Dan Nicholson Shares 3 Simple Tricks to INSTANTLY Improve Your Life's Purpose

Welcome to Creative on Purpose Live, a show about defining, developing, and delivering the difference only you can make in the second half of life so you can live your legacy. I'm Scott Perry, Encore Life Coach and author of The Art of Encore Living and Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose. It's time to play your game. Visit creativeonpurpose.com to get started now. Let's meet today's guest, Dan Nicholson. So grateful to have you on the broadcast. Welcome, and please tell our viewers, uh, who you are, what you're up to these days, and where can they go to learn more about you and the difference you're making?

I am a recovering perfectionist trying to unlearn a bunch of things that I thought I knew about life so that I can get closer to the things that I actually want. So that's who I am. What I've been up to is really building a platform around what I call Certainty, which is how do you get what you want on your terms without compromise., and, uh, enrolling other purpose-driven entrepreneurs in this methodology I created to do that, to get what you want on your terms without compromise. And so I deliver that in a bunch of different ways, uh, through a book I just, uh, recently, uh, wrote called Rigging the Game, which, uh, you can just go to riggingamazon.com, it'll take you right there. And, uh, through Certainty U, which is a business where we deliver, uh, essentially a year-long certification program to help people unlearn what they thought it would, would take, uh, to live the life that they want. And then a bunch of other finance-related, CPA-related ventures and all that kind of stuff. People can get the book at Rigging Amazon. They can learn more. I got a bunch of free stuff at certaintytools.com. So yeah, that's, that's me in a nutshell.

Fantastic. Well, I, I just to share a little bit, I connected with Dan through a mutual friend, Laurel Portier, who introduced me to the Success Finder platform where I was consuming content by Dan's officemate, Nick Peterson, but also met or got engaged with Dan there just at the time Rigging the Game was starting to be promoted. So I followed your journey and it was a masterful approach to launching a book. I wish I had followed your example in launching my book. And it is probably the book I recommend and gift most often right now to my clients. And members of my community. It is a really, really powerful approach to doing just what the COVID says, rigging the game, rigging your game so that you can get closer to what you want. And one of the things that I'd love to start with is just, you know, you say you're a recovering perfectionist and given your background as a, in the finance world, I'm sure that that comes with the territory, but I'd love to hear a little bit of the origin story of how does this person that trained to be, you know, a mover and shaker in the finance world move into something that sounds a little bit more like the personal development space and helping people unlock their potential and play their game.

So growing up, I was always this painfully, painfully shy kid. But at the same point, I was pretty enterprising. And so always had business ideas. But at the same point, like I said, shy, had a speech problem, had terrible teeth, you know, the things that compounded the shyness. And so I had to grow out of a lot of that to really start to get clarity on what I actually wanted. Went off to college thinking I was going to be a marketing major. And life had other designs for me, things that I couldn't have foreseen, opportunities that came up just really out of being in the right position at the right time, leaving options open. This is one of the things that I didn't have the language for 24 years ago, but now I come to understand how it kind of manifested. So went into college, thought I was going to be, like I said, a marketing major, uh, first person in my family to go to college. Was living at home commuting. Um, I think that made sense for me at the time. I look back on it, I wish I would have had more of the traditional college experience, but that's what worked for me and my family. And so I got this email from the business school guidance counselor saying, hey, UPS, the big shipping company, United Parcel Service, they have some scholarship money, and they have, uh, some openings in like their marketing department for a kind of internship or entry-level positions. So come to this career fair on Saturday at 9 AM. So I go, I show up, I'm in a suit, I just took this business communications class, I've got all these resumes and cover letters, and I walk in and, uh, I'm way overdressed. Way overdressed, a lot of jorts. This is like almost summertime. It's like, you know, tank tops, jorts, whatever. And, uh, I'm sitting there with my resumes, and, uh, they proceed to show this video about all the jobs that you could have inside the hub— unloader, sorter, etc., etc. And I, I look, I come from a blue-collar family. That is not below me by any means. And I have had blue-collar jobs up to that point. So I listened to it. And then I kind of like respectfully, hey, that's cool. I have this like print off here that says like marketing jobs and scholarship money. Like, where do I learn about that? Like, I don't— yeah, I don't know you're talking about marketing jobs. But there's two guys from the finance department outside at a table. You can go to you know, go talk to them. I go out there, same thing, like, hey, here's my prints off, so on and so forth. And, uh, after about almost an hour conversation, like, hey, we have this, uh, revenue recovery manager job where you'd manage 20 to 25 auditors. It's still within a hub, but you're going to manage them auditing shippers for compliance. Like, are they billing itself correctly? I'm 19, like I said, just finished my first year of college. Somehow I get this job, uh, I got 25 people reporting to me. Uh, my manager's in a totally different— they're not even there, they're in a totally different building 30 minutes away. I'm doing all the hiring, firing, and, uh, reporting to the regional controller. That was the domino that led me to change the finance, led me to change to ultimately an accounting degree, get an IS, information systems degree, and it sort of, uh, snowballed and opened all these doors, uh, that took me away from entrepreneurship and, uh, took me about a decade to, to, uh, reorient. Not in a bad way. But it took about a decade for me to kind of figure out how to leverage all the skills that I've accumulated.

Yeah, well, that's— it's fascinating to hear how people's destiny kind of unfolds and how they become agents of their destiny, but also how easy it is to get, to get off the path. That maybe was right there all along or intended for us. One of the things that, you know, one of the things I hear in that story is, you know, you and I share this language around playing your game, and we can come to it from different places, but I hear in your kind of standing up for yourself at this meeting at UPS and, you know, that you were clear about what you were, who you were, and what you were there for., and playing your game in that story. And one of the things that really fascinates me about your work at CertaintyU and, and with Certainty Tools is I have a— the way I think, have thought about certainty, um, up till colliding with your work is, um, you know, I, I look around at the world and I see people being rewarded, um, for certainty about things that they actually have no certainty, right, to certainty about, right? And, and they get rewarded with fame and fortune somehow. And, you know, just from my love of, of ancient, um, philosophy and spiritual traditions, above the Oracle of Delphi, in addition to know thyself, it says certainty is ruin, by which they, they probably mean that hubristic kind of certainty. But you have you, you have really repositioned and reframed certainty as a, um, not just a positive thing, but a thing really worth, um, trying to, to create and leverage. And I'd, I'd love to just have you unpack a little bit more about like what certainty means to you and how you help people cultivate that.

So, so I believe that there's this essential question that everyone asks, is asking, which is, am I going to be okay? And I experienced this through the lens of the last 20 years of really helping people in the finance space navigating their cash flow, etc. Am I going to be okay? Future-focused. Right now, talk to a lot of folks, and on paper they might have hundreds of millions, but they're, they're not liquid. So yeah, they've got this cool number on paper, but still, like, how am I going to pay this upcoming expense? And that's hard to relate to. You're like, oh, that must be nice, poor them. But the point is that there is a similarity across demographics, age, gender, income brackets, etc., which is this wondering, am I going to be okay? And when you kind of unpack that, you find that there's an element of they're uncertain. I don't know what what's going to happen, and there's a lack of power that they feel like this is happening to me. And so I've sort of endeavored to try to build some tools to help people navigate, well, what is— what is certainty to you? What is it that you're trying to achieve? We, I believe, have our own unique definitions of wealth, or what I call the solvable problem. This is your unique equation your sort of final destination, if you think about it in terms of a GPS. Like, you're here now, you're at this spot right now, and you have this final destination. That is your, like, ultimate definition of, of wealth. How do we get you there? Uh, and so in, in kind of unpacking that, I decided, okay, I'm gonna own this very nebulous term and something that if I was a registered investment advisor, I wouldn't be allowed to say. And so, like, okay, I, I'm going to create my own definition of this, and, uh, which is again helping people get what they want on their terms without compromise. And in that, I'm going to help people understand that, that it's actually an infinite game. See, I think the point you were making around the hubris is that you think you've made it And once you think you've made it, that's when you're in the highest probability of blowing yourself up. No, we've never really made it. There's something coming around the corner that could be a, could be a danger zone type thing, uh, or there could just be something around the corner that you didn't know you wanted 2 days ago, right? So we're constantly evolving and just adjusting. And so What you want is an infinite game and it's evolving. And so we got to give our permission, ourself permission to recognize that. But then we also have to take action, right? I, as someone who's been a recovering, uh, you know, perfectionist of sorts, that unlocked a lot of, of thinking for me to go, hey, I'm trying to get this what I want out of life to be perfect, but it's never going to get perfect, be perfect, because it's going to keep evolving. And so what I need to do is just optimize towards what I think is the most important thing today and then reassess, reserve the right to change my mind in the future.

Yeah, those are— well, and you've shared several of the principles from your book and from what I've witnessed watching the Certainty Summit and things like that that really resonate. And again, things that I've been able to share with clients and community members and and kind of repurpose through my own filter, um, that I, I'd love to, um, dive into a little bit. So one of the things that I'm hearing in what you said that I recall from the book is this idea of certainty is getting clarity on what you really want and then, um, establishing a strategy that creates the most opportuni— optionality while mitigating the risks that are inherent in anything that, um, that's right, is unknown. Um, I, I, and the, the solvable problem is something that Laurel Portier, who was a guest a couple weeks ago, introduced to me when I was her, you know, when she was my coach. Um, and that idea just profoundly resonates because, um, it, it takes, for me, It was a way of framing a challenge that I was trying to navigate in a way that disconnected it from the narrative in my head that, you know, where the imposter shows up, where fear shows up, where FOMO shows up and everything else, and instead creates this objective problem that I can solve if I lean into my gifts, my strengths, and do the things that you advocate around reducing risk. So this is now your intellectual property, which is really fascinating to me as well. So a little bit more like what's— how do you frame that? Or how do you teach people to frame a solvable problem? And how do you help them navigate their way towards solving it?

So solvable problem is probably the thing that I've created that gets talked about the most. But when we go through the certification program, it's one of the last things that we talk about. I mean, we, we reference it a bunch, but it's one of the last things that we talk about. And the reason for that is that I have found that it takes people months and months to give themselves permission to be honest about what they really want. And so we have to help them see behind all these corners of, look, your notion of what it's going to be, what's required to be extraordinary is wrong. What's required to be extraordinary is to, your words as well, play your game. Like, show me someone who's actually reinvented and reimagined an industry that was just copying somebody else in entirety. Uh, they weren't. They weren't. There's something unique that they were doing, and there's usually some unique element of their personality. We call them eccentric when they have a bunch of money. And so we have to keep showing them, um, what it takes to be extraordinary and the different archetypes. Hey, there's more than one archetype for success. We take them through these 4 types of architects— or archetypes, excuse me. One of them is called an influencer. But in the modern society, when we think, oh, I got to be an influencer to be extraordinary, when in fact usually people transition to influencer later, like they were a maker or a master or an introspector before they were an influencer. So we just got these sort of false notions. So anyhow, I have to unpack all this, really teach people about biases, how we're running a race against ourself, um, really what it means to engineer luck. When I talk about Rigging the Game, the name of the book, it's really engineering the outcome that we want. And so there's a lot of kind of journaling, opening loops, to finally get people to— here's your solvable problem. Your solvable problem is, uh, in my terms, is broken into two buckets: your core priorities and your preference-based priorities. Core— this is what I believe everyone wants. It's the conventional definition of wealth. You got enough where you don't have to work, you can pay off all your debts, and you got some amount of cash reserve. That's sort the conventional definition of wealth. I would call that financial security. You can have financial security but not be fulfilled. You don't have financial certainty yet because there's all these preferences that you— that are unique to you or your relationship, that the world is trying to tell you that these preferences are actually binary. There's a right and wrong. You should only want— everyone should pay for their kids' college. No one should pay for their kids' college. Everyone should, you know, these back and forths of you should get a vacation property, don't have a vacation property, on and on and on. And it depends, what do you want? Which is again, why we got to spend like weeks talking to people about preferences and showing them the math, and, uh, to then give them permission to go, okay, these are my preferences. So we take the core priorities, which is sort of the financial security, we add in the preference-based priorities. That combined is your solvable problem, as long as you've taken what you want and you put a dollar value to each of those things and a date. When do you want to achieve it by? Now we, we call it a solvable problem because now it is actually something we can solve. When it's just a vision board with a bunch of stuff on it, it doesn't tell us what the resources are necessary to make that possible. And so we get a bunch of dopamine and we feel awesome and we do a bunch of stuff and we get up earlier and we start taking ice baths and whatever for a couple weeks and, uh, and trying to get this vision board, and then we lose momentum because we really didn't get the clarity we needed to live the life that we actually want.

Yeah, well, and that clarity piece is so important, and it's, um, I, I really appreciate what you're saying about the vision board and, and, you know, that whole approach, because it's just like New Year's resolutions, this, this, the announcement on Facebook actually feels like achievement already.

That's right.

And you get the dopamine hits of everyone saying, yeah, you go, you. But, you know, it's, it's not.

It's actually over on Certainty Tools, I have a couple of, we call it, call them unexploitable episodes. It's my business partner, Nick Peterson, who you mentioned earlier, we're officemates. We've recorded a couple of these things on being exploitable and then how do you become unexploitable. And so many of us are in— we're just in pain. We have so much scrutiny for and expectations from the outside world, and then internally we have all this shame and guilt and otherwise because we're not living the life that we want. And so in these moments of weakness, we buy into the one step the one hack, right? What I sell, what you sell is harder because it's not hyperbolic. It's not like, hey, you know what, download and watch this 5-minute video and then your whole life is going to be better, and then, oh yeah, implement this one strategy. People want that because they're in so much pain and they keep jumping to the next one step or two steps and Sometimes they work, but often they don't. And so you're in this position of being very exploitable. Someone can sell you something because you're in this position of, of pain. And that's where you need— coming back to solvable problem— how much effort do I really need to put in? How much risk should I really take? Because when you, again, you study those who have had extreme success, they were the rice— they had the optionality, they were willing, they were able to participate. If I was so overstrapped back when I was 19, and my schedule was so filled, that I, like, I'm too busy, I couldn't go to that UPS thing, the whole trajectory of my life would be different. Yeah. And so we miss that over the course of a year, there's maybe 2 or 3 major inflection opportunities, but we're so busy putting in maximum effort and taking maximum risk that we can't even participate in those things that are going to truly be transformative, or what I would call asymmetric to the upside.

Yeah, well, that's a— that's— that is a really great point, and I guess the, uh, a reflect, a reflection that's more of a question really is, well, what one is, um, if you have any insight into how you like, how you can be present and available and aware of those inflection points. But the other is, you know, it seems as though one of the things I think a lot about is, you know, trying to be— get clearer about separate— distinguishing between decisions and outcomes. Like, I can make a really bad decision to get a good outcome, and that leads to that heuristic certainty where I must be great because I got what I wanted, um, even though you did something that, if you sustain that approach, would blow you up. Um, but at the other end is you can make the best decision possible and get and not— and get a bad outcome. And that leads to us thinking that we must be stupid and, and we are less than, you know, the idiot that made the bad decision and got the good outcome.

Um, so a bunch of time on this in the last discussion about being exploitable, which is not understanding the difference between causation and correlation. We go, I made this decision, now I have more money. That decision caused me to have more money. We didn't actually look at the evidence. I was in the right place at the right time. Um, the market happened to go up. Actually, my decision was irrelevant because I was on a podcast with Scott Perry Perry that finally aired, and now I have a bunch of people who are following me. And so the recent decision that I made has nothing to do with or the recent success I have has nothing to do with the decision itself. It has to do with the fact that I was on Scott's podcast, right? So we, we have this hubris, which is that we want to attribute sort of fundamental attribution error, right? We assume our intentions are good, but we are quick to question others. We assume that we want, you know, our reasoning, we're logical, uh, we attribute that to the outcomes. And that it's causing it, but it could merely be correlated, meaning, yeah, it's— there's a positive relationship. The decision happened and now we have more money. But we have to dig, we have to dig deeper, truthfully compile the data and analyze it. I call it the case framework. We're quick to strategize and execute, but we got to compile and analyze and try to get to the as best as we can root cause. Otherwise we blow ourselves up the next time because we thought we made the right decision. We tried a second time, doesn't work because it didn't work the first time. Well, you launch— let me give you a very classic example of this. And by the way, I spent— I used to work with this guy Steve Loudon who took Roku public, and he's been their CFO for I don't know, however long they were public plus a year or two. We were— he was my boss. We were in this group called Marketing Finance, and we value— we ultimately reported up to the CMO of this big bank, and we were analyzing, uh, these marketing proposed marketing campaigns to see if there was going to be a sufficient return on investment for it to be worthwhile. So we're doing all this analysis, and the marketers would come over and they would say, hey, we've noticed that people who— and this will date me because it obviously doesn't make sense now— they come over and they say, hey, we want to run a campaign to get more people on online banking and bill pay. Because we looked at the data and the people who have online banking and bill pay carry a higher average balance and they use more of our services. Now, now that seems silly because that was 17 years ago. Now that seems silly because everybody has online banking and can use bill pay, right? And I haven't noticed people having a lot more money in their account because they signed up for online banking and bill pay, right? It just so happened that people who sign up for online banking. So that was correlated— people who signed up for online banking was correlated at the time with them having more money. But in fact, it's just early adopters. People who had more money were more inclined to sign up for online banking. Okay, so it's causation-correlation. Now, to kind of take that one step further, When we don't have any sort of baseline, we can't actually evaluate the trends. So I was able— we were able to do these campaigns because we had baselines to evaluate whether or not the decisions actually created an incremental lift, more sales or not. So say you and I start a new product called, uh, certain Encore Tools, and, um, and, uh, so we're going to start it. Of course it's going to be high ticket, right? Uh, because you know, you got to do high ticket and, uh, or you're an idiot, or maybe you got to do low ticket or you're an idiot. Forget which one it is. I think you're just an idiot.

I think it's both.

And it's both things. Yeah. So we got Encore Tools, we're starting it day one, we announce it, we start ads, we run an email campaign, we go on a bunch of podcasts. And I don't know, one other strategy, uh, we dance naked in the outside, and we have this, uh, amazingly successful launch. And so you go, well, obviously going forward we got to dance naked outside, we've got to start ads, we've got to do the email campaign, we got to do, you know, et cetera, et cetera, because that's what works. So we do it again the next time with our next business, and it doesn't work because we don't even know what strategy works. People think they're data-driven, but they can't isolate any of the variables. They don't have a baseline. And so it's really that simple. You launch— do the opposite. This is what we teach. Take a micro step. Launch something with one piece of information. See how the market reacts, get that data, inform the next strategy, continue down that path. Eventually, uh, you have the data to isolate what strategies are actually working. That doesn't sound as sexy, that's harder to sell. That's actually what these, uh, big corporations, unicorns do. They isolate variables and track and determine what's actually working, what's not, and they stop doing the things that don't work.

You mentioned the CASE, um, formula, which I really strongly encourage people to— you can Google it and look it up and learn more about it. Get Dan's book. It's, it's, it's laid out there. Um, but what I love about that approach is, yes, I am a lover of strategy and execution, But that collect and assess element enables people like me to— I call it stillness in the storm. Like, we can be it. We can, we can, we can reflect, pause and reflect long enough, what's in a way that's necessary so that we can take the next best step or a next best step. And I love that you have So we— you've touched on some things and we're running a little overtime and I want to get one final tip or exercise from you. But, you know, playing your game, solvable problem, open loops you mentioned, it depends is a whole nother thing that could be discussed. But, you know, I'm going to encourage people to buy Rigging the Game or look Dan up and get direct access to some of these things. But if there was, you know, this is a program featuring inspiring difference makers like yourself, who I hope will inform advancing and aspiring difference makers that are tuning in to, you know, fly a little bit higher in the difference only they can make. If there was just one final practice, exercise, idea that you could share, that would help them fly a little bit higher, what would that be?

Well, every— I strongly believe in this quote that every system is perfectly designed for the results that it, or the current outcomes that it's generating. And that's a quote from W. Edwards Deming. I didn't come up with that. This is called creative on purpose, right? I believe that everybody is creative. We just maybe grew up in a system that told us that we weren't, and, uh, that math is not creative, accounting is not creative, uh, you know, all these, uh, engineering is not creative. You're not a creative person because you're an engineer, you know. You're only a creative person if you're an artist or a— but look, I used to work my first actual full-time job after college— don't judge me for this— was a fellowship at the board that writes all the accounting standards in the US. Like I said, my career went on a totally different entrepreneurship journey than I originally expected. But I look back on it, I go, that was the most creative place that I worked at outside of being a full-time entrepreneur. The board that writes all the accounting standards is the most creative place I've worked at. And why? Because we were creating something from nothing. You may not like what we created. Actually, I know a lot of people who do not like what I worked on, but we had to create it from nothing, a blank. But we started with a blank page and a framework and some ideas and iterated through until we got the final outcome that, based off, you know, a bunch of feedback, etc. So I hope that people stop thinking about themselves as being creative or uncreative and that they start being more intentional, on purpose, designing systems where they can be creative in their life. Love it.

Love it. Really appreciate that, Dan. Well, so everyone, we thank you for tuning in. Dan and I really appreciate you lending us some of your valuable time and attention. We hope today's broadcast motivates you to take a bolder step into possibility, to keep logo going with defining, developing, and delivering the difference only you can make. Visit creativeonpurpose.com. Be sure to go to riggingthegame.com and certaintytools.com to learn more about Dan. And if you're watching on social media, please leave your biggest aha lesson or takeaway or question in the comments. And if you're watching or tuning in as a podcast, please leave us a 5-star review. It helps more of the right people connect with this content so they can fly higher in the difference only they can make. Now, Take the insight and inspiration from today's show and play your game all in and full out. Dan Nicholson, thank you so much for sharing some of your wisdom and experience with us today.

My pleasure. Thanks.