Are You Burned Out? How To Reclaim Your Passion

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 Capability Amplifier. This is Mike Koenigs. I'm here with my good friend Dan Sullivan. Today's topic is Not Being bothered. It's a big idea that Dan loves to talk about. And the way we're going to expand this is we're going to talk about burnout, the entrepreneur's dilemma, which is how do you retrieve your once your passion has been consumed by busyness, details and the grind. So Dan, what do you think of that?

That's really great. You know, one of the things, as you know, Mike, as I discourage entrepreneurs to think about retirement in the way that it's thought about in the non entrepreneurial world. Because, you know, in the non entrepreneurial world there are actually regulations which dictate this, there's organizational policies. But entrepreneurs have chosen to be entrepreneurs not to live in the non entrepreneurial world. But it's kind of funny. They believe that they should start off totally different than anyone else, but when it comes close to, you know, they've been in for 30 or 40 years, all of a sudden they start thinking like non entrepreneurs about retirement. And I think one is that buying into somebody else's idea takes your energy away, takes your inspiration away. But my feeling is that, and I'll just make a statement here, Mike, that I think that entrepreneurs run out of future. You know, you can remember when we were in our 20s and 30s and 40s, you know, probably by what ambitions you had when you were 20, you had far surpassed them by the time you were 40, but you hadn't really zeroed in again and taken your ambition to another level. Well, if that happens at 40, think of what happens at 50 or 60. So I'm just going to put that in as a possible context to talk about getting burned out. I think you're burned out because your life is just about your past. It's not about your future.

Well, I will also say that what I have run into multiple times, and this is something I've had conversations with other entrepreneurs, especially those who are at their reinvention state or their burnout phase or the level at which their business bothers them so much, it's time to escape. And what that amounts to is you get tired of team people, hiring, firing, all the legal issues, customer, those damn pesky customers.

My business would be great if it wasn't just for the customers.

Yeah. Yes. And you have a situation where it's that constant grind of Being shallow and wide from a lack of focus instead of being deep and narrow, which is really the experiential side, the human side of having a great business. And I think the illusion is, especially in the Internet age, in the marketing age, where we're led to believe. And if you're a marketer, you teach people about how easy it might be to go out and build a big business by using social media and all these complicated things. And pretty soon your complicated machine requires 25 people that you probably don't even like.

You know, when I first met you, I met you at the Fontainebleau in Miami beach, and it was at Eben Pagan's green room. And I remember meeting you at the swimming pool reception. I think it was on a Saturday night. And Joe Polish, who was with me, he says, you know, that's Mike Koenix. Mike Koenix is the Traffic Geyser guy. And he says, this is a big deal. You know, this is a really big deal. Can you talk about how you were looking at your career from just the topics we're talking about when you were at that point with Traffic Geyser?

I will. And there's a friend of mine who I consider both a friend and a mentor. His name is Bill Glaser. He ran the Glaser Kennedy, Dan Kennedy inner circle. And he says, hi, by the way. And he said, dan's one guy, met Bill.

We had dinner in Chicago.

Okay.

Just when the collaboration between Dan Kennedy and Glaser was taken. I remember him very distinctly.

Yeah, he's a super fascinating guy. And one recurring conversation he and I have had because he's seen me go through four iterations and four business sales. And every time he's like, in the third one, he's like, you know, Mike, every three or five years, you always come to me, you have the same problem, which is you've reached a point where you've outgrown your business and you've outgrown who you are inside the business. And I think this is the challenge and the specific one with Traffic Geyser was Traffic Geyser was Mike in a lot of ways. Even though I had a couple of partners, I became the creative force, the sales force, the relationship force, the public face, all that. And I had developed so many unique talents along the way that finding a replacement for me was damn near impossible, or it would have required, like, five people. And when I looked at the challenge of finding and hiring people to fill the right roles, which are skills I am not good at, I am Basically best as a soloist, right. A performer and a presenter and a creative. But what happened was I looked at how long and how much. At least that's the illusion I bought into, it would take to find those people, hire them and bring them in and fill those categories. To me, it was easier to start something all over again than to continue moving on for the what I thought looked like three to five years of hell and jail. And so as a entrepreneur, creating is easier than managing and growing a real business, right. That isn't personality driven. So the problem, I think in my youth is I looked at it as the business had outgrown me and my identity was wrapped up in the company instead of building a real business which didn't need me from the start, and becoming a specialist generalist. Right? And that's another key distinction, which is as a specialist, if you get wrapped up into being too much of a specialist. I heard a great phrase not long ago, which is specialization is for insects.

It's just pretty deep, you know, I mean, you know, from us, we have all sorts of profile testing and everything like Colby and Strength Finder and, you know, Myers Briggs Disc, there's a lot of them and they each have their own use. But you begin to realize that someone like you, it isn't a high percentage of humans in the population to do that. And one of the things you have to do, you really have to own that. You know, one of the things I find that really wears out, we're going back to the wear out and burnout factor, is that you can't spend your whole life being special and then complain about what comes with being special. I mean, it's almost like movie stars that complain about their fans. And I says, well, you can't have it both ways. You can't spend your whole life being such a famous person that you have masks, fans and then complain about the fans. I said it's part of the same deal. You got to accept both parts of the deal. And I think with entrepreneurs and you recognize at an early age, and we've had these discussions before about what stage one looked like here on stage six now, but stage one, you're just scrambling for cash flow. You're just scrambling. You do not want to go into the conventional world. You do not want to make your living in a conventional way. Well, there's enormous rewards to that, but there's also some prices. And you can't on the one hand want to be totally special in one part of your life and then be completely normal in another. Part of your life. I haven't seen it work.

You're right. And I will add another distinction as you're describing that. So just like a relationship, when someone is married and, and gets divorced and they find the next special person, they're left behind with the same problems and the same person they had from the end of that relationship, you just enter in it and it's going to be amplified and magnified even more, which is if you can't solve the problem you're having in the relationship you have, you're most likely going to be attract the same person in the same level you're at. So just like a business, here's again this typical trap I see with visionary creative entrepreneurs. And I'm gonna speak for myself, which is I reached a point where I was creating so much stuff, my engine, my people couldn't keep up with marketing and supporting. What that new thing was and what a real business is, is something that builds value, that remains valuable for the long haul. So the organization becomes valuable. The next thing that I experienced was, okay, so I'd built this team of specialists who catered themselves to me instead of the organization. In other words, how do I make Mike happy instead of how do I serve the customer and build true value? And as a fast moving creative entrepreneur, I really took for granted this amazing, specialized group of people who were there and they did stick it out through thick and thin, despite the noise, despite the challenges. Right. And so when you decide, okay, I'm going to start the next thing, or you go through the site of maybe selling that business instead of building something that might be worth a hundred million or a billion dollars, you know, and again, I can speak to that where I had multiple smallish exits. If I would have stuck it out and built a more solid business, my exit would have been worth 10 or 100x potentially. But what happened instead is, okay, so I have this reset and I restart and I'm like, oh my God, I forgot how hard it is to start from scratch. Just like if you start with a brand relationship, you're like, oh my God, you mean I have to have that conversation all over again?

Like dating?

Yes.

Yeah, you sell yourself. It was great dating in the first place, but it wasn't in the first place. We tell ourselves stories about how great the past was. It was crap, you know.

Right, right in us, I'm sure.

But we had more energy and there was more time ahead of us. But I want to see if this observation that I have about you is true, that the great Fortunate thing that happened to you, and I can say not quite to the same extent that I observed in you, was that you had cancer.

Yes. That was a massive reset.

I think you might not be here now if you hadn't had cancer.

Yeah, I think I would have found another way to die or something else would have killed me or I would have maybe killed myself. I will say this in all candor. I don't have the courage or guts to commit suicide. And at the time, I would have let that take me away if it weren't for the fact that I had my wife and my young son. But I had reached a point where I had hit such a level of burnout and fear and continual anxiety, where the body pains I experienced day over day before I was diagnosed were so great. I remember laying in bed gasping for air. I literally could not fill up my lungs. I'd be like, I was shallow breathing all the time because I felt like I was stuck inside a steel box that had 2 inch walls. And, you know, I built an internal prison that was representative of the illusion I was living in which I was stuck. And the truth was I didn't have the courage or the ability or the capabilities to break out of this. And I became such a jerk. And again, not consciously, but that is certainly a byproduct.

Okay, I've got a second part to this. So one of our coaches, Lee Brower, who's been like a 20 year coach and a great guy, I mean, I have to tell you, I've said to one of his groups because I'm invited in by the other coaches, and I said, I just want to tell everybody here now. I said, you know, a room like this, some people believe in God and other people don't believe in God. And maybe you're atheistic or you're agnostic, but I want to tell you, if there is a God that sounds like Lee, Lee kind of sounds like God. You know, you have the sense that this is what God sounds, but he has a great line. And I've thought about this line over and over again. And he said, everybody in the world is competing to be interesting, but hardly anybody in the world is competing to be interested. And the flip I see from you, and that's why don't think burnout or anything is in your future, that you have flipped completely from being more and more interesting. Lifetime 1, lifetime 2, lifetime 3, lifetime 4. But in lifetime 6, it's all based on you being interested. And my feeling is that that's nourishing my feeling is that that actually replenishes you. And the reason is that you're putting your full value of all your lifetime capabilities and skills and wisdom. But you're putting that at the service of somebody else's ten times career, hundred times career. And they can't do it by themselves. And you're actually the bridge for them. You're actually allowing yourself to be the bridge and in which they can take what's inside of them and actually magnify it to the world in the best possible way. What do you think of that as an observation? I think competing to be interesting is a guaranteed burnout activity.

I can't tell you how timely this is. I actually have the chills right now. And I will tell you why. Which it was last night and this morning my wife Vivian and I were having a conversation and just to create closure for what you're saying, I realized that, yes, that is true. And I realized that I would rather support others than grow another platform and go through all that effort. It's like I don't need to be the guy on stage anymore. And I think that's just a natural evolution that hopefully men in particular go through women as well as we move through our prince to our knight, to our king to our emperor phases when elevating others and amplifying others becomes more important than ourselves. And this is a breakthrough. So I've been working on this concept you and I have talked about which is the super being accelerator. And the big idea behind this, just to recap is we've gone from a doing economy to a knowing economy where information's free doing is being replaced by automation. And the stuff that matters most is creativity, co creativity like we're doing right now, innovation, leadership and experiences also. We'll call it community. And those are things that aren't going to be replaced by all this stuff as we move towards the singularity. Right. Which we all feel, especially those of us who self identify as being aliens. Right.

Yeah.

And to even accelerate that more everything's moving towards a gig business. A gig economy. You move from gig to gig, not from business to business or job to job any longer. Things are so short lived. And if you're not uniquely helping yourself become a constant reinventor, obsolescence is in your future but faster than ever before unless you focus on those five key things.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, it's really interesting while since I haven't seen you. I turned 75 on May 19th.

Hallelujah.

Yeah. And it's very interesting. I was in London when it happened and you know, I said, you know, I'm just going to recalculate because I have this thing of the 25 year framework. You think of your future in 25 years. You got 100 quarters and all you have to think about is the 25 year measurements and the next quarter. So you don't think about one year plans, two years, five year plans. You just have a 25 year framework. And you got to start with, you get 100 quarters. And if you just do some crucial things during the next quarter, they become like compound interest. So the next quarter, not quarter number two becomes better and all you have to worry about is the 90 days ahead of you within the 25 year framework. So I did this, I had one that I did at 70 because it was the end of one 25 year period and I said those take me to 95. But I said, oh, this is neat. You know, I completed three quarters of a century and I've got a whole next quarter. And it's very, very interesting. The goal I came up with Mike, because we're doing a complete survey of revenues, ebitda. You know, EBITDA is actually the number one profit measurement in business. And then personal income that comes out of that year's activity and then number of team members, number of free days you take and how many family members you have. So there's three hard statistics and then there's more. What's your life look like actually in terms of support and you know, outside life and you know, you have team members but just going after the top three of revenue, EBITDA and personal income. So we're taking about four months and we have about 2,600 right now active in the program, 2600 businesses. And if I get like 2,300 of them, it's scientifically valid and I'm just going to take the average. There's some outliers that we're going to throw out because they have 9,000 employees and it's just going to skew the numbers and I don't want to do that. And I'm going to multiply by 1,000. So when I'm 100, those three measurements are 1,000 times what they are in 75. And my goal is that the network, that network of Strategic Coach clients would rank in the top 25 of GDPs among countries in the world. I tell you, I get so much juice out of this. And I've told the clients about and they said what a great goal. We would be part of Something that we would actually be like a country, just the Strategic Coach Network. But there's no goals in there about me. There's no goals about Strategic Coach. There's nothing I said, you know, I got to figure if we pull that off, everything for the coach is going to be really good. And I got to figure everything for me. You know, I'll just check the sofas after they stand up. I'll find my money and you know, in loose change. But it's kind of interesting that I'm handled now. 75 years. Doesn't have to be about Dan anymore. I just want to create this big, huge impact for our clients out in the world. And I'm completely, totally serene with that. I'm just totally serene with that.

Well, here's the big bridge. And I'm glad this worked out the way it did because when you asked me that question, you know, what's the difference? The distinction between being interesting, which is absolutely tiresome and prone to creating it? It requires being really a fool, a comedian almost. Right. And an entertainer constantly non stop. It's just like this constant ball of blush versus creating a movement. And what you just described was a movement. And that was my big aha last night and this morning as I was talking to Vivian was instead of creating a business, you've got to create a movement. And what is more attractive right now in our shortest attention span world, but for people to feel like they're part of a community, you know, why is Apple Apple? Why is Amazon Amazon? Why are the biggest brands truly valuable? It's when someone identifies with a movement or a sense they're part of something bigger than themselves. And it really explains the popularity and longevity of religion. And that, I think is the application of a mature visionary entrepreneur who's gone through the grind and the evolution and finally making a brand not about them, but about a movement instead.

Yeah, and I think you don't get burned out from that. I think it just brings the best of who you are out and probably more productively and profitably than when it was about yourself, unquestionably.

So I want to bring this back to one of the other big ideas, the original topic idea we had, which is not being bothered and the thought that 90% of any problem is that it bothers us. One of the biggest ones we just went through was the dilemma of burnout. But from your vantage point, what is the big idea behind not being bothered?

Well, everything in the program starts with my own personal experience. And last October, something was really bothering me. One day. And the thought came to be, well, if it didn't bother me, what would I be doing right now? And immediately my mind came up with an action plan of how I could solve this in about 15 minutes. And I said, wow. And then I solved it in 15 minutes. And I went back to the problem. I says, does it still bother you? I said, no, it's solved. So I started looking at this and I started experimenting that over the next couple of days, big bother, little bother, you know, problem. What I saw is a problem. But the moment I asked myself the question, if I wasn't bothered, what would I be doing? Immediately my mind went into the action plan. And one of them was a recurring problem that had come up, literally probably over the last couple of years. And every month or so I'd be bothered by this problem. And I felt paralyzed by it. But the moment I asked myself the question, if I wasn't bothered by it, what would I be doing? And immediately I went right through that. So here I was being bothered one quarter, another quarter, a year, two years. And I was always bothered by the problem. I wasn't solving the problem. But the moment I said, if I wasn't bothered, what would I be doing? So I tried it out. Anything I try out that works on me, I see if it works out on other people, you know, and test on check writers. Test on check writers. So I took it out, and everybody just said, wow. And I just had them identify three problems that really bothered them on a sheet of paper. Then there's a column. If it didn't bother you, what would you be doing? And everybody had two or three steps and say, better yet, who would do it instead of you? They had the steps and they were through it. And they went through three problems in about 10 minutes. And then they talked about it. And then they came back and I said, how'd you feel about that? They said, that was amazing. I said, okay, do three more. And they knocked off, you know, in five minutes. And I said, the problem is just the bother. And there's no getting to the bottom of the bother. There's just to ask yourself, if you weren't bothered, what would you be doing? And so that was just a breakthrough, you know, that I feel really, really burned out. Boy, boy, this really burns me out. Well, if it didn't bother you in this way, what would you be doing? Oh, I'd change professions. I'd, you know, I close down what I'm doing. I said, well, good, go do that and see if you're still bothered by that.

I've got an interesting way to connect these two. So yesterday, one of the people I interviewed for the podcast is a woman named Sherry Salata, who is Oprah's executive producer for 25 years. She just wrote a book called the Beautiful No. And what she and I talked about is the fact that in her book, she revealed all kinds of inner just darkness that she had been carrying around. And her hook is 56 years old, 100 pounds overweight, no man in sight. I've had a dream career, but I didn't take care of me. And when she decided to leave Oprah, here she is, this alone person who had done it all but hadn't taken care of her. She also has a podcast. And one of the things that she's learned in her podcast, it's been great therapy, because the stuff that bothers her, when she talks about it openly and vulnerably and authentically, it goes away. It's just getting it off her chest. And some of the process of the bother process that you described is really just identifying it, feeling it, and realizing it's just a feeling. And your emotions don't drive anything except the bother. So I wanted to ask you this final question in this episode, which is, what did you find when you had all these entrepreneurs, as you say, you've tested this out on check writers. What do you think is the number one bother and the number one solution that you noticed over and over again from a pattern perspective? Is there something that showed up, or do you have a story that pops into your head?

Yeah, I think the number one, just as it relates to them as business people, is that somewhere early in their career, they habituated themselves to do all sorts of activities that they really didn't like doing because that's what they had to do as well. You know, when you're an entrepreneur, you know, the entrepreneurs, they're the ones that they do what they hate doing, and they've locked this in as a mindset, and it just takes all the joy out of life. It creates strains between them and their personal life. It destroys their health, and it actually makes them very unattractive in the marketplace. So nobody's really attracted to working with them because they look like they're suffering. And, you know, if you have your preference, if someone looks like they're enjoying what they're doing, someone looks like they're suffering. I have a natural inclination to go with the. The one who's enjoying themselves.

We're all afraid of blood.

I don't like Suffering. I'm not attracted to suffering, actually, but they're locked in and boy, this can really wear you out. And the other thing is, you know, we have the experience that one of two things happens to people's marriages when they come into strategic coach. They get incredibly stronger or they end. And people say, well, gee. He says, I don't know if I want to face that. And I say, well, you will face it. I said, you will face it. At what point in your life would you like to know that something isn't working? I said, now, would you like to find out that it's not working five years from now, ten years from now? And I said, I've done both. I've done long suffering, I've done short suffering. And I've come to the conclusion that short suffering is a lot better.

So true. My wife Vivian, again, I'm going to bring this back to her. She's just embarked on getting some personal coaching. She invested a lot of money in this. I mean, a substantial amount. And I had a twinge all at once. I noticed this a week ago, which is, oh my God, what happens if. Which is. As I started seeing her make some rapid decisions and transformations, I felt an emotional threat. And I know for her, when I started going through my latest iteration of I've got to stop doing what I'm doing, she experienced the same thing. And a true supportive spouse.

How much house, how complaining is, they're actually going to be here.

I recognized that twins and I decided to make that our best friend. And we've talked about it, which, and I've talked to other coach members and I've even had this happen with my own people who've gone through my super being process, who ended relationships that they were suffering in for years and years and years, subsidizing their spouse, tolerating and coping. And again, to bring this back to watching, you know, a suffering entrepreneur, if you see someone who's joyful and tap dancing to work every day versus no one wants to pick up a half dead cat with rabies and maggots, okay? It's not attractive. You don't cuddle with a dog that has half its hair unless it's something you've had for a long time, you don't pick it up off the street. It's like, oh, let me cuddle this Rabie infested swimming at the moment doggy.

Yeah.

And so don't be a rabie dog.

Yeah. But this whole thing that not coming to grips with problems can be a lifetime habit So, I mean, I don't know where the things that bother me come from, you know, And I think a lot of. Probably a connection of five or six things that every once in a while.

I get triggered by unresolved traumas. Everyone needs a therapist.

Yeah. But the whole point, I know if I just say if this didn't bother me, I noticed that my problem solving part of my brain, which all entrepreneurs really have in superior talent, that they can hear somebody else's bother and they can create an action plan for them.

And.

And I said, well, you can do it to yourself, too. You can do it to yourself. So anyway, it's really great. And I think this thing about burnout, this is something that's really bothering a lot of people, but they're not asking themselves the question, mike, if this didn't bother me, what would I be doing? Because they're afraid of the answer. So they're more comfortable with the bother than they are with a possible alternative.

And as the old saying goes, and the truth shall set you free. Right. So I think we've reached the end of this episode, and this was fun. A lot of fun.

Yeah, this was great.

So on behalf of myself and Dan, thank you so much for listening. Dan, you have anything to say?

I love the conversation, Mike.

Fantastic. Well, thanks again for listening, and we will definitely be with you in the next episode. If you haven't listened to past episodes, check those out too. Will you head over to itunes right now to rate the Capability Amplifier show? Every rating and review helps spread the message and create more empowered entrepreneurs like you. And if you've already done that, please share this episode with a friend who you know can benefit from Capability Amplifier. And if you have any questions or suggestions, head over to capabilityamplifier.com there you can leave us an audio message, and Dan and I listen to every single one of them. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you soon.