How To Spot The Copycat Among Creative Entrepreneurs

Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. Dan, prior to us turning recording on today, we were talking about some of the impact of AI and some of the forecasts that people are making about human creativity going down and things like that. And you made a comment that I found intriguing that I thought would be a good conversation topic. And you said people who aren't creative imitate creativity. What does that mean? What does that look like? I'm super curious.
 
Dan Sullivan: First of all, I want to pay some due respect to imitation here, and that is that the two timeless ways of learning in this world and improving yourself is observing other people's performance that you admire and then imitate that. And the second one is repetition, you know, that we learn things by repeating them over and over again. But I would say that we're social creatures. So somewhere in the past, the human species pulled off something that none of the other species did, certainly not to the degree that we do it, and that is that we use our brains to access the uniqueness of other people's brains. There are some animals, we call them smart animals, because they seem to not just be the way that they were patterned by their genes, but they have the ability to spot other behavior and sort of learn. Dogs being one of them, and I think dogs are the closest companion animal to humans, probably more so than any other species.
 
And we know that there's marine life, especially the dolphin family. Killer whales are porpoises. I mean, they're porpoises. And they end up as entertainers because they learn new things. And it's very entertaining for people to be in the presence of animals that learn. We like things that learn, and we have technology now, the new AI, artificial intelligence, that's now available for individuals to work with, where before it was big corporations or big government had artificial intelligence, but now it's available to individuals. And I think the thing about this is that imitation, whether we admit to it or not, we all imitate other people's performance, that we ourselves wish we had that quality, we wish we had the level of excellence and really the uniqueness. But the interesting thing about it is that if you're a creative person and you come across someone who's more creative to you, you do imitate. But at a certain point, you make it your own and you're no longer imitating. You've created your own form of imitation. And I think what the imitating person does and for how long they do it tells you whether they're just an imitator or whether they're creative.
Shannon Waller: Ooh, I love that. It makes me think of coaching, Dan. Like I learned to coach from watching you, the other coaches as well. But at some point, I'm not the same as you, right? I've created my own style and structure and flow and perception, all the things that really works for me, as have all the other coaches as well.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, there's a point about that. I know that the coaches, people who are already coaches, Strategic Coach associate coaches and yourself and Cathy Davis and Kristi Chambers and Maureen Sullivan, they imitate me and they watch me, but I've never watched them. People say, "Why have you never seen any of your coaches coach?" Because when they're the coach in a workshop, I don't want them to think about how I did it. I want them to be themselves and respond to it. Because I don't want imitators.
 
Shannon Waller: I don't want imitators.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I want creative people. One of the people I've been very influenced by his performance, not another coach, it was a basketball player, Larry Bird. And I just admired how he seemed to have a sense of what every one of his other teammates were doing. Most players are out there, you know, "What am I doing?" And he was out there saying, "What are we doing? And how do I make them better?" I didn't even make the basketball team when I was in high school team. I don't have basketball skills. But I have an appreciation for someone else's skills that I can translate over and put them into my world. So I'm at the point now with the Free Zone where I've made everybody else in the room into a coach, into a creative coach, just through the structures I've created. I think I'm learning more from them than they're learning from me.
 
There's a player who's from Serbia and he was the most valuable player in the championship finals. Their team won. His name is Nikola Jokic. And quite frankly, I think he's the greatest basketball player I've ever seen in my life. And he's like 6'11" and he's 280 pounds. And he can shoot and he can rebound it, but he's a phenomenal passer. And they say, "You seem to have an approach to the game." And he says, "Either I'm open to score or one of my teammates is open to score. If I'm not open, I find the teammate who is open to score." And there's something I love about that. So he's playing the whole game of basketball. He's not just playing his part of the basketball. He's playing the whole team. And I love that.
 
But I've translated it into my own, where my Unique Abilities, I've taken the pattern that I see in him and I've translated it. I mean, they're probably the most talked about political individual of my lifetime, where the people who love him talk about him and the people who hate him is Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, I think, was the owner of Worldwide Wrestling before he became a politician. And he noticed that the dynamics of Worldwide Wrestling, which is all rigged and rehearsed, by the way, always had the hero and the villain. It always had the hero, and he took that model, and when he entered politics, he just inserted the model on the political scene, and he was the hero to all the people that the villains were oppressing. And I said, what a neat thing. He's turned politics, I mean, politics is usually very boring. Even the people who hate him can't stop watching him.
 
Shannon Waller: Entertainment.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. He obviously was imitating something that he picked up, but he turned it into his own creative form. And some people, you know, not every Strategic Coach client votes the same way that I do. And they said, "I can't stand the guy." I said, "Yeah, but you can't stop watching him, can you?" Yeah, and I said, "I love him." And they said, "Why do you love him?" I said, "Well, he's a thug." They said, "He's a thug? Why do you like him?" I said, "He's our thug. The other side are all thugs. We never had our thugs. So we've got our thug. And not only that, but he's an entertaining thug."
 
Shannon Waller: And I think about creative people, they can be polarizing. There's musicians that I totally respect their musicianship and their creativity, and they're not people I want to listen to. But I respect their creative take on whatever it is that they're doing.
 
Dan Sullivan: But I take my inspiration from all walks of life. And historically, I mean, I've got lots of heroes from history—Johann Sebastian Bach, Shakespeare. You can see the structure to what they do, but they've gone way beyond the structure of creating. Shakespeare just created some of the most amazing fictional personalities in the history of the world—Hamlet, Othello, Falstaff. He creates all these amazing personalities. And the personalities were bigger than the plays that they were in. Johann Sebastian Bach had this thing of contrapuntal. He would have two opposite tunes that were in harmony with each other. And I said, it's like The Strategy Circle, you know, take a vision and you have the obstacles and you take the vision on the obstacles and they create a new capability. I love that.
 
Shannon Waller: So imitation might be where we start, but it's not where you want to end up. And it's interesting, Dan, because there are people, apparently, I don't know any, but there are people who are brilliant painters and they can take a masterpiece, and they can imitate it like almost exactly. And you think, "Oh my gosh, why don't they take that, instead of trying to duplicate something and rip it off, why don't they create their own?" But they're missing that-
 
Dan Sullivan: They're not creative.
 
Shannon Waller: They're not creative. So that's one of the examples.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. They don't make it their own.
 
Shannon Waller: They don't make it their own.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like, I think I have it right here, but all grapefruit trees start as orange trees.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh, I didn't know that.
 
Dan Sullivan: There are grafts. They have an orange tree starting and they take a graft and they graft it on. And because the root structure of orange trees is stronger than the root structure for grapefruit trees.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh, OK. That's interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: I may have it wrong here, but I'm going after the principle here and what they've done. So real creativity is actually a grafting. As you start with a Unique Ability, you see someone else's Unique Ability, you learn how they're unique, and you take some of their principles and you graft it onto your own Unique Ability.
 
Shannon Waller: And that creates something new.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and that creates something brand new. The combination of their uniqueness and your uniqueness creates something totally new.
 
Shannon Waller: Awesome. So it's imitation as inspiration.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. But what happens if they're just imitators? Well, then they're thieves. When you have someone who's technically a great painter, and they take someone who's a great artist, and they produce the, it kind of looks like it. I mean, I have one in my living room, it's a Matisse painting, and the painting was done by someone else, as Matisse would do it. But I don't say I have a Matisse; I just say I've got a reproduction of a Matisse thing. People who imitate but aren't creative are counterfeits because they're stealing. They're a counterfeit bill trying to pass them off as a actual bill. And I can tell with people who have big reputations and big celebrities, but they're imitators. They're not creative.
 
Shannon Waller: Interesting.
 
Dan Sullivan: You can tell they stay within the framework of what they've imitated.
 
Shannon Waller: It seems like they would be smart enough, Dan, to come up with some of their own ideas. Are they just not courageous enough to do it, or why is that?
 
Dan Sullivan: They're lacking a chip.
 
Shannon Waller: Mm hm.
 
Dan Sullivan: They just don't have the creativity. See, they want to be admired like the real deal. They want to pass themselves off as a real deal, but they're not the real deal.
 
Shannon Waller: And they won't take that risk. Yeah. Interesting. With artificial intelligence and the writing capabilities of ChatGPT and all the different versions we see of it, is this going to exacerbate the distinction between creative and imitators?
 
Dan Sullivan: It remains to be seen because I think we're so new into it. I mean, it's only been six months since ChatGPT came out, and I think it's all in flux right now. I mean, people are using it in every which way, and there doesn't seem to be any center to this activity whatsoever. For myself, I've looked at everything, and I said, there's one question that keeps me simple in all the complexity, and the question is, "How does this get me to my next 20% productivity gain?" That's the only thing I'm interested in, is how does artificial intelligence get me to my personal 20% and then the company's 20% increase? And that's the only thing I'm interested in. I mean, people come into workshops, people who are really into AI: "Look what I can do. I can take someone else, and I can take what your thinking is and I can take someone else and their voice and I can do that." This does not increase my productivity. So I've handled AI for the rest of my life. It's always, where's the next 20% increase in productivity? I don't care about anything else.
 
Shannon Waller: I love that. It's interesting, Dan, there is an example not that long ago where I'm very clear that ChatGPT, to use one version of AI, is really good at language. It has an excellent vocabulary. Its pattern recognition, it's really good at that. But what it's missing is the ideas. And if you don't put in compelling ideas, you get a lot of well-written, meaningless information.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes, flat. What I look for is energy, and it doesn't have any energy. It's kind of cool, it's kind of cute, it's kind of clever, but there's no energy.
 
Shannon Waller: It's sort of the difference between clever and intelligence.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, really creative humans have an energy to them that is as unique to them as their capability. They just have this energy. You can just feel the energy. And it's an active energy. It's not a captured energy. But I've seen things, and they're very clever. They have all sorts of apps. Or you just put in the prompts and you say, "I want you to take these 10 paragraphs and write them as William Shakespeare would write them, with a certain rhyme sense and everything like that." And bing, 15 seconds later, it comes out. But there's no Shakespeare there.
 
Shannon Waller: Certainly not.
 
Dan Sullivan: There's no Shakespeare there. I mean, there's no energy. I think we'll respond to it without our knowing it or without actually being trained to do it. You're going to just say, no, like there's this thing where you can create totally human looking faces. And when Hamish MacDonald, our cartoonist for our quarterly books, he just creates 15 different human faces and then he cartoons from those faces, and the reason he does this, he doesn't want to cartoon from any particular human being's face. I says, "Can you show me the faces?" and he showed me the faces and there was no energy in any of the faces. It's like we've been to presentations where they have a animated, not-real person doing the introductions. And I said, when I talk to men, they say, "This always reminds me of my first wife." Kind of naggy, just a slight snarky attitude, and everything else. And I said, "I don't think this is a jump forward. I think this is a jump back."
 
Shannon Waller: That's interesting, yeah, because I know exactly the example you're talking about. There's something missing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they're a one-trick pony.
 
Shannon Waller: And if you deviate from the script, they're off in the weeds. They can't respond creatively at all.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, humans throughout history have gotten good at detecting counterfeits. It's counterfeit. It's counterfeit. It has no value. It could be entertaining, but it's entertaining the first time, but it's not entertaining the second time. Real creativity is entertaining continually. Imitation is like teaching a dog how to do card tricks. They're not very good at it, but you're amazed that they can do it at all. The first time.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah. After that, you're like, why are you wasting your time? Oh, my goodness. I mean, first of all, a couple of things I've gotten out of this conversation is that, imitation is actually how we learn repetition, it's how we learn- But it's important to kind of riff off into our own directions and make it our own. But the other point, Dan, and if you just think about a regular conversation, you don't always know where it's going to go. And it's that human intelligence ability to respond. My daughter called up a bank to resolve an issue, and AI was quite clearly talking to her. She goes, "Oh, it was AI. It was so frustrating. It kept giving me my balance. And what I finally wanted was a human." It couldn't answer the questions the way she was asking it. And it will get smarter. Finally, she goes, "Can I talk to a person?" And then she got patched through, who was lovely. The system was next to useless other than finally getting her to where she is.
 
Dan Sullivan: One way of making humans look better is to have the first interaction be with AI.
 
Shannon Waller: 100%. So one of the things I'm getting out of this conversation is how innately creative human beings are. And I think we're not appreciating it.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, every person is completely unique.
 
Shannon Waller: But AI is this bright shiny object that looks like it can do all the things and we're completely not appreciating the fact that in one single conversation, even with an institution like a bank, it requires that spontaneous, not predictable, conversational capability to solve a problem. And that's something that AI will ever be able to do. Sure as heck ain't there yet.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. You know, probably an old technology that took the world by storm when it was created was mirrors. You know, actually fairly accurate mirrors. Flat surface and it just reflected back actually where the person was and what their face was. And I think that the craze about mirrors was as much as we're seeing the craze with GPT. It's a mirror of a certain sense. We're looking into it, and it's taking us back. But I can tell almost immediately when any written communication or spoken communication to me is AI, someone reading something. And I said, "This is AI, isn't it? You didn't actually put any thought into this, did you? I don't get your personality. I don't get who you are from this. This is AI."
 
What I've noticed is that it's changed my writing because I go out of my way to be so personal with the person I'm writing to. There are things that I know about this person that aren't written down and everything else. And I always refer to these things. And I've noticed my whole personal communication has become much more specific and very idiosyncratic. You know, I've stopped using proper grammar like Peter Zeihan does. He'll have a phrase like, you know, he wants to make a point, and the phrase is "all the way to the end." And he'll say, all period, the period, way period. And he totally communicates what it means by not using proper grammar and proper sentence structure and everything else. And I think really creative people in a world of AI imitation, AI counterfeiting are going to be wildly more creative just to differentiate themselves from the robots.
 
Shannon Waller: I think so too. And I think it will shine a spotlight on human intelligence, human creativity, all of that original works, original thoughts will become actually much more valued and much more appreciated because of the-
 
Dan Sullivan: I think there's going to be some interesting court cases. We're doing a lot of work with the Patent Bureau and I think that there's going to be new differentiations, fine distinctions being made out of this, that they say, this is a derivative, this is not the real thing. So I think our senses, our human intelligence is going to jump up a notch in being able to differentiate between authentic and derivative, and real and counterfeit. I just think we're going to get smarter as a result of this, but not in the way they're saying we're going to get smarter. Our thinking is going to get smarter because of the machine intelligence. And that's what I'm seeing already, because I only like real.
 
Shannon Waller: You and me both.
 
Dan Sullivan: I only like real, and my ability to spot real from fake is much sharper with each passing decade. You know, my senses and my filters are a lot sharper at almost 80 than they were at 70, which were more than when they were 60. I don't think I'm unique in this. I think everybody, as they go along... We have a name for it. It's called wisdom.
 
Shannon Waller: Yep.
 
Dan Sullivan: I smell a fake. Gord Vickman, who's our podcast manager here, he was saying that he screens a lot of people who want to have podcasts with me or someone else in Coach. And he says, "I can tell there's something off about it. And if there's anything off, I just say no, we can't do that." And I think he's just expressing that his senses of being able to tell a real deal from a counterfeit or they're trying to scam us in some way. They're trying to attach our name to their show so that their show can have the stature that they see that we have.
 
Shannon Waller: Even with all the internet scams, someone tried to rent us a house they didn't own, which was interesting. I call it spidey senses. My spidey senses are just little inconsistencies, little things that didn't make sense. And I think we'll be trusting our instincts on that. I mean, human beings are really good at surviving threats. This is how we got this far. If we see something that's not real, I think we'll get more capable and more finely tuned in that discernment. So another thing I'm taking away is, this is a new bright, shiny object, a mirror that's reflecting back at us, but really lean in to that human, lean in to the creativity. Create your own stuff. Don't borrow, don't steal. There's lots of new opportunities for new things to be created regardless. So this is fascinating conversation as always. Thank you, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Shannon.