Collecting Years And Only Gaining Momentum

Jeff Madoff: This is Jeffrey Madoff, and welcome to our podcast called “Anything and Everything”, with my partner, Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: So, Jeff, to start off this episode of “Anything and Everything”, I was asked by one of my team members who follows the series, how is it that two seventy-year-olds act as if what they’re doing in their seventies is more exciting than anything that they’ve done before 70. So, I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought, because I thought I’d save it for today, because you’re the only other seventy-year-old that I’m actually doing a podcast series with.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, it’s an interesting question, because the only time I think about the age part is when I see people who have died that are younger than me.
 
Dan Sullivan: Which is happening more and more often.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. And I am aware, and actually the shutdown time during COVID was a kind of a forced focus for me. Because as wonderful as the clients I had, you know, Ralph Lauren for 38 years, and Victoria’s Secret for 27 years, I knew I didn’t have that kind of time ahead of me. And so it became more about focusing on the things that meant the most to me and defining that, which meant taking on totally new kinds of challenges, because my mantra has become, “If not now, when?”
 
So I think it’s a combination of things we’ve spoken about over our many conversations, which is you gain confidence, which is through capability. But then the courage that it takes, because you have no idea really what the outcome is going to be, and you’re sort of just stepping off that edge, that’s exciting. I guess that because I am older, my family is taken care of, and my kids are doing well, that you can afford to take those kind of wilder chances. And I find those things invigorating.
 
So I guess it’s part of that is not having the fear hold me back. Because what am I waiting for?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, and I just thought of this as you were talking about this, when I was 70, which was in 2014, we had a company meeting right around this time of year. So we have, you know, at that time, and we still do, we have about 130 team members in the company. And I said to them, “First of all, I don’t know if you know any seventy-year-olds,” because I’m older than most of their grandparents, “but what would happen if Babs and I,” who created the company, and we’re sort of the cutting edge of the company all the time, “what would happen if our plane,” we fly everywhere together, we spend all our time together, “what happened if the plane didn’t land right? And you got a call from Air Canada that we weren’t going to be around anymore? First of all, how many of you that would be bad news? And I’m taking names here. But what would you do? What would you do if we weren’t around anymore?”
 
So I’ll speed up the action here. What we did is we did a exercise with our key leaders, and the key leaders did the exercise with their teams. And it was, “What would you do during the first 100 days?” So I created a little thinking tool that what, in fact, would you do personally, individually, in the first 100 days if Dan and Babs weren’t here anymore?
 
And they had to fill this in. It takes about an hour for them to think it through. And then with 18 of them, we met with them individually and had them talk about what they would do, and two very interesting things were almost identical for all the 18.
 
In Strategic Coach, we have a concept, and you’ve interviewed me on this for Genius Network, and I think it’s probably come up here on “Anything and Everything”. Our central concept in the Strategic Coach is called Unique Ability, that everybody’s got a Unique Ability, and it’s where you have no competition. There’s no competition for Unique Ability if the word ‘unique’ actually means anything. What do unique people have in common? Well, they have absolutely nothing in common. They’re unique. You can’t have it both ways. It’s either unique or it’s not.
 
But I believe every person has uniqueness. And if you establish a structure where they can identify that and where they can spend more and more of their time doing that, and it works for the company, I mean, it’s got to work for the company, but then they can have their Unique Ability link up with other people’s Unique Ability to create Unique Ability Teamwork, and that’s the organizing and expanding structure for Strategic Coach. So the thing that I was amazed at is that they all went right to what their Unique Ability was.
 
And the second trend that emerged, and they all did this, was “I can’t be worrying about what other people, what the other teams, what the other team leaders in the company are doing. I just have to focus on what we can do in the next 100 days.”
 
And then, I’m not sure all of them did this, but they told Babs, and they told me, what they wanted us to do that would put them in the best possible position to do what they needed to do. And with Babs, you know, Babs was to just talk about how she puts teams together. Babs is just a great team organizer. She just has an amazing ability just to put a whole bunch of people together and give them a sense of direction. And they wanted her to talk whenever she was able to be interviewed and videoed, how she approaches putting teams together.
 
And with me, because I’m the originator of all the material in Strategic Coach, they asked me, “Just create and create and create and have lots of stuff on the shelf, so that if you’re gone, we have another five to ten years of your creativity.” And that happened at 70, and I’ll be 80 next May, so I’m in my 80th year. And I’ve created more in the last nine years than I had before I was 70. So this has been my big creativity decade. Okay? And that’s why I’m excited, because I kind of like being freed up just to create new stuff.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, that’s a great position to be in. I would consider you uniquely unique.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, as uniquely unique as other unique people.
 
Jeff Madoff: I thought our signal had dropped there for a moment.
 
Dan Sullivan: We’re dealing with a very fundamental metaphysical issue here. Do words actually mean what they say they mean? Because there’s a lot of slipping and sliding these days about the meaning of words.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes, there is.
 
When I turned 70 in 2019…
 
Dan Sullivan: You were always late.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. You know, I was standing there waiting for that train to come, but it was just across another track.
 
Actually, a friend of mine told me this, because I had not thought about it, he said, “Well, you know, so when you turn 70 a month later, you did your first full up workshop of the play. Your book was published. You did a five-part series at the Sci Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. Then you’ve had two commercial runs of your play, first in Malvern in the Fuller, and then Chicago. And now we’re looking at London.” And I’ve basically shifted all my attention away from the business that I had been doing for the previous 40-some years, which I really liked, but there was nothing unique there for me to do anymore. I had done what I could do. I enjoyed doing it, but I wanted something else.
 
And so you’ve mentioned this to me, because I hadn’t thought about this, either, which shows you how oblivious I am, which is part of why, you know, being in my 70s, I mean, it’s surreal to me, to be in my 70s. It’s weird, because the other factor I have that marks time is I’ve got two kids. And, you know, as I see them get older, it’s just, the passage of time, you know, when every Thanksgiving for a few decades, my sister has been putting together a big family Thanksgiving. Well, my parents used to be the elders at the table, and now my sister and I are. And it’s all weird to me. You know? I mean, it’s the way it should be. But when I think about it, it’s surreal because you know, people have said, “Well, why are you starting to do a play now?” I mean, why not? You know, it’s what I want to do. So why not? And because I don’t golf, play cards, you know, those kinds of things. What I get the greatest gratification out of is that creative expression and that journey that that I’m grateful that you’ve been along with me.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think one thing, because you talk about it being weird, but what’s it weird in reference to? Things are only weird because there must be something that’s, you know, normal or average or… The only reason why you would use the word ‘weird’ is because it’s out of the ordinary.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right, unless I’m just weird in how I use it. Yeah, that’s possible, too. But the thing that’s weird about it, to me, I remember when I turned 30, that just was not a big deal. And so many people I know, including my daughter, who is heading towards 30, she’ll be 30 in October, my daughter and son, that’s hitting them, is “God, 30.”
 
Forty really didn’t mean anything. Fifty, nothing. Sixty, no. Turning 70, I was more conscious that there’s more behind me than ahead of me. Not in any morbid sense, it’s just a realization that, you know, that’s reality. I mean, you know, my parents have passed. You know, and it’s funny because there’s certain thresholds along the way. Like I remember first noticing like when I got stopped for a speeding ticket that I was older than the police. That was weird. I remember a big thing was when I was older than my dentist. Then when I was older than my doctor.
 
And so all those things compounded, I’m aware that it’s the normal passage of time. And in that way, it’s not weird. But it’s weird in the sense that it’s the first time I’ve dealt with thinking about those things.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I think to a certain extent, to be in your seventies and not only working, but working on the most exciting projects of your life is out of the ordinary. I mean, if you do it as a comparison with general population and how the general population of their seventies gets talked about, you know, and how other people who are 70 who aren’t working and aren’t doing anything creative, how they talk about it to you, because to a certain extent, it’s a bit of a challenge. It’s a bit of a challenge to them. It’s not a challenge to me talking to them, but I think what I’m doing is a challenge to them.
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh, I think you’re right. But I think if you look back, I know if I look back on my life, that challenge to them, so to speak, I’ve learned that so often, when people are telling you something, it’s projection of their own insecurities or their own desires or whatever. I mean, even when I was in my sixties, people were saying, “Well, why are you working so hard?”
 
Dan Sullivan: Why are you working? [cross-talk]
 
Jeff Madoff: And yes, yeah. And I vividly remember my father’s fortieth birthday. I was 10 and it was at our house and, you know, 40 people there or whatever. And my dad was very active. You know, when we were kids, and our parents were in their forties, I mean, that’s like, you know, heading into the sunset already. Fifties, you’re old. And they were saying to my dad, “Ralph, when are you going to stop running around the tennis court, like you’re a teenager? You’re 40 now. You need to slow down.” And he would just, you know, kind of laugh it off and continued to play into his seventies. And I felt like they’re saying that because they don’t do it, and him doing it is like a threat to their sedentary nature.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know what I found? It was a chance comment that someone had and they said, ”Do you find when people get older, they get wiser?”
 
And I said, “No, I wouldn’t say that. I think when they get older, they’re simply who they practice being all their life.”
 
Jeff Madoff: And I would add to that, that when they’re older, some of them have been dumber for longer.
 
Dan Sullivan: But they’ve gained no wisdom.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, wisdom is a skill. You know, you’ve got to practice it early.
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, it’s like typing, you know, or riding a bike: There’s a right period of time to educate yourself from a muscle-memory standpoint on doing that sort of stuff.
 
I think the whole thing of aging is kind of a private and scary world for most individuals.
 
Jeff Madoff: You know, I think that you’re right, but I think it’s because so many people are just so isolated.
 
Dan Sullivan: ‘Isolate’ is really the word I wanted to use there.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, and I think that that we’re seeing so much of the result of isolation that was also became a fact of life for a while. And we don’t know the ongoing damage or trauma. And I think it is trauma that’s affected a lot of people as a result.
 
So I think that, yes, we hope we gain wisdom. But I do find it interesting that people have a much greater tendency to challenge somebody doing something because they’re not doing something. And it’s like, you know, in whatever competition they may see themselves in, the fact that you’re doing something is a threat. I don’t know why it is, because I don’t, I don’t feel threatened by them doing nothing. And good friends who you have relationships with, and connections where you are not isolated, and you can talk about topics like death, like, whatever it is, there’s nothing with my closest friends, like you met my dear friend, Ellis, there’s nothing that is not on the table for discussion. Nothing.
 
When you have those connections, obviously, you don’t feel isolated by definition, because you are part of a community. Even if it’s just a very few people, you’re part of something. But why do you think it is that people are threatened by other people’s activity?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I think we’re getting down to something fundamental with this, because my feeling is that self-comparison has been a very important activity for them from the very beginning.
 
Jeff Madoff: Tell me what you mean by that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, that whether they’re doing the right thing or not doing the right thing depends on how they’re aligning their behavior with other people’s behavior. And they’re comparing themselves all along.
 
When you’re in your teens, I think it starts in the teens, because children for the most part are oriented towards their parents up until, I think, probably about age 10. You know, when your kid is 10, that’s the last time in your life that you’re a hero. Somewhere between 10 and 11, they go sideways and it becomes ‘peer’.
 
Jeff Madoff: Just some evidence to your point with Jake and Audrey, my kids, you know, what worked for a while was, “Okay, we’re going to count to three. And if you don’t stop it…” And I remember at one point I said to Margaret, “One of the things I realized, we got nothing. We got nothing.”
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, because all they’re interested in is what happens at four.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: “All right, one, two, three...”
 
“Okay, we’ve been through one, two, three. What actually happens when you get to four?”
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right. And they have the courage at that point to go for it. And actually, why not go for it? Because if you can’t come up with an answer, then what do they have to be afraid of? And I never wanted my kids to be afraid, nor did my wife. We never ever wanted… And this is true in business, too. I have seen so much fear-based management, but I think those are the same people that use fear to manage their home life, too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and they use fear to manage themselves.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right, that’s the most fundamental. You’re right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, so my sense was that there’s this locket…
 
I was fortunate when I look back, because I had no peer relationships period until I was in first grade simply because I was a farm kid and I have a particular birth order that meant that the first humans that I really got connected with were all adults. And then when I got to first grade, age six, 1950, I encountered all these little people with their parents’ faces, and they didn’t know anything. You know?
 
I’d been talking to people about the First World War, the Great Depression, the Roaring Twenties, the Spanish Flu epidemic and everything, and then I hit these six-year-olds and they don’t really know anything. So I just continued on with teachers and coaches and, you know, people who ran businesses in the community and everything. I was just very, very… Because I had learned how to ask questions of adults, you know?
 
My one question, which to this day has been very meaningful, my one question, I would say to somebody who was 45, I was six, and I would say, “When you were my age, what was going on in your world?” And they’d talk, and they’d talk, and they’d tell me the history of a period 40 years before. So I said, “This is easy stuff. This is really easy.” There are some difficulties as you go along, but I found that very interesting.
 
But I think what’s unique, going back to the ‘unique’ and the ‘weird’ notion, is that I don’t think either of us ever mastered the skill of self-comparison. I think we missed the classes on self-comparison.
 
Jeff Madoff: Go a little more into that self-comparison. Just help me to understand what you mean by that, which I guess might be evidence that you’re correct.
 
Dan Sullivan: You’re going along a comfortable road here.
 
Anyway, I simply mean what other people were doing had no impact on what I was going to do.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. That’s true. Yeah, I never thought about that.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I haven’t to this day. You know, and part of it is the concept of Unique Ability. Well, they have a Unique Ability and they’re doing what they’re doing with their Unique Ability. And I have a Unique Ability and I’m doing what I’m doing. And therefore there’s no comparison between what I’m doing and what they’re doing.
 
But here’s the thing that I find is a real divider is it helps to know what your Unique Ability is. And most people don’t.
 
Jeff Madoff: So how does one discover their Unique Ability?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think it’s a decision. I think it’s a decision. And it’s usually a decision made in negative circumstances. To use your own example, people would say, one, two, three to me, and I’d say, “Two times three is six. One plus two is three. That’s six. That’s interesting.” I think it was that you have a vision for yourself, and I like Palmer Luckey, who’s a 30-year-old who created Oculus. And he said, “You know, everybody talks about following their dream.” He said, “I don’t follow dreams, I follow my talent. I just have a really good handle at what I’m good at, and I just keep looking at bigger and better situations where I can use my talent.” And I think that that’s probably as good an example of how you get started. You make a decision about what it is that you’re gonna focus on.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, so here’s what I think happens a lot in that world, is that, and whether you’re an entrepreneur, and we can talk about entrepreneurs who do that, so many of them, it’s not that they focus on what they’re really good at. They have met with some success, and momentum took over. And all of a sudden they have obligations, be it staff, overhead, they’re building a business. God forbid they should look like they did something wrong or failed at something. We have both witnessed lots of the hyperbolic bullshit in that world. And I think that a lot of times momentum takes over. And when you have that momentum, because then you’ve got an ongoing business and it’s generating money and you keep going and going, and then you hit into your forties or fifties and think, “It’s empty,” because you never asked yourself the serious questions is “What does success mean to me? What does it look like for me? What is it that I really want out of my life, out of my relationships?” That sort of a thing.
 
So I think with a lot of people, their momentum takes over. And until things either slow down, or maybe they hit a wall in their own life, you know, realizing that time has passed and relationships have fallen away, whatever it is, whatever it is, they don’t ask themselves those questions. And so, I mean, you can have talents. I think sometimes what you’re saying about finding your talent, you just keep applying it, is sometimes something worked early on and you didn’t explore anything else.
 
Dan Sullivan: I don’t think we have a real great sense of who we are—and there’s a lot of studies now that are indicating that an individual’s brain isn’t fully formed until about 24, okay? And therefore, decisions you’re making about yourself when you’re a teenager are, I don’t think it really brings up a great deal of self-awareness. I think being aware of your circumstances is an ability, and it operates on a bell-curve. I think all human abilities operate on a bell-curve. And what I mean is, it’s a classic bell-curve, you know, and depending on how it’s interpreted, one side of the bell-curve, you have 100% of that ability, and the other side of the bell-curve, you have zero. Okay? And then in the media, population-wise, there’s very few on either end, and there’s a lot spread in the middle. So most people have an ability that, you know, if it’s 50% to great, then they have that ability.
 
For example, I’m not a great writer, but I’m a good enough writer to make a living at it. Which most people aren’t. Okay? And you could take any other skill and say the same thing, “But would you have enough skill to make a living at it?”
 
From an adult standpoint, looking at a child, if they’re observant, they’ll actually say, “You know, you should really do more of this, you’re really, really good at this.” If they’re a good adult, if they’re a bad adult, they say, “Well, you’re really good at this, so you should ignore that and start working on the things you’re not very good at.” And I say, you know, “If you work on your weaknesses all your life, by the time you get to the end, you have some really strong weaknesses.” You know, you just keep working on the weakness, you know.
 
I think there’s something magical about what we’re talking here. I have a very healthy respect for luck. I think being born when the two of us was born was a stroke of luck. I think that that Forties period to be born is really a lucky period. First of all, you know, where we were born, which was about 90 miles apart from each other, Ohio, was a great place to be born. It was very prosperous. We weren’t caught up in a lot of media madness. You had a lot of time that you could spend developing your life and everything like that. And it was a golden period for America, because the American economy in 1945 was as big as the rest of the world’s economy. It was red, white, and blue all over the place. You know, and you had great music at that time, you had great movies, you had great sports. I was just thinking about New York, that in 1955, New York had three baseball teams, the Dodgers, the Yankees, and the Giants, okay? And each of them had a center fielder who was a Hall of Famer. You had Duke Snyder for the Dodgers. You had Mickey Mantel for the Yankees. And you had, well, I think pound for pound was the greatest baseball player of all time, Willie Mays played for the Giants. And they used to trade teams for the World Series back in those days. It was always the Yankees, but then it was either the Dodgers or the Giants in the World Series. So the World Series was going to be in New York. You played one game here and then you went across town and you played the next game there.
 
But there was sort of a golden quality about those years when you and I were growing up. And I think that’s luck. We were born healthy. You know?
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s a lot. I mean, I wonder if there’s anybody, though, that looks at what you achieve a certain age, that looks at the present and doesn’t think about all the things that are wrong, and then through a kind of gauzy nostalgia, think about how idyllic the growing up was and the world was a better place.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, you know, that’s an interesting thing, because I talked to Joe Polish about that. And Joe himself is very, very personally interested in people who had bad childhoods. Because he had a bad childhood. He had a bad childhood. And so he tends to attract people who have bad childhoods. I didn’t have a bad childhood. I had a happy childhood. Loved my childhood. It was very clear that you had to grow up, you know, it was very clear that there were all sorts of skills you had to develop and all sorts of experience you had to, but I didn’t feel deprived at all. We had enough and we had no more, you know.
 
Jeff Madoff: But that was the context you had, right? I mean, I think when you’re a little kid, whatever the world is you’re living in, that’s your view of the world at that point. You haven’t seen enough to realize-
 
Dan Sullivan: I would say you have, though, today, that you didn’t back when and that was all the visual images coming in through the media.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. And the desire to look successful.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I don’t think I had that.
 
Jeff Madoff: No, I didn’t either. I do understand. It was very interesting. I was asked to give this speech for our fiftieth high school reunion. And what I wanted to do, because it was an interesting kind of a petri dish of, you know, these people, many of us, I think that close to 30% of the class was from kindergarten, all public schools, but from kindergarten all the way through high school together. You know, and so to be able to see some of those people at 10-year intervals. It was very, very interesting.
 
There were things that you and I grew up with that, when I look back, I see now recognize kids or discovered later that they were dyslexic, but nobody knew what dyslexia was back then. Or they were autistic.
 
Dan Sullivan: Especially ADD.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, I mean, all these things that were not yet diagnosed. And so the kids were ostracized by the teachers also, in most cases, and certainly by fellow students in most cases, because we weren’t aware that this was a real thing. You know, it had never been diagnosed as such.
 
And so a lot of people—goes back to what we’re talking about in terms of isolation—grew up very isolated because they were ridiculed and made fun of and felt ashamed and all of those things. And if you’re empathic at all, I was pretty popular in high school, but I was never part of any clique. I had friends in all different kinds of areas. And it’s funny, I would put together the pep assemblies. So I would do these plays, essentially, these gags that were a lot of fun. But there was a story and I wrote a script and all that. God, I hadn’t thought about this for over 50 years. And what was interesting about it is that I was brought into the assistant principal’s office. And they’re telling me, “Why did you put this kid or that kid into the play?”
 
And I said, “Because they were good. And why not?”
 
“Well, they don’t convey the right image for Firestone High School.”
 
And I said, “You ever think that the reason they don’t put out the right image for Firestone High School is because they’ve never been accepted?”
 
And it’s like ‘The Lion’ in The Wild Ones with Marlon Brando: “What are you rebelling against?”
 
“What do you got?” You know, and instead of being inclusive, they tried to make it more out of reach.
 
Dan Sullivan: The other thing is they couldn’t project the image of something they hadn’t experienced.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yes.
 
So I didn’t change. And I continued to put those kids in it. And it was so great because they felt a part of something. I mean, people came up to me at the 50th reunion, said, “Do you remember when, you know, why do you choose me to be in an assembly?” You know, that kind of thing. And 50 years later, I had not thought about it. Fifty years later, that felt good that I actually had some kind of an impact.
 
Dan Sullivan: That seems to be a fairly consistent theme, though, from when I’ve known you.
 
Jeff Madoff: Which?
 
Dan Sullivan: Taking a person here and taking a person there and putting them together. I mean, the play is a living example.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, yeah, yeah. But it’s also, you know, it relates back, you know, when you’re saying like Joe had an unhappy childhood and he’s kind of a magnet.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, my life is filled with a lot of happy people, you know, quite frankly, because what else were there?
 
Jeff Madoff: You know, which is great. You know, I feel the same way. And I mean, you’ve met some of my friends from my childhood.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: But I also think that there are people just like those who had really difficult childhoods, felt isolated and disconnected. There are other people that demonstrated a certain talent. And especially if it was something that the parent had wanted to do themselves and never did, or they had built up a successful business and wanted it to go on, that the kid was encouraged always and only in that direction that the parents set for them. And I wonder about it.
 
I was watching, I love CBS Sunday morning. And there was a great show last week. I forget his name, but an extraordinary violinist who was a prodigy at four. And I think, you know, how that level of talent manifests so young, it’s really interesting. And I do believe there are people that, you know, his parents did encourage him. Could he have become a doctor or who knows? Could have been any number of things.
 
But I do think, you know, there was an interesting documentary on John McEnroe I recently watched. Just because he was an interesting character, because he kind of changed that bad boy era with him and Jimmy Connors and some of the others in tennis. It’s just interesting that civilized country club sport became, you know, McEnroe was more New York Street, but he always wanted to please his dad and he never got that back from his father. And so the harder he played, because that was the only thing that he did that his dad responded to.
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm hmm.
 
Jeff Madoff: And I think there’s a lot of that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. Your whole life’s in negotiation with the world the way it is.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, it’s a great way of putting it.
 
Dan Sullivan: You don’t have to accept it the way it is. You can do different things with it.
 
I was giving some thought before we came on today about how Personality is strictly made up, the musical play Personality is strictly made up. Because Lloyd wasn’t going to do it. Lloyd wasn’t going to create a musical on his life. And the only thing that lit the flame on this was really you doing a documentary interview with him. And you, with a love of theater and a love of musical presentations, you were interviewing him, and I watched the interview. And one thing was going on in Lloyd’s head, and something else was going on in your head. And you were seeing his story a hundred times bigger, a thousand times bigger than he was telling you that story.
 
And you gave him a chance in that documentary, and I don’t know if it had ever been done before, I never saw any interviews with him, but you gave him a chance through your questioning to actually, I think, experience his life in a way he hadn’t experienced it before.
 
And then you took what he made up, because when we talk about our past, we choose certain things and disregard others. I mean, you could see him come alive in the interview, which meant there was chemistry between the two of you. Then you said, “Hey, this should be a play.” Well, that’s the thought. And when you’re 68, you know, you’re working on your gin or you’re working on, you know, you’re either drinking it or playing it at 65. Who comes up with an idea? “Hey, not only should this be a play, this should be a musical and I’m going to do it.”
 
But if you go back, all the abilities that gave you the confidence close to 70 to do this had already been experimented with and developed all along the way. This just gave you a single project where you could pull 70 years of experience and put them at the service of a big story.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, that’s right. You know, I was actually talking to a friend yesterday. And he said, “Don’t you wish you would have gone in this direction 25 years ago?”
 
I said, “I mean, in the abstract, yeah, but I don’t know that I was clearly ready for it 25 years ago.” You know, the things that I have learned and the things that I have done all informed what I’m doing. As you’re saying. It wasn’t like I was procrastinating doing the play. But I hadn’t yet gone all-in. I was doing as much as I can and also running my business.
 
Yeah, so it’s interesting when you decide to take that leap and leave something which I enjoyed, but I’d lost all the fire for it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. It was just all scaffolding for the actual building.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Well, that’s right.
 
Yeah, it’s interesting. And like one of the questions that I would ask people that I interviewed in my class is, “If we would have known you as a kid…” I’ll ask you this question: If we would have known you when you were a kid, would we see any indication back then that’s manifested in who you are today? And what were those things?
 
Dan Sullivan: It wasn’t until she was 75 that my mother actually knew what I did for a living. And I took her on a two-and-a-half-week trip to Italy. And we were great talkers. My mom and I talked a lot about a lot of things, anything and everything. She was saying, “Can you kind of explain to me what you do?”
 
So I told her, you know, and this was before the company. This is when I was just a one-on-one coach. So 1983, I think it was 1983, ‘84 when I did. So I was coaching, but it was just one-on-one. I had, you know, 20, 30 individuals that I coached. And I created the structure for doing this.
 
And she said, “Well, you weren’t doing that when you were five years old. You were just talking to all the adults and asking them questions about their experience.”
 
And that was a valuable piece of information from her. She said, “Oh yeah, I would meet the adults, and she said, ‘Your son just asked the most interesting questions.’” And especially next-door neighbor lady who was 78 when I was eight. And I got her to tell me her entire history since the 1870s.
 
But that’s what I do. I find that if you can get people in touch with the significance of their past, they immediately gain the capability to act on that in the future.
 
That’s what Coach is. That’s what Strategic Coach is. I said, “You cannot give people a bigger future until they’ve given themselves a bigger past.”
 
Jeff Madoff: And is that another way of saying, “believing in themselves”?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, that their life has not been haphazard. There’s a there’s a central core to their life.
 
I just am in a couple of quarters where I’m experimenting with a new exercise which is called “Your Best Decade Ever”. Okay? So I have them, it’s a graphic thing, and I show a big arrow, and then I draw a line here where the dotted line above the dotted line is the biggest part of the arrow. Okay? And then starting thing, there are little arrows coming up, and they draw in the arrowheads. So “10 years old”, “20 years old”, “30 years old”, “40 years old”.
 
And I just did it because I’m completing an actual calendar decade. I’m getting close to 80, so I did this. And I said, “You know, when I look back to 70, I’ve actually created more and produced more than I did before 70.” So I said, “What I’d like you to do is to reproduce where you are.”
 
They’re at different ages. I mean, my youngest that I coach is 28. So you don’t have a lot of decades, you know, he’s approaching the end of his third decade, but he found it meaningful. And he said, “Oh, what I’ve created and produced since I was 18 is immensely bigger.” You know, he said, “I was just starting college when I was at the beginning of this decade.”
 
And then I have them identify the key things that they’ve done. It’s just brainstorm, everything you’ve created and produced in the last decade, and they do that. So I said, “Would you say the last 10 years have been the biggest and best decade you’ve ever had?” And for my clients, it’s pretty well always true. First of all, for a lot of them, those 10 years were in Strategic Coach, so it’s a good commercial for the Program.
 
And I have them talk about it, you know, they break in either in person, they have breakout groups, or they do it on Zoom and we break out groups, they come back and they said, “God, I’m on a roll. I’m on a roll.”
 
Well, they didn’t realize they were on a roll. It’s kind of interesting what happens in about a half hour, that’s how long the first part of this takes, is that they have the feeling that they’re just running into tougher and tougher headwinds. And I said, “Actually, you’re on a roll, aren’t you? How many of you are on a roll?” They’re all on a roll. So I said, “So why don’t you just take the key factors that are you on a roll and adapt those as your approach to the future? Everything you’re on a roll right now, how do you take this into the future?” And then they do the next 10 years. So mine is 80 to 90.
 
And I said, “So how many of you would say that what you’ve achieved in the last decade is bigger and better than anything you achieved before that decade started?”
 
And they say, “Yeah.”
 
And I said, “So why shouldn’t the next decade be the same, that what you achieve in the next decade, what you create and produce, is bigger than anything you’ve created up until now?” And they get it. They get it.
 
But the one thing I have, “Creativity x Productivity” as one part of the exercise, and “Fitness x Health” as the other. And immediately they get the point that “I can pull off the creativity and productivity, but only if I really work on my fitness and health.”
 
I said, “That’s a useful lesson.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have witnessed, well, with my sister going through some pretty difficult health issues. All your options are gone if your health is gone.
 
Dan Sullivan: If you have bad health, you only have one goal.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right, that’s right.
 
So why do people join Strategic Coach? What are they at in their lives that makes them willing to spend the money to do it and wanting to do it?
 
Dan Sullivan: I think one thing is that, by nature of being an entrepreneur, there’s a fair amount of rugged individualism.
 
Jeff Madoff: Which I think another part of that rugged individualism is what we’ve referenced, which is isolation.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and they realize that as great as what they’ve achieved, they’ve done it basically being isolated. And what we say is, “What if you were in a community of like-minded, like-motivated people? Would that make a difference on where you’re going next?” And with a lot of them now, that’s too big a price to pay. They’ve gotten used to their isolation. And they’re committed to their isolation.
 
I want to bring in a thought here, and that is I’ve just gone through a three-month period with a really great sleep psychologist out of California. One of my goals is to get off my prescription drugs. Three in particular is Adderall during the day, and then Lunesta and Sonata at night. So I have two sleep medicines, and I like them all. They’ve been wonderful friends. But there’s a price you pay for that. All those drugs have a negative impact on your health. And I’m a dozen years down with the least of them. One of them is 15, the two sleep medicines are 15 years, and Adderall has been 12 years.
 
And in three months, I’ve gotten rid of all three of them.
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh, that’s great.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One is, it’s the first time in 15 years I felt sleepy at the end of the day. You know why? Because I don’t have to be. I can sleep without feeling sleepy.
 
Jeff Madoff: So you’ve taught yourself, uh-huh.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And then in the morning, I never felt rested, but I didn’t have to feel rested, because you just pop an Adderall and you’re up and running.
 
So I was talking to the psychologist, his name’s Michael Bruce. He lives in the south of Los Angeles, and I do it by Zoom. Once a week I have a call, and I have to keep a diary of when I went to bed, when I got up. He said, “You know, there are certain people I’ve coached that they’re not addicted to the drugs. The drugs are addicted to them.”
 
Jeff Madoff: Explain what that means.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, Adderall is looking for a certain type of person. You have a great desire to be productive. And so you take the drug and you take the Adderall during the day because you want to be productive during the day. And you take the other drugs at night because you need a certain amount of sleep if you’re going to be productive during the day.
 
I just want to say this, that the isolated individual entrepreneur attracts certain types of drugs because your whole thing is being productive.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. That’s what I was just going to say, is that that obsession with productivity.
 
Dan Sullivan: I plead guilty, Your Honor.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, you know, I do believe there are certain people and we can name some, they’re public figures, be it Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or-
 
Dan Sullivan: Those two in particular, I would say.
 
Jeff Madoff: But I don’t think that anybody, I mean, I put Ralph Lauren in that category. Also, you know, he’s a multi-billionaire. You don’t get there without obsession, I don’t think. I think that’s a necessary condition to build that kind of business and wealth.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah
 
Jeff Madoff: You think you can do it without that kind of 24-7 obsession? I don’t either.
 
Dan Sullivan: Your days are for the obsession.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. Yeah. And I think what that also, though, does is it creates an image that many then aspire to.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And if you just do what they do, this is the way.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: It doesn’t work.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Jeff Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
 
Jeff Madoff: You need to learn that first.
 
Thanks for joining us today on our show Anything and everything, if you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. For more about me and my work, visit acreativecareer.com and madoffproductions.com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach.com.