Why I Made It—and Others DON’T Feat. Keith Cunningham & Brian Tracy

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

So my experience is that business is really, really complex. Uh, I think sometimes we make it harder than it is. Uh, but nevertheless, there's a lot of moving parts. One of the problems is you can do 99 things right and one thing wrong and the whole thing be wrong.

Right.

My experience is that successful people tend to have 3 or 4— sustainably successful people tend to have 3 or 4 common characteristics. One is they're really good at what they do. They consistently execute on what they know. There is demand in the market for what they're doing. And there's a healthy dose of luck. I think most people underestimate the importance of luck. I know lots of people that have They're very smart. They work hard. They've got a good product or a good service. There's demand for it. But someplace along the line, there was a miss. And sometimes that bad luck is self-inflicted. And that can happen. You know, you can do the right thing at the wrong time and it turn out wrong. You can do the wrong thing at the right time and it turned out right. And so to some extent, there's some amount of luck. And I think anybody who's successful and doesn't acknowledge luck is arrogant beyond words. It is unbelievable how, how we, we minimize some— sometimes minimize the importance of Warren Buffett. Has said, "You know, I'm really good at what I do. I really enjoy what I'm doing. There's huge demand for what I do. I've made a ton of money at what I do, and I'm probably the luckiest guy. Had I been born 50 years or 100 years earlier, or had I been born in a different country with different parents, different ex— this wouldn't have happened." And so, I think those are some common characteristics, and I'm going to quickly add, I do not believe in bathrobes. I do not believe that one size fits all. I do not believe in pithy little, "Do these 3 things and get success. Don't do these 3 things and avoid failure." I don't think it's that easy. One little thing can make all the difference. You can get the right apples for an apple pie and still have a crummy apple pie, right? And so I tend to look at it that way.

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

I would rather not talk about the loss.

Okay.

What I want—

I will though.

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

Thank you. Yeah, I think you're right in the middle of this disaster. Dan and I were talking backstage when he was coming off and I was getting ready to come on, and, and I said, I have also had a divorce and a bankruptcy. I feel very fortunate on the sequencing of mine because My bankruptcy came about a year before my divorce. So that sequencing was really important. I would have hated to have gotten divorced 5 years before I went bankrupt. Look, I was giving an interview. I don't know if I talked about this when we were together. Few months ago or not, I was giving an interview in Ireland for a radio station that was trying to promote an event that was going to happen the next day in which I was going to be the speaker. And the radio interview host, right before I went live, during a commercial break, looked at me and said, "Look, I've read about you. I know who you are. I know your background. Is there anything you don't want me to talk about?" And I said, "Yes." I said, "Don't ask me how it feels to lose $100 million. I can tell you it feels horrible, right? I mean, so don't ask me about that." He said, "No, no problem." We go live on the interview, and the first thing this guy says is, "I'm sitting here with Keith Cunningham." I'm the man that lost $100 million. He said, Keith, how does it feel to lose $100 million? And I— this— so I'm now stuck because I'm live. And I said, let me tell you how I view this. I view life like a university. And in university, there are courses, and courses have tuition. I just took a course in the university of life and the tuition was $100 million. First of all, there's very few people who get to take this course. I mean, it's kind of expensive. And so that's part one. Part two is the key is not how much it costs. The key is, did I get my money's worth? Did I take this course pass/fail, where I went in to do the least I possibly could? Or did I take this course and want— I want to make an A++ because I never again want to have to take this course. It's far too expensive. I think a key is for me, Joe Polish— and I see this over and over again in my own life and other people's lives— is that the mistakes or the failures are not nouns; they're verbs. They don't define who I am. The question is not did I make a mistake? The question is, Can I admit it? And did I learn something? I love what Buckminster Fuller said, who's one of my heroes. Bucky said, "A mistake is not a sin unless it's not admitted." The only way it can be a problem is if I don't admit it and then learn from it. And so in the book, "The Road Less Stupid," I have a chapter on the log of lessons learned. And those are lessons that I had to learn the hard way. And part of what I do, part of what you do, part of what Dan does, what all the teachers, what all the mentors in this room are doing is they're allowing other people to stand on their shoulders. I'm standing on someone's shoulders. You're standing on— that's the exercise you just did. And it's very powerful. Who is the first domino? Whose shoulders are you standing on? And the idea is, is there a way for other people to learn from my mistakes? And if I can do that, I will have had a successful life.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So you're the highest rated, I think now the only speaker at Business Mastery, Tony Robbins' big Business Mastery event, correct? Or does he have other?

We've been told that people like us.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're definitely the highest rated speaker at Business Mastery. And you read a lot, you're a voracious reader. And you see a lot of people dispensing advice out in the world through books that people, business owners, entrepreneurs follow that you disagree with. And so I'm going to ask you, which will sound kind of like a silly question, especially since you said, you know, I don't believe in bathrobes. When people ask you, you know, what's the secret to business success, what would you say to that? Because people always want to know what's the secret. And from a marketing term, I know it works. If I said, here's here's 3 rules I want everyone to write down, or if I said, here's 3 secrets I want everyone to write down, everyone would literally get out their pen when you say the word secrets. So, people are pursuing it. And I think what you do such a great job in The Road Less Stupid of is dismantling so many myths and so much bullshit that exists that people are being taught about business. And you're a guy that actually has made a lot of money and is very good with it and has gone through. So, what, you know, when someone says, oh, what's the secret? What is the thing? They're always looking for the easy way to do it. How would you respond to that?

So I think the first thing I would say is there are no secrets. There's just stuff you haven't learned yet. There's not a secret. There's no magic pill. There's no little formula that's locked away in a vault someplace that says, "Oh, guy, if you can just learn this one little thing," This is— and nobody else can learn it because it is a secret. I think that promotes the wrong kind of work ethic. I think it promotes the wrong kind of execution. I think that's the magic pill, tooth fairy, financial tooth fairy kind of mentality, and I I strongly disagree with that mentality. I do think there are some things that successful business people do. I think successful business people, some of them make a little list. It's not intended to be all-inclusive. It's intended to maybe spark a conversation or a thought. I think successful people have extreme clarity about where they are, the reality of their current situation, which is point A, and they have clarity about point B. They have clarity about what they want, where they're going. And my experience is that most, most business people and most business advisors orient towards the second one. It's all about getting clarity on what you want, which I'm in favor of, but I think the only reason Google Maps works is because you tell Google Maps where you want to go and it knows where you are. And if you don't— if Google Maps didn't know where you were and you told it where you wanted to go, the likelihood of you getting from where you are to where you want to go rounds to zero. So, the idea is, what— where are you? What do you want? And what's the obstacle or the problem that's in the way? I think the hardest work I do in my thinking time is, what's the problem? Not the symptom. What's the core root obstacle? Because if I'm going to get from where I am to what I want, there's something that's blocking, and I need to know what that is. I need some clarity around that, because if I don't have clarity on the obstacle, I have zero probability of building a machine that will help me solve the problem, and building the machine requires allocation of resources. So there's a bunch of things in this little sequence I just said. There's Clarity about where I am, clarity about what I want, clarity about the obstacle that's in the way, some thinking about what's the machine, which is priorities. So priorities, I think successful people are really good at identifying the correct priorities and then allocating the resources to execute on those priorities. I'll say it this way, I'm going to put it on a bumper sticker: a shift in priorities without a simultaneous shift in allocation of resources is wishful thinking. And wishful thinking is at the root of every failed business. They thought the idea was if they could just get clear on what they want, that somehow what they want would manifest. And I'm going to quickly say I totally agree with Dan and what he just talked about. I think getting clarity about what it is you want is important, but I think— because that allows you to filter. But I also think Somebody's got to pick up the business end of the shovel and consistently execute. I'm not a believer in the magic pill.

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

I think that's it. I think this need for speed, I think this need for significance, I think this need for— my friend Alex Mandozian, who's someplace in here, has said it very eloquently, "Few things are worse than running the wrong direction enthusiastically." Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think we tend to substitute Uh, passion and, and what we're excited about. I, I will tell you what, whatever your passion is, it's either something you think you can be successful at or you are successful at. The instant it becomes unsuccessful, your passion goes to zero and you start looking for the next cool thing. So the passion is not— it's just excitement about what I think I, I could be successful at or what I am successful at. But if you sucked at it, I promise it would no longer be your passion. So, so I, I tend to gravitate— I'm probably— and there's a great example right now in, in the press, this guy, uh, Sun I don't know how to say his first name, Maharishi Sun, who is the guy who put together the $100 billion fund that invested in Uber and WeWork and a dog walking service and has blown through $100 billion in 2 years. In 2 years, and it's probably gone, the bulk of it is. And I contrast him with somebody like a Warren Buffett who's been— he's been at it 60, 70 years and has built something that has withstood the test of time. And I compare that to what other people are doing, and it seems like there's a lot of people that are optimizing for a one-hit, and it may turn out good, but I'm not sure if it's sustainable because there's a lack of business skills and tools. I'll say it this way: business success requires business skills and tools, much like ping-pong success requires ping pong skills and tools. And if you want to win a gold medal at ping pong, somebody better have ping pong skills and tools. And the same thing is true with business. If you want a gold medal in business, somebody better have some business skills and tools and bring more to the table than simply an excitement about the idea. Somebody's got to execute something, and most failures have to do with either we haven't identified the problem, we're excited about something but don't know what to go do, we've built a crappy team or a team of munchkins, a team of people that, you know, are C players, and that can sabotage. There's so many ingredients And it just being thoughtful about what's really required and what's really the problem, I think, is the key to saying, how do I keep this thing going? Yeah, the environment's always changing. The environment is the only thing— that's the only thing that's always changing. So a good idea today could be a bad idea tomorrow, and vice versa. So I think one of our jobs as business owners is to be thoughtful about, good, how are things changing? Either the competition, the economy, the White House, Brexit, North Korea, interest rates, price of oil, the competition, consumers. There's—

I'm changing.

And so what I can do today is vastly different than what I could do 25 years ago.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm gonna ask you a question. So based on the impact filters that I read from people, I'm gonna try to ask you what I think as a whole would benefit many of the people in the room. So it's, how should entrepreneurs evaluate risk, and if a negative financial outcome does befall somebody, what can or should they do to survive?

Evaluating risk. Risk has three flavors. There's a probability that the bad thing happens, there's the cost if the bad thing happens, and there's the controllability that you do or don't have over the bad thing. I think that understanding all three of those is vitally important, uh, and I think one of my jobs as a business owner is to number one, identify the highest probability risk. So, in your business, whoever you are, whatever business you have, there's an opportunity for you to think about what are the, what are the 5 highest probability risk that I currently have that would disrupt— here's, here's the guardrail— that would disrupt my future stream of earnings? What are the 5 highest probability risks? And assign a probability to them. So, in your world, in the teaching world, a huge risk for you is you. Yeah, you are the single point of failure in your business, and if something happens to you, that's going to disintermediate genius. And I'm the same way. Something happens to me, there's going to be an— I, I in the teaching world am the product because it's my experience. So if we can understand what the 5 highest probability risks are that, that we face and we're thoughtful about those, we can then say, well, is there a way for me to reduce the cost if that risk occurs? Or can I make that risk more controllable? Is there anything I could do that would reduce the probability of that risk occurring? So W.C. Fields said it. W.C. Fields said, "I wish I knew where I was going to die, and I would make sure to never go there." It's true for us as well. If we can have clarity about what the risks are, then we can minimize sometimes the probability of that risk happening, or if the risk does happen, or the cost in the event that risk happens. And I think one of the One of the primary roles of a CEO, of an owner, is to think about defense along with thinking about offense. We tend to be offense-oriented. It's growth, it's maximizing, it's optimizing, it's 10x-ing. It's all the things we talk about. And rarely does a business owner think about what, what are the gotchas? Where are the places that if a risk did happen, it would somehow cause a major disruption, uh, uh, to the revenue stream or the earnings? And so I, I happen to be a big believer in being, uh, thoughtful about the risk. Now, if the risk does occur, you know, if it's failure, and that one's much harder. You know, Dan talked about taking 4 months off. I'm not quite as quick as Dan was, so it took me 18 months. When I went broke and lost everything, it took me much longer to get my mind screwed back, my head screwed back together. And part of the reason for that is because I had my net worth and my self-worth entwined, and that's a deadly combination. You get who you are entwined with what you do, it's deadly, particularly when you lose on what you do, right? I mean, so if those two are entwined, And so it was a brutal, brutal time period, and it took me a while. I tell— I use this example. When all this happened, I was between 38 and 40 years old, and that was 30 years ago, so those of you doing the math, I'm 69. The analogy I use is that time in my life, it was like being a basketball player And it's halftime, and I'm trotting off the court, and I look back at the scoreboard, and the score is 87 to 3. The other guys are winning. And so here I am in the locker room at halftime, my midlife, and I'm trying to figure out, how do I win this game? How do I win this game? And a very wise person looked at me, and after months and months. I grew a ponytail. I got my hair— my ear pierced. That still hurts. It's been 30 years, still got a little problem right there. I don't know why I did that. And a very wise person said to me, Keith, you're asking yourself the wrong question. You're asking yourself, how do I win? And you should be asking yourself, how am I going to play? How am I going to play this game? It's not about winning. It's about how I'm going to play. And I made a decision right then. I'm going to play for excellence. I'm going to play for mastery. I'm going to play for keeps. I'm going to play for spectacular. This is my life. I'm proud of it. And I will gladly live it again if only given the opportunity.

What actually makes a successful business that most of what is taught in the entrepreneurship faculties of the universities is nonsense. Nonsense. In fact, if you— he said that there's something like 1,687 professors of entrepreneurship and their primary focus is drinking their own bathwater and telling that entrepreneurs have to start— have a business plan. And if you have a business plan, you'll be successful. And they spent 2 years in their faculties teaching people how to set business plans and 49 out of 50 businesses are started without a business plan, including some of the most successful businesses in the world today. So we are now just starting to learn what we really need to do to build successful businesses. And what Joe Polish is doing here is absolutely marvelous because it can save you years of hard work, hundreds, even thousands of hours of hard work to understand how to do it much, much faster, to shortcut. We say there's always a learning curve in anything, and what we want to do is we want to jump the learning curve. We don't want to spend years and years learning what we need to learn to reach a certain level of income. And so I have majored now in the last few years on doing seminars and talking and books and articles and programs for owners and would-be owners of small and medium-sized businesses. Now I've got 45 minutes, so I'm going to have to condense what sometimes I share in seminars for days, but I understand you're some of the smartest people in the world, so that you could take a lot of information in a short period of time. Is that true?

Mm-hmm.

Yes. Did anybody not understand the question? So I'm going to try to bottom line several of the concepts. One of the first concepts which I thought was interesting was a little story that was in the papers recently. Warren Buffett, who is one of the richest men in the world, and Bill Gates, who is the richest man in the world, and Bill Gates Sr. were at a dinner party, and the three of them are good friends, and they were talking. And a gentleman came up to them and said, you know, I was looking at you, and you gentlemen are very successful. What would you say is the most important quality of success? And all three, according to a bystander, all three broke off their conversation and turned and simultaneously said, focus. Focus is the most important requirement for success in our fast-moving world today. If you can focus, you can succeed, and if you cannot, you cannot. It's almost a black and white thing. Well, I thought that was interesting because the way Joe and I met is I put together a program some years ago called the Focal Point Program, which basically brought in business owners like yourselves and taught them to focus. And we spent 3 years going through every single aspect of life, get 82 exercises that dealt with family and business and marketing and product and service and competition and positioning, and it was focus, focus, focus. And my offer, which is not as good as Joe Polish Polish, but my offer was that you will double your income and double your time off within 12 months, or there'll be no charge for this program. And I never had to give a refund. In fact, many people doubled and tripled their income within 30 days just by learning to focus and just by thinking in terms of focus. So it's really, really important. I read an article about myself. It was a very successful entrepreneur in New Zealand, and the article was sent to me last week. I'm reading this article, and he said the turning point in his life was when he went to a Brian Tracy seminar and learned how to focus. He was broke, he was unemployed, he had no money, and he walked out of the seminar a completely different person, and he had written goals. He then looked around, and as it happens, he saw an article on coffee shops and Starbucks' success in the United States. And it said coffee shops are a good business to be in because more and more people like the idea of a specialty coffee shop, and if it has a Wi-Fi, then they go there, it becomes a social center, and so on. He knew nothing about coffee, and before the dust had settled, he owned 80 coffee shops in Australia and New Zealand. And then he says he got into a divorce and had to sell it for $50 million to share the proceeds with his wife. But he didn't, he did not share, he did not sell off the worldwide rights to it, so he's rebuilding. Anyway, his point was at the end of the article they said, well, what would you say to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to be successful? And he said just two things. He said focus and fail fast. Focus and fail fast. Learn quickly, try something new. And I thought I would just pass that on because it's sort of what I have discovered over the years. Is the faster you fail and learn, the faster you succeed. You actually learn to succeed by failing. You know, Thomas J. Watson's famous line, if you want to increase your rate of success, you must double your rate of failure, because success lies on the far side of failure. Well, over the years I've done a good deal of reading, and I came across a concept that I want to share with you. And we were talking about this a little bit earlier, and the concept is, the question is, What is the most valuable and highest paid work that you do? It's a really interesting question, because when I heard the question, I didn't know what the answer was. What do you think the highest paid and most valuable work is that you do? And the answer is thinking. Thinking is the most valuable work. Now, I am the best-selling author in the world in time management, also on goals, also on some other subjects, but, but I began studying time management about 30 years ago, and I came across a word in my studies, and the word was consequences. And what it basically said is that something is important if it has big potential consequences, and something is unimportant if it has low or no potential consequences. Number one reason for success is people focus on things that have high potential consequences. Number one reason for failure is people focus on things that have low or no potential consequences. Exactly what Joe Polish Polish was saying earlier, that The famous Drucker quote, very worst use of time is to work intently on something that need not be done at all. And one of the things that is holding back entrepreneurs, business owners, it's killing them by the way, and it's wiping out an entire generation, is this obsession with technology. I see people that are walking with their phone. It's almost like drug addicts that are mainlined. They cannot stop staring at their screen. They cannot stop pushing their buttons. I hate to say there are people in this room that had that problem, but the fact is that this obsession with looking at the screen and staying connected is killing people because it stops them from focusing. You cannot focus if you are distracted like an attention deficit disorder dog. So you're constantly ringing and responding to bells almost like a crazy person in a toy factory. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] And so just as a quick aside, if thinking is the most important thing you do because of the consequences of thinking determine the entire quality of your life, then the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. And so the more time that you spend thinking and thinking well and thinking clearly, the more successful you are. Over the years, I've worked with some very powerful people, billionaires and multi-billionaires. People who are on the Forbes 400 list repeatedly, over and over. And I've had a chance to be with them during crises and at times where something was happening that was serious. It was a major problem. And I noticed that they all had one quality in common, is they all went calm. It's just, pooh, they went calm. People around them were angry and upset and worried about what happened and who did it and so on. And they would just go, 'Kalm.' Almost like a pond would go, 'Kalm.' And they knew, and I learned later, I didn't know why this was, I admired it, but I didn't know why it was, is that when your mind is calm, your entire cerebellum, the thinking and deciding brain, functions at its highest level, like turning up all the lights on a dimmer switch. It's functioning like a Christmas tree. But when you get upset and angry, what happens is your thinking reverts to your limbic or emotional system, and your ability to think clearly diminishes dramatically and you make a lot of mistakes. That's why when you are facing a difficult situation, you have to use every skill, trick, game, whatever it is, stay calm. And that's why they teach you to meditate. And they find that meditators in business are far more successful because they, they can automatically trigger their mind into the calm of meditation when they're facing a crisis. It enables them to think with greater clarity. Now, a couple of years ago, a man named Daniel Kahneman, a very fine man from reading him, who had won a Nobel Prize in psychology and neuroscience, wrote a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow. And this book was a very esoteric book, and I don't recommend that you read it. It's 500 pages of hard slogging. I will give you the essence of— I will give you the essence. I do the reading. Pass it on. I will give you the essence of the book. He said that there are two types of thinking. There's fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is intuitive, it's instinctive, it's automatic, it's reactionary. It's, I think of it very much as how you would drive through busy traffic. Choo-choo-choo-choo. You're not giving a lot of thought, you're just interacting. He said the other type of thinking is slow thinking. And slow thinking is where you just slow down the thinking and take You need time to think through issues. Now, if an issue has little or no consequences, then you can think quickly. You know, what do you have for lunch? What do you pick up on your plate from the buffet? Where do you park your car? These are— the consequences of these decisions are almost nonexistent. But if it's a major issue, then you say, "Wait a minute. This requires slow thinking." Here is his contention that made the book a bestseller. Is that the biggest problem that people have is that where they should use slow thinking, they use fast thinking. And entrepreneurs are extremely guilty of that. As we make important decisions that have long potential consequences, including affecting the lives of people and costing money and even leading to the bankruptcy of a business, we make those decisions with fast thinking when in reality we should be making them with slow thinking. Now, I'm a great Drucker fan, as many people are, and Mike was saying something about hiring the right people, and hiring the right people to work with you is very important. And the biggest mistakes you make is hiring fast. You hire people quickly. The best decisions you make are when you really take your time to hire slowly. And Peter Drucker said that fast people decisions are invariably wrong people decisions. Hiring an important person for for an important job has tremendous potential consequences. So therefore, you need to take a long time. One of the things I teach, which is in my book, How to Hire and Keep the Best People, is a simple rule that will increase your hiring accuracy to 90%. And I've taught it to Fortune 500 companies, and they make it a rule within their companies to use Brian's rule. Is to, this is the, you cannot hire except by doing this. And I didn't invent it, I just studied the hiring practices of the companies that hire the best people and keep them the longest, and they all at the beginning have a certain process that they follow and they follow it religiously, no exceptions. And so their accuracy in hiring goes up to 90% or better because they think more. An interesting professor at the University of San Diego last year wrote a book on sort of thinking fast and slow, but it was on decision-making. What he said is the longer that you take to make an important decision, the better the decision will be, the higher quality decision. And Lord Acton once said, when it is necessary— when it is not necessary to decide, it is necessary not to decide. In other words, he, the professor, said buy as much time as you can for a decision. Put it off. If you can put it off for a day, a weekend, a week, a month, put it off. Some of the best decisions that you make will be decisions that you will allow to steep for a while, like water in tea. So thinking is the most important thing you do. We call it thinking fast and slow. So remember, anything that is important that has long-term consequences is a candidate for slow thinking. Discussing it with other people, sitting quietly, going for a walk, letting it ruminate in your mind, sleeping on it. You know, they say if it's a big deal, sleep on it. So there's 3 thinking tools I want to give you and then 7 ideas. So the 3 ways of thinking, which I start off, the first way I start off every seminar is what I call zero-based thinking. And everybody who knows me for any period of time knows that I harp on this. Zero-based thinking is, comes from zero-based accounting, where you, instead of increasing an expense in the next accounting period, you ask, should we be engaging in this expanse at all. Now with zero-based thinking, you look at your entire world and you ask this question: Knowing what I now know, is there anything that I am doing that I would not start up again today if I had to do it over? This is one of the greatest thinking tools I've ever learned, because in a time of turbulence, you always have an answer for this question. Each person has an answer. Some people have multiple answers. There's lots of things that they're doing today that knowing what they now know, they wouldn't get into today. They wouldn't start them up. Products they wouldn't offer, people they wouldn't hire, investments they wouldn't make. And these are the greatest drags in life. These are sort of like a sea anchor, you know, that you drop it and it drags, it slows down the boat. Well, how do you tell if you have a zero-based thinking situation? And many of you were asked to write your problems, challenges, opportunities. The answer is stress. Is whenever you experience chronic stress, it's something that buzzes around. When Joe's talking or somebody else is talking, you're busy thinking about that. You drive around and you think about it. Keeps you awake at night. It's something that pisses you off. It's something that irritates you and angers you and frustrates you. Whenever you have chronic, which means ongoing, continuous, this is a candidate for zero-based thinking. So you ask yourself the question, If I was not now in this situation, knowing what I now know, would I get into it again today? If the answer is no, the next question is how do I get out and how fast? How do I get out and how fast? If ever the answer comes back that I would not get into this again today, it's too late to resolve it. It's over. The only question now is how long do you suffer? How much emotional suffering, how much financial suffering do you make before you walk. And so the most important requirement for practicing zero-based thinking, which a lot of people don't like to practice, is courage. I call it the C word. You need the C word. You need to have the courage to look at every part of your life and say, is there anything that I'm doing that knowing what I now know I wouldn't get into? Now the starting point of zero-based thinking is always with your relationships, and those are both personal and business. Whenever I give this talk, by the way, within a short period of time, divorces take place all over that city. People go home and say, geez, if I hadn't married this person, I would never marry them again today. And that's what's making me miserable. And many people are working their heads off on the outside to achieve success, but inside they're frustrated and unhappy because they're in a situation that knowing what they now know, they would never get into. So I call this a quinc analysis, and I'm going to ask you to do this for the the rest of your life and do help other people do it. K-W-I-N-K, knowing what I now know. Do a KWINK analysis on everything. Do a KWINK analysis. In my company, what they, we say is we look at every single person and on a regular basis and we say, if we had not hired this person and they walked in today to apply for their current job, knowing what we now know, would we hire them? If the answer is no, they're gone that day. There's a little rule, by the way, that in one of my books, it says the first, the best time to fire a person is the first time it crosses your mind. And because after that it's only pain and suffering. And if you, the longer you keep them in place, the more likely they are to sue you. And the longer they sue you, the more it's going to cost. So therefore, if you, if you find that you've made a mistake, belly up to the bar, have the courage to admit I made a mistake, and cut your losses. There was a great book by an author called the Zurich Axioms some years ago, and it was Principles of Success. And anybody who's in finance has probably read the book because a very successful New York financier, and he was talking about the gnomes of Zurich, whoever they are, and the rules that they go by. And he said the number one rule for success in business, personal life, is cut your losses. When you realize you've made a mistake, You made a mistake, bad investment, bad hire, bad relationship, cut your losses quickly. What do they say in Las Vegas? You know, cut your losses, let your winnings ride. So in life, that's what we do. And the faster you cut your losses, fail fast, the faster you can start doing things that are much more productive. The other, the second area has to do with every part of your business. Joe Polish and I were talking about what I think is a revolutionary new field though it's not revolutionary and it's not new, but it's business model innovation. And it's based on the concept that whatever business model you're using today is probably obsolete. If you're in any kind of a business that uses technology to market it, especially an information-based business, a knowledge-based business, consulting services, training, anything else, chances are your business is obsolete. The way that you, and the The business model is your method, your step-by-step process of generating profitability. Now, there are some companies that struggle along, struggle along, struggle along, then find a new business model, and the next year their business is up 5 or 10 times. Profits are just overwhelming. They're living in big houses on the hill, driving Cadillacs and flying private jets, and you say, what on earth did they do? They changed their business model. And if you don't change your business model, if it's the wrong business model, two things are going to happen. Your competitors are going to come up with a new business model and eat your lunch, and/or you're going to go broke. So it doesn't mean that your business model is wrong, it just means that you must be open to the possibility that your business model is obsolete, and that just means that there is a better business model. There's a superior business model, and your job is to find it. And again, there's no fixed answer to it, but I think that this is a great area of thought. I think this is a great area and it's sort of like a tool for you to have. I wonder if I need to change my business model, which is, is your way of generating sales, producing and delivering products and services, getting payments and achieving profitability. Well, so coming back to the second is look at anything in your business. Look at your products, look at your services, look at your people, look at the way that you advertise market and ask Is there anything that you're doing today that knowing what you now know you wouldn't start up again today? And the only question that you ever ask is, does it work? Does it work? Does it work? If it's not working and you can tweak it, then that's fine. If it's not working, have the courage to admit this isn't working and abandon it. Now the third area has to do with investments in zero-based thinking, investments of time, which people hate to lose. Someone said earlier that people hate to lose. It's one of the greatest emotions. We hate to lose time if we've invested a lot of time in a course of action, a project, a business, a relationship. The second is emotion. If we've put a lot of emotion into a course of action, a product, course of study, a relationship, or money, we hate to admit that we made a mistake and that what seemed like a good idea at the time has turned out not to be a good idea. And knowing what I now know, I wouldn't get into it. To it and have the courage to cut your losses and run. Now the reason I teach this first is because you can't make any progress unless you clear the decks, unless you get this 800-pound gorilla that's holding you back out of your life. And then many companies that I've worked with literally transformed, became multimillion-dollar companies when everybody said, alright, we're going to go through and do a Quinc analysis on this whole company and realize that half the things they were doing and half the people working here are not the right people for us at this time. And half the products that we're offering aren't selling and never will. They've been replaced by better, cheaper, faster products in the marketplace, so cut your loss. What happens when a big company gets into trouble? They bring in a quick analysis man and he comes in with a chainsaw and he shuts down all the factories and all the stores that are not profitable and the company goes from profits to losses in one year.

Pfft.

Anyway, the second, Another thinking tool that I teach people is WPO thinking, which is worst possible outcome. In everything that you're doing, always ask yourself, what is the worst possible outcome of this course of action, and what— and can I survive it if it were to occur? And if not, what could I do to make sure it doesn't happen? One of the number one reasons that we worry about anything in life is because of fear. And when you ask yourself, what is the worst thing that could happen in this particular situation? And then if you could say, all right, if that happens, I'll live with it. Then your worry goes away and your mind goes clear and calm. And now you say, now what can I make, do to make sure that the worst does not happen? And then you become proactive and you take charge of your life. The third thinking tool, I hope I'm not going too fast for you. The third thinking tool is called the principle of constraints. And it's one of the most important thinking tools ever discovered. It says between you and anything that you want to accomplish, there's always a constraint, a limiting factor, or a choke point that sets the speed at which you accomplish your goal. So, and I was just talking, doing a teleconference a few minutes ago, so the question I said is, let's always set the goal of doubling our income. You want to double your income? Okay, you want to double your income, then why isn't your income already twice as much? Twice as high. Now, in business, we don't think of doubling our income, we think of doubling our profitability. What we're concerned with is net cash flow. We're concerned with the amount that we take home to our family at the end of the day, not the gross, but the triple net. So we say, if I want to earn twice as much— and everybody in here can and can and will earn 2, 3, 4, 5 times as much sometime in the future— if I want to earn twice as much, why aren't I already earning twice as much. And the number one reason for most people is distraction. So they're so distracted they're doing things of low or no consequences. But we found the 80/20 rule applies to constraints. 80% of the constraints that are holding you back from achieving your financial goals are within yourself and within your business. They are not on the outside, they are not the competition, they are not the market, they are not the people in Washington or the taxes or regulation, 80% are within yourself. So the mark of the superior person is whenever they have a problem, they say, what is it in me that's causing this problem? Mike and I know this very, very clearly. What is it in me that's causing this problem? In illness, by the way, 85% of illness is psychosomatic. As Dennis Waitley said, it's not what you're eating, it's what's eating you. What's causing the problem. And so the starting point, and the first thing a doctor will tell you, or a psychologist, is what is it that you're not dealing with? And you go back to zero-based thinking. What is it that you have in your life that if you had to do over, you wouldn't do it? So ask yourself what's holding you back, and usually it's the quality of self-discipline, or it's a skill. Now one of the things that changed my life forever was when I learned that all business Business skills are learnable. You don't have to be a genius to learn any business skill. You can learn any form of technology, as Mike has proven that with his products. You can take a person who's basically shoveling Joe Polish in Shebokan and teach them how to be technologically sufficient, superior enough to earn a living from it. Every business skill is learnable. And so I say, what one skill, if you are absolutely excellent at it in your business, would help you the most to double your income? What one business skill? If you could wave a magic wand and wake up tomorrow morning superb in this area, what skill would it be? And you know, when you ask that question, everybody knows the answer. They know what it is. But here's the challenge. You don't like the skill because it involves rejection, embarrassment, ego, potential failure, loss. You've tried it in the past. You haven't been good at it. But nobody asks you, what would be an easy skill to learn. They just asked you what skill would help you the most to double your income. And here's what we have found is that most of us are only one skill away from doubling our income. And all business skills are learnable. And if you study the people who go from the top to the bottom in the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000, they found in 25 years of research these people learn one skill at a time by climbing the ladder of success and the ladder of income. Become like sniper, one shot, one kill. They don't try to learn 50 skills, they learn the one skill, focus, the most important skill, and they get their company focusing on the one skill that can help you the most to generate sales and profitability.

It's about changing your game, and you know, back in 1974 when I first started coaching, I developed a role model, and the role model was the microchip, which, people were just talking about the microchip, around 1974. And the microchip basically takes the speed of information and puts it into a smaller space. So the constant evolution of microtechnology over the last— going on 50, 60 years now— has constantly pumped more and more information to more space. Since that was taken care of by the microchip, I decided to focus on another area and take the most actionable wisdom and pack it into the shortest period of time. And so in order— what this does is that as you do this, you actually increase your impact on the planet. And so my thing, I just— little quote here from George Bernard Shaw, that progress is impossible without change. We know that the The microchip is causing change. The question is, are you changing with it? So it really requires of mind shifts all the time, actually changing your mind. So I'm going to pack 41 years of coaching— well, my original attempt was to pack 41 years of coaching into 50 minutes. That was my goal. But as I got thinking about it over the last month, I decided to pack it into 30 minutes, and then leave some room for your wisdom in response to what I'm showing you. So, uh, I've taken my entire coaching career and broken it down into 3 graphics. One of them is a circle, the other one is 4 boxes, and the other one is a curve. So I'm going to go to the circle first. And what this circle really represents, and what I want you to do, is to actually get your pen out because we're going to actually write here. And the thing I'd like you to do is to consider this circle all of your time and all of your activities as they're presently devoted to your business. So the circle represents just where you are right now. And so in 15 minutes, I'm going to get you to change your mind about where you are right now. And then I have 4 boxes I'm going to show you, and in 10 minutes I'm going to show you where— how you're going to change your mind about what you're going to do during the next 90 days. And then the upward curve that I spoke about, in 5 minutes I'm going to show you how you're going to change your mind about what you're going to do for the next 25 years. So this is basically what I'm going to do in the next half hour. So the first thing I want you to do is to imagine this circle that actually has 3 parts. And what this circle really represents is your emotional reaction to different things that you're actually doing right now, snapshot of where you are right now. And what A stands— what the first outer circle stands for, we call this A, and the second one we call B, and the third one we call C. And A stands for everything in your business right now, all the time that you're spending that really irritates you. Irritates you. So this is the irritating part of your life right now. How many of you can relate to that right away? Okay, yeah. And it's very important to actually tell the truth about what irritates you, because if you don't tell the truth about what irritates you, you can't actually do something else. The second part of what your life is right now is B, and this is the okay part of your business. And usually the okay part of your business is related to cash flow. Okay, how many of you are okay with cash flow? Okay, it's not irritating, but it's also— some of it is not very exciting. Okay, and then the third part, C, really represents the part of your business where you're spending your time and your action with that is really fascinating and motivating. Okay, so you're very fascinated with this. It's new, it's got a lot of promise, and it's very motivating because it looks like it's going to be really big. It's going to be a lot better. Okay, how many of you have all three of those right now? You have irritating, you have okay, good. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have you actually do a little list of the three most irritating things right now. Okay, and people can be irritating, so how many of you have people who are irritating? Yeah. Situations, how many of you have situations that are irritating? Right? And how many of you just have activities or tasks that are very irritating? You know, maybe obligations. How many of you have obligations that are irritating? Yeah. So anyway, it's just your truth, and I'm just going to give you an example of 3 of mine. And one of mine is spending any time with entrepreneurs who don't have any ambition.

Okay?

It seems like a wasted effort to me. How many of you realize that Being an entrepreneur is a life sentence. How many of you know you can't go back? How many of you know they won't have you? How many of you wouldn't hire you? Okay, so that's really— so I tell people it's a life sentence, there's no out. And so don't do your life sentence in an irritating fashion. Actually get rid of the irritation. That's why you became an entrepreneur in the first place. Okay, so the second one for me is meetings that don't have any impact. Okay, so I— we have a tool in Strategic Coach which is called the Impact Filter, and what I require is that before we have a meeting, I want your Impact Filter the day before, because I don't want to spend half the meeting trying to figure out what the meeting's about. I want to know what the meeting's about the next day, and I don't ask anyone to meet with me unless they get an impact filter. And then the next one is non-strategic days and hours. So I have a time system where I only do 3 important things a day. Okay? So sometimes I get my 3 important things done by 11 o'clock in the morning, and that's my day. The rest of the day is not for work. Okay? And the reason why I figure 3 things a day is that in a 5-day work week, I get 15 important things done. How many of you, if you got 15 important things done in a week, that's a good week? Okay. And I work 210 days a year, Babs and I. Babs is she who decides. So anyway, she who decides. Joe Polish and I decided about 25 years ago that we'd take 155 free days a year, which gives me 210 days, and if I do 3 important things, that's 630 important things. 630 important things in a year. How many of you, if you did 630 important things in a year, it would be a good year? And do that for 25 years and, uh, good lifetime. For a life sentence. Okay, so that's yours. Now I want you to write down right now, where you are, this is October 26, 2015, what really irritates you now, and there's a huge bonus for telling the truth here. Okay, just tell the truth about what irritates you.

Okay?

If you don't tell your brain what irritates you, your brain can't take action, your brain can't see any solution to it. So just write it down. The moment you write it down, your brain starts finding the solution. Could be big or small. A lot of people won't write what irritates them because they think there isn't a solution. But the truth is there is no solution until you write it down. Yeah, so, you know, our brain just wants to know what to work on, and you're the only one that can tell it. Okay, so that's, that's it. Okay, now I'm going to move on to okay. And for me, okay is— I like intro sales presentations. You know, we started off where I had to travel all over the world, actually, and to do sales presentations. Now they're closer to home, and they don't irritate me, they don't excite me, but they're great. I mean, they're great for cash flow, and I'm still in a position where that's important for my company, so I do it, but it's not— I'd like to see a future where I don't have to do this anymore. And that's usually what okay things are for you. It's you'll do it right now, Another one is coaching the basic concepts. So we've been coaching for 41 years, and I personally coach 6,000 people. And there's basic concepts related to time and money and relationship and purpose. And I don't mind coaching those. I mean, I'm more excited about the new stuff that's being created, but I'll do it. And then the third one is there's new knowledge products that I'm creating, and there's parts of the process that's okay for me. Lots of parts of the process are fascinating and motivating, but there's still some things that are okay. Okay. So this is a good area. This is a tremendous area. And what we want to do as part of the logic of what I'm showing you, this ABC model, is you want to always every 90 days be eliminating your current irritating, and then you want to systematize and automate the Bs, the okay part. So that's a That's kind of a progression: eliminate the A's, systematize and automate the B's. The Four Seasons Hotel has a great line, which is, "Systematize the predictable and humanize the exceptional." Okay, so the more you can systematize the predictable part of your business, it frees you up to humanize, which means creativity and all sorts of new kinds of innovation, and it's really great. And then the third one, C, is what I love. I've come up with this fabulous new idea. I'm so excited. And it's been about the last 6 months where I've discovered how you can score mindsets. And basically what I'm really discovering is that the whole world actually runs by mindsets. It doesn't run by products. Products or services. It actually runs by people wanting to graduate in their lives to a particular type of mindset, and I figured out how to create the mindsets, but not only that, I can teach anyone else how to create a mindset, a scorecard for mindsets that are important to you. So I'm very, very excited about this. Next thing is we have a part of the program which is called the 10x Ambition Program, and I really I really love it because I'm about 90 days ahead of my clients, and I have to constantly come up with new stuff, and I'm very excited about that. And my final one is I've got a whole group, a growing number of my 10 times clients. You know, a lot of them are in the room right here. You know, Joe Polish Polish Polish, very much so. I've got Dean Graziosi here. I've got Stefan Wissenbach. I've got lots and lots of people here. And they're really changing games for other people. So I really, really love Robin. Robin's over here. Robin's a game changer. So I really, really, really love working with people who are game changers. And my definition of a game changer is that where all of your competitors actually become your customers and promoters. When you have changed the game of the entire industry, then your competitors actually become your biggest customers and your biggest promoters. And you can tell, that's one of the telltale signs. How many of you would really like to do that? You would actually— yeah, that's a huge thing. I really don't like competition, you know. I like everybody else to be competing, but I just really don't like doing it. I'm the 5th child of 2 5th children, and we kind of— I wasn't born with a competitive chip. So I was just born with a sneaky chip. Sneaky chip. I know how to bypass trouble. Okay? And I never thought competing was really a good use of time. Okay? So the big thing here now— How many of you this is clarifying? You know, this is kind of clarifying where you are. And you do this every 90 days. Like, this gives you 90 days of work, And you can make a big shift. How many of you, if you eliminated the As, automated and systematized the Bs, and then focused a lot more time on the Cs, this would be a big deal for you, this would be a big shift? Okay, well, how are we going to figure out where we are right now? So what I want you to do, you'll notice the little boxes right under A, B, and C, your activities. What I want you to do is, Say what percentage out of 100% of your time right now, what percentage are you spending in A, what amount of time are you spending in B, and what amount of time are you spending in C? And these are my real numbers for this quarter, okay? And what I want to tell you is no matter how good you get at getting rid of A's, next quarter there will be a new bunch of A's that irritate you. Some of the OKs right now will become irritating next quarter, okay? And the reason is because as you get more and more into fascinating and motivating, OK things become irritating. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay. So what I want you to do now is— this is where you are right now, and what I want you to do is say what percentage of your time next time in 90 days do you want to be spending on A? And for me, it's zero. Okay, those, those activities. What percentage of those activities do I want to be spending? And I want to drop it down to 10. So I've gotten rid of 10, I've gotten rid of, I've gotten rid of 10% there. And so next time I want to be spending 90, 90% of my time on this. Okay, really good. How many of you that see, can see the shift? That's a big shift. 20% of your time being shifted to fascinating and motivating, that's a big deal. How many of you can get excited right now by the prospect of doing that? Yeah, that's really super. Now, I'm just going to have you come down below this, and I want you to say how you're actually going to do this. Okay? So one of our things is that the scorecard concept that we have, we've really developed it very well, at the 10 times ambition level. And now, over the next quarter, I want it to go throughout the program. Everybody on a scorecard. Impact filter only rules. Okay, so sometimes I let people meet with me without an impact filter, and I'm getting mad as hell, and I'm not gonna put up with it anymore. And so the next quarter, no impact filter, no meeting. And the next one is just to reinforce my 3 things a day. Okay, 3 important things. And you know, if you restrict the number of things that you do in a day to a fixed number, like 3, you only have one way of improving, and that is, since you can't increase the quantity of things that you're doing, you have to increase the quality. Okay, so I'm an enemy of busyness on the planet. I'm a huge enemy of busyness. I think busyness interferes with people's growth of ambition, and I think busyness interferes with people's sense of courage. OK? You can fool yourself by being busy that you're actually making progress, but it's a bit of a treadmill. OK? And then, I'm just going to put these in— more of this is my information. But I want you to say the 3 things that you're gonna do to automate and systematize B. And then with the 90% that I have here, and you have another percentage, what I want you to do is to actually say what you're gonna really focus on and what these activities are. So we've identified 9 possible areas for growth, and we've identified 9 activities that would lead to growth.

Growth.

And this is really super. We're really moving very, very nicely here. Okay, so this is, this is cool. And now if you could only do one thing over the next quarter, if you could only do one thing, I'll let you— I know some of you are writing furiously. Okay. 60% of my client base historically have been ADD. And so I found that with ADD people, you got to do it really fast, and you got to get them to write in small boxes. But you can keep them almost forever and have them only write about themselves. I find the greatest way to engage another human being is have the entire conversation be only about them. How many of you are quite engaged— engaged when it's about you? Yeah. That comes from being a fifth child. I have a rule. I'm number 21, so when I meet a new person, I automatically assume that they have 20 more important things in their life than meeting me. Okay? And then if they are going to move me up into the top 20, it's because I'm creating value for them that actually engages them. But it has to be about them. Okay, so that makes life a lot simpler. You know, the worst illusion in life is that any of this was created for you. Okay, so what I want you to do now is zero in on the one thing that would actually be a game changer. What would be a game changer here? Okay, and you can only pick one. You'll do more than one, but I want you to have your focus on one. Okay, so for me, it's the— I have 3 game changers and I want to get them into a digital platform. So not only do they have a scorecard, but they have a digital platform. And by, by December— January 31st, I want 3 of my game changers in it with a scorecard in a digital platform. Okay, and I'm working with Stefan here. Bright guy from England. Not all of them are, you know. They stick out. All right, that goes for Americans too. All right, so how many of you this is revealing? So this is kind of like a really, really fast way of taking a look at your quarter. Now here's a real tip for you. How many of you have teams? Okay. Go back, there's an extra blank one of these in your pack. Go back and do this with your team, and allow your team the movement now to get rid of the irritating work. And a lot of the irritating work really is what your company used to do, but it's, it's not really necessary. You know, it's kind of like your wardrobe. 80% of it you haven't worn in a year. Okay, so why do you still have those clothes around? Okay, just get rid of it. And how many of you have people in your life that are like clothes? 80% of them, 80% of them, you feel some sort of obligation, but you actually don't act on it. So we get rid of that. Okay, now we got to do another thing. So we're going to go to the 4 boxes right now. And this is a little thing that I discovered, um, probably over the course of my life, but most people want a change delivered to them so they can always stay in a state of capability and confidence. And that's what perfectionism— by the way, perfectionism is absolutely the enemy of entrepreneurism, because perfectionism is the demand that you be guaranteed upfront with success before you'll actually commit yourself to it. How many of you have done that, where you absolutely demand that success be guaranteed to you before you'll actually commit to the project? Okay, and the world doesn't work that way. It needs you to actually commit before the success can actually be created, and what that requires is courage. Okay, so commitment requires courage. So I want you to take the game changer breakthrough from the previous one, and I want you just to write from the bottom of the ABC page, write what you have in the bottom box and put that at the top. Okay, and so we have the create one-on-one game changer coaching process by December 31st. Okay, so we'll have that in place. And then this is really part of getting them digital, okay? And then my commitment. Now, a commitment is the statement to yourself that I am going to commit to this even though I don't have the guarantee of success. And that's what entrepreneurism is, that you commit yourself before you have a guarantee of success, okay? And I've coached entrepreneurs all over you know, all over the world, from 60, 70 different industries, and one of the things I notice is when entrepreneurs start to die is when they start thinking of having a courage-free future. When you start thinking you're gonna have a courage-free, the universe notices, it's a bit like the Terminator, the light's going out like this, and the universe starts wanting the parts back. When you tell the universe, "I want a courage-free life," The universe wants the parts back. Okay? And you start dying, okay, in life. So with mine, by the end of 2015, I used all my experience from individual game-changing coaching sessions over the past 2.5 years to create a unique process that standardizes everything I know will be working for all existing and new game-changer sessions in 2016. Okay, so game changer is the scary part of my life right now. Okay, and I'm really— I just have to create it out of courage right now. The moment you start creating stuff, and each of you can analyze the 5 biggest breakthroughs in your life with this card. Okay, every time you took a big breakthrough in your life is because you committed before there was a guarantee of success, which required courage. Required courage. The difference between courage and confidence is that confidence feels really good. Courage doesn't. How many of you, when you're feeling really shaky and you're feeling really, really scared and you're saying, "Oh, this is really terrible," actually it's courage. It's actually courage. And that's why a lot of people don't like courage because it feels lousy. Okay? But the more you commit 100%, the shorter the courage. That's required. That's really interesting. So I'm into short courage. I've tested long courage, and I like short courage. I like courage that's maybe 24-hour courage. Okay? 15 minutes is even better. 15 minutes is better, you know. Then there's some people, crazy people like Peter Diamandis, who has a lifetime of courage. Lifetime of courage. I'm not— I'm not that advanced yet. Okay, then the courage is that I hate going back. First of all, I have to go back and do an activity that I actually hate, and I have to collect all my notes over the last 2.5 years, and I got to organize them because I'm the only one who knows where they are, and I'm the only one who knows how they actually connect with each other. So part of courage is for a while doing a particular type of activity that moves you to the next level, but you're going to have to put in the time. To actually do that. How many of you have something right now that it requires a very unpleasant activity on your part for a period of time, but if once you get it finished, then you never have to do that again in your life, and it puts you in a position where you can take a jump? Yeah. And so everybody thinks about courage, you know, like in a very heroic, medal-winning terms, but a lot of courage is just what it is in your life right today that is required to go through to get to the next level. There are 7.3 billion people on the planet right now, and each of them got up during this 24-hour period, and they're facing something that represents the next jump for them. Okay? So one of my goals— I'll talk to you a little bit later— is that this is an exercise that's going to be online. It will be an online app by the end of this month, probably by November 1st, and it's for phones, it's for pads, and it's for computers, where you can just download this and use it. But what I'd like you to do is to distribute it to everybody in your network, because I have a goal, and this is my influence from Peter Diamandis, that by 2039 we have a billion people on the planet using this exercise. To basically grow on a daily basis. It'll be 1 out of 9 people, and if you have 1 out of 9 people actually going through courage on a day, it makes everything better. Just makes it— What they're doing, I have no idea, nor do I care. I just want them moving forward on the thing that gives them courage. That's all I want to do. OK? And then, once we get this, you get a capability out of it. So it's the commitment and the courage that actually creates capability. OK, so it's a bit like the commercials, you know, "Apply, lather, rinse, reapply." This is the same thing here. OK, so the same thing is you have to— commitment creates courage, courage creates capability, capability creates confidence. So the next one is confidence, okay? And see, this is what people really, really want, but they want confidence given to them. Nobody can give you confidence. You have to create confidence by going through commitment, courage, and developing a new capability. And it's the three of those. And once you get the higher level of confidence, then you can commit at a higher level, okay? And as long as you keep doing this for the rest of your life, you'll always be young. No matter what age you are, you'll always be young. People get old when they try to have capability and confidence without commitment and courage. Okay, so that's just how the world works and what it means to be truly human. Okay, so that's it. So I've— this is what your next 90 days is about. How many of you, if you did this during the next 90 days, that would be a real breakthrough? Yeah, yeah, and I've got a lot of people here, you know, we have 300 in the room, and each of you is working on something else, and it's you working on something else that makes the world go round. Okay, because you influence a lot of other people while you're doing it. Okay, it's not big stuff, it's the thing that you have to deal with right now. Okay, now I'm going to take you to the next one, and this is an upward arrow, And this is really important. So I did the, the 90 days. You're going, you've just done the ABC to set this up, and then you did the 4 Cs. And now I'm going to show you that if you do the ABC and you do the 4 Cs every day, uh, or every, at the beginning of every 90 days, that just locks you in just for the next 90 days. So in my program at Strategic Coach, the time period I get everybody to think about is 25 years. Okay? So for me, I started a new 25-year period last year, 2014, and I'm going to 2039. But for you today, what you're doing, you're doing 25 years from 2015 to 2040. OK, so last year I was 70, so my next growth period, and this will be my biggest growth period, is from age 70 to age 95. So when I'm 95, I'm more energized, I'm a lot smarter, I'm a lot more ambitious than I am right now. OK, and the reason I want to do that is because I want to do it. People say, "Well, why do you need to do that?" I say, "I do not need to do that." I want to do it. Most of you in this room are beyond the borderline of need. You're into the world now of want. Want doesn't have anything to do with other people thinking about what you should do. Want is simply, "This is what I want to do," and the reason why you want to do it is because you want to do it. How many of you that's actually relieving? There's no justification in the world of wanting. In the world of needing, there's total justification because you're expecting other people to do it. In the world of wanting, strictly your game. So you got the 90 days, and then you do 100 quarters like this. So you do the ABCs. So this quarter, which goes right up until the beginning of 2016, you do that, okay? And then you jump to a higher level, and then The beginning of the next 90 days, you do that, and you do this for 100 quarters in a row. How many of you think it would really take you somewhere? Yeah. And remember, each one of those 90 days is just 1% of 25 years. So if you blow one, it doesn't really matter. So what I do is every quarter I do 5 things. This is my number one thing. But I actually do 5 things, 5 multiplier projects, and it's like compound interest. See, people think— people really grasp compound interest when it comes to money, but they don't actually understand compound interest when it comes to capability. So every 90 days, I want to ratchet up my level, first of all, of operating in the area of fascinating and motivating, and I want to ratchet up being in a continual cycle of commitment, courage, capability, and confidence, and do that every quarter. And it's like investing now in something that's gonna keep paying over. One of the big problems of living in the microchip age is people's reduced timeframes. And if you reduce your timeframes, time speeds up. If you lengthen your timeframe, everything slows down. OK? OK, so this is October 26th, 2015. I'd like to take you down to— back to October 26th, 1990. And what I'd like you to do is tell me the 3 things that were really ticking you off that day. Nobody remembers. How many of you, though, can remember what generally you were really excited about in 1990? How many of you can get a handle on that? So here's a tip: our brain only remembers excitement, it doesn't remember getting ticked off. That being the case about the future, don't try to remember getting ticked off in the future. Just get— just remember, see, the only memory-worthy things that are things that are fascinating, motivating, nothing else is worth reminding. Doesn't last more than a couple of days.

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