The Self Education Plan For Entrepreneurs - Episode #16

I'm Dan Sullivan. And I'm Joe Polish. And welcome to 10 Times Talk.

Hello, this is Joe Polish and I'm here with the fantastic, the brilliant, the amazing Dan Sullivan. Right, Dan? Is that how you would refer to yourself? Usually?

That's a start. That's a start that's getting things moving in the right direction. Yes.

Well, welcome everyone to a new episode of 10X Talk. Dan, on the last episode you said something towards the end where we were talking about selling yourself on selling and persuasion and you made this comment that every company is a school and that the educational system reinforces procrastination and perfectionism. And so let's start with that one and then come back to every company as a school talk about the educational system. And before you say that, I want to preface this with remarks reminding everyone that may not be aware of who Dan Sullivan is, if they're new to 10x talk, that you have coached more successful entrepreneurs than anyone at a certain income level, than anyone else in the world. You're known as the top entrepreneurial coach for successful entrepreneurs on the planet. You've been running a school for entrepreneurs for many, many years and you're quite the educator of very achievement minded people that want to grow their companies. 10 times talk about your perspective of the educational system and what it does well and what it does not do well.

Well, you know, I mean, I'll just start this off that, you know, I've had a lot of time to think about this because I actually started first grade in 1950, so that's over six decades. And I've given a lot of thought, you know, about what is the ideal educational system for me personally. And I, I came up with one answer that I think would be good and that is I would really appreciate an educational system that really taught me how to think about my thinking. In other words, what the educational system teaches you is to think about things out in the world, people out in the world and certain kinds of thoughts. But it doesn't actually teach people the flexibility of actually being able to sort of observe how they actually go about problem solving and asking questions and learning. And I've taught myself how to do that. And that's the basis of Strategic Coach. And one of the reasons why I focused on entrepreneurs is because entrepreneurs have to learn or they get punished very quickly in the form of various kinds of failure. And so entrepreneurs, I think just by the life that they live in the marketplace, since they don't have any safety net, they don't have anyone protecting them, they have to be extremely fast learning. And the people who work for an entrepreneur have to be very, very fast learning individuals, as compared to individuals who say, work in large corporations where not too much is demanded of them, as compared to what we expect of our team and strategic coach. But let me just say that the educational system as we understand it, the real problem is system. And people say, well, we need a better educational system. And I said, well, there's nothing wrong with the thought of education, but there is a lot of problem with the word system. Because the educational system actually grew up to train people to work for a lifetime in fairly repetitive and fairly boring work over a 40 year period in large systems, Whether it was a factory system or, you know, a large office system. It could be a corporate office system, it could be, you know, a government office system. But essentially before the beginning of the industrial revolution, where you got into mass manufacturing, where you had really, really huge organizational forms, there was no educational system. Or it was provided by religious groups or was provided individually. A lot of people were essentially before the 1850s in North America. They were essentially taught by their parents, or they were taught in their church where the family belonged to a particular church group. Generally, they learned their English by reading the Bible or reading stories. They learned how to do English, and they learned the amount of math that was necessary for practical life. And everything had a practical purpose. But then once the employment of large numbers of people started to be in these large systems, which, you know, really required the ability to be okay with doing things repetitively and doing things that were kind of boring, they had to reproduce in children's childhood, starting at 5 or 6 years old and going up to 18, that they were going to accustom them to repetition and they were going to accustom them to boredom so that it was okay when they got out, they would be productively repetitive and they would be productively bored. So what it did is that it taught them actually to not give way to their imagination, but to actually suppress their imagination. But then it set out a set of standards at what represented you being a really, really great student so that you could be promoted to the next level. And then eventually university became around the 1950s and 60s, you know, you had grade school and then most people just went to grade school, and then you had high school. And then in the 1950s and 60s, college and university started being required. And there was a notion of how good you had to be at memorizing and rote learning so that you could pass the test that would get you onto the next level. And, Joe, this is where it really relates back to the whole notion of why it's very, very difficult to go through 20 years of that and then come out into the marketplace. And that is that from the moment you're five or six years old, until, let's say, you've gone through graduate school and you're 24, 25 years old, you're expected to make this entire educational journey entirely on yourself. You're an alone, isolated individual, and you have to do everything 100%. You have to study 100%, you have to pass the test 100%. And as a matter of fact, any kind of teamwork in the educational system is called cheating. You know, like if there was five or six individuals who got together and said, hey, what are you good at? And what am I good at? And they actually took tests and they traded notes so that everybody got a high grade, that would be called cheating. And yet, when people get out into the business marketplace, the whole business marketplace is based on creative and productive cheating. So, I mean, if you got to 25 and you haven't learned how to cheat, and then you go for the rest of your life in a system where cheating is rewarded, you know, you're either going to go through a very painful period of learning, or you're going to resort to drugs, or you're going to resort to government welfare to get through the rest of your life. So that's my whole point. I think the whole nature of how you put the individual light on the individual who's expected to be good at everything and pass all the tests 100% and turn in great homework, and their assignments are perfect, and they're graded on their assignments. That's not the way the world works, especially since the microchip has become the organizing principle. And all we're looking for is people who are just really good at something, and they can combine their abilities with the unique abilities, which are very different, unique abilities with other people. And so part of the crises that we're experiencing, economic, cultural, political crises we're experiencing, is that we've basically educated five or six generations of people to be perfectionists. But the marketplace, the way it's developing worldwide, is really requiring massive amounts of teamwork where you just focus on what you're good at.

So at what point did it occur to you that you needed to create your own school or at least pursue a certain type of education, education development in your adult life? I mean, did you always get that early on, or did you have to go Through a lot of just crap till it occurred to you that that's something you need to be doing.

Yeah, I think it was around somewhere between 10 o' clock and 11 o' clock on the first day of first grade and I really rebelled. I mean, I still have my grade cards, you know, my report cards from when I went through school. And I got good grades because I've got a really good memory and I'm a fast learner and I'm a good reader. So I could always pass the test and everything else. But on average, probably the first three or four years of my schooling, I missed 45 days when about a half hour before we were supposed to leave for school, I got sick. But you know, within an hour after the car had left to travel the distance to get us to school, I got better. You know, I don't know what the malady was, but it was about a, a 90 minute sickness that I would get earlier in the morning. And my mother was very sympathetic. You look back at things that you're just incredibly grateful for. My mother, I think probably she was the same kind of person I was and she saw the difficulty I was going through. So very early in the very first year of schooling, she said to me, there's two things that you need to know, is that reading is far more important than going to school. That if you learn how to read, you can go from book to book and you can travel anywhere you want with your brain. So I'd be much happier with you if you just read all the time than you went to school. And the second thing is that being very, very knowledgeable about what's going on in the world and reading the news and listening to the news. You know, I was born before television, so we used to listen on the radio. You know, that you'll be very knowledgeable and you're curiosity will be triggered to find out about things that you're hearing about. And that's more important than listening to your teachers because your teachers are basically just teaching you things that they were taught. They didn't come up with this stuff, they didn't really think about it. And she gave that permission to me and she says, and you have to go to school. She gave me the freedom and she gave me the out. But then there was a requirement that I had to go to school. And I was okay with that because, you know, I had tremendous interests outside of school and you know, I was extremely well read. And in those days the Internet was the Encyclopedia Britannica. You surf the web now, but in the old days, your brain could surf the encyclopedia, you could move from article to article and cross reference. And so I developed this real ability, I have to tell you, when I hit the Internet, when the Internet really became functional, I think when Google really hit the scene, when I got on it and I said, I've been waiting for you for 50 years. Where you been? You know, because I was waiting for that type of thing. What I'm suggesting you here, Joe, is that the educational model, first of all, it's not a system. Like you have a big broad system, like a national system, I think that's gone. There's no system to it. And what you're going to see more and more is that there's the capacity, especially using microchip based tools and networks and systems and programs for people to individually design their own education. But the biggest institution, if you will, which I think actually creates right attitudes and right skills and right habits for people, is working in an entrepreneurial company that's constantly forced to change to create new value in the marketplace.

That's great. So what are your thoughts on the current now? Obviously, I don't know how much experience you would think of having with schools today and the world where children are born completely into electronics, which never existed, certainly for you and definitely not for me. I remember when, you know, when I was a little kid, I do remember the transition from black and white televisions to color and all the different variations of, you know, eight track tapes to cassette tapes and, you know, LPs and all that stuff, to thermal fax machines, to pagers, to cell phones that were giant bricks like, you know, from the movie Wall Street. I always remember that scene with Gordon Gekko out and Bud Fox out on the beach talking on the big brick to now today where, you know, there's so much that's done with electronics. What do you think has changed and improved and what sort of things are ingrained and have stayed the same? Because there's amazing organizations like the Khan Academy and all kinds of new educational systems. But what are your thoughts on today's form of teaching children versus when you were in first grade and whatnot?

Well, I think one thing is that the responsibility for good education is very quickly evaporating from government. You know, government really took major control. Public educational system is a government run education system. And I think that government no longer has the ability to educate children for the marketplace. That's a decisive historical change. And the responsibility is actually falling back more and more on parents. I think the homeschooling movement in the United States is spreading very rapidly and the Americans are far ahead of the rest of the world in this because Americans generally almost. I think it's part of the American DNA to have sort of a negative and suspicious attitude towards what government is doing to your children. So I think that Americans have more and more taken back this activity and responsibility from the government. But I think it's going to be a mess. And I don't think that there's any answer, I don't think that there's any general answer to the educational, but I think that there's some principles which you would have to start on those principles. My biggest principle is that everybody has a unique ability, and that is that there's something unique. They have a particular ability to see something that other people can't see. They have a particular ability to figure out things in a way that other people can figure out things. And they have an ability to achieve things in a way that other people can't achieve. And, and the sooner in life that a person can kind of actually get a handle on that, that becomes sort of the organizing principle. And then if you take that, what I call unique ability and use that as the basis for lifetime education. So you're building this when you're 6 years old, but you can go ahead to 86 years old and the person is still building the thing that's been going for 80 years. And the way they're doing that is that they're continually learning how to sell themselves on a bigger and better situation around them. So you have unique ability and then you have the ability to sell, which we've talked about in previous sessions. Then the other thing is linking up your unique ability with other people's unique abilities. So you create a multiplier effect. And Joe, this is what I'm seeing. So I'm just going to put those three out, that these are the fundamental basis for education in the 21st century. One is unique ability, the second one is the ability to sell, and the third one is the ability to create unique ability, teamwork. And if you just look at your own progress over 25 years or more, you'll see that your big jumps in progress personally and organizationally has really come about because you got clearer and clearer and more committed to those three things.

Well, totally. And I mean, I think even the creation of Genius network and my 25k group first started as a byproduct of being in Strategic Coach and continually realizing that I'm responsible for my own education and I Go to Strategic Coach because it's the school that pays me the most. Not just in terms of figuring out how to run a more profitable company, but where to spend my time and activities. And then I created Genius Network because I wanted to create my own school. And originally, when I started my first 25k group, I only had it with 20 people paying $25,000 a year. And that's where I thought I would just stop. I would have my own group because I would always facilitate these incredible meetings and these masterminds and these brainstorm sessions with extremely bright people. And we would talk about who's doing what, best practices, share what's working, that sort of stuff. And people would always look to me to organize these. But I never did it in any sort of structured fashion. It was just whenever I felt like doing it, whenever I could fit it in, corralling people together, whatever. And then I started thinking, let me facilitate something that's a more structured, organized way for a guy who's completely not structured. And I did that. But along the way, going back to the strategic byproducts and opening doors that I never thought about before, I loved it. I was like, wow, I'm going to make this really built around my core business. So my whole company, which was built around me creating my own school. This is such a powerful way of looking at creating your own school. People that are in the training and coaching business, I'll have people all the time that want to learn how to better train people. And I always recommend. I was like, well, first off, if you want to coach other people, you should probably be in the best coaching school in the world, which would be Strategic Coach. From my experience, in my opinion, you mentioned that every company is a school. And so for people listening, they have an opportunity to really take not only their companies and grow them 10 times. But another amazing advantage is if they start thinking of their organizations and what they do as a school for their team and for their clientele and for themselves. How does someone approach and develop that mindset so it's not just something they hear us talk about, but doesn't really land? I mean, what does that really mean, that every company is a school?

Well, two things. One is, I divide an entrepreneurial company's universe into two parts. One's called Frontstage, which involves the experience that customers and clients and prospects are having of what you do. And the other one is backstage. And that's where you have the teamwork among specialists who actually create the experience that people are buying Frontstage. And One of the things that I put an enormous insistence on in Strategic Coach is that there's an enormous consistency between the principles that are operating in what you're preaching and preaching outside is that make sure that you're actually living that way. You know, I think consistency, you're living exactly what you're saying, you know, And I think that's a very fundamental life skill and life attitude is don't be one thing front stage and be something else backstage. So that's a big thing to learn. And I have to tell you, staff members really pick up on that. So I have a rule in my workshops, Joe, is that I never say anything publicly that my team doesn't know is absolutely true backstage, you know, and that's my reality check about what I'm willing to say and what I'm willing to claim works is that it's not anything. Well, there's a huge lesson, because we see in all kinds of life, and Joe, you've witnessed this probably more than anyone, of incredibly successful people who present themselves on stage as believing this and doing this. But backstage, their life is a total contradiction. We. We especially see this in political life. We see it in the entertainment business, this incredible disconnect between what they're presenting themselves to be and what they're actually doing when they think nobody's watching. You think people don't pick up on that. You don't think you're staff. So one of the big things that they can learn is consistency of how they are on the external and how they operate on the internal. And that's a huge life. And to know the difference between those and to be able to detect it quickly and to be able to call people on it, hey, that's not what we're doing. I mean, you talk this big story out there. I mean, if you learned that at, like, 6 or 7 years old, you know, that was one of your fundamental life skills. So I think the entrepreneurial world is very much like that, because the vast majority of entrepreneurial firms are less than 20 people. There's some much bigger ones, but the vast majority of them. And so you can really check out people's behavior and you can check out their words. And. And I think that's incredibly important in life. So that would be one skill that people say, well, you want to make sure you do this. I say, well, it's not so much you want to make sure you do it, but actually recognize that if you have the ability to always be consistent and always have an integrity between the external and the interior, that's an incredible skill. It just saves you a lot of problems in life. And this makes life incredibly easier. But most important thing, it makes people want to be part of your situation. People are attracted to integrity. People are very attracted to consistency.

Well, plus, it's a great way to not just have employees, but have people that are real true advocates and really proud to be part of something because the congruency is there. And yeah, I mean, and you're right, I have seen that over and over again because I happen to hang out with a lot of book authors and speakers and stuff. And there's a huge difference with a lot of people between the writer, the speaker and the person that's the mouthpiece behind it. And not only is it, you know, you don't have to walk around being a hypocrite, but you actually feel really good and confident about yourself when you have the alignment with the front stage and the backstage. So that's a real key.

Well, I mean, Harry Truman, who, you know is emerging as probably the better presidents of the United States, somebody said that he had a reputation for telling the truth. And he says, yeah, it's more economical. You only have to remember one version. I mean, it's kind of like if you got one act going here and another act going here, another act going here, it gets really complicated and you have to make sure that certain people don't meet certain people. I mean, it becomes a full time job just making sure that people aren't detecting all your lies.

Well, let me ask you about that, which is a little off topic, but it's appropriate. You know, Dan Kennedy, who wrote a lot of my sales copy, he's a very smart curmudgeonous marketing guy, brilliant marketer. And he made this comment to me years ago where he said, if you ever invalidate the message because of the messenger, you'll never read another book or attend another seminar. And so how are you able to take in things from people that don't really walk the walk and talk the talk? Because I've told people, I mean, more than anyone I have said Dan Sullivan is the most congruent human being I've ever seen in living the life that he teaches. And there's a lot of people that dispense really good advice, even teachers I remember in school, but they wouldn't live it. And so do you, basically. Is it difficult for you to take and learn from someone that doesn't live what it is they preach? Or do you just have a great way of separating that and applying it in your own way or how do you think about and experience and respond to that?

Well, I think one thing is that I never use anything the way that someone else is trying to teach me. So regardless, I've learned some great truth from idiots. You know, I mean, it's what your own mind does with the information. I don't think there's any human being on the planet who ever actually takes something in and actually turns it into decisions and actions the way that the person who is teaching them intended for it to be used. You know, I have 3,000 people in strategic Coach and I don't think there's a single one of them that ever did Strategic Coach the way that I taught them to do. So I think it's part of the uniqueness of human beings that regardless of what is taught to them, they'll actually custom design it for their own uses. And, you know, there's some brilliant people who are bastards, but they have a handle on something that is actually really quite profound. The big thing is that what I have observed that people whose message is very, very different between who they are as a messenger, they run out of gas after a while. The complications and the incongruity just catches up with them after a while. So they have a real blazing decade or maybe, you know, 20 years, but then all of a sudden all the contradictions because if they're lying to themselves, they're probably lying to a great number of other people. And after a while, all the bills come due, you know, for all the lies that they've t and all the inconsistencies and the word goes around, you know, I mean, there's nothing that destroys a reputation faster. Is he says this, but that's not the way he lives. I mean, nothing kills a reputation faster than that. So, you know, I do it as a safeguard. I always make sure that I am as a messenger the same as the message that I'm delivering. Just because I. I want to have a long run and I don't want to have a whole bunch of stuff coming back to bite me.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, you know what's kind of going through my head right now as we wrap this one up, is that pretty much everything you do and take in and say and experience and set up, you're either making deposits or you're making withdrawals in relationships in your business and your team members. The last thing I want to say, and then I'll leave you with final thoughts, is the three things that are principle based for education are unique ability, unique teamwork and ability to sell. And I think that's just what we are doing here in providing with 10x talk to entrepreneurs to help them with all those areas. I would encourage everyone listening to share this episode with anyone in your company, any entrepreneurs that you think need to hear it. And if you're not in Strategic Coach or part of Genius Network, check it out, go to strategiccoach.com, pick up some of Dan's books, go to 10xtalk.com and get your name onto our list and we'll, we'll send some reports and things to you that will be useful and anything else, Dan?

No, I would just say that in saying that I think that the educational system is out of whack with what people are going to do for the rest of their life. Having said that, I think that there are great teachers who actually do teach those skills of unique ability who are inside the system. I mean, I can think of a couple teachers that I had in the formal system who I thought were very inspirational and they supported me in the right ways. But they're not great teachers because they're in the system. They're great teachers because they're probably really great at custom designing and teaching themselves. Yeah. Awesome.

Well, that's true. And so my whole thing is I just really try to find people in my life that are aligned with this because as you talk about having an unfair advantage, I mean, even being aware of this is an unfair advantage. And one of the things I'd mention that we would talk about transactions to transformations. This is actually how to do it with yourself. And so in the next episode we're going to talk about that. As usual, Dan, great stuff. Thank you so much. And to all our listeners, give us your comments and we look forward to talking with you on the next episode. Take care.

Sam.