[Music] hi welcome to the inside strategic coach podcast I'm Shannon Waller with Dan Sullivan Dan you said something in a workshop the other day that struck me and I wrote it down that I wanted to talk to you about it in our inside Str coach podcast and that is that you said I have an associative brain not a linear brain and I was likea so can you describe what that means because I think that's true of me I think that's true of people I'm close to and I know it's true of a lot of our clients but I've never heard that particular distinction before so what for you is an associate brain versus a linear one well what I mean by that is and I'll give you an example and that is that I'll come up with models that are from a completely different area that explains a concept and one of the ones that if you've been with me for 29 years because that's when we started the workshop program when it comes to freedom I always say well there's two types of Freedom there's freedom from and there's there's Freedom too and I said how many of you are familiar with the book of Exodus out of the Bible and you know a lot of hands go up and I says well you know in Exodus the skills that get you out of Egypt are not the skills that get you into the promised land so I said there's a freeing yourself up from something you don't like which gets you out of an oppressive situation which is the story of Exodus and I said but that doesn't actually get you to where the freedom to do what you want to do and Moses who's the greatest force and depending on what religion you grew up with I grew up Catholic you had the Old Testament and you had the New Testament and I said you know Moses is considered the greatest greatest figure in the Old Testament but he did not have the skills to actually take the children of Israel into Egypt so he had the skills to free them up from some something that was oppressive but he did not have the skills to free them to actually go to where their destination actually was and that's what I would call an associative brain is that I'll see other models I'll see stories and everything else and I'm explaining a concept or a tool and in order to do that I just tell a story and if you look at the actual Bible itself I think the people who created the Bible and other books like that were associative thinkers they were always coming up with models I'll give you another one I think Einstein was an associative thinker so relativity means that time can slow up or time can speed up you know so somebody said well you know how do you explain differences in time seems to me that a minute's a minute an hour is an hour he said well I'll give you two examples he said you have 10 minutes and it's the last 10 minutes for 2 years that you're going to be with the person that you love the most okay and it's 10 minutes and then there's 2 years separation how long do those 10 minutes and he says it's just like a blink they go by you're desperate because the 10 minutes go by just so much like that so that's one 10 minutes and he said I'll give you another 10 minutes you've been forced to put your hand on a hot stove and your hand is actually being injured by it for 10 minutes how long's the 10 minutes last he says 10 minutes last forever so we got 10 minutes over here 10 minutes over here they're not the same 10 minutes he says that's relativity that's a great example yeah and so the brain really really loves Stories the brain really loves models so it's not logical there's no reason if you said well find a story that will actually illustrate that it's hard to do unless you have the story already in your mind you say hey this is exactly the same kind of story so when entrepreneur talk in the workshop and they bring up issues or they bring up problems I'm constantly searching my brain for some piece of information it might be from history it might be from movies I've seen it might be stories and my own experiences and I'll associate the issue that they're bringing up with an experience I had okay and all of a sudden they say oh yeah but that gives me a whole different way of thinking of it now I don't do that just to communicate I do that to think so the difference is I don't think in a linear fashion at all I just pop from one thing to another and I want to say this because I was born for the internet so I was born in 1944 so I was born 50 years before the internet came along but the first time I sat down where you could actually go on the internet and you could go from topic to topic and you could jump and say oh that reminds me of something I go over there and I say oh that's really really that's kind of like and then I'd go over here and I'm hopscotching all over and I do that you know on average I do that for about two hours every day and the interesting thing people say well you know why don't you get one of those algorithms that actually searches for you and presents what you're looking for and I said well I don't know what I'm looking for actually what I'm looking for is things that I didn't know before m and I said so there's no algorithm can possibly know what it is that I'm not looking for but that I would be interested but I had an early training for this and what it was I created my own school when I was 10 years old because the school that I went to which was not any different from anybody else's school was very linear first you learn this then you learn this then you learn this and then you know and every topic you have five six topics you had history you had geography you had English you had math and everything like that but it was all done in a linear fashion first you learn this and once you learn that then you go on but that's not the way I learned I found it really oppressive and it wasn't that I got bad grades I got good enough grades because I have good memory and I read I'm a voracious reader but what I decided was instead of complaining about school I was going to create my own school and what I did I went to the local library to the reference room and they had the big complete set of the encyclopedia britanica and I had a notebook which was a spiral notebook and I'd walk in I'd put the notebook down on a table and then I'd close my eyes and I'd turn around you know we right where the encyclopedia was and I'd go along and then i' get one book and I'd pull it off and i' turn around eyes still closed and i' open up the book and I take my finger and I go like that and wherever my finger Landed It would land on an article about something and I would read that article and in my spiral notebook I would write down notes oh gee I didn't know that that's really really interesting that's very and then at the bottom of each article they had cross references to other subjects that you might be interested in and I'd go like this I just point and I'd hit a cross reference and I go the cross reference and I'd spend two or three hours just hopscotching just like I do on the internet now I was in a linear school system which I found very oppressive so I had to create my own separate school system that was an associative thinking School rather than a linear thinking school I love it early internet per Dan yeah a couple thoughts occur to me one is that what you've described is often how people talk about an add brain so attention deficit disorder which you know there's lots of different conversations about that and there is a correlation with Colby between a preventive a short follow-through and initiating quick KCK start or implementer and it's that you know ability to switch quickly mentally between different activities I love it because you've used it to actually build interesting Pathways that are not predictable you went and found different things you actually were training your brain to make those connections Dan I don't know any other 10-year-old who's ever done that I'm sure there are some which is kind of fascinating and you do it now with the internet but what I love seeing is you do it in the workshop so there'll be a conversation come up and then you'll connect it to something else those connections really help people make sense of their experience and get them out of that linear pathway where they were feeling kind of stuck and into a much broader perspective is that how it feels to yeah and the thing is that first of all I think you're born with this my sense is that factory equipment that you're born with this I know people who have linear brains and they can stay with a topic and they go 78 hours and they can actually follow it sequentially for 78 hour well for them they've got to be in circumstances where they get rewarded for doing that and they get supported for doing that I think people who do Crypt analysis you know like they're investigating something forensic accountants or forensic lawyers so the thing is that neither way of thinking is actually better than the other it's just that if you have a particular way of thinking don't think you should be thinking the other way in other words take complete 100% proud ownership of the way that you're thinking and then maximize the value of that but get yourself in the right circumstance where that way of thinking actually creates value that other people appreciate and that you're a hero to them and I think this is the big thing is just not to be ashamed or embarrassed about the way you think and think that you're deficient because you think just fully grasp how your brain actually operates and then set up the circumstances where that just makes you increasingly successful but more importantly than that is increasingly valuable to other people and I think this is the thing and it's only I would say that making the specific decision that I'm just going to base the rest of my life on this and this is my straw suit is fairly recent even though I had unique ability down and everything but within the last two or three years in my' 70s I said you know my whole future is going to be based on this skill that I've been developing ever since childhood to me it's your recipe for creativity it's how you come up with stuff and I said I've always been not that I study you but I pay attention to how you do things I'm always queering how this works so that's what was so fun and I think building those connections and those capabilities and as you said owning it take full ownership and I think anytime any of us who if you have a linear brain and you try to be associative that's painful and hard and probably don't get much of results and when you have an associative brain and you go and try and be linear it's a similar experience so really just staying in your lane but also partnering up if something does require linear thinking that you partner up with people and the truth is that all projects which move everybody forward requires every kind of thinking okay and it has to be a teamwork so there's projects which I'll reach the borderline where I've done my associative thinking and I'll say okay now I have to go over to someone who's really good at linear thinking and just tell them how far I've come and now that part of it and I'm saying like there's two types but I suspect there's you know there may be 10 different ways of thinking but the only one that I'm really responsible for is the one that I have and then to have an enormous appreciation for people who think differently than I do if someone else identifies with what we've been talking about and thinks that they have an associative way of thinking as as well what are some things that they can do how can they take action to either strengthen it to own it to maximize it as you've talked about what would be some tips that you found work really well for you that might also work well for others well first of all is to just spend some time actually experiencing how they actually do think usually when they talk about technology and they talk about the internet in particular that young people are better at using the internet than older people but they've actually done tests where they were asked to find out some information and they found that generally people over 40 or 50 years old of giving 10 pieces of information they have to look up are infinitely better at doing that without getting distracted than younger people are younger people are much more distractable and my sense is that the older people they may have been highly distracted but they've learned how to be be task oriented and they've trained their brains in certain situations you're just going to have to switch over you probably can't do this for a whole day but for the next hour you can probably find out 10 things so my sense is the internet's a great way to actually test what kind of thinker you are so if you go on the internet and you see something you're interested in and you click on that and you go into it if 15 minutes later you're still on that topic and you're going deep on it you're not an associate ative thinker you're a deep dive thinker okay and I have to tell you we need Deep dive thinkers you know we could give names to all these and maybe you know I'll give some more thought to it and we can actually create categories of different kind of thinking but you know I've got this saying play to win with the cards you have not the cards you wish you had which is an associative thinking thing I'm relating you know that the best card players in any casino are not the ones who get the best hand they're the ones who whatever hand they get they create an immediate strategy look do I go for it with this hand or do I fold and the best card players are the ones who recognize the playability of the hand they have and that says whether they're actually going to bet on it or not bet on it how they're going to Bluff if they're not going to Bluff and so my feeling is the intelligence you're born with is like a hand that you were given except it's a lifetime hand and then you want to associate the hand you have with the situation where this hand one can be admired and respected and encouraged and then you can translate the hand that you were born with into higher and higher economic rewards in the world and you know you can produce results with that entrepreneurs are out of Egypt I would say that 95% of the entrepreneurs that I meet have the freedom of getting away from what they don't like and that's one of the reasons why they became an entrepreneur because they can't work for somebody else because anybody they'd work for would try to force them into a system so they've declared independence from other people's systems but they haven't followed through to Freedom too how can I take this unique thinking ability I have and now maximize it in the marketplace how can I maximize it as my role in much bigger teamwork collaboration with people who have different thinking abilities and I think this is why the entrepreneurial world is so fascinating to me because it seems to be Limitless in terms of what you can find out about yourself and what you can find about how you can match up the uniqueness of what you do with uniqueness of other people and it just gets constantly rewarded the more combining you do between your uniqueness and other people's uniqueness the bigger the rewards and you never run out of motivation and stimulation so other people have to retire there's a lot of mandatory retirement in the employment world but entrepreneurs don't have to retire until nature retires them the only reason why you would continue working in your 70s 80s and 90s is because you have realized the second half of freedom and you have to be free from other people's restrictions but the second half of it and I think only about % of entrepreneurs ever get into the freedom 2 role but they have captured the uniqueness of how they think about things and that just keeps getting better as they get older thank you Dan to my mind this is a very interesting distinction that helps facilitate that freedom too Again by owning it themselves and then looking at how it can maximize impact and value so I appreciate thinking this way about our thinking as always thank you thank you Shannon