[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan one of the things that you have said in recent weeks which I found really interesting so I wrote it down to talk with you more about is you're instructing people are coaching people to leave 30% of your schedule free for magic and I love love love that you use the word magic so what does that mean I'm really curious I have to reflect back again Shannon as I do and all of our podcasts here that my my entire business life for almost 50 years now has been coaching entrepreneurs okay and entrepreneurs are outliers the very decision to become an entrepreneur for your economic life is an outlier decision yeah I mean there's all sorts of talks everybody's becoming an entrepreneur but talk to the tax Department of any country and they'll tell you it's not true because you file a different kind of tax return if you're an entrepreneur than if you're an employee okay and even if you're the owner of a company there's a different kind of tax consideration that you have so it's very very easy to tell who's an entrepreneur and who's not an entrepreneur and uh you know essentially entrepreneurs are individuals who take 100% responsibility for their Financial Security by going out into the marketplace directly and selling something okay product service experience they sell things so first of all that's been my life personally since 1974 so um closing in on a half century of being an entrepreneur but my entire Focus for my entrepreneurial career has been coaching other entrepreneurs okay so I get a double dose of entrepreneurism my own because we've had to create our own money and now we've got a good siiz company that you know has a lot of unique ability a lot of unique ability teamwork in it and the results we get at the half century mark are exponentially greater than when it was just me on my first day but what I've noticed about entrepreneurs is that they have addictions to offset their periods of insecurity there are periods of loneliness I think the number one danger in being an entrepreneur is being lonely okay and what I mean by that is that as you go along being an entrepreneur you don't have the Securities of other people who are depending on what the boss thinks you do depend upon what the boss thinks but the boss is you so so you've got this thing that people who work for a boss can go home at night the boss comes home with you at night and you got these insecurities and people developed various kinds of addictions to kind of deal with the uncertainty and there's a kind of ambiguity to being an entrepreneur because yeah this quarter was great but we don't know if next quarter is going to be great you know people are buying my product or service right now but we don't know how long that going to last there could be big economic changes there could be big political changes and as we've discovered there could be big Health Care disruptions to our life and entrepreneurs for the most part have to deal with their emotions they have to deal with their insecurities on their own and it's not too surprising that some of them drink too much they take various kinds of drugs they involve themselves in various kind of self-destructive personal relationship self-destructive physical exercises but one of the big things is they become Workaholics and I think workaholism is the toughest addiction to come to grips with because it's admired yeah you somebody who puts in 60 70 hour weeks they say you know he it's probably not good for his family it's probably not good for the people who know him but boy he he's really dedicated you know he puts in the time you know everything that he gets he really deserves because he really puts in the time and my sense is that they filled their schedule up with work first of all because it pays but the other thing is that it keeps him away from the feelings of loneliness those feelings where they have to just deal with their emotions and something remarkable happened over the last 12 months so I'm talking from March of 2020 to a year later okay and that is one way of keeping yourself busy has been taken away from you and that way is traveling yeah there's no commute there's no travel by air some places it's train and there's no travel by train to a remarkable degree I mean some people still do it and everything but as a whole the world has just stopped traveling over a complete year I've done rough surveys with the 500 strategic coach entrepreneurs that I see every quarter I see a lot of them much more frequently than each quarter and I would say on average they've gotten 30% of their time back just by not traveling true so I said you've got a once in a-lifetime opportunity to do something here and it won't be given to you again I said this is only happening during this 12 month period but you've been given back 30% of your time that you used to spend traveling so what are you going to do with this opportunity so I said if you just take these 30 hours and fill them up with stuff again with business I said this will be a very very bad year for you because at a certain point in the future travel is going to be now another Demand on your schedule because we don't know how long it's going to take but we will be traveling again and I said you will have missed the opportunity to keep 30% of your schedule completely open and they said well open for what and I said magic magic and they said what do you mean magic and I said well think about some of the great breakthroughs you've had as an entrepreneur was it because of something you were doing or something because you had time to pay attention to things going on outside of you you had time to listen to somebody else's ideas you had time to just contemplate and look back and sort of transform experiences you've had and all of a sudden a brand new idea has come to you that jumps your productivity up jumps your creativity up in a sudden burst of inspiration and I said it didn't happen when you were tightly scheduled it only happened when you had time to think about things you know and a lot of people said you know I was sick for a week but when I was sitting there not being able to work I got this amazing idea yeah so for me magic for entrepreneurs is when you've got a lot of slack in your systems so I make sure I always have a half hour between meetings you can never schedule me back to back you know if it happens I shout you know I say bing bing bing bing don't put me back to back because when I have an experience in one meeting you know and my meetings are short they're usually brainstorming meetings or they're like what we're doing right here Shannon we're creating brand new ideas and they're being recorded and they're be sent out to the world that's great meeting but I don't have anything directly after this I didn't have anything I had an hour before we came on and I'll have an hour after we get off and I keep it that way because I want to notice what's happened to my thinking because of really useful teamwork that's magic that is so interesting and I love Dan that you have such a practical application of this so you make sure you've always got a minimum of 30 minutes in between meetings sometimes longer and then you take that time to reflect maybe formal maybe informally on the experience the ideas the teamwork and out of that comes new ideas and new creativity yeah that's great what are some other ways that people could add some space in or stop overc committing themselves because you've said and go something like an overcommitted entrepreneurs leaves no room for transformation right so what are some other ways that people could stop the workaholism put it that way well I think the way to not overcommit is don't overcommit and that is that I've got a general feeling that I got enough time to do everything important in my life okay the other thing is that as you go along and you actually create the 30% that's sort of free you start getting very very particular about what you actually do when you're scheduled so what I notice is that what is allowed to get on my schedule is actually work time there's two criteria it has to be creative we have to be creating something new and it has to be productive it has to be productive in other words it the more that it's new and it creates value and or getting paid for it that deserves to be on my schedule I love these criteria Dan this is amazing yeah well it deserves to be on my schedule and you know you would say this about yourself Shannon and I would say it about myself that if you compare US 10 years ago what's on our schedule today is much more important than what was on our schedule 10 years years ago and that's such a great Point Dan because I was super busy 10 years ago I can't remember doing what it clearly was important in the moment but it's not important now and the conversations we're having now with the books and the podcasts and all the things that we do way more productive way more impactful way more creative so that's a really really good point and I'm someone who is good at being very busy this is very instructive Dan and the big thing is there's a fundamental principle here of being comfortable being by yourself being comfortable being with yourself my sense is that it's contagious that if you're comfortable being with yourself your standards go up of who deserves to be with you when you're not by yourself it's interesting Dan I think as people start to well really say no is part of what will happen out of this is practice that really my friend Kim the other day said no is a complete sentence which I've heard before but it's a really good point is your standards do go up you get much much more particular if you enjoy your own company you enjoy your own thinking process you get far pickier about people and people who'd waste your time are not do something productive or creative it's not worth it there's another who out there that's better suited to handle those types of activities and our who not how thinking but really having high standards for your own time and your own creativity I think is a critical part of this yeah what I notice is that I get a lot of value out of being by myself and thinking about my own thinking and it kind of establishes a standard of company you know that I'm having company with it and I've got to have a quality experience when I'm with other people that's equal to the Quality experience I have when I'm with myself which is actually the inverse if you're not having a quality experience with yourself you cannot wait to distract yourself with other people right you're not going to have any standards at all so that ability to be really comfortable with yourself with your own thinking with your own processes is critical to this whole point and this is what I see happens with clients that we coach and strategic coach that loneliness goes away that sense of scarcity goes away they don't have to fill their work all the time they have permission in a lot of ways to not work and actually to be much much much more effective in the time that they do work than just filling it in in fact I was even talking to a team member today who we were doing our 21-day positive focus and she goes I've stopped working in the evenings she goes it was really hard like after the kids go to bed I would pick up my laptop and sit on the couch and work she goes it's made me more productive during the day which was such a key point so creating that space actually made her much more efficient when she was working so it's not even just for entrepreneurs it's for Entre team members too I find that really interesting the other thing is that I'm from technology so you know there's people say well don't have your technology in the bedroom with you at night I said I don't have the technology with me almost anytime I mean I really get enormous value out of my computer especially since Zoom became a global experience I love communicating by Zoom I love workshops I love communicating by Zoom when we're the ones designing the experience I don't love communicating by Zoom when other people are designing the experience because a lot of people really don't make it interesting they almost make it a chore to be on it so you're the one to say how you want it you know every individual is the one to say how they want it but you know you got to kind of take ownership for what you're doing here so I've just decided that for the rest of my life based on the big breakthrough advantage that we've been given during covid year that 30% is always going to be free for Magical things to happen I love it so stop over scheduling stop filling your calendar with uncreative or unproductive activities and make sure you always leave 30% of your schedule free for magic great coaching Dan thank you thank you Chan