Dan Sullivan: How to Find Success While Managing Too Much on Your Plate

What I'm going to take you through is a thought process. And this is really a distillation of almost 40 years now, working personally with about 6,000 very ambitious, very talented, very successful entrepreneurs who share this common characteristic that they've got way too much going on, don't know what to do with the busyness, and they just have a very, very difficult relationship with themselves. And so the thing I'm going to talk to you about is what it is that you need as a toolkit. And the other thing I'd like to say about this sheet of paper, this is the essence of how I live every one of my days. So everything, this map that I've put together is actually when I get out of bed in the morning and how I operate and how I go through the day. And I'd just like to share it with you because I've learned a lot and I've shared it with a lot of people. And it seems to strike home with a lot of people that I work with. And what I've discovered is that if you can stay personally in a state that has four emotions to it, you have a high level of morale, you have a tremendous sense of momentum, there's a very, very high level of motivation, and you have a sense that you're creating multipliers. You're a very happy entrepreneur.

Okay?

And so what I strive to is to show individuals how they can just get themselves into a daily state that goes forward perpetually and that allows them to create a very exciting organization around them and allows them to do incredible work out in the world. And it just allows them to be very valuable individuals who at the end of their life have a tremendous sense of success, satisfaction, and significance. Now it all comes down to how you measure. So what I've discovered is that all happiness comes down to a single factor, and that's measurement. And that is that when you achieve something, how do you measure it? So on this little map in the upper left hand corner, I have an eitheror. And what I want to show you is one way of measuring, and that is that you visualize. You start, everybody starts and they have a picture of something they'd like to achieve. And I call that the ideal. You have an ideal and you visualize yourself in the ideal. And that ideal is not a goal. That ideal shines light on what could be your goals. And you have very specific goals. You go towards and you make progress towards it and you achieve it. And then you measure what it is that you've accomplished. And if you Measure your goal against the ideal. It's like you haven't done anything. You're right back to square one. It's like the horizon line. No matter how you go towards the horizon line, you can't get it. That's a mechanism that we have to make sense of time or make sense of space. But what the ideal is, is our way of making sense with time and serves the same purpose as the horizon line. And we can't get there. But if you measure always your achievement and progress against the ideal, you always feel a tremendous sense of loss that I feel that you're always in the gap and. And it puts you in something that I call the negative zone. And some people, literally high achievers, role models for everybody else, live their entire life in the negative zone simply because they're always measuring their progress and their achievement against the ideal. Okay, they can't win. It's a game that they just can't possibly win. The other way of doing it, it looks almost exactly the same, is that you start, you visualize, you get a picture. Because that's what the ideal does. It shines light on what the immediate actions are that you can take and the achievements that you can have. And you move towards them. You make progress and you have the achievement. And then you measure, but you measure backwards from where you started. And it always feels good. No matter how much progress you had, it always feels good. And what I've discovered is kind of binary. That human beings will either be 1 or 0 on this. They'll either be, they measure against the ideal or they measure against the start. And it's like a switch in your brain. And it's either on the ideal side or it's on the start side. And if you do this for your whole life, then it becomes habitual. So what happens then with this is that the negative zone, if you measure, then you have a set of experiences which reinforce each other. Failure, frustration, disappointment, low self esteem, guilt, and a sense of depression about it. And these things are a downward cycle that tend to reinforce each other. And one of the things that people resort to is various kinds of addictions to give themselves a sense of momentary success that they would have had if they had actually achieved the ideal. And these can be very powerful, various kinds of addictions. And what happens is that they do get the feeling, but it's self destructive. And the cost of it keeps getting greater. The other one is the positive zone. And by always measuring backwards, what you do is you get a sense of success, you get a sense of satisfaction, all the ones, confidence, high self esteem, enjoyment. And there's a tremendous sense of optimism and it all has to do with which position the switch is on in your brain. So the question is, can you train yourself to move the switch over to the. How many of you would, you know, just would actually choose the positive zone to the negative zone just based on what I've said? Okay, but that's important because some people actually like the addictiveness that goes along with the left hand side. And of course they may be heavily addicted and they just can't get out of it. I mean they may have literally, and Ned Hallowell, we've talked about this for hours and hours and hours is that they may literally have changed their brain circuitry and their chemistry in such a way that it's very, very difficult for them to get out of it. But I'm talking with people who have a real desire. They're successful people, very ambitious people, very talented people. So what I started to do personally, and as I said, I'm a self tester. I'm a lot like Tim Ferriss. Everything gets tested on me, okay? I stop short of sticking needles in my legs and everything like that. But I'm a self tester and if it doesn't work for me, no one else hears about it. But the one thing I started 15 years ago was every night when I looked at my day, I accounted for the entire day with three wins. Okay? Just three wins, okay? So no matter what happened that day, it could have been a bad day, could have been a good day. I would find three wins and the three wins represented the day. And then before I went to bed, I would look at the next day and I would say, well, what are the three wins going to be tomorrow that are even better than the three wins I had today? And I've done this every single night for 15 years. And so I literally have this sense that I'm always winning. Okay? And because you do it so often, I'm a great believer in habit that your brain just starts looking for things that you can count as wins, you know, I mean, you know, when I walk through today, when I look at today's workshop, all I'm looking for is what are the wins today? Okay? That's, that's all I'm looking for. I don't care what bad happens, I don't care what doesn't go right or anything else. I'm just looking for the wins. So in the workshop we started doing this where it's just a Paper form takes about five, 10 minutes. People, you know, write down their three wins and they talk about the three wins for tomorrow, and then they share with each other. And it was a real hit. And people started taking it home and teaching their children how to do this. They started changing their family life so that they were having dinner in the evening and everybody in the evening sitting around the children and children take to this really quick. They really like it. Especially it's that connection thing that Ned was talking about. One thing to connect. But if you're connecting about your wins, it's even more powerful.

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's freebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So we were. We were having a lot of success with this, but, you know, it's on a paper piece of paper. Some people do it, some people don't do it. And I said, you know, I'd like to get this to be more widely spread for the entrepreneurs in the program. And so what I did is I talked to my project manager, and we were in January. So I'm just going to tell you what we found out, you know, about this. Okay, so this is Kathy Davis, and she's.

I think that this is such a really exciting and big opportunity for Strategic Coach. For probably just over a year now, lots of people have been asking us to create an app, and there's just never been the right feeling. 1. Until one day in January, Dan and I were sitting in the workshop room, and he has been talking about this concept of three wins. So getting focused on the three wins that you had today and what three wins that you want to set yourself up for tomorrow. And it was like the heavens opened, and that was absolutely the right direction. We felt we wanted to go with this app. I'm really, really happy to say that Strategic Coach, as of the end of June, has launched WinStreak, which is an app to do just that. It tracks the progress that you've made today and allows you to predict what things that you want to happen tomorrow. It just gives you a clear sense of the really great things that you can have happening. We've made sure that this app is really simple to use. We want anybody and everybody to be able to have the opportunity to get themselves On a win streak. So the app is very simple. It's clean, it's clear. And we just want everyone to take charge and start a new habit and get on a win streak.

So that's Kathy. Now in the book, I have a book up here which is called the 80% approach. And this is going to be the rest of my presentation. But there's a bookmark and at the bottom there's a QR code. And you can just put your iPhone on it. And you get the app, it automatically downloads the app. You can give this to anyone. It's a free app and you can send it to anyone. So one of the things is, you know, I figure 7 billion people on the planet, if we all had them on a win streak, it would probably produce a lot of good anyway. So, you know, so anyway. But it's a very simple concept. But what it does is that it solves the big problem of morale. So if you're always on a winning streak, that you have very, very high morale. And high morale makes a lot of things possible. Personally, it makes a lot of things possibly from an organizational standpoint. And that's really what I want to do is, you know, I want your life as an entrepreneur to really be happy. I want you to seem happy and I want your example to spread happiness through your family and through your company. So what I'm going to talk to you about now is. So that's kind of one form of what I would call perfectionism, which is the measuring yourself against the ideal. All perfectionism comes from measuring against the ideal. So Kathy's. I'm going to bring Kathy back a little later and we're going to have a little go between on how we create things because the next part of it is one of the greatest frustrations about entrepreneurs, especially ADD entrepreneurs. There are some Ned that aren't, I want to tell you. And their experience of being in Strategic Coach is like a visit to the zoo, you know, so that, you know, so I've created a structure that actually protects the normal people from the animals. Anyway. So anyway, the. And that would include me. And that would include me. So one of the things I've noticed because I've always worked in like I was a copywriter with BBDO when I started and I've always worked in activities, theater. I was in theater and other activities where there's a lot of deadlines. And I've written a lot. I've written 13 books. And, well, my other writing is probably the equivalent of another 40 or 50 books. And I have to produce a brand new workshop every 90 days. And I've done that every quarter for 25 years, a brand new full workshop for my clients. And I like deadlines. But the problem is the procrastination one. So perfectionism is the one thing that causes extreme unhappiness. The other one is the procrastination that goes along with perfectionism. So what I began to realize that actually just getting something started is the most important thing that you have to do with a project. And I came up with this diagram, which is called 80%. That basically the first move that you make is the 80% most important move that you could make. It's the just getting something started and in action that actually gets everything else moving. And so my role as the entrepreneur is just to do the first 80% and then have that 80% use up a very, very short period of time. So I'm a great starter. Just let's do a survey in the room. How many of the rest of you are starters rather than finishers? Starters rather than finishers. Yeah. And it's a common trait, and a lot of frustration comes because of that.

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

So what I say is that there's a lot of things that all you really have to do is do the first 80%. The world doesn't require 100%. It just requires something. Okay, so it might be the first 80%. And then there are some activities, and we see a lot of them in modern life. Virtually every manufacturing process requires successive 80%. So you have to go from 80% to 96%, and then another 80%, you have to go to 99.2%. And then there's a concept called Six Sigma, which is actually 680%. So if anyone you ever heard that and want to know what it is, it's actually just taking the process to 680%. Chip design, it might be 8 or 9 or 10. 80% surgery. Surgery teams have a lot of 80%. The whole process for making sure an airliner takes off safely and lands safely. United States. You know, before the San Francisco crash, there was 40 million flights with no, you know, with no fatality. You know, so the airline industry has got this down really, really good. The 80% it requires. I mean, their marketing. They could work on their, you know, they could work on their marketing a little bit, because right now their marketing strategy is, we're not happy until you're not happy. But, you know, but I think just on making sure that you take off safely and land safely, I think that they've done a phenomenal job. Okay, So I take this that basically when I come up with an idea, all I have to do is get something started because I'm not going to be the one probably was going to do the other 80%. So relating this back to the gap that if you are going for perfection, then you're starting with a concept of 100%. Right off the bat, you're holding yourself for 100% responsibility. This happens an awful lot with book writing. The author says it's going to be me and I have to do 100% of the writing. And right off the bat, you've condemned yourself to a 50% loss of energy. And just conceiving the book because you've already taken away the possibility of high morale, it immediately puts you in a hole. And the thing about this is that when you set yourself personally for 100%, which is perfection, there's very low teamwork with other people. There's people could help you, but your very attitude cuts you off from the possibility of teamwork. And if there's low teamwork, there's also low innovation. You don't get access to other people's ideas and skills. And the third one is that there's low breakthroughs. If you have low teamwork and you have low innovation, then there's going to be low breakthroughs. And so then that simply reinforces and probably sets you up for the failure syndrome that we were talking about previously. And people go deeper into the negative syndrome. On the other hand, if we take the other approach and it's the 80%, then what happens is that all you're saying is, I'm just responsible for one of the 80% and other people with other skill and other tools are going to be responsible for the next 80%. And the bedrock concept that holds strategic coach together is called unique ability, and that is, or something you do extraordinarily well. And if we can get you to stay within the circle of what you do extraordinarily well, and then outside that circle is everybody else's skills, then you can get an enormous amount done in the world. And the neat thing about this is that all of modern technology is really supporting this position of bringing as many skills as possible together very, very quickly so that there is a great, great possibility of teamwork and innovation and breakthroughs that comes out of this. Okay? So I just consider in my company that I'm just kind of a starter, okay? And I do have some other skills, like I'm a good writer and I'm a good artist, but, you know, I'm pulled in as sort of a craftsman at certain parts of the project, but I'm not in control of those projects. So here are my key principles on this. Number one, get the fastest first step. That's my goal with anything. The moment I get the idea, what's the fastest first step? And I'm actually going to show you a thought process that I use, which is called the Impact Filter. And I do about three or four of these a day. I've trained my brain just to think in this way. The next one is get different abilities involved as fast as you possibly can. You know, don't hold onto a project. Just get it started. Get everybody clear about what the project is, and then get everybody else involved. Next one is, each time you bring another person in, each 80% step introduces new energy into the process, okay? So you have a lot of momentum. Next one is teamwork equals innovation equals breakthroughs. That's, you know, a lot of you have become very successful entrepreneurs, but you've mostly done it on talent. And talent runs out of gas at a certain point. Talent hits a wall at some point, and that, of course, you know, the frustration of a lot of, you know, highly ambitious entrepreneurs is that they're still relying on talent. And at a certain point, you gotta switch to stage two is talent times teamwork. You know, that's the next one, and then the next one is 80% is more useful than 100%. So if I take an 80% approach, I'm probably going to get 10 times more done than if I take 100% approach. And I'm going to be a lot happier. I'm going to have high morale. There's going to be enormous momentum around me within my organization. I'm going to be highly motivated about bigger and better things because I've got a formula for getting things done, getting a lot of other people involved in it. And then the other thing is that I can go 10 times. So one of the other guiding principles is that to be a happy entrepreneur, you should always be working on something where you're going 10 times. It could be 10 times revenues, 10 times profits, what Tim was talking about. You can pull a lot of things together. You can double your free time, you double your free time, increase your personal income by five times. There's a lot of different variations you can do on 10 times. So that's the whole point. But that combination of you operating within your unique ability and having yourself and the entire company motivated by 10 times. Now people say, well, why not a hundred times? And I say, well, do the first 10 times and then do it again. I say 100 times. Immediately you're putting yourself in the gap. Just do 10 times. 10 times is okay. If you do it once, then you're better at it. So do it again. Then you're at 100 times. So the whole thing is not to play a game you can win. Because I just noticed a lot of entrepreneurs just set up the game right from the start. They can't win the game, you know, and you know, I don't know if you believe in the afterlife or not, but you don't have to go to hell if your whole life has been lived out of setting up games that you can't win. You probably worked off all the afterlife punishment. As Prohibian Catholic, I'm an expert on this. Jews invented guilt, but Catholics perfected it. I'm going to talk about the mindset. So the mindset has really been talked about a lot here. It starts with just how your brain's looking at your life, looking at the world, looking at the possibilities. Then I'm going to give you a model that shows you the radical difference between 2x and 10x. And I'm going to show you a method that everybody in this room can do. You can start doing the method that I'm talking about here. You can do that method starting right now. As a matter of fact, you could put together a very good game plan by the time I'm finished here. And then I'm going to give you a map of what the world looks like and what's happening to the world is that it's going binary. And what I mean is that the world always takes on the structure of the economics of the world. So when the world was industrial, the world looked like a factory. Okay. You know, the world wars. I was born during the Second World War. And after the Second World War, for the next 25 or 30 years, America looked like a factory that was producing war materials. It was big, it was multi level. It was a big pyramid. GM had 18 levels from the CEO down to the factory floor. And everybody thought that was Great. The unions were that way, government was that way, but now we're going digital and we're going network. And now the world is rearranging itself along network lines. So it's very, very different. And I'm going to show you basically that there's an emotion you have to have to actually get on one side or the other side of the binary. There's sort of a split going down the middle of the world. You can see it reflected in the news. Every day they talk about the polarization of society. I'm going to show you what the real polarization of society is. And I can say right now that all of you in this room are on the right side, as opposed to the left side. No, but the thing about it is that there's a way of thinking about the world and it starts with the mindset, but it's actually an emotion. And your basic path that you're going to create for yourself in the years ahead comes from a particular emotion.

And.

And there's a counter emotion. And I'm going to show you what that is. Okay, so let's just talk about the model and the mindset, first of all. First of all, I'm going to show you what 2x looks like. And we've got three tools that the brain has that I consider to be tools. And we have a tool called the future. We have a tool called the past, and we have a tool called the present. And these are tools and these are learned because children, newborn children, do not have a time sense. They learn. It takes about two years and the development of language before children begin to realize that there's a difference between what happens before they go to sleep and what happens after they get up in the morning. They call them dark sleep. So a lot of kids come up with dark sleeps as nighttime and short sleeps are naps. But they start to distinguish that there was a before I went to bed last night. And there's something happens and the brain starts to develop. It's like three dimensions. Children do not see three dimensions. Takes quite a while before children get a handle on three dimensionality. It's in the structure of the brain, but it has to be learned. And everybody learns past, present and future completely differently. I've never found two people in all my coaching who look at past, present and future in the same way. And the reason is they're made up. They're made up. People make up the future and they make up the past. People are just as creatively fictional about their past as they are about their future. And so one of the things is it's your property. These three tools are your property and the past, present, future are your property. And you do anything with them that you can get away with. OK, so here's the way 2x works, and I've seen this over and over again, that if you do 2x, you start with the present, you start where you are right now and you got a 2x goal. But you don't go to the future, you actually go to the past. You actually go to the past. And the reason is because we're smart rats. Humans are smart rats and they don't like working. And so they say, I'm going to do 2x and I wonder if I can pull it off without changing anything. So they go back and they do an inventory of the past, of all the things that they don't want to change to get to 2x. And how many of you, if you rearranged a few things, you could probably go 2x, how many of you. And they would be known. You would know right now how you could go to 2x would you know, you could double, you would probably know the means would be there. It's a tightening up on the systems a little smarter, a little better time management, you would know how to get to 2x. And so it's not very exciting. 2x is how many of you 2x really isn't that exciting. It's just not that exciting. And therein lies the issue. 2x is not exciting. It's not exciting for you. And if you tell somebody about it, it's not exciting to them. So there's no new energy in the system. So what happens then is that you actually start in the present and you circle back and you try to pull as much of the past as you possibly can into the future. And the past negotiates with you about your future. How many of you have noticed that the past is union organized? And not only are they unionized, but they drink. They're drinking partners. All the past. Oh, no, no, we're not going to do that. Have a drink, you know, and everything else. And that's one of the biggest things I've noticed is just this, negotiating with the past that most people, when they come up with a goal, they have to go back and first justify it to their past. They have to justify it to their past. Okay, and that you can see the drag immediately on this goal. Now I'm going to show you the other one. So this is the other one. So with 2x, you start with the present trying to change as little of the past as possible. Not exciting. It doesn't cause any inspiration, doesn't cause any electricity. It doesn't cause any real movement that's going to get a lot of people interested in what you're doing. That's why, I mean, when, you know, I sit there and let's see, Peter, what's he going to do? First of all, he's going to take a billion people and make him literate in 18 months, and then he's going to capture name, put his name on it. Asteroid dimandis. It's worth 5 trillion. All right, I got that one. You know, and then you go down the list. These are big. How many of you are excited just sitting there? You know, Just. Just sitting there listening to it? That's. That's the secret of it. It's. It's the excitement. The excitement. There's no. If there's no excitement, there's no electricity. If there's no electricity, there's no movement. You have to have the. You have to have the excitement. So the big thing is that you got to go 10 times or nothing moves. You gotta go 10 times. So with the 10 times, it works just the opposite. You don't start with the present. You actually start with the future. And with the future, you come back and you grab the present, you come back and you loop the present like that, okay? And you leave the past in another category. I'm going to tell you why the past is valuable, because a lot of people say the past is not valuable. I don't think about the past. A lot of entrepreneurs say, I never think about the past. And I said, well, that's too bad, because there's a lot of useful stuff in the past that would be useful for the future. And so don't knock the past. I'm not knocking the past here. I'm not saying bad things about it. I'm simply saying that you got to start with the future as the lead. And here's the deal. The past has to justify itself to the future. The past has to justify itself. The only reason why any of your past gets to come along is because it has a value for the future. So I've got 70 years with the past, and I've got a lot of valuable stuff back there. I got a lot of stuff there, and I'm constantly going back to past experience and saying, what did I learn there that's really valuable? Okay, so here's how it works with 10 times, you start with the future. Freeing your present as much as necessary from the past, you got to free it up. Okay? And that requires some shifts. That requires, you know, that's why Daniel, a lot of the stuff he does, you got to have a brain that can do this, because a lot of the, you know, a lot of the brain, if it's a damaged brain, it's responding to damage that happened in the past. Okay? That's a map of your past. When he gets a bad brain scan, you get, you get. It's a map of the past. I was knocked out twice in a football game when I was 18 years old. And the damage was still sitting there on my brain. You could see the dark section on my brain. In those days, they said, you okay?

Yeah.

Okay, get back in there. You get back in there. Yeah, that's good. I got knocked out. I sat on the bench for about five minutes and got back in. First play, I got knocked out again. Guy said, why don't you sit this one out? The coach said, why don't you sit it out? But I was back on the field next week because that's what men do. I was a man. So that's the model. So that's the model. That's the mindset. So here's the model. So I'm going to put the two of them together, and the two of them are side by side. And you can see the radical difference just visually. Okay. And this is what it looks like in the two times you're trying to pull the past into the future, and in the ten times the present is being pulled into the future and the past, large parts of the past being discarded. How many of you, this actually, when you're doing things well, this is what you do. And when you get really bogged down, you're doing the left hand side. Yeah, that's what happens. See, this happens with all 7 billion people. And nobody's 100% with it. So nobody's 100% in any area of their life. Some people are really advanced in one part of their life, but they're not advanced in other parts of their life. There's parts of their life where the future is really doing the work, but in other parts of their life, the past is giving the orders. It creates tremendous tension. All right, now, how many of you would say that this is probably harder? This is harder and this is easier. So now I'm going to talk about harder and easier. And all things considered, how many of you prefer easier over harder? Yeah. Yeah. And that's really the thing. Now you have the brain that can do this and you've got the experience that can do this. But you got to get the distinctions right. You got to get the circuitry right on this. And it has to do with what you do with past, present and future. You got to get them. You got to get them right. And generally speaking, if your child, if you're thinking about your children and they've spent 20 years in the educational system, and that's usually the case now, 4 years old to 24 years old, you know, they have been almost 99% taught by people who would not even believe in two times. They would not even believe that they would believe. I mean, at a much worse thing. I mean, they, you know, they would go for cost of living. You know, cost of living.

Wow.

I mean, that's what union fights are over cost of living. I mean, that's not very insane. Yeah, so it's a union. So you got to have the right teachers. That's why you come to Genius Network. And I just had a wonderful four days in Rancho Mirage with JJ and Camper and their mindshare. Mindshare. I mean, if you said that in the 1950s, I don't know really what that would all be about. But the whole thing of bringing together people who are future oriented and have an impact, I mean, you just being in this room for two days, your brain will change chemically, your brain will change by being in this room for two days. And Joe is just a master of bringing together people who can provide shifts. They provide, you know, they almost sometimes, you know, I'm sitting here and I'm watching a 10 minute talk. I'm going whack. I just get the, you know, I just get this like. And all of a sudden there's this real shift. And you never go back to the way you were before the shift. So this is the educational system that really, really works. But if you take everybody who does that and has that kind of impact and shift, they do the same thing. They free you from the past. There's this freeing up and you get this real movement toward the future. And remember, past, present, future, they're yours. You make them up. You got to choose what you want to feed them. You got to be careful what you feed those time sense. Okay, so I'm going to talk about harder and easier. So now I'm going to talk about the method. So I'm going to talk about 10 times easier and 2 times harder. And I'm going to talk about 10 times easier because 10 times easier is based on energy. How many of you would know in any situation whether this was energizing or this was stuff? How many of you know the difference between energy and stuff? Energy and stuff. Okay, energy makes you feel good, and stuff makes you feel bad. Okay, that's good. That's good. So I'm going to put energy and stuff. Here's what energy. First of all, I'll start with stuff. Stuff is activities that are devoid of energy. How many of you right now know that you're doing activities that are devoid of energy? Okay, how many of you could make a list of activities that are devoid of energy? How many of you could make a list of people who are devoid of energy in your life? Situations that are devoid of energy. Activities that your company has gotten involved in. Situations that are devoid of energy. Okay, that's stuff. Okay, everybody got stuff. Okay, Energy is. Activities are free from stuff. Activities are free from stuff. What's it feel like when you're freed up from stuff? Yeah, feels like bulletproof coffee. Last thing I did before I came on stage was make sure you have a bulletproof coffee before you get up on stage. Bat in my Adderall. I love adderall. Now, he doesn't recommend. He doesn't recommend. He says, but you might want to try this. You know what I realized when I came back? It took me six weeks to take the first one because I don't know if I want to do this. And I took it and it was just before our workshop and I took it and I walked in and I sat down. I was just. I introduced the group and then I sat down and all of a sudden it was almost like a physical. It was all going bang like that and the whole world went quiet. And I realized that for 66 years I had lived in a world of noise. And this is the first time my life was quiet. And it's been quiet for four years. And these have been the four best years of my life. So I got the scan. Got the scan. Shitty scan. Yeah, it is better. It is better. I saw him a year later and he was amazed. You were amazed, weren't you? How much? It was like a lit up city a year later. It was really good. And I got a lot of confidence out of it, too. So energy and stuff. Okay, now think of the world. I mean, think of Washington right now. You know what Washington is? It is an entire entire organization and ecosystem that's completely devoid of energy. It's just all stuff. Just all stuff. You know, and there's so many of these large organizations, these large systems that were considered just the normal part of life now, that are just stuff. And the reason is they don't have the ability to have a future. They don't have a future. Everything has to be justified on the basis of the past. And you can just see it drains the energy. And you can see what happens to public officials. They come in, they're full of vim and vigor, and they're very, very exciting. You just see them, energy goes out of them. They get sucked in. So the big thing here is this is the method that I'm going to talk to you about right now. So we're going to talk about that. The method for going 10 times consists of eliminating stuff. So how many of you would have a hit list right off the bat of stuff that you can do? And so I'm going to just show you in coach because we, you know, we coach a lot of people and they all come through, but this is sort of the kind of things that people go after. And if you wanted to on your sheet of paper, I know this is on the sheet of paper, you can just write down everything that others do better, everything that drains energy, relationships that go nowhere. And what I'd like you to do with each of those three things, if you see them on the sheet of paper, it's in our little folder on the right hand side down at the bottom. So this is a little strategic coach diagram that we have there. But just write down below each of those words that I have up there, everything that others do better, everything that drains energy, relationships that go nowhere. And just write down a word, a name or a word of something that would be on that list. And I'd like you to have one under each of them. Just write that down. You know, for example, everything that others do better. So what I, you know, the real, real impact that I have on entrepreneurs in the program is I get them to do far, far, far less. You know, they come in and they're doing 20 different things. I say, you're not good at 20 different things. Okay? You're good at three things. You're good at three things. So I do three things. I do what I'm doing right now. I coach my workshops, and I come up with new ideas, and I come up with new diagrams. And in the course of my work year, 95% of my time is made up of those three activities. I got a circle, okay. And I'm not allowed to go outside that circle by my team. Okay. Dan goes out and he Goes, you know what I mean? If I step outside of my circle, I mean, if Dan tries to say anything about the company that doesn't relate to giving a public performance or coaching or creating new material, he's out of bounds. He's out of bounds. And Babs enforces it. She enforces it. And I teach everybody to do that because I came from the entertainment industry. And the entertainment industry, you want the entertainer to entertain. You don't want the entertainer selling tickets. You don't want the entertainer moving furniture backstage. Frank Sinatra does not move pianos. I made a living before he died on that one. He just plays. He just entertains. Every one of you in this room is an entertainer, and you've got a song to sing and an audience to sing to. And anytime you're not singing your song to your audience, it's probably stuff. It's probably stuff. Does that make sense? I mean, I find entertainment's really interesting because it's all about energy. Entertainment, the whole entertainment industry, is just pure energy. If you want to know a model of the future, it's the entertainment industry. And that includes sports. That includes sports. Everything that drains energy. Well, what drains energy? Everybody's got a list, and it's different for everybody. Okay. If I'm not front stage or I'm not doing things front stage, it's probably not. It's probably stuff for me. I'm a front stage guy. Okay, how many of you in this room are kind of front stage people, using the theater term? Yeah, you shouldn't be. Shouldn't be backstage.

Okay.

I mean, you're backstage to prepare for it, and it's really, really different. And the thing is, you can't be disrespectful about what other people find energizing, because everybody's wired. We have Babson. I have a personal bookkeeper who twice. Twice a week, she comes in. She handles all of our bills and everything, and had her for 25 years. And from my perspective, she's done exactly the same thing every day, two days a week for 25 years. So I went in one day. Her name is Mary Beth. And I said, mary Beth, do you like this work? And she said, dan, from one day to the next, you never would know what's going to happen. You see? And I wasn't seeing it. I wasn't seeing it. So we can't make judgments about other people. Everybody's nervous system is constructed differently and what they find stimulating and everything else is different. The only thing is, you want to get them inside their circle. So we do this with all of our team. We have 120 staff, and every one of them, the moment they start the company, we start this process of getting their circles smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until there's just three of them. And we've got 65 people who've been with us more than 10 years. Because going to work every day and just being energized is actually a good way to spend your life. We try to keep them away from stuff and then relationships that go nowhere. That would be both business and. How many of you right now have relationships that's going nowhere? Okay, It's a stuff relationship. It's not going anywhere. Write down the name. All progress starts by telling the truth. BILL W. All progress starts by telling the truth. You have to tell the truth. And the writing hand is connected directly to your brain. 40% of the brain. The hand that you write with is directly. 40% of the brain is connected directly to that hand. Opposable thumb. Human brain takes the opposable thumb really seriously because the opposable thumb basically was one of the big things that created the human brain. Okay, so that's it. Now we're going to go to the other side, increase energy. I start with the stuff because it's annoying and most people can get to it right away now. So here's the energy side of it. Everything that you permanently love, everything that produces growth, and everything that grows confidence. Okay, so I have a big thing that I have a question, and Dean Jackson here. Dean. And I had a great conversation one night. I said, dean, what is the single activity or focus that would absolutely keep you fascinated and motivated for the rest of your life? Fascinating motivator. And it took him about, what, two minutes? Two minutes. Wham. Like that. And, Dean, big difference. Since we did that. Amen. Yeah, I got him on Adderall, too. Yeah. So the big thing is there's a something that is just eternally fascinating. How many of you, when you saw a number of the speakers up here, you knew they were in their sweet zone about what fascinates and motivates them. I mean, Peter, you're just. I mean, you're just a role model. You're the poster child for being in the zone of something that just permanently fascinates and motivates you for the rest of your life. Joe is. I mean, Joe. I mean, if it moves, he'll talk to it. I mean, Joe would call Putin if he thought it was a good interview. No, he's a connector. Joe cannot help not connecting. I mean, it's just fascinating and motivating to him. Scans, I mean, it's more than the scans, Daniel. There's something in there that just totally fascinates and motivates you, and you can't get enough of it. And when you're 20, 30, 40 years older, it'll still fascinate. So if you can get the person just locked into that, you can build everything else around it. And it's a series of questions. I had Jeff. I had this wonderful interview with Jeff when he first came into the program about what it was like to do his first launch where he was charging and he got $1,300 back. And he was just sitting there in a state of awe for a couple days, simply because, first of all, it was equal to their disposable income as a couple for that year. And then. But just where are the possibilities? And I think, you know the book. I read the book, and the book reflects that fascination and motivation with that process. Okay? So that's the entre. That's what really prompted you to become an entrepreneur. It was this point of fascination and motivation that is permanent right at the center. But a lot of entrepreneurs get off track, and then they get tied up with the rewards of doing this activity. And then their life gets very, very complicated and they retire and whatever. So there's this whole thing. So do this, okay? So you get this every three months. What we want you to do is eliminate three stuffs, and we want you to increase three energies. Okay? So you have stuff, stuff, stuff, energy, energy. How many of you? Every three months, you could eliminate three areas of stuff. Big, small, medium in your life, and you could increase three areas of energy and go after the small stuff first, because it gives you a kick of energy. When you eliminate stuff, you get a hit of energy. When you add energy, you get a double hit of energy. So it's really, really great. And then you get those three. And then what we do is this is what it looks like. 36. Over 36 months, you would eliminate 36 areas of stuff, and you would increase 36 areas of energy. How many of you. That would probably. I mean, can you imagine yourself if you got rid of 36 things that are stuff and added 36 things of energy? What do you think it would do to you? What do you think you would be like to other people? The ones you hadn't eliminated, But you would have attracted a lot of people in new life? Because I believe all of life is based on radio frequencies. You send out a certain energy frequency and other people pick up on it. Okay, so that's that. So this is what it looks like. Okay, So I switched it here. So this is the energy going up and the stuff going down, and this is life. You could do this for the rest of your life and every year. And that starts to compound. It isn't like you go. You start to compound. It starts to become exponential. This is where you can actually experience what Peter talks about. Exponential experience is getting rid of the stuff and adding energy, and it takes you right into things that allow you to do things faster, easier, cheaper, all the technologies and everything. This is the proper training, the emotional, psychological training for getting in tune with the technological age. All Uber is, is they got rid of all the stuff and added all the energy. Airbnb, they just get rid of all the stuff and add the energy. All Amazon. I mean, they said, dan. They always. Barnes and Noble. Never called me Dan. Dan. You know, I get so excited and I order. And they said, dan, you already ordered this one. I love that, Dan. How many of you. I love that, Dan. Barnes Noble, Border, borders. No, Dan, Borders with stuff. They're gone. So. No, no, no. I mean, this. I mean, I just want you to see this on the big level. Okay, so let's go to the big level. It's going to wrap up here. So this is the math. Okay? I'm going to talk to you about scarcity because Peter talks a lot about abundance, but I want to talk about scarcity first. And scarcity starts with an emotion. Okay? Okay. So I got a 15 minute grace period here when I'm. We got an agreement, Joe and I, you know. Okay. Okay. So here's all. Stuff. All loss of energy in your life starts with envy. Envy is the emotion that kills energy. Okay? Envy, okay? And envy is looking at what someone else has and wanting them not to have it. That's what envy is. And it's the most. It's the energy killer. Any kind of envy and envy. So it's stuff. Envy is about stuff. What are people envious about? They're envious about stuff. You got more stuff than I got. I don't want you to have that. Okay? All right. And envy leads to guilt because you got more stuff than other people, so you're guilty. So on the one hand you're envious, and on the other hand, you're guilty. Okay? You're guilty. And so you get caught between these two emotions. These are all energy killers. And then there's blame, because you got to blame Somebody why the world is structured such a way that some people have a lot of stuff and other people don't have enough stuff. So now you got three things going. Can you see how this really, really kills energy? And this is how all scarcity, it's a set of emotions that become a system. That's how scarcity, scarcity, there's more than enough for everything to go around. But the energy systems that people or the devoid stuff systems that people prevent there to actually being any abundance. And what that leads to is a sense of massive unfairness. I mean, I went to college, I go back to college reunions and it's about the unfairness of the world, you know, it's about the unfairness of the world. You know, living in America, you know, talk to the Uber drivers. They're all immigrants, they love this place. Their solution is send all the unhappy Americans somewhere they came from. So unfairness and then depletion, the depletion. The planet is being depleted, okay? There isn't enough to go around. In 1800 we crossed a billion. Now we have 7 billion. Average incomes are up 17 times. Lifespan is up 42 years. You know all the great slides that Peter had this morning, there's just massive amounts. And the reason is because it comes out of human imagination and human. The imagining an infinite future and then having more and more energy in your life. And then the other one is the zero sum. If you have something, that means I don't have it. If this person over here has it, it's only at the cost of something. These are killer thoughts. These are killer thoughts. They destroy energy, they destroy any possibility of creativity. Okay? So I call this the scarcity system. And it's a stuff system. The whole thing's based on stuff. And the whole thing's to. All right, now I'm going to. That was quick. I had to get through that quickly. Then I go to the abundance spiral starts with gratitude. Gratitude is the single most powerful energy producing emotion on the planet. Abundance is connected. Gratitude is connected to another word which we use interchangeably, which is called appreciation, which is interesting because it has both a psychological meaning, but it has an economic meaning. So stocks appreciate, land appreciates. So appreciation means growth. And I say that every time you're grateful, you appreciate the value of something, you appreciate the value of that person, but you appreciate who you are because you're grateful. So if you want to know how to enter and continually grow within the world of abundance, you have to be grateful for everything. Okay? And you'll never run out of new things to be grateful for. And people can tell that you're grateful. And people love being around people who are grateful. And they hate being around people who are envious. Okay? So gratitude leads to is energy and it leads to creativity. Steve Jobs, they said, Steve Jobs, what is creativity? He says, it's putting things together. People who put a lot of things together are really creative, Are really creative. You only put things together that you love and you appreciate creativity only. You only put things together that you really like. And creativity leads to cooperation, which is really what capitalism is. FA Hayek said that capitalism is an ever expanding system of increased cooperation among strangers. Big thing there is strangers. So when I was in. And the thing that really gets me about this is the atm. I mean, I, you know, I mean, I grew up in slow times, so ATMs are really, really exciting to me. And we were in Vienna, we were at the soccer hotel, very famous for the soccer tour. And I came down to the concierge and I said, is there an ATM here? Of course he knew what I meant. He says, yes. You come out the front, walk down two blocks till you get to McDonald's, cross the street, and the ATM is right between Starbucks and the Apple store. I go there, they ask you language, okay? They ask you currency. You put in your card. Millions and millions of strangers cooperating with each other. I give and Babs is there. I turn to her and I say, what a world. What a world. I love it. I mean, I love it. This is massive cooperation among strangers. Most of the world still, you can only have cooperation among friends and family. Okay, finally, real quick, opportunity. Opportunity. When you get this, you get massive opportunity, which leads to ingenuity, which leads to Peter's favorite subject, exponentials. And this is the energy system. So what you have to do now is that you have to put a barrier, the abundance barrier between these two systems. Okay? And what you have to do is continually surround yourself with people who are energy people, which I call the abundance neighborhood, which goes like this, goes like this. And this is what this is. This is what Joe is putting. He's putting together abundance. This is what Peter does with abundance. 360. We put together an abundance neighborhood. So this is my whole take on how going from the simple thing of getting past, present and future right in your mind, and then understanding that the mechanism for growing the future is to actually increase the amount of energy in your life, reduce the amount of stuff, you end up in a neighborhood like this. And it's a good world. Thank you. Very much.

A lot of high performing, high achieving people in here. Obviously. How many people are here or do other things to have more, more money, make more money? How many feel a little bit left behind? Like you're a little bit behind where you should be? I'm just going to get my notebook here. Yep, those two things are going to wreck you. And when I say wreck you and I'll circle back with some fundamental concepts, some assumptions that when I talk to people, they've already. They're aware of the assumptions that I'm making. So I'll share those with you shortly. When I say wreck you, I'm going to say it a lot. You're going to get wrecked. Wreck yourself, yada, yada, yada. It's a crypto term. What I mean is behaving in a way that is getting you further away from your espoused values. The things that you say that you want. I want to spend more time with my kids. In order to spend more time with my kids. If I had more money, then I could take them on a vacation. So you spend all day at the office and you are getting further away from spending time with your kids. It's very simple stuff like that, I'm assuming. So the assumptions I'm making are one, that you're human and you're aware that you're human. A lot of people, I would say anybody over 50, all of my best friends are over 50. They go, wow, this makes a lot of sense. Damn it, I wish I knew this sooner. Anybody under like 25 goes, that's the dumbest shit I've ever heard. So most of this room is probably has more experience to relate because it's really about not getting further away from what you want and not blowing yourself up. Right. Another assumption is that you are purpose driven. There's something that you're trying to accomplish. So how many days should I work out? Should I have a YouTube channel? Talked about it yesterday. What coin should I buy? Should I be in crypto? I don't know. I don't know. It depends on where you're at, where you want to be in the timeline in which you want to accomplish it. How many people have that information right now? You could tell me what you have, resources you have right now, what you need in order to fund your dream life and the timeline that you deem appropriate. Meaning, worst case scenario, I'd be okay with this. Does anybody have that right now? Okay, everybody else, how can you possibly inform your behavior on whether or not you should do a Thing. That's my question. Just think about it. Third assumption is that you're okay with open loops. That means I might say something, or anybody here might say something that removes a belief or challenges a belief that you have. And since we're human and we know we are human, we don't like this space, and we will do anything to fill it. How do you know? Proof? Did you go home last night and google anything, or did you google anything while you're sitting here? Anything make you a little uncertain and you're like, hmm, I need to know about that right now. The risk is we got a little space, it's very uncomfortable, and we're trying to fill it, and we will fill it with anything that just kind of fits that space, whether or not it actually serves us or not, relative to where we're at, where we want to be in the timeline that is appropriate. Does that make sense? Okay, so trying to think foundational stuff. Bumpers. Bumpers is. It starts with, I sat down, I wrote bumpers in, like, three and a half, four hours. People said, how do you have so much success in so many different industries? How do you do so many different things? And I couldn't articulate that. I didn't do so many different things. It's the same thing. It looks different. You all have different names. It's the same shit over and over and over. And the fundamental is. The fundamental of it is I feel behind. I need more. Because somewhere along the line, I decided more would solve this problem, right? Like, I need tools to build this house. Somewhere along the line, we started obsessing over the tools, and we forgot about the most efficient way to build the house, right? So we're seeing like, okay, you feel behind, you're rushing, you're pushing. You're doing more and more and more stuff, right? Stuff. More stuff means more resources. You're using more resources. Now you're pushing harder on the gas, like, trying to find the NOS button, you know, like, where's the nitrous oxide here? And you still got the E brake on all bumpers. Is and was and still is. Is removing the E brake. All right, let's take the E brake off. Because we know, given our trajectory, if we don't blow ourselves up, we're probably going to do pretty okay, especially if we're sitting this room. We were here, now we're here. As long as we don't, like, keel over and die or have something tragic happen, we're probably going to be okay. Keys of bumpers. First one is What I call the intention intervention gap. It's the first thing I see in people. It pisses them off. It drives them nuts. It is the gap between what you say you value and what your behaviors suggest that you value. People get really triggered because you hold up a mirror and they don't want to accept it's them. They think it's a window. They think you're an a hole. Cool thing is, I've tricked a lot of people. You hold up a window to a smart person, they still think it's a mirror. They think you're smart. That's how I make smart friends. So we got to be aware of the attention intervention gap. I say I want this. What are the things that I am doing, I am actually doing, not that I think that I'm doing, that is getting me further away from closing this gap. That make sense. You call it a cap gap. Anybody familiar with the cap gap? Capgap K A P. Knowledge, attitude, practice. It's when you go to events and you go to Tony Robbins and you read all these books and your knowledge about a thing starts to change. It expands your attitude towards that thing. Changes and expands. The practice of that thing stays exactly the same. You go to more and more events. That gap gets wider and wider. All these things you know you should be doing, but you're not doing. That's called anxiety. Right. And anxiety is powerlessness multiplied by uncertainty. Right. The wider that gap gets, the more you feel powerless over the fact that you can get there and uncertain about how to do it. I'm throwing like. This is like 21 hours of content that I'm just throwing out there. That makes sense.

Cool.

So to drive anxiety down, what do we do? Drive power over the outcome up and drive uncertainty down or certainty up. So my primary company is not actually about crypto. It's certainty. How do we make sure everybody gets what they actually want? All make sense. Cool. Step one is define what you want. Let me tell you why. Most people in rooms like this, it sounds like a lot of you have don't do that because you're high achievers, you're successful. There's a really good. I also drop a lot of resources, so you can write them down or I can give Joe a list. There is an article by Harvard Business Review called Teaching Smart People how to Learn. It is a deep dive into how the smarter somebody perceives themselves or others perceive them, the less likely they are to learn because it challenges their smartness. They like to close loops quickly so they sound smart. They don't like to sit with uncertainty because they have an identity of being smart and successful. Right? Big reason. People don't define what success actually is to them. For example, I don't have kids, but I use this example. As long as my kids are in the house before they go to school, I need to be home and have dinner with them. That's how I know I'm successful. Now, you can't hide behind your 2 comma Club Award and your Lamborghini because if you're not home by 5pm you're not successful. It really challenges that identity to define this is what actually makes me happy. Does that make sense? So that's step one. I think Dean Jackson and Joe have a, you know, what does success look like? I know I'm successful when.

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.

So it's called Bumpers because the first step, it's like bumpers in a bowling alley. I just sat down and wrote it, typos and all. I didn't really put much thought into it. So Bumpers and a bowling alley. Stay out of the gutter. That's step one. Whether it be the way you look or your body weight, the number in your bank account right now, where your business is at, obviously there's some stuff involved, right? Like Covid happened. We have no control over that. But by and large, those are byproducts. It's an average of everything you've done from the day you were born until right now. Can we agree? You spend a lot of money and then you lose a lot of money and then you make a lot of money. And it's an average of how much you've made, how much you've spent or lost. Your body weight is an average, a rolling average over time of how much you've gained and how much you've lost. Our human nature likes to pretend like New Year's Eve reset. Yeah, there's no reset button. And the human part of us, the human mindset. I'm sure you've read Daniel Kahneman, System 1, System 2. System 1's really the human mindset. The impulsive. It says more is the answer. More is the answer. I did $50,000 this month. I got to do 55 the next month and then 60 and then 70. And what we're doing is we're pushing on the gas with the E brake on, what happens? The engine explodes. We also know that on either side of a valley is a peak. So we've got to be very careful. Careful about pushing for higher valleys all the time. The core of bumpers is to raise the floor. Raise the floor. Doing better than your best, by definition, is nearly impossible for you. If it weren't, your best would be better than it is. Right? It's gonna take a lot of resources. It takes a lot. Have you run marathons or anything or lift weights? It takes a lot to beat your previous best. It doesn't really take that much, as I said yesterday, to do better than your worst. And if we know how averages work and we can agree that the outcome that what we are right now is an average of our bests and our worsts. And it makes a whole lot of sense that from a resource allocation standpoint, raising the floor will put you in a much better position much faster. Make sense. You conceptualize that. Usually I have, like, usually I draw. So we're thinking of rolling averages. Here's some quick examples. There's this weird thing that humans do where we self sabotage as well. We vacillate between chaos and rigidity. So the more rigid, the stricter your diet, the more you want to blow it up. So the more you push to see a new number on that scale, the more likely you are to have something catastrophic happen. Chaos and rigidity, that's what we do. We just vacillate. So in pursuit of more, we typically become too rigid and it leads to chaos. Counterintuitively, sometimes the way that we improve the average is not being more rigid. It's actually being less rigid on our best days. So we're not so chaotic on our worst days. Does that all make sense? Okay, so this is the process of building bumpers. I'll just throw it at you guys real quick. One and bumpers turn into something else. I'll share and I'll tie it into crypto. Avoid bad things. Simple enough. It's way harder than anybody thinks because as many of you know, if it has anybody. Have anybody been through addiction recovery or lost a bunch of weight, any of that stuff, right? When you have a family member that successfully goes through a 12 step program, we celebrate them rightfully.

So.

What message does that tell all the siblings that never did drugs in the first place or had addiction in the first place we're human, we acknowledge we're human. We know that if we're not very, very careful, we will lean towards dopamine. In fact, if I dig myself a hole right now and then dig myself out and share it with you guys, you're gonna celebrate me. That's a lot of resources that wouldn't go into, ended up in the same place. So learning how to appreciate when bad things don't happen is the, is the fundamental skill. And it's very difficult. We can all say, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's very difficult when people are getting celebrated for fucking up and then making it right. So that said, learn how to appreciate when bad things don't happen. And maybe for the people around you that you care about, express appreciation to them when bad things aren't happening to them. Because we seek that right. System One, we don't plan on it, but that human mindset, that System One mind is. It's tricky. How much time do we have?

I'm just going, okay, yeah, keep going.

Yeah. So here's how we really think about bumpers 1 in the context of what you want and talk about boundaries. What are your non negotiables? What are your non negotiables? Mine are in the book. I have one that is I will not start something I am not willing to do forever. That stresses people out. They hate that one. I will not start something I'm not willing to do forever. Why? Because I bias resource allocation and reliability. So if I say, you know, I'm going to go on a meat free diet, I'm not going to eat meat for 90 days, is that something I might be willing to do forever? No. Which means any benefits that come from it are likely temporary. That does not give me any power over the outcome in the long term. It does not drive certainty up over any appreciable amount of time. All we're trying to do is get power over the outcome and drive up certainty. That's it. Reliability. Do any of you are familiar with system reliability, how it works, like from ecology? Okay. The reliability of a system, it's multiplicative, it's a product of the components of the system, right? So a few things happen with our brain, especially when we know it's multiplicative, we do the math wrong. If I flip this light switch at 5am every day, 90% of the time Joe's pay the electric bill and 90% of the time the lights actually work, 81% of the time will I get the outcome? I expect 90% times 90% is 81%. Now, if 90% of the time I actually flip the light switch on and the rest times I forget, Joe will get the outcome he expects 72.9% of the time. 0.9 times 0.9 times 0.9. Make sense? Every component you add to the system drives down reliability. It could drive. This is where people get fucked. Excuse my language. It could drive up the potential upside, but it drives down reliability. I bias reliability. As long as I have control, I know I'm going to get there. So the argument, that's the math. Now, what people do is they think it's multiplicative. So in their brains, like, if I add more things, everything will grow exponentially. But because nothing is perfect, nothing's 100% perfect. Do we agree then? We're dealing in percentages, we're dealing in fractions. It's 99%, 99.999%. Regardless, every component you add drives down reliability. And what do you think the. In today's age where the light almost always turns on, the computer almost always works, what is the least reliable component in every single system? Human behavior. So if I only actually behave the way that I espouse, that I behave 60% of the time, at best, regardless of the reliability of the program I'm on, the marketing, I'm doing, the diet I'm on, I can at best expect less than 60%. There's a less than 60% probability I get the outcome I expect. Right. We're just engineering. So what are we engineering? Okay, so one, non negotiables. Figure out what they are. There's your boundaries. A2 system reliability. Simplify it. If you want control, if you want reliability. I much rather know if I do this, this is going to happen. I'll tie that into crypto in a minute. Because what messes people up is, yeah, but I could get a better result if I also add this thing. And I don't play in the land of hope and pray. That's not my world. That's your world. That's fine. Here's why. Because I discovered almost anybody with like any level of competence, like can engineer what they want, they can engineer what they want. Step one, avoid bad things. That's what Bumpers is about. Let's learn to avoid bad things. And the worst thing in every system ever follow a diet. But this diet doesn't work. This diet doesn't work. This marketing plan doesn't work. I promise, if we just put the camera on you, you're Flipping through these diets, your behavior is not changing. You're not gauging the efficacy of this diet or this marketing plan or this crypto plan. You're just blaming it because you don't want to look in the mirror. So this is really getting a handle on. Here's how you build your bumpers. We use the science of hindsight. I don't say, hey, how do you spend your week typically? I would say track your week. How do you actually spend it? We did this in nutrition, we do this in business. We do this in crypto. What is your actual behavior? Because we're going to modify it from there. Not how do you think you act. So I would track a person's week. I don't do this anymore. But we would track a person's week. Where are you spending your time? It's all over the place, right? You watch more TV on the weekends and yada, yada, yada. And then if we can agree that maybe we should watch the rolling average over time because it's very volatile. There's industry rhythms. Accountants are always going to have a better month before tax season. Gym owners are always going to have better month because of New Year's resolutions, right? That's an industry rhythm. So we have to account for that. We have business rhythm. Some people collect payment all up front. Some collect payment plans. So obviously you should expect if you collect everything up front, then you may not just be able to extrapolate that out over the year. So these are rhythms. There's personal rhythms. Some people just make really bad decisions around Christmas because they hate the fucking holiday. Now we have to know this about ourselves and the way to protect ourselves, get a rolling average over time. It accounts for these rhythms. So if we agree we're gonna look, let's say, at weekly rhythms, we should probably modify our weekly activity, right? So if you spend, what I would do typically is, okay, you spend, keep the math easy, 35 hours a week with your family. But it's all scattered. You know, you fit in here, fit in here, even it out five hours a day, seven days a week, Just even it out. We want to redistribute this in a way that we can get control. You can see it. I have an image in my book. Does that make sense? Then we go, how many sleeping? Keep that the same. How many hours working? How many? This all your activity. And as much as possible, the things that we can, we even it out. It removes some of the volatility. It helps us get control. We have a feedback Loop now. And it's much easier to modify over time. It's much easier to go, you know what, let's go five and a half hours a week. Much easier to add 30 hours a day than try to find these random spots in time. And then, yeah, I think I'm spending more time with my family. I'm not really sure make sense. It's amazing what happens. Two things happen. One, people tend to be happier. I'll use the nutrition example. One, people tend to lose weight. When you say eat the way you've always eaten and just track it and they come back like, you're a fucking genius. I'm eating everything I want and I'm losing weight. You don't realize how much you were just mindlessly eating. And once you have to actually track it, you're like, oh, you know, I'm actually not hungry. But you don't even realize that when you're tracking. So one people think you're a genius because I'm still eating cupcakes, I'm losing weight. That's every time. So same thing, you start going, huh, well shit, if I have to track this, I don't actually want to do it. Well then why would we do it in the first place? So even it out. And then over time, when we start, we just make one adjustment a week. One adjustment a week. Here's what happens. Spend 30, 30 more minutes a day with your family, right? They come back, alright, I'm ready for the next step. Because that's what we do. We just want more. Give us more shit to do. Did you do it well? Yeah, every day except for Saturday. But I'm ready like, nope, do it again. You repeat it until your behavior matches the plan. Now we're gauging the efficacy of the plan. Only when that gap is so small that our behavior matches the plan are we gauging the efficacy of the plan that we have. Make sense? Okay, so that's where Bumper started. I wrote it, my business partner found it, gave it out, listed on Amazon, typos and all. And then eventually Joe found it and now Anna is amazing, she's phenomenal. And now it's much better book what has happened since it's like five years ago. What has happened since is we've developed this methodology and this is where crypto fits in. Is I do not believe data driven people are data driven. I believe they are impulsive and emotional and they look at data to justify their behavior. In fact, the only reason I can think of to look at data right frequency of exposure. Expose yourself to data frequently is to inform behavior. So another foundational principle of mine is I don't do anything unless the asymmetry is to the upside. I don't take even bets. I don't take shitty bets. Asymmetry's got to be upside. If I look at data with no intent of modifying my behavior, the asymmetry is to the downside. I can only incur negative emotion. And I've already decided I'm not going to change my behavior, so I'm just going to sit feeling shitty. For example, are you going to change your diet and exercise? No, I'm way too busy. Well, then don't step on the fucking scale. Zero benefit. Because we're not changing behavior, incurring emotional damage. Do that enough times, you start acting really goofy. So when you throw up your hands and quit, right, it's yo, yo dieting in every area of life. So we. I don't. Look, I track everything because when I do want to modify my behavior, I want a trend line. I don't want a data point or line. I want a trend attract everything. But I do not expose myself to it unless I am willing and ready to modify my behavior around it. Makes sense. Okay, so develop this methodology. It's called certainty. How do you get what you actually want? And this is where crypto fits in. How does somebody want to.

Who.

Who has their number and timeline? Some people raise their hands. Yeah. Where do you want to be in what timeline?

I want to be 20% higher.

Can you use.

Please use the thing.

Oh, sorry.

Online.

Well, first I should say in what. Like, in what. In what realm?

Life. That. That's. Oh, this is. Remember, this is. This is the. This is the. The orientation that I'm gonna employ you to take.

Yeah. Yeah.

You living the life that you deem. Wow, I'm so glad I work so hard. This is worth it. All that matters to me. I don't care about anything else.

Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm really lucky to be pretty much here now. So, you know, there are still some things that I want to be better, including my health. But I'm giving myself, I don't know, probably, I guess, about five years. While I am still really committed to my work, I think of it in terms of, like, what am I really committed to right now? And so I'm, you know, I'm still committed to impacting a lot of people with my work. I still totally enjoy it. And along with that, I'm committed to getting my kids through their young Adults, life, spending really having good time with them and a lot of access to them.

So that's great. By the way, congratulations on being, you know, in a great place.

Yeah.

Then the question is. So this is the question people ask me all day yesterday. Should I be in crypto?

No.

Right. And I'm not.

What, what problem are we solving?

That's right.

Right. That is where we come down to when, when we want a solvable problem. And if, if we had more time, I would challenge you on like, okay, how much money do you actually need and what timeline to make sure your kids are, you know, all that stuff. Yeah, but that's what we're, it's, we call it a solvable problem. So we take this. I need more, I need to be happy, I want time with my kids. It's okay. Let's assign numbers to it because it's a multivariable equation. And if you know math, like fourth grade math, you can't solve for the variable. And in this case the variable is your behavior. If you haven't defined the other variables. Right, because you change this one and then this one changes. And that's what most entrepreneurs are doing. That's how most people are doing. Oh, I'll just change this. Oh, shit. Well, now this changed. Oh, well, now this. They're just chasing shit around all the time. We want to turn it into like, look, given where I'm at, where I want to be, I'll tell you what mine was. I won't tell you. You know, it's for this reason, this reason, this reason I needed $15 million extra on top of what I reliably expect to get by my 40th birthday. Because I just wanted to never have to work again on my 40th birthday. So if somebody comes and says, you know, you should do, and you know, my partner Dan is the finance guy. I just throw out things that he, you know, I think he said, you know, people like, oh, you should really get a huge real estate portfolio. Real estate's great. I'm not going to realize that. Profit by my 40th birthday. So that's probably not good for me and my solvable problem. Nothing wrong with real estate. Oh, you should do a self directed IRA and like, cool. When can I access it? I don't know, when you're 52 or 55 or whatever. Directing resources to something I can't access until I'm 50 something is not going to help me solve the thing that I say is most important to me. I have a framework called Dala d a L a direction or don't act like an asshole or directions for acting like an adult, if that better, you know, fits your sensibilities. Acting like an adult or not acting like an asshole is do not say, this is the most important thing to me and then behave in a way that is not aligned with it. I don't care what your priorities are. Right. Me being an asshole might not be you being an asshole. You do the same behavior. Makes perfect sense for you. So the solvable problem is I need this in this timeline. And we break it down into and this is where we're getting to crypto. And then I'll just answer questions if it's helpful, is where am I at? I got, you know, real estate, cash, business, I expect this much income. Where am I at? Get really clear on that. And these are things I want to accomplish. And this is a timeline. And of course, there's, there's, there's some things are dependent, like, I can't do this thing until I do this thing. And there's some things that are urgent. We got to work through all that. But we get to a number where we say, okay, I need 40 million by 2032. And I typically say, what is the worst case scenario you would be okay with? Worst case scenario, I know all your brains go, but I want best case scenario. Worst case scenario you would be okay with. Because if we could lock that in, boom, locked it in, there's your 40 million. We can then collapse time with higher risk things after we've locked in the thing that's the most important. Because people talk about risk. Reward the biggest risk. I will argue with anybody. The biggest risk. Risk for you is different than risk for me. The biggest risk is that you don't get the things that make you happy, period. So somebody might go, that's too risky. Well, if it is, based on the logic, reasoning, evidence that I have, if this is the most reliable way for me to get what I want, then it's actually risky for me to not do just guarantees that I have no path to get what I want. Whereas you may already have what you want. So exposing yourself to the same risk that I do, that's a huge risk for you.

Yes.

Right.

I love what you're saying. And I'm also in the spot where I really recognize that I don't. It's that thing you were saying earlier of like, I don't want to look at something that's gone way down. Like, it's just not like the potential for Loss right now is way less tolerable for me than having gain. And so, like, when the stock market's all bumping around, I don't even look. I just don't, you know?

Exposure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it just makes me. It just makes me crazy and makes me think, well, maybe I should be doing something different. It's like, no, I already decided that. I already decided what I'm doing, so I'm not going to look at it.

Perfect. Right? And we can inform behavior where now we can say, okay, you're here and you want to be here. Given what you have, you're already on track. Or you need 3% a year to get where. Where you want to be. Cool. Stock market will probably deliver that. Right? We don't take any more risk than is necessary to lock in the thing that matters most. But what if I miss this huge crypto wave? Who fucking cares if you have all the things you want in life?

Yeah. Yeah. And especially who cares if you don't look.

Correct. Correct. So here's what we know that's been.

The hardest part of this last, you know, this last few years or whatever. Everybody's like, why aren't you in crypto?

Yeah, well, nobody.

La, la, la, la.

Nobody gives a shit about where you're at and where you want to be. Right? Everybody's just like, look, things are going up, things are going up. And then, of course, everybody buys and it goes down. That's how it works. That would be me.

If you want crypto to go down, how can you.

Well, so we'll talk about. We'll talk about crypto. Here's what. What we know. We know that a loss feels worse than an equivalent gain. Feels good. You just touched on it. We know that. So frequency of exposure, it goes up 50%. Down 50% all day long, you just watch it. Even at a break, even you've incurred a massive emotional loss.

Yes.

Right. We have to know this about ourselves. So if we know that we are susceptible to that, then we do not trade crypto in a way that we are exposed to charts. That's probably where you like, give it to somebody else and say, manage my shit.

Yes.

Right.

So let me tell you this. Other than this is, you could say, I'm here, I want to be here. I need this return. This isn't. This is all that I'll answer questions about crypto and stuff, but it's not about, pick a coin. That's the worst way to trade. Pick a coin, like, good luck. But if you know over 10 years, you need 16%. How many people are familiar with anchor protocol? Yeah, drop it in anchor protocol and be done. You know, that's how we decide what we get exposed to. The solvable problem informs behavior. So if we don't blow ourselves up and we can not have FOMO not chase and use. We have our bumpers up, and we use our solvable problem to inform behavior, we have the highest probability of getting the things that we actually want. And that's all I care about. I don't care if your business is bigger. I don't care about any of that stuff. I'm not a crypto maxi. I'm not a ad maxi, marketing maxi. I'm like a how the hell do we get you with things that make you happy maxi. And that's a combination of many things.

What was it for you, and how do you most effectively do that to someone else?

Yeah, that's beautiful. I want to kind of riff on some of the things you just said, because you said so many great things there. I mean, sales is 101. You want to be successful in business and in life, you need to be able to sell. Now, you can use the word sale. Sometimes we use a euphemism. We say enrollment. You know, enrollment conversation. You want to get your kids to brush their teeth. It's an enrollment. You want them to get the do their homeworks. Enrollment. You want to have sex. It's an enrollment conversation. A little bit different. Enrollment, enrollment conversation, but it's an enrollment conversation. You're selling somebody on something. And I think one of the greatest shortcuts, because I think it's kind of cool if we give some little nuggets here of shortcuts for people that you can get into that heart space. That's the term I typically use, is when you say you're gonna show up for a friend and empathize and listen and coach and hold up a mirror, and all the good stuff you do. If you were really a great friend, friend, not just enable them, but be a great friend to them, you're really in your heart space. And that heart space for a person who's not your great friend yet is education. So to me, if you just teach, you just go into teaching mode, that it puts you in that place. It's a shortcut. How can I teach them something? So here's your problem. I'm going to teach you about your problem. But actually, you tell me what your problem is, right? Just you can ask, what's the biggest challenge you're Having right now in your business or in your personal life. Right. They'll tell you, what's the solution? Because Socrates said all learning is remembering. So you just. All new information comes from out there. You could be the genius if you want to be, but the fact of the matter is, they're probably going to have more of the answers than you'd think anyway. So just ask them. Right.

Exactly.

What's the solution?

What are some of the things that might help you to shift from that problem to that solution again? Again, you can just educate them in the process as you're enrolling them, as you're selling them. I actually like telling them that's exactly what we're doing. There's going to be something here that's going to be of interest to you. We'll get to that when it's time. But in the moment, I'd like to just share with you the sales process and how this works and how it works. So it's reciprocal. So there's a benefit to both of us in engaging in this way and how you can learn something valuable as you're also about to take action to change your life. Right, Right. And that when you. When you kind of pull the curtain back a little bit and you share that, that's what you're about and that's what you're doing. You're authentic.

Yes. You're being.

In your heart, you're teaching. There's an education to it. And at the same time, you're enrolling them.

Right.

That is, you're selling them. Right. So that just trips me, you know, like, that's just great, I think, as a shortcut. And then you said that you. First, you have to start with yourself. Right, Right. Enroll yourself. How do you change anybody else's life? How do you do anything different tomorrow than you did yesterday or today if you're not able to start off? By getting leverage over you.

Right, exactly. Getting leverage over you. It's a great term.

Yeah.

So to me, one of the cool things I love in the book, and I say this to people, is that the power of your life. Excuse me, quality of your life is equal to the quality of your rituals and the things that you do consciously, repetitively that you practice, that this is what's going to determine the ongoing elevation of your consciousness and your own personal unfolding. And so that starts with how you wake up so you can go through a whole day's worth of rituals and things. But just what is it that you do to begin your day? And when does the enrollment start. Why don't you start selling you on you. I was with Stedman Graham the other night for the little party to launch Pivot, which was great, and he gave a great talk. And one of the things he said that's the most challenging in the world, where he's constantly, through his philanthropic activities, coming across young people that are really challenged and are coming from challenged circumstances, you know, where they live and how they've grown up and who their parents have been, et cetera, and a lot of addiction, a lot of poverty, a lot of discrimination and things like that. And he said that the key to elevating yourself out of those circumstances, the way he was able to elevate himself out of circumstances where he was born in that same sort of situation, was knowing thyself. Like it's, it's that know thyself thing. But to, to really explore who you are until you have some sense of that, so you have a beat on who you are, it's impossible be authentic with anybody else. Which means you're never going to be good at selling because. Because people can smell it. They can smell it when there's a fraud, right?

Yeah, totally.

So.

And.

And when you're second guessing yourself all the time, it's very hard to be engaged and connected and influential because you're constantly second guessing yourself. And one of the reasons that people don't go to higher levels is they do such a shitty job of persuading themselves and influencing themselves. And what you're saying with rituals, I personally think rituals are everything. I mean, I saw this on the back of a guy's T shirt in the airport several years ago. It said winners Find Ways. And it had something to do with some sports jersey. And I was like, that's a really great line. And I checked to see if the URL was available, and it actually was. So I registered Winners Find Ways. And at this point, I've still never done anything with it, but I love the term and I've thought about it a lot, because losers Find Ways.

Also.

Now, I don't mean like a loser person as a human, it's just if your life isn't working, there are certain things and certain rituals that you're doing that are causing it to not work. And if your life is working, there are certain things that you do in a way that's making it work. I don't believe in good habits or bad habits. Not to debate semantics, it's just that I understand what people mean when saying I've got really bad Habits. I mean, I can point to things that I've done or have, have, you know, might be currently doing that aren't the highest and best use of my time. It could be done more effectively and that sort of stuff. But it's like if you wake up every day and you guzzle five cups of coffee, smoke a pack of cigarettes, yell at your wife or your husband, kick your dog and just have a really shitty attitude, you've developed really great habits about eating fast food, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes. I mean, you've really developed that. So when people have things that I can look at people's lives that are just a mess and reverse engineer what it is they're doing that's causing it to show up. That way I can look back in my life when it was just not working very well, and I could look and see, well, obviously, because I was doing certain things in a certain way. And you can wake up and turn it all around. I mean, it may not be easy, but it is. Absolutely. You know, that's why it's so great to see someone that has made a transformation, because most people don't. But in reality, there's not a lot of real complications to some of the successes now. Some successes, yeah. There's a lot involved. There's a lot of effort. But I mean, sometimes if someone just changes their sleep, it could transform their life.

Sometimes it's so simple that it would shock, you know, something shocking. It's shocking. It's shocking how simple some of these changes can be for folks. Because for the most part, people think, you know, they're not happy, it's not the way I want and all that kind of thing, but yet they still play the refrain in their mind that they know what's best for them, that I know that kind of thing. And I sometimes say, you know, everybody in this room is an extra. How many of you believe you're an expert?

Right?

And, you know, it's a few hands. And I said, no, no, everybody's hands goes up. So you're an expert. And here's why you're an expert. Because you're an expert at getting exactly the same whatever results you've got in your life. You're an expert at it. You're an expert at how to have the relationships you have. You're an expert at how to have the body you have. You're an expert at how to have the business you've got. You're all experts at it.

Yeah.

Oh, and I say, and the thing about it is that it really is just learning something new, being open to turning around those words. I know that. And saying instead. My greatest obstacle in life is not even learning more, it's unlearning. Some of the things that I think are true, that I believe, and that's truly shocking, is how people will hold, hold on so desperately to their beliefs, to their precious beliefs, which they often don't even realize are not even their own beliefs, they're someone else's. They're their parents, their grandparents, whatever, it's collective DNA of, you know, generations or whatever. And they hold on to those beliefs like they're a life server, life preserver and it's the rock that's dragging them to the bottom.

Yeah, absolutely. Completely agree. What's funny with Genius Network, my high level group for entrepreneurs, I focus more. It's sort of a trick that I play with on really successful people because the type of clients that, you know, I have clients at all different levels, but the ones that I actually take money from are usually very successful running multi million dollar companies. And we give them strategies, we give them all kinds of things to look at, talk about their challenges or opportunities, the messes in their life. One of my favorite tools though is the not to do list, which we have a not to do list. We have a not now list, which you may have great ideas, but it may not be great right now. And the thing that's hard to share with people that are pursuing more ideas and more strategies and always want to learn is that unlearning is infinitely more valuable than learning because it's the shit that we need to unlearn that will make the most difference in your life. And I interviewed this guy about a year and a half ago on addiction named Roy Nelson, in his 70s, and he wrote a book called Love Notes from Hell. And we were talking in the interview about people that are in recovery because he'll help addicts, people at the very worst level that just have not been able to make any headway from rehab centers and all kinds of stuff. And he says one of the challenges with the way that some people, people pursue personal development is they're trying to learn stuff. But if you don't discard, if you don't clean out the stuff that you know, it's like putting whipped cream on top of dog shit.

Yeah.

And he goes, and if you don't clean out the dog shit, you can't enjoy the cream. And that's how a lot of people pursue. I mean, you send an asshole to a personal empowerment seminar, you're going to have an empowered asshole. And so until you can get to the core of what's really going on, on, then that's how you do it. So I want to talk about pivot.

So you do that, you strip away those layers because. And not to be. I mean, I'm from New York, right.

So it's not.

I don't have an edge. To me, we are all the same on the inside. And I mean, at the core there's just one thing. True, there's one basic truth about ourselves, but some people have some scar tissue. And yet to get, to get at that, it takes some doing. And there's a lot of layers of crap, you know, layers of programming, of abuse, of, you know, all kinds of abuse, self abuse, abuse that came from other people. There's lots of mine files that kind of have to be opened up. You know, those dark closets that have to be opened and light has to come into them, fresh air has to come into them.

You.

And that's a process. It's not.

Well, it's a serious process. And so like to talk about, let's say like the comment of, you know, you send an asshole to an empowerment seminary of an empowered asshole. Now, it doesn't mean that is a terrible human being. It's just the way that they're actually showing up. And the hardest shells hide the tenderest meat. I mean, one thing that being an addict has given me is, is tremendous amount of empathy when I see people screwing up their lives. Because most people don't wake up every day and want to figure out how to have life, not work.

Isn't that interesting?

They don't put their feet on the floor and go, you know, today I'm going to be a manipulative, you know, no integrity, you know, loser. Or I'm going to be abusive and unkind to everybody I meet and have shit thoughts all day long. I mean, nobody wakes up in the morning, puts their feet on the floor and says that.

Right, exactly.

They all start out with great intentions.

Yeah.

You know, and it's funny because the results that people have speak so loudly. Right. That their intentions kind of fade away in the light of what they've produced so far in their life. Because that says what's been going on. I mean, their best thinking, you know, all the outcomes in their life have produced the results in their life. All the outcomes were produced by their best thinking so far, which is, it's a moment of humility because everything that's shown up has been the result of Your best thinking? No. Or did you just at some point go, no, no, I'm going to produce these results intentionally so that they cause me pain, they cause others pain. It caused me suffering and struggle. No. We all set out every wanted to be rich, happy, happy, healthy, all those things. And yet you got this mixed bag of things that shows up and you go, okay, how'd that get there?

Yeah, exactly. Well, there's a line, I have to borrow this from 12 subgroups where there will be someone that will show up in a 12 step group that's like really fighting it, very resistant, didn't want to be there, but of course their life is out of control. So they showed up in this room with a bunch of strangers and here they are. If you follow a 12 step model of admitting that your life is unmanageable and that you need some sort of help and you have to turn it over and there will be someone that will say, well, your best thinking got you here. And they're like, well, you know. And so your best thinking is going to get you out of it. So, you know, you look in the mirror every day and say, you know, good morning, let the stress begin. Or you're going to say, I'm responsible or I'm not. And so what you do with it has everything to do with it.

So originally I was going to talk about, I prepared this whole, whole talk about connecting with high level people and how to make them enjoy being your mentors. But I was sitting at my table, table number one. Yay. Table number one. And so yes, the rowdy table in the back. So everyone was talking about writing and they were getting into that. So I prepared this morning like 15. And also a lot of people up here have been talking about marketing. No one's been talking about the creation part. So I put together this morning 15 tips on writing. We'll probably get to five of them. That's cool. And next I'll do five each year or something like that. And I'm just out of curiosity just to see how many people just write newsletters or marketing emails or something like that. Cool. So most of you. And how many people have written a book? Wow. Almost just as many people. How many people would like to write, have not written a book, but would like to. So we're all writers. Okay, cool. All right, awesome. So I want to make sure this is applies. So These are the 15 tips that I wrote down for writing and I'm not going to rush through them. I'm going to take my time with Them and we'll get to what we get to. So number one, the secret to writing a best selling book or just an awesome newsletter or email that really engages your audience is to do this one thing that I always do before I sit down to write. Which is I assume that nobody cares. Nobody gives a shit about me. They don't care about my problems, they don't care about my ideas, they don't care about my world, my emotions, my family or anything I have to say. And how can I, from that first word, make them interested? The only purpose of the first sentence is to get people to transport them to the second sentence. The only purpose of the first chapter in a book is to make them want to read the next chapter. So to me, like the cardinal rule of writing is to be interesting. The cardinal sin is to be boring. So that leads me to the second point which again, like when I first started meeting marketers, they were all about, it's 80% about the marketing and 20% about the product or the idea. I still believe it's. I still believe and only because I wrote for the New York Times Times, I covered bands and I did not pay attention. I mean usually it was just I believe that talent and greatness gets recognized if someone's not a self saboteur. So I believe you just got to write about something you care about or you're passionate about. You have to write about something that matters to you. Everything matters to you. People make the mistake. Two big mistakes people make is they try to be really general and vague so they can just appeal to everybody. That doesn't work. Carl Rogers said the personal is the universal. So the more important it is to you, you've got to assume that. Why was Renee's speech so powerful? Because she talked about a truth to her and we sat at the table and we talked about our truths that we kind of locked up and no one had that exact experience. But that enabled us to kind of open up and to share. What Renee did was so powerful because it was personal, because it was true, because it was, was something she was passionate about. And a lot of the books, when you see these books that seem like these great huge best selling books that seem like that guy, they were genius marketing. Knowing most of these people and most of these authors, all that packaging and marketing that seems perfect happens after the book is done. Just go write that great book, write that thing that's meaningful and figure out the rest of that stuff. Afterward you can figure out the perfect title, the perfect way to brand it, the Perfect cover. That comes afterward.

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.

Also, even. Even if you're here because you're trying to, you know, you want to do a book just to, you know, to help your brand or to give yourself a platform, your clients and customers, they're still going to read that book, hopefully, right? And you want them to be more engaged with you. And if they like that book, they'll pass it on to their friends. And that book could end up generating a lot more than just being good for your rep. So write about something you care about. The other thing is a lot of people say to quiz your audience, grill your audience to see what they want from you. I say, don't do that at all. All your audience or your following, and everyone here has their own little. Everyone in the world right now has their own mini following. All they know. All your audience or your clients or your customers, your following knows or your readers know. All they know is what you've done before. So all they want is what you've done before. They don't know what you're going to do next or what you're capable of. So don't ask them. Go where you're going and have them follow you. So next point I'll make this one really quick is don't hold anything back. I talk to a lot of people doing a book and they're like, you know, I'm going to do this book, but I'm not going to put this in this book. It's so good. I want to do a second book about it. Write each book as if you're never going to write another book again. Put everything in there, because if it's not good, you actually won't write another book again. And the other thing is that between the time it takes for that book and for that book to come out, you're going to generate a whole new set of ideas and thoughts and principles, and that's going to be your next book. So put everything in there. Next thing, really important. You need a sacred space. You need a space to write or create. This goes for anything that you're creating, even if your creation is business models. You need a sacred space where you do not know maybe what time it is. You don't know what's going on in the world. It can be outside or indoors, but that you are not. It's not possible for you to be disturbed in a sacred space, not by a person, not by a device, not by the Internet. And it's really hard to do these days. I'm going to give you a couple tips on how to do that. Know that every time you're interrupted, it takes 20 minutes to get back into that flow. You were one interruption, 20 minutes. So it'll take all day to get to that state of flow that you want to get into. When you're creating anything, it doesn't matter what you do. You're all creators here. So a couple things that I use. How many people and I talked about this last time, but how many people use the program Freedom? Okay, guys, we're going to make Freedom a lot of money. Freedom. There's a program called Freedom. It is the greatest. I don't want to advocate. I mean, we advocate what we love. Like Joe said, freedom will block your. It says, how many minutes of freedom do you want? You type in that amount of minutes, 120 minutes. You cannot get on the Internet no matter what for 120 minutes. So every time my ritual before I go to write down is I hand my phone to somebody else. To my assistant or someone else, I say, do not give this to me until 5 o'.

Clock.

If you don't have that, if you have a phone with a battery, take the battery out and give it to someone. Otherwise just put your phone, you know, on it somewhere else as far as possible from your house, waiting your house in a drawer off. Tell anyone they can't disturb you. Put on Freedom and get to work. Some phones have like privacy apps. The iPhone doesn't really at least put in do not disturb, just you cannot be disturbed. Couple other things. Yeah. So the other thing is the hardest part of writing is starting. So once you do this ritual, you're also forced to start because you got nothing else to do. So always, always write down your ideas. I don't know how many people do this, but if you don't write down your idea, you lose it. The short term memory can only hold seven pieces of information. I personally use my phone and have a little sort of file on my phone for thoughts and ideas for each book. I used to walk around before phones with like literally a necklace with one of those little spiral bound notebooks, a teeny one just around my neck. Do not Lose your ideas. Always write them down as soon as you have them. Because the best ideas you have will not be when you're trying to focus, think, but when you stop thinking. Maybe you're exercising or you're driving or you're in the shower. Literally. I have a mnemonic system. Maybe I'll teach it next time with which I remember ideas when I'm out surfing or something. Something. I'm going to give you two more quick things. If I think I can get to them. One more is right straight through to the end. Don't be a perfect preparer. Don't try to make each part perfect. Dan said that he goes for 80%. I go for 25%. I literally. My first draft, it's going to be 25% of the book that I know it can be, and I'll accept 25%. So write it down. Just get it through to the end. Because then you know where you're going and then you're going to go back now that you know the end and how you're going to kind of shape it all once you just get all your ideas down. Your first draft, when your first draft. My only goal, the first draft, is to get every thought that will be in the book into this file or the stack of pages that I know. Somewhere in this mess of words is my book. It's there. It's out of here now, and it's there. The power of tk. The next point is the power of tk. Two little letters, tk. They come from old time copywriting. TK meant to come. So when I'm just writing and I'm in flow and I don't know, something like a fact or a date or I just can't find the right word, I just put in the letter TK and keep writing and I'll fill in the TK's later. I'll do it when I'm writing newsletters as well because then I can just get that first draft done with. I'm going to give you one other point, I guess. Let's see. There's so many things, so many good things. Okay, so the last thing that I'll tell you is it ties into the stuff that the art of writing is not writing. We were sitting with Tim Paulson. He was saying, I love writing, but my writing is horrible. Just about everybody's writing is horrible. Mine is the first draft is unreadable. The art of writing is in the revising.

Damon, you have your famous shark points. Jay, you have many things. Three Ways to grow a business, the strategy of preeminence, power, Parthenon, nine drivers, etc. Of them, which one single principle or concept would you keep and use? If you could only choose one, and why which is like what's the most important thing?

Mine would always be my first of the sharp points and I have various different ones. So a lot of time my sharp points is shao. And depending on who I'm speaking to, some, you know, can vary. The S is always about goal setting. I always attribute reading a book that probably the entire crowd has read. Think and grow Rich. The first time I read it at 16 years old and I didn't really understand the value of goal setting until I was probably about 20. And after that, immediately my life started to change. And I don't say that casually and I don't know if anybody here does not know what goal setting is. It is not about what you're going to do. This week I have 10 goals. Seven of them expire in six months, two expire in five years and one expires in 20 years. The one they expire in six months. I read them every morning and every night before I go to sleep five days a week. It's the last thing I think about when I go to sleep. It's the first thing I think about when I wake up. And I make them very, very. I set my goals very high. I usually get to about 50% or 80% of the six month goals in regards to accomplishing each one. And then I reset them for another six months.

Interesting.

And those have been over the course of my life. Those have always been the ones that I've gone back to. I. I do find that three months or six months out of my life when I'm going through extremely challenging times. It could have been my divorce or it could have been various challenges and I start maybe drinking more than I should or hanging out more than I should and I find that I don't do that. And after a while, after six, seven months, I find that my life and or my motivation have taken a large decline. So I have been through that part of not. Not goal setting probably about six times in my life. And those have been actually the worst times of my life.

Wow.

I love the whole thing of the goal with an expiration date. I mean, that's very. I mean I put deadlines on things, but I've never really kind of thought about it.

Yeah, they have expiration dates and I find myself getting anxiety around that. If the goal is 15th March, why am I feeling like this? And I reset them.

Well, okay.

I would fire myself if I was interviewing me for this one, because I'm going to give you a double answer, but probably the most important distinction, ideology, philosophy I ever learned, and I can be very arrogant about it because it wasn't my own originally, but was the strategy of preeminence. It's really redefined what I've become as a human being as a consequence, contributor, as a. As a, you know, as a catalyst to others, a benefactor, guide, advisor. And it's also, it's. It's propelled people to the highest level. And I'd like to actually tell a simple story because it's quite profound about it. But also I'd like to give a context about relational capital because there's a depth and a breadth of it that is so transcendent to what somebody would think of as an affiliate deal. But just, I mean, to give you the simplistic concept of preeminence, it's basically to establish yourself as the only viable choice, the most trusted advisor for life. You have a moral responsibility to guide people to what's in their best interest. You can't let them buy less more or less quantity, Less quantity. You may not even allow them to buy from you. Or you can't allow them to buy from the competitor, not because they're a son of a gun prick, but because they're not going to add the value of support. Your goal is not to fall in love with your product or your service. It's to fall in love with the people whose lives you're transforming. You have four categories of clients, certainly the ones that pay you, but then the others are the ones you pay your team members, your vendors, your advisors. And your goal is to enrich their life, to grow, to add value. That's the important part. But it is totally external. And the real key to it is you don't wait for money to change hands to start investing. The preface or the premise is, in any relationship, one side is always being asked to invest first in the other. And your attitude is, I think you're a good investment, so I'm going to invest, but you're going to invest real value. And you can't invest real value if you don't have a clear context of what value is defined as by the various segments of the market you're trying to take. I can go deep on that, but forget that now. So we've done billions of dollars for clients using very sophisticated relational capital, and it's Totally different than an affiliate deal. You know, it's like we will find people who have very trusted, credible relationships with the market that our client wants to reach and we will engineer extraordinary relationships. And the easiest example I can give you is an old one, but it's, it'll show the differentiation. I was laughing. Somebody wrote me the other day and said, I want you to promote my software. There's $100,000 top prize and I'm giving my Porsche. And I said, well, first of all, I have more than one Porsche. Second of all, I don't do things for that if it's got value, I don't. Making another 20 or 30 grand ain't gonna change my life. So I'd rather do it grat us if it's going to really impact the people. But when we used to do really integrated strategic relationships and the easiest one, I can tell you, I'm going to go back and date myself. But when gold was first legalized in the 70s, all the gold dealers are running ads in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Barron's. And that wasn't where the gold buyers were. The gold buyers were the conservative, pardon me, many is the water right here. Many of them were the libertarians, the von Mises, the Hayek type people. And they were subscribing and paying money to any of about 40 different newsletters that were out there. And I was the down below, the surface strategist, mastermind, ethical puppeteer for all these people. And I also was the mastermind for this gold company that sold physical gold. Physical means you buy, you get it, you can buy physical gold, you can buy, you can buy options, you can buy bank owned. And I've helped all kinds of companies like that. But, but we would go to financial newsletters and we wouldn't say send out an email for us. We would send strike a long term arrangement. Well, first we would be the recommended provider of the hard asset. Every time a new subscriber came, they would get from us a kit that would explain hard assets, give it the context, have interviews with prominent economists and advisors, including ones that didn't like gold. So it had balance. Our deal was four times a year we would pay to put out special editions of the newsletter that would chronicle a lot of hard assets and we'd pay money for great, great, respected, iconic writers and we would be featured in it too. Thrice a year we would do regional promotions where we would do programs on site all over the regions for these newsletters and they would be for profit. We would use part of the money we were spending to get an icon, then we would speak. Any profit we would give them. But it gave us credibility. Many of these newsletters were very arrogant and they would stop marketing if their marketing piece started breaking even. We were in a lead generation generating business and lead generator was costing us a thousand, two, excuse me, 100, $200 a lead. So anytime their subscription offer stopped working, we had a standing offer that we would pick up the responsibility of taking their subscription piece, their promotion. I would improve the headline, I would improve the risk reversal, I would add to the bonuses. We would do whatever we could to make it profitable. Then we would pay to send it out, but we would get joint tenancy of all the names. And I can go on and on, but it's so much more sophisticated. And it wasn't static, it was a perpetual. We always played a long game. And also if we were the first one to do that and it worked, I separately would reserve as a contingency the right to be become the ombudsman, the provider, the manager, the partner in any and all other long term strategic offerings that would go through that newsletter. So I created it as a distribution channel and I did the same kind of thing with everybody and it was a whole different level. And there still is. Oh, by the way, we never sent the same communication to any two newsletters. They were all customized so they had integrity. Because a lot of these newsletters, not unlike a lot of the email list, were multiple subscribed. And if you have the same rhetoric, it looks very crass, but there's just a lot of deeper strategic thinking that's possible. And I over talked.

No, but there's always more underneath the surface. That's why people, people that just try to knock off a certain particular ad or promotion, don't really see everything that's going on.

Agreed.

And when you make so much of your marketing, just the public thing and you're not doing the relationship building stuff. We had Dre Redfern talk about direct mail. You know, 27 year old guy here in the audience who you know, of course, you know, you're friends with Andrew.

Yeah, yeah.

And so basically, you know, 27 years old, expert in direct mail and the beauty of I became one of the highest paid speakers in the world in the niche of carpet cleaners where no one knew who the hell I was. But it was all. And I had all these people that would try to knock off my ads, but they didn't see all the direct mail. It's like it's so stealth. It's so under the radar as our mail marketing things. People just cannot see them in the surface. And that's why, if you understand what you're talking about here, it's like a positive iceberg. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just. It's such a. Such an advantage.

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.