[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan as usual I love listening to you in workshops and presentations and I pick up things that you say that I think are kind of interesting and the one thing you said that I found very thoughtful and a bit provocative was you said courage makes you younger and I thought that was a very interesting statement and I would love to know more about it so what do you mean when you say courage makes you younger well I think just from um General point of view of people when they think of Courage they tend to think that someone is performing in some Area Activity that has risk to it possibly danger that's part of the risk the danger but I think that there's a tendency to associate with people who are younger I was thinking of the history of the second world war in the Pacific the lawn War you know in the South Pacific during the second world war that generally the soldiers the Marines they were mostly Marines who were going ashore were 18 and 19 years old okay and you think of these as being men but they were barely more than boys they were very very courageous and very very brave and we associate that with a younger thing but actually from my standpoint courage is a capability that is learned young and is continually deepened and expanded as you get older I think that courageous people are courageous for their whole life and there are certain individuals who are just going to be that way but there is also in the general scheme of things there's a period probably between the time people you know are in their mid 20s to let's say their mid-40s when there are opportunities that fall in with what they can be doing they have newer skills in the marketplace there's new opportunities and they also have the thought of striking it rich striking it big when it's possible to do that so that later on when they feel they don't have the same energy and they don't have the same ambition that they're rewarded from what they did in their 20s 30s and 40s and there's kind of like a narrative about this and it's perpetuated by novels and by movies and by television but my sense is that for entrepreneurs that's not a good narrative because entrepreneurism is an independent state in the general scheme of things entrepreneurs don't have to follow the narrative that's set for other people who are not entrepreneurs they do not have to follow any kind of life cycles or path in life that other people do they actually have declared independence from all that but they haven't declared independence completely unless they realize the different challenges that you have as you get older okay so I would say that right now I'm two years short of 80 in May I'll be 80 two years down the road that my ambition is much much bigger at 78 than my ambition was at 48 and you knew me at 48 so you can say does this person tell the truth yes I'm telling the truth about that that my ambition is much bigger and I think that my courage to trust in other people's abilities is vastly bigger than it was 30 years ago that I'm much more willing to stake my future um trusting in other people capabilities than I was 30 years ago so ambition on the one hand and then this and I think that's courage I think I'm very courageous in believing that if other people have a unique ability and the opportunity is a good one for them that you can trust that they will take advantage of it in a very positive way and those two things I'm more ambitious and more courageous that's fasinating Dan and I love how you talk about just to unpack some of what you said because it was amazing got page of notes already is that courage is a capability which means to me it's also a bit of a habit so it's one of those ones if you don't develop that capability early it's going to be harder to get it later on but if you do make it a capability it can only as you said expand and deepen and I think you're 100% right for entrepreneurs the other narrative is not a good narrative it's really important that we have our own and I look at you and it's I have known you for 30 years which is really cool you personally have gotten more capable and as you said you're trust in other people's capabilities lining up with yours which has meant your capability is so much bigger which means your ambition can be so much bigger which is a whole part of our bigger future concept but it's been really interesting to see I mean your proof in the pudding of that particular way of aligning ideas so I think that's really interesting you become more confident and clear in your own capabilities and that also I think has allowed you to see and appreciate and bring to bear other people's so if you think about your $1 155 trillion do free zone ambition or living to 156 living to 156 number one and then also just the you know going from well one really to 10 major Market books with that collaboration with Ben Hardy I mean you are way more ambitious than you were when I first met you it's really exciting to see actually yeah well here's the thing it makes a radical difference of how you look at gge and I think there's almost an accepted mindset that in the normal course of people's lifetimes they will have courageous periods periods where they're courageous you know we see this depicted fictionally mainly and my feeling is it's not a period of society it's not that that courage is a capability like any other capability we have a formula in coach called the for seas that in order for you to grow and you want to grow in two ways you want your capability to be greater and you want your confidence to be greater that in order to reach those two end points of Greater capability and confidence the first thing you have to do is commit yourself to achieving something that right now you don't have the capability for and that's scary that's automatically scary if you commit to a result an outcome an achievement that you don't have the capability for but you're committed to it you're going to go through a period before any new capability takes hold or comes into play when what you have to go on is courage so there are these periods of Courage that you have to go through and then what you notice is that the commitment and the courage actually create the new capability you're not getting to something that was inside of yourself to start you're creating something new inside of yourself and that's capability and confidence which everyone wants confidence is actually a reward of committing going through courage and then developing a capability so if you do all those three and create a new capability you get greater confidence and out of that new confidence you can make an even bigger commitment I love that so to me it's cyclical and it's a skill that's learned you know it's got mindsets attached to it and it has to be tested on things outside of yourself it has to be test tested you know that the achievement could be witnessed your growth of capability can be witnessed by other people and it has impacts like our capability Shannon that's developed in two years as a company of doing Zoom workshops you know and I don't know if we were great at inperson workshops but I know we're great at Zoom workshops and the other thing is the skill that we've developed to do podast together the skills that we've done to do the audio and video part of our quarterly books we've developed all these capabilities and we take on a new book now we're operating for a very very high level of confidence because we've developed such capability for doing that but my sense is that that's not age related at all you know at 77 I'm incredibly more capable of being courageous and relationship to Big goals than I was when I was seven years old I think I'm more or less the same person you know I experienced myself as the same person but just with vastly more capability and confidence and and when I look forward to 100 I see where I am right now will not be equal to where I am at a 100 which brings up the topic if you think that at a certain point in your life you can stop being courageous my feeling is that's part of what kills you well that's what I was going to ask is so why is this so critical is because what's the cost of not being courageous well I think first of all it's one of the things about courage it's really scary one of the things about courage it doesn't feel good you know I mean we mess this up because we we say you know that people who are really confident are being courageous I said no they're being really confident because they have lot of capability courage is reserved for those situations where we're acting as though we're confident but we're scared because we're lacking the capability the capability is being created in our being committed and courageous and then it'll take hold and then you actually do have confidence but you don't have confidence when you start off so my sense is you know I wrote the book my plan for living to 156 and I got to three things in this is three or four years old now the book is and I would add a whole number of things to the things which people run out of and they die because they run out of friends you know you only have friends in a certain age group and then all of a sudden that age group starts dying and every year you have fewer friends you're not making new friends and after a while you're alone you don't have those close warm relationships okay that's number one number two is you run out of money so let's add these up you don't have any friends and you don't have any money now you're at the mercy of the charity of strangers that doesn't feel good you don't want to spend time around there and number three is you've run out of purpose you had a purpose to get to a certain point in life when you didn't have to work in anymore and then your friends start dying and you run out of money so if you have someone who has no friends no money and no purpose I have to tell you life isn't very enjoyable and you don't want to stay around but more and more I think there's several others I won't go into them today but I'll go into the one they run out of Courage yeah and the big thing is they no longer think in terms of taking risks for something bigger and better now you can call that ambition or you can call it but there's a point where in order to get to something bigger and better a result that's bigger and better you have to give up some of what you're doing that feels safe and comfy right you can't do that anymore if you want that bigger and better it doesn't come free you have to pay for it and so you have to go through this period of courage to develop the new capability that allows you to produce those bigger and better results my sense is that act aone more than the other first of all if you do that you got lots of friends if you do this you got lots of money and if you do this you got lots of purpose so I feel that this courage thing is actually continual growing perpetually expanding courage is the secret to staying young that's very cool Dan it also strikes me as you know first of all it is a danger with really successful people that they go from having you know kind of what you're talking about with people between their 20s and 40s is they go from playing offense and really striving hard to achieve that ambition and then they get to a certain predetermined point and then all of a sudden they start playing defense and you're like what happened to this person who was super interesting and learning and testing and trying and you know risking things and all of a sudden are like nope they turn into like protection mode it's almost like it's missing some creativity it's kind of interesting we're reaching the point where the people who were the live wirers in the tech revolution of the 70s and 80s they're really getting old looking they're really old they're in their 60s and 70s now and they have these views these Global views of what Humanity has to do but you don't get any sense that they have any personal risk and courage in their life anymore they're so well off because a lot of them are multi-billionaires that they can't really really experience risk and courage as they did when they were in their 20s you know they have money without meaning they have money Beyond meaning there's no there's you know one of them is the biggest land owner in the United States he owns like 250,000 acres and I said well does he visit it all I mean does he make a regular tour of his 250,000 no he he's just buying that it has no meaning there's nothing going on on that real estate there's nothing he just owns it it's dead real estate and my sense is that quite a long time ago and I think probably a good 30 years ago he stopped wanting to risk anything and stop wanting to have to have courage I think he didn't see see risk and courage as something that kept him sharp that kept him very very energized and everything he saw it as something that he didn't want to do anymore that he had done enough of that and he didn't want to do any more of that it's just an observation but I see it because I'm older than he is and I'm much more ambitious than he is so Dan what do you suggest I was going to say needs to be but what would be a more beneficial narrative especially for entrepreneurs because those the ones most capable of implementing it so I'm sure it's the one that you live by so what's the healthier narrative especially for entrepreneurs I think keep trying things that you can fail at right keep taking risks that you're risking time you're risking money you're risking probably reputation and you can fail okay so you really got to gear yourself up you got to be scared that you're not going to fail and I think that has to be at least weekly oh that's interesting I think it has to be at least weekly so what are some of those things for you a lot of mine are just brand new ideas for entrepreneurs they're paying me a bundle to be in the workshops and learn these I have a goal this year of probably producing 50 new Thinking Tools you know they're not going to be equal to each other when they come out some of them will be one day Delights and the other ones will go forever and you don't know you don't know whether they are or not but the one thing that I think you should always risk that you think that the formula that you don't have to worry about anymore you have a formula for success is that may be wrong and it may actually be heading you towards failure and that you should think deeply about what you think you're counting on and actually doing that that so there's lots of things about it you know a lot of it has to do with constantly trying new things and being open to other people trying new things that kind of strike you as Rong but you want to see what happens when they try it out because you might learn something well that's actually the word that came to mind as you were talking it's like staying really curious alert curious responsive and resourceful where have I heard that yeah yeah staying open you know alert curious response resourceful is perfect and not assuming you know not getting trapped into that way of thinking that oh my way is the right way or I've tried that it didn't work well the world progresses you probably tried it again and when something is new and different to you it doesn't mean it's not interesting or there's something to learn from that because my question is be how do people take action on this and you've answered it brilliantly do something that scares you weekly and you'll have that sense of you know being youthful and the other thing is you know because I love your kind of adage every decade make friends with a younger person you know I'm kind of marking this because in the 10 times Workshop program I have my first 50-year client people say you got somebody who was in the program for 50 years I said no I have someone who's in the program who's 50 years younger than I am he's an entrepreneur in my program and I'm 50 years older than him and yeah I checked him out he's a real honest to goodness entrepreneur and he's bright and he's successful and you know and I think he's courageous and everything else and I said that I'm open to someone being 50 years old totally impressing me as much as I am somebody who's been an entrepreneur for 50 years and one of the interesting things to make friends with people in that age group and I know exactly who it is cuz he and I are also friends is that there's a common now because both of you are trying new things both of you are experimenting both of you are testing sometimes both of you are failing so unless you are GNA make friends with people in their 20s teens even 30s 40s that's the mindset right they're not set in stone they don't consider themselves to be fully formed so it's almost a relating point that I can see that it's like both of you can connect but both of you are having new adventures in the world you might be you know 30 50 years different doesn't matter you're still thinking about the things the same way well the other thing is that he's confronted with the same challenge he's got to do things that are scary for him yeah to grow but the big thing is not to see your life as a period where you have to be really courageous but then it comes to an end and then you get to go on cruise control no cruise control I love that so stay courageous because that will keep you young and don't go on cruise control MH I love that Dan thank you this is a very interesting and invigorating conversation appreciate it thank you Sharon