Who Not How – The Formula To Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. Hey, this is Mike Koenigs, and welcome to another episode of Capability Amplifier. We are here talking about who, not how. It's actually Dan's latest book with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, and the subtitle is the Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork. And it's a big idea whose time has come, and it'll completely the way you think about getting things done. So, Dan, let's rip right into it. It's a big idea you talk about a lot. We've been talking about it now for well over a year at Coach, but why don't you give us the basic premise behind this and how our listeners can actually use it?

Well, I'll just start off by mentioning that the idea actually comes from a comment that Dean Jackson, friend of both of us, friend of a lot of people, he just happened to mention this because we have a podcast series, Dean and I, and we were dealing with procrastination, and we were just going over why do people procrastinate?

They have goals.

They have a vision of who they can be in the future, bigger and better, and they're very excited about that vision. But then they stop. And they stop. We identified and Dean really put it into words. He said, the reason is because we ask ourselves now, how can I accomplish that goal?

And it brings up a weird thing, because if you had the ability to actually accomplish that goal right now, you would have accomplished it. So by the very nature of having a bigger and better goal, you're going into territory where you really don't have all the capabilities. So instead of saying, how can I accomplish that? You say, who can accomplish that with me? Who can accomplish that for me? So the natural thing is to untrain yourself of thinking. You have to do the steps to actually get to the goal and start thinking about who can help you around you. And we talked a lot about why that is, but we put it into a book. So I just took the idea. And if anybody looks at the book, the first printed page, after a few testimonials, is a dedicated to Dean Jackson. And I did that deliberately because if somebody gives you a good idea, give them credit for the idea. And Dean's somebody who can simplify things really well, and he's got a way of summing up a big deal in just a few words. So I thanked him. And then the actual writer of the book is Ben Hardy, who just has a gift for a main market book that I don't really have. I've been kind of focused for the better part of my life just focused on a particular type of individual in the marketplace. Mike, an entrepreneur, you're one of the entrepreneurs that I think of when I think of new things. But it's not a main market. It's not a main market voice. And the process of going through and writing the main market book, I don't really have the attention for it. I really don't have the follow through on it. And Ben does. Ben's a great blog writer. He's written best selling books. And then we have Tucker Max, who's a great book strategist and book packager and he negotiated the deal with Reed Tracy, who's at Hay House just up the road from you here in San Diego. And he's Carlsbad. I think he's in Carlsbad. So the whole point is that my world for the rest of my life, it has been for the last certainly 30 or 40 years, is I have goals and I have ways of clearly communicating my goals. But the whole thing is okay now who do I have on the team that helps me do that? And you're one of, you're one of my team members.

First of all. I appreciate that and it's good to hear. Well, in your case, you really built this book based upon the who's because as a idea guy, a simplifier, and also a student and lover of history and also just being able to observe behavior patterns, that's really one of your great gifts. And so I'm going to ask you a few questions about the book. And one of my goals is to be able to create some ideas, some content that isn't even in the book. So we're not just rehashing what's there and what's available online. Although I will just shamelessly plug right now. If you're listening to us, if you haven't grabbed a copy, head on over to whonothow.com because you can get the book plus some bonus videos. There's a lot of great content that's available. But I'm gonna just ask you this. First of all, I'm gonna just say one statement, which I've been joking for years with everyone I've ever worked with. I always say be wary and avoid stepping in how pies. Cause if you spend all your time thinking about houzz, you wind up in stepping in manure. And when you and Ben created the framework for the book, you really focused this around what I would say are the defining principles of Strategic coach, which is freedom of time, of money, freedom of relationship, freedom of purpose. And one of the things then is you really dove into the who side of this. And one of our favorite people we have in common is Joe Polish, who is the ultimate who guy. If you have a problem, we connect with Joe and say, who do you know who knows how to solve the problem? And usually 10 to 15 seconds later, you get a text intro or an email intro from Joe saying, here's what's going on, you guys should talk. Here's what needs to be done. And if that person can't directly solve the problem, they can more than often turn you on to someone who can. And getting into who thinking is a big part of this, instead of how thinking. So why don't you talk a little bit about the mindset of who thinking as opposed to how thinking?

Yeah. First of all, I think that we're kind of born as rugged individuals. Even though we've got mom, we got dad, we got all sorts of people who are who's who kind of take care of us. We're not really conscious of that. And then you get into school, and school kind of doubles down on you being the how who does things. You know, you have to do the assignments by yourself. You have to do the test by yourself. You know, they recommend that you do the homework work, and that continues on from junior kindergarten through grade school to high school to undergraduate to graduate. You know, so somebody's been in this how focused system from 4 years old to 26 years old. So you're, you probably got how hardwired. And I think that when you get out into the marketplace for a while, your how that you're good at is probably rewarded. You probably can get a job, you can probably get reasonably well paid for it, but I think it probably wears off pretty quickly. And I would say probably people in their 30s pushing 40, the world wants something else from you. They would like to see if you can take your capability and combine it with other people's capability and produce a result that's a lot bigger. But I think a lot of people are so trained into how thinking when in the real learning parts of their life, you know, which is early, where the brain's putting itself together and you get hardwired on how it's not a natural thing to think of who's. But entrepreneurs get a big reward for doing this, and I think they get punished for not doing it, and they get rewarded for doing it. So I would Say that the advantage that entrepreneurs have, it's kind of like I was telling somebody, you know, that entrepreneurs are more honest than other people. And I said, I don't know if they're any more honest, but I think they get punished more quickly for lying to themselves. And one of the things you can lie about yourself is that you're good at everything. Lie that you're the one to actually do everything. That's a lie. You know, you're not, you're good at some things, but you can look around you and there's people, probably 80% of the things that you do. You could find somebody in every category who's better than you. Why don't you just learn how to do teamwork with the people who are better than you? Right.

Well, as you were describing that, there were a few things that pop into my head when I think about the cycle of evolution. And this may or may not. It's funny because I thought of a new distinction as you're going through it. So first of all, I talk about we go through a doing phase of our life and a lot of and most of the population stays there their entire lives. They get rewarded with market driven wages in exchange for doing a task. And by and large, we are created to be drones in a drone world, to do drone things. And if you're lucky enough to evolve or be educated enough, you get paid for knowing things. Okay. And then you get into a white collar knowing profession. And if you really elevate, you can elevate to a being phase of your life where simply your presence has value. And that's a combination sometimes of performance capabilities. It's connections, network, but a new type of thinking. You know, you think about being around the guru. No one goes to the bottom of the mountain to visit the guru. They go to the top of the mountain to visit the guru. And in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. So this is a great variable. But when you talked about being punished for lying to themselves, I know when I think about people, I know who are stuck, meaning entrepreneurs specifically. And these are people who are stuck that I often work with. You work with. What's happened is we're so traumatized by our fears because one thing so many entrepreneurs have in common is they grew up in an environment of lack. They're traumatized by running out of money, not being enough, not having enough, or whatever kind of social punishments or economic punishments they've lived through. And you just have to do what you do to get done. And you get into a habit of thinking that way. And there is a breakthrough moment in your life when you, I think you have a big transformation where you draw the line, you get your values together and you say, never again am I going to go through the pain of being what I'm not good at. And I want to spend all my time in my zone of genius, my unique ability or my superpower. And I'd like to know from your lens, like, is there a observational point where you see entrepreneurs hit that threshold, that breaking point, and make a decision that they'll never ever do again, but now there's a place for collaboration. What have your observations been where there's a transformation that takes place?

Yeah. Well, Mike, if you go back to the first, let's say five or 10 years of your career, and I do the same for me, you didn't have a lot of extra cash to hire the services of other people, so you doubled down on time because you didn't have the money. And you know, I don't really know anyone who got started as an entrepreneur who didn't do that. You know, the amount of time that you spend doing that at the beginning of your career may vary, but I think there is a period where everybody has to double down. They have to put in 60, 70, 80 hour weeks, they have to work on nights, they have to work on weekends and everything else. It's just to get yourself established. My sense is it probably takes about three complete annual cycles before you start getting an overview, just where you're valuable, what you have to offer in the marketplace, who are the best people to offer it to. And then you start becoming aware that there's areas that you do naturally that you're really great at. As you talk about your genius and then you notice that the stuff that wears you out, there's no way that you're going to be better at this. You know, doesn't matter how much time you put in, you're not going to get better at this. It's like being a basketball player and you're six foot one, well, you can't develop seven footness. You know, like there's not a course you can take to go from 6 foot 1 to 7 foot.

So if you're going to have a.

Team and you're really good at one thing, then get some 7 footers who are really good and other things. So we like sports because sports really puts together a whole bunch of skills on a team. And we can see that you take one of the skills away and the team is less. And I think you have to cross over into that, where you're saying, if things are going to be more enjoyable as an entrepreneur, for the rest of my life, I can't keep doing it the way I'm doing it. And if I could spend the rest of my entrepreneurial career just focused on where I know I really am good, I get better, and I really enjoy.

It, then why don't I find four.

Or five or six other people that it's the same for them too, but they're doing something different. Let's put all those things that we all enjoy, let's put them all together. So that's sort of the concept. And in fairness to history, Mike, I.

Think that, you know, up until about.

100 years ago, most of the people on the planet were happy if they got something to eat during that day, you know, that they were scrabbling for survival. So I think, you know, I don't make judgments about history because I didn't live under those conditions and everything. But I think now, in the early part of the 21st century, I think that there's an amazing amount of opportunity for teamwork and there's an amazing amount of easy capabilities that allows you to team up. Just like we're doing on the zoom call. You know, we couldn't have done this 10 years ago, and it would have taken enormous amount of work that neither of us wanted to do to pull off what we're pulling off right now with a click.

Yeah, I love the thought process. I'm going to take us down a slightly different tangent now. I'm going to get into more how to through the lens of our listener and imagine for a moment I'm going to wonder into what they're probably thinking. So the big idea between the who, not how, and also if we extend that into the free zone frontier is creating collaborations, competition, free collaborations that provide huge multiples. You know, not just 10x but 100x multiples. And when you seep into the free zone frontier, for anyone who hasn't heard that before, it's Dan's philosophy. And also there's a functional working goal that he has that in 25 years, on his 100th birthday, he wants to have created a $15 trillion GDP in the strategic Coach community, which basically means all the people who are collectively in Strategic Coach are responsible for a 15 trillion doll. And it's a way to think of a business, actually an idea as a country. And now that we live in the world of dematerialized digitized and virtualized, and more people have spent their time in the world of Zoomlandia. That's not hard for a lot of us to get our heads around. But if we go down to the practical, tactical for a moment, here's a challenge that I find myself in, and I certainly observe a lack of discipline or a lot of thinking in other entrepreneurs, which is this. So let's say you reach a point in your career where you really know what your unique ability and your superpower is. For me, for example, I've learned, and even though you're a simplifier, I'm a multiplier. We have a very similar skill set in the sense that if you set us down with a problem, we can perform our way through it. We're innate performers and we create through collaboration. We surround ourselves with collaborative minds that capture our wisdom, structure and format it, and get it ready for mainstream consumption. Our value has to do in our ability to solve problems, even though we do it in different ways. So everyone hopefully reaches a point, I mean, a successful entrepreneur where they're like, I know where I'd love to spend 95 or 90% of my time and the other 10 doing what I have to do. Be better if it was 100%. But I know for me, if I could be scheduled all day long to solve problems and show up and perform and then find ways of creating leverage and multiplication for that value, so the time value is multiplied. Right, that'd be a great thing. But the challenge that I see, and I witness it myself, and the discipline more likely is always keeping your eyes open for where you need a new whole and then being able to describe what that is and be able to pass it along. And it needs to be economically feasible too. And we live in a world now where in some cases we have negative interest rates, like money is literally free. There is no excuse for any of us to not be incredibly wealthy other than our small mindedness or our fear of accumulating debt, which it's like, okay, what is that? But I'm curious about the discipline. I'm curious about thinking about the who's and getting really good at being able to communicate what the who is, what you want out of them. And also creating an environment where you don't spend all your time managing a whole bunch of who's, because that in itself, that's not my happy fun place.

Yeah, well, the thing about it is, you know, one of our coaches, so we have in the coach program, I'm sort of the lead coach, but we have 16 other coaches. And these are entrepreneurs who joined Strategic Coach. And after a while, they kind of resonate with the notion that what they were learning, they would like to help other entrepreneurs learn, you know, and it took us a while to do it, but we have great people, you know, we have great people, and some of them are 25 years with us. But the one with the longest, when the who not how concept came out, he was so amazed because he said from the very first time he coached back in the 90s, he would tell, you know, you really got to delegate to be a successful entrepreneur.

You got to delegate.

You know, you got to delegate. And it was like Dustin Hoffman and Rain Man. He says, yeah, you got to delegate. Absolutely. Got to delegate, Delegate. But they didn't delegate. They wouldn't delegate. But he said the moment you talk about who, not how they do the thing, that they need to do it. So he said, there's a radical difference between delegating and who, not how. So I thought about it for a while and see if this rings true. In your mind, delegating sounds like you're going to take something that you're really good at and you're going to give it to someone who's not as good as you are. There may be 80% as good as. But then it seems like a big how, you know, the transition. First of all, I'm going to have to figure out what I'm going to download, and then I have to download it.

Training SOPS process. Sure.

Yeah. And not only that, but then I'm going to have to take time to train them, and then I'm going to have to manage them and I'm going to have to monitor them. So why don't I just do it myself? I'll just take off the weekend and I'll do what I want them to do because it invites more of the thing that you're trying to get away from delegation does. But with a who, you're looking at someone who's way better than you.

Okay.

In a particular skill that. I mean, you talked about Joe Polish before. I've never found his, like on the planet for being a connector between two people that he does just for the sheer pleasure of connecting. He doesn't really expect you to give him anything for making the connection. He doesn't want a commission. You know, this is what he does. And I said, you know, my Rolodex has got one name in, and it's Joe. Anybody else I want to meet, I just phone Joe and Joe set it up. And it's an ability that is so far beyond mine to connect that it would be foolish for me to try to do what he's doing when I can just give Joe, and he'll do it, as you said, in 15 minutes. It would take 15 weeks for me to do what he can do in 15 minutes, and then not as well. And besides that, it would wear me out, and I would stop doing that activity when I could. So I think that the big thing with who, not how, we're not talking about finding somebody with lesser skills. We're finding someone with greater skills, which really requires a bit of honesty on the part of an entrepreneur. This person does something better than I do. This person does something better than I do. And I think it's a little bit of arrogance, actually, why people can't recognize other people's skills. I mean, I could watch you for a day, and I could describe very, very discreetly, there's 10 things that you just do better than I do. So why would I try to do something that if I just talk to you, said, oh, I'll do that. I'll do that. So my sense is that maybe 25 years ago, if you had a circle this big, this described what I thought I was really great at. And 25 years later, the circle is about this big. But what I have in that former bigger circle is other skilled people. So I've replaced myself in a large part of my life just because they're better. I mean, Babs can put teams together. Babs can look at a financial printout, and she can just page through it for two or three days. And she said, that number is wrong right there. I know that number is run. And how does she know that? I said, I'm foggy. Said, damn, you know, how's Michael Jordan.

Do what he does?

I don't know what he does. You know, anybody? That's really great. How do you do it? It's not a thinking thing. It's just that this is really what the. How does Tom Brady have a great season at age 45 when most quarterbacks are permanently disabled by age 30? You know, I mean, how does he do that? You know? And they said, well, he's never been hit. And I said, well, maybe that's part of his capability that he doesn't get hit. So anyway, that's what I say. And I think it takes a. I won't call it humility, because it's kind of got, like, a moral sense. It's not a humility. It's just that you're looking at resources and you're one of them. But there's all these other resources. You use the word stack. I can have a stack of skills that are my own, or maybe my skill is one of my capabilities. With 10 other people's capabilities, maybe that's my stack. I mean, as far as the world's concerned, nobody cares. And as far as the results go, I think the results are bigger.

Okay, so what I really hear you saying is it's a combination of honesty, humility, and you had a little action item, which is just observe the 10 things that someone else does that's better than me. That's sort of like a summary. But there's an undercurrent here that I think gets to the bigger idea, which is you've heard before that really successful managers will say just get some really smart people in a room and they solve the problems and they get things done better than you could. I don't like the randomness of that. And I do like the idea, though. What I've learned when you talked about the concentric circles, getting down to getting narrowly focused, spending more time in your zone of genius and being surrounded by great teams. And I've noticed as I've been aging and also spending a lot more time with people who are older than me, that they're perfectly satisfied and fine with a smaller world, with higher quality people, not a higher volume of people, for example. And also being happy and satisfied, focusing on, you know, on that genius zone versus trying to do it all. It's just like a very consistent pattern, at least in what my observation of happier people who are older could be wrong there, right?

Yeah. Well, sometimes younger. I'll give you an example of a great who relationship that you've established over the last year, and that's Marissa Brassfield.

And I have to tell you, I could figure out something like, you know, putting together a game plan, following through on a game plan, putting together the team that I could do an okay job for about three months, but it's not as good as the one she can do in three hours.

Yeah, totally. We've really figured out a interesting way to create one brain, you know, over the past year or so.

Yeah. Here's an interesting thought, and this is certainly not in the who, not how book, but I'm noticing in the high tech world in Silicon Valley, they're putting this enormous attention on enhancing the individual human brain. In other words, we're going to take the individual brain and make it more powerful and all the emphasis is on the individual human brain. And I said, I don't think that's the winning path. And, you know, I have read a lot of philosophy. I've read, you know, what are called the great books. Plato, Aristotle, everything. And I have to tell you, I don't think there's anybody on the planet who's as smart in relationship to their world as Greeks 2,500 years ago were in relation to their.

So I think as far as individual.

I don't think there's any composer today.

That'S better than Bach.

I don't think there's any better than Beethoven. You know, they're living in a different world. I think the great advantage of our day is, and I make a distinction here between your brain, that's your equipment. I mean, basically, you're born with that. And, you know, I hope, you know, at 76, I got a brain that's as good as the one I had when I was 6 years old.

Your memory is about 10 times better than mine, I'll just tell you that right now.

So.

Got that going for you.

Yeah, yeah. And that's a strong suit of this particular brain. But I don't know if I'm smarter or anything else. But I tell you what I'm a lot better at. I'm a lot better at linking up with other people's brains, and I call that the mind. Your mind isn't what you were born with. Your mind is a decision to link your brain up with other brains. You know, and you're one of the brains I link up. We have a podcast series. You know, it's totally different from any other podcast series because it's random creativity, and I really enjoy that activity. I enjoy random creativity. And you're probably one of the easiest person on the planet to do that. And I'm not saying that as a thing. Very few people are really good at randomness.

In my world, that's a really unique skill of just being able to randomly wander but constantly create as you're doing it. So I would say that my mind is exponentially greater at 76 than it was at 6 or 16 or 26 and so on. And even 25 years ago, my mind is infinitely bigger than it was 25 years ago. My brain. I think my brain's pretty well the same size. I've got my brain just kind of focused on what's good for all the teamwork that I have.

First of all, thank you for those kind words. And I think you really just nailed the it and The. The. In this whole thing, and this deserves a conversation, an episode by itself that I want to propose to you, which is if we were going to get down into developing the mind, not the brain, not skills, not memory, but mind and the ability to harness the randomness, there's something very divine about that. And I've been completely obsessed lately in studying the world of the big mind and the little mind, meaning we'll call it the mind of God, which is how you really access that. Now, you've been a meditator for a.

Long time, going down 50 years. Yeah, got it.

And if you were going to just guess right now how much meditation has helped you evolve and develop your mind, which is really, I think of it as a divine tool to access the Internet of the universe, where at some point, I don't know if you're familiar with this term, but the Akashic or Akashic records, there's a belief that before there was time, space, dimension, light, matter, there was the big M, the big mind of God, the I am or the potential of it. And that, you know, we have the ability to access that. And I'm just kind of curious if you have a spiritual perspective or connection with this.

I've been reading a lot of articles over the past couple of years that science is sort of hitting the wall. And that is there was kind of a belief, you know, and I think it was very strong as recently as 10, 15 years ago, that if you run enough atoms together, it'll produce intelligence, you know, so that's what transistors are. We're rubbing more and more atoms together at the transistor, and they're kind of hitting a wall. First of all, they're no closer to understanding the human brain.

For all they talk about, we're right.

On the threshold of understanding the human brain, you know, well, the people saying that even understand their own brain, so how can they understand the brain? And the problem is that they've made a metaphor. There's a metaphor. And this is another thing, is that we don't actually experience reality. We create metaphors for reality. You know, I mean, we talk things like the global village. Well, guess what? It's not a global village. It's not a global village. They talk about the greenhouse effect. And I said, well, it's not really a greenhouse, but that's kind of a way of understanding it. So my sense is that what they've used recently for giving a metaphor for the human brain is that it's a computer, that the human brain is A computer. And therefore, we're just information processing computers. And therefore computers who are faster than we are will be more intelligent than we are. I said, well, that's all premised on the metaphor that what we have here is a computer. But you can take 100 people, give them the same information, and everybody does something to do with the information. So where's the processing taking place? We do something very different. So my feeling is, you know, let me say I'm resonant with your thought that maybe the world we live in is if you rub enough intelligence together, you'll create matter.

You know, it's just the opposite of what we think. And we're doing more and more with matter. You know, if you look at our progress, there's a nice site. It's called the Visual Capitalist. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's just diagram after diagram where they've taken a lot of information and put it in a nice diagram. One of the diagrams is they took a Tesla S and they found out the Tesla S has 850 pounds of plastic in it. It's plastic which comes from oil. So because the plastics they have now are very durable. They're very lightweight. And, you know, makes a big difference with cars whether it weighs 1,000 pounds more or less. And, you know, airplanes like the 787, the Boeing is composite plastic. Most of the plane is composite plastic. And they're saying, yeah, we want to get rid of oil. But I said, you know, oil is only 20% of it is used for energy. The rest of it is used for chemicals, for plastics and everything.

So we have all this stuff, but.

We'Ve become very gifted. Our intelligence has become very gifted at dealing with material. We can make lots of things out of other things. And that's very recent. We haven't been able to do that.

So, you know, I really believe you.

Can'T be in the jar and know what's on the label. That's a Joe Polish, and I think it's his buddy who does the Cultural Walls, the artist who does that. But there's actually a scientific theorem of the 20th century called the incompleteness theorem, and it's by a German Austrian by the name of Kurt Godel. And Einstein thought that this was the most important scientific statement of the 20th century. And what he said was, you can't be inside of a system and understand the system that you're in. And there's a thing called set theory which more or less establishes. So a computer is inside humanities There's a big system called humanity, and I'm in humanity, and you're in humanity. Therefore, neither you or me can really understand the system that we're in. But the one thing we can learn is that we can learn how to combine capabilities, and that's open to anybody. So my sense is that the reason I'm so much into teamwork is because it's available, and understanding what I am or how humanity works, that's not available to me. But cooperating with you, cooperating, you know, growing number of really skillful people, I can cooperate with them, and that's available to me. So I'm just going to play with the cards that are available to me to see if I can win some more.

So, as you're going down your rant, I've got a couple things. I don't know if it's a rant exactly, but it's a lot of ideas.

We're differently random.

You and I are differently random, and.

I'm going to collapse some of these ideas.

Yeah, we're differently random, and that's a skill. You were talking about discipline. I think you're disciplined, Mike. It's just that I think you're disciplined.

To noticing that something you just thought of is better than what you're doing. I think you're very disciplined to that, and I think you're disciplined to. I did that yesterday and it's boring today. I think you're very disciplined at that. So my feeling is that in a normal academic discipline test, you would totally fail, but all your failures are actually your advantage in the marketplace. Everything that would fail you in an academic discipline test are actually the strong capabilities that you have that have allowed you to create your entrepreneurial journey and your entrepreneurial value.

Oh, thanks. I think that's very true. I hadn't thought of it through that lens before, but let me give you a quick dump of some of the things that you're saying, and then we can bring this episode to a close, because I think there's a few big takeaways here. One of them is you're familiar with the Elysians and during Greek times, Eleusius, and some of the work that was done there. It's very fascinating, I think, very tied to this. And there is a gentleman named Irvin Laszlo. Have you ever heard of him before?

Yep. Yep.

So he travels around in the world of the Integrated Theory of Everything. So I couldn't help myself. I recently went down that rabbit hole and it ties into, again the idea of the little m And the big M, the little mind, the big mind and how deeply connected we really are. And I think some of the greatest, most ingenious things come from being able to venture into the world of the divine and bring that back. Great architecture, great music, and also great collaboration. I'm thinking of that in a much deeper, meaningful way because it's again, where you rub a bunch of stuff together. I think the universe at its core simply wants to live and create. And if you observe what Native Americans talk about, you know, I had done a lot of work with Native Americans and had the good fortune of spending a bunch of time in the culture. And they think through the lens of they don't make decisions until they think about how it'll affect five generations from now. They call the rocks our grandmothers and grandfathers. And not just metaphorically, they treat them as though they're alive. There's a different thinking and I think the more expansively you think about the environment you're in and the more connected you are, it makes you better at collaborating. So one of the other references you made here when you talked about Girdle is the book by Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher and Bach had to do with the self referencing and rules and being able to see the label. But the beauty of once you start really paying attention to the nature of the universe, you understand yourself much better, which is we really do live in a beautiful holographic fractal universe where the smallest components are the same as the largest components. Right. Everything's a reflection. And I am going to check out the visual capitalist as well. But I think spending a little more time in this realm of really observing the universe and being able to draw genius through collaboration is really what to me this is all about. And being able to collapse time as well, which is what gives great thinkers. I think about Elon Musk. I think he is one of the greatest thinkers we have on the planet right now. I had heard one little thing through a friend of mine. I haven't verified it myself, but apparently he recently bought something like 10,000 acres. Maybe it was more than that in Utah somewhere where there's a bunch of stuff and he's mining. He's figured out a way to extract lithium from salt and the earth. And when he pulls, that's a big deal.

Yeah, that's a big deal. And I mean, if he does. Yeah, yeah. The other thing is not known about him, but he's the largest owner of satellites in the world. He's got Starlink of The satellites he's put up that he single handedly. SpaceX owns more of the. And I hadn't seen that, you know, I don't know the ins and outs of that, but I think that must be a really big deal. He has probably as much as the Communist Party of China. He probably has as many satellites as the Communist Party of China, you know. But Elon is one capability. There are lots of other capabilities in the world. And the only question is, does your capability make the combining of capabilities more likely in the world? Is your capability expanding cooperation or is it preventing cooperation? And I think long range, you get judged backwards based on whether you increase cooperation or whether you prevented cooperation. I think Hitler prevented cooperation. I think Stalin prevented cooperation. We don't thank them for their existence, you know, like.

Yeah, and lots of other people. Cyrus McCormick figured out how farmers could have much bigger fields and produce much bigger yields, which fed more people and freed a lot of other people up to do things besides working all day and backbreaking labor.

Right on. Well, let's.

Okay. This was a pleasant stroll.

Yeah, I enjoyed it too. And it fulfilled one of my primary goals, which was not to do a interview about a book that you could hear somewhere else, think about who, not how, and collaboration through a different lens. So I'm going to just repeat what I said.

It's kind of funny on the audible for this. Ben actually read the book, the actual word for word. And then he interviewed me eight times, I think during the book, you know. And what I said in the interviews is not contained within the book. And none of my books is the audio track. Reading the words. I said, well, why would I want to read the word? First of all, I can't do it.

No, no, that'd be a bad Dan activity.

I couldn't stick with it. But Shannon Waller just interviews me and then I develop all sorts of interesting offshoots from the main theme. And that kind of enthuses me. Kind of enthuses me. You thought you had it, but you didn't really have it. There was more.

Yeah, collaborative chaos. I think that was one of the big takeaways from today. I'm going to see if I can come up with a word that represents that that's a little more fun. So I'll give that some cycles in the background.

But just as a thought for a further ahead podcast. But if you said this is how those who think about discipline as how lacking in perfection are you, you know, it's kind of like the academic world starts at 100%. And how much do you come short of? 100%. And the entrepreneurial world starts with one and sees how many times can you multiply one.

Yes, very good. Well, I took notes on that one. So again I'm going to give that one some cycles. So here's what we'll do for you, our listener. Definitely head on over to whonothow.com the book is great. It definitely opens your head to a lot of this kind of thinking and you'll definitely find for one thing the imprints of Dean Jackson's Genius and then the collaborative genius of Dr. Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan working and Joe Polish.

Who put all the players together, you know, so.

Yep. And thank God for Tucker Max, he's another real genius. And for Reid Tracy for believing in the vision and then being able to give you a 10 book deal in the future as well. Reid really is a true visionary who's doing something unique and different in the publishing world, which is going through and undergoing all sorts of challenges right now that were inevitable with the world as we see it, but making the most of it as well. So definitely pay attention to all the players and involved in the book and look through the acknowledgments. I think that is a very fun rabbit hole to dive into. So with that, this is Capability Amplifier. My name is Mike Koenigs and Dan Sullivan. If you'd like Dan or I to explore a topic or an idea, well, why not get to Collaborative minds thinking about it out loud to benefit you. Head over to capabilityamplifier.com There you go. Thank you. Will you head over to itunes right now to rate the Capability Amplifier? Show every rating and review helps spread the message and create more empowered entrepreneurs like you. And if you've already done that, please share this episode with a friend who you know can benefit from Capability Amplifier. And if you have any questions or suggestions, head over to capabilityamplifier.com there you can leave us an audio message and Dan and I listen to every single one of them. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you soon.