How Long-Term Businesses Manage To Stick Around

Jeff Madoff: Hi, this is Jeff Madoff. And I'm here with my good friend Dan Sullivan. And we're here to talk about anything and everything. And anything and everything today starts off with, how do you keep it going? And we're not just talking about our conversation. We're talking about, how do you maintain the fire that propels you forward in your career so you can keep doing what you love doing, or pivot and go towards what you've always wanted? But one of the things that I thought would be interesting to talk about today ...
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes
 
Jeff Madoff: ... is, you know, you and I have been having conversations about, you're experiencing a busier time than you've ever had before as your business grows. I'm involved with my play, which may be the biggest thing I've ever done. And a big challenge for people, myself included, is keeping it going.
 
You know, and one of the things about entrepreneurs, because they're often ADD, so whatever sort of catches the glint at the moment distracts them. But of course, you can't build a business that way. You've got to commit, pay attention, and keep moving forward. And so I thought it might be interesting to talk about, since we're both experiencing it in different ways, how do you keep it going? How do you stay motivated? And how do you sense opportunity and not fall into the rut of routine, which can end up even boring you about your own business?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, it's a great topic. You know, I'm familiar with some of the numbers of how long entrepreneurial businesses actually stand, and half of them are gone in the first year, like, they don't get past the first year. And I think it's like nine out of 10 don't make it past five years.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, 94%. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Even higher than nine out of 10. So what are some of the factors of long-term businesses? It's funny you should ask the question because I came across an interesting article on 500 family-owned businesses that are more than 500 years old. The oldest actually just went bankrupt or went out of business. I don't know if it's bankrupt, but went out of business in Japan. And it was a temple repair company. They did temple repairs. And that started in like 530, our calendar. Started in the year 530. So it was, that was a good run, you know. Now, its basis is whatever represents the constant religion in Japan over that period, you know, because they would go in and repair temples. You know, that's a business. And it wouldn't play well in lots of parts of the world, but in Japan, that is really good. But the other says, really interesting, that two thirds of the 500 were associated somehow with alcohol.
 
They were a distillery. They were a winery. They were a pub. The oldest in England is 940. There's been a continual use of a particular pub, and in the same family for 1100 years. But I think alcohol is one of those long-term bets.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, and the interesting thing is—a little interesting bit of trivia here—is that George Washington had the first major distillery in the United States. You know, so the drunken father of our country.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, he had customers who were--
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right. That's right. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: He had drunks for customers. The evidence isn't in that he was
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: you know, the user of his own product.
 
Jeff Madoff: No, he was probably way too smart for that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. He was also a land speculator in-- When he died, his estate, which included his own plantation, but that was the minor party, had like 50,000 acres of land that he had bought in the New Territories, which is probably the state of Ohio as we presently understand. He was a go getter. I mean, he was very ambitious, and he was very status conscious. He was very, very aware of, you know, making a good impression with the right people, you know, which is--
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, you don't become president--
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm guilty of that and so are you, so.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, you don't become father of our country and the first president by holding back. You got to put yourself out there. You know, in order to do that. But you know, the thing about keeping it going, I think a lot of people hit a point in their career, maybe they hit that in middle age. Now, since you and I both have to live into our 140s, we're middle age now.
 
But normal people in middle age, as their 40s, or something, find themselves in a rut and find themselves either not fulfilled in their work or just feel kind of stuck. And they don't know what else to do, or their cost of living is sufficiently high that they've got the golden handcuffs. They need to keep doing what they're, or at least they think they need to keep doing what they're doing, in order to continue. You work solely with entrepreneurs. How much do you see that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think there's a decision you have to make, whether having a business is something that's external to you or that the business is actually just a function of who you are. In other words, that you have a desire to be doing new things, and you have a desire to be working on new experiences, both productively and profitably. You know, in other words, it's productive. You're creating something that is useful. It's also profitable. So my point, I tell my entrepreneurs in Strategic Coach, when you accept that what you're doing is a life sentence, it'll simplify your future enormously. In other words, there's no thought—
 
And as a matter of fact, it's very interesting, because I'm just creating a new tool for the workshops, at the level that I coach, and it's called The Retirement Trick. The Retirement Trick is that you retire from all activities that you don't like doing. And you also retire from engaging with people you don't like engaging with. But you continue to do things that really interest you in a productive and profitable way. So I think that gives a bit of the formula that I, you know, I've adapted for myself, and I try to communicate to the entrepreneurs that I work with. And I think one of the common ground things that makes us good conversational partners is I think that we share that both the same philosophy towards our approach to the business world, that it's what we're interested in right now with a business structure around it.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, my question is, when you decide-- 'Cause it sounds good, you know: limit yourself to the things that you love doing. And of course, then there's the demands that one's business has and places on them. So it's managing that. And then the people—establishing a rapid and strong enough filter so that you can also limit or eliminate the contact with people that become quicksand, if you will. So what's the criteria for that? How do you even know?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, yeah, I mean, first of all, I'm in partnership with the business. So there's a very, very strict division of labor between the, what I call the Front Stage part of the business and the Back Stage. Okay, just to use a theater analogy. And that is, the Front Stage is where what we do actually creates value for the customers and clients, in our case entrepreneurs. And the Back Stage is everything that has to be done in order for that Front Stage impact to occur and the success that comes with that. And I'm totally in charge of the Front Stage, and Babs is totally in charge of the Back Stage. So if I attend three management meetings in a year, I feel there has to be an investigation why that happens.
 
Yeah, we have to get a public inspector or something come in and say, you know, why was three hours of Dan's time used up during the year on management issues? You know. So we have that, and Babs has a whole team that, you know, there's 12 different areas that we've identified as important that they have to work, you know, from sales and marketing being-- Well, coaching—the actual coaches. And we have 16 other coaches besides myself, but then there's the sales team, there's the marketing team. And then we have a special group which are called the Program Advisors, who are in contact with the people who are in the Program. They're constantly, on a continual basis, in touch with them. And they're actually the keep-'em-in salespeople. So we've got the get-'em-in salespeople, which is marketing and sales, because marketing is increasingly important as you get bigger because you have to constantly marinate the prospects such that a certain time, they'll be open to being actual check writers for the company.
 
So we have marketing activities that are going out on a 24/7 basis, you know, because of the different capabilities that the internet has given us. But there's just a constant flow of stuff that's going out. And then there's-- We have the, I would say, 14 salespeople and they're salaried to do their first year. And then after their first year, they go on full commission, you know. And they, they make their money through actually bringing people in. And then we have Program Advisors. And that's just three teams. And then there's the coach management team that selects the coaches, trains the coaches, and they're constantly learning new workshops, so they have to learn new workshops. So I could go on, and we have all these different teams, but there's 12 teams and the 12 people are together with Babs talking about progress. And you know, and everything's held together with Salesforce. So over the last four years, we've integrated everything that we do into the Salesforce platform. So you know, big tech team. We have a big tech team. We have 13,14 people on the tech team, and they're constantly creating shortcuts and integrating things. So there's a lot of work, but I'm only telling you all this other stuff by someone telling me about it because I don't experience any of it.
 
Jeff Madoff: So I want to go back in time, as the calendar pages fall off the wall. Because back when you started, you, I assume like most people, didn't really know what your true north was. You know, you were having to discover what that was. You were fortunate to have a life partner, Babs, where there was an extremely complementary division of labor and business strategy, which of course, most people don't have that. And one of the things that entrepreneurs-- And most entrepreneurs are small businesses. You know, they have huge problem delegating anything. And the key to part of your success is the delegation of it. But how did you-- Take me from starting off to realizing in order for this to happen in a way that was satisfactory to you and profitable to you and had growth, how did you arrive at that? How did you get to that bridge so that you could actually shape your company the way that you ended up doing?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I think that there were two stages. And the first stage was me just going out into the marketplace as a one-on-one sort of a consultant, which I called coaching before that word became popular. So I started doing this in 1974. I was very unprepared for the whole business of being in business. And so, you know, I suffered a lot of setbacks and went through a divorce, went through two bankruptcies. The bankruptcies weren't because I wasn't doing well. I went bankrupt because of receivables, where you do the work with the expectation you get paid in 30 days. And then because of larger circumstances, it might be 60 days or 90 days. And I, I was too close to the cliff for that. And one of the big things was, I really, really wasn't good at the backstage part of running the business. I can sell. I can perform. You know, I can handle the front stage work really well. It's a weakness because I have no interest in it. I have no interest in the backstage. I tried to use bookkeepers and accountants, but that wasn't the issue. There's a whole dynamic growth process that has to happen behind the curtain. Having, take your play, you know, the Personality play, which is an entrepreneurial business. It's a entrepreneurial startup, and the actual script of the play I bet is about that thick, but the backstage manual for everything that has to happen is about this thick.
 
Jeff Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: I don't know what the exact numbers are. But, you know, when you're putting on a play, there's, you've probably kept it to a fairly minimum at the startup stage. But when you go to Broadway, you'll be larger in numbers probably to put on the play. So I didn't have any feel for that. And it bored me. And things that bore me, I fail at. If I'm responsible for it. And it was when I met Babs, and I didn't meet her to find a business partner. I met her because I met her, you know. And, and we got talking about things. And I kind of showed her some of the thinking processes that I had created. And it impressed her right away. I actually-- She says I actually got her with one of my thinking tools. And you know, a couple of years in, she had kind of a health business, which included massage and nutrition and a lot of other things.
 
And she had a top notch clientele. She had, like, flight crews, they would come. And she had stuntmen from the movies. And she had ballerinas. And all of them are in occupations which are highly stressful. In some cases, they're murder on your bodies. And she got quite a reputation. She was really, really good at this work. But it's boring because once you learn it, you've learned it. You know, there's not added dimensions of learning. And after a couple of years after I had met her, she said, "You know what we should do? We should just team up." And she said, "I'm gonna free you up just to do what you do. You've already freed yourself up because you're just neglecting the other side. So I'll just make sure there's some responsibility with the other side." And that immediately, within about three or four years, there was a 10x productivity growth and profitability growth. And then we saw that we could go beyond just me coaching one person at a time, and we started doing groups. And that's when the real innovation had to start. Because every quarter, you put them through something they were familiar with, but you had to create something new also. Every quarter, there had to be something new. And we did that. And then there were stages of growth. And about five years after doing that we grew another 10x.
 
And I said, you know, I think other people can coach this. And then I wasn't the person to coach the coaches. So we, we had to create a team that took people through it, selected-- So Babs and I don't choose the coaches, we don't select the coaches, we don't train the coaches, we don't manage-- I've never seen one of my coaches coach.
 
Jeff Madoff: Interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. Because if the product is good, it should be able to be delivered by somebody else. I mean, I have a feeling, you know, if it depends on your personality, then you're really, you're really trapped.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, so that raises a really interesting question that relates to you and what you just said. Because I think that most people, let alone entrepreneurs, I think entrepreneurs have an additional psychological deficit. Most people are pretty bad at self-assessment. You know, they don't really know so much what they're good at or what they're not good at. And you are fortunate enough to have in Babs a sounding board, where you could kind of decide on that. Plus, through sheer neglect, it was clear that there were aspects of your business--
 
Dan Sullivan: Sheer neglect and the penalty for sheer neglect.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, yeah, you know, so that narrowed your focus just because you didn't want to do the other stuff and found somebody who could fill that deficit. So how does one accurately self-assess? And how do you get yourself out of that rut where you're kind of stuck because you think you're the only one that can do it? Typical entrepreneurial thing: if I want it done, right, I'm gonna have to do that part of myself. They don't give up. You've given up so many aspects of your business. And every time you've shared that, it's allowed you to rise higher and higher. Most people don't have that. Most people don't rise higher and higher because they don't know how to let go of things. And it weights them down. How did you do that? What questions did you ask yourself?
 
Dan Sullivan: The first criteria of whether you should be doing is actually whether you actually like it. You know, like doing that. So my sense is, I'm inclined to realize that I will not stick with something I don't like. And if you don't stick with something, you're not going to be very good at it. You know, and so I have a passion for simplicity. And I have a natural, what I would say liking of teamwork. It's very, very interesting. In my life, I've had an enormous amount of teamwork experience in sports. I've been in theater. You know, I've been in political campaigns and that. So I have a sense of how big the game can be if every individual just sticks to their own lane.
 
There's two things, that you stick to the thing that you're really good at, and then you're good at teamwork with the other players. So I would say that, that's from my childhood. You know, I come from a big family and I was a late member. So there were a lot of other bigger bodies around when I arrived. You know, you basically made your way by just being useful to the other people around you. So I have a sense of being useful. And I began to see that if I was doing something that someone else could do better, I was disadvantaging the team.
 
And I noticed since I'm 70, which is eight years ago, that all my accomplishments going forward are team accomplishments. I'm really good, you know, I've got the skills I need, I'm good at what I do. So I don't have to do too much individual self-improvement to go forward. But what I have to do is keep building my ability to work as a very, very unique and very, very continually useful member of a growing team. So I would say that that's my attitude.
 
Jeff Madoff: So your capacity for self-assessment, that forms pretty early.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: Because your way in, so to speak, was be useful.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. And I just noticed that if you pick the right person to be useful to, doors opened.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, that's, you know, what I tell my students because I think that starts when you're trying to get an internship. Make yourself important. Don't wait to be told what to do. You know, if you take initiatives, that's going to get recognized by any smart manager. If you take initiatives. And if you just wait for somebody to tell you to do something, you create more work for management because they've got to overcome your own inertia.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, I think it's just generally seeing things from another person's point of view. You know, when I joined the ad agency, you know, my movement from the United States to Canada was because I was hired by the Canadian branch of BBDO. Big, worldwide agency. But it was, you know, it was a big agency, it was the second biggest in Canada in 1971. And I was actually hired through a personal contact with the creative director who was the 50% partner in the firm. You know, it was a series of social connections, which ended me up with a job. And I remember the first month that I went out, you know, he just said, "Let's go out and talk about how the first month's been" and I said, "I want to ask you a question. How does an agency make its money? I don't quite understand how the agency--" And he explained, they made their money through 17% of the media buy. Yeah. And I was like, "Gee." I didn't know anything about that, you know, so I just kept asking him questions.
 
And I said, "So how do you know whether a writer like me is valuable or not? I mean, what kind of numbers are associated with me being valuable?" And he told me. And that was really clear. All I had to do is hit the numbers that made him happy. And, you know, I'm really creative, and don't they enjoy my work is a meaningless discussion. The question is, is your work making the money that makes the person who hired you happy?
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So that was being useful in that context. You know, I have a marvelous, she's a manager, and she runs the entire program front stage for all the coaches except for me. So she's in charge of all the workshops, all the workshop material, all the coaching of all the coaches, but not me, okay. She's about 43, 44. So she's been doing this for 10 years, and she just struck me as someone who could take on almost any kind of responsibility and thrive on it, you know, just thrive on it. So about three years in, she said, "How do you think I'm doing?" And I said, "I want to pay you a compliment. I don't even think about you. You're the last person in the world that I need to think about. I know you're doing a great job."
 
Jeff Madoff: That's great. How did she respond?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, she said, "Yep. I am." What I'm looking for is people-- and it was her Unique Ability. I mean, if you get clear about what your Unique Ability is, you start developing a real, you know, a real alertness and a real appreciation of other people's Unique Ability. And I think what people want to do in life, they want to find an activity where, one, they'll keep getting good at that activity. And it's a real pleasure doing the activity. And I think the next thing is that they're involved in a bigger team activity that is important, you know. It's got real significance. And it's got real importance to it. And they get constant recognition and rewards for doing a good job in their position to you. I said, you know, if you check off four or five boxes there, they're set for life.
 
Jeff Madoff: So a couple of things that you just said that I think are quite interesting: One is that, you know, that you get good at what you're doing. And of course, you get good at what you're doing by keeping doing it. Right? So what I hear in that is also, you need to stay curious because that's the only way you're going to learn anything different. If you think you know how it all works, and you got that down, I think there's an arrogance that comes with that, that can trip up a business. How do you feel about that? How important is, in any job, staying curious? Because I think that staying curious begs the question of, well, how can I might do this differently, what, you know, how do I improve on this system or whatever?
 
Dan Sullivan: The people who are really good in my life, and you can compare it to your life, are people whose measurements and goals are strictly internal, from a performance standpoint. In other words, they, they have a sense of where they're great at, and they create measurements for themselves of proving to themselves how good they are. And once they reach that, they set another level higher. So they don't compare sideways; they compare backwards with what they've done. And then they say, "Okay, my next jump is going to be bigger than what I did before." And it saves them from being bothered by what other people are doing, how other people are achieving or not achieving. And there's actually a way of kind of identifying them. And it's not just what we've learned in Strategic Coach, but there are some pretty interesting psychological profiles where we've discovered that it'll give you a 60% right feel that somebody is going to be like this.
 
You know, I mean, we've learned a lot of things over the 30 years. So we look for outside references, and that that help us with the job. But, you know, I mean, we've got 130 team members, and 75 of them have been with us for more than 10 years. And we have 22 have been more than 20 years, and we just have our first person who has more than 30 years, you know. And they would say that they love what they're doing, and they're in great teamwork. And what they're doing is really important, and we're successful enough that we can keep rewarding them financially, you know. So.
 
Jeff Madoff: So how much of business is maintenance?
 
Dan Sullivan: It's an interesting question because there's different parts of the company that you have to establish kind of, like your finances, you have to establish that right away, that your way of keeping track of the money is solid right from the beginning because you can really get in trouble fast if it's not. Other things like what we've discovered more and more is the quality of your database in relationship to paying customers but also in relationship to prospects. So there's a quality control issue there that if you get it to a certain level, then you don't want it to get less than the quality you have. But it reaches a point where it doesn't have to be improved that much. It just has to stay at the quality it is. And I would say finances, everything related to data is really that thing. But the other way—
 
Actually, maintenance where you're just trying to keep things where they are is the toughest kind of maintenance. Okay. The better way of maintaining is just keep making things better. You know, in other words, the constant innovation, I think, is really the, the key. Keep finding ways of doing things faster, easier, cheaper, bigger, you know. Just keep scrutinizing things. If it's taking us five steps, is there a way we can do it with three steps? I mean, it's very, very interesting because you've just had probably one of the most multi-dimensional entrepreneurial startups that I can imagine because there's so many human parts to what you're doing, and there's so many different combinations of talent to put together a successful play, especially a musical, you know, a musical play that has dancing and choreography, and everything. And you know, I mean, you were telling me just right up till the, the night before the last night of rehearsal, you were still telling people, "Just do it according to the script."
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, that did happen a few times where it's just, you know. That's the thing, by the way, about a play that's not true about a movie. In a play, the script is king. And that's not the case in a movie. So in a play, the playwright has creative control. And in a movie, it's more of a director's medium. But yeah, there are certain points where it's about, just stick with what's on the page.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: And, you know, the thing about the play is, all of a sudden, you're dealing with this multi-dimensional pursuit from day one. All the business back office stuff that has to be done, all the negotiations that have to be done with labor, with unions, with venues, with suppliers, all of that, working with the talent, working with the creatives, and that being set design, lighting design, choreography, all those things. And so you're having to deal on multiple levels simultaneously. And they all then have to arrive opening night on stage in sync the way that the vision you have is finally realized. And it's interesting because unlike my previous pursuits, what I have learned from my previous pursuits that I've applied to this is delegate everything—just like what you learned before I did—delegate everything you don't want to do.
 
But, of course, key to that is, you need to find the right people to delegate. So you have to build the right team in order to do it. And I think when you build the right team, so much more can be accomplished because you don't have to do it all yourself. And I think that was a problem I had earlier in my career, because I undertook some very large projects. But I was trying to manage all of it.
 
And I realized, you know, fortunately, I realized it young enough, but it took a while. You know, because my business is all financed through the revenue of my business. I never wanted to take in investors. I didn't want anybody telling me what I had to do.
 
So sometimes that can make it harder to let go of certain things. Because you're figuring, now it's another check to write. It's that sort of thing, which isn't great thinking. But I think it's more common than not.
 
And once you realize that there is a dollars and cents practical value to delegation so you can move much more quickly. Plus, assuming you put together the right team, you've got more ideas coming in to choose from. And that makes the whole enterprise better. But it's really interesting because, as you had said, the way that you get good at something is you keep doing it. And management falls under that too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: I mean, I'm sure you're better at dealing with people—well, I'll say it for myself. I'm better at managing people now than I was before. And I always consider myself pretty good with people.
 
But when you can direct them in a specific way towards a specific goal and be clear about it, that makes a huge, huge difference because I think that most people need and want direction. And that what I may find attractive and I suspect you do, which is no encumbrances, a lot of people feel lost in that. You know, do you find that too?
 
Dan Sullivan: You know, there I saw a great entrepreneur who was at one of Joe Polish's Genius Network meetings. And his name is David Osborne, long-time entrepreneur probably in his 50s. But part of his success has always been in real estate, where he, you know, would have big teams of agents, brokers who would sell for him. And he was talking about the first half of his life, which was very tempestuous, which, you know, all sorts of breakdowns, personal breakdowns, business breakdowns, and everything. And then, after one of the setbacks and he had a revelation that 85% of the most talented people in the world cannot give a purpose for their talents. They have to be given by someone else that, "Here, here's how you use your talent. And all I want you to do is this and this and this. And to achieve this result. I don't want you being bothered with anything else."
 
And he said, "All of a sudden, my future became exponential because" he said, "I'm very, very good at creating new purposes for other people's capabilities." And he said, "And since then, it's really, really simplified." You know, maybe a huge change for you was, this was a big project for you. But guess what. Everybody's involved in "Personality." It's a big project for them. You know, it was a big project for the person whose life is depicted there. It was a big project. So my sense is that you picked on a project your own size.
 
You know, in other words, that your talents, probably, at a certain point, were way above what was needed. And what I tried to do is always keep myself in a realm where there's both excitement and fear. I'm excited because I haven't done this before. And it'd be really great if you could pull it off. And I'm kind of fearful that I won't pull it off. So I think that when you try to retire from excitement and fear, you'll want to stop doing what you're doing.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, it's a really interesting point. I love the "pick on a project your own size." Because it's funny. I, on one hand, I wish I would have started down this path earlier. On the other hand, I didn't know then what I know now. You know, so there's always, there's always that right.
 
Dan Sullivan: I wish I had started Strategic Coach when I was six. I would have saved myself a lot of bother. I would have gone after the lemonade stands. You know, the paper boys, the grass cutters and everything. I you know, I would add them all.
 
Jeff Madoff: So many missed opportunities. So many. Dan, there's a phrase that you use. And it's probably the first phrase that, when we met years ago, that stuck with me. And I'd love you to define it. And that is Unique Ability. How you define Unique Ability.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, what I believe is that everybody's born—and I think this is factory equipment. Like, when we arrived, we already have a disposition towards something. And we can be lucky in the circumstances of our birth, or we can be very, very unlucky. So a lot of people have a disposition, but the family they're born into, the, you know, where on the planet they're born into, there just isn't any supporting factors that support who they could be. And, you know, a lot of psychology and a lot of politics and a lot of entertainment is about people who just never find their place. And what they're convinced is that they have to discover this outside of themselves. And my conclusion is that it's actually inside of yourself. And it requires courage for you to bet on yourself in spite of not having necessarily the right factors supporting you.
 
I believe that I was sort of born with a disposition towards coaching. Okay. And when I told my mother—so this would be in the late '70s. It was actually '83. I, we went on a trip to Italy. I took her. She had never been to Europe, and she was getting to the point where she might not be able to travel. So I took her for two and a half weeks. And Venice, Florence, Rome, Capri. I think I talked maybe for the first half hour, and she talked for the next two and a half weeks. But she was just Agnes Sullivan, you know, who was telling me about her life, you know. And I just kept asking her questions about all sorts of things that I didn't know about her childhood, teenage years, the marriage to my dad, the family before me, and what her family was like.
 
And she asked me, you know, what I was really focusing on right now. And I told her. And I had been at it now just about nine years, and I'd just met Babs. I had met Babs about a year before this trip. And she said, "It's really interesting." She said, "You know, people used to comment on how you had observations," she said. "When you were a little kid, there was a next door neighbor, Mrs. Wetzel, who--" When I was seven, she was 78. And she had been born in 1873. And she had never spent a night outside of the house that she lived in. She had lived in that house every night.
 
So, you know, I asked her all sorts of questions about what it was like to grow up without electricity, no tractors, no cars, no trucks, you know. And the thing that I got from it was her life was just as full of life as anybody else's life. She had a complete life, she had relationships, she had activities, you know, it was a successful farm, and she had children. And, you know, they had stayed in the business and everything like that. But Mrs. Wetzel, after I'd been over, and I could get a couple glasses of milk and three cookies out of her just by asking her about her life. Then she'd phone my mother. And she says, "You know, Danny was over again. And, you know, I tell Danny things I've never told anybody in my life," she said. "And afterwards, I learn things about my life because Danny's there." Well, that's my coaching method, just ask people their history, and then ask them, how does this connect with this? And how does this, you know, except I put it in a form where a whole group of people can work on it at the same time.
 
But my sense, I've always had this instinct that people have experiences that if they could focus on them, they would learn a lot more than they could learn from any other source. They could learn from their own experiences: what worked, what didn't work, what excites them, what doesn't excite them, and everything else. They have enough material to constantly learn from their own experience, but there's no structure available to them that actually supports that, you know. And that's how I felt about my own schooling, you know, growing up, that it was designed for somebody, but it wasn't really designed for me, you know. It didn't relate to what I was interested in. Nor should I expect that.
 
So what I look for is that there's something, and that's why when I got you talking about your before teenager experience, and you were already putting on plays. Or no, you were putting on movies, you were, turned your the basement of your home into a movie theater. You had refreshments, you had seats, you have features and everything like that. When you think about that, that's in acorn form what's an oak tree now.
 
Jeff Madoff: Actually, the first play that I wrote was in sixth grade. It was a kid falls asleep in a museum. And then a different historical figures in the museum come to life. Who knew? I should maybe try to sue if I had any kind of, any kind of proof that that was actually my idea, Night at the Museum. But it was kind of funny because the goal of the play was to be kind of an entertaining history lesson. And so this kid wakes up. And I was a kid. So I was, I wrote it, so I was the lead.
 
And there were, you know, a bunch of other kids in it. And it was really fun, you know, to do it. And I think there are certain things that we get from things. You know, it's that play, applause when you're on stage and what you do resonates and you feel the audience response. That's a potent elixir.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I think you have a disposition towards that. And it's very, very interesting. I've known some pro athletes at the professional football level, you know. I've gotten to know them where I could talk to them about their experience. And with pro football players, oftentimes, it's a function of just being stronger and meaner as a kid. You're bigger, you're stronger, and you're meaner, and you take part in informal, you know, playground or backyard sports, and you're the one that sends the other kids home crying. And not only can you do it, you actually enjoy it. You actually enjoy the experience. And you're always the meanest, toughest kid. There's a—I won't say an enjoyment of pain, but there's sort of like a indifference to pain that you have. You know, like, just getting badly beaten up and everything else. It doesn't mean anything. There's no existential meaning to getting injured or anything else. The whole thing is, get well as soon as you can and get back in the action. Well, very few people have that instinct.
 
I mean, I was remarking, you know, that there was a prize-winning documentary about three or four years ago, and it was about the free climber who've climbed the face of El Capitan in Yosemite. It's one of the toughest vertical climbs in the world. It's like 3,000 feet just straight up. There is no approaching it at the bottom. It's nothing but up. And you go up and if you're using, you know, ropes and pins, you know, nailing it up, takes about two days to get up to 3,000 feet. And he went up with only his hands and his feet. He went up with three hours, three and a half hours. I think start to finish, went up three and a half. He was doing 1,000 feet an hour. You know, it's just pure strength. But he had a film crew with him, which got it into documentary fashion. And he said, "I have in your contract." He says, "I've written your contract. And you can look at the contract that if, in my climb, I fall and you don't catch it on camera, you don't get paid." So I said, you know, there's a very different kind of nervous system at work here.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, that film is almost free solo, I saw that. Which was.
 
Dan Sullivan: It was scary watching it.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. Amazing cinematography.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But he said, "If I fall," he said, "I want it on film." He said other people will learn from this.
 
Jeff Madoff: You know, there was another documentary and I'm blanking on the name of it, that the guy you're speaking about considered this guy that I'm not referring to as crazy for what he attempted. Which gives you an idea of how crazy that guy must have been. Actually, I'm going to tell it, I gotta tell you the name. I don't want to tell you what the outcome is. But it was amazing. Tying that back to what we've been talking about is, to be an entrepreneur, you have to be impervious to the pain that is inseparable from the climb.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, the demands of the learning. You'll put up with and you'll go through whatever's required to learn what you need to learn. I remember after my second bankruptcy, which was in the early '80s. And I had to declare bankruptcy. And when you declare bankruptcy, you can't choose who you're bankrupt from. It's just straight across the board. And so I went to see the bank manager because he had been good to me. And he said, "When are you going to give up with this nonsense?" he said, "this whole thing that you're doing? I know you have writing skills, and you have artistic skills. And you know, you work for a major advertising firm. So we know you have the professional--" Said, "When you're gonna stop fooling around with this stuff and get serious?" And I said, "Never." I said, "I'm just not smart enough yet." I said, "I haven't gotten a handle on how the whole thing works." So I said, "Whatever I have to go through until I learn how it works. There's no alternative."
 
Jeff Madoff: And would you say that quest is your Unique Ability?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, there's something you want to master. There's something you want to master. I saw this in a spy thriller book that I read. The difference between an amateur and a professional. An amateur practices until he gets it right, and a professional practices until he can't get it wrong.
 
Jeff Madoff: Now, I love that. One of my favorite guitar players, favorite musicians, is Frank Zappa. And I met this guy, Mike Canary, who is the kind of musician that he can hear anything and play it. And he's astounding, an astounding guitar player. And I said to him, "What was it like when you auditioned for Zappa?" And he said, "Well, first of all, it was intimidating just knowing I had the audition. And although I couldn't afford it, I took a car service so I could sit in the back and work on all the fingerings. And so I walk into the session and I'm carrying my guitar not in the case, just carrying it by the neck, and Zappa says to me, first thing he says to me is, 'Nice case.'"
 
So, he sits down and Zappa starts running him through these drills and then doing time changes. And the more that Mike was able to do it, the more rapidly Zappa called other time changes. Until Canary couldn't do it. And he's totally crestfallen. Gets up, starts to walk out. And Zappa says to him, "Where are you going?" And he said, "I couldn't do what you wanted me to do. Figured it was over." Said, "Oh, nobody could have done that." He said, "Every time I audition a musician, I take them to their breaking point. Because that way, I know what we can pull off live." And I thought that was so fascinating. And it's basically what you're saying.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: And I just thought God, that's really interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I find that among the entrepreneurs and more and more, you know, if you use school terms, I'm into, you know, great graduate school people. I'm not doing grade school, I'm not doing high school. You know, I just had a new person join my top group. And he's got a management consulting company. He's based in Switzerland, and he's got 1,400 management consultants in 35 countries. And he said, "I'm running into myself. I have to get freed up from my old self. And I hear you can help me free myself from my old self so I get on with the new self." And I said, "Yeah, we can do that. We can do that. You know. So there's no end in mind in what I do. There's just the next thing you haven't figured out yet.
 
Jeff Madoff: So what is the difference between what you do—helping somebody to discover their Unique Ability and to be able to push through like the example you just gave? And therapy?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, first of all, I have not had the experience of therapy. So I, I don't really know, but generally, therapists have learned a method from other people, as I understand it. There's sort of a method. And as far as I can tell, you try not to add to the person's story. And I find I'm incapable of not adding to the person's story. In other words, if I see something, I say, you know, "I've listened to about five stories. And there's a common thing here. And it's this. And I think if you connect those up, it's five different experiences, but you're kind of doing the same thing in five experiences." And they said, "Oh, that's right. Yeah." And then they get excited and everything like that. So I think it's the difference between a convincing argument and a compelling offer. I'm not in the convincing argument business. I'm in the compelling offer. And what I'm going to offer you is if you're around me, you're going to find out what you do really, really well. And you're going to eliminate everything else. I think that's a very compelling offer.
 
Jeff Madoff: It's a very compelling offer.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I say, I don't care if you've been in business for 30 years, I can show you a central you that you haven't seen before. And if you discover that you go back, and you understand why you had so much trouble where you blamed it on other people, but it was your own fault.
 
Jeff Madoff: Well, and what you're saying, which is central to therapy and central to what you do, and that is examining what's blocking you. What's keeping you from moving in a direction that you're going to find more fulfilling? What's blocking that behavior? And I think that, you know, the encouragement for self-examination, which I think if you are an artist, and I think you are in terms of what you do, is an ongoing pursuit. Because really, is there anything more unchanging yet more fascinating than the human psyche? And why people do what they do?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, in a certain sense, it's all there is and--
 
Jeff Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's our experience that we find ways of externalizing in different ways. We've been at it for thousands of recorded years. But people were ascribing it to other reasons. And my sense is that if I was back in 5th century BC, Athens, and you know, sitting around these guys are talking, and I said, you know, Plato, I think you're really good at this, I think, yeah, you know.
 
He came from a wealthy family so he didn't have to make money. Aristotle, on the other hand, really had to work. He had to get paid and everything like that. But I can think of anybody who is really great at anything, but if they have trouble in their life, it's that they're confusing something, you know. They're, they're running into obstacles, or they have rocky relationships, they have conflicts, they have everything, there's a not grasping who they are.
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Right, which is, you know, central to that self-discovery. And in a sense, I think I do this through in my writing, like the play, discovering the person through that. You discover the person through the exercises and tools. And so on.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it's all goal setting. The reality checkpoint is that they have to create bigger goals, and then their response to the bigger goals, they have to make a decision. You can't achieve the bigger goal if you insist on being the way you've always been.
 
Jeff Madoff: Which also, to me, makes it somewhat of a detective story. Because you've got to discover, help them discover what the blocks are by asking the right questions. You know, what are those-- Well, what's keeping you from that? You know, what is that obstacle that's keeping you from achieving what it is you want? And that made me wonder, by the way, when you're talking about Plato and Aristotle, you're talking about 350 BC or whatever? They didn't know it was BC.
 
Dan Sullivan: They did not. If they had, they would have heard things very different.
 
Jeff Madoff: By the way, what's that BC stand for? And I thought you knew, I don't know, I'm just--
 
Dan Sullivan: Or BCE. The seculars made it "before the common era." Whose common era?
 
Jeff Madoff: Right. Really. Really.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there's a great proof and things like that is that, you know, the whole thing that Shakespeare was somebody else named Shakespeare, you know. Or, you know what I mean. But the greatest proof actually comes from a poem by Ben Johnson, who was a contemporary in London of Shakespeare, that suggests out of a poem, where he writes about Shakespeare, it's dedicated to Shakespeare. And he said that in the play, he's kind of saying, a lot of people find it difficult that this stuff could have been written by you. But essentially, I've witnessed it. You could take in all the Greeks, the Romans, and everything else, and he said, you're better than them all. And this is someone who is about eight years younger than Shakespeare, so I think he would have seen him as a model. But very famous. I mean, Ben Johnson was a well known poet and actor in the London theater scene, and he's talking about Shakespeare. And it isn't somebody else pretending to be Shakespeare or some nobleman talking through a mannequin called Shakespeare. It's Shakespeare, you know.
 
I always thought that it has to be somebody else who's educated and have a higher class. I thought it was class culture snobbery. You know, they can't accept that somebody just hung around, you know, pubs and all sorts of things and picked up stories. And none of the stories are original. There are sources for all the stories that he uses. But how could someone just have this gift of language? How could this person-- Well, he had it. Yeah, yeah, yep. Yep. Yeah. Who knows? Anyway, this was fascinating.
 
Jeff Madoff: Always love it, man. It's always fun.
 
Dan Sullivan: This was fascinating. I just thought of something while we're sitting here. My books, Who Not How and the one that Ben and I did this year, Gap And The Gain. If I were to give copies for all your class at the New School, would that be useful?
 
Jeff Madoff: Sure. Yes. Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, the target is people who are involved in creative careers.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah, I think that could be cool. I don't know yet what's going on for the fall semester. But that's very, very generous offer. Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: For one of them. And then I could come on Zoom. Or if I was in New York, maybe I could be there. And, but after they had read it had a chance to read it. And the books are very readable.
 
Jeff Madoff: Oh yeah, I've read them both.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeff Madoff: Yeah. That would be very cool. I have to see what there's a whole restructuring happening at the New School. And one of the things that I want is to be able to have a hybrid class because the great thing about doing this class on Zoom is one of the last sessions--
 
Dan Sullivan: People you can pull from overseas.
 
Jeff Madoff: Exactly. I mean, I had guests from London, from France, from Los Angeles. You know, from Texas. It was great. And I love that and there's no reason why I couldn't do that in the classroom and make it hybrid so it's sometimes live sometimes via Zoom. And that freedom has spoiled me. Because it's you know, because I can get to anybody. It was really cool.
 
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.