Collaborating From A State Of Calm

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan, Dan Sullivan, and this is Steve Krein. And, Steve, you’ve been really my go-to person for thinking through the Free Zone Frontier Program, talking about the backstage.
 
There was a test, I’ve just read about it in the media maybe two or three years ago, but there was a offer made to people walking the streets in New York that they could get a ticket for a performance at the Metropolitan Opera, or you could get a ticket for rehearsals at the Metropolitan Opera. And they found out it was 50/50, that 50% of people said “No, I’d rather see the rehearsal.” And my sense is that more and more we’re liking to see backstage and that we understand that everything that’s front stage is presented to create magic, but actually where the real magic is for people is how things are actually created backstage that creates the front stage.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think you’re really on to something, and I’ve just been noticing this more and more.
 
I’ve got a historical thing that I would like to test on you. When Gutenberg created the movable type press, it was a revolution, very, very like the microchip in the 1970s. Within 30 years there were 30,000 printing presses using Gutenberg’s technology in Europe. Much smaller population, but really big.
 
One of the things, it was the first time that large numbers of people learned how to read, and two things happened. One is they found that glass-makers had a solution because most people, their eyes had not been developed to actually read and a lot of people had to get spectacles. There was a massive, massive increase in a number of people who read. But the other thing is that reading had never been a personal experience, and what they found is that people were getting a book or they were getting a pamphlet and they were going off by themselves and reading.
 
Not only that, all of a sudden, within about 150 years later, so you have to realize that things spread more slowly in those times, but you get a dramatist actually having characters talk to themselves on stage. Shakespeare is the first author that we know where people are having conversations with themselves. Hamlet talks to himself, Lady Macbeth talks to herself, Iago. All these characters in Shakespeare start talking and they had never had an experience of people talking to themselves.
 
The theory is that in reading, individuals started having conversations with the imaginary person who was the author and they were starting to have conversations, and then they started having conversations with themselves. That modern individual consciousness started as a result of Gutenberg.
 
What I sense, and a lot of what you’ve said is that I think because of the microchip, and we’re basically 50 years from its full force, we’re now having sort of a team consciousness emerging. And your entire StartUp Health is an example of a team that’s talking to itself. It’s a very focused, very dedicated, long-term, disciplined team, “army” that you call it, but it’s talking to itself.
 
Do you sort of attach the dimension that you see as being developed in Free Zone Frontier as it relates to StartUp Health?
 
Steve Krein: Well, first of all, it starts with just who’s in the room. So if you take a Zoom call, or you take a physical room, who’s in the room virtually or in person matters the most. That’s it, start with the ingredients of who’s in the room. If you even have one, just one person in the room with the wrong mindset, it can disrupt the whole balance of energy of everybody. And I find that curation of people based on mindset and nothing else—not skill, not money, not achievements, not failures in the past, not successes, just their mindset today—matters the most.
 
And so in StartUp Health in Free Zone Frontier, the beginning, middle, and an end of the entire existence of these organizational structures or conversations are based on the quality of the people that are invited in, are committed to not only being in, but adopting to the norms, so to speak, of being a part of that community. So there are rules. There are rules around showing up on time and being present. There’s rules about keeping things confidential. There’s rules about judging—and not judging, I should say what people say as ambitious as they are, as crazy as it sounds, by the way, outside the room, it’s supposed to be a safe space.
 
And so at the core, I know we built StartUp Health as a defined safe space. And I feel the same way when I’m in a Free Zone Frontier. And again, it could be eight of us like yesterday on a call, it could be 50 of us in a room. Open up your window on Zoom or walk into that room and there’s almost a feeling you get that you’re with others who understand you.
 
So I don’t know if I’m answering the first part of the question with that one but that’s a big part of it.
 
Dan Sullivan: The thing that I want to talk about is going back to your StartUp Health example, because it seems to me that most entrepreneurs—I mean if we just take a look at entrepreneurs anywhere, they operate alone and isolated. Everybody keeps their secrets close to the vest. They keep their ambitions close to the vest. They keep their successes close to the vest.
 
The great advantage if I’m a entrepreneurial company in StartUp Health is I’m getting bypasses and shortcuts from literally dozens of different directions that I wasn’t even looking for. I wasn’t even looking for them. People are just sharing their experiences, they’re just sharing what’s working. And it seems to me more and more that that’s what I see happening in Free Zone Frontier is you walk into the room and it’s kind of like going on the internet. I’m a big internet junkie and always have, since it became available, “I found this, I found this, I found this,” and people said, “Well you know there’s programs that you can put on that they’ll go looking for what you’re looking for and they’ll find it for you.” I said, “No, no, you don’t understand. When I go on the internet, I’m looking for things I didn’t know I was looking for.”
 
Steve Krein: The mindset of the people that are in that room in Free Zone Frontier or StartUp Health, which is this notion of it’s not about an entrepreneurial mindset. It’s about a mindset of collaboration, of knowing you can’t do this alone. You don’t want to do this alone. And that is actually a defining one of the mindsets. Do you want to do it alone or do you want to do it together?
 
If you want to do it alone—by the way, plenty of examples of people very successful on their own that nobody wants to be a part of that orbit or being a part of that orbit is its own like little vortex—but in a Free Zone Frontier community and a StartUp Health community, in a big group gathering or an intimate group gathering, the idea is you’re there to share experiences to help others. Sometimes there’s an ask, and sometimes it’s to give, more times quite frankly than not you’re giving.
 
We have Expert Office Hours every week, I think I’ve told you we’ve done them for years, but they’ve been reinvigorated. We now have 50 to a hundred of our companies coming on every one of them, they’re twice a week now. Yesterday—this is one of those things we did a few years ago that we just brought back—but we did an open office hour where we didn’t have an expert. The experts were the community. So every usually Expert Office Hour, we have a couple of guests, and then people ask questions and there’s conversation. But on these, it was an open conversation between 50 entrepreneurs. And the question we said was, “What is the biggest decision you need to make today? And what’s keeping you from making it?” Give everybody a couple of minutes to think about it. And then the idea was you share what your biggest decision you’re struggling with right now, what’s keeping you from making it, and then open it up. And I don’t answer.
 
And nobody in Startup Health answers, the community is forced to answer, and we just sit back and wait. And what happens as a result of that is the most unlikely people speak up and share experiences and those who open up and share what their big decision that they’re struggling with leave with answers or ideas that they didn’t even know were possible. And I watched it happen in real time, 12 times within an hour yesterday where people got the power. And at the end, of course, we do a Positive Focus. And I think it was almost one of those things of a wonderful reminder of why they wanted to be in StartUp Health to begin with. But more importantly, how in good times and bad times, you’re not alone.
 
And so that’s a mindset that doesn’t exist in every entrepreneurial community, in every Zoom call. I’ve been on plenty of Zoom calls where it’s actually not about anybody but you, and so they’re not fun to be on either way.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, that certainly goes right to the heart of what I talk about a team talking to itself—team by any definition you want to make, it’s contribution. “I’m just going to tell you what I’m doing and this is what I’ve learned here and this is what I’m up against. And I wonder how anyone else is thinking about that.”
 
So it’s very exciting for me. I feel that all the work that has been done since in Coach since I first started coaching, which is the early Seventies, and now actually—one, two, three, four, five—this is my fifth decade that I’m actually on the same path and I’ve got the same focus almost 50 years later.
 
But it seems to me that in one way, I can just contextualize everything I’ve done now as just getting ready for-
 
Steve Krein: Now.
 
Dan Sullivan: …what’s going to take off now. Because I believe that we go a year into the future and we check back what we thought was going to happen. But then if you take a year into the future and you look back at that, I think everybody will be amazed at how much and how faster it got bigger and better in terms of being an entrepreneur.
 
Steve Krein: And those that connected into these kinds of communities and experiences are, I think, going to be far, far past where a lot of others who were alone with their thoughts and alone with their fears, not only what they end up doing, but what they end up doing during this time.
 
Dan Sullivan: I think the big thing is that there’s very definitely a whole new dimension of passion that you have for what you’re doing. This is Steve at his most passionate today. Not hyper-passionate, but convinced passionate, just an absolute conviction and certainty that you’ve been confirmed.
 
I mean, we all make it up before it becomes real. And one of the things being an entrepreneur is to have a front stage confidence when there’s not backstage evidence for what you’re doing. And so what I’ve found is that I’ve found that probably the essence of Free Zone for the members of Free Zone has become very confirmed during the last eight weeks in a way that it wasn’t. I did a 10x Connection yesterday afternoon. And the three questions were, “Where personally, have you made five years’ progress in three months? In what teamwork area have you made five years’ progress in three months? And in what area has your company made five years’ of technological progress in three months?”
 
So I always do three new questions before each workshop. I think of them before, I got about an hour before I have to get them in to Cathy and then she does it. And the reason is I want it to be as fresh as possible of where I am and where I think people are. So I’ve never repeated—we do three new questions every time, but it’s really very interesting. I mean, we had people from India yesterday, Australia. I mean, they’re getting up at two and three in the morning to be on, so it’s really great.
 
But I’m really excited. One of the things I said, and we talked about this and the Free Zone, just how calm everybody is. Part of it is a competitive calmness, that in a certain sense you’re kind of enjoying the people who aren’t calm.
 
Steve Krein: The world that I live in, I know we both live in this world where entrepreneurs are everywhere. I think you’re probably more surrounded by only those with the certain mindset. I’m in YPO and I get to experience entrepreneurs not in StartUp Health and not in Strategic Coach, which are often night and day. And when you see people disconnected from community of confident, ambitious, calm entrepreneurs, you can kind of see that, I hate to say go off the rails,” but some of them sound like, and these are really smart, accomplished people that usually have it all together, and you just see them going off the rails.
 
Dan Sullivan: They have their act together but they’re isolated.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. You see the cracks though. You could see how they’re not going to be okay necessarily on the other side of this, and not because of external things, but because of internal things. So I really appreciate thinking about how useful it’s been to talk to you. I think we’ve spoken almost every week in one way, shape, or form, either on our podcast or on our Free Zone connection calls, or even in the workshop. So I feel like the connection to you, the connection to our community and the connection to my community has created a foundation of happiness and joy and positivity and productivity that I think is actually going to be and is more healthy even than what it was eight weeks ago in terms of just my 24-hour rhythm, my weekly rhythm, our weekly rhythm as an organization.
 
So I’m very grateful for 20-plus years of friendship and partnership and guidance and coaching from you, Dan. This is definitely enabled by the underpinning of all the things that helped me and help us think through thinking about what we’re doing to really make an impact on the world. So thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, there’s resonant universe is what I’m noticing. What I’m really zeroing in on for all the Free Zoners I said, “Stop thinking locally. Stop thinking regionally, think national or think global.”
 
First of all, it’s going to be virtually free to do this. And I mean, Zoom for all practical purposes is free. I mean, even if you’re maxing out its capabilities, it’s free.
 
And the demand that you travel has decreased by 90%. Everybody now understands why you don’t want to get on a plane and go somewhere. And I think that’s the biggest thing. I mean, we talk about our own consciousness, but it’s the consciousness of the world that we’re dealing in right now.
 
So I told Peter Diamandis, “I’ve never been a believer in globalism. I’ve always—I feel the whole notion of globalism that there’s going to be world government and everything else, it’s just another story that people would like to control other people would like to tell you that you believe.” And I said, “I think technology will increasingly go maximum global.” It’s maximum technology. I think everything else is going to go local. I think people are going to stay closer to home. I think that they’re going to focus on their own communities. I think their communities are going to get more interesting now.
 
And it’s funny, Babs and I drive about three hours to get to our cottage, and it’s not major highways for about half the trip. You’re going through little towns. Some of them are just four-corner towns, but some of them, you could tell maybe a hundred years ago... And I said, “I bet every one of these towns was a lot more interesting a hundred years ago than it is today.” And my feeling is that local is going to get interesting again.