hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast with Dan Sullivan Dan we were talking before the show and you made a great comment you said entrepreneurism is not rational and I just love that statement and I think it's completely true but can you explain what you mean by entrepreneurism is not rational well I go back to basic definitions here that in 1804 a French well we would call an economist today they didn't back then because there were no credentials for economists a man by the name of say sa y Jean Baptist say from France said that entrepreneurs are individuals who take any kind of resource and make it more valuable and he was asked what kind of resource he said well any kind of resource it doesn't matter anything that people any kind of activity that is already being done to produce a certain kind of result they take a look at the activity and they say you know there's a better way of approaching this and we'll get a much bigger result out of it and I'm so clear and I'm so confident about this that I'll bet my present level of success that a new level of success is possible and I think it's a betting activity and that means that the motivation for this is not coming out that you've noticed a lot of people out there want this is basically that if I create this people will discover that they like this better than the way that they're doing it right now so it's intuitive it's not available from the environment the environment is telling you well this is how things get done and you're questioning the environment you're looking at the patterns of activity and how people organ organize themselves and how they produce in the marketplace they produce products they produce Services they produce experiences and where there's not any real movement in the society it's because everybody says well everybody already knows how to do everything that's necessary for the present and actually that's not even true is that they know everything that is good for the past and most learning is really about the past it's not about the future entrepreneurism is the only experience that's actually about the future it's the only learning experience where the experience actually gets created between a unique relationship between yourself and who you are and what you're capable of doing and a future desirable result that's much bigger bya bigger better and different from anything else that exists and you have the confidence first first of all to follow through and actually creating this new type of experience and you have to do it on your own time you have to do it with your own money you have to do it with your own resources and then you create it and then you go out in the marketplace and said I've got something bigger and better here it's really really different you might be right you might be wrong but you don't blame the market place for not accepting your new idea it's up to you to be persuasive enough to get people to as I say write checks for this I use check writing as one of my foremost signs of reality I mean there's lots of people who think that they've got a great talent but nobody wants to pay them for their talent they create new things but nobody wants to buy them I take that as reality it's like the law of gravity you know you can disagree with gravity but you'll find out very quickly that gravity is a reality outside of yourself and in the marketplace whether people actually want what you are creating whether they think that you're a useful valuable person that's a reality outside of yourself that's in other people's response to you that's my whole thesis there and it's an intuition it's an inspiration it forms in the imagination of a person and you know I mean probably in the last 50 years the individual who is in the top of people we remember as being really good at this is Steve Jobs who took advantage of the work of a lot of other people who had intuitions and Inspirations about a whole new way of achieving results in the late 20th century and certainly in the 21st century that there's this new system which is called digital communication and we can do all sorts of things that have never been done as quickly as easily as cheaply much less expensive and produces much bigger results huge bets huge bets on this but Steve Jobs had this thing that I'm not creating things that people already know they need I'm creating something that once they see what I've created realize that they need this new thing right he wasn't a real cuttingedge technology person he used usually took technologies that already existed those are the resources that Jean Baptist say talks about with entrepreneurs he took a thing called an MP3 player for example which were already in existence out in the marketplace MP3 players digital recording devices and then he took a new thing called the internet uh brand new capability in the world and he took a particular field of human activity which is as old as history itself which is music and he said you know the way we're doing music right now it seems not entirely satisfactory in other words that if you really hear a song Done by an artist and you want that song the way it works right now you have to go to a store and you have to buy a package that's got 12 SS on it and in order to get the one you want you have to pay for a 11 that you don't necessarily want and he said if I put MP3 players better yet if the MP3 player after a certain point does a lot of other things and I take the internet and we take the music and digitize it then you can download just the ones on you want as a result Apple changed the entire model of how music is created how music is organized how music is presented and how people can access just the music that they want not only that but save it at a remarkably lower cost much more easily totally changed the entire cultural model which then spread to movies Netflix is a great example but it's the Steve Jobs model of seeing that yeah people love music I've never really met a lot of people who don't like their favorite music and we can make this faster easier cheaper and give them a much bigger bang for their Buck by doing it this new way and it transformed the world I mean Apple's the number one distributor of Music on the planet and I mean people say well computers well it wasn't about computers it's what if I create this new way of getting something that we know they already need it's going to be a big deal that's intuitional that's not rational no it's not but it's rational is becoming a lawyer who's in charge of a large recording company yes that distribut music the old way that's rational okay I love it to me a bit of a clue here is what you said about questioning the environment so it's taking that step back and a little bit like okay what's working here what isn't working here it seems a bit awkward or hard how could I make it easier that's a neat clue for that another point about this whole entrepreneurism is not rational point that you've made before is that sometimes you can end up with the need for certain security blankets because as you go through that experience of testing things on the marketplace and sometimes they're successful but sometimes they're not you've talked about entrepreneurs sometimes having a circumstance that they will absolutely never ever want to return to so they have little blankies pockets of security that they have to have can you share a little bit about that because when I first heard you say it was like aha I've had so many conversations about quirky little things that people do it's kind of like considered almost Scar Tissue but it's a way to never be in an uncomfortable position again as an entrepreneur no I'll share my blankie with the world World here and blankie goes back to an incident that I had when we moved when I was 2 years old it coincided with the dog who was my first dog in life Toby you know he's a black and white mut and he died so we moved from the city to the country to a farm and Toby died and the only thing that was left was the blanket that was in Toby's where he slept at night he had a blanket so I didn't like the move I didn't want to go but I took Toby's blanket with me and my mom understanding that this was security for me made sure I had the blanket and then she would try to get it for me so that she could actually clean it because I dragged it around and the interesting thing about it is that finally she hit on a solution was she would cut the blanket in half and there would always be a clean one but it was toah I'd have it in my hand and I'd have my thumb in my mouth and I'd walk around and life was good I was in new circumstances but I I had my security blanket by the way I'm Not Unusual in this I found that there's a carryover to the general population that we have these things that we really hold on to I had a mouse mousy and blanket just so you know yeah yeah yeah these things are important in life I mean the world changes enough in unpredictable ways there's got to be something that stays the same all through life I've had a garment which served as my blankie and I have really terrific fleece jackets and when I go on the airplane it's my blanket you know cuz the planes are often times a bit chilled and you know I curl up under my blanket and I feel really great that's just one example in my life but the particular incident that I'm referring to from an entrepreneurial standpoint had to do when I was betting in the early days of strategic coach and I was so short of cash one day that I had to borrow money for my meals that day and it was a great great lesson to me that I had not organize my life correctly that I could have food and that I would have to borrow money I so short of cash and I said this will never happen again to me in my life and the particular vehicle that I use to carry out you know my adult version of the blankie in addition to my fleece jacket is my ATM account and I have a massive massive totally irrational amount of money in my ATM account at all times and it's in a checking account I'm not even getting interest done it you know I'll go I just went and got a fill up you know I got cash and the other thing is I really like cash you know I mean I do a lot of things with credit cards and things are done electronically but I like the feeling of cash I kept this very very quiet for a long time and it was just at a lunchtime at a workshop where I brought this up as my kind of irrational security of having this big Cash Pot as a result of my ATM and people say well I've got something like that too oh I do that too and it turns out that almost every entrepreneur had a something that they did could be a ritual they do a ritual every day or you know they just have a way of proceeding but it's a reminder of how bad it was once at an earlier situation in juncture usually at the beginning of their entrepreneurial career where they put in place a strategy that absolutely guarantees that that bad experience could never happen again mhm oh that's so fun well and it's interesting about that because I think all of us have different security blankies I'm I'm wearing one right now it's really about surrounding yourself with confidence yes so that you never have to go to that you know sheer Terror moment and I think we all do that and and you can supply people and circumstances and rituals and ATM pots of money that's a way of giving you confidence cuz with that confidence anything is possible but without confidence nothing is yeah and it's very very important that you're doing it for your own unique reasons it's not subject to the Judgment of the world outside of you of whether this is a good idea or not a good idea this is your own internal requirement for personal confidence on a daily basis it flows over to you know your lifestyle but it flows over to to the style in which you actually operate your business and I really am very biased towards what I would call elegant informality and if you take a look at any of the Strategic coach offices you'll notice that they're kind of comfortable they're kind of comfortable there's a lack of formality about them and we've kind of hit on sort of a style strategic o has kind of a style you know example that every body who's in coach right now is getting I really like cartoons I'll give you another example of a comfort point for me and that's cartoons I really like when information is communicated in a cartoon form so all the little books so I have a goal a 25e goal of producing a brand new book every quarter that is very short un copy and almost overwhelming in terms of cartoons and I have a cartoonist a dedicated cartoonist I love his style and I call his style dangerously cute in other words you look at the cartoons and you have to smile with them because they have a cute quality about them but the ideas they're communicating are actually kind of dangerous in the sense that after you read the text and read the cartoon your thinking will change and if that's dangerous to you then this is a dangerous communication format that we do there's a great great response to this on the part of not only the clients but actually the people that they give the books to and we found a very comfortable reassuring medium of communication and you wouldn't do it in other words I can tell clients who say well where can I get a cartoonist like that and I said well are you getting the cartoonist because you have a deep need to communicate in cartoons or you've watched what somebody else did seemed to work for them so you want to do it I said that's not a confidence zone for you you have to find the thing that gives you confidence that this is something that gives me great confidence I like it I've never actually thought of us as having a style but we definitely do and I love the informality of it but it's still elegant it's still put together it's still thoughtful it's also got some humor and color and fun you know there's a playfulness to so much of coach and how we you know we like to have fun as we're successful I think playfulness is another thing I like to play MH you know and I could never tolerate working in a large bureaucratic organization because you can say a lot of things about it but I can tell you it's not fun because I've talked to people who work there and it's not fun you walk into them and they're not fun places they're serious places and I said uh profits are serious you know growth is serious the surroundings in which I achieve profits and we achieve success that's going to be cozy and comfortable I love that so Dan we've talked about how entrepreneurism is not rational and it's very intuitional and then also how it's wise to have some areas of real confidence and comfort so that you can have that platform as a basis so any other coaching you give in terms of how people can take action on our ideas from today yeah well the big thing is to take your goals seriously there's two areas there are your business goals and there's also your lifestyle goals have a rule that you will achieve the goals that you want not the goals that other people tell you you should want okay you know I've been at this for as long as I can remember that I'll create my way of operating in the world according to what I want not what other people say is wantable or you know that you should want and that really covers all areas of life you know it's how I take in information what kind of information do I like taking in relationships who do I like hanging out with it takes in every part of my life but it's ignoring what other people say is fashionable or trendy or to be respected out in society this is what it has to look look like I couldn't care less and you just get in the groove you know of doing that so after a while it never occurred to you to pay attention to what other people think you should want should being the giveaway that it's not something that you own you know I remember talking to someone we take a lot of free time the other thing is we take a lot of free time and we push it in coach and it goes against the entire concept of rationality Babs and I for 25 years have taken off if you add them up it's the equivalent of 22 weeks of free days every 52 weeks so out of every year we take 40% of the year off for free time and they said well if you cut that in half and took 11 weeks and applied it to business your results would be a lot bigger and I said first of all that's very debatable because during those 11 weeks that I was working I would say well why am I not taking these as free time because that's a value for me but the other thing is that it gives me incredible endurance in my entrepreneurial life in the sense that I'm not trying to get to a point where I get to stop working and then take free time I took the free time right from the beginning and we've become unusually productive for two owners of a company who take 40% of the year off we instill this in our clients our clients all take massive amounts more free time than other people who are not in Co coach and who get the same results our entrepreneurs get the same results but working far less as part of a system of really wanting what you want I love that Dan I really appreciate these insights into entrepreneurism and how people can kind of expand that in their own life and I also appreciate the whole idea of the necessity of having a security blanket that's quite fun I appreciate that tobies ah I still have it I have the fleece jacket which is a direct descendant of Toby's uh through many many other garments going back to 2 years old I love it thank you