Can You Upgrade Your Productivity?

Jeffrey Madoff: Hi, I’m Jeff Madoff, and I’m here with my friend Dan Sullivan. And we’re here to talk about anything and everything. And we’re going to start off today talking about something that so many people seem to be preoccupied with, which is upgrading their productivity. Can you even upgrade your productivity? So, we’re going to start off by talking to a very productive person, Dan Sullivan. And Dan and I were just starting to talk about that whole notion of productivity. And you got an insight, as usual, to start us off with Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: I was saying that oftentimes, there’s a fork in the road when you’re talking about productivity, and some people put the, “We have to be more efficient.” Well, for example, when it comes to energy, what a lot of people don’t know is that the amount of energy used in the US for activities except for high tech, which didn’t exist in the 1970s, really, that we’re actually using less energy than we were in the mid-1970s. And the US and a lot of the world was just going through the oil crises because of the OPEC just deciding to use their strength in the marketplace. And so, there was huge inflation as a result of rising oil. They cut off oil supply, and that made oil very expensive, and the price of energy affects everything else. So, I think that generally speaking, corporate America, as far as things that were in the United States, they went through a massive 25 or 30-year period of making everything more efficient.
 
Now, the car industry was really one of the big ones, because it wasn’t unusual to get 14 or 15 miles per gallon. That was considered okay. And now, if a normal car isn’t getting 30, 35 miles per gallon, that’s considered sub-par. And a lot of that came about because they started replacing mechanical parts with chips. So, they talk about electric vehicles. Every car is an electric vehicle compared to the way vehicles were. And they’ve dropped about four or 500 pounds of weight. Well, when you drop the weight of a car by four or 500 pounds, then you’re much more energy efficient.
 
So, the one aspect of it, I’m a great believer when it comes to mechanics and industry and technology, I think you can really, really, by being more energy efficient, you can actually become more productive.
 
But when it comes to humans, I tend not to look in that direction because what it means is doing your job better. And I say, “Yeah, but is the job even worthwhile in the first place?” So, the first thing I looked at is a person’s effectiveness. In other words, during a different time period, do they get done what’s most crucial? Do they get that done? Over to you, Mr. Broadway music producer. A producer is in charge of productivity, I think.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I love Yogi Berra’s statement. When you said we’re at a fork in a road, and of course Yogi Berra said--
 
Dan Sullivan: Take it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: ... when you get... That’s right. When you get to the fork in a road, take it.
 
Dan Sullivan: And we’ll get to a nightclub that people no longer go to because it’s too crowded.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. And 75% of the people believe this, and the other half...
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But you talk about effectiveness and productivity. Another person who had many wise sayings, an old friend of mine named Hersey, used to say, “Don’t confuse motion with progress.” And oftentimes, in the incredibly competitive world that we’re in, one of the mantras I hear is, “Here’s how to supercharge your productivity.” And everything is about work harder. You work harder than anybody else. I don’t happen to believe that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, work harder and work longer.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s a two-part negative message.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. Outwork your competition. No, I’d rather out-think my competition.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I would innovate my competition. I would create the competition. Yeah.
 
I’m not a big competition guy because I was fifth child in a competitive family, and all the spaces for competition were taken up by big people before I came along. See if this isn’t true, that the people are supposed to be really highly competitive are actually just really good at differentiation. They just immediately will differentiate themselves from what everybody else is doing, creating a new value, but different. And then it’s everybody else who’s scrambling to kind of copy or imitate what that person is doing. But the person isn’t really doing it to compete with the other people. They just see a new possibility of value creation in a given amount of time, which is greater. It just produces more value.
 
And I’m thinking here, because I’ve been along for the ride, I think we’re a little cart that is attached to your big production with the play Personality. But I got to believe that going through all the auditions of everybody who came in, there’s a thought on your part when you’re judging who’s going to make the final cut, that they did exactly what they were supposed to do. So they were efficient, but they produced a bigger impact.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, that’s a really interesting point, because yeah, there’s a certain sort of table-stakes that you got to have when you’re auditioning. In our case, you need to be a triple threat, which means you need to sing, dance, and act. But if you are one of the leads, if you’re playing Lloyd Price, then you have to be able to sing, dance, and act, and then that X-factor, which is showmanship or charisma so that people want to look at you when you’re on stage. Somehow, in spite of everything, you’re commanding the performance. And that’s really interesting, and I think that translates in business settings. Who is the person in the meetings who not only puts out a great idea, but puts it across in a way that attracts support?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, so in Strategic Coach, we have three levels of advancement. And I have a person coming from number two to number three. And he’s a software designer. And can’t give away too much about what he does because it’s a trade secret. He’s actually got IP, which is called a trade secret. But what he is figured out is how an airline, a big airline, and he’s got three of them, the biggest in the world as customers using his solution, but it has to do with what happens. Let’s say it’s the biggest airline in the United States is United. United has more planes. As a matter of fact, it’s the biggest airline in the world. If you include their network of other airlines, that’s by far the biggest airline, more fights, more people, more planes. But the problem, if you have a key center... And our main US offices in Chicago. We’re right across the street from the airport.
 
If United goes down in Chicago, everything in the United States stops because everything gets backed up because it’s the one airport in the United States that you can get to almost anywhere in one flight. So, that stops all those flights. And the numbers of people have to be rebooked is in the tens of thousands. Instantly, it’s tens of thousands. And he was telling me that on average, the airlines working themselves, this is every terminal, they can rebook a hundred passengers per minute.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Okay.
 
Dan Sullivan: And that’s considered industry average. And he’s come up with a black box, which is software which nobody gets to see, and that brings up really interesting topic about trade secrets. So, what he would do, and I’ll tell you one of the most remarkably productive presentations I’ve ever heard, he would go to the whiteboard. He would only talk to the CFO of the airline. So, this is number three probably in the hierarchy, CEO, COO, and CFO, chief financial officer. And he’d simply go up and write a big number on the board. And let’s say it was $98 million, and he’d write $98 million and he’d sit down. He said, “That’s my presentation.” And the CFO said, “What’s that?” And he says, “That’s what your present way of rebooking passengers after a network cancellation happens in your system. It’s $98 million.” And that’s for one month. That’s for one month. Then he went up and he did a multiplication sign in 12.
 
So he said, “You’re good at numbers. Imagine what that looks like in a year. That’s this year, it’s next year, it’s the year after.” And he says, “What I have is a software solution that instantly does 27,000 a minute. And you’re not involved, it just has to do with the software and the cellphones of your VIP customers. So, that’s my solution.” And the guy says, “So, what are we talking about here?” He says, “Well, the thing I don’t know is how much of the 98 million is mine.” And I said, “You know, for brevity and for effectiveness and for impact,” I said, “I think that’s pretty good.”
 
So, I asked him why he has it as a trade secret, not as a patent, because with a patent, you have to basically say what your solution does, and it becomes public knowledge the moment that... The patent office, the moment it gets it it’s public knowledge. Anybody can look up your patent. And he said, “Well, it’s a good question.” But he said, “The airline industry being what it is, if I got the top five airlines in the world on my system, everybody else has to do it. So, I can just basically say, I’ve got the solution.” And it doesn’t need to be really coordinated with anything except your schedule, the schedule of the airline and the cellphones of the people who are the VIP. And then the next minute, they do 27,000 more, until everybody’s taken care of.
 
So, I would say that that is a phenomenally productive breakthrough. That’s a phenomenally productive breakthrough. Okay? It’s productive because it’s good for everybody. It’s good for the airlines, it’s good for the customers. And most of the bad will related to airlines... I always say the airlines have a wonderful marketing strategy that they can really stick with that says, “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”And he says, “But that really costs you.” And he says, “Nothing costs you more than fights being canceled, and real hassle, getting rebooked on another fight.”
 
So, it was so funny because one of our clients, when he was talking about this in the workshop, said, “Well, my daughter...” He said, “I just want to put in social proof here. My daughter is coming from Boston to Chicago, and her fight was just canceled, and she was rebooked in 52 seconds.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s quite good.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So, the big thing is that we love technology because when it’s done right, technology, it can really introduce big productivity gains.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, what I’d like to get into is on the individual level, because I think this is oftentimes a huge block for entrepreneurs, is that notion where they’re constantly told, “How do you supercharge your productivity?” And on that individual level... Because most entrepreneurs are relatively small businesses, and oftentimes it’s a single founder. Our mutual friend, Joe Polish, has a whole audience full of people that most seem to focus on this notion of the possibility of hyper-productivity and the notion that entrepreneurs in order to be successful have to keep working harder. And I’m talking now as individuals, not the product, like what you were talking about. And I’m wondering your thoughts about that, because my feeling is that’s one of the things that contributes to something we’ve touched on in our past conversations, which is the sense of isolation that so many entrepreneurs feel. So, what is your take on that focus on supercharging your productivity and the pressure, mostly totally self-imposed, in an entrepreneur’s face?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, after... I’m almost 50 years doing what I’m doing. I feel the solution is exactly in the opposite direction of working harder or working longer.
 
Now, it depends on where you are. I mean, if you’re just starting off as an entrepreneur, no question. You just have to put in enormous amount of time because you’re, quite frankly, without this being an insult, you’re really stupid. You don’t know the marketplace. You don’t know the cash cycle of what you’re doing. I mean, you haven’t been through a couple of years, so you can get a sense that in any business, there are seasons. There’s certain seasons which are much more productive seasons than other seasons as you go through the calendar. And you started off in the fashion industry. And the fashion industry is a continuous thing, but it does work in seasonal quarters as far as the fashion industry goes. And if you want to be in the fashion industry, be in a four-season temperate area because you get to bring out new things every season.
 
But I’ve gone in just the opposite direction, and what we’ve said is, go into the marketplace with what you love doing and what you’re really great at. Okay? And then look at other people who are really great at what they do, and they’re kind of working for the same audience in some way. Okay? So, I’ll give you an example where quality is the real key to productivity. That’s when you were putting your production team together. So, the production team is the producer, the director, the choreographer, the music director, the lighting director, the costume director, and the stage manager. And I may have missed someone because you’re closer to the thing. You went right to the top for talent. And getting top-notch talent is an extraordinarily productive move. Okay?
 
But you did something of a qualitative nature way, way before you even got it to that stage, and that was that you had created a very, very compelling story. I mean, made-for-Broadway story. I mean, there’s no question when you first told me about it, I think it may have been before. We weren’t doing our podcast then, but I can remember on New York visits and Phoenix visits, when we talked to each other, you had told me about the documentary that you had done on Lloyd Price. And I don’t know if you said it in this fashion exactly, but you said, “I think there’s a great story here for theater. There’s a great story for theater.”
 
So, this is where the productivity really started in this process. It was you spotting something. And I can keep going back to a point where you were giving movies in your childhood basement, but you developed a nose for what is a really, really great story, and it was the great story, I think it was the most productive force that you’ve had going for you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, thank you. That’s really interesting because you’re kind of doing a spin on the notion of what productivity is, and that’s what I wanted to define.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, productivity isn’t hourly work or how much you’re getting done, hourly work or how much you’re making an hour. It’s what do you have that attracts other people’s energies, other people’s commitment, other people’s talent? That’s the highest productive thing that you can possibly do.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, so whatever the idea is, whether in my case it’s a play, or whether it’s a breakthrough app or whatever it is, what you’re talking about then is...Tell me if this is correct, that the best business plan in terms of both productivity and sustaining a business, the best business strategy is quality.
 
Dan Sullivan: And in the realm that you’re operating here, entertaining. That’s a compelling story. Well, humans are... We know them on the basis whether they’re good storytellers or not. If they’re not a good storyteller... And it doesn’t have to be the realm of theater, it has to be a story about anything. “Hey, I’ve got something new I’m thinking about. Just to cut to the chase here, if you do this, you get this result”—which is a compelling offer. It’s not a convincing argument. “Yeah, I’ve done a lot of research in the fifties, and I think that there’s a gap in the 1950s where the... Where’s the bridge between what came before rock and roll and that rock and roll. And I’ve done a lot of study, and I’ve been looking at various artists and everything else, and I’ve come up with a handful of artists I think whose lives we should go back and look at. And then I’ll come back, and I’ll give you a choice of five or six stories here.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: As they all nod off.
 
Dan Sullivan: That is not a great story.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, your example of the airline black box for rebooking is a compelling pitch. And a compelling pitch is just a short story.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But that’s essential in business if you’re trying to attract either consumers or financing. It’s for both. But how do you respond to the argument is, you got to work harder. Outwork your competition.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, that may be something that you look at after you’ve got the result. I mean, did we take the long way around, or did we take the short way? And we always associate shortcuts with increases in productivity.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, there’s a term, it’s interesting the derivation of it, but there was the term “hack,” because hack can be someone without talent. If you’re a hack writer, you’re not considered to be a very talented writer, or it can be coming up with a shortcut to something that’s more complex, or it can mean a security issue, like you’re able to hack a computer. So, there’s different connotations. But in all the entrepreneurial conferences that I’ve been to, in all the articles I see in print and so on, the hack is some kind of shortcut to some higher-level activity that usually isn’t anything sustainable. And that notion of being a productivity hack, which I’m sure you’ve heard that term also, how do you look at that? Because I think if you start off looking for shortcuts, I think you can rethink anything. Will you come up with a better idea? I don’t know. You might, then that would be great. But is it truly a hack? And are hacks the way to get more productive, look for shortcuts all the time?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think the word has entered the language, because I think in some cases it’s true. It’s true. I mean, I think Steve Jobs, when he created iTunes, that was a hack. Okay? Because he didn’t invent anything new. He just combined a bunch of things that were not combined. So if I remember it correctly, when he introduced iTunes, a couple years before, he had already introduced the iPod. He had the iPod... And Sony was the big player there because they had created the Walkman.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And then the MP3s came in where you didn’t need the cassette, you could do the digital signal. You could download music.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it’s basically a hard drive.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So, they already had that. They already had the iPod. And then he said, “While I was away from Apple,” because he was essentially fired, and he went out. And he did a couple new things. One was called Pixar. He was part of the original Pixar founders. And the other thing was an entirely new hard drive called Next. It was a computer, very, very expensive. And I remember someone who had it here in Toronto. And he got it and it was ghastly expensive, but he said, “Boy, what this can do.” And when he came back, he brought the Next. And that’s still the basis of everything they’ve done for the last 20, 25 year. IOS is really the system that came back with Next. But he got on stage in as an inimitable way, and he said, “I was thinking,” and he said, “I developed a liking for music when I was out there. And I’d really like this song, and I go to the music store and said, ‘I’d like to buy this song.’ But every time I asked, no matter what store I went to, they said, ‘Well, in order to buy this song, you have to buy 11 other songs or nine other songs.’“ And he says, “But why? I only want the one song.”
 
And they said, “Well, it’s the business.” So he said, “It’s a weird business because then I started to really look into it. And I said, ‘Well, you’re selling 12 songs, but how much does the artist make, the singer, the musicians on this, the people who actually created the music?‘” And he said, “It’s like 5 cents on a dollar or 10 cents on a dollar. They didn’t make any money.” And then of course something’s happened. “There’s this internet thing now, and I was watching what certain people were doing, and there’s this company called Napster and they said, we’ll just have music on the internet and we’ll just download it for free.”
 
“And it was a really great idea, except it was illegal, and I just don’t think theft is a good business model.” In his inimitable way, Steve Jobs. So he says, “Why don’t we just connect some things here? So, we’ve got the iPod, which is an MP3 player, but it’s beautiful. It’s not like the other one says is they’re really beautiful. I mean, people save the boxes that this thing comes in.” And that’s a true story by the way. And he says, “So, why don’t we just have it so that on your iPod you can go to the internet with it, and you can see any song you like and you just download that song and it’s 99 cents. And to get musicians interested in this, we’re just going to offer them 60 cents out of the 99 cents. They get 60 cents. And then take something to get it down so other people have to be paid, including us.”
 
“And then if you’re a musician and you only have one song, you don’t have to wait to write at 11 other songs before you can put your music up there. And so you can just be a one-hit musician, and millions of people can listen to your one hit.” And then he said at the end, “So we put this all together. And by the way, it’s available as soon as I finish speaking here.”
 
So, that’s a wonderful hack. I mean, in hack terms, he just hacked three things and took the value of players way, way up, took the incomes of artists way, way up, and gave the internet new meaning, and gave Apple such a new take in the marketplace that they dropped the word ‘computer’.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It’s really interesting because—and I don’t know the sequence—but when you get into iMusic, it actually... The performers felt ripped off and that Apple controlled the market too strongly, and they didn’t feel that they were making... Because they weren’t making the 60 cents per dollar out there. I don’t know what that was, but anybody who’s tried to do differently, I think it was Jay-Z did Tidal, and that just didn’t work. So, Apple’s a rough competitor to have. But I think you’re also talking about creativity and imagination in terms of seeing disparate elements. I mean, it’s not unlike... On a certain level, it’s not unlike Uber taking the satellites for geopositioning tied to your phone, which wasn’t possible before that technology existed, and all of a sudden you can have a car come to you where you want, when you want it. It was just putting together what used to be disparate elements into a usable package. And I think that’s really smart business and imaginative thinking.
 
So, what is the magic for that? How does an entrepreneur set themselves up to think about that kind of magical thinking where you think about that if we download music, there’s no physical inventory. We can sell our players so they can gain access to it. And by the way, Sony, who made computers, who had their own music label, so they had the hard drive, they already had the rights. Apple had no rights to music at that point, but they were just out-thought by Jobs and what he did, and then out-marketed on that. And what was, as you said, the generic term was “Walkman” until the iPod just not rendered it unconscious basically. But what is that magical thinking? How do you get to those kinds of breakthroughs?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I don’t think you’re looking at the thing. I think you’re looking at the consumer. I think you’re looking at who are the people involved? And what is the friction that the main players are experiencing that your solution takes away the friction for them? And I don’t think it’s sitting in your room and coming up with a new invention. I think you have to be out and among the people who are actually involved in the activity that you want to improve.
 
It’s really strange because in some circles, the whole notion of business and the whole notion of entrepreneurism is that it’s based on people are only interested in money, people who are greedy, and they’ll do anything to get the buck. And there is a percentage of the entrepreneurial world that that’s a good description for. So, I’m not arguing with it, but among really great entrepreneurs—I’m meeting more and more of them 50 years in—that they’re profoundly interested in what other people are doing, where there’s a lot of friction in what they’re doing.
 
In other words, there’s a hassle in that person’s life. They record that, and then they go over... And things are networks of people. The thing you have to understand, there are no lone individuals in the world. We’re all parts of networks, and we prefer cooperation over competition, if it’s possible. We really like things getting done and people getting along while things are getting done and everybody getting what they want. I mean, there’s a basic instinct among good people to do that. So, I think what it is, that it’s a combination. And there’s a great guy in New York, he’s at a think-tank called the Manhattan Institute, and his name’s Mark Mills. And he said, “If you look back at any breakthrough in technology,” like cars for example, he said, “It wasn’t one breakthrough in technology.” He said, “It was about five or six breakthroughs in technology that came together.”
 
And Henry Ford is really considered the pioneer because there were 3000 car companies in 1910 in the United States. I mean, in my hometown in Ohio, little Norwalk, Ohio. They had two car makers, the Fisher Brothers who created all the bodies for the General Motors. They went to Detroit, seven brothers went... They were born in my hometown, and they had a carriage. They did carriage bodies for horses.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I remember that phrase, “Body by Fisher.”
 
Dan Sullivan: “Body by Fisher.” Right. But it was a whole series of things, which included... The Rockefellers really got the market on kerosene. The Rockefellers are from Cleveland. And my mother told me a story about her grandmother, this is 1870s, that this was a great breakthrough because they were using whale oil for lighting, and they were fast depleting whales and everything like that. And they discovered kerosene. And kerosene came with a bunch of waste products, so they got rid of the waste products and just got the kerosene. And the Rockefeller brothers had a truck. And they brought it around, and every week, they’d supply the kerosene that you need for your heating, kerosene for lighting and everything. Then they discovered that the thing they were throwing away was called gasoline, but there weren’t too many uses for it.
 
Everybody used kerosene. And then the internal combustion machine, long story... I don’t want to go through the whole history of this, but by the 19-teens, a whole bunch of stuff, had converged when the big thing was actually Ford taking the assembly line... Actually picked it up from meat-packing in Chicago, Hunt’s, which is still a big meat producer, canned meat producer. Hunt’s had a huge, huge pig factory. And in the morning, 10,000 pigs would come in at this end and they would go out as cans three or four hours later. And they had viewing stands, and people used to come and they’d bring their lunches and they’d watch the pigs being slaughtered.
 
And each person in the assembly line just did one thing. One cut off a leg, the other one cut off a head and everything like that. And Ford just sat there. And he also visited... Gun-making had become assembly line, like rifles. Pistols had become assembly line. So, he didn’t create the assembly line, he just took it and applied it to an industry, which is largely craftsmen who were putting together a car. They’d turn out a car a day, and that was productivity. And got to the point where he was producing a car an hour and doing three shifts, each person doing a part rather than doing the whole thing. But the big thing was... So, the first Model-T, 1915, came out, and it was a thousand dollars, which was stiff for the day. I mean, that was a whole year’s wage.
 
And he said, “The people who are making my cars are the people who should be driving my cars, but there’s a problem, and it’s called the six-day work week.” So, on one weekend in 1915, Henry Ford said, “I’m going to give everybody an extra day off,” and he doubled their salary. I mean, it’s one of the greatest innovations in the history of economics in industry. The productivity shot through the roof. I mean by the 1920, same car that had cost thousand dollars in 1915 cost $400. Okay? And I mean, until GM came along and they introduced the notion that there were colors other than black for cars, and that was their great breakthrough. You could have six different colors for your car. And Ford said, “No, nobody needs colored cars.” Well, there you go. So, what I would say, using the word ‘hack’ and using the word ‘productivity’, I think the most creative people are pulling together a whole bunch of stuff and putting it together in a new solution.
 
But it’s not just a solution for one person, the entrepreneur, it’s a solution for a lot of other people. In 1910, by the way, 40% of the cars in the United States were electric cars.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That I did not know.
 
Dan Sullivan: But you couldn’t distribute electricity like you could distribute gas.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Which is still a problem--
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, yeah, with the recharging station.
 
Dan Sullivan: Babs has a Tesla. And it’s okay for getting to the office and it’s okay for getting to our cottage, but we have a recharger at the other end. And I worry about it. I worry about it. I’m always watching the thing. I said, “Gas, you don’t worry about at this stage.” So, they’re going to have to come up with batteries that can give you a thousand miles, and they don’t have them yet.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, I mean it’ll happen, but it just hasn’t happened yet, but it will happen.
 
Dan Sullivan: So, I’m just putting this together to say that I think entrepreneurs are combiners. The productivity jumps are in combining things that don’t naturally belong together as solutions. But to begin with, they’re looking at where the friction is that people are experiencing, that if you could give them a solution that eliminated a certain kind of friction, they’d go for it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it’s the classic question, “What are the pain-points that I could relieve?” Right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And if you can articulate and do something about those pain-points, whether it’s combining different things... It’s interesting. We see in the pharmaceutical world, for instance, things like Rogaine, which was for high blood pressure, ended up growing hair. And oftentimes, things did not end up... And it’s not any different with businesses. Oftentimes, three years, five years in, you find you’re in a totally different business than what you started in.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Sometimes that’s just survival moves or recognition of how a market is shifting, and you might be better positioned to do this than that, that sort of a thing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I’m sure you know, you and I have walked past things that would’ve gotten us into another business that we wouldn’t necessarily enjoyed.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, I’m sure.
 
Dan Sullivan: So, we just say no. I mean, yeah, I might have made more money, but no passion for it. So, I think you’re balancing a number of things here.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So when you talk about no passion for it, do you think one should follow their passion and let that guide their career, or do you think--
 
Dan Sullivan: I think you should never forget it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So, explain that.
 
Dan Sullivan: It doesn’t mean it can be the main thing for the next year, but you shouldn’t forget it, that you’re doing this for a time period. I mean, cash has its own rules that you have to obey.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, but tell me what you mean by that. How do you respond to the notion of follow your passion? Can you necessarily make a career of it, or is passion something that first of all, you start with your hobby, whatever that is, and you can be passionate about your hobby, but--
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I know people who are passionately untalented. No, what I mean, they have a real passion for... You’ve seen them in theater. They’re very, very passionate about theater and everything. They just don’t have the talent. You can see your students, the marketing students, you can see there’s a gleam in their eye and they’re getting it. You bring in your top-notch people in the industry, and you can see that they’re connecting with this person. And if given an opportunity, they’ll connect with the person. And other people say, “Well, it’s not my passion. This sounds like grubby work. I have to prostitute myself and everything else.” Well, yeah, you do have to create some value.
 
Here, again, I think you’re combining a number of things. I have a talent for thoughts that really—“Who not how.” Well, that’s Dean Jackson’s thought, but I was the one who got the trademark and copyright on it, and I’m the one who turned it into a book.
 
And it’s now a part of every one of our concepts. We’ve gone back. We’ve re-engineered our whole program, that there’s a column, whenever you’re planning something inside your business, there’s a final column: “Who not how.” “Okay. We know what needs to get done. Now, let’s start looking at the people who are doing it.” Well, that’s an innovation because that bypasses the “Work harder and work longer” argument altogether.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. No, I was just going to say that the “Who not how,” I guess you could call it a hack. I would call it an insight.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I wouldn’t call it a hack, but I would call it an insight because it allows you, by leveraging the right talent and not spending your time doing it, allows one to be more efficient and effective in terms of what they’re doing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think people have Unique Ability. Okay? So, my central concept, which we pioneered this concept, you’re born with it. I don’t think it’s acquired. I think you’re born with it, and you’re born with a particular... I’m trying to find the right word, but actually it’s a preoccupation, that you keep thinking about this, you keep exploring this. And that’s why I believe that unsupervised children’s play is a very, very necessary thing to becoming a really good entrepreneur. Because children, when they’re playing, they’re creating worlds. But two children create totally different kinds of worlds. And I think that the world that a child starts noticing and developing at three years old and is stronger at four, and by the time it’s five or six, they’re really zeroing in on this, this is simply their Unique Ability, I haven’t call it “passion,” it’s just Unique Ability that your mind works in a different way and you’re connecting things.
 
You’re actually connecting things.
 
I mean, I go back to your movie theater in the basement with the entertainment and everything else. You were pulling together... First of all, you had to get a film. You had a basement. First of all, I think it’s good for kids to have basements and garages. And you did it, but you had to get chairs, you had to get refreshments, and you had to create marketing for it so people knew when to show up. And you had to charge for it, and you charge for it and everything. So, it seems to me that even at that age, you’re combining certain things which seemed fairly consistent between the seven- or eight-year-old Jeff and the... Is it 74 now? 73? 74?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: 73. Let’s not rush it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay. 73, the 73. I think there’s a consistency there over seven decades, eight decades almost.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: One of the questions that I ask my guests are “If we knew you when you were a kid--”
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, that’s a great question.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: “...would we be surprised by what it is that you’re doing now?”
 
You were in my class when I interviewed Kathy Ireland, and I would’ve never thought that one of the things I had in common with Kathy was we both had paper routes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Me too, by the way.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, did you? Okay.
 
Dan Sullivan: And it is all in the wrist.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And the tight fold.
 
Dan Sullivan: The tight fold, and make sure it doesn’t get wet on a rainy day.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: You got to put it inside the door. You got to ask them where they want it, if it’s raining.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, customer satisfaction.
 
Dan Sullivan: Plus, you’re getting new customers. It’s pure entrepreneurism because you have to buy the papers before you can sell them.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. And you’re buying it wholesale and selling it retailer. You’re learning basic business principles, right? So, there’s a double question here that occurs to me as you’re talking. We’re talking about passion. How do you discover what your passion is, or is passion something that finds you, so to speak?
 
Dan Sullivan: First of all, I was just reading an article in the Wall Street Journal. It was about quitters. There’s this big thing now.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, there’s “quiet quitting.”
 
Dan Sullivan: No, this is loud quitting because they’re actually quitting. This is... No, there’s the quiet quitters who are still pulling a paycheck, but they actually quit. I’ve known them all my life.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I was going to say, that’s not an unusual--
 
Dan Sullivan: I don’t think it’s a recent phenomenon.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Absolutely. I agree.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And this woman, Annie Duke, who’s written on this topic, and she said that she thinks that one of the things that COVID did, it gave people time to think about things that they’d were too busy to think about before that. And they started making decisions about life and outside of work. And they got some distance from going to the office, so they sort of said, do I want to do that? And she said, I don’t think they’re quitters. She says, I think they’re pausers, P-A-U-S-E-R, not posers, but pausers. And she says, “They’re just pausing because before, they would rush to get a job because they needed the money. And for different personal circumstances, they’re in good enough shape not to just rush back and do it.” And she says, “There’s no question that part of success comes from sticking with things, but a lot of people stick with the wrong things.”
 
In other words, they get something that’s wrong, and then they just stick with it because they’ve been told, you got to stick with something before you can be successful. And she thinks that there’s kind of a pause going on and there’s a little bit more thought going into “Pick the right thing and stick with it.” So, I try to stay away from passion because it’s such a big umbrella concept. You can fit almost anything under it. But I think that there is an alignment between who you are and a particular type of activity that gives you a great deal of pleasure.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think there’s also... What you’re talking about is “golden handcuffs.” You know, you’re making a certain income that supports a certain lifestyle, and there’s a great deal of fear in terms of one’s ability to somehow recapture that income or more if they do something else. And so they stick with things where there’s no fulfillment going on. There’s no happiness as a result, but they feel at least financially they’ll be secure. And maybe that was their goal without thinking about any of these surrounding issues.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I see that a lot in the professions: doctors, accountants, lawyers, dentists, architects, engineers. And I’ve talked to people about it. And a lot of it has to do with your parents wanting you to get employment in a respectable occupation. I mean, there are millions of immigrant stories about this. But the one I liked is that the first woman is being sworn in as president of the United States on the capitol steps. And her father’s dead, but her mother’s there. And just as she’s being sworn in as president, the man next to the mother leans down said, “This must be the proudest day of your life.” And she says, “Well, you know, her brother’s a doctor. We were worried about her until today. And how she’s president. Well, we’ll see how this works out. I heard there’s no job security.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, so--
 
Dan Sullivan: But I think that the passion, first of all, I think it’s used so much that’s kind of trite. It’s kind of trite. And it’s that one out of a 10,000 model where you have somebody who’s really great... Let’s say Kathy Ireland, she’s really, really great. Okay? Seventeen-year-old off the beach at Santa Barbara, goes to New York, just looks unique. She’s tall, she’s sort of muscular, she’s got freckles, and she just hits a niche where she becomes a Sports Illustrated cover girl, and 17. And at 32, decides to get out. And she never saw it as anything more than a bridge, so kind of a unique thinker here. And the way she describes how she handled herself, that she probably doesn’t have a lot of trauma from her modeling days. And then she became an entrepreneur and really went through a lot of birthing pains because it was socks. It was socks and everything else.
 
And now, it’s a $2 billion global company that follows women from the time they’re 17 or 18 till the time they’re 80 and just supplies them with everything along the way. And you look at her, and she can give the audience there a lot of advice and say, “Well, if you just do...” She didn’t do that though. She was really cool. She just had certain yeses and nos that she stuck to. It was a very, very integrity-based presentation. There was no bullshit in there. And she wasn’t telling anybody, “You can follow in my steps or anything.” But she was just saying, “This is how I did it.” So, people will go away, and they said, “Well, I’m just going to do what Kathy Ireland did.” And I said, “Yeah, but you missed the 9,999 17-year-olds who took the same path and it didn’t go anywhere.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think that’s true with all recipes for success.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, yeah. They picked the one out of 10,000 and they--
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You’re being generous, one out of 10,000. I think probably--
 
Dan Sullivan: One out of about a hundred thousand.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: One out of a million who have the... I don’t even know if she had the aspiration. I mean, it was the agents that saw her on the beach and went up to her. I don’t think she was trying to do anything.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: No, she was not trying to become a model. That was total serendipity. That’s right. And the funny thing is, when I asked her to do my--
 
Dan Sullivan: And she was too healthy looking besides. But she just hit a niche in the market.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I don’t think anyone’s reproduced it since she did.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, it was landing on the Sports Illustrated cover more times than anybody ever has or anybody ever will at this point.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So, you’ve talked about passion, and I agree that it’s one of those phrases, like “authenticity” and “value”, that has just been beaten to death and become, in a sense, cliche. And I think there’s a cultural bias in this country when you were talking about people who want to be lawyers or dentists or accountants, not necessarily happy at it, but they were either pleasing a parent or whatever. But if you say to somebody, you’re going to be a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, nobody says, “What’s your fallback position?’ But if you’re going to be an actor or a painter or a dancer, a musician, if you’re into some creative field, the first question you get asked is, “Well, what’s your fallback position?” as if that’s not serious. And then the only time you’re taken seriously is when you’ve achieved a high level of success, you’re in the public eye, you make a lot of money for what you do. But there’s a big gap to bridge between that passion or talent you have and being acknowledged by general society as being successful, where other pursuits don’t have that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and the other thing, I think it’s a very modern thought.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Which?
 
Dan Sullivan: Up until very recent eras did we have the freedom of opportunity and the possibility that you could wait out the world, if I can use that phrase.
 
I’ve read a great deal about the depression, the Great Depression, and then the second World War. And when Pearl Harbor happened, there was no problem getting everybody to sign up for the military. I mean, it was just instant. But what a lot of people didn’t realize is that until the beginning of second World War, the US had not been out of depression since late twenties, early thirties. I mean, you had 20, 30% unemployment in some places. I think it was still sitting at around 12% in 1940-41. And “You mean I get three good meals today, I get all my clothes taken care of? You mean everything’s taken care of, and everything like that?” People don’t realize just having a job during that period...
 
And your parents lived through that, and we were both born just after that period. Liking your job? I mean, that just really wasn’t a consideration. That was like, you’re not friends with your parents? Parents are parents. You’re not friends with your parents. I mean, some of us are and some of us were, but people don’t have any sense of history that it’s only been since after the second World War that we’re talking about anything here. And really, it’s not really to the beginning of the digital age that you start having all these very, very interesting occupations that people can take part in.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: When you mentioned history, to me, what you’re talking about, which I think is so important and so lacking, is a sense of context. And that sense of context is so important in order to understand something. And I think the absence of context, which is what we’re pelted with every single day—you get a headline, but you don’t know anything about it and don’t really understand anything about it, and critical thinking. How do you look at and evaluate, wherever you come out, as opposed to just going with a certain flow of people? How do you really question things? And how do you really come up with the critical thinking necessary to navigate what’s become an increasingly complex world where you’re getting pelted from all size with information. Which can be another one of our discussions, but I wanted to follow up on one other thing. We’ve talked about passion. How do you recognize your Unique Ability? How do you know what that is? Does it take a Dan Sullivan to tell you, or are there things you can ask yourself?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean there’s all sorts of, we’ve used about three outside tests. Kolbe is one of them, which you know about, and there’s another one the Gallup organization created, which is called StrengthFinder. And number three is new one that we’ve just adopted, which is called Print. And they focus, in other words, each of them does a different thing. I’m just portraying with my hands here, Jeff, so you have to pay attention to my hands. So, you have an area that you think where you are as opposed to another area. But then what these tests do, they sort of tell you if you focused on this—it sort of tests you what you could do all the time, and it actually doesn’t require much effort for you to do this all the time. Okay? And that’s a very, very important thing because we only have a certain amount of energy every day.
 
For example, in Kolbe, you have a thing called Fact Finding. You want to make sure you have all the facts before you make a decision. And can I do it for two hours, get all the facts together? I can do it for two hours, but I can’t do it for three hours. And tomorrow, I can’t do it at all because I’m worn out from the two hours the day before, fact finding. Or you work out systems of action. I can do it for two hours. I can do it for two hours, can’t do it tomorrow. And Quick Start, just coming up with a new idea and acting on it. I can do it anytime, anywhere, love hitting situations unprepared and just coming up with a new idea in those situations. Okay?
 
The other one is StrengthFinder. So, it’s what you do to take action. Okay? So, what I do to take action is I take action, and then I start doing my fact-finding.
 
Now, people say, “Well, you got to know the facts before you make a decision.” I said, “I don’t know what the facts are to know until I’ve made the decision.” Okay? I’m only saying that people are very, very different. I’ve got a very good friend here in Toronto. It’s a numerical one to 10. He’s a nine Fact Finder, and he’s a two Quick Start. I’m a two Fact Finder and a 10 Quick Start. Okay? And I get along with him really great. He’s very, very creative and everything else. But the way he approaches things is so radically different from the way I would approach it. And people say, “Well, Quick Start are the really creative ones.”
 
I said, “Yeah, but if you look at really successful people who are creative, they approach their creative success in very, very different ways. Some of them are real plodders before they get the success. A lot of them are fast failures. They get out there, they fail, they course-correct, they fail, they course-correct, they fail, they course-correct. I’m much more prone to very fast failure and just course-correcting.” Other people say, “I don’t want any failure in there whatsoever.” And I said, “It’s going to take you longer.”
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It’s also, I think if you are afraid to fail, you’re not going to do anything innovative or creative.
 
Dan Sullivan: If you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to learn.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That’s right. That’s right. Absolutely. That’s a great way of putting it. I agree. So my friend, Dan Sullivan, once again, we’ve proven the name of this podcast, “Anything and Everything.”
 
Dan Sullivan: I knew we had a keeper when I came up with the title.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: You’re absolutely right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And once again, it’s been wonderful spending the afternoon with you, and thank you very much.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Jeff. Looking forward to further progress on your production when we come back next.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Thank you.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: 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.