Create More Freedom In Your Life By Doing THIS 1 Thing

What is my most important value? And the way you can tell your values are because of your behaviors. What you do is you look at your behaviors and especially your behaviors under stress.

So why would everything be in the future? When I get this, I'll be really happy. No, you could be really happy today with what you have.

Make sure that we change the world in which we are competing, because it's not working for women, it's not working for men, it's not working for polar bears. It's not sustainable.

People say, what's the key to success? You just had it, and there's no shortcuts. And it doesn't take any genius. Well, no offense. It just takes starting and completing your most important task. And if you'll just do that, get my book. Eat that frog. And I'm not trying to sell books because you don't get very much with a book. But the thing is, the book is now 50 languages. Can you imagine that? 50 language, two and a half million copies. And by the way, it's probably closer to 10 million because there are several countries like Iran, that don't pay royalties and other have publish the book without telling anybody. So it's published all over the world, but they cheat you on their royalty. So it's probably 10 million copies of it have been sold. And so that's my starting point and everything else. Here's another thing, by the way, and I love what the lady was saying about values. I had a good friend, maybe you know him, his name is Mark Waldman. And Mark came to my office when we were doing our coaching program some years ago. And he just dropped in. He lives in Northern California, San Francisco. And I said, so what's happening in your life? Is it a break? He said, well, I've come up with a new question. And he said, I'm just walking around teaching everybody. And the question is, what is my most important value in life right now? What is my most important value in life right now? And I thought, gee, that's a great question, because all of us think about values and are impressed by value. So I asked everybody in the room, what is your most important value in life right now? And he said, you have to ask this question every day, all day long, for a week, every day. Just keep asking the question. Your first answer will be love and truth and God and things like that. Just keep asking the question and keep drilling down deeper, keep drilling and drilling until you finally, the most important value pops out. And that can change your life. And so what I did is I did the same thing. I asked the question for a week, what is my most important value? And the way you can tell your values are because of your behaviors. What you do is you look at your behaviors and especially your behaviors under stress. When your behavior is in difficulty, you'll always demonstrate who you really are inside by what you do on the outside when you have difficulties or challenges. So I finally concluded my most important value is what the lady said is freedom. Freedom is my most important value. And you know something? America was established by people for whom freedom was their most important value. And it changed the entire world. There is still no country in the world for which freedom is the organizing principle. Freedom is a concern for everybody, but Americans more than any other nationality.

Thank you.

Love freedom. And so therefore your job is to have freedom. How do you have freedom? Well, one of the things is you have to have enough money so that you can buy the things that you want, that you can take care of your family, that you can provide for your spouse and for your children. And when you, when you achieve freedom, more freedom, you feel happier, you have more energy, you have higher self esteem, you feel more in control. And everything that you do moves you toward having more or less freedom. So that was a turning point for me is that freedom is the key. And then I look at my family, everything I've ever done with my four children and my wife has been to increase their freedom, give them more freedom, open doors for them, open up opportunities for them. So freedom is mine. So what is yours? That's a great question. And the way you tell is you simply look at what do you do under pressure, what do you care about more than anything else? What is really your value? And it's great question, great organizing principle for your life.

Yeah, but you know Brian, and as you know most genius network, most genius network members have teams, many have running multi million dollar businesses. What is the dark side of success? In the midst of building and growing, what have you noticed where things become out of control, out of hand, where people start losing it? Because as you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, because of the success they have, comes responsibility, obligations, messes, navigating things. And here we are in the middle of a pandemic. What have you found to be success traps that people have gotten themselves into that you would have any advice, suggestions or insights on either how to avoid or how to navigate if you're in the middle of it?

Well Joe, that's a really tough question, but you and I have talked about this subject is that what is our ultimate goal in life. Remember, the old thing is write your own obituary. You write your own obituary. What do you want people to say about you when you pass on? And I went for a long walk on a beach near Brisbane in Australia some years ago, and about an hour, two hours of walking and I asked myself that question. And the answer that came up for me and never changed again is that after I pass on, I want. When my children meet someone who knew me, they say, oh, yeah, I knew your father. He was a really good person. That to me, was my ultimate goal in life. I knew your father, he was a good person. And I have never deviated from that. I never have done anything or said anything to anybody under any circumstances that would cause anybody to say other than he was a good person. And so you have to keep that in mind. See, this is the purpose in life. And one of the things that I learned is that success does not change you. It just makes you more of what you already are. It just makes you more of what you already are. If you're a good person, you become a better person. If you're a jerk, you become a worse jerk. If you're honest, you'll be more honest. If you're dishonest, you'll be more dishonest. So you always have to think in terms of long term. One of the things that I found, and I've written about it extensively, I wrote a book, by the way, a couple of years ago called Get Smart. And it has 10 ways of thinking that have been developed over the ages. And basically it says that successful people think this way. And in the same way of thinking, unsuccessful people think that way. The most important, which I learned from Drucker, from many others, is long term versus short term thinking is really successful people think long term. Unsuccessful people think short term. In other words, they go for advantage, opportunity, making money. They're short term thinkers. Whereas the very best people think long term. They think, where do I want to be in five years or ten years from now? What do I want people to say about me when I'm gone? And so long term thinkers, surprisingly enough, when you think and act long term, you accomplish vastly more than if you're a short term thinker.

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 joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

And the book get smart has basically 10 different ways of thinking. One of them comes from Daniel Kahneman, who got a Nobel Prize for it. He's an economist and a philosopher. And it was, you know, it was, what is it? Two ways of thinking.

Think fast.

Slow, yes, thinking, thinking fast and slow. And what he says is basically successful. People think slowly about important things in their life. One of the things that Kahneman sort of touches on, but which I hammer, is the word consequences. And consequences, as you always ask, what are the likely consequences if I do or don't do this? And everything in life has consequences. And the true measure of how really smart you are is your ability to predict the consequences of doing something or not doing it. Milton Friedman said this, exactly this. The Nobel Prize winning economist, he said, the quality of your thinking can be measured by how accurately you predict what will happen as a result. One of the greatest thinkers of history, a man named Frederick Bastiat, said he said the same thing back 200 years ago. He said that the primary consequences of everything you do are good. You eat this, drink this, do this, because the primary consequences are good, or why would you do it at all? He said, but it's the secondary consequences that are more important than anything else. And your ability to accurately predict the secondary consequences of a behavior determines your whole life. And so, for example, the people who belong to the genius network, one of the reasons that they belong, one of the things that they get is they get ideas that can affect their lives and work long term. Truly superior people are long term thinkers. And they make the sacrifice and they travel and, and they invest the time and the money. It's all aimed at long term results, consequences, what happens as a result of what you do and then what happens and then what happens? And so that's what you and I learned right at the very beginning is we started exchanging ideas. We read Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and how the mastermind was the starting point of success for so many people. Then we started doing it, and then it was sort of like a baton in a race. We handed off the baton and you took it and ran with it. And here you are.

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 joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Well, I really teach people mostly now on how to be an effective speaker. How to transfer the ideas you have in your thoughts and your brain to the eyes and ears and thinking of your audience. The fastest way to grow your business and increase your success is to be an effective speaker, because that opens the door to expertise. If you have the ability to communicate what you know in such a clear and insightful way to your audience that they get it and then they start doing those things. That's the key. So when people ask me what makes a great speaker, it's one word. Results. The first entry in the logbook is, what's it say? One of the great experiences of my life. Thanks for a great trip. Earl Nightingale, February 17, 1987.

Have you ever wondered why so many men work so hard and honestly without ever achieving anything in particular? And others don't seem to work hard and yet seem to get everything. They seem to have the magic touch. You've heard them say that about someone. Everything he touches turns to gold. And have you ever noticed that a man who becomes successful tends to continue to become successful? And.

And on the other hand, have you.

Noticed how a man who's a failure tends to continue to fail? Well, it's because of goals. Some of us have goals, some don't. People with goals succeed because they know where they're going. It's that simple.

Well, I had heard the strangest secret like you and millions of people had, and it changed my life from a carpenter going nowhere and making 62 bucks a week. So I wrote him a very detailed thank you note and he responded. And he said, if you're ever in Naples, Florida, you know, give me a call. So I called and told him I'm coming. He said, well, let's go to dinner. So we went to dinner. He said something that shocked me that I can still remember as we were getting into his car after dinner. I said, I was just so impressed that you took the time to respond to my thank you note. You must get millions of them. And he put his arm on my shoulder and he said, joel, I don't get very many at all. That recording has changed the lives of thousands of people and hundreds that I know of. And he said, well, that's why I responded. I never get letters like that. And that really told me the importance of thank you notes and gratitude. It was just an amazing experience to get to know the person behind the recording that to this day is still the largest Selling spoken word message ever recorded the strangest secret by all night and yah. And you can go to YouTube and listen to it. It would make a tremendous difference in your life.

Now let's get back to our definition of success. Who succeeds? The only person who succeeds is the person who is progressively realizing a worthy ideal.

The progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal. That's the progressive realization. Which means, just like you said, it's a journey. And so I think that's why you say always happy. Because I'm on the journey. That's the thing. It's not the end. It's where you are now. And you say this all the time. All we have is today. So why would everything be in the future? When I get this, I'll be really happy. No, you could be really happy today with what you have. And if you see that, then you're happy. Maybe that's why you don't see me grumpy and miserable. Is, you know this place where we're now sitting 1850 of these nights and days like this on this boat over the last 30 years.

And you've probably never had like a.

Big booze party or anything on this boat.

No.

Not doing Jagermeister shots or anything like that.

No, no, no, no.

That's why today there isn't really any.

Competition unless we make it for ourselves instead of competing. All we have to do is create.

So Earl taught me this statement, don't compete, create. But he said, find out what everybody else is doing and don't do it. So I knew I couldn't have a normal business card. And then I heard that statement and I went and had a printed on a label. And so over half a million people have this can. Most of them keep it on their desk as a reminder of what they can do.

Yeah.

So if you just think about that, your success comes in cans, not in cannots.

And you can do it ingredients, which is commitment, courage, faith, goals, imagination, creativity. If do not open can contains inedible. Is there drugs in here? Is there some sort of powder? Here's what you can do. Here's what you. Here's what we can do for you.

And it's.

This is great.

Success comes in cans.

Dot com.

Yes. Yes. Doesn't matter what the day is. Rain, thunder. You lost a big client. You can still make it a great day. Have a great day. Means you're subject to conditions.

So how many of you watch Shark Tank?

How many of you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How long has this been going on?

Now?

This is my. This Is the shark tank. It's been eight years now.

Eight years.

This is the eighth season.

Yeah.

Awesome. How long have you, Jay, known Damon?

I don't know, Jay. Has it been 8 years or 10 years or.

It's been like the start.

Yeah.

I really wish you would have dressed up today.

Well, you know, the problem is.

The problem is nobody invites me anymore.

To cocktail parties or social functions, and.

I got to get use out of my clothes.

Right, right.

That's true. That's true.

He was supposed to dress better than me.

What's. What's this? You built a multi billion dollar fashion.

Thing and you're wearing.

What's it say I'm wearing? Just casual, you know, a little tie.

No, that's good.

I like the.

Yeah, multis. Something.

Yeah.

So that is the biggest freaking diamond I've ever, ever seen in someone's ear.

That is huge.

Yeah, I'll tell you the story of that one day.

Okay, so first off, thank you both for being here. This is awesome. And how many of you heard the interview that I did with Damon and John? Okay. Wasn't that fantastic? Okay, awesome. So let's start with Jay. Since I didn't give you a bio, what do people need to know about you and who you are? And you say whatever you want in under one minute.

Okay.

I've grown businesses for a living for 40 years.

How's that? Yeah.

Okay.

That is quick.

That's quick.

So I've got a few questions for both of you. So you're both well known and well respected for your entrepreneurial accomplishments. You both have rather outrageous background stories. What one factor do each of you think most than anything else determine or defined what you each became and why? And how can that same factor benefit everyone in this room? We'll start with you.

I think there was a couple of factors. There was two factors I remember, but the main one, I think was that when my parents got divorced and I was 10 years old, I was. Was actually in Catholic school. And I remember acting up as a kid going, you know what? If I act up, my father will come back. Because this is the sensibility of a child, right? My father will come back. My parents will get back together because my grades are bad. So I remember the last test in school, the nuns said to my mother, listen, you know what if Damon. We understand Damon's acting up. And we would normally have to leave him back. Where we going to give him one last chance. So that night before the test, I went out and played basketball with my friends. I did everything I Could to not complete the test. I go in the next day, I do the test, and the test comes back, and I get like a 30 on the test. And I was very pleased with that. My mother comes into school and the nun says, you know what? We're not going to leave him back because we understand he's acting out because of what's going on in his life. And my mother said, no, you're gonna leave him back. So, number one, I got left back. Second of all, you know, there was public school up the block where I felt like, you know, they just ate their young and crawled on all fours up there. They were just nasty people, right? And my mother said, ann, I'm taking you out of this Catholic cushy school where you have all your buddies you've been in since the first grade, and you're gonna go to public school. And I said, no way in the world is that gonna happen. Then she said, and you're also not gonna go out the entire summer. I said, she works three jobs. How the hell can she watch over me? No way. My mother goes and gets a fourth job, hires a babysitter who watches me, takes me out of that school, and I end up back in the seventh grade in the public school with the kids stealing my sneakers every day. I realized at that point that I was responsible for my own actions. And many of our kids don't realize that. And even my daughters have a challenge with that up until 20 years old. And I try not to be, but at that point I realized that nobody's going to save me. And I think that was very instrumental at a very early age of my life.

Yeah, that's good. That's good.

What about you, sir?

Probably the most, I guess, defining is that I had always a hopeless curiosity and an outrageous fascination for what, why, how people were doing things. And I was a business transit.

I have no education.

I got started at 18 and two kids at 20.

And I jumped around, but not from.

Job to job, industry to industry.

And I would realize how totally different each industry was in the way they.

Thought and their actions. And I have always had an obsessive desire to learn how many different ways different businesses, but more importantly, different industries, think, act, strategy, access vehicle, business model.

And I think that's probably made a bigger difference in defining my.

If you want to talk about not.

Just success, but the ability to add.

A lot of dimension to people.

Yeah.

What's your perspective on business and how would you define this word success that everyone throws around?

Yeah. Wow. So how would I define business. That was the question.

Yeah. Or perspective on business. And how would you define success?

Yeah, my perspective on business. For me, I use business as a creative exploration. It's a creativity. It's not what I am or who I am. Even though I'm known as an entrepreneur, to me it's just an outlet for creative expression. I have an idea, but what turns me on is having an idea and manifesting it in the physical world. So I have an idea and I'm like, oh, this would be great. Let's make it into a product and then let's share it. That's marketing. Right. And I really look at business and like Poo Pourri, I call her a living, dynamic organism. So we do marketing a little bit backwards. We don't have a target consumer.

Why is it a she versus a he? Poo Pourri.

That's just where she was. She was a woman. I mean, it was just very clear to me.

So women do poop.

Women poop, yeah. But you know, so what it is, is we talk about, everyone in our company knows what she would do at any moment, what she would say, how she would act, whether she. So that helps keep decision making. Almost. Almost like in a holacracy environment where people would know, oh, Poo Pourri would never do that. Poo Pourri would. So we look at the brand as an energy within itself.

I mean, what you're saying and doing right now is so interesting. Does that strike you as kind of interesting, what you just said? Yeah. Like what a unique and very smart and strategic way to interact with your company because it gives a whole nother life to it. And it's so funny because it's poopery.

Right.

But I really like what you're saying. I mean, I mean it's the whole thing about energy.

Yeah.

Because even when people say time management. Because one of my questions for you is that. But it's really energy management. It's energy management and it's how you. I mean it's like time management. Well, everyone here has got the same 24 hour franchise as everyone else. And they're going to eat and they're going to have meals, they're going to have commute time, they're going to have bathroom time, they're going to have sleep. Everyone's got these things. But it's what they do within it and that energy and how they contain it and what they generate. Because I don't think success just happens. You generate it. You create it.

Yes, well, actually, so I had a conversation a few years ago with Dr. Bruce Lipton because I had this theory that ideas are alive. And I called him and I said, are ideas alive? And he said, why do you ask? And I said, because it seems to me the ideas that are alive within my being and my body meant I get excited and I feel like a physical sensation. Those seem to work out more than the ones that I create with my strategic mind because that's what someone told me I should do. And he said it was a great question. And he said everything's alive, everything's an energetic vibration. So. And then he taught me about resonance and dissonance. Are you guys familiar with resonance and dissonance? So resonance is when you take two energy waves and you put them together and they're both traveling at the same speed and the same height. Those two together create more energy to together than they do apart. So imagine that you with the amazing idea create more energy together. Right. Than you do apart. So I'm going to get back to your question because this is so fun. Dissonance is when you take two energy waves and they're traveling at different speeds and different wavelengths. Those create less energy than they do together. That's the reason that job's killing me, my relationship, whatever, it's literally draining your life force energy. So what's really fun about this is I started thinking about resonance and these alive ideas. So if an idea is alive, it's a living, energetic vibration. So what I'm talking about, a business being alive is not far fetched. So you put that with me, those two together create more energy. So what I'm doing as a business person is I'm looking and censoring and sort of going, where are the alive ideas? I'm reading the room.

Yeah, yeah, you know what, that's awesome. I got to show you this tool. We haven't done done it in a couple of years here, but I created a tool for genius network called anatomy of a successful business. And it shows like a human body, just like a doctor would point the brain, the heart, the nervous system, the muscles, the skeletal structure, the lungs, the stomach. And I have lines where it's like go and fill up all of the different areas of a business what you think. And it's funny because some people will put the heart is the marketing or the marketing is the brain or the people are the heart or the lungs happen to be the finance. And it's interesting because everybody has a different perspective on how they think of the anatomy of a successful business. Because if you look at the anatomy of a successful human. It's all these different parts that are working together, which is why health is so important to have a healthy organism. But when I have people do it in business, it's so interesting to see the different ways people would frame a business like they would a body. Yeah. And you're giving me a whole different meaning of this now. Like thinking, wow, based on what you said, it's a whole different way to interact with that. But the whole point is I want people to feel like, yeah, how do you make something, you know, more alive, you know.

Yeah. Well, and what I love about this when you talk about success. So the way I define success is, is my organ, is my child, my business happy, healthy.

Yeah.

And are they thriving?

Yeah.

And they are. Yeah, Right. I mean, it's so amazing. Whenever I have people come to me and they ask about, you know, should I get investment or whatever? And I really have them feel into with each investor. Like you're going into a relationship. It's not about money. You know, there's so many that fail because they make these bad investments. It's a. You're putting. There needs to be resonance. When there's resonance, like it's golden. You know, those are Those case the 1 or 2% that just fly and make it. The other is not resonance. And I just say, walk, get rid, don't take the money.

Do you know how many startup entrepreneurs that are going out and raising money, if they actually took seriously what, what you just said, how much grief it would prevent, how much wasted money, time and effort and energy. And there's so much. Because there's no such thing as a good business deal with a bad partner. And a lot of them, they just go into it simply because it's money. Yeah, yeah.

Now the thing with resonance also though, is it's based on your subconscious mind as well. So we can get into a whole thing here, but you're going to resonate. So it's also a way to kind of co create with life and co create with your business. If you keep creating a problem, you can kind of go in and go, oh, wow, what's happening in my subconscious mind? Right. And how am I creating this?

We've got a little plan for you.

Okay, good. So I know what I just kind of came out. I've been doing this for 13 years and growing my business. But I really did it through a lot of medicine journeys. I went down to the jungle the first time twice, 12 years ago. But I really started looking at everything as energy. And that's when I found out about money as energy. Because I thought I wanted to be a shaman. I thought, I'm called to be a shaman, as every person that goes down to Peru thinks. It's like, this is my calling. And the shaman said, actually, you're going to be able to do that. Money is just energy and business is the greatest way to move money through the world. And you're going to affect money people by doing business, by running that energy in the world, than you are down here pouring ayahuasca to 20 people at a time.

That's awesome.

Which I thank him.

Now.

What do you think of the advice? Do what you love.

Oh, it's the only advice, like, literally in our company, if we don't love it, we don't do it, and we don't do it if it's hard. So we only do stuff that's easy. So we have a rule that literally we'll be in meetings and. But we need to start filming this. We talk about it all the time. We have meetings and someone will say, I think we're in struggle. I'll say, okay, what's happening? And they'll tell us when it's in struggle. Like, I've literally. It doesn't matter. $250,000 contracts. I can tell you story after story where I'm like, cut it, quit it. We just don't do it if it's hard.

Yeah, well, you know, my whole elf thing, easy, lucrative, and fun.

That's it. I love that.

Yeah. Versus hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. If someone or something is half. And it could be hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating. But if you're, you know, all money's not created equal.

So for us, hard. When it starts to be a struggle, it's not exactly a stop. It's definitely. It's a pot, it's a yield sign. And that's why I want to go. Tell me what's going on. Right? Because we want to kind of stop and sense in. And there's so many stories I could tell you that validate how this is, you know, But I always, like, if the phone won't. I can't get a call through. I literally notice that if the Skype, if the zoom won't work, I really notice that energy, like, oh, this will be interesting to see what happens. And almost every time there's either no connection or. And I'm really walking around. If I am an energetic being, just like dating, I'm walking around in business kind of going, does this Feel good, does it not? Because what I know is that whenever I lost everything before, it didn't feel good.

Were you checking in with those other things also in the past when they failed or were you kind of disconnected?

No, I was super disconnected. I thought from just here up I had no access to any of my intuition or my body. Yeah, I remember the first time a therapist said where do you feel that in your body? And I literally said what body? Like what are you talking about?

Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, because it's all, it was all mental.

Well, you know what I mean. Look, you've done a lot of, you've done a lot of work. And the personal work is parlayed into the business success.

Well, to me, they merge. You can ask anyone in our company, anyone, they'll tell you that. Literally, I look at the business, I think business is the greatest catalyst for your own personal growth because then you can go, what's going on in there? And then, oh, what story do I have? And how can I create a different reality and people? For me, success is what I'm constantly opening up to. You know, there's a level of where you have to keep expanding to be able to receive. Right. I just got interviewed like the Forbes richest self made women and I'm like, what? I mean like literally I'm on the floor crying just two nights ago, just going like, okay, like, just taking all that in. Like, okay, this is it. Like this is keep going bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. That takes as much muscle as I think anything else in life does.

Jo, it's great to be with you.

So good to be here with you. So we're here in New York. We're going to talk about your new book which is Thrive. Look at this. You need to get this immediately. The third metric to redefining success and creating a life of well being, wisdom and wonder. So this is your 14th book?

Yes.

Why'd you write it?

Well, it was like the surprise baby. I had promised myself, my children, everybody who cared for me that I would never write another book because it's always been so stressful and filled with deadlines and sleep deprivation, all the things I was trying to avoid. And then I gave a commencement speech at Smith where I talked about the need to redefine success and move beyond the first two metrics of money and power. Because so many people, including very successful people, were just completely burned out. And instead of finding happiness in success, they're undermining their health, their relationships, etc. The same happened to me incidentally So I was suddenly inundated with all these offers to write a book, and my agent had to sell it to me first. And finally he did. And I promised myself I would write it in a different way, and I did. It was a book, which I wrote without the same kind of sense of stress and pressure that book writing has had for me before. So at least I proved to myself that it can't be done in another way.

Right, okay, so you're literally wanting to redefine the definition of success because you basically say in the book, and you talk about this in your third metric conferences that people can find online if they just look for it, that the definition that we currently have, that people look at money and power and is what success is. And you're saying this is wrong and it's destroying people.

It is, and we have the evidence to prove it. We have 75% of health care costs in America are because of preventable, chronic stress related diseases. And I'm talking about heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera. And women are particularly susceptible to it because we internalize stress differently. You know, you guys are better at handling it than we are. So women in stressful jobs have a 40% greater risk of heart disease and a 60% greater risk of diabetes. So I call this the third women's movement. You know, the first was to give us the vote. The second was to give us equal access to every job at every level, equal pay, et cetera. And it's still an ongoing process. We're not done yet. And the third one though, which is absolutely urgent, is to make sure that we change the world in which we are competing. Because it's not working for women, it's not working for men, it's not working for polar bears. It's not sustainable. And we're all, in some way or another, paying a price. You know, I start the book with my own wake up call.

Yeah, talk about that when you literally collapsed in 2007.

I literally collapsed in 2007 and hit my head on the way down on my desk, broke my cheekbone, got four stitches on my right eye. And then nobody knew exactly what was wrong with me medically. So, you know, I found myself going from MRI to echocardiogram to test after test. And doctors waiting rooms, it turns out, are good places to ask yourself the big questions. What am I doing? What is a good life? Is this really success by conventional definitions of success? I was successful. I was on the Time 100 list, and I was on the COVID of magazines. But by any sane definition of success, I was clearly not successful. So that's what started me on this journey. That was April 6, 2007.

Do you think someone needs to have literally hit bottom or one of these? Do you see people typically change without having a heart attack or having some sort of major breakdown?

I think yes, when the culture changes. So that's why I'm an evangelist for this now. I want people to change and I believe there is a collective longing to change without having painful wake up calls, often much worse than mine, often life threatening wake up calls. And that's why I believe that by putting together three things, my own personal journey, the information about how the world is changing. I mean, 2013 was the year when we had the coming out of circumstances. CEOs not as gay, but as being meditators. You know, literally had Marc Benioff of Salesforce and Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, the third largest health insurance company in America, who came out and said that after his. He broke his neck during a skiing accident. And after being hooked on narcotics, he discovered meditation, yoga and acupuncture. And it transformed his life. Immediately made them available to his 49,000 employees and then brought Duke University to study the results. And they found a 7% reduction in healthcare costs and a 69 minute improvement in productivity a day.

Wow.

So that was my second, the second sort of thread in the book. What are people doing that is advancing our lives in terms of thriving and not just succeeding? And the third one is all the scientific studies. There have been amazing scientific studies about the importance of sleep on our health, our productivity, our creativity. Practically every university now is having a sleep division of meditation on our creativity. So this is not like a trade off. It's not like we're saying, you know, be serene and peaceful and check out of life. On the contrary, what science proves is that the more we actually connect with our own center and our own essence, the more effective we're going to be in the world.

Right?

Yeah.

Well, you know what I want to say, Kathy, for people that have not done a Colby, what's happening right now is in the chat line, everybody's putting their Colby. So can you do me a favor? Because people that know it, know it, but for people that don't. And I think many people have never had an opportunity to hear Kathy Colby herself explain what does all of this mean? Like, what's the difference between conative and cognitive?

Hey, Joe, God love you. I've known you for so many years. And you still don't say it right.

I know.

Conative.

Conative. I know, yeah. If I had a dollar for every time you've corrected me, it'd be I'm.

Going to start carrying a little penny pot around. And every time you say it wrong, even the pennies will add up to a million dollars before long. Okay, so let me tell you what it is. Conation is not how smart you are. My dad Wonderlic personnel test, that all tells you how smart you are. So what? You're smart, what do you do about it? I've hired smart people. Early in running my business, which started over 40 years ago, I used the Wonderlic and I would hire really smart people and then I would think, what the heck? You may think that's a smart answer, but it won't work in the marketplace. They didn't have what it took to understand how to sell or how to create new products they were stuck in. The cognitive requires that you learn what we already know. So smart people can only tell us about the truth of what we know from the past with the data. I'm looking for the future and I know a whole lot of you on this line are doing the same things. Quick starts are very vision oriented. So what the heck is a quick start? And if you aren't initiating in quick start, you do have quick start and we'll talk about it, because every single person in the world has has quick start. You all have a conative different from your cognitive. It's your natural ability, the way you strive, the way you create problems, solutions to problems. Well, you create problems too, but it also helps you create solutions to those problems. So the conative is what you do about what you know. The cognitive is only what you know. It has nothing to do with taking action. And the affect or the emotions are what drives you to want to do it so that you're willing to put forth the energy. So I, as a very young person with my dad working in the cognitive, said, dad, I love you a lot, but I don't think you're right. I still got fed, but I sure got a lot of discussions and arguments. And what I found was very young, that there was a thing that had no name. Nobody could tell me what it was, but it drove who I wanted on my teams. It was this, how do people act? And so I've collected literally for decades, data that then allowed me to prove and validate that. An instrument I created, the assessment called the Colby A index, will tell you the truth. These are your strengths. There's never any bad news. Everybody has an equal amount of cognitive ability. It's not a bell curve and it's not normed like cognitive. So it's the one way we all have an equal amount of conative talent, ability to create solutions. It's the degree to which we understand who we are and how to use it that makes the difference between success and failure. My definition of success, which I think many on the line know, is the freedom to be yourself. Well, right now, with what we're going through with this horrible illness, a lot of people are feeling I've lost my freedom to be myself. I'm stuck at home. Well, but you're free to do what you want to do when you're at home. So don't tell me you're not free. You're free in a different way. You're still free to be you. You can still act on who you are. So go back and revisit your Colby A index, and if you haven't taken it, for goodness sakes, go to Kolbe.com, K-O-L-B-E.com, take the Colby A index, and I'm going to tell you the next best thing you should do. Get your spouse to do that. And then order the Colby A2A, because there is nothing that's going to give you greater freedom to be yourself right now than the person you're living with, your spouse or your significant other knowing what you need. Because the Colby result is not just, here's who I am, these are my strengths. It also tells you, this is what I need to succeed. These are the freedoms I need. If you initiate, in factfinder, you need the freedom to be able to look over the information, to compare options, to look at the past so it informs you in the future. That's if you have a long red line in factfinder, a 7 to 10 in fact finder. I have an itty bitty little two in fact finder, but I still have fact finder. We all do. My factfinder, the gift I have in factfinder, my ability is to simplify. So those of you who have a 1, 2 or 3 in fact finder, don't say, I have no fact finder. That is not true. You have the fact finder ability, the uniqueness to be able to simplify it and say, oh, yeah, I see what's going on. Here's how I'm gonna make it work for me. Because this is a great opportunity for resistant fact finders. Nobody knows what the hell is gonna Happen next. Nobody has the rule book, nobody has the guidelines. By the way, the stupid banks don't know how to even prepare the loans for us. So they keep changing the rules in Washington and then the banks can't get it straight. And those of us trying to get, you know, I decided this morning it's a lot easier to make money than beg banks to help you get the money that the government says you should get. So as a small business person, I'm going back to where I've always been. Do the work, just do the work. Because nobody's going to give you a good handout. That takes more time to get it than just work and make it. So this is a time to create new programs and new products and to make new customer relationships. You can go back to the old and you should and see what you can do to help them. But you should exercise, if you are a resistant fact finder, that energy to simplify it and say, here's bottom line, the best thing, best two or three things I could do. If you're highly initiating have a 7, 8, 9, 10 in fact finder, you should be looking at all of the data. You can look at comparing it, analyzing it, and that will help you make decisions. When you accommodate in the mid zone, it means you can go either way and you can work with people who go either way. So if you look at your significant other's mo, if they have a lot of factfinder and you have a little bit of factfinder, let them read all of it and summarize it for you. Let them yellow highlight for you. Turn it into teamwork, don't make it conflict, make it energizing that you're different in follow through. And I found these four modes over those years of making lists of characteristics, I found that there was a goodly percent of people. And now I can tell you from my data because I've got a million and a half case studies. Yeah, I really do. And I really look at all that data a lot. My bottom line, don't tell David, my son, he looks at it in detail. I look at the bottom line. Okay, so what I saw in follow through is that there are a group of people who have a natural ability to organize, systemicize. And their way of organizing is to do things sequentially. There is a way to start, there is a middle and there is an end. So in school you were told write a story by having a beginning, a middle and an end. Well, if you are initiating follow through, so 6 to 10, really 7 to 10 to initiate. So if you are initiating in follow through, you automatically thought that, oh, there I am, you are. They thought that was good advice to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Those people, and there are a lot of you on this call, I know many of you. There are a lot of just fabulous, resistant follow throughs. It doesn't occur to you that you have to go through that process. And you are the guys, if you're resistant to follow through, who have it made right now because you're good at that randomness. You're good when there is no end in sight, when nobody knows what's going to happen. You're wonderful at multitasking. So for all of you, it is really, really important. I'm going to click. I'm told to click. And I follow directions because I'm a 6 in follow through, so I accommodate. So I just follow the direction there. So if you initiate structure, you would think this would be a horrible time for you. And the answer is, yeah, it is. And we all need to really be kind and considerate to the follow throughs who are helping us do things in an orderly way. I could not do without Nicole, my follow through wonder person on our team. She tells me what I'm supposed to do when I'm supposed to do it. I don't have to spend my energy, my mental energy doing it, because I know she will. You need to lean on the people who give you the cognitive abilities you don't naturally have. Back to so many of you being resistant to follow through. Oh, John's a two and follow through. Oh, I love choose and follow through because they prove me right when I say multitasking comes naturally. I once said that I got an award from a systems organization for being supposedly a great developer of a system. And then they booed me from the podium because I talked about multitasking and they said that's how people get killed. That's terrible. You should never say that. Come on. They don't. If you can't do it, you don't understand how easily you do it. Joe polishes another sitting. Talking to Joe is like being at a circus with the three things going on. I know whatever we're talking about, he's thinking about other things and watching other things. And I mean, it's just delightful to be with people who don't have to stay on one track and don't finish what they start. They pass it on. They're great at being good team members, but if you have one spouse who initiates and follow through and there's a place for everything, and everything in this place. And all the spices are alphabetized. Now, the other spouse is home doing some cooking. Okay, Uren, I say U, R, A, N. I don't know how to pronounce your name, but I know that you would not alphabetize the spices, and if your spouse does, you wouldn't put them back that way. So we have a whole lot of spousal issues, particularly in follow through. And I once remember Dan Sullivan saying at a couples conference where he and I were co presenting and there were a lot of quick start people in the room, and most of the people in the room. This is way back when almost everybody dealing with Dan was a male. And one of the things that was said was, well, and we all need our wives to do the follow through. I believe I leapt out of my seat. I don't think there was anything graceful or polite about what I did because there are as many resistant follow through females as there are males. There are no gender differences in the data that we're seeing. So what that means is we are falsely stereotyping the poor, dutiful wife who is absolutely as unlikely to be a follow through as a male spouse is. So you got to know your results. You can't just say, oh, I can make a good guess. The wives do the follow through. So many people get that wrong. Don't do it because it's cruel, it's unnecessary. It causes a lot of angst in relationships. And I'm going to go back to. If there's one thing I think all of you should do as soon as we stop talking Today, go to Kolbe.com K, O, L, B, E. I have to keep spelling my name. There's now a pretty high up guy in the Catholic Church spelled that way, so it's not that hard. But there was a TB person spelled it differently. K, O, L, B, E. You need to go there. And what you do is both of you, you and your significant other, take the index and then you order the A to A and it will tell you. And I wrote every word of every result, every word of it. And I love doing that writing. I put in a box for all of you a thing that starts with don't even think about it. There's just some things you shouldn't even think of asking your significant other to do. By the way, when you're done doing that, do the same thing with your kids. Get their results if they're 13 or older. We've got a Colby youth assessment it's called the Colby Youth Quiz. And because I care so much about what's happening for the youth right now, I'm really, really worried about them. I'm giving this away free through the end of the month. So go get all the free ones for your kids, your grandkids, and then compare it. I know all seven of my in town grandkids, Colby aptitude results. I know which ones I can help by doing what. And as a grandmother, that's a whole lot of meaningful input for your grandkids right now. You can help them. You also can do it with your clients. Get a client's MO and then match it with yours on the A to A and it'll tell them they shouldn't even think about asking you to do this or expecting that and then tell you about them. It opens up the conversation. I've had clients who have been a little hesitant to use my work in the ways I use it right now. With education, health, wellness issues. Colby.com uses it with business and government. So when I work with people in the medical field, field and I talk about all this stuff, you can imagine some of the reactions I get. I said, well, you know, try it, you'll like it. Or I don't think you're doing such a great job. Why don't you see whether this could help? I tend to be pretty out there with challenging people. If you don't know me, let's get acquainted and I'll help you be more challenging because we need to do that right now. So with that follow through, we need to know who is where on that scale because that is the cause of the greatest amount of conflict between people who live and work together. And right now, if you're doing both, this can save you a lot of angst. The quick start is very interesting. And again, knowing so many of you online and a lot of you of your results up for me to see, it's really interesting how initiating quick starts initiate in moments of stress and distress. There's a great opportunity because the more quick start you have, the more you deal really, really well with uncertainty. If I know what's going to happen, I'm an aid in quick start. Why bother doing it? I'll delegate someone else take it over and do this. If I don't know what is happening, okay, I'm gonna grab it. That's mine. I get to do that project because I don't know where it's going. And I will take all the uncertain projects. It's not unknown cognitively. It's not when you don't know the answer. It's when it's uncertain what's going to be there or happen when there is a moment of uncertainty. Those of you whose col ba result shows you have a seven or more in Quick Start, this is your time, this is your era, this is your moment. Grab it. And if ever there was uncertainty, I never seen anything like this before. This is uncertain time. So I want to see each and every one of you get out there and do the uncertain. Challenge it. Figure out where you fit in, experiment, explore, contribute, do the things that Quick Start and only a Quick Start would be doing right now. If there are 10 other people doing it, get out and go do something else. And don't argue, don't fight, don't compete. Do your thing, because this is when your thing is going to work for you and the world. Now, if you're a resistant Quick Start and I have resisted Quick Start in my family, now is the time when I really, really wish I could give them more hugs because this is a really challenging time for a resistant Quick Start. How about all those bankers who can't figure out how to help you with the loans? By the way, I make all my bankers, my accountants, my attorneys, I make every vendor take a Colby index. I don't want them all to be the same. I want differences. I want a group of people who are my advisors who have conative synergy or differences. That's what you want in your advisors. You don't want to hear everybody give you the same kind of advice from the same mindset. So a resistant Quick Start is a wonderful person to have as a friend right now and in your advisory group because what they naturally do, their go to position is to provide stability. Well, stability is essential. We can talk all we want about or we can innovate. We can come up with a new thing. Yes, but some things in our life have to have stability. What are they? How much do we need saved? Where? How far out can we go? Taking risks. I'm launching a new product line next week. I'm giving away, as I told you, for those kids I want to give away. I feel I should do it and I'm going to do it. I don't know how that's going to affect my business. It's uncertain. But I'm going with my heart. And I think we have to start everything we do with the affect and then move into the conative and then edit. That's the Colby creative process. And with Quick Start resistant people, it is very important for them to keep saying, yes, I understand why you want to do that, cognitively understand it, but it's making me so uncomfortable because where's the stability? We need them to speak up. We need to listen to them. We need them on our teams. Don't let them scare you. Let them inform you. It is the accommodating Quick starts who are earning their spurs right now because they have to run interference between the haves and the have nots in terms of the Quick Start aversion to uncertainty versus the quick starts. Go for it, people. And I kind of wish each and every one of you had some advisor I knew for sure accommodating quick start because I would feel better on your behalf that you were hearing someone say, yeah, but how is that going to impact him? Or what's that going to do to them? I have team members who accommodate in Quick Start, and I really rely on them right now more than ever. So I think that. Oh, David came in and said, do the takes too. Oh, my gosh. Thank you, David. I love you so much. Yes. Go to Colby.com and whatever else you do, do the A to A and Takes two. David wrote takes two, and I'm so proud of that guy. Okay. I gotta tell you, because a lot of you know David. David's the factfinder initiator who taught me the value of factfinder initiators, and he's the guy who is keeping Colby at the top of its game with every single member of his team in place. He's finding ways to make it work through this tough time. And. And he wrote Takes Two and imagine David Zaid in factfinder and Kathy's two, in fact finder. And we have worked together all of his adult. Well, no, from the time he was in junior high school, he edited my stuff. Oh, David, you're welcome. I mean, I just really think you should know when you have conative conflicts, they're real, and we fight through our conflicts. A lot of times I try to bite my tongue and I don't do it very well. And he tries to edit and he doesn't do it very well, but we end up better for it. And I think it's important we understand how vital it is that we don't judge each other, that we let each other contribute in the ways that Colby is showing you are important. I think I learned almost all I've learned about the factfinder mode by watching David over the years. And I kept encouraging him to be a lawyer, and then when he came, when I said, oh my God, I got a lawyer in the family. I use his fact finder legal and his Wharton business degrees and I use all of that and love it. And so you need to learn to love what you sometimes don't like. I don't like doing the fact finder, so I gotta love it when someone else I care about and trust does it in the implementer. The implementer needs the here and now to be okay. The implementer needs quality in their life. They really resist anything that's slipshod. I had an implemented client, I was on the phone and I was trying to help this guy. He's going to, he runs a construction business and he does all kinds of incredibly wonderful implementer things and makes a lot of money doing it. But right now he said, I'm at home, I've got my computer on this rickety table and it's just jiggling back and forth. And the kids have this and the kids have that because they need it to do this work and that work. And I'm stuck on this jiggly table, Kathy. And they said, okay, it serves you right because you know your M.O. and you know you could fix it and you need to take time out, fix the table or build another table, but stop with all the fact finder quick start things you're trying to do and set up your space to fit your needs. I, I think it's really, really important to do that. And I hope all of you value what the implementers are doing right now. The food chain, the medical supplies, the building things in a hurry. They are not going to build things that don't work. If you have implementers building all of that equipment we need, it will work. We got to be really careful that we don't take them out of the position. It really bothers me that I don't know that the medical world is using Colby enough to be sure that we have implementers doing quality check on all these things that are being created an emergency basis. The world would be safer, physically safer with more implementers involved. The implementer doctor can feel your forehead, can touch and know so much more about you than someone who's just looking at a thermometer. I'd love to get Sanjay Gupta's result. If anybody knows him, let's get him to take the Colby because I have a hunch he's a quick start implementer, accommodating to factfinder and resistant to follow through. Let's see if I'm right. Oh, by the way, never guess. No, I Say, and I want to be clear on this, go ahead and guess people's results, but don't act on it, don't hire, don't do anything without double checking. The resistant implementers are also important because they can imagine solutions, they can envision what's going to happen. And right now, when so many of our infrastructures are breaking down, the combination of a resistant implementer working with an initiating follow through can design futuristic equipment and materials and physical scenarios so they can put together the new hospital. You need the quick start involved to make it happen fast. Find the money, find the spot, make it work. You need the follow through, however, the initiating follow through to be sure every single step is lined up ahead of time. It will go more smoothly, but in the end, if you don't have implementers involved in the actual construction, putting it together, we're in danger. So when you hear me say all this, and I could talk for hours about all the benefits and all the values of every single insist and resist and accommodation. The world was created with these 12 strengths and each get four of them, only four. So none of us can do it all. We absolutely need each other. That's why you got to try to save your team. This is the hardest part right now. I think for most of us who run businesses, it's really, really hard. Because if we use Colby, we created synergistic teams. We created teams with the right people in the right place. We not only affectively care about our people, we cognitively know we've done the right thing by putting them together with the conative right fit. Don't give up on using the conative right fit. Don't just throw people together. And if you have to have some people leave, keep checking your synergy. Keep looking at your Colby dynamics. You need to be so sure that you're not giving up the benefits you have available through Colby. Right people in the right place, the right synergy or mix of people, not only on your team, among your advisors, that you have conflicts that you turn into synergy and turn into an advantage because of different points of view. You can do it in your family, you can do it in your business, but for goodness sakes, do it. And if there's a way I can help you, or David can help you, Colby Corp has a group of people in the. Well, they're not in the office, in their homes, but they're all hooked up. However, he's done a magnificent job of making it work. They are there. They are not closed down. Colby Corp is there to Guide you and help you find the right thing. If you're dealing with family, with kids, especially with teenagers, go get that free stuff. Talk to me about next week. I'll be talking to some of you about our work with little tiny ones. I want to get. I want to launch new products next week. Am I crazy? No, I am not crazy. I may be stupid, but I'm not crazy. I am going to launch a new product because the world needs it, right? And that is to find out what the younger kids results are. You all need to know your results if you don't know it, and several of you have been saying, or I know that you've known your results for years. I'd love to see your questions and I'll be here as long as you want me to stay here answering them. Joe, do you have questions?

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, this is great, by the way, so thank you. One of the things that remember you saying to me years ago is that some research that you had done through different schools and stuff is that the majority of the teachers were high research and low quick start. And then the troublemaking kids, which would account for many of the quick starts that were labeled add, ADHD and you know, got sent to the principal's office and were, you know, troublemakers, as you said, you know, the school system was not designed for many that would fall into the entrepreneurial category. So they would be punishing and in many cases drugging these kids because they could not, you know, their mos didn't match who their teachers were. And so it makes me think right now that, you know, my question to you is really about how do entrepreneurs right now maintain focus and clarity? How do they take their troublemaking aspects of them and actually utilize those in talents and just have you really speak to that. Because what made me think of this, and I'm sorry, I'm kind of formulating my question as I'm talking out loud is you said I'm not crazy.

You do?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. You said, you know, I'm not crazy. Maybe stupid, but the fact is, what is crazy? I mean, like what? You know, there's a fine line between, you know, crazy and, you know, genius. And so I'd love to get some of your perspective on it because I think a lot of what manifest is like very bad, dysfunctional, you know, behavior that doesn't serve us is just, you know, these resources that we have as being humans, not creating that, that environment and outlet to utilize it in a great way. Because some people right now will do amazing things to, to help their clients, help their team, help their families and others are, you know, self destructive. I mean, I've had two people I know last week that attempted to commit suicide that were, have families, millionaires and smart. But they, the stress level did not, you know, it's just not working for them. So, so I wanted to have you kind of speak to that a little.

Okay. I want to speak to about five things you just said.

Right, I tried to do that. Yeah. I tried to give you five subjects to talk, which I really did. I mean, if anyone paid attention to that. Yeah, it was kind of a weird.

Yeah, I'm kind of on to you, Joe. So I shouldn't be smiling, but I have to smile when I think about that. Among your questions are some of what I consider our greatest battles. I am doing a very strong research and delivery system to prevent suicide. Suicide has gone up 30% in the last five years with our youth. We've been doing with all these free things we're giving out. Don't tell anybody. I'm looking at the data and part of the data includes an analysis of their self efficacy for youth. And what I'm seeing is a lot of our youth who are insecure are the ones who try to prevent suicide. But when they see their Colby result, the student aptitude quiz tells them how great they are and goes into detail. You're good at this and this and this and these are all the things that you can achieve. And the cost in life, it tends to mitigate that insecurity that leads to suicide. I believe if we use that with adults right now, the more adults who see their Colby now, who have never known it but are down, are really depressed, the more lives we're going to save. So in addition to your own family and the people who are maybe driving you nuts but you couldn't, you can show them how and you can work through it. If you know people who are depressed right now, I do believe one of the important things you could give them is the Colby a index to take. They will both see or read and hear how great they are and how much they have to offer. And we are finding that Colby makes a significant difference in building self efficacy. So I want to say that too, because every single person I know who is depressed, who has taken the Colby, has found some reasons to see value in themselves and to see a future. Right now a lot of people lost what they thought was all they had to do or give and they should also take op gig and you can Get OP gig either when you take a Colba result. OP Gig is our career program and you get it discounted. You go take the Colby A or tell someone to they can then get our career program that says based on your Colby result and your interest, here are all the things you'd be great at. And by the way, you can click on them and see you get all kinds of information you can see, but one thing you can do is click and see where within 100 miles of where you are are their careers job openings for you. So there's hope. So I want to really encourage you to include OP gig with the A for people you know are depressed because it may be losing jobs. Anybody who's lost a job or lost hope, the best thing I can advise is given the colby a and op gig and it is discounted@colby.com now. So do it. Now. Your other question is one, you know, Joe is so dear to my heart also. There's so many things that are dear to my heart. I could go on and on, but you've mentioned too that you know are real hot buttons for me. Do not. If you are a Quick Start follow Quick Start implementer, do not let anybody pathologize that. The schools and parent conferences tell parents, your kid doesn't pay attention, your kid doesn't stay focused. Your kid moves around a lot. Your kid is. Your kid is. So now we probably should put him on drugs, slow this down and you know, pathologizing conative abilities. Well, yeah, the kid's squirrely because you make them sit there how many hours and not move around. How many hours does the teacher stay seated listening to someone talk without getting up and moving around? The teacher can't do it. None of us can do it. We expect kids who are constitutionally unable because of their MO for that to help them show their talent. It's not that they can't do it, it's they can't show their talent and do it. What they show is their disgust, their discomfort. They show that it isn't working. And instead of the teacher saying, oh, I see, this isn't working, the teacher says, the kid isn't doing what I told him to do and therefore the kid's a problem. And I can't have this in my classroom. And then, oh, the parent says, you know what? I'm having problem managing Joey at home too. Joey never finishes Legos. He doesn't do the whole thing. He doesn't follow directions. How many of you follow directions? If I could see the show of Hands. It wouldn't be many because it's the initiating follow through that creates the directions. Who follows the directions. And most of you are not. Because of the nature of you being in this group, that's not probably what you do. There'd be a small percentage. One time, Joe, I had the percentages for. I think everybody was at one of your big programs. But anyway, most of the time, kids who are initiating Quick Start and Implementer are presented as having problems that need to be fixed. And very often the schools recommend meds. Well, they're not medicine. What they are are drugs. And the drugs change their behavior, rob them of the freedom to be themselves, and therefore they won't find success in school again. Success is the freedom to be yourself. If you're drugged so that you don't do that and it slows you down and it changes your brain from your strengths to this oddball concoction, you will not succeed in school. You will not be at your best. And that was done to you. I consider it child abuse.

So. Well, let me ask you some business questions.

So.

Well, no, these are actually all tied together. How did you deal with failure? And what advice could you give to entrepreneurs going through difficulties or struggling? Because certainly you've had a shit ton of that.

Okay, I'm going to try to explain this because I had a download about this a couple months ago.

One of those downloads.

It's one of those things that sounds so simple, yet it's so profound. I know. And I haven't quite the magnitude. Okay. So I saw success, what we consider success and failure, like as a yin and yang, you know, like this energy. And what I saw was that at the same rate you fail, so the amount of failure that you put into. Let's just say failure is the black part of the yin and yang. It's the Yang part. And the success is the white that the amount of energy that you put into that failure is the amount of energy that you can have in success. And I suddenly saw why My life, I'm like, my God, most my life was failure of what people consider. Right? So now I've had the success that's so big. And then I thought back to like a concert violinist think about how much failure there is and how many years. That's the 10,000 hours. Those 10,000 hours are. Aren't 10,000 hours of success. Right. So there's something energetically that I haven't quite figured out. But do you guys understand what I'm talking about? So I think that we should all Be aiming for failure all the time, Lots of it. Lots and lots and lots and lots of failure. Because you're going, I believe that we have a natural propensity to learn and that we're not going to. It's just like oh, fire. We naturally know not to do things and that is going to actually increase the natural magnitude of your success.

Yeah, that makes good point. You know, this thought's coming to me about. I'm trying to. I have a friend who actually talked about how we measure success in let's say love relationships more so over not depth, but duration. Like if you been married for 50 years, well it could have been 50 years of total misery. But if you were married for 50 years you're like that's a successful couple versus maybe you're only in a relationship for one year, but that one year had enormous depth and growth and things like that. Or you've been in business for 20 years but you fucking hate it. You don't let, you know, I mean everything about it's been miserable versus you had a certain period of time where you just, you were winning and you were connected and that sort of thing. So I think depth and just squeezing the much juice out of life in all areas is a far more to me admirable than just long drawn out duration.

I think that's great. We have a saying that we just have to win more than we fail. Because I want my team to fail. I want them to because we don't take those long shots. You know, I want to take the long shots and I know, you know, you know, I'm debt free, I don't have any loans so we're all self funded. So I make sure it doesn't hurt the organism. But I want them taking these risks because the only way, you know, and it might not work and what's the worst thing that happened?

You know, I think here's like, I think the entrepreneurs that get rewarded the most in life is relative to their ability to take those risks and put themselves. And this could be totally taken out of context where it's like, oh, that means be crazy. Because when people hear the word risks they sometimes think, oh, that just means do crazy shit and be willing to lose it all. When you can point to those sort of stories, I mean, I remember in a meeting with Elon Musk, there was about 20 of us there and Peter Diamandis had set it up at SpaceX and one of the guys had asked Elon, you know, how did you. You have, you know, how did you become successful. And he said, you know, I'm willing to endure more pain than anyone that I know. That's what he said. And he also said that he was borrowing money from friends and sleeping on couches, and he bet everything that he had, and had that rocket not flown, he would have just been done. But he was willing to do that. And, you know, and I don't know if that's necessarily a smart thing, you know, because, you know, there's. Now looking back, everyone's like, of course, you know, and it's super admirable, but for every one of those things, there's so much human wreckage. And so. Yeah, but the thing with risk, though, is your thing on failure. No, the thing on failure, though, what you're saying, here's what I'm getting at, is that every time you're willing to. Willing to put yourself out there, you're building that muscle. And by doing that, you develop an endurance and a stamina that cannot come any other way. You can't just think yourself into successful entrepreneurship. You have to just do shit. You don't build a great reputation by talking about what you're going to do. You build a great reputation by doing shit that ends up leading to a great business or a great whatever.

Yes, I would say. And maybe, hopefully that idea was so alive within him. And that's what I tell entrepreneurs. Like, wait till the idea's alive. We will literally go eight months without making a video. And we've had hundreds of millions of views. That seems like a long time in marketing. You would think content, you have to have all this strategic content. But we wait until that idea is so delicious that you can feel the energy and you can feel the aliveness, and then we go towards that campaign. So that's the way we operate. And so hopefully it is worth the risk. So for me, if everything failed tomorrow, which I've been in that situation before, like, I'm happy, right? Like, I. There was nothing that I didn't go for that I wanted to go for. Maybe love. Okay, so we already talked about that, so let's take that one off there. But as far as business, like, there's nothing that I really haven't shot for. And in our business, so that's what I want everybody to feel. Hey, we went for it.

Yeah.

Because to me, the worst thing is when you didn't go for it, you held back and then you sold out. And I mean, that shit, it doesn't feel good. I gotta tell you, it sucks really bad.

Yeah, well, you're either winning or you're learning. That's one thing I learned from Tony. And I remember telling that back to Tony when he. He was going through some media shit that he was dealing with. And it's like, yep, you're either winning or you're learning. He's like, yeah.

What are the five obstacles, pitfalls that I want to caution you against? The first is the devil of negativity. And all people who are as bright and creative as you are, you see, you pay a price. And you pay a price in that you have a rich imagination. And that imagination can not only envision beauty, greatness, achievement, it can envision the opposite. You can envision failure. You can envision people against you. You can envision impossibility. That's the devil. Negativity. I don't know if any of you felt a little hint of it when Peter was talking. When Peter was talking, we were all feeling excited, but I'll bet you some of you, I know I was. Are thinking, God, I'm not as smart as he is. I can't keep up with all this stuff. There's no hope for me. I'm just a loser. You know, I might as well pack my bag and leave right now. The world is going to pass me by, you know, I'm too old anyway. Send me out to pasture. I've done all I can do. And you know, how can I? This guy's got it. I don't have it. And you know, that's the voice of negativity. And I have to see my advice in dealing with that, don't ignore it. Because if you do, it'll keep knocking on your door, recognize it, and then subject it to rational observation. So what I said to myself as I was listening to Peter, I said, peter doesn't want you to feel that way. He wants you to feel inspired. He's here to share a gift with you, take advantage of it.

And.

And sure, it's a lot, and sure he's way smart, but he's here to help you, share with you. So connect with him, work with him, grow with him. And I told the devil to piss.

Off.

But you gotta stare it down. You gotta squash it. It's there in almost everyone who is very imaginative. The imagination. One of my great heroes, Samuel Johnson, had a wonderful phrase, the hunger of the imagination. And he called worry a disease of the imagination. And when you start worrying and getting into these negative places, it's that disease of the. It's the imagination turning against itself and starting to poison and soil the best parts of you and your life. And the remedy when you fall into those states, if you can't talk yourself out of it and stare the devil down. Never worry alone. Profound advice. Never worry. Now, you want to pick your worry partner wisely. You don't want to pick some sadist who says, yeah, you are a loser, but because the minute you connect with someone else, the minute you partner up, the two key variables in worry go away. The two key variables in toxic worry, number one, heightened feeling of vulnerability. It has nothing to do with the reality feeling of vulnerability and diminished feeling of power and control. The minute you talk to someone, the minute you connect with someone, you feel more powerful and less vulnerable. The situation hasn't changed one bit. The reality. Reality hasn't changed one bit. You're just suddenly, instantly better able to deal with it. A good analogy is if you're in a big dark room, alone in a warehouse, you feel afraid, paranoid, scared. If you're in a big dark warehouse with someone, you laugh and giggle. You're not afraid. And this is one of the fundamental facts of life. One of the fundamental facts of life is that we in danger and distress need each other. We need to connect. And one of my fears about modern life is what I call the modern paradox. We have super connected electronically in ways that have changed the world for the better, magnificently. But we've been disconnecting interpersonally. And that's why your coming together here is so important. That's why you really couldn't do this conference virtually. Or you could do it, but it wouldn't have nearly the impact. We really need each other. We need the human moment, not just the electronic moment. The electronic moment is great. Change the world. But don't think we can dispense with the human moment. We need that particularly in dealing with negativity, in dealing with toxic worry, in dealing with these states that are very common amongst highly talented people that can absolutely sabotage you if you're not careful. Because in those states you make bad decisions, you back away from opportunities, you use drugs, you get into trouble. Okay, the next pitfall I'd like to point out is again, all these are two edged swords. They're paradoxes. But it's the flip side of one of your greatest strengths. One of your greatest strengths is your enthusiasm and curiosity. You are naturally enthusiastic, you are naturally curious. But guess what? You can become the victim of your own enthusiasm. You can over commit, you can lose focus. You can have so many good ideas that, that you're not able to nourish and develop any one of them to its fullest. And you can have this chronic frustration of saying, gosh, I've got all these great ideas, I've got all these great contexts, I've got all these great resources, but my garden ain't growing. You know, I'm not getting the kind of full maturity of growth that I want to get. In other words, you have add. See, and I want to plant the seed in your mind to take this notion of ADD seriously. While it's not a disorder, it is a trait. And take seriously considering if you might have it. Because I can tell you there's no condition in all of medicine that can change a person's life more dramatically for the better than the diagnosis and treatment of adult add. It's remarkable how you can go a quantum level up, not only in your professional life, by the way, in your personal life as well. So consider that you might have this. If you are a visionary, a pioneer, full of ideas, have trouble with follow through, impatient, low tolerance of frustration, tendency to procrastination, tendency to go down blind alleys. If any of that sounds familiar, consider that you might have this. And remember, the treatment in no way takes away your special sauce. Quite the opposite. It allows you to make maximum use of it. I often, I make the analogy. Having ADD is like Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls is just a lot of noise and mist until you build a hydroelectric plant. Then you light up the state of New York. That's what the treatment of this condition in adults can do. So consider that I can't talk to an audience like this and not have you. It's like Dean was saying, what am I obligated to say? I am obligated to tell you that there is a possibility to dramatically change your life for the better by considering this. And I won't go into the whole, because we don't have time, but if you grab one of my books, my books are very straightforward and clear. Okay? The third one is more delicate. You all have achieved great success. You have achieved, in most of you, quite a lot of wealth. This allows you to become a jerk. See, because people will tend not to tell you. They will tend not to tell you that you're becoming a jerk. The most obvious example are professional athletes. These people walk around with these sycophants who just, you know, tell them what they want to hear and they behave like horrible jerks. You know, 10 children with 10 different women, none of whom they care about treating people like scum, offering nickel tips, and they're Flaming jerks. We all have it in us to become a jerk, particularly when we become rich, famous and powerful. Give people permission, those who are closest to you, to tell you, you know, dad, you're changing. You know, Joe, you're changing. You're not, by the way, I didn't mean you Joe Polish. I meant Joe Blow. You know, you're not the humble, friendly, what you see is what you get kind of guy anymore. Your success is going to your head and it's not attractive. Now, you may continue to be highly effective. You may continue to be be master of the universe. You may continue to change the world for the better. But on your deathbed, there's not going to be many people standing around feeling very sad. You may get lionized in your obituary, but you're not going to like yourself much. You're not going to leave the kind of legacy of love that is by far the most most important legacy. So give others permission to give you that kind of feedback. I love the simple intervention which Dan taught me. If someone is exhibiting difficult behavior, you don't have to have a year of psychotherapy. Just tell them them to cut it out. And if they'll listen, that can save them a lot of time and money. Okay? The fourth pitfall that I want to point out to you is what I call the itch at the core of the entrepreneurial mind. Most entrepreneurs have an itch. Most of us with this trait feel a need to change our inner state. We need to do something to pump up the volume. We need to do something to make life seem more vivid and alive. When we wake up in the morning, life just isn't as gripping as we want it to be. We have this appetite for more. We have this desire to make life more vivid, to make life more intense, to somehow or other make it gripping enough that we can really engage. And that really is at the core of this trait. Now, you can't make the itch go away, nor should you want to. It's your greatest asset. But it can also be your worst enemy. So what you have to do is be careful how you scratch the itch. Be careful how you scratch the itch. The maladaptive ways of scratching the itch cause enormous trouble. Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, extreme danger seeking. You know, I had one patient who said, I only feel focused and alive when I'm at the racetrack. The horses are coming down the home stretch, and I have a bet down that I can't afford to lose. I had another patient who said, I only feel really focused and Alive. When I'm making love to a woman and I, her husband is on the way home, these are dangerous, these are not adapt. But another one who said I only feel focused and alive when I'm skiing down a sheer face, knowing that I really don't have the skill to do it, hoping that I'll survive. And by the way, Peter's partner in writing writes about these extreme sports, Kotler. What's his first? Stephen Kotler, a wonderful man. And he talks about the states of flow that you can get into by courting danger. But it's not something I think we wouldn't want to risk our lives to scratch the itch. And yet that's what these folks tend to do. In scratching the itch, they resort to danger, to addiction, to all manner of self destructive activities. What they're really seeking is adrenaline. What they're really seeking is nature's own stimulant medication, epinephrine, adrenaline. So what are adaptive ways of scratching the itch? Well, right at the top of the list is my favorite intervention, my favorite drug connection. I call it the other Vitamin C, Vitamin Connect. And, and the beauty of Vitamin Connect is that it's infinite in supply and it's free. The sad part of Vitamin Connect is people don't take it seriously. They'd rather get a prescription for Prozac than spend time with a friend, than get a pet, than love somebody. And it's killing people. We live in a big epidemic of Vitamin Connect deficiency. And the symptoms are lethargy, loss of ambition, loss of hope, low grade depression. And these people are being medicated and what they need to do is turn off their electronics and sit down and talk to somebody. You know, I have nothing against electronics. I love them. They change the world for the better. But we're seeing this growing addiction, this growing epidemic of what I call screen sucking at the expense of getting the kind of connection with other people you need. Number two in terms of adaptive ways of scratching the itch, physical exercise. My friend John Ratey wrote a great book called Spark, the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise in the Brain in which he lays out in absolute hard scientific detail the myriad ways in which physical exercise builds your brain. John calls it the miracle grow of the brain. It's not just good for your body and heart and bones, it's really good for your brain. And you don't have to just wait to go to the gym. When you're working on a project and you get stuck, stand up and do 25 jumping jacks, do 10 push ups, do a few burpees, whatever, run up and down stairs a few times. You. You will push the reset button on your brain. It changes your brain chemistry dramatically within three minutes. So have that as a ready at hand remedy instead of the jar of M&MS. Or the Starbucks and the donut. A quick burst of exercise. And then the third particular way of scratching the itch that I recommend is a creative outlet. You all have come to this instinctively. You know that when you have a creative outlet, when you have a business that you're growing, you feel better. The reason I write so many books, I'm on my 20th book now. The reason I write so many books is not that I'm driven to write books. It's because if I don't have a book going, I get depressed. It's just that simple. If I don't have a book in process, I get depressed. I don't have to be working on it. But the fact that I have it in process gives me a creative outlet. I know it's there and my unconscious is percolating away on it. The same with you guys with your businesses. The fact that you're growing them, the fact that you're here, the fact that you have it in mind, it gives you that creative outlet which scratches the itch. The final in my last 20 seconds pitfall may be the most dangerous of all. The failure to take seriously and develop your loving connections. All the studies on health, longevity, success, and happiness in life come back to the importance of one love. Take it seriously, honor it. Nourish will pay you back over and over again.

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.

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