Thriving in an Era of Constant Change: Mastering Change for Success W/ Jonathan MacDonald

0:00Dealing with change is largely about mindset. 84 % of the Fortune 500 in the last 40 years have gone out of business. So you're never too big to fail. You should just fail bigger. The Jonathan McDonald, award-winning, best-selling author, absolutely all of that sort of stuff. What we're gonna look at today is change. We're gonna look at transformation. If we don't have a purpose and an objective in place, it's hard to know what you're transforming toward. Every time I chat with him, I feel like I've got so much more to learn. I mean, Einstein said that if he had 60 minutes to answer the hardest question in the world, He'll spend 55 minutes defining the question and five minutes solving it.

0:35And that's my point of that transformation. How do we succeed at change? I think the main thing about change to understand is that it's inevitable. And that's a massive point to kind of digest. Today's the slowest pace of change you'll ever experience. Getting your mind around the fact that change is the only thing that we know is going to happen. And that today's the slowest pace of change means that dealing with change is largely about mindset. and sure it's handy to have a bank full of cash it's handy to have a product market fit it's handy to have a million customers it's handy to have all those things but the truth is you can have all of that stuff I mean you know there are many many companies that have had all of that stuff and still lost 84 % of the fortune 500 in the last 40 years have gone out of business so you know it's you're never too big to fail you just fail you should just fail bigger it's like you know the only thing that we know is that today isn't a predictor of the future so you may as well assume, and my wife says that I'm realistically pessimistic.

1:36My view is that it's pretty much a guarantee that stuff's going to go south. What is the key success factors in changing our thinking? If you start it from a really base grassroots level, it's extremely important to understand that there are two types of thought. There's the fast and slow or system one, system two. You know, Kahneman and Zversky did brilliant work in the 70s about this. And Thinking Fast and Slow is a great book. But at the end of the day, if you think about the two systems that we have, we have a very slow, rational, logical thought process inside our brain, which is about 5 % of how we think.

2:15And then 95 % of how we think is irrational, unpredictable, highly emotional, crazy. Right. So and we're all and people will be listening to this going, no, I'm very much more 50-50. And it's like, well, that's an emotional response to what I've just said. So we are actually irrational, unpredictable people. And what we tend to be as well is thinking in ways that are pretty much the same pattern as the day before. So we think about 80 ,000 to 90 ,000 thoughts per day. And about 80 % of those thoughts are the same as the day before. So we're living in a holding pattern of bias. and that bias is the emotional part where we actually prefer things that we know we like or we eat things that we know make us comfortable and all of this stuff is complete fiction but it makes us feel more secure and more comfortable and so in terms of mindsets to enable change to be productive the starting point is to realize that if we can work on our thoughts as much as we work on our bodies at the gym or as much as we work on our relationships if we can work on our thoughts then we can actually enable a life and fulfillment that's far more advantageous for ourselves because we tend to be sleepwalking through life and that's why the rise of advanced thought exists because it's like hey this is a muscle your thought muscle is the most important muscle bear in mind it controls your reality what you actually believe in and what you do in your life comes from how you think and as the saying goes you've got to watch your thoughts because they become your behaviors and behaviors become your destiny so that we have to think about how we're thinking much more and that's why i had to write the rise of advanced thought the reason i self published it is because the publishers were absolutely disinteresting they said powered by Change just needs a sequel about businesses.

3:50And I said, but businesses are full of people. I need to book about people. That's what businesses are. Businesses are people. And they're like, no, it has to be about business. And I said, well, I'm going to write a book about people. And they're like, well, you have to go on your own. So I self-published it and sold 70 times as many copies on my own. How do we succeed at transformation? If we don't have a purpose and an objective in place, it's hard to know what you're transforming toward. So it's like kind of setting a satellite navigation system without a destination. So I think it's extremely important to actually work out where it is that we want to get to and stop the negative concern about not having the roadmap in place yet.

4:32That's fine. That's a part of the fact that we don't actually have the roadmap. But let's work out what the destination should feel like or look like or sense. And that's the starting point. And when I see transformation programs that haven't worked, my first exclusive question throughout my whole 33 years in business is the same question I've always asked, which is where were you trying to get to? What was the actual destination? 90 percent of the time when transformation doesn't work, they've gone, well, we never really kind of worked that out. And I'm like, how would you imagine that the satellite navigation system would have got you to wait?

5:06Because you don't actually know where it is. So I would say, you know, I mean, Einstein said that if he had 60 minutes to answer the hardest question in the world, he'd spend 55 minutes defining the question. And then five minutes solving it. And that's my point about transformation. You've consulted with some of the biggest companies in the world. What's the difference between a company that, you know, does good and a company that does amazing? What do you see as a difference in those? Well, there's been some brilliant research on this. You know, Cotter and Heskett did some great research. HBR has done some brilliant research and everyone's research turns out the same.

5:42The outcome is always the same. In good to great and all the other pieces of work that have been done, the answer is the answer. It has been for the last 100 years of commercial enterprise. The answer between a good company and a great company all boils down to a sense of purpose that people inside the business believe in. How do we leapfrog someone from level A to level Z type thing? I think the first thing to do is to uncover what the barriers are, because mostly they're mental barriers. And those barriers tend to be biased barriers. Out of the biases, there's one that supersedes all else. And that one is loss aversion.

6:21People are so scared of what they could lose, they prefer to do nothing and have that type of loss rather than something and potentially lose it. The people who absolutely and utterly max out, who actually achieve their potential from a financial perspective, at some point or another have put absolutely everything on the line. And the reason why people don't necessarily want to achieve that much is not because they wouldn't like the trappings of that type of income, it's because the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And it's like, don't do the crime if you ain't going to do the time, right? So if you really want to 10x your business, 100x your business, what would you do?

6:58What would you put on the line for it? And if the answer is everything, because I believe so much in what we're doing, I'll put the whole damn lot on the line. The chances are you'll probably win. And if you don't win, you're going to learn so much that the next time you probably will win. Yeah. And that's a big success podcast for today. Hopefully you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch. And if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today. Big success is what it's all about. And by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button so you're here with us every single week on the Big Success Podcast.

7:32I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for. Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success. I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast. You've been listening to the Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com.