Joe: Hello everyone. It’s Joe Polish and I’m here with…Dan: Dan Sullivan.

Joe: Yep, the brilliant Dan Sullivan. Dan, I say that you’re brilliant and like the smartest person that I know so much. I mean how do you take that in? You’d be like, ah, that’s just Joe Polish saying his stuff, or do you actually believe that, or do you take it in stride? I mean how does one react to something like that?

Dan: Well, first of all, I believe everything you say Joe. So over a number of years, the number of times you’ve said, it’s just overwritten my own judgment about that. So, you know, I just…You know, I say if Joe if feels that way by golly that has to be the truth out there in the world. But I’ve given a lot of thought to it because, you know, you don’t want to come across as a phony and I think the one thing that would kind of justify it, you know, I mean I wouldn’t want to go into the smartest person in the world Olympic games.

But I think in the area where I operate which is coaching talented, successful, ambitious entrepreneurs and the number of years I’ve put in for 40 years, I think probably it’s justifiable in this sense that back in the early ‘70s I just felt that the entire entrepreneurial experience in the future was just going to be a function of taking advantage of technology and the exponential growth of the microchip, and I’ve spent literally 40 years just thinking about how do entrepreneurs take advantage of the constant creation of very, very powerful technologies. You know, and I’ve never seen anyone in writing or I’ve never seen interviews that have the particular take on it that I do where it just applies to each entrepreneur and what he or she can do over a period of time, you know, over 90 days or a year or so on. So from that prospective I think, yes, I think I have a really unique take on just how the technological world is creating complexity for entrepreneurs but also creating incredible multipliers.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, and I want to say a couple of things about that too because I mean it when I tell people you’re the most brilliant entrepreneurial thinker that I know, and I’m always goofing around with people. And I’ve had friends on stage or there will be a panel of really brilliant people and I’ll get up to the mic and I’ll say, you know, “Which one of you is the smartest on the stage?” And there’s always the serious one, and they’ll be like “Well, you know, there’s different forms of intelligence.” And some of them, you know, they can’t see the humor in that sort of statement. But at the same time what I’ve learned about it—and I think both you and me play that role and certainly we have said many times on 10X Talk that like this is a mutual admiration sort of relationship we have here. The fact that you go out and edify people like sincerely though. You can tell when someone is just brown-nosing or kissing up to you that doesn’t really know you or you don’t really have rapport with it or saying, you know, all these wonderful things about you and they may be missing the mark. You know a lot of people that are celebrity gawkers sort of have that approach where they’re like “Oh, my God! You’re so amazing! You’re so great!” But if you really know somebody and you say that to them they have to almost live up to it. And it’s one thing where I genuinely have experienced everything that I say about you that you’ve lived up to it before I’ve ever said it, and at the same time when you just really edify a person it does make them want to live up to that.

And so I think, you know, everyone listening, it’s good to take a look at who are the people in your life that you really genuinely do have respect for and you see their talents and you see their skills. And that doesn’t mean they’re not human and they don’t have shortcomings, it’s just the areas where they really do excel. How do you go about expressing that and communicating that to them because you get more of what you reward and reinforce, not in all cases but in many cases. You can overdo it. You can actually overdo compliments to people where it then tends to lose its meaning and its value; however, I think that’s more the exception than the norm. I just don’t think people edify and acknowledge people enough and I love it when you say like great things about me because it probably makes up for what I didn’t get in my childhood, but it’s also really is like, ah, you know, a guy that I respect, Dan Sullivan, he actually admires me and says these things. It really makes me want to live up to that standard.

Dan: Yeah. Well, you know, I mean I think that there’s a lot to this. You know that our confidence as individuals comes…partially we’re just confident about certain things we can do, but the best possible confidence as entrepreneurs—because we’re really talking about entrepreneurs—comes from, you know, the thing that you most want to do but it’s also something that makes you a hero to other people. So you got to do this combination of I’m very passionate about doing this but I really, really want to help a certain individual with what I do and I want to do it in a way that actually creates financial success for me and expands my reputation. So there’s a whole combination of considerations. And the other thing is that once you’ve told me something about myself, I really don’t want you to ever tell me “I thought you were that but you’re not actually that.”

Joe: Right.

Dan: And I don’t think anybody does. I don’t think once somebody’s established a standard for us that they see us hitting a certain standard, I don’t think any one of use ever wants to not live up to that.

Joe: Yeah, no, totally agree. And also it’s made me think a lot about if you start really dissing on or complaining or telling someone that they’re just bad or they’re incompetent or whatever, even if they are just how you go about telling somebody that a lot of people live up to it. You know, the weirdest thing is that if people really admire you and take what you say as truth even if you go on a rampage, you know, if you’re one of these people that just goes off on your team or loses your temper, you will instill the belief in good people that they’re not good…

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: If you go about doing it a certain way. And one thing I notice from Strategic Coach clients that I’ve spoken with over the years, because there’s been several times where I’ve actually recorded people voluntarily. You know I’ll go in there…It’s been a while since I’ve done this one, but, you know, there have been a couple of times where I’ve volunteered to shoot some videos with Strategic Coach clients and ask them what do they get out of it, and one thing that I’ve heard numerous times is, “You know, I just feel better.” I mean I come in here, Dan, and it just makes me feel better about myself, you know, and I don’t get that sort of acknowledgement in my world in quite the same way that I get it at Strategic Coach you know?

I mean I’ve team members that—you know, I’m paraphrasing here like a combination of what many people would say—but you know like I’ve team members that look up to me, I have many clients that admire us, but you know I don’t get a peer network that really makes me feel great and that’s what I do in Strategic Coach. So I think it’s real important and I hope that virtually with 10X Talk one of the things that I hope that this podcast is accomplishing for a lot of our listeners is that it simply makes them feel better about what they do and how they do it, and edifies capitalism and entrepreneurship, and the struggles and everything that someone goes through in order to build it, you know, and grow a company 10 times. So anyway that’s my rambling.

Dan: Yeah, and I mean we discussed a little bit about what we were going to discuss on this podcast. You know I have this brand new concept that I’ve created at the very, very cutting edge of Strategic Coach which is called the 50-Person Future. Put simply, I said, you know who you’re going to be in the future really depends upon who you start surrounding yourself with from now on because, you know, as human beings we don’t operate alone we operate within communities, and we’re born into a community. Our family being the first one and then you know all the things that develop around you as you get through school and then you go out into the work world after your formal education, and your future is either propelled forward or it’s held back by the quality of people who you surround yourself with. And so a lot of people talk “Well I want a future like this,” but they tend to think about in terms of dollar terms so they tend to think about it in profit terms or they tend to think about it market share words, so it’s kind of like an abstraction. They’re measuring their future in abstractions.

But what I found personally, Joe, is that it’s actually my teamwork and cooperation with a certain discreet number of individuals who are likeminded who have values that I have, but most of all they have a really, really big sense of what’s possible in the future. And when I’m around them they get inspired and I get inspired when I’m around them so there’s this reciprocal building and providing direction and morale building conversations and a sense of momentum. So I just began thinking because the only people I coach in the Strategic Coach right now are people who have 10x goals, and I say well one of the fundamental parts of having a 10x goal is having a network of people for whom a 10x a goal would be the most wonderful thing in the world.

Joe: Right, absolutely.

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: So in order for someone to have that sort of goal, that sort of objective, what needs to be present?

Dan: Well we’ve had a previous podcast on this which I called “The 10x Matrix” and it was almost like the huge separation that’s going on in the planet right now because of microchip technology between people who think everything’s getting better and another part of the population that thinks everything’s getting worse. If you talk to an individual on what I call the scarcity side, they’ve got an incredibly well thought out, very, very logically consistent approach at why everything’s getting better and basically nothing they do is really going to matter. So one of the things that’s important for you to realize is to have sensors when you meet someone just to have some alarms that go off.

You just don’t want to have a relationship with this person because they’re just going to drag you down. And on the other hand, there are people who just believe that things have been getting better, I mean, throughout human history, at least in the more advanced countries things have been getting constantly better. And by any set of measurements—lifespan, healthiness, per capita income, a sense of security, a sense of protection, and everything else. Everything’s just getting better, opportunities are increasing, capabilities are more readily available and if they believe that then that’s one of the early signs that, yes, I want to be with that person.

And this has changed fundamentally since microtechnology came on the scene because now we live in a world where if you have your attitude right you can take advantage of exponentials and exponentials simply means it’s not linear growth. You know like one plus one equals two and two plus one equals three, but you start getting a multiplier; it’s like compound interest. There’s growth on the growth. So if you got two then it goes to four and if you’ve got four it goes to eight and if you have eight it goes to 16, and more and more a lot of the technological world that we have around us actually corresponds to that exponential principle not a linear principle. So that’s the big one I go after, do they have an abundance mind about the world that there’s just going to be…Everything you’re going to need in the way of capabilities, resources, and opportunities that are going to be for you, you just have to be clear of what you personally want.

Joe: Right, yep, that’s great. And if people have not heard of that episode they should go and listen to it immediately. And I use the guilt world should, I mean they…

Dan: Yeah, yeah.

Joe: Really because.

Dan: You’re the guilt cop, you’re the guilt cop.

Joe: Yes.

Dan: You know I’m just a hope cop. You know, you’re…I’m the encouragement cop; you’re the one who comes—you’re the hammer man.

Joe: That is comedy. Okay, so you have this great 50-person progression tool, conversation…

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: Mindset, activity. I mean however you want to describe it.

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: So let’s talk about that.

Dan: Here’s the thing, yesterday I was in a workshop and I went through the thinking on this and I said I want to give an example of a person that all my criteria he has. And so I have a list and I have a way of scoring my list and Joe Polish is just at the top of my list and I think this is why we’re doing this project together because it doesn’t matter what subject we describe, we’re going to be on the same wavelength about how we talk about it here Joe. And so what I’d like to do is kind of just describe how, you know, I see you and how I see you as a part of my life and why I think that this is just going to get infinitely better and it’s going to be permanently better.

Joe: I would not object to that at all. I mean especially if you shared this in a workshop which I was not at, you know, I’m curious to hear how you described it. So yeah.

Dan: Yeah, and you know there were people in the workshop who knew you and they totally agreed with my assessment so that was it. But the first thing is just what does Joe believe about the world you know? If you don’t mind, Joe, that I just use you as the example because you know a lot of people listening to this 10X Talk actually know you personally. There’s a great number of people who know you personally so, you know, I’m kind of giving them a checklist in their minds as they listen to this whether this corresponds to their experience. But the big thing is all the people that you’ve interviewed on the Genius Network series, the people that you invite to 25k they are people who are more than 95% of the population are taking advantage of exponential technology and combining it—most of them do—with marketing. So they use exponentials to market and they’re very ingenious.

So the second thing is because we have these exponentials there’s a possibility of real ingenuity paying off incredibly quickly and it’s faster, it’s easier, it’s cheaper and you get much bigger results, and there’s just a constant creation of opportunity that’s coming out of this so you can’t have any scarcity because the very nature of the world we’re living in creates opportunity for people who are ingenious and who actually believe that what’s happening in the world is a really good thing but most of all they have a tremendous sense of gratitude. And one of the things I really notice if I talk to the entrepreneurial, the successful entrepreneurial group of people, and I talk to non-entrepreneurial people right now where we are in the 21st century that entrepreneurs are just incredibly more grateful. I mean they have a lot more than everybody else. They’ve had much bigger rewards, but they also have a much bigger sense of gratitude and I think the two of them are very, very much connected that I think we live in a world now where if you don’t appreciate what you already have you don’t get anymore. And I think that’s kind of a good stopping point because you’re just incredibly grateful for what you have.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean I don’t know if you ever saw that Louis C.K. clip—it’s all over YouTube. It was him at Conan O’Brien where he’s talking about everything is amazing and nobody’s happy?

Dan: Mm-hm. Yes.

Joe: The only thing I disagree with in that clip is he says, “You know,”—he kind of disses capitalism but I don’t think he quite understands capitalism but, you know, the clip is fantastic about how—and you talk about this so much too—is that we live in this abundant world, there’s so much stuff and people, you know, are still complaining about what’s lacking. You know? And you always talk about you can complain or you can create, you can’t do both. Being grateful is one of the biggest ways to switch your attitude instantaneously. Is just to put yourself into a state of gratitude until it actually becomes your state.

Dan: Mm-hm.

Joe: Because a lot of times you have this great audio called “The Gratitude Principle”. I’ve probably listened to it about 10 times because there’s different types of gratitude. There’s reactive and proactive and different ways that you describe it.

Dan: Yeah, I mean I always think of his because he talks about people constantly complaining about air travel, and he says “Let’s get this straight; you’re at 40,000 feet, you’re traveling at 500 miles an hour, you’re sitting in a lounge chair, and they’re serving you drinks—can you tell me what’s wrong with that experience?” You know? And I always think about it because, you know, I travel a lot and periodically there’s delays so you know you’re two hours delayed, you know, and see everybody grouching in the lounge, you know everybody’s unhappy. And I said let’s see this is 2000, you know I name the year that we’re in right now and I go back 100 years and I say “Here I am in 19…” let’s say, “1913,” and I say “I’m traveling from Phoenix to Toronto. In 1913, how long does it take me to get there?” I said, “I got a two hour delay and then I’m going to be there in five hours.” I said, “You know, in 1913 with everything working that’s going to take me two and a half days so.” I says, “Get a sense of prospective, you know, this is pretty terrific what we have available to us.”

Joe: Completely. You know what I’ll do too? I’ll make sure we put the clip—that we have our magic 10X Talk technical person put the Louis C.K. clip attached with this podcast in case people have not seen it because I think they can relate to it.

Dan: Yeah and this also talks about our world is going to become more technological every day, every week, every month, every year more and more of our environment is going to be controlled by computer software. Traffic systems, air traffic control systems. Amazon is the great example that your retail shopping is becoming more and more of a digital online experience. That just comes in and I said you know you have to step back about what life was like before that, and I always have. It’s one of the reasons I’m deeply interested in history, Joe, is because it gets me back before the current age of progress and you say, you know, things were tough back then. I mean I grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s and people say “Boy, those were the good old days,” and I said “You obviously weren’t there.” You know, I said it was boring. It was incredibly boring. Watching the traffic light change was entertainment you know? So, you know, I just have this enormous appreciation, you know, of measuring where, you know, the world has come in the course of my lifetime, and I have to tell you every decade it’s been incomparably better. That goes for the one we’re in.

So that’s it. But the other thing is that creativity. Everybody, you know, they read books on creativity, they talk about creativity, universities offer courses on creativity, but a lot of the people are ungrateful and I’ve got a rule that you can’t be creative and ungrateful. That’s just impossible for someone who doesn’t have an enormous appreciation of the world that they’re living in can actually can be creative. So the image of tortured creative people today it’s self-defeating. You know, to be tortured, the world doesn’t do this for me and I don’t have this available and everything else; you’re killing the creativity in the bud, nothing’s going to emerge from that. So I think that gratitude is a necessary condition for greater opportunity, but I think it’s a necessary condition for creativity and creativity itself is a necessary condition for cooperation with other people because people really only want to cooperate with people who bring new things to the table all the time.

Joe: Can I also say something too about being a cooperative person? I mean a lot of this ties into something that you’re really the only one that I hear talk about this that I’m aware of. Not that other people aren’t, just that I’m aware of in the business/coaching/advice giving world that also I know simultaneously lives it which is the taking off of time; the free time, the free days, and just giving yourself some space in order to do that while simultaneously being an achievement entrepreneur focused not only on your own company but all your clientele growing 10 times and the ability to be grateful and the ability to be cooperative has a lot to do with not being so overworked and so stressed out. Kind of like the saying “Fatigue will make a coward out of anyone” or however it goes? I’d like to come back to that after you describe cooperation a little bit because I think the way that you do self-care has a lot to do with setting up these conditions that you do in your life in order to experience, you know, exponentials, ingenuity, opportunity, gratitude, creativity, cooperation—you know what you’re talking about here.

Dan: A lot of what makes people successful in today’s age is having an attitude that it’s not about them. I mean our age teaches a lot of what I say focus on the self, the people become preoccupied about themselves as if that’s the reality, and really the most successful people are the ones whose consciousness and where they’re putting their attention is really outside of themselves and it’s really noticing how they can be valuable to other people where everybody else out there doesn’t have it all handled. I don’t have it handled. There are areas where I’m just incapable or areas where I just can’t be very, very successful and what I’ve tried to do is just to pull everything in terms of what I actually create back into a circle that’s just areas where I’m just very, very good at what I do. Well that’s my Unique Ability concept.

And then what I try to do is not get involved in any area where I am not any good, but what happens in that area then I find someone who’s better than I am. And really cooperation really starts with the recognition that you’re only good at certain things and there are other people who are really, really great at certain things and we can do a teamwork and that’s essentially…It’s a teamwork between my unique abilities and a teamwork with their unique abilities, and that’s really what we call cooperation.

Joe: So what I’d like to do is kind of wrap up this section of this episode of 10X Talk on the 50-person progression, and then on the next episode we’ll go deeper with it because you have a thing called the Double Multiplier Criteria. But so the 50-person Strategy, you even have this in Strategic Coach where you have a graphic which is with 10x as your goal all progress is now about developing and expanding 10x relationships and then accelerating multiplier progress and results, and the first ones create the next ones and that’s where you go through exponentials, ingenuity, opportunity, gratitude, creativity, and cooperation.

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: And at the bottom it says your entrepreneurial growth now comes from your multiplier networks and you have arrows pointing one to abundance upward and one to resourcefulness.

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: And so how does someone wrap up these six things that you just talked about?

Dan: Well, first of all, I have a saying that your eyes only see and your ears only hear what your brain is looking for. So it’s how we program our brain that totally determines what we notice, okay? So what I’m saying is just talking about myself, I’m just looking for people to go through the list. I’m just looking for people who totally believe in exponential capabilities, resources, and opportunities who are using their ingenuity to take advantage of these things that other people would be fascinated with who have a tendency to create great opportunities for other people who themselves are very grateful and they’re very creative in the relationships with other people, and there’s constant expansion of cooperation. Okay?

So what I’m setting up, Joe, is that I may have had all kinds of relationships in my past that got me to where I am, but I have learned a lot of things and going forward, you know I’m just looking at my next 25 years, and I’m saying from now on the new people that I want to meet and bring into my world are all people who correspond to the descriptions that I just put out there. They’ve got to be on the abundance minded side of the spectrum.

I can’t have anyone new in my world for the rest of my life who thinks that the world is getting worse or think the world is bad or think the world is unjust, and things were so much better in the past. I just can’t have anyone in my room. You know, I’ve checked out the value of talking to people like that since 1944, since 1950, and I just, there’s no profit from it so I just decided from now on I just don’t associate with anyone like that. And more and more as I go forward for the rest of my life it’s just going to be on the abundant side of the spectrum. And you know that thought alone will allow people to grow 10 times. I mean it doesn’t matter what you do because having that thought you’re going to do a lot of different things that in alignment with abundance.

Joe: You just made a really good point. I’d have to kind of go back and even hear exactly how you described it, but you know there’s no profit. There’s no financial profit. There’s no psychological profit. There’s no relationship profit in hanging out and associating with people. So the greatest takeaway that I always get from you just delivered in many different ways is that you are very clear on boundaries. You’re very clear on alignment. You’re very clear standards and you have a criteria and you think about it and you take it very seriously. Because I think a lot of people think about stuff. They’ll maybe hear something and they’ll be like oh, yeah, you know, that kind of works and then they’re off to the oh, that kind of works, and then they’re constantly bombarded with different people’s value systems, but you’ve developed your own value system and you adopt it to your own criteria and what is alignment from you coming from places of scarcity mindset and abundance mindset.

So on the next episode I want to talk with you about how do you blow off people that aren’t in that world? And when I say blow off, I mean do you sit down and have godfather talks with people that really aren’t in that space? Do you just realize…You know, our friend **** has this saying where he says, “You know for those that get it no explanation is needed. For those that don’t no explanation will do.” I’d like to hear, and again we’ll talk about it in the next episode how you actually remove yourself from relationships that just don’t fit that if you’re in them currently and then they change, or you know you kind of grow beyond that, or are you just so good at your boundaries that you just never even let those people in, and if they do somehow sneak their way in, you know, how do you kind of just get away from it sort of thing?

Dan: That will be great. And you know I just want to bring back a point that I made at the beginning of this presentation and that is I think the one reason why we have such extraordinary cooperation is that both of us check out on the things that I’ve talked about so far. I mean in each other’s minds we say well Joe’s that, and then in your mind you say Dan’s that, and that’s really the basis. You know, our relationship has really impacted a lot of other people. I had one yesterday who says, “You know the thing that prompts me to go in this direction is just what I see happening between you and Joe.”

Joe: Oh that’s great. I love hearing that. Yeah, and I hope that you know—and when I say hope, obviously I do hope and I also know because I get a lot of feedback from people that listen to 10X Talk that that’s exactly, they’re being influenced by this and that’s our whole reasoning for putting this out there…

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: Is in a lot of ways we just want to recruit more people that think like…

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: This and agree with it because that’s the world we want to live in. So awesome. Anything else Dan? We’ll wrap up this episode.

Dan: No, that’s great because there’s other dimensions to this but they deserve their own presentation.

Joe: Great, great. So everyone give us your comments if you’d like at 10xtalk.com. Go watch the funny video from Louis C.K. that we’ll put up there along with this episode, and me and Dan will join you on the next episode of 10X Talk. So share this with anyone in your sphere of influence that needs to hear what we just talked about. Thank you.