The Power Of A Quarterly Reflection

Dan Sullivan: Hi everybody, it's Dan Sullivan and I'm here with Steve Krein for our next episode of the Free Zone Frontier. Steve, before we came on we were chatting about, it's called The 25 Year Transformation. It's one of the quarterly books we've done and it's just a great thing of, I ask people what their biggest goals are and I say, "So what would it look like if you were consistently focused on that for the next 25 years? Every quarter you would adjust and see how much progress you've made and then measure backwards where you were the previous quarter. What would that do for you?" And people are all in agreement that it'd be like going through the locks of the canal, that every quarter the water would be higher or the water would be lower depending on what direction, so it's a hundred lock canal system over the next 25 years and I think the moment that people visualize it, it actually has some impact on their thinking.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
First of all, great to be with you as always, Dan, and I was describing this because I'm just coming on the 25 year mark of being in Strategic Coach this year, and when I had my birthday a couple days ago, it was a really, like every birthday, I think, for people, a moment of reflection, but now in, I call it my mid-early 50s because I'm smack in the middle at 53, but I think the idea that I can look back at a whole 25 year period, one of the most underappreciated, maybe even understated, elements of the last 25 years is the quarterly rhythm that I've been on like clockwork, quite frankly, since the day I came into Coach, and the world's organized when you're young in semesters or grades in elementary school and semesters in college and grad school, and when you come out into the real world of business, if you're at a public company there's quarterly earnings and quarterly reports but for private companies, it was a new introduction for me.
 
Prior to us going public a year-and-a-half after I joined Coach, that idea of a quarterly framework just wasn't even in my consciousness, but what began in that moment was this idea of stopping once every 90 days and reflecting and recalibrating, and the compounding of that effect 25 years later, it's not just the planning part of it that was done, it's like now looking back at what I achieved in 25 years and looking ahead for the next 25 but the quarterly compounding's pretty impactful when I look around me at my peers and I see a big difference in those that do this and those that don't; just that one habit versus not.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think people get into a long, unconscious marathon.
 
I think one of the issues is that consciousness is refreshing. Anytime you reflect and you go back and look at the recent past and you use the Gap and Gain concept that you don't see the quarter from a negative standpoint but you see it from a positive standpoint and you just pick out three things from the quarter; I'm way ahead of where I was the last quarter; I think your consciousness jumps, your overall sense of who you are and what you are and where you're going takes a jump.
 
I'm very conscious of it because when I was 70, 2014, I set a goal that in the next 25 years, which would take me to 95, that would be a hundred quarters and I was going to write a hundred small books, so I'm just finishing quarter 34 and we're just about putting our 34th book out to the printer to get it back for the beginning of June.
 
Steve Krein: You're a third of the way there.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, just past a third.
 
As you've reflected, and I'm very pleased with your feedback on it, over the last couple books I think I've broken through to a new level with the books but we have a 10 person team that actually every person has a part of the book process.
 
We have an interviewer, we have someone who makes sure that the interview gets recorded and transcribed and then it goes to a writer and an editor, and then we do an audio one so we have an audio director and we have a cartoonist, then we do the cartoonist, so there's this 10 person team and they're in the rhythm.
 
We have the five interview dates already scheduled in the calendar and so it's a nice thing right at the center of all my other activities. I've got this steady, every quarter producing a product.
 
I find, and it's a little bit of, I think, my ADD that if I don't produce something after a 90 day effort, I won't finish it. If it's not finished in 90 days I'm not going to finish it, so I've tried to keep all my obligations and my commitments that we're going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end of the obligation or the commitment within a 90 day period.
 
Steve Krein: I think there's something powerful about that idea, not only for self-accountability but it's kind of like getting on a ride or the conveyor belt at the airport that if you get on it, you just end up somewhere else. There's something about the ride of a quarterly recalibration and a 25 year framework for us.
 
In StartUp Health, we always talk about the problem that the entrepreneurs are trying to solve around healthcare. Many of them start off with a three to five year vision and as soon as you stretch it out and say, "What could happen if you actually work on this for the next 25 years?" And all this, "Oh, well, I mean, you know." And you start talking about it, and I know there's a saying about, I think, "You underestimate what you can do in a long period of time and you overestimate what you can do in a short period of time." But you get on the ride and if you're on the ride of this 25 years and you have this quarterly, good things are bound to happen, but more importantly it's just like putting on a black shirt every day. You're just taking care of it.
 
It's happening and you don't have to think about it. It frees you up to do a lot of other things within that framework but I think it's one of the most powerful... Again, looking back 25 years now and looking forward 25 going, that's chunked down into a what, one percent iteration every quarter so you're getting to a hundred quarters over 25 years but-
 
Dan Sullivan: But it's compounding, so it's-
 
Steve Krein: But it's compounding. That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's not that you gain just 1% every quarter, you actually get more than 1% and that increases because you have a compounding effect.
 
The other thing is that you're both simplifying and multiplying during those 25 years.
 
In other words that every quarter you're saying, "What am I doing that should not come forward?" And that can be your own activities, that could be investments that you've been making and it's not worth bringing them forward; the investments could be in technology, the investments could be in team members, the investments could be in clients or customers, and you clean up but at the same time you say, "Where are we getting our results?" And you say, "How could we multiply our best results during the next quarter?" So I think there's a simplifying and multiplying that goes forward with that.
 
It's why I think Moore's law works so well for the microchip industry, and Gordon Moore always chuckled when people interviewed him on it and he says, "Well, it's not a law."
 
He said, "It was just three data points that I noticed in 1965 that from the first data point to the second data point, the amount of computing we could do doubled and the cost of that computing halved, so it was a fourfold multiplier." And he said, "I didn't notice it until we had the third data point, and between two and three, the computing power was two times and the cost was half."
 
He just wrote an article and I asked a question. He says, "I wonder how long this will persist as we develop this technology, and..." Actually, people didn't really respond to it at the time. It was an article. They didn't even have the word microchip back then, that was named in the early '70s, but then all of a sudden you notice people, "Well, Gordon Moore says there's a law here."
 
And messiahs don't volunteer, they're drafted, and he got drafted as this overriding visionary for the microchip industry, but nevertheless people had fundamentally a two year framework for planning their next improvement in technology and then the rest of the industry geared its progress so much on the increased power of microchips, the software industry and the rest of the hardware industry just started doing it, but that's how I think time got created in the first place. It was probably just, the beginning it was sunrise to sunset. It was dusk to dawn and then there was sunrise to sunset.
 
Steve Krein: One day at a time.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: I got a feeling a lot of meetings were really missed in the old days.
 
Steve Krein: Well, the framework of the quarterly rhythm, and I want to come back to Free Zone because I think it's...
 
We talk about all the characteristics of Free Zoning and collaboration, and a lot of the underpinning elements of what we talk about every quarter in Free Zone, that one that's not talked about is the Free Zone of people who get together and recalibrate and those that don't. Like just, "Are you in the rhythm or you're not?"
 
And I look across, we started 2012, we're 11, 12 years in, to StartUp Health, we have 470 companies in. We're exponentially growing our community now but you really have some good data now about what's working, what's not working, and the entrepreneurs that are on that rhythm and those that aren't have a dramatically different result today, and even if it didn't all work out in the pace they wanted or the timing they wanted or the result they wanted yet, you see those that have committed and those that have not and it's just step one but I'm wondering what you've noticed over the years in Strategic Coach, and maybe even as you've thought about the different community levels of Coach from 10x and then in Free Zone. Do you see a difference in those?
 
Obviously you only see people every quarter from the framework, but even with the touchpoints now two to three times throughout the quarter where you can maybe once a month check-in on a connection call, are you seeing those that you continually see every quarter, those that you see get different results than those that just go and put their head down and work and pick up every once in a while?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think first of all you can very definitely see a separation between growth entrepreneurs and lifestyle entrepreneurs.
 
Growth entrepreneurs want to see evidence of growth in important areas every quarter. They were here a quarter ago, they want to be here next quarter. Lifestyle entrepreneurs treat Coach a bit like taking your car in for a quarterly tune up. They really don't have any growth goals but on the other hand, they find it crucial that they refresh themselves every 90 days.
 
More and more we're making it harder and harder for the lifestyle entrepreneurs to stay in the program.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And right from the beginning, the screening people, because I was telling my salespeople who... We've got about 14 in all centers; US, Canada, and the UK; we have about 14 salespeople and I says, "I know you want a commission because you're paid on commission." But I said, "There are some commissions that are good for you and not good for us, and the ones who are not good for us are just trying to get some organization and balance in their life but they actually don't have any bigger goals than where they are right now."
 
That was cool for us 20, 25 years ago but it's not cool for me right now that when someone comes in for their very first workshop for the Signature Program, I want them to have all the characteristics we're looking for for someone who's going to arrive at the Free Zone in two years or three years. I bet you're doing that with all your StartUp Health companies.
 
Steve Krein: Absolutely.
 
Dan Sullivan: What was acceptable five years ago is not acceptable today.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. And the interesting thing, and the reason this quarterly reflection's become such a big topic for me is because we recently announced the shift from StartUp Health Academy to Health Transformer University, which is really a next level generation of our program and it really happened in the market's change in 2018, '19, '20, '21, where the availability of funding for startups and the massive inflated values of startups put entrepreneurs in a position where they didn't think they had to do-
 
Dan Sullivan: They had free money.
 
Steve Krein: They had free money and didn't have a lot of commitment to the accountability, self-accountability by the way, and measurement that a growth entrepreneur has every quarter and I think people got a little sloppy with their commitment to the quarterly rhythm that enables the recalibration; monthly commitment to showing up and connecting with their peer community.
 
We do a peer network circle like a YPO forum. We have always had weekly office hours but I feel like this idea of a quarterly rhythm and check-in on not just their mindset but the snapshot of the metrics of their business as well as what the ideal characteristics of an entrepreneur and StartUp Health need, and we're getting a much better view of tightening those rules up, if you will, to not make it about us, about them, like, "Hey, if you're serious about achieving that moonshot and making the progress, got to be in the quarterly rhythm and if you're not, then come back when you're ready." Because that is one of the things when we look at the companies that have made the most progress, that are making the most progress and are navigating the changing environment, they're treating every quarter just like a...
 
No quarter is any worse or better than a quarter a year or two ago. There's simply a 90 day period and they have the same 90 days and 12 weeks and days to work with, and they're thinking about the achievement of whatever it is for that 90 day period in a very healthy way. Just making that progress and that compounding effect is obvious but we're seeing it very much as a identified habit you need to want to have, so you got to get it, you got to want it, and you got to do it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, if you were creating some checkboxes for proof that you're growing, what would be some of the checkboxes every quarter? Just staying within the framework of the quarterly checkup and you're going to have a hundred of them in 25 years.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Just starting with yourself, what would be, let's say, three crucial checkboxes where you could say, "Yes, this is better, this is better, and this is better."?
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Well, I think maintaining that transformational mindset and making sure that I stay in my visionary optimism mode, and the achievement and the success that we have is keeping me and my team and my orbit with aligned mindset, so it's my mindset, it's my team's mindset, it's my partners and anybody around me, but just a mindset check in.
 
I do it every quarter, every week, every day, but that consciousness is a really important place to check in for every entrepreneur. Not just the beginning and the end of every quarter but hopefully throughout the quarter, but at least once a quarter, check in where that is, and making sure that you're not slipping into a pessimistic or a frustrated or a failure mode.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I think one thing is, and I was just thinking about this, that when we went through COVID of course we had significant numbers of clients who dropped out; and dropped out I mean they said, "I'm not going to do the workshop on Zoom and I can't travel so there's no workshops so I'm just going to take time off until the live workshops come back again." And all of them did worse over the two years.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, the ones that came back, they said, "I wish I hadn't taken the two years off."
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: But all the ones who were as steady with Zoom as they had been with the live workshops... And in other words there was a full day quarterly workshop and then a lot of them took advantage of the new connection calls that we did, and we put six of them between each 90 day workshop, there were six of them, and I had some people who did everything and they had fantastic two years.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: So much so that they said, "You know, I feel almost embarrassed to say it but I hope this COVID thing doesn't end too soon."
 
Steve Krein: Well, it's created, I think...
 
Situations like COVID, by the way, you could take any market disruption in the momentum 2008, COVID, 9/11, the recent banking debacle a couple of months ago, and you look and say, "Entrepreneurs that are able to weather the storm, if you will, and recalibrate in the wave of that rollercoaster fare better." And it's, again, part of the ride; not going to change the habit.
 
I think it's interesting you saw that within Coach. We've seen that in StartUp Health's community as well. I see it in my peers outside of-
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah.
 
Steve Krein: ... both communities.
 
And again, maybe it's being in my mid-early 50s but I noticed peers of mine who 10, 20, 30 years of not doing that and you see what their life looks like.
 
Dan Sullivan: They're getting really old.
 
Steve Krein: Well, you're seeing the weathering of their life differently, if you will-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: ... and the quality of relationships that result from that.
 
The growth of their personal achievement, professional achievement, all that stuff I think takes a hit.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Just a little note for you that when you're two years older, sometime between your next birthday and the one after that, you will have spent more than half your life in Strategic Coach.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Well, I think some of the value of that habit established back in my late 20s of being like... I just do a quarterly recalibration. I don't...
 
Again, you can't appreciate it when you start it. I don't think I did. You could definitely appreciate it now 25 years later, and then like they said, looking around and looking at what my ambition looks like for the next 25 years and I think I am planning for significantly... I think I've had a great, first of all, 25 years, amazing 25 years, but I think my next 25 are going to be even better.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: And the foundation of what I can achieve-
 
Dan Sullivan: When you have your next 25 years you'll be a year younger than I am now.
 
Steve Krein: Isn't that crazy? Yeah.
 
Well, you've always laid the tracks for me right in front of me, Dan. Thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: But it's funny because...
 
Wow, it's crazy because you were my age when I started Coach, so you'll go back to the question we asked, what are the checkboxes, the quarterly recalibration? So the mindset check-in is one thing.
 
The plan... Let's call it the plan, the measurement of progress and the celebration of the wins.
 
Another big component of that quarterly check-in, can I celebrate the wins of the last 90 days? Can I plan and measure the progress I've made over the last 90 and then plan ahead for the next 90? And this goes back to goal cultivator.
 
I think one of the first modules was this notion of 25, 10, three, one, 90. It was like this cascading from 25 years, which was very broad vision, even a mission, and then you do a snapshot three years from now then one year from now, and then 90 days from now.
 
I forget what that one module was called but it was in the beginning of goal cultivator, and that snapshot's been locked for me that what is that refresh? Hey, let me look out. I do 25, 10, 3, 1, 90.
 
Every 90 days I'm looking at that. The only things that change every 90 are the 90 ones, but there's something that happens in your head, in your mind I should say, when you look and keep looking at the 25, 10, 3... Even you look out just to recalibrate.
 
I'm not working on any of that. I'm just working on the next 90, but...
 
So that quarterly recalibration of mindset and then your quarterly snapshot of your measureables, of your own progress, big, big impact.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. What I get out of that is that kind of thought structure has to be developed. It doesn't happen naturally so you have to work at it.
 
It's like muscle. You've created time muscles. And my feeling is that that's why every human being is unique is because I think everybody creates different kinds of time structures in their brain.
 
Steve Krein: That's all they are. They're just structures because you're not-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, they're-
 
Steve Krein: They're not [inaudible 00:22:26]-
 
Dan Sullivan: They're structures but you're actually creating synapses where there's a natural tendency for your thought to go to this framework.
 
Like I was noticing, we just submitted last Monday to the patent bureau 22 patents of Coach, and we have 28 identified that the 22 and 28 will all be submitted in the 12 month period between April and April, and I let Kathy and Shannon actually be the choosers of the tools because they're dealing with them all the time in a way that I'm not. I'm dealing with new tools that I'm creating but I'm not dealing with 90% of the tools that lie in the past, but they're still being used at some point in the Program and they've stood up to the test of time, but I was just reflecting as we were going through the list, how much I have structures in my brain for each one of those tools, and where earlier in my career I would be within the framework of one of my tools and then I would be distracted from something from the outside, now when I'm in a tool and I get distracted, it's another tool that's distracting me.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: They're all cousins, they're all relatives, and I find that a great achievement actually.
 
It was like when I first started thinking my Lifetime Extender. I said, "The first goal is can I make this a normal thought in three years? How long will it take me in the future to make this a normal thought?" And it took me three years.
 
Steve Krein: Do you normalize it? You mean normalize it?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, normalize it.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
How long? It took me three years, from '87 to '90; 1987 to 1990, and ever since then, so this is 33 years, whenever I think of my lifetime I think of that number and it has a profound impact, and I'm sure my productive 70s, where I am right now, has come about because it's not the end of my life. For most people, their 70s, they're closing in on the end of their life, and for me, I wasn't even halfway yet in terms of the structure that I've laid out.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. There's a mindset check-in, big part of it, there's this snapshot check-in-
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I'm thinking of a tool-
 
Steve Krein: ... that's based on-
 
Dan Sullivan: ... based on our conversation today.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
And then the last piece, just to bookend it, is this check-in on what I would call your readiness and your confidence about what it is you're working on, and for me there's a bunch of building blocks.
 
Mission and mindset and rhythm and progress are two of them but the relationships that I have around me, I take a great deal of pride in the curation of the notion of the batteries included versus batteries not included is one element, so is being around people whose Unique Abilities compliment mine, but I think of this image of a target and there's... Of course I put me in the middle but then when you go out each ring from there, I've got my team but I've got now there's investors and customers and partners and different people in the orbit, there's board members, advisors, there's different stakeholders, and what I've noticed is the alignment of mindset and the alignment of that plan needs to be consistent throughout, and so being religiously strict with not letting people into that orbit that don't belong, like let the system reject it, it used to be me who rejected it, now I think my team has gotten that muscle to know there's somebody batteries not included entering or there's somebody in who's changed their mindset and they're now no longer batteries included, but being able to make sure that you build an orbit of relationships around you at every level that lets you stay in that zone and be in that zone and not even entertain conversations or relationships that don't align with you.
 
Again, I think in your late 20s when you evaluate that, radically different than when you evaluate it couple of decades later; family and lots of other things and you start to realize it sounds almost impossible at 27 to do that.
 
I now sit at 53 saying, "Very possible and important." And actually another one of those understated things like a quarterly recalibration that makes a big difference.
 
It's who you hang out with, you spend your time with, and who you allow into your orbit.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, because any kind of review of that you're thinking about your thinking, you're thinking about how you're thinking about things and I think all creativity and decisiveness really comes about thinking about your thinking.
 
One of the things, going back to the quarterly rhythm, my feeling is that if you miss a quarter you'll notice at the end of the missed quarter, which is now two quarters, you're much more susceptible to external forces than you were when you were doing it every quarter.
 
You're more and more reinforcing being your own center of influence with the quarterly review, but if you miss it, things outside of you become the forest.
 
Steve Krein: So, many moons ago, Dan, we talked about the importance of Free Days and recalibrating and rejuvenating in a Free Day, and so I know every entrepreneur picks a different rhythm for their Free Days. For me it's been weekends; every weekend off since 1998 or '99, whenever.
 
I think it probably took me a couple quarters to do it. I started with one day and then two days but I not only have done it now since the beginning of Coach but my team at StartUp Health and the entrepreneurs in StartUp Health, for me it's like a vacation every week. You get two days to rejuvenate. But what I found is putting aside the two days off, about noon on Friday, which is coming up in a couple hours here, no big decisions get made because now four and-a-half days into my work week, the susceptibility, going back to your point of missing a quarter of it, it feels the same as the Friday afternoon decision.
 
You're like, "Don't make any big, life changing decisions because on Monday morning it's going to feel radically different." And I think your point about the quarterly recalibration and what you become susceptible to is the same as what poor thinking decision making you might do at two or three or four o'clock on a Friday afternoon about something that feels a lot like a bigger deal than it might be because it's Friday afternoon versus Monday morning, so I think there is this element of my quarterly rhythm also has an element of weekly rhythms, and just like before you go on vacation you try to get a lot done but you don't try to make any big decision, I think there's some element of this rhythm that plays such an important role in building the right habits.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah, I grew up a very active life until I was 30, from the standpoint of weekly religion. I grew up Roman Catholic and you went to mass at least once a week and then there were holy days and everything else.
 
If you, apart from the religious aspect of it, just that your weeks were formed and you had an hour in church and another, prayers, and there was singing but mostly you were just reflecting and then there were messages from the priest, the various readings and then a sermon and everything else, and I'm always enormously supportive in Strategic Coach of anybody being involved in the religion of their choice or the religion of their inheritance, as the case may be, and the reason is because I think two things about it is that I think it's a rhythm.
 
You used the word rhythm to start the podcast but it's a rhythm and you're part of a community, and the messages are about two subjects, morality and ethics for the most part, that are, I think, discussed less and less in general society and it's almost like you're part of the past if you're bringing up moral and ethical issues, but what I realized when I was 30, that I had traded all sorts of time structures that no longer required my weekly religious activities, and I was finding too many of the priests who were talking to us, I felt they should come to me for advice. They seemed troubled. They seemed confused. And this was the beginning of the 1970s.
 
My mother asked me about that once because she was very devout, and I says, "The last 10 priests I've met, they should come to me for advice." I said, "They seem profoundly lonely. I suspect a lot of them are alcoholic. They seem lost, so I don't feel like being preached at by people who have those qualities." And...
 
Anyway, but it's that regularity. I think it's that regularity, quite apart if you move back from it. And the other thing that I encourage that type of thing is that there's always...
 
At the middle of any country there's a core in the center of the governmental structures that's really totalitarian, and that's totally true in totalitarian countries where it's manifested itself throughout the society but there's always this tendency at the core of totalitarianism, and what I mean by totalitarianism, they want each individual to have only one relationship, and that relationship is with the government. They don't want any other government, and religion and family life and community life, these are buffers and mediations between the individual and that tendency in government to want to totalize people's life, so I don't care what religion it is, it's a buffer organization, like EO is a-
 
Steve Krein: Yep. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: ... buffering organization where people can talk about things freely, but I'm noticing with technology available for surveilling people, and we now know that the former government officials were thick and heavy inside the social media organizations and everything and they want to know what people are thinking and what people are communicating about, I just want to create as many buffers as possible between the individual and whoever those individuals are.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. And I think the systems, the rituals, the rhythms, I like how you talked about maybe relating to your weekly visits at church or any kind of thing where it's like this ritualistic thing where you're doing something, whether it's personal headspace, whether it's religious, whether it's for business. Like you said, you found a different sense of self once you got to a certain age with your entrepreneurship.
 
I think just to put a bookend on this conversation around the importance of the habit and the commitment you're making to yourself, to your company, to your family, to your relationships, to your life by either being committed to it or not, period, and I think, like I said when I started, it's one of those things people are always thinking about, "Well, what are you doing in a workshop?" Or, "What are you doing?"
 
It's like, "It doesn't matter. I am showing up." And half the battle is just having it in your calendar and doing it and showing up, and sometimes you show up with a lot of intentionality and sometime you're just scraping by to get there, but you're showing up and you always feel better afterwards.
 
Dan Sullivan: The time it took you to get here was valuable time and the time it's going to take you to get back to where you are, and I notice that the people who come from Australia are much better prepared for the workshops and they're much better clear about what they're going to delegate when they get back home than people who live 15 minutes away.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And the other thing, they stay for the full workshop where the people who live 15 minutes away oftentimes arrive late in the morning and leave early in the afternoon.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
You know, I've been a part of YPO almost as long as I've been a part of Strategic Coach, and the monthly forum is another ritual of commitment. Second Tuesday of every month I have the same group of entrepreneurs I've been meeting with, and you also see that evolve over time where you see who has the habits of a coach and being in a coaching environment and actually being coachable and having the quarterly recalibration, but one of the things I've noticed is those that show up every single meeting on time stay until the end, don't sit on their phone, and don't phone it in, if you will, mentally, are the most successful. And I'm not just talking about monetarily successful. You look at their relationships and you look at their life overall.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: And people might look and go, "Oh, well they have the financial success to do that." Or, "They have..." And the funny thing is-
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, they have the financial success because those are their habits.
 
Steve Krein: Yes! And so it's like I've watched these entrepreneurs from when they were younger, from when they had nothing, and the habits are the same. It's like the habits when they had no money, the habits before they had a relationship, the habits after...
 
The before and after does not look different. Their commitment level was. And that is, again, another one of those cause and effect.
 
People like to attribute certain people's behaviors and habits to, "They have the whole team. They can take off a day." It's not like that. It’s not like that. Whether you have the financial wherewithal, whether you have the freedom, whether you...
 
It doesn't matter. It's you're committed to showing up and being present for that workshop, that session, that event.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah, it was very interesting that you brought up the topic of the 25 years today because I'm on a four or five month marketing schedule where I get invited to outside podcasts, and maybe in a quarter I'll have six or seven where I've agreed to be on somebody but for two quarters I'm saying, "I only want to talk about our new book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x. Okay.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And some of the times they've been seminars so there's an audience there, and I said, "I only want to talk to audiences who've bought the book and read the book." So I had one last Friday where it was a group of 300. It was on a Zoom call and all 300 had read the book and all 300 of them had bought 50 books to send out to other people, and that was their qualification to have me be a guest.
 
So I started my part of the presentation and I said, "This is just the greatest audience I've ever talked to." And I said, "First of all, I know you're totally motivated for me to be here because those were the conditions, and really great questions." But somebody asked the question, "2 times goals puts pressure on me and I feel if I have a 10 times goal, it puts more pressure on me." And then I said, "Well, it's not the goal that puts the pressure on you, it's actually your deadline for achieving the goal. Entrepreneurs don't drive themselves crazy with their goals, they drive themselves crazy with their deadlines."
 
Steve Krein: Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: So, I'm going to share an experience I had. I was talking to somebody and I said, "I'd just like you to do something.
 
Is this your best revenue year? Like, the last 12 months, is this your best revenue year?" And he said, "Yeah, actually it is." And I says, "Okay, I want you to take that number that you've just achieved and I want you to multiply it by 10." And it was really weird because he said, "Multiply it by 10? I can't achieve that in three years." And I said, "Well, I only said multiply the number by 10. You're the one who added the three years." I said, "Why did you add the three years?"
 
And I went back to the question afterwards but I said, "Actually, I'm going to give you 25 years to do it. You can go 10 times in 25 years." And he said, "25 years? I don't need 25 years to go 10 times." And I says, "Oh really? How many do you need?" And he said, "I can do it in 15." I said, "Wow. Isn't that great? You get 10 times the result and you get 10 years change. What would you do with the extra 10 years?" And he said, "I'd do it again."
 
I said, "Wait a minute. Before, you're objecting to going 10 times and now you just set a goal for a hundred times." I said, "What screws you up is the deadlines that you put on your thinking."
 
Steve Krein: You know... Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I said, "Can I tell you why you do that?" And the reason is there's a lot of other problems in your life that you're not dealing with, and so having an outrageous goal that drives you every day is a fix that keeps you from having to think about other things in your life that you have to take care of.
 
"Then the other thing is..." I said, "You're doing it because you're trying to get away from something in your past and you're not heading towards something great in the future. You're trying to get away from something negative in your past."
 
And it was a very fruitful conversation from that standpoint.
 
Steve Krein: There's something really interesting about locking a quarter or locking a week as a framework and asking a question, not, "How long is it going to take to do that?" But, "What can you do within a given period?"
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Steve Krein: So we have this new software we're using called Roam. It's phenomenal.
 
It's actually-
 
Dan Sullivan: R-O-A-A-M?
 
Steve Krein: R-O.A-M, and it's basically taking remote office to the next level for companies like yours which has multiple offices plus people remote, for mine which is fully remote. It creates a visual workplace to feel like we're all together in one office, and they've combined the best of Zoom, the best of Slack, and the best of conferencing in a very pleasant new way of working.
 
We started using it, got instant productivity gains. I'm off Zoom now except for a couple of external calls.
 
We're moving everything over to Roam outside of Zoom, but what I'm actually getting at is every Wednesday there is a new release of the software. Sometimes there's 14 bullets of improvements, sometimes there's three, sometimes there's one, but every single Wednesday they're releasing. What's fascinating is we've been on it since early January, so it's going on a little over three months. That's 14 weeks of improvements we've watched. The product is transformed in 14 weeks, but there, I'm sure, is a roadmap behind...
 
Not I'm sure; I know there is a roadmap. The roadmap probably is not much further than a couple weeks out in terms of details but there's probably a long-term roadmap, but the interesting thing is you just know being on Roam three months from now or six, it's going to be infinitely better, and I bring this up because I think that if you commit to shipping every week or you commit to recalibrating every quarter, it might be two quarters to get something done, it might take three quarters to get that goal to your point done, but the idea is what can you do to measure it every 90 days or every week?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: And I think there's something, go back to your own psychological framework for everybody to be in that rhythm and to commit to saying, "Come hell or high water every Wednesday we're releasing." Or, "Every 90 days we're recalibrating for the next 90."
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Centuries ago when you didn't have the frequency of change, people had enormous number of rituals and structures that they built into their life. They were seasonal, they were religious, they were political, they were community events and everything, but that was done for you from the outside so you didn't really choose those structures, you were just born into the structures and you grew up into the structures, and I think that what the industrial revolution, and especially its technological component, has done, it's fractured all those structures that people had so that basically 365 days a year can be workdays; 24 hours a day can be a workday.
 
There's no separations and timeouts or anything except the ones that you impose yourself, and I think entrepreneurs have an advantage there because they decided to depart from most of the structures of your economic lifetime very, very early in life, and so that they're very, very open to finding new ways of structuring because they've taken responsibility for their economic future.
 
So you're talking about this, if you talk to a corporate executive about Roam they'd say, "Oh no, that's just going to screw up all of our existing structures." And so they'll stick with dysfunctional things because they have a pattern to them.
 
There's a rhythm to our dysfunction. There's a rhythm to our mediocrity that feels good. It's Newton's second law, "That which is in motion tends to stay in motion until stopped by outside."
 
If you look at who the longtime users or the most engaged users of this new software or the new app, my sense is that they will be people whose activity is entrepreneurial. They themselves are creating new things.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Yep.
 
Dan Sullivan: And they feel a kindred spirit with a software that updates itself every week.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. And it works both ways by the way. There's people who don't like that and they're like, "Ah, it keeps changing. I got to install every Wednesday and upgrade." And I'm like, "You don't get how beautiful that is."
 
Again, but it repels the people also. It doesn't just attract. It's an interesting thing.
 
So, I just want to be mindful of time.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: What's your biggest insight from the conversation? So we can bookend this and start another episode.
 
Dan Sullivan: Now I'm going to go back and revisit this, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take three main points that I got from the conversation and I'm going to put it in the triple play and see if I can come up with a new thinking tool that updates the 25 year framework.
 
Steve Krein: I love it. I love it.
 
Well, I appreciated the conversation and the thinking that I've been doing around the quarterly recalibration for entrepreneurs in StartUp Health and for myself is built on this notion of almost feeling like I can restart my effort every 90 days, which is a lot of fun.
 
I say restart, meaning recalibrate and plan, and we're in the beginning of Q2 2023 right now and my visionary optimism for the quarter is without a doubt a thousand times more clear to me and I have more confidence around it than I did three years ago, five years ago, or 15 years ago, but-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: ... bookending, what I said from the beginning and just celebrating my 53rd now being in Coach 25 years, I think it's exciting to think about the next 25, and what I have a deep amount of gratitude to you for, Dan, is the habit of doing this from my late 20s to my early-mid 50s.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I see the same impact on me, so your 25 years were also my 25 years. I'm just noticing how I'm performing in my 70s as compared to other 70 year olds.
 
You made reference to my physical health from 2009, or my physical appearance anyway, since 2009.
 
Steve Krein: Dan, always love being with you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Was a pleasure. Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Take care.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you.