Dan Sullivan's High-Performance Routine for Entrepreneurs | Capability Amplifier (103)

Everyone wants to know, what's a day in the Life of Dan Sullivan like? And instead we do A Week in the Life of Dan in this episode, and we dive into how Dan sleeps, some of his sleep tools, some of the technology gadgets he has, and also how he plans creatively and thinks creatively and coordinates with his team. Dan, what are some of the cool things that we're going to be talking about that really lit you up?

Yeah. Well, first of all, what came as a surprise to Mike and I realize that it's worth talking about is just how much sleep I get. I get a ton of sleep, probably more than a lot of people. And the other thing is that I'm a fiendish exerciser. And what I've discovered is that the law of gravity, each year I'm pushing 80. Pretty soon, you know, in a couple of years, I'll be 80. And I found that every year, gravity ups the ante. You know, it says, okay, I'll raise you. And. And I have got. I've got to increase the intensity and the, you know, the duration of my exercise. So I've accepted the. I've accepted the gravity challenge and a couple neat technologies to help health. We're going to talk about that and just kind of, you know.

That I'm very, very good at certain things and not good at a lot of things. So there's all sorts of teamwork roles that I have that keep me being who I am at my best and kind of limits or prevents me from operating at my worst. Yeah.

And you'll also learn about something I've never heard Dan talk about before. It's the constraints in how he writes books. So you're going to learn all that more in this episode of Capability Amplifier.

Okay. This is an episode that I've wanted to do for a long time with Dan. It's A Week in the Life of Dan Sullivan. A lot of people ask me all the time, what's a Day in the Life of Dan Sullivan like? And when Dan and I were talking, you said, hey, look, it's going to be a lot easier to spread it over a week. And it's something I'm always interested in, too. So we're going to cover a lot of topics. I reached out to a lot of people and I said, hey, I'm going to be doing this interview today. What do you want to know about Dan and A Day in the Life of Dan? So, Dan, why don't we take go through typical week, and why not start either on a Saturday Or a Sunday, because you're thinking about the week is probably just important. As important as what happens inside of a week as well.

Yeah. Well, first of all, I will start on Saturday and. Thanks, Mike. I've not been asked this question before, so.

Oh, good.

It's being created as I'm telling it.

And but first of all, Saturday is always my free day. You know, if I'm taking just one free day during a week and I do in some weeks take more than one free. But Saturday for some reason is. I never ever work on a Saturday. And you know, and I, you know, I do shopping runs for Babs and, and you know, and I read, you know, I read the Wall Street Journal. The Saturday edition of Wall Street Journal. One of the sections, the review section is the finest piece of newspaper journalism in the world. It's just so far above any other news, really. Yeah. And so it's usually, it's like a two hour read. They have so many interesting articles and it's completely, you know, it's just really interesting things that you wouldn't know about. So that's that. So Saturday, Sunday, I generally will do preparation for.

For workshops. I might do some new tools for an upcoming workshop or I might do the outlines that I use for my small books and I do that. And I have two or three hours on Sunday afternoon when I'm uninterrupted. And on a lot of the Sundays at 11 o' clock, I do a podcast with Dean Jackson, you know, and that goes in the schedule like a year ahead. Like we just look at all the Sundays and we put them in the schedule. And I love, you know, it's a very free form.

Like ours, you know.

Yeah, yeah, no, a bunch of ideas.

Dean is like the marketing Buddha, you know, he kind of floats above the normal affairs of human beings, you know, and gazes down and pronounces brilliant insights. Anyway, so I'm going to stop you.

Just for a second, ask a couple clarifying questions, which is.

When you're taking some notes on, let's say you came up with a few ideas that you know are going to be useful for a thinking exercise. A book.

Where are you storing that stuff? Do you type it? Do you keep it in a computer? What software are you using? Do you have a notepad? How are you organizing these ideas to ensure that you don't lose anything?

I have some desktop, desktop tools that I've created for myself and I've got, you know, one of them that's just Idea Developer and it's new Tool developer or the, you know, and we may be on the tool and now it could become a book title. And so that's where, So I have a place where any ideas about things that are going to become.

You know, an actual workshop tool or it's going to become, you know, the title of a upcoming book and they, they all go, go into, to the same place. I just have one place for all my ideas and I, you know, I consulted a lot, you know.

Okay, yeah, so, and, and when you say it's a, a tool, again, I don't want to get too, too granular, but I know people are thinking the same thing I am.

Tool is actually a thinking exercise. So we call, you know, the whole strategic coach program consists of questions about some aspect of entrepreneurial life. And, and it's put into a, you know, it's, it's a single page diagram and it's got boxes and it has questions and, you know, and then it's got. For the last year, it's really been great because we have a column that when you come to a decision about something, there's a column called who, not how now, who do you talk to on your team? Or who's the who that's actually going to follow through on the decision you've just made or the project that you've just completed that's there. And then we always have a section called.

Insights, Decisions and Actions that come from going through a thinking process which have been.

Extraordinarily useful during the last two years because Zoom, all of our workshops have been Zoom. And in Zoom, you have a really terrific capability to have great breakout sessions with other people. So we always get people primed to think about their thinking and then when they go into the breakout session, they actually talk about what they got from the exercise and insights and breakthroughs they have. So they're, you know, there's not four people sitting in silence for a couple of minutes before some. What, what are we doing? What are we supposed to talk about? You know, they're already rehearsed to start off a really great conversation.

Okay, okay, well, let's, let's move on from, from here. So you basically may record an episode with the Buddha with Dean. And what's the rest of the weekend look like in terms of your.

The process or, you know, your ritual?

I would say that most. I'm putting in about three or four hours. If I, if I'm working on a Sunday. I don't work every Sunday, but most Sundays I do. And I like getting the weekdays Actually started on Sunday. And. And the other thing is that we always try to get nine hours sleep on Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night. And not always. If we have the intention of getting nine, we get at least eight. So, you know, so anyway, how about.

Maybe some sleeping tools?

Nighttime preparation. Do you have any particular rituals that you go through? Any electronic gadgetry, your mattress even?

There's one that's very valuable, and it's certainly been valuable during the lockdown, the great lockdown, I call it. I don't mention the virus or anything.

The least problematic thing was actually the disease. The most problematic thing were the lockdown rules. I think that will be remembered as the thing that people dislike most about it. But anyway.

So a lot of screen time. I've done an awful lot of screen time and most of my creativity is done on the computer. So I used to writing a lot, handwriting, and I used to draw a lot. But generally speaking, now.

I'm doing screen work. And it has an impact on you. I mean, if you're that close. These are very powerful electronic devices that we're dealing and we're in an electronic field.

And it can keep you jangled when you go to bed. So from Switzerland, there's a really neat device. And I'm just going to give you the. It's four, four letters. It's imrs, im, R S. And you just go to Google and they have pages of what they do, but they have a device that unhooks you. It kind of, what can I say, a D. Screen energy. It gets rid of all the screen energy and it's about 20 minutes. And it's a machine. You time it and there's a little. It's like a little buzz. You get a buzz. You just hold something in your hands and.

You feel kind of like you're going into a meditative, meditative.

Zone, you know. And I've meditated for 50 years, so I'm familiar with meditation. And then you won't be kept awake by your screen time. So I do that every night because during the week, like today, I'll probably spend six hours, seven hours on the screen with the different things that I do. So I'm early.

A lot of it is just zoom, and I love zoom. You know, we can get into that more. But then.

I'm going to tell you four activities, which are really dance activities. And these could, you know, these could pop up on any day. Okay, so.

One of the things is that I do a lot of podcasts, and so the one that we're doing today would be my, basically my third set of podcasts this week. And so I did two with one person and I two with another person. And we'll probably do two or three. And that's a regular part of my week. The other thing is I write a lot of books or luck. And I, I'm going to rephrase it, Mike. I've said there's a lot of books that are written that have my name as the author on it.

So starting when I was.

75, I'm just pushing 78 right now. Was that 75? No, no, I think it's longer than that. There was a decision. I'm trying to think when it was. I think it was when I was 70. Yeah.

2014, I made a decision that I was going to write 100 books in 100 quarters. And they were going to be small books. They were going to be little books, less than 60 pages of content, and they would be illustrated. We have cartoons.

And it would be a concept from the program that I wanted to fill out a little bit more and provide, provide technical support for it and also audio support and video support. And I give a lot more examples to it.

And so I started this process and it was hard at the beginning because I thought I was going to write the books. And I immediately put myself in trouble that I make this promise. I made the trouble. I made. I, I, I, I made the commitment out loud to 13 different workshops filled with strategic coach clients and probably 25 of my team members. You know, every quarter.

From 8, you know, from age 70 to age 95, I'm going to write a new book.

And, and right into the deep end of the pool with barely the ability to float. And so anyway, but I'm very quick, very quick at adjusting in order to make a bad decision into a good decision. And I started accumulating all my team members who could help me out with it. And within a very short period of time, we had nine different team members who did part of it. But with the big breakthrough was all I had to do is go to break out the concept into what the chapters would be. Then an outline for every chapter. And then Shannon Waller, who's a really amazing.

Interviewer. She's got great interviewing skill. She's been AT coach for 30 years. She knows all the concepts, and so she interviews me. Then a writing team of a writer and editor take the outline. They know it's going to be four pages in the book. We predetermined the size of the book that's an old trick from copywriting, advertising. Copywriting is the best training for writing in the world. And the reason is you write to time or you write to space. You write to 30 seconds or to 60 seconds or 6 inches of copy. And you have to get a whole story over in six inches. So it's a trick that I always predetermined the actual size of a book before I write any, you know, before I write anything. So every chapter is going to have four written pages. There's going to be two pages of cartoons, there's going to be an introduction, there will be eight chapters, and there will be a conclusion in every book. So the writer and the editor know that. And so they start taking the transcript from the outline. And then they had, you know, they fill in the headlines, the headlines, subheads, and all the copy. And it's gotten so good that the last five books, I haven't changed to work. You know, it's come back and it's. I said totally. They totally got it. And I wouldn't change a word in what they do. And that. It's a great thing. So on average, I can produce a new book in 35 hours of my time every quarter.

That's great. So I'm going to summarize what I've heard so far and correct me if I'm wrong. And then we'll move on into the next chunk, which is more of the breakdown of the day. And also I think people want to know how you're functionally moving around all the chess pieces, the people, and producing the volume. And I'll frame this a little bit. So the weekend, the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, let's call it. The Saturday is going to be rest day, run around, do some errands, Wall Street Journal thinking time, et cetera.

And then we had a social event during the week. It would be dinner on Saturday.

Okay, okay. And then on Sunday.

Might be workday or it's playtime. And that'll be thinking. And that could be thinking about tools.

Systems, et cetera. And along the way, the big thing is the focus on sleep, eight to nine hours. And I did find this IMRS device from Switzerland. Just curious, how much are these devices? Because it's doing pemf. They've got a variety of different models. Do you have the one with the mat and the goggles and all that stuff?

We have the mat and you have the central machine. And it'll either just attach the mat and the mat kind of vibrates, or you can take it on the road with Just the central machine. And that's. It's kind of, you know, it's just a cylinder that you hold on to. It goes through your body. But it.

Yeah, it's pemf. I noticed that. That's really interesting. And what's the investment for this thing? And I'll put the link in, show notes, but it's IMRS2000.com is the website.

I have no comprehension. That's all right.

I did the research in the background.

I know we had enough money in the account to.

Santa Claus just blessed, Left down some money leaves and took care of that.

And I've been using this for probably seven or eight years. The other thing is that I exercise every morning and I'm, I'm very, very good at it. I mean, I get. But here's the thing. If I don't get out of bed and exercise, I'm not going to exercise during the rest of the day. Yeah.

And what time is that? I'm curious what time. And I've watched you work out, but I'd like you to go through your workout and let's also talk a little bit about food because you've got food and diet.

I'm an early riser. Grew up on a farm, was an older boy, was in the army, was in Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts athletics. And I'm just a very early riser. And generally speaking, I'm up between 4 and 4:30, you know, and you know, I mean, if I do a late night, I won't do that. I'll, you know, I'll get my eight hours, you know, from when I go to bed. And, and so, you know, and I am chemically enhanced at nighttime, you know. You know, and Sonata, I especially like Sonata, the Time release Sonata, because it lasts.

No. Okay. I'm not familiar with that. Is that a sleeping pill?

Yeah, yeah, it's a prescription. I mean, it has to be prescribed by a doctor. And one of the benefits of living in two countries is that you can get, you can double up your prescription.

Okay. Papa Bear's got a drug bag.

Oh, the Prime Minister of Canada just heard this.

You know, and he's going to find out that I really have a preference for truckers over prime ministers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the next episode. Next episode.

So anyway, yeah. And so every morning, you know, a minimum of a half hour to a maximum of an hour. And you know, and I'm, I'm pretty vigorous about it. And I wear a elevation training mask which restricts. This is another product. It's just called elevation training mask. About 80 bucks. You put it over your mouth and nose, wraps around your head, and it has a series of gauges which, you know, they progressively, they progressively restrict your airflow. And I've been doing it for about six or seven years. And people say, well, what's it feel like to breathe? And here I said, I'll just clean it out. You know, I cleaned it out and I said, I'll bring you a freshly cleaned. And they put it on and they couldn't breathe. They couldn't breathe. They couldn't do it. And I said, well, this is where I am now. And I brought another one because I have backup once and I brought another one and it's got the full holes that are there. They're completely open. And I put it on. And they said.

Boy, this makes me nervous. And I said, well, this is, you know, this is the way you start. And.

So you start. Usually most people can't have it on for more than five minutes when they start because they just feel. It's almost like they're being waterboard or something, you know?

Yes. You know, and it looks creepy, I'll add. It's definitely creepy looking. But you know what, it works.

But you know, during a period where everybody's wearing a mask.

It'S just a.

Style statement, you know, you tied that whole thing together. Well done, well done.

Yeah, but what it does is it forces your lungs to become really strong because you really have to pull the air in. And my Cardio, you know, VO2 Max is one of the ways it's standard when they're testing for cardio health, you know, and, you know, I'm 78, but probably my average performance, you know, come in, I'd be a 40 or 45 year old. You know, my lungs are, you know, at that level. And cardio is probably really vigorous. Cardio is probably the one thing that is most responsive for fitness, but it's also the thing most responsive for not having cognitive decline. Because that breathing thing and getting breath and getting blood to your brain, getting oxygen and blood to your brain is the key thing to prevent cardio decline. And also it's one of the main contributors to heart health because your heart really, really has to work. Yep. So, so I wear that. And the other thing is I wear, while I'm doing all my other exercises, a 20 pound weight vest. Okay. It's just a weight vest. So right off the bat, I'm, you know, if I'm doing a half hour an hour, I'm you know, I'm lifting and I. I do stair work and I do, you know, I do.

Elliptical. I do sprints on the elliptical. I do weightlifting. I do stretching. But all that time I've got my mask on. So the mask automatically will raise your heartbeat 20 points a minute. You know, so if you're. If you're just doing exercise and you're 100 point, you do the same exercise with mask, you're at 120. And so I, you know, I get up and I said, do I feel really vigorous today? If I do, I do it really hard if I get up and I say, you know, I just like to warm up and get things I just do. So I always judge it when I get up in the morning, what I feel like. And I don't push myself to do vigorous exercise when I'm not feeling it. But if I do that, then there are days when I get up and I say.

I really want to push myself this morning. So I do. But I have days when I go for an hour, and my average heart rate for the hour is 152, the average heart rate.

And, you know, I'm in good shape. And, you know, I'm in, you know, I'm, you know, and it's all for the work, Mike. I don't do this for, you know, athletic competitions. You know, I'm not entering into bodybuilding contests and.

Everything. And that. It's just that I have a really demanding and really challenging work schedule, and I just want to be energetically capable of doing that and not drop off. I just don't want to drop off at all, you know, and so do that. So the, the I've described, you know, and then.

The way my schedule works, I. We work in quarters, in strategic coach. Okay. So every quarter, I have two brand new workshops to create one for the second level of coach, which is the 10 times ambition program, in which I have about four or five hundred clients somewhere in between. And then I have the Free Zone. The Free Zone, which is just about collaboration, you know, entrepreneurs collaborating with other entrepreneurs. And, you know, both of them, because you're in both of those programs. Yes, and there are some in Coach, the exercises, there's Oldies But Goodies, There's. There's like the Moving Future is one that we do every single workshop. You know, the. They. It's like Paul McCartney. I mean, he can sing all the new songs he wants, but if he doesn't sing yesterday, gotta have the oldies.

Yep.

It's not gonna be. It's not gonna Be a. It's not gonna be a happy concert. So I do that. But generally I speak for each workshop. I'll do three new things and some of them are, you know, one time wonders and sometimes some of them you hit one like the certainty uncertainty one. And this is not only, you know, probably a permanent tool, but it may be the most important tool that we've ever created over 30 years. And that's just been within the last year. So you never know, you know, I mean the audience tells you whether it's a keeper or not. Right, right.

And I think I'm going to clarify a few things. I'm going to again summarize some of the big takeaways I have. We talked about the sleep.

And a typical week for you then is event preparation and events that are going on and what has happened. And as being a witness to this and watching the evolution say I am. And oftentimes just because I.

You like to say what it's slow learners with big checkbooks. So I like attending a few events and I'll see you'll have a new tool. And what I love about the tools is it's a thinking exercise. It solves a big problem. It often originates either from a problem you're trying to solve for yourself, or you've observed it, witnessed it, or someone asks to solve a problem, you're like, man, let me think about this. Come back with the tool. And we've got essentially the tool itself and you filled it out for you. So it's a working tool within.

So I never ask people to fill in a tool where I don't with a very real. I mean, I'm not putting down made up stuff. I'm putting down, this is a project I'm working on. These are problems I'm solving right now and I talk through so that they know that I'm not asking them to do anything that I'm not doing myself. And I think there is a very important credibility.

Factor with that, you know.

That and transparency too. I think that's the authentic Dan. One thing I forgot to mention too is just physically something I've noticed in you is your. Like when I stand behind you, you've noticeably put on muscle on your upper body, like the width of your shoulders. And I bumped into you enough, like you're firm, you've got a lot of muscle on your legs. So you've increased your muscle, which is normally for someone in their 70s is rare, but it has to do with just the insane discipline. And I've. I'VE worked out next.

I mean, you know, gravity wants us, you know, I mean, gravity.

Yeah, yeah.

Gravity ups the stakes every year and you have to up the work every year, you know. That's right.

Solar powered, solar dust requires constant. Yeah, but, but that's, yeah.

And I should say the other things. In addition to preparing for the workshops, I actually coach the workshop, you know, and, and so I have weeks when actually for the days would be at least a six hour coaching session. You know, I never do more than two days in a row coaching because I.

I need the break. I need the break because I'm very, very on and I find that my concentration levels have been much, much more.

Constant. And you know, during Zoom. And so in.

Two weeks we're going back to live in Toronto and then, you know, we'll be in Chicago. I'll be doing live workshops and you know, and so I think the, the transition back to live workshops is going to demand more of me than the movement from live workshops to Zoom. Yeah, I love Zoom. Zoom. I'm a complete and total highly focused extrovert on Zoom and I'm sometimes highly distracted introvert in live sessions. So I'm going to have to, you know, kind of treat the first month or so as, you know, training, learning how to ride a bike again, you know, and everything. And then what we introduced during Zoom was the two hour connector calls. And that has been a total gift to me and I think it's been great for the entrepreneurs too, wouldn't you say? Just to pop in for two hours. I usually have a new tool and.

It'S a mishmash of all sorts of different groups and people from around the world and everything. And I think it's got a nice cultural knitting effect for the entire coach community.

Yes. My experience of it, for one thing, this is easy to take for granted until you've done it yourself. But your process of doing an event is some sort of an opening, training a conversation and then dive right into here's the tool, everyone gets a link. So in the Zoom world we have a PDF and then in the physical world in Meet Land, we've got our binders and we open it up and you'll walk through and show the example, describe the tool, the outcome, and then you're very precise about timing and what I love, and this is the distinction, it's why workshops work so well, especially given the fact that most entrepreneurs are used to going to several day workshops. Coach are one day, it's one day, a quarter. Unless you're Doing.

Some of the simultaneous programs, but it's spend one minute on each box and it forces you within constraints, it forces discipline, it forces creativity. And only what is important, I think urgent and important to come out. And then the net result of the tool is something that you can look at through your 90 day lens or through your 25 year lens, your 100 quarter lens. And then there's conversations, discussions and breakouts. And I think having that predictable process and system.

Really explains why coach works so well. So you've got the disciplined system, a shared vocabulary amongst all the members. Which means when we have our two hour get togethers, that's where Dan's talking to people, we're having open conversations and it's clear that that's where you get a lot of your ideas and reinforcement. And one rule of Dan that I've learned is there is no negative in the world of Dan Sullivan. You know, my dad used to say, if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all. But in your world, everything is a positive, moving future and learning.

There's a learning involved, you know. Yeah, I had one yesterday. You'd be interested. And I think you, during January you were in one of the Free zone workshops where I said, you know, a way of looking at your future growth is the way that the technology world looks at its growth. And that is you have a platform. You have a platform and inside the platform are programs and then feeding the programs are apps. There's apps feeding the programs. And I said, so we kind of use the word shortcuts in the coach world. So it's shortcuts, programs and platform. Okay. And it was really interesting because.

Yesterday I was hitting, I just tried it out on 10 times entrepreneurs. So for those we have three levels in the program Signature, which is boot camp, really, you know, you learn the basics. And then we have 10 times when you've created a self managing company where you know, everything that exists is managed by other people and the entrepreneur is creating new. The entrepreneur is creating the future of the company, the property. You know, the proper role of an entrepreneur is to create the future, not to be managing the present.

And I had three or four people who are really smart and they just had a hard time with this.

But I was really great with them. I said, so what's it looking like to you? I mean, what I'm asking you to do, what's it doing to your thinking, you know, as you watch your thinking? And they said, well, I would do it just the opposite way that you do it, you know, I would do it this way, this way, this way. And I said, so let's do a little experiment here. Why don't you do it that way? Has anybody else got a different way to do this than the way I coached you? Because my way may be very idiosyncratic. It just may be Dan's way of doing things, and it's not everybody's way of doing things. And so there was another person. Well, I'd kind of approach it differently, you know, and I do it from the bottom upward. I would fill it up from the bottom. I said, why don't you do it that way? And afterwards, let's just talk about what we each found out. But the thing was at the end, they said, well, this had a tremendous impact on my thinking. That was experiment one. Experiment two was. This had a tremendous impact on my thinking and mine. It had tremendous impact. So I said, I want to get across the point. It isn't the form that matters. It's what happens to your thinking.

Yeah.

I said, I could care less. I could care less about the shape of the form or the wording or used. I said, I'm totally open to changing anything, you know, but the end result has to be. It has a tremendous impact on your thinking.

Yep. I think that pretty much sums up the state of people who have been practicing failure for a long time. Practicing failure is.

Ongoing sequential wrong thinking. It's a stack of bad decisions and wrong thinking.

So not one, not five, but 10.

Bad ways.

10 bad capabilities all stacked into a power pack. Yep.

Yeah, that's someone very close to me who will remain unnamed. I've often described as 50 years of bad decisions stacked in a row.

All right, one year repeated 50 times.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So I'm going to do one more, and then I've got two blocks I want to review with you. One of them is the books. And. And note for our audience, there's really two primary book types. There are the quarterly books, which precede a tool, and it's a new form of thinking. And it's whatever is going on, whether it's.

The gap and the gain or who, not how they really started out as quarterly books and evolved into the mainstream books that were produced by Dr. Ben Hardy and Tucker Max and distributed by Hay House. Right.

But you hadn't fully described before the structure of the book, which is Dan's new idea slash thinking tool. And the framework, for anyone who's not familiar with scorecards, are. There are eight mindsets which are also the eight chapters. And then there are gradients of thinking, which are really a scorecard. A one to three is bad thinking. Well, and it's not that it's good or bad, but we'll call it unevolved.

I call it roadkill. This is roadkill thinking.

Okay. There you go.

You know.

You actually are just part of the concrete. You know, you're possum pie.

Yeah, yeah.

You're no longer casting a shadow, you know?

Yeah. Okay. All the way up to high level thinking. And you don't score.

You're transformed. You have the ability to transform yourself. You know, I mean, you know, the. And you know, and we don't know what the intelligence is that allows people to transform themselves. You know, they. They learn something new and they take the learning and it alters their behavior for the better. We don't really know. We know education doesn't do it. Like formal education can have just the opposite effect on people. That makes them more rigid to transform itself. So we don't really know what this is. But entrepreneurs, by definition, if they're a successful entrepreneur, have to have had that to become a successful entrepreneur. The ability to transform themselves. So that's why it's such a wonderful joy. I'm kind of a philosopher in a certain way. I'm a teacher, teacher and everything else. But what a difference to, you know, be of assistance and support to people who are natural self, learners, self, transformers, anything. I mean it, you know, sometimes you just have to hold on, you know, because they. They take it and run, you know, and then. And then they'll come back and they'll give you improvements. They discovered this and discovered that. So my job as a coach is just to have myself so handled well when I go in that I don't have to be thinking about me. I'm just picking up new stuff that'll be useful for future workshops.

Yeah. I think as I'm listening to you, I think one thing, and it's not all coach members because there's plenty in there who are highly educated, really successful academic backgrounds. And then there's a lot that kind of fit into what I'd say is my category. Grew up in the tiny.

They had an indifferent relationship with the. With.

Yeah, nothing about it worked for me. I was horrible at school. I barely passed high school and never went to college. And I despise traditional classroom rote learning. And I hated the relationship I had with my teachers. That's really. It took me a long time to realize that's actually what it was, is I had some authoritary issues, plus.

I was an angry Catholic and all that. But I'm going to get back to what's important here is entrepreneurial education.

Works because scorecard, there's a way to keep score, there's financial score, there's brand relevance. And inside of the strategic coach world, the real promise is not hope, but a genuine better life. With 30 years of history of success, I mean you can literally now paint by numbers and receive an outcome. And I've met members who've been in coach for 27, 28 years and they're remarkably successful, not just as business people, but as fathers or spouses and husbands and wives and living a life of choice.

That to me is one of the outcomes. So I think what's beautiful about the books are.

It'S a full immersive experience because you've got the cartoons, you've got the, even the kinesthetic of the book, the fold out scorecard in the front.

The diagrams, they're skimmable and get, I mean the title describes the thinking that, you know, it's, you're very formulaic, but it just flat out works. So.

Yeah, well, I was really happy to see Net. We were both at Genius Network last weekend and Ned Halliwell, who is, you know, just a world famous.

Thinker about attention deficit disorder, his own, he'll be quick to tell you his own. And he's devoted the last 40 years of his life to getting people to see this as a strength and not as a weakness. But it's only a strength under certain constrained conditions. I mean, you have to, there has to be a real discipline to how you do it. And I am, and you are, and lots of people, you know, lots of people we know are, and generally speaking.

ADD people before they actually get official help or they get medical help, have actually worked out a lot of really neat strategies for dealing with their short attention span, their inability to stay with anything that bores them for very long. And the other thing is the constant preference of something brand new over something that they've been doing before. So they tend to be, you know.

I mean, some of them, I often say there's probably an IQ level which a person like that is an entrepreneur and below that line, they're in prison. Yeah, totally. You know, Andre Norman will tell you the truth about that. You know, he'll say, you know, these people are just entrepreneurs with bad habits.

Yeah, well, I had a bad judgment.

They have bad judgment. They don't have much of it. They have no time perspective. They have bad judgment and you know, they, they, they, they don't plan very much.

Yeah, well, it's, it's, yeah, there a lot of boundary, boundary issues. That would be an interesting podcast by itself. But here's, here's an observation and something I've tested out messaging wise that I observe in ADD entrepreneurs, and it certainly is, is for me, which is because I didn't and couldn't learn. Traditionally I learned to read early. I was good reader, but I required implementation. A lot of hands on. Unfortunately, my dad gave me access to the tool shop when I was very young.

But I tried this out. I was actually speaking at a Brian Sweet event a couple weeks ago in front of a bunch of, we'll call it the top 2% financial advisors, wealth managers. And I said to everyone, do you know what rules are? And I just waited and I said, they're for other people.

And the crowd went nuts. And that night there were a few people who basically said, I knew the second you said that I wanted to work with you. But when you have a brain that doesn't learn in a rote linear way, you're looking for shortcuts that and you. And to overcome severe adhd, which I certainly had, along with the baggage that goes along with that, you've got to find who's that make up for your lack like you have. So I wanted to put this in the context of your book writing, for example. So what do you have? You have time constraints, volume constraints with 60 pages or so of content, a course structure, and then what do you do while you come up with the eight mindsets, which are the chapters? You've got Shannon as your shortcut to interview you. Because one thing you know about Dan Sullivan is he's spontaneous, very spontaneous. Which leads me into podcast creation. But first, any commentary you have before I go into the other part of.

Dan Sullivan day important because it, you know, it stresses the main point that you just mentioned. So I have a rule now that I never do any work alone for more than a half hour. That will not lead to a handoff to a team member. In other words, that I will only work a lawn to set a team member up to support my project. So I don't do. I'm no good alone. I'm no good alone because I just get too distracted.

You'll wander. Dan will wander what he's left to his own device.

Not only that, but I'll get frustrated because I'm setting myself a goal of accomplishing things and I won't accomplish it. But to show up prepared for a team member is a crucial value to me. You know, I never, I want it. Never want to disappoint a team member. So at every state, I never show up. You'll never find me alone. I'm always surrounded by team members. And the team members are very, very good at planning. They're very, very good at organization. They're very good at follow through and.

Keeping Dan on the rails. Keeping Dan on the rails.

Dan on the rail. And we agree to rules and how we're going to work together. And then I stick to the. I will stick to teamwork rules. I won't stick to my own rules, but I'll stick to teamwork rules. And I've had a lot of team experience, right from being in a big family on the farm, to sports, to boy scouts, to, you know, I was in theater, I was in the army and everything. So I'm actually very, very good at teamwork. You know, I will follow the rules as they relate to teamwork, but I won't follow rules related to my individual behavior.

Yep. And that's. But without that mindset, without that behavior, you wouldn't have this constant stream of, first of all.

Creativity, in my opinion. I've been around you long enough to witness, observe this and see your behaviors. But also.

Like, at least the philosophy I've heard you say, I'm going to butcher this. But it's not important that you have the right answers. It's that you ask the right questions. And your nature, you have a very Socratic method, which is put really smart people together, ask them questions that you don't know the answers to that are super open ended, and see what happens.

Yeah.

And.

And that then be able to, you know, sort of facilitate a conversation where one person says this, one person says this. You know, if we, you know, you know, what do you think about what each other said? You know, I mean, it's, it's, you know, you don't know how it's going to go. It's very improvisational.

I was just gonna say that what this is, is. Is a collective positive focus. Yes. And so I think the rule set, I think of it like a ratchet, which is you can't go backwards and.

In a downward spiral of pain, there's only one direction, and that is a positive moving future.

And I think that lends itself both to your successful mindset. The fact that as far as I've observed, I've never witnessed a second where Dan didn't have Purpose, and he wasn't on purpose.

And that created an opportunity to create purpose, which you and I have both agreed that that is probably the greatest gift we as entrepreneurs and leaders can provide.

Yeah.

One of the things. And I'd like you to reflect on this because I think it may be a common trait.

I'm a really good loner. You know, I'm really. I can really spend lots as long as I'm not working on something, you know, that's got a project. But I, you know, Babs and I. Babs is, you know, we're partners for, you know, for. We're in our fifth decade of being partner at Partners, and, you know, we've created strategic coach together.

And she still likes you, too. That's a good sign.

Well, Babs, you know, is very, you know, I mean, she's add and she's, you know, she's. She's also not a manager. We're not manager. We're good leaders, but we're not managers. And so she oversees a. You know, who the real managers are in the company. And she does everything about this. But sometimes she has sisters that will come and visit, and so she'll take them to our cottage, which is two or three hours away. And I might. That might be for about three days. And during those three days, it wouldn't occur to me to talk to somebody else. I mean, to phone somebody up or let's go out and everything else. I've got three days, and I'm totally capable of entertaining myself and, you know, and reading during that. But when I'm with people, I don't want it to be Helter Skelter. I want structure to it. I want. I want outcomes from being with other people, you know, and it really reduces who you can deal with in the world that when you're with them, it's structured. And quite frankly, entrepreneurs are the only people that you can do it where you can get together.

But what they're working on has to be their stuff. It can't be your stuff. So, anyway, people say you're a real extrovert in the workshop and everything else. And I says, because I love the people I'm working with and I'm intensely interested in what they're talking about. But put me in any other setting with a group of people and I'm, you know, I'm in the corner sucking my thumb, you know. You know, and. And I'm facing the corner.

Yep.

You know, and because, you know, people say, you know, I just love being in a social Setting where you can feel the emotion. And I said, I get absolutely zero out of that.

Well, and I'm going to explain that for the audience here because, you know, we've had dinner many, many times over at your house, oftentimes preceding a meeting. And we sit down, you know, first of all, we walk in and until dinner time, sit around, have some fairly loose conversations, you know what's going on, and, you know, olives and nuts and wine, etc. And then we sit down at dinner.

Yep, there we go. Ma' am needs his lubricant. Tristarum and lubricant. But the way every meal begins, it's the Dan Sullivan prayer, which is positive focus. And that becomes the subject. Everyone goes through positive focus. And it is abundantly clear what the table conversation is as a result of that, because there's a clear migration. And the way I compare it to is because I open every business meeting with positive focus now. And I even do it with our family dinner, you know, even if it's just Zach and Vivian and I, because what I believe it creates is a resonant frequency tween.

In a communal setting. And you also learn something really nuanced about who someone is as a re. As part of that. And I heard. I just came back from Wizard Academy. I don't know if you're familiar with Roy Williams, Roy H. William. He wrote wizard of Ads. Truly one of the most brilliant thinkers ever.

Legendary.

I want to connect the three of us for an interview because you guys would be long lost brothers, I guarantee it. You won't believe how similar you are, but he said one of the main reasons why you eat together is. Is people who eat together, especially if they've celebrated in a feast, don't go to war, they don't fight. And I hadn't thought of that before, but he's really into esoteric literature. He happens to be the world's foremost authority on Don Quixote. And he's really just, you know, wine and interesting food and esoteric topics. But I think that's what I notice happens at every meal at Dan Sullivan is there is structure. And with that structure comes freedom of thought. And that. And I agree with you. I think the emotional connection happens when there's a framework and constraints to operate within. Yeah, like great comedy.

Yeah. I mean.

I'm okay without structure inside my own head, but when I'm in a social setting, I really need structure because.

You know, I've got enough unstructure going in my mind. I don't need it added to. From the outside. And.

So, you know, and, you know, a lot of success in life is, you know, just continuously and probably at a deeper level, just telling the truth about who you actually are and how you operate. And there's no right or wrong here. There's just, don't be something that you actually aren't. You know, like, you know, I'm, you know, I am more who I actually am now than I was 10 years ago. And that was true 10 years previously, too. And my entire organizational structure in my business life and my personal life just enhances what I'm. When Dan is at his best, and it prevents when Dan is at his worst.

And I will say that I haven't seen any bad Dan, to the best of my knowledge, because I know I've only probably kind of. It irked you a couple times, and that's because I said some negative stuff, and you stop that immediately. All right, so I've got one last question. I actually have two, but I don't know if we have time for it. One of them, I wanted to talk more about what podcasts represent to you in the process, but I think that's another topic for another time to deconstruct.

I would say this, that I do have. That's the fourth. You know, I have the creation of tools, I have the creation of books. I have the actual coaching of workshops. And the fourth thing is the creation of podcasts. And the reason I do that is that I'm a talker, you know, and I don't need any preparation for it. The conversation, as the conversation starts, and the other person is a flexible conversationalist and adaptive conversationalist. The two of you together, just improv, you know, like we do. And, And. And I've had some situations where I'm dealing with someone who.

Is just not really responsive. And it really wears me out. It really wears me out really fast. You know, they. They. You'll say something and they just ignore it, and they'll go on talking about what they're talking about, you know, like that. And, you know, and, you know, and it really, you know, you know, you say, geez, you know, how do I get out of this? How do I get out of that? Yeah.

The way I see you do it is.

If someone offers you something, that's typically the way I see. I haven't seen you eke out of a bad conversation, but what I have seen you do is when you go, that would be a no. That'll be a no. When someone says, oh, yeah, how about.

Just add an example? And we have a tool in the program called the Impact Filter. It's how to, you know, very quickly out lay out what a particular project or particular proposal is. And, you know, it gives the real context, the why, and then it says when it's finished, it looks like this. And somebody who used to be in the program came up to me at Genius Network and it did a. Had an Impact Filter, you know, and, you know, they were, you know, they were using Strategic Coach thinking process to present me the idea, you know, and so far he, you know, he had a plus on his report card. And then I read through it and I got through to the end of it and I said, and he represented a, you know, a group of people who were putting something together. And I said, well, I can certainly see how this would be an opportunity for you.

And he says, well, what about you? And I said, well, I said, I'll make this really quick. The answer is no. But I said, but I want to have to tell you right now it's only a half no. And he says, oh, oh, what is it? I said, I haven't talked to Babs yet. Then it'll be a full no.

And the reason was he was asking they were going to create a platform and where a strategic coach was a program under their platform.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I said, no, you can't.

That's a horrible idea.

Yeah. I said, first of all, this would require me attending a meeting, wouldn't it?

I said, and probably there would be a legal contract, right? I said, well, that's impossible because there are no meetings of that kind or legal contracts in my future. There are simply no meetings of this.

Kind or someone collecting money ahead of you.

That's the other no. That'd be interesting.

I was reflecting afterwards how fast that was, and one of my team members was with me and she said, how do you just say no like that? You haven't considered it? And I said, we've rehearsed this in our mind. We have rules. And Babs and I have rehearsed this in our mind because, you know, I mean, there'd be a tsunami of this stuff if I, you know, if it was known that you could talk Dan into something like this. But we know our future. We know, you know, we know our culture. We know, you know, what it is we're trying to achieve. And they were calling it a win win collaboration, which is.

Which is false.

Giant poopy lie.

Well, it's not win win. It's win.

But not for us, you know, so anyway, it's really, really interesting. So when you're kind of.

You know, kind of unrestricted within your own thinking, you have to take special pains that in your relationships with other people you have to have very, very clear guidelines and ground rules and restrictions and periods. Because my natural tendency is to, you know, I'm like the, you know, the, the dogs, they say, dogs that will get into cars with strangers. And number one most stolen kidnapped dog is the dog that's called a Samoyed. It's like a white husky. They're beautiful white dogs, but their tails curl up and they have that husky look. And they're the most stolen and it's only half true. They're willing that they're willing to get in anybody's car. Oh boy, you're my friend. I mean, you know, you.

I mean, you can always make somebody's boring opportunity exciting.

Yeah. But you have to stop doing that at a certain point. You just. Because other people depend upon you and they don't want to clean up your messes afterwards.

That's right, yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, although I'm, you know, you know, I'm very spontaneous and you know, I do have a naturally creative mind. Outside of me, everything has structure and rules.

That limit me. And I hope this is useful to people because you can't have it both ways. You can't be free within your own mind and then demand that there are no rules outside of you.

Yes. Well, I think what we have is a good, think of this like a big thick Oreo cookie. We just had a lot of good double stuff. What I want to do is put the underside of the cookie or the top side of the cookie, depending on how we're making it today. The right side up cookie would put the cookie on top. So that is how do you end your day? So let's just say you finished your day, you left.

The Toronto office or the Chicago office or left this house.

And went to the.

Yeah, yeah. But what's a Dan night? Well, first of all, I've got a rule.

There's no creative activity after 3 o' clock. And I'm a morning. You know, most of my creative work really, really gets done in the morning, before noon. You know, I'm up at four, you know, I'm up at four. So I put in, I put in eight hours by the time I get to lunchtime and everything else. But I've, I've cut it, you know, for about three years. I said I, I might do creative Work after three. But there can be no requirement that I do creative work after 3 o'. Clock. I, I mean I can't be doing obligated projects that require creative thinking after 3 o'. Clock. So I cut off at 3 o' clock and then there's, you know, I'll just be chatting or something like that. And you know, Babs and I have more and more during COVID because during lockdown we've had more actually more control of our lives than we do, you know, when we're traveling and doing anything. So we, we have tended to eat, have our evening meal finish around six o' clock and then we do the intermittent and fasting things. We. I don't eat again until 6 o' clock the next morning, you know, and I've exercised and then I get a heavy protein hit right after exercise. So you don't, you're not burning muscle, you know, you're growing muscle. So that's been really good. And that's, you know, I'm sitting a lot. I mean these have been two years of advanced sitting.

And do you have a great chair? I have a rule, for example, which is I'm never cheap with my mattress, pillow, toothbrush.

Desk, keyboard, chair or monitor.

And so it's where, if you spend, figure out where you spend most of your time. And then the other thing is I don't drive that much anymore, but I have the last car I'd ever want to own. I have something that lights me up and I feel great driving it because it's fun. But I'm kind of curious what your gadgetry or keyboard mattress.

Yeah, cars. It's, it's a machine that takes you from one.

You don't care about cars.

I know that I don't care about cars. You know, if I own, if I owned.

If I owned a vehicle, it would be a vehicle made in Russia called the Sherp. I don't know if you've seen the Sherp.

Yes, I have seen it.

The reason is that it's a vehicle that I think outwardly would really represent my personality. That basically. That basically.

Or giant wheels. It's amphibious, can go through anything. It's practically unstoppable.

Yeah, yeah. Go over huge boulders and go that. And I said, you know, I really feel sort of a like mindedness and emotional resonance with this vehicle. Cutting my eyes.

They're awesome. They are awesome. They're worth checking out on, on YouTube. All right, so car.

How about H S H E R P? And they've got great youtubes I mean they've got, yeah.

Tons of fun.

Yeah. And you know, we're Mac, we've been a Mac shop since, since 1987. And you know, so we live totally in the Mac universe and we have a great tech team and you know, I'm upgraded from time to time and you know, I have an iPhone for certain apps.

I'm not a phone guy. I don't, I don't really chat on the phone. If I hear my number.

If I hear my phone ring, I look at the number and I said they can't know me because nobody's got my phone number. And.

And yeah, you use it for your.

Device. Yeah. You're happy.

I got my happy on and ever since I got the happy, my phone's always charged up because I don't like running out of power. The one, the real switch is I'm going to switch over to the Apple watch here and because there's so much that relates to health and fitness now and you know, Tim Cook himself has said we want to be known for at the end of our hundred years and I think Apple's got a good chance to be a hundred year corporation. We want to be known for the impact that we had on medicine and health, you know. So we're creating the new program, the lifetime extender. So I think I'll get myself. You know, I've just been using polar neuro.

Oh sure.

Yep. Blood pressure, you know, the blood pressure, the.

Polar devices and that. I don't even know if they're in business anymore because I haven't paid attention.

I still see them. I think they can get a heart rate monitor that talks to like your peloton and stuff but I haven't. I don't know how they could make it with, with their watches, but. Well, let's do this. Yeah, I can see us doing. Oh, go ahead.

I've loved Pandora during. During. Yeah. And Pandora, Pandora is.

Beautifully, beautifully designed to respond to your likes and dislikes and you know, and I've discovered all sorts of music and the strange thing is that I'd never paid much attention to country and western and I've just become a totally deep country and western band during the last two years, you.

Know, so that'd be a good way to wrap this episode up. Your top three most listened to artists right now. Who would they be? I have a guess. Hank Williams Jr. Probably.

And will he or not not technically country and western because I think he's his own genre as Roy Orbison.

Oh God, yeah. That angelic Voice.

Roy Orbison, you know.

Elvis said. Roy Orbison. He said. They said, elvis, you're the, you know, the best popular singer in the world. And he said, oh, no, no, no. He says, Roy Orbison. He said, roy could take any song that I sing and he could match me or do it better. And I can't sing any of the songs that he sings, you know, so, like, you know, so Roy Orbison. I think the other one would be Waylon Jennings.

Oh, yeah. So good.

Waylon Jennings. And then on the female side, you know, Patsy Klein, I just really, really loved. Or Lynn Anderson. Lynn Anderson, who I didn't know at all. Lynn Anderson, you know, I never promised you a Rose Garden was her hit.

Oh, of course, yeah.

14 years old, you know, she was number one in the hit charts and everything like that, you know. And you know the difference between country and Western and modern pop music? Modern pop music, it's the difference between wailing and whining. Okay, so country and western, it's all about disasters, you know, but the singer knows that they are the cause of their own disasters.

Oh, yeah, Modern pop singers. Everything's falling apart and the world's a disaster, but they're innocent. It's everybody else's fault. So wailing is where you take responsibility for the disaster. Whining is where you're making other people someone else's fault.

That is a great, great way to wrap up this episode. Oh, it's good. I love it. And here's what I did in the background here, because I'm traveling today. I'm visiting a little Minnesota, going back to see the folks in horrible weather, by the way. But I downloaded the best of Lynn Anderson because I haven't thought about her in forever. And she was a big deal in the 70s.

I learned a lot. And this opens us up for a part two, because I thought of other things to ask you that I wrote down. Here's something just to swish around in your head. How about a no tool and a yes tool? I can't imagine everyone wouldn't want the grid of thinking of how you make yes decisions and no decisions and collaboration decisions.

At a minimum, we could do an episode about it and it'd be to me, I always look at what's the rule set? What's the right thinking? And these are some right thinking tools. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you're catching me by surprise here, so I'll have to give some. Right?

You don't have to say yes right now. It's just.

Hey, hey. It's about thinking.

Yep. Thinking right. Not the thinking wrong part. Well, you want to wrap this one up, Dan Sullivan?

Yeah. Well, first of all, I appreciate this and you know, you've actually prompted me into doing a new tool for the workshops that describes my week. So I'm going to actually, you know, just take this and I'm, I'm going to take the thinking I've done and I'm just going to lay it out. And I said this is my approach to my week. What would your approach to be your week be? You know, is there anything I'm doing that's useful to you? You know, please borrow it. You know, you don't have to, you know, do it. But it actually, people like to know how. You know, it's one thing is that people enjoy other people's front stage performance, but even more these days they like to know what the backstage organization is and the backstage preparation is.

Yeah, you wouldn't believe the response I got today. I'm in a couple of groups that there are multiple strategic coach folks in and I just, I posted Day in the Life and it was like brrr. Got a whole bunch of questions. So I think it's.

It'S very interesting to them. Even just the little, you know, the sleeping. I'd never heard you talk about the sleeping pill dude ad before Sonata and nor the IMRs. Those are two that and you and I talk a lot about these kinds of things. So I think optimization is key and this also evolves into lifetime extender because when we start collaborating amongst other members and finding lifetime best practices, that's incredibly valuable tool. So. Well, I'll do my version of the wrap up of this which is.

If you've got questions, comments, head over to capabilityamplifier.com, leave either Dan or I a message. Secondly, you can reach me on social or just by posting a comment. If you're watching this in YouTube or iTunes, someone on my team will get that to me and I learned a lot today. I feel very inspired and it gave me three more episode ideas. So how about you? How would you like to wrap this one up and finish it up? Dan?

Yeah, I would just say that you know what I would like to.

Contribute just describing my week is that it's very, very useful to identify if you took four or five of your weeks and you looked at them.

Which of the four would be the best.

Use of your time and the results and use that as a model and keep improving the best model you have right now. And every week go back and look at the model of your week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, what you do on weekends. And is the sleep right, is the exercise right? And we didn't get the diet, but we, we, you know, we eat a very, we, we eat a very sensible diet but not a dogmatic diet. You know, like, no, you're not, you're.

Not an unfun guy to eat with and we had a nice dinner the other night.

You know, we can break the rules. The, the only thing I say, you know, the thing you have to understand about bad habits, it's not what you do on day one, it's what you do on day three.

Yeah, that's right. Well, that's why cheat days work. But that's another episode, so. Well, another great episode of Capability Amplifier. You're always a load of fun, Dan. Blast to collaborate and improvise with.

Yep. Thank you.

All right, thanks.