Key Criteria Successful Relationships

Hello, everyone.

It's Joe Polish, and this is Dan Sullivan.

Yep, here we are. We're going to follow up on the previous episode. We were Talking about the 50 connector future and Genius Network and connecting with your network and how to do all that stuff. So, as a refresher, Dan, how would you summarize some of the things we talked about on the last episode?

Well, I think that one of the big things, Joe, is just the distinction between what each of us does uniquely well and how we've kind of combined this into a system. And so my notion right from the beginning of my life virtually, has been that people are really, really good in a particular area of activity, and mostly not good or just mediocre in others. And it just seemed to me that from the standpoint of education and training and how you organize your life, it makes no sense to try to be good at anything that you're mediocre. But just continually, year after year, decade after decade, just develop and expand the area where you're great. But that brings you to a boundary line. And on the other side of the boundary line is other people's unique ability. And you have to learn how to connect. What I discovered when I first met you that you are the guy who is master of connecting. I'm an okay connector, but it's not my unique ability. So I quickly have done, and both of us have mutually done, is develop a teamwork between our two unique abilities. And that relationship has incredibly expanded my notion of strategic coach. And it's also, you had this concept of Genius network, and it's greatly expanded your network. And it's just a relationship. It's a professional relationship, and it's a personal relationship that just goes on and on and on because each of our contribution to the other makes us want to contribute more to each other.

Yeah. And, you know, I sort of think of this. When I was a little kid and I used to race BMX bikes, my father would always have a can of WD40. And if the bike chain got really dusty, you know, you just kind of spray this magic WD40 on it. All of a sudden it would just be a lot smoother and the wheels would turn and the chain would not be as dirty and that sort of stuff. And in a lot of ways, I think I act that way for a lot of people. It just adds a little oil to these cranky gears sometimes. And not only do I do that, but obviously I want to bring more people into the mix. And if you think of in your life, you hire all kinds of different capabilities. I mean, you have a chef, you have a driver, you have a housekeeper, you have a team of 100 people that support you. You have really built this great life. And you make money so that you can live a great life. And you make money because you have set things up in a way that allow you to do the best that you can do. And so I go by paying money to Strategic Coach because it helps me get my focusing and my goals and my unique ability set up. It allows me to think about my life and what's working and what's not working and how to plan out and prepare myself for bigger things and to multiply myself. And in my world, I bring in a bunch of different skills and abilities and different multipliers with a heavy emphasis on marketing and selling and just put it all together and connect all of these together. So sometimes if you're arguing with somebody, having a mediator really can help you talk things through. Well, I think about that in every area of life. So if there's friction somewhere, who's a person that can remove the friction? If you've got a foggy window, a dirty window, what can you do to clean it? What's the Windex? And so, in a lot of ways, I want to connect people with all kinds of things that are simply going to not only help them reach their opportunities and make things better and get rid of problems and challenges, but also want to reduce suffering. And I take suffering very seriously because I think a lot of people endure their lives and endure their relationships and their businesses, and they don't enjoy them. And I know that because of my own personal experience of enduring and what I've done to transform it. And it gives me tremendous joy in being able to connect someone with someone else. It's not just a money thing. I mean, I really get off on the fact that I can. Oh, you should call this person. Oh, you should talk to this person. Oh, you need to meet that person. Ah, let me interview that person. That's really comes natural to me. And what you've pointed out that that doesn't always come very natural to you. No, what does come natural to you is the way that you help entrepreneurs focus. So when you can connect those two skills together, it just makes each person that much more capable. So I think of what we're doing here at 10x talk is capability conversations.

Well, yeah, and the interesting thing is, Joe, is that your trump card over the years has been that your connecting ability has allowed you to understand the relationship of connecting to marketing, because that's really what marketing actually is. It's making connections and then forming relationships out of those connections, which hopefully last for a long time or lasts forever. What I've noticed as I've been part of Genius Network, is that you are always incredibly bright and very, very intuitive about marketing. But I came to understand that your marketing skills is all something that has come out of your connecting skills.

Yes, totally. You know, I first learned marketing that worked by studying direct response. And direct response, unlike image advertising or institutional or just brand building, which is get your name out there. Direct response is get your name out there and get a response back. And I tend to think of networking as direct response networking. Like, there's a lot of people that will take pictures with famous people and they'll put them on their Facebook page, or they'll put it out there and they got a picture and, you know, great. And what I tend to do is pictures are cool and all that. I would much prefer having the relationship with people. And so direct response networking, Genius networking is not just going out and meeting people or having 5,000 Facebook friends. It's really about developing connections and relationships with people that actually matter. People that are interesting to me, people that are doing important, incredible, interesting, useful, novel things in the world that are really skilled, and then taking those same individuals and connecting them with everyone else that I tend to like. And that's not everybody, because there's a lot of people I have no interest in becoming friends with, in connecting. But there are people, entrepreneurs that I really, absolutely do. So people struggle with this and they get overwhelmed by it. And they can spend a lot of time interacting and connecting and following and reading about other people that have really no relevance to their goals, their life. And so I'd love to ask you from your perspective and how you've really learned how to leverage relationships. I mean, when I recommend someone to you that you meet this person, I really think it through. You know, I don't send people to you or whatever, ask you or someone else to have a conversation with someone if there wasn't, for one, a direct benefit for both of you. Meaning a lot of people want to put people together because it benefits them. But then the two people are like, what the hell are we doing here? I mean, what's in it for us sort of thing. Take Peter Diamandis. I really recommended to Peter that he join strategic coach because I knew it would be really valuable for Peter seeing all the incredible things he was doing in the world, but also the price he was Paying with the time he was putting into it and the sheer volume of bureaucrats and parasites that suck off of his energy. And I really recommended Strategic Coach because I knew it would be a game changer for him. And in the beginning, it was really difficult. Like, with anything. I look at it as. It's like going to the gym. If you can make it through the first few weeks and get through the soreness and get through the burn, then all of a sudden you're like, oh, my God, I'm getting stronger. I'm getting more powerful. I'm sleeping better. This is awesome. But Peter went through this transition, and now Peter and you have aligned. You just heavily recommended to your Strategic Coach clients, as I did to my genius network members, this thing called Abundance 360 Summit, which was originally my idea for him to do last year, and now he's done his second one. And you've taken that relationship and just. You've gone so deep with it. So anyway, my rant here is about how do people really leverage relationships once they've made those connections? And how do you know which ones to take on and which ones not to? I mean, how does Dan Sullivan do it?

Well, you know, in all areas of life, you have criteria about who you should spend time with and who you shouldn't spend time with. And people who get smarter as they get older. The smartness actually comes from that. They have filters for sorting out what's worthwhile and what's not worthwhile. I've never met an entrepreneur who has doubled their income and gone 10 times with their income, who hasn't done it by creating some incredible filters that they know when something's worth their time and attention and investment, and they instantaneously know when it's not. I can just tell everybody, you know, that we've all had this experience just in the area of dating. When you're a teenager, almost anything is a possibility. But as you go along and you have experiences, and some of them are very painful experiences, and then you begin to realize that your life partner or someone that is just going to be a lifetime friend is basically, it falls into a very, very small circle of humanity. There's 7 billion people on the planet, but you're not looking for 7 billion. You're actually looking for a very small number. And the way you find them is that you make judgments about who's worth your time. And that's how we become successful more and more in all relationships and friendships. So it's really criteria, and I have six criteria that I really, really use to take a look at who's going to be in my life from this point forward. I got a lot of people in my life who are a result of everything I've done up until now. But when I look ahead, let's say over the next quarter century, next 25 years, I said they have to fall into this area of criteria. And I just have six of them. The first one is that they have to be really, really grateful and generous people. Next thing is they have to be creative. They have to have a way of thinking about things that produces new ideas and new connections. And they have to be very cooperative. It's easy to work with them. And then just working with them constantly creates bigger opportunities. And then out of the cooperation, something ingenious gets created in the world and then it links you up with all sorts of exponentials. So it's six. It's gratitude, it's creativity, it's cooperation, it's opportunity, it's ingenuity, and it's exponentials. Now that seems a lot to think through when you're just doing it, but if you do it 100 times or you do it 200 times, you, it's like a five second size up, you know, you just go, you know. I mean, we're enormously skillful at things that we repeatedly apply, especially mental habits, which. Oh no, that's not for me, not interested. It's like channel flipping. You know, people are incredibly gifted at channel flipping with a television, you know, they'll go through 10 channels in 40 seconds. And their criteria says not interesting. Not interesting, not interesting. Yep, this is a good one. Is it interesting more than a minute? I mean, we have all these criteria and we don't realize that we have it. I mean, movies get killed in the first five minutes of the first release because people are texting. They go into the movie and say, this is a dog, don't even bother. And instantaneously it's in the blogosphere, it's around the Internet. I mean, movies die in about a half hour now, or they certainly die within the first half hour after someone's seen them. And the reason is people got criteria. This is just not interesting and everything else. And we're shoppers, we go into Walmart, which has 50,000 products, but we're only looking for about six or seven things. When you go in, nobody goes into a supermarket and buys 50,000 things.

That is very true. So everyone has this built in criteria anyway. It's just how they're applying it to their relationships.

Well, not only that, they don't know what their criteria are. You're making very firm judgments, but you don't know what you're making your firm judgments on. I just decided to make as many of my criteria conscious as possible so that I can see if they're good criteria and then I can improve on them.

Gotcha. Okay, so you got exponentials, you got. Go through them again. Opportunity.

I start at the bottom where you're the most personal, you know, and the most emotional, which is just gratitude right off the bat. If someone isn't thankful, they're not generous. Pew, gone. I don't care how good the deal might be. I'm just not even really interested in interacting with them. And then they have to be creative. They can't be conformist thinking, they can't be rigid. They've got to really have some flexibility to them. And then third thing is that working with them is really, really easy. And it's give and take. Both sides immediately get a better deal just by working together. So those are the three. You know, that's what we teach in strategic coach. Those are the three things that we really concentrate on is gratitude, creativity, and cooperation. And that prepares you for a much bigger world. And you're part of that bigger world. You're set up of opportunity, ingenuity, and exponentials. When I come to 25k, that's what you provide so I don't have to create that world. And that's what Peter Diamantis creates. He creates opportunity, ingenuity, and exponentials. And just by being in his environment, his structure and process, same thing with you. Anything I can say about either of you is exactly the same situation. You just create massively bigger opportunities, Connection with ingenious ideas, ingenious strategies, ingenious methods. And then the exponentials, of course, which are being supplied so much by technology are available. But in order to be the person who would even be able to connect with that world that you and Peter are creating, and you have to have gratitude, creativity, and cooperation.

Let me ask you, what if someone sort of has a chip on their shoulder against humanity, meaning they just don't like people, or, you know, there's a lot of people that are incredibly untrusting and uncooperative and not grateful at all, because maybe they've been born that way. Maybe they've been really hurt and betrayed. And of course, there's a lot of these things that are way beyond our capabilities and could or require therapy or something. But that being said, a lot of people just have closed themselves off to gratitude, creativity, cooperation. And I think all human beings on some level, you know, they certainly go through stages in their life where they're selfish and sometimes they're generous and they go back and forth. But what does a person need to do in terms of personal rituals and things to just have more of those and to exemplify those and to really internalize them if they're lacking those abilities?

Yeah, I guess I don't fully know the answer to that except in a specific situation. I don't know what people should do. But if I'm talking with a single individual, you can ask them all sorts of questions, basically about some successful experiences, because their mindset's based on a lot of unsuccessful experiences. And I don't try to correct people's unsuccessful experiences. I just try to get them to actually identify some successful experiences. And I said, well, if you look at this successful experience, what was going on there? And pretty soon they can say, well, it was this kind of situation. It was this kind of person. I said, so right off the bat, do you have some other situations like that where you can maybe have kind of a successful experience? And then you get them 1 experience, 2 experience? And what happens, Joe, is those experiences start to connect with each other, and they have a basis of moving forward where they become highly selective about the conditions that they can be in, and they have more of a sense of personal confidence that, you know, I can actually expand personally more than I thought I did, and then they develop capability. But see, that's why I fundamentally distrust a lot of therapy and psychiatry, because they keep embedding people in the negative experience and try to deal there. I said, I don't think there's any solution there. I think you have to just find out where some success has been happening and build on that.

Yeah, versus getting people marred in their past and living there. And the reason I bring this up is that I have seen you countless times take entrepreneurs that are in extremely overwhelmed bad moods. I mean, shit, when I'm in a bad mood and I need to think something through, you're like the perfect person to talk to because you always can bring out the positive focus and your ability to help people think through how to transform opposition and obstacles into opportunities and into lessons and how to take negative experiences and transform them. I mean, you're incredibly good at that. So the reason I bring up the question is when you talk about gratitude, creativity, cooperation, I mean, if you're not a cooperative person, if you don't have any gratitude, you're not going to get that from other people. I mean, one of my magic rapport formula processes is be the type of person that you would always answer the phone for. I talk about if you have a phone and someone's calling in someone where you're immediately, if you see it on the phone coming through that you're excited, well, what is it about that person? And take the business scenario out of it. What is it about just a friend where some people you'd be like, you can't wait to talk to him and other people you're like, oh, you know, I mean you just immediately, you know, it's this person again sort of thing. Well, the first key is not having those people have your phone number, but if they get through sort of thing, what makes you excited? And so to reverse it as my question to you is, you know, some people are just in a place where they're not very cooperative.

Yeah.

That they're unlucky and they get pissed at people that are successful and they bitch about these people when they don't realize the problem is not these other people or that the world is withholding opportunities from them. They're just operating in a way to where they're just not the type of person that's making it happen.

Yeah. Well, I probably had a much clearer answer 30 years ago than I do today because people's lives are incredibly more complex. First of all, more complex than they actually understand, but certainly way more complex. Then the other thing, Joe, and it's just a thought that I've been thinking over the past year, is that I think every individual is essentially and uniquely self organizing. So just for an example is that I realize that I am remarkably similar to a six year old that I remember wandering around a farm in northern Ohio. And I realized my entire life has really been about expanding an incredibly kind of wondrous set of experiences I had just being a kid wandering around through woods and forests when I was six years old. But on the other hand, I had a mother that really encouraged me to leave home and learn about the world. And so what I've done is that I've essentially taken that early experience of who I am when I'm very, very young and six years old. And I essentially kept reproducing it out in the world and that required that I learn all sorts of things about other people and develop all sorts of personal skills. So I've come to believe that if I'm working with Joe Polish, he started doing that at six, and Peter Diamantes I'm sure that if you took the Peter that is there today and you moved him back to six years old, there's a remarkable similarity in the general approach to day to day situations and to life in general. So I don't know that stuff. I think what you call self knowledge is just people beginning to recognize that there's this fundamental, very, very unique organizing principle that's been going on in their life from the moment and the things they choose in life is either in support of that early experience or not experience. Having said that, the early experience can be incredibly negative. So what a lot of people do is that they keep self organizing into more extreme negative situations. I just don't have any answer to that. I mean, there's wiring in the brain, there's wiring in the nervous system. You just don't know what's going on with another person. I believe that if you grew up in a very violent neighborhood and your mother was a heavy crack cocaine user, you've probably been severely damaged in your nervous system and your brain even before you come into the world. And everything you see around you is negative in that. And I don't know if there's any comeback from that. I just don't know. And why it's important that children get born and nurtured in really positive circumstances. You know, I did. My mother said I was the happiest baby she ever knew. That's my general approach. You know, I just feel that life is a really happy place. But there have been times in my life where I worked against that and I made myself miserable and I had to learn not to do that.

Right. Well, you know, I remember on this audio you have called Going Against Gravity for, you know, the personal economic system about taking free days. And you were talking about, you know, a really worn out, tired, cranky brain. And your response is, you know, I don't know the solution, but I would bet that taking free days would probably be really helpful for that brain. You know, a lot of times the solution is this rest. And the other thing too. I mean, you wrote a great book, which if this was resonating with anyone listening and they're like, yeah, because I brought this up because there's obviously there's a ton of people that are incredibly successful that listen to 10x talk, and I know there's some really incredibly successful financially people that have, quote, unquote, the trappings of success, money and power, but they're not very happy. And so I bring that up because I just want them to really look at Ways to think about their future so that they not only can have great success, but they can have enjoyment along the way. And you wrote a book called Laws of lifetime Growth. You know, how to make your future bigger than your past. And so without going deep into that, I will just recommend great book. And I would highly encourage everyone listening to this if they've not read your book.

Well, that was our big seller. Most of the books that I've produced are self produced. I think I have 13 books now and that was the only one. I went through a publisher. The experience was so painful and it took such a long time. I said, I don't know if I really want to do this again. But you know, it was translated into I think 20 languages. And you know, in the US if you produce a nonfiction book and you get 10,000, it's a best seller. So we did 13 times best seller with it, but we got incredibly good reviews around the planet. It's used in schools and everything else, but it's just how you think about your thinking in a world that is radically changing in ways that people weren't trained for and aren't prepared for. You know, it has a lot to do with setting yourself up for if really good things can happen, you're setting yourself up for those really good things to happen to you.

Well, so let me ask you, so if a high level entrepreneur, a 10x entrepreneur, they start building a 50 connector future today, identify 50amazing individuals, what's the bigger and better future they can expect from doing it?

Yeah, well, first of all, just a little instruction. Start with one. Start with one. You know those criteria that I have of gratitude and creativity and cooperation and then opportunity, ingenuity and expansion. Use them and say, well, among all the relationships I have, who's the person that would have the highest score on that credential and then go out and start developing the relationship with that person. And people say, well, you know, I'm going to go after all 50. And I say, well, you don't know 50, you know, you know one. You don't even know what one looks like until you develop the first relationship. You know, I remember one of the workshops, this guy had inherited $28 million. You know, he came to his first workshop and he said, you know, I've just come up with a solution for the financial planning for everybody in the world. And he said, I just want to get the marketing so we can get out to as. And he was talking a lot for a while and I said, the solution do you have, have you actually done it with one person to see that? No, no, no. We have to go really big with this. And I said, you don't even know what you're doing. I said, you have to start with one person. I mean, Joe, you started with one person and helping them with their marketing, and then two, and then four. It went exponential. But people are always trying to take over the world, and they haven't even taken over the backyard.

I love that. I love that life.

We have a mutual acquaintance, you know, and he wants to entrepreneurially transform the world. And he showed me his latest plan, and he says, we're going to take the top hundred problems, human problems, and we're going to create a system for transforming them entrepreneurially, and we're going to teach people how to do this. And I said, well, do you have one person you're teaching? He said, well, no, no. I mean, it's got to be really big. And I said, are you working on one problem? And he said, no. He said, you got to go after all 100. And I said, well, you know, good luck.

Yeah, no, exactly. In another lifetime, we'll be having that conversation. That is comedy. No, that's great. So what I'd like to do, Dan, to kind of wrap up this one, I want to go into discussing on the next episode we do about an abundance neighborhood, which I think will be an incredibly useful conversation because I think this all ties in and so for people. Dan actually did a interview with me that was on a previous episode about the magic rapport formula and how I actually build genius network. So if you want to hear me talk about how I go out and connect and develop relationships with people and what I do, that's explained there. Any other suggestions?

I think that it was great that you mentioned that, because I think that if you look at your nine criteria that you have, and this was a very observant coach, another coach, not me, but another coach who just sat down with you and just immediately knocked out these nine criteria. And they ring true. I mean, why it's so valuable is because it actually rings true. And then you just go up against my criteria because I'm just looking for big general environments. And if you combine your list with the list of grateful, creative, cooperative, opportunity, ingenuity and exponentials, you see, they match up perfectly. So that might be a nice little bit of homework for people before they listen to how we talk about the abundance neighborhood.

Yep, absolutely. Great. Well, as always, thank you, Dan, and to all our listeners, thank you for listening to 10xtalk.com you can post your comments@10xtalk.com and if you have some individuals in your life that you think would be well served to listen to this, go ahead and do it. Pick up a copy of Dan's book how to make the laws of lifetime Growth, how to make your future bigger than your past. You can see all of Dan's books@strategiccoach.com or just do a Google search and we'll talk to you next time on 10X Talk. Thanks.

Thank you.