The SuperBeing Economy: What To Do When You Outgrow Yourself

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. Hello and welcome to another episode of Capability Amplifier. I'm here with my very good friend Dan Sullivan and we are talking today about something we call the super being economy and what to do when you outgrow yourself. So we're going to talk a lot about our evolution and how reflects on the changes that are happening right now in the world around us. So one more time. Thank you for being here, Mr. Dan.

Okay, thank you, Mike. Real pleasure. And we spent some good time together in la. I always enjoy the unpredictability of our conversations.

Me too. Absolutely Nothing better than a little bit of mind stimulation here. And for you, the listener listening to us right now, one of the things that Dan and I make a point of doing is talking about the stuff that's really happening right now, both in our world, what we observe in our clients, our customers. Our goal is constant, never ending evolution. And hopefully that's what's drawing you to this program. So Dan, let's talk a little bit about the superbeing economy. First of all, what that is and also this notion of what to do when you outgrow yourself. We just came back from an event, Abundance360 hosted by Peter Diamandis and that of course provides some of the stimulation for this conversation. But what we've seen is this shift in the economy from a doing economy which is rapidly being replaced by robotics and all sorts of machine related things. And we've got the knowing economy which in a lot of ways I see us as transitioning out of to some degree. And we know now that artificial intelligence neural networks are going to be dramatically affecting that. And specifically if we get a little bit nerdy when you hear about a software as service system where you subscribe to some sort of software system like Amazon's AWS or Google Apps. You pay for something that does something for you, it's a service and you don't own hardware. Everything is all in the cloud. My prediction and what's obvious right now is soon we're going to have artificial intelligence and neural networks that are software as service systems. And a tremendous number of knowing jobs, financial services, accounting, therapy, even medicine, is going to be replaced so quickly we're not going to know it came out of left field. So what that's forcing is for us to shift about our own capabilities and our skill sets so we create more experiential, you know, the experiential industries and businesses. Those aren't going to go anywhere. Anything related to innovation, creativity, leadership, as of right now, those things can't easily be replaced by machines.

Yeah, well, I created a model of Mike about 15 years ago that I've never really developed and this would probably be an excellent opportunity to get your input on this. And I say that, you know, we're surrounded in a way that's really radically different in terms of getting input from the outside. You know, there's various models that people talk about that the average person now interacts with more information in an average 24 hour day just from the system, the cultural system that we're in than a really, really well educated person did in their entire lifetime a couple of centuries ago. And that we're just bombarded, we're not aware of the most of it, but we're being affected by this. And, and I was just thinking, because there are businesses built around actually assembling this input and directing it at you. And the first one would be data, which is, you know, it's very short lived data. The average stock price. I just got this from somebody who really delves into this. The actual stock price on the board on the New York Stock Exchange, if you use the stock exchange is 21 seconds, the average length of a price. And that's down from about 35 seconds just two years ago. So that means that there's been a 40% faster change of pricing in the world. So therefore to talk about yesterday's stock price is now meaningless because what was the stock price five minutes ago is meaningless. So that means just connected back to your AI model. Because this is primarily AI, Humans are not capable of keeping track of that and of reflecting prices. So we're moving over to AI. It's not just the actual of knowing what the price is, but it's actually responding to the price. A lot of the trading mechanisms now are not human trading mechanisms, they're AI trading mechanisms. So that means that if you were knowledgeable about pricing in the stock market, that knowledge would have been incredibly more valuable six months ago than it is today. So I'm just going to bring up a thought about that in terms of AI, human teamwork. Garry Kasparov, when he was defeated by Deep Blue, that was the IBM computer that defeated the number one chess player in the world. And he said, I was depressed for about six months and he said, oh, we'll just create another league. It'll be human and AI competition. So we'll still take the grand masters in the world, but they'll each have to pick their favorite AI program. We'll just compete with AI programs, which is interesting because the game shifted, but the really smart human shifted with the game. There was a massive capability amplifier. Now with Deep Blue and they say, oh good, we'll just form a new league where every grandmaster will be the grandmaster of teamwork with his AI or her AI. So that kind of tells you the types of shifting that's going on. I'll just make one point and then I'd like to go back to you. My whole thesis about the growth of technology in the world, that humans are actually being freed up to be human. A lot of human beings haven't been trained to be human and actually been trained to be machines.

I couldn't agree with you more. That's actually incredibly profound. Let me expand on that a little bit. I'll go down a couple little avenues. One of the first, first is we've entered into a world of augmentation. Okay. We have augmented human beings. And you can already say that we are augmented humans with our smartphones. Smartphones by themselves replaced like 50 or 100 different gadgets because an app can replace a gadget. The next thing is, I have a client, his name's Alex Bates. He exited from an artificial intelligence company and I helped him rebrand himself and work on a book called the Augmented Mind. And it's AI Superhumans and the Next Economic Revolution. And the whole idea is what he created was a software based system that combines human intuition with artificial intelligence so humans could do what they do really, really well, which is to see a lot of patterns that sometimes AI or neural networks can't learn. Right now they're really good at repetitive stuff. But still humans can interesting patterns, especially when they deal with human behavior and hierarchy, for example, and human relationship related things. So I think that's a fascinating little avenue to go down. And then the next part of what you talked about, remind me what, there was one other thing that you said. Oh yeah, Humans haven't been trained to be human. So I'm working right now on a TED Talk and I did an interview with two people. They're in the business of booking TED talks. Okay. So they prepare you for what you need to know. And you know, unlike doing any regular speech, TED has a specific formula. There's a certain grading, and TED is looking for a certain type of talk that they use to propel themselves forward. Okay. In other words, they're always working on their brand as well. So I had this conversation and I pitched a concept to these two people. One's 44, the other one is 21. So Tucker is 44. And by the way, some of the conversation we talked about had to do with this being stuff, okay? This whole idea of outgrowing who you are, which I know is going to transition into what we're really talking about today. I talked to him about this notion of evolving and essentially out evolving who you are, and it directly related to the fact that we're not trained to be human. So in his particular case, he was in the same career path for 25 years. He was miserable in his job, and he reached this point where he didn't feel like he had value and purpose. And a couple years ago, he had that experience of, well, there's got to be something more. And he realized, like all of us do at many times in our life, we had outgrown who we were, or as he says, I had outgrown the self I was supposed to be. And he talked about how his father had shown him a certain trajectory. And, you know, in his particular case, he got comfortable doing what he was doing, in this case, being in a marketing ad agency. And that was what he was supposed to do. We all go through that. You know, we become really good machines. Finally, he really realized that to be more human, he had to go back to feeling and being passionate about his younger self and reclaiming that side.

Right.

When you and I, for example, are in the zone of creating, you know, we feel like giddy little boys in that process. I mean, to be truly human is to be a creator in my mind. Now I'm going to go down on the other path, which is Lindsay, who is there. She's 21. So I asked her this simple question. I said, based on what I said, what did you actually hear and what was meaningful? So Tucker heard one thing, Lindsay heard another one. And she said, first of all, you talked about the distinction between a doer, a knower, or a beer. And she said, I just went through school. I wasn't sure what I was going to be. And there's so much value put on knowing at my age. But nobody teaches you how to present yourself, how to show up, how to elevate your value. Her question, her walk away is, wow, if we just even instilled this notion of the distinction between a knower, a doer, and a beer, what kind of impact that would have on young people and how it's like, if you imagine going on a. How many kids these days go into school, they study a topic, they love the topic but then they get out and find the work environment so sucks, and they're like, I don't even want to be here. I invested my four or five years. That certainly is the opposite of being so. That was a lot of information. But it really, again, gets back to this whole notion of as we go through these cycles, can we predict when we outgrow who we are? There are certainly cycles in our physical age, but you've got a few years on me. You've worked with 30,000 business owners in your career. I'm curious, from your perspective, what patterns have you recognized and seen in folks when they outgrow them, who they are?

Yeah, well, Joe Polish, who a lot of our listeners know, and my connection with you, as it is with many other people, came through an introduction from Joe. I can remember I met you poolside at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, and Joe said, you got to go over and talk to Mike. And so I did. But I just like to hit on that childlike thing because Joe and I are creating a book called Unique and we did a series of podcasts on it. And it'll come out, first of all, as one of our small books in the Strategic Coach. It'll be co authored by Joe and myself. But one of the mindsets I came there is that you have to get back in touch with who you were when you were six years old. You were more unique in terms of the future when you were six than you were, let's say, 16 years later when you got out of college or anything else. A lot of what made you unique has been asked to submerge itself through the process of learning how to do and learning how to know. And after a while, who you thought you were at six gets shifted to the total, what I would say, layer after layer of knowing how to do things and doing what you know how to do as preparation for going out into the marketplace. So I'm totally in agreement with you. I've been coaching entrepreneurs for 45 years now, Mike, and I would say that the ones who continually self evolve right from the beginning, they strike you as childlike, their enthusiasm about the future. And, you know, I'm 75 and just massively, almost 75 in a few months. But I'm just massively excited about what lies in the final quarter of my first century. You know, in other words, 75. So it's a nice framework I have because I can just look at 25 years and I say, man, what's going to happen over the next 25 years? And who I'm getting to meet and who I'm getting to interact and teamwork and collaborate now is 100 times greater than it was even 10, 15 years ago. So my sense is that the key skill really, really starts in getting in touch with where you were right at the beginning. And actually, six is a really interesting age because in my day, it's different today. But school started at six, you know, in September, after my sixth birthday. And I hated school because up until six, I just had massive amounts of freedom. And then they started taking my freedom away, you know. But I feel, you know, at 75, I'm operating more like my six year old than I was a quarter century ago. When I was 50 years old, I wasn't nearly as in touch with who I was at 6 as I am right now. And whether it was by choice or I've been forced to do it, I've been moving more and more towards the being stage rather than the knowing or doing stage. I'm surrounded by knowers and doers. I've built networks of knowers and doers around me. And I found that just being Dan and the podcasts, actually, I've got eight podcast series going. And the thing that I love best about the podcast, I can just be who I am on the podcast.

I see that. So I'm going to enter in part of what my objective and my goal in working with you is for our listener to be able to hear what we do. And I know we're talking about actually switching up the format of the podcast a little bit. We may or may not talk about that on this episode, but one of your greatest skill sets is creating filters. And one of the goals of being able to model a great mind, being able to emulate and take on or adopt that. And I think about it like this. If you imagine that a young brain has a lot of plasticity, neuroplasticity is a big phrase that's used in brain research. And young brains, whether they're old or young, are those that are the most plastic, most malleable, and able to, like, eliminate addiction, for example, or trauma and be able to reprogram themselves, create new chains and connections. When I think about creating a filter. So, again, the objective of if we use the Dan Sullivan genius of thinking about, how do we model that brain? Some of the things that popped into my head is, okay, going back to what happens when you outgrow who you are. You feel that need. There's something inside of you that gets activated, and it's like Blech. Speaking personally, about a year and a half ago, I woke up and I realized I felt anxious. For the first time in my life, I was experiencing noticeable depression. Like I did not want to get out of bed. And that is not characteristically who I am. But I realized that even though I loved doing what I was doing, I had outgrown my message, who I was, why I was doing it, and my motivations changed. My value systems literally shifted almost overnight. So I'm curious, from your vantage point, what is going on inside a brain when you've outgrown who you are? And from your perspective, after working with, observing, experiencing this yourself, how do you garner the courage and the confidence and the clarity to address that, move forward, detect it? How do you get out of your own way?

Yeah, well, one of our podcasts, Mike, we had you go through your six careers, if you will. It was either the cornfields or you were going to be a hacker. You know, and we share that in common because we're both Midwest farm boys. The interesting thing, as we went through, and I'll ask you the question here, it strikes me that your first five iterations of your career, which was heavily taking advantage of the new electronic capabilities to amplify yourself, I would say that there was a common stream. You were investigating different areas of how you could take advantage of the growth of technology. And it seemed to me that if I could characterize this, and I'm going to ask you whether that's actually the case, that for the first five, starting with the first one, you sort of exhausted the possibilities of one level of knowing and doing, and you had to find a new knowing and a new doing you could go to. And you did that once, twice, three times, times, five times, and you had that down pat. You could always make a jump to a new level of knowing and doing. But it struck me that as you tell the story a year and a half ago, you had reached the point where you knew the answer wasn't any new level of knowing and doing. And, gee, you know, you're like a snake who always knows how to grow a new snake. And then you hit one level of snake ability and you've run out of a bigger skin. And it had to be not a difference of degree. It had to be a difference of kind. In other words, it wasn't just a bigger, better version at another level of knowing and doing. It was something entirely different. So does that give a context of what you were saying? And there's a real identity crisis that occurs.

Wow, that Was very powerful. I'll tell you what struck me is ever since I started talking about this publicly, I've had an enormous number of business people coming up saying that's exactly what's been going on for me too. And they aren't all the same age either, because I've had some people say, well, how many of these people are your age? So I'm 52. There are a chunk of them. But I'm talking to 40 year olds, certainly younger people, 30. Some year olds are relating to it too. I think some of it just has to do with something's in the air. I've said this before. My prediction, my belief is that from a spiritual, energetic level, we are on the brink of singularity. A shift in human consciousness, not to mention everything else that's going on on a socioeconomic, political level as well. And it's the human organism, meaning beyond the individual can feel this occurring. I will tell you that I had something pretty profound happen yesterday. I'm working with an energetic healer, a gentleman from Sri Lanka. I can share this much. It's someone I met through Dave Asprey from Bulletproof. He's close to 80 years old and really fascinating guy who does energy stuff. He said two things that were simple but profound. He calls them practices and passwords. And he uses the word password as a means of causing a shift in consciousness or awareness. So sometimes, you know, it's the smallest little thing that causes a skip in your brain record and you make an evolutionary shift in a jump. Right. His password that he threw out at me was called fascination. As you were talking and going back to what makes you you, meaning Dan Sullivan, is you're constantly fascinated. I also realize as you were talking about when you wear out the snake skin, so to speak, the evolutionary shift is when you stop being fascinated. That is a force. It's like you reach the barrier in the block. So I'm curious what your response, reaction is to that notion of when fascination leaves or exits.

Well, it's like the tank is empty and there's no fuel. I mean, the fuel that worked before, doesn't it?

You're really crossing over a threshold. And part of the threshold is because of your own development and growth that you've gone through. Okay, so you've constantly improved, you've constantly transformed, but you've kind of transformed from within the same kind of categories. I think the doing, knowing, being is a great structure, but for thinking about this, and I think everybody has to go through a knowing and doing stage of their life. Just to accumulate experience and know what works from what doesn't work, what counts, what doesn't count. So my feeling is I don't think that this is bypassable. Even though you could give someone who's 6 years old or 10 years old or 15 years old this structure, they don't have enough experience to actually check it out for themselves. Because in our world, you're under the guidance, you're under the care, you're within the structures that other people have created for you. And they now know from neural research that the human brain, especially the frontal cortex, is not completely developed until about age 24. And my feeling is that you have to have a high degree of frontal cortex to see the distinction, Mike, that you're actually making here. You know, you got to have an adult brain, and you can't operate as an adult when you're 15 because you don't have a fully developed brain. You can have tremendous intuitions about it, but you just don't have enough experience. My preferred group of people to work with in the marketplace, and has been for 45 years, are people who are willing to go out and hit the marketplace head on as entrepreneurs. And the reason is because the marketplace doesn't really care about your knowing and doing. It just wants what it wants, and it's your job to adjust to the new knowing and doing. So I think entrepreneurs, I don't know if they're any more honest than the general population, but I think they get punished more quickly for failure than the general population does.

That is so true. Yeah. Well, I think the distinction that I hear is there's a big difference between knowing and then wisdom, which is the accumulation of life experience, the ability to act on that and know what the pains are. But as we age, the resistance, at least the resistance I notice in myself, and I certainly do in people who stop being fascinated is what you're willing to put up with. In other words, let's say, and I have the good fortune of being able to do this right now, I've got a lot of white space in my life. And that is, you look at the environment, whether it's a marketplace, and you'll say, look, I'm not willing to do that because I know what's going to happen. And a young brain doesn't know any better. You're willing to take on the impossible because you're ignorant. And the beauty of young entrepreneurship is the impossible can be pulled off because a, you're not wise enough to know what doesn't work, but also your Threshold of pain is different. You know, it's not exercised. So I certainly think that there's something to that as well.

Yeah. You know, we can continue on in the next episode or we can sum up this one. But I would say going back to my model, I started with data, and I said, and the next input is organized on the level of information. Information lasts a little bit longer than data. And then the third level is knowledge, and knowledge hangs around a bit longer than information. And then there's this big jump across a chasm to wisdom. And wisdom is good forever. In other words, it's a realm of knowing about the world, knowing about yourself, knowing about your relationships with other people. That is solid to start with, and you can build on it so it doesn't have to be completely replaced. There's a lot of talk today about religion, but, you know, the great purpose that religion, the ones that have lasted a long time, is because there's enormous wisdom in the stories that that religion talks about humans, regardless of their circumstances. This is who humans are actually going to be. And my sense is that if you're going to be gainfully employed, gainfully engaged in the marketplace over the next several decades, as AI takes care of knowledge, AI takes care of information, and AI takes care of data, then it's sort of saying, we're being thrown out of the nest.

Mother eagles have a really, really easy way of teaching eaglets, little eaglets, how to fly. They kick them out of the nest. And the ones that don't hit the ground learned how to fly. And I think humans right now are getting tossed out of the nest. And some people saying, I don't know how to fly. I don't know. I would go back to your year and a half ago, you were suddenly realizing for the first time in your life you didn't know how to fly.

That's very true. Well, in the meantime, again, what's comfortable suddenly becomes uncomfortable. And it's like, I don't want to fly that way any longer.

Right, yeah.

And it's an interesting ego battle that takes place. So, yeah, that's a great story. So there's a lot of big ideas that we can take on in the next episode. I'm looking forward to that. I'm looking at some of our notes, but I think some of the things that we're going to be talking about are breakthroughs, obstacles, and reality, but also what it takes to be a hero and the continuation of what you just talked about now, which is what I think we seek is when we Talk about experience and wisdom and building our capabilities is what does it take to become legendary? You know, like a religion, for example, is legendary. People who have great wisdom that gets carried on for decades or centuries later are those who have been able to articulate wisdom, which matters. It's something that can be acted upon and it lasts for a long, long time. It weathers the test of time.

Yeah.

So I think that's going to be a great topic for us to dive into and really explore. What do we need to do, especially with the future that we're standing in front of right now, to continue to create an opportunity to become a hero to our own audience, our own marketplace, and remain relevant and also encourage our natural need to constantly evolve.

Great, Great topic, Mike. Thanks for introducing this and actually keying it back to something that you've experienced very vividly yourself over the last year. And what's interesting, and we'll talk about this in the next episode, is what you immediately found as the focus. Because of the experience you were going through, you had a keen insight into other people who were actually going through the same situation. So, you know, we teach the things that we want to learn.

I don't know if I've said this on the podcast before. My wife used to work for Deepak Chopra, and he said to her, once we all write the book we need to read. And my observation has been, we all create the product we want to buy. And that is absolutely true as we cycle through. And if you're a good marketer, if you're a good entrepreneur and you're constantly evolving, you're going to get exactly who you deserve as a customer as you evolve as well. That is true for a good brand also. So this reflects both on the creator as well as the individual entrepreneur and the brand too. So we'll definitely tie that together in the next episode. And I'm looking forward to that.

Thanks, Mike. Great, Great topic.

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