Joe: Hello everyone, it’s Joe Polish.

Dan: And this is Dan Sullivan.

Joe: Yep, here we are. We are going to follow up on the previous episode. We were talking about the 50-connector future and genius network and connecting with your network and how to do all of that stuff. So as a refresher Dan, how would you summarize some of the things we talked about on the last episode?

Dan: Well I think that one of the big things Joe is just the distinction between what each of us does uniquely well and how we’ve kind of combined this into a system. So my notion right from the beginning of my life virtually has been that people are really, really good in a particular area of activity and mostly not good or just mediocre and others, and it just seemed to me that from the standpoint of education and training and how you organize your life. It makes no sense to try to be good at anything that you’re mediocre but just continually year after year, decade after decade, just develop and expand the area where you’re great. But that brings you to a boundary line and on the other side of the boundary line is other people’s unique ability and you have to learn how to connect.

What I discovered when I first met you is that you are the guy how the master of connecting. I’m an okay connector but it’s not my unique ability so I have quickly have done and both of us have mutually done is develop a teamwork between our two unique abilities; and that relationship has incredibly expanded my notion of strategic coach and it’s also you had this concept of genius network and it’s greatly expanded your network and it’s just a relationship that’s a professional relationship and it’s a personal relationship that just goes on and on and on because each of our contribution to the other makes us want to contribute more to each other.

Joe: Yeah and I sort of think of this – when I was a little kid and I used to race BMX bikes, my father would also have a can of WD40. If the bike chain got really dusty, you know you would just kind of spray this magic WD40 on it and all of a sudden it would be a lot smoother and the wheels would turn and the chain would not be as dirty and that sort of stuff. In a lot of ways I think I act that way for a lot of people. It just adds a little oil to these cranky gears sometimes and not only do I do that but obviously I want to bring more people into the mix. If you think of in your life, you hire all kinds of different capabilities. I mean you have a chef, you have a driver, you have a housekeeper. You have a team of 100 people that support you. You have really built this great life and you make money so that you can live a great life. You make money because you have set things up in a way that allow you to do the best that you can do.

And so I go to you by paying money to Strategic Coach because it helps me get my focusing and my goals and my unique abilities set up. It allows me to think about my life and what’s working and what’s not working and how to plan out and prepare myself for bigger things and to multiple myself. And in my world, I bring in a bunch of different skills and abilities and different multipliers with a heavy emphasis on marketing and selling and just put it all together. I mean connect all of these together. So sometimes if you’re arguing with somebody, having a mediator really can help you talk things through.

Well I think about things in every area of life. So if there is friction somewhere who’s a person that can remove the friction? If you’ve got a foggy window, your dirty window, what can you do to clean it? What’s the Windex? And so in a lot of ways I want to connect people with all kinds of things are simply going to not only help them reach their opportunities and make things better and get rid of problems and challenges but also want to reduce suffering. I take suffering very seriously because I think a lot of people endure their lives and endure their relationships and their businesses and they don’t enjoy them. And I know that because of my own personal experience of enduring and what I’ve done to transform it. It gives me tremendous joy in being able to connect someone with someone else.

It’s not just the money thing. I mean I really get off on the fact that I can – oh you should call this person. Oh you should talk to this person. Oh, you need to meet that person. Oh, let me interview that person. That really comes natural to me and what you’ve pointed out that that doesn’t always come very natural to you.

Dan: No.

Joe: What does come natural to you is the way that help entrepreneurs focus. So when you can connect those two skills together it just makes each person that much more capable. So I think of what we’re doing here at 10X Talk is capability conversations.

Dan: Well yeah and the interesting thing is Joe is that your trump card over the years has been that your connecting has allowed you to understand the relationship of connecting to marketing because that’s really what marketing actually is. It’s making connections and then forming relationships out of those connections which hopefully last for a long time or last forever.

What I’ve noticed as I’ve been part of Genius Network is that you are always incredibly bright and very, very intuitive about marketing but I came to understand that your marketing skills is all something that has come out of your connecting skills.

Joe: Yes, totally. You know I first learned marketing that worked by studying direct response. Direct response unlike image advertising or institutional or just brand building which is get your name out there. Direct response is get your name out there and get a response back and I tend to think of networking as direct response networking. Like there is a lot of people that will take pictures with famous people and they’ll put them on their Facebook page or they’ll put it out there and they got a picture and great. What I tend to do is pictures are cool and all that. I would much prefer having the relationship with people. So direct response networking, Genius Networking is not just going out and meeting people or having 5,000 Facebook friends. It’s really about developing connections and relationships with people that actually matter. People that are interesting to me. People that are doing important and incredible, interesting, useful, novel things in the world that are really skilled and then taking those same individuals and connecting them with everyone else that I tend to like and that’s not everybody because there are a lot of people I have no interest in becoming friends with and connecting. But there are people, entrepreneurs that I really do.

So people struggle with this and they get overwhelmed by it and they can spend a lot of time interacting and connecting and following and reading about other people that have really no relevance to their goals, their life. So I’d love to ask you from your perspective and how you’ve really learned how to leverage relationships. I mean when I recommend someone to you that you meet this person, I really think it through. I don’t send people to you or whatever ask you or someone else to have a conversation with someone if there wasn’t for one a direct benefit for both of you. And a lot of people want to put people together because it benefits them but then the two people are like what the hell are we doing here. What’s in it for us sort of thing.

Take Peter Diamandis; now I really recommended to Peter that he join Strategic Coach because I knew it would be really valuable for Peter. Seeing all the incredible things he was doing in the world but also the price he was paying with the time he was putting into it and the shear volume of bureaucrats and parasites that suck off of his energy. I really recommended Strategic Coach because I knew it would be a game changer for him. In the beginning it was really difficult like with anything. I look at it as, it’s like going to the gym. If you can make it through the first few weeks and get through the soreness, and get through the burn, then all of a sudden you’re like oh my god. I’m getting stronger. I’m getting more powerful. I’m sleeping better. This is awesome.

But Peter went through this transition and now Peter and you have a line. You just heavily recommended to your Strategic Coach clients as I did to my Genius Network members this thing called Abundance 360 Summit which was originally my idea from the do last year. And now he’s done his second one and you’ve taken that relationship and just – you’ve gone so deep with it. So anyway, my rant here is about how do people really leverage relationships once they’ve made those connections and how do you know which ones to take on and which ones not to. I mean how does Dan Sullivan do it?

Dan: Well in all areas of life you have criteria about who you should spend time with and who you shouldn’t spend time with. People who get smarter as they get older, the smartness actually from that they have filters for sorting out what’s worthwhile and what’s not worthwhile. I’ve never met an entrepreneur who has doubled their income and gone 10 times with their income who hasn’t done it by creating some incredible filters that they know when something is worth their time and attention and investment and they instantaneously know when it’s not. I can just tell everybody that we’re all had this experience just in the area of dating when you’re a teenager almost anything is a possibility. But as you go along and you have experiences and some of them are very painful experiences and then you begin to realize that your life partner or someone that is just going to be lifetime friend is basically it falls into a very, very small circle of humanity. There’s seven billion of people on the planet but you’re not looking for seven billion. You’re actually looking for a very small number and the way you find them is that you make judgments about who’s worth your time and that’s how we become successful more and more in all relationships and friendships.

So it’s really criteria and I have six criteria that I really, really use to take a look at who’s going to be in my life from this point forward. I got a lot of people in my life who are a result of everything I’ve done up until now. But when I look ahead, let’s say over the next quarter of century, the next 25 years and I said they have to fall into this area of criteria and I just have six of them. The first one is that they have to be really, really grateful and generous people. The next thing is they have to be creative. They have to have a way of thinking about things that produces new ideas and new connections and they have to be very cooperative. It’s easy to work with them. Then just working with them constantly creates bigger opportunities. Then out of the cooperation something ingenious gets created in the world. Then it links you up with all sorts of exponentials. So it’s six; it’s gratitude, it’s creativity, it’s cooperation, it’s opportunity, it’s ingenuity and exponentials.

Now that seems a lot to think through when you’re just doing it but if you do it 100 times or you do it 200 times, it’s like a five second size up. You just go [inaudible]. We’re enormously skillful at things that we repeatedly apply especially mental habits which that’s not for me. I’m not interested. It’s like channel flipping. People are incredibly gifted at channel flipping with the television. They’ll go through 10 channels in 40 seconds and their criteria says not interesting, not interesting, not interesting. Yep this is a good one. Is it interesting more than a minute? I mean we have all these criteria.

And we don’t realize that we have it. I mean movies get killed in the first five minutes of the first release because people are texting. They go into the movie and say this is a dog. Don’t even bother. Instantaneously it’s in the blogosphere. It’s around the internet saying ah. I mean movies die in about a half hour now. They certainly die within the first half hour after someone has seen them. And the reason is people got criteria. This is just not interesting and everything else. We’re shoppers. We go into a Walmart which has 50,000 products but we’re only looking for about six or seven things. Nobody goes into a supermarket and buys 50,000 things.

Joe: That is very true. So everyone has this built in criteria anyway. It’s just how they’re applying it to their relationships.

Dan: Well not only that but they don’t know what their criteria are. You’re making very firm judgments but you don’t know what you’re making your firm judgments on. I just decided to make as many of my criteria conscious as possible so that I can see if they are good criteria and then I can improve on them.

Joe: Gotcha, okay. So you got exponentials. Go through them again…opportunity.

Dan: I start at the bottom where you’re the most personal and the most emotional which is just gratitude. Right off the bat if someone isn’t thankful they’re not generous, poof, gone. I don’t care how good the deal might be. I’m just not really interested in interacting with them. And then they have to be creative. They can’t be conformist thinking. They can’t be rigid. You’ve got to really have some flexibility to them. The third thing is that working with them is really, really easy. And it’s give and take. Both sides immediately get a better deal just working together. So those are the three and that’s what we teach in Strategic Coach. Those are the three things that we really concentrate on is gratitude, creativity and cooperation. And that prepares you for a much bigger world and you’re part of that bigger world. You’re set up of opportunity, ingenuity and exponentials when I come to 25K, that’s what you provide. So I don’t have to create that world and that’s what Peter Diamandis creates.

He creates opportunity, ingenuity and exponentials and just being in his environment, in his structure and process. Same thing with you. Anything I can say about either of you is exactly the same situation. You just create massively bigger opportunities, connection with ingenious ideas and genius strategies and genius methods. And then the exponentials of course which are being supplied so much technology are available. But in order to be the person who even be able to connect with that world that you and Peter are creating, you have to have gratitude, creativity, and cooperation.

Joe: Let me ask you, what if someone sort of has a chip on their shoulder against humanity? Meaning they just don’t like people or there’s a lot of people that are incredibly untrusting and uncooperative and not grateful at all because maybe they’ve been born that way. Maybe they’ve been really hurt and betrayed. And of course there are a lot of things that are way beyond our capabilities and could require therapy or something. But that being said, a lot of people just have closed themselves off to gratitude, creativity, cooperation and I think all human beings on some level. They certainly go through stages in their life where they’re selfish and sometimes they’re generous and they go back and forth. But what does a person need to do in terms of personal rituals and things to just have more of those and to exemplify those and to really internalize them if they’re lacking those abilities.

Dan: Yeah I guess I don’t fully know the answer to that except in a specific situation. I don’t know what people should do but if I’m talking with a single individual you can ask them all sorts of questions. Basically about some successful experiences because their mindset is based on a lot of unsuccessful experiences. I don’t try to correct people’s unsuccessful experiences. I just try to get them to actually identify some successful experiences. I say well if you look at the successful experiences what was going on there. And pretty soon they can say well it was this like of a situation, it was this like of person. I said right off the bat, do you have some other situations like that where you can maybe have kind of a successful experience and then you get them to want to experience. And what happens Joe is those experiences start to connect with each other and they have a basis of moving forward where they become highly selective about the conditions that they can be in and they have more of a sense of personal confidence that I can actually expand personally more than I thought I did and they develop capability.

But see that’s why I fundamentally distrust a lot of therapy and psychiatry because they keep imbedding people in the negative experience and try to deal there. I said I don’t think there is any solution there. I think you just have to find out where some success has been happening and build on that.

Joe: Yeah versus getting people marred in their past and living their – and the reason I bring this up is that I have seen you countless times take entrepreneurs that are in extremely overwhelmed bad moods. I mean shit when I’m in a bad mood and I need to think something through like you’re the person to talk to because you always can bring out the positive focus and your ability to help people think through how to transform opposition and obstacles into opportunities into lessons and how to take negative experiences and transform them and you’re incredibly good at that. So the reason I bring up the question is when you talk about gratitude, creativity, cooperation, I mean if you’re not a cooperative person. If you don’t have any gratitude you’re not going to get that from other people.

I mean one of my major formula process is you know be the type of person that you would always answer the phone for. I talk about if you have a phone and someone is calling and somewhere where you immediately see it on the phone coming through that you’re excited. Well what is it about that person and take the business scenario out of it. What is it just about a friend where some people you’d be you can’t wait to talk to them and other people you’re like ah. I mean you just immediately it’s this person again sort of thing. Well the first key is not having those people have your phone number. But if they get through sort of thing, what makes you excited. And so to reverse it is my question to you is some people are just in a place where they’re not very cooperative. They think they are unlucky and they get pissed at people that are successful and they bitch about these people when they don’t realize the problem is not these other people, that the world is withholding opportunities from them. They’re just operating in a way to where they’re just not the type of person that’s making it happen.

Dan: Yeah, well I probably had a much clearer answer 30 years ago then I do today because people’s lives are incredibly more complex. First of all, more complex than they actually understand but certainly way more complex. And the other thing Joe and that’s just a thought that I’ve been thinking over the past year is that I think every individual is essentially and uniquely self organizing. So just for an example is that I realize that I am remarkably similar to a 6-year-old that I remember wondering around the farm in northern Ohio and I realized my entire life has really been about expanding an incredibly kind of wondrous set of experiences I had just being a kid wondering around through woods and forests when I was 6-years-old. But on the other hand, I had am other that really encouraged me to leave home and learn about the world and so what I’ve done is that I’ve essentially taken that early experience of who I am when I’m very, very young and 6-years-old and I’ve essentially kept reproducing it out in the world. And that required that I learn all sorts of things about other people and develop all sorts of personal skills.

So I’ve come to believe that if I’m working with Joe Polish. He started doing that at 6 and Peter Diamandis. I’m sure that if you took the Peter that is there today and you moved him back to 6-years-old there’s a remarkable similarity in the general approach to day to day situation and to life in general. So I don’t know that stuff. I think what you call self knowledge is just people beginning to recognize that there is this fundamental very, very unique organizing principle that’s been going on in their life from the moment. The things they chose in life is either in support of that early experience or not experience.

Having said that, the early experience can be incredibly negative. So what a lot of people do is that they keep self organizing and to more extreme negative situations. I just don’t have any answer to that. I mean there is wiring in the brain. There is wiring in the nervous system. You just don’t know what’s going on with another person. I believe that if you grow up in a very violent neighborhood and your mother was say a happy crack cocaine user. You’ve probably been severely damaged in your nervous system and your brain even before you come into the world and everything you see around you is negative. I don’t know if there is any comeback from that. I just don’t know. And why it’s important that children get born and nurtured in really positive circumstances.

I did. My mother said I was the happiest baby she ever knew. That’s my general approach and I just feel that life is a really happy place. But there have been times in my life where I worked against that and I make myself miserable and I had to learn how to do that.

Joe: Right. Well you know I remember on this audio you have going against gravity for the personal economic system about taking free days. You were talking about really warn out, tired, cranky brain and your response is I don’t know the solution but I would bet that taking free days would probably be helpful for that brain. A lot of times the solution is rest. The other thing too, I mean you wrote a great book which if this resonating with anyone listening in they’re like yeah. I brought this up because obviously there is a ton of people that are incredibly successful that listen to 10X Talk and I know there is some really incredibly successfully financially people have “the trappings of success,” money and power but they’re not very happy. And so I bring that up because I just want them to really look at ways to think about their future so they can not only have great success but they can have enjoyment along the way. And you wrote a book called The Laws of Lifetime Growth, how to make your future bigger than your past. So without going deep into that. I will just recommend a great book and I would highly encourage everyone listening to this if they’ve not read your book.

Dan: Well that was our big seller. Most of the books that I produced are self produced. I think I have 13 books now and that was the only one that I went through a publisher. The experience was so painful and it took such a long time I said I don’t really know if I want to do this again. But it was translated into I think 20 languages. In the US if you produce a non-fiction book and you get 10,000 it’s a best seller so we did 13 times best seller with it. But we got incredibly good reviews around the planet. It’s used in school and everything else. But it’s just how you think about your thinking in a world that is radically changing in ways that people weren’t trained for and aren’t prepared for. It has a lot to do with setting yourself up for really good things to happen. You’re setting yourself up for those really good things to happen to you.

Joe: Well so let me ask you, so for a high level entrepreneur at 10X entrepreneur, they start building a 50 connector future today. I mean identify 50 amazing individuals. What’s the bigger and better future you can expect from doing it.

Dan: Yeah well first of all just a little instructions. Start with one. Start with one. Those criteria that I have of gratitude and creativity and cooperation and then opportunity, ingenuity and exponential. Use them and say well among all the relationships I have, who’s the person that would have the highest score in that credential and then go out and start developing the relationship with that person. And people say well you know I’m going to go after all 50 and I say well you don’t know 50. You know one. You don’t even know what one looks like until you develop the first relationship.

I remember one of the workshops this guy had inherited $28 million. He came to his first workshop and he said I’ve come up with a solution for the financial planning for everybody in the world. He said I just want to get the marketing so we can get it out to as many people. He was talking a lot for a while and I said, this solution that you have. Have you actually done it with one person? No, no we have to go really big with this. And I said you don’t even know what you’re doing. I said you have to start with one person. I mean Joe you started with one person in helping them with their marketing and then two and then four. It went exponential. But people are always trying to take over the world and they haven’t even taken over the backyard.

Joe: I love that. I love that line.

Dan: We have a mutual acquaintance you know and he wants to entrepreneurially transform the world and he shoed me his latest plan and he says we’re going to take the top 100 problems, human problems and we’re going to create a system for transforming them entrepreneurially and we’re going to teach people how to do this and I said well do you have one person you’re teaching. He said no, no, I mean it’s got to be really big. And I said are you working on one problem. And he said you got to go after all 100. I said well good luck.

Joe: Yeah exactly. In another lifetime that covers it. That is comedy. That’s great. So what I’d like to do Dan to kind of wrap up this one. I want to go into discussing on the next episode we do about an abundance neighborhood which I think will be incredibly useful conversation because I think this all ties in. And so people – Dan actually did an interview with me that was a previous episode about the major report formula and how I actually build genius networks. If you want to hear me talk about how I go out and connect and develop relationship with people and what I do, that’s explained there. Any other suggestions?

Dan: I think that was great that you mentioned that because I think that if you look at your main criteria that you have and this was a very observant coach, another coach not me but another coach who just sat down with you and just immediately knocked out these nine criteria and they ring true. I mean why its so valuable is because it actually rings true. And then you just go up against my criteria because I’m just looking for big general environments and if you combine your list with the list of grateful, creative, cooperative, opportunity, ingenuity and exponentials. You see they match up perfectly. That might be a nice little bit of homework for people before they listen to how we talk about the abundance neighborhood.

Joe: Yep absolutely, great. Well as always thank you Dan and to all of our listeners, thank you for listening to 10X Talk.com. You can post your comments at 10Xtalk.com and if you have some individuals in your life that you think would be well served to listen to this, go ahead and do it. Pick up a copy of Dan’s book, How To Make The Laws Of Lifetime Grow. How to make your future bigger than your past. You can see all of Dan’s books at StrategicCoach.com or just do a Google search and we’ll talk to you next time on 10X Talk. Thanks.