How Your Role Models Relate To Your Business Motivation

Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. Dan, you have talked before about the fact that you have five role models, none of whom are currently alive, which I think is kind of fascinating and I'm super curious as to why they are role models for you and how that is. So I'll let you say who they are, but I'd love to know who do you really hold in high esteem historically, and why are they role models for you?
 
Dan Sullivan: This is a long-term, what I would say, project. Because I've been thinking about this. Certainly I had these five when I met you, and it's 32 years since we engaged with each other and you joined Strategic Coach. I'm a lifetime reader, and I've really zeroed in on people whose abilities were so extraordinarily apparent even when they were alive. And it goes way back. Some of them go way back. But I'm going to use two words here to sort of structure the explanation here. I would say unique is one of the words, timeless is another word, and structure is a third word.
 
With one of them, there's not a lot of historical records, but it was very, very clear that this person had profound impact in his own time. And it was a Greek, but he lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and this was 300 BC. Alexandria had a great library. For the times, it was considered the greatest library in the world, and it was a center of learning for the whole Eastern Mediterranean, which was basically the known world from an intellectual standpoint. That was Euclid. His name was Euclid.
 
My second one is Shakespeare, who lived in the crossover between 1500s and 1600s. And Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived in the 17th century, and then James Madison, who was really the author of the US Constitution. And Thomas Edison, who was born in the middle of the 1800s, lived into the 1900s and was born in the same town that I grew up in, in Milan, Ohio. Northern Ohio.
I use these five people and there's many other great people that you could choose from. But I chose these five because there was an extraordinary uniqueness to what they did. There was a timeless quality about what they created, and number three, they gave great structure so that other people could do things. They created sort of the structure. I aspire to all three things. I aspire to uniqueness, I aspire to timelessness, and I aspire to lasting structure. So those are my five and those are my reasons.
 
Shannon Waller: I love that, Dan. Well, let's dive into a little bit to each one of them. What do you specifically admire, for example, about Euclid? I know you do because you actually based a lot of the structure of our latest book on that.
 
Dan Sullivan: "Geometry" For Staying Calm & Cool. Yeah, there's no basis for understanding who created what he put together, but he put together a compendium. He was a great aggregator, so he took all the available practical mathematics that was available in the world, especially as it related to construction, so it related to time, space, and shapes. He created the most marvelous books that kind of show how you construct things in such a way that they stay up, angles and lines, and how you create the various shapes. And there's a formula for it. My knowledge of it is basically the first book, which is 47 Propositions. They are first principles of mathematics.
 
We live in a city, Shannon, Toronto, which is one of the fastest growing advanced cities in the world. The population has tripled in the 52 years that I've been here. And right now, it's a forest of tower cranes, the big cranes where the operator is hundreds of feet off the ground, and we have an inside expert on this, Sasa Krcmar, who's the number one site surveying company in the city of Toronto, and he gives me a scorecard. But right now, of all the cities in the world, either advanced or developing countries, Toronto has the most cranes, and he establishes what the site has to look like, the S-I-T-E, but then he establishes where 90 degrees is. So you don't want an elevator that goes up at 89 degrees.
 
I asked him, "If you discover that the elevator is off, what do you do about it? It's not 90 degrees, it's 89 degrees." He said, "Well, truthfully, you should tear it out and start over because the cost of dealing with the maintenance problems that it's one degree off 90 degrees, the friction and the wear is just so great that the cost of maintenance is going to be greater than tearing it out and starting over again."
 
Shannon Waller: Goodness.
 
Dan Sullivan: The whole thing is that the entire physical world that we know, is maybe by far the most influential book ever, because you know, you have the world divided by religions and nationalities. But the one law that really, really governs everything is the law that gravity respects no angle except a 90 degree angle. Things either stay up or they don't stay up. So our entire physical world has been based on this one book. So it's very, very clear that there's genius level, Unique Ability here in the way he put these books together and also that they're timeless. 5,000 years from now, if you're building something, you got to follow the geometry books of Euclid, and it's all about structure. How do you build things so that what you've built stays up and stays useful over forever? Really forever.
 
Shannon Waller: His proposition stacked on top of one another. You have to understand one before you understand two, is that correct? You have to-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And you have to understand the first 46 before you can understand number 47. So it builds. It's almost like watching a building go up the way that he constructs it. I just have a passion for structure, that once the structure's up, you don't have to fool around with the structure. So that's Euclid.
 
Shannon Waller: Cool. What is it about number two, Shakespeare, Dan, that inspires you?
 
Dan Sullivan: Hands down, greatest thinker who ever lived. Greatest intellect. I mean, there's just nobody that you can compare to Shakespeare. He created 37 plays in, I think 23 years from 1589 to 1613, I think 24 years, he created 37 plays, and there's about 15 of them that are acted out everywhere on the planet in probably 60, 70 different languages. The most from a theatrical standpoint, from a dramatic standpoint, from a poetic standpoint, from a creation of personalities in a dramatic setting, there's no comparison. Just the greatest master of language who ever existed, is said to have created a sizable portion of the English language during his 24 years. His insights into human psychology are just unmatched.
 
Actually, Freud, who is famous, he was a psychiatrist around 1900, was asked once, "Where did a lot of your psychiatric theories come from?" And he said, "Actually, periodically I get a insight into a new understanding of human psychology, and it's like a road and I'm walking down the road going into this new territory, and I see a figure coming back the other way, and it's Shakespeare." And Shakespeare says, "Yeah, it's worth exploring," or, "Nothing there."
 
Shannon Waller: Right. That's brilliant. I love it.
 
Dan Sullivan: He is so extraordinary that people won't accept that he was just a commoner living in London, born in Stratford, small town, still fairly small. Son of a tanner. Well, went through church school or the village school, whichever one it was, and moved to London.
 
Shannon Waller: So Dan, the other thing about Shakespeare that's so fascinating, and I know I went to visit all the sites when I went to London, is that he was also an entrepreneur. In fact, on his statue, there's-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there's two things that modern scholars who are elite people, they [inaudible 00:10:04]. First of all, it couldn't have been the person that everybody says, but everybody knew him. I mean, there were famous people like Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, these were great writers and great poets, and they all knew him really well. And soon after his death, he died in 1616, all of his friends got together and they financed it and they put together the folio of all his writings, which included the 37 plays, but it also included his sonnets, which are some of the most sublime poetry in the world. It was very, very clear that he wrote for money and he wrote to deadline. He had deadlines. I mean, there isn't a playwright in the world who has ever knocked off 37 plays in 24. He's got some that are not as important as others, but things like Hamlet and Macbeth and Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, King Lear.
 
I mean, if one person spent 30 years writing one of those plays, it would be considered a great breakthrough. He was knocking them off every five, six months, and he was doing it for an audience. Not only that, but he was the first actor that created his own company and then, in his own company, created his own theater. But what a lot of people don't know, because the academic community hates this idea, the profits he made from theater, he speculated on wheat. He bought big granaries full of wheat, because in those days you had famines every six or seven years. And people said, "Yeah, but he exploited them." And I said, "Well, being exploited for food is better than dying from no food." And then he took his earnings from wheat speculation, and he bought real estate. He went back and became a major landowner in Stratford.
 
He is buried in the church where he grew up and they have a statue of him. It's sort of a wall statue. The statue sort of comes out of the wall. They have him with books down to the side, and he is kind of holding onto a pen with his hand. But they noticed that that was an addition to the original statue, and the original statue they have, somebody caught a drawing of it when it was first created. He was holding the top of a big bag of wheat. So it was well known at his time that he was the wheat guy. When things got tight, you went to Shakespeare for the wheat. This is totally unacceptable to modern people, but again, I'm going to go back.
 
Utterly unique. Not only was he utterly unique, his personalities, the characters are just utterly unique characters. I mean, the characters in his plays overshadow the plots of the plays. Just amazing and genius. You can spend a week just looking at a stanza and just the cleverness of the words and the wit and the insight is just extraordinary. He's just pouring this stuff out every day, just get up and write myself a play today and everything else. He's had such a profound impact on the world. There is nobody, certainly in the field of literature, the field of drama. He's on another planet.
 
But going back to the original thesis, what he had was extraordinary uniqueness, and he knew he had it because all his characters know that they have it. He was the first person to ever dramatize individual actors, characters talking to themselves on stage. Hamlet being the great example. I mean, Hamlet's lines are 60% of the play, but 90% of them are him talking to himself on stage. There's a thought that thinking about your thinking and expressing it in front of an audience starts with Shakespeare. Nobody ever did it before, and that's extraordinary. He had uniqueness. 2,000 years from now, he'll be just as fresh as he was the day he introduced the play and enormous structure of putting different human emotions together, human insights together, human failings together. Somebody said, "There's two things in the world. There's Shakespeare and then the other life that isn't so interesting."
 
Shannon Waller: I love it. The other piece of structure, Dan, and you've talked about this before, is the iambic pentameter.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. He did this all in a single style, which is called iambic pentameter. And it's 10 syllables per line. Next line. The volume of Shakespeare is about this big, and all of it is 10 syllable lines.
 
Shannon Waller: Fascinating. Very cool. All right, Dan, let's jump to our next person, Johann Sebastian Bach.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there's a saying that, "When angels play music among themselves, they play Mozart, but when they're playing for God, they play Bach." There is something so extraordinary about Bach and there's never things about him that are more known because the further closest to us in history, more is known about him, is that he seems to have been absolutely extraordinary from the youngest possible age. He was an amazing singer. He started off as an amazing singer, and he was known for his voice, and he's got some of the most gorgeous choral music. St. Matthew Passion and Cantatas. He wrote for money and he wrote to deadline. He was an entrepreneur. He had two wives, one of them died, and then the other one was quite a superb musician, and there's thought that she was the copyist for a lot of his music. Anna Magdalena, her name was. Anna Magdalena. He had 19 children, and at least three of them became really, really great composers in their own right.
 
Shannon Waller: Wow.
 
Dan Sullivan: Lived in maybe three places in his entire life, had court music for the [inaudible 00:16:40] of the day, and actually had commercial contracts. “Coffee Cantata” is one of the most famous cantatas, and that was for a coffee house in Leipzig, Germantown, it was. Then a lot of work with Thomaskirche, a major church in Leipzig in Germany, and he did the weekly cantata. So he'd knock out a new cantata every week, and there's a lot of cut and paste. You'll see a theme in one thing, and he'll pull that theme, reorchestrate it, and do it. Phenomenal instrumental music almost on any instrument. He was a phenomenal organist and phenomenal piano player because piano was very late. It was just coming in when he was there.
 
But totally unique. The thing that he mastered is called contrapuntal. And if you listen to him, he’s always got two notes going back and forth, and then he'll have one melody line that's doing this, and another melody line that's doing this. He wrote one thing, I forget the name of it, where he’s got one melody line going this way, and he's got the reverse melody line coming at the same thing. So as you're going through it, you're starting at the beginning of one thing and ending, and you're starting with the end and going, and they all match up as it's going through. This is amazing intelligence. So uniqueness, totally timeless, and phenomenal structure. You can't believe the structure that's in Bach.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, that's one of the interesting things for me about Bach. He's known for structure in his music. People have done mathematical studies of his music.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And it really fits in, he became enormously popular during the digital age. It's been the last 40-50 years. I mean, the vast majority of great people are not widely recognized as great during their own time. You earn enough that you can make a living. Then his music went out of style. Actually, one of the people who replaced him was one of his own sons, Johann Christian Bach, and he was more popular. He created stuff for the court. He was much more popular in the courts of those days and everything else. But you don't remember any of the people who competed with him back then. Same thing with Shakespeare. You do remember Shakespeare. Shakespeare had some really, really powerful, Thomas Kyd, as I mentioned before, Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe. These are major literary giants in their age, but they all knew Shakespeare and they all considered him great. So same thing with Bach. Bach was totally known in his times, but Bach is as current today as he was when he wrote this stuff.
 
Shannon Waller: Dan, I'm in awe of your knowledge of history. I have Wikipedia up while you're talking and it's pretty much like reading Wikipedia. Your knowledge of people that you respect and care about is quite impressive. So thank you for the history lesson. So yeah, you were talking about Shakespeare did have competitors, but still it's really those three things, unique, timeless, and the structure that has the longevity.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Those three. That's what I really aspired to. When I create thinking tools in Coach, I do a timeless test and then I said, "If this was a hundred years ago in an entrepreneurial setting, would this thinking tool be as valuable a hundred years ago as it is right now?" I said, "Yes." If I went a hundred years, what I can imagine a hundred years in the future, and it was an entrepreneurial setting, would this be as useful as it is now? And I said, "Yes, absolutely." It's unique. No one's come up with these tools before and they're timeless, and all of our stuff has amazing structure to it.
 
Shannon Waller: It really does.
 
Dan Sullivan: And none of them contradict. We identified what we're going after with our immediate patents and the first 122 that we identified. We've created a lot more, but the 122 all have those qualities. They're unique, they're timeless, and enormous structure. They all build on each other. There's not any of our tools that contradict another tool.
 
Shannon Waller: The through line, the congruency, the consistency is really quite spectacular, and they allow for other people's creativity to grow as well.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Shannon Waller: You've gone through a model of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. And wisdom is timeless knowledge.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah.
 
Shannon Waller: That's one of the things I really appreciate about our conversations, which I liken to philosophy a lot, which I think they are very practical, and that's what it feels like. It's so essential. It's so core to human and entrepreneurial experience that it is going to last the ages, which it's fun being involved in those types of conversations. All right. We have two more very interesting humans, James Madison and Thomas Edison. So tell me about James Madison.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The U.S. is the only country that was created out of a document. The Constitution of the United States is the set of rules by which all governance at the federal level and makes possible the state level and makes possible municipal level in the United States is governed by a single document, which if it was typed out single line in 1787 when it was created, it would be 23 pages long, and all the amendments added to it since 1787 would take it from 23 typed out pages to 27 typed out pages. These are adjustments. And of all the amendments, the first 10 are the most important, and they're called the Bill of Rights. The unique thing about the U.S. Constitution, it's actually not written to facilitate government. It's actually written to protect the people from the government.
 
Because the history of government preceding the American Revolution was mostly tyranny of one sort or another. It was mostly tyranny where one person or a small group of people told everyone else what to do and the colonists, who not many of them were immigrants. The only one who was an immigrant was Alexander Hamilton, who was born in the Caribbean, but all of them were the descendants of immigrants. They had come from situations, mostly Great Britain, where the king was still claiming divine rights. And there's a whole history to that that I won't go into here. There were powerful people in that first group that we called the founders, and they were fairly young. I mean with few exceptions. Most of them were in their twenties and thirties when the revolution happened.
 
Of all them, the least significant physically was Madison, and he was kind of sickly. All his life, he was fairly sickly and he was five foot two, and he weighed about 120 pounds. To give you an idea, Washington was six foot two. Jefferson was like six foot. They were normal sized present day. He was five foot two, but he was a phenomenal negotiator, a phenomenal integrator, and is known to have had one of the largest collection of constitutions going back thousands of years.
 
The other thing about it is that when the revolution happened, it was agreed upon that the colonies, these were separate colonies, there were 13 of them eventually, they all had constitutions of one sort or another because they all came from Britain and the British had documents, the Magna Carta, it was a very literate place. And then of course, Shakespeare is the type of person that a highly literate culture will produce. So he put this all together, took about two years to put it all together, a lot of backroom dealing and everything else, and it was all triggered by the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, 1776, July 4th, which said that this is a new beginning, and here we are going to start with that humans have inalienable rights, three of them in particular, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If you take the declaration's compelling offer and you combine it with Madison's structure, you just created the biggest, most dynamic batshit country in the history of the world.
 
Shannon Waller: I love when you describe the U.S. as crazy.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, it's a batshit crazy country because everybody wants more life, they want more liberty, and they're pursuing happiness. But the pursuit of happiness is not happiness. So you got to come to grips with that pursuit.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: But the Constitution itself is the rules that are in charge.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Nobody in particular is in charge of the United States. The rules are in charge, and the President has to play by the rules. The Congress has to play by the rules. The Supreme Court has to play by the rules, and that's the big structure. Then each state is structured on the big structure. The governor is the President, they have a legislature and usually a Senate and a Congress, not necessarily those names, but the equivalent. Then they have a Supreme Court. So it's fractal. The whole United States country is very fractal, very simple, and hardly changes at all. So it's totally unique, it's totally timeless, and phenomenal structure.
 
Shannon Waller: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: The final product was written by a five foot two, 120 pound sickly person who became president of the United States.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh, I forgot that. As a Canadian, I don't have to know that. Just saying.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, the first five presidents were, Washington was number one, Addams number two, Jefferson number three, Madison number four, and Monroe number five, and they were all part of that gang that got the whole thing started.
 
Shannon Waller: That's amazing. I feel compelled to mention, Dan, Shakespeare's first folio and the Magna Carta can be seen at the British Library, not the British Museum, but the British Library. Well worth the trip if you happen to be there.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, a remarkable experience.
 
Shannon Waller: Love it.
 
Dan Sullivan: There's definitely a religious feeling when you're in there.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh my gosh. That's how I felt about seeing the Magna Carta.
 
Dan Sullivan: In the National Archives in the United States, you can see the original Constitution.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah. You kind of get goosebumps because you realize... Again, this goes back to the phenomenal book "Geometry" For Staying Cool & Calm. It's like when you get those source documents for the key rules that have shaped our thinking, our behavior, our system, our society, it's meaningful. It's really quite spectacular. A little sightseeing trip on that one. All right. Last but certainly not least, Thomas Edison, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Who under any other circumstances would've been a Canadian. Okay. Because he was born in southwest Ontario and there was what Canadians call a rebellion in 1837, and this was before Canada was actually Canada. On Canada, it was kind of the map, but it was upper Canada and lower Canada, lower Canada being closer to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River and Upper Canada, essentially today's province of Ontario. They had colonial aristocrats who did things that triggered a rebellion. It didn't last very long, wasn't very violent by American standards, but Edison's father was caught up and he had an arrest warrant issued for him. He did what any smart Canadian would do at that time. He got a boat and went across Lake Erie and ended up in northern Ohio, a small town in Ohio, Milan, and I grew up two miles from his birthplace.
 
Edison created modern scientific infrastructure. He created the whole model for how you systematically invent new things. He was a master of marketing. He was a master of the stock market. He was a master of patents. He was a master of how you put together a research lab, Menlo Park, New Jersey. He had a hundred scientists and technicians and engineers, and they had a rule that they had to pump out a quota of patents every month. He got them patenting and he had over a thousand. They did the work, they got paid, he got credit for the patents, and had over a thousand when he reached the end. And had an impact, obviously on electric lighting, not the first to create the light bulb, the first person to make the light bulb into a commercial success. He created the first system for electrifying cities, lower Manhattan, pressed a button, and all of a sudden blocks and blocks and blocks of lower Manhattan were created.
 
Shannon Waller: It was the grid system, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Created phonographs. Sound technology. Was into movies. Movie theater. Created the old ticker tape for the stock markets. And just constantly, constantly inventive for probably a good 50 year period. Yeah. The electrical systems in the United States, many of them are named Cleveland, Edison. All of them have the names Edison. And was deaf. Had a childhood injury in an accident, and he lost his hearing.
 
Shannon Waller: I did not realize that Thomas Edison went deaf.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, he was deaf as a child, and his mother created a unique educational assistant to train him, but total genius, timeless, what he created is timeless, but it was his extraordinary organizational capabilities besides his inventiveness, which is unmatched. It's really, really unmatched. And enormous structure. Enormous structure. Just understood how electrical systems get structured and how you take advantage of this new technology. Anyway, so those are my five. I don't try to be like Euclid. I aspire to the uniqueness, the-
 
Shannon Waller: Timelessness.
 
Dan Sullivan: The timelessness and the structure that they do. And that's what I learn from them. I don't try to imitate them because their skills were in a totally different realm. All five of them, their skills were totally in a different realm. So I'm not aspiring to them. I'm aspiring to how they demonstrated these three qualities.
 
Shannon Waller: Yes, and the impact that they've had. Your audience is entrepreneurs and related people to entrepreneurs, and that's with whom you want to have an impact, right? In that kind of way.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The first definition of entrepreneur is 1804 that seems to fit the modern definition, and that's French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who said, "Entrepreneur is someone who takes resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity." So in every case, you take Euclid, you take Shakespeare, you take Bach, you take Madison, you take Edison, they were dealing with a resource. There was all these drawings, maybe blueprints or techniques that were mathematical that people used all over what was called the Middle East now. They used them to build things, and he's the one who took all those and compiled them, organized them, and published them that took the resource from a lower level of productivity to a worldwide productivity. Same is true of Shakespeare with language, with storytelling, with character creation, took it to a higher level. Bach did it with music. Madison did it with rules of governance, and Edison did it with technological scientific innovation.
 
You're always taking something that already exists and you're raising it to a higher level of productivity. So in Coach, what we aspire is to have a unique timeless structure that takes the resources called entrepreneur from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity.
 
Shannon Waller: It's such a great bottom line way of describing Coach, Dan. Starting at the Signature level, then going up to 10x Ambition, and then going up to Free Zone. That is exactly... I mean, clients can literally document their success and growth according to what you've just said. So a hundred percent. That's exactly what Strategic Coach does. For me, it's really fun to hear your role models because you're kind of singular to my mind. So hearing who's inspired you, why they've inspired you, love the history, the context of it is quite fascinating, and it also educates what you really reinforce with other people. Take your own experience seriously. Your unique focus on that, not fairness, which is what we talked about in our last podcast, you really encourage people to get started with, number one. And then also, make sure that what they're doing, their plans, their lives are more on the timeless side and that they have a structure to them because you see what happens when they don't, which is the other part of it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And ours exists in the mindset realm, the realm of mindsets, because it's mindsets that create habits, and habits are things that work that have become automatic. That's what entrepreneurism is. It's unique insights that can be communicated through a particular way of looking at things, and then is transferred into teamwork and is transferred into technology, and that produces exponential entrepreneurial results. There's a real method, and we're really finding this out now that we're taking 34 years of program, the innovation in the program and translating them into the world of patents. You can see how easy it is for the patent attorneys to just take the structure and lay it out, and all the structure is resonant with every one of the other structures. I think this stuff lasts forever. I think what we're creating in Coach lasts forever.
 
Shannon Waller: Well, and I think it does, Dan, because you are dealing with mindset. Whether or not you see surprises as exciting or not, in another recent podcast, those things are timeless, right? You're very much about the human experience, definitely focused in on entrepreneurial experience, but it's extraordinarily relevant, as you said, it could be 5,000 years ago or 5,000 years in the future, it's still going to really land.
 
I really appreciate this conversation. It's really fun to hear who inspires you and what you have gleaned from those examples. Each of those five people have had fascinating lives, and there's lots to be extracted from them in terms of value, but unique, timeless, and structure. That's a lens through which to look at these five individuals. Thank you for sharing that. It's inspiring for me too.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you.