[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan we were in a conversation earlier this week actually and you had mentioned a book that you had read years and years and years ago that provided a really interesting and useful framework for people being able to understand really their experience and it puts such an amazing context frankly on the world for me that I was I'm very excited to be able to talk about it today this podcast so Dan talk to me about what you took out of the book The Lonely Crowd by David reesman yeah the lonely crowd became a very famous book it's still talked about 70 years later it came out in 1950 the author's name was David rean he's deceased but he was a very prominent sociologist and that was kind of like a big new things people who were sociologist you know it wasn't a big thing that people talked about somebody who talked about society as if it's a thing and what I remember from it he said he was just observing around him in American society so this is probably East Coast American society in the 1950s he said that it seemed to me that there were three categories of people as individuals so take taking each person as an individual that they were falling into one of three categories and what he said was that there's one of them that's getting smaller and the other two are getting bigger but at a certain point one of them will really almost like disappear and the other one the third one will get bigger and bigger and bigger and what he called them was he said there are individuals who are tradition centered and there's people who are in inner centered and there are people who are outer centered or I think it may have been other centered they were other centered and then he went on to explain each one of them and he said well tradition centered people are people who grow up and basically spend their whole life in a specific type of community that's based on Traditions passed on for generations and generations and he said it just be a particular geographic location but they grow up so it's a local tradition and there's Traditions there's things you do things you don't do you know there's expectations and you're expected to know the Norms without any of this being written down you you just know what's responsible and he said that could be based on religion or it could be based on ethnicity for example it might have been an immigrant Community you know the that people were from a country but they sort of settled in a particular location in the United States and they were carrying on Traditions that were hundreds of years old that had been brought from Europe you know Italian Irish all the different nationality groups ethnic groups and then you know there might be religious sects America is just amazingly prolific in terms of different kinds of religion and you know it's an entrepr oral activity in the United States you know so they're particular very very staunch traditional religious groups I grew up Catholic and I don't think I was I might have been leaving town before you actually associated with or on out with people who weren't Catholic you know and I remember going through high school and the Catholic boys were told no don't you go hanging out with Protestant girls you know Protestant girls who belong to the Protestant Church you know well anybody who wasn't Catholic was Protestant or somebody like that you know and especially the ones with sleeveless blouses you know you don't don't want to be there that's the road to hell is Protestant girls so anyway I grew up with that I was marinated in this tradition and then we had our own family traditions and everything so that's the tradition and there still Prime examples movies are made like Amish communities or you know something like that but that's a typical of a very very strict sort of and it's a lifetime choice you know you either leave or you follow the rules for the rest of your life and you don't go very far a field you don't travel much out of the community and around the world this is the rule this is the rule like Africa this would be tradition you know South America southeast Asia the vast majority of the world is still very very tradition oriented but not the advanced technological economic countries and the United States is probably the least you know it's it's wide open very individualistic then he says there are people who actually do leave the tradition and they move some place else but they've internalized certain fundamental rules and norms from their community and they take them with them and even though they're not involving themselves in any of the traditions in the new place where they are they've internalized it and they regulate their life with it so that that's the difference between the first two okay interesting so inner centered people have their own sort of what comes to mind as like moral compass or their own but their own beliefs sets of Bel values you know their values what's considered meaning ful and what's not considered meaningful and right and their choice of people that they you know that they associate with but they're not in any way bound from the outside by the traditional society that they lived in and then there's the third type which is other or outer centered yeah and he said he thought this was a function of first of all radio and then Automobiles and televisions so 1950 when the book came out television was just going National in the United States the three big networks were going National and but television had been around in the like New York area Boston area i' had been around since the late 30s you know that there had been television sets and the telephone made a big difference and what he said was that more and more people's norms and their values was was regulated by other people's opinion of them as individuals as individuals so they weren't responding to a tradition there was this moving sort of value system where you really had to pay attention about what other people thought about anything and who you are was really determined by what was acceptable to the people that you were hanging out with okay and he said he thought that America was going to become more and more dominated by they're all outer centered so other people's opinions other people's judgments gossip you know and everything is affected so as these three different categories apply to me I'm not a traditional person but I'm not an other directed person either so I've got a set of inner principles and I'm I'm largely immune to the values of those other two groups yeah even within my own family I think that I'm an outlier to that degree but the thing is that at a certain point they were inner principles that I had acquired from my parents or from being Catholic and everything but I think as we've developed strategic coach all the inner principles are basically self-created principles yeah so your family would be much more on the tradition side of things yeah and you you know instituted the ones that made sense for you and you created a lot of your own ever since then so you're very indirected it's interesting because David rean was so advanced in his thinking social media did not exist when he was coming up with this model and he probably had no idea just how like you just describe with the other centered you know social media world and influencers yeah and it was nothing in 1950 compared with what it is now and it seems you know it's not going to get less and actually it's very very interesting that you know we have world events right now where we can see political events military events economic events where we can see that people who have a Mastery of establishing dominant opinions and everything else you know are very very influential podcasters like Joe Rogan you know he's got 11 million people who listen to him and he's got an enormous influence yeah that's so interesting so Dan why is it so important to have this model and to place yourself in it I certainly have my own sense of which one actually leads people to be the healthiest happiest most productive in the world what's your take on why this model is so practical 70 years later after well I think the first determinant is what are you paying attention to you know where does your attention go to on a daily basis are you spending time on the tradition you know are you spending time and I'm spending no time whatsoever on you know what I grew up with you know it doesn't play any part of my life I'm not negative towards it but you know I've got my own thoughts I got my own criteria I've got my own standards for judging things and they're sufficient they're sufficient for feeling that I'm making personal progress feeling that I'm I'm meeting great people and having great relationships with great people we're creating things together so the interet that I have seems to do me good you know and as far as what public opinion thinks about this or that one thing I just realized about four years ago that television was a waste of time that television was now just dominated by this other centered notion you know with polls and I said why am I even spending five minutes watching this so I'll be approaching four years in July just a few months from now I just haven't watched a minute of television and what I noticed is that the world got a lot better as I didn't watch television you know and I've never done social media I've never been on Facebook I've never been on Twitter as I value my time that would not be a good use some my time well and what I have heard you say is that you spending time reading because you spend a lot of time online but it's reading yeah yeah I read articles the internet has some wonderful sources of great articles so that you can form your own insight and your own opinion not somebody else's which I find really interesting so I just want to throw something out at you like I notice that when people are super other directed and keep in mind I have have an almost 19 and a 22y old so that probably colors my thinking when people are completely other centered their inner sense is lost they don't have that core thing to come back to and frankly I see it obviously with teenagers but I think that's true about actually anyone who for whatever reason maybe they were not of their own valtion yanked out of the traditional and put into current world and they find it difficult to bring that with them but what's your coaching to people who sort of get swayed by the other and don't seem to be grounded in their own sense of values and what's important my experience is so heavily influenced by being focused on coaching individuals who are basically outliers by definition so all the people that we coach are people who have bet their future on something that comes from the inside so I think entrepreneurs as a class are fundamentally more inner centered than any other category of people in the world you know they have enough of a confidence of a inner vision of what they could be that they ignore other people's opinion about whether they're doing the right thing or not okay so I would say that as a category and I think that I role model this extraordinarily well you know and there'll be news events that will fill up the news media and everything else and people say what do you think about that and sometimes I don't even know what it was because it wasn't interesting enough to look at but I said what's any of that have to do with you and what way is this event happening someplace on the planet does it have anything to do with how you create value for your customers and how you're improving your teamwork and they said no but everybody's talking about it and I said maybe you need some different people to talk to be talking to so the big thing is I think that entrepreneurs are as individuals are more comfortable being alone by themselves that their reality isn't determined by being filled up with quantity of relationships most of them have deep friends but they don't have 50 of them right I noticed their relationships entrepreneurs tend to be much more longlasting but I think the reason is that they're finding other people who inner life resonates with their inner life it's so great that we're talking about this because even this morning I was in a meeting with Babs co-founder of Coach with you and she was talking about some of our clients in particular particular segment who are so independent-minded and that's exactly what you're talking about they just have been courage they've gone Against the Grain they haven't done things the way other people could would should have thought they would do it and they're outrageously successful as a result so that independence of thought I think that's a very neat validation of who entrepreneurs are yeah yeah it's so funny because it gives you a sense of perspective and distance from what's gripping other people emotionally you know life is long and there's lots of time to do really useful stuff but you don't have unlimited time and you don't have unlimited attention so so I don't know but I just found this David reesman book and the fact that he kind of nailed this in 1950 I was six years old I started first grade in 1950 so I didn't catch up with this book for about 25 years after that but I've read it a couple times and he keeps coming up especially as the social media phenomenon he came up more and more as being and a almost like a a prophet before his time about this and you know it's one of those things that it's useful as a model yeah okay it's not the truth but it's very useful well and I think it provides Direction know it's like okay if you're feeling you know disassociated with what's going on you know this model might help you or if you are you know very inner centered this might help explain all the other stuff that you're watching going on around you ma'am so Dan if someone's going to take action on this particular way of thinking or maybe my personal thing would be to become more inner centered or more clear on that what actions I mean you talked about stopping watching television what are some other things that people can do to really solidify their own independence of thought and action well you know just write down five things that are really worth it and you know I think life has changed because of the the covid and the lockdowns that went along with Co what I noticed that people reacted in two distinctly different ways related to co the dangers of covid you know the scary part of a disease that they didn't know whether they had a handle on and then the lockdown the isolation and the lack of meability they either got a lot lot stronger or they fell apart right yep a lot of people just fell apart and the reason is because they were deprived of their other centeredness you know I found Zoom perfectly satisfying for all my work purposes you know I always felt that the people on the screen were like right there you know I I experienced them not any differently than but other people say I just can't stand that you know it's not like being in person so it probably has something to do with David reesman model so Dan you were starting to say like write down five things when somebody says I'm passionate about this I always ask them the question okay you're passionate about this because you believe something now I want to ask you a question if you were the only person in the world who believed this and nobody else supported you in this would you still believe it good question and I said that kind of tells you where your values are and your values are no matter whether get any agreement or any support from other people in the world is this still a solid useful guide for me and then you move out people you know well who are the people that wouldn't change with the flavor of the Season or flavor of the month I mean do you like people who are constantly changing their position or anything else or do you like people that you know you cannot see them for 10 years and you start talking to them and it's like you had just talked to them the day before there's a quality about it I find almost all my longtime people there's no time that's passed even if there has been months and years that moment you start talking with them it's like oh yeah yeah it's like you just went and got a drink from the fridge you know that's the time separation and I think as Things become more disruptive and hectic which is a function of constant technological innovation and news as a commodity that I think as you go along people are going to Tire of that and they're going to realize that they can lead a completely happy life in a hectic world just by having Central values that they design their life for around their values for their own behavior their values for their relationships their values for their cooperation and collaboration in their economic life and what they enjoy activities that they eny enjoy and you say you know I think I'm just going to like things that last forever yes it feels like then you'll be much more stable in a you know a world that blows a lot of different stuff at you yeah yeah and I think another example I think about from that I've learned from you Dan is reflecting on your own experiences where you know things that have been consistent over your lifespan relationships that have been ways of doing things ways of responding creatively dis situations you know there's a lot about us I think that is consistent that we simply may not we may be distracted from based on the overwhelm of information that's coming at us so just reflecting because you're always having us do that in the workshops having people reflect on their own experience really I think helps to solidify those core values and behaviors yeah yeah but it's really interesting and it was obviously something that was striking enough in 1950 for David reesman to write the book and then have the book be so influential you know maybe it's a constant in human Affairs we've got better records recently than we had a long time ago but I sometimes feel that probably it's been true throughout human history going back tens of thousand hundreds of thousand years that older Generations are always fearful and disappointed by younger Generations I think that's true it's always been true the young Greeks you know the Neanderthals say geez you know you know so maybe it's just a function of generational thing yeah that this happens I don't know you know but I love it the more individual you are the less that that matters oh I like that the more individual you are the less that matters an inner principle I think the less that people are who they are regardless of their age or where they came from there you connect or you don't connect I love that last question do people need to run out and buy the book I think you'll find that after you grasp the three things and he's got like chapters on each of them once you grasp it I think it's dated you know I think it's dated he's bringing in a lot of stuff that's happening in the early 1950s okay and he doesn't have any comprehension of Facebook or Twitter Instagram or Tik Tok or any of the others so my sense is that you know if you went to Google or Wikipedia you looked up David reesman the lon crowd they would give really great paragraphs that describe those three categories so depends on how much you need you know well I certainly feel like I have enough to take it and run with it so as always Dan enlightening and useful thank you thank you Shen