The Best Deals You'll Ever Do Are The Deals You Don't Do

Foreign.

Stuff. We're talking about life changing stuff in this episode. Some of the best deals you'll ever do are the deals you don't do. What are we talking about? Well, it'll change your life when you understand it.

All right. One of the things that Gay talks about is one of the deals when he was in the movie business and how one big thing turned to a giant mistake. And then we really get down and talk about how to read your body and your mind and reprogram your brain mind and start paying attention to the things that are failure points even before they happen to prevent yourself a lot of aggravation in the future.

All right, Gay, you had the idea for this, which is the best things I've ever done were the deals I never did. And I thought this would be a great episode to talk about knowing what your joyful limitations are. And really this fits into the big leap in our upper limits challenges. And some of those challenges are things that are inside our character and we're perfectly happy never doing anything about them or at least just acknowledging and owning them completely. And I'm sure you'll frame this a little bit differently, but why don't you talk a little bit about that? I know you've got some great stories, too.

Yes, well, the upper limit problem is our tendency to sabotage ourselves when things start going better than we know how to handle. So if you haven't built a structure for how to have more money, for example, or more fame, a lot of times if those things come along, we find some way to kind of push ourselves back down. And so that's one of the big concepts in the. In the big leap is the upper limit problem. And with regard to the original thing that you mentioned, some of the best deals you'll ever do are the deals you don't do. That came from me by a gentleman named Jerry Jones, who is a big entrepreneur and really knows his stuff. Not the Jerry Jones that owns the Dallas Cowboys. This was a Jerry Jones who's a Portland entrepreneur now, passed on anyway, great guy. But that resonated with me. And at the time when he told me that I was probably only about maybe 40 years old and just kind of flexing my muscles entrepreneurially a little bit. But boy, did I come to find that out later because I had deals that I did that I overrode my internal. No, you know, because the money looked good or something about it, or even in a. In a book situation, I agreed to co author a book one time with another colleague. And it Turned out to be kind of a disaster, even though I could have seen in the first session we had together that I shouldn't be trying to write a book with this guy. So I've learned the hard way that.

I always tell people in business, hiring mistakes are the most costly things you do. But don't forget, sometimes the hiring mistake is hiring you to do something that you're not any good at. A lot of times, creative entrepreneurs, once the business starts succeeding, they start trying to do things that are not in their area of genius, but. And they get booted around a lot. And I. I've made some colossal, in retrospect, things I wish I hadn't done. You know, like, I had a very successful movie business and the Spiritual Cinema Circle, and we were thriving like crazy and had investors and all of us were making great money and everything like that. And then I got the bright idea, okay, we're doing so well at movies, let's start our own little book publishing company.

Everybody was trying to say, don't do that. Stay, you know, put your attention in where you are right now. Don't try to do two things at once. And. But, you know, I'm an old book writer and I'm a book guy. And so I wanted to create this unusual kind of book business called the Transformational Book Circle. And so we did, but it wasn't anywhere near successful. And so I begin to think, what is it that we do when we are being successful that really distracts ourselves? Well, one thing we do is to launch some other project rather than just really going all the way with the one we've got. And so I learned that a couple of times the hard way, and then kind of came back and then put all my attention on the movie business until I was ready to sell it to a bigger company.

I know in myself that I'm not a good administrator. I learned that I got fired from a clinical job when I was right out of. When I just gotten my master's program. I was running a halfway house for juvenile delinquents. And I love the treatment aspects of it. But the administrative part, going to meetings and running across the state to attend some stuff at the governor's mansion, and all that stuff just drove me nuts. And it wasn't in my zone of genius. And so.

Fortunately, unfortunately, I didn't spot that in time. But the guy that I work for really spotted. Oh, yeah, he came by and had a heart to tie, heart to heart talk with me and said, look, you're no good at this. You're fired. I don't have any better way to tell you, but don't try to run a halfway house anymore. Don't get involved with administration. And so that really was a great piece of feedback. And so you got to know what your own limitations are. And generally speaking, the only way to find that out is by.

The holy consulting, the holy temple of your body, by finding out what lights you up and what feels good and what bums you out. And, you know, because your body will always tell you the information.

Right.

Well, you know, before we started recording this, I told you about a couple things going on for me right now. And I'm going to deconstruct what I'm comfortable talking about, because some of it I just can't be public yet. But first of all, I think you said something really key. And for you and I, I'm sure there are big parts of our personality profiles that are virtually identical. So, for example, on the colby scale, I'm a 3-294-which is fact finder is the first one. I think Follow through is the next. The big one is quick start, which I'm a nine, and then executors of four, even though I know my adjusted style is different than that. In other words, when you contort yourself to accommodate and do stuff that is out of character, that's when you get yourself in trouble. And like, for you, it was being an administrator in a halfway house, where I'm sure nowadays, just imagine the piles of paperwork and all the potential lawsuits. You know, guys like you and I are a lawsuit waiting to happen, you know, to something that's administrative oriented or requires a lot of notes.

Yeah.

And, you know, like, I, I, one thing I know about myself is my best creativity happens when I'm collaborating and performing. And if 99% of what I do is creating new things and innovating and collaborating in a performance style where there's there, it's demand driven, deadline driven, that's where I'm going to do my very, very best. And.

The other thing that I was going to add is.

You know, this notion of.

In a chaotic environment, even though on one hand I can, I do well in chaos, meaning high demand.

A lot of outside chaos. So, like, I have, I'm very, very disciplined and strict with my work. For example, like, if I'm in work mode, I'm in work mode, I'm not in play mode, and I've been put into some compromising positions where the people around me are going nuts and trying to mix play and work. And no good work gets done when everyone's trying to play or where then there's a bunch of chemicals involved. And I'm also super strict. Like, I get up every single day and my butts in my chair doing the work. Right. The discipline work, whether it's creating or. Or building something. But I did want to go back to our original theme here, and I think the point I'm trying to make is know thyself. And you said, hey, get out there and do a bunch of work and figure it out. But I know now I wish I would have known more about personality profiles like Colby Enneagram and Deep Dove in there and really understood what that meant and how to collaborate better with other people. I think that would have provided some great shortcuts and put up the bumpers in the bowling alley, so I wouldn't have had as many sinkers.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's really good to know some basic things about yourself. You know, things like the Myers Briggs and the personality self portrait and the Colby are really good at that. Giving yourself a kind of a benign label in a way. And also, I remember the first time I remember taking a test was in high school. They take this senior aptitude test, and I don't know if they do that out here or Minnesota, wherever you were, but I grew up in Florida and everybody takes this Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Yeah, I think said I should be a garbage man. But I remember they had something like that, and I was very disappointed in whatever the results were. I'm like, bastard. Yeah.

Well, apparently I had one of the lowest scores ever in my high school on being a farmer. I remember my guidance counselor, he said.

Boy, you really should not think of going into farming.

And I said, well, son, I hope you love anvils. Yeah.

I said, I don't have any intention of it. I'm one of those people that don't like to get their hands dirty. You know, I've washed my hands 10 or 20 times a day, so that wouldn't work in the farming trade or plumbing trade. But I think that's a useful thing to do. The only thing about tests is sometimes they can do a little bit of restricting on you in putting you in categories, because there's a lot more than four types of human beings. But those four types identified on the Colby and the Myers Briggs are ones that are useful in work situations. I think another thing too is that regardless of the test you take or anything like that, somewhere along the line we all have to get good enough at reading our own inner cues and reading the cues of other people in order to make it in the world. Because you can be the most brilliant person on earth. And if you don't know the basics about kind of contacting yourself inside and finding out who you are and what you want, and if you don't know how to read the signals of other people, those kinds of things, which could probably be taught in the first, second, third grade, are really things that I see people all the time, 20s, 30s, 40s, don't know how to do. And so sometimes the most fundamental things are the most useful. And especially things that have to do with tuning you into yourself or figuring out how another person is thinking and feeling.

Okay, so let's do some hypotheticals here. Both some real life examples of the best things you've ever done were the deals that you never did and. And kind of deconstruct what went on to make that work. And I'm going to begin one idea, which. There's a million variations of this story, but it's, you know, the fastest way to make $10 million is to start with 100 million and try to make a movie. You know, and.

This isn't about the money. I think some of it's just your health. But I know now.

And I've really learned this from you. I really feel into anything before. I make a big commitment now. And if I just feel yucky, I don't do it. So I have a yuckometer that's built in, that's based upon the gay Hendrix check in with my body and am I feeling good? And can I imagine myself feeling good with this? And the things that have got me in trouble in the past that I now recognize, I score them, are, am I in love with the shiny new object? Is this something that I'm so fascinated in I'm willing to compromise.

My relationships or quality of life?

Or do I feel the need to not disclose all the details to someone.

Close to me? In other words, I know, like, it'll be like, well, I all this is all fine, but I better not tell Vivian Blank. It'll be like, whoa, where'd that come from? That is in some old mommy stuff that pops up. And it's like the sense, do I feel like I'm going to be in trouble or get in trouble? And again, I know that's some really old, traumatic child programming, but how about you?

I think that, first of all, having some internal standards is really useful. Because if, like, I can remember a situation where a person Came here with a really good idea and well funded, had plenty of money and that kind of thing and wanted my participation in it. And here was a great example of the best deals you will ever do or the ones you don't do. But there were some integrity things that I saw in him from the very beginning. Just little tiny things, like something kind of a little bit derogatory, he said to my wife. And I noticed he was sort of ungentle with one of my cats. And, you know, just little things like that that stuck in me. And so I.

Decided just to go with. Even though the money looked great and the project looked great and it was in an area that I cared about. And then later on, I was so glad I didn't get involved because it crashed and burned. And I forget what the circumstances were, but I remember thinking, oh, okay, that's one airplane I decided not to get on, and I'm glad I didn't. So.

Sometimes, of course, it's going to go the other way. Something that you don't participate in is going to take off like a rocket. And, you know, I was talking to one of my clients this morning that popped an extra 10 million bucks in the bank last month from bitcoin.

Oh, the temple of bitcoin. Yes.

Yeah. And so who knows? But the big point, I think, is to have some kind of internal set of references. Teach yourself. It's kind of like I learned to pay attention finally to when to stop eating, you know, and for some reason I never learned that I would stuff myself. But there's this little point where my body says, okay, that's enough food. And if I go beyond that, I end up feeling stuffed. But if I stop right there, I feel great. I never feel stuffed. And so once I learned to identify that, that was extremely useful to me and made me a healthier and certainly a slimmer person than I was before. And the key thing for whatever you're doing, though, is to find out what those internal references are that go off and trigger you not to do something or to do something. And I think the information is there. It's just learning how to listen to it.

Okay, so I want you to think a little bit about people you've worked with, you and Katie, about people who have broken references for a moment. In other words, they come in and either they've got an unconscious habit of self destruction or a habit that they.

Engage in over and over again, and how you create awareness and create a transformation where you either eradicate it or increase the awareness so much that it's no longer problematic. Can you think of an example or two? Especially as it is the best deals that they never did.

I'll give you a very dramatic example. I was working with a person one time who.

Is now a well known entertainer. But at the time she was hadn't had her big breakthrough as much as she does now. And so in, in the first session with her, I noticed she kept doing this spontaneous body language mannerism where she would.

Kind of like reach up and touch the right side of her face like she was brushing something off. And I noticed it was always on the right side. Now I'm not one of those people that says the right side of your body is all the male side and the left is the female and all that. That's kind of a crude understanding of things, how things work. But you do have to learn how to recognize things in your body. And so I called that to her attention. I said let's make that a metaphor. It looks like you're trying to hide something or wipe something off the right side of your face when you do that. And so we worked with that a little bit. And what came up was that there was this whole area of her life she was trying to hide. And the problem there is if you're trying to hide, you know, like my.

Wise granddad, he was a kind of a combination of Darth Vader and Yoda. He said the higher a monkey gifts up a tree, the more of its butt you can see. And so you know, when she's. When my actress plays.

Starring only in soap operas, but now she's, you know, wants to get into movies and things like that. So.

What I do oftentimes if I find something that a person is hiding secret, I invite them to consider using it as part of their platform. You know, rather than saying, rather than hiding from the fact that she had a lot of addiction in her past, that was the issue that she did not want to bring to the surface. There's an old saying in the marketing business that instead of hiding it, paint it red, you know. And so I did the equivalent or in success.

Yeah, mess to success is the other. They call it mess to success is the other success.

Yeah, yeah. And so instead of doing that, use that as part of your platform and say this is how I got here. And, and use the energy of what you're trying to hide to fuel you to going to that next level. And so there's a situation where that really worked was letting go of control of that whole area of her life. And opening up about it and then using it to ride higher and higher and higher. And then just to add a P.S. to the story.

It's never. Whenever you hear a story like that, it's never. And they were happily ever after because the same kind of issues come up even after you've made a big breakthrough. Like with this particular client once she's now in some movies and on some television network shows and things like that, she's living a different life. She's higher up the tree. But she said, hey, look, this is me. This is who I am. Basically, take it or leave it, I'm not going to hide anymore. And I think that's an approach that really we need to pay attention to because the energy of secrets will be a drag on you no matter what kind of relationships you're in.

Yeah, that's. That is really interesting. This is definitely a little off from the theme of the best things I've ever done were the deals. I never did the. And is because both of us have, we spent a lot of time around a lot of celebrities. And there's an old saying about how money just amplifies who you really are. And if you've been hiding things and you've been secretive about who you really are. And finally, when you feel safe enough because you don't have your money concerns any longer and the ogre shows up, you know, the monster appears. That is very, very interesting. And it's scary because that's when you really find out how incongruent someone might be and how important gaining power was.

To either buy or have power because of the, you know, whatever that number is. So yes, I think some of the.

It's interesting bringing up celebrities. We ought to do a whole show on this sometime because one of the things I've learned in working with various well known people is that celebrity.

Often takes you in a really bad direction in your life.

And sometimes though, some of the coolest, most down to earth people I've met are the most famous people. And in many situations I think it's because they have a certain attitude about the whole thing. I remember one time they put on when we lived over in Santa Barbara, they got several of us local folks to do a benefit and it was me and Kenny Loggins and Marianne Williamson. And so they put out this poster and they put our names up there alphabetically. And so I was showing it to Kenny Loggins and it said Hendrix Loggins Williams. I said, this is probably the only time in my life I'm ever going to get top billing above you. And I remember what he said. He laughed and he said. He said, I believe in the law of gravity. Everything that goes up is going to come down eventually. You know, if you have that kind of attitude toward the whole thing, that's a much healthier way to stay there all the time.

Yep, yep. What do they say, the people you see on the way up? And if you're cruel to them, the same people you're going to see on the way down. And, yeah, the system has a way of equalizing itself another time.

I remember.

The head of.

Motorola was founded by Bob Galvin Sr. And but the Bob Galvin I knew was Bob Galvin Jr. And now there's Chris Galvin, third generation. But anyway, one of the most amazing human beings in the world as far as an executive. And yet in having lunch with the guy, he's so paying attention to what the waiters and things are doing that he realized that the waiter was waiting for us to finish so he could clear that area. I mean, it's just an astonishing thing that this guy is out of the corner of his eye noticing what's going on with a waiter, and yet we're having this animated conversation about the whole structure of Motorola and that kind of thing. So I think that's.

In a way, if I could wave a magic wand over the celebrities that I've. I've worked with, it would be to have a healthier attitude about the whole process itself and not be attached to certain aspects of it. And I've also been grateful many times in walking down the street with one celebrity or the other. I've murmured a thank you prayer that I'm not that famous because it's a little bit of a hassle walking down the street sometimes just trying to get through a city block with somebody who's recognizable.

Yeah. I think what I will do is I made a note for our next episode and let's go down the celebrity path because I've got a whole bunch of stories about some observations and the ones who I think have done the best and.

Are adjusted and actually are happy and have relatively normal families. And then some of these, we obviously can't name them, but then there's some other ones that you're like, holy cr. You know, if people only knew. And.

And. Right. And I think that'll be really, really.

We'll.

We'll come up with a really good angle that we can go down that path and talk about them. Because I. I told you off camera that, you know, I'VE just spent several days in Hollywood with a whole bunch of high ranking people and learned a ton. It was overwhelming and I thought I had an angle and, and some know how but I part of it was because I was in a different position this time position and I got to ask some really deep questions. I spent 90 minutes with a couple of very, very young superstars, music superstars who are change, you know, they're followed by millions of young girls who are very, very jealous. And so we'll go down that path because I learned a lot about how it's framed and how social media has changed their roles, but.

Well, good. Maybe we ought to bring on a couple of healthy celebrities sometime and ask them how they do it.

That is a fantastic idea. And I can think of a couple and I think we should go and get some older ones and some younger ones too. But that would make for some fabulous, fabulous upper limits conversations. So. Well, let's wrap up some of the best things we've ever done and the deals we never did. Because when I looked through my arsenal, the truth is I've done so many bad deals.

Now I can tell you what my mental framework is now that I've told a few younger entrepreneurs and they're like, oh, you have no idea how much that saved me. So here's a frame. And it came from.

I didn't learn it this way. I learned it just by doing stupid things too many times in a row. But, but it came from. I've heard some successful entrepreneurs say, if I had any idea how hard it was going to be, I would never would have started in the first place. Okay. And the, that I think that comes from when we're younger and it's even when you talked about your spiritual cinema Circle book club, it sounded like a good idea. It seemed like it was just going to be a natural brand extension. And you know, the entrepreneurial brain, especially the quick start entrepreneurial brain is going to be like, hey, that's not going to be that hard. I'll just throw some people at this thing and we're just going to make more money and I don't have to build the infrastructure. So it's like a brand extension. And then on another side it'll be like starting a new business. And you forget that there's the people component, the hiring, the firing, the human resources. And someone's not going to get along with someone and pretty soon you're playing babysitter. Right. It's not about the business, it's about the humans or just Gaining market traction and trust.

So.

And, and also this is where you got to become a keen student of the upper limit problem. Because one of the big problems is that somebody on the team will have an upper limit problem that influences the whole operation. And I've seen that happen many times.

Yes. So here's the.

Here'S. I'll tell you the big lesson, but first a little anecdote. So I was sitting next to a guy named Randy Peterson, who's a very big name.

Music manager. And he worked with Prince and Michael Jackson and Justin Bieber and the list goes on and on. I mean, just like an endless supply. And he's, he's an older guy now, but he's still in the game. And it's all about passion. It's only about people he loves. He's only going to work with entertainers he loves. He's not in a compromised position. And he at one point was part of one of the biggest talent agencies in the world and sold. So my suspicion is he doesn't worry about money any longer. Now with that in mind, he just says, I avoid any and all aggravation. That was his basic philosophy of life. And that's what minds become. Now is I, whether it's for the better or for the worse, now that I have the benefit of 30 some years of building and selling businesses, I pretty much can be like, ugh, that is going to be costly to my lifestyle and intimacy and I simply will not compromise my lifestyle intimacy. And frankly, there's a certain amount of financial risk that I'm simply under, unwilling to accept. In other words, now I, I spend a lot more time thinking about it and I should have spent a lot more time thinking about how can I leverage someone else's money here and still own most of it. Because it would have prevented a lot of.

Scarcity mistakes that I made. You know, being, you know, you never want to be cheap on your way to.

And there's certain risks that if you limit the scope of what you're doing and focus, things actually reduce in terms of risk. And I didn't, I just couldn't have, I don't think I could have heard it or understood it or my inability to know just how costly some of these dumb mistakes would be. You know, there wasn't a way to measure it. There wasn't like a scale that I had a reference point to. And I think that's one of the benefits of gaining a little bit of wisdom.

Yeah, some of these things you just have to kind of try learn by fire. Being in the fire. Yeah. Well, good. Well, let's wrap it. Subject we're going to touch on this on other occasions, but for sure, yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to wrap this up or how to summarize exactly what we've been talking about. Well, the general theme I think has to do with pay attention to the things that you get into and ask yourself the big question, is the value I'm going to be getting here worth the potential hassle?

Yeah. Joe Polish has a saying, is the juice worth the squeeze? And that's a great old saying. And I think my summary on this when I listen to you talking about the spiritual cinema circle is the biggest complexities are going to come with people. And if you have an instinctive reaction to the way someone addresses someone you love or care about, or like you said, someone rough with your cats.

And it rubs you, that's going to be amplified 10 or 100 times. And if you don't listen to that gut level reaction.

You can be guaranteed it's going to drive you nuts. And if you're not able to address it internally, it's going to be incredibly difficult to address it externally when you have to do it and it starts eating at you and affecting your performance.

And who needs the aggravation? Life is too short.

To have that in our lives. So that's, I guess my observations after rethinking it.

Yeah, there used to be a beer commercial that said for Vorsteiner beer. It said life is too short to drink cheap beer.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's true. And it's they say the same thing about wine except it it rhymes with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. So.

Life'S too short for Kitty Chitty Bang Bang Wine. So Gay, as usual, you're awesome and I love the way you think. And I can't wait till we do our upcoming episode about celebrities and living in that world. I think there's going to be some great stories there.

So here folks, this is where all the cool conversations are happening on planet Earth right now.

Right on. So a couple of quick things for you always. If you want some neat goodies from Gay and me or want to stay in touch, give us some feedback. Text BL the letters BL 2858-434-5316 or learn more about big leap year and opportunity to work with Gay and me@bigleappodcast.com and of course subscribe. Leave a comment and tell your friends all about this podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode. Thanks for listening.

Thanks a lot everybody.

Sam.