Transcript for:
Inside Strategic Coach Podcast with Dan Sullivan

[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan today we're going to talk through the process that we have put together Dan that you've initiated to put together the quarterly books and and we've been asked a lot how do you do this what does it look like and there's a very interesting creative process that has emerged and we're going to talk about how it got started that we just really wanted to share with you again because a lot of people have asked us how this worked I'm really proud because this is one of the best examples of unique ability teamwork I've been a part of and also that I've ever even heard about so I really am excited Dan that we get to pull back the curtain and share this but before we jump into how we actually do this let's talk about the book project in of itself and how it got started so how long go down did you start thinking about the fact that you want to produce a book every quarter well actually I'd like to go back to two bigger context points one is that I had produced 13 books before we started this process and I'm a huge huge believer that in the age of digital technology and the cloud there's still a magic about actual books there's evidence now that even where people have ebooks like Kindle that they kind of topped off about six years ago and every year there's more books sold but the ebook version of it is not more than 30% of the total market so a lot of actual books are still being produced and people like books and in the entrepreneurial World Books are magic and I always say that entrepreneurs who produce books find out that they've created magic because of the way that other people look at someone who's capable of doing a book and I would say in the entrepreneurial world for every 99 entrepreneurs who think someday I'm going to write a book book or they've been writing a book their whole life but it actually hasn't come out the fact that you've actually followed through and you've actually thought it through and you've gone through the entire process and you created the book and it's out there only one out of a 100 entrepreneurs get around to actually doing that it's a very formidable task because most entrepreneurs if you think about it are really great salespeople that's what allowed them to be an entrepreneur and the kind of skill sets that you need need to actually write a book the way that entrepreneurs see it is very gring for them and one of the biggest things is that it's a very lonely activity as they see it so there's a lot of stereotype images that entrepreneurs have and I went through all this because I went through the lonely stage I went through the grueling stage so I got to the point where I said there has to be a faster way of producing a lot more books and in my typical fashion what I do is when I get an idea I just jump in the pool and then I figure out whether I can float and whether I have strokes so just after my 70th birthday we had just completed 25 years of strategic coach I said you know what it keep me really growing into the future I'm just going to make a public commitment that in the next 25 years which is 100 quarters and that's a fundamental model in the 10 times program we say let's think in terms of 25 years it's 100 quarters and all you have to do is make a jump every 90 days with a certain number of projects and it'll be like compound interest you'll notice that your productivity goes up your creativity goes up and it compounds so I've got self assurance in my strength finder profile in addition to 10 quick so I just announced in all my workshops in the fall of 2014 that over the next 25 years I was going to write a 100 books and then I just launched into my lonely grueling way of producing a book and you know I was about 3 weeks into this and I said oh my goly what have I gotten myself into so we had to do some experienced Transformers impact filters and I said you know I've got to spread this out over teamwork and here we are Shannon we're pretty well putting to bed book number 14 we've done it in 15 quarters and we will hit 100 books in 100 quarters but we've put together the most marvelous teamwork and I know you've had a lot of requests to describe what the teamwork looks like what the process looks like how we structure each person's unique ability in this and it's just a pleasure for me today to actually cap this up in our own minds because we've never taken time to really give an overview of what we actually do so one of the things that's really interesting to note is there's approximately 10 people including you Dan involved in this process and for a lot of people that look at that and go oh my gosh that sounds very complicated but we're going to describe how it's actually quite simple and one of the most Stellar impacts of this unique ability team and teamwork that we put together is actually the number of hours that you spend on the book has decreased by a multitude so talk about how many hours it was before and how much time you spend now yeah the first quarter was really tough because I was into it without anybody and then I said look I'm going to complete this goal I'm going to deliver but now I've got to stop looking at myself as a rugged individualist in this and I've got to go total unique ability teamwork I mean it's the central concept that under lays everything in strategic coach so you know I was very open about it I was impact filtering and everything so we can talk a little bit about but the most interesting thing is we've produced 14 books but equally important is we've produced this marvelous process and teamwork and so that would be the jumping off point you know to actually talk about it and you're down to about 30 hours yeah so I would say first qu it was 100 hours and now I'm down to 30 hours and every quarter from now on I'll still see ways of shaving off time because even as good as we are with book number 14 I can see some little shortcuts and little bypasses in my part and everybody's getting better at this so I think everybody is shortcutting in the process people are getting things done more quickly and we have a sense of what the whole process looks like in a way that we did not at the beginning so here's what we're going to do we're going to go through the process and then we're going to talk about what we learned and some of the enhancements and those shortcuts and those bypasses that we figured out because a lot of it was actually how we refined it down to making sure that everyone involved was doing their unique abilities as opposed to just what they're really excellent at and we've had a lot of very interesting learnings and lessons through this process which I think are incredible and it's made me a lot wiser about what it takes to put together a unability teamwork process so Dan let's talk about the very beginning where you decide on the topic is there any magic to that no and all topics that we'll turn into books and this is true for the first 14 is that it's an idea it's a workshop idea it's a strategic coach program idea the one we're just putting to bed you know that goes probably to the publisher in three or four weeks it's the lifetime extender which for the vast majority of people is the first concept that you actually encounter when you come into strategic coach and it's one of the all-time favorites anytime I'm anywhere and I talk about extending your lifetime and my goal of living to 1506 instantly the room stops I'm a guest on a lot of other people's podcasts and I say well is there one topic more than any other that you think your audience would really enjoy and they say talk about that lifetime extender everybody loves hearing about the lifetime extender but this is book 14 so we've done 13 other Concepts before this but what I do is I am constantly introducing at least three new ideas every quarter into workshops and I test them on 500 people you know just in the 10 times program so first of all the ideas really develop or expand or they don't they don't go anywhere but ones that really have a lot of legs to them and and people are really interested and they want to develop an idea then I say okay I think this could be a book and then I've got a series of self filters before I will ever tell the team that this is going to be the next book and the first one is I do an impact filter on the idea okay so for example the next book that we're going to do after the lifetime extender is the incredible concept which was just a tiny little thought less than a year ago and it's just boomed not only in the 10 times program but throughout the signature program and it's the whole concept of who not how so what I will do I'll take the who not how concept and I'll do an impact filter on the idea and in the impact filter on the right hand side there's eight success criteria so if you check out all of our books our books always have eight chapters and by the way if you want to see the impact filter it's book number 13 so before my plan for living to 156 which is a lifetime extended book we did the extraordinary impact filter and this is your starting point for books Dan you've written another book about how to write a book which is essentially an impact filter and it's so powerful because you get really really clear on exactly what your idea is and that's your initial template yeah so I'll do the you know this is the project I'm going to create the eight mindsets that are going to be the chapter ahead for the book so that's the project then I write down the purpose you know this has been such a powerful idea in the uh in the workshops everybody loves this idea we Show brand new firsttime first experience in strategic coach and I just write the diagram who not how and I've had people who came to my workshop it's the first hour that they've been in strategic coach they say I can go home right now I got my money's worth that who at how and what it means is that when you have a bigger and better goal you immediately think well how am I going to do this and I say well all that's going to get you into is procrastination because it's really important that the what you're talking about really represents an expansion for your company and you can say why but you shouldn't do the how you should be able to express the what and why and then get a team involved to actually do the how and your job is to keep creating the future out of your ideas so I said this is the purpose this is a great concept and I say the difference this will make and let's just go back to the lifetime extender that this is an idea that everybody who comes across this idea is immediately so it's a book and I knew it was a book but the question is can I create eight plausible mindsets that make really interesting chapters and so the ideal outcome of this is that every one of these mindsets just has a real punch to it and then what's the worst result we try to proceed with the idea but we haven't really identified the structure to it so nobody on the team is really clear about what we're doing and it bogs down and we get delayed and we miss our quarter so I'm committed to having a finished product at the end of the quarter and the worst that can happen is that I don't set it up properly now I'm just talking to myself here I'm doing the sales job on myself here I'm not wasting any anybody's time or Talent on the team I'm just selling myself and then the best result is this just goes more smoothly and there's more excitement about this idea than any of the previous books we've done so I've I've really sold myself and then I I'll spend you know a little bit more than the usual impact filter time which for me is about a half hour for a finished impact filter and I just put in what are the mindsets related to you know extending your lifetime and I go through and you know I can really feel it and I'm an old copywriter you know I was a copywriter in a big Ad Agency and everything's in the headlines with advertising because we live in a population that processes information modular you know in any hour of Television there's 17 commercials and each of them is about 60 seconds so you got to connect so I approach books like I'm a copywriter and advertising copywriter and it's the Sizzle that's in the headlines and these are the mindsets but it also fully plumps The Depths for what's really involved in thinking that you're going to live this long and then you're logically progressing say no I'm going to live 15 years longer and that shifts me it's a GameChanger it's the first game Cher in strategic coach where you shift how long you think you have and then once I have the eight mindsets that I'm on to stage two and I'm still still you know it's still day in there but this is not grueling for me this is very exciting for me so then I go on to the next stage and the next stage after you do the impact filter be it on the impact filter or who not how or any of the other topics we've done in the books then you do a scorecard and this is really taking kind of the ideal of what you've written down for the mindsets and actually creating a whole SC let's briefly describe what that yeah and if anyone who's listening to this has one of the small books with the exception of the first book wanting what you want because I began to see the importance of the scorecard and we'll go back when we do a rewrite later on and I'll go back and I'll run the first books which we're experimental as far as our process I'll just run it through our process and it'll be a much better book but what I do I'm really good at mindset scorecards and so I've got eight mindsets and then I've got the four column process and anyone who's not familiar with the mindset scorecard just take any one of the small books and fold out the back cover and you'll see the it's kind of like the complete psychological map of the idea so I've covered everything psychologically because all our books are about mindset you were looking at life this way we suggest you look at life this way and there's eight different ways that make up this new way of looking at things and then I go through and if I'm a failure at this mindset what's it look like if I'm totally transformative with this mindset what does that look like and then if I'm frustrated because I don't have this mindset what's it look like and then what's conventional thinking about this area that the mindset looks like and I go through and I find this an extraordinarily enjoyable activity so how I developed the idea in the first place in the workshop that's an incredibly enjoyable activity for me using impact filters to find mindsets I love the activity and doing the scorecard I love the activity and then when I got the scorecard now I'm ready to launch it with the team so I put in I would say at this point not including all the R&D in the workshops but as far as the book project goes by this point I've put in about 3 hours 3 or 4 hours and now I'm totally confident about the idea I've thought about it in a 360 degree way but it's just on a single sheet of big sheet of paper but everything that's contained that we're going to talk about is on this one sheet of paper so no words have been you know book words have been created but we're just getting all the supporting psychological Foundation Stones so that once we start it's very very easy to move forward and by the way one of the corly books is the mindset scorecard yes yeah how to do a mindset scorecard it's good thing we're doing this recording now Dan after we've already created those well the other thing is that if you look at the book The mindset scorecard there was a mindset scorecard that I used to talk about the mindsets that would make doing a mindset scorecard a very important part of your future I love that doesn't sound like it makes sense but it really does now the next step is one that we added in Midway through and this was a GameChanger in our process and this is where you take the mindsets from the scorecard C and this is what I understand you create an outline based on that and you create the subhead so talk about that process well I just want to talk about a shift in the process because it's kind of hard to know what the Chicken and the Egg is here but what I began to realize that I'm a great headline writer but I'm not a great text writer because I tend to get too lawn and I get sidetracked but if I can just keep my writing rle just to the subheads so that's a real shift but the other thing and this is an old copywriting trick from the advertising business you determine ahead of time how big the book's going to be right okay so what I found is advertising writing is the most powerful writing in the world because you're selling and you have to sell and advertising writers don't write and write and write and write and write they've got 6 in by 8 in and they've got to create a powerful message you know if they're writing in text so what we did is we predetermined that each book would consist of a introduction eight chapters based on the mindsets a conclusion and then a you know an explanation of what strategic coach is so there's 11 sections and each of them has four pages so it's 44 pages and it's good siiz type it's not small type the type is punctuated by eight subheads that carry the messages so what I do now tremendous shift in the process that I will only write the outline of the book and then I will not write the rest of it but I'll be interviewed by yourself in my life you're the best interviewer that I've ever experienced I think you're just a phenomenal interviewer so I can create an outline for you for each of the sections with five subp points and then I just write little you statements you do this you do that just like on the mindset scorecard but the chapter heading is the mindset plus the column four the transformative message and then I just look at that and I say well there would be five really interesting subp points under this and then I'll do three sections and I'll come in here and we'll spend you know like an hour an hour and a half and then you just ask me all sorts of questions about the outline that I've written and in the room with us we're in our studio we have our sound engineer Willard who is recording us right now and then I have Carrie Morrison who is our editor and she's been editing me for 12 years on all the other materials I did and she knows how Dan sounds in in writing in writing and she knows exactly what I sound like and she has a a real ability to condense a lot in a little in her editing and then that was the big shift but just to talk about another capability we added about halfway through the books that we've done she has a brother who is a master copywriter and he gets the transcripts so we come into the studio you take me through the conversation and I just talk off the top because I'm a 10 quick and my best way of thinking about something is just to say it off the top and I just have an ability to actually just talk it through and I don't know really what I'm going to talk about before you ask me the question that's the really fun part I wonder every want to picture this there's really about three pages you know so each of the eight chapters there's five subheads for each one and we know it fits into the book and actually you raised a really good point Dan having the size of the book There's a constraint to that already and so everyone knows exactly what we're working towards and that that was something that came up pretty quickly so there's a consistency to it so knowing what you're aiming to produce is a key point of that and just to talk a little bit about interviewing I often don't see it until that day so I'm not necessarily studying it and I'm a nine quick start so kby wise we're very similar and what's really fun is and for anyone who actually wants to do this process for themselves and you can tell me danam what you think your criteria is for a great interviewer but I'm just really interested and intrigued and enthusiastic about the ideas so it's it you know I've got facial expressions and my voice is excited and and my voice is not guess it's being recorded but it's not really in the final transcript unless they like what I say but it's really just that engaging creative process and my job is to pull it out of you in that questioning period And if it triggers an idea with me or if I know a story that would be relevant I'll bring that up so it really is a collaborative creative process in the studio which we have a ton of fun with and we usually take about three roughly three sessions to get all of it out which is powerful and then it gets sent to rev.com for transcription so that's you know in terms of the actual content part of it for the actual writing part you're kind of done no I'm finished once we finish the interview I never see the copy again until its final copy and I have to say this is always a learning process every time you repeat this process you get better each individual gets better at it and I would say the last three books I can't remember changing a word in the the final copy you're asking the questions Adam who's our copywriter Adam who happens to be car's brother he has really learned how to take a lot of words and make them into very Punchy copy his copies as Punchy as my subheads and then Carrie makes sure that it corresponds to what I really sound like and she's she's been working on strategic coach Concepts and she's very precise about that you got the central point but here's the thing Terry will tell you she's getting better Adam will tell you he's getting better you're getting better I'm getting better so my whole point is that each thing you do is going to be better than the one you did before but the next one you do is going to be better than the one you're doing now and you got to be okay with that and that was a big aha for me cuz I'm an Avid Reader I'm passionate about books as are you and it was a big deal for me to realize oh it's never going to be perfect it's actually not even a useful way to think about it but we're always going to get better and it actually becomes a bit of a game a bit of an adventure say oh how can we make it better this quarter where's an efficiency where can we find a shortcut where can we make this easier faster easier cheaper bigger better is our criteria and it's become fun we always know we're great and we're getting even better and that's a very fun attitude for a team to come from a mindset perspective to come at this process with so I really appreciate the positivity you're so acknowledging and appreciative and respectful of people's talents and knowing that we're just going to get better the more we do this well in the other thing is I know for a fact that a couple years down the road we'll look at a previous book and we'll say you know we've learned a lot about this since we brought this out and this is a crucial point is to get your ideas out into the world because your audience is really a creative partner to you so my whole point about a book get a book out fast so that you can get into into a conversation with your readership and I'm a great believer that it's the communication between you and your audience which really improves your ideas because they take your ideas they test them out in ways that you wouldn't think about and they come back and they say Hey you know this idea right here this could be a book in itself but the other thing is I'm responding to your interview questions with already about 50 hours of Workshop kind conversation on the idea itself so I've got dozens of stories people have brought up other things that they've read they bring forward stories and I have all those stories in my head but I don't really have access to them until you asked me a question I said oh there's a great story here and I'll give you a great story related to what we're recording here so in a workshop earlier this week somebody said I just don't know how you can turn it around that fast and I said well are you writing a book right now and he said this is a client you know very smart very good at what he does he's very articulate he says yeah I've been writing a book for about three or four years and I said so does it have a lot of chapters and he said yeah he says I'm past 20 chapters now and I said do you know how many more chapters you're going to have in this book and he said no he says I'm really getting antsy because I'd like to get this book out but I just haven't covered this and I just haven't covered that and I said well I'm just going to suggest to you that you look at each of your chapters as a book and go back and make each of the chapters into a complete idea so that if you just created a little book out of the chapter automatically you have 20 books ahead of you and it was like Oh Oh you mean I could just take a little and create a little book and I says yeah because you know we live in an age now where people like their information real fast and they will read a book that's about one idea that you go in deeply and give a 360 degrees on the one idea but they find it very hard to read a book that's got 20 five ideas in it and after a while I said oh jeez you know this one this was worth the book I said so just make the idea about one and predetermine the size and then just take the other chapters and make them into separate books and get them out there so that you're having this discussion and it was like I had just take an enormous burden off his mind and I said the other thing is you are the author but you don't have to be the writer and that's another one of these changes Steven cvy one of the all-time great sellers The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People yeah seven habits well he didn't write it but he was the author he was a lecturer he was a a consultant and he just had a writer sit in on his lectures and his speeches and the writer actually organized the book They're his words they're his ideas but he didn't do the writing so if you can make a separation that you can be a great author you can be a famous author but you don't have to be the writer that's a real shift and the other thing is be really really great and expressive about a single idea don't give people 10 ideas or 20 ideas it could infuses them and bogs them down and they don't give proper treatment to any one of the ideas you know our books are small but they're I was going to use the word intense they're succinct they're rich rich rich with no wasted anything but back to writing I want to describe the next few steps So Adam does the first 80% based on the outline sends it to Carrie and then Carrie edits and creates the final draft in in design which is the program we use so here's the other thing there are software programs which are called authoring software or publishing software where you can actually in software create the entire structure of the book so we have it all set up and so when Adam's work comes back well Adam has to write to our four page format okay so for each section of the book it's four pages and there's 44 total pages in the book and I was talking to Carrie about this in preparation day and she goes well he writes in word and then I put it in to in design and I make sure if it's too long I edit or if it's not enough then I add and so she's the one who does a lot of that shaping and then what's fun is then we start the next part of the process and by the way this is we'll do an outline then it gets written you know we'll do a recording and then it gets sent off to you and to HH for cartooning but before we talk about that you can be starting on that part and we're actually could still be recording in the studio another part so different processes kind of layer in in to get the book done Dan let's get into cartooning for a moment because it's kind of fun you and I both have the same perspective on books that don't have any pictures on them and one of the things that's really fun and interesting and graphic about our books are the cartoons so talk about that a little bit and then your process that you use with heish because you really got it down from what was hours and hours down to almost two sessions per section yeah so I'm a great believer and I see in visuals you know so all my ideas I see in diagram form and anybody who's had me as a coach knows I use a lot of I really take advantage of electronic whiteboards because somebody will bring up an idea in a workshop and I said hey that idea kind of looks like this and I use circles arrows stars to do it so I'm very graphically oriented but my feeling is so is the world that we're living in right now because we're on the internet and the internet is highly highly visual we watch TV it's highly visual people watch you know YouTube and it's highly visual so we live in a visual world when we're anywhere in the world there's Billboards there's signs and everything like that so we're not living in a world that just consists of text anymore and the other thing is that people take in information in different ways so if you take any one of our books and you open up and you're on the first page we give you six ways of experiencing the book first of all there's the text you're reading which is going to take you an hour start to finish we've timed it the books reading time you start the book and an hour later you finish the book so a flight from shirono yeah and I use taking off from Pearson Airport in Toronto I start the book and by the time I land at O'Hare in Chicago I'm finishing the book and it's about an hour hour and five minutes my feeling is that we want information fast and we want it Compact and we want to have a complete idea in a very short period of time and I'm just adjusting to changing habits of how people take in information but here's the thing all of our ideas are a bit challenging if you just heard it as an idea but there's something that makes ideas comfortable and kind of cozy and as if you have really good cartoons and cartoons are kind of I call them d ously cute okay and so haish my cartoonist who I've been working with for a long long time he was a writer for us but he was a doodler who did little cartoons and for special occasions heish would do cartoons and I said oh this is a unique ability I said he can take coach Concepts and he can turn them into cartoons I said I want this capability so it's another case where I'm getting it better at set setting him up for his cartoons he's getting better at taking any idea and turning it into a cartoon and our teamwork between the two of us has constantly increased to give you an idea when we did the first book with the cartoons it was about 5 days to do two pages worth of cartoons wow okay and that was me putting in about 10 12 hours and heish putting in about 10 or 12 hours and now we do it all on zoom and this is something that has arrived done the scene since we started the book project and we have the finished copies so the moment the first section comes in and finish copy and we usually wait for a couple so that we don't catch up with the writing process heish can take the text small formats so we can put the format right on the screen and we just read through the chapter and then heish will in freehand just draw a two-page layout because we always have two pages of cartoons and we have them together and I'll talk through and I said now we're not going to be slavish to the text but we're going to pull out the really big ideas from this section and I start talking him through and he's freehand drawing while I'm doing it it takes us maximum an hour and we'll have the two pages completely you know they call it a story board and it's just a rough drawings but we know what the shapes are we know how the pages are divided and then I say over to you heh and then you know about a day and a half later he'll come back and he comes back with complete finished artwork using the latest and there's just marvelous Technologies out there and you know the name to this I don't know the name of it but it's an application that you can buy anywhere it's called clip Studio paint for those of you that are interested so clip Studio paint is what he uses and he's tested a ton to find the one that really works which is amazing and just a couple quick enhancements for this one of the things you guys figured out was the different types of panels for cartoons and that was an innovation that you put in and the other thing that you've had I think almost from the get-go Dan is colors if you're talking about a contrasting idea if it's a not happy or not Progressive kind of thought it goes one color palette and then if it's a happy uplifting forward momentum thought it has another palette so just talk about your palettes from CU I think this is fun yeah so there's a real emotional impact so you know we do a lot of contrast in the book because we're constantly contrasting from a failure way of looking at a situation to a transformative so there's colors that would go so for example we're doing the today we were working on one page and it was the three things that predisposed people to die early and one of them is you run out of friends you run out of money and you run out of purpose and this is very dreary I mean this is when you look at the C cartoons they're very gray they're purple the scenes that we're putting in are really really depressing okay if you had to look at these cartoons every day you would be so depressed you'd want to die early and then on the other page we'll talk about as your age gets greater that you have more friends than you've ever had you have more money and you money is continuing to increase into the future and you have more powerful purpose for your life and these will be all radiant it'll be you know it'll be Heavenly there will be bright lights and hopeful lights and the whole point is that we're using as many different levels of meaning as we possibly can so in the text you have these really Punchy subheads you know and they're in red all the subheads and the head are in red and then there isn't a lot of black and white type and then immediately at the end of each chapter you have two pages of of cartoons which capture but not slavishly they just say oh wow this is really different and what we've noticed is that some people will just pick up the book and read all the cartoons and the whole meaning of the book is contained in the cartoons so that's a an entirely different dimension which expands people's understanding of the idea people say well I don't like the cartoons I says yeah but there are people who only love the cartoons and I want to have them as raving fans of the idea too even if they're not text people they'll you know we have a significant amount of Dyslexia among the entrepreneurs and they said you know the words don't be anything but I love the cartoons I said that's great the other thing is that our books never went down to the children of entrepreneurs but now that we have the cartoons we have entrepreneurs who are going through with six-year-olds and seven-year-olds and explaining the cartoons and what the cartoons mean and the children love the book the one that we have the four C's you know commitment courage capability and confidence has been a huge childhood book which was a surprise to me I hadn't really given a thought to it but people say every night we take one of the cartoon sections out of the books and I talk through my children with it so we've expanded the readership and the usefulness of the book and that's it but we go back and forth and generally my time on the cartoons has been reduced from five six sometimes 10 hours down to roughly about an hour going back and forth with HH and his confidence is just grown because I've just released him I said go for it I said as soon as we have the agreement on the rough layup it's yours just run with it and then there's always little adjustments or enhancements that you can do when you get the finished artwork but it's a process and what he does when he's ready to go he just sends an email to Anna who controls my my schedule and we book us in I have sound Studios and video studio and then we just go to a room where I just do Zoom calls it's very enjoyable you see and I've taken all the grueling out of it I've taken all the isolation out of the process I love that we'll talk more about that in a moment and what's interesting is by the way once we've got the whole audio interview to get the content out for the writers Adam and Carrie then you and I go in the studio you know in terms of different ways you can enjoy the book then we do what I call the author interview yes I love it because it's not a slavish thing to the text either so we actually use the headlines we use the outline that you created and we go in and do we do a much shorter version you know roughly hour and a half although takes us a little longer to get to that point but it's nice and tight and it really covers the entire book in 70 to 80 90 minutes and that's really fun because that's a very Dynamic process we've both gotten I think a lot better at just making sure we flow through that that and sometimes even new ideas pop out yeah and the whole thing is that both of us are totally familiar with the text because it was the original interview that actually created the text so we're experts on the text and so we can just freeform and we know from the original recording that there are certain things to stress in the interview that can be developed more and we know the real hotspots that are if we get this idea across and we tell this story this is people are just going to remember what we're talking about but we've already been through so we know what really will now be the highlights and we do that in the audio interview and meanwhile the writing is going on you know I mean the writing is finished generally but the writing doesn't have to be finished because we're just working from the outline and then we do a video where you have about four or five questions that seem to be just the mountain peak ideas from the book and then we just talk on camera and that's another thing people will say well before I read the book I just link on the video and I just get the 30 or 40 minute for the whole idea and that prepares my mind for reading the book and we've also learned again I love what your point Dan about your audience as your creative partner with you in the process we've learned that so this morning we did six five minute videos on my plan for living to 56 that was so fun and again as you said we can take the Mountaintop ideas to really make that happen and again as you said the whole book is kind of being done so there's a whole production team so jens's are amazing graphic over all layout artists she packages everything yeah suie is the one the video director amazing amazing producer and Margot and Victor record and edit that for us so you can tell there's lots of Backstage people who are really make us look good Willer does an amazing job editing the author interview to make sure it sounds great then we send it off to the printer you know it gets a final proofing by Carrie and then we have our overall production manager who handles all the communication with the printer and the deadlines and the deadlines and you know we have a deadline because each quarter in my first Workshop of the quarter the latest book so I just started last Monday so the newest book went in capis which is the book before the lifetime extend book so we have a whole process that constantly delivers a brand new book in my first Workshop of every quarter mhm fantastic so just to summarize Dan because this has been a lengthy process and I do want to explain that we did actually have a little bit of a pause in our quarters or 15 quarters because HH who's This brilliant cartoonist went for a bike ride that did not end up so well and end up damaging both forearms so broke his wrists and everything so he was in a cast I don't know which was the greater pain for him you know the actual injury because it was a lengthy operation because there's a lot of small bones and it's his life you know his hands and I just wrote him a a lawn impact filter not a lawn impact filter as lawn as an impact filter is and I just said it's okay what's your job now to do is just be relieved and we'll catch up sometime over the next 25 years we'll catch up so just focus on healing yourself and when you tell us you're confident to come back to the project to come back to the project but meanwhile we just went on developing the book except for the cartoons we just went on doing it but sometime you know some maybe year six or year 10 or year 15 we'll get in five books one year and uh and everything else but you know we were able to reassure him because I've been injured I've had a lot of orthop itic injuries legs and arms and I think the one thing is you don't want any additional pressure except having all your energy available for healing and he did it you know but his mind developed about what he was doing while he was away and he came back and he was incredibly more productive after the quarter off than he had been before because he was thinking about it all the time okay so as a experienced Transformer you know what's working this is really working I love this activity what's not working I I shouldn't ride a bicycle in busy traffic you know and he came back much more clear about it so the 25 years and the 100 quarters really gives you a lot of flexibility and one thing I just want to say and it's in the 10 times thinking and now in the game changer program it's thinking about how you would go a hundred times that if you're just thinking about one book you can take forever to complete that book and that becomes almost like an incredible burden because you've given yourself no time frame for getting the book out but once I switch over that I'm going to do a hundred books all of a sudden my mind said well how can I produce a really great book once a quarter and it's the easiest shortest most impactful book but I've got a deadline and I have to get it done all of a sudden you can't do it as a single isolated individual and I'm still looking I mean we're always looking for is there more teamwork that we can add to our team so the bigger goal the hundred books automatically made each of the smaller books that we're doing right now much more impactful than if we were writing a lawn book I always say that everybody's first book Is Like War in peace you know it's 3 or 400 pages but that's not what the audience today want especially when our books are non-fiction books and non-fiction books lawn books just wear people out if it's fiction and it's a story people will read three or 400 Pages if it's a great story but with non-fiction now we want our information in small packets we want them to be impactful we want them to be useful and we want to be able to do something with the idea right away mm well and the last final comment for me Dan is that as we've gone through the process and produced more and more books and I just realized that the extraordinary impact filter is actually Book 12 because of capis came in there too is that we keep making these improvements and we've talked about what a lot of those have been and big om was adding Adam to the process but it has really freed up every single person to do what they love to do and what they're best at and what they're most creative about and the break that heish physically had but allowed us means that we're ahead it actually took off a ton of pressure cuz we were kind of against harder deadline so we're now ahead and there's a really positive momentum to that so you and I in the recording studio a joy for both of us Carrie editing loves it Adam writing loves it Willard editing loves it and even the schedulers who have challenges with our calendar sometimes love the process of complex scheduling so it's because we've parceled It Out Among so many people even though it might look like a complex team to manage everyone knows their part their place we've got the system down and it keeps getting better every quarter so I'm thrilled to be a part of it some of it was on purpose some was accidental but it's really gelled into this amazing amazing process and something that I by sharing it I hope other people can a get excited about getting their own creativity out with their own books and be just recognized how unique ability teamwork actually works and how it can grow yeah it's been the most joyful teamwork experience that I think I've had in the close to 30 years since we started strategic coach as a workshop company you know I get better and better at making sure that I'm setting up all my other unique abilities in the process you know I spent a lot of time to make sure that these are the best ideas the most impactful ideas so that it's easy for everybody else to do it and so consequently I'm starting much earlier in the workshop process when I'm testing the ideas out at spotting a potential book and then I'll draw a lot more drawings on the Whiteboard I'll have more stories about it so that three months sometimes six months before we would actually start the official impact filter mindset scorecard I'm spotting an early book so growth happens in a 360 Dee Direction it doesn't happen in a linear direction for yourself you're probably linear if you're doing the whole thing yourself but if you're using teamwork it goes out in 360° it's just been a joy for me that I mean I started this when I was 70 and you know in my 70s I'm experiencing the greatest teamwork experience that I've ever had where it was just created because I said an outrageous goal I love it I'm sure a lot of people resonate that well thank you Dan it's been a total pleasure a to do the books and B to do the interview so everyone listening I hope you've really enjoyed this ation any questions or comments let us know at questions strategic coach.com and we'll talk to you next time on the next podcast thanks thank you Shannon