Top 5 Things Procrastinators Get RIGHT (Yes, Really!) Feat. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan

Procrastination is a very, very interesting mindset, and the reason is that it's largely secret. It's a largely secret experience that most people have. You know, so you watch Peter up here, or you watch other performers over the next 2 days, and you'll sit there and you have a tendency— we all have a tendency to compare what's going our insides against someone's outsides. How many of you have ever noticed that you compare your inside— outside? So you would look at a guy like Peter or Joe Polish Polish, and he's up here and he's really cool, and both of them are really composed and they have their act together, and you would say, "That person does not procrastinate. Absolutely does not procrastinate." Okay, and I'm not sharing any secrets here. But if you interviewed them, they would say, "There's enormous areas in my life where I'm just running ahead as fast as I can, but there are some areas that I'm actually procrastinating." And so what I'm going to show you— and this is just one of the things that we in Strategic Coach would call a mindset gateway. So I have— over the years, I've created about 100 of these, and these are general-purpose thinking processes that will actually take you through a mindset ceiling. Now, what we're going to actually do is I'm going to show you how to actually use your biggest procrastinations to actually be the vehicle for telling you what the most important things are that you want to do. And you're going to take on 3 of your biggest procrastinations right now, where you are today, and within about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, we're going to flip them, and we're going to turn them into an area of motivation, we're going to turn them into an area of energy, and an energy of focus. Okay? And by doing this today, I'm hoping that you can see that you can do this on any day, that you could actually, for the rest of your life, You could actually, in thinking about what's most important tomorrow, you could actually say, well, what are the 3 biggest things that I'm procrastinating on? And those 3 biggest things that you're procrastinating on are actually your best indicator on what you should work on tomorrow. And therefore, for the rest of your life, you never have to worry about whether you're doing the right things because your procrastination procrastination will actually tell you that these are the most important things. Okay? And for each of you is unique, but the general principle is actually something that we can all master. And there's a great deal of loneliness with procrastination. One of the things I notice is that generally speaking, when I talk to people about their procrastination, it's like it's a secret that's buried in the basement, but it's not just in the basement, it's in a secret room in the basement. And they actually do not want— they said, "I can't talk about my procrastinations." Okay, because the way it's set up is that procrastination is kind of like— it's an indication that you're a lesser human being.

You're—

you know, you don't have your act together. And, you know, there's a moral failing here. Actually, it's a moral failing. You're a sub, you know, it's not very, very good. And if you'd only get your act together, you could live up to your potential. I don't know if any of you have ever had that. Okay, so let's talk about procrastination. First of all, how do I know if I'm procrastinating? So I'm just going to give you the two guides to know what constitutes procrastination for you. And the first one is that it uses the word "should," and it's something that you should do. So "should" is the giveaway. I think words are very, very important, and I think that the word "should"— the moment you hear the word "should," you know that someone's talking about procrastination. It's "should do," or the second one is "shouldn't do." Okay, "should do" or "shouldn't do." And the should do is you should do, but you haven't done.

Okay?

So that's the first procrastination.

Okay?

And the second one is you shouldn't do, but you haven't stopped. Okay? So that pretty well covers the field. And I find that generally speaking, if you just hear, you know, listening, if someone in talking to you uses the word should, you know they're procrastinating.

Okay?

If you use the word should, and should is a guilt word. Should is a manipulation word, and it always indicates that procrastination is going on. It's just a general indicator. I think it's good for 90% of the procrastinations. Two places where you can procrastinate. The first one is work, and the other one is your personal time outside of work. And just generally speaking, so I can include the whole room, in the area of work procrastination, it would fall into these areas. First of all, planning, deciding, initiating, communicating, informing, implementing, responding, completing. Okay, so those general areas. And so when you think about your work and you think about these activities, then these activities would sort of indicate to you where you could be procrastinating. We're going to do a quick sprint, what I call sprint thinking, where I'm just going to have you brainstorm for about 3 minutes and actually write down a whole bunch of procrastinations that you're doing right now. And then in your personal life, it's sort of similar, but it's informing, helping, supporting. Organizing, participating, discussing, deciding, solving, and completing. Okay? And so you can think of all the different situations. As entrepreneurs, there's a particular indicator of what constitutes your biggest procrastinations. And I've got an organization, BABS, Bav Smith is here, she's my partner. We have about 120 team members, and when I'm procrastinating, I'm being a bottleneck that's preventing teamwork. And I notice that my biggest procrastinations is where teamwork can't really be triggered using the skillful people that we have in the company, and the reason is because I'm being a— bottleneck of one kind or another, and it generally falls into the category of the first line. How many of you, the rest of you, when you think of the procrastinations that really keep you awake at night or not enjoying your free time, it usually is where you're kind of a bottleneck that's preventing teamwork? Yeah, it falls into that. And at home, you know, in personal life too, you know, happy personal life requires enormous amounts of teamwork with other people. And so they're doing it. So I'm just trying to give you the general landscape of procrastination. And what I'm trying to do here is saying that this is an enormous source of potential energy for you. This is an enormous sense of potential motivation, but right now it's trapped. So whatever you write down where your procrastination is, it's energy, but you don't have access to the energy. It's actually trapped energy. And how many of you have procrastinated on something for quite a long time, and then when you finally acted on it and broke through, there was this huge burst of energy, there was this enormous burst of energy. And so the one thing I want to get across to you here is that the time you spend procrastinated— procrastinating is never wasted time once you get through it, and the energy that you feel that you've wasted procrastinating is never lost; it's just not available to you right now. And this is one of those areas too where you get manipulated around the issue of procrastination— you actually get manipulated. Being a happy person I'm very resistant to manipulation. You know, Joe spoke about the theme of the conference for Freedom is actually freedom from being manipulated by external circumstances or external messages. So I'm very sensitive, I have, you know, I have a spidey sense for anything where I sense that someone is trying to manipulate me in a particular direction, and so I go after any thought form or any mindset which actually seems to be a manipulative manipulation, and then I come up with a counter— an antidote to it. I counteract manipulation so that people really are free in their own minds and they can think very, very freeing thoughts. So I really, really love helping people get a real sense of freedom about their life and not being manipulated by thoughts that come from the past or in the present. Or possible future. And once they're freed up in that aspect of their life, then their time gets freed up, their money gets freed up, their relationships get freed up, and also their purpose in life, your purpose in life. See, one of the things you discover when you come to Genius Network and also Abundance 360 is that there's a lot of very, very smart people in the world. Okay, there's a lot of very, very smart people in the world. And so you don't want to have a goal that you want to be the smartest person in the room. Okay? Say, I'm not the smartest person in the room, but for something that I've really taken a look at for 40 years, I'm probably the smartest person regarding that particular thing. And each of you has a special thing that you're working on. And in that area you're actually the smartest person. But the vision that Peter is talking about is a lot of really smartness all being available to everybody else. Okay, so my goal from a very early age is that I just want to be in a room where everybody is getting smarter. Okay, that's all I really wanted, and therefore my best usefulness in life as a strategic coach is to just show people how their performance and their achievement can continually go up just by thinking about their mindset ceilings and then freeing themselves up from it. So this is my life work on the planet. I don't know what I've done in previous lifetimes or in future ones, but for this lifetime, this is it. So, um, I'm—

this—

What I'm doing today is, you know, what I was put here to do.

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

All right, now I'm going to give you a form. We're going to go through this quite quickly. And the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to go to a first column. So if you just look at this, and I've got mine filled out, so you can see what one of the forms looks like when it's all filled out. This is called the procrastination priority. Okay, it's called procrastination priority, and that is your procrastination on any day that you choose to do this. Will actually establish your priority for the next day. Will actually establish your priority for the next day. And it's really, really neat because how many of you have, you know, and just raise your hand, how many of you have generally looked at procrastination as a negative in your life, generally speaking? Me too, I mean me too. And I want to tell you I've got a real partner on this in the room and it's Dean Jackson. And Dean and I have been working on this nonstop for the last 2.5 months. And both of us, you know, if there was a big room, I would introduce myself, "Hi, my name's Dan, and I'm a procrastinator." And you would say, "Hi, Dan." Yeah. Hi, Dan. I'm just— I mean, people look at me and they say, "Dan, if there's one person in the world who doesn't procrastinate," It's the king of the mindsets, and I procrastinate just as much as anyone else does. Okay, but we all have our unique things that— where we get caught up. So first of all, there's a, you know, the general transparency. The other thing is, I'll tell you this just because of the experience that I've had with Dean over the last couple months, is that the single most interesting conversation that you'd ever— that will get— if you meet a total stranger and you want to talk about something and it immediately becomes interesting is saying, "Do you procrastinate?" And people go, "Huh, yeah, yeah, I do. I could write the book on it," you know. And what I notice is that there's 7.3 billion people on the planet who could write the book on it. We're all master procrastinators, okay. There's a reason for this. The only way that you could not be a procrastinator is is simply cease having goals. That'll cut it off. And if you're going to do that anyway, death is a quick way of not thinking about goals. So don't do that. So the first thing I'd like you to do very quickly, and we're just going to take 3 minutes, and the first column, what I'm going to have you do is just write down as fast as you can in no particular order, just write down every area where you're procrastinating, big or small, you know, and just get it out there because I just want you to actually write down everything that's in your mind where you know you're procrastinating, where there's a "should" word, you should do or you shouldn't do, personal life or business life, and just write those down. Okay, and if someone will give me the timer on— well, I've got it right in front of me, so I I'll keep a track on you. And don't worry about the ranking, don't worry about which comes first. All we're trying to do is get some things down on paper. How many of you have 4 or 5 and you can work with them? How many right there?

Yeah, we got enough.

So what I want you to do very, very quickly— and this is all emotional because procrastination is a very emotional thing. Just pick the 3 which, if you got them out of the way, would give you the biggest burst of energy. Like if you got through it, this would actually give you a real burst of energy. And the other thing is other people are depending upon it. I find that things where other people are depending upon me and I'm procrastinating, those are really big payoffs if I actually take my action. Then, as soon as you get them circled, just go to the next column where it says the top 3 priorities, and in the 3 boxes, 1, 2, 3, just put— write down again what the procrastination is. Just write it down. Just write down what the procrastination is. Raise your hand if just writing them down and ranking them actually, you can start feeling the energy, the energy is starting to come back. Yeah. Because you're telling the truth, you know, you're just telling the truth. Telling the truth always has big energy boost. About anything. And then once you get the 3 of them written down, I'd like you very quickly just to give a first statement of why you're procrastinating. So I've got these, you know, for example, I made a commitment to my team when I was 70 that over the next 25 years, I was going to write 100 books, 100 books in 100 quarters. And the first 7 quarters, I'm good so far. But I always notice that there's a period during the quarter when I get kind of frozen. Can I pull it off again? And that's one of the things I really noticed was I would procrastinate, even though I've done it 7 times before. There's always that thing, "Can I pull it off again?" And anyway, that's one of the ways I keep my mind alive, by the way, is it makes me really scared about the next 25 years, and I think fear makes you young. I believe that when people start desiring a courage-free future is the moment that they send the universe out— they send a message out to the universe to actually take the parts back. The moment you want a courage-free future is the moment you start dying. So I have a motto in life not to give death any assistance. And Peter and I are— I thought I was a big deal because my goal is living to 156. And then the first podcast I did was with Peter. His was 700. And I immediately felt like a lesser human being, and I began procrastinating even on things that would get me to 156. Never get into that type of sword— but now he's got swords, this is even worse, now he's got swords, and I didn't know that. I didn't know about the sword. Anyway. Okay, so let's— I just want to do this, but how many so far, this is very, very useful? I mean, just doing this. And yeah, and so this is one of those mindset gateways because one of those mindsets coming along that is stopping performance and achievement is actually procrastination and looking at procrastination in a negative way rather than as a source of enormous energy and direction. So I'm going to just show you, I divide basically every person who's a performer, every person who's an achiever, there are 4 boxes that contribute to performance achievement. And a lot of people will say, for example, you'll come to a session like these two days and you'll say, "I would take action on that if I had the confidence." How many of you, when you feel confidence, it's no problem to actually take action?

Yeah.

And then I'll say to them, "But you probably need something else to have confidence because I've noticed that people are only confident when they have "Capability." And they said, "Right, when I have the capability and confidence, I would take action." I said, "Do you have the capability and confidence right now?" And they said, "No, I don't." So what that means is you're not going to take action, right? And they said, "Right, when I get the capability and confidence, I'll take action." And I said, "You know, it's kind of like saying, 'If the government would give me a loan, I would become an entrepreneur.'" Okay, with the proviso that if it was a failure at the end of the year, the government would forgive all my debts. Okay, that sounds pretty reasonable, doesn't it? Yeah, so anyway, but it's that type of demand. And what I've noticed actually, that this is not how capability and confidence actually happen. Actually, there's something that happens that has to happen first when you're up against something where you don't have the capability and confidence. And the thing is, it requires courage. It requires courage. And courage is never triggered unless you have commitment. So what a commitment actually is, is where you say, "I'm going to move forward toward a breakthrough, toward something bigger and better," where I don't yet have the capability and confidence. That's actually what courage is. That's what courage is. The difference between courage and confidence is that courage doesn't feel good. How many of you have noticed the sharp difference in emotion between confidence and courage?

Courage—

the reason why we call it courage is because it doesn't feel good, and that's one of the main reasons why we admire it so much in other people. You know, so I was, I had a very enjoyable Army career during the 1960s, and I'm saying that truthfully. I had one of the dream Army careers that you can have, but I was drafted right when Vietnam started. Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin was 1965 in April, and I got drafted in June, July, and ended up 2 years as the entertainment director for about half of South Korea. Very, very enjoyable. I was actually sorry to come back. I really liked the Koreans. Okay? But in basic training— basic training, for the most part, if you're reasonably fit, is just kind of boring, except for one thing: practice with live grenades. Okay? And the Army is very, very intelligent that you actually understand the seriousness of these are weapons that can turn you into hamburger. In about 5 seconds. So they would take us out the night before, and they would show us what we're going to do the next morning. And you get down into a pit with one of their instructors, and you, you know, take the pin out, and as long as you have the handle down, it won't release. But 5 seconds after you throw it, then it explodes, and it explodes on the other side of a big mound. And so they let you see this. So that you'll sleep really well that night, which I did not do. And there was accidents. There was actually in the group before us, there was actually someone killed and the instructor badly injured because someone dropped a grenade in the pit. So we got out there and the first sergeant, who was a World War II, Korean War veteran, he said, "Anyone here scared?" My hand went right up. Yeah, understanding that I'm a happy person, so of course I'm going to put my hand up. And he said, "Well, Sullivan's the only one I trust here, because he's the only one telling the truth." And he said, "I want to tell you the difference between fear and courage." He says, "Fear is wetting your pants. Courage is doing what you're supposed to do with wet pants." And that's what I really, really noticed, that entrepreneurism is really, you know, it really is marked by a lot of wetting your pants over, you know, at least, you know, psychologically over time and requires courage. So you cannot wait until you have capability and confidence to start upward movement. You have to start with commitment. And commitment requires that you establish a deadline when something's going to be true and you put a measurable result to it. The bigger you have a measurement to it, the better you have a measurement to it. Now this is what happens when you— so this is really what you want to do if you're leading a really great upwardly progressing life as an entrepreneur. You want a 4-way system where you're continually committing to a bigger and better, you have courage. The combination of commitment and courage actually creates the new capability, which gives you a higher confidence, and then you do it again. Okay, and that's how you constantly grow. But when you are procrastinating, what happens is that all four of these disappear. It's like sensory deprivation. Okay, you're not in contact with capability, you're not in contact with confidence, you're not making any commitment and you have no courage. And so you are in the no zone. And the no zone is— no zone is no capability, no confidence, no commitment, and no courage. And you're paralyzed. You're procrastinating and it feels like you're paralyzed and you can't move forward. How many of you have experienced that? And in some part of your life right now you're a bit paralyzed from moving forward right now. And what I want to say is this is completely normal, every human being on the planet does it. There's nothing wrong with procrastinating except not telling the truth that you're procrastinating. That's the only thing that's wrong with procrastinating, is not telling the truth. The moment you tell the truth, you can start the process. So what we have to do is we have to go from the no zone to the grow zone. And the way you grow is by going right back to commitment and courage, and then you're back into the cycle and you'll be creating new capability and confidence. And going back to our sheet now, what I'm going to have you do— and this will take about 4 or 5 minutes— I'm going to have you take each one of your procrastinations And I'm going to have you write down what the commitment is. Remember, you have to have a deadline. And you have to have a measurable result. Okay? And so I'll just take you through this. So these are— this is real stuff for me. This is my actual— and I do this all the time. So I'm naming names here and I'm naming projects. And what I want you to do is just take each of the commitments and say what your commitment is. This next Thursday. So I was totally ready for something next Thursday. It was a measurable result. I was totally ready, and it was next Thursday, and that was it. The courage is that I had to do about 4 days of nose-to-grindstone work, you know, for about 30 hours to get ready for that interview. And, you know, I'm clinically diagnosed as ADD. I want you to know I'm fully medicated as I'm talking to you. For this. And doing something continuous for 4 days requires a lot of courage on my part. How many of you in this room doing one activity continuous— yeah, it requires a great deal of courage, but the payoff was huge. If I do that, the team gets triggered. So I'm always thinking teamwork. I'm always thinking teamwork. And so Carrie Shannon and I are able to do our best ever first interview 3 weeks earlier than normal. Big gain.

A big breakthrough.

Everyone on the team is far, far more clear, focused, and energized from start to finish with no slowdowns. And what I do day by day, the night before I say, "What am I procrastinating on?" And I go through this process the next morning. And I always have my 3. I'm always motivated, I'm always focused, and these procrastinations are just enabling me to make very, very rapid progress, my performance increases and my achievement. And, you know, at age 72, none of this matters. There's nothing slowing me down except not telling the truth about my procrastination. In my company, and this is where I'm telling you how I operate, so what I'm going to show you is on a daily basis, if you did a snapshot and you— the reporter who can't follow Tim around is following me around. They would notice that I'm doing a lot of thinking and putting it in thinking processes to figure out whether I want these ideas to actually go on and become action, and if they do, how I pass them on. So this is me, and I call this the first 80%. So this is you, actually. So up here I'm talking about you. And with you, You have a goal, okay, and you see it real big. So out of today's activities, tomorrow's activities, there's going to be some big goals that emerge, okay. And so what I do the moment that I have that goal, I use a tool called the impact filter, and you have copies, all of you, right on your tables. If you just pass out the white printed sheet, they're down here, right here. So it's a sheet that looks like this.

Okay.

So this is a thought process. This is the paper version, and we have a software version for the participants in Strategic Coach, so you can do it and you can save all your impact filters. And I'll take you through it in, you know, in just a few minutes. But what I do is an impact filter, and then I pass it to one of my project managers.

Okay.

So Paul Hamilton, Paul Rage— This is Paul Hamilton. Paul Hamilton is one of my project managers. So just a very, very short one, and I could do an entire talk on this. One of the biggest failures that I've seen among entrepreneurs is they make a mistake between what I call process managers and project managers. And they hire a lot of people, and then they don't know why their people aren't excited by all their new ideas. And the reason is because the people they've hired are not project managers.

Okay?

They've hired process managers, and what process managers like to do is to do the same thing every day and keep getting better at it. They do not like new things. Okay? Project managers only like new things, and they want to take it right through to completion, but they don't want to do it a second time. So I'm only surrounded on a daily basis with people who like taking my ideas running with them, getting them finished, and then handing them over to other people. And then they come back and they say, what's the next one? So there is close to a pure entrepreneur that you can get in a team situation that isn't actually the entrepreneur. So I have to be surrounded. I would say, suspect almost everybody in this room is that you have to be surrounded by project managers and not process managers. You drive process managers crazy, and they drive you crazy. And so that's not a good thing. So Peter— I'm working with Peter right now, but the key player here is Marissa. Marissa's right there, because Marissa's a project manager. Marissa loves getting Peter's new ideas completed and in play, but she doesn't want to do them a second time.

She does a great job.

Yeah, she does. She doesn't want to do it a second time. So if you want to talk about process manager or the next 2 days just talk to Paul. But I'm going to go back to Kathy Davis because Kathy is the project manager that I work most. So what I do is I do an impact filter. It takes me about a half hour to do this. I'm really good at it. And I've done close to 1,000 of them. And I just— it's a way of satisfying whether, one, I'm sold on the idea, one, it's an idea that should actually go into action. And number 3 is if it does go into action, then I'm going to give very clear instructions to the person who's going to then take it. So I sent it to Kathy, and the reason is because my role in the company is to make things up.

Okay?

I'm a master of making things up. I can make anything up.

Okay?

But my company should not be subjected to my making-it-up habits.

Okay?

So I would say if I've achieved it 10 times over the last 10 years, it's a 1/10 of the ideas that I think about get communicated to my company because I just come back and confuse them. OK, here he comes again. She holds up. She says, oh no, you know, and where does this one belong, Dan, with the 25 you've already given me? OK, and you drive people crazy. Undermines their confidence. Okay, so here's Kathy again. So I'm gonna talk— Kathy's gonna talk through what happens when she gets my impact filter.

Getting an impact filter from Dan is really important and crucial at the beginning of any project, and specifically for this app project, because first of all, I know he's extraordinarily sold on the idea. This is something he really wants to see have happen. So I know right out of the gate that this is something that he's got a lot of intention around. The second thing that's really important is that he's just extraordinarily clear about what the result is that he's looking to get from this. When I get the impact filter and he's illustrated his criteria for me, he's not telling me how to get it done. He's telling me what he wants the result to look like when it is done and leaves that strategizing up to me. I think that it's just such an extraordinarily clear way to communicate to people what your intentions are. I think the one thing that Dan has done that ended up being a really good byproduct is that he gives gives me a little bit of time to marinate in the impact filter. He doesn't hand it to me and we don't sit down right away and have a conversation about it. He gives me time to take it away, read it, think about it, and start to come up with some strategies, solutions, maybe some ulterior plans that will make the project happen a little bit smoother that he maybe didn't think about on the onset. It gives me a chance to do that with myself. The last thing I want to do is rain on Dan's parade in terms of this new project because I know how excited he is about it. This just gives me the chance to do all my strategic thinking and then come back because I'm also excited about this project and I— and all of the projects that Dan comes to me with, and I want to make sure that he knows how excited I am. So it just gives me a real clear opportunity to, to think through that. So I think that's just a real pivotal thing to do.

So the impact filter that I sent Kathy is the first one, so you'll see Dan's impact filter and you can read that through tonight. So she gets that, and what I'm doing is that I'm See, I'm not telling Kathy how to do the project. I'm just telling Kathy what the project looks like when it's finished.

This is—

this— and this is the importance of it. And this is the impact we're going to have. So the project that we're actually going to talk about here is actually the creation of the app that we just talked about. Kathy came out and introduced the app. And I'm going to tell you how the teamwork was that did that. It was about a 5-month teamwork. And so she's going to explain it because Kathy is the second 80%, and she's the project manager. If you're going to hire— you know, someone and you're thinking about hiring anyone in your company, I would strongly recommend that you hire a project manager before you hire anyone else. And the reason is that Kathy is a master of two tools, doing impact filters to launch a project, and she also has one called a strategy circle, which we'll explain in just a few minutes. And the reason is Kathy is the master of making things real. I'm not a master of making things real. I'm a master of making things up. So when I come to the line that finishes making things up, I have to pass it on to a skilled person whose passion— now, Kathy is a master of making things up, but only within my projects. She doesn't start her own projects. Okay? And it's a particular profile which Paul, her— Shannon especially. Shannon, raise your hand. Shannon's speaking tomorrow morning on teamwork, but she'll talk to you about that. So then Kathy goes into action, and she's going to explain what it takes to make it real. Okay, so this is—

I think the most important thing I do right out of the gate is I do my own impact filter. Essentially, I do an impact filter on Dan's impact filter. So I have a real clear sense of what his vision is, and then I do an impact filter on how I'm going to actually make that real. I start to think through the strategies, so my success criteria start to become strategies and ideas that I know need to happen in order to make his vision a reality. It's just a great chance for me to get clear on that. I communicate that back to Dan so he knows that I'm clear about what needs to happen in order to have his vision become a reality. He now has confidence in me that I'm going to get the job done. Then I can turn around, take that impact filter, drop it into a strategy circle, which for me is the best tool to think through all of the things that need to get done and really build a team around what needs to happen and start to come up with the, the explicit strategies in order to have it happen. I knew that by doing the strategy circle there were going to be a number of things that were going to be needed for this particular project. So one was definitely development of this particular app. We have an amazing tech and development team in-house at Strategic Coach, but based on the timeline that Dan and I had discussed up front and all of the other projects that we have going on the company, this ended up being a really good project that we could actually outsource with since it was its own independent little entity that could be created by someone else, especially someone else that had experience in creating apps since that's something that we had never done before. So by doing the impact filter and the strategy circle, we were really clear that this was the correct direction to go in.

So then Kathy puts together the third 80%, which is the team. And that's whoever she needs to actually carry it out, and in this case, it involved an outside organization. Now, what I should say is that we wanted the app back by June 30th. We had it on June 24th. But the thing was that between the time we got agreement on the impact filter— so it took me a half hour to write the impact filter. Her impact filter came back to me. So these— we had two documents. We had these two documents, and she lives 1,000 miles away from me. So she— I live in Toronto and she lives in Winnipeg. So we see each other perhaps, you know, maybe 2 months of the year actually live, but this was all done by email and it was done by Skype and it was done by teleconference. But this document is actually just a teamwork document, and we just talked about it. We talked about it for a half hour. And then she was off and running. So between that conversation and the actual finished impact filter, an hour of my time was required over the next 5 months. I was only involved for— you know, like, she made the decision on the outside developer. She went through the entire design process and everything else. And the reason is I know nothing about apps, so what input am I going to have? The only time I was brought back in is that we were gonna call it the Three Winds and it was taken, and she came back to me, and I'm good at naming things, so I said, well, what do we want here? And I said, well, what we want is a winning streak, but winning streak was too long for an app, so they made it Winstreak, and I think Winstreak's better— turned out to be a better name. And that was an hour— you know, I just played around with an hour. We went back and forth. And so there were literally hundreds and hundreds of hours on this project. There were roughly about you know, all told about 10 other people involved, but I knew nothing about that. The only thing I knew is that on June 24th we got a result and it more than satisfied the criteria I'd put together in the original, and that's a big win. So that constitutes a big win. And Kathy and I have done probably 100 projects like this over the last 6 years, okay? And each of them is just a little upfront with me Very clear instructions. And so what it does for me is that allows me— so what it is then that you need a team to make it recur. And one of the teams that we need to make it recur was Apple. So Apple is out there. You know, Apple is part of our team. You know, we have the developers who are constantly fine-tuning it. So they're part of our team. So in this world, your team can be anywhere. Okay, and that's what I love, is that this is a methodology which fits in perfectly with the technologies that we now have for communication and collaboration, because you're just doing a part of it and you're not overseeing the complexity of it. Okay, so, um, what I'm gonna do is wrap this up because now this is the way I'm gonna operate for the rest of my life. Okay, so I've got a methodology And, you know, I put together a new 25-year framework for where I'm going to go, and it takes me over 90. And so my goal is at 90 I'm just as energetic, just as involved, just as enthusiastic as I am today. And the way I'm going to do that is by vastly simplifying my existence right now such a way that I just do the first 80% Okay, and my entire life from now on is just making it up. Okay, and that's leadership. Okay, and so I'm just in a leadership role. Okay, and that's me, and I suspect that's all you are. And then I have a line, I call it the line, and I don't go any further than the line. And on the other side of the line, I'm just creating a framework by the impact filter where I explain every to everybody exactly what the purpose is. Okay, exactly what the purpose is. Why we, you know, why we doing this. The next thing is the importance of it if we pull it off. The other thing is the ideal outcome, what it looks like. You know, what the benefit would be. And then the other thing is, I always say what the worst result is. And you can see the worst results there, you know. We totally screw it up, it's a mess. We give it to the clients, it doesn't work. Our renewals drop by 30%. We start laying off staff. I'm miserable. I really spell it out. I really spell it out. I scare the shit out of myself. And it's very, very important. One of the most famous actors of all time, Laurence Olivier, he would, before he went to, he went to act every night, and he was renowned for if he was doing something for the 150th time, that he would go and just before the performance, they had peepholes in the curtains, and he would look out, and he would remind himself that if he tried to do last night's performance, he was gonna totally blow it. So he would say, "This is not last night's audience. This is not last night's theater. This is not last night's performance." It was not last night. And he would just remind himself that it was all fresh and new, and he'd scared himself right back to opening night. And so every play was opening night, and he was as scared as can be. So whenever I do anything, I want to make sure I get myself into the state of creative fear, you know, that I'm going to blow it, okay? And then I say, okay, I've handled the fear, and then I say, okay, so what's the best result? Now I want the excitement because All achievement is a high-octane mixture between fear and excitement. A lot of people kind of try to remove both from their life and they produce nothing. You cannot get away from fear and excitement, but it's got to be fear and excitement for the right things. So I'm laying out something really right, and then I lay out the success criteria. So my philosophy is, you know, and this relates back to the very first model I started with about this, gap of measuring your progress. You're measuring your progress against the ideal.

If you ran everyone's life and would wave a magic wand, what's the next action you recommend people take? You've already talked about some by finding some goals, some things that you want. Anything else you want to speak to on that?

Well, I just do a quick thing because Ben built this into the book. And that is that in Coach, we have a main tool, which is called an impact filter, where you identify what you want in such a way that other people can really get it. And that's actually included in the book. And, but what it does, it simply says that, that you have a project in mind and you say what you want to achieve, the importance of it to you, And then the ideal result you're looking for. And then there's a section where you say this is the best possible result. So you, you say it's done and it's fantastic. And you say on the day this is done, what does this look like? And you identify up to 8 measurable results when the project is done. And once you're finished with that, you go and say, what's the worst result if I don't move forward on this? Because when you get engaged with a goal and you're emotionally committed with it and you don't act on it, you've set yourself backwards. It'll be harder for you in the future to actually have a bigger and better goal that you act on. So when you commit to visualizing the goal and writing it down, it's serious business because your brain takes it seriously and it wants, wants you, wants to know why you're not moving forward on it.. And then I take, I type this up. It's a writable PDF, or you can write it in Purpose. And I run my life with Impact Builders. And, and so the, and then what I do, I said, now, who can I send this Impact Builder out to and talk to them about my project? And invariably within a matter, you know, if I send it out to 10 people, within about 2 or 3 days, I've got the entire team put together.. And my job is just to maintain the focus on the goal and other people are actually doing the goal. So I write a book every quarter, but I have 10 people on my team and it takes me roughly 25 to 30 hours to write a brand new book every quarter because everything else is handled by a 9, 10 person team. And so people, how can you write a book every quarter? And I said, don't do much of the work. Don't do much of the work. Don't do much of the work, you know. And so, well, I would say that Ben and I creating the Who Not How book over the past year has cost me 50 hours.

How do you build systems and structure in a company without becoming a prisoner to them yourself?

You know, and this is why I wanted to start with the 5 pieces of content, because what's going to happen in these questions and these answers is I'm going to anchor it in the content. So not only we can have this great conversation, I love how we're going to dig and go down the rabbit hole. But for the audience, I want them to know where to go for that content that we touch on. But I'm also going to keep it as generic as I can so they don't have to go chase down some content. So you use two words, systems and structure, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, and I love how you asked the question because you ask it in the way that the perception is that systems and structure restrict freedom. And I'm gonna challenge that. It's just the opposite. Systems and structure create freedom.

Mm-hmm.

So hopefully I can make this make sense, but this is what I love about your style. We'll dig deep and make this clear if I don't make it entirely clear. But I don't know how you can have freedom without it. And so let's just, let's just take a hypothetical entrepreneur and then I'll use myself a lot because I've experienced everything I teach. I've experienced every piece of content. I am one that teaches what I needed the most. Danielle Kennedy quote. So let's go back to what that entrepreneur wants. And if that entrepreneur truly wants freedom, then they have to put a structure in place. In other words, you have to decide what is the right and best structure to free you up. And so the way I look at this is, is freedom for the entrepreneur is that entrepreneur spending all of their time doing what they're genetically encoded to do. And the only way to do that is to surround yourself with great people. And the only way to surround yourself with great people is to figure out the right structure. You know, so we call it accountability chart in EOS, but call it what you call it. You've got to figure out how to build a team around you that completely free you up to that sweet spot. That's structure. And then systems is once you figure out your product or your service, and I love how you said it. I can't remember how you said it earlier, but you gotta figure out that model first before you scale, invest, whatever you wanna call it.

Yeah, nail it before you scale it.

Nail it before you scale it. And so you gotta spend some time nailing it. But once you nail it, when you know the product or service, when you know the business, there's a handful of core processes for how that business goes around, how you market, how you sell, how you make the product, how you provide the service, how you process the money, how you take care of that customer forever. And there's just a handful. And so systems is systemizing all of that. So there's consistency in the organization and everybody knows the playbook, the rules we're playing by, how it works, the ABC way of doing it. And in those two things, as an entrepreneur, you're completely free. The opposite is all of that stuff is a clusterfuck and you show up every day putting out fires, pulling out your hair, doing your 2:00 AM tossing and turning in bed every night. That's not freedom. So hopefully I've made my— have I made that clear? Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it does to the ADD mind. I don't know if you consider yourself ADD or ADHD.

Oh, I'm diagnosed. Dr. Amen diagnosed me with ADHD.

That's funny.

Yeah.

When they looked at my brain after the scan, they said, wow, I didn't expect to see so much brain damage. I've taken a lot of hits to the head and I have ADHD. I got it all and I've got OCD.

I'm a, I'm a, yeah, I'm a, you're diagnosed.

Yeah.

Well, the reason I bring that up is I, so we were talking about this before we started recording, my buddy, uh, Dr. Edward Hallowell, nicknamed Ned, and he's the top ADD ADHD psychiatrist in the world.

I know of him well. He's actually in Entrepreneur Elite. I wrote about him in the book.

Okay.

Yes. Yes, you did.

Because it's one of the The traits of a true entrepreneur, most of them have ADD or ADHD.

Right, right.

And I remember talking with him, I don't know how many years ago this was because we've known each other for a couple decades. And he said, Joe, he's like, people like us, systems cramp our style. He goes, we abhor systems, but we need them. And he goes, and if you're like in a relationship, personal relationship, he goes, if you have attention deficit disorder, you want someone with attention surplus disorder, where they have an abundance of attention to kind of counteract your stuff. And he says, so within a company, like, you don't want to be fit into a box because you think that's not going to let you be spontaneous, but that actually, like you said, is the scaffolding that will help you.

Yeah, let me grab that piece because you're talking about, you know, a significant other needs to be that structure. Same thing in business. And so that's the concept I call the visionary and the integrator. So that, that true entrepreneur who I call visionary needs to be counterbalanced with somebody with structure. So the, the entrepreneur is never going to put in place systems and structure. They're incapable of doing that, right? But they just need somebody who's great at doing that. And again, I've seen it more times than I can count now, hundreds if not thousands of times, when that entrepreneur is all of a sudden in that position where they have systems and structure in place, they are free, right? They're more productive, they're happier, they're freer. You know, then going back to my crazy mind, you know, it's creating EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. You know, people will ask, you know, how did you create that? You know, how are you capable of creating that?

It's—

it—

I believe it's the combination of my OCD and my ADHD. It's the craziest combination. It's the only way to create something like that. I mean, I obsessed for 5 years, 500 sessions, 50 companies, pulling levers, figuring it out. I mean, it's borderline crazy the way that I obsessed about trying to figure it out, but I saw it. It seems so simple. So this brain is good for some stuff.

Well, no, it—

I'll never be a good accountant.

Yeah.

Oh, I can't even fathom how certain skills work really well for some people, but they're the polar opposite for others. The same way, I mean, P&Ls, anything like that type of work, although critically important, and I really appreciate people that have it, I mean, my eyes glaze over. I can't even comprehend how to do it. But here's the thing too. There are— so let's take the hunter and the farmer, people that are driven and people that are not driven. So my assistant who's been with me for 30 years, she's a farmer. I'm a hunter. Hunter, to use Doug Brackmann's work, who you're obviously super familiar with.

Oh, yeah, huge fan.

My partner, who's a plastic surgeon, she's a farmer, not a hunter. Her brain does not get PR. Her brain does not operate well with all the creative marketing things, but she can sit down in front of a spreadsheet for hours and just analyze data. And she's phenomenal at it in that area, not phenomenal at creativity and ideation and all— drives her nuts. But me, I'm the total opposite. And so—

Right. And on that, and I purposely am stopping you there because this is why I'm hoping we're making this point come across and why I'm talking about myself, because I'm hoping the listener out there that is that ADHD entrepreneur— you know, again, we're talking about true entrepreneurs— we're a little fucked up. And you've learned to embrace your fucked-upness, and I've learned to embrace mine. And that's like the beginning. As soon as you understand the gift that we have, and then all of the weaknesses. And to the degree we can accept both of those things again and build systems and structure around that to free ourselves up to just spend all of our time in that greatness. It's a beautiful thing, but it starts by just accepting how quirky and odd we are to the other 96% of the world.

Right, right. And it is finding the, the gifts in those areas and continually enhancing it. Because most of the time it starts off very raw, very just nuts. It doesn't make any sense to most people. But if you have the stick-to-itiveness, which is a trait of real entrepreneurs, like when I was a dead broke carpet cleaner living off credit cards, I was going into debt doing hard manual labor, 10, 12, 14 hours, sometimes 16-hour days was not uncommon.

Yeah.

And I was not only making no money, I was paying money on my credit card back in 1990 to 1992. I'm doing, you know, I was at an age, early 20s, doing super hard manual labor and not only not making enough money to even pay my bills, I was going into debt in order to do it. And if I had to look back at that, like, what the hell was I thinking? It doesn't matter what I was thinking. What it was is it was just, Dammit, I wanted to make a business work. I didn't know what I was doing. I was trying to figure it out. So it just is part— it's just part of the process.

Yeah.

Let's go back to two of those six essential traits of a true entrepreneur: driven and passionate. Those are two traits you're talking about that if you don't have that kind of drive and passion for something, I mean, you're just rarely going to make something like that work because it requires borderline insanity to get knocked down so many times and keep pushing forward and outworking everybody else. It's just, it's, it's what you have to do most of the time to become successful as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, no, totally, totally. And here we are trying to help guide and direct our ambitions to help other ambitious entrepreneurs not get into the same traps.

Hear, hear.

Yeah.

And that is my passion, man.

Yeah, and it's funny, like, why does one do it? I mean, why does one do it? Because there's— at the end of the day, here I am sitting on a podcast with, you know, a picture of me. I don't even know if I like—

well, that's not a picture of me. Everybody says we look alike.

So yeah, I wonder how people are going to interpret this. Yeah, two bald guys with goatees. But, uh, it's, you know, I sit and look at all of the different things that I do. Like, most of my time is actually spent. If I was to think about my time, attention, money, effort, and energy, most of it is spent doing things that don't make me any money. Now, if I didn't make any money doing other things, I certainly couldn't devote the time to do these non-money-making things, which is the beauty of a business. That's, that's one of the freedoms. And I also used to beat myself up because I'd read all these books about time management, priority management, you know, how much is your time worth per hour. I'd go to all these marketing seminars and stuff, and I would find myself spending time on things or people that weren't the quote-unquote highest and best use of my time if it was only devoted to making money. And then Dan Sullivan taught me this opportunity filter process that he has, which is there's 5 ways to get paid. You get rewarded— money's one of them. The second way you get paid is people appreciate you. A third way you get paid is people utilize you. A fourth way you get paid is people refer you. And then the fifth way you get paid is people— it enhances you. It literally makes you better. And what I learned is that money is important to me because I am a capitalist. I don't want to do business deals without making money. I mean, that's kind of silly, right? However, money is only one part. And, and so now I'm like, does it enhance me first? Do I work with people that utilize me? Because I don't like throwing pearls before swine. You know, it's kind of cool if you're going to write a book or you're going run a group or you're gonna do stuff that people actually utilize. It's sort of like a chef that works his butt off on making food and then no one eats it. And then I like when people appreciate me 'cause I have low self-esteem and I want people to tell me they think I'm cool. Fourth is it's great when people refer me. And fifth doesn't make me money. But all money's not equal. And so there's ELF money, easy, lucrative, and fun. And then there's HALF, which is hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating, or hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating. So it's different words, different language like we've talked about. But I, I kind of look at, all right, how do we get to ELF? And I think the very last thing that you said on your 5 stages of content is Shine, the 10 disciplines. To me, that would be getting to ELF. However, in order to build an ELF business, it's often very hard. You have to set up a lot of stuff in order to get something to be ELF. And I think the non-entrepreneur gets really attracted to easy, lucrative, and fun, but they think they're just gonna jump to it. Like, it just should be so easy. And if you're not willing to take many, metaphorically speaking, kicks to the nuts, you probably don't have what it takes to do that, and you may wanna take a look at it. And I'll tell you, too, I think it's actually kind of funny if we sat here and spent like 30 minutes just discouraging people from going into business because of how horrible it is and all the painful things that could happen. And we certainly could paint that picture if we wanted to. The fact of the matter is that's actually doing people a favor.

Well, that's what Entrepreneur Leap is all about. I'm doing everything in my power to talk them out of not doing it, and if I can't talk them out of it, then they're probably a true entrepreneur.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's, that's exactly it. Because if none of this dissuades you, then you're like, yeah, you're kind of built for this stuff. And if not, it, you know, then you can thank us later because it'll probably save you a lot of time.

Well, so let me— oh my God, you said so much there, and I'm going to try and I'm going to respond in less than 3 minutes, but there's some really important things I want to say to that because, you know, you jumped all the way to the 5th piece of content, the Shine Content. But I want to back up one. Again, we call it the EOS Life, otherwise known as your ideal life.

Okay.

And so what you just described about, you know, it becoming more easy, lucrative, and fun. First of all, I think you have to crawl through the mud a little bit. I think that's where we learn. And so there's stuff that's ingrained in us. Because we got our ass kicked for decades. And what I talk about in Entrepreneur Elite for these entrepreneurs in the making and these early-stage entrepreneurs is I say, you know, if you will read and embrace this book, confirm, glimpse, path. I'm going to first confirm that you are, show you a glimpse of the life, and then show you a path. Well, in path, what I talk about is I'm going to help you avoid half the mistakes you're going to make. The other half, Nobody. You cannot avoid the other half. You have to get your ass kicked. So those are all the lessons that are those things that are ingrained, that become ingrained in you out there and are ingrained in us. And so we don't even remember 90% of them. They're so ingrained. And that's why it's easier and more lucrative and fun because it's so natural. You know, it's like karate. I'm not— I don't know anything about it, but it's like, you know, you get to a point where every move, it's like, You know, the Matrix, you're seeing the ones and zeros. So that's going on below the surface as well as a lot of times we've made enough money. So we're past the stressful part of the making money piece. And so we relax into it a little bit more. But EOS Life, a.k.a. the ideal life. Remember those 5 points? It's doing what you love with people you love, making a huge impact, getting paid really well for it, and having time for other passions. What I would suggest is So just imagine that life and it's so doable. And we call it the EOS life is because when you implement EOS in your business, you can't help but live the EOS life. It's going to happen. Like it's— you can't stop it from happening. You're going to be put in a position where every day you're doing what you love. You're going to be surrounded by people you absolutely love working with. You're going to be making a huge impact on the world. You're going to be making lots of money. So do that math right there. That's, that's everything you talked about. But this fifth one is where I'm going with what you're saying. And then you have time for other passions. Where you can go buy a fricking city. You have time to do the things you're passionate about. The things, other things that I'm passionate about, they're so simple, but I can dabble in new content. I can write a new book, whether it's gonna be successful or not. I can do these other things that are other passions. But I certainly built a nice foundational, a foundation of, a nice, let me back up on that. I built a strong financial foundation that I can go do those things. So I killed myself you know, worked really hard building that foundation to free myself to spend time in other passions. And then that's going to start to take us to that fifth piece, piece of content that you alluded to. But the last point I want to make is that fifth piece of content isn't so much about that, what that is about, because I'm trying to move the fifth piece of content to the first piece, and that is get the entrepreneur to become healthy before the climb. And that might be a fun little debate we can have by the end of this. So that's really not about living the life you talked about living the life you talked about is that fourth piece of content, the EOS Life, your ideal life. The healing begins in that fifth piece of content. I know we're not going there yet, but I just, just want to keep trying to create context. I'm a teacher at heart, so I just can't help but try and teach as we're having this conversation.

I'll tell you, I think you're a teacher at heart because you also know one of the most effective ways to learn something is teach it to other people. Yeah, you know, when I hear some author like, so what, why'd you write Why did you write the book? Oh, because I'm so blessed and I wanna just share my gifts with the world. And it's like, yeah, I mean, that could be true, of course. And that's probably valid, especially if you wrote like a book that's useful and good and has things that if people read it and follow it can improve their lives. But a lot of ways, I think the real people that are on the path of getting better by, you know, whoever said, an unexamined life is not worth living, but I also say, you know, an unlived life is not worth examining, right? So you're examining what it is you've done, how you've done it, you're documenting it, you're teaching it to other people, 'cause you can learn through the school of hard knocks. That's one way to learn. You'll get bloodied and beat up, but you'll learn, maybe. Second is you learn through the experiences of others. You read their books, listen to their podcasts, go to their events, you know, get mentored by them. The third and more effective and accelerated way of learning something is you teach it to other people. And I think that is one of the— so I mean, yes, you're a teacher, which is great. And secondly, you're also a student, which is why you're a teacher. And the best teachers— like, I always love these, these mostly authors and coaches where they get to a point where they've had a little bit of success or they've built a big following, you know, before, you know, before social media. It could have been whatever PR they were doing. Now social media and likes and everything, it's a much different sort of way to have your social equity, or at least perceived. And then they quit going to events. They quit going to workshops. They quit— and as long as I've known you, we both go to Strategic Coach.

30 years running.

Yeah, we're not too cool for school.

Yeah.

And I cannot tell you how many people that once they get a little bit of fame and notoriety, I don't go to events anymore unless I'm speaking at it. One that I know who I've built up to where this person's had, you know, a few bestsellers. And he's like, yeah, you know, I, with my family and everything, I've got to make some strategic decisions where I'm only going to go to highly curated events. I'm not, I'm not doing any more trainings. Oh, okay. So you're now in the ego place where— and this is a person in their mid-30s, so they're in that prime, right? Yeah. And, and I've seen it a million times. They're going to cut off all of the resources and the people that help them because now they're famous.

Yeah.

And what's going to happen is they're going to probably continue to make money. They'll continue to build their notoriety. But what'll happen is they quit training. It's like, all right, I'm a black belt now. I don't need to practice anymore. And I just think it's one of the dumbest things that I've seen. But the reason I bring it up is that this person— I'm not going to mention their name— famous person. And I like the person. I mean, I very much care about this person. I'm bummed because I see something that even mentioning it to him will not sink in. As I'm sitting here talking to you, I actually don't believe the person is an entrepreneur. I believe the person's just a really great writer. And there are people that are reporters of success, and then there's people that are actually successful. And someone that's actually successful doesn't necessarily need to have money. They may have money, and they probably will if they stay at it. And they just get— they have like your 5 pieces of content here, they put it all together. It is a bit of a puzzle. But I'll tell you, like, uh, there are a lot of people that are really good at articulating success, but they themselves have never obtained it and really can't. And part of it is because they convince themselves because they're talking about it that they are that. Yeah.

And yeah, for what it's worth on that, like, little pet peeve of mine is that saying, "Those who can't teach." You know, like that one. So when I heard that the first time in my early 20s, I've been obsessed about, I am not going to be the teacher who couldn't.

Right.

And I'm never going to teach theory ever. I will— I'm never going to teach anything I haven't experienced firsthand. And that's what I do. I just teach what I needed the most. Entrepreneurial Leap, I'm teaching my 18-year-old lost soul self that was a mislabeled derelict that I knew, you know, there was something in there. So I'm teaching me. And so all the content I've lived because probably too obsessive about never wanting to be accused of being someone who couldn't, therefore he taught.

Right.

Yeah.

And I totally hear you.

And so you're talking about somebody who probably can't, therefore he teaches.

Right.

Right.

And well, because there is truth to that.

And probably more of those, probably more teachers out there are teaching because they can't. But, you know, I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole.

Yeah. Well, and it's also been important to me to be congruent with the, like, live the message I write about. If not, I'm a total hypocrite. And as I say that, everybody's hypocritical. There's no perfect scenario. There are plenty like That— what's that line? If you ever invalidate the message because of the messenger, you'll never read another book or attend another seminar. I want to give people a lot of reasons not to invalidate me though, because I really, really strive to not teach things I don't do. Yeah, I really strive to not be— I'm, I'm super self-deprecating because never for a moment do I want to believe my own PR, because I think that's super dangerous. If you have a little bit of success, people start telling you how great you are and you actually take that shit take it seriously because it could be true, but you're also human and there's also, you know, everyone has their moments. So, all right. If I go back with you, so you joined Genius Network in 2017. You immediately gave a 10-minute talk.

And I did that because my aunt was in here and she told me to do that.

Really?

Yeah, my Aunt Jane was in here and she said, Ben, you should give a 10-minute talk in your first meeting. I said, I mean, thank you, that was good information.

Yeah.

It was terrible. I told you it was terrible.

How am I doing now, Jim? How am I doing now? Throw some rocks.

As high as these hecklers.

I love Jim. And I want to say just like the conversation yesterday and today, like I know Jim and Mimi very well. Like genuinely some of the best people that I've known in this group have let me sleep in their house. Like they're just beautiful people. I don't know, remind me from yesterday her name.

Karina.

Karina. She's amazing too. And I think we all learned from today. So I think Joe is really— what I love about Joe in this room is that he allows that to happen and he can handle a little bit of discomfort. And then all of a sudden we come out, I think, a little bit better, right? So I thought it was all beautiful.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Anyways, you were saying something about 2017, me coming in.

You always have had this growth thing. So even— so then you immediately, you know, you joined 100K. You're always stretching yourself. You had no kids. Now you have 7. And so you scale things, right? And by the way, so you should tell a story about your wife because it's not like you married into this. You adopted some of the kids, then in the process of going through crazy stuff you had to go through to adopt your children, then she ends up getting pregnant with twins, right? And then all of a sudden, yeah, I mean, and so you, and then in the midst of this, you put it off for a bit, but then you get your PhD and that's an extraordinary amount of work. I've seen you go through these mental gyrations and you become the number one writer, I think in the world, on medium.com, millions of people reading your stuff. Then you decide, "No, I'm going to change my focus over here because I think this is higher leverage." You build a YouTube channel, start building up the thing and you're like— I mean, and so you build up what, I don't know how many thousand people you have on this multimillion-dollar coaching group and you decide to sell it because you're always So you're behaving to what you're talking about here. And part of it is like you make these decisions and you learn what's going to be a big lever. And I've always seen you keep jumping and you grapple with a lot of stuff too.

You got to grapple.

It's tough. You grapple with a lot of stuff.

Yeah, it's good.

But it's because of the growth mindset. It's because of the future self-focus, right? My question to you is, like, a lot of people would dream to build some of the things in such a young age at such a pace that you end up deciding, "This is not going to get me to where I want to go," and you literally drop it.

Most people aren't willing to do that.

Right. I wanted to talk about, like, that's really hard to do. How do you bring yourself to rev yourself up and actually do it because I think you're not doing this thoughtlessly. I mean, you certainly have made some great successes and you've probably made some big mistakes, but the fact is you're willing to do it and most people limit themselves because they just don't— I don't know if it's courage. I don't know what is the secret sauce to that. I don't even know if it is a secret sauce. You're building yourself to do this. I'm just trying to break into what is it. Someone here that's watching or listening to this could, you know, learn from that.

So there's, there's a lot of beauty in your question. I'll try to break down as much as I can from that. So one of my favorite quotes is that we're kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal, right? So we're kept from a goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal. And so sometimes the goal does change, and it— and I would— I actually feel like a very healthy thing is when you have a new goal, right, a new future. And as I'm talking about, I'm just sharing with you my view of the psychology. A bigger future and a more urgent future, and obviously it should be an aligned future, is going to lead to better decisions in the present. And so you have— I think one of the hardest things to do is let go of goals, right, goals of your former self, right, vanity goals. They end up just admitting that maybe that goal wasn't worth the squeeze, but So one of the people, as an example, that read this book early, he then, you know, he's in real estate. And so he was like, okay, he realized he was on more of a linear path. And so he read the book, he's like, okay, I'm gonna set a scale goal or an impossible goal. And so he got on the phone with me, he's like, I'm gonna go for 10,000 specific types of units in this way in 3 years. And I asked him, what level of growth would that represent based on your current trajectory? He said, that's about 20 years of growth, 10 to 20 years of growth. To do it in 3 years, different path, it'd be a different, a different. And then I was like, okay, so do you see some pathways on how to get there? And he's like, I would have to get really good at getting funding, right? And then this is where like I'm now just pulling to the idea. He then said, well, Ben, I really still want to have a podcast. And I said, well, tell me why. And then he started to begin to justify the podcast. And I said, if you want, you can have the podcast, but if you're going for the podcast, it's probably going to cost you the $10,000 in 3 years. And he was like, no, no, no, they synergize, this is a pathway to that. And I was like, well then be rigorous with yourself, right? When you have the bigger future, and I think it's very strategic, you got to be really rigorous with yourself and really honest with yourself. And I was just inviting him to be honest with himself. Is that a vanity goal? And it might not be, yeah, it's— and so the letting go of certain goals is very difficult for people. Like I view the impossible goal as the goal a goal that makes all the other goals obsolete, right? And so it's like choose one, right? A new model or a new future that makes your existing, you know, your existing situation obsolete. It's very difficult to let go of things that meant something or, you know, and so that's the hard part.

The very first question I was going to ask you, but let me just read it the way I have it written here. Right now people are more burned out and distracted than ever, but you're saying The problem isn't their calendar, it's their goal. Why is having a big impossible goal actually less stressful than just grinding? And now, of course, you already answered a lot of this, right, with where you're talking about previously. But the, the thing is to make everything we think is so damn important obsolete because we come up with something that's better. That is a magical place to get to because we are so drawn to what we think is significant and important until we have something that is that much more exciting, that much more important, that much more impactful, not to just ourselves but our— maybe our everyone, our families, our clients, our community, etc. And to be able to let that other stuff go, you don't feel like you're giving up.

No, it's, you know, I define the floor as what you say no to, right? And so part of growth is saying no to things you're your former self said yes to, right? That's learning. And so what I have learned is that when you start going for a bigger future, which I believe all of you can do, you have to let go of a lot of things that you currently place value on that from the better future becomes noise versus signal. And then certain— I believe in this, like the idea of there are tests that will question floor. I was actually talking to Tucker Max this morning because there's interesting things that are coming towards me now. And as you're starting to go for certain growth, right, obviously you can get in your own way. You can start to, you know— how many people in here know Garnett Morris? He's awesome. I quoted him in the book because he talked to me much over the last few years and he said that his view of the reason why people don't scale is because they're lying to themselves. And I believe that they're lying to themselves when they're below the floor, when they're saying yes to things that they know are contradictions to what they want, right? Or what could be better. And we all do it. All of us go below the floor.

We're all—

and that's why raising the floor is a spiritual process, but it's a strategic process. But you will be tested. And if you're willing to say no to certain things that you would have said absolutely yes to even like a few months ago, right? Then you're demonstrating That again, that goes straight back to just accountability and honesty, transparency. And so there will be things that will come to you that are those lesser goals, those vanity metrics, those things that absolutely will take you off course. Tucker actually brings up a really good case study because he himself was scaling Scribe and they brought on a yellow flag, right? Their Javon, like their CEO, right? And if you're saying yes to even like yellow flags, There's that quote that when you see smoke, you're in the future going to see fire, right? And if you're trying to justify certain yellow flag decisions or people and you start to scale, those are the things that are going to blow you up.

Right.

So you have to really be willing to make some of those hard choices.

It's really funny too because the domino effect of all of this. So Ben was very instrumental in helping with even my book, which is the latest book. Great book. Book, yeah, the What's in It for Them. Well, I guess I didn't write the second— the latest book is Winners Find Ways, but that's really crowdsourced all of the genius.

And it fits with Pathways thinking.

Yeah, and so with Tucker, so the way this happened with the Dan Sullivan thing is I brought Tucker, Scott Hoffman, my agent, and Reid Tracy, who's the owner of Hay House, to a $100K meeting, and there was a 4-hour session all on books, everything from writing a book to marketing a book. And Tucker, you would think like you and Tucker in terms of Satan's disposition, complete polar opposite, right? And when Tucker started doing a bunch of plant medicines and psychedelics, I mean, it completely shifted him, right? And it's funny because he told me after I did ibogaine, he, like, he had told me in 2017, goes, big reason I'm starting down I'm on this path is because of what you shared with me about your experiences with doing plant medicines and stuff. So you approached Dan Sullivan and the 100K Group, you proposed a book reads there, everyone's there, right? So you end up doing this 3-book.

What actually happened was I was at my first 100K meeting in Dean's old office. Dan presents his first view of Who Not How, very sketchy, 15-minute, awesome. Awesome version, and I was like, that's phenomenal. And I already loved Dan's thinking, and so I was like, Dan, if you ever want to make that a mainstream concept, I'll write the book. It actually took— it was— that was a year before this next 100K meeting.

That I didn't know.

Because my publisher— I was at Portfolio. They're like one of the top business publishers in the world. They didn't want to do Who Not How. They didn't know who Dan was. Dan, very famous in this room. In New York, no one knows who he is. They do now. Right? And so, you know, the publisher at Portfolio, who was the editor of Good to Great, said, Ben, you're making a massive mistake wanting to write this book, Who Not How, because I already had Willpower Doesn't Work, I had Personalities Impermanent, I was writing. They were like, you should grow your own brand, we don't know who this guy is, this is a bad decision for your career. And so I was like, well, I really want to write I wrote this book. And so then I had no publisher. I mean, I was writing "Personality Is Impermanent." It came out. But then a year later, I'm at your meeting. Tucker's there in this. And Reid became that pathway. And so then I just walked away from my publisher, which is one of the top business publishers in the world at Penguin Random House. And we went to Hay House. So Dan waited patiently for a year for that to happen.

Yeah, which is cool. Of course, the instructive thing here, really the underlying message is that all things start with me. I'm kidding.

He is the first domino.

No, what I'm saying is it shows that if you spend time developing these relationships, they will turn into something. Dean Jackson is the one that came up with the term "who, not how." Dan Sullivan developed it into— he's talking about it because it's a good concept. Ends up writing the book about it, right? And so they do that, and then it leads to this whole other domino effect. But if you only go shallow with relationships or with groups or with communities, that's what you get. But when you go deep, that's where you actually find the gold, right? True. And how you develop it. And so here's one of the questions I have is, so you and Dan Sullivan, you guys met, you've written you wrote 3 bestselling books together that have sold over 1 million copies. What's something you and Dan disagreed on that—

There's actually a lot of things.

That helped you both grow?

I don't know if in the process we agreed or disagreed. There's definitely perspectives that I fundamentally disagree with on Dan in terms of— But in terms of the process of writing those books, he was very— he applied the concept of who, not how. He very much let me go through it and go— I mean, I wrote those books. On 10x is Easier Than 2x, he— aside from like my frustration of there not really being a process for that, that's where we came up with the 80/20 model was like through— I couldn't write the book until I actually had some framework for how to make it work because that didn't exist. And he was very collaborative. And so there was nothing process-wise we disagreed with. He let me write the books as I saw fit, which was awesome. So I'm like, there— how I wrote those books was I pretty much just used his interviews with Shannon Waller that he used for the little books. And then I'd say 80% of my study was outside of Dan, studying psychology, studying strategy, and then just integrating that in with with his simple, like, he's just so good at coming up with like a really snappy concept, right? Gap Gain, right? And so I just would take that snappy concept and really build it out.

Oh yeah, and part of it is he has these great concepts, and now you've got an army of humans that it's completely altered their life.

And they're beautiful. They've got a lot of depth to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, they're great books. They're great books. And so, and part of the reason I bring this up is because, look, I mean, you and Dan are both great. I mean, dear friends of mine. And when I said disagree is because the fact is, if you're gonna collaborate even with the guy who you put his name on as an author, which I'll wait for you to read the book and you can hear that story with Ben, is that no matter who you're gonna be with, there's going to be differences of opinion.

There were some tough moments.

Oh yeah, and it's scary. Scaling though, that's a whole thing. With scaling, if someone thinks scaling a business is gonna be all elf versus half, don't try to scale.

There's a good quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He said that for the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give a fig, but for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, I would give my whole life. And so even Steve Jobs said, right?

Explain that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to get to your goal, right, or to get to some new level, you're going to have to go through complexity because you don't currently understand it, right? And so like even Steve Jobs said, you have to work very hard to go from complex to simple, but once you do, you can move mountains. And that dealing with the complexity, whether it's just you don't know how to do it or dealing with relationships, right, going through the half component and reaching that new level of understanding, right, or going through those decisions where you realize is this can't scale, right, or I'm below the floor, or like I got to let go of this relationship or these businesses, right? Even Mark, in thinking about his $100 million in 3 years or less, he had to grapple with the reality that actually like most of his businesses, he has a lot of businesses, were all a distraction. And so he actually is now in process of selling all those. But to, you know, the main pain or half is just psychology, right? Like you have to get to a new perspective and then from that new perspective you can make a better decision. So the main pain is just dealing with it and figuring it out and reaching kind of a new level of understanding, which is then getting to that new side of simplicity that now is from a completely different place of understanding and now you can do something that you couldn't do before, maybe even you're now innovating a new field or system, but takes a lot of work work to get there, as Steve Jobs said. A lot of people aren't willing to— I think that's really the pain that Musk is going through, is he's got this huge goal, but to actually get there, there's a lot he has to deal with psychologically, systematically. He's got to do inventions, he's got to build rockets, but look at what he can do. Look at what he has done. But there was the quote, you know, yesterday from Frankl, when the why is strong enough, you can bear anyhow, right? So like, that's what allows him to do it, is he's utterly committed and convicted to get to Mars, and so that's allowing that's his strength, is his future, right? And that's what allows him to clear through all the noise, right? And he's amazing at that, honestly.

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

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.