#831 - Dan Martell - How To Stop Wasting Your Time & Money On Things That Don’t Matter

25:35I would have had the same response 15 years ago. What what would your advice be to the That person the me or you in 15 years ago who you know they have that sort of antibody immune reaction to this It's all guilt coming from somewhere. You're not good enough. I would literally tell me, Dan, you can have it all. You're not good enough, comma, yet. What do you mean by that? Dig into that. I'd have to tell myself. I'd have to jolt myself out of it because I would be in the delusion that the harder I work, the better my life's gonna be. The goals are gonna happen. And unfortunately, I would just, and I know what I was selling myself, selling this pipe dream that someday.

26:18Like I used to, I was engaged to a woman and I worked my butt off to create a future for us that she never asked for And she laughed And because of your absence 100 % I was so selfish told myself a story What was it actually for if it wasn't for the not enoughness to prove to yourself and validation earlier? Yeah, yeah, that's what that's me. I mean, that's again And that's just the dark energy we most young men start with that we're trying to prove ourselves to our parents or dads or whoever. And you know, recently I was on a hike with one of my friends and you know, he, I think it was like three million in revenue.

26:58He wanted to get to 10 and he's like, you know, he has a young family. He's like, I'd love to do it. I know how I could do it. I want to do it. I just, I think to myself, well, if I go on the journey to try to get to 10 to then I'm gonna have the freedom to spend time with my kids. I could actually, but I have the time now, I don't wanna give it up. And I said, oh, no, that's not true. It was way mean. I said, dude, I love you, man, but I'm gonna tell you, like, you're just not good enough. You can 100 % go for 10 and have more time for your kids. And he's like, what, how? And I said, dude, you see me do it every day.

27:39Like, you're my buddy. You stay at my house, you see my friends. like this is you're watching me operate. Just look at the difference between how you are literally addicted to your phone. You have to be involved in everything. You can't, there's no strategy. Everything's from the hip. It's like daily. Like I literally sit there and again, I'm a lighthouse not a tug, but I will sit back and let him do that. He's still one of my best friends. But don't tell me you wanna do something and then you can't because of this thing when the truth and if you admit, like I'm just not good enough, then cool.

28:14Then hopefully you decide how do I get better? Well, good enough. You just don't have the skill yet to do that. So you say, well, I don't want to do, if I have to go to 10, I'm going to give up my time. No, you don't. You're just suck. What does suck mean? And what does the skill mean? What does the skill mean? You don't understand leverage. You don't understand how to let go. You don't understand how to create a system. You don't want to do the component parts of that. It is the audit transfer fill. You don't know how to look at your time. You don't worth you don't value it I mean even the idea one of the things I like to share with people is the concept that people don't buy your presence they buy your standard Like if you build a business that delivers value The person is buying the problem to the or the solution to the problem and if you built the machine that solves that problem They don't care if you're there.

29:07They want the problem solve at the highest level. So for example, the guy that was the owner of the bike store, he used to bring my bikes to, used to bring my bikes to. Man, I probably spent 50 grand on freaking bikes that I pushed around my, they weren't even e -bikes. These are these like carbon thingma jigs. And all I wanted was the thing to be done when you said it would be done. Or to show up when you said it would show up. Or what, like, and instead, he had this belief that if I'm the guy that meets Chris at the front door and he, Chris, has the family dead of the, that was business. So I just want him to run the company.

29:43I think that I learned a particularly bad lesson in this from running nightclubs. And this is, I guess, where changing standards internally within a company, changing expectations with partners and stuff like that, very difficult when it's with partners and outside stakeholders or whatever, because you don't get to control their interpretation. But for instance, I've stood on the front door of about a thousand club nights in my career. That's from nine to 11 -ish until two to three in the morning and then you cash the till. But the reason that we stood there, the reason that we couldn't just outsource this to the boys was 50 % that we needed to be able to see what was going on to kind of keeper.

30:28That's the money maker, right? That really is our skill set. Our skill set is building, designing brands, and putting a team together, and then just making sure that the operation on an evening goes well, because it's experiential. But it wasn't an unbelievable sort of skill. We could have got someone else in, they could have had some sort of SOP for writing a report. But the real reason that we stood in the front door is that if it's November and it's pissing rain in Newcastle and the manager of the venue stood there, you stand next to him. He's miserable, so you're miserable too. And you fucking stand there, and you stand there until two in the morning, and then you go upstairs and you cash the tell with him.

30:59And it was this sort of very obvious symbol of I am invested in this event. I am working hard. And that, I guess, reinforced to me that there is kind of this, like peacocking pride. Some people call it pride. I think it was, it's kind of like a very costly signal of commitment. That's what you were doing. You were saying, hey, and I almost know that this is fucking pointless, But this is how how much I care and we could see we would know From other events other Companies around town if one of the guys one of the owners like us Stop showing up on the front door and consistently did that for maybe sort of two or three months We got that that events gonna fall off a cliff because the managers relationship with the events company owner Is so important all of the fucking contracts were made of toilet paper in any case So someone could slip stream in and say, oh, it's been a little while since Jerome's been stood on the front door.

32:01You're a little bit worried. Do you think he's really committed? Oh, well, we have had numbers down a little bit over the last couple of months. So you were there as this sort of weird buffer that was built into stuff. And that resulted in me spending, you know, 10, between 5 ,000, 10 ,000 hours of my life stood on the front door and nightclubs throughout my 20s. It's one of those things where, you know, I always go back to, is there a business like mine where somebody owns it and they don't operate it? That's why I always go to, first principles. Like, it doesn't matter what kind of company I'm in, is there a business like mine in the world where there is an owner who doesn't operate in the business?

32:44It's very rare that I hear, no, like there is one, right? It doesn't matter if it's, like people say you can't make money in restaurants. It's fucking tons to do. They just do. So then the question should go to, well, how do they do things differently? So even the idea of having somebody step in on your behalf. So in my camcorder method, one of the philosophies is, what are the five criteria that you've taught somebody to look for that after they're done the thing that you could prompt other people to give feedback on as a sensor on how well it did? So I have sensors set up in my companies that report up so that there's thresholds just like you would do for a production line where it's like red, green, yellow and unless it goes to yellow red, I don't need to know about it.

33:33Right? So you could ask yourself for example in your situation, what would some of those numbers be? Would it be attendance over time? Would it be some level text message, hey, how is the night? You know, feedback one out of five. Plains, custom and complain. Exactly. So then, because this is the part that broke my heart, the first time I realized it, you may have somebody on your team that are going to get better numbers than you. And I'll tell you, man, just even recently, I have a company I'm involved in that coaches, software CEOs, biggest in the world, and I hired a CEO to run it. It was actually in Austin, in February, I came here.

34:08And I transitioned, I guess, from the guy to the talent or whatever and he asked me not to come to 98 % of everything and just do a 45 minute Q &A. And I went, I did my Q &A and then they did the NPS score at the end of the event, Net Promoter score, which is like a customer satisfaction score. And it was the highest we'd ever gotten. That one hurt. Because I mean, essentially the business in many was an extension of who I am. I was part proud, but I'm not going to lie, man, it really hurt us. And then it made me question, where else in my business life am I bottlenecking the team? How can people who say, okay, Dan, I trust that you're not lying to me.

34:54I believe that I can overcome my Puritan work ethic from my working class background. But I've got this existential connection to being the guy. I have this sort of need to feel needed and to contribute and stuff like that. How can people learn to relinquish some of that existential guilt? It's beautiful because I actually want them to lean into it. So I love that people have that. Like if you didn't, you're going to fail in business. So let's just start that. So they've got the right desire. It's just their approaches wrong. So most people that like that, they hire people and they want to see the person succeed.

35:29So they jump in and help them out. Well, you just hired somebody and then did the job for them. So you didn't actually buy back any time. So, how about instead, for example, one of my philosophies is we train, we don't tell. So if I see something that somebody is doing wrong, if I outsource something or if I give somebody else accountability for something, I just say, hey, I used to do this. I no longer do it. You now own it. There's clear ownership. Anytime I see a defect in their work, it didn't get done the way I would have loved you or I would have done it, you write it down and you train them.

35:57Why would you do it that way? Well that way I record the training so then the next person, if somebody else doesn't work out, they get that training. So most CEOs, this is fascinating to me and I got to get the stats around this. Most people spend more time training customers than they ever do training their own internal team. And I mean like training, like sitting down and saying, like, here's a great example. I was coaching a CEO and he was pissed off at a team. Most CEOs are. And I said, can you make a list of everything that frustrates you about your team right now? He's like, yeah, easy. I said, cool.

36:29Let's write him down. And they had to have in meetings, they're quiet. They don't care as much as me. I was like, well, try to be a little bit more specific. So like, it was a bunch of stuff from like, oh, they forget steps, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. All right, cool. So you got a list, there was like 13 things. I said, cool, rank, order it based on the thing that would make you the most money in your business. So like whatever the value metric is, like what rank order, like if this was solved, this would make me the most money and impacts the most people on your team. So like, they don't know how to do email.

37:01That was probably everybody in your company. And I'm not sure that would make you the most money, but let's say it's customer service or something. Then I want you to ask yourself, where in your company have you trained your people to do that? And he goes, ah, I get it. So dude, leadership is building leaders. You build the people, the people build the business body. Like this is, again, when I say it to my friend, you're not good enough. That's what I mean. As a leader, I love the desire to like, like, you know, roll up your sleeves late nights, do the work. Awesome. But also, before you do that, ask yourself, is this building the machine that runs the machine?

37:43Because like, for example, I had a revenue leader and his job was to hire somebody to replace them. And it was like delayed, delayed, delayed, and ask them why? So I'm too busy coaching the team. I said, how many hours you spend coaching your sales team? He's like, oh, probably 15 hours last week. I said, well, this is a thing, man. and every hour you do that and not the thing, you're actually not building the machine. So you're working against our goals, your goals, your desires, because you wanna roll up into revenue offers. Like, and he's like, oh, I go in, it's so subtle. Cause like that, he, of course he felt like he was doing the right thing.

38:14But he wasn't because he didn't understand the problem to solve was I need a higher leader, I build the machine to make those people's coaching his problem so I can move up and take care of the bigger picture. So I love the desire. I just think the execution of the responses flawed. Yeah, and it's so difficult to let go of because that hard work mentality is what got you there. Ball fruits in the past. 100 % you're letting go of a strategy that is proven to work to try and do a new strategy with a new person that is not proven to work. And it's just existential pain over and over and over, I'm terrified that this is going to go wrong, terrified that it's going to mess up.

38:57It's not going to be as good as me. They don't care as much as me. They haven't got the same. They could cost me my business. These are real things and I get where it comes from. The fear of like they could embarrass me, they could cost me money, they could cost me the whole thing. I get that. At a guy one time he was working on site with a client who were deploying some software. Friday afternoon, he made friends with another guy in the office and him and that person and had some choice words to describe the manager and what they were planning on doing on the weekend and involved some white stuff.

39:26Good, gets picked up by the firewall, sent to the CTO, kicked back to the manager, they read the chat logs. I get a call. They're not only are they not moving forward, they're gonna sue me because not moving forward costs delays in their business, blah, blah, blah. I think I was like 12 employees. I was just like, I can't believe my whole company is gonna go down because of one freaking dude. So luckily I got some good advice from mentor. He, this is crazy. I'm in Canada, this customer's in New Jersey. He says Sunday, he goes, if you want to show the customer the client that you're serious, you get on a plane, you should be there before they show up.

40:02I was so nervous, I'm 25, 26, suit and tie, get on the plane. And luckily they still kicked us off and bought us off, but they decided not to sue us. But that, but again, that was the pain that made me go, okay, they buy my standards, not my presence. How do I instill a standard? How did what did I do about crewing on the internet? Yeah, like, but I hired the guy and I knew he was a little wild, but he was really technically brilliant. But I also know the first time I ever met him. He like I looked at him and I go, that guy's the guy that likes to party. Like the reason he loved doing what he did is because he liked traveling and paid to do it.

40:36And every weekend was like, how can I replicate Vegas kind of situation? So again, I think that's the big idea. Yeah, my buddy in regards to the conflict, my friend Sam said, he goes, what do you say to the other? It was so good. He goes, if you're not contradicting yourself, you're not growing fast enough. Well, got you here won't get you there. You have beliefs that you had when you started, that you have to redesign because they're just not gonna support the future. That's an interesting point. I mean, it's an interesting pivot on if you're not embarrassed by the previous version of yourself and you're not growing quickly enough.

41:19But if you're not contradicting yourself, there's another interesting one. And it gets to something I've been thinking about a good bit recently. Sam Evans, who used to... I've known Sam for, yeah, he did some software stuff back then. He's a king. And he's crushing it with school now. Yeah. Seems like I mean, I think he interviewed 400 people for that CTO role. Anyway, I was away with him last year and I asked him, why did you stop making? For the people that don't know Sam used to kind of be a... He was like the OG online info guy. He taught all the early guys. Correct. He was like a real sort of guard up there, you know, sort of the Russell Brunson of the world, but more front facing last moment.

41:55And he... I asked him, why did he stop making content? He said, I'd begun to feel like I had to live up to and private the things that I was saying in public. And that's what's interesting about the contradicting yourself that a lot of the time we plan to stake in the ground, I've done that. I've done that before with the boys. I've said, you know, the guys that used to work for us, the managers, I'm like, hey, look, be on time. I was on time. I'm freezing my tits off studying the front door. So you freeze your tits off studying the front door. But if I'm going to be prepared to evolve through this, I need to go back and go, you know when I said that I stand on the front door, guess what?

42:32I don't stand on the front door anymore, but you still have to. So there is this. You sort of create these odd standards for yourself when another thing as well is at the beginning of your business, just rolling up your sleeves, spitting sawdust, is the way to go because there's no one else to do it and you don't have enough fucking spare capital things of the ass. Yes, just go. Yeah, yeah. So it is the right way. Okay, I really like this sort of framework and I think it's important for us to get people across the line with this philosophically first before getting into the attack. The mind's set in place first and then they'll do the thing.

43:08I think so. So hopefully we've managed to erode some of the blockages that people may have had. I really want to get like just super, super, super tactical. Just before we even get to that, the pain line that you mentioned there, what are the warning indicators that you have crossed the pain line threshold? I mean, it's everything from being on your phone the whole time you're on vacation. Having your partner in life upset at you all the time for being delayed. I mean, I did it all. I mean, so I'm just like, what else did I do?

43:46Even like, I think 10 years ago, I decided to take on a new project and I didn't talk to my wife and all of a sudden I was doing calls at 8 o 'clock and we had kids. and she's like, what are you doing? Like you hadn't done this in years. I always started anything. And I never talked to her about it. And like so over the years, I've just like, oh, that's a symptom. Not having space to think, not having space for yourself. I think a lot of people, again, there's no self -worth so they'll start sacrificing the work out, sacrificing the routine, sacrificing the resets, the recharges. Oh, this is noble.

44:23Yeah, this is what builds us through. They're dying on the sword and it's like, no, you just suck. Like it's actually not the way to do it. You just don't know how, because I can show you. I wrote about it. I can introduce you to people and Richard Branson's a big inspiration for me watching this guy, like literally just live life and also run billion dollar companies. So it's possible you just need to learn the skill set. But the symptoms are just overwhelmed. But in physically, I work with a lot of people. I talk about my book, one of my clients Stewart. He had like, got shingles. Like even physical response.

44:56Have you ever gotten shingles? No, what is it? Shingles, I got them once. I had this spot on my back. It was like red and kind of patchy and it hurt when I touched it. And I went to my doctor, Aaron, and said, I got this thing and he showed it to me. He goes, oh, he goes, you stressed out? I said, nah man, things are awesome. You know, he goes, what's going on in your life? I said, well, just closing you around for my company. So it closed about a million and a half bucks. Oh, we're having a baby. My wife's pregnant, just found out and always decided to move back to Canada. And he goes one sec.

45:27He leaves, he goes gets this pill box or whatever and then he goes and he pulls up Google and he types. And he goes, this is what it was about to look like. Shingles, it's attached to your nervous system and it literally is your body's response to stress. So there's physical adrenal fatigue. Some people have that, if you've never felt that, it's literally like your drunk all the time or hung over. sorry, you're hung over all the time. But you can't, it's like, you don't know why. Anxiety attacks, that's a big one that a lot of the women typically have. I mean, so there's, as much as like, I used to be the guy that was like, positive mental attitude, mindset, put like, can delineate and hold it.

46:09Oh man, I give it to me. Not like, I literally would say to myself, I'd rather die. I'd rather, like give it, I'm not gonna stop. I'd rather die. So either the world gets easier, I'm going to just die and that's at least I figure out where my edges are. So I just think if anybody feels that that's the pain line. And really it's just asking yourself if you you know tripled your business over the next three months what would break? Because most people they couldn't even absorb Opportunity because of the way they built it. So Saying no to Things that should be yeses because there's just no spec capacity for you or the team or whatever.

46:46Yeah, that email from a friend that wants to make an intro to the guy that could probably add a zero to your revenue. And you, you don't even know you're doing this. You just slow. You put, you start unstuck. You know what I mean? Then one day after the gym on a Saturday afternoon, you're sitting down to the image, you're feeling good about yourself and you reply two weeks later. And the person's like, yeah, we already went a different direction. It's so subtle that most people wouldn't even know they're doing it. We'll get back to talking to Dan in one minute. But first, I need to tell you about the way that I've started my day.

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47:48So just try it and feel the difference for yourself. You have an unlimited duration returns policy. So you can buy it and try it. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back and you don't even need to return it to them because that's how confident they are that you love it. Right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by are going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. Okay, so what are the principles here? Someone has realized that they've crossed the pain line.

48:23They're in that threshold, they're saying no to think that they should be saying yes to, they don't have time to think, maybe they're feeling more stressed. And let's get tactical. Like I just love it. I can go to the extreme. So the extreme where I live is I don't do anything that I don't love to do. That requires my unique skill set or spend time with people I love. That's like, when I say I don't do anything, I'm talking about I don't put gas in my car, I don't pack my bags when I travel, I don't, like, it's obnoxed. People, if you want to talk about luxury vibes and beliefs, I'll piss ya. I think you and Bill Puckins would compete with each other.

48:58Yeah, no, that's why I love Bill's stuff. We've messaged each other on Instagram and I've reached out to him to do something. and he's like, I'd love to do it, but reach out to me closer to the date because I don't schedule, because I wrote him. No worries, gonna be. I mean, literally, yeah, I wrote a book about it. So I'm just talking Dan Bilzerian's the same man. I try and schedule that guy in, and he's like, when is it, and I'm like three weeks, and he goes, I don't know what I'm doing in three weeks. I'm like, bro, it's three weeks away. Yeah, it's API, I call it MAPI, it's software, it's an API, it's the interface.

49:22So what you see with these people is they say, here's my interface and connect into it, but I don't change my process, the external world. So that's on the extreme. On the entry level is simple stuff, like not running so many errands. Like it sounds subtle, but like using apps to bring stuff to you. Like a postmates and just breathe. Yeah, like just understand what your value of your time is. Whole foods through Amazon Prime. Yeah, and it requires a little bit of planning. I would say, you know, meal prep could be one. If you spend a lot of time on meal prep and you want to have your fitness on cleaning, that's a big one, right?

50:00I mean, at one time, literally, so I had a co -founder, one of my company's Ethan, and we had just gone through a major setback. And I call him up and I'm like, it's Saturday morning, we gotta get to the office, whiteboard the solution, like, stew or die. And he's like, I'll be there around three, I gotta do laundry. It's plainly as I possibly could. I was like, you cross in front of six wash and fold on your way to the office, and you make 80 grand a year. I'm just shut up now before I say something. I can't take back. And he's like, heard. I was like, good. But I mean, again, those are kind of the silly things that people, they do, right?

50:40You don't think about it. And there is this sort of degree of nobility again, something else that will be sort of triggering people in the comments, like a house, you know, full of yourself would you need to be to get someone to come and be a chef for you or to do your laundry or to do the gardening or to clean the house. Like, who am I? Put gas in your car. You're an asshole. Yeah, I'm okay. That's cool. I understand. And it really has the, you know, me 10 years ago, 15 years ago, sort of curls and disgust at the fact that I don't do those things anymore. But on the flip side, I know that it's the right call.

51:15And you know, when I was in back in the UK, the first person that I got when I moved into a house was a cleaner. And she was 40 pounds every two weeks. but it meant that I haven't picked up a Hoover in, I think, eight or nine years. I haven't hoovered anything, and maybe I've dropped some glass on the floor. But I haven't hoovered anything or eight or nine years. I'm like, that was 40 pounds every two weeks is not nothing. You know, 80 pounds a month to me back then was like, I'm like, oh, I'm fucking 80 pounds a month. That's like, you know, like a grand a year that I'm gonna spend on this thing.

51:51But I never had to clean. It was so revelatory to me. And I think that, you know, this is what I like about the principle. It's the same thing with bills, same thing with yours that it works, whether you're going to go to the complete sort of discussed mode that you're in or whether you're just sort of the white belt mentality, which is... Try anything. It's literally, it's a gateway drug. So talk to me. Let's say that there is someone who is taking the absolute first step. What would be the first places that you would suggest professionally, personally, that someone should have a little look at?

52:21I go into the calendar. I literally go into calendar and I say, tell me about your week. What do you do? Where do you go? I'm one of the most common culprits. It's everything from like, why do you go to that gym this 30 minutes away? Well, because it's cheaper. Like, it's really like that level. I'm like, I'm challenging some weird things that you didn't even consider, because I'm just trying to give you back time, right? So it's everything from travel time. It's kind of like, I'm a six sigma, like back in the day I studied manufacturing because I'm a software guy and I wanted to like Toyota production system.

52:56I don't know why, it just spoke to me. And I just love how like they would have people walk around with pedometers to measure steps. And they'd be like, why does Bobby walk twice as far as everybody on average during the day? Well, it's because he has a product that's only stored in this room. Can we bring it closer to Bobby as an example? So I think that's the philosophy that people need to look to and also understand what their time's worth because to your point when you say a thousand pounds a year for somebody's going to help you out and clean up, then you also have to go, okay, well, I'm going to get that time back.

53:29What am I going to do with it? And that's the fill part. And that's where I think a lot of people fail because they don't plan ahead of time to say, okay, if I'm willing to go on the journey, Dan, you save my time's worth something. So let's pretend it's worth a hundred bucks an hour, okay? Then, all right, I'm going to pay somebody else twelve dollars an hour to help me out. and I get an extra five hours back a week. What do I do at that time? And that's where people I think don't think enough about strategy in their own life to say, if I'm here and I wanna go there, I'm not good enough yet. What do I need to do to become the person who creates more value per hour of unit of time?

54:05And that's the big thing. That's, you know, so I'm always looking at skill acquisition, I'm looking, and I also realize at my level, the number one thing I could be is the person as the knowing of who can solve the problem. So like when we were talking about CBG brands, like you can give me a problem and I actually know the person, I've never solved it. I don't know how to solve it, but I know that guy knows. So even just saying to yourself, what makes somebody valuable? Like sometimes it's not a skill. It's actually just knowing how to solve a problem even if you don't know how to solve yourself, but nowhere to point somebody.

54:37And that could be something you can invest in, right? Let's say that we're talking professionally. Yeah. where should people focus the hiring plund first typically? I have a framework called the replacement ladder. And I actually, Hermosy, I know you've had him on here. Some of the best content he's ever done is with you. So thank you. The world thanks you guys. You know, we talked about it like if we were starting, you know, and I love what I love about Alex is his background with gym owners. They're very, you know, entry like, you know what I mean? They're not, I'm a software guy. So like sometimes they come out of Harvard Stanford.

55:12He's working with Jim. So it's like, what would the order be if we have first principles sequence? The one that I think we might have gotten to where we differed is sales and marketing and sequence, but we both agreed administrative tasks right off the bat. So anything that's low level running errands, paperwork, receivables, accounting, email, calendaring, scheduling, coordinating, research. There's a lot of stuff. It doesn't mean you're not involved. It's the 108010s. 10 % upfront setting the thing, 80%, they can go do the thing. The last 10 % is where you come in with the information they've gotten to then finish the thing.

55:53So it's not like 100 % give it to somebody else, but it's starting to figure out in your workflows, what parts don't require a lot of creative pattern matching thinking that you can give somebody else to do. So administrative work usually inbox encounter that's level one. And that is a administrative assistant, personal assistant. Most people start with a virtual assistant overseas at first and hours a week. Like if we're talking like day one, 100 % there. And I would joke like I would sell everything I own to not lose my assistant and she is, she's a clone to me. She's 100 % can go to meetings on my behalf.

56:28Like, I mean, when you get to the level where you have a partner in your life who can decide, like, if I was doing anything, she can pick stuff for me. She knows my preferences. That's invaluable. So why would you go for the 10 hours per week but you're a assistant? There's a thousand versions of it in the Philippines and whatever. And it's actually not necessarily who has the, because like really nobody's got a lock on talent, right? So really it's you're learning the skill of working with that person and that's why I like going 10 hours five dollars an hour Just practice most people again for our work week taught me there are certain things I just need to not do and once I set up a system and gave it to somebody and they did it I never had to do it ever again for rest of my life But that's a skill I had to learn so I like the low stakes Look, you know, it's like a tight rope.

57:17It's like slacklining in the park Like you're not gonna fall too big full. Yeah, I think that's it's a nice way to start obviously Athena is real. Yeah, Athena is great. Hot shit, the problem with that is that you have to commit to having somebody who's essentially full time. Yeah, it's three grand. And they're a higher price point. Three grand a month. Now you get this unbelievable system behind them and they're trained up and all the rest of it, but that's a big, just a three grand. You can literally start with an intern. Like I remember early days, Lisa, who was my first assistant helping with the mail.

57:44I think I found her through a friend. She was like a mom, she had kids. She worked in an office, but didn't wanna go full time. and she was cool. She's still to this day, 20 years later, does my mail. She's cool. And she's changed jobs six times, but she just loves picking up my mail. She knows my lawyers and my calons and she brings stuff around. Okay, so we've got administrative time. Yeah, that's level one. Calendar scheduling email. I always say inboxing calendar is where the opportunity is. If you really wanna go full time with somebody, if you have somebody process every new email that comes to you, I'm not saying they have to reply on your behalf although it's fun, they at least can start to understand where their to -do's are.

58:19Because it's in your inbox. Just downstream from that actually when it comes to email, what's the process from there? You are this complex decision engine. No one fully knows whether you're going to say yes or no to a particular thing. What is your step -by -step inbox management triage? You're talking my love language right now. I will give you the goods. Here's the concept. In your inbox, even if you get 1 ,000 emails a day, 5 ,000, there's certain things that that are just don't require immediate attention. So what I like to do is, even for your hire somebody, just go start setting up some rules.

58:57So like there's in every email tool, there's filters. And you could set one up for just newsletters and say anything with the unsubscribe link, put it in this folder, set a task every Friday for 45 minutes to process. And that way you go in there, you scan through, you read the ones you wanna read. That could be a beginning start. And then what I do is I have seven folders. So the big idea for me is all companies I'm involved if I have different domains in my Gmail, they all go to one spot. So I have all mail goes into my primary inbox. And then what I have within there is a label in Gmail or folder and outlook that is...

59:29Well, that's what you're using. You're using Gmail to do all this. Gmail web? Yeah, I've tried front, like front app was, I went there for a bit, but because it does some cool routing task stuff, but we went back. Superhuman. I don't know if it has this feature. I'm assuming it does. What I love about Gmail is the delegated access. So I can give access to my assistant and her assistant because she's that busy, without giving them password to my Gmail because my Gmail is essentially everything. Vulnerability. Yeah, there's certain things, attack vectors, you just don't wanna do. And so then the folders are my folder, Dan, exclamation mark, Dan Martell.

1:00:02And then that's where my phone goes to, when I open up my email on my phone, it goes to that folder. Okay, so I never ever, and this is the hardest, I remember when I first did it, I just kept checking it, kept checking it, right? Again, you teach people how to treat you. So if you're hired an assistant, tell her to manage the inbox, and then you keep checking and replying whenever it's a week or whatever, then she's going to go, well, if I just wait long enough, Christopher Dan's going to reply to it. So that was a hard one. And then what I do after that, and these are the, there's seven, the other ones are like finance, anything financial related reporting all my updates.

1:00:35I want that in one spot. It's easy to find. But the big one is responded to respond and review. Okay. So what happens is email comes in and this is what Richard Branson showed me how to do this where essentially every morning He ran his is everybody that needed anything from him went through Helen his assistant She's still with them now. I think it's 16 years. She's been with them She travels with them. I'm assuming still and they would just have breakfast and essentially she would only bring to him The things that she didn't know how to deal with but again She's been there for that long everybody knows her.

1:01:06She knows his preferences So 99 .2 % of the stuff she just moved for and they route it right and this This is like the concept of routing is actually financially a very important decision like strategy. You know, what's his name? The CEO, the previous CEO, Eric Schmidt from Google talked about. They said, my job as CEO is a route. Email comes in. Good. Like, he just needs to accent right person. So the review folder is only the things that my assistant doesn't know how to deal with. And then we have a daily meeting where she, she literally talks to me. She said, Chris email, he wants to do this.

1:01:39And I don't know, should we do it this day or that day? I say, well, in the future, this is the principal. What would you do? See, I'm teaching, right? So I use the review folder to actually teach my thinking behind the, because if not, then you're telling somebody. You're doing that in person or video? Phone. I try to do it over phone, because I'm always in commute, right? I don't want to have to be in front of the laptop. And honestly, these... So is that coming into your assistant that making notes, the sending it in the future, when X, that's why? They do a draft email and they put their notes in.

1:02:08So they processed the email, they put the draft for them to read to me over the phone. It's a little hack for what it's worth because there's no really no note place in Gmail. Yep. So they reply and then if I ever see it in there, I can actually leave my own notes and we just put our initials before. I'm careful that you don't send that to someone by accident. It's never happened, but I 100 % have done send something. Oh, yeah. And then and then the cool part is is some of the control freaks in the world. They are like, well, I need to know what's being said on my behalf. So that's where the responded comes into place.

1:02:35So everything my assistants reply on my behalf. they tag responded. And then if anything comes into my folder, so let's say they put something in there, but I wanted them to deal with it like a contract that I reviewed, I then label it to respond, and that's there to do less they start within the morning. So we built this cool little mechanism where emails can still flow. There's no bottlenecks, and over time they get better. Now, the whole philosophy for me is I believe like if you think about velocity of opportunity. See your inbox is nothing more than strangers requests on your time. Like really that's all it is.

1:03:15It's like anybody can guess your email they send a request and then it's just a thing that you have to do. If you had an office like on Main Street Austin right 6th Street you wouldn't just allow strangers to walk into your office and interrupt you yet that's what email essentially is. So my whole philosophy is create somebody that stands in between. They protect your time. They interact. And then that way if somebody needs something, they just get it right away. So if I'm speaking on an event and they want my head shot, I want, so there's actually language that I've created that I think would help anybody that's like, ooh, that feels a little, and I'm Canadian, so that was really hard for me.

1:03:48I didn't want to act, like it felt super douchey. So the language is, hey, this is Ann, Dan's assistant. I got to this before he did. and I assumed you wanted the fastest reply. And then she replies. That language is that coming from assistant at on motel .com? And no, it's coming from Dan. It's my email, Dan. Yeah, I don't wanna get my, well, it's not hard to guess. Yeah. And then it's a reply and then it says, and so they know it's her. So here's another trick. All my everything goes through my email because in the future, if I'm not a counter and there's a what's your confirmation number, I wanna search my inbox.

1:04:24But if they're doing stuff in their email, then I don't have the confirmation unless they forward it. So my rule is - That's why you like Delegate access. Yeah, and I put everything in one spot. And then, yeah, I mean, I joke now that, you know, inbox zero is cool, but even cooler is zero inbox. I don't even do email anymore. Like no, I don't send emails for the most part. I mean, people like - It's just the morning coal that you have, while you're up, but - Yeah, I don't want to do email. I just gave up on it. I'd rather work with Anne, she knows everybody I love. It's a big source of pain in my life.

1:04:57It's a very large. I would love to show you, like, consider me an ally, like, whatever you need. Because again, I want creators to create more. And sometimes, and look, and I get it. Because like, we both have people that, like, we don't want our assistant to reply because there are relationships we want to maintain, all that stuff. What I've done is I've just been very strategic on my text messages. So like, my cell is my, essentially, my new inbox. And, but I'll also, if somebody accidentally gets it that I really don't want to be involved in. I just screenshot the message and loop in my assistant and text message.

1:05:29And again, it teaches people how to treat you. The problem is is that like people that respond, you know, it's like somebody emails you don't reply and then they message you on Facebook and you reply, well, you just taught that message me on Facebook next time. So it's tough. It requires a little discipline, but I'll tell you, man, like the ability for me to be focused. Here's where the money maker is. While I'm here, there's messages that are moving forward, opportunities. So when I think about the value in an annual, like, because really all we're trying to do is pull revenue forward, I'm gonna say on the low end, we're talking two months of revenue in this calendar year.

1:06:03And if you're really good at it, more like four months. If you just think about response times, because Anne doesn't give a crap about my personal emotions to that email. She literally is like, oh, I need to sign this. She signs it. Somebody asks to be on a pod. I don't sit there and ho and hum and worry about, like, am I good enough to be out? Like, she just replies, yes, we'd love to do that. You know, and I'm just like, ah, like sometimes, do Tony Robbins invite me to speak as a vent? If it was me, I would have stared at that email for two weeks, worrying, like what do I say? How do I say? Well, and spin a toe.

1:06:34She already scheduled it. It's done. It's like, she's like, oh, damn it. I'm gonna speak of your rant. Yeah, it's scheduled. Calendars are done. Okay. In other news this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Every day millions of people you Shopify to power their businesses, they're the driving force behind Jim Shock and Olbards, and, Nutonic, plus 10 % of all e -commerce in the US. From neighborhood shops to global retail giants, Shopify makes commerce better and easier for businesses of all sizes. You don't want to build a business so that you can start coding websites or learning about how to build online or hosting or inventory management or any of that.

1:07:11And Shopify just allows you to get all of that out the way and get into the business of business, which is coming up with products that are cool and communicating it to customers. There's no coding or design skills that you need. they make it so simple to get your shop set up and to start selling in no time. Plus, they've got award -winning support that can help you every step of the way. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at the link in the show notes below or going to shopify .com slash modern wisdom all lowercase. That's shopify .com slash modern wisdom now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.

1:07:44Really lovely and I think that it's good to have spent a good chunk of time on the admin thing and given that that's what most people will at least begin at and maybe some people will stop. And I wanna say this Chris, if anybody's stuck on this because I think the admin wants such a heavy piece, they wanna know like what do you, I have a document, 47 pages, okay? If anybody wants it, just follow me on Instagram, that's all I ask, I message me EA and I will send them the Google doc, it's my internal doc, I just sanitize it. It's got preference section, it's got travel stuff, it's got my five -nore star principles.

1:08:11Like, I think once you see it, like once, I remember one time I paid a guy to buy the subway, SOP, the subway, the sandwich place, the standard operating procedure. Cause I mean, like, I wanna know, I wanted to see the, I'm like, what's the McDonald's one look like? Like, wouldn't you be fascinating to know what do you, the McDonald's franchise? What do they get? This huge big operation. But it's beautiful cause once you see it, it's like, oh, cause if you've never created an SOP, you may even know how to word it, how to categorize it. I mean, for example, the subway, when I remember they had a diagram of where the store needed to be and it was a right turn corner near and then I think it was within two miles from a university.

1:08:54So they had all these details that this is the optimal location and I would have never even thought of putting a die. I mean, I'm like, I'm right and where is there like no, put diagrams like, oh, yeah, that makes sense pictures. So so I if anybody wants that, I'll send it to them. But that's cool. Instagram. That's really cool. Okay. Level two. level two is delivery. So doing the thing, just like you were outside freezing your, you know, it's once you have somebody helping me with the administrative task, which is like back office, then start looking at where in the workflow, somebody else can help you with delivering the thing that you deliver.

1:09:27It doesn't mean you don't do it. If you paint houses like paint the house, but maybe there's an account manager, maybe you have enough work where you need to start hiring somebody to help you with coordination and other stuff. So it kind of usually the admin person and can play that part a little bit until it requires some is a little bit more knowledgeable in the domain. I always say for that one, it's onboarding and support. That's what you. If you have any aspect of what you do, like this pod, like having somebody help, once you approve the gas, schedule, coordinate, so onboarding and support, answering questions.

1:09:59Somebody else takes over that, so that's delivery. Third is marketing and really the big idea is build a marketing system. Most people do marketing, then I have a marketing system. So marketing system is somebody else that wakes up every day and looks at traffic and campaigns. That's the way I look at it. I mean, how many times have I changed something broken a landing page or broken, change a color and some CSS file and then the button is the same color as the background and nobody knows how to check out. I mean, it's just stuff like that. So having somebody that wakes up every day that moves traffic into your business, opportunities leads, build that system, right?

1:10:33when I say like, what do you do with your new found time? Learn marketing. Read the books, build an SOP. What books? For that one, for marketing, I'm going to go one page marketing plan by Alan Dibbs. It's an awesome book. Yellow book. So good. I'm going to say, marketing, Seth Godin. I mean, yeah, if you want more tactical, honestly Gary Vee's latest book was super tactical. So yeah, I would say like, depending on your industry, what you're trying to do, paid ads versus organic versus socials. Just thinking as we go from level one where somebody is kind of a bit of an unlock, they require maybe quite a lot of training, but they showed over time just to accumulate stuff by watching you do it.

1:11:17And then you get maybe to level two where you're starting to have some key ancillary business operations being assisted with. Then you get to three, but I imagine that this stage are actually going to start to feel the pain of coordination because we now have more people that report to us and that in itself can create disacconemies and that can be a source of stress. I was fucking held down. You told me that I was doing this to make my life easier. And now I've got all of these people that report to me and now I feel like a prick because I hate the people that report to me because they're now a drawer on my time.

1:11:51How can people alleviate the pain of this coordination problem? Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, these are the skills of the entrepreneurial journey. So like, what you're, and it's funny, because my next book's probably gonna be on this concept of talent, because I think most people don't know how to identify, acquire and develop talent, but the whole philosophy is, there's really five hires if you do it, you have freedom in your business, right? So most people will never, most, it's interesting, because I've talked in account once, and he showed me the data, and most businesses never crack about three to 500K.

1:12:24The reason why is that individual never learns how to delegate. Like they're literally control freaks to the point where they really, everything they have to be involved, they could be a surgeon, they could be an accountant, they could, you know, but they could never have a team or have anybody else. The next level, what you're talking about is just like having anybody on the team, you know, if you don't do it right, you don't allow them to do the work, you hire them and then do their job for them, then you end up, you know, what I call transactional leadership, where you tell them what to do, you check they got done, and then they then you tell them what to do next.

1:12:55The problem with that is that about 12 employees, you'll wake up with projects you wanna get done and all this stuff, and you won't even get to them till about 6 p .m. at night. That's what happens. Usually for most companies, the numbers about 1 .4 million doesn't employees, and that's the pinnacle line. So there is a different way, which is understanding how to communicate rhythms, right? So I always like I was on a podcast recently guy say well, why do you hate meetings? I said meetings are great If they have a purpose they're not good if they're they're got a second meetings last minute meetings It means we didn't do the strategic work up front If we don't give a quarter like 90 days of effort to execute Admin delivery like you built a thing.

1:13:37Let's just try it out for a while Then you're always you're reactive and it becomes really hard for people on your team to even I mean I used to be the guy where they'd ask me what book I'm reading, because they wanted to get ahead of the whiplash. Like literally, I remember guys saying, hey man, what book are you reading? I was like, why? He goes, because we want to get ready for what you decide you want to do next with the bit. I was like, my that bad. He's like 100%. It's like, yeah. So to me is, there's a whole strategy on how do you run a company that most people don't want to do, right? Around strategic planning, reporting scorecards.

1:14:12Just before we go into level four, What about the sort of internals for a business, the use of Slack rules around that, async communication, stuff like that? Can you dig into the nitty -gritty? Yeah, I just literally did leadership training on Slack, which I think it could be one of my best pieces of training I've ever done. Was that available? It was internal, I'll put it on the internet. Just messing around Instagram, people wanted. I'll tell Sam to consider putting it out. He doesn't think my stuff is cool, I think it is, but because the thing is Slack can just become another inbox. And it is for most companies.

1:14:49What I love about Slack and the problem that it solves is it creates an organizational knowledge. And I think that's what makes it more powerful than email. And what I teach people in regards to Slack is the difference between one to one. Because like even if you start, if you're using Slack and you're direct messaging me for stuff that should have been put in a channel, then that also takes away from the potential could have, which is the power to create search and discovery. Like, the reason why, I remember Gary V said this once, he said, my competitive advantage is continuity. And most people would never understand that.

1:15:21They didn't understand how to operate and lead people. But having somebody on your team for seven years is incredibly valuable in regards to the understanding of why decisions were made, why we went this direction and where things, yeah, context. So, Slack's value prop is organizational knowledge. But you don't get that if you don't use it or you don't get that if you don't structure it, right? You don't get that if you don't integrate it, right? So that's why I was teaching everybody is like, there's certain, like there's one -on -one in -person and virtual. So like even sometimes in the office, I'll tell people that meeting should be a Zoom meeting.

1:15:54They're like, but we're all here. I know, but you're not allowing yourself, like sharing, like when you're on a Zoom meeting, or even on your phone on a Zoom call, it's easy to share. When you're in a room and you're like talking about the diagram of the thing, It's like, I gotta get my laptop, I gotta pull up. You just don't do it and you lose the richness of the potential communication. So to me, I think Slack is a beautiful tool and understanding one -on -one, one -to -many, digital or in -person, like you don't fire somebody over Slack. But I have to tell people this, right? You don't criticize publicly in a channel, right?

1:16:28Praise and public, criticize and private. All these kind of things. But so that would be level three is the marketing systems. Level 4 is sales. And I call it the freedom stage. And the reason why it's a freedom stage is that level, if you can actually trust somebody else to take an opportunity to have the conversation to bring them into your world. Okay. Really, I look at the sales call in the follow up. Then for most small business owners, they have a thing they've been dreaming of, which is a business that makes them mind well. They sleep because you have somebody's waking up every day getting you an opportunity traffic, somebody talking to that person, somebody onboarding them into your world.

1:17:01So it still requires you to come back to do the thing potentially, paint the house, create the logo. But while you're on vacation, the machine runs and we're talking four hires. So see the difference where people make with the buyback principle is like, we don't hire people to grow our business. We hire people to buy back our time. If you do it right, you actually will grow your business because you adding people just to design more logos. But when you didn't solve the right problem, the right order means there's not enough customers to keep somebody busy. like how many entrepreneurs hire somebody because they're busy and then have to fire them because they're not because they didn't build a marketing system.

1:17:34So that's that was like the mental model I was trying to to solve for and then the highest level is leadership and this is where for me, you know, some people that are further along because that's what's cool about the principle it works when you're starting off and if you're nine -figure CEO. Most people when you start off you start you build from the bottom up, right? You wear the 17 hats, you take a couple off you hire the first intern, you give it to them, you're admin But as you actually become successful and you have resources, you make profit. If you're starting something new, you should be starting top down.

1:18:06So like when I start new companies, I'm hiring the person to run the company as the first hire. I'm not hiring an engineer. Now if that engineer is going to also run the company, cool. But to me, I want to start top down and then that way everything I work through that person. So I started my new media company. One of the first hires was taught. He's my general manager. I remember I was sitting in the office, we had just built this new built -in shelf for the set. And he looks at me and he goes, dude, looks kind of bare. I said, yeah. He goes, well, like, are you guys gonna get that fixed? I just stared at him and he goes, oh, I'm gonna get that fixed.

1:18:44I go, Todd, I work for you, man. I'm the talent, you're the guy. So anything that you see that should get better, just know you own it. Even understanding how to communicate ownership and letting people, you know, Steve Jobs called the DRI, direct responsible individual, right? Like being clear, these are the things that I hired you to do, own them, ownership looks like this. These are the numbers I'm going to hold you accountable to. And if there's a deficit, I'm going to write it down and in our one -on -ones, I'm going to coach you up. And that's the difference when I say transactional leadership versus transformational leadership.

1:19:18Transformation leadership is every time there's an issue, I don't address the thing. I talk about the principle that was violated. I teach or train or coach against the principle so that I'm developing my people. So the bigger my team gets, the less time it requires me because I'm not jumping in, putting out fires all the time. Like they say, all the time, like, you don't want to be a firefighter, you want to be a firefighter, preventer. Like I want to, and oh, by the way, there's a difference between a dumpster fire and a kitchen fire. And that is a skill that entrepreneurs should learn the difference because if you treat everything like a kitchen fire Because like this I think Warren Buffett said this he goes 100 % chance right now amongst the 2 ,000 200 ,000 employees that work for me at one of my companies somebody's doing something that would embarrass me So I I just got to be okay with that, right?

1:20:09But the cost of doing business at this scale. I think and I think at 12 employees there's a cost of doing business at the scale that we just have to reevaluate. And at every level, there's just like, what am I now willing to? I know it's a fire, but I'm going to let it burn. We'll get back to talking to Dan in one minute. But first, do you sleep too hot on a night time? Does your partner shout at you because you're making them too warm while you're in bed? Well, if so, eight sleep is the solution. I've been using an eight -sleep mattress for years now, and I can't imagine life without it. When I'm on the road, I hate it.

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1:21:11it's clinically proven to give you up to one hour more of quality sleep per night. Best of all, they shipped to the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, and you can get $350 off the pod for ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep .com, slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. That's e -i -g -t sleep .com, slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. Getting into the nitty gritty of standard operating procedure, you have a thing you're going through the task, you're recording it on what are you recording on loom using loom.

1:21:46I like using zoom share my screen. So you're doing it live with someone whilst recording? No, I'll do the work myself. Right. Like even creating slides for a keynote for a presentation, I don't do anymore. I did it. I recorded a bunch. I said, here's my outline. Here's how I find my images. I put one word on it. I did that three or four times and I gave it to my designer. Now I have to do is give them the words. So turning the recording into an SOP, the person that's I'm delegating to has to do it. Right. And the reason why I do that is because then I get to see did they actually understand? Have you interpreted this correctly?

1:22:17Yeah, so that I remember my like you have an SOP department that takes over. I don't have an SOP department. Whoever I'm giving the task to creates the SOP. Now I have an SOP, SuperMeta, on how to create an SOP. Yeah. New it. Of course, there's a template. There's a blueprint, right? We build the machine that runs a machine. Yeah. But what's unique is like, I'll tell you one that you'll love is your iPad has a control panel and you can actually put in there, there's a way to record your screen and audio. So for example, when I'm creating a new architecture for some software and my designer sends it over to me, I'll pull it up on my iPad screen record and do the audio, pull out my pen and I go through it and I talk through it.

1:23:01And what happens is I'm creating a training to train the guy that's going to run the department. So like right now if I'm the product manager, that's my job. But what I'm doing is as I'm done recording, I save it and share it eye cloud folder, that notifies a person because there's a trigger on Zapier whatever says, hey, there's a new video. They watch it, but I automatically save that to a Dropbox folder. So every time I've done that, I might have 13 examples, but it's me talking why I don't like the, you know, really the golden ratio is this, this and this, like whatever nerdy thing I know about the thing is being captured in audio.

1:23:34And then when I hire the person, they go through those and they create the SOP if it doesn't exist. So I don't, I just why I call it the camcorder method and net time, no extra time. So Chris, I just want you to do the work. And because like no, man, I see people they're like, oh, I love this. I'm going to go and do an offsite with my team. And we're going to create the company way, the document that we all follow. And it's like, that's dumb. It will be stale in three weeks. It will not be relevant. Nobody will look at it. It's a cultural thing. So the culture is you cannot do a process unless you have the document open.

1:24:06So that is a... That's something that you have to teach. You have to train people. You're gonna be like, first time you see somebody that makes a mistake, it's like, like I remember, you know, I was like, hey, do you have a checklist? He's like, yeah, show it to me. Yeah, I didn't look at it. Cool. Hey, we have a rule. If you're doing the thing that has a checklist, you look at the checklist. Are we on the same page? Yeah, I apologize. So again, And CEOs are usually the worst ones culprits of this. So it's like, you know, sometimes you'll contradict yourself, but at the end of the day, there is no other way.

1:24:35That is how all great companies are built, every company at scale, right? You can be the crazy genius with a thousand servants or you can build people in the people build the business. And that's if you wanna create something meaningful, even Steve Jobs or every person that you admire, if we went and watched the way they were, you would see GaryVee, 1080, 1010. He has like most of your team Gary sits outside his office and they're executing while he's doing his thing and You know like they're listening to it. They're writing content. They're editing videos He sets up the first 10 % they go do 80 % but he's still for the most I don't know if he's still doing it, but he said and I still post myself Does he post the same video on Instagram TikTok and YouTube shorts?

1:25:17No, he might post it on Instagram And then the team goes oh, and then they'd finish it off. That's the process. So it's like I I would assume he's spending two, three million dollars just for team Gary. Just for him to do like people have realized his social media is a side hustle. Like it's not his primary thing for the most part. It's like he's an operator and he's a member like I've known Gary since early wine library like 12, 13 years ago and it's like that's how he he's always and the people he's had around them, the continuity. He's actually I just want to say like I think Gary is one of the best operators that most most people don't give enough credit for it because he never talks about it as much.

1:25:55He's actually an incredible operator. He's just out there as the louds New York empathy. Like he literally, I've also never met somebody so consistent on messaging. Like I get bored with my messaging fast. Like I don't wanna talk, I feel like we share that same, like what are the new concepts? He's said the same thing for as long as he's had a camera in front of his face. different ways, different formats, NFTs, you know, social media. I'm just glad to get the load of it. No, because he's like, these are my core of principle. These are my life philosophies. How do people get past the, no one can do it as well as me, Trump?

1:26:34Well, first off, my philosophy is 80 % done by somebody else is 100 % freaking awesome. Let's just try to buy into that. 80 % done by somebody else is 100 % freaking awesome. Meaning that that hour you didn't have to clean your apartment or you're flat, that was 80 % awesome. Could you have done it better? Maybe, but you didn't. So while they were supporting you on that part of your life, you were hanging out with your friends going to the gym or working on that new project. So I've just gone to a place where my expectations are lower on regards to the, so does that mean it cost me a little bit more than if I did it myself?

1:27:09Yes, but I also didn't have to do it. So even the mental beliefs around like, when you hear people say like, I don't like doing shit work. Like the way they look down on certain things, I go, you shouldn't say that because first off, there are people that play at the things you work at. Like, Sandy on my finance team loves spreadsheets. Like she would be happy all day long if she could just sit there and reconcile bank accounts. Like, and she does. So there are people that if you hire in to support you, we'll love doing it and your judgment against the type of work it is, is actually stopping you from getting other people to do it.

1:27:48It's like people that are like, I could never ask my engineer to go get lunch for everybody. It's like, no, you can. Well, no, I gotta do that. I'm the leader. I gotta go get lunch for him. Okay, you could or you could not. Instead, you could go work on the architecture diagram. It's gonna help them all. And they'll probably be a lot happier with you doing that than going to get them lunch. Just saying. They're like, yeah, probably. That's like, to me, I'm always thinking about where should I be spending my time? that's gonna create the most value for the team. And I got to, sometimes you got to talk to them and let them know, because like you said, if I didn't stand outside in the pouring rain, what would the story would they have told themselves?

1:28:24And rightfully so, if you just stop going to work and that was a case, then of course. But if you said, hey team, I just want you to know you probably haven't seen me around lately, because I've actually been working on this big opportunity that's gonna help, and this is the bigger idea, help your dreams come true by buying this other thing or starting this other thing. Like leadership 101 is having a vision big enough for everybody on your teams dreams and goals up to sit inside of That's like leadership 101 if you know everybody's five -year dreams and goals And you wake up every day to build a business to learn to let go to be okay with it And they know this and they believe it They'll literally give you permission to pull back because they just trust like Chris gets up every day To try to make this vision and I want to have my own agency someday.

1:29:10And he's telling me if I help edit the pod that someday, you know, he'll vouch for me and send clients. It's like, so I need him to not be doing this thing so that I can, he can go do this thing to help us build the bigger thing. And I think that's like a big part of it, learning to let go, doing the work. Dude, do you know how much of it is all childhood stuff? It's old roads lead back to childhood for all of us. Dude, everything. I actually have this thing I teach about like goals and current. and essentially there's limiting beliefs and negative beliefs, right? Like really everything comes down to like, why did you not achieve that goal?

1:29:42I either have negative beliefs around achievement, rich people are evil, or I have limiting beliefs in my skill. And then people go, well, how do I overcome that? And then I go back. Looking in the wrong direction. Yeah, I mean, trauma is a book we're meant to read, not just put on a shelf. And it's in that space of doing that work. And that's why I think entrepreneurship is the ultimate personal development program. Correct. Yeah, I think James Cleared talks about building a business being a personal growth vehicle masquerading as a capitalist pursuit. Totally. Totally. I remember when I finally occurred to me that my work was literally becoming a better version myself every day.

1:30:21I was like, well, there's just so few, the so few places. I guess your relationship is one of them too. So if your intimate relationship is one, there's so few places that you go to that push you beyond your acceptable limits. You know, your morning walk isn't that your Saturday afternoon pickleball game isn't that. All of these things are done. This is one of the problems that I had with CrossFit back in the day even as an avid X CrossFit with the injuries to prove it. Yeah, you and I both. I never liked to the get comfortable being uncomfortable thing because the discomfort in CrossFit was always done through choice.

1:31:02So yes, Fran is an ugly workout, 21, 15, 9 of thrusters. Thrusters and polyps. Yeah, it was not fun. But you chose to do that. What would be real discomfort would be me telling you that you need to sit on the couch for a week and not train. Like that's actual discomfort. There's so few areas that you get to where the things that you have to or get to do sort of forced onto you that there's real pressure coming in from the outside. That's interesting. So what you're saying is the frames of things you do that are hard that you get that you decided to do is a different type of hard than the things that happened to you that you didn't decide to do.

1:31:41Of course, even your triathlons, your Ironman's, or whatever, is a fucking hard, but let's be serious. It's a hard that you chose to do. You know, it obviously fits even the person that's £450, but you know, live a child. I literally would say lots of a parent, you know, like you've got this thing and it was a shock and fuck the funeral is next week and I have to hold family together. Okay, like that, I'm not advising losing a parent as a personal growth strategy, but you know, that's real discomfort. And I think that we get a little taste of that when there are other people that are thoroughly invested that we can't get away from.

1:32:18You know, even friendships don't necessarily push the limits in the same way. because you can, ah, fuck them, fuck them, they're out of my life, it doesn't matter. And this is your fiance or your husband. That's a little bit... That's the same level of hard work. Correct. It's not a fire and investor. Yeah, you have to hold on and with business, like, unless you're gonna, what, close the business down, you're not, and that's why it is a personal growth vehicle because it pulls you, it is progressive overload on a treadmill rather than road running. Yeah. Right? It is moving at a pace and you have to keep up.

1:32:49And if you don't, things will start flying off on the sides and eventually it'll spit you out the back. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's an important insight to remember. Which is the part when we go back, especially I love you said progressive overload. It's like the volume has to go up, which means I now have to maintain a level of volume to make for progress, which is why people are scared to make forward progress. Because it's a new bar. It's a new bar. But yeah, I mean, you know, there's a better and worse way to think about this. For instance, we did a video about a year ago with Chris Bumstead talking about 10 exercises.

1:33:21Every guy needs to blah, blah, blah. You only had 10 exercises for the rest of your life. What would you do? They did a million plays in 24 hours. You have this sort of odd sense of elation and fear and whistfulness at the same time. It's silly because it's about plays, but it's a nice microcosm for bigger sort of more ex -essentially connected things. The other thing is that when I talk about plays on the show, it's not something that we focus on tremendously, but it is very well metric and dashboarded. So I'm packed with what did you find fascinating about that? So the fact is, million plays in 24 hours on a video, oh, we did Tim Kennedy last week.

1:33:55How did Mike, Dr. Mike, do compare? Because I saw his answer. His fucking, his crush, but not his life. His answer was actually better answer. I mean, well, look, who am I to say that, that Dr. Mike with his Jewish foreskin is better than Chris Bums said, the sickle and the outside. So hard when he did what is name liver king that one was so funny. He's built different man that Mike Mike's built different in fact Mike is the other half of the new thing that I'm launching later. Oh, so Anymore opportunity to do more stuff with him We we set a new bar. This could be anybody that runs a business that has a great training session that gets in there and just Gravites at 70 % of what it is usually you go.

1:34:34Oh my god. I feel super humid the sleeper style the creative style, the caffeine style, whatever you did. And then you have this odd sense of elation and fear or whistfulness at the same time, with that great PR session, with that new record -breaking video, because you go, oh my God, yes, that's a new record. And immediately after that, you think, oh, fuck, that's the new bar. That's now the new standard. In order for me to get our best performing video ever, it needs to be 1 .1 million within 24 hours. It needs to be 1 .2 million. In order for me to get my next PR, I need to PR, a PR, I only just PR today in a workout or pitch dressing yourself up.

1:35:12Pick your pursuit of choice. And there's this, that framing, you know, to really lovely little sort of microcosm of the peril of success, the peril of pushing yourself to a new level, because that then becomes the bar that you measure yourself against. I've posited an ideal, I've achieved an ideal, and now if I want to grow, I need to beat the thing that previously was a dream, now has been achievable. And I need to go, what you tell me, I need to go even further than that to do the next thing again. It's like a reverse hodonic adaptation. Well, it's like goal adaptation. And yeah, it's just, it's interesting.

1:35:46It's one of those things that, you know, I sort of play with with with regards to the show. And I think, fucking about with metrics is one useful way to teach us of this lesson, but at least what I've learned is that after a while you realize that there are other more important metrics hiding behind those. So George, one of my friends, who is a great writer, talks about after you reach a certain number of followers on Twitter, you realize that it's not about how many retweets you get, it's about who retweets. And he doesn't look at the number of plays or the number of exposures that something's got.

1:36:26He checks to see if Paul Graham or Elon Musk's retweeted it because that's what he's bothered about. Yeah, he's bothered about that. You know, and what you really learn from that is that you're talking about sort of depth you're talking about resonance about sort of the quality of the work. It's the concept of What is a qualitative versus quantitative? So like if you if you quant everything out my buddy Shani say this He said if we split test everything will end up to poor So there needs to be art, right? Yeah, taste, you know, curation. But that to me is, you know, back to, I think you said a few times, just like we're here to create and express ourselves and we need the data to give us a feedback loop, but the real big wins.

1:37:13Like if you ever heard of the local maxima problem, so in software, it's like we talk about all the time because we could be on to something that actually has product market fit. but it's only going to have an impact to a certain size of a total dressable market. And to go on the journey of trying to make this thing appeal to a larger group of people, we have to work backwards. And it's scary. I mean, that's the hard thing about building innovation is sometimes, I think Elon talked about this for his neural net when they were building the self -driving. He woke up one day and looked at it and he said, we have to rebuild this whole thing.

1:37:47And most people would not have ripped it all out to rebuild it, but he just he could see we're at the local maximum. It's two great examples of that with three actually one from a personal life. So Tiger Woods gets to a good level of maturity within his game, but his original swing had a lot of inefficiencies in it. So he had sort of unnecessary movement as he was pulling back. And he learned from a coach, like, you're really good, but you're not going to be world class unless we get rid of this, which meant that he needed to get worse before he could then rebuild things from getting better. And the rebuilding was even harder because he had to deprogram the habits that he'd spent, you know, a decade or a couple of decades building up.

1:38:31So that was the first one. For me, an equivalent in my life with this here is I worked on vocal precision for a long time in terms of articulation, in terms of my cadence and a lot of other things, but it's very difficult to think about how you're saying something while allowing the thing to come out naturally. So the show got worse. My elucidation got worse. You saw it. Yeah, I could feel it. And thankfully I was able to carry it through and you know. Did you notice it or did somebody say something? The audience never knows. And this is the thing. No, that's the thing. That's why I ask. Well, this is Alex's thing about, but I'll know, right?

1:39:05That's Alex's standard that holds himself. 17, but I'll know. And I understand why that's useful. The problem being that the certain times that you need to sacrifice particular areas in order to be able to move forward. And I'm sure that you could sort of accept that as a little caveat. But yeah, nobody else knows. This is a beautiful thing about anyone that's concerned about too much scrutiny from people outside. No one knows the sentence that you could have said or the paragraph that you could have written. So you forgot to say. Correct. No one knows how beautifully you could of delivered X or Y or Z.

1:39:37Only you know. So there is a lot of responsibility on you, but there is also a degree of relinquishing that you can have from this sort of concern about skepticism and scrutiny from people that are outside of yourself. And that's, I find that quite nice. So yeah, it's interesting to think about sort of, okay, I need to go back. Yes, I need to take a few steps back and then I'm going to allow myself to move forward. And it's a difficult thing to be prepared to let go of. It requires trust in yourself. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, Will Smith said in his memoir that gaining fame was amazing, having fame was a mixed bag and losing fame as the worst thing ever.

1:40:21That basically on the way up, it's fantastic at the top. It's like, and then on the way down it's brutal. And if Tiger Woods is, Tiger's fallen off his game, he can't hit, you know, his going back and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, he knows that he's just sort of on the other side of his local maxima, heading up to a bigger false peak on the other side. But yeah, it's, it's an interesting challenge. I think, again, back to entrepreneurs that being this all ultimate personal loan program, and I think just like, I don't know what the quote is, but it's about, the bird doesn't land on the branch because it trusts the branch won't break.

1:40:58It lands on the branch because it trusts that it can fly. So like, it does require, because people always ask you like, you know, how did you know or how did you do it? It's like, I don't know if I can tell you because there was a point where I started to trust myself, right? Because I'm not gonna move forward if I don't trust. So it's like, how many times did I fail that overcome the failure? Because there was a number of them. What number was it that I finally said okay? I'm gonna trust that I know I'd solve problem Well the difference is that the trust thing is is kind of like my my conception around motivation that most people over Complicate motivation and they presume that it's this necessary step in between Not doing a thing and doing a thing where you decide that you're going to do the thing But like the only thing that's doing the thing is doing the thing there is no deciding to do the thing There is simply just doing it.

1:41:44Yeah Sam Harris and Jocka Willink talk about how there's no such thing as faking courage. If you do something in spite of being terrified of doing it, that is what courage is. That's bravery. And I think that the equivalent exists with motivation, that there is no such thing as faking motivation. If you do the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing, that was motivation. And if you didn't do the thing, no matter how much you wanted to do it, then that wasn't motivation. So we add this sort of a necessary middle step and the trust in myself thing is a huge part that you kind of just add So do you get rid of the word motivation?

1:42:23For me, it's not something that I use very much at all. You don't ever say like I just don't feel motivated No, you just I'm not gonna do it. No, and that's not I haven't gone, you know like full like Goggins meets Homozi meets some linguistic Neuralinguistic programming to get it out of me. I just learned that inside about two years ago And I just really think that most of motivation is bullshit that you've got This it is and it might be something which is I love this idea. I'm writing it writing about it at the moment It's taken forever this idea of something which is Literally true, but functionally useless say more so So, porcupines can throw their quills.

1:43:03No, they can't. Porcupines can't throw their quills. Fascinating. They're not fucking dark growers. But if you believe that porcupines can throw their quills, you'll stay a bit further away. So even though it's literally false, functionally it's true. Oh, good. That's good. Pigs are uniquely morally dirty animals that you should never eat. Not true. Morally, I think they probably hold the exactly same sort of worth. Yeah, exactly. There's a ton of other animals. But they do, their flesh does carry a higher pathogen load, especially in a lot of the countries that said that you shouldn't eat them.

1:43:32So literally false, functionally true. Something which is literally true, but functionally false would be an equivalent of, hmm. Well, I suppose another one would be always treat the gun like it's loaded, right? Like never point the gun at something. Even if you've checked the chamber a million times, you know that there's absolutely nothing in it. Just do not point the gun at somebody that you intend that you don't intend to kill. But my point being that there are lots of things that you can do where it's good to believe them. Like, how do you use that in your life? I think the line, and this is kind of a through line from what we were talking about before that Mark Grobes quote where he says, there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.

1:44:19If you focus on inputs, you don't actually know whether the outcomes are going to increase. but if you focus on outcomes, what is the thing that I meant to achieve? You're egalitarian, you're non -pregidist about all of the different routes that you can take in order to get there. But you don't mind about how I actually go through these things. I get there on the other side and it comes back to what you were saying about having self -trust. After a particular amount of time, I had built up enough trust that I could then have faith that I was going to be able to do the thing. I... I... It describes the sensation that you go through.

1:44:53the sensation that you go through as you're becoming more experienced and having more faith that you can do the thing is more enjoyable because there's less of that sort of tight uncertainty if you're doing it. That's why I like that. But the outcome is the same. The outcome is the same. Yes, the inputting experience is different because as you go into it, you go, yeah, I'm going to crush this keynote. I've done this 50 times before and it's a keynote that I've delivered specifically this one to a similar crowd. I've got lots of, as Alex would say, undeniable proof is stack of undeniable proof that I can do the things I say I can do.

1:45:26But the things still get done on the other side. Are you saying without the emotional shrapnel that you might have brought? Of course. Dude, this is like my people are like, well, how do you deal with that? I go that just you're literally doing it to yourself. Yeah. You are the sort of task master that's whipping yourself. You're the guy with the keys that sell. You're telling yourself a story. I mean, some people do it where they live. They can't even get work done until they put themselves in a position where they have to do it, but they did it to themselves. Or they tell themselves a story about doing the work that just you could tell yourself the opposite story in the way.

1:45:59Again, the work still gets done. The thing still happens. Just one is a lot more pleasurable. So that's why I like your philosophy of like motivations bullshit because it's either I did or I didn't do. So I don't have to make a big thing out of it. So I just didn't do it. Just be honest with it. It's like, yeah, motivation. What is, you know, it's a neat concept. going onto the finding and recruiting process. What do you find these people? How do you test first hire? Yeah, this is like the people side, again, that's why I think talent is such an important thing. The core philosophy that I have is different than everybody else when it comes to talent is first off, I have to give them a test on the front end to see if they even can do basic stuff.

1:46:41So I'd every role at any company, unless I'm going outbound, I'm trying to pull somebody from another company, which I do. Director level and above, I'm always stealing from an existing company. They have to submit a video and they got to answer some questions. And if they can't do that, Chris, there's like the my recruiting team. I had a people they just are caught. Like there's no conversation. If they what is the test? It's a video. They have to submit a 60 second video answering certain questions. Okay. And if they go three or four minutes, they didn't read the instructions. The last thing I want is that person on my team, right?

1:47:10Or you find out they don't even know how to record a video and send it to you. We don't have an upload button. We say record a video and paste the link. I mean, I live in a digital world. Like if you can't figure that out, we've got to drive a fucking. We just have bigger issues, right? Like the other day is funny. I was one of my companies and I was watching one of the new sales guys in SDR and asked the guy who ran the, I said, have you seen that guy type? And he's like, no, he goes, I was like, do you not test typing skills? Yeah, it was just an oversight, you know? So I think like having an initial kind of filters There is a really great idea.

1:47:44It gets rid of a lot of the noise. It's a shit to us. Yeah, it's just a signal to noise ratio. The next level is profile assessment. And I like a lot of them. For an assistant, I like Colby A. It's a great one. And the thing with an assistant is don't hire somebody that maps to you. You want to find the opposite. So it's like a key. If you're a high researcher, you want to find somebody that's low. If you're low follow through, you want to find something high. Sounds obvious, but I know some people hire their friends to be their assistant. that's not a winning strategy. So the other one we use is ProfileXT.

1:48:16We use a bunch of different ones. I let the companies decide, but the big idea is just the default cognitive pattern that that person inherently, like people have certain ways to act, and certain ways people act will be better for a role than others. So different leadership styles, different, and what we're using to assess the ProfileXT is one of them, ProfileXT. But what's neat is like if we're hiring VP of sales, We can actually profile the other people on the team, the other vice presidents, and it'll tell us if it Candidate is because of the way they are if they're going to cause conflicts.

1:48:49It doesn't say don't hire them. It just gives you a data point. How accurate do you find those to be? Well, the very accurate in regards to like How they're going to work together, but really it's the maturity of the person to be self -aware that they're going to work with to solve that, but it tells you how to solve it. This person's usually going to act like this in a meeting, so you're going to have to act like this. But if you're self -aware, you'll adjust, right? If you talk a lot and somebody doesn't talk, you hopefully should shut up and let them talk. But the thing that it does that I'm like 100 % stick for is cognitive tests.

1:49:17So just pure ability to solve problems. So like funny part is I think I'm one of the lowest cognitive scores on my team. So like when they say hi, people start to be like, I mean, it's like, I've got dated a band. The idiot in the room. Yeah, by design. I think I was in high class. I'm like, I'm gonna test. IQ, that one's still prophylex team. Okay, it's got both the cog plus the the profile fit. So that's number two. And then the third is test project. You know, Seth Godin said this many years ago, he said, I can't work with you till I work with you. We were talking about a new startup and he said, you know, how do you hire people?

1:49:47Anyway, he said that it was just like off the cuff. I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, I haven't hired anybody for a decade where I didn't start off by working on a project on some kind of thing. Just to see if we gel on collaborating, communication style. So, So what we've gotten really good in our companies is just how to hire people, setting up a test project. So for an assistant, it might be like, hey, here's a person's profile on social media. I need, this is birthday. What should we get them? Just see. And you give everybody, this is the key, is you give everybody the same test project and they present it.

1:50:20And then you can, you can map it. What most some people do, they're like, all right, they asked this person to do this. They do this. And it's like, if you're hiring a designer, you don't want them to do, you want to say, on our homepage and then see which one did it, right? It's like I was hiring a CEO once and I was like, just the test project for a CEO for everybody listening is to build the 90 day plan. So you're gonna hit the ground. What are you gonna do in the first 90 days? Talk to everybody you need to on the team, figure out what you're gonna be dealing with and then present a plan. That's actually the test project.

1:50:47So it was like three candidates. First guy goes out, starts reading and PowerPoint slide. I don't know about you, Chris, but big no. I can't, it's like I can read faster than you can read to me. So let's stop that. Next person's plan was just not even, it's like they didn't talk to anybody. It's like, what company did you make that for? Third guy pulls up a diagram, and I could tell by the quality of the diagram, the quality of the thinking. It was almost like you had me at hello. So like to me, test projects is non -negotiable, every we don't skip it. And that's what makes it very different. So it doesn't matter if it's admin, delivery, like just give them the thing you want them to do.

1:51:22It's like my buddy Brian hired somebody to help with marketing and they fired him because their ideas for TikTok videos weren't good. And I said, well, did you make that part of the test project? He's like, gosh, I should have done it. So, but I mean, that's just like, where are you looking for these candidates using headhunters? We use, I think we use Indeed a lot. So again, director level above we go outbound. Direct below that we use Indeed. What's unique is we do spend money on boosting the post. So we'll spend it on LinkedIn, et cetera. for remote roles we'll use, I think it's remote .io.

1:51:57There's different websites again, I'm not involved in it, but it's the idea of spending money on amplifying the opportunity, because most people don't, and then they just get a bunch of super low, it's just, you get a man's like, this person isn't like, why did they apply? I don't know what their role, it must be like a select all apply or something. It must be way too easy to apply for jobs. So, but I mean for an assistant truth is I think last time we hired somebody on a team is like 800 applicants We had to sift through like it's it's worth we did a two Job postings one guest book a one general manager and we had 6000 for two -rolled for sure in your world I fucking nightmare.

1:52:37Yeah, so I mean again. You don't want to be you want to get you want to do that? I do finals like I do I do 15 minute finals in most of my companies. I don't want to you know I trust you minute final final interviews Yeah, I asked three fun questions. First one is, because I'm pretty public about my childhood and some of my traumas. I always say, you know, what's the, you know, what are some of the things that you went through as a kid that shaped you as a person? And I asked a broad question. I see where they want to go with this, right? Because like, I don't know. I just don't like doing the whole like suit and tie bullshit kind of vibe and work.

1:53:07So if they don't tell me anything, well, I had a great childhood and I'm really grateful for my parents and nothing bad happened. I'm like, hey, good, good enough. Then the next question I ask is, what are the two toughest things that you've ever gone through in your whole life? And how did those shape you as a leader? Try to give them another, like, can you knock it out of the park please? Some of them are beautifully, yes, I did an interview and it was actually quite sad. The guy that was applying for the job, his sister's child unfortunately got run over by a car months prior. I was like, my heart, my heart.

1:53:41But the fact that he shared that with me, I was like, dude, we're going to create some magic together. And sometimes I actually know somebody that his sister should be working with that. I didn't want to offer it on that call, but I'm waiting until time is right. I'm going to offer that out. But that's a great question. And then my favorite one is five years from now. You're living your most beautiful life. I want to know where you're living, who you living with, what are you making, what's your job, and pretend we can't work together. So we take that off the table. So we can't work together. You're pitching me on your 10 out of 10, five year life.

1:54:15What does that look like? The reason I do that is first, I want to see if they have a vision for the life. If they do, I'm looking at what I need them to do. If they would be selfishly motivated to create that, if it's what I need them to do. So for example, Sam, who you met out there, when I first interviewed him, he had a vision some day to own his own creative agency. Well, I needed to build that inside of one of my companies. So the cool part is is if he if he wants to do that someday he's gonna go learn the skills and I'll pay him to learn it So him to do it here. So someday he can do it there.

1:54:45So alignment was there and then what I like to do is I like to make notes of those so like my assistants assistant Fabiano when I was interviewing her She says she's from Brazil. She goes I have a vision someday somehow. I'd love to live in Florida. Okay Didn't judge her too hard for that one The capital of Central America. I was like, okay Florida it is And then she wanted to do pattern design. It's like there's actually a name for this that people that design patterns for like different things. Like this is a, I don't know, it's not tapestry. So I don't know what it's called, but I happen to know the number one woman in the world that does that.

1:55:22I just filed those back in my mind and anytime I have interaction with Fabiana, I tell her. I'm still looking out for some home free in Florida and I can't wait to introduce you to my friend. And because of that, like I said earlier, if I know her dreams and goals and I can tell her that I'm working hard to make those true resources opportunity skill set. I just think that creates the alignment and the culture that those people will show up and do the thing. Like I don't have to bribe them. I don't have to. You know one of my most viral videos recently was given Sam again out there a GT4, a Porsche GT4 because on his phone.

1:55:58Fuck off. Dude, it's on my Instagram and I'll tell you why. He's been with me for six years. The guy is solid to solid could be he started when he was 16 he's 23 now and One of the ways that I do this Process five -year goals I teach it to my teams and then I get them to create a wallpaper of their vision What they want to create on their phones so that when I go around the office? I just tap their phone I don't even have to be that smart right I'm a I'm a sister. I'm not again my cognitive score is low So Sam and you can ask them see he still has it there. He has a white GT4 on the top right corner of his phone

1:56:36and yeah, I just want to, I just, I don't know, I just was like, he just, he absolutely knocked out of the park from last year. Everything we've done, everybody follows me and the media stuff there. I'm like, dude, this is the guy, he showed up every day. So it was, I remember when we landed, I was trying to, I was trying to trick him. I got to go into dealership, the guys want to sell me this car. I don't know if I want to get it. But I need you to come with the camera and I told the team to come. He's like, all right, and we're walking around the cars there. I was so nervous. I've never been a while since I proposed to my wife had I even become close to that nervous.

1:57:12And I was just like, because I didn't want to mess up my words. And it was we put it on the turn table. So it's sitting in the whole showroom. There's a turn table. And it was sitting there, but we walked in the other corner. I was looking in the cars. And then you can see in the video, he's like, is that a GT4? And I was like, I don't I don't know, is that, and I told him, is that a Porsche? Cause I, he's like, yeah, and he walks over. I was like, isn't that the car on your phone? He's like, yeah, same spec white, and I go, and I just started telling the guy about Sam. I said, hey, can I tell you about Sam?

1:57:49He goes, yeah, so let me tell you who Sam is. This is literally the guy I kept saying, I need you to make more money so give it to the team. I need you to, I need you to, you know, I need you to be rich, bro, like help me help you. He goes, I'm here to learn not earn. He would never, he would have probably waited another decade before he ever got himself to car. He literally had the money to buy and said he bought at home because he's at 22 at the time. It's not good. Yeah. And I'll tell you, man, I bought myself some cool cars. It's 100 times cooler by some type. Like it was, yeah, it was special.

1:58:23And I just think that that was a symbol as well to everybody else, like just understand your team's dreams and goals. And just if you wake up every day to try to make theirs come true, everything gets easier. I thought you say that you run you up personal life like a business as well. What does that consist of? Every, like the comments when I talk about this are like, hey, you should be so fine to be married to. I would love you. You are. So I said, I'm like, shut up. Like, I just, for me, dude, I, again, I went through massive pain when I was engaged and she walked away. Like, that was one of the hardest 28 at the time, 27, 28.

1:59:04And I realized I was good at business. Like, I finally figured out the rhythms of success of business, but I sucked at being in relationships. Like, I literally, I remember one time I saw an Elon interview and the interviewer is like, do you ever think you'll date again? He's like, hmm, I know I need to allocate some time to dating. Do you think five hours a week is enough? And I was just like, okay, he's worse than I am. But I just, I just ask myself like, well, why am I so good in business, but so bad in relationships. And I started thinking about like what I do in business that makes it successful.

1:59:34It's, you know, it's a relationship with my team and all this stuff. And I just, I just got to a place where I applied some of those principles. So for example, you know, every quarter we do an off -site. Okay, and it's two nights, three days. Initially, I didn't know what we were going to do. My wife fought with me for it when we were dating at the time, but I just said, like, I just think that it's important that we build a rhythm. So now we look forward to them. They're incredible. We pick cool destinations and it's just for us. We do weekly meetings. Every week we have lunch together, we have an agenda structure.

2:00:07One of the coolest things we ask each other is how have I been for you as a husband? And I listen, Chris, I just sit there and listen. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Criticize you did this on my mind. Like I'm so fast -same by how good her memory is. Like she can remember, you left this cup on this table, half on the corner and then my only response is thank you. And then she asked me the same question and I usually say you are incredible. There's nothing wrong with it. Like you do, this is like natural selection. Like I mean, what I'm not gonna criticize. But even on those meetings, we talk about, like, because I manage the finances.

2:00:44If anything happens to me, I have a great team, but I want her to know. So any big decisions I review it with are, talk about the weekend. So we just figured out where the friction points and the lives were, and then we review them in that weekly meeting. We do date nights every week. We just, you know, we have core values as a family, Martell core values, and those are really cool. Like our kids are 11 and 12 now. But ever since they were young, we've, We use them because then it's like, here's what Martell stands for. And when you're punching your brother, we're gonna go to, we love and support each other.

2:01:17So you tell me how punching your brother love and support each other. So it's not, and it's an identity thing, right? If you got a family crest like Ben. We didn't do the crest. No, I have a lot of friend Ben. And that's how I met Ben. He put our family in a presentation he was given on his family stuff. And I'm not gonna send my kids in the woods at 13 years old to defend for themselves. It turns out the world's hard enough if you just let it affect your kids. But I do love that he does everything at the extremes. But yeah, so I would say core values, we have a scorecard kind of like we measure ourselves on different dimensions of like spirituality and hobbies and we just ask our community service, like are we living up to the core values?

2:01:59So we review them. But it's just, it's gotten to a place where, I think what happens with some entrepreneurs that are like growth -minded and their partner's not, is that the partner starts feeling scared. They may never say it this way. Scared that you are gonna depart and wake up one day. It's like when I go do retreats, like spiritual retreats, my wife is always like, you still wanna be with me? Like, yes, I never worry that that's gonna be the, I don't know, maybe I'm just weird, but she goes with death or anything. I'm like, hey, I'm here with me. It's like, we're pretty good. So to me, it's the fear of the person going on a growth journey and then being such a big chasm.

2:02:35And what this does, even the weekly meeting, right? Because a lot of my friends, unfortunately, you know, 50 % have been divorced since, you know, last decade. And it's usually because there was a crack that nobody talked about. Some kind of resentment, some kind of moment, a fight that just never got resolved. And it just kept breaking. And eventually by the time it gets bad enough, it's we're talking and Grand Canyon type scale. And it's just too far to come back. So like even the concept of having practices that are resentment inoculators, like in my book I talk about how to do clearing conversations, which is the same thing you do with your spouse that you do with your team.

2:03:14How do you do? So I think it's probably one of the most important things in the book that nobody gives, because it doesn't make the money. But it is, it will make them the most money. It's essentially if you do something and that I've like, I've got resentment for, or if I do something and I know you have resentment for it, because you can see, you know those people in the meetings that just keep chirping, and you're like, they're chirping about, it's not even the thing. It's this other thing. They just haven't, they don't wanna bring that up. So they're gonna chirp about this. So the way it works is you go to them and you go first and you say, hey, I wanna be the best leader for you.

2:03:46And I realize the only way I'm gonna be able to do that is that if you're honest, if I get honest feedback on how I've been showing up for you, and I'm not perfect unless you think I'm Jesus or Messiah like I'm not like I got opportunities and I can't get better if I don't know what they are. So Chris, can you think about something that's happened in the last six months that's you know you were concerned about question didn't understand and that might have caused you some feelings rounded and they go yeah would you got that thing? They go yeah say cool would you do me the honor of sharing it with me?

2:04:18And I sit back and I listen. Now the key is is most people don't want to do that because they're like like, well, I know what he's gonna say, and I don't agree with him. That's not the point. The whole point is literally taking the venom out. It's letting the person, well, I was in it. I mean, the shit I've heard is fascinating. You didn't say hello to me the other day when you walked in the office. Thank you. And again, the only thing is, so you repeated back. So what I heard you say is that when I didn't come in and say hi to you, you felt that I was in a mood or I was upset with you and he was, yeah, I said, okay, appreciate you sharing that with me.

2:04:55First off, thank you, always thank you. I would have never known, thank you for sharing that. And then there's, I accept it and here's what I commit to change or I wanna, is it okay if I share with you why? And see most people think, well, if I go to the why, I'm dismissing what they said, 90 % of the value is them saying it. And I will tell you, they will say at the end of it, I don't even care if you agree with me or you'd agree to change anything? This one you hear it. Herd, Seen, and Appreciated. I was at the element offsite. That's it, the powder thing? Correct. So I was with them in Boseman, Montana, and then Big Sky.

2:05:33And they did basically the same thing. I think it's called a discharge. So they allowed a... Poor name. Well, I mean, it depends on what the lines look. And they, I think, maybe opened it to the floor and just said, okay, so it basically the same thing. He brings up something that's occurred within the last few months. You say to it and the person says, thank you and whatever, whatever. And I remember thinking like, God, I am fucking balsy. You're allowing all of these people to unload these things, but it's taking the tension out of it. And you're right. It's sort of just getting into it early.

2:06:07Neil Strauss who sat in that seat not long ago, my favorite quote from last year was, but spoken expectations are premeditated resentments. Just fucking, yeah, absolutely banging. And it's so true. It's so true, you know, because we get mad at people for doing things that we haven't told them that we don't want them to do. What a crazy thing. And then we get irritated at the fact that they don't know that we didn't want them to do it. And then it grows into this big thing, like the way that you slurp your tea at dinner, all of the different, what a British analogy that it... The idea that you had about sort of someone that's very high growth in somebody that's lower growth, I made me think of one example and one idea that I've got.

2:06:49So the example is Aaron Alexander, the big bloke that was outside that came to Cooingreaters. When we first started playing pickleball together about two years ago, I said, I'm friends with Zayn Navratil, who's the current man's number two, and he's got this great coach in town. He said that the coach could work with me. And Aaron got nervous and angry about the prospect of me working with a coach when he wasn't working with a coach because the concern in the disparity between us, because it's only fun when you're at the same sort of a level. He also happens to be much better than me. So I think he just, he's a bit of an ego boost for him, you know what I mean, he regularly beats me.

2:07:20And the other one is I had this idea that I came up with actually while doing my life to a last year, which is personal growth velocity, which is what you're referring to. So there is a pace that you move. Imagine that you're Falcon 9 or the challenger and you're taking off from the launch pad and you're moving at a particular pace and there's other people that are around you and they're moving at velocities too. And there are some people that are ahead of you But if you're moving more quickly, you can't jump to them and then you sort of strip past them. And the goal is to find someone who is moving at roughly the same sort of velocity that you are, so that you can keep up together.

2:07:54The problem is that a lot of the time we are friends with people who are still sort of on the ground, and there's this odd unspoken about tension when you mention things, you don't feel comfortable talking about what's happening in your life, because you know that it's in some way sort of triggering to them. It kind of puts them into a harsh light in retrospect. I did a big chunk of time in my 20s, not drinking as a club promoter in 2016 -17. It was pretty radical and a sobriety low and no alcohols kind of super popular at the moment. But that caused a lot of friction in many of the relationships I had because the subtext was, oh Chris thinks he's too good for us.

2:08:32Better than me. Yeah, he thinks that because he's not drinking, that it throws my behavior into sharp contrast. And that caused me to see a lot of the friendships that I had as drinking partners rather than general patriots. Yeah, they were only happy to be friendly as long as I was destroying my life along with them. They were more happy to be around me doing something I didn't want to do, but they did, than being around me doing something that I did want to do. And it just highlighted a bunch of different friendships that really I didn't need to go sober to have this sort of be identified. But that personal growth philosophy thing I think is really important, especially in marriages, like so much in marriages.

2:09:20And finding, especially as a guy, I think there is often a question, why are so many of the top podcasters and the top nonfiction authors in the personal development world men? And I think that it's the same reason that more men are CEOs that there's this sort of obsessive need to fill a void inside of us that conquer and mastery of somehow going to give us. The problem being that if you're a guy who has this high capacity for personal growth and already has built this into your life, it's going to be tough for you to find a female partner that's able to keep up with that pace. I think that you're, you know, for all that how young she is and for Kennedy and waste a hip ratio and mate value and your resources with her youth and all of this fucking bullshit.

2:10:04It's like, dude, if you like personal growth, it's going to be one of the most important things in your life. Finding a emotionally balanced, pretty girl who is into self -development is you're talking, that's the real unicorn. The real unicorns from a wife perspective are finding women that into personal growth. And, you know, fortunately, we've sort of cultivated the microcosm below this particular podcast. So, you know, the modern was the target rich audience. The modern was the dating pool would actually be fantastic if I could just fucking, you know, yeah, exactly. Get the mailing list from the two million people on YouTube.

2:10:39But yeah, you know, that's that's really where you're struggling. And it's because of that, you know, that's not the development of law. You feel people pulling away from you. When you have of this, I called it personal growth guilt, like survivor guilt, you know, that you've sort of come back from norm, this sort of difficult place and you're now in a better place in this person's still there. And you feel like, oh, God, maybe, maybe I should be spending time fixing trucks and sheds with my uncle and his, you know, crazy racist brother. So here, this is, this is my opinion, I think on that is a little controversial in the sense that I believe when we live our truth, oftentimes we show people where they've been living in their lie.

2:11:20And that's the feeling. And, you know, so I coach a lot of CEOs that run into this, Hey, how did you deal with your wife and this and this and this? This is just person where I've gotten to similar to motivation concept is nobody has to change for me to win. That is my, I repeat that to myself. I say, well, does that mean to you? It means that I'm not going to make anybody have to change for me to win. I'm not going to require anything from anybody for me to win, I do not need the rest of the world to be any certain way for me to win. And I just, as soon as I started thinking that way and started seeing me react, frustrated and resentful, I'm like, oh, no, I can be with somebody that chooses not to be on a path of growth.

2:12:04And that's okay. I can choose to talk, it came from my dad, okay? Like most young men, I think when we talk to our dad, you know, they have this beautiful way of asking us question that makes makes us feel incompetent. Even today, my dad worked at a job for 32 years and never really became rich, but he retired. He makes me feel like an idiot. And I remember one day I go, so I could either get frustrated every time he does that or just get to a place where it has no bearing, kind of the trigger back to the trauma, whatever. It was just like, I got to a place where I had to reprogram and just say to myself, like every time you ask me a question, that's his way of saying, I love you.

2:12:43So literally every time you'd say, like, hey, that new business you invested in, who's the CEO or whatever, all I heard was I love you. And I just, it was funny because the more I did that, the less he worried. Like I grew up and I gave my dad a freaking, for sure, I gave him my car hard to tax his whole, like I was a wild. And it's like he's chilled out with me. And I think it's in response to me, right? Like my wife is a happier, more fulfilled, loving female, expressive because I don't need her to be anything. And that was not the case, Chris. I mean, dude, I had some weird shit I had to work through in my early relationship with her.

2:13:25Came from previous relationships of like, hey, we agreed to this and I thought you'd do this and now you're not doing this and blah, blah, blah. And now I gotta get a house manager, like, what are we doing? And then I was like, dude, you gotta get over yourself. So I just got to a place where I don't need anybody's, I don't need anybody to act a certain way for me to win. How do you avoid that making you too jaded or detached or, you know, there's obviously going to be preferences that you would have for how you could connect with your father. It's such a good question. So if you ever run into Peter Cron, yeah, he's been on the show.

2:14:00Okay, so Peter, I've coached them twice, okay? because Peter has a way of explaining things to a software guy in a way that resonates. And you know, one time I was working with him on something and he goes, how does it make, how does it feel making people wrong? So what do you mean? He goes, essentially that thing you just did, you're trying to make them wrong. And you know, Dan, you're very, you know, he has this, you know, British way of saying, you know, you're very, you're very, very, you compliment me and then he punches me in the side of the neck, you know, but he goes, it's just a way for you to control.

2:14:33He goes, so instead of making people wrong, how about you allow people to be, doesn't take away from your opportunity to express your preferences. But expressing your preferences is a completely different language pattern than criticizing people for who they are or choice to say make. And I was like, wow, I remember writing down making people wrong and like underlying, highlighting, and just kind of think about all the ways I've done that in my life to people. And that was the beginning of where I kind of kind of came to this conclusion. and he says it differently, but the way I think about it is the world shows me where I'm not free.

2:15:06And then through that experience, I'm then going to evaluate how do I, is it big enough, is it worth even addressing or do I just have to let it be to your point, like being too passive? Or is it something where I'm going to express my preferences? And if it continues, also choose to no longer engage, right? Remove somebody from a team, move on from a friendship. I'm still trying to figure it out. What I'm telling you, I'm a happier person once I started adopting. Nobody has to change for me to win. I'm going to win. I'm willing to do the work, be consistent, show up. If you want to join the go train, jump on.

2:15:46If not, that's on you. You're on your own journey. I'm going to move forward. And then what's funny, and this is the way I do my content, is whenever I see something that I don't agree with, I then share it on social. I don't attack them. I don't even tell them, but they inspire the content. And I think it's the coolest, like, I think it's a spiritual thing that we should all do, where our inspiration from the way we see the world through our lens is actually our learning, then we get to share with other people. It's a beautiful way to transcend things that have hurt you or challenged you in the past, which is to say you didn't stop me and I'm going to make sure that you don't stop these other people too.

2:16:21Yeah. I'm going to take the bad and turn it into a good. I had a post that I wrote a couple of months ago after spending time with a friend, which relates exactly to what you're talking about. I had a conversation this week with a friend about emotions, specifically jealousy, frustration, and anger about how they hijack even the most cerebral, cognitively sophisticated person. It's highly annoying. You spend all of this time trying to be a rational, agentic beast, then a thing happens that disrupt your emotional state and you turn into a petal and petulant toddler. He explained that when he finds himself getting carried away by jealousy, frustration or anger, He asks a few questions.

2:16:55First, out of all of the emotions that you could have chosen, why did you choose that one? You have this huge library of emotions to tap into. Why did that one get activated? What is it about you, your desires, your assumptions about the world, and your patterns that caused that emotion to rise to the surface so quickly? It's not strictly too that you chose it, your body and mind just delivered it to you, but I love the language and framing for retaking agency over our emotions. Second, and how's that working out for you? What has been the outcome of that emotion arising? Has it made your relationships, life, quality of mind better or worse?

2:17:30I love this language again because it creates distance between you and your feelings, plus it assumes that you chose it giving you a sense of power. And third, do you want to be right or do you want to be loved? Often when we feel emotions like jealousy, or frustration, and anger, it's because we feel like a boundary has been crossed. Someone should have known that we would have felt this way if they did that thing and they didn't, so we need to get them to realize their transgression. In our less gracious moments, we hope to achieve this through mistreatment, passive aggression, mean comments or distancing, and in our more gracious moments, it's done through a calm, honest and open explanation of why someone did something that made us feel this way without accusing the other person of having done it on purpose.

2:18:11Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. We assume the best of others. We assume that our friend or partner wouldn't never mean to make a subset that their impact, their actions that had on our psyche was done through ignorance, not negligence or malice. Maybe their behavior does warrant the silent treatment. Maybe we are righteous in our indignation. Maybe they should have known better. You may even be right for reacting this way. But do you want to be right or do you want to be loved? Because your petulence in response to a situation you wish hadn't happened is unlikely to create more love.

2:18:43And if your partner or friend is incapable of hearing you gently and frankly explaining why you feel bad, then you have a good indicator that your interlocutor is a bigger problem than just their behavior. You encapsulated, it's cool when you arrive at the same sorts of insights. The word you said is agency. It's agency. It's when we get to a place where we can be aware that we control the meaning everything. Like my kid's fight. Like Max said, I'm this. I go, dude. All right, let's talk about it. I can teach this stuff to my kids and they're young. It's if he's sitting there screaming at you saying you have purple eyes, are you gonna care?

2:19:28Well, no, because you don't. Why? And he's, okay, perfect. So whether he says you have a crush on a girl or not, like let it go. And they're like, said, you don't control what other people do. you control how you respond and what meaning you associate to what's going on. And again, I'd like to your point, I'd rather be left. I'm okay not being right. I'm, I'm, I'm, I got to point guy literally this morning, text message me, I gave him a emoji. He, his response was some, some sort of a sentence that sounded like, you know, I, I don't know if you realize how insensitive that was. I sent you a heartfelt message and you replied with a thumbs up and you know, I don't know why people think that's okay.

2:20:08But and I'm like, dude, that's okay. If you don't understand that I like, I at least replied, haven't seen you in years. Love you. Hope you're doing well. But like, your feeling is what it is. Like, I don't need to be right about it. I just, I just replied and I gave him that one of those emojis. Like, what are you wanting to do? I can't do, you can't do thumbs up. Oh yeah, I did. I was passive aggressive. I was passive aggressive. 100 % less gracious. That's gracious. Yeah, I can't win them all. I am human and I do enjoy a good, like I like the jokingness of it. It is what it is, but I don't know.

2:20:44I just, I try to go to a place where I don't need anything from anybody. I'm just a happier place and then I'm gonna create and then if it works, even just the desire to making things work. I had to like that, and this is, again, it's contradiction. Like I actually, I think I wake up and I create And I'm, you know, like I'm very focused, but at the same time, if it doesn't happen, I'm not gonna be sad, I'm not gonna cry, I'm not gonna scream at anybody. Try not to, anyways, just try to, you know, Buddhist -ish, mind like water -ish. But again, to your point about the path, this is where I'm going back to what Peter said, okay, because like, I was like, okay, I can get on board with this.

2:21:23Don't react. Nobody needs to change from you to win. Stop making people wrong. But then I felt like life got really boring. Like I literally - There's no stakes anymore. Dude, I got on a call with them and I was like, I'm doing the thing and it's pretty flat. Like it's the emotional, like if you're addicted to chaos, which a lot of entrepreneurs are. And I talk about that in my book, Big Time, because I used to be that person. And most people, it's normal. So they're comfortable in the chaos. Turns out chaos is a really shitty way to be a leader for a team, so you gotta get over that. So if you go from like chaos is like super normal for me, and then you go to like plain and there's no more chaos.

2:22:00It's actually a, it's a new place to get comfortable and he says, oh, he goes, you forgot the other part of the equation, which is you still have to create. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, so the way you create when you disconnect from a behavior is you actually, this is so bananas, okay? And I'll tell you real examples. I'm sitting on the couch and my wife wanted to go to CrossFit. She's in a hardcore CrossFit. So she's a better person for all of us when she does CrossFit. 55 spine bulging disc. Yeah, I don't go to cross anymore. She loves it and we're happy. I don't think she puts, she just likes to take over.

2:22:34Yeah. And she's like, hey, the boys need to be ready by eight o 'clock cause this person's gonna pick him up for a soccer practice. Yeah, no problem. Like, I'm a man and I think I know how to handle stuff. So anyways, 30 minutes later, she texts me, are the boys ready. Now, she writes, are the boys ready? I hear you are a horrible dad, irresponsible, and can't tire on shoelaces. So I'm telling this to Peter, but I, again, mine like water, I don't respond. So what should I have done in that situation? Because like I heard that and he goes, well, let me ask you a question. One, did she say that?

2:23:12No. Which is a big idea. Like, did she say those words? No. Do you felt that way? Yes. Why do you think she said those things? Well, because she's, you know, sometimes she gets worried, she thinks about the kid. I mean, my wife puts signs block on my kids at four in the morning, looking at the weather thinking about the rest of the day. So like she, you know, moms do that. And she go, he said this beautiful thing. He goes, do you think that's because of who you are or who she is? So because of who she is? Was she that way before you met her? Yeah, probably. Let it go. It's not a you thing. It's a zero percent you think.

2:23:51This is who she was before she met you. Then he said the cool thing. He said, what would you have rather happened instead? Well, I mean, I would have rather been a master to say, you're the most incredible husband. Thanks for taking care of the kids this morning. That would have been cool. He goes, all right, so this is the creation part you forgot. I want, next time reply to her and tell her how incredible she is for that. I go, what do you mean? He goes, and like tell her what you wish she told you. So I reply to her, all good, kids are ready. I love how much you care about the boys. I know he's making sure things are down on top.

2:24:25Set. Safe. I feel safe. I feel reassured. Dude, I'm talking like ninja level relationship stuff. I've been non -stop doing this. Anytime I feel away, I don't respond and instead I take the opposite to create the future that I want it and it turns out if you express because if somebody said once they said what you were pressed gets expressed. So if you, you know, masculine, feminine energy, like sometimes the wife starts acting like a man because you start acting like a wife You know, I mean the masculine energy. So the idea of expressing and creating a future state that you desire Anytime you feel the opposite is been game changer for me and all aspects of my work There's two ways that you can get people's behavior to change sort of into personally I mean there's probably a ton of others, but there's two big ones You can either criticize the negative or reinforce the positive and the reinforcing of the positive It's way more fun.

2:25:18Dude, it's more fun. It's 10 times more effective. But people, I wonder why that is. I mean, I know this too in my... It's easier. It's literally easier. It's easier for me to be critical in front of you in a meeting, than to make a note, write it down, and save it for a 101. And go from a place in the 101 to be supported. To be like... So this happens during the meeting. You know what I really love? I love it when X, Y, and Z. This is when you're at your best, and this is really what I want you to bring to that. I don't think that that's necessarily... That's exactly how you do it. And just think about how cool that is where you're like, oh, why is that person doing that thing?

2:25:51And you say, hey, can I, you know, and again, I don't always do it in public. So again, praise and public, criticize and private. But I'll use that like, it's, they're bright spots, right? And people have talked about this for years. It's way better to identify a good behavior and reinforce it and praise it and celebrate it. And then everybody else starts seeing, oh, if I do this and I get praise, I'll start doing that. And then it creates a culture of we're looking for bright spots versus I'm scared to do anything because if I put my head too high I'm gonna get punched in the face. Because I saw Bobby.

2:26:22Yeah, he got punched in the face. He got punched in the face. Hard. Two insights around that. Do you know Rory Sutherland? Do you know who he is? Yeah, I get a comment. Vice Chairman of Ogil the advertising. It's been on the show five or six times. The guy is a fucking absolute force of nature. It's a big gruff British man and everything's a bit fucking shit isn't it? I know exactly who you're talking about. Yes, he's got some great stories. He came into a podcast episode with seven vapes around his neck once, which was fantastic because of and I quote range anxiety range angst. What did he teach you though?

2:26:51Oh, I mean, he's he's one of the great stories. He's one of the greatest advertisers on the planet So he's his one insight in particular um that Non creative people are always made to Dance to the rhythm of non creative people So Silicon Valley almost all businesses now see pretty much everything as an operational and the logistics solution to be solved as opposed to something that requires something new and creative. So his quote is you never get fired for hiring delight. The point being that what we followed the blueprint, yet the blueprint that didn't work for the last eight times year, but we followed the blueprint as opposed to potentially succeeding at something that's new because you're not going to lose your job for doing the thing that's always been done, even if it's more guaranteed to be unsuccessful.

2:27:38But there is a potential that you're going to get punched in the face for trying to do something that's new. Now, your potential, probably proof. This is where I think Jeff Bezos had Amazon is probably one of the best innovators in the world because even the fire, most people forget about the fire phone. It's $600 million investment in a phone to try to compete against Google and Apple. And he, by design, and I can't imagine what it took, he celebrated that. that the team got built, they tried it. In hindsight, Alexa came from that and the Kindle, which have been category leaders in the home space and et cetera.

2:28:16But his whole thing is that if we don't build a culture where we celebrate failures and everything has to win, it would be impossible to your point. It's impossible to assume that we're gonna be able to innovate because innovation requires a level of, like a massive level of uncertainty. Because if we just followed the blueprint everybody's got, we're gonna get what they got, which is not what we're after. So I think that, like, Bayzos' leadership strategy is one of the few that I study. I think Netflix is another one, but yeah, it's like, celebrate people doing the thing you wish more people would do.

2:28:50It's kind of like, in my buddy Phil Jones said to me once, we're doing something, and he's a speaker and I want to speak more. And he said something so simple, yet so profound. He says, take pictures of you doing the thing you want to do more of. It's like, what do you mean? He goes, you want to sell more copies of your book? Yeah, he goes, do you take pictures of you signing books for people? No, you might want to do that. So that simple concept of take pictures of you doing things you want to do more of is find the thing that people are doing you want more people to do and celebrate it. And I just, those simple little mental cues are I think just the coolest.

2:29:25But again, I gotta rewrite some beliefs because there's probably some scary stuff around that. What are you saying? I don't tell somebody to do something wrong. So you can tell them, you just tell them differently. And again, that's where you're not good enough yet. That's that's the skill. It's like it goes to a client. Yeah, it's where, where's my gap? Am I willing to create the space of my calendar to work on it? You know, am I willing to hire a coach to look at the way I operate? I mean, some of the coolest stuff I do is actually watching CEOs interact on meetings and giving them some feedback.

2:29:55Because there's, they're so close to it, they can't see it. And once they hear it, they're like, Oh, I didn't, I thought I was leading through transformational leadership. I'm like, no, dude, you told everybody what to do on that call. So yeah, I think, I think it's just like one of those things of just creating space to do the work to become better. There's a Kevin Kelly quote from his most recent book, where he says, you lead by letting others know what you expect of them, which may exceed what they expect of themselves, provide them a reputation that they can step up to. Dude, Kevin Kelly's a star.

2:30:31He's a beast. Let's go. Beast. That was awesome. The one thing I wish he'd done in that book, that most recent book of his that he did, it was, you know, fucking 300 pages of aphorisms. Yeah, really? I just, you know, I'm worried. Yeah, I just want him, I wish that he'd done it over 10 volumes, and I'd got like a daily stoic. Yeah, I just, I wanna hear, and you know, that's made for a very easy episode for me in the whole Mozy -style, listicle thing that we've, I guess, kind of owned, cornered, cornered, the market a little bit for. But that's my favorite thing. Okay, here's a lovely aphorism.

2:31:06And what that, that's like a, it's a compression fight. You remember Wynzip? It's like, you're zipping this sort of. It kicks a llama's ass. Wynzip. Oh, no, sorry, I'm thinking of the MP3 player. Oh, Win -Am. Do you remember winning? I fucking do remember winning. Kicks the llamas at. What was it? Everyone starts. It says that. What was the one that's got the orange cone? What's that? Oh, it was it. Is there a Z? V player or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. V player. Anyway, when you've got this, you've got this sort of entire idea, you know, whatever life experience is, Kevin's gone through to think about you set this sort of expectation of people and it may be beyond where they're prepared to go or what they think of themselves and you allow them to step up to it and stuff.

2:31:47and go, okay, wow, okay, so this is, you know, 500 hours of business meetings, where that little sort of insights come about, and then it's been synthesized and compressed now. But there is a part of me that wants to go, okay, but I need the fucking password to unlock this zipped file so that I can then see it in all of its full resolution. Yeah, to me, the stories are the glue for the concept. And sometimes I need more of the painting to be able to see my example. Yeah, aphorisms on the run just aren't enough. Well, you're putting the onus on the receiver, the listener, the reader to then unpack it themselves.

2:32:23Correct. Look at what this means. Look at what this means. And it could go down the wrong path. They could like, how many times have people heard you say something? And they're like, you know, and that meant this to me. And you're like, oh, I meant the opposite. Yeah, correct. The best thing, these single best thing is when you get to the stage, which I'm starting to get to now at least a little bit, is where people don't, they misattribute quotes. I didn't say that a better than the ones that I did say. Dude, that's the coolest thing in the world. People quote you for things you didn't say, but it's the coolest thing in the world.

2:32:50But it's better. Yeah, whole mostly did that. He misquote it something that I came up with, made it better and then gave it to me. And I was like, that's mine now. I know that it's technically yours. It technically was. Yeah. There's an idea called Churchill and Drift, which is that unattributed quotes over time are more likely to be attributed to Churchill. Dude, all of them are. You basically want to accumulate sort of Martelli and a Williamsonian drift over time. I just want to keep doing this. Dude, I really, really appreciate you. Let's bring this one into land. People want to check out all of the shit that you do, resources, book, everything else.

2:33:20They go Instagram is my favorite. It's where I push to everything else. And it's where, I mean, my whole thing is I want to die empty. So it's like, I give it away all. It's free. It's like my best stuff. We produce, I mean, we spend close to a million dollars a year just on media, just giving it all away. Yeah, Alex was a big inspiration for that. My book's on Amazon. You can get at bookstores. And it's, you know, the mission there is to help entrepreneurs build companies, they don't grow to hate and it's going to take me a long time to kind of try to move the needle on that because I think a lot of people, they climb these ladders that just suck and then they go and then they just stop.

2:33:55That's the worst part. Creators that could have been great at creating cool new stuff, they just decide it's not the way they want to do it. And then my YouTube, my YouTube has been a big focus of us just trying to understand the algorithm and we put out some pretty cool bangers lately. I like it. You're getting them and yeah, you're starting to die. Yeah, it took a year of just testing and iterating, but we're starting to get some wind. Heck yeah. It's an honor, man. I really appreciate it. Demo tell everyone. Thanks, Ghost.