Who Do You Want To Be A Hero To? | Capability Amplifier

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Hi, this is Dan Sullivan, and this is the next episode of one of my very favorite fascinating and motivating activities, and that is doing a podcast with my great friend Mike Koenig. And. And Mike, we've opened up a whole universe in one of the previous episodes. And the episode was that we're moving as humans from the state of being doers and being knowers to actually being beings, which I guess what human being actually means. It's aptly named. It was hidden all that time and we didn't even know it was right. In the first two words of how we describe ourselves. We are human beings. Most of the time we' talked about human knowers and human doers, but now we have to be human beings.

And I'd go so far as to say now we're being forced into another level, which I think is super beings. We're entering into a, in some ways a more complex economy and more complex times and how we engage and interact with each other and society and technology is forcing an evolution. So today we're going to be talking about. About where we run into breakthroughs and how we get through them, but also we're going to talk about being a hero for 25 years and where we can find and seek more improvement in our lives. So again, running consistent and congruent with the title of this podcast, which is Capability amplifier and increasing your capabilities, but also moving towards being better beings at the same time. So I want to kick things off a little bit with you, Dan. What do you mean when you say that the breakthroughs are in the obstacles through your lens?

Well, Mike, I've been part of the creation of Abundance360 with Peter Diamantis. So I think this was conference number seven in our seventh year that we went to in Beverly Hills, and you were sitting with Babs and me throughout the entire two and a half days. I have become very super conscious as we've gone along with technology, that it's becoming more and more hype. There's a hype quality to the presentation of new technologies, cutting edge technologies, technologies that might be disruptive, but I'm noticing there's a high hype quality about them and you have to create filters. And you complimented me by saying that one of the things that I do is to create filters for actually taking what you're hearing and actually making it sensible for you. So we had a variety of different technologies, and I'LL just use one as an example. It would be virtual reality. There was a lot of talk about virtual reality, but this has been constant now for six years. This whole thing about virtual reality. And predicted on what was being predicted six years ago, I'm not seeing a lot of it around. And part of it is that you have to wear goggles still. Goggles are kind of antisocial. There's an antisocial quality about goggles that you're kind of alone with your own experience. When you're wearing goggles, you might be in somebody else's experience, but you're kind of alone with that. So I was saying, you know, I have no interest in doing this myself. And why is it that I have no interest in doing this my myself. Now, if I was training to be, you know, a fighter pilot, I would want the very best virtual reality program to train me. But what I'm saying is that to pick up on a model that you created in our last episode, that humans are generally trained to be doers or knowers. And it strikes me that virtual reality is a heightened version of teaching people how to be doers and knowers. But it doesn't necessarily teach you how to be a bee or actually being a being. So what I did is with each new technology that was presented from the Abundance360 stage, I had my computer there and I went to Google and I said, what are the 10 biggest obstacles standing in the way of the development of virtual reality? And you know what the biggest obstacle is to people really adapting virtual reality?

Well, convenience is the first thing that pops into my head, is there's a lot of inconvenience, but that was one of them.

But the actual one is that people actually like actual reality, that they've got things about actual reality which keep them really fascinated and engaged and motivated. And a lot of the people that I've talked to are really into virtual reality. When I ask them about their life outside of virtual reality, it's kind of boring. You know, they don't have a real sense of satisfaction about their actual life in their parents basement. And they're going on 35 and they've never been really good to get results. So my sense is that the being stage that you're talking about, while it can be amplified with technology, it actually has to do with the actual reality of your own life. And I'll just take everybody Back to the 18 months ago date with destiny that you had with yourself, that you had gone very successfully through five iterations of your entrepreneurial career and then kind of hit a wall because those were all doing and knowing successes. And all of a sudden there wasn't a next level of doing and knowing that you would automatically be fascinated and motivated to move on to. As a matter of fact, you were into a void, you were into a desert. You were without sensory input. The only thing you had left to deal with was actually Mike. You just had to deal with Mike. So that's where I'd like to talk about, is that you were confronted with obstacles. And what came out the other side, which I'm very excited about, is that you zeroed in that maybe my next stage isn't about knowing and doing at all. It's about tapping into where I can be more Mike in a vast number of different ways. And not only that, I can be extraordinarily useful to other people who are going through exactly the same jump over a threshold as I'm going now. If that sums up where we were before.

Yeah, that's a hell of a setup. So thank you. So here's to even put it in more context. At first I was pretty scared to talk about it. And that's a ego fear thing. Of course, that again, I recognize in a lot of entrepreneurs, which very frequently when you meet someone who recently sold a business and they're out, the first thing, especially if you're a hardcore entrepreneur, is you get scared really fast because you're not busy. One of the first things I had to confront was how addicted I was to being busy and how dependent I was on constant feedback inside an organization of doing, doing, doing, doing, doing that whole spin. And when it's not there, holy cow, terror kicks in. And again, I wasn't willing to take the risk to talk about it because as an entrepreneur with an ego, a big ego, in my case, because I was public, forward facing, I was like, well, I don't want to talk about something until I fixed it first. Because who's going to want to work with me if I'm not the guy with the answers? And what I have found is the more raw and authentic you are as you're going through the process as an imperfect being, the more attractive and real you are to your audience. And interestingly, as soon as I started talking about that publicly, a lot of people saying, hey, I'm going through that too. Can you help me?

Yeah, I know you're in the beginning stages of your. I'll call it coaching because it's a natural form that I've been at for the last 45 years. But let's just use the word coaching. If you take the first person that you coached in this new process, sort of now becoming good at super being, that's the framework that you're talking about, the super being. And you now look at the first person and what you knew as a result of that first interaction. And now it's accumulating the number of people that you're doing this with. What do you now know are basic building blocks towards this that you did not know when you first started?

God, that's a great question, Dan. I talked about this a while ago in a speech called the Value Gap, but I'll be a little more distinctive, which is, as we evolve, we take for granted our accumulated wisdom and value to a market. And the way we're judging ourselves is based on a new reality.

And.

And it's like we forsake our past and don't communicate that effectively. In other words, our evolved state, our accumulated wisdom, has a tremendous amount of value in our being state. I can't tell you how many people I meet. In fact, I was talking to a gentleman yesterday who had started a new business and he's severely undercharging for what he does. And this is a guy who's built and sold a business. And he walked away. It was a multimillion dollar transaction. I gave him the shame on you or how dare you undercharge by so much. And he said, well, that's all this particular audience I'm talking to can afford. I said, how do you know that? It's the assumptions we make are always dependent upon the state of being, the state of mind we're currently in. And I like to say we all get exactly who we deserve as customers based on our own perception of ourselves and our filter. So it's when our ego gets in the way of our own value and our unwillingness to ask for our true value and worth. So the direct answer to that question is not knowing your true perceived value and how easy it is. And easy I'm going to put in quotes. It's hard to get out of your own way. It's hard to get out of your ego's way. But learning how to tell a story and a framework for positioning you as an authority, as an influencer, as an expert in a way that resonates with an audience that they hear and being able to really understand what they hear. So what I've noticed in my own evolution is every person I've been working with as an advisor. It's been a year or so since I started taking on a bunch of people and I've gone through multiple iterations. A huge part of what I do is listen. I ask a lot of questions and I craft stories that position them that they can present and talk about. So people are like, holy cow, you're the one for me. And that same storytelling process works for an individual as well as a real brand. And just before we got on to record today, I was talking to another gentleman. He works with extremely high net worth individuals. In this particular case, people who have recently come into an enormous amount of wealth. Like someone who just a company they worked for went public and suddenly they have $100 million. A genuine identity crisis. And like, what am I going to do next? It's a high quality problem to have. But their whole world is shocked. So how do you communicate and attract that type of person into your business? And then I've worked with an AI company. Now I'm working with a space company that's launching rockets into space. Well, the storytelling we have to do has to come through a variety of filters. So what I've been learning that I'm endlessly fascinated with is to become a great storyteller is an exercise in compassion and empathy where you need to become the eyes and voice of two sides of a conversation simultaneously and oftentimes dozens of them. It's why I love copywriting and marketing so much. Is on its deepest, most spiritual level. It is profound empathy. It's a fascinating practice because you can adopt many personalities simultaneously to become good at this. And it's not easy. It's brain breaking work.

Yeah. Well, the other thing is that you have to give yourself credit for all your previous evolutions, that you are picking up permanent skills. I'll call them permanent skills. So I've gotten down to the point at 75 and I think we all start around 6 or 7 because you start to grasp that you're actually a different unique human being around age 6 or 7. That I'm good at three things. And I try to even whittle the doing part, knowing part of these three things. I'm really good at coaching. So I coach entrepreneurs in workshops. I would say I've gotten continually better. I'm just going on 30 years. This is my 118th quarter that I'm going into right now. And my feel for a workshop, my feel for who's in the workshop, my ability to stop the action, my ability to just go with the flow has constantly been getting better. The other thing is that I'm really good at thinking through new thinking tools that my clients can be using right now to deal with a changing world around them. So that's two. And the other thing is, I'm very, very good at marketing. That takes the form of what we're doing right now, where it's not about talking about the service of Strategic Coach or talking about Strategic Coach at all, but it's just talking about the kinds of ideas that we explore in Strategic Coach. And it's just geared to one kind of person that I want to be a hero to, and that is a ambitious, talented, successful entrepreneur who wants to change their game at a higher level than they've ever experienced before. And we're very resonant in what we're both doing here, Mike. And they want to change their game, and I want to be a hero to them for the next 25 years. So I'm saying this at age 75 and for the next 25 years, I want to be extraordinarily useful to entrepreneurs who are game changers. And they could be in their 20s, they could be in their 30s, 40s, 50s, but it doesn't matter. They just have an instinct that they want to do something that continually will make them more fascinated and motivated about their future, both as an entrepreneur, but also in their personal life. So that's it. And I'll tell you where I came up with this. So yesterday I had a zoom call with five members of my game changing program and it was focused on health care. And I have eight of the game changers out of 50 right now. That's the number of game changers. And eight of them are focused in, in very, very different ways on healthcare. Healthcare now in the 21st century, with massive amounts of technological and scientific breakthroughs happening exponentially. I started the conversation, I said, before we talk about what you are doing and what you know to be true about the marketplace you're working in, I'd like each of you to say, who is it specifically that you want to be a hero to? That 25 years from now, you would be even more excited about being a hero to this person. And the whole conversation just went whack, just like that. And we got through and everybody had a tremendously moving, almost a moving statement about who they wanted to be a hero to. And the interesting thing about it, somebody said, hey, I just noticed and I'm looking, and we've got people in their 50s and 60s here, maybe somebody in their late 40s, but everybody said they're going to actually be around 25 years from now, doing the thing that they're most excited about. And I said, isn't that interesting that nobody said, oh, no, no, I'm packing it in 10 years or 15 years. And I think part of the reason is that the guy who was leading the conversation was the oldest guy in the discussion, and he's saying, oh, 25 years. What we're going to be able to do 25 years from now. And I said, quite frankly, the five of you that I see on the screen here are exactly who I want to be a hero to for the next 25 years. So maybe if you find that a useful context of talking about your particular clients now and talking about who you want to be a hero to, and it would be Even more so 25 years from now, that's great.

What a setup, Dan. So here's what runs in parallel. So when I had my big eye opening game changing, holy cow, I got to change my life moment 18 months or so ago, I started trying to muscle my way through the process, right? It was like, I'm going to get through this thing, not really understanding and realizing that I needed to shed layers of practice and ego and chaos, addiction and all that. But over the course of those 18 months, I've developed about 25 tools and resources that I use as diagnostic result things, you know, so one of them that's very similar to what you're talking about when you say who you want to be a hero to. I call it the 2% exercise. And the basic premise behind this is if you looked at anyone who's got a real business, so a real business is one that has customers that pay you. I ask them, first of all, who their top 20% are and who their bottom 20% are. And then I say, now let's look at the very top, and who are the top 2%, okay? And if you could tell me who they are, knowing that everything you ever say from this moment forward is designed to attract that 2% to you is true, right? And we're going to actually create a narrative. And the narrative is simple. First of all, you're going to inspire and create an aspirational environment to inspire everyone to become the 2%. In fact, you're going to tell people, the second exercise I do with someone is I actually force them to fire the lowest 20% of their clients. And ideally, you cycle through that and do it every half a year, every year, sometimes more frequently. So from there, we create this narrative and this conversation, and the parallel is, who do you want to Be a hero to. It really is a hero conversation.

Yes, it is.

It's the dialogue. It's the words we use. It's the phrase we use. And so when we go back to what has been working the best, especially to trigger the empathy, is struggling entrepreneurs are the ones who've gotten used to opening up a conversation with something like, this is the cheapest way you can start working with me. Or if you want to get going, the easiest way possible. They've become so used to appealing to the lowest common denominator that that has become who they are. Their being is embedded in that practice, and it literally requires a toilet flush. So a huge part of what I do, you know, and I call myself an advisor versus a coach. I have some psychological reasons for that, is to stop patterns of mental behavior that permeate through the entire organization. In fact, it infects the brand. It infects everyone inside the organization. And energetically, the owner actually brings that imprint around with them. So it's sort of like, if you think about, there's this big record company, it's stomping records into everyone who works for you. And interestingly, you can reset that behavior super quickly. So I'll give you an example of something that I started doing. I'd say, okay, your first job is going to be after we go through the exercise of the top 20% and the top 2%. You know, I get them excited about feeling that way again and communicating that way and changing their language pattern. But then I say, we're gonna actually call up whoever's in charge of client services or customers. And this can also be your Whoever answers the phone. Secretary's executive assistant. And you're going to empower them to identify the red flags, the lowest 20%. And you're gonna say, you have the right to fire the lowest 20%. Anyone who's a PETA, also known as pain in the ass. You get to determine who they are, and I can't veto you. And that energetically shifts every way that everyone interacts, and they feel empowered. It, like, shifts the energy of an organization, and it's a massive reset. So I think that goes back to, who do you want to be a hero to? Well, if you want to create an amazing brand, an amazing business, you better be a hero to your own people, first and foremost. And that's a great way to empower them, which is I value you. I value your opinion so much that I empower you to decide who our top 2%, our top 20% is and who we aspire to inspire.

I notice a process with a lot of entrepreneurs whose identity is totally tied to what they do, you know, in the marketplace. And oftentimes, you know, they've had 25 years in the past actually doing this and they become totally identified with their product or with their particular service. And here's their pricing. They have a four stage pricing model and the first one is, well, here's my price. And the person says, that seems like a lot. Well, tell you what, we have a way where it's only half that. Yeah, seems, you know, am I getting any value? Oh, well, I didn't tell you about our free trial. I didn't tell you about our free trial for the next free three months. And they said, free? Yeah, I don't know if I want that free trial. And then they said, tell you what, we'll pay you for the first three months.

And the whole point is they're below worthless. They price themselves to below worthless. But the fact is that if you're having the bottom 20% of your client base ruling the roost, you're actually paying to work with them, you're taking it out of your own pocket to pay for them.

It's usually the bottom 50% that are costing you money.

Oh, yeah, it's actually the bottom 80%.

Yeah, right.

I mean, once you get around to it, I know you can hit them with get rid of your top 80% right off the bat. But there's a network which is called the value accounting network, and they have analyzed hundreds of thousands of companies, companies in terms of their client base. And they have to draw a line where above that line they're actually making a profit and where below that line it's actually costing them to do this business. And it's 80, 20, not surprisingly, it's 80, 20. Top 20% is where all the profit is. Bottom 80% is where all the expense is. Mike, I just want to say that the value of the model that you're creating and I think also the way we're approaching our own strategic coach client base, first of all is very resonant. But I think the way the two of us as entrepreneurs now are approaching our own creation in the marketplace is very much supported by what's happening technologically, what's happening culturally. Certainly it's supported enormously by psychological research and economic research. You know, that basically I think we're at the very, very center of a major shift on the planet that we're being forced into because of the technology just taking over and making us Obsolete in a lot of other ways that we've thought that's who we are on the planet. We're just being obsoleted very, very quickly.

Yes. And as you talked about that, I'm going to go off on a slight tangent. That's relevant, that's affecting more people than realize, and I know we'll deep dive in this in another conversation too, but right now, Facebook at this particular moment is actually out of inventory. Okay. There are six and a half million advertisers. That's what I've heard. I haven't verified that number. So if someone smarter than me knows precisely what it is, but let's assume for a moment it is. There's no inventory available. There's six and a half million advertisers, and I guarantee you 80% of those advertisers have no idea what they're doing. They're just people buying Bitcoin for all practical purposes, back when it was going crazy. But it means from a business perspective, we have to behave differently. We have to rethink and revisit. And as soon as the masses are in a space, it's time to go in the exact opposite direction. And that again goes back to all of these. And we talked before about the evolution of humankind becoming more being. This is where the economy, the being economy, we're moving to of something that's intimate, deep and narrow and expensive. Never has there been a better time to build a business that revolves around leadership, intimacy, evolution, transformation. Exactly. And people are willing to pay for that, especially in times of massive shifts like we're experiencing right now. And my prediction is, again, on a geopolitical level, we're going to have so many shakeups around us. And those who really start avoiding the large crowds right now are going to be the big winners once again as we go through the next dip, the next cycle that we're about to experience.

Terrific. What a topic. I have to tell you, you introduced this an episode ago. You know, it has allowed me to organize a lot of diverse, different insights I've had. And this is my 45th year of coaching. It's our 30th year of the program. But a lot of things are converging, which were separate topics, separate dimensions. Just out of your focus on the super Being Economy. Sounds like a great book, actually. It sounds like a great book, Mike.

That's what my agent says. So that's part of what I'm doing in the podcast is I'm actually testing it out. Right?

Yes, I know, entrepreneur.

You better test out the idea and see what the reaction and response is.

Yeah, we're both very sneaky copywriters.

So true. So maybe we can bring this baby home. So one more time, Dan, it's always a pleasure to spend time thinking with you and creating with you, my friend.

Thank you, Mike. Yeah, this is sure pleasure for me.

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