The HARSH Truth About What It Takes To Build A Good Business Feat. Keith Cunningham & Dan Sullivan

What do successful entrepreneurs do to create sustainable, successful businesses versus entrepreneurs that fail, that don't? So what's the difference between the ones that fail and the ones that succeed?

So my experience is that business is really, really complex. I think sometimes we make it harder than it is, but nevertheless there's a lot of moving parts. One of the problems is you can do 99 things right and one thing wrong and the whole thing be wrong. My experience is that successful people tend to have three or four sustainably successful people tend to have three or four common characteristics. One is they're really good at what they do. They consistently execute on what they know. There is demand in the market for what they're doing and there's a healthy dose of luck. I think most people underestimate the importance of luck. I know lots of people that have, they're very smart, they work hard, they've got a good product or a good service, there's demand for it, but someplace along the line there was a miss. And sometimes that bad luck is self inflicted. And that can happen. You know, you can do the right thing at the wrong time and it turn out wrong. You can do the wrong thing at the right time and it turn out right. And so to some extent there's some amount of luck. And I think anybody who's successful and doesn't acknowledge luck is arrogant beyond words. It is unbelievable how, how we, we minimize some sometimes minimize the importance of. Warren Buffett has said, you know, I'm really good at what I do, I really enjoy what I'm doing, there's huge demand for what I do. I've made a ton of money at what I do. And I'm probably the luckiest guy. Had I been born 50 years or 100 years earlier, or had I been born in a different country with different parents, different, this wouldn't have happened. And so I think those are some common characteristics. And I'm going to quickly add, I do not believe in bathrobes. I do not believe that one size fits all. I do not believe in pithy little. Do these three things and get success. Don't do these three things and avoid failure. I don't think it's that easy. One little thing can make all the difference.

You can get the right apples for.

An apple pie and still have a.

Crummy apple pie, right?

And so I tend to look at it that way.

So in terms. So you've made literally hundreds of millions of dollars and you've lost the tune of that. I mean, and so there is, I Mean, you've.

I would rather not talk about the loss.

Okay.

What I want I will though dig.

Into with though is in the pain of it all. That's where it seems that you've got getting yourself on, say, the road less stupid. You've made, admittedly some very stupid, arrogant mistakes early on. And what it did to you mentally and psychologically nearly crushed you. And you told the story how you overcame that and it became one of the greatest things ever. I'd love to have you like, how did you learn all of this? What did you need to do in order to get the business knowledge and wisdom that you have done an incredible job of condensing in this really amazing book.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think.

Right in the middle of this disaster, Dan and I were talking backstage when he was coming off, and I was getting ready to come on and. And I said, I have also had a divorce and a bankruptcy. I feel very fortunate on the sequencing of mine because my bankruptcy came about a year before my divorce. So that sequencing was really important. I would have hated to gotten divorced five years before I went bankrupt. Look, I was giving an interview. I don't know if I talked about this when we were together a few months ago or not. I was giving an interview in Ireland for a radio station that was trying to promote an event that was going to happen the next day in which I was going to be the speaker.

And.

The radio interview host. Right before I went live during a commercial break, looked at me and said.

Look, I've read about you.

I know who you are. I know your background. Is there anything you don't want me to talk about? And I said, yes. I said, don't ask me how it feels to lose $100 million. I can tell you it feels horrible.

Right?

I mean, so don't ask me about that. He said, no problem.

We go live on the interview, and.

The first thing this guy says is, I'm sitting here with Keith Cunningham, the man that lost $100 million. He said, Keith, how does it feel to lose $100 million? And so I'm now stuck because I'm live. And I said, let me tell you how I view this.

I view life like a university.

And in university there are courses, and courses have tuition. I just took a course in the university of life, and the tuition was $100 million. First of all, there's very few people who get to take this course.

I mean, it's kind of expensive. And.

And so that's part one. Part two is the key is not.

How much it cost.

The key is, did I get my money's worth? Did.

Did I take this course?

Pass fail, where I went in to.

Do the least I possibly could?

Or did I take this course and.

And what?

I want to make an A plus plus, because I never again want to have to take this course. It's far too expensive.

I think a key is for me.

Joe, and I see this over and over again in my own life and other people's lives, is the mistakes or the failures are not nouns. They're verbs. They don't define who I am. The question is not, did I make a mistake? The question is, can I admit it and did I learn something? I love what Buckminster Fuller said. Who's one of my heroes? Bucky said, a mistake is not a sin unless it's not admitted. The only way it can be a problem is if I don't admit it and then learn from it. And so in the book the Road Lesson Stupid, I have a chapter on the log of lessons learned, and those are lessons that I had to learn the hard way. And part of what I do, part of what you do, part of what Dan does, what all the teachers, what all the mentors in this room are doing, is they're allowing other people to stand on their shoulders. I'm standing on someone's shoulders you're standing on.

That's.

That's the exercise you just did. And it's. It's very powerful. Who is the first domino? Whose shoulders are you standing on? And the idea is, is there a way for other people to learn from my mistakes? If I can do that, I will have had a successful life.

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 free and you can.

Get a copy there.

So you.

You're the highest rated, I think now, the only speaker of business mastery, Tony Robbins. Big Business mastery event. Correct? Or does he have other.

We've been told. We've been told that people like us.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're definitely the.

Highest rated speaker of business mastery.

And you, have you read a lot.

You're a voracious reader, and you see a lot of people dispensing advice out in the world through books that people, business owners, entrepreneurs follow, that you disagree with. And so I'm going to ask you, which will sound kind of like a silly question, especially since you said, you know, I don't believe in bathrobes. When people ask you, what's the secret to business success? What would you say to that? Because people always want to know, what's the secret? And from a marketing term, I know it works. If I said, here's three rules I want everyone to write down, or if I said here's three secrets I want everyone to write down, everyone would literally get out their pen when you say the word secrets. So people are pursuing it. And I think what you do such a great job in the road less stupid of is dismantling so many myths and so much bullshit that exists that people are being taught about business. And you're a guy that actually has made a lot of money and is very good with it and has gone through so what? You know, when someone says, oh, what's the secret? What is the thing they're always looking for the easy way to do it, how would you respond to that?

So I think the first thing I would say is, there are no secrets. There's just stuff you haven't learned yet. There's not a secret. There's no magic pill. There's no little formula that's locked away in a vault someplace that says, oh God, if you can just learn this one little thing, this is. And nobody else can learn it because it is a secret. I think that promotes the wrong kind of work ethic. I think it promotes the wrong kind of execution. I think that's the magic pill, tooth.

Fairy.

Financial tooth fairy kind of mentality. And I, I strongly disagree with that mentality. I do think there are some things that successful business people do. I think successful business people, some of them make a little list. It's not intended to be all inclusive. It's intended to maybe spark a conversation or a thought. I think successful people have extreme clarity about where they are, the reality of their current situation, which is point A. And they have clarity about point B. They have clarity about what they want, where they're going. And my experience is that most business people and most business advisors orient towards the second one. It's all about getting clarity on what.

You want, which I'm in favor of.

But I think the only reason Google Maps works is because you tell Google Maps where you want to go and it knows where you are. And if you don't, if Google Maps didn't know where you were and you told it where you wanted to go.

The likelihood of you getting from where you are to where you want to go.

Rounds, zero. So the idea is what?

Where are you?

What do you want? And what's the obstacle or the problem that's in the way?

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 couple copy there.

I think the hardest work I do in my thinking time is what's the problem? Not the symptom, what's the core root obstacle? Because if I'm going to get from where I am to what I want, there's something that's blocking and I need to know what that is. I need some clarity around that. Because if I don't have clarity on the obstacle, I have zero probability of building a machine that will help me solve the problem. And building the machine requires allocation of resources. So there's a bunch of things in this little sequence. I just said there's clarity about where I am, clarity about what I want, clarity about the obstacle that's in the way, some thinking about what's the machine, which is priorities. So priorities. I think successful people are really good at identifying the correct priority and then. And then allocating the resources to execute on those priorities. I'll say it this way. I'm going to put it on a bumper sticker. A shift in priorities without a simultaneous shift in. In allocation of resources is wishful thinking. And wishful thinking is at the root of every failed business. They thought the idea was if they could just get clear on what they want, that somehow what they want would manifest.

And.

I'm going to quickly say I totally agree with Dan and what he just talked about. I think getting clarity about what it is you want is important, but I think because that allows you to filter. But I also think somebody's got to pick up the business end of the shovel and consistently execute. I'm not a believer in the magic pill. So.

Can I say something? Because this is an interesting point because, you know, Dan says as entrepreneurs, you know, just their creativity, you know, make it up and make it real. Now the making it up part and making it real, all kinds of shit goes squirrely right along the way. And what you're saying with the execution and even like the impact filter, which is a thinking process, in order to get clear on the importance selling yourself on it, what's the success criteria and piecing it together. I mean, think of the amount of suffering of these idealistic, aspirational desires that are missing all of the roles, the key elements and the priorities done in a certain way, they actually achieve something, which is why there's so much business success. And I think what you're doing here is getting people to slow down enough with thinking time so they're not so reckless as they're trying to drive. Because so many entrepreneurs are just, they're driven, but their drivenness is driving them in the walls. It's driving them into poor health, it's driving them into insanity and a tremendous amount of driving off cliffs all the time.

I think that's it. I think this need for speed, I think this need for significance, I think this need for. My friend Alex Mandozian, who is someplace in here has said it very eloquently. Few things are worse than running the wrong direction enthusiastically. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think we tend to substitute passion and what we're excited about.

I will tell you, whatever your passion.

Is, it's either something you think you can be successful at or you are successful at. Now the instant it becomes unsuccessful, your passion goes to zero and you start looking for the next cool thing. So the passion is not. It's just excitement about what I think I could be successful at or what I am successful at. But if you sucked at it, I promise it would no longer be your passion. So I tend to gravitate. I'm probably, and there's a great example right now in the press, this guy, son, I don't know how to say his first name, Marushi son, who is the guy who put together the hundred billion dollar fund that invested in Uber and we work and a dog walking service and has blown through $100 billion in two years.

In two years.

And it's probably gone. The bulk of it is. And I contrast him with somebody like a Warren Buffet who's been, he's been at it 60, 70 years and his built something that, that has withstood the test of time. And I compare that to what other people are doing and it seems like there's a lot of people that are optimizing for a one hit and it may turn out good, but I'm not sure if it's sustainable because there's a lack of business skills and tools. I'll say it this way, business success requires business skills and tools. Much like ping Pong success requires ping pong skills and tools. And if you want to win a gold medal at ping pong, somebody better have ping pong skills and tools. And the same thing is true with business. If you want a gold medal in business, somebody better have some business skills and tools and bring more to the table than simply an excitement about the idea. Somebody's got to execute something. And most failures have to do with either. We haven't identified the problem. We're excited about something, but don't know what to go do. We've built a crappy team or a team of munchkins, a team of people that, that you know are C players and that can sabotage. There's so many ingredients and it just being thoughtful about what's really required and what's really the problem, I think is the key to saying, how do I keep this thing going? The environment's always changing. The environment is the only thing that's the only thing that's always changing. So a good idea today could be a bad idea tomorrow, and vice versa. So I think one of our jobs as business owners is to be thoughtful about good. How are things changing? Either the competition, the economy, the White House, Brexit, North Korea, interest rates, price of oil, the competition, consumers. I'm changing. And so what I can do today is vastly different than what I could do 25 years ago.

What is the road less stupid? How would you describe it?

If I gave you the opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions you've ever made in your whole life, how much money would you have? And there's not a person in this.

Room that if I gave them the.

Ability to unwind any one of three financial decisions wouldn't have more money. It turns out that the key to making more money is to doing fewer stupid things. That's true. I don't need more good ideas. I need fewer ideas that I think are good that I've executed on. And so I've had the experience over the last 47, 48 years of being.

In business of having done some smart.

Things where actually it wasn't that smart. But in reality, I was lucky. I happened to catch a big wave. And I mistook catching a big wave.

With being a good swimmer.

And it's what Warren Buffett is very famous for saying. Most of you have heard it. You never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. And so the key is not can I make it? The key is, can I make it and keep it? Those are two entirely different skill sets. And in Fact, they are almost diametrically opposed. What it takes to make money is very different than what it takes to keep it. And most people are so obsessed with making it that as they become more successful, they do stupid things, which winds up sabotaging their overall success. And I know this story firsthand because this is one of the reasons I appreciated you so much, Paul, and your presentation is because I've had the experience of losing a lot of money. $100 million of my money that I made. I didn't inherit it, I made it. You were better off than me because you cut the bleeding at plus 600,000. I didn't cut the bleeding until I.

Was minus 50 million.

So I went from plus 100 million to minus 50 million in a matter of 24 months. And when you do that, it takes your breath away. I mean, that's a major, major event. Not only because of the size of the money, but also because the loss is so devastating. And I had so much of my net worth. I have my self worth entwined with my net worth, which is a deadly combination.

How old were you during that time?

40.

40. And that was during the.

For real in real estate.

Real estate, yeah, A lot of. And what led to the loss? Look at your losses. It's not necessarily pleasant to think back on, but everybody's had some kind of loss that they've sustained as a result of a bad decision or excessive optimism. Unexamined assumptions, unexamined assumptions, faulty expectations, excessive optimism are killers. Arrogance is killers. Hubris is a killer for creating and sustaining wealth. So the goal to me is not to get it. The goal is to get it and keep it. You can get lucky and make it. And I know lots of people who got lucky, but the problem is they.

Weren'T able to keep it because they.

Didn'T have skills that would allow them to sustain. So the truth is, to me, sustainability.

Of wealth is the holy grail.

Making it. I can catch a big wave, I can get lucky. I can happen to hit a crease in the market at exactly the right point and you know, we can wind up being, you know, affiliate associated with you or Tony Robbins or any number of other people. And there's a degree of luck in all that and there's a skill set.

In all of that.

And so I'm very much about, let's make sure that if we're going to all this effort in order to create the success. And people do stupid things in the creation mode as well. People oftentimes think that if I just improve My product that. That would somehow allow me to create business or financial success. And yet the truth is, it doesn't require great product in order to make a lot of money. If I ask you to think about your favorite restaurant, the place you would go to have a huge celebration, you're thinking about it. You know where it would be. There's not one person in this room that's thinking about McDonald's. Not one. And yet nobody has made more money in the history of mankind in the restaurant business than McDonald's. How did it happen? Is it because their cheeseburgers are so good? No, their cheeseburgers are horrible. Right? They are. Their French fries, on the other hand, are really good, but the cheeseburgers are horrible. What allowed McDonald's to make a lot of money was not an obsession with the product. It's never. Write this down. This will be a takeaway. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. Southwest Airlines, their whole business model is put butts in seats and fly those butts from point A to point B safely. No mention of your luggage. Right. Your luggage is immaterial to the airlines. Whether it makes it or not, we don't care. Let's just make sure the person gets from point A to point B. Doesn't even have to be on time. Southwest Airlines has made more money in the last 10 years in the airline business than the rest of the airline industry cumulatively since Orville and Wilbur Wright. Now you think about that. One airline has made more money than everybody else since Orville and Wilbur. How'd that happen? Is it because their planes are so good? Is it because their first class section is so roomy? Is it because the food is so outstanding? Is it because the hostesses and stewards and stewardesses. Is it because they're so good looking? No. I can't tell which is older, the stewardesses or the airplanes. Right. It's never what you. Southwest Airlines success is not based on what they did. It's how they did it. You name me any product or service, I don't care what it is. Give me one week. You could say chewing gum, shoelaces, seminars, pins, socks. Name me any product or service. Give me one week, and in one week I'll come back and name you one person who's made millions and 100 people that have gone broke with the exact same idea. The problem is, as entrepreneurs, we become obsessed with the product. We become obsessed with the either the Quality. And I'm not opposed to great products. That's not the message. The message is, what is it as a business person, what is it that we're focused on? The artist side of me wants to focus on the product and making it better and longer lasting and prettier and more robust. And I'm good with that. We need artists. The operator side of me wants to get busy and get a bunch of stuff done. I just, I got so much to do and holy cow, if it's going.

To get done, I'm going to have.

To do it myself because I don't know how to hire a team or keep a team or have a players or create a culture. I don't know any of that. I just got a lot to do. That's the operator side. The business person side says, wait a minute. The job is not to react to the problem du jour. What I need to do is leverage and structure. Write those two words down. That's the difference between a solopreneur and one person army. A solopreneur and a business owner. A business owner has mastered two things, structure and leverage. And without structure and leverage, there is not a way to create a sustainably successful business. I'm going to say the structure part a different way before I talk about leverage.

Yeah.

Opportunity without structure is chaos. The Achilles tendon of most entrepreneurs is structure. They hate it. That's why they started their own business is because they hate the idea of having structure. And yet structure is critical for scaling. I hear a lot of people in here talking about scaling, or scaling is just a Silicon Valley word for growth. That's all it is. How do I grow this thing? Okay, well, if I'm going to grow this thing, I need structure in order to be able to do it. Otherwise I got kind of a fire drill working with a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff. And it's not necessarily the most productive thing that needs to happen. Leverage, one of the highest forms. When I talk about leverage, most people think, oh, he's talking about debt. In reality, I'm not. I mean, debt is a financial instrument, it's leverage. But, but the more powerful form of leverage is who's on your team. So I'm going to ask you a question. If I gave you an opportunity to build a world class team of a players, and the only people on your team were a players, I mean seven footers, these are the Kevin Durants, they can do it all. If you only had a team of A players, how many of your existing Problems that you have right now would go away, disappear. It turns out the problems that most of us are dealing with are not even really the problem. Unison where I need a little whiteboard, if I can get one right here. Joe just handed you a piece of paper a second ago and said thank you and said, write down one of your biggest problems. So I'm going to ask you right now to write down on your piece of paper one of your three biggest problems. Maybe you just did that. Maybe you can refer back to that piece of paper. Maybe you're not going to have to share this. We're not going to talk about it. It's not going to be anything. So you may want to write really, really small so that nobody else can see. Write it really small and just write down or revisit one of your three biggest problems that you think you have with your business. Let me give you a thought. The exercise is over. You don't have to complete writing it down.

The exercise is over.

Every person here has an is line. This is reality. This is the way it looks. This is point A. Point A. And the problem that most people have, in my experience, I know I have this problem, is that I'm not particularly honest with myself about the reality of my situation. I sugarcoat it. When I was at the University of Texas, every day I'd walk past a little message etched in granite over the.

The doors of a building.

And the message was, you shall know.

The truth, and the truth will set you free.

See, you know this, right? And every day for four or five years, I walked past this saying, and I went, I don't know what this means. What does that mean? You should know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Well, the reality, it dawned on me later, is that as long as I'm lying to myself or not telling the truth, I have no opportunity to make a change. So it's why addicts don't stop using is because they say, well, I don't really have a problem. I can stop anytime I want. Yeah, I know it's a little. I know it's a little bit. But, you know, the reality is it's I'm functioning right. It's why alcoholics or poor people pick a topic. People don't tend to tell themselves the truth. This is point A. We also have point B. Point B is ought. This is the way I'd like for it to look. This is point B. And it turns out that most of us are experts on point B. We have massive clarity on the way we would like for it to look because we've done all this visualization. We've done all this goal setting where you make a goal and then you make it vibrant, and then you turn it into black and white, then you bring it closer and farther away, and then you put music around it. And so we're really good at visualizing what ought we tend to suck at. What is. And when asked what our problem is, we describe the gap. The gap between where you are and what you want is what you typically describe as the problem, when in reality, this gap is not the problem. This gap is the symptom. I just ask you, Joe just asked you the last exercise you did, write down one of your three biggest problems, and everybody got busy real quick. We knew what the problem was because we were visualizing the gap between where we are and what we want, when in reality, that's not the problem. That's the symptom. The gap sits right here. This is. Sorry. The problem sits right here. This is the problem. This is the obstacle that I need to overcome in order to move the needle on my is line. In order to move the needle on my is line, I need to get clarity on what it is that's truly blocking my forward progress. What's blocking my forward progress has nothing to do with where I am versus what I want. What's blocking my forward progress is the obstacle that sits right here. And it turns out, Joe, that the hardest part of thinking time is getting clarity on the problem. That is, if you don't have clarity on the problem, that is.

You'Ll be.

Tactical instead of strategic. So I say 10 pounds overweight. What do I want to do about it? Well, as long as I view the problem as being 10 pounds overweight, which is not the problem, that's the symptom. Hello. Hello. Are you with me that? Being 10 pounds overweight is not the problem. That's the symptom. But as long as I identify being 10 pounds overweight as being the problem, then what I will lurch to. Okay, should I buy a jump rope or should I join a gym? Should I buy Oprah's latest diet book? Or should I get a personal training? Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll get a piece of home exercise equipment. That's what I'll do. If I just had a peloton bike in my house, then I would get in shape, which is why most home exercise equipment and most diet books don't work, because it's a tactical response to a tactical question. As long as I'm dealing with the symptom, I'm going to be dealing in tactical. And once I say it's not a tactical issue, I need to be strategic and think strategic and identify the problem it is.

So here it is.

And then I'll stop, Joe. If I don't have clarity on the problem that is, I'll build a machine for the problem that isn't, which is what we do 99% of the time. We identify the gap, call it the problem, when in reality it's a symptom. And we're highly tactical in our response because we have a tactical question that we've asked which winds up sabotaging our results. If you tell me your sales aren't high enough, I'm going to say that's a symptom, not a problem. If you tell me you don't have enough profits, if you tell me you have a crummy culture, if you tell me you have weak employees, if you tell me your balance sheet is screwed up, I'm going to look at you and say, all those are symptoms. What's the problem? So if I gave you an opportunity to rethink the problem that you identified a minute ago, is that really the problem? Really? Is that the problem? Is that the core root underlying problem that's blocking your forward progress? Or is there something below that, something buried where you got to get busy and figure out what in the world is going on? So business, to me, is an intellectual sport. It's chess. Money and business does not respond well to emotions. Warren Buffett said it. Optimism is the enemy of the rational investor. It turns out in business, optimism is your enemy, which is why one of the pieces of advice that you gave is so good, Paul, which was, we all need a board. We need advisors. We need people that we will listen to. The higher you go or the higher you want to go, the greater the requirement to have somebody around you who will tell you the truth. Because I can't smell my own breath. I can smell your breath, but I can't smell mine. I can't see my own swing. I can see the shot. I can't see the swing. I need people around me, watching me swing, who will give me advice. And then I got to be willing to hear that advice. As long as I'm arrogant, right? Unwilling to listen. It does no good to ask. So business is an intellectual sport, and the people that win the game sustainably have got skills and tools, which is why I wrote the book Let the Road Less Stupid.

I've been in strategic coach since 1997. Me and Dan do the 10X Talk podcast together. Hang out quite a bit over the years with Dan and Babs and even up at their, you know, cottage. And, you know, we spent a lot of time together doing a lot of things. And you have the. You've taught me how to really look at things that I invest in as a cost versus an investment. And you also have done extraordinarily well in Genius Network. And what I really admire the most about you is that you're in a position where it'd be really easy for you to just constantly be the smartest guy in the room or be the quote, unquote guru. And you always have a beginner's mind as you approach things. And so even though you've coached more successful entrepreneurs than anyone in the world, you are great at being a student and participating in ways. And a lot of people that haven't even done 1/100th of what you have done, I see a level of they start believing their own PR and they get arrogant and they think they're really cool or they swoop into an event and as long as they're on stage, that's there and then they're gone. And so you're not that way at all. And you're constantly learning and you also help other people with how to take that approach. So I've written some questions that I want to make sure I ask you.

In the right way.

What's your perspective and definition of cost versus investment is the first one. But if you want to say anything before, I just want to make sure.

We set it up right.

Yeah, I think the.

So.

My focus in any situation that I get into is just what's my mindset going into the situation. And what I try to do is to treat the past as raw material. In other words, you know that I'm very interested in my past, but I'm only interested in my past as raw material that can be transformed into new lessons for the future. So I'm constantly going back, taking situations for my life. And I was so impressed with your video. And I've been enormously impressed with Joe ever since I first met him. In spite of his best efforts, when I first met him to seem like he was really odd, I didn't see how odd he was. I saw this incredible capability in the middle. And so what I say is that one of the keys. And I guess I'm proving it more now for a lot of people because I over 70, but my number one rule is that you always have to make your future bigger than your past. And that has to do with that. The past is simply there for learning, and the future is there for winning. That's my basic attitude. So when I walk into Genius Network, every time I do a little thought process before I come in and I say, okay, we're starting fresh.

So.

So what is it that I'm actually looking for when I come to Genius Network? And it's kind of funny because even before we started, we already got two crucial pieces of information. One on an AI program that actually does wonders on your website. And that was just in a chance conversation that we had at dinner the night before. Somebody mentioned this. I said, bingo, there's one. And then the next morning, we were sitting in the restaurant here at the. At the hotel, and this man was sitting at the table next to us, and we said hi and everything like that. And then we started chatting, and then we invited him over and we talked for an hour and a half. And from Australia, Jason. Whereas Jason here. Anyway, over there. Oh, there he is. So anyway, I have a phrase that our eyes only see and our ears only hear what our brain is looking for. So our number one responsibility is just to tell our brain what we're actually looking for. And then your eyes and ears are out there picking up what you're doing. And then. So I really zeroed in on Jason, and then I knew somebody in strategic Coach program who would be very interested in Jason. So the first thing I did when I could yesterday, I introduced the two of them, and I said, you two have a lot to talk about. And then when Bo came up, I said, you know, it's time for me to do Bo's course. So I went up to Bo and I said, next year, I'm going to do your program. So, you know, even before, you know, the first hour of Genius had started. Three things that already happened that corresponded to what I was looking for.

Right, Right.

No.

And see, one thing that I. When you showed me the impact filter that you did for the 100k group. So Dan joined 100k right when we first started it. And the interesting thing was watching how he thinks about something before he goes into it. So me and Dean Jackson and I love marketing, we actually teach a model of the before, during, and after unit, because there's three stages of your business. There's the before unit, what you do before you start interacting with a client, doing business. Then there's the during unit, and then there's the after unit. After somebody gives you money, how do you deliver world class service so that they love you, appreciate you, and repeat business and generates referral business? And so as business owners, it's a real simple framework to not just think of, oh, I got to grow my business. Well, do you have to. Do you want to grow. If it's growing the business, the before unit, do you want to do better in the during or the after unit? Because some people are really great at before, but they're not very good at during. Some people are great at during, but they're terrible at after. They never interact with the clients after the fact that. So if you look at your business as having three different units. But then I realized by watching Dan with any sort of learning experience, it's what he does. It's kind of like what Robert Cialdini was talking about pre suasion. It's what do you do before the event? So before every Genius Network event, Genius X event, Dan does thinking beforehand and you don't spend a lot of time doing it, but what he does is this great line, is the juice word worth the squeeze? Well, the juice is worth the squeeze to the degree that you are able to squeeze to the degree that you're able to go into it very thoughtfully, very intentionally. And so where's Alex Van Dozian? Is he in the room yet? Okay, Alex. I wasn't at the breakfast thing. How was that, by the way? Yeah, thank you. And so Alex held an event called Pathfinders and I went to it. And before the event, I read every bit of the program and made notes beforehand. A lot of times I've not done that in the past, but I do that thinking about Dan because Dan goes into things very thoughtful and it just made a world of difference once I was there. And so a lot of times people that don't do any sort of thoughtful, intentional thinking before they go to something, then they're waiting for that thing to impress the hell out of them. When in reality it was up to them to create the experience, you know, because the experience you have in Genius Network or here or any sort of environment, as a matter of fact. So it's the same thing with Strategic Coach. But the big thing I want to point out though is the cost versus investment. I'd love to have you speak to that because you've articulated it better than anyone I've ever heard.

Yeah.

So what I see is you have a choice. And I believe the more that your life going forward is a choice rather than that things happen to you and then, as you say, you react to them. But just using Robert Cialdini yesterday, it struck me as Robert was talking that the best way to be a persuader of other people is actually to be a pre suiter of yourself. And therefore I don't see Genius Network as any kind of cost whatsoever. You know, because I persuaded myself that. And can I give you some numbers? I just want to tell you I did a form a thinking process that we have in Strategic Coach called the Impact Filter. And it's a way that I prepare my mind for any kind of situation, whether I'm doing a new workshop, whether I'm doing podcasts, whether I'm writing a new book. And I pre swayed myself before what the optimum outcome is. And I tell myself the breakthroughs I'm going to have, even though I don't even know what the experience is. And then I just sit back and I watch how these breakthroughs are coming. And they never come quite the way that I've defined them, but they're usually better than I've defined them. And I think the reason is because I persuaded my mind for breakthroughs.

Yes.

And so I was thinking of Robert because I pre swayed myself continually that I'm going to maximize or optimize any situation that I'm in. But then I just let reality present itself to me. And then I say, well, there's one, there's another one, there's another one, and it works. But therefore, I've invested a great deal to set up the situation so that the best possible thing can happen. And it's always a surprise. I mean, it's not like it's predictable. What's predictable is that the experience is going to be a great spirit. And I'll contrast that with what I see with a lot of people. And I even see it in my program. I see it with people, you know, and we're getting big. You know, I've noticed a trend that as we've gotten bigger as a company, we've started to attract companies that are our size or bigger.

Right.

So we're about 130 team members now. We're in three, three countries. We operate in 10 cities. But I've noticed people who are incredibly successful come in, but they still have a mindset that I would call a consumer mindset. And I like to contrast the consumer mindset with what I call the transformer mindset. And the consumer mindset is that the world is supposed to do it for you. Okay. And you retain three mindsets and one mindset. Is a critical mindset. So you retain the right to criticize what's going on. And number two, you retain the right to complain about what's going on, and then you retain the right to blame. So it's criticize, complain, and blame. And it's amazing to me that entrepreneurs have gotten to such a high level of success with those mindsets. But the problem is nothing's ever good enough for them. Nothing ever matches their ideals. Okay, so I don't have any ideals. What I have is measurement. I have pre suasion, then I have measurements of how well my persuasion has identified things I didn't even know I was looking for. The opposite of that is what I call the transformer mindset that you go in and you transform the actual experience. Experience that you're having. And there's three mindsets there too. And the first one is that you contribute. Contribution is just the magic password. You're going to go in to actually create value for other people. Number two, you're going to collaborate with other people. So to the degree that teamwork is available during that period of time, then you can collaborate. And number three is that you create. You just create new things. And so to me, at 74, I'm not trying to get anywhere. I'm just trying to expand my transformer mindset of contribution, collaboration, and creativity. And so I feel that time is actually slowing down for me. It's not speeding up.

Well, so you, what are your thoughts? Because you're a big fan of Ben Hardy.

Of course.

Ben Hardy. I'm a big fan of Where's Ben? Did I mention, Did I mention that I'm a big fan of Ben Hardy?

You just did. Yeah. You just did. And so Ben, with his book Willpower doesn't work. And I know he's doing a book with you. Who not how.

Who not how. Yes.

And Ben is a great example because people say, why is it that you do certain things with certain.

Certain genius?

Like there's some sort of click or favorism. There is a click within genius network. And it's like, well, a lot of that depends on the energy, the collaboration, the contributions of people. It's not just like, hey, I'm going to single out, see people that I really attach to, single themselves out by just exhibiting great sort of. I mean, you're the same way. That's why me and you do so much together. Because you hear the same thing at Coach about me. Like what? You know, like people that don't understand our relationship probably, you know, they kind of have their own story about it. So Ben writes about willpower, doesn't work. And he writes about the environment and creating the sort of environment and what you've always been a master at. And I think from the very early stages of Strategic coach. Strategic Coach in a lot of way is AA for workaholics that are super high achievers. And you bring them in and you talk about free days and focus days and buffer days and that if you want to, you know, a lot of your perspectives, that a entrepreneur that is too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves. Right. And you give people freedom. And a lot of entrepreneurs, if you ask, why are you, what do you want? Well, I want freedom, but a lot of them don't have any time freedom. A lot of them don't have relationship freedom and a lot of them don't have money freedom. Although compared to the average person, you could probably say that they do. And you give them ways to think about freeing that up. But you create an environment and you show them how to actually set that environment up. And then you surround yourself with people that support you in what it is that you want to do. Before I just quit rambling here, I remember hearing from you. If you spend a lot of time working on what you're weak at, your weaknesses, at the end of your life, you have a lot of really strong weaknesses. And so your whole thing is focus on your strengths and surround yourself with the unique ability team. So you go to environments where you can tap in the capabilities. So Genius network for you, from my perspective is you're coming to find other people that can just. You're not going to spend the time, the money, the energy, you're just going to go and latch onto that and access it and collaborate with it and continue to build and grow yourself. But a lot of this has to do with the environment and how you self select that.

Yeah.

And it's a skill. So, you know, I mean, everything, it starts with mindset. And mindset alters your behavior. So when you look at people's behavior, it tells you nothing unless you go back upstream and look at the mindsets that actually determine the behavior. And what I reflected in my description of my first five years in Genius Network with Babs. And by the way, Babs right here, Bab Smith is my partner.

And.

You know, unless I know Babs, I haven't created Strategic Coach. I mean, we actually had T shirts last year on her birthday that said, no Babs, no coach. And I said, my life has two stages. It's BB and AB and it's before Babs and after Babs. And if I hadn't met Babs, I'm just a smart drunk worried about the rent, you know, and, you know, and I say that honestly because I really required that collaboration with the person not only who was my partner in my personal life, but my partner in my business life. And I'd gone through a lot of setbacks and a lot of frustration until I met Babs. And. And then bang, there was just this huge jump and it's gone. We're into our collaboration, we're really into our 35th year, going into our 36th year. But when Babs and I came to Genius Network, the very first thing you said when we started, you said, you're paying 25,000 for this, and if you don't get $250,000 of value out of it in first the first year, I won't let you come back. And so I was sitting there And I said, 10 times. 10 times. And we had done a thinking exercise in Coach, which is called the 10 times mind expander, where you go back 25 years to when you were one tenth of where you are, and you talk about the stages of growth that got you to where you are. And, you know, we just create a structure. And people say, amazing, you know how I did that? And I said, now you're 10 times where you were when you were 1 10. But could you have predicted how you were going to get to 10 times back then? And of course you couldn't. And I say, okay, so we're going to do it again. Now I've given you proof that you've already gone 10 times. And now what I'm going to say is we're going to pick a date in the future when you're going to go 10 times and then we're going to work on that. But I came up to you after the first. I said, you know, I'm going to create a whole program called the 10 Times Ambition Program. And it happened in the first half hour. And at the first break, I came up to you and I said, I just got my. I just got my money back. And it turned out that that first insight in the first hour of my first 25k, after 5 years, had netted a $16 million. 16 million, which turned out to be a 64 times return on investment. And it was just bang, I got the idea. And then, so when I started 100k, so first 5 years is going to be a million dollars. I said, we're going to get $64 million. And the very first workshop I was in, I met Ben. And all my career in Coach, I've been looking for the writer who just is not an inside writer, but an outside writer who just totally gets what we're talking about. And he's got a reputation and he's got an audience and he's got a reach and he's got an agent and he's got a publisher, and they have a big budget. And I say, bingo, there's my writer. And so we have our first project. It'll be written during the next year, and then we'd go. And Ben said, you know, after this book, can we do another book? I said, you bet.

That would be a bad idea.

Yeah. So I sweetened the deal and I said, ben, all the money we make on these books is your money. I just want the customers who come from your books. So just like that. And it's going to be 64 times. I know it'll be. Plus, I've gotten an enormous amount elsewhere. I thought. I mean, I've talked to John Ratliff a lot over the years about his thinking about this packaging your company as if you're going to sell it. And I tell you, the two hours yesterday afternoon, you know what it was for me is that that was a threshold. Two hours for Genius Network, because you're now jumping where we're not just talking about entrepreneurs, we're really talking about entrepreneurial companies. And I just felt it was like time for Genius Network. Everybody put their big boy pants on and actually started thinking about companies. So it's really great. So that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for $64 million of value every time I come here, which is.

Okay. So I love that, for one.

You.

Just have the intention and then you keep your eyes and ears out because you don't know where the actual opportunity is going to come from.

Yeah, well.

So everyone has in their folder here that tool that says 250k ideas. Now, part of that is a trick in the same way that when I. And I don't emphasize it as much as I used to, but for the first eight years of Genius Network, I would say if you're here for new people that would join the group, and those of you that have been in the group for a while, you've heard me say this many times, where I would say, if you don't get at least a 10 times return on your investment, I don't want you to renew for the next year. And it's not that I don't want the money, because I want the money. I'd like the money. What I want though is I want you to get a 10 times return. I want Genius Network to be a school that pays you to attend. I don't ever want it to be a cost. And what I'm doing though is I'm doing a trick. Because if your brain asks and listens for $250,000 ideas, if you are truly asking and looking for that, your brain cannot avoid the question. And so in a lot of ways.

It'S a way to.

Because there's all kinds of stuff you can focus on. But if you focused on what am I going to hear that's worth at least a quarter million to me, you're going to get a 10 times return on that. And the idea for the 10 minute talk was how could someone share a concept, a strategy, a methodology in 10 minutes that if someone actually took seriously what it is and they have to deliver, not all of them do, but a lot actually do that. Each minute of that 10 minute talk would be worth $25,000. If you could literally do a $250,000 idea in 10 minutes, that would be a pretty damn good return on investment. And so we've done like in the membership site, there's so many 10 minute talks that are worth a quarter million dollars, but only to the degree that someone interacts with it that way. So when you're talking about mindset, when you're talking about this, what would prevent someone, even though you're talking about it, even though you're explaining exactly what you did, even though I just shared the whole idea and a lot of people are very capable of saying this is what I want, and then they go about doing what is needed in order to get it. What would prevent someone from being able to do that? Because there will be some people in the audience here that are hearing this, but it just doesn't land, it just doesn't penetrate.

Well, I think there's a decision, so there's a choice. But there's an interesting distinction between the word choice, because choice can only come from the inside. In other words, the choice is that you have a picture of yourself in the future and you choose that that's who you're going to be in the future. Future. And entrepreneurs, I would say probably become entrepreneurs because they have that ability to a degree that the general public doesn't, that they can see themselves, that you have a picture of yourself in the future and you choose that that's who yourselves a year from now or three years from now. And they can actually engage intellectually, intellectually with that, that totally makes sense. But also they emotionally commit to it. You know, they're committed, but there's no evidence of it yet. So literally who you are as an entrepreneur constantly gets created by your vision of who you want to be in the future. But that's the choice. But the decision is that you have to give up criticism, complaining and blaming for the rest of your life. That once you enter onto the this path, you can no longer stand back and say, well, if it works, if it doesn't work, I get to criticize, complain and blame. Because you don't. That's the decision and that is the real what I would say the fork in the road. You know, Yogi Berra said, when you come to the fork in the road, take it. And my feeling is that I took this, I took this the one fork a long time ago. And then there's all sorts of mindsets that build up around being a transformer. And also your behavior changes and then your behavior becomes automatic habit. And then what you notice is you start noticing other people who have the same mindset. And that's where the payoff is. Because our brain is not our intelligence. Intelligence, our ability to access other people's brains is really our intelligence. And the school system, starting at junior kindergarten now, where they have proms at the end of the year, they teach people to be isolated individuals who think their intelligence is inside of themselves. So you get 20 years of that in the educational system and it disenables your from accessing the intelligence of other people. Entrepreneurs, by necessity and also by choice, really, really access the intelligence. And that's really your intelligence. The creativity and the contributions of other people. But you don't access other people's capabilities intelligence, unless you give up criticizing, complaining and blaming, you can't do it anymore or it's just not part of your life.

To the people in the room, there's a lot of resources, human resources. Here are some of the greatest. I mean, Chip Frank's with Joe volunteer. It's basically taking human resources that want to contribute and creating a mechanism for people to link them with each other because so many. So this is a room filled with incredible genius, wisdom and knowledge. It's a tribe of tribal leaders. So advice on, on how to build yourself as a better entrepreneur, how to get the most out of this community. Because both of you have done a.

Great job with it.

Dan, you go first.

Yeah, I Mean, I think I just have a couple insights about. First of all, you have to realize that being an entrepreneur is a life sentence and you can't go back. How many of you know that once you gone out, you can't go back? So, you know, I mean, you're condemned to be an entrepreneur for the rest of your life. And a lot of people want to play it half and half. I could do what I'm doing as an entrepreneur or I could do something else. And I want to tell you it's not true. You have no other option except to continue on the way you are. So my feeling is make it fun, you know, and so go for the part of your entrepreneurial experience that tells you that you're always energized. And the other thing is, if everybody could just cut off today thinking about their entrepreneurial future as an individual future and start thinking about it as a team. Team future. So I'm surrounded by teamwork. I'm not in control of any one of my work days. I walk in in the morning and I am controlled and managed by other people from morning till night. I'm told when to show up, I'm told what to do, but I am in charge, so I'm not in control. So one of the biggest things for entrepreneurs, you have to give up the idea of control and switch over that you're 100% in charge, but other people are 100% in control. Okay? It's like the entertainment industry or the sports industry. The top performers are not in control, but they are in charge. And, you know, and so. And the other thing is, don't try to have a complete life, okay? The notion of bucket list and completing your life and leaving a legacy are all signals to the universe to take the parts back. Okay? I want to die in the middle of eight projects. I mean, if I die, I want it to be a surprise. And I'm in the middle of eight projects. And there's no grieving for the first two or three weeks because people are so pissed off about the mass. Yeah, I mean, this whole notion, oh, I'm going to bring my life to completion, you know, I mean, this is a death signal, you know, I mean, you're talking yourself into the grave, you know, let you know, death needs no assistance. You know, death needs no assistance, and I'm not giving death any assistance. And yeah, we have fun with Peter and I have really fun with the longevity thing because people, you know, every time we talk about this 156 and 700 thing, the podcast goes right off the charts. Every podcast people are really interested in this topic. How many of you, if you could extend your active working career for 25 years right now, right at the top, top, you'd actually make a lot of investment to actually do that.

Well, I want to see who doesn't want to.

Yeah, who, yeah, who's. Who's wrapping it up within the next.

12 months.

Because I'd like to buy a life insurance policy on you and have me as the beneficiary.

So great.

Advice for entrepreneurs. Listen, it's. We are linear and local thinkers. Our brains, 100 billion neurons in our brain, the 100 trillion synaptic connections were evolved on the savannas of Africa hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago. And so we have these cognitive biases. And what we do is we take our past and we extend it into the future, and that's a linear extension. And that puts a self imposed limitation on us, on what we can do. And so I'm going to ask you to think about, are you putting those self imposed limitations on your life, right? Because are you building a business for what used to be possible versus what is now possible? A world of infinite information, infinite computing speed, massive amounts of capital, all of these things. So in that world of it's the best time ever to be alive in a world of near infinite opportunity, in a world of abundance, my question to you is, are you doing the most important thing that you can be doing, right? Is it, are you doing something because it's a quick buck because you inherited it, because you have a partner you're obligated to, or are you doing something that gives you joy?

Right?

I cannot believe the shit I get to do.

Right?

I feel so grateful, so lucky for, like, being able to dream about opening up the cosmos with planetary resources, or extending the lifespan with human longevity, or the investments I make with bold capital. I mean, I'm a kid in the candy store and I'm like, just excited about life. And every one of us has that ability, right? You can make a career out of anything. What did you want to do as a kid if I gave you a billion dollars of cash and said, go make the world a better place, what.

Would you do with it?

That's what I learned from you, Dan, is who do I want to be a hero to? Those kinds of thinking is where your massively transformative purpose is. And so take a second, one second and answer this question in your heart and your soul, are you doing right now the thing that is the most important thing in your life that gives you joy. Are you doing what you're doing right now out of obligation? Or is it truly your calling in life that at the end of your life you can look back and say, wow, I'm so lucky to have worked on that? If you're doing the thing that is your greatest joy and that you feel so lucky to be working on, commit to 25 years. Go 10 times bigger.

Right.

And by the way, going 10 times bigger means letting go of the past. You can go 10% bigger working harder. You can't go 10 times bigger working harder. You have to reinvent the entire business to get 10 times bigger. If you're doing something out of obligation, consider selling it, letting go of it, dumping it, giving it to a friend, and making the whites space to live and to live a full life.

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

Just what makes a great entrepreneur?

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

Well, so the key there, acting on it. Because there's a lot of people that will go to seminars, they'll read a lot of stuff, they'll consume things, but they spend a lot of their time consuming and reading and less doing. So what is the action element? I mean, there are these unicorns that you can. Some of the people you mentioned, people could be thinking, well, I can never.

Do what Warren Buffett does or Zuckerberg.

I mean, I'm just a.

Whatever, I'm a normal person.

How do I apply that? Should I really read that much?

I mean, what would be your response to that?

Well, first of all, I want to come back to this bias for action. You know, Tom Peters, who is my idol, he wrote the very first really popular business book, In Search of Excellence, and he was kind enough to endorse the first book on the COVID And he said, you know, looking back on the eight things that he found were key to building these significantly excellent companies. He said the only one of the eight that still holds, he believes, is this bias for action. And that's what most people miss. They have these dreams, but they don't really have visions. Vision's a dream with a plan that then you act on and then you have these fundamental routines like reading, like going over for three hours every day, like Steve Jobs did when he was launching his retail store. It's what an Olympic athlete has to do that reaches to the gold level is committing to getting up at 4 o' clock in the morning and practicing for three hours before they go to school. It's Jordan Spieth, who we've just witnessed have the most amazing year in 2015 that doesn't happen by accident. He had a big, hairy, audacious goal. I want to not only go to the Masters, I want to win the Masters.

And.

And then he had this discipline and focus to practice. Did you read some of the stories about where when you go over to his family store, he would pick yards between then and he'd hit the golf balls from yard to yard to Yard. I mean, this is crazy, this obsession. But that's what's necessary.

Well, and it is the thing that gives the edge.

Well, you said something earlier today when.

You were talking to the EO group about having the, you know, not reading is no different.

Something along like having those who can't read. I mean, those who don't read barely have an advantage over those who can't. And I think we've lost a lot of that. Gotta wanna to learn.

Yeah, yeah. So how do you have four children?

We do.

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

That or what are some of the.

How does this apply to how you're.

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

How would you define an entrepreneur? I mean, what's entrepreneur?

I mean, I know the original definition of it.

I don't know if you ever heard it, but I.

Well, you know, I don't know if you've ever heard my definition, but my definition is an entrepreneur is someone who's too incompetent to work for anyone else. And really, you know, I was. I had like big ideas. I had things I wanted to do. And I'd get into a company and start working. I'd just go like, I can't work in this minutia. I have to like, no, I want to do this. And so I became somebody that wasn't a very good employee. And so, okay, it's kind of chip, if you don't like the way we're doing things here, why don't you go do it yourself? And finally, I had no other option it wasn't even a choice. It was like, if I want to feed myself, I got to figure something out.

No, honestly, I was in the same.

Boat when I started my own company. I was 20, 22 years old.

I could not work for other people.

I just had this thing in me, even to the point where I was in debt for two years. Credit cards, just clean carpets, doing the hard manual labor. And I was even going broke doing it. And I was like, there's so many ways to go broke. A couch, watching TV is an easier way to go broke than doing hard manual labor, clean carpets. But it was in me. I was wired and I wanted to do it.

And you learned probably something there.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

And I think entrepreneurs, they saw. Solve problems for a profit.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's very good.

And like Dan Sullivan says, you just make it up and make it real. So you came up with all these things and you actually made them real. And so there's a lot of people that will be watching this that will look at you as an incredibly aspirational role model of how to build and grow a successful enterprise. And they're trying to take their ideas and make them up and then turn it into something. And, you know, I remember saying this years ago in a seminar. If I would have known how difficult being successful in business was, I would have stuck with being a loser. It was just a lot.

You have a passion. Exactly.

So, again, it's another version of advice you would give to the person out there that hasn't quite nailed it yet. And I say this because even the people that really have reached the top, most of them don't think they have.

Right.

There's never any top. Yeah, exactly.

The world's highest achievers live with the highest levels of dissatisfaction.

I agree with you. Not me, any. I chose not to. But I could see my mind moving into that. That realm if I wanted it to.

Well, good.

Well, that's something I want to highlight, too, then.

I'd love to speak to that mindset that you've had about that, because, look, if you're going to play the game, you might as well enjoy it as best you can, because a lot of times you could be winning but feel like you're losing totally based on how you frame it, how you look at it. And so when I ask questions like, what would you say to a young person? The truth is, I'm really talking about. About everybody, because this is all available to anyone that's willing to. To do it.

So not to. But I could See my mind moving into that, that realm if I wanted it to.

Well, good.

Well, that someone is, you know, wanting to just become better and they're, you know, they don't, they're not hitting it. What advice would you give them? Or what do they need to, to do? They need to change their attitude? Do they need to look at a different business model? I mean, what are some of the factors? I know there's not just one answer, so I wanted to get some of your perspective.

Well, I, I, I go back, I can only say about me, but I, you know, there was that time when I was like 18 when I just decided that I wanted to learn everything I could. And I, I think there has to be. Knowledge is based on the knowledge you already have. So the more you know, the more, you know, I find that some people just aren't. They say this, they say they want to be successful, they say they want to do it, but then they play their video games or they watch football games on Sunday, or they, you know, they're not really driven. I think mostly because they haven't found their passion. And I think they haven't found their passion because either when they were in university, they didn't take a myriad of courses to find out what was really easy for them, which is where their passion is, or they haven't read enough to actually find something they're passionate about. And it almost seems lame, like talking to people like, find your passion. But I think I would have made athletic clothing for no money my whole life. Just enough to pay my, to feed my family, just enough to pay the mortgage would have been fine because that's what I was put on the earth to do. Right. You know, and so I think it's up for people to get out there and find that. And as we've talked about before with the landmark is like figuring out what the blocks in my life were that had me view the world from a place of ultimate possibility rather than being constrained from my past.

Yeah.

What scares you, if anything?

Well, I think the normal things, like one of my kids dying would be number one. You know, like, I'm actually not concerned about climate change at all. I think the world is, like, moving at such a rapid pace, technology wise, that we're going to, we've got to solve for everything. Like the knowledge that's on the web and the way people are able to crowdsource information and solve things at such a rapid rate, I think is far faster than climate change is occurring.

Yeah, well, I agree.

And there's A lot of technology. And I will say this because I'm still, as far as I know, Richard Branson's largest fundraiser. I've raised a few million dollars and a big chunk of that money has gone into things that have to do with climate change and the environment. And I've also been around a lot of people that are in that world that call themselves like the saviors of the planet. And this, that I don't find to be very, you know, very high integrity individuals.

I think a lot of it is.

Used as fear tactics and things. And there's enormous solutions and I look at both sides and I'll interview people on to get completely different perspectives. And there's a guy that I interviewed, Alex Epstein, oh, very good, great guy. And he wrote a book called the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. And it's very fascinating because he, you know, he doesn't sell anything related that field. He just took a look at how much, you know, how much propaganda is put out about climate change and things. And this other side didn't have a voice to it. And of course his favorite book is Atlas Shrugged, which is one of the, one of my favorite books and one of your favorite books. And we can even maybe talk about that. But yeah, I mean, I think technology coming from the mind of entrepreneurs and the creation of things can solve almost all world problems. And I don't think we have a resource problem. We have a distribution problem when it comes to food. And some of the greatest resources are human resources employed in a certain way. And if, I don't know if anyone's ever designed, described you this way, I think you are a brilliant deployer of human resources by empowering them in a certain way. Like the original definition of entrepreneur, the first time it was recorded usage was in 1804 by a French guy named John Baptiste who said an entrepreneur is an individual that takes resources from a lower yield to a heart.

Okay, interesting.

From a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity. And so when someone thinks of there's an ax to chop down a tree and someone invents a chainsaw, they've made an invention. But I think when you take a human mind and you take it from here and you make it here, be more productive, higher integrity, more resourceful, more happy. That's entrepreneurship. And then you apply that to technology or anything where there's world problems, you can improve it. And there's plenty of people that use business principles to sell toxic foods, alcohol and tobacco, pharmaceuticals, things that are damaging. But there's a lot of other individuals that are what I would consider empowering and doing things that do good for people. And I think the way that I think of you, which is one of the reasons I wanted to interview you, is there's very few people that not only have transformed an entire industry and have made billions of dollars as a result of it, but have empowered literally hundreds of thousands of team members. Because when you take someone to get them to read that book or go through landmark or whatever sort of thing, you've not just improved that person's performance and their career, you've improved their family, you've improved their family's family and then.

Their community, and then it's extraordinary how that works.

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'll be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. They're over here.

Do it now. Come on. Thank you.

Watch them.

The Achilles tendon of most entrepreneurs is structure. They hate it. That's why they started their own business, is because they hate the idea of having structure. And yet structure is critical for scaling. I hear a lot of people in here talking about scaling, or scaling is just a Silicon Valley word for growth. That's all it is. How do I grow this thing? Okay, well, if I'm going to grow this thing, I need structure in order to be able to do it. Otherwise, I got kind of a fire drill working with a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff, and it's not necessarily the most productive thing that needs to happen. Leverage, one of the highest forms. When I talk about leverage, most people think, oh, he's talking about debt. In reality, I'm not. I mean, debt is a financial instrument. It's leverage.