It's the biggest letter in the English alphabet, is 2.5 volumes of S. And, but one of the things I noticed is that there's two words that people use interchangeably. One of them is choose, And the other one is decide. And I notice when people talk about choose and decide, it's like they're equal words. You know, they choose, they decide. But one of the things you have to understand about choose is that choose can only be used in relationship to the future. It's a future— it's a future sense. You can't choose the past. You can only choose the future. And so the thing that's really important here is that choosing comes from the inside. It's not dictated from the outside. Okay, so people who choose the future are doing it on the basis of their imagination. They're doing it as a result of the life they've lived and capabilities they've developed. And every human choice is kind of unpredictable before it happens. And it's very, very important that the very basis of creativity, of creating new things, actually comes from a very, very strong capability of choosing the future. So people who are very creative, people sort of say, well, how can— where do the ideas come from? The ideas don't come from anywhere except an act of choosing a bigger and better future. And the reason why they create something new is because they need to create something new to satisfy a chosen future that's bigger and better than what they have right now. Then what happens when you choose the future, now you're in a position to do something with the past. So a lot of times people will come to me because I'm really good at giving advice. And when I was 6 years old, I was very good at giving advice to people who were older than me. And one of— I must have got onto this time sense very early, and people say, I'm having a hard time making a decision. How many of you right now have a decision and it's a bit hard? It's a bit hard right now. You're having a hard time getting your mind around it. And what I've discovered is you cannot make a good decision in the present. It's impossible to make a good decision in the present. You have to first of all choose a much bigger and better future at a date in the future, let's say 3 years. We can decide. Decide is a very interesting word. It comes from a Latin word, and the C-I-D-E part of decide, we have other words like that in the English language, and one of the words we have in the English language is homicide. We have suicide. We have fratricide. We have pesticide. Okay, and what it means is to kill. So the C-I-D-E means to kill, so that when you decide, you're actually saying something's okay and something has to die. Okay, and it's an actual killing off. So what I say, just to make it positive, is that what you actually decide is what part of the past gets to come along? What part of the past, given the new bigger and better future that you've chosen, what part of the past gets to come along? How many of you like that sound rather than this can't come with me? That's sort of a negative, but you're actually deciding what part of the past gets to come along. And how many of you have parts of the past that if you create a new bigger and better future, there's definitely parts of your past that get to come along. Any idea what the two main things that always get to come along from the past? What would be one thing that always gets to come? Knowledge. Yeah, well, knowledge. Yeah, I put it down, so knowledge, learning, but I say skills. Do skills always get to come along? How many of you would develop a skill and then leave it behind? No, no, but we always bring the skills. And how many of your achievements you actually bring forward? So one of the best ways to really clean up your past is just see your past in terms of skills and achievements. Just see it. And you say, well, what of my past is really worthwhile? And I said, well, any part of your past that represents a skill is a good part of your past. And any part of your past that's an achievement is a good part of your past. So once we're there, now we've done two things here. We have to choose the future. Okay? So we're choosing the future. So it's being created bigger and better. And with that picture now in our mind, visualizing our mind of the bigger and better future, now and only now are we actually in a good position to make good decisions. So we often wonder, why do people make bad decisions? And it's because they're trying to decide in the in the present. You cannot decide in the present. You can only decide in the future, from the standpoint of the future. Once you're in the past, then we can do something else. Now we can move from the past to the— the past to the present. And what we get to do now is utilize our past. Okay, so I'm a big deal that my past is very valuable. Because I get to use things from the past, skills and achievements, to arm myself in the present to actually take the actions to create the bigger and better future. Okay, now, so this is really, really interesting because this is innovation. So a lot of people say, well, how are these creative people creative? And I said, they choose the bigger and better future. No, no, no, but I mean, how does it actually happen? How's it actually happen? You know, I've listened to all the CDs, I've read all the creativity manuals, I can't quite get a handle on what it is they're doing. I said, they're choosing a bigger and better future. Yeah, yeah, I know, no, but I'm talking about creativity. I said, they're choosing a bigger and better future. I can do this for 25 years. They're choosing a bigger and better future. No, no, but I want to be really creative. Choose bigger and better future. It's gotta be something else, gotta be something else. No, it's just choosing a bigger and better future. And I'm gonna show you in my third diagram, the 4 C's, how you get really good at choosing, okay? 'Cause a lot of people are very, very bad at choosing. Very, very bad at choosing. I call this the freedom cycle, okay? And I've gotten permission from Harley-Davidson to actually use this language. Language. So it's a freedom cycle, and that is that the feeling of using your time senses to innovate gives a very powerful sense of freedom. Okay, and the freedom shows up, the freedom shows up, freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose. And this is why you became an entrepreneur. I've been coaching entrepreneurs for 40 years, and people say, 'You know, how can people just do that for money?' And I said, 'Well, they're not doing it for money, they're doing it for freedom.' Okay, it's just that in our world, freedom costs a lot of money. And they have to have the money to buy their freedom for them. So that's innovation and what it is, it's related to abundance. Okay, so the abundance is the constant feeling that you're innovating a bigger and better future. And that your life is becoming more and more innovative. This is out of want. Why are you doing this? You're doing it because you want to. And why do you want to? You want to because you want to. No, no, no, I mean, but what's the reason why you want it? It's because you want it. And people say, no, no, no, there has to be reason why you want it. And I said, the reason why you want it is you want it. Okay? And this seems like a very simple statement, but most people don't want things because they want them. They want things because— and then they tell a story about why they want it. And from the moment they start telling the story about why they want something, they're pure fiction writers. They're just making it up on the spot to justify why they want something. The only reason why we want things is because we want them. Well, this is just going to eliminate the entire psychological industry— psychiatric industry, because they're saying, "Yes, but why do you want it?" You want it because you want it, and the truth is it's a creative act, and you cannot psychoanalyze a creative act. It just happens, and it's creative. Okay, so this is the freedom cycle. Now I'm going to do the captivity cycle. Okay, you can say boo. Boo. Okay, so here's the thing. This is what happens. They still start off with the same 3 potential skills, but what happens is when they're in the present and they get the notion that they would like to have a bigger and better future. Okay, so you take Joel's prescription, Joel Kahn's prescription, that you can have a picture of in every health indicator that you have, that you would have a higher performance. It would be a bigger, better world. Okay, or, you know, what Robert talked about of people really truly being breakthrough leaders. You know, they have a high sense of energy. Okay, and you know, they have a high sense of engagement. They have a, you know, a high sense of empathy. They have a high sense of productivity and creativity. So they have these 5 things and all of us can visualize it. Okay, but people who are in the captive cycle have a hard time visualizing because the moment they even start to visualize that it's gonna be different from what they've been doing up until now, they immediately get clicked right back to the past. It's almost like they get a thought, "I'm really thinking about bigger and better," and they get an email, and the email says, "What are you doing? Let's come in on Monday and talk about this new better thing and bring counsel with you." You know, this is the justification board in your mind. How many of you, the justification board And the justification board says, "Yeah, we notice that you're thinking this thought, bigger and better. What's that all about? You got a problem? I mean, is there some complaint that you have about the way things are now?" And you have to understand that people who— the vast majority of people, the moment they get a new thought, a new possibility in their mind, immediately their past, which is completely unionized, their past, which is completely unionized, says, "Uh." Why don't we talk about this? Why don't we look it over? Bring him in for a couple days, he'll forget about it. Every time you come to the justification board and you have to tell lies, because that's what happens, see, the justification of what you want is a lie, and you get used to lying about what you want. Okay, and you feel it. I mean, when you lie, you lose power. I mean, it's just one of the things about lying is that you lose power because you're removing yourself from reality. You're not telling the truth about the reality, and there's a loss of confidence, there's a loss of power in that. But not only that, that becomes the dominant experience in your life is that if you even so much as have a glimmer of something bigger and better, Boom! You're right back to the justification for it in the past. Okay? And so what happens then is that the past— so you're choosing the past, you're not choosing the future, and then the past decides what you get to do in the present. So your past gets to decide what you do in the present, and the only acceptable thing to do in the present is to utilize your time to reinforce the past. How's that feel? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, so how many of you have done this? I do it. I do it. I mean, I teach this stuff, but I still do it. But in the major parts of my life, not so much. I do it with minor things. I mean, we all where none of us are 100% anything. We're all doing this, but how many of you know people around you who do this? That the moment you would suggest a new idea, what happens? Whoom! What's that all about? What are we doing here? So the big thing is that the vast— now, the freedom cycle really requires a lot of individual effort. This is totally supported by society. This one is totally supported because society basically wants to stay the way it is. That's why, you know, that's a stable society. Yeah. So all of you here are change agents in one part of human life. I mean, this is what— this is really what Genius Network is about. You would not come into Genius Network, you would not be a member of Genius Network, if you weren't a change agent in some part of human life related to individuals, related to organizations and everything. But it's going to require people to have a vision of themselves that's bigger and better than it is right now. Okay, so the thing is that if you're going to be better and better as a change agent, you better really, really get the freedom cycle down as a very powerful skill inside yourself because you will not be able to help people when they say, "I can't meet tomorrow, I'm at the justification board." I'm at the justification board. Can we make it Thursday, 10 years from today? So anyway, so this is repetition. It's repetition. And it's a constant repetition. Now here's— it has some very, very interesting connections into society. I believe that the lifetime experience of not being able to get out of the repetition cycle is the basis of all addictions, especially drug addictions. And the reason is that people really, really want to have the sense of innovation. They're really passionate. I mean, it's something that people— it's such a powerful idea of the ability to feel that you're creating something really new and really different and really better. It's such a powerful feeling, and people have had this feeling. I mean, you know, it may have been accidental, and it may be when you were 5 years old, but you have that feeling of innovation. And your circumstances as you become an adult doesn't allow you to have that, but drugs will give you the experience for a short period of time that you're actually in that innovative mode, you know, that you're actually in that innovative existence. And there's all sorts of addictions, but it's an artificial way of actually creating the sense that you're innovating. But then of course it doesn't last. And then, It's destructive. It's self-destructive. So what happens here is this ability to actually engage with the future for people who are in the repetition cycle is actually cut off. And after a while, they just can't really, really do it. Okay? And you can say, well, anybody can turn them around. And I said, well, no, you can rearrange the wiring in your brain so much over such a long period of time that You might have a religious conversion, you might have deep psychotherapy, shock treatment, or that. You might get a chance to do it, but it's not going to be self-created. You're probably not going to make it, and a lot of people are in that. They're in that degree. Okay, so this is the captivity cycle, and it's spoo, spoo. Freedom cycle? Yay! Captivity cycle? Boo! Okay. Okay. And this is about scarcity, and what it is is the scarcity of being able to create greater freedom for yourself. It's a profound scarcity that a lot of people have. It's time. They don't have— they have a scarcity of time. They have a scarcity of money. They have a scarcity of relationship. And they have a scarcity of purpose, you know, and so they're driven strictly from their past and it's about need, okay. So very, very interesting, one of the most dominant models of the last 50 years has been Maslow, and I disagree with Maslow totally. The first time I saw Maslow I totally disagreed because It's about needs. And needs are dictated from the outside, they're not dictated, they're not created on the inside. So you've got survival, you've got safety, you've got belonging, you've got achievement, and you've got self-actualization. But notice the structure that Maslow used, it was a pyramid. And when I was born in 1944, society was pyramids. Government was a pyramid, big unions were a pyramid, corporations were a pyramid, and it was kind of like— this pyramid society was created as a reaction to the Great Depression and the Second World War, which, you know, my parents lived through that, some of your parents lived through that, and just to to have the basic things that you needed to live was a real win. And so everybody thought about needs, you know, you got to satisfy your needs. We don't live in that world, okay? And it's probably why things are kind of confusing today because we've switched over to a world where wanting is possible. As a matter of fact, wanting more and more things. —Yeah, but why do you need that? —Well, I don't need it. I want it. Why does Stefan need to be on a boat for 6 months? He doesn't. He wants to be on a boat for 6 months. Why does he want it? Because he wants it. You see the distinction? How many of you are really grasping the distinction here? Between eating and wine. Now I'm going to tell you something. I gave this talk at J.J. Virgin's Mindshare in August, and afterwards, after I gave the speech, I had about 20 entrepreneurs come up to me to tell me how much of an impact that they had, that my talk had on them, and they were all female. Everyone was a female. There were men there, but all the women came up and talked to me about it. And they said, "I can't tell you how much this wanting just because you want it is liberating." And I asked about— this started happening, I had 3 or 4 of them, because we have ever since the beginning, whereas there's just as many successful women entrepreneurs in the marketplace as there are men entrepreneurs, are men entrepreneurs. Our percentage in Strategic Coach has always been between 15% and 20% women. Okay. So I started asking this question. I said, I'm going to say something and see if you agree with me. Really successful women are as successful as they need to be. Really successful entrepreneurial women are as successful as they need to be. But really successful Men entrepreneurs are as successful as they want to be. So you ask a woman, well, why do you need to do that? And what happens? They say, well, I've got a family to feed, I've got this— it's a justification of why they're ambitious. Okay, so I just want to say that, and my feeling is that this is culturally induced, that women are really forced far, far more than men to justify their success and standing out as an individual. But if you get this wanting thing straight, you immediately get relieved. You won't need a justification because wanting requires no justification. So this is really the big difference about need. Okay, so diagram number 1 is the freedom cycle. Diagram number 2? Spooze, captivity cycle. Now I'm going to show you how to really get good at wanting. And the way you get really good at wanting, if you turn the sheet over, the sheet over, this sheet right here, turn the sheet over. So I'm gonna just take the present and I'm gonna do the future and we're gonna choose the future. Now, how do you get good at choosing? So I'm gonna tell you a story. August 15th, 1978, I was both bankrupt and divorced on the same day. What? August 15th, 1978. Okay? Divorced in the morning, bankrupt in the afternoon. I arranged that way so I could keep my credit card and have a really good lunch. What? Celebration. That I had to give in my credit card. And, uh, you know, I mean, you laugh about it, but it wasn't laughing time back then because you just got really two very, very bad report cards, you know, and you had really screwed up in two areas. So I began thinking about that for about 3 months after my experience, and I came to two decisions that I was, number one, going to relieve everybody else of responsibility. Responsibility for what had happened to me, because I had to get my power back and you can't get your power back if someone else is responsible. So one of the things, if you want to free yourself up in a situation, a bad situation, you've got to relieve everybody else of responsibility and take it, take it on 100%. So that was number one. But number two is I came to the conclusion that I had had the relationship failure and the business failure because I wasn't really telling myself what I wanted. You know, I was expecting that if I got married, I would be told what I wanted, and that if I just started a business, I'd be told what I wanted. But it's not that. I didn't have the wanting skill. So I came to one goal at the end of 1978, and that was for 25 years, every day for 25 years, I was going to keep a journal, and in that journal I would write at least a sentence about something I wanted every day. I could write a paragraph if I wanted, I could write several pages if I wanted, but I had to write at least one sentence, and it was about something going on in my life right at that point. Fast forward, it's 2003, it's January 31st, Babs and I are out with some close friends of ours, We're having dinner and I said, "I just want to let you know I'm finishing a project, a 25-year project, and over the last 25 years, every day except 12 days out of— it's 9,131 days, so 9,119 days I wrote in my journal, and you know what's something? I really became a muscle-bound wanter." And I'm like, wanting on steroids. I really want things. Don't need much, want lots. Okay? And wanting— we were talking about keeping young— needing ages you. Wanting makes you very, very young. So it's a skill that makes you young because no matter what you've wanted in the past, you want more in the future, bigger and better. Okay, so how do we get to be a really good wanter? Okay, so that we can constantly stay in the freedom cycle and not in the captivity cycle. Well, people say, how many, how often have you heard this with what you sell? I would do what you're telling me to do if I had the confidence. I would become an entrepreneur If Obama would subsidize me. The Department of Free Stuff. Do that. So, you say, well, no, no. So the weird thing about this is that people always want to get what is essentially confidence, which is the fourth thing you get in becoming a good wanter. You get confidence. And I said, so that's number 4. And they said, no, no, no, no, I know what you're saying. Not confidence, I want the capability. And I say, eh, that's really unfortunate because capability is number 3. And they say, well, I want— I don't know what I want. I said, it all starts— I'm going to go right to number 1. So capability equals confidence. It really starts with a commitment. And what a commitment means is that you're giving yourself a picture of bigger and better in the future. And you're saying, regardless of what it takes, I'm committed to get there because that starts it, because you have to organize and channel your energies. And once you get there, you have that commitment. Then, and this is the tough part, this is the tough part. It requires a second step, and the second step is courage, requires courage. Okay, now just to clarify courage, the difference between confidence and courage is that confidence feels really good and courage feels really shitty. How many of you right now in some project or area of your life right now are experiencing courage? Yeah, yeah, and I have to tell you that this courage is a skill. It's the ability to go through periods of feeling really shitty because you've had a really strong commitment to change something with the knowledge that if you can just stay in the state of courage having made the commitment long enough, what will happen is that the courage will give you capability, and the capability will give you confidence. And once you have the confidence, you can then jump to a higher level of commitment for something that's even bigger and better. So what we have is a virtuous cycle here of commitment, courage, capability, and confidence. And our past— our past all becomes raw material. And the raw material is what? What are the two things that you always want to bring forward? Skills and achievements. So you keep stockpiling in the past skills and achievement, which you get to come forward. And it's that higher level, constantly increasing level of skill and achievement, which allows you to make commitments to higher and bigger, better things. And then it starts over again. So here's a weird thing with entrepreneurs, because I've been coaching them. Little survey in the room. How many of you, your biggest breakthroughs since you started being an entrepreneur came when you went through periods of commitment and courage where you weren't guaranteed capability and— how many of you? Okay. And how many of you right now are planning your future to such an extent that you'll never have to go through another period of courage? Yeah, I had this guy, he was born, he was a hidden child during the Second World War, a Jewish child in Europe, went through a horrendous war, comes to Canada, doesn't speak English, speaks French, so he went to Montreal, and he taught himself English, got a doctorate from college, became an incredible expert on the Canadian tax code, was a financial advisor, Made millions of dollars, and then he's sitting there, he's got 20, 21, 23-year-old children, and they're slugs. Because he said to himself, everything that I had to go through, my children are never going to go through that. So he had to demonstrate incredible courage and develop incredible capabilities, but he created a cocoon for them so they had And now he's spending the rest of his life subsidizing them because they never developed any courage or capability. So I really watch out for entrepreneurs who are always trying to make things easy for their kids. Don't make things easy for your kids. Have them go through the same 4 C's so that they can actually master the freedom cycle. And if you can do that, by the time they're, you know, adults and walking around, you've done everything you possibly can for your children. So this is the 3— how many of you— I made the claim that 3 diagrams were going to totally change and transform your sense of the past, present, and future. So I want to survey how many of you I've actually done that with my 3 diagrams. Actually do that. And how many of you can see that the more you use the 4 C's to reinforce the freedom cycle, One, you'll become an extraordinarily good wanter of the future. And the other thing is that you'll find yourself separating and not being bogged down by people and organizations that are in the captivity cycle.

You have a whole process in the book to think through— I mean, there's so much, but thinking time. And I want to talk about thinking time and how you describe that process. What is the process? Why is it so important? And it slows people down so that they can go faster and so that they can not build a machine for the problem that isn't, right? And there's so much knowledge and skills, especially in this room. I mean, everyone here has had a certain level of accomplishment because they wouldn't even be in this room if they hadn't. And at the same time, taking this knowledge and wisdom that's within them and being able to flesh it out by simply asking themselves the right questions and giving themselves the time to come to that is your thinking time process. So I'd love to have you describe that.

Great. So this will have some amount of strategic and a greater amount of tactical, because the tactical is kind of important because the tactical is what it allows it to become a ritual. So the key to thinking time is to start with a powerful question. The piece of paper that Joe Polish passed out asked you to write down one of your problems, challenges, or opportunities. And what would have made that piece— that your response very successful would be if it was framed in the form of a question. So the instant a problem is framed as a statement, your brain will shut down because you've just said it's true, right? I'm poor. I'm single. I have— my sales are inadequate. That's a statement. And what I want is a question because the question is going to be the thing that opens everything up. And so the question might be, how might I so that I can? How might I increase revenues by 20% And maybe I want to insert a guardrail right there. How might I increase revenues by 20% and on less than $1,000 a month budget? So I just put in a guardrail so that I can drop an incremental $10,000 in my bottom line every month. So, the power is in the question. Albert Einstein was a professor at Princeton for 20 years. In his third semester of teaching, Albert's fellow professors came to him and said, "Dude, they're on to you." And Albert said, "What do you mean?" his fellow professors said, the students have stopped studying because you keep giving the same final exam questions every single semester. They're on to you. These are smart kids. They said, you got to change it up, otherwise they all have passed around the test, they know what's coming. Albert said, I'm not going to do it. And they said, you got to be kidding me. Albert, you got to change the questions. He said, Not gonna do it. And they said, why? And he said, because the answers keep on changing. I want you to think about that in the context of your business, in the context of your competition, in the context of the price of oil, or who's in the White House, or interest rates, or or alliances or networks that you have available. The answers keep on changing. And so what I need to get good at is figuring out the question. The saying I have is this: smart people have really good answers, geniuses have really good questions. The key is can I find the question that I need to ask before I start my thinking time. And The Road Less Stupid has got 704 questions that I've used, or variations on those themes, out of the thousands more that I've created. These are some of the best, these are the best 704 questions I got. I've been doing thinking time for 25 years, 28 years. I do it 3 times a week. It lasts for 45 minutes. I turn off my machines. I'm not in front of a computer. I have a kitchen clock, a timer that I set for 45 minutes so I'm not constantly picking up my phone or glancing at the clocks in my office. And I got a chair that I sit in, and the only time I sit in this chair is when I'm gonna think. I got a, a Big Chief tablet. Mm-hmm. And I got a pen. And the only time I touch this pen, sit in this chair with this tablet, is when I'm about to think. I've pre-framed my thinking time with a question that I've developed that I need to ask myself that would, I'm gonna think about. And the idea of thinking time is not to come up with the right answer. The idea of thinking time is to come up with a lot of answers. You know how to have a great idea? Do you know how to have a great idea? Have a lot of them and pick the best one. That's exactly what we want to do. We want to have a lot of ideas, and the thinking time process is all about can I generate more ideas, more possibilities, more choices than what I have today. So here's a discipline, that's what thinking time is, it's a discipline that says if I can sit quietly, if business is an intellectual sport, which it is in my opinion, and If I'm going to be successful in solving problems or taking advantage of opportunities or identifying risk or figuring out what the obstacle is as opposed to the symptom, if I'm going to be successful in that, I need to stop reacting. I need to stop lurching. And what I need to start doing is thinking about here's possibilities. And when I'm done with thinking time, the alarm goes off. When I think it looks like this. So I'm in my chair, I get all settled in, I got to get my body really, really still, which my body is going to interfere with my thinking, so I always clear my throat, I take a sip of water, I do whatever I need to do, scooch my butt, I get very, very still, I've got my question or questions on my piece of paper. I start my timer and I literally have my hand over my eyes so that I'm not— I'm only looking down. If I look up, I get distracted. And I go into 45 minutes. And then the buzzer goes off and then I look and say, OK, well, which one of these answers or which ones do I need to think more about? I've yet to have a thinking time in 28 years, I've yet to have a thinking time that didn't add massive value. Has anybody in here taken— I know several of you have taken 4-day MBA, you've heard me say this. Take away all my skills, take away all my money, leave me only thinking time.

I had 100,000 talks in my head, and when she asked me, the guy with ADD at that moment, what do you want to talk about? I did the smartest thing in the world. I asked my wife, what should I talk about? And literally she said, let me think about it for a second. And she comes back, she goes, here's what entrepreneurs deal with. I know you always talk about influence, you always talk about sales, you know, getting people to get their point across, stuff like that. Why not help people with the biggest thing that they deal with, the shit that shows up in our lives? And the majority of you You're master marketers, you're really great at getting your point across, but how much time are you spending marketing to you to get yourself to be less bothered? Because isn't that what we do in business? Like literally, you got a person with a problem, you hit them over the head a little harder, you sell them a Tylenol, and then you get them on auto-ship. How many of you know what I'm talking about? That's our job, that's what it is we're here to do. But the question is, when something shows up in our life, how much time and energy are you literally taking I'm gonna question you. Here's question number 2 that she gave you, the ultimate question. I'm giving you question 2, and really ask yourself this very simplistic question is, how often are you spending time rewording and recalibrating things in your life that may be slowing you down and possibly bothering you? So I'm gonna give you 6 steps here that are very simple. I use this for high-level intervention work. Eunice has been to our event before, and she's seen me do this, where someone that's been raped or abused has a problem, 30 years of issues, and and I get them to see it differently in 10 or 15 minutes to change their emotions. But there's little things that happen in our day that wind up being big challenges for ourselves. So I'm gonna give you a little synopsis real quick. I want you to imagine you're 4 years old again, okay? You're 4 years old, 3 years old, 2 years old. If— and don't be that person that, "4 years old was a bad year for my life." Pick a year, it doesn't matter. You're a little kid and you're walking down the street and there's a little hole in the ground and you step in it. And immediately your parent says to you, or someone next to you goes, "You tripped, are you okay?" Now before that, nothing had occurred. Your foot went in a hole. Immediately, you were told that you tripped. Your brain says, "Tripped, when I trip, people get worried, something must go wrong." Now when Tucker was talking about earlier about jamming stuff down in our body that lives there for a while, you're starting to develop a little something called a pattern. Tripping is bad and I get people's attention. Well, you're about 8 years old and you're with your buddies and you trip and you fall and they laugh at you. Now tripping is bad, you fell, people laugh at you, it's the wrong thing to do. Then you're 15 years old, you're playing ice hockey and the coach says we need to, you know, you need to do a drill you're not comfortable with. Or you're doing gymnastics, something you're uncomfortable with. Or you're in business at 35 years old and you're wondering why you're the person that won't do something that's outside of your comfort zone. And what the most stimulating thing for this, for me to think about, is all of us have the ability to do this with others, but how much time are you spending working on yourself? So my challenge is, I'll do my little 7 minutes left of this talk, I'm gonna challenge all of you, even over the next month, spend 7 to 10 minutes thinking about the word choices that you use in your life. And Tony brought up something you said something a little bit ago and I started reframing immediately because my brain is always in reframe. Meaning when you said your challenge, like my person, my partner died and I finally made as much money as I wanted to make in my life and I'm more miserable than I've ever been in my life. I heard that and immediately started to reframe. So I'm going to use slides and I'll see how this works. Here's a big sign we have in our office and it's very simply says, your future hinges on your ability to effectively communicate.

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.

Now, after reading the book about why, I thought about this for a second, and why we do what we do is that I truly believe that communication is the most underdeveloped and underutilized asset we have as human beings. Most people are miserable at communicating with other people and themselves, and when you communicate with yourself in a weak way, you typically get a weak life. So when I explain this to you all real quickly, I'm gonna ask all of you to realize this. How many of you have had some shit happen to you in the last week that's not what you expected? How many of you, raise your hands. Okay, how many of you in the last year have had shit happen? Okay, how many of you recognize that immediately when that shit occurred, it happened, and your brain was searching for, what do I actually call this thing? Because you've never actually had that moment before. So Doc, you're going to get this immediately. I'm taking like Sigmund Freud, forgive me, and I'm taking all of the work— I get that backwards sometimes. And maybe all of you will learn that if you actually put things backwards in people's brains, they'll learn to start seeing things differently. And you'll realize very quickly that one of the smartest things you can do is screw up during your presentation, say something backwards, use somebody's name backwards, and they start questioning everything else, and they start questioning themselves. So pay attention to this because it'll make sense. So the first thing that happens is an event occurs. Little boy trips in hole, or just little boy foot in hole. Go on date, somebody does something you didn't ask them to do. What happens is an event occurs immediately in our brain. Anytime we have an event occur in our lives that we've not expected experienced before, the brain almost immediately starts looking for answers. Oh my God, what is this called? What does it look like? What does it do? And all that happened was an event. If you look, the 21st of whatever the hell month this is got circled. There was an event that occurred. Tony made more money than he ever made in his life. His brain said, what do we label that? It's supposed to be a great day. See, my question for Tony is, what Tony did was, He set a plan for himself that said, he set an event that one day I'm going to make more money than I've ever made in my life. And what that's gonna be called is the happiest day of my life. It's gonna be called the reckoning. It's gonna be called the breakthrough. It's gonna be called everything I invested, every dollar and every event ever in his life. And he told himself a story. Am I correct? We do this all the time. We put a label on something, no different than I tripped. Soon as you get a label, the brain immediately gives it meaning. Now what you said is, Tony said I'm unhappy. What does that mean when I'm unhappy? Wow, things in my life are not working out the way I want them to. Now what's fascinating is, let me give you another example here, 'cause I have 6 minutes. I'm gonna walk a few people through this right now. Who here has had some challenge, something show up recently that's not like super complicated like a divorce with a narcissist, but has anybody, had something happen recently that's a challenge that wants to jump in? Go quick. What's that? You gotta go quick. I wanna jump in. I have a narcissist stepson. Oh geez, the narcissist again. Okay, very good.

Who told us that he wasn't gonna come for Christmas Eve dinner.

So let's go back again.

So what happened is we had an event that happened. Somebody made a promise, correct? Correct. Very good. And immediately somebody made a promise. So immediately you labeled it. And you labeled it and said, somebody didn't follow through, correct? And immediately after that is, what does that mean? That means that that person is a liar, that person lied to me, that person let me down, correct? Now anytime you label something and you give it a meaning, which we all do immediately, all human beings do this in a matter of seconds. You can slow this shit down. I've learned how to slow this down. I'm out with my wife one day and we ran into a jumping cholla. How many of you ever done that before? For? A jumping cholla. Let me explain real quickly. If your wife's screaming and she goes, "Ow, there's something on my leg," don't always grab it. Because I grabbed the jumping cholla off her leg, now my hand was stuck to her leg, okay? And immediately I'm looking at this thing, I said, "Wow, maybe this is telling us that we need to be closer or spend more time together or communicate better." And she's like, "No, no, it's just a jumping cholla." Our brains— what? Okay, it is a poisoned latent wind cactus. They call it jumping because they go in the wind. It's like a baseball. They're like, "Oh, look how cute that is." And I'll tell the story another time how I try to get it off my hand like this. And then we were out for a run and I tied my key to my shorts. You know how boys do that? And I put it down my pants. So I have like, so I had to like, whole nother conversation, a whole nother day. But I created meaning out of it. So the whole thing with Tony, for an example, and I'll explain this in a minute, is what that means is, so what Tony created for himself is, I set a goal for myself, just like you, you thought things would be different this time with this guy, so you lied to yourself. And then you start questioning, how often do I lie to myself? I got 2 minutes and I gotta get to the point. So what happened with Tony is, Tony goes like this, I'm going to, I'm just gonna backtrack and we can, he had an event occur, I'm gonna make this ultimate amount of money, He lies to himself, tells himself that this is gonna occur. Then what happens is he labeled it, said it's gonna be the best day of my life. He added meaning to it, said things are gonna work out great, but what then really happened is Tony basically said, but the meaning, what does it really mean is that what else in my life is not working out the way I want it to, or what else am I lying to myself about? So my question for you is a little different, 'cause I wanna switch this back and I wanna help you out a second is basically, Basically, who told you that making more money would make you happier? You did. Me. You came up with that. So basically, you were wrong. Yes. And you don't like being wrong, because accountants don't like being wrong. So really, you're not bothered that making more money, you're unhappy. You're really bothered that you're wrong. Let's step ahead another thing. And what happens when you actually become wrong? We're just playing with this, and none of this is true. You feel something. You're wrong, you feel insecure. So then Tony's like, wait a second, is my whole life bullshit? I told myself if I finally get to this place in my life, I would be happy. How many of you are resonating with Tony's story for your own life? If you are, say I am. Anybody catching this? So what happened with Tony, and I'll be done in like a minute, okay? So what happens is, give me a second, it'll be worth it. I just told her not to be because I know you're just being, you're being Michael. I'm being Michael. And if not, I'm going to be a narcissist for a second and fuck off. No, I'm just kidding. But so what happens is Tony feels something and he says to himself, Tony says to himself, "Wow, this is uncomfortable. I don't like this." And then what happens is he reacts and he goes, "I don't know what to do. I go in my shell. This is what I typically do." And after we react for a while, what happens is you get a result. You get an unhappy person. I've watched that most of us looked at change people's lives, we like to get them to pretend that the event didn't occur. And no, no, that didn't happen. It's one of the worst things you can say to somebody. And then we try to change the reaction of what they're doing, like stop doing that. I'm gonna tell you all of the gem, all therapy, I have read every, I have a library you couldn't even imagine on everything from psychotherapy to hypnosis and you name it. Everything that works out good from Virginia Satir, one of my heroes, and all this Joe Polish's great work basically comes down to a very simple thing, is you can't change the event and you really can't change the reaction of what's happening, but if you could change the label, the meaning, and the emotion behind what happens, you have the ability to change almost anything in your life. See, when we were going over this list of what pisses you off, I use gradient language all the time, it's a term that I use. I don't really have things that piss me off, I have things that bother me, I have things that annoy me. I have things that frustrate the shit out of me and I avoid the majority of those things. But why I'm bringing this up to all of you to really think about right now is most of you are looking to change your results this year and demand from yourself that you do things differently, or you're looking to pretend those things didn't occur. If you could change the label slightly on what occurred, even the label on being here, ingenious, even shifting the label that I'm here to understand myself better instead of like I have to get it. How many of you recognize you are torturing yourself in Genius Network with the attitude of, I came here because I spent $25,000 and I have to get it. If you're here to, I'm here to improve myself and find a few things that can make my life better, the emotion in your body starts looking for things differently. Your biochemistry changes, your emotions change in a major way. So why I'm bringing this up is if I were to recalibrate Tony here real quickly in less than 30 seconds, I would say, Tony, basically what happened is You told yourself something was gonna happen that didn't happen the way you wanted it to, correct? And because of that, it made you a little bit upset. So it wasn't that you made more money that was your problem, it was that you actually did something you didn't expect. You actually achieved something you've always wanted and you thought you'd have a different result, correct? So you were wrong temporarily. And being wrong temporarily is not wrong permanently. So all I'm gonna challenge you to think about is from that context, by changing that one word, one word, it changes everything after associated with it. So I'm going to ask all of you to play with your brains for the next couple of days to think about this in any major way. I deal with this all the time. I had a woman that was held hostage for 5 days and literally she was on a bus and basically she said, "Four hostages, I'm in Israel, there's four hostages on a bus." And all of you hold yourself hostage from time to time. And she was on a bus in Israel and there's four hostages, got her on the bus, kept her there for 4 or 5 days. I said, "Okay, so 4 hostages on the bus." I said, "4 got on, 5 got off." She goes, "What the hell are you talking about?" I said, "What do you mean?" She goes, "You're not listening, Michael. You're being an asshole." I said, "No, no, you don't get it. I'm confused. 4 hostages got on the bus and 5 got off." She goes, "Is your math bad? Are you stupid? What's wrong with you?" I said, "I think I'm hearing you clearly. 4 hostages got on the bus, kept you captive for 5 days, and 5 hostages got off." She goes, "No, there was 4 hostages." I said, "No, 4 got on the bus, you were there and you decided to join them for the rest of your life. You're holding yourself hostage. You became a terrorist and you joined them. You've been terrorizing yourself for years. When she realized that she wasn't held hostage, that she was terrorizing herself, her emotions changed immediately. She got back to me. I'd worked with her 10 years ago, changed her life, changed her relationship by one shift in one word. It's like marketing. One shift. Joe Polish, one word in your context, the of your copy, or Tucker, one word, or yesterday when he was talking about you and your changes everything. So my question is, were you terrorized or are you terrorizing yourself?

How would you describe the successful entrepreneur? What are the characteristics of these people that truly make it? They make money, they make impact, they do it with integrity versus the ones that just flounder and kind of have jobs but call themselves business owners or entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs? I mean, what's the key difference between— I mean, there's a lot of differences, I know, and you've done this for many years, but like, what are some of the things that you see as just what makes a great entrepreneur?

Yeah, well, you know, you've got the kind of standard stuff everybody talks about, which is you've got this huge vision, you know, you're able to think 10x over everybody else, you've got this tremendous ability to be both disciplined and focused, and I don't think a lot of People people think of entrepreneurs as being disciplined, but those that knock it out of the park have a lot of both of those kind of things. But what was interesting is this executive program I founded and ran for 15 years, I just made it a game to see if I could predict who coming out of that course would build the biggest, fastest companies. And I could. And it came down to something very simple, and that was those who are the hungriest to learn, that had this really thirst for learning. And it's the thing we were talking about where Mark Cuban in his book, and I'd known Mark for 30 years, but I didn't realize he's had this fundamental routine, this habit, this daily focus of reading 3 hours every day. And he talks about it in his book. Warren Buffett, 500 pages a day. Bill Gates, who we talked about in The Greatest Business Decision, his famous Think Weeks where, you know, his record, 112 books, manuscripts, PhD thesis, white papers. Mark Zuckerberg this year in 2015's focus to read a book every 2 weeks. Eric Schmidt saying on the stage there at the Milken Conference, you know, what was key to him really helping scale up Google. We're thinking he's going to say some really big fancy stuff. He said, no, shut my BlackBerry off. Every weekend to read a book or two. And so it's this— you can't have anything come out of your brain that you don't get in first. And it's this intense ability to learn and then act on it.

Bias for action. Well, so the key there, acting on it, because there's a lot of people that will go to seminars, they'll read a lot of stuff, they'll consume things, but they spend a lot of their time consuming and reading and less doing. So What is the action element? I mean, there are these unicorns that you can— some of the people you mentioned, people could be thinking, well, I can never do what Warren Buffett does or Zuckerberg. I mean, I'm just a whatever, I'm a normal person. How do I apply that? Should I really read that much? I mean, what would be your response to that?

Yeah, well, first of all, I want to come back to this bias for action. You know, Tom Peters, who is my idol, he wrote the very first really popular business book in The Search of Excellence. And he was kind enough to endorse the first book on the COVID And he said, you know, looking back on the 8 things that he found were key to building these significantly excellent companies, he said the only one of the 8 that still holds, he believes, is this bias for action. And that's what most people miss. They have these dreams, but they don't really have visions. A vision's a dream with a plan that then you act on. And then you have these fundamental routines like reading, like going over for 3 hours every day like Steve Jobs did when he was launching his retail store. And it's what an Olympic athlete has to do that reaches to the gold level is committing to getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning and practicing for 3 hours before they go to school. It's Jordan Spieth who we've just witnessed have the most amazing year in 2015, that doesn't happen by accident. He had a big, hairy, audacious goal. I want to not only go to the Masters, I want to win the Masters. And then he had this discipline and focus to practice. Did you read some of the stories about where when he'd go over to his family store, he would pick yards between then and he'd hit the golf balls from yard to yard to yard I mean, this is crazy, this obsession, but that's what's necessary.

Well, and it is the thing that gives the edge. Well, you said something earlier today when you were talking to the EO group about having the, you know, not reading is no different, something along like having the ability—

Yeah, those who can't read, I mean, those who don't read barely have an advantage over those who can't. Right. And I think we've lost a lot of that gotta wanna to learn. Yeah, yeah.

So how do you, you have 4 children. We do.

What are you doing as a parent? Do you try to instill entrepreneurial values in them, or do you just kind of let them be their own person, see if they kind of fall into that? Or what, what are some of—

how does this apply to how you're a parent? Yeah, you know, you know, I've always seen— again, that's why I love being an educator. The word education, educare, means to draw out the genius, you know, your whole thing that's within everyone. And you know And you know what, I'm purposely not focused on them being entrepreneurs. I, you know, the founding fathers of the U.S. said something interesting. We're soldiers so our children can be farmers, entrepreneurs, so their children can be poets. And what I'm finding is interesting is all of our children have kind of gravitated towards the creative arts side, which by the way is the one thing robots, going to be one of the kind of the last things that robots are gonna take over. Almost every other job— accounting, lawyer, doctor— the kind of things that our generation focused on is being automated. Right. So, you know, I think they've got to go with their own trends, and just— I just want them to have this thirst to learn.

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Go ahead. They're over here.

Do it now. Come on. Thank you. Watch 'em.