Joe: Hello everyone, this is Joe Polish.

Dan: And this is Dan Sullivan.

Joe: And here we are again Dan, 10X Talk…

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: …ready to talk about some important stuff so people can get more capable to creating a 10X future, build their companies 10 times, take 10 times the amount of free time, 10 times more profitability, whatever their thing is.

Dan: Yes.

Joe: I even saw a really funny YouTube the other day, I sent it over to you and Babs, that had someone like making fun of 10X because there’s a lot of people I think in the world that are like using that as a sort of a goal and maybe a lot of people perceiving this as a completely over the top sort of thing, and so what I want to talk about today is your 50-person progression and your 50 connector future and we’ll explain what that means in a moment, but I just want to get your perspective to remind people that listen to 10X Talk, is this grandiose thinking? Is it realistic? I mean what did it exactly mean to you when you even started the You Times Ten program in Strategic Coach?

Dan: Well first of all, this is an idea that’s out in the culture right now, and the reason is simply because of the technologies that have developed, Joe, since the microchip came on the scene in, you know, the 60s or 70s. But what we have now is the technological capability to achieve pers9onal growth, organizational growth in a way that was just impossible probably before 10 or 15 years ago. So when a new technology comes along and it individually makes people more capable and you can just see that with the iPhones, what you can do with an iPhone, you know, major corporations couldn’t do in the 1960s what each individual can now do technology. So when you have that new capability, then you can think bigger thoughts and you can think about bigger kind of progress. So I don’t think there’s anything weird about it. I mean there’s companies that are growing at the rate of 50% per year and individuals just achieving extraordinary progress today, but the general population is just fixed back in a notion that was probably 100 years old about how much progress that an individual could make in their life and a lot of organizations are really, really fixed in an old model where if you could do 2% or 3% per year, you were considered really, really progressive. So I don’t think there’s anything unusual about it, but I think what’s unusual about it is just a fairly small portion of the population in any place is really tuned into what’s possible with these new technologies, and 10X is not a big deal in that world. The other thing about Joe is 10X over what period of time? So if you’re talking about 10X over a year, well that’s 900% growth. It’s a real stretch. It would be a stretch for me. But if you’re talking about 10 times growth over 25 years, it’s 10% growth per year, and that’s fairly manageable for most individuals who, you know, who have their wits about them and they’re actually creating some sort of valuable thing in the marketplace. So I say to people there’s no unreasonable goals but there are unreasonable deadlines, so it’s all in terms of time you give yourself to actually achieve a very significant result.

Joe: No, makes sense. So, well let’s talk about the 50 Connector Future.

Dan: Yes.

Joe: I’ll just ask you to describe it and explain it. I have my Genius Network. You’ve created something called the 50 Connector Future. What is it? What’s it all about? What’s it like?

Dan: Well I, first of all, I should just acknowledge that I got the whole idea of the 50 Connector Future, I really, really got it from you because you do an exercise every time we’re in 25K of the network of other capabilities that you have available to you just through a series of relationships. And I’ve been to 10 sessions of 25K and the whole notion of Genius Network, and that one is very meaningful for me and I’ve just really zeroed in on it, and I just began to see that what you were essentially doing was creating a model for how everybody ought to create the future, and it’s through a series of relationships with people who have unique abilities on the one hand but they have amazing connections out in the world that you yourself couldn’t develop unless you knew them. As I’ve gone along and I’ve really gotten a handle on this model, I’ve realized that of everybody I know or have ever known in my entrepreneurial career, you’re the greatest example of a connector to other worlds, other capabilities, other resources, other opportunities, and so I’ve got a poster on the wall and it’s Joe Polish. I mean he just represents for me how you develop your future.

Joe: You know what’s kind of interesting listening to it from my perspective too, you know, I mean a lot of people that are listening to this may be thinking, “How do I interpret hearing something like that?” and it’s kind of interesting because sometimes like, you know, we’re talking about connection and it’s even connecting with my connecting abilities, and as you have pointed out to me early on, when I would kind of – boy what would be the term – maybe poo-poo the whole idea and not take it as seriously enough, is just because it comes naturally, you know.

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: If you see a fish and if the fish spoke and understood English and could talk back and you said, “Oh, you know, you just swim so well,” and the fish would be like, “Well I’m a fish. I mean, yeah.” And so when you pointed out to me you’ve actually allowed me to take what I do naturally more seriously and realize it and understand it as a useful ability not only for myself and for my career and for what I do, but also for other people. And by just having a deep awareness of that put into your languaging of unique ability, it is really what has allowed me to take things way more seriously than I typically wouldn’t because I actually was raised in a way to where hard work is admired and you should, you know, really try to figure out how to do things you don’t know how to figure out, and then a guy like Dan Sullivan comes along, which is an enormously rare individual that says, “You know, work on your strengths and how are your weaknesses. I mean don’t do that sort of stuff, and really develop that and that’s your unique ability. It comes naturally. And, you know, what gives you energy? I mean spend your time doing that, not all this other stuff.”

Dan: Can I just say a thing there Joe? You know, I’ve observed you over quite a number of years now, probably going on 14 or 15 years now that I’ve observed you. And I think you work just as hard now as you did 14 or 15 years ago, but you tend to work on things that have huge multipliers to them where that wasn’t as true, you know, when I first met you, and I think that’s my model. And I said you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve got a lot of energy and you got a lot of ambition. You’re probably just going to work hard all your life, and you’re going to put a lot of effort into it and you’re going to put a lot of passion into it, but the question is what is that focused on? That’s the huge shift that I’ve seen in you over the 15 years.

Joe: Well, you know, we just determined this the other day Dan when I was over in Chicago at your place. We went back and looked at the numbers of how long I’ve been a Strategic Coach, and I’ve been saying 13-14 years and we determined I’m going on like 18 years. So now it’s, just think, in a couple more years it’ll be a 20-year relationships, and then we’ll be, “Remember back in the old days when we only knew each other for a decade?” So going back to the connection, now that I’ve been able to really see that I just do things naturally to connect with people and the way that I think about problem solving, the way that I think about challenges, the way that I think about opportunities, I always look at it as, well instead of seeking for and searching for outside of my network, I just tend to focus on who in my life, who in my world has this capability, has this answer, has this solution, has this resource, has this skill that I can simply tap into, and when people take their sphere of influence, their circle of influence seriously, you’ll see that many of the things that are going to advance your income, that are going to improve your life, that are going to free up a lot of time wasteage, that are going to give you just an enormous amount of unfair advantages, those all exist within the relationships you have now properly leveraged or ones that you need to or can develop if you think of it this way. So what criteria can 10X entrepreneurs look for to build a 50 Connector Future?

Dan: Well when people think about the modern marketplace, that’s very, very quickly emerging around the planet right now. A lot of it is very technology based so they tend to think about connections as being technological connections and they tend to think of the multipliers and my feeling is that both of those are kind of the payoff stage of developing some earlier characteristics. When I first say this to people, you know, kind of snaps their head a little bit, and I said, you know, “The number one quality that you have to have to even begin to enter into a world where you can see other people as extraordinary connections for you that will connect you to great things out in the world is actually gratitude.” So what you have to train yourself on a daily basis of being grateful for what you already have, and what gratitude does is it just makes you appreciate all the capabilities and the resources and the opportunities, but especially the relationships that you already have.” And I said, “Well everybody thinks they don’t have what they need and they’re looking for something better, which, you know, immediately makes them discount what they already have, and they devalue what they have,” but what appreciation does, or gratitude because it’s an interesting thing in the English language anyway is that we have two words which more or less mean the same thing from an emotional state. One of them is people say appreciate someone. Well that kind of conveys that you’re very grateful for the person, and when you say gratitude it means that you appreciate. And appreciate is a very, very interesting word because it has a very, very definite emotional meaning and it conveys a certain kind of individual. We love people who are grateful in our life and so it’s very emotional, but the other thing that has an economic meaning in the sense that in the stock market they talk about appreciating stocks with commodities, they talk about that real estate is appreciating, gold is appreciating, oil is appreciating. And so in the economic world, what appreciate means is to grow. If you appreciate the value of something, you’re growing something,” and I said, “Well it’s actually the same principle both on the emotional side and the economic. It both means grow.” English is an interesting language. I don’t know if the same situation develops in another language, but in English they have this very, very interesting notion that all growth of anything starts with appreciation, and appreciation in the human world actually starts with gratitude. And it’s actually that gratitude, and I would say Joe from the moment I’ve known you that there’s two qualities that you have that just sets you apart from almost anyone else I can think of, and one of them is enormous gratitude for the people in your life, for the learning in your life, but you also have this enormous sense of growth. You know, you want to grow in generosity. So you, when you get into any situation, you’re the first one in the situation to actually create value, is that you create value and put it on the table before you ask anyone else to create value for you, and I think it’s those characteristics just practiced on a daily basis, relationship by relationship, situation by situation, which sets you up then to take advantage of the technological exponentials and multipliers that are out in the world.

Joe: Well yes, thank you, and you know how to leverage that, acknowledge it, utilize it, appreciate it, refer it and enhance it…

Dan: Yes.

Joe: …you know, which fits your opportunity filter, which are the five ways that you get paid…

Dan: Yes.

Joe: …reward, refer, appreciate, utilize, enhance. And a lot of people that I’ll do the same things that I would do to you will not treat it that way. It’s almost like you hand someone a goose that lays a golden egg and they actually want to choke the goose and squeeze all the eggs out but get nothing in return. And so you very quickly tend to gravitate towards people that share your value system if you are a person that doesn’t want to be abused in a relationship, who wants to be appreciated, and I think that our friendships develop with similarities and stuff, which is why me and you have developed such a great business relationship and such a great personal relationship. So for people that are out there that may not naturally do this or think about it this way is one of the reasons I created my Genius Network tool and certainly one of the reasons you created the 50 Connector Future. And since we haven’t really described what the 50 even means, can you kind of go a little deep into it and then we’ll continue to talk about how people can develop their networks and how they can utilize this thinking to improve themselves?

Dan: I’ve given a lot of thought to this over the years on a number of friends, but there’s a thing in the networking world, just the kind of networking, how many people can you be in connection with and still have the experience be meaningful? And, you know, you have people with Facebook and they’ve got 10,000 friends; well I have to tell you that’s not really a meaningful experience because a friend really represents something very different than just a relationship or an acquaintance or a connection. And there’s a thing called Dunbar’s Law, and what Dunbar’s Law says is that the maximum that any human being can actually meaningfully connect with other people is about 100, but generally speaking from a useful, practical, go forward position, the number is actually about 50, you know, and you have to actually train your nervous system to actually connect that. And some people can only start with five and some people can start with 50. So what I said is, you know, I started in 1974 to be a coach, so I’ve put in four decades or more of being coach to entrepreneurs and we started our Strategic Coach program in 1989, so we’ve had a quarter century or more of actually coaching high level, talented, successful, ambitious entrepreneurs, and I’m right at a point now where I said, you know, the rest of my life is just creating these fabulous connections, and I would never have thought of it if I hadn’t met you Joe, and I would never have thought of it in these terms if I hadn’t joined 25K. 25K has been the school that I went to to learn how to be a connector, and you know, when I go to your workshops, the actual sessions of 25K – and they’re two days each, so I get six to eight days a year – I’m just sitting there watching, what is Joe doing that’s teaching me about being a connector, you know? And then you connect me with all sorts of talents and those become the examples. But every time I come away, my ability to be a connector actually improves enormously, and sometimes it’s very specific lessons and sometimes I’m just developing a mindset towards it from watching you, and the reason is because you do it all the time and it’s not something you watch yourself doing. You’re just a supreme athlete, kind of a supreme performer in operation, and, you know, I take notes because I’m not, you know. I don’t have that ability, but I’ve become incredibly better at it over the years that I’ve been in 25K, so I really look forward to just seeing you in action to actually see how you do it and for some reason, I don’t know what the chips are in your brain or what the training was that you went through it, but you just have this natural gift for connecting with strangers. And the interesting thing is all progress on the planet isn’t taking your friends and making them friendlier, it’s actually taking strangers and making them into partners.

Joe: So let me ask you this then because certainly I’ve talked about what I do and my perspective and other people have helped me kind of break down certain things, but I’d love to, you know, have you describe what it is that I do that’s useful for you to become a better…

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: …connector so that other people listening, you know, on our episode here can actually utilize it for themselves.

Dan: I’ll just go back to a fundamental concept of unique ability, which is the cornerstone of Strategic Coach that I believe every person the planet is born with a unique ability that in the entrepreneurial world has three fundamental qualities. One is that you’re passionate about doing this activity. You do it all the time. You’ve done it since you were a kid. You do it all your life. Second thing is you do it to be a hero to a particular type of person out in the world. So it isn’t just a self-contained passion, you know, I have this tremendous passion and I want to create something; it’s actually creating something that actually makes you a hero in the eyes of other people. And then the third quality that’s there in the entrepreneurial world is that there’s a multiplier to it that you by focusing on this passion and being a hero to this type of person get a multiplier of revenues, of profits, of capabilities and opportunities and that’s what really the essence of entrepreneurial growth actually is. And what I’ve identified is it’s one thing to know what your unique ability is, but the other thing is to surround yourself with other people who, just being in their presence and just interacting with them, actually enhances your unique ability. Your unique ability gets better as a result of your communication with them and your cooperation with them, but the other thing is that you do the same thing to them that they get better. They get clearer about what they’re really great at and they grow in unique abilities. Every one of these that we’re going to talk about over the next period of time Joe are reciprocal. It happens to the one person but the it automatically happens to the other person.

Joe: Babs was the first person that mentioned to me that, you know, one of the things that I do with sarcasm, with humor, with, you know, my shenanigans is charm and disarm. She used those two terms.

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: And I remember, you know, I’ve had Genius Network now, the Genius Network Group, also called 25K, for going on nine years, and a couple years into the group there were three people that all lived in the Phoenix area. They were sitting there talking to each other during a break, and one of them said to me, they’re like, “You know, we all live in the same town. We never take time to get together. We’ll have phone calls,” and they were doing business together. I mean they were doing joint ventures and partnerships and endorsing each other’s stuff and working together. They said, “You know, we get more done coming to 25K just because of the environment than left our own,” and I thought to myself, “My god, you know, if you have to charge people $25,000 a year that are already working together because they’re actually going to work more functionally together, that seems like a good investment to me,” and, you know, and it was funny but it was true. And part of it is being able to create that comfortable rapport building environment, and for the life of me sometimes I don’t even know quite how I do it. I just tend to create environments and say things and ask questions that I would feel comfortable in. So I mean a lot of it is just this feeling that, “Wow, you know, this needs to be said. This needs to be talked about. Don’t take yourself too seriously.” Some people take themselves too seriously and then other people it’s the complete opposite. They do or they don’t.

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: And I just try to keep everything in a very chummy feeling, and people tend to relate and interact and get along better in that sort of situation. I just think people become more better versions of themselves.

Dan: Yeah, and I think that’s really important because there’s real tangible values that are created where people can really point to it, you know, “Because of Joe I was able to do this and this and this,” you know, and it’s kind of measurable, very specific actions or very, very specific results. But I think that the more important thing about this ability is just what you pointed to with Dean’s, you know, and his two other people who are working with him there, is that you create an environment. It’s almost like you create an energy space and when people are in that space they’re able to do things, especially they’re able to create and cooperate. You know, and that’s why we hang around certain people and we avoid other people. It has a lot to do with the energetic level of what’s happening in the space. And a lot of people come to 25K and, you know, they’re feeling really bad. They feel like they’ve had a lot of setbacks, and after about three or four hours on the first morning, they’re starting to say, “Gee, I’m starting to really see all sorts of possibilities here,” and it doesn’t have actually anything to do with anything specific that happened in the first couple hours of the session, but it’s actually just whose in the room and what kind of spirit they’re bringing in the room and the kind of attitude they’re bringing in the room, but most important is a lot of them are really, really good connectors without know it.

Joe: Right. They’ve never really kind of linked up with someone in quite the way that we do it here. I mean some people have become the greatest connectors on the planet, and you put them around other leveragable connectors, I mean great things happen, which is our secret friend J.R., you know, I always have conversations with J.R. that literally everything that I would want in my life, that almost anyone would want or need you can make available through your Genius Network, and if you don’t have a Genius Network or a 50 Connector Future assembled, if you haven’t thought about it, if you haven’t put it together, you can create literally the most valuable relationship asset that could solve or link you to every solution or every opportunity you could ever possibly need. And I think it really simplifies and enhances life. I just think it makes life way easier, way more leveragable. It absolutely multiplies you. And I mean what’s more important than relationships. I just think it makes life way easier, way more leveragable. It absolutely multiplies you, and I mean what’s more important than relationships. I mean you’re the one that I first heard making this comment years ago about people say time is money and you’re like, “Well, you know, time isn’t really money. You know, relationships are money. You don’t hit the alarm clock and all of the sudden there’s a stack of money waiting for you. It’s really in the depth of the relationships.” And so I think both me and you have developed communities of great individuals and great relationships, which I want to ask you about. How do you feel or think Strategic Coach compliments Genius Network and vice versa, because we’re always talking about both of our groups, and people that are listening that might not be in either of our groups, although a lot of people that listen are in both of our groups or in one or the other, why would two guys that have different groups be so collaborative when a lot of people would perceive it’s like, “You know, what’s going on here? Shouldn’t you guys be competitors or something?”

Dan: Well everybody’s kind of competing for something in the world, and one of them is just peoples attention. You’re competing for peoples attention because there’s an enormous amount of things that people are paying attention to, and so you have a limited bandwidth in peoples brains to actually catch hold and offer them something valuable. So from that standpoint, you are, and also time because both of us ask commitment of time when they’re traveling to my location or your location. Then the third one is just that they have a certain amount of disposable income for this kind of self-learning, you know, self-enhancement and everything else. But the way that I explain it, why Joe and I aren’t competitors, because we’ve teamed up and we just ask you not to pay attention to anyone else. Don’t spend any time with anyone else, and don’t spend money on anyone else. Just give it, just give it all to us, you know. You know, so, I said, “You know there’s no problem here.” I said, “Joe and me against the world,” so you know.

Joe: That’s great.

Dan: And then we’ve added Peter Diamandis to it because both of those have just come from a fabulous event that Peter Diamandis just put on in Los Angeles, and I said, “Well and now it’s three against the world,” you know, and I just keep adding other people because having the three talents working on it, Peter can do something entirely different than either you or I can. Can I tell you a story because this is kind of how my mind works? We have a guy in the 10X problem and his name is Reggie Shandra and he’s from the very south tip of India, but he lives in Kansas City. And I mean when I met him he said, he told me what he does and I said, “Reggie, I feel like I’ve just met Jesus.” I said, “You’re kind of like the salvation of the world,” and what Reggie has created is a little device that in a major city like Toronto, because he’s coming to Toronto to do this, you just put this device on every traffic light in the city and the moment you engage the whole system all the traffic lights talk to each other and they say what’s going on with their intersection, and the whole system just regulates traffic flows and so there’s no set time for any green light or red light in the city. It all depends upon the traffic flows. So if you have one street where all the traffic is going down one street and nothing coming from the side, it doesn’t turn red and stop everybody in the traffic flow. So I said, “Reggie, you’re the green light Jesus of the world.” But he said that within about 10 days you’d cut traffic congestion in a major city by 30%. It’s just such an amazing ability. So when I look at what I’ve combined to my list of capabilities by getting involved with Joe Polish and I get involved with 25K is that this is not an ability that I can actually develop myself, but I can have it put into the best possible context and the best possible situation to learn how to do this, and you’re the one who creates this setting for me to do this, so I don’t have to spend time alone and try to become a great connector because I’m just never going to do it because it’s not my natural tendency. You know, I’ll never equal you in connectivity but I’ll be 10 times better than I was three years ago, and that’s all that really matters. I got Joe, you know, so that’s part of my capability mix. I don’t care whether the rest of the world gets this. I just want to be a better connector and tap into Joe’s connections, you know, and I think that’s the difference between the people who are trying to save the world and people who are just trying to grow a capability and a set of resources. I’m not trying to change the world with what I’m doing. I don’t get any sense that you’re trying to change the world. But we are trying to change our own personal environments and everybody we know who we find are kind of aligned with us and they’re self-minded, I just want to change their world. So I’m very specific in the part of the world that I actually want to transform.

Joe: Well, you know, and I’ll tell you, from my observation and experience, and I’m sure maybe some people could argue this, from my observation is because of how you focus that and change in your own clients world in the level of who these clients are, you’re doing more to change the world as a result of focus that way than some person with some grandiose idea that, “Oh I got to do this, I got to do that.” You know, this is going to effect millions of people and you’re the person that would say, “Well have you done it with one person?” You know, yeah, you could do it with a million, but, you know, have you done it with one? And so your ability to just focus that way is critical, which I think comes back to the 50 Connector Future, which is going back to your statement, you can have 10,000 people, friends, fans, followers on social media but, you know who are the 50 people in your world that are going to multiply you 10 times, 100 times, you know…

Dan: Yeah, and it’s very personalized, very immediate. In other words, you have immediate access to that relationship. I don’t worry about people around the world that I don’t know, you know – if I had a choice any time by helping Joe Polish expand his capabilities or transform Africa, you know, I’d bet on Joe every time.

Joe: Yeah, so no one misunderstands that, if my goal was to change Africa, I would have a bunch of greater capability doing it that way than versus like, “Oh, you know, we’ve got to save all starving people.” You know, why don’t you start with like one thing, and that’s how it builds upon itself. I mean anyone…

Dan: I just start with all the well-fed people I know.

Joe: Yeah, work outwards. Right, right, right, I hear you. So what I’d like to do Dan is I want to continue on a follow-up episode that we talk about, you know, literally building your 50-person…

Dan: The 50 connections, yeah.

Joe: Yeah. One thing in Genius Network is I have people literally got a list of the top eight people in your life that have the most impact, that are most important to you. Now you can niche it, you can do it for health. We’ve done a previous 10X talk on this if someone wants to go back and listen where we go through how to build a Genius Network. But literally just take out a piece of paper and write eight of the top people that are in your life that are most valuable and then write the capability, the skill that they bring into your world. You can do it personally and business. You can do it just business. And think about how much time are you spending with these people. What can you do this week to just even say thank you and to have a conversation with one of them? And if you haven’t done that recently, that’s a good exercise. And then on the next episode we’ll continue on with this and we’ll also do some future episodes here just to give someone sort of a cliffhanger, we’re going to talk about the Abundance Neighborhood and we’ll talk about what we learned from the Abundance 360 Summit with Peter and how all that works. So yeah, let’s do that. Any final words to wrap this one up?

Dan: No I’m saving my ammunition for the next one.

Joe: Awesome. So thank you and everyone, leave your comments of what you got out of this one at 10xtalk.com and we will talk to you on the next episode. Thank you.

Transcribed by: www.iDictate.com