Lecture with Keith Cunningham on Business Mastery

okay welcome everybody I'm here with the one and the only Keith Cunningham Keith in my opinion is one of the best teachers may be the best teacher when it comes to business and business mastery Keith has over 45 years of business experience and investing experience and I've been a student of Keith for many many years for example I read his book keys to the vault which is an amazing book I went to his four-day MBA in in Texas which was one of the be the best courses that I haven't went to did a lot of home study work with this home study material man this new book the road less stupid which is I think the best business book ever written it's so good it's so much value I really feel that this book alone if you really study it well and practice all the thinking time principles and everything in it it's worth more than any online course you can buy from multiple thousands of euros so yeah I'm super honored that our Keith takes the time to be here with us so thanks a lot to Keith yeah you're very welcome thank you for having me and thank you for all your kind words I appreciate it thank you so much so let's just dive in I've been a student for for many years and one of the secret weapons that I've learned from you is the power of thinking time just to sit down with myself and think about certain important topics it's super helpful for me in your new book the road less stupid it literally has a hundred hundreds of questions that you can ask yourself to actually really become better in business and come up with the answers that are already within yourself especially nowadays it's really tough to do critical thinking or go deep with your thinking because we were so surface leveled nowadays because of the social media and everything why has this been so powerful for you and how did you found out about this well it's powerful because in a nutshell business is an intellectual sport and my and you know that's true because you can look back at various decisions maybe that you made or various results that you got that didn't turn out as well as what you originally hoped and you can look at those decisions or at those results and over and over again the common denominator is faulty assumptions so if I here's the question I love to ask if I could give you an opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions you've ever made in your whole life so you could have a do-over and you could have three of them always a good if I hate it should be good right if I gave you the opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions I promise you you would have more money and what cost us money is that that what I call the dumb tax these are stupid mistakes that cost us money and most of those stupid mistakes are a result of being irrationally exuberant way too optimistic not checking for second-order consequences and so that when I say the business is an intellectual sport what I'm really saying is that money and business contrary to popular opinion does not respond well to emotions and when I look at my mistakes if you look at your mistakes what you'll find is a series of emotional glandular gut kind of decisions and it's those decisions that wind up D railing our progress to me that the goal is not to get rich the goal is to get rich and stay that way I don't want to be I don't want to be successful for a month out any more than I want to be healthy for a month or being a great relationship for a month what I'm looking for is long-term results and the only way to get those long-term results is to have skills and tools I think the mistake that gets made and the power of thinking time the power of using your brain is that it allows you as a business owner as a human being and in every part of your life to examine the risk so the reality to me is that successful entrepreneurs successful business owners people that are successful in their lives have done a great job of thinking through what are the second-order consequences what are the risk what are the gotchas what were the places this could wind up being a bad idea and so a tremendous amount of the work that that I think is required in order to create business success is an intellectual work unfortunately most of us have built who are in business have built a business that requires us to to pick up the business end of the shovel and and I'm okay with that I'm okay with there are times when I'm needed to go do something in the business what I want that thing that I'm doing is - yeah I want to avoid that thing being a reaction instead I want the thing that I'm doing to be a plant so the the difference to me between somebody who's successful and unsuccessful in business is a whole lot to do with how they do it quantifying and minimizing mitigating risk and number two are you executing a plan or are you reacting to the problem dujour which is the whack-a-mole [Music] you know that's the part that gets everybody tired if you wake up in the morning you whack moles all day long you put out fires and there's so many fires that most people don't even have a have an opportunity to figure out who's lighting them and so as a result we wind up at the end of the day tired and worn out and discouraged and frustrated and it's all because we haven't done the work that's required in order to put in the place the structure and the leverage and and all of that is a result of using your brain and not your emotions yeah you ask the question how did I learn this well I had to learn it the hard way I mean that's the that's the bad part is that you know I was I I thought the goal years ago was okay well let's get rich let's become successful and and so I did and I promptly lost a ton of money and in fact within 24 36 months I went from having a lot of money to having no money I mean nut I was broke and and that transition from a lot of money to no money is a result of of not using the skills and tools and not using my my brain in order to help me make decisions I was totally emotional I was I was caught up and you know hubris and I was arrogant and I ignored risk and and so I had to learn it the hard way look the goal is not to get there the goal is to get there and stay there and that's true in every part of our lives yeah yeah that's great I think it's your phrase that most problems started off as a great idea yeah it's one of the things that I talk about in my book yeah the reality is I've yet to get up in the morning and say today's the day I'm going to use my third-best thinking hmm every problem that I have and I'm going to suggest to you and the people that are listening to this that every problem you have is a result of a good idea and so what I want to do in order to create and sustain the success that I want what I want to do is make sure that if I execute on a good idea that I've thought about the second-order consequences and the unexamined assumptions and the risk and the things that could go wrong I have a tendency and I think most people have this tendency to substitute a story for the facts and as a result we wind up executing on a story or an idea instead of executing on the facts or a plan and I think that we we sabotage because we substitute ideas for a plan and and as you said it is true my problems that I have right now are a result of some good idea that I had three months ago three years ago thirty years ago some good idea that I had that I executed on and I should have taken a pass but I didn't do it because I didn't think about it yeah when it comes to thinking time what what are your personal rituals when it comes to thinking time like because I mean we can journal or we can put stuff in our phone or whatever but how did what's your ritual when it comes to thinking time well in my book the road less stupid I actually spent the chapter talking about the mechanics and that's really what you're asking about I went when I get ready to do thinking time the the key is to come up with a really good question that I want to think about the first couple times I tried thinking time i sat down in the chair with my pencil and my my tablet my journal and I was all ready to think and I took a nap I didn't have anything to think about and and so I learned very quickly that the key to a great thinking time session is designing a great thinking time question so I'm going to give you an example of a couple of questions so that your audience knows what I'm talking about a great thinking time question might be how would I run my business if 100% of my future growth was by referral only how how big would my business be if I still had every customer who ever tried me uh what what assumptions am i making about the problem that I have and and so when I sit down within thinking time and in the road less stupid there's over 700 different thinking time questions that I've developed over the course the last thirty years of of religiously doing thinking time thinking time to me is a 45 minute session where I turn off the alarms I turn off my phone my computer I have a little kitchen timer that I sip is set beside me I I closed the door to my office I have a thinking time chair I have a thinking time tablet I have a thinking time pen and so it's highly ritualized and I have one or two or three questions that I'm going to sit quietly and the only thing I'm going to do during that 45 minutes is focus on that question and the job of thinking time is to create more choices some of those choices are going to be dumb some of them are just going to be truly bad ideas but it doesn't matter but because the goal is not to create the right choice they are the best choice the goal is to create more choices and then at the end of 45 minutes culled through and get rid of the ones that are weaker horrible and and wind up with one or two really good ideas and then those good ideas may require a future thinking time about risk or assumptions or my ability to execute or resources or priorities that I need to establish in order to successfully implement this new idea so thinking time is very much designed to help me with one thing and one thing only and this is this is probably one of the biggest benefits to doing thinking time and that is clarity it gives me clarity it gives me the ability to say this is the direction this is my best choice these are the resources that I need are the priorities that I need to set or the the team that I need to add or build or the skills that we need to augment our ability to consistently execute it's it's how do I make sure that I'm not executing on an idea particularly a bad idea how do I make sure that I'm executing on something that is gives me an opportunity to be sustainably successful yeah this is great and again everybody's listening or watching in the book the road less stupid it has 700 thinking time questions and what I said at the intro that this book could be more valuable compared to a lot of trainings or online courses because this is actually a tool that you can use for years and years and years and it's super powerful so it's great something else is that what we oftentimes hear is we need to work on the business instead of in the business and what you talked about in your book is that it might be a better idea to make the transition from being a business operator to being becoming a business owner what do you mean by that so I think that the words that we use are incredibly powerful in fact the words we use may be the most powerful force in our lives and the reason is because is because the label becomes the experience uh if I have something happen to me and I go holy moly this is a catastrophe as soon as I label it a catastrophe my my experience of it is going to be it's a it's catastrophic if the same thing happens to me and I say well this is going to be interesting then my experience of it is going to be interesting if the same thing happens to me and I say well this is going to be exciting then my experience of it is going to be exciting I think there's a lot of relatively weak advice that that's out there in the business world there's a lot of people who have written books and and they've put labels on stuff an example would be the concept of passive income which is an intergalactic Lea stupid concept because it implies that you can get money by doing nothing or it implies that you can create and sustain success by doing nothing or doing the least and I don't know anybody who's got a gold medal at anything whether it's in business or pole vault or or ping-pong I don't know anybody at a gold-medal they got there by doing the least I see people doing the most not the least and so there's a concept out there that has gotten a lot of traction and the concept is of this idea that you should be working on your business and not in your business so let's let's take a second look at that when's the last time somebody came up to you and asked you the question what business are you on it didn't happen and the reason it didn't happen is because it's a stupid idea when somebody comes up to me and says what do you do I don't say well I'm on the teaching business I say here's what is what I'm in this is what I do I'm engaged in in doing this and so the distinction to me is not whether we should be on versus in the distinction is what do we wind up doing all day long or with with our time the majority of our time and so instead of on versus in I have a different label and this label may or may not serve but the label that I have is I say look there's four hats that a business owner can wear somebody that that is an entrepreneur that owns a business you can be an artist you can be the operator you can be the owner or you can be the board or investor hat all of those are hats and it's wardrobe you can take one off and you can put another one on and there's times like when I wrote the road less stupid I needed to be the artist right now with you I'm the operator I'm not creating anything news that was done when I wrote the book there's times where I need to be the owner and so that's going to be about my plan and the structure and the people that we have on our team and and hiring and retaining a players and and leverage all of that is about being an owner and then there's times I need to put on a different hat and that hat is the investor of the board had and that's a hat that says I wonder why could go wrong uh wonder where the risk are how do I play defense and not just offense so so there's nothing wrong with being the operator as long as every once a while I take that hat off and put on some of the other hats the problem becomes where where we we we only have one hat in our wardrobe that's where the problem happens and so you find people who are who have the artist hat they are really really good at creating they love their product whatever their product is they are passionate about their product and which means that they're probably going to take really good pictures or have a really good art whatever that is are going to write a really good book but the book will never be a bestseller because they spend all their time writing a really good book and don't understand what the business into the stick is it would enable them to turn it into a best-seller books don't become bestsellers because they're good books I'm really clear on that people don't make a lot of money simply because they've got a really good product you and I can both think of some businesses that have truly truly horrible products but they've made a ton of money McDonald's comes to mind yeah McDonald's has more more food than any other restaurant in the history of mankind and they have a truly lousy product that their fresh fries are fantastic but their cheeseburgers are horrible there's nobody thinks their cheeseburgers are good but they said billions and billions of them and so the message is this if you're listening right now you're going to want to write this down success rarely has anything to do with what you do and almost always has everything to do with how you do it success is not a result of what you do it's how you do it and so you know when I look at operator versus owner or in versus on I think the mistake that gets made is that people think if they're on their business yeah they don't have to really engage they can kind of show up or not show up in the business will run itself and and they can leave for months at a time and when they get back to business is better than when they left all that utter nonsense it's it's crazy when you and I look at the 10 wealthiest people in the world the ten richest people in the world with the exception of Bill Gates who's too sad and he wants to figure out how to give away a hundred billion dollars that's he's made a transition the other nine are still in their businesses yeah they get a job they wake up every day they go to work they take meetings they get a business card they they they hire and fire and coach people they they they sit in meetings they they make decisions they're in their business now their job has changed this is critical their job is changed so Michael Dell is no longer assembling computers Jeff Bezos is no longer you know running it to the end of the end of the warehouse to find a book to ship out they their job has changed but they're still in their business and I think we would be better served as as entrepreneurs as business owners if we forgot about the distinction of on versus in and instead ask the question how do I add more value to my business and to my customers and and where are the points of leverage that I need to take advantage of by adding people to my team or or redesigning that who does what on my team which would free me up to run the business end of the business the reality is running the business into the business can be a full-time job and not everybody has the the luxury of mass of size to be able to do that but it doesn't mean you can't have another hat in your wardrobe this says owner on it and another hat that says investor another hat that says artists and another hat that says operator and so I just need to be thoughtful about is the real problem that I got this on versus in distinction that's out there or is the real problem that I need to acquire some business skills and tools which is the purpose as you know of the four-day MBA the 4-day MBA is designed to help give you the business skills and tools that will allow you to begin making the transition from operator to owner no I don't think that's on versus end I think that make a transition from react to plan from from emotions to intellect from a optimism to identifying risk and second-order consequences so to me this distinction of on versus in is not that useful I don't think that's how Bill Gates got rich I don't think Bill Gates read a book that said uh I need to be on that business I don't think Michael Dell did I don't think Jeff Bezos did I don't think the Google boys did I don't think Steve Jobs did I don't think they read that book and said oh I need to be on my business instead they said I need to learn business skills and tools that will allow me to successfully run the business end of my business yeah yeah this is great okay next question I'm gonna switch gears a little bit so in your book you say a wise man once told you hell on earth would be would be to meet the man you could have been why does it say s o has such a profound impact and what does it mean to you this thing I heard almost 30 years ago when I was after I had lost a ton of money and I was I was depressed and and unhappy and you know probably suicidal I mean really I was a mess and and this this saying hell on earth would be to meet the man or the woman you could have been gives me the opportunity to think in terms of of living intentionally it allows me to set expectations and be purposeful about my life it allows me to to make sure that as I go about my daily life and my my daily activities that I'm moving towards an outcome I'm moving towards something I yeah I'm in a very fortunate kind of situation where I I no longer need to work for more money I don't need to be doing this interview with you I don't need to be writing books I don't need to be teaching or or anything like that I've got all the money I can spend and when you look at people that have all the money they can spend and yet they still get up and do something so Warren Buffett clearly has Bill Gates they clearly got all the money they can spend Jeff Bezos for crying out loud the guy's got a hundred and fifty billion dollars get all the money can spend and yet he continues to get up and and continues to to go to work and to me the reason that to do that is because we we understand that there's more to life than just this idea of amassing a lot of money at now as soon as I say that I'm not going to minimize getting rich I think getting riches is a great idea if that's something you want but it certainly gives you a lot more choices that then what you have when you don't have thanked somebody told me one time I think this is very true if if you have enough money to solve a problem you don't have a problem I love that yes and and and I think Dan Sullivan who's a very wise man is the originator of that and it's true you know if money gives me the ability that maybe solve problems that that otherwise I wouldn't be able to solve this idea of hell on earth would be to meet the man or the woman you could have been it allows me to get up in the morning and and an attempt to get better as opposed to sit back and say okay I've made it I've achieved it I've got what I want and I can retire or or do nothing and and certainly that's a choice that I have but I choose not to exercise that choice because there's this idea of mastery and the man I could have been and and this idea of avoiding looking back with regret no III really don't want to get to the end of my life and look back and go ah ah Keith you missed it I don't want to do that and so it's kind of its kind of the Stephen Covey idea of begin with the end in mind you know what is it I'm trying to achieve and and what is it that I need to do today to help me move the needle yeah very powerful very powerful quote super powerful what's most important for you right now like in your life right now so that is it that's a really really good question I have made a distinction uh between success and fulfillment and success to me is getting what I want and fulfillment is giving what I got fulfillment for me happens from contribution and so what's important to me at this point is maintaining the success I don't necessarily add I don't necessarily need more but for sure I don't want to go backwards so maintaining the success that I have and and then adding to that this idea of fulfillment where's the opportunity for me to have an impact or to make a difference in one person's life it doesn't have to be meds as soon as I say I want to impact millions of people now it's about me and not them that's a narcissistic point of view that Bill Gates was giving an interview several years ago and the reporter who is interviewing Bill Gates asking the question what do you want your legacy to be and Bill Gates who is known to be very abrupt very direct and sometimes profane looked at this interviewer and and said that it is the singularly stupidest question I've ever been asked and of course the interview was kind of taken back and Bill Gates said I'm not concerned about my legacy because the instant I become concerned about my legacy then what I'm trying to do is about me it's narcissistic I'm doing what I'm doing in order to see if I can make a difference and if I do make a difference it'll be for other people to decide what my legacy not me I'm not in charge of my legacy I'm in charge of doing what I know to do to try to make an impact and other people will ultimately vote on whether or not that was or was not worth remembering I think that's very insightful I think what I'm about at this point is not yeah I'm not about trying to do something that where I'll be remembered or create a legacy I'm more about is there a way for me to use the last 40 five years of business experience business acumen the the wisdom you know experience is is what wisdom is what you get when what you did failed mmm that's where wisdom comes from and I've got a few broken legs and bum knees and concussions that have happened over the course of the last 45 years and and I have the ability to distill those down into bite-sized chunks that entrepreneurs and business owners can use to help them create success so I'm very much about being purposeful and intentional with my life and and and simultaneously being thoughtful about the choices that I'm making yeah how much time do you spend teaching probably thirty five to forty percent of my time for forty forty percent of my time is spent teaching and then we own some businesses and so I'm a business owner I think that's one of the things that differentiates me from other people who teaches I'm a practitioner of the Arts you know I eat my own cooking and so what I teach is what works not what I would add it's not a theory this is the stuff that I've used and we own a handful of businesses that are all relatively relatively small they're you know they're ten five ten you know twelve million dollars revenue we own half a dozen of them and and what we at what I do my role is to run the business into the business not operating that's why I can spend so much time teaching and then I spend a couple hours a week running our businesses because I have really good operators and then the balance of my time you know I'm I play golf and and Sandy and I my wife and I do quite a bit of travel and so I'm in a transition state you know my foots not on the gas but on the other hand I'm not tapping the brakes I've got some good equilibrium and I want to make sure I maintain it that's good you're going through incident next week ride that's right I'm coming Amsterdam next week in fact I leave tomorrow for Amsterdam and will teach a business mastery with Tony Robbins which we've been working closely with him we're very fortunate we've been working closely with him for I think there's our 18th year it's been a long time yeah that's great I've watched you speak at business mastery I think four years ago and there were literally accountants in the room who told me that they learned more in your four hours than they did at their four years of studying accountancy and and for me it was fascinating when I saw you teach it was just fascinating to see somebody teach so well on the topic that is for a lot of people so boring which is numbers and accountancy and how did you learn to become such a great teacher well I mean it's the same way everybody learns how to do anything well which is I think it requires a a guide a mentor um you know some people call them a coach but I think it requires a commitment to learning um I think I think without a commitment to growth in learning it is very likely you will become stagnant so number one it was a commitment add to learning and number two it was a commitment to practicing and so I spent 20-something years to sing yeah but if you want to if you want to do what I do there's three things you have to master number one you got a you got to have some clarity around and mastery around the subject number two you have to learn how to teach that subject which means that you learn need to learn how to break it down into bite-sized chunks that are understandable for the audience so if I tried to teach people accounting and financial statements are cut and so as soon as I say accounting people got there so I'm a I'm a reframe it and call it a business cockpit yeah yeah as soon as I start trying to teach business cockpit now the sudden everybody who's listening to this goes oh yeah I need a cockpit but if I tell them they need accounting they go on and I don't want to count so you know I got I got a master that I got to have mastery of the subject I got to learn how to teach which is I got to learn how to take what I know and present it in a way that people can do something with it and so you know instead of talking about debits and credits we're going to talk about optics I don't talk about debits and credits that's what a countess talked about I don't care about our debits and credits but as a business owner I want optics so the second thing is I got up I learn how to teach and then to be able to do what I do at Tony I gotta learn how to speak hmm there's the difference between being a really effective teacher and being a really effective speaker yeah and so those are the three things that that I've had to practice over the years and fortunately I've had a number of opportunities to the hone what I do and I'm still a student yeah yeah I'm still a student of business I'm still a student of teaching and I'm still a student of speaking and every time I see a great speaker there's a lot of lousy speakers but every time I see a great one I go all right what are they doing how are they doing that a very good friend of ours is a very famous singer his name is Lionel Richie and Lionel's a good friend of ours and I've been backstage a number of times with him and I've seen how Lionel controls the audience you know what he does his timing and and I've watched how he's done that and I studied it and he and I have talked about it you know Lionel Lionel be in front of an audience and all of a sudden he'll start bouncing on his toes in the audience literally within two seconds you see him would start bouncing and rhythm he asked me a bit so how does he do that how does he engage the room so I'm a student of that kind of stuff and so when you ask a question had I learned to do it I'm a student in our practice I'm very very deliberate about my practice and how I'm gonna do what I'm about to do yeah that's great I heard speaking of studying I hear you talk a lot about this book the most important thing oh great book what what's your number one thing that you learned from this book the book the most important thing is written by a guy named Howard Marks and Howard Marks runs a giant pool of money he's an investor he's a contemporary of Warren Buffett and has made billions by doing it I mean he's one of these people who eats his own cooking uh Warren Buffett has said Howard Marks is the only guy who went Howard writes something and Warren receives it Warren will stop what he's doing to read what Howard Marks is thinking about which that's incredible probably there's two really important concepts so there's a lot of important concepts and the book the most important thing one is the less risk you perceive the more risk there is this this idea is unbelievably important particularly for business owners because as business owners we tend to not be thoughtful about the risks that we're taking we tend to be way too optimistic we tend to shoot most the time we don't even try to identify the stuff that could go wrong and so the idea that the less risk you perceive the more risks there is here's how that translates into daily life if if you thought there was zero probability of you being in an automobile accident when you got in your car to drive to the grocery store if you say so you're about to get in your car make the five minute trip to the grocery store and you think there's zero likelihood that you'll have an accident then on the way to the grocery store you will text and drive you won't use your seatbelt and as a result of texting and driving and not using your seatbelt your your odds of dying in an automobile accident actually go up yeah and so so this idea that the less risk you perceive the more risks there is is incredibly important the other thing that he sent me he says lots of really good things but the other thing that really resonated with me is he said that we would all be better off if we worried about survival in the event that things didn't turn out then trying to predict maximum returns in the event they do so his orientation is actually the orientation of all sustainably successful people there are no exceptions there are no exceptions - if you want sustainable success then you have to build a world-class defense and most of us as business owners as business as entrepreneurs tend to think only in terms of offense how do we grow how do we get bigger how do we have more more MORE we're little greedy but about our businesses we just want to keep getting bigger and bigger and we never worry about what could go wrong hmm we don't we don't worry about playing defense and so having a world-class defense is actually critical to being sustainably successful so if you don't have the most important thing in your library you should get it and read it it's good one yeah it's great it's also one of the thinking time question I don't know if it's in the book but the question what don't I see is so powerful and it's it's you know I think it's also mentioned in the book the most important thing or at least in a way so it's great so last question this it's been great so far so thank you so the book it counts 700 thinking time questions again which you can work on for years and and you'll still don't have enough time to actually go through all the questions unless I got like 200 years to live but uh no it's it's it's amazing it's really good but what thinking time question did you ask yourself in the past that made the biggest profound impact on your business or in your life so I made two comments number one the the goal is not to answer all 704 questions that's not that's not what we're trying to achieve you know I've got I've got some questions that I've asked myself 200 times 200 different thinking time questions there's 200 thinking time sessions where I sat down with the exact same question and the reason that's so powerful is because the what's what's it the environment is always changing and so a good answer today could be a lousy answer a year from now or a bad answer five years ago could be a great answer today because the circumstances are different and I can give you a lot of examples of that but the most powerful question I ask is the one that you just mentioned a minute ago which is this question of what don't I see only the way I frame that question is by asking what story am i telling that isn't true the way I ask that question is by asking what assumptions am i making and can I get clarity on those assumptions maybe the assumptions are accurate maybe they're inaccurate that the way I ask what don't I see because what none of us can see is the assumptions we're making or the story we're telling and so I had that mean when I asked that question that's really what I'm asking what it what are the assumptions what is the story I'm telling where am I being irrationally exuberant what do I know it might be so yeah that's exactly it you know and and what are the facts and what's the upside and what's the downside and can I live with the downside that's that question is by far the most powerful question because what sabotages my results what sabotages your results what sabotages everybody's results are faulty assumptions unexamined assumptions excessive optimism all offense no defense an inability or an unwillingness to identify the risk and what could go wrong what don't I see is all about risk it's what what what caught what causes me to lose money what causes my mistakes is risk that occurred that I didn't build a defense for or I did never guess that could happen and so if I'm willing to be thoughtful which is the road less stupid it's this idea of thinking time if I'm willing to be thoughtful about my business about my decisions about the direction I'm going I'll make fewer impulsive decisions and more thoughtful planned decisions that actually will help me improve the success and the performance of my business and my will yeah this is so good so thank you so much for taking the time I would really recommend people to at least just buy the book the road less stupid I've been working on this thing for many times it's so great our friend Joe polish he has I think he has hundreds of the books at his office to give away to all of his clients and students because it's just it's just so good I would also advise anybody I mean I traveled from them to go to Texas to learn from you I went to the four-day MBA which is a great course how often do you do that course I do it two times a year and the next one is actually coming up September 19th through the 22nd yeah so that if anybody has an interest in that we'd love to have you and it's all about the transition from operator to owner yeah and it's I mean I tell every entrepreneur when when we talk about you it's like you have to go to the course because it's just it's it's so powerful to learn from you in person of course you know the book is great or going to a seminars grade or watching it online or whatever but really learning from you in person and it's not like an event with 12,000 people or whatever it's just pretty small right hundred fifty people yeah it's so yeah and then you have how to buy an exit a business how to buy or extra business which is all about either either creating maximum value in your business that you currently have so the thing I like to tell people about how to buy or exit what we want to do is run our businesses like we could like we could own it forever but we could sell it tomorrow yeah if we can if we can learn how to do that we're going to create maximum value and then some people want to acquire a business and so if this is the skills and tools and nuts and bolts about buying or exiting a business and then I have one more course and I teach how to buy or exit one time a year and it's coming up in October and then I have one other course I teach one time a year which is planning or gets slaughtered and it's always at the end of the year that'll be in November this year but it thank you for bringing that up people can go to our website or shoot us an email and we're more than happy to provide you with details and dates and cost on all these courses and the email is info at keys to z vault com keys to the vault comm and that's the web keys to the wall calm and you go there and you know what I'll tell people is that you know that all of our all of our courses are priced at the upper range we're not attempting to be the cheapest but I tell people hey is always more expensive before it's been through the horse and so you're gonna get that you're gonna get the hay before it's meant there's a horse I think your courses are super cheap and cheap as the value you get at the four-day training I mean all the nuts and bolts and ideas but also the vibes and like the great insights and wisdom it's it's priceless so it's I would recommend any entrepreneur who actually serious about growing and sustaining a good and healthy business to just go and yeah again it's it's it's a couple of times a year small group I know the event space well and this is like one of the best events you can actually go through so anything else you want to add I'm very appreciative of you and the work you did to get ready for this interview and mostly I'm appreciative of the opportunity that you're creating for your listeners who if they're listening to this are committed to getting better I one of my core beliefs is that if you want to do better or you got to get better and so if you're listening to this interview if you're reading these books if you're attending courses whether they're mine or Tony Robbins or anybody else's that commitment to get better is the key to doing better and it's become it's that level of commitment that I think that's required for mastery so thank you for the opportunity to participate with you and and your audience I'm very appreciative thank you thanks so much and enjoy Amsterdam of course thank you very much I look forward to it good thank you

okay welcome everybody I&#39;m here with the one and the only Keith Cunningham Keith in my opinion is one of the best teachers may be the best teacher when it comes to business and business mastery Keith has over 45 years of business experience and investing experience and I&#39;ve been a student of Keith for many many years for example I read his book keys to the vault which is an amazing book I went to his four-day MBA in in Texas which was one of the be the best courses that I haven&#39;t went to did a lot of home study work with this home study material man this new book the road less stupid which is I think the best business book ever written it&#39;s so good it&#39;s so much value I really feel that this book alone if you really study it well and practice all the thinking time principles and everything in it it&#39;s worth more than any online course you can buy from multiple thousands of euros so yeah I&#39;m super honored that our Keith takes the time to be here with us so thanks a lot to Keith yeah you&#39;re very welcome thank you for having me and thank you for all your kind words I appreciate it thank you so much so let&#39;s just dive in I&#39;ve been a student for for many years and one of the secret weapons that I&#39;ve learned from you is the power of thinking time just to sit down with myself and think about certain important topics it&#39;s super helpful for me in your new book the road less stupid it literally has a hundred hundreds of questions that you can ask yourself to actually really become better in business and come up with the answers that are already within yourself especially nowadays it&#39;s really tough to do critical thinking or go deep with your thinking because we were so surface leveled nowadays because of the social media and everything why has this been so powerful for you and how did you found out about this well it&#39;s powerful because in a nutshell business is an intellectual sport and my and you know that&#39;s true because you can look back at various decisions maybe that you made or various results that you got that didn&#39;t turn out as well as what you originally hoped and you can look at those decisions or at those results and over and over again the common denominator is faulty assumptions so if I here&#39;s the question I love to ask if I could give you an opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions you&#39;ve ever made in your whole life so you could have a do-over and you could have three of them always a good if I hate it should be good right if I gave you the opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions I promise you you would have more money and what cost us money is that that what I call the dumb tax these are stupid mistakes that cost us money and most of those stupid mistakes are a result of being irrationally exuberant way too optimistic not checking for second-order consequences and so that when I say the business is an intellectual sport what I&#39;m really saying is that money and business contrary to popular opinion does not respond well to emotions and when I look at my mistakes if you look at your mistakes what you&#39;ll find is a series of emotional glandular gut kind of decisions and it&#39;s those decisions that wind up D railing our progress to me that the goal is not to get rich the goal is to get rich and stay that way I don&#39;t want to be I don&#39;t want to be successful for a month out any more than I want to be healthy for a month or being a great relationship for a month what I&#39;m looking for is long-term results and the only way to get those long-term results is to have skills and tools I think the mistake that gets made and the power of thinking time the power of using your brain is that it allows you as a business owner as a human being and in every part of your life to examine the risk so the reality to me is that successful entrepreneurs successful business owners people that are successful in their lives have done a great job of thinking through what are the second-order consequences what are the risk what are the gotchas what were the places this could wind up being a bad idea and so a tremendous amount of the work that that I think is required in order to create business success is an intellectual work unfortunately most of us have built who are in business have built a business that requires us to to pick up the business end of the shovel and and I&#39;m okay with that I&#39;m okay with there are times when I&#39;m needed to go do something in the business what I want that thing that I&#39;m doing is - yeah I want to avoid that thing being a reaction instead I want the thing that I&#39;m doing to be a plant so the the difference to me between somebody who&#39;s successful and unsuccessful in business is a whole lot to do with how they do it quantifying and minimizing mitigating risk and number two are you executing a plan or are you reacting to the problem dujour which is the whack-a-mole [Music] you know that&#39;s the part that gets everybody tired if you wake up in the morning you whack moles all day long you put out fires and there&#39;s so many fires that most people don&#39;t even have a have an opportunity to figure out who&#39;s lighting them and so as a result we wind up at the end of the day tired and worn out and discouraged and frustrated and it&#39;s all because we haven&#39;t done the work that&#39;s required in order to put in the place the structure and the leverage and and all of that is a result of using your brain and not your emotions yeah you ask the question how did I learn this well I had to learn it the hard way I mean that&#39;s the that&#39;s the bad part is that you know I was I I thought the goal years ago was okay well let&#39;s get rich let&#39;s become successful and and so I did and I promptly lost a ton of money and in fact within 24 36 months I went from having a lot of money to having no money I mean nut I was broke and and that transition from a lot of money to no money is a result of of not using the skills and tools and not using my my brain in order to help me make decisions I was totally emotional I was I was caught up and you know hubris and I was arrogant and I ignored risk and and so I had to learn it the hard way look the goal is not to get there the goal is to get there and stay there and that&#39;s true in every part of our lives yeah yeah that&#39;s great I think it&#39;s your phrase that most problems started off as a great idea yeah it&#39;s one of the things that I talk about in my book yeah the reality is I&#39;ve yet to get up in the morning and say today&#39;s the day I&#39;m going to use my third-best thinking hmm every problem that I have and I&#39;m going to suggest to you and the people that are listening to this that every problem you have is a result of a good idea and so what I want to do in order to create and sustain the success that I want what I want to do is make sure that if I execute on a good idea that I&#39;ve thought about the second-order consequences and the unexamined assumptions and the risk and the things that could go wrong I have a tendency and I think most people have this tendency to substitute a story for the facts and as a result we wind up executing on a story or an idea instead of executing on the facts or a plan and I think that we we sabotage because we substitute ideas for a plan and and as you said it is true my problems that I have right now are a result of some good idea that I had three months ago three years ago thirty years ago some good idea that I had that I executed on and I should have taken a pass but I didn&#39;t do it because I didn&#39;t think about it yeah when it comes to thinking time what what are your personal rituals when it comes to thinking time like because I mean we can journal or we can put stuff in our phone or whatever but how did what&#39;s your ritual when it comes to thinking time well in my book the road less stupid I actually spent the chapter talking about the mechanics and that&#39;s really what you&#39;re asking about I went when I get ready to do thinking time the the key is to come up with a really good question that I want to think about the first couple times I tried thinking time i sat down in the chair with my pencil and my my tablet my journal and I was all ready to think and I took a nap I didn&#39;t have anything to think about and and so I learned very quickly that the key to a great thinking time session is designing a great thinking time question so I&#39;m going to give you an example of a couple of questions so that your audience knows what I&#39;m talking about a great thinking time question might be how would I run my business if 100% of my future growth was by referral only how how big would my business be if I still had every customer who ever tried me uh what what assumptions am i making about the problem that I have and and so when I sit down within thinking time and in the road less stupid there&#39;s over 700 different thinking time questions that I&#39;ve developed over the course the last thirty years of of religiously doing thinking time thinking time to me is a 45 minute session where I turn off the alarms I turn off my phone my computer I have a little kitchen timer that I sip is set beside me I I closed the door to my office I have a thinking time chair I have a thinking time tablet I have a thinking time pen and so it&#39;s highly ritualized and I have one or two or three questions that I&#39;m going to sit quietly and the only thing I&#39;m going to do during that 45 minutes is focus on that question and the job of thinking time is to create more choices some of those choices are going to be dumb some of them are just going to be truly bad ideas but it doesn&#39;t matter but because the goal is not to create the right choice they are the best choice the goal is to create more choices and then at the end of 45 minutes culled through and get rid of the ones that are weaker horrible and and wind up with one or two really good ideas and then those good ideas may require a future thinking time about risk or assumptions or my ability to execute or resources or priorities that I need to establish in order to successfully implement this new idea so thinking time is very much designed to help me with one thing and one thing only and this is this is probably one of the biggest benefits to doing thinking time and that is clarity it gives me clarity it gives me the ability to say this is the direction this is my best choice these are the resources that I need are the priorities that I need to set or the the team that I need to add or build or the skills that we need to augment our ability to consistently execute it&#39;s it&#39;s how do I make sure that I&#39;m not executing on an idea particularly a bad idea how do I make sure that I&#39;m executing on something that is gives me an opportunity to be sustainably successful yeah this is great and again everybody&#39;s listening or watching in the book the road less stupid it has 700 thinking time questions and what I said at the intro that this book could be more valuable compared to a lot of trainings or online courses because this is actually a tool that you can use for years and years and years and it&#39;s super powerful so it&#39;s great something else is that what we oftentimes hear is we need to work on the business instead of in the business and what you talked about in your book is that it might be a better idea to make the transition from being a business operator to being becoming a business owner what do you mean by that so I think that the words that we use are incredibly powerful in fact the words we use may be the most powerful force in our lives and the reason is because is because the label becomes the experience uh if I have something happen to me and I go holy moly this is a catastrophe as soon as I label it a catastrophe my my experience of it is going to be it&#39;s a it&#39;s catastrophic if the same thing happens to me and I say well this is going to be interesting then my experience of it is going to be interesting if the same thing happens to me and I say well this is going to be exciting then my experience of it is going to be exciting I think there&#39;s a lot of relatively weak advice that that&#39;s out there in the business world there&#39;s a lot of people who have written books and and they&#39;ve put labels on stuff an example would be the concept of passive income which is an intergalactic Lea stupid concept because it implies that you can get money by doing nothing or it implies that you can create and sustain success by doing nothing or doing the least and I don&#39;t know anybody who&#39;s got a gold medal at anything whether it&#39;s in business or pole vault or or ping-pong I don&#39;t know anybody at a gold-medal they got there by doing the least I see people doing the most not the least and so there&#39;s a concept out there that has gotten a lot of traction and the concept is of this idea that you should be working on your business and not in your business so let&#39;s let&#39;s take a second look at that when&#39;s the last time somebody came up to you and asked you the question what business are you on it didn&#39;t happen and the reason it didn&#39;t happen is because it&#39;s a stupid idea when somebody comes up to me and says what do you do I don&#39;t say well I&#39;m on the teaching business I say here&#39;s what is what I&#39;m in this is what I do I&#39;m engaged in in doing this and so the distinction to me is not whether we should be on versus in the distinction is what do we wind up doing all day long or with with our time the majority of our time and so instead of on versus in I have a different label and this label may or may not serve but the label that I have is I say look there&#39;s four hats that a business owner can wear somebody that that is an entrepreneur that owns a business you can be an artist you can be the operator you can be the owner or you can be the board or investor hat all of those are hats and it&#39;s wardrobe you can take one off and you can put another one on and there&#39;s times like when I wrote the road less stupid I needed to be the artist right now with you I&#39;m the operator I&#39;m not creating anything news that was done when I wrote the book there&#39;s times where I need to be the owner and so that&#39;s going to be about my plan and the structure and the people that we have on our team and and hiring and retaining a players and and leverage all of that is about being an owner and then there&#39;s times I need to put on a different hat and that hat is the investor of the board had and that&#39;s a hat that says I wonder why could go wrong uh wonder where the risk are how do I play defense and not just offense so so there&#39;s nothing wrong with being the operator as long as every once a while I take that hat off and put on some of the other hats the problem becomes where where we we we only have one hat in our wardrobe that&#39;s where the problem happens and so you find people who are who have the artist hat they are really really good at creating they love their product whatever their product is they are passionate about their product and which means that they&#39;re probably going to take really good pictures or have a really good art whatever that is are going to write a really good book but the book will never be a bestseller because they spend all their time writing a really good book and don&#39;t understand what the business into the stick is it would enable them to turn it into a best-seller books don&#39;t become bestsellers because they&#39;re good books I&#39;m really clear on that people don&#39;t make a lot of money simply because they&#39;ve got a really good product you and I can both think of some businesses that have truly truly horrible products but they&#39;ve made a ton of money McDonald&#39;s comes to mind yeah McDonald&#39;s has more more food than any other restaurant in the history of mankind and they have a truly lousy product that their fresh fries are fantastic but their cheeseburgers are horrible there&#39;s nobody thinks their cheeseburgers are good but they said billions and billions of them and so the message is this if you&#39;re listening right now you&#39;re going to want to write this down success rarely has anything to do with what you do and almost always has everything to do with how you do it success is not a result of what you do it&#39;s how you do it and so you know when I look at operator versus owner or in versus on I think the mistake that gets made is that people think if they&#39;re on their business yeah they don&#39;t have to really engage they can kind of show up or not show up in the business will run itself and and they can leave for months at a time and when they get back to business is better than when they left all that utter nonsense it&#39;s it&#39;s crazy when you and I look at the 10 wealthiest people in the world the ten richest people in the world with the exception of Bill Gates who&#39;s too sad and he wants to figure out how to give away a hundred billion dollars that&#39;s he&#39;s made a transition the other nine are still in their businesses yeah they get a job they wake up every day they go to work they take meetings they get a business card they they they hire and fire and coach people they they they sit in meetings they they make decisions they&#39;re in their business now their job has changed this is critical their job is changed so Michael Dell is no longer assembling computers Jeff Bezos is no longer you know running it to the end of the end of the warehouse to find a book to ship out they their job has changed but they&#39;re still in their business and I think we would be better served as as entrepreneurs as business owners if we forgot about the distinction of on versus in and instead ask the question how do I add more value to my business and to my customers and and where are the points of leverage that I need to take advantage of by adding people to my team or or redesigning that who does what on my team which would free me up to run the business end of the business the reality is running the business into the business can be a full-time job and not everybody has the the luxury of mass of size to be able to do that but it doesn&#39;t mean you can&#39;t have another hat in your wardrobe this says owner on it and another hat that says investor another hat that says artists and another hat that says operator and so I just need to be thoughtful about is the real problem that I got this on versus in distinction that&#39;s out there or is the real problem that I need to acquire some business skills and tools which is the purpose as you know of the four-day MBA the 4-day MBA is designed to help give you the business skills and tools that will allow you to begin making the transition from operator to owner no I don&#39;t think that&#39;s on versus end I think that make a transition from react to plan from from emotions to intellect from a optimism to identifying risk and second-order consequences so to me this distinction of on versus in is not that useful I don&#39;t think that&#39;s how Bill Gates got rich I don&#39;t think Bill Gates read a book that said uh I need to be on that business I don&#39;t think Michael Dell did I don&#39;t think Jeff Bezos did I don&#39;t think the Google boys did I don&#39;t think Steve Jobs did I don&#39;t think they read that book and said oh I need to be on my business instead they said I need to learn business skills and tools that will allow me to successfully run the business end of my business yeah yeah this is great okay next question I&#39;m gonna switch gears a little bit so in your book you say a wise man once told you hell on earth would be would be to meet the man you could have been why does it say s o has such a profound impact and what does it mean to you this thing I heard almost 30 years ago when I was after I had lost a ton of money and I was I was depressed and and unhappy and you know probably suicidal I mean really I was a mess and and this this saying hell on earth would be to meet the man or the woman you could have been gives me the opportunity to think in terms of of living intentionally it allows me to set expectations and be purposeful about my life it allows me to to make sure that as I go about my daily life and my my daily activities that I&#39;m moving towards an outcome I&#39;m moving towards something I yeah I&#39;m in a very fortunate kind of situation where I I no longer need to work for more money I don&#39;t need to be doing this interview with you I don&#39;t need to be writing books I don&#39;t need to be teaching or or anything like that I&#39;ve got all the money I can spend and when you look at people that have all the money they can spend and yet they still get up and do something so Warren Buffett clearly has Bill Gates they clearly got all the money they can spend Jeff Bezos for crying out loud the guy&#39;s got a hundred and fifty billion dollars get all the money can spend and yet he continues to get up and and continues to to go to work and to me the reason that to do that is because we we understand that there&#39;s more to life than just this idea of amassing a lot of money at now as soon as I say that I&#39;m not going to minimize getting rich I think getting riches is a great idea if that&#39;s something you want but it certainly gives you a lot more choices that then what you have when you don&#39;t have thanked somebody told me one time I think this is very true if if you have enough money to solve a problem you don&#39;t have a problem I love that yes and and and I think Dan Sullivan who&#39;s a very wise man is the originator of that and it&#39;s true you know if money gives me the ability that maybe solve problems that that otherwise I wouldn&#39;t be able to solve this idea of hell on earth would be to meet the man or the woman you could have been it allows me to get up in the morning and and an attempt to get better as opposed to sit back and say okay I&#39;ve made it I&#39;ve achieved it I&#39;ve got what I want and I can retire or or do nothing and and certainly that&#39;s a choice that I have but I choose not to exercise that choice because there&#39;s this idea of mastery and the man I could have been and and this idea of avoiding looking back with regret no III really don&#39;t want to get to the end of my life and look back and go ah ah Keith you missed it I don&#39;t want to do that and so it&#39;s kind of its kind of the Stephen Covey idea of begin with the end in mind you know what is it I&#39;m trying to achieve and and what is it that I need to do today to help me move the needle yeah very powerful very powerful quote super powerful what&#39;s most important for you right now like in your life right now so that is it that&#39;s a really really good question I have made a distinction uh between success and fulfillment and success to me is getting what I want and fulfillment is giving what I got fulfillment for me happens from contribution and so what&#39;s important to me at this point is maintaining the success I don&#39;t necessarily add I don&#39;t necessarily need more but for sure I don&#39;t want to go backwards so maintaining the success that I have and and then adding to that this idea of fulfillment where&#39;s the opportunity for me to have an impact or to make a difference in one person&#39;s life it doesn&#39;t have to be meds as soon as I say I want to impact millions of people now it&#39;s about me and not them that&#39;s a narcissistic point of view that Bill Gates was giving an interview several years ago and the reporter who is interviewing Bill Gates asking the question what do you want your legacy to be and Bill Gates who is known to be very abrupt very direct and sometimes profane looked at this interviewer and and said that it is the singularly stupidest question I&#39;ve ever been asked and of course the interview was kind of taken back and Bill Gates said I&#39;m not concerned about my legacy because the instant I become concerned about my legacy then what I&#39;m trying to do is about me it&#39;s narcissistic I&#39;m doing what I&#39;m doing in order to see if I can make a difference and if I do make a difference it&#39;ll be for other people to decide what my legacy not me I&#39;m not in charge of my legacy I&#39;m in charge of doing what I know to do to try to make an impact and other people will ultimately vote on whether or not that was or was not worth remembering I think that&#39;s very insightful I think what I&#39;m about at this point is not yeah I&#39;m not about trying to do something that where I&#39;ll be remembered or create a legacy I&#39;m more about is there a way for me to use the last 40 five years of business experience business acumen the the wisdom you know experience is is what wisdom is what you get when what you did failed mmm that&#39;s where wisdom comes from and I&#39;ve got a few broken legs and bum knees and concussions that have happened over the course of the last 45 years and and I have the ability to distill those down into bite-sized chunks that entrepreneurs and business owners can use to help them create success so I&#39;m very much about being purposeful and intentional with my life and and and simultaneously being thoughtful about the choices that I&#39;m making yeah how much time do you spend teaching probably thirty five to forty percent of my time for forty forty percent of my time is spent teaching and then we own some businesses and so I&#39;m a business owner I think that&#39;s one of the things that differentiates me from other people who teaches I&#39;m a practitioner of the Arts you know I eat my own cooking and so what I teach is what works not what I would add it&#39;s not a theory this is the stuff that I&#39;ve used and we own a handful of businesses that are all relatively relatively small they&#39;re you know they&#39;re ten five ten you know twelve million dollars revenue we own half a dozen of them and and what we at what I do my role is to run the business into the business not operating that&#39;s why I can spend so much time teaching and then I spend a couple hours a week running our businesses because I have really good operators and then the balance of my time you know I&#39;m I play golf and and Sandy and I my wife and I do quite a bit of travel and so I&#39;m in a transition state you know my foots not on the gas but on the other hand I&#39;m not tapping the brakes I&#39;ve got some good equilibrium and I want to make sure I maintain it that&#39;s good you&#39;re going through incident next week ride that&#39;s right I&#39;m coming Amsterdam next week in fact I leave tomorrow for Amsterdam and will teach a business mastery with Tony Robbins which we&#39;ve been working closely with him we&#39;re very fortunate we&#39;ve been working closely with him for I think there&#39;s our 18th year it&#39;s been a long time yeah that&#39;s great I&#39;ve watched you speak at business mastery I think four years ago and there were literally accountants in the room who told me that they learned more in your four hours than they did at their four years of studying accountancy and and for me it was fascinating when I saw you teach it was just fascinating to see somebody teach so well on the topic that is for a lot of people so boring which is numbers and accountancy and how did you learn to become such a great teacher well I mean it&#39;s the same way everybody learns how to do anything well which is I think it requires a a guide a mentor um you know some people call them a coach but I think it requires a commitment to learning um I think I think without a commitment to growth in learning it is very likely you will become stagnant so number one it was a commitment add to learning and number two it was a commitment to practicing and so I spent 20-something years to sing yeah but if you want to if you want to do what I do there&#39;s three things you have to master number one you got a you got to have some clarity around and mastery around the subject number two you have to learn how to teach that subject which means that you learn need to learn how to break it down into bite-sized chunks that are understandable for the audience so if I tried to teach people accounting and financial statements are cut and so as soon as I say accounting people got there so I&#39;m a I&#39;m a reframe it and call it a business cockpit yeah yeah as soon as I start trying to teach business cockpit now the sudden everybody who&#39;s listening to this goes oh yeah I need a cockpit but if I tell them they need accounting they go on and I don&#39;t want to count so you know I got I got a master that I got to have mastery of the subject I got to learn how to teach which is I got to learn how to take what I know and present it in a way that people can do something with it and so you know instead of talking about debits and credits we&#39;re going to talk about optics I don&#39;t talk about debits and credits that&#39;s what a countess talked about I don&#39;t care about our debits and credits but as a business owner I want optics so the second thing is I got up I learn how to teach and then to be able to do what I do at Tony I gotta learn how to speak hmm there&#39;s the difference between being a really effective teacher and being a really effective speaker yeah and so those are the three things that that I&#39;ve had to practice over the years and fortunately I&#39;ve had a number of opportunities to the hone what I do and I&#39;m still a student yeah yeah I&#39;m still a student of business I&#39;m still a student of teaching and I&#39;m still a student of speaking and every time I see a great speaker there&#39;s a lot of lousy speakers but every time I see a great one I go all right what are they doing how are they doing that a very good friend of ours is a very famous singer his name is Lionel Richie and Lionel&#39;s a good friend of ours and I&#39;ve been backstage a number of times with him and I&#39;ve seen how Lionel controls the audience you know what he does his timing and and I&#39;ve watched how he&#39;s done that and I studied it and he and I have talked about it you know Lionel Lionel be in front of an audience and all of a sudden he&#39;ll start bouncing on his toes in the audience literally within two seconds you see him would start bouncing and rhythm he asked me a bit so how does he do that how does he engage the room so I&#39;m a student of that kind of stuff and so when you ask a question had I learned to do it I&#39;m a student in our practice I&#39;m very very deliberate about my practice and how I&#39;m gonna do what I&#39;m about to do yeah that&#39;s great I heard speaking of studying I hear you talk a lot about this book the most important thing oh great book what what&#39;s your number one thing that you learned from this book the book the most important thing is written by a guy named Howard Marks and Howard Marks runs a giant pool of money he&#39;s an investor he&#39;s a contemporary of Warren Buffett and has made billions by doing it I mean he&#39;s one of these people who eats his own cooking uh Warren Buffett has said Howard Marks is the only guy who went Howard writes something and Warren receives it Warren will stop what he&#39;s doing to read what Howard Marks is thinking about which that&#39;s incredible probably there&#39;s two really important concepts so there&#39;s a lot of important concepts and the book the most important thing one is the less risk you perceive the more risk there is this this idea is unbelievably important particularly for business owners because as business owners we tend to not be thoughtful about the risks that we&#39;re taking we tend to be way too optimistic we tend to shoot most the time we don&#39;t even try to identify the stuff that could go wrong and so the idea that the less risk you perceive the more risks there is here&#39;s how that translates into daily life if if you thought there was zero probability of you being in an automobile accident when you got in your car to drive to the grocery store if you say so you&#39;re about to get in your car make the five minute trip to the grocery store and you think there&#39;s zero likelihood that you&#39;ll have an accident then on the way to the grocery store you will text and drive you won&#39;t use your seatbelt and as a result of texting and driving and not using your seatbelt your your odds of dying in an automobile accident actually go up yeah and so so this idea that the less risk you perceive the more risks there is is incredibly important the other thing that he sent me he says lots of really good things but the other thing that really resonated with me is he said that we would all be better off if we worried about survival in the event that things didn&#39;t turn out then trying to predict maximum returns in the event they do so his orientation is actually the orientation of all sustainably successful people there are no exceptions there are no exceptions - if you want sustainable success then you have to build a world-class defense and most of us as business owners as business as entrepreneurs tend to think only in terms of offense how do we grow how do we get bigger how do we have more more MORE we&#39;re little greedy but about our businesses we just want to keep getting bigger and bigger and we never worry about what could go wrong hmm we don&#39;t we don&#39;t worry about playing defense and so having a world-class defense is actually critical to being sustainably successful so if you don&#39;t have the most important thing in your library you should get it and read it it&#39;s good one yeah it&#39;s great it&#39;s also one of the thinking time question I don&#39;t know if it&#39;s in the book but the question what don&#39;t I see is so powerful and it&#39;s it&#39;s you know I think it&#39;s also mentioned in the book the most important thing or at least in a way so it&#39;s great so last question this it&#39;s been great so far so thank you so the book it counts 700 thinking time questions again which you can work on for years and and you&#39;ll still don&#39;t have enough time to actually go through all the questions unless I got like 200 years to live but uh no it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s amazing it&#39;s really good but what thinking time question did you ask yourself in the past that made the biggest profound impact on your business or in your life so I made two comments number one the the goal is not to answer all 704 questions that&#39;s not that&#39;s not what we&#39;re trying to achieve you know I&#39;ve got I&#39;ve got some questions that I&#39;ve asked myself 200 times 200 different thinking time questions there&#39;s 200 thinking time sessions where I sat down with the exact same question and the reason that&#39;s so powerful is because the what&#39;s what&#39;s it the environment is always changing and so a good answer today could be a lousy answer a year from now or a bad answer five years ago could be a great answer today because the circumstances are different and I can give you a lot of examples of that but the most powerful question I ask is the one that you just mentioned a minute ago which is this question of what don&#39;t I see only the way I frame that question is by asking what story am i telling that isn&#39;t true the way I ask that question is by asking what assumptions am i making and can I get clarity on those assumptions maybe the assumptions are accurate maybe they&#39;re inaccurate that the way I ask what don&#39;t I see because what none of us can see is the assumptions we&#39;re making or the story we&#39;re telling and so I had that mean when I asked that question that&#39;s really what I&#39;m asking what it what are the assumptions what is the story I&#39;m telling where am I being irrationally exuberant what do I know it might be so yeah that&#39;s exactly it you know and and what are the facts and what&#39;s the upside and what&#39;s the downside and can I live with the downside that&#39;s that question is by far the most powerful question because what sabotages my results what sabotages your results what sabotages everybody&#39;s results are faulty assumptions unexamined assumptions excessive optimism all offense no defense an inability or an unwillingness to identify the risk and what could go wrong what don&#39;t I see is all about risk it&#39;s what what what caught what causes me to lose money what causes my mistakes is risk that occurred that I didn&#39;t build a defense for or I did never guess that could happen and so if I&#39;m willing to be thoughtful which is the road less stupid it&#39;s this idea of thinking time if I&#39;m willing to be thoughtful about my business about my decisions about the direction I&#39;m going I&#39;ll make fewer impulsive decisions and more thoughtful planned decisions that actually will help me improve the success and the performance of my business and my will yeah this is so good so thank you so much for taking the time I would really recommend people to at least just buy the book the road less stupid I&#39;ve been working on this thing for many times it&#39;s so great our friend Joe polish he has I think he has hundreds of the books at his office to give away to all of his clients and students because it&#39;s just it&#39;s just so good I would also advise anybody I mean I traveled from them to go to Texas to learn from you I went to the four-day MBA which is a great course how often do you do that course I do it two times a year and the next one is actually coming up September 19th through the 22nd yeah so that if anybody has an interest in that we&#39;d love to have you and it&#39;s all about the transition from operator to owner yeah and it&#39;s I mean I tell every entrepreneur when when we talk about you it&#39;s like you have to go to the course because it&#39;s just it&#39;s it&#39;s so powerful to learn from you in person of course you know the book is great or going to a seminars grade or watching it online or whatever but really learning from you in person and it&#39;s not like an event with 12,000 people or whatever it&#39;s just pretty small right hundred fifty people yeah it&#39;s so yeah and then you have how to buy an exit a business how to buy or extra business which is all about either either creating maximum value in your business that you currently have so the thing I like to tell people about how to buy or exit what we want to do is run our businesses like we could like we could own it forever but we could sell it tomorrow yeah if we can if we can learn how to do that we&#39;re going to create maximum value and then some people want to acquire a business and so if this is the skills and tools and nuts and bolts about buying or exiting a business and then I have one more course and I teach how to buy or exit one time a year and it&#39;s coming up in October and then I have one other course I teach one time a year which is planning or gets slaughtered and it&#39;s always at the end of the year that&#39;ll be in November this year but it thank you for bringing that up people can go to our website or shoot us an email and we&#39;re more than happy to provide you with details and dates and cost on all these courses and the email is info at keys to z vault com keys to the vault comm and that&#39;s the web keys to the wall calm and you go there and you know what I&#39;ll tell people is that you know that all of our all of our courses are priced at the upper range we&#39;re not attempting to be the cheapest but I tell people hey is always more expensive before it&#39;s been through the horse and so you&#39;re gonna get that you&#39;re gonna get the hay before it&#39;s meant there&#39;s a horse I think your courses are super cheap and cheap as the value you get at the four-day training I mean all the nuts and bolts and ideas but also the vibes and like the great insights and wisdom it&#39;s it&#39;s priceless so it&#39;s I would recommend any entrepreneur who actually serious about growing and sustaining a good and healthy business to just go and yeah again it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s a couple of times a year small group I know the event space well and this is like one of the best events you can actually go through so anything else you want to add I&#39;m very appreciative of you and the work you did to get ready for this interview and mostly I&#39;m appreciative of the opportunity that you&#39;re creating for your listeners who if they&#39;re listening to this are committed to getting better I one of my core beliefs is that if you want to do better or you got to get better and so if you&#39;re listening to this interview if you&#39;re reading these books if you&#39;re attending courses whether they&#39;re mine or Tony Robbins or anybody else&#39;s that commitment to get better is the key to doing better and it&#39;s become it&#39;s that level of commitment that I think that&#39;s required for mastery so thank you for the opportunity to participate with you and and your audience I&#39;m very appreciative thank you thanks so much and enjoy Amsterdam of course thank you very much I look forward to it good thank you

Transcript for:Lecture with Keith Cunningham on Business Mastery

Transcript for:
Lecture with Keith Cunningham on Business Mastery