How To Make Yourself “Anti-Fragile”
There are a wide variety of reasons that a person might feel fragile, and there certainly seems to be more people feeling fragile in the world today than there used to be. In this episode, Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller discuss what has people feeling fragile and what they can do to be stronger.
Here's some of what you'll learn in this episode:
- How modern parenting styles are affecting children’s health.
- Why manure can actually be good for the human body.
- Why some people have meltdowns while other people can shrug it off.
- The major ways in which the world has changed since the Second World War.
- How the educational system makes children fragile.
Show Notes:
If you run into an obstacle, transform it into an advantage.
Someone is referred to as “fragile” usually when their health isn’t strong.
Gut bacteria is as important for forecasting ongoing health and fitness as your genes.
Some fears surrounding dirt and hygiene are psychological and emotional, not physical.
Hospitals are among the most dangerous places you can go.
There’s nothing in science that says that the climate is in danger.
There’s a creeping sense of fragility that starts at the national level and moves down from there.
The reason people criticize the U.S. is because their entire future depends on the country.
Children who go through college aren’t given the psychological strength to deal with unpredictable things.
If you’re feeling confident about your world, the “big” world doesn’t really matter.
Some predictions are just people projecting their feelings onto humanity.
One of the biggest reasons people are fragile is that they’re ignorant.
Episode Transcript:
Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. Dan, you’ve made this comment a couple of times over the last couple of days, and I immediately leaned in and got curious. And you’ve been saying that there’s a great deal of fragility in society right now, and I think that is spot on, but I would really love to know more about your thinking. What exactly do you mean by fragility in society right now?
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think it starts with a fragile person, and there’s many explanations for that. Usually it’s spoken about that their health isn’t very strong, they’re not strong physically, and they’re susceptible to catching things that doesn’t really affect other people. I grew up on a farm in the 1940s and 50s, and there’s a new test in medical science and it measures what’s called your gut bacteria. And these are bacteria that we all have inside of us. And what they’re discovering is that they’re as important for forecasting ongoing healthiness and ongoing fitness as your genes. In other words, that your ability to stay healthy in almost any situation, it has a lot to do with your gut bacteria.
And one of the things they’re discovering is that children who are born today are growing up in antiseptic conditions. It’s like their parents are so worried they’re going to come in contact with dirt. They’re afraid that they’re going to be around other people who aren’t as hygienic as they are. And that would not have been talked about when I was growing up. And they’ve got five or six allergies, they’ve got food allergies, or they’ve got substance allergies. They can’t be around certain smells, they can’t be around certain types of sprays. I’ve been pondering it, and I think some of it is not physical at all; it’s psychological and emotional. But to go back to gut bacteria, when I take tests, I get tested for allergies, so I have blood tests taken and almost nothing shows up for any kind of allergy.
Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. Dan, you’ve made this comment a couple of times over the last couple of days, and I immediately leaned in and got curious. And you’ve been saying that there’s a great deal of fragility in society right now, and I think that is spot on, but I would really love to know more about your thinking. What exactly do you mean by fragility in society right now?
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think it starts with a fragile person, and there’s many explanations for that. Usually it’s spoken about that their health isn’t very strong, they’re not strong physically, and they’re susceptible to catching things that doesn’t really affect other people. I grew up on a farm in the 1940s and 50s, and there’s a new test in medical science and it measures what’s called your gut bacteria. And these are bacteria that we all have inside of us. And what they’re discovering is that they’re as important for forecasting ongoing healthiness and ongoing fitness as your genes. In other words, that your ability to stay healthy in almost any situation, it has a lot to do with your gut bacteria.
And one of the things they’re discovering is that children who are born today are growing up in antiseptic conditions. It’s like their parents are so worried they’re going to come in contact with dirt. They’re afraid that they’re going to be around other people who aren’t as hygienic as they are. And that would not have been talked about when I was growing up. And they’ve got five or six allergies, they’ve got food allergies, or they’ve got substance allergies. They can’t be around certain smells, they can’t be around certain types of sprays. I’ve been pondering it, and I think some of it is not physical at all; it’s psychological and emotional. But to go back to gut bacteria, when I take tests, I get tested for allergies, so I have blood tests taken and almost nothing shows up for any kind of allergy.
Then there’s tests you can do of what the amount and the quality of your gut bacteria is. And I’m, on a scale of 10, I’m very close to 10. So some of the more perceptive medical practitioners, they said, “How’d you grow up as a child?” And I said, “I grew up on a farm.” And so one of them said, “Did you eat a lot of dirt?” And I said, “Oh yeah, easily 10 pounds. By the time I was 10 years, easily I’d eaten 10 pounds of dirt.”
He laughed and laughed and he said, “Well, that dirt was good for you. There’s just millions and millions of really good bacteria in the dirt.” Dirt on a farm is really healthy dirt. Not if it’s got a lot of disinfectants or herbicides.
Shannon Waller: Chemicals, yeah.
Dan Sullivan: You got to watch out for that. But that wasn’t true in the 1950s and 1960s. So it was just scoping out the extremes of how far I can go with this conversation right now.
Shannon Waller: That’s pretty far, Dan.
Dan Sullivan: But the whole point is that that’s one aspect of fragility, and I’ve just been really healthy all my life. I get occasional colds. I have the mandatory flus, I had mumps, I had measles. But what I noticed is I’m really physically robust.
Shannon Waller: That was the word I was thinking; robust is a good word. And the old expression, Dan, “You have to eat a pack of dirt before you die.” I think you accomplished that early, which I like.
Dan Sullivan: Do the heavy eating before you’re 10. But then I began thinking about it with changes in the world, certain elections, starting probably in the middle, the 2016 election, I noticed that people just had meltdowns. And I said, “It’s an election and you win some, you lose some.” And what I noticed, generally, when the vote is disappointing to you, you kind of shake it off the first day and you go back doing what’s really important in your life, like your work and being supportive of all the relationships you have in life.
But the fact that an election would depress me, I could never understand that. In my lifetime, in both the United States, and since I moved to Canada—I vote in both elections. So I’m a citizen of both countries. And so I get to vote in Toronto for city elections and provincial elections and then the national election, the federal election. And in the United States I vote for the off-year elections—which I’ll vote in a few weeks for the off-year election—I vote in the presidential elections. And what really interests me is that my batting average on voting is about 50%. I’m batting about 500, and the parties go like this and that. And I’m not overly elated when my party wins because as an entrepreneur, the only thing that a bad election in my way of thinking means is that there’s going to be more headwinds. There’s going to be taxes I don’t like, there’s going to be regulations I don’t like.
But the nature of what we coach in Strategic Coach, if you run into an obstacle, transform the obstacle into an advantage. So you’re just tacking with the wind. But some regimes come in for three or four years, the present one being one of them, where some of it seems bizarre to me, but it doesn’t really affect me emotionally. I said, that’s why they have elections every two years, every four years, and things can get corrected.
And so that was one big one. And then the COVID really, really was a prime example. And I just noticed people just having enormous meltdowns because they were locked down or they were fearful. The first news reports is tens of millions of people are going to die. One “expert” in London predicted that more than 10 million Americans would die from COVID. And it’s a little bit more than 1 million have died. Not too much different than normal flu over a two- or three-year period. And there’s a lot of people who die because they went to the hospital. Even the American Medical Association admits that hospitals are one of the most dangerous places that you can actually go. There’s a lot of disease in hospitals and it gets carried around.
So one of the things that I think that—just as a general statement, stepping back about fragility—one of the biggest reasons why people are fragile is that they’re ignorant.
Shannon Waller: So that’s a really interesting statement, Dan. So they’re ignorant. So they’re, as the expression goes, “In their feels,” they’re feeling things, but they don’t actually know the rationale or the science or the facts behind the circumstances. Is that what you’re saying?
Dan Sullivan: Or the reality of the threats. They really don’t know the reality of the threat. They’re obviously experiencing a threat of some sort, but I don’t think that they’ve actually studied it. They’ve picked it up in social media or they’ve picked it up—
Shannon Waller: Or regular media?
Dan Sullivan: Regular media. Or people. They travel in circles that are sort of fear mongering circles, kind of threat cycles. And what it means is they don’t have knowledge; they haven’t really actually studied it. I’ve read about 25 books on the climate situation, and more and more it said that carbon dioxide—first of all, we know that carbon dioxide is wonderful for plants and that in fact, as carbon dioxide grows the amount of it, and we’re not by any means at high levels. We’re still in the very, very low range of carbon dioxide since we’ve had a atmosphere on the planet, which is about 4.5 million years that we’ve had an atmosphere. And it’s a very minute, very, very tiny portion of the atmosphere.
And that in fact, what they’re discovering, is they know when the cold periods were, they know where the warming periods were because they can measure against all sorts of geological and they can measure against trees that live a long time. You can see how much carbon dioxide they had or what the impact was. And it seems now that whenever the earth warms, about 20 years later, the carbon dioxide starts going up.
So the carbon dioxide doesn’t go up and then the earth warms; the earth warms and then the carbon dioxide goes up. And what the thesis is right now is the ocean water warming up and there’s an enormous storage of carbon dioxide in the oceans. And when they warm up, they release some of the carbon dioxide into the air. And this is for scientific debate. What do you think? They’re looking at the evidence.
Shannon Waller: It seems like people are very vulnerable or susceptible. That this whole “fragile”—it seems, my joke has been “rationality seems to have left the building.” So I concur with you, Dan. Why is it that people are just so ungrounded, just not asking those questions? What are your thoughts as to where this mindset came from, and most importantly, how people can become anti-fragile? How can they become stronger?
Dan Sullivan: I’ve got a guess. And I think it has to do with what happened in the world after the Second World War. By no means my original research or study here, but the First [World] War in the Second [World] War, they’re basically the same war with a pause in between. And absolutely the most two destructive events in the history of the world. And it left almost every other country weaker and poorer as a result of it. Even the countries that won, like Great Britain, paid a huge price for those two wars. They were one of the great powers before the first war, and they had been diminished enormously and they were very poor. Rationing of certain key things in society lasted until 1960, 15 years later, rationing in Great Britain.
But one country ended up on top and it was the United States. And the United States got stronger because of the Second World War. Its economy boomed. And it had no physical damage except for the island of Oahu in Hawaii. That was the only part of America that was actually damaged by the war. And that was a half hour event right at the beginning of the war. And the United States ended up with a navy that’s hard for people to comprehend how powerful the US Navy is.
If you take all the other navies in the world and put them together, the American Navy is 10 times greater in power than all the other navies in the world right now put together.
Shannon Waller: 10 times?
Dan Sullivan: 10 times, yeah. One of their carrier groups, which is aircraft carrier with about 80 jets on it, and then a whole flotilla of other ships plus submarines and all the satellite technology and communication goes along with that, is equal to about all, except about three or four other navies. Just one of them in the US has 11 of these carrier groups.
And what they did with the carrier groups, they guaranteed world trade. First of all, the US opened up its treasury and lent enormous amounts of money to anybody who wanted to rebuild their economy and start manufacturing. And a lot of countries who were never manufacturing countries became manufacturing countries. You had globalization and global population increased by a factor of three; I think it was three times, in 75 years, the global population has tripled. Those in poverty has been reduced by 90%.
The same measure measured poverty in 1945. It’s down 90%. People are healthier. Average longevity shot up about 35 years. And by any measure you want to use, material life has just gotten incredibly better around the planet. Global tourism thrived. But it was basically because the United States was financing this global peace, and the US Military was guaranteeing that there was freedom of shipping, there was freedom of passage, freedom of transportation everywhere on the planet.
All right. So that story is—but it was premised on one factor and that was the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union had goal to take over the whole world with what is basically a no-fun system, a very, very bleak no-fun system. And whatever the Soviets touched got worse as a result of their touching it.
So America said, “We can’t let this—it’s like a cancer—we can’t allow this cancer to get out.” And so they cooped them up and they created a prosperity curtain around the iron curtain. So what happened then, this is a long story short, but it ended 31 years ago, it was December 1991. The Soviet Union, without anyone’s permission, collapsed. But the rest of the world had such a good deal going from the financial and military protection that the United States paid, that they acted as if nothing had happened. But starting at right the next year, American presidents saying, “Why are we doing this anymore? The game’s over. Why are we still on the field when the game’s over? Why have none of the people in the stands left?"
And everybody’s just cheering and cheering and cheering because no one wants the deal to end. It was a very cheap deal. Most countries didn’t have to pay anything for defense. All the money that used to go to defending themselves—no defense problems. And they poured it into social programs and all sorts of other things, but not really keeping themselves robust as countries.
The world, except for the United States, became very fragile defensively. And we live in one of them called Canada. Canada doesn’t pay anything for its defense because the United States provides all the protection. And my sense is that the fragility really starts at the national level. There’s a sense in the country, if anything bad really happened, we don’t know that we could actually pull things off here.
So there’s a creeping sense of fragility that starts at the national level and then it works its way down through society, through the educational system. And there’s a certain amount of make-believe that comes into people’s thinking about the world. “Well, the United States really isn’t that important, and it’s kind of a bad country anyway.” And they start criticizing.
The reason why they’re criticizing this country is because their entire future depends upon this country. And that doesn’t feel good that our entire sense of protection and health and fitness depends upon this one country. And the whole educational system is pumping out jobs that are going into organizations that are tied to a world which the United States, starting about 30 years ago, said, “We’re not going to support and protect anymore.” And we’re 30 years down the road.
And what it means is that you go off to college and you study things that only have a bureaucratic use after you graduate. In other words, you’re not learning a skill, you’re not learning a trade, you’re not learning how to make things, you’re not learning how to invent things. You’re learning how to have meetings in bureaucratic organizations and sound like you’re knowledgeable.
Somewhere around the last five or six years, it’s dawned on a lot of children—and it’s dawned on their parents—that the educational system is essentially worthless for making the children strong. It’s an educational system that makes children fragile. So I think what we’re doing is we’re getting the full impact of about 30 or 40 years of an educational system that teaches children to be frightened and to be scared and to blame their problems on other factors besides the fact that they just didn’t do the work and they just didn’t learn the knowledge and they just didn’t develop the skill.
And I think then when unpredictable things start coming in the world, they realize they just don’t have the brain power, they don’t have the emotional strength, they don’t have the psychological strength to deal with unpredictable things. And that’s my thesis why there’s a lot of fragility in the world right now.
Shannon Waller: Yeah. So you’re saying it actually, it is based in the fact that the world has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union? And it’s interesting because—Peter Zeihan, you’re a huge fan, thanks to you, I’ve been turned on to him, was watching him last night actually, a great video by him. Just all the different ways it documents how the world’s changing and why, but people are attributing that change to things that are in fact political and national and...
Dan Sullivan: Economic. So they’re making up stories of why they’re not feeling good, but it has nothing to do with any of the reasons that they’re pointing out. They’re fictitious. They’re fraudulent. And the reason is that to fully engage with the idea that maybe our country is fragile is too big a thought. Because what do you if your country’s fragile, what does that do?
Shannon Waller: Well, let’s actually take that question seriously. And before I even ask you that—
Dan Sullivan: No, I’m going to bring this back to why Strategic Coach is an answer to this.
Shannon Waller: Perfect.
Dan Sullivan: It’s not like we’re off topic as far as the...
Shannon Waller: No. Not at all.
Dan Sullivan: …focus of our workshop, because what I noticed about our entrepreneurs who came through COVID, some cases they lost either, as was our case, we lost our entire income base. People couldn’t travel to workshops, so that was the end of our cash flow. And lots of others had it. And what I noticed is that skills they had learned in Strategic Coach really, really equipped them to turn what was a negative into a positive. So instead of coming out weaker and feeling more insecure, they came out stronger and feeling more confident.
Shannon Waller: Well you even said earlier, Dan, with regard to the results of different elections, to transform the obstacles into an advantage. And that really is the entrepreneurial mindset. And I’ve got daughters who are, to some degree or less, involved in the educational system and they’re finding exactly what you’re talking about.
My one daughter didn’t continue because she goes, “Mom, I would have to pay to take courses for that right now my job pays me to do that work, so why should I pay to do something that I can actually get paid for?” And I’m like, “I think that’s an excellent rationale. Go for it. Keep working." So it’s not as relevant, it’s not as useful. And more importantly, it’s not teaching people how to transform obstacles into advantages. So this is my next question is how can people become anti-fragile? What are some of the action steps, rationale, ways of approaching things that actually doesn’t keep them vulnerable this way? Because you’re right, it’s completely not a fun feeling to feel so much like you’re on shaky ground all the time. So what can we do?
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, for people other than who I come into contact, I can’t do anything for them. I’ve got a universe of team members in Coach, and I’ve got a universe of Strategic Coach clients. So in my case, I show them better ways of thinking, not about the world, but just about their world. If you’re feeling confident about your world, the big world doesn’t really matter.
Shannon Waller: I want to spend another moment on that because I think that is so key. It can be very overwhelming to focus on the big world and it makes your personal world pretty shaky. But when you have confidence in your world, the rest of it goes into kind of a shadow over there.
Dan Sullivan: Well, the world is an abstraction. Does the world have a email address? Does it have an office? Does it have a street address? Is it listed in phone directories? I mean, does the world have a cell phone that you can talk to the world? So people talk about the world as though it’s a reality, it’s just an abstraction. It’s just that when you get beyond the boundaries of the people that you actually know, you call all the other shapes out there the world.
Shannon Waller: That’s so true. I like that.
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I’ve never encountered the world. I only encounter people that I have relationships with. And when I walk through airports that are packed, I don’t pay any attention to, I keep my eyes out, they don’t collide with me. And we’ve taken courses where you have to watch out for bad people maybe there and that, and I keep myself alert when I’m in public places. But that’s not the world. And I don’t even know who those people are; I don’t have any relationship with them.
And I think there’s this attempt to say we should care about other people that we don’t know. And it’s not natural. I don’t wish them bad. And I would wish that other people have the means to lead good lives and lead productive and healthy lives and satisfying lives. But I have absolutely no influence whatsoever. And besides, I don’t have attention or energy in any day to really devote to them.
But I do to the people that I—I devote a lot of energy and a lot of attention and a lot of interest and a lot of care to you because you’re my creative partner on my podcasts, and you’re very important for my future. So I care a great deal about you. But you get out to number 151 and I just don’t have the juice every day. I wish I could extend my interest further, but I really don’t.
So my whole sense is that if you take care and you surround yourself by people who are growing, who are committed to growing, and they are courageous in developing new capabilities, and they gain new capabilities and their confidence goes [up a] level—and that’s for the five people around you, and then the 50 who are around them, and another 100 that are beyond them, you’re living in a great world.
Shannon Waller: So the antidote to the fragility is to really focus on what you can control and what you can impact. And with regard to your number 150, Dan, there’s a lot of research...
Dan Sullivan: It’s called Dunbar’s Law. That emotionally, we don’t have any emotional energy to devote to more than 150 people.
Shannon Waller: Was it the hypothesis that was kind of the village size and once it got beyond 150 people would leave and start to create another village further away because that’s kind of what the resources could handle?
Dan Sullivan: There’s a lot of evidence for that. But I think a lot of it came out of military units that the biggest operating military unit is not more than 150.
Shannon Waller: That’s cool. I like that.
Dan Sullivan: It’s the most number of people who will feel cohesive and integrated as a unit.
Shannon Waller: So Dan, what are some very specific things that people can do to take ownership over their own experience as opposed to getting overwhelmed by the world? And there’s a lot of input available, regular media, social media, whatever you choose to put your attention on. But if people can put their attention on their own lives, what are some very specific ways that they can turn what is an obstacle into an advantage?
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think as far as taking ownership over your experience, decide that you want to do that.
Shannon Waller: So tell me more about that. What does that mean exactly?
Dan Sullivan: Well, I want to own every part of my experience. I don’t want anyone else to have ownership over my experience. I don’t want them to tell me what my experience means. I don’t want them to think that they know what my experience is. So I’m a fairly significant shareholder in my experience.
Shannon Waller: So you’re going to have your own internal perception, decisions?
Dan Sullivan: And that concludes my bad experience, by the way. And so I never attribute my bad experiences to other people.
Shannon Waller: Well, that means you don’t blame?
Dan Sullivan: No blaming.
Shannon Waller: That’s interesting. So when you do blame others, you’re not taking responsibility. In my experience, there’s no power...
Dan Sullivan: You’re making yourself fragile because you’re attributing the strength in your life to somebody else. Instead of you having the strength, you’re attributing that someone else is so strong that I’m helpless. Well, that’s a fragile person. That makes you fragile. First of all, just that one act of blaming other people for bad things that have happened, that you think are bad, or making you feel uncomfortable, or feeling that they have advantages that you don’t have—every one of those thoughts makes you fragile.
Shannon Waller: The word that comes to mind is victim, and victims are not powerful. They’re not strong. They’re incredibly fragile. Fortunately, I haven’t been in the situation of being victimized, but I resist the word. It’s like, “Maybe I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I don’t want to be a victim because that takes away all my power and that does not sit well with me as an individual.” That makes total sense. So deciding to take complete ownership over your both good experiences and bad experiences, to not blame, to take full responsibility, good and bad. What are one or two other things ways that people can become anti fragile?
Dan Sullivan: Be clear about what you want that’s bigger and better than what you have right now. In other words, and that you would learn new things, you would develop new skills, and you would take advantage of other people’s knowledge and skills in order to achieve future results that are way bigger than the results that you’re experiencing right now. Victims aren’t goal setters, victims are not achievers, victims are not learners. Victims are...
Shannon Waller: Are victims.
Dan Sullivan: …lumps of self-pity.
Shannon Waller: So coming to grips with that, even though sometimes that’s incredibly hard work, is actually the path through to becoming strong and building muscles; as you said, emotional muscles, sometimes physical muscles, mental muscles to be strong and capable,
Dan Sullivan: Enjoy hard work.
Shannon Waller: And I think embracing hard work is an older work ethic, but it’s talked about less now, let me just put it that way.
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
Shannon Waller: Do people expect things to be easy, Dan?
Dan Sullivan: They want to get things without any effort on their part. To be given things. I think people want to be given things. But with the proviso that they complain that it’s not enough. Complainers are fragile.
Shannon Waller: This is a really simple example, Dan. We all ingest a lot of media, and I know you don’t watch television, which is… The world’s become a better place since you stopped.
Dan Sullivan: Specifically television. I watch YouTube; I have favorite speakers and thinkers that I watch their YouTube videos. And I read lots of books.
Shannon Waller: And I realize that often when I’m watching someone do something, I’m watching this sped up version. So in my head—first of all, I’m watching someone who’s expert who’s put hours and hours of experience in it. And then I’m watching someone who has not only done it really well and crafted it, but can do it quickly even without the video being sped up and then it sped up.
So I’m thinking that this cake or this painting or this, whatever they’re doing actually happens that way. It’s not true. Things take a lot more work, a lot more time, a lot more effort. And to actually embrace the fact that that’s normal, that’s good, that’s how we get it into our being. You can’t put on 20 pounds of muscle in one exercise session. This takes endurance a little bit.
Dan Sullivan: And I think that you can use physical terms to describe: you’re just eating carbohydrates with no protein. That makes you very fragile. It doesn’t take long on a diet of all...
Shannon Waller: Carbohydrates.
Dan Sullivan: And no protein. The other thing is that inside of you, you’re all fat and no muscle, you just don’t have any muscle. Well, somebody who doesn’t have any muscle is very fragile, I’ll tell you. And hard work and courage and ambition all build muscle.
Several times I’ve been in situations where people learned that I was drafted into the US Army during Vietnam, right at the beginning of Vietnam. So the official beginning of Vietnam, as far as the war goes is April. Then I was drafted in May and went to bootcamp, basic training in the beginning of July. And I ended up in South Korea for two years. Great experience. I just had a marvelous experience in the army. Loved every part of it. Found it really interesting, this big kind of lumbering organization where if you had your wits about it, you could get anything you wanted just by volunteering and having goals and trading value for other people. It was a remarkably easy organization to navigate through.
And then I get back, and then I would talk to people 20, 30 years later who had been anti-war during the 1960s, and a lot of them are in the massage industries. I like really deep tissue massage. And so somebody there who’s really strong, physically really strong, but you could tell he’s still wounded by the war. And I said, “Yeah, I was drafted in the middle of Vietnam.” He said, “Oh, that must have been horrible.” And I said, “Were you drafted during…?” And he says, “No, I had a deferment. I made sure I had my college deferment, so I wasn’t drafted in the war."
And I said, “So you didn’t have a bad time?” And he said “It was the most terrible, not being drafted and avoiding being drafted, it was just one of the scariest, it was almost a traumatic experience for me,” and everything like that. “And it seems like yesterday, I’m still, when I think about it.” And I just wonder because they didn’t come to grips with an experience they had 30 years ago. The experience has them in its grips 30 years later.
And I said, “No. I went, I enjoyed it.” And then I went to college after I went to the military, and everybody was petrified. And it wasn’t so much of an anti-war movement, it was an anti-draft movement.
Because the moment that Nixon, who was the president, he eliminated the draft, oh, all the demonstrations went away. The war was still going on, but there was no more draft. And then they just forgot about the war. So it wasn’t really about the war, it was really about them. And they envisioned themselves, the most horrible things happening to [themselves] and I didn’t. When I was drafted, I had three older brothers who had been in the military— voluntarily, three of them had been. I had another one later who went in voluntarily. I’m the only one who was drafted.
And I just decided, this is not going to be two wasted years of my life. I’m going to make them most of it. And little bit sad at the end that I had to be discharged. Not really. I wanted out, but I had such an enjoyable time. And I would say because I’m not fragile person, that no experience that other people think is bad can negatively impact me.
Shannon Waller: Have an old quote on my desk of something: “I refuse to get pushed around by life,” is a quote that I wrote down from you. One of your other quotes is, “You bother me and I’ll transform you.” Which is kind of fun. So you just have this conviction and it’s a mindset—and Coach and all of this, I think really comes down to mindset—that you are going to take any experience that either life provides for you, whether it was your idea or not, if it’s your own idea, and you are going to make the best of it. Either it’s going to be a great experience or it’s going to provide incredibly powerful learning so that you end up stronger, more capable, more resilient at the end of it. That’s just not an option for you. That’s how you live your life and you’re...
Dan Sullivan: Anything.
Shannon Waller: Anything. And you’re probably the most anti fragile person I know. So obviously this works, which is really fascinating. Dan, as always, this is a very interesting conversation. I love all the different places we’ve gone, and thanks for giving the solution for how to be anti-fragile. I really appreciate that.
Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Shannon.
He laughed and laughed and he said, “Well, that dirt was good for you. There’s just millions and millions of really good bacteria in the dirt.” Dirt on a farm is really healthy dirt. Not if it’s got a lot of disinfectants or herbicides.
Shannon Waller: Chemicals, yeah.
Dan Sullivan: You got to watch out for that. But that wasn’t true in the 1950s and 1960s. So it was just scoping out the extremes of how far I can go with this conversation right now.
Shannon Waller: That’s pretty far, Dan.
Dan Sullivan: But the whole point is that that’s one aspect of fragility, and I’ve just been really healthy all my life. I get occasional colds. I have the mandatory flus, I had mumps, I had measles. But what I noticed is I’m really physically robust.
Shannon Waller: That was the word I was thinking; robust is a good word. And the old expression, Dan, “You have to eat a pack of dirt before you die.” I think you accomplished that early, which I like.
Dan Sullivan: Do the heavy eating before you’re 10. But then I began thinking about it with changes in the world, certain elections, starting probably in the middle, the 2016 election, I noticed that people just had meltdowns. And I said, “It’s an election and you win some, you lose some.” And what I noticed, generally, when the vote is disappointing to you, you kind of shake it off the first day and you go back doing what’s really important in your life, like your work and being supportive of all the relationships you have in life.
But the fact that an election would depress me, I could never understand that. In my lifetime, in both the United States, and since I moved to Canada—I vote in both elections. So I’m a citizen of both countries. And so I get to vote in Toronto for city elections and provincial elections and then the national election, the federal election. And in the United States I vote for the off-year elections—which I’ll vote in a few weeks for the off-year election—I vote in the presidential elections. And what really interests me is that my batting average on voting is about 50%. I’m batting about 500, and the parties go like this and that. And I’m not overly elated when my party wins because as an entrepreneur, the only thing that a bad election in my way of thinking means is that there’s going to be more headwinds. There’s going to be taxes I don’t like, there’s going to be regulations I don’t like.
But the nature of what we coach in Strategic Coach, if you run into an obstacle, transform the obstacle into an advantage. So you’re just tacking with the wind. But some regimes come in for three or four years, the present one being one of them, where some of it seems bizarre to me, but it doesn’t really affect me emotionally. I said, that’s why they have elections every two years, every four years, and things can get corrected.
And so that was one big one. And then the COVID really, really was a prime example. And I just noticed people just having enormous meltdowns because they were locked down or they were fearful. The first news reports is tens of millions of people are going to die. One “expert” in London predicted that more than 10 million Americans would die from COVID. And it’s a little bit more than 1 million have died. Not too much different than normal flu over a two- or three-year period. And there’s a lot of people who die because they went to the hospital. Even the American Medical Association admits that hospitals are one of the most dangerous places that you can actually go. There’s a lot of disease in hospitals and it gets carried around.
So one of the things that I think that—just as a general statement, stepping back about fragility—one of the biggest reasons why people are fragile is that they’re ignorant.
Shannon Waller: So that’s a really interesting statement, Dan. So they’re ignorant. So they’re, as the expression goes, “In their feels,” they’re feeling things, but they don’t actually know the rationale or the science or the facts behind the circumstances. Is that what you’re saying?
Dan Sullivan: Or the reality of the threats. They really don’t know the reality of the threat. They’re obviously experiencing a threat of some sort, but I don’t think that they’ve actually studied it. They’ve picked it up in social media or they’ve picked it up—
Shannon Waller: Or regular media?
Dan Sullivan: Regular media. Or people. They travel in circles that are sort of fear mongering circles, kind of threat cycles. And what it means is they don’t have knowledge; they haven’t really actually studied it. I’ve read about 25 books on the climate situation, and more and more it said that carbon dioxide—first of all, we know that carbon dioxide is wonderful for plants and that in fact, as carbon dioxide grows the amount of it, and we’re not by any means at high levels. We’re still in the very, very low range of carbon dioxide since we’ve had a atmosphere on the planet, which is about 4.5 million years that we’ve had an atmosphere. And it’s a very minute, very, very tiny portion of the atmosphere.
And that in fact, what they’re discovering, is they know when the cold periods were, they know where the warming periods were because they can measure against all sorts of geological and they can measure against trees that live a long time. You can see how much carbon dioxide they had or what the impact was. And it seems now that whenever the earth warms, about 20 years later, the carbon dioxide starts going up.
So the carbon dioxide doesn’t go up and then the earth warms; the earth warms and then the carbon dioxide goes up. And what the thesis is right now is the ocean water warming up and there’s an enormous storage of carbon dioxide in the oceans. And when they warm up, they release some of the carbon dioxide into the air. And this is for scientific debate. What do you think? They’re looking at the evidence.
Shannon Waller: It seems like people are very vulnerable or susceptible. That this whole “fragile”—it seems, my joke has been “rationality seems to have left the building.” So I concur with you, Dan. Why is it that people are just so ungrounded, just not asking those questions? What are your thoughts as to where this mindset came from, and most importantly, how people can become anti-fragile? How can they become stronger?
Dan Sullivan: I’ve got a guess. And I think it has to do with what happened in the world after the Second World War. By no means my original research or study here, but the First [World] War in the Second [World] War, they’re basically the same war with a pause in between. And absolutely the most two destructive events in the history of the world. And it left almost every other country weaker and poorer as a result of it. Even the countries that won, like Great Britain, paid a huge price for those two wars. They were one of the great powers before the first war, and they had been diminished enormously and they were very poor. Rationing of certain key things in society lasted until 1960, 15 years later, rationing in Great Britain.
But one country ended up on top and it was the United States. And the United States got stronger because of the Second World War. Its economy boomed. And it had no physical damage except for the island of Oahu in Hawaii. That was the only part of America that was actually damaged by the war. And that was a half hour event right at the beginning of the war. And the United States ended up with a navy that’s hard for people to comprehend how powerful the US Navy is.
If you take all the other navies in the world and put them together, the American Navy is 10 times greater in power than all the other navies in the world right now put together.
Shannon Waller: 10 times?
Dan Sullivan: 10 times, yeah. One of their carrier groups, which is aircraft carrier with about 80 jets on it, and then a whole flotilla of other ships plus submarines and all the satellite technology and communication goes along with that, is equal to about all, except about three or four other navies. Just one of them in the US has 11 of these carrier groups.
And what they did with the carrier groups, they guaranteed world trade. First of all, the US opened up its treasury and lent enormous amounts of money to anybody who wanted to rebuild their economy and start manufacturing. And a lot of countries who were never manufacturing countries became manufacturing countries. You had globalization and global population increased by a factor of three; I think it was three times, in 75 years, the global population has tripled. Those in poverty has been reduced by 90%.
The same measure measured poverty in 1945. It’s down 90%. People are healthier. Average longevity shot up about 35 years. And by any measure you want to use, material life has just gotten incredibly better around the planet. Global tourism thrived. But it was basically because the United States was financing this global peace, and the US Military was guaranteeing that there was freedom of shipping, there was freedom of passage, freedom of transportation everywhere on the planet.
All right. So that story is—but it was premised on one factor and that was the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union had goal to take over the whole world with what is basically a no-fun system, a very, very bleak no-fun system. And whatever the Soviets touched got worse as a result of their touching it.
So America said, “We can’t let this—it’s like a cancer—we can’t allow this cancer to get out.” And so they cooped them up and they created a prosperity curtain around the iron curtain. So what happened then, this is a long story short, but it ended 31 years ago, it was December 1991. The Soviet Union, without anyone’s permission, collapsed. But the rest of the world had such a good deal going from the financial and military protection that the United States paid, that they acted as if nothing had happened. But starting at right the next year, American presidents saying, “Why are we doing this anymore? The game’s over. Why are we still on the field when the game’s over? Why have none of the people in the stands left?"
And everybody’s just cheering and cheering and cheering because no one wants the deal to end. It was a very cheap deal. Most countries didn’t have to pay anything for defense. All the money that used to go to defending themselves—no defense problems. And they poured it into social programs and all sorts of other things, but not really keeping themselves robust as countries.
The world, except for the United States, became very fragile defensively. And we live in one of them called Canada. Canada doesn’t pay anything for its defense because the United States provides all the protection. And my sense is that the fragility really starts at the national level. There’s a sense in the country, if anything bad really happened, we don’t know that we could actually pull things off here.
So there’s a creeping sense of fragility that starts at the national level and then it works its way down through society, through the educational system. And there’s a certain amount of make-believe that comes into people’s thinking about the world. “Well, the United States really isn’t that important, and it’s kind of a bad country anyway.” And they start criticizing.
The reason why they’re criticizing this country is because their entire future depends upon this country. And that doesn’t feel good that our entire sense of protection and health and fitness depends upon this one country. And the whole educational system is pumping out jobs that are going into organizations that are tied to a world which the United States, starting about 30 years ago, said, “We’re not going to support and protect anymore.” And we’re 30 years down the road.
And what it means is that you go off to college and you study things that only have a bureaucratic use after you graduate. In other words, you’re not learning a skill, you’re not learning a trade, you’re not learning how to make things, you’re not learning how to invent things. You’re learning how to have meetings in bureaucratic organizations and sound like you’re knowledgeable.
Somewhere around the last five or six years, it’s dawned on a lot of children—and it’s dawned on their parents—that the educational system is essentially worthless for making the children strong. It’s an educational system that makes children fragile. So I think what we’re doing is we’re getting the full impact of about 30 or 40 years of an educational system that teaches children to be frightened and to be scared and to blame their problems on other factors besides the fact that they just didn’t do the work and they just didn’t learn the knowledge and they just didn’t develop the skill.
And I think then when unpredictable things start coming in the world, they realize they just don’t have the brain power, they don’t have the emotional strength, they don’t have the psychological strength to deal with unpredictable things. And that’s my thesis why there’s a lot of fragility in the world right now.
Shannon Waller: Yeah. So you’re saying it actually, it is based in the fact that the world has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union? And it’s interesting because—Peter Zeihan, you’re a huge fan, thanks to you, I’ve been turned on to him, was watching him last night actually, a great video by him. Just all the different ways it documents how the world’s changing and why, but people are attributing that change to things that are in fact political and national and...
Dan Sullivan: Economic. So they’re making up stories of why they’re not feeling good, but it has nothing to do with any of the reasons that they’re pointing out. They’re fictitious. They’re fraudulent. And the reason is that to fully engage with the idea that maybe our country is fragile is too big a thought. Because what do you if your country’s fragile, what does that do?
Shannon Waller: Well, let’s actually take that question seriously. And before I even ask you that—
Dan Sullivan: No, I’m going to bring this back to why Strategic Coach is an answer to this.
Shannon Waller: Perfect.
Dan Sullivan: It’s not like we’re off topic as far as the...
Shannon Waller: No. Not at all.
Dan Sullivan: …focus of our workshop, because what I noticed about our entrepreneurs who came through COVID, some cases they lost either, as was our case, we lost our entire income base. People couldn’t travel to workshops, so that was the end of our cash flow. And lots of others had it. And what I noticed is that skills they had learned in Strategic Coach really, really equipped them to turn what was a negative into a positive. So instead of coming out weaker and feeling more insecure, they came out stronger and feeling more confident.
Shannon Waller: Well you even said earlier, Dan, with regard to the results of different elections, to transform the obstacles into an advantage. And that really is the entrepreneurial mindset. And I’ve got daughters who are, to some degree or less, involved in the educational system and they’re finding exactly what you’re talking about.
My one daughter didn’t continue because she goes, “Mom, I would have to pay to take courses for that right now my job pays me to do that work, so why should I pay to do something that I can actually get paid for?” And I’m like, “I think that’s an excellent rationale. Go for it. Keep working." So it’s not as relevant, it’s not as useful. And more importantly, it’s not teaching people how to transform obstacles into advantages. So this is my next question is how can people become anti-fragile? What are some of the action steps, rationale, ways of approaching things that actually doesn’t keep them vulnerable this way? Because you’re right, it’s completely not a fun feeling to feel so much like you’re on shaky ground all the time. So what can we do?
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, for people other than who I come into contact, I can’t do anything for them. I’ve got a universe of team members in Coach, and I’ve got a universe of Strategic Coach clients. So in my case, I show them better ways of thinking, not about the world, but just about their world. If you’re feeling confident about your world, the big world doesn’t really matter.
Shannon Waller: I want to spend another moment on that because I think that is so key. It can be very overwhelming to focus on the big world and it makes your personal world pretty shaky. But when you have confidence in your world, the rest of it goes into kind of a shadow over there.
Dan Sullivan: Well, the world is an abstraction. Does the world have a email address? Does it have an office? Does it have a street address? Is it listed in phone directories? I mean, does the world have a cell phone that you can talk to the world? So people talk about the world as though it’s a reality, it’s just an abstraction. It’s just that when you get beyond the boundaries of the people that you actually know, you call all the other shapes out there the world.
Shannon Waller: That’s so true. I like that.
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I’ve never encountered the world. I only encounter people that I have relationships with. And when I walk through airports that are packed, I don’t pay any attention to, I keep my eyes out, they don’t collide with me. And we’ve taken courses where you have to watch out for bad people maybe there and that, and I keep myself alert when I’m in public places. But that’s not the world. And I don’t even know who those people are; I don’t have any relationship with them.
And I think there’s this attempt to say we should care about other people that we don’t know. And it’s not natural. I don’t wish them bad. And I would wish that other people have the means to lead good lives and lead productive and healthy lives and satisfying lives. But I have absolutely no influence whatsoever. And besides, I don’t have attention or energy in any day to really devote to them.
But I do to the people that I—I devote a lot of energy and a lot of attention and a lot of interest and a lot of care to you because you’re my creative partner on my podcasts, and you’re very important for my future. So I care a great deal about you. But you get out to number 151 and I just don’t have the juice every day. I wish I could extend my interest further, but I really don’t.
So my whole sense is that if you take care and you surround yourself by people who are growing, who are committed to growing, and they are courageous in developing new capabilities, and they gain new capabilities and their confidence goes [up a] level—and that’s for the five people around you, and then the 50 who are around them, and another 100 that are beyond them, you’re living in a great world.
Shannon Waller: So the antidote to the fragility is to really focus on what you can control and what you can impact. And with regard to your number 150, Dan, there’s a lot of research...
Dan Sullivan: It’s called Dunbar’s Law. That emotionally, we don’t have any emotional energy to devote to more than 150 people.
Shannon Waller: Was it the hypothesis that was kind of the village size and once it got beyond 150 people would leave and start to create another village further away because that’s kind of what the resources could handle?
Dan Sullivan: There’s a lot of evidence for that. But I think a lot of it came out of military units that the biggest operating military unit is not more than 150.
Shannon Waller: That’s cool. I like that.
Dan Sullivan: It’s the most number of people who will feel cohesive and integrated as a unit.
Shannon Waller: So Dan, what are some very specific things that people can do to take ownership over their own experience as opposed to getting overwhelmed by the world? And there’s a lot of input available, regular media, social media, whatever you choose to put your attention on. But if people can put their attention on their own lives, what are some very specific ways that they can turn what is an obstacle into an advantage?
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think as far as taking ownership over your experience, decide that you want to do that.
Shannon Waller: So tell me more about that. What does that mean exactly?
Dan Sullivan: Well, I want to own every part of my experience. I don’t want anyone else to have ownership over my experience. I don’t want them to tell me what my experience means. I don’t want them to think that they know what my experience is. So I’m a fairly significant shareholder in my experience.
Shannon Waller: So you’re going to have your own internal perception, decisions?
Dan Sullivan: And that concludes my bad experience, by the way. And so I never attribute my bad experiences to other people.
Shannon Waller: Well, that means you don’t blame?
Dan Sullivan: No blaming.
Shannon Waller: That’s interesting. So when you do blame others, you’re not taking responsibility. In my experience, there’s no power...
Dan Sullivan: You’re making yourself fragile because you’re attributing the strength in your life to somebody else. Instead of you having the strength, you’re attributing that someone else is so strong that I’m helpless. Well, that’s a fragile person. That makes you fragile. First of all, just that one act of blaming other people for bad things that have happened, that you think are bad, or making you feel uncomfortable, or feeling that they have advantages that you don’t have—every one of those thoughts makes you fragile.
Shannon Waller: The word that comes to mind is victim, and victims are not powerful. They’re not strong. They’re incredibly fragile. Fortunately, I haven’t been in the situation of being victimized, but I resist the word. It’s like, “Maybe I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I don’t want to be a victim because that takes away all my power and that does not sit well with me as an individual.” That makes total sense. So deciding to take complete ownership over your both good experiences and bad experiences, to not blame, to take full responsibility, good and bad. What are one or two other things ways that people can become anti fragile?
Dan Sullivan: Be clear about what you want that’s bigger and better than what you have right now. In other words, and that you would learn new things, you would develop new skills, and you would take advantage of other people’s knowledge and skills in order to achieve future results that are way bigger than the results that you’re experiencing right now. Victims aren’t goal setters, victims are not achievers, victims are not learners. Victims are...
Shannon Waller: Are victims.
Dan Sullivan: …lumps of self-pity.
Shannon Waller: So coming to grips with that, even though sometimes that’s incredibly hard work, is actually the path through to becoming strong and building muscles; as you said, emotional muscles, sometimes physical muscles, mental muscles to be strong and capable,
Dan Sullivan: Enjoy hard work.
Shannon Waller: And I think embracing hard work is an older work ethic, but it’s talked about less now, let me just put it that way.
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
Shannon Waller: Do people expect things to be easy, Dan?
Dan Sullivan: They want to get things without any effort on their part. To be given things. I think people want to be given things. But with the proviso that they complain that it’s not enough. Complainers are fragile.
Shannon Waller: This is a really simple example, Dan. We all ingest a lot of media, and I know you don’t watch television, which is… The world’s become a better place since you stopped.
Dan Sullivan: Specifically television. I watch YouTube; I have favorite speakers and thinkers that I watch their YouTube videos. And I read lots of books.
Shannon Waller: And I realize that often when I’m watching someone do something, I’m watching this sped up version. So in my head—first of all, I’m watching someone who’s expert who’s put hours and hours of experience in it. And then I’m watching someone who has not only done it really well and crafted it, but can do it quickly even without the video being sped up and then it sped up.
So I’m thinking that this cake or this painting or this, whatever they’re doing actually happens that way. It’s not true. Things take a lot more work, a lot more time, a lot more effort. And to actually embrace the fact that that’s normal, that’s good, that’s how we get it into our being. You can’t put on 20 pounds of muscle in one exercise session. This takes endurance a little bit.
Dan Sullivan: And I think that you can use physical terms to describe: you’re just eating carbohydrates with no protein. That makes you very fragile. It doesn’t take long on a diet of all...
Shannon Waller: Carbohydrates.
Dan Sullivan: And no protein. The other thing is that inside of you, you’re all fat and no muscle, you just don’t have any muscle. Well, somebody who doesn’t have any muscle is very fragile, I’ll tell you. And hard work and courage and ambition all build muscle.
Several times I’ve been in situations where people learned that I was drafted into the US Army during Vietnam, right at the beginning of Vietnam. So the official beginning of Vietnam, as far as the war goes is April. Then I was drafted in May and went to bootcamp, basic training in the beginning of July. And I ended up in South Korea for two years. Great experience. I just had a marvelous experience in the army. Loved every part of it. Found it really interesting, this big kind of lumbering organization where if you had your wits about it, you could get anything you wanted just by volunteering and having goals and trading value for other people. It was a remarkably easy organization to navigate through.
And then I get back, and then I would talk to people 20, 30 years later who had been anti-war during the 1960s, and a lot of them are in the massage industries. I like really deep tissue massage. And so somebody there who’s really strong, physically really strong, but you could tell he’s still wounded by the war. And I said, “Yeah, I was drafted in the middle of Vietnam.” He said, “Oh, that must have been horrible.” And I said, “Were you drafted during…?” And he says, “No, I had a deferment. I made sure I had my college deferment, so I wasn’t drafted in the war."
And I said, “So you didn’t have a bad time?” And he said “It was the most terrible, not being drafted and avoiding being drafted, it was just one of the scariest, it was almost a traumatic experience for me,” and everything like that. “And it seems like yesterday, I’m still, when I think about it.” And I just wonder because they didn’t come to grips with an experience they had 30 years ago. The experience has them in its grips 30 years later.
And I said, “No. I went, I enjoyed it.” And then I went to college after I went to the military, and everybody was petrified. And it wasn’t so much of an anti-war movement, it was an anti-draft movement.
Because the moment that Nixon, who was the president, he eliminated the draft, oh, all the demonstrations went away. The war was still going on, but there was no more draft. And then they just forgot about the war. So it wasn’t really about the war, it was really about them. And they envisioned themselves, the most horrible things happening to [themselves] and I didn’t. When I was drafted, I had three older brothers who had been in the military— voluntarily, three of them had been. I had another one later who went in voluntarily. I’m the only one who was drafted.
And I just decided, this is not going to be two wasted years of my life. I’m going to make them most of it. And little bit sad at the end that I had to be discharged. Not really. I wanted out, but I had such an enjoyable time. And I would say because I’m not fragile person, that no experience that other people think is bad can negatively impact me.
Shannon Waller: Have an old quote on my desk of something: “I refuse to get pushed around by life,” is a quote that I wrote down from you. One of your other quotes is, “You bother me and I’ll transform you.” Which is kind of fun. So you just have this conviction and it’s a mindset—and Coach and all of this, I think really comes down to mindset—that you are going to take any experience that either life provides for you, whether it was your idea or not, if it’s your own idea, and you are going to make the best of it. Either it’s going to be a great experience or it’s going to provide incredibly powerful learning so that you end up stronger, more capable, more resilient at the end of it. That’s just not an option for you. That’s how you live your life and you’re...
Dan Sullivan: Anything.
Shannon Waller: Anything. And you’re probably the most anti fragile person I know. So obviously this works, which is really fascinating. Dan, as always, this is a very interesting conversation. I love all the different places we’ve gone, and thanks for giving the solution for how to be anti-fragile. I really appreciate that.
Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Shannon.