Amplify + Multiply Your Time

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. Welcome to another episode of Capability Amplifier. This one is about something that is near and dear to both Dan and my heart. We were talking about bonus time earlier, which is let's say, for example, if you're a cancer survivor, every moment, or let's say you escape any a near death experience, every time is bonus time. But this one is about getting the most time out of the life you have by doing something I call folding time. Time compression, time slicing. But this is an episode about amplifying and multiplying time. Dan Sullivan, how are you doing, my friend?

Great. You know, as we're longtime conversationalists, Mike. But the thing is that there is one thing fixed and that's everybody has quantitatively the same amount of time. All the inequality in the. The difference in qualitative use of the quantified team. So people say, you know, I get, you know, I found a way to shorten time. Well, actually you don't. You know, it's like shortening gravity or it's like shortening water. You know, we're given pretty well the same material to work with. But the great inequality is just what people do with the quantity of time that they have. Right on.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately and I had a brainstorm. I was in Ohio with a client, someone who's in coach, mutual friend. His name's Brett Kaufman, doing some incredible things. I love Brett and he's an amazing guy. But I woke up in the middle of the night and I just dictated these ideas. So I'm gonna tell you what they are. I know you're gonna be able to add something to them and I wanna go deep, so I'm gonna just tell you what they are first through my lens and we'll explore each of them. So one of them is this notion of time slicing. And then another one is time compression. Another idea is folding time. Another one is chaos elimination. It's the over creation, under creation, courage, amplification, and then embracing new rules. So I'll begin with one of them that I think you'll relate to. And it's time slicing. And the basic premise is increasing your consciousness through meditation and actually slowing down time and creating peak experiences. And the basic idea is I believe that consciousness, in other words, living in the spiritual realm, is outside of time versus living in the physical realm. But the more conscious you are, the slower time appears to be, or if you pack more exciting experiences into the same amount of time, you in fact live more. So think of it like stacks of pancakes versus laying down the pancakes, end to end. They're stacked together. There's more density to the quality of life. So I'm curious about your perspective on the notion of time slicing and, let's say, amplification of consciousness through meditation or some other tools. Thoughts?

We've both explored a lot of different, you know, what you would say off the track, therapies and experiences in our life. And I find generally the ones that I've appreciated most. And I've meditated since the spring of 1972. So every morning, at least, I've meditated. And it's just a standard thing in the marketplace, Transcendental meditation. And it's brought over from Indian practice, and it went Americanized. It's Americanized Indian practice. And I learned to do it. And I always say things that I learned like that. And another one was EST. I went to EST in the 1970s and I said, do the two weekends and then have nothing to do with their organization. And I feel the same way about the meditation is do the meditation. They teach you a sound. I still have the sound. If I just say the sound to myself, I go to a meditative state. But what it does is if you meditate, like tonight or maybe Friday night, I'll get home. And I've had a packed week. My days have just been packed. I had workshops on Monday and Tuesday, and I've been in the studio because I've given in to the devil of podcasts. Michael, I have to tell you, I'm confessing here. And we both have confession, early lifetime confession experience. And I've given into the devil of podcasts, and I'm totally enjoying the experience, but it does require my, myself to be in the studio a lot. But tomorrow night I'll meditate, you know, when I get home. And it just kind of like, well, that week's over and now I can just enjoy the weekend. So there's all sorts of really, really interesting meditative techniques these days. And there's really interesting, actually technologies like Muse, you know, if you use Muse, it actually puts you in a medit. I've got a little light therapy beam, which if I put it right here and I put it right here and I put it right here and I put it right here, it automatically drops me to a theta state of meditation, and I can do it in two and a half minutes. So my feeling is the world is getting complicated and complicator and it's actually the experience of complexity, unpredictable complexity, which I think robs people of time consciousness, that they're being asked to constantly respond to new things where they don't even have time to reflect, they're just asked to react. So my feeling is it's the grasp of time mastery in our world is actually reducing the complexity of our day. The number of different things that we have to deal with which require standards and choice and goals that you have, which are more important than what anybody else is actually offering you to do, that what you have intended to do. That's just my first take on what you're talking here.

Okay, that's good because I think the natural blend then I had one other one I was going to go through, but I think we can go down the chaos elimination, which you talked about, the complicator. And my version of this is owning your time by not giving it away or devaluing yourself and then improving your decision making. And that does get into eliminating complexity. But I also would give the example of unconscious consumption is also on that level. So to me, the biggest robber of consciousness right now and time is social media, specifically the race to the bottom. Low frequency, I'll call it buzzfeed, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter consumption, which is done on a just flip through where either don't block out a time or have a specific goal. And it is designed to, at this point anyway, to appeal to the lowest frequency addictive side of the human brain. But through your lens of chaos elimination, if we were just going to look at this, I'm curious for you where you see the biggest sucks and how you've evolved in your own chaos elimination and how you approach doing that.

Well, I'll give you an example that I'm in right now. And in the summer of 2018, we had a really gorgeous summer. And Babs and I, instead of watching television in the night, would go out on our patio and we would, you know, have dinner and we'd talk. And I have Kindle, she has Kindle. And I'd be in the middle of a novel. And what I noticed during about a three week period that we got about 45 minutes more sleep by not watching television. But before I went to bed, I was less jangled. And what I discovered about television, there's two jangling experiences. Part of it is just the content that you're watching because it's coming at you super fast. And you know, they're losing advertising dollars so they're going for maximum hit. You know, they're kind of pounding you with headlines, this just in emergency, you know, killing fires, you know, whatever. And there's the intensity of the content, but there's just the electric field that you're in when you're in front of a television. I mean, you're really being bombarded with electric pulses that aren't necessarily in agreement with you being relaxed and tranquil and focused and concentrated. So I did the three weeks and I said, I wonder how long I can keep this going. And I'm 13 and a half months in now. I haven't watched any television. And I have to tell you, the world has improved enormously over the last 13 and a half months. And I'm responsible for it. I'm responsible for the world just getting better over the last 13 and a half months. But I just noticed things have slowed down for me. Okay? I still am up with the news because I read articles. So I go to RealClure Politics, which is a great aggregator. It's the best news source on the planet right now. Every day they give you headlines and then you just click on them and you go right to the source. If it's the New York Times, you go to New York Times. But they curate articles according to what their readers have told them. They enjoy those articles. And every day, you know, and I'm not looking for everything, but I'm always looking for something. I'm kind of in sync with them because the kind of articles I get every day. But reading is a very different experience than watching television. You have more touch with your rational mind. And, you know, why is this interesting? Does this really make sense when you're getting it in five second burst or complete story in five minutes, Your nervous system doesn't really have the time. So that's one. And I'm just going to see if I can do it for the rest of my life. Now I like that because I've done it for 13 and a half months, which means I can do it for 27 months, which means I can do it for 54 months. So I mean, you know, you could do it. But I'm noticing the thought of sitting down watching television is like a very unpleasant food experience you've had. And I said, you know, I really don't want to eat that. I know what it feels like when I'm eating that. And it's really interesting. I wouldn't have felt that 13 and a half months ago because I was sort of addicted to it. But 13 and a half months away has freed me from the neural addiction of Watching television.

I am so with you. I haven't watched television pretty much for the most part for 30 years and I haven't had cable and I don't know how long.

Sure, Mike, yeah, just make me look like my shit.

It's only because I just didn't have time. I was so afraid of running out of money that I was like, I got to make money. I do. On the other hand, I do consume a lot of Netflix comedy. I think comedy right now is one of the greatest gifts to our world, especially in light of the low frequency leadership that exists on the planet as well as low frequency news. And I think this steers us towards. When I was listening to you talk about real clear politics, the notion of curated content, you know, news has reached a point now. It's not like you're watching back in the old days, someone like a cronkite or old 60 minutes that were really well curated sources and there was real journalism taking place that simply is not economically feasible for the most part any longer. But I love that. So anything else from a chaos elimination perspective? You know, if you look at coach members, for example, and pay attention to the biggest challenges and problems you observe, is there anything else that you would add to that list? Otherwise we can move on to the next big one?

No, I think the big thing is that their days today are filled up with activities that were useful five years ago, but they're not useful right now, so they don't have time to actually update what they should really be doing. We have a concept called unique ability, and unique ability can never be more than three activities. And the goal in coach is just get your whole life down to three activities and then all the stuff you were doing before, you just find who's who actually are really great at those activities. You don't like those. So I've given a general name to it. It's called crappy stuff. I'll just put the two words out. My crappy stuff. How quick did it take you to fill up all the lines with crappy stuff? What would constitute crappy stuff for you?

Oh, that's easy. Okay.

No, no, but I mean, I'm just saying one of the reasons why time is out of control for most people because most of their time is filled up with crappy stuff. They're business life, their personal life.

So yeah, yeah, Crappy people, crappy things. That's good. I love it.

Well, it's a crappy existence if your time is filled up with crappy stuff. You know, the people you're meeting are crappy people.

Yeah, I went through a complete a hole operation a couple years ago where I have none in my life at all, business and personal. I simply give them no time whatsoever and I make it impossible to reach me if they're, you know, in that world. I've got multiple levels of filter, so let's go on to the next one, which is time compression. And that through my lens is adding new capabilities and increasing leverage by who ing up your business in your life. And to me, my greatest time compression, one of them is podcasting as well, because conversationally, it's a great creative outlet. I'm getting inquiries because of podcasting on a business level and I get to test out ideas with a market that doesn't pay money. It's sort of like comedians who are unknown have to get up and the only thing that matters is if you're getting laughs. Right. And the same is true with performance content as well. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on time compression by adding new capabilities, increasing your leverage, and just getting more out of life in that regard.

Well, one of the things I adapted about 15 years ago is that I would only shoot each day to accomplish three important things. And if I accomplished them by 11 o' clock in the morning, the day was over and I could go and do anything I wanted. And what I noticed is because I was restricting the quantity of things that I could do, the quality of those had to increase. It could never be more than three. So one thing I noticed, and I'll just add in some things that you already mentioned, I would more and more restrict myself to activities where all I was doing was setting up teamwork for other people to actually do the activities. So I became more and more a designer of projects for other people rather than me doing projects myself. But just three a day, Just three.

A day, that's really smart. I like that. So give me an example. Can you tell me a story of something in particular that stands out? And they were like three really high impact because I think I hear the word impact and quality is what this is about.

Well, one of them today is my podcast with you. First of all, we enjoy the activity. Not only do I not know what you're going to say, I'm a bit in the dark about what I'm going to say. The other thing is unpredictability. If it's the right kind of unpredictability, it's an enjoyable. Unpredictability is incredibly nourishing for the brain. It's incredibly nourishing but we got a multiplier here because we have essentially a global radio station here. So we don't know who's listening to this, we don't know who resonates, but they start telling us and all of a sudden you're resonating with people. I had a workshop a year ago and three individuals showed up and they lived within 20 miles of each other in Mumbai, India. And all three of them met for the first time in their first strategic coach workshop. But they had come because of podcasts. They had listened to podcasts. I have a series with Peter Diamantis and I have a series with Joe Palisch. And they came through them and in each case they listened about five or six podcasts and say, I really like kind of the thought here, I kind of trust this guy and tell me something about this mike that I noticed that we're distrusting visual things more and more these days because we can be fooled because there's enormous number of visual tricks, you know, visual tricks. And I think a lot of people are retreating back to voice. They have a greater confidence that they can pick up trustworthiness or non trustworthiness vocally than they can with their eyes. What do you think about that?

Well, I've spent a considerable amount of time on the topic of deep fakes and something called Voco. And in fact there's a brand new product that just came out called Lyrebird. L Y R E B I R D so deep fakes can create visual fakes. And what I predict is either in this election or the next one, entire reputations and careers are going to be destroyed with fake media more than ever before. And it will be powered by and created by AI which will be able to recreate in millisecond timing based upon the outrage from herd based mentality that exists right now. So we live in a world that feelings matter more than facts and so manufacturing reality is now possible. Lyrebird can do that with voice even now. So it's paired up with some software that with it it'll listen to. Like for example, we could edit our podcast with this technology. And what it does is allows you, let's say if you're not happy with something, not only edit something out, but type something in and it'll listen to either your voice or my voice. And you can word processor the V in. So I do agree that with voice we can do that, but with video is less trustworthy and images are less trustworthy because they can be photoshopped. But now voice can with lyrebird in this product called descript, which is an audio editor that can actually fill in the blanks. You can actually replace. Let's say we see a mistake in here and we want to correct it. Well, you type it and it'll replace the audio with your voice. And so it's pretty terrifying.

Well, it isn't. Or isn't. Because what's happened as these technologies, you know, I'm just putting this out as a talking point for a future podcast. But it's kind of like if you look at the biggest grossing tours today, the biggest tours today in music are actually people who are in their 70s, you know, and I grew up in the national audience age, so I grew up in the 50s, 60s, you know, music for me, like Elvis Presley. Everybody in the United States knew who Elvis Presley was, whether you liked him or not. The Beatles and there were all sorts of other artists who went along. And then around the end of the 70s, all the markets fragmented and you niched audiences. And I think one of the things is we have a niche audience, okay? So we have no incentive whatsoever to actually do anything fake on here. Because the whole draw to us is that we're real. This is the real Mike. This is the real Dan. So I'm wondering if maybe the niching and the microing combined, if they're trying to do that, they can certainly get us on network news, but nobody's watching network news anymore. So the whole point is that I think there's. I'm a great believer in Newton's law. You know, everybody talks about Moore's law, and I believe in Newton's law that for every action there's an opposite and equal reaction. So if they try to do something, there's a counteraction to it. I will modify Newton's law for the microchip age. And said for every action, there is a massive unpredictable reaction. It's not an opposite and equal reaction. It's a massive unpredictable reaction. So our prime minister, who's the son of a prime minister and he's from central casting. I mean, there's nothing there. But he's the of two famous people, and he has trust funds supporting him. And they packaged him. They packaged him. He's been really big identity politics for four years. Every identity politics, he's on the side of lecturing other people and apologizing for other people. But we're five weeks away from an election and three early photos of him in his 20s in blackface have appeared. And he said, well, it was makeup And I said, no, no, no, no. It's not makeup. It's not makeup. I said, black is not makeup. It might have been makeup when you did it, but it's not makeup now. I mean, it's just devastating. You know, all the opposition candidates do is just shut their mouth for the next five weeks. You know, don't say anything. You know, Gord said, for God's sakes, don't say anything. You know, but those are just fast images. But the way he set himself up, he's the one who lectures other people on these offenses. So it's hypocrisy, you know, and there's one thing that people can't stand is hypocrisy, you know, I mean, it's a killer.

Yep. That is fascinating. Bill Burr, the comedian calls it cancels society now.

Yeah.

And everything gets canceled out. So that's good. Well, let's move on to another one here.

Yeah. And we're at the one minute mark, so we're going to catch it on the other side.

We will. So this will be part one, and then we'll get into the other one. So, Dan, anything else you'd like to end with?

Let's just evaluate right now. What's the next one? We're going to increasing your courage. I think increasing your courage is. Is a great topic.

Yes, it is. That's what we're going to be talking.

About as a time control tool.

Thank you for that, Dan. In the meantime, we'll see you in the next episode of Capability Amplifier. Thanks for listening.

Thank you.

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