Big Leap EP #31 - How to Create Profitable Collaborations

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Hendricks. We're going to be talking about collaborations that changed our lives, for better or worse, and we're going to wind up with a checklist how to create of how to create great relationships. Collaborations that are profitable, they're fun, they allow you to express yourself fully and also prevent you from falling into dangerous pitfalls that we both live through. So what do you have?

When collaboration is great, it is the best thing just about you can do with the lights on. When it's not going well. Ew, man. Yucky stuff can happen there. And I want to spend a lot of time in this episode talking about how you can avoid the yucky stuff and get through to the good, sweet cream of having two or more human beings creatively engaged in a way that produces a useful product.

And as usual, Gay really gets into some big, deep nuggets. Some of his biggest regrets, biggest lessons, but more importantly, things that you can adopt right now. And if you're in a challenging relationship or collaboration, how to get out, but also how to prevent yourself from getting into the bad ones in the first place. All that and more in this episode of the Big Leap.

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks. Welcome to this episode of the Big Leap podcast. We have a whole consideration this time around on the subject of collaboration, and we've both had a lot of experience with that and have kind of come up with a tip sheet of things to do and not do to make your collaborations better. So. So, Mike, what's on your mind?

All right, well, we decided to call this Collaborations that Changed Our Lives, for better or worse, because we both have got the up stories, the down stories, as you say, the checklist. And I think we'll be talking from a personal and also a business perspective, because one of the great things about great collaborations is if you meet and match with the right person.

You can build an amazing business, create profound wealth, but also expand your consciousness dramatically. And whether that's a marriage, a friendship, but also.

Collaborations can reach a certain point where they don't make sense any longer. You may retire the relationship. You hit a point of resentment or overlap of talent, some sense of one partner's taking too much or whatever that challenge or that problem is. What I intend to do is tap into your genius as a therapist, Gay today, and ask you some questions about what's going on in addition to those checklists. So I know you've got some great stories. So do you want to tell a bad one first and then a good one, or where do you want to go?

Okay. From my large Stack of bad ones. Earlier in my career before I wised up.

My co author on my first book. Well, in 1973, I was sitting in the back of my daughter's classroom when she was in the first grade, and I often stopped by there. They like to have parents stop in and help them help the teacher and that kind of thing. And so I was a graduate student getting my PhD at Stanford at the time, and I was right there on the campus where her school was. So I would frequently stop in and. And I noticed the teacher ate up a tremendous amount of time just getting the children kind of organized and centered and, you know, in a learning place. After they'd come back from recess, there'd be, you know, crazy for a while. So I wrote this little book called the Centering Book, and it's still available to this day here. How many years later? Almost 50 years later. But it's in the field of education. Well, I developed a partnership with another writer named Russell Wills, who had some really interesting educational stuff from an anthropological perspective that I wanted to have in the book. And so I took him on as a co author and ended up giving him half the royalties.

Dumb move number 118. But he turned out to be a person without an ability to keep an agreement. He's passed on now, but he never improved in his life, and so he was always that way. But he just had a congenital inability to keep agreements. And it drove me nuts because I'm kind of a precise, keep my agreements kind of guy. It's a way I get a lot done and stay sane in my life. So it's a.

Very specific boundaries. It'll be like, like you, you've got an. You've got an on switch and an off switch, and it is like, boom. It's pretty specific. I know what it's like. And I observed you when you're like, nope, that isn't going to work for me. And that's. It's. It's admirable. Admirable. And a congenital inability to hold his agreements. I. That is a. A. I gotta put that on a poster. That's a great gay poster thing.

Keep it going. I'm with you so far. This is fun.

Okay, so I'll make a long, painful story short, but after many attempts to get his stuff into the book, finally I was practically, you know, because we had deadlines. He brought me this sheaf of papers that smelled like cigarette smoke and that had scribbling all over them and everything. And it was genius stuff. It just wasn't anything like what you could get into a book. And so basically what I did was I took a whole weekend of my life and just went into a binge of writing a chapter or two out of these notes. So if you look at that book, it's about 98% stuff that I ended up having to do myself, which was fine in the long run. We ended up maintaining a modicum of friendship. But I certainly never hired him for any other projects or let him get near any of my other projects. But that's an extreme situation where I would call that a Persona interlock, where. And it's also a case of bad picking, bad hiring. And I bet you will know this, Mike, how important hiring errors are to avoid, because one hiring error can.

Mushroom. And so it's, you know, and I've. I managed to hire an administrative person in 95, back in 1995 that embezzled from me, you know, and there's always that little tiny thing at the beginning where I noticed something and overrode it. So, anyway, collaboration is an art form. And I want to contrast that with. I've written now 10 books with Katie without a single cross word between us the entire time. And it's because we adhere to the actual principles we teach about talking honestly and sharing feelings. If somebody's got something they're angry about, we talk about it. And so it never gets to the point where anybody has to stalk out of the room or anything, because when stuff comes up, we just sit there and deal with it until we get it figured out. And so gradually, it's just like learning how to rollerblade or something like that. Once you get used to how to make the wobble stop and stay in touch with the way it moves, then you don't have to think about it very much anymore. In the beginning, you have to spend a lot of time processing, probably. So there are certain things we adhere to, like being honest and taking responsibility and fulfilling our agreements and things like that, that if you do them, tend not to have problems in collaboration. And also, you don't even have to study our kind of work to do it. I just had a great collaboration with Carol Klein, who wrote our book Conscious Luck With Me. And Carol is just a wonderful human being and a wonderful writer, and she and I got all the way through a book together without a single disagreement, because anytime stuff came up, we just talk to each other about it. So I think creative collaboration is one of the most juicy, wonderful things we've got going on our planet. And it's Usually those Persona interlocks or some kind of integrity issue that.

Gets people in trouble. I actually had to dissolve a partnership with a very famous new age figure simply out of integrity reasons would not tell the truth about certain things. And so it just kept creating. Yuck. Until finally we had to go when it cost us both some money and opportunity cost too at the same time. But I have a feeling too that if you work it right, you can learn as much from your failures as you can from your successes. In fact, more sometimes. Because like one of my business mentors, Jerry Jones, once said, the best deals I've ever done were the deals I didn't do. You know where he spotted something on the horizon that wasn't quite right. Boy, I'd probably be significantly richer and a few less lines on my forehead if I'd adhered to that at the time, 20 or 30 years ago.

Emotional Botox, my friend. Emotional Botox.

All right, that's what we need to do for only 29.95 at the big leap. There we go.

We're going to pray the lines out of you. All right, so I've got a. I'm going to frame this a little bit, which is one of my greatest and first collaborations. And this particular one.

Was both the best one I've ever done, but in between, almost the worst thing happened and it had to do with blurry lines. Okay, so that's a big takeaway and a lesson, right? So here's the setup for it.

So I was in my early 20s, and at the time I had gone through a hell of a grind and I was teaching myself how to write video games because that's all I really wanted to do when I grew up. And at the time I was writing code for a startup, a startup that was doing fine making money and stuff like that. But this was my escape plan. And I met a guy, his name is Dean hires, super sweet. He and his brother made five feature length science fiction movies by the time they graduated college. So they had this unique skill set and talent. Super creative sci fi geeks, total nerds. And they went to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, really close to where I grew up. And we were like instant blood brothers. The brother you choose, not the brother you're born to kind of a thing. And both he and his brother and I really started to work together and got along really, really well. So we decided we're going to start making movies together. And at the time I bought a bunch of gear that was very rare, but I Was teaching myself computer graphics and animation and all that kind of stuff. And the transition to go to video was happening even though everything then was still shot on film. And we decided that we wanted to make movies, but we didn't know how to raise money. So we figured we'd make money so we could make our movies and then control. And we didn't know anything about distribution. I mean, we didn't know what we didn't know at the time. We're just a bunch of dumb kids. But we ended up starting a company called Digital Cafe. And our idea was we'd have our agency and on the side we'd write scripts and make money and be able to make our movies.

And what was the core business of Digital Cafe?

So we were one of the very first digital marketing agencies in the world. The way it began is my wife at the time worked in something called a pre press shop. So they did like, they printed the film for four color work and separations, all that. And their clients were agencies. And I got to be friends with the owners and the people in there. And I met some of the agency people and they knew I had this funky advanced equipment. One of them was to grab pictures or frames from video. And at the time, agencies didn't have Photoshop experts. They didn't know how to manipulate images. And the one other thing I had is I was tremendously well networked with the largest software piracy.

Groups in the world at the time. I knew the biggest and best. And I was friends because I was a developer with a lot of companies that develop software. So I had an unlimited access to every tool that existed and I learned how to use it and we could utilize it. And I wasn't hamstrung. You know, we didn't have any money at the time. I couldn't have bought the software if I did. But what it meant is I could do stuff for agencies that they couldn't do themselves. That became the digital marketing agency. So we eventually wrote video games, we made movie promotions, we started producing some of the first websites in the world, that kind of thing. And again, the whole idea is we're going to make our science fiction movie. Well, if you fast forward, it took us 10 years to get there. And the way we finally made our feature film is we.

We sold the company. We had enough money and we raised a little more money. We eventually made it. And along the way we had our ups and our downs and we struggled. And we went through our broke times and went through our good times. It was incredibly hard that business cost me my first marriage, as I would like to say. But I want to pause because there is a happy ending. We sold the business, we made a movie. And Dean and I are still friends, but we don't do stuff together. And it's not because we don't love each other. But what happened was I lived with him. When I was going through my divorce, things got very mushy. But there were a couple times when.

In my youthful ignorance, I'm not going to put this on anyone else. There were what I would consider some blurry lines and betrayals in the relationship. And this is a lesson I've really taken to heart and have been careful ever since. But not careful enough. And here's what happened. Gay. Along the way, we had an opportunity and we met some young, other producer director types and we decided to collaborate together. Well, I had a studio. I was also into audio equipment in addition to video. So I knew how to put a bunch of stuff together. And, you know, I owned gear, I had a job, I made good money. And Dean at the time was an artist. And we had our little business. Well.

I created a sub collaboration with these guys and we started working on a TV show pilot. And what wound up happening is there was jealousy because the other guy was a director. Dean was a director. The other guy was a writer. Dean was a writer. They had different styles and they just. They weren't compatible.

But I. Persona interlock.

Yeah, I became kind of a linchpin. But also I. It was like there was a power struggle there, and I wanted to just keep the peace. You know, I came from, you know, like.

You know, I wasn't. I'd never considered myself an abused kid, but I got hit a lot. I was around a lot of noise, and I just hated physical confrontation and battles and psychological stuff. And I didn't know how to manage it. So I just did my best to be peaceful. But both of them talked about each other. And so it just became this tension that just grew and grew and grew.

And I know later on there was like. Dean was also a great designer. He was an artist. But I collaborated with different artists because I wanted to expand what we were capable of doing. But again, there was jealousy and conflict that came from that. And I wasn't good at managing or drawing the lines and negotiating the piece. And I tried to make everyone buddies and try to collaborate together, which compromised everything we did, you know. And so.

The net. Net was.

It left, you know, how some relationships just end and they're not. They don't end well and you know, when they're done, there's nothing to say after them. It's sort of like they make their. They reach their destination and then there's just a foul taste in everyone's mouth. And even if you evolve, you know, going back to that state, that relationship kind of brings you back to that icky place. So I think since then I'm going to just stop, get your comments and then I have an idea to talk about creating super healthy collaborations that also create ecosystems and community. But I want to pass it along to you for some commentary first.

Yeah, well, I think that those kind of mistakes especially I appreciate you mentioned blurred lines because really what that is is you came in with different agendas that some were named and some were not named. And you know, a lot of, especially, you know, in your 20s, you got a lot of undealt with stuff that you don't even know that you don't know, you know. And some of that stuff you don't even learn to be with until you're 30, 40, 50 years old sometimes. And so I think it's kind of almost unrealistic to expect collaboration to work really well in those early days. The people I've seen do it well are people like, you know, like Billie Eilish and her brother Phineas. They're a great example of a sibling pair that create well together. And that's pretty rare though, you know, that I've actually had to, I mean, not had to, but been consulted to intervene between brothers in a business and in one case, brothers and sisters in a business. And it's some ugly stuff that comes up in sibling relationships. And so we, you know, I think in your 20s it's hard going sometimes because you make mistakes that you would never make in your 40s and 50s. I look back on things I overlooked in my 20s that I would see a mile away today. And so I think we have to be very forgiving of the mistakes and regrets from our 20s and 30s back there before we begin to wise up a little bit.

Yeah, I think you're right. So here's another idea that I want to touch on and that is this whole idea of.

Knowing what you know now and when you create a collaboration, how do you set them up to succeed, create a safe tainer and then make them the better ones that has a life where it can have a lifespan and it's okay. But also.

If you were going to create the checklist, as you said earlier, what are some of the key checklist items that you feel make for great collaborations that also produce monumental products.

Well, I think number one on the checklist is you need to go into it with some basic structural agreements about simple things like who's going to do what, getting that very clear. But also things like in my relationship with Carol Klein, the co author that I did conscious luck with, we talked about the importance early on of, you know, being open and honest and not carrying away stuff from things. We talked about if somebody had a different point of view. And so she's, you know, maybe 60 years old and has been a meditator and a meditation teacher for a long time. So she's very open to learning, easygoing person. But I've been in collaborations where we didn't get that clear at the beginning, and it caused us real trouble.

Especially around this issue of whether people take responsibility or do they blame. You know, that's a big issue in many relationships. That many relationships wither and die because it's a blame game. It's a race to occupy the victim position. One person blames the other and then the other blames the other, and they go round and round. But you can only get out of that drama by first one person and hopefully both people eventually taking responsibility for what's come up. Because there's never any just one side to a story. There's always an interlock that brings up stuff in both people. And so there's never any clearly defined victim and villain in these kind of collaboration situations because each person brings baggage to the situation. And so I think upfront agreements are super, super important to have a venue, also to.

Have a third party that if you get stuck, that you can go to for counsel. So that's another thing that I recommend, having to find a person who doesn't have skin in the game. They like both of you, but can help you sort through things if you do get stuck. It turned out Carol and I never had to use that, but I think it's a good idea to have that as an upfront agreement, Frankly. I've seen those ego clashes been the death of most collaborations where one person digs in around their ego position and then the other person just can't get them to budge or digs in on their ego position. And I've seen businesses fall apart because of that and partnerships dissolve because of that. So, interestingly enough, if you look at the macro, Wall Street Journal did a big study of something like 2,000 mergers and acquisitions over the past 20 or 30 years, and they found that only about 17% of them worked. And I remember telling that statistic once to Yerka Rissopy, a friend of mine who's the CEO of GAIA. And when I said the 17%, he looked at me and he said, I'm surprised it's that high.

And so that's what I was going to say too.

Yeah. Because you often. And if you think about it on an individual level, you're trying to mesh two cultures. An individual has one culture that they're coming in with their whole way about being with agreements. For example, some people are very precise, as I tend to be. And some people get pissed off when I confront them and say, hey, I don't know if I told you this, I fired a stockbroker a while back because he was three minutes late for the meeting. And so I'm sure he's still telling his wife about what a hard ass I am. But I don't care, you know, because nobody over there is ever going to keep me waiting three minutes again. And because I canceled out on a couple of million dollars. And so.

That'S the nice thing about money. You can move it around from place to place. If you don't like who's handling it right.

Well, I've got a. I developed a checklist as you were describing this right now, gay. And I'm going to go through a couple of mine that I look at, like what makes them work, what makes them not work. And so yours, I think you basically said basic agreements. And I will go so far as to create a sub definition, which is swim lanes. It's like, who's responsible for what? And then the other one is having an agreement about taking responsibility. So you don't have someone who's a blamer or an ego dig in which that is the death. Ultimately, it's where someone's just unwilling to move. And then in order to do that, you've got to have a third party tiebreaker. Now, fortunately, I do have someone in my life. His name's Gene, who's been my guardian angel and protector forever and he's negotiated my deals. I learned a long time ago if you negotiate your own business deals, you're going to get screwed. Someone's going to figure out how to manipulate you.

On that note, my rule is I never do battle on someone else's battlefield. So, for example, you never ever want to get into it with a trial attorney. You're screwed. They know how to bleed you to death, and they will, just because they can't. Anyway, you were about to say something. I know you Were like, what?

Well, I know we want to wrap this up because this is a big subject and I want people to kind of have a chance to digest what we've talked about. But I want to do a whole other episode too on more specific about what comes up and how to fix those things when they come up. Because there's a whole art to that that I've learned a lot about. And so it's a bit of a tightrope walk, though. So prepare. Next time we get together or whenever we get around to talking about that subject again, we'll do collaboration part two.

Okay, great. And I just made a note how to fix any relationship or disagreement. So I only have two more points on here, which what's the cause of the pain? It's generally going to be a rules violation and it's surrounding integrity issues or perception. And it could be brand reputation, in other words, or an activation of a deep rooted shame response. I know in my own marriage there have been things like I have a tendency to be the loose, funny guy and I push to things to the limit and I'll say stuff that is just too far, but not quite right, and my wife hates that. So I just don't do it any longer. And that leads me to the last one, which I think is most important. And I've actually learned this from you because early on in our relationship.

You would go.

And you'd feel into that thing and you told me you don't do anything that doesn't make you feel good. And I have ended stuff long before it reached a threshold of insufferable pain. Because I was like, ugh, I hate how this makes me feel. And the thought of trying to figure it out and fix it makes me feel yucky. And the illusion that you've got to stick to something and do it because of pick the reason. Here you've got some.

Agreement that no one cares about except your illusion that if you don't do it, it's going to be bad. Right? It's a total myth. That is to me, the number one thing you've just got to listen to. Like.

This sucks. It's just like it's yucky and I don't feel good. And your.

Rule set for when it doesn't feel good, I just don't do it. And that takes an enormous amount of courage because it's like, well, what'll happen? It's like you live in the world of what if and what might happen. And if you live in the world of what if and what might. You are screwed. It is so not conscious and present. So there you go. That's my wrap up for this one. What do you got?

Well, it's great to use your body as the barometer of that because that's what it's designed for. Your body's been now we've been evolving these particular bodies now for 4 million years and they've got a lot of sensitivities and to listen to those things is really important. And just to refine that a little bit, not only does it feel good, but what I'm tuning into is this in my genius zone, you know, is this something that above all I would love to do and am I the only person on earth who could probably see do this? You know, those are the kind of things I want to do.

I agree. I agree. And so, well, we will officially wrap this up. But here's a couple quick notes for you if you've been listening to us, watching to it. If you want to connect with Gay and I, you can always text bl285-843-45316. Any comments, any questions? Also, head over to bigleappodcast.com and learn more about the big leap experience where you can work with Gay and I for a year. And finally, there's lots of past episodes. But the thing that matters most to us is comment. Leave some feedback, share this episode with other people you know and let us know what you think. We pay attention, listen to every comment that we get, especially if you leave it in the itunes comments along with a five star rating. So, Gay, as usual, always a pleasure to create these with you.

Thanks a lot, Mike. Great being with you again.