[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan we were just chatting and you mentioned that you have two personal axioms that really guide you in terms of how you live your life which I found completely fascinating and I would love to talk about them some more so can you please talk about Axiom number one really which has to do with the fact that you don't have to do any research because people you're talking to already have the answers yeah so and it's probably early life good luck that I can say here so you know just give a brief description I was born in 1944 I wasn't born on the farm but very early I grew up on a farm in Northern Ohio my birth placement I'm a number five in a family of seven children I'm a fifth child and it just so happened that by the time you're 2 or 3 years old and you're starting to explore and wonder I just had no Playmates so I had no peer Playmates until I got to first grade first grade school and that was a six- mile drive so it wasn't neighborhood but I was very alert I was very curious I was a happy kid I was very interactive with my parents and my parents would take me everywhere and all I encountered was adults and somewhere along the line I cracked the Cod on dealing with adults I think probably I was like 5 years old a year before I went to school and what I learned was that if you asked adults a certain question they would talk non-stop okay and one early question I found really did the job was asking them that when you were my age so I'm talking to someone who's maybe 40 or 50 years old and I'd say when you were my age I'm 5 years old when you were my age what was going on in your world okay and all of a sudden they said what a question you know and they're talking about 35 years before so it might be the 19s and they said a the war was going on and everything like that and then I'd ask them questions about their answers you know well what was that like and then they had the first world war they had the Spanish flu epidemic then they had the wild 20s you know when a lot of new technologies took hold and then they had the Great Depression and then they had the second world war so massive you know just massive experiences so I just realized that anywhere that my parents took me they took me shopping they'd take me on social visits my father would take me to feed stores he would take me to Seed stores tractor stores and I had always run into an adult and I'd interact with him I developed a reputation so my parents would hear they said but that little kid of yours boy you know he's really really interesting you know he knows a lot well actually I didn't know anything and that was the whole point you know and I realized that it developed a lifetime Axiom so an axiom is a Greek word and it's a philosophical term and what it means is that what you know is so self-evident that you don't need any proof of it okay so my Axiom with this is is that I don't have to know any of the answers because everybody else has the answers but they can't access their answers unless they have my questions and that the key to life isn't in the answers the key to life is in the questions that's what I was discovering at five or six years old and now I'm 77 and the entire strategic coach Empire universe is simply based on that for steps and we don't need to know any of the answers because all the answers are in the heads of our entrepreneurial clients but they can't access their answers unless we ask them our questions so that's an axiom and that's such a perfect explanation of how you work and how the program works it's kind of a wonderful assumption to be able to work with people on and it kind of bypasses the normal I don't know the normal way that people think they have to do business they have to know a lot and then impart that into other people but you're like no I just have to know the right questions to ask and you have a whole series of questions that you ask that are incredibly insightful and help people really gain Traction in their own thinking and their own progress yeah and the questions are really about their experiences as they see them you know and they're the only person who's an expert on their experiences but they're not an expert on actually putting their experience together okay and that's largely what my questions are about you know if you think about where you are right now and you go back 10 years you know what would be the three areas where you think you've made the greatest progress over the last 10 years that person has never put this experience with their past experience before and never would unless I ask them the question but I didn't have to know what the experiences were I just have a knowledge that they have an experience that can be compared and measured against each other and that they'll think new thoughts as a result of this the other thing is that questions about Human Experience are Timeless right I mean if I went back to Rome ancient Rome I was teleported time machine back and you know I could somehow speak the language am I I'm in the marketplace in Rome you know I could interact with a merchant who's got a stand or a shop there and I said How's this year compared to you know last year oh jeez you know this and this and this and can't stand the regulations and the taxes and you know and everything else and we got interruptions in the supply chain and everything you know and I've heard about this fever that's you know we got to watch out you know and everything like that you know Human Experience tends to be constant so if you get a handle on the kinds of experiences that are really important to people to compare with each other you're set for life okay and then you just have more and more examples to fine-tune the questions you have but answers are seasonal they're like a fashion you know when people stock up on answers you know Cutting Edge interest it's all about answers that have a shelf life you know the answers are good for 90 days and there's businesses where the answers are good for seconds you know they're Big Data you know we the latest data on this well that information will be like last week's leftovers in five minutes you know and everything like that I just don't have the nervous system to compete on the level of answers so I've just spent my whole life just focused on mastering really really great questions to allow other people to get enormous value out of their own experience Dan I just wanted to say this again questions about Human Experience are Timeless answers have a shelf life that is just such a great way to summarize that just for fun before we go on to axium number two what are some of those other questions you know it's like asking people about their experience I'm just kind of curious what the next couple of questions are just for fun yeah what are the three biggest failures that seem totally negative to you when they happen which later turned out to be great discoveries and breakthroughs and the person says wow wow and I have to tell you you can tell the moment you've asked the question they're just going through their memory banks or picking up well I had this one I had this one you know I was involved in a relationship when I was 18 years old and I thought this was going to be it at 18 and she just abandoned me and I was just devastated for two years then about 20 years later I went back to a high school reunion she was there and I said oh I'm glad I missed that book it yep they had never thought about that in their life yet it was a huge experience and now updating their understanding of that failure or that thing was very useful to them you know I love that you have so many great questions that are just have people reflect but then as you said integrate their experience together in new ways and then they're able to take those lessons into the future well the other thing is you know it's another Insight you know it's an axiom you know that we could add to that but what people call their past is made up and what people call their future is made up okay and what I mean by that is that you have certain events from your past that are not made up you know things did happen and you didn't make up the events but your interpretation of what the events meant was made up okay and you can change your interpretations about anything in your past and when you reinterpret a past event for example that may have seemed like a worthless experience and then you found that it was actually valuable suddenly you're equipped with something important now that can be applied to your future because the future is also made up and I think it's one of the most difficult realities for anyone to accept that the past that they feel so parly about is made up that they made up the story and that's also going to be true about their future once you do have that insight though there's a bit of Freedom there that wasn't before yeah I think there is a freedom but it's a scary Freedom okay in the sense because if the past isn't real I didn't say it was real I just said it was made up I said you're the one who's saying that made up isn't real I said I think made up is totally real okay and the reason why you made it up is to make it even more real you know and the moment why you would change it is to make it even more real but what I'm saying is that you're the reality Creator in your life you know I mean a lot of people want freedom to do whatever they want to do but at the same time they want somebody to blame why it didn't work yep excellent excellent point excellent point yeah so Dan this really leads us into Axiom number two which has to do with your thought that none of this was created with you in mind tell me more what I notice is and it's more from a observation over seven decades you know that people have a lot of things that bother them about their daily lives or you know the situation where they live the circumstances which they're living in and it's been multiplied exponentially by social media and by the speed with which we can communicate with each other worldwide in a matter of seconds about things that are happening and people are bothered by an amazing number of things and I find I'm not bothered by very much and I think the reason is that somewhere along the line it may have been I'm a fifth child and so everything's already been used up all the available space and you know has been used up by older siblings by the time you come along and I always had this sense right from the beginning of life that nothing in the world was designed with me in mind and and fortunately I was born into circumstances where there you know there was enough safety and there was enough support but it wasn't designed for me it was just that I lived in a good place on the planet and you know was born in a good time you know had good parents and lots of interesting things to you know keep myself occupied with and everything else but I found that by freeing myself that there's nothing in the world that was designed with me and mine then I have no basis for a complaint about things aren't the way that I want it okay and what it does on the one hand it kind of frees me from being annoyed and it frees me from being bothered but at the other hand since nothing was created with me and mind then I can do anything I want with my circumstances and with my experiences and nobody has any say about me doing things differently or experimenting with different ways of doing it because since none of it was designed for me I don't have any responsibility for it it's just the embodiment Dan of a no entitlement attitude as opposed to being upset or bothered or sad about that or something you're like oh okay in that case I can have all the freedom I want to arrange the circumstances to better suit me so you really took it as an opportunity for as you said not feeling responsible for it but actually just using it as a creative like raw material almost yeah I mean it seemed to me that having no complaints about the way things are the reward for that it just gives you a sense of complete Freedom that you can more or less rearrange things to suit you you know and you know and I think I've done that you know I think I've done that very very much and the other thing is that I've got the right to do that but so does everybody else and the only thing that prevents other people from feeling that they're free is that they think that they were owed something and that they've got to put in about 20 years of complaining before they can get to the point where they can start creating okay it's so true oh yeah yeah no I'm not finished my complaining yet you know well you haven't done anything yet you know I mean you spend the first 30 years of your life complaining you know well you know you haven't really done anything yet you know you're just complaining and the other thing is complaining for 30 years gets to be a habit it does and it makes it very difficult to shift into creative mode you know we actually talk well actually you've said this in one of our conversations complain or create like you have a choice to do one of the other what I love especially since I have two you know kids in my family 18 and 21 where I'm like okay let's start creating sooner complain never if you can but I love that that freedom that that gives you because it's almost like when no enement attitude no one owed you anything but also you don't owe anything and that ties a little bit Dan you talk about you know people talk about giving back a little bit it's interesting there's an implied obligation there but you're like let's talk about it as just giving yeah can you talk about that for a moment because I think it it definitely ties into this yeah well it's very very interesting and that I've just noticed this that the people who most took responsibility for their own life at the earliest point in their life and then created great Enterprise I'll just use the word Enterprise here they created something new in the world that was valuable for people and a big you know very successful Dynamic organization formed around them which H created enormous number of great jobs for people people and then the person who started all this becomes very successful well-known and Wealthy okay and then the people in another part of society who didn't take responsibility for themselves didn't create anything in their life and were totally supported by what already existed get to the point and say you wealthy person successful person now you have to give back for everything that you've been given and I said they didn't take anything they didn't take anything you know and I said with really successful people who've done it on a good basis that you know they've done it honestly they've done it ethically you know it's legal and it's valuable that's what I call you know creating in a very very positive way I think that they naturally reached the point where they've got so much for themselves so they have a desire to share it they have a desire to include other people in on their success and include other people in on their prosperity but that's their choice you know it's their choice and they're under absolutely no obligation to do anything okay since they took total responsibility for themselves you know where others didn't others expected to be taken responsibility for those are the takers for me the people who made other people responsible for their success of the takers but in the end they're the least likely people to actually give back because they didn't create anything in the first place you know a new book arrived from Amazon that I'd ordered based on recommendation from a client called how to give yourself a raise by Napoleon Hill and it it's phenomenal it just flicked through it last night and Dan it was so reminiscent of our conversation about American happiness I couldnot begin to tell you but it's his interviews with uh Andrew Carnegie and it pretty much Echoes everything you just said he said I'm going to give away my fortune in the way that does the most good and the least harm we know about the Carnegie libraries and things like that and it's the 17 principles of success but that is I it's like an echo that whole thing about giving versus giving back as though you've taken something where in fact you've created something and I think that distinction is really important have you taken now you might have taken advantage of some circumstances but you have created something out of that and then out of that there's a sense of abundance and generosity and giving and there's just an sound flaky but there's an energetic difference between giving back and giving right there's just a whole different level I think of Consciousness yeah and that's what I would rather I'm totally into giving well giving back implies that you took something you know and I said well look how successful you are okay you know and all the advantages that you have and I said well I mean if you really want to do some research on this you could notice that when I started I was one of a million who had the same advantages and of the million who had the same advantages 50 years ago I'm at the top and the vast majority of them didn't do anything with their advantages so why am I being pointed out that I now have to give back simply because I did a good job and I was a successful job where they did nothing with their advantages they should be taxed now for not developing their capabilities you know that's definitely a different different thought than I'm just saying why is it that the people who have actually improve things the most why are they the ones who are now most responsible for giving back what they gained from helping so many other people they've already helped other people it's very interesting right now the wife of one of the greatest Tech successes in the last 50 years inherited like $16 billion okay and now she's out to transform the world in such a way that someone like her husband who made $16 billion would not exist okay but she didn't create the 16 billion you know he did and when he was you I'm not going to say who it was but he actually while he had his Corporation had no charitable foundation and he was bitterly bitterly he says you don't have a charitable foundation and he said no no he said we create technology that transforms the lives of millions of people they're just better off because we create our technology and we've got 40,000 employees we created those jobs those 40,000 jobs and we pay enormous amounts of taxes both in payroll taxes and you know and the sale of our products generates taxes and you know we have to pay taxes you know wherever we are and he says we're just massively massively productive and created maximum value in our life why should I have a charitable Foundation you know but the moment that he died then they took over and now they have this massive charitable Foundation you know and I'm not saying you shouldn't have a charitable Foundation I'm saying but don't feel that you're obligated to have a charitable foundation and I guess if you're going to have a charitable Foundation there's rules that you have to follow and you have to fill in the paperwork and you have to you know you're subject to you know certain kinds of scrutiny and accountability well you can choose to do that but I don't see how anybody's obligated to do it yeah the difference here is in obligation if it comes out of a sense of generosity and abundance it just feels better yeah so I really appreciate that it's a binary mindset either entitlement or no entitlement and different things come out of that way of approaching things so thank you for sharing your axioms I think a lot of entrepreneurs will resonate with this one I'm sure people will be sharing it with other like oh this is how I've been thinking I've been trying to explain it so thank you and and all the really practical questions about how people can reflect on their experience I know it'll be great takeaways too thanks Dan as always lots of insight and great perspectives on mindset thank you Shan man