Dan Sullivan & Ben Hardy: Secrets to Achieving Financial Freedom and Happiness

You can be successful by everybody else's standards. In other words, that you can be a super achiever and not have any of that experience yourself for your entire life. For your entire life. And it's because you're measuring wrong. So that's really what we're talking. We're just going to show you that there's only two ways of measuring what you're doing in life and it's a switch in your brain and for some reason it got switched one way if you're not happy and you can switch it back and that switch can happen in a matter of hours.

For this Genius Network annual event, we tried very hard, very hard to get superstar singers, 35 year old Lady Gaga and 95 year old Tony Bennett to be speakers. But it just didn't work out. Their age gap was too great and Tony wasn't able to make the trip. So we narrowed the gap to increase the gain for you. By doing this for you, you'll be happier, even more successful and even a lot more confident. Did you get what I just did? That was my sneaky way of getting all of the key words. You're going to need to know about two of your most visible and wonderful Genius Network members. One is a bit older and one is a bit younger. And the two of them, despite their age difference, have built a connection that began right here in Genius Network room. This, of course, is one of the biggest benefits for you being part of this amazing network of geniuses. Now, if you've been a member for a while, you've already figured out I'm talking about the one and only Dan Sullivan and the one and only Ben Hardy. The connection that they built through Genius Network resulted so far in two books that they've co authored. The first one, who not how, was an immediate bestseller. Their new book, the title, Gap in the the High Achiever's Guide to Happiness, Confidence and Success, is well on its way. Dan Sullivan, as you know, is a co founder and strategic coach. With his wife and partner, Bab Smith, they have figured out how to achieve a life of significance, free time and financial freedom. When you take or can take off 150 days a year, you're doing something right. Plus, each business year, their business grows and becomes even more successful. Dan has found the keys and shares them in his wonderful programs at strategic coach, Ben Hardy. Excuse me, Dr. Ben Hardy. He has a doctorate degree in what? Psychology.

Organizational psych.

Okay. He's also the author of other books, but these two with Dan are the highlight of his young career. He was one of the youngest members ever to join Genius Network and immediately went into the 100k group his second year together. This amazing team has done tremendous things to narrow the gap and increase the gain. They're here to share with you this interview with Ben. Interviewing Dan, please help me welcome. Listen to this. Our version of Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett, I guess. Anyway, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy.

Dan. So that is for the gap and the gain. Everyone, I think you all got a copy. Dan, I think we wanted to start by you talking about this thing that Timothy gave us yesterday.

Yeah, I was just looking at the concepts that Tim used to structure the entire two days. I said, that's great. But the one thing I want to tell you is that what I've observed in myself and working with entrepreneurs is that it's how you measure your. Your life that really makes a difference. And one thing that's really built into the human brain is that we're measurers. And they know that probably within a couple days, a newborn baby has immediately knows the distinction between its mother and any other shapes that there are in the vicinity. So right from the very start, we measure things because it's crucial to learning. We have to know the difference between things, and we have to know things that are good for us, things that aren't bad for us. And this comes from measuring. And so whether you feel good about your life or you don't feel good about your life, regardless of how it looks from the outside. So I, you know, Babs and I from the very beginning, went for, by comparison, super successful entrepreneurs, okay? So, you know, I think that from an income standpoint, just to qualify for the program, you're not only in the top 1% of the world, but you'd probably be in the top 1/10 of 1%, you know, and so the other thing is that these are outliers. These people are all outliers. There's nothing about where they were born, who they were born to, that really explains what they've done with their lives. They're kind of freaks. They're kind of freaks. And actually, the biggest inequality in the US is not between families. The biggest inequality in the US is actually within families. There's one person in the family that goes through the roof, okay? And so there's a lot of inequality that's involved with superstar entrepreneurs. And I should say that about halfway through the last project, the Gap in the GAIN book, I said, you know, Ben, we need a target reader. We have to have a target reader, okay? So that we're not talking to everybody in the world. We're just talking to one reader. So we did this and we talked about it and I said, tucker Max is our target reader. And we talk about Tucker Max. Came day he was born. He was setting goals. Double goal setter. You don't teach Tucker anything about goal setting. You don't teach Tucker anything about achievement. He had four New York Times bestseller books before he was 30 years old. One of them had been made into a movie. Went to Duke, got his law degree in publishing law. Never went to class once while he was at Duke to get his law degree. And they passed a law in the United States after that that no law student can get their law degree without going to class. Okay. And I'd met him, and you've met him. And I said, God, talented guy. But you could never bring him home to polite company. I mean, he had one word that he used about once out of every five words that I just couldn't have that being said over and over again in polite company. So I said, tucker just has everything to be a super achiever. He just missed all the classes on being happy. So we talked about this and then we talked to Tucker. And so Ben says, do you think that's really true? I said, well, I'll just write him an email. And I just wrote the whole thing. And Tucker came back. He said, this is so bad word true. You can't believe it. Bad word. So the whole point about it is that you can be successful by everybody else's standards. In other words, that you can be a super achiever and not have any of that experience yourself for your entire life. For your entire life. And it's because you're measuring wrong. So that's really what we're talking. We're just going to show you that there's only two ways of measuring what you're doing in life. And it's a switch in your brain. And for some reason, it got switched one way if you're not happy and. And you can switch it back. And that switch can happen in a matter of hours. Okay, so I have about 20,000 entrepreneurs who kind of got that. I mean, not all of them get it. I mean, some people are really committed to their unhappiness. And no, and I mean, humans are strange. You never know what they're going to be committed to. But anyway, so Ben, your take on that take on this, because Ben chooses the books. So Ben not only writes the books, but he gets to, you know, he chooses. Because Ben has a better sense of the major market, book market than I do. And therefore, whatever idea we work on next, it's Ben's job to pick the next one.

Yeah. So just to give a little bit of context and then in a minute I'll have Gina or Rakim or whoever share kind of the core diagram. But when I first read the Gap, and again, it was Dan's Little Book, probably 2018, this was before Dan and I actually fully established a collaboration. It was very clear to me this single framework, if applied, can basically, it essentially applies all of the best of all the research in psychology that I've studied as far as positive psychology and things like that. And so that was actually the book that I was more interested in writing even than who not how, but strategically who not how was the best book to write. And it really is a core strategic coach concept. And Dan and I were thinking. So the three books that immediately I wanted to write with Dan were who not how, the Gap and the gain and 10x is easier than 2x. And Dan and I. And I wasn't sure which book to do after who, not how, 10x is easier than 2x or the gap in the Gain. And so Dan and I had conversations and we thought there's really no use in teaching entrepreneurs how to maximize their growth and to go 10x 10x 10x if they're going to stay in the gap the whole way. And so that's why we did Gap and gain here. 10x is easier than 2x will come out next year, but just as a mindset model. And I'll let Dan explain his structure in a quick second. You're never going to feel successful if you're in the Gap. It does not matter how successful you actually are. Your current situation is not what changes. What we're going to help you understand is how to relook at your current situation so that you're always in the game. You're always, as Dan just described, you're always actually the master. If you're in the Gap, you're never the master because you're making your ideal in the future. The person you hope to become, an unreachable target that you're always chasing. And that's. That's an endless path to nowhere. So how about we share the screen, Gina or Rakim show the diagram, and then Dan out. We really only have probably 15 more minutes and then we'll do a QA. So how about you just basically explain. And a lot of these people have actually already read the Gap in the game. A lot of them are core students of yours, but maybe just from your standpoint, share what you want them to know.

Yeah. So the thing is that I show this to people and I said, you know, these two sides of this diagram are going to look very similar. So I'm going to go through the gap.

We're back to just making it full screen.

Yeah. So we're going to go through the gap first. And the gap works this way. That we have a construct in the human brain which is called an ideal. Okay. And the reason we have that is because one of the fundamental things we have to come to grips with is time. Okay. And we have another model, what I call a mental construct in our brain which deals with space. And we've created a construct there called the horizon line, so that when you're outside, you have a reference point where the sky meets the ground. And that allows you to actually pick a point between where you are and the horizon, so. So that you can actually measure a goal. And for some reason, we don't get really off track about this, that most children in a very short period of time get the horizon. Right. That it's not real, the horizon is not real. It's just a reference point. And they don't judge themselves by not reaching the horizon. They're quite comfortable, but with the ideal, they don't. And I would say that the majority of human beings never adjust to this because they've been told, you know, great people achieve their ideals. Achieve their ideals. But the ideal is just a mental construct that allows us to chunk off a period of time in our brain and then actually create an achievement which we call a goal and actually move towards the goal and achieve the goal. And so both sides do exactly what I've said. So you do that on the gap side and you do this on the gain side. Okay. So it's exactly identical. And all 8 billion. I think that's the current population. All 8 billion human beings are dealing with this every day. And I should say here that my greatest mastery that has come in relationship to the gap is that I only do it four or five times a day.

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.

Okay. After 25 years of getting better at this. I only now do it four or five times a day where I judge myself against an ideal, okay? So the thing I want to say, it's very natural to do this. And the only question is that you want to be aware that you're doing it, okay? Because you'll immediately feel it as a tightness. Your muscles will tighten up, you'll feel a sense of urgency, you'll feel a sense of scarcity in your mind, you'll immediately feel that you're in the gap. And so what the person does is that they achieve their goal and. And then they measure against the ideal and nothing's changed. The ideal is further.

They're always here wanting to be there.

They're always here wanting to be there. And so other people see their achievement, what they've actually done, but they don't see it because they bounced it against the ideal, okay? And they get unhappy, they're dissatisfied, they feel disappointed. And actually, some people can go into a permanent state of depression for this, okay? So the whole thing is that every individual. And we're all on our own with this. There isn't anybody who can help us with this. You just got to get what the true measurement is. And so the gain looks exactly the same. You have the ideal, and the ideals are important. Ideals are very important because they throw illumination on our future. And the other thing is they motivate us. And when times are really tough, it's our ideals that actually allow us to go through very difficult times, as many people have done over the last two years, okay? And you have to go through that, but they're not for measurement. So on the gain side, you have the ideal, you see the goal, you start, and you have an achievement. And then instead of measuring against the ideal, you turn around, measure where you started. And every time you measure where you started, you feel good because you've made progress. May not have been all the progress that your ideal said you were going to make, but you always feel progress. So what I notice is that you become very, very masterful of your own progress. And so I would like to add to Tim's structure here, is that the real master that you want to follow is the master that's based on measuring your progress backwards. And every day you measure your progress backwards, you feel more masterful about your future.

Yeah. One thing I will say, and this is something we discuss in the audiobook, by the way, and some of you probably already listened to it, the audiobook has about two and a half hours of interviews between me and Dan, one crucial thing to realize, and this is something we talked about, is you're not either in the gap or the gain. It's a commitment you have to make if you want to stay in the gap and continue to measure yourself and other people against unreachable ideals which are constantly moving and changing like the horizon. You're making happiness and success impossible for you, your team, everyone around you. And just as an example, personal for me, and I go in the gap, obviously, about myself regularly. And I can tell quickly when I go into the gap now, because I can feel the physiology and just the depression of, why am I not where I could be or should be or why did I do that incorrectly? Like, you know, whenever you start measuring yourself or your situation against what you thought it ideally could have been, you start to start to feel like a loser, no matter what you've done. But I've caught myself, you know, especially with our older three kids, shifting from gap to gain. And I think this is very important with kids, if you're always measuring them against where you think that they could be or should be, you've made success an impossible adventure for them. And with, especially my oldest son, we got him as a foster kid. We got him out of the. Out of a group home when he was seven years old. And I remember all three of those kids were so far behind in school. He was about two years behind in school. And I remember sitting with him and trying to teach him how to read for hours and hours and hours. And it's interesting because as he moves forward and as I move forward, my ideals continue to change for him. And, you know, if I were. He's now 14, very good reader, just brilliant in so many things. But if I'm constantly measuring him against my moving ideals for him, he gets no experience of his own progress. If I can help him see who he is right now against where he was a year ago or back when we were working on his reading, he can start to measure himself accurately, which is not against my ideals, but against his own progress. And so this is a fundamental mindset for yourself, for teams, for the people you're around. And this is something that Dan and I have talked about, but something he's found and you can talk to. But I think one thing that I really want to move to in a second, but one of the things he's found is that once an entrepreneur actually gets this and they start to help see their family or their team and the gain, sometimes it takes some time to overcome the Psychological damage that was imposed by constantly putting the loved ones in the gap. And so that's not to like put pressure, but the gain is where you can start to get healing. And it really is. It's very good. One thing I just wanted to maybe, you know, and you can go wherever you want, Dan. But the thing that I think is helpful is kind of just helping people realize that the past is only theirs to decide that there's no value in beating up your former self. No value. And as an example, if you didn't live the perfect day, if I didn't achieve all my goals today and now I'm in the gap because I was a failure, maybe talk about that. You are the owner of your own experience. Your experiences aren't the owner of you. I don't know if that or you can go wherever you want at this point, Dan.

Yeah, I think I'll follow your directions and go wherever I want.

Exactly. I'm going to go in the gap on that one.

Yeah. I just want to tell you, sometimes the stories are the things. So I had this client, brilliant guy, probably 10 years in coach, and he had gone to medical school and done everything except become a doctor. And he just at a certain point didn't want to become a doctor, but he had valuable skills going through medical school. And he went into the insurance industry and created a company that was called Second Opinion. And it was having to do with the insurance underwriting for really wealthy people. Okay. And it's a real problem. As you know, we have Susan here and they deal with at the top of the world market in terms of wealthy people getting life insurance. And one of the problems with the life insurance industry is the doctors who do the rating are mediocre doctors who follow strictly. You know, it's not based on wisdom, it's not based on knowledge, it's not based experience. They have checklists. And you go through the checklist and do it. So what this person, his name is David, what David did is that he would bring in top notch specialists, medical specialists to the insurance company. And he says, we want a second opinion on this. And we're saying the way the doctor said is that he just applied a standard rule to something, but it doesn't take into account what the person's actual situation is. And in about 80% of the cases he would get a reversal and the person would get rated and then, you know, and so the insurance agent then would get paid and they would get paid part of it, you know, and so that was his business. And he was tremendously good at it, you know, and many of you will deal with this situation, you know, in the future. So anyway, he was telling us a story because he came into the workshop and he learned the gap just as we're doing. This is 25 years ago. And he was the next quarter he came back and he was really, really kind of upset about something. And he told me, he said, you know, after I saw this, he says, I visited with my father and everybody's dead. I don't have siblings. My father is there. And we were sitting there at dinner and my father was just saying, what were you thinking? What were you thinking? And David says, what was I thinking about what, dad? He said, you went through four years of high school and you got 39 A's and one B. What were you thinking? Why couldn't you just work a little harder and get 40? This is 25 years after he graduated from high school. So for 25 years, his father is. Is that the right use?

Anyway.

Cavechin over the fact that his son could have been 40 as and he only got 39 As, 39 A's. And I mean, it was a. Let's say it was a strained rest of the conversation in evening, but he's going home and he has to pull off to the side of the road. And he realized what his father had just done to him, he was doing to his daughter. And it's a killer. I'll tell you. It's an absolute killer. And I've seen it over and over again. And it's funny. Richard Rossi with his thing. The reason why what Richard is talking about is really extraordinary is because we've never actually had a health care system. Only for the first time now are we having a health care system. Up until now, it's been a disease management system. Okay. And you know it because when you get your reports back, if you get a negative report back, it means they're not going to make any money. Say all the reports are negative. This is negative. This is negative. Okay, so what should be really positive for you is actually negative because they're not going to make any money on any of your diseases. And that's the entire healthcare system. I mean, how many of you experienced that? And the doctor says, yeah, yeah, it looks pretty good. This looks pretty good. This looks pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hell, wish I could find something to charge you for. Rather than getting paid for. Wow, another quarter and you're healthier than you've ever been. So the healthcare would be conversation about health not what's wrong with you, but the big thing is that we live in a highly visual world right now, and we can talk. And we're getting teenagers today, especially right during the period when they've switched off the. Their parents. You know, I mean, it's around 10 or 11 years old. You want to be a hero to your kids before 10, because at 10, they switch to. They switch to peers as their judgment. So they start having that sideways communication. But now it's enabled with social media. Now it's, you know, and it's all the visual signs now. And they're going through their most vulnerable period. There's hormone change and. And now they have to develop all sorts of social skills, and they're being presented with images about what they should look like and how successful they should be at 10, 11 years old. And they've got this extreme tendency to be judging themselves by the ideal, okay? And, you know, it's a real problem. And we live in a highly visual. And visual images are much faster to imprint our brains than any other image coming from the outside. But it's a human thing. Every human being has to deal with this, and you have to come to grips with it. So if you can master this. Anytime that you feel yourself really feeling uptight about something you're doing and you're starting to judge yourself, you're in the gap, and you say, okay, where did this start? And the moment you go back to where this started, you said, oh, I'm further ahead than I thought. And immediately the pressure goes away. And so when I say I do it four or five times a day, I only stay with it for about a minute, and I immediately catch myself. It's like sailing, you know, I'm not on the straight line. I'm just tacking back and forth between it. I was divorced from bankrupt on the Same day in August 1978. Divorced in the morning. Got to keep my credit card for lunch. People are very considerate when you've been divorced and bankrupt on the same day. They don't bother you. They just give you massive amount of privacy. Take a as long as you want. Take as long as you want. And I realized that the reason for both was that I wasn't telling myself what I really wanted. I was expecting other people to kind of indicate to me what my goals should be and what my achievements should be. But one of the things I noticed is that I was asking permission of other people about whether I was doing a really good job. And as long as I did that, I was always downplaying myself, actually criticizing myself. And so that's what I've been through. I mean, I've been through. I'm not going to go through the whole history. But during that period I started coaching really, really top notch entrepreneurs. And I just noticed as a coach that individuals who should have every reason in the world to feel proud about themselves and happy about their results weren't. And I had one in particular. He was a movie maker and really superb at his skills. And one day, everybody else, I could get them to say, yeah, that was a good quarter. I'm surprised, you know, now that I think about it, it was really not him. He would never say it. And that diagram that you see up on the screen immediately came to me when I get really pissed off. I do diagrams. And that diagram popped out, the one you saw there. And I said, this is what you're doing. And everybody in the room except him got it. And he didn't last very long. He was with us another six months. But I began to see that for super high achievers who are outliers, you have to become master of your own measurement. You have to declare total ownership of your. Nobody gets to say how you're doing. You're the only person who gets to say how you're doing. And you got to use, you got to measure backwards. If you measure forwards, you're going to be very, very unhappy. And it's chronic. And then people develop all sorts of ways of coping with their unhappiness. Great thing that Joe said to me about two years ago, Joe Polish, he said, you know, the biggest problem with addictions is that people think it's a problem. Addictions are actually a solution. There's something more, a lot worse that you're doing the addiction. He says until you understand that addictions are a solution, you'll never solve any. You'll never get to the real problem. The real problem is this negative lifetime constant measurement of yourself as not achieving your ideals. That's why you're drinking, that's why you're doing dangerous activity. That's why you're gambling. That's what you're doing. Because you can't win this game that goes on in your head every 24 hours. That. Yep. So, I mean, Ben, you know, Ben. What I love about Ben among anything is that if you subtract his age from me, he still hasn't been born. Right. You still have about another 10, 11. But I really love the partnership with him. But one of the big things is Ben's got all the psychological models that support what we're doing here. That's one thing. And that's not my game. I mean, I would never spend the time to do it and, you know, so. But this has really. You've gone down the checklist of all the things that kind of explain this unhappiness. And this diagram really, really does. Well, it's massive. Not perfect. It's not perfect. There's a few things that it doesn't.

No, I think it's a great, great concept and we'll open this up to Q and A in just a quick second. But, yeah, I think one thing just that I wanted to share. Last thought for me and, you know, you guys can entertain any questions you want, but one thing I will say is it is fun working with Dan simply because he does let the who do the how. You know, like, I get to decide literally what the book is, how it's going to be. He gives me feedback, Babs gives me feedback. But ultimately the book is the book that I created and I really enjoy who, not how, collaboration, and it is just a beautiful experience. I will say one of the immediate thoughts that we get regularly of, okay, if I'm going to start measuring myself backwards and being in the gain and actually enjoying my life and actually enjoying my progress, isn't that going to blunt my ambition? Because being in the gap is the reason I'm so successful in the first place. I'm always trying to get to the next place and it is a false idea. Me being in the gain for myself and actually appreciating my progress hasn't stopped, slowed my ambition. It's actually blunted my worry about what anyone else thinks about my progress. I get to take ownership over my own measurements. And that's exactly what Dan said. You have to take ownership of your measurements. None of your opinions of my progress matters to me. Literally, the only person whose opinion of my progress matters to me should be myself. And if I'm in the gap, I'm continuously devaluing my own experiences, devaluing my own progress, beating up my former self because I could have been better or should have been better. And so what it blunts is the noise outside of you and it allows you then to become a more unique individual. Because now that I'm measuring myself backwards rather than against social media ideals or against where I wish I could be, now I can actually see my own progress, enjoy it, think about it, and then start to decide the progress that matters to me, the progress that I want not the progress that I think I should need or that anyone else thinks that I should have. So it really then allows you to play your own game, enjoy your own game, become the more unique individual that you actually are. And it doesn't stop you from having deeper connections with other people. It just simply allows you to determine for yourself what your own life means for yourself. Anything else you want to say before we open it up?

No, I think. I mean, I think. And this, you know, I would say this, is that this relates to everything that goes on in society. And think about political ideals, that people born in the freest country that's ever existed thinks that the country's a disaster because it doesn't meet their ideals.

We have a very gap culture about America right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's very funny. The Founding Fathers, with one exception at the end of their lives, thought that what they had created failed. Washington felt that way. Jefferson felt that way. The only one who didn't is Madison, who actually created the blueprint and at the end of his life. And they all lived a long time, by the way. The average lifespan of the seven or eight people who are considered the founding fathers is roughly 81. At a time when people died, lifespan was 35 or 40. Hamilton died real early because he chose the wrong hobby. You know, dueling. You know, that's not it. Washington died the earliest. He died a year after he was president at 67. But all the others, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin is one of the things. Average age around 83, 84. You know, it was something really big. But Madison said. He said, now he says they're just unhappy because the people that they see coming to the United States don't look like them, and they're snooty about people who are coming to the United States. And he says, we got a great system here. It stops. You know, it makes government almost impossible, which allows other people just to get on with useful things in their life. And he says, no, no, this is a good system. You know, it'll do great. And so the whole point is that the smartest people in the world can be the people most people caught up in the gap, the most highly educated people in the world. The tendency is that they'll be the big gappers, okay? Because they start judging people around them and start judging what's going on around them by impossibly high ideals. And I just see it. I just see it everywhere. I mean, this is pretty. Yeah, I mean, it's very really interesting. And it just deprives you of the, you know, the great freedoms that are really available, greatest freedoms that humans have ever experienced. We're at the healthiest that humans have ever been. You know, poverty levels are dropping, you know, really, really rapidly around the world and everything like that. And it's a terrible world and everything like that. But it has nothing to do with actual measurements. It just has to do with measuring what they see against their ideal of what things should be.

Do we have time for Q and A or.

We have time for a few questions? So online. Kevin, if you can, let us know if there's someone online who has a question.

Joe Clark is ready to rock and Rob Wallace next.

And if anybody here step up to the mic, we probably have time for one or two. Thanks. Yeah, we can't hear you.

You're muted, buddy.

You know, Ben, you hit it.

And.

And I guess I need to know what you think about how to control it, because I know the gap. You know, I've been in strategic coach for 22 years. You're a friend of mine. Love you both dearly. You've made huge impressions on my life. But when I'm in the gap, which is easily identifiable afterwards, is when I've had the greatest progress. It's not when I'm in the game. When I've had the greatest progress, I'm happiest, right? I'm, you know, I'm. I have the most joy when I'm in the. In the game. But how do we regulate that? How do we have success in the game going forward when we're pressing the outer limits of everything that we know and you're talking to a lot of people who have done a lot of shit?

Any thoughts on that, Dan?

Yeah, you're going to have to. I mean, at a certain point.

If.

You'Re freeing yourself up and you can measure it in freedom of time, you have more hours that are available to you. Freedom of money, the quantity is bigger and the quality is better of how you're making your money. The relationships, personal and business, you can measure them. And the fact that your entrepreneurial business is serving really fundamental purposes in your life, both personally and business, you can measure that. And you're still unhappy. You're measuring. Ron.

Okay.

Here's the thing. You can have trauma in your life that need to get fixed. I mean, a lot of people have trauma in their life. I mean, they've had really, really bad things happen to them in their lifetime, you know, and one of the interesting things is Babs and I are very, very close friends with Joe and both Babs and I had really, really incredibly happy childhoods. Well, my mom and dad. My mom and dad, Babs, we are happy. I wouldn't wish anybody Joe's childhood, worst childhood. I mean, it was just a disastrous childhood. And he explores it and everything else. And he had to compensate for the pain with drug addiction, sex addiction. I mean, he tells the whole story and everything else. Well, there are injuries that have been done to yourself that have to be dealt with, okay? And so what I. My sense is, and this is another breakthrough, is the new psychedelic therapies, now that they're using, you know, LSD just got a bad name at the wrong time. You know, it's minute amounts of lsd, mushrooms and all other stuff, okay? And they can walk you through in a matter of months something that's been a deep, dark hole in you for years. And all of a sudden you feel. You don't feel that trauma anymore. You don't feel that. The only question is, how committed are you to your trauma? Because a lot of people have built their life about that. They can't do certain things in their life because so and so did something to them at an early age. And I said, at a certain point, you got to choose. You got to make a choice between what happened to you and how you now want things to be, okay? So I'm not saying that this is going to reverse trauma. It is not going to reverse trauma. But if everywhere that you are making progress, you're being disrespectful, if you don't measure it and say that this is real progress, and I say you're being unfair to yourself, you're being an enemy to yourself if you don't measure backwards and celebrate your progress, which are going to choose, you know, your excuse, Are you going to choose what's actually happening here? And, yeah, and I. And I. I didn't have much trauma in life. Much trauma in life. But, you know, there was a period where I was just doing things wrongly and I was getting bad report cards. Divorce is a bad report card. Bankruptcy is a bad report card. You know, so you have to take responsibility for that. But, yeah, and you're. I mean, you tell the story. You know, you tell the story. You didn't have the ideal childhood.

What I'll say to Joe, and obviously, let's move on, but what I'll say is the gap is when you're measuring yourself against your ideal. We're not telling you to not have ideals, Joe, like you have ideals. Keep going. Keep having Vision. Keep having goals. We're not telling you to not have vision. We're saying stop measuring yourself against it and actually appreciate the gain. And I know that you've said you've already practiced it, but continuously making yourself unhappy about where you're at isn't making you more successful. It's not actually making you better at what you do. Being in the gain means you're actually appreciative of who you are, you see yourself more accurately, and you still have ideals, you're still chasing dreams. I'm still in the middle of writing a book. I'm still chasing targets, but I now see myself a lot better. And it's just a more enjoyable experience.

So we have. I'm sorry, go ahead. So we have eight more minutes. I'm apologizing in advance that we're not going to get to all of your questions, but we do have eight more minutes and we need to take a break. Go ahead.

Let's take the cute guy, though.

It is the nice jacket.

I want one of those.

You and my canines got beautiful jackets. So it's interesting. I might be wrong about this, but when I was preparing the slide deck that we're going to circulate from our talk yesterday, I looked into the founding fathers and entrepreneurialism around them. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, I might be mistaken that James Madison was one of the only ones who wasn't entrepreneurial in his capacity outside of founding the country, which is an interesting.

Yeah, he was a lifetime. He was the greatest, probably the greatest expert on Constitution. He had, like, in his library, like 2,000 constitutions. The interesting thing, he was about 5 foot. I think he was 5 foot one, and he weighed 105 pounds, 110 pounds. But he was the master of the Constitution. And, you know, he became president. He was president for two terms and everything, but no human being, I think, ever had the grasp of constitutions. And the American Constitution is cut and paste. You know, they had 13 colonial constitutions and they put that together. But the Constitution is interesting because the Constitution does not govern the United States. The Constitution protects individual Americans from the government.

Amen.

That's the purpose of the Constitution.

Well, real quick, even before you ask your question, which I want you to do, and I love when Dan talks about politics, whatever he talks about, I will just say the gain puts the responsibility on you to actually get gains from your own experience. That was actually why I acknowledged Michael earlier. You could wonder, what the heck are Dan and Ben talking about? This conversation isn't working. That's the gap. The responsibility is on you to get gains from your own experience and to inflate the value of what you're experiencing. It literally puts a responsibility on you.

Anyways, so the question in there, bringing it back to the ADHD conversation we had to this morning, I am a prototypical ADHD case. I am the poster child for adhd. And when we look at the gap in the gain, one of the things I find challenging and the answer to this might be join strategic coach. But one of the things that I find challenging is I get really bored by measuring where I am in this moment to be able to then go reflect on that in the future moment to look back and say, hey, you've made so much progress from where you were, and I get very exceptionally bored by it. So the only thing I have to reflect on is how am I meeting the ideal future self with the future metrics that I'm imagining and getting excited about daydreaming. So do you have any tips for how I can not get bored measuring?

Yeah. Get over it.

What'd you say? Get over it.

Stop doing that. It's fair.

It's fair.

Okay, simple answer. No, no, no, I'm serious here. He's. He's got a story about how he gets bored and therefore he can't do the things that would make him happy. Well, he's got, you know, he's a special case. You know, he's got a legitimate excuse. He gets bored. No, I'm just telling you what you're doing. I've done it. I've heard lots of people. Nobody gives a shit if you're bored, but you're doing damage to yourself. You're doing damage to. To your relationships, you're doing damage to your family because you got an excuse that you're getting bored.

Oh, of course. Wait, let's give you a mic.

No, no, I mean, you asked the question because I think you're very serious about coming to a resolution on this. Right? But you've got to stop using the boredom. If you want to be a great musician, you have to put in about 40 years of boredom to get to expertise, scales and everything else. Mastery of skills requires things that are really boring. And the question is, is happiness one of those skills you'd like to have, that it's worth being bored every once in a while?

I will also say that measuring progress backwards immediately propels forward imagination, because from a psychological standpoint, confidence is the byproduct of prior performance. So if you actually look at your progress. Take some time to enjoy it and actually think deeply about it. It's only going to propel the imagination you have towards your future self.

Yeah.

And that's a brilliant piece of coaching. And it's totally Toby, if I guess I'm talking to you. Appreciate what you've done. You appreciate your progress. You don't have to spend a whole lot of time doing it. You don't have to stay there. You like, you appreciate your progress and then you get the energy back. I mean, or you get energy to move forward and you keep moving forward. That's the high achieving entrepreneur way of doing it. Except that if you don't take time to say what you did and be happy about it, tell other people, okay.

Here we are, we got here.

Good job, guys. All that kind of stuff. Look at where we were, look at where we are now. Okay, we didn't get to this, but let's keep going and keep going. That's for you too, Joe Clark.

Yeah. And I'd say, you know, one last thing is that every night before I go to bed, I grade the day on the basis of three wins that I had for that day. And if you want to go to the app store, there's a free app called Win Streak that allows you to log in your three wins. And it can be about anything. It can be about anything. And then after you've done that, you look forward to tomorrow and you say, just the way I'm thinking about it now, what are three wins I can do for tomorrow? And you just get into this habit and I tell you, if you get your children on this, and we found as early as four or five years old, you can get them that every night they look at their day and usually start with one. It becomes a habit. And once they get this habit, they're safe for life from other people's judgments, outside reference points and everything else. And, you know, so, you know, I mean, we live and we're born into a haphazard world. You know, it's like, you know, it's like a dice throw of circumstances. We have no control. I mean, we all arrive basically accidentally. But you have to deal. You know, you have to have a skill that actually makes you own the game that you were born into. And I think the skill of measuring backwards actually allows you, day by day, greater and greater ownership of who you are, what you're really unique at and what really gives you pleasure and how you're most useful to other people.

So one just last thought on this and this goes.

Ben, before you do, I'm sorry. So we have one minute left. We're not going to be able to get to the other questions. I'm sorry, but they're here. You can talk to them during the break.

Listen to the audiobook.

So I've listened to the audiobook. I'm in my fifth listening. And that two and a half hours of discussion between you two is absolutely amazing. So thank you. Go ahead.

Yeah, I'll just say, and I quoted this yesterday, but you don't see the outside world. You only see your own reaction to it. Right. So you have a reaction to measuring your progress and enjoying who you are right now. Maybe, but it's just good to see your own reaction. And one of the things that I like about Dan, what he just described, is when you look at the end of your day, you don't see the day. You see your reaction to the day. Are you going to frame it against an ideal and be mad at yourself and beat up yourself because you didn't accomplish everything you could have, or are you going to frame it in the game and choose to contextualize your experience in a way that actually boosts your confidence and where you can actually start to see, okay, what did I get out of today? How am I actually farther today than I was before today? So it actually enables you to learn more from your experiences and to value your experiences more. And again, last thought is for me, and this is something that Dan says, never compare the value of today against any other day. It's not like I have to compare today against tomorrow. That's the gap. I'm just increasing the value of today and seeing that I am actually further along than I was yesterday.

And one thing I'd like to say is that for two years I've worked in collaboration with someone who wrote a book that I would be totally incapable of. And what he wrote really surprised me the way. And it's an idea, you know, in both cases, it's an idea of mine. And however Ben wrote it, I had no image in my mind of how he was supposed to write. I said, wow. Wow, that's amazing. I didn't see that and everything. So I was just sitting there, you know, for usually about three or four months at a time, saying, wow, I wouldn't have written that way, but it makes total sense and everything like that, you know? And the reason is it's going to make me rich and I'm not doing any of the work. That's a game.

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

Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.